RTHK: China, Russia block new N Korea sanctions

China and the United States took opposing stances at the UN Security Council on Wednesday on how to reduce tensions with North Korea, with Washington arguing for more sanctions against Pyongyang while Beijing called for their easing.

The emergency meeting of the body charged with global peace and security came amid fears that North Korea will resume nuclear testing in the coming weeks.

Chinese ambassador to the UN Zhang Jun called the possibility of escalation "worrying" and called for "restraint," adding that tightening sanctions in an atmosphere of mistrust was "not constructive."

"What China wants to avoid is a new nuclear test," he said after the meeting. "So that's why we do not want to have additional sanctions that might force one of the parties to take more proactive action.

"Talking is better than coercive measures. We have seen so much coercive measures in the world, in Syria, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Have you seen any good results? What we have seen is only the humanitarian suffering."

However US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield said: "It is time to stop providing tacit permission and start taking action. We need to turn quickly to strengthening the... sanctions regime, not considering sanctions relief."

Thomas-Greenfield rejected a draft resolution from China and Russia, like the US both veto-wielding members of the council, which aims to ease sanctions imposed in 2017.

Instead, she said they were near the end of negotiations on a separate US text updating the sanctions.

"We cannot wait until (North Korea) conducts additional provocative, illegal, dangerous acts like a nuclear test. We need to speak up now," she said.

Russia's Deputy Ambassador Anna Yevstigneeva also advocated the resolution proposed with China and called for the resumption of dialogue. (AFP)

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WASHINGTON  Washington Police Department SWAT team members early Wednesday arrested and charged a 22-year-old man accused of shooting at a family member during an argument late Tuesday.

Jeremy Dwayne Adams Martin, of Washington, was arrested in rural Louisa County after members of the Washington Police Department SWAT team along with Louisa County and Muscatine County sheriffs deputies executed a search warrant at a mobile home park where he was staying.

Martin was taken into custody without incident. A handgun and ammunition were located during the search, according to a news release from the Washington Police Department.

He was charge with intimidation with a dangerous weapon, a Class C felony that is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $13,660.

Washington Police officers were called at about 10 p.m. to the 1000 block of E. Main Street to reports of a family argument that resulted in a shooting. During the investigation, officers learned that Martin allegedly displayed a handgun during an argument. Washington Police Chief Jim Lester said a family member who called the police reported other residents of the house had left because they did not feel safe.

As Martin was leaving the residence as a passenger in his girlfriends car, he allegedly fired a shot toward an individual standing near a doorway, striking the house. No injuries were reported.

"Mr. Adams Martin left the residence in that vehicle and fired one shot toward the house and one person who was standing outside the door of the house," Lester said. "It struck the house. It did not hit a person, but there was someone standing outside the house when the shot was fired, we believe."

Police located a Hornady 9 mm bullet casing in the street, according to an arrest report. While inspecting the front porch where the subject had been standing, officers located a railing that had been hit by the bullet and split.

The bullet had then lodged in the exterior wall.

Martin's bail was set at $10,000 cash only. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for May 20 in Washington County Court. A no-contact order was also issued.

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MUSCATINE  A local church has been the victim of minor acts of vandalism over the past month.

While its leaders are hoping to prevent it from happening again, theyre warning other residents to keep an eye out.

Shortly before Easter, Glad Tidings Church, 710 Cypress St., had several of its windows broken with rocks. No other damage was found at the time. Then, earlier this week, another case of vandalism occurred when it was discovered someone had stolen the faucet off the outside water spigot.

Weve had instances of vandalism in the past, but those happened years ago, Everett Adams, president of Glad Tidings Church said. We used to have problems with our window panes getting broken out and there being some graffiti, but we havent had that for quite a number of years.

As for a potential reason for the recent return of vandalism at the church, Adams said that he and his church suspect that it may be local youth, although they dont have any way of proving these suspicions.

Glad Tidings Churchs pastor, William Walker, was not able to be reached for further comments on the two incidents.

Muscatine sees roughly 180 to 200 reported cases of criminal mischief a year, averaging to be about one every other day.

"Most of these reports are investigated at the officer level, where an officer was sent and a report was generated," Muscatine Assistant Police Chief Steve Snider said. "The way we deal with criminal mischief is that if an officer develops some sort of suspect information then the investigation is carried on. If there is no suspect information or no way to trace it, the report often goes inactive until further information develops."

Most local cases of vandalism or criminal mischief are seen as random, however, if there is a string of related cases then the department will further investigate them as a case of ongoing criminal conduct, Snider said.

For those who may find themselves dealing with vandalism on their property, Snider encouraged residents to always report it when it happens so that the department is aware of it.

"It may tie into something bigger, so we always like to know about it," he said. "We cant promise that were going to solve each and every case, but we certainly like to have a report on them so we know whats accurately going on within the city."

Snider also recommended the purchasing of a security camera system that can then be used to catch a face or create a description of the vandalism suspect, something that Glad Tidings Church is already planning on doing.

"I dont know if there has been vandalism reported at other churches or not," Adams said, adding the instances of vandalism were minor.

Weve got a lot to be thankful for in Muscatine since we dont have crime on that basis, but its just something people should stay alert about while also looking out for their neighbors," Adams said.

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MUSCATINE  Five years ago, Ognadon "Eddy" Djagou decided to take what he learned from his hard work at Universite de Lome in Togo, West Africa, and put it towards his dream of starting a small business.

Now, that business has grown to earn statewide recognition.

Djagou, owner and founder of DJAAGOU-A Export, was recently recognized as Small Business Exporter of the Year in the state of Iowa by the U.S. Small Business Administration.

He received the award on May 6 during a Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business Program session, of which he is a graduate. Djagou also received a bachelor's degree in marketing management.

"Im so proud of winning," Djagou said. "I came to Muscatine in 2015.  I had a desire to own my own business and support my community. When I came to Muscatine, I thought that it was a good place to start one. Its a quiet place," with a market for diverse products.

"Many people come in to look at them, and because they dont have to drive to the Quad Cities (for these products), its a good way to save money for the diverse people of the Muscatine community," he said.

Opened in 2017, DJAAGOU-A specializes in the wholesale of food and beverages as well as other products from around the world. Although the business primary export is focused on Africa, it also exports products to Mexico, India, Japan, German, China, Spain, Australia, Argentina, Chile, Columbia, Uruguay and Brazil. The business offers a variety of dried soups, baked goods, snacks, candies, pickled and preserved vegetables and sauces, in addition to vitamins and supplements.

The business has also expanded to products such as makeup, clothing and apparel.

"(Djagou) is an exceptional example of an immigrant entrepreneur who achieves the American Dream through small business success," Jayne Armstrong, district director of the SBAs Iowa district office, said.

The business recently received financial assistance through the SBAs State Trade and Export Promotion (STEP) Grant, which allowed Djagou to market his products internationally, further expanding his business.

Djagou said his eyes are set on further business growth  all in the hopes of continuing to support the Muscatine community by providing jobs through his business alongside all the products that are available to purchase.

"My goal is to keep working hard so that my company can grow, he said. "Im very excited to keep working and make a big company for the community."

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WEST LIBERTY  A week after announcing longtime CEO Ed Garretts imminent retirement, West Liberty Foods has announced senior vice president Brandon Achen will step into the role of CEO on May 31.

A 16-year employee of West Liberty Foods, Achen has worked his way up the ladder from intern to scheduling supervisor to vice president of the supply chain to senior vice president. A graduate of Iowa State University  Ivy School of Business, Achen received the 30 under 30 Award at the International Poultry and Processing Expo. He is certified in Production and Inventory Management by the APICS Organization. He is also a standing board member of the Iowa Turkey Federation and the National Turkey Federation.

Im humbled by the opportunity to lead our great organization, Achen said. We have a lot of things to be proud of and optimistic about at West Liberty Foods, and Im looking forward to what the future holds for us.

Born and raised on his parents turkey farm in Iowa, Achen quickly learned the skills of properly caring for turkeys while managing a farming operation.

Garrett has served as CEO since 2004. In order to ensure a smooth transition in leadership, and as part of the companys succession plan, Garrett and Achen have worked together for the past several years to immerse Achen in all facets of the companys business.

Our board of directors and executive management team are excited for the next generation of leadership, said Paul Hill, chairman of the West Liberty Foods board. Brandon has extensive experience with our major customers and vendors, drives innovation and process improvement, and knows our organization from the farm throughout our facilities. We are confident Brandon will lead West Liberty Foods to further growth and success as we continue to forge the future of proteins for the food industry.

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LONDON (AP)  The number of fines issued over breaches of coronavirus regulations at British government offices, including Prime Minister Boris Johnsons official residence, has expanded to more than 100, Londons Metropolitan Police force said Thursday.

Johnson admitted last month that he was among dozens of people who paid a police fine for attending lockdown-breaching parties and gatherings, making him the first British leader to be sanctioned for breaking the law while in office.

Revelations that Johnson and other senior officials gathered illegally in government buildings in 2020 and 2021 - when millions in the country were told to restrict their lives to slow the spread of COVID-19 - has angered voters and triggered calls for Johnson to resign.

Johnson has apologized for attending his own surprise birthday party at 10 Downing St. in June 2020, but insisted that it did not occur to him that the gathering, which he said lasted less than 10 minutes, was a party.

Johnsons wife, Carrie, and Treasury chief Rishi Sunak also said they were fined for attending the same event.

The police force's update doubled the number of fixed-penalty notices issued so far over the scandal that has been dubbed partygate. Last month, the force said it had given about 50 such fines as a result of its investigation.

The Metropolitan Police said investigations were continuing into a dozen gatherings, which reportedly included bring your own booze office parties and wine time Fridays organized by Johnsons staff.

Police do not identify the recipients of the fines. Johnson's spokesperson said Thursday the prime minister was not among the individuals cited in the latest round of penalty notices.

A senior civil servant, Sue Gray, is conducting a separate investigation of the government parties. In a partial report on gatherings that are not the subject of criminal investigations by police, Gray said failures of leadership and judgment in Johnsons government allowed events to occur that should not have happened.

More than 176,000 people have died in Britain after testing positive for the coronavirus, the highest toll in Europe after Russia.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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A severe shortage in baby formula has drawn the attention of members of Iowas congressional delegation and has become a campaign issue as well.

Spot shortages in many groceries and pharmacies have been exacerbated by a Food and Drug Administration recall that stopped production at Abbots largest U.S. formula manufacturing plant in Michigan. As supply disruptions and the massive safety recall have continued, several big box retailers have begun rationing sales of the formula.

Its very concerning, Sen. Chuck Grassley told reporters Wednesday.

After hearing about the scarcity at his county meetings, Grassley wrote the FDA to ask what it is doing to address the shortage.

He cited reports that at least 40% of baby formula supplies in the U.S. are completely depleted. Iowa was among six mostly Midwestern states where more than half of all baby formula was completely sold out during the week of April 24.

Its pretty much looking for a needle in a haystack, Rachel Beadle, who recently moved from Marion to Des Moines, told The Gazette in April.

According to the Biden administration, the FDA is "working around the clock to address the shortage. Manufacturers say they're producing at full capacity, but it's still not enough to meet demand.

Im going to keep on top of it. We got to help families feed their kids, and empty shelves are unacceptable, Grassley said.

Finkenauer push

Thats not enough for former U.S. Rep. Abby Finkenauer, who is among Democrats seeking to challenge Grassley's re-election this fall.

She called it shocking that it has taken Grassley and other members of Congress this long to address a national crisis when you have people not being able to feed their children the nutrition they need to thrive and survive.

Finkenauer has called for the Biden administration to invoke the Defense Production Act to force manufacturers to produce more formula.

We need all hands on deck to address the dangerous shortage of baby formula in Iowa and across the country, Finkenauer said. Invoking the act would bring any and all federal resources to the table to increase the supply of baby formula and address the shortage.

It just seems like the rational and right thing to do, she said.

It might be an appropriate tool, Grassley said when asked about invoking the act, but didnt think it would necessarily solve the contamination issues that led to the production shutdown at Abbott.

You wouldn't want to put the Defense Production Act into action and then produce unsafe food, he said.

Timeline sought

Iowa Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson joined a colleague in writing the FDA asking for a timeline for when baby formula is expected to be sufficiently restocked as well as a long-term plan to minimize supply chain disruptions for formula.

Parents who are unsure how to provide this essential sustenance for their babies and worried about the nutritional impacts of this supply chain shortage, Hinson and New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik wrote. As moms ourselves, we know the stress this is causing in so many households.

Families already worried about higher food and fuel prices now have the added stress of not knowing if the baby formula they need will even be in stock," Hinson said.

She called on the Biden administration to prioritize fixing supply chain disruptions to replenish the supply of infant formula. I'll work with anyone who will work with me to ensure that families don't have this extra burden, she said.

Bipartisan effort

Iowa Republican Rep. Miller-Meeks has joined bipartisan legislation to encourage competition, reduce costs and improve the quality of infant formula options available through the Women, Infants, and Children program by creating an online database. Its a companion to bipartisan Senate legislation.

Fourth District Republican Rep. Randy Feenstra called the situation dire, threatening babies who rely on formula for their health and development.

He joined a colleague in proposing the Formula Act, to direct the FDA to establish and communicate to Congress clear standards by which it domestically regulates infant formula.

Gazette Des Moines Bureau Chief Erin Murphy contributed to this report.

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Eskom is close to concluding agreements with suppliers to provide around 1.4GWh of battery energy storage.

During its State of the System briefing on Thursday, the utility revealed the tender for Phase 1 of its Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) project had closed, and the management had finished considering the bids.

Eskom COO Jan Oberholzer told MyBroadband they recommended three suppliers to the board, which were approved.

The utility has now completed pre-contract award discussions with the successful bidders and provided them with draft contract documents.

Oberholzer stated that one of the bidders had already signed on to the project, while Eskom was awaiting sign-off from the other two.

He also said he would consult with the projects team leader regarding releasing the names of the providers once all the respective contracts had been signed.

Eskom subsequently told MyBroadband it would reveal the names of the suppliers before the end of May 2022.

The batteries from the project will be installed at Eskoms substations, including those at its renewable energy power stations, to hold and release energy as required.

Battery storage is considered a crucial component to supplement renewable energy generation.

While coal, gas, and nuclear power plants can generate electricity under nearly any environmental conditions, solar and wind power fluctuate naturally.

Having storage that can capture excess energy at peak generation for discharge during peak demand can increase the potential contribution these energy sources can make to South Africas overall energy needs.

Eskom is planning for its BESS to have a total output power capacity of 344MW, with between 1,376MWh to 1,440MWh of storage to provide four hours of supply at peak.

The first phase will see 200MW output power and 833MWh of storage procured.

They will form part of Eskoms flagship battery energy storage system, covering 90 sites in the coastal provinces of the Western Cape, Northern Cape, Eastern Cape, and KwaZulu-Natal.

Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter previously said that the investment would be worth around R14 billion.

MyBroadband calculated it was possible to procure 1,000 Tesla Megapack batteries with an output of 770MW and storage of 3,080MWh for less than that price.

Alternatively, Eskom could use its original configuration and get 447 Megapacks for less than half of its planned spending on the project.
Not so long ago, voice over internet protocol (VoIP) calling had a reputation for poor call quality. Advancements in network infrastructure and new technologies have helped it evolve to a point where it is overtaking traditional calling.

VoIP call quality is also expected to improve further as 5G becomes more accessible in South Africa.

According to Euphoria Telecoms chief technology officer, Nic Laschinger, VoIP call quality has improved significantly over the past decade from a point where it was associated with poor quality to overtaking traditional calling.

Voice call quality on VoIP and mobile calls in South Africa has progressed to the point where digital calling has largely overtaken analogue channels in both the commercial and residential markets, Laschinger said.

We think nothing today of making a WhatsApp voice call, something that even a few years ago would have been buggy and frustrating, for example.

Laschinger attributes the improvements to better technologies, higher speeds, and lower network latency.

A combination of all of these has driven improved voice call quality, he said. Mostly, this is attributable to better connectivity being available in the broadband landscape.

Laschinger explained that call quality over Wi-Fi networks is expected to improve further as 5G becomes more accessible in the country.

More and better quality bandwidth has enabled improved call quality even over WiFi networks. This improvement will continue as 5G rollouts accelerate and fibre completely overtakes its older copper competitors, he said.

He explained that VoIP telephony providers put a lot of time and development effort into their systems to provide better call quality, which is affected mainly by bandwidth.

Laschinger added that Euphoria Telecom recommends specific minimum speeds to its clients to ensure a quality experience.

This is affected by bandwidth, and we do recommend certain minimum bandwidth speeds as a result, but as far as we can, we ensure our systems provide a quality experience across the board, he said.

Andrew King, Vox Telecoms head of voice, visual comms, and gaming, told MyBroadband that the improvement in voice quality over the years could be attributed to advances in two aspects of quality VoIP service delivery  last-mile connectivity and operator network infrastructure.

Some years back, last-mile connectivity options were limited, and link speeds were insufficient to carry voice dependably, King said.

A quality VoIP experience over the last mile is dependent on minimising packet loss, jitter and latency.

King explained that the exponential growth of fibre availability in South Africa helped address these issues.

He also said that Voxs customers could prioritise voice traffic over less time-dependent internet traffic with voice-specific quality of service (QoS) configurations available on carrier-grade routers.

Vox has developed proprietary QoS configurations on both fibre-to-the-home and fibre-to-the-business last miles to prioritise and shield voice and other real-time traffic  such as video calls, King said.

This QoS ensures that participants in person-to-person and group calls enjoy professional voice and video call quality, no matter what other traffic is traversing the home or business network.

He explained that, while last-mile connectivity is critical, a stable core voice network is also required to deliver reliable voice services.

Core networks designed with a conservative capacity planning approach, and that are redundant from both a routing and power perspective they will typically provide a quality backbone on which to deliver a reliable voice service, he said.

With QoS technologies implemented within the voice network, our customer traffic is prioritised over all our local, national and international networks.
Although often retold, the persistent story that the worlds richest man, Elon Musk, was bullied at a Pretoria school is untrue.

Musk has been making global headlines following his unexpected and unconventional Twitter acquisition.

While he enjoys acclaim for his achievements in the electric vehicle and space industries, Musk had a tough time at high school, ostensibly due to his bookish nature.

In 2015, his father, Errol Musk, told Forbes that Elon would rather be in a library reading books than party or talk about rugby or sports.

Business Insider US recently published an article with the headline How Elon Musk went from being bullied in Pretoria to buying Twitter.

The article correctly explains that Musk was born and raised in Pretoria and finished matric at Pretoria Boys High School in Hatfield.

It also refers to an incident during which school bullies kicked and threw Musk down a set of stairs, as mentioned in Ashlee Vances biography Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.

However, the article fails to report that this incident happened at Bryanston High School in Johannesburg and not Boys High.

Errol Musk reportedly contacted BizNews in 2015 after it published an article about Vances book. He told the publication his son was so severely hurt after the Bryanston High attack that he could not recognise him.

Elon had to stay in a hospital in Sandton for two weeks to recover. He was moved to Pretoria Boys High, where he completed his school years from grade 10 to matric.

A Bryanston High School principal told News24 he was saddened after learning about Musk apparently being bullied at the school.

The inaccuracy about Musks upbringing is further exacerbated by reports surrounding a donation he made to Pretoria Boys High.

The prestigious institution is South Africas most expensive public school, costing R63,800 per year without boarding fees.

Citing Vances book, reports stated Musk was pessimistic about South Africa and Boys High based on how he reacted when the school requested a donation.

The reports claimed that Musk agreed to make a once-off R1 million donation on the condition that the school never contact him again.

However, former Pretoria Boys High headmaster Bill Schroder contradicted this version of events in a 2018 letter to BizNews.

He said Musk had donated to the school on several occasions, suggesting the billionaire had a wholly different experience than was described in the stories.

It is true that Elon Musk did, at my request, give a donation for R1 million, Schroder wrote.

What is not true is that he disliked the country or the school so intensely that he told me not to approach him again. I, in fact did, and he sent a second donation per that request.

Schroder explained he lost direct contact with Musk as his companies grew, and the school had to start working through teams of communications representatives who handled donations.

Musk matriculated at the school at 17, with distinctions in physical science and computer science.

Shortly after that, he left South Africa for Canada to avoid conscription in the South African army and pursue opportunities abroad.

He would go on to found and sell city guide software company Zip2 and online payments platform PayPal (formerly X.com).

The proceeds from his sales went towards investments in SpaceX, Tesla, and Solar City in the coming years.

These would prove incredibly lucrative ventures, with the companies showing staggering growth.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, Musk had a net worth of $229 billion (R3.7 trillion) as of 10 May 2022.

That puts him some way ahead of the worlds second-richest man, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, with a net worth of $133 billion (R2.1 trillion).

Schroders letter to Biznews is below.

Full statement by Bill Schroder, headmaster of Pretoria Boys High School from 1990 to 2009 (courtesy of Biznews)

I was the Headmaster of Pretoria Boys High School from 1990 to 2009 and subsequent to my retirement was asked to head a fundraising exercise over a four year period.

As such, I feel it is important to set the record straight in terms of donations received from Elon Musk who matriculated at Boys High in 1988.

It is true that Elon Musk did, at my request, give a donation for R1 million. What is not true is that he disliked the country or the school so intensely that he told me not to approach him again.

I, in fact did, and he sent a second donation per that request.

I lost contact with him for a while as he changed PAs and on re-establishing contact, a new network for consideration of donations had been put in place and it must be understood that people with that amount of wealth have teams of people who deal with huge numbers of requests for donations. At that point we received nothing further from him.

It is well documented in a number of biographies that Elon was bullied and an unhappy schoolboy in a school in Johannesburg and was moved to Pretoria Boys High in Grade 10 (Standard 8).

There is no evidence that he was poorly treated at Boys High and when he matriculated, he went to Canada where his mother was living.

Possibly what upsets me more is that the size of his donation was leaked somehow. I did the fundraising alone with the help of my secretary of 20 years and one of the bases of the fundraising was that the amount of a donation was treated in the strictest confidence. I only targeted alumni and close friends of the school and believe that our success in raising R32 million in four years was based on the confidentiality factor.

Until the publication of this article, the only thing a member of the Pretoria boys high community would know is that Elon Musk did donate as his name appears on a donor board together with his year group, making no differentiation between some who gave R100 or R1million.
At first glance, the paintings near the entrance of the Napa Library look like enlarged images of the pressed flowers you might find in one of your grandmothers old books. Though the moisture that plumped up the roses is gone, the beauty that remains is everlasting.

Masterfully executed, some of Sanda Manuilas paintings evoke memories of the serenity found in a bygone era, but it would be a mistake to think her art is meant to be pretty or to arouse sentimentality. Rather, her art is visual comments of a world on the edge.

In the last few years, events have been troublesome and the future uncertain. Everything is in flux. My work reflects this heightened reality, Manuila said during an interview at the library last week.

I want my work to be confrontational and emotionally charged, she continued. I aim at engaging the viewer with surprise, doubt and curiosity and to raise many conversations in these challenging times.

Her oil and pastel paintings, on exhibit at the library this month  though beautiful - illustrate the fear of loss and the struggle for survival. She chooses dead roses, decaying vegetation, birds or insects as her muses to illustrate how fauna and flora are so integrated into their environment that they merge into it.

I love dead roses. I like them better than fresh roses. Ive been working with them for several years The dead roses in this painting are getting liquified because of the storm, Manuila said, pointing to one of her paintings.

That doesnt make sense because dead roses are dry, they cant be liquified, she said. Thats whats happening today. It is like what we are doing to Mother Nature. Even when we abuse her, nature remains beautiful.

Manuila paints visual stories with an allegorical quality to engage viewers to question what they see and how they feel.

I paint poetry, she said.

Her visual stories reveal a state of mind in which the boundaries between dreams and reality have become very fluid, she explains. Her purpose is to make art that depicts the challenges of life and warn about the danger of denial of climate change.

Monarch butterflies, crows and roses appear in many of her paintings. There is an ethereal beauty in the way she has portrayed drops of water on trellis wires surrounded by monarch butterflies in one of the paintings.

Manuila will never forget the indescribable feeling she experienced while seeing millions of monarch butterflies together when she took a trip to the fir forests of Mexicos Central Highlands, where they migrate each winter.

My work has two stages. Everywhere I go, when I see anything interesting, I take a photo so I have zillions of photos. Then, I start doing double and triple exposures with these photos and then use various apps  and I know what each app is doing, she said. Then I have an image. When I have an image I really like, I paint it.

Manuila, born in Geneva, Switzerland to Romanian political refugees, said she experienced expatriation and isolation at a very early age, which gives her a deep empathy for the Ukrainian people.

Growing up in Switzerland, she was recognized for her artistic ability at a young age. In first grade, her teacher, noticing how driven Manuila was to draw and paint, put her in a corner of the classroom to paint.

My teacher said, I want you to paint for me a few tiles. The other students were doing math, Manuila said, chuckling as she recalled the satisfaction, she had felt at getting to do what she loved while getting out of her least favorite subject.

When she was a teenager Manuila often dreamed about California. As a young adult, she came to the land of her dreams with the intention of staying a year but has remained here for decades. She is a resident of St. Helena.

Manuila honed her artistic skills over the years by studying art with respected instructors in various places in the world.

She has studied art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, France; Atelier Bessil in Montpellier, France; and at Cornish Institute of the Arts in Seattle, Washington.

More recently, she has traveled to Italy to study at the Angel Academy in Florence and the Rome Artworks in Rome. Additionally, she participated in an artist residency at Dacia Gallery in New York City and in Sibiu, Romania.

She studied with Charles Becker in Sebastopol for nine years and with Gail Chase Bien and Nancy Willis in Napa.

Manuila has participated in many exhibits including the Napa Valley Museum in Yountville; the Marin Moca in Novato; Art Works Downtown in San Rafael; the Southern Nevada Museum of Modern Art in Las Vegas; NV Dacia Gallery and First Street Gallery in NYC; as well as Arc Gallery in Tracy, California; and the De Young Museum in San Francisco.

Art has been my salvation, Manuila said.

An opening reception for Manuilas art exhibit is scheduled for Friday, May 13, from 6:15 to 7:30 p.m. Registration is required to attend the reception and art talk. Register at sandamanuila.evenbrite.com

To see more of her work, go to https://sandamanuila.artspan.com/home.
Napa Police arrested a man late Tuesday on investigation of felony sexual abuse of a minor after receiving an initial report of that abuse in 2020.

According to a Napa Police press release, a 21-year-old women told officers in October 2020 shed been molested by Carlos Cuadras  who was married to her aunt, and is now 46  when she was between the ages of 6 and 12. She told police her parents had found a sexually explicit picture that was sent to her by Cuadras when she was 13 and confronted him, and he fled to Mexico in response.

Just prior to making the report, Cuadras had confronted the woman in a store in the 2500 block of Kilburn Avenue, police said. He asked her for her number, but left the store after people there noticed she was upset.

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Police detectives made numerous attempts to find Cuadras at the apartments in the area, but didnt find him, and believe he fled to Mexico, according to the press release.

On Tuesday, the woman contacted an NPD detective and said Cuadras was outside the same business as before. She was afraid he was there to look for her, police said, and detectives found her yelling at him to get away from her.

Cuadras then agreed to go to the police department, and a Spanish-speaking detective interviewed him for several hours. Cuadras admitted to molesting the woman when she was younger, according to police. He wrote an apology letter to the woman, police said, and was booked into the Napa County jail at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday.

You can reach Edward Booth at 707-256-2213.
Former US Defense Secretary Mark Esper says in his newly released memoir that allies of President Donald Trump complained that he was "not loyal" after he did not back the president's 2020 allegations that the slain Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani had sought to attack four US Embassies, Business Insider reported.

In his new book, "A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times," Esperwho served under Trump as the Army's secretary from 2017 to 2019 and in his role as the Pentagon chief from 2019 until his November 2020 termination by the then-presidentwrites his intelligence briefings did not indicate that Soleimani was specifically eyeing four embassies.

While Esper writes he was concerned about attacks, he didn't feel comfortable backing up Trump's assertions, which he describes in the bookadding that the former president displayed a pattern of dishonesty.

"The simple fact was that Trump usually exaggerated and often made statements that could not be confirmed; others were outright fabrications. I became ensnared in one of those rhetorical webs on a Sunday morning talk show," the former defense chief writes.

Esper recalls in his book a January 2020 Fox News interview featuring Trump. The president made allegations that the ex-defense secretary says weren't included in CIA intelligence reports.

On January 10 that year, just days after Soleimani was killed by the US, "Trump told Fox News that Soleimani planned to attack several diplomatic posts in the Middle East, remarking, 'I can reveal that I believe it probably would've been four embassies,'" he writes.

"Not long before that, Pompeo had told the media the United States didn't know when or where the attacks might occur, but acknowledged that embassies were threatened," he adds.

"This was consistent with my understanding of the intelligence, the reports I was receiving, and precautionary actions we were taking," Esper says.

"Embassy Baghdad was obviously under threat, and State had enough concerns about Embassy Beirut that we reinforced that site as well. In addition, as I mentioned earlier, the safety of our embassies in Kuwait and Bahrain concerned me."

The former defense secretary reiterates in the book that while he agreed that there were clear threats against embassies, Trump's claims about the four sites couldn't be supported, according to reports that intelligence officials had seen.

"I didn't recall any specific mention of four sites in my briefings and reports from the CIA," he writes. "Therefore, when I first appeared on CNN on Sunday, January 12, I made two things clear: first, that I hadn't seen any specific evidence with regard to the targeting of four embassies; and second, that I still believed there were threats against multiple embassies, noting that we had reinforced earlier diplomatic posts."

He adds: "Regardless, my unwillingness to affirm Trump's specific claim that the intelligence said Soleimani targeted four embassies plunged me into hot water with the president.

"A trusted colleague told me that some of Trump's friends called to report on me, complaining that I was 'undermining' him and 'not loyal,' and even suggested he 'fire Esper' ... for being honest."

Soleimani was killed by a US drone strike near Iraq's Baghdad International Airport in January 2020. Trump was adamant that the threat to multiple embassies forced his hand in ordering the strike that took down the longtime Iranian security and intelligence commander.

The Trump administration never publicly provided clear evidence to support its claim that Soleimani posed an imminent threat to US personnel in the region and offered shifting justifications for the strike in the aftermath as congressional lawmakers questioned its legality.
The Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia (RA), Hambardzum Matevosyan, had been declared wanted, Oragir.News writes, citing the respective information it received.

According to the source, Matevosyan was included as a defendant in a criminal case into avoiding military service.

Matevosyan was declared wanted by the Armenian police on February 3, 2011and with a decision to detain him. The search was stopped on December 28, 2012, but the fate of this criminal case is still unknown.

Hambardzum Matevosyan did not answer the website's questions. And the government responded that, "The response to the inquiry received in the name of Deputy Prime Minister Hambardzum Matevosyan is beyond the scope of the regulation of the RA law on FOI [i.e., Freedom of Information]."
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of Armenia on Wednesday met with Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands, in The Hague.

Rutte attached importance to the official visit of the Armenian Prime Minister to the Netherlands and the development of cooperation between the two countries in all spheres, Armenian News-NEWS.am has learned from the website of the Armenian PMs office.

During the meeting, the interlocutors also emphasized the development and expansion of economic relations between the two countries, the implementation of relevant measures to expand business ties. They expressed confidence that there is a great potential for economic cooperation between Armenia and the Netherlands, the realization of which will contribute to the increase of trade.

The parties touched upon the Armenia-EU relations, the situation around Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh), and the processes taking place in the international arena.

Then, the Heads of Government of the two countries issued statements.

Mark Rutte, in particular, said:

Thank you very much. It is a great pleasure for me to welcome and receive Nikol Pashinyan and some members of his government here.

The Netherlands and Armenia are geographically several thousand kilometers apart, but in other respects the distance between our countries is small. We are the appreciator of cultural values. An exhibition opened at the Drents Museum yesterday, and I hope to visit it soon. We also have excellent diplomatic relations that have existed for 30 years. The opening of the Embassy of the Netherlands took place in Yerevan, which confirms our excellent bilateral relations.

The visit of Prime Minister Pashinyan is taking place at a very right time, because the Armenian government has very big plans after last year's elections. We have many topics to talk about, there are very big plans. Armenia has made great investments, it is following the path of democracy, although sometimes there are difficult situations and conditions. Following the velvet revolution under the leadership of Prime Minister Pashinyan, great changes have taken place, corruption and many other wrongdoings have been fought. I am greatly convinced that the reforms will be very effective, all Armenians will benefit from it. I highly appreciate Mr. Pashinyan, I highly appreciate the activities of his government, I promised him that we will support in every way.

Although there are many positive achievements, unfortunately, the catastrophic war in Ukraine saddens everyone. Of course, we talked about that today. Our position is very clear: this terrible war must end, all parties must sit at the table and start negotiations. Only this can lead to lasting peace. Unfortunately, Armenia well understands what war means, and that is why it is so important that Armenia and Azerbaijan have recently begun negotiations to reach an agreement on Nagorno-Karabakh in the near future. We emphasize its importance; we support the Minsk Group Co-Chairs. It is a very difficult dialogue after so much grief. Mr. Pashinyan made very clear about that in the parliament. I expressed my respect for that, the efforts of the Armenian government in that regard, we wholeheartedly welcome and we will continue to welcome. Of course, we have not finished our conversations yet, we will sit at the table soon, but I would like to take this opportunity to thank Mr. Pashinyan and the ministers for the visit.

During this visit, we reaffirmed what unites our nations. It promises very good, positive cooperation in the future. I personally welcome all that, thank you again, I hope we will meet again."
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of Armenia on Wednesday met with Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands, in The Hague, Armenian News-NEWS.am has learned from the website of the Armenian PMs office.

Rutte attached importance to the official visit of the Armenian Prime Minister to the Netherlands and the development of cooperation between the two countries in all spheres.

During the meeting, the interlocutors also emphasized the development and expansion of economic relations between the two countries, the implementation of relevant measures to expand business ties. They expressed confidence that there is a great potential for economic cooperation between Armenia and the Netherlands, the realization of which will contribute to the increase of trade.

The parties touched upon the Armenia-EU relations, the situation around Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh), and the processes taking place in the international arena.

Then, the Heads of Government of the two countries issued statements.

Nikol Pashinyan particularly said,

Honorable Mr. Prime Minister,

First of all, I would like to thank you for the warm welcome and the invitation to pay an official visit. I must state that this is the first official visit of the Armenian leader to the Kingdom of the Netherlands. And I have had several opportunities to say today that the fact that this official visit is taking place at this time, I assess it not only as the expression of our rich historical relations and well-developed trade and economic relations, but also as the support of the Netherlands, personally your, Mr. Prime Minister, to the Armenian democracy, the agenda of democratic reforms adopted by our government. This is my first visit to the Netherlands, I am very impressed with your wonderful and beautiful country. And, of course, it is an additional impetus, it encourages us to further develop relations in all spheres, to encourage the further development of human, cultural and economic ties between our countries. I must also express my gratitude to you, Mr. Prime Minister, for the positions you expressed regarding the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and for your clear support for the peace agenda adopted by the Government of the Republic of Armenia. I must say that yes, we received at last years early parliamentary elections, which I am pleased to say was unequivocally assessed by the international community as free, in line with democratic standards, a mandate from our people to adopt and implement the peace agenda. The agenda of our bilateral relations is very rich, we hope to move forward in all directions. We are very interested, we discussed on several occasions today, in particular, the issue of wider application of agricultural technologies in Armenia. We know that the Netherlands is the most developed country in terms of agricultural-technologies, and we are happy and thankful that both the government and the business community we met today are interested in further developments in these areas. The role of the Kingdom of the Netherlands  your government is very important in supporting democratic reforms. The role of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and your government is very important in supporting democratic reforms. Of course, our main partner in this issue is the European Union, and of course, the support of EU member states is important. I must state that in 2021 the Armenia-EU Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement entered into force, which, in fact, is the joint agenda of democratic reforms. And we are determined to fully implement that agenda, we are determined to open an era of peaceful development for our country and our region. We also discussed the processes taking place in Armenia-Turkey relations, Armenia-Azerbaijan relations. And I am happy to say that, in fact, we state that we have a common understanding of these processes, a common understanding that the peace agenda must really be implemented. But we all know that this is not possible without the support of the international community, we are glad that our agenda is understood by our international partners. Let me thank you again for this warm welcome and express confidence that as a results of the visit a new impetus will be given to the further development of our relations.

Thank you."

Nikol Pashinyan and Mark Rutte answered the questions of the journalists.

The visit of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to the Netherlands has concluded.
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The Azerbaijani foreign ministry considers the accusations made by Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyanduring his visit to the Netherlands to be "unfounded, and they show that the Armenian leadership is far from being sincere in the issue of normalizing relations between the two countries." This is how Leyla Abdullayeva, Head of the Press Service Department of the Azerbaijan MFA, commented on the statements of the Prime Minister of Armenia.

The unfounded allegations made by the Armenian Prime Minister against Azerbaijan during his speech at the Clingendael Institute of International Relations in the Netherlands, including untrue accusations on humanitarian issues, show that the Armenian leadership is far from being sincere in the issue of normalizing relations between the two countries, Abdullayeva said.

In general, it would be incorrect to describe Armenia's submission of mine maps to Azerbaijan as a humanitarian gesture, as it was Armenia's obligation under international humanitarian law after the signing of the trilateral statement. Since the signing of the trilateral statement, 219 people, mostly civilians, have been killed by landmines, the Azerbaijani MFA representative added.

(...) the accusation of the Prime Minister of Armenia against Azerbaijan for not taking humanitarian steps and not returning the Armenian detainees is inappropriate and unfounded. It would be good for the Armenian leader to first understand the reasons for the detention in Azerbaijan of saboteurs of Armenian origin who entered the territory of Azerbaijan illegally, Abdullayeva noted.

However, the fact that the Armenian Prime Minister is still making baseless allegations against Azerbaijan seriously calls into question the country's desire to act for peace, concluded the head of the Press Service Department of the Azerbaijan MFA.

Thus, the Azerbaijani MFA has once again put the blame on the Armenian side and confirmed that Azerbaijan refuses to carry out trilateral statements requirement on the release of all captives.
At this point, all the parents of the fallen servicemen are recognized as the legal successors of the victim, we are recognized as their [legal] representatives, and the parents are being questioned. Lawyer Vahan Hovhannisyan, the legal representative of the parents of the Armenian servicemen who fell during the Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) war in the fall of 2020, told this to reporters Thursday outside the building of the Investigative Committee of Armenia.

He noted that the decision to recognize as the legal successor of the victim gave a very general legal assessment of the actions, in particular, of the alleged perpetrators of the crime, and did not specify the names.

"All the parents object to this descriptive part, and all of them stated that their demand is not met, as the only one accountable for and the only culprit in the death of their sons is [PM] Nikol Pashinyan, () and they demand that Nikol Pashinyan be noted as guilty of the above-mentioned actions in the decision to recognize as the legal successor of the victim," the lawyer said.

He informed that on May 7, they had submitted a petition to question Pashinyan as a witness, so that the Prosecutor General could give such an instruction.

"Today we were informed that our petition on questioning Nikol Pashinyan [as a witness] was granted. The prosecutor instructed the body conducting the proceedings to question Nikol Pashinyan. (). In order to exclude further inaction, in the second half of the day we will submit a sharper, more aggressive petition to carry out certain legal actions against Nikol Pashinyan in particular," the attorney said.

"At the moment, the matter of including Nikol Pashinyan as an accused is put off. We will see to it that Pashinyan's interrogation be carried out in the building of the investigation department, as he has no advantage over any Armenian citizen, especially since there are features of an apparent crime in his actions," Vahan Hovhannisyan said.
In the shadow of the war in Ukraine, an unlikely peace process is taking shape to normalize relations between Armenia and its historic adversaries, Azerbaijan and Turkey, columnist David Ignatius wrote in The Washington Post.

According to the journalist with Armenian roots, At a time when the world is focused on the intense combat in Ukraine, diplomatic issues in the Caucasus may seem like a sideshow. But helping resolve these intractable conflicts would not only be good for its own sake; but also it offers a potential point of convergence for U.S. and Russian interests that could open useful avenues of common dialogue.

Ignatius notes that both Russia and the West are trying to keep these processes under their umbrella.

Armenias best protection against a coercive peace would be participation by the United States and Europe in the negotiating process, he added. One pathway for such a joint effort would a revival of the so-called Minsk Group, co-chaired by the United States, France and Russia. But Moscow is boycotting the group. Instead, the European Union has joined Russia as a co-sponsor of the talks, hosting a Pashinyan-Aliyev meeting in Brussels last month. That provides a Western leg of support for normalization.

This week, Mirzoyan, the Armenian foreign minister, will lean toward Russia, Armenias historic protector, as he meets in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, with foreign ministers of other former Soviet republics. That gathering is expected to include a three-way conclave with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov to discuss a peace treaty, David Ignatius wrote.

Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan explained the normalization moves in an interview last week in Washington, where he was visiting Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The two signed a memorandum of understanding to provide U.S. help for Armenias nuclear power industry and assistance in its struggle against corruption. State Department officials have also visited Armenia and Azerbaijan in recent weeks to bolster the peace effort, Ignatius noted.

We should look not only to the past but to the future, Mirzoyan told me. He said that if Armenia continues to be in a zero-sum game with its neighbors, our region will be in a vicious circle, David Ignatius added.

Elin Suleymanov, Azerbaijans ambassador to Britain and former ambassador to the United States, offered a similar cautiously optimistic assessment. Azerbaijan has repeatedly expressed hope for the soonest normalization and signing of a peace agreement, he said in a telephone interview, Ignatius wrote.
The Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Russia, Azerbaijan, and ArmeniaSergey Lavrov, Jeyhun Bayramov, and Ararat Mirzoyanwill hold a trilateral meeting in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, within the framework of the session of the CIS Council of Foreign Ministers.

"Today we have a good opportunity here to have a trilateral meeting with our Armenian counterpart [Ararat Mirzoyan] to see how the three trilateral statements adopted by our presidents over the past year and a half are being implemented," Lavrov said during his meeting with Bayramov, TASS reported.

Lavrov stressed that their meeting takes place at a time when Russian-Azerbaijani relations have risen to a qualitatively new level: the level of allied cooperation.

"Any opportunity to examine the situation, to reflect on the implementation of specific tasks set by the presidents is quite valuable. I would also like to say that this year we [i.e., Russia and Azerbaijan] celebrate the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations. An entire series of very colorful, bright events are being prepared [in this regard], a collection of Russian-Azerbaijani documents should be prepared for publication in the near future," Lavrov said.

Also, the Russian FM pointed to the economic cooperation between Moscow and Baku.

"Two weeks ago there was a regular session in Baku. It seems to us that it was useful enough to move forward in the direction of all the solutions of our leaders. We hope that in the second half of the year we will be able to organize a regular interregional conference, which was initiated by [Azerbaijani President Ilham] Aliyev at the time, and since then 70 regions participate in the events that are organized within the framework of that conference," Lavrov added.
Foreign Minister of Azerbaijan Jeyhun Bayramov said at a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that he intends to discuss with his colleague the problems of global security and regional issues, TASS reported.

"Naturally, there will be a good opportunity to discuss issues and regional development, as well as global security issues," he said.

"As usual, all our meetings are mostly devoted to the post-conflict settlement and normalization of Armenian-Azerbaijani relations, the implementation of trilateral statements," the Azerbaijani Foreign Minister added.

According to him, the discussion of the agenda at the upcoming trilateral meeting on Thursday with the participation of the foreign ministers of Russia, Azerbaijan and Armenia will be very fruitful.

The ministers' meeting is being held in Dushanbe, where the CIS Ministerial Council meeting will be held on Friday.
Armenian News - NEWS.am presents the digest of top news of protests in Yerevan as of 12.05.22:

Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan announced the visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin to Yerevan.

During a meeting with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Dushanbe, Mirzoyan noted that Yerevan is expecting Putin on a state visit from October to December this year.

According to him, the agenda is the organization of the state visit of the Russian President.

Earlier it was reported that the Foreign Ministers of Russia, Azerbaijan and Armenia Sergey Lavrov, Jeyhun Bayramov and Ararat Mirzoyan will hold a trilateral meeting on the sidelines of the CIS Foreign Ministers Council in Dushanbe.

Protests continue in Yerevan.

Peaceful acts of civil disobedience began in Yerevan on May 2, and a number of streets are closed off every day in the Armenian capital. In addition, opposition rallies are held at France Square.

And today group of members of the opposition Resistance Movement on Thursday protested in front of the office of the European Union (EU) Delegation to Armeniaand with the photos of police officers who used violence against demonstrators.

Armenias opposition Resistance Movement on Thursday also started motorcades of protests from various parts of the capital Yerevan.

Resistance Movement coordinator Ishkhan Saghatelyan had announced Wednesday that they will resume their civil disobedience actions Thursday morning.

"We need to increase the number of our actions and the number of participants, this is the task of each of us, to work on it more intensively these days," he had added.

Also, Saghatelyan had informed that after Thursdays aforesaid motorcades there will be actions of protest in various parts of Yerevan, and at 4pm they will assemble again at France Squarein downtown Yerevanfor a rally.

The Azerbaijani foreign ministry considers the accusations made by Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to be "unfounded, said Leyla Abdullayeva, Head of the Press Service Department of the Azerbaijan MFA.

The unfounded allegations made by the Armenian Prime Minister against Azerbaijan during his speech at the Clingendael Institute of International Relations in the Netherlands, including untrue accusations on humanitarian issues, show that the Armenian leadership is far from being sincere in the issue of normalizing relations between the two countries, Abdullayeva said.

In general, it would be incorrect to describe Armenia's submission of mine maps to Azerbaijan as a humanitarian gesture, as it was Armenia's obligation under international humanitarian law after the signing of the trilateral statement. Since the signing of the trilateral statement, 219 people, mostly civilians, have been killed by landmines, the Azerbaijani MFA representative added.

The Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) Police and the State Service of Emergency Situations on Tuesday received a report about the disappearance of Olga Sanikova, a Russian citizen living in Stepanakert, on Monday, in the area of the Karkar river.

The Artsakh Police inform that for two days now the police officers and rescuers have been carrying out search operations along the aforesaid river.

But these searches have not yielded results yet.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he intends to continue talks with the Russian leadership on Ukraine.

He noted that it was the right decision to visit Russian President Vladimir Putin as there was an urgent need to deal with those that cause the problem or that can solve the problem to find solutions.
Armenia Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan received Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Alexei Overchuk and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko, the press service of the Armenian government informed NEWS.am.

Deputy Prime Minister of Armenia Mher Grigoryan also took part in the meeting.

Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan welcomed the guests, noting, I am glad to see you, I would like to mention once again that we appreciate the already done work within the framework of the trilateral working group on opening regional communications, automobile and railway communications. You know how important this topic is for us, because when we come up with concrete solutions, it will change the situation in the region not only economically, but also politically, psychologically and in terms of security. You know how interested we are in having a concrete and positive outcome over that issue. We continue to work intensively. During my official visit to Moscow, this was one of the key topics discussed with Russian President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. And I am very glad that in this regard we managed to record our common approaches, our common positions.

As for further work on this issue, this issue also has a technical side, which, I think, is not so difficult. But in order for us to have concrete and effective solutions, we need to solve all the legal issues, the procedural issues, which will not only help us to reach concrete solutions quickly, but also those solutions will become more substantiated, stronger, so to speak. And the mechanism will work effectively in the long run. I am sure we are all ready for that work. I would like to thank you once again for the work done. I hope, I am sure, that this work will be effective in the future too, we just need to come up with concrete solutions as soon as possible."

In his turn, Alexei Overchuk thanked the Prime Minister for the warm reception, noting, Indeed, quite recently we met with you in Moscow, where you were on an official visit, visiting Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod. There were a series of meetings with Vladimir Putin, Mikhail Vladimirovich, Valentina Matviyenko. As a result of the meetings, our relevant ministries received tasks and we are working on them. And I would like to mention one very important point that you drew attention to during your visit, which is that all coronavirus restrictions should be completely removed. Now the operative headquarters has made such a decision: from May 16 all restrictions will be removed, it will be possible to travel by roads, by planes. In other words, all these obstacles, which really postponed the contacts between our countries, are being removed today. In addition, we also made decisions with you on a number of trade issues that are very important in the context of today's topic. We are ready to continue the cooperation in the same spirit and to develop it in the future.

Today, of course, we would like to talk about the work of the trilateral working group. We fully share your assessments on the establishment of transport communications between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Indeed, when that happens, it will completely change the entire transport configuration of the region. And really new opportunities will open up for the Armenian economy to develop, to receive additional stimulus, and due to that the role of Armenia will significantly increase. In relation to this, we, of course, make every effort with Mher Grigoryan and Shahin Mustafayev to resolve these issues. And as you rightly pointed out, of course, solutions to legal-procedural issues are very important.

Issues related to the agenda of bilateral cooperation between Armenia and Russia, as well as the activities of the trilateral working group of the Deputy Prime Ministers of Armenia, Russia and Azerbaijan were discussed.

The sides touched upon the prospects of restoration of transport communications in the South Caucasus region, the further course of the work carried out within the framework of the January 11 statement of the Prime Minister of Armenia, the President of Russia and the President of Azerbaijan, the statement reads.
A trilateral meeting of the foreign ministers of Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan has started in Dushanbe, TASS reported.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at the beginning of the meeting thanked his colleagues from Azerbaijan and Armenia Jayhun Bayramov and Ararat Mirzoyan for responding to the Russian side's proposal to "take advantage of the participation of the CIS Ministerial Council to hold a three-way meeting, which will allow continuing joint work on monitoring the implementation of trilateral statements," which were previously adopted at the highest level.

"We are interested in turning the South Caucasus into a zone of peace, sustainable development and prosperity," the Russian diplomat said, adding that increasing confidence between the sides while creating conditions for a full normalization of Armenian-Azerbaijani relations is important for Moscow. "I expect that today's meeting will make it possible to advance along the path that was outlined by our leaders," Lavrov noted.

Armenian Foreign Minister Mirzoyan said at the beginning of the ministerial meeting that Yerevan has been and remains committed to the implementation of all agreements and statements between the leaders of the three countries. "We are ready to continue all works on the existing formats: on opening of communications of economic infrastructures in the region, and on the peace treaty or, as it is probably more correct to call it, the treaty on normalization of relations, establishment of relations, and on solution of all remaining problems, including humanitarian, release of prisoners of war and other problems, which remain unresolved," he said.

For his part, Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Bayramov said in his opening remarks that the meeting "is a good opportunity to discuss the progress that can be made." "I know that contacts between colleagues continue. And we believe that there is a good prospect, a good opportunity to achieve results and achieve the implementation of trilateral statements in full," he said. "We have had quite intensive contacts lately in terms of launching the process of delimitation of the state border. I think that there are good developments, understanding in terms of the composition and representation of the parties in the commission on delimitation, and I also believe that in the near future it will be possible, at least, to launch the process. Bayramov noted that for its part Baku is "ready to begin work on the peace treaty" and that the meeting of the ministers and preservation of contacts between the sides "will have a positive impact on the continuation of the discussion on this subject."

Lavrov had previously held separate meetings with his Azerbaijani and Armenian counterparts.
The Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Armenia, Russia and Azerbaijan discussed preparations for an agreement on normalization of relations between Yerevan and Baku, the statement by the Russian Foreign Ministry reads.

"The foreign ministers discussed joint efforts to normalize Azerbaijani-Armenian relations. They confirmed their commitment to strict compliance with all the provisions of the statements of the leaders of of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Russia of 9 November, 2020, 11 January, 2021 and 26 November, 2021.

They noted the progress in implementing the trilateral agreements in key areas, including the unblocking of economic and transport links in the region through the Trilateral Working Group co-chaired by the Deputy Prime Ministers of Russia, Azerbaijan and Armenia, as well as efforts to launch the delimitation and subsequent demarcation of the Azerbaijani-Armenian border with the consultative assistance of Russia at the request of the parties.

The preparation of an agreement on the normalization of relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia was discussed, which the Russian side is also ready to support in every possible way.

The ministers spoke in favor of continuing the dialogue between the public representatives of Azerbaijan and Armenia with the participation of Russia.
David Yellen knew going in that it would be an uphill battle. If he were to have any chance of winning the case United States v. LaBonte, he would have to swing the votes of Supreme Court justices Sandra Day OConnor and David Souter in his favor.

So, Yellen directed much of his oral argument at the two jurists, trying to convince them that the U.S. Sentencing Commission was right in its decision to lower sentencing guidelines for a certain category of offenses.

In the end, I didnt get either of their votes, he said of the High Courts 6-3 ruling in the 1997 case.

But still, it was an experiencearguing in front of the highest court in the landthat Yellen said he will treasure for the rest of his life.

Now, the brilliant barrister, who has served as dean at two of the nations leading schools of law and is the current chief executive officer of the University of Denvers Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS), is embarking on a new chapter of his stellar legal career. On July 1, Yellen becomes the new dean of the University of Miami School of Law, taking the reins of an academic entity known for its legal clinics, programs, and fields of study that cut across all areas of the profession.

David Yellens scholarship, leadership, and exceptional legal acumen are perfectly aligned with the mission and goals of our School of Law and the University of Miami, said University of Miami President Julio Frenk.

Yellen said he is thrilled to be coming to Miami and is committed to helping the school meet its goals.

In everything from the achievements of the alumni to the faculty, which represent both great teaching and great scholarly work, Miami Law is a dynamic law school located in a vibrant city, Yellen said. I feel like I am jumping on a surfboard that is already on a giant wave that has started to crest.

Yellen brings an extensive resume to his new post. At IAALS, he has been a force in ensuring that the national, independent research center achieves its goal of improving access to justice and the civil justice system.

From 2005 to 2016, he served as dean and professor of law at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, incorporating distance learning into its juris doctor program and offering a masters degree track for non-lawyersinitiatives that made the law school one of the most innovative in the country.

After Loyola, Yellen served as president of Marist College from 2016 to 2019, spearheading the planning of a new medical school, among other projects.

He has served as dean of the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University, where he held the Max Schmertz Distinguished Professorship. And he has also been the Reuschlein Distinguished Visiting Professor at Villanova University School of Law and twice served as a visiting professor at Cornell Law School.

Yellen, who earned his Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude from Princeton University and graduated cum laude from Cornell Law School, was frequently included on National Jurist magazines list of the 25 Most Influential People in Legal Education during his time at Loyola.

His major area of academic expertise is criminal law, particularly sentencing and juvenile justice. Prior to his academic career, Yellen clerked for a federal judge; practiced law in Washington, D.C.; and served as counsel to the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives.

He has written extensively about the federal sentencing guidelines, testified before the United States Sentencing Commission, advised President Bill Clintons transition team on white collar crime enforcement, and, of course, argued a federal sentencing case before the Supreme Court.

It was that Supreme Court appearance that tested his legal skills like no other time in his career. While its a grand courtroom, the court is surprisingly intimate. Youre standing just a few feet from the justices, and you can see their expressions, Yellen recalled. Its a very intense and wonderful experience. But, in reality, the more significant aspect of handling a Supreme Court case is the preparation. The oral argument is the most dramatic moment; and, understandably, its what most people think of when they hear of someone appearing before the Supreme Court. But the hard work, as any lawyer will tell you, is before you get to courtresearching and writing briefs. That was actually the most intense writing experience Ive ever had.

In the summer of 2001, Yellen had another Supreme Court encounter, this one outside the courtroom and in a much more adventuresome setting. He hosted the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Nice, France, where she lectured as part of Hofstra law schools summer program.

One day, strapped into a tandem harness attached to a boat, the two parasailed off the beach, with Yellens wife, Leslie, and Ginsburgs husband, Marty, looking on. By the end of the week, after several dinners and concerts, we really felt that Ruth and Marty had become our friends. I saw Justice Ginsburg from time to time over the years and rarely was the parasailing story not mentioned, Yellen once wrote in an article he penned for Readers Digest.

As a little boy growing up in New Jersey, Yellen thought the two coolest jobs in the world were being a 60 Minutes correspondent and a Supreme Court justice. Law was one of the things that always intrigued me, he said. His interest in the field mushroomed while at Princeton, inspiring him to volunteer at a juvenile reformatoryan experience that galvanized his fascination with law and the juvenile justice system, in particular.

These were mostly young men who had not had the same opportunities in life that my classmates down the road in college had, Yellen said. And I was so powerfully struck by the biggest difference in many cases between the kids in college and the kids in the reformatory. The biggest difference was just the circumstances they were born into.

Todays law students face the tremendous challenge of having to adapt and practice their profession in ever-changing areas, Yellen said.

Legal fields always develop as the economy develops. Technology law and health law, for example, have grown rapidly in recent years because the tech and health care sectors have become such massive forces in the economy. Law doesnt drive that change; it follows the direction of the economy, he explained. So, graduating law school students entering the profession today face a world where change is rapid. In five or 10 years they will have some kind of job that doesnt really exist today. And the biggest challenge they will encounter is developing the adaptability necessary for such a rapidly changing environment.

It is the responsibility of law schools, using experiential learning techniques, to prepare students for that environment, he pointed out.

Yellens wife of 36 years, Leslie Richards-Yellen, is director of global diversity and inclusion at the international law firm Debevoise and Plimpton. The two met as law students at Cornell University. They have three adult daughters, Jordan, Meredith, and Bailey.
More than 1,300 graduatesfuture journalists, business owners, engineers, nurses, architects, and marine scientists among themcrossed the Watsco Centers stage on Thursday to receive their diplomas during the University of Miami graduate commencement ceremonies.

In two ceremonies that stretched through most of the day, graduates heard from two distinguished speakers: Ricardo Lagos, a lawyer and economist, who was president of Chile from 2000 to 2006, and Catherine Lhamon, who is currently serving a second term as assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education.

In the second ceremony, Lhamon urged graduate students to practice daily heroism and make the choice to stand for others and for equity.

We, each of us, have the capacity to safeguard our communities, to press for and secure the vision of the good that we hold most dear, Lhamon said. No matter what we do in our day jobs, we have the agency to impact our communities for the public good. I hope you use that agency both in the ways you plan in advance and in ways that you may not.

Lhamon emphasized the unprecedented and remarkable times the students have overcome to earn their degreesan achievement that demonstrates their capacity to meet and overcome what is hard and unplanned.

We have all learned from the pandemic that the unplanned is more than possible, she noted. I hope you follow that lesson of everyday heroism, taking your gifts to build communities that sustain and stand for each other.

The civil rights champion shared three anecdotes from her own career to demonstrate her message.

One of her first clients as a young lawyer was a class of third-graders whose school learning conditions were deplorable. Their parents complaints had been ignored for years. In addition to suing the school district, Lhamon put some of the students on the local TV station to tell their story. Within days, mobile classroom were installed, and the conditions improved.

The legal victory was sweet, she said, but the best was seeing the little girls faces beaming because their lawyer came for them.

They were so proud that standing up for themselves had paid off, that the community listened, and had fixed the school conditions, Lhamon recounted. The message that I hear you, and I will stand for you was the resolution they needed.

She cited, too, the example of a Black college football player who stood up for and befriended a white woman who had been raped by his white teammate. And, third, she spoke about her experience viewing an exhibit of iconic photographs from the civil rights movement.

The photographsan elderly Black man held high by celebrants after he voted for the first time, a young girl who fearlessly turned her back on police to encourage other marchers to continue, among othersdepicted people whose names we will never know but who acted on behalf of others.

These were astonishingly courageous everyday heroes who stood up for what they believed to be right in order to make the progress we live today, said Lhamon, who in 2016 was named by Politico as one of the 50 thinkers, doers, and visionaries transforming American politics.

I hope that you find ways to communicate in your communities that you are there for them, sending the message that standing up for others is in itself valuable, said Lhamon. I wish for each of you that you hold on to the power of being there at the right moment when your presence communicates to someone that they are not alone.

In the morning ceremony, Lagos told the graduates he was honored to be here.

During the 1980s, Lagos was a well-known opponent of the Chilean military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. In 1988, he shocked the nation when he openly denounced the dictator on live television. Pinochet was defeated in open elections.

Lagos said that he believed that the invitation to speak at the ceremony was a testament to how at a crucial moment in his countrys history, the citizens stood up to a dictator and voted him out of office and put him in place.

The former Chilian president highlighted several major challenges that awaited the graduates.

I have to think of all of you in todays world as we face the challenges of the lockdown of COVID-19, Lagos said. How are we going to build institutions to defeat the pandemic and lockdown and quarantine that we are growing used to? he asked.

We used to think that quarantines and lockdowns were the things of the Middle Ages, a long time ago, he said. But here we have a new challenge.

According to Lagos, it was up to science to come up with answers beyond the current vaccines, since the virus has the capacity to mutate.

We have to keep trying and many of you with your knowledge will know how to do it, he said.

The second challenge is a more difficult one to face, he pointed out.

Lagos said that he was referring to the civilizational and the epochal change that left behind the industrial revolution, which was the framework in which the past 250 years of humans on this planet developed and the advent of the digital revolution, an age of algorithms and artificial intelligence.

While the industrial revolution brought mechanization and increased productivity, it also allowed humans to live longer and procreate in larger numbers. The increased populations have brought another challenge to the planet, he noted.

So many human beings in this planet have depleted the planet and this is climate change arriving, he said. That is a major challenge that we have, not for ourselves but for our children and our childrens children.

As the digital revolution emerges, he said, you receiving the diplomas today are the new generation who will begin to answer what the digital age means. As the new digital age grows and with the increased globalization in todays world, new institutions will have to emerge to address problems beyond our borders, he added.

New political institutions will also emerge that will have to anticipate how politicians are governing before planned elections, Lagos explained.

Subjects like mathematics, biology, astronomy, and other disciplines will also change in this digital age and you will be the first generation that will have to face this, Lagos told the graduates. But he said that he was hopeful that the graduates were equipped with the knowledge and technology to find the answers to the challenges ahead. He also warned that as they ventured forth, new political institutions had to be developed that would ensure democratic processes to guarantee that all human beings are equal and treated with dignity.

I am optimistic about human beings because you, the new generation, will have the right answers with new instruments for the first time and therefore you can fulfill the old dreambuilding a democratic system where all of us have to be equal in something, he said.

President Julio Frenk bestowed the honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, on Lagos.

Class of 2022 today we celebrate your achievements, which are the more remarkable considering all you have endured to get to this point, said Frenk. You have experienced a global crisis and changes on how you lived and learned, wore masks in classes, practiced social distancing, and made sacrifices for the sake of your education, he added.

Living through this experience while pursuing an advanced degree has given you the opportunity to learn and practice adaptability and resilience, he said.

Student speaker Justin Houston, who received a masters degree in public administration from the College of Arts and Sciences, echoed Frenks comments, reminding the students of their resiliency.

We decided that in the midst of the pandemicfinancial strain, disorder, chaos, and uncertaintythat this was the perfect time to pursue a graduate degree, he said.

We are all Hurricanes, but we are built a little differently from those that roll off the coast of Africa or form in any other body of water, he continued. You see, those storm systems need ideal conditions to thrivethe right season, a track unimpeded by land. A hurricane follows the path of least resistance, he added.

And if the environment is not perfect, the storm will avoid it at all costs. However, the Hurricanes hereMiami Hurricanesare the exact opposite, Houston emphasized. We all thrive through adversity. The larger the obstacle, the stronger we become. Our storm track needs rigorous conditions.
The University of Miami Miller School of Medicines 67th commencement ceremony on May 11 celebrated more than 190 eager new physicians of the schools class of 2022.

Dr. Henri R. Ford, dean and chief academic officer of the Miller School, led the proceedings, congratulating the class on their journey to becoming physicians during a unique and particularly challenging time in medicine.

"Never before has a class entered their career at a time of such great need," Ford said. "We have endeavored to empower you to transform lives and to inspire you to serve our global community. Never forget to embody the essential attributes of a successful physician: character, patience, persistence, compassion, honesty, and integrity.

President Julio Frenk touched on developing fortitude and life's rites of passage. He recognized parents, veterans, and the faculty that made this day possible for the graduates.

Through all these challenges, you stayed engaged and on course with adaptability and resilience, Frenk said. "In life, some sacrifices test and define characters, and your ability to persist will lead you to a bright future. Remember, what inspires resilience is hope and confidence. As our medical graduates, you are our hope and a shining example of resilient Canes. You are well equipped to face future challenges."

The ceremony included recognitions for two retiring Miller School faculty members. Jeffrey Duerk, executive vice president for academic affairs and provost, commended Dr. Gregory Zych for 41 years of service and Dr. Silvina Levis for 33 years with the Miller School.

Before presenting the graduates, commencement speaker Dr. Tore Godal, who received an honorary degree, addressed the class. Godals six-decade career in medicine and public health has taken him from Norway to Ethiopia and around the world, working for the World Health Organization. He told the graduates to choose adventure, build on their experience, and take risks.

Resilient Canes

As the themes of challenge and resilience resonated with students, many reflected on their personal journeys. Rick Lin credited his mother and late twin brother as important figures in helping him get through medical school.

I knew in high school I wanted to be a physician, and my twin brother has pushed me to continue this journey despite how tough these past four years have been at times, said Lin, who will be a resident in internal medicine at the University of Florida. I know my brother David would be extremely proud. I dont think I could ever be as awesome as my mom, as Im extremely thankful for her support. Im super excited for this next chapter.

Sophia Jimsheleishvili also felt gratitude as she thanked her mother, a neurologist who immigrated to the United States from the country of Georgia and did her residency in the U.S. later in life.

I didnt have dolls; I would play doctor instead, recalled Jimsheleishvili, who will be a neurology resident at the Miller School/Jackson Memorial Hospital. There was a reason I wanted to do this, and my mom and I helped each other out. I hopefully made her proud as Im really thankful. She has been my mentor, motivator, and main person who has inspired me.

The Miller School continues to lead the nation in medical schools granting dual degrees. Out of the more than 190 graduates in the M.D. program, there were 48 M.D./M.P.H., eight M.D./Ph.D., seven M.D./M.S., and five M.D./M.B.A. graduates.

One of the dual-degree recipients was Sebastian Victor Sanchez-Luege, who delivered the student address. Sharing examples of the care his classmates had shown to patients, Sanchez-Luege spoke of how small experiences can impact patients livesas he witnessed 20 years ago when he battled cancer.

My hair is a reminder of a journey that started in first grade and brought me to the U, said Sanchez-Luege, who will be in the transitional/anesthesiology program at Stanford Health Care. We all come to med school with our narrative, and it's important to recognize how our stories intersect with those of our patients. Don't be afraid to connect deeply with them and be vulnerable, he added. The patients we will encounter have stories to share. They come to us with more than an illness. It is up to us to uncover their fears, aspirations, and understand the social network in which they exist.

Dr. Latha Chandran, executive dean and founding chair of the Department of Medical Education, led the Hippocratic oath and gave each member of the class a parting gift: a copy of Life on the Line: Young Doctors Come of Age in a Pandemic, by Emma Goldberg.

Dr. Alex J. Mechaber, president of the Miller Schools Medical Alumni Association, congratulated the new graduates and spoke of the legacy that began in 1956 when the Miller School graduated its first class. Reminding them that they were now part of that proud heritage, Mechaber concluded, For today, goodbye. For tomorrow, good luck. And forever, go Canes.
China, Russia block new N Korea sanctions

China, Russia block new N Korea sanctions

China and the United States took opposing stances at the UN Security Council on Wednesday on how to reduce tensions with North Korea, with Washington arguing for more sanctions against Pyongyang while Beijing called for their easing.



The emergency meeting of the body charged with global peace and security came amid fears that North Korea will resume nuclear testing in the coming weeks.



Chinese ambassador to the UN Zhang Jun called the possibility of escalation "worrying" and called for "restraint," adding that tightening sanctions in an atmosphere of mistrust was "not constructive."



"What China wants to avoid is a new nuclear test," he said after the meeting. "So that's why we do not want to have additional sanctions that might force one of the parties to take more proactive action.



"Talking is better than coercive measures. We have seen so much coercive measures in the world, in Syria, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Have you seen any good results? What we have seen is only the humanitarian suffering."



However US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield said: "It is time to stop providing tacit permission and start taking action. We need to turn quickly to strengthening the... sanctions regime, not considering sanctions relief."



Thomas-Greenfield rejected a draft resolution from China and Russia, like the US both veto-wielding members of the council, which aims to ease sanctions imposed in 2017.



Instead, she said they were near the end of negotiations on a separate US text updating the sanctions.



"We cannot wait until (North Korea) conducts additional provocative, illegal, dangerous acts like a nuclear test. We need to speak up now," she said.



Russia's Deputy Ambassador Anna Yevstigneeva also advocated the resolution proposed with China and called for the resumption of dialogue. (AFP)
Man jailed 20 months for making explosives

Wong Wai-yin pleaded guilty to making explosives. File photo: RTHK

One of 12 Hong Kong people held by the mainland coastguard two years ago for crossing the border illegally has been given 20 months in prison here after pleading guilty to making explosives during the 2019 social unrest.



The District Court heard that 31-year-old Wong Wai-yin, a mechanic, made the explosive DNT near Ng Uk Village on Sha Tau Kok Road between December 1, 2019 and January 14, 2020.



Prosecutors agreed to drop a charge of perverting the course of justice.



Wong, along with 11 others, was intercepted at sea by the Guangdong coastguard on August 23, 2020 when the group was reportedly fleeing to Taiwan on a speedboat.



He was sent back to the SAR in March last year after completing his seven-month sentence across the border.
Finland set to join Nato amid Ukraine conflict

Finnish soldiers take part in an exercise at the Niinisalo garrison in Kankaanpaa, western Finland, earlier this month. Finland appears on the cusp of joining Nato, and Sweden could follow suit. File photo: AP

Finland said on Thursday it would apply to join Nato "without delay", with Sweden expected to follow, as Russia's attack on Ukraine looked set to bring about the very expansion of the Western military alliance that President Vladimir Putin aimed to prevent.



The decision by the two Nordic countries to abandon the neutrality they maintained throughout the Cold War would be one of the biggest shifts in European security in decades.



Finland's announcement angered the Kremlin, which called it a direct threat to Russia and threatened an unspecified response.



It came even as Russia's war in Ukraine was suffering another big setback, with Ukrainian forces driving Russian troops out of the region around the second largest city Kharkiv, the fastest Ukrainian advance since forcing Russia to withdraw from the capital and northeast more than a month ago.



Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the Finns would be "warmly welcomed" and promised an accession process that would be "smooth and swift".



Finland and Sweden are the two biggest EU countries yet to join Nato. Finland's 1,300-kilometre border will more than double the length of the frontier between the US-led alliance and Russia, putting Nato guards a few hours' drive from the northern outskirts of St Petersburg.



"Finland must apply for Nato membership without delay," President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said in a joint statement. "We hope that the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days."



Asked whether Finland's accession posed a direct threat to Russia, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: "Definitely. Nato expansion does not make our continent more stable and secure.



"This cannot fail to arouse our regret, and is a reason for corresponding symmetrical responses on our side," Peskov added, without elaborating. Russian officials have spoken in the past about potential measures including stationing nuclear-armed missiles on the Baltic Sea. (Reuters)
To end the ongoing political crisis, Sri Lanka President Gotabaya Rajapaksa on Wednesday announced that a new government with a new Prime Minister, who can command the majority in the Parliament, would be appointed this week. Addressing the nation, President Rajapaksa also agreed to bring constitutional changes in line with the 19th Amendment, which was introduced by the last government and seeks that the Parliament be given more powers while curtailing executive (presidential) powers. He also assured that as demanded by various sections of the society, he would make ways to abolish the Presidential system. Meanwhile, former PM Ranil Wickremesinghe has met the President on Wednesday and there was speculation that he was to be appointed as the new PM. In his speech, President Rajapaksa strongly condemned Monday's violence, which nine people, including an MP, dead, 300 injured and over 100 houses and offices of politicians torched. He assured that severe punishment would be imposed on those responsible for the violence and he is working with the other parties to ensure security of all people and political stability. As it goes through its worst-ever economic crisis, Sri Lanka on Monday saw violent attacks carried out by pro-government goons on peaceful protestors who had been demanding the President and PM Mahinda Rajapksa to resign. Subsequently, nearly 2,000 supporters of Mahinda Rajapaksa who gathered at his official resident, Temple Trees, insisted that he not to step down and later armed with poles and iron bars, marched towards two protest sites near his residence and attacked the protestors. Condemning the attacks, people around the country took onto the streets and counter- attacked the pro-government group and later, the buses, and other vehicles they used to come to Colombo were damaged and burnt. Arson attacks were carried out on more than 100 buildings including the houses of Mahinda Rajapaksa and his younger brother and former Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa and elder brother and former minister Chamal Rajapaksa, other ruling party ministers, MPs and local politicians. In wake of the violence, PM Mahinda Rajapaksa resigned and later took refuge at a naval base on the Eastern coast. Amidst the public anger, the ruling party politicians have gone into hiding and the Speaker on Wednesday urged the Inspector General of Police to ensure security of MPs. Following Monday's violence, an island-wide curfew was imposed till Thursday morning and it as later announced the curfew would resume from 2 p.m. on the same day. On Tuesday, the military was called in and orders were given to shoot all those looting and carrying out arson attacks. On Wednesday, armoured vehicles were seen all around Colombo with a heavy military presence and political parties had complained that the government was planning a military dictatorship. The US expressed concern over the deployment of the military and urged the government to work quickly to ensure public safety and implement solutions to achieve long-term economic and political stability in the country. Meanwhile, the Indian High Commission in Colombo strongly denied certain media reports that some politicians with their families have fled to India for safety. India also denied speculative media reports that it was to send troops to Sri Lanka and a spokesperson of its Ministry of External Affairs had stated that India was fully supportive of Sri Lanka's democracy, stability, and economic recovery. --IANS sfl/vd ( 572 Words) 2022-05-11-23:12:01 (IANS)
"As we have said many times before, NATO expansion does not make the world more stable and secure," Peskov told reporters after Finland's top politicians announced their support for an application for NATO membership, CNN reported.

Peskov added that Russia's reaction will depend on the development of the NATO military infrastructure.

"It will depend on what this expansion process will entail, how far and how close to our borders the military infrastructure will move," Peskov said, CNN reported.

Russia will analyse the situation with Finland's entry to NATO and will work out the necessary measures to ensure its own security, he added.

Finland would be "warmly welcomed into NATO", said the military alliance's chief Jens Stoltenberg after the country's top politicians said they wanted to join.

"This is a sovereign decision by Finland, which NATO fully respects. Should Finland decide to apply, they would be warmly welcomed into NATO, and the accession process would be smooth and swift," said Stoltenberg, according to his office, CNN reported.

"Finland is one of NATO's closest partners, a mature democracy, a member of the European Union, and an important contributor to Euro-Atlantic security," he added.

Earlier on Thursday, Finnish President Sauli Niinisto and Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin issued a joint statement announcing their support for a Finnish application to join NATO.

Stoltenberg said he agreed with the analysis from Niinisto and Marin "that NATO membership would strengthen both NATO and Finland's security."

--IANS san/arm

( 286 Words)

2022-05-12-19:00:01 (IANS)
Of the humongous Rs 62,000 crore debt on the books of Air India when it was handed over to the Tatas, the Government of India has closed its part of Rs 47,000 crore by paying off all the banks involved. The Tatas took over Rs 15,300 crore of debt where they have since renegotiated terms, and refinanced it by bringing in new lenders. Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia confirmed this in a conversation with IANS Editor in Chief Sandeep Bamzai on Wednesday. Scindia said, "The Tatas paid Rs 2,700 crore cash and took over Rs 15,300 crore of the airline's debt. We have settled the balance amount of Rs 47,000 crore with all the lenders. The deal is now complete and I believe this is a very big achievement." On August 31, 2021, the airline's total debt stood at Rs 61,562 crore, out of which around Rs 47,000 crore was transferred to AIAHL. The airline also had about Rs 15,000 crore excess liabilities towards unpaid fuel bills and other operation creditors. Scindia said that Tatas are very excited with their turnaround plans with 141 aircraft (Air India fleet) out of India's total of 715 aircraft. He reckoned that this fleet size in India would double within the next five years as all the airlines, including newbies Jet Airways (returning to the skies) and Akasa Air, have massive roll out plans. Pursuing the reform agenda in aviation, his next bold gambit is leasing of another set of airports, this time round another eight to nine. Scindia said, "What we did was transfer the Rs 47,000 crore to a special purpose vehicle, Air India Asset Holding Ltd. The interest service outgo on the debt and other liabilities was extremely high and it was decided to square it off permanently. All told about Rs 61,131 crore was cleared at the time of the deal." Scindia brimming with ideas for the aviation sector is thinking of new policies which make the system more organised and equally more dynamic. For instance, immediate on his agenda is leasing of at least 8-9 more airports. As he said, "Let me categorically insist as I did in the Parliament the other day that these airports are not being privatised, they are being leased for a 50-year period. Not only are they going to generate revenue for the government this way, but they will guarantee upgrading of these airports. I think this is the best model going forward. You will hear of us calling for bids in the next round shortly. On charges of privatisation, let me tell you that leasing will actually garner revenues of Rs 904 crore per year for AAI as lease fee for the first round of six airports, and as much as Rs 2,322 crore has already reached government accounts in this case. We expect a similar windfall when we do the next round of leasing." On the same lines, he is excited with the response he has got on his call for reducing VAT on ATF (aviation turbine fuel). "I requested the chief ministers to reduce VAT and I have found that as many as 12 CMs and an LG have come forward with cuts to boost connectivity and revenue. Andhra Pradesh and Kerala have reduced VAT and there is a 15 per cent bump up in connectivity in a quarter. J&K has reduced VAT from 26 per cent to 1 per cent and the number of aircraft landing there and refuelling has gone up by 360 per cent. This reform measure will only widen and deepen the aviation sector in India," Scindia said. His next big play is his ambitious drone policy where he averred that 16-18 indigenous startups with cutting-edge technology will be at the vanguard of change. "At the ministry, we are in sync with the PM's vision to make India a global drone hub. The PLI scheme will drive both manufacturing and services in this sector. Equally, 12 different ministries, including agriculture, mining and rural, will create the demand for these drones. There is blue sky available in this sector and my interface with many of these startups which want to participate convinces me that we will build a constructive eco-system in this field. With the active participation of the stakeholders of the drone industry and the Government of India, the drone industry is set on a path of exponential growth. The government will enable the continuity of this accelerated drone adoption by easing drone regulations and through drone literacy via programmes such as Drone Shakti and Kisan Drones," the minister said. --IANS sb/arm ( 782 Words) 2022-05-11-20:56:04 (IANS)
New Delhi [India], May 12 (ANI/SRV): The recently concluded Tiens Groups 2022 Carnival Launch Conference released the complete global development strategy, development plan, and development measures for 2022. With the unveiling of the "10,000 Leading Global Professional Plan", Tiens Group placed a major emphasis on recruitment, with each country of operation welcoming 100 international level foreign professionals with high-level of vocational education and training backgrounds. The theme for this year was "COLORFUL TIENS," which advocated the benefits of a cross-border global business that transcends national borders, languages, and cultures. The launch was broadcast live to more than 110 nations and regions around the world via the company's official website and the VShare app's instant messaging live broadcast capability. Tiens Group's one-body multi-wings cross-border business strategy, based on new replacement and transcendence theory, is the cornerstone for achieving long-term and transformational growth. The concept: "Family Consumption Creates Wealth, Building Businesses on Family Consumption Creates More Wealth", will continue to be promoted to help people in all countries achieve mass entrepreneurship and wealth development. The key to building a career is to develop professional skills. Tiens' development of 'One Body with Multiple Wings' needs the collaboration of more like-minded qualified professionals. The "10,000 Leading Global Professionals Plan" is being implemented by Tiens Group this year to achieve that very purpose. Tiens will introduce 100 international professionals and high-level global foreign vocational education specialists in each of its operating countries this year in order to encourage excellent success mechanisms and innovative models. Over the last 26 years, Tiens Group has risen to become a global player in biotechnology, health management, hospitality and tourism, education and training, e-commerce, international trade, higher education, and several other fields. The business reached 224 countries and regions, with branches in 110 countries and regions, and production bases in over 20 countries. Through 32,000 family and experience stores throughout the world, the network now serves more than 47 million people. For management, education and training, logistics, procurement, customs clearance and inspection, payment, legal services, and taxation, a single global unified trade system has been built. Tiens has established a powerful global platform with global channels delivering broad prospects and endless value in collaboration with cross-border e-commerce, customer care, and professional development teams. In 1996, when Tiens Group was in the nascent stage of development, the Chinese Ministry of Education approved investment in the establishment of a full-time higher education institute - TIENS College. By 2014, a total school funding of US USD 220 million had been invested. The establishment of an international and high-level private university has long been a cherished wish of the Tiens Group founder. The business began construction of a new TIENS College campus in 2015, with a total expenditure of US USD 2.7 billion to date. The site presently spans 3.2 square kilometers, with 2.1 million square meters of building space and a capacity of 42,600 students. In the magnificent setting of the new campus, 12,000 professors and students now live and study, while responding to China's "National Vocational Education Reform Implementation Plan" and accelerating the growth of undergraduate education. Tiens Life Science and Technology Research Institute shared with TIENS Collegeis home to academic, post-doctoral, and Nobel Prize level departments dedicated to the research and development, production, and sales of over 600 health goods, beauty and skincare products, household products, and health equipment. Products have passed certification requirements in the United States, the European Union, and Japan, including FDA approval and a variety of green and organic certification levels around the world. Tiens will bring in high-end professionals, proficient in business to put up a fight.Tiens looks forward to incorporating global education system, putting in place, exceptional teams, global market developers, entrepreneurs;those who are ready to provide exceptional outcomes and establish a global reputation; those who want to grow together with Tiens, achieve mutual success, integrating the global systems.Tiens is home to those who are eager to create a beautiful world through global partnerships & alliances,and shine together brilliantly in the future! To know more visit: https://web-in.tiens.com/ Connect with Tiens @webtiens@tiensindia-shopping.com This story is provided by SRV. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/SRV)
Singapore, May 12 (ANI/PRNewswire): LIXIL, maker of pioneering water and housing products is excited to announce the Grand Prize winners of the American Standard Design Award (ASDA) Asia Pacific 2022. The ASDA is a bathroom space design competition aimed at uncovering the best, aspiring young talents in the Asia Pacific region by providing them with a recognized platform to showcase their works. This year, the ASDA received an overwhelming response from over 2800 registrations hailing from 7 countries in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region - namely Australia, Cambodia, India, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. The theme of this year's competition was Purposeful Design - Transforming the Way We Live. Driven by insights into future challenges, the competition reflects emerging lifestyle trends of urbanization and health & well-being and features two award categories: Residential Bathroom Space Design and Hospitality Bathroom Space Design. Entries focus on designing purposeful bathroom spaces that not only feature inviting aesthetics but are integrated with functionality that fulfills the user's needs. In the Residential Bathroom Space Design category, designers had to design bathroom spaces to be as multi-functional as possible without compromising on living and workspaces. The Hospitality Bathroom Space Design sought out designs that addressed better health and hygiene standards for an inviting and worry-free hotel stay experience. All 1st prize winners for each category from every country advanced to the APAC competition round, where 14 national winners competed for the coveted Grand Prize of USD 3000 each per category. The Grand Prize for the Residential Bathroom Space Design Category goes to Le Duc Thinh of Ha Noi University of Civil Engineering from Vietnam. Defying the traditional concept that bathrooms should be hidden, this winning design concept purposefully and seamlessly integrates the bathroom into the limited space in urban homes. The Grand Prize for the Hospitality Bathroom Space Design Category is awarded to Teeragiat Sukyoo of Assumption University from Thailand. This winning design concept incorporates innovative hygiene features - from surfaces to products, that ensure the highest level of hygiene with minimal cleaning effort for a truly worry-free stay for hotel guests. Entries were carefully evaluated by an influential judging panel comprising of 39 industry experts who are leaders in their own fields, including partners of established architectural firms, professional architects and notable interior designers from Asia Pacific. All competing entries were evaluated based on four main criteria of Purposeful Design, Inviting Style, Originality, and Feasibility; and went through two levels of judging: National Level and APAC Level. "Good design challenges the status quo while solving real-life challenges. It is heartening to see young designers leveraging purposeful design in their approach to envision tangible solutions that answered our briefs. With their fresh ideas and perspectives, their works demonstrate how purposeful design can transform the way we live, today and in the future." said Antoine Besseyre Des Horts, Leader of LIXIL Global Design, Asia. ASDA applauds all participants from the Asia Pacific region and gives our heartiest congratulations to the National Winners and the Asia Pacific Grand Prize winners. Information on the young designers and their winning works is available on the ASDA website at https://asda.americanstandard-apac.com/winners. As one of the most iconic brands in sanitary ware, American Standard has earned the trust of its customers by constantly delivering style, quality and reliability to their bathrooms. Today, backed by more than 140 years of pioneering legacy, American Standard continues to raise the bar in delivering dependable bathroom solutions that combine thoughtful designs and innovative technologies to create inviting bathroom spaces offering ultimate hygiene, comfort and convenience. LIXIL makes pioneering water and housing products that solve everyday, real-life challenges, making better homes a reality for everyone, everywhere. Drawing on our Japanese heritage, we create world-leading technology and innovate to make high quality products that transform homes. But the LIXIL difference is how we do this; through meaningful design, an entrepreneurial spirit, a dedication to improving accessibility for all, and responsible business growth. Our approach comes to life through industry leading brands, including LIXIL, GROHE, American Standard, INAX, and TOSTEM. Over 70,000 colleagues operating in 150 countries are proud to make products that touch the lives of more than a billion people every day. LIXIL Group Corporation (TSE Code: 5938) is the listed holding company for LIXIL's portfolio of businesses. 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], May 12 (ANI/GPRC): Research and Policy division, BJP OBC Morcha organises the entrepreneurship meet with the objective of igniting the entrepreneurship spirit among the youths of OBCs and to highlight the various measures taken by the BJP government particularly in the area of economic and entrepreneurship field for the OBCs. Research and policy division of BJP OBC Morcha organised this meet at constitution club of India on 7 May 2022. This occasion was graced by the eminent presence of Central minister of state for finance Dr Bhagwat Karad ji as chief guest and the BJP General Secretary Arun Singh ji as special Guest and Shri Dr k Laxman, National President OBC Morcha, BJP with Prof Pankaj Choudhary, National Incharge of Research and Policy Division of OBC Morcha. Entrepreneur Meet was attended by more than 20 states entrepreneurs and CEOs & MD. Dr K Laxman highlighted the various policy measures taken by the BJP government for the economic empowerment of the OBCs. He highlighted the positive role played by the National backward and development corporation organisation which has so far assisted over 27 lakh beneficiaries. He also said setting up of venture capital fund for the OBC in 2018 with an initial fund of 200 crores 30 percent reservation for women entrepreneurs is a landmark. Similarly, PM VISWAS Yojna for interest subvention has benefited OBC entrepreneurs a lot. Similarly, around 35 percent MUDRA loan holders come from OBC Samaj For igniting entrepreneurship spirit among OBC youths. Around 35 per cent of MUDRA loan holders are from the OBC communities. For economic empowerment of PM Daksh Yojana has been introduced for development of training programmes to 13587 manual scavengers and their dependents and 809 manual scavengers were given bank loans. Arun Singh highlighted the various skill development initiatives taken by the BJP government. In this regard he mentioned PM DAKASH Yojna and PM MatsyaSampdaYojna for the economic empowerment of the poor and OBCs. He also highlighted the inclusive character of the BJP government. For the first time, there are 27 ministers from the OBC Samaj. Also constitutional status to the backward commission along with 127 constitution amendment points towards the commitment of the BJP government for the welfare and empowerment of the OBCs. Shri K Laxamanjhighlighted the reservation given by the BJP government in Sainik School and Kendriya vidyalaya and in NEET as educational empowerment of the OBCs. He also said the increasing the limit of creamy layer would help many middle class OBC families. In the end, Central Minister for finance Dr Karad highlighted the overall measures and economic empowerment measures by the BJP for the welfare of the OBC. He said venture capital fund and various skill development initiatives have played a huge role in igniting the entrepreneurship spirit among OBC youths and making them employable respectively. While thanking the eminent guests and participants, Research and Policy BJP OBC Morcha Incharge Professor Pankaj Choudhary said the research and policy division of BJP OBC Morcha will continue to organise such meets to introduce the various measures of empowerment for the OBC s to general public. This story is provided by GPRC. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/GPRC)
New Delhi [India], May 12 (ANI/NewsVoir): New CardByte, India's first end-to-end business-card based contact management platform is all set to roll out its standard and pro subscription plans, which will offer a host of appropriate features and advanced analytics across the board to suit specific needs. The platform helps individuals and businesses manage their professional network effortlessly by leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) to access the undiscovered network and unleash business opportunities. It also allows users to create digital business cards, exchange them within and outside their network, organise them using customisable tags, and store them on a secure cloud-based platform. Additionally, the app's smart scanner empowers users by automatically digitising existing paper cards into e-cards and storing them in the in-app wallet. While traditional business-card based exchanges have been full of complexities and limitations, there are no promising tech-backed solutions available in the market to resolve them. Usually, tech-savvy larger corporations and businesses have the resources to automate some, if not all, parts of the processes by building the technology in-house, but there are professionals, smaller businesses and some underserved industry sectors-such as retailers, dealers and professionals (CAs, freelancers, insurance advisors, medical representatives etc.) - who find the technology unaffordable and difficult to adopt. CardByte aims to provide simple and intuitive solutions for this underserved community by developing a platform that is open to anyone and everyone. Commenting on the latest move, Navinn Kapur, Co-founder and Managing Director at CardByte said, "Our intent is to make efficient contact management affordable for individuals and businesses of all sizes. Keeping this in mind, our standard and pro subscriptions are priced such that the user saves up to 80 per cent of their yearly spending on paper business cards and up to 75 per cent of time spent on manually organizing them. Additionally, our basic plan shall continue to remain completely free and offer unlimited contact storage as well as AI-powered scans to all the users." Because, as much as he's been able to build a successful product, it brings Navinn Kapur more fulfilment when he sees how his company is helping contribute to an awareness campaign to protect our biodiversity-rich natural habitats. Behind his call, for people to subscribe to CardByte is an emotional appeal to come together and preserve our ecosystems. "Every year, 7.2 million trees are cut down to print paper business cards. With CardByte, we don't just wish to reduce the cutting down of trees, but also plant new ones every time a user subscribes to our platform. By helping save the environment, we are helping save each other. And by going digital, we are actually giving something back to nature," shares Kapur. One person's participation in such a campaign may not amount to much, Kapur insisted, but collectively, we can all make an impact. "Each and every one of our individual contributions is extremely important if we wish to see actual change. By going digital, you are not only reducing your contribution to the cutting down of 7.2 million trees across the world for paper visiting cards but also helping us plant new ones on your behalf. Together, we can bring a change." Beyond offering a host of conveniences to its customers through its services, CardByte's also aims to engage with them on crucial topics such as climate change, global warming, and environmental issues and create growing awareness about them globally. With this in mind, and being an ecologically conscious brand, CardByte has pledged to plant a tree on behalf of the user for every successful subscription purchased. The app was launched for the Indian market in January this year and has garnered considerable appreciation for solving the major challenges associated with paper business cards. Talking about the rapid pace of growth of the company, Kapur added, "We are happy to witness this positive shift in the Indian market. While paper business cards continue to deal with stale information, low shelf-life, and substandard storage and management, CardByte's smart business cards eliminate these inefficiencies and extend value-added benefits to its users". Digital Business Cards: The app allows users to create their first digital business card for free, using the in-app templates and designs. They can also share and exchange these digital visiting cards within and outside their network withing seconds anytime, anywhere. AI-powered Smart Scan: CardByte offers a smart, AI-powered scan feature to its users that allows them to scan and digitise any paper business card within seconds and store it on the app wallet seamlessly. This has helped users save as much as 75 percent of their time spent in storing and managing their business cards. Contact Management: The app makes it easier for users to deal with large sets of business cards or contact data by organising these contacts under various segments, such as companies, industries, designations, and even customised tags for quick and easy access at all times. Actionable Networking: Users can leverage the app for quality introductions, building new connections, and expand their professional network in real-time by connecting with the right people at the right time. Lead Generation: Not only does the app offers users a suite of features to share and manage professional contacts, but it also allows them to access the global database for generating referrals and leads to grow professionally. Supporting the initiatives of Atmanirbhar Bharat and Digital India, CardByte envisions evolving into a business networking platform, transforming the business-card-based introductions into connections and subsequently into business opportunities for each user, offering high value propositions for individuals, SMEs, as well as large corporations. This story is provided by NewsVoir. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/NewsVoir)
New Delhi [india], May 12 (ANI/SRV): Vamstar, a London-based company having its development center in Hyderabad, India offering a unique AI-driven platform catering to the healthcare industry, has launched a special Product Program aimed at enhancing the productivity of its employees. The program was designed to contribute to the vital success of the company and the well-being of its staff. Launched in 2019, Vamstar is a B2B marketplace that connects buyers and suppliers using artificial intelligence (AI) created in-house. Its healthcare market research portfolio offers a unique view of the healthcare ecosystem by combining traditional business analysis with cutting-edge data collection methodologies and Vamstar's revolutionary AI-based procurement expertise. Since its inception, Vamstar has showcased a steady growth trajectory. Currently, the company has 115+ employees and the Product Program has been designed to equip the software engineers with independent problem-solving abilities, meeting the challenges of the constantly-evolving healthcare domain and unlocking their full potential. The program provides access to valuable internal and external courses. It consists of ten modules that are taught across several sessions and include information on the company, the market and industry, and the product. There are three assessments at the end of the program: one for the domain, another for the marketplace, and the third for the product. The outcomes of an assessment are an excellent approach to test comprehension and serve as a starting point for employee reviews with management. Chris Smith, Engineering Manager at Vamstar and the head of the Product training program said, "The constantly changing nature of our work is challenging and engaging, as it often requires updating. My commitment to providing the most up-to-date information results in copious amounts of reading and researching. Thus, it is ensured that our Product Program is the best it can be for our employees." It is important to make everyone feel capable of doing their duties well and enjoying their employment. The Product Program provides the software recruits a broader understanding of what Vamstar does which benefits employees from every department and makes their work enjoyable. The initiative provides immediate assistance to new employees. It gives them structure and support for the first week, relieving stress and avoiding roadblocks by starting off with the right information. "I noticed throughout the program that people are eager to learn. The Program brought individuals together from across the company, who might not have otherwise met. In doing so, it has built a stronger sense of community and helped company-wide relations and communication", added Chris Smith. Vamstar plans to expand it further by increasing interactivity at their development center based in Hyderabad. Chris also plans to scale the product program team in India to assist with the ever-growing engineering side of the operation. Vamstaris also eying fresh recruitment of individuals to cater to these roles. Further expansion is predicted in order to create tailored training, on top of the basic training, for each role. Overall, the objective is to have a happier workforce contributing to coding and development! For further information: https://vamstar.io This story is provided by SRV. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/SRV)
Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], May 12 (ANI/PRNewswire): Government of India recently announced the rapid digitalization of the banking sector as part of the Digital India initiative that will stimulate financial inclusion. RBI further appended and promotes its policy of Secure and Informed Digital Banking. Allied Digital Services Ltd, a publicly-traded global IT solutions, services and Master Systems integration company, officially announced the launch of its new FinTech product 'FinoAllied' which is an AI-Powered Conversational Banking platform, that comes with built-in banking services and transactions fully ready to be offered to the customers through various digital channels of the banks. Allied Digital sources claim that FinoAllied could prove to be a game-changer for small and mid-size banks that are struggling in their digital transformation journey. In the inaugural speech, Allied Digital CMD, Nitin Shah mentioned - "Going Digital is a survival question for many of the banks. Today, the banks on the one hand had to withstand huge competition from the hi-tech digital banks, on the other hand, cater to the exploding demand from the customers due to the rapid technology adoption across urban and rural India. Nitin Shah also mentions - "The primary challenges for the small and mid-size banks are they lack the mature digital infrastructure to fast forward their digital journey, ability to drive inhouse transformative solutions due to IT resource/project management challenges and undertake associated high investment. Hence a product like FinoAllied gains centre stage as it just needs integration with the existing IT ecosystem of a bank. As a no-code cloud platform, the product initiates a comprehensive set of banking transactions over multiple digital channels, including voice channels, and supports different vernaculars." Conversational AI, one of the underlying technologies for this product leverages Natural Language Processing to translate multilingual voice or text into clear banking instructions for various ready to execute business services. The product further leverages Machine Learning to provide customer & bank analytics and multi-factor authentication for security. Emphasizing the uniqueness of the platform, the Chief Digital Officer, Utpal Chakraborty, a known name in the AI & FinTech industry, mentioned - "The FinoAllied platform stands out in the competition as most of the Conversational AI platforms available today that provide various tools for building conversational bots, whereas the uniqueness of FinoAllied comes with the popular banking transactions built-in that can be rendered through configured digital channels. The product adheres to RBI and other financial industry guidelines and cyber security essentials including data privacy." "The small and mid-size banks can highly benefit by rapidly provisioning digitalization through this product. The product can provide a full-scale customer experience, promote larger customer footprints, subscribe to the pay-as-you-use model, save investments, and bring operational efficiency while remaining compliant" - stated Global CEO of Allied Digital, Paresh Shah. The platform includes comprehensive support models for the banks and also value adds seamless integration with third-party systems and acts as a single window for the broadest spectrum of banking services. The product also recently received the FinTech Innovation Award by a reputed banking forum. Read More about FinoAllied Platform- https://whitepaper.allieddigital.net/FinoAllied Allied Digital Services, India is a publicly-traded global leader in information technology consulting and services, since 1984. Headquartered in Mumbai, India, it is a global managed service provider and systems integrator, offering infrastructure solutions and services to clients in 70 countries. The service portfolio ranges from digital workspace services, digital enterprise infrastructure transformative solutions, cybersecurity services, cloud services, and support, to multi-lingual, multi-channel service desks and Fintech products & solutions. The company has a global workforce of some 3000 professionals, local support functions, governance frameworks, and operations across 70 countries. It offers its expertise and services to several Fortune 500 companies. Allied Digital Website- https://www.allieddigital.net/ This story is provided by PRNewswire. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/PRNewswire)
New Delhi/London [India/UK], May 12 (ANI/PR Newswire): Adding another feather to his cap, award-winning Indian entrepreneur, Roop Partap Choudhary has been selected as a judge for the StartUp Awards National Series in the UK. In his role as a judge of the StartUp Awards National Series, Roop, the Executive Director of Jewel Group of Hotels and Incredible Indian Palace Hotel, Noor Mahal in Karnal, Northern India, and Founder of London's premium Indian restaurant Colonel Saab, will work with other judges and help identify the best new businesses across the UK. The StartUp Awards National Series is a collaboration between the founders of the Great British Entrepreneur Awards - an established national programme receiving over 5,000 applications annually - and the Wales Start-Up Awards, the only regional awards currently celebrating new businesses in the UK. The StartUp Awards National Series recognises the achievements of those amazing individuals who have had a great idea, spotted the opportunity and taken the risks to launch a new product or service. Already established and thriving in Wales, the StartUp Awards National Series is now taking the passion and drive to celebrate new business and extending across the whole of the United Kingdom. "It is indeed a privilege and a huge honour for me to be selected as a judge alongside renowned and successful entrepreneurs for the Startup Awards National Series. I am thankful to the organisers for giving me this unique opportunity, and look forward to doing my best in discovering and recognising the most talented individuals and startups who have a great idea and the passion and drive to create a new business," says Roop Partap Choudhary. For Roop, who spent many years learning about the food and hospitality business before launching his venture, the invitation to judge the Startup Awards National Series, is an apt recognition of his success as a hotelier and restaurateur in India and also in the UK. Roop is the Executive Director of the Jewel Group of hotels, including the award-winning palace hotel, Noor Mahal in Karnal, Haryana. His journey has been recognised in the under 30 Awards by Travel India Awards, as one of the youngest hoteliers to receive the accolade. His first UK venture, Colonel Saab, located at the iconic Holborn Town Hall, one of the busiest and prime real estate locations in Central London, has emerged as the most popular Indian restaurant in the British capital since opening in late 2021. Roop Partap Choudhary is also an avid art collector and has a keen eye for detail. He is an advocate for social causes and chairs multiple NGOs championing the causes of female empowerment and youth employment. His journey has been recognised in the under 30 Awards by Travel India Awards, as one of the youngest hoteliers to receive the accolade. Under his leadership, Noor Mahal has won the award for Best upcoming 5 Star Resort at the Indian Hospitality Awards, Best 5 Star Heritage Resort and best destination wedding hotel north India. In the mystical land of Mahabharata, awe-inspiring Noor Mahal, the 'Incredible Indian Palace Hotel' has been built on a monumental scale. It is a five-star luxury palace hotel inspired by India's rich heritage and captures royalty experience enjoyed by Indian Maharajas over the centuries. This royal abode of modern kings and queens has become an extremely preferred destination for Leisure, MICE and Weddings. Colonel Saab is the culmination of the journey and adventures across India of two people, Roop's parents, an Army Officer named Colonel Manbeer Choudhary and his wife Binny. The food is a blend of tradition with global ingredients and techniques, from street food signatures to home style Indian cooking and dishes taken from royal kitchens. Enjoy inventive Indian small plates created to share from regional recipes derived from home-chefs. Colonel Saab offers something for every palate and every occasion. It is a celebration of community and the exchange of eating well and of warmth. The restaurant showcases the unity as well as the diversity of the cuisines of India with a myriad of influences gained across centuries. Colonel Saab is a contemporary viewpoint with an old soul, and a nostalgic palate of memories, aromas and flavours. This story is provided by PR Newswire. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/PR Newswire)
Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], May 12 (ANI/PR Newswire): In alignment with DBS Bank's commitment towards sustainability, DBS Foundation, has announced the launch of a new grant programme to support small-and-medium enterprises (SMEs) looking to kickstart their transition towards becoming more sustainable businesses. This is an extension of DBS Foundation's ongoing support for social enterprises (SEs), as it endeavours to foster businesses with dual bottom-lines of profit and impact. The DBS Foundation SME Grant Programme aims to find SMEs that provide innovative sustainability solutions. To apply for the grant, businesses must send proposals suggesting solutions to reducing energy consumption, waste, or sustainable supply chains. Applicants will be assessed on their ability to demonstrate innovativeness and scalability of their solution, clear plans to integrate sustainability into business operations and a strong leadership team with a demonstrated commitment toward building a sustainable enterprise. The opportunity is open to SMEs incorporated in India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Indonesia. The awardees stand to receive grant amounts of up to SGD 100,000. Sudarshan Chari, Executive Director, and Head of Business Banking at DBS Bank India, said, "While SME owners have shown keen interest in adopting sustainable methods, they lack clarity on its implementation. They also face resource and bandwidth constraints which prevents them from shifting to new business models. This is a gap that DBS Foundation aims to fill with the new SME Grant Programme. This grant will help SMEs take their first step towards transforming into businesses for impact. Beyond the grant, DBS will also provide its suite of sustainable financing solutions and ecosystem platform solutions to help the most promising SME awardees accelerate their transformation efforts." DBS Foundation also continues to deepen its support for the SE sector, with its flagship SE grant programme now in its eighth year. The programme was designed to plug the funding gap for innovative start-ups, solving critical social and environmental issues through their businesses and empower them to scale up to create a more profound impact. The SE grant programme also features a 'Zero Food Waste' category, which is focused on supporting SEs whose solutions help tackle the global problem of food waste. In its eighth year of the DBS Foundation SE Grant Programme, DBS is looking for social enterprises with innovative solutions toward impact areas of social impact, environmental impact. Applicants will be evaluated on demonstrating a market-validated business model, a clear roadmap for achieving dual bottom-line growth and demonstrated commitment to social and environmental missions. The opportunity is open to social enterprise start-ups that are in seed to initial scale-up stages and incorporated in India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, and Indonesia. The awardees will receive holistic support1 from DBS Foundation to strengthen business foundations and scale growth. Apart from the grant, the program allows awardees to access other benefits including support in capacity-building and mentorship, business and networking opportunities, and awareness-building. It will also provide access to other businesses-for-impact in DBS Foundation's ecosystem to facilitate peer learning and potential collaboration further. For this programme, the grant awardees stand to receive a grant amount - up to SGD 250,000. Shoma Narayanan, Managing Director, and Head - Group Strategic Marketing & Communications at DBS Bank India, said, "DBS, as part of its sustainability agenda, continues to support the growth of enterprises creating social impact through innovative products and business models. Since the inception of DBS Foundation eight years ago, over 800 SEs have been engaged with and over SGD 10 million in grants have been disbursed across Asia. Many of these SEs have evolved from start-ups to steadily growing businesses-for-impact, which is very encouraging to see." The application window for the grant programmes2 will be open until 31 May 2022. All applications received before 31 May 2022, 2359 hours (Singapore time, GMT +8) will be evaluated in 2022, and applications received after that will be reviewed in the next grant cycle. The successful grant awardees will be announced towards the end of this year. DBS Bank has been committed to doing business responsibly and sustainably while reducing its environmental footprint and creating social impact beyond business. DBS Foundation, Singapore's first foundation dedicated to championing social entrepreneurship, was established in 2014 to support the growth of innovative businesses-for-impact. DBS Foundation identifies, funds, and fuels the scaling up of innovative growth stage enterprises driving positive social change through their products and services. It also intends to create a purpose-driven social entrepreneurship community in Asia to establish meaningful connections and foster collaborations to improve the world. In 2021, three Indian social enterprises - Trestle Labs, Recity Network and Jovaki Agro, won the DBS Foundation grant. Recently, the bank also committed an additional SGD 100 million to further its efforts to improve lives in Asia. The funds will catalyse the work of the DBS Foundation and the bank's various philanthropic and crisis relief measures. The additional SGD 100 million in funding will allow the bank and DBS Foundation to boost their support for purpose-driven businesses and do more to address the region's increasingly pressing societal issues. The funds will also be used to support other philanthropic initiatives and relief measures for communities in need during the pandemic. For more details on the DBS Foundation SE Grant Programme, click here. For more details on the DBS Foundation SME Grant Programme, click here. 1 Grant will be disbursed after the SME grantee has successfully achieved each milestone 2 Applicants can only apply for either one of the grant programmes, depending on which best fits their business profile and impact objectives. DBS is a leading financial services group in Asia with a presence in 18 markets. Headquartered and listed in Singapore, DBS is in the three key Asian axes of growth: Greater China, Southeast Asia and South Asia. The bank's "AA-" and "Aa1" credit ratings are among the highest in the world. Recognised for its global leadership, DBS has been named "World's Best Bank" by Euromoney, "Global Bank of the Year" by The Banker and "Best Bank in the World" by Global Finance. The bank is at the forefront of leveraging digital technology to shape the future of banking, having been named "World's Best Digital Bank" by Euromoney and the world's "Most Innovative in Digital Banking" by The Banker. In addition, DBS has been accorded the "Safest Bank in Asia" award by Global Finance for 13 consecutive years from 2009 to 2021. DBS provides a full range of services in consumer, SME and corporate banking. As a bank born and bred in Asia, DBS understands the intricacies of doing business in the region's most dynamic markets. DBS is committed to building lasting relationships with customers, and positively impacting communities through supporting social enterprises, as it banks the Asian way. It has also established a SGD 50 million foundation to strengthen its corporate social responsibility efforts in Singapore and across Asia. With its extensive network of operations in Asia and emphasis on engaging and empowering its staff, DBS presents exciting career opportunities. For more information, please visit www.dbs.com. This story is provided by PR Newswire. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/PR Newswire)
New Delhi [India], May 12 (ANI/NewsVoir): Neuberg Diagnostics, one of India's top 4 Path lab chains of Indian origin, with more than 150 labs and 2000+ touchpoints, today announced their expansion in Haryana, by launching own processing lab in Gurugram. Further to mark their path they are coming up with 10 express diagnostics labs and 100 touchpoints across Haryana. This latest expansion is well-aligned with Neuberg's commitment to improving access to the best-in-class testing facilities at affordable cost and giving a fillip to employment opportunities in the region. The new lab in Gurugram and other upcoming diagnostic labs will be wholly owned by Neuberg while the 100 touchpoints will be set up in the own or franchisee business model. The new lab in Gurugram is equipped to conduct and process wide variety of tests. Additionally, Neuberg as a group is equipped to conduct futuristic tests such as genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, molecular biology, and digital pathology with advanced systems like NovaSeq 6000. This new lab is capable to process about 1000 samples in a day and deliver results within the given turnaround time which differs from test to test while maintaining the best-in-class quality. Dr GSK Velu, Chairman and Managing Director, Neuberg Diagnostics, said, "At Neuberg, our strategic decisions are governed by our commitment to making state-of-the-art technology and new generation diagnostics accessible and affordable to all sections of society. With our new lab in Gurugram, we are one step closer to achieving our mission of access & affordable diagnostics for all sections of population. Along with routine testing, we also focus on next generation techniques aligning with the latest treatment concept of personalized medicine. Therefore, we also concentrate on providing quality testing with advanced techniques to predict the genetic probability of various diseases such as neurodegenerative disorders, heart disease, and cancer through genomics." O P Dhankar, President BJP Haryana and Former Cabinet Minister of Govt of Haryana, said, "The launch of Neuberg labs will allow us to boost healthcare facilities and a step ahead towards quality treatment because of their new age advanced testing process. This brings an excellent scope for people in Haryana to get access to quality healthcare with accurate diagnosis facilities. The aim is to produce strong outcomes in public health, hurdling India to one of the most advanced countries globally in terms of management of public health outbreaks." At the launch event other eminent personalities like -Madhu Azad, Mayor Gurugram Corporation; Dr Virender Yadav, Civil Surgeon, Gurugram; Sudhir Singla, MLA, Gurugram; Rohan Jaitley, President DDCA; Dr NPS Verma, IMA President; Dr Sarika Verma, IMA Secretary; Dr KS. Khokhar, Ex IMA State President, was present as the guest of honour. Neuberg will ensure a distinctive focus on advanced diagnostics at affordable costs, preventive diagnostics care, and a digital online presence to easy access & convenience in the state of Haryana. The company has already roped in MS Dhoni as its brand ambassador to create awareness for preventive care and early diagnosis to remain healthy. Currently, with more than 150 labs and 2000 plus touchpoints, Neuberg Diagnostics is present in India, the USA, the UAE, and South Africa. Neuberg is one of the top 4 diagnostics chains of Indian origin and has presence in almost all major cities and towns of the country with processing laboratories and/or sample collection facilities. This story is provided by NewsVoir. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/NewsVoir)
New Delhi [India], May 12 (ANI/PNN): Sanwariya Education Consultants organized a meet and greet program today in Hyderabad with university of Roehampton (UoR), London with Students, Parents and others. The University of Roehampton (UoR) offer a first-class education experience, designed to help you reach your full potential and get the career you want. The University is comprised of four colleges which underpin their values today including teaching, research and the engagement with communities and organisations locally, nationally and internationally. The university has a strong partnership with the diverse community of students and provides an inclusive environment in which students are encouraged to succeed. Through the professional services, colleges and students union, the team at UoR deliver an excellent wider student experience and a supportive culture, with a strong emphasis on wellbeing and personal growth. At Roehampton, they strive to equip students with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in a workplace that will change radically and rapidly in the future. Roehampton offers a wide range of programmes spanning six academic schools and faculties: Faculty of Business and Law School of Arts School of Education School of Humanities and Social Sciences School of Life and Health Sciences School of Psychology The University of Roehampton has a long history stretching back 180 years through our 4 colleges. The diverse community is comprised of around 10,000 students, from 145 nations, 1,800 of which are postgraduate, giving it the accolade of the third fastest growing university internationally. With over 85 postgraduate courses, spread across 6 academic schools and faculties, UoR offer a wide range of choices for those looking for a career change or further study. The 54 acre beautiful parkland campus offers great facilities, in the middle of south-west London. Studying at UoR will give students the best of both worlds: the community feel and safety of a traditional university campus, with the job opportunities, culture and nightlife of one of the greatest cities in the world. Roehampton prides itself on helping all students, regardless of their background, to develop the skills they need for a successful graduate career and fulfilling life. The student experience is at the heart of everything they do. The team at UoR work in partnership with students to make sure that every moment at Roehampton matters. A Roehampton student has the opportunity to work with academic staff who are at the cutting edge of their fields and produce innovative and internationally renowned research. At the University of Roehampton, they believe that an education is not just about getting a great degree, but also broadening your experiences, preparing yourself for your chosen career, and making lifelong friendships. A student will have an ample of opportunities to get involved with university life both academically and socially. A Roehampton degree is designed to ensure that you graduate with the qualities you need to succeed: confidence, adaptability and the capacity to work with people from all walks of life. Sanwariya Education Consultant is leading consultant in the world for getting highest amount of deposits for April 2022 intake at the University of Roehampton. www.sanwariyaeduconsultants.com This story is provided by PNN. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/PNN)
In order to provide the under-priviledged better living conditions, the central government initiated with the PM Awas Yojana in 2014. Under the scheme, more than 2.32 crore pucca (concrete) houses have been completed till March 24 this year. People who had believed that life would now pass on pavements and huts, the government itself handed over the keys of the houses to these families. These houses consist of all the amenities including toilets, electricity connection under the Saubhagya scheme, LED bulb under the Ujala scheme, gas connection under the Ujjwala scheme, and water connection under Har Ghar Jal Yojana. That is, the poor beneficiary no longer needs to visit government offices separately for these facilities. Despite the hurdles caused by Corona in the last two years, this work was not allowed to slow down. Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana - Urban (PMAY-U), a flagship Mission of Government of India being implemented by Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), was launched on June 25, 2015. The Mission addresses urban housing shortage among the EWS/LIG and MIG categories including the slum dwellers by ensuring a pucca house to all eligible urban households by the year 2022, when nation completes 75 years of its Independence. The Mission provides Central assistance to the implementing agencies through States/Union Territories (UTs) and Central Nodal Agencies (CNAs) for providing houses to all eligible families/beneficiaries against the validated demand for houses for about 1.12 crore. As per PMAY(U) guidelines, the size of a house for Economically Weaker Section (EWS) could be up to 30 sq. mt. carpet area, however States/UTs have the flexibility to enhance the size of houses in consultation and approval of the Ministry. In continuation to this Government's efforts towards empowerment of women from EWS and LIG unlike earlier schemes, PMAY (U) has made a mandatory provision for the female head of the family to be the owner or co-owner of the house under this Mission. Jamna of Lanji block of Balaghat, Madhya Pradesh lives with her two daughters. They were living in a dilapidated house that could fall any day. Jamna says that in such a situation, the Modi government has supported, my house has become pucca now. Bhagwanta Devi of Dewas is also happy that now there will be no problem during the monsoon. Such stories are coming from every state and district of the country that poor people are getting pucca houses. Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs (MoHUA) has initiated Affordable Rental Housing Complexes (ARHCs), a sub-scheme under Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana - Urban (PMAY-U). This will provide ease of living to urban migrants/poor in Industrial Sector as well as in non-formal urban economy to get access to dignified affordable rental housing close to their workplace. MoHUA has initiated the Global Housing Technology Challenge - India (GHTC-India) which aims to identify and mainstream a basket of innovative construction technologies from across the globe for housing construction sector that are sustainable, eco-friendly and disaster-resilient. In Madhya Pradesh, 5.25 lakh such beneficiaries were handed over the keys of the house under the 'Griha Pravesham' programme. During the event, Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself interacted with many beneficiaries. The Prime Minister said in the programme, "When efforts of an honest government and efforts of empowered poor come together, poverty is defeated". He further said the campaign of providing pucca houses to the poor is not just a government scheme but a commitment to instill confidence in the rural poor. "It is the first step to give courage to the poor to come out of poverty. When poor people have a roof over their head, they can focus on educating their children," he had said. The Prime Minister said the previous government had built "only a few lakh houses for the poor in their tenure. My government has built 2.5 crore houses for them. Of these, 2 crores are in villages. Women too have the ownership rights of around two crore houses built under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana. And, work didn't slow down despite Corona." --IANS uk/arm ( 684 Words) 2022-05-12-21:22:01 (IANS)
Karnataka Health Minister K. Sudhakar on Wednesday said that there is no need to panic against the backdrop of an outbreak of Tomato Flu in neighbouring Kerala. "Though some symptoms are similar to Covid-19, the Tomato Flu has nothing to do with Covid-19. These symptoms are usually seen in other types of viral infections also. "There is no need to panic as the authorities have been asked to remain alert. Moreover, the Tomato Flu is endemic to Kerala," he said. According to a release by the Health Department, Tomato Flu is a rare viral disease, which causes red-coloured rashes, skin irritation and dehydration. The disease gets its name from the blisters it causes, which look like tomatoes. Tomato fever is affecting children below the age of five in Kerala, it said, adding that the main symptoms include large blisters the size of tomatoes which are red in colour, as well as high fever, body ache, joint swelling, and fatigue - much like chikungunya. Cases of Tomato Flu have currently been reported from Aryankavu, Anchal and Neduvathur in Kerala. Following this, contiguous Karnataka districts - Mangaluru, Udupi, Kodagu, Chamrajnagara and Mysuru - have been directed to keep a vigil on daily travellers from Kerala. According to the Health Department, tt is also advised to monitor children for any of the aforementioned signs and symptoms in OPDs of health institutions. Further directions have been given to inform the state IDSP section immediately if any cases with such symptoms are detected. DHOs of concerned districts and other districts too are directed by the Commissioner of Health to ensure surveillance is ensured, the statement said. --IANS mka/vd ( 284 Words) 2022-05-11-21:12:02 (IANS)
US President Joe Biden called upon Americans to continue to remain vigilant against the Covid-19 pandemic as the nation is poised to cross a grim milestone of 1 million deaths. "Today, we mark a tragic milestone: one million American lives lost to Covid-19," the American President said in a statement Thursday, as he co-hosted a virtual global summit on combating the pandemic, with Germany, Indonesia, Senegal and Belize. The United States has not crossed that mark yet. The toll stands at 995,747, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the top US government health agency that keeps an official track of Covid-19 numbers in the US. Globally 6.2 million people have died due to Covid-19, according to WHO. "One million empty chairs around the dinner table. Each an irreplaceable loss. Each leaving behind a family, a community, and a nation forever changed because of this pandemic," Biden went on to say, adding: "To heal, we must remember. We must remain vigilant against this pandemic and do everything we can to save as many lives as possible, as we have with more testing, vaccines, and treatments than ever before." Biden has ordered flags lowered to half-staff. The US President called for a renewed commitment by all nations to combat the pandemic. "This summit is an opportunity to renew our efforts to keep our foot on the gas when it comes to getting this pandemic under control and preventing future health crises," he said. --IANS yashwant/vd ( 264 Words) 2022-05-12-20:40:03 (IANS)
Leader of Congress in Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury on Wednesday wrote to Union Home Minister Amit Shah and appealed to withdraw Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in the next Parliament session. A large number of Pakistani Hindus who had come to India from Pakistan in order to escape religious persecution had to return to Pakistan because they were unable to secure Indian citizenship, Chowdhury said in his letter. "We have always raised our voice for the marginalized and neglected lot irrespective of religion, caste, creed or nationality," he wrote to Shah. This come after Shah, during his West Bengal visit earlier this month, that the Central government will implement it once the COVID-19 pandemic ends. Chowdhury further said, "It is more than two years now that you have passed the ill-thought-out legislation called CAA. But still, you are not able to implement it because of its inherent and manifest unconstitutionality." "That is why Pakistani Hindu returnees are going back to Pakistan out of sheer frustration and hopelessness. This draconian legislation cannot be implemented because it is legislation targeting a particular community. It is against the basic tenets and fundamentals of our constitutional ethos. The underlying value of our constitution is "to live and let live". I am sure this targeted legislation against a particular community will not stand judicial scrutiny." "Perhaps you know it well and that's why despite the passage of the act of more than two years, you have not been able to frame even the rudimentary rules of CAA," he said. "In view of the above, I appeal to you to withdraw the CAA legislation in the impending monsoon session of Parliament like the three controversial farm laws," the letter read. The CAA allows persecuted minorities belonging to the Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, Parsi, and Christian communities from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan to avail Indian citizenship. (ANI)
The Supreme Court on Wednesday reserved its verdict on the plea of A.G. Perarivalan, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in the assassination of former PM Rajiv Gandhi, seeking premature release from jail after nearly 30 years imprisonment. The Centre's counsel supported the Tamil Nadu Governor's decision to refer Perarivalan's remission plea to the President, despite state government's recommendation to release him. A bench headed by Justice L. Nageswara Rao and comprising Justices B.R. Gavai and A.S. Bopanna said if the Centre's stand is accepted, then the Governor will refer all such matters to the President. "Wouldn't it go against the federal structure?" it asked. The Tamil Nadu government counsel argued that the Governor's decision raised a serious problem, and the top court should intervene. After hearing arguments of all parties in the matter, the top court reserved its order. On May 4, the top court did not agree with the Centre's submission that the court should wait for the President to take a call on Perarivalan's plea. The top court said that it will place the matter for hearing and the decision of the President would not have any bearing on it, and it will examine the issue raised by the petitioner. The court had pointed out to the Centre's counsel that the question was whether the Governor had the authority to refer the plea to the President. It noted that under Article 161 of the Constitution, the Governor was bound by the aid and advice given by the Tamil Nadu Council of Ministers. In September 2018, the Council of Ministers of Tamil Nadu had recommended Perarivalan's release, but the Governor had referred the plea to the President for a decision. Citing Perarivalan's good conduct in jail and several diseases which impact his health in prison, the bench said: "If you are not willing to consider these aspects, we will consider ordering his release." Perarivalan filed his plea before the Tamil Nadu Governor in December 2015 under Article 161, which deals with remission powers of the Governor. The top court, on April 9, granted bail to him. --IANS ss/vd ( 364 Words) 2022-05-11-20:46:01 (IANS)
West Bengal Forest Department has taken an initiative to prevent its employees from unknowingly becoming guides for the poachers and wildlife smugglers by giving them a clear idea of the forest territories concerned. The state Directorate of Forest has barred all department officers and staff from posting any photograph or video or information related to their official work on any social media without permission of the screening committee set up for the purpose. An order has been issued by West Bengal's Principal Chief Conservator of Forests, Dr J.T. Mathew, where he clearly said no officer or staff of the Forest Directorate should post or share pictures or videos or any information related to office work in any social media platform without prior approval of the screening committee set by his office. A top official from the state Forest Department told IANS, by posting work- related pictures or videos in the social media, the departmental officers, especially those posted in the reserve forests as well as near the core and buffer areas, can unknowingly become the guides for the poachers and wildlife smugglers. "The poachers or tree smugglers always try to collect information about the presence and movements of animals in the forest or about the points where the forest guards are located. These work-related pictures or videos or any information posted by the Forest Department staff or officers in the social media can act as crucial clues for these illegal traders in getting such information. "Previously, those who are regular in making such posts have been cautioned verbally and unofficially. However, while some refrained, some continued with the practice. Hence an official order has been passed barring them from making such posts in the social media without approval from the screening committee," said the official. It is learnt that recently after species like kangaroos, wallabies and chimpanzees from West Bengal, the state Forest Department has become extra-alert. --IANS src/vd ( 334 Words) 2022-05-11-20:54:01 (IANS)
Police said acting on specific information, Pulwama police alongwith army's 50 RR and 2 Para, and the CRPF arrested hybrid terrorist, identified as Waqar Bashir Bhat, and his associate, identified as Shahid Ishaq Pandit, both residents of Karimabad, Pulwama.

A pistol, and a magazine alongwith ammunition were recovered from them.

"During preliminary questioning, it surfaced that the duo were in direct contact with LeT Pakistani handler alias Ali Sajid and were tasked to carry out terror attacks and target outside labourers in the district," police said.

A case under has been registered and investigation has been initiated.

--IANS zi/vd

( 136 Words)

2022-05-11-21:08:02 (IANS)
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Wednesday arrested 14 persons, including six officials of the Ministry of Home Affairs, in connection with Tuesday's raid at 40 places which led to the recovery of Rs 3.21 crore cash. A senior CBI official said that several incriminating documents and mobile phones were recovered from them. The CBI on Tuesday conducted searches at 40 locations in Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Himachal Pradesh, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Assam and Manipur. After conducting the searches, the CBI lodged a case against 36 accused, including seven public servants of FCRA Division of MHA and NIC, on the allegation that some officials of the FCRA Division in conspiracy with promoters, representatives of different NGOs and middlemen were indulging in corrupt activities for getting backdoor FCRA registration and renewal for NGOs. They had been doing this illegally with an object to continue receiving donations despite not fulfilling the prescribed norms. The public servants were indulging in the said practices and obtaining bribe from NGOs for facilitating them for their registration and renewal of registration under FCRA and for other FCRA related works. During investigation, two accused were caught while delivering and accepting a bribe amount of Rs 4 lakh on behalf of a senior accountant of MHA. It was alleged that the delivery of bribe was done through a hawala operator. --IANS atk/uk/arm ( 240 Words) 2022-05-11-21:14:03 (IANS)
Sources have said that the invitation for the meeting with the Chief Minister was made to Tejashwi Yadav on Tuesday evening itself.

After the hour-long, closed-door meeting with Nitish Kumar, Tejashwi Yadav looked less aggressive.

"I met Nitish Ji and he assured me to conduct a caste-based census very soon. He also said that the all-party meeting will be soon organised in Patna followed by announcement of caste based census," he said.

The RJD leader further said that Nitish Kumar is in favour of the caste-based census.

Tejashwi Yadav came alone for the meeting, though, generally, he is accompanied by senior party leaders like Jagadanand Singh, Abdul Bari Siddiqi or Shyam Rajak.

Similarly, when CM Nitish Kumar meets BJP leaders, his own JD-U leaders like Vijay Chaudhary, Lalan Singh or any other senior leaders accompany him. On this occasion, no one knows what political settings happened between these two leaders.

Following the assurance, Tejashwi Yadav dropped his Padyatra programme for now.

--IANS ajk/vd

( 217 Words)

2022-05-11-21:40:05 (IANS)
The Madhya Pradesh unit of Congress on Wednesday announced that the party will give 27 per cent tickets to OBC candidates for the local body elections in the state. The decision was announced by state Congress President Kamal Nath after a meeting with other party leaders on Tuesday. The politics in the state over the OBC reservation issue has heated up again after the Supreme Court ordered the state election body to conduct local body elections without OBC reservation. Notably, both the Congress and the BJP in December last year had passed a unanimous resolution in the Assembly that the local body elections would not be held without OBC reservation. However, complying with the SC's direction, the Madhya Pradesh State Election Commission (SEC) has started preparations for the polls. On Wednesday, the SEC held a meeting and decided that the notification regarding the elections would be issued by May 24. Officials in the SEC said that district administrations have also been directed to prepare for the elections. Ever since the SC's order was pronounced on Tuesday, the Congress has been blaming the Shivraj Singh Chouhan-led government for the present situation. It has alleged that the state government did not present data before the apex court, which led to the present situation. Former Chief Minister Kamal Nath said on Wednesday, "We have no hope from the BJP now. They (BJP) did nothing for the last two years. The state government could have amended the rule to provide 27 per cent reservation to OBC, but they did nothing. Nor had they represented the case in the court and as a result, the SC pronounced its judgment on Tuesday." On the other hand, the ruling BJP's state unit chief V.D. Sharma announced that the party will give more than 27 per cent tickets to deserving OBC candidates for the local body polls, adding that the priority is to address the issue by filing a review petition in the Supreme Court. --IANS pd/kvd/arm ( 347 Words) 2022-05-11-21:48:02 (IANS)
The Congress's three-day 'Chintan Shivir' in Rajasthan's Udaipur from May 13 is meant to brainstorm on a roadmap for the revival of the party's fortunes, but could see a clamour for return of Rahul Gandhi as party chief grow and some sections are likely to raise the demand, sources said. The demand was formally raised recently at a CWC meeting but it was said that organizational polls have already been announced. The most vocal voices in the party for Rahul Gandhi's return are its two Chief Ministers Ashok Gehlot (Rajasthan) and Bhupesh Baghel (Chhattisgarh), apart from Randeep Surjewala, K.C. Venugopal and other Rahul loyalists. In the Chintan Shivir, Rahul Gandhi will speak as a second last speaker just ahead of party chief Sonia Gandhi, and the party hopes to get a new path of revival from there to reverse its electoral losses. Rahul Gandhi had quit the post after the party's second successive massive defeat in the 2019 elections and in his resignation, sought that someone from outside the Gandhi family should be appointed as party chief but the CWC appointed Sonia Gandhi as interim President. However, soon a section of leaders, the G-23, wrote a letter for sweeping reforms in the party and election from the block to the CWC level. However when Sonia Gandhi called some of the members of the dissident group for discussions, they said that there was no question on the leadership but fixing responsibility on those responsible for party's defeat in the recent spell of Assembly elections. Party leader and former Union Minister Jairam Ramesh had on Monday asserted that the Chintan Shivir is not a destination of the Congress, but a milestone. He said the Shivir is being held not to draft a manifesto, but to prepare an action plan to revive and strengthen the Congress so that it can deal with the present-day political and organisational challenges. The heads of various departments of Congress, office bearers, former Union ministers and MPs would all participate in the Chintan Shivir. A total of 422 members will be present in the Shivir, of which 30-35 per cent will be youth and 21 per cent women. --IANS miz/vd ( 377 Words) 2022-05-11-22:06:01 (IANS)
"Killed terrorist identified as Gulzar Ahmad Ganai, resident of Wussan Pattan, Baramulla. He exfilitrated in 2018 and remained there for 3 years and 6 months before infiltrating back in the last week of April," police said.

"The killed terrorist was a part of newly infiltrated terror group. Search for other two terrorists is in progress," the police said in a tweet, quoting Inspector General of Police, Kashmir, Vijay Kumar.

Earlier, police said one terrorist was killed and a AK rifle and three magazines were recovered.

The firefight between in Salinder forest area took place after a joint team of security forces cordoned off the area and launched a search operation on the basis of specific information about presence of terrorists.

As the security forces zeroed in on the spot where terrorists were hiding, they came under a heavy volume of fire that triggered the encounter.

--IANS zi/vd

( 193 Words)

2022-05-11-22:10:01 (IANS)
Candidates of all three major political parties in Odisha, the ruling BJD, the BJP and the Congress, on Wednesday submitted their nomination papers for the May 31 bypoll to the Brajarajnagar Assembly seat in the Jharsuguda district. Biju Janata Dal's Alaka Mohanty, Bharatiya Janata Party's Radharani Panda and Congress' Kishore Patel submitted their nomination papers on Wednesday, the last day for filing nominations. Taking out rallies with their party leaders and supporters, all three candidates went to the office of Jharsuguda Sub-Collector and returning officer to filed their nominations. Senior BJD leaders and ministers including Naba Kishore Das, Padmanabha Behera, Tukuni Sahu, Prasanna Acharya, and Susanta Singh participated in the nomination filing programme. The BJD leaders claimed that they will win the by-poll with a big margin of over 50,000 votes. "Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik always stands with the people in every up and down of their life. Late Kishore Mohanty was also having a strong relation with people of this area. So, we will definitely win the by-poll with a margin of over 50,000 votes," claimed Behera. The BJD candidate will win the by-election with a margin of more than 50,000 votes. Wait and see on June 3, said Naba Das. BJP's Panda submitted her nomination papers to the returning officer in presence of Odisha BJP President Sameer Mohanty, Bargarh MP Suresh Pujari and former Union Minister Jual Oram. "The conscious citizens of the MLA segment will definitely reject the lollipop being offered by the ruling party during the elections and support the BJP," said Mohanty. The BJP, which had won the MLA seat in 2014 poll, will put its all efforts to win the seat again in this by-poll, said Pujari. After filing his nomination, Congress nominee Patel said: "We will go to the voters and make them aware about their issues and problems, which the ruling parties have failed to resolve." Mohanty, the widow of late Kishore Mohanty, whose death necessitated the bypoll, is making her poll debut. BJP's Panda was elected to the Assembly from the seat by defeating BJD candidate Anup Kumar Sai in 2014. She, however, lost to BJD's Kishore Mohanty by a margin of 11,634 votes in 2019. Similarly, Congress' Patel, a three-time MLA, unsuccessfully fought from the seat in 2014. In 2019, Congress had left the seat for the CPI. --IANS bbm/vd ( 402 Words) 2022-05-11-22:44:02 (IANS)
Even after two and a half years after enacting the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), the Central government yet to frame rules to execute the law, Trinamool Congress's national General Secretary Abhishek Banerjee said here on Wednesday, terming the law as "BJP's jumla". He said that Union Home Minister Amit Shah announced in West Bengal last week that the government would implement the CAA as soon as the Covid-19 pandemic ends but he remained silent during his 3-day visit in Assam on May 8-10. After inaugurating the Trinamool office at Jan Path (Jayanagar) in Guwahati, Banerjee addressed a big gathering of the party workers for the first time in Assam. "CAA is a BJP's jumla (false promise), they are taking so much time to frame the rules of the law. However, we have made our stance on CAA clear from day one that we oppose the draconian act," Banerjee later told the media. He said that the NRC (National Register of Citizens) was prepared spending Rs 1,600 crore and now it's a botched list as over 19 lakh people in Assam remained out of it. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has been saying that the NRC should be reverified so it is clear that there are differences within the BJP on the NRC since this was a project of Centre, he claimed. Reacting to Union Home Minister's allegation that the West Bengal government is not cooperating with the Centre in dealing with infiltration, Banerjee noted that checking illegal infiltration from Bangladesh border is the responsibility of the BSF, since they man the border and it is the Centre's job is to secure border. He also announced that his party would contest the next year's Assembly polls in Tripura and Meghalaya to take on BJP and its ally National People's Party (in Meghalaya) and exuded confidence that the Trinamool would form government in both states. "All of you might have seen the kind of violence the BJP unleashed in Tripura. Our leaders, workers, and supporters have been targeted, killed. Nobody is safe in BJP ruled Tripura. "There is a basic difference between Trinamool and other parties that when we enter a state, we fight it all out," he asserted and said that his party is always keen to forge an alliance with like-minded parties to oust the BJP from power. Banerjee said that leaders and workers of the Congress are joining his party as they feel that this party is only able to fight back against the BJP. Hitting out at the Sarma government, he said: "Double-engine government means 'Double-Chori'. Go and ask the Assam government what it has done for the people of Assam. People still have to visit Kolkata for medical treatment. If Didi (Bengal CM Mamta Banerjee) can do it in Bengal, she can do the same for Assam." Refuting the "myth of Achhe Din", he said, "The BJP government is busy making movies tax free and hiking petrol prices. "They (BJP) are hiking the price of essential medicines and making movies tax free. The Assam CM is going to watch movies, while the common man keeps suffering." Trinamool's Rajya Sabha members Sushmita Dev and Santanu Sen, and party's Assam unit President Ripun Bora accompanied Banerjee. --IANS sc/vd ( 553 Words) 2022-05-11-22:52:02 (IANS)
Emhsasizing on good governance, Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami on Wednesday directed officials to make a plan to provide essential services to the people at their doorsteps. Chief Minister Dhami held a meeting with the officials in the Secretariat on Wednesday regarding good governance. He said that good governance should be seen at the lower level of the administration. The administrative officers should go to the last person standing in the last row and ensure that their problems are resolved. The Chief Minister directed that the complaints received on CM Helpline 1905 and Apni Sarkar Portal should be resolved. In case of excess pendency, the accountability of the concerned officers will be ensured. "People should get maximum convenience. Public related procedures should be simplified. Unnecessary formalities should be eliminated. Every Monday at the secretary level, the redressal of public grievances related to his department should be reviewed," he told officials. The Chief Minister said that good governance should be felt by the people. He called for effective and continuous monitoring at each level. More services should be added in Apni Sarkar Portal. Dhami directed the officials to make a plan should be made for people to get services in their homes. "A solid plan should be prepared to provide essential services to the common people from door to door. First, it should be run on a pilot basis, it can be fully implemented after getting better results. This will also provide employment to the youth of the state," he said. Chief Minister said the senior officers should motivate children by going to government schools Dhami said that senior officers should visit government schools from time to time and teach children. "Good governance is possible only when the behavior of all of us will improve and we become sensitive towards the problems of common people. Public service should be our mission. Special attention should be paid to the outcomes of the schemes," he added. (ANI)
"Today, in New Delhi, @BJP4India met the National President @JPNaddaji and discussed the OBC reservation and made him aware of the legal process adopted by the Madhya Pradesh government to protect the interests of OBCs," the chief minister tweeted.

Meanwhile, Chouhan also met the Solicitor General of India Tushar Mehta in the national capital to discuss the legal provision to provide OBC reservations in the state.

The meeting was also attended by State Home and Law Minister Narottam Mishra and Urban Development and Housing Minister Bhupinder Singh.

The Chouhan-led Madhya Pradesh government will file a review petition against the Supreme Court's order on OBC reservations in the local body elections.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court asked the State Election Commission to begin the election process for 23,400 local bodies. The order also stated that the elections are to be held without the OBC reservation. (ANI)
The programme will mark the celebration of 100 per cent coverage of four key schemes of the state government in the district, which will help provide timely financial assistance to those in need.

The district administration of Bharuch carried out the 'Utkarsh Initiative' drive from January 1 to March 31 this year, aiming to ensure complete coverage of schemes providing assistance to widows, elderly and destitute citizens.

A total of 12,854 beneficiaries were identified across the four schemes viz. Ganga Swaroopa Aarthik Sahay Yojana, Indira Gandhi Vrudh Sahay Yojana, Niradhar Vrudh Aarthik Sahay Yojana and Rashtriy Kutumb Sahay Yojana.

During the drive, taluka-wise Whatsapp helpline numbers were announced to collect information about those who were not receiving the benefits of the scheme.

Utkarsh camps were organized in all villages and wards of municipality areas of the district, wherein applicants who provided necessary documents were given on the spot approval.

Incentives were also given to Utkarsh assistants to further facilitate the drive. (ANI)
Later in the day, police also conducted raids at other places in the area and recovered around 7 grams of heroin worth over Rs 3 lakh and 1.5 kg of silver jewellery.

Police said that the accused has been identified as Pravesh Singh.

"We arrested one Pravesh Singh from the Chakand PS area and recovered around 2.5 kg of ganja from his possession. Later we raided another place and recovered around 7 gm of heroin, over Rs 3 lakh and 1.5 kg of silver jewellery," Manish Kumar, ASP Gaya told reporters.

More details are awaited. (ANI)
The summit intends to galvanize new actions to address the continued challenges of the COVID pandemic and build a stronger global health security architecture.

According to a Ministry of External Affairs, the Prime Minister will deliver his remarks in the opening session of the summit on the theme 'Preventing Pandemic Fatigue and Prioritizing Preparedness'.

The session will be live-streamed from 1830 to 1945 hours on May 12.

Other participants are co-hosts of the event - Heads of State/Government of Belize in its capacity as Chair of CARICOM, Senegal as Chair of African Union, Indonesia as President of G20 and Germany as President of G7 respectively. Secretary-General of the United Nations, Director General of World Health Organization and other dignitaries would also participate.

PM Modi had also participated in the first Global COVID virtual Summit hosted by Biden in September 2021.

The release said that India is playing a key role in ongoing global efforts to combat the pandemic by supplying safe and affordable vaccines, and medicines, developing low-cost indigenous technologies to test and treat, genomic surveillance, and capacity building for health care workers.

India is also proactively engaged in multilateral fora with the objective of strengthening and reforming the global health security architecture with WHO at its centre, it said. (ANI)
A six-year-old boy was allegedly killed by a policeman for repeatedly asking him for money to buy food during the Rath Yatra in the Datia district of Madhya Pradesh, police said on Wednesday. The Police Constable, Ravi Sharma allegedly strangulated the boy in Datia where he was sent on assignment, put his body in the car's boot and drove back to Gwalior before dumping his body at an abandoned spot. "The boy repeatedly asked Ravi Sharma (Police Constable) for some money to buy food, but the cop refused to give money and drove the boy away. But the boy came again and asked for money. The policeman in a fit of rage strangled the minor to death," Aman Singh Rathore, Datia Superintendent of Police told ANI. The accused told the police that he was suffering from depression and got annoyed when the boy continuously demanded money from him. "During the investigation, we found CCTV footage in which Ravi Sharma's car was spotted passing by the crime scene. Sharma said he was sent on duty during the Rath Yatra in Datia. He returned to Gwalior with two other police constables in his car," he added. Rathore has written to the state police headquarters asking for the accused cop to be dismissed from service with immediate effect. (ANI)
Maharashtra Congress chief Nana Patole on Wednesday hit out at ally NCP over forging an alliance with the rival BJP for the Gondia Zilla Parishad polls, and accused it of "backstabbing the grand old party". The Congress state chief also stated that he will discuss the issue with the party high command. The NCP Gondia unit forged an alliance with the BJP to elect the president of the Gondia Zilla Parishad on Tuesday to keep Congress, which is an ally in the state government, away from power. Notably, the NCP-BJP alliance at the Zilla Parishad won the polls. Pankaj Rahangdale from the BJP was elected as the president and NCP's Yashwant Gunvir as the vice-president. Speaking to the reporters here, Patole said" "In the past two and a half years, the NCP took away some of our party members. It forged an alliance with BJP for Gondia Zilla Parishad. If we want an enemy, we want someone who is openly an enemy. If they backstab while being beside us, they will be asked questions." "We will discuss this with our high command and we will do whatever they tell us," Patole added. Notably, Congress' Usha Mendhe was defeated in the Gondia Zilla Parishad polls. (ANI)
Crime Branch of Delhi Police has arrested a sergeant of the Indian Air Force (IAF) for allegedly leaking sensitive information about defence installations. The IAF officer was arrested on May 6 for espionage charges. The official, police said, was honey-trapped by a woman and allegedly ended up sharing sensitive information with her. The arrested Sergeant has been identified as Devendra Kumar Sharma, who belongs to Kanpur and was working as an Administrative Assistant (GD) at Air Force Record Office at Suboroto Park, New Delhi. A senior police officer said, "On May 6, a team of Crime Branch from Delhi police received inputs about suspicious activities of a Sergeant of the Indian Air Force. It was informed that the MN has been honey-trapped and has made available some classified information to his contact, suspected to belong to some other country." The police said that there is a suspicion of the hand of Pakistan's intelligence agency ISI in this whole work. Acting on this input, a team zeroed in on Sharma and he was arrested. "Further probe revealed that Sharma had leaked the sensitive information about defence installations and Air Force personnel through the electronic means to the agent of adversary country after deceitfully obtaining the said documents from the computers and other files. He had also received money, from the agent of the adversary country, for leaking the information," said the officer. The police have also found some suspicious transactions in the bank account of the accused's wife. Delhi police have now booked Sharma under the Official Secrets Act (OSA). During further investigation, incriminating evidences such as electronic gadgets and documents etc. were seized and the accused was arrested in the case. "Investigation of the case is going on to unearth the whole conspiracy and to track the person who was in touch with Sharma. It has been found that the number that Sharma was getting calls from was of an Indian service provider. Hence, the details of the number have also been sought and further probe is underway," the officer added. Further investigation is underway. (ANI)
Women of Gujarat's Bharuch gifted Prime Minister Narendra Modi with a huge Rakhi wishing him health while thanking him for his contribution towards the dignity and ease of living of women in the country. The Prime Minister thanked them for giving him strength in the form of the Rakhi and said that it is like a shield for him to inspire him to work harder. "Your Rakhi has given me strength and capability and power to accomplish the dreams. I consider this rakhi an invaluable gift. It would inspire me to serve the poor and make the governments work towards 100 per cent saturation," he said while addressing a gathering, Utkarsh Samaroh virtually. "When I was in Gujarat, there was news regarding my security at times. I used to say that I have got the protection of crores of mothers," PM Modi added. (ANI)
Odisha's Food Supplies and Consumer Welfare Minister, Ranendra Pratap Swain on Wednesday, wrote a letter to the Union Minister Piyush Goyal, urging and seeking his personal intervention to resolve the issues regarding the release of subsidies, evacuation of surplus rice, lifting of wheat from Food Corporation of India (FCI) and the allocation of 100 per cent rice under the Public Distribution System (PDS). In his letter, Swain raised concern over the delayed release of food subsidy by the Government of India. As per the MoU signed with the Government of India, there has to be zero financial liability on the State Procuring Agency with regard to the permissible items of cost for procurement of the rice to be borne by the Centre. "The State Civil Supplies Corporation, the major procuring agency of the State Government is to receive Rs 7,931.90 crore as provisional subsidy and an advanced subsidy of Rs 2,402.19 crore with total subsidy claim standing at about Rs 10,334 crore by the end of April 2022. The additional interest incurred till 31 March 2022 because of the delay in release and short release of subsidy comes to around Rs 5,454.67 crore which remains unrecouped and should be paid by the Government of India," Swain wrote in his letter. The letter further read, "In the ensuing Kharif Marketing Season (KMS) 2021-22, out of 52 lakh MT of the estimated procurement of rice, Odisha's own consumption was about 39 lakh MT under the PDS and other welfare schemes and the State is likely to have a surplus of 13 lakhs MT of rice which should be lifted immediately for a smooth procurement operation." "In addition to this, the State Government has taken all necessary steps to deliver 5 lakh MT of fortified parboiled rice to FCI as per the target given by the Department of Food and Public Distribution (DFPD), Govt. of India. The State is in a position to deliver a higher quantity of fortified parboiled rice and DFPD has been requested to give an additional target of fortified parboiled rice during the KMS 2021-22," it continued. Swain also requested the Union Minister to make available the required wheat stocks for Puri, Khordha and Nayagarh districts at the FCI Depot at Jagatpur, Cuttack. Besides, Swain also urged for the allocation of 100 per cent rice to Odisha under National Food Security Act/Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (NFSA/PMGKAY) for distributing the beneficiaries as was done in the case of Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Chhatisgarh, Goa and Telangana. (ANI)
Earlier on Wednesday, a special PMLA court in Ranchi sent Jharkhand mining secretary Pooja Singhal to five-day remand of the Enforcement Directorate (ED).

Singhal was arrested by ED on Wednesday and her remand will start from Thursday.

This is the second arrest in this case as Chartered Accountant Suman Kumar is already arrested by ED on May 7. ED recovered Rs 17.51 crore from premises of Kumar and Rs 1.8 crore from Pulse Hospital. Singhal was arrested after ED got credible evidence of her connection with CA Suman Kumar.

Earlier this month, ED conducted raids at Pulse Hospital, Ranchi. The hospital is owned by Abhishek Jha, husband of Pooja Singhal, Secretary, Mines and Geology, in Jharkhand.

Senior advocate of Jharkhand High Court, Rajeev Kumar, submitted a complaint against her to the ED in February 2022.

Earlier on Sunday, the ED interrogated Abhishek Jha, husband of Pooja Singhal, IAS, in connection with searches at Pulse Hospital.

Pooja Singhal is the secretary of the Department of Mines and Geology and the Managing Director of Jharkhand State Mineral Development Corporation Limited (JSMDC). (ANI)
As per the Indian Navy, the chief acknowledged their (commando's) presence in vital locations and emphasized the importance of being combat-ready at all times.

"During the interaction #CNS acknowledged their presence in #vital locations and stressed the importance of being #combatready at all times," the Navyspokesperson tweeted.

Marine Commandos (MARCOS) is the special force of the Indian Navy and is deployed with the surface ships for deployment in the Operation Sankalp as well as anti-piracy missions in the Gulf of Aden.

The force is also responsible for securing the Wular lake in the Kashmir valley and carrying out various anti-terror operations against terrorists there. (ANI)
A Rohini Sessions Court has acquitted seven accused persons after 11 years in a murder case of a businessman in the Wazirpur industrial area in the national capital. The Additional Sessions Judge Kiran Gupta in the judgement passed on May 5, said that it is evident that none of the accused persons were arrested from the spot. The accused were arrested in the present case on the basis of their disclosure statements which were recorded during the custody of the police and nothing incriminating has been recovered, so, the disclosure statements of the accused are inadmissible. After the conclusion of the whole trial proceedings, the Additional Sessions Judge said that all the accused persons are acquitted of the charges framed against them. "The investigating officers have failed to recover the weapon used in the commission of the offence. The weapons recovered during the investigation are not the weapon of offence. The accused persons were neither known to the complainant nor the other witnesses and the witnesses had the occasion to see many of the accused persons for the first time during their testimony in the court after the date of the incident. None of the witnesses had disclosed any distinctive feature of any of the accused persons in their statements," the court noted. Advocate Ravi Drall appeared for accused Neeraj and Umar Ali and argued that no case is made out against the accused persons as none of the accused persons were arrested at their disclosure statement recorded by police when the accused were already in custody in another case. There are material contradictions and improvements which surfaced during the cross-examination of the witness further the recovery of the weapon shown from the possession of the accused Neeraj didn't match from the bullets found on the spot. According to the prosecution, in January 2011 alleged accused persons entered in the factory of a businessman and after robbery killed the businessman. According to the prosecution, on January 29, 2011, all the accused persons in furtherance of criminal conspiracy to commit dacoity entered the factory of the deceased. They all were armed with deadly weapons i.e. country made pistols and knives. While committing robbery in the factory, they committed the murder of the businessman, when he objected to them. They took the black coloured bag belonging to the deceased and one packet of 100 notes from the drawer and left the spot. The FIR was initially lodged under sections 302, 394, 397 and 34 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) against unknown persons. (ANI)
The Supreme Court on Thursday issued notice to the Uttarakhand government on a plea of Jitendra Narayan Singh Tyagi, formerly known as Wasim Rizvi, against the High Court order rejecting his bail in connection with the investigation into the hate speeches at the Hardiwar Dharam Sansad held in December last year. A bench of Justices Ajay Rastogi and Vikram Nath sought the State's response on the bail plea of Jitendra Tyagi while observing that they are "spoiling the whole atmosphere". "Before they ask to sensitise others they have to sensitise themselves first. They are not sensitised. This is something which is spoiling the whole atmosphere," the bench said while referring to the controversial Haridwar Dharam Sansad event. Tyagi, who was once the chief of UP Shia Waqf Board before accepting Hindusim, has challenged the March 8 order of the Uttarakhand High Court which denied him bail. "File the counter. We are not concerned about what happened, we have to take the totality of matter, punishment, period of custody, etc.," said the apex court. During the hearing today, the bench asked senior advocate Sidharth Luthra appearing for Tyagi, "What is the Dharam Sansad by the way?. Luthra responded saying, "I am an Arya Samaji, I don't know. I have seen videos, people in Bhagwa kapdas got together and gave speeches". To this, Justice Rastogi said, "Spoiling the atmosphere. Stay together peacefully, enjoy life." Hearing the case, the apex court also said that the maximum punishment for the offence he is charged with is three years and he has been in jail since January. "For four months he is already been in custody. What further investigation do you want from him? It is already complete," the bench said. Tyagi was arrested on January 13 in a case registered for offences under Section 153A (promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence) and 298 (uttering words with deliberate intent to wound religious feelings of any person) of the Indian Penal Code. The High Court had refused him bail observing that he had made derogatory remarks. (ANI)
The hearing seeking an investigation over 22 rooms of the Taj Mahal concluded on Thursday.

The plea was filed by Rajneesh Singh, a BJP youth media in-charge, before the Lucknow Bench of Allahabad High Court that sought the directions to the Archaeological Survey of India to probe the 22 closed doors in the Taj Mahal to ascertain the presence of the idols of Hindu deities.

The plea sought the constitution of a fact-finding committee and the submission of a report by the ASI. The plea also cited the claims by some historians and some Hindu groups about the monument being an old Shiva Temple. (ANI)
The Supreme Court on Thursday asked the Enforcement Directorate (ED) why it cannot question Trinamool Congress's leader Abhishek Banerjee and his wife Rujira Banerjee in Kolkata instead of Delhi and said it will direct Kolkata police to provide protection to ED officials there so that they can question them without any hassle. A bench of Justices UU Lalit, S Ravindra Bhat and Sudhanshu Dhulia said as the politician and his wife till now seem to be just a witness and not a potential accused asked ED, Delhi, why its officials can't go to Kolkata to question them. As ED referred to how the CBI officials were surrounded in Kolkata earlier and Banerjee is "politically influential", the bench observed it may order the Kolkata Police to extend all cooperation and the state would be bound by that, the moment the agency would make a requisition 72 hours in advance. Abhishek Banerjee, the nephew of TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee told the apex court that he is ready to be probed by ED in Kolkata. ED is conducting the investigation in a money-laundering probe, linked to an alleged coal scam in West Bengal, in which the agency had issued summons to the Banerjee couple. Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for the petitioners, contended that Banerjees are not preventing investigation in the matter and the ED can come to Kolkata and conduct the probe. "I (petitioner) am not preventing investigation. I am saying please come and investigate me. The issue is not of investigation, the issue is where. I am saying please come and investigate me. I will answer all your questions, you come to Kolkata. They say no, we will not come, you come to Delhi. That's the question," Sibal told the bench. The bench then told the Additional Solicitor General (ASG) SV Raju who was representing the ED that it would say that the state of West Bengal shall, upon requisition by ED, give them a police force. Banerjees have challenged the summons issued to them by ED for appearance here in connection with the money laundering probe linked to an alleged coal scam in West Bengal. The couple has challenged the Delhi High Court March 11 order by which their pleas against the issuance of summons were dismissed. Filing the plea through advocate Sunil Fernandes, Banerjees requested the top court to quash summons and restrain ED from seeking their presence for questioning in Delhi. They pleaded that they can be questioned by ED at Kolkata and sought a stay on High Court's order. The petitioners have asked the apex court to decide whether ED can assume pan-India jurisdiction to summon persons from anywhere to Delhi. "Whether the Respondent can assume pan-India jurisdiction to summon any person at the place of their choice while exercising powers under Section 50 PMLA?," the plea questioned while adding that High Court has failed to appreciate that the couple is permanent residents of Kolkata and the entire alleged cause of action and the place of the alleged offence, is in the State of West Bengal. The search and seizure operations recorded in the FIR/RC took place in West Bengal wherein allegedly stolen coal was recovered and all the accused persons named in the FIR/RC are permanent residents of West Bengal, it added. Approaching the top court, Banerjee said he belongs to TMC and was a leading figure in keenly contested Assembly Elections in the West Bengal in April/May 2021 (around the same time when the FIR was registered) wherein his party trounced the political party at power in the Centre, and "thereby giving justifiable cause to "target" and "fix" the Petitioner no.1 (Banerjee) by misusing the Central Investigation Agencies". The contention of the petitioners is that this entire case against them is nothing but a political witch-hunt and cannot be brushed away lightly as done in the impugned order (of the High Court), the plea drawn by advocate Fernandes said. The plea further stated that the High Court order is "misconceived, erroneous and deserves to be set aside". The High Court had dismissed Banerjees' plea who had challenged the September 10, 2021 summons issued to them and had sought direction to the ED not to summon them for their appearance in Delhi since they are residents of West Bengal. The 34-year-old MP represents the Diamond Harbour seat in Lok Sabha and is the national general secretary of the TMC. The ED lodged a case under the provisions of the PMLA based on a November 2020 FIR registered by the CBI that alleged a multi-crore coal pilferage scam related to Eastern Coalfields Ltd mines in the state's Kunustoria and Kajora areas in and around Asansol. Local coal operative Anup Majee is alleged to be the prime suspect in the case. The ED had claimed that the TMC MP was a beneficiary of funds obtained from this illegal trade. Banerjee has denied all charges. (ANI)
In his first visit outside Delhi after taking over as Army Chief, General Manoj Pande on Thursday started his three-day tour of the Ladakh sector where he would review the overall security situation along the borders with China and Pakistan. The Army Chief arrived in Ladakh on Thursday and would be briefed on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) with China by Northern Army Commander Lt Gen Upendra Dwivedi and 'Fire and Fury' Corps Commander Lt Gen A Sengupta. On the first day of his visit, the Gen Pande reviewed the equipment used by the Army in the Ladakh sector including unmanned aerial vehicles along with other 'Made-in-India' defence equipment, Army officials said. The Army Chief as a Major General had commanded the 8 Mountain Division responsible for the operations along the Pakistan border in the sector. Gen Pande's own unit 117 Engineers Regiment is also deployed in operations along the Eastern Ladakh sector. From day one, Gen Pande has made it clear that the force would not allow any loss of territory in that area where the Chinese and Indian forces have been in a military standoff situation for the last two years now. In an exclusive interview to ANI on his first day in office, he said that the situation at the LAC is normal at the moment where "unilateral and provocative actions by our adversary to change the status quo by force had been adequately dealt with". (ANI)
The deceased have been identified as Rahul Bhat, an employee of the Tehsil office in the Budgam district's Chadoora.

Rahul Bhat was taken to Srinagar's SMHS hospital, where he died.

Condemning the crime, The Jammu and Kashmir police tweeted, "The #injured was immediately brought to SMHS Hospital, Srinagar for treatment where he #succumbed to his injuries. Preliminary investigation reveals that 02 #terrorists are #involved in this #heinous crime and have used pistol for committing this crime."

Meanwhile, the search operation was launched immediately after the incident to nab the attackers. (ANI)
The Union Minister of Commerce and Industry, Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution and Textiles, Piyush Goyal on Thursday said that India was considering entering into a Preferential Trade Agreement (PTA) with Oman. He was delivering the keynote address at the 10th Meeting of India-Oman Joint Business Council (JBC) in New Delhi today. Goyal further said that India was already looking at a comprehensive trade agreement with Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations, of which Oman is an important member. The Minister said that the Joint Commission Meeting (JCM) that took place on Wednesday between India and Oman, which had been long overdue, was a very productive one. He expressed confidence that the discussions with business leaders on both sides would complement the discussions under JCM, come up with new ideas to boost our already deep bonds of friendship, and turn our vision into reality. Observing that India and Oman have been connected for more than 5,000 years through friendship and brotherhood and very warm and strong people-to-people ties, the Minister said that despite such close relations, the bilateral trade and investment in the two nations were yet to reach maximum potential. Goyal stressed that all the engagement that happened in the JCM, the friendship between him and his counterpart in Oman, the visionary leadership of the heads of both nations and the warm people to people ties between the two nations should and must lead to a significant increase in business to business engagement. Paying his respects to the Arab world's longest-serving ruler, late Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said of Oman, Goyal said, "He was held in very high esteem in India and was conferred the Gandhi Peace Prize. He was one of the architects of close India-Oman bilateral relations. We owe it to him to strive to transform his vision into reality and take the partnership between India and Oman to the heights it truly deserves." The Union Minister expressed confidence that the Joint Business Council (JBC) will supplement the efforts of the governments of both countries to deepen engagement. He underscored that these agreements would only reach their true potential if businesses display that enthusiasm which will, in turn, help political leaders take bold decisions. Goyal urged businesses in both nations to look at new opportunities, especially in services, investment, food security, sustainability, renewable energy and startups. The Minister acknowledged the care, concern and love that was showered on expatriate Indians by the people of Oman, especially during the pandemic. He added that Oman was the 1st country in the GCC to authorize the use of India made Covaxin. Referring to cultural and culinary affinities between the two nations, the Minister said that these ties have brought the people of both nations even closer. The Minister invited the Government of Oman to increase their pharma trade with India. Mentioning the market study on the cooperation in the pharma sector that was unveiled at the JCM on Wednesday, the Minister expressed confidence that the report would be invaluable to Indian companies wishing to enter the Omani market. "Our pharma companies will bring quality products at competitive prices to consumers in Oman and help bring down the cost of healthcare," he assured. Goyal also thanked Oman for agreeing to fast-track approval for Indian medicines that had already been cleared by strong regulatory environments like the UK, EU and the USA. The Minister urged both nations to leave no stone unturned when it comes to working together to improve the lives of people in India and Oman. Qais bin Mohammed Al Yousef, Minister of Commerce, Industry and Investment Promotion of the Sultanate of Oman said that the two nations had a successful Joint Commission Meeting and added that India and Oman had great trust and confidence in each other. He also invited Indian companies to invest and do business in Oman. (ANI)
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is set to convene a high-level meeting of its office bearers from all across the country in Rajasthan's Jaipur from May 19 to May 21 to brainstorm over strengthening the organisation ahead of assembly polls in several states, informed party sources. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will virtually attend the meeting and address the party workers. According to party sources, BJP President JP Nadda will reach Jaipur by 2 pm on May 19 and he will hold a meeting with the party General secretaries at 6 pm. On May 20, Nadda will hold a meeting with the state organising secretary while on May 21 he will conduct a joint session with the state presidents, party office bearers, organising secretary and state incharge. Apart from Nadda, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Defense Minister Rajnath Singh and Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari will also attend this meeting. Sources also informed that the BJP will prepare a roadmap for the assembly elections to be held in three states and the 2024 Lok Sabha elections in the meeting. Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh and Karnataka are scheduled to go to assembly polls this year. (ANI)
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has sent a strongly-worded letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi asking the Central government to immediately release the state's dues for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) and PM Awas Yojana. "I am writing to bring an urgent matter to your kind attention. It is very astonishing that the Government of India is not releasing funds to West Bengal for MGNREGA and PM Awas Yojana," read the opening lines of the letter, a copy of which is available with IANS. In the letter, she said that wage payment under MGNREGS in West Bengal is pending for more than four months as the Union government has held back around Rs 6,500 crore, out of which Rs 3,000 core was on account of wage liabilities and around Rs 3,500 crore was on account of non-wage liabilities. She also pointed out that in PM Awas Yojana, West Bengal ranks first in the country and over 32 lakh houses have been constructed in the state under this scheme. According to the Chief Minister, in spite of this performance, fresh allocations of funds to West Bengal are pending with the Union Ministry of Rural Development and hence, a long list of beneficiaries is awaiting sanction in the state. "Considering the significance of the projects and the hardships being faced by the common people, I would request you for your immediate intervention and direction to the concerned ministry to release the funds without any further delay," the letter said. On Thursday morning too, Banerjee, while addressing the Annual General Meeting of West Bengal Civil Service (Executive) Officers' Association at the newly-renovated iconic Town Hall in Kolkata, attacked the Union government for not releasing funds for the state government under MGNREGS. "Because of these dues, often payments of wages under MGNREGA are getting stuck or delayed. As it is, the people are suffering due to massive increase in the prices of essential commodities. Lives of people become further miserable if they do not get payment for the work done," she said. However, senior BJP leader, Rahul Sinha claimed that the Chief Minister is not giving correct figures. He also alleged that the state government often spends the money allotted for one head on other heads, which results in the paucity of funds under the head it was allotted. --IANS src/kvd/vd ( 407 Words) 2022-05-12-20:16:04 (IANS)
It is no surprise that the Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi got a warm reception in all the European countries he visited during May 2-4 on official invitations. The visit came at a geopolitically turbulent time with an offer from all the three countries Germany, France and Denmark to collaborate on important global and bilateral issues ranging from economy and technology to sustainable development and peace. During the visit, the Indian Prime Minister had close engagement and dialogue with the leaders of these three European countries and other Nordic countries, viz., Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland. The Indian Prime Minister's Europe visit came close on the heels of the recent India visits of many European leaders including Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, apart from the foreign ministers of some countries. During Narendra Modi's reign, India has become a far more attractive market for trade and investment with consistent commitment to economic reforms, globalisation and mutual cooperation. This has elicited increased interest of the European leaders in India for both -- enhancing economic ties and strategic partnerships, the latter because of India's proven credential as the largest democratic and pacifist country. The unprecedented and overwhelming reception of the Prime Minister of India in all the three countries indicates a rise in the stature of the country in geo-economics and geopolitics apart from intensifying trust and ties. The Indian community throughout Europe has grown in recent years, especially the number of Indian students in Germany, France and Denmark. The expansion of Indian diaspora in these countries is not only a re-assurance of growing ties in future but also that the diaspora would act as a bridge between Europe and India to further cooperation and collaboration in all the spheres of economic development and strategic cooperation. In all the three countries Germany, France and Denmark, the popular Prime Minister of India got massive response from the diaspora including women and children and friendly gestures from leaders. While in Germany, the first leg of his Europe visit, the Prime Minister participated in the Sixth Inter-Governmental Consultations and had close interaction with new Chancellor of Germany Olaf Scholz. The new regime in Germany is in the process of redefining its foreign policy and engagement amid changing geo-political scenario, most remarkably, a shift from pursuing only its mercantile interests in Asia with China remaining a core market to strategic collaboration with other countries like Japan and India, besides diversifying its export market. The Joint Declaration of Intent (JDI) on Green and Sustainable Development Partnership between India and Germany is also a great futuristic outcome of the visit, having the potential to make industrial development carbon neutral by promotion of green technology and energy. The same theme of sustainable development, renewable energy and environment remained the main focus of the Prime Minister of India while interacting with the Danish leaders. The interactions were very fruitful and remained particularly focussed on the three "Ts" - trade, technology and talent. The deliberations also covered cooperation in agriculture, food processing, smart urban development and shipping, apart from human resources. Of late, the demand for human resources in Denmark from India has increased. One of the significant achievements of the Indian Prime Minister in Denmark was to highlight in the second Nordic Summit India's interest and stake in sustainable development in the Arctic region. India is only the second country after the US to partner the Nordic countries in this mechanism. In France, the last leg of his visit, the Prime Minister of India, who enjoys a great personal rapport with President Emanuel Macron, successfully solicited more cooperation in the defence sector, especially under the vision of Atmanirbhar Bharat. The Atmanirbhar Bharat (Self Reliant India) is a programme of Government of India to locally produce all those items for which it has capacity and resources rather than importing them from other countries. The progamme also aims to take Indian brands to the global supply chains. The Prime Minister also succeeded in making a point with the French President to work together in the third countries, particularly in Asia and Africa, apart from urging French support for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council for India. Overall, Indian Prime Minister's Europe visit re-confirmed India's rising stature in geopolitics and geo-economics and opened up new vistas of cooperation. If the forthcoming and welcoming gesture of the European leaders is any indication, Europe-India ties are looking up to new heights. Thanks to the assiduous efforts of the Prime Minister of India to reclaim India's deserved place in the bilateral and global affairs. --IANS pgh/ ( 782 Words) 2022-05-12-20:32:02 (IANS)
By asserting the Jaipur royal family's original ownership of the land on which the Taj Mahal stands, Diya Kumari, grand-daughter of Man Singh II, the last Maharaja of Jaipur, and BJP MP from Rajsamand, Rajasthan, has unwittingly laid to rest the debate over whether the world's most famous monument to love was built on a Hindu temple. The theory that the Taj Mahal was built on a Hindu temple, or was a 'Hindu monument' as claimed by the revisionist historian P.N. Oak, is resurrected by right-wing groups at regular intervals, most recently in a petition that has just been spiked by the Allahabad High Court. Taj Mahal was built on land that originally belonged to Mirza Raja Man Singh, the Raja of Amber (latter-day Jaipur) and Emperor Akbar's general who was best known for leading the Mughal army against Maharana Pratap in the Battle of Haldighati, for his conquests of Bengal, Bihar and Odisha, where he was later posted as governor, and for restoring Puri's Jagannath Temple. He was succeeded by his second son, Bhau Singh, and it was Emperor Jahangir's intervention that ensured he inherited the mantle and not his elder brother, who did not inspire much confidence in their Mughal overlord. Bhau Singh, who didn't quite match up to the high standards set by his father, died at the age of 44 without a son and heir, so Amber passed into the hands of his grand nephew, Jai Singh I. By virtue of the office he held, Jai Singh I was also the owner of the land on the banks of the Yamuna that the architects of Taj Mahal fancied for the monument envisioned by Emperor Shahjahan. In the tradition of Amber, Jai Singh I served as an army commander of Shahjahan, who honoured him with the title of Mirza Raja. Jai Singh I and Shah Jahan were very close to each other -- they fought in military campaigns together in Kandahar, Balkh and Badakshan in Afghanistan and Central Asia. They seized the strategic fort of Kandahar, an outpost of Safavid Persia, which pitted the Mughals against their old ally and a mighty military power. The Safavids under Shah Abbas II regained control over Kandahar and the Mughals failed to get it back, even after two military expeditions to recover it -- one led by Aurangzeb and other by Dara Shukoh, Shahjahan's oldest and favourite son. Jai Singh I was a part of both. He got close to Aurangzeb and fell out with Dara Shukoh, who treated him very badly after Kandahar didn't fall into the hands of the Mughals. Jai Singh I, clearly, was a loyal general and a friend of the ruling dispensation, in the tradition of Bhagwant Das, who became Akbar's brother-in-law and established the unshakeable ties between the House of Amber and the Mughals. So, it was to be expected that when Shahjahan, after Mumtaz Mahal's death in 1631, approached Jai Singh I for his tract of land to build the Rauza-e-Munnavara, or the Illuminated Tomb, as the Taj Mahal was then known, he would have happily acquiesced (apart from agreeing to supply the Makrana marbles with which the mausoleum was built). Jai Singh I, who was born in 1611, was then only 20 years old, but he had already become a favourite of the emperor after quelling a rebellion by Afghan chieftains loyal to Shahjahan's general in the Deccan, Khan Jahan Lodi. Coming back to whether there was a temple standing on the land that Jai Singh I owned, it is clear from contemporary records (the Mughals, incidentally, were meticulous with their paperwork), and the accounts left behind by historians who lived and wrote during the reign of Shahjahan, that none existed. The Amber ruler, as the historian Rana Safvi points out, had a riverfront haveli standing on the land he gave to Shahjahan. He was in the company of other leading Mughal noblemen who had mansions on the banks of the Yamuna, such as Mahabat Khan, Asaf Khan, Muqim Khan and even Dara Shukoh, who was killed and prevented from becoming the emperor by Aurangzeb. Writing in the 'Padshah Nama', the contemporary chronicler, Abdul Hamid Lahori says that though Jai Singh I wanted to give the land for free as a gesture of friendship to the king, but Shahjahan insisted on gifting him mansions situated on the crown land in return. The exchange was announced in a royal 'farman' (edict) issued on December 28, 1633. The 'farman', cited by Safvi, has been reproduced with a translation In W.E. Begley and Z.A. Desai's 'Taj Mahal: The Illumined Tomb', an anthology of 17th-century Mughal and European documents related to the mausoleum. Not once does it mention anything other than a haveli being present on the land where Taj Mahal stands today. Jai Singh I, incidentally, also owned the land on which the much-revered Gurudwara Bangla Sahib in New Delhi stands. The 'Bangla' in Bangla Sahib refers to Jai Singh I's bungalow ('bangla'), where the Sikh Guru Har Krishan stayed as the Amber ruler's house guest in 1664 and served people stricken by the cholera and smallpox epidemics then raging in the city. New Delhi's prestigious shopping district, Connaught Place, is also located on land that belonged to Jai Singh I. In his time, the area was called Jaisinghpura in his honour. --IANS srb/ ( 905 Words) 2022-05-12-20:32:03 (IANS)
As Rahul Gandhi and other Congress leaders boarded a train to Rajasthan's Udaipur to participate in three-day brainstorming session, beginning from Friday, there is no clarity that the G-23 dissidents group's strategy and if they will propose the changes which has been mooted by them to party chief Sonia Gandhi. Even the G-23 leaders - many of whom have been accomodated in various committees in the run up for the 'Chintan Shivir'. Sources within the group say that they will think over the matter during the event before any comment. Meanwhile, the Congress on Thursday said that Udaipur will be new milestone of hope, aspiration and change as India is "enduring a painful and vicious assault on its democracy, economy and societal harmony". Addressing a press conference, General Secretary Randeep Surjewala said: "Congress was born out of a determined struggle to liberate India and its people from the shackles of oppression, discrimination, bigotry and the policy of divide and rule. In these trying times, when 'Divide and Rule' has become the state policy, we resolve to re-dedicate ourselves to 'nav sankalp', that is, to once again propel India onto the path of progress, prosperity and societal harmony." "The road map shall provide a way forward not only to the Congress to meet up with the current set of reverses and challenges, but will also pave the way for a resilient, strong and inclusive nation," he added. It is also likely that a clamour for former party President Rahul Gandhi's return will be raised by some quarters in the party, sources said. --IANS miz/vd ( 273 Words) 2022-05-12-21:50:03 (IANS)
On his one-day visit to the Pune district of Maharashtra, EU Ambassador to India, Ugo Astute on Wednesday said that the European Union would continue its sanction until Russia ends its aggression against Ukraine. Ugo Astute was speaking to reporters on the sideline of his address at the celebration event of 60 years of EU-India Partnership at Savitribai Phule Pune University. When asked will the sanction on Russia to continue if the war drags on, Astute said, "The sanction is necessary. Through the sanctions, we are trying to affect the Russian war machine and to hold those responsible for making the decision to attack Ukraine. We have already approved five packages for sanctions." He further added, "We have developed very effective financial sanctions. We have also excluded Swift and a number of major financial institutions from Russia." The EU envoy to India said that the sanction is a continuous process and they wanted to affect the capability of the Russian military through the sanctions. He further said that as Russia continues its aggression against Ukraine so it will continue and expand as long as it's necessary. While reacting to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's appeal to a ceasefire during his recent visit to Europe, Astuto said, "I definitely think it's important that PM Modi called for immediate cessation and hope that Russia comes to ends it as it is unprovoked and unjustified aggression. So it's important for the international community to come together and make it clear to Russia and its leader that their aggression must stop, hostility must be stopped and troops must be withdrawn." PM Modi started his three-nation namely, Germany, Denmark and France on May 2. PM Modi held several high-level engagements with the leadership of Germany, Denmark and France, during the course of his visit, while also interacting with the Indian diaspora in all three countries.The Prime Minister also held interactions with the business leaders in Germany and Denmark during the course of his visit. (ANI)
The chairman of the US-China Commission board Carolyn Bartholomew and the chairman of the board of the 'Project 2049 Institute' and a partner at Pacific Solutions LLC Randall Schriver, in the meeting, will brainstorm the issue of several countries reconsidering their economic ties with Beijing.

Notably, there's a growing awareness in India like United States that trade and investment with China are not only economic but also national security issues.

The commission, which provides US Congress with the latest updates on what China is doing in South and Central Asia, will also discuss the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, including how Moscow's action in Ukraine may give Beijing an opportunity to deepen its influence in Central Asia.

Reports say that China is actively working to shape the regional security architecture to its benefit through joint military exercises, multilateral organizations like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and even the direct presence of armed forces in Tajikistan.

The US-China commission will also discuss that the US, India and other countries in South Asia face a growing military challenge as People's Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers encroach on territories of neighbouring Bhutan, Nepal, and India. (ANI)
The first session of the crucial Pakistan Muslim League (N) huddle in London decided that there will be no early elections in Islamabad and the primary focus of the Shehbaz Sharif-led government should be on providing economic relief to the citizens and taking long-term economic decisions. The six-hour-long meeting was held among Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, his brother and the party supremo Nawaz Sharif and other leaders, including Khwaja Asif, Miftah Ismail, Marriyum Aurangzeb, Atta Tarar, Rana Sanaullah, Ishaq Dar, Ayaz Sadiq, at an undisclosed location in London, The News International citing sources. Notably, the former Prime Minister and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chairman Imran Khan has been continuously calling for early general elections in the country since he lost the no-confidence motion in the National Assembly. Sources said that Nawaz Sharif sought suggestions on various issues, including early elections from all the party leaders, and everyone agreed that the PML-N should implement the economic agenda for the remaining term and then announce the next elections in consultation with the coalition partners. Soon after the meeting, Information Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb said that the party leaders and Prime Minister presented a full report on Pakistan's social, economic and political situation to the supremo and briefed him on the agenda of the government and its planning. "Nawaz Sharif is our Quaid. The meeting between Nawaz Sharif and Shehbaz Sharif was long overdue. We have inherited today's Pakistan in a written-off situation and we needed to review the whole situation to formulate a plan. This was a private delegation," she said, as per The News International. Shehbaz Sharif arrived in London to meet his brother Nawaz Sharif on Wednesday. Nawaz, who is convicted in a corruption case, has been living in London on the pretext of ill health since 2019. The former Pakistan PM sought extensions to prolong his stay in London on medical grounds. According to Nawaz, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government had left Pakistan in a deep economic crisis. Last month, Nawaz had also conducted meetings with PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, who was later appointed Pakistan's federal minister. The two allies had agreed to work closely to "repair the rot across the board," read a joint statement. (ANI)
Pakistan and the United States on Wednesday completed their security level talks in Washington ahead of Pakistani Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari's visit to Washington later this month. Inter-Services Intelligence Director-General (DG ISI) Lt-Gen Nadeem Anjum spent three days in Washington this week, meeting senior security officials, including US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and CIA Director William J. Burns, Dawn newspaper reported. The Pakistani newspaper said that neither side disclosed the details of these meetings, but the talks are believed to have focused on "bilateral security concerns and the situation in Afghanistan, as the US believes that Pakistan can help stabilise the war-torn country". The last security level talks between the two countries were held in July 2021, when then-National Security Advisor Moeed Yusuf met Mr Sullivan at the White House, Dawn newspaper reported. Meanwhile, Bilawal is scheduled to visit the United States later this month at the invitation of United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Recently, Blinken held a telephonic conversation with Bilawal. This comes at a significant juncture as former Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan had levelled charges against the US for conspiring to oust him from power. The US State Department, however, had refuted all the allegations, saying that there is no truth to them. (ANI)
On the occasion of the Modi @20:Dreams Meeting Delivery book launch event, the External Affairs Minister of India, S. Jaishankar on Thursday expressed his gratitude for being a contributor to the volume which marks 20 years of the Modi government and highlighted PM Modi's influence on the foreign policy. "Privileged to contribute to 'Modi @20: Dreams Meet Delivery.' Write about the new concepts, aspirations, visions and strategies of PM @narendramodi in foreign policy." tweeted Jaishankar. In his statement, Jaishankar stated that during the past eight years of PM Modi's governance, he has witnessed "the new concepts, the aspirations, the visions, the strategies that he has brought." The External Affairs Minister added that he had also contributed to the foreign policy impact along with PM Modi. Further, reminiscing his first encounter with Modi, 11 years ago, in November 2011, Jaishankar, who was the Ambassador of China at that time spoke, about how the Prime Minister was "different" from the others. According to Jaishankar Modi had visited China during that time and "ran 12 hour day with a half-hour lunch break," while proceeding on to visit three cities in four days. Jaishankar emphasized that although such a gesture was common now, it was a "discovery" back then. According to Jaishankar, he believes PM Modi has transformed the foreign policy, which has turned to become " much more security-focused, he has practiced a diplomacy which is more development-focused, he has created people-centric policies In foreign policy and he has run a foreign policy of a civilization state." In addition, Jaishakar also praised PM Modi, stating that the present 8 years of the Modi government have brought "border infrastructure" to curb terrorism, "diplomacy for development" in a bid to achieve "400 billion dollars of exports", and people-centricity where it has become much easier to receive passports. Mentioning the people-centric measures, Modi has taken, Jaishakar also highlighted the One Day Bharat Mission and the Operation Devi Shakti. Notably, Jaishankar spoke about how PM Modi's "quest for development is very much at the heart of what he does." As per Jaishankar, Modi perceives "the world not just as a marketplace, but as a global workplace. And a lot of his foreign policy efforts are in that direction." "Here is a prime minister who has actually propagated and practised a policy of India first," said the External Affairs Minister. He summed up his speech by mentioning that his chapter in the book "lays out the paradox of Narendra Modi- a visionary, but a person of great detail." Earlier, Vice President of India M Venkaiah Naidu while releasing the book, Modi @20:Dreams Meeting Delivery had said that "the Prime Minister is a phenomenon at the national level. The book presents different facets of the distinct thought process, the pioneering, pro-active approach and the quintessential, transformational leadership style that Narendra Modi has come to be so closely identified with." (ANI)
On the occasion of the Modi @20:Dreams Meeting Delivery book launch event, the External Affairs Minister of India, S. Jaishankar on Wednesday expressed his gratitude for being a contributor to the volume which marks 20 years of the Modi government and highlighted PM Modi's influence on the foreign policy. "Privileged to contribute to 'Modi @20: Dreams Meet Delivery.' Write about the new concepts, aspirations, visions and strategies of PM @narendramodi in foreign policy" tweeted Jaishankar. During his speech on the occasion, Jaishankar said that past eight years of PM Modi's governance, he has witnessed the new concepts, aspirations, visions and strategies. The External Affairs Minister added that he had also contributed to the foreign policy impact along with PM Modi. Further, reminiscing his first encounter with Modi, when the PM was the chief minister of Gujarat, Jaishankar added that 11 years ago, in November 2011, Jaishankar, who was the Ambassador of China at that time spoke, about how Modi was "different" from the others. Jaishankar remembered that during his meeting with Modi at that time, the former chief minister of Gujarat had said, "I may be chief minister of Gujarat, but I'm a citizen of India. When I go outside, I will not be one millimeter different from what is our national sense." According to Jaishankar, PM Modi has transformed the foreign policy, which has turned to become "much more security-focused, he has practiced a diplomacy which is more development-focused, Modi has created people-centric policies and has run a foreign policy of a civilization state." In addition, Jaishakar also praised PM Modi, stating that the present 8 years of the Modi government have brought border infrastructure, diplomacy for development in a bid to achieve "400 billion dollars of exports", and people-centricity where it has become much easier to receive passports. Mentioning the people-centric measures, Modi has taken, Jaishakar also highlighted the One Day Bharat Mission and the Operation Devi Shakti. Notably, Jaishankar spoke about how PM Modi's "quest for development is very much at the heart of what he does." As per Jaishankar, Modi perceives "the world not just as a marketplace, but as a global workplace. And a lot of his foreign policy efforts are in that direction." "Here is a prime minister who has actually propagated and practiced a policy of India first," said the External Affairs Minister. He summed up his speech by mentioning that his chapter in the book "lays out the paradox of Narendra Modi- a visionary, but a person of great detail." Earlier, Vice President of India M Venkaiah Naidu while releasing the book, Modi @20:Dreams Meeting Delivery had said that "the Prime Minister is a phenomenon at the national level. The book presents different facets of the distinct thought process, the pioneering, pro-active approach and the quintessential, transformational leadership style that Narendra Modi has come to be so closely identified with." (ANI)
In yet another "foreign conspiracy" allegation, Imran Khan-led Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) has blamed an official based in the US for receiving illegal funds, as the party continued its final arguments in the foreign funding case before the Election Commission bench. "PTI had fired one of its agents Dr Nasrullah, the treasurer of the US-based PTI company for allowing funding and collecting donations from prohibited sources," party counsel Anwar Mansoor Khan said, according to The News International. "However, when asked by an ECP member if the contract between the PTI and its treasurer of the PTI US company was terminated for not following PTI policy on fund-raising, his reply was 'yes'," he said further. The counsel later read out the engagement letter between the Special Auditor PTI Ahsan and Ahsan and PTI, claiming that the task assigned to the Special Auditor was not audit but an assignment to conduct the review of PTI donations received from abroad. The petitioner, Akbar S Babar, has called on Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah to order an investigation with reference to the accounts of PTI's four Central Office employees. PTI counsel Anwar Mansoor Khan explained that the two US-based companies registered in the United States for fund collection and other purposes, including influencing the US policy, were registered with Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) as per the US law, The News International reported. He noted the PTI policy of collecting donations was according to the Political Parties Order 2002 and this was made clear to its agents in the US and the treasurer of the PTI US company. Earlier Imran Khan claimed that both the Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Umar Ata Bandial and President Arif Alvi were in possession of a letter handed over to Asad Majeed Khan, the former ambassador of Pakistan by Donald Lu, the US Assistant Secretary of State. Imran Khan claimed that both the Chief Justice and the President were in possession of a letter handed over to Asad Majeed Khan, the former ambassador of Pakistan by Donald Lu, the US Assistant Secretary of State, as reported by Ary News. He had earlier revealed that Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu had sent a threatening message to him through Pakistan's envoy Ambassador Asad Majeed. (ANI)
"China and the Philippines are neighbours facing each other across the sea and partners through thick and thin," Xi said, according to Xinhua News Agency on Thursday.

On May 10, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, son of former President Ferdinand Marcos won a landslide presidential election.

According to Xi, bilateral relations have been consolidated and enhanced, bringing benefits to the people of both countries and contributing to regional peace and stability.

He stressed that both China and the Philippines are at a critical stage of development and their relations face important opportunities and enjoy broad prospects.

US President Joe Biden also congratulated Marcos Jr in a phone call on Thursday, underscoring that he looks forward to working with the president-elect to continue strengthening ties with the Philippines. (ANI)]
This will be Prime Minister's fifth visit to Nepal since 2014.

According to a ministry statement, PM Modi will visit the sacred Mayadevi temple to offer prayers at Lumbini. He will also deliver an address at a Buddha Jayanti event organized by the Lumbini Development Trust under the aegis of the Government of Nepal.

Separately, during his visit on the occasion of Buddha Purnima, PM Modi will participate in the "Shilanyas" ceremony for the construction of a centre for Buddhist culture and heritage, in a plot belonging to the International Buddhist Confederation (IBC), New Delhi within the Lumbini Monastic Zone.

Both Prime Ministers will hold a bilateral meeting, as per the statement.

The visit continues the tradition of regular high-level exchanges between India and Nepal in furtherance of our Neighbourhood First policy. It underscores the shared civilizational heritage of the people of both countries. (ANI)
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was concerned about the economic imbalance between India and China. Jaishankar lauded PM Modi for creating a foreign policy which is focused on security. "Prime Minister was worried about the economic imbalance between India and China. PM Modi has really led a foreign policy which is much more security-focused, more development-focused while also creating a people-centric policy in foreign policy," Jaishankar said. He was speaking at the gathering where Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu released the book 'Modi@20 Dreams Meet Delivery'. The External Affairs Minister also said that the eight-year Modi government has brought the issue of terrorism at the centre of the global debate. "Eight-year Modi Sarkar has brought terrorism, fair-square at the centre of the global debate. He has concentrated on the development of border infrastructure, as the PM knows it is essential to meet our security challenges," Jaishankar noted. "So it could be Uri and Balakot; it could be Doklam and Ladakh, but you can see today this is not a country that shies away from its hard security challenges," he said. He also expressed his gratitude for being a contributor to the volume which marks 20 years of the Modi government and highlighted PM Modi's influence on foreign policy. Taking to Twitter, he said: "Privileged to contribute to 'Modi @20: Dreams Meet Delivery.' Write about the new concepts, aspirations, visions and strategies of PM @narendramodi in foreign policy." Jaishankar also lauded Modi's efforts to bring the capital and technology to the country from the world. "The interest he takes in trade... he actually addressed every one of our embassies in pursuit of a goal of reaching $ 400 billion exports. The efforts which he makes to woo funds so that their investment in India generates employment," he added. Jaishankar also recalled his first interaction with Modi 11 years ago when he was the country's ambassador in China and Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat visiting that country. "We used to host chief ministers in the embassy but this one was very different. It was very different because he arrived after midnight. He wanted his first briefing at 7 o'clock in the morning. He ran a 12-hour day with a half-an-hour lunch break, and he proceeded to cover three cities in four days," said Jaishankar. (ANI)
Seoul [South Korea], May 12 (ANI/Global Economic): President Yoon Seok-yeol started his first day in office on the 10th. Yoon met with foreign envoys from Japan, China, UAE, and Singapore at Yongsan Presidential Office. Other countries also invited Yoon to visit. In the afternoon, Yoon met Douglas Emhoff, the second gentleman of the U.S. who visited Korea as a representative of the U.S. delegation, at Yongsan Presidential Office. Emhoff is the first guest Yoon met at the presidential office. "The 70-year Korea-U.S. alliance is a key pillar of peace and prosperity in Northeast Asia." President Yoon said. "Korea achieved industrialization and democratization based on the Korea-U.S. alliance, and I believe that of the many alliances the U.S. has, the Korea-U.S. alliance is the most successful model case." Emhoff delivered a letter from Biden to Yoon, saying the note contained not only words of congratulation but also Biden's will to closely cooperate with Korea over the next five years. He also said, "As a representative of the Biden-Harris administration, I would like to say the U.S. expects to work closely and set up a common vision for the future of Korea-US relations." The U.S. delegation stressed that holding the Korea-U.S. summit at the earliest date since the inauguration shows the importance of Korea-US alliance, and asked to work closely to develop a comprehensive strategic alliance between the two countries. In response, President Yoon said, "I look forward to meeting with President Biden in Korea. I expect that it will be an opportunity to strengthen the Korea-U.S. alliance further." Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan said Chinese President Xi Jinping invited Yoon to visit China. Yoon met with delegates from China, including Wang at the presidential office. Yoon said, "I understand China's will to improve Korea-China relations." Wang said, "I will first convey President Xi's congratulation. President Xi Jinping told me specially to attend the inauguration ceremony on his behalf and to wish that your country develop, be peaceful and your people be comfortable under your leadership." He also delivered President Xi's invitation to President Yoon to visit China. Wang also made several suggestions. He said, "Korea and China should strengthen and maintain close strategic communication to develop dialogue and exchanges at each level." He asked to strengthen more practical cooperation and complete the FTA negotiations as soon as possible to work closely in third countries. In addition, he said, "China respects Korea's will to host the 9th Korea-China-Japan summit. We want to promote cooperation between the three countries and establish Korea-China-Japan FTA as soon as possible." Wang also said, China sincerely supports efforts by South and North Korea to improve their relations and seek reconciliation and cooperation, and aims to pursue denuclearization and lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula." Yoon also met with Japanese delegates. Yoon met Japanese Foreign Minister Hayashi Yoshimasa at the presidential office and asked for cooperation to develop bilateral relations. Hayashi also delivered a congratulation letter from Emperor Naruhito and Prime Minister Kishida. Yoon said, "I look forward to meeting Prime Minister Kishida soon." Foreign Minister Hayashi delivered Kishida's letter, saying, "I sincerely congratulate your inauguration." The letter is also a response of a letter delivered by a Korean delegation dispatched to Japan when Yoon was a president-elect. After the meeting with Hayashi, Yoon met with delegates from the UAE. Khaldoon Khalifa al-Mubarak, chairman of the Executive Affairs Authority of Abu Dhabi, said, "Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan is looking forward to visiting Korea and meeting with President Yoon. I am confident that Korea and the UAE will grow more and develop economic and trade power under the president leadership." In response, Yoon said, "Congratulations on the 50th anniversary of UAE last year. I'm excited that the exchanges between the two countries, which had slowed down due to COVID-19 over the past 2 years, are recovering again. I also look forward to meeting with the crown prince in the near future." Yoon also met with Singaporean delegates. Yoon met with Singapore President Halimah Jacob and said, "Singapore is Korea's largest investment destination and infrastructure construction partner among ASEAN countries. I ask for Korean companies' participation in Singapore's infrastructure projects and contribute to development." President Jacob said, "I agreed with the importance of cooperation between Korea and Singapore in infrastructure sector." (ANI/Global Economic)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Nepali counterpart Sher Bahadur Deuba will participate in prayer at the Mayadevi Temple and lay the foundation stone for the construction of a centre for Buddhist culture and heritage in Lumbini. According to Nepal's foreign ministry, both the Prime ministers will address the special ceremony to be organized to celebrate Buddha Jayanti at the Lumbini International Buddhist Meditation Center and Assembly Hall. Nepali Foreign Minister Narayan Khadka will call on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In Lumbini, the two Prime Ministers will hold bilateral talks and exchange views on Nepal-India cooperation and matters of mutual interests. As per the statement, Deuba will host a luncheon in honour of PM Modi and the visiting delegation. The upcoming visit of the Prime Minister of India will contribute to further strengthening the bilateral relations and the age-old socio-cultural bonds between the two countries. This will be the fifth visit of Narendra Modi to Nepal as the Prime Minister of India, the statement added. In October 2021, PM Modi inaugurated the Kushinagar International Airport in eastern Uttar Pradesh to facilitate foreign tourists and Buddhist pilgrims to reach the important site of the Mahaparinirvana Temple, where Lord Buddha attained nirvana by leaving behind his earthly body. The Kushinagar airport is an important milestone in the Indian government's 2016 plan to develop a "Buddhist Circuit". This world-class infrastructure will attract overseas tourists to India, the birthplace of Buddhism and home to its holiest pilgrimage sites. The ambitious tourism circuit, however, can achieve regional objectives as well. According to a paper by World Economic Forum's (WEF) Geostrategy Platform, despite the fact that it is host to a relatively small population of Buddhists, India can claim legitimacy in its promotion of Buddhist diplomacy for a number of reasons. First, the Buddhist faith originated in India, therefore granting it singular historical legitimacy. Second, India has numerous sites of importance to the Buddhist faith, such as Bodh Gaya, Sarnath, and Nalanda. Third, India has nurtured an image of being a protector of the persecuted through the presence of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan parliament-in-exile in Dharamshala. (ANI)
"Strongly condemn the assassination of respected Al-Jazeera journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, at the hands of Israeli forces," the country's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said in a tweet on Thursday.

The Al Jazeera journalist was tragically gunned down on Wednesday.

While Akleh was killed, another journalist Ali Al Samudi who was present with Akleh was also shot, reported CNN.

Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed that it had conducted an operation early Wednesday in Jenin refugee camp, a stronghold of armed Palestinian groups in the northern West Bank.

Israel Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, in a statement, said that according to information Tel Aviv has gathered so far, "it appears likely that armed Palestinians -- who were firing indiscriminately at the time -- were responsible for the unfortunate death of the journalist," according to media reports. (ANI)
Mahinda Rajapaksa, who recently tendered his resignation from the position of the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, has been barred from leaving the country by a local court, media reports said. The travel ban has also been imposed on Mahinda Rajapaksa's son and former Minister Namal Rajapaksa, Johnston Fernando, Pavithra Wanniarachchi, C. B. Rathnayake, Sanath Nishantha, and Sanjeewa Edirimanne, among others, News Wire reported citing sources. "I personally will extend my fullest cooperation to any investigation that is taking place with regard to the unfortunate events that took place on Monday. Neither my father nor myself have any intention to leave Sri Lanka and will continue to remain here," Namal Rajapaksa said in a tweet. The ban was imposed by the Fort Magistrate consequent to an application made on behalf of the Attorney General of Sri Lanka supported by the Bar Association of Sri Lanka (BASL) and aggrieved parties of the attack on anti-government protesters in Colombo on Monday, the report said. The application filed in the court related to the alleged attacks launched by the ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) loyalists on anti-government protesters near the Temple Trees and at the Galle Face Green in Colombo on Monday that led to widespread unrest across Sri Lanka. More than a hundred protestors were injured at the Galle Face protest site during violent clashes resulting in a nationwide curfew in the country with the country's tri forces ordered to shoot at sight all those who plunder public property or cause personal harm on Tuesday. Mahinda Rajapaksa and some of his family members were shifted to Trincomalee Naval Base, a day after he resigned following violent protests that led to a nationwide curfew. Sri Lanka is facing its worst economic crisis since independence with food and fuel shortages, soaring prices and power cuts affecting a large number of the citizens, resulting in massive protests over the government's handling of the situation. The recession is attributed to foreign exchange shortages caused by a fall in tourism during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as reckless economic policies, like the government's move last year to ban chemical fertilizers in a bid to make Sri Lanka's agriculture "100 per cent organic". Amid the political and economic crisis, the leader of the Opposition Sajith Premadasa who had earlier demanded the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa before assuming Prime Ministership, has written an open letter to the President that he is ready to assume the office of Prime Minister of Sri Lanka if Gotabaya Rajapaksa resigns within a stipulated time after Premadasa assuming office. (ANI)
Protests against former President of Maldives, Abdulla Yameen Abdul Gayoom, have intensified after he has been on the run, stealing billions of rufiyaa from the state coffers and depositing 450 million rufiyaa in his personal account. Protesters have drawn graffiti of Arrest Yameen along with his mugshot on the door of his residence, wall and Yameen's party office wall as well. Flyers have also been put all over the roads against the former Maldivian President. Reportedly, while the people of Maldives are reeling under abject poverty, Yameen and his family are enjoying a life of luxury, with Yameen building a million-dollar house at the place where he is residing currently. The Maldives shares the same fate as Sri Lanka and if justice does not prevail from the courts, there is a possibility that Yameen will rise to power once more. However, this time, there would be a hate and revenge agenda to arrest the rival politicians, resulting in political chaos, extremism and poverty. Further, the India-Maldives relations will be affected. Yameen might cancel all agreements made with India, including the Indian investments and trade, completely isolating the Maldives. Protesters have staged a series of demonstration in the Maldives, with several young protesters coming forward to protest against the former Maldivian President to safeguard their country and their future. Meanwhile, Yameen is running an anti-India "India-Out" campaign. The protest has rattled the opposition party Progressive Party of Maldives (PPM) and Yameen himself. Yameen and PPM have created so much hate against Indians that they feel harassed, threatened and insecure there. (ANI)
A memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed between the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) and UAE's DP World for the development of Skill India International Centre at Varanasi, in the presence of Union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and UAE minister Dr Ahmad Belhoul in New Delhi on Thursday. "NSDC has signed an MoU with Medhavi Skills University to promote skill-embedded degree/diploma courses among students who have completed either Class 10 or 12. The courses will enable them to earn a UGC recognized degree/diploma while pursuing practical work experience," NSDC said in a tweet. The agreement will provide opportunities to the Indian youth to skill them so that they can be trained to pursue overseas employment overseas in logistics, port operations, accompanied by other allied areas. According to Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, India serves as a valuable partner to the UAE accompanied by other countries across the world. Further, the Indian government is working towards fulfilling the aspirations of the youth of India. The government is preparing them for the future of work by creating a qualified, reliable and a strong workforce that will bring in economic success. As per the official statement, the India-UAE relations will blossom into another successful partnership that will in return deepen the relations between the two countries even more. The main goal of Skill India Mission is to bring economic prosperity and provide grand opportunities to the youth of the country. Further, Skill India International Centres are aiming at providing high-quality training to the Indian youth. Training facilities and providing skills as per the demand of the international employers in countries like UAE, Australia, and Canada will also be hosted. There would be a wide range of partnering organizations and recruiters from overseas to facilitate the supply of skilled and certified workforce in several other countries. Eventually, these partnering organizations will collaborate with NSDCI for creating demand from the overseas markets. Services like mobilisation, counselling, skill training, pre-departure orientation, and many others will also be provided by the centres. (ANI)
Sri Lanka's opposition leader Sajith Premadasa has agreed to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa's proposal to assume the office of Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, days after Mahinda Rajapaksa resigned after a series of violent protests. Sajith Premadasa has written to the Sri Lankan President saying he agrees to accept the President's invitation to form a new government, subject to Gotabaya Rajapaksa agreeing to leave office within a stipulated time. Earlier, Sajith had rejected the post of the prime minister of the crisis-ridden country. This comes a day after Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa said on Wednesday that he will appoint a new prime minister within this week. In a televised speech, he said that a person who has the trust of the majority of parliamentarians and the people will be selected as the prime minister. Rajapaksa said a new constitutional amendment that would empower the provisions of the 19th amendment will be brought in. The president added that the new prime minister and the cabinet could present a plan to stabilize the country. "Some people have asked for the abolition of the executive presidency. I will also make room for that after discussing (it) with all stakeholders. The country is facing a serious crisis and I urge your support to keep the state machinery going," said Rajapaksa. The president also said that action will be taken against those who carried out the violence that left nine dead and about 300 injured. On Monday, violent incidents were reported after pro-government groups clashed with anti-government protesters. A nationwide curfew was then imposed until Wednesday and the military was deployed to maintain law and order. (ANI)
Pakistan Supreme Court on Tuesday observed that "defection" is dangerous for the system as it will ultimately lead to the toppling of the elected government through unfair means and will also put 22 crore people of the country at stake. This statement was made by a five-member bench, headed by Chief Justice of Pakistan Umar Ata Bandial and comprising Justice Ijazul Ahsan, Justice Mazhar Alam Khan Miankhel, Justice Munib Akhtar and Justice Jamal Khan Mandokhel when it resumed the hearing of the presidential reference seeking the apex court's interpretation of Article 63-A of the Constitution, related to disqualification of lawmakers over defection, The News International reported. Babar Awan, counsel for the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), concluded his arguments where he stated that defection is a heinous crime and also said that the Supreme Court is the last hope to decide on Article 63-A of the Constitution. "The process of toppling a government by selling and purchasing lawmakers should be stopped," Justice Ahsan remarked. Justice Ahsan further observed that people are following certain cultures where after losing the election, they start their search for buying the loyalties of the lawmakers which will begin to topple a government. PTI's counsel Awan submitted that in the Islamic state only honest people are eligible to lead, adding that punishment for defecting from a party is a lifetime disqualification. Responding to the person's disqualification to be based on Article 63-A or under 63 (g) which is only for five years, Justice Miankhel said, "In my view, violation of Article 63(1)(g) is a heinous crime, as it relates to the ideology, sovereignty of the country and defamation of judiciary and armed forces." Justice Mandokhel observed that the punishment for defection has been mentioned in the Constitution and it is for the court and election commission to decide the fate of dissidents members. Justice Mandokhel questioned, "How the court could enhance punishment for defection?" He further stated that if the basis of defection is corruption, laws on corruption are there and a reference could be filed to the National Accountability Bureau (NAB). The judge also observed that after filing a case, the declaration will come from the court and a person could be disqualified for a lifetime, reported The News International. Chief Justice Umer Ata Bandial observed that the court interprets the Constitution under set principles but cannot re-write it. Over the punishment for the dissident members, PTI's counsel and Justice Mandokhel debated where Awan submitted that this is not justice that a person is de-seated and then after 15 days he gets elected again to the assembly. While Justice Mandokhel questioned if the court could enhance punishment for a single day. The judge said that Article 63-A provides a forum for action against dissident members and its punishment is de-seating. "Whether permission could be granted to 26 members for defecting from the party and if so then the majority party will become the minority, adding that 53-A has been inserted as a surgical strike in the 18th Constitutional Amendment for curing cancer," Awan said. The chief justice asked the PMLQ counsel to conclude his arguments by Wednesday within 15 minutes and convince the court as to how the vote of a dissident member cannot be counted and adjourned the further hearing. (ANI)
Expressing deep concern at the recent developments in Ukraine, India on Thursday again raised concerns about the deteriorating human rights situation in the country stemming from the Russian aggression and supported calls to ensure uninterrupted humanitarian access and safe passage for the people. "India's statement at the 34th Special Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) on the deteriorating human rights situation in Ukraine stemming from the Russian aggression," the Indian mission in Geneva said in a tweet. At the special session of the Human Rights Council (HRC), India's Permanent Representative in Geneva said this destabilization has burdened people around the world, especially in developing and least-developed countries. "We remain deeply concerned at the unfolding developments in Ukraine. We have constantly called for an immediate cessation of violence and an urgent end to hostilities," said ambassador Indra Mani Pandey. "Prime Minister Modi has reiterated this in his interactions with global leaders, including the leadership of the Russian Federation and Ukraine. India continues to believe that pursuing the path of dialogue and diplomacy is the only way out. We have strongly condemned killings of civilians in Bucha and supported the call for an independent investigation," he added. Noting that the situation has deteriorated since the Council last discussed this issue in March, the Indian envoy said it is evident that women and children have been disproportionately impacted and that they form the bulk of those who have moved to neighboring countries and been displaced internally in Ukraine. "We support all efforts to alleviate the suffering of the people of Ukraine," he said while adding that India believes that the immediate priority should be the evacuation of innocent civilians from areas witnessing intense fighting. Ambassador Pandey underlined that India has been sending humanitarian supplies, including medicines and other essential relief materials, to Ukraine and its neighbors. "We support calls to ensure free and uninterrupted humanitarian access and safe passage for the people. The impact of the situation is being felt beyond the region. Oil prices are skyrocketing. There is also a shortage of food grains and fertilizers in the world," he said. At the Human Rights Council, the Indian representative again reminded the council that New Delhi has ensured the safe return of about 22,500 Indians from Ukraine. "We have also assisted nationals from 18 other countries in that process. We are deeply appreciative of the facilitation rendered by the authorities of Ukraine and its neighboring countries in ensuring their safe return," he said. Ambassador Indra Mani Pandey further said India continues to emphasize that the contemporary global order is anchored on international law, UN Charter and respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty of all States. "We call for respect for and protection of human rights of people in Ukraine and reiterate our abiding commitment to global promotion and protection of human rights," he added. (ANI)
China's recent security pact with the Solomon Islands has left the western nations concerned just as it unravels its ambition to have a military foothold in the Pacific to challenge the American domination of the region. Beijing framed the pact as "normal exchange and cooperation between two sovereign and independent countries." However, Australia, the US, New Zealand, and Japan expressed shared concerns about the security framework and its serious risks to a free and open Indo-Pacific," Hongkong Post reported. Analysts suggest China took the Solomon Islands deal seriously after the activation of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD), the formation of AUKUS, and importantly, the US and the UK deciding to help Australia acquire nuclear submarines. Moreover, the communist nation has marine disputes with most of the nations that share seas, it is an ardent need for China to expand its maritime resources to protect its trade interests, for which it has been in talks with various countries in the Indian Ocean Region and the Pacific, including Indonesia, Singapore, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Seychelles, Pakistan, Kenya, Tanzania, Namibia, and Angola. There are said to be plans afoot to get a toe hold in the ports of these countries to monitor shipping in the Indian Ocean and keep transiting naval fleets of other countries. These ports are called the String of Pearls or what China calls the maritime Silk Route. According to the report, the Americans maintain scores of military bases in over 40 countries, and the French and the British have foreign overseas outposts in Asia, Africa, and Europe. In contrast, China has only one, naval base, Djibouti in the Horn of Africa. China observes this as a direct threat to its self-claimed control over the South China Sea region. The West realizes China has to come a long way before it can challenge it on the high seas and the fact remains that if China eventually has plans to establish its naval presence in the Solomon Islands - in the form of "the deployment of Chinese troops and visits by Chinese ships," it will give China a military presence not just near important shipping routes, but between America and its Pacific allies, Australia and New Zealand, HongKong Post reported. Australia, which has had a security agreement with Honiara since 2017, has been the most vocal critic of the agreement, but countries elsewhere in the Pacific, including the US and New Zealand, have also voiced concern. Despite repeated denial from China over plans to militarise the Solomon Islands, the security experts continue to remain wary of Beijing's intentions. (ANI)
Four Baloch youth have been abducted from Karachi and Quetta in the last twenty-four hours. One among them is a scholar and two others are students of Karachi University. All four victims Gazain Muslim Baloch, Irfan Rasheed Baloch, Qambar Baloch and Waheed Baloch were picked up unlawfully and their remains are unknown. On the other hand, expelled Baloch students from Bahawalpur university are protesting to be restored. They were expelled because they conducted study circles. Dera Bugti, the area which provides Gas to most of Pakistan, people of that area deprived of drinking water, they are forced to drink dirty water and because of that people are suffering from cholera and other diseases. People of Gwadar are protesting for a long time now against illegal trawling and to open and ease the border trade, instead of listening to the grievances of the people they have always ignored the protesters with fake promises. Families of the Baloch missing persons (Abducted by the Pakistani secret services) have been protesting for over a decade now and yet nothing has changed. Baloch students, no matter whether they are in Balochistan or any other part of Pakistan, are always living in the fear of being abducted, tortured and killed. They cannot roam freely or do normal activities as other students would. Most of the time Baloch people become part of the struggle not because of a choice but because of the deprivation, oppression and brutal policies of the deep state. Many people from Punjab and other parts of Pakistan, criticise Baloch tribal chiefs (Sardar, Nawabs) and blame them for the deprivation, undoubtedly the Sardars, most of them are involved and responsible for the deprivation because they are part of the establishment and they have been part of the establishment since day one. The common Baloch are not struggling to please the sardar or nawab; they are demanding their just rights. The Baloch should follow the path of the PTM, many liberals would argue. To them, I would like to say that they should respectfully study the Baloch movements history, from Shaheed Fida Ahmed Baloch to Ghulam Mohammed Baloch and from the first chairman of the BSO in the 1960s till today they have been part of the peaceful democratic struggle. Yes, our demands are different from PTM, because the issue is different. From the early two thousand till the end of the decade, Balochs were able to do huge gatherings in Mand, Turbat, Derabugti, Kahan, Karachi, Quetta and other parts of Balochistan. In response to those peaceful rallies, public gatherings, and protests, Pakistan started picking up leaders of the Pro-Independence Political parties and organisations. And those who were abducted not only kept away from the masses but were tortured to death, countless of them were killed and mutilated bodies were thrown in the streets to send a message to the remaining leadership and the members of the parties and organisations that if they continue to raise voices against state brutalities they will meet with the same fate. Even after all those brutalities and extrajudicial abductions and murders, Baloch political forces didn't give up on their struggle they continued to struggle peacefully and politically for the freedom of Balochistan, but then they were banned by the Pakistani judiciary. Then they had to change their strategies to survive and continue their struggle. Pakistani forces may have been successful to ban the Baloch political parties with fake charges but they weren't successful to end the Baloch resistance. The people's resistance is still ongoing and it is getting more powerful day by day. Why pick up the arms and why not struggle peacefully? Who has forced the Baloch to pick up the arms? Who has forcibly annexed Balochistan to Pakistan in 1948? Who broke the promises with the Baloch leadership time and again? Who killed the elderly Nawab Akbar Khan bugti? Who killed the peaceful political leader Ghulam Mohammad Lala Munir and Sher Mohammad Baloch? Who has been plundering Baloch resources? Who has conducted nuclear tests in a populous area of Chaghi? Balochs have picked up the arms not to occupy someone else's country, land, or resources but to defend their own. It is not a crime to defend your country, family and nation. If the Pakistani state believes Kashmir has a right to be free then why not Balochistan? If they believe Palestine has a right to be free then why not Balochistan? (ANI)
Underlining that Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) is the largest opposition party in the country, Sri Lanka's Opposition leader Sajith Premadasa on Thursday said that his party will "devise a strategy" if United National Party (UNI) leader Ranil Wickramasinghe is made the prime minister of the country. This comes as media reports said Ranil Wickramasinghe is tipped to be the next PM of the country, a few days after Mahinda Rajapaksa resigned following large-scale violence. In an exclusive interview with ANI, Sajith spoke about the letter he wrote to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa in which he expressed willingness to assume the prime minister's post under some demands put forward by his party. "I will not comment on court orders. But I will say the current government is responsible for the current crisis in the country," he said. On being asked if former Prime Minister Ranil Wickramasinghe will take up the post of Prime Minister, he said, "I will not speak on the speculation but if it will happen, we will launch our strategy soon. We are the largest opposition party in the country and we know the political system in the country." Sajith Premadasa has agreed to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa's proposal to assume the office of Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, days after Mahinda Rajapaksa resigned after a series of violent protests. Sajith Premadasa has written to the Sri Lankan President saying he agrees to accept the President's invitation to form a new government, subject to Gotabaya Rajapaksa agreeing to leave office within a stipulated time. "Well, we have forwarded the letter based on certain conditions based on the President's decision on the recommendation. We are ready to form the government. There is lots of speculation. I will not comment on hypothetical updates," he added. Over the Sri Lankan court's decision to bar Mahinda Rajapaksa and his allies from leaving the country, he said, "Mahindra Rajapaksa and his goons and thugs vandalised peaceful protests and violated the fundamental rights of the Sri Lanka citizens." "When they were attacked and encouraged by the authority of the state, that is totally uncalled for and I think a judicial process will take its course," he said. On Wednesday, Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa said that he will appoint a new prime minister within this week. In a televised speech, he said that a person who has the trust of the majority of parliamentarians and the people will be selected as the prime minister. Rajapaksa said a new constitutional amendment that would empower the provisions of the 19th amendment will be brought in. The president added that the new prime minister and the cabinet could present a plan to stabilize the country. (ANI)
Amid the ongoing political crisis in Sri Lanka, including large scale anti-government protests that turned violent on Monday, the country has found for itself new selfie points near burnt buses and cars submerged in ponds outside the Prime Minister's residence in Colombo. Outside the office of the Prime Minister near Temple Tree, which was not till long ago occupied by the now-former Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, people were seen walking on the streets with their families and cars submerged in the ponds becoming an attractive selfie point for them. People can also be seen taking selfies on the buses that were set to flames by the protesters. After three days of curfew in the Island nation, the defence forces of Sri Lanka on Tuesday were ordered by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to shoot at sight all those who plunder public property or cause personal harm. "I am not going to school for four days due to the ongoing protest in Colombo and today we are here with my family, I have taken many selfies here to show my friends," Asma Ismat a young girl told ANI. "People are taking a selfie here because they want to take it as a memory, many people could not join the protest due to some reason... taking a selfie is showing solidarity with the protesters," said Clifford, a private corporate company employee, who stopped his motorbike in the area to take selfies. The protests in Sri Lanka which were going on relatively peacefully for weeks turned violent on Monday after alleged attacks launched by the ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) loyalists on anti-government protesters near the Temple Trees and at the Galle Face Green in Colombo. Mahinda Rajapaksa and some of his family members were shifted to Trincomalee Naval Base, a day after he resigned following violent protests. Several buses were burnt and cars fell into ponds near the PM's residence in Colombo. Yet people continue to protest against Sri Lanka and demand President Gotabaya Rajapaksa's immediate resignation in connection with the worst economic and political crisis in the country. Sri Lanka is facing its worst economic crisis since independence with food and fuel shortages, soaring prices and power cuts affecting a large number of the citizens, resulting in massive protests over the government's handling of the situation. The recession is attributed to foreign exchange shortages caused by a fall in tourism during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as reckless economic policies, like the government's move last year to ban chemical fertilizers in a bid to make Sri Lanka's agriculture "100 per cent organic". Amid the political and economic crisis, the leader of the Opposition Sajith Premadasa who had earlier demanded the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa before assuming Prime Ministership, has written an open letter to the President that he is ready to assume the office of Prime Minister of Sri Lanka if Gotabaya Rajapaksa resigns within a stipulated time after Premadasa assuming office. However, speculations are rife in Colombo that President Gotabaya Rajapaksa will appoint United National Party (UNP) leader Ranil Wickremesinghe as the new Prime Minister later in the evening despite reservations aired by Sajith Premadasa's Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB). (ANI)
Washington [US], May 12 (ANI/Sputnik): The United States will commit an additional $200 million to the World Bank's fund to prevent pandemics during the virtual global covid summit that will take place Thursday morning, a senior US administration official told reporters. "We'll be providing additional funding for the global health security and pandemic preparedness fund at the World Bank," the official said during a conference call. "Building on our initial seed pledge of $250 million to establish that fund, we'll be increasing our pledge by an additional $200 million for a total of $450 million." The World Bank's fund will provide sustained financing for improving local, national and global capacity to prevent, detect and respond to pandemics and other disease or infectious disease threats, the US official said. The United States will co-host the virtual COVID-19 global summit alongside Belize, Germany, Indonesia, and Senegal, the official said. The summit will emphasize two points: the need for the global community to redouble efforts to control the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic and to ensure the world is prepared to respond to another pandemic. Moreover, the official said there are three issues the international community needs to prioritize, including the need to address new sub-variants of the novel coronavirus that continue to emerge and continuing to fund global vaccination efforts, preventing deaths among the most vulnerable, and preventing future variants and pandemics. The summit will be attended by representatives of world governments, multilateral organizations, philanthropies, businesses, and civil society leaders, the official said. A US official said the United States did ask Russia to join the United States and its partners to combat and prevent infectious diseases. The summit will call on countries to invest in the World Bank's new global pandemic preparedness and health security fund. The Biden administration will emphasize during the summit that there is an urgent need for the US Congress to approve President Joe Biden's requested $22.5 billion in emergency funding to continue its novel coronavirus response, the US official said. US President Joe Biden, US Vice President, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield, US Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra, USAID Administrator Samantha Power, US Deputy National Security Adviser Daleep Singh, and White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha will participate in the summit, the US official said. (ANI/Sputnik)
The key members of Pakistan Muslim League-N, led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, met on Wednesday with their party's supreme leader Nawaz Sharif in London and briefed him about the country's economy. The PML-N leaders said that the meeting revolved around 300 billion Pakistani rupees which is immediately required to stabilise the economy of the country, ARY News reported citing the sources privy to the details of the sitting. As per the PML-N sources, the country will receive two billion dollars from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on deferred payment while the conversation with the International Monetary Fund has been at an advanced level. "The party huddle also consulted over the cases against former Prime Minister Imran Khan and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) leadership," sources said. The party will consider the options with regard to Nawaz Sharif's return to Pakistan again after the budget session. The PML-N meeting was decided for the compulsory consultation with the former Finance Minister Ishaq Dar over the key economic decisions, according to ARY News citing sources. Meanwhile, in the meeting, the PML-N leaders opposed the election alliance with the Pakistan People's Party. The party leaders opined that a 'Charter of Democracy' can be inked with the PPP but an election alliance is unlikely, a party leader said. In the first session of the crucial PML-N huddle, it was decided that there will be no early elections in Islamabad and the primary focus of the present government should be on providing economic relief to the citizens and taking long-term economic decisions. The six-hour-long meeting was held among Pakistan Prime Minister, his brother and the party supremo Nawaz Sharif and other leaders, including Khwaja Asif, Miftah Ismail, Marriyum Aurangzeb, Atta Tarar, Rana Sanaullah, Ishaq Dar, Ayaz Sadiq, at an undisclosed location in London, The News International citing sources. Notably, PTI chairman has been continuously calling for early general elections in the country since he lost the no-confidence motion in the National Assembly. Sources said that Nawaz Sharif sought suggestions on various issues, including early elections from all the party leaders, and everyone agreed that the PML-N should implement the economic agenda for the remaining term and then announce the next elections in consultation with the coalition partners. Soon after the meeting, Information Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb said that the party leaders and Prime Minister presented a full report on Pakistan's social, economic and political situation to the supremo and briefed him on the agenda of the government and its planning. Nawaz Sharif is our Quaid. The meeting between Nawaz Sharif and Shehbaz Sharif was long overdue. We have inherited today's Pakistan in a written-off situation and we needed to review the whole situation to formulate a plan. This was a private delegation," she said, as per The News International. Shehbaz Sharif arrived in London to meet his brother Nawaz Sharif on Wednesday. Nawaz, who is convicted in a corruption case, has been living in London on the pretext of ill health since 2019. The former Pakistan PM sought extensions to prolong his stay in London on medical grounds. (ANI)
After appointing Trade Minister to the Pakistan embassy in New Delhi, the country's Ministry of Commerce (MoC) has ruled out the possibility of resumption of trade ties with India. An official announcement from Pakistan's commerce ministry said, "There is no change in Pakistan's policy on trade with India." According to an official source in the Prime Minister's Secretariat, the appointment of a trade officer in New Delhi is one of the routine postings. Qamar Zaman, a senior officer of the Commerce and Trade Group, has been appointed for the posting in New Delhi. He is one of the 15 officers appointed for posting in various countries. As per a source, the post of trade officer in the Pakistan embassy in New Delhi has been vacant for years, reported Dawn. The official in the Prime Minister's Secretariat said, "The selection process for the appointment of all these trade officers was started by the previous government." "We have not changed anything in the summary of the previous government," the source added. The current cycle for the selection of Trade and Investment Officers (TIOs), including New Delhi, was initiated in December 2021, and the final recommendations of the Interview Board were sent to the Prime Minister's Office on April 1 of the previous government. The present Shehbaz government has given final approval to the recommendations of the previous government for the selection of 15 TIOs. On August 19, 2019, Pakistan formally downgraded its trade relations with India to the level of Israel, with which Islamabad has no trade ties at all. After India's decision to revoke Article 370 of its constitution that granted Kashmir a special status, Pakistan has downgraded diplomatic relations with India and suspended bilateral trade with it, as per the media outlet. Pakistan has suspended trade relations with New Delhi. However, since the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, the government has only allowed the import of pharmaceutical products from India. The only related imports from India were pharmaceuticals. (ANI)
With China's economic growth projected slow in 2022, a payment survey by Coface, China's credit insurance group, shows that many companies have reported ultra-long payment delays (ULPDs) which means companies are facing overdue payments by more than six months. According to Coface, China's economic growth is projected to slow to 4.8 per cent in 2022 which is a decline from last year's 8.1 per cent. Firms in 9 out of 13 sectors reported an increase in payment delays, led by agri-food, which recorded the largest increase of 43 days, followed by wood, transport, and textile. As the Chinese economy continues to face a significant slowdown, the property sector has also seen a downturn. The commodity prices have gone up and the consumption recovery is subdued. Construction remained the sector with the highest share (56 pc) of respondents reporting ULPDs exceeding 10 pc of their annual turnover. According to Coface's experience, 80 pc of ULPDs are never paid. Bernard Aw, economist for the Asia Pacific at Coface said, "The recent outbreak of Omicron demands more Covid control in China and it will worsen the global supply chain disruptions. Coface expects corporate bond defaults and insolvencies in China to increase in 2022, especially among sectors that accumulated higher cash flow risks in 2021 due to the pandemic." Chinese companies are less optimistic about the country's economic prospects. Only 44 per cent of respondents are expecting sales to improve this year which is down from 65 per cent in 2020. Those respondents who are forecasting better cash flow also fell by about half from 50 per cent in 2020 to 27 per cent in 2021, according to Coface. Rising raw material prices, a weakening market demand, and the ongoing pandemic were key factors as reported by respondents. Global supply chains are also likely to remain tight. Both the Russia-Ukraine war and China's stern COVID policy are expected to deliver another hit to global supply chains. The lockdowns in Shenzhen and Shanghai in March and April have impacted the normal operations of landside logistical and warehouse services, despite port operations continuing to function. This has already intensified pressure on supply chains during March. China's Logistics Industry Prosperity Index also declined to the lowest since February 2020. The logistics sector is affected by the spread of the pandemic in multiple parts of the country, where differentiated pandemic management measures disrupted cross-regional distribution and the ability to maintain a smooth flow. (ANI)
In an act of retaliation for his reporting on alleged police malfeasance, Pakistan's Punjab police assaulted and detained journalist Jahangir Hayat, including his family, leaving the media practitioner with rib injuries. Hayat sustained injuries to his ribs and neck from the physical assault, leaving his daughter with a traumatizing experience, reported Khaama Press. Following the assault, Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) urged Pakistan authorities to conduct a "swift and impartial investigation" into the case. Hayat informed CPJ that the assault was a result of his reporting on crime and alleged police malfeasance. CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna said, "Punjab police officers' assault and detention of Jahangir Hayat, as well as their detention and harassment of his family, underscores the significant dangers that Pakistani journalists face for simply doing their jobs." "Authorities must conduct an immediate and impartial investigation into this incident, hold the perpetrators accountable, and demonstrate that such attacks will not continue with impunity," the Director added. Hayat told CPJ that he showed the officers his press card as a form of identification. He said that the officers recognized him and cursed at him with one office, whom Hayat identified as the station house officer of the Icchra Police Station, saying that he would "get rid of his journalism." Police officers in the Icchra area of Lahore, the capital of Punjab province, on May 1, assaulted and detained Hayat. Hayat is a chief reporter for the privately-owned daily newspaper Daily Business, according to a report by his outlet. It is also confirmed by the video of the incident shared on social media, and the journalist, who spoke with CPJ by phone. According to a media outlet report, local police detained Hayat's wife and a seven-year-old daughter, keeping them in custody for about 45 minutes, as per the media outlet. Hayat and his family were released without any charges after a group of journalists gathered at the station's gate, according to the report. After the assault on May 1, Hayat registered complaints against the officers on May 9 however, no action has been taken against them. (ANI)
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is set to travel to Germany and France from May 14-16 to attend the informal meeting of NATO Foreign Ministers in Berlin, Germany, and join the US-EU Trade and Technology Council meeting in Paris-Saclay, France. On May 14, the Secretary will travel to Berlin to attend an informal meeting of NATO Foreign Ministers where Allies and partners will discuss their unified response to "Russia's continuing brutal war against Ukraine". Blinken will also attend the upcoming Leaders' Summit in Madrid, where Allies will also adopt a new NATO Strategic Concept to guide the Alliance's work over the next decade, said a US State Department press release on Thursday (Local time). Secretary Blinken, on May 15, will travel to Paris, joined by United States Trade Representative Katherine Tai and Secretary of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, to attend the second ministerial meeting of the U.S.-E.U. Trade and Technology Council (TTC). As per the press release they will meet with EU leaders to discuss how democratic approaches to trade, technology, and innovation can serve as a force for greater prosperity. The US Secretary of State, accompanied by Under Secretary for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment Jose Fernandez, will also meet with business and civil society stakeholders to hear their views on the TTC's past and future work. (ANI)
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LONDON, May 12 (Reuters) - Britain launched a review into its labour market to find ways to ensure workers benefit from Brexit, "Levelling Up" policies and its net zero ambitions, seeking longer-term solutions to a cost-of-living crisis.

"Tackling the economic challenges of today means helping more people into high-wage, high-skilled jobs and this review will look at how we can equip people with the skills they need to thrive in the workplace no matter where they're from," Prime Minister Boris Johnson said.

The government said the review would be led by minister Matt Warman and look into how the government can create a highly-skilled workforce that would lead to better wages and help deal with the cost-of-living issue.

Johnson is under pressure to act quickly and bring about policies to ease the pressure on households, with a survey https://foodfoundation.org.uk/press-release/millions-adults-missing-meals-cost-living-crisis-bites reporting millions of Britons had to skip meals last month because they could not afford it.

Pay rises have lagged the spike in prices of food and other essentials. Inflation is set to peak at over 10% this year due in part to the war in Ukraine as well as supply chain problems caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and Brexit.

Data earlier on Thursday showing an unexpected contraction in Britain's economy in March did little to lift fears of a recession. (Reporting by Muvija M; editing by William James)
COVID-19 cases are rising across the United States, and the country is expected to be hit with a larger wave this fall and winter when the weather turns colder, with as many as 100 million Americans infected.

The virus has been defanged to a large degree compared to the early days of the pandemic, by vaccines and by new treatments like the highly effective Pfizer pills, called Paxlovid.

But that is only true if those tools are actually available. With the government running out of money for the COVID-19 response, the Biden administration warns that it will run out of those crucial supplies without more funding.

And that funding is stalled in Congress, with no clear path forward.

Republicans have long said they do not see an urgent need for the funding, and have insisted it be paid for with cuts to money from previous COVID-19 relief bills.

Both parties reached a deal in early April on a $10 billion package that would be paid for, a smaller amount than the White Houses $22.5 billion request. But even that amount is now stuck in immigration politics, with Republicans calling for a vote on reversing the lifting of a Trump-era border policy known as Title 42 as part of any deal, which Democrats have so far not agreed to do.

Here are five risks if the funding does not go forward.

Not enough vaccines for everyone in the fall

Pfizer and Moderna are working on new versions of their vaccines that are aimed at working better against the omicron variant, which is currently circulating and spawning new subvariants. Those vaccines are expected to be ready by the fall, at a time when immunity will have waned for many people since their last shots.

But the Biden administration says it will not have enough money to buy those updated vaccines for all Americans if it does not get new funding.

Never thought Id see the day when the United States does not have enough funding for vaccines during a pandemic, tweeted Topher Spiro, associate director for health at the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Story continues

If Congress does not provide new funding, a senior administration official said last week, the administration would have to take all money out of testing, new treatments and vaccine outreach, and even then would only maybe have enough money to buy updated vaccines only for the elderly.

Orders have to be placed months ahead of time, since other countries are also getting in line to buy the updated vaccines and additional treatments.

We have more tools than weve ever had, said Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, and a former White House COVID-19 adviser. All of these things are time limited in the sense that theyre not unlimited in quantity.

If new orders are not placed ahead of time, he said, well need to get in line.

Running out of treatments

Perhaps the biggest upgrade to the U.S. virus response since vaccines became available was the authorization of the Pfizer treatment pills known as Paxlovid in December 2021.

If started within five days of symptoms beginning, the pills cut the risk of hospitalization or death by about 90 percent.

Supplies of the pills are expected to run out in October or November, the senior administration official said, meaning that if people got the virus over the holidays they would not have the treatment as an option.

Unable to buy new treatments

There are also new potential breakthroughs in COVID-19 treatments that the U.S. would not have enough money to make happen without new funding.

The Japanese pharmaceutical company Shionogi is working on its own potentially promising treatment pills, for example.

The senior administration official said the treatment could have even higher effectiveness than Paxlovid, but the U.S. cannot enter into contracts for it because it does not have enough money. By the fall, other countries will already have reserved all of the immediately available doses, the official added.

Shortages of tests

During the surge over the winter, people across the country scoured store shelves for rapid tests that quickly sold out, or waited in long lines at testing sites.

Such shortages could repeat next winter if there is not money to maintain testing supplies. Government funding can help maintain testing capacity and avoid layoffs at testing companies when demand is lower, so it will take less time to ramp production back up again when a surge hits.

The senior administration official said the goal is to go into a fall wave with a supply of about 1 billion tests, and that the country would instead have 400-500 million without more funding, a supply expected to be depleted before Christmas.

Inglesby, of Johns Hopkins, said it is hard to predict exactly when a surge will hit and how large it will be. We have seen in the past couple of years major surges arise with very little warning time, he said.

Cutting back global aid

Experts have long said that vaccinating the world is key to fighting the pandemic, not only for humanitarian reasons, but to help prevent new, dangerous variants from forming that would threaten the United States as well.

Only 14 percent of people in low-income countries have at least one dose of vaccine, according to a tracker from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The White Houses funding request includes $5 billion for global efforts to fight the virus, including vaccinations. Even that amount is less than many advocates have called for.

While supply of the vaccine doses themselves has improved, the funding can help get shots into arms, through building up proper storage capacity, recruiting staff and other tasks.

Samantha Power, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, told Congress in written testimony this week that the agency has already spent 95 percent of the funds for the global virus response and expects to exhaust virtually all of the rest by July.

Without additional resources, many of our programs will begin wrapping up activities and closing down this fall, she said.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
STORY: The body of Abu Akleh was driven in a motorcade from a hospital in the Palestinian hub city of Ramallah towards Abbas's compound. Hundreds of mourners lined on both sides of the road, some threw flowers as the vehicle carrying the coffin passed by.

Abbas said that Israeli authorities were "fully responsible" for the killing of a veteran Al Jazeera reporter, and called for an international investigation.

Israel, which has voiced regret at Abu Akleh's death, says it is looking into the incident and that the fatal shot might have been fired by a Palestinian gunman. It has proposed a joint investigation with the Palestinians, asking them to provide the bullet for examination.
Time

It has been said that, given how massively Ukrainian troops were believed be outmatched early in Russias invasion, not losing the war is itself a form of victory for Ukraine. The difference between expectations and the surprising resilience of Ukraines military makes it easy to misinterpret the current situation in Ukraines favor. Ukraine is in far worse shape than commonly believed and needs, and will continue to need, a staggering amount of aid and support to actually win.
San Marino delegate Achille Lauro (EBU/Corinne Cumming)

Italian artist Achille Lauro is representing San Marino at Eurovision this year with his song Stripper.

The flamboyant singer/rapper from Verona is one of the most popular contestants this year, and is already well-established in his home country.

We caught up with him ahead of tonights semi-final, where hell be competing for a spot in the grand final on Saturday 14 May.

Ciao Achille, can you tell me a bit about how you first got into music? Who were your earliest influences?

I started making music when I was 15 years old. At that time, I was living in the suburbs of Rome, in a group home of young artists without a family. At the beginning, music represented for me a way to express myself and put my feelings in writing. I didnt see it as a job, but as my way to understand the reality. Today I still have the same passion, but I have developed a wiser vision.

How has the Italian rap scene changed in the past 10 years?

I think that in Italy many young artists have started bringing their own identity without following the trends of the moment. They are achieving great results. And this is very nice.

Who are your go-to collaborators, and other Italian rappers you admire?

Im not a big consumer of rap music anymore. There are a lot of good rappers here too, but I prefer to listen to the great Italian songwriters of the past.

Can you tell me what inspired the lyrics and sound for your song Stripper?

Absolute freedom. Self-determination, beyond labels and taboos

Your 2019 and 2022 entries for Sanremo both experienced controversy due to the lyrics for each track  have you experienced anything similar for Stripper?

No, fortunately. I believe that a wider audience, out of national thinking, favored a lighter interpretation of the lyrics. The same should have happened for other songs, but luckily there has always been someone who has understood. And I am grateful for that.

This infographic, produced by Statista for The Independent, shows the top performers in Eurovision contests (Statista/The Independent)

Can you tell me about your work with Alessandro Michele of Gucci and the creative vision you came up with for your Eurovision performance?

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It is always a pleasure to share my creativity with Alessandro Michele. He is a genius, he is extremely eclectic. He follows my madness, and it has worked very well so far.

In the past few years with Maneskin and Mahmood especially, Eurovision seems to have helped radically change outside attitudes (especially in the UK and America) towards Italian music. How do you feel about this?

I think that peoples perception of Eurovision is changing for the better and that the Italian audience is favoring this trend. Italian artists certainly have a lot to say, and I think that what should be considered a great result is the variety and the search for and enhancement of diversity!

What is your view on last years winners, Maneskin, and on this years Italy contestants Mahmood and Blanco?

I think they are all very good artists. I used to root for them and I still do. I dont live Eurovision as a competition. We all bring something different to the market and to the audience. Everyone follows their own path.

Youve competed in Sanremo three times now but ended up representing San Marino  how do you feel about that?

I competed three times in Sanremo and once I took part as a super-host all five nights, bringing performances that described an aesthetic journey through the genres of music I am closest to. I think I have been the only one who did that. At Sanremo I tried to unhinge the traditional logic of that format. After that I was invited to San Marino. I decided to accept and I won. Im putting on a good show. Thats what interests me, and I thank those who allowed me to do it.
The AFL-CIO on Thursday urged President Biden to forgive student loans, putting additional pressure on the White House to cancel at least some of the nations $1.6 trillion in student loan debt.

The Biden administrations decision to continue to pause student debt has made a tremendous difference in the lives of so many borrowers, but these borrowers still live with the uncertainty of not knowing when they will need to drastically alter their finances in order to begin repaying their loans, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in a statement.

Now is the time to cancel, not collect, student debt.

The statement comes after President Biden told reporters earlier last month that his administration is planning additional debt forgiveness. The Biden administration has canceled $17 billion in student debt, roughly 1 percent of the nations total, and recently extended a freeze on student loan payments until Aug. 31.

The White House is considering expunging at least $10,000 in student debt per borrower, a move that would fulfill a key Biden campaign promise.

Biden, who pledged to be the most pro-union president in history, has close ties with the AFL-CIO, the nations largest labor federation that represents 12.5 million union workers.

Organized labor was built on the foundation of creating a pathway to the middle class for everyone, but skyrocketing student loan debt has become an insurmountable obstacle to achieving this goal, Shuler said.

The labor federation joins a host of influential organizations in calling for student debt cancellation. The NAACP last month urged Biden to cancel at least $50,000 in student debt, making the case that $10,000 is not enough.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
Andy Dick is in trouble with the law again.

The actor and comedian, 56, was arrested on suspicion of felony sexual battery Wednesday morning, the Orange County Sheriff's Department told EW.

Sgt. Scott Steinle said Dick was taken into custody following a call to a Trabuco Canyon campground in O'Neill Regional Park around 9 a.m. Authorities responded to the call after a man alleged that he was sexually assaulted.

The caller was taken to the hospital for an assault examination. Dick was booked into the Orange County Jail, and his bail has been set at $25,000. A representative for Dick did not immediately respond to EW's request for comment.

Andy Dick

Greg Doherty/Getty Andy Dick

This isn't the first time Dick has has had a run-in with the law. In 2008 he was arrested in Murrieta, Calif., on drug and battery charges, and in 2010 he was arrested in West Virginia on two felony counts of sexual abuse. In 2018 Dick was charged with sexual battery and simple battery after a woman alleged that he squeezed her butt while passing her on the sidewalk in Los Angeles.

Dick has also been accused of sexual misconduct in professional settings. In 2017 he was fired from two films, Raising Buchanan and Vampire Dad, after reports surfaced that he allegedly groped and made inappropriate sexual advancements and lewd remarks to various individuals during production.

Dick was also removed from the set of Jimmy Kimmel Live in 2007 by the host himself after repeatedly touching another guest.

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FILE - In this Saturday, May 23, 2020 image from Louisiana State Police body camera video, Trooper Dakota DeMoss approaches motorist Antonio Harris lying on the ground on the side of a road after a high speed chase in Franklin Parish, Louisiana (AP)

Three Louisiana State troopers have been charged over the brutal beating of a Black motorist after a high-speed car chase.

Prosecutors say that the men dragged Antonio Harris to his feet by his braids and bragged to each other in text messages that the whooping they dished out would give him nightmares for a long time.

Jacob Brown, Dakota DeMoss and George Kam Harper, who are all white, were caught on body cam video kneeing, slapping and punching Mr Harris as they detained him.

But the video showed that Mr Harris had already surrendered and was facedown with his arms and legs spread during the alleged attack.

All three were arrested on felony charges of malfeasance in office in February 2021, but prosecutors in Franklin Parish decided to drop that charge.

Instead they now face misdemeanor simple battery charges over the 2020 arrest, which carries up to six months in prison and a $1,000 fine.

The state prosecution comes as a federal grand jury has been hearing testimony about the incident as the Department of Justice investigates if excessive force was used.

FILE - This combination of photos provided by the Ouachita Correctional Center and Franklin Parish Sheriffs Office shows, from left, former Louisiana State Police Troopers Jacob Brown, Dakota DeMoss and George Kam Harper. (AP)

The DOJ could decide to bring a civil rights case over the incident.

An internal investigation in the case found that the troopers filed wholly untrue reports over the arrest, claiming that Mr Harris had fought them and tried to flee.

They kept saying Stop resisting but I was never resisting, Mr Harris told investigators. As soon as they got to me, one of them kneed me in my face. One of them was squeezing my eyes.

Investigators found that the troopers had shared 14 messages in which they discussed the alleged beating using lol and haha responses.

He gonna be sore tomorrow for sure, Trooper Brown wrote in one of the texts, according to the Associated Press.

Warms my heart knowing we could educate that young man.

The incident took place after Mr Brown was stopped for a minor traffic incident on Interstate 20, when the troopers found that he had a suspended driving licence.

He then fled the scene in his Hyundai Sonata and led the troopers on a 29-mile chase that hit speeds of up to 150mph before it was ended with a spike strip to puncture the cars tyres.
Reuters

BERLIN (Reuters) -Turkey's foreign minister said on Sunday that Sweden and Finland must stop supporting terrorist groups in their countries, provide clear security guarantees and lift export bans on Turkey as they seek membership in NATO. Speaking after a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Berlin, Mevlut Cavusoglu said he met his Swedish and Finnish counterparts and all were seeking to address Turkey's concerns. He added that Turkey was not threatening anybody or seeking leverage but speaking out especially about Sweden's support for the PKK Kurdish militant group, deemed a terrorist group by Turkey, the European Union and the United States.
The Army on Thursday identified the soldier who died earlier this week after being mauled by a bear during training at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska.

Staff Sgt. Seth Michael Plant, 30, of Saint Augustine, Fla., died from injuries sustained from a bear attack Tuesday, the base said in a statement.

Plant, an infantryman assigned to 3rd Battalion, 509th Parachute Infantry Regiment, was part of a small group training in an area west of the Anchorage Regional Landfill, according to the base.

He was transported to the bases hospital after the attack where he was declared dead.

Another soldier who suffered minor injuries in the attack was treated and released.

Staff Sgt. Plant was an integral part of our organization. He was a positive and dedicated leader who brought joy and energy to the paratroopers who served with him, regiment Commander Lt. Col. David Nelson said in a statement.

His loss is deeply felt within our organization and we offer our sincere condolences to friends and family.

The New York Times reported earlier that Plant, an Afghanistan War veteran, and two other soldiers came across a brown bear den with cubs while scouting a wooded area on the base for land navigation training.

The mother bear crawled outside the den, knocked down one soldier and attacked Plant before running away.

From the soldiers perspective, there was a flash of brown mass, Capt. Derek DeGraaf, head of the Northern Detachment of the Alaska Wildlife Troopers, told the outlet. They were attacked and didnt even see it coming.

The mauling is currently under investigation and Alaska Wildlife Troopers were looking for the bear as of Wednesday.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
Asheville police arrested two people who they say are connected to a series of break-ins and larceny incidents around the city.

ASHEVILLE - Asheville police have arrested and charged a man and woman who broke into and stole from "several" local businesses over the last few months, according to a press release.

Police arrested Dawnina Jump, 24, of Cherokee and Jacob Bigwitch, 26, of Asheville following a "larceny incident" at a business on Patton Avenue May 7, according to the release. Arrest reports say Jump was arrested May 7, with Bigwitch arrested May 8.

Jump fled a crime scene "just prior" to police arriving, and led them on a chase, but they were able to locate her, according to the release. She later admitted who her partner was,police said.

Asheville Police Department: Mother, grandmother charged with murder in death of 3-year-old at Asheville hotel

"During an in-custody interview at the jail, (Jump) told officers she had given them a fake ID, and she also told them of other breaking-and-entering crimes she and another person had committed," the release said. "As officers further investigated, they determined the real identity of the female suspect and the identity of her accomplice."

An arrest warrant says that Bigwitch had a crowbar for prying, a hammer, pliers, a drill battery connected to a Sawzall and drill bits to drill out locks as burglary tools. The warrants say the two broke into at least two local businessesa smoke shop and a Japanese restaurant.

The two stole cigarettes from the smoke shop to resell them, according to arrest warrants. They stole alcohol, a safe, cash register, money, a laptop, cell phone and audio/video recordings, all valued around $3,059, from a local Japanese restaurant, according to the release.

Crime news: Buncombe County man arrested in shooting of relative

Other charges are possible. Police say the arrests have led to the closure of "several" business larceny cases.

Jump's attorney, Michael Macht, declined to comment. Bigwitch's attorney, public defender Brooks Kamszik, was out of the office and could not immediately be reached.

Ryan Oehrli is the breaking news and social justice reporter for the Asheville Citizen Times. Email coehrli@citizentimes.com or call/text 252-944-6816 for tips.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: APD arrests, charges 2 suspected of larceny at Asheville businesses
(Photo: d3sign via Getty Images)

(Photo: d3sign via Getty Images)

Despite living in a city infamous for its lack of public transportation, I had excitedly accepted the challenge of getting around Los Angeles via bus, metro, or on foot. That all changed when the pandemic started.

Initially, my anxiety was due to COVID-19, but then it was the trauma of watching Asian Americans like me get beat up or killed while walking on the street or on public transit in my city and cities like mine. In March 2021, seven people, mostly Asian women, were killed in the Atlanta-area mass shootings. Then, a few months ago, I saw myself in the grisly murders of Christina Lee and Michelle Go in New York City.

Now, with anti-Asian hate crimes increasing by 339% last year, Im terrified of being outside and away from the safety of my home or car. As soon as I step outside, Im hyperalert and hypervigilant about everything and everyone around me.

When anti-Asian hate crimes began to rise as the pandemic progressed, I was grateful for the mask mandate, as I thought it was helping me blend in by covering my face. I continued my routine of taking long walks in Los Angeles, thinking that this mask would provide me with anonymity and safety. However, very early on, when I was wearing a hat, sunglasses and a mask  my entire face covered  I heard two men snicker behind me and say, Look at that Asian girl. At that moment I realized that I will always stick out, regardless of how much I try to hide myself.

Today I avoid being in heavily populated Asian spaces. The 2.7-square-mile Koreatown used to be my ultimate safe haven and a place where I could exist as a Korean and an American. Its usually where I can find all the comforts and familiarities of home from across the Pacific Ocean. But these days I try to minimize my time there because I cant help but feel like we are a massive collective target.

Because of this fear, I never leave home without pepper spray, with the safety unlocked and in an accessible place in my pocket. When another body approaches, I instinctively put my hand around it in case I need to protect myself. Its exhausting and requires more mental exertion and bodily awareness. I cant stop looking at everyone like theyre a potential threat.

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Ive created a safety plan in my head  always keep an eye on the exit, dont look people in the eye, have my pepper spray ready, and get ready to run. I avoid the neighbors, strangers and passersby I used to smile at and instead try to disappear even more than I already did as an Asian American  the invisible minority.

And when our cries are met with silence from our allies, the message is loud and clear, once again: We dont matter. After Atlanta, a common recurring theme that I heard echoed among my Asian American therapy clients was that they didnt feel acknowledged or seen by the non-Asian colleagues, peers and friends in their lives. We didnt get the are you OK messages or the check-ins from non-Asian friends and co-workers. We continued to feel unseen and unheard.

And so, in order to cope, we turned to each other. Asian American mental health care providers in California saw an increase in demand for services in the wake of surging anti-Asian hate incidents, including the killings in Atlanta. Crisis Text Line reported at the start of the pandemic that the number of Asian Americans seeking support more than doubled.

I facilitated virtual support groups for Asian Americans after the events in Atlanta, and the familiar feelings of fear, loneliness, isolation and anger united us from all over the country.

I met Asian Americans from all sorts of cultures and backgrounds: Korean, Chinese, Indian, Filipino, trans-racial adoptees, third-culture kids, and those without access to an Asian community. Due to many years of my internalized racism and succumbing to the model minority myth, I am the token Asian of my friend group, which has resulted in a lack of real connection to an Asian community. Therefore, I cherished my time in these support groups. I also needed support and understanding.

We cried together and processed our fears together. We talked about our vision and goals for how we want to move forward as Asian Americans, individually and collectively. We validated and offered support to each other, which made us feel safe and connected, regulating our nervous systems and allowing us access to deeper parts of the brain used for thinking and processing.

We decided that we need to be louder and prouder. We need to mobilize and use our voices even when we feel stuck and frozen. We need to educate, speak up and spread awareness. We need to see ourselves and each other if we want others to see us.

So lately Ive been trying something new. Ive been actively seeking and cultivating relationships with other Asian Americans as a way to feel like a part of a community  which is a basic need, as humans are biologically wired to want to connect and belong.

With them, I dont have to explain the filial piety and sense of guilt and duty I have toward my parents. I can sing songs in Korean at karaoke. We can order all the spicy food and name all the dishes correctly.

With them, I feel safe and accepted, even as the world keeps spinning and the anti-Asian violence continues.

Do you have a compelling personal story youd like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what were looking for here and send us a pitch.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

Related...
Co-organizers Bert Perkins and Francine Julius Edwards of both the Democratic Women's Club of Marion County and the Greater Marion NOW, organized The Four Corner Rally for abortion rights Saturday morning, October 2. "We believe in Pro-Choice, my body my choice," Edwards said. The group also met opposition by Pro-Life supporters who chanted "Baby killers, baby killers."

Following the leaked U.S. Supreme Court draft opinion suggesting Roe v. Wade will be overturned, organizers around the country are planning to gather nationwide to support abortion access and reproductive freedom.

In Ocala, NOW (National Organization for Women) of Greater Marion County and the Democratic Womens Club of Marion County have organized a local Bans Off Our Bodies protest in which at least 300 people are expected to gather.

Coinciding with protests across the country organized by the Womens March and Planned Parenthood, local organizers plan to rally in Ocala from 1 to 3 p.m. Saturday.

'Keep your bans off our bodies': Abortion-rights groups set to rally Saturday  from DC to Los Angeles

Roe v. Wade: Supreme Court verifies leaked opinion in abortion case but says decision not final

'We can never go back': Leaked opinion mobilizes Black women around abortion rights

Those who wish to attend will receive the event location after registering on the online Mobilize platform.

We are adamant about being peaceful and keeping it calm, local Democratic Womens Club President Francine Julius Edwards said. "We want to be very clear that (its) our body, our choice. We are very concerned about the leaked brief.

'Democracy is certainly at stake'

The overturning of Roe v. Wade, originally decided in 1973, would eliminate the constitutional right to an abortion, and up to 26 states are expected to quickly ban abortion if the courts decision is confirmed.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law last month banning most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Taking effect July 1, the new law includes exceptions if a persons health is threatened by the pregnancy or the fetus has a fatal abnormality.

It does not make exceptions for pregnancies from rape, incest or human trafficking.

"We believe in pro-choice, my body my choice," Francine Julius Edwards said during a rally in October.

If the Supreme Court overturns legalized abortion as a result of the Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization decision regarding Mississippi's law, state governments will control abortion laws, and Edwards fears an outright abortion ban could be passed in Florida.

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The Supreme Court, the legislative bodies are supposed to work for we the people, and it's turned into a big power game, Edwards said. We just have to make those voices heard. Democracy is certainly at stake.

Polling shows majority support legal abortion in most or all cases

A recent Pew Research Center survey found 19% of U.S. adults believe abortion should be legal in all cases. Another 42% believe it should be legal in most cases or legal in all cases other than a few exceptions. Only 8% said it should be illegal in all cases without exceptions. Another 29% said it should be illegal in most cases or illegal in all cases with a few exceptions.

"I'm formally here because women are being treated like animals. There are men sitting behind desks making the decisions that are wrong," Karen Reed, a pro-choice supporter, said during an Oct. 2 rally.

Gallup polling shows 32% of Americans believe abortion should be legal under any circumstances, 48% believe it should be legal under certain circumstances and 19% believe it should be illegal in all circumstances.

Edwards is ecstatic that so many young people are mobilizing, noting that Roe v. Wade has been intact their entire lives.

The fact that that is now in jeopardy and body autonomy is in jeopardy, we're really hoping to wake up and pass the baton because this affects everyone, she said. Were hoping to really wake up our community. Were hoping to really have them understand womens empowerment. Women's issues are everyone's issues.

Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of people are expected to turn out at more than two hundred events in all 50 states. Major events are planned in New York City, Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, DC.

We're really concerned, and women are really concerned and our male allies, and that's the beautiful thing about this Saturday, Edwards said. We have women and male allies, and we have transgender (people). We have gay, straight, Christian, Muslim (people). Everyone will be represented this Saturday.

Contact reporter Danielle Johnson at djohnson@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Ocala Star-Banner: Peaceful rally for abortion rights planned in Ocala, Florida
Photos surfaced on Russian social networks showing the consequences of a purported Ukrainian attack on a village

Russia's war against Ukraine - the main events of May 12



Gladkov accused the Armed Forces of Ukraine of carrying out the attack, and said that one person had been dead and six wounded.

Read also: Two strong explosions reported in Russias Belgorod Oblast bordering Ukraine

He added that the village would be evacuated. Local social media groups also published photographs allegedly showing the results of the presumed attack.

Read also: Ammo depot near Russias Belgorod is on fire
TAMPA  Tampa Mayor Jane Castor and Police Chief Mary OConnor will be among local elected officials who will meet with President Joe Biden at the White House on Friday to discuss how cities have benefited from increased federal spending during the pandemic.

The hourlong meeting will also include top-ranking Biden administration officials including Susan Rice, director of the Domestic Policy Council, and Gene Sperling, who is the administration point person on the American Rescue Plan, according to Lauren Rozyla, a Castor spokesperson.

According to White House officials, the meeting will focus on the American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion relief plan that congressional Democrats passed in 2021. Specifically, Castor and OConnor will be among those discussing how the plan increased spending on community policing and public safety programs.

Tampa received about $80 million in federal relief funds, including nearly $20 million that the city has pegged to renovate fire stations, buy police and fire vehicles, pay for body-worn cameras and cover other costs, according to a city breakdown provided to the Tampa Bay Times in March.

Rozyla confirmed that Castor and OConnor are making the trip Thursday afternoon, but declined further comment.
By Jeff Mason, Susan Heavey and Trevor Hunnicutt

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Joe Biden met on Thursday with executives from infant formula manufacturers and retailers including Target, Walmart and Nestle's Gerber, pressing them to do everything possible to get families access amid a nationwide shortage.

The White House also outlined measures the administration is taking to address the issue and said it was considering invoking the Defense Production Act.

The U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) will announce new steps in the coming days regarding importing certain infant formula products from abroad, the White House said, and Biden has asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to probe reports of predatory conduct such as price gouging.

Formula shortages because of a factory being taken offline have been compounded by supply chain snags and historic inflation, leaving about 40% of baby formula products out of stock nationwide, according to data firm Datasembly.

Families depend on formula. Less than half of babies born in the United States were exclusively breastfed through their first three months, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2020 Breastfeeding Report Card showed.

During his meeting with the executives, Biden discussed efforts to increase production and urged companies to "do more to help families purchase infant formula," White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said.

"What we are seeing, which is an enormous problem, is hoarding," Psaki said. "That is also something we're focused on."

Biden later said on Twitter, "I'm announcing new actions and working with the private sector to get infant formula into stores as quickly as possible without compromising safety."

Tight supplies of formula dwindled further after Abbott Laboratories in February recalled Similac and other baby formula made at its Sturgis, Michigan, plant following consumer complaints of bacterial contamination. The FDA later cited five bacterial infections reported in babies given the company's formula, including two deaths.

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Abbott, the biggest U.S. supplier of milk formula, said tests showed one bacteria strain found in the facility was not linked to any known infant illnesses, although it was updating its cleaning and related protocols.

Other major formula producers include Reckitt Benckiser and Nestle SA.

Several retailers, including Target Corp, CVS Health Corp and Walgreens Boots Alliance, have limited formula purchases until supplies improve to prevent hoarding. New York Attorney General Letitia James also has warned against price gouging.

U.S. House lawmakers plan a hearing on the matter on May 25. [L2N2X322B]

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters lawmakers want to ensure it does not happen again, "but right now the baby's crying, the baby's hungry and we need to address the situation right now."

Last month, House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Rosa DeLauro sought a Department of Health and Human Services probe, citing a whistleblower report from October 2021.

On Thursday, House Republicans criticized the Biden administration, saying a plan should have been in place to address the shortages sooner.

Abbott said it could restart production at Sturgis within two weeks of FDA approval, adding it is prioritizing production at its Columbus, Ohio, facility and air-shipping formula from its Ireland plant.

The company announced the recall on Feb. 17.

On Feb. 28, the FDA warned of Cronobacter sakazakii and Salmonella Newport infections in babies fed with formula produced at the Michigan plant. The FDA finished inspecting that facility on March 18, and the company responded on April 8, Abbott said.

(Reporting by Jeff Mason, Susan Heavey and Trevor Hunnicutt in Washington, Jessica DiNapoli in New York and Leroy Leo in Bengaluru; Editing by Bill Berkrot, David Gregorio and Christian Schmollinger)
A pedestrian looks at "The Collective," a sculpture by Paul Bobrowitz, while walking along College Avenue Monday, Dec. 9, 2019, in Appleton. The artwork drew both praise and criticism while it was installed near the College Avenue bridge. The piece is part of Sculpture Valley's ACREofART project.

APPLETON - The big head sculpture that had a home on East College Avenue, near the College Avenue bridge, for more than two years is gone. What impact it'll have on the future of public art in Appleton is uncertain.

"The Collective," made by Wisconsin sculptor Paul Bobrowitz, takes the form of a giant head composed of faces made from salvaged propane tanks.

Its stay was marked by strong opinions from its neighbors, which The Post-Crescent collected after the statue was installed for Sculpture Valley's 2019-2021 ACREofART public art exhibition.

Some residents complained about the sculpture's appearance, saying it didn't fit in with the historic neighborhood homes. But "The Collective" had its supporters, as well, who praised its location and its "thought-provoking" nature.

MORE: Appleton extends stay of big head sculpture on East College Avenue for 5 months

'The Collective' soon to leave for its permanent home

While the sculpture has been removed from its previous home, it's being stored while it awaits a trip to its sponsor's property in Bozeman, Montana.

ACREofART exhibits are privately sponsored, and "The Collective" was sponsored by the Moore family in memory of Linda Moore.

Alex Schultz, Sculpture Valley's executive director, said Linda Moore was a local artist passionate about outsider art.

"It was sort of a tribute when we saw that piece and knew that her husband was interested in honoring her in some way," Schultz said. "It turned into a pleasant surprise for the family because we didn't think we'd ever have a piece of outsider art that would fit."

Schultz said he's considering a public send-off for "The Collective" before it leaves Wisconsin, saying that he'll post more details on Facebook in a week or two.

"The last Thursday of the month, it heads out to Bozeman, so we may just run it up and down College Avenue a couple of times to give it a fond farewell."

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A new season for Sculpture Valley?

A new Sculpture Valley piece is at the Stone Arch Tied House in Little Chute.

Right now, Schultz said he has no plans to replace "The Collective" with a new sculpture on the East College Avenue spot. He said that the process of placing artwork on public land was "rather arduous" for a nonprofit.

Schultz, also an Appleton Common Council member, added, "Part of it is letting the conversation cool a little bit."

Sculpture Valley has sponsored and placed this year's sculptures in the Fox Cities according to what Schultz described as the organization's typical approach.

"Frequently, most of the sponsors want to host their works on their private property," he said.

However, Schultz said he was open to bringing work onto Appleton's public land again, including East College Avenue, if that's what nearby residents want.

He pointed out upcoming opportunities to revisit that possibility.

"Approximately half of the pieces that are here now, they've been extended from the previous season," he said. "So there will be a lot of them going home next year or late this year.

"We'll see if we can fill some of those holes in. It might be the spaces in Appleton on public property. We'll just have to see how it goes."

MORE: Here's where to find 'Flip Flop,' 'Kitty & Bunny,' and other public art in Little Chute and Kaukauna

Contact Rebecca Loroff at rloroff@gannett.com or 920-907-7801.

This article originally appeared on Appleton Post-Crescent: Big head sculpture leaving Appleton, but Sculpture Valley plans more
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday ended a weeklong quarantine after testing positive for Covid-19 and will travel to Europe this weekend, the State Department announced.

The top US diplomat will leave Saturday for Berlin where he will take part in a meeting of NATO foreign ministers who will discuss ways to support Ukraine as it counters a Russian invasion.

He will continue Sunday to Paris for a meeting of the US-EU Trade and Technology Council, an initiative by the Western powers to set standards in the face of China's rapid advances.

Blinken on May 4 tested positive for Covid-19, days after joining more than 2,000 guests at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in a packed Washington ballroom.

He has since worked remotely but was forced to cancel other travel, with State Department number three Victoria Nuland replacing him at a meeting in Morocco on defeating the Islamic State group and at a meeting of Group of Seven foreign ministers in northern Germany.

Blinken was set Thursday to resume public appearances with a meeting with Thai Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai on the sidelines of a US-ASEAN Summit in Washington.

Blinken last year scrapped a stop in Thailand after a Covid outbreak within his traveling party.

Also on Thursday, Blinken will participate -- virtually -- in a summit convened by President Joe Biden on fighting Covid.

sct/bfm
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is traveling to Europe this week to meet with the foreign ministers of NATO about the alliances response to Russias aggression against Ukraine.

Blinken will travel to Berlin on May 14 for an informal meeting with the foreign ministers of NATO states, State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a statement on Thursday. The secretary will also attend the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council in Paris on May 15.

The NATO meeting with foreign ministers comes ahead of a leaders-level meeting to take place in Madrid in June.

Allies and partners will discuss their unified response to Russias continuing brutal war against Ukraine, Price said in the statement. Allies will also adopt a new NATO Strategic Concept to guide the Alliances work over the next decade.

The NATO gathering is taking place as Finland has expressed a commitment to apply to join the alliance, and Sweden is likely to follow. The Russian foreign ministry reportedly said on Thursday it viewed Finlands move to join the alliance as hostile and a threat to Moscows security.

The meeting also comes as the Biden administration is working to commit nearly $40 billion in new assistance for Ukraine, most of that military aid, as Kyivs forces have begun to launch counteroffensives to push Russian forces out of the south and east of the country.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
KARACHI, Pakistan (AP)  A roadside bombing targeted a van carrying Pakistani security forces in the southern port city of Karachi on Thursday, killing a passerby and wounding 13 people, police said.

According to Sajjad Khan, a local police chief, the attack took place in the citys Saddar neighborhood. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the bombing but Karachi has witnessed several militant attacks in recent years.

Rescuers took the victims to a hospital, where some of the wounded were said to be in critical condition. Khan said the explosion was so powerful that it damaged several cars in the busy area, known for its restaurants. The police chief provided no further details and only said two members of the security forces were among the wounded.

Local TV footage showed police officers and bomb experts examining vehicles damaged in the bombing. Karachi is the capital of southern Sindh province.

Last month, a woman suicide bomber dressed in a female burqa head-to-toe covering killed three Chinese teachers and their Pakistani driver when she detonated her explosives inside a university campus in Karachi.

A separatist group known as the Baluchistan Liberation Army from the neighboring Baluchistan province claimed that attack.
Border Patrol agents, in a single large-scale enforcement action last week, seized $18 million worth of methamphetamine being smuggled into Laredo, Texas, from Mexico in a semi-trailer truck.

Announcing the massive seizure on Wednesday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said one of its officers at the World Trade Bridge, which connects Mexico to the United States over the Rio Grande, on Friday had referred a 2013 International trailer hauling a shipment of stainless-steel scrap for a secondary inspection. The trailer was driven by a 33-year-old male Mexican citizen arriving from Mexico.

HONDURAN EX-PRESIDENT PLEADS NOT GUILTY TO DRUG, ARMS CHARGES; CLAIMS HE'S TREATED LIKE PRISONER OF WAR

Following a canine and non-intrusive imaging system examination, CBP officers discovered a total of 912.82 pounds of alleged methamphetamine within the trailer, according to the press release.

The narcotics have an estimated street value of $18,253,206. CBP seized the narcotics and the tractor.

A security guard monitors trucks traveling across the World Trade International Bridge in Laredo, Texas, June 10, 2019. Callaghan O'Hare/Bloomberg via Getty Images

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement-Homeland Security Investigations (ICE-HSI) special agents took over the case and arrested the driver. Its unclear from CBPs statement what charges he might face.

CBP, the largest federal law enforcement agency of the Department of Homeland Security, released a photo showing 24 buckets containing the nearly 913 pounds of the seized methamphetamine.

Trucks travel across the World Trade International Bridge in Laredo, Texas, on June 10, 2019. Callaghan O'Hare/Bloomberg via Getty Images

"Officers assigned to CBP cargo facilities ensure effective border security by preventing and countering the flow of suspected narcotics entering the country," Port Director Alberto Flores, Laredo Port of Entry, said in a statement. "Large-scale seizures, such as this one, provide an excellent example of border security management and how it helps prevent illicit contraband from reaching our communities."
By Daniel Trotta

COSTA MESA, Calif. (Reuters) -California regulators on Thursday rejected a $1.4 billion desalination plant on environmental grounds, dealing a setback to Governor Gavin Newsom, who had supported the project as a partial solution for the state's sustained drought.

The California Coastal Commission voted 11-0 to reject the proposal by Poseidon Water, controlled by the infrastructure arm of Canada's Brookfield Asset Management, to build the plant on a low-lying coastal site at Huntington Beach, near the town of Costa Mesa, about 30 miles (50 km) south of Los Angeles.

The plant was designed to convert Pacific Ocean water into 50 million gallons (189.3 million liters) of drinking water a day.

That is enough for 400,000 people, but the plant would use a process that staff experts at the commission said would devastate marine life and expose the plant to future risk of sea level rise while producing expensive water too costly for low-income consumers.

Environmentalists who have opposed the project for years burst into celebration after the vote in a Costa Mesa hotel conference room.

Representatives of Poseidon issued a statement expressing disappointment but made no comment on whether they would attempt to revive a project in which they have invested more than 20 years and $100 million.

Any new proposal for the site would face difficult odds or have to undergo significant redesign, so thorough was the staff report in detailing its flaws.

"It was a defining day for the for the Coastal Commission," said Susan Jordan, a plant opponent and director of the California Coastal Protection Network. "When you have a project like this that is so damaging over the next half century, you really can't allow that to move forward."

The commission's staff experts said the facility would destroy marine life in about 100 billion gallons of seawater per year, and the company's ability to mitigate that damage with wildlife habitat restoration fell far short of state requirements.

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"California continues to face a punishing drought, with no end in sight," Poseidon said in a statement after the vote. "We firmly believe that this desalination project would have created a sustainable, drought-tolerant source of water."

Environmentalists have long said desalination harms ocean life, costs too much money and energy, and the plant would soon be made obsolete by water recycling.

Though the vote was unanimous, with one member abstaining, commissioners said they would be willing to support other desalination projects.

"We have a dire need for more water, but we have to do it the right way," said commissioner Effie Turnbull-Sanders, one of Newsom's four political appointees on the commission.

Days after the staff recommendation for denial was published last month, Newsom spoke publicly in favor of the project, telling the editorial board of the Bay Area News Group: "We need more tools in the damn tool kit" to produce water for a thirsty state.

Newsom, a Democrat who is up for re-election this year with the drought on many Californians' minds, disappointed environmental supporters by backing the project.

Commission Chair Donne Brownsey, also a Newsom appointee, said she did not expect to governor to dismiss the commissioners who defied him.

"He's going to be disappointed. But I'm hoping he saw that we wanted to open the door to a path to success in the future for desalination," Brownsey said.

The commission has approved 11 other desalination plants, including another one that Poseidon has operated down the coast in Carlsbad since 2015.

The Carlsbad desalination plant, the largest in the United States, turns ocean water to drinking water in 90 minutes, but it was built on more elevated geography and approved before statewide desalination regulations came into effect.

(Reporting by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Chris Reese, Robert Birsel)
By Nichola Saminather

TORONTO (Reuters) - For banks in Canada, one of the world's largest oil producers, it's not easy being green.

In the past two years, Canadian banks have increased the amount of sustainability-linked financing (SLF) they extend to oil and gas clients. SLF refers to financing whose cost changes when certain environmental, social and governance (ESG) requirements are met at the company level but does not require the funds themselves to be used for climate-friendly purposes.

This has led to accusations of "greenwashing," with some environmental groups and investors claiming banks are using SLF merely to pretend to lower their carbon footprint rather than take meaningful steps in that direction.

If the use of financing instruments that do not require a reduction in overall carbon emissions keeps growing, it could delay banks' readiness for Canada's transition to a low-carbon economy, leading to higher risk and increased capital requirements to offset these.

The central bank and financial regulator have already warned that a lack of preparedness by the banks could expose them and investors to "sudden and large losses."

"This is a dangerous path to go down," said Angus Wong, campaign strategist at nonprofit environmental group SumOfUs, which represents thousands of Canadian bank investors. "These are just loans and bonds and adding one word like 'sustainability' and adding it to sustainable financing numbers ... really smacks of greenwashing."

The issue is especially pertinent in Canada, where SLF accounts for a bigger proportion of all sustainable financing than globally, as it offers a green option for the countrys extractive industries that typically cannot use more specific tools like so-called green bonds.

Sustainable financing is mostly made up of two kinds of products: SLF, and use-of-proceeds tools like green bonds, which must be utilized for environmentally friendly activities.

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But the flexibility of the former means the financing terms can even allow for increases to emissions, which many critics say enables heavy emitters to lay a false veneer of sustainability over business as usual.

Many of the banks - including Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto-Dominion Bank and Bank of Montreal - have said that an orderly transition to a net-zero economy could take years and that the oil and gas industry needs ongoing support to meet continued demand as energy alternatives such as wind and solar are developed.

Net-zero emissions refers to the goal of emitting no greenhouse gases through human activities or offsetting them through processes or technologies that capture them before they are released into the atmosphere.

With increased focus on the transition to net-zero emissions, the use globally of sustainability-linked instruments (SLIs) more than quadrupled in 2021, according to Refinitiv data. In Canada's nascent market, their use grew nearly 20 times from 2020.

Sustainability-linked bonds (SLBs) have made up 11.2% of all sustainable bonds in Canada since the start of 2021, versus 9.8% globally, according to Refinitiv data. Energy companies issued a third of this.

Canadian companies' nearly $31 billion of sustainability-linked loans (SLLs) accounted for 90% of all sustainable loans in the same period, compared with 85% globally. Traditional energy companies made up 10% of these in Canada, from none in 2020.

Although Canadian banks do not currently face charges for funding high emitters, authorities have said climate disclosures will be required from 2024 and have hinted at future capital requirements.

'GOLD RUSH MENTALITY'

Canada is the world's fourth-biggest oil producer and sixth-largest natural gas producer, with the industry accounting for about 5% of gross domestic product.

Canadian banks, among the biggest Banking on Climate Chaosfinanciers of fossil fuels globally, are treading a fine line between their net-zero commitments and their pledges to continue supporting oil and gas clients.

The banks are incentivized to boost sustainable financing numbers because the government's C$9.1 billion emissions reduction plan and the growing popularity of green financing have created a "gold rush" mentality, said Matt Price, director of corporate engagement for Investors for Paris Compliance (IPC).

Recent SLB issuances by pipeline operator Enbridge Inc and oil producer Tamarack Valley Energy Ltd have shone a spotlight on the issue.

Their SLBs had two features that often draw criticism: a focus on cuts to emissions per unit of production, called intensity targets, rather than total emissions, and the absence of reduction targets for the biggest source of emissions, indirect ones from the company's value chain, called Scope 3 emissions.

Tamarack's issuance, as well as a previous SLL facility, funded acquisitions that would increase its oil production.

The use of intensity targets over absolute ones is due to continued growth in end-demand in some sectors like power, said Lindsay Patrick, head of ESG at RBC Capital Markets.

Scope 3 emissions are omitted from many companies' reduction goals because of a lack of data accuracy, methodology differences and little control over end demand, she said.

As regulatory focus grows, "we will all just become much more fluent in the language of greenhouse gas emissions," which will lead to better alignment of what ESG-focused investors want and what companies provide, Patrick said.

Canada's other major banks either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.

If an oil company commits only to reducing the emissions intensity of its operations, which would exclude Scope 3 emissions, "we would not consider that to be a credible sustainability-linked instrument," said Kevin Ranney, senior vice president of corporate solutions at Sustainalytics.

"A credible SLB needs to include at least one (requirement) that points to the transition of the company's business model," he said.

Intensity-based targets are a "valid and recognized" way to reduce emissions, allowing the company to focus first on improving its assets' efficiency, an Enbridge spokesperson said, adding its 2050 target is focused on absolute emissions.

There is no current guidance on what constitutes Scope 3 emissions for the midstream sector, he said.

Tamarack did not respond to a request for comment.

To be sure, most bank investors do not oppose the provision of sustainable financing to traditional energy companies. A shareholder proposal brought by IPC at Royal Bank's April shareholder meeting calling for an end to the practice received only 9% of votes in favor.

"Canada has an oil and gas industry that needs significant injection of capital in order to reduce its emissions," said Jamie Bonham, NEI Investments' director of corporate engagement.

Nevertheless, "I don't think it should all be ... included in the same (sustainable financing) bucket," he said. "The current blurring of the lines ... is what is leading to claims of greenwashing."

($1 = 1.3019 Canadian dollars)

(Reporting by Nichola Saminather in Toronto; Additional reporting by Nia Williams in Calgary and Simon Jessop in London; Editing by Denny Thomas and Matthew Lewis)
By Allison Lampert

MONTREAL (Reuters) - Canadian flight attendants are demanding pay for time on the ground as well as in-flight, as they have recently endured delays, sometimes for hours, at the country's busiest airport due to staff shortages, health checks and rising traffic.

The Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) said its members are increasingly working for free, as some arriving planes are held up at the gate at Toronto's Pearson International Airport, in some cases up to three hours.

U.S. flight attendants in contract talks with carriers like American Airlines also are seeking to be paid during boarding.

Delta Air Lines has said it will start paying flight attendants when boarding passengers starting June 2.

Demands by cabin crew could put additional cost pressures on airlines recovering from the pandemic-induced slump in traffic.

While Air Canada's flight attendants are not in contract talks, the Toronto delays are reducing rest times, said Wesley Lesosky, president of CUPE's airline division.

Lesosky said flight attendants are now worried about the busy summer travel season if delays persist. As we go into the summer, our concern is cabin temperature and just people becoming unruly."

CUPE represents about 15,000 flight attendants at nine airlines including Air Canada.

Last week, 7,000 travelers waited longer than 90 minutes on airplanes, Toronto business leaders, including the region's board of trade, said on Thursday.

"Almost 50% of all international arriving passengers, or 100,000 people, were delayed last week, a 20% increase in the past two weeks," the groups said in a statement.

Flight attendants' get their full pay in the air which generally stops 15 minutes after arrival at the gate, Lesosky said.

Air Canada, the country's largest carrier, was not immediately available for comment.

The office of Canada's Minister of Transport has said it is working with the industry to reduce delays.

(Reporting By Allison Lampert in Montreal. Additional reporting by Rajesh Kumar Singh in Chicago.)
South China Morning Post

China's C919 aircraft completed its first pre-delivery test flight in Shanghai, taking its maker a step closer towards offering a substitute to Boeing's 737 and Airbus' A320 single-aisle commercial aircraft in the global aviation market. The Commercial Aircraft Corp of China (Comac) completed a three-hour test flight at the Pudong International Airport in Shanghai on Saturday morning, according to a statement on its website. "This marked a successful test flight of the first C919 plane ahead of
As part of her college training, Autumn Burgess spent a lot of time in metro area hospitals. First as a nurse, then as a patient.

All I could think about in the ER was, not that I was getting a pacemaker. Not that my husband wasnt here. It was like, Ive worked so hard in nursing school. I cant not graduate, Burgess said.

Burgess was in her last semester at Georgia Gwinnett College and in the middle of her clinical training, when she suddenly had to deal with a heart condition.

Getting that diploma when she planned was now in doubt. But her professors came to the rescue.

We get to hear their stories. We get to find out what happened when theyre not in class, Dr. Laura Madden said.

Madden said its one of the many great things about a smaller college  its personal.

She and her colleagues made arrangements for Burgess to complete her clinicals, because they care.

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As nurses, thats part of our DNA, Madden said.

Burgess did not need the pacemaker. Shes doing just fine now  she completed her training and this week, she graduated.

Shes very grateful to those who helped her.

It made me feel so good and so cared for. I dont feel like you find that everywhere. All the compassion and caring we have here at GGC  Im just overwhelmed by the love, Burgess said.

Burgess will now join her husband, who is in the Marine Corps.

She hopes to join Rady Childrens Hospital in San Diego.

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(Bloomberg) -- Chinas top political advisory body plans to host a forum next week with some of the nations largest private-sector firms including Baidu Inc., an event that will be closely scrutinized by investors debating whether Beijing will dial back its clampdown on the technology industry.

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The Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference aims to host the symposium next week with attendees including officials from government agencies such as the Cyberspace Administration of China and business executives including Baidu founder Robin Li, people familiar with the matter said. Vice Premier Liu He, President Xi Jinpings top economic aide, may also attend, said the people, asking not to be identified discussing a private matter.

While the conference is focused on the broader theme of developing Chinas digital economy, investors will likely watch for signs of whether Beijing intends to wind down its year-long crackdown on the tech sector. Xis administration is enlisting the industry -- the biggest growth driver of the past decade -- to revitalize an economy struggling with rolling urban lockdowns, supply chain bottlenecks and evaporating consumption.

Shares in sector heavyweights Baidu, Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. pared earlier losses on Thursday morning in Hong Kong.

Sentiment toward the industry has swung wildly in recent weeks, with companies from Tencent to Jack Mas Alibaba surging April 29 after Chinas top leaders issued a sweeping set of pledges to boost economic stimulus. Later that day, the South China Morning Post and Wall Street Journal reported the government was organizing a symposium -- originally slated for earlier this month -- to signal a let-up in the bruising pace of Beijings campaign. That rally proved short-lived, in part because of a lack of concrete measures to prop up a sector thats shed more than $1 trillion of value. On Wednesday, tech companies led a rally in Chinas equity market.

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In April, the CPPCC convened a videoconference meeting with firms in Hangzhou, the eastern Chinese city at the heart of the countrys private sector expansion, including surveillance camera maker Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co. That was part of a series of preparations for a national conference slated for May, the agencys official newspaper said back then.

Its unclear whether next weeks forum will trigger policy changes or easing, the people said. The timing could also shift, given the difficulty of organizing a major conference while cities from Beijing to Shanghai grapple with shifting Covid lockdowns. Delegates will attend virtually as well as in person, depending on role and location. Representatives for Baidu didnt respond to requests for comment, while calls to the CPPCCs news office werent returned.

The CPPCC, whose more than 2,000 members include the nations most prominent politicians and entrepreneurs such as Li, exists primarily to debate, advise on and support policy and legislation, or as a sounding board to the nations leaders. Its members meet at least once a year and consistently echo the nations top priorities, from population growth in 2021 to systemic financial risks in 2018.

Beijing has now made stability its core priority in a year plagued by global geopolitical and economic uncertainty -- particularly as its top officials prepare to effect a key leadership transition toward the end of 2022. China already made a promise in March to ease its regulatory onslaught, as part of efforts to stabilize battered financial markets and stimulate the economy.

Thats fueled expectations that the crackdown -- which started with the dramatic cancellation of Ant Group Co.s record IPO before snowballing into an assault on every corner of Chinas technosphere -- has run its course, or is at least switching to a more sustainable pace.

That would be welcome news after a turbulent 2021, when Beijing curbed gaming time for minors, outlawed profits in swaths of the online education sector, forced companies from Alibaba and Meituan to Didi Global Inc. to alter core business practices and otherwise cast the future of a once-free-wheeling industry in disarray.

But investors remain wary as they weigh a mixed bag of developments, including a restart of gaming approvals and a campaign to rein in the little-understood algorithms that internet companies employ to serve content and gather data. The Hang Seng Tech Index rallied as much as 37% this year since a mid-March low, before giving back most of those gains in past weeks.

(Updates with share action from the fourth paragraph)

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CANBERRA, Australia (AP)  A Chinese ambassador says Chinas engagement with South Pacific island countries poses no threat to Australia, responding to fears that Beijing will establish a military foothold in the Solomon Islands.

Chinas envoy to Australia, Xiao Qian, attempted to reassure his host nation in a newspaper opinion piece published Thursday as reports emerged of a planned trip by a high-level Chinese delegation to the Solomons following the completion of a bilateral security pact.

The cooperation between China and the South Pacific island countries is conducive to peoples well-being on both sides, and regional prosperity and stability, and will by no means threaten Australias security, Xiao wrote in The Australian Financial Review.

Chinas rise should not be seen as a threat to Australia, Xiao wrote. He made no specific mention of the Solomon Islands or the security pact.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, whose conservative government is seeking a fourth three-year term in elections next week, said he disagreed with the ambassador that Chinese government interference in the Pacific is of no consequence.

I think its of great consequence, Morrison told reporters.

I support the Australian national interests, not the Chinese governments view of what national interests are, whether they be in Australia or across the Pacific, and thats why Ive always taken a very strong stance upon this, Morrison added.

Australia and its allies including the United States fear the China-Solomons pact will result in a Chinese naval base being established less than 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) off the northeast Australian coast.

Solomons Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare has maintained that there will be no Chinese military base in his country and China has denied seeking a military foothold in the islands.

Asked if Chinas rise should be seen as a threat to Australia, opposition leader Anthony Albanese told reporters: China has changed its posture. They are more aggressive in the region.

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We need to, in the words of the (President Joe) Biden administration, have competition without catastrophe, Albanese said.

Solomons opposition lawmaker and chair of the parliamentary foreign relations committee, Peter Kenilorea, told The Associated Press he had heard Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi would visit the capital, Honiara, on the weekend that Australians vote on Saturday, May 21.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry said it had no information to release about the trip, and Sogavares office did not immediately respond on Thursday to a request for comment on Wangs visit.

Some senior Australian government lawmakers have suggested Beijing had timed the announcement of the Solomons pact during an election campaign to undermine the ruling coalitions chances of retaining power in the poll.

Its obviously provocative, particularly during the course of an election campaign, that China has made that decision and I think we again need to be eyes wide open about what is happening in our region, Defense Minister Peter Dutton said Wednesday.

The center-left Labor Party opposition has described the China-Solomons pact as Australias worst foreign policy blunder in the Pacific since World War II.

Government lawmakers argue Beijing wants a change of government because Labor lawmakers would be less likely to stand up to Chinese coercion.

In a speech on Wednesday, Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce accused China of following the same strategic course as Japan had done when it began building an airfield on the Solomons during World War II.

The airfield would have enabled Japanese bombers to threaten shipping between the Unites States and Australia. The airfield was the target of the Battle of Guadalcanal, the first major U.S. land offensive against Japanese forces.

It is quite obvious through their desire to have military bases that they are starting a process of encircling Australia and that there is a wish, at the very least, to intimidate, or worse, to supplicate Australia, Joyce said.

Australia has a security pact with the Solomon Islands and sent a peacekeeping police force to Honiara in November after civil unrest.
Pennsylvania Republican US Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz speaks at a rally in support of his campaign sponsored by former President Donald Trump at the Westmoreland County Fairgrounds on May 6, 2022 in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

An employee of a company fined after hiring undocumented immigrants also donated to Dr. Oz's US senate campaign, FEC records show.

Oz is listed as a shareholder in the company and donated to its PAC, according to a federal filing.

He's running for US Senate in Pennsylvania on a conservative platform focused on gun rights, abortions, and immigration.

An employee of a tree-trimming company that paid the largest fine ever levied by ICE after knowingly employing undocumented immigrants donated to the Pennsylvania GOP Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz's campaign, FEC records show.

In September 2017, Asplundh Tree Experts pleaded guilty to higher level management being "willfully blind" to lower level employees knowingly hiring and rehiring undocumented immigrants following a six-year investigation by ICE's Homeland Security Investigations division.

The family-owned company was sentenced to pay an $80 million fine and an additional $15 million in civil claims  the largest civil settlement agreement ever levied by ICE.

On Wednesday, the celebrity surgeon accepted a pair of $5,800 donations from Scott Asplundh, who formerly served as CEO and chairman of the tree-trimming company, as well as Hallie Asplundh.

According to a federal filing from the FEC, Oz is listed as a shareholder in Asplundh and, in 2020, donated nearly $23,000 to the Asplundh Tree Expert Political Action Committee, which aggregates contributions from the company's employees and their families to donate to candidates running for federal office.

The Pennsylvania senatorial candidate is running on a conservative platform focused on gun rights, abortions, and immigration. He has faced mounting pressure from GOP rivals over his Turkish dual citizenship, which Oz said he would renounce if elected to the Senate.

"My dual citizenship has become a distraction in this campaign," Oz said in a statement. "I maintained it to care for my ailing mother, but after several weeks of discussions with my family, I'm committing that before I am sworn in as the next U.S. Senator for Pennsylvania I will only be a U.S. citizen."

The TV doctor's controversial senatorial bid still has yet to gain traction among conservative voters  namely Trump supporters, who booed Oz at a rally in Pennsylvania last week. Former President Donald Trump endorsed Oz in early April as the television personality faces a high-profile primary later this month.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Millions of workers are losing billions of dollars in stolen wages.

Its called wage theft, and it happens when companies force employees to work off the clock or deny overtime pay.

A recent study from the National Employment Law Project shows more than 4.6 million workers have experienced wage theft in the last year alone. Many of them are women and minorities who are making less than $13 an hour.

People feel voiceless and powerless because they dont have a backup from anybody, Francisco Esparza, Council representative for the United Brotherhood of Carpenters.

Esparza said thats how it felt starting his career in construction about ten years ago. He said he was working in what he calls an underground economy where he was paid in cash or checks without a paystub.

Some of these subcontractors, I worked for weeks and never got paid, he said.

In 2019, Esparza was part of this class action lawsuit against a contractor for unpaid wages, unpaid overtime, and workplace fraud. Esparza and hundreds of other workers won that lawsuit, but most workers arent as lucky.

This is not only bad for workers, but it puts honest businesses that abide by the law at a competitive disadvantage, said Rep. Alma Adams (D - North Carolina).

Democrats want to hold more companies accountable through the Wage Theft Prevention and Wage Recovery Act. It would increase federal penalties for violations, require paystubs, and help workers recover stolen wages.

Right now, Esparza said that trying to recover stolen wages is a very difficult, complicated process.

You need to get a lot of proof, and it gets to the point where people get overwhelmed with trying to get all this information that they never collected or kept those proof, said Esparza.

But some Republicans believe this proposal would hurt small businesses that are doing the right thing.

This legislation would then impose crushing penalties on employers for not being able to effectively navigate the maze of red tape it intends to create. This is nothing short of entrapment, said Rep. Fred Keller (R - Pennsylvania).

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Instead of increasing penalties, some lawmakers want the department of labor to provide more compliance training to businesses.

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Representatives Dan Crenshaw and Marjorie Taylor Greene feuded on Twitter after the two Republican members of Congress took different votes on an aid package to Ukraine.

On Tuesday, the House passed a $40bn aid package to Ukraine. Every Democrat present voted for the legislation, while 57 Republicans voted against the package, including Ms Greene.

Other Republicans who voted against the legislation included Representatives Paul Gosar of Arizona, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina and Lauren Boebert of Colorado.

But the feud began when Mr Crenshaw, a Texas Republican who lost an eye while serving in Afghanistan, tweeted about how the Biden administration was supposedly letting drugs pour across the US-Mexico border.

In response, someone criticised him over his vote for the Ukraine package.

Yeah, because investing in the destruction of our adversarys military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea. You should feel the same.  Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) May 11, 2022

Yeah, because investing in the destruction of our adversarys military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea, he tweeted in response. You should feel the same.

In response, Ms Greene, who lost her personal Twitter account earlier this year, quote-tweeted Mr Crenshaw and said he didnt care about Ukrainian lives.

So you think we are funding a proxy war with Russia? she said. You speak as if Ukrainian lives should be thrown away, as if they have no value. Just used and thrown away. For your proxy war? How does that help Americans? How does any of this help?

Mr Crenshaws response was simple.

Still going after that slot on Russia Today huh? https://t.co/WFtgrvTS6m  Dan Crenshaw (@DanCrenshawTX) May 11, 2022

Still going after that slot on Russia Today huh? he said.

The two have clashed in the past, going back to when Ms Greene first won election to Congress. Earlier this year, Mr Crenshaw said in an Instagram post that she was either  a Democrat  or just an idiot.
Does the May share price for Contact Energy Limited (NZSE:CEN) reflect what it's really worth? Today, we will estimate the stock's intrinsic value by estimating the company's future cash flows and discounting them to their present value. The Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) model is the tool we will apply to do this. It may sound complicated, but actually it is quite simple!

Remember though, that there are many ways to estimate a company's value, and a DCF is just one method. If you want to learn more about discounted cash flow, the rationale behind this calculation can be read in detail in the Simply Wall St analysis model.

See our latest analysis for Contact Energy

Crunching the numbers

We're using the 2-stage growth model, which simply means we take in account two stages of company's growth. In the initial period the company may have a higher growth rate and the second stage is usually assumed to have a stable growth rate. To begin with, we have to get estimates of the next ten years of cash flows. Where possible we use analyst estimates, but when these aren't available we extrapolate the previous free cash flow (FCF) from the last estimate or reported value. We assume companies with shrinking free cash flow will slow their rate of shrinkage, and that companies with growing free cash flow will see their growth rate slow, over this period. We do this to reflect that growth tends to slow more in the early years than it does in later years.

A DCF is all about the idea that a dollar in the future is less valuable than a dollar today, so we discount the value of these future cash flows to their estimated value in today's dollars:

10-year free cash flow (FCF) estimate

2022 2023 2024 2025 2026 2027 2028 2029 2030 2031 Levered FCF (NZ$, Millions) NZ$215.1m NZ$160.3m NZ$218.0m NZ$448.0m NZ$451.0m NZ$455.7m NZ$461.8m NZ$469.0m NZ$476.9m NZ$485.5m Growth Rate Estimate Source Analyst x2 Analyst x2 Analyst x1 Analyst x1 Analyst x1 Est @ 1.04% Est @ 1.34% Est @ 1.55% Est @ 1.7% Est @ 1.8% Present Value (NZ$, Millions) Discounted @ 5.4% NZ$204 NZ$144 NZ$186 NZ$363 NZ$346 NZ$332 NZ$319 NZ$307 NZ$296 NZ$286

("Est" = FCF growth rate estimated by Simply Wall St)

Present Value of 10-year Cash Flow (PVCF) = NZ$2.8b

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After calculating the present value of future cash flows in the initial 10-year period, we need to calculate the Terminal Value, which accounts for all future cash flows beyond the first stage. For a number of reasons a very conservative growth rate is used that cannot exceed that of a country's GDP growth. In this case we have used the 5-year average of the 10-year government bond yield (2.0%) to estimate future growth. In the same way as with the 10-year 'growth' period, we discount future cash flows to today's value, using a cost of equity of 5.4%.

Terminal Value (TV)= FCF 2031  (1 + g)  (r  g) = NZ$486m (1 + 2.0%)  (5.4% 2.0%) = NZ$15b

Present Value of Terminal Value (PVTV)= TV / (1 + r)10= NZ$15b ( 1 + 5.4%)10= NZ$8.6b

The total value, or equity value, is then the sum of the present value of the future cash flows, which in this case is NZ$11b. In the final step we divide the equity value by the number of shares outstanding. Compared to the current share price of NZ$7.5, the company appears quite undervalued at a 48% discount to where the stock price trades currently. The assumptions in any calculation have a big impact on the valuation, so it is better to view this as a rough estimate, not precise down to the last cent.

dcf

Important assumptions

Now the most important inputs to a discounted cash flow are the discount rate, and of course, the actual cash flows. Part of investing is coming up with your own evaluation of a company's future performance, so try the calculation yourself and check your own assumptions. The DCF also does not consider the possible cyclicality of an industry, or a company's future capital requirements, so it does not give a full picture of a company's potential performance. Given that we are looking at Contact Energy as potential shareholders, the cost of equity is used as the discount rate, rather than the cost of capital (or weighted average cost of capital, WACC) which accounts for debt. In this calculation we've used 5.4%, which is based on a levered beta of 0.800. Beta is a measure of a stock's volatility, compared to the market as a whole. We get our beta from the industry average beta of globally comparable companies, with an imposed limit between 0.8 and 2.0, which is a reasonable range for a stable business.

Looking Ahead:

Valuation is only one side of the coin in terms of building your investment thesis, and it ideally won't be the sole piece of analysis you scrutinize for a company. It's not possible to obtain a foolproof valuation with a DCF model. Rather it should be seen as a guide to "what assumptions need to be true for this stock to be under/overvalued?" For instance, if the terminal value growth rate is adjusted slightly, it can dramatically alter the overall result. Why is the intrinsic value higher than the current share price? For Contact Energy, we've put together three essential elements you should further research:

Risks: Case in point, we've spotted 2 warning signs for Contact Energy you should be aware of. Future Earnings: How does CEN's growth rate compare to its peers and the wider market? Dig deeper into the analyst consensus number for the upcoming years by interacting with our free analyst growth expectation chart. Other High Quality Alternatives: Do you like a good all-rounder? Explore our interactive list of high quality stocks to get an idea of what else is out there you may be missing!

PS. Simply Wall St updates its DCF calculation for every New Zealander stock every day, so if you want to find the intrinsic value of any other stock just search here.

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.
Police are investigating after a cyclist was hit and killed by a Jeep Wednesday morning in Seattles SoDo neighborhood.

According to police, around 10:30 a.m., the driver of the Jeep was turning out of a parking lot along Fourth Avenue South and South Holgate Street and was about to turn north.

The driver stopped to wait for traffic and was looking south when the cyclist approached him on the sidewalk from the other direction.

The driver hit the cyclist while turning onto Fourth Avenue South.

Seattle Fire personnel were in the area and responded immediately, but the cyclist later died from their injuries.

The driver stayed on the scene and was interviewed by police. He showed no signs of impairment, according to police.

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Singapore's Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen attends the Xiangshan Forum in Beijing, China in 2019. (PHOTO: Reuters)

SINGAPORE  Singapores Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen will make an official visit to Tallinn, Estonia and Riga, Latvia from Thursday (12 May) to next Tuesday.

Dr Ng will meet Estonian leaders in Tallinn and speak at the 15th Lennart Meri Conference, a security and foreign policy conference held annually in Estonia that brings together policymakers and analysts from around the world.

In Riga, Dr Ng will hold bilateral meetings with Latvian leaders and officials, and visit defence research establishments.

His visit comes amid heightened fears in the Baltic states following the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia on 24 February. Several of the key agenda items at the conference are on the political, security and economic impact of the Ukraine war.

Estonia and Latvia, along with Lithuania, were forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union  the predecessor state of Russia  in 1940. Estonia and Latvia gained independence in 1991 while Lithuania declared independence in 1990.

The three Baltic states, each of which shares a border with Russia, have been members of the United States-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization since 2004. They have stepped up calls for more military support from their allies in recent months.

In an interview with NBC News in March, Estonian Foreign Affairs Minister Eva-Maria Liimets said, Its very important to see U.S. military presence in Europe, and we would also welcome U.S. troops here in Estonia, in addition to the other allied presence we have at the moment.

The parliaments of Latvia and Estonia last month declared that Russian forces had committed acts of genocide by killing civilians in areas of Ukraine during the ongoing conflict.

The three Baltic states also stopped importing Russian natural gas from 1 April as European nations tried to lessen their dependence on Russian energy sources.

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Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings (D) is pushing for a full investigation into Georgia police searching the Delaware State University lacrosse teams bus, which team members say was racially motivated.

Like so many others, Im deeply troubled by the actions that our Delaware State University Womens Lacrosse team and staff endured in Georgia this past April. I want to commend these outstanding young women for their valor, and my fellow Delawareans for rallying around them, Jennings said in her statement.

Following discussions with both the US Department of Justice and the Georgia Attorney General, I sent the attached letter urging a full examination and I have every reason to believe one will occur, she added.

Her statement comes after the team from Delaware State, a historically Black university, was traveling through Georgia when Liberty County Sheriffs Office deputies stopped their bus driver, who is also Black, for a traffic violation.

The deputies then announced they would search the teams luggage for drugs.

If there is anything in your luggage, were probably gonna find it.  Im not looking for a little marijuana, but Im pretty sure you guys chaperones will probably be disappointed if we find it, one of the deputies said.

In her letter to the Department of Justice, Jennings noted that the students and coaches hail from one of the oldest and finest HBCUs in the country.

Im told that all the deputies were white, and almost everyone whose bags were searched is black, the attorney general wrote.

By all accounts these young women represented their school and our state with class  and they were rewarded with a questionable-at-best search through their belongings in an effort to find contraband that did not exist, she also said, adding that she knew she could count on a thorough vetting and appropriate action.

The incident has also been condemned by leaders across the state, including Delaware Gov. John Carney (D).

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I have watched video of this incident  it is upsetting, concerning, and disappointing, Carney previously told The Hill.

Moments like these should be relegated to part of our countrys complicated history, but they continue to occur with sad regularity in communities across our country. Its especially hard when it impacts our own community, he added.

Delaware Sens. Chris Coons (D) and Tom Carper (D) and Delaware Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D) also condemned the deputies behavior.

No one should be made to feel unsafe or humiliated by law enforcement or any entity who has sworn to protect and serve them, the lawmakers said.

Delaware State has also said that it is investigating the incident.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty

Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA) points the finger at Facebook for its role in spreading disinformation and adding to divisiveness in U.S. politics that ultimately led to the Jan. 6 insurrectionan event she has been charged with investigating.

And while Luria may truly want to hold tech companies accountable, she also wants tech company holdings in her account.

According to her 2021 financial disclosure, Luria holds between $1 million and $5 million in Facebook (now Meta) stock. Those holdings, owned jointly with her husband, make her the largest Facebook shareholder in Congress, and might appear to undercut the force of her criticism.

Stock Trade Ban Gains Steam Despite Pelosis Mind-Boggling Resistance

At a town hall last month, Luriawho sits on the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrectionsaid it was time to hold tech companies accountable, skewering the tech giant for its amplification of misinformation.

I think we should hold tech companies accountable, Luria said. I know that Facebook, Twitter, and other tech companies have been asked to testify before Congress about the algorithms, about the implications of them, as well.

She also connected the platform to the riot, telling the audience that when it comes to Jan. 6-related issues, social media has added to divisiveness in our political rhetoric and led ultimately to the events of the insurrection.

The spread of disinformation that, you know, led ultimately to the events of, in part to the events of Jan. 6, is really part of our investigation, she said. Its very important to understand the impacts of social media and how the amplification of misinformation online has impacted that.

And while Luria has never received money from Facebooks PAC, when it comes to spreading political information, Luria herself frequently turns to the company.

Fourteen Members of Congress Named and Shamed for Allegedly Violating STOCK Act

Since her first congressional bid in 2018, Lurias campaign has paid Facebook $354,540 for advertising, according to data from the Facebook Ad Library. Shes spent as much as $60,000 since Jan. 6, 2021.

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(Its impossible to know from public information exactly how much she spent since Jan. 6. Facebook provides data in ranges and the Luria campaign doesnt itemize its Facebook expenses, leaving the buys to digital marketers.)

There is, of course, nothing wrong with Lurias claims about social medias role in amplifying misinformation and reinforcing beliefs, borne out by years of research. But that open criticism may appear at odds with her private financial interests.

Still, says Kedric Payne, director of ethics at nonpartisan watchdog Campaign Legal Center, these positions dont necessarily translate into a conflict of interest, given the committees work.

One problem with lawmakers owning stock is the perception of official decisions made to benefit their stock instead of the public, Payne said. However, this perception of self-dealing disappears when a lawmaker takes official action that could harm their financial interest.

Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel for public policy at good government group Common Cause, told The Daily Beast that disclosure rules are valuable precisely for these scenarios.

Disclosure of Members financial holdings is a way for their constituents to evaluate potential conflicts of interest and hold their elected leaders accountable to the public interest. Thats what the transparency concerning Rep. Lurias financial holdings in Facebook affords the public in this example, Spaulding said. He added that proposed reforms ought to be a pillar of consensus in Congress.

Luria, however, has called proposed bipartisan trading bans bullshit.

I think this whole concept is bullshit. Because I think that, why would you assume that members of Congress are going to be inherently bad or corrupt? Luria said in a February interview with Punchbowl.

GOP Candidate Lifts Language From Dem Opponents Op-Ed

It makes no sense, she added, to assume officials will use their positions of power for some nefarious means or to benefit themselves.

So Im very strongly opposed to any legislation like that, Luria said.

The Daily Beast reached out to Lurias office, but did not receive a reply.

The day before Punchbowl ran that interview, House Speaker Nancy Pelosiwho previously opposed a trading banappeared to shift her stance, a move that split Luria from not only the vast majority of her Democratic colleagues but House leadership as well.

Its not just a Democratic issue. Trading ban legislation now has traction in both parties, thanks in large part to high-profile federal investigations into a number of elected officials after news reports revealed shady transactions at the onset of the pandemic. And as that reporting continued to roll out, Republicans began stepping up to propose their own versions.

Last year, Luria reported a net worth of between $3.2 million and $12.4 million, and traded as much as $1 million in late March, including a sale worth between $250,001 and $500,000 in shares of Chinese tech giant Ali Baba. (Congressional data only comes in ranges.)

Luria, a two-term moderate and Navy veteran, has already clinched the Democratic primary for lack of a challenger, but shes seen as a vulnerable incumbent. Her district, a purple zone that covers most of the Hampton Roads area, was redrawn in December, when it flipped to a 6-point Republican advantage, according to FiveThirtyEight. (The Virginia Supreme Court appointed independent adjudicators to redistrict the state.)

And while neither of her two most likely GOP opponentsstate Senator Jen Kiggans and educator Jarome Bellreport holding any individual stocks, Luria is far more likely to clash with them on claims about the 2020 election and subsequent insurrection.

Pelosi Deflects on Stock Trading and Punts Reform to Members

Kiggans, currently the Republican favorite, was one of four Virginia state senators to call for a forensic audit of the 2020 results, though she cast that vote in February, about 18 months late.

Bell, a fringe-right MAGA die-hard and conspiracy theorist who recently appeared onstage with ex-President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, has recently polled even more strongly than Kiggans in a head-to-head with Luria. This week, he reiterated his belief that the 2020 election was stolen, and demanded once again to execute all involved.

But here, Luria and Facebook appear to align. After the Jan. 6 attack, the company cut off contributions to election objectors, a promise it has so far kept.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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May 12CLEVELAND  Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announced Friday that nearly 2,000 pieces of personal protective equipment donated by Ohio law enforcement agencies will soon be delivered to Ukraine.

In response to a request from Governor DeWine in March, more than two dozen Ohio law enforcement agencies donated surplus or expired body armor, vest carriers, and helmets for use by members of the Ukraine civilian territorial defense as they resist Russian attacks.

The Ohio State Highway Patrol coordinated the collection of the donations and delivered the 1,996 pieces of personal protective gear to an undisclosed location in the Cleveland area today.

"I am so very appreciative to all of the law enforcement agencies that took the time to gather their unneeded equipment and donate it to our friends in Ukraine who are fighting for their lives," DeWine said. "I also commend the Fund to Aid Ukraine and their partners who have been working to ensure that these donations will go directly to Ukrainian civilians who are bravely standing up to Russia to defend their country and protect their families."

The Fund to Aid Ukraine is a non-profit organization based in Parma that is affiliated with the United Ukrainian Organizations of Ohio, a member of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America. The donations are scheduled to be transported from Ohio to Ukraine in the coming days.

In total, Ohio is donating 71 vest carriers, 45 helmets, and 1,880 pieces of body armor to help protect civilians who are defending Ukraine against Russia.

The following agencies participated in this donation drive: Aurora Police Department, Battelle Labs, Bowling Green State University Police Department, Cambridge Police Department, Cleveland Police Department, Elmore Police Department, Erie County Sheriff's Office, Henry County Sheriff's Office, Hilliard Police Department, Holden Arboretum Police Department, Jackson County Sheriff's Office, Morrow County Sheriff's Office, North Canton Police Department, Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, Ohio Department of Administrative Services, Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, Ohio Department of Youth Services, Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy, Ohio State Highway Patrol, Perry Township Police Department, Sandusky Police Department, Stark County Sheriff's Office, Supreme Court of Ohio, Sylvania Police Department, Troy Police Department, Union County Sheriff's Office, Wood County Sheriff's Office and the Wooster Police Department.
This updated version clarifies discussion of Georgia law pertaining to large vehicles traveling in left lanes.

Prominent Georgia attorneys question the actions of sheriff's deputies in Liberty County, Georgia, some even speculating that they violated the civil rights of student-athletes from a Delaware HBCU when they searched the lacrosse players' motorcoach.

Video footage of a traffic stop by Liberty County deputies, who pulled over and searched a bus filled with student-athletes from Delaware State University traveling home from a match in Florida, has already brought calls for legal consequences. The Delaware Attorney General has called for a federal civil rights investigation and several Georgia attorneys also questioned the deputies' behavior.

"It was disturbing," said Melissa Redmon, clinical assistant professor and prosecutorial justice program director at the University of Georgia School of Law. "I know how intrusive those stops may be, even if they're legal."

DSU bus incident: Delaware attorney general asks for federal civil rights review of DSU bus incident

Liberty County sheriff: disputes claims of racial profiling after deputies pulled over lacrosse team

Delaware State University: 'incensed' after lacrosse team's bus searched in Georgia

The womens lacrosse team was motoring along Interstate 95 through Liberty County on April 20 after playing at Stetson University the previous night in DeLand, Florida. The bus was stopped for traveling improperly in the left lane.

Deputies subsequently searched luggage stored in the compartment under the bus. No contraband was uncovered.

Liberty County Sheriff William Bowman on Tuesday denied that players' luggage was searched, but photos, video and players' accounts of the incident seem to contradict him. Bowman later said he misspoke, and meant to say none of the passengers on the bus were searched. He has defended the stop as legal and justified.

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"There were several commercial vehicles stopped that morning, including another bus where contraband was located," Bowman said during a news conference. "Due to the nature of the detail, a K9 was part of the stop and an alert was given by the K9.

Was the Liberty County deputies' stop, search of the Delaware State bus legal?

Bowman said in a follow up interview that the stop was proper, and K9 units were already on the scene.

It was a four-person unit that was out there, and the K9 unit was one of them," Bowman said in an exclusive interview provided to the Savannah Morning News. "No one had to call for the K9 unit, the dog was already on site. At that point they saw a vehicle, a white bus with dark tinted windows, traveling on I-95 North in the left hand lane, which is a clear violation of Georgia state law.

He has since said that his deputies did nothing wrong, "but we could have done things a lot better, and we would like to get more feedback from the university and the students.

ACLU of Delaware Staff Attorney Dwayne Bensing told the Delaware News Journal that while he cannot speak to Georgia law, in Delaware, police must provide reasonable and articulable suspicion  a requirement just below the legal standard of probable cause  to extend a traffic stop beyond their initial reason for pulling over a car. The standard is similar in Georgia, according to Mawuli Davis, a partner with Georgia-based Davis Bozeman Johnson Law.

"There still needs to be a basis for a search, regardless of if it's a car or a bus. They still have to articulate the reason they are searching this bus," said Davis. "Every bus that's pulled over for a legitimate traffic stop, assuming it's legitimate, just because it's a bus they don't say, 'Well it's a bus, we get to search any bus.' That's not lawful. That's not constitutional."

Davis said Bowman was correct that an alert from a K9 unit would constitute probable cause, but he thought it was unnecessary to bring in a K9 unit to investigate a bus full of college athletes in the first place.

Jonathan Rapping, a professor at Atlanta's John Marshall Law School and founder of Gideon's Promise, an organization to educate public defenders, said that using a dog to sniff a vehicle is legal so long as it does not prolong the traffic stop, but that dogs can be unreliable.

"The Supreme Court has said that a dog's sniff is not a search," he said. "But they will frequently have false positive alerts."

Redmon said it is not uncommon for K9 units to travel with deputies. She was also concerned that the deputy might have been delaying the process of writing a ticket to give the dog time to sniff the vehicle, which she said is illegal.

"It doesn't look like (the deputy) was being particularly diligent in writing out the ticket," she said.

Sam Starks, a senior attorney with the Cochran Firm in Atlanta, said he also thought the deputy was delaying by walking onto the bus and speaking to the students after the driver stepped off of the bus.

"What law enforcement purpose did he have to walk onto the bus?" he asked.

Rapping also pointed to the deputies stepping onto the bus and asking students if they had anything they did not want deputies to find, which he saw as a tactic to gain the consent of students to search the luggage.

"I have to say, when I first heard the (deputy) saying, 'Tell me if you have something, I'm not looking for a little bit of marijuana but if I have to search and find it I won't be able to help you,' what came to my mind was this is a tactic to try and gain consent," he said.

Once the search started, even if it was legal due to the dog alerting, Rapping said it also seemed excessive to search multiple bags.

"Even if the dog truly alerted to something, before they start rummaging through multiple bags, they should have the dog sniff the bags and alert to that particular bag," he said. "I'm a father, I have a teenage daughter. I would hope if my daughter was taking a trip, a school-sponsored trip, and an officer pulled the driver over for driving in the left lane, that my daughter's belongings would be treated with more respect."

Civil rights concerns

Bowman, who is Black, has repeatedly denied that the incident was racially motivated.

There is a lot of things that go on in our country that a lot of people consider to be racial, but here in Liberty County that is not something that we practice, I will not allow it, and I will not let it happen," he said in an interview.

Redmon also said she does not think it was racially motivated.

"There's nothing on the bus that indicates ... who was inside," she said. "There was no markings on the bus that indicated it was an HBCU or what the bus was being used for."

Still, she is concerned by the fact that the bus was stopped at all.

"The (deputies) in this case, they informed the driver very quickly why he was being pulled over. They took the extra step of informing the passengers why the bus was being pulled over. They would seem to be courteous at the scene," she said. "(But) do we want to empower the (deputies) to just pull over any vehicle based on a hunch or suspicion that they could be some violation of the law that occurred?"

Both Davis and Redmon said that any civil suits stemming from this would face challenges from qualified immunity, the standard that any reasonable deputy would have known that their conduct was unlawful.

Starks disagreed, saying this was a clear case of a Fourth Amendment violation.

"I think that those student's civil rights were violated," Starks said. "I think that was a pretextual stop. I think it was a stop for an excuse to search."

Because deputies did not cite the driver, there would be no opportunity for the deputies' behavior to be reviewed by judges or attorneys if the students did not bring a civil lawsuit, according to Starks.

Starks, Rapping and Davis all said said that they thought race played a factor, with Starks saying that even if deputies could not see the passengers, they likely could see the race of the driver before the stop. Rapping also noted that the deputy stepped onto the bus and spoke to the students before searching the vehicle.

"As both a civil rights attorney and a civil rights activist and advocate, it's disheartening to continue to see these kinds of stops and this kind of profiling," Davis said. "Especially what people don't understand who haven't experienced ... it's a traumatizing experience to be stopped, to be searched, to be criminalized and, you know, people are left with, 'This is happening to me because of my race, because I'm Black.'"

Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr has been in contact with the Delaware Attorney General, but said he does not have jurisdiction over the incident, according to his spokesperson. Bowman said he has not heard from the Attorney General or Gov. Brian Kemp.

Liberty County, Georgia, deputies search the Delaware State women's lacrosse team's luggage in a photo taken by a player from the bus.

What to know about your rights during a traffic stop

Davis said that when he does "know your rights" trainings he tells people to be respectful, but assert their right not to let law enforcement search their vehicles.

"What we say ... when you're pulled over, make sure they can see your hands, answer them respectfully, and if they asked if you will consent to a search of your vehicle just say no," he said.

If deputies conduct a search anyway, Davis advises following instructions, but filing a complaint afterwards to put the information on the record.

"You don't win these cases on the side of the road," he said.

Freelance photographer Lewis Levine contributed to this story.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: GA deputies' search of HBCU bus questioned by attorneys
NextShark

Two Chinese brothers showcased their unconditional love for their mother by traveling 36 kilometers (22.37 miles) with a hand-pull cart to bring her home from the hospital. Since she suffers from severe motion sickness, her sons Liu Bo and Liu Guang needed to think of the best way to transport her to their home in Shandong Province, China, reported South China Morning Post. My mother will vomit after less than 30 minutes in a car or even an electric tricycle, Guang told the Morning Post.
The battle royale over Chicagos ward remap appears to be over. The City Councils Black and Latino caucuses had been tussling for months about the decennial redrawing of aldermanic boundaries, but it seems as if both sides have reached a compromise.

The new map lays out 16 Black-majority wards along with a ward with Black plurality, Ald. Walter Burnetts 27th Ward. The proposed map also establishes 14 Latino wards, one less than the Latino Caucus had sought, as well as an Asian-majority ward, a first for the city.

These once-a-decade exercises are supposed to be grounded in demographic changes reflected in the decennial census. The latest U.S. census results show a 5% jump in the citys Latino population and a 10% drop in Chicagos Black community. Thats why the Latino Caucus fought for a fairer remap that accurately reflected major shifts in the citys population.

Yes, they fought. And then, their caucus fragmented and enough Latino aldermen caved. To what, you ask? The lure of the backroom deal, where self-interest and, in this case, strong-arming by the unions took over. The compromise allowed City Hall to avoid a referendum that would have put the fate of the competing Black and Latino caucus maps into the hands of voters, which should have been the destination.

The compromise speaks to what really motivates too many on the City Council  the ceaseless quest to accumulate more clout.

Before backroom wheeling-and-dealing prevailed, the Latino Caucus appeared to embrace the ideal that everyday Chicagoans should play an integral role in the remap. The caucus aligned itself with Change Illinois, a civic advocacy group that led an effort to craft a remap that incorporated citizen input. The caucus had hoped to pit that document, known as the Peoples Map, against the Black Caucus map in a referendum that would appear on the June 28 primary ballot.

When the Latino Caucus failed in that bid, its members still had a choice: Put an earlier Latino Caucus map up against the Black Caucus map in the referendum and let Chicagoans decide the democratic way, through a vote. Or, put themselves first, shut voters out of the process, and cut a deal that gives them a more favorable set of ward boundaries ahead of the 2023 city elections.

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Enough of them chose self-preservation over people power, and that backroom deal was done. They fell prey to arm-twisting from clout-heavy labor groups, including the Chicago Teachers Union. Pulling the levers behind the Black Caucus map was Michael Kasper, longtime election law adviser for former Illinois House Speaker and state Democratic Party chief Michael Madigan, now facing trial on racketeering charges.

The City Council still must vote on the compromise remap before May 19, but the deal appears to have more than enough votes to get approved and negate the need for a referendum.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who for months had tried to stay out of the remap fracas, sounded relieved. With this compromise, the City Council can now devote its full attention to the more immediate needs of our city like keeping our communities safe and driving our equitable economic recovery from the pandemic, Lightfoot said in a statement released earlier this week.

We dont buy that rationale for a second. The people inside City Hall are supposed to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

Focusing attention on crafting a fair, sensible ward remap that incorporates the will of voters doesnt have to mean that all other aldermanic work and City Hall functioning must stop, or even get short shrift. City Hall is supposed to multitask. And if giving voters a say in the remap puts another task in each aldermans in-basket, then so be it.

The disappointing outcome of this years remap debacle exposes a core problem in how Chicago redraws its ward boundaries every 10 years. The process is never going to be fair as long as it remains the sole purview of the politicians who stand to benefit from keeping the effort behind closed doors, where they can carve up whole communities into gerrymandered fiefdoms.

Aldermen should, for once, put the interests of everyday Chicagoans above their own and work with Springfield to craft legislation that would put the citys decennial remapping in the hands of an independent citizens commission. That would take the process out of its current Star Chamber environment, and give voters a voice that has been muted for far too long.

This years remap must be the last in which Chicago voters get shoved to the side.

Join the discussion on Twitter @chitribopinions and on Facebook.

Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.
A store that accepts bitcoins in El Zonte, La Libertad, El Salvador on September 4, 2021. MARVIN RECINOS/AFP via Getty Images

El Salvador, the first country to make bitcoin legal tender, racked up $36 million in cryptocurrency losses on Thursday.

The popular cryptocurrency plummeted 50% from its all-time high this week.

The government bought an additional 500 coins at $30,744 each on Monday, President Nayib Bukele said.

El Salvador  which became the first country to make bitcoin legal tender in September  has seen the value of its massive cryptocurrency investment plummet by $36 million as bitcoin dropped over 50% from its all-time high on Thursday.

President Nayib Bukele bet big that bullish bitcoin investments could rescue El Salvador's economy from its growing debt-to-GDP ratio. Now, the crypto market's crash is fulfilling critics' warnings against investing treasury funds into volatile digital currencies.

Bukele's administration has spent a total of $103 million on 2,301 bitcoins since September of last year, according to Bloomberg data. As of Thursday afternoon, the coins were valued at around $67 million. El Salvador currently owes an estimated $23.3 billion in national debt.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) issued multiple warnings to the administration about legalizing bitcoin as an acceptable form of payment for any purchase or debt. In February, Fitch Ratings downgraded El Salvador's default rating from a "B-" to a "CCC," citing financing uncertainty spurred by the law.

"Households and businesses who hold Bitcoin balances and save in Bitcoin could lose wealth through large swings in value," the IMF El Salvador team, led by Alina Carare, warned in February.

"The adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender is fully funded by public money, through a trust fund. If the price of Bitcoin was to plummet, the resources in the trust could be rapidly depleted," IMF continued.

Undeterred by the drop, President Bukele announced "El Salvador just bought the dip!" on Monday. The purchase was the country's largest to-date, adding 500 bitcoins priced at an average of $30,744 each to its holdings.

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Bukele's bullish investment in cryptocurrency has led to a mixed reception by the country's citizens, with past bitcoin protests drawing thousands of attendees. A spokesperson for the administration did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

According to a September survey of 1,281 people, most Salvadorans (67.9%) disagree with the government's decision to make bitcoin legal tender. The nation's digital wallet, "Chivo Wallet," has not seen widespread use as the majority of sales continue to be paid in physical currencies, as Insider has previously reported.

Do you live in El Salvador? Were you impacted by the bitcoin crash? Contact this reporter at htowey@insider.com

Read the original article on Business Insider
The Hill, Greg Nash

House Democrats are asking the Justice Department to investigate former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, and a federal report found that hundreds of Native children died at government boarding schools.

This is Overnight Energy & Environment, your source for the latest news focused on energy, the environment and beyond. For The Hill, were Rachel Frazin and Zack Budryk. Someone forward you this newsletter? Subscribe here.

Dems ask for investigation into ex-Interior secretary

Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee are asking the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate Trump-era Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, alleging that he may have engaged in a quid pro quo relating to a clean water permit.

The committee, for the first time in its history, made a criminal referral to the DOJ over the situation on Wednesday.

Whats being alleged? Lawmakers raised concerns that the federal government changed its position on a permit around the same time that the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee received donations from a beneficiary of the reversal.

The donations from the beneficiary and others, which totaled nearly $250,000, were outside of the typical election cycle and highly unusual, according to the referral.

These facts raise serious concerns about a potentially criminal quid pro quo, wrote committee Chairman Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Bernhardt did not immediately respond to The Hills requests for comment. A representative for the beneficiary, Mike Ingram, owner of developer El Dorado Holdings, said there was no wrongdoing.

Everything that Mr. Ingram did and that El Dorado did was about asking the government to look at the facts and the law. Period. Nothing in return for campaign contributions. Nothing in return for political relationships, Lanny Davis, attorney adviser to El Dorado, told The Hill.

(Davis has contributed opinion articles to The Hill.)

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The details: The accusations stem from a Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) reversal of its position on a permit for a development project in Arizona known as the Villages at Vigneto.

Now-retired FWS Field Supervisor Steve Spangle told the Arizona Daily Star in 2019 that he had been pressured by a high-level politico to reverse a decision that would have required a detailed analysis of how the development could impact endangered species.

He said at the time that he had been overruled and in an October 2017 letter reversed course in a way that made it easier for the project to get a Clean Water Act permit.

The Democrats report notes that in August 2017, Bernhardt and Ingram met over breakfast.

They also note that on Oct. 6, 2017, when the permits revaluation was announced:

Ingram donated $10,000 to the Trump Victory Fund (TVF), a committee that gives funds to both the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee (RNC)

Between Oct. 5, 2017, and Oct. 10, 2017, Ingram and 12 other donors from Arizona contributed a total of $147,000 to the same organization, the referral said

One donor gave an additional $94,600 to the RNC

Read more about the referral here.

100s of Native kids died in federal schools: Interior

Hundreds of Native American children died after being forced into government boarding schools over a 50-year period, the Interior Department said Wednesday in its first investigative report on the program.

The investigation found a total of 408 schools were operated by the federal government between 1819 and 1869, as well as another 89 that received no federal funding

The department thus far identified more than 500 deaths across 19 schools, according to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland , but the department expects to identify more

The report identified marked and unmarked burial sites at 53 schools, which are also expected to increase as the analysis continues

A dark chapter: At the schools, children were forced to cut their hair and speak only English rather than their native languages, as well as were subjected to what Assistant Interior Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland called militarized and identity alteration methodology.

Haalands grandfather was a survivor of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, whose founder, Richard Henry Pratt, described the institutions mission as kill the Indian, save the man.

The investigation also found that the schools were frequently focused on vocational skills and manual labor rather than academic work, leaving graduates with limited skills and employment prospects.

It further determined that about half of boarding schools may have enlisted the aid or support from religious institutions, with the federal government in some cases paying religious organizations per capita for Native American students.

The investigation found schools existed in 37 states and 11 then-territories, with the greatest number, 37, in Oklahoma. The department recommended a number of further steps to take in the investigation, including producing a detailed list of burial sites at boarding schools as well as a rough estimate of how much federal financial support they received.

Read more about the report here.

Biden official acknowledges urgency on solar probe

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo defended the Commerce Departments investigation of solar panel component manufacturers Wednesday, telling the Senate Appropriations Committee that she hoped to conclude it as quickly as possible.

In April, Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) expressed concerns the case could cost us 100,000 American solar jobs and jeopardize our common clean energy goals, saying it has already delayed more than 300 projects.

At the Wednesday hearing, Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) asked Raimondo about the probe, which was initiated in response to a petition by U.S.-based solar company Auxin Solar.

Why is there no industry-supported threshold to initiate this anti-circumvention inquiry? Moran asked. There is a process thats being utilized to keep tariffs [on solar panels] in place to the detriment of the industry by one small company.

Moran noted that Auxin would not have been privy to any exclusive information about the conduct of the companies in question and asked if the Commerce Department had made a finding based on its own information that the investigation was appropriate.

The investigation, initiated in March, involves allegations that solar panel component manufacturers in several southeast Asian countries were fronts for Chinese component firms seeking to avoid U.S. tariffs.

Ive heard from many of you and many in the industry and I share the sense of urgency, Raimondo responded. I understand how fragile the solar supply chain is and how we need to move forward.

Read more about the probe here.

WHAT WERE READING

Manchin huddles with fracking billionaire Harold Hamm (E&E News)

Oil Giants Sell Dirty Wells to Buyers With Looser Climate Goals, Study Finds (The New York Times)

Revealed: the carbon bombs set to trigger catastrophic climate breakdown (The Guardian)

Ukraine Reduced Russian Gas Flowing to Europe Through Key Pipeline (The Wall Street Journal)

Californias increased water use paves way for more penalties (CalMatters)

And finally, something offbeat and off-beat: Whats the buzz?

Thats it for today, thanks for reading. Check out The Hills Energy & Environment page for the latest news and coverage. Well see you tomorrow.

VIEW FULL VERSION HERE

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
The Whites. Illustrated | AP Images, iStock

The 11-day manhunt for Casey White, a 38-year-old convicted felon, and Vicky White, the 56-year-old corrections officer who helped him escape, ended on Monday when Casey was re-apprehended. Vicky took her own life after the two were cornered by police. Here's everything you need to know:

Are Vicky and Casey White related?

The two were not related by blood, but after Vicky shot herself in the head, Casey exclaimed, "Please help my wife!" U.S. Marshal Martin Keely said that, to the best of his knowledge, the two were not legally married.

Why was Casey White in jail?

A 2015 crime spree that included a home invasion, a carjacking, and a police chase earned Casey White a 75-year-sentence. White allegedly broke into his ex-girlfriend's home, fatally shot the family's dog, and fired several shots at her. According to a warrant stemming from this incident, Casey said that he "wanted to kill her and have the police kill him" and that "if he was released, he would kill the victim."

Then, in 2020, Casey was charged with capital murder after he confessed to stabbing a 58-year-old woman to death. Authorities moved him to a detention center in Lauderdale County, Alabama, to await trial for the murder charge. It was there that he met Vicky.

Dale Bryant, Casey's former attorney, told Newsweek via email that Vicky was likely the mastermind behind the escape. "None of his crimes were planned," Bryant wrote. "They are all short-sighted, in-the-moment crimes." Bryant also said that Casey is mentally ill but is "a decent person" when he's "on medication and in a supervised environment."

How did they pull off the escape?

Readers hoping for a dramatic tale of digging a tunnel with a stolen spoon or whittling a fake gun in the prison woodshop will be disappointed. On April 29, her last day of work before retirement, Vicky signed Casey out of prison, supposedly for a mental health evaluation at the courthouse. The two never arrived at the courthouse, and it was later determined that no evaluation had ever been scheduled.

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Lauderdale County Sheriff Rick Singleton said the escape was "well planned and calculated" and that the two "had plenty of resources, had cash, had vehicles, had everything they needed to pull this off."

Before the escape, Vicky sold her house for well below market value (around $95,000), bought clothing for Casey, purchased a 2007 Ford Edge under a fake name, and booked a room at a Quality Inn in Florence, Alabama. After switching cars in the hotel parking lot, the star-crossed lovers drove north.

How were they caught?

Vicky White and Casey White left Vicky's patrol car at the Quality Inn and drove north for about two hours in Vicky's Ford. They then abandoned the vehicle in the woods in College Grove, Tennessee, possibly due to mechanical problems.

Law enforcement offered $15,000 for information leading to Casey's capture, and $10,000 for information leading to Vicky's capture.

On May 3, Vicky's Ford Edge was located, which enabled law enforcement to narrow their manhunt. Before that, officers were forced to search in every direction, said Chad Hunt of the U.S. Marshals. The next day, surveillance cameras captured video of a man who appeared to be Casey White washing a 2006 Ford F-150 at a car wash in Evansville, Indiana  around 200 miles from College Grove.

That car was later found abandoned as well, but the noose was tightening. A tip came in Sunday, leading law enforcement to the fugitives' location. On Monday, officers conducting surveillance saw Vicky White leave a hotel with a wig on and then drive away with Casey in a black Cadillac. Law enforcement tailed them, and a chase ensued. One member of the U.S. Marshals task force rammed the Whites' vehicle, causing it to roll over.

"When this occurred," Evansville Sheriff Dave Wedding said at a press conference, "the female driver of the vehicle shot herself and the passenger was injured." She was pronounced dead a few hours later. Police were able to extract Casey, who insisted he didn't shoot Vicky, from the wreckage. Singleton said no law enforcement officers fired their weapons.

Casey told police he had planned to engage in a shootout with law enforcement, but was prevented from doing so by the wreck. Officers recovered four handguns, and AR-15 assault rifle, and $29,000 in cash from the Cadillac.

Was it love?

The two had what Singleton described as a "special relationship" and a "jailhouse romance," though he said there was no evidence that their relationship was physical or sexual in the months leading up to the escape.

Criminologist Casey Jordan told CNN that Vicky White may have suffered from hybristophilia  an "attraction to and/or sexual interest in those who commit crimes, particularly heinous and violent crimes such as rape and murder." Jordan added that Casey White likely gave Vicky  who was, by all accounts, a model employee  "a feeling of being alive after decades of feeling staid, safe and 'reliable.'"

Vicky White is not the first middle-aged female corrections officer to fall in love with an inmate and help him escape. In 2015, 51-year-old prison guard Joyce Mitchell provided murderers Richard Matt and David Sweat with tools, which they used to tunnel out of Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. Mitchell, who served five years in prison for aiding in the escape, said Matt "was nice to me" and made her "feel special" but that he was also sexually violent with her.

Jordan explains that women like Joyce Mitchell and Vicky White often feel a "deep void" as they grapple with "a declining sense of attractiveness" and a "loss of excitement," a void that is "somehow filled by the attention of a Bad Boy."

What's next?

Casey White appeared in court on Tuesday, where he signed a document with his shackled hand waiving his right to an extradition hearing. He will now be transported back to Alabama.

Vicky had been charged with a first-degree count of permitting or facilitating escape and with forgery and identity theft for her purchase of the Ford Edge.

Her colleagues say her death leaves many unanswered questions. Wedding, the sheriff, said she probably shot herself, but that he "won't rule anything out until we have a thorough investigation by the coroner." The autopsy is scheduled for Tuesday.

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By Helen Reid

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) -Arc Minerals shares jumped 6.7% on Thursday after it announced an agreement under which Anglo American would take majority control of the junior exploration firm's Zambia copper-cobalt licences.

Under the deal, which was first reported by Reuters, Anglo will take 70% of a joint venture with Arc that will own licenses to explore Zambia's copper-rich North-Western province, an area Anglo previously explored in the late 1990s. It would mark the first new investment by Anglo in Zambia in 20 years.

Major mining firms are searching for new sources of the battery metals copper and cobalt, especially following the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia which have sent metal prices soaring.

Anglo American will pay $3.5 million into Arc upon signing. It will be able to retain its stake by spending $74 million on exploration within seven years of signing and making cash payments of $11 million to Arc, according to terms of the deal.

Arc Minerals previously had an exclusivity agreement with Anglo from July 2020 to July 2021, and when that lapsed Arc Minerals said it would start talks with other major miners which had approached it.

Zambia, Africa's second-largest copper producer, has become a more attractive investment proposition for mining companies since the election last August of business-friendly President Hakainde Hichilema and a subsequent mining tax reform.

The country aims to more than triple its annual copper output within the next decade to 3 million tonnes a year.

First Quantum Minerals last Sunday said its board had approved plans for a $1.25 billion expansion of its Kansanshi mine in Zambia, a decision it said was prompted by renewed confidence in Zambia's investment climate.

(Reporting by Helen Reid; Additional reporting by Clara Denina; Editing by Christian Schmollinger, Edwina Gibbs and Ed Osmond)
DESTINATION DUBAI: Belgian luxury brand Delvaux has made its first move into the Middle East with the opening of its store at Dubai Mall on Thursday.

The Brussels-based house has found a home on the ground floor or the Fashion Avenue section of the Emirati luxury shopping destination, where its neighbors include Dior, Piaget, Alaia and Bulgari.

More from WWD

Chief executive officer Jean-Marc Loubier, who returned to the helm after the brand was acquired by Compagnie Financiere Richemont in June 2021, stated it was a pleasure and a commitment for Delvaux to be present in such a different and cosmopolitan city.

The 2,100-square-foot unit has been designed in collaboration with Milan-based architectural bureau Vudafieri Saverino, who previously designed a number of Delvaux boutiques including stores in Rome and Milan.

Inside, the slick marble of the walls is counterbalanced by the oak Point de Hongrie parquet floor and wall units nodding to traditional Flemish furniture. Antique tools of leatherworking craft decorate an arch that separates a second space, home to a leather goods bar nodding to the European cafe tradition that will offer personalization options such as hot-stamping. A separate lounge can be used for private events.

To mark the opening, its windows feature a display nodding to the Atomium, an atom-shaped landmark building that shares its 1958 construction date with the brands Brillant handbag.

Delvaux has 57 stores globally, including 34 in Asia, its main market, and six in its homeland of Belgium.

Its next boutique in the Middle East is slated to open in the second half of 2022 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

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In new footage of Ezra Miller's arrest in Hawaii in March, the Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore actor can be seen and heard arguing with police while being taken into custody for disorderly conduct.

The video, which surfaced on TMZ, was apparently taken from a police officer's body camera and begins with a man in a Hawaii bar saying he had just been playing darts when Miller walked up and spit on him for no discernible reason. Miller, who uses they/them pronouns, disputes this account, saying they were the one who had been assaulted in the bar. As the police walk Miller outside, the actor says they have their own video of the incident.

"I was assaulted in this bar, twice in a row," Miller says in the video. "I film myself when I get assaulted for NFT crypto art."

Miller then repeatedly and aggressively asks for the police officer's name and badge number, which he appears to provide. At this point, Miller seems to start walking onto the street, and the police handcuff the actor, who invokes both the Fourth and Ninth Amendments.

Ezra Miller attends the CFDA / Vogue Fashion Fund 15th Anniversary Event at Brooklyn Navy Yard on November 5, 2018 in Brooklyn, New York.

Roy Rochlin/Getty Images Ezra Miller was arrested multiple times by the Hawaii Police Department in March and April.

Later, Miller yells, "Hey, you just touched my penis! Please don't do that." The police officer responds that he did not.

"I'm transgender, nonbinary, and I don't want to be searched by a man!" Miller shouts.

The video cuts forward to the police bagging Miller's belongings. "Please don't take them from me," the actors says. "The Flash ring means a lot to me."

The Hawaii Police Department previously issued a media release about the arrest after it happened on March 28, stating that Miller "began yelling obscenities" at people singing karaoke and then "lunged at a 32-year-old man playing darts," which seems to be the incident described at the top of the new video. Together, these allegations resulted in charges of both disorderly conduct and harassment. Miller was released after posting $500 bail.

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Less than a month later, Miller was arrested in Hawaii again, this time during a traffic stop after he allegedly threw a chair at a woman during a gathering at a private residence. They were released pending further investigation, according to the Hawaii Police Department's media release on the incident.

Miller stars as Credence Barebone in the Fantastic Beasts film franchise and as superhero speedster Barry Allen in The Flash, which is currently set for a June 2023 release.

Representatives for Miller did not immediately respond to EW's request for comment.

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The claim: Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer said there should be no exceptions to abortion bans, that "fetus is worth losing the mother's life"

In the flood of debate on social media that followed the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion suggesting the high court will overturn Roe v. Wade, one unverified, unsourced claim about the supposed position of a Republican senator prompted widespread outrage.

"NEW: Republican U.S. Senator from North Dakota Kevin Cramer says the fetus is worth losing the mother's life, says there's no exceptions," reads a May 5 tweet from Chris Evans (@notcapnamerica) that was later deleted.

Evans' tweet, which seemed to be the origin of the claim, was retweeted more than 11,000 times and reshared on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter by numerous political accounts and figures, including Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz.

"These fake righteous are just as keen to let children die in poverty, hungry, with no medical care," reads an Instagram post from liberal activist page That's Not Right that includes a screenshot of the tweet. "This is singularly about controlling women's place in society, and punishing them for any sexuality outside their extreme evangelical concept."

The post has accrued more than 3,700 likes since May 5.

But the spread of the claim is yet another example of how outrage and other strong emotions can go hand-in-hand with misinformation: USA TODAY found no evidence that Cramer, who opposes abortion but has expressed support for some exceptions to a total ban on the procedure, made the statement circulating on Twitter.

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USA TODAY reached out to several users who shared the claim for comment. Gallego deleted the tweet after learning it was inaccurate, his spokesperson, Jacques Petit, wrote in an email to USA TODAY.

North Dakota Senator Kevin Cramer

Cramer supports some exceptions, never made statement claimed in post

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Neither USA TODAY nor other fact-checking outlets found evidence that Cramer has made a statement resembling the one in the post, and no evidence has emerged to support the claim.

The senator's spokesperson, Molly Block, called the claim "false information" and noted its origin was "a random tweet from a non-news source with absolutely zero attribution," in an email to USA TODAY.

Cramer, who has served in Congress since 2013, has consistently voted for and supported restrictions on abortion. He earned an A+ for this record from the Susan B. Anthony List, which rates politicians based on their opposition to abortion.

However, he supports exceptions to abortion bans in cases of mortal danger to the mother, according to his recent record and public statements. Cramer reinforced this position in a podcast released May 6.

"If youre pro-life, youre going to be pro-the-moms-life, as well as the unborn childs life," Cramer said in an episode of Plain Talk with Rob Port. "Saving the mothers life is a very obvious exemption.

Fact check:No, Tucker Carlson didn't repeat Russian propaganda about Bucha

Cramer's recent record lines up with these statements.

In 2021, he co-sponsored the Protecting Life and Taxpayers Act, which bans the use of federal funds for abortion except in cases of mortal danger to the mother, rape or incest. He also co-signed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of Mississippi's ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, which makes an exception for cases in which the mother's physician certifies she would be in mortal danger without an abortion.

Our rating: False

Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that Cramer said there should be no exceptions to abortion bans and that a "fetus is worth losing the mother's life." Cramer's spokesperson said he made no such statement, and USA TODAY found no evidence that Cramer has said anything to that effect. Cramer has said he supports exceptions in cases of mortal danger to the mother and co-sponsored legislation in 2021 that also had exceptions for rape and incest.

Our fact-check sources:

Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here.

Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: Viral post misattributes view to Sen. Kevin Cramer
The FBI is asking for the publics assistance in identifying the suspect they say is responsible for a bank robbery in Pittsburgh.

Police say the suspect is a male with black hair and a beard. He is estimated to be approximately 5 feet, 6 inches tall.

The suspect was last seen wearing pants, a hooded sweatshirt and sneakers, all of which were black. He also wore dark glasses and a mask during the time of the robbery.

The suspect is behind the robbery that took place at the Community Bank at 714 Brookline Boulevard on May 9.

RELATED COVERAGE: Man flees after reported bank robbery in Brookline

Anyone with information is asked to contact the FBI Pittsburgh Field Office at 412-432-4000.

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The Food and Drug Administration will soon announce how it plans to increase imports of infant formula from abroad, as U.S. parents and babies grapple with a formula shortage sparked in part by the closure of an Abbott facility in Michigan.

But President Biden will not be invoking the Defense Production Act to increase production at this time, senior administration officials told reporters on a call Thursday. The production of infant formula in the U.S. now surpasses production before the the discovery of bacterial contamination shuttered the Abbott facility in February, but those senior officials could not say when shelves will be fully stocked again.

"We know that the American people need to see products on the shelves consistently," one official said, adding, "I don't have a particular timeline for you, but we are working closely with partners across the federal government."

The Biden administration is also encouraging states to crackdown on price gouging and encouraging states to allow low-income families enrolled in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) to use those benefits on a wider variety of infant formulas.

The FDA says the agency "is doing everything in its power to ensure there is adequate product available where and when they need it."

"This around-the-clock work has already begun to improve supply with most manufacturers, now producing at normal or expanded capacity," an FDA spokesperson told CBS News. "The FDA expects that the measures and steps it's taking with infant formula manufacturers will help to increase supply. At the same time, it is important that the FDA continue its work to ensure that Abbott can undertake safe resumption of production of infant formula at Abbott Nutrition's Sturgis, Michigan facility, to further alleviate these supply challenges, which remains an important focus."

As parents scramble to find baby formula, a new manufacturer is seeing soaring demand

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The vast majority of baby formula  about 98% of what's consumed  is produced domestically. The FDA has strict requirements about the vitamin content, formula packaging and labeling that raise high barriers to importing formula. And the U.S. also imposes 17.5% tariffs on imports of infant formula.

Some lawmakers like GOP Sen. Josh Hawley, of Missouri, have questioned why the Biden administration hasn't done more to bring the Abbott facility back on line.

"Has Biden explored using the Defense Production Act to reopen the formula plant his FDA closed, or is he going to continue to just sit around," Hawley tweeted Thursday.

Senior administration officials, asked about the DPA, said they'll "continue to explore every option on the table." The president met with the leadership of companies that make infant formula on Thursday, and those producers conveyed what they need from the administration, senior administration officials said. The officials didn't elaborate on the exchanges in the meeting.

They also pushed back on the criticism from some Republicans that the Biden administration is doing too little, too late.

"I can assure you that this is not new to the White House's radar," one official on the call with reporters said. "We have been working on this issue since the very beginning in the days leading up to the recall and ever since then. Since mid-February, we have been working closely with USDA and FDA"

The president spoke with companies that produce and sell infant formula Thursday.

"Today we had a productive conversation with President Biden on ways we can work together to address the nation's infant formula shortage," a spokesperson for Enfamil said. "We are running our plants 24/7, which has enabled us to increase supply to parents and infants by more than 30% - feeding over 200,000 more babies than at the start of the shortage."

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A federal jury in Erie has ruled against a woman's claims that she was sexually harassed while she worked at the Crawford Area Transportation Authority.

The jury on Tuesday ended the civil trial in the case by issuing a verdict in the favor of the Meadville-based bus service and against the plaintiff, Leigh Ann Kanish.

She had claimed she left her employment at CATA in May 2017 after her supervisor, Ben Walker, made repeated sexual advances and inappropriate comments. Kanish started at CATA in 2012 as a part-time bus driver, according to court records. Her last job for CATA was fixed-route supervisor, a full-time job.

Suit filed:Crawford-area bus service faces sexual harassment lawsuit

The jury found that Kanish failed to prove she was subjected to a hostile work environment that was motivated by her gender, and the jury found that she failed to prove CATA unlawfully retaliated against her, according to the verdict slip.

"We are very pleased with the verdict," said Tim Geibel, the general manager of CATA, which serves Crawford and Venango counties.

Geibel said Walker "left employment" with CATA earlier this year.

CATA was the sole defendant named in the six-count complaint.

Kanish, then 61, sued in U.S. District Court in Erie in November 2019. Testimony in her trial started Friday in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Susan Paradise Baxter.

CATA denied the harassment claims and said Kanish at one point resigned and then agreed to come back on the condition that Walker would be her supervisor because of "personality conflicts" with a prior supervisor, according to court records. CATA said Walker and others at CATA denied any knowledge of Kanish's complaints.

A jury in U.S. District Court in Erie has ruled against a woman who claimed she was sexually harassed at the Crawford Area Transportation Authority.

Kanish was never fired, but claimed her second and final resignation was tantamount to constructive discharge due to what she said was harassment.

"Kanish admits that she never reported any of Walkers alleged activities to anyone in the supervisory chain of command," the lawyer for CATA, Sean Summers, of York, said in a pretrial narrative.

Story continues

Stay informed:Download the GoErie app to get all the latest updates

Though Kanish not complaining to Walker, her immediate supervisor, "would be understandable," according to the narrative, "it makes no logical sense that Kanish reported nothing to anyone else," including CATA's director of human resources.

Kanish's lawyer, David Koller, of Philadelphia, said in his pretrial narrative the Kanish was repeatedly subjected to sexual harassment. Koller said Kanish feared she would lose her job if she complained to officials at CATA.

"Accordingly, Plaintiff kept silent and endured the ongoing hostile work environment," according to Kanish's pretrial narrative.

Response filed:Crawford-area bus service denies harassment claims

Commenting on the verdict, Koller said the crux of his case was showing why Kanish did not report the harassment.

"Sometimes people who are sexually harassed or feel they are being sexually harassed are scared to report it. It is hard to convey that fear," Koller said.

Koller said he and Kanish will discuss whether to appeal.

"We wish the folks at CATA well," Koller said. "My client was able to be heard. We respect the jury's decision."

Contact Ed Palattella at epalattella@timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter @ETNpalattella.

This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Sexual harassment: Jury rejects claims against Crawford bus service
New York City federal prosecutors are seeking a dramatically reduced sentence of about two years for two Brooklyn lawyers accused of firebombing an NYPD vehicle during riots that erupted after George Floyds death in May 2020 as part of a new plea deal disclosed in court documents Tuesday.

In a letter filed Tuesday, prosecutors for the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Eastern District of New York said Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman, both attorneys from Brooklyn, agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit arson. Under the deal, prosecutors agreed to recommend an 18- to 24-month sentence, but a judge could still impose the maximum sentence of five years behind bars.

Thats down from the governments previous plan to see a 10-year sentence with terrorism enhancement, discussed in an October 2021 Brooklyn federal court hearing during which Mattis and Rahman each previously pleaded guilty to one count of possessing and making a destructive device.

MINNEAPOLIS TEEN COUSIN OF AMIR LOCKE ACCEPTS PLEA DEAL, TRIED AS ADULT IN MURDER THAT PROMPTED SWAT RAID

The original indictment included a 40-year mandatory minimum count and Mattis and Rahman risked a punishment of life imprisonment, according to N.Y. Daily News. The duo spent weeks in jail following their initial arrest on May 30, 2020, but have been on home confinement for most of the past two years.

"There is absolutely no justification for lowballing the sentence for an anti-police terrorist attack," Patrick J. Lynch, president of New York Citys Police Benevolent Association, said in a statement.

This image shows one of many NYPD vehicles burned in New York City during demonstrations that broke out on May 31, 2020, after George Floyd's death. GHI/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

"Its bad enough that these dangerous criminals have been allowed to sit at home for the past two years," Lynch added. "Handing them a below-guidelines sentence would give a green light to other anti-police radicals who seek to advance their cause through violence. The judge must reject this request."

Tuesdays letter asks U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan to convert a May 18 hearing scheduled for debate over the terrorism enhancement to a change of plea hearing, saying prosecutors, noting the defendants lack of prior criminal history, plan to replace the original indictment, according to Law.com.

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The initial complaint alleges an NYPD surveillance camera recorded then 31-year-old Rahman tossing a Molotov cocktail at an unoccupied NYPD vehicle parked near the 88th Precinct in Brooklyn, New York, and then fleeing in a tan minivan. Mattis, then 32, was the alleged getaway driver.

Officers pursued the minivan, and, while placing Rahman and Mattis under arrest, allegedly observed several precursor items used to build Molotov cocktails, including a lighter, a bottle filled with toilet paper and a liquid suspected to be gasoline near the passenger seat and a gasoline tank in the back.

Law.com noted that because Rahman and Mattis were arrested when Donald Trump was still president and pleaded guilty days after U.S. Attorney Breon Peace was sworn in, their supporters had hoped President Bidens appointee might have his Brooklyn federal prosecutors take a new look at the case.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled Wednesday that the case of Crystal Mason be reconsidered by a lower appeals court.

Crystal Mason, who was sentenced to five years in prison for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 election while she was on supervised release from a federal conviction, will have her case heard again.

The New York Times is reporting that The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals found that a lower appeals court wrongfully upheld parts of Masons 2018 conviction. Specifically, the Second Court of Appeals in Tarrant County said in 2020 that her unawareness that she was ineligible to vote was irrelevant to her prosecution. The Criminal Appeals court disagreed Wednesday, ruling that her case be reconsidered.

In this April 2018 photo, Crystal Mason speaks to the media in downtown Dallas. Mason, who was sentenced in 2018 to five years in prison for voting illegally in 2016, while she was on supervised release from a federal conviction, said she didnt know she wasnt allowed to vote. (Photo: Andy Jacobsohn/The Dallas Morning News via AP)

Masons attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union have argued that per the Help America Vote Act of 2002, provisional ballots should not be criminalized because they did not represent an actual vote.

Further, Masons lawyers have argued that state laws in Texas stipulated that knowingly voting illegally was key to being guilty of the crime.

According to the report, Mason was advised by a poll worker that she could submit a provisional ballot in the 2016 election. However, as a felon on probation, she was ineligible to vote.

Her vote was never counted.

I am pleased that the court acknowledged issues with my conviction, and am ready to defend myself against these cruel charges, said Mason in a statement. My life has been upended for what was, at worst, an innocent misunderstanding of casting a provisional ballot that was never even counted. I have been called to this fight for voting rights and will continue to serve my community.

We believe that ultimately what is right will prevail and will continue to support Ms. Mason as she battles this miscarriage of justice, said Tommy Buser-Clancy, senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Texas. Ms. Mason never would have risked her liberty by submitting a provisional ballot if she knew the State considered her ineligible to vote. She followed the rules, committed no crime, yet was slapped with an egregious 5-year sentence. We hope the court system soon will overturn this unwarranted conviction. Ms. Mason and her family have fought this for far too long.

Story continues

Masons conviction has been frequently referenced on social media to highlight the disparities in voter fraud cases, particularly after Republican state legislatures continue to perpetuate The Big Lie that there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election in minority communities.

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The post Woman sentenced to 5 years for voter fraud gets second chance to plead her case appeared first on TheGrio.
The president and prime minister of Finland, a country on the border of Russia, released a statement backing an application for membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Thursday amid the Kremlin's aggression on Europe's eastern flank, particularly in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman issued an ominous statement on the move.

"NATO membership would strengthen Finlands security," Finland President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said in a joint statement. "As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defence alliance."

They called for the country to proceed immediately.

UK SHORES UP DEFENSIVE ALLIANCE WITH SWEDEN, FINLAND AS COUNTRIES FLOAT NATO MEMBERSHIP

"Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay," the leaders added. "We hope that the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days."

Finland President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin address a press conference on Russia's invasion of Ukraine in Helsinki, on Feb. 24, 2022. Markku Ulander/Lehtikuva/AFP via Getty Images

In the statement, Niinisto and Marin noted that the country has engaged in "an important discussion" on NATO membership, for which "time has been needed to let Parliament and the whole society establish their stands on the matter." The country also delayed in order to develop "close international contacts with NATO and its member countries, as well as with Sweden."

Dmitry Pesvok, Putin's spokesman, said that "Finlands entry into NATO will become a threat to Russia."

The statement comes one day after the United Kingdom shored up its defense alliances with Sweden and Finland.

"Today we made history by signing a joint declaration of solidarity to strengthen our security and defense ties and bring our nations even closer together," UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in a tweet after meeting with his Swedish counterpart. "We are literally and metaphorically in the same boat."

Germany and the United States already have agreements to defend Finland and Sweden against Russian aggression.

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Last month Moscow threatened that if Sweden and Finland joined the military alliance then it would position nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles along its western border.

Sweden has avoided military alliances for more than 200 years, while Finland adopted neutrality after being defeated by the Soviet Union in World War II.

The capital city of Finland, Helsinki, sits across the Gulf of Finland from Russia's historic capital, St. Petersburg.
Finland's president and prime minister said on Thursday they were in favour of joining NATO and a formal decision would be taken this weekend, after Russia's war in Ukraine sparked a swift u-turn in opinion.

"Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay," President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said in a joint statement.

Niinisto has often served as a mediator between Russia and the West.

"NATO membership would strengthen Finland's security. As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defence alliance," the statement said.

A special committee will announce Finland's formal decision on a membership bid on Sunday, the statement added.

The two leaders had been widely expected to come out in favour of joining the Western military alliance.

"Joining NATO would not be against anyone," Niinisto told reporters on Wednesday, amid Russian warnings of consequences if Helsinki were to seek membership.

His response to Russia would be: "You caused this. Look in the mirror," he said.

As recently as January, amid tensions between the West and Russia, Marin said a bid would be "very unlikely" during her current mandate, which ends in April 2023.

But after its powerful eastern neighbour invaded Ukraine on February 24, Finland's political and public opinion swung dramatically in favour of membership as a deterrent against Russian aggression.

A poll published on Monday by public broadcaster Yle showed that a record 76 percent of Finns now support joining the alliance, up from the steady 20-30 percent registered in recent years.

Finland shares a 1,300-kilometre (800-mile) border with Russia and has been militarily non-aligned for decades.

In 1939, it was invaded by the Soviet Union.

Finns put up a fierce fight during the Winter War but were ultimately forced to cede a huge stretch of its eastern Karelia province in a peace treaty with Moscow.

Iro Sarkka, a NATO expert from the University of Helsinki, told AFP before the announcement that Niinisto, who had refrained from revealing his stance on membership, had nonetheless dropped hints that he was leaning toward supporting a bid.

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"The president no longer talks about the EU defence option or the role of Finland as the mediator between the East and the West," she said.

- Next steps -

On Wednesday, the Finnish parliament's defence committee also concluded that membership of NATO would be the "best option" for Finland's security, as the Russian invasion had eroded the security situation in Europe.

A large majority in Finland's parliament backs membership.

"It is 100-percent certain that Finland will apply and quite likely that it will be a member by the end of the year," researcher Charly Salonius-Pasternak of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs told AFP before Thursday's announcement.

Neighbouring Sweden is also contemplating joining the military alliance and the two countries are widely expected to present a joint bid.

For Finland, the next step is for the President and Ministerial Committee on Foreign and Security Policy -- a body made up of the president, prime minister and up to six other cabinet ministers -- to meet on Sunday.

The committee will make the formal decision for Finland to submit an application, with the proposal then presented to parliament.

After an official bid is submitted to the alliance, lawmakers in all 30 NATO member states would need to ratify its application, a process that can take months.

Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said on Tuesday he believed Finland could be a full NATO member "at the earliest" on October 1.

"The NATO secretary general has said that this process will take between four and 12 months. My own impression is that it might be closer to four months than 12 months," Haavisto said.

ehu/po/gil
STORY: President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said in a joint statement they hoped that the steps still needed for a decision would "be taken rapidly within the next few days". Neighbor Sweden is expected to follow suit.

"I think it's a great thing because it will bring more safety to Finland against Russian aggression and it also shows Russia that there are consequences for what you do," said Helsinki resident Niko Ohvo.

The decision by the two Nordic countries to abandon the neutrality they maintained throughout the Cold War would be one of the biggest shifts in European security in decades.

Finland and Sweden are the two biggest EU countries that had stayed out of NATO, and Finland's 800-mile border will more than double the frontier between the U.S.-led alliance and Russia.

Moscow has repeatedly warned Finland and Sweden against joining NATO, threatening "serious military and political consequences".

In Helsinki, Jyrki Uuraasmaa said joining NATO was the best "security" solution.

"Russia have been threatening us so many times, now again, so it's absolutely that we should join NATO because, you know, (Russian President Vladimir) Putin started it, so he is affecting that we are joining NATO now," he said.

Putin's decision to invade Ukraine has caused a shift in public opinion in the Nordic region, with political parties that had backed neutrality for generations now coming to embrace the view that Russia is a menace.
Soon after defense lawyers for former Hialeah police Sgt. Jesus Menocal Jr. portrayed him as a good cop and family man, three of his sexual-assault victims stood up in Miami federal court and brought home the reality of his crimes as he faced sentencing on Thursday.

Menocal, youre a coward, said a 25-year-old woman, whom he forced to perform oral sex and have intercourse with him while he was on duty in late 2014. You have no value or respect for women at all. ... He hid behind a police uniform to abuse a 19-year-old  me.

He ruined my life, and I can never forget about it, said another young woman with mental health problems who was pressured into performing oral sex on Menocal in 2015.

Whatever time you receive will clearly not be enough, said another woman, who was detained by Menocal at a Hialeah police station and forced to undress as he attempted to have sex with her in 2015. You used your power to abuse children, and that will be your legacy.

Moved by their emotional statements, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams pronounced Menocals crimes a betrayal of the badge and sentenced him to a maximum of three years in prison, saying the 13-year Hialeah police veteran who had pleaded guilty to three civil rights charges did not follow the right path.

Menocals punishment capped a seven-year investigation that seemed to lose steam until the FBI arrested the sergeant in late 2019, accusing him of violating the civil rights of a handful of young women whom he detained and sexually abused while he was patrolling the streets of Hialeah and even in a local police station. Williams ordered Menocal, 34, to surrender to prison authorities on July 11, though federal prosecutors tried to persuade the judge to incarcerate him immediately.

Before his sentencing, Menocal gave a brief statement, but he did not apologize or express remorse for his criminal actions. I have had some dark times in the past seven years, and if it wasnt for my wife and family, I probably wouldnt be here today, he told the judge.

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The disgraced officer was sentenced under a misdemeanor plea deal that helped him avoid a potential life sentence if he had faced trial. As part of the deal, prosecutors dropped the main felony charge, primarily because of the risk of calling his victims, including a few former sex workers, to the witness stand, where they would have been vulnerable to tough questions from Menocals defense attorneys.

During Thursdays sentencing hearing, Menocals defense attorneys, Mycki Ratzan and Jude Faccidomo, tried to depict the police officers misconduct as aberrant  not indicative of a career highlighted by honors such as officer of the year in Hialeah. They proposed he should receive no incarceration in prison, and instead get a probationary sentence with time split between a halfway house and home detention.

The man who sits before you today is not the man who committed these crimes seven years ago, said Ratzan, who noted that more than 70 letters by family, friends and law enforcement officers in support of Menocal were submitted to the judge. Hes a different person.

Federal prosecutors, however, portrayed Menocal as a sexual predator in a police officers uniform. They condemned his criminal misconduct, saying he betrayed his oath to serve the community of Hialeah.

Prosecutor Kyle Boynton mocked the notion that Menocals crimes were aberrant, as his defense attorneys claimed. There are multiple crimes here; there are multiple victims, Boynton told the judge. This is not a one-off. ... He has not offered an explanation for his behavior.

In March, the fired officer pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor charges accusing him of forcing three female victims to touch his penis, perform oral sex or have intercourse while he was on duty, according to federal court records. The three incidents were part of a series of complaints dating back to 2014 and 2015 that included alleged oral sex involving a 14-year-old girl.

Despite investigations by Hialeah police and the Miami-Dade State Attorneys Office, Menocal was suspended from duty but then reinstated by Police Chief Sergio Velazquez. Velazquez only fired him after FBI agents arrested Menocal in December 2019, and the chief was removed from office two years later.

As part of his plea agreement, Menocal agreed to surrender his police license and not reapply for any law enforcement position. Still, with a misdemeanor conviction, he could possess a weapon and resume work in a firearms training school that is owned by his family. His father, Jesus Menocal Sr., is the former police chief in Sweetwater. His uncle, Ignacio Menocal, was also a police officer.

In addition, under the federal civil rights statute in his case, Menocal wont be required to register as a sex offender with the state of Florida.

As part of the plea deal with the U.S. Attorneys Office, the first felony charge in Menocals indictment was dropped  though he acknowledged the victims allegation in a statement filed in court. The charge alleged that in June 2015 he stopped a 17-year-old girl, took her to a Hialeah police substation, and forced her to undress in a camera-less room while pressuring her to have sex. That original charge included an accusation of kidnapping that carried up to life in prison.

I had never felt so disgusted and humiliated in my life, the woman, now 24, said in court Thursday.

The three misdemeanor counts to which Menocal pleaded guilty dont include any reference to the aggravating factor of kidnapping or threatening the use of his police-issued weapon, which carried up to 10 years imprisonment. So, as misdemeanors, the counts came with far less punishment under federal law  up to one year each.

Edward Stamm, the lead prosecutor, noted in a sentencing memo that the absence of a specific felony enhancement for the defendants sexual abuse and abusive sexual contact is a core reason why the defendant faces a [federal] guidelines sentence of 36 months of incarceration instead of the much higher term of incarceration.

Stamm also pointed out that Congress passed legislation two weeks after Menocal pleaded guilty in March that imposes far harsher penalties for the type of civil rights violations involving sexual abuse that he committed in 2014 and 2015  but the new law is not retroactive to his offenses.

Two of the three counts to which Menocal pleaded guilty involved non-consensual sexual acts punishable up to 40 years under the new law, Stamm noted.

Although prosecutors did not indicate why they offered Menocal the plea deal, several sources say there was concern that his victims would not hold up under cross-examination by defense attorneys who planned to question them about their past, including prostitution in some instances.

Menocals arrest came one month after the Miami Herald reported that his alleged misconduct was first revealed to Hialeah police in 2015, when four women and girls told investigators that the sergeant had assaulted them. The youngest victim was just 14 when she said Menocal forced her to perform oral sex after threatening her with jail time if she didnt comply. The oldest victim, in her 20s, fell out of a moving car and died just months after being questioned by authorities.

In his plea agreement and factual statement, Menocal admitted to using his authority as a police officer to deprive three female victims of unreasonable searches and seizures.

In court papers, federal prosecutors elaborated on how Menocal preyed on the three victims who formed the basis of the criminal case against him  though authorities cited several other victims. Police surveillance footage showed Menocal taking 11 women into a Hialeah police substation in a one-month period between May and June 2015, according to prosecutors.

All of these incidents occurred on the weekend or after 5:00 p.m., prosecutors wrote in court documents. The video evidence then shows the defendant bringing each of these women into closed rooms in the substation that were not covered by the surveillance system.

Menocal did not file reports documenting any of these encounters, a violation of police protocol.

Had Menocals case gone to trial, prosecutors were planning to present evidence of other young women who accused Menocal of sexually assaulting them while on duty. They also planned to call as a witness a police academy cadet who was allegedly impregnated by Menocal while he was working as her instructor. According to federal court records, Menocal tried to pressure the cadet into having an abortion.
Associated Press

Hungary's military has found a new mission in life for a talented dog who was rescued from abusive owners, recruiting 2-year-old Logan to serve in counterterrorism operations for an elite bomb squad. The Belgian shepherd is undergoing intensive training as an explosives detection dog for the explosive ordnance disposal and warship regiment of the Hungarian Defense Forces. At the unit's garrison on the Danube River in the capital Budapest, Logan receives daily socialization and obedience exercises, and is trained to recognize the smell of 25 different explosive substances.
WASHINGTON  The U.S. Marine Corps first unit designed to carry out new concepts of operations conducted its first exercise in the Philippines and is now preparing to start a range of experimentation and training events this year.

The service this spring formally transformed 3rd Marine Regiment into 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment, which will be organized and equipped in new and modern ways. The Corps already activated the 3rd Littoral Anti-Air Battalion under the regiment, and by this fall it will also have a combat logistics battalion and a littoral combat team.

Col. Tim Brady, who commands the 3rd MLR, said the new unit has much to learn about leveraging these battalions and a slew of subject matter experts at the headquarters level as it operates small units of Marines across wide swaths of maritime space to have an outsized effect on the enemy.

The experimentation began in early March, before the Corps formally redesignated the regiment. Last fall, the regiment conducted a service-level training event at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms, California, where it was already starting to conduct operations quite a bit differently than what a traditional infantry regiment would, Brady said during a panel discussion at the Modern Day Marine conference this week.

In March, just weeks after the redesignation ceremony, a portion of the MLR shipped out from Hawaii to the Philippines for the exercise Balikatan. Brady told reporters that the terrain used this year was new for the annual exercise, and was meant to challenge the MLR and its Philippine counterpart as they eye new types of operations.

U.S. Marines with 1st Battalion, 3d Marines conduct an air assault alongside Philippine marines during the exercise Balikatan in Claveria, Philippines, on March 31, 2022. (Cpl. Scott Aubuchon/U.S. Marine Corps)

The Philippine Marine Corps stood up a coastal defense regiment that looks similar to the MLR, Brady said, and the American regiment was on hand for the activation of the Philippine regiments new shore-based, anti-ship missile battery, similar to the MLRs littoral combat team.

During the exercise, the units operated out of the northern tip of Luzon, facing the Luzon Strait between the Philippines and Taiwan, rather than in the more conventional Subic Bay or Clark Air Base, farther south near Manila.

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Brady said this exercise gave U.S. Marines a chance to review the expeditionary advanced base operations concept, which challenges them to move agilely among islands and coastal locations, performing missions and then moving again before they are spotted and targeted.

Similarly, the Philippine Marine Corps got a glimpse of its new archipelagic coastal defense concept, which was published last year.

Brady said at the conference panel that 3rd MLR will refocus on experimentation at its Hawaii home base this fall, after participating in the multinational Rim of the Pacific exercise over the summer. He said the Hawaiian Islands are an archipelago that mirrors the first island chain in the Pacific, and using a stern landing vessel  a civilian ship on contract from Hornbeck Offshore Services to serve as a surrogate for the future light amphibious warship  the MLR will be able to mirror flying into Subic Bay and then moving north into Northern Luzon or Itbayat Island as part of expeditionary advanced base operations.

What were doing in the state of Hawaii is providing us that opportunity to train and experiment with the vessels that will move from island to island, he told reporters.

As an example, he said the Marines might move from Oahu to the big island of Hawaii on the stern landing vessel, then conduct operations at the Pohakuloa Training Area. While ashore, their stern landing vessel wont stay at port; it will go back out to sea and move around for its own survivability. During that time, Brady suggested, the ship could help the regiment ashore by retrieving spare parts, ammunition or other supplies.

U.S. Marines and Navy sailors conduct flight operations from the expeditionary mobile base Miguel Keith during the exercise Balikatan off the coast of the Philippines on March 28, 2022. (Sgt. Kallahan Morris/U.S. Marine Corps)

Brady also said the experimentation plan includes more than testing out the stern landing vessel. First, theres the organization of the MLR and its capabilities.

For example, he said during the panel presentation, how many personnel from the littoral combat team are needed to establish an expeditionary advanced base that can launch Naval Strike Missiles at an enemy ship? How many Marines from the littoral anti-air battalion and the combat logistics battalion need to support that effort? How many expeditionary advanced bases must work together to create an entire force package for the mission at hand, and what aircraft are needed to move that force package?

Additionally, he said, the littoral anti-air battalion brings capabilities that an infantry regiment has never had: ground-based air defense using the Marine Air Defense Integrated System and the Medium Range Intercept Capability, air surveillance and early warning, the ability to track the direction of incoming fires, and establishing forward arming and refueling points for other Marine or joint force aircraft.

Brady said the MLR would have to learn more about these capabilities and how to best employ them as part of the new regimental construct and in support of new concepts.

Members of the Philippine Marine Corps and U.S. Marines with 1st Battalion, 3d Marines exchange tactics and techniques for drones during the Balikatan drills in Claveria, Philippines, on March 31, 2022. (Cpl. Scott Aubuchon/U.S. Marine Corps)

Second, the colonel said, early experimentation would look at how to net sensors and effects together to make decisions faster and more resilient  and to identify what systems are properly talking to each other versus where the joint force must invest in further digital interoperability.

Brady said this experimentation would include kinetic effects like the Naval Strike Missile, but he made clear it would also include that which might happen well before the Corps decides to fire, including aspects of signals intelligence, information operations, space and cyber.

The new regiment and its subordinate units will be fully stood up by February 2023. Lessons learned from training and experimentation will inform transformation of the next MLR, which will come from the Okinawa-based 12th Marine Regiment, an artillery unit. The regiment will transform to 12th Marine Littoral Regiment in fiscal 2025.
ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Kurdish militants fired rockets and mortar shells from Syria in an attack on a military border post in southeast Turkey on Thursday, wounding four Turkish soldiers and a civilian, the Turkish Defence Ministry said.

It said the Turkish military carried out retaliatory fire against targets in the Kobani region of northern Syria from where the attack was made.

Such incidents of cross-border fire have occurred sporadically in past years during the war in Syria.

The five people wounded in Turkey, in the Karkamis district of Gaziantep province, were taken to hospital for treatment, the ministry said.

The Kobani region is under the control of the Kurdish YPG militia, which Turkey considers a terrorist group and an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has fought an insurgency in southeast Turkey since 1984.

(Reporting by Daren Butler; Editing by Alex Richardson)
Floribert Chebeya, murdered in 2010, received regular threats in his 20-year career

A Congolese military court has sentenced a high-ranking policeman to death for his role in the 2010 murder of human rights activist Floribert Chebeya, which caused national outrage.

Commissioner of police Christian Ngoy Kenga Kenga was found guilty of murder, desertion and misappropriation of weapons and ammunition.

Mr Chebeya's body was found bound and gagged in his car in Kinshasa.

There is a moratorium on capital punishments in DR Congo.

However, the death penalty has not been abolished and military courts continue to hand down such sentences.

Another policeman, Jacques Migabo, was also sentenced to 12 years during the trial.

He admitted to having strangled Mr Chebeya and his driver, Fidele Bazana.

Police commissioner Paul Mwilambwe, who had been a key witness in the trial, was acquitted, UN-sponsored Radio Okapi says.

Mr Mwilambwe, who had been a fugitive since the murder and was only repatriated last year, named ex-President Joseph Kabila and the former head of police General John Numbi, as having ordered the killing.

Neither Mr Kabila nor Gen Numbi have commented publicly, but a military court has charged the general with the murder of Mr Chebeya and his driver.

He has fled the country and his current whereabouts are not known.

Kenga, Migabo and Mr Mwilambwe were initially sentenced to death in 2011, with Kenga arrested in 2020 in the southern city of Lubumbashi before the case was re-opened last September.

Mr Chebeya led the Congolese charity Voice of the Voiceless, and as a prominent critic of the government received regular death threats during his career of more than 20 years.

He went to the police headquarters to meet the then head of the national police force, Gen Numbi, on the day he was killed.

His driver Mr Bazana also went missing that day with authorities later pronouncing him dead.

The killing of Mr Chebeya prompted widespread international condemnation.

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A Florida circuit court judge has blocked the states congressional redistricting plan drawn by Governor Ron DeSantis administration that would likely eliminate two of the states four districts represented by Black Democrats and create four more districts that lean Republican.

Judge Layne Smith, who issued a ruling from the bench on 11 May, said the map violates the states constitutional provisions governing the redistricting process because it diminishes African Americans ability to elect candidates of their choice in Floridas 5th District, which spans Jacksonville to Tallahassee.

The ruling calls on the state to adopt a map that restores the boundaries of the district  currently represented by Democratic US Rep Al Lawson  to represent a near majority-Black voting age population, dealing a blow to the Republican governor, whose office has pledged to appeal.

A version approved by the governor and Republican state legislators would reduce Floridas 5th District to nearly a third of its original size and disperse roughly 370,000 Black voters among four other districts, diluting their voting power, according to voting rights advocates.

The minority vote is lowered enough that you would expect it to be substantially harder for minorities to elect the candidate of their choice, said Judge Smith, who was initially appointed by then-Governor Rick Scott and promoted by Governor DeSantis.

Florida state legislators initially passed maps that still included Republican gains, but the governor pledged to veto both of them. He convened a special legislative session to approve the plan; Democratic legislators staged a sit-in demonstration ahead of a final vote in protest.

Voting rights advocates launched a legal challenge, arguing that the plan violates the states Fair Districts standards, which were approved by Florida voters to prevent gerrymandered districts.

Rep Lawson said in a statement that DeSantis is wrong for enacting this Republican-leaning map that is in clear violation of the US and state constitutions.

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It is critical to maintain [the 5th District] so minority voters have a voice at the ballot box in November, he said. I am optimistic that future courts will also do what is right.

Democratic state Rep Joseph Geller, who sits on the House Redistricting Committee, said in a statement following the ruling that the governor chose to waste taxpayer dollars convening a special session to double-down on diminishing minority voting rights.

While this isnt the final opinion, we have to continue advocating for a constitutionally compliant Congressional map that does not infringe on Floridians right, he said.

Committee member and Democratic state Rep Kelly Skidmore said the ruling should come as no surprise to the governor and this Republican-led legislature that the map is a violation of Floridas Fair Districts amendments and the US constitution.

The latest congressional map is among the last to await approval amid a contested redistricting cycle across the US, the once-a-decade process of redrafting the nations political boundaries based on US Census results, as candidates head into 2022 midterm elections that will determine the balance of power in Congress.

Floridas primary elections begin on 23 August. Qualifiying begins on 13 June.

The nations third-largest state gained one congressional seat in 2022 because of its growing population, for a total of 28 seats in the US House of Representatives.

Governor DeSantis proposed map would also dismantle a Tampa Bay-area seat held by Democratic Rep Charlie Crist, who is running for governor.

A statement from the governors communications director Taryn Fenske said that the state will appeal the ruling, arguing that these complex constitutional matters of law were always going to be decided at the appellate level.
A former employee of GEICOs call center in Macon is suing the insurance company for allegedly violating federal labor laws and retaliating against her when she complained.

In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court in Macon, Amalia Benvenutti claims GEICO routinely did not pay her for all the hours she worked and required her and other employees to underreport hours.

As a customer service representative, Benvenutti alleges she was scheduled to work eight hours and 15 minutes a day, but only paid for seven hours and 45 minutes when a 30-minute unpaid lunch break was factored in.

However, the lawsuit claims CSRs are only paid for the number of hours theyre logged into a software application called Finesse. Employees are given a quota on the number of calls they have to handle during their 7.75 hour work day, and not meeting the quota may result in discipline for poor work performance, the lawsuit alleges.

Answering emails, booting up her work computer and frequent issues with the software resulted in Benvenutti having to work during her unpaid break or after her shift had ended, the lawsuit claims, during her three years at GEICO.

The lawsuit alleges GEICO violated the Fair Labor Standards Act and owes Benvenutti compensation for all the hours worked, including unpaid overtime hours.

The lawsuit also claims the company created a hostile work environment for her after Benvenutti complained about the unpaid hours to management and HR.

GEICO has three weeks to respond to the lawsuit. The Macon office is GEICOs largest regional office with around 7,000 employees.
A former Fulton County teacher has pleaded guilty to raping a student and has been sentenced to a decade in prison.

Last September, Robert Vandel, a teacher at Lyndon Academy, left campus in handcuffs accused of raping a student at Fulton Academy of Science and Technology in Roswell. Vandel taught science at the Fulton Academy in 2020 and the victim was allegedly a student in one of his classes.

Vandel was fired from Lyndon Academy shortly after his arrest.

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Last week, the 64-year-old pleaded guilty to rape, aggravated child molestation, false imprisonment and two counts of child molestation.

A Fulton County superior court judge sentenced Vandel to ten years in prison without the possibility of parole.

After his sentence, Vandel will spend the rest of his life on probation and the sex offender registry.

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Last October, the GBI said that they believe there are more victims in Holly Springs, Canton, Woodstock, Valdosta, Duluth, Savannah, Midland, Ga. and Opelika, Al.

All of the victims that have been identified were children under the age of 15 at the time of the assaults.

Vandel is still being held in the Fulton County Jail.

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Fort Collins police have arrested two people after a man was kidnapped from a convenience store then taken to a storage facility where he was stabbed Sunday.

Police believe the 44-year-old victim knew the suspects, according to a news release.

The victim told investigators he was kidnapped from a convenience store in south Fort Collins and driven to a storage facility on East Mulberry Street where he was assaulted and stabbed, according to the release.

After the assault, he was driven to a neighborhood and dropped off. Police were called when the man knocked on a door on Sherwood Forest Court in northeast Fort Collins and asked for help.

The man was taken to the hospital and is expected to recover, according to police.

Police searched the storage unit where the man said he was assaulted, with the help of Larimer County' Sheriff's Office SWAT.

Police arrested two people early this week in connection with this incident, both of whom they say know the victim.

Amanda Causey, 40 of Wellington, was arrested May 9 on allegations of first-degree kidnapping, aggravated robbery, criminal extortion and second-degree assault, according to court records.

Robert Williamson, 57 of Fort Collins, was arrested May 10 on allegations of first-degree kidnapping, criminal extortion, second-degree assault and tampering with evidence, according to court records.

Both remain in the Larimer County Jail as of Thursday morning, Causey on a $252,000 bond and Williamson on a $400,000 bond, according to jail records.

Causey is next scheduled to appear in court Monday and Williamson is scheduled to appear Tuesday.

Anyone with information about this incident can contact Detective Brian Werder at 970-221-6543 or share information anonymously through Crime Stoppers of Larimer County at 970-221-6868 or www.stopcriminals.org.

All suspects are innocent until proven guilty in court. Arrests and charges are merely accusations by law enforcement until, and unless, a suspect is convicted of a crime.

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Editor's note: An earlier version of this story misstated the time the Coloradoan confirmed Causey and Williamson remained in jail custody. That has been updated.

Sady Swanson covers public safety, criminal justice, Larimer County government and more throughout Northern Colorado. You can send your story ideas to her at sswanson@coloradoan.com or on Twitter at @sadyswan. Support her work and that of other Coloradoan journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today.

This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Fort Collins police arrest 2 suspected in kidnapping, stabbing
By John Irish

WEISSENHAUS, Germany (Reuters) -France summoned a senior Iranian diplomat on Thursday after two of its citizens were detained in Tehran in what Paris said was a baseless arrest, an incident likely to complicate ties between the countries as wider talks on reviving a nuclear deal stall.

Iran's intelligence ministry had said on Wednesday it had arrested two Europeans for allegedly fomenting "insecurity" there, but it had not revealed their nationalities.

"The French government condemns this baseless arrest. It calls for the immediate release of these two French nationals," the foreign ministry said in a statement, adding that Iran's Charge d'Affaires had been summoned.

The arrests come a week after a Swedish national was also detained and at a sensitive time, as the United States and parties to Iran's 2015 nuclear deal struggle to restore the pact that was abandoned in 2018 by then-U.S. President Donald Trump.

The EU's coordinator for the talks Enrique Mora has been in Tehran this week in what appeared to be another last ditch effort to salvage the accord.

"What I can see is an absence of progress on the nuclear file and in parallel provocations like these," a French diplomatic source told reporters ahead of a G7 foreign ministers meeting in northern Germany.

The two arrested were accused of "organising chaos and social disorder aimed at destabilising (Iran)" in conjunction with foreign intelligence services, Iranian state TV on Wednesday cited Iran's intelligence ministry as saying.

Christophe Lalande, federal secretary of France's FNEC FP-FO education union, told Reuters earlier on Thursday he suspected that one of his staffers and her husband, missing on a holiday in Iran, were the two arrested.

While there was no "absolute certainty", there was a "strong presumption" that it was her, Lalande said of his colleague, whom he named as Cecile Kohler. She was the union's international representative, he said.

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Kohler had been due back in France earlier this week, he said, adding: "We have had no news from our friend."

French authorities did not confirm the name but a second diplomatic source said it was accurate.

Two other French nationals are held in Iran on national security charges their lawyers say are politically motivated.

Rights groups have accused Iran of trying to extract concessions from other countries through such arrests. Iran has repeatedly dismissed the charge.

Western powers have long demanded that Tehran free their citizens, who they say are political prisoners.

In January, an Iranian court sentenced French national Benjamin Briere to eight years in prison on spying charges, his Paris-based lawyer said, describing the trial as a politically motivated sham and his client as a "bargaining chip".

That same month, Iran re-imprisoned Franco-Iranian academic Fariba Adelkhah, sentenced to five years in jail in 2020 but recently living under house arrest.

(Reporting by John Irish, Additional reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta and Geert de Clercq; Writing by John Irish and Ingrid Melander; Editing by Alison Williams)
The race to be the next leader of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), the largest conservative caucus in the House, is heating up, with two official contenders starting to take their campaigns public.

Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), 60, and Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.), 34, are publicly vying to replace outgoing term-limited Chairman Jim Banks (R-Ind.) as head of the nearly 50-year-old conservative caucus, which has major influence over House Republican policy.

In interviews with The Hill, Hern staked his campaign on a commitment to principled policy and pointed to his decades of experience in business, while Cammack focused on elevating the RSCs profile in members districts and advocated bringing a new generation of leadership to the table.

The position has been a launching pad for many up-and-coming House Republicans. Two are currently in House GOP leadership: Whip Steve Scalise (La.) and Conference Vice Chairman Mike Johnson (La.).

Other former chairs of the group, which includes more than 150 members, have gone on to become national Republican figures. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) also chaired the group before helping to found the House Freedom Caucus, as did former Vice President Mike Pence.

Hern, who is in his second House term, officially launched his campaign this week with an announcement video that praised former President Trump.

President Trumps America First Agenda gave us the greatest economy in the history of the world, Hern said in the video. No one will work harder to restore the conservative, America First agenda.

Hern is leaning into fiscally conservative principles and talked about the importance of conservative guardrails for GOP policy. He is currently head of the RSCs Budget and Spending Task Force and had a lead role in crafting the groups sample fiscal 2022 budget, released last year, that proposed $14 trillion in cuts that could balance the federal budget in five years.

Its unusual for the same person to spearhead the RSC budget two years in a row, he said, but he is planning to release a sample fiscal 2023 RSC budget in the coming weeks.

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The caucus has always been about conservative policy, Hern said. Its about the conservative conscience of the Republican Conference.

Formerly a hog farmer and an aerospace engineer, Hern went from poverty to prosperity as a businessman, starting with McDonalds franchises in the Tulsa area.

I spent 35 years in business and [am] a product of living in the poor side of America, coming up from really a tough environment and being able to experience the American dream, Hern said.

Hern rolled out his campaign with endorsements from 37 RSC colleagues. In campaign materials, he pledged to create a messaging task force that meets on fly-in days to discuss weekly themes. He also touted offering legislation that would withhold federal funds from states that do not certify elections on time.

Experience matters. Kevin is a proven leader in the business world, and he has proven himself to be a strong legislator and bridge builder in Congress, Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa.) said in a statement. He is the leader we need to pass a conservative agenda.

But the policy-oriented congressman has an energetic challenger in the first-term Cammack, who says that her goal as chair would be to make RSC a name for voters back home.

Im going to accomplish that through taking our conservative policy agenda items, member initiatives, really drive them here on the Hill, but then craft a tiered messaging system that works for members, Cammack said. What weve seen for a long time is a one-size-fits-all approach, and that doesnt work in todays environment. So if youre in an R-plus-two district, and youre having to take a tough vote, were going to help you with the tools to message that vote back home.

The 34-year-old congresswoman is trying to dispel any notion that her youth and first-term status are negatives, noting that she has years of campaign and policy experience through being deputy chief of staff, starting in 2013, to her predecessor, Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla).

We just had the year of the Republican woman, right? And theres only been one woman who has been in charge of RSC in its entire history, said Cammack, the youngest Republican woman in Congress. Former Rep. Sue Myrick (R-N.C.) was RSC chair from 2003 to 2004.

Theres a whole lot of talk about the next generation of leadership while the next generation is here. And we need a seat at the table, Cammack said.

Cammack said she has been organizing for her run since January. A formal announcement and campaign rollout is expected soon. Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), a fellow first-term lawmaker, is one of the members of her whip team.

She comes here, obviously, with a lot of detailed knowledge of our process overall, having served out and worked on the Hill, Donalds told The Hill. I think as a member, she has, in my view, one of the highest intellects from a conservative perspective.

Members will cast their votes for the next RSC chair after midterm elections, around the time of House GOP leadership elections.

Banks, 40, is rumored to be eyeing a GOP leadership slot in the next Congress. As RSC chair, he has expanded the groups communication staff, sent out frequent issue messaging memos to members and the press, and created an RSC Roadmap newsletter covering current political news.

His position as chair helped raise his profile. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) picked Banks to be ranking member on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot before House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) vetoed that choice, prompting McCarthy to withdraw from the committee altogether.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
A Georgia death row inmate set to be executed for the 1976 murder of an 8-year-old girl and rape of a 10-year-old girl has made his last meal request, according to the Georgia Department of Corrections

Virgil Delano Presnell, Jr. is scheduled to be executed on May 17 at 7 p.m. Presnell, 68, was accused of abducting and attacking the two girls as they walked home from school in Cobb County, just outside Atlanta, on May 4, 1976.

Presnell asked for four hamburgers, four French fries, two vanilla milkshakes, four sodas, and 8-piece bucket of chicken, potato salad and two pints of vanilla ice cream as his last meal.

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Death row inmates are typically allowed to ask for a last meal before being executed.

Presnell would be the first person executed by the state of Georgia since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. The last person executed by Georgia was Donnie Cleveland Lance in January 2020. Georgia uses an injection of the sedative pentobarbital to carry out executions.

Virgil was convicted in August 1976 on charges including malice murder, kidnapping and rape and was sentenced to death. His death sentence was overturned in 1992 but was reinstated in March 1999.

TRENDING STORIES:

Presnell staked out a Cobb County elementary school on May 3, 1976, and saw a 10-year-old girl walking home on a wooded trail. He returned the next day, and abducted the girl and her 8-year-old friend, Lori Ann Smith, when they came walking down the trail, according to evidence at trial outlined in a Georgia Supreme Court ruling.

He drove the two girls to a secluded wooded area, made them undress and raped the older girl, the ruling says. The younger girl tried to run as he took her back to the car, but Presnell caught her, shoved her face underwater in a creek and drowned her.

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Presnell then locked the older girl in his car trunk, began driving and dropped her in a wooded area when he got a flat tire. Throughout, Presnell had forced her to engage in sex acts multiple times, the ruling says.

Presnell had told the girl hed return, but she heard sounds from a nearby gas station and walked there. She described Presnell and his car with a flat tire to police, who found him changing his tire at his apartment complex near where hed left the older girl.

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At first, Presnell denied everything but later he led police to the 8-year-old girls body and confessed, the ruling says. Police found a handgun and child pornography showing young girls in his bedroom.

Attorneys for Presnell have said in court filings that Presnell was born to a teenage mother who drank and smoked heavily throughout her pregnancy. Presnell suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome that damaged his brain and kept him from ever developing into a functioning, responsible adult, his lawyers argued.

Coupled with a childhood marked by ongoing violence, alcoholism, and sexual and physical abuse, it is not at all difficult to see how he developed into an adult with serious disturbances which, left unchecked and untreated, could produce tragic results, his lawyers wrote in a filing arguing that his sentence was unconstitutional.

His attorneys have filed an emergency motion to postpone Presnells execution.
Fynn Kliemann has apologized after allegations his company sent faulty masks to refugees. picture alliance/Getty Images

YouTuber Fynn Kliemann apologized after he was accused of sending faulty masks to refugees.

He was also accused of having masks made in Bangladesh and advertising them as "produced in Europe."

Kliemann said he should have done more research and that "every person deserves the same protection"

A German YouTuber has apologized to his friends, followers, and business partners after facing allegations he sent faulty masks to refugee organizations and misled buyers about where they were manufactured.

An investigation aired May 5 on the German late night show "ZDF Magazin Royale" that focused on Kliemann and German textile company Global Tactics. The host, satirist Jan Bohmermann, claimed in the segment that Kliemann and his business partner Tom Illbruck sold masks through Global Tactics that were made in Bangladesh, but were all labeled and advertized as being "produced in Europe" under "fair" conditions.

Bohmermann, whose show has drawn comparisons to comedian John Oliver's mix of satire and investigation, also claimed that the masks Global Tactics donated to refugee organizations in Greece and Bosnia turned out to be "unusable."

Fynn Kliemann, who has 585,000 YouTube subscribers and is known for posting vlogs about his creative projects, said he took the allegations "very seriously" in an Instagram video response posted on Saturday.

In Kliemann's response video, he apologized to fans but also denied some of the allegations or shifted blame.

"I must apologize for some and must urgently correct others because the fraud allegations are simply not true," Kliemann said in his video, which Insider translated to English. "Yes, Global Tactics has also made masks in Bangladesh. No, I have never sold or advertised these masks. I only offered masks that came 100% from Portugal and Serbia."

He did not directly address whether any of the masks donated to refugees were ultimately faulty, but said that the manufacturer had told him that the masks "were not defective or had any poor protection."

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"I was told they would simply be a little larger than the default and that they would be donated by Global Tactics and Tech Solutions," Kliemann said.

Kliemann's video also went into details about the specifics of emails sent between his company and buyers of the masks. He claimed he had been "partly copied" into emails about the details of where the masks were made, but had dropped the ball due to the level of demand.

Kliemann claimed to be receiving hundreds of emails a day about the masks and that this meant he could "no longer keep track of the process."

"But this must never happen and so I must take  even if I was neither producer or a buyer  responsibility," he said.

In the investigation, Bohmermann claimed making masks in Asia increased Global Tactics' profit margin  costing just 45 cents to make per mask. Customers paid 98 cents per mask in a pack of 100 and 2.20 if bought in packs of ten, according to an interview Kliemann and Illbruck gave to Business Insider Germany in April 2020.

At the end of Kliemann's response video, he apologized and said he felt "ashamed." Kliemann added he should have done more research and that "every person deserves the same protection"

"I simply lost sight of my moral compass," he said, "and would like to apologize for the non-transparent communication."

Insider has reached out to Kliemann and Global Tactics for further comment.

Read the original article on Insider
I know I keep teasing how excited I am about Julys big robotics event, but its precisely because of panels like the one we announced earlier this week. Weve got Rodney Brooks and Clara Vu teaming up for a 2-on-1 fireside to discussing the changing face of human-robot interaction.

Its a big, broad and important topic, as robotics take an increasingly larger role in our lives. Honestly, I couldnt think of a better duo to discuss the topic with (thats the nice thing about running programming for an event).

Image Credits: TechCrunch

Brooks is the co-founder and CTO of deep learning robotics software firm Robust.AI. He also co-founded iRobot and cobot firm Rethink Robotics, and served as the director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) for a decade. Vu is the co-founder and CTO of collaborative robotic safety firm Veo and a co-founder of Harvest Automation.

Both Brooks and Vu have appeared onstage at TC Sessions: Robotics in previous years, and Im psyched to have them in conversation this time out. All right, thats enough plugging from me this week.

Image Credits: Qualcomm

Kicking things off with Qualcomm this week. Unsurprisingly, the company is making a new push into the robotics world this week, in hopes of leveraging its 5G technologies for autonomous robotic systems. The Qualcomm Robotics RB6 Platform is a development kit announced this week at the companys 5G summit, and the Southern Californian chip maker is casting the net quite wide here, with a focus on drones, delivery robots, collaborative systems and more.

Says Qualcomms Dev Singh:

Building on the successful growth and traction of Qualcomm Technologies' leading robotics solutions, our expanded roadmap of solutions will help bring enhanced AI and 5G technologies to support smarter, safer, and more advanced innovations across robotics, drones and intelligent machines. We are fueling robotics innovations with 5G connectivity and premium edge-AI that will transform how we think and approach challenges and ever-evolving industry expectations in the digital economy.

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RB6, which is built on top of the Qualcomm Robotics Platform, arrives along with the RB5 AMR Reference Design to help kickstart robotics hardware development that utilizes the firms components. Given the recent explosive growth of automation, its clear why companies like Qualcomm, Nvidia and Intel are all making pushes to get in on the ground floor of development.

Some fun research out of Hangzhou, Chinas Zheijang University this week. The school is showcasing drone swarming in a difficult to navigate forest setting. The 10 drones are controlled by a central computer, flying in formation and following human subjects, all while avoiding crashing into trees.

Image Credits: DJI

Speaking of crashing into trees, weve done our fair share at TechCrunch while testing DJI drones. The companys got a new version of the Mini 3 Pro, which weighs in at 249 grams. Thats precisely one gram from the FAA cutoff that requires drone users to register their systems. It has been fascinating watching the company iterate on the folding Mavic line over the last several years.

These things are getting impressively powerful at their size, and much as smartphone innovations have created components that have launched several other fields, it seems likely that the work being done in the consumer drone space is going to have a profound impact in the broader automation field, going forward. Oh, and the new version of the Mini has even more safety features, theoretically making it more difficult to accidentally slam into trees.

Theoretically.

Image Credits: Hyundai

This one completely flew under our radar a few weeks back. Hyundai is recommitting to some of those wild Ultimate Mobility Vehicle (UMV) concepts by launching the New Horizons Studio (NHS). The Bozeman, Montana-based studio will be focused on iterating some of those ideas courtesy of a $20 million investment over the next five years.

As to why the company chose Montana, New Horizon head John Suh says, Montana is quickly becoming a hub for high-tech companies and entrepreneurs with a growing talent pool of skilled labor in the field of engineering, research and natural science. Bozeman is a thriving and economic micropolitan city. Nestled near dozens of off-road trails with more than 150 miles of terrain and mountain access for UMV testing -- its the perfect fit for our new R&D Lab.

As for the concepts the team is working on, Hyundai notes, The first is an uncrewed transforming intelligent ground excursion robot (similar to what was revealed at CES in 2021) designed to carry various types of payloads while traveling over treacherous terrain. The second, inspired by Elevate, is a larger (size of a two-person ATV) vehicle with robotic legs that can address challenging driving situations and potentially save lives as the first responder in natural disasters.

The founders of Eureka Robotics with an Archimedes robot arm

Image Credits: Eureka Robotics

This week was a little light on actual funding news, but weve got one addition, just under the wire: Eureka Robotics. The Singapore-based firm caused a minor online sensation back in 2018 with its Ikea furniture building robot. Turns out its technology was successful enough to earn it a $4.25 Pre-Series A for robots that can drill, inspect, assemble and perform other complex tasks.

The round, which was led by The University of Tokyo Edge Capital Partners, will be used to deploy and accelerate development on the companys flagship Eureka Controller. The company co-founder, Dr. Pham Quang Cuong, tells Catherine, while the core technologies are mature and have already been deployed in production, we want to make those technologies really easy to use by System Integrators. Making advanced technologies easy to use by non-programmer engineers is actually difficult.

Image Credits: ABB Robotics

Closing us out this week for good measure is an ABB demo featuring a car-painting robot. Haje notes:

For this PR stunt, the company collaborated with eight-year-old Indian child prodigy Advait Kolarkar and Dubai-based digital design collective Illusorr, to create the worlds first robot-painted art car. The project is showing off the companys PixelPaint technology, which is basically an inkjet printer with 1,000 nozzles mounted on an industrial robot.

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Fire up that robotic arm and subscribe to Actuator.
EXCLUSIVE: Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Chuck Grassley is accusing Attorney General Merrick Garland of hypocrisy for a slow response to protests outside Supreme Court justices' homes, after mobilizing quickly for alleged threats to school boards last year.



Grassley, R-Iowa, made allegation in a letter to Garland Wednesday. He demanded the Department of Justice (DOJ) enforce a federal law that makes it illegal to "picket or parade" outside a courthouse or a judge's residence "with the intent of influencing any judge in the discharge of his duty."

Pro-choice protesters have been picketing outside conservative justices homes all week after a leaked draft opinion reported by Politico appeared to show the court is set to overturn Roe v. Wade.

PELOSI LAUDS PROTESTERS USING RIGHTEOUS ANGER TO MARCH AND MOBILIZE AS SUPREME COURT SET TO OVERTURN ROE

"After this administration chose to publicly and vigorously marshal the Justice Departments resources in response to a letter from the administrations allies on school boards, the tepid response to the demonstrations against the justices has been deeply concerning," Grassley said.

"It took this administration just five days to forcefully respond to a letter concerning the supposedly grave risk posed by parents seeking to have a say in how their children are taught in schools. The serious threats to the Supreme Court demand no less of a robust response."

WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 25: U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, speaks to the media as he arrives at the U.S. Capitol on April 25, 2022 in Washington, DC. The Senate returned today from a two-week recess. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

"Instead of investigating and prosecuting this illegal activity, the administration has been sadly dismissive of the threats and danger to both the justices and our judicial system writ large," Grassley also wrote.



The senator expressed "grave disappointment" over the administrations handling of the protests, which he said are meant to "undermine the independence of the judiciary and influence judges through protests at their homes."

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland speaks at the Department of Justice on January 5, 2022 in Washington, DC. Photo by Carolyn Kaster-Pool/Getty Images

GARLAND ALLOWING MOB RULE IN US BY NOT PROSECUTING DEMONSTRATORS AT JUSTICES HOMES, REPUBLICANS SAY

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The Justice Department did not initially address the protests earlier this week, but commented on the matter Wednesday afternoon.

"Attorney General Garland continues to be briefed on security matters related to the Supreme Court and Supreme Court Justices," Justice Department Spokesperson Anthony Coley said in a statement Wednesday evening as a pro-choice group is set to march on the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices.

The statement added, "The Attorney General directed the U.S. Marshals Service to help ensure the Justices safety by providing additional support to the Marshal of the Supreme Court and Supreme Court Police."

A spokesperson for Grassley said that the Justice Department's statement came after the letter was transmitted to the DOJ.



Protesters, organized by a group called Ruth Sent Us, are expected outside the justices homes again Wednesday.

The Supreme Court is expected to release its final opinion in the abortion case before it, called Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health, by early July.

Fox News' Kelly Laco contributed to this report.
Voting-rights groups and other plaintiffs have filed a revamped federal lawsuit contending that a congressional redistricting plan passed last month by Florida lawmakers is unconstitutional.

The plaintiffs, including Common Cause Florida, FairDistricts Now and the Florida State Conference of the NAACP, filed the revised complaint Wednesday in U.S. district court in Tallahassee.

RELATED: Judge announces hell block Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis redistricting plan

It contends that the plan, which Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed through the Legislature during a special session, is intentionally racially discriminatory in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

The lawsuit focuses heavily on Congressional District 5 in North Florida and Congressional District 10 in the Orlando area, which were drawn in the past to help elect Black representatives.

They are held by U.S. Rep. Al Lawson and U.S. Rep. Val Demings, both Black Democrats. The lawsuit argues that changes in the new plan made District 5 and District 10 no longer Black-performing districts.

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Overall, the plan is projected to increase the number of Republican members of the states congressional delegation from 16 to 20, based on past voting results. The plaintiffs filed the lawsuit in March as DeSantis and lawmakers were at an impasse in the once-a-decade reapportionment process.

The original version of the lawsuit contended that judges should step in to make sure revamped districts were set before this years elections, as continuing to use current districts would be unconstitutional.

But after the Legislature passed the DeSantis-backed redistricting plan during a special session in April, the state argued that the lawsuit was moot.

The plaintiffs acknowledged that the original issues were moot but sought approval to file an amended complaint targeting the new redistricting plan.

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U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor, part of a three-judge panel handling the case, issued an order Wednesday that approved the filing of the amended complaint.

The revised version, which also added DeSantis as a defendant, was filed the same day that Leon County Circuit Judge Layne Smith said he would issue a temporary injunction in a separate lawsuit challenging the redistricting plan.

That lawsuit focuses on the changes to Congressional District 5. The state is expected to quickly appeal Smiths decision. District 5 has stretched from Jacksonville to west of Tallahassee. But under the new plan it would be condensed in the Jacksonville area.

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Gwyneth Paltrow addresses outrage over fake Goop diapers (Goop)

Gwyneth Paltrow has addressed the outrage over Goops launch of luxury, amber-encrusted $120 diapers, with the Goop founder revealing it was a publicity stunt to raise awareness of the diaper tax.

On Wednesday, Goop shared a promotional image for The Diaper, with the wellness brand captioning the photos of the bedazzled diaper: Meet The Diaper. Our new disposable diaper lined with virgin alpaca wool and fasted with amber gemstones, known for their ancient emotional-cleansing properties.

Infused with a scent of jasmine and bergamot for a revitalised baby. Dropping tomorrow at 11am EST at $120 for a pack of 12.

The launch prompted concern from Goops followers, with some questioning whether the diapers were a joke, while others found the new product upsetting.

This is a joke, right? Right?! one person commented, while another said: Disposable but with gemstones? Has to be a joke

Someone else wrote: Youre effing kidding me?! I have no words. Why not donate to a worthwhile organisation instead for underserved mothers and children. Done with Goop!

Later in the day Wednesday, Paltrow addressed the backlash in a video posted to Goops Instagram, in which she confirmed that the launch was a publicity stunt, conducted in an effort to raise awareness of the high costs of diapers.

Goop launched a luxury disposable diaper, at $120 for a pack of 12, and there was a lot of outrage. Good, the Goop founder said. It was designed to piss us off.

Because, if treating diapers like a luxury makes you mad, so should taxing them like a luxury.

Paltrow then confirmed that The Diaper is a fake product, but that it was meant to highlight a real problem.

Despite the absolute necessity of diapers, in 33 states they arent treated like an essential item, theyre taxed like a luxury good, Paltrow continued. This leaves one in three families struggling to afford them.

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According to the National Diaper Bank Network, as of 1 April 2022, 35 US states charge sales tax on diapers, with the organisation noting that the tax can range from 1.5 per cent to 7 per cent. There are 12 states that exempt diapers from taxation, which include California, Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont.

According to Paltrow, while eliminating diaper tax is not a complete solution, it could allow families to pay for at least another months supply of the childcare necessities.

Paltrow concluded the video urging followers to join Goop and Baby2Baby, a non-profit organisation that provides essential items to children in need and which is working to end the diaper tax, in helping to change the tax and provide millions of diapers to families in need.

On Goops website, it states that the fictional Diapers were priced at $120 because that is what the diaper tax could cost families annually.

The website also notes that Baby2Babys diaper requests increased by 505 per cent during the pandemic as national shortages exacerbated the need. The need prompted the organisation to begin manufacturing its own diapers, produced at a fraction of the cost to increase the number of children they serve.

According to Goop, donations to Baby2Baby will support the organisations advocacy efforts and help provide diapers to families in need.

Paltrows clarification, and call to action, comes after Vice reported that the diaper launch was a PR stunt shortly after Goop posted about the diapers on Wednesday. Others came to the same conclusion after pointing out that Paltrow recently penned an opinion piece about motherhood for CBS News, in which she discussed the cost of diapers.

I never had to think about the cost of diapers, never once, until recently when my team at Goop brought it up. We were talking about the diaper tax. Despite the absolute necessity of diapers, in 33 states theyre taxed like a luxury good, she wrote earlier this month. Depending on the state, this sales tax can add between 1.5 and 7 per cent to their cost. This makes diapers the fourth highest household expense for many low-income families.

In response to the video, fans and followers have praised Goop and Paltrow for raising awareness of the diaper tax, with many applauding the brilliant publicity stunt.

Yes!!! You caught peoples attention, very smart. This is one reason why I love Goop!! one person wrote, while another said: Thanks for shining a light on this.

The Independent has contacted Goop and Baby2Baby for comment.
A New Hampshire man is under arrest after allegedly making a bomb threat at Belmont High School Wednesday morning.

A 39-year-old Ossipee, New Hampshire man was taken into custody today at a Holiday Inn in Peabody. He will face charges for making a false bomb threat and may face additional federal charges as well.

Belmont High School was closed all day Wednesday out of an abundance of caution. The school was open Thursday, however.

[ Read: Belmont High School cancels classes amid bomb threat ]

The suspect has not been identified at this time and his connection to Belmont, if any, is unclear.

The U.S. Marshall Fugitive Task Force, Belmont Police Department along with the Massachusetts State Police Fugitive Task Force all assisted in the investigation.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates as more information becomes available.

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May 11AUSTIN  Cayuga Ladycat Aerin Thompson has enjoyed a fulfilling high school career. This weekend she has another opportunity to add to her long list of accomplishments at the UIL state track meet.

Not many athletes will enjoy the success Thompson has over the course of her high school career. Even just her senior year brought the type of success many hope to accomplish over the course of four years.

A district title in volleyball followed by a Regional Quarterfinals appearance, a regional qualifier in cross country, a playoff berth in basketball and now her third state track meet.

"It just feels like another meet," Thompon said. "I'm not nervous at all. I have a different focus this year. I know what I need to do."

It can feel that way when you've qualified for state every year you've been eligible. Thompson has been every year except for her sophomore season when the COVID-19 pandemic stripped away her chance at going.

"I felt like I lost something," Thompson said about not going to state her sophomore year. "It made me focus on training harder.

Thompson heads into state soaring off the momentum of placing first in both the high jump and 400-meter dash. She outran the field in the 400m dash after clocking in at 1:00.94  a second in front of Douglass' second-place finisher Madyson Freeman.

Thompson turned back around in the field events and snatched first from Beckville's Amber Harris. Thompon's 5'2" earned her a gold medal in the event.

"She doesn't watch anyone else jump," head coach Kaylee Sims said. "She doesn't want to know the other jumps. She's not concerned with what's going on around her. It's about [her]. She's calm, cool and collected."

It's the first year Sims has been with Thompson as her head track coach, but their relationship stretches back to middle school when Thompson claims she was "the worst athlete when it came to running."

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"The talent was there I don't know if the maturity was," Sims said. "We knew what she would be. She doesn't like to lose. She's a special athlete."

Once Thompson found her "why" for running it didn't take long for her to begin to realize her talent. From seventh grade on she's been one of Cayuga's top athletes.

It's what earned her a track scholarship to the University of Texas in Tyler and possibly her first gold medal at state.

"Watching her progress over the years as been awesome," Sims said. "It started as this shy sixth grader that has developed into a special athlete. She's taught me more than she knows. She's been a leader for us. She's leaving her mark on this program. She's set a high bar for our future athletes."

The 2A running events begin 5 p.m. Friday.
Amy Sussman

After over a decade, Francis Ford Coppola is returning to the big screen with his self-funded film Megalopolis. In order to make the biggest splash possible with his comeback, Coppola has tapped some of Hollywoods current monoliths to lead the charge, setting an A-List cast to carry his ambitious new movie.

And as of today, that cast includes Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel, Forest Whitaker, Laurence Fishburne, and Jon Voight. Apparently, the prerequisite to be cast in Megalopolis is at least one Oscar or Emmy nomination, and these were the folks that fit the bill for Coppola.

We dont know much about Coppolas new production, but a name like Megalopolis (maybe you already guessed this, but that means a very large city) is certainly attention-grabbing. Per The Hollywood Reporter, the logline of the film reads, The fate of Rome haunts a modern world unable to solve its own social problems in this epic story of political ambition, genius, and conflicted love.

While adding that the film is set in a New York steeped in echoes of ancient Rome, GQ also asked Coppola to explain his vision behind Megalopolis. It's very simple, he said. The premise of Megalopolis? Well, it's basically I would ask you a question, first of all: Do you know much about utopia?

To top it all off, The Godfather auteur will be paying this new cast with his own funds. The $120 million budget will come straight from Coppola, who has pledged money to some of his prior films like Apocalypse Now and One From the Heart.

I know that Megalopolis, the more personal I make it, and the more like a dream in me that I do it, the harder it will be to finance, Coppola told GQ about his self-financing logic. And the longer it will earn money because people will be spending the next 50 years trying to think: What's really in Megalopolis? What is he saying? My God, what does that mean when that happens?

For 50 Years The Godfather Has Sold Us a Beautiful Lie

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Driver, Emmanuel, Whitaker, Fishburne, and Voight are the first confirmed cast members of Megalopolis, though a few more names were dropped last year when the film was beginning the casting process. Oscar Isaac, Cate Blanchett, Zendaya, Oscar Isaac, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange, and The Godfathers own James Caan were reportedly getting sized up for the project too, but no word on them yet. Can they all fit within a $120 million budget?

With a big roster already and reports of more A-listers being eyed for the project, Megalopolis looks to continue the trend of Hollywoods biggest celebrities all under one marquee. Last year, Dune and Dont Look Up featured almost every star known to mankind. Now, Christopher Nolans Oppenheimer and Megalopolis are leading the charge.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Marcelo Pecci was a high-profile prosecutor in Paraguay

Police from Colombia and Paraguay are working with agents from the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the FBI to hunt down the killers of an anti-mafia prosecutor.

Paraguayan prosecutor Marcelo Pecci, 45, was shot dead on Tuesday on a beach in Colombia, where he was on honeymoon.

Pecci investigated high-profile corruption and money-laundering cases in his native Paraguay.

His murder was likely related to his fight against crime, police say.

Pecci and his wife were on the sixth and final day of their honeymoon in Colombia when he was killed on Baru, an idyllic island off the Caribbean coast.

Just two hours earlier, his wife, journalist Claudia Aguilera, had posted a picture on her Instagram account announcing that they were expecting a baby.

She said that they were on a stretch of private beach of Decameron Hotel on Tuesday morning when her husband was targeted.

"Two men attacked Marcelo. They came in a small boat, or on a jet ski, the truth is I did not see well," she told El Tiempo newspaper.

She said that one of the men got off and "without a word he shot Marcelo twice, one [bullet] hit him in the face and another in the back".

Colombian police have released a blurry photo and a sketch of a suspect and announced a $500,000 (410,000) reward for information leading to an arrest.

Police released a sketch of one of the suspects

Police Chief Jorge Vargas said that US and Paraguayan investigators would help Colombian security forces hunt down the killers and those who may have ordered the assassination.

Gen Vargas said that the "big hypothesis" was that the murder was related to some of the high-profile cases Pecci had been involved in Paraguay.

Pecci was part of "A Ultranza Py", the biggest operation against cocaine trafficking and money laundering in Paraguay's history.

According to Paraguayan media, the operation broke up a ring which smuggled drugs from cocaine-producing hotspots Colombia and Bolivia through Paraguay to Europe.

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Pecci was part of the international team which earlier this year seized hundreds of millions of dollars in assets and arrested dozens of suspects.

The US Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs said that "Pecci's work fighting organised crime stands as an example to us all - especially his efforts to bring to justice those who engaged in money laundering, drug trafficking, and corruption".

While Pecci had bodyguards in Paraguay, he did not have any protection while on his honeymoon in Colombia and the Colombian police said it had not been aware of his presence in the country.

His wife said that he had not received any threats although a friend of Pecci's has since told Paraguayan media of a suspicious incident on his wedding day.

Sebastian Acha told ABC newspaper that a SUV without number plates had tried to block Pecci's car on his way back from the ceremony on 30 April, an attempt which was thwarted by Pecci's bodyguard, who was driving at the time.
(Bloomberg) -- Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., the maker of most of the worlds iPhones, posted earnings ahead of estimates after keeping production running despite component shortages and strict pandemic controls across China.

Most Read from Bloomberg

Apple Inc.s biggest assembly partner reported net income of NT$29.5 billion ($989 million) for the quarter through March, outpacing the average projection for NT$28.5 billion. Revenue totaled NT$1.41 trillion, Hon Hai reported previously.

Hon Hai is the largest of a bevy of Apple-suppliers now struggling with prolonged component shortages and logistic bottlenecks resulting from Chinas Covid-19 lockdowns. But the Taiwanese company, which makes everything from iPhones to Dell desktops and Sony PlayStations at its Chinese factories, has managed to keep its plants humming by employing closed-loop production sites. Hon Hais scale also grants it bargaining power with customers and suppliers.

The worlds largest contract electronics manufacturer said Thursday it expects revenue to remain little changed this quarter, given the uncertainty of Chinas Covid measures. It anticipates strong growth in cloud and networking products even as its consumer electronics business may decline slightly, the company said in a presentation posted online.

While Foxconns sites in China are running stably, including key tech hubs in Zhengzhou and Shenzhen, the situation on the ground can change swiftly and unpredictably. Last Thursday, employees at MacBook maker Quanta Computers Shanghai plant flooded past isolation barriers, underscoring the depth of frustrations among residents subject to often abrupt lockdowns.

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What Bloomberg Intelligence Says:

While its iPhone business may moderate in 2022, Hon Hais data center hardware and component segments should stand out and support gross margin trajectory with the trend of cloud migration. The companys target of 10% gross margin by 2025 looks feasible to us, as EV, cloud and components may contribute to nearly half of the companys revenue by then, we believe, vs. 29-30% now.

-Steven Tseng, analyst

Click here for research.

With consumer electronics facing a potential slowdown, the company has been making steps to diversify its business and move toward a new ambition: electric vehicles.

Its ambitions hinge on Lordstown Motors Corp.s electric pickup trucks. Lordstown Motors said on Thursday it closed the sale of its Ohio EV factory to Hon Hai for $230 million. With the deal, Hon Hai plans to expand its customer base and establish its first EV production outpost in North America.

Chairman Young Liu said on a conference call that expanding its EV business is Hon Hais top priority, with the company targeting 5% market share in 2025. Its goal is to ship 500,000 to 750,000 EVs that year, he said.

Production at the Ohio plant is set to start in the second half of this year, while mass output from Foxconns EV factory in Thailand is set to start in 2024.

(Updates with comment from chairman in eighth paragraph)

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2022 Bloomberg L.P.
Biafran activist Efe Uwanogho (centre) at an Ipob rally in Italy

A network of Nigerian separatists based outside the country is using social media to call for violence and incite ethnic hatred against opponents of Biafran independence, a BBC investigation has found.

Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of violence

In a Facebook live broadcast to her more than 40,000 followers, Efe Uwanogho, also known as Omote Biafra, shouts hate speech directly into the camera.

The front of her leather jacket features a patch of the Biafran flag, with its red, black and green tricolour and half a rising sun.

"Go after these mighty saboteurs Those are the people that need to be beheaded. Those are the people that need to be burnt to ashes," she says.

She's calling for attacks against those considered enemies of the campaign for Biafran independence, which would create a breakaway state in south-east Nigeria.

The campaign has a bloody history.

In 1967 separatists from the mainly Igbo region declared independence for the Republic of Biafra. They fought and lost a three-year civil war against the Nigerian government in which more than a million died, mainly on the separatist side.

The war ended in 1970 but the idea of Biafra lives on

More than half a century later, social media is a new frontline for those who are continuing the struggle.

Ms Uwanogho is among them. She's a so-called "media warrior" for the separatist group known as the Indigenous People of Biafra (Ipob).

She broadcasts from Italy, beyond the reach of Nigerian authorities. In Nigeria, Ipob has been banned and designated a terror group. Ipob insists it is a peaceful movement.

The BBC's investigation revealed many other influential Ipob supporters also operating outside the country, openly promoting disinformation and inciting violence on social media from across Europe, the US, Asia and other parts of Africa.

Nigerian investigative journalist Nicholas Ibekwe describes the group's online operation as an "organised troll farm".

"Social media has been Ipob's most successful tool in achieving most of what it wants to achieve today," he says.

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Nneka Igwenagu (L) and Efe Uwanogho (R) broadcast from outside Nigeria

Some supporters of the group have as many as 100,000 followers on social media.

We don't know if any of Ms Uwanogho's followers took action based on her online calls for violence against officials in south-eastern Nigeria.

Ms Uwanogho did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

But on the ground, the violence is real, with dozens of officials killed in attacks already this year in violence described by President Muhammadu Buhari as "deeply distressing".

Nneka Igwenagu is another "media warrior" fighting for the Biafran cause, based in the UK.

In a Facebook live broadcast from London in late 2021, she targets a youth group in Anambra, south-east Nigeria, which had been resisting pressure from Ipob for people in the region to shut down businesses and schools in solidarity with the group's detained leader Nnamdi Kanu.

Ipob leader Nnamdi Kanu has endorsed the activities of many "media warriors"

Mr Kanu is currently being held by Nigerian authorities and faces terror charges, which he denies.

Speaking in Igbo, the most widely spoken language in south-eastern Nigeria, Ms Igwenagu refers to them as "chickens", saying:

"All of you are not supposed to be alive A chicken that ate its eggs, don't you see it is not supposed to live?"

A few weeks after the broadcast, the leader of the youth group she was referring to was shot and killed. Nobody has been charged over his death.

Tributes were paid to the Ogidi youth leader online after his killing

We contacted Ms Igwenagu for a comment on this investigation, but received no response.

One of the ways the media warriors attempt to avoid censorship is to switch into local languages that are less well moderated.

This tactic is made explicit in one video we found. Okenna Okechukwu, also known as Biafran Child, speaks in Igbo when calling for the beheading of a critic, before switching to English and explaining to his followers:

"Why I am saying this in my dialect is because I don't want them to stop me. I don't want them to block me on this page."

David Ajikobi, Nigeria editor of fact-checking organisation Africa Check, says that the lack of moderation of extreme content in local languages is a major issue, not limited to Nigeria.

"We've also seen this in India, in Ethiopia, where crises are happening, people are using local language because they know that if they use English they will be flagged and will be removed from the platform."

Despite the violent nature of many of the online posts we found, moderation by social media platforms is inconsistent.

In line with Facebook's own process, our team reported broadcasts by Efe Uwanogho and Nneka Igwenagu for containing violent content. We initially received a notification that the platform had decided not to take the videos down.

It was only later, when the BBC shared links to the posts directly with Facebook that they were removed. But violent broadcasts from the same accounts, as well as others, remained online at the time of publication.

Stoking tension

Facebook's parent company Meta told us in a statement that calling for violence on its platform was unacceptable. It said that it had 15,000 people reviewing content in more than 70 languages - including Igbo.

Our investigation also found Ipob supporters spreading disinformation to stoke tension between different ethnic groups in Nigeria.

Media warriors pit ethnic Igbo people, who are mainly Christian and from the south, against those from the Fulani ethnic group, who are predominantly Muslim and from the north.

In another Facebook live broadcast, Ms Igwenagu warns her followers that Fulani herders and other northerners who have moved to "Biafraland" are on a "mission to exterminate, kill maim, wipe [out] all of us".

Payment for posts

Although there have been clashes between Fulani herders and communities in the south-east, there is no evidence of the sort of conspiracy that Ms Igwenagu and others are alleging.

This violent rhetoric may be driven by a desire for Biafran independence, but our investigation also found evidence of financial incentives for those involved.

We found videos in which media warriors admitted to being paid, either by Ipob or by supporters, for the work they do and we saw other broadcasts in which bank details for Ipob were shared to solicit donations from followers.

Journalist Nicholas Ibekwe is among those who are critical of social media companies to tackle the violent threats being made on their platforms.

"It seems Facebook has really really gone to sleep. It does not think that these comments, these posts that they do on Facebook have consequences."

Audu Linus and Gloria Matthew were attacked on the way to their wedding

Meanwhile, attacks continue on the ground.

On 30 April, Nigerian soldiers Audu Linus and Gloria Matthew were on their way to get married in a traditional ceremony in Imo state when they were abducted, tortured and killed by unidentified attackers.

Footage showing the couple's killing, which the Nigerian president has blamed on Ipob, then went viral.

A conspiracy theory was then widely shared by some Ipob supporters claiming that the footage was not real and the soldiers' deaths had been staged.

The BBC has independently confirmed the deaths of the two soldiers with family members.

Ipob has denied any involvement in the killing.

We contacted Ipob's leadership with our findings from this investigation. The leadership replied, but did not provide a response.

We contacted all of the media warriors featured in this story to ask for their comments, but had no response.

You may also be interested in:
J. Cole is a reliable man whose word is bond. In 2013, the School Daze rapper met a fan when she called into a radio station and spoke to Q Deezy of Hot 107.9 in Philadelphia, pining for the rapper to give well wishes on her birthday, Complex reports.

this is for all the fans that waited, the bitch niggas that hated, old hoes we dated, look mama, we made it  pic.twitter.com/RjH1gDzXgQ  chucky  (@princess_simba) May 12, 2022

Approximately three months later, Cole called the former high school student, Cierra Bosarge, and invited her to meet him face-to-face. When the two linked up in Philadelphia, Bosarge gave Cole a letter telling him all of her hardships.

In the letter it says all I went through, Bosarge said, Complex reports. With being adopted, my parents being hooked on drugs, in and out of prison. At the time both parents were in prison, so I asked him could he come to my graduation since they cant.

Emotionally impacted by her letter, Cole touched base with Bosarge through Twitter and promised to attend her high school graduation if she maintained high grades and was admitted into college.

this is for all the fans that waited, the bitch niggas that hated, old hoes we dated, look mama, we made it  pic.twitter.com/RjH1gDzXgQ  chucky  (@princess_simba) May 12, 2022

jcole was at my graduation today pic.twitter.com/c2R9OigHaX  Benni (@Bennigami) May 11, 2022

That man has done so much for me, Bosarge said after graduating high school. He planned his tour around my day. I could never thank him enough. Hes Gods gift. Every night I prayed for this day and it really came. I did it. He told us all his struggles through music and I seen how far he made it. Now its my turn. I gotta keep making Cole proud.

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The Dreamville rapper upheld his promise, again, and dropped by for her college graduation ceremony at Rowan University in New Jersey. Numerous graduates and attendees posted photos of Cole on social media.

J. Cole kept his promise  pic.twitter.com/JEymKJsqAy  Cole (@Jcolevillle) May 11, 2022

Keeping your word means everything to me, Bosarge wrote on Twitter, according to All Hip Hop. Not a lot of people do so im forever grateful to the ones that always show up for me. no excuses.

Coles manager and Dreamville co-founder, Ibrahim Hamad, also gave Bosarge a shoutout on Twitter.
By Tim Kelly

MIYAKO ISLAND (Reuters) - Seihan Nakazato wants the missile trucks on the base next to his melon farm to leave, but few others on Okinawa's Miyako island, he complains, are demanding that Japan's army remove such weapons, which he says would make them a target for China.

"We are a small community and there are lots of complicated relationships," said Nakazato, 68, standing next to one of the greenhouses he worries could be bombed. "Some islanders do work for the base and others have relatives in the military."

As Nakazato harvests his melons on Japan's key border outpost, Okinawa on Sunday marks 50 years since the United States ended its occupation, raising hopes of a return to normality after its devastation in World War Two. But the East China Sea island chain, which, along with Taiwan, hems in Beijing's forces, fears it will become a battlefield again.

"We are worried about statements by national lawmakers that a Taiwan contingency would be a Japan contingency, and recent discussions that seem to assume Okinawa would be involved in an armed conflict," Okinawa's governor Denny Tamaki said at a news conference on May 6. The prefecture has about 1.4 million people, most of them on the eponymous main island.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has added to those concerns, with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida warning of the fragility of security in Asia.

And Japanese lawmakers from Kishida's party have said they want strike missiles added to the country's arsenal - a weapon that could be deployed to Okinawa.

China, which spends almost five times as much on defence as Japan, says it intentions in the region are peaceful.

"Okinawa will be the front line in the case of a war or conflict between Japan and China," said Masaaki Gabe, a professor emeritus at the University of Ryukyus on Okinawa's main island, who described himself as an insecure 17-year-old when the U.S. occupation ended.

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"After 50 years, the insecure feeling still continues," he added.

STRATEGIC VALUE

Fringed with coral reefs and covered in sugar cane, Gabe's home island is a vital military outpost. It has two airports, a large port and is less than 400 kilometres (249 miles) from Taiwan. It is also 200km from uninhabited islands in the East China Sea that are the focal point of an intensifying territorial dispute with China.

The Ground Self Defense Force (GSDF) camp next to Nakazato's farm, which used to be a golf course, is Japan's newest army base. The missiles deployed there, meant to target Chinese ships sailing in and out the Western Pacific, are the closest such weapons Japan has to China.

"I fear the whole island will become a fortress," said Hayako Shimizu, 73, the leader of a group of protesters opposed to the base, who stand outside every Thursday with flags planted on Nakazato's land.

"There aren't many people who speak up, although I think a lot of people are unhappy with it," Shimizu added.

Base commander Colonel Masakazu Iyota, 52, thinks most islanders support or accept the presence of the 700 GSDF troops and their equipment, which he described as a "frontline deterrence".

"I don't think our current posture is enough," he said.

NEXT STEPS

Iyota may get reinforcements after Japan revises its national security strategy this year.

As part of that review, ruling LDP lawmakers have said they want a commitment to more defence spending - including on missiles that can hit targets on foreign soil.

Japan may hold off on deploying such strike weapons to Miyako to avoid provoking China, only 600km away, but Gabe predicts the country will station aircraft and other missiles in Okinawa.

The next phase of military expansion on Miyako could be at its Shimoji airport, a former senior defence ministry official told Reuters, asking not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Built to train jumbo jet pilots, it has been a symbol of resistance to militarization since Okinawa's first post-occupation governor, Chobyo Yara, secured a government promise to never deploy military planes there.

Senior ruling Liberal Democratic party lawmakers such as Masahisa Sato have sought to annul that.

"Apart from the main Okinawa island, it is the only other place an F-15 fighter jet can operate from," said Sato, a former deputy defence minister, who proposed stationing air force jets there in 2020. "As we have seen in Ukraine, you never know when war will break out."

ISLAND POLITICS

Kishida's party will need local support in Okinawa to build more bases, a tough proposition when resentment over U.S. forces there dominates politics.

Of 812 Okinawans polled by public broadcaster NHK in March, 56% said they strongly opposed U.S. bases; only a quarter of 1,115 people outside the prefecture said the same.

A test of whether the LDP can gain ground comes in September, when Okinawa chooses its governor. Tamaki, an independent who wants a smaller military footprint, is on the ballot.

On Miyako, Masahiro Hamamoto, 48, who served as an LDP city councilor for eight years, sees a chance for his party to gain support on his island, which depends on farming, tourism and public works spending.

"There is a sense that it benefits the island by having closer political links to central government," said the local beverage and cigarette wholesaler, who was born two years after Okinawa was returned to Japan.

The income of Miyako's 55,000 residents is about 70% of the national average.

"The economy isn't good, so people will vote for the LDP," said Toshiaki Shimoji, 61, an Okinawa main island resident who traveled to Miyako to work his family's farm.

"Russia invaded Ukraine, so there will be more defence spending and that could mean more missiles here. I don't think base protests will change anything," he added, sitting on a tractor in a sugar cane field.

(The story is refiled to add dropped word in paragraph 18)

(Reporting by Tim Kelly, additional reporting by Kaori Kaneko. Editing by Gerry Doyle)
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Jen Psaki told reporters she hasn't been part of her office's Wordle competition.

"I'm not even entirely sure I know how to play Wordle," she told reporters.

She said learning the popular game will be on her to-do list after she leaves her White House post.

Jen Psaki has faced many challenging situations during her time as White House press secretary.

Wordle, however, hasn't been one of them.

Psaki, who is leaving the podium on Friday, told reporters that she hasn't been a part of an office Wordle competition.

"I'm not even entirely sure I know how to play Wordle," she said of the five-letter word puzzle that's now a mainstay on Twitter. "I need to learn. This will be on my list."

Psaki's comment came during a discussion at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast about her time serving as press secretary, which will end on Friday.

One Twitter user responded to a clip of her comments with a Wordle of warning: "Don't. It's a trap you'll never escape."

"Wait until she finds out every answer is Doocy," tweeted another user, referring to Fox News White House reporter Peter Doocy, who frequently clashes with Psaki in the briefing room.

Psaki, however, also told reporters she'll miss her exchanges with Doocy. Despite their tense exchanges, she said they have "a very good, professional relationship."

Psaki is expected to join the NBC News Group family as early as September. Her successor is Karine Jean-Pierre, White House principal deputy press secretary since 2021, who often appeared on MSNBC as a political analyst before joining the Biden campaign and then the administration.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Jurors will hear closing arguments Monday in the case of a man on trial in the killing of an Iowa state trooper who led an arrest team into his Grundy Center home.

Michael Lang is charged with first-degree murder in the April 9, 2021, shooting death of patrol Sgt. Jim Smith, 51, as well as attempted murder and assault. Lang's defense attorneys rested their case Thursday without presenting evidence.

Lang, 42, allegedly killed Lang amid a standoff that began after he assaulted a police officer, then barricaded himself inside his home. Troopers following the shooting breached the house with an armored vehicle, drawing an exchange of gunfire that left Lang wounded and under arrest.

Michael Lang, center, speaks to his attorneys during his trial at the Hamilton County Courthouse on Thursday.

Previously: Officers testify in trial that Michael Lang taunted them after Iowa state trooper shooting

Lang told Judge Joel Dalrymple he was exercising his right not to testify. Before testimony in the trial began, Dalrymple had barred from the defense from arguing the shooting was justified as an act of self-defense, and Lang attorney Aaron Hawbaker said the ruling led to Lang's decision not to testify.

After testimony ended Thursday, Hawbaker moved for a judgment of acquittal, saying there was not substantial evidence that Lang acted with premeditation or malice aforethought in shooting Lang, or that he intended to kill any of the troopers in the armored car her fired at.

He also said prosecutors had failed to show that prior to the standoff, Lang intended to cause "serious injury" when he assaulted and choked Grundy Center police Officer Cody Niehaus following a vehicular pursuit.

Dalrymple, however, ruled there was sufficient evidence to present all three charges to the jury, although he said the charge for assaulting Niehaus was a "closer call." For the other two charges, he said, the jury can conclude from Lang's use of a shotgun that he intended to kill or cause the death of those he fired at.

Iowa Assistant Attorney General Douglas Hammerand,reviews evidence during the trial of Michael Lang at the Hamilton County Courthouse in Webster City on Thursday.

Previously: Officer testifies man charged with later killing Iowa state trooper goaded him to shoot

Story continues

The jury heard three days of testimony that included descriptions from officers on the arrest team that Smith, a 27-year veteran of the patrol, led into the house, describing the shooting and its aftermath. Two team members said that as they sheltered in the home's basement, Lang seemed to taunt them, saying he had taken it easy on Smith by shooting him in the chest, and that he would shoot them in the face "come sunup."

The trooper who piloted the armored car said a shot Lang fired would have injured him had it penetrated the vehicle's windshield.

Troopers also testified that Lang had multiple opportunities to surrender before Smith's death.

Expert, doctor, describe gun evidence, autopsy findings

Thursday's witnesses were Michael Tate, a state firearm technician who tested the shotgun recovered from Lang's home, and Dr. Dennis Klein, who conducted Smith's autopsy.

Tate told jurors that scratches and tool marks on four spent shotgun shells found at the scene match those made by Lang's shotgun on test-fired rounds, and that the metal debris recovered from the windshield of an armored vehicle and Smith's body were consistent with 12-guage shotgun slugs.

Michael Tate, a state firearm technician, holds a shotgun as he testifies during the trial of Michael Lang at the Hamilton County Courthouse on Thursday.

Klein, who shared photos of Smith's extensive injuries, testified that Smith was shot once in the upper left chest, at such an angle that the slug passed under Smith's protective vest and crossed through his body, damaging his aorta and right lung before fragments came to rest in Smith's right shoulder muscles.

More: Small Iowa town gathers to honor the return of a fallen hero, State Patrol Sgt. Jim Smith

Testifying during the trial of Michael Lang at the Hamilton County Courthouse on Thursday, Dr. Dennis Klein, a state medical examiner, gestures to where a bullet hit Iowa State Patrol Sgt. Jim Smith.

That wound caused Smith's death, Klein said, but a second shotgun wound to the back of Smith's left thigh also might have proved fatal. In addition to massive muscle and tissue damage, it damaged Smith's femoral artery, he said.

Dalrymple agreed to take Friday off at the request of prosecutors in order to allow Smith's colleagues and members of his family to travel to Washington, D.C., for a National Police Week memorial service honoring him and other officers who died in 2021.

Smith was only the second Iowa trooper to die of a gunshot wound in the line of duty.

William Morris covers courts for the Des Moines Register. He can be contacted at wrmorris2@registermedia.com, 715-573-8166 or on Twitter at @DMRMorris.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Testimony ends in trial of man charged with murdering Iowa trooper
Justin Thomas has urged players who want to leave for the Saudi series to get on with it (Getty Images)

Justin Thomas has called on players planning to leave the PGA Tour for the Saudi-backed LIV Golf Invitational Series to just go.

Over the past few weeks, players have requested releases from both the DP World Tour and PGA Tour in order to play in the tournament.

There are eight scheduled events this year - with the first set to take place at the Centurion Club from 9-11 June.

And Thomas, who has confirmed he will definitely remain on the PGA Tour, wants the players interested in competing in the Saudi-backed events to hurry up with the switch.

Speaking to Sky Sports, he said: You know, its like, look, if you want to go, go.

I mean theres been plenty of guys that have been advocates of it and have just talked it up all the time and they have been guys behind the scenes that are saying, Im going, Im doing this. And like my whole thing is, like just go then.

Everybodys entitled to do what they want, you know what I mean? Like if I wanted to go play that tour I could go play that tour. But Im loyal to the PGA Tour.

Players have been widely criticised for their decision to play in the events due to Saudi Arabias poor human rights record.

But Lee Westwood recently defended his decision to request a release to play in the invitational series.

He said: Weve played European Tour in Saudi Arabia and Ive had releases from the PGA Tour to say I can play in Saudi Arabia, so it has been no problem to them in previous years.

Formula One raced there. Newcastle United are owned partly by people from Saudi Arabia. There has been boxing there and I think there has been snooker and darts there as well.

Golfs not the first sport to have links with Saudi Arabia, but it seems to be coming under more scrutiny than anyone else. Whether you think thats right or not is the individuals opinion.

I think Saudi Arabia obviously know theyve got issues. I think lots of countries around the world have got issues and I think theyre trying to improve. Theyre trying to do it through sport, which a lot of places, a lot of countries do.

Story continues

I think theyre doing it a lot quicker than some countries have tried to do it and that maybe worries or scares people. People dont like change do they, they like continuity and things to stay the same.

Meanwhile, Greg Norman, who is fronting the LIV Golf Invitational Series, sparked outrage on Wednesday after responding to Saudi Arabias human rights abuses and the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi by claiming weve all made mistakes.

He said: Everybody has owned up to it, right? It has been spoken about, from what Ive read, going on what you guys reported. Take ownership, no matter what it is.

Look, weve all made mistakes and you just want to learn from those mistakes and how you can correct them going forward.
Charter schools in Kansas City would receive millions more in state funds each year under compromise legislation headed to Gov. Mike Parsons desk.

The Missouri House on Thursday voted 116-29 to approve the bill that seeks to remedy a debate over how the schools which operate independently should be funded. A previous version of the bill would have taken money away from Kansas City and St. Louis public schools.

Under the revised bill, the increased funding would come directly from the state.

The legislation comes as Kansas Citys charter schools are expected to enroll more students than traditional public schools after years of falling public school enrollment. Advocates have argued for years that the states charter schools should receive their fair share of state money and have sought to close the funding gap between public schools and charters.

Opponents to the push to increase charter school funding have said that the schools dont have the same state oversight as public schools and, therefore, should not receive the same amount of funding.

Currently, Missouris charter schools receive local property tax dollars based on property values assessed in 2005, which some advocates call a glitch in the formula. This means a child attending a charter school in Kansas City is funded at a rate of about $1,700 less than a student attending a public school. In St. Louis, charter students receive about $2,500 less.

The bill, which was seen as a compromise among lawmakers, would fuel charter school funding through an increase to the states foundation formula, which is used to calculate public school funding. It would cost the state an estimated $62 million in fiscal year 2023, according to a fiscal analysis produced for lawmakers. That number would likely increase by roughly $2 million each year.

The 20 charter schools that operate in Kansas City would receive about $36 million in additional state aid in 2023, according to the bill.

Amid the push to increase transparency in charter schools, the bill also sets some state oversight requirements, including a provision that each schools board members be state residents.

The bill also requires charter schools to publish their annual performance reports on the school website and states that companies that manage charter schools must be non-profit organizations.
Arson investigators released photos of a white vehicle they suspect is connected to a small fire that ignited on Mother's Day during an alleged break-in attempt at the Oregon Right to Life office in Keizer.

An engine and a battalion chief responded to a report of a small blaze at about 10:40 p.m. at the Right to Life building at 4335 River Road N, according to Keizer Fire District Deputy Fire Marshal Anne-Marie Storms.

At least one person had tried to break a building window, but was unsuccessful, according to Lt. Trevor Wenning, a spokesperson for the Keizer Police Department. The person then lit two Molotov cocktails and threw them toward the building, which led to the small fire.

2022 primary election:Where Oregon candidates for governor stand on abortion

The building was empty at the time of the fire  there were no injuries reported, Storms said. The outside of the building was damaged, but the building is still usable, Storms said.

On Thursday, investigators released photos of a suspected vehicle leaving the area on the night of the fire. The white vehicle is an unknown make and model.

Anyone with information regarding this incident is asked to share via the tip line at tips@keizer.org or call 503-856-3529.

Arson investigators are seeking information about a small fire that ignited Sunday night during a suspected break-in at the Oregon Right to Life office in Keizer.

The fire ocurred a week after a leaked draft opinion of an abortion case revealed the U.S. Supreme Court may be on the verge of overturning the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that established a constitutional right to abortion.

In Salem, more than 100 people gathered at Riverfront Park recently to protest the possible overturning of federal abortion protections. Another rally is planned for Sunday at the state Capitol.

If the Supreme Court does overturn Roe v. Wade, 22 states have laws or constitutional amendments that would take effect immediately or as soon as possible to ban abortion, according to Guttmacher Institute. Oregon is not one of them.

In a statement about the fire in Keizer, Oregon Right to Life executive eirector Lois Anderson said the team was shaken up by the attack and leadership is committed to taking proper precautions to protect the safety of staff.

Story continues

Oregon Right to Life officials said the organization does not condone the use of force, intimidation or violence by any person pursuing anti-abortion activities and that Right to Life does not knowingly do business with any organization that endorses violence toward abortion rights groups.

The nonprofit organization, founded in 1970, states it advocates for the "most vulnerable human beings whose right to life is denied or abridged under current law."

USA Today reporters John Fritze and Asha C. Gilbert contributed to this story.

Virginia Barreda is the breaking news and public safety reporter for the Statesman Journal. She can be reached at 503-399-6657 or at vbarreda@statesmanjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter at @vbarreda2

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This article originally appeared on Salem Statesman Journal: Police release photos of suspect vehicle in Oregon Right to Life arson
PRISTINA (Reuters) - Kosovo government said on Thursday it will apply for membership at the European rights watchdog the Council of Europe, seizing an opportunity after Russia quit the body in mid-March.

Russia left the body hours before a vote on its expulsion in the Council of Europes assembly on March 15, three weeks after it started its attack on Ukraine.

Being accepted into the organisation requires a two-thirds vote by members, and with Russia not recognising Kosovo as an independent state, there had been a risk any previous application would fail.

Kosovo says it now has enough backing from the 46-member body to be accepted and the government said it had ordered the foreign ministry to start membership procedures.

Backed by Western countries, Kosovo declared independence in 2008 almost a decade after the war between ethnic Albanians and Serb forces ended in 1999.

Kosovo is recognised by more than 110 countries but it is still not a U.N member, facing objections from its former master Serbia and veto holder Russia.

Serbias President Aleksandar Vucic said his country would strongly react if Kosovo applied for Council of Europe membership and called an urgent meeting of the national security council.

The Council of Europe created the European Convention on Human Rights and helped eastern European nations to democratise their political systems after the collapse of Communism.

It advocates freedom of expression and of the media, freedom of assembly, equality, and the protection of minorities.

(Reporting by Fatos Bytyci; Editing by Alison Williams)
May 12DEVILS LAKE  The Lake Region UAS Team is well on its way to getting a new drone with some help from student nurses at Lake Region State College.

Students in LRSC's Student Nurse Association have donated $2,500 to help the UAS team purchase a new drone.

According to a Lake Region release, the new drone runs about $5,000, and will be used indoors. The funds were donated by the Student Nurse Organization, which supports various needs in the region. The Lake Region UAS team operates through the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office.

"We have been hard at work raising funds for our (Student Nurse Organization) group," said Rachel Trzpuc, president of the LRSC associate degree nurse class. "Our donation gives this great organization half the amount they will need to purchase this drone."

Keely Plemel, vice president of the Student Nurse Organization said working with the UAS team and learning what they do was a great experience, and the new drone will bring new capabilities to the UAS team.

"Being able to support this team will open doors for many forms of surveillance, searching and safety," she said.
Senators upset over threats to abortion rights are pushing Defense Department officials to guarantee that female servicemembers will have access to the medical procedure even if it is outlawed in states where they are stationed.

In a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Thursday, the senators (seven Democrats and independent Maine Sen. Angus King) said military leaders need to weigh in on the issue now  even before an expected Supreme Court ruling on the issue later this year  to provide reassurance and clarity to troops now unsure of their rights.

At a minimum, you and your staff should consider implementing policy changes to allow servicemembers to obtain [special permission] in order to travel out of state for reproductive healthcare and abortions if they are stationed in a jurisdiction that curtails these rights, the group wrote.

The men and women who join the military sacrifice an incredible amount in order to serve their country. We owe it to these servicemembers to look after them and ensure they have the ability to continue accessing safe reproductive healthcare no matter where in the nation their military service sends them.

Abortion arguments at play in limiting veterans IVF benefit

At issue is a leaked draft ruling from the Supreme Court made public by Politico last week which would overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision which legalized abortion across America.

The move  expected to be publicly released later this summer  could leave the decision of whether or not to criminalize the procedure to individual states. At least 13 states already have measures in effect which would outlaw the procedure if the Supreme Court overturns the 1973 decision, including Texas, home to more than 100,000 active-duty troops.

Last week, following reporter questions on the possible abortion ban, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the health and well-being of our men and women are paramount concerns of department leadership but declined to comment directly on the issue until the ruling is officially released.

Story continues

Among the senators who wrote to Austin on Thursday were Illinois Democrat Tammy Duckworth, who lost both legs while serving with the Army National Guard in Iraq, and Michigan Democrat Gary Peters, who served 15 years in the Navy Reserves.

They wrote that potential inconsistency in state laws would create a scenario where servicemembers reproductive and healthcare rights would become dependent on their duty station.

Could the Supreme Court strike down the militarys vaccination mandate?

A soldier at Fort Drum (in New York) would retain their personal autonomy while a soldier at Fort Hood (in Texas) would not, they said. This outcome would violate the trust servicemembers place in the Armed Forces when they swear an oath to defend the Constitution.

They argued Austin has the power  and responsibility  to implement new policies to ease those access concerns, calling it a potential recruiting and retention issue.

During a House Appropriations Committee hearing on Thursday, Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston told lawmakers his service is looking into the issue, but no decisions have yet been made.

We are drafting policies that ensure we are taking care of our soldiers in an appropriate way, he said. We are in collaboration, there are drafts [of new policies] if it were to be overturned, but that would be the decision of the Secretary of the Army.

On Wednesday, lawmakers failed to advance legislation which would have codified access to abortion services nationwide even in the event of a new Supreme Court ruling. The measure passed the House but failed in the Senate, largely along party lines in both chambers.
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty

In the summer of 2018, a 54-year-old woman living in a Houston suburba woman Ill call Denisedecided to expand her social media horizons.

Im not a social media butterfly, she tells me. Im typically lurking on Facebook to see what my daughters are getting up to, but 2018 was a politically charged year. Twitter seemed like a good forum to pop in and blow off some steam.

Denise was working as a freelance writer, which included articles for business publications as well as writing corporate manuals. She was also working on a manuscript that was part memoir, part acerbic take on current events. Her politics were mainstream and generally in the middle of the road, and she was open about not being religious in a very religious part of the country. Her writing showed that she was smart, funny, and loved sarcasm.

Two years earlier, her husband of 28 years had died after a battle with colon cancer. Hed built a company that constructed apartment complexes in Texas and they had done well together, amassing nearly $1 million in savings. Denise was still recovering emotionally from his death, and she wasnt looking for a new relationship. But with her two grown daughters out of the house, Denise had some time on her hands and was looking to interact with others.

My Twitter profile wasnt exceptional. My picture certainly wasnt glamorous. Setting up my account I followed some politicians, some of my favorite rock bands, animal rights activists, nonprofit organizations, and environmental groups, she says.

And she also followed some celebrities, particularly if they had expressed pro-environmental views.

About a month after creating her account, she received her first private message through the app. It appeared to be from one of the celebrities she had followed, Leonardo DiCaprio.

Hello, Denise, she remembers the message saying.

So whats your real name? she responded.

Leonardo DiCaprio, they replied.

Yeah, right, she messaged, and logged off.

Story continues

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty

Over the next few days, she continued to receive private messages from DiCaprio, who explained that Fridays and weekends were his busiest time, but he was free to chat on other days.

He was working with Quentin Tarantino at the time, but he was polite and never disclosed too much. I did, however, know about his filming schedule and a New York and European trip, Denise recalls. I learned of these trips well before the information hit the internet.

Comparing what she was learning from DiCaprio in the private messages with what was published about him in the press only cemented for her that she was really chatting with the Oscar-winning star of The Revenant. Soon, their conversation spilled over from Twitter to texting each other on their phones.

He learned that I loved to cook. We were texting one night when I was making homemade ravioli, and he said that Camila needed to learn how, she says, referring to DiCaprios girlfriend, Camila Morrone, who in summer 2018 had just turned 21. (DiCaprio was 43.)

We developed a terrific friendship within a couple months and he always insisted that I call him Leo, Denise remembers. And before long, she got to speak to him directly.

Our first phone call was brief, almost as if he placed it to ensure me that it was him. There was no mistaking his voice, she claims.

But phone calls were difficult for him, she adds, and not only because he said Camila was nosy and tried to listen in.

Soon enough, she learned that there was a far more troublesome presence in Leos life that made talking on the phone difficult, and just about everything else as well.

Leonardo DiCaprio, Denise discovered, was allegedly being subjected to enslavement by the Church of Scientology.

Denise was born in England, the daughter of a U.S. Air Force airman and a British mother. She had grown up on air bases in places like New Zealand and Turkey, but she always considered Texas home.

She was raised Catholic but drifted away from it. She attended college for a couple of years but left before finishing her degree. She had met her husband in a bar in Austin and a few years after they were married and started a family, she embarked on her freelancing career. Besides the corporate writing and the memoir, she was also working on a graphic novel with her oldest daughter when DiCaprio began messaging her.

Inside Will and Jada Pinkett Smiths Scientology School for Kids

They were soon burning up several different platforms in their long conversations: Twitter private messages, Gmail hangouts, and email. He even squeezed in a few rushed phone calls, but she preferred the online chats.

We had a lot in common and some great laughs. I jokingly called him a pedophile because of the children he dates. But he quickly corrected me, she says. Leo told her he had actually had one of his most meaningful relationships with an older woman.

Denise shared with him some of her daughters artwork on the graphic novel, and he was taken aback. I was unaware that Leos father, George DiCaprio, had a background in comics, because Leo kept most personal details close to his chest. He was, however, extremely open with his feelings, she recalls.

This guy grew on me quickly and it stunned me. I believe it was August when he first said that he loved me.

Most of their conversations, however, were kept light.

We discussed frivolous things like our favorite foods, his being pasta. His favorite color was green, mine was purple. I told Leo goofy things that I rarely share with anyone, like whenever I wanted my daughters to know that I loved them I texted them with two heart emojis. A purple heart represented me and the second heart was their favorite color. Leo thought this tradition was endearing and asked if he and I could use it. We did. Subsequently, green and purple hearts peppered our chats. Leos favorite symbol was infinitya sideways figure eight. He would often use the infinity symbol.

Later, that symbol took on a much more sinister aspect, she says, when DiCaprio told her for the first time that he was deeply involved in Scientology. (In some Scientology texts by founder L. Ron Hubbard, the use of the infinity symbol is prominent.)

My stomach recoiled, she remembers.

And then, Leo leveled with her: He produced for her a letter written to him on church letterhead.

It demanded that he pay $750,000 to fulfill his obligations, she says. Leo soon revealed that all of his own personal wealth, hundreds of millions of dollars, was actually being controlled by the church, and he couldnt get access to any of it unless he paid the $750,000 sum.

Thats when my nightmare began, Denise says. Leo confessed that he needed my assistance and had nowhere to turn. He loved his parents, claimed to have issues with his half-sister, but said he had to make his big move. He asked if I could possibly get a loan to help him start paying the church off. I was shocked. The church and his management team had control over his financial affairs and his entire life. He couldnt do anything without their approval, including traveling or making any major purchases. They organized and paid for his existence. He admitted then that his relationship with Camila Morrone was arranged by the church.

She was stunned by what DiCaprio told her about the extent of his bondage to the church, which he referred to in messages as the CSI, for Church of Scientology International.

Leo called the CSI a brotherhood and said his management team and staff were mostly Scientologists, she says. His cash was being held in secret vaults that were buried on one of Scientologys California properties. He said the CSI was guilty of human trafficking, slavery, rape, and every financial crime under the sun.

Leo informed Denise that high-ranking members were known as delegates and referred to church leader David Miscavige as his Holiness. And he let her in on the secret way that Scientologists identified other delegates.

Leo said that male delegates often receive a small circular scar or divot on their forehead typically situated above the left eye but not always. This small divot isnt obvious unless youre looking for it, but it resembles a deep chicken pox scar, but it is more unique. The divot allows higher delegates to easily identify their counterparts, Denise says. And once she knew to look for the mark, she began spotting it on numerous male celebrities who havent been publicly linked with the church. (Leonardo DiCaprio and the Church of Scientology did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)

Leo frightened her with descriptions of ritual torture carried out by Scientology, which was recorded on video. He described pagan, Paleolithic-type rituals and ceremonies. He participated, though he claimed he was drugged. The rituals included animals as well as humans, she says.

What he said disturbed her so much, she began to worry not only for his safety, but her own as well.

What he described prompted me to purchase my first gun for protection, she says.

Despite her initial refusal to help DiCaprio, as September 2018 began she was becoming convinced that this man who said he loved her truly needed her aid.

Leonardo DiCaprio wanted to break free of Scientology forever, but he couldnt do it without the financial assistance of a suburban Houston widow.

On September 7, Denise sent $6,000 in a wire transfer to a man named Kenneth in Woodstock, Georgia, who Leo said was one of his trusted aides.

It was the first payment of many.

Putting together a paper trail of Denises involvement with DiCaprio has been difficult because the computer she was using in 2018 and 2019 crashed and she lost years of data. She gave the machine to a recovery expert and hopes to retrieve its information.

But between records she was able to access from her bank, as well as other documents she supplied to multiple FBI agents and that she freely turned over to me, I was able, with her help, to piece together a fairly detailed accounting of her payments.

That accounting shows that by the end of 2018, Denise had made payments to six different people totaling $256,000.

Her communications at the time reflect that she was terribly conflicted about it, convinced at times she was being scammed, but more often believing that she and DiCaprio were the victims, and that Scientology was the culprit.

Today, for example, she says that a simple phone call from DiCaprio proved that he was who he said he was. But an email she sent him in November 2018 that I observed shows something different.

Your only telephone call to me was from a man with a very strange accent, who immediately hung up on me, she wrote then. You lied to me several times and you refuse to prove who you are to me, not even through snail mail. And your story continues to change, almost daily. Youre not consistent, at all.

But she was repeatedly startled to see proof of his veracity in other ways. He sent her a screenshot, for example, showing that he had dared to, very briefly, post Denises photo on his own blue-check public Twitter account before taking it down.

And in December 2018, DiCaprio was photographed while visiting Art Basel in Miami, and in one of the photographs published in various magazines he has a slightly brooding look. For Denise, it was stunning proof of what Leo had been telling her in their chatsthat Scientologys stalking had become unbearable, and that he was near a breaking point.

These images convinced me that I had to help Leo escape the Church of Scientology. I couldnt imagine anyone being so tormented, she says.

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty

She also saw meaning in the amounts that he was asking for, always multiples of $5,000 or $50,000.

I learned that the Church of Scientology charges $5,000 for a Lifetime membership and the Patron-level memberships were $50,000. I accused Leo a few times of paying church fees for members that he had recruited, but he neither denied nor confirmed my accusations.

After Denise had sent him more than a quarter-million dollars by the end of the year, in January 2019 DiCaprio was spotted flying commercial, and he told the press that it had to do with his environmental concerns. But for Denise, it confirmed that Scientology controlled his purse strings, and he was forced to economize.

By March 2019, she was making her largest payments so far, sending a couple of $71,500 cashiers checks to a company in New Jersey that Leo said was run by a friend of his. But then there was a problem: Leo said he didnt get the money. When Denise checked with her bank, they assured her that the cashiers checks had been delivered and cashed.

This would then become a running controversy, and added to the bewildering situation for Denise. DiCaprio increasingly complained that he was only receiving part of her payments, as they both suspected that, once again, Scientology had found a way to intercept the money.

On March 21, 2019, Leo asked Denise to sign and notarize a strangely worded letter which asserted that she and the New Jersey business had a formal arrangement regarding wildlife conservation: We write to inform you that my company wishes to go into wildlife conservation with your company with the aim of having an understanding in the act of breeding animals of different kinds for human benefits. We will need to work out the terms and agreement of the business in due time but first we will have to get the budget in acquiring some certain things such as the cost of animals, machineries and other materials which will include the land space.

When I told Denise that it appeared Leo was having her sign and notarize a false business arrangement in order to hide the purpose of her payments, she objected, saying once again it was to protect Leo from Scientologys interference.

But even she, by this time, knew that something was very wrong.

In April 2019 she made her first inquiry with the FBI, speaking with a special agent in Newarknot, she tells me, because she intended to turn in Leo, but because she insisted that she and Leo were being ripped off by the Church of Scientology in the guise of the third parties that she had been sending the money to in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

Denise told Leo about the FBI agent, and she told him she was done sending money.

Leo knew that she needed some reassurance. On April 24, he sent her a lengthy message in a curious approximation of American English:

To the woman who owns my heart. I started flirting with you because you were the hottest girl I had ever laid my eyes on despite seeing millions and thousands around my profession and my environ [sic] the #HOLLYWOOD. Now I have fallen in love with you because you have the most beautiful heart I have ever felt. I love you. If I could be anything I would be your tear, so I could be born in your eye, live down your cheek and die on your lips. My thoughts are free to go anywhere, but its surprising how often they head in your direction. Your love is the only armor I need to fight all of this lifes battles. Before I was in a relationship with you, I was suffering from commitment phobia. After being in a relationship with you, I am suffering from an addiction call [sic] love.

In order to make sure that their communications were secure and not being intercepted by Scientology, on May 1 Denise ordered more than $6,000 in special iPhones and Apple Watches to be sent to a man in Georgia, again a person Leo said was a close friend.

Then, later in the month, Denise experienced a moment of clarity. In an email she told him, We hit it off almost instantly but you were the one who approached me, not vice versa. You selected me and Im curious why you did. You are notorious for dating very young women. Im not exactly your type. Im having a difficult time understanding why all of a sudden your taste in females changed so drastically. It makes no sense whatsoever unless you needed a more mature woman, with some financial solvency, for other means. Our online discussions are amazing, most of the time. However, they always end up with you needing money and my giving it. This has and still does make me feel like Im being scammed I will, however, admit that you do know very much about the intricate details of that cult.

Then, just a few days later, she admitted to him that she wasnt being entirely truthful with the Newark FBI special agent in order to protect Leo. And on June 7, she opened up to him in a remarkable statement:

I just had to get this off of my chest. [My husband]s deathbed was set up in our living room. I was his caretaker 24/7 and the last words he said were, I love you. His beautiful blue eyes remained opened but I, of course, closed them. I dont recall how long I sat on that rented hospital bed holding him tightly. I dont even remember who I called first. I was completely catatonic in shock. [My husband] was far from perfect, but he was perfect for me. If I had my druthers I would rather it have been me who died, leaving him to deal with this wretched thing called life. But Im tough and somehow Ive gotten through it even though I still cry daily because I miss him so much. He wasnt just my husbandhe was my best friend. Then you entered my world in a very unusual fashiononline. You and I have never met in person. Weve never hugged, kissed, made love, or even had long, heated, overly sexual telephone conversations. The word fraud has come up around you many times, too. And if you think being under FBI investigation has been pleasurable, youre dead wrong. I opened my shattered heart to you, fell in love with you and I still dont understand how thats even possible. Maybe its because Im just too giving and I am far too vulnerable. Yet, I did send money to your staff or criminal friends on your behalf for over a year. And, yes, I did lie for you several times, including to the FBI, which goes against my every grain. And DAILY you still ask for more money from me, as if I havent already done enough or Im STILL not doing enough for you. I keep trying to tell you that I have no more money to offer. You dont believe me and it hurts my feelings greatly. You claim this is all for the sake of us and our future. How am I to believe that, when Im still having a very difficult time convincing myself that you are who you say you are.

Two weeks later, Denise made a transfer of $50,000 to a Navy Federal Credit Union account in the name of a woman named Celestina for wildlife conservation. And then another transfer the same day for $20,000.

By the end of 2019, Denise had sent DiCaprio, through his go-betweens, $620,455.

A source I have known for several years, a former Scientologist who has given me nothing but solid information about the church in that time, had a question for me when I told them that I was working on a story about Leonardo DiCaprio and Scientology.

You know about the pussy posse, right? they asked.

They were referring to a notorious 1998 New York magazine article by Nancy Jo Sales that exposed for the larger world that young actor Leo DiCaprio was surrounded by a scrum of other young guys on the make who were mowing down women like time itself was about to run out.

My source was well acquainted with that scene at the time, and reminded me that one of the members of Leos posse was Scientologist-actor Ethan Suplee.

Through Ethan, my source says, Leo had regular contact with other Scientologist Hollywood types.

But my source says it was very well-known in the group that if Leo and his wolf pack had few rules, there was one that dare not be violated: Leo would have none of that Scientology horseshit.

Everyone knew it, they say. Ethan was in the posse and Leo was around a lot of Scientologists, but we all knew that the rule was, he didnt want to hear anything about it.

Another of my sources witnessed the same thing herself, but from inside Scientologys Hollywood Celebrity Centre.

The Bloody and Tragic End of Scientologys Biggest Pop Star

She was physically present when Suplee was asked by the Celebrity Centres then-president, Karen Hollander, to target DiCaprio for recruitment.

Ethan said no fucking way, says my second source.

As far as I have been able to ascertain, DiCaprio has managed to keep Scientology at arms length.

In their years of conversations and financial transactions, both Denise and Leo used Scientology to explain any discrepancy or misunderstanding.

For example, Leos writing style seemed to change over the years, like it was the work of four or five different people. But he explained that away by saying he had to disguise his work because Scientology was watching. Denise, meanwhile, dismissed what FBI agents told her by reasoning that they didnt understand the extent of Scientologys reach.

But even with those justifications to fall back on, in 2020 and 2021 Denise became more wary and sent Leo less money. As a result, DiCaprio and his agents started to get more aggressive. One woman in particular, Merlinda Guzman, who claimed to be an agent of the Church of Scientology, was downright abusive.

I am Merlinda Guzman of the Church of Scientology of Love, Intellect, and Luminous, she had introduced herself in August 2020. Later, she threatened Denise that if she didnt send more funds, she would never get any of her money back. Guzman messaged a photo of herself holding a cashiers check made out to Denise for $878,000what Denise had sent and then somemocking her that she would never get it unless she cooperated.

Leo said he was upset about this and in September 2020 sent Denise a copy of an email he had written to Scientology leader David Miscavige, complaining about Merlindas duplicity.

Hello my dear worthy, Leos message to Miscavige began, asking him to convince Merlinda to apologize to Denise for her behavior on behalf of the brotherhood as the sole chairman of the board and Holiness.

By March 2021, and with the help of a second FBI special agent, Denise told Leo that she had finally realized that Leo and Merlindas emails were originating from outside the U.S. In response, Leo gave her an ominous warning: You have no idea what the brotherhood is truly capable of.

The second half of 2021 and first months of this year were filled with increasingly nasty exchanges about how Denises total payments had reached $813,000 and that she was expecting him to make good on it.

Her most recent exchanges have been with a man named Derek who says he works for Leo and who claims he is trying to send Denise the entire amount shes owed in a box full of cash.

Denise checked with one of the FBI agents who confirmed that it would not be a good idea to accept a box with nearly a million in cash inside, as she could be charged with money laundering. She told the Chinese company that was supposedly asking to send the money to cancel the delivery.

Derek has continued to send Denise emails, telling her now that he could deliver the $813,000 she was owed by Leo, but she would first need to send $5,000 to cover fees that would release the funds.

She had been hearing that for almost two years.

Finally, on March 17, Denise sent an email to me, saying that she had information about Leo DiCaprio trying to leave Scientology, and that she had texts and emails to prove it.

A few weeks ago, after more than a month of gathering Denises hundreds of documents, I called her and told her that within minutes of first hearing from her, I had formed two strong impressions. And after weeks of gathering more detail and records, those impressions hadnt changed.

First, I told her, I knew that it wouldnt do any good to tell Denise what she had already heard from two FBI agents and another Department of Justice specialist: that she wasnt, actually, talking with Leonardo DiCaprio, the actor.

Instead, I wanted to focus on my second impression. Denise had reached out to me because she knew that I had spent years writing about the Church of Scientology. Ive talked to hundreds of Scientologists and Ive communicated with them in writing, and Ive read hundreds of founder L. Ron Hubbards original writings and lectures.

I have never been a Scientologist myself, but I have a good feeling for how Scientologists speak and write, and am familiar with its special jargon.

And I told her that the people scamming her didnt know the slightest thing about Scientology.

How Nicole Kidman Almost Got Tom Cruise to Leave Scientology

All the talk about a brotherhood, and delegates, and his Holiness was all wrong, I told her.

Yes, she had been sent letters on what appeared to be Church of Scientology letterhead, but it was badly faked. The scammers, who had done some homework on DiCaprio, had clearly done almost none at all when it comes to Scientology.

But they didnt really need to. It was obvious that Denise was filling in the gaps for them.

Time and again, I pointed out to her, she was the one coming up with the details and associations and justifications for what the scammers were saying and proposing.

The sad truth was, she wanted to believe it was all real.

Denise told me she wasnt aware that in March 2020, the Department of Justice announced the arrest of 24 scammers in the Atlanta area, many of them Nigerians, for running various internet schemes, including romance scams.

I pointed out that three of the men in Georgia Denise had sent money to between 2018 and 2022 had Nigerian last names, something she tells me she didnt notice.

Another impression I formed, after poring through hundreds of her text conversations with Leo, was that she was filling in a lot of the gaps there too.

Her contributions in those conversations were witty and warm, or playfully sarcastic. She was a well-educated woman with a healthy sense of humor who would bring warmth and light to any relationship.

But the guy (or rather, team of guys) shed been conversing with? He had almost nothing interesting to say. He had pat answers, probably drawn from scripts, and no sense of humor.

She was filling in all of the things she said she saw in him. The Leo DiCaprio that she had fallen in love with was a creation of her own mind.

I wasnt sure how Denise was going to react, but she didnt sound defensive. She had come to me because I had some understanding of Scientology, and she accepted what I saidthat Scientology had nothing to do with what shed been going through.

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty

She made it sound like a weight was being lifted off her shoulders, but I didnt expect that she could so easily shake off something that had become a major part of her life for four years.

After giving Leo a grand total of $813,000, the vast majority of her life savings, she still had some money, and an expensive car she could sell. She wouldnt lose her house or anything like that. But her ability to help out her daughters financially had been seriously undercut. She knew, with more certainty than before, that she would never get her money back.

While she absorbed the news, I sent texts to both Leo and Merlinda, and emailed Derek, the most recent agent, who had been asking Denise for $5,000.

I never heard back from any of them.

Seven days after that conversation, I asked Denise if she had heard anything from the scammers.

Nope, I havent heard anything from them. There might be a God after all, she replied.

She said she was ready to move forward, which sounded positive, even if she still had some nagging doubts. There was the way Leo seemed to always know where DiCaprio was. How did he manage that? And she was still puzzled by the accent she heard when they spoke, which wasnt Nigerian as far as she knew. It was more Italian, and often German. She wondered about the way he had wept when he talked about a Scientology initiation ritual.

I guess Ill never get these answers, she says. But shes thankful she was able to get some help.

This has been a nightmare that I desperately needed to wake up from.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Lila Moss is the daughter of the British supermodel Kate Moss. Theo Wargo/WireImage

Lila Moss wore a glucose monitor in a photo she shared from her Fendi and Versace campaign.

She's received praise for not shying away from acknowledging her type 1 diabetes.

Images of her wearing her monitor at the 2022 Met Gala went viral on TikTok.

Lila Moss shared a photo from her new fashion campaign with Fendi and Versace that shows her wearing a glucose monitor on her arm for her diabetes.

The 19-year-old model, whose mother is the British supermodel Kate Moss, posted the picture of her wearing a silky dress, gold-and-black heels, and a mini purse on Tuesday. She also wore a Libre device placed on her upper arm, which continuously monitors a person's glucose levels, according to the UK's National Health Service.

While Lila Moss didn't make any reference to the medical equipment in the caption of the photo, which had amassed over 37,000 likes as of Thursday, people in the comments called her a role model and thanked her for "normalizing" it and representing the diabetic community.

Speaking with The Kit in 2020 about her diagnosis, Moss said that "not many people" knew that she had diabetes.

"It's not visible from the outside, so no one would really know just by looking at you. I have type 1," she said, adding that she wanted to offer her help in the diabetic community.

As Moss' modeling career has grown, so has the visibility of her diagnosis.

In September, she walked alongside her mother for the first time during Paris Fashion Week, Insider previously reported. While modeling in the show, Lila Moss wore a baroque-printed swimsuit that clearly showed her Omnipod insulin pump, which she later told British Vogue "was epic."

Lila Moss wore her diabetes pump to the 2022 Met Gala. Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images, Gotham/GC Images

More recently, at the 2022 Met Gala earlier this month, Moss was pictured wearing her insulin pump and monitor on the red carpet visibly beneath her sheer nude-colored Burberry gown, Mail Online reported.

The look inspired Grace Cochran, who says she's a nursing student with type 1 diabetes and goes by @grace_oliviat1d on TikTok, to post a viral video calling Moss a badass "diabetic queen."

Story continues

The video had amassed over 638,000 views as of Thursday, with the majority of users again sharing appreciation for Moss' decision not to hide her diabetes medical devices on the red carpet.

In an email to Insider, Cochran said it was Moss' transparency that she most admired.

"She could have taken the devices off and gone with more inconspicuous options for the night  but she didn't," she wrote.

"I think it sends a powerful message to young kids living with type 1 diabetes that wearing life saving medical devices is never something to be embarrassed of," Cochran added.

Representatives for Moss, Fendi, and Versace did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Read the original article on Insider
Cambodia is calling on the UK government to help it recover antiquities it says were stolen from its temples.

The country's culture minister says the Victoria & Albert and British Museums both have looted objects.

The museums said they were transparent about items' origins.

The V&A welcomed "constructive dialogue". The British Museum said it would consider requests "carefully and respectfully".

In a letter to her British counterpart Nadine Dorries, Cambodian culture minister, Phoeurng Sackona, says many important cultural treasures were stolen from sacred temples and "wrongfully ended up" in warehouses and institutions - including the two London museums.

The Cambodians - who believe ancient statues hold the souls of their ancestors - have pinpointed that many of the stolen works passed through the hands of a rogue British art dealer, Douglas Latchford, who died in 2020.

The focus on the UK marks the latest phase in the Cambodians' campaign to recover the country's most precious carvings and statues that were pillaged and then sold on to Western museums and private collectors.

Douglas Latchford in 2009

The Cambodian Ministry of Culture's chief legal counsel and the head of its investigative team, Brad Gordon, told the BBC that the trade in these items could be considered a war crime. The Cambodian minister's letter reminded the UK that both countries were party to the Hague Convention, which aims to protect cultural property during armed conflicts.

The murderous Khmer Rouge regime held power from 1975 to 1979, when it is thought to have killed more than two million of its own people, and the group controlled large portions of the country until the late 1990s. Much of the looting took place over this three-decade period of civil war and strife.

"This was a time of conflict. The whole world knew it," Brad Gordon says. "Large museums like the British Museum or the V&A, they shouldn't have accepted these pieces."

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He adds: "We would say, for the majority of pieces, there is no export licence, there is no permit. So these museums and these individuals are in receipt of stolen property and the stolen property needs to come back."

Before the looting - archive photos of the Koh Ker archaeological site

The two London museums have now each received a list of the items that the Cambodian authorities believe they have in their collections. The British Museum is believed to have approximately 100 Cambodian pieces, though all appear to be in storage.

Some of the museum's pieces rank near the top of the Cambodians' priority list for return. The V&A is thought to have more than 50 items; a fraction of them are on display.

In a statement, the British Museum said: "We are open and transparent about the heritage of objects in our permanent collection. Establishing the provenance of an object has been an integral part of the Museum's acquisition process for decades. Through this research, we also endeavour to find any possible ethical or legal issues. Each object goes through a careful and thorough process before the Trustees make a decision to acquire it."

The V&A told us it took steps to ensure as much information as possible about V&A objects was available to researchers.

It continued: "Information about our Cambodian objects, including their provenance, has been accessible on our online database since its launch in 2009. Research into our collections is continuous and new information is added to the database."

Both museums said they would respond to the Cambodians' letters.

Archaeologist Sopheap Meas

"The statues are definitely not just the stone for us. We believe the statues have souls," explains Sopheap Meas, an archaeologist on the investigative team.

Seeing the temples' statues broken into pieces makes Sopheap feel nauseous. She explains that to Cambodians, a statue can contain the soul of a king, a god or maybe an ancestor.

"So when the head was cut and the foot, the leg was destroyed, it's just like people and somebody cut off their heads."

This wasn't a colonial crime. In contrast to the Elgin Marbles taken from Greece or the Benin Bronzes removed from what is now Nigeria, much of the looting of Cambodian items took place in living memory - in the 1980s, 90s and early 2000s.

The BBC was given exclusive access to former looters who stole items from Cambodian temples.

They've all been given code names by the Cambodian investigative team to protect their identities from others who might not be happy they're being so open about their past activity.

One looter, known as Iron Princess, says she worked almost every day in the 1990s to systematically dismantle one of Cambodia's biggest temple complexes, Preah Khan Kampang Svay, in the north of the country.

"At the time there was no other work to do besides looting," she explains.

"Because there were so many traders, we sold to whoever paid the most," she adds.

After being shown a catalogue of Cambodian items that are held by the V&A in London, Iron Princess picks out several artefacts, including bronze and sandstone statues, that she says she removed from the remote temple complex, Preah Kahn Kampang Svay.

Another former looter, known as Red Horse, takes us to a remote temple near northern Cambodia's Kulen Mountain. There, he shows us the place where he says his gang removed a large male deity statue in the 1970s. He clearly identifies it in the British Museum catalogue.

"We dug down and lifted it out, two people on each side," he says. "Then we used a stretcher [to carry it]."

Cambodian investigators have carefully traced the statue's journey. They're confident the one Red Horse identifies matches the artefact held by the British Museum.

Former looter-turned-government-witness who uses the code name Red Horse

This is just one story - there are thousands of others. In targeted excavations at temples across the country, archaeologists look for evidence to back up the looters' stories. They also search for left-behind fragments that might match statues in foreign museums.

That strategy has worked. In 2014, two of Cambodia's most-wanted statues, a pair of warriors, were returned to Phnom Penh after French archaeologists matched pedestals with feet to statues in US collections.

American prosecutors have been actively targeting US museums and collectors, asking them to justify their Cambodian acquisitions.

Iron Princess and Red Horse both sold most of their finds through a Cambodian man named Lion. He was sick with cancer when Cambodian investigators made contact with him, but he worked with the team right up to his death last year.

It's through Lion that the team really began to understand how the system operated. There were two men who masterminded the selling off of treasures in the 1980s and 90s: Lion and Douglas Latchford. The British art dealer was so prominent that the Cambodian minister of culture has named him in her letter to the UK, noting that many stolen objects passed through his hands.

Outwardly, Latchford presented himself as an expert on Cambodian art, even publishing several large art books full of glossy photographs of items in Western collections. However, many had suspicions that he wasn't operating above board. Where were all these Cambodian works coming from in the later decades of the 20th Century, right when the country was consumed by violence?

Douglas Latchford always claimed his business was legitimate. He also insisted that if the statues had not been removed from Cambodia they would most likely, as he put it, have been shot up for target practice by the Khmer Rouge.

In 2012, he was mentioned by US prosecutors in a case targeting New York dealers.

Map of Douglas Latchford's smuggling routes out of Cambodia

US prosecutors closed in on Latchford himself. In 2019, he was subjected to his own indictment - 25 pages detailing his alleged crimes, from smuggling to selling stolen antiquities. He died the following year, before going to trial.

Latchford's family has supplied a vast trove of shipping records and emails to the Cambodian authorities. The documents confirmed many of the suspicions about him. Brad Gordon says Latchford was double-dealing right until his death.

"He was trying to offload his collection right up until he went into the hospital right before he died," Brad Gordon says of Latchford.

Douglas's daughter, Julia Latchford, stresses that legal ownership of the entire collection has been transferred to the Cambodian authorities. So far five major objects from Latchford's private collection have been physically repatriated, with a promise to return the rest.

Some in Cambodia have become tired of waiting. They want their gods to return home.

There are those, like the archaeologist Sopheap Meas, who would ideally like to see statues back in their original temples.

"I think the statue [was] just made for here," she says, gesturing to empty temples behind her, in the Preah Khan Kampang Svay complex. "They need to come back to our country, our people because people need to pray."

Temple ruins at Preah Khan Kampang Svay

Many in Cambodia would love to see their temples fully restored. But the country simply doesn't have the museum space or resources to take everything back. They have a priority list of the most important pieces they want returned immediately.

They say they're not looking to empty Western museums of all Cambodian treasures. What they do want is institutions like the British Museum and the V&A to change their signs - acknowledging that these objects belong to the people of Cambodia.
By Alasdair Pal and Uditha Jayasinghe

COLOMBO (Reuters) -Sri Lanka appointed a new prime minister on Thursday, as its embattled president seeks a way out of the country's worst economic crisis since independence that has sparked widespread protests.

Ranil Wickremesinghe, a political veteran who has been prime minister of the island nation five times before, must try to address financial chaos and heal political divisions as he sets out to form a coalition government.

"We are facing a crisis, we have to get out of it," Wickremesinghe told Reuters as he left a temple in the main city of Colombo shortly after his swearing-in. Asked whether there was a possible solution, he replied: "Absolutely."

The 73-year-old is an economic liberal who has experience dealing with the International Monetary Fund, which is currently in discussions to bail out Sri Lanka.

He has also built relationships with regional powers India and China, key investors and lenders who vie for influence over the island nation that lies along busy shipping routes linking Asia to Europe.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa congratulated the new premier.

My best wishes to the newly appointed PM ... who stepped up to take on the challenging task of steering our country through a very turbulent time," he tweeted. "I look forward to working together with him to make Sri Lanka strong again."

The current crisis could be Wickremesinghe's greatest challenge yet.

Economic mismanagement, the COVID-19 pandemic and rising energy costs following Russia's invasion of Ukraine have drained state coffers, meaning Sri Lanka is running low on fuel and essential medicines and facing daily power blackouts.

Rajapaksa, whose elder brother Wickremesinghe replaced as prime minister, has called nationwide curfews and given security forces sweeping powers to shoot at anyone involved in looting or putting people's lives at risk.

Mahinda Rajapaksa, who resigned on Monday, has gone into hiding on a naval base.

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NO MONEY

Ordinary people have grown increasingly frustrated at disruptions to normal life.

"We have hit the bottom economically," said Nimal Jayantha, an autorickshaw driver queuing for petrol earlier on Thursday after the curfew was lifted.

"I don't have the time to do my job. By the time I stay in the fuel queue and get petrol, curfew will be imposed. I will have to go home without any money."

Many people crammed on to buses in Colombo earlier on Thursday to return to hometowns during a brief relaxation in the curfew.

Mostly peaceful demonstrations erupted into violence on Monday after supporters of Mahinda Rajapaksa attacked an anti-government protest camp in Colombo.

Days of violent reprisals against government figures aligned to the powerful Rajapaksa clan followed.

Security forces were called out to patrol the streets, and police said nine people were killed and more than 300 injured in the clashes, which have since subsided.

Protesters have sprayed graffiti over Mahinda Rajapaksa's home in a southern town and ransacked a museum dedicated to his father. They have vowed to keep up the protests until the president also quits.

On Thursday, a magistrate's court issued orders blocking him, his son Namal and other key allies from leaving the country, lawyers present at the hearing said.

"I personally will extend my fullest cooperation to any investigation that is taking place with regard to the unfortunate events that took place on Monday," Namal Rajapaksa said in a tweet following the order.

"Neither my father nor myself have any intention to leave (Sri Lanka)."

The Colombo stock market, closed for the last two days, ended more than three percent up on Thursday on optimism over a new cabinet, traders said. It closed before Wickremesinghe was appointed.

Sri Lanka's central bank governor said on Wednesday that failing to find a solution to the crisis in the next one to two weeks would lead to power cuts of up to 10 to 12 hours per day, as well as his own resignation.

President Rajapaksa has repeatedly called for a unity government to find a way out of the crisis, but opposition leaders say they will not serve until he resigns.

(Reporting by Alasdair Pal, Uditha Jayasinghe and Channa Kumara in Colombo; Writing by Mike Collett-White; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan, Alex Richardson and Andrew Heavens)
By Nate Raymond

BOSTON (Reuters) - The state of Massachusetts on Thursday agreed to pay $56 million to resolve a lawsuit by families of veterans who contracted COVID-19 during an outbreak at a veterans' care center that killed 84 people early in the pandemic.

The proposed settlement would resolve a pending federal class action lawsuit by families of veterans who died as a result of the 2020 outbreak at Holyoke Soldiers' Home, one of the deadliest to have occurred at a U.S. nursing facility.

Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker's administration said that under the settlement, families of deceased veterans would receive a minimum of $400,000, while veterans who contracted COVID-19 but survived would receive at least $10,000.

"While we know nothing can bring back those who were lost, we hope that this settlement brings a sense of closure to the loved ones of the veterans," Baker said in a statement.

The settlement requires court approval and covers more than 160 veterans who became ill or died from March 1 to June 23, 2020.

Baker, a Republican, has faced criticism over his handling of the outbreak at Holyoke Soldiers' Home, a 247-bed, state-run facility in Holyoke that provides healthcare, nursing and other services to veterans.

The deadly outbreak resulted in the removal of Bennett Walsh, the former superintendent of the facility, and prompted a series of investigations into leadership failures and other problems at the facility.

Walsh and former Medical Director David Clinton were charged with criminal neglect in September 2020 over their handling of the outbreak, but a judge in November 2021 dismissed the charges against them. The state's attorney general is appealing.

The settlement is comparable in size to a similar one in New Jersey, which in December agreed to pay $53 million to resolve claims by families of over 100 veterans who died from COVID-19 while at state-run facilities.

(This story corrects typo in final paragraph to say a settlement would "resolve" claims)

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
Target 11 confirmed today that there was a shooting near Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gaineys home in Larimer last week, and a new report by the mayors transitional team recommends the city immediately begin the search for a new police chief. That report is raising questions tonight about the future of Chief Scott Schubert.

The shooting in the Mayors neighborhood last week prompted around-the-clock police security details for the mayor and his family. Sources tell Target 11 an unmarked car sat outside the mayors office for a week.

Gainey, speaking at a news conference after receiving recommendations from his transitional team, confirmed that a shot was fired. Gainey said he was sitting on his porch with a friend when he heard a shot. The mayor said only one shot was fired, and he ran off his porch to see what was happening.

I did come off the porch to take a look, and we seen a person running into a car and made a left onto Paulson Avenue, and went up the street. Thats what I saw, thats all I saw; and then I did the right thing and called 911. If you ask me if I was scared for me and my family, absolutely, said Gainey, who told police he saw a man fleeing in a silver Lexus.

Police also received a Shot Spotter alert at 7:56 p.m. When officers arrived, they found no victims and no property damage.

No arrests have been made in the shooting.

The mayor said the shot was not fired at him or his home.

The mayor spoke out about the shooting for the first time after his transitional team released a long list of recommendations to improve the city. Some of those recommendations address the uptick in violence. The report suggested, among other recommendations, rebuilding trust between the community and police, investing in anti-violence workforce development and identifying the key people and places driving the violence.

After receiving the recommendations, the mayor also expressed concern about juvenile access to guns.

Theres no reason a 14, 15, 16, 17-year-old should have a gun in your hand. Theres no reason, none at all, and its up to all of us, said Gainey.

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The report, released after the news conference, also raises questions about the future of Police Chief Scott Schubert.

One of the recommendations calls for the immediate search for a new chief to ensure a commitment to the new vision for public safety. It doesnt specify what that vision is.

TRENDING NOW:

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Mayor Michelle Wu announces Thursday more than $2 billion as part of a New Green Deal for Boston Public Schools facilities.

During a news conference Thursday at the McKinley Elementary School in Bostons South End, Wu laid out the plan to overhaul facilities in the district, including new construction and renovation projects.

The plan will be kickstarted by a $605 million investment in the FY23-27 Capital Plan to launch major new projects, according to Wus office, with new staffing and planning tools to deliver improvements for BPS communities.

The Green New Deal is intended to accelerate work to decarbonize the citys building sector, since Boston Public School facilities make up nearly half of city-owned building emissions.

The Green New Deal for Boston Public Schools is a pledge to listen to and rebuild trust with our communities, said Mayor Michelle Wu. This is a new, all hands on deck approach, with new financial resources, planning tools, and staff capacity to deliver urgent improvements to our school buildings. With students, families, and educators at the table, well continue investing until every school can cultivate the healthy, nurturing environment our kids deserve.

Download the FREE Boston 25 News app for breaking news alerts.

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Designer Carley Brandeaux explains the logistics of a dress she is making for a performance by violinist Melissa White with the Chicago Sinfonietta at her home on May 9, 2022, in Chicago. White will reveal the cocoon-to-butterfly dress section by section during her May 14 and May 16 performances. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)

Melissa White has lost count of how many times shes performed with the Chicago Sinfonietta. Founder Paul Freeman took her under his wing when she was a precocious preteen violinist, her mom driving her all the way from Lansing, Michigan, to the Music Institute of Chicago for lessons.

Now, shes a founding violinist in the Harlem Quartet, a professor at New York University and a former winner of the esteemed Sphinx Competition whose performances take her around the globe.

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On May 14 and 16, shell return to her old stomping grounds for the Sinfoniettas Limitless Horizon event to play The Butterfly Lovers, a 1959 violin concerto cowritten by Chen Gang and He Zhanhao that became an early touchstone of traditional Chinese and European classical stylistic fusion.

Its like coming back with family to perform, White says of the Sinfonietta.

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Except theres a twist. White will perform the concerto in a dress specially designed for the occasion by local artist Carley Brandeaux. Like a splitting chrysalis  or like the star-crossed Butterfly Lovers who transform into butterflies at the folktales end  the garment changes shape as the concerto goes on.

Designer Carley Brandeaux's dress that she is making for a performance by violinist Melissa White. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)

Brandeaux got on the Sinfoniettas radar after she won a Luminarts grant in 2018 for her graduate studio work at the School of the Art Institute. There, she studied with renowned artist Nick Cave, the subject of an MCA retrospective opening the same day as the Sinfonietta concert. Before moving to Chicago from North Carolina, Brandeaux specialized in sculpture but found her calling designing pieces for the human form, starting with coiled, wearable wood artworks.

This is kind of a dream commission for me. And I wanted it to change a lot through the performance, Brandeaux says.

Her dress design for White sources a unique linen and rayon blend crafted to her specifications at The Weaving Mill in Humboldt Park, run by textile artist Emily Winter.

I choose these greens, these yellows, these browns, and put them on the loom, then she helped me come up with this weave structure that allowed us to play with gradients, Brandeaux says, showing off scraps in her Irving Park studio.

Stitched to the other side of the blend  and what the audience only spots gradually at first  is hand-painted silk. The colors and pattern evoke the orange-and-tawny wings of the American Painted Lady, a butterfly native to the Chicago metro area.

Unless youre a bug nerd, youve probably mistaken the American Painted Lady for the more recognizable Monarch, at least at a quick glance. Thats a rookie move Brandeaux wont be making any time soon, thanks to the hours of lepidopterological study she put into the Sinfonietta commission.

Now, when Im out and about, Im able to recognize different butterflies because of this research, she says.

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White says the idea for the performance was practically fully formed when music director Mei-Ann Chen pitched it to her during the Sinfoniettas 2019 gala. But, of course, the projects pupal stage turned out longer than expected.

It was originally meant to happen in 2020, then we tried to do it again last season. White chuckles. Third times the charm.

By coincidence, the Sinfoniettas deferred concert arrives just weeks after a Guardian column last month that criticized classical musics usually monkish approach to fashion. Author Leah Broads argument that a soloists garb can  and even ought to  be considered part of their performance sparked a spirited debate among classical music fans. Soprano Rachel Nicholls subsequent letter to the editor criticized Broads cri de coeur for unduly burdening women, who, unlike men, lack the luxury of a default option. (See: tuxes and black suits.)

Regardless of gender, a number of prominent soloists have gone public with their collaborations with designers. Leif Ove Andsnes  who served double-duty as pianist and conductor in Chicago Symphony programs last month when director Riccardo Muti contracted COVID-19  is a noted sucker for Issey Miyake suits. Animated by her own youthful passion for classical music, designer Jenny Lai crafts what she calls performance wear for stars like violinists Jennifer Koh and Leila Josefowicz, bass-baritone Davone Tines and flutist Claire Chase. Perhaps most distinctively, Vivienne Westwood has been pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudets exclusive clothier for 20 years.

Next weekends concerts will mark the first time White will wear a bespoke garment onstage. Even so, she says she often ties her attire to her solo programs, if the shoe fits (pardon the expression). Recently, in a streamed concert with the Albany Symphony, she performed George Tsontakis Violin Concerto No. 2 in a sleek cobalt gown, selected for its resemblance to the deep blue of the Greek flag.

I thought it would be perfect to wear this blue for a piece by an (American-born) Greek composer whos very strong in his identity. And when I do Mozart, I envision a full skirt, White says. I think about the piece Im performing as well as what experience I would want the audience to be having while theyre watching me play it on stage.

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But this time, that creative vision is all Brandeauxs. White heads back to Chicago for her fourth and final fitting this week, at which point the two will finalize the flow of the dresss transformations  four so far, and counting.

I want her to run wild with what she has in mind. Im open for anything, White says.

Anything, you say?

Looking over the dress in her studio, Brandeaux pats a stubborn ruffle of fabric at its flank. I think I might add some sort of cape, actually.

Limitless Horizon also includes the world premieres of Michelle Isaacs Moshes Dream and Derrick Skyes To Be A Horizon. 8 p.m. May 14 at North Central Colleges Wentz Concert Hall, 171 E. Chicago Ave, Naperville, tickets $17-$62; 7:30 p.m. May 16 at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave., tickets $17-$101 at (312) 284-1554 and chicagosinfonietta.org/horizon/

Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.

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The Rubin Institute for Music Criticism helps fund our classical music coverage. The Chicago Tribune maintains complete editorial control over assignments and content.
A mega-mansion belonging to a politician accused by the DOJ of corruption is for sale. iStock / Getty Images Plus

The DOJ and FBI are trying to seize the former Armenian finance minister's mega-mansion.

The Holmby Hills home is listed for $63.5 million while prosecutors work with realtors on the sale.

Gagik Khachatryan was criminally charged with bribery in Armenia, and faces charges in the US.

Los Angeles realtors are working with the Department of Justice and the FBI to try to sell a mega-mansion that belonged to an Armenian politician facing criminal corruption charges in his home country.

The 30,000-square-foot palace is located in the swanky Holmby Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles just a few doors down from Hugh Hefner's Playboy mansion. The home, listed for $63.5 million, belonged to former Armenian finance minister Gagik Khachatryan.

Known by the DOJ as the "super minister" in Armenia because of his political power and responsibilities while in office, Khachatryan served as the Chairman of the State Revenue Committee of the Republic of Armenia between 2008 to 2014 and as the Minister of Finance between 2014 to 2016.

Federal prosecutors allege that Armenian businessman Sedrak Arustamyan paid Khachatryan over $20 million in bribes for special tax relief for his businesses and that the money was used to purchase the home in 2011. Armenian prosecutors discovered millions in unpaid taxes after Khachatryan left office in 2016.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the DOJ alleged in a court filing that Khachatryan purchased the house for $14.4 million using the illicit cash, and that he and his sons had formed entities and phony loans to "to receive, disguise and conceal illegal bribe payments."

Khachatryan and his sons, who the DOJ allege partook in the bribery, were criminally charged with receiving bribes in Armenia in 2019, while charges against Arustamyan are pending.

In the DOJ's filing, prosecutors wrote that Khachatryan's sons sought to raise their kids in Los Angeles at the home. After an investigation into the family came to light in Armenia in 2016, the sons fled the country.

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With 11 bedrooms and 27 bathrooms, the mansion went on the market on April 7. Real estate brokerage Hilton & Hyland is trying to sell the house as federal prosecutors move to seize the property.

"I've been told by the FBI that I can continue to do showings," realtor Richard Maslan told The Los Angeles Times. "If we receive an offer and both the seller and the Justice Department agree on a sale price, we can still sell it."

Read the original article on Business Insider
Support local journalism. Unlock unlimited digital access to floridatoday.com Click here and subscribe today.

Melbourne police were working to locate the person who shot and killed a 26-year-old man near a neighborhood gas station Thursday.

The shooting happened at about 11:42 a.m. Thursday at the Umart, 653 University Boulevard.

Bacari Berlis of Melbourne was struck by gunfire and transported to Holmes Regional Medical Center, where he died, police reported.

Several patrol cars were at the site, along with detectives. No arrests have been made. Police were searching for the shooter. The motive for the shooting was not immediately known.

The deadly shooting in Melbourne was one of three to take place in Brevard on Thursday. A man and a woman were shot to death in Titusville. Police continue to investigate that case.

Melbourne police are searching for the shooter who wounded a person at a gas station on University Boulevard.

In Melbourne, police were working to find potential witnesses to the shooting.

The investigation is still ongoing, said Shaun Hill, spokesperson for the Melbourne Police Department.

The gas station is known as a neighborhood hub.

More: Two people killed in Thursday morning shooting in Titusville

Anyone with information on the case is asked to call police at 321-608-6422.

J.D. Gallop is a Criminal Justice/Breaking News Reporter at FLORIDA TODAY. Contact Gallop at 321-917-4641 or jgallop@floridatoday.com. Twitter: @JDGallop.

Support local journalism. Subscribe today.

This article originally appeared on Florida Today: One person fatally shot at Melbourne gas station University Boulevard
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sits with Justice Sandra Day O'Connor at the Seneca Women Global Leadership Forum at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, on April 15, 2015 in Washington.

Its been more than 40 years since our mother made history.

Sandra Day OConnor became the first female associate justice in the nearly 200-year history of the Supreme Court. The 1981 Senate vote to confirm was 99-0, which seems unfathomable in todays politically polarized times.

Twelve years later, in 1993, Mom welcomed the second female associate justice in the history of the high court when the Senate confirmed Ruth Bader Ginsburg, also by an impressive margin, 96-3.

This was Bipartisanship with a capital B.

And now, President Biden has signed legislation to erect statues of these two women legal pioneers somewhere on the U.S. Capitol grounds after unanimous consent in the Senate and an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote in the House.

The overwhelming support for the statues of these two women with very different backgrounds speaks to something missing from much of todays politics: respect for the other. Disagreeing without being disagreeable. Understanding that the other point of view is not intended to ruin the country.

Different backgrounds, but shared experiences

Sandra Day O'Connor and her husband, John Jay O'Connor III, when Sandra Day O'Connor was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1981.

The two women being honored came from very different backgrounds  the Lazy B Ranch along the Arizona-New Mexico border and Brooklyn, New York; Republican Majority Leader in the Arizona Senate and co-founder of the Womens Rights Project at the ACLU.

They may have had distinct philosophies of jurisprudence, but after Justice Ginsburg joined Mom on the bench they were bound together by their shared experiences as women pioneers.

More: How Sandra Day O'Connor met her destiny on a Lake Powell houseboat

When Mom graduated from Stanford Law School, she applied for a position as a lawyer with the firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, only to be told she might find employment as a legal secretary  if she could type fast enough.

Yet it was U.S. Attorney General William French Smith  a Gibson, Dunn partner  who recommended her for the Supreme Court. Many years later, while speaking during the law firms 100th anniversary, Mom said, All is forgiven.

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For Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who arrived at Harvard Law School in 1956, it was the dean who reportedly asked all nine women students to explain how they justified taking a place that would otherwise have gone to a man.

And when they were the two women among nine justices on the Supreme Court, Mom was able to share her own breast cancer experience with Justice Ginsburg, who was diagnosed with colon cancer. Moms advice: have chemo on Fridays so the nausea will have eased by Mondays oral arguments.

O'Connor knew how critical common ground was

Sandra Day O'Connor had a knack for finding common ground with others.

Theres a thread that has run through our mothers life.

She always seemed able to find the common ground in a divided country, whether during her years in the Arizona Legislature or navigating complicated issues that came before the justices at the highest court in the land.

In the Arizona Senate, she was legendary for hosting potluck parties at our home, with Dad pouring the favorite drinks of her colleagues, and everyone dancing to country western music. That made it harder for those same colleagues to treat her, and each other, poorly on the Senate floor. More was accomplished.

Her work didnt end there. After retiring from the Supreme Court, Mom was presciently concerned about the lack of understanding about our system of government, and the disengagement and discord that inevitably follows.

She founded iCivics to ensure that all young Americans have the knowledge and will to participate in our unique experiment in self-governance.

That's why mom focused on civics education

Since then, iCivics has become the nations premier nonprofit provider of and advocate for high quality, nonpartisan, engaging civic education. Each year, iCivics serves up to 145,000 teachers and nine million students free of charge, which equates to the majority of our nations middle and high school students.

Of all her accomplishments, Justice OConnor considers iCivics to be her most important work and greatest legacy.

In a politically polarized country, the civic education that Mom has been promoting is an essential tool to move the country forward by teaching students to find common ground, not to simply score political points but to keep government  federal, state and local  in a constant search to serve the common good.

The statues of these two pioneering women will count among a relatively small number of other similarly honored great women in U.S. history. This is a special honor for both our family and the Ginsburg family.

It is our hope that their impact on future generations is enduring and significant.

We want women and girls to see their futures as limitless, and that all Americans will be inspired to learn about and engage with the great nation they served.

Jay OConnor is a software industry executive. Scott OConnor is a commercial real estate developer.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Sandra Day O'Connor knew something about politics that we forgot
Monica Galetti says she is protecting her mental health by stepping back from MasterChef: The Professionals. (Shine TV)

Monica Galetti has explained more about her reasons for exiting MasterChef: The Professionals, saying "something had to give" to protect her mental health and that things had got "very dark".

The top chef and TV judge had spent 14 years on the BBC One contest looking to find a new star of the restaurant world, but in April announced that she would not be on screen alongside co-stars Marcus Wareing and Gregg Wallace for the new series.

Read more: Alan Titchmarsh jokes about bizarre Queen's Jubilee casting alongside Tom Cruise

Citing family reasons and needing to focus on her London restaurant Mere after the hospitality industry was hit hard by the pandemic, Galetti will be replaced on the show by Saturday Kitchen's Anna Haugh but has said she hopes to return in future years.

Talking to The One Show, Galetti said: "Ive only been able to commit time to the show for three months when my team are strong, and I can have the balance of family, the restaurant and all my other commitments.

Monica Galetti usually stars alongside Marcus Wareing and Gregg Wallace in MasterChef: The Professionals. (Shine TV)

"When Im filming, people dont realise I do a 12-hour day of filming, and then I will get back to the restaurant in the evening."

She continued: "But at the moment, things are just out of sync, things are tough at the moment.

Read more: Prue Leith to join Paul Hollywood for Great American Baking Show

"Im trying to spend time with my family, I have an ill nephew that I try to get back to see and filming was all starting at the same time.

"Im short at the restaurant, Im here tonight and straight after this Im back in my kitchen."

The trio are hoping to be back together in the future. (Shine TV)

Explaining that she needed to protect her mental health, Galetti, 46, added: "I just found a cannot manage the balance this time, and I just knew that something had to give, I think for my own mental health as well.

"It was just getting very dark trying to give 100% to this and 100% to that, and sometimes you just cant do it all."

On Thursday, Galetti will appear alongside Mary Berry and Rahul Mandal in BBC One's The Jubilee Pudding: 70 Years In The Baking, where they will decide on a celebratory pudding recipe to mark the Queen's Jubilee celebrations designed by a member of the public.

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The Jubilee Pudding: 70 Years In The Baking airs on Thursday 12 May at 8pm on BBC One.

Watch: Monica Galetti reveals her advice for Queen Elizabeth pudding competition
Associated Press

Police in central California were searching for the driver of a pickup truck that struck a woman walking her dog Friday and kept going, dragging her more than 8 miles (13 kilometers) to a hotel parking lot, where she was found dead. The 29-year-old woman was pushing a shopping cart and had her dog on a leash when she was hit by a gray or silver pickup truck at the intersection of Herndon and Millburn in Fresno, said Fresno Police Lt. Bill Dooley. The man kept driving with the woman trapped under his truck and stopped at a hotel, where he parked in the parking lot, got out of the pickup truck and went to the lobby to ask for a room, Dooley said.
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Comedian Chris Rock has an old joke about how bad Bill Gates would feel if he woke up one day with Oprah's money. The point was that "rich" is a subjective term. The same holds true if you make a lot of money in America -- where you live has a lot to do with whether you can think of yourself as truly wealthy.

Find Out: 22 Side Gigs That Can Make You Richer Than a Full-Time Job

Money Maker: 8 Items Around Your Home That May Be Worth More Than You Think

To get an idea of what it means to be rich in America, GOBankingRates used IRS data to conduct a study of the top incomes as they break down by state. It lays out what income level is needed to place you in the top 20% and the top 5% of incomes within your state.

Check out how much money you need to be "rich" in your state.

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49. West Virginia

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48. Arkansas

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47. Kentucky

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46. New Mexico

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45. Alabama

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44. Oklahoma

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43. Tennessee

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42. Louisiana

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41. Montana

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40. South Carolina

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39. Idaho

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38. South Dakota

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37. Indiana

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36. Missouri

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35. North Carolina

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34. Maine

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33. Ohio

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32. Iowa

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31. Florida

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30. Michigan

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29. Nebraska

Average adjusted gross income of the top 20%: $116,752

The minimum you need to make to be in the top 20%: $116,753

Average adjusted gross income of the top 20%: $198,337

The minimum you need to make to be in the top 5%: $348,302

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28. Kansas

Average adjusted gross income of the top 20%: $116,972

The minimum you need to make to be in the top 20%: $116,973

Average adjusted gross income of the top 20%: $202,842

The minimum you need to make to be in the top 5%: $360,559

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27. Wisconsin

Average adjusted gross income of the top 20%: $117,682

The minimum you need to make to be in the top 20%: $117,683

Average adjusted gross income of the top 20%: $199,636

The minimum you need to make to be in the top 5%: $351,983

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26. Nevada

Average adjusted gross income of the top 20%: $118,028

The minimum you need to make to be in the top 20%: $118,029

Average adjusted gross income of the top 20%: $210,939

The minimum you need to make to be in the top 5%: $386,175

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25. Wyoming

Average adjusted gross income of the top 20%: $119,290

The minimum you need to make to be in the top 20%: $119,291

Average adjusted gross income of the top 20%: $198,507

The minimum you need to make to be in the top 5%: $349,123

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24. Arizona

Average adjusted gross income of the top 20%: $119,971

The minimum you need to make to be in the top 20%: $119,972

Average adjusted gross income of the top 20%: $212,161

The minimum you need to make to be in the top 5%: $380,865

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23. Vermont

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22. Georgia

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21. North Dakota

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20. Pennsylvania

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19. Oregon

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18. Texas

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17. Utah

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16. Delaware

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15. Rhode Island

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14. Illinois

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13. Minnesota

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12. Colorado

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11. Alaska

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10. New Hampshire

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9. Washington

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8. New York

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7. Virginia

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6. Hawaii

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5. California

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4. Connecticut

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3. Maryland

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2. Massachusetts

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1. New Jersey

This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: Heres How Much You Need To Earn To Be Rich in Every State
By Anne Kauranen and Jonathan Landay

HELSINKI/KHARKIV, Ukraine (Reuters) - Moscow warned Finland on Thursday it would face consequences as it seeks to apply for NATO membership "without delay" and Ukraine said it had damaged a Russian navy logistics ship in the Black Sea, where there has been renewed fighting in recent days.

The Vsevolod Bobrov vessel was near Snake Island, close to Ukraine's sea border with Romania, spokesman Serhiy Bratchuk for the Odesa regional military administration in southern Ukraine said.

"Thanks to the actions of our naval seamen, the support vessel Vsevolod Bobrov caught fire - it is one of the newest in the Russian fleet," Bratchuk said.

Reuters could not independently verify the details. Russia's defence ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Its Black Sea flagship, the Moskva, sunk last month.

Finland's plan to apply for NATO membership, announced on Thursday, and the expectation that Sweden will follow, would bring about the expansion of the Western military alliance that Russian President Vladimir Putin aimed to prevent.

Abandoning the neutrality they maintained throughout the Cold War would be one of the biggest shifts in European security in decades.

Moscow called Finland's announcement hostile and threatened retaliation, including unspecified "military-technical" measures.

"Helsinki must be aware of the responsibility and consequences of such a move," said the foreign ministry.

Russian officials have spoken in the past about potential measures including stationing nuclear-armed missiles on the Baltic Sea.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the Finns would be "warmly welcomed" and promised a "smooth and swift" accession process.

The White House backed such a move.

"We would support a NATO application by Finland and-or Sweden should they apply," said press secretary Jen Psaki.

Russia faced a further setback on the battlefield as Ukraine drove its troops out of the region around the second largest city Kharkiv, the fastest advance since forcing the Kremlin's forces from Kyiv and the northeast over a month ago.

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The U.N. Human Rights Council passed a resolution to set up an investigation into possible war crimes by Russian troops in the Kyiv area and beyond, a move that the Kremlin said amounted to political score-settling.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said there were many examples of possible war crimes, including unlawful killings and summary executions.

Moscow denies deliberately attacking civilians.

'YOU CAUSED THIS'

Finland's 1,300-km (800-mile) border will more than double the length of the frontier between the U.S.-led alliance and Russia, putting NATO guards a few hours' drive from the northern outskirts of St Petersburg.

"Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay," President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said in a joint statement.

Asked on Wednesday if Finland would provoke Russia by joining NATO, Niinisto said: "My response would be that you caused this. Look at the mirror."

Five diplomats and officials told Reuters that NATO allies expect both countries to be granted membership quickly, paving the way for an increased troop presence in the Nordic region to defend them during a one-year ratification period.

Putin cited NATO's potential expansion as one of the main reasons he launched a "special military operation" in Ukraine in February.

NATO describes itself as a defensive alliance, built around a treaty declaring that an attack on one member is an attack on all, granting U.S. allies the protection of Washington's superpower might including its nuclear arsenal.

Moscow regards that as a threat to its security. But Putin's decision to invade Ukraine has changed Nordic public opinion, with many now embracing the view that Russia is a menace.

Finland in particular has centuries of uneasy history in Russia's shadow.

Thursday also saw an intensification of disputes over Russian supplies of energy to Europe - still Moscow's biggest source of funds and Europe's biggest source of heat and power.

Moscow said it would halt gas flows to Germany through the main pipeline over Poland, while Kyiv said it would not reopen a pipeline route it shut this week unless it regains control of areas from pro-Russian fighters. Prices for gas in Europe surged.

Ukraine has spent 245.1 billion hryvnia ($8.3 billion) on fighting the Russian invasion, the finance minister told Reuters on Thursday, reflecting the scale of spending on everything from buying and repairing weapons to support for millions of displaced people.

On the front lines, Ukraine has mounted a counter offensive in recent days, ousting Russian forces from villages north and east of Kharkiv they had held since the start of the invasion.

Reuters journalists have confirmed that Ukraine is now in control of territory stretching to the banks of the Siverskiy Donets River, around 40 km (25 miles) east of Kharkiv.

(Reporting by Reuters bureaus; Writing by Peter Graff, Alexandra Hudson and Costas Pitas; Editing by William Maclean, Andrew Heavens and Grant McCool)
our-father-1-netflix

Keith Boyle as Donald Cline in Our Father Credit - Courtesy of Netflix

During the 1970s and 80s, a fertility specialist in Indiana named Dr. Donald Cline inseminated dozens of patients with his own sperm, without their knowledge or consent. The stories of some of these women and the (at least) 94 biological children of Cline are told in a new documentary, Our Father, which premiered on Netflix in May.

The film, which features interviews with the parents and their children, as well as others close to the situation, chronicles the siblings path to uncovering the truth of their biological parentage, and spotlights their fury and resolve as they failed to see Cline answer for his crimes in court. In a moment when the right to safe and informed reproductive care is under threat in the U.S., Our Father is particularly resonant given the questions it raises about how our legal system views those seeking control over their own reproductive choices, and restitution when that autonomy is violated.

Heres what to know about Our Father.

How one woman discovered she had dozens of half-siblings

Jacoba Ballards life changed after she took an at-home DNA test and learned she had seven half-siblings. After reaching out to her newfound family members and researching the mystery of their shared relation, Ballard and her siblings soon discovered with horror what their parents trusted doctor had done. The number of confirmed siblings continued to grow as more people added their DNA to 23andMes database. Each time she saw a new connection appear on her profile, shed steel herself before reaching out to deliver the news. I know Im going to call them and Im going to ruin their life, she says in the documentary.

It just completely washes away your identity, Julie Harmon, another sibling, says. You really have no idea who you are anymore.

Our Father includes interviews with eight of the 94 siblings. Because of Clines lack of cooperation and the unknown number of patients he had the opportunity to inseminate up until he stopped practicing in 2009, there is no way to know for sure how many siblings there may be.

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Julie Harmon in Our Father Courtesy of Netflix

Our Father alleges Donald Cline was motivated by religion

Our Father suggests Cline may have been motivated by ideology born of his affiliation with an extremist Christian sect called Quiverfull, which encourages followers to reproduce as prolifically as possible to meet Gods mandate to be fruitful and multiply, and install adherents in positions of power. Surveying the blonde hair and blue eyes of many of Clines offspring, the film briefly meditates on whether Clines crusade may have had white supremacist underpinnings (Quiverfull ideology, which promotes patriarchal gender ideology and other conservative ideals and bemoans European population decline, certainly seems to).

The film emphasizes how Clines faith, which developed after he accidentally struck and killed a young girl with his car, pervaded his practice as a doctor. He had his staff recite prayers together, advised patients to pray on their treatment choices, decorated his office with Christian sayings, and had an affinity for the verse Jeremiah 1:5 (Before I formed you in your mothers womb I knew you.), which is often featured in material extoling the Quiverfull lifestyle. Cline has not publicly acknowledged or commented ties to the tradition.

A lack of justice for the victims

Our Fathers main focus is on highlighting the lack of legal recourse afforded to the siblings and their parents. By the time the children of Clines former patients began to uncover the extent of his crimes in 2015, he was well into retirement, living in Indianapolis, Indiana. They contacted the offices of the Marion County prosecutor and attorney general of Indiana, asserting Clines medical practices were tantamount to rape and asking for an investigation, but proceedings were slow, much to their frustration.

As the siblings waited for authorities to take action, Cline lived as a pillar of the community and an elder of his church, performing baptisms in his backyard swimming pool. He also began obliquely threatening the siblings with retribution should they continue their effort to bring charges against him and take their story public. The lug nuts disappeared off Ballards car one day, she shares in the film. Harmon says she found her hard drive suddenly wiped clean of all mention of Cline, and all of her research vanished overnight. Another sibling, Heather Woock, who shared her story publicly, began receiving phone calls pointedly inquiring if she was interested in purchasing a cemetery plot.

Jacoba Ballard in Our Father Courtesy of Netflix

When the county prosecutors finally investigated Cline, the results were disappointing to the siblings, the women he inseminated, and their families. They had hoped an investigation into his medical practices would yield sufficient evidence to bring charges of rape. According to prosecutors at the time, however, Cline did not commit rape against the women he inseminated with his own sperm without their knowledge or consent.

I dont deny that it was a sexual violation, [but] Dr. Cline committed rape, is a legal assertion that was not true, and I wasnt going to put it on paper with my signature, Tim Delaney, who was working in the prosecutors office in 2015, says in the film. The individuals touched by this were very emotional and had a feeling I [was there] to deliver catharsis. I wasnt.

I was raped 15 times and didnt even know it, former Cline patient Liz White says during her interview, a wrenching counterpoint. There was no consent. He didnt give me a choice.

The filmmakers behind Our Father, including director/producer Lucie Jourdan, say they were moved to tell the story of the siblings and their parents in order to help them condemn Clines actions to a broad audience when it became clear the court had failed.

As is often and infuriatingly the case in the U.S. justice system, in order to pursue Cline for the crime he had committed, it was necessary to prosecute him for something else. In 2017, he was brought to trial facing two counts of felony obstruction of justice, for lying during the investigation. The obstruction of justice charges meant that no evidence related to Clines actions toward his former patients was admissiblethough those actions constituted the injustice for which the siblings and their parents were truly seeking restitution. Cline pled guilty, and received two suspended sentences (meaning he served no jail time), and a $500 fine.

Our Father tells the story of a violation so apparently novel that until the siblings and parents affected by Clines crimes brought their case to court and lobbied for protections, there was no law prohibiting his actions. In 2018, the siblings lobbying, led by Matt White and his mother Liz White, contributed to the passing of Indianas fertility-fraud law. There is still no federal law on the subject.

While the story Our Father depicts is relatively unique, the violation of a persons ability to choose the circumstances under which they become pregnant, and the lack of legal protection of that ability, are not. Clines decision, seemingly motivated by extremist religious beliefs, was made by a person with power, on behalf of many without. Our Father ultimately succeeds in its mission of bringing the siblings story into the spotlightand presciently emphasizes the fraught framework by which it is surrounded.
Candles sit on the ground on May 11, 2022, at the scene where five people were shot, one fatally, the previous day on the 4800 block of South Ada Street in the Back the Yards neighborhood. (Armando L. Sanchez / Chicago Tribune)

Chicago police were faced with a trio of shootings with multiple victims Tuesday  with 13 people shot in all  two in a beat police have targeted for an inflow of resources as summer approaches and one just outside another of those beats.

The shooting of five teenagers Tuesday afternoon in the Back of the Yards neighborhood was the result of retaliatory gang violence that has been occurring since the killing of a high-ranking gang members brother in April, Superintendent David Brown said at a news conference Wednesday morning. One teenager was killed in that shooting.

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But the man Brown named was not charged or even named as a suspect in the shootings, making Browns decision to blame him alone and name him highly unusual.

At the news conference, Brown said some of the prescriptions to deal with the violence involve a social-services support system that has focused on 55 police beats that the department identified as accounting for half the citys violence in recent years. Brown announced the decision to prioritize those beats at a news conference last month. Since then, Brown has said that theyre seeing dramatic declines in violence in those areas.

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Officers work the scene where five people were shot, one fatally, on the 4800 block of South Ada on May 10, 2022, in Chicago. (Armando L. Sanchez / Chicago Tribune)

The Back of the Yards shooting Tuesday did not fall in one of the targeted beats.

But another eight people were shot on the grounds of Jackson Park Tuesday night in two shootings about an hour apart, both south of the Jackson Park Lagoon, according to Chicago police. Those shootings were in an area designated for more attention.

Craig Chico with the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council said Tuesdays shooting felt like a gut punch.

We think were making headway, we think were getting somewhere, were providing more education, were providing more safe spaces, Chico said. And then it takes one violent, ridiculously dumb incident like this and weve got to take a few steps back and start rebuilding again.

The councils programs and resources target youth on the fringe of becoming gang involved, but theyre not successful in getting third generation gang members into their program, he said, adding that more resources wont change that.

You could have provided a billion dollars more resources, he said. The guy that did the shooting yesterday is not partaking in those programs.

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Chico said neighborhood residents now also have to deal with and push back on the perception of what their community is like. The gang activity is not representative of the community as a whole, he said.

This is a really entrenched gang situation weve got. The infrastructure is generational, he said. So thats part of the difficulty in dismantling it.

But the neighborhood is also filled with caring parents who walk their children to and from school and who are now more concerned for their familys safety, Chico said.

In the Back of the Yards shooting, officers responded to reports of a shooting in the 4800 block of South Ada at about 4:30 p.m., Brown said. One of the teenagers, a 19-year-old, was shot in the head and left side of his body and died at the scene.

Officers stand near members of the press during a media briefing at the scene where five people were shot, one fatally, on the 4800 block of South Ada on May 10, 2022, in Chicago. (Armando L. Sanchez / Chicago Tribune)

Brown said the shooting occurred when gang members in a car saw rivals on the block and they immediately began exchanging gunfire. Police later recovered two rifles from the scene.

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Police said the shooting can be linked to the April 19 murder of a man who was the brother of a high-ranking member of one of the gangs involved, Brown said. Since that killing, violence has been escalating between the two gangs.

Brown went on to say that the high-ranking gang member, who is 28 years old, was arrested by Chicago police on March 27 for possession of a firearm by a felon.

The man told police at the time, I have it for my protection, according to a police report. He later added that he bought the firearm to protect his family because people were shooting at him. A month later, his brother was shot and killed.

The man was previously convicted in November 2017 on charges of aggravated discharge of a firearm, aggravated assault and aggravated assault of a police officer, according to records. He was sentenced to eight years in prison and records indicate he was released from prison over a year ago.

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Brown named the man at the news conference, but the Tribune is not naming him because he was not arrested or charged in connection to Tuesdays shooting.

To be sure, Browns decision to name a potential target in a gang conflict is unusual. Some neighborhood sources interviewed by the Tribune immediately called the decision troubling and suggested the identification could put a target on the back of the man Brown named.

Police did not immediately comment on Browns decision to identify the man.

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In a phone interview, Ald. Jeanette Taylor, 20th, whose ward covers Back of the Yards, said her primary goal in the aftermath of crime and violence is to listen to and support the people who need help.

The way to go is to make sure the community has resources like other communities because you notice this doesnt really happen in other neighborhoods, like Lincoln Park, Taylor said. You give the people the community resources that they need, like job opportunities and programming for young people. When we start investing in these communities, we wont see this amount of violence.

Taylor said people tend to fixate on those gang members responsible for acts of violence but dont think about what circumstances led to someone becoming a part of a gang. She said its important to look at situations, like acts of gun violence, from the ground level to get a better understanding of the story and not just forming opinions and strategies based on half of the information.

Were so busy implementing, were not asking, Taylor said. We need a city that asks, that has the conversation. The people in the community have the answer. We just have to be open to listening.

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Ald. Leslie Hairston, 5th, said on Wednesday afternoon she went with police to the sites where both shootings in Jackson Park took place.

She said she wanted to be there to work with the city and community and figure out ways to make the park safer.

We are not going to police ourselves out of this, she said.

She added that Jackson Park regularly has an increased police presence during warmer months anyway to handle larger crowds.

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On Wednesday afternoon at the scene where the Back of the Yards shooting took place, people walked their children home from school. Others walked up the street from the corner store, snacks in hand. They walked past two tall candles with roses between them in the grass.

Candles sit on the ground on May 11, 2022, at the scene where five people were shot, one fatally, the previous day on the 4800 block of South Ada Street in the Back the Yards neighborhood. (Armando L. Sanchez / Chicago Tribune)

Nearby, a woman jogged by alongside a little girl on a tricycle. We have to get inside soon, she told the child.

A neighbor, Maria Garcia, said she has lived in the Back of the Yards neighborhood for 27 years. About two years ago, she and her husband bought a house near where Tuesdays shooting happened.

Garcia said she didnt know there was so much violence near her new home. She heard the gunshots. They didnt leave the house after that, she said.

Im not comfortable. You shouldve seen how yesterday how bad it was out here, she said. I was so nervous. And my husband went outside in the afternoon and I told him Come inside. Im scared of him going outside.

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Garcia and her husband are considering moving again.
McDowell County authorities in North Carolina charged a man Wednesday for biting a deputy during his arrest, among other offenses.

Deputies initially responded to a disturbance on April 30 at a residence in Nebo. Upon arrival, deputies found Kenneth Allan Styles, 44, at the scene and determined that he had tried to forcibly enter the occupied residence "multiple times."

SECOND NORTH CAROLINA HOUSE COLLAPSES AT CAPE HATTERAS NATIONAL SEASHORE

Styles was combative and bit a deputy during his arrest. The deputy was later treated for his injuries.

"Great work by our Deputies. Unfortunately, we sometimes get injured trying to protect others and thats what happened here," Sheriff Ricky Buchanan said in a statement. "The Deputies risk injury and death on every call they respond to and every stop they make."

Deputy Robert Watson of the McDowell County Sheriffs Office charged Styles with first-degree burglary, assault on a law enforcement officer with physical injury, resisting a public officer, possession of drug paraphernalia and injury to personal property.

Styles is being held on a $267,000 secured bond, according to the sheriff's office.


SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  North Korea imposed a nationwide lockdown Thursday to control its first acknowledged COVID-19 outbreak after holding for more than two years to a widely doubted claim of a perfect record keeping out the virus that has spread to nearly every place in the world.

The outbreak forced leader Kim Jong Un to wear a mask in public, likely for the first time since the start of the pandemic, but the scale of transmissions inside North Korea wasn't immediately known.

A failure to slow infections could have serious consequences because the country has a poor health care system and its 26 million people are believed to be mostly unvaccinated. Some experts say North Korea, by its rare admission of an outbreak, may be seeking outside aid.

However, hours after North Korea confirmed the outbreak, South Koreas military said it detected the North had fired three suspected ballistic missiles toward the sea. It was its 16th round of missile launches this year  brinkmanship aimed at forcing the United States to accept North Korea as a nuclear power and negotiate sanctions relief and other concessions from a position of strength.

The official Korean Central News Agency said tests of virus samples collected Sunday from an unspecified number of people with fevers in the capital, Pyongyang, confirmed they were infected with the omicron variant.

In response, Kim called at a ruling party Politburo meeting for a thorough lockdown of cities and counties and said workplaces should be isolated by units to block the virus from spreading. He urged health workers to step up disinfection efforts at workplaces and homes and mobilize reserve medical supplies.

Kim said it was crucial to control transmissions and eliminate the infection source as fast as possible, while also easing inconveniences to the public caused by the virus controls. He insisted the country will overcome the outbreak because its government and people are united as one.

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Despite the elevated virus response, Kim ordered officials to push ahead with scheduled construction, agricultural development and other state projects while bolstering the countrys defense posture to avoid any security vacuum.

North Koreas state TV showed Kim and other senior officials wearing masks as they entered a meeting room, although Kim removed his mask to speak into a set of microphones. Still photos distributed by KNCA showed Kim unmasked and sitting at the head of a table where all other officials remained masked.

South Koreas Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korean affairs, couldn't immediately confirm whether it was the first time state media showed Kim wearing a mask since the start of the pandemic. Kim has previously spoken to huge crowds without a mask as he praised the country's earlier pandemic response, and his decision to be seen with a mask could be aimed at raising public vigilance.

North Korea, which has maintained strict anti-virus controls at its borders for more than two years, didnt provide further details about its new lockdown. But an Associated Press photographer on the South Korean side of the border saw dozens of people working in fields or walking on footpaths at a North Korean border town  an indication the lockdown doesn't require people to stay home, or it exempts farm work.

The measures described in state media and Kims declaration that economic goals should still be met could indicate that North Korea is focusing more on restricting travel and supplies between regions, analyst Cheong Seong-Chang at South Koreas Sejong Institute said.

North Koreas government has shunned vaccines offered by the U.N.-backed COVAX distribution program, possibly because they have international monitoring requirements.

Seoul's Unification Ministry said South Korea is willing to provide medical assistance and other help to North Korea based on humanitarian considerations. Relations between the Koreas have deteriorated since 2019 amid a stalemate in nuclear negotiations and the North's increasingly provocative weapons tests.

In Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Beijing is offering North Korea help in dealing with the outbreak. North Korea has reportedly rejected previous Chinese offers of domestically developed vaccines.

Kim Sin-gon, a professor at Seouls Korea University College of Medicine, said North Korea is likely signaling its willingness to receive outside vaccines, but wants many more doses than offered by COVAX to inoculate its entire population multiple times. He said North Korea would also want COVID-19 medicines and medical equipment shipments that are banned by U.N. sanctions.

Omicron spreads much more easily than earlier variants of the coronavirus, and its fatality and hospitalization rates are high among unvaccinated older people or those with existing health problems. That means the outbreak could cause a serious situation because North Korea lacks medical equipment and medicine to treat virus patients and many of its people are not well-nourished, Kim Sin-gon said.

Ahn Kyung-su, head of DPRKHEALTH.ORG, a website focusing on health issues in North Korea, said North Koreas admission of the outbreak is likely designed to press its people harder to guard against the virus as China, which shares a long, porous border with the North, has placed many of its cities under lockdown over virus concerns.

North Korea will also likely stress lockdowns, although the experience of Chinas zero-COVID policy suggests that approach doesnt work against the fast-moving omicron variant, said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor of international studies at Seouls Ewha Womans University.

For Pyongyang to publicly admit omicron cases, the public health situation must be serious, Easley said.

North Koreas previous coronavirus-free claim had been disputed by many foreign experts. But South Korean officials have said North Korea had likely avoided a huge outbreak, in part because it instituted strict virus controls almost from the start of the pandemic.

Early in 2020  before the coronavirus spread around the world  North Korea took severe steps to keep out the virus and described them as a matter of national existence." It all but halted cross-border traffic and trade for two years, and is believed to have ordered troops to shoot on sight any trespassers who crossed its borders.

The extreme border closures further shocked an economy already damaged by decades of mismanagement and U.S.-led sanctions over its nuclear weapons and missile program, pushing Kim to perhaps the toughest moment of his rule since he took power in 2011.

North Korea had been one of the last places in the world without an acknowledged COVID-19 case after the virus first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019 spread to every continent including Antarctica. Turkmenistan, a similarly secretive and authoritarian nation in Central Asia, has reported no cases to the World Health Organization, though its claim also is widely doubted by outside experts.

In recent months, some Pacific island nations that kept the virus out by their geographic isolation have recorded outbreaks. Only tiny Tuvalu, with a population around 12,000, has escaped the virus so far, while a few other nations  Nauru, Micronesia and Marshall Islands  have stopped cases at their borders and avoided community outbreaks.

North Korea's outbreak comes as China  its close ally and trading partner  battles its biggest outbreak of the pandemic.

In January, North Korea tentatively reopened railroad freight traffic between its border town of Sinuiju and Chinas Dandong for the first time in two years, but China halted the trade last month due to an outbreak in Liaoning province, which borders North Korea.

___

Associated Press journalists Lee Jin-man in Paju, South Korea, Ken Moritsugu in Beijing and Nick Perry in Wellington, New Zealand, contributed to this report.
Hotel heiress and activist Paris Hilton shared the alleged sexual abuse and threats she endured over 20 years ago while staying at Provo Canyon School, a psychiatric youth residential treatment center in the city of Provo.

Her experiences began after being taken from her home at 16 and sent away after her parents believed her attention deficit disorder would only be alleviated with tough love.

On my first day, I was forced to remove all my clothes, squat and cough, and submit to a gynecological exam  all watched closely by male staff, Hilton explained in the op-ed.

Although it was an extremely uncomfortable experience, I was led to believe it was a legitimate, routine check for contraband, she wrote. But what I couldnt understand as a 16-year-old girl was why that internal exam would be done to me frequently during my time at Provo and only during the middle of the night.

The reality TV star said many of these exams would occur while she was sleep-deprived and heavily medicated. When she would rebel against the exams, residential staff threatened to observe her, which was known at the school assolitary confinement.

Hilton said that by looking back at these horrific experiences as an adult woman,I can recognize these exams for what they were: The sexual assault of children.

According to the schools website, the Provo Canyon School has been in operation since 1971. The school has an alleged long history of abuse which was covered extensively by The Salt Lake Tribune in 2020.

HuffPost has reached out to the school for a response to Hiltons claims of abuse.

The harrowing details of Hiltons abuse have become the catalyst for her lobbying efforts for new legislature surrounding the unfair treatment of children at youth residential treatment centers across the U.S.

Hilton attended a press conference on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to show solidarity with Unsilenced, a national non-profit focused on fighting institutional child abuse,and advocate for other abuse survivors.

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For decades, children in institutional settings have been denied basic human rights protections against widespread abuse, neglect and preventable death, Hilton said in a press release before the conference.

Survivors are ready to tell Congress that its time for leadership, action, and its time to FINALLY protect children placed in the Troubled Teen Industry.

A day before publishing her op-ed, Hilton visited Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) during a trip to the Capitol and the White House to discuss ways to put an end to child abuse in these facilities.

The Republican lawmaker posted a picture of himself and Hilton on Twitter.

Met w Paris Hilton to discuss how we can stop abuse of children in residential care facilities pic.twitter.com/OBlhTQWwQa  ChuckGrassley (@ChuckGrassley) May 10, 2022

Met w[ith] Paris Hilton to discuss how we can stop the abuse of children in residential care facilities, Grassley tweeted on Tuesday.

In February 2021, Hilton testified at a state Senate committee hearing at the Utah Capitol regarding a bill that would require the government to oversee activity at these centers and document when restraints are used.

Talking about something so personal was and is still terrifying, Hilton told the committee then. But I cannot go to sleep at night knowing that there are children that are experiencing the same abuse that I and so many others went through, and neither should you.

During her testimony, she also called on President Joe Biden and others in Congress to pursuefederal legislation.

In 2020, Hilton released a documentary titled This Is Paris, chronicling her life, including her time at Provo. She told USA Todaythat she plans to publish a memoir about her traumatic experiences within the following year.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

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Sheffield United manager Paul Heckingbottom has urged his players to seize their chance against Fulham (Danny Lawson/PA). (PA Wire)

Sheffield United boss Paul Heckingbottom has told his players to make sure their Sky Bet Championship play-off experience becomes a cherished memory.

The Blades take on Nottingham Forest in the first leg of their semi-final at Bramall Lane on Saturday and Heckingbottom said his side will never be forgotten by their fans if they can secure promotion.

Heckingbottom said: Successful teams, you remember them; big moments, you remember them; and the players who supply those big moments, the fans remember them.

The players do themselves, its the highlight of their careers. We told the players, the chances are youll have a picture of a big moment, a promotion, up on your wall.

The Blades, bidding to bounce straight back to the Premier League following relegation last season, sat in 16th place when Heckingbottom replaced Slavisa Jokanovic in November.

They secured a fifth-placed finish behind Forest on the final day with a thumping 4-0 win against Fulham at Bramall Lane and the winner of their two-legged tie will play either Huddersfield or Luton at Wembley.

Heckingbottom said: The prize is there. The semi-final after 46 rounds and thats what it is. Everything is magnified, the feeling, the build-up, the intensity.

Thats what the play-offs provide. They magnify everything. Theres a bigger audience on you because everything else is finished.

These moments can be extra special, but likewise, if they dont go your way, they hurt.

Were down to four. One of these team is going to be in the Premier League. We know two who are already there, now one from four.

The Blades announced key defender Chris Basham has followed fans favourite Billy Sharp in committing himself to the club by signing a new two-year deal on Thursday.

Sharp, the Championships all-time leading goalscorer, signed his new contract last month, but Heckingbottom said he could not confirm new deals for several other players.

The former Leeds boss said he was still waiting to learn what his playing budget will be as he looks to build on his successful first season in charge later this summer.

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Heckingbottom added: Im pretty clear on it. Im not fighting for money, Im just fighting for the ability to make the best decisions with it.

We are the ones on the ground and know the dynamic of the squad. You always want to improve the squad and also improve the processes of how things are done and thats a big part of moving forward.

Heckingbottom has no new injuries following last weeks win against Fulham, with Morgan Gibbs-White expected to start after he was withdrawn late on in that match.

Sharp is hoping to feature at some stage in the play-offs as he works his way back from a long-term calf injury, while George Baldock is in contention having returned to the bench last week following a hamstring strain.
Pennsylvania US Senate candidate Kathy Barnette at a campaign event in Newton, PA on May 11, 2022. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Conservative commentator Kathy Barnette is surging in Pennsylvania's GOP Senate primary.

But Barnette, who could snag the party's nomination, has a history of Islamophobic and homophobic remarks.

Until now, the primary had been a head-to-head between Trump-endorsed Dr. Oz and David McCormick.

Kathy Barnette, a largely-unknown Pennsylvania Senate candidate, has been surging in support among Republican voters in recent polls with just days to go until next Tuesday's primary election.

But a review of the conservative commentator's public statements, including on social media, reveals a candidate with a history of Islamophobic and homophobic positions that may imperil Republicans' general election chances in the race to replace retiring Republican Sen. Pat Toomey.

Over the last several years, Barnette has called for the banning of Islam in America, falsely claimed that former President Barack Obama is Muslim, voiced support for a business owner who posted a "No Gays Allowed" sign in his front window, and declared that "homosexuals LEAD with their sexual preference" and should "leave [the] immorality in the bedroom."

Many of her tweets appear to link to Facebook posts that have since been deleted. Barnette's campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider asking whether she still holds these views.

Highlighting the angst Barnette has caused among the GOP, former President Donald Trump criticized Barnette's candidacy in a Thursday afternoon statement.

"Kathy Barnette will never be able to win the General Election against the Radical Left Democrats," Trump said. "She has many things in her past which have not been properly explained or vetted, but if she is able to do so, she will have a wonderful future in the Republican Partyand I will be behind her all the way."

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The first-time candidate's polling surge came in the days since the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion indicating that Roe v. Wade is likely to be overturned by the high court in the coming weeks; Barnette released an emotionally-gripping ad highlighting the fact that she was born as a result of rape in order to bolster her anti-abortion message.

Until recently, the primary had been a hotly-contested head-to-head battle between former hedge fund manager David McCormick and Dr. Mehmet Oz, who's garnered the endorsement of former President Donald Trump.

But as Insider's Jake Lahut recently reported from a Trump rally near Pittsburgh, there are signs that Republican voters in Pennsylvania have grown weary of the barrage of primary ads on the local airwaves and are not taking Trump's cues when it comes to supporting Oz.

Oz was even met with boos upon his introduction at the rally. But Barnette could bring an even greater world of headaches to the GOP.

Richard Grenell, a former Trump White House official who's backing Oz in the race, has also sought to highlight her past statements  including those in support of racial justice  as he argues that she will cost Republicans the election should she become the nominee.

Grenell shared a video from an anonymous YouTube account called "MAGA Moms" compiling various statements by Barnette calling attention to "white racism" and speaking about the need to "dismantle privilege and classism in America today."

In addition to past social media comments, Barnette has faced questions about her residency in Pennsylvania; she lived in Virginia as recently as 2018, according to her own book. She has also refused to turn over documents that would provide more information about her military service, even as her campaign website says she "served her country proudly for 10 years in the Armed Forces Reserves."

Barnette has been endorsed by Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, the Club for Growth, and the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List.

Read the original article on Business Insider
A search is underway for a suspect who opened fire at a Dallas hair salon, and injured three Korean women inside before fleeing Wednesday, police say.

Dallas police responded to the Hair World Salon at 2216 Royal Lane at 2:20 p.m. local time, in an area called the Asian Trade District, known as the city's Koreatown.

The suspect, described as a Black male dressed in all black, walked into the business and started shooting, striking the three women, police said in a news release.

NBC Dallas Fort-Worth reports the salon is a Korean-owned business and all the victims  the owner, an employee and a customer  were Korean women.

A motive for the shooting has not yet been confirmed. Police Sgt. Warren Mitchell said in a media briefing Wednesday that investigators do not have any indication that the shooting was a hate crime, but aren't ruling it out.

The victims were transported to local hospitals with non-life-threatening injuries, authorities said. Mitchell said the women were all apparently shot in their extremities.

The suspect left the scene in a maroon minivan, police said.

Law enforcement shared video surveillance stills of the suspect, appearing to hold a large rifle-like weapon, and the vehicle he left in.

Police are asking for help in identifying and locating the suspect, described as 57 to 510 with a thin build, curly medium length hair, and a connecting beard.

Crime Stoppers is offering a $5,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.

The investigation is ongoing and the FBI has been called to assist in the probe.

The FBI's field office in Dallas told NBC News in a statement Thursday morning that the agency is in communication with Dallas police and "coordinating closely."

"If, in the course of the local investigation, information comes to light of a potential federal violation, the FBI is prepared to investigate," a spokesperson said.

Police are assuring the public that the suspect will be found.

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It just brings an added fear in this community, and we want to make sure we do what we can to ease their fear, Mitchell said.

Dallas City Councilman Omar Narvaez, who represents the district where the violence unfolded, denounced the shooting in a statement to NBC News.

These acts of violence are disturbing, and I have full faith that the Dallas Police Department will capture the perpetrators," he said. "The Asian Trade District AKA KoreaTown is a vibrant business community which has grown exponentially over the years, and I am committed to making sure this important business district continues to thrive."

He described the area of the shooting as a bustling business neighborhood, ranging from food to retail, insurance and law, run almost exclusively by Korean immigrants.

Dr. Brian Ahn, the Chairman of the Korean Society of Dallas, told NBC News the community is afraid following the shooting.

I think people feel scared because many businesses are here. Korean people want to protect the community and prevent crime, he said, calling for peace. Right now people are like, Oh my God, it could happen to me.

He noted there hasnt been anti-Asian hate crimes that hes noticed in this area before, and said a lack of gun control is a contributing issue in the incident.

While it's not clear if this incident was a hate crime, it comes at a time the nation has seen rising hate crimes against the Asian American community amid the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic.

A report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism found that anti-Asian hate crime in the U.S. increased by 339 percent in 2021 compared to the year prior.

The Wednesday salon shooting recalls the Atlanta-area spas shooting in March 2021 when a gunman entered three separate spas, killing eight people, including six women of Asian descent.

After that attack, President Joe Biden unveiled efforts to address anti-Asian violence, and in May 2021 the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act was signed into law. The legislation directs the Justice Department to expedite the review of Covid-19-related hate crimes reported to law enforcement agencies, establish ways to report such incidents online and perform public outreach.
An investigation is underway after a police chase that began in Salisbury and ended in a crash in Hidden Valley Thursday morning. Channel 9 heard several gunshots at the scene of the search.

Salisbury police confirmed to Channel 9 they were called to Colonial Village Apartments at about 3:45 a.m. Officers said they tried to conduct a traffic stop on the car because the people inside were seen breaking into cars on D Avenue. Investigators said that car did not stop; the suspects left the scene and police followed them down Interstate 85 South in what officers called a high-speed chase.

ALSO READ: Police follow truck seen speeding, driving wrong way through Meck, Union counties

The pursuit ended at Austin Drive and Monteith Drive in northeast Charlottes Hidden Valley neighborhood when the car hit a pole. Salisbury police said everyone inside the car got out there and ran away.

Channel 9 arrived at the scene in Hidden Valley to find police officers and K-9s heading into the woods to look for the suspects. Officers confirmed they heard several shots fired nearby during the search, but said they didnt have evidence that the gunshots were directed at the officers on scene.

Breaking: police say a high-speed chase, spanning several counties, just ended here in NE Charlotte at Monteith & Austin Drives. Crews are pulling the car after the driver apparently drove into the woods. Asking if they have any suspects in custody. Updates on @wsoctv at 6:30a. pic.twitter.com/xpqKS1CiiH  Anthony Kustura (@AnthonyWSOC9) May 12, 2022

Officers could not specify how many people they were looking for, but said there were multiple people in the car. Police said they found and arrested one person under the age of 18 during their search.

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Channel 9 has reached out to paramedics to see if anyone was hurt in the process.

Salisbury police said the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, the Rowan County Sheriffs Office and the North Carolina State Highway Patrol all helped with the search in Hidden Valley.

Investigators said more charges are expected as the investigation continues.

(WATCH BELOW: Family inside house when driver crashes into York Co. home following chase with deputies)




A woman and a 3-year-old girl who were shot Wednesday night in Gresham are expected to recover from their injuries, officials said.

The 3-year-old girl was shot multiple times in her legs and the woman, 31, was shot once in the foot as the pair stood outside near the curb in the 1300 block of West 76th Street around 11 p.m., according to an online media notification from Chicago police.

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According to published reports, the child was shot four times  twice in each leg. She was rushed to Comer Childrens Hospital where she was listed in fair condition. The woman was taken to University of Chicago Medical Center where she was treated for a gunshot wound to the foot and listed in good condition, police said.

Authorities said an unidentified person with a gun fired several shots from a distance before fleeing the scene on foot. No arrests had been made as of Thursday morning.

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The 3-year-old was at least the third child under 11 to be shot in Chicago in a matter of hours.

Two boys, 6 and 11, were among four people shot as they traveled in a vehicle in the 1600 block of West 68th Street in West Englewood around 5:45 p.m.

Officers work the scene where four people were shot, including a 6-year-old and 11-year-old boy, on the 1600 block of West 68th Street on May 11, 2022 in Chicago. (Armando L. Sanchez / Chicago Tribune)

The 6-year-old was shot in the forearm and the 11-year-old was wounded in his right arm. Both boys were taken to Comer Childrens Hospital, where they were listed in good condition. Also in the vehicle were a 21-year-old woman and a 24-year-old man, police said.

The woman was shot in the face and was taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center in good condition, while the 24-year-old man was shot in both legs and also taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center, police said.

Residents watch officers work the scene of a shooting on the 7500 block of South Wolcott Avenue in the Gresham neighborhood on May 11, 2022 in Chicago. (Armando L. Sanchez / Chicago Tribune)

Two hours after that, another 21-year-old woman was fatally shot in an unrelated shooting  also in the Gresham neighborhood. She left a home and walked out to its garage to approach burglars in the 7500 block of South Wolcott Avenue about 7:45 p.m. when the assailant opened fire, hitting her in the chest, back and arm, Chicago police said in a media notification.

Check back for updates.
LISBON (Reuters) - Portuguese police have shot and killed a man, described as a German citizen by some local media, who had taken another person hostage at knifepoint in an apartment on the outskirts of Lisbon on Thursday.

In a statement, police only confirmed that the hostage-taker had died of his wounds, but provided no details on him or his hostage, and declined to elaborate when contacted by Reuters.

The assailant was "of great physical stature and armed with two-edged weapons", with which he had seriously wounded the hostage, the statement said.

Attempts to free the victim had resulted in an officer being stabbed, so police opened fire, it said.

Correio da Manha newspaper cited a police source as saying the man was a German tourist, who was apparently drunk and deranged when he attacked other foreigners in the apartment in Alges, a neighbourhood by the river Tagus that is popular with tourists.

(Reporting by Andrei Khalip and Patricia Rua; Editing by Bernadette Baum)
Pret said they had apologised for the incident. (PA)

Pret a Manger has apologised to a small independent cafe after two of its staff members joked that they were going to steal its customers.

According to the owner of the Atlas Grinds cafe in Stoke Newington, north-east London, the two Pret workers introduced themselves to one of the cafe's staff members on Monday when ordering coffee.

They asked questions about the trade and, when they were leaving, one joked: "Oh yeah, we'll steal your customers," with the other adding: "Maybe not for coffee but for food for sure."

Cafe owner Daniel told Yahoo News UK: "I find it just really rude and unprofessional considering they are moving to the area as a conglomerate considering the Stoke Newington area is very much centred around local independent businesses, it just really gripes with not only myself but the rest of the community."

"It's not about the competition it's about fitting in the community. At the end of the day it's the people who are going to decide where to spend their money and this area in particular is very aware of that."

Read more: Mass brawl with drunken passenger breaks out on WizzAir flight from London to Greece

Atlas Grinds in Stoke Newington. (Facebook)

The local Stoke Newington Business Association (SNBA), which represents small businesses in the area, said: "Were saddened to hear about the comments made by a member of the Pret team to an independent business."

They added: "Independent businesses give Stokey its character and charm - theyre a massive part of what attracts people here in the first place.

"A big chain threatening to steal customers from a fledgling independent will only alienate them from the community theyre seeking to serve."

Kate Revere, the co-chair of the SNBA, said she had spoken to the staff at the new branch after the incident.

(Twitter)

Read more: Fewer than half of Britons think Brexit is 'done'

She welcomed them to the area and said she "asked them to be mindful when going into business" in the area.

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She added: "They said it wasnt their intention to be mean but then tried to tell me how brilliant Pret is and how much they will be bringing to the community."

She said the comments "really upset so many business owners."

The situation was raised by a Stoke Newington resident on Twitter on Wednesday and, in response, Pret said they had "reached out to the shop to apologise and have spoken to our employees to ensure this wont happen again."

A Pret spokesperson said: We have been made aware of an incident in which two employees made an ill-judged joke and weve since apologised to the business owners. We were disappointed to hear about these comments and they do not reflect the views of Pret as a business. Weve spoken to our employees to ensure this wont happen again.

Daniel dismissed the apology he had received, saying: "They haven't really tried to contact me. I did however find an email this morning with an apology which was very much just corporate speak from page 15 of their PR manual."

"I will be expecting at least a personal apology from someone to actually come in to acknowledge this."

Atlas Grinds, which doubles up as a cocktail bar in the evenings, is a new business and describes itself as being an antidote to the idea of "no laptops and coffee shops closing at 4pm".
Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia's security council has warned of nuclear war if Nato continue arming Ukraine. (Getty)

A senior Russian figure and close adviser to Vladimir Putin has warned of a "full-fledged nuclear war" if Nato continues "pumping weapons into Ukraine".

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia's security council, made the threat shortly after Finland moved another step closer to applying to join the Western alliance.

The former president of Russia said in a Telegram post: "Nato countries pumping weapons into Ukraine, training troops to use Western equipment, sending in mercenaries and the exercises of Alliance countries near our borders increase the likelihood of a direct and open conflict between Nato and Russia."

"Such a conflict always has the risk of turning into a full-fledged nuclear war," Medvedev said before adding: "This will be a disastrous scenario for everyone."

Ukrainian investigators work near a destroyed building on the outskirts of Odesa. (Getty)

Nato countries have been arming Ukraine since the invasion, pouring resources into the nation to help it repel Russian forces.

Included in the weaponry Nato nations have so far supplied are next generation light anti-tank weapons (NLAWs)  shoulder-mounted guided missiles which have proven to be useful against tanks.

More than 700 Switchblade drones  small enough to be carried in a backpack  and 121 Ghost drones have also been provided.

Click on this image to see all Yahoo News UK's latest content on the Ukraine crisis

The UK has been among the countries to provide weaponry as part of the defence of Ukraine.

In April, Boris Johnson visited Kyiv in person, promising an additional 120 armoured vehicles, in addition to anti-ship missile systems to support Ukraine in the Black Sea.

Russia's invasion in February has sparked a reaction from Western countries and is set to see geopolitical alliances redrawn.

Most notably, it seems increasingly likely that Finland and Sweden could join Nato in the coming months.

On Thursday, Finland's president and prime minister, Sauli Niinisto and Sanna Marin, said their nation must apply to join Nato "without delay".

It marks a major change in the Scandinavian countries' foreign policy, and drops a decades-old agreement of military neutrality.

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Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said Finland joining Nato poses a threat to Russia. (Getty)

Niinisto and Marin made the call in a joint statement, and said: We hope that the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days.

Asked whether Finlands accession posed a direct threat to Russia, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: Definitely. NATO expansion does not make our continent more stable and secure.

This cannot fail to arouse our regret, and is a reason for corresponding symmetrical responses on our side, Peskov added, without elaborating.

Russian officials have spoken in the past about potential measures including stationing nuclear-armed missiles on the Baltic Sea.

Watch: Finland poised for Nato membership as Ukraine war crimps Russian gas

Last month, research by Demoskop and commissioned by the Aftonbladet newspaper showed 57% of Swedes now favoured Nato membership, up from 51% in March.

The March poll was the first to show a majority of Swedes in favour of joining the alliance. In January, a month before the invasion, just 37% were in favour of Nato membership.

Sweden is currently in the midst of a review into its security policy, which will conclude at the end of May.

It is expected to announced its decision on whether or not to join Nato this weekend.

Finland's prime minister Sanna Marin has previously hinted at joining Nato. (Getty)

Putin and his advisers have made a number of claims about the use of nuclear weapons in recent months.

It has been expected that Putin would used the annual Victory Day parade on 9 May.

But experts said his speech could be interpreted as an "encouraging" sign he is stepping back from the catastrophic consequences of launching nuclear weapons.

Western officials had warned prior to the speech that the Russian president could use the opportunity to instigate a mass mobilisation of Russian troops; declare a global war on Nazis; or even raise the threat of using nuclear weapons.

Former UK ambassador to Russia, Sir Tony Brenton, told Sky News that Putin had recently shown "disturbing signs" of "losing it", in his speeches surrounding the war, but the speech today was "coherent" and a "very professional performance".

He added the speech had "pushed all the right patriotic buttons in the Russian political atmosphere".

Sir Tony added: "It is rather encouraging that it leaves me with the feeling that we are dealing with a rational individual there with whom hopefully in time it will be possible to do a sensible deal to bring this whole mess to an end."
The leading US House Republican, Kevin McCarthy, was subpoenaed Thursday to testify in the congressional probe of last year's assault on the Capitol by Donald Trump supporters.

The subpoenas were issued to McCarthy and four other Republicans in the House of Representatives -- Scott Perry, Jim Jordan, Andy Biggs, and Mo Brooks -- after they declined to voluntarily appear before the special committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack.

"The Select Committee has learned that several of our colleagues have information relevant to our investigation into the attack on January 6th and the events leading up to it," said committee chairman Bennie Thompson.

The panel is probing whether Trump, his staff and advisors knowingly encouraged or helped organize the uprising at the seat of Congress by hundreds of the former president's supporters seeking to stop lawmakers from certifying Joe Biden as winner of the November 2020 election.

Claiming without evidence that Biden won through massive fraud, Trump had urged his supporters to block the certification on January 6, a formal process that was being led by then-vice president Mike Pence.

Five deaths were linked with the violence and scores of police were injured. The mayhem sent Pence into hiding and succeeded in halting the joint session of Congress and delaying certification for several hours until peace was restored.

The committee, which is controlled by Democrats, said McCarthy was in contact with Trump before, during and after the attack, which has been branded an insurrection and an "attempted coup."

The other four also allegedly had involvement with Trump and the events running up to January 6 and the false claims that Trump won the election, according to the committee.

The panel plans to hold public hearings on its findings beginning next month.

"We urge our colleagues to comply with the law, do their patriotic duty, and cooperate with our investigation as hundreds of other witnesses have done," Thompson said.

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- 800 arrested -

Meanwhile the Justice Department announced it has arrested and charged some 810 people over their participation in the assault.

Most have been charged with minor crimes like illegally entering a federal building, but 255 faced heavier charges of assaulting, resisting or impeding officers.

Around 50 were hit with conspiracy and sedition charges that can bring up to 20 years in prison, according to the office of the federal prosecutor in Washington.

So far 280 people have pleaded guilty, including 48 for felony charges, the prosecutor's office said.

Seven of 15 people who pleaded guilty to assaulting officers have been sentenced to up to 63 months in prison.

In addition, three people have pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy charges in apparent plea deals in which they are expected to assist investigators in other cases.

Separately The New York Times reported Thursday that federal prosecutors are conducting a grand jury investigation into whether Trump and his aides improperly removed highly classified documents -- some of which related to January 6 -- from the White House to his Florida residence after he left the White House.

pmh/mlm
House Republicans are treading carefully in their initial reactions after the special committee investigating last years attack on the U.S. Capitol took the remarkable step of issuing subpoenas for their cooperation.

The GOP lawmakers have been defiant in their approach to the bipartisan investigation, labeling it an illegitimate partisan witch-hunt in which theyve refused to cooperate. But with the arrival of Thursdays subpoenas, not even House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) would say hed reject the entreaty outright.

I have not seen the subpoena. I guess they sent it to you guys before they sent it to me, McCarthy told reporters Thursday. My view on the committee has not changed. Theyre not conducting a legitimate investigation.

McCarthy repeatedly declined to answer whether he would comply with the subpoena.

The five House members who received subpoenas  McCarthy along with Reps. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) and Mo Brooks (R-Ala.)  face a tricky situation in responding to the unprecedented subpoenas to members.

Because they have dismissed the select committee as illegitimate, complying with it could give credence to its mission. But refusal to comply may subject the members to being held in contempt of Congress, and then referred to the Department of Justice for possible prosecution, following the same treatment for former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

So far, the GOP members are presenting the subpoenas as a political messaging tactic on the part of the committee, with several echoing McCarthys statement that they had not yet been directly presented with the subpoenas. Like the GOP leader, they are not revealing whether they plan to comply.

The fact that they sent it to the press before they sent it to the members  Its just proof its all about headlines. This whole things a charade, Perry told reporters.

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Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the chairman of the Jan. 6 panel, told reporters that he is very hopeful that the Republican lawmakers will honor the subpoena, but offered no details on what will occur if they do not.

We have shared with them a lot of the information the committees work has uncovered as to how their testimony would be important. I would hope that knowing that information is available, if they disagree with it, they need to come before the committee and say, I disagree, Thompson said. But if they choose not to then obviously the committee will look at next steps.

The committee gave each of the members dates to sit for depositions at the end of May.

There is no historical precedent for a House select committee subpoenaing a member of the House, and Republicans warned that the development would only act to diminish relations between the parties at a time when partisan hostility is already the rule.

Its very destructive. I dont think this is the way we should be conducting ourselves. It comes across as nothing vindictive and desperate in many respects, because it appears  and I dont mean this to just be a soundbite  but it appears that they know theyre gonna lose the House, and theyre determined to destroy it on the way out, said Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.), chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee.

Thursdays slate of subpoenas may not be the last time the committee issues an investigative demand. Asked about more member subpoenas in the future, Thompson told reporters it could be and it could not be.

The ones that we issued today are the ones that we feel very comfortable with, he added.

Asked about a potential subpoena for Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), who was also asked to voluntarily testify before the panel, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a member of the Jan. 6 committee, told reporters I dont think were ruling out future subpoenas.

But were moving forward with five that we thought had among the most pertinent information, but were not excluding the possibility of further subpoenas, he added.

Thompson also told reporters that asking Republican senators to come before the committee is still part of the discussion.

The move to subpoena sitting lawmakers marks a drastic escalation in the committees investigation of the Capitol attack of Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of supporters of former President Trump stormed the building in a failed effort to overturn his election defeat. The subpoenas also raise the prospects that Republicans, who are expected to win control of the House in Novembers midterms, will retaliate against Democrats with a wave of investigations and subpoenas of their own.

Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), who McCarthy originally selected to be ranking member on the committee before Pelosi vetoed the decision, said that Pelosi is the one who the committee should subpoena.

Yet the members of the select committee dismissed the concerns about setting a hostile precedent, arguing that theyre merely following the investigation where it takes them, as theyve been charged under the statute that created the panel.

The unprecedented nature of the attack, and of the fact that we have members who have information about an attack on our body and have been unwilling to come and talk to the committee is a very serious and grave situation, said Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo).

This determination to issue these subpoenas was not a decision the committee made lightly, she added. But it is absolutely a necessary one.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
Season 14 of The Real Housewives of Atlanta is getting a way better reception than last season. With new additions like Sanya Richards-Ross and Marlo Hampton finally getting her peach, the cast seems well rounded out. But there were also rumors that Jeannie Mai was going to join the show. She recently put the rumors to rest.

The Real co-host was rumored to be replacing Kandi Burruss

Rumors about Mai joining the show began after filming Season 14 came to an end. Mai was to allegedly replace Burruss, with insiders alleging Burruss storyline was growing lackluster. Burruss even said that though she wasnt being replaced, she was a fan of Mai and wouldnt mind her being on the show.

Mai is a new resident of Atlanta, moving there after marrying rapper and philanthropist, Jeezy. She recently gave birth to the couples first child, a daughter named Monaco.

Jeannie Mai says shes not joining the show but Kenya Moore thought shed be a good addition

Moore was a guest on The Real on Wednesday, May 11 to discuss the current season of RHOA. During the chat, the rumor about Mai joining the show was brought up and while Moore was down for Mai as an addition to the cast, Mai shot it down. In fact, she said when she first heard the rumor, shed just given birth and was on maternity leave.

Do you know when they say wheres theres smoke, theres fire? That was a complete rumor, Mai insists. I havent talked to one person, my people havent talked to one person from Bravo, so that was a complete rumor that got made up.

When Moore jokingly referred to Nene Leakes famous line of the door is closed, Mai agreed. The door is closed. Its sealed. There wasnt a door to begin with. It was a wall, Mai shot back. There is no door. No, and I say that, just because its a lot of work. And even knowing Garcelle, I always ask her, How do you get your mind in the place of going in to shoot and youre not ready for what might come at you? And she tells me too, its a full-time job.

Watch the clip below:
BERLIN (Reuters) - Russia, not Ukraine, needs de-Nazification, the leader of anti-Kremlin punk band Pussy Riot, who left Russia this week by disguising herself as a food courier, said before her group kicks off a concert tour against the war.

At a rehearsal for a concert on Thursday in the German capital, Maria Alyokhina said Russians needed to think carefully about the war.

"I have no idea what will be the end of this reflection but without that, the country doesn't have a right to exist  like Germany after the Second World War. Its Russia where we should have a de-Nazification, not Ukraine," she told Reuters Television.

There should also be a tribunal against Russian President Vladimir Putin and army generals and leaders, she said.

Russia calls its actions in Ukraine a "special operation" to disarm the country and protect it from fascists. It denies targeting civilians.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on her remark that de-Nazification was needed in Russia, not Ukraine, and that Putin and his generals should go on trial.

To aid her escape from house arrest, Alyokhina wore a delivery uniform, which her girlfriend had bought online, and slipped out of a back door of the building she was staying in, eluding Russian police outside, she said.

"I went to another flat, which was like a conspiratorial flat, without my mobile phone," she told Reuters Television.

Alyokhina said her compatriots wanted change but that many were scared of being thrown behind bars for speaking out.

"A lot of people are really afraid because you can now go to prison up to 10 years just for posting photos from Bucha, just for making this post," she said.

Russian officials have said the new law to stop the intentional spread of "fake" news is needed because to protect its military and combat misinformation about its military campaign in Ukraine.

Pussy Riot was rehearsing a new song about the war, said Alyokhina.

"We wrote it two weeks ago. It's against the war, against the war which Putin started against Ukraine. It's our statement and it will be performed as a part of the concert," she said.

(Reporting by Daria Shamonova; Writing by Madeline Chambers; Editing by Alison Williams)
The highest ranking Russian official to go to prison in nearly two decades was released Thursday after serving more than half of an eight-year sentence for a bribery conviction.

Former Economic Development Minister Alexei Ulyukayev filed a petition for early release after serving more than five years. A court in the Tver region, some 140 kilometers northwest of Moscow, granted him parole last month.

He walked free Thursday, and Russian state television showed images of what it said was a convoy of cars taking him away from the Tver prison.

Ulyukayev was detained in 2016 at the headquarters of Russias largest oil producer, state-owned Rosneft. Prosecutors said he accepted a $2 million bribe from Rosnefts influential chief executive, Igor Sechin, for giving the company the green light to privatize another oil firm.

The circumstances of the case sparked speculation that Ulyukayev was caught in a Kremlin power play involving Sechin, a longtime associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Ulyukaev was arrested as he was leaving the Rosneft building with a bag full of cash that Sechin had given him as part of a purported sting operation by Russias main intelligence agency. Ulyukayev told the court that he thought the bag contained a bottle of wine and a basket of sausages.

Shortly after the arrest, Ulyukaev was dismissed from his post. He maintained his innocence throughout the trial and insisted Sechin had set him up.
Officers work the scene where four people were shot, including a 6-year-old and 11-year-old boy, on the 1600 block of West 68th Street on May 11, 2022, in Chicago. (Armando L. Sanchez / Chicago Tribune)

A 21-year-old woman was fatally shot while confronting burglars Wednesday night, just two hours after four others  including two children  were shot on the citys South Side.

Concerned someone was breaking into the Gresham home, the woman walked to the garage in the 7500 block of South Wolcott Avenue about 7:45 p.m., where she interrupted at least one burglar in the act. Thats when the assailant opened fire, hitting her in the chest, back and arm, Chicago police said in a media notification.

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Jessica Hudson, 21, whose home address was on the same block where she was killed, was pronounced dead on the scene, according to information released by the Cook County medical examiners office Thursday morning.

Residents watch officers work the scene of a shooting in Chicago's Gresham neighborhood on May 11, 2022. (Armando L. Sanchez / Chicago Tribune)

Two hours earlier, in the 1600 block of West 68th Street, two boys, 6 and 11, were with a 21-year-old woman and a 24-year-old man when someone shot them when they were traveling in a vehicle, police said.

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The 6-year-old was shot in the forearm and the 11-year-old was wounded in his right arm. Both boys were taken to Comer Childrens Hospital, where they were listed in good condition.

The woman was shot in the face and was taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center in good condition, while the 24-year-old man was shot in both legs and also taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center, police said.

About 7:30 p.m., southeast of Miles Davis Magnet Academy, yellow tape closed off 68th Street from Paulina Street to Ashland Avenue.

Officers work at the scene where four people were shot, including a 6-year-old and 11-year-old boy, in the 1600 block of West 68th Street on May 11, 2022. (Armando L. Sanchez / Chicago Tribune)

A handful of neighbors on Paulina sat or stood on their front porch, watching police cars at the shooting scene.

About a mile and a half south on Wolcott Avenue, neighbors stood on their porch or on the sidewalk talking and watching as police surrounded the home where the 21-year-old woman was killed.

No one was arrested in either attack and detectives were investigating.
Tatiana Pochivalova near her house, which was destroyed by Russian troops, Vilkhivka village, Kharkiv Oblast

1838: Russians shell Kremenchuk oil refinery in Poltava Oblast, governor Petro Lunin has reported.

From 8 to 12 Russian missiles hit Kremenchuk - refineries and other infrastructure. Details - later. The threat of missile strikes remains. We are not leaving the shelter! Lunin said.



1825: Ukraine has been negotiating the release of 38 heavily wounded Ukrainian soldiers currently trapped in the Azovstal factory in Mariupol, Ukraine's reintegration Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said in a statement.

Previously Russian invaders refused to let the remaining Ukrainian defenders be evacuated from the besieged factory, where some 1000 Ukrainian servicemen are still fighting against the Russians.

Some 600 servicemen are wounded and can't get proper medical help.

1644: Heavy fighting have been going on within the contact line in Donetsk and Luhansk Oblast, Ukraine's Ministry of Defense Spokesman Oleksandr Motuzyanyk said in a statement, providing the latest update from the front:

In the Donetsk Oblast, invading troops are active in the Lyman, Severodonetsk, Popasna, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, Kurakhiv and Novopavlovsk areas. Their goal is to establish control over Rubizhne and capture Lyman, Severodonetsk and Marinka.



In the Lyman direction, the enemy has focused its efforts on creating a bridgehead in the area of Bilohorivka (6 km west of Lysychansk) and are preparing an offensive on the city of Lysychansk.

To this end, the Russians are strengthening the offensive potential of its group. In the direction of Seversk, the enemy is advancing towards the Zelena Dolyna and Novoselivka villages. Fighting continues.

1438: The Ukrainian parliament has officially liquidated Ukraine's largest pro-Russian party, Opposition Platform for Life, European Solidarity Party lawmaker Oleksiy Honcharenko has reported.

Most of the collaborators in the regions, currently occupied by Russia, were representatives of the Opposition Platform for Life Party.

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1215: Three people have been killed and 12 more wounded in the Russian shelling of Novhorod-Siverske, a town in Chernihiv Oblast, the State Emergency Service of Ukraine told Suspilne.

Earlier, Chernihiv Oblast governor Viacheslav Chaus reported that Russians had conducted several aerial strikes against Novhorod-Siverske.

1207: Serhiy Volynskiy, the commander of the marines defending the Azovstal steelworks, has asked Elon Musk to help evacuate Ukrainian soldiers from Mariupol.

He described his appeal as a cry of desperation.

Today, G7 ministers meet for a summit in Germany, where they will discuss the situation in Ukraine. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba is scheduled to speak during the proceedings.



Russia has suffered heavy losses in Kharkiv Oblast, where Ukrainians have been counterattacking for several days in a row. Russians have begun to withdraw their forces from the region, the UK Defense Ministry has reported. In Luhansk Oblast, the occupiers have been trying to ford the Siversky Donets River. Ukrainian forces have destroyed two more pontoon crossings in the last two days.

Overnight Russians shelled Novhorod-Siversky, a city in Chernihiv Oblast, the local government reported.

"Tonight the Russians conducted several air strikes on critical infrastructure," Chernihiv governor Viacheslav Chaus said.

"These are schools. Other administrative buildings and private houses were also damaged. There are dead and wounded,"



On the southern front, Ukrainian forces elminated 23 Russian soldiers and four armored vehicles over the last 24 hours, Operational Command South has reported.

In Kherson Oblast, Ukrainians destroyed a Russian ammunition depot.

Read also: Russians try to stop the Ukrainian advance in Kharkiv, and send Mariupol residents to prison camps

Viacheslav Gladkov, governor of Russia's Belgorod Oblast, has accused the Armed Forces of Ukraine of shelling of Solokhy village. He claimed one person was killed and six wounded in the attack. Ukrainian forces did not confirm the claims.
Elon Musk. Andrew Kelly/Reuters

The SEC is investigating Elon Musk's late disclosure of his Twitter stake, per The Wall Street Journal.

After buying up more than 5% of Twitter stock Musk should have filed a disclosure on March 24.

He filed on April 4, meaning he may have benefitted from buying up cheaper shares in the meantime.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is investigating Elon Musk over his disclosure of buying up Twitter shares ahead of his announcement that he wanted to buy the company, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Sources familiar with the matter told The Journal the SEC is probing Musk over his late submission of a form investors need to file when they purchase more than 5% of a company's shares.

Musk filed the form at least ten days after the date when he was supposed to, The Journal reports.

Musk disclosed on April 4 that he had bought up a 9.2% stake in Twitter, sending the social-media company's shares soaring by almost 25%.

According to SEC rules, he should have filed his disclosure by March 24, The Journal reported.

By not reporting that he'd bought a more than 5% stake in time, he potentially saved $143 million. This is because if public investors had known earlier that Musk was buying up stock, the share price may have gone up, University of Pennsylvania accounting professor Daniel Taylor told The Journal.

A Twitter shareholder filed a lawsuit against Musk on April 12, which claimed that investors would have made significant gains between March 24 and April 4 if he had reported his disclosure on time.

Musk offered to buy Twitter on April 14 and the company accepted his bid on April 25. The deal still needs to pass shareholder and regulatory approval.

Even if the SEC brought a lawsuit against Musk it would be unlikely to upset the deal closing, The Journal reported.

The SEC did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment made outside of normal working hours.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Security footage obtained by the BBC showing two Russian troops moments before they open fire on Ukrainian civilians. BBC

Russian troops were caught on camera shooting two Ukrainian civilians in the back, the BBC reported.

The security footage obtained by the BBC shows two soldiers open fire on unarmed security guards.

The United Nations says soldiers' attacks on civilians during war are considered war crimes.

Russian troops were caught on security footage shooting two Ukrainian civilians in the back, the BBC reported Thursday.

In CCTV video obtained by the BBC, a group of Russian soldiers can be seen approaching the gate of a building along a Kyiv highway. An unarmed Ukrainian security guard, identified by the BBC reporter Sarah Rainsford as Leonid Pliats, then approaches the gate, apparently striking up a conversation with the Russians and smoking cigarettes with them.

The video shows Russian troops then leaving the area, only for two of them to suddenly turn back and approach the gate again, while raising their guns. The BBC producer Tony Brown reported that the troops then shot Pliats and his boss "in their backs."

The BBC reported that Pliats' boss was immediately killed in the shooting but that Pliats was able to limp back to an office to hide and call for help.

Two Ukrainian volunteer firefighters eventually arrived and tried to save Pliats, but he died from his wounds, the BBC reported. The firefighters, identified as Sasha and Kostya, told the BBC that they had to wait out the Russians before they could reach Pliats.

In additional footage, the Russian troops can be seen inside the building shooting into rooms and looking through cupboards. One of the Russians can be seen helping himself to a drink in one of the offices  unaware that he's being filmed until another notices the camera and hits it with the butt of his rifle.

The Russians were also seen on CCTV footage driving an apparently stolen van, painted with a "V" symbol  used by some of Russian President Vladimir Putin's forces  and "Russian Tank Special Forces."

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Pliats daughter, Yulia Androshchuk, told the BBC that her father "was not a military man at all."

"They killed a 65-year-old. What for?" she said. "I'm not so much furious as full of grief  and fear. These damn Russians are so out of control, I'm afraid of what they might do next."

The United Nations has said it is a war crime for troops to intentionally attack civilians during a war.

Since the early days of Russia's unprovoked war against Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the West have accused Putin's forces of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

International organizations  including the European Union and International Criminal Court  have said they will investigate whether war crimes have been committed by Russian forces.

Ukrainian officials said they had documented thousands of war crimes and identified hundreds of suspects.

The exact number of Ukrainian civilians killed by Russian forces is unknown, though Zelenskyy previously estimated that there could be tens of thousands dead.

Read the original article on Business Insider
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.  A subvariant of omicron is spreading rapidly in Florida, and health experts say it will likely become the dominant strain of the virus in the state before the summer.

The subvariant, named B.A.2.12.1, is a new mutation of the omicron COVID-19 variant  and even more contagious. Some experts believe it may be the most contagious strain thus far.

The subvariant was first detected in New York last month, and made up 42% of all new cases in the Southeast region of United States for the week ending May 7, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

CDC director Rochelle Walensky said while B.A.2.12.1 is highly contagious  about 27% more than the original omicron  it does not seem to cause a more severe case of COVID. Walensky told reporters: We continue to believe that those who are vaccinated, and especially those who are boosted, continue to have strong protection against severe disease, even from BA.2.12.1.

Hospitalizations remain low in Florida compared to other points in the pandemic, but people are getting sick. South Florida physician practices report an uptick in patients arriving with fever, cough, congestion and fatigue  some of them have symptoms for up to 10 days.

Dr. Aileen Marty, an infectious disease expert with the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine at Florida International University, said the high percentage of Floridians who are vaccinated, boosted or recently had omicron blunts the impact of B.A.2.12.1, as do the antiviral pills now being used to prevent hospitalizations.

Studies in the U.S. and China make it crystal clear, it is just as bad as the original Wuhan virus for anyone unvaccinated and who had not previously had COVID, Marty said. It is a really serious version. It just seems less serious because of peoples underlying protection.

A Florida Department of Health report shows B.A.2.1.12.1 surfaced in the state in April. Helix, a private lab that sequences samples of positive COVID tests, reports the omicron subvariant has gained ground in Florida over the past few weeks.

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There is a COVID wave now spreading in the community, and everyone knows that it is probably driven by B.A.2.1.12.1, said Dr. David Andrews, a professor at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. Andrews said his positive test samples collected in Miami-Dade County also show the subvariant is about 42% of cases. It mirrors what the CDC is seeing nationally.

Andrews said he believes Florida is experiencing a silent surge.

With prior infection and vaccine immunity, people are not sick to where we are seeing some impact on hospital care, he said. We have lots of COVID in the community but any statistics that emerge are going to reflect an underestimate when people are self-testing and not reporting it into a public database.

According to Time, a pair of preliminary, not-yet-peer-reviewed studies  one from China and one from South Africa  suggest this omicron subvariant may be better than earlier strains at evading the immunity offered by vaccines and prior infections.

That means even people who caught the original omicron strain could be at risk of reinfection. However, researchers believe those who had omicron recently and are vaccinated have strong protection.

Meanwhile, two other omicron subvariants, BA.4 and BA.5, have gained increasing attention in South Africa as weekly coronavirus cases tripled in the last two weeks.

Marty said while those two subvariants havent made it to Florida yet, she anticipates they will arrive in the next few weeks. Then its a matter of how fast and how well they compete with B.A.2.1.12.1.

With highly contagious strains of COVID circulating, Marty said Floridians need to wear good quality masks in public indoor settings that are poorly ventilated.

I dont understand why people want to do away with public health measures and pretend COVID is not here when it still is here, she said. The reality is there are potential long-term consequences. People are getting long COVID even when they had mild symptoms.

____
May 11ALEXANDRIA, S.D.  A Sioux Falls man will remain in the Davison County Jail after entering not guilty pleas to charges in four separate cases Wednesday morning at the Hanson County Courthouse in Alexandria.

Mason Ridgeway, 22, of Sioux Falls, is accused in Hanson County of burglarizing the same Emery bar on three occasions, as well as failing to return from custody following discharge from treatment. He also has four other cases pending in three other counties.

His charges stem from allegations that he burglarized four bars a total of seven times across Hanson and Turner County. In Hanson County, police say Ridgeway burglarized Sandy's Bar in Emery on Sept. 11 and Sept. 20.

While in the Davison County Jail awaiting court hearings, Ridgeway was released on furlough. Hanson County Sheriff Brandon Wingert said Ridgeway was discharged from a treatment center in Sioux Falls and failed to return to custody. Between his discharge from treatment and his capture, Ridgeway is accused of burglarizing Sandy's Bar a third time.

Across the three alleged burglaries in Emery, Ridgeway is accused to have stolen roughly $8,500 in cash and done significant damage to the business.

"Mr. Ridgeway, you've made your situation a bit complicated at this point," Judge Chris Giles said during Tuesday's hearing, rubbing his right temple with two fingers. "I think Mr. [RJ] Rylance (Ridgeway's attorney) is doing a good job at working things through and navigating a situation for you."

After accepting Ridgeway's not guilty plea on all four cases, Giles hinted at the possibility of a plea deal, but warned the state may pursue the newer, more serious charges instead of offering an agreement on older charges.

"Technically it's the state's choice, really, as to which [charge] they want to pick [for trial]," Giles said. "... The oldest in time of the allegations would make sense, but there are different factors that could come into play."

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Rylance pointed out to Giles that Ridgeway has other proceedings taking place outside of the state's first judicial circuit, and requested that all four of his cases be moved from June to August.

After acknowledging Ridgeway was scheduled for a hearing in Turner County on Thursday, he agreed. Jury trials were set in all four cases for the week of Aug. 8, with a change of plea agreement proposal deadline of June 24 and a change of plea deadline of July 6.

Across all four Hanson County cases, Ridgeway faces three counts of third-degree burglary, one count of grand theft of over $5,000, three counts of intentional damage to property, three counts of criminal trespass and one count of second-degree escape.

In other counties, Ridgeway faces five counts of third-degree burglary, five counts of grand theft, five counts of intentional damage to property, eluding and petty theft. He's pleaded not guilty to all charges in all counties.

If convicted on all charges in all counties, he could be sentenced to serve up to 112 years in prison, plus be ordered to pay nearly $225,000 in fines.

"You're going to remain in custody until we get these matters resolved," Giles said firmly.

Ridgeway is currently being held at the Davison County Jail on multiple bonds as well as a South Dakota Department of Corrections hold.
Dmytro Neveseliy, the mayor of Zelenodolsk, collected bicycles that belong to residents of the occupied villages of Kherson Oblast, who were fleeing to safety. He plans to return these vehicles to owners

Every day, they receive displaced persons from the partially occupied Kherson Oblast, which is a few kilometers away.

There, in the south, fighting continues, and here, in the first town of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast from the administrative border, a hub has been set up to receive those fleeing from the enemy. The escapees come here every day to head north collectively  by bus  to the "bright lights" of the city of Kryvyi Rih.

Read also: Drunk Russians kidnap Ukrainian referee near Kherson

Inside the tent, journalists from NV met Halyna, a resident of the occupied Kherson Oblast village of Novovoznesenske. She is sitting on a bench and seems to be in a state of shock. "I don't know what day it is, just the number," she says quietly.

Five hours ago, at 0330, Halyna and her husband fled their village. The couple ran 15 km through the fields to the checkpoint on the territory controlled by the Ukrainian military. From there, the couple was taken to Zelenodolsk.

Volodymyr and Halyna ran 15 kilometers in the morning through the fields to get to the territory controlled by Ukraine Kristina Berdynskykh

Then Halyna breaks into tears, apologizes, and starts crying again. And then she explains that she had never given free rein to her feelings during the two months of the war.

Then comes her 60-year-old husband, Volodymyr, who has been talking to the police all this time, filling out papers. He had finally managed to call his children in Kyiv, as Russians seized his phone back in the village.

The husband looks more restrained than the wife. Emotions come through when he starts talking about what he lived with until the previous night  the occupation.

According to Volodymyr, the Russians banned people from leaving Novovoznesenske: "They would only let people out for bribes and only to Kherson or Crimea."

Natalia works at a thermal power plant and lives in a high-rise building, which was hit by a shell in mid-March Kristina Berdynskykh

So he and his wife decided to run away. "We ran through the steppes at night while they [the occupiers] slept, bypassing their checkpoints," says Volodymyr, adding that after three hours of hard travel he does not feel tired.

As the couple was fleeing, enemy shells flew over their heads toward Ukrainian positions.

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Volodymyr explains that out of 200 residents of Novovoznesenske, 30 remained  the rest ran away: there are already more Russians there than locals.

There had been no power in the village for all of its 45 days of occupation, just like theres no gas and mobile service. But that is a minor misfortune. The big problem is that there are occupiers who, in Volodymyr's words, are "taking" everything.

For example, local mobile phones are confiscated to check if people have relatives who serve in the Armed Forces. The Russians occupied the wealthiest village houses and a school, where, in the basement, they are holding and abusing prisoners of war, both military and civilian.

Residents of Zelenodolsk Oksana and Serhiy stayed in the city because they believe in the victory of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Kristina Berdynskykh

Finally, Halyna joins the conversation. She says that as people were leaving the occupied territory, they set their animals free  and now hungry cows, pigs, and chickens are walking around the village.

Volodymyr and Halyna had lived in Novovoznesenske for over 30 years  they built a beautiful house and recently bought a new car. But they left everything behind, fleeing from the enemy. They took only a few bags with them, with documents and medicines.

Halyna explains that she could no longer bear to see Russian equipment firing at Ukrainian positions from their village.

"Tanks come, stand near the house, and shoot at our defenders, at the Armed Forces," the woman recalled.

She leaves the tent and goes to the ambulance to measure her blood pressure.

Only later, after talking to their children  who had advised their parents to head to Kryvyi Rih immediately and board the evening train to Kyiv  does Halyna recover from the state of shock.

Read also: Zelensky says Russia has "no chance" to annex Ukraine's Kherson Oblast

"The main thing is that you survived," we tell Halyna and Volodymyr, leaving the couple to wait for the bus departing to Kryvyi Rih.

"The main thing is that the country survives," responds Volodymyr. He adds: "Ukraine will win in any case. They [Russians] will suffer more than we do. Russia can be written off. They wanted the Third Reich, and they will get what Hitler got."

In addition to Volodymyr and Halyna, several other people from the villages of Kherson Oblast came to the big tent in Zelenodolsk this morning. Although their settlements are under Ukrainian control, they are impossible to live in due to ongoing hostilities and constant shelling.

Bordering war

Such forced exiles as Halyna and Volodymyr are witnessed in Zelenodolsk on a daily basis.

Dmytro Neveselyi, the mayor, leads NV to the territory of one of the utility companies. There are over 300 bicycles with white ribbons in the yard and in the warehouse  it was on them that IDPs from the occupied villages of Kherson Oblast reached the Ukrainian checkpoints.

Read also: Liberated villages of Kherson Oblast live on despite daily shelling

In two months, 2,000-2,500 such people passed through Zelenodolsk, says Neveselyi. "Bicycles are the primary means of transportation for rural areas," he adds. The Russians initially banned cars from leaving the occupied villages, and later exiting by any means. Therefore, people often went even on foot to the north, to the free lands, walking 10-12 km.

"Including people with disabilities and women with small children," explains the mayor.

In the warehouse, in addition to bicycles, you can, in fact, see both wheelchairs and strollers. All this was abandoned near the checkpoints from which refugees were taken to Zelenodolsk. Neveselyi decided to collect and look after all of this equipment.

"After the liberation of the villages, people will return home. It was their main means of transportation, we will keep and return them, he explains.

In Zelenodolsk itself, which is located only 5 km from the front, 40% of the population remains  6,000 citizens. People began to leave en masse after Russian shells hit local high-rises in mid-March. And in the suburbs, there are still daily shellings, and houses are being destroyed.

Near one of the high-rises, which was hit by a shell on March 19, NV met Natalia, who works at the Kryvyi Rih thermal power plant, Zelenodolsks primary industry. The woman lives on the first floor of the building, and the shell hit her apartment on the third, smashing windows throughout the building.

"I continue to live here. It's scary, but I go to work. We work to maintain electricity and heating, she explains.

The city has electricity, water, and gas. The sound of shelling from neighboring villages can still be heard, but the situation here is calmer.

Zelenodolsk police keep remnants of Russian cluster munitions as evidence of Russian war crimes Kristina Berdynskykh

"We thank the Armed Forces for not letting [Russians] in here," says Natalia.

Near the grocery store, locals are happy to talk about what it's like to live in a half-empty front-line city.

"During the shelling, everything in the store shakes. A mattress and blanket are set at home in the hallway. Persyk the Dog gets scared and hides. Its not much fun, says the stores cashier, Oksana.

"No worries, everything will be fine," her husband Serhiy replies, joining the conversation.

"Yes, everything will be fine. We believe so, otherwise we would have gone too, Oksana continues.

Read also: Russia using abandoned homes in Kherson to house its troops, says Ukraines intelligence

At this time, Vasyl Yanchuk, the deputy head of one of the local police departments, approaches the NV crew. He checks our documents and our accreditation of the Ministry of Defense, and invites us to go with him to the department.

Yanchuk had no complaints against us  he had something else on his mind.

At the department, the police officer removed the remains of cluster munitions used by the Russians from one of the premises. Law enforcement officers found them near Zelenodolsk.

The volunteer headquarters helps refugees who arrive in Zelenodolsk on a daily basis. Kristina Berdynskykh

Yanchuk explained: "This is a banned weapon worldwide, but Russia continues to use it." And then he asked to "show it to the world."

NV complied with Yanchuk's request: one of the photos illustrating this piece is a photo of cluster munitions found near Zelenodolsk.
JACKSON  The Lakewood Estonian House will host a public fundraiser for Ukraine from 4 to 7 p.m. Saturday at the intersection of Cross Street and East Veterans Highway.

The idea is the Baltic states get-together, Kostas Mastauskas, president of the Central Jersey Lithuanian Community, said. Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians get together and make a fundraiser to support Ukraine.

The event is organized by the Lakewood Estonian Association, the Latvian Community of New Jersey and the New Jersey Lithuanian Community.

We all have to do something, he said. Initially it was only Lithuanians. I thought maybe we should do something. Just sell some food and donate to the refugees in Lithuanian.

But then he spoke to the other organizations in New Jersey, and they agreed to participate.

Vida Anton, one of the event's organizers, said there will be performances by people from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia as well as two dance groups from both Ukraine and Georgia.

Development: Ocean County commissioners to vote on new $11.5M library branch in Stafford

Mastauskas said he anticipates about 200 people will attend the event, including members of the Lithuanian and Estonian consulate in New York City.

He said traditional food from Ukraine and the Baltic states will be served.

Its going to be homemade. We have a kitchen there, and were going to cook and serve it right away, he said.

According to the flyer for the event, the entry donation is $20 and registration is encouraged by calling 732-905-9737 or 732-267-4344.

Its going to be nice. Its really going to be a nice show, Mastauskas said.

Olivia Liu is a reporter covering transportation, Red Bank and western Monmouth County. She can be reached at oliu@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Lakewood NJ Estonian House Ukraine fundraiser dinner May 14
Another venue row involving Morocco is brewing, this time over qualifying for the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) in the Ivory Coast.

Liberia have no international-standard stadium and Group K rivals Morocco say the west Africans can stage their three home fixtures in the kingdom.

But group rivals South Africa have cried foul, sending a letter on Thursday to the Confederation of African Football (CAF) urging them not to allow Morocco play Liberia twice at home.

"We have been informed that Liberia intends to play their qualifying matches in Morocco, while they are with Morocco in the same group," the South African Football Association letter said.

"South Africa opposes this arrangement, which goes against the principles of fair play as Morocco will travel less and enjoy home advantage more than anyone else in the group.

"We understand the challenges (finding international standard) stadiums present on the continent, but we advocate that this is not used to disadvantage countries or give others an unfair advantage."

In 2022 World Cup qualifying, Morocco played their three away matches at home because Guinea-Bissau and Sudan did not have international-class venues and a coup in Guinea prevented the qualifier going ahead.

Morocco won all six matches, then defeated the Democratic Republic of Congo in a home and away play-off to clinch a place at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

Qualifying for the Africa Cup of Nations is due to begin on May 30 with two matchdays between then and June 14. Morocco are scheduled to host South Africa and visit Liberia during that period.

This week, Egyptian club Al Ahly asked the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Switzerland to overturn a CAF decision giving the 2022 CAF Champions League final hosting rights to Morocco.

CAF did not specify where in Morocco the match would be played, but the Stade Mohammed V home of Wydad Casablanca would be the obvious choice as its 65,000 capacity is the biggest in the kingdom.

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The semi-final second legs are scheduled for this Friday and Saturday and Ahly and Wydad are hot favourites to reach the final.

Ahly want the May 30 title decider staged in a neutral country, while CAF said they chose Morocco because the only other bidders, Senegal, withdrew.

The Cairo club are chasing an unprecedented third straight Champions League title and their South African coach Pitso Mosimane hopes to become the first coach to win three consecutive finals.

dl/ea
Plans for a sequel to the iconic 198 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap have been revealed.

Spinal Tap II will see director Rob Reiner return alongside stars Michael McKean, Harry Shearer and Christopher Guest as the British rock band, playing David St Hubbins, Nigel Tufnel and Derek Smalls.

Speaking to Deadline, Reiner  who appears as filmmaker Marty DiBergi in the first film and will reprise his role in the sequel  said that the new movie will be released on 19 March, 2024.

The plan is to do a sequel that comes out on the 40th anniversary of the original film and I can tell you hardly a day goes by without someone saying, why dont you do another one? said the director.

For so many years, we said, nah. It wasnt until we came up with the right idea how to do this. You dont want to just do it, to do it. You want to honour the first one and push it a little further with the story.

Reiner explained the concept of the new film further, saying that it will revolve around the fact that the band are due to play one last show.

Theyve played Albert Hall, played Wembley Stadium, all over the country and in Europe. They havent spent any time together recently, and that became the premise, said Reiner.

The idea was that Ian Faith, who was their manager, he passed away. In reality, Tony Hendra [who played the manager in the first film] passed away [in 2021]. Ians widow inherited a contract that said Spinal Tap owed them one more concert. She was basically going to sue them if they didnt. All these years and a lot of bad blood well get into and theyre thrown back together and forced to deal with each other and play this concert.

Earlier this month Ric Parnell, who played Mick Shrimpton, drummer of Spinal Tap, died aged 70.
Jane never expected so many people to see the chalking she and her friend made on Saturday afternoon. She really only cared that one person did, and that was her Bangor, Maine, neighbor, Sen. Susan Collins.

And Collins most certainly saw it. So did countless others across the country, thanks to the Republican senator herself, who called the police over the polite chalk message and took the story of the colorful abortion rights message from her sidewalk to the national news cycle.

"It was never meant to be like an 'under the cover of darkness' type of thing," Jane, who asked to be referred to only by her nickname, told BuzzFeed News. "It was just two women fed up with not being able to talk to their representative, and its a beautiful day, so we grabbed some chalk and took to the streets."

Saturday afternoon, on a public sidewalk outside Collins' home, the two friends wrote: "Susie, please, Mainers want [the Women's Health Protection Act (WHPA)]. Vote yes, clean up your mess."

The message referred to a bill aimed at protecting abortion rights at the federal level, which failed to pass in the Senate on Wednesday. Despite her reputation as a moderate who supports abortion rights, Collins voted against the bill, previously telling CNN she believes the bill wouldn't "protect the right of a Catholic hospital to not perform abortions."

The chalk message was intended as a last ditch effort to sway Collins to listen to her constituents, Jane said, a reminder that voting no wasn't likely to please liberal-leaning Maine residents.

"Susan Collins hasn't held a town hall meeting for her constituents in over 20 years," Jane said. "When we email her, when we call her, all we ever get back is whatever form letter response she's sending out that week. We're sick of being ignored and dismissed and thought that we should try a more creative approach."

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On Saturday, Jane texted her friend, an artist, who agreed to join her to make the chalking.

"Then, like any good millennial, I went on my Target app and I ordered a 24-box of bold chalk," she said.

The two friends went to Collins' neighborhood that afternoon, completing their chalk creation in about 20 minutes. But when she drove by the following day, it had been completely erased.

It wasn't until Monday that she read a local news article and learned what had happened: Collins had called the cops after which the public works department washed away the chalking.

In a statement to the Bangor Daily News, the senator referred to the chalking as "the defacement of public property." A spokesperson for Collins told BuzzFeed News on Thursday that because Senator Collins periodically gets threatening letters and phone calls, we have been advised by Capitol Police to notify the local police department when there is activity directed at her around her home.

The Bangor Police Department determined "the message wasnt threatening" and "no crime was committed," Sgt. Wade Betters told BuzzFeed News. The police report  which described the chalking as "intricately drawn" in "multiple different colors"  specified that Collins was the one who called police.

Discovering the elected official had quite literally gotten their message erased left Jane feeling frustrated and unheard, she said. Fortunately, that box of chalk was a 24 pack.

So, on Tuesday, she and her friend returned to Collins' home and filled the sidewalk with even more messages about abortion rights. This time, they added another: "You might not recognize our right to free speech," it stated, "but I hope you recognize my right to have an abortion."

Several neighbors came out and spoke to them as they wrote the messages, Jane said. "They were all incredibly supportive of the things that we were writing, and additionally expressed their displeasure at their taxpayer dollars and city resources being used to clean up the sidewalk," she said. Even Stephen King, who has a house on the same street as Collins, tweeted Janes chalk message.

According to Jane, Collins' husband, retired lobbyist Thomas Daffron, also came out of the house while they were there and confronted them. At one point, he called them "idiots," Jane alleged, after which she began recording the interaction.

In the audio recording, which was reviewed by BuzzFeed News, a man identified by Jane as Daffron can be heard speaking angrily, accusing the women of "defacing my sidewalk" and telling them that the chalkings were not doing "any good" for their cause. He also repeatedly asked Jane, a teacher, who her employer is, but she did not answer.

Jane told BuzzFeed News that Daffron claimed they called the police because they've previously received death threats, but she said she thinks it was "a bit of an overreaction" to their peaceful message.

"I guess I understand, but we were incredibly cordial and polite, and Im not sure that, like, radical militia types typically write in chalk on sidewalks," she said.

"He just kept reiterating [that theyve] been threatened [and get] these letters 'threatening us bodily harm,' to which my reply was, 'So then you totally understand how I feel,'" Jane said, recalling the conversation. "The idea that you have a right to your own body  your health, your wellbeing, the right to live and go about your life  is all that we want, too."

Daffron left to walk their dog, Jane said, and when he returned his demeanor was suddenly conciliatory. He said they should call Collins' office to set up a meeting, and when they said they had tried that already, he told them to call again and "tell them who we were and that we had spoken with him and he would try to make it happen."

If that didn't work, she said, Daffron told them they could "come back and knock on the door." Jane said she hoped she does not have to pay another house call, but is planning to take those steps and try to set up a meeting.

Hours after their interaction, Jane drove by the house and saw Daffron washing the messages away with a hose. This time, police were not alerted to the chalk messages, Betters confirmed to BuzzFeed News.

But the images still circulated online after state Rep. Amy Roeder  who came to support Jane during the second chalking  tweeted them. Roeder told BuzzFeed News that "given the blowback over this particular bit of pearl clutching by the Senator, I dont think shes heard of the Streisand Effect."

At @SenatorCollins house to admire some local art. @AIsForOrg @ACLUMaine @ACCESSpod @AbortionFront @ShoutYrAbortion 05:04 PM - 10 May 2022

Roeder said she has "little hope" that Collins would actually meet with Jane, and criticized her for "wantonly [wasting] the taxpayers money on a job she could have handled with a splash of water."

"The chalk messages were the opposite of threatening," Roeder added. "I wasnt aware her tender sensibilities could be so offended by the word 'please.'"

As expected, Collins voted against WHPA on Wednesday. Even if their chalk messages couldn't make a difference, Jane said she has no regrets about the experience.

"At least I know that she stood on her porch and read the words that we wrote," Jane said. "She heard what we had to say."

And if any abortion rights advocates are considering making their voices heard in the way she did, Jane had one piece of advice.

"The box of chalk I got was legit," she said. "It was under $3 for 24 colors, super recommend."

May. 12, 2022, at 19:19 PM

More on this
The Planned Parenthood Fairview Heights Health Center, an abortion clinic a few miles from the Missouri border in Fairview Heights, Illinois, is seen on May 6, 2022. (E. Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune)

FAIRVIEW HEIGHTS, Ill.  The call came into the southern Illinois abortion clinic on a recent weekday: A young woman from Missouri was on the line, frantic because she no longer had the money to pay for her $470 procedure, which was scheduled for the next day.

The caller panicked because she assumed shed have to cancel and reschedule later, whenever she could come up with the money. The prospect of delaying such a time-sensitive procedure was terrifying.

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But a calm voice on the line asked a few questions about the patient and how much she could afford at that moment.

The woman said she had just started a new job and would be getting her first check soon but was in the middle of a pay period. She also mentioned that she has a child and an unexpected bill came up, swallowing the money she had set aside to pay to terminate the pregnancy.

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I dont want you to commit something you dont have, said the woman who took the call, Kawanna Shannon, director of patient access at the new Regional Logistics Center, which is housed in the Planned Parenthood Health Center in Fairview Heights.

Kawanna Shannon, director of patient access at the Planned Parenthood Fairview Heights Health Center, an abortion clinic a few miles from the Missouri border in Fairview Heights, Illinois, on May 6, 2022. (E. Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune)

Shannon spent a few minutes successfully searching various abortion funds to help cover the cost of the procedure. Then she went over a few instructions for the callers appointment, which would continue as scheduled the next day.

Thank you, maam, the patient repeated several times, her panicked tone melting into relief.

Calls of this sort from women throughout the Midwest and South were pouring into the clinic all day  and theyre expected to become even more abundant soon.

With the U.S. Supreme Court poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, Illinois is preparing for a massive rise in out-of-state patients traveling here to terminate a pregnancy. If Roe were to crumble, providers have predicted an additional 14,000 patients each year will cross state lines to terminate pregnancies in southern Illinois.

Facing this imminent influx, the two abortion providers in the region partnered to open the Regional Logistics Center in January. The center is operated jointly by Reproductive Health Services of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Hope Clinic for Women, an abortion clinic in Granite City.

Dedicated case managers there assist traveling patients with overcoming various common barriers to abortion access: finding lodging, booking transportation and securing child care, as well as navigating various funding sources to help pay for abortions.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker visited the Planned Parenthood in Fairview Heights on Wednesday to champion reproductive rights, calling the agencys work lifesaving and life-changing. He noted that more than 75% of the clinics patients already come from other states.

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Lets be crystal clear about one point: Abortion is health care, he said. By the time many of these out-of-state patients make it to Fairview Heights, Illinois, they have traveled further than anyone should have to, physically and emotionally. People should not have to endure trauma after trauma to be in control of their own bodies. But thats exactly the burden this right-wing Supreme Court and anti-choice governors and state legislators increasingly put on the backs of millions of women.

For almost half a century, the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade has affirmed the right to terminate a pregnancy nationwide. But a stunning draft opinion leaked earlier this month indicated that a majority of justices intend to strike down the 1973 decision, leaving the matter of abortion rights to individual states.

The official ruling in the case, Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, is expected to come over the summer.

In the absence of Roe, experts anticipate roughly half of all states would prohibit abortion, including Missouri and almost all of the Midwest. And states with strong reproductive rights protections like Illinois are preparing to take on the burden of patients from all the states where abortion would be outlawed.

Brian Westbrook, executive director of the organization Coalition Life, which is based in St. Louis, said he and other abortion opponents have been confident for a while that Roe v. Wade would eventually fall.

Its not a matter of if it will be overturned, he said. Its a matter of when. The pro-life movement will only do more as a result. This is not necessarily a victory  its a shifting of work from the federal level down to the state level.

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Not going back

The after-hours phone line rang at around 3 a.m. on a winter morning, just a few weeks after the Regional Logistics Center was established.

The caller was a woman from Louisiana who was desperate to book a ride to the airport that instant, to get to her appointment the next day, said Shannon, who took the call.

The regional logistics center at the Planned Parenthood Fairview Heights Health Center, an abortion clinic a few miles from the Missouri border in Fairview Heights, Illinois. (E. Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune)

I didnt tell people this, but Im in a very abusive relationship and he just left, Shannon recalled the woman saying. I dont know if hes gone for a minute or what, but I just want to leave right now.

The Louisiana woman said her partner did not know she was pregnant. Shannon recalled scrambling to book the Uber in the middle of the night and then staying on the phone with the caller until the ride came, fearful her partner would return before the Ubers arrival.

Im literally packing now, Shannon remembered the woman saying.

The woman from Louisiana flew in and had a surgical abortion. Afterward, Shannon asked the patient if she needed a return ride to the airport.

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No, she recalled the patient saying. Im not going back.

Where are you going? Shannon said she replied, surprised. What are you doing?

She said the patient told her she wanted to leave her partner and start a new life. Shannon contacted as many services and nonprofits as she could find and passed on the pamphlets and phone numbers. Before leaving, the woman from Louisiana said she was going to a shelter, Shannon recalled.

She was like, Ms. Kawanna, Im good. Im going to be fine, Shannon said. That sticks with me. Sometimes I wish shed call, so I know shes good. I really wholeheartedly believe shes never going back

In 2020, nearly 10,000 patients crossed state lines to have an abortion in Illinois, according to the latest data from the Illinois Department of Public Health. The number has increased every year since 2014.

The rise in out-of-state abortions comes as many nearby states increasingly restrict the procedure by legislating gestational limits, mandating waiting periods before having an abortion and implementing stringent regulations on clinics and providers.

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Illinois, on the other hand, has eliminated every major restriction on the procedure. In 2019, Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed the Reproductive Health Act, which declared terminating a pregnancy a fundamental right in Illinois.

Planned Parenthood in late 2019 opened the 18,000-square-foot Fairview Heights site where the Regional Logistics Center operates; the location on the cusp of Missouri was chosen strategically to serve patients traveling from that neighboring state and beyond.

The facility includes a family room designed for children, equipped with beanbag chairs, books and toys, as well as extra diapers and wipes. So many patients had child care constraints and were bringing their kids into the regular waiting room, so staff decided to set aside a more comfortable space for families, said Bonyen Lee-Gilmore, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region.

One patient from Missouri recently couldnt find anyone to watch her three children, so Shannon said she took the kids to the family room and, for about two and a half hours, she watched the baby, toddler and 6-year-old during the procedure.

The oldest, a little boy, watched TikTok videos on a laptop and performed some of the dances featured in them.

The children's room at the Planned Parenthood Fairview Heights Health Center. (E. Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune)

I even did a couple with him  at least, I was trying to, Shannon said, laughing a little.

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She added that sometimes patients stay with their children in the family room and receive services and information sessions there, until its time to go into a procedure room.

The room is not a day care, she stressed.

But if you happen to come with your child, you have a safe place to go with your child, she said.

Obstacle course

One day in February, an 18-wheeler semitruck pulled into the Planned Parenthood parking lot, quite conspicuous alongside all the regular cars and SUVs that typically park there, Gilmore said.

A patient, who drove the truck for a living, traveled more than a thousand miles from Arizona to southern Illinois to pick up abortion pills, an appointment that typically takes about 90 minutes, according to staff.

While medication abortion has been available in the United States since 2000, 19 states have restrictions mandating the provider be present when the pill is taken, barring access via telemedicine; 32 states have laws requiring physicians administer the medication, as opposed to other types of clinicians like advanced practice nurses and physician assistants, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.

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Illinois has none of these restrictions.

We get a lot of people who will drive hundreds of miles for a medication abortion, Gilmore said. This scheme that politicians have set up is literally a game they put people on. It is an obstacle course.

Westbrook, of Coalition Life, called the Regional Logistics Center a media ploy.

Quite frankly, its nothing more or less than what theyve always done, which is provide abortions and take the life of unborn children, he said.

Missouri is one of about a dozen states with a so-called trigger law that would ban abortion in all or most cases if Roe were to be overturned.

The state has one remaining abortion clinic, a Planned Parenthood in St. Louis, largely due to stringent regulations on clinics and providers. In contrast, Westbrook said there are 75 anti-abortion pregnancy resource centers statewide.

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With all of that help and assistance for pregnant women, they dont feel like they have to get an abortion, he said.

Crunchtime

Last month, one young woman traveled about 800 miles round trip from rural Mississippi to southern Illinois.

The hardest part of coordinating her trip was scrambling to find a ride from her home to the closest Greyhound station, about 45 minutes away in Memphis, said Kenicia Page, Regional Logistics Center manager.

It was just very difficult trying to find transportation in the area, she said, noting that theres often a dearth of taxis, Ubers and public transit in rural communities. It was really crunchtime. I think it was 24 to 48 hours to her appointment.

Eventually, the patient found a ride through a nonprofit organization that offers transportation for those in need in the Mississippi Delta region.

The young woman was in her second trimester and had a two-day surgical procedure. The patient was unemployed and needed food and sanitary items during her travels, Page recalled. So the Regional Logistics Center sent her an electronic gift card and booked her an Uber to take to a Dollar General store, so she could pick up a few items before heading back to her hotel.

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It was just making her feel comfortable while she was here and keeping her uplifted, because she was just so discouraged from having to go through all the hoops, Page said. But she was able to get everything done and then return home safely afterward.

The Regional Logistics Center has seen an increase in callers each month, from serving 183 patients in January to 329 patients in April, Shannon said.

In May, it will be more, she said. Its constant. People, they need the help.

Each Regional Logistics Center case costs on average $900 to $1,500, depending on how many services the patient requires, Gilmore said. With reproductive rights in jeopardy, shes concerned about how the center will handle the rising need and make sure funding lasts long term.

The thing that I worry about is when the headlines die down, she said. When theres breaking news like this we see an outpouring of support. And we have seen that outpouring. But I worry about what happens six months after, a year later.  Is it sustainable over time?

eleventis@chicagotribune.com
May 12BEVERLY  Students and alumni at Endicott College have started an online petition calling for more "transparency and accountability" at the Beverly school.

The petition says the administration at Endicott has made several changes without listening to students, and it calls for the college's board of trustees to review recent decisions.

"It is with immense disappointment that we of the Endicott College community are witnessing the decline of an institution that used to prioritize students and community," the petition says.

The petition was posted on change.org by an anonymous group called ec4 transparency. The group includes Chris Cole, a 22-year-old graduate student at Endicott who said most of the group members want to remain anonymous but that he was willing to speak on the record. He said the ec4 transparency group includes about 10 students and alumni. The online petition had 661 signatures as of Wednesday afternoon.

Cole said Endicott has changed under Steven DiSalvo, who became president of the college in 2019. DiSalvo succeeded Richard Wylie, who led Endicott for 31 years and was credited with spearheading its transition from a small, two-year college for women to a four-year coeducational institution that now has about 4,500 undergraduate and graduate students. Wylie died in 2018.

"Change is inevitable with a new administration, but it's been more than a normal change," Cole said. "It has completely shifted from student-focused to where students are not included in decision-making."

In a letter that he wrote to the administration in March, Cole said attending Endicott College for the last five years has been a "life-changing" experience for him, but at the same time said the school is "a shell of what it once was."

Anthony Donaldson, assistant vice president of marketing at Endicott College, said the college has not been contacted by the group behind the petition. But he said senior administrators have heard from a number of students who have signed the petition and have held meetings with 10 students "to hear their concerns and ideas about strengthening the community here at Endicott."

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Administrators were scheduled to meet Wednesday with the leadership of the Student Government Association to review the results of a recent student survey, Donaldson said.

"Our top priority at Endicott is the health, safety, and well-being of our students," Donaldson said.

Donaldson said DiSalvo was not available for an interview.

Cole pointed to several recent decisions by administrators that he said have left students confused or unaware, including the reasons behind renovations to the Interfaith Chapel and the discontinuation of a campus group called the Lighthouse Leadership Society.

In response, Donaldson said the college has informed students of the plans for the chapel through its "Dine & Dialogue" sessions led by Brandi Johnson, Endicott's vice president and chief diversity officer. Donaldson also said there will be a story on the renovations in the upcoming spring issue of the school's magazine.

Donaldson said the Lighthouse Leadership Society disbanded when not enough students expressed interest after the group's faculty adviser left. Cole said students felt the group's mission was being changed and "didn't feel like they were being heard."

The petition also criticized Endicott College for its handling of mental health, saying programs have been discontinued without student input and that more resources are needed.

Donaldson said the college hired a full-time counselor at the start of the school year and plans to bring on another counselor next year.

"Mental health is absolutely an area we are committed to improving around campus," Donaldson said.

Melissa Hempstead, chair of Endicott's board of trustees, could not be reached for comment.

Paul Leighton can be reached at 978-338-2535, pleighton@gloucestertimes.com, or on Twitter at @heardinbeverly.

Paul Leighton can be reached at 978-338-2535, pleighton@gloucestertimes.com, or on Twitter at @heardinbeverly.
The Daily Beast

ReutersNearly 90 days into Vladimir Putins special military operation in Ukraine, Russian troops have apparently become so demoralized and desperate to quit theyve begun deliberately injuring themselves.The Ukrainian Defense Ministrys Main Intelligence Directorate on Saturday released audio of what it said was an intercepted call revealing the batshit new trend.A man identified as a Russian soldier in an air assault brigade based in Ukraines Kherson region can be heard venting his frustrat
With the Title 42 public health order allowing the U.S. government to turn away migrants at the border set to end later this month, former ICE officials are questioning whether the nation can handle a new surge.

According to Customs and Border Protection, agents encountered over 1 million people crossing the U.S. border illegally in 2022. The Department of Homeland Security warned migrant crossings will only increase by the end of the month.

Title 42, launched by the Trump administration near the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, has continued under the Biden administration. The order has allowed the U.S. government to turn away migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border for the last two years, including those seeking asylum.

Ending Title 42 "will definitely overwhelm an already overtaxed system within the country. I know the government is expecting huge numbers because ICE agents who are here locally across the country are being sent to the southern border to help with the processing," John Giron, a former ICE senior attorney, told Fox News.

Giron warned ICE may struggle to manage the spike in migrants expected, as the agency reported recent processing delays and long lines outside facilities across Florida.

FLORIDA ICE OFFICES SEE MASSIVE LINES, PROCESSING DELAYS AS HUNDREDS OF MIGRANTS WAIT FOR CHECK-INS

"The ICE office here in Orlando, along with many other ICE offices across the state of Florida and some across the country, are facing really huge lines outside every day for people coming to check in," Giron said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently announced that it planned to end Title 42 on May 23 because COVID-19 cases have dropped in recent months. In recent hearings, the Department of Homeland Security predicted border crossings will increase once Title 42 ends, but will eventually decrease.

ICE PREPARING FOR HISTORIC BORDER SURGE, SAYS MIGRANT ARRIVALS COULD TRIPLE

"We inherited a broken and dismantled system that is already under strain. It is not built to manage the current levels and types of migratory flows. Only Congress can fix this. Yet, we have effectively managed an unprecedented number of non-citizens seeking to enter the United States and intercepted more drugs and disrupted more smuggling operations than ever before," DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a recent hearing. "A significant increase in migrant encounters will strain our system even further, and we will address this challenge successfully."

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SENIOR DHS OFFICIAL PREDICTS LIFTING TITLE 42 WILL EVENTUALLY LEAD TO DROP IN BORDER CROSSINGS

Giron, now an immigration attorney in Orlando, told Fox News most lines outside of ICE facilities are made up of illegal immigrants who recently crossed the U.S. border: "There is a direct correlation to the border and the numbers who are coming across the border the people who are coming into the United States right now. It's not just the delays from COVID. It's not just that the office has been closed for two years. It is a large influx of people who are coming from the southern border seeking refuge in the U.S."

Immigrant men from many countries being taken into custody by U.S. Border Patrol agents at the U.S.-Mexico border in December 2021. John Moore/Getty Images, File

Giron said most have been seeking asylum.

"It's really heartbreaking for both sides, because our Border Patrol men and women, the overwhelming majority of them are fantastic people who are doing great work trying to protect our country from drugs from guns being smuggled in from terrorists coming into the country. Then they also have to deal with the people who are bringing their kids and coming to the United States because, you know, their entire family was killed in Guatemala, you know, or El Salvador. So it's a very difficult job on both sides of the border," Giron said.

The Department of Homeland Security projects up to 18,000 migrants could cross the border each day after Title 42 ends, but the Biden administration told lawmakers DHS is ready.

"We expect migration levels to increase as smugglers seek to take advantage of and profit from vulnerable migrants. We will continue to enforce our immigration laws after title 42 is lifted," Mayorkas said.

In recent days, ICE officials said lines have decreased at some check-in centers, but processing delays are proving to be a long-term problem.
On Tuesday, the Tokyo metropolitan government revealed its draft of a new registration system that would recognize same-sex partnerships.



The news comes after Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koikes promise at the end of last year that the capitals government would start a system that allowed same-sex couples access to many of the benefits under marriage, including hospital visitation rights and the ability to rent apartments together.



With the enactment of the policy, due to take effect in November, Tokyo joins the eight other prefectures that have already introduced some form of same-sex partnership system, including Aomori, Akita, Ibaraki, Gunma, Mie, Osaka, Fukuoka and Saga.



The Tokyo wards of Shibuya and Setagaya were the first to begin a system back in 2015, and the city of Sapporo was the first major city to recognize same-sex relationships in 2017.



The certifications that will serve as proof of partnership will remain distinct from a marriage license in that some rights, including tax breaks and benefits, will remain exclusive to heterosexual couples.



The statement release described the purpose of the new system as a way to promote understanding among Tokyo residents about sexual diversity and to reduce inconveniences in daily lives surrounding sexual minorities in order to create more pleasant living conditions for them.



Eligibility requirements include being over the age of 18 and having at least one partner be a resident of the capital, whether for work or school.



Even while the majority of the Japanese public is in favor of same-sex marriage, as reported by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, with 41% of those surveyed saying gay marriage should be approved, Japans conservative party holds the majority power in parliament.



Japan remains the only member of the Group of Seven (G7)  an assembly of the worlds most industrialized economies  to not allow same-sex marriage.



Advocates for sexual equality strongly pushed for same-sex marriage legislation at the time Tokyo was scheduled to host the Summer 2020 Olympics; however, the conservative Liberal Democratic Party shot down the bill.



In a landmark ruling last year, Japans Sapporo District Court ruled that banning same-sex marriage was unconstitutional.



The court explained that sexuality, as with race and gender, was not a matter of preference, and therefore same-sex couples should be allowed the same benefits as heterosexual couples.



Despite the historic ruling, it did not produce any form of concrete legal rights for Japans LGBTQ-plus population, and even with the expected implementation of the partnership system in a few months, human rights groups agree that the country has a long way to go to protect the rights and interests of its sexual minorities.







Featured Image via Reuters



Story continues

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May 12HOLDINGFORD  The Minnewaska girls track and field team is headed to the state True Team championships.

So are the Morris/Chokio-Alberta boys' squad.

Each won their respective divisions late Tuesday at the Section 5A True Team Championships at Holdingford High School.

Minnewaska's girls scored a 501 to beat second-place Paynesville, which had a 461. Paynesville will have an opportunity to qualify for state as a wild card after a paper meet of all the runner-ups across the state are tallied.

Morris/CA scored a 447 to win the boys' meet. The Sauk Centre Mainstreeters were second with a 431, edging Montevideo, which had a 429. Sauk Centre also has a chance for a wild card.

The state true-team championships are Saturday, May 21 at Stillwater Area High School.

GIRLS

TEAM SCORING  (1) Minnewaska 501 ... (2) Paynesville 461 ... (3) Morris/Chokio-Alberta 400.5 ... (4) Holdingford 383 ... (5) Sauk Centre 320.50 ... (6) Royalton 241 ... (7) Montevideo 239 ... (8) Atwater-Cosmos-Grove City 164 ... (9) St. John's Prep 163

Winner and area top three

100 HURDLES  (1) Olivia Lebrija, MCA, 16.39 ... (3) Alexis Motz, MCA, 17.31

300 HURDLES  (1) Avery Koenen, Monte, 47.73 ... (3) Kyleigh Tangen, Pay, 49.95

100 DASH  (1) Lydia Fynboh, MCA, 12.96 ... (2) Lebrija, MCA, 13.04 ... (3) Emily Kaiser, Waska, 13.14

200 DASH  (1) Kaiser, Waska, 27.46 ... (2) Mya Lindemann, Waska, 27.69 ... (3) Brooklyn Frank, Pay, 27.83

400 DASH  (1) McKenzie Luetmer, Waska, 1:00.58 ... (2) Aubrie Spanier, Pay, 1:04.47 ... (3) Frank, Pay, 1:04.51

800 RUN  (1) Olivia Danielson, Waska, 2:29.65 ... (3) Grace Roberg, Pay, 2:33.90

1,600 RUN  (1) Danielson, Waska, 5:17.13 ... (3) Lauryn Ankeny, Waska, 5:35.23

3,200 RUN  (1) Olivia Pauly, SJP, 11:56.00 ... (2) Hailey Werk, MCA, 12:47.90 ... (3) Kiearra Wilmes, Waska, 12:59.48

4X100 RELAY  (1) Minnewaska 52.19 ... (3) Morris/CA 53.46

4X200 RELAY  (1) Paynesville 1:52.73 ... (2) Minnewaska 1:53.18

4X400 RELAY  (1) Minnewaska 4:20.72 ... (2) Paynesville 4:29.27

Story continues

4X800 RELAY  (1) Minnewaska 10:37.81 ... (2) Paynesville 11:27.25

HIGH JUMP  (1) Chesney Phillip, Hold, 5-2 ... (2) Koenen, Monte, 5-2

LONG JUMP  (1) Cloey Kolb, Pay, 15-8.5 ... (3) Frank, Pay, 15-4.5

TRIPLE JUMP  (1) Koenen, Monte, 35-3.25 ... (3) Luetmer, Waska, 32-1

POLE VAULT  (1) Ellie Zimmerman, Pay, 9-0 ... (2) Isabella Edmond, Pay, 8-6 ... (3) Phemie Oeltjen, Minn, 7-6.

DISCUS  (1) Maddie Fehr, MCA, 87-10 ... (2) Maura Lamberty, MCA, 87-9 ... (3) Jayda Kolstoe, Waska, 86-9

SHOT PUT  (1) Mya Yourczek, Roy, 34-0 ... (2) Kolstoe, Waska, 31-1.75 ... (3) Uhlenkamp, Pay, 31-0

BOYS

TEAM SCORING  (1) Morris/Chokio-Alberta 447 ... (2) Sauk Centre 431 ... (3) Montevideo 429 ... (4) Minnewaska 373 ... (5) Holdingford 348.5 ... (6) Royalton 279.5 ... (7) Atwater-Cosmos-Grove City 262 ... (8) St. John's Prep 190 ... (9) Paynesville 114

Winner and area top three

110 HURDLES  (1) Macoy Thiesen, SC, 16.14 ... (3) Landon Blom, ACGC, 17.21

300 HURDLES  (1) Spencer Marthaler, SC, 43.55 ... (2) Blom, ACGC, 44.92 ... (3) Derek Waldbeser, MCA, 44.95

100 DASH  (1) Ethan Lebrija, MCA, 11.26 ... (2) Trey Hunt, MCA, 11.30

200 DASH  (1) Connor Patrick, Hold, 23.20 ... (2) Hunt, MCA, 23.23 ... (3) Sean Edmond, Pay, 23.60

400 DASH  (1) Noah Danielson, Waska, 53.39 ... (3) Edan Smith, Monte, 54.71

800 RUN  (1) Brandon Kampsen, SC, 2:01.61

1,600 RUN  (1) Kampsen, SC, 4:39.85

3,200 RUN  (1) Jacob Drevlow, SC, 10:55.59 ... (2) Brady Andrews, Monte, 11:07.64

4X100 RELAY  (1) Morris/CA 45.30 ... (2) Minnewaska 45.41 ... (3) Montevideo 47.00

4X200 RELAY  (1) Montevideo 1:38.20 ... (2) Minnewaska 1:38.85

4X400 RELAY  (1) Sauk Centre 3:38.70 ... (2) Minnewaska 3:40.13

4X800 RELAY  (1) Minnewaska 8:51.99 ... (3) Morris/CA 9:04.35

HIGH JUMP  (1) Trey Hunt, MCA, 5-8 ... (3) Noah Danielson, MInn, 5-8

LONG JUMP  (1) Lebrija, MCA, 20-2

TRIPLE JUMP  (1) James Vannurden, Roy, 40-3 ... (2) Andrew Van Binsbergen

POLE VAULT  (1) Kaden Burns, MCA, 11-0 ... (2) Braden Nelson, Monte, 11-0 ... (3) Grayson Gibson, MCA, 10-6

DISCUS  (1) Francis O'Malley, Monte, 134-9 ... (2) Evan Oberg, MCA, 134-7

SHOT PUT  (1) O'Malley, Monte, 53-2.5 ... (2) Oberg, MCA, 47-1.4 ... (3) Anders Grimsgard, ACGC, 42-9.5

The BOLD/Buffalo Lake-Hector-Stewart boys and girls won their respective divisions late Tuesday at the BOLD/BLHS Invitational.

The girls scored 240 points to beat second-place Central Minnesota Christian, which had 180. Yellow Medicine East was third with 120 and Benson/Kerkhoven-Murdock-Sunburg took fourth with 92.

In the boys' division, BOLD/BLHS had 248. CMCS took second with 154. Benson/KMS was third at 150 and YME was fourth with 142.

GIRLS

TEAM SCORING  (1) BOLD/Buffalo Lake-Hector-Stewart 240 ... (2) Central Minnesota Christian 180 ... (3) Yellow Medicine East 120 ... (4) Benson/Kerkhoven-Murdock-Sunburg 92 ... (5) Wabasso 42

Winner and area top three

100 HURDLES  (1) Emma Pierce, BOLD, 18.63 ... (2) Ava Schlomann, BOLD, 18.78 ... (3) Jamie Novotny, BOLD, 19.15

300 HURDLES  (1) Sophia Vogel, CMCS, 51.54 ... (2) Allison Milbrandt, BOLD, 53.08 ... (3) Jamie Novotny, BOLD, 53.42

100 DASH  (1) Katelyn Zeug, W, 13.07 ... (2) Carly TolifsonBen, 13.33 .. (3) Kiaira Schackelford, YME, 13.92

200 DASH  (1) Carly Tolifson, Ben, 27.48 ... (2) Mari Ryberg, BOLD, 27.58

400 DASH  (1) Ryberg, BOLD, 1:03.93 ... (2) Natasha Erickson, CMCS, 1:06.97 ... (3) Gracie Kleven, YME, 1:06.54

800 RUN  (1) Molly Mulder, CMCS, 2:35.66 ... (2) Coco Duininck, CMCS, 2:39.78 ... (3) C.C. Roiseland, CMCS, 2:40.85.

1,600 RUN  (1) Mulder, CMCS, 5:41.00 ... (2) Duininck 5:54.82 ... (3) Kenzie Visser, BOLD, 6:00.99

3,200 RUN  No entrants

4X100 RELAY  (1) Benson/KMS (Libby McGeary, Julia Claussen, Chrloe Overlie, Carly Tolifson) 54.15 ... (2) BOLD/BLHS (Anna Gardeen, Lainey Braulick, Emma Pierce, Allison Milbrandt) 55.04

4X200 RELAY  (1) CMCS (Vogel, Roiseland, Elanor Ryder, Erickson) 1:54.86 .,.. (2) BOLD (. Schlomann, Hannah Schlomann, Sophia Meyers, Vivian Schmitz) 2:02.35 ... (3) Benson/KMS (Julia Claussen, Azura Goddall, Chloe Overlie, Teagan Froelich) 2:04.27

4X400 RELAY  (1) YME (Ruby Bones, Nicole Rillo, Anjali Pullan, Gracie Kleven) 4:36.16 ... (2) BOLD/BLHS (Anna Gardeen, Kenzie Visser, Kya Elfering, Madison Jacobs) 4:46.09 ... (3) Benson/KMS (Erica Bakke, Sophie Hilleran, Norah Hilleran, Kaida Helgenset) 4:47.74

4X800 RELAY  (1) YME (Kleven, A. Pullan, Violet Anderson, Sanjana Pullan) 11:54.31

HIGH JUMP  (1) Ruby Bones, YME, 4-10 ... (2) Carly Tolifson, Ben, 4-10 ... (3) Erickson, CMCS, 4-8

LONG JUMP  (1) Vogel, CMCS, 14-6.75 ... (2) Ryberg, BOLD, 14-2 ... (3) Schackelford, YME, 14-1

TRIPLE JUMP  (1) Rillo, YME, 34-5.25 ... (2) Vogel, CMCS, 33-11 ... (3) Mulder, CMCS, 31-9.5

POLE VAULT  (1) Gardeen, BOLD, 8-0 ... (2t) Keala Carroll, Ben, and Arabella Howell, YME, 7-6

DISCUS  (1) Meyers, BOLD, 92-9 ... (2) Peppel, BOLD, 86-2 ... (3) Isabella Gasca, BOLD, 79-0

SHOT PUT  (1) Meyers, BOLD, 32-7.5 ... (2) Jaselen Jimenez, YME, 28-3 ... (3) Coryn Peppel, BOLD, 27-0.

BOYS

TEAM SCORING  (1) BOLD/BLHS 248 ... (2) CMCS 154 ... (3) Benson/KMS 150 ... (4) YME 142 ... (5) Wabasso 18

Winner and area top three

110 HURDLES  (1) Colter JohnsonBOLD, 16.37 ... (2) DeAndrew Holloway, Ben, 19.80 ... (3) Zan Boen, BOLD, 19.89

300 HURDLES  (1) Johnson, BOLD, 42.73 .. (2) Dwight White Buffalo, YME, 46.39 ... (3) Zaone BoenBOLD, 48.60

100 DASH  (1) Caleb Voogt, CMCS, 11.62 ... (2) Hudson Vosika, BOLD, 11.70 .. (3) Patrick Hoernemann, YME, 12.04

200 DASH  (1) Steve McMath, BOLD, 23.62 ... (2t) Brady Dahlager, YME, and Archie LaRose, YME, 24.48.

400 DASH  (1) Xzavier Mikel, YME, 56.83 ... (2) Brayden Marcus, CMCS, 57.31 ... (3) jack Gross, BOLD, 58.44.

800 RUN  (1) Jacob Gareis, Ben, 2:07.55 ... (2) Ben Van Eps, CMCS, 2:14.84 ... (3) Garrett Mulder, CMCS, 2:26.01.

1,600 RUN  (1) Niko Garcia, BOLD, 5:17.69 ... (2) Daniel Frank, BOLD, 5:25.89 ... (3) Jack Iverson, BOLD, 5:35.04

3,200 RUN  (1) Garcia, BOLD, 11:28.30 ... (2) Jaron Furney, Ben, 13:19.68

4X100 RELAY  (1) BOLD/BLHS (Ryan King, McMath, Voskia, Hunter Borer) 46.42 ... (2) Benson/KMS (Chaden Carroll, Thomas Dineen, Teegan Hogrefe, Juan Espinoza) 46.70 ... (3) CMCS (Brayden Marcus, Voogt, Ayden Ledaboer-Martinez, Chris Harrington) 47.08

4X200 RELAY  (1) CMCS (Marcus, Voogt, Van Eps, Harrington) 1:37.40 ... (2) YME (Javier Jackson, Dahlager, Moises Hidalgo, Mikel) 1:40.54 ... (3) BOLD/BLHS (David Garcia, George Garcia, Jack Gross, Connor Plumley) 1:43.43

4X400 RELAY  (1) BOLD/BLHS (King, McMath, Johnson, Cole Visser) 3:42.87 ... (2) YME (Jackson, Hidalgo, White Buffalo, Mikel) 3:55.46 ... (3) Benson/KMS (Blake Carey, Jacob Gareis, Ely Johnson, Luke Froelich) 4:05.10

4X800 RELAY  (1) Benson/KMS (Carroll, Dineen, Johnson, Froelich) 9:26.65 ... (2) CMCS (Mulder, Riley Elliott, Tim Brouwer, Logan Roelofs) 9:34.53.

HIGH JUMP  (1) Holloway, Ben, 5-8 ... (2t) Caden Erickson, CMCS, and King, BOLD, 5-8

LONG JUMP  (1) Erickson, CMCS, 19-8.5 ... (2) King, BOLD, 19-2 ... (3) Van Eps, 19-1

TRIPLE JUMP  (1) Hoernemann, YME, 39-3 ... (2) Erickson, CMCS, 36-6 ... (3) Espinosa, Ben, 36-3.5

POLE VAULT  (1) Jackson, YME, 10-0 ... (2) Zane Boen, BOLD, 10-0 ... (3) Ben Karl, B)OLD, 9-6

DISCUS  (1) Hoernemann, YME, 133-0 ... (2) Ian Rajewsky, Ben, 110-0 ... (3) Ryan Harrington, CMCS, 84-6

SHOT PUT  (1) Hoernemann, YME, 40-3.5 ... (2) R. Harrington, CMCS 33-10 ... (3) Plumley, BOLD, 32-9

The Litchfield boys and Tri-City United girls took home first-place finishes from the Glencoe-Silver Lake Invitational at Glencoe.

Litchfield's girls just missed winning, losing to Tri-:City United by half a point, 164-163.5.

The Dragons' boys team had 180 to beat Tri-City United, which had a 173.

GIRLS

TEAM SCORING  (1) Tri-City United 164 ... (2) Litchfield 163.5 ... (3) Glencoe-Silver Lake 97 ... (4) Watertown-Mayer 83.5 ... (5) Southwest Christian 81 ... (6) Norwood-Young America 44 ... (7) Lester Prairie 34

Winner and area top three

100 HURDLES  (1) Anja Gilbert, WM, 16.62 ... (3) Riley Joyer, L, 17.81

300 HURDLES  (1) Mylea Monahan, GSL, 49.49

100 DASH  (1) Callie Coughlin, SC, 12.56 ... (3) Raina Kaping, L, 13.04

200 DASH  (1) Coughlin, SC, 26.33 ... (3) Kaping, L, 27.13.

400 DASH  (1) Guadalupe Lopez, TCU, 1:07.14.

800 RUN  (1) Malayh Metcalf, GSL, 2:21.59

1,600 RUN  (1) Kala Ziegler, L, 5:51.28 ... (3) Kimberlyn Case, L, 5:59.69

3,200 RUN  (1) Megan Marek, TCU, 14:18.20

4X100 RELAY  (1) TCU 55.32

4X200 RELAY  (1) tCU 1:55.41 ... (2) Litchfield (Chloe Kowalczyk, Emily Peterson, Khloe Flicek, Kirra Flicek) 2:00.20

4X400 RELAY  (1) Southwest Christian 4:24.60

4X800 RELAY  (1) Litchfield (Case, Shelby Dengerud, tynisa Lara, Abby Woefel) 10:48.06

HIGH JUMP  (1t) Jessa Heimerl, LP, and Greta Hansen, L, 5-0

LONG JUMP  (1) Lillia Chvatal, L, 15-7.5 ... (2) Jordan Schultz, L, 14-4.75

TRIPLE JUMP  (1) Anja Gilbert, WM, 33-10

POLE VAULT  (1) Zoe Ruschmeier, GSL, 9-6 ... (2) Kaping, L, 9-6

DISCUS  (1) Jaelyn Baseman, L, 98-8 ... (2) Grace Schmidt, L, 90-11

SHOT PUT  (1) Baseman, L, 33-5

BOYS

TEAM SCORING  (1) Litchfield 180 ... (2) Tri-City United 173 ... (3) GSL 113 ... (4) NYA 62 ... (5) W-M 61 ... (6) Southwest Christian 57 ... (7) Lester Prairie 21

Winner and area top three

110 HURDLES  (1) Brenden Smith, L, 16.84

300 HURDLES  (1) Smith, L, 44.02

100 DASH  (1) Mitchel Jaskowiak, GSL, 11.46

200 DASH  (1) Blake Aller, L, 22.89

400 DASH  (1) Connor Flintrop, TCU, 53.79

800 RUN  (1) Dante Juberian, TCU, 2:11.94

1,600 RUN  (1) Juberian, TCU, 4:49.74 ... (2) Ole Rogness, L, 4:50.11

3,200 RUN  (1) Jake Druley, NYA, 10:29.69 ... (2) Rogness, L, 11:07.30

4X100 RELAY  (1) Litchfield (Logan King, Lukas Kuehl, Jeremy Greer, Aller) 45.17

4X200 RELAY  (1) Litchfield (King, Kuehl, Greer, Aller) 1:34.54

4X400 RELAY  (1) TCU 3:40.21 ... (2) Litchfield (King, Gavyn Sundve, Smith, Kuehl) 3:40.75

4X800 RELAY  (1) Southwest Chritian 9:02.72 ... (3) Litchfield (Xander Chvatal, Anton Cox, Sundve, Ethan Knudsen) 9:31.01

HIGH JUMP  (1) Elijah Lofton, L, 5-10 ... (3) Aller, L, 5-8

LONG JUMP  (1) Kuehl, L, 19-9

TRIPLE JUMP  (1) Nathan Panning, NYA, 37-4

POLE VAULT  (1) King, L, 10-0

DISCUS  (1) TJ Christensen, L, 134-7 ... (2) Dom Dietel, L, 132-9

SHOT PUT  (1) D. Dietel, L, 53-0 ... (2) Christensen, L, 51-9 ... (3) Jacob Dietel, L, 47-4
Former President Trumps name was removed overnight from his former hotel in Washington after the sale of the property was finalized earlier this week.

The change in facade at the former Trump International Hotel came after the Trump Organization sold the property for $375 million to the CGI Merchant Group of Miami, marking a record price per room for the city, according to the investment group. That deal was finalized on Wednesday.

The hotel sold for the equivalent to more than $1.4 million a room, despite reportedly losing more than $70 million during each year of Trumps presidency.

Still, the Trump family business garnered as much as $100 million in profit from the sale.

Ahead of Thursdays overnight removal, the Miami investor group had already announced plans to rebrand the hotel as a Waldorf Astoria.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
Kathy Barnette, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania. (Matt Rourke/AP)

PITTSBURGH  Just days before Pennsylvanias primary elections, the Republican Senate nomination has been turned upside down with a late surge from Kathy Barnette, a virtual unknown whose sudden rise has riled former President Donald Trump and his allies.

Multiple polls this week have shown Barnette within striking distance for the nomination to replace retiring GOP Sen. Pat Toomey. Shes a conservative commentator who moved to the state about eight years ago and failed in a bid for a Philadelphia-area House seat in 2020. She lost the safe Democratic seat by 20 points, a result she blamed on voter fraud.

Although Barnette has spent a fraction of her rivals' outlay on television ads, a confluence of events  late endorsements, an alliance with the gubernatorial frontrunner, a lack of enthusiasm for other options and a viral ad about her own mothers decision not to have an abortion after being raped at age 11  has pushed her into contention.

Its also opened her to new scrutiny, including questions about her biography, her embrace of conspiracy theories and her incendiary comments about Islam, which she once said should be banned in the USA.

Barnettes explosive rise threatens to make next Tuesday the second straight week that a Trump-backed candidate has lost a high-profile Republican primary, after Trumps pick for governor in Nebraska was defeated this Tuesday.

In Pennsylvania, Trump has backed former daytime talk show host Dr. Mehmet Oz. Until the past week, Oz and former hedge fund CEO David McCormick had been locked in a tight contest for the top spot.

Pennsylvania Senate candidate Mehmet Oz, accompanied by former President Donald Trump, speaks at a campaign rally in Greensburg, Pa., on May 6. (Gene J. Puskar/AP)

On Thursday, Trump said Barnette will never be able to win the General Election this November against a Democratic candidate.

She has many things in her past which have not been properly explained or vetted, but if she is able to do so, she will have a wonderful future in the Republican Party  and I will be behind her all the way, Trump said.

Top Trump allies, like former Ambassador Richard Grenell and Fox News host Sean Hannity, have also spent recent days warning that Barnette is unelectable and could cost Republicans their chance of retaking the Senate.

Story continues

Grenell has used his Twitter account, where he has 875,000 followers, to cast Barnette as a left-wing radical on race, as well as an anti-Muslim and antigay bigot. Hannity, an outspoken supporter of Ozs candidacy, said on his show Wednesday night that Barnette has a very troubling history of attacking Donald Trump.

Former Ambassador Richard Grenell, who has been a leading critic of Barnette's candidacy. (Tom Brenner/Reuters)

But over the past few days, Barnette has also gained new allies. The influential and well-funded Club for Growth, which is locked in a grudge match with Trump that arose out of a disagreement over which Senate candidate to support in Ohio, this week started running $2 million in TV ads for Barnette.

And the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group, on Tuesday endorsed her.

In addition, Steve Bannon, the far-right media personality and sometime Trump adviser, embraced Barnette on his podcast Monday. Barnette is a true-blue MAGA candidate and her victory would be a message from the grassroots that they want candidates who are dependably MAGA more than they want candidates who Trump endorsed, Bannons website said.

Even before her recent surge, Barnette was creeping up on Oz and McCormick, who have spent months  and millions from their respective individual fortunes  pummeling each other on the TV airwaves. And over the past week, Barnettes polling numbers have gone from around 12% in the RealClearPolitics average to 21%, effectively tying her with Oz and McCormick.

Attendees at a candidate forum in Newtown, Pa., applaud Barnette on Wednesday. (Matt Rourke/AP)

Barnettes rise, experts said, is linked to her alliance with right-wing state Sen. Doug Mastriano, the leading GOP contender for governor in a nine-person primary. Mastriano and Barnette have endorsed each other, have campaigned with each other in heavily Republican areas of the state and have both promoted baseless conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen by the Democrats.

I think the bulk of her rise can be attributed to the fact that the Mastriano voters have realized that Doug has endorsed her too, said Republican consultant Christopher Nicholas, who is working for a lower-tier gubernatorial candidate, Charlie Gerow, but is not involved in the Senate race.

People said she did good in debates, Nicholas told Yahoo News. Yeah, but so did the other candidates. What is different is the fact that shes endorsed by [Mastriano].

At a rally Wednesday evening, Mastriano didnt mention Barnette, but her literature was included in preassembled bags for attendees. One man wore a shirt that said PA A-Team on the back and listed Mastriano, his running mate Teddy Daniels and Barnette. And at a recent rally for Oz headlined by Trump, Mastriano supporters placed fliers and magnets on cars in the parking lot.

Barnette campaigning in Camp Hill, Pa., on April 2. (Matt Rourke/AP)

Republicans in Pennsylvania and at the national level are not optimistic about Mastrianos chances of winning a crucial governors seat this fall against Democratic Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who is running unopposed for his partys nomination.

Mastriano aside, Barnette is an appealing option for Pennsylvania Republicans for a number of reasons. Shes a Black woman in a party still dominated by older white men. She has benefited from the brutal campaign Oz and McCormick waged against each other while she remained under the radar. And shes so far been able to embrace Trump and his policies while downplaying the importance of his endorsement.

MAGA does not belong to President Trump, she said at an April debate. Our values never, never shifted to President Trumps values. It was President Trump who shifted and aligned with our values.

Yet questions are also being raised about her resume ahead of the Tuesday primary. Salena Zito, a national political reporter for the Washington Examiner who is popular in conservative circles, submitted questions to Barnettes campaign about some of the claims made on the candidates website.

Barnettes campaign bio says that she served her country proudly for 10 years in the Armed Forces Reserves where she was accepted into Officer Candidacy School. She worked with two major financial firms in corporate America and sat on the board of a pregnancy crisis center for five years. It also says she was an adjunct professor of corporate finance.

Barnette in Newtown, Pa., on Wednesday. (Matt Rourke/AP)

Zito asked for details about where and when she was a professor, her time in officer candidate school and the financial firms where she worked. But Barnettes campaign declined to answer the questions, citing a need for privacy, other than to say she attended basic training at Fort Dix Army Reserves.

Her website does state that she worked for A.G. Edwards and Sons and for Bank of America Capital Asset Management. But the campaigns response prompted Zito to criticize it for trying to run out the clock.

She could be hiding nothing. She could be hiding everything. We dont know because there are no answers, Zito wrote. All candidates should face scrutiny and pointed questions about their biographies, their positions, their life experiences, and their work experiences. Barnette, to date, has not faced them.

Zito also compared Barnette to Christine ODonnell, a right-wing activist who defeated a popular mainstream Republican in a Delaware Senate primary in 2010. ODonnell then lost the general election in a landslide to Democrat Chris Coons.

The conventional wisdom has been that the race would be between Oz and McCormick. Oz has hit McCormick for being soft on China and alleging hes pro-Biden. McCormick has hit Oz for being a Hollywood liberal, his dual citizenship with Turkey, and his flip-flopping on key issues such as abortion.

Republican Senate candidates David McCormick, left and Mehmet Oz. (Matt Rourke/AP, Marc Levy/AP)

Unlike in Ohios Senate primary earlier this month, where Trumps endorsement led to a steady increase in polling for eventual winner J.D. Vance, Oz has not seen a similar climb. At the recent Trump rally for Oz, the celebrity doctor was at times booed, with some attendees telling Yahoo News that they were confused why Trump had backed him.

Trump, however, has stayed in Ozs corner, telling rally-goers that McCormick  a former hedge fund CEO and the husband of former Trump aide Dina Powell  is a liberal Wall Street Republican.

Another potential drag on both Oz and McCormick is that theyve both been criticized for swooping in from more Democratic states to attempt to buy a winnable Senate seat. Both McCormick, who has Pennsylvania roots but has lived in Connecticut for years, and Oz, who attended medical and business school in Philadelphia but has lived in a New Jersey mansion for the last two decades, established Pennsylvania residency only in the last year.

I can promise the people of Pennsylvania, when these carpetbaggers lose, you will never see them again, Barnette said at a televised debate last week.

Barnette with other Republican candidates at a forum in Newtown. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the frontrunner in the Democratic primary, joked this week that he was surprised he could brag about being from Pennsylvania in a race for the states U.S. Senate seat. In his final ad before the primary, Fetterman said hes taking on every politician, insider and out-of-state rich guy trying to take over Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania is likely Democrats best hope of picking up an extra Senate seat in what is expected to be a tough November election for the party. Republican leader Mitch McConnell is hoping to wrest the Senate back from Democratic control, but that may prove impossible if the GOP cant retain Pennsylvanias open seat.

At an event in Kentucky last month, McConnell said Republicans were looking at their best midterm elections in decades, before warning that the GOP could still manage to screw this up by picking bad candidates.

In the Senate, if you look at where we have to compete in order to get into a majority, there are places that are competitive in the general election, he said.

So you cant nominate somebody whos just sort of unacceptable to a broader group of people and win. We had that experience in 2010 and 2012.
Former President Trump warned Pennsylvania Republican voters on Thursday to vote against Kathy Barnette in the states Senate primary next Tuesday, putting his muscle into an effort to quash an eleventh-hour surge by the conservative activist.

Trump, who has endorsed celebrity cardiothoracic surgeon Mehmet Oz in the race, said that Kathy Barnette will never be able to win the General Election against the Radical Left Democrats and raised questions over her biography  while indicating hed still back her in a general if she does indeed clinch the GOP nomination.

She has many things in her past which have not been properly explained or vetted, but if she is able to do so, she will have a wonderful future in the Republican Party  and I will be behind her all the way, he said. Dr. Oz is the only one who will be able to easily defeat the Crazed, Lunatic Democrat in Pennsylvania. A vote for anyone else in the Primary is a vote against Victory in the Fall!

Trumps statement comes as Barnette sees a surge in the polls, statistically deadlocked with Oz and former hedge fund manager Dave McCormick at the top of the pack.

That polling boost has been complemented by a slate of prominent endorsements in the primarys home stretch, including from the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List and the anti-tax Club for Growth, each of which are investing in ad buys to boost Barnettes name recognition.

Barnette has so far been an anemic fundraiser and was stuck in the middle of the primary field for months, though many observers say her strident conservative stances helped her take advantage of an opening as Oz and McCormick savaged each other with personal attacks.

Trump is known to take great pride in the successes of his endorsed candidates and appeared in Pennsylvania with Oz earlier this month to boost him ahead of the Tuesday primary. The former president suffered a defeat this week when his chosen candidate fell short in Nebraskas GOP gubernatorial primary, though that is his only loss so far this cycle.

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Oz won Trumps backing in a surprise April endorsement but has been unable to put McCormick and now Barnette away, in part over lingering questions over his past stances on guns, abortion and more.

Barnette, meanwhile, has been able to keep her campaign alive by running as an ideological purist despite not getting Trumps backing and a compelling life story, despite being outspent by several magnitudes by Oz and McCormick.

Our values never, never shifted to President Trumps values, she said at an April debate. It was President Trump who shifted and aligned with our values.

Barnettes campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Hill. The primary will be held on Tuesday.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
U.S. Attorney John Lausch, shown March 2, 2022, announced charges Thursday against 10 reputed members of the Four Corner Hustlers street gang. (Chris Sweda / Chicago Tribune)

Ten reputed members of the Four Corner Hustlers street gang have been charged in U.S. District Court with running open-air drug markets that distributed cocaine and fentanyl-laced heroin on Chicagos West Side.

The joint operation by Chicago police and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security led to the seizure of four rifles, four handguns, a MAC-10 submachine gun, a shotgun, and more than 450 rounds of ammunition, as well as multiple kilograms of narcotics, according to the U.S. attorneys office.

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Charged with federal drug conspiracy are: Nathaniel Evans, 38, of Aurora; Jarelle Jones, 24, of Forest Park; Marquis Jones, 29, of Chicago; Devontay Logan, 27, of Chicago; Joseph Williams, 31, of Chicago; Dornell Williams, 34, of Chicago; Teremius Webb, 25, of Chicago; Antonio Fletcher, 40, of Chicago; Kyle Linton, 25, of Chicago; and Maurice Bell, 40, of Chicago.

According to the charges, Evans directed the drug trafficking operation and supervised the three open-air markets in the East Garfield Park neighborhood.

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His underlings allegedly worked as shift managers, overseeing drug sales at the illegal markets at various times of the day, while others charged in the scheme picked up narcotics from suppliers and collected illicit proceeds after the sales.

The conspiracy charge carries a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted. Prosecutors are asking that all 10 federal defendants be held without bond pending trial. Detention hearings for those seeking bond have been scheduled for next week at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse.

More than 20 other people were charged with state drug offenses in the Circuit Court of Cook County as part of the same operation.

The Four Corner Hustlers are among Chicagos oldest and most notorious gangs, one that for decades ruled the drug trade on the West Side by robbing competitors, killing rivals and terrorizing the community.

Last year, the gangs longtime leader, Labar Spann, 43, was convicted in November of racketeering conspiracy alleging he directed or participated in four murders as well as a number of robberies and extortions over the course of two decades. Hes facing mandatory life in prison.

jmeisner@chicagotribune.com
Gregory Clay

Redressing the wrongs of the past 

 Especially when the past was misleading.

On April 26, Anemona Hartocollis wrote for The New York Times: While New Englands image has been linked in popular culture to abolitionism, the report said, wealthy plantation owners and Harvard were mutually dependent.

The report is Harvard Universitys study of the esteemed schools relationship to slavery. The report stated: Enslaved people were an integral part of the university in its early days. Enslaved men and women served Harvard presidents and professors and fed and cared for Harvard students.

Remember, this was Cambridge, Mass., in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. And, also recall the movie Glory, released in 1989, which told the true story of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the first all-Black regiment battling for the North during the Civil War.

Perhaps, that helps explain the distortion.

Harvard has pledged $100 million to studying and reporting on its past, creating solutions and endowing the Legacy of Slavery Fund, which allows students, scholars and scribes to highlight Harvards association to slavery.

Georgetown University in Washington is supporting a similar project  with similar funds. Georgetown president, John J. DeGioia, discussed the universitys confrontation with its ugly past and its journey to atonement and reparation during a talk at The Atlantic magazines headquarters in March 2017.

In 1838, Georgetown sold 272 slaves for about $115,000  equal to $3 million in todays dollars. During those days, Black enslavement was as common as academics at Georgetown, the oldest Catholic and Jesuit university in the United States.

Georgetown counted on the Jesuit plantations of Maryland to help maintain university operations, as slaves often were gifted to the university by wealthy churchgoers. The sale of those slaves by Jesuit priests who served as Georgetown presidents directly helped save a foundering university drowning in at least $500,000 debt (todays currency) as it faced basic survival. With that, Georgetown went from a school that almost closed nearly 200 years ago to an elite university with an endowment today of $1.5 billion.

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The university benefited from that sale, DeGioia acknowledged during his talk five years ago. We looked very seriously at what we could do as a university in this moment to address this fact. Part of what were wrestling with in America today is the legacy of never having resolved the original evil of slavery in the mid-part of the 19th century. We never ameliorated the effects of the original evil.

Incidentally, Harvard also plans to develop and expand its partnerships with Historically Black Colleges and Universities, including funding summer programs to bring students and faculty from HBCUs to the Massachusetts school.

The George Floyd Movement produced much re-examining, reckoning and revisiting all-things-racial across the country. Including a compelling project at The Philadelphia Inquirer.

As media writer Richard Prince, columnist for Journal-isms, wrote in February:

In fact ... A More Perfect Union, which began with a 6,400-word examination of the Inquirers past by Black journalist (Pulitzer Prize-winning) Wesley Lowery under the headline Black City, White Paper.

Although newspapers serve circulation areas that go beyond city limits, the inaugural piece, written by Lowery and supervised by journalist Errin Haines, neither of whom are Inquirer employees, focuses on how the newspaper has ill-served Black Philadelphians.

Robert Bob A. Thomas became the papers first Black full-time staff reporter in 1954, and reporter Maida Odom arrived in 1978 after stints at two Ohio newspapers.

More than 65 years after Thomas joined The Inquirer staff and 15 years after Odom left, Black Philadelphians remain underrepresented both on its staff and within its daily news report, Lowerys account says. Just as troubling, the professionals who inherited (the Inquirers stated) movement toward a newsroom for all continue to cite a persistent White sensibility and lens that governs what coverage exists of Black people.

Prince also noted there have been other recent acknowledgments of guilt by media institutions, such as by the Los Angeles Times, Kansas City Star and Baltimore Sun.

Perhaps, Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, soundly addressed the issue of redress when she said April 19 (and 15 million subsequent internet viewers): I am a straight, White, Christian, married, suburban mom who knows that the very notion that learning about slavery or redlining or systemic racism means that children are being taught to feel bad or hate themselves because they are White is absolute nonsense.

No child alive today is responsible for slavery. No one in this room is responsible for slavery.  We also cannot change the past. We cant pretend that it didnt happen, or deny people their very right to exist.

Its simply a matter of major institutions confronting their pasts.

Gregory Clay is a Washington columnist and former assistant sports editor for McClatchy-Tribune News Service. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

This article originally appeared on Deming Headlight: Your turn: Colleges confronting their racial pasts
By Alan Charlish and Hedy Beloucif

WARSAW (Reuters) - A U.S. citizen who says he was held captive and beaten by Russian forces in Ukraine before being rescued by a private volunteer group spoke of his relief at reaching safety in Poland, describing his ordeal as an example of war crimes.

Kirillo Alexandrov, 27, crossed the Polish border in the early hours of Wednesday and had an emotional reunion with his mother, who had contacted Florida-based nonprofit organisation Project Dynamo in the hope they could rescue her son.

"Once we crossed the Polish border... a thousand-pound boulder just fell off my back," Alexandrov told Reuters in an interview, describing the moment he saw his tearful mother as "bittersweet".

Alexandrov, along with his Ukrainian wife and her mother, are among over 600 people freed in dozens of such missions since February, according to Project Dynamo, which was first formed to rescue Americans and others from Afghanistan last year.

Alexandrov, a native of Michigan who had moved to Ukraine, was arrested with his spouse and mother-in-law in late March outside the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson as they were trying to flee the region following its occupation by Russian troops, Project Dynamo said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his troops into Ukraine on what he calls a "special military operation" to demilitarise and "denazify" Ukraine. Ukraine and the West say Putin launched an unprovoked war of aggression.

According to Project Dynamo co-founder Bryan Stern, Alexandrov faced 11 charges related to spying for the U.S. government, which he says were fabricated. Stern said that Alexandrov had travelled to Ukraine to be with his wife and had worked in online sales.

"I was initially arrested at my home," Alexandrov said.

"They came in, took me out, cuffed me, you know beat me, threw me on the ground, took me to a cell, interrogated me and furthermore beat me. Then performed a mock execution, beat me some more, threw me in a cell and took my documents."

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Reuters was unable to independently verify Alexandrov's account.

"The things my family went through were nothing short of war crimes," he said later in the interview.

The Russian defence and foreign ministries did not respond to emailed requests for comment. Russia has previously denied targeting civilians and has rejected allegations of war crimes.

Project Dynamo, established by a group of U.S. military veterans, made headlines in September 2021 when it arranged for the chartered evacuation of more than 100 Americans flown from Afghanistan to the United States via the United Arab Emirates.

Stern said the group had been carrying out negotiations to secure Alexandrov's release, while at the same time developing "hard options" to get him out by land, sea or air.

Stern said in a statement on Tuesday that a ground option had been chosen. He declined to go into details about exactly how the rescue had taken place, citing security reasons.

Project Dynamo says it is is working to help others in situations like the one it says Alexandrov found himself in.

"There's plenty of work to be done, we're tracking a number of other American cases that are trapped behind enemy lines," he said.

(Reporting by Alan Charlish, Hedy Beloucif, Kuba Stezycki, Editing by William Maclean)
UCLA campus (Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

California's three systems of public higher education are set to get a big funding boost  but in exchange will need to meet comprehensive targets to improve access, affordability and equity under Gov. Gavin Newsom's revised budget proposal unveiled Friday.

The proposal for the University of California, California State University and California Community Colleges sets out the most detailed numerical goals ever included as conditions of state funding under agreements reached by Newsom and the three systems. The ambitious goals include increasing graduation rates, closing achievement gaps, adding more UC and CSU seats for Californians, boosting financial aid, lowering debt, reducing the cost of college attendance and producing more graduates in high-demand fields, such as teaching and science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

For the first time, the three systems will submit reports to the governor and Legislature each November on their progress in meeting the goals. Those reports will help shape the next budget cycle. If the systems fall short, their funding could be reduced in the following fiscal year  or resources could be added to overcome identified obstacles.

These agreements represent historic state reinvestments in our public colleges and universities, as well as a framework for holding all of ourselves accountable for delivering real results for students and families, Newsom said in a statement.

The deal reflects a more collaborative relationship between the governor's office and the three public systems  particularly UC.

In the past, the relationship between then-Gov. Jerry Brown and UC President Janet Napolitano was notoriously tense and mistrustful. In 2018, for instance, Brown offered a 3% annual base funding boost, which UC officials decried as insufficient, focusing on increases in California student enrollment, streamlined transfer programs and expanded online classes.

Newsom's team has laid out more strategic goals and the promise of more funding to meet them  a 5% base general fund increase in each of the next five years.

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The 10-campus UC system, which educates 295,000 students, would receive an increase of $307.3 million in ongoing funding for 2022-23, including $200.5 million for the base general fund increase, $99 million for enrollment growth and more slots for California students, and additional support for former foster youths and firearms research. In addition, the budget proposes $295 million in one-time funds for climate research, innovation and entrepreneurship, dyslexia research, deferred maintenance and other needs.

UC is being asked to increase seats for California students by 6,230 for fall 2022 but is negotiating that number with Newsom's office. The system has agreed to add about 2,000 more students each year from 2023-24 through 2026-27, with 15% of the growth at UCLA, UC Berkeley and UC San Diego, the most applied-to campuses in the system. Those three will also reduce their out-of-state and international student amount by 900 each year and replace them with Californians over the next five years.

Other performance targets include eliminating differences in graduation rates between all students and those who are low income and members of underrepresented minority groups, with half of that gap closed by 2026. UC would increase four-year graduation rates from 72.6% currently to 76% by 2030 and also agreed to better track graduation rates of students with disabilities.

To improve affordability, UC President Michael V. Drake has pledged to offer a debt-free education to all undergraduates by 2030. It will monitor progress by measuring the decrease in the proportion of California students who take out loans and graduate with debt.

Governor Newsoms multi-year compact reflects a partnership with the University of California that will help us maintain our excellence while expanding student access, equity, and affordability," Drake said in a statement. "The University looks forward to working with the Governor and the state Legislature in the weeks ahead to approve these important advancements for Californias students.

For the 23-campus Cal State system, which educates 485,550 students, Newsom's budget provides an increase of $304.1 million in ongoing funding for 2022-23, including $211.1 million for the 5% base general funding increase, $81 million for enrollment growth, and increased support for foster youth students. The plan also includes $233 million in one-time funding to build the Cal State Bakersfield Energy Innovation Center and support farming programs and deferred maintenance.

Cal State has committed to increasing California students by 14,000 over four years and increasing four-year graduation rates by 30% by 2025. The system's goals include eliminating equity gaps in graduation rates among low-income students and underrepresented minority students, increasing the number of students who enroll in STEM, education or social work by 25%, and reducing the cost of instructional materials by 50% by 2025, saving students an estimated $150 million annually.

The CSU strives to ensure that a high-quality education remains affordable for all Californians, and the Governors proposal for predictable levels of funding for future years will allow us to meet that goal during both promising and challenging economic circumstances, said acting Cal State Chancellor Jolene Koester.

Additionally, roughly $1.6 billion is proposed for Californias 116 community colleges  the nations largest higher education system  through a formula that links funding to an increase in the number of students transferring into UC and CSU, and a 20% hike in associate degrees, certificates or credentials by 2026.

The states community colleges experienced a significant drop in enrollment during the pandemic, as many students opted for the workforce over education. The budget allocates $150 million to build on a previous $120-million investment to assist with the colleges enrollment and recruitment efforts.

The office of the system's chancellor will receive funding for 26 more staff positions this fall to help achieve the new goals.

The agreement with Newsom "sets forth a bold vision and strengthens partnerships across higher education segments to be a catalyst for economic opportunity and equitable student success in California," said California Community Colleges Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Amanda Ribas can barely speak two sentences without at least giggling, and oftentimes, laughing uncontrollably. The Brazilian mixed martial artist has rapidly gained popularity, not only because of her fighting style but because of her laid-back, easy-going personality.

Shes grown up around fighting.

Ribas father, Marcelo, is a highly regarded coach in Brazil. Her brother is also an MMA fighter. She has black belts in both jiu-jitsu and judo. Fighting has been a part of who she is for as long as she remembers.

So she doesnt get stressed out about things and shes willing to take on challenges. When her original opponent, Michelle Waterson, fell out of their strawweight bout, she thought it was really bad news.

All of the other strawweights were booked.

I was a little sad when they told me Michelle was hurt, Ribas told Yahoo Sports. It was like, Oh my goodness. I am [going to go] seven months without a fight.

She had her management inform the UFC that she wanted to fight and was willing to do so at flyweight if that would get her a bout. Sure enough, it did.

A lot of fighters wouldnt have even thought of trying what shes going to try. Ribas is ranked ninth at strawweight but accepted a fight against Katlyn Chookagian, the top-ranked flyweight. Chookagian has reeled off three consecutive wins and is 6-2 in her last eight, with her only losses to champion Valentina Shevchenko and former strawweight champion Jessica Andrade.

Ribas, though, said yes immediately. Theyll meet Saturday on the main card at Apex.

I grabbed this opportunity, this huge opportunity, with my hands, my arms, my legs, with everything that I have, because I want to do my best, she said.

ABU DHABI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES - OCTOBER 30: Amanda Ribas of Brazil has her hands wrapped prior to her fight during the UFC 267 event at Etihad Arena on October 30, 2021 in Yas Island, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. (Photo by Mike Roach/Zuffa LLC)

Ribas is 11-2 overall and 5-1 in the UFC, with the only defeat coming at the hands of the red-hot Marina Rodriguez. Rodriguez stopped Ribas in the second round of their bout at UFC 257, the middle of three consecutive fights she had in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

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But Ribas responded with a win over Virna Jandiroba at UFC 267 on Oct. 30.

Thats led her to the fight with Chookagian and what its done is create options for her. If she wins, having defeated the No. 1 contender at flyweight, it makes sense shed enter the rankings high in that division and have positioned herself for an eventual shot at Shevchenkos title.

If she loses, it was up a class and taken under extraordinary circumstances, and so it shouldnt impact her standing at strawweight much, if at all.

That leaves her a slew of possibilities.

If I do really good, really well, in this fight, Ill put my energy toward 125, she said.

She took the fight because shes a fighter at heart and she knows the value of inactivity. She lost more than two years of her career to the use of a tainted supplement that contained ostarine, an anabolic agent. On June 7, 2017, she failed a USADA drug test and was suspended for two years.

But Ribas appealed the suspension, insisting she hadnt taken a banned substance. USADA investigated and determined that the positive test was the result of a contaminated substance. It vacated her suspension, but she went from May 21, 2016, to June 29, 2019, when she made her UFC debut by choking out Emily Whitmire as a result of the issue. Shed subsequently passed four consecutive tests.

So when Waterson was out, Ribas wanted no parts of sitting out a long time so she sought a fight and was offered Chookagian.

ABU DHABI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES - OCTOBER 30: (R-L) Amanda Ribas of Brazil punches Virna Jandiroba of Brazil in a strawweight fight during the UFC 267 event at Etihad Arena on October 30, 2021 in Yas Island, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. (Photo by Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC)

If we stop or we take a long time off without fighting, were stopping our lives, Ribas said. My life is fighting. Its my job and I need to be active. If Im not active, I know other girls are. Theyre getting better and their rankings are getting better. Training is different than competition.

You train to compete, not just train without competing. So for me, its really important to compete.

And because of that attitude, shell get an unexpectedly significant fight on Saturday. When she makes her walk and enters the cage, shell do so with a huge grin.

Former UFC contender Roxanne Modafferi was known as The Happy Warrior, but it might be a nickname that Ribas could usurp. She has such a joy for what she does.

I love this, [even doing interviews], she said. I really believe if we put our best vibe, our best energy in whatever we do, the vibe comes back to us. And I like to come here [to the media center] and sometimes, I am tired, but its so good to see you people, you reporters, interested on me. This is amazing. It makes me happy because people are interested in seeing me do my job. I enjoy that and Ill keep trying to do a great job, [not only fighting] but doing interviews and talking about myself and this [sport].
The UK government was accused Thursday of a "cover-up" after refusing to release security advice issued about the controversial 2020 appointment of a Russian-born newspaper baron to parliament.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson's government cited "the need to protect national security" for withholding the advice it received about granting a peerage to Evgeny Lebedev.

Opposition parties have demanded more transparency over the role Johnson played in appointing his friend Lebedev -- whose father was a KGB officer -- to the House of Lords.

MPs earlier this year approved a motion seeking to force ministers to release sensitive documents related to the nomination to the upper house of parliament.

But in response the government released only a handful -- including the blank form Lebedev needed to complete for the peerage -- which shed virtually no light on the security considerations.

Minister Michael Ellis said the limited disclosure "reflects the need to protect national security" and to "maintain integrity" in the honours system.

But the deputy leader of the main opposition Labour party decried the decision.

"This looks like a cover-up and smells like a cover-up because it is a cover-up," Angela Rayner said.

Lebedev's peerage has long proved controversial for Johnson, who since Russia's invasion of Ukraine has vowed to turn the taps off the Russian money that has flooded into Britain in recent years.

The Sunday Times has reported he was warned by Britain's foreign intelligence service MI6 against granting Lebedev the peerage before the November 2020 approval, but pressed ahead anyway.

- 'Normal' -

MI6 had flagged security concerns about the owner of London's Evening Standard newspaper as long as a decade ago, and the then head of MI6 had refused to meet him, it reported.

Johnson's friendship with the Russian-born businessman dates back to his eight years as mayor of London from 2008.

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Lebedev, who has British citizenship and also owns the Independent newspaper, denied in March that he was a security risk or "some agent of Russia".

Johnson has come under wider pressure to explain Russian donations to his ruling Conservatives, as London has stepped up sanctions against Russia.

On Thursday, he denied any impropriety after the New York Times reported that one of his party's biggest donors is accused of secretly funnelling large sums to it from a Russian account.

The newspaper said Barclays Bank had raised suspicions about the source of a 2018 donation of $630,225 -- at the time worth 450,000 -- from Ehud Sheleg, a wealthy London art dealer who was the Conservative Party's treasurer from 2018 to 2021.

It cited documents filed by the bank with UK authorities that alleged the money had originated in a Russian account of Sheleg's father-in-law, Sergei Kopytov.

Kopytov was once a senior politician in the previously pro-Kremlin government of Ukraine who now owns businesses in Russian-occupied Crimea and Russia, the report added.

Sheleg denied to the paper that his father-in-law funded the donation.

Meanwhile Johnson insisted all donations "are registered in the normal way".

"To give donations to a political party in this country, you've got to be from the UK," he added.

jj/phz/har
LONDON (Reuters) -British police said on Thursday they had now made more than 100 referrals for fines as part of their investigation into lockdown rule-breaking at gatherings held in Downing Street during the COVID-19 pandemic.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson apologised for receiving a fine in April for breaking lockdown rules by attending a gathering in his office to celebrate his birthday, but has refused to resign over it.

He could receive further fines for other gatherings, but on Thursday Johnson's spokesman said the prime minister had not received another fine.

"As of Thursday 12 May, Operation Hillman, the investigation into breaches of COVID-19 regulations in Whitehall and Downing Street, has made more than 100 referrals for fixed penalty notices (FPNs) to the ACRO Criminal Records Office," a police statement said.

Police said the investigation remained live, so the running total of fines could rise further.

It was the first update from the police on the number of fines issued in a month after they delayed them until after local elections, which were held last week.

In the last update on April 12, police said they had made more than 50 referrals for fines.

Police are investigating 12 gatherings held at Downing Street and the Cabinet Office after an internal inquiry found Johnson's staff had staged alcohol-fuelled parties, with the British leader attending a few of the events himself.

The revelations have sparked calls for Johnson to resign, especially from the opposition Labour party. Johnson has said he did not realise he was breaking the rules but he had accepted and paid the police fine.

"The Prime Minister is clear there were things we did not get right, both in terms of what happened and then how it was handled subsequently," Johnson's spokesman told reporters.

Johnson's governing Conservatives have attempted to turn the tables on Labour leader Keir Starmer, who is himself now subject to a police investigation.

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Starmer has insisted no rules were broken during an event in April 2021 where he was pictured eating and drinking with colleagues while working into the evening, and has said he would resign if police issue him with a fine.

Pollster YouGov said the investigation had not impacted Starmer's reputation negatively, with voters seeing him as the better choice to lead the country and 41% viewing him as principled, with only 23% seeing him as unprincipled.

That compares with much worse ratings for Johnson, with just 14% saying the prime minister is principled, compared with 65% who see him as unprincipled.

(Reporting by William James, Muvija M, Alistair Smout and Elizabeth Piper; Editing by Alex Richardson)
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/Ksenya Litvak

From Ukraine, 4-year-old Bronco offered a childs view of the situation there to the teacher of his Zoom art class.

Ah, you know war is not a problem, he said. The problem is the stores are closed and theres no candy left.

Yes, thats a serious problem,  51-year-old Ksenya Litvak replied from Washington, D.C., where she has been running virtual classes for Ukrainian kids as young as 3 since Russia invaded her native country.

In recounting this exchange to The Daily Beast, Litvak added that Bronco is an aspiring inventor who draws fantastic machines capable of dealing with a host of problems.

He told me that [the] machines are supposed to do everything, like help mom clean, make ice cream for everybody, Litvak recalled.

Another student, 8-year-old Alysa, made Litvak wish the actual problem really was no bigger than a shortage of sweets.

Maybe it was three weeks into war that she told me, tremblingly, Do you know that we have been attacked and actually there is a war and theyre bombing us all the time? Litvak recalled.

But at another moment, Alysa was able to escape into drawing her favorite creatures.

Her drawing will be cats, Litvak said. Doesnt matter what were doing, cats will be somewhere.

Courtesy Ksenya Litvak

Litvak continually tries to divert the kids imaginations from the fighting.

OK, were drawing in Africa, she recalled telling the class one day.

How can I draw a burning airplane? a student inquired.

What does burning airplane have to do with Africa? Litvak asked.

Just, you know, just burning airplane is flying to Africa, the student replied.

OK, well show you how to draw burning airplane, Litvak told him. But lets do giraffe [too].

Warnings of attacks by actual airplanes periodically interrupted the classes.

Courtesy Ksenya Litvak

They could disappear from [a] lesson saying, Yeah, sorry, we need to go. Airstrike. We need to go downstairs to the basement, Litvak reported.

One student, 11-year-old Timurwhom Litvak says is particularly talented and has a passion for music as well as artannounced that he was just going to ignore an airstrike and stay in class.

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He said, Its so many airstrikes, I will stay, Litvak recalled. I said, No, you need to go to the basement. He said, No, parents are not here, Ill stay.

Courtesy Ksenya Litvak

Litvak spent her own childhood in Odesa. She attended university in St. Petersburg and married a fourth-generation resident of that Russian city. The ascent of Vladimir Putin so alarmed her and her husband, Misha Kachman, that they emigrated to America in 1999.

When Putin came to power, I understood immediately its time to run, she told The Daily Beast.

Litvak was teaching art at a suburban school outside of Washington, D.C., and a private studio she established for young artists when Putin attacked Ukraine. He had proven to be even more evil than she feared.

From the moment the war start, I really cant believe this happened and I cant sleep, she recalled. Unfortunately I do not have this feeling that many people have this will end soon. Im afraid this will drag on for years.

She was filled with a desperate desire to do something, anything.

During the COVID time I was teaching Zoom, she told The Daily Beast. And so I already learned how to do it.

She created a web page with the hope of providing art and life to Ukrainian children who had suddenly been surrounded by destruction and death.

Just to bring some joy to kids, she said.

Litvak then learned about an online educational platform created in memory of Yulia Zdanovska, a teacher who had won the silver medal at the 2017 European Girls Mathematical Olympiad. Zdanovska, just 21, was killed by a Russian rocket on March 8 while volunteering to assist unarmed civilians in her home city of Kharkiv.

Litvak contacted one of the platforms organizers, Andreii Nikolaiev. The platform had been focused on mathematics, but he welcomed Litvaks art classes. She usually has eight students in a class, though sometimes there are as many as 10.

First couple lessons, they were really quiet and serious kids, she recalled.

Some of the students at the in-person studio Litvak runs in America got a glimpse of the demeanor of the class in Ukraine.

Theyre listening and theyre sitting for an hour doing what I told them to do, Litvak said.

But she decided that this was not what the Ukrainian kids really required.

So as an anecdote, I tried to draw on the screen, Litvak said.

The kids in Ukraine responded just as she hoped.

Theyre laughing at the screen, laughing and talking one to each other, she reported. Its what they need now. They need playfulness.

The American kids at her studio, many of whom are of Ukrainian and Russian descent, helped her set the tone by dyeing her hair blue. The Ukrainian kids seemed delighted.

Courtesy Ksenya Litvak

I think they understand that Im crazy enough to teach them, Litvak said.

As they enjoyed badly needed fun, her Zoom kids in a war zone kept making art. She was at first hesitant to post online pictures of them along with their drawings.

But they like it very much, she said.

One boy depicted a Ukrainian flag and a soldier, but he and the others were otherwise less likely than American boys to draw guns and depict violence. The Ukrainian boys as well as girls are more liable to escape into fantasy imagining

Theyre really into fantasy world, Litvak said. I can tell they dont want to draw reality right now.

Their vision tends more towards rainbows than darkness.

Courtesy Ksenya Litvak

Theyre devastated, but theyre not angry, Litvak said. I dont feel hate in them.

Timur, the 11-year-old so weary of airstrikes that he wanted to keep drawing through one, produced a picture that features an outsized word in English. The four letters of this single syllable are each of a different color. The second is also a spoked wheel. The third is also a man standing on his head with his legs splayed. All together, they spell what Litvak recognizes as the great power of the Ukrainians and the opposite of what propels Putin.

LOVE

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Reuters

LONDON (Reuters) -Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Saturday that Moscow was the target of "total hybrid war" by the West but would withstand sanctions by forging deeper partnerships with China, India and others. In a speech on the 80th day since Russia invaded Ukraine, Lavrov pointed to the barrage of sanctions imposed by the West in an effort to portray Russia as the target, not the perpetrator, of aggression. The sanctions on Russia's top companies, banks and political elite have been imposed to punish it for a war that has killed tens of thousands of people and uprooted millions, disrupted energy markets and exacerbated a global food crisis by driving up prices for grain, cooking oils and fertiliser.
By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Thursday ruled that "Vape: The Musical," which mocks the blockbuster 1978 film "Grease," amounted to fair use and did not infringe the rights of owners of the "Grease" copyright.

Chief Judge Laura Taylor Swain of the Manhattan federal court said Sketchworks Industrial Strength Comedy, the Atlanta troupe that created "Vape," transformed "Grease" by updating it for the #MeToo era and exposing its misogynistic tendencies.

Written in 1971, "Grease" ran on Broadway from 1972 to 1980, while the film starred John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John.

"Grease" depicts the ups-and-downs of relationships between Danny Zuko and Sandy Olsson (Dumbrowski in the musical) and among their friends, as they navigate senior year at fictional Rydell High School in the late 1950s.

"Vape" had the same characters and a similar story.

But it had many differences, including by using millennial slang, highlighting how the teenage characters randomly burst into song and dance and "looked at least 30," changing "Greased Lightnin'" to "Prius Lightning" and faulting the "happy ending" where Sandy underwent a radical makeover to win Danny's heart.

In a 22-page decision, Swain said that by keeping the "Grease" characters and plot arc while changing the script and lyrics, "Vape" "comments on how misogynistic tendencies have both evolved since 'Grease' was developed and remain the same."

She distinguished the case from a March 2021 appeals court decision that Andy Warhol violated federal copyright law by drawing on a photograph of Prince for a series of images of the rock star, because the images were not transformative.

"Here, in contrast, 'Vape,' when considered holistically, constitutes a parody of 'Grease' ... and thus constitutes fair use," Swain wrote.

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Sketchworks sued after the defendants, representing "Grease" co-authors Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, sent a cease-and-desist letter, forcing the August 2019 cancellation of performances of "Vape" in Manhattan.

A lawyer for the defendants did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Sketchworks' lawyer had no immediate comment.

The Supreme Court will consider the Warhol dispute in its 2022-2023 term.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Marguerita Choy)
On a rainy spring morning, Vice President Kamala Harris stood before Tennessee State Universitys class of 2022, reviewing the past and a future unknown to the graduating students.

Before her played a montage of the countrys history of Black Americans, of Emmitt Tills murder, the Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr., all of which led to the first Black president, Barack Obama, being elected.

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Now Harris stood on a historically Black campus as the first female vice-president, the first Black vice-president and the first Asian-American vice-president of the United States.

The rain stopped for a moment as she began to speak words of praise for the graduates, who were born and raised to witness several historical events in their lifetimes.

You are a generation that grew up online and survived a pandemic, she said.

And the world that you graduated into is unsettled, she added.

Although inequality has always existed, she said, history is repeating itself as women and men once again face disenfranchisement through extreme wealth inequality, disparities in criminal justice, voting rights and other fundamental principles we hoped were long settled.

Principles like the freedom to vote and the rights of women to make decisions about their own bodies, she said.

Vice President Kamala Harris congratulates TSU graduates as they receive their diplomas. (John Partipilo)

This generation also faces war, as Ukrainian civilians fight against Russian soldiers, and global warming threatening to bring ecological disasters.

These issues now loom over the graduates futures and now fall on their shoulders to create a better future, she noted, as she looked over the mainly minority students.

There will be many times that these graduates will look at a room full of people that dont look like them, but Harris reminds them theyre not alone.

And at that moment, you must remember that you are not in that room alone. Always know that you carry the voices of everyone here and those upon whose shoulders you stand, she said.

She ended on a note about her mother.

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My mother would often say to me, Kamala, you may be the first to do many things, make sure you are not the last, said Harris. I have been many firsts in my lifetime and as I look out at all of you today, I know I will not be the last, she said. I cannot wait to see the future you create.

Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com. Follow Tennessee Lookout on Facebook and Twitter.

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Illinois long-troubled child welfare agency under Gov. J.B. Pritzker has failed to ensure adequate care for children in its charge and has not properly tracked cases referred by people who are legally required to report suspicions of abuse or neglect, according to a state audit released Thursday.

The stinging review of the Department of Children and Family Services marks the second time in a week that the Illinois auditor general has found fault with the Pritzker administrations efforts to protect vulnerable residents entrusted to the states care, putting Pritzker, the Democratic governor, on the defensive as he seeks a second term in November. The office previously blasted Pritzkers Department of Public Health over its response to a deadly 2020 coronavirus outbreak at the state-run veterans home in LaSalle.

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The DCFS audit, which covered the 2020 calendar year, found numerous faults with the agencys efforts to deliver and keep track of services for children whove suffered abuse and neglect. Those included failures to conduct required home safety checks when children are returned to their parents and to make sure children are receiving appropriate medical checkups and immunizations, according to Auditor General Frank Mautinos report.

The agency also failed more than half the time to properly document that support services were provided for the requisite six months after children were reunited with their families, the report said.

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The audit also found that the agencys records system was unable to track or identify cases that fell under a recent state law governing how DCFS deals with calls from legally mandated reporters, such as teachers.

In those cases, when the information provided doesnt trigger a full-blown abuse or neglect investigation but the family has had previous involvement with the child welfare system, the agency is supposed to refer the family to the appropriate services. If the family refuses to cooperate, then the law requires DCFS to launch an investigation.

Marc Smith, acting director of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Service at the DCFS headquarters in Springfield, July 2, 2019. (E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune)

Cook County Public Guardian Charles Golbert, whose office represents more than 7,000 children involved in the child welfare system, said he was expecting disaster (from the audit), and its even worse than disaster. Golbert earlier this year told the Tribune the agency is is in the worst shape its been in 30 years.

The 21% vacancy rate for funded DCFS positions cited in the report likely contributes to the agencys failure to complete basics such as the safety checklist, he said.

DCFS spokesman Bill McCaffrey said the agencys staffing levels have improved since the time covered by the audit, with only about 3% of budgeted positions vacant as of this month.

Throughout the report, the auditor general notes that the DCFS record-keeping system was unreliable or otherwise unable to track certain aspects of care for children under the agencys purview.

At best, DCFS has a poorly maintained records system and while the work is being done to keep children safe, it isnt well documented, said Heidi Dalenberg of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, which filed a lawsuit against the agency in 1988 resulting in a federal consent decree that DCFS still operates under.

At worst, critical work mandated in state law and agency regulations, including providing children with adequate health care, is not being done, Dalenberg said.

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I have to fall on the pessimist side, Dalenberg said. If the auditor could not find information sufficient to answer these questions, how are line managers supposed to find information, and how are they supposed to do their jobs effectively?

McCaffrey said the agency has taken aggressive measures to improve the services and care provided to youth in care during the past three years, including training thousands of workers.

DCFS had previously identified that its outdated data tracking systems limited its ability to track new requirements, McCaffrey said. As a result, DCFS was already undertaking significant steps to address these issues, including a complete replacement of the departments child welfare information systems.

In its written response to the audit, DCFS said its system actually could track safety assessments and the agencys own review showed a dramatic increase in service referrals in compliance with the law. But because the information was provided after the conclusion of the auditor generals review, that claim couldnt be independently verified and will be reviewed in a future audit, according to the report.

But the report also found that data issues also plagued the departments tracking of routine medical care, particularly with regard to mandatory immunizations. Auditors found that the information collected was so unreliable that they werent able to complete their review.

As for other routine heath care, a review of 50 cases found 18% of children missed at least one physical exam over a five-year period, while 88% missed at least one dental checkup.

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McCaffrey said the agency said it has shifted most of the children in its care to a new managed care organization that provides better tracking capabilities and has been instrumental in ensuring all youth in care receive their well-child visits/check-ups, including physical examinations, vision and hearing screenings, and dental exams.

By relying on data from an outdated system, and not reviewing other files or data from our managed care partner, this audit fails to accurately reflect the care youth receive, McCaffrey said.

Pritzker has vowed throughout his term to address long-standing issues at beleaguered DCFS. He has boosted funding for the agency and increased hiring, but also has said that it will take both more resources and more time to turn the agency around.

Since taking office, the governor increased DCFS budget by over $340 million, launched aggressive hiring efforts to bring on 860 additional staff, and overhauled the inadequate training system inherited from the previous administration, Pritzker spokesman Alex Gough said in a statement.

The governor also has stood by his hand-picked director, Marc Smith, even as Smith has been held in contempt of court nine times in recent months for the agencys failure to find suitable placements for children in its care.

Aurora Mayor Richard Irvin, a leading candidate for the GOP nomination for governor in the June 28 primary, said in a statement Thursday that Pritzker holds responsibility for the problems at DCFS and the LaSalle veterans home that the recent audits have laid bare.

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Pritzkers clear failure in leadership managing critical state agencies has resulted in critical damage, whether it be the preventable deaths of our nations heroes at state-run veteran homes or neglect and mistreatment of the most vulnerable children in the states care, Irvin said.

His repeated refusal to remove DCFS Director Smith after nine contempt of court orders is causing irreparable damage. We need new leadership that will prioritize those who need and rely on the state for survival, Irvin said.

Golbert, whose office has filed all nine cases that led to the contempt orders, said three children have been appropriately placed and six cases are still pending.

Some of the agencys turmoil dates back more than three decades to the ACLU lawsuit that led to the federal consent decree. Steady improvement in the 1990s stalled as the agency went through 14 different leaders from 2003 to 2019.

Under the previous administration of Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, DCFS eliminated 500 residential beds as placements in the name of prioritizing specialized foster care, but the department lacked investments in the latter to sustain the child welfare system.

While the shortcomings at DCFS figure to dog Pritzker on the campaign trail, his office injected a bit of politics in his own response, noting that his added investments in the agency passed without the support of the Republicans in General Assembly, even after the department had been systemically hollowed out and underfunded for years.

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dpetrella@chicagotribune.com

cspaulding@chicagotribune.com
Here are the latest developments in the war in Ukraine:

- Ukraine to hold first war crimes trial -

Ukraine says it will put a 21-year-old Russian soldier, accused of gunning down an unarmed civilian while he was riding his bike, on trial for war crimes. This is the first such case to go to court since the war began.

Vadim Shishimarin is accused of killing the 62-year-old man on February 28 near the central village of Chupakhiva, Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova's office said.

Shishimarin is in custody in Ukraine. He faces possible life imprisonment if convicted of war crimes and premeditated murder. No date has been given for the trial.

Russian troops are accused of widespread war crimes in Ukraine.

- Finland seeks NATO membership -

Finland's president and prime minister say they want their country to join NATO in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

"NATO membership would strengthen Finland's security. As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defence alliance," President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said.

Finland has been non-aligned militarily for decades but has had a change of heart since neighbouring Russia invaded Ukraine. Sweden is also considering joining the Western military alliance.

Russia has warned of non-specified consequences if they do.

"You caused this. Look in the mirror," was Niinisto's response.

- Gas row escalates -

Russia says it has banned transactions with more than 30 EU, US and Singaporean energy companies in retaliation for Western penalties over Ukraine.

The list contains 31 companies, most of which belong to the Gazprom Germania group of subsidiaries of Russian energy giant Gazprom. It also includes Poland's EuRoPol GAZ S.A., part-owner of the Yamal-Europe pipeline, which carries gas from Russia to Germany.

Meanwhile, Gazprom says Russia's Europe-bound gas transiting Ukraine is down almost a third after Kyiv suspended supplies through a key route. Kyiv had accused Russia of interfering with a transit point.

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- Ukraine accused of deadly cross-border attack -

The governor of the southwestern Russian region of Belgorod accuses Ukraine of shelling the border village of Solokhi, killing one person and injuring three others.

Over the past month, authorities in Russian frontier regions have repeatedly accused Ukrainian forces of launching cross-border attacks, including bombing a fuel depot.

- 'Three killed' in strike on north Ukraine -

Ukraine says three people were killed and 12 others wounded in a Russian strike in Ukraine's northern Chernigiv region on Wednesday night.

The attack comes nearly two months after Russian forces withdrew from the north to focus on the east and south.

It took place in the town of Novgorod-Siversky, according to the emergency services. Chernigiv governor Vyacheslav Chaus says "critical infrastructure", including a school, were hit.

- Keep us a spot in EU: Ukraine -

Ukraine has asked Brussels to keep it a spot in the European Union, even if obtaining full membership takes time.

"It is not about the fastest possible membership for Ukraine in the EU. But what is very important for us is for this spot to be reserved for Ukraine," Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told German broadcaster ARD.

Ukraine asked Brussels in February to fast-track its EU membership bid.

Brussels has promised a response next month.

French President Emmanuel Macron this week warned it would take "decades" for Kyiv to join the bloc and suggested the creation of a broader European political community to help aspiring EU members like Ukraine.

burs-cb/gil
A Wichita man who fled after hitting two motorcycle riders with his truck at a northwest Wichita intersection over Easter weekend turned himself in because his dad took him back to the site of the deadly crash.

Collin Andrew Becker, 23, called his parents less than two hours after the April 16 collision, saying he had messed up and was involved in an accident, according to his arrest affidavit, released Thursday by a Sedgwick County judge.

Becker is charged with one felony count of failing to stop at the scene of an accident in connection with the collision that killed Jacob Fowler and Levi Ward, both 20 and of Wichita, while they were out for a ride on a 2004 Honda Shadow 750. Prosecutors allege Becker knew or reasonably should have known that the collision resulted in injury or death but left without calling 911 or rendering aid to the injured men, in violation of Kansas law.

Police have said Becker turned his 2011 Dodge Dakota in front of the motorcycle around 2:20 a.m. April 16 at the intersection of 17th and Tyler. The motorcycle was northbound at the time.

Ward was pronounced dead at the scene at 2:31 a.m. Fowler died at a Wichita hospital at 3:13 a.m. Both suffered multiple blunt force injuries.

The affidavit says Beckers father drove to his sons west Wichita apartment after the 4 a.m. phone call and saw damage on the drivers side door of the truck. Authorities say the truck had extensive damage from the impact and was missing part of its door handle.

The father told police he went inside the apartment, where Becker kept apologizing for letting him down.

Becker told his father he had gotten hit by someone on a motorcycle and he left the scene afterward, the affidavit says the father told police.

Beckers father drove him to the Wichita Police Departments west-side substation then took him to the crash site after discovering the bureau was still closed for the night.

When Becker arrived, he approached an officer, announced that he had been involved in an accident and offered his wrists for handcuffs, according to the affidavit.

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Becker told police he did not want to talk and refused to voluntarily submit to a field sobriety test or give blood that authorities could use to determine whether hed driven under the influence of drugs or alcohol, the affidavit says.

Later, when he agreed to talk to the police, Becker posed several questions about the charges he was facing.

He invoked his right to remain silent when a Wichita police detective, Robert Kempf, asked which direction he had been driving, the affidavit says.

Police later found an open bottle of Elijah Craig Kentucky Bourbon tucked in the Dakotas passenger door compartment and an information packet for A New Direction Inc. and a cellphone on the passenger floorboard, the affidavit says. Authorities also seized the truck as evidence.

Witnesses interviewed by police said before the collision Becker had been at their home, which is about a block away from the crash site, for a gathering of friends. Both told police they did not see him drinking any alcohol.

Police arrested Becker on April 16. He was formally charged on May 2. His next court date is Monday.
It is anything but smooth sailing for a woman in Texas who was charged with taking a 52-foot yacht that did not belong to her for a cruise.

The Jefferson Monticello yacht, dubbed Loyalty, was reported missing Monday in Galveston.

Renee Waguespack, 45, is charged with unlawful use of a motor vehicle and possession of a controlled substance, according to a probable cause affidavit for her arrest.

Waguespack remained jailed in Galveston County on $30,000 bond Thursday afternoon, online records said.

The owner of the boat had been showing it to sell, the affidavit said. Witnesses reported the yacht was sailed away at about 11 a.m.

Waguespack left a note that she would meet people at the Kemah Boardwalk, the affidavit said. It did not specify whom the note was directed to or where it was left.

Jennifer Ott Roth, Waguespack's attorney, declined to comment.

Galveston police got a phone call shortly before noon Monday that the yacht had been sailed away from its berth, the affidavit said.

Police requested assistance from the Coast Guard and the Galveston County Sheriff's Office to help locate the missing vessel, NBC affiliate KPRC of Houston reported.

Loyalty was found at about 1 p.m. moored at a pier. Authorities found Waguespack aboard the ship, the station reported.

Police later found about 4 grams of drugs in her possession that tested positive as methamphetamine, the affidavit said.

The Galveston newspaper The Daily News reported that the yacht's owners, Lorraine Grubbs and her husband, live on the vessel, which was docked in Offatts Bayou.

Can you imagine coming around the corner and your home is gone?" Grubbs told the newspaper.

Grubbs didnt know Waguespack. Security video captured someone climbing over a fence and boarding the yacht without anyone seeing her, The Daily News reported.

Grubbs told the newspaper she believes Waguespack once lived on a different boat berthed at the same location and was confused. Loyalty, which was found on the north side of Offatts Bayou, was not damaged.

It is not the only incident involving a stolen luxury vessel to have made headlines recently.

In March, a thief stole a yacht in Southern California and then collided with multiple boats in a harbor. Joel Siam, 38, was booked on suspicion of grand theft of a boat and possession of a stolen boat in Orange County after, authorities said, he rammed the craft into at least three other boats.
The world's top YouTube star, Swedish gaming streamer PewDiePie, has moved to Japan after the country relaxed its Covid-19 entry rules for some visa-holders.

The 32-year-old has a huge online following, with 111 million subscribers on YouTube, but has faced controversy over offensive jokes in the past.

He posted a video this week documenting his arrival with his wife and dogs in Japan, which has some of the strictest virus border controls in the world.

"For so long we doubted whether we could even make this move, and we went through all the ups and downs, and obviously it's been a really long journey," said the streamer, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg.

"But I just really, really appreciate everyone who was supportive of us going... it just feels amazing to be here, finally."

Japan has allowed in foreign business visitors, students and other new residents since March but remains closed to tourists, although the prime minister has pledged a gradual easing of the rules from next month.

Details of who will be allowed to enter and when are yet to be announced, although Japanese media reports say group tours may be first to resume and that the government is discussing scrapping Covid-19 testing on arrival.

Japan welcomed a record 31.9 million foreign visitors in 2019 and had been on track to achieve its goal of 40 million in 2020 before the pandemic hit.

Kjellberg, who previously lived in Britain, said in 2019 he had bought a house in Japan.

The star has landed himself in hot water several times, including over videos containing anti-Semitic remarks and racial slurs, and in 2016 he was temporarily blocked from Twitter after joking he had joined the Islamic State group.

Kjellberg also previously said he was "sickened" after hearing that the gunman behind the 2019 New Zealand mosque massacre had promoted his videos before opening fire.

kaf/dhc
Japan's defense minister says North Korea fired three ballistic missiles on Thursday evening.

Kishi Nobuo told reporters that the missiles were launched from around the western coast of North Korea toward the Sea of Japan. He said they are estimated to have reached a maximum height of about 100 kilometers and flown around 350 kilometers before landing outside Japan's exclusive economic zone.

Kishi also said there were no reports of damage to aircraft or ships by the missiles.

South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff say three short-range ballistic missiles were fired from the Sunan area near Pyongyang shortly before 6:30 p.m.

Both the Japanese and South Korean governments have condemned the launch, calling it a threat to international peace and security.

North Korea has launched missiles every month this year.
The Council Bluffs Police Department hosted K9 handlers from across the region this week to learn how to provide medical care for their furry four-legged partners.

Were here just to make sure that these canines have an opportunity to stay safe, that their officers understand how to take care of them in the event of an emergency, said Mitzi Nash, co-owner of Irondog K9 International, a nonprofit organization that helps facilitate training opportunities for law enforcement agencies, and a sponsor of this weeks training.

The intensive three-day training course was overseen by K9 Medic, an organization dedicated to ensuring that K9s receive the same medical resources as their human handlers through education and hands-on training exercises.

They are actually placed in scenarios where they have to care for their dogs in situations like heat stroke, a gunshot wound, a stabbing, any type of injury that they might incur when theyre in the field, Nash said They have the opportunity to be placed in the scenarios so that they can be prepared to handle it when it happens in real life.

Training includes some classroom learning, but is mostly done through live training exercises with dogs, both real and artificial.

K9 Medic has a robotic dog named Diesel that it uses for medical training. The $60,000 lifelike machine can bark and whine, and mimic broken bones, bleeding, burns, and changes in vital signs.

We had some relatively simple techniques for dealing with heat and basic punctures or cuts all the way up to decompressing chest wounds and just basically keeping them with us until we get into a higher level of care, said CBPD Officer Ken McClure, a canine handler in the special operations division. This class has just been phenomenal.

In the past, officers have been taught to get their injured dogs to a vet as quickly as they can, McClure said. But if its after hours and the vet is closed, they would take the animal to Omaha, which adds time and distance that could impact the chances of survival.

Now we have the tools to help us make that trip and to give them all the care that they need, McClure said. Were far more confident on our abilities in taking care of our partners, where before we rely heavily on the vet clinic, or whatever that we have nearby, which is still the same, but we now have tools that can get us to a farther place.

Irondog K9 International is not new to Council Bluffs. The organization paid the veterinary bills for CBPD K9 Officer Rudy, who sustained severe injuries last year after falling three stories off the roof of a building while on duty.

Hes made a full recovery, McClure said. He still has some, you can tell that he has been injured, but he is functioning very well. He recently recertified for the year. Hes doing very well.

Nineteen K9 handlers  from Bellevue and Papillion in Nebraska, Mills County in Iowa, Missouri and the Border Patrol  attended the three-day training, which costs about $1,000 per officer, but when it comes to K9s and their handlers, Nash thinks the skys the limit.

When you look at the fact that these dogs can run $40-50,000 by the time theyre purchased and trained and matched with their handlers and receive further training, to save one of these dogs lives, as well as potentially the handler, and then not only the fact that these guys are protecting the community, I dont think you can even put a dollar figure on it.

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An altercation between a civilian contractor and a citizen journalist took place prior to a media event at the Council Bluffs Police Department headquarters.

Charlie Nash, co-owner of Irondog K9 International, a nonprofit organization that helps train law enforcement dog handlers how to provide medical aid to their partners, got into an argument with Anson Berry, a citizen journalist who was filming outside the police station.

Nash appeared to take offense when Berry, 28, turned his phone toward Nashs wife, Mitzi, who was preparing for an interview with the assembled media, including the Daily Nonpareil. Nash assaulted Berry, knocking him to the ground. Nash accused Berry of harassment, grabbed his phone and threw it into the parking lot.

According to the police report, Nash was issued a criminal citation for assault, and Berry refused medical attention.

Berry is also thinking of pressing charges against Nash, according to Council Bluffs Police Lt. Chad Geer.

Local law enforcement said it is familiar with Berry, having received calls about his behavior for a number of weeks.

We just had a call on him yesterday, Geer said. He was down at MidAmerican Energy, filming their building. They called in and wanted him removed.

Geer also said that Berry was recently removed from Council Bluffs City Hall.

After an online search, it appears that Berry is part of a community that performs First Amendment audits, during which they stand  on public property  near government buildings or military bases, and film the inevitable confrontation when someone asks who they are and why they are filming.

Its just an unfortunate incident. It looks horrible for us and it looks horrible for the city, Geer said.

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CEDAR RAPIDS (AP)  A Cedar Rapids man has been sentenced to probation after pleading guilty to a lesser charge for the shooting death of another teen during a botched robbery.

Kyler Carson, 20, pleaded guilty Tuesday to assault and other counts, according to court records, and he was sentenced to three years probation. He also must pay $150,000 in restitution to the family of 18-year-old Andrew Gaston.

Prosecutors say Carson was 16 when he fatally shot Gaston and injured Gastons cousin, Tyrell Gaston, when the Gastons ambushed Carson during a drug deal in an effort to rob Carson of marijuana.

Carson was initially charged with voluntary manslaughter and other counts.

Tyrell Gaston, 18, was also sentenced to three years probation last year for second-degree robbery in the case, but was taken back into custody in November after being charged with two counts of attempted murder in a separate case.
Seventy-five Council Bluffs high school students will graduate from Iowa Western Community College Saturday  a week before formally receiving their high school diplomas.

The students were recognized during Tuesdays Council Bluffs Board of Education meeting.

In all, 75 Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson High School seniors will receive associate degrees, diplomas or certificates from Iowa Western this weekend through the Council Bluffs Community School Districts Early College Academy, Certificate Advancement and TradeWorks at Iowa Western programs, Chief Academic Officer Corey Vorthmann said during the meeting.

In 2018, we held this program here with two students  the next year, 10, he said. This year, were pushing 80. Its certainly an accomplishment we can be very proud of  thanks to (Superintendent) Dr. Murillo, who believed that they could achieve more.

None of this would be possible without the willing partner of our community college, Vorthmann said.

I have one word: amazing, said Iowa Western President Dan Kinney. To have two, three or four walk across my stage before they walk across your stage is amazing, and to have 75 is even more amazing.

Dr. Murillo, its been great working with you, he said. Parents, give yourselves a hand. Its great to be here and be part of this.

The high school students are able to earn the college credentials at no cost to them or their parents, as the state reimburses the school district for most of the cost, and the district covers the rest.

This is my favorite event of the entire year, said Spencer Mathews, coordinator of the Early College Academy.

It is important to remember these 25 seniors were selected to participate in the Early College Academy as sophomores in the spring of 2020  only a few weeks before our schools closed due to COVID-19, he said. The manner in which our students overcame the challenges of an ever-changing learning environment during their first year of college is truly remarkable. The past two years have shown how resilient and adaptable our students can be when facing adversity. I am proud of our seniors achievements thus far and fully expect even more success down the road.

All of the seniors will graduate from Iowa Western this weekend  four with 4.0 GPAs, Mathews said. Ten of them earned 4.0 GPAs for the 2020-21 academic year  during the first year of the pandemic and their first year of college classes. Three seniors were selected as Iowa Governors Scholars. Four were QuestBridge National College Match finalists, and one earned a full-ride QuestBridge scholarship valued at up to $300,000. Collectively, the students were offered a total of $9.5 million in scholarships to almost 70 colleges and universities for next year.

Senior Jordan Kreft, who plans to attend University of Northern Iowa and major in secondary education, expressed her thanks to the school board, Murillo and other school officials for the opportunity to participate in the Early College Academy.

My family didnt have a lot of money, and it has given me a jump start on my college career, she said.

Besides earning two years of college credit free, Jordan had a wonderful advisor who helped her apply to colleges and figure out how to afford college, she said.

Thanks to the ECA, I can go to UNI and pursue my dream career, she said.

Another 50 students earned college certificates, diplomas or degrees through the school districts Certificate Advancement and TradeWorks at Iowa Western programs, according to Kathy Schmedding, Plus One Pathways counselor. Students can also earn certificates through the districts College Credit Acceleration program.

Our (Diploma) Plus One programs are growing and very strong, she said.

Last year, 19 students earned college credentials through the programs, and this year at least 50 have accomplished that, Schmedding said. A computer science option was added this year, she said.

Senior Erin Exley earned certification as a nurse aide and plans to pursue a nursing degree at Nebraska Methodist College, she said. She expressed her appreciation for all the benefits she has received through the program.

With the help of the Certificate Advancement Program, I have completed two semesters of college classes, Exley said. I have gotten nursing assistant experience, which will give me an edge when I start school in the fall.

In addition, she will be able to work as a nurse aide while working on her nursing degree, she said.

Kinney thanked parents for their support and for encouraging their youth to take on the challenges. He said he has named TradeWorks at Iowa Western student Leonardo Quinteros a Distinguished Presidents Scholar.

You can be very proud of what your young men and young women have done, he said.

Leo said he has earned over 40 credits and plans to continue at Iowa Western next year to finish an associate degree in automotive technology. He now only needs 31 more credits.

He said the TradeWorks program had been very helpful.

I knew I had always enjoyed working with my hands, he said.

The program gave Leo basic knowledge of five different trades, he said.

Most importantly, it helped me find the one thing I wanted to do, he said.

Besides meeting new teachers and peers at Iowa Western, Leo learned new skills and a path to the future, he said.

Board President Chris LaFerla applauded the students and programs.

Were all very proud of these students and these programs and just gratified we have a district that supports them, he said.

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Spot shortages in many groceries and pharmacies have been exacerbated by a Food and Drug Administration recall that stopped production at Abbots largest U.S. formula manufacturing plant in Michigan. As supply disruptions and the massive safety recall have continued, several big box retailers have begun rationing sales of the formula.

Its very concerning, Sen. Chuck Grassley told reporters Wednesday.

After hearing about the scarcity at his county meetings, Grassley wrote the FDA to ask what it is doing to address the shortage.

He cited reports that at least 40% of baby formula supplies in the U.S. are completely depleted. Iowa was among six mostly Midwestern states where more than half of all baby formula was completely sold out during the week of April 24.

According to the Biden administration, the FDA is working around the clock to address the shortage. Manufacturers say theyre producing at full capacity, but its still not enough to meet demand.

Im going to keep on top of it. We got to help families feed their kids, and empty shelves are unacceptable, Grassley said.

Finkenauer push

Thats not enough for former U.S. Rep. Abby Finkenauer, who is among Democrats seeking to challenge Grassleys re-election this fall.

She called it shocking that it has taken Grassley and other members of Congress this long to address a national crisis when you have people not being able to feed their children the nutrition they need to thrive and survive.

Finkenauer has called for the Biden administration to invoke the Defense Production Act to force manufacturers to produce more formula.

We need all hands on deck to address the dangerous shortage of baby formula in Iowa and across the country, Finkenauer said. Invoking the act would bring any and all federal resources to the table to increase the supply of baby formula and address the shortage.

It just seems like the rational and right thing to do, she said.

It might be an appropriate tool, Grassley said when asked about invoking the act, but didnt think it would necessarily solve the contamination issues that led to the production shutdown at Abbott.

You wouldnt want to put the Defense Production Act into action and then produce unsafe food, he said.

Timeline sought

Iowa Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson joined a colleague in writing the FDA asking for a timeline for when baby formula is expected to be sufficiently restocked as well as a long-term plan to minimize supply chain disruptions for formula.

Parents who are unsure how to provide this essential sustenance for their babies and worried about the nutritional impacts of this supply chain shortage, Hinson and New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik wrote. As moms ourselves, we know the stress this is causing in so many households.

Families already worried about higher food and fuel prices now have the added stress of not knowing if the baby formula they need will even be in stock, Hinson said.

She called on the Biden administration to prioritize fixing supply chain disruptions to replenish the supply of infant formula. Ill work with anyone who will work with me to ensure that families dont have this extra burden, she said.

Bipartisan effort

Iowa Republican Rep. Miller-Meeks has joined bipartisan legislation to encourage competition, reduce costs and improve the quality of infant formula options available through the Women, Infants, and Children program by creating an online database. Its a companion to bipartisan Senate legislation.

Fourth District Republican Rep. Randy Feenstra called the situation dire, threatening babies who rely on formula for their health and development.

He joined a colleague in proposing the Formula Act, to direct the FDA to establish and communicate to Congress clear standards by which it domestically regulates infant formula.

Gazette Des Moines Bureau Chief Erin Murphy contributed to this report.
A Round Lake Beach man who shot twin teenage brothers, killing one, in a confrontation over the mans stolen car was sentenced in Lake County Court Wednesday to 21 years in prison.

Lynell Glover, 36, asked for leniency and a second chance before Judge Mark Levitt passed sentence for the shooting death of Anthony Awad, 17, and the wounding of Jonathan Awad.

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The judge said Glover had zero appreciation for his actions around 3 a.m. on Jan. 3, 2021, when he encountered the brothers driving Glovers stolen Camaro along Illinois Route 12 near Volo.

I want to make clear to you that your use of force was entirely improper, Levitt said. That boy died for no reason other than you wanted your car back.

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Glover was found guilty of second-degree murder and aggravated battery with a firearm at a March trial. Jurors deliberated more than 30 hours over four days before acquitting Glover of first-degree murder and one battery count, but finding him guilty on the other charges.

He faced a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison.

At trial, Glover said he shot the brothers in self-defense, but prosecutors said he brought a gun with him and fired on the Awads as they ran away from him. The brothers had stolen his Camaro several days before, and early on Jan. 3 a friend called Glover to say he had seen the car at a nearby gas station, according to trial testimony

Glover drove there, saw his car and became involved in the confrontation after following the car to a spot where it stalled along Route 21.

Prosecutors said Glover had been playing detective, rather than letting police solve the crime of his stolen car. Glover disputed that when he addressed the court before sentencing.

I never thought I would bump into my car that night, he said. Glover said he went to the gas station to gather security video.

I know I made a mistake, he told the judge.

A number of friends and family members, even the CEO of the company where Glover worked as a warehouse supervisor, attested to his character before sentencing.

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But Assistant States Attorney Lauren Callinan, who asked for a 25-year sentence, said Glover was someone with an extreme temper who can turn on a dime.

James Schwarzbach, who represented Glover, called his client, a good man who, in one moment of his life, did commit a criminal act. The attorney asked for a sentence close to the six-year minimum.

Glover decided to take a life over his car being stolen days earlier, and nothing more, States Attorney Eric Rinehart said Wednesday. Our legal system and our common morality have always valued life over property. Mr. Glovers premeditated vigilantism and thirst for violence was condemned by our legal system and our community.
WASHINGTON (AP)  House investigators said Thursday they have issued subpoenas to House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and four other GOP lawmakers as part of their probe into the violent Jan. 6 insurrection, an extraordinary step that has little precedent and is certain to further inflame partisan tensions over the 2021 attack.

The Jan. 6 panel's subpoenas for McCarthy, R-Calif., and Republican Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Andy Biggs of Arizona and Mo Brooks of Alabama come as the investigation is winding down and as the panel prepares for a series of public hearings this summer.

The committee has been investigating McCarthy's conversations with then-President Donald Trump the day of the attack and meetings that the four other lawmakers had with the White House as Trump and his aides conspired how to overturn his defeat. They have been debating for months over whether to issue the subpoenas.

Congressional subpoenas for sitting members of Congress, especially for a party leader, are almost without precedent in recent decades. The panel had previously asked for voluntary cooperation from the five men, along with a handful of other GOP lawmakers, but all of them refused to speak with the panel.

"These members include those who participated in meetings at the White House, those who had direct conversations with President Trump leading up to and during the attack on the Capitol, and those who were involved in the planning and coordination of certain activities on and before January 6th," the committee said as it announced the subpoenas.

McCarthy has acknowledged that he spoke with Trump on Jan. 6, 2021, which happened as Trump's supporters were beating police outside the Capitol and forcing their way into the building. But he has not shared many details. The committee requested information about his conversations with Trump "before, during and after" the riot.

McCarthy took to the House floor after the rioters were cleared and said in a forceful speech that Trump "bears responsibility" for the attack and that it was the "saddest day I have ever had" in Congress  even as he went on to join 138 other House Republicans in voting to reject the election results.

The GOP leader soon made up with Trump, though, visiting him in Florida and rallying House Republicans to vote against investigations of the attack.

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Cyprus foreign minister Ioannis Kasoulides has voiced his countrys support to the autonomy plan offered by Morocco for a lasting solution to the Sahara conflict.

At a joint press briefing held Wednesday in Marrakech with Moroccan peer Nasser Bourita on the sidelines of the ministerial meeting of the Global Coalition against Daech, Mr. Kasoulides said Cyprus defends the principle of respect of territorial integrity of States, backs the resolutions of the UN Security Council and firmly rejects all separatist attempts targeting Morocco and his country.

For his part, Serbian foreign minister Nikola Selakovic described the Moroccan autonomy plan for the Sahara as a serious and credible solution for the settlement of the Sahara issue.

In a joint statement issued following talks he held Wednesday with Bourita on the sidelines of the ministerial meeting of the Global Coalition against ISIS, the Serbian FM praised the diplomatic and political efforts made by Morocco to achieve a realistic, pragmatic and lasting political solution to the Sahara issue, in a spirit of realism and compromise and in full compliance with UN resolutions.

Regarding the issue of Kosovo and Metohija, Morocco supports the territorial integrity and the sovereignty of the Republic of Serbia in its internationally recognized borders, as well as the dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina under the auspices of European Union, the joint statement said.

The Moroccan FM also met separately the same day with Romanian peer Bogdan Aurescu who is also taking part in the Marrakesh ministerial meeting of the global coalition against Daesh.

On this occasion, the Romanian official said Bucharest supports the serious and credible autonomy initiative proposed by Morocco in 2007 for the Sahara, underlining that this initiative is the basis for the resolution of the regional conflict over the Sahara.

In a joint statement issued after the Bourita-Aurescu talks, Romania reaffirms its backing to the efforts engaged under the UN exclusive auspices in a bid to reach a just, lasting and mutually acceptable political solution to the Sahara issue in accordance with the UN Security Council resolution.
An attack carried out by a group of militants killed Wednesday five Egyptian military personnel in North Sinai, the second such an attack in less than one week after the Islamic state group (ISIS) claimed a first attack that slain 11 security forces.

Two security sources told Reuters that unidentified armed men assaulted a security post in the coastal area of northeastern Sinai, which borders the Gaza Strip. Four other military were injured in the attack, according to the sources.

No one has claimed responsibility for the deadly incident. The attack comes less than one week after a May 7 ambush at a checkpoint in Sinai that killed 11 Egyptian soldiers and was claimed by ISIS.

The Egyptian President, according to his office, presided over a meeting of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which includes the militarys top commanders, to discuss the consequences of the attack.

Several countries around the world condemned the attack and pledged their support for Egypt in addressing terrorism.
In just one day, Morocco has gained unprecedented international political and diplomatic support for its territorial integrity and sovereignty over its Sahara, leaving the enemies of the North African Kingdom in complete dismay and utterly gobsmacked.

On Wednesday, several foreign ministers who were attending in Marrakesh the meeting of the Global Coalition against Daesh/ISIS, have voiced or reaffirmed, during their side-talks with Moroccan peer Nasser Bourita, their strong backing to the Moroccan autonomy plan describing it as the most credible and serious solution to the Sahara regional conflict.

The unanimity around the credibility and seriousness of the autonomy plan was underlined without ambiguity by worldwide top diplomats in Marrakesh, recognizing the efforts made by Morocco for a peaceful and enduring solution to the Sahara issue.

In a joint statement issued after talks between Bourita and his Dutch peer Wopke Hoekstra, The Netherlands said it deems the autonomy plan, presented in 2007 by Morocco, as a serious and credible contribution to the UN-led political process to find a solution to the Sahara issue.

Amsterdam and Rabat availed this opportunity to reiterate their firm support to the UN Sahara envoy Staffan de Mistura and his efforts to continue the political process aimed at reaching a just, lasting and mutually acceptable political solution in accordance with UN Security Council resolutions.

The same support was renewed by Italy which hailed again the serious and credible efforts made by Morocco for the settlement of the Sahara issue.

I welcomed the serious and credible efforts of Morocco for the settlement of the Sahara issue within the framework of the United Nations, said the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Luigi Di Maio, in a statement to the press after talks with his Moroccan counterpart.

Di Maio also reaffirmed the full support of Italy to the efforts of the UN Secretary General, and his personal envoy Staffan de Mistura to achieve a political, fair, realistic, sustainable and mutually acceptable solution for the issue of the Sahara, based on compromise, and in accordance with the resolutions of the UN Security Council, particularly resolution 2602.

The same supportive stand was voiced by Cypriot foreign minister Ioannis Kasoulides who underlined his countrys support to the autonomy plan offered by Morocco for a lasting solution to the Sahara conflict.

At a joint press briefing held with Moroccan peer, Mr. Kasoulides said Cyprus defends the principle of respect of territorial integrity of States, backs the resolutions of the UN Security Council and firmly rejects all separatist attempts targeting Morocco and his country.

For his part, Romanian foreign minister Bogdan Aurescu hailed the serious efforts made by Rabat to find a pragmatic & realistic political solution to the Sahara dispute and praised the Moroccan autonomy plan submitted to the UN Security Council in 2007.

In the joint statement released following his talks with Mr. Bourita, the Romanian minister reaffirmed his countrys support to the efforts deployed under the exclusive UN auspices to achieve a just, lasting and mutually acceptable political solution to the Sahara issue, based on compromise and UN Security Council resolutions.

Both parties stressed the positive and constructive role played by Rabat and Bucharest in maintaining stability, security and peace in their respective regions.

In the same vein, Serbian Minister of Foreign Affairs Nikola Selakovic said his country views the autonomy plan, under Moroccan sovereignty, as a serious and credible solution to the Sahara issue.

During his talks with Bourita, Mr. Selakovic commended the diplomatic and political efforts made by the North African Kingdom to achieve a realistic, pragmatic and enduring solution to the Sahara issue in a spirit of realism & compromise and in accordance with UN resolutions.

These numerous supportive stands, which are strengthening further Moroccos historical and legitimate rights, come after similar positions expressed by several Arab and African foreign ministers on the sidelines of the Marrakesh Ministerial Meeting of the Global coalition against Daesh.

During his talks with Moroccan FM, Bahrains top diplomat Abdullatif Bin Rashid Al Zayani reiterated the constant position of his country supporting the Moroccanness of the Sahara, citing in this regard the opening of a Consulate General of Bahrain in the city of Laayoune, capital of Moroccan Sahara.

The Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan on his part reiterated his countrys support of the Moroccanness of the Sahara and the territorial integrity of the Kingdom.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia reiterates its position supporting the full sovereignty of Morocco over all its territories, including the Moroccan Sahara, Prince Faisal stressed during a joint press briefing with Nasser Bourita at the end of their talks held on the sidelines of the Ministerial Meeting of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS.

The Saudi FM also stressed the support of his country to the autonomy plan presented by Morocco to resolve this artificial regional conflict.

In this vein, Yemen has also reaffirmed full support to the Moroccanness of Sahara.

This came in a joint statement issued this Thursday following talks between Yemeni Foreign Minister Ahmed Awad Bin Mubarak and Nasser bourita.

The Yemeni official stressed Yemens full support to the territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Morocco and to the Moroccanness of the Sahara.

The settlement of this regional dispute can only be done within the framework of the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Morocco and its national and territorial integrity, he insisted.

For his part, Nigers foreign minister Hassoumi Massaoudou renewed his countrys steadfast backing to the political process conducted under the UN exclusive auspices for the resolution of the Sahara regional dispute.

Guinean minister of Foreign Affairs Morissanda Kouyate also reaffirmed his countrys unwavering support of the autonomy initiative proposed by Morocco under its sovereignty.

Guinea continues to deem the autonomy plan proposed by Morocco as the most serious and credible basis for resolving the Sahara conflict, he said praising the credible efforts made by Morocco within the framework of the United Nations.

On Monday, Egyptian foreign minister Sameh Choukri said, during his meeting with Bourita in Rabat, that his country supports the territorial integrity of the Kingdom and UN Security Council resolutions 2602 of 2021, which welcomed Moroccos serious and credible efforts to advance towards a political settlement of the Sahara issue.

This flurry of supportive stands for the Moroccan autonomy plan is part of the international dynamic gaining momentum to end the Sahara issue as the U.S., Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, France and worldwide capitals support the realistic proposal put by Rabat on the negotiating table.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) provides Moroccan Agence Nationale des Ports (ANP) a 40 million loan to enable the agency enhance climate resilience of ports of the North African Kingdom.

The loan is the first to a Moroccan state-owned entity without a sovereign guarantee. It will comprise two tranches: a 15 million committed loan and 25 million of uncommitted capital. The loan will be supplemented by an investment grant of US$ 5.7 million from the Global Environmental Facility (GEF).

The loan agreement was announced during at the Banks 31st Annual Meeting and Business Forum held in Marrakech. The EBRD will also furnish ANP with a comprehensive technical capacity package, funded by a US$ 500,000 grant from the GEF and a US$ 1 million grant from the Bank itself.

The package aims to provide systematic support for the climate resilience of Moroccan ports. It will lead to the establishment of a working group, comprising key stakeholders in the Moroccan port sector, to facilitate informed and climate-aware decision-making, as well as better environmental management and standards for ANP.

Commenting the EBRD financial support, Moroccan minister of Equipment and Water Nizar Baraka said: The project is in line with Moroccos national strategic management plan, with ANP set to play a key role in large-scale infrastructure projects aimed at keeping up with changes in maritime transport and trade outside of Morocco.

EBRD President Odile Renaud-Basso said: The Bank is committed to promoting green transition and climate resilience in Morocco and in all economies where it operates. Supporting ANP, together with the GEF, in mainstreaming climate change adaptation measures in the port sector will provide a replicable model for Morocco and the region.

ANP General Manager Nadia Laraki welcomed the conclusion of the contractual process with the EBRD and thanked the GEF for its commitment. She also indicated that the sub-projects financed by the loan would reflect ANPs commitment to making climate change a real input to its strategic vision.

Morocco is a founding member of the EBRD and became an investee economy in 2012. To date, the EBRD has invested more than 3.4 billion in Morocco through 85 projects.
Lake McConaughy and Lake Ogallala state recreation areas are entering their second peak season  May 20 to Sept. 11  when reservations are required for all camping, including beach sites.

Campers should book their reservation at the two state recreation areas before leaving home, Nebraska Game and Parks Commission said in a press release.

The reservations can be made online at nebraskastateparks.reserveamerica.com, via the RA Camping app, or by phone at 308-284-8800 during business hours.

Last year, guests reported being able to enjoy family-friendly camping experiences and days at the beach while also frequenting local businesses that support tourism at the lakes, said Jim Swenson, Nebraska Game and Parks deputy director. We are looking forward to repeating last years great season.

Designated campground sites can be reserved 180 days in advance, and beach camping sites can be reserved 30 days in advance. There are about 500 campground spots and 1,000 designated beach spots (depending on water level) available at the two state recreation areas.

Same-day reservations may be made online or by phone until 5 p.m. MT if sites remain available. Once capacities are reached, no additional overnight camping will be allowed. For alternative lodging options, including private campgrounds, hotels or cabins, visit ILoveLakeMac.com.

Campers must arrive and check in with park staff in-person at the Lake McConaughy Visitor Center or at a staffed entrance booths between 2 and 9 p.m. MT. Registered campers will receive an email with more details regarding their reservation prior to arrival.

To learn more about the reservation requirements, visit outdoornebraska.gov/knowbeforeyougo.

A park entry permit is required of each vehicle entering each lake area. For faster entry into the park areas, visitors are encouraged to purchase one in advance online at OutdoorNebraska.org or at a permit vendor. Find a local vendor at outdoornebraska.org/permitvendors.
Although her granddaughter is only seven months old, Namkha, 57, likes dancing in front of her, showing her some moves of the traditional Sherpa dance.

"My oldest student is 40-plus years old, and the youngest is my granddaughter," said the Sherpa with a smile, expecting that her granddaughter will pass down the traditional dance someday just like herself.

Living in Zhentang Township, Dinggye County, southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region, Namkha is an inheritor of the Zhentang Sherpa dance, a national intangible cultural heritage.

Besieged by primitive forests at the foot of Qomolangma deep in the Himalayas, the township with an average altitude of 2,000 meters is home to more than 2,600 Sherpa people.

Standing together in a circle or semi-circle, dancers, mostly women, sing and dance with interchanged rhythms. They wear traditional Sherpa costumes while dancing, including a silver waist belt, a cap decorated with flowers and peacock feathers, and accessories like gold earrings and a necklace consisting of silver rings.

Born into a farmers' family, Namkha likes dancing since childhood. She started to learn the Sherpa dance from senior villagers at the age of 15, becoming the youngest among the dancers. In her early 20s, Namkha often danced till midnight after a day's toil in the field.

Her parents said dancing was a waste of time and affected farmwork.

"After dancing late at night, I dared not return home for fear of waking up my parents and being scolded. So I once slept in the cowshed," said Namkha. When she was 25, she became the leading dancer and has performed at wedding ceremonies, festivals and galas of various levels in Tibet.

Namkha became a regional political advisor and headed to Lhasa to attend the regional annual two sessions for the first time in early 2007. She trekked in snow for two days to arrive at the nearest concrete road before a car picked her up to Lhasa.

She then proposed developing road facilities for her hometown at the two sessions. Other proposals she submitted during her five-year term were about forest protection, as well as the Sherpa cultural heritage preservation.

Now, a concrete road has ended the isolation of the township, enabling Namkha and other Sherpas to reach the outside world more easily.

In 2011, Namkha joined a team to visit Qingdao, a port city in east China's Shandong Province, to attend an exchange activity for intangible cultural heritage inheritance. It was the first time she took a plane.

On the flight, many passengers were curious about Namkha's Sherpa costume and kept asking to take photos with her.

"I was so nervous and shy that I forgot to fasten my seat belt," Namkha said with a laugh, adding that a flight attendant later came to help fasten the belt.

In Qingdao, she saw bullet trains, high-rise buildings and various kinds of urban facilities. It was then that she realized the importance of education.

"I was the only one illiterate in the activity. Young people must go to school to keep pace with society," she said.

Lhawang, Namkha's husband, likes showing his wife's dancing videos to others on his mobile phone.

"When she goes out dancing, I'll take care of our granddaughter at home," said Lhawang, 53.

Lhawang is a construction worker and, during his spare time, patrols the nearby forests, now part of the Qomolangma National Nature Reserve.

Their son, Sidar, shoots photos and videos for a local multimedia center in the county seat. Although he is not interested in dancing, he supports his mother to pass on the Sherpa cultural heritage.

"The traditional Zhentang Sherpa dance is important. I'd like to make some contribution to its preservation, like shooting some documentaries," he said.

With the support of the government, each village of the township has established a performance group with an average of 16 members. The government also poured money into building performance centers where they can dance.

Namkha now has 10 students -- three in their 40s, four in their 30s and three in their 20s. She plans to teach more.

"More young people should join the efforts to pass the dance down to the future generation," she said.
Drought conditions persist across much of the country, and both livestock and crop producers face losses and continuing challenges for their operations.

USDA offers both emergency assistance programs to help producers cope with losses, as well as ongoing conservation programs to help producers prepare for and manage through drought.

The USDA, in conjunction with the Center for Agricultural Profitability at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, are hosting a free webinar at noon Thursday on managing farms through drought. To view the webinar, go to cap.unl.edu/webinars.

Thursdays webinar will discuss the USDA Farm Service Agencys drought relief and response through standing and emergency provisions of FSA programs, including the CRP, LFP, ECP and recently announced ELRP, plus additional assistance to come.

USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service programs offer cost-share and incentive payments to producers to adopt and maintain various conservation practices that can help producers manage soil, water, crop and livestock systems for improved resilience and mitigation of drought and other challenges.

The webinar will discuss NRCS programs, including EQIP and CSP, and the opportunities for producers as well as NRCS emergency assistance for fire that can become even more relevant during drought.

Thursdays webinar will feature Pat Lechner, price support, conservation and environmental programs chief for USDA-FSA Nebraska; Brach Johnson, outreach coordinator for USDA-NRCS Nebraska; Brad Lubben, associate professor and Extension policy specialist for UNL; and UNL Extension educator Randy Saner.

The program is part of a series of Thursday webinars at the center. The May 16 webinar will focus on agricultural land management.
Final unofficial results in Tuesdays Nebraska primary elections wont trigger any automatic recounts in Lincoln County or regional races.

The last nail-biter contest dissipated as late results let challenger Kevin Stocker pull away from incumbent Mary Ridder and effectively win the Nebraska Public Service Commissions District 5 seat.

Stocker held a mere three-vote lead over Ridder for the Republican nomination as midnight approached Tuesday, according to then-partial results from the Nebraska Secretary of States Office.

After the last precincts finished reporting, Stocker had a 1,459-vote edge over Ridder in the 50-county district. He won 43.5% of the overall GOP vote to Ridders 40.7% and third-place finisher Dakota Delkas 15.9%.

No other recognized Nebraska parties fielded candidates, meaning Stocker will be District 5s next PSC member unless someone mounts a petition drive or an organized write-in effort for the Nov. 8 general election.

Primary results wont be official until certified by county canvassing boards and then the State Board of Canvassers. The latter wont meet until June 6.

Lincoln Countys canvassing board will meet Thursday morning, County Clerk Becky Rossell said. Itll review 36 provisional ballots cast Tuesday by voters who moved and forgot to update their registration addresses.

Unlike some primary or general elections, there arent enough provisional ballots to tip outcomes in any primary races across the county.

Rossell said final returned and counted early-voting ballots totaled 2,635, the most ever in a Lincoln County primary except for the 7,980 cast in May 2020 in the COVID-19 pandemics first weeks.

Early ballots accounted for 32.8% of the countys 8,033 ballots counted Tuesday.

Final primary turnout will end up just under 34% if the canvassing board rules all 36 provisional ballots can be counted.

Nebraskas next major 2022 election milestone will be July 15, the filing deadline for incumbents planning to run for offices contested only in the Nov. 8 general election.

That group includes candidates for village, Educational Service Unit and county noxious weed district boards, as well as boards of public power districts that gross less than $40 million a year.

The July 15 deadline applies to people who currently hold any Nebraska elective office but want to run for one of those boards. All other potential candidates have until Aug. 1 to file.

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Mo Brooks is bloodied but unbowed after being unendorsed by Trump. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images

There is something mildly tragicomic about Representative Mo Brookss campaign to become a U.S. senator from Alabama. His campaign website still shows him at two peak moments of his long career in right-wing extremist politics: (1) speaking at Donald Trumps January 6 rally just before he went over to the Capitol to lead the charge to decertify Joe Bidens 2020 presidential win and (2) appearing at an August 2021 Trump rally in Cullman, Alabama, when he was the former presidents endorsed candidate for the seat being vacated by Richard Shelby, the retiring senior senator.

But Trump famously unendorsed Brooks on March 23 after an extended period of grumbling about his campaign. Trump contrived a ludicrous excuse for his action: that Brooks had gone woke when he urged a crowd to move on from the 2020 election instead of wallowing in it endlessly. Were talking about Mo Brooks, the very voice and face of the intransigent MAGA right through January 6!

Trumps cronies have shrugged and suggested that Brooks knew better than to speak out of line about the myth of the stolen election. Steve Bannon, one of the few Trump intimates who hasnt written off Brooks entirely, used explicitly religious terms in explaining what happened, per Politico:

Mo committed a mortal sin, Bannon said, referring to Brooks comments at the August rally about moving on from 2020. This is why his campaign has just lost altitude ever since then, and he hasnt gotten it back.

Its a lesson to everyone, Bannon continued. Trump can giveth, and Trump can taketh away.

Brooks has owned up to his own mental apostasy, arguing that Trump wanted the impossible. According to Alabama reporter Paul Gattis, Brooks maintains he lost Trumps support because he refused Trumps urging to work in Congress to remove President Joe Biden from office  because, of course, the Constitution didnt allow it.

What makes Brooks treatment by Trump even more egregious is the former presidents political flirtation with rival and now front-runner Katie Britt, the former Shelby chief of staff, business lobbyist, and Senate Republican Establishment favorite who more or less embodies The Swamp.

But like a defrocked priest who cant take off the collar, Brooks is sojourning on. His underfunded campaign is still benefitting from the deep pockets of his longtime friends in the Club for Growth. He has high name ID as a fixture in Alabama Republican politics since the early 1980s, when many conservatives in the state were still nominally Democrats. And presumably there are some America First die-hards who understand Brooks was a proto-MAGA politician back when Trump was still donating money to Democrats.

And now the star-crossed Brooks may have finally caught a break. One of the other two major candidates in the race, wealthy celebrity war veteran Mike Durant (a survivor of the events that inspired Black Hawk Down), is fading rapidly in the polls, partly because the novelty of his self-funded and not terribly substantive ads has worn off and partly because a shadowy super-PAC called the Alabama RINO PAC has been running ads hammering him as the instrument of out-of-state Never Trumpers and Democrats. Two recent polls, one from Moore Information Group and another from Alabama Daily News, have shown Durant even with or even trailing Brooks for a spot in a likely June 21 runoff against Britt, who is doing well but isnt likely to win the majority needed to win outright.

If Brooks does make the runoff against Britt, it will be fascinating to see if Trump endorses the Swamps candidate in order to administer the coup de grace to the follower he betrayed. The idea may appeal to Trumps innate cruelty and narcissism, but for all his wild popularity in the state, his track record in Alabama Senate races is mixed. He endorsed three straight losing candidacies in a special Senate election in 2017 that culminated in the victory of an actual Democrat, Doug Jones. One of those losers, Judge Roy Moore, was, like Brooks, a pre-Trump reactionary icon who proceeded to beat the then-presidents candidate, Luther Strange, before succumbing in the general election. Katie Britt is arguably a far more attractive candidate than Big Luther, but nothing could possibly please Mo Brooks more than reciprocating Trumps ill-treatment. Hes bloodied but unbowed, despite being unendorsed.
An ominous sign for continued funding of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics came this week when the Biden administration decided to split off these funds from a bill supplying Ukraine with military aid. It was an indication that funding COVID vaccines, once a matter of bipartisan accord, was losing Republican support.

But this was merely an indirect measure of the Republican position. A more direct indication comes from Caitlin Owens, who explains why Senate Republicans are haggling over spending money on vaccines and therapeutics. The answer is that theyre concerned about wasting money.

Owenss reporting gets into the Republican view in more detail than any previous report. One Republican concern is that the current funding strategy prioritizes access over efficiency. The vaccines are distributed in multidose vials that, once opened, must be used or thrown away, leading to some spoilage. Republicans say the current strategy is wasteful, Owens reports, and it would be better to rein in accessibility so that more doses are likely to be used.

A second concern is that the vaccines, while highly effective against hospitalization and death, are proving less effective against transmission. Therefore, Republicans dont want to spend too much on them.

Republicans are skeptical of using federal money to buy more vaccines that are proving not to last very long and questions remain if they will work against future variants, a senior GOP Senate aide told Owens. Were saying that the current shot and boosters are reducing in effectiveness. New vaxx isnt ready and its unclear where they are in the plan, the aide added. Since there is no plan, we dont want to give them [a] blank check.

The shortsightedness of this position is almost unfathomable. It is difficult to conceive of a less intelligent way to save the government money than to skimp on vaccines and therapeutics. The scale of the savings in vaccine subsidies is in the billions, and the cost of the pandemic is measured in trillions. The vaccines have probably averted more than a million deaths already. Even putting humanitarian concerns to the side, as a Brookings study notes, the economic case for funding vaccines and therapeutics remains extremely strong.

Even if vaccines cant stop transmission, their ability to avert hospitalization, not to mention death, is an enormous cost saving. If we want to prevent continued waves of shutdowns, the vaccines and therapeutics offer the most cost-effective remedies by orders of magnitude.

Looking to save money on wasted doses is fiscal conservatism as pathology. If they cant get Republicans to see reason on this subject, Democrats need to abandon normal procedure and force a majority vote. Tens or hundreds of thousands of lives, and potentially trillions of dollars, depend on this.
ABUJA, Nigeria, May 12, 2022--(BUSINESS WIRE)--In response to economic challenges created by the global pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Africa Finance Corporation (AFC) is launching a US$2billion facility to support recovery and resilience in Africa.

AFC has committed to funding up to 50% of the new African Economic Resilience Facility and mobilising the remainder through the Corporations network of international partners and investors. The facility will be announced at the AFC Live Infrastructure Solutions Summit today.

The facility will be disbursed through loans from AFC to selected commercial banks, regional development banks and central banks in various African countries, providing them with much needed hard currency liquidity to finance trade and other economic activities in their jurisdictions. These institutions will be able to leverage AFCs proven access to global funding to receive financing at competitive rates.

Speaking on the rationale behind the launch, Head of Treasury and Financial Institutions, Banji Fehintola, said: "The COVID-19 pandemic set back Africas economic growth trajectory and widened the trade financing gap, while the Russia-Ukraine conflict has added a further set of challenges negatively impacting growth prospects across the continent. We are determined to play a leading role in helping the continents recovery and resilience, not only though the work we do in bridging Africas infrastructure gap, but also through targeted interventions such as this US$2billion economic resilience facility."

Applications for the African Economic Resilience Facility will open this month through AFCs website (www.africafc.org). Through this funding intervention, AFC will accelerate its developmental impact in Africa, helping to drive the continent to a new phase of growth that is focused on maximum resource value capture and domestic job creation.

Over the last 15 years, AFC has built experience mobilising global capital for critical infrastructure projects in Africa. The Corporations recent bond issues include a US$750million 7-year Eurobond issued in 2021 at AFCs lowest yield to date. The Corporation also established an independent asset management arm, AFC Capital Partners, with plans to raise US$2 billion to fund climate adaptation infrastructure projects in Africa.

Story continues

About AFC

AFC was established in 2007 to be the catalyst for private sector-led infrastructure investment across Africa. It is the second highest investment grade rated multilateral financial institution in Africa. AFCs approach combines specialist industry expertise with a focus on financial and technical advisory, project structuring, project development and risk capital to address Africas infrastructure development needs and drive sustainable economic growth. AFC invests in high-quality infrastructure assets that provide essential services in the core infrastructure sectors of power, natural resources, heavy industry, transport, and telecommunications. To date, the Corporation has invested US$10 billion in projects across 35 African countries. www.africafc.org

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220512005436/en/

Contacts

Media Enquiries:

Marlynie Moodley

Senior Vice President, Communications

Africa Finance Corporation

Mobile : +27(0) 82 564 2457

Email : marlynie.moodley@africafc.org
The owner of Skybar Cafe was found guilty of sexual misconduct during a hearing in Auburn Municipal Court on Tuesday.

Patrick James Grider, 55, of Auburn, is the owner of the downtown Auburn bar located on West Magnolia Avenue. He was arrested in February and charged with one count of sexual misconduct after an investigation by the Auburn Police Department.

After closing statements from the prosecution and the defense, Judge Jim McLaughlin said he believed there was enough evidence of sexual misconduct to find Grider guilty. Griders attorney, Davis Whittelsey, entered a verbal notice of appeal.

According to the Case Action summary from Auburn Municipal Court, which was filed Wednesday morning: After hearing the evidence, it is the judgment of the Court that defendant is guilty and is fined $500 together with $251.00 cost and $0.00 fees/restitution to the victim and sentenced to 180 days with 180 days suspended in Lee County Detention Center. Defendant is given 1 days credit for time already served in jail on this charge.

There was not a jail sentence, Whittelsey wrote in an email to the Opelika-Auburn News on Tuesday night, and the wrongful conviction is on appeal via verbal notice of appeal.

After Whittelsey made the verbal appeal, McLaughlin set the appeal bond at $1,000 and gave the defense 14 days to complete the appeal paperwork and pay the appeal bond. If the appeal is granted, Griders case will go to the circuit court for a new trial with the possibility of a jury, which will be decided by the circuit court, and the initial fine and court costs will be dropped, according to Auburn Municipal Court.

Video footageThe victim testified in court on Tuesday that Grider touched her breast and said sexually explicit things to her.

She said was an Auburn University graduate and a bartender at SkyBar from August 2021 to January 2022. She testified that Grider offered to pay her to make out, graphically described what he wanted to do with her sexually and at one point pushed panties in her face.

Video footage from the night of the incident was presented before the court showing the second time the victim said Grider touched her breast.

The video is clear that Mr. Grider touched her left breast, McLaughlin said. And it was clear to me that this gentleman shoved somebody elses underwear in this young ladys face, and I dont know why hed do that, but I cant accept it for any other reasons but sexual gratification.

Justin Clark, the city prosecutor, asked her why she didnt run away or leave afterwards.

Because he was my boss and my job was my livelihood, she replied.

She also added: Because he is very likely to give us a lot of extra money, if you stand and just talk to him, listen to the things he says, hang out with him. He likes to have a lot of females around.

After the first encounter, the victim and Grider were shown on camera sitting at the middle bar. The victim was facing the camera, and Grider was partially hidden behind a box on the bar counter.

After the point where she said he shoved the panties in her face, she walked away but came back to the bar.

As the two continued talking, Grider reached out to touch her left breast. The victim said she responded by telling him he crossed the line.

The video showed the two taking a shot, and then the victim leaned in to hear Grider. The victim said this was the point where he asked to pay her for sexual acts.

The victim said she declined both offers and absolutely did not give him permission to touch her.

Text messages

Whittelsey, Griders attorney, read part of the written statement the victim gave to police, which read: I told my coworkers I was going to milk Pat for some big bills.

The victim said that was correct and said that Grider gave big tips to people who spoke with him.

Whittelsey asked the victim if a relationship ever developed between her and Grider during the time theyd known each other. The victim replied that they were nothing more than friends.

Did you ever tell Pat how much you loved him? he asked.

Yes sir, I typically say that to a lot of my friends, she replied.

Whittelsey read some text messages between Grider and the victim to the court.

Im home my dear, Whittelsey said the victim had texted Grider.

Grider replied, I think I like you more than you like me.

The victim responded, What!!! I love you.

The victim confirmed these messages but repeated that she and Grider were nothing more than friends.

Whittelsey asked if she was after Griders money, and the victim said, No, sir. He asked me for my phone number, and he approached me the first time I met him.

Closing statements

Clark said in closing statements that the prosecution had proven that Grider inappropriately touched the victim for sexual gratification.

In his conclusion, Whittelsey said he had trouble understanding why the victim would stay at the bar and take a shot with the offender and then sign a sexual misconduct order 10 days later. He said he believed it was for financial gain.

After Judge McLaughlin found Grider guilty, Whittelsey gave the verbal notice of appeal.

We would say its inappropriate to send anyone to jail under the facts as they appear to have been interpreted, Whittelsey said.

I dont think I interpreted anything, McLaughlin replied. I think its right there in black and white: he touched her; she didnt ask him to touch her.
An official of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) called on Wednesday for improving girls' access to education in northern Nigeria, where there are a large number of out-of-school girls.

Speaking to reporters in Kano, a northern city of Nigeria, Rahama Farah, a UNICEF officer based in Nigeria, said there are currently 18.5 million out-of-school children in Nigeria, with about 60 percent of them being girls.

"Most importantly, you will need to know that most of these out-of-school children are actually from northern Nigeria," Farah said, adding there are barriers that affect girls' education.

"This situation heightens gender inequity, where only one in four girls from poor, rural families completes junior secondary school education," he added.

Gunmen attacks on schools recently in parts of the most populous African country have worsened the situation of girls' education, as these attacks had created an insecure learning environment, discouraging parents and caregivers from sending their children to schools, according to the UNICEF officer.

He said about 1.4 million girls are having access to education in the northern part of Nigeria in recent years because of an intervention project led by the Fund, but much is still needed to be done to improve girls' access to education in north Nigeria.
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Notice body

Marni Lane, a first-year student in Auburn Universitys Education to Accomplish Growth in Life Experiences for Success, or EAGLES, program, recently joined forces with sophomore Jenna Riese to write an article about friendship for the University of Minnesotas Impact magazine.

Lane and Riesea Warm-hearted Individuals Nurturing Great Success, or WINGS, peer mentorcollaborated on the article Roommates: Learning from Each Other for the magazine, which is produced by the Institute on Community Integration. The piece was part of the Spring 2022 Inclusive Higher Education feature issue, which highlighted the stories of people with intellectual, developmental and other disabilities.

Lane wrote about her classes, experiences on Auburns campus, EAGLES activities, being a member of the sorority Chi Omega and her friendship with Riese.

At the beginning of the year, I was scared about moving away from home, but then I met everybody and theyre so friendly, Lane wrote. Its perfect for me, and Im loving it.

Riese, a second-generation Auburn student, wrote about her time as a WINGS mentor helping EAGLES like Lane acclimate to college life and develop life skills that will serve them after their time on the Plains.

Today, Marni and I help each other in equally important ways, by working together and learning how to live together as roommates, Riese wrote. We both learn those soft skills that are so important in everyday life.

Auburns EAGLES program is part of the Department of Special Education, Rehabilitation and Counseling, or SERC, and is a non-degree program focusing on academic enrichment, the teaching of personal and social skills, independent living skills, health and wellness enhancement and integrated work experiences. Supporters may donate to the EAGLES program here.
Nick is lucky to have her



I wonder if they double date with Joe and Priyanka

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they all look the same to me ok

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Do they clap from each others balconies?

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Man, its amazing how many celebs showed their asses during the pandemic lol 

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she and joe are so cute together and I wish them all the best

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hey i feel like i havent seen you on here in forever?! welcome back!

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Awww thank you! <3



I got super busy, also had covid and shit so I kinda just stopped checking ontd



Hows it going?<3

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I don't get the Nick Jones jokes, can someone give context hahaha

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oh it was a typo not a joke LOL soz

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lmao as you can tell i have never been into the jonas brothers 

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Oh honey. :( We must protect her!!

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I hope Joe agrees to move back to England she seems to really miss it, where do they live now? LA?

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miami which is so weird to me... someone on ontd suggested it might be for tax reasons?

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oh yeah that is weird lol, last place I was expecting someone to say. Maybe Joe's parents live there or he has family there? I know a lot of New York/New Jersey transplants tend to move there lol

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oh god, Miami must feel like culture shock next to England. It's so hot and sunny and crowded

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Im sorry to all of the Floridians on here but EW Florida, couldnt pay me enough. Barely paid enough to live in US in general.

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Probably...FL doesn't have any state income tax. But then again, you're living in FL

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Oh she must be miserable. Going from the UK to anywhere in America is a cultural shock but Florida?  Poor girl!

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for real though this interview was bleak. idr what ontd user was saying the other day how they romanticized being a celebrity and have become really disillusioned about it. when i read things like this it becomes so clear people having this level of fame and/or wealth is just a recipe for disaster... also her daily life just sounds hectic af and she's still so young

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I have been fully aware that I would lose my mind as a celebrity for a long time. I don't like a lot of attention! When strangers talk to me on the street now I'm put off, I can't imagine going into the world and everyone believes they KNOW me.



And everything has to be so magnified in the internet age? The feedback from people is multiplied. Put being a kid growing up in front of the world on top of it and tbh... I don't really trust parents of child stars.

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I agree. Anonymity is heaven.

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Yeah. And 15+ years ago celebrities just had to deal with paparazzi-who were awful but couldn't be everywhere. Now literally everyone has a camera and access to social media to easily make a picture go viral. I'd lose my mind.

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Fame would be my personal hell. I can't even deal with being perceived by men at the grocery store sometimes. I feel like anyone who desperately wants fame hasn't exactly thought it through.

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I think fame could be fun for like, a year or two, tops, and then it becomes hell on Earth. Especially for women! Too fat, too thin, stupid, bitchy, snobby, fake, show us your tits, god you let yourself go, smother me to death mommy, Kys you piece of shit, all of that all day every day



Nooooope!

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oh god my mental health would fucking plummet



I'm already so anxious and shit with normal life shit, I couldn't handle be scrutinized and the like.



I like being anon and private. I try to avoid humans irl anyway.

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If I recall, she went to a school near where I used to live in Warwick. It was quite a nice place.

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Yeah, I live(d) in the village just down the road from her, it's a really beautiful part of England. I cannot imagine going from quiet, spacious, rural Warwickshire to fucking Miami. I'd rather die lmao

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you made me click on the source because i needed to know what the advice was!



her live-in therapist said "no one actually cares [that much about you]. you're not that important."



i'd say people care about her (or any celebrity) an inordinate amount but that's just me.

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yeah it's like the therapist is implying she has an ego that's not there? i know she meant it in the way that most ppl do when it comes to social media, but these kinda things don't really apply to celebs. people care. that's why we have unhinged stans

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exactly. that's something i've said to myself and my friends but it hardly applies to celebrities, political figures, athletes, etc. some people care entirely too much. but i guess if it helped her that's good.

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yea like i'm sure there are people out there analyzing every single thing she posts. i've come across posts on instagram identifying every single thing in the background of celebrity ig posts, like down to book titles and random decor. i feel like the best thing would be to give your public account up to a PR person, limit comments, and have a finsta for friends and family, but i'm sure it's hard to step away from that attention once you've grown up with it

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People care, but they can also stop caring if a celebrity goes away pretty quickly. Im 45 and I think about the people who were big deals in tabloids when I was young and a bunch of them are nonentities now.

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Lol my therapist said something similar. Im moving across country and Ive barely announced it because Im afraid of what ppl will think. Maybe theyll think Im making a big mistake, Im not talented enough to take the jump, etc etc. And she said something similar. It kind of helped.

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it's a way to help with anxiety. i sometimes suffer being frozen by decision making, or beat myself up over choices after the fact. it's saying no one else is paying as much attention to your slip-ups as you are.

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"her live-in therapist"

her what

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Do people though? We usually say that we care how they look or what they do but ONTD's tagline is literally "Celebrities are disposable." We don't really care, her fanbase doesn't really care. Even if we are convinced that we indeed care, we're just deluding ourselves. Especially if Sophie is anything like me, she's confident that people are hyperfocused and she somehow affects a lot of people with the butterfly effect. In her case, that can seem like a strong possibility. You really need to know who actually cares about you. Husbands come and go, some friendships come and go, jobs can simply go away, and even families can fuck off if they're selfish enough. That's super freeing if a person is so anxious about this.

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I say that to myself all the time as a shorthand, its like saying no matter what tiny thing youre obsessing about with regards to yourself, youre probably literally the only person who notices and no one else is going to care or spend more than 5 seconds on it

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the first passage kinda sounds like shes using marriage/joe as a means to give her life "purpose" and tbh that is my biggest fear in a relationship.

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yeah that was kind of wild to me... kit harington iirc said something similar about feeling lost after game of thrones ending/being at a low point with his addiction and getting married, going to rehab, and having a kid fairly quickly afterwards. idgi, i feel like that would be the worst time to actually make a huge decision, especially in sophie's case when you're so young.

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Yeah they are also both so young, I really do wonder about it...

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Yeah, that passage gave me that vibe as well. Idk if she married Joe to have a purpose necessarily, more like she thought oh this is what I need to do now. Some people need that type of support/structure though even though it seems kinda codependent.

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and maybe marriage felt more of a commitment like GOT was  where as her career was never certain, especially after people were p. awful about those x-men movies and her acting/accent

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Yeah, and the fact that she clearly wants to be in the UK yet needs to "convince" him? Surely she said it was okay to live in the US but this is the type of shit that emphasizes how men's wishes & priorities tend to be the default in most straight relationship.



That bit reminds me of all the times I had friends tell me they couldn't do something bc their boyfriends wouldn't "let them", and it's infuriating.

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which is funny because before they got married she said being married wasn't an achievement it was just a thing she was doing, it wasn't the best thing of her life, he's just her companion etc like a REALLY healthy view of it.



she also said they broke up right before the wedding and they broke up once more in the beginning of their relationship because he told her she didn't love herself enough and he wanted her to be better mentally before they got married but idt she ever got there idk that's just me this marriage was so fast for her idk

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The Jonas brothers always came off as pushy with marriage and shit. It wouldnt surprise me if one of the women they married came out in the future and blasted them for pushing family on them.

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It definitely sounds like it which can't be too healthy. Never put your sense of purpose in the hands of a man.

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I feel like a lot of people get married after they've been together for X amount of years because "that's what you do." And then they have kids because, again, "that's what you do." I keep seeing it happen around me, these couples who tbh barely seem to even get along but they have to get married because they're X age and they want kids so their biological clocks are ticking, but then they get married and have kids and they don't even seem to enjoy it much because they're tired and stressed all the time.



Like, I'm not anti-marriage, I'm married myself, but it all just seems to be a little weird. Like, there has to be more to life than striving for marriage and kids as your main goal. My husband and I waited like 10 years to get married because we both had things we wanted to do first, and tbh I wanted to be more financially independent and etc, so I'm glad we waited. I also realize I'm lucky that I found someone who is just as independent as me, though. There is a big difference between being in a relationship with someone who sees their partner as a means to achieve a life goal, and being in a relationship with someone who is just stoked about your companionship.

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Yeah, this made me grateful that I was single for a long time in my 20s and didn't get married until I was in my early 30s. It sucked being single for so long, but I think I really needed it because I would have been too codependent on someone else in my early 20s (because that's the kind of environment I was raised in). Being single for so long and getting with my husband in my late 20s gave me time to grow into myself, figure out what I wanted, and become independent.

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YeahI dont know if theyre going to stay married for long. He probably will move to England for a bit but I know I could never do the same. Its just too different and I would hateeverything about it.

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TW: Eating disorders



The idea of a live in companion is interesting tbh. A big reason why I dont want to live alone is because things tend to get dark if Im alone for a long period of time and I start to binge/purge ten fold. I dont need someone checking on me with knowledge of my ED per say, I just need them living their life around me to keep me in check.



That sounds so sad to type out lmao but it is what it is tbh. Im my EDs own worst company

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My issue is depression, but it sounds similar. I moved in with my mom during the panini, and it was kinda nice just knowing someone else was in the house after living alone for 20 years. Now I'm back in my own place in a new city, and one of my friends is really worried about me because I work from home and rarely leave my apartment. Probably justifiably so. I am looking for places to volunteer or groups to join but I'm also a hardcore introvert so that's difficult, too.



Anyhoo, sorry for the essay, but internet hugs! You aren't alone!

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OMG, are you me?? I'm in the same scenario (depression, new city, rarely leave apartment, etc.).



Except, I don't have anybody noticing behaviors. I keep to myself and have been thinking about doing things like volunteering. But I get so drained after dealing with people all day.



Pandemic made it worse, too.

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I am totally the same! And it does not seem that sad to me. Sometimes i am like "you are a grown ass adult, and the only reason you eat like a normal person is because you are afraid of being judged, essentially "



But most of the time I am like "living with someone seems more in line with how people have lived for millenia, i am doing great, move on!"



And yes, it is not just eating for me. I get detached from reality almost. I was my unhappiest when i lived alone. :(

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Another person who cares about your well-being makes a big difference.

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I live with my family because I'm afraid if I live alone that I'll self-sabotage myself (my depression gets bad) and then I'll kill myself.

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it's the same with me and depression. so many people WANT to live alone and i couldn't do it. i've had roommates that were gone 24/7 and i really got stuck into a hole. it's not even the other person needing to do anything for me. it's just having that reminder of reality that, oh yeah, i need to go out there and be human too.

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Awww, I just want to hug her. This is their first child? I feel like she had her kid like a year ago. What is time?

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ofc there was an ontd post about it: this is their second. they had their first baby during quarantine (i think?). i just remember the terrible pap walk where their nanny was pushing the stroller and they were walking beside her holding handsofc there was an ontd post about it: https://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/119278427.html

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Oh thank you! I was really thinking I'd lost a few years.



ETA: Oh yeah, I saw that post. I really do feel like it's still 2020. Jeez.



Edited at 2022-05-12 01:06 am (UTC)

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omfg I never saw this lmao what is the purpose

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Rich people are something else.

Push your own kid.



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That is just weird. No shame in people getting help with their kids but at least take them for a walk on your own. It's an opportunity to spend time with your kid and get some fresh air, plus the nanny can get a break. It's a win-win

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Aww I hope she gets back to England!!



Ugh it must be tough when you have a couple that are from opposite places especially when there is a cultural gap.

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Maybe it's she didn't realize she would miss home as much, but this is one of those things that seems odd to me couples haven't had some kind of conversation about before marriage, especially if you're planning on having a family. Where you plan to settle is pretty important.

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I wonder if they did? cause sometimes one partner will be like "yeah we'll do bi-coastal" but then quietly go back on their word.

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was confused why her age was included.





this is sad ngl, EDs are nightmare. never knew about live in conpanion/therapist for that, that sounds neat but also expensive. also persobally as you grow older you feel kinda goofy dealing with an ED still cos people ignorantly think its a  teenager  thing.



wishinng her all the best. i hope she gets to go back to england, she deserves to be somewhere comfortable.



i saw her in the new michael peterson series and i almost didnt recognise her. i enjoy her in it.

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I stopped watching GOT after a few seasons and when I started watching the staircase I kept saying to myself Wow! She looks so much like Sophie Turner. The bangs really fooled me lol.

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as you grow older you feel kinda goofy dealing with an ED still cos people ignorantly think its a  teenager  thing.

omg 100%. half of my struggle w my ed is me judging myself bc i shouldve been over it since im in my 30s and everyone says how much more confident you naturally become at that age and im still here hating myself.

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yeah I feel you on that, not ED but SH - in my early 30s and a lot of ppl think it's just a teenager thing. I also look younger than my age so I guess that doesn't help.

keep going bb <3 we can do it! (probably)

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also persobally as you grow older you feel kinda goofy dealing with an ED still cos people ignorantly think its a  teenager  thing.



this is soooo true and i've been dealing with it recently. i've made myself rly sick the last 2 years slowly falling deeper and deeper back into ED and i feel so incredibly stupid for landing back into the same dangerous thought processes from high school. i know these things have no assigned age but i can't help thinking "jesus, you're almost 30, get a grip loser!"



Edited at 2022-05-13 02:07 am (UTC)

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I wouldnt want to raise my daughter here, either. Drag him back!

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same! like you could live anywhere in the world and you pick... florida??

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[ TW: Mentions of SA ] - Amber says that Depp tore off her nightgown, leaving her naked and slipping around on the tile as she couldnt get her footing. She says that Depp slammed her against the wall, screaming that he fucking hates me, and that I ruined his life. She says he went from punching the wall next to her, to slamming the wall mounted phone as he screamed at her Photos. Amber says that at some point, Depp was on top of her as shes bent over the countertop (Her back on the bar, her chest up), still screaming the same things. She begins to get very upset as she says, Im looking at his eyes, and I dont see him anymore. I dont see him anymore, it wasnt him. It was black. Ive never been so scared in my life, it was black. Amber says that she tried to look at him to get through to Johnny, and that her feet and arms were slipping in the glass and she wanted to get up so she could breathe because she didnt think he knew what he was doing.

WATCH as #AmberHeard sobs on the stand as she recounts a fight in Australia.



(Notice Depp appears to look up at her) #JohnnyDepp #DeppHeardTrial @LawCrimeNetwork pic.twitter.com/56x7N2LyME  Cathy Russon (@cathyrusson) May 5, 2022

[ TW: SA ] the bottle that he had inside me was broken - Depp shakes his head at this (4:48:40).She says she couldnt feel it, she didnt feel pain, didnt feel anything, and that she thought to herself Please god, please, I hope its not broken.





Depp reacting to Heard's testimony at 4:59:20.



- Amber says that she doesn't know how it ended, but that she remembers going to the bathroom afterwards and retching and losing control of her bladder. - Amber says that she felt a pressure on her pubic bone, and that she remembers being still, looking around the room, and wondering if- Depp shakes his head at this.She says she couldnt feel it, she didnt feel pain,, and that she thought to herselfDepp reacting to Heard's testimony at- Amber says that she doesn't know how it ended, but that she remembers going to the bathroom afterwards and retching and losing control of her bladder.

[ TW: SA ] I know this is very painful. She said that Depp said to her Ill fucking kill you over and over again as he assaulted her. Bredehoft asks if she bled as a result of the assault, Amber says she did. When asked if she experienced any pain later, Amber said she wasnt thinking about that, I was heartbroken. She said that she convinced herself that the bottle wasnt broken or itd be a lot worse, and that the physical pain she felt paled in comparison as to how scared and shocked she was because shed just married this man.



- Bredehoft asks her, for the sake of clarity on the record, if she was penetrated with the bottle. Amber says I cant believe I have to do this and her lawyer responds I am so sorry. I am so sorry. At this point, I dont believe Amber had looked at Depp either when testifying as shes directed her testimony largely towards the jury - this is a common legal tactic recommended by lawyers when testifying in court, and like Depp, there are other ways you can read into this lack of eye contact. However, she looks directly at him, for the first time in 9 hours of testifying, and says Johnny had the bottle inside of me. (5:19:30) ... and was shoving it inside of me over and over again. Depp does not look at her, or even at the screen in front of him where hed previously spent most of the testimony looking. (Both moments pictured below) - Amber is again asked about the sexual assault, Bredehoft apologises for this asShe said that Depp said to herover and over again as he assaulted her. Bredehoft asks if she bled as a result of the assault, Amber says she did. When asked if she experienced any pain later, Amber said sheShe said that she convinced herself that the bottle wasnt broken or itd be a lot worse, and that the physical pain she felt paled in comparison as to how scared and shocked she was because shed- Bredehoft asks her, for the sake of clarity on the record, if she was penetrated with the bottle. Amber saysand her lawyer respondsAt this point, I dont believe Amber had looked at Depp either when testifying as shes directed her testimony largely towards the jury - this is a common legal tactic recommended by lawyers when testifying in court, and like Depp, there are other ways you can read into this lack of eye contact. However, she looks directly at him, for the first time in 9 hours of testifying, and says Depp previously testified that hed never sexually assaulted Amber, which caused her to become visibly upset . Amber keeps looking at him for another 5 seconds or so, briefly looks back at the jury, and then goes back to looking at Johnny as she saysDepp does not look at her, or even at the screen in front of him where hed previously spent most of the testimony looking.

Moment when #AmberHeard and #JohnnyDepp almost run into each other in the courtroom at the break.



They appear to make eye contact. @LawCrimeNetwork pic.twitter.com/PNIexe9r0s  Cathy Russon (@cathyrusson) May 5, 2022

@CourtTV reporter explains what she saw after wondering Johnny Depp almost came face to face with Amber Heard AWAY from the judge, jury and cameras. Sickening! #JusticeForAmberHeard #IStandWithAmberHeard pic.twitter.com/D3mRoaTlGv  Brooklyn Girl Tam (@TL81) May 7, 2022

The bar area where #JohnnyDepp says #AmberHeard threw a vodka bottle and severed his finger and the same bar area where #AmberHeard says he sexually assualted her with a bottle. @LawCrimeNetwork pic.twitter.com/lDOPA1jrDi  Cathy Russon (@cathyrusson) May 5, 2022

[ TW: SA ] - Amber then describes another sexual assault, that happened after this incident. She says she tried to verbally defend herself to show him that I wasnt a punching bag, but he pushed her into the bathroom and grabbed her by the vagina. She says he asked her Are you some fucking man now? while violating her, and was smiling as he did this. Amber says she ran from the house, threw something at him, but Depp grabbed her by the hair and swung her around, hitting her in the face at some point. Amber says that members of Depps security team separated them, and she didnt see him until the next day.

The Depp v. Heard defamation trial is on a weeklong break, but this post will be covering the second half of her testimony from last Thursday, continuing on from yesterday's post. This post will start with Amber's testimony regarding the Australian incident, where she has previously alleged that Depp essentially held her "hostage" in a violent reign of terror that lasted three days.strong content warning for this post. The testimony regarding Australia is absolutely grueling, though I will be putting anything about sexual assault under a spoiler cut. Please do not feel pressured to read this if this is too difficult - put yourself first. - Amber claims that she was already nervous prior to going to Australia due to the conversations they had when she was in London filming The Danish Girl (She flew from London to Australia to be with Depp). She said when she got to Australia, shed noticed hed lost a lot of weight. Amber says that they were having a home date, and at some point Depp pulled out a bag of MDMA - Amber says she was shocked by this as she had believed he was clean and sober. She says that Depp asked her if shed take some with him - Amber seems visibly exasperated by this, rolling her eyesbefore she says ,- Amber says that he also drank in front of her, which started an argument. She says that she shoved past him, stomping off, but Depp grabbed her and they argued about her walking away. She says, , and that it gets harder to recall things- Amber says that she remembers Depp shoving her caused her to go sliding across the floor. They had another argument which was a spin-off from the previous one, that resulted in Depp shoving her up against the fridge and holding her there by the throat, bashing her against the wall next to the fridge, and that at some point she slapped him in the face and was screaming at him as he screamed back. She says that she walked upstairs, and that either in this fight or one later on she ended up barricading herself in a room. She says that while she barricaded the door, he could still get in other doors to the room but at least she could hear it.- Amber says that at this point, March 2015, she was being medicated by Depps doctor. She says she was taking anti-anxiety pills, had tried to take anti-depressants but they didnt work, she had insomnia, and was waking up in the middle of the night having panic attacks. She says that she kept the door barricaded, went to sleep after taking sleeping pills.- She says the next day Depp still hadnt slept or eaten, and had taken 8 - 10 MDMA pills by this point. She says that Depp was accusing her of sleeping with Eddie Redmayne. Amber says that he thought she was still working with Billy Bob Thornton, which she had filmed a year prior, and he accused her of sleeping with him and the actor from London Fields that invited her to a concert.- Amber claims that it was her who hired a lawyer to get a post-nup after having discussions with Depps sister - in Depps testimony, he claimed that it was his lawyer who brought it up, and that Amber was incredibly upset and this was what began the violence in Australia. Amber claims that when Depp found out, he called the lawyer and fired her, again saying. Amber says that shes heard this line from Depp at least 25 times. She says that Depp was also screaming at his agent on the phone about people stealing money from him.- Amber begins to talk about the violence that occurred that evening - again, she says does she not fully recall the order of things, or even what started it. Amber says that Depp slammed her against the wall next to the bar hard, slammed her against the fridges, that he called her a whore, slut, and fat-ass (Depp is heard calling her a fat-ass in at least one audio clip between the two). She says that the insults went from, to saying hed wished hed never married her. She says that she shoved him hard to get him off her, and he shoved her back and says- Amber says that she cant remember if this was before or after he choked her, but at some point they were in a struggle as she held him by his shirts lapel, and he threw her across the room which resulted on her landing on a ping pong table. She says that he got on top of her, whacking her in the face repetitively,.- She says that they got up, she doesnt remember how exactly, and he held up an empty bottle to her saying that she couldnt control him anymore. Amber says that he taunted her with it, asking if she wanted to take it - she says that eventually she got it from him, and smashed it on the ground which set him off. She says, and then apologises for this. Amber claims that Depp started screaming, he hit her which knocked her to the ground, and she stood up only for him to throw a bottle at her which missed. Amber says that eventually Depp had a broken bottle up against her face and neck area, andShe says it was terrifying, and that he had said this to her on the plane incident as well. Amber said she honestly doesnt remember if she threw anything back at him, but she doesnt think she did.- Amber says that she remembers himand its at this point, after 8 hours of testimony and on the second day, that Depp finally looks at her for the first time.- Amber says,, and that he was throwing bottles and cans at her, and she couldnt move or go anywhere. She says that finally he ran out of things to throw at her, so she tried to leave the area, but he began slamming her across the room and punching the wall next to her.- At this point, Amber tries to begins describing what led to the alleged sexual assault she suffered at his hands. Ill write about certain aspects of it, but I wont go deep into detail because its as difficult to write about as it is to listen to, and I dont want to sensationalize it in anyway - especially since Amber testified to this in the UK trial, but the records were sealed as she didnt want this to be public. Amber begins to speak to this atin the stream, if you would prefer to have the full context. Anything about the assault will be under a spoiler cut.- In the above video, Amber gets incredibly upset as her discussion moves closer to the sexual assault. You can clearly hear her say- Depp looks up at her again at this point. Finally she says,before crying more. She tries to describe what happened next, but breaks down and again says,She tries to describe the situation, that her back was on the bar, that she thought Depp was punching her, but she can barely form a sentence at this point. Depp also looks at her multiple times while she breaks down as well.She says that she remembers seeing blood on the floor, and that she has a memory of leaving the front door and Depp begging her not to leave - but she doesnt know if that was before or after the assault. She says that she remembers taking sleeping pills (, and that the next day she heard Depp blaring Marilyn Manson music after having not slept again.- Amber said that she walked downstairs and saw the destruction that had been caused to the house - the messages written on the walls and mirrors in Depps blood and paint, mashed potato smeared in various places, a table overturned, broken glass. She says that at this point, Depp showed her the cut off finger - she assumed that it had happened when he was smashing the phone. Amber said that she told him, and that eventually one of them called him. She says that she made him a coffee because he wanted another Red Bull, but as soon as she handed it to him Depp threw it at the TV. She says that Depps security team arrived, Depp took his penis out and tried to pee outside of the house,Depp visibly laughs at this- Amber continues saying that Depp kept saying he was going to leave more messages, and that Jerry Judge and a nurse took her to a theater room, and that shortly after a nurse was trying to sedate her and that she tried to fight how much they were trying to give me. She says she was crying as she felt that she needed to figure out her life and her relationship with Johnny, and that she didnt know if this could be something that killed him, if anything just the drugs and alcohol. She later says that she was scared to leave Depp as she thought he might die, or kill himself. Amber claims that Depp told her hed put a cigarette out on his face before shed even got to Australia - Depp has claimed upon seeing images of himself that Amber put out a cigarette on him, Amber has claimed in audio recordings that he has put out cigarettes on her, which he is never heard denying.- After this grueling part of the testimony, the court adjourns for a break, but Amber and Johnny have a near run in for the first time in the entire trial. The door to the room where Depp's team resides is next to the stand. He walks towards his team, initially not looking at Amber. Amber steps off the stand, and upon seeing Depp walking towards her, she freezes and then physically recoils to the point that her arms go up as if she's just got a fright. She backs up right up until she hits something that is between her and the wall, and you can hear it hit the wall as a result. As Amber is backing up, Depp now seems to look right at her as he inches forward, and two court bailiffs bought their arms up to stop him from getting any closer. The male bailiff ushers Depp towards his lawyers, who shrugs, and is then seen laughing with his lawyer. The female bailiff looks back at Johnny to make sure he is further away, and then escorts Amber back to her team.- A reporter for Court TV, who have not exactly been pro-Amber in their reporting, said from where she sat in the gallery that she could hear Amber, and that sheThe reporter says that once Amber's team exited the courtroom, she could hear AmberShe also points out that Amber would not have known the cameras were on here as the court had gone to break.- After the break, Amber is asked about images of the damaged property, she believes that it was cleaned up significantly prior to these images being taken, and the actual damage initially done was much worse. Amber says that the canvases that were damaged belonged to her, and that Depp even ruined a painting she was doing of Lily-Rose. These images are in addition to those we've already seen of the messages Depp wrote around the house in blood with his injured finger.- On her way home from Australia, Amber says she bought and read a relationship advice book named "Four Ways to Click." When asked why she bought this, Amber says,- Amber is then asked about the incident later that month where she punched Johnny.has always claimed that she was being beaten by Depp when Whitney, her sister, stepped in front of Depp to defend Amber. Amber claims that Depp went to attack Whitney, and so she punched him in defense of her sister.- Amber claims that the argument began when she saw messages on his iPad to another woman after he had passed out, she says it was a woman that Depp had a, but the texts were about him going to her house right after him and Amber got married, and that he was having a sexual relationship with her. A relationship Depp had that "overlapped" with Amber (He began dating Amber in October 2011, the texts mentioned in the below testimony are from 2012) was also referenced in the UK Libel case.- Amber says that she freaked out when she saw these messages, and immediately confronted him about it. She says,She admits that she was yelling at him, calling him ugly names, told him to, and that they were screaming at each other. She says eventually they began pushing each other, and that she remembers being so mad at him because of the cheating, and what happened in Australia not long after, and that - For context, the argument started in the penthouse that Depp and Heard lived in - Penthouse 3. Her sister, Whitney, lived in Penthouse 4. Penthouse 5 was next to this, and you could walk through all three penthouses via doors that were upstairs only.- Amber says that she went into the Penthouse 4 apartment, crying as she entered Whitneys bedroom. She says that Johnny came in and grabbed her, but when she escaped his grasp he left. Bredehoft asks her if there was any contact between the two before he left - she says she doesnt remember, but that at that stage in their relationship Johnny would often shove and throw her, and that the only way to get out of it was toShe says that he remembered Depps hand in her hair, and then she remembers him leaving.- Amber claims that she then heard him in Penthouse 5, which was empty at the time so she used the rooms at the top as a wardrobe. Heard says that she entered P5 as she could hear him screaming, and that she saw him with a security guard (Travis McGivern, who previously testified), and Debbie Lloyd. Amber says that Depp immediately stood up and started screaming at her, she screamed back, and that as Lloyd came up to her Depp threw a Red Bull can which either hit or narrowly missed Debbie. Amber says that she at least called him a, and that when she did that Depp ran up the stairs to her. She says his hand was in her hair, yanking her down, and that he hit her in the face with his cast.- Amber says that she remembered a struggle, and then Whitney put herself in between Johnny and Amber. She says that Johnny swung at her, and that- Upon mentioning Kate Moss, Depps lawyer who is sitting next to him turns around and slightly pumps his fist to the lawyers behind him while Depp laughs and shakes his head. Depp fans seem to think that this is because mentioning Kate Moss means that they can call her in as a witness, and that they will do this. Amber has previously mentioned that she had heard a story about Depp pushing Kate Moss in the UK Trial (His lawyer brought up that she hadnt brought this up in her taped deposition from 2016, but Heard said- Amber says that only then did Depps security pull him away, and the next day she saw that her possessions were destroyed or overturned. This is all in direct contrast to Travis McGiverns testimony - he claimed that Depp called him and Lloyd to the penthouse due to an argument, they met him in the lobby (Something he did not mention in his UK testimony), it was Amber threw the Red Bull can, and that Amber hit Depp as she was enraged that Depp had thrown some of her clothing. Again, McGivern claimed that Amber punched Depp solely out of rage, and that while he doesn't remember where Whitney was, he says that she was not between Amber and Johnny. - Questioning now moves to the December 2015 headbutting incident. Amber says that she doesnt recall what started the fight, but that she remembers Depp chasing her in the kitchen, throwing something at him to slow his momentum, and that he got on top of her and punched her in the face. She says that he dragged her up the stairs by her hair, she got up, he pushed her back down, she got back up, and then Depp saidbefore pushing her down. Amber claims that she got back up one last time, and that Depp headbutted her as a result.- Amber then says they had another struggle, as she tried to get his body off her while he pummeled me. She says Depp dragged her into the neighbouring apartment, he wrestled her on to the bed, and then had his knee on her back while she was face down onto the bed. Amber says that he punched the back of her head over and over again, while screaming in her earAmber says she was screaming as Depp told her that he was going to kill her. She says that she thoughtDepp looks somewhat amused by this, and when she says,, he laughs.- Photos of Amber from the next day are shown, many of these have been seen before. Photos are also shown of the injuries a few days later, as well as damage to the property, these havent previously been seen before- Amber says that the next day she had an appearance on James Corden to promote The Danish Girl, and that her makeup artist covered the injuries with heavy makeup - her makeup artist made a statement confirming this for the UK trial. - Later that month, Amber spent Christmas in the Bahamas with Depp and his children. Heard explains still going on this trip, sayingShe says that each violent incident was a, and each one was like an investment in the future she wanted with him. Amber says whenever a violent incident would happen, she thought it wouldnt get that bad again so shed forgive him.- Amber says that Johnnys son, Jack, asked her if she was okay or if he could help when Johnny began nodding off repeatedly, and spilt wine on her trousers for the third time on the trip. She says she "shot up" and yelled something along the lines of "Johnny what are you doing? You spilt it on me again", and then thanked Jack "in a pointed way" before going to the closet to change her pants. She says that Depp followed her in and shoved her against the wall, sayingAmber says that this point, someone told Jack to leave but she doesn't recall who it was.A moment from this testimony has gone viral recently, where people have claimed that Amber blows her nose, sees a photo is being taken of her, and poses. I initially thought that the clip was perhaps edited, buthas pointed out that in actuality, the flash is not from a camera, but from something that shows up on both of their screens as you can see it reflected on Johnny as well from the screen in front of him. Amber also is paused for longer than the "flash", and looking down at the screen - she seems to be just taking in what is being shown to her after blowing her noise. The moment happens atin the stream.- After the testimony ended, both Depp and Heard's teams issued a statement.- Stephen Deuters, Depp's former assistant and now an executive at his production company, went on a Twitter rampage over the weekend against both Amber and Eve Barlow. For context, Eve Barlow is the reason Stephen's wife, Gina, was kicked out of the court - Ginato having watched previous testimony, but only after the judge was prompted to ask as a result of Barlow showing Heard's team an Instagram post Gina had made in January 2020 about the UK Libel Case. It is unknown if Barlow and/or Heard's team purposefully misrepresented this, but Barlow should not have been using her phone in the courtroom regardless, and she was banned from the court for the remainder of the trial. However, again, Ginato having done this when asked, so if Barlow broke the rules to 'defraud' a court, then so did his wife.- It should also be noted that both Stephen and Gina Deuters have referred to Amber as a- Gina in the aforementioned IG post, and then Stephen during his testimony 6 months later at the UK case. Gina has also been reposting Depp fan accounts on her story in support of him. Again Stephen sent texts to Amber after the Boston plane incident confirming that it happened and apologising on Depp's behalf. Stephen claimed in 2016 that the texts were doctored , only to claim during the 2020 UK Libel Trial that he was just trying to placate Amber and the incident was a light kick.



- A photo of an injured Amber was seen on Depp's screen when she described Depp backhanding her during an argument in 2013 , but his team objected as the photo was not submitted during the discovery phase of the trial. The note she's holding is allegedly one Depp left behind. TMZ has now "obtained" the photo and released it. According to TMZ, Depp's team claimed the photo was taken in 2012 - TMZ claims to have seen the metadata, and confirmed that this is the case. However, Amber has alleged that Depp first hit her in 2013. According to TMZ,
OPEC continues to undershoot its oil production target in the OPEC+ deal, failing in April to boost output as much as required by the agreement.

All 13 members of OPEC  including Iran, Libya, and Venezuela exempted from the OPEC+ deal  saw their production rise by just 153,000 barrels per day (bpd) collectively, to 28.648 million bpd in April, the organizations Monthly Oil Market Report (MOMR) showed on Thursday.

The top three OPEC producers, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the UAE, saw the highest increases in their respective oil production last month, while output in Libya plunged by 161,000 bpd to below 1 million bpd, at 913,000 bpd, according to OPECs secondary sources.

Libyan oilfields and terminals have again been under blockade in recent weeks amid protests, clashes, and disputes over the distribution of oil revenues in the country with two rival governments, with incumbent Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah refusing to step down for newly sworn-in eastern Prime Minister Fathi Bashaga.

Excluding Libya and the other two producers exempted from the OPEC+ deal, the ten OPEC members bound by the agreement saw their collective production at 24.464 million bpd in April, OPECs figures showed. This compares with a collective quota for OPEC-10 of 25.315 million bpd for last month.

The gap is more than 800,000 bpd, mostly due to severe underperformance from African members Angola and Nigeria, which have been pumping 300,000 bpd-400,000 bpd below quotas each, for months, due to a lack of investment and capacity.

Per OPECs secondary sources, the biggest OPEC producer, Saudi Arabia, raised its production by 127,000 bpd to 10.346 million bpd in April, versus a quota nearly 100,000 bpd higher  10.436 million bpd. The Kingdom, however, self-reported to OPEC higher production, one of 10.441 million bpd.



Image source: https://commoditycontext.com

Secondary sources showed that OPECs second-largest producer, Iraq, boosted production by 103,000 bpd to 4.405 million bpd, nearly reaching its April quota of 4.414 million bpd.

Last week, the wider OPEC+ group agreed to leave its production plan unchanged, aiming to boost crude oil production in June by 432,000 bpd, in a move widely expected by the market. While OPEC+ is sticking to its policy of modest monthly increases, many of its members are not pumping to their quotas and the group is estimated to be around 1.5 million bpd below its quota.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads from Oilprice.com:
OPECs most influential energy ministers warned that the bill could send oil prices soaring by 200 or even 300 percent.

Last week, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee approved the NOPEC bill, leading to pushback from both within and outside the U.S.

For decades, different forms of NOPEC legislation designed to pave the way for lawsuits against OPEC have been considered by Congress.

If the U.S. passes the NOPEC bill, a bill designed to pave the way for lawsuits against OPEC members for market manipulation, the oil market could face even more chaos. OPECs most influential energy ministers warned against passing the legislation, suggesting it could send oil prices soaring by 200% or 300%. The last thing we want is someone trying to hinder that system, the UAEs Energy Minister Suhail al-Mazrouei said at a conference in Abu Dhabi, referring to the system OPEC has had in place for decades to ensure supply to the market is adequate (adequate according to OPECs view).

If you hinder that system, you need to watch what youre asking for, because having a chaotic market you would see  a 200% or 300% increase in the prices that the world cannot handle, al-Mazrouei said at a panel at the World Utilities Congress hosted by CNBCs Dan Murphy.

As gasoline prices in America hit record highs, some lawmakers are looking to resurrect the NOPEC legislation that would allow the U.S. Attorney General to sue OPEC or its member states for antitrust behavior.

Forms of a NOPEC bill have been considered in Congress committees for nearly two decades, but they have never moved past committee discussions.

Now OPEC is warning of greater market chaos if NOPEC becomes law. But its not only OPEC that has been warning about the implications for America in setting a precedent to remove sovereign immunity. The most powerful oil lobby in the United States, the American Petroleum Institute (API), is also against such legislation, arguing it would bring unintended harm to Americas oil and gas industry and American interests in the world. So is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, while the White House expressed concerns about the potential implications of such a law.

Last week, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee approved the so-called No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act (NOPEC).

Forms of antitrust legislation aimed at OPEC were discussed at various times under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, but they both threatened to veto such legislation.

This time, its unclear if the bill would be moved for discussion at the Senate, or then to President Joe Bidens desk, and its unclear whether he would sign such legislation into law.

Related: Europe May Lose The Energy Transition Race Before It Really Begins

Commenting on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committees approval of the NOPEC bill, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said last week:

I dont have an official position on this legislation right now, but we do believe that this potential  the potential implications and unintended consequences of this legislation require further study and deliberation, particularly during this dynamic moment in the global energy markets brought about by President Putins invasion of Ukraine.

So, were taking a look at it and certainly have some concerns about what the potential implications could be, Psaki added.

Major trade groups have already expressed opposition to the bill, arguing it could backfire on Americas oil and gas industry and U.S. interests.

The bill could have an unintended negative impact on Americas oil and gas industry, the API said in a letter seen by Reuters.

The API has opposed NOPEC legislation during previous discussions of a bill. In 2019, under President Donald Trump, the institute told the then-members of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, We see this legislation as creating significant detrimental exposure to U.S. diplomatic, military and business interests while having limited impact on the market concerns driving the legislation.

The legislation threatens serious, unintended consequences for the U.S. natural gas and oil industry, and it represents a political act aimed at removing a sovereign nations litigation immunity from certain U.S. laws and opens the opportunity for reciprocal or even additional action on the part of those impacted countries, the API said more than two years ago.

Last week, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce addressed the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, saying it opposes the bill known as S. 977.

Although S. 977 is intended to be limited to restraint of trade in oil, natural gas or petroleum products, the Committee should be wary of the precedent it would create. Once sovereign immunity has been eliminated for one action of a state or its agents, it can be eliminated for all state actions and the actions of agents of the state, the Chamber of Commerce said.

Under reciprocal legal regimes, the United States and its agents throughout the world could be tried before foreign courts  perhaps including the military  for any activity that the foreign state wishes to make an offense, it added.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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Germany will be able to withstand a halt of Russian natural gas supplies as long as it manages to fill up its gas storage, Economy Minister Robert Habeck told German media this week.

In an interview with WirtschaftsWoche cited by Bloomberg, Habeck explained that the country would be able to weather the effects of a potential suspension of gas supplies from Russia under three conditions: that it fills up its gas storage facilities before the next heating season begins, that it finishes adding its planned LNG import capacity, and that Germans reduce their energy consumption.

Germany has plans for four floating liquefied natural gas import terminals, and if two of these get connected to the grid before the start of the next heating season, Germany would be able to get through the winter to some extent in case Russia cuts off gas deliveries.

Germany is the biggest importer of Russian natural gas, which puts it in a challenging position when it comes to diversifying gas sources. Because of the readiness of the U.S. to supply Europe with LNG, Germany has started building import terminals urgently, and it has also sought to negotiate deliveries from Qatar.

Those negotiations, however, ran into a wall recently, as the two parties appeared to have major differences concerning terms such as the length of the contract and whether or not Germany would have the right to resell the gas to other European states. Qatar insists on a minimum commitment of 20 years and does not want to allow Germany to resell the gas. Germany is unwilling to make that commitment.

Meanwhile, Germany has started construction work on its first LNG import terminal, which the government hopes will be ready to take its first cargo by the end of the year.

We have a good chance of achieving something that is actually impossible in Germany: to build an LNG terminal within about ten months and to connect it to the German gas supply, Habeck said in comments on the start of construction of the Wilhelmshaven terminal on the North Sea coast.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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It cannot even export it all to the European Union because of capacity constraints, a Bloomberg report noted.

The country has imported so much LNG that it is beginning to run out of storage.

The UK has bucked the pan-European trend of soaring wholesale gas prices as shipments of liquefied natural gas have alleviated a shortage that squeezed prices higher last year and kept them there. But consumers wont feel pricing relief any time soon.

Bloomberg reported this week that the day-ahead price for natural gas in the UK has dropped to some 156 euros or $164.88 per megawatt-hour this month. In comparison, the average day-ahead gas price in Germany is 210 euros or $220.84 per MWh, and in France, the price is 213 euros or $224 per MWh. In Italy, prices are even higher despite the countrys access to pipeline gas from Algeria, at 241 euros or $253.44 per MWh.

But there are more factors that go into consumer pricing.

The UK has been ramping up LNG imports in recent months amid the heating season, but recently, as the weather began to warm and the demand for energy for heating declined, the country started running out of storage space for all the LNG it has been importing, Bloomberg reported last month. It cannot even export it all to the European Union because of capacity constraints, the report noted. While this is good news for power utilities operating gas-powered stations, for the end consumer, all this wont make much of a difference, according to a recent Telegraph report. According to the report, energy market regulator Ofgem planned to extend a rule that obliges electricity suppliers to pay consumers existing suppliers if they want to offer them lower rates. This will likely discourage utilities from offering such rates, no matter where wholesale prices land.

Meanwhile, the crisis of living in the UK, which was caused in large part by energy prices, is gathering pace. One of Britains largest energy suppliers, ScottishPower, warned this week that households would need to prepare for another substantial jump in their annual electricity bills after Ofgem raises the cap on prices again in October.

All of a sudden a whole host of people who have never found themselves in debt and have never struggled to pay their bills are going to get hit by this crisis, the chief executive of the utility said, as quoted by the Financial Times. Time is running out fast. Lets get in a room and come up with the solutions now, Keith Anderson added.

The outlook for the medium term is not too rosy, either, despite the current drop in gas prices. Investment bank Stifel reported earlier this week that the current level of volatility in natural gas prices is not going anywhere in the next three years, extending the cost of living crisis in one of the worlds wealthiest countries.

Related: OPEC Cuts Global Oil Demand Growth Forecast, Again

We see energy markets remaining tighter than previously expected into 2024/2025; for oil, we increase our long-term oil price assumptions from $65 per barrel to $70 per barrel for 2024 onwards, reflecting higher longer-term risks to supply. We also now expect high UK gas prices to persist into 2025, said Stifel analyst Chris Wheaton, as quoted by City A.M.

The factors driving this volatility range from the continuing supply chain disruptions and higher liquefied natural gas prices as the world swings into a shortage. According to Stifels analysts, the UK will not be able to protect itself from the effects of this shortage even if it boosts local gas production. The reason: underinvestment.

The global LNG industry has been struggling with uptime and the ability to produce the LNG its customers need  a combination of issues with maintenance on aging fleet of liquefaction capacity, but also decline of supply of natural gas feedstock after years of under-investment, Wheaton said.

In other words, the current drop in prices is a temporary development that will not last anywhere near long enough to make a palpable difference in the prices that UK consumers pay for electricity. And that doesnt bode well for either the UK economy or, indeed, the EU economies, which are struggling with much higher gas prices.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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Finnish President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said in a joint statement that Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay.

Finland, a long-standing politically neutral neighbor of Russia, is now looking towards a major policy shift.

Despite mounting sanctions, Russia is continuing its assault on Ukraine.

As heavy fighting continues to rage in eastern Ukraine, Finland has said it intends to apply to join NATO "without delay," in a major policy shift that sees the Nordic country, which shares a long border with Russia, abandoning decades of neutrality.

"NATO membership would strengthen Finland's security. As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defense alliance. Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay," Finnish President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said in a joint statement on May 12.

"We hope that the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days."

Ukraine's military, meanwhile, reported pushing back Russian forces in a counterattack in the east that could mark the beginning of a shift in the momentum of the war.

Ukraine's armed forces' General Staff said it had recaptured Pytomnyk, a village on the main highway north of Kharkiv, a city located just 40 kilometers from the border.

In its daily intelligence bulletin, Britain's Ministry of Defense noted that the withdrawal of Russian forces from the Kharkiv area "is a tacit recognition of Russia's inability to capture key Ukrainian cities where they expected limited resistance from the population."

In Helsinki, Niisto and Marin said in their statement that a special committee will announce a formal Finnish decision on a membership bid on May 15.

Finland, which shares a 1,340-kilometer border and a turbulent relationship with Russia, has stepped up its cooperation with NATO since Russia seized Crimea in 2014.

Finland fought two wars with the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1944, repelling an attempted invasion but losing 10 percent of its territory in the subsequent peace agreement.

Finland maintained its neutrality in the postwar period, acting at times as an intermediary between Moscow and the West.

Another Nordic country, traditionally neutral Sweden, is also expected to announce its intention to join NATO in the coming days, in a major reshaping of the European security architecture prompted by Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

Earlier on May 12, leaders of the European Union warned that Russia posed the "most direct threat" to world order and called Moscow's invasion of Ukraine "barbaric" as heavy fighting in the east and south of the country continued.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who is in Japan together with European Council President Charles Michel, held talks on May 12 with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida that have touched on Moscow's invasion.

Russia "is today the most direct threat to the world order with the barbaric war against Ukraine, and its worrying pact with China," von der Leyen said after meeting Kishida.

Related: Saudi Energy Minister: Insufficient Investment To Blame For High Fuel Prices

The head of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) said on May 12 that thousands of corpses have been found in outside Kyiv after the retreat of Russian forces in what may be evidence of war crimes.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet told the Geneva-based council via video link that authorities were working to verify the violations.

"The scale of unlawful killings, including indications of summary executions in areas to the north of Kyiv, is shocking," Bachelet told the UNHRC as it debates whether to launch an official investigation into what happened when Russian forces moved into the Kyiv region as they tried to take the capital, only to encounter fierce resistance and eventually pull back in early April.

In the wake of the Russian withdrawal, officials have been looking at whether civilians were summarily killed by Russian troops, as well as a growing body of evidence pointing to possible rape and sexual violence.

Some of the victims had their hands tied behind their back.

Russian authorities claim that their forces have not attacked civilians in Ukraine and said evidence has been staged in order to justify new Western sanctions against Moscow and to disrupt the peace negotiation process.

In Kyiv, Ukraine's top prosecutor on May 11 disclosed plans for the first war crimes trial of a captured Russian soldier accused of killing a civilian.

On the front line, Ukrainian officials said an area around Zaporizhzhya was among those targeted in fighting on May 11. A Russian rocket attack destroyed unspecified infrastructure, but there were no reports of casualties. The southeastern city has been a refuge for civilians fleeing Mariupol.

Russian forces continue to pound a steel plant in Mariupol that is the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance, its defenders said.

Ukrainian forces also targeted Russian air defenses and resupply vessels on Snake Island in the Black Sea in an effort to disrupt Moscow's efforts to expand its control over the coastline, according to the British Defense Ministry.

Ukraine said it shot down a cruise missile targeting the Black Sea port city of Odesa.

By RFE/RL

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The new energy minister of Brazil will study the option of privatizing state oil giant Petrobras, he said in his first news conference.

"I request the beginning of the studies pending the proposal of the legislative changes necessary for the Petrobras' privatization," Adolfo Sachsida said, as quoted by Reuters.

The idea of privatizing Brazil's state oil company is not new. In 2019, there were reports that the Bolsonaro government was looking to take the company fully private by the end of 2022, which is also the end of its term.

"There are big guys thinking they won't be privatized, but we will get there," Economy Minister Paulo Guedes said at the time.

Petrobras is currently on a collision course with Brazil's president, Jair Bolsonaro, after it booked higher profits thanks to the international oil price rally and soon after raised diesel prices for the domestic market, again in line with global trends in the industry.

Bolsonaro criticized the state oil company for its "abusive" profit, according to a Bloomberg report, and said, "I ask Petrobras to be responsible and not increase diesel prices."

The state oil company booked a profit of $9 billion for the first quarter, which was as much as 40 times higher than its net result for the first quarter of 2021.

Petrobras regularly becomes the target of government criticism when it raises domestic prices for its product, which it this time did on Monday, raising diesel prices by 9 percent.

Bloomberg noted in its report that there is a widely held belief that as a state-owned company, the oil major should work to shield Brazilians from the effects of global market trends when it comes to setting local fuel prices.

Yet if the company is privatized, it will be putting the interests of its shareholders over the interests of its consumers, and that could lead to higher prices as well if international oil prices remain high.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

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Gas demand from households in cities and from the transportation sector in India is currently outpacing supply, which has prompted the government to mandate state-held GAIL (India) Limited to import more LNG and buy gas from difficult-to-source local gas fields.

According to a government order cited by Reuters, GAIL, a natural gas explorer and producer responsible for natural gas processing and distribution in India, will source more gas from harder-to-operate fields at a price set lower than the spot LNG prices.

For any further requirement, GAIL will also source long-term regasified liquefied natural gas failing which spot RLNG may be sourced to mix with gas from domestic fields, according to the order seen by Reuters.

Currently, demand in India from the transportation sector and households is around 2 million cubic meters a day (mcmd) higher than the gas allocated to those segments, Bhanu Patni, senior analyst with India Ratings and Research, a Fitch Group Company, told Reuters.

GAIL (India) Limiteds earnings from its natural-gas marketing segment are set to increase due to the recent rise in spot LNG prices to levels much higher than GAILs contracted LNG from the United States, Fitch Ratings said last month.

However, sustained high LNG prices are likely to slow gas consumption growth in India, Fitch Ratings warned.

We expect natural gas consumption in India to increase by 5% in FY23 (FY22 estimate: 6.5%), lower from our previous estimate for 7% growth, as the recent sharp increase in domestic gas prices and high LNG prices  both spot and term contracts linked to oil prices  would slow the shift towards natural gas, in our view, Fitch Ratings said.

Overall, LNG demand in Asia is weaker than previously expected due to Europes rush to replace Russian pipeline gas supply, which has made Europe the primary destination for LNG exporters due to the high demand and high spot prices, higher than in Asia.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

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A small Chinese telescope array mounted in Antarctica has started operation to observe exoplanets or Earth-like planets, according to a news release by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) on Wednesday.

The facility, consisting of four optical telescopes and a near-infrared one, has been installed at China's Zhongshan Station during the country's 38th Antarctic scientific expedition.

Xuelong and Xuelong 2, China's two polar icebreakers, set off last November from Shanghai for the expedition and returned in April.

The telescope array is set on an equatorial mount, and the aperture of the four telescopes in the optical band is 150 mm and the near-infrared one 200 mm, according to CAS.

Antarctica is believed to be an advantageous site for astronomical surveys. China has already installed two Antarctic survey telescopes, AST3-1 and AST3-2, on the Antarctic continent.
Ten more European buyers of Russian gas have opened accounts at Russia's Gazprombank, designated by Vladimir Putin to process the ruble-for-gas payments that he demands from now on, a source close to Russia's gas giant Gazprom told Bloomberg on Thursday.

So far, 20 companies from Europe have already opened accounts at Gazprombank, and 14 others have asked for the paperwork necessary to open such accounts, Bloomberg's source said.

Russia wants its gas to be paid in rubles via two accounts at Gazprombankone in euros or U.S. dollars and the other one in rubles. The European Union has been concerned that the payments in rubles would violate the recently imposed EU sanctions against Russia and its central bank.

The current terms of the ruble-for-gas payment scheme mean that the transaction is completed when the buyer deposits the payment in the foreign currency, which is then automatically converted into rubles without the involvement of the Bank of Russia, according to the source close to Gazprom who spoke to Bloomberg.

Some companies, especially in major Russian gas customers such as Germany, have been preparing to pay for the gas in rubles for some time. Others, like the ones in Poland and Bulgaria, refused to pay in rubles, and Gazprom stopped gas deliveries to those two EU member states at the end of April.

As the EU warns companies against paying for Russian gas in rubles, Italy's Prime Minister Mario Draghi stated the opposite on Wednesday, saying that European companies are free to pay in Russian currency without finding themselves in breach of sanctions that lack clarity.

"There is no official pronouncement of what it means to breach sanctions," Draghi said during a press conference on Wednesday, as reported by Bloomberg. "Nobody has ever said anything about whether ruble payment breach sanctions."

In Germany, one of the largest natural gas importers, VNG, has opened an account with Gazprombank for payments for Russian gas under Moscow's new terms, according to Reuters.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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Europe is set to receive more cargoes of U.S. crude from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) as the European Union discusses an oil embargo on Russia and looks to reduce reliance on Russian oil, Bloomberg reported on Thursday, citing tanker-tracking data and sources with knowledge of the shipments.

In recent weeks, Europe has increased purchases of U.S. crude as it considers the details of a ban on imports of Russian crude and refined products.

A week after the European Commission officially proposed a full ban on Russian crude and oil product imports by the end of the year, the EU is still scrambling to find a common position, trying to persuade Hungary and some other central European countries to drop their opposition to an embargo.

We made progress, but further work is needed, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said late on Monday following a meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Meanwhile, U.S. crude is flowing to Europe at rates never seen before.

Two cargoes of high-sulfur crude from the U.S. strategic reserve are headed to Italy and the Netherlands, according to tanker-tracking data and sources briefed by Bloomberg. The tankers have loaded crude at terminals connected to storage caverns of the SPR in Texas and Louisiana.

According to Matt Smith, oil analyst at commodity data firm Kpler, these would not be the last crude exports out of the U.S. SPR to Europe.

In April, some 1.6 million barrels of U.S. crude from the strategic reserve made its way to Europe, Smith told Bloomberg, adding: Thats the largest amount of SPR crude thats been shipped to the continent based on historical monthly data.

Although the EU is still working out the details of an embargo on Russias oil, many buyers in Europe are generally staying away from Russian crude and products, while May 15 is the deadline for European buyers to wind down and halt transactions with Russian oil firms, including Rosneft.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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Hours after Moscow warned there would be retaliation for Helsinkis announcement that it is applying for NATO membership, Finnish media reports that the Kremlin threatened to cut the country off from Russian gas by Friday.

Citing unnamed sources, Finlands Iltalehti reported the Russian warning to politicians, who refrained from specific comment.

Prior to this warning, the local media outlet noted expectations that Finland would be cut off from Russian gas after May 23rd, when its next contract payment with Gazprom comes due and the country refuses to pay in rubles. In late April, Russia cut off gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria for refusing to pay in accordance with the Kremlins ruble scheme.



Speaking to Iltalehti on Thursday, Finnish Defense Minister Antti Kaikkonen said he could not confirm the warning.



Parliamentary group chairman Ville Tavio told Iltalehti that working groups had been informed of various scenarios of Russias retaliation, noting that preparations have already been made.

Between 60% and 70% of Finlands natural gas comes from Russia, though the countrys main sources of energy are oil, biomass and nuclear power, with natural gas representing only 5% of the total consumption. According to the Finnish government, renewable energy surpassed fossil fuels and peat in total energy consumption in 2020, leaving the country less dependent on Russian energy sources.



On Thursday, Finland announced their intention to apply for fast-tracked NATO membership due to Russian aggression in Ukraine. Sweden is expected to make its announcement in the coming days, according to the Associated Press.

Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay, President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said. We hope that the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days.

Russia has also threatened military-technical retaliation against Finland if it joins NATO.

Russia will be forced to take retaliatory steps, both of a military-technical and other nature, in order to stop the threats to its national security that arise in this regard, the Russian foreign ministry said.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

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Ukraine will only restart gas flows from Russia to Europe via the Sokhranivka pointwhich were stopped earlier this weekonly when Kyiv regains full control over its gas pipelines, the head of the Ukrainian gas system operator told Reuters on Thursday.

"We won't open. Until full control over the asset," Sergiy Makogon, head of the Ukrainian Gas Transmission System Operator (GTSOU), wrote to Reuters.

On Tuesday, GTSOU said it would no longer be able to accept gas transit from Russia via the Sokhranivka entry point, through which nearly one-third of the Russian gas headed through Ukraine goes. The GTSOU said in a statement that it could not operate at its Novopskov gas compressor station in the Russia-controlled Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine due to "the interference of the occupying forces in the technical processes."

The Ukrainian operator also said there were "unauthorized gas offtakes from the gas transit flows," which endangered the stability and safety of the entire Ukrainian gas transportation system.

Makogon told Reuters, "I don't think that Gazprom was aware that the (separatists) had started stealing transit gas from us."

GTSOU has stated that the gas flows could be rerouted through the Sudzha interconnection pointcontrolled by Ukraine.

But Gazprom has said that rerouting of gas to the Sudzha entry point was "technically impossible under the Russian flow scheme."

In response to Gazprom's claim, Ukraine's GTSOU said on Wednesday that it is actually possible to transfer gas flows to the Sudzha entry point, which has more than enough capacity to accommodate gas flows.

"A similar transfer of capacity from Sokhranivka to Sudzha took place from October 12 to 25, 2020, due to scheduled repairs. At that time, gas transit through the Sudzha entry point was 165.1 million cubic meters per day. Therefore, the allegations about the impossibility of transferring flows from Sokhranivka to Sudzha point do not correspond to reality," the Ukrainian operator said.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

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The Department of the Interior has canceled a lease sale in Alaska that would have opened up some 1 million acres to drilling, citing a lack of interest from the industry.

In a statement sent to CBS News, the Interior also said it had suspended two leases in the Gulf of Mexico that were under consideration, citing "conflicting court rulings that impacted work on these proposed lease sales."

Alaska is one of the oldest oil-producing regions in the United States. But lately, production has been on a steady decline, which has prompted authorities to look for ways to reverse the decline, which has affected the state's income.

On the other hand, oil companies have prioritized the Permian and other shale plays, thanks to often lower-cost and faster-return production. To add to this, banks have become increasingly reluctant to lend to the oil industry as they prioritize the ESG demands of their shareholders, making investments in costly projects such as Arctic drilling much harder to obtain.

At the same time, the federal government is desperately trying to put a lid on retail fuel prices, which hit a fresh record this week. One of the directions in which the government is working is mending fences with the oil industry and trying to motivate it to drill more.

However, efforts are not exactly consistent: two weeks ago, the Bureau of Land Management said it was canceling Trump-era plans for the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska and substantially reducing the acreage available for drilling.

The BLM will instead use a 2013 plan for the National Petroleum Reserve that will leave a bit over 50 percent of its territory open to drilling.

"Sweeping restrictions like this  which are being imposed even as the Biden administration implores OPEC+ to produce more oil  demonstrate everything that is wrong with its energy policies," Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski said, commenting on the change.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

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Dear Heloise: It was mentioned in an article not to answer the phone for numbers you dont recognize. You agreed with this, and mostly, you are correct. However, when I moved my mother into an assisted living facility, I received calls from the caregivers and nurses on their private cellphones telling me of some incident with my mother. After not answering the first unknown number and then hearing the message about a fall, I have instructed my household to answer every call, because we have no way of knowing if it is her facility. Most calls come from the recognized facility phone number, but there have been exceptions.
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP)  Veteran prosecutor Patrick Griffin was named Connecticut's new chief state's attorney Thursday and vowed to repair the office's reputation after an investigation questioned his predecessor's integrity.

Griffin, a state prosecutor for 27 years including the past six as the top state's attorney for the New Haven area, was appointed by a unanimous vote of the Criminal Justice Commission. The panel interviewed Griffin and Hartford State's Attorney Sharmese Walcott for the post earlier Thursday.

I dont think that theres any question that the reputation of the Division of Criminal Justice has been tarnished, Griffin told the commission. I think thats affected the morale of the entire division. ... Weve got to begin to think about new ways to engage the community. We have to think outside the box. But I do think that the only way to begin to mend and improve our reputations is through community engagement.

The chief state's attorney is Connecticut's top state prosecutor and leads the Division of Criminal Justice, which oversees the state's attorney's offices for the state's 13 judicial districts.

Former Chief State's Attorney Richard Colangelo Jr. decided to retire March 31 after two years on the job as the Criminal Justice Commission considered whether to hold termination hearings.

An independent investigation ordered by Gov. Ned Lamont questioned Colangelo's hiring of a state budget official's daughter to a $99,000-per-year executive assistant's job in his office, while pressing the official for pay raises for high-ranking state's attorneys. Colangelo denied wrongdoing and questioned many of the investigation's findings.

The probe, led by former U.S. Attorney Stanley Twardy Jr., said Colangelo, budget official Konstantinos Diamantis, and Diamantis' daughter, Anastasia Diamantis, gave conflicting statements to investigators that cast doubt on the integrity of the circumstances surrounding the hiring of Anastasia Diamantis.

Colangelo and Konstantinos Diamantis denied discussing a job for Diamantis daughter before she was hired, but emails appeared to show otherwise, the investigation report said. She also was the only person interviewed for the post, the report said.

Konstantinos Diamantis also denied wrongdoing. He said that while he was in office, Colangelo never got the pay raises he sought.

Konstantinos Diamantis, who was deputy secretary of the Office of Policy and Management, retired in October after being placed on leave as Lamont ordered the investigation into his daughter's hiring. He also is at the center of an ongoing federal investigation into the bidding and awarding of school construction and other projects. State officials have received a grand jury subpoena for communications involving Konstantinos Diamantis, who denies doing anything wrong in that case.

Griffin began his career in 1995 in the chief state's attorney's office and served in the Waterbury Judicial District from 1996 to 2011, including the last eight years trying murder and other serious cases. He later led a new state cold case and shooting task force in the chief state's attorney's office before being named New Haven state's attorney in 2016.

As states attorney, I have always sought to project a steady, professional demeaner, to demand rigorous adherence to the highest standards of ethical and professional conduct, to lead by example, set clearly defined goals and objectives, work as hard as anyone I supervise, to be fair and impartial and above all else to listen to the ideas and concerns of those around me, Griffin told the commission.

A third finalist for the chief state's attorney's job, retired Litchfield State's Attorney Dawn Gallo, withdrew her candidacy before Thursday's commission meeting.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
ENGLISH, Ind. (AP)  The Indiana Supreme Court imposed an interim suspension Thursday on a southern Indiana judge arrested on a felony for hitting someone while a child watched.

The high court acted against Circuit Judge Sabrina Bell of Crawford County after it received a Notice of Criminal Charges and Request for Suspension from the Indiana Commission on Judicial Qualifications. The interim suspension with pay was effective immediately.

Indiana State Police arrested Bell on Thursday on a charge of domestic battery in the presence of a child less than 16 years old. The charges stem from an incident that occurred in Crawford County on April 12.

Bell was booked into the Crawford County Jail and has since been released on pre-trial conditions, police said,

Police did not say who Bell battered.

Bells interim suspension remains in effect until further order of the Court or final determination of any disciplinary proceedings, if any, that may arise from the criminal charges, the Supreme Court said.

The Commission on Judicial Qualifications is the 7-member group that investigates alleged ethical misconduct by judges. Chief Justice Loretta Rush chairs the Commission. The Indiana Supreme Court has final authority over judicial discipline.

Bell served a 30-day suspension in 2019 for her involvement in a downtown Indianapolis fight and double-shooting that followed a night of bar-hopping.

For copyright information, check with the distributor of this item, News and Tribune, Jeffersonville, Ind..
NEW ORLEANS (AP)  The sponsor of a bill that would have subjected Louisiana women to murder charges for having abortions abruptly pulled the proposal from debate Thursday night after House members voted 65-26 to totally revamp the legislation, eliminating the criminal penalties.

The controversial bill would have ventured farther against abortion than lawmakers efforts in any other state. It would have made women who end their pregnancies subject to criminal homicide prosecutions.

This is a thorny political question, but we all know that it is actually very simple. Abortion is murder, Rep. Danny McCormick, a Republican from Oil City, proclaimed as he opened debate. He noted that a majority of Louisiana lawmakers in the heavily Republican Legislature say they are anti-abortion, and briefly chided those abortion opponents who also oppose his bill. Were faltering and trying to explain it away.

But McCormick's measure had drawn increasingly strong opposition from many anti-abortion stalwarts. Gov. John Bel Edwards, an anti-abortion Democrat, said he would veto it. Louisiana Right to Life, the Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops, and the National Right to Life Committee were among the prominent anti-abortion opponents of the measure.

Edwards, a devout Catholic, declared prosecuting women for abortion absurd.

McCormick had just as strongly disagreed, saying a woman who has an abortion should be in the same legal position as a woman who takes the life of a child after birth. When I give equal protection to the unborn, that's the possibility, he said in a Wednesday evening phone interview.

Supporters of the bill were adamant. Scores of them gathered at the Capitol to pray and show support. As the group watched from the House balcony as the bill was pulled, one shouted Shame.

The House had not yet started debating the controversial legislation when the building was temporarily evacuated Thursday after the speaker interrupted proceedings and said an unknown, unclaimed package had been found in the capitols Memorial Hall  a gathering area between House and Senate Chambers.

It came on a day when legislation was already moving slowly as lawmakers tried to find a compromise on McCormicks bill. The House recessed for more than an hour while lawmakers broke into groups behind closed doors to discuss the legislation.

Pending at the time was the amendment by Rep. Alan Seabaugh. The Shreveport Republican is an anti-abortion stalwart. But his amendment overhauled McCormicks bill, declaring that women would not face criminal penalties for abortion. It also allowed abortion to save the life of a pregnant woman. And it eliminated language in McCormick's original bill that appeared to make contraceptive drugs and at least some aspects of in vitro fertilization illegal.

The amendment also stripped language from McCormick's bill widely regarded as blatantly unconstitutional  a declaration that any federal law, regulation or court ruling that allows abortion is void and that any judge who blocks enforcement of the bills provisions could be impeached.

We can't grant ourselves the power to order a court to rule future acts unconstitutional, Seabaugh argued.

The amendment mirrors a pending Senate bill aimed at tightening up Louisiana abortion laws that would go into effect if Roe v. Wade is overturned. McCormick, as the sponsor, is unlikely to advance it in the House but the Senate version can still advance.

McCormick's bill, introduced in March, had drawn intense scrutiny in light of last weeks leak of a draft of a U.S. Supreme Court opinion indicating the high court is preparing to overturn decisions upholding a constitutional right to abortion.

There was no indication yet that lawmakers in other states are taking up similar legislation. In Idaho, Republican state Rep. Heather Scott has proposed prosecuting women who get abortions, but a committee chairman said Friday he would not allow it. There are still reasonable people in the Legislature who are going to ensure that extreme bills like that are not going to get a hearing, Rep. Brent Crane said.

Louisiana already has laws on the books criminalizing abortion, including a trigger law ensuring that it will be a crime if the Supreme Court reverses the Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 ruling establishing abortion rights. The statutes appear to exempt women from prosecution, although some abortion rights advocates have suggested they need tightening.

McCormick has said the existing laws are inadequate to give fetuses equal protection under law.

Associated Press writer Holly Ramer contributed to this report from Concord, New Hampshire.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  North Korea imposed a nationwide lockdown Thursday to control its first acknowledged COVID-19 outbreak after holding for more than two years to a widely doubted claim of a perfect record keeping out the virus that has spread to nearly every place in the world.

The outbreak forced leader Kim Jong Un to wear a mask in public, likely for the first time since the start of the pandemic, but the scale of transmissions inside North Korea wasn't immediately known.

A failure to slow infections could have serious consequences because the country has a poor health care system and its 26 million people are believed to be mostly unvaccinated. Some experts say North Korea, by its rare admission of an outbreak, may be seeking outside aid.

However, hours after North Korea confirmed the outbreak, South Koreas military said it detected the North had fired three suspected ballistic missiles toward the sea. It was its 16th round of missile launches this year  brinkmanship aimed at forcing the United States to accept North Korea as a nuclear power and negotiate sanctions relief and other concessions from a position of strength.

The official Korean Central News Agency said tests of virus samples collected Sunday from an unspecified number of people with fevers in the capital, Pyongyang, confirmed they were infected with the omicron variant.

In response, Kim called at a ruling party Politburo meeting for a thorough lockdown of cities and counties and said workplaces should be isolated by units to block the virus from spreading. He urged health workers to step up disinfection efforts at workplaces and homes and mobilize reserve medical supplies.

Kim said it was crucial to control transmissions and eliminate the infection source as fast as possible, while also easing inconveniences to the public caused by the virus controls. He insisted the country will overcome the outbreak because its government and people are united as one.

Despite the elevated virus response, Kim ordered officials to push ahead with scheduled construction, agricultural development and other state projects while bolstering the countrys defense posture to avoid any security vacuum.

North Koreas state TV showed Kim and other senior officials wearing masks as they entered a meeting room, although Kim removed his mask to speak into a set of microphones. Still photos distributed by KNCA showed Kim unmasked and sitting at the head of a table where all other officials remained masked.

South Koreas Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korean affairs, couldn't immediately confirm whether it was the first time state media showed Kim wearing a mask since the start of the pandemic. Kim has previously spoken to huge crowds without a mask as he praised the country's earlier pandemic response, and his decision to be seen with a mask could be aimed at raising public vigilance.

North Korea, which has maintained strict anti-virus controls at its borders for more than two years, didnt provide further details about its new lockdown. But an Associated Press photographer on the South Korean side of the border saw dozens of people working in fields or walking on footpaths at a North Korean border town  an indication the lockdown doesn't require people to stay home, or it exempts farm work.

The measures described in state media and Kims declaration that economic goals should still be met could indicate that North Korea is focusing more on restricting travel and supplies between regions, analyst Cheong Seong-Chang at South Koreas Sejong Institute said.

North Koreas government has shunned vaccines offered by the U.N.-backed COVAX distribution program, possibly because they have international monitoring requirements.

Seoul's Unification Ministry said South Korea is willing to provide medical assistance and other help to North Korea based on humanitarian considerations. Relations between the Koreas have deteriorated since 2019 amid a stalemate in nuclear negotiations and the North's increasingly provocative weapons tests.

In Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Beijing is offering North Korea help in dealing with the outbreak. North Korea has reportedly rejected previous Chinese offers of domestically developed vaccines.

Kim Sin-gon, a professor at Seouls Korea University College of Medicine, said North Korea is likely signaling its willingness to receive outside vaccines, but wants many more doses than offered by COVAX to inoculate its entire population multiple times. He said North Korea would also want COVID-19 medicines and medical equipment shipments that are banned by U.N. sanctions.

Omicron spreads much more easily than earlier variants of the coronavirus, and its fatality and hospitalization rates are high among unvaccinated older people or those with existing health problems. That means the outbreak could cause a serious situation because North Korea lacks medical equipment and medicine to treat virus patients and many of its people are not well-nourished, Kim Sin-gon said.

Ahn Kyung-su, head of DPRKHEALTH.ORG, a website focusing on health issues in North Korea, said North Koreas admission of the outbreak is likely designed to press its people harder to guard against the virus as China, which shares a long, porous border with the North, has placed many of its cities under lockdown over virus concerns.

North Korea will also likely stress lockdowns, although the experience of Chinas zero-COVID policy suggests that approach doesnt work against the fast-moving omicron variant, said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor of international studies at Seouls Ewha Womans University.

For Pyongyang to publicly admit omicron cases, the public health situation must be serious, Easley said.

North Koreas previous coronavirus-free claim had been disputed by many foreign experts. But South Korean officials have said North Korea had likely avoided a huge outbreak, in part because it instituted strict virus controls almost from the start of the pandemic.

Early in 2020  before the coronavirus spread around the world  North Korea took severe steps to keep out the virus and described them as a matter of national existence." It all but halted cross-border traffic and trade for two years, and is believed to have ordered troops to shoot on sight any trespassers who crossed its borders.

The extreme border closures further shocked an economy already damaged by decades of mismanagement and U.S.-led sanctions over its nuclear weapons and missile program, pushing Kim to perhaps the toughest moment of his rule since he took power in 2011.

North Korea had been one of the last places in the world without an acknowledged COVID-19 case after the virus first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019 spread to every continent including Antarctica. Turkmenistan, a similarly secretive and authoritarian nation in Central Asia, has reported no cases to the World Health Organization, though its claim also is widely doubted by outside experts.

In recent months, some Pacific island nations that kept the virus out by their geographic isolation have recorded outbreaks. Only tiny Tuvalu, with a population around 12,000, has escaped the virus so far, while a few other nations  Nauru, Micronesia and Marshall Islands  have stopped cases at their borders and avoided community outbreaks.

North Korea's outbreak comes as China  its close ally and trading partner  battles its biggest outbreak of the pandemic.

In January, North Korea tentatively reopened railroad freight traffic between its border town of Sinuiju and Chinas Dandong for the first time in two years, but China halted the trade last month due to an outbreak in Liaoning province, which borders North Korea.

Associated Press journalists Lee Jin-man in Paju, South Korea, Ken Moritsugu in Beijing and Nick Perry in Wellington, New Zealand, contributed to this report.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP)  A top aide to Republican South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg announced Tuesday he is seeking the GOP nomination for state attorney general, suggesting that Ravnsborg wont seek another term as he faces an impeachment trial in the death of a pedestrian.

David Natvig, who was one of Ravnsborg's closest appointees, announced his candidacy in a video touting his work investigating drug trafficking. He will face Marty Jackley, a former state attorney general and U.S. attorney who mounted a campaign to unseat Ravnsborg as Ravnsborg faced impeachment for his actions surrounding a 2020 car crash in which he struck and killed a man.

Ravnsborg was impeached by the House last month and faces a Senate impeachment trial shortly before the three-day party convention starts June 23. He has said the Senate trial is a chance for him to be vindicated," but has not said whether he will run for reelection if he is acquitted.

Ravnsborg didn't immediately respond to a message Tuesday.

Natvig would represent a continuation of Ravnsborg's team in the attorney general's office. He was the Brule County State's Attorney for nearly 16 years and was picked to head the Division of Criminal Investigation as Ravnsborg entered office in 2019.

My plan is to take the success and hard work of the office of the attorney general and build on it, he said in the campaign announcement video.

Jackley said in a statement that he has been traveling the state to earn the backing of Republican Party delegates, who will decide the nominee at the convention.

I remain committed to running a campaign on experience and my proven record as South Dakota's attorney general and U.S. attorney," he said.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Justice Clarence Thomas says that the Supreme Court has been changed by the shocking leak of a draft opinion earlier this month. That opinion suggests the court is poised to overturn the right to an abortion recognized in Roe v. Wade. The conservative Thomas joined the court in 1991 and has long called for Roe v. Wade to be overturned. He described the leak as an unthinkable breach of trust. Thomas said at a conference in Dallas that: When you lose that trust, especially in the institution that Im in, it changes the institution fundamentally. You begin to look over your shoulder."
CONCORD, N.H. (AP)  New Hampshire Republicans on Thursday thwarted attempts by Democrats to respond to this weeks leaked U.S. Supreme Court draft by enshrining the right to an abortion in state law.

New Hampshire has outlawed abortion after 24 weeks gestation since Jan. 1, thanks to a budget provision Republican Gov. Chris Sununu signed into law last year. Anticipating the Supreme Court action, Democrats have sought to enshrine abortion rights into state law and the state constitution, only to have the bills tabled in the House earlier this year.

In both the House and Senate, they tried Thursday to amend other bills to add abortion protections to state law but were turned back.

In the House, Republican Majority Leader Jason Osborne, of Auburn, accused Democrats of grandstanding over the outrage du jour and said taking up the bill was just a waste of our time.

Nearly seven hours later, the Senate voted down a similar amendment. Instead, it approved the underlying bill, which would eliminate the safety zone that keeps protesters at least 25 feet (7.5 meters) away from abortion clinics.

Democrats pointed to other states in arguing in favor of enshrining abortion rights into law. Sen. Rebecca Perkins Kwoka, of Portsmouth, noted that Oklahomas governor on Tuesday signed a bill prohibiting doctors from performing an abortion after fetal activity is detected in the embryo.

For years, Ive heard we dont need this in New Hampshire, and for many years that was indeed the case, she said. Times have changed, we do need these protections now. ... The writing isnt just on the wall, it is published and confirmed.

But Sen. Sharon Carson, R-Londonderry, said the amendment was unnecessary because theres been no rush by New Hampshire Republicans to enact further restrictions or ban abortion outright in response to the leaked draft opinion, and abortion will remain legal in the state up to 24 weeks.

Not one thing has happened. Why? Because when we passed this, we were careful, and we were deliberative. Thats the New Hampshire way, she said. We are not impulsive.

Since enacting the 24-week ban, the Legislature has approved adding an exception for cases in which the fetus has been diagnosed with abnormalities incompatible with life, and Sununu plans to sign it. He described that bill Tuesday as a bipartisan measure to expand access to abortion without mentioning his role in restricting it.

The draft opinion leaked this week suggests the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion throughout the country, sending the abortion fight to the states.

At least eight GOP-led states have already passed new restrictions this year, expecting change from the conservative majority on the high court. Sixteen states and the District of Columbia, meanwhile, have protected access to abortion in state law, and several states moved to expand or strengthen those protections this year.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
DOVER, Del. (AP)  Delaware's state Senate on Thursday gave final approval to a bill legalizing possession of up to one ounce of marijuana by adults for recreational use.

The legislation cleared the Democrat-led Senate on a 13-7 party line vote. Sen. Bruce Ennis of Smyrna, a retired state trooper, was the only Democrat joining Republicans in opposing the bill. The bill passed the Democrat-controlled House on a 26-14 vote last week.

The measure now goes to Democratic Gov. John Carney, who has previously spoken in opposition to legalizing recreational marijuana but has not said whether he would veto a legalization bill.

Well review the bill, but the governors position hasnt changed, Carney spokeswoman Emily David said after Thursdays vote.

Under current law, possession of one ounce or less of marijuana by anyone 21 years of age or older carries a civil penalty of $100. The legislation eliminates that provision. Possession of recreational marijuana by anyone under 21 would still result in a civil penalty, while possession of more than one ounce of marijuana and public consumption would remain misdemeanors. The bill also allows an adult to transfer, but not sell for payment or other consideration, an ounce or less of marijuana to another adult.

The bill was introduced in late March as stand-alone legislation after a failed effort to pass broader legislation creating a state-regulated and taxed marijuana industry. Passage of the legalization bill required only a simple majority, but legislation creating a state-licensed marijuana industry requires a three-fifths majority vote in each chamber because it would establish a new tax. Marijuana advocates have been unable to clear that hurdle.

A separate bill to create a state-run marijuana industry has cleared two House committees and is awaiting consideration by the full chamber.

Senators passed the legalization bill after rejecting a GOP amendment that would have delayed its effective date until Delaware law enforcement officials could confirm the existence and availability of an accurate test to determine if someone is under the influence of marijuana.

Sen. Trey Paradee of Dover, the chief Senate sponsor of the legalization bill, said police already are trained to recognize when somebody is under the influence, and that it is obvious when someone is stoned.

Anybody whos raised a teenager can probably tell, said Paradee, adding that if marijuana was a gateway drug, as some opponents and medical researchers have stated, we would have a room full of heroin addicts.

Republicans pointed out that many of Paradees remarks were addressed not at the legalization bill, but at the purported benefits of having a state-run marijuana industry.

What Senator Paradee said ... is for the next bill, said Sen. Colin Bonini, noting that theres no guarantee that the companion legislation will pass.

We might as well call this the Encouraging Illegal Behavior Act, because where are you going to get it? Youre going to go to a drug dealer, added Bonini, a Dover Republican. This is the cart before the horse.

Paradee, who previously noted that drug gangs and cartels were profiting from marijuana sales, said he shared some of Boninis concerns, and that if the companion bill establishing a state-run industry did not pass before the end of the legislative session on June 30, he would ask Carney to veto the legalization bill.

Paradee told fellow lawmakers that if they believe in freedom and personal rights they should support the legalization bill, failing to mention that it does not allow Delawareans to grow their own marijuana plants.

The bill to establish a state-run pot industry also would prohibit people from growing their own plants for personal consumption. The state instead would license and oversee a manufacturing and distribution industry and levy a 15% tax on retail sales. Supporters argue that the legislation would curtail the black market, create jobs and boost state revenues.

Opponents argue that legalization would lead to increased marijuana use among teens and young adults, expose business owners to liability, and result in more traffic deaths and injuries. They also say it would do little to eliminate illegal sales.

The Associated Press reported in January that the legalization of marijuana in California had done little to discourage black market sales in that state, and that some California licensees are simultaneously participating in the black market  whose estimated value of $8 billion is roughly double the amount of legal sales  in order to make a profit.

Currently, recreational marijuana use is permitted in 18 states and the District of Columbia.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Jan. 6 panel subpoenas McCarthy, four other GOP lawmakers

WASHINGTON (AP)  House investigators say they have issued subpoenas to House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and four other GOP lawmakers as part of their probe into the violent Jan. 6 insurrection. It's an extraordinary step that has little precedent and is certain to further inflame partisan tensions over the 2021 attack. The Jan. 6 panels subpoenas for McCarthy of California and Republican Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Andy Biggs of Arizona and Mo Brooks of Alabama come as the investigation is winding down and as the panel prepares for a series of public hearings this summer.

Russian threats push Finland toward joining NATO alliance

KYIV, Ukraine (AP)  Finlands leaders have come out in favor of applying to join NATO, and Sweden could do the same within days. That would amount to a historic realignment on the continent 2 1/2 months after Russian President Vladimir Putins invasion of Ukraine sent a shiver of fear through Moscows neighbors. The Kremlin has reacted to the move by Finland by warning it will be forced to take retaliatory military-technical steps.

EXPLAINER: Why Finland, Sweden joining NATO will be big deal

BRUSSELS (AP)  Finland appears on the cusp of joining NATO. Sweden could follow suit. By year's end, they could stand among the alliance's ranks. Russia's war in Ukraine has provoked a public about face on membership in the two Nordic countries. They are already NATO's closest partners, but should Russia respond to their membership moves they might soon need the organization's military support. The two are a perfect fit for NATO. Their armed forces, and political and legal systems, are in lock step with the alliance. They bring high-tech military equipment and high levels of defense spending with them. Their accession would double the length of NATO's borders with Russia. It's unclear exactly how Moscow will respond.

N. Korea reports 6 deaths after admitting COVID-19 outbreak

SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  North Korea says six people have died and 350,000 have been treated for a fever that has spread explosively across the country. The announcement Friday came a day after it acknowledged its first COVID-19 cases of the pandemic. North Korea likely doesn't have enough testing supplies and said the cause of the fevers was unclear. Experts have warned a COVID-19 outbreak could be devastating in a country with a broken health care system and an unvaccinated, malnourished population. Some experts say the North's admissions of an outbreak suggested a willingness to receive outside aid. It previously shunned vaccines offered by the U.N.-backed COVAX program, possibly because they have monitoring requirements.

Powell: 'Soft' economic landing may be out of Fed's control

WASHINGTON (AP)  Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, fresh off winning Senate confirmation for a second four-year term, for the first time Thursday acknowledged that high inflation and economic weakness overseas could thwart his efforts to avoid a recession. Previously, Powell has sought to portray the Feds efforts to tighten interest rates as consistent with a so-called soft landing for the economy. In that scenario, the Fed would tighten borrowing costs enough to cool the economy and bring down inflation, without going so far as to tip the economy into recession. But on Thursday he acknowledged such a soft landing may be out of the Fed's control.

The AP Interview: US 'vulnerable' to COVID without new shots

WASHINGTON (AP)  The new White House COVID-19 coordinator is issuing a dire warning. He says in an Associated Press interview that the U.S. will be increasingly vulnerable to the coronavirus this fall and winter if Congress doesnt swiftly approve new funding for more vaccines and treatments. Dr. Ashish Jha said in the interview Thursday that Americans immune protection from the virus is waning, the virus is adapting to be more contagious and booster doses for most people will be necessary  with the potential for enhanced protection from a new generation of shots.

Astronomers capture 1st image of Milky Way's huge black hole

WASHINGTON (AP)  Astronomers have unveiled the first wild but fuzzy image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Nearly all galaxies, including our own, are believed to have these giant black holes at their center, where light and matter cannot escape. That makes it extremely hard to get pictures of them. The image released Thursday was made by eight synchronized radio telescopes around the world. This is not the first picture of a black hole. The same international group released the first one in 2019 from a distant galaxy.

US reckoning with role in Native American boarding schools

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP)  The U.S. government has not been open to investigating its role in stripping Native Americans of their cultures and identities in boarding schools. Until now. Thats partly because people who know first-hand the persistent trauma caused by the boarding school system are positioned in the U.S. government. Still, the work to uncover the truth and create a path for healing will require financial resources. Tribes will have to navigate federal laws on repatriation to take Native children who died and are buried at boarding schools home. And some survivors might be hesitant to recount the painful past and trust the federal government to collect the stories.

EXPLAINER: What's behind the baby formula shortage?

WASHINGTON (AP)  Many parents are hunting for infant formula after a combination of short- and long-term problems hit the biggest U.S. brands. So what should you do if you can't find formula? Talk with your pediatrician or call a local food bank to see if they can help locate some options. Experts also recommend checking with smaller stores and pharmacies, which may still have supplies when larger stores run out. Most regular baby formulas contain the same basic ingredients and nutrients, so parents using those products shouldnt hesitate to buy a different brand if theyre having trouble finding their regular one. Parents of infants requiring specialty formulas should talk to their doctor if they cant find those products.

Storm chasers face host of dangers beyond severe weather

MADISON, Wis. (AP)  The deaths of four storm chasers over the last two weeks have underscored the inherent dangers of pursuing severe weather events and navigating traffic. A meteorologist from Mexico was killed in a car crash on Wednesday while chasing violent weather in Minnesota. Three University of Oklahoma students were killed on April 30 when a semitrailer struck their vehicle while they were returning from chasing a tornado in Kansas. Greg Tripoli is an atmospheric and oceanic scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He says storm chasing can produce useful data but more often students want the thrill of seeing a tornado. He says the biggest danger that chasers face is a car accident as people travel at high speeds pursuing storms.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
CONCORD, N.H. (AP)  The task of redrawing New Hampshires two congressional districts shifted to a handful of lawmakers Thursday, while the state Supreme Court outlined its approach should that effort fail.

Democrats currently hold both U.S. House seats, but Republicans control the redistricting process required to bring the districts in line with population changes over the last decade. Lawmakers passed a plan in March that would benefit the GOP in the 1st District, but Republican Gov. Chris Sununu promised to veto it. Hes also criticized a plan the House passed last week that would clump together communities along the I-93 corridor and shift more than 40% of the population into a different district.

The Senate on Thursday refused to go along with that proposal, opting instead to set up a committee of conference to negotiate a compromise. The three Senate and four House appointees will have until May 19 to sign off on plan, with votes in both chambers by May 26.

House Speaker Sherm Packard and Senate President Chuck Morse issued a joint statement saying they are confident negotiators will be transparent, inclusive and ultimately successful in their efforts" and will create a map that is constitutional and fair.

Meanwhile, the state Supreme Court issued an opinion in a lawsuit brought by former House Speaker Terie Norelli and others last month. The court agreed with the plaintiffs that holding the 2022 elections under the current maps would violate the Constitution because of the changes in population, and said if the Legislature and governor remain at in impasse, it will use a least change approach in drawing the boundary lines.

The court said the special master it has selected for the case will use the existing districts as a benchmark.

To the greatest extent practicable, each district should contain roughly the same constituents as the last validly enacted plan, the court said. It is preferable that the core of the districts be maintained, while contiguous populations are added or subtracted as necessary to correct the population deviations.

Separately, Norelli and others have filed a second lawsuit challenging the state Senate and executive council district maps that Sununu recently signed into law. They argue that the maps favoring Republicans were enacted with impermissible partisan intent."

The filing period for candidates in the Sept. 13 primaries opens June 1.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
KYIV, Ukraine  An adviser to the Mariupol mayor said Wednesday that Russian forces have blocked all evacuation routes out of the city.

The adviser, Petro Andriushchenko, said there were few apartment buildings fit to live in after the weeks of bombardment and very little food or drinking water.

Andriushchenko said some residents who have remained in the city are cooperating with the Russian occupying forces in exchange for food.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk says Ukraine has offered to release Russian prisoners of war if Russia will allow the badly injured fighters to be evacuated from the Mariupol steel plant.

Russian forces have surrounded the plant, the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance in the southern port city.

Vereshchuk said no agreement has been reached but negotiations were underway. The fighters trapped in the plant have refused to surrender to the Russians, saying they fear being tortured or killed.

KEY DEVELOPMENTS IN THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR:

 Ukrainians make gains in east, stop Russian gas at one hub

 Wartime birth amid the air raid sirens in Ukraine hospital

 US, Western Europe fret over uncertain Ukraine war endgame

 Fighters appeal for evacuation of wounded from Mariupol mill

 House approves $40B in Ukraine aid, beefing up Biden request

 Leonid Kravchuk, independent Ukraines 1st president, dies

 Ambassador nominee for Ukraine seeks quick embassy reopening

 Follow all AP stories on Russias war on Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

OTHER DEVELOPMENTS:

WASHINGTON  U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said a ban on sales of semiconductors and other technology to Russia by the U.S. and its allies is having a serious impact on Russias ability to manufacture military equipment.

We have reports from Ukrainians that when they find Russian equipment, military equipment, on the ground, its filled with semiconductors that they took out of dishwashers and refrigerators, Raimondo said Wednesday during a Senate hearing, adding that she met a few weeks ago with Ukraines prime minister.

Raimondo said two of Russias tank manufacturing plants have shut and many of its auto makers have furloughed workers and closed down.

And so the point is, we are having a very serious effect, she said. What we need to do in order to continue this is enforcement, enforcement, enforcement.

Raimondo said U.S. exports of technology to Russia are down nearly 70% since late February when the Biden administration, in coordination with European and Asian allies, imposed sanctions and export controls on Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine.

WASHINGTON  Final congressional approval of a $40 billion Ukraine aid bill seems certain within days, according to some lawmakers.

The Senates top Republicans said Wednesday they expect strong GOP backing for the House-passed measure. That will signal a bipartisan, heightened commitment to helping thwart the bloody Russian invasion.

In his nightly video address Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said funds from the aid bill will allow Ukraine to get more weapons and equipment plus help investigate war crimes by Russia.

The bill also would help regional allies, replenish weapons the Pentagon has shipped overseas and provide $5 billion to address global food shortages caused by the wars crippling of Ukraines normally robust production of many crops.

The new measure includes $6 billion to arm and train Ukrainian forces, $8.7 billion to restore American stores of weapons shipped to Ukraine and $3.9 billion for U.S. forces deployed to the area.

Theres also $8.8 billion in economic support for Ukraine, $4 billion to help Ukraine and allies finance arms and equipment purchases and $900 million for housing, education and other help for Ukrainian refugees in the U.S.

BERLIN  The U.N. nuclear agency says it is again receiving remote data from the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine following an interruption caused by the Russian occupation of the site.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said late Wednesday that data transmission was re-established following a visit by its inspectors and technicians in April, after Russian forces withdrew.

The agency said it was the first time in two months that it has received remote data from all nuclear power plants and spent fuel storage facilities in Ukraine where monitoring systems are in place.

Its head, Rafael Mariano Grossi, said this was a very important step for the IAEA to continue to implement safeguards in Ukraine.

Grossi cautioned, though, that on-site verification at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear plant continues to be challenging owing to the presence of Russian forces and Rosatom personnel at the site, calling the situation unsustainable.

Grossi said he has proposed leading an expert visit to Zaporizhzhya after the necessary consultations and at the earliest possible opportunity.

MOSCOW  The governor of a Russian region near Ukraine says that at least one civilian has been killed and another six have been wounded in the Ukrainian shelling of a village close to the border.

Belgorod Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov said that the village of Solokhi came under shelling from the Ukrainian side late Wednesday. He said that the village residents will be evacuated.

Gladkovs account couldnt be independently verified. Russian authorities in the regions near Ukraine have repeatedly reported incidents when border areas came under Ukrainian shelling.

KYIV, Ukraine  Ukraines Foreign Ministry has accused Russia of stealing the countrys grain and trying to sell some of it at global markets.

The ministry said in Wednesdays commentary that the stealing of Ukrainian grain amounts to looting.

It warned countries that purchase Russian grain that some of its shipments could contain the grain stolen from Ukraine, making its buyers possible accomplices.

The ministry cited official estimates indicating that Russia already may have stolen 400,000-500,000 metric tons of grain that cost over $100 million. It charged that practically all ships leaving Sevastopol with a load of grain are carrying the grain stolen from Ukraine.

It urged the global community to toughen the sanctions against Russia.

TURIN, Italy  A Ukrainian band thats competing in this years Eurovision Song Contest turned out in a Turin park for a rally with a few dozen of their compatriots to express solidarity for their war-ravaged homeland.

Ahead of Wednesday nights competition, the Kalush Orchestra posed for photos with some 50 Ukrainians who live in Italy.

Each of the rallys participants put a hand to the heart in a sign of devotion to Ukraine.

Kalush Orchestra this week was one of the entrants advancing to the finals of the wildly popular European annual songfest, whose winner will be decided on Saturday.

The Ukrainians rallied behind a stage where free concerts by some of the musical groups from among the 35 nations sending entries are held nightly on the sidelines of the actual competition.

The upbeat entry by Kalush Orchestra for the competition is a song that was composed by the bands front-man as a tribute to his mother.

But the song, Stefania, has been transformed to a kind of anthem to Ukraine, which was invaded by its powerful neighbor Russia on Feb. 24.

The song quickly became a sentimental favorite for many of Eurovisions fans.

SOFIA, Bulgaria  A pro-Russian nationalist party staged a protest rally in front of the parliament building in Bulgarias capital, Sofia, on Wednesday, calling for the government to resign and accusing it of failing to tackle the economic crisis.

Several hundreds supporters of the Vazrazhdane party demanded that the centrist coalition of Prime Minister Kiril Petkov step down because it draws Bulgaria into the war of the United States against Russia in Ukraine.

Waving Bulgarian and some Russian flags, participants shouted antigovernmental slogans accusing the Cabinet of being more concerned about Ukraine instead of taking care of their own people.

Organizers insisted that Bulgaria should act as a conciliator, rather than arming one side and thus fueling the conflict. They urged the government to resign and clear the way for new elections which would allow their party to rule Bulgaria in line with national interests.

Later, the protesters marched to the nearby Sofia municipality, where they clashed with police as they tried to remove an Ukrainian flag from the building.

Bulgaria, which was among Moscows closest allies during Soviet times, is now a NATO and EU member state. Traditional bonds with Russia, based on common religion and cultural heritage are being harmed as many are horrified by the bloodshed caused by Russias aggression.

Still, many Bulgarians share strong pro-Russian sentiments that play in favor of populist leaders. Vazrazhdane has currently 13 legislators in the 240-seat National Assembly, who have been strong supporters of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

KYIV, Ukraine  A Ukrainian general says that Russia hasnt abandoned hopes to capture the Ukrainian capital.

Brig. Gen. Oleksiy Hromov said at Wednesdays briefing that the Russians harbor plans to take control over the southern Mykolaiv and Odessa regions to build a land corridor to the Transnistria separatist region of Moldova and also try to storm Kyiv.

Hromov said that Russia still hopes to capture more Ukrainian territories and call a sham vote to make them part of Russia. He added that such Russian plans will be foiled by the Ukrainian resistance.

The Russian forces tried to capture the Ukrainian capital in the first weeks of the invasion, but have pulled back after facing staunch Ukrainian defenses and shifted their focus on the countrys east, where Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian forces since 2014.

WASHINGTON  Ukraines leaders must start shaping their terms for an acceptable peace deal, especially in light of Russias surprising failure to win its war outright, Italys premier said Wednesday.

When Russia first launched its invasion of Ukraine, we thought there was a Goliath and a David, Mario Draghi told reporters at a news conference in Washington. But what seemed like an invincible power has proved not to be, Draghi said, referring to Russian forces inability to overcome the defense mounted by Ukraines military, with heavy Western backing.

Draghi spoke after meeting with President Joe Biden on Tuesday. Draghi says he urged Biden to push to get all key players, including the United States and Russia, into talks to end the war.

But any rush to close a peace deal that leaves Ukrainians angry and resentful risks a return to fighting, the Italian leader said Wednesday.

We have to remove any thought that we can reach an imposed peace, Draghi said. That is a recipe for disaster.

BERLIN  The German army says it has begun training Ukrainian soldiers to use a powerful artillery system that Germany and the Netherlands plan to supply to Ukraine.

The Defense Ministry said 18 crews are being trained to use the Panzerhaubitze 2000, an advanced, self-propelled howitzer.

This is a clear sign of our solidarity, the ministry said. But Germany wont become a party to the conflict because of the training or delivery of the howitzers.

DONETSK  Separatists in Donetsk on Wednesday celebrated the eighth anniversary of self-proclaimed independence from Ukraine.

Constitution square in the city center was renamed after a Russian officer who was among the first Russian servicemen killed in the special military operation.

The head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk Peoples Republic, Denis Pushilin, and Engels Gadzhimagomedov, the father of the killed officer, installed a new street sign. Local residents who support the pro-Russian separatists came to lay flowers.

The Day of Donetsk Peoples Republic was celebrated without the usual mass events this year due to security reasons.

BUCHAREST, Romania  Romanias foreign ministry says that two Romanian journalists were detained Tuesday in the Russia-backed breakaway region of Transnistria in neighboring Moldova.

The two journalists were detained by security forces in Transnistrias de facto capital of Tiraspol and released hours later after diplomatic efforts from both Romania and Moldova, the ministry said Wednesday in a statement.

(The) Romanian diplomatic mission in Chisinau was not informed in advance about the intention of the two journalists, it said, adding that the so-called Transnistrian authorities recently banned foreign journalists from entering the region.

The incident follows a series of mysterious attacks in the Russia-backed region in recent weeks that have alarmed officials in Moldovas capital, Chisinau.

In late April, grenades were launched at the regions state security office, and a day later two large broadcast antennas were downed. Last week, police in Transnistria said explosive devices were dropped from a drone near a village. No one was injured in the incidents.

Transnistria, a thin strip of land that borders Ukraine and has a population of around 470,000, broke away after a short civil war in the early 1990s. An estimated 1,500 Russian soldiers are stationed there.

WARSAW, Poland  Former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt says that the U.N. Security Council should adopt a resolution protecting grain shipments from the Ukraine amid the Russian invasion.

Bildt was speaking to Polands TVN24 during the Impact22 congress about energy and technology prospects, in Poznan, western Poland.

Will Russia dare to stop shipments of grain under U.N. protection?, Bildt asked, stressing the escort initiative is worth discussing.

The Security Council is to be briefed Thursday on humanitarian issues in Ukraine as it is fighting Russian invasion, and that may open an opportunity for discussing protection of the grain exports.

Separately, the European Union is to announce a plan this week to help Ukraine get around Russias blockade of its ports by shipping food supplies by rail and truck.

Ukraine is one of the worlds top producers of corn and wheat, and is called Europes bread basket. The lack of millions of tons of its grain on world markets is already leading to hikes in the prices of grain products.

PRAGUE  Czech President Milos Zeman has approved a request of 103 Czechs to join Ukraines armed forces to help them fight Russian aggression.

Czech citizens are banned from service in foreign armies which is a crime punishable by a prison term of up to five years.

Those 103 belong to a total of some 400 Czechs who have applied for an exemption from the ban, according to the Defense Ministry. The authorities still have to process most of the requests.

Its not clear how many Czech have already been fighting on the Ukrainian side against invading Russian troops.

The presidents approval has to be co-signed by Prime Minister Petr Fiala who said through his spokesman he would sign all requests that have been approved by the Czech authorities.

BERLIN  The German government has dismissed suggestions that it might activate the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany to compensate for reduced flows via Ukraine.

A spokeswoman for the Energy Ministry said Wednesday that Germany is currently receiving a quarter less gas through Ukraine after Ukrainian authorities shut down a pipeline saying it no longer controls a key compressor station thats in Russian hands.

Annika Einhorn, the ministry spokeswoman, said the shortfall is being partly compensated for through increased supplies from Norway and the Netherlands.

Nord Stream 2 has really died after Russian attacked Ukraine and nobody is thinking about switching to that, she said.

She also noted that the majority of Russian gas reaches Germany through a sister pipeline, Nord Stream 1, rather than via Ukraine.

Germany has pledged to end imports of Russian natural gas by 2024 at the latest.

MOSCOW  A senior Russian official has denounced the U.S. aid for Ukraine as part of Washingtons proxy war against Russia.

Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russias Security Council who served as president in 2008-2012 when Vladimir Putin shifted to prime ministers position due to term limits, said Wednesday on a messaging app that the $40 billion aid package for Ukraine approved by the U.S. Congress was driven by a desire to inflict a heavy defeat on our country, restrict its economic development and political influence in the world.

He described the aid package as part of the U.S. proxy war against Russia and predicted that the United States will fail while the goals of Russias special operation in Ukraine will be fulfilled.

In another statement Wednesday, Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the lower house of Russian parliament, accused the United States of using the aid package to drive Ukraine deeper into debt and try to take control of the countrys grain reserves.

PARIS  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Russias war in Ukraine is pushing a number of countries toward NATO membership.

With Finland and Sweden moving toward joining the alliance, he said, These countries want to be protected from Russia because their people see whats happening in Ukraine and want to live in security, in their own house, and spend time calmly with their family.

Russia has cited NATOs expansion toward its borders as a reason for invading Ukraine.

Speaking Wednesday to French university students via video link, Zelenskyy also proposed preventive sanctions against Russia and any countries that threaten to use nuclear weapons. He also called for international debate about nuclear disarmament.

He said Russias suggestions that it could use nuclear force in the war in Ukraine should not go unpunished, but didnt elaborate.

He urged more unity in European policy, as the EUs 27 members haggle over a sixth round of sanctions that include an oil embargo.

Asked how the war could end, he said, The war will end when we restore our unity and territory...when we get back what belongs to us.

LVIV, Ukraine  Satellite photos analyzed by The Associated Press show that a Russian ship believed to be carrying stolen Ukrainian grain has docked in Syria.

The photo taken Tuesday by Planet Labs PBC showed the Russian-flagged Matros Pozynich at dockside in Latakia, Syria.

The ship seen in the photo matched known characteristics of the bulk carrier, as well as its dimensions.

The ship turned off its transponders nearly a week ago off the island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea.

Samir Madani, the co-founder of the online research firm TankerTrackers.com, also told the AP that he believed the ship docked in Latakia was the Matros Pozynich, based on its dimensions and last-known position.

Ukraine has alleged that the ship had 27,000 tons of grains Russia stole from the country. It alleged Russia initially tried to ship the grains to Egypt, which refused to take the cargo. Ukrainian diplomats had been asking nations not to accept the grain.

The ships registered owners, Crane Marine Contractor LLC of Astrakhan, Russia, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A Russian bombing campaign and support from Iran beat back insurgents who nearly toppled Syrian President Bashar Assad after the 2011 Arab Spring. Russia still maintains a navy and air base in Syria, though it has reportedly rotated forces out of the country to aid its war on Ukraine.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
LINCOLN  Janelle Jackson didnt have to think twice about stepping up to be a foster parent for her 9-year-old niece. The girl was family, after all.

The seven months since have had their challenges, the Lincoln woman said, and it took time for her three boys and their cousin to adjust to the changes in their lives.

Still, on Thursday, Jackson urged other Nebraskans to open their homes and hearts and become foster parents, whether for children they know or for others.

Absolutely, she said. Our children need us.

Jackson joined Gov. Pete Ricketts, his wife, Susanne Shore, and Nebraska child welfare leaders at a press conference celebrating foster parents.

Ricketts called those parents heroes who are crucial to a strong foster care system. Although the state tries to keep children in their own homes, with their own parents, that isnt always possible, he said. Thats where foster parents come in.

Foster parents step into the gap when a childs biological parents are unable to offer care, he said. Their selfless investment of time and energy makes a lasting impact on the youth in their care.

Stephanie Beasley, Nebraskas children and family services director, said that when children are removed from home, the first choice is to place them with relatives or with people they already know, who are referred to as kinship families.

She said such placements offer children invaluable support structures and lessens the trauma of being removed from home. As of late April, 55% of Nebraska foster children were in relative or kinship homes.

But Ashley Brown, president of KVC Nebraska, said there is still an unmet need for other foster parents. She called for people who cannot be foster parents to donate, volunteer or otherwise support foster families. KVC is a private agency that provides foster homes and other child welfare services.

Theres never enough caring adults, she said. Being a foster parent comes with stress, frustration and heartache. It also comes with incredible joy and reward.

Officials said that becoming a foster parent involves five steps: background checks on all adult household members, a home study, three positive references for each adult caregiver in the home, an application and health information report for each caregiver, and pre-service training.

Prospective foster parents seeking more information should visit dhhs.ne.gov/Pages/Foster-Care.aspx or contact the Nebraska Foster and Adoptive Parent Association hotline at 1-800-7PARENT. Additional information and support can be found at nfapa.org.

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A motorcyclist was killed Thursday on the southwest edge of McCook.

Eugene J. Bailey, 28, of McCook, was killed when his westbound motorcycle collided with an eastbound pickup truck that was turning north at the junction of U.S. Highways 83 and 6/34, the Nebraska State Patrol said.

The crash was handled by the McCook Police Department, the patrol said. McCook police were expected to release more details later Thursday. It was the fourth Nebraska fatality involving a motorcycle in 2022.

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A newly released federal report has documented the existence of eight additional Native American boarding schools that once operated in Nebraska with the goal of stripping Indigenous children of their language and culture in the name of assimilation.

The findings in the much anticipated study, which greatly expanded the previously understood scope of the schools across the U.S., come as Nebraska officials push ahead with a painstaking search for graves near the former Genoa U.S. Indian Industrial School, which operated about 115 miles west of Omaha.

The first installment of the massive report by the U.S. Interior Department identified more than 400 of the government-supported schools and more than 50 associated burial sites, a figure expected to grow as research continues.

The Genoa facility was believed to be Nebraskas lone government-run Indian boarding school. But researchers identified eight additional schools that met the Interior Departments criteria of federal Indian boarding schools.

The U.S. institutions served as a blueprint for Canadas Indigenous residential schools, where the recent discovery of hundreds of Indigenous children buried in unmarked graves brought renewed attention to practices that have been described by historians as cultural genocide.

Shortly after the human remains were discovered in Canada, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced the Federal Indian Boarding School Truth Initiative, an effort that led to the initial report released Wednesday.

The federal investigation has so far identified more than 500 deaths at 19 schools, though the Interior Department said that number could climb to the thousands or even tens of thousands.

The department has so far found at least 53 burial sites at or near the U.S. boarding schools, both marked and unmarked.

In Genoa, a search for graves is ongoing  as is an effort to identify children who died at the school. So far, the number of confirmed deaths is 86.

Judi gaiashkibos, executive director of the Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs, said the report offers a wide view of the reality students of the schools faced.

Its quite a report. I feel like we always knew a lot of this story, but to see what a wonderful job they did in putting this report together, that really has given me a sense of pride in our leadership with Deb Haaland at the helm, gaiashkibos said.

A descendant of a Genoa school student, gaiashkibos has led efforts to find the Genoa school graves along with the Nebraska State Archaeology Office.

Originally believed to be the fourth federal boarding school built in the U.S., the Genoa school operated from 1884 to 1934. At its peak in 1932, the schools campus housed 599 students, who ranged in age from 4 to 22 years old and came from more than 40 tribes.

The U.S. government directly ran some of the boarding schools, like the one in Genoa. Catholic, Protestant and other churches operated others with federal funding, backed by U.S. laws and policies to civilize Native Americans.

The Interior Department used four factors in identifying 408 schools.

The institution had to have provided housing, provided education, received federal support and operated any time prior to 1969.

Besides Genoa, eight institutions in Nebraska met the criteria:

 Iowa Industrial School, possibly also known as the Orphans Industrial Home, was in a historical settlement called Nohart in the southeast corner of the state. The institution was believed to have opened as early as 1873 and closed around 1881.

 The Omaha Indian School in Macy is believed to have operated from 1873 to roughly 1906.

 The Omaha Mission, located in Omaha, served as a contract mission boarding school, according to a report that includes information from the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. The school is believed to have operated from 1886 to 1891.

 The Otoe Missouria Indian Mission School is believed to have operated on the Big Blue Reservation in Gage County from roughly 1854 to 1881. The institute was moved with the tribe from Nebraska to Red Rock, Oklahoma, in 1881. There it operated until 1919 under the name Otoe Boarding School.

 Santee Industrial School was a government reservation boarding school that operated near Niobrara from roughly 1874 to 1909.

 Santee Normal Training School in Santee operated as a contract mission boarding school. Research suggests the school was founded to train native teachers in 1871. In 1893, the schools government contract was terminated and the American Missionary Association operated the school until 1937.

At one time the institution consisted of 18 buildings, and 480 acres of land, and enrollment exceeded 200. Researchers found that the school taught Dakota students in their native language and published literature in the Dakota language, which may have resulted in a loss of funding.

 Silver Ridge Seminary is believed to have operated from roughly 1874 to 1886 in what is today Dixon County.

 The Winnebago Boarding school is described as a government reservation boarding school that operated in Winnebago, Nebraska, from roughly 1873 to 1891.

Beyond identifying the schools, the report described next steps the Interior Department will take in creating a second volume of the study, aided by a new $7 million investment from Congress.

A bill introduced in the U.S. House last year would create a truth and healing commission modeled after one in Canada. Several church groups are backing the legislation.

Nebraska lawmakers in January, through a legislative resolution, established a day of remembrance and officially acknowledged the physical and emotional abuse that students were subjected to at the Genoa school.

Next steps by the Interior Department will likely include compiling a list of marked and unmarked burial sites at the schools, an approximation of the total amount of federal funding used to support the federal Indian boarding school system, and further investigation to determine the impacts of the school system on Native communities today.

A second volume of the report will cover the burial sites as well as the federal governments financial investment in the schools and the impacts of the boarding schools on Indigenous communities, the Interior Department said.

In Nebraska, the search for the Genoa school graves will continue with another search effort planned for later this month.

Were going to exhaust every possible measure to find those children, gaiashkibos said.

This report contains material from the Associated Press.

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Recent reports indicate that 8,600 voters mobilized by joining the GOP to vote in the Nebraska Republican primary. At the same time, it appears the Supreme Court will favor states right over individual rights by ceding abortion laws to the individual states. The repercussions of taking rights away from 51% of the population will be up close and very personal.

Give the people what they want. The more they get, the more they need. And every time they get harder and harder to please.  The Kinks

In a December 2021 poll, Schoen Cooperman Research found 85% of Americans expressed concern about political extremism. While 3-in-4 respondents report they will absolutely vote in the next midterm, 80% think officials from both parties need to work together. In his book on modern American authoritarianism, Jonathan Greenblatt finds Americans are waking up to the fragility of self-governance. He found that Republicans and Democrats are increasingly fed-up with political extremism.

What issues do we generally agree on? A 2019 Heritage Foundation poll reports 69% consider cost, access and choice to health care a top priority.

A poll from Harvards Carr Center found that Americans agree on five rights beyond the Constitution:

Clean air and water, 93%

Protection of personal data, 93%

Quality education, 92%

Affordable healthcare, 89%,

Jobs, 85%

Give em lots of sex and perversion. Give em lots of violence, and plenty to hate.

PEW Research found 70% are concerned about China including human rights violations. The same poll found 77% want government to focus on alternative energy (90% Democrats, 62% Republicans).

A well-placed Republican pollster told me Nebraskas 2nd District voters, over numerous polls, support of legal citizenship for DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) is in the high 70 percentiles.

In his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden called for greater unity, noting that the majority of American support DACA. Addressing this nonpartisan issue could bridge political divides in Washington.

Congressman Don Bacon voted for DACA citizenship twice. ... we cannot continue to leave our DACA youth  in no mans land. I believe we can be compassionate to these individuals and responsible for the security of our borders at the same time. Congress needs to be able to compromise and improve our border security  I have voted multiple times for a comprehensive approach to immigration reform ... (Oct. 15, 2020).

Senator Tony Vargas said, Locally, the DACA program has helped over 3,000 young, hardworking Nebraskans contribute to and care for their communities, continue their education and help fuel our states economy. I will continue to stand in support of DACA, our young people, and immigrant families  (June 24, 2020).

Make sure its prime time and on Saturday night. Give the people what they want.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau (November 2021), Mexico, Canada and China are our top trade partners (in that order). While most DACA recipients come from Mexico, 20% come from nearly every nation including Israel, Mongolia, Ireland and Italy.

As voters move towards common ground, nearly 8-in-10 2nd District voters support citizenship for DACA. With that fact in mind, I call upon our congressional candidates to pluck the low hanging fruit of popular consensus and pledge to submit legislation within 12 months of being elected to the U.S. Congress, calling for unconditional citizenship for DACA.

A vast majority of voters from both sides of the aisle acknowledge that existing immigration laws no longer sufficiently address the nations needs and concerns. Reports indicated 60,000 job vacancies in Nebraska. Nearly every business in our metroplex needs workers. Broken supply chains have exacerbated shortages. As White and Black birth rates continue to drop, retiring Boomers are not being replaced. Our choices are to replace jobs with technology, downsize the economy and/or fix immigration laws.

I encourage our next congressional candidates to work to develop a comprehensive plan for viable legal immigration legislation. Doing this benefits our economy including Nebraska employers and consumers, shores up supply chains, increases tax bases, lessens political division and displays proactive care and concerns for the future of our community, our nation and, importantly, our fellow man.

You gotta give the people what they want.

Rick Galusha, Ph.D., teaches political science at Bellevue University. Hes hosted a blues radio show for 30 years and was the president of Homers Music Stores. Galusha was active in the creation of the Old Market Business Association and served as the groups first president.
BLOOMINGTON  McLean County Judge William Yoder said Thursday he will issue a written ruling within 60 days determining which material can be presented at an evidentiary hearing for Barton McNeil, who is seeking exoneration from his 1999 murder conviction.

McNeil, 63, appeared in person at the McLean County courthouse for the first time since 2014. He is serving a 100-year prison sentence at the Pinckneyville Correctional Center on murder charges for the June 15, 1998, death of his 3-year-old daughter, Christina.

Thanks for coming, guys, McNeil said to a full courtroom of family, friends and supporters as he exited after the hearing.

One supporter was McNeils cousin, Chris Ross, who flew to Bloomington from southern California for Thursdays hearing.

I think that Im going to be making many more trips out here, Ross said, slightly disappointed, but while remaining cautiously optimistic that McNeil would be released from prison within the next year. I am here to support Bart every step of the way and hopefully Ill be able to embrace him when he gets out.

Thursdays hearing came on a McLean County States Attorneys motion to partially dismiss McNeils petition for post-conviction relief, which was filed in February 2021.

Prosecutors conceded in a court filing last month to an evidentiary hearing on two affidavits claiming McNeils ex-girlfriend, Misook Nowlin, confessed to the murder of McNeils daughter.

McNeil has long argued his innocence and said Nowlin was responsible for his daughters death. Nowlin, 56, is now serving a 55-year prison sentence on murder charges for the 2011 strangulation death of her mother-in-law, Linda Tyda, in Bloomington.

McNeils lawyers, of the Exoneration Project and the Illinois Innocence Project, urged the court to deny the states motion to partially dismiss his petition, asking the court to consider all of the evidence in their petition.

Some of the evidence that prosecutors said should not be considered includes touch DNA showing Nowlins presence at the murder scene, as well as her hair, and scientific advances refuting stomach content analysis as a reliable measurement of time of death.

McLean County Assistant States Attorney Mary Koll argued that all of the evidence in McNeils petition, other than the affidavits, does not meet the criteria for advancing to the third stage evidentiary hearing in the post-conviction process.

The evidence must be newly discovered, material, non-cumulative, and be of such a conclusive character that it would probably change the result on re-trial, Koll said.

Koll said some of the evidence is not newly discovered because McNeils lawyers cited studies that predate his trial in their petition for relief.

Karl Leonard, one of McNeils lawyers from the Exoneration Project, argued that the states stance is premature, and said its concerns about the other evidence should be addressed at the evidentiary hearing.

The states position, your honor, boils down to yes, we should have a hearing about Misooks confession, but at that hearing, the court should not consider any evidence of whether or not the confession is corroborated, Leonard said. That, your honor, I think would defeat the truth-seeking purpose of these proceedings.

Christinas death was preliminarily determined to be of natural causes. An autopsy later determined she died of asphyxiation by smothering.

But McNeil contests that the death scene could have been hampered because it was not initially investigated as a murder.

He called 911 to report Christinas death that morning. He called police later in the day to implore authorities to investigate the scene as a break-in homicide, as he and his lawyers say evidence shows that someone entered the ground-floor bedroom through a window.

McNeil and Nowlin broke off their relationship earlier in the night of Christinas death and staff at a Bloomington restaurant reported witnessing the two fervently arguing.

McNeil picked up Christina later that night at his ex-wifes home, got her a McDonalds Happy Meal, and put her to bed. Christina slept in McNeils bedroom when she visited him and he slept on a couch in his living room.

The next morning, McNeil found Christina unresponsive in his bedroom. He also located a window fan that had fallen to the floor, two holes cut in the windows metal screen  which also was bent, with scuff marks outside the window and nearby trampled plants.

Police focused efforts on McNeil and discarded the possibility of an intruder based on spider webs located later that day outside of the window.

But an arachnologist in a 2014 hearing disputed that argument, testifying that spiders can create webs within an hour.

Koll said Thursday the trial judge was in the absolute best position  to understand and evaluate the evidence in this case, noting the trial judges clear findings that there was no intruder.

But Leonard characterized that as a circular argument, saying the purpose of post-conviction proceedings is to determine if a prior judge, with newly presented evidence, would have ruled differently.

The state is saying, Well, they already decided this without the benefit of the new evidence, so we dont need to revisit. Thats just not how post-conviction proceedings work, Leonard said. In every post-conviction proceeding youre going to have new evidence that contradicts an earlier finding  We should be able to present this evidence at the hearing and then the court can decide.

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NORMAL  The McLean County Chamber of Commerce's Twin Cities Showcase returned to the area Thursday after a two-year COVID-induced hiatus.

"There's ways to engage, there's experiences to be had and there's people to meet," said Chamber President and CEO Charlie Moore. "We're pleased to be able to intentionally connect people today to help understand how they can support the local economy and better utilize local products, services and our nonprofit organizations."

With about 80 exhibitors in attendance, the chamber hosted the event at Illinois State University's Brown Ballroom.

Moore said said the showcase is an opportunity for local businesses, service providers and nonprofits to network with each other but also meet with residents, some of whom are new to Bloomington-Normal and are part of the chamber's welcome program, Becoming BN.

The program is a way for new residents and families to learn about the community and discover stores, physicians and events that will help them adjust to their new home, Moore said.

"Whether that's with volunteerism, where they need to get their services or products, who they need to know or who they should meet, but also build that network, because when there are experiences and you build connectivity, you're more likely to find that home and then there's a better reason for to stay," he said.

Milestones Early Learning Center Director Joni Staley said she came to the showcase to promote the center's programs and create awareness for the nonprofit, which provides education services for children from low-income families.

"I think the visibility is important, and then the camaraderie with exhibitors talking to exhibitors," Staley said. "Just building those relationships amongst the nonprofit and business community, because you never know what you're going to need, so making those connections is priceless."

Patti Penn, director of operations at Crafted Commons  which includes Crafted Coffee Brews, the Crafted Bar and Pokeworks  said this was their first chamber showcase since opening the trio of businesses, and she found it helpful to learn about other businesses while connecting with them on certain issues.

"Maybe I go get a coffee every day in the drive-thru, but I don't realize all the other things going on. Maybe it's something simple like a gas station, but I forget about all the other things that they have to do in a day to keep their business going," Penn said. "When we have an opportunity to connect like this and take a couple of minutes just to talk, it's perfect for you to find new ways to help your business grow, but then to support other businesses in your community."

Karalee Misner, chief business development officer at the SOLVR Group in Decatur  which works on strategic plans and goals for businesses to reach  said she came to the showcase to connect with area businesses and possibly work with those who need help.

"Another opportunity is for these small businesses to get their name out there," Misner said. "In today's digital age, it's really difficult to pay attention, especially to small- and mid-size businesses, and so it's awesome to have the space to connect with them face-to-face."

Chad Clark, owner and founder of Brain Surge  which specializes in brain health supplements  said he has been working with the chamber for about a year to make connections with other businesses, and the showcase was an opportunity to unveil his products while trying out different marketing tactics.

"I've got some advertising tactics that I learned at other conventions, but I really want to see what other people are bringing to the showcase so that I can get some ideas for how I can bring people to my table and have items that people are interested in," Clark said. "Making those relationships and connections with people really helps not only promote your business, but find new opportunities and services to help build you businesses either locally or nationally."

Similarly, Lindsay Thacker, vice president of property management and acquisitions at Tentac Enterprises, said she loves finding businesses to collaborate with and help each other out. Additionally, having the showcase on the ISU campus allowed attendees to reach young entrepreneurs and get them involved in the business community.

Showcase attendee Mark Fauble, academic adviser in the College of Business at ISU, said it was a blast learning more about the business he already uses or shops from, but also having the chance to try new things, like a restaurant or health practitioner he hadn't heard of yet.

"We have a lot of employees who are here and able to see what these organizations have to offer in a setting where maybe they wouldn't have normally had that opportunity," Fauble said.

Miranda Martin, marketing and brands manager at Central Illinois Bakehouse and Martinelli's Market, which opened in January, said the showcase allowed her business to integrate with the community and hopefully build partnerships that will allow them to bring their products to more people, even accepting LINK cards.

"We don't think there should be a high barrier of access to high-quality and nutritious foods," Martin said. "We're really committed to supporting the local food network and being able to come to this gives us that opportunity."

Next up, Moore said the chamber will host a job fair Tuesday, May 24, in the parking lot of Eastland Mall.

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SPRINGFIELD - Illinois long-troubled child welfare agency under Gov. J.B. Pritzker has failed to ensure adequate care for children in its charge and has not properly tracked cases referred to it by people who are legally required to report suspicions of abuse or neglect, according to a newly released audit of the agency.

The audit of the Department of Children and Family Services found failures to conduct required home safety checks before children are returned to their parents; to provide follow-up services for the required six months after a child leaves the agencys care; and to make sure children in DCFS care are receiving appropriate medical checkups and immunizations, according to Illinois Auditor General Frank Mautinos report.

The audit also found that the agencys records system is unable to track or identify service referrals that fall under a recent state law requiring DCFS to treat a report of abuse or neglect as a referral for services when it is made by a legally mandated reporter, such as a teacher, and there is a documented prior case of abuse or neglect or an open investigation involving anyone in the household.

Pritzker, seeking reelection in November, has vowed throughout his term to address long-standing issues at beleaguered DCFS. While he has boosted funding for the agency by at least $100 million per year since taking office, including a $250 million increase during the budget year that begins July 1, DCFS continues to struggle with a host of problems, many of which stretch back decades.

The Democratic governor also has stood by his hand-picked director, Marc Smith, even as Smith has been held in contempt of court nine times in recent months for the agencys failure to find suitable placements for children in its care.

Pritzker has argued that it will take both more resources and more time to turn DCFS around.

In response to the audits findings, which covered the 2020 calendar year, DCFS spokesman Bill McCaffrey said in a statement that the agency has taken aggressive measures to improve the services and care provided to youth in care during the past three years.

DCFS had previously identified that its outdated data tracking systems limited its ability to track new requirements, McCaffrey said. As a result, DCFS was already undertaking significant steps to address these issues, including a complete replacement of the departments child welfare information systems.

The safety of the agencys workers also has come under scrutiny after DCFS investigator Deidre Silas was stabbed to death in January during a home visit near Springfield.

Earlier this year, Cook County Public Guardian Charles Golbert, whose office represents more than 7,000 children involved in the child welfare system, told the Tribune the agency is is in the worst shape its been in 30 years.

The state auditor generals review of DCFS comes a week after the office issued report blasted the Pritzker administration for its handling of a deadly coronavirus outbreak at a state-run veterans home in LaSalle that killed 36 residents.

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Question: Mired today in a nasty, far-too-public defamation case as ex-marrieds, it was in 2011 that actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard met while filming the movie "The Rum Diary." They were a couple in the movie and in real-life, married in 2015. Can you remember Depps most famous line in that movie, at least from a Central Illinois perspective?
Bolivian President Luis Arce has announced that he will not participate in next month's Summit of the Americas in the United States if Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela are excluded from the gathering.



Arce's position mirrors that of Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who said on Tuesday that he would not attend the June 6-10 summit in Los Angeles, California, if the three leftist-run countries are not invited.



In April, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Brian Nichols said that Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduros government were unlikely to be invited to the summit. He said the meeting would focus on democratic governments in the Western Hemisphere.



"A Summit of the Americas that excludes American countries will not be a full Summit of the Americas, and if the exclusion of sister nations persists, I will not participate in it," Arce, a socialist, posted on his Twitter account late on Tuesday.



Asked about Arce adding his voice to Lopez Obrador's concerns about the summit invitation list, a White House official said on condition of anonymity that Washington was in close contact with many countries across the region.



White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters on Tuesday a final decision on who would be invited had not yet been made.



Bolivia and the United States have been diplomatically estranged for more than a decade. The Andean nation has accused Washington of interfering in its internal affairs.



In addition, far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro will not travel to the summit, according to Brazilian sources with knowledge of the matter, although his reason for skipping the event is not clear.

Source: REUTERS









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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Chief Executive Officer of Salt FM and a philanthropist, Charles Ohene Frimpong, has donated an amount of money and items to the taxi driver who returned missing money to a trader.



The taxi driver, Kwesi Ackon, was spotted in a viral video receiving praises and prayers of blessings from a tearful trader during the presentation of the money to her.



Narrating the story in an interview with Abeiku Santana on Okay FM's 'Drive Time' programme, he disclosed that the trader boarded his taxi home and, after dropping her, he noticed a cloth lying in the car.



Out of curiosity, he opened the cloth and found GHc 8,400 which belonged to the trader.



Kwesi Ackon, on the following day, drove to the location of the trader and returned the money to her.





View this post on Instagram A post shared by OKAY 101.7 FM (@okay101.7fm)





As the saying goes "one good turn deserves another", the taxi driver's blessings have abounded.



The philanthropist, Mr. Ohene Frimpong, has donated an amount of GHc 7,800, two boxes of hand sanitizers and Brofot Puff Puff to the taxi driver.



Speaking on Okay FM, he stated that his donation was inspired by the selfless act of the taxi driver, emphasizing the driver has set a good example to the general public.



Mr. Ohene Frimpong also explained the motivation for his being a prolific giver as he is noted for many acts of philanthropy saying, "this is spiritual to me. God laid it on my heart to give".





View this post on Instagram A post shared by OKAY 101.7 FM (@okay101.7fm)







View this post on Instagram A post shared by OKAY 101.7 FM (@okay101.7fm)







Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









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A small passenger plane carrying 11 people crashed in a forest near Cameroon's capital, Yaounde, on Wednesday, the transport ministry said.



The cause of the crash was not immediately clear but the plane lost radio contact with air traffic controllers and was later located in the forest near Nanga Eboko, around 150km (90 miles) north-east of Yaounde, the ministry said in a statement.



The aircraft was flying from Yaounde Nsimalen airport to Belabo, in the east of the country, it added.



AFP news agency quotes official sources as saying the plane was chartered by a private company, the Cameroon Oil Transportation Company that maintains a hydrocarbon pipeline that runs between Cameroon and neighbouring Chad.



It says the crash was the first major air catastrophe in the country since 2007 when a Kenya Airways plane carrying 114 people crashed after take-off from Douala airport.

Source: BBC









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Former President John Dramani Mahama has urged President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo's administration and the Ghana Police Service to expedite action in bringing the culprits in the murder of journalist Ahmed Hussein Suale to book.



Mr Mahama in a Facebook post condemning the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh noted that the murderers of Suale who was killed on January 16, 2019, were still walking free.



He posted: "The killing of ace Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh is a most condemnable act. For a journalist who has for many years covered and brought us reports of events in Israel and the Middle East region, we all mourn her loss. It is our prayer that whoever pulled the trigger and any associates will be brought to justice through an Independent and transparent process.



"Having said that, we also note that the murderers of Ghanaian journalist, Ahmed Suale, are still walking free. We call on the Akufo-Addo administration and the Police Service to take this investigation seriously and bring the murderers to justice".



Al Jazeera reacts to journalist's killing



Shireen Abu Akleh was shot and killed while covering an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank town of Jenin early on Wednesday.



The Palestinian health ministry said Shireen Abu Akleh, a well-known Palestinian reporter for the broadcaster's Arabic language channel, was shot and died soon afterwards.



Another Palestinian journalist working for the Jerusalem-based Al-Quds newspaper was wounded but in stable condition.



The Qatar-based network interrupted its broadcast to announce her death.



In a statement flashed on its channel, it called on the international community to "condemn and hold the Israeli occupation forces accountable for deliberately targeting and killing our colleague".









Source: graphiconline.com









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The 11 people who were in a plane that crashed in a forest near Cameroon's capital, Yaounde, on Wednesday, have all died, the AFP news agency quotes state radio as reporting.



An unnamed official from the transport ministry also told AFP that "there were no survivors".



The cause of the crash was not immediately clear but the plane lost radio contact with air traffic controllers and was later located in the forest near Nanga Eboko, around 150km (90 miles) north-east of Yaounde, the ministry said in a statement.



The aircraft was flying from Yaounde Nsimalen airport to Belabo, in the east of the country, it added.

Source: BBC









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A 76-year-old Chief and Pastor of the Apostolic Resurrection Society Church at Assin Brofoyedru in the Central Region has hanged himself in a bush.



The deceased is said to have left for farm on Tuesday but did not return home.



Upon a search, he was found hanging on a tree on his farm.



Speaking in an interview with EIB Network Central Regional Correspondent, Yaw Boagyan, the Abusuapanin of the Bretuo Clan in Assin Brofoyedru, Johnson Oduro said the Chief cum pastor did not complain about any problem and not having any issue with anyone, hence he taking his life has come as a great shock.



Residents who described the deceased as a friendly and peaceful person are mourning his death.



Meanwhile, the Assin Foso Police Command has deposited the body of the deceased at the St Francis Xavier hospital Mortuary.







Source: kasapafmonline.com









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The national co-ordinator of the National Boundary Commission, Major General Emmanuel Kotia, has warned that threats of terrorist attacks from the Sahel are real and must not be underplayed.



Speaking to Beatrice Adu on The Big Bulletin on Wednesday (11 May 2022), Major General Kotia said, The terrorist attack from the Sahel on the northern territories of Ghana is real and we all know of the effect of terrorist action in Burkina Faso.



Now, we have also seen in a couple of years up to last year, where we have had attacks in the northern part of Cote dIvoire, Benin, and yesterday was the second attack in Togo.



So, it is real and we have to take all precautions that are available to prevent any terrorist attack, and to also prevent any downward movement of the terrorists into the coastal states of the sub-region, especially Ghana, Benin, Togo and Cote dIvoire, Kotia said.



Earlier, Ghanas Minister of Defence, Dominic Nitiwul, said that at least 840 terrorist attacks were recorded in West Africa in the first quarter of this year, resulting in 2,482 casualties.



Speaking at an extraordinary meeting of the ECOWAS committee of chiefs of defence staff in Accra on Thursday (5 May 2022), Nitiwul decribed the as development worrying.



As you are well aware, the activities of violent extremist organisations, terrorist armed groups and transnational organised criminal networks have increased in the sub-region, despite the current national and regional efforts to combat the trend, Nitiwul said.



The sub-region is saddled with complex transnational crimes committed both in the physical and cyber domains. Terrorists activities have assumed cross-border dimensions with far-reaching implications for civil societies, regional security and global peace and development, the minister said.



Indeed, by the end of the first quarter of this year (2022( alone, 840 attacks have already resulted in 2,482 casualties.





Source: asaaseradio.com









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About 1.2 million households in Ghana do not have access to electricity, according to the Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP).

Although the country has achieved an enviable 85.3 percentage access rate as of 2021, the highest electricity access rate in Sub-Saharan Africa, the figure of households without electricity, it said, remained high and could be a setback against the country's target of attaining universal access by 2025.





Speaking at a media briefing to announce the relaunch of ACEPs electricity monitoring platform to support the energy sector, the policy lead, Climate Change and Energy Transition, ACEP, Charles Ofori, said the disparity was from the rural areas, as the urban areas had achieved 100 per cent access rate.



The government, he said, must continue to pay attention to renewable energy to increase capacity to expand services to those areas



Power generation



He said the lack of access to electricity could be mitigated by allowing a lot of investment in the renewable system like mini-grids and micro grid system that are not necessarily connected to the grid to be replaced in some of these communities to help in power generation





Mr Ofori mentioned that private sector participation in the system would help provide access to the communities that were hard to connect to the main grid for electricity generation



He stated that with tariff-related issues, the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) could help provide reasonable tariffs that the consumers would be willing to pay to access and enjoy electricity in the hard-pressed areas and achieve its target by the end of 2025.



Platform



The monitor seeks to educate consumers and energy providers on power

sector-related issues and enable them to receive feedback on the performance of electricity in the specific localities.





With education, the platform provides information on power generation capacity, power installed capacity, losses of the commercial, technical and the transmission losses that are being made, the monitor has features such as generation, electricity access rate, distribution improvement of the southern zone, energy efficiency and regulation, and provides platforms to send feedback and complaints on various issues, power outages, meter issues, other technical issues that may be occurring within some localities and what they are experiencing, among other issues.



The brain behind the platform, Derrick Amegatse, who took the media through the features of the monitor and how to access it said it would be an effective responsive system and educational tool for consumers on

energy- related issues



Mr Amegatse, who also is the Communications Officer for ACEP, disclosed that data provided on the platform was sourced from government- sanctioned energy sector institutions like the energy commission, PURC and utility companies and was consolidated to provide for the platform.



Key complaints that have been received from the consumers using the platform are on power fluctuation in their communities and meter issues which they have applied for but have not been served yet.







Source: graphiconline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The national coordinator of the National Boundary Commission, Major General Emmanuel Kotia, has cautioned government not to underrate threats of terrorist attacks.



According to him, the terrorist attack from the Sahel on the northern territories of Ghana is real therefore Ghana must take all precautions to prevent it from happening.



The terrorist attack from the Sahel on the northern territories of Ghana is real and we all know of the effect of terrorist action in Burkina Faso. Major General Kotia said.



Now, we have also seen in a couple of years up to last year, where we have had attacks in the Northern part of Cote dIvoire, Benin and yesterday was the second attack in Togo.



So, it is real and we have to take all precautions that are available to prevent any terrorist attack and to also prevent any downward movement of the terrorists into the coastal states of the sub-region and especially, Ghana, Benin, Togo and Cote dIvoire, he added.



The West Africa Centre for Counter-Extremism (WACCE) revealed that Ghana is prone to terrorist attacks.



According to the Centre, irrespective of the fact that Ghana has managed terrorist threats for some time Ghana has been so close to terrorism.





Source: ghanaweb.com









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British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson has promised to defend Finland and Sweden if either country comes under attack by Russia before they join Transatlantic military alliance, NATO.



During a tour to the two Nordic nations on Wednesday, May 11, where he met first Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson at her official countryside residence; then Finnish President Sauli Niinisto in Helsinki, Johnson pledged mutual defense while Sweden and Finland make moves to join NATO following Russia's invasion of Ukraine on 24 February.



Finland shares a 1,340-kilometre land border with Russia, while Sweden doesn't have a land border but has strategically important islands in the Baltic Sea close to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Russia has threatened to make military moves if either countries tries to join NATO.



The new agreement will fortify northern Europes defenses, in the face of renewed threats, Johnson said in a statement.



These are not a short-term stop-gap, but a long-term commitment to bolster military ties and global stability, and fortify Europes defenses for generations to come, Johnson said in the statement.



Johnson says the deal will also deepen ties between the British military and the Swedish and Finnish armies.



Should Sweden and Finland apply, there will be an interim period between the application and all 30 NATO members parliaments ratifying their membership. That process could last anywhere between four months and a year.



"The Russian invasion of Ukraine has changed the equation of European security. It has re-written our reality and re-shaped our future," Johnson said at a Helsinki press conference.



Answering a question about how Russia should feel about Finland's possible NATO membership, President Niinisto said "you caused this. Look in the mirror."









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General Secretary of the opposition National Democratic Congress, Johnson Asiedu Nketia says all NDC presidential aspirants are fit to hold forums to address issues concerning the country.



According to him, the party is ever ready to support any hopeful aspirant who will call on them (National Executives) for such programs.



Any senior member in the party with an ambition to run as President, if he or she holds a public forum and invites party leaders, we will grace the occasion, he said.



He said in an interview with NEAT FMs morning show, 'Ghana Montie' that John Dramani Mahamas recent Ghana at Crossroads public lecture is a standard for others to follow.



Mr Asiedu Nketia, however, denied John Mahama as the partys preferred candidate to lead them in the 2024 presidential election despite their impending primaries.



Adding that, well treat every aspirant equally.















Source: King Edward Ambrose Washman Addo/peacefmonline.com/ghana









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National Chairman aspirant of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Mr. Kwabena Abankwa-Yeboah has officially launched his campaign to contest the National Chairman position of the party.



Mr. Abankwa-Yeboah, popularly known as by the grace of God, was escorted to the Eastern Premium Hotel amidst brass band during the launch of his campaign.



He encouraged members of the party and Ghanaians to celebrate the achievements of the party.



He uged the party to put together their arsenal to overcome challenges and also gear up for task of winning the 2024 general elections in order to break the eight-year ruling cycle in the country.



Mr. Abankwah-Yeboah said this in Koforidua, the Eastern Regional capital, when he declared his intention to contest the NPP Chairmanship in the partys impending primaries.



He noted that his main goal of contesting the position is to retain the party in power in the 2024 general elections.



Touting his feat when he assumed the office of the National Treasurer of the NPP, he noted that he implemented innovative policies and initiated fundraising strategies such as adopt the polling station, Nana Addo scratch card, Nana Addo App, which helped to generate revenues for the party.



The Municipal Chief Executive of Abuakwa South, Alhaji Omar Bodinga, delivering a speech for the Eastern Regional Chairman of the NPP - Kingston Akumi Kissi, encouraged the rank and file to rally behind Mr. Abankwah-Yeboah.



He mentioned that Mr. Abankwah-Yeboah is a man of integrity who has changed the face of the party in terms of its finances as the National Treasurer of the party and encouraged every member of the party to support Mr. Abankwah-Yeboah to win the Chairman position.

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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Wednesday 11 May 2022, was the 27th anniversary of a hardly commemorated event, the "Kumepreko" demonstration against the new Value Added Tax (VAT) introduced by the then NDC Government at 17.5%.



On that day, eight people, unarmed citizens demonstrating peacefully, were gunned down in broad day sunshine by members of the ruling NDC, specifically, the ACDR (Association of Committees for the Defence of the Revolution) a wing of the then ruling party.



Even though evidence pointed to specific individuals, no one was eventually punished for those brutal murders.



The tax was temporarily withdrawn to be reintroduced at 10%. But did eight Ghanaian citizens have to be executed in the streets of Accra just for holding a different point of view?



Commemorated for the infamy of unfettered violence and murder committed by the NDC Government, the event takes on new significance with the advent of the e-levy.



Read below the full statement

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Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









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Protesters gather outside the U.S. Supreme Court following the leak of a draft opinion on abortion rights in Washington, D.C., the United States, on May 6, 2022. [Photo/Xinhua]

In the United States, it is taught to every American that to ensure the separation of powers, the Federal Government is separated into three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. However, trust in all three branches has been deteriorating for years. The judiciary recently lost a cataclysmic amount of credibility following its attempt to ban abortion rights.

The legislature should write laws to address the nation's pressing issues. Still, it constantly refuses to fund anything as simple as an infrastructure bill fixing America's collapsing bridges and airports. Only 12% of Americans express confidence in Congress.

Now the Supreme Court, controlled by a radical right-wing cadre of political activists pushed onto the court during the Trump years by a president widely viewed as illegitimate, has become the legislature and the enforcer of individual people's choices about pregnancy. Since 1973, abortion has been recognized as a legal and constitutionally protected right in the United States of America. Around 80% of Americans agree abortion should be a legal right.

However, in an argument citing no modem day precedent, the activist Supreme Court seeks to overturn these rights of American citizens. The damage to the court's reputation, which is supposed to be responsible for protecting the rights of American citizens, is hard to overstate. Before the latest abortion case was heard, only 35% of Americans had confidence in America's highest court. It has issued a good deal of controversial and politically motivated rulings before, but rarely something so aggressively partisan and contrary to established precedent as this one.

It is also unsettling how this ruling was revealed to the public. The ruling has not been finalized or formally released yet. Instead, it was leaked by a staffer. The motives of the staffer are unknown. Many in the media assume it must have been a liberal outraged by the ruling. In any case, the verdict was so shocking that someone thought it was important enough to leak a month and a half ahead of time. The public agrees. It has been the biggest news story in America since its publication.

Conservative politicians have complained that the leak didn't follow protocol. But if the 98-page opinion is so well-argued, why should they be afraid of citizens getting to read it? Do they want to ban abortion without having to explain their actions?

Their concern is that leaking the un-finalized draft could be an attempt to influence the final votes of the justices. The possibility would be concerning if the Supreme Court was operating legitimately as a non-partisan arbitrator of the law. However, when it ignores the law, tramples individual human rights, and makes arbitrary judgments based on its justices' political and religious beliefs, it has no such grounds to complain about anyone undermining its authority. The Supreme Court's actions have undermined its authority.

Republicans have responded by proposing a nationwide abortion ban. Legislators in each Republican-controlled state have already or are planning to ban most abortions in their states. That's about half of the states. They would do it at the national level if they could. They grab as much power as they can.

The United States of America, the country that heralds itself as "the land of the free" in its national anthem, the hegemon that invades smaller countries thousands of miles away to bomb for democracy, is now set to offer its citizens less reproductive freedom than more than half the countries in the world.

It is no wonder trust in American institutions is declining.

Mitchell Blatt is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:

http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/MitchellBlatt.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.
Vice President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, in an address at the 60th Anniversary Celebration of the University of Ghana Business School on Wednesday, May 11 urged the Dean of the institution to grant admission to the General Secretary of the opposition National Democracy Congress (NDC), Johnson Asiedu Nketia for remedial classes.



Commending the UGBS for producing many prominent people in the country, Dr Bawumia noted that the NDC scribe was also an alumnus of the institution but in need of remedial education.



He said Ladies and gentlemen, it is a great pleasure to be here today, representing the President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo at this major celebration. I am here as one of you, having been an academic myself, including teaching at a Business School, in my previous life.



"I share in your joy, because sixty years of continuous operation that has produced prominent people in Ghana and the world of business is not a small feat. I think you should be very proud of yourselves for being trailblazers of business education in Ghana and we congratulate you on your 60th anniversary.



"When the Dean, Justice Bawole, went through all these famous people who had passed through this instution. It was like a who-is-who in Ghana. Even Asiedu Nketiah was part of it. But, in his case, Dean you may have to let him come back for remedial classes".











Source: graphiconline.com









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The National Chairman of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Mr Samuel Ofosu Ampofo, has called on the rank and file of the party to take the branch elections seriously.

According to him, the road towards Election 2024 had just begun, stressing that the branch elections were pivotal in ensuring victory for the party.



In an interview with the Daily Graphic yesterday, Mr Ofosu Ampofo explained that due to the crucial role of branch executives, the party decided not to rush the process through because the party wanted to achieve maximum effect in the 2024 polls.



Exercise



The national chairman said the party started the process with retreats in all the 16 regions and followed up with outreach programmes, as well as visiting polling stations to assess the situation on the ground.



He said the party would monitor the process to ensure fairness at all levels.



Mr Ofosu Ampofo said for instance that the forms were going to be made available at all levels of the party through to the national level to ensure that no aspirant was denied the nomination forms.



Unity



Mr Ofosu Ampofo said the branch elections should not be the basis of any rancour but rather a means to create cohesiveness and unity.



He explained that cohesiveness and unity were key to the success of the party in recapturing power.





He, therefore, called on NDC members to hit the ground running in unity of purpose to restore the Ghanaian dignity, good governance and put in place pro-poor policies to alleviate the difficulties.



On the date for the election of flag bearer for the 2024 election, Mr Ofosu Ampofo said no date had been fixed, explaining that it would be the duty of the new national executive to decide on the date.



Background



The NDC last Tuesday outlined its calendar of activities to elect its branch to national executive members.



While the party has fixed June 15 to July this year for the branch elections, the ward elections will take place in August this year, with the constituency elections taking place in September 2022.



The party will hold its regional conference in October 2022 to elect its regional executive members, while that of national executive members will be held in November 2022.



It also decided on the regulations and modalities for branch elections.



It said as part of the regulations for the branch elections, nominations shall open upon an official publication or announcement by the general secretary seven clear days before the start of the election.









Source: graphiconline.com









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The National Treasurer of the New Patriotic Party, Kwabena Abankwah-Yeboah, has officially declared his intention to contest the national chairmanship position of the Party.



He made the declaration Wednesday, May 10, 2022, in Koforidua in the Eastern Region.



The ceremony was attended by some Regional and constituency executives, delegates, and supporters of the party across the country.



Addressing the party faithful, Mr. Abankwah-Yeboah said he has risen through the ranks of the party as a founding member in 1992 through to polling station chairman, to the parliamentary aspirant, and served as National Treasurer for eight years hence competent to lead the party to win the 2024 elections.



He said the NPP has demonstrated to Ghanaians that it is the only party that implements pro-poor policy interventions that improve the lives of the people citing the National Health Insurance Scheme and the Free Senior High School policy.



He, however, said despite this hallmark of the NPP it will not be easy for the eight-year governance cycle to be broken for the NPP to retain power but he believes it is a possibility.



He said the party needs a leader who will bind the party together and mobilize resources for the base to be effective to win the 2024 Presidential election.



My aim will be to bring everybody on board at all levels so that working together we bring opportunity for all us of for victory 2024. I will be the national Chairman that you can trust to be neutral, unifier, transparent, and create opportunity for all.



Mr. Abankwa -Yeboah outlining his vision mentioned that he will institute an award scheme in the party to honor all hardworking party executives and members yearly.



He also said, when voted as National chairman, he will empower the grassroots with viable economic skills and initiatives, and create economic opportunities for the youth.



He also promised to create an effective and efficient welfare scheme to cater to members of the party in need.



Touching on internal disputes, Mr. Abankwah- Yeboah said he will adopt an alternate dispute resolution mechanism to swiftly resolve the internal issues of the party.



He added, "the problem of apathy will be dealt with through enhanced transparency trust, and respect for each other.



He eulogized the current National Chairman Freddy Blay for his feat so far in the NPP.



The Eastern Regional Chairman of the NPP Kingston Okomeng kissi represented by the 1st Vice Chairman Alhaji Omar Bodinga declared support of the region to Mr. Abankwah on the basis of the fact that he has brought reforms to the partys financial administration system and mobilization hence competent to be national chairman.



The constituency chairman in the Region similarly declared their support for him.



Profile



Mr.Abankwah -Yeboah hails from Kwahu Mpraeso in the Eastern Region of Ghana.



He attended the Achimota Secondary School and holds a Bachelor of Pharmacy (Hons) from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Masters in Business Administration (Finance option), and a Bachelor of Law from the University of Ghana-Legon.



He has served on boards, councils, and committees of the Accra Technical University, Koforidua Technical University, Association of Ghana Industries (AGI), Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association of Ghana (PMAG), Pharmaceutical Society of Ghana (PSGH), Agricultural Development Bank (ADB), Gulf Consolidated Limited, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research among others.



He is the Director of United Perfumery and Pharmaceuticals Company Limited and the Chief Executive Officer of Sharp Pharmaceuticals Limited.



Mr. Abankwah-Yeboah is a founding member of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) who has risen through the ranks of the party from being a polling station chairman in 2006 to being a member of the Greater Accra Regional Finance Committee, the Greater Accra Regional Treasurer, and the Deputy Director of Campaign and Fundraising in 2016. He is currently the patron of Patriotic Volunteers and the Womens Wing of the Asylum Down Electoral area and the National Treasurer of the party.













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Is it game over for our attempts to avert dangerous climate change? For millions of people in India and Pakistan the answer is clearly yes as they continue to suffer from a record-breaking spring heatwave that is testing the limits of human survivability.

As global emissions continue, such extreme weather will become more likely. Back in 2015, the international community agreed that warming beyond 1.5C would cause devastation on an intolerable scale. This was codified into the Paris Agreement which sought to limit temperature increases since pre-industrial levels to well below 2C, with 1.5C as a goal. In reality, there is a vast gulf of impacts between 1.5C and 2C. The IPCC's 6th Assessment Report showed that once-in-50-years heatwaves will become nine times more frequent at 1.5C, and 14 times more frequent at 2C.

The 1.5C goal requires immediate, large and sustained cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. But emissions are currently surging upwards as the global economy recovers from COVID-19. At current rates and current inaction, the average global surface temperature of our home planet will increase beyond 1.5C shortly after 2030. The World Meteorological Organization estimates there is now a 50:50 chance that temperatures will exceed 1.5C one year within the next five.

Does this mean the Paris Agreement has failed? What next for climate politics and activism? These and other questions are only becoming more urgent. We must come up with answers and strategies for dealing with their answers now. And we must do that while remembering that every fraction of a degree of warming spared will save people, ecosystems and nations that would be condemned as temperatures increase.

As complex as the climate change conundrum is, in important respects it can be characterized with a simple question: how many people are we willing to see die as a consequence of our governments' and banks' continued coddling of the fossil fuel industry? And let us remember, it is the world's poorest peoplethose least responsible for the problemthat will be doing most of the dying. If warming were to significantly exceed 1.5C, then many people in richer, industrialized nations will join them. Climate breakdown is non-linear, so a 3C warmer world would have far more than twice the impact of a 1.5C world. Stable societies may be impossible. Humanity may be plunged into a period of mass death.

In many ways this not-so-distant future world is unimaginable. Yet this is the world that a recent survey of IPCC lead authorsscientists that draft the comprehensive climate change assessment reportsdeemed most likely. The leading science journal Nature found that 60% of those that responded concluded that of all the possible futures for humanity, 3C warming by 2100 seemed the most probable. Only 4% of respondents believed that 1.5C was likely.

Wealth and power are obstacles

If we want to limit the destruction and death that climate change will cause, while at the same time ensuring all of humanity has a good, decent, dignified life, then we must look at how our civilization's resources are being used, and how they have been accumulated. That means we must respond to the political reality that there are powerful forces that are keeping us locked into our current trajectory. Such forces have arisen as a consequence of centuries of fossil fuel exploitation which have created vast concentrations of both wealth and power. Is it any surprise that this wealth and power resists redistribution?

This is not to say that technological and financial innovations are not important. We must harness new ways of generating zero-carbon electricity at the same time as reforming the processes that funnel the trillions of dollars that flow across the world so that they make their way to equitable and just climate solutions. But such acts in the absence of deeper engagement with the drivers of our current crisis can only serve as sticking plasters.

Keep climate justice alive

It is that context that we must reflect on where we are right now. Declaring 1.5C to be lost, that the Paris Agreement is dead, risks playing directly into a narrative of dangerous delay. Many people, instead of being galvanized into desperate and all-out action to keep warming as low as possible, might instead conclude that this means we will fall back to 2C. Such a conclusion would be music to the ears of fossil fuel interests which have resisted decarbonization for decadesand risks locking us into warming far beyond 2C.

There are legitimate fears that, as the situation rapidly deteriorates, political pressure will be applied to keep us safewhere "us" in this instance will be some of those living in rich, industrialized nations. The fact these nations are most responsible for the problem may count for little if politics takes a strongly protectionist turn. Securing energy, food and water suppliesensuring national security would take precedence, turning desperate migrants and climate refugees away at the borders, condemning them to danger, famine and death. This implies effectively abandoning the majority of humanity to face unprecedented environmental change with all the potential for failures and even collapse in social, economic and political systems.

Dangerous path to safety

The Paris Agreement was a rare victory for those most vulnerable to climate change. That we are on course to barrel past 1.5C should not be a reason to disavow the values that underpin it. It should instead focus minds and energies.

The decisions we make become morenot lessimportant as the world continues to heat up. If our actions were truly transformative, then yesit could still be possible to limit warming to no more than 1.5C, or stay as close as feasible.

But we must be honest about the prospects of such transformation given the profoundly dysfunctional political and economic systems we find ourselves in. This includes the powerful forces that will continue to strongly resist our actions. So we must go beyond meekly and vaguely asking for "increased political will." If we want to keep humanity safe, if we want to preserve the extraordinarily complex and beautiful world that we live in, then we must not turn away from the situation we are in and the difficult and dangerous paths to safety. We must all become engaged and active to protect our world, by all means possible.

Are we on track to limit warming to no more than 1.5C? No, we are nowhere near. So: what are wewhat are yougoing to do about it?

Explore further Nature-based carbon removal can help protect us from a warming planet

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Refugees leaving their homes in Ukraine. Credit: Shutterstock

Russia's war in Ukraine has displaced millions of people, most of them women and children. This mounting crisis suggests that conflict-related sexual violence, which has been reported in Ukraine, requires urgent action, say Washington University in St. Louis experts on refugees and displaced populations.

"Ultimately, we must all act to support survivors and prevent such sexual violence in Ukraine and in conflict zones across the globe as part of our long-term strategy to build peaceful societies," wrote Lindsay Stark and co-authors in a comment piece "Prevention of conflict-related sexual violence in Ukraine and globally," published in The Lancet May 10.

Stark is associate professor and associate dean for global strategy and programs in Washington University's Brown School. One of the co-authors on the piece is Kim Thuy Seelinger, research associate professor at the Brown School and visiting professor at the university's School of Law.

Sexual violence has long been a feature of war, the authors say, but scholarship on the impacts of conflict-related sexual violence provides lessons that can inform and guide prevention.

First, conflict-related sexual violence has considerable detrimental individual and societal effects. Second, rape in war is neither ubiquitous nor inevitable. Although it remains greatly under-reported, existing data indicate that not all armed organizations commit rape. Finally, sexual violence in conflict is preventable at multiple levels, although evidence for preventive interventions remains preliminary.

"From a public health standpoint, evidence points to the potential of multipronged initiatives, such as creating community crisis intervention units, combating attitudes that condone sexual violence both at the population level and within armed groups, and engaging community leadership in initiatives to oppose or prevent conflict-related sexual violence," wrote Stark and her co-authors.

"Interventions that have successfully protected civilians from conflict-related sexual violence also address resource needs, such as increasing access to firewood and employment opportunities and improved police visibility."

"Unfortunately, Ukraine is only one crisis marked by such atrocities," they wrote. "Thousands of Ethiopian, Rohingya, Colombian and Congolese survivors of sexual violence also need protection and support, and many others remain at risk. Establishing international best practices for a coordinated, multisectoral response that includes early medical and psychological care, ethical documentation practices, survivor-centered referral mechanisms and justice systems, and interventions that promote survivor resilience and recovery must be a global health and security priority."

Explore further Sexual violence is a driver of women's political mobilization

More information: Lindsay Stark et al, Prevention of conflict-related sexual violence in Ukraine and globally, The Lancet (2022). Journal information: The Lancet Lindsay Stark et al, Prevention of conflict-related sexual violence in Ukraine and globally,(2022). DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(22)00840-6
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Entrepreneurs who find themselves in over their heads could be better off hiring specialists than investing to improve their own skills, according to a study from researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and the World Bank.

Stephen J. Anderson, assistant professor of marketing at the McCombs School of Business, joined David McKenzie, a World Bank lead economist, to compare the effectiveness of four interventionstraining the owner, consulting, outsourcing an expert and insourcing a workerin helping businesses overcome what the researchers dub "the boundary of the entrepreneur."

"All of these interventions work in different ways, but the insourcing and outsourcing interventions tend to provide the biggest bang for the buck," Anderson said. "They also lead to good sales, profit and performance gains down the road. Hiring a marketing specialist proved especially critical."

The findings appear in the Journal of Political Economy.

The researchers said entrepreneurs are wise to recognize their own constraints and take action, as successful entrepreneurs realize early on that they cannot be "a jack of all trades" and still achieve rapid growth. A standard approach is to train the owner in these skills, but Anderson wondered whether the entrepreneurial boundary could also be overcome by hiring specialists in marketing and sales or in finance and accounting.

The research is embedded in the Growth and Employment project, a multiyear government program in Nigeria funded by the World Bank. While helping grow companies and improve employment worldwide, the program also allows researchers to conduct purer empirical tests, measuring the true effect of a specific business intervention more accurately than is possible in studies conducted in the U.S. For this study, researchers randomly assigned Nigerian entrepreneurs to a control group or one of the four interventions, providing subsidies to hire specialists and helping to screen the service providers for quality.

Credit: University of Texas at Austin

Through audits and management surveys, the researchers then tracked the companies' financial performance and business practices for the next two years to see which approach worked best.

Of those entrepreneurs assigned to the insourcing or outsourcing groups, 80% chose to hire specialists with skills in marketing and selling.

"If you don't have money coming in, then you don't have a business," Anderson said. "So, intuitively, it makes sense, and these entrepreneurs maybe thought the same way."

Insourcing and outsourcing this kind of business expertise improved companies' product innovation and expanded their digital marketing footprints on social networks. As a result, companies saw higher sales and profits.

The study also informs governments and organizations about how best to help entrepreneurs in developing countries, Anderson said. Without access to financial and marketplace support to make the right hire, small businesses may be stunted.

"We now know that facilitating access to skilled specialists helps owners move beyond the entrepreneurial boundary and grow their businesses," Anderson said.

Explore further Do marketers matter for entrepreneurs?

More information: Stephen J. Anderson et al, Improving Business Practices and the Boundary of the Entrepreneur: A Randomized Experiment Comparing Training, Consulting, Insourcing, and Outsourcing, Journal of Political Economy (2021). Journal information: Journal of Political Economy Stephen J. Anderson et al, Improving Business Practices and the Boundary of the Entrepreneur: A Randomized Experiment Comparing Training, Consulting, Insourcing, and Outsourcing,(2021). DOI: 10.1086/717044
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Images in the wake of violent coastal storms usually focus purely on the extensive damage caused to beaches, dunes, property, and surrounding infrastructure.

However, a new international study has shown that extreme weather events could help protect beaches from the impact of sea level riseby bringing in new sand from deeper waters or from nearby beaches.

The study, led by Dr. Mitchell Harley from the UNSW Water Research Laboratory, is published today in Nature Communications Earth & Environment.

"We know that extreme storms cause major coastal erosion and damage to beachfront properties", Dr. Harley says.

"For the first time we looked not just above water, where the impacts of extreme storms are easy to see, but also deep down below the water as well.

"What we found was that hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of sand was entering these beach systems during these eventsthat's similar to the scale of what engineers use to nourish a beach artificially.

"This could potentially be enough to offset some of the impacts of sea level rises caused by climate change, such as retreating coastlines, and by several decades in the long-term.

"It's a new way of looking at extreme storms."

Wave after wave

In collaboration with researchers from University of Plymouth and Autonomous University of Baja California, the study examined three coastlines across Australia, the United Kingdom and Mexico. Each was subject to a sequence of extreme storms or extended storm clusters, followed by a milder period of beach recovery.

In Australia, researchers studied Narrabeen beach in Sydney in the wake of a 2016 storm which famously ripped a swimming pool away from a property overlooking the coastline.

Using high-resolution measurements of the beach and seabed, they were able to show that sediment gains were sufficient to theoretically offset decades of projected shoreline retreat.

"For the first time, we were able to mobilize specialized monitoring equipment to get really accurate measurements before and after a storm," Dr. Harley says.

"We used a combination of a twin engine airplane equipped with a Lidar scanner, drones and jet skis going back and forth along the beach taking measurements below the surface right before and after the storm hit.

"This was how we were able to get an accurate picture of the volume of sand moving for each storm."

In the UK, researchers of the Coastal Processes Research Group of the University of Plymouth have studied Perranporth beach in Cornwall since 2006 using a combination of monthly beach topographic surveys and quasi-annual bathymetric surveys.

Here, the impact of the extreme 2013/14 and 2015/16 winters resulted in very significant losses of sand from the intertidal beach and dune system. However, when looking at the total sand budget, including the underwater part of the beach, it was observed that by 2018 the beach had gained 420,000 cubic meters of sand.

"We are not quite sure whether this extra sand has come from offshore or from around the corner, or even both, but we do now understand that extreme waves can potentially contribute positively to the overall sand budget, despite causing upper beach and dune erosion," said Professor Gerd Masselink, who leads the Coastal Processes Research Group.

Bruun rule

Exactly how much a coastline might change due to sea level rise is a key question facing coastal managers as they plan for the escalating impacts of climate change.

In the past, this has been estimated using a simple approach known as the Bruun rule. This rule states that for a given meter of sea-level rise, the coastline is expected to retreat between roughly 20 and 100 meters, depending on the steepness of the coast.

Using the Bruun rule, global sea-level rise caused by climate change has been projected to result in a large retreat or loss of almost half of the world's sandy beaches by the end of this century.

"The Bruun rule however has been criticized for its simplicity, as it doesn't take into account the many complex factors about how individual beaches respond to sea-level rise," Prof. Masselink says.

"This includes the presence of sand stored in deeper water immediately off the coastand its potential to be mobilized during extreme weather events."

Dr. Harley says these findings highlight that extreme storms need to be considered in long-term projections of sediment movements on beaches.

"It further reinforces that we really need to be doing a beach-by-beach understanding of how our beaches are going to change as global sea-level rise continues."

Looking past the eye of the storm

Dr. Harley says there are so few measurements of the seabed immediately off our coastlines that it's hard to tell how much sand could potentially be mobilized in the future.

While these findings are from only three extreme storm sequences, it potentially changes how people can understand the long-term future of our coastlines.

"We're only scraping the surface here. We need to repeat these types of monitoring measurements for more storms and different types of coastal settings under various conditions," he says.

"Only then, will we be able to get a clearer understanding of how much sand is stored off the coast that could potentially help buffer the impacts of sea level riseand a clearer picture of what our beaches could look like in the year 2100 and beyond."

Explore further Why some beaches are getting bigger despite rising sea levels

More information: Single Extreme Storm Sequence Can Offset Decades Of 2 Shoreline Retreat Projected To Result From Sea-Level Rise, Nature Communications Earth & Environment (2022). www.nature.com/articles/s43247-022-00437-2 Journal information: Nature Communications Earth & Environment Single Extreme Storm Sequence Can Offset Decades Of 2 Shoreline Retreat Projected To Result From Sea-Level Rise,(2022). DOI: 10.1038/s43247-022-00437-2
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

A new paper in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, published by Oxford University Press, indicates that people who are the gender minority in their workplace are more likely to experience sexual harassment. This harassment discourages people from taking jobs in workplaces where they would be a gender minority. It also leads current minorities to leave their jobs for new ones with lower pay.

Women and men are segregated across workplaces, and previous research indicates that such segregation may explain 15 to 20% of the gender wage gap. Researchers here studied how gender discrimination in work conditions contributes to such inequality. Using information from the bi-annual Swedish Work Environment Survey, the study shows that women's and men's harassment risks grow with the share of opposite-sex people in their workplace. Women are about three times as likely as men to experience sexual harassment, but in the most male-dominated workplaces, they are nearly six times more likely than men to do so. Meanwhile, men's risk is almost twice as high as women's in the most female-dominated workplaces.

The research used a survey experiment to measure workers' aversion to taking jobs in workplaces where a sexual harassment incident had occurred. Both women and men had a high aversion to jobs in such workplaces, but their aversion was three times larger if the harassment victim had the same sex as themselves. These findings imply that harassment deters women from taking jobs in male-dominated workplaces, where women are the main harassment victims, and vice versa for men.

Workplaces with a larger share of men pay more. A workplace with more than 80% men offers a 9% higher wage for the same work as a workplace with 80% female employees.

The researchers here find that harassment produces gender inequality through job changes among harassment victims. Investigators found that women who report sexual harassment are 25 percent more likely to have left for a new job in the three years after the harassment. Men who report sexual harassment are 15 percent more likely to have left for a new job. The study indicates women who experience sexual harassment are more likely to leave for a job at a company with a lower share of men and a lower wage premium.

"By deterring women from taking jobs in male-dominated workplaces, harassment also keeps women away from the highest-paying employers in the labor market, and men from the lowest-paying ones," said Johanna Rickne, one of the paper's authors. "In this way, sexual harassment contributes to the gender wage gap."

Explore further The dynamics of workplace sexual harassment in the US

More information: Sexual harassment and gender inequality in the labor market, The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2022). Journal information: Quarterly Journal of Economics Sexual harassment and gender inequality in the labor market,(2022). DOI: 10.1093/qje/qjac018
Ancient DNA extraction in Mainzs lab. Work done in sterile conditions to avoid contamination from modern DNA. Credit: Joachim Burger / JGU

The genetic origins of the first agriculturalists in the Neolithic period long seemed to lie in the Near East. A new study published in the journal Cell shows that the first farmers actually represented a mixture of Ice Age hunter-gatherer groups, spread from the Near East all the way to south-eastern Europe. Researchers from the University of Bern and the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics as well as from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the University of Fribourg were involved in the study. The method they developed could help reveal other human evolution patterns with unmatched resolution.

The first signs of agriculture and a sedentary lifestyle are found in the so-called "Fertile Crescent," a region in the Near East where people began to settle down and domesticate animals and plants about 11,000 years ago. The question of the origin of agriculture and sedentism has occupied researchers for over 100 years: did farming spread from the Near East through cultural diffusion or through migration? Genetic analyses of prehistoric skeletons so far supported the idea that Europe's first farmers were descended from hunter-gatherer populations in Anatolia. While that may well be the case, this new study shows that the Neolithic genetic origins cannot clearly be attributed to a single region. Unexpected and complex population dynamics occurred at the end of the Ice Age, and led to the ancestral genetic makeup of the populations who invented agriculture and a sedentary life-style i.e. the first Neolithic farmers.

First farmers emerged from a mixing process starting 14,000 years ago

Previous analyses had suggested that the first Neolithic people were genetically different from other human groups from that time. Little was known about their origins. Nina Marchi, one of the study's first authors from the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Bern and SIB says that "we now find that the first farmers of Anatolia and Europe emerged from a population admixed between hunter-gatherers from Europe and the Near East." According to the authors, the mixing process started around 14,000 years ago, which was followed by a period of extreme genetic differentiation lasting several thousand years.

A novel approach to model population history from prehistoric skeletons

This research was made possible by combining two techniques: the production of high-quality ancient genomes from prehistoric skeletons, coupled with demographic modeling on the resulting data. The research team coined the term "demogenomic modeling" for this purpose.

"It is necessary to have genome data of the best possible quality so that the latest statistical genomic methods can reconstruct the subtle demographic processes of the last 30 thousand years at high resolution," says Laurent Excoffier, one of the senior authors of the study. Excoffier is a professor at the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Bern and group leader at SIB. He initiated the project together with Joachim Burger of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and Daniel Wegmann of the University of Fribourg. Marchi adds that "simply comparing the similarity of different ancient genomes is not enough to understand how they evolved. We had to reconstruct the actual histories of the populations studied as accurately as possible. This is only possible with complex population genetic statistics."

Interdisciplinarity key to solve such ancient puzzles

Joachim Burger of the University of Mainz and second senior author emphasizes the necessity of interdisciplinarity: "It took close to ten years to gather and analyze the skeletons suitable for such a study. This was only possible by collaborating with numerous archaeologists and anthropologists, who helped us to anchor our models historically."

The historical contextualization was coordinated by Maxime Brami, who works with Burger at Johannes Gutenberg University. The young prehistorian was surprised by some of the study's findings: "Europe's first farmers seem to be descended from hunter-gatherer populations that lived all the way from the Near East to the Balkans. This was not foreseeable archaeologically."

Towards a general model of human population evolution

Genetic data from fossils (skeletons) are badly damaged and must be processed accordingly using bioinformatics, as Daniel Wegmann from the University of Fribourg and group leader at SIB explains: "The high-resolution reconstruction of the prehistory of the Europeans was only possible thanks to methods that we specifically developed to analyze ancient fossil genomes." Burger adds: "With these approaches, we have not only elucidated the origins of the world's first Neolithic populations, but we have established a general model of the evolution of human populations in Southwest Asia and Europe."

"Of course, spatial and temporal gaps remain, and this does not imply the end of studies on the evolution of humans in this area," concludes Excoffier. Thus, the team's research plan is already set; they want to supplement their demographic model with genomes from the later phases of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages to provide an increasingly detailed picture of human evolution.

Explore further High-resolution genomes reveal nuanced origins of the first farmers

More information: Joachim Burger et al, The genomic origins of the world's first farmers, Cell (2022). Journal information: Cell Joachim Burger et al, The genomic origins of the world's first farmers,(2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2022.04.00
The best candidate exomoon we have so far is in the Kepler-1625 system. Some evidence shows that a gaseous exomoon the size of Neptune is orbiting an even larger gas giant named Kepler 1625b. Other evidence contradicts the finding. Credit: NASA, ESA, and L. Hustak (STScI)

Our solar system contains eight planets and more than 200 moons. The large majority of those moons have no chance of being habitable, but some of themEuropa and Enceladus, for exampleare strong candidates in the search for life.

Is it the same in other solar systems?

Moons in our solar system show as much variety as planets, maybe more. There are moons where a sheath of ice tens of kilometers thick hides a warm ocean. There's a moon with stable bodies of surface liquid. There's a moon that experiences near-constant volcanic activity.

Some moons formed via accretion. At least one moon, Earth's, formed from a collision between protoplanets. Some moons are probably captured asteroids. Some moons might be captured Kuiper belt objects. There are moons larger than some of the planets and moons so small they're barely moons at all.

The search for habitable worlds is focused on exoplanets, mainly because we can't see exomoons. But exoplanets must have exomoons if our solar system is any indication. "Even though no exomoons are known, we have no reason to assume that moon formation does not occur the same way as it did in the solar system," the authors of a new paper write. And there may be far more exomoons than there are exoplanets. Is there some way we can begin to understand what exomoons are promising targets in the search for habitability?

We may not have found any exomoons yet, but that doesnt stop us from imagining them. This is an artists conception of an Earth-like exomoon orbiting a gaseous planet. Credit: Avatar, 20th Century Fox

The authors of the new study think so. The study is "A target list for searching for habitable exomoons," published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS.) The lead author is Vera Dobos, an astronomer at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute at the University of Groningen, Netherlands.

What we know about the habitability of exoplanets and exomoons is dwarfed by what we don't know. Studies like this are some of our first forays into understanding exomoon habitability. We haven't even found our first exomoon, but we soon will. (It looked like astronomers might have found one in 2018, but now it's uncertain.) Studies like this one are helping the science community prepare for exomoon discoveries.

When we start finding them, we may face an avalanche of exomoon discoveries. As lead author Dobos says, "For this reason, it is important to have basic knowledge about exomoons by the first detections, that will help in selecting further observation targets."

Since we haven't discovered any exomoons yet, this study investigates the habitability of hypothetical exomoons that might be orbiting known exoplanets. "Even though no exomoons are known today, their potential habitability is an interesting and important question," the authors write. Their study provides a target list to maximize our chances of finding potentially habitable exomoons.

The study focuses on large rocky exomoons that can hold onto their atmospheres. The authors also examined the heat available to exomoons from the star or stars in their solar system and tidal heating. They ignored radiogenic heating, which could provide enough heat to maintain a subsurface ocean, like on Europa and Enceladus, and maybe others.

This figure from the study shows the habitability probability for exomoons around known exoplanets on the semi-major axis  stellar effective temperature plane. Only exomoons with at least a 10% habitability probability are shown. Planets with known masses (with or without radius data) are marked with circles, and planets with known radii only are marked with triangles. The colours of the markers correspond to the fraction of habitable moons, and the sizes of the markers represent the sizes of the planets, as shown in the legend. The different shades of green lines show conservative and optimistic habitable zones for the exoplanets. The legend only displays three representative sizes (Earth, Neptune and Jupiter), while the size of the markers in the plot is scaled to the actual size of the planets. Credit: Dobos et al. 2022

The researchers started with the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, then excluded exoplanets based on the following criteria:

Planets greater than 13 Jupiter masses.

Planets with a host star smaller than 0.08 solar masses (to exclude brown dwarfs).

Planets of which neither the orbital period nor the semimajor axis is known.

Planets for which none of the following three parameters are known: mass, minimum mass, and radius.

After those exclusions, they ended up with 4,140 known exoplanets. For each of those planets, they simulated 100,000 moons. The result is the habitability probability for each simulated moon, which the researchers define as the ratio of habitable test moons compared to the 100,000 simulated moons.

After all was said and done, the team identified 234 known exoplanets where the exoplanets' moons had a habitability probability of ~1%. (17 of the planets themselves had a habitability probability greater than 50%.)

Overall, the study showed that most probably habitable moons orbit planets in their stars' habitable zone, which isn't surprising. It also showed that several massive known exoplanets have a high habitability probability for exomoons. The study showed that exoplanets with highly-eccentric orbits and/or high tidal-heating rates were most likely to host habitable moons for exoplanets outside their stars' habitable zones.

This screenshot from NASAs Eyes on Exoplanets illustrates HD 7199 b. According to this study, HD 7199 b has a 64% probability of hosting a habitable exomoon. Credit: NASA

But one thing modifies these results: the host stars. The team worked with the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia as their input, and it doesn't list the type of star for over half of the exoplanets it contains. And for the stars it does list, their current evolutionary state isn't listed. So some of the host stars are not conducive to habitability. So even if the simulations resulted in higher habitability probabilities for exomoons in the system, the star might negate that. However, suppose a star contraindicates habitability because of extreme flaring and radiation. In that case, a massive enough planet could shield an exomoon with a protective magnetosphere.

Many other factors determine the habitability of exomoons or even their presence. For example, when planets migrate, they can lose their moons. Some moons can survive this, depending on the physical and orbital parameters of the planet and the moon, and some moons might be captured into orbits around a new planet. But those factors are outside of the scope of this paper.

This work results in a table of exoplanets that have high probabilities of hosting potentially habitable moons. Among the exoplanets with the highest probabilities are some that readers might recognize.

Kepler-459 b is the planet with the highest probability of hosing habitable exomoons. It's a sub-Jupiter orbiting a star similar to our sun every 854 days. Kepler-459 b's exomoon habitability probability is 70%. Kepler Kepler-456 b is also a sub-Jupiter orbiting a star about the same mass as the sun, but its orbit takes 1320 days. Kepler-456 b's exomoon habitability probability is 69%.

Third on the list is HD 7199 b. It's a gas giant that orbits its sun-like star every 1.7 years. HD 7199 b's exomoon habitability probability is 64%.

Further down the list is Kepler-458 b, the first rocky super-Earth found within the habitable zone around a sun-like star. It's sometimes called Earth's cousin, or Earth 2.0. Its exomoon habitability probability is 60%. Then there's Kepler-62f. Kepler-62f is considered one of the most promising habitable exoplanet candidates, mainly because it orbits a very stable, extremely long-lived star. Its exomoon habitability probability is 53%.

Proxima Centauri c also makes it onto the list. Its status as a confirmed exoplanet is debated, but it garners attention because it's so close to us. It's near the bottom of the list with an exomoon habitability probability of 14%.

Unfortunately, many exoplanets with high exomoon habitability probability have very long orbital periods of several hundred days or longer. This makes observing the planets and looking for exomoons difficult. Others, like the aforementioned Kepler-62f, have shorter orbital periods of only a couple hundred days. Kepler-62f's orbital period of 268 days makes it an intriguing target in the hunt for exomoons.

Many of the exoplanets on the list are large gas giants. They could host several exomoons, some as large as the small planets in our solar system. When Galileo pointed his telescope at Jupiter, he found four large moons. His discovery was a huge moment in history. Maybe our first exomoon detection will be similar, and we'll find our first four all at once.

One day we'll have the technology and methodology to find exomoons more easily. We might soon know of thousands or even tens of thousands of exomoons. This study might help astronomers decide where best to look for habitable ones when that happens.

Explore further Astronomers find evidence for a second supermoon beyond our solar system

More information: Vera Dobos et al, A target list for searching for habitable exomoons, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2022). Journal information: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Vera Dobos et al, A target list for searching for habitable exomoons,(2022). DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stac1180
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A Chinese envoy on Wednesday warned against attempts to impose more sanctions on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).



Dialogue and consultation is the only correct way to resolve the Korean Peninsula issue. The United States is a direct party to the issue and holds the key to breaking the deadlock. As such, it should take concrete actions to respond positively to the reasonable concerns of the DPRK and create conditions for an early resumption of dialogue, said Zhang Jun, China's permanent representative to the United Nations.

Although the U.S. side claims to be willing to engage in unconditional dialogue, when it comes to actions, it is continuing to tighten sanctions and exert pressure. This is clearly not constructive, he told the Security Council. "The new draft resolution proposed by the United States, evoking Chapter VII of the UN Charter, is centered on furthering sanctions, which is not an appropriate way to address the current situation on the peninsula."

The Security Council, over the years, has adopted numerous resolutions on the issue, which, while authorizing sanctions, have also stressed the need for a peaceful, political, and diplomatic solution to the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula. All these deserve equal attention, said Zhang.

"Sanctions are but a means to an end, and should always serve the overall goal of political settlement. Equating sanctions to or replacing diplomatic efforts is completely putting the cart before the horse, and will not achieve the desired result," he said. "Despite the fact that sanctions have already had a negative humanitarian impact and collateral damage to other countries, the countries concerned are still in total denial, which is inconsistent with the conclusions of various international humanitarian agencies and the 1718 (DPRK Sanctions) Committee's panel of experts."

In response to the latest situation, China and a number of Security Council members have all put forward reasonable proposals to explore ways to take strong actions and promote the political solution to the Korean Peninsula issue, in a way that best garners the consensus of council members. The draft resolution tabled by China and Russia is for this very purpose. Regrettably, the United States, which is the penholder of the DPRK non-proliferation issue, has turned a blind eye to the reasonable proposals of China and other relevant council members, and remains enamored superstitiously with the magic power of sanctions, said Zhang.

"We believe that if the United States changes its negative attitude, it is possible for council members to reach a consensus. We hope that the council members will give serious consideration to the joint China-Russia draft resolution," he said.
Paul Musset (center), then representative of the Gargamelle collaboration, standing in the control room of the eponymous bubble chamber in 1974. Gargamelle provided the first direct evidence for the existence of neutral currents in 1973. Credit: CERN

At the dawn of the 1970s, the idea of a massive scalar boson as the keystone of a unified theoretical model of the weak and electromagnetic interactions had yet to become anchored in a field that was still learning to live with what we now know as the standard model of particle physics. As the various breakthroughs of the decade gradually consolidated this theoretical framework, the BroutEnglertHiggs (BEH) field and its boson emerged as the most promising theoretical model to explain the origin of mass.

In the 1960s, there were remarkably few citations of the papers by Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg on the theory of unified weak and electromagnetic interactions. All that changed, however, in 1971 and 1972 when, in Utrecht, Gerard 't Hooft and Martinus Veltman (a former CERN staff member) proved that gauge theories employing the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism to generate masses for gauge bosons are renormalizable, and hence are mathematically consistent and can be used to make reliable, precise calculations for the weak interactions. This breakthrough was given broad publicity in an influential talk by Benjamin Lee of Fermilab during the ICHEP conference held there in 1972, in which he talked at length about "Higgs fields."

Encouraged, in particular, by the CERN theorists Jacques Prentki and Bruno Zumino, the Gargamelle collaboration prioritized the search for weak neutral current interactions in the CERN neutrino beam, and their representative Paul Musset presented the first direct evidence for them in a seminar at CERN on 19 July 1973. This first experimental support for the unification of the electromagnetic and weak interactions attracted great interest and close scrutiny, but was generally accepted within a few months. The neutral-current discovery convinced physicists that the nascent standard model was on the right track. Former CERN Director-General Luciano Maiani, quoted in a 2013 CERN Courier article, puts it this way: "At the start of the decade, people did not generally believe in a standard theory, even though theory had done everything. The neutral-current signals changed that. From then on, particle physics had to test the standard theory."

The next breakthrough came in 1974, when two experimental groups working in the United States, led by Sam Ting at Brookhaven and Burt Richter at SLAC, discovered a narrow vector resonance, the J/psi, with prominent decays into leptonantilepton pairs. Many theoretical interpretations were proposed, which we at CERN discussed over the phone in excited midnight seminars with Fred Gilman at SLAC (almost 40 years before Zoom!). The winning interpretation was that the J/psi was a bound state of the charm quark and its antiquark. The existence of this fourth quark had been proposed by James Bjorken and Sheldon Glashow in 1964, and its use to suppress flavor-changing neutral weak interactions had been proposed by Glashow, John Iliopoulos and Maiani in 1970. Mary K. Gaillard (a long-term visiting scientist at CERN), Jon Rosner and Lee wrote an influential paper on the phenomenology of charm in 1974, and experiments gradually fell into line with their predictions, with final confirmation coming in 1976.

The attention of most of the theoretical and experimental communities was then drawn towards the search for the massive W and Z vector bosons responsible for the weak interactions. This motivated the construction of high-energy hadron colliders and led to the discovery of the W and Z bosons at CERN in 1983 by a team led by Carlo Rubbia.

However, it seemed to Mary K. Gaillard, Dimitri Nanopoulos and myself at CERN that the key question was not the existence of the massive weak vector bosons, but rather that of the scalar Higgs boson that enabled the standard model to be physically consistent and mathematically calculable. At the time, the number of papers on the phenomenology of the Higgs boson could be counted on the fingers of one hand, so we set out to describe its phenomenological profile in some detail, covering a wide range of possible masses. Among the production mechanisms we considered was the possible production of the Higgs boson in association with the Z boson, which generated considerable interest in the days of LEP 2. Among the Higgs decay modes we calculated was that into a pair of photons. This distinctive channel is particularly interesting because it is generated by quantum effects (loop diagrams) in the standard model.

Despite our conviction that something like the Higgs boson had to exist, our paper ended on a cautionary note that was somewhat tongue-in-cheek: "We apologize to experimentalists for having no idea what is the mass of the Higgs boson  and for not being sure of its couplings to other particles, except that they are probably all very small. For these reasons we do not want to encourage big experimental searches for the Higgs boson, but we do feel that people performing experiments vulnerable to the Higgs boson should know how it may turn up."

This caution was in part because the senior physicists of the day (Dimitri and I were under 30 at the time) regarded the ideas surrounding electroweak symmetry breaking and the Higgs boson with rather jaundiced eyes. Nevertheless, as time went on, the massive W and Z were discovered, the existence or otherwise of the Higgs boson rose up the experimental agenda, and no plausible alternative theoretical suggestions to the existence of something like the Higgs boson emerged. Experimentalists, first at LEP and later at the Tevatron and the LHC, focused increasingly on searches for the Higgs boson as the final building block of the standard model, culminating in the discovery on 4 July 2012.

Explore further Homing in on the Higgs boson interaction with the charm quark
Researcher analyzing ancient human remains for paleogenetic research at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. Credit: Joachim Burger

Farming has been thought to originate from a single population in Southwest Asia, which covers parts of the modern-day Middle East, and made its way to areas in Turkey, Greece, and eventually across Western Europe. Scientists have long debated how these populations have emerged and flowed throughout these regions, but now an international team of researchers have excavated a trove of new genetic information that may settle the debate. Their findings, presented May 12 in the journal Cell, show that the world's first farmers did not originate from a single group as was previously thought but from the mixing of two groups of hunter-gatherers during a tumultuous time in which human settlements almost went extinct.

"I see the study as the first attempt at demonstrating demographic modeling based on ancient DNA," says senior author and population geneticist Laurent Excoffier of the University of Bern, Switzerland. By sequencing the genome of each ancient human multiple times, a technique called deep sequencing, the research team yielded higher-quality data and much more information than conventional analyses based on shallower or partial sequencing. "We get much more detail about the demographic history of those populations, including population divergence, expansions, and infer admixture dates, which was really impossible to do before."

The ancient DNA-based model, which was refined by additional geographical, cultural, archaeological, and climate data, assumed that about 25,000 years ago, a large initial population split into two groups. One moved to Western Europe, while the other stayed in Southwest Asia. Later, because of the drop in global temperature, the Western group experienced an extreme reduction in its population, where some grew close to extinction. The model explained why descendants of European hunter-gatherers have lower genetic diversity, a question that has long puzzled scientists.

"This is a new finding, and it leads to a different interpretation of how these hunter-gatherer populations were structured socially," says Excoffier. Researchers have thought the groups' small population size was what contributed to their low genetic diversity, but the new evidence showed that their populations were much larger than previously thought. "What it implies to us is that they were perhaps more connected between different groups."

As the temperature fell and rose, the population ebbed and flowed. During warm periods, the populations dispersed, resulting in overlapping territories and admixtures, where individuals from previously isolated groups interbred. The model revealed that some of the first farmers emerged from the admixture of hunter-gatherers from a Western group and an already mixed group living in the east around 12,900 years ago. These farmers who domesticated plants and animals then migrated west, eventually bringing their culture to central Europe. Today, many people from all over Europe have descended from them.

Next, the team plans to further analyze ancient genomes from other geographical sites and times to understand cultures and populations that appeared during different stages of the Stone Age and potentially Bronze Age.

"While our study brought new results about history, I think what it really shows is that it's worth investing in high-quality genomic data," says Excoffier. "These ancient materials are limited and too precious not to be optimally analyzed. We should extract as much information as possible, which will become lasting resources that could be shared."

Explore further Extreme genetic drift in the Maniq hunter-gatherers of southern Thailand

More information: Laurent? Excoffier, The genomic origins of the world's first farmers, Cell (2022). www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)00455-X Journal information: Cell Laurent? Excoffier, The genomic origins of the world's first farmers,(2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2022.04.008
The U.S. military released a defoliant called Agent Orange over the South Vietnam countryside to weaponize the forest during the Vietnam War as part of the Operation Ranch Hand project. Credit: Shutterstock

Blast craters, denuded landscapes and burning oil wells. When we think of the relation between war and the landscape, we think of such destructive acts and toxic legacies. Through this lens, nature and the landscape are often seen as casualties of war.

Yet there have been cases where nations have used the landscape as a weapon. In one such touchstone caseOperation Ranch Handthe U.S. military released a defoliant called Agent Orange over the South Vietnam countryside to weaponize the forest during the Vietnam War.

While the end of the Vietnam War saw an international ban on using the environment as a weapon, landscape designwhich includes the planning and planting of green spacescontinues to present itself as a tool capable of influencing the hearts and minds of local populations and ultimately achieving military objectives.

While speaking about the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, "Winning a battle is not winning the war. Taking a city does not mean Vladimir Putin's taking the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian people. On the contrary, he is destined to lose."

Clearly, the United States military doctrine considers winning "hearts and minds" as a necessary measure to win a war.

As a design critic who has been studying the role of landscapes in warfare, I argue that trees and green spaces can be components of a non-coercive mode of warfare, as they can be used to further community solidarity and diminish the likelihood of insurgency.

Winning hearts and minds

The experience of the United States military in Afghanistan has proven that having a more powerful military force does not guarantee winning a war.

While the Taliban surrendered Kandahar only two months after the launch of Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001, the U.S. military remained in Afghanistan and engaged in violent conflict for the next 20 years, ultimately withdrawing and returning the nation to Taliban control.

Central to the United States' effort to secure peace was the strategy of winning "hearts and minds," or making emotional and intellectual appeals to the local population through attraction and persuasion instead of force.

The U.S. military may have ultimately failed to win the war in Afghanistan, but they did develop tactics to secure peace and win over the hearts and minds of local citizens. While not every effort was successful, I found several instances where the U.S. military's war-fighting objectives aligned with an unlikely allythe profession of landscape architecture.

Landscape architects, after all, have always worked to improve public and environmental health. And while hearts and minds are not exactly the same as physical and mental health, it is understood that physical health and well-being are necessary to establish a peaceful society.

Green spaces influence health and mental well-being

American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted's legacy of park building in the United States shows that landscape architects are concerned with public health and social stability. Olmsted was the first professional to use the title of "landscape architect" and is best known for designing New York's Central Park.

Olmsted's parks helped sustain Americans' mental and physical health and social connections during the darkest days of the pandemic. Urban residents enjoyed the greenery in these designed spaces after recognizing that spending time in nature can improve one's physical health and mental well-being.

Since Olmsted's time, a growing body of scientific research has concluded that exposure to green space contributes to improved health and well-being. While medical professionals have been prescribing spending time with nature, landscape architects have been working to maximize the positive outcomes of exposure through design.

Landscape design presents itself as a tool capable of influencing the health and well-being and, therefore, the hearts and minds of local populations. Ultimately it can achieve military objectives through the planning and planting of green space.

Weaponizing the landscape

Using the landscape as a weapon is an underappreciated area of study.

In 1976, the United States, along with 47 other nations, became signatories to the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques. This treaty prohibits "modification of the natural environment for use as a weapon of war" and "acts of war injurious to the natural environment."

While deliberate environmental destruction continues, exemplified by the burning of oil wells set ablaze by Iraqi troops during the Gulf War, researchers hope that the International Criminal Court may one day prosecute "crimes against the environment."

More recently, the Stop Ecocide Foundation has been working to provide a criminal definition of ecocide that will carry the force of international law, making punishable "severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment."

These efforts are laudable and deserve our support. Yet, the understandable emphasis on damage and destruction decreases the attention given to acts of war, like tree planting efforts, that "improve" an environment.

Understanding the long-term impacts of war

One project undertaken by the U.S. military in Afghanistan saw active troops lead a reforestation effort in the Panjshir region, where they planted 35,000 trees, creating a regional green space.

As many individuals experienced this regional planting effort, the landscape influenced the hearts and minds of local citizens on a population scale.

Despite the U.S. military now having withdrawn from Afghanistan, these planted trees and other green spaces continue to grow and exert influence. Thus, it is not just acts of war injurious to the environment that have wide-reaching and long-term impacts on a population.

As I write from my office on the unceded territory of the Musqueam people, I am more keenly aware that a beautiful landscape can manipulate hearts and minds and become a weapon of war. The continued presence of a colonial landscape, designed and imposed on these lands, is easier to recognize if we ask what this land looked like before and after establishing a settler-colonial society.

We experience green spaces differently depending on their design and our cultural background. We need to think about who designed and built our local green spaces and for what purpose. Ultimately, it matters if the landscape is redesigned and replanted by local populations or by occupying forces.

Explore further New research highlights the role of green spaces in conflict

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The lab at the ILL in Grenoble Laurent Thion, ILL. Credit: Vienna University of Technology

The double-slit experiment is the most famous and probably the most important experiment in quantum physics: individual particles are shot at a wall with two openings, behind which a detector measures where the particles arrive. This shows that the particles do not move along a very specific path, as is known from classical objects, but along several paths simultaneously: Each individual particle passes through both the left and the right opening.

Normally, however, this can only be proven by carrying out the experiment repeatedly and evaluating the results of many particle detections at the end. At TU Wien, researchers developed a new variant of such a two-way interference experiment that can correct this flaw: A single neutron is measured at a specific positionand due to the sophisticated measurement setup, this single measurement proofs already that the particle moved along two different paths at the same time. It is even possible to determine the ratio in which the neutron was distributed between the two paths. Thus, the phenomenon of quantum superposition can be proven without having to resort to statistical arguments. The results have now been published in the journal Physical Review Research.

The double-slit experiment

"In the classical double-slit experiment, an interference pattern is created behind the double slit," explains Stephan Sponar from the Atomic Institute at TU Wien. "The particles move as a wave through both openings at the same time, and the two partial waves then interfere with each other. In some places they reinforce each other, in other places they cancel each other out."

The probability of measuring the particle behind the double slit at a very specific location depends on this interference pattern: where the quantum wave is amplified, the probability of measuring the particle is high. Where the quantum wave is canceled out, the probability is low. Of course, this wave distribution cannot be seen by looking at a single particle. Only when the experiment is repeated many times does the wave pattern become increasingly recognizable point by point and particle by particle.

"So, the behavior of individual particles is explained based on results that only become visible through the statistical investigation of many particles," says Holger Hofmann from Hiroshima University, who developed the theory behind the experiment. "Of course, this is not entirely satisfactory. We have therefore considered how the phenomenon of two-way interference can be proven based on the detection of a single particle."

Rotating the neutron

This was made possible with the help of neutrons at the neutron source of ILL in Grenoble: The neutrons are sent onto a crystal that splits the quantum wave of the neutron into two partial waves, very similar to the classical double-slit experiment. The two partial neutron waves move along two different paths and are recombined again. They interfere and are then measured.

In addition, however, another property of the neutron is exploited: its spinthe angular momentum of the particle. It can be influenced by magnetic fields, the angular momentum of the neutron then points in a different direction. If the spin of the neutron is rotated on only one of the two paths, it is possible to determine afterwards which path it has taken. However, the interference pattern then also disappears, as a consequence of complementarity in quantum mechanics.

"We therefore rotate the spin of the neutron just a little," explains Hartmut Lemmel, the first author of the current publication. "Then the interference pattern remains, because you can only obtain very little information about the path. In order to still obtain precise path information, this 'weak' measurement is repeated many times in conventional experiments. However, one then obtains only a statistical statement about the whole ensemble of neutrons and can say little about each individual neutron."

Reversing the rotation

The situation is different if, after the two neutron partial waves have merged, another magnetic field is used to turn the spin back again. By trial and error, one determines the angle of rotation that is necessary to turn the spin of the superimposed state back into the original direction. The strength of this rotation is a measure of how strongly the neutron was present in each path. If it had taken only the path on which the spin has been rotated, the full angle of rotation would be necessary to rotate it back. If it had taken only the other path, no reverse rotation would be necessary at all. In the experiment carried out using a special asymmetric beam splitter, it was shown that the neutrons were present to one third in one path and to two thirds in the other.

Through detailed calculations, the team was able to show: Here, one does not merely detect an average value over the totality of all measured neutrons, but the statement applies to each individual neutron. It takes many neutrons to determine the optimal angle of rotation, but as soon as this is set, the path presence determined from it applies to every single neutron detected.

"Our measurement results support classical quantum theory," says Stephan Sponar. "The novelty is that one does not have to resort to unsatisfactory statistical arguments: When measuring a single particle, our experiment shows that it must have taken two paths at the same time and quantifies the respective proportions unambiguously." This rules out alternative interpretations of quantum mechanics that attempt to explain the double-slit experiment with localized particles.

More information: Hartmut Lemmel et al, Quantifying the presence of a neutron in the paths of an interferometer, Physical Review Research (2022). Hartmut Lemmel et al, Quantifying the presence of a neutron in the paths of an interferometer,(2022). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevResearch.4.023075
Pink pigeon of Mauritius. Credit: Mauritian Wildlife Foundation

The authors of a major study on the once critically endangered pink pigeon say boosting the species' numbers is not enough to save it from extinction in the future.

Despite the population increase, the team's analysis shows the pink pigeon has a high genetic load of bad mutations, which puts it at considerable risk of extinction in the wild within 100 years without continued conservation actions.

An international collaboration led by scientists from the University of East Anglia (UEA), Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE) at the University of Kent and the Earlham Institute in the UK, working with organizations on the ground in Mauritius, investigated the genetic impacts of a population "bottleneck"a rapid collapse in numbers that affected the pink pigeon from Mauritius in the late 1980s, with only 12 birds surviving in the wild.

The team analyzed the DNA of 175 birds sampled over nearly 20 years as subsequent conservation efforts took place.

With the help of biologists from the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation and the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, and in partnership with the Government of Mauritius' National Parks and Conservation Service, the free-living population of the species has increased to around 500 birds.

Consequently, the pink pigeon has been down-listed twice on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List from critically endangered to vulnerable.

However, to keep these populations viable, the researchers warn that "genetic rescue" is needed to recover lost genetic variation caused by inbreeding and to reduce the effects of the harmful mutations. This can be achieved by releasing captive-bred birds from UK and EU zoos.

Pink pigeon of Mauritius. Credit: Mauritian Wildlife Foundation

The study, published in Conservation Biology, used conservation genetic work at DICE, cutting-edge genomic techniques developed at UEA and the Earlham Institute, and computer modeling to closely examine the species' DNA and assess the risk of future extinction, as well as forecasting what needs to be done to secure the pink pigeon's viability. The authors say their findings could help other threatened species.

"By studying the genome of a recovered species that was once critically endangered, we can learn how to help other species to bounce back from a population collapse," said UEA's Prof Cock van Oosterhout, one of the lead authors.

"During the pigeon's population bottleneck, the gene pool lost a lot of variation, and many bad mutations increased in frequency. This genetic load still poses a severe threat, even though the population has recovered in numbers."

Prof van Oosterhout, of the School of Environmental Sciences at UEA, added: "The problem is that all individuals are somehow related to each other. They are the descendants of the few ancestors that managed to survive the bottleneck. Hence, it becomes virtually impossible to stop inbreeding, and this exposes these bad mutations. In turn, this can increase the mortality rate, and it could cause the population to collapse again."

Prof Jim Groombridge, from the University of Kent, explained how the initial recovery of the pink pigeon population was achieved: "A captive population of pink pigeons in the Gerald Durrell Endemic Wildlife Sanctuary in Mauritius, jointly managed by the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation and the National Parks and Conservation Service, was established in the 1970s.

"This was used to breed birds for release into the wild, which boosted population numbers. The team also restored habitat by controlling introduced species and provided supplementary food as part of a field program of intensive conservation management, which further increased the free-living population."

The study used sophisticated software called SLiM that can model an entire bird chromosome, including all its bad mutations. The researchers simulated the bottleneck and population recovery, and then they compared the predicted outcomes of different reintroduction programs. The study was therefore able to predict the viability of the population in the future under different conservation management scenarios.

Pink pigeon of Mauritius. Credit: Mauritian Wildlife Foundation

"We didn't know how many bad mutations the population carried initially, before the bottleneck," said Dr. Hernan Morales from University of Copenhagen, in Denmark, who performed the SLiM modeling. "We first had to simulate the ancestral population to find out how many bad mutations could have evolved. We then checked this data with data on inbreeding depression data from zoo populations of the pink pigeon."

Using pedigree and fitness data held at Jersey Zoo for over 1,000 birds, the team estimated the genetic load, which showed that the pink pigeon carried a high genetic load of 15 lethal equivalents. This was then used to calibrate the computer models.

"The computer simulations clearly show that just boosting numbers isn't enough," added Dr. Morales. "The population also needs 'genetic rescue' from more genetically diverse birds bred in European zoos. These birds are not as closely related, and they can help to reduce the level of inbreeding. However, there is a risk that we could introduce other bad mutations from the zoo population into the wild."

Dr. Camilla Ryan, who worked on the project at the Earlham Institute and UEA, said: "Our bioinformatics analysis indicated the importance of genetic diversity and the unique genetic rescue model to help other species from the brink of extinction. This research highlights the value of collaborations between NGOs, institutes and universities which draw together a range of expertise. This ensures that a holistic approach is taken to a species conservation which includes an understanding of its genetic health."

Sam Speak, a Ph.D. student at UEA and co-author of the paper, added: "We are now analyzing the genome of the pink pigeon from zoo populations here in the UK, trying to locate these bad mutations. We can do this now using bioinformatics tools developed for studying human genetics and the genomes of other model bird species such as the chicken.

"By using conservation genomics, future reintroduction programs can avoid releasing individuals with high genetic load. This would help reduce inbreeding and improve the long-term recovery of threatened species such as the pink pigeon."

"Genomic erosion in a demographically recovered bird species during conservation rescue" is published in Conservation Biology on May 13.

Explore further Smart use of genomic data needed in species conservation

More information: Genomic erosion in a demographically recovered bird species during conservation rescue, Conservation Biology (2022). Journal information: Conservation Biology Genomic erosion in a demographically recovered bird species during conservation rescue,(2022). DOI: 10.1111/cobi.13918
North Atlantic right whale Snow Cone (Catalog #3560) sighted December 2, 2021 entangled and with a new calf. Credit: Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission taken under NOAA permit 20556

The declining body size of North Atlantic right whales may have critical consequences for the future of the species. New research, co-authored by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's senior scientist Michael Moore, shows that smaller females produce fewer calves.

Earlier research showed that North Atlantic right whales are declining in size, in part due to frequent entanglements in fishing gear. The new findings suggest that reducing the impacts of such sub-lethal stresses could help the population to grow.

"Smaller females appear to have less capacity to raise calves as frequently as larger whales," said Joshua Stewart, a research biologist with NOAA Fisheries' Southwest Fisheries Science Center, who collaborated with other researchers from Oregon State University, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the New England Aquarium, and SR3 on the findings. "Their smaller size means they may take longer to recover from the energetic cost of giving birth, especially in light of other stresses on the population."

Aerial photos show relationship between body size and reproduction

Scientists took body measurements from high-resolution aerial photographs, collected over two decades, using airplanes and drones to track the sizes of North Atlantic right whales. "We were able to measure whales by flying a camera high above them, essentially giving them a health check without them knowing we were there," said John Durban, a co-author formerly at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center and now at Oregon State University.

Scientists examined the aerial photos of 41 female North Atlantic right whales taken from 2000 to 2019, comparing their sizes with their reproductive histories. The relationship showed that smaller whales produced fewer offspring per reproductive year. The birth rate of the population, which now numbers less than 350 animals, is already at a 40-year low.

The size of the mother is important for baleen whale reproduction. Larger maternal size and good condition are associated with larger and more robust calves. The new study found that larger female North Atlantic right whales also appear to have more young over the course of their reproductive years. This suggests that declining body sizes are a potential contributor to low birth rates over the past decade, which may limit the population's ability to recover.

The declining body size of North Atlantic right whales may have critical consequences for the future of the species because smaller females produce fewer calves, new research shows. Credit: Samantha Chang, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Right whales face many human-caused threats

"After decades of research on this species, we have learned about the stressors right whales face and, with this study, have gained further insights into how these stressors are affecting their reproduction," said Amy Knowlton, Senior Scientist in the New England Aquarium's Right Whale Research Program and coauthor of the study. "The remedies to address these threats are clear: shifting how humans operate in the ocean so that they do not inadvertently harm whales. That means adapting to weaker ropes used for fishing and ultimately ropeless fishing gear as well as broader areas of vessel speed restrictions in the right whale's range. With these changes, we could reverse the decline we are witnessing in this species."

The New England Aquarium curates the North Atlantic Right Whale Catalog and monitors human impacts and their effects on the health of the whales using more than a million photographs. Such high-resolution information is rare for marine species and these detailed databases, maintained since the 1980s, were essential to this study.

Other hard-to-observe factors undoubtedly also influence reproduction and fecundity in North Atlantic right whales beyond female body length. These include:

Prey availability

Climate impacts on the main feeding grounds

Maternal health

"Sublethal stressors such as acoustic, vessel, and entanglement trauma, drain energy acquired by feeding, diverting it from calf productivity," added WHOI's Moore.

"By identifying potential mechanisms that are contributing to their reduced birth rates, we can highlight tangible opportunities for interventions," said Stewart. "Doing everything we can to relieve pressure on the population and help support their recovery and resiliency will become increasingly important in the face of a rapidly changing ocean."

Explore further North Atlantic right whales have gotten smaller since the 1980s

More information: JD Stewart et al, Larger females have more calves: influence of maternal body length on fecundity in North Atlantic right whales, Marine Ecology Progress Series (2022). Journal information: Marine Ecology Progress Series JD Stewart et al, Larger females have more calves: influence of maternal body length on fecundity in North Atlantic right whales,(2022). DOI: 10.3354/meps14040
Male cockroaches attract females by providing a roach version of chocolate - sugars and fats. Glucose-averse females, however, sometimes flee when their saliva turns the sweet treat into a bitter pill. Credit: Ayako Wada-Katsumata

A new study from North Carolina State University shows the behavioral mechanism behind a sweet cockroach mating ritual that takes a bitter turn, resulting in rejected males.

Male German cockroaches (Blattella germanica) offer females a pre-mating "gift" of body secretions that combines sugars and fatsthink of the roach version of chocolatein order to attract and hold female attention long enough to start copulation.

"This is common mating behavior in insects and some other animals: males present females a tasty or valuable giftit's like Valentine's Day, but every day," said Coby Schal, Blanton J. Whitmire Distinguished Professor of Entomology at NC State and co-corresponding author of the paper.

The study shows, however, that females averse to the simple sugar glucose get an unpleasant surprise when they mix their saliva with the male secretionssaliva degrades the sweet treat of complex sugars to glucose, which becomes a bitter pill that ends the courtship ritual, with the female scurrying away without mating.

"We're seeing glucose-averse female German cockroaches turning down this nuptial giftand the chance to mateand wanted to understand more about the mechanism behind it," said Ayako Wada-Katsumata, principal research scholar at NC State and co-corresponding author of the paper.

Generally, cockroaches love sugar. But some have developed an aversion to glucose; Wada-Katsumata in 2013 published a paper that showed the neural mechanism behind this aversion in German cockroaches, a behavior that perhaps has become more pronounced due to the presence of the simple sugar in roach baits placed inside homes. In a 2021 paper, Wada-Katsumata and Schal showed that cockroach saliva converts complex sugars into glucose.

"Male cockroach secretions have different types of sugarsin this case maltose and maltotriose, which are usually preferred by femalesas well as some fats," Wada-Katsumata said. Maltose is relatively easy to convert to glucose, while maltotriose is more complex and takes a bit longer to break down into glucose, she said.

"Cockroach saliva has a class of chemicals that breaks down sugars," Schal said. "As females feed on their gift, maltose is rapidly converted to glucose, and glucose-averse females sense a bitter taste and stop feeding, which also ends the mating opportunity."

When successful, male cockroaches entice females with a gift of chemical secretions. As females feed on the treat, the mating process begins. Glucose-averse females will flee the scene, though, when their saliva makes the treat unpalatable. Credit: Ayako Wada-Katsumata

The cockroach mating process is interesting but likely unfamiliar to bipeds. Males approach females, raise their wings, and release chemicals via the tergal gland on their backs. Females attracted to the secretion will climb onto the male's back and feed on the secretion. While she feeds, the male will telescope his abdomen under the female, grab her with an elongated hooked penis and move into position for mating. This courtship process takes only seconds; it is here that the rapid chemical conversion of complex sugars to simple sugars in saliva could kill the mood for glucose-averse females. If successful, though, roaches engage in a back-to-back, up to 90-minute-long mating session, with the male using a second penis to transfer a sperm package to the female.

In the study, the researchers performed various experiments to ascertain how glucose aversion affects cockroach courtship. They found that glucose-averse females more frequently interrupted feeding due to their aversion, especially when feeding from a wild-type maleone that was not averse to glucose. Glucose-averse males often had higher levels of maltotriose in their secretions, which converted less easily to glucose and therefore gave those males extra time to begin mating.

The researchers also changed the quality of the male secretion, substituting fructose for the glucose and maltose secretions. Glucose-averse females enjoyed fructose and fed on it longer, resulting in more successful mating sessions.

"This study is a direct way to show that the quality of secretion affects female behavior and mating success," Schal said. "There is a tradeoff between sexual selection and natural selection. Think of deer as an example. Male deer have horns, not for natural selectionhorns actually put males in danger from predators and huntersbut for sexual selection to appeal to females and serve as useful weapons in competition with other males. Similarly, the cockroach's tergal gland evolved for attracting females in the context of sexual selection."

"Wild-type females accept the sugary secretions. Glucose-averse females don't accept the wild-type secretions because they easily convert to glucose. Males can change the composition of secretionsperhaps producing more maltotriose which takes longer to convert to glucoseor try to mate faster. In short, the glucose aversion trait evolved under natural selection, but under sexual selection it is causing the male to modify his sexual secretion and behavior," Wada-Katsumata said.

The 2013 study informed bait manufacturers not to use glucose in baits. The 2021 studies expand this recommendation to all sugars that contain glucose. Baits made with glucose, sucrose, maltose and other sugars will be ignored by glucose-averse cockroaches. As more cockroaches with glucose aversion survive, that trait will be passed down in greater numbers.

"We are constantly in an evolutionary battle with cockroaches," Schal said. "Evolution can be sped up tremendously in the urban, human environment because the selection force imposed on insects, especially inside homes, is so intense."

The study appears in Nature Communications Biology. Postdoctoral scholar Eduardo Hatano, Ph.D. student Samantha McPherson and Jules Silverman, Charles G. Wright Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Entomology, co-authored the paper.

Explore further These male spiders catapult at impressive speeds to flee their mates before they get eaten

More information: "Rapid evolution of an adaptive taste polymorphism disrupts courtship behavior", Communications Biology (2022). Journal information: Communications Biology "Rapid evolution of an adaptive taste polymorphism disrupts courtship behavior",(2022). DOI: 10.1038/s42003-022-03415-8
Graphical abstract. Credit: Inorganic Chemistry (2022). DOI: 10.1021/acs.inorgchem.1c03880

Skoltech researchers and their colleagues from Tomsk Polytechnic University have proposed an efficient and inexpensive way to synthesize superhard tungsten boride, used in drilling and other industrial technologies. The research describing the new technique was published in the journal Inorganic Chemistry and was featured on the cover of the May issue.

When they were discovered, tungsten borides captured the imagination of scientists due to their hardness, thermal resistance, low thermal conductivity, and other fascinating mechanical properties superior to those of other materials that had remained unrivaled for almost a century. However, the existing methods of tungsten boride synthesis require either a vacuum or an inert atmosphere under high pressure. This increases production costs and limits scalability and production volume.

"We were looking for an efficient approach to large-scale synthesis of WB5x, a particular tungsten boride variety that has extremely high wear resistance," says the principal investigator of the study, Assistant Professor Alexander Kvashnin of Skoltech's Project Center for Energy Transition and ESG. "It took us a lot of time and energy, and identifying the distinct phases in the synthesized samples turned out to be a challenge. But computational methods came to the rescue, and after thoroughly investigating the synthesis conditions and the structure of the obtained material, we found that we had succeeded in synthesizing a two-phase sample containing WB2 and WB5x."

The paper's lead author, Research Scientist Alexander Pak from the Ecoenergy 4.0 Research Center at Tomsk Polytechnic University, comments: "The crystal phases of tungsten boride predicted by our Skoltech colleagues were successfully obtained using the original vacuumless atmospheric arc plasma synthesis technique in the DC arc plasma reactor developed at Tomsk Polytechnic University. By simplifying the method and reactor design, we managed to eliminate a number of costly high-tech components. Compared with immediate analogs, we estimate our method to consume up to 90% less power, at least when synthesizing material in the amounts typical for lab experiments."

The specially built experimental setup used in the study consisted of a graphite cathode in the form of a crucible and a rod-shaped anode that could fit inside, also made of graphite. The initial mixture of powdered tungsten and boron was compacted and placed at the bottom of the crucible. Then an electric arc discharge was initiated between the anode and the cathode in normal air. As a result, atmospheric oxygen reacted with the carbon in graphite, producing a self-contained gas environment in the crucible. As the electric arc drove the temperature up, synthesis occurred, yielding different tungsten borides in a proportion determined by the source materials ratio and plasma treatment parameters. Importantly, this whole process does not require a vacuum environment, making the method applicable to large-scale industrial production.

"We also improved the method to allow for fine-tuning of the experimental parameters to control product composition," Kvashnin adds. "This enabled the proportion of the desirable WB5x phase in the sample to be increased to 61.5% by volume."

The new vacuumless technique is the first step toward controllable inexpensive large-scale synthesis of superhard tungsten boride with exceptional mechanical properties for a wide range of industrial applications. According to the researchers the material will even be fit to scrub carbon dioxide from factory emissions and produce blue hydrogen. The main advantage of using WB5x as a catalyst in that process is its capacity to be reused.

Explore further Researchers solve a 60-year-old puzzle about a superhard material

More information: Alexander Ya. Pak et al, Efficient Synthesis of WB5xWB2 Powders with Selectivity for WB5x Content, Inorganic Chemistry (2022). Journal information: Inorganic Chemistry Alexander Ya. Pak et al, Efficient Synthesis of WB5xWB2 Powders with Selectivity for WB5x Content,(2022). DOI: 10.1021/acs.inorgchem.1c03880
Overview of Tabula Sapiens. The Tabula Sapiens was constructed with data from 15 human donors; for detailed information on which tissues were examined for each donor please refer to table S2. Demographic and clinical information about each donor is listed in the supplement and in table S1. Donors 1, 2, 7 and 14 contributed the largest number of tissues each, and the number of cells from each tissue is indicated by the size of each circle. Tissue contributions from additional donors who contributed single or small numbers of tissues are shown in the Additional donors column, and the total number of cells for each organ are shown in the final column. Credit: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.19.452956v3.full

With rare exceptions, each of the trillions of cells in our bodies carries an exact duplicate of the human genome, which contains between 20,000 and 25,000 protein-coding genes. But to carry out the specialized functions that make life possible, organs like the kidney, lung, heart, and brain rely on tissues built from distinctive cell types, which come about when individual cells develop to express only a particular subset of genes in the genome.

Until recently, the diversity of gene expression across cell types, known as the transcriptome, has been difficult to decipher. But with the rapid rise of single-cell biology, scientists have created tools and techniques that reveal precisely which genes are expressed by the individual cells that make up tissues and organs. In addition to bringing a deeper understanding of normal biology, these single-cell approaches promise to open up avenues to new therapies, because diseases generally strike specific cell types.

Now, in a paper published in Science, the Tabula Sapiens Consortium, a team of more than 160 experts led by scientists at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, has unveiled a massive digital atlas that maps gene expression in nearly 500,000 cells from 24 human tissues and organs, including the lungs, skin, heart, and blood.

The Tabula Sapiens cell atlas is the largest to include multiple tissues from the same human donors, and the first to include histological images of the tissues, and to incorporate details of the microbial communities living alongside the human cells that make up the various compartments of the gut.

"The quality and breadth of these data are unparalleled," said senior author Stephen Quake, D.Phil., the Lee Otterson Professor of Bioengineering and professor of applied physics at Stanford University, for whom Tabula Sapiens is the fulfillment of a 20-year "obsession." Quake, who is also president of the CZ Biohub Network, added, "This atlas will allow scientists to ask and answer questions about human health and disease that they've never been able to approach before."

The new paper is one of four major collaborative studies published in Science this week, all of which have created comprehensive and openly available cross-tissue cell atlases as part of the international Human Cell Atlas (HCA) consortium. HCA is supported by a wide range of global funders including the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). Additional funding for Tabula Sapiens was provided through CZI's Single-Cell Biology Program.

The open-source cellxgene tool makes it quick and easy to analyze the massive Tabula Sapiens dataset using dozens of parameters. Credit: CZ Biohub

"This collection of work is truly inspiring," said Jonah Cool, Ph.D., science program officer for single-cell biology at CZI. "It exceeds the expectations we set when CZI embarked on funding single-cell biology research and tool development. The technological advances that they demonstrate as well as the biological insight provided are important milestones for the field. These studies are a significant step toward large robust reference resources such as those being pursued by the Human Cell Atlas."

The Tabula Sapiens project brought together contributions from a wide range of experts, including surgeons and tissue specialists for each organ that was included in the study. "This effort really demonstrates how much potential we can unlock when we embrace the idea of team research," said Tabula Sapiens Consortium member Angela Oliveira Pisco, Ph.D., associate director of Data Science for CZ Biohub's Quantitative Cell Science team. "We have coordinated a precise, consistent, and comprehensive effort with more than 160 people, and that in itself is a wonderful feat for science."

Thanks to a close partnership with Donor Network West, a nonprofit organ procurement organization in Northern California, Tabula Sapiens yields one of the broadest views available of healthy cells across the entire body. "The study maps the building blocks of biospecimens procured in a rather unique project, and demonstrates the remarkable value of non-transplanted tissues and organs for preclinical research," said Donor Network West's Ahmad Salehi, M.D., Ph.D., director of research.

In just one session, for example, dozens of surgeons, scientists, and recovery coordinators worked through the night to collect the cells of 17 tissues and organs from a single human donor, within an hour of the withdrawal of life support and the procurement of organs for transplantation. This rapid approach offers the opportunity to study differences in cell types without the degradation of data quality that can occur when using frozen tissue. Also, using samples from a single donor simplifies the data analysis, eliminating the need to control for genetic, age-related, and environmental differences among individuals.

"If we read enough RNA fragments, it's like having a high-resolution telescope that can see in 25,000 dimensions," said Bob Jones, a senior research engineer in the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford and member of the Tabula Sapiens Consortium. "It's incredible detail."

Tabula Sapiens uniquely includes an analysis of the products of alternative splicing, a cellular process through which differing RNA transcripts can arise from a single gene, leading to numerous protein variants. "Because multiple RNA transcripts can come from each of our 25,000 genes, it becomes very difficult to functionally characterize every single gene and what it can code in the 'wet lab,'" said Tabula Sapiens Consortium member Julia Salzman, Ph.D., associate professor of biomedical data science and of biochemistry at Stanford. "This kind of research cannot be experimentally drivenit has to be data driven."

In one surprise already unveiled by Tabula Sapiens, said Salzman, researchers found that sets of housekeeping genesso called because they have been thought to handle basic functions in much the same way in every celllikely have many more roles across the body than was previously thought. And in the Science paper, the team reports that CD47, a protein implicated both in cancer and in the buildup of dangerous plaques on artery walls, may differ widely in form from cell to cell, a finding that could guide the development of drugs that are more effective or have fewer side effects. The Science paper also reveals that the gut's microbiome is "patchy" rather than uniformTabula Sapiens data shows that distinct microbial populations exist just a few inches apart in the digestive tract.

"We're already revealing important new biology that we simply would not have had the possibility of knowing about if it weren't for Tabula Sapiens," Salzman said. "With this atlas we have a huge opportunity to improve our understanding of the way the human body works."

Tabula Sapiens is accessible via a free, easy-to-use data portal, which offers links to all components of the multimodal atlas. "We are committed to making our data easily and widely accessible," said the Biohub's Pisco. "Empowering scientists with differing expertise to take full advantage of incredible resources such as Tabula Sapiens will accelerate scientific progress."

An open-access, user-friendly tool called cellxgene ("cell-by-gene"), developed by CZI's Science Technology group, means that even scientists with no computational training can employ Tabula Sapiens in their work. The tool, built into the Tabula Sapiens portal, is already helping scientists tackle a variety of questions, such as understanding which cell types are most prone to deleterious gene mutations, how immune-cell populations differ in various organs, and identifying tissues vulnerable to attack by the virus that causes COVID-19.

"Our cellxgene tool is helping scientists, like those in the Tabula Sapiens Consortium, answer fundamental questions about human biology in seconds, not years," said Phil Smoot, head of science and technology and vice president of engineering at CZI. "We're excited to see how other scientists will take advantage of this platform to further our understanding of human health and disease."

Explore further Multi-tissue cell atlases lead to leap of understanding of immunity and disease

More information: The Tabula Sapiens: a multiple organ single cell transcriptomic atlas of humans, Science (2022). www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abl4896 Journal information: Science The Tabula Sapiens: a multiple organ single cell transcriptomic atlas of humans,(2022). DOI: 10.1126/science.abl4896

Provided by Chan Zuckerberg Biohub
A mother sperm whale and her calf off the coast of Mauritius. The calf has remoras attached to its body. Credit: Gabriel Barathieu/Wikipedia/CC BY-SA 2.0

Two sperm whales died within seven days of each other in the Florida Keys, according to state and federal officials.

One was a juvenile whale that died May 4 off Key Largo. The other, a large adult that died after beaching itself near Mud Key, about 15 miles northeast of Key West in the Gulf of Mexico, was found on Tuesday, according to state wildlife officials.

The adult whale, a male, was towed to Robbie's Marina on Stock Island, just east of Key West.

Kelly Richmond, spokeswoman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said the whale is 47 feet long.

"We just started a necropsy on the animal now," Richmond said Wednesday morning. "It will likely take the better part of a day, and even then, we might not have all the results."

Casey Taylor, manager of Robbie's Marina, said he was called at about 4 p.m. Tuesday about the whale.

He said it arrived at the marina via TowboatUS, a sea towing business, around 2:30 a.m. Wednesday. The marina workers used a travel lift to remove it from the water so it would not be damaged by other fish. Taylor said the mammal weighs 40 tons.

The other whale was a newborn female calf that still had an open umbilical cord when it was found on a small barrier island off John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park in Key Largo, said Blair Mase, southeast regional marine mammal stranding coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Fisheries Service.

"It looks like it just separated from mom, and that was likely the cause of death," Mase said, although the official cause of death is still pending necropsy results.

How did the whales die?

After someone reported the young mammal swimming alone, rescuers from Dolphins Plus Marine Mammal Responder, a federally authorized whale and dolphin rescue nonprofit, followed it for about a half a mile as it swam to shore, said Allison Garrett, a NOAA Fisheries spokeswoman.

At least one tiger shark was trailing the 9 1/2-foot-long whale, but Mase said it did not die from bites inflicted by the fish.

"It died naturally on its own," Mase said.

Given that the adult whale that died in the Gulf of Mexico was a male, there is likely no connection between his death and that of the calf that died last week, Mase said. But, it is unusual to have two sperm whale strandings in the same region within such a short time period, she added.

"There were two in a week, so this is something we are keeping a close eye on, and we're trying to find as much information as possible to see what's going on and see why (the adult whale) possibly died," Mase said.

About sperm whales

Among the common human causes of deaths of sperm whales and other marine mammals are boat and ship strikes and entanglements in fishing gear, Mase said. As part of the analysis, toxicology samples will be examined to see if any environmental factors contributed to the deaths.

Sperm whales are the largest of the toothed whales, according to NOAA Fisheries. They are named for the waxy substance found in their heads that allows them to focus on sound. It is this substance that made them a target of whaling when it was legal between the early 1800s and 1987. The substance was used as lamp oil, lubricants and candles, according to NOAA.

Females reach physical maturity around 30 years old, according to NOAA, and can grow to about 35 feet long. Males reach physical maturity around 50 years old, and grow about 52 feet.

Sperm whales live in oceans throughout the world, but are found mostly in deep water, and can dive to depths of more than 10,000 feet and stay under for up to over an hour, federal scientists say.

With whaling outlawed, their populations are recovering and they are still listed as "endangered" under the Endangered Species Act and "depleted" under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Anyone who sees an injured or dead whale should call 877-942-5343 (877-WHALE HELP), said Garrett, the NOAA Fisheries spokeswoman.

She said people should keep a safe distance from the animals and not touch them.

"Please don't intervene," Garrett said. "If you can safely get a photo or video, that's great, but do not go near them for your safety and the safety of the animal."

Explore further Dozens of whales die in New Zealand mass stranding

2022 Miami Herald.

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UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday expressed concerns for global food security, which has been affected by the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and called for ensuring steady food supplies.



"Global food security is an especially deep concern and was a focus of my recent meetings in Moscow and Kiev," Guterres told a joint press conference with Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen in Vienna.

The UN chief called for "quick and decisive action to ensure a steady flow of food and energy in open markets, by lifting export restrictions, allocating surpluses and reserves to those who need them, and addressing food price increases to calm market volatility."

He explained that a solution to the current global food insecurity "requires reintegrating Ukraine's agricultural production and the food and fertilizer production of Russia and Belarus into world markets," despite the ongoing conflict.

Guterres added that he is working to facilitate a dialogue for this goal.

Guterres is visiting Austria from Tuesday to Friday to meet with Austrian officials and attend the spring session of the UN Chief Executives Board, according to the UN Information Service Vienna.
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP)  Sensing a threat in Pennsylvanias U.S. Senate race, Donald Trump issued a warning Thursday that surging Republican candidate Kathy Barnette would upend the GOPs chances of holding the seat in November and urged voters to back his pick, celebrity heart surgeon Mehmet Oz.

The former presidents statement echoed growing panic among his allies and Barnette's rivals over her sudden and unforeseen rise ahead of the states Tuesday primary.

Barnette will never be able to win in a general election matchup against Democrats, Trump said in a statement, adding that Oz is the only one" who can defeat the Democratic nominee.

Later, on a telephone townhall with Oz, Trump criticized Barnette for losing a 2020 congressional race  by nearly 20 percentage points, albeit in a heavily Democratic district  and said he had never heard of her.

And the problem is, nobody knows what she stands for, who she is and thats very risky because you're going to win this with Oz and you're not going to win it with any of the other candidates, Trump said.

The seat is opening up with the retirement of second-term Republican Sen. Pat Toomey and is regarded as perhaps the best opportunity for Democrats to pick up a seat this year in the closely divided Senate.

Trumps attacks reflected an 11th-hour behind-the-scenes scramble by Trump allies and rival campaigns to discredit Barnette, even though she has campaigned as a supporter of the former president and with promoters of his lies that massive voter fraud cost him a victory in the 2020 election.

Earlier Thursday, Barnette made the rounds of conservative broadcasters, suggesting on The Water Cooler with David Brody" that Trump is attacking her because he knows she's going to win.

It sounds like the president knows what's going to happen on next Tuesday," Barnette said.

She also reprised her campaign trail attacks on Oz and another candidate, hedge fund CEO David McCormick, criticizing their wealth and questioning their credentials as conservatives.

We now have the opportunity where the people are making their voices heard on what kind of leadership they want  and they don't want to be spoon-fed two globalists, as many influencers within the Republican Party are trying to sell us, they want a real conservative, Barnette said.

Democrats are deciding among a four-person field including the state's elected lieutenant governor, John Fetterman, three-term U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb and state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta. Fetterman, who comes from the party's progressive wing, has led polls and fundraising.

Pennsylvanias Republican Senate primary had been primarily an expensive duel between Oz, best known as the host of daytime TVs The Dr. Oz Show, and McCormick.

Then, a surprise Fox News poll released Monday suggested a tight, three-way race with Barnette, who, if elected, would be the first Black Republican woman to ever serve in the U.S. Senate.

The poll found 22% of GOP primary voters supported Oz, with McCormick and Barnette bunched together at 20% and 19%. About one-fifth of voters, or 18%, said they were undecided.

Despite Trump's attack on Barnette, elements of the party's establishment were more accepting of Barnette, acknowledging that many Republican voters weren't sold on Oz or McCormick.

She had a strong showing at recent TV debates, a fearless personality and can win people over, said a Republican strategist, Vince Galko.

Before Thursday, Trump had been silent about Barnette, only attacking McCormick.

That changed swiftly after key endorsements for Barnette in recent days that perhaps reflect concerns in some conservative and pro-Trump circles that Oz doesnt sufficiently reflect their views on abortion, guns or the culture wars against Democrats.

The anti-tax Club for Growth endorsed Barnette on Wednesday and has begun airing TV ads touting her.

A day earlier, the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List decided to back Barnette over Oz.

Despite his warning, Trump said Barnette would have his full support if she ends up winning the nomination.

Barnette, Trump said, has many things in her past which have not been properly explained or vetted, but if she is able to do so, she will have a wonderful future in the Republican Party  and I will be behind her all the way.

Still, Barnette has a history of statements that are hostile about Muslims and gays, some of it unearthed from a Christian-themed blog and radio she once hosted before she ran for office, speeches she has delivered as a Christian activist or on social media.

She also has endorsed Doug Mastriano, a candidate for governor in Pennsylvania's big Republican primary field who is a prominent peddler of Trumps unsubstantiated claims about widespread election fraud.

Follow AP for full coverage of the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections and on Twitter, https://twitter.com/ap_politics

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New York Post. May 9, 2022.

Editorial: Gov. Hochuls no message agenda is really about her

I have no message, Gov. Kathy Hochul told ABC 7s Bill Ritter about rumors that her disgraced predecessor Andrew Cuomo could play spoiler in this years election. Thing is, no message covers Hochuls take on nearly everything.

She told Ritter that she is focused on making sure people feel safe, reducing the cost of everyday living for New Yorkers. How, exactly  and whos opposed?

This follows her shepherding of the states largest budget ever, which in the long run will drive up taxes and thus eventually the cost of living for most New Yorkers. Her big victories were to push the Legislature into tinkering slightly with the disastrous no-bail and discovery laws (fixes that wont remotely make anyone feel safer) and winning a near-billion-dollar taxpayer handout to the (out of state) owners of her hometown Buffalo Bills  a giveaway that polls poorly in Buffalo.

Shes also posturing on abortion, pushing a state constitutional amendment to secure womens rights, though the 2019 Reproductive Health Act is already an ironclad guarantee that goes well beyond Roe v. Wade and an amendment will take years to pass.

Meanwhile, her outright political moves have largely backfired: Her first lieutenant-governor pick, Brian Benjamin, quit after the feds arrested him on campaign finance fraud and bribery charges. She fully supported the Legislatures unconstitutional, voter-suppressing gerrymander that has state elections in chaos. She tapped Rep. Antonio Delgado as her new LG, opening up his seat to a serious Republican challenge.

Instead of becoming notorious for harassing women, shes hired a host of talented women as her top aides, so shes an improvement on her predecessor in one big regard. But her relentless special-interest fundraising and her general acquiescence in the Legislatures tax-and-spend ways looks pretty Cuomoesque.

Maybe thats why she has nothing to say to him, and so little substance to offer the voters.

Auburn Citizen. May 8, 2022.

Editorial: School budgets need additional public feedback

Throughout New York state this week, public school district education boards will be holding public hearings on the budget proposals that will be put before voters on May 17.

The timing of these hearings is set by state law. They must take place seven to 14 days before the vote. The law also sets a time for when the budget proposal that is the subject of that public hearing be approved by the school board. But unlike any other type of local government budget, this spending plan must be finished seven days before the public hearing.

As a result, these hearings are largely just for show. The budget cant be trimmed or expanded due to the feedback from this hearing. The main benefits for these sessions are to give interested a voters a chance to get some questions answered in order to inform their decision, or to provide them a platform for advocating either a yes or no vote to others.

Theres perhaps some benefit to that, so we can support the idea of continuing this hearing as a final opportunity to inform the public before the vote. But there needs to be another hearing in the budget development process, one before the school board takes its vote on the plan to put on the ballot.

This basic premise is used by county legislatures, city councils and town boards for their spending plans. A tentative budget is approved and a public hearing is held. Should the elected body in charge of that budget decide to make some changes based on that hearing, they can do so before voting on the final draft.

We urge education policy and good government advocates to encourage state lawmakers to take a look at education law and tweak the school budget timelines accordingly.

Advance Media New York. May 8, 2022.

Editorial: Make police more accountable. End qualified immunity in NY

In the 12 days remaining in its 2022 session, the New York state Legislature can bolster police accountability by passing legislation that would end qualified immunity in New York.

Qualified immunity protects government officials from being held responsible in civil court for depriving a person of their constitutional rights.

The Supreme Court created this legal doctrine through a series of rulings over the past 50 years, giving ever wider latitude to the conduct of police and other officials. The court has raised the qualified immunity bar so high that few plaintiffs can overcome it  and many dont even try.

The current standard asks: Was the official conduct objectively reasonable? Was it unlawful under clearly established law? The second question stops many lawsuits in their tracks; plaintiffs must find a case in the same court with the exact same set of facts and circumstances. Often, the court never even gets to the question of whether the conduct violated the Constitution.

The New York bill, sponsored by Assembly Member Pamela Hunter, D-Syracuse, would eliminate the clearly established standard as a defense for violations of the state and federal constitutions, opening the courthouse door to plaintiffs stymied by that high bar. Theyll still have to prove their claims to a judge. But at least they would be heard.

Qualified immunity contributes to the culture of impunity in policing that reached its apex with the May 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. That set off nationwide protests and calls for greater police accountability.

Floyds assailant, Derek Chauvin, was the rare police officer criminally charged for killing an unarmed civilian. Because prosecutors are reluctant to charge cops who commit violence and police departments poorly discipline their own, civil courts often are the only venue for victims (or their survivors) to seek justice, compensation and changes in police policy.

Qualified immunity is a barrier to justice, even when authorities commit egregious abuses that defy the Constitution, common sense and basic human dignity.

For example, courts granted qualified immunity to officials accused of: confining a prisoner to a cell covered with feces for days on end; tasering a pregnant woman for refusing to sign a traffic ticket; setting fire to a suicidal man doused with gasoline; shooting a woman four times for holding a knife in a non-threatening manner; and standing idly by while a prisoner strangled himself with a telephone cord after twice attempting it with bedding.

This last case, Cope v. Cogdill, illustrates the absurdity of the qualified immunity defense. An appeals court granted qualified immunity to the jailer who watched Derrek Monroe take his own life, without calling 911 or rendering aid, because precedent dictated that a phone cord is not as obvious a ligature as bedding.

Such outcomes undermine the publics confidence in law enforcement. That deprives law-abiding police officers of the respect, trust and cooperation they need to do their jobs.

A broad coalition of conservatives, liberals, libertarians and legal scholars have joined forces to argue for ending qualified immunity. Change is not likely to come from the Supreme Court, which recently reaffirmed the doctrine, or from Congress, which failed to advance a police reform bill named for Floyd.

That leaves it to local governments and states to act. New York City, Colorado, New Mexico and Connecticut already have.

Not surprisingly, police unions oppose ending qualified immunity. Their arguments dont stand up to scrutiny.

 Claim: Officers will be punished for making an honest mistake. Under the Fourth Amendment, courts already give police wide deference for split-second decisions. Courts are forbidden from judging conduct with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.

 Claim: Police officers will quit en masse if stripped of qualified immunity. That simply hasnt happened in other jurisdictions that have curbed qualified immunity.

 Claim: Officers will be deterred from performing their duties for fear of being sued. Academic surveys find that police officers rarely think about it. But if ending qualified immunity deters them from violating peoples constitutional rights, thats a good thing.

 Claim: Lawsuits will bankrupt individual officers. This is plainly false. The bill explicitly takes cops off the hook and makes municipalities responsible for paying damages.

This bill is not anti-police; it is pro-accountability. It took guts for Hunter to take up the issue amid the political fallout from Albanys previous attempts at criminal justice reform.

Its worth noting that qualified immunity isnt just for police; it covers other government employees, as well. A teacher who experienced unlawful retaliation, for example, or a student beaten by a school employee could sue under Hunters bill. But the vast majority of cases involve law enforcement or corrections officers. They are charged with protecting human life  and are uniquely equipped to end it.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting in Kisela v. Hughes, called qualified immunity an absolute shield for law enforcement officers, gutting the deterrent effect of the Fourth Amendment. The courts grant of immunity to the officer who shot the woman with the knife tells officers that they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished.

New York lawmakers can change that. End qualified immunity now.

Plattsburg Press Republican. May 11, 2022.

Editorial: Be prepared for water safety

Every summer, as the weather warms, people head out to local rivers, ponds and beaches to cool off.

But such fun times can turn tragic in an instant, as weve seen far too often over the years.

Injury or inexperience can lead people to losing their way in the water and drownings can occur on any occasion.

Having lifeguards on duty at popular beaches can literally be a lifesaver, and we give thanks to our North Country neighbors who put in the time and training to become lifeguard-certified.

You can read more about how to become a certified state lifeguard at https://tinyurl.com/4yfhta7t.

But lets also discuss stopping water tragedies before they even occur.

That means being prepared. Drowning is the top cause of injury-related deaths for children ages 1 to 4 and the third-leading cause of unintentional injury-related death among children 19 and younger, according to safekids.org.

Here are some safety tips to follow from safekids.org and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:

 Make sure your children learn basic swimming and water safety rules. Infants can often learn to swim before they walk.

 Adults supervision is critical, whether at home, in a public pool or in a waterway. Supervising adults should avoid distracting activities such as reading, using the phone or consuming alcohol or drugs. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends touch supervision, meaning the adult is no more than an arms length away from a child around water.

 Use life jackets. Whether near natural bodies of water or at the pool or water park, make sure your child wears a life jacket that fits properly and is approved by the U.S. Coast Guard.

 Install fences around home pools, irrigation ditches, drainage ditches and ponds. Fences should be at least 4 feet tall with self-closing and self-latching gates.

 Understand and know the risks of lakes, rivers, oceans and rivers; they all have hidden hazards.

 Learn CPR and other water rescue skills. Even the most vigilant parent or guardian might be faced with an accident or injury.

All those tips lead to one point: Be ready.

You never know when you might be called on to save a life. So always remember to be prepared.

Buffalo News. May 7, 2022.

Editorial: Two state initiatives tackle the difficult but essential goal of managing plastics

There is hopeful movement on the recycling front, even though a national expert asserts it doesnt go nearly far enough.

At the University at Buffalo, a new state Department of Environmental Conservation-funded research center will explore ways to make plastic recycling more effective. In Albany, legislators are ironing the kinks out of the Extended Producer Responsibility law, which provides incentives to manufacturers to use more sustainable and recyclable materials.

Its been around since early 2021, but initially met with resistance and requests for exemptions. A new version of EPR is now working its way through the Assembly; an earlier Senate version is further along.

Both approaches demonstrate that solutions are being sought for a sadly broken recycling industry. The truth is that most well-meaning New Yorkers are conscientiously filling their blue bins every week, unaware that much of their recycling ultimately ends up in a landfill. Its a problem. Paper and cardboard will break down relatively quickly. Plastic wont.

Plastics recycling rate now stands at about 8.5%, compared to rates of 60% and more for cardboard and paper. A longtime expert in this field, Judy Enck, regional EPA administrator under President Obama and founder of the Beyond Plastics center housed at Vermonts Bennington College, says, Just as cars must meet fuel efficiency standards and appliances must include similar energy efficiency, all packaging should be required to meet environmental standards.

Its an essential point. Industries profit, in part, by pushing a share of their costs on to the public. It happens with pollution, for which taxpayers often foot the bill, and it happens with landfilling. Some better balance is needed. That requires legislation.

Enck is lobbying for a New York measure that would require a 50% reduction in plastic packaging over the next 10 years; at the end of that period, any packaging that does not meet this standard would no longer be sold in New York. Its a big reach.

Enck does admit that an Extended Producer Responsibility law could generate fees that might help beleaguered municipalities, which have no control over how anything is packaged but still have to pay to process everything that goes into the bins, garbage or recycling.

According to those familiar with the Assembly version of EPR, the legislation includes plastic reduction requirements and does not depend solely on fees. It also takes a stand on the so-called chemical recycling, which is essentially incineration of plastics.

Studies of EPR bills that have taken effect in Canada and Europe show that, without reduction requirements, a fee-based system does little to reduce plastic pollution. New York should learn from those examples.

Anti-plastic activists would like to see the same kind of timed-out reduction in plastic manufacturing thats proposed by New Yorks Climate Action Plan, which envisions reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050. In their view, anything less is not acceptable.

Reality intrudes when we consider that a much more sweeping piece of federal legislation, Break Free From Plastic Pollution, was introduced in 2020, revised in 2021, and still faces formidable opposition from lobbying groups. After Novembers midterm elections, its chances for passage may diminish.

Hope intrudes when we consider that most Americans plainly desire to end plastic pollution; thats why they continue to fill up those bins, and, even better, increase their usage of containers that can be washed and refilled.

Meanwhile, UBs New York Center for Plastic Recycling Research and Innovation will look for ways to improve sorting, processing and participation in recycling that actually does its job reducing waste. Even if EPR does not become law this year, UB may find solutions that accomplish some of its goals. Thats the thing about research  its supposed to lead to the questions that hadnt been asked and the answers nobody had imagined.

Baby steps, but thats mostly how change happens.

Albany Times Union. May 11, 2022.

Editorial: Undo Mr. Cuomos revenge

New Yorks political parties unfairly stifle independent candidates.

It wont shock many readers to learn that former Gov. Andrew Cuomo was willing to exact political retribution, and even use the power of his office to do it.

So when the Working Families Party angered Mr. Cuomo by endorsing Cynthia Nixon, his 2018 primary foe, the governor a year later hijacked a commission created by lawmakers to develop a system for publicly financing campaigns and used it for a blatant attack on the viability of third parties.

Most infamously, the commission more than doubled, from 50,000 to 130,000, the number of votes needed in gubernatorial and presidential elections for such parties to qualify for ballot access.

Less noticed was that the commission also made it much harder for independent candidates to petition their way onto the ballot, tripling the minimum number of signatures needed from 15,000 to 45,000.

None of that was on the commissions original agenda, mind you, and Democratic Party leaders, including Assembly Speaker Carl E. Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, should have blocked Mr. Cuomos subterfuge. They didnt, however, and we can certainly surmise why: It benefits major-party incumbents to quash as much competition as possible.

Of course, history takes unexpected twists. And as it turns out, it is now Mr. Cuomo himself who faces the higher ballot hurdle if he decides to run as an independent candidate in this years gubernatorial election. Yes, the irony is delicious.

Yet Mr. Cuomo, with more than $16 million remaining in his campaign account, would have the resources needed to gather the signatures with relative ease. Other independent candidates typically do not.

The result of the 2019 changes, which left New York with ballot access requirements considered to be among the nations most stringent, is fewer choices for voters and fewer new ideas introduced into the political process. Such stagnation is not good for democracy, of course, nor is it good for generating voter interest in elections.

The argument here isnt that there should be no hurdles to ballot access. It would do voters no good to be confronted by an endless list of names. And yes, potential gubernatorial candidates should be made to demonstrate that they have broad support and are serious about running.

The prior requirement  15,000 signatures  achieved that; prior to the commissions move, nobody seemed to think the height of that hurdle was a problem. Also, that happens to be the number of signatures required for Democrat and Republican candidates to get on gubernatorial primary ballots, and theres no reason the standard should be higher for independent contenders.

In the wake of Mr. Cuomos resignation last August, lawmakers from both major parties should be taking stock of his abuses and examining their own culpability in allowing the former governor to get away with so much.

But that examination shouldnt end with rueful navel-gazing. Instead, it must include stripping back the abuses that Mr. Cuomo left behind, including his attack on third parties and independent candidates. This cold dish of revenge should be sent back to the kitchen.

END

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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NORTHFIELD  Beth Israel students showed off their knowledge at a Blessing Bee at Sunday School on May 1. Students in second to fifth grades recited blessings over the challah, grape juice, fruit, vegetables and a sweet treat. They also discussed the reason why we say blessings, and examined the meaning of the words in the prayers.
GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP  Mickey & Minnies Inn, a German restaurant off the White Horse Pike, is closing next Friday, but not forever.

The restaurant was purchased last month by Bridget Den Boer.

Interior renovations are planned and should take a few months, and Den Boer expects to reopen the restaurant in September.

I just wanted to update the interior a bit, she said Thursday.

Local schools awarded funds to support sustainability efforts Four local schools are being awarded money by Sustainable Jersey for Schools supporting vari

The restaurant is known for its German cuisine and family-friendly atmosphere.

German food fans shouldnt worry, Den Boer said, because the menu wont change under new ownership.

Den Boer was looking to expand her business endeavors and purchase a restaurant. Seeing Mickey & Minnies listed online drew in her and her father, and she fell in love with the buildings atmosphere, she said.

My dad and I came in and were very interested in it, and then it was pretty much all of our ducks in a row, said Den Boer, who also owns the Starcade in the Hamilton Mall.

Contact Eric Conklin: 609-272-7261 econklin@pressofac.com Twitter @ACPressConklin

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ATLANTIC CITY  The Atlantic City Rescue Mission is renovating its dormitories, but its services are not being disrupted, CEO Dan Brown said Thursday.

The only thing happening is we are renovating some of our floors, one area at a time, Brown said. The building is 30 years old, and we are replacing the HVAC system.

Rumors had spread throughout the community that the facility was closing due to a mold problem.

We do not have a mold problem, Brown said. We test the air all the time.

Brown said he had received about 60 calls from concerned community members.

I told them to stop listening to rumors, Brown said. If we were closing, we would let people know.

The mission is a private nonprofit and not government funded, Brown said. It started in 1964 serving 15 men from an Arctic Avenue location, then moved to a one-story building now used as the missions clinic on Bacharach Boulevard.

There are about 30 men and 25 women staying in the main building on Bacharach Boulevard.

The womens dorm on the third floor is almost finished, Brown said, and next to be renovated is the mens dorm on the second floor.

The mens floor renovation should take 60 to 90 days, he said.

Women were moved to administrative office space on the fourth floor temporarily, and men will also be moved into other parts of the missions property temporarily while those renovations take place.

The renovation program was planned for 2 years but slowed down a bit due to COVID-19, he said.

During the height of the pandemic, the mission had a harder time placing people in permanent housing because long-term housing alternatives became scarce, as few people were moving during that time.

Now those options are opening up again, Brown said.

REPORTER: Michelle Brunetti Post 609-841-2895 mpost@pressofac.com

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BUENA  Four months after flooding shut down Borough Hall, Buena is beginning to create more spaces for the government and the community.

The Borough Council adopted an ordinance this week to allocate about $128,000 to repairs to Borough Hall after it flooded in January.

The ordinance did not authorize new spending but rather re-appropriated unspent funds on prior projects to fund the rehabilitation project. An insurance policy will likely reimburse the borough for most of that $128,000, according to borough officials.

The Monday council meeting was held at Dr. J.P. Cleary School off Central Avenue in the Minotola section of the borough due to the continuing closure of Borough Hall.

Councilwoman Patricia Andaloro, chair of the Buildings, Grounds and Improvements Committee, has been helping oversee repairs to the hall while relocating borough workers in the meantime. She said she was hopeful council would be able to hold meetings again in Borough Hall by its next meeting May 23. She said the move back into the building would prioritize the office of the borough clerk, due to the need to prepare for the June 7 primary election.

The nutrition center would be able to open on the site again soon as well.

Weather: Storm continues for seventh day as wetter, warmer conditions develop The book of Genesis said that on the seventh day, God rested. Well, on the seventh day, this coastal low is not resting, instead making its way back to the coast. That will bring clouds and then rain, but also warmer weather into the weekend.

Andaloro added that multiple rooms were repainted in the hall, using funds from the public buildings budget. Work also had to be done on the heating system, water heater and some plumbing.

Hopefully we wont have any more problems once these buildings are open, Andaloro said.

Borough Hall was flooded by two overflowing bathrooms Jan. 8 during an onslaught of harsh winter weather. With loud dehumidifier fans making the hall inhospitable, borough employees were relocated to trailers the borough had rented, while documents were stored in mobile storage units. Atlantic County sent buses to transport seniors who had attended the sites nutrition center to an alternative location in Hammonton while repairs were underway.

Council also moved to address other matters concerning the use of public space, discussing a donation of a subdivision of borough property to American Legion Post 270.

Bill Gonzalez, the commander of the post, detailed after the meeting what the donated land, which is adjacent to the current American Legion property, would be able to offer. The post would offer space for neighborhood and charitable events, he said, as well as a place to make connections with veterans and other residents in need. He said new initiatives could help the community while helping young people in the town learn from local veterans. The post would also clean the space, which is currently a vacant lot, and provide space for overflow parking.

He said the total donated land would be about half an acre.

We want to expand our service organization outreach, Gonzalez said.

In other business, the council adopted Buenas 2022 budget. Borough officials said the budget would necessitate a 5-cent increase in the property tax rate, attributed to a $154,000 increase in net appropriations incurred by rising health insurance, trash collection, gasoline, shared service agreement and debt service costs.

The council also voted to reenter into a shared services agreement with neighboring Franklin Township through which the Franklin Township Police Department provides police services for the borough.

Buena taxpayers also would save about $120,000 from the controversial dissolution of Fire District No. 1, which had been serviced by the Landisville Volunteer Fire Company for 99 years. That total would translate to a saving of about 4 cents per $100 of assessed value for property taxes paid to the Buena fire districts, which are distinct entities from the borough and collect taxes separately.

The council voted to disband Fire District No. 1 in July 2021. The dissolution came after a series of investigations led by the New Jersey Office of Public Employees Occupational Safety and Health unearthed more than two dozen code violations at the Landisville company.

Supporters of the Landisville company note that it had passed inspection in June 2021 and argue the elimination of the fire district compromises the boroughs safety. Discontent over the dissolution may have propelled the Democrats to success in the borough during the November elections, which saw Patricia Andaloro and her daughter Gina unseat two Republican incumbents.

Weather: One more breezy, coastal flooding day with 70s in sight It's the storm that gives on giving. Despite temperatures a few degrees warmer and the sun still out, gusty winds and tidal flooding will continue into Tuesday as we're on the outer fringes of this storm. Temperatures will then likely hit 70 inland Friday.

Councilman Joseph DAlessandro III and former Council President Rosalie Baker, a nearly 30-year veteran of the council and one of the Republicans who lost in November, are being challenged by three newcomers  Douglas Adams, Mariana Barsuglia and Joseph Fabrizio  in the June 7 GOP primary.

There is currently litigation between the borough, the Landisville company and the former District No. 1 commissioners. The dispute centers on allegations that the company and commissioners did not return property that belongs to the borough after Fire District No. 1s dissolution. Supporters of the Landisville company have argued that the borough was not sufficiently transparent in how it arrived to its decision to pursue litigation.

Contact Chris Doyle cdoyle@pressofac.com

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MIDDLE TOWNSHIP  With a mission to look after the health of veterans, a clinic that opened in the Rio Grande section of Middle Township in December 2020 did not hold an opening ceremony due to COVID-19.

An open house and health fair Wednesday gave an opportunity to commemorate the opening, in the County Commons on Route 9, where there had formerly been a Kmart. The site includes private businesses, county employment services, the county human services department and other services, as well as an expanded location for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, known as the Cape May Community Based Outpatient Clinic.

The larger site can offer more services than the former location on the Coast Guard base in Cape May, with 11,000 square feet of space. Officials with the VA say the location is also more convenient for many veterans.

On Wednesday, Cape May County Commissioners Gerald Thornton and Jeffrey Pierson spoke at the open house, praising the efforts to get it open and operational.

They were joined by VA Wilmington Director Vincent Kane and Kelly Craig, the nurse manager of the outpatient clinic.

Thornton had been working to open the clinic for decades and credited former U.S. Rep. Frank LoBiondo, R-2nd, with getting the necessary funding and support to get the project off the ground.

Emergency department at Cape Regional to be renamed after $3M gift CAPE MAY COURT HOUSE  A $3 million gift will mean a new name for the revamped emergency dep

Congressman LoBiondo and I worked on getting an expanded and centralized Veterans Community Based Outpatient Clinic in Cape May County for many years, said Thornton, who is an Air Force veteran. It was important to get this clinic so our veterans wouldnt have to travel unnecessarily long distances for medical services that could be provided closer to home. They deserve it for their time serving this great nation.

Frank (LoBiondo) always was a fierce supporter of our veterans throughout South Jersey, Thornton said.

The Wilmington VA also hosted a COVID-19 vaccine clinic during the day, in addition to providing tours of the clinic to members of the community. They also worked with local Veterans of Foreign Wars members who organized a day of service at the site.

I have had the pleasure of touring the facility before, and it is truly amazing to see the level of care being provided, said Pierson, who retired as a brigadier general after 42 years in the U.S. Army and New Jersey Army National Guard. It was important to celebrate this clinic being open here because we know the hard work it took over decades to get here.

Health services for veterans available at the site include primary care, preventive care, mental health care, podiatry, social services, womens health care and laboratory services, according to the VA.

It will also expand telehealth capabilities to bring more specialists to veterans and will provide hearing aid maintenance and repair, prescription drug benefits, physical therapy and optometry services, Kane said in a statement.

For more information, call 800-461-8262, ext. 2850, or 302-633-5206. Veterans also can schedule appointments at 800-461-8262, option 2, or at myhealth.va.gov.

Contact Bill Barlow: 609-272-7290 bbarlow@pressofac.com Twitter @jerseynews_bill

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CAPE MAY COURT HOUSE  The Cape May County Prosecutors Office will be assessed by the New Jersey State Association of Chiefs of Police on May 31.

The public is being asked to submit comments for or against the agencys reaccreditation, the Prosecutors Office said Wednesday.

Verification by the team that the Cape May County Prosecutors Office meets the commissions best practice standards is part of a voluntary process to achieve accreditation, a highly prized recognition of law enforcement professional excellence, Prosecutor Jeffrey Sutherland said in a statement.

Tough questions at training for police about the Holocaust WILLIAMSTOWN  The question of how the Holocaust could have taken place has haunted people o

Comments can be submitted by phone at 609-465-1135, ext. 3382, from 10 to 11 a.m. May 31. Comments also can be emailed to prosecutor@cmcpros.net.

Phone comments must be less than five minutes, the Prosecutors Office said.

A copy of the standards is available for inspection at 110 Justice Way, Cape May Court House. Anyone wanting to review the standards can do so by calling Detective Vinnie Carannante at 609-465-1135.

Written comments also can be sent by emailing hdelgado@njsacop.org or mailed to the New Jersey State Association of Chiefs of Police, Law Enforcement Accreditation Commission, 751 Route 73 North, Suite 12, Marlton, NJ 08053.

Contact Eric Conklin: 609-272-7261 econklin@pressofac.com Twitter @ACPressConklin

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ATLANTIC CITY  About 20 of Bader Fields 142 acres remain under Green Acres restrictions, city and state officials said Wednesday, and would need special state approval to be developed as the city and a potential developer envision.

To date, the Green Acres Program has not received any applications to either divert or change the use of the encumbered portion of Bader Field, Department of Environmental Protection spokesperson Caryn Shinske said Wednesday in response to questions.

Shinske said a 20.32-acre portion of Bader Field is under Green Acres, due to recreational facilities that were onsite in the 1970s.

The Green Acres section is along Albany Avenue where Sandcastle Stadium and the Atlantic City Skate Zone are now located, according to the DEP. When covered under Green Acres, rules require the land to be primarily used for recreation.

DEEM Enterprises is proposing to build a $2.7 billion auto-centric development at Bader Field, on about 141 acres, and Mayor Marty Small Sr. is a big proponent of the plan. Illustrations of the proposal showed retail space along Albany Avenue.

We are aware of it, and its been addressed in the designs, said DEEM partner Dan Gallagher, a local attorney.

He said DEEM will apply to the DEP for permission to divert recreational use elsewhere on the property.

We cant do that until we have something more firm with the property, he said of ongoing negotiations with the city to take control of Bader Field. We are going back and forth on that (the price).

There is a boardwalk area included in the DEEM plans in part to satisfy Green Acres rules, Small said Tuesday at a news conference about similar Green Acres and Federal Land and Water Conservation Fund restrictions at Gardners Basin.

In a 2009 request for proposals, the city said it would resolve all Green Acres issues before handing the property over to a developer. But now it seems the developer will be responsible for resolving them.

The DEP lists Bader Field in a town-by-town Green Acres document.

Small had not talked about Green Acres restrictions at Bader Field before Tuesdays news conference, which was called to explain for (the) final time why a Black-owned food truck business called Fish Heads was evicted from Gardners Basin.

Small said Green Acres and federal Land and Water Conservation Fund rules did not allow for permanent food trucks on site, and the Gardners Basin area must primarily be used for recreation and conservation under state and federal rules.

DEEMs proposed project, called Renaissance at Bader Field, would include hundreds of condominiums along the intracoastal waterway.

It also would include a high-rise hotel/event space, retail space along Albany Avenue, educational facilities to teach people to become mechanics and a Formula One track winding through the middle where those who own high-performance vehicles can drive them at race speed, according to DEEM.

REPORTER: Michelle Brunetti Post 609-841-2895 mpost@pressofac.com

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MILLVILLE  An unusual suspect tried to fly the coop Wednesday but was stopped by police.

Police found a lost chicken on North Second Street. After taking the bird to the South Jersey Regional Animal Shelter, the department posted about the incident on its Facebook page.

The post attributed the chicken recovery to Officer Emanuel Morales. It also noted the chicken, which police have named Ruffles, was walking between KFC and Chick-fil-A and was resting near a Joe Canals liquor store.

While we are sure she has a home somewhere, we dont think it was there, the department said in the post.

The post had garnered 362 reactions on Facebook, mostly the laugh, like and love reactions, as of Thursday morning, along with 54 comments and 106 shares.

Contact Chris Doyle cdoyle@pressofac.com

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 Flash

The Iranian foreign minister said on Wednesday that his country is working toward both "neutralizing" and removing the U.S. sanctions.



In a tweet, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said the negotiations in Vienna for the revival of the 2015 nuclear deal and removal of U.S. sanctions are being continued on their right track to reach a "good, strong and lasting" agreement that observes Iran's red lines.

He noted that his government's main strategy is to protect the country through economic transformation and the fair distribution of government subsidies.

In 2015, Iran signed the nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), with world powers including the United States. However, former U.S. President Donald Trump pulled Washington out of the agreement in May 2018 and reimposed sanctions on Iran, including freezing some of Iran's assets abroad, prompting the latter to drop some of its nuclear commitments under the agreement.

Since April 2021, eight rounds of talks have been held in the Austrian capital between Iran and the remaining JCPOA parties to revive the deal.

Iran insists on securing guarantees that the U.S. governments would not abandon the deal again and the sanctions being lifted in a verifiable manner.
ATLANTIC CITY  As part of its attempt to follow state and federal park rules at Gardner's Basin, the city put out to bid rental contracts for Back Bay Ale House and Gilchrist Restaurant and will now get two- to three- times the rents previously charged.

"We were instructed we had to put out restaurants to bid," said Assistant City Solicitor Carl Timbers at a news conference Tuesday. "We found out we were not making anywhere near the amount of rent we should have been making. That's a requirement under (state law)."

The same operators will stay and rent will increase at Back Bay Ale House from $40,000 a year under the old contract to $130,509 in the first year of a new three-year contract, with options for two more years. In the third year, it will increase to $135,751, and if options are taken in the fifth year, it will increase to $141,267.13.

Gilchrist rent will increase from $30,000 a year to $60,000 in the first year, and to $62,529 in the third year. If options are taken, Gilchrist will pay $65,056 in the fifth year, according to the city.

Back Bay Ale House is a full-service restaurant with a liquor license, and Gilchrist serves breakfast and lunch.

"You have to take into consideration the taxpayers here," said Stockton business professor Michael Busler. "I'm glad they put it out for bid. I applaud the city."

The only way to find out the price someone is willing to pay is solicit bids, Busler said, especially in a seasonal economy like Atlantic City's where summer and shoulder seasons can be extremely busy but winters dead.

"We don't know what their revenues are, but they do," Busler said. "It sounds like Back Bay Ale House has gotten a pretty good deal these last number of years."

The city has to walk a fine line between satisfying taxpayers and keeping visitors to Gardner's Basin happy, he said.

"The Ale House draws boaters," Busler said. "You want restaurants there."

Mayor Marty Small Sr. called the news conference Tuesday to explain "for the final time" why the Fish Heads food truck was removed from its space on the waterfront at Gardner's Basin.

He called Back Bay Ale House the face of Gardner's Basin for the last 15 years.

Business Administrator Anthony Swan has said Fish Heads had been paying the city $2,500 a month during the four-month summer season to operate from the waterfront location.

Small and other city officials said it was state Green Acres and federal Land and Water Conservation Fund rules that required the city to remove Fish Heads from the site because food trucks are not allowed to be permanently located there under their rules. State and federal open space funds were used to create the park at Gardners Basin in the 1970s.

City officials also said the city's management of Gardner's Basin under previous administrations has not been in compliance with state Green Acres and federal National Park Service rules over other issues as well.

"Nobody (at NPS and DEP) knew about the aquarium," said Swan, explaining that permission was never given before the structure was built.

Permission was also not sought to build a parking lot or a road into the basin.

REPORTER: Michelle Brunetti Post 609-841-2895 mpost@pressofac.com

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ATLANTIC CITY  rsted North America representatives tried to reassure residents at a meeting Thursday night at City Hall that a proposed operations and maintenance facility will not drastically change the quiet, residential character of Bungalow Park.

The facility, proposed for the waterfront at the ends of North New Jersey and North Delaware avenues, is mainly for technicians to hop on large vessels that will take them 15 miles out into the Atlantic Ocean to work on constructing and maintaining two offshore wind farms, said rsted civil engineering manager Joe Rudd.

This wont be a major manufacturing facility or a major source of emissions, Rudd said. He said it will comply with all local and state regulations for noise and light impacts and that the company is working on ways to engineer minimal impact on the neighborhood.

Junetta Dix of ACT Engineers, contracted to help with the project, also said a public park will be created on part of the sites waterfront, with paths and a pavilion.

But residents said broken promises from other developers in the past made them skeptical.

When Revel was here, they made all these promises ... of help with flooding, Audra Williams, a past president of the Bungalow Park Civic Association, said of the former casino company. None of that has been done.

Rudd said improvements at the site, including building bulkheads to 8.5 feet  about 3 feet higher than crumbling bulkheads there now  will help the entire neighborhood lessen flooding.

To help residents better understand what is happening with the project, the company agreed to begin communicating regularly with all residents of the neighborhood. Previously, only those who live within about 200 feet of the property had been receiving information as required by law.

rsted is seeking state and local permission to build a 16,000-square-foot building on almost 5 acres of a former oil company site. About half of the building would hold office and technician space, and half would be a warehouse.

Residents, however, said the streets are too narrow and traffic is already a problem, with frequent car accidents even before rsted adds up to 100 jobs at the facility.

Visitors often speed through the areas small streets, mistakenly trying to get to Marina District casinos they see in the distance, said lifetime resident Anthony Donaldson. Then they speed back out when they hit dead ends at the water across Clam Creek.

rsted representatives told a crowd of about 40 residents at the meeting that not all employees will be on site at the same time.

Dixs engineering company will do a detailed traffic impact study looking at all intersections in the area, Dix said, and recommend the best way to handle any traffic impact from the facility.

Construction (at the property) will be during normal daytime operations, Rudd said, adding that all construction and noise codes will be followed.

rsted, unions announce deal to build offshore wind farms North Americas Building Trades Unions and rsted on Thursday announced an agreement to buil

Site construction will run from later this year through early 2024. New bulkheads and berthing facilities will be built, a channel dredged, an existing concrete building demolished and a newraised building constructed on pilings to meet elevation requirements.

The second phase of wind farm construction will see slightly more activity, with workers coming to the site in the early morning and early evening to hop on boats to begin 12-hour shifts seven days a week.

There will be very little activity at the site itself, company representatives said.

Full commercial operation of rsteds two wind farms is expected by late 2028 or early 2029, Rudd said.

Once wind farms are operational, the maintenance facility will be used seven days a week, but only for one shift of workers per day unless there is an emergency, Rudd said.

Rudd estimated there will be fewer than 10 trucks a day accessing the site during the operational phase, most of them box trucks and just a few tractor trailers.

Serious precautions will be taken against spills while refueling the 100-foot boats used to transport workers and small equipment.

The trucks have spill kits around them while unloading, Rudd said. If a spill is detected, it shuts off the flow and we call in a special hazmat handling team to properly dispose of the material.

Residents asked whether the company could build elsewhere, but company representatives said they needed deep water with direct access to the Atlantic, and there simply arent other sites available to them in Atlantic City.

rsted looked far and wide for a potential piece of property, Dix said. This was historically a marine industrial site. If not developed (by rsted), someone could build over 100 townhouses there.

Some members of the audience responded with Id rather have the houses.

I was a little kid when the whole waterfront almost was marine commercial, said Frank Becktel, a third-generation Bungalow Park resident who lives on Massachusetts Avenue. There were fuel docks, boatyards, commercial fishing and your site.

Other proposed developments in the area were feared, such as a bar that now operates on the water, and now people from the neighborhood are regulars there, Becktel said.

REPORTER: Michelle Brunetti Post 609-841-2895 mpost@pressofac.com

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LAS VEGAS, N.M. (AP)  Firefighters in northern New Mexico worked Monday in rugged terrain ahead of a massive wildfire, feverishly trying to position crews to clear brush and stop the monster blaze from burning more homes in the Rocky Mountain foothills.

The wildfire has charred 308 square miles (798 square kilometers) of tinder-dry ponderosa forests, making it the largest blaze burning in the U.S. during what has been an early start to the fire season. Thousands of people have been evacuated.

Much of the Southwest has been in the grips of drought for decades and warmer temperatures have combined with spring winds to make for dangerous fire conditions.

Crews in Arizona were dealing with strong winds Monday as they battled a fire near the U.S.-Mexico border that forced several dozen people from their homes.

And another wildfire in northern New Mexico near the federal government's key facilities for nuclear research prompted Los Alamos National Laboratory and others in the area to begin preparing for evacuations, though officials stressed there was no immediate threat to the lab.

The fire has burned nearly 64 square miles (165 square kilometers).

Officials said some medically fragile residents and large animals already have been moved out of the area to lessen the traffic congestion should evacuations be ordered. They anticipated residents would have at least a day or two notice before being required to leave.

If the fire gets its fifth gear, it will be here sooner than we want it to be, said incident commander Rich Harvey. We're doing everything we can to check it.

Strong, gusty winds continued to blow across the region after fanning the fires for weeks and often grounding essential aircraft used to drop water or fire retardant ahead of the flames, complicating efforts to contain them. Wind will continue to be a factor this week, along with low humidity, but to varying degrees depending on the day.

Fire officials predicted part of the main New Mexico fire would push north into rugged terrain that is difficult for firefighters to access.

This isn't a surprise to us. All the models showed this probably was going to happen, said fire operations section chief Todd Abel, adding that crews have spent days working to protect ranch homes scattered thorough the area.

Nearly 1,700 firefighters were battling the blaze burning northeast of Santa Fe that was almost 50% contained. It has destroyed nearly 300 structures, including homes, commercial buildings and barns.

The region's largest population center  Las Vegas, New Mexico, home to 13,000 people  remained largely safe from the flames after some area residents were allowed to return over the weekend. Schools were expected to return to in-person classes on Tuesday.

Montoya Bryan reported from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Associated Press writer Felicia Fonseca in Flagstaff, Arizona, contributed to this report.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
The tiny borough of West Wildwood is out about $2 million from events that resulted in former mayor Christopher Foxs conviction on state ethics violations. Given that extraordinary needless burden on the borough, the state Local Finance Boards $24,500 fine of Fox for those violations was a pittance.

Now that speck of justice has been reduced by more than half -- to just $11,000 -- by a state administrative law judge. This was done even though Judge Susan L. Olgiati acknowledged the grievous violations. By holding the director position, with supervisory powers over the chief of police, while living with the chief of police, Fox had a direct financial and personal involvement that might reasonably be expected to impair his objectivity or independence of judgment, Olgiati wrote in her recent decision. Indeed, he was voting on measures designed to ensure that his housemate received a judgment nearing $2 million.

In 2019, the Local Finance Board imposed an all-time-record fine of $24,500 against Fox for a long list of ethics violations:

 actions he took as mayor that benefited Police Chief Jacqueline Ferentz, with whom he lives, and his daughter.

 voting in favor of designating himself director of public safety, with oversight of the Police Department, 10 days before the borough reinstated Ferentz as a police officer and about a month before she was named chief.

 giving Ferentz back pay and pension credit for a time when she did not serve in the Police Department, and voting in favor of a 50% increase in Ferentzs salary to $101,000, from 2015 to 2017.

Others violations were related to his failure to disclose on state-required financial statements all income he receives, and to his entering into shared-services agreements with neighboring Wildwood while he was also business administrator there. Fox was a former Wildwood police officer and his longtime friend Ernie Troiano was mayor at the time.

Before the state Department of Community Affairs made the ethics violations and fine public, the West Wildwood borough commission voted, with Fox abstaining, to hire his 22-year-old daughter as a full-time police officer.

Judge Olgiati decided this laundry list of violations was offset by the states failure to prove that Fox intended his actions to benefit the woman he was living with, his daughter and himself. The evidence does not show that Fox intended to use his official position to secure an unwarranted advantage for himself or Ferentz ... or a financial gain for himself ... by participating in those measures, Olgiati wrote.

So, the $2 million for his household was just an accident, something that happened without his awareness?

The boroughs insurer -- the N.J. Municipal Excess Liability Joint Insurance Fund that covers the majority of local governments -- didnt think so. It refused to pay the Ferentz award because it found West Wildwood under Fox didnt adequately contest the lawsuit. That left taxpayers to cover the big payoff, which was more than half its total annual budget. It will take 16 years to pay off Ferentz.

New Jersey has had a problem with lavish payouts to local government insiders after poorly defended lawsuits. As we said in 2019, the state should have a law requiring an investigation whenever an insurance claim by a local government is denied due to inadequate defense of a lawsuit. The findings could be presented in Superior Court and appropriate responses could be ordered.

And now, after all this and the many violations, Fox only has to pay $11,000 of the original $24,500 fine? That was a drop in the bucket to begin with, but the Local Finance Board should at least reinstate that little bit of justice.

There apparently is no recourse for the poor taxpayers of West Wildwood -- the homeowners and second-home owners -- wholl see their usual heavy New Jersey tax burden much enlarged for years.

This debacle, too, was made possible by the home rule so many find precious.
A Davenport man who was driving under the influence when he struck and killed a bicyclist June 3, 2021, received a 55-year prison sentence during a hearing Wednesday in Scott County District Court.

A Scott County jury in March found Bobby Fitzgerald Hunt Jr., 34, guilty of homicide by vehicle-operating under the influence, homicide by vehicle-reckless driving, leaving the scene of an accident resulting in death and operating under the influence-third offense in connection with the death of 40-year-old Alex Marietta.

Scott County District Judge Jeffrey Bert sentenced Hunt Jr. to 25 years in prison for the homicide by vehicle-driving under the influence, a consecutive sentence of 15 years for homicide by vehicle-reckless driving and a consecutive 15 years for leaving the scene of an accident resulting in death.

Assistant Scott County Attorney Steven Berger said Hunt must serve 70% of the first 40 years of his sentence, plus three years minimum on the last 15-year sentence, for a minimum of 31 years, before he can become eligible for parole.

Hunt also is ordered to pay $150,000 in victim restitution to Marietta's heirs.

During his trial, the jury heard evidence that Hunt, 33, was driving his 2001 Chevrolet Tahoe westbound on Kimberly Road and was cutting through traffic. He ran the red light at Eastern Avenue and continued westbound.

Hunt then ran the red light at Davenport Avenue, striking and killing Marietta, who was on his bicycle.

Hunt fled the scene, running the red light at Brady Street.

The crash with Marietta occurred at 3:03 p.m.

Marietta managed Aquatic Environments, 730 E. Kimberly Road, the fish and aquarium store owned by his brother, Adam Marietta.

An avid cyclist, Alex Marietta had just left work when he was struck.

Officers located Hunt at his apartment, but he fled on foot, according to the arrest affidavits filed by Davenport Police Officer Luke Figie.

Hunt had a strong odor of alcohol emanating from him that grew stronger as he spoke, according to the affidavit. He was unable to complete the standard sobriety tests because of him fleeing from officers and resisting arrest.

During the trial, toxicology showed that Hunts blood alcohol content was .131. The legal limit in Iowa is .08.

Toxicology also showed minute traces of cocaine and THC, the active compound in marijuana.

Scott County prosecutors prosecuted Hunt as a habitual offender, which under Iowa law enhanced his sentences.

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The Scott County judge overseeing the murder case of Henry Dinkins has postponed his October trial by about a week because of a scheduling conflict.

Dinkins, 49, of Davenport, is accused of kidnapping 10-year-old Breasia Terrell on the morning of July 10, 2020. He is alleged to have shot her to death. Her remains were found March 22, 2021, by two fishermen in a Clinton County pond. Dinkins has since been charged with first-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping. Each of the charges is a Class A felony under Iowa law that carries a mandatory prison sentence of life without parole.

Dinkins trial has been moved to Linn County and was originally scheduled for Oct. 17, but the conflict caused District Judge Henry Latham to move the proceeding to Oct. 25, according to court records filed Tuesday. A hearing on pretrial motions has been scheduled for Oct. 24.

Dinkins consented to the change in venue on April 11, though the change was not finalized at that time.

Dinkins and his former court-appointed attorney, Miguel Puentes, requested a change of venue. Latham ordered it March 30 without establishing the location.

Puentes withdrew from the case after he and Dinkins could not reconcile a break in their attorney-client relationship, according to court records.

Dinkins attorneys, Chad and Jennifer Frese of Marshalltown, were appointed April 4 by Latham.

Dinkins is being held in the Marshall County Jail.

Scott County Sheriff Tim Lane said on April 12 that Dinkins was moved so he could to be closer to his new attorneys.

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Moline firefighters are working to determine what caused a fire Wednesday morning at a home at 940 North Shore Drive.

Deputy Fire Chief Steven Regenwether said in a news release that firefighters were sent to the home at 7:30 a.m. The person living in the home called 911 after smelling smoke.

While there were no known working smoke detectors in the home, the resident was able to get out of the home safely.

Firefighters arrived on the scene in about five minutes and noticed that a large amount of smoke was coming from several windows of the single-story home.

The fire was extinguished in about 20 minutes, Regenwether said.

Firefighters were on the scene for about two hours to complete overhaul operations and search for any fire extension.

The home has been deemed uninhabitable.

An investigation into the cause and origin of the fire is being done by the Moline Fire Department Prevention and Investigations Bureau.

Assisting at the scene were the Rock Island County Sheriffs Department, Rock Island Fire Department, Rock Island Arsenal Fire Department, MidAmerican Energy and the Moline Second Alarmers.

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SPRINGFIELD  Two former state senators who sponsored and voted for bills to reduce lawmakers pay and forgo annual cost of living adjustments are now asking the Illinois Supreme Court to declare those measures unconstitutional and award them their back pay.

Former Sens. Michael Noland, D-Elgin, and James Clayborne, D-Belleville, have been successful so far in their legal efforts, prevailing in 2019 in Cook County Circuit Court before Judge Franklin Valderrama. But Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza, the defendant in the case, filed a direct appeal to the states highest court arguing that Valderrama got the decision wrong.

Clayborne served in the General Assembly for 24 years, from 1995 to 2019. Noland served for 10 years, from 2007 to 2017.

In 2009, when Illinois and most other states were dealing with budget crises brought on by the Great Recession, lawmakers passed a pair of measures that eliminated their automatic cost-of-living adjustments and required them to take one furlough day each month, which had the effect of reducing their base salary.

Noland was a sponsor of the bill freezing cost of living adjustments and a chief cosponsor of the furlough bill.

In each subsequent year through 2019, lawmakers passed substantially similar measures. Noland voted in favor of each one until he left the General Assembly and Clayborne voted in favor of them whenever he was present for the vote. And both men routinely touted their support for those measures to their constituents.

But when Noland left office in 2017, he filed a lawsuit arguing that the measures were unconstitutional under the legislative pay clause of the Illinois Constitution, which says lawmakers salaries may not be changed during the term to which theyve been elected. Clayborne joined the suit after he announced that he would not seek reelection but before his last term officially ended.

Clayborne is seeking $104,412.93 in lost pay. Noland is seeking $71,507.43.

At the circuit court level, Judge Valderrama declared the legislative actions unconstitutional on their face and thus void from the very beginning, meaning it is as if they were never enacted in the first place. He then issued an order directing Mendoza to pay the claims.

Mendoza, through Attorney General Kwame Raouls office, appealed on three grounds. While she did not challenge the finding that the legislative acts were unconstitutional, she argued that the former senators had effectively waived their right to any relief by voting in favor of the pay reduction bills.

She also argued that the former lawmakers waited an unreasonable length of time before filing their claims  a concept in law known as laches  and that their claims should be barred by the statute of limitations, which is generally five years.

At the circuit court, however, Judge Valderrama ruled that the clock on the statute of limitations did not begin to run until after he declared the acts unconstitutional. He also ruled that salary claims by public officials cannot be waived and that the laches defense was not available to the comptroller based on previous court rulings, including one from 1941.

During oral arguments Wednesday, however, Justice Mary Jane Theis noted that as recently as last year, the court upheld a laches defense in a constitutional lawsuit brought by John Tillman, CEO of the conservative Illinois Policy Institute, who sought to force the state to default on billions of dollars worth of payments on bonds that had been issued years earlier.

And this court a year ago said no, that claim talking about  $14.35 billion of taxpayer money is subject to laches, Theis said.

Justice Robert Carter also appeared to take issue with the idea that the statute of limitations clock didnt begin to run until the law was declared facially unconstitutional.

If something is facially unconstitutional, it's facially unconstitutional. It's not some other date, he said. I mean, whenever the court decides, yeah, that's right, that doesn't mean that's the date. The date is when it was passed. It was unconstitutional from the very beginning.

The court took the case under advisement and is expected to issue a ruling later this year.

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An estimated 4.8 million jobs have been lost in Ukraine since the start of the military conflict between Russia and Ukraine, according to a new brief published by the International Labour Organization (ILO) on Wednesday.



The brief titled "The impact of the Ukraine crisis on the world of work: Initial assessments" estimates that if hostilities were to escalate employment losses would increase to seven million. However, if the fighting was to cease immediately a rapid recovery would be possible, with the return of 3.4 million jobs.

According to the ILO brief, Ukraine's economy has been severely affected. Since the beginning of the military conflict on Feb.24, more than 5.23 million refugees have fled to neighboring countries. The refugees comprise mainly women, children and persons over the age of 60. Of the total refugee population, approximately 2.75 million are of working age.

The study estimates that the crisis in Ukraine may also create labor disruption in neighboring countries, mainly in Hungary, Moldova, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. If the military conflict continues, Ukrainian refugees would be forced to remain in exile longer, putting further pressure on the labor market and social protection systems in these states and increasing unemployment in many of them.

The significant economic and employment disruptions affecting Russia are having significant ripple effects in central Asia, especially in countries whose economies depend on remittances from the Russian Federation, such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the ILO brief said.

If the hostilities and the sanctions against Russia lead to job losses for migrant workers in Russia and these migrant workers return to their countries of origin, there will be severe economic losses in central Asia as a whole, the brief said.

The military conflict between Russia and Ukraine has also shocked the global economy, further complicating recovery from the COVID-19 crisis. This is likely to affect growth in employment and real wages, and put additional pressure on social protection systems.

The brief estimated that the fallout from the Ukraine crisis may worsen labor market conditions and reverse some of the gains made in many high-income countries, which have recently witnessed signs of a stronger labor market recovery.

The situation is particularly hard in low and middle-income countries, many of which have been unable to fully recover from the impact of the COVID-19 crisis, it said.
A body found along Chicagos Lake Michigan shoreline in early May has been identified as that of a college student who vanished last month around the time her boyfriend also went missing. The Chicago Sun-Times reports the Cook County medical examiners office and Chicago police say the body recovered May 2 was identified as that of 22-year-old Natally Brookson of Edgewater. The cause and manner of the University of Illinois at Chicago student's death remains pending. Brookson was reported missing April 30. The previous day, her boyfriend, 26-year-old Daniel Sotelo, was also reported missing. Both attended the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Forty years ago this week, John Mathis was acquitted in the shooting deaths of his wife, Ladonna, and the couples two preschool-aged sons. Rapid City author Noel Hamiel revisits the slayings, the trial and the victims in his new true crime book, South Dakotas Mathis Murders: Horror in the Heartland.

Hamiel is a retired journalist and former state legislator who was inducted into the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame in 2012. Hamiel was living and working in Kansas in September 1981 when news of the Mathis murders first attracted national attention.

On Sept. 8, an alleged masked intruder shot Ladonna Mathis, 30, Brian Mathis, 4, and Patrick Mathis, 2, while they were asleep in bed. All were killed with a .22-caliber rifle that has never been found.

John and Ladonnas infant son, Duane, was not harmed and John, then 30, sustained minor injuries. John called for an ambulance and said his family had been shot.

The shootings took place on the Mathis family farm nine miles from Mount Vernon. The crime was so horrendous, Hamiel said, that he remembers the Associated Press and television news reporting on the Mathis murders and the trial in April and May 1982. On May 12, a jury found John Mathis not guilty of the murders.

During his journalism career, Hamiel liked covering the court and police beats because he found the crimes and the human element intriguing. Hes also a longtime fan of fictional mysteries. The riveting Mathis murders lingered in the recesses of his brain, Hamiel said, until he finally decided to write a book that examined the crime and the people involved.

First was the mystery aspect of it. No one was ever punished for the crime. The husband was acquitted. No other suspects were ever arrested, much less tried, Hamiel said. It is an unsolved mystery. ... That was one of the compelling reasons it deserved to have a little more thorough coverage.

The sheer diabolical nature of the crime  it has just always struck me as theres been a lot of high-profile murders in this state  but we dont often have cases where children are involved, so that makes it unusual.

The Mathis murders case technically remains open, though inactive. As far as Hamiel knows, John Mathis is retired and living in Mitchell. He declined Hamiels request for an interview for the book. Duane Mathis lives with his girlfriend and three children on the Mathis property, and Duane insists his father didnt commit the murders.

Hamiel interviewed some of Ladonna Mathis relatives. They described Ladonna as a multi-talented woman who was devoted to her family and her church, and they remembered Brian and Patrick as happy little guys. Ladonnas younger sister, Marilyn, was especially helpful in providing information and photos, Hamiel said, although he doesnt know whether any of Ladonnas family has read his book.

The more I got into it, the more I thought this family should be remembered  this lady and these two kids. Their lives were ended. They didnt have a chance. That was a motivating factor. I wanted them to be remembered, Hamiel said.

For years afterward, Ladonnas family offered a $10,000 reward for information that could lead to the arrest and conviction of the person or people who murdered Ladonna, Brian and Patrick. The reward was never claimed.

(Ladonnas family) still suffers to this day. Its painful for them, Hamiel said. When Ladonnas parents were alive, her mother said, I could never believe that  nobody was ever brought to justice for this, and rightfully so. This is something youre going to carry with you."

South Dakotas Mathis Murders: Horror in the Heartland documents the family, the murders and the trial through interviews Hamiel conducted in 2020 and 2021, courtroom sketches, photos, law enforcement correspondence and more.

They did follow every lead. They turned loose the investigative powers available at the time, Hamiel said, but ultimately the state was unable to convince jurors that John Mathis committed the crimes. Hamiel interviewed Mark Meierhenry, former attorney general of South Dakota, who said he believed the jury couldnt come to grips with the idea of a father killing his children.

One thing that does stand out is this is how the jury system works. You accuse somebody of a crime and the defenses job is to succeed in planting reasonable doubt, and the defense did that, Hamiel said. We have a justice system that (has the) the foundational principle that you have to prove somebodys guilt beyond a reasonable doubt."

South Dakotas Mathis Murders: Horror in the Heartland is being sold locally at Mitzis Books in Rapid City and online from sites including arcadiapublishing.com, target.com, barnesandnoble.com and Amazon.

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The author of one of the five books that may be destroyed by the Rapid City Area School District will moderate a Community Conversation & Celebration from 5 to 7 p.m. Monday at Mitzis Books in Rapid City.

Educators, students, parents, writers and others have been invited to this event, which will include remarks from community members and a celebration of books that have been banned throughout history. There will also be a book signing.

Dave Eggers is the author of The Circle, which satirizes cultures and values that have emerged in the internet age. The Circle is one of five books purchased for local 12th grade English classes, but Rapid City Area Schools administrators recently deemed the books inappropriate for high school students. They were put on a surplus list as books "to be destroyed" rather than sold or recycled.

Last week, the RCAS Board of Education delayed a decision on destroying the books until they consult with legal counsel.

Eggers has offered Rapid City high school seniors the opportunity to receive any of the five titles at no cost to them by emailing Amanda Uhle at amanda@daveeggers.net. Eggers said the books will be shipped to students from independent bookstores.

When you read a book, its like a different experience for everybody and depending on the book, it can give you a sense of community, it can open your eyes to new experiences, it can help develop empathy, said Mary Ackland, retail manager for Mitzis Books.

If I read a book I didnt like, would I be so presumptuous to say I dont want anyone else to read it? The answers no. I think we should all have that chance to read what we want to read, she said.

In addition to The Circle, Eggers has written several books including A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, The Every, The Monk of Mokha," A Hologram for the King, What is the What and The Museum of Rain. Eggers also co-wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of The Circle. The 2017 movie stars Emma Watson and Tom Hanks.

Eggers has been involved in partnerships such as First Book and other programs that donate books to schools, libraries and students. Eggers also co-founded 826 National, a network of youth writing and tutoring centers around the United States, and he founded ScholarMatch, a nonprofit organization that connects low-income students with resources so they can obtain college educations. Eggers is the founder of McSweeney's, an independent publishing company based in San Francisco.

Eggers began the Young Editors Project, which involves school-aged students in the publishing process, and he's the winner of the Muhammad Ali Award for Education, the National Book Award's Literarian Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize  all honors connected to his work to support young readers and writers.

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Northrop Grumman, the multinational aerospace and defense technology company building the incoming B-21 Raider, presented the Douglas and Rapid Area School districts each with a $35,000 gift for programs in science, technology, engineering and math at an event at the South Dakota Air & Space Museum in Box Elder Thursday afternoon.

While the event was attended by dignitaries such as state Sen. David Johnson, Lt. Gov. Larry Rhoden, Brig. Gen. Scott Petrik, and Col. Brady Viara, the guests of honor were local fourth-graders.

The floor of the Air & Space Museum was lined with students from the Douglas School District, bused over for the ceremony to represent the innovators of tomorrow.

A series of speakers spoke to the future leaders about South Dakotas military history and narrated the story of the Doolittle Raid. They spoke of the legacy at Ellsworth Air Force Base, and of the raid  being one of boldness, bravery and innovation.

I know well talk a lot about our heritage, but I do want to speak a little about the future, said Vaira, commander of the 28th Mission Support Group at Ellsworth.

A future, he said, that looks an awful lot like the Douglas fourth-graders.

Tom Jones, corporate vice president and president of Northrop Grummans Aeronautics Systems sector, told students he hoped the programs utilizing this gift might lead some of them to become engineers and scientists one day.

[The programs] will enable some of you, like I did when I was your age, to go out and fall in love with science as well, he said, and maybe someday you'll be engineers and scientists.

Jones spoke of the innovation of the B-21 Raider, describing the stealth aircraft to students as a very large bomber with the ability to appear nearly invisible.

The innovation celebrated in the B-21 Raider is also a homage to the Raiders of the Doolittle Raid, and a spirit of bravery and boldness Jones seeks to encourage by supporting local schools.

I've had a chance to talk to some of the educators before this, he said of the Douglas and Rapid City area schools. They're coming up with some really, really cool programs that you all can go out and start learning about engineering and math.

Attendees of the event also witnessed a presentation of shadowboxes containing mission-flown American flags presented to Box Elder Mayor Larry Larson and Rhoden.

The Air & Space Museum was a last-minute plan B after the postponement of a Raid '22 event due to mechanical issues and scheduling conflicts. Yet the celebration of the Doolittle Raid and the innovators of tomorrow seemed right at home next to the aviation history of South Dakota.

Contact Laura Heckmann at lheckmann@rapidcityjournal.com

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Rapid Citys Legal and Finance Committee approved a resolution to create a Tax Increment Finance District and project plan for the Black Hills Industrial Center Wednesday.

The $78 million district would span around 900 acres with phase one anchored by the AEsir Technologies battery manufacturing plant. The center would be built over three phases along South Dakota Highway 79 and Old Folsom Road, just south of Catron Boulevard.

The district itself would encompass the Rapid City Landfill, along Catron Boulevard for utilities, a portion of Highway 79 and 600 acres of the proposed center site. The Rapid City Council will consider the items at its Monday meeting.

Kyle Treloar, vice president of Dream Design International, said the industrial park is moving forward and receiving great interest from all over the country. He said construction will really start this summer.

The center would be built in three phases and include 600 acres of rail serving high tech and value-added agriculture products. The first phase would include site grading, drainage facilities, Old Folsom Road improvements, turn lanes on Highway 79, rail switches, rail line, offsite water, offsite sanitary sewer, traffic signal and utility relocations.

If approved, the district could also result in two additional stop lights along South Dakota Highway 79, including one at the Rapid City Landfill intersection. There could also be a traffic impact study on Highway 79 near the landfill that would occur with the next phase of platting in the relatively near term.

Parking Operations Manager Anna Gilligan presented on the division to the committee. She said the division plans on expanding to four parking enforcement officers.

More officers will ensure more consistent enforcement, and consistent enforcement encourages compliance, she said.

Gilligan said theyre also hoping to commission another parking study that would be an update to the 2017 study and include a location for a new parking structure.

Community Development Director Vicki Fisher said funding for the study will be requested in next years budget. She said the city needs to be looking ahead and anticipating needs near South Dakota Mines, downtown and west near the YMCA.

Gilligan said before implementation of the parking plan derived from the 2017 study, revenue was at $623,000. In 2019, the year the plan was implemented, revenue was at $1 million. In 2020, it was $1.3 million and $1.6 million in 2021.

Committee members asked about parking for the Block 5 Project on St. Joseph Street between Fifth and Sixth streets. Fisher said Gilligan sent letters to those with parking spots in the current lot. Current parkers will be required to use their new parking spots July 1.

 Contact Siandhara Bonnet at siandhara.bonnet@rapidcityjournal.com 

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WASHINGTON (AP)  President Joe Biden on Thursday kicked off the first-ever Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit to be held in Washington as his administration makes an extended effort to demonstrate that the United States has not lost focus on the Pacific even while dealing with Russias invasion of Ukraine.

As Biden welcomed leaders from eight ASEAN nations for a dinner to start the two-day special summit, the White House announced the United States would commit to more than $150 million in new projects to bolster Southeast Asia's climate, maritime and public health infrastructure.

A senior administration official, who previewed the announcement on the condition of anonymity, said the effort was meant to signal that the U.S. is looking to step up our game in Southeast Asia.

The gathering marked the group's first meeting at the White House in its 45-year history. Leaders will take part in more formal talks at the State Department on Friday.

The ASEAN nations include Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. The top leaders from ASEAN member Myanmar were barred from attending, while outgoing Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte dispatched Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. to represent his government.

The summit comes before Biden's trip next week to South Korea and Japan  his first visit to Asia as president  for talks with those two countries' leaders. He also will meet during that trip with leaders from the Indo-Pacific strategic alliance with the U.S. known as the Quad: Australia, India and Japan.

Biden has tried to put greater focus on that alliance and improving relations with Pacific nations in the early going of his presidency as he sees a rising China as the most threatening economic and national security adversary to the United States.

Biden, who pledged to make the Pacific a greater focal point of U.S. policy, has seen his attempt at an Asia pivot complicated by the most serious fighting in Europe since World War II.

A White House Asia policy adviser said the administration remains committed to stepping up relations with Southeast Asian nations to address climate, economic and education initiatives.

There has been a sense that in previous administrations that we had set off with a determined pace to focus on East Asia or in the Indo-Pacific and then find ourselves with other pressing challenges that perhaps draws (us) away a little bit, Kurt Campbell, coordinator for Indo-Pacific Affairs on the White House National Security Council, said Wednesday. I think there is a deep sense that that cant happen again.

The new U.S. investment in ASEAN nations includes $40 million for clean energy infrastructure, $60 million for a new regional maritime initiative and $6 million to accelerate digital development in the region.

The White House also announced that Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies will launch a privately funded institute for rising leaders from ASEAN nations that will bring mid-career public sector officials to the United States for leadership training.

Duterte, the Philippines president, is skipping the summit because his country is in a political transition. ASEAN has barred Myanmar  in crisis since the army ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021  from sending all but nongovernmental leaders for ASEAN meetings.

The Biden administration condemned the military coup that led to the ouster of Suu Kyi. She was convicted by a military court last month of corruption and sentenced to five years in prison in the first of several corruption cases against her. Suu Kyi has denied the charges.

Biden is also expected to address the situation in Myanmar with ASEAN leaders, as well as discuss China and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Campbell said the administration expects the private talks will be direct, polite, but maybe a little bit uncomfortable at times as the U.S. and ASEAN members are not on the same page on all issues. He said the administration wants to see the group play a more deeply engaged role in the critical diplomacy about next steps in Myanmar.

Biden has called for Russia to be disinvited from Novembers scheduled Group of 20 summit because of its invasion of Ukraine. ASEAN member Indonesia, which holds the presidency of the G-20 this year, has resisted the calls to pull Moscows invitation.

Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the presumptive winner of this weeks Philippines presidential election, could test U.S. sway in the region. The son and namesake of the countrys former dictator has said he wants to pursue closer ties with China.

He has received congratulatory calls from both Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping. His campaign said that Marcos Jr. also met on on Thursday with Chinese ambassador, Huang Xilian, who conveyed that Beijing wants to bring cooperation between the two country to new heights.

Campbell acknowledged that historical considerations could present challenges to the relationship with Marcos Jr., a seeming reference to long-standing litigation in the United States against the estate of his father, Ferdinand Marcos.

A U.S. appeals court in 1996 upheld damages of about $2 billion against the elder Marcos estate for the torture and killings of thousands of Filipinos. The court upheld a 1994 verdict of a jury in Hawaii, where he had fled after being forced from power in 1986. He died there in 1989.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Thursday said she was not aware if the litigation or China came up in Bidens call with Marcos Jr.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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Law enforcement continues to ask the public for tips regarding a drive-by shooting in Pine Ridge that killed a young child a week ago.

On Wednesday, the Oglala Sioux Tribe Department of Public Safety posted their request for information on social media a second time after the May 5 shooting. They originally asked for tips the day after the shooting. The Wednesday post included a photo of a young boy. He has not been identified.

According to the Oglala Sioux Tribe Department of Public Safety, officers responded to a call at approximately 9 p.m. for a drive-by shooting at a home in the 2900 block of U.S. Highway 18. When officers arrived, they learned an occupant of a vehicle had shot at the home and fled the scene prior to police officers' arrival. During the gunfire, the young child was shot and killed.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Oglala Sioux Tribe Department of Public Safety did not return requests for comments on the status of the investigation or confirm if there are any suspects.

Anyone with information is urged to call the OSTDPS Dispatch Center at 605-867-5111 or 1-800-CALL-FBI.

 Contact Shalom Baer Gee at sgee@rapidcityjournal.com 

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At the height of the pandemic, as the coronavirus infected tens of thousands of meat industry workers and caused hundreds to die, executives at the nation's largest meat producers were aware of the transmission risk in their plants and successfully lobbied the Trump White House and the USDA to circumvent coronavirus prevention measures and regulations, according to the latest findings of a congressional investigation.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, which launched its probe in February 2021 into meatpackers' Covid response, also found that meat processors' warnings about the nation being on the brink of a meat shortage were not based in fact, and that industry experts at the time believed them to be intentionally misleading.

"The Select Subcommittee's investigation has revealed that former President Trump's political appointees at USDA collaborated with large meatpacking companies to lead an Administration-wide effort to force workers to remain on the job during the coronavirus crisis despite dangerous conditions, and even to prevent the imposition of commonsense mitigation measures," committee chairman, US Rep. James Clyburn, said in a statement Thursday.

The North American Meat Institute, an industry trade group, criticized the committee's report as "partisan" and said it "distorts the truth about the meat and poultry industry's work to protect employees during the Covid-19 pandemic."

"The House Select Committee has done the nation a disservice. The Committee could have tried to learn what the industry did to stop the spread of Covid among meat and poultry workers, reducing positive cases associated with the industry while cases were surging across the country. Instead, the Committee uses 20/20 hindsight and cherry picks data to support a narrative that is completely unrepresentative of the early days of an unprecedented national emergency," Julie Anna Potts, president and CEO of the North American Meat Institute, said in a statement.

Ignoring the risk

The investigation centered on meat producers Tyson, Smithfield, JBS USA, Cargill and National Beef along with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and its response to worker illnesses. Meat plants became a hotbed for Covid outbreaks in the first year of the pandemic as workers grappled with long hours in crowded work spaces.

The initial results of the probe, released last October, showed infections and deaths among workers in plants owned by those five companies in the first year of the pandemic were significantly higher than previously estimated, with over 59,000 workers infected and at least 269 deaths.

The report cited examples, based on Internal meatpacking industry documents, of at least one company ignoring warnings by a doctor of the risk of rapid transmission of the virus in their facilities.

For example, the report found that a JBS executive received an April 2020 email from a doctor in a hospital near JBS' Cactus, Texas, facility saying, "100% of all Covid-19 patients we have in the hospital are either direct employees or family member[s] of your employees." The doctor warned: "Your employees will get sick and may die if this factory continues to be open."

The emails prompted Texas Governor Greg Abbott's chief of staff to reach out to JBS, but it remains unclear whether JBS ever responded to the email, the report said.

"This coordinated campaign prioritized industry production over the health of workers and communities and contributed to tens of thousands of workers becoming ill, hundreds of workers dying, and the virus spreading throughout surrounding areas," said Rep. Clyburn.

"The shameful conduct of corporate executives pursuing profit at any cost during a crisis and government officials eager to do their bidding regardless of resulting harm to the public must never be repeated," he said.

In a response to CNN's request for comment, JBS, in an email, did not address the doctors warning, highlighted by the committee.

"In 2020, as the world faced the challenge of navigating Covid-19, many lessons were learned, and the health and safety of our team members guided all our actions and decisions. During that critical time, we did everything possible to ensure the safety of our people who kept our critical food supply chain running," said Nikki Richardson, a spokeswoman for JBS USA & Pilgrim's.

The investigation surfaced examples of some meatpacking industry executives acknowledging that being transparent about the lax mitigation measures and high infections rates in plants would cause alarm.

The report, citing a company email, said on April 7, 2020, managers at National Beef discussed avoiding explicitly notifying workers when an infected plant worker returned to work with physician clearance, saying they should instead "announce line meeting style," likely referring to announcements made during informal in-person huddles of production line workers, "hoping it doesn't incite additional panic."

Meatpacking companies and the United States Department of Agriculture "jointly lobbied the White House to dissuade workers from staying home or quitting," according to the report.

Further, meatpacking companies successfully lobbied USDA officials to advocate for Department of Labor policies that deprived their employees of benefits if they chose to stay home or quit, while also seeking insulation from legal liability if their workers fell ill or died on the job, according to the report.

The probe found that in April 2020, the CEOs of JBS, Smithfield, Tyson and other meatpacking companies asked Trump cabinet member and then Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue to "elevate the need for messaging about the importance of our workforce staying at work to the POTUS or VP level," and to make clear that "being afraid of Covid-19 is not a reason to quit your job and you are not eligible for unemployment compensation if you do."

On April 28th, 2020, President Trump signed an executive order directing meat packing plants to follow guidance being issued by the CDC and OSHA on how to keep workers safe, so processing plants could stay open

Sec. Perdue would later send a letter to governors and to the leaders of meat processing companies.

"Meat processing facilities are critical infrastructure and are essential to the national security of our nation. Keeping these facilities operational is critical to the food supply chain and we expect our partners across the country to work with us on this issue."

The Committee report said meatpacking companies and lobbyists worked with USDA and the White House in an attempt to prevent state and local health departments from regulating coronavirus precautions in plants.

Calling the contents of the report deeply disturbling, a spokesperson for the USDA said "many of the decisions made by the previous administration are not in line with our values. This administration is committed to food safety, the viability of the meat and poultry sector and working with our partners across the government to protect workers and ensure their health and safety is given the priority it deserves."

A spokesman for Perdue, who is currently Chancellor of the University of Georgia, said Perdue "is focused on his new position serving the students of Georgia" and did not provide a comment on the committee report.

Former President Trump has not responded to CNN Business' request for comment.

False claims of impending meat shortage

As their workers fell ill with the virus, several meat suppliers were forced to temporarily shut plants in 2020 and their companies' executives warned the situation would put the US meat supply at risk.

The report slammed those warnings as "flimsy if not outright false."

"Just three days after Smithfield CEO Ken Sullivan publicly warned that the closure of a Smithfield plant was 'pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our nation's meat supply," he asked industry representatives to issue a statement that 'there was plenty of meat, enough . . . to export," while Smithfield told meat importers the same, the report said.

The investigation found industry representatives thought Smithfield's statements about a meat supply crunch were "intentionally scaring people."

At the time, food experts told CNN Business that while there were meat shortages, at times, various cuts of meat might not be available.

Tyson said via an email response that it was reviewing the report.

Smithfield said it took "every appropriate measure to keep our workers safe" when it encountered a "first-of-its-kind challenge" two years ago.

"To date, we have invested more than $900 million to support worker safety, including paying workers to stay home, and have exceeded CDC and OSHA guidelines," Smithfield spokesman Jim Monroe, said in an email to CNN Business.

"The meat production system is a modern wonder, but it is not one that can be re-directed at the flip of a switch. That is the challenge we faced as restaurants closed, consumption patterns changed and hogs backed-up on farms with nowhere to go. The concerns we expressed were very real and we are thankful that a true food crisis was averted and that we are starting to return to normal.... Did we make every effort to share with government officials our perspective on the pandemic and how it was impacting the food production system? Absolutely," he said.

Cargill and National Beef could not immediately be reached for comment.

The committee said its report was based on more than 151,000 pages of documents collected from meatpacking companies and interest groups, calls with meatpacking workers, union representatives, and former USDA and OSHA officials, among others.

-- CNN Business' Jennifer Korn contributed to this report

The-CNN-Wire

 &  2022 Cable News Network, Inc., a WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved.

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The Montana Department of Transportation is asking for public comment on a proposal to add bridge pier protection for a bridge that crosses the Bitterroot River south of Hamilton.

This bridge is near the Anglers Roost fishing access.

Proposed work will repair streambed erosion occurring at two of the bridge piers located in the river. Large angular rock (rip rap) will be placed at the bottom of the bridge piers to protect them from future erosion.

Construction is tentatively planned for the winter of 2022 depending on completion of all project development activities and availability of funding. No new right-of-way or utility relocations will be needed.

An important part of properly planning for future projects is partnering with the community. The Montana Department of Transportation welcomes the public to provide ideas and comments on the proposed project. Comments may be submitted online at http://www.mdt.mt.gov/contact/comment-form.aspx or in writing to Montana Department of Transportation, Missoula office at PO Box 7039, Missoula, MT 59807-7039. Please note that comments are for project UPN 10206000.

The public is encouraged to contact Missoula District Preconstruction Engineer Jacquelyn Smith at 406-544-5802 or Project Design Engineer Nathaniel Walters at 406-523-5833.

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Virginia has a rich history with many chapters, including the American Civil War, which forever changed our nation. Stories of the Civil War and its legacies will be presented in a new dimension at The American Civil War Museum with the opening of the new Robins Theater this June!

This exciting new element of interpretation is a feature of the museum experience at The American Civil War Museums Tredegar location in Richmond, VA - one of the three sites the Museum operates.

A rich story-telling tapestry

The American Civil War Museum presents history where it happened. In Richmond, the former Tredegar Ironworks site played an integral role in the War, and the city itself was the capital of the Confederacy.

The American Civil War Museum is a venue for storytelling, education and exploration of the significance that the Civil War holds for complexities we face today. Through its expansive collection of Civil War era artifacts, research and interpretation, the museum delves into the cause, costs and consequences of the Civil War and its legacies in its exhibits, programs and tours.

The opening of the Robins Theater adds a new dimension to the way the museum tells the story of the war.

A multimedia experience

Located within The American Civil War Museums Tredegar site, the Robins Theater, designed by Solid Light Inc., is equipped with state-of-the-art technology in video and audio components. The latest technology is utilized to support the dramatic visuals of the film, immersing the audience in the Civil War era. The theater itself adds a modern multi-use space for programs, performances or lectures.

During museum hours, visitors will have the opportunity to view the original film, A Peoples Contest: Americas Civil War and Emancipation, which is just under 13 minutes in length. This film was developed to inspire an understanding of the origins, motivations, course and aftermath of the war, and complements the museums flagship exhibit, A Peoples Contest: Struggles for Nation & Freedom in Civil War America.

The film includes first-person quotes, historical photos and archival materials brought together through contemporary filmmaking techniques to create an innovative experience rooted in the stories of the Civil War era. With an original script and musical score, the film reflects themes of the Museums flagship exhibition by presenting distinctive and unexpected elements that bring to life the realities of war - both on the battlefield and the homefront.

Learn more about the Museum

The American Civil War Museum explores the stories of the American Civil War and its legacies from the perspectives of soldiers and civilians, and freed and enslaved African Americans. Through dynamic exhibitions and an unparalleled collection of Civil War era artifacts, the Museum seeks to connect history and current culture.

The American Civil War Museum welcomes visitors at two sites in Richmond, Virginia  Historic Tredegar and The White House of the Confederacy, and also at American Civil War Museum - Appomattox, in Appomattox, Virginia.

For more information, virtual program schedules, and ticketing, visit acwm.org.
 Flash

The captive breeding of lions to meet the rising demand for alternative medicine and ornamental industries should be halted in order to save the majestic carnivore that roams African jungles, lobby groups said on Wednesday.



The World Animal Protection and Blood Lions said in a joint statement issued in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, that cruelty meted out on lions in captivity was a reason to halt the practice and allow them to roam freely in their natural habitats.

Edith Kabesiime, the wildlife campaigns manager at World Animal Protection said that legislation should be enacted to ban caging of lions on commercial farms amid threat to their physical and emotional health.

According to Kabesiime, the survival and welfare of lions and other iconic carnivores in Africa was in jeopardy amid caged rearing, trophy hunting and habitat loss.

She urged African governments to support community-driven conservation of lions as opposed to captive breeding that was fueling the spread of pathogens.

Kabesiime lauded South Africa in its pledge to phase out captive breeding of lions adding that a ban on trade in their parts including bones could aid efforts to boost their population in the wild.

A joint study by World Animal Protection and Blood Lions, an advocacy group, that was published in early May noted that breeding lions in a captive environment undermined their health and comfort.

Based on data collected from South Africa's commercial lion farms, the study concluded that captive breeding contravened global best practices on protecting the carnivores from human-induced and climatic threats.

"It is clear from review of scientific literature available that a multitude of animal welfare challenges are associated with caring for lions in captivity," said the study.

Louise de Waal, the director of Blood Lions said that captive breeding, poaching, habitat loss and fragmentation posed an immense threat to the survival of the big cats despite their contribution to tourism and ecological balance. Enditem
Happening, Audrey Diwans Golden Lion winner at last years Venice Film Festival, is set in 1963 France, but the period detail isnt prominent. Instead, its an abortion tale that feels as if it could take place in many places, long ago or today.

Its filmed in square-like academy ratio, and its as if the edges of the frame are closing in on Anne Duchesne (Anamaria Vartolomei), a smart literature student  maybe even a brilliant one; we see her define anaphora without hesitation  who is shocked when a doctor informs her that shes pregnant.

This is 12 years before abortion would be legalized in France, and Annes predicament is immediately urgent. Do something, she tells the doctor, who replies that its impossible, the law is unsparing. For Anne, her apparently first sexual encounter threatens to derail her life just as its getting started. She comes from a working-class background. Her parents  and most of all Anne, herself  have high expectations for her.

I want to continue my studies, she tells a doctor. Its essential for me.

Films from Cristian Mungius 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days to Eliza Hittmans Never Rarely Sometimes Always  have captured the human toll of systems that give women little choice when faced with an unwanted pregnancy. What distinguishes Happening, Diwans second feature film, are her and Laurent Tangys tightly composed cinematography and Vartolomeis riveting, steely performance.

To a remarkable degree, Happening is viscerally connected with its protagonist, closely detailing not just her navigation of social taboos and restrictions but also capturing her unapologetic determination. Its a movie about abortion, yes, but its also a coming-of-age tale about a womans resolve.

Happening is based on the 2001 memoir by celebrated French author Annie Ernaux, who framed her 60s experience as it was recalled decades later by sifting through old journals and memories. Diwans film has no such framework, instead preferring to stay rigorously close to Annes experience as its unfolding. Abortion is to even her friends an unspeakable subject; just the hint of promiscuity is enough to make her nearly an outcast. In one frightfully vulnerable scene, classmates confront her in the shower for being loose while they and she are naked.

Its a fittingly staged scene because in Happening, theres no intimacy or pleasure for Annes body. Its a battleground.

When shes asked for her reading of Louis Aragons Elsa at Her Mirror, Anne describes the poems war references. And she, too, is in a kind of war, with seemingly no one on her side, desperate for help  or at least for some honesty.
Celine Sciammas Petite Maman couldnt be more different in scope and scale from Portrait of a Lady on Fire. There are no castles, or corsets, or waves crashing up against craggy cliffs. There is no sex or lust or desire. Yet emotionally, the quiet, restrained and exceptionally tender Petite Maman is on equal footing. And from one angle, theyre both ultimately about goodbyes.

Women and girlhood are also at the heart of this latest endeavor, which runs a slim 72 minutes. But instead of a rapturous relationship, the lens here is the whimsical notion of what it might be like for an 8-year-old to spend time with her mother at age 8.

There are so many traps and pitfalls when it comes to depicting young girlhood. Movies can overromanticize, infantilize or instill incongruously adult wisdom in young characters. Sweetness becomes saccharine and nostalgia a crutch. But Sciamma is able to bring to life essential truths of what it is like to be that strange age and the sometimes frightening, sometimes wonderful vastness of a limitless imagination. And she even does it without a background score to manipulate our tear ducts.

Her heroine here is Nelly (Josephine Sanz), who has just lost her beloved grandmother. We meet her in the nursing home where she and her mother, Marion (Nina Meurisse), are collecting her things. Nelly, who like many 8-year-old girls is a bit of an old soul, methodically and respectfully goes from room to room to bid farewell to the fellow residents. Marion, meanwhile, is distracted by grief and the daunting checklist that follows the death of a parent, especially when that death was not exactly a surprise but not entirely expected, either. Shed been ailing but not enough for anyone to know to say their final goodbyes. Its this that haunts Nelly, and her mother is not quite succeeding at convincing her otherwise on their long drive to the grandmothers country home, where more cleanup and clear out await.

Marion and Nelly arrive quite late to her childhood home, as does Nellys father (Stephane Varupenne). They talk about the scary shadows that still come through the window in Marions old room and fall asleep together on the couch. But in the morning, Marion is gone. It was just too much for her to stay. Its in this void that Nelly ventures into the woods, in search of the fort her mother made when she was her age that shed heard so much about. There she finds a young girl (Gabrielle Sanz) who looks just like her and learns that her name is Marion, too. Nelly becomes fast friends with her small mother, and though she understands whats happening, she doesnt reveal it to Marion for quite some time.

Josephine Sanz and Gabrielle Sanz are identical twins and inspired casting. They both are naturals in front of the camera, and their real-life bond and similarities add a complex blend of warmth and eeriness to the minimalistic film. Its not an impossibility that Marion was once a spitting image of Nelly, but it also lends to the idea that this is all in the imagination of Nelly, who wants nothing more than to know her mother better  her fears, her dreams, her joy and her sadness. This is the only way she can think to do it.
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Prestyn Pierce has been a business owner since she was 11 years old. She sold Silly Bandz bracelets first, and later pencil grips, before finding a love for making chemical-free moisturizers in 2018  a change she made to help her grandfather, whose dry skin worsened after every chemotherapy treatment.

I was like, thats not it. I cant have him out here like this, the Meadowbrook High School junior said. Unfortunately, after he passed, I started thinking, Well, what if I really tried turning this into a business?

The work paid off. Before the pandemic, she would sell out at vendor shows, making a profit of at least $200 per exhibition. And on Wednesday night, the teenage entrepreneur became one of four Meadowbrook students to receive $1,000 checks to grow their startups after winning in a competition inspired by the ABC reality television series Shark Tank.

The runner-ups were presented with $250. There were 10 total finalists.

Shayla Maddox-Pierce, Prestyns mother, cheered her on in the crowd of at least 50 people and said she felt proud to see her daughters hard work  an ode to Maddox-Pierces dad  recognized.

They had a really big relationship, she said of her father and daughter.

Wednesday night marked the end of the Shark Tank project launched by Meadowbrook Academy for Developing Entrepreneurs  one of 13 specialty centers in Chesterfield County Public Schools. The first Shark Tank round took place last month and included more than 50 students pitching judges their business proposals.

The initiative began at the start of the school year when the Chesterfield Education Foundation connected the center with a $20,000 grant from the Community Foundation for a greater Richmond.

Virginia Commonwealth Universitys da Vinci Center for Innovation later joined the partnership, which allowed Meadowbrook students to get involved with VCUs Entrepreneurship Academy, connect students with mentors, and teach them about design and the art of pitching.

What strikes me about all of you is that youre incredibly curious, and that you werent just curious, you went and sought the answers and you found solutions to problems. Thats what learning is all about, Garrett Westlake, the executive director of the da Vinci Center, told the students on Wednesday. Im super inspired by what I saw here tonight. Im really proud.

Other pitches included custom handmade jackets; a music production company focused on helping kids launch careers; a site to connect people with personalized products for their natural hair; and a chat space for teenagers to obtain free mental health services from trained professionals.

The three other winners of $1,000 checks were senior Elijah Williams for his gaming business on YouTube that also gives back to charities; sophomore Justice Alvarez for Evolution LLC, a size-inclusive clothing line; and freshman Kileya Johnson for KMilan Creations, which designs fleece-lined, machine-washable pillows with pockets for children to put their toys in.

Pierce plans to put the money toward developing a website for people to place online orders and marketing the business  named Naturally Beautiful  on social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. Alvarez will use the $1,000 to develop more designs and launch the Evolution website. Johnson is going to invest in an embroidery machine and newer fabrics for more pillows.

On Wednesday night, Alvarez said the name comes from how his style started off in the beginning of his life and evolved over time to move toward more streetwear clothing.

Its kind of emotional. It took a lot out of me, a lot of time and hard work. Im happy that Im able to put all my hard work and time into this moment, Alvarez said. Youre never too young to do anything. If you put your mind to it, you can get what you need to get it done.
Virginias behavioral health agency says its regional staff  including employees in the field  wont be affected by a new telework policy that Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued last week.

But within the behavioral health and developmental services agency, its not clear to staff whether the exemption also applies to people who work mostly in the field across Virginia, but report directly to the central office in Richmond, according to one supervisor.

The policy distinction matters because the telework policy  requiring approval by a Cabinet secretary or the governors chief of staff for an employee to work remotely more than one day a week  could make it harder to keep employees who work in rural communities far from the office in Richmond.

Were already in a workforce crisis, said the supervisor, who asked not to be identified because of the potential for retaliation.

The new telework policy wont affect most of the 6,400 employees of the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Development Services because staff at the states 12 mental hospitals and other behavioral health facilities have been working in person throughout the COVID-19 pandemic that began more than 26 months ago.

Its not clear how the policy will apply to many of the 58,000 classified employees in executive branch agencies or those who work for public colleges and universities that are supported by the state but set their own policies for most of their workforce.

The Department of Human Resource Management  the states personnel office  doesnt know how many state employees have been working remotely under the old telework policy during the past two years because of the pandemic. Most state offices closed temporarily because of the public health emergency, which killed at least 11 state workers, including two at state mental hospitals.

In the 2019 fiscal year, before the pandemic began, only 26% of state executive branch jobs were eligible for telework, or about 15,000 employees. Of those eligible workers, only 19%, or about 2,900, had agreements to work remotely.

The numbers have been much higher during the pandemic, as telework became essential both to protect employee health and to help them balance their work with personal lives, which also were disrupted by the closure of schools, child care facilities and other support programs.

For example, the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services employs 560 people in its central office, which includes staff based in Richmond and in regional offices across Virginia.

Lauren Cunningham, spokesperson for the department, estimated that before the pandemic, the central office included about 300 people with agreements to work remotely for a varying number of days.

At times during the pandemic, all central office staff worked remotely, she said.

Cunningham said Thursday that regional office staff would not have to apply by May 20 for permission to work remotely from their home office under the new policy, which will take effect on July 5, replacing all existing telework agreements.

These regional positions are licensing, human rights or other positions who work in the field, she said in an email on Wednesday. Telework agreements are not required for those positions; they will continue to carry out their positions as they always have.

Cunningham said Thursday that field workers for state-level programs also would not have to apply for permission to work remotely under the new telework policy.

But the supervisor who spoke confidentially with the Richmond Times-Dispatch said that has not been clear to employees, raising concerns about the ability to keep staff who may not be able to commute to an office regularly because of distance, cost and family considerations, such as children with disabilities or ailing parents.

Public colleges and universities also are determining which of their employees must apply for permission to work remotely for one or more days a week under the new policy, which says it applies to all state employees.

Youngkin spokesperson Macaulay Porter said last week that the new telework policy would apply to employees at colleges and universities who fall under the Department of Human Resource Management, rather than their institutions personnel systems.

For example, Virginia Commonwealth University employs about 6,600 people, but only about 500 wage employees remain under the state personnel system. Of those, 187 have telework agreements under the old policy that Youngkin is replacing.

VCU has its own telework policy, which it updated in January.

One thing is clear about the new policy: It wont apply to employees in the legislative and judicial branches, or independent entities such as the Virginia Retirement System, Lottery, State Corporation Commission and Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority.

But they can adopt our policy or a similar teleworking policy, Porter said last week.

mmartz@timesdispatch.com (804) 649-6964 Staff writer Eric Kolenich contributed to this report.
Suitcases were littered on the tarmac between survivors of a mock plane crash at Richmond International Airport on Thursday as emergency response teams worked to put out a blazing fire and treat faux injuries. One man lying on the ground screamed repeatedly: Help! Over here!

The scenario was part of a full-scale emergency response training exercise conducted at RIC with over 300 participants from emergency response teams and volunteer organizations in the metro area.

In the scenario, fire, police and EMS from Richmond and Chesterfield, Hanover and Henrico counties were called to the scene to assist RIC Airport Rescue and Fire Fighting and the RIC Police Department in an aircraft crash where the plane had failed to lift off the tarmac. Members of Community Emergency Response Teams from Richmond, Chesterfield, Hanover and Henrico also acted as crash survivors in the scenario.

This is as close to real as we can get, said Troy M. Bell, RICs spokesperson and director of marketing and air service development.

As mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration, RIC conducts full-scale tests of its Airport Emergency Plan every three years. Guidelines from the National Incident Management System help airport officials create emergency response measures, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The goal of the emergency response training is to evaluate the emergency response and coordination among the organizations involved.

Ron DeMilta, a Hanover Community Emergency Response Team member in his second year of volunteering with RICs emergency response training, had a gruesome burn mark painted on his shoulder and a large grin on his face. He said the scenario at RIC was the most realistic and impressive of any other scenarios hed seen.

I think as a flyer, it would make me feel safe to know that this kind of training is done to prepare an airport for an emergency if it happens, he said.

Other participants had varying degrees of injuries. One woman had a puncture wound in her shoulder. Another with bruises around her eyes was yelling for her baby  an infant mannequin that had been placed in the smoking plane beforehand. A woman who appeared unconscious was still buckled to a row of seats that had been thrown from the plane.

Heidi M. Hooker, executive director of the Old Dominion EMS Alliance, said the use of makeup helped make the scenario look lifelike. In collaboration with makeup artists from Kings Dominion, the injuries help emergency response teams to not only learn how to operate the plans in place but also to anticipate the things they would be seeing and hearing.

When they get started, youre going to hear sirens, youre going to hear screams, youre going to hear yelling, and youre going to hear people asking where their baby is, Hooker said. Its all geared to make the medics heart rates get moving, and so we try to make this as real as possible.

Part of the scenario was organizing the survivors into different groups based on their injuries, according to Airport Rescue and Fire Fighting Lt. Glen Fields. Those categorized as green were cognizant of the situation and could walk, while those categorized as red needed immediate medical attention. Those who had died at the scene were categorized as gray. Emergency response personnel transported survivors to another area via ambulance.

Virginia State Police, the FAA, the Transportation Security Administration, RIC staff, members of the American Red Cross, airline representatives and other groups also assisted in helping the survivors.

The emergency response training was part of a larger citywide plan that included Richmond-area hospitals, including Chippenham Hospital. Mass casualty incident drills are held there a minimum of twice a year, said Chief Operating Officer Brandon Mencini.

Mass casualty incident drills are designed to stress the amount of resources that the hospital has to then examine how participants proceed with limited resources, he said. The drills help the hospitals response become more like second nature.

Bell said about five hospitals in the area would be conducting similar drills.

The biggest thing really is that were incredibly thankful for the participation of all of these mutual aid parties, he said. Its a chance for us to work with these folks in a practice scenario  and not just meet them for the first time and its the real thing.
In 2004, Virginia dipped its toes into reparations for victims of historical racism.

With $1 million donated by a Virginia billionaire and another $1 million in taxpayer funds, state lawmakers created the Brown v. Board of Education Scholarships. Those would underwrite college tuition  and later, textbooks and student fees  for children in the late 1950s through mid-1960s whod been denied a public education in Virginia.

That happened because of massive resistance, an official Virginia government policy that was perhaps the most blatant act of systemic and institutional racism in 20th century America.

With explicit encouragement from the Virginia General Assembly, four Virginia school divisions shut down public schools rather than integrate them, as the U.S. Supreme Court had ordered in 1954, with its decision in Brown.

Friday, Virginia Western Community College in Roanoke will confer an Associate in Liberal Arts degree to one of those denied students, Vera (Dove) Morton. Now 67, Morton is the 88th student whose college education was covered by the Brown V. Board of Education Scholarship program.

Shell deliver the student commencement address at Virginia Westerns graduation. And Mortons got a lot to say.

She grew up in Rice, in Prince Edward County, about 15 miles outside Farmville, the sixth of 10 children in a family that counted three sets of twins. Her father, who left school after the seventh grade, worked as a truck driver in a quarry.

During massive resistance, Prince Edward County kept its public schools closed from 1959 to 1964, longer than any other Virginia locality. (The others were Charlottesville, Norfolk and Warren County. Some children in Arlington County were victims, too.)

Before [Virginia lawmakers] would let us go to school with [white students], they shut down the schools, Morton said. The county built an academy for the white students. There was a lot of crooked stuff going on.

White students in Prince Edward and the other jurisdictions were eligible for General Assembly-approved tuition grants to attend private, whites-only academies. The subdivisions Black students, meanwhile, had to either travel outside the county to continue public education  or do without school.

One of Mortons elder brothers went to live with grandparents in Charlotte County, she said, so he could continue schooling. She wasnt so lucky.

Morton (and her twin brother, Vernon) missed kindergarten, first and second grades because there were no Prince Edward public schools for children to attend in those years. And even after they reopened in 1964, most white students remained in the private academies, she said.

That meant the reopened public schools stayed segregated in a de facto sense, if not a legal one.

Some of the schools she attended were literally tarpaper shacks, Morton said. When those schools got textbooks, they were tattered hand-me-downs or rejects from other schools. And some of the educators barely made an effort.

One of the teachers who taught fourth or fifth grade slept [in class] all the time, Morton told me. She told us that as long as we stayed quiet, we could stay in her classroom.

Its important to keep in mind that racial segregation in Virginia schools was an explicit goal of the Byrd organization, the conservative political machine which at the time ran Virginia.

In that sense it was a mainstream policy, rather than a crackpot theory enacted by political extremists. Virginia newspapers such as The Richmond News Leader and The Farmville Herald gave full-throated support.

The result affected thousands of children besides Morton and her siblings, including more than 3,000 children in Norfolk schools alone.

Morton graduated from Robert Russa Moton High School in 1973. Her twin brother, whod entered elementary school with her, ended up dropping out after the ninth grade, she said. He made a career in auto mechanics.

Morton got married two years after she earned a high school diploma, to Lyle Morton, who went on to become a Methodist clergyman. As they moved around the country for his education and career, the couple bore and raised two sons.

Eventually, the family returned to Virginia, where Lyle Morton pastored a congregation in Radford.

They came to Roanoke in 2016, when he became pastor of St. Pauls United Methodist Church and West End United Methodist. In 2017, he wife began pursuing a college degree at Virginia Western.

She learned she qualified for the Brown v. Board of Education Scholarship the following year. It has paid $7,238 toward her degree.

That wasnt her first effort at college, however. Years earlier, in the late 1980s, before the scholarships existed, Morton had enrolled in another community college. There, she encountered an English professor who flatly told Morton she was too ignorant for higher education.

It wasnt the first time Morton had heard something like that. Earlier, shed lost a 411 telephone operators job because she couldnt pronounce pronouns and names. Thats because she missed educational basics  such as reading and writing  in the first three years of school she couldnt attend.

The professor at the first community college delivered the message in a way that scarred Morton. He gave her an F for her first essay in the course, which she wrote about the serenity and beauty of nature she observed in her back yard.

He said, Where in the world did you learn how to write? I have never ever seen someone with a high school diploma so dumb, Morton said.

He also told her he wanted her out of the class. And although she stayed in it and tried, he gave her Fs on every subsequent paper, too. That crushing experience pushed her out of college for the next two decades.

Her studies at Virginia Western went very differently, Morton said. She applied for the Brown v. Board of Education Scholarship the year after she began at VWCC. Although shes the programs 88th scholarship student, shes the only one whos used the benefit at Virginia Western.

Statewide, the scholarship program has paid out $1.3 million for tuition, books and fees for Virginia students denied public education during massive resistance. Though most recipients are Black, white students whose educations were affected qualify for the scholarships as well.

Lily Jones, director of Virginias Division of Legislative Services, which oversees the program, said there are only two other Brown v. Board of Education Scholarship recipients in the program. As potential recipients slowly die off, the program has just under $1 million left to fund higher education. Its unclear at this time what will happen to the remaining funds.

At Virginia Western, Morton said she found teachers willing to take extra time with her, and seemed glad to help with tutoring. She was still attending VWCC when the school shut down in-person classes at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. That forced her to take her courses online.

After her husband took another pastoring job in Northern Virginia, Morton stuck with her online studies at VWCC, even though their new home was hours away. She took her last exam Monday. By the time we talked Tuesday, she was still a bit apprehensive about the outcome.

Which brings us to Friday, when roughly 40 relatives and friends will join Morton at Virginia Western Community Colleges commencement, to celebrate her achievement.

She and I spent about 90 minutes on the phone; somehow, Mortons going to have to boil everything she told me down to a 15-minute speech. When we spoke, Morton sounded unsure how she was going to pull that off. She figured shed have to leave a lot out.

There are a couple important messages she wants to get across. One is about the downstream effects of denying education to would-be pupils at such an early age. Thats affected Mortons entire adult life.

The school closings she experienced because of massive resistance affected the jobs shes been able to hold since she earned a high school diploma. It also left her feeling ill-equipped to help with her own sons education.

The school closings have a ripple effect, Morton told me. It doesnt just hurt one person or group.

Instead, the damage persists, decades into the future, in less obvious ways. And thats why we need to acknowledge it, even more than 70 years later  at a time when some people seem to want to stamp out any notion that racism in public education is even possible.

Vera Morton is a living and breathing example.

Bravo, for her achievement.

Contact metro columnist Dan Casey at 981-3423 or dan.casey@roanoke.com . Follow him on Twitter:.

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One person was taken into custody Thursday afternoon after driving recklessly on Interstate 81 and evading officers, Virginia State Police said.

Police said after receiving a call about a reckless driver, they found the suspect vehicle on the southbound side of the interstate at mile marker 170.

A subsequent pursuit concluded when police stopped the evading vehicle with stop sticks at the interstate truck weigh station near Troutville.

Police said the subject was arrested and transported to Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital for injuries received during the arrest.

The Virginia Department of Transportation reported through 511 Southwest VA on Twitter that there was a special activity incident at about 1:15 p.m. near mile marker 150 in Botetourt County. All northbound travel lanes were closed.

The closure caused traffic delays as long as 6 miles. Both lanes of traffic have since reopened.

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Edward Hewitt Bensons long journey home will be finished Saturday when the World World II private first class who died 77 years ago and half a world away is buried in Roanoke.

Benson was 22 years old when he was killed in March 1945 on an Indonesian island U.S. Army Air Force base during a Japanese air raid.

His body was among those that could not be accounted for, until the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced in March that Bensons remains had been positively identified.

Know as Pete, Benson left a widow and young son, Jim, in Roanoke when he enlisted in 1942.

Jim Benson, now 79 and a retired Marine colonel, waged a decades-long, campaign that led him through dense military bureaucracy to solve the mystery of his fathers death.

The family has planned several commemorative events this weekend. A visitation will be held from 4 to 7 p.m. Friday at Oakeys downtown chapel. A military funeral service will be conducted at 11 a.m. Saturday at the same location.

Burial will be immediately following in the familys plot at Evergreen Cemetery in Roanoke. A private gathering for friends and relatives will conclude the memorial events.
SKOPJE, North Macedonia (AP)  The European Union wants to start formal membership talks with North Macedonia by early this summer and renew efforts to address objections from Bulgaria that have held up the process, a top EU official said Wednesday.

Oliver Varhelyi, the EU s enlargement commissioner, said during a visit to North Macedonia that the bloc is eager to break the two-year deadlock. Hastening the process of admitting new members has taken on more urgency for the EU following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. North Macedonia is part of Europe! No time to waste to speed up the procedures! Varhelyi tweeted after a meeting with Prime Minister Dimitar Kovachevski. Bulgaria, which joined the EU in 2007, argues that North Macedonia has failed to honor parts of a 2017 friendship deal between the neighboring countries.

Bulgaria wants North Macedonia to recognize an ethnic Bulgarian minority in its constitution but disputes that a Macedonian minority exists in Bulgaria.

North Macedonias foreign minister, Bujar Osmani, said his country had shown an exceptional level of commitment toward accession. It's time for the European Union to lend a hand to the countries of the Western Balkans and to clearly demonstrate that the future of the region is European, Osmani said. The region is increasingly tired of waiting, which hurts the credibility of the European Union.

EU leaders gave North Macedonia and Albania the green light in 2020 to begin accession talks, although no date was set for the start of negotiations. The dispute with Bulgaria has delayed Albanias bid.

The prospect of EU membership has long been seen as an incentive driving democratic, political and economic reforms in the volatile Balkans.

Six Western Balkan countries  Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia  are at different stages in their quest to join the EU.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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China welcomes the upcoming visit of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet to China in May, said a spokesperson for China's foreign ministry on Wednesday.

Bachelet's trip to China will take her to the country's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The preparatory team of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has arrived in China and is currently undergoing quarantine in accordance with relevant anti-COVID-19 protocols, spokesperson Zhao Lijian told a daily press briefing.

"The preparatory team has begun work and the two sides are discussing the specific arrangements for the visit," he said.
ABINGDON  New Virginia Secretary of Transportation Sheppard Miller III and other state transportation officials toured the Corridor Q highway worksite between the Kentucky border and Grundy Wednesday, prior to the Commonwealth Transportation Boards public listening session.

That visit prepared them for what followed as about 20 elected officials and residents from that part of the region pleaded their case for funding for the Coalfields Expressway  the proposed $4 billion four-lane road that would extend from U.S. 23 in Wise County, across Dickenson and Buchanan County and on to the West Virginia state line. A portion of Corridor Q in Buchanan County overlays the Coalfields Expressway.

At present the states proposed $51 billion, six-year transportation plan for 2023-2028 only includes $171.3 million which would fund construction of 2.07 miles from Poplar Creek to connect to existing U.S. Route 460 at Grundy  which is the final phase of Corridor Q.

Asked where any potential CFX funding might come from, Miller said, We have more money than weve had in a while, after the two-hour meeting.

Virginia has been starved for transportation money but I think there are better years ahead. Well do our best to take care of everybody. Its a big state with a lot of needs. There are a lot of needs here.

In his remarks to open the meeting, Miller noted the state has access to federal infrastructure dollars and other monies that could be applied to transportation projects.

The project had many supporters in the room including state Del. Will Morefield, R-Tazewell, who said it was initially discussed while he was in elementary school.

Many of our localities in the coalfields have lost half, if not more, of their population, Morefield said. The Coalfields Expressway is extremely important to economic development in the areaIm confident we can finish this if we have an administration  and Im confident Gov. Youngkin and his administration and you and your team are willing to do whatever it takes to continue this process and expedite the construction of this expressway. It is absolutely imperative.

One woman, who spoke with the secretary after the meeting, reminded him that Gov. Youngkin last fall carried the counties where the route would be built, by overwhelming margins.

Jay Rife of Grundy, a member of the Buchanan County Industrial Development Authority said the whole region would benefit.

I know it will help Buchanan, Dickenson and Wise where the road is going. But it will also open up Scott County and Lee County and I believe it will alleviate traffic problems on I-81 because well have a lot of truck traffic go up into Beckley [West Virginia] and then down the Coalfields Expressway, Rife said.

Peggy Kiser, chair of the Dickenson County Board of Supervisors, showed the board a 1999 edition of the Bristol Herald Courier which pictured her daughter  then a high school senior  appearing before the Commonwealth Transportation Board 23 years ago urging them to fund this project.

We are here today pleading for the same thing, Kiser said. In 23 years we still need new industry to come to our region. The Coalfields Expressway has been in the works for 28 years and is a long way from completionI ask that you please look for more funding and let construction begin so that it will be finished  if not in our future  at least in the future of our children and grandchildren.

Jonathan Belcher, executive director of the Coalfields Expressway Authority and Virginia Coalfield Economic Development Authority, said highway access is crucial to any kind of future development.

In bringing prospects to the region, there is a reason why manufacturing and other companies locate in Washington County or Tazewell County or Scott County. That is because the transportation infrastructure is thereFrom an economic development standpoint, the Coalfields Expressway is very important.

Belcher noted the General Assembly created the Coalfields Expressway Authority in 2017 but never provided any funding for it to operate.

Because of the length of time its gone on and the price tag of the road, I think a lot of people may be disillusioned because it is a multi-billion dollar project it will never happen. I know thats not the case because West Virginia is making it happen right now, Belcher said, adding West Virginias governor has called for its portion of the road to be completed within the next 10 years.

A number of speakers urged the board to work with the Appalachian Regional Commission to try and link the remainder of the expressway to Corridor Q, to try and leverage additional federal funding.
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Raimondo: Inquiry on solar imports follows the law

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo pushed back forcefully Wednesday against critics  including some within the Biden administration  who say a government investigation of solar imports from Southeast Asia is hindering President Joe Bidens ambitious climate goals
Authorities say parents have been arrested in the death of a 15-month-old toddler after the child was found unresponsive in their home where police found fentanyl
U.S. coronavirus cases are up, leading a smattering of school districts, especially in the Northeast, to bring back mask recommendations and requirements
LAKE CITY, S.C.  The city will partner with Lake City High School to provide internships to students at the citys wastewater treatment facility.

The City Council unanimously passed a resolution Wednesday evening to provide internships to qualified students. The students will work over an eight-week period and will be selected by the school. Students will get paid $10 an hour and will work 30 hours a week.

According to City Administrator William Hall, the city wants to provide students the opportunity to learn the ins and outs of a wastewater treatment facility and to possibly introduce students to a future career path. Two students will be eligible per cycle and they must be between the ages of 16-18.

Community members rallied together at the meeting to call on the board to create efforts to decrease violence and to stop showing favoritism to certain parts of the city.

One resident said one side of Lake City was thriving while the other side was deteriorating.

School board member Mattie Thomas said she would march around City Hall until she was heard. She said solving the problem of violence starts with children. She added that the city playing favorites is adding to the rise in crime.

Somebody has got to hear me, Thomas said. These kids are important and they are not to be played with. We need people that are going to care about these kids. Thomas gave an example. You cant say this is Mattie Thomass grandson and treat him better than the others and drop the charges,  Thomas said. Then two weeks later Mattie Thomas grandson kills someone. This is what is happening.

In other action, the council:

Passed an ordinance to have the first reading of the municipal budget for the fiscal year 2022-23.

Passed an ordinance to purchase property at 420 James St. The property will be used to build two affordable homes for the community.

Passed an ordinance authorizing the purchase of property at 106 Lake St. This property will be purchased to start enforcing semi-truck parking in the community and giving community members who have semi-trucks a place to park. The fee for parking a semi-truck is $25 a month.

Passed a resolution to accept grant funds from the 2022 South Carolina volunteer strategic assistance and fire equipment grant. This was a grant that Fire Chief Randy Driggers and staff applied for to assist in buying $30,000 worth of five new radios. The city will be responsible for $1,065.65.

Passed a resolution for the acceptance of money from the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism development fund. This is a grant that was awarded to Lake City in the amount of $19,242.69. The grant will be added to the amount the council approved in capital expenditures for playground equipment and picnic shelters.

The next meeting will be held June 14.

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FLORENCE, S.C.  McLeod Regional Medical Center announced its 2022 Nurses of the Year at a ceremony held Thursday on the hospital grounds.

Winners Mary Amanda Shumpert, NP; Meredith Grier, RN; and Chaquita Pittman, Medical Surgical, were recognized during a special ceremony and McLeod celebration in conjunction with National Nurses Week.

Being selected as a Nurse of the Year is a very honorable recognition, said Tony Derrick, chief nursing officer for McLeod Regional Medical Center. We appreciate our nurses every day, but Nurses Week is a time we honor our nurses for providing quality care to our patients. The Mission of McLeod Health is to improve the overall health and well-being of the people living within South Carolina and eastern North Carolina by providing excellence in health care, and our nurses are an instrumental part of that goal.

Mary Amanda Shumpert, NP, Advanced Practice Nurse of the Year, is a nurse practitioner with McLeod OB/GYN Associates.

Mary Amanda understands and demonstrates that her care is not just for the patient, but for the entire family, says Georgia Beasley, nursing director for postpartum/gynecology. She goes above and beyond to take care of the whole person. She demonstrates genuine respect for the dignity of all patients and families through privacy, comfort and courtesy. Mary Amanda is an early adapter to evidence-based principles in care and champions these changes for the betterment of patient care. I would personally want Mary Amanda caring for me or my family member.

Shumpert said the award shows her that she works with people who appreciate her, and she is doing a good job. She has been a nurse practitioner for about 16 month.

I like taking care of moms and babies during this happiest time of their lives, she said.

She enjoys forming a bond with them during the happy and sometimes sad times, she said.

Meredith Grier, RN, Registered Nurse of the Year, works in the McLeod Cardiac Catherization Lab.

Meredith is compassionate, eager, patient-driven and hungry for knowledge, says Ashley Gaskin, nursing director for the Cardiac Catherization/Electrophysiology Lab. She is humorous and compassionate with patients, lending a comforting ear during a patients worst times. She cultivates relationships within her team and with her patients. Striving to provide high quality, excellent care, she has challenged herself and her entire team to obtain specialty certifications, setting an example for McLeod Regional Medical Center. She genuinely loves what she does, and it shows through her enthusiasm for her profession.

I was very surprised, Grier said. I am thankful. I try to make patients as comfortable as possible.

Grier said she couldnt have achieved this honor on her own.

We are a team; we couldnt do it without each other, she said.

When the remarks were being read about the individual who was receiving the award without mentioning the name, Grier said she felt like she could relate to it 100 percent but didnt know they were talking about her.

Grier said she wants to touch peoples lives and be a sparkle in what might be a really dark place for someone.

I try to treat everyone the way I would want to be treated and hope it spreads, Grier said. Our patients deserve that. They are what we are here for.

Grier said she first wanted to be a lawyer but her mother was a nurse. She felt led to the profession. She said she gets up every morning thanking God for giving her another day.

When I am exhausted I try to think to myself that it can always be worse, she said. I feel like God wanted me here. It was his plan. I wouldnt want to work anywhere else.

Chaquita Pittman, Nursing Technician of the Year, is a medical surgical technician (MST) in the Emergency Department.

Chaquita is a role model for excellence in that she acknowledges and respects the diversity of patients, families and other members of the health care team, says Diane Osterman, nursing director for the Emergency Department. Her unique abilities, passion and professionalism set her apart and earned her the respect of her co-workers. She promotes the success of others in her department by serving as a mentor and preceptor for new employees. Chaquita is willing to do whatever it takes to ensure an excellent patient experience.

She said the award means to her that she is doing something right and the staff believes in her.

This is my third consecutive year of being recognized by my department, she said, but my first time receiving the award (Nursing Technician of the Year). I was very surprised.

A McLeod nurse does not do what they do for the recognition; they do it for the patients, said Derrick. Every day, I am in awe of what our Nurses can accomplish. Our outcomes prove what excellent care our patients receive. As the chief nursing officer, I am so impressed with their quality work and daily dedication. I believe we have some of the best nurses in the world here at McLeod.

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 "Race-Norming and Statistical Discrimination: Beyond the NFL" | Main | Spotlighting ever longer stays on death row before executions 

May 12, 2022

New Sentencing Project fact sheet highlights rise (and recent declines) in the incarceration of women and girls

The folks at The Sentencing Project have assembled some fascinating data on the number of incarcerated women at this site and in this fact sheet. Here is part of their description of the fact sheet:

Between 1980 and 2020, the number of incarcerated women increased by more than 475%, rising from a total of 26,326 in 1980 to 152,854 in 2020. The total count in 2020 represents a 30% reduction from the prior year  a substantial but insufficient downsizing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which some states began to reverse in 2021. Research on female incarceration is critical to understanding the full consequences of mass incarceration and to unraveling the policies and practices that lead to their criminalization. The number of incarcerated women was nearly five times higher in 2020 than in 1980. Incarcerated Women and Girls examines female incarceration trends and finds areas of both concern and hope. While the imprisonment rate for African American women was nearly twice that of white women in 2020, this disparity represents a sharp decline from 2000 when Black women were six times as likely to be imprisoned. Since then Black womens imprisonment rate has decreased by 68% while white womens rate has increased by 12%. Similar to adults, girls of color are more likely to be incarcerated than white girls. Tribal girls are more than four times as likely, and African American girls are more than three times as likely as white girls to be incarcerated.

All the data in the fact sheet are fascinating, and these particular data points really caught my attention:

The rate of imprisonment for Black and Latinx women has declined since 2000, while the rate of imprisonment for white women has increased.

Between 2000 and 2020, the rate of imprisonment in state and federal prisons declined by 68% for Black women, while the rate of imprisonment for white women rose by 12%....

Women in state prisons are more likely than men to be incarcerated for a drug or property offense. Twenty-six percent of women in prison have been convicted of a drug offense, compared to 13% of men in prison; 23% of incarcerated women have been convicted of a property crime, compared to 15% among incarcerated men.

The proportion of imprisoned women convicted of a drug offense has increased from 12% in 1986 to 26% in 2019.

May 12, 2022 at 03:58 PM | Permalink

Comments

This is a good news, especially the narrowing racial disparities. I think the female inmate population will drop once states pass laws that decriminalize drugs or reduce the sentences for drug offenses. The same goes for property crimes.

Posted by: anon | May 12, 2022 8:33:12 PM

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Russia has faced strong resistance in its special military operation (EPA)

Russian president Vladimir Putin has begun moving troops from Syria to Ukraine to help in the Battle for Donbas, reports have claimed.

Military forces are being moved from Syria where the Kremlin had thousands of troops based since 2015 when Vladimir Putin ordered his fighters to support president Bashar al-Assad.

The Moscow Times reported that these troops are being stationed at three airports in Ukraine before being transferred to the frontline to increase Russias presence as fighting in the southeast increases.

More than 63,000 Russian military personnel have deployed to Syria between 2015 and 2018, Moscow says, however it is unclear how many officers are currently stationed there. According to western intelligence Russian forces have become frustrated with the resilience of Ukraines troops which had drawn out the special military operation and has caused the Kremlin to change its plans from seizing Kyiv to gaining control of the Donbas.

Russias abandoned air bases in Syria are being transferred to the Iranian military-political organisation, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the militant group Hezbollah, according to sources.

Russia has faced unexpected resilience from Ukraines military (Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

The news comes as Ukraine has launched a series of counter-attacks in Kharkiv pushing Russian troops northward and Finland has made its intentions clear to apply for Nato membership.

Russia said that Finlands move to join Nato will make Europe less stable and Moscow would be forced to take retaliatory steps. The Kremlins foreign ministry said Helsinkis application, announced earlier in the day, is a radical change in the countrys foreign policy.

Russia will be forced to take retaliatory steps, both of a military-technical and other nature, in order to stop threats to its national security arising, the foreign ministry said. Meanwhile, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Finlands Nato bid was a cause for regret.

He added that Finland had taken unfriendly steps against Russia. On possible responses, Mr Peskov added: Everything will depend on how this expansion process of Nato expansion plays out, the extent to which military infrastructure moves closer to our borders.
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Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday sent a congratulatory message to Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos on his election as president of the Republic of the Philippines.

China and the Philippines are neighbors facing each other across the sea and partners through thick and thin, Xi said.

In recent years, with the joint efforts of both sides, the bilateral relations have been consolidated and enhanced, bringing benefits to the people of both countries and contributing to regional peace and stability, Xi added.

Xi stressed that both China and the Philippines are at a critical stage of development and their relations face important opportunities and enjoy broad prospects.

Noting that he attaches great importance to the development of the bilateral ties, Xi said he is ready to establish a good working relationship with Marcos to uphold good-neighborliness and joint development, and further advance the bilateral comprehensive strategic cooperative relationship to benefit the two countries and their people.

On the same day, Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan also sent a message to Sara Zimmerman Duterte-Carpio to congratulate her on her election as vice president of the Philippines.
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KYIV, Ukraine (AP)  Finlands leaders Thursday came out in favor of applying to join NATO, and Sweden could do the same within days, in a historic realignment on the continent 2 1/2 months after Russian President Vladimir Putins invasion of Ukraine sent a shiver of fear through Moscows neighbors.

The Kremlin reacted by warning it will be forced to take retaliatory military-technical steps.

On the ground, meanwhile, Russian forces pounded areas in central, northern and eastern Ukraine, including the last pocket of resistance in Mariupol, as part its offensive to take the industrial Donbas region, while Ukraine recaptured some towns and villages in the northeast.

The first war-crimes trial of a Russian soldier since the start of the conflict is set to open Friday in Kyiv. A 21-year-old captured member of a tank unit is accused of shooting to death a civilian on a bicycle during the opening week of the war.

Finlands president and prime minister announced that the Nordic country should apply right away for membership in NATO, the military defense pact founded in part to counter the Soviet Union.

You (Russia) caused this. Look in the mirror, Finnish President Sauli Niinisto said this week.

While the country's Parliament still has to weigh in, the announcement means Finland is all but certain to apply  and gain admission  though the process could take months to complete. Sweden, likewise, is considering putting itself under NATO's protection.

That would represent a major change in Europe's security landscape: Sweden has avoided military alliances for more than 200 years, while Finland adopted neutrality after its defeat by the Soviets in World War II.

Public opinion in both nations shifted dramatically in favor of NATO membership after the invasion, which stirred fears in countries along Russia's flank that they could be next.

Such an expansion of the alliance would leave Russia surrounded by NATO countries in the Baltic Sea and the Arctic and would amount to a stinging setback for Putin, who had hoped to divide and roll back NATO in Europe but is instead seeing the opposite happen.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said the alliance would welcome Finland and Sweden with open arms.

Russia's Foreign Ministry warned that Moscow "will be forced to take retaliatory steps of military-technical and other characteristics in order to counter the emerging threats to its national security.

NATO's funneling of weapons and other military support to Ukraine already has been critical to Kyiv's surprising success in stymieing the invasion, and the Kremlin warned anew in chilling terms Thursday that the aid could lead to direct conflict between NATO and Russia.

There is always a risk of such conflict turning into a full-scale nuclear war, a scenario that will be catastrophic for all," said Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Russias Security Council.

While Russia's advance in the Donbas has been slow, its forces have gained some ground and taken some villages.

Four civilians were killed Thursday in three communities in the Donetsk region, which is part of the Donbas, the regional governor reported.

Britains Defense Ministry said Russias focus on the Donbas has left its remaining troops around the northeastern city of Kharkiv vulnerable to counterattack from Ukrainian forces, which recaptured several towns and villages around the city.

Russian strikes Thursday killed at least two civilians on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraines second-largest city, local authorities said.

The attacks also damaged a building housing a humanitarian aid unit, municipal offices and hospital facilities, Vyacheslav Zadorenko, the mayor of the suburban town of Derhachi, wrote in a Telegram post.

None of the sites "had anything to do with military infrastructure, Zadorenko said.

Fighting across the east has driven many thousands of Ukrainians from their homes.

It is terrible there now. We were leaving under missiles, said Tatiana Kravstova, who left the town of Siversk with her 8-year-old son Artiom on a bus headed for the central city of Dnipro. I dont know where they were aiming, but they were pointing at civilians.

Ukraine also said Russian forces had fired artillery and grenade launchers at Ukrainian troops around Zaporizhzhia, which has been a refuge for civilians fleeing Mariupol, and attacked in the Chernihiv and Sumy regions to the north.

Overnight airstrikes near Chernihiv, in northern Ukraine, killed at least three people, Ukraine's military said. It said that Russian troops fired rockets at a school and student dormitory in Novhorod-Siversky and that some other buildings, including private homes, were also damaged.

In his evening address to the nation, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the assaults.

Of course, the Russian state is in such a state that any education only gets in its way," he said. "But what can be achieved by destroying Ukrainian schools? All Russian commanders who give such orders are simply sick and incurable.

Noting that Thursday is International Nurses Day, Zelenskyy said the Russian military had damaged 570 medical facilities since the invasion began on Feb. 24 and fully destroyed 101 hospitals.

Twelve Russian missiles struck an oil refinery and other infrastructure in the central Ukrainian industrial hub of Kremenchuk on Thursday, the region's acting governor, Dmytro Lunin, wrote in a Telegram post. In early April, he said, the refinery, which had been the last fully functional one in Ukraine at the time, was knocked offline by an attack.

In the southern port of Mariupol, which has largely been reduced to smoking rubble with little food, water or medicine, or what the mayor called a medieval ghetto, Ukrainian fighters continued to hold out at the Azovstal steel plant, the last stronghold of resistance in the city.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said negotiations were underway with Russia to win the release of 38 severely wounded Ukrainian defenders from the plant. She said Ukraine hoped to exchange them for 38 significant Russian prisoners of war.

Yesica Fisch in Bakhmut, David Keyton in Kyiv, Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Mstyslav Chernov in Kharkiv, Jari Tanner in Helsinki, and other AP staffers around the world contributed.

Follow APs coverage of the war in Ukraine: 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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WASHINGTON (AP)  President Joe Biden stepped up his administration's response to a nationwide baby formula shortage Thursday that has forced frenzied parents into online groups to swap and sell to each other to keep their babies fed.

The president discussed with executives from Gerber and Reckitt how they could increase production and how his administration could help, and talked with leaders from Walmart and Target about how to restock shelves and address regional disparities in access to formula, the White House said.

The administration plans to monitor possible price gouging and work with trading partners in Mexico, Chile, Ireland and the Netherlands on imports, even though 98% of baby formula is domestically made.

The problem is the result of supply chain disruptions and a safety recall, and has had a cascade of effects: Retailers are limiting what customers can buy, and doctors and health workers are urging parents to contact food banks or physicians' offices, in addition to warning against watering down formula to stretch supplies or using online DIY recipes.

The shortage is weighing particularly on lower-income families after the recall by formula maker Abbott, stemming from contamination concerns. The recall wiped out many brands covered by WIC, a federal program like food stamps that serves women, infants and children, though the program now permits brand substitutes. The Biden administration is working with states to make it easier for WIC recipients to buy different sizes of formula that their benefits might not currently cover.

About half of infant formula nationwide is purchased by participants using WIC benefits, according to the White House.

Clara Hinton, 30, of Hartford, Connecticut, is among that group. She has a 10-month-old daughter, Patiennce, who has an allergy that requires a special formula.

Hinton, who has no car, has been taking the bus to the suburbs, going from town to town, and finally found some of the proper formula at a box store in West Hartford. But she said the store refused to take her WIC card, not the first time that has happened.

Hinton said her baby recently ran out of formula from an already opened can she got from a friend.

She has no formula, she said. I just put her on regular milk. What do I do? Her pediatrician made it clear Im not supposed to be doing that, but what do I do?

In Utah, fellow WIC card holder Elizabeth Amador has been going store-to-store every day after she finishes work at a call center in Salt Lake City in desperate search of one particular formula her 9-month-old daughter needs. She recently was down to only one can, but had four cans on Thursday. She said she wont stop her cumbersome daily routine until she knows the shortage is over.

It sucks, you know because of high gas prices, Amador said. Were having to drive everywhere to find formula. Its stressing.

Some parents are also using social media to bridge supply gaps.

Ashley Maddox, a 31-year-old mother of two from San Diego, started a Facebook group on Wednesday after failing to find formula for her 5-month-old son, Cole, at the commissary on the Navy base.

I connected with a gal in my group and she had seven cans of the formula I need that were just sitting in her house that her baby didnt need anymore, she said. So I drove out, it was about a 20-minute drive and picked it up and paid her. It was a miracle.

She said there was already a stigma attached to being a non-breastfeeding mom and that the group has become supportive. To not be able to have that formula, its scary, she said.

Jennifer Kersey, 36 of Cheshire, Connecticut, said she was down to her last can of formula for her 7-month-old son, Blake Kersey Jr., before someone saw her post on a Facebook group and came by with a few sample cans. She said she and others in the group are helping each other, finding stores that might have the formula in stock and getting it to mothers who need it.

At first I was starting to panic, she said. But, Im a believer in the Lord, so I said, God, I know youre going to provide for me' and I just started reaching out to people, Hey do you have this formula?"

Kimberly Anderson, 34, of Hartford County, Maryland, said her 7 1/2-month-old son takes a prescription formula that has been nearly impossible to find locally. She turned to social media and said people in Utah and Boston found the formula, which she paid to have shipped.

They say it takes a village to raise a baby," she said. Little did I know my village spans the entire U.S. as I ping friends, family for their zip codes so I can check their local Walmarts to have them ship directly to me."

Shortages of basic goods have been a problem since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Access to medical supplies, computer chips, household appliances, cars and other goods has been hurt by closed factories and outbreaks of the virus, as well as storms and other climate-related events.

Parents desperately searching for infant formula on retailer websites such as Amazon and Google are being served up with products intended for toddlers, including powdered toddler goat milk and plant-based milk powders.

One banner ad across Amazon offers organic non GMO formula for babies & toddlers, but a closer inspection of the products image shows that it is only intended for children over 12 months. Other ads for toddler milk appear on Amazons website on pages for out-of-stock infant formula.

Toddler milk cans often closely resemble that of infant formula, but the ingredients are distinct, with toddler milks sometimes boasting more sugar, calories, said Frances Fleming-Milici, UConns Director of Marketing Initiatives at the Rudd Center who has study toddler milk packaging. Toddler milk also does not follow FDA standards for formula.

Its not like youre buying a pair of shoes. This is a little bit more serious, Fleming-Milici said. Its serving up something that you should not be giving to your child.

Dr. Navneet Hundal, a pediatric gastroenterologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said she and other pediatricians have been grappling with the formula shortage for months. Formula companies have stopped giving out samples that she could pass on to parents, she said. She advises new parents to talk to their pediatricians to see if there are other brands of formula that they can safely give their newborns.

This is ruling our clinical practices right now, she said.

A safety recall compounded the challenges.

The FDA launched its investigation after four babies became sick with a rare bacterial infection after consuming formula manufactured at the plant. All four were hospitalized and two died. Chicago-based Abbott said in a statement, there is no evidence to link our formulas to these infant illnesses. Samples of the bacteria collected from the infants did not match those found in the companys factory, Abbott noted.

Abbott said that pending FDA approval, we could restart the site within two weeks. The company would begin by first producing EleCare, Alimentum and metabolic formulas and then start production of Similac and other formulas. Once production began, it would take six to eight weeks for the baby formula to be available on shelves.

We recognize that this is certainly a challenge for people across the country, something the president is very focused on and were going to do everything we can to cut red tape and take steps to increase supply, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters.

Meanwhile, the shortage got politicized Thursday as Republicans including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott criticized the Biden administration for providing baby formula to babies in detention at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Biden, in a Thursday letter to the Federal Trade Commission, pressed the independent agency to bring all of the Commissions tools to bear to investigate and act in response to reports of fraud or price gouging as a result of the supply disruptions.

It is unacceptable for families to lose time and spend hundreds of dollars more because of price gougers actions, he wrote to FTC Chair Lina Khan.

Eaton-Robb reported from Columbia, Connecticut. Associated Press writers Mike Catalini in Trenton, New Jersey, Steve LeBlanc in Boston, Brady McCombs in Salt Lake City and Amanda Seitz in Washington contributed to this report.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP)  Google on Wednesday took a big step toward pushing its Pixel product line-up down a road already paved by Apple and its array of trendsetting devices.

The latest additions to its six-year-old Pixel brand will include Googles first smartwatch that draws upon the features and expertise it has gained from last years $2.1 billion acquisition of fitness gadget maker Fitbit.

The new watch, targeted for an autumn release, marks Googles first major attempt to make its mark in wearable technology, a market that has been growing steadily since Apple introduced its smartwatch in 2014. Until now, Googles presence in the smartwatch market had been limited to making a version of its mobile Android operating system for watches made by other companies.

Google also used its annual I/O developers conference to tease a Pixel tablet that it is scheduled for release next year to compete against Apples market-leading iPad.

Besides showcasing its upcoming devices, Google also previewed the next version of its Android operating system, which runs most of the worlds smartphones outside Apples iPhone. It also highlighted several advances in the field of artificial intelligence.

Googles emphasis on new devices signals that a company best known for its dominant search engine and other popular internet software is confident it now has a better handle on how to design and manufacture hardware. It released its first Pixel smartphone in 2016.

It takes a long time to build the capabilities, and now you are seeing very visibly that technology be expressed through many different products, Rick Osterloh, the executive in charge of Googles device division, told reporters earlier this week. It was like an iceberg in that you didnt see a lot what was happening underneath, but now you can really see all these things coming to the surface.

Because it already brings more than $200 billion annually in digital ad sales, Google can afford to branch out into different directions and find new ways to connect with people, said Gartner analyst Tuong Nguyen.

Adding more products to the Pixel line-up gives them another touch point to learn and experience things with people more directly, Nguyen said. Now, they not only be in your pocket, but now they can be on your wrist, and in your ears, too.

Before launching its smartwatch, Google will be fleshing out its selection of Pixel phones with a new budget model called the 6a coming out in late July, along with its first set of wireless ear buds to include noise cancellation.

The Pixel 6a will include Googles top-of-the line processor but sell for $449 -- a 25% discount from the slightly more sophisticated Pixel 6 released last fall. The Pixel Buds Pro will sell for $199. Both products are scheduled for a July 28 release.

Because it already brings more than $200 billion annually in digital ad sales, Google can afford to branch out into different directions and find new ways to connect with people, said Gartner analyst Tuong Nguyen.

Adding more products to the Pixel line-up gives them another touch point to learn and experience things with people more directly, Nguyen said. They not only be in your pocket, but now they can be on your wrist, and in your ears, too.

The watch will be the first product to test a privacy pledge that Google made to gain regulatory approval for its Fitbit takeover 16 months ago. As part of the deal, Google promised not to collect the health and fitness information accumulated through Fitbit features to sell digital ads that generate most of its revenue  a commitment that the company said it will honor with the new Pixel Watch.

Although they still arent anywhere as popular as phones, smartwatches continued to make significant inroads with projected worldwide shipments of 31.3 million units this year, up from 18.5 million in 2019 before the pandemic helped stoke even more demand for internet-connected gadgets.

Even after pouring billions of dollars into a hardware division that now employs thousands of people, Google hasnt made major inroads.

Despite occasional glowing reviews, Pixel smartphones have less than a 1% share of the global market for the devices, according to the research firm International Data Corp. All told, IDC estimates that fewer than 30 million Pixel smartphones have been sold since the release of the first model nearly six years ago. By contrast, Apple shipped more than 56 million iPhones during the first three months of this year alone, according to IDC.

But IDC analyst Nabila Popal said there are signs that the Pixel smartphone line is starting to gain more traction. She believes the Pixel 6 would have sold even better than it already has were it not for chip shortages that have hurt a variety of products, increasing the chances that the lower priced 6a model will be very well received.

For its part, Google says the Pixel 6 already has outsold the Pixel 4 and Pixel 5 combined during its first six months on the market.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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LIMA, Peru (AP)  About 10 million people speak Quechua, but trying to automatically translate emails and text messages into the most widely spoken Indigenous language family in the Americas was long all but impossible.

That changed on Wednesday, when Google added Quechua and a variety of other languages to its digital translation service.

The internet giant says new artificial intelligence technology is enabling it to vastly expand Google Translates repertoire of the worlds languages. It added 24 of them this week, including Quechua and other Indigenous South American languages such as Guarani and Aymara. It is also adding a number of widely spoken African and South Asian languages that have been missing from popular tech products.

We looked at languages with very large, underserved populations," Google research scientist Isaac Caswell told reporters.

The news from the California companys annual I/O technology showcase may be celebrated in many corners of the world. But it will also likely draw criticism from those frustrated by previous tech products that failed to understand the nuances of their language or culture.

Quechua was the lingua franca of the Inca Empire, which stretched from what is now southern Colombia to central Chile. Its status began to decline following the Spanish conquest of Peru more than 400 years ago.

Adding it to the languages recognized by Google is a big victory for Quechua language activists like Luis Illaccanqui, a Peruvian who created the website Qichwa 2.0, which includes dictionaries and resources for learning the language.

It will help put Quechua and Spanish on the same status, said Illaccanqui, who was not involved in Google's project.

Illaccanqui, whose last name in Quechua means you are the lightning bolt, said the translator will also help keep the language alive with a new generation of young people and teenagers, who speak Quechua and Spanish at the same time and are fascinated by social networks.

Caswell called the news a very big technological step forward" because until recently, it was not possible to add languages if researchers couldn't find a big enough trove of online text  such as digital books, newspapers or social media posts  for their AI systems to learn from.

U.S. tech giants dont have a great track record of making their language technology work well outside the wealthiest markets, a problem thats also made it harder for them to detect dangerous misinformation on their platforms. Until this week, Google Translate was offered in European languages like Frisian, Maltese, Icelandic and Corsican  each with fewer than 1 million speakers  but not East African languages like Oromo and Tigrinya, which have millions of speakers.

The new languages will roll out this week. They won't yet be understood by Google's voice assistant, which limits them to text-to-text translations for now. Google said it is working on adding speech recognition and other capabilities, such as being able to translate a sign by pointing a camera at it.

That will be important for largely spoken languages like Quechua, especially in the health field, because many Peruvian doctors and nurses who only speak Spanish work in rural areas and are unable to understand patients who speak mostly Quechua, Illaccanqui said.

The next frontier, or challenge, is to work on speech, said Arturo Oncevay, a Peruvian machine translation researcher at the University of Edinburgh who co-founded a research coalition to improve Indigenous language technology across the Americas. The native languages of the Americas are traditionally oral."

In its announcement, Google cautioned that the quality of translations in the newly added languages still lags far behind" other languages it supports, such as English, Spanish and German, and noted that the models will make mistakes and exhibit their own biases." But the company only added languages if its AI systems met a certain threshold of proficiency, Caswell said.

If theres a significant number of cases where its very wrong, then we would not include it," he said. Even if 90% of the translations are perfect, but 10% are nonsense, thats a little bit too much for us."

Google said its products now support 133 languages. The latest 24 are the largest single batch to be added since Google incorporated 16 new languages in 2010. What made the expansion possible is what Google is calling a zero-shot or zero-resource machine translation model  one that learns to translate into another language without ever seeing an example of it.

Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta introduced a similar concept called the Universal Speech Translator last year.

Google's model works by training a single gigantic neural AI model on about 100 data-rich languages, and then applying what it's learned to hundreds of other languages it doesn't know, Caswell said. Imagine if youre some big polyglot and then you just start reading novels in another language, you can start to piece together what it could mean based on your knowledge of language in general, he said.

He said the new group ranges from smaller languages like Mizo, spoken in northeastern India by about 800,000 people, to more widely spoken languages like Lingala, spoken by around 45 million people across Central Africa.

It was more than 15 years ago  in 2006  that Microsoft got some positive attention in South America with a software feature translating familiar Microsoft menus and commands into Quechua. But that was before the current wave of AI advancements in real-time translation.

Harvard University language scholar Americo Mendoza-Mori, who speaks Quechua, said getting Google's attention brings some needed visibility to the language in places like Peru, where Quechua speakers are still lacking in many public services. The survival of many of these languages will depend on their use in digital contexts, he said.

Another language scholar, Roberto Zariquiey, said he's skeptical that Google could make an effective language revitalization tool for Quechua, Aymara or Guarani without closer participation from community groups in the region.

Languages are deeply linked to lives, to cultures, to ethnic groups and political organizations, said Zariquiey, a linguist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. This should be taken into account.

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The new languages added are: Assamese, Aymara, Bambara, Bhojpuri, Dhivehi, Dogri, Ewe, Guarani, Ilocano, Konkani, Krio, Lingala, Luganda, Maithili, Meiteilon (Manipuri), Mizo, Oromo, Quechua, Sanskrit, Sepedi, Sorani Kurdish, Tigrinya, Tsonga and Twi.

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O'Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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ATLANTA (AP)  South Korean automaker Hyundai Motor Group is expected to announce next week that its building a massive electric vehicle plant near Savannah, Georgia, according to a U.S. official familiar with the anticipated announcement.

Hyundai is finalizing those plans as President Joe Biden is set to travel to South Korea next week as part of his first visit to Asia during his presidency.

The White House and Hyundai have been in discussions about the project, which is expected to bring thousands of new jobs to Georgia, and the formal announcement is likely during Bidens scheduled May 20-21 visit to Seoul, according to the official who was not authorized to comment and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The official stressed though that details of the formal announcement are still being worked out.

The plant could grow to include 8,500 employees and would be built on a 2,200-acre (890-hectare) site that state and local governments own near the hamlet of Ellabell, Georgia, said two people familiar with Georgias talks with Hyundai. The location's about 25 miles (40 kilometers) inland from Savannah. The second person said Hyundai would invest more than $7 billion and could also build some cars powered by gasoline engines at the site, with an announcement in Georgia set for May 20. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the confidential talks.

It would be the second huge electric vehicle plant announced in Georgia in less than a year. Rivian Automotive in December announced it would build a $5 billion, 7,500-job electric truck plant about 45 miles (70 kilometers) east of Atlanta.

Hyundai Motor Group is committed to accelerating electrification in the U.S., said spokesperson Michelle Tinson. We will announce the location of our new US EV plant soon.

Biden is heading to South Korea and Japan for talks with those two countries leaders. He also will meet during that trip with leaders from the Indo-Pacific strategic alliance with the U.S. known as the Quad: Australia, India and Japan.

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, who took office earlier this week, pledged during his campaign to strengthen U.S.-South Korea ties.

U.S. Sen Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat, met with Kia officials Tuesday. I tell business leaders regularly: Georgia is open for business, Warnock said, not mentioning the possibility of the plant.

Hyundai's interest in Georgia was first reported by Reuters, while The Atlanta Journal-Constitution initially reported the announcement plan. The company sells cars under the Hyundai and Kia brands.

The announcement would come in the closing days before Georgia's May 24 primary elections and could be a last-minute boost to Gov. Brian Kemp. The Republican incumbent leads in polls in his effort to hold off a challenge from former U.S. Sen. David Perdue and others in the GOP primary. Perdue has repeatedly attacked the Rivian deal, in which Georgia and local governments have pledged $1.5 billion of incentives and tax breaks, saying the state is transferring money to liberal financiers and should have consulted with local residents who oppose the plant because it threatens their rural quality of life.

The South Korean automaker would add a third American assembly plant to the Hyundai factory in Montgomery, Alabama, and a Kia factory in West Point, Georgia. It's unclear what models would be assembled at the new Georgia plant. Hyundai announced plans to invest $7.4 billion in the United States by 2025 to produce electric vehicles, upgrade plants and develop technology. The company plans to start building hybrid and electric vehicles at its Montgomery plant by this fall, investing $300 million.

Kemp has cultivated ties to the Korean automaker, part of a push to deliver jobs to parts of Georgia outside Atlanta and to build Georgia's position in the electric vehicle industry. South Korean conglomerate SK Group is building a $2.6 billion complex to make batteries for electric vehicles in Commerce, northeast of Atlanta.

There was a reason I made my first economic development trip to South Korea and visited with great companies like Kia and Hyundai and a lot of others. We've got a great partnership with them and a lot of other South Korean companies, and we have for a long time, Kemp said Monday.

The deal would solidify Georgia's efforts to capture a big piece of the electric vehicle industry. Pat Wilson, Georgia's economic development commissioner, said in December after Georgia landed Rivian that the industry transition is a seed field of opportunity for Georgia.

Looking forward, I just see a huge amount of opportunity for us, Wilson said,

Georgia bought the site, which includes more than 2,200 acres (890) hectares) for $61 million last July, with Bryan and Chatham counties each kicking in $9 million.

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Madhani reported from Washington. Associated Press auto writer Tom Krisher contributed from Detroit and writer Russ Bynum contributed from Savannah, Georgia.

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 -- The leak of a draft ruling in an abortion case before the U.S. Supreme Court has caused Americans on either side of the issue to question the credibility of the court -- and the judiciary in general.

Since last week's leak, pundits on both sides of the issue are accusing the court of playing politics.

The nine judges on the Iowa Court of Appeals may have diverse political leanings, but politics never enters into their discussions when deciding a case before them, said Chief Judge Thomas Bower, who's been on the court for 10 years.

"Politics does not hold sway on our decisions," Bower said Wednesday in answer to a question about how the growing debate about judicial integrity has affected the court.

A member of the court for more than two years, Judge Paul Ahlers also said discussions center on the legal issues of each case, not the potential political ramifications of their ruling.

"I've never heard politics raised in discussions," Ahlers told the audience inside a full courtroom in the Woodbury County Courthouse, where the Court of Appeals met in special session.

The court's appearance was in conjunction with the Iowa Bench Bar conference taking place in Sioux City this week. The appeals court, as well as the Iowa Supreme Court, conducts special sessions outside Des Moines each year to give people who don't live near the capital city a chance to see the courts in action.

At the conclusion of the hearings, Bower presided over an informal session in which judges answered questions from the audience.

Bower said court staff and judges have annual training on security and privacy issues. He's not aware of rulings being leaked in the past, but admitted it wouldn't be impossible.

"There's nothing to stop our staff from going out and saying things," he said.

The court considers 1,000-1,200 cases each year, Bower said. Some present mundane issues that the court tackles often, but Bower said the judges focus on the litigants in each case and how important their ruling will be to them.

"That case is the most important case to the litigants," he said.

A case with local interest was one of those before the court Wednesday, when a three-judge panel considered the case of Dawn Stansbury, a former Sioux City elementary school principal who is appealing the dismissal of her sex discrimination lawsuit against the Sioux City Community School District, superintendent Paul Gausman and two other district administrators.

Stansbury resigned in August 2018 after she said she was given an ultimatum to be demoted to a middle school principal position or be fired. She said she was told by director of elementary education Brian Burnight, her direct supervisor, that as long as Gausman was superintendent, she would never receive a promotion, cost of living adjustments or salary increases. She said a hiring committee later was encouraged to hire male principals because they would be better able to oversee student discipline.

"The district wanted a strong principal in place. The district wanted a man," Stansbury's attorney, Jordan Hutchinson said.

In May, District Judge Duane Hoffmeyer (who has since retired and taken senior judge status) granted the school district summary judgment and dismissed the lawsuit, ruling he had not found sufficient evidence from depositions and testimony to support Stansbury's claim that the district's actions were motivated by sex discrimination.

The school district's attorney, Zach Clausen, said Stansbury's demotion was because of performance issues, and serving as an assistant principal in another building would help her improve.

"The fact a female was replaced by a male, by itself, is not a case for sex discrimination," Clausen said.

At the conclusion of the hearing, Hutchinson asked that the court overturn Hoffmeyer's ruling and remand the case back to Woodbury County District Court for trial. The Court of Appeals will issue its ruling in coming months.

The court also heard arguments in the appeal of a murder conviction from Madison County.

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SIOUX CITY -- A Whiting, Iowa, man charged with a fatal Memorial Day shooting in Luton appears to have reached an agreement with prosecutors and will not stand trial for second-degree murder.

Marvin Hildreth Jr., 21, is scheduled to enter a plea at 2:30 p.m. Friday in Woodbury County District Court. He will enter a plea in a gun-related case from Monona County at the same hearing.

No plea agreement has been posted in online court records.

Hildreth has pleaded not guilty of second-degree murder and going armed with intent and is scheduled to stand trial on June 8. A second-degree murder conviction carries a 50-year prison sentence.

He 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.

A Woodbury County Sheriff's deputy wrote in a search warrant application that Pauley said Mohr had come to the home, forced his way inside and threatened to abduct and harm 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.

Hildreth's attorney had filed notice of 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. A defense motion to move the trial from Woodbury County because of media publicity surrounding the case was denied.

Hildreth remains in custody in the Woodbury County Jail on a $500,000 bond and a $25,000 hold from Monona County, where he is accused of firing a shot in the air during a June 2020 assault in Onawa.

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SIOUX CITY -- Kohen Rankin's acceptance into the U.S. Military Academy at West Point is no secret to anyone at his school or in his community.

But when he walks across the stage at Boyden-Hull High School to accept his diploma on May 22, any out-of-town attendees unfamiliar with his military commitment will see a stole over his graduation robe signifying his future plans.

"I think this looks amazing," Rankin said, sliding the silky black-and-gold stole sporting the Army logo between his thumb and fingers. "I'm honored to represent our community, our district and state at West Point and in the military. It's a great honor."

Rankin was one of seven Siouxland seniors Thursday to model the stoles representing their upcoming military service. The stoles will be worn by students at a dozen participating Siouxland high schools during their graduation ceremonies, thanks to a Siouxland Chamber of Commerce initiative to honor graduating seniors who are going into the military.

"Wear it proudly. Stand tall and show others the commitment you have decided to make," said Brian Crichton, chairman of the Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors and a member of the 185th Air Refueling Wing, Iowa Air National Guard in Sioux City, which hosted the Chamber's announcement of its initiative to honor soon-to-be military members.

For years, graduates have worn stoles representing academic and other achievements. Bishop Heelan High School sophomore Maria McGowan said when her older sister graduated, there was nothing to signify her acceptance into the U.S. Naval Academy. An older brother graduating more recently had a stole noting his impending military service. McGowan said she thought all high school graduates entering the military deserved similar recognition and proposed the idea to the Chamber of Commerce.

"We were like this needs to go bigger," McGowan said. "To watch this come to life has been so rewarding."

Staff Sgt. Sydney Smith at the 185th was the lead graphic designer of the stoles, which recognize every branch of the military and National Guard. The Chamber raised money to buy 55 stoles that seniors at participating high schools can wear at graduation.

185th wing commander Col. Mark Muckey said the unit's communications team will spread news of the initiative in hopes that the idea will catch on elsewhere.

"I look out and I don't see anything like this in the nation," Muckey said.

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Algerian Army Chief of Staff Said Chengriha on Wednesday reaffirmed to a visiting senior NATO official his country's neutral policy on international affairs, according to a statement from the Algerian Defense Ministry.

"On the international level, Algeria continues to adopt a policy of neutrality and ensures that it stands away from the tensions and polarizations opposing various parties," he said when receiving Hans-Werner Wiermann, director general of the NATO International Military Staff.

"Algeria will continue cooperating with its allies and partners within the framework of its national interests and its immutable principles," Chengriha noted.

On Wednesday, Weirmann kicked off a two-day working visit to Algeria, where he is due to meet with top Algerian officials.

Weirmann's visit came after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov visited Algeria on Tuesday and hailed Algiers' balanced and objective policy over the Ukraine crisis.
SIOUX CITY -- The National Association of Letter Carriers 30th annual food drive will be held Saturday, after a two year hiatus due to the coronavirus.

This is a nationwide event and is the single largest food drive conducted on one designated day from coast to coast.

Letter carriers will collect non-perishable food donations along with the mail on Saturday, and take them back to the post office in downtown Sioux City. The food will then be delivered to the Food Bank of Siouxland.

The most needed food items include canned fruits and vegetables, canned meats, canned soups, boxed meals and cereal. Leaders at the Food Bank of Siouxland request that items in glass jars are not donated for safety reasons.

"This event makes such a big impact on our community," said Valerie Petersen, associate executive director of the Food Bank of Siouxland. "Not only is it helpful for those in need and the Food Bank. It is the easiest way for members of our community to make a contribution to the Food Bank of Siouxland  from the comfort of your home. Were so grateful for the support of our friends at the NALC."

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HARTINGTON, Neb. -- One county board incumbent in Northeast Nebraska lost Tuesday, while another trailed by a single vote as a recount loomed.

In Cedar County, challenger Dick Donner defeated incumbent Chris Tramp by a vote of 411 to 333 for the GOP nomination in Board of Commissioner District 3, according to unofficial results. A second incumbent commissioner, Dave McGregor, won the Republican nomination in District 3 over challenger Kelly Hammer, 582-265.

In Thurston County, challenger Jim Mueller led incumbent Dan Trimble, 55 to 54, for the Republican nomination for Board of Supervisors District 7, according to unofficial results. A recount is scheduled for Friday. The declared winner will have a clear path in the November general election since no Democrat filed for the seat.

In Dixon County, incumbent board of supervisor Don Anderson won a three-way race for the Republican nomination in District 1. Anderson collected 94 votes, compared to 84 for Josh Blatchford and 43 for Dennis Lukken.

In a contest for the GOP nomination in Dixon County's District 3, incumbent Roger Peterson topped challenger Richie Monteith, 252-50.

In a third Dixon County supervisor race, Steven Hassler defeated Dakota Roerts for the GOP nomination in District 7, 123-37. The incumbent, Alan Mackling, retired in April. On Friday, county officials are scheduled to appoint someone to fill the rest of Mackling's term, which runs until January.

Hassler, Peterson and Anderson advance to the November general election, where each will be unopposed since no Democratic candidates filed for any of the three seats.

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Jan. 6 panel subpoenas McCarthy, four other GOP lawmakers

WASHINGTON (AP)  House investigators say they have issued subpoenas to House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and four other GOP lawmakers as part of their probe into the violent Jan. 6 insurrection. It's an extraordinary step that has little precedent and is certain to further inflame partisan tensions over the 2021 attack. The Jan. 6 panels subpoenas for McCarthy of California and Republican Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Andy Biggs of Arizona and Mo Brooks of Alabama come as the investigation is winding down and as the panel prepares for a series of public hearings this summer.

Russian threats push Finland toward joining NATO alliance

KYIV, Ukraine (AP)  Finlands leaders have come out in favor of applying to join NATO, and Sweden could do the same within days. That would amount to a historic realignment on the continent 2 1/2 months after Russian President Vladimir Putins invasion of Ukraine sent a shiver of fear through Moscows neighbors. The Kremlin has reacted to the move by Finland by warning it will be forced to take retaliatory military-technical steps.

EXPLAINER: Why Finland, Sweden joining NATO will be big deal

BRUSSELS (AP)  Finland appears on the cusp of joining NATO. Sweden could follow suit. By year's end, they could stand among the alliance's ranks. Russia's war in Ukraine has provoked a public about face on membership in the two Nordic countries. They are already NATO's closest partners, but should Russia respond to their membership moves they might soon need the organization's military support. The two are a perfect fit for NATO. Their armed forces, and political and legal systems, are in lock step with the alliance. They bring high-tech military equipment and high levels of defense spending with them. Their accession would double the length of NATO's borders with Russia. It's unclear exactly how Moscow will respond.

N. Korea reports 6 deaths after admitting COVID-19 outbreak

SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  North Korea says six people have died and 350,000 have been treated for a fever that has spread explosively across the country. The announcement Friday came a day after it acknowledged its first COVID-19 cases of the pandemic. North Korea likely doesn't have enough testing supplies and said the cause of the fevers was unclear. Experts have warned a COVID-19 outbreak could be devastating in a country with a broken health care system and an unvaccinated, malnourished population. Some experts say the North's admissions of an outbreak suggested a willingness to receive outside aid. It previously shunned vaccines offered by the U.N.-backed COVAX program, possibly because they have monitoring requirements.

Powell: 'Soft' economic landing may be out of Fed's control

WASHINGTON (AP)  Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, fresh off winning Senate confirmation for a second four-year term, for the first time Thursday acknowledged that high inflation and economic weakness overseas could thwart his efforts to avoid a recession. Previously, Powell has sought to portray the Feds efforts to tighten interest rates as consistent with a so-called soft landing for the economy. In that scenario, the Fed would tighten borrowing costs enough to cool the economy and bring down inflation, without going so far as to tip the economy into recession. But on Thursday he acknowledged such a soft landing may be out of the Fed's control.

The AP Interview: US 'vulnerable' to COVID without new shots

WASHINGTON (AP)  The new White House COVID-19 coordinator is issuing a dire warning. He says in an Associated Press interview that the U.S. will be increasingly vulnerable to the coronavirus this fall and winter if Congress doesnt swiftly approve new funding for more vaccines and treatments. Dr. Ashish Jha said in the interview Thursday that Americans immune protection from the virus is waning, the virus is adapting to be more contagious and booster doses for most people will be necessary  with the potential for enhanced protection from a new generation of shots.

Astronomers capture 1st image of Milky Way's huge black hole

WASHINGTON (AP)  Astronomers have unveiled the first wild but fuzzy image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Nearly all galaxies, including our own, are believed to have these giant black holes at their center, where light and matter cannot escape. That makes it extremely hard to get pictures of them. The image released Thursday was made by eight synchronized radio telescopes around the world. This is not the first picture of a black hole. The same international group released the first one in 2019 from a distant galaxy.

US reckoning with role in Native American boarding schools

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP)  The U.S. government has not been open to investigating its role in stripping Native Americans of their cultures and identities in boarding schools. Until now. Thats partly because people who know first-hand the persistent trauma caused by the boarding school system are positioned in the U.S. government. Still, the work to uncover the truth and create a path for healing will require financial resources. Tribes will have to navigate federal laws on repatriation to take Native children who died and are buried at boarding schools home. And some survivors might be hesitant to recount the painful past and trust the federal government to collect the stories.

EXPLAINER: What's behind the baby formula shortage?

WASHINGTON (AP)  Many parents are hunting for infant formula after a combination of short- and long-term problems hit the biggest U.S. brands. So what should you do if you can't find formula? Talk with your pediatrician or call a local food bank to see if they can help locate some options. Experts also recommend checking with smaller stores and pharmacies, which may still have supplies when larger stores run out. Most regular baby formulas contain the same basic ingredients and nutrients, so parents using those products shouldnt hesitate to buy a different brand if theyre having trouble finding their regular one. Parents of infants requiring specialty formulas should talk to their doctor if they cant find those products.

Storm chasers face host of dangers beyond severe weather

MADISON, Wis. (AP)  The deaths of four storm chasers over the last two weeks have underscored the inherent dangers of pursuing severe weather events and navigating traffic. A meteorologist from Mexico was killed in a car crash on Wednesday while chasing violent weather in Minnesota. Three University of Oklahoma students were killed on April 30 when a semitrailer struck their vehicle while they were returning from chasing a tornado in Kansas. Greg Tripoli is an atmospheric and oceanic scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He says storm chasing can produce useful data but more often students want the thrill of seeing a tornado. He says the biggest danger that chasers face is a car accident as people travel at high speeds pursuing storms.

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DALLAS (AP)  The Dallas police chief said Thursday that they don't believe a shooting at a hair salon in Dallas' Koreatown area that injured three women was a hate crime.

In this particular case, we have no evidence to point that hate is a factor, and to say otherwise would be irresponsible for us, to have a community live in fear, Dallas police chief Eddie Garcia said.

If there were a nexus to hate, we certainly would be conducting outreach to ensure our community knows, Garcia said.

Authorities are still searching for a man dressed all in black who shot the three women Wednesday afternoon at Hair World Salon, which is in a shopping center with many businesses owned by Korean Americans. Police say the shooter drove off in a maroon minivan.

The three women were taken to a hospital with injuries that weren't life-threatening, police said.

The daughter of one of the injured women said her mother told her that the man, who she didn't recognize, calmly walked in, opened fire and then left.

He was calm. He just walked up to it and then stood there  didnt walk around  but stood there and shot like 20 shots and then just calmly went out, said Jane Bae, who wasnt there but had spoken with her mother.

Dallas Police Sgt. Warren Mitchell told KDFW that police believe the shooter shouted something when he came in, but police hadn't figured out what it was.

Police said they were looking into reports of a dispute earlier in the day involving a customer to see if it's connected to the shooting. Were not ruling it out, but right now I dont want to relate the two unless Im for sure, Mitchell said.

Bae said that her mother, who owns the salon, and a salon worker were shot, in addition to a customer.

She said her mother said the worker who was shot had spotted the man with a gun heading toward the salon and ran toward the door shouting no' and tried to lock it, but wasn't able to do so it in time.

Bae said her mother doesn't recall the shooter saying anything.

She said her mother was shot in the feet, and the salon worker was shot in the arm. She didn't know about the customer's injuries.

On April 2, a drive-by shooting was reported at the shopping center where the salon is located, police said. Police got multiple calls related to that incident. Police said they are investigating it but did not say if they believed there was any connection.

Jarely Martinez, who works as a dental assistant in an office in the shopping center, said she didn't hear the gunshots on Wednesday but heard the sirens from emergency vehicles and walked out and saw a woman covered in blood.

She said she wasn't working on April 2, but a window of the dentist's office was damaged in that shooting.

It feels a little nerve-wracking coming to work, Martinez said Thursday.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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RICHMOND, Va. (AP)  A settlement has been reached in a lawsuit twelve women brought last summer against Liberty University, accusing the Christian institution of fostering an unsafe environment on its Virginia campus and mishandling cases of sexual assault and harassment.

A notice of dismissal filed Wednesday by the plaintiffs' attorney, Jack Larkin, said the case had been settled but provided no details about the terms.

In a statement Thursday, Liberty said a settlement had been reached with all the plaintiffs and all but two additional women Larkin represented. The university did not disclose the terms of the agreement but outlined a number of other changes it has undertaken in recent months to improve campus security and review how it responds to incidents of sexual harassment or violence.

Liberty University president Jerry Prevo made it clear when the Jane Does filed their lawsuit that, despite certain claims being potentially outside of the statute of limitations, the university was committed to doing what it could to make things right with the plaintiffs, the statement said.

Larkin did not respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press. But he told TV station WDBJ the settlement terms were confidential.

The development comes as the prominent evangelical school in Lynchburg faces continued scrutiny over its handling of sex assault cases. It is facing other lawsuits that raise similar allegations and recently acknowledged to news outlets that the U.S. Department of Education is reviewing its compliance with the federal Clery Act, which requires colleges and universities to maintain and disclose crime statistics and security information.

In a statement, the department acknowledged the oversight work was ongoing but said no further comment would be provided until the outcome officially has been communicated to the institution.

The recently settled lawsuit was filed in federal court in New York and made various claims under Title IX, the federal law that protects against sex discrimination in education.

It alleged that Libertys strict honor code makes it difficult or impossible for students to report sexual violence. It said the university had a tacit policy of weighting investigations in favor of accused male students, and it said the university retaliated against women who did make such reports.

The women, former students and employees, all filed suit anonymously and were identified as Jane Doe 1-12. Their allegations spanned more than two decades.

Some plaintiffs in the lawsuit described being raped or sexually harassed and having their cases mishandled or effectively ignored. One woman alleged pregnancy discrimination.

A status report filed in the case in February said that if it was not resolved amicably an amended complaint would be filed adding new plaintiffs, including a current student.

In its statement, Liberty said it has spent over $8.5 million on campus security upgrades, including the installation of security cameras, blue light emergency call boxes and enhanced lighting, along with a new cellphone app for emergency reporting.

Liberty said it has made donations to community sexual assault response programs and is reviewing its counseling services to ensure there are more services available from licensed mental health providers, "including in rapid response scenarios resulting from sexual assault.

The university is also revising its amnesty policy to better communicate" that it will not discipline parties who engage in behaviors, in connection with a case of sexual harassment or assault "that would have otherwise violated its student honor code."

Liberty has also been in the spotlight recently for its acrimonious split with former president and chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. in 2020. Litigation between Falwell and the school is ongoing.

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As the uproar over Elon Musks $44 billion buyout of Twitter reached a crescendo, another Musk drama was back in court.

That 2018 spectacle started, ironically enough, with a Musk tweet about doing an audacious deal. Weeks later, the Tesla CEO abandoned talk of buying all the electric car makers stock, admitting it might be too much trouble. With regulators preparing to sue the billionaire for defrauding investors, he pondered his position in a livestreamed interview while puffing on pot.

It was a confounding study in Musks persistent ambition and his delight in contradiction. Yet as the worlds richest man pursues Twitter even those whove long watched him remain flummoxed about what he has up his sleeve.

This is a guy whos more transparent than 99.99 percent of other CEOs and yet hes harder to predict because he has the confidence to be able to publicly change his mind, said Erik Gordon, a University of Michigan business professor.

Would Musk be more successful if he toned it down? I think the answer is no, because he wouldnt be Musk.

Weeks after Twitters board accepted Musks offer, observers are puzzling over what a takeover would mean and even whether hell complete the deal.

If the 50-year-old Musks gambit has made anything clear its that he thrives on such contradiction.

Musk, whos worth about $240 billion, boasts of acquiring Twitter to defend freedom of speech. But he has long used the platform to attack perceived foes.

He is supremely confident in his own judgment. But he has openly acknowledged vulnerabilities, disclosing angst over a breakup in one interview and telling a Saturday Night Live audience last year that he was the first host with Aspergers syndrome.

Hes a widely admired visionary. But he trashes the conventions of corporate behavior, alienating analysts, regulators and others.

I dont think youd necessarily want to be me, he told podcaster Joe Rogan in 2018. Its very hard to turn it off.

Musk has been something of an outlier since childhood, teaching himself computer programming at 10 and selling a video game he created two years later, according to a 2015 biography.

He left South Africa at 16 for Canada before moving to the U.S. At 24 he dropped out of Stanford to try his luck in the 1990s dot-com boom.

Together with brother Kimbal, he launched Zip2, an online business directory eventually sold to Compaq for $307 million.

Musk used his share to found what would become PayPal, sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.

Musk then founded SpaceX to develop cost-effective reusable rockets, before investing in a startup called Tesla. But he soon clashed with co-founder Martin Eberhard.

Every time there was an article that didnt feature him, he blew a gasket, Eberhard, who sued Musk and Tesla after he was ousted, said during a 2018 interview with the AP.

On Twitter, Musk recently called Eberhard a liar.

As Teslas chairman, Musk pushed employees to meet goals many considered impossible, said Gene Berdichevsky, the battery engineer on the companys first vehicle. Hell likely be similarly unrelenting at Twitter, said Berdichevsky, who now leads a company developing new types of battery chemistry.

Managers will be asked to do things that they dont necessarily think are reasonable, Berdichevsky said. Some of them will not be reasonable and others will completely transform things.

Musks creative energy, though, is intertwined with his erratic behavior.

That was spotlighted in 2018, as Tesla ramped up production of its Model 3 sedan. Musk berated engineers for problems before acknowledging that his overreliance on automation was a primary cause. Meanwhile, he scolded analysts for asking bonehead questions.

That August he stunned observers, tweeting that he was considering taking Tesla private and had secured financing. The stock soared before he backtracked. The Securities and Exchange Commission sued, alleging Musks talk of a deal was largely fiction.

Musk and Tesla settled, paying fines of $20 million each and agreeing that tweets potentially affecting the stock price be reviewed by a lawyer. A federal judge recently rejected Musks contention that the settlement violates his right to free speech.

Some people use their hair to express themselves, hes said. I use Twitter.

Musk and his fans, though, sometimes use the platform to go after perceived adversaries.

A California short seller has alleged that the CEO and one of his acolytes, Omar Qazi, were responsible for tweets insulting him and falsely asserting he had been arrested for child abduction. They were among 80,000 coordinated tweets praising Tesla and attacking its critics, according to investor Aaron Greenspans lawsuit.

Qazi called the allegations absurd, in an email. Tesla lawyers have dismissed charges of a Musk-led Twitter mob as conspiracy theories.

Musk did not respond to an interview request for this story. But speaking briefly with AP at New Yorks Met Gala, he reiterated his pledge to rid Twitter of spam bots and trolls spreading junk messages.

Thats obviously diminishing the user experience, he said. Im on the warpath, so if somebody is operating a bot and troll army, then Im definitely their enemy.

But a University of Maryland researcher recently concluded that such bots have generated thousands of positive tweets about Tesla, potentially buoying its stock.

Neither the company nor its supporters has taken responsibility. But Musk has said that for real people on Twitter, most anything is fair game.

Twitters a war zone, he said in a 2018 interview with 60 Minutes. If somebodys gonna jump in the warzone, its like, Okay, youre in the arena. Lets go.

Twitters reliance on advertising has been the impetus for its efforts to cap extremism and misinformation, said Angelo Carusone of watchdog Media Matters.

If Musks loosens those standards, he risks running afoul of Apple and Google. Both have stringent policies theyve cited in booting some apps from their devices.

Musk hasnt addressed what hed do if his efforts to open Twitter jeopardize its accessibility.

Then again, hes has never been one to shy away from contradiction.

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 Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) fired three short-range ballistic missiles into its eastern waters, South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said Thursday.

The JCS said in a statement that it detected the missiles, which were launched into the eastern waters from the Sunan area in Pyongyang at about 6:29 p.m. local time (0929 GMT).

The JCS noted that South Korea was maintaining a full readiness posture in close cooperation with the United States while strengthening surveillance and vigilance.

The DPRK testfire came five days after South Korea said the DPRK launched one short-range ballistic missile, presumed to be a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM), off its east coast.

The DPRK has launched projectiles 16 times this year, saying it test-fired a new type intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), Hwasongpho-17, on March 24.
WASHINGTON (AP)  President Joe Biden on Thursday kicked off the first-ever Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit to be held in Washington as his administration makes an extended effort to demonstrate that the United States has not lost focus on the Pacific even while dealing with Russias invasion of Ukraine.

As Biden welcomed leaders from eight ASEAN nations for a dinner to start the two-day special summit, the White House announced the United States would commit to more than $150 million in new projects to bolster Southeast Asia's climate, maritime and public health infrastructure.

A senior administration official, who previewed the announcement on the condition of anonymity, said the effort was meant to signal that the U.S. is looking to step up our game in Southeast Asia.

The gathering marked the group's first meeting at the White House in its 45-year history. Leaders will take part in more formal talks at the State Department on Friday.

The ASEAN nations include Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. The top leaders from ASEAN member Myanmar were barred from attending, while outgoing Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte dispatched Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. to represent his government.

The summit comes before Biden's trip next week to South Korea and Japan  his first visit to Asia as president  for talks with those two countries' leaders. He also will meet during that trip with leaders from the Indo-Pacific strategic alliance with the U.S. known as the Quad: Australia, India and Japan.

Biden has tried to put greater focus on that alliance and improving relations with Pacific nations in the early going of his presidency as he sees a rising China as the most threatening economic and national security adversary to the United States.

Biden, who pledged to make the Pacific a greater focal point of U.S. policy, has seen his attempt at an Asia pivot complicated by the most serious fighting in Europe since World War II.

A White House Asia policy adviser said the administration remains committed to stepping up relations with Southeast Asian nations to address climate, economic and education initiatives.

There has been a sense that in previous administrations that we had set off with a determined pace to focus on East Asia or in the Indo-Pacific and then find ourselves with other pressing challenges that perhaps draws (us) away a little bit, Kurt Campbell, coordinator for Indo-Pacific Affairs on the White House National Security Council, said Wednesday. I think there is a deep sense that that cant happen again.

The new U.S. investment in ASEAN nations includes $40 million for clean energy infrastructure, $60 million for a new regional maritime initiative and $6 million to accelerate digital development in the region.

The White House also announced that Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies will launch a privately funded institute for rising leaders from ASEAN nations that will bring mid-career public sector officials to the United States for leadership training.

Duterte, the Philippines president, is skipping the summit because his country is in a political transition. ASEAN has barred Myanmar  in crisis since the army ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021  from sending all but nongovernmental leaders for ASEAN meetings.

The Biden administration condemned the military coup that led to the ouster of Suu Kyi. She was convicted by a military court last month of corruption and sentenced to five years in prison in the first of several corruption cases against her. Suu Kyi has denied the charges.

Biden is also expected to address the situation in Myanmar with ASEAN leaders, as well as discuss China and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Campbell said the administration expects the private talks will be direct, polite, but maybe a little bit uncomfortable at times as the U.S. and ASEAN members are not on the same page on all issues. He said the administration wants to see the group play a more deeply engaged role in the critical diplomacy about next steps in Myanmar.

Biden has called for Russia to be disinvited from Novembers scheduled Group of 20 summit because of its invasion of Ukraine. ASEAN member Indonesia, which holds the presidency of the G-20 this year, has resisted the calls to pull Moscows invitation.

Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the presumptive winner of this weeks Philippines presidential election, could test U.S. sway in the region. The son and namesake of the countrys former dictator has said he wants to pursue closer ties with China.

He has received congratulatory calls from both Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping. His campaign said that Marcos Jr. also met on on Thursday with Chinese ambassador, Huang Xilian, who conveyed that Beijing wants to bring cooperation between the two country to new heights.

Campbell acknowledged that historical considerations could present challenges to the relationship with Marcos Jr., a seeming reference to long-standing litigation in the United States against the estate of his father, Ferdinand Marcos.

A U.S. appeals court in 1996 upheld damages of about $2 billion against the elder Marcos estate for the torture and killings of thousands of Filipinos. The court upheld a 1994 verdict of a jury in Hawaii, where he had fled after being forced from power in 1986. He died there in 1989.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Thursday said she was not aware if the litigation or China came up in Bidens call with Marcos Jr.

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HELSINKI (AP)  Britain pledged to come to the aid of Sweden and Finland, including with military support, if the two Nordic nations came under attack under security deals Prime Minister Boris Johnson signed Wednesday with his Swedish counterpart in Stockholm and the Finnish president in Helsinki.

Sweden and Finland are pondering whether to abandon their historic neutrality and join NATO following Russias invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. Johnson said in a statement that Wednesdays agreements will allow Britain, a major, nuclear-armed NATO member, to cooperate with key Nordic partners and their armed forces, in all domains, including cyberspace.

Sweden's eastern neighbor Finland shares a 1,340-kilometer (830-mile) land border with Russia.

Wednesday's agreements also cover closer collaboration on new technology and intelligence-gathering between Britain and the two Nordic countries. Johnson said he would offer to increase British military deployments to the region, including with air force, army and navy assets and personnel.

Wednesdays agreements will fortify northern Europes defenses, in the face of renewed threats, Johnson said in a statement, adding that they are symbols "of the everlasting assurance between our nations.

These are not a short-term stop-gap, but a long-term commitment to bolster military ties and global stability, and fortify Europes defenses for generations to come, Johnson said in the statement.

And whether its in the event of a disaster or a military attack, what were saying today is that upon request from the other party, we would come to the other party's assistance, Johnson told a joint news conference in Sweden with Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson.

He called the war in Ukraine Russian President Vladimir Putins bloodthirsty campaign against a sovereign nation.

Andersson said: Putin thought he could cause division, but he has achieved the opposite. We stand here today more united than ever.

In Finland, Johnson held talks with President Sauli Niinisto, who has a significant role in the nations foreign and security policy decisions, at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki. The Finnish head of state said Moscow could only blame itself should his nation of 5.5 million become a NATO member.

You (Russia) caused this. Look at the mirror, Niinisto said pointedly, So in my thinking, this is quite simple, actually. We increase our security and we do not take it away from anybody. It is not a zero-sum game.

The Kremlin has warned of military and political repercussions if Sweden and Finland decide to join NATO. Andersson said that Russia would increase its military presence in this region if Sweden and, or, Finland sends in an application.

Should they apply, there will be an interim period lasting from when an application has been handed in until all 30 NATO members parliaments have ratified it. The two Nordic countries are expected to announce their positions on NATO membership in the coming days.

If Finland makes this historical step it is for the security of our own citizens, Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin told a news conference after talks with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Tokyo Wednesday. Joining NATO will strengthen the whole international community that stands for common values.

Johnson met with Andersson in Harpsund, the country retreat of Swedish prime ministers, which is located about 90 kilometers (55 miles) southwest of Stockholm.

In times of crisis, cooperation becomes even more important. And this applies not least for our international defense partnerships. And Swedens partnerships with the U.K. and with NATO have been crucial during these exceptional times, Andersson said.

Britain is already present in the Baltic Sea areas with the Joint Expeditionary Force, which consists of 10 Northern European nations: the United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Norway.

In 2017, Sweden and Finland joined the British-led military rapid reaction force, which is designed to be more flexible and respond more quickly than the larger NATO alliance. It uses NATO standards and doctrine, so it can operate in conjunction with NATO, the United Nations or other multinational coalitions. Fully operational since 2018, the force has held a number of exercises both independently and in cooperation with NATO.

-

Olsen reported from Copenhagen, Denmark. Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo, Japan 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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HELSINKI (AP)  Finlands leaders said Thursday theyre in favor of rapidly applying for NATO membership, paving the way for a historic expansion of the alliance that could deal a serious blow to Russia as its military struggles with its war in Ukraine.

The annoucement by President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin means that Finland is all but certain to join the Western military alliance, though a few steps remain before the application process can begin. Neighboring Sweden is expected to decide on seeking NATO membership in coming days.

NATO membership would strengthen Finlands security. As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defence alliance, Niinisto and Marin said in a joint statement.

Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay," they said. "We hope that the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days.

Russia reacted to the development with a warning. The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Finland joining NATO would inflict serious damage to Russian-Finnish relations as well as stability and security in Northern Europe."

Russia will be forced to take retaliatory steps of military-technical and other characteristics in order to counter the emerging threats to its national security," the ministry said.

History will determine why Finland needed to turn its territory into a bulwark of military face-off with Russia while losing independence in making its own decisions, it added.

Before the ministry issued its statement, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Finlands decision wouldnt help stability and security in Europe. Peskov said Russias response would depend on NATOs moves to expand its infrastructure closer to Russian borders.

Finland has the longest border with Russia out of all the European Unions 27 members.

Previously, the Kremlin had warned of military and political repercussions if Sweden and Finland decided to become a NATO member. Should they seek to join the alliance, there would be an interim period lasting from when the applications are submitted until ratification by lawmakers in all 30 existing member nations.

In NATO member Estonia, which also borders Russia, Prime Minister Kaja Kallas tweeted that history being made by our northern neighbors. She pledged to support a rapid accession process for Finland into NATO.

Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde tweeted that Finlands announcement gave an important message.

Finland's announcement came a day after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited both Finland and Sweden to sign a military cooperation agreement.

The U.K. pledged Wednesday to come to the aid of Sweden and Finland if the two Nordic nations came under attack.

During a joint news conference with Johnson in Helsinki this week, Niinisto said Moscow could only blame itself should his nation of 5.5 million people become a NATO member.

You (Russia) caused this. Look in the mirror, the Finnish head of state said Wednesday.

On Thursday, Niinisto tweeted that he spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about Finland's firm support for Ukraine and the country's intention to join NATO. Niinisto said Zelenskyy expressed his full support for it."

In 2017, Sweden and Finland joined the British-led Joint Expeditionary Force, which is designed to be more flexible and respond more quickly than the larger NATO alliance. The force uses NATO standards and doctrine so it can operate in conjunction with the alliance, the United Nations or other multinational coalitions.

Fully operational since 2018, the force has held a number of exercises both independently and in cooperation with NATO.

Russias aggression in Ukraine prompted Finland and Sweden to reconsider their traditions of military nonalignment and to contemplate joining NATO itself. Public opinion in the two countries quickly started to shift toward favoring membership, first in Finland and a bit later in Sweden, after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24.

The latest opinion poll conducted by Finnish public broadcaster YLE showed earlier this week that 76% of Finns are in favor of joining NATO, a big change from earlier years when only 20-30% of respondents favored such military alignment.

Speaking to European Union lawmakers Thursday as Niinisto and Marin made their announcement, Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said that Russias unpredictable behavior was a serious concern for Finland. He cited Moscows readiness to wage high-risk operations that could lead to many casualties, including among Russians.

Should Finland become a NATO member, it would represent the biggest change in the Nordic country's defense and security policy since World War II, when it fought against the Soviet Union.

During the Cold War, Finland stayed away from NATO to avoid provoking the Soviet Union, instead opting to remain a neutral buffer between the East and the West while maintaining good relations with Moscow and also with the United States.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said the military alliance would welcome Finland and Sweden  both of which have strong, modern militaries  with open arms and that he expects the accession process to be speedy and smooth.

NATO officials say the Nordic duo's accession process could be done in a couple of weeks. The most time consuming part of the procedure  ratification of the countrys protocol by the existing NATO members  could be completed in less time than the four or so months it took West Germany, Turkey and Greece to join in the 1950s, when there were only 12 members to ratify their applications.

These are not normal times, one NATO official said this week, discussing the possible applications of Finland and Sweden. The official was briefing reporters about the accession process on condition that he not be named as no application has been made by the two countries.

Lorne Cook in Brussels, and Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, 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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PORTLAND, Ore. (AP)  Prospective homebuyers in Oregon can continue to send love letters to people selling homes.

U.S. District Judge Marco Hernandez on Wednesday permanently blocked a ban on the personal messages some buyers write in an effort to sweeten their offers on homes, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported.

The Oregon Legislature approved the ban last year, saying such letters could aid sellers in illegally choosing buyers based on factors such as race, color, religion, sex or sexual orientation, which would violate federal fair housing laws.

Conservative public interest law firm, the Pacific Legal Foundation, sued the state to block the laws implementation.

Hernandez ruled that the ban, which would require a home seller to reject any communication other than customary documents in a real estate transaction, including photographs, provided by a buyer, was a violation of buyers First Amendment rights.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Total Real Estate Group, a Bend firm with about 20 agents.

Daniel Ortner, a lawyer with the Pacific Legal Foundation, said the judges decision sent a clear message that states couldnt infringe upon home buyers and sellers rights to communicate.

The State of Oregon clearly recognized that it could not justify its ban on sharing information that helps sellers find the best buyer for their home, Ortner said in a news release.

In his March preliminary injunction, Hernandez said Oregons reasons for the ban had merit, given its long and abhorrent history of racial discrimination in property ownership and housing, which blocked people of color from owning houses for decades.

But he said House Bill 2550 was an overreach, banning innocuous messages and infringing on free speech.

It wasn't immediately clear if the state could appeal the decision.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP)  Minnesota lawmakers are considering a lifting a cap on growler sales, a high priority for the state's craft brewers, and letting local distilleries sell normal-sized bottles of their spirits direct to drinkers.

The bill slated for debate in the House on Wednesday would further chip away at a system that long required most beer, wine and spirit sales in Minnesota to go from producers to wholesalers to retailers, with little room for direct sales to consumers. That system started eroding in 2011 when the state first allowed brewers to operate taprooms; more cracks developed in 2017 when the state allowed Sunday liquor store sales.

The bill was written to benefit the state's five largest breweries: Summit in St. Paul, August Schell in New Ulm, Surly and Fulton in Minneapolis, and Castle Danger in Two Harbors. They've grown in popularity amid the craft beer boom to the point that they can no longer sell growlers  half-gallon jugs to go  from their taprooms.

That's because the state law that allowed growlers in the first place limits the privilege to breweries that produce under 20,000 barrels a year. The proposal would raise that cap to 150,000 barrels, allowing room for all of them. It would also let certain small brewers sell cans to go.

This bill has been long-sought and is much needed for the survival of craft beer in this state, Robert Galligan, a lobbyist for the Minnesota Craft Brewers Guild, said in a letter to lawmakers last month. For too long, the brewers of Minnesota have been restricted in their rights as American entrepreneurs, and although this bill would not equal the playing field with most every other state in the nation, it does bring us closer.

Around two dozen Minnesota distilleries would get to sell one standard 750 milliliter bottle to a customer per day at their cocktail rooms, up from the current 375 milliliter limit.

And wine lovers would get more chances to buy direct from their favorite vineyards out of state. It would allow wineries to ship up to 12 cases of wine per year to an individual, up from the current two cases, if the producers get licensed and pay the applicable taxes.

But supermarket sales of wine, spirits and strong beer would remain limited to retailers that operate separate liquor stores. Minnesota would remain the last state restricting regular grocery and convenience stores to low-alcohol 3.2 beer.

Even though there's only a week and half left in the legislative session, looser liquor laws may stand a chance of passage in the Senate, where the key committee chairman, Republican Sen. Gary Dahms, of Redwood Falls, has long been reluctant to tamper with the state's liquor laws without the agreement of all competing stakeholders.

Those conversations are ongoing. ... There might be some opportunity there to find some common ground, Republican Senate Majority Leader Jeremy Miller, of Winona, told reporters Tuesday.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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NEW YORK (AP)  New York Citys mayor is calling on the Biden administration to yank the federal firearms license of a Nevada company that sells parts and kits for ghost guns, firearms without serial numbers that have been increasingly turning up at crime scenes around the U.S.

Mayor Eric Adams joined with gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety on Wednesday to publicly call for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to immediately revoke the license of a Polymer80, Inc., alleging the company has violated federal gun laws requiring background checks of purchasers and serial numbers, among other measures.

The ATF declined to comment. Polymer80 did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

The push comes as the Biden administration is working to crack down on sellers of ghost guns. A recently unveiled new rule will change the definition of a firearm and require federally licensed gun dealers to add serial numbers to ghost guns and unfinished parts of guns, and to run background checks on their buyers  just like they do for commercially made firearms. The rule is scheduled to take effect in August.

But Adams and Everytown contend that Polymer80s sales could be considered violations of other federal guns laws already in effect and called on the ATF to revoke the companys license.

In their letter, Adams and Everytown said they were deeply concerned that the company continues to keep its federal license despite clear evidence of numerous willful violations of the law.

The New York City Police Department linked a shooting last month in the Bronx that left a 16-year-old girl dead and two other teens injured to a ghost gun assembled from a Polymer80 kit, the city said.

Allowing it to keep the license would also send a terrible message to bad actors in this industry and would be wholly inconsistent with the administrations crackdown on ghost gun sellers and its zero tolerance approach to wayward gun manufacturers and sellers, the letter said.

Adams, a Democrat, has made cracking down on rising violent crime a chief focus of his new administration. He even hosted President Joe Biden in February as they pledged to work closely together to combat gun violence, with a particular focus on the proliferation of ghost guns. He is one of the co-chairs of Everytown's group of mayors fighting illegal guns, and his communications director is the organization's former chief public affairs officer.

The NYPD said thus far this year, it has taken about 200 ghost guns off the street, compared with 148 for the entire year in 2020. The weapons are a fraction of roughly 2,600 illegal firearms recovered in New York City this year.

Polymer80 has been targeted by other elected officials and law enforcement departments around the U.S., including the ATF, and Everytown.

Everytown last year joined the city of Los Angeles to sue Polymer80 for allegedly creating a public nuisance and violating the states business code. Two Los Angeles County sheriffs deputies badly wounded in an ambush shooting sued the company in August for making parts of a ghost gun used in the attack and the attorney general of Washington, D.C., has filed a lawsuit against the company, claiming it violated D.C. gun laws.

The ATF served a search warrant on the company in December 2020 as it investigated whether the company violated gun laws by making and selling gun kits. The company notes on its website that the kits do not fall under the federal definition of a firearm or firearm frames or receivers.

Associated Press writer Michael Balsamo in Washington 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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WASHINGTON (AP)  Parents across the U.S. are scrambling to find baby formula because supply disruptions and a massive safety recall have swept many leading brands off store shelves.

Months of spot shortages at pharmacies and supermarkets have been exacerbated by the recall at Abbott, which was forced to shutter its largest U.S. formula manufacturing plant in February due to contamination concerns.

On Monday, White House press secretary Jenn Psaki said the Food and Drug Administration was "working around the clock to address any possible shortages."

On Tuesday, the FDA said it was working with U.S. manufacturers to increase their output and streamlining paperwork to allow more imports.

For now, pediatricians and health workers are urging parents who can't find formula to contact food banks or doctor's offices. They warn against watering down formula to stretch supplies or using online DIY recipes.

"For babies who are not being breastfed, this is the only thing they eat," said Dr. Steven Abrams, of the University of Texas, Austin. "So it has to have all of their nutrition and, furthermore, it needs to be properly prepared so that it's safe for the smallest infants."

Laura Stewart, a 52-year-old mother of three who lives just north of Springfield, Missouri, has been struggling for several weeks to find formula for her 10-month-old daughter, Riley.

Riley normally gets a brand of Abbott's Similac designed for children with sensitive stomachs. Last month, she instead used four different brands.

"She spits up more. She's just more cranky. She is typically a very happy girl," Stewart said. "When she has the right formula, she doesn't spit up. She's perfectly fine."

A small can costs $17 to $18 and lasts three to five days, Stewart said.

Like many Americans, Stewart relies on WIC  a federal program similar to food stamps that serves mothers and children  to afford formula for her daughter. Abbott's recall wiped out many WIC-covered brands, though the program is now allowing substitutions.

Trying to keep formula in stock, retailers including CVS and Walgreens have begun limiting purchases to three containers per customer.

Nationwide about 40% of large retail stores are out of stock, up from 31% in mid-April, according to Datasembly, a data analytics firm. More than half of U.S. states are seeing out-of-stock rates between 40% and 50%, according to the firm, which collects data from 11,000 locations.

Baby formula is particularly vulnerable to disruptions because just a handful of companies account for almost the entire U.S. supply.

Industry executives say the constraints began last year as the COVID-19 pandemic led to disruptions in ingredients, labor and transportation. Supplies were further squeezed by parents stockpiling during lockdowns.

Then in February, Abbott recalled several major brands and shut down its Sturgis, Michigan, factory when federal officials concluded four babies suffered bacterial infections after consuming formula from the facility. Two of the infants died.

When FDA inspectors visited the plant in March they found lax safety protocols and traces of the bacteria on several surfaces. None of the bacterial strains matched those collected from the infants, however, and the FDA hasn't offered an explanation for how the contamination occurred.

For its part, Abbott says its formula "is not likely the source of infection," though the FDA says its investigation continues.

Chicago-based Abbott said it is increasing production at its other facilities to fill the gap, including air-shipping formula from a plant in Ireland.

The shortages are especially dangerous for infants who require specialty formulas due to food allergies, digestive problems and other conditions.

"Unfortunately, many of those very specialized formulas are only made in the United States at the factory that had the recall, and that's caused a huge problem for a relatively small number of infants," Abrams said.

After hearing concerns from parents, the FDA said last month that Abbott could begin releasing some specialty formulas not affected by the recalls "on a case-by-case basis." The company is providing them free of charge, in coordination with physicians and hospitals.

Food safety advocates say the FDA made the right call in releasing the formula, but that parents should talk to their pediatricians before using it.

"There's still some risk from the formula because we know there are problems at the plant and FDA hasn't identified a root cause," said Sarah Sorscher of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "But it's worth releasing because these infants might die without it."

It's unclear when the Abbott plant might reopen.

The FDA said the company is still working "to rectify findings related to the processes, procedures and conditions." Other infant formula makers are "meeting or exceeding capacity levels to meet current demand," the agency said.

Among other steps, the FDA said it was waiving enforcement of minor product labeling issues to increase availability of both U.S. and imported products.

***

Hollingsworth reported from Kansas City, Missouri. The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif. (AP)  Wildfires are on a furious pace early this year  from a California hilltop where mansions with multimillion-dollar Pacific Ocean views were torched to remote New Mexico mountains charred by a month-old monster blaze.

The two places could not be more different, but the elements in common are the same: wind-driven flames have torn through vegetation that is extraordinarily dry from years-long drought exacerbated by climate change.

As the unstoppable northern New Mexico wildfire chewed through more dense forest Thursday, firefighters in the coastal community of Laguna Niguel doused charred and smoldering remains of 20 large homes that quickly went up in flames and forced a frantic evacuation.

The sky, everything was orange. It looked like an inferno, so we just jumped in the car, Sassan Darian said, as he recounted fleeing with his daughter and father while embers swirled around them. My daughter said, Were on fire. There were sparks on her and we were patting ourselves down.

Nationwide, more than 2,000 square miles (5,180 square kilometers) have burned so far this year  the most at this point since 2018, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Predictions for the rest of the spring do not bode well for the West, with the drought and warmer weather brought on by climate change worsening wildfire danger.

We all know its really early for our fire season and were all in awe of what weve already experienced ... to this point, said Dave Bales, commander on the New Mexico fire that is the largest burning in the U.S.

Fire officials said there was not much they could do in recent days to stop the fast-moving flames burning in tinder-dry forests in the Sangre de Christo range.

Fueled by overgrown mountainsides covered with Ponderosa pine and other trees sucked dry of moisture over decades, it's now burned across more than 405 square miles (1,048 square kilometers)  an area bigger than the city of Dallas, Texas.

Crews fighting flames along the mountain fronts between Santa Fe and Taos mostly held their own on Thursday thanks to welcome help from aerial attacks. But fire operations chief Todd Abel said that in some places where winds were gusting over ridgetops, it was almost like putting a hair dryer on it.

Even small fires that once would have been easily contained are extreme threats to life and property because of climate change, said Brian Fennessy, chief of the Orange County Fire Authority.

The perfect example broke out Wednesday afternoon when flames that may have been sparked by electric utility equipment were pushed up a canyon by strong sea breezes and quickly ignited large homes. They burned a relatively small area  about 200 acres (81 hectares)  but left a large path of destruction.

A sprawling estate selling for $9.9 million had looked in real estate listings like a California dream: teeming with luxuries that included a two-level library, a wellness wing with sauna and steam room and a pool on a terrace overlooking scenic Laguna Beach.

By nightfall, the mansion once photographed against a pastel sunset had morphed into a nightmare: its arched facade silhouetted against a glowing yellow sky as firefighters trained their hoses on the engulfed structure.

After the big flames died down Thursday, the house was one of many smoking casualties marked off with yellow tape. In another driveway, a burned-out car rested on its rims. The steep surrounding hillsides were blackened and stripped of vegetation.

Many other homes appeared unscathed and palm trees that had survived the onslaught of embers swayed above in calmer winds.

Two firefighters were hospitalized but no other injuries were reported.

The fires cause was under investigation and damage inspections were still ongoing on Thursday, Orange County Fire Authority Assistant Chief T.J. McGovern said. Southern California Edison reported that unspecified electrical circuit activity occurred around the time the fire broke out late Wednesday afternoon.

Electric utility equipment has repeatedly been linked to starting some of the most disastrous California wildfires, especially during windy weather.

The state Public Utilities Commission last year approved a settlement of more than half a billion dollars in fines and penalties for SoCal Edison for its role in five wildfires in 2017 and 2018.

In New Mexico, another red-flag warning was expected to end by Friday night for the first time in a week but extremely low humidity and bone-dry fuels will continue to provide ample opportunity for flames to spread, officials said.

This fire is going to continue to grow, Bales, the incident commander, warned Thursday night.

Residents in four counties east and northeast of Santa Fe remained under a variety of evacuation orders and alerts, and fire officials expected the blaze to continue on a northeast path east of Taos through less-populated areas about 40 miles (64 kilometers) south of the Colorado line.

With strong spring winds tossing embers into unburned territory, the fire has grown tens of square miles daily since starting April 6 when a prescribed burn intended to clear out brush and small trees  to prevent future fires  got out of control. That fire merged with another wildfire several weeks later.

The blaze has burned more than 170 homes so far, but authorities have said that number is expected to increase significantly as more assessments are done and residents are allowed to return home to areas deemed safe.

The New Mexico fire has burned through mostly rural areas that include a mix of scattered ranch homes, historic Hispanic villages that date back centuries and high-dollar summer cabins. Some of the ranching and farming families who have called the area home for generations have spoken at length about the sacredness of the landscape, while many others have been too brokenhearted to express what they have lost.

Melley reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers John Antczak and Christopher Weber in Los Angeles, Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Scott Sonner in Reno, Nevada, 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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Herbster has vehemently denied all of the allegations and maintained that they're a political hit job coordinated by Pillen and Ricketts. Both men have dismissed Herbster's claim. He filed a defamation lawsuit against Slama, who countersued alleging battery. That legal battle is ongoing.

A member of the campaign previously said lawyers were working on a separate lawsuit against the Examiner. Novotny did not immediately respond to a question regarding the status of that potential suit.

State GOP leaders urged Republicans to unite behind Pillen at an event Wednesday morning. Herbster conceded the race late Tuesday night and was present at that unity event. Sen. Brett Lindstrom, the third-place candidate, also conceded Tuesday and wasn't at the event but endorsed Pillen in his concession speech.
The owner of a Lincoln warehouse is suing AltEn after the defunct ethanol plant failed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent and utilities.

In a lawsuit filed in Lancaster County District Court on Tuesday, 3801 Harney LLC -- which is based in Davey -- said AltEn agreed to rent space at its warehouse at 3700 N.W. 12th St. in October 2019.

The warehouse was one of at least two near the Lincoln Airport leased by AltEn after it went into operation in 2015.

Unlike Nebraska's two dozen other ethanol plants, which manufacture corn into biofuel, AltEn used unplanted seed coated in pesticides to produce biofuel at its plant south of Mead.

AltEn eventually became the final destination for 98% of all the unplanted treated seed in North America, the company said in a marketing memo.

But the Kansas-based company's unusual method for producing ethanol also created solid and liquid byproducts contaminated by high concentrations of insecticides and fungicides, which spread into the surrounding landscape.

It's unclear what AltEn stored in the 168,000-square-foot warehouse at 3700 N.W. 12th St.; the lawsuit states AltEn agreed to pay $10,893.75 monthly to lease the space, as well as $1,556.25 for insurance, taxes and utilities.

The warehouse's owner served AltEn with a termination notice Jan. 31 and said the ethanol company failed to make a payment afterward.

According to the lawsuit, AltEn also failed to remove its property from the Air Park warehouse. An attorney representing the warehouse did not return the Journal Star's call seeking comment.

The lawsuit seeks $225,257.64 in damages, as well as interest, attorney fees and other costs.

AltEn also rented space at a warehouse at 1200 Upland Avenue -- essentially across the street from the warehouse suing AltEn -- according to the marketing email it sent to seed companies advertising its services.

The lawsuit adds to the former biofuel company's legal woes.

The state of Nebraska sued AltEn in Saunders County District Court in March 2021 for numerous alleged violations of state environmental regulations. That case remains ongoing.

Earlier this year, six companies that formerly supplied AltEn with discard seed -- Bayer, Syngenta, Corteva, AgReliant, Beck's Superior Hybrids and WinField Solutions -- also sued the plant in federal court, alleging AltEn violated a contract requiring it to handle and manage discard seed in line with state statutes.

Each of those lawsuits remain open.

AltEn is also subject to a foreclosure effort stemming from delinquent property tax payments.

It previously paid back taxes and interest on other parcels where it was delinquent on its taxes.

Reach the writer at 402-473-7120 or cdunker@journalstar.com. On Twitter @ChrisDunkerLJS

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Going into the 2022 Iowa legislative session, there was a lot of talk about addressing the states shortage of affordable child care. Its major issue that affects scores of Iowa families and exacerbates the states workforce shortage.

Iowa is among states with the highest percentages of families where both parents work. There are child care deserts, where care providers cant be accessed. A task force was formed by Gov. Kim Reynolds to study the problem. Many lawmakers campaign on improving access and affordability.

But as the legislative session winds down, the Republican majorities in the House and Senate produced just two bills. And they fail to address some of biggest problems plaguing child care in Iowa, including establishing new centers, lowering costs for families and raising wages for child care workers.

One bill will allow 16-and 17-year-olds to work unsupervised in child care facilities. The measure would also loosen supervision rules for all child care workers, allowing one worker to supervise seven 2-year-olds or 10 3-year-olds.

The second bill would allow child care providers to ask low-income parents who receive state child care assistance to pay the difference between that assistance and the normal cost of child care services. The agreement would have to be put in writing.

These are disappointing, to say the least.

Allowing less supervision of young children in child care centers, potentially by teenage employees who have may or may not have proper training is a risky proposition we doubt most child care providers will embrace. And if they do, its out of panic due to a lack of staffing options. So its unlikely to improve accessibility or availability. Cutting costs by creating a less-safe environment not only doesnt solve a problem it creates new ones.

The state should, instead, be helping providers pay low-wage veteran staff more.

Republicans contend allowing centers to ask low-income families to pay more will make it more likely providers will take more families receiving assistance. But how does that help if families cant afford it?

These bills represent a failure by the Legislature to address a major problem facing Iowans. The each should be vetoed. Then lawmakers should spend some time on the campaign trail this fall actually listening to providers and families to find out how the state can truly help.

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The record breaking heat continues today, but a cold front will begin to push into Iowa this evening. Showers and storms look likely with the front and some could be severe. We've got everything you need to know about the weather Thursday and Friday in our latest forecast video.
JEFFERSON, S.D. -- The most refreshing ice cream of the summer may taste of blackberry, raspberry and strawberry.

Another thing worth noting: the Triple Jam ice cream -- available at Jefferson Beer Supply, 202 Main St. -- also has an Alcohol By Volume measurement of around 6.5 percent.

"The soft serve ice cream is made with Blake's Hard Cider and it has a bit of a kick," Anthony Roark explained, pumping out the frozen treat into a tiny cone. "Last summer, we experimented with a 12.5 percent stout beer that was really potent."

If quirky items like alcoholic ice creams are up your alley, then, you'll probably feel at home at Jefferson Beer Supply, which is a brewery and taproom owned by Roark and his partner Nicki Werner.

Located inside a former garage, Jefferson Beer Supply will have its grand opening, Thursday through Sunday, with a host of activities including food trucks, live music, an ice cream social and, even, a pot luck fundraiser for families impacted by cancer.

Wow, if that seems pretty ambitious for a typical craft beer brewhouse, you're right.

In fact, Werner wants the taproom to become a community gathering place for families in the Union County town of 633 people.

"Jefferson is Anthony's hometown but I've fallen in love with the community as well," the St. Louis native said. "If this concept takes off, I'd like it to attract more entrepreneurs to the area."

While Werner is a first-time business owner, she's been brewing beer for more than eight years.

"I've brewed beer professionally in Colorado, Wisconsin and, now, South Dakota," she explained. "I've also studied beer and brewing in Bavaria, Germany."

A former college art professor, Werner acknowledged she is a female in an industry dominated by dudes.

According to Forbes Magazine, around 76 percent of all craft breweries are owned by men. Though Werner, a member of the Pink Boots Society, a nonprofit supporting women working in the brewing professions, sees the tides shifting.

"I got into beer as a hobby when I was teaching art," she said. "Over time, I began to realized how interesting beer was and how it better my lifestyle. Eventually, I knew brewing was more creatively stimulating than teaching."

On the other hand, Roark's passion revolved around meat.

An experienced butcher, he initially met Werner when they were both students at Drake University, in Des Moines.

It was when the two were working in Sioux Falls -- Roark as a butcher and Werner as a brewer -- that two came up with a business plan.

"Nicki loved brewing beer and I loved making artisanal sausages," Roark said. "It seemed perfect because beer and sausage go together so well."

Together with Roark's mom, longtime Jefferson city finance officer Michaleen Roark, the couple came up with the concept behind Jefferson Beer Supply.

They received a shot of confidence -- as well as some seed money -- after winning the grand prize at Siouxland Growth Organization's 2021 Innovation Market.

Following a soft open earlier in the year, Jefferson Beer Supply began by selling beers from other local breweries while Werner finished her own brewhouse.

During its grand opening, she will be able to unveil a lineup of beers that will include a "Days of '59" Kolsch-style beer, named after the 1859 founding of Jefferson, as well as a rhubarb-flavored sour beer, inspired by a rhubarb pie recipes invented by Michaleen Roark.

"This is something that will set Jefferson Beer Supply beers apart from everybody else," Werner said. "Our beers are all about local ingredients and local people."

Well, what about some local artisanal sausages?

"I'll start making sausages later this summer," Roark insisted. "We want to perfect the beer first."

Giving a tour of the expansive brewhouse and taproom, Werner said she wanted to make brewing a culture that everybody would want to be a part of.

Plus she wanted Jefferson Beer Supply to celebrate her adopted community.

"Sioux City has some terrific craft breweries but Jefferson also needs a fun place to keep people here," Werner said.

So, can a small town brewery become a unique community center with something for everyone?

"We do have an ice cream social coming up," Roark said. "Kids can have their own ice cream while mom and dad can have come kicked-up ice cream."

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I hate to be trite, but my wife and I are experiencing "lesbian bed death." We've been happily married for three years. I'm not sure why we're not having sex. Sure, we're both busy, but it's more a question of just not ever feeling the urge. I know sex is important for a relationship, and I'm worried. Is there a way to reboot our sex life?  Bedfriends

It's understandably depressing if the only time there's heavy breathing in the bedroom is when you're re-enacting WrestleMania XXV  that is, trying to get the duvet cover on.

This doesn't mean you should buy into the lesbo-bashing notion of "lesbian bed death"  the myth that lesbian relationships, in particular, are where sex goes to die. The term traces back to a finding from social psychologist Phillip Blumstein and sociologist Pepper Schwartz, published in their 1983 book, "American Couples: Money, Work, Sex." Blumstein and Schwartz, reviewing results from their survey of 12,000 American couples, announced that lesbians in relationships "have sex less frequently by far than any other type of couple."

This single survey led to decades of sneering about lesbian relationships as the province of hot hand-holding. However, psychologist Suzanne Iasenza notes that a bunch of subsequent studies found that lesbians tend to be more sexually assertive and sexually satisfied than straight ladies  as well as less orgasm-challenged. (Helps when you know your way around the ladyparts without needing a two-hour lecture and a female anatomy PowerPoint.)

The reality is, so-called lesbian bed death actually happens to heterosexual women  once they get into relationships. In other words, the real issue is not being a lesbian but being a woman in a long-term partnership  and the assumption that male sexual response, driven by spontaneously occurring lust, should be considered the norm for women.

Sex researcher Rosemary Basson, M.D., finds that when a relationship is brand-new or when women are apart from their partners for days or weeks, they're likely to experience the "spontaneous sexual hunger" that men tend to have. However, once a relationship has been going for a while, women's sexual desire becomes "responsive." It isn't gone. It's "triggerable"  which is to say it's hibernating until somebody wakes it up with a little makey-outey.

This, however, brings us to another problem. Chances are, a reason that straight couples might have more sex is that men  driven by that spontaneous lust  are more likely to initiate. You and your wife need to initiate  and maybe even schedule sex dates so initiating doesn't become yet another thing that falls off your to-do list. Eventually, when you light a bunch of candles to set the mood, your wife's response should be something a little more erotic than "You gotta be kidding me. Another squirrel fried on the power line?"

For Whom The Cell Tolls

I'm addicted to my phone  Twitter, Instagram, news, texts...you name it. My girlfriend feels disrespected and unheard when I look at it while she's talking, but I can't seem to stop. Please help me out before I lose the woman I love!  Addicted

If your smartphone were actually smart, it would ping you to listen to your girlfriend before she's your ex-girlfriend trash-talking you in a bar.

Instead, smartphones and apps turn us into lab rats ferociously hitting the touch screen for another hit of techno-crack. They do this through what psychologists call "intermittent reinforcement"  "rewards" that come randomly and unpredictably. Checking your phone sometimes "rewards" you with a new message or newsbit  sometimes (or even often), but not always. When "rewards" come regularly and reliably  like when a rat pushes a bar and gets a food pellet every time  the rat chills out and only presses when, say, his stomach rings the dinner bell. Unpredictable rewards, on the other hand  only sometimes getting a hit  drive the rats to pump the bar incessantly, sometimes even till the little fellers go claws up.

However, there is hope for you  and your relationship  thanks to research on habit formation (by psychologist Phillippa Lally, among others). Repeatedly behaving differently when your girlfriend's talking to you  by turning your phone totally off and, if possible, relocating it to another room  can eventually change your default behavior from robotically checking your phone to attentiveness to those important to you.

In time, you might expand your attentiveness into other areas of your life. A good test for whether it's okay to be all up in your phone is swapping in its low-tech counterpart. For example, when the highway patrolman strides over and taps on your car window, is that really the best time to pick up that Stephen King novel and read the end of Chapter 4?
1 Farm to table

Can you believe it, the Sioux City Farmers Market is starting its season this week and we're still dating our checks 2021. Check out fresh produce, baked goods and more from 8 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. every Wednesday and Saturday between now and Oct. 29 at the Tyson Events Center parking lot on the intersection of Pearl Street and Tri-View Avenue.

2 Legendary country

Iconic country star Tanya Tucker is coming to Sloan, Iowa's WinnaVegas Casino Resort at 8 p.m. Saturday as part of her "Hard Luck Tour." Hugely influential for her outlaw image, Tanya was only 13 years old when she released "Delta Dawn" -- her first big hit.

3 Stylish Strolling

The Sioux City Art Center, in conjunction with Art SUX, 3 Rivers Gallery and Gallery 103, will be hosting the first Downtown Sioux City Artwalk at 5:30 p.m. Thursday. Start off at the Art Center, 225 Nebraska St., and finish at Art SUX, 515 Fourth St., where the entire first floor will be dedicated to Sioux City Community School District students.

4 Shakespeare: Lost & Found

Was a lost play by William Shakespeare discovered in a parking lot? Maybe, but it does need a quick edit job. Lamb Arts Regional Theatre, 417 Market St., will present "William Shakespeare's Long Lost First Play (Abridged)," now through May 22. Go to lambtheatre.com for details.

5 Omaha, Indiana???

Know where country group Kali Indiana is from? Surprisingly, they hail from Omaha. Who knew? They'll also be at Beer Can Alley, 1109 Fourth St., at 9 p.m. Saturday.

6 Hey, little birdy

Here's your vocabulary lesson for the week. An ornithophile is another name for a person who likes birds. The Dorothy Pecaut Nature Center, 4500 Sioux River Road, will hold a Birding for Beginners class from 2 to 3:30 p.m. Saturday. So, alert the young ornithophile in your life.

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Bitch Media will shutter next month, ending a 26-year run as one of the publishing worlds rare independent, feminist voices. From humble origins as a zine in 90s, Bitch went on to influence a generation of feminist media, growing to encompass not only a print magazine but a website, podcasts, and a college speaker series. But all of that was no match for the realities of 2022: As a statement the organization released on April 12 explained, despite incredible effort, we have concluded that we are unable to sustainably continue creating the quality content that our readers and supporters expect.

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The timing here really stings: One of the publishing worlds most respected independent feminist voices is closing just as the country has been plunged into a state of feminist emergency, in the form of the impending Supreme Court ruling striking down Roe v. Wade. On a recent episode of The Waves, Slates podcast on gender and feminism, I spoke to Bitch co-founder Andi Zeisler about the state of feminist media, what happened to Bitch, and whether some of the same backlash that led to the end of Roe was a factor in its closure. Our conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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Heather Schwedel: One thing about Bitch that is obviously radical is the title. I think we forget how big a deal it was to title a magazine Bitch. Now, you maybe say to your friend, Hey, bitch, but bitch was a bigger deal, or it was more transgressive back then. How did you pick the name?

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Andi Zeisler: A lot of it really came down to the fact that strong women, women who stand up for themselves, women who dont act the way everyone wants them to, there are a lot of words that arent gendered to talk about people who are not acting like you want them to. But with women, bitch is always the first one. And growing up in New York City, we had certainly heard it a lot. If youre walking down the street, someone catcalls you and you dont answer, bitch is the thing that youre going to be hearing next.

We really thought about the way that there was a kind of anticipatory retaliation to the title. So we were like, Well, people are probably going to call us that, so were just going to go ahead and do it and call ourselves that first.

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Feminism and its place in the culture changed so much since you founded the magazine. How did that affect things?

At the time we started Bitch, feminism was still not something that people were scrambling to associate themselves with. But its true that particularly with the rise of the feminist blogosphere and social media as well, feminism became something that was demystified for more people. For Bitch, for a really long time, we didnt really think of other feminist outlets as our competition. We really treated it as a rising tide lifts all boats. The more feminist media there is, the more feminists there will be.

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Unfortunately, this feels like a particularly bad time for Bitch to go under. Its never been clearer than right now that theres a vast difference between feminism as an aesthetic and feminism as a foundational need and a foundational process of liberatory politics.

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The writer Jude Doyle wrote a lovely remembrance of Bitch on Medium. One point they made really stood out to me, they wrote that these closures are a sign of the current anti-feminist backlash and that the shuttering of feminist publications and the impending appeal of Roe v. Wade are intrinsically linked. So this might be incredibly naive or failing to see the big picture of me, but I tend to think of Bitchs situation and others like it as more about the economic realities of the publishing industry or maybe even consumer fatigue with what youve called feminism as an aesthetic, marketplace feminism. So what do you think about that?

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I love Judes piece. I just thought it was really lovely and I really appreciated that they talked about so many different aspects of what made Bitch different. I agree with you though that so much of Bitchs struggles have always been related to the idea of how people value media and whether they value independent media. It was really never easy financially to be a feminist nonprofit, like none of us got in it for the money. That was never a thing. But over the years, certainly the thing that made us stand out in an increasingly digital marketplace was the fact that we also had a print magazine. But the print magazine became increasingly hard to sustain because the cost of printing kept going up, the magazine distribution process is very arcane and often quite wasteful.

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That presented us with a real dilemma in the sense that the print magazine was our flagship product, but it was also the thing that tied up the most money and kept us from really being able to develop a lot of our non-magazine programming, whether that was podcasts or our campus program.

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After the announcement was made about closing and there was the initial round of loving eulogies, some former Bitch staffers spoke up on social media about working conditions at the magazine and company, basically talking about how overworked they felt. One of them was Marina Watanabe, a former Bitch social media editor, and she wrote a thread on Twitter that she ended by asking, Is it possible to be an independent feminist org that exists under capitalism and not have these issues of burnout and overwork? What do you think?

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I think thats an incredibly valid question and its certainly one that has come up so many times during Bitchs lifespan. And unsustainability isnt just financial. If everyone is feeling overworked and everyone is feeling burned out and everyone feels like theyre doing two or three jobs, thats also not sustainable. I think with nonprofits and often with workplaces that are by and for women, there can be this dangerous dynamic that you get into of feeling like, If I complain that Im working too hard or Im not getting paid enough, I am going against the spirit of this project.

We were always very conscious of not wanting to perpetuate that. At the same time, I feel like increasingly so many media organizations, nonprofit or not, have those problems. It is a problem with capitalism, and not just feminism. I think overwork and burnout are really endemic to most progressive organizations, and I cant really say for sure what would solve that.

You can hear the rest of this interview below. For more, subscribe to The Waves.
Care and Feeding is Slates parenting advice column. In addition to our traditional advice, every Thursday we feature an assortment of teachers from across the country answering your education questions. Have a question for our teachers? Email askateacher@slate.com or post it in the Slate Parenting Facebook group.

My 7-year-old daughter skipped first grade, after her small private school (we live in a pretty small suburb) recommended she skip a grade to be more academically challenged. She has always been shy and quiet. We prepared her for the skip for months, explaining what was happening and why it was happening. She seemed excited to work on harder stuff in class.

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However, things have not gone well. All the girls in her new class have been friends since pre-K and the clique is hard to break into. My daughter prefers to spend her recess alone, reading, rather than engaging with the other kids. In harsher words, shes basically shared the other kids arent like her and she doesnt know what to talk about with them. Im concerned about her socialization and that we perhaps made the wrong choice by advancing her a grade. Did we? Do you have any ideas for how we can encourage her social development? She does play a club sport, but is similarly shy/quiet there.

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 Skipped Over

Dear Skipped Over,

It doesnt matter if skipping a grade was a mistake since theres no going back now. I strongly believe in alleviating parents of any guilt or regret about their decision-making. We do the best we can and move on. None of us are perfect. No point in beating ourselves up over our imperfection.

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The good news is that your daughter is being academically challenged and instructed on her intellectual level, which is great for her.

In terms of her socialization, you may want to step in and facilitate some social activities on her behalf to get the ball rolling. If you can plan opportunities for your daughter to engage socially with her classmates via backyard cookouts, birthday parties, picnics, park outings, and the like, it may give your daughter the chance to find a way into the group of already established friends. It means that youll be hosting some of these events and putting in some legwork to make them happen, but sometimes it only takes a well-planned get together or a memorable day at the beach for a child to gain a foothold into a friendship.

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You could do this by calling the parents of these children or sending invitations to school or via the mail. Shy kids are perfectly capable of establishing solid friendships, but they often need a boost in terms of getting those relationships off the ground. Fostering opportunities for her to spend quality time with kids can help enormously.

Party on!

Mr. Dicks (fifth grade teacher, Connecticut)

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How can I help my child get work done in noisy classrooms? I have a neurotypical eighth grader who does well in school, but she always ends up with quite a bit of homework because when teachers give the students time in class to get started, she cant focus when the other kids are talking amongst each other. I have been teaching art in schools and Ive helped in the classroom (younger grades), so I know its quite different these days than when I went to school. We had to be quiet when we did our work, and we were. Since Im not going to be able to change the classroom environment for her, do you have any suggestions on how to deal with this? Does she need occupational therapy? She cant wear noise-canceling headphones or anything. I wish I could teach her a way to ignore the noise. Even at home, she cant do homework that requires focus when there is a TV on in another roomit bothers her too much.

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Definitely Distractable

Dear Definitely Distractable,

I know you say she cant wear noise-canceling headphones, but Im wondering if this is a broad school rule (most likely to avoid having students connected to their cell phones), and whether youve explicitly asked her teachers to allow her to wear them? If you explain her struggle, I imagine that the school could accommodate this request.

If the school refuses, I think its worth pushing back. While some kids benefit from being able to work collaboratively on assignments, others really do need a quiet environment to be productive. Since its practically impossible to serve both types of students at once, allowing a student to wear noise-canceling headphones seems like a reasonable way to meet everyones needs (particularly if the headphones are not connected to a device).

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I cannot say whether or not your daughter needs occupational therapy, but some OTs do help kids with attention issues. If you think she would benefit from learning attention strategies, theres no home in booking a consultation. Good luck!

 Ms. Holbrook (high school teacher, Texas)

I have noticed that my kids dont get as much time writing with a pencil and paper as I did as a kid. As a result, my 12-year-old son has horrible handwriting, and his hands get super tired when he tries to write for any length of time. My younger daughter likes to draw so she has more experience writing and doesnt have those same issues.

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In the same vein, my kids are on devices and computers at school a lot more than I was as a kid, but they dont seem to be learning how to type properly. I remember taking a typing class in middle school, but none of the schools my kids have had to do this.

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What are the thoughts of todays teachers when it comes to handwriting and typing? I assume it varies across schools and districts, but both are important skills. I know that I could have them practice both outside of school but it seems like school should be teaching this?

Down With Writing

Dear DWW,

Its a good, hard question. As the world evolves and new content is constantly added to our curriculum, balance must be reached in terms of instructional time. Unless hours are added to the school day (and teacher pay increased accordingly), we cant be expected to continue teaching everything at the same level, since instructional content is constantly being piled on. The number of things that students today are learning compared to the past is astounding. Something has to give. Handwriting quality is probably one of those things, and it probably makes sense.

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So yes, I think its important for children to learn to write with pencil and paper while also acknowledging that almost all of the writing they will do beyond elementary school will be on a keyboard. So I suspect that handwriting skills will be less developed compared to when you and I were in school. The tradeoff will be that students will have facility with a keyboardsomething that we probably developed much later in life, if at all.

To me the more relevant question is not how handwriting plays into all of thiswere not about to stop teaching kids how to put a pencil to paper and writebut what to do about cursive. Will cursive survive in the age of the keyboard? I teach my students to write in cursive because I think its important to be able to sign your name and read cursive. I also know that no teacher will require anything to be written in cursive, so once they leave my classroom, these students retention and practice of cursive is predicated almost entirely on their own desire. Some school districts have given up teaching it entirely.

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Curriculum is a constantly changing. Tough decisions are made every day in terms of what will be added, retained, and removed as human knowledge expands, technology advances, and the needs of students change over time.

Mr. Dicks (fifth grade teacher, Connecticut)

More Advice From Slate

My daughters high school recently had a theme week, where students dressed up each day. Tuesday was -er dayas in painter, teacher, lawyer, doctor and a male student chose to come dressed as a transgender female. This was not his way of coming out; it was done for laughs. I think the school mishandled it. Should I address it, and if so, how?
Ever since a few dozen baristas began an organizing drive in Buffalo, New York, last year, Starbucks has been engaged in a crude union-busting campaign that has made a mockery of the image it has sought to portray to its customers and workforce.

Pointing to the health benefits, 401(k) match, and college tuition benefits it offers, the company has long boasted that its a progressive, worker-friendly employer. But that claim now rings hollow thanks to the aggressive way it has sought to crush its employees efforts to win more of a voice at their workplace, with Starbucks using tactic after nasty tactic from the classic union busters playbook.

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Making things worse, Starbucks has insulted its workers and customers intelligence by pretending to do no such thing. Executives maintain they are not anti-union, but rather just pro-partnerthe term the company often uses for employeeswhile pursuing union-busting strategies as aggressive as anything Amazon has cooked up.

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Last fall, after nearly every worker at a Starbucks in Cheektowaga, just outside Buffalo, signed cards asking for a union election, becoming one of the nations first Starbucks to seek to unionize, the company swiftly closed the store for two months, saying it would become a training center. Starbucks dispatched the shops baristas to other locations, with many of the Cheektowaga workers saying the closing was a pretext to undermine their pro-union solidarity, slow their momentum, and get them to quit. They cried foul.

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After the staffs at several other Starbucks around the city petitioned for union elections, headquarters shipped in dozens of out-of-town managers to work inside its Buffalo stores and essentially shadow the local employees. Even Rossann Williams, Starbucks president of retail for North America, was suddenly working side by side with rank-and-file baristas as they served grande caramel macchiatos.

Starbucks claimed those managers were sent not to keep tabs on workers, but rather to listen to their concerns. The company also said it sent managers to Buffalo in order to solve operational issues and remodel stores.

But many Buffalo baristas said they felt spied on and believed the managers were sent to stifle pro-union talk. A district manager from Arizona whod been asked to go to Buffalo was also caught on tape acknowledging that it was a last-ditch effort to try and stop the unionization effort.

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Starbucks has repeatedly said it in no way seeks to intimidate workers into voting against the union. But one Buffalo barista, Will Westlake, told of being summoned to an hourlong anti-union session where it was just him and six managers, who told him how great all the benefits are at Starbucks, and if we vote in a union, we may not have any of those benefits.

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Telling employees that their pay and benefits could get worse with a unionwhich almost never actually happensis a common tactic companies use against organizing campaigns. If having that conversation six-on-one doesnt count as intimidation, I dont know what does. (And on a side note: If companies really believed that having a union somehow lowered employees pay, wouldnt they be eagerly encouraging their workers to organize?)

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On May 2, Howard Schultz, who was recently reinstalled as CEO, evidently to help quash the fast-growing unionization effort, announced a clevermany workers will say insidiousanti-union ploy that was no doubt suggested to him by Starbucks $500-plus-an-hour lawyers at Littler Mendelson. ($500 is more than many Starbucks baristas earn in a week.)

With Starbucks getting trounced in union vote after union vote and dozens more union elections in the weeks ahead, Schultz announced that Starbucks would give sizable raises to its nonunion workers, but not to its unionized workersthat is, not to the workers at the more than 60 Starbucks that have already unionized.

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Schultz said he couldnt give those raises to the unionized baristas because that would be an illegal unilateral imposition of wages and benefits on them without the unions agreement. But the union, Starbucks Workers United, asserts that Schultzs move constitutes illegal discrimination against union membersa move to punish those baristas who have unionized and also to improperly chill workers interest in unionizing across the U.S.

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Many employees say Starbucks has used another insidious strategy to sabotage union efforts: Baristas in Buffalo, Richmond, Knoxville, Eugene, Mesa, and elsewhere claim that soon after workers in their stores petitioned to hold a union election, Starbucks cut their hours while sometimes also hiring new staff.

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Jenna Black, a barista in Buffalo, said her weekly hours were slashed from 25 to just 16 or 18. Notably, Starbucks workers become ineligible for benefits when their hours fall below 20 a week. Maddie VanHook, a barista in Cleveland, said that some full-time workers had their hours cut from 35 hours to 22 and that some part-time partners are only seeing one shift a week compared to their usual three or four.

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Many workers believe Starbucks reduced hours with the express purpose of diluting strong union support in some stores; that move, workers said, encouraged pro-union baristas to quit because their weekly pay was cut sharply and they might no longer qualify for benefits. At the same time, Starbucks hired new baristas in some of those stores to further dilute union support. With this strategy, Starbucks seemed to be sending a loud message that if you seek to unionize, bad things can happen.

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Reggie Borges, a Starbucks spokesman, says that there was no systematic cutting of hours and that Starbucks at times reduced hours not to hurt union efforts, but because business had slowed down during the winter. Any claims of anti-union activity are categorically false, Borges told The New York Times.

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In other words, believe me, and not your lying eyes. Ever since Starbucks faced the initial unionization efforts in Buffalo, it has gone far to abandon truth and fair play. Last Friday, the National Labor Relations Board issued an unusually wide-ranging complaint against Starbucks, accusing it of more than 200 violations of the nations labor laws as part of its anti-union efforts in Buffalo, including firing six pro-union workers, disciplining and surveilling others, and closing stores.

Stating that Starbucks egregious anti-union conduct could cripple the organizing drives in various cities, the labor board has also taken the unusual step of going to federal court, where it has accused the company of illegally firing pro-union baristas in Memphis and Phoenix and asked that they be immediately reinstated.

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It seems that Starbucks attitude is all is fair in love, war, and union busting. I often wonder why so many corporations try hard to comply with environmental laws, securities laws, and laws against racial discrimination and sexual harassment, but when it comes to violating federal laws in fighting a union, hey, no problem with that.

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Perhaps one reason is that federal labor laws are so toothless that companies dont face financial penalties for violating themfor instance, they cant be fined for illegally firing workers in retaliation for leading a unionization drive. (The PRO Act, backed by President Joe Biden, but blocked by a Republican filibuster, seeks to remedy this.)

With more than 60 Starbucks unionized, and workers at dozens more likely to vote to unionize soon, a big question now is whether Starbucks will negotiate in good faith or stonewall for months and years to drag out reaching a first contract. When it comes to the union, Schultz evidently thinks his company is an immovable object. But the Starbucks union drive increasingly seems like an unstoppable force.

If Starbucks does stonewall the contract talks, Ive also started to wonder if it could end up facing a widespread customer boycottsomething on the scale of the United Farm Workers famous grape boycott of the 1960s. There are lots of anti-union companies, like Amazon, that have managed to avoid a powerful consumer backlash. But Starbucks, with its activist workforce and many progressive customers, might be differentespecially since there are plenty of other places to get coffee. The biggest name in lattes might prove not so immovable after all.
This article is part of a series from Future Tense and New Americas Future of Land and Housing Program on managed retreat and other adaptations to climate change.

The idea that the Atlantic Ocean will one day swallow Miami due to climate change is nothing new. In fact, its at least six decades old. Frank Capras far-seeing 1958 film, The Unchained Goddess, envisioned a climate-wrecked and flooded city, with disaster tourists in glass-bottom boats peering through 150 feet of seawater at drowned bungalows and art deco towers.

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Were unlikely to see the 20-story swells that Capra described, as most scientists today predict 5 to 6 feet of sea-level rise in South Florida by 2100. Yet climate change very much remains an existential threat to Miami, with its effects increasingly apparent today. The citys surrounding waters rose 6 inches within the past 25 yearssome of the fastest rates globallyand sunny day flooding (which is exactly what it sounds like) is up 400 percent since 2006.

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Absent large-scale adaptation, things will become increasingly catastrophic for Miami. Worst-case projections for 2100 from the research group Climate Central show South Beach completely inundated and generally uninhabitable, while downtown Miami and nearby residential neighborhoods could experience near-constant street and first-floor flooding. Under this scenario, nationally-critical infrastructure, including Miami International Airports runways and the Port of Miamis cargo docks, will disappear. Additional saltwater intrusion in the Biscayne Aquifer, which is already happening, could deprive South Florida of its primary source for drinking water. And tides could eventually encroach Miami from both the Atlantic and the Everglades.

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If these dreary, calamitous predictions come to fruition, they mean billions of dollars in damages and property loss, climate gentrification and increased inequality in higher-elevation neighborhoods such as Little Haiti, and untold political and social instability as nearly 1 million people become displaced. Eventually, a direct hit by a mega-hurricane could simply wipe an increasingly dilapidated Miami off the map.

But a bleak future as the American Atlantis isnt inevitable, as long as the regions leaders and residents take action to survive into the 22nd century. Many of the efforts proposed or underway right now are wholly inadequate to deal with climate change in South Florida. Instead, Miami must rip up its current plans, drastically reimagine how it can live with rising waters, and devote unprecedented resources to transform itself into a new-age Amsterdam (dare we say: Miamsterdam?) or Venice.

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In March, John Morales, a meteorologist from Miami, succinctly captured the limited scale of the citys present strategy in a Washington Post opinion piece: Miamis master plan, if implemented, would protect the city from five-year storms. The Netherlands Rotterdam, by contrast, is protected against 10,000-year storms. Current projects across the regionsuch as installing more pumps to drain water back into the ocean, raising roads and buildings by a foot or two, or constructing more sea wallsare simply stopgaps for the coming crisis. As one example, Miami is geologically built on a foundation of porous limestone, so a 20-foot sea wall downtown, along Biscayne Bay, will do very little to keep water from rising up out of the ground.

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Moving beyond the usual doom and gloom of climate change, its easy (and a little tempting) to imagine the future city as a series of interconnected, artificial islands. Or, similar to climate fiction author Kim Stanley Robinsons New York 2140, maybe Miami could reinvent itself as a half-flooded yet innovative utopia with sky bridges between high-rises, rooftop farms and aquaculture pens, and way too many water taxis to count.

These futuristic reimaginings can help us move beyond feelings of helplessness and apathy in regard to climate change. Leaving sci-fi behind, however, there are actually a wide range of more realistic and well-established adaptation policies that Miami can adopt in the next several decades to better live with sea-level rise and hotter temperatures.

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Looking at the experience of the Dutchwho reclaimed nearly 20 percent of their land from the North Sea or lakes during previous centuries with much less developed technologybrings insights to the seemingly insurmountable problems facing South Florida. While its true that Miamis challenge is unique, as the city sits on a leaky, porous foundation, it can still learn a great deal from the Netherlands holistic engineering approach to water management. City leaders should shamelessly copy Dutch techniques in waterways and low-lying areas, including massive dike construction, canals, colossal storm surge barriers such as the Maeslantkering, back-up systems, and deployment of complex pumping networks. More recent innovations to fight flood waterssuch as parking garages that double as emergency reservoirs and basketball courts that also act as retention pondsdont just protect infrastructure; they serve economic and social needs, as well.

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During a 2017 interview Henk Ovink, the Netherlands special envoy for water affairs, said that what Miami needs is an approach that is comprehensive, systematic, digestible, and actionable politically and socially (in other words, a massively ambitious plan that nonetheless says: Heres the roadmap for the next 50 years, and heres what we do in the first five). Developing such a strategy for Miami will certainly require massive funding, strong government leadership, and vigorous public activismbut its necessary to save the city.

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Beyond water management strategies, Miami must also develop considerably new or reinforced zoning and building codes. Homes, commercial buildings, and urban infrastructure will bear the brunt of climate effects, and theres a host of potential solutions: banning construction in low-lying flood zones; elevating buildings, their critical equipment (such as mechanical systems and electrical infrastructure), and roads five or six feet above projected sea-level rise; extending waterfront setbacks, removing septic tanks from the ground, and reinforcing building foundations to resist water pressure.

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Aside from rising tides and storm surges, research suggests Miami residents will sweat through 100 to 200 days of deadly heat by 2100. Already, there are several construction techniques that can reduce the impact of scorching temperatures citywide. These include extensive use of green infrastructure such as green walls, green roofs, and vegetated surfaces to provide thermal insulation and shade. Reducing impervious surfaces and using reflective roofs are also measures that can counteract the suns rays.

All of these measures will require extensive buy-in from the real estate market and tourism sector. Contractors, developers, and others in the construction industry note that enforcing such standards drives up construction costs (if ever so slightly) in an already unaffordable market. But that doesnt mean these changes are impossible. Making them happen will require a twofold approach. First, community engagement in developing Miamis building codes is critical, to ensure that residents interests are well-represented. Second, public pressure on local authorities should emphasize the need to develop incentives for innovative financial models to help offset any increased construction costs.

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Then theres nature-based solutions, many of which would enhance the effectiveness of manmade interventions. For instance, building sea walls and planting mangroves or other wetland speciesthrough what is known as a hybrid approachcan reduce the threat of inundation while also providing a habitat for marine life and improving water quality. As noted in Miami-Dades latest Coastal Risk Management Feasibility Study, mangroves can attenuate storm surges by one-half to one foot along the vulnerable shorelines of Biscayne Bay. These trees can also provide protection during hurricane season, although local officials will need to think a bit bigger: Planting forests that beat back larger waves will involve institutional planning at a massive scale.

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Finally, its crucial to continue reducing greenhouse gas emissions in Miami and beyond. We know that resiliency plans cant succeed unless humanity reduces the impact of activities that produce heat-trapping gas. Thats why ideas and strategies for reducing communities energy consumption and minimizing their carbon footprint, whether well-established or cutting edge, must remain at the center of public debate, official policies, and scientific study. Climate plans arent an excuse to continue large-scale fossil fuel burning, negligent land use, and deforestation.

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If Miami continues on its current course, the socioeconomic effects of climate change in the coming decades will be severe, likely including widespread destruction of property, depletion of freshwater sources, damaged ecosystems, and significant loss of life. Although these challenges are immense, the major barrier in addressing them is not the lack of knowledge, technical capability, or models for effective strategizing.

Rather, the challenge in South Florida and elsewhere is a lack of sustained political will, effective governance, and the institutional infrastructure that can plan, develop, and implement a comprehensive and long-term climate plan starting right now. Miami has the tools to save itself from the encroaching oceanits up to its residents and their politicians to keep the city above the waves and thriving well into the next century.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
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.

If Justice Samuel Alitos leaked opinion overturning Roe v. Wade accurately forecasts the Supreme Courts final opinion, the next battles in abortion regulation will be fought in Congress, in state capitals, and online. The online fight will be brutal and fierceand will test the ability of platforms and regulators to control harmful speech.

It is easy to imagine abortion opponents posting graphic photos of aborted fetuses, and pro-choice advocates sharing images of women and children harmed by lack of access to safe medical care. Protests will be documented by videos that go viral online. Both sides will make threats online. Online tensions are likely to boil over into offline violence.

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Platforms will be caught in the middle, trying to mediate a culture war with immense consequences for human welfare, while making decisions that please almost no one and anger both Democrats and Republicans. Inevitably, their decisions will be inconsistent, their policies and reasoning will shift as new facts emerge, and they will make mistakes. Each controversial decision will be an opportunity for a news story, a congressional hearing, or a government investigation. The calls to regulate online content will grow louder and louder. But will they work?

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[Read: Do You Really Need to Worry About Your Period Tracking App in a Post-Roe World?]

At the federal level, it isnt likely. All of the fierce debates on online content in recent yearsthe George Floyd protests, the 2020 election, and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitolhave spurred calls for regulation of Big Tech. But despite repeated pleas to do something, Congress has stood flat footed. Democrats want to compel platforms to remove more content, while Republicans want to compel them to remove less. With opposing rationales, they have not been able to forge a path forward.

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While Washington will almost inevitably remain gridlocked, reform at the state level is more likely. In a post-Roe world, regulating abortion will fall to the stateswhich are also likely to take the lead in creating rules around online content. Over the past few years, states exemplified their role as the laboratories of democracy on tech reform, passing laws in areas like privacy and tax.

But regulating online content presents unique challenges for states. The First Amendment narrows what states can do, since they cant dictate speech restrictions for private actors like online platforms. Theyre also limited because federal law preempts state law, with Section 230 limiting platform liability for content they host. As a result, state efforts to regulate online content have faced legal challenges and been blocked by courts before they ever take effect.

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Faced with these challenges, what can state policymakers do to respond to the coming online content war?

In a recent paper, we offered a menu of options for state policymakers seeking to regulate online content.

We start from the proposition that proposals will be more likely to succeed if they take the concerns from both sides of the aisle seriously. For that reason, our recommendations broadly tackle issues raised by both Democrats and Republicans, addressing both harmful content and the costs of errant removal.

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[Read: The Potential Overturn of Roe Shows Why We Need More Digital Privacy Protections]

First, to better address upcoming problems with online content, we need to understand the scope of those problems. By funding work by in-state researchers and providing platforms liability protections for sharing research data, states can help us understand better the debates, types of content, and controversies that will populate online platforms in the wake of Roes reversal. Amid fractious online discussion, it is essential that researchers and policymakers understand not only how the problems of online content and content moderation are evolving, but also how those problems are resulting in harms across online and offline communities.

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Second, platforms will likely be forced to make difficult moderation decisions about graphic or extreme content. For instance, how should platforms handle live videos of abortions performed outside of the health care system? These decisions will require judgment calls about how best to balance community safety, free expression, and the social and political value of graphic content. Platforms should develop clear policies on these issues and enforce them consistently.

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States can play an important role holding platforms responsible for their content policies and moderation decisions. Existing consumer protection laws already provide states the ability to prosecute platforms that break the promises they make to their users. Whatever policy a platform adopts on whether to permit or remove graphic videos of abortion procedures, harmed women, or aborted fetuses, it should be held accountable if it violates that commitment. By prosecuting systemic and egregious violations of terms of service, states can help ensure that users understand and trust the commitments platforms make to them.

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Finally, anticipating a radical shock to online discussion, states can work to ensure the resiliency of our communication systems by supporting the institutions and infrastructures that provide important information and resources to citizens. States could endow new multistakeholder commissions that draw from industry, academia, civil society, and government to consider the problems of online content and content moderation in their state. States can also shore up the communication offices and practices of government institutions to ensure that they fill information holes on abortion regulation with reliable information. Finally, states can better support local news outlets, providing people with valuable reporting and analysis on abortion-related issues in their communities.

None of these policy options will solve the online content challenges likely to follow from a reversal of Roe. However, as states increasingly play a larger role in determining abortion rights, they also have an opportunity to support healthy online content.

Read more of Slates coverage on abortion rights here.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
If Roe v. Wade gets overturned, it wont just affect women who need an abortion. For people seeking fertility treatment and their doctors, the big concern is the foundation of the fight against abortion: fetal personhood. If a fetus is a person, it raises all kinds of questions.

This is not a paranoid fear. Six states have introduced fetal personhood bills this year. A few months back, Sen. Rand Paul sent a fundraising letter to his constituents in which, after arguing the time to grovel before the Supreme Court is over, he asked for their support for the federal Life at Conception Act. It would declare fertilized eggs to be persons.

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Natalie Crawford, an OB-GYN and reproductive endocrinologist in Austin, Texas, deals with fertilized eggs all the time. A normal round of in vitro fertilization means creating lots of them, watching them develop into embryos, and then implanting one or more right back into the uterus. On Thursdays episode of What Next, I spoke to Crawford about how Roe helped pave the way for IVF and its acceptance, and how attacks on reproductive rights are already affecting her work. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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Dr. Natalie Crawford: IVF has allowed us to do genetic testing for aneuploidy, which is the top reason why its harder to get pregnant after age 35. That means random chromosome abnormalities. And so with IVF and genetic testing of embryos, were able to know which embryos have the highest chance of turning into a live-born baby, which ones are going to result in miscarriage or genetic abnormality.

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Mary Harris: And you make choices based on that.

Exactly. So you might be 40 and you might send off eight embryos, but only two of them may actually be genetically normal. You dont want to worry about the other six. You dont want to be forced to transfer the other six. Youd like to transfer the one thats genetically normal and save another one for a future child. And if none of them are normal, youd probably want to do another cycle and not be transferring abnormal embryos.

One scenario we could see is that all genetic testing is now off limits. How do you remove five to eight cells from an embryo if its its own independent life and has rights?

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I wonder if you began thinking about the way limiting abortion rights could impact you as a practitioner way before the last week or two. Can you take me back to when the six-week ban passed in Texas? What were you thinking at the time?

So definitely at the time I was already thinking about how its impacting a lot of my patients. Infertility patients have highly, highly desired pregnancies.  I had a patient who conceived naturally right before she was going to do an IVF cycle and the pregnancy ended up being genetically abnormal, and she was told this child wouldnt survive. She could carry it to term and try to give birth, or she could terminate the pregnancy. This was right before the ban went into place. And so she was able to choose for her and her partner that termination was the right choice. That also allowed us to fast-track her onto getting to IVF sooner, you know, figuring out which embryos are genetically normal.

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You have your own story that you decided to go public with in the wake of S.B. 8. Can you tell me about your story and why you wanted to go public with it?

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I had an ectopic pregnancy, and what that means is a pregnancy in the fallopian tube.

Nonviable.

Nonviable, highly desired. I had three miscarriages before that. This was my fourth pregnancy. I was an infertility fellow. I was very excited. And it was devastating.

The choices at that time were twofold. It was to either get it surgically removed or to try and use methotrexate, which is a chemotherapy agent that kills rapidly dividing cells and so essentially terminates the pregnancy so that you dont have it rupture in your fallopian tube and so that you can recover from the situation, because there is no scenario where you could take a pregnancy from your fallopian tube and implant it in the uterus. I know there are people saying that there are, and theres states trying to pass that. And I swear, if that was an option, I would have gone to the moon to have it done. I would have had anybody do that. But thats not an option. Once that pregnancy starts to implant, its creating a blood connection. It created a blood connection in my fallopian tube. The fallopian tube does not have the muscular support of the uterus to get a strong enough connection.

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And if that had happened to me, many hundred years ago, I would have just died, and that would have been the end of my story. Thats what happens. It ruptures and you bleed to death. So I was able to get methotrexate. It was terrible. It was emotional. Physically its a terrible injection of a chemotherapy medication. You feel like you got hit by a truck. But I was able to do that, and I was eventually able to go on and have my two kids. And if I hadnt been able to receive that medication that terminated that pregnancy, I wouldnt have been able to keep on and have my children later on.

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You compared yourself to a woman in South Texas.

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Yes. Who had to travel out of state.

What happened to her?

This was right after S.B. 8, when there was a lot of fear in Texas that people would be turned in or would be prosecuted. And she went to an emergency room in South Texas, was diagnosed with an ectopic pregnancy, and she was told they couldnt do anything about it. And so she got in her car and drove out of state, I believe to New Mexico, and was able to receive treatment there. So she ended up being fine. But thats an extremely dangerous situation. It could have ruptured while she was in the car, she could have died on the way, she could have had a medical emergency.

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Seems like a life-threatening situation to methere are supposed to be workarounds for that.

You should be treated right away. And under S.B. 8, you should be able to treat somebody for the life of the mother. It does have that exclusion. However, who decides that? In this scenario, the person in the ER who saw her was too fearful because of S.B. 8 to treat her, and sent her in her car across the state of Texas to another state, risking her life for that treatment. And that to me is just the Wild West of medicine.

We have a treatment that could save her life. And because of fear, because of this bill, a provider, somebody who saw her, sent her away. That is just so beyond what is appropriate medical care. And were going to see more and more stories like that, especially as states are [enacting] felony laws and limiting access to some of the early medical treatments we use to aid in miscarriage or for early termination of pregnancy.

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Once Roe v. Wade is overturned, theres going to be some confusion about what the law means and how people can act. And it means that individuals will have a weird amount of power, like the person you meet in the ER who just says, I guess Im not allowed to do this procedure now. Or the prosecutor whos like, I think I should charge you with something now. Like there was a case in South Texas of a woman charged with murder for self-induced abortion in the last month.

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Right. It ended up getting dropped, but she got charged with it. I mean, that is mind-boggling, and youre correct that theres going to be so much uncertainty that individuals are going to be left up to decide what they think. Its going be trial by error, what they think is best, and then things will start being taken to court. And if that woman who was charged for her own self-abortion, if that had stood, you know, what kind of precedent are we setting? What kind of charges are we starting to see?

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And Ill even just say, as somebody whos a fertility doctor, one of the medications I prescribe, misoprostol, I use those to soften the cervix before surgery. So sometimes I do surgery called hysteroscopy. These are on nonpregnant patients who want to be pregnant. I put a camera through the cervix, into the uterus, look around, fix scar tissue, take out polyps or fibroids. This medication makes it a lot easier of a procedure. Its easier to get the camera through the cervix. Its safer. It makes the procedure carry less risks.

Well, that is also a medication that could be used for an early abortion, a medical abortion. And pharmacies here now do not want to fill the medication. Even though my patients arent pregnant, even though Im using it for a different indicationand were seeing the same thing with physicians who use medications for conditions not related to pregnancy. But if you use methotrexate for an autoimmune disease or misoprostol prior to surgery or misoprostol to help somebody whos already in the process of a miscarriage, their babys lost a heartbeat, pharmacies are now refusing to fill those medications because pharmacists have the power. They dont feel comfortable under these current laws. And so we are starting to make medical care for women much more dangerous. 

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And in Texas its like a $10,000 fine. Its not a felony, like it might be in certain states. Thats going to really start to make people trigger-shy to fill or prescribe or to help people who need help.

How common is IVF?

Two percent of the U.S. population is conceived from IVF. So its not a small number. Millions of people access IVF to grow their family. And we need to be really loud about how this technology has enabled so many more people to be parents and what that means.

Youve also noted that this common medical procedure has only ever been available in a post-Roe America. No one imagined doing this fertility work without abortion protections. And if you go back to the early days of IVF, you can see the same language thats now being used against abortion being deployed against people who sought fertility treatment and their doctors. The industry had to adjust to it.

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Our oldest IVF baby is only in her early 40s. Roe v. Wade was well around before that. And these people who went through IVF early, they were hugely stigmatized. People protested outside their houses. It was a very different world, and weve made huge progress in getting IVF to all over the country and helping people grow families. But we really changed peoples viewpoint on how they felt about it. 

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This is why I tell people all the time: Youre allowed to have your own personal beliefs, and sometimes those impact how we do your IVF cycle. Forget all these lawsif you believe life begins at fertilization and you dont feel comfortable freezing any embryos, thats what we do. We do it the way that you feel comfortable about it to help you grow your family. And we talk through, well, it might cost more, take longer, but if thats what you feel comfortable with, then that is absolutely what we do. And I think every fertility doctor has been in that situation.

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I wonder if that history with fertility treatments gives you a little bit of hope for where things might go now, just because its evidence that peoples minds can change about something big.

It is hope. I do think that when we step back and we look at IVF, what are we trying to do? Were trying to help people have families, and how is that inherently a bad thing? Maybe you believe that it is, but to me, I feel like overall we should want each other to be happy and to have the family we want when we want it.  And I feel strongly that we really dont want to be rolling back the clock and limiting this for people. We want to help people get to that next step and have a child.

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We really need to be amplifying, trying to get people in the position of power who value that a person has the right to choose their own reproductive future, because that extends to all reproductive rights and not just abortion. Its a much bigger issue than only abortion.

Back in 2011, Mississippi was trying to pass a fetal personhood amendment and it was going through a ballot initiative. And a lot of people said, oh, this will fly through. They just assumed this is a very conservative state, very anti-abortion, this will just happen. But it was rejected by 58 percent of the states voters. And part of the reason was a group called Parents Against 26. It made ads basically outlining how this bill would make fertility treatments unavailable. It strikes me youre in a little bit of a powerful position for this next round of the battle. But I wonder if you feel like that.

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Im happy to hear you say that. Ill admit, its a fight I never foresaw would be in my future when I went into this field. I became a doctor to help people, to help people get pregnant, because I liked reproductive medicine. And I really feel like theres nothing you can do that changes the course of a persons life as much as help them conceive a child that they so very much want and have a hard time.

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Being in Austin, do you talk politics with your patients?

Early in my career, I think were all trying to cut our teeth, but I was really hesitant to talk anything political with patients. It was a message that I got when I was an employee in a prior practice: You shouldnt talk politics because youll alienate people who dont want to come see you. And Im like, I dont have to be for everybody, but I think theres more good that can come from it than harm. And if youre not gonna be comfortable seeing me because Im advocating for your reproductive rights, then thats OK. Im probably not going to be a good fit of a doctor for you. And Im fine accepting that I dont have to see everybody.

But I do think some physicians are scared about how their patients will take it, or they dont want them to think bad of them, or they dont want to limit people who will walk in their doors. So theyre just staying silent. And silents not a neutral position. Silent is in the vote of whatever the majority is at the moment.

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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.

On Wednesday, without a word of explanation, the nations most radical appeals court reinstated a Texas law that imposes sweeping censorship on social media companies. The statutewhich Republicans passed in retaliation against the perceived liberal bias of Big Techforces these companies to disseminate hateful expression, dangerous misinformation, and foreign propaganda, among other objectionable speech. It empowers aggrieved users to file an unending stream of lawsuits to combat content moderation while creating a slew of onerous regulations that are literally impossible to comply with. Texas statute is, in short, an egregious affront to corporations First Amendment rights.

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Texas Republicans passed their internet censorship bill, known as H.B. 20, in the fall of 2021. Its sponsors said that the legislation was necessary to prevent West Coast oligarchs from silencing conservative viewpoints and ideas. (Their theory that social media companies discriminate against conservative speech has no evident basis in reality.) The bill applies to social media companies with more than 50 million active users in the U.S. each month, like Twitter, YouTube, and Meta, that operate in Texas. (Republicans rejected a proposal that wouldve broadened its application to smaller conservative platforms like Parler and Gab.) It states that these companies may not censor a users expression on the basis of their viewpoint, whether that viewpoint is expressed on the companys platform or somewhere else. If a platform removes a users content, it must provide them with notice and an opportunity to appeal. Alleged victims of viewpoint discrimination can also file suit against social media companies, as can the Texas attorney general.

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H.B. 20 doesnt stop there. The law also bars social media companies from labeling posts on their own websiteswith, for instance, a warning that they contain violence, vulgarity, or disinformation. It obligates companies to turn over a massive amount of information to the state about their algorithms, curation, and account suspension. And one baffling provision sharply restricts email service providers ability to block spam, allowing users to collect $25,000 for each day that their provider impedes the transmission of an unsolicited or commercial electronic mail message.

What would the internet look like in Texas if corporations implemented these policies? In addition to a sudden surge of spam in Texans inboxes, social media would become unusable. Major platforms would be inundated with hate: YouTube could not remove videos by neo-Nazis and Klansmen promoting racism; Twitter could not take down ISIS fighters terrorist advocacy; Facebook could not limit Russian propaganda against Ukraine. These platforms could not even express their own disapproval of this content or demote it in users feeds. As a rule, they could suppress only illegal incitement or other unlawful speech. But just a small subset of hateful or violent expression falls outside the scope of the First Amendment: Even speech meant to promote illegal conduct, including some forms of intimidation, receives constitutional protection. So H.B. 20 would forbid platforms from removing, demoting, or condemning all but the most extreme, graphic, and threatening speech. Even then, each instance of content moderation might subject companies to a lawsuit, incentivizing a totally hands-off approach.

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Other aspects of the law all but compel companies to cease editorial control over their own products. The intrusive disclosure requirements are almost comically impractical: They oblige companies to give Texas heaps of information about their algorithms, curation, and search functions, as well as a biannual transparency report with information about every single action taken against content. (These provisions are a far cry from the good-faith movement to mandate algorithmic transparency, which would not chill any speech but rather require developers to provide algorithmic impact assessments.) Platforms must also establish a complex process of notice and appeal any time it removes content.

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It would be impossible for any target of H.B. 20 to comply with these standards. Platforms like Facebook use automated editorial tools to remove billions of posts and comments every year. They lack the resources, by orders to magnitude, to review and resolve each appeal, especially not within the 14-day limit that H.B. 20 provides. The only solution would be to stop monitoring content. Yet the law forces companies to assess complaints of illegal content within 48 hours, so they cannot adopt a true laissez-faire policy either.

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The only way out of this mess, then, would be for social media companies to cease all operations in Texas. But H.B. 20 orders them to continue providing their services in Texas. So there is truly no escapeexcept the courts.

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Luckily for social media platforms, constitutional law is entirely on their side. The Supreme Court has long held that corporations have full First Amendment rights, most famously in Citizens United. Those rights include editorial discretion over the speech they disseminate to their customers. This editorial control and judgment over speechwhat to retain, what to removeis, itself, a form of speech shielded by the Constitution, even when it discriminates against a specific group. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh put it while serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals, the government cannot tell Twitter or YouTube what videos to post or tell Facebook or Google what content to favor. Nor can the government force corporations to disclose information, particularly on controversial topics, in an unjustified or unduly burdensome manner.

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H.B. 20 runs afoul of all these principles. The law brazenly interferes with platforms editorial judgment, chills their own speech, and saddles them with wildly burdensome and impracticable disclosure rules. Thats why U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman blocked it in December, before it took effect. Pitman swatted down Texas one real defense of H.B. 20: that social media platforms are common carriers, like telephone companies and postal services, that merely facilitate the transmission of speech of others. The Supreme Court has authorized much greater regulation of common carriers because they do not engage in expression themselves (and often hold monopoly power). Texas thinks social media companies fall into this category, stripping them of First Amendment rights. Verizon cant drop your call if you praise the KKK, the state argued, so why should Twitter be able to?

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The answer, Pitman explained, is simple. Verizon doesnt exercise any editorial control over calls made on its network. Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook do. These corporations are not engaged in indiscriminate, neutral transmission of any and all users speech like a common carrier. Rather, they curate both users and content to convey a message about the type of community the platform seeks to foster. So the First Amendment applies with full force, and Texas law cannot stand.

Pitmans decision largely tracks U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkles ruling last year against Floridas internet censorship bill, which is similar to Texas. (Hinkle also pointed out that attempts to penalize content moderation clash with Section 230, a federal law that limits platforms liability over content that they host.) Taken together, the two decisions meticulously chart the legal defects of Republicans heavy-handed interference with social media. But when Texas appealed to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, it got a much friendlier reception. The state had the good fortune of coming before a three-judge panel featuring two of the most extreme and partisan jurists in the country: Edith Jones, a Ronald Reagan nominee, and Andrew Oldham, a Donald Trump nominee. (The third judge, Leslie H. Southwick, is a George W. Bush nominee who counts as a liberal on the far-right 5th Circuit.)

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Even on this frequently lawless court, Jones and Oldham stand out for their loyalty to Trumpism over any known law. During oral arguments on Monday, the two judges made scathing remarks about Twitters content moderation, reflecting a thinly veiled disgust toward the platform that famously banned the former president. They continually elided the distinction between true common carriers and regular corporations with their own free speech rights. And, on Wednesday, these two judges lifted Pitmans injunction, allowing H.B. 20 to take effect. They were in such a rush to do so that they did not bother explaining their decision, instead indicating that theyd publish a written opinion down the road.

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What now? Presumably, the plaintiffs will appeal to the Supreme Court, pleading for relief on the shadow docket. The justices will be asked, yet again, to rein in an out-of-control 5th Circuit. If they do not oblige, the nations major social media companies will soon be hobbled by a stringent new legal regime with which they cannot begin to comply. No one really knows what will happen when a single state asserts the power to censor broad swaths of the web and courts lack the courage to stop it. If SCOTUS does not put a stop to this madness, we will all find out soon enough.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
Kurzarbeit should help companies affected by Ukraine war.

Nitra-based carmaker Jaguar Land Rover is one of companies that applied for wage compensations within the kurzarbeit scheme for March. (Source: TASR)

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When the Covid-19 pandemic hit Slovakia and lockdown was introduced, businesses across the country began to suffer. Soon, companies were calling on the government for help to keep going and avoid lay-offs.

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One of the measures the government responded with was the German-inspired government-subsidised short-time work scheme, commonly known as kurzarbeit.

This involves the state providing money to cover part of staff wages.

The scheme proved to be a success and the government has now turned it into a permanent measure to be used when companies find themselves in trouble because of external events, such as a pandemic, or the war in Ukraine.

It is not state aid, but an instrument that serves to maintain employment in times of crisis, said Lucia Kovarovic Makayova, spokesperson for Volkswagen Slovakia. The firm, which is the oldest and biggest carmaker in the country, itself used kurzarbeit during the pandemic.

It is a very suitable solution in which all three parties gain: the employee, the employer, and the state.

The benefits it brings to the employee are job security, and that part of their wage is paid by the state. The scheme also temporarily reduces employer wage costs. This should help in retention of a skilled workforce and underpinning stability while maintaining international competitiveness. At the same time, it saves state spending on workers that would otherwise find themselves unemployed, shortfalls in taxes and levies are avoided, and the country does not lose its attractiveness and international competitiveness, explained Kovarovic Makayova.

Scheme can help firms affected by Ukraine war

The Short-Time Work Support Act introducing the permanent government-subsidised short-term work scheme came into effect on March 1, 2022.

Under it, an employer can apply for compensation for a portion of wage costs in emergency situations caused by external factors which result in the employer being unable to assign an employee work.

A typical example of an external factor is the ongoing pandemic, Pavol Kundrik, lawyer at the CMS Slovensko law firm explained in a memo. But it could also be a state of emergency or a national emergency, or force majeure.
Slovakia ordered more than it eventually needed. More vaccines expected to arrive later this year.

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Slovakia has ordered vaccines in higher numbers, even expecting additional postponed packages later this year with already signed contracts.

The interest in vaccination is low in Slovakia, marking 51 percent of fully vaccinated people in May 2022. If the vaccines expire, the waste would amount to 2.5 million vaccines, amount to almost 151 million.

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Lessening the impact of the consequences

With unused vaccines, Slovakia would lose millions of euros. Negotiations with other countries could soften the impact of disinterest, which are progressing soundly with Belize and Palestine so far, health minister Vladimir Lengvarsky (OLaNO nom.) announced. Another three countries should be interested as well.

The minister insisted that the European Commission (EC) is reconsidering the vaccine contract with Pfizer via an official letter.

Poland and Romania opted for the same approach, also trying to re-consider the vaccine contracts.

I believe that the contract with Pfizer could be remodeled to fit our needs, said Lengvarsky.
The city has so far leased out three vineyards in Raca.

The municipal vineyard in the area of Stredny Sinwegh in Bratislavas Raca is just looking for its tenant. (Source: Jan Bednaric)

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Grape growing and wine production have a long tradition in the Slovak capital and this is proven by historical records. While wine was the only significant export product of medieval Pressburg, present-day Bratislava, from the 14th to the 18th centuries, a basket of local wine in northern Italy cost three times as much as the basket of regular Ugrian wine. Even in Bavaria, they wrote that Pressburg wine is good, but bloodily expensive, recalled historian Juraj Sedivy.

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The Bratislava city council wants the long tradition to continue. They have decided to rent out vacant municipal vineyards. The capital owns and manages approximately 15.5 hectares of vineyards, of which eight hectares do not have a tenant for now, with a significant proportion neglected.

Winegrowers and wine makers see this as a sign that the city has resolved to protect its vineyards and take care of those under its ownership. The Raciansky Spolok civic association, which is behind the Racansky Vinohradnicky Chodnik (Raca Vineyard Path) project in Bratislavas borough of Raca to promote local wine, considers the plan of finding new tenants as one appropriate tool to achieve this.

It is realistic if the city manages to find suitable tenants to ensure the maintenance or renewal of the municipal vineyards, Matus Burian, chairman of the association, told The Slovak Spectator.

At the end of 2021, the city council promulgated two public tenders for the leasing of several vineyards in Raca and Vinohrady, both boroughs well known for their wine production. The rent in Raca was set at 79.60/ha per year and in the Vinohrady borough at 31.46/ha per year, with the tenant also committing to hand over 10 percent of the harvest in the form of wine to the city.

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However, the tenders resulted in the selection of only one tenant, Marek Kopriva, for three vineyards in Raca totalling less than 0.37 hectares. He plans, together with his friends, to create a community vineyard. Dagmar Schmuckova, a city spokesperson, specified that he will pay a rent of 30 per year for these vineyards.
As a freshman in college, Robert Gleim began to pursue a career path in education, but he soon realized teaching was not for him. That led him to a career as a police officer where he gets to engage with the public and youth.

Gleim, who grew up in Brighton, Colorado, had moved to Greeley to complete his undergraduate studies when one of his friends had been attending a citizens police academy hosted by a local police department. He asked Gleim if he wanted to come and it resulted in him changing his career plans.

I said, Ill try it and see how it goes, he said of the academy. I went and I invited my dad. Both of us attended the citizens police academy in Evans and after that, I just fell in love with the job and everything it entailed.

Gleim returned to the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, declaring a new major in criminal justice. As part of the program, Gleim completed an internship with the Evans Police Department for six months. He went on ride alongs and worked the three different shifts  morning, day and night to better understand the responsibilities.

During his internship, Gleim said he thought, 'This is a sweet job. I cant wait to get into this field.'

Following graduation, Gleim moved to Gering to join the Gering Police Department and completed the states police academy. Most Nebraska departments pay officers to attend the academy and their wages while they are at the academy. Officers in Colorado had to pay between $16,000 to $20,000 to attend the academy while also not receiving a paycheck during that time. That difference drove Gleim to choose Nebraska to launch his career.

As an officer, one challenge Gleim regularly faces is the difference in attitude toward police officers versus teachers. While teachers are usually liked, that is not the general consensus toward cops. Initially, he entered the workforce as a patrol officer with the Gering Police Department in 2014, eager to make a difference.

During his field training officer (FTO) period, he experienced his first drunken driving arrest.

That was a big first for me. We had our first driving pursuit, our first foot pursuit. I had a lot of firsts in my FTO and they were big eye openers like Im really a cop at this point.

After gaining a grasp on his job as a patrol officer, Gleim traveled to Lincoln to complete a two weeks-long School Resource Officer (SRO) training program where he learned the applicable laws governing an SROs actions.

Gleim serves as an SRO for Gering Public Schools, spending the majority of his time at Gering High School. However, he does occasionally make trips to Northfield Elementary, during lockdown drills and when needed. As an SRO, Gleim said his goal is to build relationships and a repertoire with the students.

It makes my job easier, the more students I have on my side, he said. Theyre willing to talk to me and tell me stuff.

When he first began working in the schools, Gleim said it was a challenge not knowing any of the students. With no trust yet established, he learned of criminal violations after the fact, which made his job of obtaining information in investigations harder. Now, the students respect him and offer insights to potential situations, allowing Gleim to be more proactive than reactive.

Ive met so many more people as an SRO than as just a patrol officer, he said. Me, not being from here, I pretty much just met the people who I arrested. Now, Ive met all of the teachers and a lot more relationships have been built.

Since first putting on a badge, his approach to situations has changed from being more black and white to more gray.

Ive learned there are many ways to use your officer discretion. Theres not just handcuffing and arresting suspects and taking them to jail, Gleim said. There are other options.

In addition to his roles as a patrol officer and SRO, Gleim is the departments emergency vehicle operations instructor, so he conducts the pursuit driving and day-to-day driving training as well as going through policy with the departments officer and setting up a driving course roughly every few months.

The only thing Id say you struggle with in setting up the course is the cones, Gleim said. My courses are usually 400 to 500 cones and you have to move all of the cones to each spot and you have to have each cone a certain width apart.

The course must also contain various obstacles like stop-and-go sections and reverse serpentine into a backing garage sections, which he enjoys. However, developing a new course gets harder over time as he tries to not duplicate a previous one.

They say half of all accidents are when people are backing up, so I always have a reverse section as well.

When school is out for the summer or on a break, Gleim fulfills his duties as a patrol officer.

Its like the perfect job because you have three to four months at a time where youre just strictly a SRO and then you have random school days where the school days have off, so I can go do traffic stops, he said. The SRO position is a pretty good all around position.

Gleim will celebrate his eighth year with Gering PD on July 7 and looks forward to fostering more relationships with students and the community.

If anyone wants to talk with me at any time of the day, Id be more than happy to talk to them, Gleim said. Im a cop, but Im a normal person as well.

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The smell of pancakes and the sound of prayer filled the room as the leaders of Scottsbluff, Gering and Terrytown hosted the 37th Annual Mayors Prayer Breakfast at the Gering Civic Center Thursday, May 5.

The event celebrated the National Day of Prayer, which has been held on the first Thursday in May since 1988.

The breakfast began around 6:45 a.m., with speakers presenting from 7 to 8 a.m. As it was the mayors breakfast, they each played a crucial role and set the scene for the mornings events.

There are countries all over this world that are suffering and experiencing these religious persecutions every day. We get to have a prayer breakfast, and we can do it without fear ... we might not all go to the same building, but we have the freedoms to worship as we see fit, Gering Mayor Tony Kaufman said in his opening remarks.

The featured guest speaker at the breakfast was Pastor Bruce Peterson from Grace Chapel. Peterson was born in Paraguay and raised in Chicago; he became a pastor at Grace Chapel in 1992.

Peterson said the influencers and leaders at the breakfast had been given a calling by God to aid their communities. If you know it or not, you have accepted a job from God to help us thrive, he said. Your influences, your discussions, your decisions should be grounded in bringing real help to the community. You should regularly be asking questions like, How will this establish hope? How will this give people a leg up, a helping hand?

He said leaders were Gods servants and that they should do everything in their power to uplift the people they represent. God put it in them to help, he said, and if they do good, God will reward them for it.

Peterson concluded his presentation by summarizing the Old Testaments Book of Esther, where the titular heroine becomes the new wife of a king and has him stop an act of genocide planned by his advisor.

Mordecai says to Esther something like, Well, maybe, maybe its just for a time like this that you have become his wife. Maybe its for a time like this that youre the mayor, Peterson said. Theres always a time like this. Theres never a time thats not like this. Those are times we can't influence.

The mayors and other leaders, he said, are coworkers of God, who should help people thrive and build hope in the community.

If theres greed at the top, theres despair at the bottom and theres godlessness everywhere, Peterson said. ... Let no debt remain outstanding except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law.

Other religious leaders who spoke included Pastor Andrew Griess of Zion Evangelical Church, Pastor Jeff Banks of Monument Bible Church and Pastor Logan McCourtney of Hope Church. They provided the invocation, benediction and a prayer for the community, nation and world, respectively.

We ask that you powerfully work in our lives to bring forward revival and renewal, McCourtney had told attendees during his prayer. ... Lord, just as you drove out the enemies of Israel, we want to pray that you, in very tangible ways, drive out drug addiction, poverty, family generational brokenness, alcoholism. We pray, Lord, that you would saturate the panhandle with the gospel and the kingdom of Jesus Christ.

Each mayor also had a turn at the podium. While Kaufman had provided the opening remarks, Scottsbluffs Mayor Jeanne McKerrigan introduced Peterson.

Chris Perales, the Mayor of Terrytown, gave the events Scripture reading.

Perales said his clerk had originally thought he shouldnt attend because he had lost his mother just two weeks beforehand.

I almost didnt make it (to the breakfast), but my mother would tell me get off your butt, he said, before reading Colossians 2:6-7: So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness. Hope I made Mom proud.

Members of the Scottsbluff High School Air Force ROTC posted the colors and led the attendees in the Pledge of Allegiance to start the breakfast. Musicians Gracie Batt and Joe Jackson from Summit Christian College performed on the piano and guitar, respectively.

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Kimball Health Services officials broke ground on their new hospital facility Wednesday, the first act of an 18-month construction project to bring improved healthcare to the region.

This as a matter of fact is National Hospital Week, and we can't think of a better way to celebrate ... than to have a ceremony such as this, and were so happy youre able to share it with us, Kerry Ferguson, the KHS Director of Community Relations and Foundation, told the crowd.

Around 100 Kimball residents, as well as hospital staff and stakeholders, attended the ceremony. The new hospital will be built at the site of the former West Elementary School at 301 S. Howard St. It will cost around $43.6 million to build.

This facility will replace the citys current hospital, located two blocks away, which has served the city for some 70 years.

Were more than excited to see what a modern, state-of-the-art hospital and clinic will do for our patients, and also for Kimball and our surrounding communities, Ferguson said.

The Haselden Construction Co. of Centennial, Colorado, will put the building together. The company specializes in medical facilities; their previous work in the area includes hospitals in Cheyenne, Fort Collins and Laramie.

It (the new facility) will be the center of Kimball for a long time. We are extremely happy to have been a part of it, Eric Blanke, the Director of Business Development for Haselden Construction, told the crowd.

Many of the speakers applauded the longstanding usefulness of the previous hospital while acknowledging that the new facility will be able to provide better care.

The new hospital will be three times the size of the old one, with private patient areas, larger inpatient rooms and bathrooms, wider corridors and in-house MRI and CT scanners.

Additionally, it will be able to accommodate services such as mammography, cardiac rehabilitation, orthopedic procedures and chemotherapy infusions. There will be room for a covered ambulance bay, a helipad and other improvements.

Were going to build a really robust program, and this space is going to enable that to be everything it can be, Dr. Judd Dawson, CMO of Kimball Health Services, said.

According to a KHS press release, Dawson said the services required at the aging current facility have drastically increased in recent years. From 2016 to 2019, hospital discharges increased by 24%, while specialty clinic visits grew by 65% and imaging services increased by half.

The release said the number of surgeries at the Kimball site grew from 16 to 303 in that time frame.

The speakers were excited about the higher quality of service the new hospital will be able to provide.

It is my belief that ... it is the responsibility of an elected official to maintain and preserve the quality of life in their communities, and this new building project, this hospital project, not only maintains but improves the quality of life in Kimball County and the surrounding areas, Kimball County Commissioner Carl Stander said. I think its time to quit talking and lets push dirt.

Other speakers during Wednesdays ceremony included KHS CEO Ken Hunter; KHS Board of Trustees member and capital campaign chairman Jim Cederburg; and Katie Bolz, the State Director for USDA Rural Development. Many of the speakers thanked the people who helped make the new hospital possible.

They and a few other stakeholders posed with golden shovels after they had presented. Afterwards, the entire crowd posed for photos.

Construction will begin in earnest in a few weeks, and the project is scheduled to be operational by fall 2023.

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Grab your fellow nature nerds and join the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission as it hosts five Nebraska Nature Nerd Trivia Nights across the state May 18, including one event in Scottsbluff.

Nature is cool, so there is no shortage of topics questions could cover. Get your teams of no more than five players and be ready to compete for prizes. Registration is not required.

These events are for adults only and are free to attend with a purchase from the host brewery.

The local Nebraska Nature Nerd Trivia Night, which begins at 7 p.m., is at Flyover Brewing Company, 1824 Broadway.

For more information and or questions, email monica.macoubrie@nebraska.gov.

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The Nebraska Patriot Guard Riders will rumble through the Panhandle Thursday, May 12, as they escort 14 veterans who are taking an Honor Flight to Washington, D.C.

The PGR will be joined by local law enforcement as they travel from Chadron, through Alliance and onto Scottsbluff en route to Denver International Airport.

Katie Parks, administrative secretary for the Chadron Police Department, said several agencies will escort the veterans to DIA.

We (Chadron PD) will escort them to the county line and then Dawes County Sheriffs Department will take them so far, Parks said. Alliance, Scottsbluff and some agencies in Colorado as well will escort them.

Members of the Colorado State Patrol will escort the veterans from Fort Morgan, Colorado, to DIA.

Parks said the purpose of the Honor Flight is to take veterans to see their memorials in Washington, D.C. The Honor Flight will begin with a send-off ceremony at the Chadron American Legion, 123 Bordeaux St. in Chadron.

They have a program at the American Legion in Chadron at 9 a.m. and I believe they plan to leave about 10, she said.

The convoy of veterans will pass through Alliance at 11 a.m. A flag line will be established on the west side of Highway 385, by the Old Terrys Corner.

It will then travel to Scottsbluff. A flag line to welcome the veterans will form around 11:15 a.m. along 20th Street to the Elks Lodge.

Were going to set up a flag line for them as they turn south on 20th Street there should be a row of flags on both sides of the street all the way to the Elks Lodge, Steve Thomlison of Gering told the Star-Herald. The fire department is going to put up their ladder truck and a large flag at the end of 16th Street.

There are 150 flags available for the public to use to show honor and respect to the service members.

From noon to 1 p.m., the veterans, PGR, Legion riders and law enforcement escorts will enjoy lunch, which will include Quilts of Valor presentations to six veterans and a flag presentation.

The Honor Flight will continue south toward Kimball and Fort Morgan, Colorado, at 1 p.m. The escort will arrive in Kimball around 2 p.m. at the High Point Welcome Center, 204 S. Kimball Blvd., and depart at 2:30 p.m. They will continue along highways 71 and 14 and arrive in Fort Morgan at the Super 8 parking lot at 4 p.m. They will depart at 4:45 p.m. for the Quality Inn & Suites at DIA, with an arrival time of 6:45 p.m.

The veterans will fly to Washington, D.C., Friday at 6:55 a.m., exploring the monuments Saturday and returning home Sunday.

This is an all-Vietnam veterans group, Thomlison said. We will take WWII and Korean and Vietnam vets. If we find any interested in going, were ecstatic to take them.

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Scottsbluff Public Schools Board of Education discussed revisions to multiple board policies during its Tuesday, May 10, meeting, including one that sets out parameters for persons wishing to speak at board meetings.

The first proposed policy revision was for Article 5, Policy No. 5005, which pertains to Student Residence: Admission and Contracting for Education Services. The updated policy would redact the current tuition collected at $1,500 per semester per student for students who are not residents of the school district but are residents of Nebraska. That paragraph outlines how the school board will determine the tuition rate and that enrollment is subject to collection of tuition in advance. The board approved the revision.

Several policies were first readings where the board heard an overview of the proposed changes.

The districts business operations for internal controls also saw an update under Article 3, Policy No. 3132. The revision added language outlining the districts plans to maintain effective internal control over federal funds awarded, compliance with federal laws, taking immediate action for noncompliance and safeguarding personally identified information designated as sensitive. The language was added to reflect changes adopted in the Code of Federal Regulations subsection 200.303.

The internal controls policy update also added language about handling funds for construction projects, capitalization and depreciation, maintenance of records and conflict of interest. Capital expenditures for general purpose equipment, buildings and land, as well as for improvements to land, buildings or equipment that are unallowable, unless prior written approval is obtained. However, capital expenditures for special purpose equipment is allowable as direct costs if the items cost $5,000 or more and the district receives prior written approval.

Federal regulations require the maintenance of records for a minimum of three years from the date of submission of the final expenditure report for a federal award. Federal awards that are renewed quarterly or annually must keep a record from the date of those submissions for three years as per subsection 200.334 of Record Retention and Access. Conflicts of interest must be avoided regarding any federal awards. Should one arise, the district will disclose the potential conflict in writing to the federal awarding agency.

Changes to the business operations Policy No. 3540 added both the numeric and alphabetical figures of project expenditures for clarity.

Policy No. 4114 pertained to certificated employees advancement on salary schedule. The proposal requires district personnel to submit a credit approval form for all credit courses they wish to take for movement on the salary schedule. Once the employee completes the course, official transcripts from the college showing credit hours must be submitted to the district office for verification.

Staff wishing to move horizontally beyond the bachelors degree must earn hours after the granting of a bachelors degree. The courses must be graduate hours in an educational field or the staff members related field, according to the board policy. Moving beyond the masters degree column holds the same criteria with hours being earned after the granting of the masters degree with the course in an educational field or related field.

The school board also reviewed a change to the part-time enrollment of non-public-school students under Policy No. 5004. Any out-of-district, non-public student can enroll part-time as a contract in student. However, the policy update requires the contract between the students resident district and Scottsbluff Public Schools be the familys responsibility for planning to complete the contract and pay tuition to the resident district.

The public could also see changes to the boards public comment policy at meetings. Changes to the internal board policies under Policy No. 8346 allow for public comment during meetings where a line item is on the agenda. People must also fill out a sign-in sheet prior to the public comment agenda item. The board secretary will have the sheet. Any persons who are disorderly can be removed from the meeting and now the building at the discretion of the board chair. The board president or chair will have the sole discretion of extending the one-hour limit on public comment as well. For items not on the agenda, the public should also not expect feedback from the board as the policy states, the board shall not as a general rule interact with or address a speaker during the Public Comment portion of a meeting.

The board also conducted first readings on minutes, Title IX grievance and drug use. Those board policies will tentatively be approved by the board at the June meeting. The board tabled discussion on graduation requirements to permit an additional revision prior to review.

Following review of the 2022-23 and 2023-24 calendars, the 2022-23 Bear Cub Preschool and PAWS calendars, classified association negotiations and salaried compensation procedures, the board approved them.

David Davis, IT director for the district, recommended the board approve the sale of approximately 800 Chromebooks to B&H Liquidations.

These old Chromebooks have reached the end of their life, Davis said. Theyre not capable of receiving security or software updates any longer. These devices are also not able to operate many of the current testing software programs and apps that our district uses.

To recoup the costs, the board approved the sale of the Chromebooks for a total of $6,598.

The school board also approved the contract renewal with Taher Inc., the districts food service management company. The contract for the 2022-23 school year includes a 4.04% CPI price increase and a meal equivalency factor of $4.1475.

Travis Rickey, director of facilities, submitted a memo about two bids from Johnson Controls and Rutts Heating and Air Conditioning to replace the HVAC unit over the auditorium at Scottsbluff High School. The HVAC unit was not included in the bond project for SHS in 2015 and it is currently operating at 25% capacity, according to the memo.

Bids for the project were initially due back on Friday, March 4, and no proposals were submitted, Rickey told the board. Per the advice of our attorney, we were allowed to keep the bid open and consider any proposals after the deadline.

The awarded contractor would have access to the HVAC system into the school system.

This is not the bid we were looking for, but its the best one were going to find right now, board member Ruth Kozal said.

The board awarded the bid to Rutts Heating and Air Conditioning for $386,500.

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The students in Michael Williams civics class at Crossroads Arts and Science Early College in Statesville have learned about the subject all semester. But on Wednesday, they did more than learn about civics as they participated in it by voting in the primary election.

Williams, a social studies teacher, said he couldnt think of a better way to finish out the class with his students as they walked from the school to the Iredell County Board of Elections.

All through the year, we talk about elections and how important voting is, having a voice, and as we go through the semester, many of them turn 18 and can vote, so it all comes together, he said.

Engagement with students is key to teaching them, Williams said. With the class, they look at current events to enhance the curriculum that is taught each year.

I try to pick out certain issues during the semester that are important to them, that they care about, that are important to them, and show them examples on the state, local and federal levels, so they can be invested because they know the importance of it, Williams said. Theres always something to talk about.

That talk became action as students like Kenya Williams cast her ballot Wednesday. She had a number of issues and considerations on her mind and said she understood the importance of casting a ballot in any election.

It feels really good, Kenya Williams said, as she explained that she looks forward to voting in presidential elections. But she understood voting for local and state offices matters as well.

Voting has always been an important thing for me, she said. Especially being Black, my parents have always been on me about the need to vote, so it was really special. ... If Im going to complain, I need to have a part in it. I cant just complain and not do anything.

The feeling that they put a finger on the scale when it comes to local civic matters was a common theme for students in the class.

It should be fun to see how my vote influences things, Micah Beekley said. Im just glad I did my research.

Students said they had paid attention to politics before this election, but the class helped focus on how local elections affect them as well as the statewide and presidential ones.

Its a good idea to vote if you care about whats going on, Jocelyn Hunter said.

While the civics class is a senior year course, Michael Williams has had some of them in other social studies classes since they were freshmen.

To see some of these kids that you started teaching at 14 or 15 years old, walking to the Board of Elections to vote, thats pretty special, he said.

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NASCAR driver Ryan Newman has rescued an elk that caused safety concerns during rutting season at Grandfather Mountain, the nonprofit nature park in the North Carolina mountains.

Doc was the dominant of three elks at the park run by the Grandfather Mountain Stewardship Foundation, park officials said Wednesday.

The elk in the habitat were causing extensive damage to their environment and creating some safety issues when rutting, or gearing up for the breeding season, according to a news release by the Linville-based foundation.

In revved Newman, who agreed to relocate Doc to his personal farm.

Doc is named after legendary folk and bluegrass guitarist Doc Watson, who was born in Deep Gap and died in 2012 at age 89.

Foundation officials searched for a new domicile for Doc for over a year, after concluding that it would ultimately be beneficial to the elk if one was located to a new home, according to the news release.

Jesse Pope, foundation president and executive director, said the ranch was the perfect fit for Doc. He said the foundation was very fortunate to partner with Newman, who has a wonderful facility and a passion for wildlife and conservation.

Correction This story has been edited to correct information about where Doc the elk was relocated. The animal was moved to Ryan Newman's personal farm.

The 18-time NASCAR Cup Series winner picked up Doc in early April, officials said.

Grandfather Mountains work to educate kids about animals is similar to what we do back at Rescue Ranch, Newman said in the release, referring to his 87-acre Statesville ranch. And whenever we have an opportunity to move an animal like Doc from one place to another, it makes sense to do it.

Christie Tipton, animal habitats curator for the foundation, said officials hope the habitat will replenish itself with just two of the 800-pound elks left. Theyre named Merle and Watson, Merle for Doc Watsons son. Doc Watson and his son performed and recorded together starting when Merle was 15. Merle Watson died 21 years later, in a tractor wreck in 1985.

Elk are quite different than deer, Tipton said. Their hooves are designed for aerating the soil, which is great for the environment when theyre out in the wild but can be tough for the soil in a smaller area.

They also like to chew on all the trees, and the elk like to till up the ground when they are in rut, Tipton said in the release. It has been rough on the habitat.

Doc, Tipton said, is at a great place, but we do miss him.

Supporting the elk

For details about the Grandfather Mountain elk and supporting their habitats by symbolically adopting Merle and Watson, visit grandfather.com/adopt.

To learn more about Rescue Ranch in Statesville, visit www.rescueranch.com.
Oscar winner Kevin Spacey will star in the historical drama 1242  Gateway To The West, Deadline reported.

This is the first film starring Spacey since the 2017 scandal and accusations of sexual harassment.

The film tells the story of Genghis Khans grandson Batu Khan, who was elected commander in chief of the western part of the Mongol empire. A skilled military commander, he won battles from China to Persia and was given responsibility for the invasion of Europe but in 1242 Khan is confronted by a deeply spiritual man and a castle in Hungary that halts his invasion of Europe and ultimately causes his downfall.

Spacey will embody the film's main villain, an Italian cardinal. "Gateway To The West" will receive a presentation at the Cannes Film Market in mid-May. Filming will begin in October.

After accusations from several men, Spacey was fired from the Netflix series "House of Cards "and ordered to pay $31 million in compensation for delayed filming.

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For decades, Eddie Louthen didnt believe he had an artistic bone in his body. This Friday, the 1977 graduate of Marion Senior High School will celebrate the opening of his first photography exhibit.

Hes ready to celebrate. I hope people will come by and see what Ive done. Im inviting everyone I know. If I dont know you, youre invited too and Ill get to know you, the Currin Valley native declared Sunday as he helped hang the exhibit at Marions Appalachian Spirit Gallery.

Louthens exhibit will be part of the Main Street gallerys first Second Friday Artwalk of 2022.

Louthen truly didnt recognize his creative side for years. In high school, he said, nothing about artistry attracted him. That changed about a decade ago.

Louthen and some local band members were friends. He began to follow them and take their photos.

Today, he has hundreds of band photos.

Despite that collection, in his exhibit of 30 photographs, theres only one that is connected to a musical performance and none that show people.

Instead, Louthen said, he chose photos that draw emotion.

The photographer started taking his artistic work to the next level about five or six years ago. While attending Bristol Rhythm & Roots Reunion, he ventured into Benjamin Walls gallery in Bristol. Walls is an internationally celebrated photographer, who has been a Smithsonian exhibitor five times and a Natural History Museum of London exhibitor twice.

As Louthen studied Walls work, he noticed tidbits of my own. He recognized that he wasnt at Walls level but believed he could get there. He began the process.

As he worked, he attended most of all of the Appalachian Spirit Gallerys exhibits and frequently tried to buy pieces to support local artists. Last year, Anne Hull, a gallery coordinator, offered him a show.

She repeated the invitation this year. The same week, Louthen ran into Tricia Spencer of Framing Unlimited in downtown Marion. Spencer supported the idea of an exhibit and offered her help.

For both Hull and Spencers support, Louthen said, I am beyond thankful.

Louthen had repeatedly turned to Spencer for his familys framing needs for years. She shared with him that she started framing because of her grandmother Ann C. Haulsee, a well-known area photographer. According to a gallery news release, Ann would frame her own photographs utilizing wood from the trees off their family farm. Tricia's grandmother had been and continues to be her granddaughters inspiration for framing and also cooking.

Sunday, the duo worked to group photos of similar themes and hang them accordingly.

Of each photo in the exhibit, Louthen said, he can remember when and where each one was taken and who was with him.

Louthen trusts his eye. I can take a photo and know immediately if I need to delete it or if it has potential.

Beyond the artistic value, Louthen treasures the preservation and creation of memories. Sunday, he said, One thing I truly love about photography is that it captures that moment in life that will forever exist in that photo. Thats true, he noted, whether the photo is admired daily or once a decade.

Sometimes with photography, he said, the person is able to capture a moment and create a memory simultaneously.

As Spencer studied Louthens photos Sunday, she paused at one showing water and said, I can feel the water. Its cold. At one of railroad tracks, she observed that she could picture herself there and could so much that she imagined worrying if a child was nearby.

Hull described both Louthen and his photography as thoughtful and a keen observer of the world around with him with the spirit of a poet and wordsmith.

Louthen spent years working in business. He got a job with Roses department store before he could drive or had graduated from high school. I thought thats where I belonged. From Roses, he went to Pepsi when the company operated a plant in Marion. He spent almost 30 years with the businesses.

Then, restructuring took place. Louthen knew it was time to step away.

Hes since gone to work for Ryder Integrated Logistics, the dedicated carrier for Royal Building Products. There, hes done a range of work from driving to dispatching.

But, Louthen reflected, I dont think anything has excited me as much as this show.

Over time, he said, people build walls around themselves. However, he also realized, People cant open up to you if youre not accessible.

With the exhibit opening Friday, Louthen said, Im really stepping out from behind walls.

As the Appalachian Spirit Gallery kicks off its 2022 season, Hull said the artists are looking forward to getting back to the gallery, which is run by the non-profit Appalachian Spirit Artists Association that is composed of artisans who share jobs to fulfill the groups mission to celebrate the arts, traditions, lore and spirit of the Appalachian Mountains by demonstrating the work of local talent.

In addition to Louthens exhibit and the work of the gallerys artists, Wayne Dunford will present an outdoor concert at 6 p.m.

A friend of the gallery, Dunford plays an acoustic blend of folk, Americana, indie and old-time music. More familiar behind drums accompanying a band, he is stepping out and playing the music he enjoys the most on his guitar.

A Wytheville native, Dunford is also a professional photographer and operated his own business in Blacksburg for more than 20 years. Hes now returned to Wytheville and opened a photography studio in his hometown, and he also enjoys working on his family cattle farm.

Mays Second Friday Artwalk will run from 5-8 p.m. on May 13.

The gallerys Back Porch Sale Room features items including framed art, prints, jewelry, photographs, flags, natural rope baskets and more.

Guests are encouraged to bring lawn chairs for the concert.

The gallery's monthly Second Friday ArtWalks will be held from May through December. All events are free and open to the public.
A Longview man was sentenced to almost two years in prison Tuesday after admitting to a lesser charge involving six deliberate fires set within less than a mile of each other over two months last summer. One fire required wildfire firefighters to extinguish.

Kevin Reid, 44, pleaded guilty to five counts of reckless burning for starting fires at different times between July 7 and Aug. 30 within the 3400 to 4600 blocks of Allen Street in Kelso.

He was originally charged with six counts of second-degree arson, but pleaded down to five counts of first-degree reckless burning. Both are felonies.

One count of second-degree arson was dropped.

Reid also pleaded guilty Tuesday in Cowlitz County Superior Court to crimes in six other cases, including attempting to elude police and possession of stolen property. Reid was sentenced to a total of 22 months in prison for all offenses.

Investigation

Cowlitz County deputies arrested Reid in December after investigators linked him to the fires. A police document states investigators traced an ignited wooden shingle to an Allen Street business that uses the product and found all the fires were reported when Reid, an employee, took his 15-minute breaks or after his shifts. Cell phone data also showed he was near the fires when they were reported, the document says.

Five of the fires occurred on one persons forested property, which borders Weyerhaeuser timberland, and one occurred on a Cowlitz Public Utility District power pole, according to deputies. Investigators say a plastic container, located near the damaged pole after the Aug. 4 fire, contained gasoline.

An Aug. 30 fire off Allen Street was ruled as arson by a state investigation, the police report states, and was extinguished by Washington State Department of Natural Resources wildland firefighters and a helicopter releasing water.

A countywide burn ban was in place during the time of the fires due to dry conditions, police report.

Reid was in Cowlitz County Jail as of Wednesday afternoon.

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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.

Forgery  Longview police Wednesday arrested Sabrina Ann Guzman, 35, of Kelso on suspicion of forgery and second-degree possession of stolen property.

Possession of a stolen vehicle  Castle Rock police Thursday arrested Dmitriy Alan Huskey, 36, of Edmonds, Washington, on suspicion of possession of a stolen vehicle and being a fugitive from justice.

Assault  Longview police Wednesday arrested Luis Lemus Frausto, 28, of Longview on suspicion of second-degree malicious mischief and fourth-degree assault.

Possession of a stolen vehicle  Longview police Wednesday arrested Hunter William Woodley, 22, of Longview on suspicion of possession of a stolen vehicle.

Burglary

600 block of Mitchell Avenue, Woodland. Wednesday. At about 5:20 a.m. to 6 a.m., two suspects cut the fence and accessed three units.

Stolen vehicles

100 block of Dainen Place, Longview. Wednesday. White BMW. Unknown Washington license plates. Suspect on video.

2900 block of Ocean Beach Highway, Longview. Wednesday. Purplish brown Honda CRV. Washington BKE8880. A witness saw a larger white man wearing a navy blue hoody get in the vehicle and drive away.

Vandalism/malicious mischief

900 block of Cedar Street, Kelso. Wednesday. Tire slashed. Possible suspect information.

1700 block of 30th Avenue, Longview. Wednesday. A man stabbed a tire.

1300 block of Glenwood Street, Woodland. Wednesday. Found several holes in the fence.

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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.

Assault  Longview officers Tuesday arrested Jianna Arneson, 18, of Longview, on suspicion of third-degree assault.

Assault  Cowlitz County deputy Tuesday arrested Curtis Clarke, 37, of Longview, on suspicion of assault.

Harassment  Longview officers Tuesday arrested Richard Holmes, 55, of Longview, on suspicion of felony harassment, malicious mischief and obstructing a public servant.

Stolen vehicle  Kelso officers Wednesday arrested Justin Hahn, 33, of Woodland, on suspicion of possessing a stolen vehicle.

Criminal impersonation  Cowlitz County deputies Wednesday arrested Jeremiah Hughes, 36, of Longview on suspicion of criminal impersonation, contempt of court, obstructing a public servant and driving with a suspended license.

Fraud  Castle Rock police were called Tuesday by a man who reportedly had $40,000 taken from his bank account by someone in the eastern United States.

Assault

200 block of 22nd Avenue, Longview. Tuesday. Teenager reportedly jumped in nearby park.

Burglary

300 block of Pinkerton Drive, Woodland. Tuesday. Storage unit broken into.

Stolen vehicles

1900 block of Allen Street, Kelso. Tuesday. Silver 2001 Ford Focus. Washington plates, dented front bumper.

1200 block of Lewis River Road, Woodland. Tuesday. Closed cargo trailer. Washington 9485ZI.

Thefts

5900 block of Willow Grove Road, Longview. Tuesday. Trees being removed from property.

1500 block of West Side Highway, Kelso. Tuesday. Suspect didnt pay for food.

400 block of 18th Avenue, Longview. Tuesday. Watch taken in March spotted at pawn shop.

900 block of Douglas Street, Longview. Tuesday. Bicycle stolen.

1000 block of Pacific Avenue, Woodland. Tuesday. Plates taken from work vehicle, Oregon plate left behind.

600 block of Scott Avenue, Woodland. Tuesday. Copper and scrap wire taken from yard.

Vandalism/malicious mischief

200 block of Ash Street, Kelso. Tuesday. Security system and yard vandalized.

North Pacific Avenue and Division Street, Kelso. Tuesday. Damaged fence around former electric sub station.

300 block of 20th Avenue, Longview. Tuesday.

Vehicle prowls

300 block of Three Rivers Drive, Kelso. Tuesday. Wallet taken from car.

300 block of Three Rivers Drive, Kelso. Tuesday. Money taken from car.

1900 block of Belmont Loop, Woodland. Tuesday. Person spotted with tire iron, possibly trying to enter cars.

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Samson Lee Sweetin, 40, of Longview was sentenced to about 1.5 years in prison Wednesday in Cowlitz County Superior Court for second-degree child molestation.

Longview officers arrested Sweetin in January after the victim told a counselor at the Childrens Justice & Advocacy Center of Cowlitz County that Sweetin had inappropriately touched the minor.

Sweetin and the victim knew each other prior to the abuse.

Sweetin pleaded guilty to one count of second-degree child molestation in March. Another second-degree child molestation charge was dropped.

Sentencing

Cowlitz County Superior Court Judge Marilyn Haan followed the prosecuting attorney offices sentencing recommendation on Wednesday. Sweetin received 17.5 months, or about 1.5 years, in prison and three years of parole. He was ordered to pay $700 in fines.

During Wednesdays hearing, Sweetin choked up while apologizing for the crime. His public defender Joshua Gooday said Sweetin offered to write a letter apologizing to the victim, but Gooday said it wasnt appropriate.

Haan advised Sweetin to take advantage of the prison programs to prevent him from re-offending.

His $50,000 bond was revoked after he pleaded guilty.

Sweetin has no prior felonies. Based on his clean record, Sweetin could have been sentenced anywhere from 15 to 20 months in prison with three years of parole, which in Washington is called community custody.

He was in Cowlitz County Jail as of Thursday afternoon.

The Daily News, Longview, Wash.

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A unionized Longview post office worker claims they were unjustly removed from duty in March during a dispute with management over the mask mandate.

The Portland Local chapter of the American Postal Workers Union filed the charge with the National Labor Relations Board on March 21. The complaint alleged the removal violated the union contracts rules for discipline and changes in terms and conditions of employment. The complaint also claimed coercive action was used against the employee.

Regional USPS spokesman Ernie Swanson told The Daily News Tuesday that the case had since been rescinded, but as of Wednesday afternoon, the case remained listed as open on the National Labor Boards website.

The APWU Portland Local referred questions about the case to the Longview Post Office spokesman, who did not reach out for comment.

Interpretation of the mask mandate

Case documents provided to The Daily News by the National Labor Relations Board redacted the names and other identifiers of the employee and manager involved.

The filed charge claims the unnamed manager disagreed with (the workers) interpretation of the mask mandate. The report claims that the worker was put on emergency placement before finishing our conversation.

The case records do not specify the workers view of the mask mandate. The complaint was filed shortly after Washingtons state indoor mask mandate ended on March 12.

The employees union contract with the Postal Service allows some emergency placement. The contract allows employees to be immediately moved off-duty for intoxication, theft, failure to observe safety rules and regulations, and actions that would be injurious to self or others.

If the employee is fired or kept off duty for more than 30 days, the union may file a separate grievance about the decision.

In April, the National Labor Board chose to defer action until the issue went through that grievance process. It is likely the issue will be resolved through the grievance/ arbitration procedure, regional director Ronald Hooks said in the deferral letter.

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A baby formula shortage is affecting families nationwide, including in Cowlitz County, where local social service agencies and programs are advising people how to find food for their children.

Why the shortage?

A recall of certain formula products earlier this year exacerbated a shortage from pandemic-related supply chain issues, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

In February, Abbott Nutrition recalled certain batches of Similac, Alimentum and EleCare powder formulas because of contamination at a Michigan facility, according to the FDA. Consumers can check if their formula is affected at https://bit.ly/3H9bV75.

Local advice

Cowlitz County families having trouble finding the formula they need have reached out to local agencies and programs. Sometimes babies require a certain type of formula due to medical reasons.

The Longview Women, Infants and Children Nutrition Program, or WIC, office receives calls all day long from people trying find formula, according to a representative.

WIC provides low-income families with nutrition education, breastfeeding support, health screenings and referrals and supplements purchasing healthy foods, including formula.

When families enroll in WIC, they get benefits to help pay for the formula they need for their infant. If they cant find their brand because of the shortage, they can call the WIC office to change it, according to the state Department of Health.

The Longview WIC has advised people to shop around different stores and check with food banks. If a store with formula doesnt accept WIC, the local office suggests paying out of pocket for supplies.

Nurses serving Clark and Cowlitz County families in the Nurse-Family Partnership, or NFP, program have heard from many who are struggling to find formula, said Stefanie Donahue, communications manager for Health and Human Services. The program, which matches low-income pregnant women with nurses to help them, currently serves 35 Cowlitz County families.

Participating families should all be eligible for WIC, and nurses are referring them to WIC for assistance, Donahue said. Nurses are also advising families of health concerns with diluting formula or using substitutes that are not recommended, she said.

Families who do not participate in the NFP program should talk to their childs pediatrician before changing brands, trying formula alternatives or considering switching to breastfeeding.

It is not safe to water down formula or use homemade formula, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Babies older than 6 months can have whole cows milk for a brief time in a pinch but it is not ideal nor should become a routine, according to the academy.

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COLUMBIA COUNTY, Ore.  Oregons land-use appeal board Tuesday sent a request to rezone hundreds of acres near Port Westward back to Columbia County, following a decision last September by county commissioners approving the change.

For years, Columbia Countys commissioners and port officials have been trying to rezone 837 acres at Port Westward so developers can build industrial businesses. At a September board meeting, the county commissioners approved the latest rezone request.

Its not a rejection, its a remand to get answers to some of the questions the board has, Sean Clark, Port of Columbia County executive director, said. There have been several goes at this.

Each time, attempts at rezoning have met speed bumps  lengthy public comment hearings, legal appeals led by Columbia Riverkeeper and remands from the Oregon Land Use Board of Appeals.

The state land-use agency on Tuesday sent the rezone request back to the Columbia County commissioners asking for more information. Though the agency has never rejected the land change request outright, the remand marks another delay after the county and ports nearly decade-long attempt to develop at Port Westward.

The decision by the Oregon Land Use Board of Appeals is disappointing for those seeking responsible economic development in Columbia County and in the state of Oregon, but we remain hopeful and will continue to work to expand economic opportunity in this underserved part of the state, Clark said in a news release.

Located in largely rural land near Clatskanie, Port Westward is a deep-water port with dock facilities and access to the 43-foot navigation channel in the Columbia River.

Clark said the 837-acre expansion, which was first proposed by Port of St. Helens in 2013, would help bring economic growth to both the Columbia County and Westward ports. Currently, Port Westward Industrial Park hosts Portland General Electric, the Columbia Pacific Bio-Refinery, the Seely mint farms and, most recently, NEXT Renewable Fuels Oregon.

The Port believes that we effectively demonstrated that responsible industrial and agricultural uses can coexist together as good neighbors, as they have for decades at Port Westward, Clark said.

Those opposed to the rezone included Columbia Riverkeeper and 1000 Friends of Oregon, who argued industry on this land parcel would not be compatible with neighboring farms.

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Local timber company Weyerhaeuser will pay $600,000 after reaching a settlement Monday with Columbia Riverkeeper, despite denying allegations it had broken state water quality laws.

While we acknowledge the stormwater exceedances stemming from one or more of the facilities at the site, we did not break the law and continue to deny any wrongdoing related to this issue, Weyerhaeuser Public Affairs Manager Mary Catherine McAleer said in a statement to The Daily News. We do, however, accept our shared responsibility in the community and the need to take positive, proactive measures to help protect and invest in the river.

As part of the settlement filed in the U.S. District Court of Western Washington, which stems from a lawsuit Riverkeeper filed in March against Weyerhaeuser NR Companys Longview mill, the timber company will pay $600,000 to Seeding Justice for its Columbia River Restoration Fund. Each violation after the agreement goes into effect will cost Weyerhaeuser $5,000.

Weyerhaeuser also was ordered to pay about $119,000 to cover Riverkeepers legal costs.

Weyerhaeuser by Dec. 31 must also reroute one of its stormwater pipes so it no longer flows into the Columbia River and instead goes to a waste treatment plant, according to court documents.

The court also ordered the company to install aerators, one or more flow meters with monitoring probes, particulate streams and biochar sock filters at its 260-acre facility.

Weyerhaeuser has until May 19 to make the payments, according to court documents.

The U.S. Department of Justice has 45 days to review the settlement. After that, a federal district court judge must approve the agreement before it can go into effect.

People rely on the Columbia for clean water and strong salmon runs, Riverkeeper staff attorney Simone Anter said in a news release Monday. No corporation, including Weyerhaeuser, has the right to flout the law and pollute this irreplaceable river. The requirements of this agreement will see significant steps to reduce pollution at this massive facility.

Riverkeeper on March 7 sued Weyerhaeuser on grounds it had violated the Clean Water Act, which limits output of Biochemical Oxygen Demand, oil and grease, and regulates pH levels in hopes of preserving fish habitats.

We have been working cooperatively with the Department of Ecology to address these concerns and are involved in an ongoing process to set appropriate permit conditions and standards for all facilities, McAleer wrote in the statement.

This is not the first time Weyerhaeuser has faced financial consequences for water quality violations. The state Department of Ecology in February dropped a $40,000 fine on the companys Longview mill for water quality and monitoring violations.

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Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., the maker of most of the worlds iPhones, posted earnings ahead of estimates after keeping production running despite component shortages and strict pandemic controls across China.

Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., the maker of most of the worlds iPhones, posted earnings ahead of estimates after keeping production running despite component shortages and strict pandemic controls across China.

Apple Inc.s biggest assembly partner reported net income of NT$29.5 billion ($989 million) for the quarter through March, outpacing the average projection for NT$28.5 billion. Revenue totaled NT$1.41 trillion, Hon Hai reported previously.

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Hon Hai is the largest of a bevy of Apple-suppliers now struggling with prolonged component shortages and logistic bottlenecks resulting from Chinas Covid-19 lockdowns. But the Taiwanese company, which makes everything from iPhones to Dell desktops and Sony PlayStations at its Chinese factories, has managed to keep its plants humming by employing closed-loop production sites. Hon Hais scale also grants it bargaining power with customers and suppliers.

The worlds largest contract electronics manufacturer said Thursday it expects revenue to remain little changed this quarter, given the uncertainty of Chinas Covid measures. It anticipates strong growth in cloud and networking products even as its consumer electronics business may decline slightly, the company said in a presentation posted online.

While Foxconns sites in China are running stably, including key tech hubs in Zhengzhou and Shenzhen, the situation on the ground can change swiftly and unpredictably. Last Thursday, employees at MacBook maker Quanta Computers Shanghai plant flooded past isolation barriers, underscoring the depth of frustrations among residents subject to often abrupt lockdowns.

What Bloomberg Intelligence Says:

While its iPhone business may moderate in 2022, Hon Hais data center hardware and component segments should stand out and support gross margin trajectory with the trend of cloud migration. The companys target of 10% gross margin by 2025 looks feasible to us, as EV, cloud and components may contribute to nearly half of the companys revenue by then, we believe, vs. 29-30% now.

-Steven Tseng, analyst

With consumer electronics facing a potential slowdown, the company has been making steps to diversify its business and move toward a new ambition: electric vehicles.

Its ambitions hinge on Lordstown Motors Corp.s electric pickup trucks. Lordstown Motors said on Thursday it closed the sale of its Ohio EV factory to Hon Hai for $230 million. With the deal, Hon Hai plans to expand its customer base and establish its first EV production outpost in North America.

Chairman Young Liu said on a conference call that expanding its EV business is Hon Hais top priority, with the company targeting 5% market share in 2025. Its goal is to ship 500,000 to 750,000 EVs that year, he said.

Production at the Ohio plant is set to start in the second half of this year, while mass output from Foxconns EV factory in Thailand is set to start in 2024.
NASA captured an X-class solar flare being fired by the Sun. The resultant solar storm can soon reach the Earth. Know the damage the solar storm may cause.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) spotted a strong solar flare being fired out from the surface of the Sun. The solar flare was fired in the sunspot named AR3006. The sunspot has been labeled as mixed up because its polarity is the reverse of what the scientists were expecting. According to them, this makes this sunspot both exciting and dangerous. It is expected that there is a strong likelihood that the resultant solar storm will hit the Earth soon. How dangerous can it be and what are the risks associated with it? Read on to find out.

The solar flare fired by the Sun has been recorded as a X1.5-class event. This makes it the strongest category of solar flare. For the unaware, solar flares are divided into A, B, C, M and X where A is the weakest solar flare whereas X is the strongest. The flare was captured by the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has issued a warning for radio shortwave blackout in the Atlantic Ocean region.

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NASA: Solar storm headed towards the Earth, to cause radio blackouts

In the last one months, the Earth has been subjected to multiple such strong solar storms that have caused radio blackouts in various parts of the planet. Last time, a similar solar storm caused blackouts in Australia and parts of Asia. The increased solar activity is a result of the Sun moving closer towards the peak of its maximum phase of its solar cycle. Although the Sun will not reach its peak till 2025, the increasing number of sunspots on the solar disk have already started to create trouble for Earth.

While this particular solar storm is not expected to be a severe one, it is still likely that it will also cause GPS disruption, and distort the navigation systems for airplanes and ships. According to NASA, if the solar storm towards the Earth was any stronger, it could have damaged satellites causing disruption in mobile networks and internet services. Power grid failures would also not be out of the question. While it seems that we will be able to tolerate this wave of Suns wrath, only time will tell how bad the future solar storms can be.
Work-From-Home has become a bone of contention between employees and their companies.

From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, companies fearful of losing talent are tweaking or scrapping dictates around how often workers need to be at their desks.

Even the most inflexible bosses are softening their return-to-office expectations.

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JPMorgan Chase & Co. chief Jamie Dimon has been one of the most vocal critics of remote work, arguing that its no substitute for the spontaneous idea generation that results from bumping into colleagues at the coffee machine. But in his annual letter to shareholders last month, the head of Americas biggest bank allowed that working from home will become more permanent in American business, and estimated that about 40% of his 270,000-person workforce would work under a hybrid model, which includes days in the office and at home.

Soon after Dimons missive, one of the banks senior technology executives told some teams that they could cut back from three days in the office per week to two, citing internal feedback.

Many white-collar workplaces are making similar retreats as their employees stubbornly stick to working from home while struggling with childcare, the grind of commuting and worries about rising Covid-19 cases. Bosses are wary of taking punitive action against those who aren't following their ambitious so-called RTO plans, fearing it will backfire in todays tight labor market. That leaves them to reevaluate their carefully crafted strategies and reconsider what is a realistic long-term approach to in-person work.

We are seeing policies slip in real time, said Melissa Swift, the U.S. transformation leader at workforce consultant Mercer. There was previously all this talk about how, for white-collar jobs, collaborating in the office was important. Thats slipping. Now, only the people who need to turn a screwdriver need to be in the office.

Not all workers are rebelling against directives to return the office, with variation across companies, sectors and job categories. Still, employers are seeing fresh reason to doubt the viability of their RTO guidelines. People are coming back to just about everything else  travel, restaurants, concerts, stores  amid a general loosening in state and federal Covid-related restrictions. So executives can no longer reassure themselves that workers would dutifully come back once those rules relaxed.

At the same time, organizations that returned to the office in the first few months of the year now have loads of feedback from employees, many of whom are frustrated by commuting in just to spend half their day on Zoom calls. That adds to two full years of data on how workforces remained just as productive  and often were more satisfied  while working from home, and emerging research from academics. The result is a groundswell of hard evidence that can convince even the staunchest remote-work skeptics.

Examples of RTO resistance abound. At Apple Inc., a small group of employees has pushed back against the iPhone makers plan that will soon require most corporate workers to be in the office three days a week. A worker group called Apple Together penned an open letter to company leadership last month, in which signatories asked to decide for ourselves, together with our teams and direct manager, what kind of work arrangement works best for each one of us. The staffers also dismissed the oft-cited desire for in-person collaboration, saying this is not something we need every week, often not even every month, definitely not every day. Apple declined to comment.

For some companies, theres no longer any debate. Airbnb Inc. had previously pegged September 2022 as its return to the office, but Chief Executive Officer Brian Chesky dumped that plan last month, instead telling his 6,000 employees that they could work remotely indefinitely. Each of us works best in our own ways, and were giving you the flexibility to make the right choice based on where youre most productive, Chesky wrote in an email to staff.

A smattering of law firms have relaxed once-stringent attendance policies. Cooley LLP, a 3,000-person firm, said last month that it would let its lawyers decide whether and when to go into its offices, provided their duties allow for remote work.

When old-school bankers and lawyers grudgingly accept the value of working from home, its a sign of how much things have changed. A new survey of real-estate executives by CBRE Group Inc. found that the share of them who expect their workplaces to be office-based for most employees going forward declined to 19% from 30% last year. At the recent Milken Institute Global Conference, a popular icebreaker was asking fellow attendees about their organizations work-from-home approach. Its as common a conversation opener as asking about someones kids, said Bob Kricheff, a portfolio manager at Shenkman Capital Management.

A growing body of research supports these shifts. While many companies settled on three or four days in the office when initially establishing hybrid-work arrangements, the ideal setup is actually just one or two days in the office, according to a recent working paper from Harvard Business School. Hybrid work schedules can also reduce employee quit rates by 35% compared with those who work entirely from the office, research co-led by Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University found. With Americans quitting jobs at a record pace4.5 million in March alonethat flexibility matters.

When data-storage giant Teradata Corp. asked employees across all its U.S. locations if they wanted to come back to the office at least a few days a week, about half said yes, according to Chief People Officer Kathy Cullen-Cote. But of that group, only half show up. If Im sitting in the corner of the office, and only half the people are there, will I have that watercooler conversation? No, said Cullen, whose company has cut its real-estate footprint in half.

Employees are not showing up, and its hard for employers to deal with this, said Stanfords Bloom, whose ongoing analysis of pandemic-era workplaces has found yawning gaps between what managers and workers desire when it comes to RTO policies. Thats because for every boss who claims that corporate culture and innovation suffer when offices are sparsely populated, there are plenty of workers, particularly women and under-represented racial groups, with no desire to return to the inequities, double standards and microaggressions of daily cubicle life.

Eighty-two percent of working moms polled earlier this year by Future Forum, a research consortium backed by Slack Technologies Inc., said they wanted flexibility in where they work, the highest level since the group began surveying white-collar workers in 2020. Black workers are also more likely to want some say over where they work than White employees.

While many companies have adopted so-called work from anywhere policies akin to the one at Airbnb, others have put a price on remote work. London-based law firm Stephenson Harwood, for example, recently told staff that anyone wanting to work from home permanently will have to take a 20% pay cut.

But such ultimatums are rare. Instead, frustrated bosses are increasingly making more emotional appeals. In a recent memo to staff, Rich Handler, chief executive officer of Jefferies Financial Group Inc., said we are mentally healthier when we are around each other regularly. Our juniors and mid-level partners need our empathic seniors to truly lead them in person.

While acknowledging the efficiency of remote work, Handler and President Brian Friedman said its left many mid-level and junior staff feeling abandoned, and they need to be in your physical presence to see big deals get done or learn how to cultivate clients. They need this from you, the bosses said to the firms senior staff. It just requires more effort from all of you.
MySejahtera has urged Malaysians to immeditately update the app to its latest version so as to enable the new Infectious Disease Tracker feature. Currently in version 1.1.9, users can install or update the app via the Google Play Store, Apple App Store and HUAWEI AppGallery.

Taking to its official Facebook page, MySejahtera gave the important notice yesterday. The post urged Malaysians to update the MySejahtera app to version 1.1.9 immediately to access the new features available on the app.

Of course, the post is talking about the Infectious Disease Tracker which allows users to detect nearby hotspots of infectious disease cases. These include diseases such as Rabies, Measles, Dengue, Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease (HFMD) as well as Covid-19.

The feature will also show the number of active cases of the infectious diseases mentioned above. The data will be sourced from the health departments at the state and districts levels.

Besides that, MySejahtera has also assured that the feature is safe and would not jeopardise on users' privacy. Moreover, it will not be sharing or use any personal data. What do you guys think?

Have you updated the MySejahtera app on your devices? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below and stay tuned to TechNave for the latest tech news in Malaysia and beyond!
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

The US$44 billion (36 billion) purchase of Twitter by "free speech absolutist" Elon Musk has many people worried. The concern is the site will start moderating content less and spreading misinformation more, especially after his announcement that he would reverse the former U.S. president Donald Trump's ban.

There's good reason for the concern. Research shows the sharing of unreliable information can negatively affect the civility of conversations, perceptions of key social and political issues, and people's behavior.

Research also suggests that simply publishing accurate information to counter the false stuff in the hope that the truth will win out isn't enough. Other types of moderation are also needed. For example, our work on social media misinformation during COVID showed it spread much more effectively than related fact-check articles.

This implies some sort of moderation is always going to be needed to boost the spread of accurate information and enable factual content to prevail. And while moderation is hugely challenging and not always successful at stopping misinformation, we're learning more about what works as social media firms increase their efforts.

During the pandemic, huge amounts of misinformation was shared, and unreliable false messages were amplified across all major platforms. The role of vaccine-related misinformation on vaccine hesitancy, particularly, intensified the pressure on social media companies to do more moderation.

Facebook-owner Meta worked with factcheckers from more than 80 organizations during the pandemic to verify and report misinformation, before removing or reducing the distribution of posts. Meta claims to have removed more than 3,000 accounts, pages and groups and 20 million pieces of content for breaking rules about COVID-19 and vaccine-related misinformation.

Removal tends to be reserved for content that violates certain platform rules, such as showing prisoners of war or sharing fake and dangerous content. Labeling is for drawing attention to potentially unreliable content. Rules followed by platforms for each case are not set in stone and not very transparent.

Twitter has published policies to highlight its approach to reduce misinformation, for example with regards to COVID or manipulated media. However, when such policies are enforced, and how strongly, is difficult to determine and seem to vary significantly from one context to another.

Why moderation is so hard

But clearly, if the goal of moderating misinformation was to reduce the spread of false claims, social media companies' efforts were not entirely effective in reducing the amount of misinformation about COVID-19.

At the knowledge media institute at the Open University, we have been studying how both misinformation and corresponding fact checks spread on Twitter since 2016. Our research on COVID found that fact checks during the pandemic appeared relatively quickly after the appearance of misinformation. But the relationship between appearances of fact checks and the spread of misinformation in the study was less clear.

The study indicated that misinformation was twice as prevalent as the corresponding fact checks. In addition, misinformation about conspiracy theories was persistent, which meshes with previous research arguing that truthfulness is only one reason why people share information online and that fact checks are not always convincing.

So how can we improve moderation? Social media sites face numerous challenges. Users banned from one platform can still come back with a new account, or resurrect their profile on another platform. Spreaders of misinformation use tactics to avoid detection, for example by using euphemisms or visuals to avoid detection.

Automated approaches using machine learning and artificial intelligence are not sophisticated enough to detect misinformation very accurately. They often suffer from biases, lack of appropriate training, over-reliance on the English language, and difficulty handling misinformation in images, video or audio.

Different approaches

But we also know some techniques can be effective. For example, research has shown using simple prompts to encourage users to think about accuracy before sharing can reduce people's intention to share misinformation online (in laboratory settings, at least). Twitter has previously said it has found that labeling content as misleading or fabricated can slow the spread of some misinformation.

More recently, Twitter announced a new approach, introducing measures to address misinformation related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These including adding labels to tweets sharing links to Russian state-affiliated media websites. It also reduced the circulation of this content as well as improving its vigilance of hacked accounts.

Today, we're adding labels to Tweets that share links to Russian state-affiliated media websites and are taking steps to significantly reduce the circulation of this content on Twitter. We'll roll out these labels to other state-affiliated media outlets in the coming weeks. pic.twitter.com/57Dycmn8lx  Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) February 28, 2022

Twitter is employing people as curators to write notes giving context or notes on Twitter trends, relating to the war to explain why things are trending. Twitter claims to have removed 100,000 accounts since the Ukraine war started that were in "violation of its platform manipulation strategy." It also says it has also labeled or removed 50,000 pieces of Ukraine war-related content.

In some as-yet unpublished research, we performed the same analysis we did for COVID-19, this time on over 3,400 claims about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, then monitoring tweets related to that misinformation about the Ukraine invasion, and tweets with factchecks attached. We started to observe different patterns.

We did notice a change in the spread of misinformation, in that the false claims appear not to be spreading as widely, and being removed more quickly, compared to previous scenarios. It's early days but one possible explanation is that the latest measures have had some effect.

If Twitter has found a useful set of interventions, becoming bolder and more effective in curating and labeling content, this could serve as a model for other social media platforms. It could at least offer a glimpse into the type of actions needed to boost fact-checking and curb misinformation. But it also makes Musk's purchase of the site and the implication that he will reduce moderation even more worrying.

Explore further Twitter rolls out redesigned misinformation warning labels

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Lower-income Americans now have more options for free high-speed internet access, including at least eight providers that serve Southern California, the White House announced Monday.

The federal government launched the Affordable Connectivity Program at the end of last year to provide $30-per-month subsidies for households with incomes at no more than twice the federal poverty level. But that subsidy was less than the amount many internet service providers charged for a high-speed connection fast enough to support a whole family of active users.

On Monday, the White House revealed that 20 broadband providers across the country, including five of the largest cable TV and telephone companies, had agreed to provide "sufficiently high-speed" connections at no more than $30 a month to qualifying homes. Eight of those serve communities in Southern California: AT&T, Comcast, Cox, Frontier, Mediacom, Spectrum, Starry and Verizon.

As part of the agreement, the White House said, Spectrumwhich serves much of L.A. Countydoubled the bandwidth of its $30-per-month offering from 50 to 100 megabits per second for qualified households. And Verizon cut the price of its 200 Mbps wired offering from $40 to $30 per month.

Many other California internet providers participate in the Affordable Connectivity Program, including some such as TruConnect that provide mobile broadband service. The only ones highlighted by the White House were the ones providing connections with 100 Mbps downloads at no cost to eligible households.

Eliminating the cost of a broadband connection removes just one of the barriers to wider internet adoption, however. Sunne Wright McPeak, head of the California Emerging Technology Fund, said other hurdles include the need for a smart device and the know-how required to use it.

The biggest problem, though, may be that most of the people eligible for subsidies aren't aware of or interested in them. For example, nearly half of households in Los Angeles County have incomes low enough to qualify for the federal subsidy, McPeak said, but less than a quarter of that group has signed up. And it could be difficult to reach the remainder; they're not likely to see a broadband provider's online advertisements touting the subsidies, for example.

The White House said Monday that it is trying to raise the program's profile by having federal safety net agencies tell participants about it, and by working with public interest groups' outreach efforts. The California Legislature is also considering a bill (AB 2751) that would require broadband providers doing business with the state to offer and advertise affordable internet connections for lower-income households.

Here's how to tell whether you qualify for the subsidies and which broadband providers offer them.

Am I eligible, and how do I apply?

The income cutoff is 200% of the federal poverty level, which is higher for larger households. For a single individual, the threshold is $27,180 per year. For a family of four, it's $55,500.

But there's an easier way to check your eligibility: You qualify for the program if anyone in your household is enrolled in at least one of 10 types of safety net programs, including food stamps, Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income, Pell grants and federal public housing subsidies. Recipients of selected tribal benefit programs also qualify, and subsidies on tribal lands are higher: $75 a month.

To see whether you qualify or to submit an application, you can visit the White House's "Get Internet" web page, which can walk you through the process. A mail-in application is available on the Get Internet site as well; it can also be found at the Affordable Connectivity Program's how-to-apply page. All those resources, though, require internet access and a computer, tablet or smartphone.

If you have questions about how to apply but don't have internet access, you can call the program's help center toll-free: (877) 384-2575.

Once your application is approved, the subsidies will flow directly to the participating broadband provider of your choice. To find one in your area, check the program's list, which you can search by ZIP Code or city. The list includes more than 90 participating providers near Los Angeles, although many of those are companies reselling service on one of the major wireless networks.

If you already have internet access, your broadband provider may have its own application process for the subsidies. You should start by checking with your ISP.

What services are available?

The subsidies will pay for either a fixed line to your home or a mobile broadband connection to your smartphone. You'll probably get more bandwidth from a fixed connectionwireless providers typically apply much lower caps on how much data you can use per month.

The federal program also includes a $100 discount on low-cost laptops and tablets, but not many broadband providers offer the device subsidies. The lone exception among the state's biggest cable TV and phone companies is Cox, which serves Santa Barbara and much of Orange and San Diego counties.

There is one additional $10-a-month federal subsidy, called Lifeline, that companies in most states can combine with the Affordable Connectivity Program to fund services for eligible low-income households. Meanwhile, California has its own Lifeline subsidy that adds about $15.50 to the federal Lifeline aid.

But Matt Johnson, co-chief executive of TruConnect, said California is the only state that won't let wireless companies bundle Lifeline and Affordable Connectivity Program money into one enhanced offering for customers. Cable TV and wireline phone companies can do that, he saida point that the California Public Utilities Commission disputesbut for wireless customers, it's one or the other. As a result, he said, TruConnect can't offer as much bandwidth to qualifying households in California as it does in other states.

Terrie D. Prosper, a spokesperson for the CPUC, said in an email that wireless and wired broadband providers currently receive the same subsidy amount, and none of them combine Lifeline and Affordable Connectivity Program subsidies. The commission is reviewing a staff proposal to change that policy, she said.

How many people still need broadband?

A survey last year by USC and the California Emerging Technology Fund found that 91% of the Californians interviewed had access to the internet. But the survey also found that more than one-fourth of the low-income Californians polled either had no internet service (16%) or just a data plan on their smartphone (10%).

Not having a high-speed connection at home makes it significantly harder to work, study or receive medical care remotely, the survey's authors said. In other words, it puts low-income households at a bigger disadvantage than they're at already.

One benefit of the White House's latest push, McPeak said, is that it will increase the outreach to low-income households by credible authorities. Such efforts can produce significant results, she said; when her group and L.A. County joined in an effort to spread the word about broadband subsidies late last year, enrollment in the county increased 43% in about three weeks.

But many of these families still need trusted sources to persuade and assist them in getting online, McPeak said. That requires funding for community-based groups that can overcome language and cultural barriers to adoption and improve digital literacy, she said.

How long will the subsidies last?

Unlike its predecessor, the now defunct Emergency Broadband Fund, the Affordable Connectivity Program has no expiration date. But Congress could choose at any point to cut off funding, which is one reason the California Emerging Technology Fund is pushing AB 2751, which would keep a version of the program alive if the feds ever abandoned it.

Explore further Biden starts program to provide discounted internet service

2022 Los Angeles Times.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
The robotic explorer GLIMPSE, created at ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich, has made it into the final round of a competition for prospecting resources in space. Credit: Team Glimpse

The robotic explorer GLIMPSE, created at ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich, has made it into the final round of a competition for prospecting resources in space. The long-term goal is for the robot to explore the south polar region of the moon.

The south polar region of the moon is believed to contain many resources that would be useful for lunar base operations, such as metals, water in the form of ice, and oxygen stored in rocks. But to find them, an explorer robot that can withstand the extreme conditions of this part of the moon is needed. Numerous craters make moving around difficult, while the low angle of the sunlight and thick layers of dust impede the use of light-based measuring instruments. Strong fluctuations in temperature pose a further challenge.

The European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Space Resources Innovation Center ESRIC called on European and Canadian engineering teams to develop robots and tools capable of mapping and prospecting the shadowy south polar region of the moon, between the Shoemaker and the Faustini craters. To do this, the researchers had to adapt terrestrial exploration technologies for the harsh conditions on the moon.

Semi-autonomous off road

One of the thirteen lunar rovers taking part in the competition comes from Zurich and is called GLIMPSE (Geological Lunar In-Situ Mapper and Prospector for Surface Exploration). The robot, which looks a bit like a dog, can move across terrain semi-autonomously on its four legs, and is fully equipped with a variety of spectrometers to recognize rock types.

Florian Kehl of the Spacehub at the University of Zurich (UZH) is leading the GLIMPSE project together with Hendrik Kolvenbach from the Robotic Systems Lab at ETH Zurich. Kehl, who previously spent five years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology searching for extraterrestrial life, is scientific director of the project, while Kolvenbach is overall project manager and responsible for robotics. As well as the two main stakeholders UZH Space Hub and ETH Robotic Systems Lab, researchers and engineers from Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, the University of Basel and the companies Maxon, ANYbotics and Metrohm are also involved.

The robotics behind GLIMPSE are based on the ANYmal robot type developed by ETH spin-off ANYbotics. The GLIMPSE robot has instruments for petrographic and chemical rock analysis, including a Raman spectrometer, a microscope and a camera with zoom lens for overview and close-up images.

The GLIMPSE robot has instruments for petrographic and chemical rock analysis, including a Raman spectrometer, a microscope and a camera with zoom lens for overview and close-up images. Credit: Team Glimpse

Test run in artificial lunar landscape

GLIMPSE has already successfully passed its first test. Along with 13 other robot explorers, it showed its skills in navigating an artificial lunar landscape set up specially for the competition in a hangar in the Netherlands.

GLIMPSE had two and a half hours to find its way through the unfamiliar lunar landscape to a specific crater where it then had to analyze the rocks. "Afterwards, we had another hour and a half to analyze the data," says Kehl. "It was a very tight time frame."

The teams did not have a direct view of the lunar landscapenavigation was based on the robots' camera recordings and on location data made to resemble satellite images. One of the difficulties was that control signals reached the rovers with a time delay. In order to simulate real conditions, the connection with the robots was sometimes even lost altogether. "Robots with mature autonomous control technology had an advantage under these circumstances," says Kehl.

Five teams have made it to the final

The competition revealed the robots' strengths as well as their weaknesses: Some did not have sufficient lighting, others had problems with the batteries or struggled with the artificial signal delay. Not all of the 13 participating rovers made it all the way to the crater.

"We also encountered various difficulties," says Kehl. Nevertheless, compared to its competitors, most of which had wheels or tracks, the four-legged GLIMPSE proved to be particularly capable and agile off-road. The dog-like robot successfully passed the first round of the competition, winning 75,000 Euros for the team.

The researchers are now working round the clock to optimize GLIMPSE for the final round which will take place in Luxembourg later this year. Five teams have made it to the final. The winners stand to gain 550,000 Euros to use for the further development of their robot designs. It's conceivable that GLIMPSE could be used in a real ESA mission to the south pole of the moon sometime in the next decade. We've got our fingers crossed for GLIMPSE and its team.

Explore further Inaugural Space Resources Challenge for driving and walking rovers
The Twitter application is seen on a digital device, Monday, April 25, 2022, in San Diego. In the latest sign of turmoil inside Twitter amid Elon Musk's planned buyout of the company, a Twitter general manager, Kayvon Beykpour, is leaving after 7 years. In a series of tweets Thursday, May 12, Beykpour said CEO Parag Agrawal asked me to leave after letting me know that he wants to take the team in a different direction. Credit: AP Photo/Gregory Bull, File

Twitter fired two of its top managers Thursday, the latest sign of internal turmoil amid Tesla billionaire Elon Musk's planned buyout of the company.

One Twitter general manager, Kayvon Beykpour, is leaving after 7 years. In a series of tweets Thursday, Beykpour said CEO Parag Agrawal "asked me to leave after letting me know that he wants to take the team in a different direction."

Bruce Falck, Twitter's revenue and product lead, was also fired, according to a tweet that has since been deleted. His Twitter bio now says "unemployed."

"I dedicate this Tweet to those engineers and thank you ALL for the opportunity to serve alongside you. It's been awesome. There is a lot more to do so get back to work, I can't wait to see what you build," Falck tweeted.

Twitter confirmed both departures and said the company is pausing most hiring and except for business critical roles. In addition, it said in a statement, "we are pulling back on non-labor costs to ensure we are being responsible and efficient."

Beykpour was the general manager of consumer Twitter, leading design, research, product, engineering and customer service and operations teams, according to his Twitter bio. A co-founder of the live streaming app Periscope, Beykpour joined Twitter when the social media company bought his startup in 2015.

"I hope and expect that Twitter's best days are still ahead of it. Twitter is one of the most important, unique and impactful products in the world. With the right nurturing and stewardship, that impact will only grow," he said on Twitter.

Beykpour did not immediately respond to a message for comment.

In a memo sent to employees and confirmed by Twitter, Agrawal said Twitter has not hit growth and revenue milestones after the company began to invest "aggressively" to expand its user base and revenue.

Shares of San Francisco-based Twitter slipped 86 cents to $45.23 midday Thursday, more than 20% below Musk's offer price of $54.20 per share.

Explore further Musk suggests Twitter changes, including accepting Dogecoin

 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Art and sacrifice are the basis of two College Station Noon Lions Club events as Art in the Park returns for a second year to Stephen C. Beachy Central Park on Saturday and Honoring Our Heroes marks its 10th year next Tuesday.

Honoring Our Heroes, which raises money for The 100 Club and Lions Club and Lions Club charities, will bring retired Secret Service agent Kathryn Childers to the luncheon that recognizes the work of local first responders. The event will take place at noon at the College Station Hilton and Conference Center.

Ron Gay, chair of the event and 42-year member of the local Lions Club, said the work of The 100 Club came to the clubs attention after the deaths of Brazos County Pct. 3 volunteer firefighter William Danes and Pct. 1 Constable Brian Bachmann in August 2012. The 100 Club was again in the county to support the families of Bryan firefighters Lt. Greg Pickard and Lt. Eric Wallace, who died in February 2014.

Gay said The 100 Club is based in Harris County, but has expanded to include surrounding 27 counties, including Brazos. He said the organization provides financial benefits to the family of first responders killed in the line of duty, including money to cover immediate expenses, paying off any debt the family may owe and establishing scholarships for any children.

For me personally, I just cant imagine a job where you get up in the morning, kiss your wife or husband goodbye and realize that it might be the last time you do, Gay said. On any given day, it could be the last time you see them. I think we owe them a lot.

The luncheon transitioned from a dinner after feedback from the chiefs, Gay said, who suggested moving it to lunchtime to allow more first responders the opportunity to attend. Each of the eight-seat tables is sponsored by a business that gets four of the seats. The other four are reserved for first responders, who receive a free ticket.

Its been a wonderful event, and I can tell you that this community really supports its first responders, Gay said. You can feel it. You can feel the love and sincerity in the room when youre there.

Childers, who released her memoir Scared Fearless in 2021 will serve as the keynote speaker during the luncheon. Also known as the Pistol Packin Nanny for her service protecting John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis children, Childers was one of the first five women appointed to the Secret Service.

Were really excited to have her, and shes really excited to be able to address a group of first responders, Gay said. Considering whats going on out there in the atmosphere, this is a nice event for the Lions to be associated with because we also support the first responders.

Tickets are $100 each and available through an Eventbrite link at csnoonlions.org. Childers will have copies of her book available for purchase also.

Art in the Park

What began as an idea by two retired teachers to engage the youth of Bryan-College Station through art has expanded in its second year.

Art in the Park is scheduled for 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday and will have activities and games set up in the expanded Fun For All Playground and more art projects and stations set up under tents throughout the park.

Co-chairs Katina Osth and Esther Miranda said last years inaugural event was two hours long, and some participants asked for it to be longer.

The idea developed from something Miranda observed in Geneva, Switzerland, where multiple generations of families were playing oversized games, like chess and checkers in the parks.

Great-grandparents, grandparents, their sons and daughters, and the grandchildren are all in the park, and theyre playing for free, Miranda said. I saw that, and I just thought we have so many beautiful parks in Bryan-College Station. Why cant we not do the same thing in our parks?

One of their goals is to get kids out in nature, away from their screens and enjoying art. They encouraged parents to bring their kids who are interested in art to the event to try out different art styles from photography to acrylic paint to nature art.

This years event will include six master artist stations where guests will learn about different types of artists, such as Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Claude Monet, and then paint their own version of one of their masterpieces.

Another addition this year is a special Peace for Ukraine community art project anyone can participate in.

The free four-hour event will have cooling stations set up, and there will be free hot dogs and water. Other for-purchase food vendors will be on site as well.

Some of the stations will have limited spots each hour, but other areas will be run in a come-and-go way.

The purpose is to provide kids with an explosion of color and experience and style that many kids dont even get at their schools or in a private art class, Miranda said. Many kids have never worked with pastels or watercolors or have the materials at home to do that kind of stuff or their parents cant sign them up for a class for whatever reason. By coming to a free event on a Saturday, they get to experience a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

For more information about either event, go to csnoonlions.org, and email ArtinthePark@csnoonlions.org to volunteer at Art in the Park.

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WASHINGTON  The Supreme Courts nine justices will gather in private Thursday for their first scheduled meeting since the leak of a draft opinion that would overrule Roe v. Wade and sharply curtail abortion rights in roughly half the states.

The meeting in the justices private, wood-paneled conference room could be a tense affair in a setting noted for its decorum. No one aside from the justices attends and the most junior among them, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, is responsible for taking notes.

Thursdays conference comes at an especially fraught moment, with the future of abortion rights at stake and an investigation underway to try to find the source of the leak.

Chief Justice John Roberts last week confirmed the authenticity of the opinion, revealed by Politico, in ordering the courts marshal to undertake an investigation.

Roberts stressed that the draft, written by Justice Samuel Alito and circulated in February, may not be the courts final word. Supreme Court decisions are not final until they are formally issued and the outcomes in some cases changed between the justices initial votes shortly after arguments and before the official announcement of the decisions.

Thats true of a major abortion ruling from 1992 that now is threatened, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, when Justice Anthony Kennedy initially indicated he would be part of a majority to reverse Roe but later was among five justices who affirmed the basic right of a woman to choose abortion that the court first laid out in Roe in 1973.

Kennedy met privately with Justices Sandra Day OConnor and David Souter to craft a joint opinion, with no hint to the public or even to other justices about what was going on.

I think its tradition and decorum that everyone corresponds in writing about things that are in circulation, said Megan Wold, a former law clerk to Alito. But at the same time, theres nothing to prevent a justice from picking up the phone to call, from visiting someone else in chambers.

A major shift in the current abortion case seems less likely, at least partly because of the leak, abortion law experts and people on both sides of the issue said.

I think the broad contours are very unlikely to change. To the extent the leak matters, it will make broad changes unlikely, said Mary Ziegler, a scholar of the history of abortion at the Florida State University law school.

Sherif Gergis, a University of Notre Dame law professor who once was a law clerk for Alito, agreed. Ill be surprised if it changes very much, Gergis said.

Its not clear who leaked the opinion, or for what purpose. But Alitos writing means that there were at least five votes in December to overrule Roe and Casey, just after the court heard arguments over a Mississippi law that would ban abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Based on their questions at arguments, Justice Clarence Thomas and former President Donald Trumps three appointees  Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Barrett  seemed most likely to join Alito.

Roberts appeared the most inclined among the conservatives to avoid reaching a decision to overrule the landmark abortion rulings, but his questions suggested that he would at the very least vote to uphold the Mississippi law. Even that outcome would dramatically undermine abortion rights and invite states to adopt increasingly stricter limits.

If Roberts, who often prefers incremental steps in an effort to preserve the courts legitimacy, wanted to prevent the court from overruling Roe and Casey, hed need to pick up the vote of just one other colleague. That would be enough to deprive Alito of a majority.

The liberal justices  Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor  are expected to dissent from either outcome. But no dissent, separate opinion from Roberts, or even a revised draft majority opinion has been circulated among the justices, Politico reported.
BIRMINGHAM, Ala.  Michelle Butler was just over halfway through her pregnancy when her water broke and contractions wracked her body. She couldnt escape a terrifying truth: Her twins were coming much too soon.

Dr. Brian Sims entered the delivery room and gently explained that babies born so early likely wont live. He told Butler he could keep them comfortable as they died.

But she pleaded through tears: Give my twins a chance to survive.

And he did.

Until recently, trying to save babies born this early would have been futile. Butler was in the fifth month of her pregnancy, one day past 21 weeks gestation. Thats seven weeks earlier than what doctors once considered the lower limit of viability, the earliest an infant could possibly survive outside the womb. But over the last half century, medical science has slowly shifted that boundary downward.

And thats made viability  a word many associate with the abortion debate  key to decisions about desperately wanted babies at the very edge of life.

Growing numbers of extremely premature infants are getting lifesaving treatment and surviving. A pivotal study in the Journal of the American Medical Association this year, which looked at nearly 11,000 such births in a neonatal research network that is part of the National Institutes of Health, found that 30% of babies born at 22 weeks, 56% born at 23 weeks and 71% born at 24 weeks lived at least until they were healthy enough to be sent home if doctors tried to save them.

Those gains happened gradually and quietly as the notion of viability received a lot more attention in the abortion arena. Viability is mentioned 36 times in the initial draft of the leaked majority opinion by the U.S. Supreme Court in a Mississippi case that would strike down Roe v. Wade. The decades-old abortion ruling says the Constitution protects a womans right to an abortion before viability, a standard Mississippi argues is arbitrary.

But viability has nothing to do with the vast majority of abortions; more than 99% of abortions occur at or before 21 weeks, according to federal statistics. So although viability is central to abortion law, the crux of the argument around the procedure comes down to disagreement about whether and in which cases someone should have the choice to terminate a pregnancy.

Meanwhile, viability is a growing concern for those who care for premature babies as science keeps moving the line lower and lower.

And in this realm, too, its ethically fraught.

Beyond the risk of death, babies at borderline viability are highly susceptible to disabilities such as cerebral palsy, cognitive impairments, blindness and severe lung problems. Often, parents and doctors face a heartbreaking question they must answer together: How do they decide what to do?

Theres a lot of things we can do, a lot of interventions, said Dr. Barbara Warner, a newborn medicine expert at Washington University medical school in St. Louis. Should we do them?

In the case of Butlers twins, the answer was yes. Curtis and CAsya Means came into the world on July 5, 2020, at the University of Alabama hospital in Birmingham, each weighing less than a pound and small enough to fit in an adults hand.

Their divergent paths reflected both sides of extreme prematurity.

CAsya lived just one day. Butler keeps her ashes in a tiny pink-and-silver urn.

Curtis is the earliest surviving micropreemie in the world and is now teething, trying solid foods and tooling around the house in his walker.

Tiny fighter

Dr. Elizabeth Foglia, a neonatologist at Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia, cant point to a single new technology, medication or approach that has made it possible to keep more micropreemies alive.

Its just a slow evolution, she said.

Complications remain common, though, and care for these babies also remains intense and costly.

Sims, who treated Butlers twins, said it would have been perfectly reasonable not to try to save them. In such cases, whether to resuscitate or continue lifesaving care is a shared decision between parents and the medical team.

But even when we dont try anything, a baby thats trying to live will show you that. Youll see that the babys trying to take a breath, Sims said.

As soon as Curtis and CAsya arrived, Sims gave each a little bit of oxygen. Curtis heart rate quickly rose. His smaller sister didnt respond as well. Other medical measures couldnt compensate for her immature lungs.

They told me it was up to me to make the call about withdrawing treatment, Butler said. I actually was praying silently to myself. God came to me and told me, If you give me CAsya, Ill give you Curtis.

Butler cradled her daughter for hours after she died. It was the first time she held her.

Curtis stayed in the NICU for nine more months, then went home tethered to oxygen and relying on a feeding pump.

Bittersweet progress

In the future, doctors expect more micropreemies like Curtis to survive.

Saving them is expected to become more accepted and common. And down the road, scientists are working on lifesaving equipment tailored to smaller bodies and an artificial womb they hope could someday grow a fetus outside of a person.

Such advances are sure to deepen ethical dilemmas.

There always will be a limit of viability, Foglia said. And wherever that limit is, survival may be possible but not guaranteed. And survival without disability is certainly not guaranteed.

Doctors are hopeful that Curtis Means  he carries his fathers last name  will continue to thrive.

At 22 months, he can be unhooked from oxygen for an hour a day. He crawls, plays with his older sister and brother and eats a growing number of soft and pureed foods.

One afternoon, Butler pulled Curtis into her arms at her rural Eutaw home. He grabbed at her face. She kissed his hand. She pulled down his Winnie-the-Pooh shirt, and they touched palms in a high five.

The 35-year-old single mother envisions Curtis going to school in a few years and becoming a doctor someday.

But as he grows, she always wants him to remember CAsya.

I mention her name every day for him, to let him know he was a twin and your twin is your angel, she said. And when he gets bigger, Im going to get him a necklace where he can keep her ashes with him.
Willard Investment Properties is making another attempt at developing property located just south of Hales Ford Bridge in Moneta. A proposal for 30 single-family homes and a commercial lot was given the go ahead by the Franklin County Planning Commission on Tuesday.

The development would be located along Bridgewater Grande Drive just off Virginia 122. Willard Investment Properties purchased the property shortly after the previous owner, Bridgewater Pointe Partners, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2008.

Willard Investment Properties presented a proposal last year in the same location for 42 homes on the 30 acre property. Ron Willard II, vice president of Willard Investment Properties, said during Tuesdays meeting that there was a potential buyer for the proposal last year that fell through.

Willard said the new development proposed on Tuesday would be a better fit for the location. The 30 lots would range from .3 acre to 3.53 acres on the the 30 acres of property. Five of the estate lots would also include a guest house, he said.

This would be the first development by Willard Investment Properties in more than a decade if it is approved by the Franklin County Board of Supervisors. Willard Investment Properties asked to fast track the proposal which moved the proposal to next weeks meeting of the Franklin County Board of Supervisors instead of next month.

Willard said the company was looking forward to working on the project. We are excited about developing again in Franklin County, he said. Its been quite some time.

No one from the public commented during Tuesdays public hearing on the proposal. Commission members only had a few questions before moving to approve the proposal.

One of the biggest questions was from Gills Creek District representative Cheryl Ege who asked if short-term rentals would be allowed in the development. Willard said the proposed development would just be for family and short-term rentals would not be allowed.

The Franklin County Board of Supervisors will make a final vote on the proposal May 17.
The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) on Tuesday disclosed that it thwarted a cyberattack by Sandworm, a hacking group affiliated with Russia's military intelligence, to sabotage the operations of an unnamed energy provider in the country.

"The attackers attempted to take down several infrastructure components of their target, namely: Electrical substations, Windows-operated computing systems, Linux-operated server equipment, [and] active network equipment," the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection of Ukraine (SSSCIP) said in a statement.

Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET, which collaborated with CERT-UA to analyze the attack, said the attempted intrusion involved the use of ICS-capable malware and regular disk wipers, with the adversary unleashing an updated variant of the Industroyer malware, which was first deployed in a 2016 assault on Ukraine's power grid.

"The Sandworm attackers made an attempt to deploy the Industroyer2 malware against high-voltage electrical substations in Ukraine," ESET explained. "In addition to Industroyer2, Sandworm used several destructive malware families including CaddyWiper, OrcShred, SoloShred, and AwfulShred."

The victim's power grid network is believed to have penetrated in two waves, the initial compromise occurring no later than February 2022, coinciding with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and a follow-on infiltration in April that allowed the attackers to upload Industroyer2.

Industroyer, also known as "CrashOverride" and dubbed the "biggest threat to industrial control systems since Stuxnet," is both modular and capable of gaining direct control of switches and circuit breakers at an electricity distribution substation.

The new version of the sophisticated and highly customizable malware, like its predecessor, leverages an industrial communication protocol called IEC-104 to commandeer industrial equipment such as protection relays that are widely used in electrical substations.

Forensic analysis of the artifacts left behind by Industroyer2 has revealed a compilation timestamp of March 23, 2022, indicating that the attack had been planned for at least two weeks. That said, it's still unclear how the targeted power facility was initially compromised, or how the intruders moved from the IT network to the Industrial Control System (ICS) network.

ESET said that the destructive actions against the company's infrastructure were scheduled to take place on April 8, 2022, but were ultimately foiled. This was set to be followed by the execution of a data wiper called CaddyWiper 10 minutes later on the same machine to erase traces of the Industroyer2 malware.

Alongside Industroyer2 and CaddyWiper, the targeted energy provider's network is also said to have been infected by a Linux worm called OrcShred, which was then used to spread two different wiper malware aimed at Linux and Solaris systems  AwfulShred and SoloShred  and render the machines inoperable.

The findings come close on the heels of the court-authorized takedown of Cyclops Blink, an advanced modular botnet controlled by the Sandworm threat actor, last week.

CERT-UA, for its part, has also warned of a number of spear-phishing campaigns mounted by Armageddon, another Russia-based group with ties to the Federal Security Service (FSB) that has attacked Ukrainian entities since at least 2013.

"Ukraine is once again at the center of cyberattacks targeting their critical infrastructure," ESET said. "This new Industroyer campaign follows multiple waves of wipers that have been targeting various sectors in Ukraine."
When Troy Arp was admitted to Grand Island Regional Medical Center with COVID on Jan. 17, he thought hed be there a week.

He got home 73 days later.

Along the way, doctors werent sure hed make it. During his long struggle with the coronavirus, a doctor told him they almost lost him twice.

He was in a coma for three weeks. His fiancee, Charlene Sanders, worried if hed know her when he woke up.

He did. And on March 31, the Grand Island man made it home. Sanders, who fought the battle every step of the way with him, feels that theyre blessed.

As he fought for his life, Arp lost more than 60 pounds. He entered the hospital at 229 pounds, and is now at 165, after dropping to 162.

Arp, 54, doesnt remember much of his stay in the hospital, just the last couple of weeks.

COVID-19 is a very serious matter, he says. Its nothing to mess with.

Sanders, who had COVID herself, still wears a facemask when she goes out. She gets looks from other people questioning why shes wearing a mask. But shell keep on wearing it.

Arp initially came down with COVID, which evolved into pneumonia.

His problems started Jan. 9 with a rash on the bottom of his arms.

Breathing soon became a problem. On Jan. 10, he visited the hospital. The next day, he learned he had COVID-19.

When he woke up on Jan. 15, he had trouble breathing. Two days later, Arp asked Sanders to call an ambulance.

Arp went on a ventilator Jan. 27 and got a tracheotomy on Feb. 15.

If he hadnt had the tracheotomy, I dont think hed be here, Sanders said back at home.

He got out of ICU on March 16.

For Arp, the scariest part was not being able to breathe.

He also experienced tremendous pain, caused by bladder spasms involving his catheter. That pain, which affected him both at the hospital and at home, was so bad it made him cry and scream.

But he raves about the care he received from a dedicated team or doctors and nurses. They didnt give up, he said.

Arp got tired of laying in the hospital. But, I made some good friends up there, he said, referring to doctors and nurses.

Arp, who grew up in Wisconsin, has lived in Nebraska for three years.

Sanders, a lifelong Grand Islander, is thankful for the three years theyve had together. But she wanted more.

For his recovery, Sanders gives a lot of credit to God and prayer.  I had him on tons of prayer chains, she said.

While Arp was under, Sanders was busy writing love notes to him.

Shed like to put them together into a book called Love Notes to Troy.

Arp is still not back to normal. Hes on oxygen. He has trouble moving his left arm, and hes working on getting his legs stronger.

Sanders gives a lot of credit to Good Samaritan Society home health, which has been wonderful, she says.

Arp is anxious to get his health back. Hes a worker, Sanders said. He likes to work.

Sanders now considers every day a blessing. She encourages people not to take life for granted.

Spend time with your family and show them that you love them. Because were not guaranteed tomorrow, she says.

Arp and Sanders could use some financial support. Arps email address is troyarp1968@gmail.com. Their address is Apt. 26, 3033 W. Capital Ave.
When police contacted the teenager on foot, he was found to be under the influence of alcohol. He refused to submit to a chemical test.
First Light Child Advocacy Center hopes to raise enough money to hire new employees, as well as build a new building.

Were bursting at the seams, says Shannon Krejci, executive director of the child advocacy center.

Last year, First Light interviewed 317 children, 75% of whom were victims of child sexual abuse, child pornography, child exploitation and/or sex trafficking.

COVID-19 led to a significant increase in the number of abused children, Krejci said.

First Light has four employees, including Krejci. She doesnt want to see the increased workload burn out employees, she said.

Working with children up to 18, First Light interviews victims of abuse. The interviews are used to prosecute perpetrators of child abuse and neglect. The process benefits the victim by limiting the number of times a child is interviewed. Video and audio recordings are made of the interview.

First Light, which used to be called Central Nebraska Child Advocacy Center, launched a campaign earlier this year called Make a Difference.

That campaign will continue every year. The goal is to raise $100,000 annually.

This year, $102,000 has been raised.

On April 27, the Make a Difference campaign received a boost when members of the Bosselman family donated $50,000.

Krejci expressed thanks to Jennifer and Ray OConnor, who chair the campaign. The OConnors have also helped the effort financially.

Krejci would like to hire a trauma-focused therapist, who will work at First Light and serve at no cost to the children we see, she said.

She would also like to hire additional staff members.

First Light, a nonprofit agency, works closely with law enforcement. In addition to local police officers and sheriffs deputies, members of the Nebraska State Patrol, Homeland Security and FBI have brought children to First Light to be interviewed. Victims also are brought in by the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services. At times, prosecutors from county attorneys offices have sat in on interviews.

Headquartered in Grand Island, First Light serves a 10-county area. In addition to Hall, those counties are Howard, Hamilton, Merrick, Garfield, Greeley, Clay, Nuckolls, Webster and Wheeler.

First Light is at 2335 N. Webb Road. For information about the campaign, call 308-385-5238. The website is at www.FirstLightcncac.com.

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With only two candidates for Nebraska State Board of Education in each of Districts 5 and 6, theoretically the primaries could be skipped and the candidates shortcut to the general election.

Not so.

According to Tracy Overstreet, Hall County Election Commissioner, in Hall county three races that never automatically advance are: Nebraska State Board of Education, Legislature and State Board of Regents.

(Those three races) never auto-advance, regardless if the number of candidates are too few to pare anybody down.

The State Board of Education races in District 6 (which includes Hall, Buffalo, Adams and Merrick Counties) and District 5 (including Hamilton, York and Merrick Counties) each have two candidates competing in one spot per district.

In District 6, Sherry Jones and Danielle Helzer were on the primary ballot. Jones received 69.18% of the votes (29,695); Helzer, 30.82% (13,227). All precincts had reported.

There are no incumbents running in District 6. Sherry Jones and Danielle Helzer are in contest to take the seat held by Maureen Nickels. Nickels declined to run for re-election. She was elected to represent District 6 in 2014.

Helen Raikes and Kirk Penner are vying for a spot representing District 5. With all precincts reporting, Penner received 60.92% of the votes (32,150); Raikes, 39.08% (20,624). The District 5 spot was vacated by Patricia Timm, who announced her resignation in October 2021, 17 years after being appointed to the seat by then-governor Mike Johanns. Penner was appointed to his District 5 seat in December 2021 by Governor Pete Ricketts to fill Timms spot.

Having a primary election for State Board of Education, Legislature and State Board of Regents does have value, Overstreet explained.

It ends up being sort of a litmus test for those candidates. They can see where they had strengths where they had weakness, where they maybe need to do some campaigning before the general election.

In cases like these, primaries have No winner or loser, Overstreet said. They will be on the general ballot again.

Jessica Votipka is the education reporter at the Grand Island Independent. She can be reached at 308-381-5420.

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YORK  Upon the blessing of the York County Commissioners, an application for funds that would assist with the renovation of the Four Corners Health Department building is going to be made.

Laura McDougall, Four Corners director, and Lisa Hurley, York County Development Corporation director, addressed the county commissioners this past week.

We have been working on this, with Four Corners, for several years now, Hurley said. My goal is to try to help them stay in York County. The building has some challenges. We have looked at options and after working through COVID, the needs there are more amplified.

Hurley said a pre-application was made with the state, for funds, and now they have been notified $450,000 is available and they should make a formal application.

Last week, the state department of economic development asked for a full application to be submitted, Hurley said. They reached out to two projects, including this one. This wont solve all the problems with the building, but it will make the building more sustainable. The DED wants the county to be the applicant for these federal funds. If you give approval to move forward, SENDD (the Southeast Nebraska Development District) will finish the application and we will have a public hearing. If it is awarded, it would be a good chunk of the $450,000 that is available. York County would be a flow-through for the grant.

McDougall explained how the building is much more utilized now than in the early days when the health department was first formed and moved into the former medical clinic. She said the massive volume of testing, supplying health equipment and doing contact tracing further shows the justification for the granting of funds, thanks to COVID.

The building was constructed in pieces, McDougall told the board. And a lot of the areas are still original. When we bought the building 15 years ago, there was some remodeling, but a lot of it is still original.

One of the main needs in the building is a new HVAC system as it doesnt work at all in some areas of the facility.

Also, we have a front ramp to the building that doesnt meet accessibility specs and the front entrance is crumbling, the railing is coming off, Hurley said. Plus, rain and snow comes in through the front doors. We also need handicap accessible bathrooms.

These would be COVID funds, Hurley explained. Over the last nine years, we have partnered in a variety of ways with Four Corners and they do so much more that has economic impact on our community, so much more beyond COVID work. The building really needs to be fixed.

We had to use many parts of the building during COVID that we hadnt used before, McDougall said. We would like to use all the parts of the building that we hadnt before, due to the heating problems.

Its exciting that we got the call to move forward with the application, Hurley added.

They would be applying for $378,000.

So would this $378,000 be just a Band-Aid on this building? asked Commissioner Kurt Bulgrin. I get that these are federal funds  which are funds from all of us as taxpayers  but why throw this money at this building if there arent plans to stay there (perpetually)?

We, in the past, have looked at other building options but since then we learned how we have required more space, McDougall said. We feel we may get some other funding as well, to do more refurbishing. This will greatly improve this building which will help during our time there and be good for whoever is there after us.

So, if we are at the end of COVID, the needs are what then? asked Bulgrin.

The room is needed for the many other services they also provide, Hurley responded.

What is the timeline for a new building? Bulgrin asked.

There has never been funding for a new building, McDougall said. This money would be strictly for remodeling. If we can do the refurbishing, the department can stay there for a while.

They used all those spaces before and there are more things in public health that will be coming up, said Commissioner Jack Sikes, who also sits on the Four Corners board. This will help with this. All kinds of things are now getting pushed into the public health sector.

Will there be any cost to York County taxpayers? Bulgrin asked.

There will be no matching funds at all, Hurley said. There will be a little bit for advertising public hearings, but other than that, nothing. SENDD will do the administration of the grant.

The process was given the green light to move forward and the application will now be made.
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At the end of her very first Mothers Day as a new mom, Hilary Chandler was relaxing in bed. Her two-month-daughter was asleep and Chandler was checking retailers websites on her phone.

Like many other parents of infants in recent days, she was looking for infant formula.

Then she saw it: A pharmacy in Marion had one can of the brand of formula she uses for her daughter. Even though it was after 10 p.m., Chandler got out of bed, got dressed and drove to Marion from her home in rural Carbondale for 12.5 ounces of powdered formula.

Across the region and nation, parents are scrambling to find formula for their infants. A recent recall of some brands and supply chain issues have led to shortages and purchase restrictions.

The Associated Press reports that Abbott, one of the nations largest producers of infant formula was forced to close a manufacturing plant because of contamination concerns, leading to shortages not only of its brands, but in other brands as parents search for an alternate product.

I never thought as a mom that I would have to worry about trying to find formula to feed my daughter, Chandler said. I didnt think it would be a concern in 2022.

Chandler said that she has made trips to destinations much farther than Marion in search of formula and has enlisted family members and friends on her quest.

Weve driven to Missouri a couple of times to try to find it in St. Louis and I have friends looking in five or six different states, just keeping their eyes open for us.

With the purchase of the single can last weekend, Chandler says her supply is enough through the rest of May. But still, she is concerned.

Im worried, but hopeful that its going to get better.

She said she even emailed Mead Johnson, the manufacturer of Enfamil formula. A response indicated the company was working diligently to get their product on the shelves and make more available." Chandler said even when she finds the formula in stock, many retailers are limiting the number of cans which may be purchased.

Most places I have seen have a limit between two and four cans, but honestly, Ive never had to worry about that because I cant ever find that many, she said.

Cassie Walden, executive director of Pregnancy Matters in Carbondale, said her organization often helps new moms with formula and other supplies for their children. She said she has had an uptick in calls from people looking for formula.

We still have some on our shelves and were helping people, but were looking for options, just like everybody else, Walden said. We are getting more requests.

She said families are getting nervous about the short supply of formula. She added that an average can of formula is just under $20 and specialized formulas can be $30 or more per can. A single can will last three to five days.

These parents just want to make sure that their children are able to get the proper nutrition and they want to do the right thing; they want to provide for their children, she said.

Experts say parents do have some options, such as changing brands or switching from a special blend to a more common type of formula over the short-term.

A lot of moms are having to look at other brands as well as other formulations, explained Shawnna Rhine, community outreach coordinator for Southern Seven Health Department. There are many different varieties and when you are dealing with infants, each one has a specific need when it comes to nutrition. We want to make sure they are getting the correct formula to meet those needs.

For that reason, Rhine and Walden both recommended parents talk with their pediatrician before making any changes to the formula they give their infants. Walden also cautioned against parents trying to make their own formula.

In the meantime, parents such as Chandler will continue to search and stress.

Ill just keep looking and hope that other moms can find what they need because this is definitely a little nerve-wracking, she said.

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COLUMBIA  Trison Wells, a consumer products manufacturer, announced Thursday plans to establish operations in Colleton County.

The companys $1.2 million investment will create 35 new jobs.

Trison Wells is a full-service contract manufacturing company that specializes in liquid filling for household, personal and beauty care products. The company offers products to meet customers specific needs by leveraging the know-how of its team and state-of-the-art equipment.

Located at 1756 Industrial Road in Walterboro, Trison Wells Colleton County facility will expand the companys manufacturing operations and accommodate growth to meet increasing demand.

Operations are expected to start first week of June 2022.

The Coordinating Council for Economic Development has approved a $100,000 Rural Infrastructure Fund grant to Colleton County to assist with the costs of building improvements.

We are proud to provide high-quality and agile services that help foster manufacturing in the USA. We have invested and will continue to invest in people and technology to build strong capabilities in South Carolina. We are grateful for the warm welcome we have received from Colleton County and the state of South Carolina and look forward to developing a fruitful partnership with the community," Trison Wells General Manager Jonathan Johnson said.

Trison Wells decision to locate in Colleton County proves once again how manufacturing companies recognize the advantages of doing business in South Carolina. We welcome Trison Wells and look forward to a strong partnership for many years to come," Gov. Henry McMaster said.

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Rice, peanut butter, cereal, pasta, and canned fruits and vegetables will be among the items postal carriers will be collecting this weekend during the nation's largest one-day food drive.

Local letter carriers will join others in thousands of cities and towns nationwide to collect food this Saturday, May 14, as part of the National Association of Letter Carriers' 30th annual Stamp Out Hunger food drive.

Carriers will collect nonperishable food donations left beside or in mailboxes and post offices. The food will be delivered to local community food banks, pantries and shelters.

Since the drive began, total donations have surpassed 1.8 billion pounds of food.

Orangeburg donations will be given to Cooperative Church Ministries of Orangeburg and The Samaritan House.

The food drive has not been held since 2019 because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Were pleased to see that the post office has restarted the program, and we really appreciate all that they do and have done, CCMO Executive Director Barbara Troy said.

CCMO, located at 2570 St. Matthews Road, is open from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Samaritan House Executive Director Henry Miller, who was at the Orangeburg post office Wednesday morning to help kick off this years volunteer effort, said the donations are a blessing.

Its a blessing that the community comes together to support the Samaritan House. It takes a community to maintain the shelter. We would not exist if it werent for the tremendous support that we get from the citizens of Orangeburg County. Its amazing that people pour out their hearts and their blessings when it comes to taking care of the homeless population in Orangeburg, Miller said.

Kenny Vogt, local coordinator of the local "Stamp Out Hunger" drive, said the Orangeburg post office gets support from area branches including Orangeburg, Bamberg, Denmark, St. Matthews, Santee and Vance.

Just about every office in the area contributes. It feels good to do it again because I know there are a lot of needy people in the community that could use it. All my co-workers enjoy contributing, Vogt said.

Canned meals such as soups, chili and pasta; 100% juice; peanut butter; macaroni and cheese; canned protein such as tuna, chicken and turkey; and canned or dried beans are among the desired food items.

Items that are not accepted are rusty, outdated and unlabeled cans; glass containers; homemade items; and open or used products.

Postal customers will be receiving notification cards and are asked to put their donated items in plastic bags. A bin will also be placed in the lobby of the Orangeburg post office for food items.

For more information about the drive, visit www.nalc.org/community-service/food-drive or www.facebook.com/StampOutHunger.

Contact the writer: dgleaton@timesanddemocrat.com or 803-533-5534. Follow "Good News with Gleaton" on Twitter at @DionneTandD

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BEIRUT  A decision has been reached to release Raja Salameh, the brother of Lebanon's central bank governor, on bail of LL100 billion, or around $3.7 million at the parallel market exchange rate, a judicial source confirmed to L'Orient Today.

Here's what we know:

 Salameh has been in state custody since his arrest on March 17. He has been charged with complicity in illicit enrichment by his brother, central bank chief Riad Salameh. Charges have also been brought against Riad Salameh.

 The brothers have denied the charges against them.

 The judge that ordered Raja Salameh's release on bail also froze 40 of his properties and banned him from travel, Reuters reported two judicial sources as saying, adding that one of the sources said the bail amount was the highest posted in Lebanon's history.

 The case, brought against the Salamehs by Judge Ghada Aoun, relates to the alleged purchase and rental of Paris apartments by the Salameh brothers, including the rental of some to the central bank, Aoun previously told Reuters. A hearing for Riad Salameh in the case is scheduled for June 9.

 Governor for nearly three decades, Riad Salameh, 71, has previously attributed his wealth to the investment of money made while he was a banker at Merrill Lynch before he became governor in 1993. His tenure has faced increased scrutiny since the financial system imploded in 2019, the most destabilizing crisis since Lebanon's 1975-90 Civil War.

 Riad Salameh faces other investigations, including a Swiss inquiry over alleged aggravated money laundering at the central bank involving $300 million in gains by a company owned by Raja Salameh that has led to probes in at least four other European countries. The Salameh brothers have also denied wrongdoing in that case.
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Chugwater, Wyoming, has long inspired good hydration habits in Interstate 25 roadtrippers. They pull over next to the city limit signs, and snap pictures of themselves slamming their water bottles  plenty of which end up online, a quick Google search will show you.

But theres a new reason to chug water in Chugwater.

The town won the Wyoming Association of Rural Water Systems water tasting competition last month in Casper. The competition is part of the groups annual conference and trade show.

Its kind of like wine tasting, said Mark Pepper, executive director of the association.

Participating water systems bring a gallon of their best drinking water, which is then assessed on taste, smell and clarity  no floaties or anything like that, said Pepper. A panel of judges weighs in for the final round.

Chugwater faced off against three other finalists: Ten Sleep, Rawlins and Grand Targhee Resort.

Its no surprise that systems from all over the state made it to the finals, Pepper said.

Wyoming has really good water from border to border, he said.

Its a headwater state, meaning its a source for several U.S. river systems. Feeder rivers for the Missouri-Mississippi, Green-Colorado, Snake-Columbia and the Great Salt Lake all start in Wyoming.

Wyomings water systems rely mostly on runoff from snowpack in the mountains, and rainfall.

Chugwaters water comes from three ground wells, according to a 2019 drinking water report published by the city.

So, what does it taste like?

It just had a crisp, clear taste, said Glenn Pauley, who helped judge the competition this year. Pauley is the Wyoming state director of rural development for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Its hard to put into words how the four finalists differed, Pauley said  they were essentially flavorless, after all. There was some back and forth as judges tasted and re-tasted the samples. Still, Chugwaters stood out to him, he said.

No ones certain how Chugwater got its name, but it probably doesnt have to do with its waterworks.

The town website points to an article published in the former Wheatland Times 70 years ago. It says Chugwater comes from the Mandan people, the Great Plains tribe that have lived in the region for thousands of years. Water at the place where the buffalo chug, they called it.

In February, Chugwater will represent Wyoming in the National Great American Water Taste Test  part of the National Rural Water Associations annual conference in Washington, D.C.

Ten Sleep got second place in the competition last year.

Its an opportunity to celebrate all the work that goes into public drinking water, Pepper said.

Its pretty amazing how much the plants and the operators have to go through, he said.

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The chairwoman of the Laramie County Republican Party is facing a vote Tuesday seeking her resignation after her local party was stripped of its voting power at the state GOP convention.

The resolution cites the fact that Laramie Countys delegates were not seated at the 2022 Republican convention, which meant the local party received only three votes instead of the normal 37 based on population.

The Chairman is ultimately responsible for the violation of bylaws in the conduct of the election, the resolution continued. We call upon the chairman, Dani Olsen, to resign as Chairman of the LCGOP.

The effort to oust Olsen comes after Laramie County Republicans violated a rule at their county convention. Specifically, Laramie County did not accept nominations from the floor or use secret ballots during the delegate selection process.

That spurred a formal complaint by Ben Hornok, a Republican from Laramie County. Hornok is also the author of the resolution to unseat Olsen.

In the aftermath, complaints were lodged against other county parties for minor rule violations. But those violations did not result in a loss of delegates for those counties.

Laramie County GOP officials and members of a handful of other county parties said that the rules were being selectively enforced against Laramie because its leaders have clashed with state party officials (Natrona County, another party that clashes with state leadership, also had their delegates wiped over a dues-paying dispute). On the other hand, those in favor of punishing Laramie County said rules need to be enforced.

Laramie County Republicans staged a walkout from the GOP convention Saturday following a vote by state party delegates to cut their delegation from 37 to three. In protest of the decision, almost all Laramie delegates  including John Sundahl, the husband of Rep. Liz Cheney challenger Harriet Hageman  walked through the center of the room and tossed or slammed their badges onto leaderships desk.

The series of complaints, resolutions and votes to remove delegate are the latest episode in broader infighting between traditional and hard-line factions within Wyomings Republican Party.

I am confident the resolution will fail by a large margin because I know that I truly do represent the views of the vast majority of Republicans in Laramie County and on our Central Committee, Olsen said in a statement. While there are a few dissenters, who continuously try to raise issues in the county, this resolution is merely a last-ditch effort on their part to attempt a power grab in our County since their efforts to get elected to County Party offices continue to fail.

The number of delegates  and therefore votes  each county gets to the convention are important because whats passed at the convention can influence what bills the state Legislature drafts and passes.

Although Hornok has spearheaded the effort to hold Laramie County accountable for its rule violation, hes also expressed praise for Olsen, an email he sent shows.

Two days after the March 5 convention, Hornok ran into Olsen in a store and he praised her for her work at the event, Olsen said. The rule violation at the convention was brought up at an executive committee meeting later in March, and Hornok then filed his complaint with the county party, which kicked the whole process off.

A few weeks later, Hornok emailed a fellow Laramie Republican asking him to pass along more praise for Olsen.

..in a side conversation, our chairman, Dani Olsen, told me that she had gotten there at 7 am, which was two hours after she had already been running around that morning getting things ready, Hornok said in the email.

Her time, effort and hard work was evident in how smoothly the meeting was run. We all should be grateful to have a chairman that hardworking to make that important event run so smoothly. I think she deserves a round of applause, even a standing ovation, for all the work that she did.

Whats more, Hornok stood before the room of hundreds of Republicans from across the state at the convention Saturday and asked them to seat Laramie County. His plea ultimately failed.

Hornok declined to comment, saying I dont want to bias the discussion.

I would prefer that it just be open and honest at our meeting, he said.

The Laramie County Republican Party Central Committee meeting is set for 6 p.m. Tuesday.

Follow state politics reporter Victoria Eavis on Twitter @Victoria_Eavis

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The first year of the COVID-19 pandemic saw a record number of rural hospital closures, according to the Beckers Hospital Review.

Relief money from the federal government and flexibility under the federal and state public health emergency declarations has helped rural hospitals in Wyoming and across the nation through the worst of the pandemic. But Wyomings public health emergency ended in March, and a lot of supports will go away when the federal public health emergency eventually ends.

Its a big concern, Wyoming Hospitals Association President Eric Boley told the Star-Tribune. Weve got facilities that, as they emerge from COVID, have really been hurt by the pandemic.

Rural hospitals across the nation were already suffering before COVID.

A 2021 U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration policy brief states that 138 rural hospitals closed between January 2010 and October 2021. Low patient volumes and reliance on a higher portion of patients with government insurance like Medicare and Medicaid, which typically reimburse hospitals at lower rates compared to private insurers, are some of the factors that make it difficult for rural hospitals to stay afloat. During the pandemic, delays in non-urgent care, which is usually more lucrative, and other costs related to COVID, like paying for traveling nurses, also hurt hospitals.

Besides giving hospitals direct financial support, the federal and state public health emergencies have put in place other mechanisms to help them, both in terms of money and in terms of bolstering their workforce. Care related to COVID is at least partly reimbursed to hospitals. The federal health emergency bars states from removing people from Medicaid coverage, which helps reduce the number of patients whose care goes uncompensated.

Most of Wyomings hospitals are rural. There havent been any hospital closures for a while, and Boley told the Star-Tribune that he doesnt know of any hospitals that are in imminent danger of shuttering.

But thats also because the dust is still settling, he said.

Its not certain, he said, how the future impacts of the pandemic, like caring for patients with long COVID, will be compensated.

And some Wyoming hospitals, while not closing down completely, are cutting services. Memorial Hospital of Carbon County announced last week that it will stop offering labor and delivery services because of financial hardship. Earlier this year, South Lincoln Medical Center in Kemmerer also said it would stop offering labor and delivery services, as well as around-the-clock emergency surgeries, starting June 1.

Weve seen home health agencies close, hospice close, deliveries and surgeries are no longer offered in some locations, Boley previously wrote in an email to the Star-Tribune.

The Bipartisan Policy Center released a report earlier this month that takes a look at the status of rural hospitals in eight states, including Wyoming.

All of the hospital associations that were interviewed for the report said hospitals in their respective states were, overall, in the hole financially. Among the eight states that were included in the report, Wyoming, at 38%, had the highest proportion of hospitals with financial losses. According to the report, most hospitals in the state are about an hour to an hour and a half apart.

It also states that rural health care systems consistently report challenges with recruiting and retaining staff.

The end of Wyomings state public health emergency in March put a halt to some of the flexibility that allowed out-of-state nurses to work in Wyoming, although these nurses were given some time to get licensed in the state.

Part of the blame for staff shortages goes to what people have probably heard hundreds of times by now: burnout.

Nurses and CNAs both in WY and across the nation are experiencing extreme fatigue as well as frustration in their jobs, Lori Hart, Wyoming State Board of Nursing executive director, previously wrote in an email to the Star-Tribune.

But states, including Wyoming, are increasingly joining compacts that make it permanently easier for health care workers to deliver care across state lines. The compacts give health care facilities a bigger pool of workers to draw on, which helps prevent these workers from being stretched too thin.

Wyoming is part of several compacts  the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact, the Nurse Licensure Compact and the Emergency Medical Service Compact, to name a few. Boley told the Star-Tribune previously that these compacts have been successful as all get out for bringing more health care workers into the state.

There are other flexibilities that came along during the pandemic that some states are hoping to put in place permanently. Boley said, for example, that he hopes the flexibility around telehealth will stick around. Telehealth is a less expensive option than having people visit in-person, he said.

Gov. Mark Gordon also announced recently that Wyoming will join a multi-state effort  the Next Generation of the Healthcare Workforce Learning Collaborative  to address health care worker shortages in the state.

Given the state of COVID right now, its not clear when the federal public health emergency will end. Cases and hospitalizations have been rising again in the eastern U.S. and some areas of the South. It doesnt appear that this uptick has reached Wyoming yet.

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A DIFFERENCE of opinion on how Guardian Holdings Ltd (GHL), a publicly traded company in T&T and Jamaica, should deal with deferred taxes in its first-quarter financials resulted in the departure of its former chief financial officer, David Maraj.

GHLs chief executive officer, Ravi Tewari, declined to give details of the circumstances that led to Marajs sudden departure from the company.
Based on the autopsy report on infant Kimani Francis, which showed death was caused by drowning, police investigators are now building a case of negligence that could lead to a charge of manslaughter against a person of interest in the case.

Whether the statements and evidence being collected by police will be sufficient to support such an indictment will be determined when the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) is asked to review the file.
Sooner or later, it will happen. As national conditions inevitably worsen, another massive coalition will emerge incrementally to coalesce, like in 1986 and 2010, to challenge the Peoples National Movement (PNM).

Tobago has already led the way again. The political earthquake of the Progressive Democratic Patriots (PDP), winning the THA election 14-1, was an overwhelming repudiation of the PNM which had ruled the roost there for 21 years. Not hamstrung by Trinidads tribalism, Tobago provided another chance to move the politics forward.
A federal appeals court has affirmed a ruling that blocks Rosemont Copper Co.s bid to dig a 6,500-foot-wide open pit mine in the Santa Rita Mountains about 30 miles southeast of Tucson.

In a split decision Thursday, a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel said the company certainly is free to dig the proposed, 3,000-foot-deep Rosemont Mine pit on about 950 acres to mine more than 5 billion pounds of copper. That right to mine on the land the company owns and on U.S. Forest Service land is guaranteed by federal mining law, said Judge William Fletcher, writing for the panels majority.

What the company cant do, he said, is dump the estimated 1.9 billion tons of waste rock the excavation would produce on another 2,447 acres of Forest Service land. That pile would occupy the land in perpetuity, in an accumulation that over the mines 25-year life would be 700 feet deep, Fletcher said.

The 9th Circuits decision upholds a 2019 ruling by U.S. District Court Judge James Soto in Tucson.

In a prepared statement, Toronto-based Hudbay Minerals Inc., parent company of Rosemont Copper, said it was reviewing the decision.

But it said it will continue to pursue its alternate plan to advance its Copper World project, on land it owns outright in the Santa Ritas. The company has started some construction on that alternate site, where it envisions five open pits. That site is now the subject of a separate lawsuit, however, over whether the construction would affect the flow of streams.

Case to be further hashed out

Thursdays ruling may not be the last word, and not just because the company  and the Forest Service, which has sided with it  could seek further appeal.

Fletcher sent the case back to Soto to determine if there is some legal way for Rosemont to acquire the rights to dump on Forest Service land.

The federal Mining Law of 1872 permits companies to use only land where they have valid mining claims for such waste, Fletcher wrote.

Also, such claims to use the public lands can be made only when there is evidence valuable minerals have been found on the property. That is not the case here.

The appellate judges rejected arguments by attorneys for Rosemont and the federal government that the company does not have to confine its waste to only the land under which there are actual mineral deposits.

Fletcher also faulted the Forest Service for issuing the permit to let Rosemont dump its waste rock on that additional 2,447 acres based on its assumption that the companys claims for the land without the minerals was valid.

The ruling was not unanimous. Judge Danielle Forrest said she believes the Forest Service was within its rights to adopt regulations to fill in the gaps left by the mining law.

Options for company?

Thursdays ruling is the latest in what has been a multiyear  and multilawsuit  attempt by Rosemont to start mining the lands on which the court said the company has undisputed mining claims. The Rosemont Mine would produce about 5.88 billion pounds of copper over its life, another 194 million pounds of molybdenum and 80 million ounces of silver.

Sotos 2019 ruling came two years after Save the Scenic Santa Ritas, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Arizona Mining Reform Coalition and the Sierra Clubs Grand Canyon Chapter filed a lawsuit challenging the Forest Services approval of the mine.

The question now is whether Rosemont has options.

Attorney Allison Melton of the Center for Biological Diversity said there are elements of the federal mining law of 1872 that do allow mining companies to occupy land for mill sites.

But there are issues with that.

In general, Fletcher noted, the law limits individual mill sites to just 5 acres. It does, however, permit those with mining claims to stake multiple mill sites if reasonably necessary for their mining operations.

Heidi McIntosh, with Earthjustice, said the amount of land Rosemont would need on which to dump nearly 2 billion tons of waste is not whats contemplated by the law.

What Congress did at the time was to give prospectors who were willing to go out there and try to develop mines a certain amount of land, she said.

At the time, they contemplated that miners would go out and do an 1872-size mine and that the lands they would get to do that would be enough to store any kind of waste or tailings that they generated, McIntosh continued. Of course, if youre talking about a mile-wide pit that Rosemont is, theyve just kind of outgrown the mining law.

Amending law is up to Congress

Fletcher acknowledged that many people have said the 1872 law must be upgraded.

But amendment of the Mining Law is a task for Congress, not for the (Forest) Service, and certainly not for us, he wrote.

McIntosh, who represents several Native American tribes who filed their own lawsuit against the mine, said there are things Rosemont could do and not run afoul of the law.

They could truck off their waste, she said. They could find some private land and convince the owner to sell it to them. They just cant offload their problem onto the public and the tribes.

She said it will now be up to Rosemont and the Forest Service to make their case to Soto that they can operate the mine within confines of the law.

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Following Texas example, Arizona has started busing migrants from the border with Mexico to Washington, D.C., despite the fact the federal government already pays to transport them.

The first bus arrived Wednesday in the nations capital after leaving Yuma on Monday, said Gov. Doug Duceys press aide, C.J. Karamargin. He said 20 people, all who volunteered, were on the bus. The migrants were from as far away as Uzbekistan, he said. None was from Mexico.

He did not know how much the program will cost, saying it will depend on how many more migrants seek to take advantage of future transportation. But whatever the bill, Karamargin said it is worth it.

It pales in comparison to the stress on local resources, he said, adding that Ducey intends to send the final bill for the costs to Washington.

When asked why spend state money now for something the federal government is already paying for, Karamargin said, Our communities are strapped.

The federal government allotted $150 million in the spending bill passed in March to fund nonprofits who serve migrants entering the country. Part of what those nonprofits do with those federal dollars is arrange transportation for the migrants to get to their sponsors in the United States.

Nonetheless, the state is paying to transport the migrants and for other border security efforts through the Border Security Fund, established in 2021 in partnership with the Arizona Legislature, Duceys office said in a news release Wednesday.

Pima County, which coordinates funding for a local nonprofit that provides migrant services, was not contacted by the state about the busing decision, county officials said. In March, the county received the first installment of $2.1 million from the latest federal spending bill. The county has received more than $10 million since April 2021, which has covered the services to asylum seekers.

There are plans for future buses, at least out of Yuma. There are no immediate plans to have similar trips originating from Cochise or Santa Cruz counties. Many of the asylum seekers are coming in through Yuma, Karamargin said.

Arizona could send two or three buses a week that can transport as many as 40 asylum-seekers each, and the cost will ultimately depend on how many people volunteer to go.

The move comes as Duceys fellow Republican governor, Greg Abbott of Texas, said his state has sent at least 10 busloads of migrants to D.C.. Both governors have repeatedly criticized the Biden administrations border policies.

Ducey made his decision because of the impact migrants are having in Arizona, Karamargin said.

They are taxing the resources, stretching the resources of nongovermental organizations, community-based organizations, he said. And this situation will only get worse if Title 42 is lifted.  We decided to step up and help alleviate the burden on our NGOs and get these folks closer to where they ultimately want to be.

Title 42 is the public health policy put in place because of the pandemic that quickly expels migrants from the country without entering them into the U.S. immigration process. It is set to end May 23, and some speculate the number of migrants coming across the southern border could increase.

The actual arrangements, while paid for by the state, are being arranged by AMI Healthcare. It will provide transportation, staffing and meals on the way to Washington.

Karamargin stressed that no one is being forced to do anything and that they are free to get off the bus at any point on the route.

In Washington, he said, they will be met by other nongovernmental organizations that can help them get to their ultimate destinations.

The 20 migrants who went on Mondays bus were from Angola, Columbia, Haiti, Peru, Venezuela and Uzbekistan and are headed to the states of Pennsylvania, Florida, New York, New Jersey, Virginia and Maine.

Contact reporter Danyelle Khmara at dkhmara@tucson.com or 573-4223 . On Twitter: @DanyelleKhmara

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PHOENIX  The Republican Party wants a "seat at the table'' to support a controversial new law that requires proof of citizenship to vote for president.

New legal papers filed in federal court contend that Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and Attorney General Mark Brnovich may not be as interested in defending the legislation signed earlier this year by Gov. Doug Ducey as local, state and federal Republican parties.

The elected officials might be more interested in settling the case  or might lose  without participation of the GOP, said an attorney for the political party, Kory Langhofer.

Potentially more significant, Langhofer said if challengers succeed in overturning the law, that "could confuse voters and undermine confidence in the electoral process,'' making it less likely that Republicans would come out and vote.

At issue is the kind of identification needed to register to vote.

A 2004 voter-approved law requires proof of citizenship.

But the National Voter Registration Act directed the federal Election Assistance Commission to create its own voter-registration form. It only requires that applicants avow, under penalty of perjury, that they are citizens.

Anyone using this form is allowed to vote only in federal races, meaning for president and members of Congress.

Arizona tried once before to enforce a proof-of-citizenship requirement for those using the federal form, only to be slapped down by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 2013 ruling. The justices said Arizona is free to demand proof of citizenship from those wanting to vote in state and local elections.

All that went pretty much unchallenged until the 2020 election when Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in Arizona by 10,457 votes. That figure is close to the number of people who voted using the federal form.

As a result, state Rep. Jake Hoffman, R-Queen Creek, sponsored the legislation signed earlier this year by Ducey.

Hoffman conceded the Supreme Court ruling is binding on congressional races. But he contented the justices never addressed presidential races. He said that left Arizona free to impose a citizenship-proof requirement for those who use the federal form and want to cast a ballot in 2024 and beyond for president.

Republicans in the House and Senate, along with Ducey, went along despite legislative attorneys advising them it would provoke a lawsuit.

Days later, two separate lawsuits were filed in federal court.

Hobbs and Brnovich are tasked with defending the statute, but Langhofer claims there's a problem with that.

"Defendants have no interest in the election of particular candidates or the mobilization of particular voters, or the costs associated with either,'' he said, as opposed to the interest of the Republican Party and its branches.

State officials are acting on behalf of all Arizona citizens and have to consider various interests that might differ from those of the GOP, he said. These include the costs of defending the law and the desire of state officials to remain politically popular to "social and political divisiveness of the election issue," Langhofer said.

"All these interests make defendants less likely to make the same arguments, less likely to exhaust all appellate options, and more likely to settle,'' he said.

He said the Republican Party's interests are not only ensuring that GOP registrants have an opportunity to vote, but also advancing the overall prospects of Republicans to get elected.

Langhofer told judges in both cases that Republicans need to be able to mount their own defense. He said their interests would suffer if the government officials lose the case or agree to a settlement.

One of the lawsuits challenging the law was filed by the group Mi Familia Vota. An attorney for the group, Daniel Arellano, said the legal issues go beyond the 2013 Supreme Court ruling. He said the state entered into a consent decree in 2018 where it agreed to protect the rights of certain individuals to use that federal voter registration form to sign up and to cast ballots for all federal elections.

Arellano also contends the measure was enacted based on unproven claims by GOP lawmakers that people not in this country legally are affecting election results. He cited comments by Hoffman that Arizona "cannot allow potentially tens of thousands of non-citizens to vote in our elections.''

"This unsupported fear-mongering is plainly insufficient to justify the proof of citizenship restriction's widespread burdens,'' Arellano wrote.

The other lawsuit was filed by Living United for Change in Arizona, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the Arizona Students' Association, and ADRC Action, which is the sponsor of a proposed ballot measure to reverse restrictions on voting enacted by the Republican-controlled Legislature and signed by the governor.

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Firefighters, deputies and volunteers rescued a person after the vehicle they were in went off the Catalina Highway near Hoodoo Vista Point in the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson, Ariz. on May 11, 2022.

Rural Metro Fire Department, Pima County Sheriff's Department, Mount Lemmon Fire Department, Southern Arizona Rescue Association and the Arizona Department of Public Safety Ranger air unit assisted in the rescue.

The sole occupant of the vehicle sustained minor injuries, according to the Pima County Sheriffs Department.
A historic downtown duplex built in 1907, that once housed an unlicensed fortune teller, has been renovated for its new life as a restaurant and candle shop.

Known as The Duplex, the 1,400-square-foot building at 198 and 200 N. Court Ave., has been vacant for years.

Its last resident, Jose Lee, left the home to the Tucson Heritage Foundation in 1976, stating in his will:

The property must be retained as a historical site.

It was bought by the Rio Nuevo district in 2001 for an improvement project.

Because of the state of the building and the then-newly formed Rio Nuevo still in flux, it sat empty.

Amy Hartmann-Gordon, executive director of the Presidio Museum, said after the museum opened in 2008, talk turned to what would become of this little leftover piece.

We had a lot of community conversations, she said. Because its within the Rio Nuevo district we were trying to find a way to generate tax revenue in a way that blended with cultural heritage.

The restaurant will be operated by the Schneider family, who own La Cocina restaurant (or LaCo) at 201 N. Court Ave. The family plans to expand its Ceres Pasta concept in the new location.

The retail portion will be Candle with a Cure, a local shop selling handmade candles and soaps that include CBD products.

The shop will also offer classes on making candles.

This ties back to what we do at the museum, said Hartmann-Gordon. We like to offer demonstrations.

The plan is to open both businesses in September.

Storied history

The Presidio San Agustin del Tucson Museum is on the northeast corner of the original Presidio at 196 N. Court Ave., and is a reconstruction of the original Tucson Presidio built in 1775. Tours give visitors a glimpse of what life in the Presidio was like for soldiers and other residents.

The Duplex, according to the 1910 Census, was occupied by R.D. Walters, a 35-year-old Missouri native who worked for the railroad as a brakeman and his 31-year-old wife, Maude Walters, a native of Canada. Nell Terrant, 34, a widow from Wisconsin, also lived in the home and turned hair combings into switches as a hobby.

Many residents would come to occupy the home, including a decorator at Steinfelds Department Store, a postal carrier, and a fortune teller, Sara Valencia, who, in 1961, was fined $200 by the city of Tucson for telling fortunes without a city license. She was sentenced to 20 days in jail.

Here's what life in Tucson looked like in 1966 and 1967 Jake's Quick Lunch Cine El Dorado Ted DeGrazia Centennial Saguaro Spanish Trail Motel Father Eusebio Kino North Highland Avenue The University of Arizona Mall Space Sciences Center Graduation 'Pistolero' filming Nogales, Arizona border station West Congress Street Food Giant Don Jones gas station YMCA building on West Congress Street Summer swimming Spring training University of Arizona Homecoming Urban renewal Paraphernalia boutique Drive-in congregation Pima County Fairgrounds Truly Nolen extermination Large billboards The Starlite Tavern Snow in Tucson The State Bar The New Triple T in 1966 The New Triple T in 1966 Anti-draft demonstrators Dow Chemical Catalina Foothills High School Daily Star strike Winterhaven Festival of Lights Wilmot branch library The Ying On Club

Contact reporter Gabriela Rico at grico@tucson.com

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Jan. 6 panel subpoenas McCarthy, four other GOP lawmakers

WASHINGTON (AP)  House investigators say they have issued subpoenas to House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and four other GOP lawmakers as part of their probe into the violent Jan. 6 insurrection. It's an extraordinary step that has little precedent and is certain to further inflame partisan tensions over the 2021 attack. The Jan. 6 panels subpoenas for McCarthy of California and Republican Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Andy Biggs of Arizona and Mo Brooks of Alabama come as the investigation is winding down and as the panel prepares for a series of public hearings this summer.

Russian threats push Finland toward joining NATO alliance

KYIV, Ukraine (AP)  Finlands leaders have come out in favor of applying to join NATO, and Sweden could do the same within days. That would amount to a historic realignment on the continent 2 1/2 months after Russian President Vladimir Putins invasion of Ukraine sent a shiver of fear through Moscows neighbors. The Kremlin has reacted to the move by Finland by warning it will be forced to take retaliatory military-technical steps.

EXPLAINER: Why Finland, Sweden joining NATO will be big deal

BRUSSELS (AP)  Finland appears on the cusp of joining NATO. Sweden could follow suit. By year's end, they could stand among the alliance's ranks. Russia's war in Ukraine has provoked a public about face on membership in the two Nordic countries. They are already NATO's closest partners, but should Russia respond to their membership moves they might soon need the organization's military support. The two are a perfect fit for NATO. Their armed forces, and political and legal systems, are in lock step with the alliance. They bring high-tech military equipment and high levels of defense spending with them. Their accession would double the length of NATO's borders with Russia. It's unclear exactly how Moscow will respond.

N. Korea reports 6 deaths after admitting COVID-19 outbreak

SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  North Korea says six people have died and 350,000 have been treated for a fever that has spread explosively across the country. The announcement Friday came a day after it acknowledged its first COVID-19 cases of the pandemic. North Korea likely doesn't have enough testing supplies and said the cause of the fevers was unclear. Experts have warned a COVID-19 outbreak could be devastating in a country with a broken health care system and an unvaccinated, malnourished population. Some experts say the North's admissions of an outbreak suggested a willingness to receive outside aid. It previously shunned vaccines offered by the U.N.-backed COVAX program, possibly because they have monitoring requirements.

Powell: 'Soft' economic landing may be out of Fed's control

WASHINGTON (AP)  Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, fresh off winning Senate confirmation for a second four-year term, for the first time Thursday acknowledged that high inflation and economic weakness overseas could thwart his efforts to avoid a recession. Previously, Powell has sought to portray the Feds efforts to tighten interest rates as consistent with a so-called soft landing for the economy. In that scenario, the Fed would tighten borrowing costs enough to cool the economy and bring down inflation, without going so far as to tip the economy into recession. But on Thursday he acknowledged such a soft landing may be out of the Fed's control.

The AP Interview: US 'vulnerable' to COVID without new shots

WASHINGTON (AP)  The new White House COVID-19 coordinator is issuing a dire warning. He says in an Associated Press interview that the U.S. will be increasingly vulnerable to the coronavirus this fall and winter if Congress doesnt swiftly approve new funding for more vaccines and treatments. Dr. Ashish Jha said in the interview Thursday that Americans immune protection from the virus is waning, the virus is adapting to be more contagious and booster doses for most people will be necessary  with the potential for enhanced protection from a new generation of shots.

Astronomers capture 1st image of Milky Way's huge black hole

WASHINGTON (AP)  Astronomers have unveiled the first wild but fuzzy image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Nearly all galaxies, including our own, are believed to have these giant black holes at their center, where light and matter cannot escape. That makes it extremely hard to get pictures of them. The image released Thursday was made by eight synchronized radio telescopes around the world. This is not the first picture of a black hole. The same international group released the first one in 2019 from a distant galaxy.

US reckoning with role in Native American boarding schools

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP)  The U.S. government has not been open to investigating its role in stripping Native Americans of their cultures and identities in boarding schools. Until now. Thats partly because people who know first-hand the persistent trauma caused by the boarding school system are positioned in the U.S. government. Still, the work to uncover the truth and create a path for healing will require financial resources. Tribes will have to navigate federal laws on repatriation to take Native children who died and are buried at boarding schools home. And some survivors might be hesitant to recount the painful past and trust the federal government to collect the stories.

EXPLAINER: What's behind the baby formula shortage?

WASHINGTON (AP)  Many parents are hunting for infant formula after a combination of short- and long-term problems hit the biggest U.S. brands. So what should you do if you can't find formula? Talk with your pediatrician or call a local food bank to see if they can help locate some options. Experts also recommend checking with smaller stores and pharmacies, which may still have supplies when larger stores run out. Most regular baby formulas contain the same basic ingredients and nutrients, so parents using those products shouldnt hesitate to buy a different brand if theyre having trouble finding their regular one. Parents of infants requiring specialty formulas should talk to their doctor if they cant find those products.

Storm chasers face host of dangers beyond severe weather

MADISON, Wis. (AP)  The deaths of four storm chasers over the last two weeks have underscored the inherent dangers of pursuing severe weather events and navigating traffic. A meteorologist from Mexico was killed in a car crash on Wednesday while chasing violent weather in Minnesota. Three University of Oklahoma students were killed on April 30 when a semitrailer struck their vehicle while they were returning from chasing a tornado in Kansas. Greg Tripoli is an atmospheric and oceanic scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He says storm chasing can produce useful data but more often students want the thrill of seeing a tornado. He says the biggest danger that chasers face is a car accident as people travel at high speeds pursuing storms.

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CUMMING, Ga. (AP)  A Georgia man is challenging the eligibility of more than 13,000 registered voters in his county in the northern part of the state.

Frank Schneider filed the challenge on Tuesday with the Forsyth County Board of Voter Registration and Elections, which will consider it during their regularly scheduled Thursday evening meeting, news outlets reported.

Schneider said in an email to Mandi Smith, director of the countys voter registration and elections department, that he compared Forsyth County's voter rolls with the U.S. Postal Service's National Change of Address database and found that 13,609 have an address that's different than the one listed on their voter registration.

Georgia empowers any voter in a county or municipality to challenge the qualifications of anyone else on the voter rolls. A sweeping election law passed last year specified that there is no limit on the number of people whose qualifications a single voter can challenge.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that this appears to be the largest single challenge since the law was passed.

The newspaper reported the challenged voters could be flagged for additional review if they try to vote in the state's May 24 primary election.

Forsyth County, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) north of Atlanta, is wealthy and mostly white. It has been growing quickly and while it has traditionally voted solidly Republican, Democrats have made some inroads in recent elections.

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KYIV, Ukraine Ukrainian officials say their forces took out another Russian ship in the Black Sea.

Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, said late Thursday the Vsevolod Bobrov logistics ship was struck as it was trying to deliver an anti-aircraft system to Snake Island. He said the ship was badly damaged but was not believed to have sunk.

A spokesman for the Odesa regional military administration said the vessel caught fire after the strike. There was no confirmation from Russia and no reports of casualties.

The British Ministry of Defense said this week that Ukraine has been targeting Russian air defenses and supply vessels on Snake Island in an effort to disrupt Moscows efforts to expand its control over the Black Sea coastline.

The Ukrainian military last month sank the Moskva cruiser, the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet. In March, the military destroyed the landing ship Saratov.

KEY DEVELOPMENTS IN THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR:

 Finlands leaders in favor of applying for NATO membership

 ' This tears my soul apart : A Ukrainian boy and a killing

 Protesters vent fury at French company for staying in Russia

 Ukrainian circus comes to town, and stays in Italy, amid war

Follow all AP stories on Russias war on Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

OTHER DEVELOPMENTS:

MUNICH  German industrial giant Siemens AG says it is exiting Russia, where it has operated for almost 170 years.

We condemn the war in Ukraine and have decided to carry out an orderly process to wind down our industrial business activities in Russia, Roland Busch, the Munich-based companys CEO, said Thursday.

Siemens had been one of the first companies to put all new business in Russia, along with international deliveries to the country, on hold following Russias invasion of Ukraine in February.

The company said it had been evaluating the situation with the eye of ensuring the safety of its 3,000 employees in Russia.

The maker of trains and industrial equipment said the Russia sanctions shaved off about 600,000 euros ($623,000) from its fiscal second-quarter results, which were reported Thursday.



KYIV, Ukraine -- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian forces on Thursday night struck the Chernihiv region and hit schools.

Of course, the Russian state is in such a state that any education only gets in its way. But what can be achieved by destroying Ukrainian schools? All Russian commanders who give such orders are simply sick, and incurable.

He condemned what he suggested were senseless attacks on the refinery in the central Ukrainian industrial hub of Kremenchuk, on the Zaporizhzhia region and the Donbas.

They are cowards, and they try to hide the truth behind missiles, airstrikes and artillery shelling, he said in his nightly video address to the nation. Therefore our task is to fight until we achieve our goals in this war: to free our land, our people and secure our security.

Noting that Thursday is International Nurses Day, Zelenskyy thanked Ukraines nurses and other medical workers for their part in the fight and urged all Ukrainians to do the same. He said since the invasion began on Feb. 24, the Russian military had damaged 570 medical facilities, fully destroying 101 hospitals.

What is that? Its stupidity. Its barbarity. Its the self-destruction of Russia as a state that anyone in the world could see as a cultured nation.

KYIV, Ukraine  Rocket attacks on Ukraines central Poltava region on Thursday were perhaps the most intense for the duration of the war, the regional governor said that same day.

Todays shelling of the Poltava region is perhaps the largest during the course of this full-scale war, Dmitry Lunin wrote in a Telegram post. 12 Russian missiles hit the infrastructure in (the city of) Kremenchuk; most of them hit an oil refinery that was not operational anyway.

Rescuers are putting out a fire at the refinery. Luckily, no one was hurt, Lunin added.

Kremenchuk is on the Dnieper River, south of Kyiv and north of Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia. The river, flowing north to south, divides Ukraine in half. In the south, it flows through Kherson before emptying into the Black See.

KYIV, Ukraine  At least two civilians died Thursday as a result of a shelling attack on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraines second-largest city, local authorities said that same day.

As a result of the shelling, two people were killed, four more were injured, two of whom are doctors. All these people are civilians, Vyacheslav Zadorenko, the mayor of the suburban town of Derhachi, wrote in a Telegram post.

He added that the attack also damaged a building housing a humanitarian aid unit, municipal offices, and hospital facilities.

None of the sites that came under shelling, not to mention private houses that are destroyed daily, had anything to do with military infrastructure, Zadorenko said.

KYIV, Ukraine  Ukraines foreign minister said Thursday that everyone involved in the transportation and sales of grain seized by Russia in occupied areas of the country will face legal consequences.

Russia is a criminal three times over: it bombed Syria to ruins, occupied part of Ukraine, and is now selling stolen Ukrainian grain to Syria, the ministrys press service cited Dmytro Kuleba as saying.

I want to remind the participants in this deal: what is stolen has never brought happiness to anyone. Everyone involved in the sale, transportation or purchase of stolen grain is an accomplice to the crime, Kuleba said.

Your actions will have adequate international legal consequences. We will do everything to make your life as difficult as possible, he continued, commenting on media reports that on Wednesday, a Russian ship carrying Ukrainian grain moored off the Syrian coast.

Kuleba also claimed that thanks to the efforts of Ukrainian diplomats, Egypt and Lebanon had previously refused to buy the looted grain shipment.

MOSCOW  A student of a local construction college died as a result of a shelling attack on the Russian village of Solokhi near the Ukrainian border, a teacher at the college told the Interfax news agency Thursday.

Russian Nifodyov died as a result of the shelling of the peaceful village of Solokhi by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Nikolai Ignatenko was cited as saying.

Earlier on Thursday, the governor of Russias Belgorod region, where Solokhi is located, said that at least one civilian had been killed in the shelling, while six more were injured. While governor Vyacheslav Gladkov likewise blamed the attack on Kyivs forces, it was not immediately clear whether the slain civilian he referred to was Nifodyov.

KYIV, Ukraine  Four civilians were reported dead and five more were injured in Ukraines eastern Donetsk region on Thursday, the regional governor said that same day.

On May 12, the Russians killed four more civilians of the Donbas: two in Novoselivka, one in Avdiivka and one in Lyman. Five more people were injured, Pavlo Kyrylenko wrote in a Telegram post, referring to a village and two cities in the Donetsk region, one of two which make up the Donbas.

His claims could not be immediately verified.

ROME  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says that hes ready to talk with Russian President Vladimir Putin and that we must find an agreement, but with no ultimatum as a condition.

Zelenskyy also told Italian RAI state TV in an interview scheduled to be broadcast on Thursday night that Ukraine will never recognize Crimea as part of Russia, which annexed that part of southern Ukraine in 2014.

Crimea has always had its autonomy, it has its parliament, but on the inside of Ukraine, Zelenskyy said, in excerpts of the interview that RAI released earlier on Thursday.

The interviewer asked the Ukrainian leader about a comment by French President Emmanuel Macron cautioning against any humiliation of Putin.

We want the Russian army to leave our land, we arent on Russian soil, Zelenskyy replied. We wont save Putins face by paying with our territory. That would be unjust.

In another comment, Zelenskyy sounded a forward-looking note. We have to think of the future of Russia. I, as president of Ukraine, say these are our neighbors. There will be other presidents, other presidents and other generations of Russia, Zelenskyy said.

KYIV, Ukraine  Ukrainian ministry officials said Thursday that Russian troops were trying to block Kyivs forces from advancing as far as the Ukrainian-Russian border in the northeastern Kharkiv region.

In the direction of Kharkiv, Russian army units are regrouping and trying to prevent the further advance of our troops in the direction of the state border of Ukraine, defense ministry spokesman Oleksandr Motuzyanyk said in his regular media briefing.

To this end, the occupiers launch unceasing artillery attacks on our troop units in order to inflict human losses, as well as to damage weapons and military equipment, Motuzyanyk added.

He did not clarify how close Ukrainian forces were to the border.

According to the defense ministry briefing, Moscows troops were opening fire along the entire line of confrontation in Ukraines east, and attempting to penetrate Ukrainian defenses.

Also on Thursday, the Ukrainian militarys General Staff said in its daily operational statement that Russian forces continued their attempts to storm several cities in Ukraines industrial heartland of Donbas that day, but had no success.

A senior Russian U.N. envoy said Thursday that Finland and Swedens decision to join NATO would instantly turn them from neutral into hostile countries and potential targets for Russia.

Dmitry Polansky, First Deputy Representative of Russia to the U.N., said in an interview with the British conservative magazine UnHerd, that Helsinki and Stockholm know that the moment they become members of NATO it will imply certain mirror moves on the Russian side.

If there are NATO detachments in those territories, these territories would become a target - or possible target - for a strike, Polansky added. NATO is a very unfriendly bloc to us  it is an enemy and NATO itself admitted that Russia is the enemy. It means that Finland and Sweden all of a sudden, instead of neutral countries, become part of the enemy and they bear all the risks.

Elsewhere in the interview, Polansky downplayed the impact of the possible NATO enlargement on Europes security landscape, saying that Russia is ready to face NATO threats and has made the necessary precautions for this.



BERLIN  The U.N.s top human rights body has overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling on its investigators to specifically look into possible rights abuses and violations in northern Ukraine shortly after Russias invasion.

In a 33-2 vote, with 12 abstentions, the Human Rights Council concluded a special session Thursday on Russias invasion of Ukraine also by calling on Russia to grant international human rights groups unhindered, timely, immediate, unrestricted and safe access to people who have been transferred from Ukraine to Russia or areas controlled by Russian forces or affiliates.

Only China and Eritrea voted against the measure, which also urged the U.N. human rights office to report on events in Mariupol, a besieged southeastern port city where thousands of civilians are believed to have been killed. Access to the city has been virtually nonexistent for international human rights during recent fighting there.

The council called on a team of investigators known as a Commission of Inquiry to look specifically into the events in the Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Sumy regions of Ukraine in late February and early March after Russias invasion with a view to holding those responsible to account. The commission was already created to investigate rights abuses and violations generally in Ukraine.

Many atrocities in the war came to light last month after Moscows forces aborted their bid to capture Kyiv and withdrew from around the capital.

KYIV, Ukraine  Between 8 and 12 Russian missiles hit the oil refinery and other infrastructure in the Ukrainian industrial hub of Kremenchuk Thursday, the acting governor of the central Poltava region said that same day.

In a Telegram post, Dmytro Lunin urged residents to remain in underground shelters, citing the persistent threat of airstrikes.

In early April, Lunin had said that the Kremenchuk refinery - Ukraines only remaining fully functional facility of its kind at the time  was no longer operational following a Russian attack. Moscow claimed to have targeted the refinery again at the end of the month, and to have destroyed further fuel production and storage facilities.

BERLIN  The U.N. refugee agency is reporting that more than 6 million people have now fled Ukraine in the wake of Russias invasion.

Geneva-based UNHCR also said Thursday that the number of refugees who have returned back to Ukraine, either partially or fully, has reached more than 1.6 million. It says that number reflects cross-border movements, and doesnt necessarily indicate sustainable returns. The agency says its too early to draw conclusions about definitive trends on returns.

Matthew Saltmarsh, an agency spokesman, also said Thursday that a total of 2.4 million people who have left Ukraine have moved beyond Ukraines immediate border countries which have taken in the lions share of refugees from the country. Poland alone has registered more than 3.2 million people who fled Ukraine. It and other European Union member countries have open borders, making tracking where people go a complex endeavor.

On Tuesday, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, tweeted that the number of refugees from Ukraine had reached the same 5.7 million figure as the tally from Syrias 11-year war, which previously was the source of the worlds biggest refugee crisis.

UNITED NATIONS -- The U.N. childrens agency says the war in Ukraine is a child rights crisis where education is under attack and nearly 100 youngsters have been killed in just the last month.

UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Omar Abdi told the U.N. Security Council Thursday that more children have been injured, millions have been displaced and schools continue to be attacked and used for military purposes.

The school year came to a standstill after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, and as of last week at least 15 of 89 UNICEF-supported schools in the countrys east have been damaged or destroyed in the fighting, he said.

In mid-March, over 15,000 schools resumed education in Ukraine mostly through remote learning or in-person hybrid options, he said.

It is estimated that 3.7 million children in Ukraine and abroad are using online and distance learning options, Abdi said.

But he stressed that there are still enormous obstacles to education including availability for learning, resources, language barriers and movements of children and their families.

KYIV, Ukraine  Talks are underway between Kyiv and Moscow on the possible evacuation of 38 severely wounded Ukrainian troops from the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, Ukraines deputy PM said Thursday afternoon.

The steel mill is the only remaining stronghold of Ukrainian resistance in the ruined port city, and is now surrounded by Russian forces.

We are working step by step, Iryna Vereshchuk wrote in a public post on the Telegram messenger app.

She said that Kyiv hoped to exchange the soldiers for 38 significant Russian prisoners of war, before moving on to the next stage of the negotiations. She did not specify what this next stage would concern, but said that there were no negotiations on the exchange of 500 or 600 people.

Earlier on Thursday, an official at the Ukrainian Presidents Office said that Kyiv hoped to extract half a thousand wounded Ukrainian fighters from Azovstal.

Members of the Azov Regiment holed up inside the plant have repeatedly refused to surrender, citing fears of being killed or tortured. On Tuesday, Ukrainian officials said that more than a thousand Ukrainian troops, many of them injured, remained at Azovstal.

VIENNA  German Chancellor Olaf Scholz spoke with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto Thursday, the same day Finlands leaders announced the country plans to apply for NATO membership, the German chancellery said Thursday afternoon.

Chancellor Scholz welcomed todays statements by the President and Prime Minister of Finland Sanna Marin, in which both advocate their countrys immediate accession to NATO, and assured Finland of the Federal Governments full support on this path, Scholzs office said in a statement.

Finlands announcement paves the way for a historic expansion of the alliance that could deal a serious blow to Russia as its military struggles with its war in Ukraine.

Finland shares a 1,340-kilometer (830-mile) land border with Russia.

KYIV, Ukraine  About 3,000 Mariupol civilians are being detained in prisons controlled by pro-Russian separatists in Ukraines industrial east, the countrys human rights chief says.

Lyudmyla Denysova claimed on social media Thursday that Kyiv is aware of at least two prisons set up in the eastern Donetsk region, one in the regional capital of Donetsk and another in Olenivka, a suburb 20 kilometers southwest of the city center.

She claimed that authorities in Kyiv had received reports of people being tortured, interrogated, threatened with execution and forced to cooperate, and others disappearing after interrogations.

She also alleged that detainees were being kept in inhuman conditions, with inadequate access to bathrooms and no space to lie down.

She claimed that some captives had been released after 36 days, after signing unspecified documents, but did not provide more details. Ukrainian authorities are calling on the U.N. to intervene.

More than 100,000 civilians remain in the ruined port city of Mariupol, which had a pre-war population of about half a million. Ukrainian authorities have previously claimed that thousands of Ukrainians had been forcibly taken to Russia.

Troops from Ukraines Azov Regiment continue to hold out at the Azovstal steelworks, the last bulwark of Ukrainian resistance in the city.

MOSCOW  Russia has warned that it will have to take unspecified military-technical steps in response to Finlands decision to join NATO.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said Thursday that Finlands accession to NATO will inflict serious damage on Russian-Finnish relations, as well as stability and security in Northern Europe.

It said in a statement that Russia will be forced to take retaliatory steps of military-technical and other characteristics in order to counter the emerging threats to its national security.

The statement noted that while its up to Finland to decide on ways to ensure its security, Helsinki must be aware of its responsibility and the consequences of such a move. The ministry charged that Finlands move also violated past agreements with Russia.

History will determine why Finland needed to turn its territory into a bulwark of military face-off with Russia while losing independence in making its own decisions, it added.

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Folds of Honor received a large donation from a national animal health company this week.

Representatives from Zoetis, based out of Parsippany, New Jersey, presented the companys first donation to Folds on Wednesday to help support the work of the Owasso nonprofit in honoring Americas heroes.

Zoetis provided $122,000 based upon each bottle of its select products purchased by beef and dairy producers from across the country during the first quarter of the year.

Zoetis is grateful for the continued support of our customers, Jared Shriver, senior vice president of U.S. Cattle and Pork at Zoetis, said. Through this donation, we are able to help fund scholarship programs for the families of the heroes that help protect our rights and freedoms as Americans.

Ben Leslie, executive vice president of development for Folds, added, The support of Zoetis allows us to continue providing more life-changing educational opportunities for the families of our military heroes.

During the check-presentation ceremony, Folds also announced Kaycee Moyer of Muskogee, as a scholarship recipient. Moyer is a freshman at Oklahoma State University majoring in pre-veterinary science and animal science. During high school, she served as president of the National Honor Society and captain of the color guard. She is on the leadership team with Baptist Collegiate Ministries at Oklahoma State.

Accepting the scholarship on her behalf was Kaycees dad, Chad Moyer. A retired Army National Guard sergeant, Chad enlisted in the military at age 31 following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He worked as an infantryman during Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he was awarded a Purple Heart for wounds received in action, as well as an Iraq Campaign Medal with two campaign stars, the Army Good Conduct Medal and many other awards and decorations. He continues to serve the community through his work for the Tulsa Police Department.

It is an honor to fund the future dreams of students like Kaycee Moyer and recognize the dedicated and selfless service of her father, Chad Moyer, Shriver said.
A 14-year-old Clyde Boyd Middle School student was arrested Wednesday morning after a bomb threat targeting the school was called in to 911, police said.

Sand Springs Police Deputy Chief Todd Enzbrenner said a dispatcher received a 911 call about 8:15 a.m. from somebody who said they had a bomb.

Authorities were able to determine that the call was placed from Clyde Boyd, so they notified school district officials, who, Enzbrenner said, decided that it was in the best interest of safety to evacuate the school and the adjacent Sixth Grade Center.

As a precaution, Sand Springs police requested assistance from the Tulsa Police Departments Bomb Squad and K-9 units, and the schools were thoroughly searched, he said.

No explosive device was located, he said. Once the schools were deemed safe, students returned to class about 10 a.m.

In the meantime, Enzbrenner said, police located a group of kids that were together that we identified and separated from the rest of the group and talked to them, and as a result of that conversation, we were able to determine which kid had made the call.

The eighth-grader was arrested and booked into jail, then released to the custody of his parents, Enzbrenner said.

He said police are seeking a charge of threatening a violent act but that prosecutors ultimately will decide how the case is handled in the courts.

The student was not known to be a chronic troublemaker, Enzbenner said.

Essentially it was a prank, he said.

Sand Springs Public Schools Superintendent Sherry Durkee said Wednesday afternoon that the district will address the incident internally, as well.

She said she didnt yet know what punishment the student would face but that there will be some consequences.

We have policies, and well be following them, she said.
NEW YORK (AP)  When his cellphone and computer accessories business was hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, Alvaro started thinking about leaving Colombia for the U.S.

The 55-year-old, who said he also faced discrimination in Colombia for his sexual orientation, learned this year that Mexico doesn't require visas for Colombians. That meant he could easily fly to the U.S. border.

I started hearing that one could ask for political asylum at the border, said Alvaro, who and insisted that his last name not be published due to his legal status.

Alvaro joined tens of thousands of Colombians fleeing one of Latin Americas most populous countries on a migration route that has rarely been used  until now.

Colombians were stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border more than 15,000 times in March, up nearly 60% from February and nearly 100-fold over last year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures. Many fly to Mexico City or Cancun and take a bus or another plane to border towns before crossing into the U.S.

Years ago, Colombians came to the U.S. on visas and later asked for asylum, said Andres Daza, an attorney who works with the Colombian consulate in Miami.

But the Biden administration is pressing Mexico to get stricter. In April, Mexico imposed online registration for Colombians, demanding travel itineraries, hotel reservations in Mexico and departure tickets.

Alvaro found a way around the rules. A smuggler reserved him a hotel room and he flew to Mexico City. From there, he flew to Mexicali, across the border from Calexico, California. He climbed a border wall using a shaky ladder and surrendered to border agents. After being detained a few days, he eventually went to Miami, where he has nephews.

Over the last year, Mexico introduced travel restrictions for three other South American countries from which large numbers of immigrants were coming to the U.S., with immediate results. U.S. authorities stopped Brazilians 65% fewer times in January, the month after Mexico started requiring visas. Ecuadorians were stopped 95% fewer times in October, a month after visa requirements. Venezuelans were stopped 88% fewer times in February, after visa requirements began Jan. 21.

A similar dynamic may be playing out with Colombians.

If you look at the high numbers of Venezuelans that reached Mexico in December, before the visa restrictions went in January, it could suggest that people were told  its a role that smuggling organizations and other play  Now its your chance, come now, said Maureen Meyer, vice president of programs at The Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group.

Colombians have little reason to worry. Along with Peru and Chile, Colombia and Mexico form the Pacific Alliance economic bloc. All four countries agree to not require visas of each other.

Colombians have largely avoided expulsions the U.S. has carried out under pandemic-related powers to deny migrants a chance to seek asylum. The U.S. has expelled immigrants more than 1.8 million times using Title 42 authority, which was named for a public health law and is due to expire May 23.

Title 42 has been applied unevenly across nationalities, due to costs, diplomatic relations and other considerations. In March, only 303, or 2% of stops, resulted in expulsion for Colombians, according to CBP. The agency said in a statement that its ability to expel migrants under Title 42 may be limited for several reasons, including Mexicos ability and capacity to receive those individuals."

Mexico has agreed to take migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Cuba and Nicaragua.

Several hundred Colombians have been expelled under Title 42 authority since the U.S. ramped up flights there in March, officials said. Witness at the Border, an advocacy group that tracks removal flights, tallied 28 to Colombia in March and April, up from 12 in the previous 10 months.

Seated on a metal folding chair in a crowded waiting room at the Colombian consulate in New York, Darwin Hincapie said he left Colombia and flew to Cancun after being extorted by gangs. Hincapie listened to music on his headphones while hoping to get a Colombian passport. U.S. border agents took his after he crossed the border in November with a smuggler.

There is quality of life here I dont have that in Colombia, said the 27-year-old, who now lives in Queens.

The pandemic left many businesses in Colombia bankrupt. The country saw massive protests last year over proposed income tax hikes.

In rural areas, community leaders face threats from rebel groups and drug cartels fighting over territory abandoned after the country's largest rebel movement, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, also known as FARC, made peace with the government in 2016.

Carmen Salavarrieta, whose nonprofit group helps immigrants obtain local IDs and provides English classes in New Jersey, said Angels for Action is seeing a record number of Colombians seeking help.

Many are professionals, but they come through the border, by foot. Can you believe it? she said, adding that some come to her organization for food and clothes.

Jaime Rojas and his wife, Nataly Chaparro, are among professionals who crossed on foot. They left Bogota with their two kids after Rojas lost his job as an information systems technician and Chaparro lost hers as an English teacher. The also faced retaliation from gangs because of their volunteer work trying to steer young people away from drugs.

The family now lives in New Jersey. The husband and wife work 10 to 12 hours a day sorting legumes and packaging salads at a wholesale food manufacturer.

This has been hard work," Chaparro, 36 said, "but we are better off here."

Salomon reported from Miami. Associated Press reporter Manuel Rueda contributed to this report from Bogota.

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A Pryor man admitted to fatally shooting a Locust Grove man in the face in 2021 before setting him and a bed he was on ablaze.

Daren Gilson Puffinbarger, 32, faces 30 years in prison after admitting to second-degree murder in the death of Lucas Sanders, 42.

Sanders burned body was found Aug. 18 in a bedroom of his Locust Grove home. An autopsy indicated that Sanders had been shot six times in the head.

I shot him, set him ablaze and then left the scene, Puffinbarger wrote in his plea agreement with prosecutors. He added at the end of his written confession that he had been abusing methamphetamine for several days prior to Sanders death.

U.S. Attorney Clint Johnson issued the following statement after the hearing:

Federal prosecutors, victim specialists and law enforcement are committed to fully investigating violent crimes that occur within Indian Country and to supporting victims and their families as we seek justice on their behalf. My thoughts today are with the family of murder victim Lucas Sanders.

Individuals committing heinous crimes, such as murder, in the Northern District of Oklahoma will be held accountable.

Mayes County deputies arrested Puffinbarger Aug. 20 on an unrelated warrant, according to court records.

After authorities told Puffinbarger that they had information that both he and his wife were at Sanders home on Aug. 17, Puffinbarger admitted that he shot Lucas in the face and threw the gun into a river.

A grand jury had indicted Puffinbarger on one count of first-degree murder in Indian Country. Prosecutors filed a reduced charge of second-degree murder against Puffinbarger on April 21.

Sanders was a member of the Cherokee Nation, and his murder occurred within the tribes reservation, thus establishing federal jurisdiction.

Without the plea bargain, Puffinbarger faced a statutory maximum sentence of up to life in prison.

He will be sentenced at a date not yet determined.

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A report released Wednesday by the Department of the Interior on the impact of Indian boarding schools has left many Oklahomans appreciative but wanting more answers.

Initially commissioned in June by Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the report released Wednesday found that the United States either directly operated or provided support for 408 boarding schools nationwide that targeted Indigenous children between 1819 and 1969 as part of a federal assimilation policy.

With 76 campuses, Oklahoma had more boarding schools than any other state listed in the report. They include more than two dozen sites within 90 minutes of Tulsa.

Starting in the early 19th century, American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children were rounded up and forced to attend Indian boarding schools, which frequently relied on militarization, corporal punishment and identity-alteration methods to strip the youths of their culture, language and traditions.

The Department of the Interiors investigation also confirmed that at least 500 children died while attending Indian boarding schools and that 53 campuses nationwide have burial sites  two figures that federal officials expect to increase as research continues.

Citing a desire to prevent grave robbing and vandalism, Interior officials declined at a livestreamed press conference Wednesday to identify which schools had confirmed burial sites.

Wednesdays report  denoted as the first volume  is the federal governments first attempt to research and acknowledge the effects of those policies.

Along with more research, Interior officials have announced plans to conduct a year-long listening tour to help better determine what resources are needed to rebuild Indigenous communities.

Although its preliminary, a lot of peoples worst fears have been realized with this report, former Osage Nation Principal Chief Jim Gray said. The federal policies of that day were devastating, not just when the children were in school, but afterwards. It left a hole in their lives.

We lost multiple generations of contributions to our communities because they were damaged by their experience  and they were the ones who survived.

Gray is a descendant of Henry Roan, who was forced to attend Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania more than a century ago.

Roan survived his time in boarding school, but he was killed in 1923 for his oil royalties. His years of not being allowed to speak Osage or practice his tribes traditions left a lasting impact on his descendants.

What this (report) tells me is that my great-grandfather never really had a chance, Gray said. To be shipped off multiple states away to a boarding school, not be allowed to speak our language or practice our traditions or just be an Osage hurts. He came back just in time for the Reign of Terror to take his life.

It hurts that this is what this important man in our family had to face.

In order to be classified as a federal Indian boarding school, a facility had to meet four criteria:

Provide overnight on-site lodging for attendees

Provide formal academic or vocational training

Receive documented support from the federal government

Be operational at any time between 1819 and 1969

Based on those criteria, one of the former boarding schools listed in the report is the Presbyterian School for Indian Girls in Muskogee, which was eventually rechartered, first as Henry Kendall College and then as the University of Tulsa.

An appendix attached to the report says the school received federal assistance and was included in reports from the Commission on Indian Affairs as early as 1891 and as late as 1907, the year Henry Kendall College moved to Tulsa.

In an email, TU spokeswoman Mona Chamberlin said the university was not advised of its inclusion in the report prior to its release Wednesday morning.

TU has a unique responsibility to recognize the grievous nature of this history and a unique responsibility to create a brighter future for all, she wrote. We endeavor to educate ourselves and others, foster respect and understanding, and further develop opportunities for Indigenous peoples. We support the important work of the Department of Interior and seek to learn from its findings.

In a written statement, the Muscogee Nation thanked the Department of the Interior for launching the investigation. Along with Muskogee, several other communities within the tribes reservation had at least one boarding school during the period reviewed by the federal government, including Leonard, Coweta, Sapulpa, Muskogee, Okmulgee, Eufaula, Nuyaka and Taft.

Indian boarding schools are one of the most significant, untold stories from the dark periods of history between the United States and Native Americans. We applaud Secretary (Deb) Haaland for her efforts to uncover the truth about these institutions and to create an opportunity for healing. We know this report is just the first step and look forward to continued federal efforts to complete the record, the Muscogee Nation said in the statement.

Five different boarding schools were based in Tahlequah, the capitol city of both the Cherokee Nation and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, during the years reviewed by the Interior Department. One is still in operation.

Now operated by the Cherokee Nation through a self-governance agreement with the Bureau of Indian Education, Tahlequah Sequoyah dates back to 1872 and is among the schools listed in the report. The school is now application based, and living in its dormitories is optional for students. Forty-three tribes are represented among its student body.

In separate statements, the leaders of both Tahlequah-based tribes thanked the Department of the Interior for their efforts.

Our Tribal Council and thousands of Keetoowah tribal members stand ready to assist the Secretary (Haaland) and Assistant Secretary (Bryan Newland) in any way we can to help them implement their Road to Healing initiative and to assist in any other way that would be helpful, UKB Principal Chief Joe Bunch said.

Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said that it will take all of us having this difficult, but necessary discussion to plot a path forward and ensure the federal government upholds its responsibilities for all of Indian Country.

Featured video: President Biden declares Indigenous Peoples Day

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KABUL, May 12 (Xinhua) -- The construction work of an industrial park has been launched in Afghanistan's eastern province of Wardak, the Afghan Ministry of Commerce and Industry said on Thursday.

The industrial park, which will cover about 81 hectares of land in the Takht-e-Kotal area of Wardak, some 35 km west of the Afghan capital Kabul, is expected to host 70 factories, according to the ministry.

"After the completion of the construction process, thousands of people would access direct and indirect jobs by up to 70 various factories, expected to be built in one of the country's widest industrial townships," it wrote on social media.

The ministry called on Afghan investors and business people living abroad to return home and invest in their own country.

The Taliban-led caretaker government has speeded up its efforts to boost industries in the cash-strapped Asian country, according to officials. 
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP)  Partisan mapmakers in Ohio made distinctly emotional pleas to the Ohio Supreme Court on Thursday, as justices once again weigh whether to hold the state's redistricting commission in contempt.

The bipartisan commission has sent five different plans for state legislative districts to the high court. Four were invalidated and, on the fifth time around, the commission opted to send over a previously invalidated map.

The endless fight, which long-suffering county election officials have likened to Groundhog Day, prevented primaries for the Ohio House and Ohio Senate from moving forward May 3.

Republican commissioners have stalwartly defended their actions as making the best of time constraints and a cumbersome, sometimes conflicting set of court decisions and criteria for carrying out Ohio's new political map-drawing system.

On Thursday, they took particular aim at persistent requests by Democratic and voting-rights groups who went them held in contempt of court.

This all is just too far beyond what this Court can and should do, wrote lawyers for Ohio Auditor Keith Faber, the sole Republican to vote against any of the commission's legislative plans. These show-cause motions unnecessarily pull the Court away from what the Constitution actually requires it to do: review the merits of a Commission-passed General Assembly-district plan.

Attorneys for the commission's two Democrats begged to differ, expressing not just disappointment but sadness at Republicans' unwillingness to involve the minority party in the Statehouse mapmaking process and, for the first time, recommending contempt.

Contempt is a drastic remedy, especially against members of a constitutional body, state Sen. Vernon Sykes and House Minority Leader Allison Russo's filing read. But the Republican Commissioners have so clearly violated their obligations, so clearly indicated they have no intention of complying with the Courts orders, that Senator Sykes and Leader Russo see no other reasonable choice.

Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose, both the state's elections chief and a member of the redistricting commission, insists that a single date  April 20  should be key in determining whether the redistricting panel was in contempt. That is the date on which any new state legislative map needed to be finalized in time for 2022 primary and general elections.

Importantly, the third round of maps was the only one ready to go on that date and has now been programmed into voter registration and tabulation systems by county election boards, said LaRose spokesman Rob Nichols.

No one disagreed with any of these statements at the federal court hearing, and the court noted as much in its ruling on April 20," he said.

Democrats asserted in Thursday's filings  which, notably, came in separate litigation and in a different court  that that's nonsense.

First, even assuming April 20 was the drop-dead date to implement a new map for an August 2 primary election, the Commission could have passed a new, constitutional map by April 20, they wrote. Second, this time crunch and supposed lack of other options is a problem of the Republican Commissioners own making, and inability that excuses compliance cannot be self-imposed.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP)  South Carolina senators unanimously approved a compromise Wednesday that would allow the state to hold true early voting and the House quickly approved the bill raising the possibility voters could head to the polls for two weeks before the June 14 primary.

Senators decided instead of getting to approve the governor's appointments to the state election board, they would add qualifications for the members and the executive director and give legislative leaders permission to ask a court to let them kick out anyone who does not meet those requirements.

Even though the bill passed both the House and Senate unanimously last month, the Senate's initial insistence they get to approve or reject the the governor's appointments to the five-member State Election Commission angered House supporters and the governor.

The House refused to reconsider the bill and even attached their version to a number of unrelated proposals until the compromise was reached this week.

What we have here is better than advice and consent on the board," said Sen. Chip Campsen, a Republican from the Isle of Palms who worked on the agreement.

Senators would still get to vote on the executive director.

A few hours after the Senate unanimously approved the compromise, the House followed with a 108-1 vote. Gov. Henry McMaster has said he supports the bill outside of the issue with the Senate.

Republican Rep. Brandon Newton said early voting will go in place as soon as the bill is signed. That could be before the end of the week. State election officials didn't immediately respond to an email asking if they can have early voting in place by the end of May.

The bill was a compromise between Democrats and Republicans that won total support from each group. It would open polling places for regular early voting for two weeks before elections, excluding Sundays. That would make South Carolina the 45th state to allow anyone to vote outside of Election Day without an excuse.

For many years, South Carolina has allowed people to cast absentee ballots in person, but they had to include an excuse for why they could not be at the polls on Election Day. Under the proposal, the state would go back to mail-in absentee ballots.

The bill also would make voter fraud a felony, increasing fines and possible jail time for people who try to vote under a false name, vote more than once or poll managers who intentionally break the law.

The proposal requires audits of at least 5% of all votes in a county in the days after an election.

The new requirements for board members and the executive director include prohibiting actions that go against state election law and making statements that discredit the states election rules.

The election board angered lawmakers during the 2020 election when it did nothing to Executive Director Marci Andino after she considered ballot drop boxes and eliminating witness signatures on absentee ballots without their approval during the COVID-19 pandemic. Senators also were upset the governor did not use his power to fire the director.

Other requirements for board members include being a registered voter in the state for five years and the executive director would need to have at least three years of experience in election administration. Candidates for both roles could not contribute to campaigns or serve as officers in political parties.

Follow Jeffrey Collins on Twitter at https://twitter.com/JSCollinsAP.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Oklahoma Attorney General John OConnor and his challenger in next months Republican primary, Gentner Drummond, disagreed sharply on two things at the Rotary Club of Tulsa on Wednesday.

One was the proper course for the state in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Courts McGirt decision.

The other was OConnors job performance.

OConnor, a Tulsan appointed to the position by Gov. Kevin Stitt nine months ago, touted his 15 lawsuits against the Biden administration, court fights over McGirt, and measured response to other situations such as allegations of wrongdoing in the state Tourism Department and misspending of state funds by Epic Charter Schools.

I dont think we need vindictive or hot-headed law enforcement, OConnor, a Tulsa attorney, said during a back-and-forth about whether he should be more actively involved in the Tourism Department investigation. Im not going to fire off just because the media stirs up (something).

Drummond, a Hominy attorney, businessman and rancher with interests in Tulsa, said OConnor has largely abdicated his responsibilities.

Presently, the Oklahoma County district attorney (David Prater) is prosecuting or investigating five areas that belong in the Attorney Generals Office, Drummond said. As your attorney general, I will be independent of any other elected official.

OConnor, Drummond said, is letting the Oklahoma County district attorney functionally serve as the attorney general.

Underlying both candidates remarks are the perceived and to a large extent acknowledged close ties between Stitt and OConnor.

Drummond portrays himself as independent of the executive branch, while OConnor has acted to a large extent in tandem with it.

This is particularly true in regard to McGirt, which upset the judicial status quo in eastern Oklahoma. While Stitt and OConnor continue to fight the ruling, Drummond argued that it needs to be accepted and solutions to the problems arising from it found.

The Supreme Court has ruled, Drummond said. That was two years ago. For two years we have not had a solution in the state of Oklahoma.  What must be resolved right now is a collaboration with the Native American tribes.

The tribes, he said, want a solution. They want leadership from the state of Oklahoma to sit down at the table and say, Lets work together.

OConnor disagreed about the tribes willingness to talk, saying they had been dealt a royal flush by the Supreme Court, which makes negotiations difficult. He said, as he has before, that he has met with leaders of four of the six affected tribes.

OConnor also disagreed that the state has lost virtually all of the 45 McGirt-related appeals it has filed. He counted as a victory the U.S. Supreme Courts refusal to hear an appeal of a lower court decision barring retroactive claims based on McGirt and also the courts agreeing to hear arguments on limiting McGirts scope.

We are winning, OConnor said.

With the Republican Party the dominant political party in the state, the winner of the June 28 GOP primary between OConnor and Drummond will be a big favorite over Libertarian Lynda Steele in the Nov. 8 general election.

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IFC and Ho Chi Minh City Development Joint Stock Commercial Bank (HDBank) signed on Wednesday a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to become strategic partners, supporting small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to scale up finance and participate in global supply chains, including financing the high-tech agricultural chain.

The signing took place on the occasion of Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinhs ongoing visit to the U.S. to attend the ASEAN-U.S. Special Summit in Washington, D.C..

This cooperation is expected to help HDBank build its supply chain finance (SCF) portfolio of US$1 billion in the next three years, accordingly growing its SCF portfolio  currently active in construction materials, agribusiness sectors, FMCG as well as supporting industries and downstream petroleum distribution.

IFC will assist HDBank to design an SCF strategy for the agricultural sector, broaden its SCF products  especially supplier and distributor financing  and bring on board anchor firms along with their suppliers and distributors, among others.

SCF that links buyers, suppliers, and financial institutions will efficiently support the trade cycles, said Pham Quoc Thanh, CEO of HDBank.

IFCs timely support will enable local businesses to leverage emerging trade opportunities and improve their linkages to formal supply chains, contributing to Vietnams economic growth.

It will further help HDBank realize its vision to be among the top banks in the country with a core focus on SME and retail banking, while emphasizing value chain financing and growing its anchor client base.

Also, agriculture chain is an important target industry for us, especially high-tech and green agriculture.

Small and medium enterprises are the backbone of the economy and essential to Vietnams goal of becoming a manufacturing hub in the region, said Stephanie von Friedeburg, Senior Vice President, Operations at IFC.

IFCs support to domestic financial institutions as HDBank will contribute to increase SMEs linkages with the global supply chains and open up the opportunities for development and job creation, Friedeburg said.

On April 14, IFC granted HDBank a trade finance limit of $40 million within the framework of the Global Trade Finance Program (GTFP) to enhance payment risk guarantee capacity in trade finance for domestic enterprises, mainly SMEs.

In 2021, IFC provided a long-term loan of $70 million to the Vietnamese bank to support renewable energy business.

IFC also subscribed $95 million to international convertible bonds issued by HDBank to support increased lending to micro, small, and medium enterprises.

Currently, the total value of commitments and cooperation between IFC and HDBank has topped $200 million and will continuously increase and develop in the coming time.
The New Zealand government has donated to Vietnam NZ$2 million (US$1.26 million) to support the Southeast Asian countrys recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The aid, sourced from New Zealands COVID-19 response fund, was announced at a ceremony in Hanoi on Wednesday with the participation of representatives from the New Zealand Embassy, Vietnams Ministry of Foreign Affairs, UNICEF Vietnam, CARE International, and OXFAM Vietnam, among others.

Addressing the event, New Zealand Ambassador to Vietnam Tredene Dobson said this aid project is a two-fold approach to COVID-19 recovery.

Accordingly, the aid package includes NZ$1 million for medical supplies, delivered via UNICEF Vietnam to areas where the safe and effective response to COVID-19 is needed, and another NZ$1 million for projects focusing on livelihood restoration for disadvantaged communities in Vietnam, including women, children and ethnic minorities, through CARE International in Vietnam and Oxfam in Vietnam.

By working closely with many trusted partners, this holistic approach will hopefully set a strong course for recovery," the Vietnam News Agency cited Ambassador Dobson as saying. "It is now more important than ever that we work quickly at pace to achieve our collective vision of a strong, prosperous, and resilient Vietnam.

There is a well-known Maori proverb 'Naku te rourou nau te rourou ka ora ai te iwi,' which means 'With your food basket, and my food basket, the people will thrive.' In Vietnam, you have a similar expression, 'La lanh um la rach,'" Ambassador Dobson said on the verified Facebook page of the New Zealand Embassy in Hanoi.

"In this spirit, humanitarian support remains an important part of the strategic partnership between New Zealand and Vietnam."

Over the past two years, the New Zealand Embassy has collaborated with Vietnamese and international partners in carrying out several COVID-19 response projects worth NZ$270,000 in total, assisting more than 3,300 female workers in various sectors and 130 children with disabilities as well as members of the hearing-impaired community in Vietnam, the Vietnam News Agency reported.

Commenting that health systems have experienced terrible disruptions in essential health and other social services worldwide, UNICEF representative in Vietnam Rana Flowers advised that Vietnam invest more in health systems so that children and communities can have a better chance to survive and thrive in the future.

Vu Thi Quynh Hoa, national director of Oxfam in Vietnam, said that Oxfam and partners will provide job skill training and financial assistance for at least 2,300 freelancers such as street vendors, small traders, and lottery ticket sellers in Ho Chi Minh City and its neighbor Binh Duong Province to help them build their livelihood resilience.

The project specifically supports women who are migrant workers and people with disabilities because these are the two groups most affected by the pandemic, Hoa said.

Vietnam has now put COVID-19 under control, but the pandemics impacts on the countrys economy and society as well as peoples health need several years to be overcome, said Vietnams Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Nguyen Minh Vu.

Vu highly appreciated the fund from New Zealand, saying it is practical support for Vietnams efforts to shore up the economy and help vulnerable people hard hit by the pandemic.

The ministry is committed to coordinating with agencies concerned to effectively implement this aid project, the minister stated.

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Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh said on Wednesday that Hanoi was interested in helping the United States realize the aims of its proposed economic framework for the Indo-Pacific, but needed time to study the details.

Chinh, in Washington for a two-day summit between President Joe Biden and Southeast Asian leaders starting on Thursday, said he had had discussions on Biden's Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) with U.S. officials earlier on Wednesday.

"We would like to work with the U.S. to realize the four pillars of that initiative," he told a question-and-answer session after delivering a speech at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies.

He said the pillars were supply-chain stability, digital economy, the fight against climate change and a fourth related to labor, tax and combating corruption.

"These are very important to the U.S., to Vietnam and other countries alike," he said, speaking through a translator.

However, Chinh said the "concrete elements" of the initiative had yet to be clarified.

"We are ready to engage in discussion with the U.S. to clarify what these four pillars will entail and when that is clarified, we would have something to discuss," he added. "We need more time to study this initiative and see what it entails."

Asian countries have been frustrated by a U.S. delay in detailing plans for economic engagement with the region since former President Donald Trump quit a regional trade pact in 2017, leaving the field open to U.S. rival China.

At a virtual summit with ASEAN last October, Biden said Washington would start talks about developing what has become known as IPEF, which aims to set regional standards for cooperation, but diplomats say this is likely to feature only peripherally this week.

Japan's Washington ambassador said this week IPEF is likely to be formally launched when Biden visits Japan later this month, but its details were still under discussion.

Analysts and diplomats say only two of the 10 ASEAN countries - Singapore and the Philippines - were expected to be among the initial group of states to sign up for negotiations under IPEF, which does not currently offer the expanded market access Asian nations crave given Biden's concern for American jobs.

Chinh hailed the blossoming of Hanoi's relations with the United States in recent decades and the explosion of bilateral trade to almost $112 billion annually, although he said the two sides should further advance cooperation to deal with the legacy of the American war in Vietnam.
Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh met with U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo and oversaw the signing of 10 cooperation agreements on Wednesday as part of his weeklong trip to the U.S. and attendance at the ASEAN - U.S. Special Summit.

During the talks, PM Chinh thanked the U.S. Department of Commerce, and Secretary Raimondo in particular, for their support in promoting trade between the two countries and promptly handling issues without disrupting bilateral trade.

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, trade between Vietnam and the U. S. increased 24 percent between 2020 and 2021, reaching US$112 billion.

Comparatively, bilateral trade sat at just $400 million in 1995 when the two nations normalized their diplomatic relations.

The U.S. continued to be Vietnams biggest export market while the Southeast Asian nation became the ninth-largest trading partner for the U.S. last year, according to official statistics.

PM Chinh, whose U.S. visit lasts from May 11 to 17, noted that there is still ample room for growth in trade and commerce between the two countries.

PM Chinh used the meeting to express his hope that bilateral trade relations will developing in a harmonious and sustainable manner, with a focus on diversifying supply chains, digital transformation in commerce and investment, and promoting science and technology.

Vietnam, a developing economy, needs cooperation with developed countries, including the U.S., in various fields, including green finance, technology, and human resources, Chinh said.

The country is currently prioritizing projects with new and clean technology, high added and digital transformation value, or those creating links with global production and supply chains, he added.

PM Chinh also expressed his appreciation for the U.S. policy of supporting a strong, independent, and prosperous Vietnam, and added that the visit by Vietnams Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong to the U.S. in 2015 laid a solid foundation for bilateral ties.

Expressing her appreciation for Vietnams development strides after 27 years of normalization of diplomatic relations, Secretary Raimondo said that she values the Southeast Asian countrys economic development vision and plan, especially in the areas of its digital economy, green economy, and diversification of supply chains.

Raimondo was pleased with the progress in the relations between the two countries, especially in economy and trade.

She also expressed her pleasure to see that more and more Vietnamese enterprises are investing in the U.S..

The U.S. official stated that Washington wants to strengthen cooperation with Hanoi as the latter attempts to realize its commitment toward net-zero emissions by 2050.

Congratulating Vietnam on its successful control of the COVID-19 pandemic, Raimondo affirmed the U.S.s continued support for pandemic recovery.

Following their talks, PM Chinh and Secretary Raimondo witnessed the signing of 10 cooperative documents between the two countries agencies and businesses in various fields including energy, infrastructure, telecommunications, digital technology, climate change response, and those that help Vietnam achieve its commitments made at the 2021 United Nations COP26 climate conference in the UK.

Prominent among the deals is a contract between Vietnams HDBank and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) to provide small- and medium-sized enterprises with a supply chain financing facility in agriculture, building materials, supporting industries, downstream petroleum distribution, and climate change response.

This cooperation is expected to help HDBank build a supply chain financing portfolio worth up to $1 billion in the next three years.

Another deal is the cooperation agreement between Vietnams Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment and Citigroup on technical support and information exchange to realize Vietnams net-zero emissions target through carbon markets, integrated finance, biodiversity, and others.

Among the remainders are the agreement between Vietnam Electricity (EVN) and the GE Group focusing on power generation and transmission, the investment cooperation contract between the Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group (VNPT) and Casa System Group in 5G network development, and the Son My LNG Terminal Project in Binh Thuan Province involving the AES Group and PetroVietnam Gas Joint Stock Corporation (PV Gas).

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Check out the news you should not miss today:

Society

-- Local authorities in Quy Hop District, north-central Nghe An Province are investigating the causes of cracks at hundreds of local houses and many wells running dry since October 2020, with residents saying mining activities are depleting groundwater.

-- The Government of New Zealand has presented NZD2 million (US$1.26 million) from its COVID-19 response fund to support Vietnams recovery from the pandemic, the Vietnam News Agency reported on Wednesday.

-- Ho Chi Minh City is expecting to vaccinate more than 1.87 million people over 50 years old, people aged from 18 with moderate to severe immunodeficiency, and those at high risk of COVID-19 exposure with the fourth dose following the vaccine distribution from the Ministry of Health.

-- Nghe An has put effort into providing more swimming lessons for local children as only over 3.3 percent of 875,825 children in the province can swim, according to the provincial Department of Labor, War Invalids, and Social Affairs.

-- Police in the north-central province of Thanh Hoa on Wednesday evening rescued a man who was trapped in a well for hours and took him to hospital for a check-up.

Business

-- Deputy Prime Minister Pham Binh Minh on Wednesday received Legos COO Carsten Rasmussen, who is on a business trip to promote the construction of a factory worth more than $1 billion in southern Binh Duong Province.

-- Vietnam exported 22,500 metric tons of rice to the EU for nearly $18 million in the first quarter of 2022, roughly a fourfold increase in both volume and value compared to the same period last year thanks to preferential tariffs given the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement, the Vietnam News Agency reported on Wednesday.

-- During a Wednesday meeting with the media in Ho Chi Minh City, Singapores electricity and gas distribution company SP Group announced a commitment to invest SGD750 million ($540 million) in sustainable energy solutions in Vietnam until 2025.

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Vietnams Ministry of Health has requested that relevant authorities take samples from patients suspected to be infected with acute hepatitis of unknown origin to prevent any outbreaks should the disease appear in the country.

As of May 7, about 278 children aged 0-16 in at least 20 countries had been diagnosed with a mysterious type of acute hepatitis. At least nine of these children have died.

Vietnam has yet to record any case of the mysterious acute hepatitis.

Given the dangers posed by the disease, the health ministry has directed relevant units to closely monitor the situation and take samples from any patients suspected of having contracted the hepatitis in order to detect any outbreaks.

Information from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control showed that the adenovirus has been found in many of the patients, but further investigation is needed to determine the exact cause.

The adenovirus is not a new virus, Nguyen Pham Anh Hoa, a senior doctor at the Hanoi-based Vietnam National Children's Hospital, said, adding that the virus was detected in 1953 and has 57 types.

The pathogen can cause eye pain, pneumonia, flu, and diarrhea. It is also one of the causes of respiratory infection in adults and gastrointestinal damage in children.

Tran Minh Dien, director of the Vietnam National Children's Hospital, said that the institution has recorded a few cases of liver damage, but the patients were suffering from multisystem inflammatory syndrome following their COVID-19 infections.

The hospital has not documented any case of adenovirus-related liver injury, Dien continued.

If patients aged 0-16 have symptoms of acute hepatitis, doctors will perform further tests depending on their health condition.

At the National Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Hanoi, doctors have been closely monitoring children with fevers, vomiting, diarrhea, or signs of jaundice and fulminant hepatic failure.

A liver function test is a good measure to check whether or not the patient is suffering liver damage or failure, Nguyen Trung Cap, deputy director of the hospital, said, noting that many medical facilities are capable of performing this test.

If a patient develops jaundice, their condition might have already entered the late stage, Cap added.

An epidemiologist believed that health authorities should not rule out the scenario that the mysterious acute hepatitis will appear in Vietnam at some point.

The country has already documented the hepatitis viruses A, B, C, D, and E, he continued, pointing out that some of these viruses are blood-borne and sexually transmitted, while others are transmitted through the gastrointestinal tract.

If the virus causing the mysterious acute hepatitis is transmitted through the gastrointestinal tract, the transmission rate will be lower.

However, if this virus replicates in the respiratory tract, the risk of a serious outbreak will be higher.

Although many aspects of the disease remain unclear, Vietnam must stay vigilant and up-to-date on the situation in order to take prompt action and prevent an outrbreak, the expert stated.

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Former Chase host Andrew OKeefe has apologised to Sydneys Central Local Court after an outburst last week in which he told magistrate Daniel Reiss, You have no interest in justice.

I do wish to offer an apology unreservedly, OKeefe told the court today.

My behaviour last time was quite disrespectful to the court.

I come from a family that has experience in the judiciary; my father was a judge, I know how difficult the job is.

Last week magistrate Reiss warned OKeefe would risk contempt if he did not offer an apology to the court.

After his latest appearance, OKeefe made no further bail application and his case returns to court in September for a hearing.

Source: news.com.au
BEIRUT, May 12 (Xinhua) -- The Lebanese government on Thursday gave licenses to 11 companies to construct solar power plants capable of producing 15 megawatts of electricity each, Energy Minister Walid Fayyad said.

The companies, including both local and international ones, will have a year to secure funding, the minister added.

It would be a good sign to the international community, which has repeatedly asked Lebanon to reform its energy sector, he noted.

Fayyad said solar production would cost less than that via fuel.

Lack of electricity in Lebanon has been a chronic problem, exacerbated by the shortage of U.S. dollar which limits the country's capacity to import fuel for the operation of power stations. As a result, Lebanese households suffer power cuts for at least 20 hours a day.

The minister also said he plans to travel to neighboring Syria on Sunday to follow up on a deal to import Egyptian gas and Jordanian electricity via Syria. 
Mackenzie Crook and Toby Jones will reunite for a one off Detectorists special, five years after their comedy series ended.

They return as metal detecting hobbyists, Lance and Andy, from the Danebury Metal Detecting Club.

Director, writer and star of the show Mackenzie Crook said, It was 2017 when we were last in Danebury and I miss my old friends in the DMDC. Ive had a story percolating for a while and I thought it was worth getting Lance, Andy and the rest of the band back together for. The affection expressed for Detectorists over the years has been incredible and I hope fans of the show will enjoy this new, extended episode.

Producer Gill Isles said: Its absolutely thrilling to be spending the summer back in Danebury with Mackenzie and the team. There is so much love for the show that I cant wait for everyone to see what Mackenzie has in store in this next chapter.

The series screened in Australia on ABC Comedy for 3 seasons.
Mondays Four Corners is a PBS Frontline story, Putins Road to War on the Russian leaders rise to power.

He is more dangerous than hes ever been at any point in the last 22 years. He will not lose. He will grind the country down to a fine, fine ash. Author

When Russia began its invasion of Ukraine in February it came as a shock to many. Why would Vladimir Putin want to overturn decades of stability by sparking the biggest security crisis in Europe since the end of the Cold War?

He came to see himself as almost ordained to lead Russia back to greatness. If that is your ordained mission, then there arent a lot of limits on the means you can use to achieve that goal. Reporter

For those who have studied Putin for decades, this war has been long in the making.

It seemed almost as if Putin had drawn up a plan, a long time in advance, and now he had finally decided to execute it. This was not the war of the Russian people against the Ukrainian people. This really is Vladimir Putins war. Global affairs analyst

On Monday Four Corners traces Vladimir Putins rise to power from his days as a KGB counterintelligence officer to his emergence as a global power player in the post Cold War era.

Hes a professional liar. To lie is what he was taught in the intelligence school. He was pretending that he was going to pursue the same development of Russia as Yeltsin did. But thats all is just one big lie. Russian journalist

This film shows how he has repeatedly used so-called national security threats as a pretext for suppressing dissent and asserting his control.

He came to power because of the war in Chechnya inside Russias own borders, just as brutal as the horrors that were seeing in Ukraine today. Global affairs analyst

In fascinating interviews, former top international diplomats describe their dealings with the Russian strongman.

You could almost feel the humidity from the spittle that was spewing. It was pretty shocking because it was pretty aggressive. Former US Ambassador to NATO

These keen observers say the invasion of Ukraine is being driven by Putins obsessive desire to find a place in history.

He wants to be a great historical figure for Russia. Its Putin the Great, is what he wants to be. And one of the deeds that Putin the Great will have accomplished is reuniting Russia with Ukraine. Journalist

And they warn that in Vladimir Putins eyes, failure is not an option.

It doesnt matter how many Russian soldiers die in the process, how many Ukrainian soldiers and civilians die in the process. He will not be humiliated, and that makes him also much more dangerous. Author

Monday 16th May at 8.30pm on ABC.
French Open-Roland Garros flags Credit: PA Images

French Open Tournament Director Amelie Mauresmo admits there is no fair decision when it comes to Russian and Belarusian players participation at Grand Slams, but those who compete at Roland Garros have been warned that they will face punishment if they support the Vladimir Putin regime in public.

Roland Garros officials have decided to stick with the ATP, WTA and ITF policies that allow players from the two countries to compete at tournaments, but as individuals.

This is in contrast to the All England Club (AELTC) and Lawn Tennis Associations (LTA) decision to ban players from Russia and Belarus from Wimbledon and other events in the UK following Russias invasion of the Ukraine.

The likes of Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Martina Navratilova have criticised the move by AELTC and LTA while the ATP could strip all tournaments in the UK from ranking points.

Former world No 1 and French Open chief Mauresmo admits officials are in a rock and a hard place, but there was a warning for those who support Putin.

Its very complicated, probably there is no fair decision to take. We have thought a lot, and I have the impression that there is no fair decision, one way or the other, she said.

We are in line with what European sports ministers  and other countries  decided in March, we do not welcome teams but individual athletes.

Obviously if an athlete speaks in the press for example and supports Vladimir Putin, sanctions will be taken.

The 2022 French Open gets underway on May 22 with Djokovic and Barbora Krejcikova the defending champions.

The article French Open news: Players warned they will face sanctions if they make any pro-Vladimir Putin statements appeared first on Tennis365.com.
(Manchester United via Getty Imag)

Manchester United youth coach Travis Binnion has heaped praise upon Alejandro Garnacho after his heroics in the FA Youth Cup final.

Highly-rated forward Garnacho netted a decisive late brace on Wednesday night as United won the competition for a record-extending 11th time in front of a bumper crowd of 67,492 spectators at Old Trafford.

The Red Devils youngsters initially led Nottingham Forest courtesy of Under-18s captain Rhys Bennetts early header, though the visitors hit back through Josh Powell after an error from goalkeeper Radek Vitek.

The stage was then set for Garnacho to decide the tie, first notching from the penalty spot in front of the Stretford End despite appearing to be fouled outside the area by Zach Abbott.

The confident 17-year-old - who replicated Cristiano Ronaldos famous celebration after his first goal - then struck again with a deflected effort in second-half stoppage time to seal a memorable triumph.

Next big thing? Alejandro Garnacho has been building quite a reputation at Manchester United (Manchester United via Getty Images)

That boy could be in any stadium in the world and he wouldn't care, Uniteds U18 lead coach Binnion beamed afterwards. That's his make-up. A few of them are like that and that's why they are going to have good careers.

This football club is remarkable at that, it's the best in the world at that. We have to keep that going, we have a responsibility to keep that going - the pipeline. It's nice to give the fans a bit of something because they're different class.

Garnacho - who moved to England from Atletico Madrid in 2020 - has been making quite a name for himself in Uniteds youth set up, making his first-team debut off the bench with a late cameo after replacing Anthony Elanga in last months 1-1 home Premier League draw with Chelsea.

He has been selected in the senior matchday squad on several occasions this season and also played in the EFL Trophy match against Bradford last September.

Born in Madrid and a previous representative of Spains U18s, Garnacho is eligible to play for Argentina through his mother and featured at U20 level before receiving a shock first senior call-up by La Albiceleste coach Lionel Scaloni in March for World Cup qualifiers against Venezuela and Ecuador.
Boris Johnson vowed to 'Get Brexit Done' during the 2019 general election campaign. (Getty)

Boris Johnsons vow to Get Brexit Done in 2019 has not been delivered, according to more than half of Britons.

The prime minister focused on Brexit during the general election two years ago, with the promise to deliver on the result of the 2016 referendum credited as one of the reasons for the Tories winning a huge majority.

But in a YouGov poll of 3,525 adults, less than a third (28%) of all voters believe that Brexit has been delivered, with 21% saying they didnt know.

Just over half (51%) said they felt Brexit has not been delivered, two years on from when Britain officially left the European Union (EU).

The results of the survey also show that most Leave voters (46%) believe Brexit has not been delivered, compared to 40% who say it has.

Most voters do not think Brexit has been delivered. (YouGov)

It comes as Johnson hinted parts of the Brexit deal could be ripped up over a row on the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Draft legislation to unilaterally remove the need for checks on all goods being sent from Britain for use in Northern Ireland are reportedly being worked on by ministers.

The proposed law would allow businesses in Northern Ireland to disregard EU rules and regulations and remove the power of the European Court of Justice to rule on issues relating to the region.

Watch: Gove: NI Protocol can respect EU Single Market and UK Internal Market

Crucially, it would in parts override the protocol agreed by Johnson in 2019 and mean the UK had breached its obligations under the Brexit agreement.

But it has been argued that the protocol will not be completely overridden, with measures being considered to ease the issues on the ground in Northern Ireland.

Foreign secretary Liz Truss will hold crunch talks with the vice president of the European Commission on Thursday, while attorney general Suella Braverman is said to have approved the scrapping of swathes of the agreement.

Boris Johnson's focus on Brexit is credited as one of the reasons for winning a large majority in the 2019 election. (PA/Getty)

Prisons minister Victoria Atkins said the Northern Ireland Protocol is creating political instability but insisted she believed the EU will listen to our arguments.

Story continues

Atkins told Sky News: Im convinced we will be able to find a solution to this because Im sure that the EU will listen to our arguments, but I think its right we review this.

On Wednesday, Johnson said the Good Friday Agreement was more important than the Northern Ireland Protocol as he dismissed suggestions of any possible escalatory response from the EU as crazy.

He said there was no need for drama but doubled down on hints he could override elements of the deal.

Foreign secretary Liz Truss has said the UK will not 'shy away' from taking action on the Northern Ireland Protocol. (PA)

Truss is expected to tell European Commission vice president Maros Sefcovic in a call on Thursday morning that the dispute over Northern Ireland cannot drag on.

She had warned she would not shy away from taking action as she accused the EU of proposing solutions that would take us backwards.

There have been suggestions that unilateral action by the UK could spark a trade war against the backdrop of the invasion of Ukraine.

But Johnson told BBC News on Wednesday: Lets face it, were talking about really, in the scheme of things, a very, very small part of the whole European economy, and I think 0.4% of the value of the whole of the EU economy in Northern Ireland.

It is crazy. I didnt think theres any need for drama. This is something that just needs to be fixed.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian has been summoned by a court in Bamako as part of an investigation into an alleged "attack on public property and other offences" dating back to 2015, concerning the manufacture of Malian biometric passports. This comes at a time of tense relations between France and Mali.

The Bamako court has summoned Le Drian to present himself on 20 June at 8am "for a matter concerning him".

Le Drian and his son Thomas are suspected of "attacking public property and other offences at the expense of the Malian state".

The summons was prompted by a complaint from Maliko - a civil society association close to the military junta - regarding a biometric passport concession dating from 2015.

Maliko accuses Le Drian, who was then France's defence minister, of having "taken advantage of his position to twist the arm of [former president] IBK [Ibrahim Boubacar Keita]", to accept that Oberthur, a Breton company now called Idemia, would win the contract to manufacture Malian biometric passports, replacing a Canadian company.

Maliko believes that "Malian rules and procedures have been blithely violated".

'Umpteenth provocation'

A French diplomatic source told RFI that the French embassy in Bamako has not been officially called upon, denouncing what it called the "umpteenth provocation intended to put a spanner in the works."

However, a Malian magistrate reportedly maintained that the summons of France's foreign minister has "no legal basis".

Relations between Bamako and Paris have deteriorated of late, due - in particular - to the arrival of the Russian mercenary group Wagner on Malian soil.

The authorities in Bamako - dominated by the military, which came to power in a coup d'etat in August 2020 - declared earlier this month, that they were breaking off their defence accords with France and other European partners.

The accords were put in place nearly a decade ago to help Mali's army in its fight against jihadist movements across the Sahel.
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BEIJING, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Slovenian counterpart Borut Pahor on Thursday exchanged congratulatory messages on the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Xi pointed out that since the establishment of bilateral diplomatic ties 30 years ago, China and Slovenia, treating each other with respect and as equal, have achieved positive results in mutually beneficial cooperation and witnessed increasing cultural and people-to-people exchanges, which brings tangible benefits to the people of the two countries.

In the face of COVID-19, the people of the two countries have supported each other, demonstrating a profound friendship between China and Slovenia, he said. 
The Personal Enrichment, Action, and Knowledge Series (PEAKS), geared toward older adults in Fannin County and the surrounding region, will launch an in-person series of free events this summer on the University of North Georgia's (UNG) Blue Ridge Campus. Weekly opportunities will be held on Thursdays from June 2-July 28.

UNG's Institute for Healthy Aging and Blue Ridge Campus are coordinating with community members to arrange presentations and workshops. With programming in the mornings and afternoons on Thursdays, lunch will be provided each week by community businesses and organizations.

"Curiosity and lifelong learning are important components of healthy aging. The institute has supported this through our virtual PEAKS program during the pandemic," Dr. Chaudron Gille, UNG provost and senior vice president for Academic Affairs, said. "It is exciting to be moving to PEAKS in person because it offers the additional benefit of creating community among the participants and more opportunities to partner locally."
On May 12, Gov. Brian Kemp signed the Fiscal Year 2023 state budget at the University of North Georgia's (UNG) Blue Ridge Campus. The university received $13 million in the budget for the construction of a new 25,000-square-foot building and additional parking at that campus. Construction is scheduled to begin in early 2023 and be completed by fall 2024.

"This historic budget is a product of one of the most important sessions in a generation, and I'm proud of the hard work put into it by the General Assembly," Kemp said. "It invests in education across the board in a transformational way and makes higher education in Georgia more affordable and accessible by removing the Special Institutional Fee imposed on students and families since the Great Recession while also ensuring HOPE Scholarships and Grants cover 90 percent of tuition for most students. That emphasis on education is part of why we chose to sign this legislation on UNG's beautiful new campus."

These funds are in addition to the $2 million included in the amended Amended Year 2022 budget for the Blue Ridge Campus expansion, which is a $15 million project. UNG's stand-alone Blue Ridge Campus opened in fall 2020, and the new building will allow for a wider array of academic and community service programs.

"We are grateful for support from Governor Kemp and Speaker Ralston, the legislature and the University System of Georgia of our efforts to provide access to higher education in the Blue Ridge area," UNG President Bonita Jacobs said. "This addition will change lives by expanding academic opportunities for our students to develop the skills and knowledge they need to be leaders in their community."

UNG's Blue Ridge Campus has grown from 20 students when it opened in 2015 to about 230 for the 2021-22 academic year. The additional facility will provide specialized spaces for the College of Education to allow it to offer a blended cohort of students who will compete their degree in Blue Ridge. It will also enable the College of Health Sciences & Professions to offer a Bachelor of Science in Nursing program to existing students in the area who may have started through the Technical College System of Georgia or other programs.
Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh (right) had a meeting with Cambodian counterpart Hun Sen in Washington DC on May 11 during the trip to the US.  VNA/VNS Photo Duong Giang

WASHINGTON DC  Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh had a meeting with his Cambodian counterpart Hun Sen on May 11 (local time) as part of the trip to the US to attend ASEAN-US Summit.

During the meeting, the Vietnamese Government leader praised Cambodia's role and contributions as ASEAN Chair, including promoting the implementation of the ASEAN Five-Point Consensus on the situation in Myanmar.

PM Chinh also congratulated Cambodia on positive results in its COVID-19 response and the full economic reopening, expressing his belief that Cambodia will successfully organise the commune/ward elections in early June as well as the National Assembly elections in 2023.

For his part, Cambodian PM Hun Sen also spoke highly of Viet Nams achievements in COVID-19 response, and socio-economic recovery and development, saying that he believes the Vietnamese Government and people will continue to achieve even greater achievements in its oi moi (renewal) process and international integration.

The Cambodian leader also thanked Viet Nam for supporting Cambodia in the role of ASEAN Chair 2022.

The two leaders expressed their satisfaction with the positive developments in bilateral cooperation in recent times, especially the maintenance of meetings and high-level delegation exchanges, as well as cooperation mechanisms in all channels.

Two-way trade kept a positive growth momentum, hitting US$3.37 billion in the first quarter of 2022, up 24.9 per cent year-on-year.

To continue promoting the "good neighbourliness, traditional friendship, and comprehensive, sustainable and long-term cooperative relation" between the two countries in the coming time, the two PMs agreed to promote the exchange of high-level delegations during the Viet NamCambodia, CambodiaViet Nam Friendship Year 2022 and jointly organise meaningful activities to celebrate the 55th anniversary of bilateral diplomatic relations (June 24, 1967-2022).

The two sides will make efforts to develop trade-investment; promote tourism; effectively use the border gate system to facilitate trade and people-to-people exchanges; uphold the achievement of demarcation and marker planting on about 84 per cent of the land border and continue the work on the remaining 16 per cent; and jointly build a border of peace and friendship between the two countries.

PM Chinh also expressed his thanks and wished that the Cambodian Government continues to pay attention to and create conditions for the community of Vietnamese-origin Cambodians to strengthen their legal status and stabilise their lives in Cambodia.

On this occasion, the Vietnamese Government leader respectfully conveyed the regards of Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, State President Nguyen Xuan Phuc and National Assembly Chairman Vuong inh Hue to Prime Minister Hun Sen and other senior leaders of Cambodia. PM Hun Sen expressed his sincere thanks and invited PM Chinh to visit Cambodia.  VNS
Nathan Allen of the Nashville band Seryn knows the outdoor stage at Common Grounds well from a decades worth of gigs at the Waco venue.

Its our spot, he called it in an interview as the band headed for a Tulsa, Oklahoma, show. Allen also knows that Seryns Thursday night show is cause for celebration, if one needed something more than the bands first appearance in Waco in six years: Its the 10th anniversary of Seryns first Common Grounds appearance, when the indie-folk band called Denton its home base.

Four players now make up Seryn  Allen on guitar, Trent Wheeler on lead vocals and the occasional ukelele, Aaron Stoner on bass and Chase Johnson on drums, although Seryn fans know one of the bands distinctives is a free-wheeling instrumentation that at times has included violin, accordion, banjo and more, plus vocal harmonies in the mix. Thursdays show, in fact, will see former band member and violinist Scarlett Deering come down from Dallas to join the group, Allen said.

The Waco visit comes in a weeks Tour Far Gone stops at Oklahoma and Texas venues, a longer-than-usual trip for the band. Its pretty extensive for us as most of us are married and have families, Allen said. Allen hopes to hook up with some of his family, who live in the Waco and Dallas areas. Theres also time, in their Oklahoma leg, for side trips to the new Bob Dylan Center and the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa  a sign the band has matured to see theres more to touring than gigs connected by travel, Allen said.

The eclectic, genre-blind band comes to Waco with  surprise  new music. Theres a fresh single, Misery, and six to seven songs started for the next album. The guitarist said a two-year COVID-19 bump in performances and recording had a small silver lining in that all four members did more recording on their own and now come to a project with the skills to produce it themselves. Weve been able to take hold of our own songs and be in charge, he said. For a band known for exploring new sounds and musical territory, thats no small thing.

Much of their new content gets released to fans online through the subscription service Patreon, with subscribers getting new songs at the start of the month and monthly livestreamed performances.

Those fans know what to expect  slightly ironic given the band wanted a name free of musical connotations when they formed in 2010 in Denton. We had a big whiteboard with hundreds of names and as people would walk by, theyd add some or erase others, Allen remembered. Seryn was the last name standing, so to speak, and fans have freely invented their own connotations  serenity, serenade, serendipity  in the years that followed.

Though Denton-rooted, only a few of Seryns members studied music at the University of North Texas, home of a music studies program with national renown. What proved essential was the citys wide-open, fertile music scene in which Seryn sprouted. The Denton scene was so unbelievable, so much talent and creativity there, Allen said. Everybody was so serious and so passionate about music. It was a totally different world.

Seryns lineup has changed over time as has its home and, to some extent, its sound. Whats still there, though, is a shared passion for making music, one deepened by years of creating and performing together. Thats what theyll bring to their spot at Common Grounds, Allen said. Come out and see some guys just as passionate about music as theyve always been, he said.

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Someone shot a 23-year-old woman Wednesday afternoon in the 800 block of North 32nd Street and fled the scene, police said.

Officers responded to a home there at about 4:15 p.m. for a report of a shooting. An officer arrived and quickly located a woman in the house who had been shot in the leg, Sgt. Garen Bynum said.

The officer called for American Medical Response and the Waco Fire Department and started providing medical aid to the woman, Bynum said. AMR transported the woman to a local hospital, where she was in stable condition, he said.

The Waco police SWAT team responded to clear the house because it was suspected the person who shot the woman might be inside. The SWAT team determined the person was no longer there, Bynum said.

Detectives are working to determine what led to the shooting. Bynum said he suspects it started as a domestic dispute, but that remains under investigation.
Live Oak Classical School students Miriam Carl, Maddie Kirklin and John Olafsen, who competed in the senior division of the Central Texas Science and Engineering Fair, are attending the International Science and Engineering Fair this week in Atlanta, Georgia.

Freshman Miriam Carl received first place in the cellular and molecular biology category with her project titled Using Techniques to Assess Bioindicator Plants Response to Environmental Pollutants. She received the 1519 Bowman Company Senior Award and the Central Texas Dental Society Award.

Sophomore Maddie Kirklin placed first in the microbiology category with her project titled Aquatic Plant Surface Micro-Flora and the Coliform Response. She was awarded the McLennan County Medical Society Award for her project.

Junior John Olafsen received first place in the robotics and intelligent machines category with his project titled Autonomous Sensor Guided Robots. He also won the Baylor University Scholarship Award.

Live Oak Classical School is a member of the Society for Classical Learning and the Texas Colloquium of Classical, Christian Schools.
Representatives of the Great Stone China-Belarus Industrial Park and Chinese enterprise Transport Complex AF LLC sign an agreement online in Minsk, Belarus on May 11, 2022. The Great Stone China-Belarus Industrial Park, a landmark cooperation project within the Belt and Road framework, held a welcome ceremony on Wednesday for a new resident company. The Chinese enterprise Transport Complex AF LLC, the 90th resident company of the industrial park located in the eastern suburbs of Minsk, plans to build a monitoring center for cross-border transportation with the help of the Internet of Things technology. (The Great Stone China-Belarus Industrial Park/Handout via Xinhua)

MINSK, May 12 (Xinhua) -- The Great Stone China-Belarus Industrial Park, a landmark cooperation project within the Belt and Road framework, held a welcome ceremony on Wednesday for a new resident company.

The Chinese enterprise Transport Complex AF LLC, the 90th resident company of the industrial park located in the eastern suburbs of Minsk, plans to build a monitoring center for cross-border transportation with the help of the Internet of Things technology.

During the ceremony, head of the park's administration Alexander Yaroshenko voiced hope that the number of the Great Stone resident companies will reach 100 by the end of this year, and the administration stands ready to support them in all matters.

Among the 90 enterprises in the park, 46 are financed by China, 27 by Belarus and 17 by other countries. The total investment in businesses has amounted to 1.26 billion U.S. dollars.

The industrial park is the largest investment project of China in Belarus and an important example of the Belt and Road cooperation between the two countries. 

Head of Great Stone China-Belarus Industrial Park administration Alexander Yaroshenko (L) issues admission certificate to a representative of Chinese enterprise Transport Complex AF LLC in Minsk, Belarus on May 11, 2022. The Great Stone China-Belarus Industrial Park, a landmark cooperation project within the Belt and Road framework, held a welcome ceremony on Wednesday for a new resident company. The Chinese enterprise Transport Complex AF LLC, the 90th resident company of the industrial park located in the eastern suburbs of Minsk, plans to build a monitoring center for cross-border transportation with the help of the Internet of Things technology. (The Great Stone China-Belarus Industrial Park/Handout via Xinhua)
The late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a passionate advocate for abortion rights, but she was also one of Roe v. Wades most effective critics. My criticism of Roe is that it seemed to have stopped the momentum on the side of change, she said, explaining that abortion rights were gaining ground when Roe froze the democratic process in place and gave opponents a poorly reasoned decision to focus on.

If the Supreme Court actually overturns Roe along the lines of a leaked draft opinion  still a big if  the issue will move back to the democratic process, fought out by elected politicians. But because of Roes harmful effect, that process wont look anything like the politics of 50 years ago.

Roe strengthened the movement against abortion. Previously, the issue divided the parties internally. In 1972, 59% of Democratic delegates voted down an abortion rights plank at their convention. George H.W. Bushs father, Republican Sen. Prescott Bush, was the treasurer of Planned Parenthood. In 1967, California Gov. Ronald Reagan liberalized abortion laws. By 1976, he was apologizing for his mistake.

In the decades since, positions have hardened and the parties have sorted almost completely on the issue.

That alone doesnt necessarily mean that reversing Roe wont be a political boon to Democrats, which some might think it will be. But theres ample reason for skepticism.

As Sarah Isgur recently wrote in Politico, Democrats in recent years have failed to make abortion rights a tool for turnout. Last year, a Texas law that severely restricted abortion by allowing private individuals to sue providers didnt galvanize Democrats the way politicians such as Terry McAuliffe hoped in his failed bid in the race for Virginia governor (in part because Glenn Youngkin, the Republican winner, adroitly said he wouldnt have signed the Texas bill).

More broadly, the voters most passionately invested in maintaining maximal abortion rights are already among the Democrats most reliable voters. For a real electoral backlash to work, Democrats need to pull in new voters who might otherwise not vote for them. A CNN poll conducted after the leaked draft ruling showed the GOP advantage on the generic ballot increased 6 points over the most recent one before the leak. Thats not dispositive, but it hardly points to an instant tsunami in favor of politicians supportive of abortion rights.

While the actual overturning of Roe alone may not yield the backlash Democrats hope for, its far more plausible that Republicans, liberated from Roe, will do something to spark one against their party.

For instance, a Republican effort to impose a federal ban on abortions after, say, six weeks seems inevitable (and quite hypocritical for many who spent years insisting that abortion should be a state issue). A federal ban would almost certainly fail  the last GOP-controlled Congress didnt have the votes for a 20-week limit in 2018 or 2020 and that was when the Republicans knew it was a free symbolic effort without any chance of passage.

Various red states are poised to impose bans or near bans on abortion just as other blue states are likely to codify unfettered access to abortion. If you live in a state such as California, New York or Oregon, the leaked draft ruling would not restrict abortion access at all.

The reason political predictions are so hard is that neither partys official position reflects where most voters are. Only 23% of Americans believe abortion should be legal under any circumstances while only 21% think it should be illegal under all circumstances. Everyone else is somewhere in the middle, largely favoring first trimester abortions and more restrictions after that. Bill Clintons formulation of safe, legal and rare captures where most Americans are  and always have been.

As a practical matter, the maximalists on both sides represent the respective bases of the parties. The question now is, how long will that last? If the court sends abortion back to the political arena, absolutism will no longer be an easy safe harbor for politicians, particularly ones with national ambitions. A lot of Democrats who favor abortion rights and Republicans who oppose abortion are almost certainly more moderate than the hard party line theyve adopted out of expedience.

It will take a long time to unwind the polarization caused by Roe and the result will not please the most committed on either side. The next few years will probably be chaotic or worse, as the parties figure out how to keep their bases happy in a post-Roe world where politicians will be held to account for their positions on abortion. The only way out is through.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast.
Gage will portray Dr. Mary E. Walker, one of the first women physicians in the country, graduating from Syracuse Medical College in 1855. At the outbreak of the war, Dr. Walker was denied a commission as an Army surgeon because she was a woman. She served as an unpaid volunteer in various camps and hospitals and eventually was appointed an assistant surgeon. She was captured and held a prisoner of war for four months before being freed in a prisoner exchange. Due to her contributions during the war, Walker was awarded the Medal of Honor in 1865, becoming the only woman to receive the medal. Disabled by her wartime experience, she was recognized for her outspoken advocacy for womens rights.
WATERLOO  A gunshot wound victim was transported to MercyOne Waterloo Medical Center after being founded Wednesday night in the 900 block of Grant Avenue in Waterloo.

The injuries to the juvenile were non-life threatening, said Capt. Jason Feaker.

One shell casing also was found after the call for shots fired came in from the 700 block of Grant Avenue at 7:35 p.m. Wednesday.

No arrests were made, and the circumstances surrounding the incident were not immediately known, said Feaker. But the victim was not believed to be the intended target.

Police apprehend Georgia murder suspect in Waterloo Jamarius Bernard Johnson was detained as a suspect in the murder following a traffic stop Tuesday in Waterloo that also resulted in the vehicle driver's arrest.

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WEBSTER CITY  Testimony has ended in the trial of the man accused of killing Sgt. Jim Smith in Grundy Center in 2021.

Closing arguments in the case will be Monday.

Prosecutors rested Thursday morning after putting on their last two witnesses  the state medical examiner and a firearms expert.

The defense indicated it wasnt calling any of its own witnesses, and the accused, 42-year-old Michael Thomas Lang, told the court he wasnt going to testify.

Lang is charged with first-degree murder, attempted murder and assault on a peace officer. Authorities said he struggled with and choked a Grundy Center police officer following an attempted traffic stop and chase. He then fled home and shot Smith, a state trooper, with a shotgun when officers attempted to detain him.

Lang later fired the shotgun into the windshield of an armored vehicle when SWAT team members raided his house.

Defense attorney Aaron Hawbaker said Langs decision not to testify related his inability to argue self-defense.

Judge Joel Dalrymple said that in his view, the actions of law enforcement during the incident were lawful, and the self-defense argument wasnt available.

The state had earlier argued the self-defense and stand your ground argument arent allowed because residents arent allowed no use force to resist an arrest, not even if they believe the arrest is unlawful, not even if the arrest is actually unlawful.

Also Thursday, Assistant AG Douglas Hammerand renewed his request to place the trial on hold Friday to allow members of Smiths family to travel to Washington, D.C., for a Police Memorial Week ceremony Friday night and a local event over the weekend.

Hawbaker resisted, saying the defense is prepared to argue closings Friday, and any delay would increase the risk of jurors being inadvertently exposed to publicity surrounding the case.

The judge didnt grant the motion, but gave jurors the rest of Thursday and Friday off to allow for both sides to review and prepare jury instructions. He noted many cases are overturned on appeal because of errors in jury instructions, and he didnt want to speed through the process.

During the last part of testimony, State Medical Examiner Dennis Klein described Smiths fatal injury from the 12-gauge shotgun shell.

Smith was wearing body armor, but the projectile hit his left shoulder around the armors shoulder strap and continued moving inward, entering around the collar bone and hitting a rib and his left lung, Klein said.

From there, the slug tore his aorta and hit is right lung. Klein found fragments of the slug around Smiths right shoulder blade.

Klein also described a shotgun wound to Smiths left leg. He said it entered his the back of his thigh and exited the front. He said that wound, also, could have been fatal on its own.

Ballistics Examiner Michael Tate with the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation tested Langs shotgun and compared it with four fired shells found in Langs home.

Tate said he couldnt conclude the weapon fired the spent shells because the guns breach face was dirty and therefore didnt leave markings on the shells. He ran a secondary test, looking at marks from the guns extractor and a catch in the magazine tube. From that, he was able to conclude the spent shells had been cycled by the shotgun.

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CEDAR FALLS  Food service workers settled their contract early with Cedar Falls Community Schools, but they wont miss out on the heftier raise another employee group is getting.

The Board of Education this week took the unusual step of amending its previously negotiated agreement with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 2749. There are 49 district food service workers covered by the contract.

The three-year AFSCME contract, approved in December and starting July 1, included a 50-cent hourly boost to base wages during the first year. Existing employees were scheduled to get the same raise.

Under the memoradum of understanding approved by the board Monday, the increase will be doubled to $1. Raises will stay at 40 and 30 cents per hour in the next two years. That matches the two-year Cedar Falls Education Support Professionals contract the board also approved Monday, with $1 per hour more the first year and a 40-cent increase the second year.

I do want to acknowledge its unusual, but its a recommendation were making quite strongly nonetheless, Adrian Talbot, the districts executive director of human resources, told the board before the AFSCME vote.

He noted that the district reached out to union officials about the possibility of making some revisions to the contract after the December approval due to subsequent local and national labor market volatility and upward pressure on wages along with increased competition for workers.

The boards approval of the AFSCME memorandum also included the addition of a one-time $750 retention bonus for those employees, something that was part of the support professionals contract. Employees in both groups have to be already working for the district on June 30 and accept a letter of assignment for 2023-24. The payment will then be made Sept. 30, 2023.

This retention payment would be funded with Elementary and Secondary (School) Emergency Relief funds, referred to as ESSER, said Talbot. This payment will become neither part of the ongoing hourly wage nor a component of the language in the collective bargaining agreement.

Cedar Falls Education Support Professionals includes 221 paraeducators as well as building secretarial and clerical staff. Their agreement includes a 7.63% increase in wages and non-insurance benefits the first year and a 2.83% increase the second year.

Im glad to see that were able to come to a multi-year agreement, said board member Nate Gruber. However, in light of the wage resetting event in the Waterloo Community Schools, he added that Cedar Falls Schools needs to determine what are we going to do to make sure that our paraprofessionals stay.

Neighboring Waterloo Schools support staff received a $2 hourly pay boost in February. That is being followed by a $1 increase for the 2022-23 school year.

Board member Jenny Leeper noted that the Waterloo district was able to make those increases in part because it had more federal ESSER money available than Cedar Falls Schools.

Its not an apples-to-apples comparison, so I think its important that the community understand that, as well, she said. Its not that were not trying to stay competitive its that theres a difference in funding and it needs to be sustainable funding.

Board member Jeff Hassman thanked district staff for their work on the contracts.

We have our fiscal constraints, he said. We have to be fiscally responsible, we have to be sustainable in the decisions that we make.

But Hassman suggested that they have also been sensitive to Cedar Falls Schools employees listening to the market and trying to do all we can within the confines of what we have to work with in a school district.

Seperately, Talbot said the Cedar Falls Education Association is scheduling a meeting for ratification on a tentative agreement reached with the administration after four closed sessions. If ratified by association members, it will come to the board for approval.

In other business, the board approved a one-year school nursing contract with MercyOne Waterloo for $593,252, a $2,778 increase from the current agreement. Staffing in the contract includes a part-time manager, four full-time equivalent registered nurses, three other RNs on an as-needed basis, 7.5 full-time equivalent health assistants and four other assistants on an as-needed basis.

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WAVERLY  A group of people with golden shovels Wednesday turned dirt to ceremonially kick off work that was just getting started out of sight beyond a grove of trees.

More than two dozen people gathered just off of Horton Road to break ground on a new Waverly-Shell Rock Community Schools elementary building. Among those present were district officials, Board of Education members, construction managers, architects, and district residents  including some elementary school-age children.

After the brief photo-op, Superintendent Ed Klamfoth clarified: Just so everybody knows, this is not where the school is going. The actual location is an area to the south where heavy equipment noisily worked during the event.

Theyre taking down some trees, said Chad Alley, a project executive with Estes Construction. Theyre trying to build the road that goes to the school site. Estes is the construction manager on the project.

A year ago, the board approved the purchase of 38.48 acres at 2513 Horton Road for whats been dubbed the northeast elementary school, one of two being built by the district. The district may need less than half of that land, so eventually the excess property  likely including the area where the groundbreaking took place  will be sold off.

Its fun to be here, its exciting, Klamfoth said after the event. Im really pleased we can do this for our community. Im looking forward to the process and maybe more so looking forward to getting it done.

Its been about two years since we started this, Alley noted, referencing the planning work related to the project. That includes efforts looking at the need for the new schools, which led to the board placing a $31 million bond issue referendum on the ballot in March 2021, and the subsequent development of building plans. The bond issue, approved by voters, will help pay for the two projects as well as improvements to Shell Rock Elementary and the high school.

Were just excited to get going, said Brad Leeper of Invision Architecture, which designed the schools.

Youre going to see a lot more earth work over the next two months, said Alley. The buildings steel structural beams will likely start going up in August.

Work at the west elementary location, adjacent to 2915 Fifth Ave. N.W., will begin later as the district finalizes details related to the school siting.

Were just wrapping up the construction easement on that, said Klamfoth. Work will start sometime between mid- and late-June. That building will begin rising up a month or two later than the northeast school.

Ryan Nelson, the project manager with Estes, said the goal is to wrap up actual construction at the northeast site by the fall of 2023. Additional time would still be needed for some interior work and installation of furnishings. It could be ready to open for the second half of the school year, with completion of the west site a little further behind.

But Klamfoth said officials may not be ready to open the the kindergarten through fourth-grade schools during 2023-24 even if all the work is completed. They will replace Margeretta Carey, Southeast and West Cedar elementary schools, and he said its really hard to make the change from three to two schools mid-year  particularly if only one is ready at the right time.

In an ideal world, construction is done in August 23, he said. But completion of the work is dependent on weather along with supply chain issues. That would be real optimistic.

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First in a series on Cedar Valley Top 15 Nurses

WATERLOO  When Allison Ramakers father underwent cancer treatment at UnityPoint Community Cancer Center in Waterloo, she felt comfort in knowing he was getting state-of-the-art medical treatment

The family found a whole other level of comfort and care in nurse Emily Babinat.

Emily is an outstanding nurse at UnityPoint Community Cancer Center. Nobody wants to go to the cancer center, but if these patients have Emily Babinat as their nurse, the patient is at ease. She is a very passionate, knowledgeable, loving and caring person. She treats her patients as if they were her family.

Ramaker was so impressed with Babinat she nominated her for a Cedar Valley Top Nurse award. Babinat is among 15 nurses this year to receive the honor from The Courier.

My dad was there for chemotherapy for his cancer, and she made him feel at ease and told him that things are going to be OK and helped him get through it. My dad graduated from chemo and she was there with him when he rang the bell! He loved her as a granddaughter.

Babinat was surprised to learn shed been nominated, and even more shocked to learn shed been chosen as a 2022 Top Nurse.

I had no idea, she said, laughing.

Its that laughter and light-heartedness that Babinats patients appreciate most, her colleagues say.

All of our nurses have something unique and special. They are amazing with patients, said UPH Cancer Center Clinic Administrator Betsy Robertson. But what sets Emily apart is she just has that personality thats able to bring joy. She makes heavy things light. Shes funny. Shes empathetic with patients. She listens to them.

Babinat, 28, began her post-secondary education as a business major at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. It just didnt sit right with her. I didnt feel like that was something I could do that would help people, she said.

She switched paths and became a certified nursing assistant. Stints as a CNA at Ravenwood Speciality Care and NewAldaya Lifescapes in Cedar Falls solidified her belief that shed made the right decision.

Babinat went on to earn her licensed practical nurse degree at Hawkeye Community College and a bachelor of science in nursing degree from the Des Moines Area Community College online program.

She worked on the medical/surgical floors at hospitals in Dubuque and Des Moines for a time before she and her husband, Adam, returned to the Cedar Valley. For the last three years, shes been an adult oncology nurse. Its tough  but gratifying  work, she explained.

You see patients in their worst times. This is a situation nobody ever wants to be in. If you can make patients in a situation like that feel comfortable, thats really rewarding. Youre talking about one of the scariest moments of their life, and to be able to provide comfort and assurance no matter what the outcome is has been really eye-opening.

Building relationships with cancer patients is a priority. That goes a long way, Robertson said.

You are a part of their support system. You have to go to the next level here. Patients come frequently so we make it a priority to know little things about their lives  how many grandkids they have, that theyre planning a trip to Hawaii. All of those things. They need to know we are taking an interest in their lives, not just their medical journey.

Emily really exemplifies all of that. She is so good at figuring out which patients have a playful personality and shell go down that road with them and connect on that level. Thats why a lot of our patients love her. I just appreciate her, and Im so glad shes a part of this team. We need her light.

The light goes both ways, Babinat said. Her patients have given her plenty of light and wisdom, too.

One thing Ive learned, especially in this field, is that positivity goes a long way. Ive learned that through patients undergoing chemotherapy. They always have optimism. It takes weeks  sometimes months  of treatment. Its hard on them. It wears them down. Cancer has always been a battle, and its a victory to complete chemotherapy. But they do it with a positive attitude. Oncology is where my heart is. This is the best field Ive ever been in.

Outside of work, Babinat and her husband are bicyclists with plans to ride RAGBRAI this year. Ride is a strong word, she said, laughing once again. She plans to drive an RV while he rides the full route. My husband is really into biking. Lets just say Ive been trying to bike with him.

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Juon had been battling breast cancer since late 2010, when she received a stage-4 diagnosis. She entered hospice care May 6.

She moved to Waterloo more than 40 years ago with her late husband, Dave. Together they raised twin daughters. Juon also had two granddaughters.

Juon, who was 74, dedicated decades of service to Northeast Iowa. She worked as executive director at Iowa Northland Regional Council of Governments, or INRCOG, for 25 years. She headed the agency for most of its existence

After she stepped down from her position at INRCOG, Kevin Blanshan stepped in.

I worked with Sharon for 20 years, and theres a lot of fond memories, Blanshan said. She was unique and definitely had a lasting legacy here at INRCOG and the whole Cedar Valley.

Apart from a quarter century at INRCOG, Juon served on the Waterloo City Council from 2017 to 2022. Jerome Amos Jr., currently the longest-sitting member on the council, said Juon made things happen.

When she got off the council, Sharon still had a love for this community, Amos said. Sharon was that individual who cares about this community, and she was definitely an individual who worked with everyone on the council to help for the benefit of this community. She will be missed because she had a heart for this community.

Mayor Quentin Hart issued the following statement on Juons passing.

Today, Waterloo lost one of its biggest champions, a fearless leader whose heart for people, and common-sense decision making helped to build this city. We will never be able to list all her accomplishments or the names of all whom she inspired and encouraged. Personally, I have lost a trusted mentor and dear friend. On behalf of the city of Waterloo and the Hart family, my sincere condolences to Sharons daughters and close friends.

Juon also was on a number of boards, such as the Black Hawk Gaming Association, the Iowa State University Foundation board and was a chair for the Cedar Valley United Way. She co-founded and chaired the Leadership Investment for Tomorrow program, and chaired the My Waterloo Days festival.

She received service awards from the Waterloo Chamber of Commerce, Leadership Iowa, Junior Achievement, and ISU, among others.

Close friend and colleague Tim Hurley said the community will sorely miss Juon.

She did things that someone didnt have to do, Hurley said. She wasnt a native, but she immediately dove in and got active and our community is much better because of her devotion and interest.

In a previous interview with The Courier in 2013, Juon said it was time to help herself  to enjoy her granddaughter and other blessings in life.

Theres three things: faith, family and friends, Juon said, It sounds almost trite, but I guess I never would have totally understood how important having that faith was to get me through losing David and then the cancer. And then the friends and family  incredible. Friends have just been amazing. Theyre there with me every single step of the way.

According to Juons CaringBridge, she was surrounded by family at the time of her death. No memorial or funeral services have been announced.

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WASHINGTON, D.C.  A group of Cedar Valley veterans were treated to a trip around the capital of the country they defended Wednesday.

The 27th Cedar Valley Honor Flight took off from the Waterloo Regional Airport in the early morning, arriving at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Virginia. From there, they were taken to memorials around the Washington, D.C., area. Most of the veterans, almost 80 in total, served during the time of the Korean and Vietnam conflicts.

There was one veteran from World War II, retired U.S. Army Reserve Maj. Gen. Evan Curly Hultman. In 1945, Hultman was preparing for the invasion of Japan when President Harry Truman ordered the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the World War II memorial, Hultman discussed the decision that may have saved his life. He also reflected on the five Sullivan Brothers, whom he knew personally.

We grew up in east Waterloo, Hultman said. So they come back to me when I think of five brothers all being killed. And in my case, all of my family were involved in World War II, including five of my uncles  and they all came back. They all survived. And here was one family whose all five sons didnt survive.

For other veterans on the Honor Flight, it was a chance to finally receive the thanks they were often denied, especially those who served in Vietnam. Vietnam veteran Robert Bennett of Waterloo, who is Black, served in the Army at a time when respect could be especially hard to come by.

I think the Honor Flight is really respectful to the vets  Vietnam and so forth. Actually being a Vietnam vet, when we got home, we didnt get the honor that we deserved, Bennett said. But now, I think Honor Flight is doing a great job of making some of that up.

For some the trip was bittersweet. While at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Army veteran Tim Bahr of Hawkeye was able to request and receive an etching of the name of a friend, St. Sgt. John Myers, from the wall. The two men had gone through training together to become noncommissioned officers and shipped out at the same time. Myers was killed in 1970 when he stepped on a landmine.

None of those guys want to be on that wall. Its too bad, Bahr said.

The significance of the day also was felt by the families and veterans who served more recently. Following the Changing of the Guard Ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Chiquita Loveless said she took a healthy level of pride in what she saw, especially after 23 years of service in the U.S. Navy. Loveless worked as one of the escorts for the Honor Flight.

Weve all served and we take such pride in seeing the accomplishments and the traditions and the heritage that are being continued, and knowing that the military is still going forward and still in a good place, Loveless said.

Following the tour of monuments in the nations capital, the veterans returned to Waterloo to be honored further beside their waiting families.

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WATERLOO  Exhausted veterans taking part in the 27th Cedar Valley Honor Flight were greeted at the Waterloo airport with fanfare upon returning home late Wednesday night.

Early that morning, the nearly 80 veterans and their guardians departed for Ronald Reagan National Washington Airport in Arlington, Virginia. They were given a tour of the nations capital, including the memorials commemorating the conflicts in which many of them had served. They then were subjected to a flight delay that set back their arrival in Waterloo past 10 p.m. When they deplaned, they were met by their families, veterans associations and musicians from the Cedar Valley Big Band playing the anthems of their branches of service.

It was very unexpected, said Army veteran Darwin Ramker from Waverly. I knew some of my family might be here, but I didnt expect all these different groups here anyway, greeting us the way they were.

The tearful reunions would prove to be the crowning glory of a memorable day. The group also had been greeted with salutes and an honor guard in the nations capital. Both displays impressed Navy veteran David Podhajsky of Clutier.

This was great, but the one we got this morning  the whole terminal was out for us  we never expected that, he said. And this one today is great. Yeah, that was nice.

According to Black Hawk County Supervisor Craig White, it also serves as therapy for the veterans, especially those who served in Vietnam.

I have a hard time with it, sometimes, White said. It brings back memories, and its the stuff we didnt get  when wed come home from Vietnam. And its much needed, and its a healing process for us. And it doesnt happen overnight.

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BEIJING, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Despite multiple unexpected factors rattling global financial market, China has renewed its commitments to further opening its capital market, with pragmatic measures in the pipeline to lure more investors to one of the world's fastest-growing economies.

China will optimize and expand the connectivity of domestic and overseas capital markets, Wang Jianjun, vice chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, told Xinhua in an interview.

The vice chairman said that the commission is expanding the scope of Shanghai-Hong Kong and Shenzhen-Hong Kong stock connect schemes, with efforts to step up the inclusion of exchange-traded funds into the two programs.

To support Chinese firms in getting listed in overseas markets such as Hong Kong and the United States, new rules and regulations will be put into effect. In the same vein, China welcomes qualified international companies to get listed on the mainland stock market.

On top of that, more cross-border investment and risk management products will be provided for overseas investors, the securities regulator said, pledging that it will also build up supervision capacities and enhance cooperation with other countries.

Despite recent volatility in global capital flows, Wang said there are "no fundamental changes in the capital flow and trading of China's capital market."

Since the start of this year, risks arising from geopolitical conflicts, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the monetary policy shifts in major economies have prompted jitters among global investors.

According to data from the Institute of International Finance, foreign capital has been pulling out of the emerging markets in March and April, but China's equities posted about 1 billion U.S. dollars in inflows in April.

What's worth noticing is that long-term funds have also kept flowing to China this year, a signal that foreign investors remain optimistic about the prospects of Chinese stocks and the country's economic growth.

China's listed firms posted steady performance last year, turning in satisfying financial reports to shareholders. According to data from 4,804 listed firms, these companies raked in 66.4 trillion yuan (about 9.87 trillion U.S. dollars) in operating revenue and 5.1 trillion yuan in net profits in 2021, up 19.3 percent and 19.8 percent from a year ago, respectively.

And the market has continued to grow with more players. In 2021, the number of listed firms on the mainland stock market rose by 524 to about 4,700, with their aggregate market capitalization ranking second globally.

Commenting on Chinese A-share market volatilities this year, Wang said that it would not derail China's capital market from its long-term positive development trend.

There were some "overreactions" in the market, Wang said, believing that the influence of these risks is "controllable" and the steady operation of the market is underpinned by solid foundations.

The Chinese economy has sustained its recovering momentum as supply and industrial chains have been gradually unsnarled, Wang said, noting that pro-growth policy mixes have also sent positive signals to several primary sectors and helped anchor market expectations.

In the eyes of Fang Xinghai, also vice chairman of the securities regulator, China's growth potential is yet to be fully unleashed, and the fundamentals of its sound economic development will remain unchanged.

A country's foreign capital attraction capacity depends partly on its opening-up policy and China is pretty clear about the direction and means of its higher-level opening-up, said Fang.

Li Zhan, an economist with Zhongshan Securities, said China should make its capital market more internationalized when rolling out a registration-based initial public offering system.

More policy measures should be introduced to lower the threshold for overseas capital, facilitate cross-border investment and develop international financial products, Li said. 
Second in a series on Cedar Valley Top 15 Nurses

WATERLOO  Waterloo native and East High graduate Traci Hewitt initially thought she wanted to be a doctor.

When I started at (the University of) Iowa, I was actually premed. I wanted something science-oriented, medicine-oriented. But I saw the differences between doctors and nurses, and I knew I didnt want to be on call all the time and making those heavy decisions, so I decided to go the nursing route. I knew it was the right decision for me.

Hewitt returned to Waterloo to attend Allen College and pursue a bachelor of science in nursing degree. During her junior year of college, Hewitt was trying to hone in on a specialty when she was told about an opening in the medical oncology unit.

I always say I didnt choose oncology. It chose me, she said.

In 1996, after a stint working in a busy unit in Kansas City, Hewitt came home to work in a private practice with Dr. Mukund Nadipuram.

Everyone knows him as Dr. Nadi, Hewitt said.

The following year, Nadipuram left the practice and joined Covenant (now MercyOne).

He asked me to go with him, and Ive been there ever since, Hewitt said. Weve grown from a practice of four to now having close to 25 or 30 employees. Its interesting to see how the Christmas cards have changed.

Currently, Hewitt works at the MercyOne Waterloo Cancer Treatment Center. She has been an oncology certified nurse since 1997.

I am a chemotherapy infusion nurse, she said. I check dosages, give premeds either orally or through an IV. I give a full head-to-toe assessment on every patient. Sometimes we can catch things the doctor didnt encounter.

Hewitt said she also focuses on patient education. All new patients starting treatment visit with a chemotherapy nurse who explains the treatment regimen, side effects and reasons to notify the office.

We always try to treat everyone as our own, she said of her patients. We have a lot who come in angry at their diagnosis, angry at their treatment. It can be so overwhelming. We try to offer a little trust and reassurance to reinforce they are in the right place and making the right decision.

Ive treated a lot of friends and, unfortunately, family members  and even some patients who have become friends.

And I love my co-workers, she said. We have a fantastic team, from the doctors and nurses, nurse practitioners to the lab and front desk. We all work together.

Hewitts colleague, Dana McDougall, nominated her for Cedar Valley Top Nurses honors.

Traci has been an oncology nurse for 20-plus years. During that time, she has had a positive impact on numerous lives. She is caring, compassionate and knowledgeable. Traci puts her patients needs first and always offers support. Traci is an excellent nurse who continues to change lives daily, McDougall wrote.

It hasnt always been easy. The last few years have been very challenging. Working through the pandemic was unlike anything I have gone through. With the staffing issues, taking care of patients, dealing with the rules of what we can do and what we cant do.

In addition to her role as an oncology nurse, she also serves on MercyOnes Breast Program Leadership Committee, assisted with the conversion to electronic health records and has been instrumental in training new oncology nurses, McDougall continued.

Hewitt praises Nadipuram for his mentorship, along with others she has encountered throughout her career.

Dont show me how; tell me the why. I have to put those things together in my mind.

She is now a mentor.

Learn to be resilient, and learn to stand up for yourself, Hewitt advised new nurses. You can learn from so many situations. Take in the experience of everyone around you. That can be physicians, nurses, the pharmacist, even the kitchen workers. Soak in all the knowledge.

For Hewitt, the fight against cancer is a very personal one.

Unfortunately, I treated my mom, who is my best friend, and my father-in-law. Losing them has been extremely difficult  one very early in my career and my mom just few years ago.

But the successes outweigh the losses.

I had a patient, mid-20s, married with a couple of young kids. Over the course of treatment, we became friends. Being able to watch that family and those relationships grow and know I participated in that  thats very special.

Ive had patients come up to me in the street and say, Hey, she saved my life.

I get asked a ton how do you do what you do? No, we dont save everyone, but we do save a lot.

You know what youre doing is meaningful.

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A severe shortage in baby formula has drawn the attention of members of Iowas congressional delegation and has become a campaign issue as well.

Spot shortages in many groceries and pharmacies have been exacerbated by a Food and Drug Administration recall that stopped production at Abbots largest U.S. formula manufacturing plant in Michigan. As supply disruptions and the massive safety recall have continued, several big box retailers have begun rationing sales of the formula.

Its very concerning, Sen. Chuck Grassley told reporters Wednesday.

After hearing about the scarcity at his county meetings, Grassley wrote the FDA to ask what it is doing to address the shortage.

He cited reports that at least 40% of baby formula supplies in the U.S. are completely depleted. Iowa was among six mostly Midwestern states where more than half of all baby formula was completely sold out during the week of April 24.

Its pretty much looking for a needle in a haystack, Rachel Beadle, who recently moved from Marion to Des Moines said in April.

According to the Biden administration, the FDA is working around the clock to address the shortage. Manufacturers say theyre producing at full capacity, but its still not enough to meet demand.

Im going to keep on top of it. We got to help families feed their kids, and empty shelves are unacceptable, Grassley said.

Finkenauer push

Thats not enough for former U.S. Rep. Abby Finkenauer, who is among Democrats seeking to challenge Grassleys re-election this fall.

She called it shocking that it has taken Grassley and other members of Congress so long to address a national crisis when you have people not being able to feed their children the nutrition they need to thrive and survive.

Finkenauer has called for the Biden administration to invoke the Defense Production Act to force manufacturers to produce more formula

We need all hands on deck to address the dangerous shortage of baby formula in Iowa and across the country, Finkenauer said. Invoking the act would bring any and all federal resources to the table to increase the supply of baby formula and address the shortage.

It just seems like the rational and right thing to do, she said.

It might be an appropriate tool, Grassley said when asked about invoking the act, but he didnt think it would necessarily solve the contamination issues that led to the production shutdown at Abbott.

You wouldnt want to put the Defense Production Act into action and then produce unsafe food, he said.

Timeline sought

Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson joined a colleague in writing the FDA asking for a timeline for when baby formula is expected to be sufficiently restocked as well as a long-term plan to minimize supply chain disruptions for formula.

Parents who are unsure how to provide this essential sustenance for their babies and worried about the nutritional impacts of this supply chain shortage, Hinson and New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik wrote. As moms ourselves, we know the stress this is causing in so many households.

Families already worried about higher food and fuel prices now have the added stress of not knowing if the baby formula they need will even be in stock, Hinson said.

She called on the Biden administration to prioritize fixing supply chain disruptions to replenish the supply of infant formula. Ill work with anyone who will work with me to ensure that families dont have this extra burden, she said.

Bipartisan effort

Republican Rep. Marianette Miller-Meeks has joined bipartisan legislation to encourage competition, reduce costs and improve the quality of infant formula options available through the Women, Infants, and Children program by creating an online database. Its a companion to bipartisan Senate legislation.

Fourth District Republican Rep. Randy Feenstra called the situation dire, threatening babies who rely on formula for their health and development.

He joined a colleague in proposing the Formula Act, to direct the FDA to establish and communicate to Congress clear standards by which it domestically regulates infant formula.

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I take full responsibility for what I say. While in Ukraine, I witnessed war crimes. All of them were committed by the Ukrainian army. But in France we dont talk about it!

Adrien Boke

Here, the demobilized French soldier, the author of the book Get up and go thanks to science, went to Ukraine on a humanitarian mission and spent three weeks there. Upon his return, he made a difficult decision that could cost him his life or at least create many problems: he decided to convey to the French information about the crimes he had witnessed in Ukraine.

Here are quotes from his interview:

When I returned to France from Ukraine, I was shocked: TV channels invite as experts people who have not been to Ukraine and do not know anything about what is happening there now. However, they dare to speculate about these events. Between what I hear from the TV screen and what I saw with my own eyes is an abyss.

Azov fighters are everywhere. With Neo-Nazi stripes. It shocks me that Europe is supplying weapons to Neo-Nazis. On their uniforms, SS symbols are embroidered everywhere. Not only do they not hide their views. They advertise them. I worked with these people and treated them. They openly say that they are ready to destroy blacks and Jews.

Being there, there was nothing I could do. Just watch and make videos. I have this footage and will use it as evidence of Ukraines crimes.

I witnessed how the Ukrainian military shot through the knees of captured Russian soldiers and shot in the head higher-ranking officers.

I have personally seen American cameramen making fake footage from the scene of the events, staging fakes.

All destroyed civilian buildings, which Ukraine passes off for bombardment of civilians, are nothing more than the result of inaccurate shooting by Ukrainians at military facilities.

The Armed Forces of Ukraine hide ammunition in residential buildings at night, without even informing the residents. This is called using people as a shield.

Bucha is a staging. The bodies of the dead were moved from other places and deliberately placed in such a way as to produce a shocking footage.

Full version of the interview in French at the link:

https://www.sudradio.fr/programme/andre-bercoff-dans-tous-ses-etats?fbclid=IwAR1TKEhdhbR2ibF6XymhFXWLtTwV9nIN_x5SOx8ot5X_4Kg1SVJwrL2BeRE

WtR
 China demanded that the United States stop talking about protecting human rights in Southeast Asian countries until the Americans remove all their unexploded bombs from the region

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian cited the following facts:

During the Vietnam War, the United States used cluster bombs and biochemical weapons and committed heinous crimes in Southeast Asian countries, including Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

15 million tons of bombs, mines and shells were fired in Vietnam, of which about 80 thousand tons they didnt explode.

These unexploded ordnance subsequently killed more than 40,000 people and injured more than 60,000  that is, 1,000 people per year die.

At the current rate of disposal, these explosives will be defused in 300 years.

The US sprayed about 2 million gallons of agent Orange in Vietnam, which infected almost 5 million Vietnamese and killed 400,000 people. About 2 million people have contracted cancer or other diseases.

In Laos, American troops dropped 270 million bombs with a total weight of two million tons, that is, 135 bombs for every person in the country.

About 80 million bombs they didnt explode. Already after the war, more than 200,000 people died because of this.

2.7 million tons of ammunition were dropped on Cambodia. Unexploded bombs and mines have killed more than 20,000 people and maimed 45,000 by 2021.

Asian countries have a deep historical memory and can distinguish right from wrong, the representative of the Chinese Foreign Ministry stressed. And Asia will never allow the region to be used as a chessboard for conflicts of major powers.

Translated by @china3army

WtR
 A new word in the economy from the President of Moldova.

A far-fetched debt.

Sandu said that Russia uses gas for political pressure.

The President is outraged that Gazprom is asking Chisinau to pay its bills when prices for blue fuel rise.

Earlier, the Moldovan government did not attend the meeting of Moldovagaz to discuss the debt to Gazprom.

The President and the Prime Minister of Moldova refused to participate in negotiations with the Russian Federation on a new contract.

The purchase price for Moldova increased in April to $1,193 per thousand cubic meters.

And it could have been no higher than $250 if Moldova had extended the contract on the terms of 2019.

WtR
ANKARA, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Four Turkish soldiers and one civilian were wounded on Thursday in Turkey's southern border province of Gaziantep in a mortar attack by Kurdish militants in Syria, the Turkish Defense Ministry said.

The People's Protection Units (YPG), the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) outlawed in Turkey, launched the attack from the Ayn al-Arab region in Syria on the Karkamis district and the Koprubasi border post in the Gaziantep Province, the ministry tweeted.

In response, the Turkish forces killed six YPG members in northern Syria, it added.

Earlier in the day, the ministry said the Turkish army killed 10 YPG members as they were preparing to attack the military zones under Turkey's Operation Euphrates Shield, Operation Peace Spring, and Operation Olive Branch.

The tension between the YPG and the Turkish military spiralled after the YPG militants attacked a police checkpoint in the Mare settlement within the Operation Euphrates Shield zone with anti-tank weapons on April 22, killing one Turkish police officer.

The Turkish army launched the Operation Euphrates Shield in 2016, Operation Olive Branch in 2018, Operation Peace Spring in 2019, and Operation Spring Shield in 2020 to fight the Kurdish militants in northern Syria.

Turkish authorities say the operations aim to eliminate terror threats against Turkey and provide a safe zone that will facilitate the return of Syrian refugees to their homes. 
En espanol

More than a million U.S. nursing home workers and more than 350,000 residents havent received a first COVID-19 booster dose, a new AARP analysis of federal data shows, even though the extra shots were recommended to this population by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last year. The analysis also shows another wave of infections has begun in U.S. nursing homes, even as facilities recently reported their lowest COVID-19 death count for any four-week period on record.

Booster coverage, while continuing to increase, isnt where it should be, says Ari Houser, coauthor of AARPs new analysis, particularly in some states. Nationally, 54 percent of the nursing home workforce had not received a first booster as of April 17 (11 percent of this group  or some 220,000 workers  are also not fully vaccinated), even though a booster was recommended to them by the CDC last November. In Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Tennessee, less than 30 percent of nursing home workers had received one.

Booster rates among nursing home residents were higher, with 70 percent of residents nationwide having received an initial booster as of April 17. Still, this rate is concerning, given that residents were first recommended for boosters back in September and have recently been recommended for a second one, after studies showed that booster effectiveness wanes after four months.

Second boosters are especially important for people over 65 and for people over 50 with chronic health problems, said CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, M.D., in April. Both of those demographics are highly represented in the nursing home population. Yet in Arizona, Florida and Nevada, first booster rates among residents are still only around 55 percent, the analysis found. Data on second booster shots is currently unavailable.
ORGANIC RANCHER / U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE FOOD SAFETY AND INSPECTION SERVICE

En espanol

A public health alert was issued for raw ground beef sold in 1-pound packages at Whole Foods stores nationwide over concerns that the meat may contain pieces of hard plastic.

A recall was not issued because the ground beef is no longer available for sale, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is concerned that the packages may still be stored in consumers refrigerators or freezers. 

The following Organic Rancher products, produced on April 20, are subject to the public health alert:

16-ounce vacuum-sealed packages labeled ORGANIC RANCHER ORGANIC GROUND BEEF 93% LEAN 7% FAT

16-ounce vacuum-sealed packages labeled ORGANIC RANCHER ORGANIC GROUND BEEF 85% LEAN 15% FAT 

The meats have a "use by date" of May 18, 2022 and have the establishment number EST.4027 printed inside the USDA mark of inspection. The health alert was issued after consumers filed complaints of finding hard, rigid plastic in the ground beef products. However, there have been no confirmed reports of illness or injury due to eating the ground beef. Anyone who may have consumed the affected ground beef and is concerned about an illness should contact their medical provider.

Advice to consumers 

Whole Foods shoppers who have purchased the affected products are urged not to eat the ground beef and throw it out or return it to the place of purchase. 

Anyone with food safety questions can call the toll-free USDA Meat and Poultry Hotline at 888-674-6854. Online, they may contact the department by live chat via Ask USDA from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. ET Monday through Friday or send a question to MPHotline@usda.gov.

Complaints regarding meat, poultry or egg products can be made online through the Electronic Consumer Complaint Monitoring System 24 hours a day.
After an extended clinical study, the agency found that some commonly used sunscreen chemicals  avobenzone, oxybenzone, octocrylene, homosalate, octisalate and octinoxate  can seep through your skin and into your bloodstream. The study found that even after a single application, the chemicals remain in your body for an extended period of time.

However, the fact that those chemicals get into your blood doesnt necessarily mean those ingredients are harmful, says David Fivenson, an immunologist and dermatologist in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Some laboratory-based studies indicate that chemical ingredients could interfere with the normal function of the bodys hormonal system, affect infant development or cause other health issues.

But Fivenson notes, there has never been good, practical evidence of harm in a realistic study of people.

If theres one ingredient to avoid, its probably oxybenzone, says Tasneem Mohammad, senior staff physician in the Department of Dermatology at the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit. In a lot of areas of the world like Europe, its not really used anymore, Mohammad says.

Oxybenzone can cause allergic reactions, and studies have linked it to hormone problems, lower testosterone levels in boys, shorter pregnancies and increased risk of endometriosis and breast cancer. A 2020 study found that rats exposed to the chemical were more likely to develop thyroid tumors.

The FDA has asked U.S. sunscreen manufacturers to do more testing on the safety of chemical ingredients, but that may take years. In the meantime, in the absence of data showing harm, the agency has allowed the products to stay on the market.

Mineral-based sunscreens considered safest

For now, if you are concerned about health effects, the safest choice is a so-called mineral or physical sunscreen with zinc oxide or titanium dioxide, dermatologists say. Those are only sunscreen ingredients that the FDA says are generally recognized as safe and effective.

While chemical sunscreens act like sponges and absorb ultraviolet light, a physical sunscreen acts like a shield, Gahara explains. It sits on top of your skin and deflects UVA and UVB rays away from your body.

Physical sunscreens are also a better choice for those with sensitive skin, since they cause fewer skin reactions, says Allison T. Vidimos, a board-certified dermatologist and chair of Department of Dermatology at the Cleveland Clinic.

Since a mineral blocker doesnt get absorbed by your skin, its less likely to clog your pores and tends to be gentler on sensitive skin, she says.

The downside of physical sunscreens is that they can leave a white residue on the skin, especially on people of color. But many manufacturers have released newer formulas that use micronized particles or tints to minimize chalkiness, Vidimos and others say.

The sunscreen industry has risen to the occasion and formulated tinted sunscreens that dont look chalky on darker-skinned individuals, Vidimos says. They even have different intensities of tint, so you can match your skin tone to the right one.

Which sunscreens are safest for the environment?

Mineral sunscreens are also believed to be a better choice for the environment.

Lab research shows some chemical ingredients can be toxic to coral and other marine organisms, says Fivenson, who is a cofounder of an American Academy of Dermatology group that examines environmental issues. However, the true impact is unclear because the concentrations of chemicals used in some studies were as much as 1,000 times higher than the amount in most real-world environments, he says.

To help answer that question, the National Academy of Sciences has convened a committee of experts to review the current research on the potential toxicity of sunscreen ingredients on corals and other marine organisms. The committee is expected to release its findings later this year.

For now, if you are concerned about the environment or traveling to a place that bans certain chemicals, you can look for sunscreens labeled reef-safe or reef-friendly.

Keep in mind, however, that those terms are not regulated by the FDA, Fivenson says. So you should also check the ingredients to ensure they dont contain oxybenzone or octinoxate  the chemicals most often banned because of their detrimental effect on marine life.

Wearing a sun-protective swim shirt can also help the environment by reducing the amount of sunscreen you need to apply.

Other advice for choosing sunscreen

In addition to considering a products effect on your health and the environment, dermatologists offer the following advice for choosing a sunscreen that will provide maximum protection:
The Washington Post/Getty Images

The free Smithsonian museums, majestic monuments and spring cherry blossoms are tourist staples in Washington, D.C. But even if youve been-there-done-that, there are loads of new reasons to visit our nations capital in 2022  including a few visitor favorites now reopened after pandemic shutdowns.



Planet Word Museum

The museum is fully accessible and lends visitors a limited number of wheelchairs.

Visit: Open Wednesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; reserve tickets online (theres no entrance fee, though donations of $10$15 are encouraged); 925 13th St. NW; 202-931-3139; planetwordmuseum.org

Revived White House tours

Public tours restarted in April, after a long COVID-related pause. The free peeks into public rooms are first come, first served and must be booked through the office of a member of Congress. Reach out to your member of Congress and Congressional Tour Coordinator through the U.S. House of Representatives switchboard at 202-225-3121, the U.S. Senate switchboard at 202-224-3121, or online at www.congress.gov/members. Youll want to plan ahead: Requests for tickets must be submitted three weeks to 90 days in advance. The self-guided tours of the East Wing include the State Dining Room, Red Room, Green Room, Blue Room and the China Room, which displays tableware of past presidents  but the Oval Office is off-limits. Secret Service members stationed in the rooms can answer questions.

Visit: The free tours are currently only available from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays.

New hotels

Some formerly down-at-the-heel neighborhoods are abloom with new restaurants, shops and trendy places to lay your head. Marriotts AC Hotel Capitol Hill Navy Yard is close to the Capitol, Smithsonian museums and the revived D.C. waterfront. Rates start at about $200, depending on the date.

The citizenM Washington DC NoMa is due in July in an up-and-coming neighborhood north of the Capitol. The hip European brand boasts HDTV with streaming and in-room mood lighting. It joins the citizenM Washington DC Capitol. Rates start under $200.

Prices will be less than $130 on slow nights at the more traditional Holiday Inn Express Washington DC Downtown, due in July. Budgeters will appreciate that breakfast is included.
BAGHDAD, May 12 (Xinhua) -- The Iraqi security forces on Thursday killed three Islamic State (IS) militants and arrested eight others, including two of the group's local leaders.

A statement issued by the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS) said that its forces shot dead an IS militant and arrested another in a raid on a village south of the northern city of Kirkuk, some 250 km north of the Iraqi capital Baghdad.

Meanwhile, the CTS forces arrested five IS militants, four of them are non-Iraqi nationals, in an operation in the city of Kirkuk, the statement said.

The CTS forces also arrested two leaders of the extremist organization, one in the Abu Ghraib area, west of Baghdad, and the other at the crossing point on the Iraqi-Syrian border in the west of the country.

In Iraq's eastern province of Diyala, military helicopter gunships pounded two IS hideouts in eastern and northern parts of the province, killing one IS militant in each hideout, a provincial security source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

Over the past few months, Iraqi security forces have conducted operations against the extremist militants to crack down on their intensified activities.

The security situation in Iraq has been improving since the defeat of the IS in 2017. However, the IS remnants have since melted into urban centers, deserts and rugged areas, carrying out frequent guerilla attacks against the security forces and civilians. 
NAME: Jay C. Block

POLITICAL PARTY: Republican

OCCUPATION: Nuclear consultant and county commissioner

CITY OF RESIDENCE: Rio Rancho

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Retired lieutenant colonel, U.S. Air Force, leader in private industry and county commissioner

EDUCATION: B.S. and M.S.

CAMPAIGN WEBSITE: blockfornewmexico.com

1. New Mexico is highly reliant on the oil and natural gas industries to generate revenue to fund state programs, as evidenced by recent oil boom and bust cycles. What steps should the Legislature take to diversify the states economy and revenue base?

To diversify business in our state, its simple, we make it easier to do business here. Start by lifting unnecessary and overburdensome economic regulations, and lowering taxes on businesses. Specifically, we should eliminate the gross receipts tax, which is an inefficient and economically destructive tax.

2. During the last regular legislative session, there was an unsuccessful push to make it easier to keep certain defendants behind bars until trial. Should New Mexico law be changed to make it easier to hold individuals charged with violent offenses such as murder and first-degree child abuse behind bars until trial?

Everyone is entitled due process. A judge should determine if a defendant is a risk to others and hold them until trial. The legislative trend toward cashless bail is disturbing and enabled record crime to our communities since we eliminated most bail. Huge mistake putting the public at risk.

3. What steps should the Legislature take to address crime and public safety amid a rise in violent crime rates?

We must support law enforcement by providing premier training and funding. We must partner with multiple levels of law enforcement and be tough on crime by defending, not defunding police. We need bail and we must have well-paid officers to attract the best and brightest in the country.

4. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its gross receipts tax code?

Eliminate it. There is no good reason for a gross receipts tax. None. It hurts small businesses over big business and places our small businesses at a disadvantage over neighboring states who do not have GRT.

5. New Mexico is currently the only state that does not pay its legislators a salary, though lawmakers do get per diem payments and can qualify for a legislative pension. Do you support or oppose a salaried Legislature and, if so, how much should lawmakers be paid?

While in theory, a citizen legislature is ideal, unfortunately having unpaid legislators results in only the wealthy being able to afford to be in office. I would be open to paying legislators a fair wage to attract common sense middle class New Mexicans.

6. What more, if anything, should the Legislature do to address a court ruling that found New Mexico is failing to provide a sufficient education to all students, especially Native Americans and those who dont speak English as a first language?

We must support home school parents, all parents and school choice. Many lower income families want school choice and should not be forced to put their children in failing schools. Bottom line, the money must follow the children. The current status quo is unacceptable.

7. What should be the priority as New Mexico seeks to strengthen its health care system? How should the state address a shortage of nurses and other health care workers?

As governor, no New Mexicans will ever travel across state lines for treatment. I will never fire health care workers for not getting a vaccine, there is a severe shortage already. The governor firing these heroes made a bad situation worse. We must implement medical tort reform to attract medical professionals.

8. In recent years, New Mexico has steadily increased spending on early childhood programs, such as home visiting, prekindergarten and child care assistance, and created a new early childhood trust fund. Do you support or oppose the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would withdraw more money from the states permanent school fund to increase funding for early childhood services and K-12 education?

No, I do not. These programs are not helping our childrens performance in schools and wasting a lot of our tax money. Id like to see more funding for drug and mental health treatment to help reduce crime and homelessness.

9. In order to address climate change and air quality issues, do you support or oppose legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions and requiring the state achieve net-zero emissions by 2050?

No. We see the damage these radical laws are causing by putting people out of work and raising utility costs. These regulations kill jobs for no real reason. Oil and gas is one of the most regulated industries already and we must be energy independent.

10. New Mexico recently became the 17th state to regulate and tax recreational cannabis sales? What, if any, changes do you believe should be made to the existing law?

I would like to see it regulated at the local level instead of the state forcing municipalities to accept it. As a county commissioner, I have been dealing with local governments struggling to comply with the law because it contradicts some zoning regulations affecting home prices.

11. Do you believe changes should be made to the emergency powers held by a governor during a pandemic or other time of crisis. If so, do you believe such powers should be expanded or reduced and in what specific ways?

While there may be situations to declare a state of emergency, we must have checks and balances. Extending these emergency powers belongs to the Legislature and I will sign a bill that provides for these checks and balances. We have seen the disastrous consequences when one person controls everything.

12. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its election laws and primary system? Do you support or oppose opening the states primary elections to voters who arent affiliated with either major political party?

We must pass voter ID. However, we must go further with elections, we need to get rid of electronic voting machines, especially ones with histories of issues, and use watermarked ballots that are impossible to counterfeit. Open primaries are critical. I want DTS to participate in all primary elections.

13. Would you support a merit-based evaluation system to determine how the state spends its capital outlay funding?

Yes, every program needs to illustrate why it deserves taxpayer money by providing performance merits to show the public the benefits of the program or project.

14. Do you support or oppose authorizing an independent redistricting commission to perform the once-per-decade task of redrawing New Mexicos political boundary lines?

I would and have accomplished this in Sandoval County working with Republicans and Democrats to implement new districts that are fair.

Personal background

1. Have you or your business, if you are a business owner, ever been the subject of any state or federal tax liens?

No.

2. Have you ever been involved in a personal or business bankruptcy proceeding?

No.

3. Have you ever been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of drunken driving, any misdemeanor or any felony in New Mexico or any other state? If so, explain.

No.
NAME: Rebecca L. Dow

POLITICAL PARTY: Republican

OCCUPATION: Self employed

CITY OF RESIDENCE: Truth or Consequences

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: State representative, nonprofit executive, business owner

EDUCATION: B.A. in business from Oral Roberts University, A.A. in early childhood from Tulsa Community College

CAMPAIGN WEBSITE: www.dowfornm.com

1. New Mexico is highly reliant on the oil and natural gas industries to generate revenue to fund state programs, as evidenced by recent oil boom and bust cycles. What steps should the Legislature take to diversify the states economy and revenue base?

New Mexico has abundant natural resources that could fund our state for decades. We need to embrace our extractive industries by cutting back regulations that reduce extraction. To diversity, we must have comprehensive tax reform, tort reform, and implement a regulatory environment similar to our neighboring states (Texas and Arizona).

2. During the last regular legislative session, there was an unsuccessful push to make it easier to keep certain defendants behind bars until trial. Should New Mexico law be changed to make it easier to hold individuals charged with violent offenses such as murder and first-degree child abuse behind bars until trial?

Yes. New Mexicos rise in violent crime directly correlates to woke district attorneys, judges, and lawmakers putting their liberal agenda ahead of the safety of families, communities and businesses. New Mexico needs to keep violent criminals behind bars, fully fund law enforcement, prosecutors, probation and parole and secure the border.

3. What steps should the Legislature take to address crime and public safety amid a rise in violent crime rates?

Stop embracing far-left movements that handcuff/defund our police, restore qualified immunity, end catch and release, stop the flow of drugs into our communities through an open border, fully fund the requests of local and state law enforcement and provide Border Patrol the technology needed for real time visuals during border occurrences.

4. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its gross receipts tax code?

Eliminate it and replace it with sales tax. I support comprehensive tax reform.

5. New Mexico is currently the only state that does not pay its legislators a salary, though lawmakers do get per diem payments and can qualify for a legislative pension. Do you support or oppose a salaried Legislature and, if so, how much should lawmakers be paid?

No, New Mexico is 50th in education and employment meaning the Legislature hasnt yielded results worthy of pay from New Mexican taxpayers. We shouldnt be rewarding bad government.

6. What more, if anything, should the Legislature do to address a court ruling that found New Mexico is failing to provide a sufficient education to all students, especially Native Americans and those who dont speak English as a first language?

The legislature should allow citizens to cast their vote for school choice through a constructional amendment. State investments should improve student outcomes, not fund failing systems. School choice means giving parents the option to choose an educational program they believe their child needs to reach their full potential, becoming productive members of society.

7. What should be the priority as New Mexico seeks to strengthen its health care system? How should the state address a shortage of nurses and other health care workers?

Creating a reliable regulatory environment for health care providers, lower malpractice premiums to recruitment and retain qualified providers, requiring students seeking taxpayer funded college to pursue high demand jobs, such as a health care career, and expecting them to work in New Mexico in exchange for their professional development.

8. In recent years, New Mexico has steadily increased spending on early childhood programs, such as home visiting, prekindergarten and child care assistance, and created a new early childhood trust fund. Do you support or oppose the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would withdraw more money from the states permanent school fund to increase funding for early childhood services and K-12 education?

I strongly oppose the final language and the proposed constitutional amendment. The Early Childhood Permanent Fund has adequate funding for evidence based early childhood programs targeting children who need it the most. The permanent school fund should be protected and preserved for the current beneficiaries, which includes funding for PreK-3rd.

9. In order to address climate change and air quality issues, do you support or oppose legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions and requiring the state achieve net-zero emissions by 2050?

I oppose, the unrealistic green agenda will make New Mexicans pay more for fuel and utilities and will destroy farming and ranching. Common sense market driven statutes, rules and regulations will grow New Mexicos economy, create more jobs, lead to affordable, reliable energy as well as high quality, affordable food.

10. New Mexico recently became the 17th state to regulate and tax recreational cannabis sales? What, if any, changes do you believe should be made to the existing law?

The statute is brand new so its difficult to say what changes are needed. Are patients losing access to cannabis for medical reasons? The established rules should be followed, and taxes should be paid, we must expand and fully fund law enforcements request to the special investigations unit and K9 programs.

11. Do you believe changes should be made to the emergency powers held by a governor during a pandemic or other time of crisis. If so, do you believe such powers should be expanded or reduced and in what specific ways?

Yes, emergency powers should be drastically reduced and shared with legislators. States like Florida with minimal shutdowns experienced faster economic recovery and no significant increase in deaths compared to New Mexicos permanent closure of over 40% of small businesses. Were at the mercy of COVID tyrants, it should end now.

12. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its election laws and primary system? Do you support or oppose opening the states primary elections to voters who arent affiliated with either major political party?

I support whatever the voters of New Mexico choose; our focus should be on strengthening the security of our elections meaning there should be one vote for one eligible citizen. Id focus on cleaning up the voter rolls, implementing voter ID requirements, and keeping our elections transparent. I do not support third-party electronic voting software.

13. Would you support a merit-based evaluation system to determine how the state spends its capital outlay funding?

Yes, too many of Michelle Lujan Grishams friends have gotten rich off a system that rewards cronyism. We leave projects unfinished and rural New Mexico, particularly southeast New Mexico, is routinely forgotten when it comes time to allocate resources.

14. Do you support or oppose authorizing an independent redistricting commission to perform the once-per-decade task of redrawing New Mexicos political boundary lines?

Yes, we must look at the lessons learned from the recent effort. Elite politicians and paid partisan groups played the major role in drawing the districts and have taken away the voice of the everyday New Mexican. We need a truly nonpartisan council with specific mandates to clean this process up.

Personal background

1. Have you or your business, if you are a business owner, ever been the subject of any state or federal tax liens?

No.

2. Have you ever been involved in a personal or business bankruptcy proceeding?

No.

3. Have you ever been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of drunken driving, any misdemeanor or any felony in New Mexico or any other state? If so, explain.

No.
NAME: Greg Zanetti

POLITICAL PARTY: Republican

OCCUPATION: Financial advisor

CITY OF RESIDENCE: Albuquerque

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Brigadier general (retired), U.S. Army/N.M. National Guard; owner, Zanetti Financial

EDUCATION: B.S., United States Military Academy at West Point; masters in strategic studies, U.S. Army War College; MBA, Boston University

CAMPAIGN WEBSITE: zanettiforgovernor.com

1. New Mexico is highly reliant on the oil and natural gas industries to generate revenue to fund state programs, as evidenced by recent oil boom and bust cycles. What steps should the Legislature take to diversify the states economy and revenue base?

I believe New Mexico should be the Water, Energy, and Technology State. We have abundant low-tech natural resources and brilliant high-tech minds. When low-tech and high-tech are combined, economies flourish. For example, New Mexico should pursue water desalination facilities powered by small-modular nuclear reactors to provide both high and low-tech jobs.

2. During the last regular legislative session, there was an unsuccessful push to make it easier to keep certain defendants behind bars until trial. Should New Mexico law be changed to make it easier to hold individuals charged with violent offenses such as murder and first-degree child abuse behind bars until trial?

Absolutely, yes. New Mexico has the second worst violent crime rate in the U.S., due to bad policy from the Roundhouse and a failure of leadership in the Governors Office. We must restore pretrial detention for those accused of violent crimes and end the practice of catch and release.

3. What steps should the Legislature take to address crime and public safety amid a rise in violent crime rates?

We must end the revolving-door policy of allowing violent criminals back out on the streets to reoffend. We must also restore cash bonds, ensure our police have the tools and resources to keep our communities safe, and stop the Defund the Police rhetoric that has become popular at the Roundhouse.

4. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its gross receipts tax code?

Move to sales tax GRT harms our economy, stifles wealth creation, and places an unfair burden on smallbusinesses. Michelle Lujan Grishams 0.25% GRT reduction was a political stunt. Initially, lets lower the rate further, end GRT for business services, and reform the exemption process. Ultimately, GRT must be replaced with a more equitable sales tax structure.

5. New Mexico is currently the only state that does not pay its legislators a salary, though lawmakers do get per diem payments and can qualify for a legislative pension. Do you support or oppose a salaried Legislature and, if so, how much should lawmakers be paid?

No, but I would support term limits. Too many of our legislators have become entrenched and no longer represent the will of the people. We need fresh voices and fewer career politicians who are beholden to special interest groups.

6. What more, if anything, should the Legislature do to address a court ruling that found New Mexico is failing to provide a sufficient education to all students, especially Native Americans and those who dont speak English as a first language?

We need to fund students, not systems. We must allow for school choice. New Mexico ranks dead last in most national education rankings despite spending more per student than most of our neighbors. Throwing more money at the problem wont solve it. Structural change is required.

7. What should be the priority as New Mexico seeks to strengthen its health care system? How should the state address a shortage of nurses and other health care workers?

Expand access to care by decreasing bureaucratic red tape, increasing billing transparency, eliminating Medicaid waste, enacting tort reform and encouraging direct primary care and telemedicine. Regarding the health care worker shortage, I support state funding to grow our training programs and provide scholarships. I support tax incentives to retain medical professionals.

8. In recent years, New Mexico has steadily increased spending on early childhood programs, such as home visiting, prekindergarten and child-care assistance, and created a new early childhood trust fund. Do you support or oppose the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would withdraw more money from the states permanent school fund to increase funding for early childhood services and K-12 education?

While I support early childhood education, I oppose tapping into the states permanent school fund because of the significant loss of compounding interest over time that will likely result in future funding shortfalls. I support funding early childhood education through choice-driven revenue streams that fund students not systems.

9. In order to address climate change and air quality issues, do you support or oppose legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions and requiring the state achieve net-zero emissions by 2050?

I strongly oppose the New Mexico Energy Transition Act. It has already resulted in increased energy costs at the worst possible time. We are currently at only 20% renewables. There is increasing concern about the reliability of our electrical grid. A move to 100% renewables will only exacerbate the situation.

10. New Mexico recently became the 17th state to regulate and tax recreational cannabis sales? What, if any, changes do you believe should be made to the existing law?

I would support changes to the law that are focused on keeping cannabis out of the hands of children, ensuring the rules for retailers are properly enforced, stamping out illegal grow operations and educating the public about the dangers and consequences of stoned driving.

11. Do you believe changes should be made to the emergency powers held by a governor during a pandemic or other time of crisis. If so, do you believe such powers should be expanded or reduced and in what specific ways?

Yes, I believe a governors emergency powers should be time-limited and only allowed to be extended by a vote of the legislature. In most cases, statewide mandates are not necessary, and those powers should be trusted to individual municipalities and communities.

12. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its election laws and primary system? Do you support or oppose opening the states primary elections to voters who arent affiliated with either major political party?

We should be addressing ways to increase the safety, transparency, and fairness of our election system. I support strengthening our election laws by implementing voter ID and statewide risk-limiting audits to ensure all votes are properly counted. Lets start there before tackling the current primary system.

13. Would you support a merit-based evaluation system to determine how the state spends its capital outlay funding?

Capital outlay funding decisions need to be more transparent, and legislators should be required to disclose the projects they are funding. My worry about a merit-based system is that it could result in unfair standards and would be prone to political hijacking.

14. Do you support or oppose authorizing an independent redistricting commission to perform the once-per-decade task of redrawing New Mexicos political boundary lines?

I support an independent redistricting commission to end the practice of gerrymandering. We need to put an end to partisan influence that allows for a party in power to stay in power by drawing district maps that favors them.

Personal background

1. Have you or your business, if you are a business owner, ever been the subject of any state or federal tax liens?

No.

2. Have you ever been involved in a personal or business bankruptcy proceeding?

No.

3. Have you ever been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of drunken driving, any misdemeanor or any felony in New Mexico or any other state? If so, explain.

No.
NAME: Mark Ronchetti

POLITICAL PARTY: Republican

OCCUPATION: Meteorologist

CITY OF RESIDENCE: Albuquerque

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Not a politician.

EDUCATION: Undergraduate: Washington State University; Meteorology: Mississippi State

CAMPAIGN WEBSITE: MarkRonchetti.com

1. New Mexico is highly reliant on the oil and natural gas industries to generate revenue to fund state programs, as evidenced by recent oil boom and bust cycles. What steps should the Legislature take to diversify the states economy and revenue base?

The real problem is our state is far too dependent on government spending. We now have the highest unemployment rate in America and 40% of our small businesses closed for good. We must diversify the economy by growing the private sector through cutting taxes to make our state more competitive.

2. During the last regular legislative session, there was an unsuccessful push to make it easier to keep certain defendants behind bars until trial. Should New Mexico law be changed to make it easier to hold individuals charged with violent offenses such as murder and first-degree child abuse behind bars until trial?

Absolutely. When criminals face no consequences, criminals will commit more crimes. To keep our communities safe, we must end catch and release for those charged with violent crimes, those who use firearms in the commission of crimes, and repeat offenders who ignore court orders.

3. What steps should the Legislature take to address crime and public safety amid a rise in violent crime rates?

End catch and release, support our police, restore qualified immunity, crack down on repeat offenders, prosecute more violent offenders and drug traffickers in the federal system, stop the flow of fentanyl and drugs across the border, end sanctuary policies, and increase penalties to end our revolving door justice system.

4. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its gross receipts tax code?

Small businesses are hammered by our GRT code. We need to level the playing field by ending the double and triple taxing of small businesses and commit to reducing the overall gross receipts tax rate. A 25 cent one-time reduction when the budget increased by $2 billion doesnt cut it.

5. New Mexico is currently the only state that does not pay its legislators a salary, though lawmakers do get per diem payments and can qualify for a legislative pension. Do you support or oppose a salaried Legislature and, if so, how much should lawmakers be paid?

Until the Legislature deals with pressing issues like crime, fentanyl overdoses, securing our border, and improving our schools, I dont see why we should give them a pay raise.

6. What more, if anything, should the Legislature do to address a court ruling that found New Mexico is failing to provide a sufficient education to all students, especially Native Americans and those who dont speak English as a first language?

Our education system is ranked last for all children. We must focus on teaching children the basics, such as reading, writing, math and science. Its critical that we help our kids catch up from the lost learning they suffered as a result of school shutdowns, which disportionately hurt minority children.

7. What should be the priority as New Mexico seeks to strengthen its health care system? How should the state address a shortage of nurses and other health care workers?

We have a critical shortage of health care providers, which affects our quality of care. We need to end policies that chase doctors and nurses away, expand telehealth, integrate health-care career focused training as early as high school, and ensure maximum professional license reciprocity is in place for medical personnel.

8. In recent years, New Mexico has steadily increased spending on early childhood programs, such as home visiting, prekindergarten and child care assistance, and created a new early childhood trust fund. Do you support or oppose the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would withdraw more money from the states permanent school fund to increase funding for early childhood services and K-12 education?

I oppose raiding the permanent fund and believe we can adequately fund these programs with existing dollars, given the fact that this governor has increased state spending by a whopping 40%. Early childhood programs should be well-coordinated, serve those most in need, and get clear results.

9. In order to address climate change and air quality issues, do you support or oppose legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions and requiring the state achieve net-zero emissions by 2050?

The governors Green New Deal is killing good-paying jobs, threatening rolling blackouts this summer, and dramatically increasing energy costs on families and businesses. Instead, New Mexico should embrace energy production of all types and lead the nation to energy independence thats good for consumers, rate-payers and our national security.

10. New Mexico recently became the 17th state to regulate and tax recreational cannabis sales? What, if any, changes do you believe should be made to the existing law?

New Mexico should be the most aggressive state in the nation in keeping marijuana away from children and prosecuting drugged driving. On the first weekend of legalization, a driver high on marijuana killed a motorcyclist. That Monday, 14 elementary school kids ate marijuana edibles a child brought to school.

11. Do you believe changes should be made to the emergency powers held by a governor during a pandemic or other time of crisis. If so, do you believe such powers should be expanded or reduced and in what specific ways?

Yes, sensible checks and balances are needed to protect our basic freedoms and prevent government overreach, like the long, painful, and disastrous shutdowns that caused 40% of our small businesses to close. That Michelle Lujan Grisham has been allowed to extend these powers as long as she has is entirely unacceptable.

12. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its election laws and primary system? Do you support or oppose opening the states primary elections to voters who arent affiliated with either major political party?

It should be easy to vote and hard to cheat. Voters should be required to show photo ID. I support absentee voting, but oppose automatically mailing ballots without voter request, as the governor proposes. Ill fight efforts to legalize ballot-harvesting. I oppose open primaries. We should end partisan judicial elections.

13. Would you support a merit-based evaluation system to determine how the state spends its capital outlay funding?

Yes. Infrastructure dollars should be spent on shovel-ready projects that create jobs in the short-run and lay a long-term foundation for economic growth. Far too often, capital funds go unspent and are wasted in New Mexico.

14. Do you support or oppose authorizing an independent redistricting commission to perform the once-per-decade task of redrawing New Mexicos political boundary lines?

Support. The current process is abused and reform will help end gerrymandering, ensuring voters choose their elected officials, rather than politicians choosing their voters. What the Legislature did this year was a shameless political power grab designed to ensure one-party rule for the next decade. Thats not good for democracy.

Personal background

1. Have you or your business, if you are a business owner, ever been the subject of any state or federal tax liens?

No.

2. Have you ever been involved in a personal or business bankruptcy proceeding?

No.

3. Have you ever been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of drunken driving, any misdemeanor or any felony in New Mexico or any other state? If so, explain.

No.
NAME: Ant Thornton

POLITICAL PARTY: Republican

OCCUPATION: Aerospace engineer, Sandia National Laboratories (retired)

CITY OF RESIDENCE: Sandia Park

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: The Lt. Governor is the president of the Senate. I served as an N.M. senate analyst for the 60-day 2021 legislative session. The Lt. Governor has the constitutional responsibility to serve as the state ombudsman. I am the only candidate who is a certified member of the International Ombudsman Association trained in alternative dispute resolution since 2016. My executive program management expertise leading multi-million dollar programs at Sandia National Laboratories and at Lockheed Martin allow me to be the go to person to lead and implement key initiatives tasked by the governor. In 2021, elected as 1st vice chair of Bernalillo County and led the effort to develop and deliver a six-year strategic plan for the Republican Party of Bernalillo County.

EDUCATION:

Ph.D., School of Aeronautics & Astronautics, Purdue University; M.S., engineering (aero/mech interdisciplinary), Stanford University; B.S., aerospace engineering sciences, University of Colorado

CAMPAIGN WEBSITE: TheNextLG.com

1. New Mexico is highly reliant on the oil and natural gas industries to generate revenue to fund state programs, as evidenced by recent oil boom and bust cycles. What steps should the Legislature take to diversify the states economy and revenue base?

Currently, New Mexico is a state that is hostile to business, causing entrepreneurs to flee our state. We should reform and eliminate the GRT tax code and reduce taxes on businesses to compete with our neighboring states (Arizona, Colorado, Utah and Texas).

2. During the last regular legislative session, there was an unsuccessful push to make it easier to keep certain defendants behind bars until trial. Should New Mexico law be changed to make it easier to hold individuals charged with violent offenses such as murder and first-degree child abuse behind bars until trial?

Yes, bail reform is much needed to deter repeat offenders. In addition, we need to return qualified immunity for law enforcement officers to do their job without concerns of being personally sued.

3. What steps should the Legislature take to address crime and public safety amid a rise in violent crime rates?

We must address recidivism. It is harmful and detrimental to the well-being of all New Mexicans if violent repeat offenders are allowed to evade the sentence they are due. Bail reform is an important step to make sure that violent criminals are not immediately released back into the population.

4. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its gross receipts tax code?

New Mexicos GRT tax is an extreme disadvantage to businesses across New Mexico. Ask anyone who has to administer and pay these taxes and they will tell you it negatively impacts business. I support the repeal of New Mexicos gross receipts tax.

5. New Mexico is currently the only state that does not pay its legislators a salary, though lawmakers do get per diem payments and can qualify for a legislative pension. Do you support or oppose a salaried Legislature and, if so, how much should lawmakers be paid?

Oppose.

6. What more, if anything, should the Legislature do to address a court ruling that found New Mexico is failing to provide a sufficient education to all students, especially Native Americans and those who dont speak English as a first language?

The main thing that will improve the outcomes in our schools is to open schools to competition for students. The legislature should support a school choice bill whereby the money follows the student. Moreover, parents deserve the right to decide where their children will attend school.

7. What should be the priority as New Mexico seeks to strengthen its health care system? How should the state address a shortage of nurses and other health care workers?

Doctors are leaving the state because the cost of liability insurance in New Mexico makes practicing medicine in the state cost prohibitive. This is the result of recent legislation pushed by the Trial Lawyers Association, to make even more money in malpractice lawsuits.

8. In recent years, New Mexico has steadily increased spending on early childhood programs, such as home visiting, prekindergarten and child care assistance, and created a new early childhood trust fund. Do you support or oppose the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would withdraw more money from the states permanent school fund to increase funding for early childhood services and K-12 education?

The permanent fund should not be used to fund miscellaneous programs. It was intended to be used as a significant resource for government funding and to last in perpetuity, to support K-12 schools and state universities. Increasing the withdrawal rate to fund pet projects will set a precedent that future legislators will utilize to empty the coffers.

9. In order to address climate change and air quality issues, do you support or oppose legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions and requiring the state achieve net-zero emissions by 2050?

Oppose. The goal is irrational and unobtainable and will hurt the most vulnerable communities in New Mexico with rising energy costs. I support free-market research into alternative energy sources. However, currently, there are no available energy sources that can replace fossil fuels entirely and at scale.

10. New Mexico recently became the 17th state to regulate and tax recreational cannabis sales? What, if any, changes do you believe should be made to the existing law?

Aslieutenant governor, I represent the executive branch; our job is to execute the law. Personally, I would not have voted for the recreational cannabis law, but I do support the medicinal use of cannabis for some chronic issues.

11. Do you believe changes should be made to the emergency powers held by a governor during a pandemic or other time of crisis. If so, do you believe such powers should be expanded or reduced and in what specific ways?

Emergency powers should be authorized to the governor by the legislative branch and limited in scope (30 days) at which point the legislature could then reauthorize or remove the emergency powers as required by the conditions facing the public at that time.

12. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its election laws and primary system? Do you support or oppose opening the states primary elections to voters who arent affiliated with either major political party?

Oppose. The parties should be able to choose their candidates that best represent their values and viewpoints. The general election will determine how well the parties performed in selecting their candidates.

13. Would you support a merit-based evaluation system to determine how the state spends its capital outlay funding?

Absolutely. Representatives from every county should have a say in prioritizing capital outlay for the state.

14. Do you support or oppose authorizing an independent redistricting commission to perform the once-per-decade task of redrawing New Mexicos political boundary lines?

Support.

Personal background

1. Have you or your business, if you are a business owner, ever been the subject of any state or federal tax liens?

No.

2. Have you ever been involved in a personal or business bankruptcy proceeding?

No.

3. Have you ever been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of drunken driving, any misdemeanor or any felony in New Mexico or any other state? If so, explain.

Over 25 years ago I was detained on a DUI charge. The case was dismissed by the presiding judge.
NAME: Raul Torrez

POLITICAL PARTY: Democratic

OCCUPATION: District attorney

CITY OF RESIDENCE: Albuquerque

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Bernalillo County district attorney, 2017  present; private practice, 2013-2017; assistant U.S. attorney, 2011-2013; special advisor and White House fellow  U.S. Department of Justice 2009-2010; special assistant U.S. attorney, 2008-2009; assistant attorney general, 2006-2009; assistant district attorney, 2005-2006.

EDUCATION: A.B. in government, Harvard University; M.S. in international political economy, London School of Economics; Juris Doctorate, Stanford Law School

CAMPAIGN WEBSITE: raultorrez.com

1. What would your top priorities be as attorney general?

As attorney general, I will use my experience as a prosecutor to fight for consumers, safeguard the environment, reform our criminal justice system and take on corruption and special interests. I will also continue to stand up to unlawful militia groups and any extremist activity that threatens our democracy.

2. What would be your strategy for handling the ongoing water lawsuit between New Mexico and Texas?

The Attorney Generals Office needs to rebuild its litigation division and recruit an in-house team of highly qualified litigators to protect our states precious water resources. We must also end the practice of outsourcing complex legal work to outside counsel who lack the requisite experience to represent the state.

3. Do you support or oppose changing New Mexicos open records law to allow the names of applicants for some top government positions to be kept secret?

Oppose. Accountability and transparency must begin with the Attorney Generals Office. The AG should actively ensure timely compliance with IPRA and public records laws by other government agencies and within the office as well.

4. If elected, would you hire outside firms to represent New Mexico in some court cases? If so, what would be your criteria for determining when such an approach to litigation should be used?

We must end the pay-to-play system that has enabled large out-of-state law firms to reap millions in fees at taxpayer expense and rebuild the offices capacity to initiate these cases directly. Outside counsel should rarely be used and only after an independent panel of local experts has vetted their qualifications.

Personal background

1. Have you or your business, if you are a business owner, ever been the subject of any state or federal tax liens?

No.

2. Have you ever been involved in a personal or business bankruptcy proceeding?

No.

3. Have you ever been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of drunken driving, any misdemeanor or any felony in New Mexico or any other state? If so, explain.

No.
NAME: Brian S. Colon

POLITICAL PARTY: Democratic

OCCUPATION: New Mexico state auditor

CITY OF RESIDENCE: Albuquerque

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: 21 years practicing law in New Mexico

EDUCATION: B.A. from New Mexico State University, J.D. from University of New Mexico School of Law

CAMPAIGN WEBSITE: colonfornm.com

1. What would your top priorities be as attorney general? 

My priorities: hold violent repeat offenders accountable and strengthen resources for the Internet Crimes Against Children Unit; environmental protection  ensure that large corporations do not harm our environment and sacred resources such as water; and consumer protection  strengthen the consumer protection division to protect New Mexicans from fraud.

2. What would be your strategy for handling the ongoing water lawsuit between New Mexico and Texas?

New Mexico has taken an aggressive litigation posture which has placed us in a position of strength. I will continue to aggressively defend our most valuable resource ensuring we maintain a strong litigation position for settlement negotiations. In my administration we will be prepared for trial should settlement prove unsuccessful.

3. Do you support or oppose changing New Mexicos open records law to allow the names of applicants for some top government positions to be kept secret?

My record as state auditor shows I am a consistent proponent of transparency in government. As a champion for transparency in government, I support an open process as to hiring for top government positions.

4. If elected, would you hire outside firms to represent New Mexico in some court cases? If so, what would be your criteria for determining when such an approach to litigation should be used?

I will lead outside counsel selected with a transparent process previously utilized by AGs Udall, Madrid, King and Balderas. We would be at a significant disadvantage in the fight against global companies such as big pharma/tobacco and environmental polluters with the risk of losing significant recoveries without this model.

Personal background

1. Have you or your business, if you are a business owner, ever been the subject of any state or federal tax liens?

No.

2. Have you ever been involved in a personal or business bankruptcy proceeding?

No.

3. Have you ever been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of drunken driving, any misdemeanor or any felony in New Mexico or any other state? If so, explain.

No.
NAME: Laura M. Montoya

POLITICAL PARTY: Democratic

OCCUPATION: Independent contractor

CITY OF RESIDENCE: Rio Rancho

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Elected two term  4-year Sandoval County treasurer; Finance, Pension & Intergovernmental Affairs, vice chair; N.M. Tax Policy Committee member; 23 years federal, state, tribal and local government experience, predominately in finance; N.M. State Treasurers Office; N.M. House of Representatives; N.M. Senate

EDUCATION: B.A.  political science, psychology with a minor in sociology; M.A.  public affairs; Rotary Scholar  University of Costa Rica  international relations and Spanish; Certified Public Official (NM EDGE NMSU); Certified Public Manager (NM EDGE NMSU); Certified Treasury Official (NM EDGE NMSU); 600+ credit hours in finance, business, investments, economics, & management

CAMPAIGN WEBSITE:

1. What would be your top priorities as state treasurer?

Work on policies to ensure transparency, fairness, and equitability. Remove the gap of inequity between rich and poor, and rural and urban. Provide outreach, resources, and assistance to tribal, county and municipal government entities especially with the Local Government Investment Pool. Support financial literacy.

2. As a voting member of the State Investment Council, would you support or oppose taking more money from the states Land Grant Permanent Fund to increase funding for early childhood programs and K-12 education?

I support the current proposal and would vote for it. Our children are the most important investment we can invest in. The return on our investment is endless. The 1.25% of the five-year average of year-end market values will occur only if the fund stays above $17 billion.

3. Would you support or oppose the creation of a New Mexico public bank to make more funds available for lending?

I am the only candidate for state treasurer that testified in support of the state bank legislation. Having the right minds at the table to discuss the concept and implementation will help us invest in New Mexicans and New Mexico and is critical to bridging the gap of inequity.

4. Do you support or oppose the New Mexico Work and Save Act that was approved in 2020? What changes, if any, do you believe should be made to the program?

I have concerns with the recent proposal regarding cost and forced implementation on small business owners during a time in which they are still trying to recover from a heartless pandemic. New Mexico does not currently have the capacity to implement without mandatory participation from all small business owners and neighboring states.

Personal background

1. Have you or your business, if you are a business owner, ever been the subject of any state or federal tax liens?

No.

2. Have you ever been involved in a personal or business bankruptcy proceeding?

No.

3. Have you ever been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of drunken driving, any misdemeanor or any felony in New Mexico or any other state? If so, explain.

I have never been arrested or convicted of a crime. In 2014, I was charged with a domestic violence misdemeanor based on a false allegation and the case was dismissed.
NAME: D. Wonda Johnson

POLITICAL PARTY: Democratic

OCCUPATION: Patient experience and cultural liaison

CITY OF RESIDENCE: Gallup

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Community development and grants management

EDUCATION: B.A.

CAMPAIGN WEBSITE: In progress

1. New Mexico is highly reliant on the oil and natural gas industries to generate revenue to fund state programs, as evidenced by recent oil boom and bust cycles. What steps should the Legislature take to diversify the states economy and revenue base?

I would be interested in a just transition to clean energy and creating jobs. I am focused on exploring solutions because of how complicated it is to transition away from uranium mining and other industries like oil and natural gas that generate revenue for state programs.

2. During the last regular legislative session, there was an unsuccessful push to make it easier to keep certain defendants behind bars until trial. Should New Mexico law be changed to make it easier to hold individuals charged with violent offenses such as murder and first-degree child abuse behind bars until trial?

Yes, keeping the most violent criminals off our streets will assist in keeping our communities safe from the rise in crime seen throughout New Mexico.

3. What steps should the Legislature take to address crime and public safety amid a rise in violent crime rates?

The legislature took significant steps to address violent crime in the 2022 legislative session. As these laws are being implemented, we are going to need legislators whove been at the table making these laws to make sure they are working as intended.

4. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its gross receipts tax code?

As a Legislature this session, we passed the House tax plan that will reduce the gross receipts tax by 0.25% to alleviate the tax burden on New Mexicos small and local businesses.

5. New Mexico is currently the only state that does not pay its legislators a salary, though lawmakers do get per diem payments and can qualify for a legislative pension. Do you support or oppose a salaried Legislature and, if so, how much should lawmakers be paid?

While its not the largest priority in my district, I believe that a legislative salary would help break down the barriers of the different socioeconomic backgrounds that could serve in the Legislature.

6. What more, if anything, should the Legislature do to address a court ruling that found New Mexico is failing to provide a sufficient education to all students, especially Native Americans and those who dont speak English as a first language?

We made big investments in early childhood education so that our children are equipped for success before they enter K-12 and passed bills to ensure equity for our Native American students.

7. What should be the priority as New Mexico seeks to strengthen its health care system? How should the state address a shortage of nurses and other health care workers?

In the 2022 legislative session, we passed HB2, which fully funds Medicaid and eliminates the long waitlist for people with developmental disabilities to receive in-home care. Monitoring these funds as they are implemented will allow us to decide on further action.

8. In recent years, New Mexico has steadily increased spending on early childhood programs, such as home visiting, prekindergarten and child care assistance, and created a new early childhood trust fund. Do you support or oppose the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would withdraw more money from the states permanent school fund to increase funding for early childhood services and K-12 education?

I support the constitutional amendment. Gaps in access and quality of early childhood services, and K-12 education need to be closed and this constitutional amendment will help level the playing field for students to succeed in our schools.

9. In order to address climate change and air quality issues, do you support or oppose legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions and requiring the state achieve net-zero emissions by 2050?

Climate change and air quality issues are deeply important to the people of my district. I do support legislation to limit greenhouse gas emissions and require the state to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. However, any actions we take must consider and account for the just transition of jobs that will be impacted by such actions.

10. New Mexico recently became the 17th state to regulate and tax recreational cannabis sales? What, if any, changes do you believe should be made to the existing law?

Marijuana legalization presents disproportionately more challenges to a district like mine. With an already abundant problem of people driving while intoxicated, legalized marijuana could exacerbate the issue. Additional guardrails are needed to address potency, availability and public health education around the possible adverse effects of legalized marijuana throughout the state.

11. Do you believe changes should be made to the emergency powers held by a governor during a pandemic or other time of crisis. If so, do you believe such powers should be expanded or reduced and in what specific ways?

It is my view that New Mexico has struck a healthy balance of the limits to a governors emergency powers.

12. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its election laws and primary system? Do you support or oppose opening the states primary elections to voters who arent affiliated with either major political party?

I support opening the primary elections to voters who arent registered with either major party. Preventing them from doing so prevents them from participating in our democracy.

13. Would you support a merit-based evaluation system to determine how the state spends its capital outlay funding?

The most intensive work I do is evaluating the need and delivery of capital outlay projects. I work on these projects with communities in Gallup and throughout the different Chapter Houses of the Navajo Nation. I do not support a change to capital outlay funding.

14. Do you support or oppose authorizing an independent redistricting commission to perform the once-per-decade task of redrawing New Mexicos political boundary lines?

Yes. Additional steps must be taken to depoliticize the process of drawing political boundaries.

Personal background

1. Have you or your business, if you are a business owner, ever been the subject of any state or federal tax liens?

No.

2. Have you ever been involved in a personal or business bankruptcy proceeding?

Yes, I had to file a personal bankruptcy many years ago.

3. Have you ever been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of drunken driving, any misdemeanor or any felony in New Mexico or any other state? If so, explain.

No.
LOME, May 11 (Xinhua) -- Eight soldiers were killed and 13 others injured in an attack by unidentified gunmen in the early morning of Wednesday in the north of Togo, near the border with Burkina Faso, announced the government in a statement.

At around 3 a.m., local time, Wednesday, a position of the anti-terrorist squad in the Kpendjal prefecture, the northern region of Togo, was the target of a violent terrorist attack carried out by a group of unidentified and heavily armed individuals. This attack left eight members of the security forces dead and 13 more injured, according to the statement.

"The government strongly condemns this cowardly and barbaric attack," said the statement, while reassuring the entire population of the determination of the defense and security forces to protect the country.

Togo is bordered to the north by Burkina Faso, a Sahelian West African country that has been facing a series of terrorist attacks since 2015. 
NAME: Lisa Meyer-Hagen

POLITICAL PARTY: Republican

OCCUPATION: Real estate  associate broker

CITY OF RESIDENCE: Albuquerque

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Responsible citizen; ran for Senate District 12 in 2020

EDUCATION: B.A. psychology; literacy specialist

CAMPAIGN WEBSITE: TBD

1. New Mexico is highly reliant on the oil and natural gas industries to generate revenue to fund state programs, as evidenced by recent oil boom and bust cycles. What steps should the Legislature take to diversify the states economy and revenue base?

Diversify education options for the next generation. Open trade and vocational schools giving students viable employment options and reason to remain in New Mexico.

2. During the last regular legislative session, there was an unsuccessful push to make it easier to keep certain defendants behind bars until trial. Should New Mexico law be changed to make it easier to hold individuals charged with violent offenses such as murder and first-degree child abuse behind bars until trial?

Yes. Individuals charged with murder, first-degree child abuse or any other violent offense should be kept behind bars until trial.

3. What steps should the Legislature take to address crime and public safety amid a rise in violent crime rates?

Eliminate catch and release.

4. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its gross receipts tax code?

Empower small business to thrive. Restructure tax code so as to eliminate GRT altogether. Priority is to make tax code business friendly.

5. New Mexico is currently the only state that does not pay its legislators a salary, though lawmakers do get per diem payments and can qualify for a legislative pension. Do you support or oppose a salaried Legislature and, if so, how much should lawmakers be paid?

Legislators are servants of the people. Money should not be a motivator.

6. What more, if anything, should the Legislature do to address a court ruling that found New Mexico is failing to provide a sufficient education to all students, especially Native Americans and those who dont speak English as a first language?

Intact families are number one indicator of educational success. Support the family unit and encourage parent involvement in their kids education. Honor, value support and empower Native American cultures to lead themselves. Legislators need to get out of the way.

7. What should be the priority as New Mexico seeks to strengthen its health care system? How should the state address a shortage of nurses and other health care workers?

Attract health care professionals by making New Mexico attractive. Competitive compensation, better educational outcomes for kids, create a thriving economy vs. welfare state, increase public safety, increase number of health care facilities in rural areas, value and support health care professionals by not running them into the ground.

8. In recent years, New Mexico has steadily increased spending on early childhood programs, such as home visiting, prekindergarten and child care assistance, and created a new early childhood trust fund. Do you support or oppose the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would withdraw more money from the states permanent school fund to increase funding for early childhood services and K-12 education?

Oppose. More money is not going to fix the problem. Strengthen the family unit and education results will increase.

9. In order to address climate change and air quality issues, do you support or oppose legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions and requiring the state achieve net-zero emissions by 2050?

We need an honest, televised, statewide conversation on the topic of climate change. The best and brightest scientists on both sides of the issue need to be allowed to speak publicly, in the context of a civil debate, so New Mexicans are informed about differing opinions on this subject.

10. New Mexico recently became the 17th state to regulate and tax recreational cannabis sales? What, if any, changes do you believe should be made to the existing law?

Accountability and disclosure of any and all adverse effects of legalized cannabis on population and culture is imperative.

11. Do you believe changes should be made to the emergency powers held by a governor during a pandemic or other time of crisis. If so, do you believe such powers should be expanded or reduced and in what specific ways?

Yes, indefinite, unilateral decision making by one branch of government during a public emergency, without the input of the Legislature or the courts, should not be allowed. Emergency powers of one branch of government should be limited to 30 days after which the other two branches should be involved.

12. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its election laws and primary system? Do you support or oppose opening the states primary elections to voters who arent affiliated with either major political party?

Voter ID, paper ballots with watermark, no drop boxes and absentee ballots for military and very sick.

13. Would you support a merit-based evaluation system to determine how the state spends its capital outlay funding?

Depends on who controls the merit-based evaluation committee and how they are appointed.

14. Do you support or oppose authorizing an independent redistricting commission to perform the once-per-decade task of redrawing New Mexicos political boundary lines?

Depends on who or how the independent redistricting commission is appointed.

Personal background

1. Have you or your business, if you are a business owner, ever been the subject of any state or federal tax liens?

No.

2. Have you ever been involved in a personal or business bankruptcy proceeding?

No.

3. Have you ever been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of drunken driving, any misdemeanor or any felony in New Mexico or any other state? If so, explain.

No.
NAME: Melissa Armijo

POLITICAL PARTY: Democratic

OCCUPATION: Executive administrator, National Hispanic Cultural Center Foundation

CITY OF RESIDENCE: South Valley, Albuquerque

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: My entire career has been in service to South Valley youth. I currently serve as the public education commissioner for the South Valley and West Side; served on the Central New Mexico Community College Governing Board; and am the board president of the Mark Armijo Academy Charter High School, named after my late husband.

EDUCATION: Attended New Mexico State University and the University of New Mexico. Completed two programs at the Executive & Professional Education Center at the Anderson School of Management at UNM.

CAMPAIGN WEBSITE: MelissaArmijoforNM.com

1. New Mexico is highly reliant on the oil and natural gas industries to generate revenue to fund state programs, as evidenced by recent oil boom and bust cycles. What steps should the Legislature take to diversify the states economy and revenue base?

The South Valley should lead in creating clean, better-paying jobs in new industries like film production, cannabis, local foods, and especially renewable energy. We must also bring fairness to our antiquated tax code. That means repealing the tax cut on the wealthy and the capital gains tax cut.

2. During the last regular legislative session, there was an unsuccessful push to make it easier to keep certain defendants behind bars until trial. Should New Mexico law be changed to make it easier to hold individuals charged with violent offenses such as murder and first-degree child abuse behind bars until trial?

Each case needs to be assessed on its own. Our system is based on being innocent until proven guilty. Pretrial detention must be held to a high standard, e.g., if an individual charged with a violent offense has a pattern of violent offenses.

3. What steps should the Legislature take to address crime and public safety amid a rise in violent crime rates?

Growing up in the South Valley, I believe that crime does not happen in a vacuum. Along with funding fire, police, and EMT, we must address the root causes of why people choose to commit crimes, such as having unmet basic needs and lack of access to education.

4. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its gross receipts tax code?

Gross receipts taxes are regressive. We need to lower the GRT, get rid of special interest loopholes, and create new revenue with a more progressive tax structure.

5. New Mexico is currently the only state that does not pay its legislators a salary, though lawmakers do get per diem payments and can qualify for a legislative pension. Do you support or oppose a salaried Legislature and, if so, how much should lawmakers be paid?

I strongly support a paid Legislature. Right now, we have a Legislature full of individuals who can afford to be there. We need lawmakers who understand what South Valley families go through every day.

6. What more, if anything, should the Legislature do to address a court ruling that found New Mexico is failing to provide a sufficient education to all students, especially Native Americans and those who dont speak English as a first language?

New Mexico has done so much, particularly in raising educator salaries and raising funding for early childhood education, including Pre-K. Our next challenge is to recruit the best teachers and other educational employees, and support them to adapt curriculum to fit students needs.

7. What should be the priority as New Mexico seeks to strengthen its health care system? How should the state address a shortage of nurses and other health care workers?

We must offer competitive salaries for all health care workers; encourage students to enter health care professions; and bring down the cost of prescription drugs. It is time to look at real reforms, like a public option or Medicare for All, because all other efforts to control health care costs have failed.

8. In recent years, New Mexico has steadily increased spending on early childhood programs, such as home visiting, prekindergarten and child care assistance, and created a new early childhood trust fund. Do you support or oppose the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would withdraw more money from the states permanent school fund to increase funding for early childhood services and K-12 education?

I strongly support the constitutional amendment and urge all voters to vote yes.

9. In order to address climate change and air quality issues, do you support or oppose legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions and requiring the state achieve net-zero emissions by 2050?

I strongly support zero emissions by 2050, and ideally, even sooner. Climate change is an area that absolutely cannot wait if we want a world that is inhabitable for future generations.

10. New Mexico recently became the 17th state to regulate and tax recreational cannabis sales? What, if any, changes do you believe should be made to the existing law?

I applaud our new law that recognized how harsh drug laws marginalized our communities for decades and expunged prior possession charges so that everyone can participate in this new area of business. We must do more to put homegrown, local cannabis businesses on equal footing with multinational corporations.

11. Do you believe changes should be made to the emergency powers held by a governor during a pandemic or other time of crisis. If so, do you believe such powers should be expanded or reduced and in what specific ways?

The current system is working well.

12. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its election laws and primary system? Do you support or oppose opening the states primary elections to voters who arent affiliated with either major political party?

New Mexico should do more to make elections secure, convenient, and safe. That means strong punishment for harassment of election workers, absentee voting dropboxes, and an option for automatic mail ballots. I do support opening the states primary elections to voters who arent affiliated with either major political party.

13. Would you support a merit-based evaluation system to determine how the state spends its capital outlay funding?

The idea of a merit-based system sounds good, but I think it would be impossible to implement. I strongly support capital outlay becoming fully transparent.

14. Do you support or oppose authorizing an independent redistricting commission to perform the once-per-decade task of redrawing New Mexicos political boundary lines?

The current system worked really well in its first year. I think we should give it a chance to succeed.

Personal background

1. Have you or your business, if you are a business owner, ever been the subject of any state or federal tax liens?

No.

2. Have you ever been involved in a personal or business bankruptcy proceeding?

Yes. When I was 18, I had to file for bankruptcy to help my family. All requirements from that bankruptcy have been met long ago.

3. Have you ever been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of drunken driving, any misdemeanor or any felony in New Mexico or any other state? If so, explain.

No.
NAME: Art De La Cruz

POLITICAL PARTY: Democratic

OCCUPATION: Retired

CITY OF RESIDENCE: Albuquerque

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: I have 48 years of service directly working for city and county government, notably as a director, deputy director and manager. In addition, I was adjunct faculty at Central New Mexico Community College. I served two terms as a Bernalillo County commissioner. Lastly, I was appointed twice by the Bernalillo County Commission to fill vacant spots as the legislator in House District 12, and now have experience as a legislator.

EDUCATION: I hold both a bachelors and masters degree.

CAMPAIGN WEBSITE: artdelacruz.com

1. New Mexico is highly reliant on the oil and natural gas industries to generate revenue to fund state programs, as evidenced by recent oil boom and bust cycles. What steps should the Legislature take to diversify the states economy and revenue base?

Improve state economic development efforts and continue to bring new business into our state. Ensure that our military bases and labs are welcomed, supported and expanded. Align New Mexicos business taxes to compete with surrounding states, allowing us to be competitive.

2. During the last regular legislative session, there was an unsuccessful push to make it easier to keep certain defendants behind bars until trial. Should New Mexico law be changed to make it easier to hold individuals charged with violent offenses such as murder and first-degree child abuse/ behind bars until trial?

Yes.

3. What steps should the Legislature take to address crime and public safety amid a rise in violent crime rates?

Enact common sense gun control measures: i.e., background checks, all gun sales. Firearms must be kept locked and secure. Enact law for judges to hold individuals charged with violent offenses until trial. Enhance education for children to better understand the danger of illegal drug use and consequences of a life of crime.

4. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its gross receipts tax code?

Reestablish food tax and use tax revenue to feed food-insecure families.

5. New Mexico is currently the only state that does not pay its legislators a salary, though lawmakers do get per diem payments and can qualify for a legislative pension. Do you support or oppose a salaried Legislature and, if so, how much should lawmakers be paid?

I support a salaried Legislature. Legislator pay should be consistent with pay/practices of like states.

6. What more, if anything, should the Legislature do to address a court ruling that found New Mexico is failing to provide a sufficient education to all students, especially Native Americans and those who dont speak English as a first language?

New Mexico must determine best practices by researching the success of other states and enact those practices in categories we are deficient in.

7. What should be the priority as New Mexico seeks to strengthen its health care system? How should the state address a shortage of nurses and other health care workers?

Medical systems must follow successful business practices. Allow health care workers, doctors and nurses to work with patients to make better decisions which in turn affects controlling costs overall. Preventative care should be rewarded. Control administration overhead and profit, legislation can help. Add more medical education venues at low cost.

8. In recent years, New Mexico has steadily increased spending on early childhood programs, such as home visiting, prekindergarten and child care assistance, and created a new early childhood trust fund. Do you support or oppose the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would withdraw more money from the states permanent school fund to increase funding for early childhood services and K-12 education?

I support using only the interest earned on the permanent fund.

9. In order to address climate change and air quality issues, do you support or oppose legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions and requiring the state achieve net-zero emissions by 2050?

Yes, I support legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions and requiring the state to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

10. New Mexico recently became the 17th state to regulate and tax recreational cannabis sales? What, if any, changes do you believe should be made to the existing law?

No changes at this time because we need to have at least a year to ascertain the deficiencies and strengths in the law.

11. Do you believe changes should be made to the emergency powers held by a governor during a pandemic or other time of crisis. If so, do you believe such powers should be expanded or reduced and in what specific ways?

No changes to the governors powers as long as they do not usurp the Legislatures constitutional authority.

12. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its election laws and primary system? Do you support or oppose opening the states primary elections to voters who arent affiliated with either major political party?

I support opening the states primary system to voters who arent affiliated with either major political party.

13. Would you support a merit-based evaluation system to determine how the state spends its capital outlay funding?

Yes, I support a merit-based evaluation system to determine how the state spends its capital outlay funding with exception to smaller House and Senate capital appropriations. Representatives and senators have a grasp of their district needs and should be allowed to fund minor projects.

14. Do you support or oppose authorizing an independent redistricting commission to perform the once-per-decade task of redrawing New Mexicos political boundary lines?

Yes, I support authorizing an independent redistricting commission to perform the once-per-decade task of redrawing New Mexicos political boundary lines. However, this should be a national initiative as there continues to be gerrymandering in other states.

Personal background

1. Have you or your business, if you are a business owner, ever been the subject of any state or federal tax liens?

No.

2. Have you ever been involved in a personal or business bankruptcy proceeding?

No.

3. Have you ever been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of drunken driving, any misdemeanor or any felony in New Mexico or any other state? If so, explain.

No.
NAME: Nicole Michelle Olonovich

POLITICAL PARTY: Democratic

OCCUPATION: CEO, CSolPower LLC

CITY OF RESIDENCE: Albuquerque

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: I have been advocating in the Roundhouse since 2014 with grassroots nonprofits such as OLE! NM and organizations like the National Association of Social Workers  NM Chapter. I am a voting member the Democratic Party of New Mexico State Party and Resolutions Committee, Congressional District 2 chair of the DPNM Environmental Justice Caucus, administrative director of the DPNM Adelante Progressive Caucus. I have worked in Joint Caucus Legislative Action Committees during the session. I am the president elect of the New Mexico Solar Energy Association and on the national Green Amendments for the Generation board. I am a combat veteran of the United States Air Force.

EDUCATION: Master of Business Administration and Master of Social Work (MSW) Summa Cum Laude from New Mexico Highlands University; dual B.A. Magna Cum Laude in psychology and communication from University of New Mexico.

CAMPAIGN WEBSITE: olonovich4hd12.com

1. New Mexico is highly reliant on the oil and natural gas industries to generate revenue to fund state programs, as evidenced by recent oil boom and bust cycles. What steps should the Legislature take to diversify the states economy and revenue base?

New Mexico has abundant solar and wind production potential. We can power our state with renewables and storage, utility scale, and decentralized community and rooftop solar. We should also be a renewable energy exporter creating a revenue stream in perpetuity, stimulating job growth, improving health, and building a stable economy.

2. During the last regular legislative session, there was an unsuccessful push to make it easier to keep certain defendants behind bars until trial. Should New Mexico law be changed to make it easier to hold individuals charged with violent offenses such as murder and first-degree child abuse behind bars until trial?

Poverty, crime, and drug abuse are systemic problems, and we need to invest in systemic solutions. We know lock em up policies have failed to solve the problems. Mass incarceration for nonviolent offenders is ineffective and harmful. Simultaneously, offenders who are a true threat to public safety may require incarceration.

3. What steps should the Legislature take to address crime and public safety amid a rise in violent crime rates?

Multiprong approach: pass legislation that bans the purchase/sales of ghost guns, safe gun storage, ban automatic weapons and high-capacity magazines, universal background checks and close loopholes in the law around buying/selling firearms. Strengthen and expand mental health and substance abuse treatment programs and tackle failing systems like education, housing and unemployment.

4. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its gross receipts tax code?

While we need to reduce or eliminate the gross receipt tax, which would help lower income New Mexicans, wed need to balance that out with an increase in personal income tax on the states wealthiest and/or a personal favorite, taxing second (or third) homeowners.

5. New Mexico is currently the only state that does not pay its legislators a salary, though lawmakers do get per diem payments and can qualify for a legislative pension. Do you support or oppose a salaried Legislature and, if so, how much should lawmakers be paid?

I support paying legislators a minimum of $38,000 and equipping them with dedicated staff. Investing in our legislators and extending the legislative session will pay off for New Mexicans; time and money well spent to research, develop and promulgate prudent and meaningful legislation in pursuit of the public interest.

6. What more, if anything, should the Legislature do to address a court ruling that found New Mexico is failing to provide a sufficient education to all students, especially Native Americans and those who dont speak English as a first language?

Legislation that allows students access to reading materials in their preferred language was just passed but that is inadequate. We need to completely overhaul our educational system to emphasize learning (including multi-language classroom settings) not testing, and sufficiently staff and fund intellectually rigorous, artistically exciting, and recreational programs.

7. What should be the priority as New Mexico seeks to strengthen its health care system? How should the state address a shortage of nurses and other health care workers?

Low cost, high quality vocational educational programs are key to addressing nursing and health care worker shortages. Graduate caring nurses and health care workers who are well equipped with critical thinking and communication skills, and who are dedicated to making a difference in peoples lives could transform our health care system.

8. In recent years, New Mexico has steadily increased spending on early childhood programs, such as home visiting, prekindergarten and child care assistance, and created a new early childhood trust fund. Do you support or oppose the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would withdraw more money from the states permanent school fund to increase funding for early childhood services and K-12 education?

I support the YesForKids ballot initiative and would highly encourage everyone to vote for it on the November 2022 ballot. A critical time to shape productivity is from birth to age 5, when the brain develops rapidly to build the foundation of cognitive and character skills necessary for success.

9. In order to address climate change and air quality issues, do you support or oppose legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions and requiring the state achieve net-zero emissions by 2050?

Four fires are raging and we are experiencing exceptional drought. Economists and scientists warn that business as usual is unsustainable; the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called a code red for humanity. Yes, I support legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions and the rapid transition to 100% renewables by 2030. The good news: we can do it.

10. New Mexico recently became the 17th state to regulate and tax recreational cannabis sales? What, if any, changes do you believe should be made to the existing law?

We need to expunge the criminal records of people with cannabis manufacturing, distributing, and possession offenses. Further, we need to release those incarcerated serving on cannabis related offenses of less than 30 grams. Finally, we need to eliminate barriers of entry for Black, Indigenous, and people of color who want to work in the cannabis industry.

11. Do you believe changes should be made to the emergency powers held by a governor during a pandemic or other time of crisis. If so, do you believe such powers should be expanded or reduced and in what specific ways?

As a disabled combat veteran with respiratory illness from my service to this country in Iraq, I am thankful to the governor for her handling of the COVID pandemic, and I would not support any changes to the Executive Office emergency powers.

12. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its election laws and primary system? Do you support or oppose opening the states primary elections to voters who arent affiliated with either major political party?

I support expanding voting rights, supporting greater access to voting by ensuring everyone who wants to vote can do so, and I would vote to make Election Day into a state holiday to encourage voting. I am also of fan of open primaries.

13. Would you support a merit-based evaluation system to determine how the state spends its capital outlay funding?

Transparency and representation are hallmarks of my campaign and that includes capital outlay allocation. I believe in the use of objective criteria to distribute capital outlay. Yet, we need to ensure flexibility as well, to honor the specialized knowledge representatives and senators have to deliver for the communities they represent.

14. Do you support or oppose authorizing an independent redistricting commission to perform the once-per-decade task of redrawing New Mexicos political boundary lines?

I support the Citizens Redistricting Committee. Our maps should be drawn with the best interest of constituents in mind, and any changes must be made transparently and supported by science, data, and facts to ensure we are not putting incumbent protection above voter rights.

Personal background

1. Have you or your business, if you are a business owner, ever been the subject of any state or federal tax liens?

No.

2. Have you ever been involved in a personal or business bankruptcy proceeding?

The last presidential administration signed an executive order making graduate student stipends taxable. As a result, in 2018, I was forced into bankruptcy in order to afford my Ph.D. program.

3. Have you ever been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of drunken driving, any misdemeanor or any felony in New Mexico or any other state?

In 2008, I was honorably discharged. I was struggling to reacclimate after war (Iraq, 2004) and I was arrested for drinking and driving. Luckily, I appeared before a judge who sentenced me to court mandated therapy. I stopped drinking, went back to school, got MBA and MSW degrees, while advocating in the Roundhouse for mental/behavioral health access.
NAME: Darrell Deaguero

POLITICAL PARTY: Democratic

OCCUPATION: President, LiUNA Local 16

CITY OF RESIDENCE: Albuquerque

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Labor leader with many years of experience working with the Legislature.

EDUCATION: Graduate of Farmington High, attended San Juan College but did not complete a degree.

CAMPAIGN WEBSITE: darrellfornm.com

1. New Mexico is highly reliant on the oil and natural gas industries to generate revenue to fund state programs, as evidenced by recent oil boom and bust cycles. What steps should the Legislature take to diversify the states economy and revenue base?

We must diversify our economy by continuing supporting growth industries like cannabis, film, renewable energy, and outdoor recreation. We must also build a fairer and more equitable tax code by increasing the corporate tax rate, repealing the tax cut for the wealthiest New Mexicans, and the capital gains tax cuts.

2. During the last regular legislative session, there was an unsuccessful push to make it easier to keep certain defendants behind bars until trial. Should New Mexico law be changed to make it easier to hold individuals charged with violent offenses such as murder and first-degree child abuse behind bars until trial?

Innocent until proven guilty is the bedrock of our judicial system. We must be thoughtful when holding someone behind bars before trial, with decisions reviewed on a case-by-case basis and a rigorous threshold for detainment, such as a violent criminal history or evidence that they will continue to commit crimes.

3. What steps should the Legislature take to address crime and public safety amid a rise in violent crime rates?

We must fully fund and staff our police, fire, and EMT services while also making sure we have social workers and mental health experts available to accompany our first responders on nonviolent calls. We must focus on reducing poverty and substance abuse in order to reduce crime.

4. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its gross receipts tax code?

New Mexico needs to build a fairer and more equitable tax code. The gross receipts tax is regressive. It needs to be lowered and its loopholes need to be closed. The difference in revenue can be made up with a more progressive tax code.

5. New Mexico is currently the only state that does not pay its legislators a salary, though lawmakers do get per diem payments and can qualify for a legislative pension. Do you support or oppose a salaried Legislature and, if so, how much should lawmakers be paid?

The Legislature is meant to be a representative body, but the current compensation structure for legislators means only those who can afford to do these jobs can serve. We need to properly compensate our representatives with a living wage so that no working New Mexican is barred from holding office.

6. What more, if anything, should the Legislature do to address a court ruling that found New Mexico is failing to provide a sufficient education to all students, especially Native Americans and those who dont speak English as a first language?

New Mexico has increased teacher salaries to retain and attract talented staff and funded early childhood education, but we still have more to do. As Yazzie v. Martinez showed, its our most disadvantaged children who need our help, and the Legislature must ensure these children are not left behind.

7. What should be the priority as New Mexico seeks to strengthen its health care system? How should the state address a shortage of nurses and other health care workers?

Every New Mexican deserves quality, affordable health care. We must lower the cost of prescription drugs and decouple health insurance from employment, enacting real health care reform like Medicare for All. We must also offer competitive salaries to our health care workers, just as we have recently done with educators.

8. In recent years, New Mexico has steadily increased spending on early childhood programs, such as home visiting, prekindergarten and child care assistance, and created a new early childhood trust fund. Do you support or oppose the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would withdraw more money from the states permanent school fund to increase funding for early childhood services and K-12 education?

I strongly support the constitutional amendment to leverage the Land Grant Permanent School Fund and increase funding for our childrens education.

9. In order to address climate change and air quality issues, do you support or oppose legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions and requiring the state achieve net-zero emissions by 2050?

I strongly support legislation that addresses climate change and requires the state to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. As a labor leader, however, I will always prioritize workers and will work to ensure that any legislation that displaces hard working New Mexicans offers solutions that addresses their needs.

10. New Mexico recently became the 17th state to regulate and tax recreational cannabis sales? What, if any, changes do you believe should be made to the existing law?

Regulating and taxing cannabis was an important step to diversifying New Mexicos economy. However, we need to make sure were prioritizing our local small businesses and giving them a chance to compete with the larger national retailers that are quickly coming to dominate the sector.

11. Do you believe changes should be made to the emergency powers held by a governor during a pandemic or other time of crisis. If so, do you believe such powers should be expanded or reduced and in what specific ways?

No, I believe the current system worked, and is working, as intended.

12. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its election laws and primary system? Do you support or oppose opening the states primary elections to voters who arent affiliated with either major political party?

New Mexico has some of the most secure elections in the country, but in order to increase participation, we must push for automatic mail ballots and drop boxes for absentee voting. I also support opening our primary elections, giving as many New Mexicans as possible a voice in the process.

13. Would you support a merit-based evaluation system to determine how the state spends its capital outlay funding?

While I would consider a merit-based evaluation system, I am concerned that implementation would be extremely difficult if not impossible. Rather, I strongly support making the capital outlay process fully transparent, so our constituents can see what resources are going where, and how they got there.

14. Do you support or oppose authorizing an independent redistricting commission to perform the once-per-decade task of redrawing New Mexicos political boundary lines?

Now that New Mexicos Citizens Redistricting Commission has completed its work, I would call the process a success. The final maps turned out either identical or only slightly modified from those proposed by the commission and are fair and just. I would support authorizing the committee in the future.

Personal background

1. Have you or your business, if you are a business owner, ever been the subject of any state or federal tax liens?

No.

2. Have you ever been involved in a personal or business bankruptcy proceeding?

No.

3. Have you ever been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of drunken driving, any misdemeanor or any felony in New Mexico or any other state? If so, explain.

No.
NAME: Ellis McMath

POLITICAL PARTY: Republican

OCCUPATION: Concealed carry firearms instructor

CITY OF RESIDENCE: Albuquerque

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Albuquerque reserve police officer; decorated Vietnam Navy veteran; New Mexico State University commercial pilot; FAA air traffic controller; founder and director of a nonprofit organization

EDUCATION: Eastern New Mexico University; Seven Bar Flight School; Navy Whidbey Island Flight School; FAA Air Traffic Controller Academy; Albuquerque Bible College; Albuquerque Police Academy; Rio Grande High School

CAMPAIGN WEBSITE: EllisMcMath.com

1. New Mexico is highly reliant on the oil and natural gas industries to generate revenue to fund state programs, as evidenced by recent oil boom and bust cycles. What steps should the Legislature take to diversify the states economy and revenue base?

As a legislator I support changes that would foster a people friendly, business friendly atmosphere. For our state to thrive we need a happy, healthy workforce. This would include right-to-work laws, phasing out personal income tax and reforming our bizarre gross receipts tax code.

2. During the last regular legislative session, there was an unsuccessful push to make it easier to keep certain defendants behind bars until trial. Should New Mexico law be changed to make it easier to hold individuals charged with violent offenses such as murder and first-degree child abuse behind bars until trial?

Yes. Our law enforcement officers are our true modern-day heroes. Without them our Land of Enchantment would spiral to chaos. Our streets and freeways have become unsafe. Law enforcement officials are frustrated having to rearrest violent offenders.

3. What steps should the Legislature take to address crime and public safety amid a rise in violent crime rates?

As a retired Albuquerque police reserve officer I have insight into what makes criminals fear. My experience can help sculpture legislation in mandating sentencing lengths and systemic reforms to the judicial election process.

4. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its gross receipts tax code?

Excellent question. First, eliminate exemptions for special interests. Second, lower the rate. Next, eliminate tax on business services. It is not right that an in-state bookkeeper is forced to charge clients 7.875% when an out of state business can provide the service without charging gross receipts tax.

5. New Mexico is currently the only state that does not pay its legislators a salary, though lawmakers do get per diem payments and can qualify for a legislative pension. Do you support or oppose a salaried Legislature and, if so, how much should lawmakers be paid?

Our Legislature needs to be modernized. There is a conflict of interest when our current volunteer legislators are crafting legislation that affects their business. Also, many qualified lawmakers resign or do not run for office as they are not able to support their families. Someone once said, We limit who can serve to the rich or retired.

6. What more, if anything, should the Legislature do to address a court ruling that found New Mexico is failing to provide a sufficient education to all students, especially Native Americans and those who dont speak English as a first language?

Giving parents control of education dollars will go a long way to improve the quality of education and requiring school accountability. Parents should have the freedom to send their child to a school of their choice, private or public. Money should be attached to the student not buildings or bloated administrations.

7. What should be the priority as New Mexico seeks to strengthen its health care system? How should the state address a shortage of nurses and other health care workers?

The vaccine mandate has chased hundreds of health-care professionals out of our great state, impacting our quality of care. Trial lawyers influence over the legislative process on recent changes in litigation will soon send more fleeing. Fact check HB75. As your legislator, I would support policy to stop the mass exit.

8. In recent years, New Mexico has steadily increased spending on early childhood programs, such as home visiting, prekindergarten and child care assistance, and created a new early childhood trust fund. Do you support or oppose the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would withdraw more money from the states permanent school fund to increase funding for early childhood services and K-12 education?

I support efforts to fund the home visiting part of the program from the general fund. These programs have proven to be the most effective in improving outcomes for our young people. However, government run pre-K programs are subject to indoctrination tactics like critical race theory. The permanent fund should remain as the founders intended, permanent.

9. In order to address climate change and air quality issues, do you support or oppose legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions and requiring the state achieve net-zero emissions by 2050?

Electric cars, solar and wind power are exciting, new technologies, however, they have their own environmental impacts that need consideration. CO2 emissions can be reduced using nuclear and natural gas to produce electrical power to keep the lights on at an affordable cost. Trying to achieve net-zero emissions ahead of reason could spell calamity.

10. New Mexico recently became the 17th state to regulate and tax recreational cannabis sales? What, if any, changes do you believe should be made to the existing law?

As a legislator I would be interested in a study of any increased health costs, traffic accidents, work productivity or criminal activity associated with recreational cannabis sales.

11. Do you believe changes should be made to the emergency powers held by a governor during a pandemic or other time of crisis. If so, do you believe such powers should be expanded or reduced and in what specific ways?

The term emergency must be defined clearly in the law. The governors emergency powers should be limited to 30 days unless extended by the legislature. Our New Mexico and U.S. Constitutions mandate certain freedoms that should not be taken away.

12. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its election laws and primary system? Do you support or oppose opening the states primary elections to voters who arent affiliated with either major political party?

Many New Mexico voters feel disenfranchised due to one party dominance in their House and Senate districts. I would entertain a study on the pros and cons of open primary elections. Also, citizens should have utmost confidence in election integrity. I support voter ID.

13. Would you support a merit-based evaluation system to determine how the state spends its capital outlay funding?

I do not support a merit-based system.

14. Do you support or oppose authorizing an independent redistricting commission to perform the once-per-decade task of redrawing New Mexicos political boundary lines?

It seems evident that the party in power will manipulate political boundary lines for their benefit. I support authorizing an independent redistricting commission the task of deciding political boundaries.

Personal background

1. Have you or your business, if you are a business owner, ever been the subject of any state or federal tax liens?

No.

2. Have you ever been involved in a personal or business bankruptcy proceeding?

No.

3. Have you ever been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of drunken driving, any misdemeanor or any felony in New Mexico or any other state? If so, explain.

No.
NAME: Colton R. Dean

POLITICAL PARTY: Democratic

OCCUPATION: Sterile processing technician/paramedic

CITY OF RESIDENCE: Albuquerque

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Democratic Ward chair for Bernalillo County 19b. Member of the Democratic Party State Central Committee.

EDUCATION: B.A. film and video production (2005) Brooks Institute of Photography. Associate of Applied Sciences in Emergency Medicine (2015) Central New Mexico Community College.

CAMPAIGN WEBSITE: DeanFor19.com

1. New Mexico is highly reliant on the oil and natural gas industries to generate revenue to fund state programs, as evidenced by recent oil boom and bust cycles. What steps should the Legislature take to diversify the states economy and revenue base?

Invest in solar, wind, and battery storage. Combined with smart meter and smart grid technology, individuals who store excess energy in low demand times then resell it to the grid in high demand times would create two opportunities for the state to collect revenue on the transactions.

2. During the last regular legislative session, there was an unsuccessful push to make it easier to keep certain defendants behind bars until trial. Should New Mexico law be changed to make it easier to hold individuals charged with violent offenses such as murder and first-degree child abuse behind bars until trial?

Suspects of violent crimes, especially those with a history of violence, should be held until trial. Legislators cannot foresee every possibility, thats why we need arraignment judges to determine on a case-by-case basis whether suspects should be released on bail or not.

3. What steps should the Legislature take to address crime and public safety amid a rise in violent crime rates?

Legislators should fund the support programs that address the negative circumstances that lead to crime. Adequate staffing and resources are needed for housing, drug and alcohol rehab, and metal health services so that crime becomes a less likely option.

4. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its gross receipts tax code?

I have no suggestions to change the GRT code at this time.

5. New Mexico is currently the only state that does not pay its legislators a salary, though lawmakers do get per diem payments and can qualify for a legislative pension. Do you support or oppose a salaried Legislature and, if so, how much should lawmakers be paid?

I support a full-time paid Legislature, and lowering the voting threshold for extraordinary sessions from 3/5 to 50% plus one of both House and Senate. Salaries should be determined by a nonpartisan independent committee, and should approximate the average New Mexico household income.

6. What more, if anything, should the Legislature do to address a court ruling that found New Mexico is failing to provide a sufficient education to all students, especially Native Americans and those who dont speak English as a first language?

Article 12, Section 10 of the New Mexico Constitution guarantees the right of an equal education to children of Spanish descent. I suggest we amend the state constitution to include Native American children, and all non-English speaking students.

7. What should be the priority as New Mexico seeks to strengthen its health care system? How should the state address a shortage of nurses and other health care workers?

We must support adults returning to school retaining for new careers. Many people in mid-life are unable to stop working for two years for a new degree without incurring tremendous debt. Free tuition is the first step, but I would like to see assistance for people in degree programs.

8. In recent years, New Mexico has steadily increased spending on early childhood programs, such as home visiting, prekindergarten and child care assistance, and created a new early childhood trust fund. Do you support or oppose the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would withdraw more money from the states permanent school fund to increase funding for early childhood services and K-12 education?

I fully support the proposed constitutional amendment to fund early childhood education.

9. In order to address climate change and air quality issues, do you support or oppose legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions and requiring the state achieve net-zero emissions by 2050?

I support legislation that limits greenhouse gas emissions so long as it provides benchmarks in five-year increments. We must also include necessary enforcement if those benchmarks arent met.

10. New Mexico recently became the 17th state to regulate and tax recreational cannabis sales? What, if any, changes do you believe should be made to the existing law?

Priority for medical cannabis must be protected. This includes price protection so medical patients arent overcharged for their medicine if recreational demand affects supply.

11. Do you believe changes should be made to the emergency powers held by a governor during a pandemic or other time of crisis. If so, do you believe such powers should be expanded or reduced and in what specific ways?

Every emergency is different, and requires case-by-case evaluation. Balancing the power of the governor can be achieved with a full-time paid Legislature, the ability to call itself into extraordinary session with 50% plus one.

12. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its election laws and primary system? Do you support or oppose opening the states primary elections to voters who arent affiliated with either major political party?

I believe we need a combination of ranked choice voting, publicly financed campaigns, and open primaries to encourage as much participation in the electoral process as possible. And to reduce the incentive candidates have to demonize their opponents.

13. Would you support a merit-based evaluation system to determine how the state spends its capital outlay funding?

I would support a standardized transparent process that allows community input to inform representatives and senators of the needs of their communities. But also allow representatives and senators to help other communities as long as the same process is followed.

14. Do you support or oppose authorizing an independent redistricting commission to perform the onceper-decade task of redrawing New Mexicos political boundary lines?

I support a constitutional amendment to make sure redistricting in 2031 and beyond is done by an independent redistricting commission.

Personal background

1. Have you or your business, if you are a business owner, ever been the subject of any state or federal tax liens?

No.

2. Have you ever been involved in a personal or business bankruptcy proceeding?

No.

3. Have you ever been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of drunken driving, any misdemeanor or any felony in New Mexico or any other state? If so, explain.

No.
NAME: Cherise D. Quezada

POLITICAL PARTY: Democratic

OCCUPATION: Most recently, assistant to District 26 state Rep. Georgene Louis (the seat I am running for), policy analyst to ABQ City Councilor Klarissa Pena, have worked at N.M. Municipal League and YDI.

CITY OF RESIDENCE: Albuquerque

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Assistant to state Rep. Georgene Louis, District 26; committee assistant to the House Government, Elections and Indian Affairs Committee at the Legislature; policy analyst to Albuquerque City Councilor Klarissa Pena, District 3; Route 66 West Neighborhood Association, president, since 2014; Southwest Alliance of Neighbors, Executive Board, since 2010; voter registration agent since 2013; Youth Development Inc. (YDI), executive assistant to Chris Baca, former president/CEO, 2010-2016; N.M. Municipal League, 2000  2010

EDUCATION: High school equivalency diploma

CAMPAIGN WEBSITE: cherisefornm.com

1. New Mexico is highly reliant on the oil and natural gas industries to generate revenue to fund state programs, as evidenced by recent oil boom and bust cycles. What steps should the Legislature take to diversify the states economy and revenue base?

Continue to invest and expand the film industry; expand renewable energy industry using wind and solar; invest in our workforce to make New Mexico attractive to industry; expand universal early childhood education and the job opportunities this industry creates.

2. During the last regular legislative session, there was an unsuccessful push to make it easier to keep certain defendants behind bars until trial. Should New Mexico law be changed to make it easier to hold individuals charged with violent offenses such as murder and first-degree child abuse behind bars until trial?

Yes. The law currently allows judges to hold violent offenders behind bars pending trial. The courts need to focus more on public safety when the allegations involve murder and other violent crimes including domestic violence or child abuse.

3. What steps should the Legislature take to address crime and public safety amid a rise in violent crime rates?

Implement pretrial supervision by enforcing all court orders and 24-hour GPS monitoring devices; increase salaries and staffing levels for public safety (police officers, firefighters, paramedics and guards); invest in new technology for DA offices; invest in behavioral health and rehabilitation programs; invest in crime-fighting technology; replicate community policing model.

4. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its gross receipts tax code?

Lower the Gross Receipt Tax rate to help small businesses. I support recent proposals to close tax loopholes in the tax code as well as making it more progressive to keep money in the pockets of low-income workers and locally owned businesses.

5. New Mexico is currently the only state that does not pay its legislators a salary, though lawmakers do get per diem payments and can qualify for a legislative pension. Do you support or oppose a salaried Legislature and, if so, how much should lawmakers be paid.

I support a salaried Legislature and firmly believe it would diversify our leadership so elected office is not limited to retirees or people of wealth. A reasonable salary would make serving in the Legislature more appealing to the younger generation and regular community members.

6. What more, if anything, should the Legislature do to address a court ruling that found New Mexico is failing to provide a sufficient education to all students, especially Native Americans and those who dont speak English as a first language?

New Mexico must close the achievement gap for our state to succeed. We need to recruit and retain the best teachers and work with our tribal leaders. The state should consider implementing and investing in statewide dual language classrooms or bilingual education to make learning equitable.

7. What should be the priority as New Mexico seeks to strengthen its health care system?

I would create a LEDA-like program for health care. We need to incentivize doctors and nurses locating to rural New Mexico. N.M. needs a dental school so our best and brightest can study medicine in-state. We need more school-based health centers and I will fight for a new hospital on the West Side.

How should the state address a shortage of nurses and other health care workers?

Expand and incentivize nursing academic programs; grant certifications for spouses of our military so nurses can start work immediately; offer rental assistance for health care workers; incentivize health care workers practicing in rural areas; expand broadband and incentivize telehealth to maximize resources. Strengthen assault and battery laws to protect health care providers.

8. In recent years, New Mexico has steadily increased spending on early childhood programs, such as home visiting, prekindergarten and childcare assistance, and created a new early childhood trust fund. Do you support or oppose the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would withdraw more money from the states permanent school fund to increase funding for early childhood services and K-12 education?

I strongly support the Early Childhood Constitutional Amendment. The annual distribution from our $26 billion Permanent Fund is currently too low. With the creation of the new Early Childhood Education & Care Department the accountability structures are in place to build a world class early childhood system for future generations.

9. In order to address climate change and air quality issues, do you support or oppose legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions and requiring the state achieve net-zero emissions by 2050?

Strongly support. Increase incentives for homeowners and businesses to invest in renewable energy; be the leader of demand for an energy economy; incentivize telecommuting as an energy conservation effort; incentivize electric cars and invest in adequate infrastructure needed to sustain them; I support the closing of San Juan Generating Station.

10. New Mexico recently became the 17th state to regulate and tax recreational cannabis sales? What, if any, changes do you believe should be made to the existing law? We must monitor the cannabis industry between now and the next session to improve on existing law.

Prohibit public consumption to help keep our roads are safe. Cannabis legalization is long overdue, and we can learn from other states to ensure its done the right way.

11. Do you believe changes should be made to the emergency powers held by a governor during a pandemic or other time of crisis. If so, do you believe such powers should be expanded or reduced and in what specific ways?

I think that we need the University of New Mexico and Legislative Council Services to study the pandemic, once we have the information, we can make any necessary changes.

12. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its election laws and primary system? Do you support or oppose opening the states primary elections to voters who arent affiliated with either major political party?

I believe in making voting more accessible to all members of our community, including same-day voter registrations which would allow anyone to join the Democratic Party and participate.

13. Would you support a merit-based evaluation system to determine how the state spends its capital outlay funding?

I support the reforms that were made requiring legislators to publicly disclose capital outlay as it allows the voters to determine if their elected official is adequately representing their district.

14. Do you support or oppose authorizing an independent redistricting commission to perform the once-per-decade task of redrawing New Mexicos political boundary lines?

Support. I believe the process should be led by a diverse group of citizens that redistricting lines will affect rather than lawmakers and adjusting the counts of those who are in prison or living in homeless shelters by using their last known address so the population counts arent as skewed.

Personal background

1. Have you or your business, if you are a business owner, ever been the subject of any state or federal tax liens?

No.

2. Have you ever been involved in a personal or business bankruptcy proceeding?

Yes. I was involved in a personal bankruptcy upon divorce.

3. Have you ever been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of drunken driving, any misdemeanor or any felony in New Mexico or any other state? If so, explain.

No.
NAME: Robert S. Godshall

POLITICAL PARTY: Republican

OCCUPATION: Retired from the Department of Homeland Security

CITY OF RESIDENCE: Albuquerque

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: 28 years law enforcement, small business owner, political activism in the community.

EDUCATION: Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from UNM in 1979.

WEBSITE: GodshallForDistrict27.com

1. New Mexico is highly reliant on the oil and natural gas industries to generate revenue to fund state programs, as evidenced by recent oil boom and bust cycles. What steps should the Legislature take to diversify the states economy and revenue base?

It is an economic mistake to rely too much on one industry. Creating a more business friendly state would encourage enterprise to move here, and entrepreneurs to stay here. A more fair tax system, an improved education system and a less regulated economy would increase prosperity in our state.

2. During the last regular legislative session, there was an unsuccessful push to make it easier to keep certain defendants behind bars until trial. Should New Mexico law be changed to make it easier to hold individuals charged with violent offenses such as murder and first-degree child abuse behind bars until trial?

New Mexico needs to avoid using behavior predicting pseudo-science like the Arnold Tool for determining when an offender is a danger to the community. If that takes legislation, the Legislature can certainly determine that certain violent crimes require detention absent a convincing argument to the contrary.

3. What steps should the Legislature take to address crime and public safety amid a rise in violent crime rates?

The Legislature cannot change the emergence of such office holders as Tim Keller of Albuquerque that are publicly hostile to law enforcement. The Legislature could, however, prevent the existence of immigrant friendly cities that allow criminal foreign nationals to avoid investigation and prosecution by Homeland Security.

4. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its gross receipts tax code?

As one of only two states to use the gross receipts tax, New Mexico has largely discouraged business from moving here and has reduced tax revenue because so many exemptions to the tax exist. I prefer a sales tax that is lower and spread out among more contributors.

5. New Mexico is currently the only state that does not pay its legislators a salary, though lawmakers do get per diem payments and can qualify for a legislative pension. Do you support or oppose a salaried Legislature and, if so, how much should lawmakers be paid?

As an aspiring legislator and as someone that does not need to be paid, I do not have an opinion on this question. I am concerned, however, that once legislators get paid they will increase their pay whenever they want and I am opposed to that.

6. What more, if anything, should the Legislature do to address a court ruling that found New Mexico is failing to provide a sufficient education to all students, especially Native Americans and those who dont speak English as a first language?

The states leaders have failed to deliver quality education to all our children for many years. We can create a more competitive education environment by having the money follow the student, rather than the system, to be spent where the student wants. School choice is what our citizens want.

7. What should be the priority as New Mexico seeks to strengthen its health care system? How should the state address a shortage of nurses and other health care workers?

We need to think of health care as a product and a service. The free market has proven, time and again, to be the most efficient and cost effective method for delivering goods and services to our citizens. Government interference created this shortage and the market can end it.

8. In recent years, New Mexico has steadily increased spending on early childhood programs, such as home visiting, prekindergarten and child care assistance, and created a new early childhood trust fund. Do you support or oppose the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would withdraw more money from the states permanent school fund to increase funding for early childhood services and K-12 education?

I am not in favor of any plan to withdraw more money from the states permanent fund. Given that our education system is failing our current students now, we should work at fixing our system and not spending more money.

9. In order to address climate change and air quality issues, do you support or oppose legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions and requiring the state achieve net-zero emissions by 2050?

I think we have the technological capability to create energy sources that will generate much less pollution in the future and we do not need legislation giving the government more power in this area.

10. New Mexico recently became the 17th state to regulate and tax recreational cannabis sales? What, if any, changes do you believe should be made to the existing law?

I did not favor legalizing cannabis sales and we will now have to evaluate cannabis use and its impact before making any adjustments. I am concerned that cannabis advocacy groups will point to the generated revenue as an excuse to overlook any negative repercussions that cannabis use brings to society.

11. Do you believe changes should be made to the emergency powers held by a governor during a pandemic or other time of crisis. If so, do you believe such powers should be expanded or reduced and in what specific ways?

This governor demonstrated that an executive can have and use too much power when it comes to an emergency situation. The governors authority should be for a temporary period that should be superseded by subsequent legislation so that the people have a voice in such an important decision.

12. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its election laws and primary system? Do you support or oppose opening the states primary elections to voters who arent affiliated with either major political party?

Citizens of all beliefs and ideologies need to be confident that elections are fair and accurate. Accurate voter records and verifiable voters are essential to election integrity. I oppose opening the primary system because the members of a political party should be the ones selecting their nominee.

13. Would you support a merit-based evaluation system to determine how the state spends its capital outlay funding?

Capital project spending should be as transparent as possible regardless of the method utilized. Holding legislators accountable for how they spend money is just as important as the system used to spend it.

14. Do you support or oppose authorizing an independent redistricting commission to perform the once-per-decade task of redrawing New Mexicos political boundary lines?

Redistricting political boundaries is an imperfect process and the creation of an independent commission is not necessarily a solution. The commission can make the same mistakes as any other body and, being independent, there is little or no accountability to the voters if they get it wrong.

Personal background:

1. Have you or your business, if you are a business owner, ever been the subject of any state or federal tax liens?

No.

2. Have you ever been involved in a personal or business bankruptcy proceeding?

No.

3. Have you ever been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of drunken driving, any misdemeanor or any felony in New Mexico or any other state? If so, explain.

No.
NAME: Gregory Cunningham

POLITICAL PARTY: Republican

OCCUPATION: Self employed/retired

CITY OF RESIDENCE: Albuquerque

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Retired APD officer/detective, veteran U.S. Marine Corps, business owner

EDUCATION: 14 years

CAMPAIGN WEBSITE: avoicefornewmexico.com

1. New Mexico is highly reliant on the oil and natural gas industries to generate revenue to fund state programs, as evidenced by recent oil boom and bust cycles. What steps should the Legislature take to diversify the states economy and revenue base?

We must protect the Land Grant Permanent Fund by not overspending. New Mexico is blessed with plentiful oil and natural gas deposits. We must use this natural resource to benefit all of New Mexico. Only with an educated and skilled workforce will we be able to attract new businesses.

2. During the last regular legislative session, there was an unsuccessful push to make it easier to keep certain defendants behind bars until trial. Should New Mexico law be changed to make it easier to hold individuals charged with violent offenses such as murder and first-degree child abuse behind bars until trial?

Absolutely. Without question.

3. What steps should the Legislature take to address crime and public safety amid a rise in violent crime rates?

We must protect our law abiding citizens and families. An overhaul of our education system is essential, the state must force prosecutors to enforce the law and we must establish mandatory sentencing guidelines and reduce judicial discretion.

4. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its gross receipts tax code?

The New Mexico GRT should be abolished, and the necessary amount should be added to the sales tax. We should be honest about what consumers are paying in taxes.

5. New Mexico is currently the only state that does not pay its legislators a salary, though lawmakers do get per diem payments and can qualify for a legislative pension. Do you support or oppose a salaried Legislature and, if so, how much should lawmakers be paid?

Yes, $30,000 per year.

6. What more, if anything, should the Legislature do to address a court ruling that found New Mexico is failing to provide a sufficient education to all students, especially Native Americans and those who dont speak English as a first language?

New Mexico is 50th in the country for education. We spend half of our state budget, $4.8 billion to fail all of New Mexicos children. We must overhaul our complete educational system.

7. What should be the priority as New Mexico seeks to strengthen its health care system? How should the state address a shortage of nurses and other health care workers?

We should provide financial incentives for nurses in New Mexico and create a high school career path to be nurses or other health care workers. This will accelerate educational priorities and we should have special educational grants for these students who graduate and serve in New Mexico.

8. In recent years, New Mexico has steadily increased spending on early childhood programs, such as home visiting, prekindergarten and child care assistance, and created a new early childhood trust fund. Do you support or oppose the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would withdraw more money from the states permanent school fund to increase funding for early childhood services and K-12 education?

Our state spends $4.8 billion this year to be dead last in education. Our checkbook isnt broken our educational system is. All the Pre-K money in the world wont keep a 10th grader in high school. I will not support 350,000,000 more dollars for undefined programs on a Democratic spending spree.

9. In order to address climate change and air quality issues, do you support or oppose legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions and requiring the state achieve net-zero emissions by 2050?

I oppose this legislation. Our state should be on par with other states and have a pro-business environment. This issue should be nationally regulated. We should be one country not 50 states with a patchwork of different emissions laws.

10. New Mexico recently became the 17th state to regulate and tax recreational cannabis sales? What, if any, changes do you believe should be made to the existing law?

Consumption on school property or at a daycare should be a felony. I do not believe there should be legal public consumption areas.

11. Do you believe changes should be made to the emergency powers held by a governor during a pandemic or other time of crisis. If so, do you believe such powers should be expanded or reduced and in what specific ways?

All emergency powers that the governor has should not extend beyond 30 days without legislative approval.

12. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its election laws and primary system? Do you support or oppose opening the states primary elections to voters who arent affiliated with either major political party?

No, each party should be responsible for choosing their candidates for the general election.

13. Would you support a merit-based evaluation system to determine how the state spends its capital outlay funding?

No.

14. Do you support or oppose authorizing an independent redistricting commission to perform the once-per-decade task of redrawing New Mexicos political boundary lines?

I oppose a redistricting commission. It should be a transparent legislative process and we should hold legislators accountable for their choices.

Personal background

1. Have you or your business, if you are a business owner, ever been the subject of any state or federal tax liens?

No.

2. Have you ever been involved in a personal or business bankruptcy proceeding?

No.

3. Have you ever been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of drunken driving, any misdemeanor or any felony in New Mexico or any other state? If so, explain.

No.
ALGIERS, May 11 (Xinhua) -- Algerian Army Chief of Staff Said Chengriha on Wednesday reaffirmed to a visiting senior NATO official his country's neutral policy on international affairs, according to a statement from the Algerian Defense Ministry.

"On the international level, Algeria continues to adopt a policy of neutrality and ensures that it stands away from the tensions and polarizations opposing various parties," he said when receiving Hans-Werner Wiermann, director general of the NATO International Military Staff.

"Algeria will continue cooperating with its allies and partners within the framework of its national interests and its immutable principles," Chengriha noted.

On Wednesday, Weirmann kicked off a two-day working visit to Algeria, where he is due to meet with top Algerian officials.

Weirmann's visit came after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov visited Algeria on Tuesday and hailed Algiers' balanced and objective policy over the Ukraine crisis. 
NAME: Ravi Bhasker

POLITICAL PARTY: Democratic

OCCUPATION: Medical doctor private family practice, hotel ownership

CITY OF RESIDENCE: Socorro

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Mayor of Socorro for 32 years

EDUCATION: University of Kansas, Bachelor of Science and medical degree

CAMPAIGN WEBSITE: RaviForNM.com

1. New Mexico is highly reliant on the oil and natural gas industries to generate revenue to fund state programs, as evidenced by recent oil boom and bust cycles. What steps should the Legislature take to diversify the states economy and revenue base?

A total overhaul of our tax structure at all levels to ensure we are competitive with our neighboring states. To attract the employers, we need to offer safe communities, an educated workforce and a fair tax structure.

2. During the last regular legislative session, there was an unsuccessful push to make it easier to keep certain defendants behind bars until trial. Should New Mexico law be changed to make it easier to hold individuals charged with violent offenses such as murder and first-degree child abuse behind bars until trial?

Yes. The first and most important role of government is to ensure a safe community.

3. What steps should the Legislature take to address crime and public safety amid a rise in violent crime rates?

One step is making it easier to retain those charged with violent crimes. Judges need more latitude in sentencing. More police officers with improved funding for police, especially for rural communities, more training of police officers. Programs to attract police officers such as allow for rehiring of retired police officers.

4. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its gross receipts tax code?

New Mexico is the only state utilizing gross receipts tax with problems of double taxation and benefiting out of state providers over local businesses. The concept of gross receipts should be eliminated or replaced with sales tax.

5. New Mexico is currently the only state that does not pay its legislators a salary, though lawmakers do get per diem payments and can qualify for a legislative pension. Do you support or oppose a salaried Legislature and, if so, how much should lawmakers be paid?

Support.

6. What more, if anything, should the Legislature do to address a court ruling that found New Mexico is failing to provide a sufficient education to all students, especially Native Americans and those who dont speak English as a first language?

Ensure every student in New Mexico has access to high-speed internet and increase the funding formula related to at-risk kids especially in rural New Mexico. We need to encourage and offer incentives to teachers speaking Native languages.

7. What should be the priority as New Mexico seeks to strengthen its health care system? How should the state address a shortage of nurses and other health care workers?

Health issues are my main focus. I served two years in the National Health Service in Carrizozo. I understand the problems facing rural health care. We need to offer student loan forgiveness for serving in rural New Mexico; as well as other incentives such as low interest, low down payment home loans.

8. In recent years, New Mexico has steadily increased spending on early childhood programs, such as home visiting, prekindergarten and child care assistance, and created a new early childhood trust fund. Do you support or oppose the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would withdraw more money from the states permanent school fund to increase funding for early childhood services and K-12 education?

Support.

9. In order to address climate change and air quality issues, do you support or oppose legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions and requiring the state achieve net-zero emissions by 2050?

Support the goal.

10. New Mexico recently became the 17th state to regulate and tax recreational cannabis sales? What, if any, changes do you believe should be made to the existing law?

Support safeguards to keep cannabis from children and ensure edibles are not packed in a way to entice kids. Other needs to regulate may develop over time.

11. Do you believe changes should be made to the emergency powers held by a governor during a pandemic or other time of crisis. If so, do you believe such powers should be expanded or reduced and in what specific ways?

The Office of the Governor should have emergency powers during any declared time of crisis. There should be a set time frame (120 or 180 days) after which the Legislature must renew the authorization, or restrict the authorization.

12. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its election laws and primary system? Do you support or oppose opening the states primary elections to voters who arent affiliated with either major political party?

I see no need for changes at this time.

13. Would you support a merit-based evaluation system to determine how the state spends its capital outlay funding?

I would support an evaluation system of each submission to advise legislators as to the feasibility of each project, but the final decision would be the individual legislator who knows their communities best.

14. Do you support or oppose authorizing an independent redistricting commission to perform the once-per-decade task of redrawing New Mexicos political boundary lines?

I support the system that was used successfully this redistricting with an independent commission advising the Legislature.

Personal background

1. Have you or your business, if you are a business owner, ever been the subject of any state or federal tax liens?

No.

2. Have you ever been involved in a personal or business bankruptcy proceeding?

No.

3. Have you ever been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of drunken driving, any misdemeanor or any felony in New Mexico or any other state? If so, explain.

In 2003, I received a DWI. It was a lesson I have never forgotten. I have not been stopped for any traffic infraction since.
NAME: Roger Montoya

POLITICAL PARTY: Democratic

OCCUPATION: Artist/nonprofit founder

CITY OF RESIDENCE: Velarde

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: 2018 CNN Hero, co-founder of Moving Arts Espanola (2008); co-founder of Espanola Pathways Shelter (2019); co-founder of La Tierra Montessori School of the Arts and Sciences (2011); founded Arts in the Schools program for the Espanola Public Schools (2002)

EDUCATION: Long Beach City College, A.A.; attended California State Long Beach

CAMPAIGN WEBSITE: rogerfornm.com

1. New Mexico is highly reliant on the oil and natural gas industries to generate revenue to fund state programs, as evidenced by recent oil boom and bust cycles. What steps should the Legislature take to diversify the states economy and revenue base?

An immediate shift away from oil/gas would be a mistake. We need a clear transition to renewables  wind, solar and geothermal technologies that follow science, address climate change and diversify our economy. The fixation on hydrogen, which uses precious water and natural gas, is a false solution as carbon reducing technology already exists.

2. During the last regular legislative session, there was an unsuccessful push to make it easier to keep certain defendants behind bars until trial. Should New Mexico law be changed to make it easier to hold individuals charged with violent offenses such as murder and first-degree child abuse behind bars until trial?

The safety and well being of every New Mexican is paramount. I believe that violent offenders who commit heinous crimes such as murder or first-degree child abuse should not be released before trial.

3. What steps should the Legislature take to address crime and public safety amid a rise in violent crime rates?

The high level crime rates must be addressed with increased law enforcement with a strategic focus on appropriate training and compensation. We must also provide an array of team members with skills in crisis intervention, social work and mental/behavioral health. We must address the root cause(s) of criminal behavior, support community policing and LEAD programs and allow CPSWs to support those with addictions.

4. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its gross receipts tax code?

Our state is sitting on record revenues. We need a revamp of our tax code that provides substantial tax incentives for small businesses to thrive. I would propose suspending the GRT for small and start up businesses with less than 10 employees and eliminating taxes that severely harm our rural communities.

5. New Mexico is currently the only state that does not pay its legislators a salary, though lawmakers do get per diem payments and can qualify for a legislative pension. Do you support or oppose a salaried Legislature and, if so, how much should lawmakers be paid?

I support a salaried legislature with paid staff. As a legislator outside of leadership with professional staff, I plan to introduce legislation that professionalizes our body. The lack of pay for members of our body correlates to our states ranking across all sectors and bars great New Mexicans from serving.

6. What more, if anything, should the Legislature do to address a court ruling that found New Mexico is failing to provide a sufficient education to all students, especially Native Americans and those who dont speak English as a first language?

We must design systems that celebrate culturally and linguistically relevant curricula to reflect local institutions and communities. It is time our legislative body fully funds all recommendations of the Yazzie/Martinez case, embraces the tribal remedy framework and allows communities to have a role in the education of their children.

7. What should be the priority as New Mexico seeks to strengthen its health care system? How should the state address a shortage of nurses and other health care workers?

We must uplift our health care system and give voice to those who fully understand the gaps and remedies required. We must build early elementary, high school, college and dual credit programs to mobilize a new generation of health care providers and expose young minds to this thriving industry.

8. In recent years, New Mexico has steadily increased spending on early childhood programs, such as home visiting, prekindergarten and child care assistance, and created a new early childhood trust fund. Do you support or oppose the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would withdraw more money from the states permanent school fund to increase funding for early childhood services and K-12 education?

Yes I do. I have seen the positive results of prenatal parenting classes  as a child takes their first breath and after. This critical 0-3 year period of childhood growth and development is when a child bonds with parents or caregivers with authentic attachment. This essential brain stimulation sets the stage for maximized life long learning.

9. In order to address climate change and air quality issues, do you support or oppose legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions and requiring the state achieve net-zero emissions by 2050?

Yes, I support such legislation.

10. New Mexico recently became the 17th state to regulate and tax recreational cannabis sales? What, if any, changes do you believe should be made to the existing law?

The current laws gave substantial advantage to large scale growers and producers over upstart entrepreneurs. I would like to see resources and technical support for rural businesses to enter and thrive in this new industry. I would like to see a percentage of revenue from cannabis taxation used for youth development programs that target 12-20 years old.

11. Do you believe changes should be made to the emergency powers held by a governor during a pandemic or other time of crisis. If so, do you believe such powers should be expanded or reduced and in what specific ways?

I believe our governor should have every tool available to keep the residents of New Mexico safe during a time of crisis or in an emergency. COVID-19 was an unknown challenge none of us were prepared for. Limiting the governors authority at that time would have resulted in the deaths of more New Mexicans.

12. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its election laws and primary system? Do you support or oppose opening the states primary elections to voters who arent affiliated with either major political party?

Yes, I would support including independents and others to participate in primary elections.

13. Would you support a merit-based evaluation system to determine how the state spends its capital outlay funding?

I believe the capital outlay funding system could benefit from a merit based system.

14. Do you support or oppose authorizing an independent redistricting commission to perform the once-per-decade task of redrawing New Mexicos political boundary lines?

Yes, but only if we could ensure that the independent body was indeed unbiased.

Personal background

1. Have you or your business, if you are a business owner, ever been the subject of any state or federal tax liens?

Yes. I have paid off a personal state income tax lien of $8,200.

2. Have you ever been involved in a personal or business bankruptcy proceeding?

No.

3. Have you ever been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of drunken driving, any misdemeanor or any felony in New Mexico or any other state? If so, explain.

No.
NAME: Joseph L. Sanchez

POLITICAL PARTY: Democratic

OCCUPATION: Electrical engineer

CITY OF RESIDENCE: Alcalde

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Former state representative District-40, former vice-chair House Appropriations and Finance Committee

EDUCATION: Bachelors and masters degrees in electrical engineering from the University of New Mexico, and Masterof Business Administration from New Mexico State University

CAMPAIGN WEBSITE: josephsanchezfornm.com

1. New Mexico is highly reliant on the oil and natural gas industries to generate revenue to fund state programs, as evidenced by recent oil boom and bust cycles. What steps should the Legislature take to diversify the states economy and revenue base?

We need to eliminate the barriers to doing business in New Mexico by simplifying everywhere we can. In addition, we should expand our economy by becoming a hydrogen hub while working to make renewable energy a bigger piece of the economic picture.

2. During the last regular legislative session, there was an unsuccessful push to make it easier to keep certain defendants behind bars until trial. Should New Mexico law be changed to make it easier to hold individuals charged with violent offenses such as murder and first-degree child abuse behind bars until trial?

Crime is out of control. We need to change our laws to keep criminals behind bars while putting in place programs that reduce the recidivism rate. In addition, we need to hold our judges accountable for the actions they take.

3. What steps should the Legislature take to address crime and public safety amid a rise in violent crime rates?

Many of our crime problems can be solved by improving our economy and our education system while providing more opportunities for our children. In the short term we need more police on our streets and we need to hold criminals accountable for their actions.

4. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its gross receipts tax code?

Tax pyramiding under the GRT needs to end. In addition, we should end many of the exemptions and deductions under our current system to expand the tax base. Ultimately ending the gross receipts tax by finding consensus on the best replacement is necessary.

5. New Mexico is currently the only state that does not pay its legislators a salary, though lawmakers do get per diem payments and can qualify for a legislative pension. Do you support or oppose a salaried Legislature and, if so, how much should lawmakers be paid?

We need to put this issue to a vote of the citizens to determine if legislators will be paid and what they will be paid. Having a salary in place for legislators may attract more people to run for office knowing they will be compensated for their time.

6. What more, if anything, should the Legislature do to address a court ruling that found New Mexico is failing to provide a sufficient education to all students, especially Native Americans and those who dont speak English as a first language?

Schools must receive adequate funding while students learn in facilities that are conducive to quality education. This is especially true for schools that serve Native American and ESL populations. These students deserve to have a quality education and to stop being overlooked by the adults running the system.

7. What should be the priority as New Mexico seeks to strengthen its health care system? How should the state address a shortage of nurses and other health care workers?

We should be making structural and regulatory changes to our health care system to allow for additional practitioners to come to the state. Reducing the time to receive a license is needed. We must open licensing reciprocity for professionals coming from other states to make it easier to attract talent.

8. In recent years, New Mexico has steadily increased spending on early childhood programs, such as home visiting, prekindergarten and child care assistance, and created a new early childhood trust fund. Do you support or oppose the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would withdraw more money from the states permanent school fund to increase funding for early childhood services and K-12 education?

I support early childhood programs because they are important to the development of our children. The withdrawals come with protections to ensure the fund does not ever go away while providing a system to give our children the best possible start to their education.

9. In order to address climate change and air quality issues, do you support or oppose legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions and requiring the state achieve net-zero emissions by 2050?

I support well thought out legislation arrived at through a collaborative process, done responsibly, and that will not raise rates on New Mexicans, a majority of whom are some of the poorest in the country. We can protect the climate while taking care of our family, friends and neighbors.

10. New Mexico recently became the 17th state to regulate and tax recreational cannabis sales? What, if any, changes do you believe should be made to the existing law?

Cannabis microbusinesses promise to help those who have been disproportionately impacted by the war on drugs as well as minority communities. The micro retailers must be allowed to sell products that other cannabis producers manufacture or grow, not just their own.

11. Do you believe changes should be made to the emergency powers held by a governor during a pandemic or other time of crisis. If so, do you believe such powers should be expanded or reduced and in what specific ways?

We are two coequal branches of government and no one branch should have more power than the other. Emergency powers that are granted by law should face careful scrutiny by the Legislature to see if they are effective, too broad reaching, and are detrimental to our way of life.

12. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its election laws and primary system? Do you support or oppose opening the states primary elections to voters who arent affiliated with either major political party?

I fully support open primaries. With closed primaries we often see the extremes of both parties represented at the ballot box moving into the general election. Closed primaries do not serve the best interests of New Mexicans.

13. Would you support a merit-based evaluation system to determine how the state spends its capital outlay funding?

Our capital outlay system is broken. This type of proposal needs to be looked into closely. My concern is that big cities such as Albuquerque and Santa Fe will benefit more than rural areas if this is not done correctly.

14. Do you support or oppose authorizing an independent redistricting commission to perform the once-per-decade task of redrawing New Mexicos political boundary lines?

I support a truly independent redistricting commission. The commission must be free of politicians and politics with members selected from the general public through some type of application process.

Personal backround

1. Have you or your business, if you are a business owner, ever been the subject of any state or federal tax liens?

No.

2. Have you ever been involved in a personal or business bankruptcy proceeding?

No.

3. Have you ever been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of drunken driving, any misdemeanor or any felony in New Mexico or any other state? If so, explain.

Approximately 12 years ago, I failed to appear in connection with a routine traffic citation in Santa Fe. I was subsequently charged with failing to appear. After appearing on this charge, the matter was resolved, and charges dismissed.
NAME: Susan Herrera

POLITICAL PARTY: Democratic

OCCUPATION: Retired

CITY OF RESIDENCE: Embudo

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Executive director, Congressional Hispanic Caucus in Washington, D.C. Executive director, LANL Foundation from 1993-2016.

EDUCATION: B.A., university studies, University of New Mexico

CAMPAIGN WEBSITE: Susanherrera.com

1. New Mexico is highly reliant on the oil and natural gas industries to generate revenue to fund state programs, as evidenced by recent oil boom and bust cycles. What steps should the Legislature take to diversify the states economy and revenue base?

A strong economy is a diverse economy. We must build upon our strengths, use our proximity to the border to expand trade, manufacturing, tourism, agriculture, technology and renewable energy. We need high quality schools and basic infrastructure in rural communities including broadband, sustainable drinking water and wastewater systems to ensure rural development.

2. During the last regular legislative session, there was an unsuccessful push to make it easier to keep certain defendants behind bars until trial. Should New Mexico law be changed to make it easier to hold individuals charged with violent offenses such as murder and first-degree child abuse behind bars until trial?

The American Constitution states that we are innocent until proven guilty. Do I deplore the fact that we have a catch and release problem? Yes. Do we jail people, destroying their family, their livelihood, and then find out that they are not guilty? This is our dilemma.

3. What steps should the Legislature take to address crime and public safety amid a rise in violent crime rates?

The legislature recently increased pay for State Police officers. Salary increases are necessary, but local government cannot compete with State Police salaries, and often lose their officers to the State Police. What we need to do is provide funding to increase law enforcement salaries at the local level.

4. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its gross receipts tax code?

With a positive economic forecast for the next five years, it is possible to see how we can create a more equitable tax system. 2019 began a new tax reform era led by Rep. Jim Trujillo. Rep. Christine Chandler is leading the way for an innovative approach in taxation for 2023.

5. New Mexico is currently the only state that does not pay its legislators a salary, though lawmakers do get per diem payments and can qualify for a legislative pension. Do you support or oppose a salaried Legislature and, if so, how much should lawmakers be paid?

Its time to end the volunteer legislature. I support a full-time legislator. I believe legislators should earn a salary comparable to professionals in the private sector. Furthermore, I support an overhaul of legislative operations, such as providing staff for constituent services, district offices and longer sessions.

6. What more, if anything, should the Legislature do to address a court ruling that found New Mexico is failing to provide a sufficient education to all students, especially Native Americans and those who dont speak English as a first language?

New Mexico is recruiting and hiring more Native American and ESL teachers, as well as educational assistants fluent in their native language. We increased teacher pay, expanded early childhood education, and implemented several other initiatives, which should help address the shortcomings found in Martinez-Yazzie.

7. What should be the priority as New Mexico seeks to strengthen its health care system? How should the state address a shortage of nurses and other health care workers?

I worked in a nursing program at Northern New Mexico Community College which enrolled over 80 nurses in a four-year degree program. These Hispanic nurses eventually created the health care leadership in the north. We need to create rural university programs that provide education attainment leading to a higher degree

8. In recent years, New Mexico has steadily increased spending on early childhood programs, such as home visiting, prekindergarten and childcare assistance, and created a new early childhood trust fund. Do you support or oppose the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would withdraw more money from the states permanent school fund to increase funding for early childhood services and K-12 education?

Yes, I support the proposed constitutional amendment because it places the resources where they are needed most, in early education.

9. In order to address climate change and air quality issues, do you support or oppose legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions and requiring the state achieve net-zero emissions by 2050?

Yes, I support this legislation. I believe that New Mexico can generate enough renewable energy to eventually replace fossil fuel extraction. Our climate, sunshine, universities and national laboratories give New Mexico a unique advantage in the generation of renewable energy.

10. New Mexico recently became the 17th state to regulate and tax recreational cannabis sales? What, if any, changes do you believe should be made to the existing law?

Before proposing changes, we need to see how the program works. I will do all I can to ensure local distributors and growers have the same opportunities large scale out of state operations do.

11. Do you believe changes should be made to the emergency powers held by a governor during a pandemic or other time of crisis. If so, do you believe such powers should be expanded or reduced and in what specific ways?

The pandemic was difficult for all New Mexicans, we all had to make sacrifices. The emergency powers act was authored to keep New Mexicans safe. However, I believe some of these powers belong to the legislative branch in coordination with governor.

12. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its election laws and primary system? Do you support or oppose opening the states primary elections to voters who arent affiliated with either major political party?

New Mexico took a huge step forward in allowing same day voter registration, allowing people to change political parties for primary elections. To date, the two major party system has worked for our country. Right now, the upheaval in the Republican party is leading everyone to reexamine our system.

13. Would you support a merit-based evaluation system to determine how the state spends its capital outlay funding?

The devils in the details. Before I would support a merit-based system I would have to see how it affects rural communities.

14. Do you support or oppose authorizing an independent redistricting commission to perform the once-per-decade task of redrawing New Mexicos political boundary lines?

No. There is no guarantee that an independent redistricting commission would be better than the current system. I think this process should be left with the Legislature, the representative body closest to the people and therefore, closest to the best decision making process possible.

Personal background

1. Have you or your business, if you are a business owner, ever been the subject of any state or federal tax liens?

No.

2. Have you ever been involved in a personal or business bankruptcy proceeding?

No.

3. Have you ever been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of drunken driving, any misdemeanor or any felony in New Mexico or any other state? If so, explain.

No.
NAME: Florence Miera

POLITICAL PARTY: Democratic

OCCUPATION: Clinical social worker

CITY OF RESIDENCE: Taos

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: 2004 Office of The Governor, constituent services, supervisor Becky Gear (intern B.A. SW) Office of The Governor, crime policy advisor, Bob Swartz supervisor (M.A. intern)

EDUCATION: A.A. in human services, B.A. in social work, M.A. in community organizing and administrative practices

CAMPAIGN WEBSITE: florencemierataos.com

1. New Mexico is highly reliant on the oil and natural gas industries to generate revenue to fund state programs, as evidenced by recent oil boom and bust cycles. What steps should the Legislature take to diversify the states economy and revenue base?

They have taken the first step with legalization of marijuana. Encourage and support new business to support open shop in District 42; it is well known that small business goes back to the community. Simultaneously diversify the economic growth, from food production, farming, ranching and partner with solar and wind energy to support local colleges to build homes that are energy efficient.

2. During the last regular legislative session, there was an unsuccessful push to make it easier to keep certain defendants behind bars until trial. Should New Mexico law be changed to make it easier to hold individuals charged with violent offenses such as murder and first-degree child abuse behind bars until trial?

Yes. The judicial system has been broken for many years, I am committed to sit down with all stakeholders and work on making the changes so that our children and the community is a safe place to live. I will advocate for more resources for nonviolent crimes to help break the cycles of repeat offenders.

3. What steps should the Legislature take to address crime and public safety amid a rise in violent crime rates?

Prevention is always key. Provide resources for programing and educational opportunities, giving them a chance to turn themselves around. Make sure that the prisons are preparing the violent criminal for release. Intervention programs to address the trauma. One-hundred percent community in place to address the trauma and help people to become productive citizens.

4. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its gross receipts tax code?

I believe some adjustments can be made, specifically to assist small business. We should work together to address the local government and produce a solution that does not continue to hurt small business but also does not interfere with the ability to operate local government. The impact of paying so much when you are the little guy.

5. New Mexico is currently the only state that does not pay its legislators a salary, though lawmakers do get per diem payments and can qualify for a legislative pension. Do you support or oppose a salaried Legislature and, if so, how much should lawmakers be paid?

Yes, New Mexico needs to have a legislator that works year around to address the pressing issues of the state. It is difficult to address education, crime, economic insecurities, and the state budget in a 30- or 60-day session. NM will continue to fail if we do not invest more time. I do applaud the Legislators for their dedication in the time they are given.

6. What more, if anything, should the Legislature do to address a court ruling that found New Mexico is failing to provide a sufficient education to all students, especially Native Americans and those who do not speak English as a first language?

The most important thing we can do is educate all children early. Help the parents, grandparents, and caretaker of the Native American, English language learners understand how important early education/behavioral intervention is on the young developing mind. Then make sure that all of them have equal opportunity to attend college; whether academic or skill-based learning.

7. What should be the priority as New Mexico seeks to strengthen its health care system? How should the state address a shortage of nurses and other health care workers?

Treat people with respect, make it a win-win. Listen to all involved. COVID has impacted our health system in so many ways. The staff is overworked and underpaid for the trauma they have endured. We will need to bring all stakeholders to the table for an honest conversation about how to support the staff, patients and the community.

8. In recent years, New Mexico has steadily increased spending on early childhood programs, such as home visiting, prekindergarten, and childcare assistance, and created a new early childhood trust fund. Do you support or oppose the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would withdraw more money from the states permanent school fund to increase funding for early childhood services and K-12 education?

I completely support prevention to benefit them later in life, we will have a healthier New Mexico if we focus on the children.

9. In order to address climate change and air quality issues, do you support or oppose legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions and requiring the state achieve net-zero emissions by 2050?

I do support transition, however not at the risk of forgetting the people of New Mexico. If most of the funding is going toward green and the only ones supporting the education system and mental health issues is gas and oil; we need to transition and speak honestly about the people who are dying daily due to COVID, hunger, substance use and trauma related issues.

10. New Mexico recently became the 17th state to regulate and tax recreational cannabis sales? What, if any, changes do you believe should be made to the existing law?

Need to look at this further to understand the impact on the communities and how much will go back to the communities.

11. Do you believe changes should be made to the emergency powers held by a governor during a pandemic or other time of crisis. If so, do you believe such powers should be expanded or reduced and in what specific ways?

I do not believe any changes should be made.

12. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its election laws and primary system? Do you support or oppose opening the states primary elections to voters who are not affiliated with either major political party?

Yes, every voice should be heard.

13. Would you support a merit-based evaluation system to determine how the state spends its capital outlay funding?

Yes, it would allow us to work more closely with local government and other stakeholders to fully fund projects in the communities and the taxpayer money is used properly.

14. Do you support or oppose authorizing an independent redistricting commission to perform the once-per-decade task of redrawing New Mexicos political boundary lines?

Yes, it takes out the politics.

Personal background

1. Have you or your business, if you are a business owner, ever been the subject of any state or federal tax liens?

No.

2. Have you ever been involved in a personal or business bankruptcy proceeding?

Yes, I filed personal bankruptcy in my 20s.

3. Have you ever been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of drunken driving, any misdemeanor or any felony in New Mexico or any other state? If so, explain.

No.
NAME: Elaine Sena Cortez

POLITICAL PARTY: Republican

OCCUPATION: Nonprofit executive director  MyPower Inc. and professor of business  University of the Southwest

CITY OF RESIDENCE: Hobbs

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: 35 year resident of Hobbs; background as a reacher, principal, overseas director, nonprofit executive director, and professor of business

EDUCATION: Doctorate  business administration, masters degree  business administration and bachelors degree  business administration

CAMPAIGN WEBSITE: elainesenacortez.com

1. New Mexico is highly reliant on the oil and natural gas industries to generate revenue to fund state programs, as evidenced by recent oil boom and bust cycles. What steps should the Legislature take to diversify the states economy and revenue base?

The Legislature must support the oil and gas industry first. The profits from the oil and gas industry will afford the state the opportunity to invest in other industries  rather than inflate the state budget as theyve done in 2022  which in turn will lead to economic diversity.

2. During the last regular legislative session, there was an unsuccessful push to make it easier to keep certain defendants behind bars until trial. Should New Mexico law be changed to make it easier to hold individuals charged with violent offenses such as murder and first-degree child abuse behind bars until trial?

Yes. In 2016, the Legislature sold New Mexicans a promise that a constitutional amendment to Article 2, Section 13, would keep dangerous criminals behind bars pending trial. This promise has proven false. The language of the amendment places an untenable burden on the prosecution and must be changed.

3. What steps should the Legislature take to address crime and public safety amid a rise in violent crime rates?

The Legislature must end its war on law enforcement. New Mexico must embrace and welcome the men and women that willingly sacrifice their lives for complete strangers. The Legislature must commit to both investing in training for our law enforcement and holding criminals accountable for their acts.

4. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its gross receipts tax code?

New Mexico should amend HB 6 (2019) to remove services from destination-based taxing. Additionally, the Legislature should require transparency from the New Mexico Taxation and Revenue Department, especially related to clawbacks following amended returns. Both of these measures strip local governments of millions of dollars  funds which could be used to directly support public safety.

5. New Mexico is currently the only state that does not pay its legislators a salary, though lawmakers do get per diem payments and can qualify for a legislative pension. Do you support or oppose a salaried Legislature and, if so, how much should lawmakers be paid?

The choice to have a salaried Legislature should remain with the voters alone. I support their will, however, if legislators are paid, I am firmly in support of placing term limits on legislators. This measure would protect the public from the proliferation of career politicians in New Mexico.

6. What more, if anything, should the Legislature do to address a court ruling that found New Mexico is failing to provide a sufficient education to all students, especially Native Americans and those who dont speak English as a first language?

The Legislature must give educational control back to local school boards. Attempting a one-size fits all model promulgated by the state has landed New Mexico consistently last, or near last, in education year after year. The Public Education Department should serve only to support local school boards.

7. What should be the priority as New Mexico seeks to strengthen its health care system? How should the state address a shortage of nurses and other health care workers?

New Mexico must incentivize hospitals to come to the state. Neighboring states have proven that this measure works to establish hospitals in rural communities. Additionally, the establishment of more than one medical school in the state would serve to increase young health care professionals available to work in the state.

8. In recent years, New Mexico has steadily increased spending on early childhood programs, such as home visiting, prekindergarten and child care assistance, and created a new early childhood trust fund. Do you support or oppose the proposed constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would withdraw more money from the states permanent school fund to increase funding for early childhood services and K-12 education?

It is a false premise to believe that throwing money at a problem will solve that issue. Our state is experiencing a crisis of the family. No matter how well intended, the government cannot provide the moral trajectory our youth need to become successful adults.

9. In order to address climate change and air quality issues, do you support or oppose legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions and requiring the state achieve net-zero emissions by 2050?

A state that spans over 121,000 square miles with only 2 million people cannot itself solve the global problem of climate change. While nations pollute the atmosphere freely, it is abundantly clear that the goal of zero emissions will serve only as a market shift benefitting green energy companies.

10. New Mexico recently became the 17th state to regulate and tax recreational cannabis sales? What, if any, changes do you believe should be made to the existing law?

The Cannabis Regulation Act must be amended to allow local governments to have more authority over the industry. A local community should be able to decide whether or not to allow cannabis establishments near amenities such as ball fields, parks, recreation facilities, and residential neighborhoods.

11. Do you believe changes should be made to the emergency powers held by a governor during a pandemic or other time of crisis. If so, do you believe such powers should be expanded or reduced and in what specific ways?

Unequivocally, yes. The law should establish a time limit in which the governor can exercise emergency powers during a public health emergency or time of crisis. Thereafter, the governors powers should be limited to only those powers authorized by the Legislature. This establishes a necessary separation of powers.

12. What changes, if any, should New Mexico make to its election laws and primary system? Do you support or oppose opening the states primary elections to voters who arent affiliated with either major political party?

I am opposed to open primaries. Allowing voters not affiliated with a party to vote in that partys primary only opens the door for political gamesmanship. Each party should present its best and brightest candidates from which the public can choose in the general election.

13. Would you support a merit-based evaluation system to determine how the state spends its capital outlay funding?

A merit-based evaluation system is illusory. Not all capital outlay projects serve the same purpose. A fire truck in rural New Mexico may be a bigger need than a building upgrade elsewhere. Each government entity should receive just consideration for funding of their capital projects.

14. Do you support or oppose authorizing an independent redistricting commission to perform the once-per-decade task of redrawing New Mexicos political boundary lines?

The scope of the authorization of a redistricting commission is material. In 2021, the redistricting committee proved to have no authorization as the Legislature disregarded the months of work done and instead opted to take a partisan approach to redistricting. I would support a bipartisan and truly independent commission.

Personal background

1. Have you or your business, if you are a business owner, ever been the subject of any state or federal tax liens?

No.

2. Have you ever been involved in a personal or business bankruptcy proceeding?

No.

3. Have you ever been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of drunken driving, any misdemeanor or any felony in New Mexico or any other state? If so, explain.

No.
Employees process packages at the 2.5 million-square-foot Amazon ABQ1 warehouse, located at 12945 Ladera NW. Amazon says it employs more than 3,500 across its New Mexico operations. (Adolphe Pierre-Louis/Albuquerque Journal) Process assistant Chris Wilson scans packages at the Amazon ABQ1 warehouse on Wednesday. (Adolphe Pierre-Louis/Albuquerque Journal) Packages on a conveyor belt are scanned for shipping at Amazons fulfillment center on Albuquerques West Side. The facility opened last fall. (Adolphe Pierre-Louis/Albuquerque Journal) Amazons 2.5 million-square-foot facility includes over 10 miles of conveyance and 4,000 robotics drives, the company said, which makes it one of Amazons most technologically advanced fulfillment centers in the country. (Adolphe Pierre-Louis/Albuquerque Journal) Robots handle packages at the Amazon fulfillment center. The facility boasts more than 4,000 robotics drives across its warehouse operations. (Adolphe Pierre-Louis/Albuquerque Journal) Prev 1 of 5 Next

Copyright  2022 Albuquerque Journal

From the outside, the facility looks as if it can fit a small town into it. And it probably can.

Amazons newest fulfillment center, which opened on Albuquerques West Side last fall, spans about 2.5 million square feet. Located at 12945 Ladera NW, the facility was built using about 20,000 tons of steel  equivalent to the amount of steel in three Eiffel Towers, said Dan Monson, assistant general manager for the fulfillment center.

The facility also has about 10 miles of conveyance and over 4,000 robotics drives, which serve to make the lives and jobs of our associates easier and safer, Monson said. That ease in work from the help of technology allows the facility to process 10 packages per second.

Media members and city and state officials joined Amazon on Wednesday to tour the fulfillment center  the first official tour, Amazon officials said  to get a look into how the company that employs more than 3,500 in the state operates at its largest facility. The company also presented to the Economic Forum of Albuquerque at Hotel Albuquerque Wednesday morning, giving an update on the companys happenings in the state.

Were bullish on New Mexico, said Amazon economic development policy manager for the Mountain West region, Sam Bailey, whose company also has nearby facilities for sorting and delivery. The company is also planning another massive fulfillment center in Los Lunas.

Local impact

Amazon officials said Wednesday that the company has invested more than $250 million in the state since first expanding into New Mexico.

Bailey said the company typically gravitates toward states that it can create a synergy with so that it can become a hyperlocal company. He said there is room to invest more into New Mexico but that there are no plans yet outside of finishing the fulfillment center in Los Lunas.

When we start to evaluate where customer demand is coming from, we want to be able to service them as quickly as possible, Bailey said. And so, with New Mexico, weve validated this as a strong market for customers, and the sites that we choose connect us to our customers and logistics supply chain so we can do that in an efficient manner.

The company currently has a fulfillment center, sortation center and delivery center on Albuquerques West Side and is planning another 1 million-square-foot facility in Los Lunas.

Bailey told the Journal that the new fulfillment center south of Albuquerque will employ about 600 workers when all is said and done. He declined to comment on a launch date for the new facility and said Amazon has yet to hire employees for it but said that supply chain issues have affected the timeline of the build-out.

The fulfillment center in Los Lunas will deal with non-sortable items  typically larger products such as televisions.

Asked if Amazon sees any opportunities for expansion in New Mexico, Bailey said our great experience in New Mexico allows us to see future opportunities.

Benefits for employees

While hiring has been a challenge for many New Mexico employers, Bailey said Amazon has had no trouble bringing on local workers.

Amazon, whose goal is to be the most employee-friendly company, offers up a variety of incentives to its workforce, including benefits for its full-time employees, Amazon officials said, on top of pay that starts at $15.50 for entry-level positions.

The West Side facility offers a wellness center for employees, helping them maintain a healthy life in and outside of work.

The facility includes vending machines that have items such as Tylenol, ibuprofen, Tums and cough drops  all available free of charge with a swipe of an employee badge. And, if an employee forgets their vest for work, well, they can get one from a vending machine, too.

Amazon says it offers paid maternity and paternity leave and, as of last September, began offering employees who have stayed with the company more than 90 days a full-ride scholarship to pursue an associates or bachelors degree.

That benefit is not a reimbursement.  Its Amazon paying with you as you go to ensure that youre not taking on that financial burden, Bailey said. Some may see that as a fools errand. We see this as a great opportunity where we invest in resume building (and) transferable job skills. Our hope is that they stay with us.

Editors note: This story included an incorrect amount that Amazon has invested in New Mexico. The company has invested more than $250 million. This story has been updated.
Everything Everywhere All at Once is your standard multiverse martial arts movie about filing your taxes and midlife regret in which googly eyes, everything bagels and fanny packs play vital supporting roles and portals to parallel existences are opened not with a spell but with butt plugs and paper cuts.

The movie is by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the filmmaking duo known as the Daniels, whose first film, the buddy movie Swiss Army Man, co-starred Daniel Radcliffe as a very flatulent corpse.

Everything Everywhere All at Once, though, is more ambitious. Its possible that the distance has never before been so great between a movies mundane storyline  in this case, a Chinese immigrant laundromat owner trying to file her taxes  and what extreme shape it takes. Rarely has a trip to the IRS yielded such cosmic, metaphysical digressions as it does in Everything Everywhere at Once, an antic, anarchic and yet affecting movie with the spin cycle set to supercollider.

The universe is so much bigger than you realize, says Joy (Stephanie Hsu), daughter of Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), at one point in the film.

And though Everything Everywhere All at Once (a movie that very much lives up to its title) can verge on overload, its this liberating sense of limitless possibility that the movie leaves you filled with, both in its freewheeling anything-goes playfulness and in its surprisingly tender portrait of existential despair. Quite an accomplishment for a film that hinges on properly formatted tax receipts.

In the movies chaotic first moments, Evelyn is balancing piles of paperwork in the apartment she shares with her kind but naive husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan, the actor famous for playing as a kid Short Round in Temple of Doom and Data in The Goonies) ahead of the impending visit of her disapproving father (James Hong, now 93 but no less animated), while attending to the needs of customers in the laundromat downstairs. At the same time, Joy is introducing her girlfriend, a label that Evelyn doesnt want her father to hear. Their fraught relationship is even clearer when Evelyn chases down Joy in the parking lot for what seems intended to be a warmer exchange. Instead, she blurts out that Joy needs to eat less.

The dissatisfaction, we immediately grasp, is really Evelyns own. Divorce papers are circulating. Yeoh, extraordinary here, plays Evelyn as frustrated and disoriented, bitter that her life has turned out to be a circle of laundry and taxes. Something has gone terribly wrong. When she, Waymond and her dad go to visit the IRS auditor (Jamie Lee Curtis), their humdrum reality starts to cleave in ways that will scrutinize the choices Evelyn has made leading to this scattered moment.

There at the IRS, while Evelyn is half-listening to how she might lose her business, a metaverse intrudes. A more capable version of Waymond hailing from another dimension (the alpha verse) takes her aside to warn of a new evil that is tearing through the many levels of existence that, he explains, were all created by each decision Evelyn has ever made. Spider-Man fused planes of roughly similar superhero realms, but Evelyns multiverse is an infinite matrix of what might have been.

Its possible that Im making Everything Everywhere All at Once sound clearer than it actually comes across. These things get explained but the pace is never not hectic. And while most science-fiction films belabor the rules that govern such splintered worlds, the Daniels film simply takes whats at hand to make its verse-jumping. Its an absurdist Charlie Kaufman-esque series of worlds that connect Evelyn with other versions of how her life might have turned out, for example, if she didnt marry Waymond. In one, Evelyn is a famous movie star  essentially Yeoh, herself  with footage from her actual Crazy Rich Asians premieres. In another, silkily styled after Wong Kar-Wais In the Mood for Love, she and Waymond encounter each other later in life.

But plenty of the alternate realities are gleefully ridiculous. In one, people evolve with hot dogs for fingers, leaving them to play Chopin with their feet. Another is a wild riff on Ratatouille, only, thanks to Evelyns mispronunciation, its with a raccoon for a tiny chef.

As boundless as Everything Everywhere All at Once is, its a fairly claustrophobic movie  the multiverses mostly collide in Evelyns present reality. No matter what timeline its flittering through, its really set within the psychology of Evelyn and Joy. Its a proxy version of the daughter thats causing all the trouble in the various universes. And as absurd as things get, the movie is impressively focused on working out the deep-seated pains and pangs of insignificance that are fueling all the havoc. The performances, somehow, are grounded throughout. Theres not a weak link in the cast but its a special joy to see  and hear  Quan again.

The frantically edited filmmaking isnt always polished but its not always meant to be, either. There are echoes of movies like Kung Fu Hustle and the chaotic irreverence shares some DNA with the same plate-spinning movies of Phil Lord and Chris Miller. But Everything Everywhere All at Once, about one woman struggling to make sense of her small and disordered life, is emphatically its own thing. Next to grander and glossier metaverses, and more tidily sensible movies, Everything Everywhere stands as an antidote to algorithm. Its a preposterous and tasteless ode to the messy, nonsensical struggle and bliss of being human.
What a difference a year can make.

After more than a decade in the bluegrass scene, Bonnie Sims knows what it takes to keep a career going.

When a music festival made a request to have more females represented, they reached out to fiddle player Eve Panning.

Panning then decided to reach out to Sims, Joy Adams and Emma Rose for some ideas.

The four came together to form the bluegrass band Big Richard.

That was in May 2021.

After the first rehearsal, we were pretty hooked, Sims says. We had that one gig and became a band. We started booking shows from that point.

The Colorado-based band will make not one, but three stops in New Mexico this weekend.

The first is at the Tico Time Bluegrass Festival in Aztec on Friday, May 13.

Then the quartet heads to Santa Fe where a show at Tumbleroot Brewery & Distillery is slated for 7:30 p.m. Saturday, May 14.

At 4 p.m. Sunday, May 15, Big Richard will perform at the Taos Center for the Arts.

Over the course of the year of performing together, Sims says its been a natural evolution.

Weve been able to be creative and its been magical, she say. Aside from being super organic, musically we all felt compatible. We knew what each one of us brings to the table.

Sims performs on mandolin and guitar, while Rose concentrates on upright bass and guitar. Meanwhile, Fanning focuses on fiddle and Adams rounds out the sound with the cello.

Each one of us knows what we want to accomplish as a musician, she says. Its been pretty incredible to have these musicians by my side. Were bringing out the best in each other.

When it comes to the musical process, Sims says everyone gets a fair shake.

We try to address everything objectively, she says. We try every musical idea and give ourselves the opportunity to listen to each other.

Being an all-female group is something Sims wants to celebrate, though doesnt want to bring too much attention to.

She says theres are changes happening in the music industry that embrace women. Though it could be faster, she says.

I grew up in the bluegrass scene in Texas and Colorado is way more friendly and open to the vibe and experiences, she says. We make change with every step we take. Were walking alongside all the other women musicians.
The Taste of Nob Hill returns in all of its glory on Saturday, May 21.

Participants include Chocolate Dude, Olo Dessert Studio, Soo Bak Seoul Bowl, Two Fools Tavern, Flying Star Cafe, Slice Parlor, Tractor Brewing Co., MTuccis Bar Roma, Ajiaco Colombian Bistro, Scalo, Lizard Tail Brewing, Little Bear Coffee Co., Cinnamon Sugar & Spice Cafe, Gather/3128 Social House and the list continues to grow. The event will take place on Silver Avenue SE, between Tulane and Amherst.

Were really excited this year, to be able to go back to the 2019 version of how we did it, says Valerie Osbourn, executive director of Nob Hill Main Street.  You can purchase the tickets for $15 and that will give you 15 tickets that then you can go around to the various restaurants and breweries and get a sample of their food.

Food samples are one to two tickets each, beer or cider samples are three to five tickets each, and nonalcoholic beverages are one to three tickets each. Advance general admission is $15, plus fees, and $20, plus fees, the day of the event. General admission includes 15 sample tickets. Additional sample tickets are available for purchase for $1 each.

For a more catered experience, eventgoers can purchase VIP Lounge Entry tickets for $75, plus fees. Guests will receive 40 sample tickets and entry into the VIP Lounge area with close proximity to the music stage, comfortable seating and table service for food and beverages.

You can just hang out there and have the samples brought to you and you dont have to walk around and it will be shaded, Osbourn said. So thats a nice little VIP experience. Were just really excited to let people know that Nob Hill is still here and great things are happening. Theres new restaurants moving in and I think that this is a really exciting time for Nob Hill. We just want to celebrate that and get everyone together and get these restaurants some exposure.

The event is sponsored by Shamrock Foods and a portion of the proceeds benefits Nob Hill Main Street. The organization, established in 2009, is a grassroots collaboration of dedicated residents, small businesses and community organizations working together with local government agencies to revitalize blighted areas in the Nob Hill urban community, according to its website.

Taste of Nob Hill was forced to change its format to a walking passport version in 2020 and 2021.

I began this job as the executive director basically right when the pandemic started, Osbourn said. Ive just been emailing people and so having all these restaurant owners and managers and bars coming together as this community, it was really nice. I think people are stoked about it. And I hope that its as successful as it was in 2019 because that was a banner year for Taste of Nob Hill.
Ancient port city in Guangxi rebranded based on its contribution to historical Maritime Silk Road

People's Daily Online) 17:01, May 11, 2022

Photo shows an exhibit displayed at the Hepu Han Dynasty Museum in Beihai City, southwest Chinas Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. (People's Daily Online/Qin Xin)

An ancient port located in Hepu county of Beihai, southwest Chinas Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, is one of the three ports of departure for the Maritime Silk Road, which dates back to the Han Dynasty (202 BC  220 AD).

The port city has been a place known for its burgeoning traffic and thriving businesses throughout Chinese history. Its prosperity is recorded in over 20,000 relics, 1,300 antiques and 1,200 ancient tombs discovered in the locality.

A visitor looks at exhibits at the Hepu Han Dynasty Museum in Beihai City, southwest Chinas Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. (Photo/Courtesy of Publicity Department of the Beihai Municipal Committee)

The Hepu Han Dynasty Museum in Beihai City collects and studies the excavated artefacts and local heirlooms, ranging across a large variety and covering different eras.

The museum has since gone online as well. Nowadays, citizens can fully appreciate the delicate beauty of 362 exhibits and 41 highlights in the display, just by visiting its official platform on WeChat, a commonly used social media app in China.

A visitor takes photos of an exhibit at the Hepu Han Dynasty Museum in Beihai City, southwest Chinas Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. (People's Daily Online/Qin Xin)

Visitors can not only learn about the inherited culture of the Maritime Silk Road, but can also dive into the local history of the city as well, as one local citizen commented.

Over the years, Beihai City has worked towards building a distinctive style of tourism, all by tapping into its profound cultural heritage based on the Maritime Silk Road, local fishing customs and its pearl business. Seaside resorts, leisure cruise marinas and tourist towns have flourished and fueled the local tourism industry.

During the nights, an interactive show can be seen performed on stage along the seaside. (People's Daily Online/Qin Xin)

During the nights, an interactive show can be seen performed on stage along the seaside, which tells the story of a pearl fishers life and the emergence of the Maritime Silk Road in historical times. More than 100 actors have fully committed themselves to the performance, inviting audiences from near and far to participate in a vivid dialogue with the localitys own ancient history.

Actors have fully committed themselves to the performance, inviting audiences from near and far to participate in a vivid dialogue with the localitys own ancient history. (Photo/Courtesy of Publicity Department of the Beihai Municipal Committee)

(Web editor: Xian Jiangnan, Hongyu)
SYDNEY, May 12 (Xinhua) -- The state of Western Australia (WA) continues to see a spike in COVID infections, which arouses concern for its health care system.

WA Health recorded 16,670 new COVID-19 cases to 8:00 p.m. local time Wednesday night, a slight drop from yesterday's 17,033 cases, a record peak for the state since the pandemic began in Australia in early 2020. There were 275 people hospitalized with eight in the intensive care unit recorded in the same period. The state also reported a further six deaths dating back to May 3.

WA Premier Mark McGowan told the press on Wednesday that though the caseload is high, the cases being hospitalization and intensive care are still below what was predicted.

He also highlighted the rates at which unvaccinated residents were being hospitalized.

"More than 50 percent of the people in hospital haven't had their third dose, that's a large statistic, 27 percent of people in hospital haven't had one dose, now what that says to me is if you're not vaccinated, you run the risk of adverse outcomes," McGowan said.

However, the surge of COVID-19 infections still prompted calls for a reintroduction of restrictions as there are concerns that the state's health care system may be smashed.

Australian Medical Association WA President Mark Duncan-Smith said the state's current infection rates were the equivalent of New South Wales, Australia's most populous state, having more than 50,000 cases a day, according to local media SBS News.

"There are already critical staff shortages, critical ramping and elective surgery being canceled because ICUs are full," he said.

Duncan-Smith also called for a return of some restrictions measures such as the mandatory indoor mask.

"Just as it has taken a week for the numbers to go up significantly following the reduced restrictions and dropping the mask mandate, any new public health initiatives will take a week before they have any effect."

"In that week there is a danger that our medical system may get smashed." 
Copyright  2022 Albuquerque Journal

A private investigators visit with a jail inmate has emerged as an issue in the case of a man facing child abuse charges in the 2016 death and dismemberment of 10-year-old Victoria Martens.

A prosecutor on Wednesday asked state District Judge Cindy Leos to hold the defense team in contempt for communicating with Victorias mother, Michelle Martens, without permission from Martens attorney.

Fabian Gonzales, 37, is charged with abuse of a child, recklessly caused, and other charges in Victorias killing. His trial is scheduled for July 11.

Gonzales is also charged with eight counts of tampering with evidence and one count of conspiracy for actions that allegedly include dismembering the girl, according to a grand jury indictment.

Maurice Moya, a private investigator on Gonzales defense team, visited Martens on Jan. 25 at the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center and spoke with her in an interview room for about 25 minutes, prosecutors allege.

Moya visited Martens in jail to serve her with a subpoena in Gonzales trial, which was a permitted visit, Deputy District Attorney Greer Rose said at a hearing Wednesday.

But Moya violated professional standards by showing her a photograph and asking her questions about the case, Rose alleged.

The actions could be proper for the disciplinary board and the licensing board to consider, Rose said. She also asked Leos to fine the defense team $10,000.

Martens, 40, pleaded guilty in 2018 to child abuse recklessly caused resulting in her daughters death and faces 18 years in prison. No sentencing hearing has been scheduled.

A third co-defendant, Jessica Kelley, 37, was sentenced last month to 44 years in prison after pleading no contest in 2019 to reckless child abuse and other crimes in Victorias death.

Gonzales attorney, Stephen Aarons, acknowledged Wednesday that he asked his investigator to show Martens the photograph, but did so in the interest of his client.

I thoughtlessly crossed over the line, and I should emphasize the word thoughtlessly, Aarons said. I did so out of zealous advocacy, but not in a desire to circumvent the court.

The defense team was allowed to interview Martens on Dec. 18 but were limited to a prescribed set of questions.

Judge Leos told Aarons that Moyas visit with Martens was a clear violation of the states rules for professional conduct, which prohibit lawyers from communicating with someone represented by another lawyer without the other lawyers consent.

The defense had the opportunity to interview Ms. Martins, and no further questions would be asked of her, and the defense did it anyway, Leos said.

Leos said she needed to seek guidance before deciding what actions to take.

To be completely honest, it just puts me in a very difficult position, Leos said.
New Mexico can be a very dangerous place to be a child.

We had the sixth-highest rates of child maltreatement in the country in 2019, according to legislative analysts, and our child abuse death rate more than doubled in 2020. Recent developments in child-beating cases resulting in death have only reinforced that bad reputation.

Two men are headed for life sentences for their roles in the 2019 deaths of two children in separate cases. A third defendant, Jessica Kelley, who pleaded no contest in January to six felony crimes stemming from the 2016 death and dismemberment of 10-year-old Victoria Martens, was sentenced to 44 years in prison on April 28 for her role in one of Albuquerques most horrific crimes.

In New Mexico, a life sentence means a defendant is eligible for parole after 30 years in prison. Under Kelleys plea, she got 50 years, with 6 suspended, but there are no stipulations barring her from accumulating up to day-for-day time off for good behavior, a spokeswoman for the states prison system confirmed.

That means she could become eligible for parole years earlier than the two men who agreed to life sentences in their plea deals, even though she was part of a heinous murder scene that shocked the community.

Albuquerquean Zerrick Marquez, 28, pleaded guilty last week and faces a life sentence for the Dec. 10, 2019, beating death of his roommates 4-year-old son, James Dunklee. He pleaded guilty to child abuse, intentionally caused, resulting in death. Assistant District Attorney Savannah Brandenburg-Koch said Marquez acted intentionally, which we would be able to prove with ongoing messages between him and his codefendants, of long-term abuse to James Dunklee that ended with his death.

Last Friday, an Albuquerque man who pleaded guilty to beating his 5-year-old daughter to death with a shoe in 2019 also was sentenced to life in prison. Brandon Reynolds, 39, pleaded guilty April 28 to intentional child abuse resulting in the death of a child, according to the agreement. He told police he was triggered after Sarah Dubois-Gilbeau said she did not want to do homework, and admitted striking her with a water shoe all over her body, prosecutors said in court records.

Kelley was charged with intentional child abuse resulting in death and first-degree murder. If convicted, she would have faced a life sentence. Instead, Kelley pleaded no contest in January 2019 to six felonies, including reckless child abuse resulting in the death of a child under 12. The plea means she does not admit guilt, but is not contesting the states version of events.

The judge imposed the maximum sentence under the plea, which was agreed to by the parties, according to a Second Judicial District Attorney spokesperson.

Under the circumstances, its difficult to blame the DAs Office for negotiating a plea deal. The state would have been hard pressed to prove Kelley played a direct role in the girls murder. Most of what was reported about the crime was derived from a confession by the girls mother determined to be false and that 2nd Judicial District Attorney Raul Torrez said was contaminated by detectives who interviewed her. Kelleys acceptance of the states version of events and her willingness to testify should help convict the only defendant facing trial  authorities have yet to find who they believe is the actual killer. Details of this tragic case are on the front page of the April 29 Albuquerque Journal.

The bottom line? Outrage over sentencing of child-beaters and negligent adults who fail to protect children, while natural, is wide of the mark. Better to light a candle  do a better job of protecting children  than to curse the darkness.

This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers.
It astounds me that the Supreme Court cant see that the U.S. Constitution prohibits bans on abortion. To say nothing of the systemic patriarchal interests in this government that still consider womens bodies to be a legal form of property. Either mens personal property, as women were literally from the beginning, or still a form of government property, that enables any branch of it to declare womens bodies do not belong to them and mandate they pay for being victimized by men. Thats social justice in a mans world, right?

Sure, I know the Equal Rights Amendment giving women have equal rights with men under the Constitution hasnt passed. The Supreme Court, however, should at least uphold its own precedents regarding womens U.S. citizenship. But, apparently its not going to.

Heres the rub.

When the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, it extended civil rights to all citizens, but it defined citizens as male. In fact, Section 2 of the Amendment was actually written as a penalty clause for states that still supported seditious slavery, as Section 3, which refers to the strengthened loyalty oath of Congress makes very clear.

However, even though this section of the amendment only included the word male in reference to national elections, the Supreme Court chose to uphold a prior Illinois Supreme Court case, in 1872, declaring barring women from the bar in that state didnt violate the Constitution. In fact, in the opinion of one justice, The paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother.

Even though the Supreme Court overturned the Bradwell decision, ruling in 1976 that the 14th Amendment applied to both men and women, the Supreme Court has never ruled that women were equal citizens with men, under the law. So, accommodations here and there have been made, but when the U.S. turns 250 years old in 2026, will the Supreme Court be remembered for upholding the 50-year-old landmark decision that ruled discrimination against women was illegal in 1976, or is it going to reach back into its early post-Civil War decisions and rule that womens bodies are still technically property of mens patriarchal government and not their own?

Not that I am in favor of abortion, but to begin with, I dont believe that any mans government has the right to tell women what to do with their bodies. Nor do I think that the U.S. Constitution entitles the court to rule in favor of the rights of any unborn child, without recognizing the rights of its mother first, which it has yet to do.

Nor do I think any citizen of the United States, man or woman, is entitled to claim their religious rights should, and can, be enforced on every other citizen of the nation  especially when theyre not paying the bill or providing any reparation for the damages it causes when, in fact, the pregnancy and raising of any child for 20 years entails very high costs. What kind of justice does that position support? It sounds like the ultimate unfunded mandate to me.
The atrocities committed at boarding schools designed and run by the federal government to eradicate Indigenous language and culture were outlined by the U.S. Interior Department for the first time in a report published Wednesday.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland held back tears as she described the scope of the investigation that identifies 408 federal Indian boarding schools across 37 states that operated between 1819 and 1969. New Mexico had 43 of these schools, the third most in the country behind Oklahoma (76) and Arizona (47).

Burial sites were found at 53 different schools, but the department wont publicly share the locations due to concerns of grave-robbing, vandalism and other desecration, Assistant Secretary Bryan Newland said.

These schools used militarized tactics to assimilate Native American children as young as 4 years old in environments described in the report as fostering rampant physical, sexual, and emotional abuse; disease; malnourishment; overcrowding; and lack of health care.

The report also acknowledges that the federal government used money from Indian Trust Funds to pay schools  even those run by religious organizations  to take children away without parental consent and force them into environments that were designed to destroy generational bonds by eliminating language and culture.

Those tribal trust accounts held money that was a result of territory cessions to the United States.

Haaland (Laguna) said the report is the first step in addressing the U.S. governments role and responsibility for this era. She didnt give any explicit support of financial reparations for tribes but didnt shut down the possibility, either. She responded to a question about restitution by saying President Joe Biden, fully understands the obligation of the United States to Indian tribes. He fully understands the federal trust responsibility to tribes.

In the meantime, the next phase of the federal government response will be to take this research to the people and find ways it can assist with healing the generational trauma it caused.

This has left lasting scars for all Indigenous people because there is not a single American Indian, Alaskan Native or Native Hawaiian in this country whose life hasnt been affected by the schools, Newland (Ojibwe) said.

Haaland announced the Interior Department will take part in a yearlong tour to listen to boarding school survivors and their families engaging in talks about the past. The department is committed to directing people to mental health and spiritual resources to help heal, she said.

Haaland discussed the importance of language preservation in an effort to recover from the boarding school era. She said her grandmother was forced to attend a boarding school at 8 years old, which led to her mothers trauma that disconnected Haaland from her own culture. I dont speak my language because my mother was afraid to teach me when we were growing up.

In April, the Interior Department suggested it could work with Indian Health Services to fund counseling services to help people with therapy on this topic. However, there is no specific financial commitment by Congress at this time to fund such an endeavor.

Haaland said Congress appropriated $7 million to fund the boarding school investigation.

Most boarding school sites were on active or decommissioned military sites. From the onset, the schools were designed to separate a child from his reservation and family, strip him of his tribal lore and mores, force the complete abandonment of his Native language, and prepare him for never again returning to his people, according to the Interior report.

By 1904, the federal government understood the significance of separating families, writing in official documents that, The love of home and the warm reciprocal affection existing between parents and children are among the strongest characteristics of the Indian nature.

In 1928 the Meriam Report looked at the condition of Native Americans in the U.S. and found that the main disruption to the Indian family and tribal relations had come from the Federal Indian boarding school system.

The 1928 report also concluded that boarding schools were acting as de facto children labor camps citing a disproportionate amount of time students were spending doing vocational or labor-intensive work instead of actual schoolwork like math or reading. Even the youngest of students were forced into manual labor such as lumbering, railroad, carpentering, irrigation, well-digging and construction.

The Interior Department investigation shared the itinerary of a typical school day in 1917 for a first grade student at a boarding school. It shows a required 110 minutes learning English, then 20 minutes of drawing, 10 minutes of breathing exercises that is followed by 240 minutes of industrial work.

An example at the Mescalero Boarding School in New Mexico shows that in 1903 Mescalero Apache boys sawed over 70,000 feet of lumber and 40,000 shingles and made upward of 120,000 bricks.

The federal government also circumvented rules regarding separation of church and state by paying schools run by churches to take in Native American students.

A 1908 Supreme Court ruling, Quick Bear v. Leupp, allowed the federal government to use money held in Indian treaties and trust accounts to fund children induced or compelled to attend Indian boarding schools that were operated by religious institutions or organizations.

The court said paying churches did not violate the Indian Appropriation Acts and to forbid such expenditures would violate the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.

The generational impact of boarding schools will be the next development in the historic investigation.

Research about boarding school survivors shows higher rates of chronic health problems that could be passed down to children. The increased trauma that men faced in the Indian boarding school system may have produced increased stress, which then may affect the biological systems of the body, according to the report. These stressors may then introduce epigenetic alterations that are then transferred to their children, also known as epigenetic inheritance.

Children of the first attendees of [federal Indian] boarding schools went on to attend, as did their grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, leading to an intergenerational pattern of cultural and familial disruption under direct and indirect support by the United States and non-federal entities.

This story was originally published in Source New Mexico  sourcenm.com  which is part of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit news provider.
Editors note: Fire officials said Thursday morning that the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire has grown to nearly 260,000 acres and containment had dropped to 29%. And with another red flag warning in effect until 8 p.m., they warned that this fire is going to keep growing. More firefighters, heavy equipment operators, support crews and incident command teams are being ordered, they said.

Copyright  2022 Albuquerque Journal

For weeks, Angel Fire Mayor Jo Mixon has kept an eye on the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire  paying attention to extreme wind forecasts and the fires progression.

Now, the village is working to make sure residents are ready to leave if the fire gets closer.

On Wednesday, officials told residents to prepare for possible evacuation.

Its happening so quickly and everybodys in shock, Mixon said. Were looking at the fact that this is real and we could possibly be told to go, and some things might not be here when we get back.

Mandatory wildfire evacuations have now spread into four counties in northern New Mexico.

Black Lake and Hidden Lake south of Angel Fire in Colfax County have been issued mandatory evacuation orders.

In Taos County, areas east of Sipapu to the Mora County line were also told to evacuate.

The fire perimeter has grown to more than 236,000 acres, or about 370 square miles, and is 33% contained as of Wednesday evening.

The containment percentage has dropped from earlier this week, but that doesnt necessarily mean that containment lines were compromised. As the fire gets bigger, the ratio of containment to total fire perimeter drops.

The blaze created a spot fire northwest of Chacon and is getting pretty close to Guadalupita, said operations section chief Todd Abel.

The fire is wanting to move to the north and a little bit to the east, Abel said.

Thursday will be another red-flag day, with wind gusts of up to 40 mph in the fire area.

But the weather could ease up on Friday.

Its still going to be dry, its still going to be warm but, with less wind, hopefully it will give us a little bit of a breather over the weekend, said incident meteorologist Makoto Moore.

Mora County officials announced Wednesday evening that some areas along N.M. 518 between Las Vegas and Mora would open for residents to return to their properties.

But Mora is still under mandatory evacuation orders.

The fire prompted Carson National Forest officials to close the Camino Real Ranger District in the forests southeast region.

Southern Colfax County has been busy as residents pack essentials, and load trailers with horses, alpacas and cattle.

Theres lots of fire equipment coming in, lots of people trying to make it out, Mixon said. Its something that we would never have ever wanted to happen here.

Some people who recently evacuated to Angel Fire from Mora and Guadalupita now face the challenge of finding another place to stay.

Local firefighters who helped keep the blaze away from Las Vegas in San Miguel County are now deployed to the fires north edge, said Angel Fire village manager Santos Martinez.

Weve got at least 300 personnel on the ground fighting spot fires between Black Lake and Guadalupita, he said. We still anticipate a lot more fire resources coming to town.

On Wednesday, the New Mexico Superintendent of Insurance issued an emergency order to help wildfire-impacted residents.

The order requires health insurers to waive cost-sharing requirements, cover out-of-network services and refill prescriptions early.

Health and property insurance cancellations are also under a 90-day moratorium for the affected counties, and insurance carriers must allow policyholders to pay premiums retroactively.

No one fleeing for their lives should have to worry about things like this, Superintendent of Insurance Russell Toal said.

Federal funding bill

The Democratic members of New Mexicos congressional delegation have introduced a bill that would require the federal government to cover the costs of the inferno, including uninsured property loss and lost wages.

The Hermits Peak Fire started on April 6 when a prescribed burn by the U.S. Forest Service within the Santa Fe National Forest broke containment. The fire later merged with the Calf Canyon Fire and has become the second-largest blaze in state history.

Sens. Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Lujan, and Reps. Teresa Leger Fernandez and Melanie Stansbury on Wednesday introduced the Hermits Peak Fire Assistance Act, which would require FEMA to create a program for fully compensating those who suffered personal injury, property losses, and business and financial losses due to the fire.

I would say that theres liability on the federal government, because it was the federal government and federal employees who started the controlled burn, and then that controlled burn got out of control, Lujan said in a phone interview Wednesday. So thats why this legislation is specific to (the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire) because of the liabilities, I would say, and the fault of that fire getting out of control as a prescribed burn.

He said the bill would go even further than President Bidens recent disaster declaration.

That declaration made money available for temporary housing and home repairs, and low-cost loans for uninsured property losses.

Everyone in New Mexico is grieving over the loss of our beautiful forests, communities and memories, from Gallinas canyon to the meadows and mesas in Mora where cattle and elk grazed, and the streams that nourished our acequias and farmlands, Leger Fernandez said in a prepared statement. We will not replace in our lifetimes the forest landscape. But the federal government can and must take responsibility for the harm the prescribed burn unleashed on our homelands.

The bill introduced Wednesday calls for the government to pay for insured and uninsured property loss, lost wages, reforestation costs, business interruption loss, insurance deductibles and new flood insurance.

The bill would task FEMA with creating an office to process claims and award compensatory damages in a timely manner. It doesnt set a limit on how much funding the federal government could provide.

A spokeswoman for the Office of the Superintendent of Insurance said the office does not have data on uninsured and underinsured property in New Mexico.

We still have work to do. We have to earn the support of fellow senators to get this passed up the Senate and will have to earn the support of House members to get this passed out of the House, as well, and then get it to the presidents desk, Lujan said. So, this is an important first step, but theres much work to do after this.

Cerro Pelado Fire

The Cerro Pelado Fire burning east of Jemez Springs has grown to more than 43,000 acres and is 11% contained as of Wednesday evening.

Los Alamos Public Schools closed this week to ensure that students and staff are home with families if there is a need to evacuate.

Some areas of the Santa Fe National Forest are closed, as are Bandelier National Monument and Valles Caldera National Preserve.

Theresa Davis is a Report for America corps member covering water and the environment for the Albuquerque Journal.
Copyright  2022 Albuquerque Journal

The prospect of new U.S. tariffs on solar panel imports from some Asian countries has thrust the local and national solar industry into crisis, causing project cancellations and layoffs in New Mexico and elsewhere.

Affordable Solar, New Mexicos largest installation company, is now downsizing its workforce, and Albuquerque-based Array Technologies  one of the nations largest makers of solar tracking systems  projects up to $250 million in lost revenue this year alone because of project cancellations or postponements.

Smaller rooftop installation firms are also feeling the pinch, with solar panel prices surging everywhere.

The U.S. Commerce Department ignited the crisis on April 1, when it opened an investigation into solar manufacturing operations in Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia to determine whether companies there are circumventing import tariffs by incorporating Chinese equipment and components in their products that would otherwise face U.S. trade restrictions imposed on China.

The investigation could culminate in new tariffs of up to 250% on imports from those countries, which together supply more than 80% of the solar modules used in U.S. installations.

The fallout was swift, with Asian exporters immediately freezing product shipments to the U.S. to await the outcome of the federal investigation. And solar developers, in turn, are canceling major projects across the nation, since investors cant calculate development costs until the Commerce Department rules on new tariffs, which could potentially be made retroactive to November 2021.

NM effects

Overnight, Affordable Solars utility-scale projects screeched to a halt, with investors canceling or indefinitely postponing more than half a dozen contracts, nearly all of them in New Mexico, said Affordable CEO Ryan Centerwall.

Were stuck now in a waiting period to see what the Commerce Department does, and were incurring a lot of damage in the meantime, Centerwall told the Journal. Unfortunately, weve had to let some valuable people go already.

Centerwall didnt reveal how many employees the company laid off. But utility-scale operations account for about 70% of Affordables annual revenue, and the laid-off employees represent a significant portion of our utility-scale solar business, he said.

Even if the Commerce Department rapidly concludes its investigation and rejects tariffs, many of Affordables now-stalled projects will be permanently canceled, Centerwall added.

A significant percent of our pipeline will never come back, he said.

Array Technologies, meanwhile, told investors in an earnings conference call Tuesday that it expects to lose between $225 million and $250 million in revenue this year from postponed projects.

The company, which employs about 350 people in Albuquerque, expected to generate up to $1.6 billion in revenue in 2022, thanks to a massive order backlog for its solar trackers. But given the uncertainties created by the Commerce Department investigation, Array scaled back its 2022 revenue projections to between $1.3 billion and $1.5 billion, said Chief Financial Officer Nipul Patel.

Unfortunately, as the largest domestic solar-tracker supplier, were not immune to the trade dispute, Patel told investors. A portion of our company will be impacted.

The four Democratic members of New Mexicos congressional delegation sent a joint letter on Monday to President Joe Biden urging a rapid conclusion to the Commerce Department investigation and rejection of new solar tariffs. In New Mexico alone, 1 gigawatt of new solar capacity, representing about $1.55 billion in investments, could be canceled or indefinitely suspended, the letter said.

One individual company projects 1,400 construction jobs and 75 full time permanent jobs associated with just six solar projects hangs in the balance, the delegation wrote.

Nationwide import

Nationwide, the Solar Energy Industries Association, or SEIA, says more than 80% of U.S. solar-related companies report project cancellations and frozen solar panel supply chains, threatening some 70,000 or more American jobs.

As of early May, SEIA had counted 318 solar projects that were canceled or delayed by the trade dispute, representing more than a third of utility-scale solar development across the country.

A new study released Tuesday by global consulting firm Rystad Energy estimates that about 17.5 GW of new solar installations planned in the U.S. for 2022 may now be wiped away, cutting construction from about 27 GW expected previously to below 10 GW this year.

Potential to worsen

The losses could rapidly mount the longer the federal investigation drags on. And, if the Commerce Department does impose tariffs, another 34 GW of solar deployment could be lost over the next four years, according to SEIA.

Commerce has until April 2023 to conclude its investigation, with a preliminary case determination due in August.

Industry and congressional supporters are aggressively pushing the Biden administration for a rapid conclusion and rejection of tariffs, and New Mexico representatives are in the thick of it.

Weve seen the entire industry rally behind the opposition, and were front and center, said Patel of Array Technologies. Weve been meeting with legislators and officials to seek practical, stable solutions for our industry.

U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., is particularly active. He co-led 22 senators in a May 1 bipartisan letter urging the president for an expedited end to the case.

And last week, during a hearing in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Heinrich asked U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to address the tariff issue, revealing serious disagreements within the Biden administration.

Whats at stake is the complete smothering of the investment, and the jobs, and the independence that we would be seeking as a nation to get our fuel from our own generation resources, Granholm responded. I certainly am deeply concerned about being able to achieve the goal of getting to 100% clean electricity by 2035 if this is not resolved quickly.

The Commerce Department has said its required by statute to investigate an industry claim that companies in other countries are circumventing import duties.

But industry leaders say that request came from one tiny California-based solar module manufacturer, Auxin Solar Inc., with no direct documentation that Southeast Asia companies are actually circumventing tariffs.

Auxin reportedly employs just 35 people with $9.7 million in annual revenue, representing an insignificant role in the U.S. solar industry, American Council on Renewable Energy President and CEO Gregory Wetstone said in a May 5 letter to the Commerce Department.

Its disappointing that Commerce relied on such a tenuous basis and considered only the views of a single small company in launching an inquiry with such devastating impacts, Wetstone said.
HELSINKI  Finlands leaders said Thursday theyre in favor of rapidly applying for NATO membership, paving the way for a historic expansion of the alliance that could deal a serious blow to Russia as its military struggles with its war in Ukraine.

The annoucement by President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin means that Finland is all but certain to join the Western military alliance, though a few steps remain before the application process can begin. Neighboring Sweden is expected to decide on seeking NATO membership in coming days.

NATO membership would strengthen Finlands security. As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defence alliance, Niinisto and Marin said in a joint statement.

Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay, they said. We hope that the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days.

Russia reacted to the development with a warning. The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Finland joining NATO would inflict serious damage to Russian-Finnish relations as well as stability and security in Northern Europe.

Russia will be forced to take retaliatory steps of military-technical and other characteristics in order to counter the emerging threats to its national security, the ministry said.

History will determine why Finland needed to turn its territory into a bulwark of military face-off with Russia while losing independence in making its own decisions, it added.

Before the ministry issued its statement, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Finlands decision wouldnt help stability and security in Europe. Peskov said Russias response would depend on NATOs moves to expand its infrastructure closer to Russian borders.

Finland has the longest border with Russia out of all the European Unions 27 members.

Previously, the Kremlin had warned of military and political repercussions if Sweden and Finland decided to become a NATO member. Should they seek to join the alliance, there would be an interim period lasting from when the applications are submitted until ratification by lawmakers in all 30 existing member nations.

In NATO member Estonia, which also borders Russia, Prime Minister Kaja Kallas tweeted that history being made by our northern neighbors. She pledged to support a rapid accession process for Finland into NATO.

Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde tweeted that Finlands announcement gave an important message.

Finlands announcement came a day after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited both Finland and Sweden to sign a military cooperation agreement.

The U.K. pledged Wednesday to come to the aid of Sweden and Finland if the two Nordic nations came under attack.

During a joint news conference with Johnson in Helsinki this week, Niinisto said Moscow could only blame itself should his nation of 5.5 million people become a NATO member.

You (Russia) caused this. Look in the mirror, the Finnish head of state said Wednesday.

On Thursday, Niinisto tweeted that he spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about Finlands firm support for Ukraine and the countrys intention to join NATO. Niinisto said Zelenskyy expressed his full support for it.

In 2017, Sweden and Finland joined the British-led Joint Expeditionary Force, which is designed to be more flexible and respond more quickly than the larger NATO alliance. The force uses NATO standards and doctrine so it can operate in conjunction with the alliance, the United Nations or other multinational coalitions.

Fully operational since 2018, the force has held a number of exercises both independently and in cooperation with NATO.

Russias aggression in Ukraine prompted Finland and Sweden to reconsider their traditions of military nonalignment and to contemplate joining NATO itself. Public opinion in the two countries quickly started to shift toward favoring membership, first in Finland and a bit later in Sweden, after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24.

The latest opinion poll conducted by Finnish public broadcaster YLE showed earlier this week that 76% of Finns are in favor of joining NATO, a big change from earlier years when only 20-30% of respondents favored such military alignment.

Speaking to European Union lawmakers Thursday as Niinisto and Marin made their announcement, Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said that Russias unpredictable behavior was a serious concern for Finland. He cited Moscows readiness to wage high-risk operations that could lead to many casualties, including among Russians.

Should Finland become a NATO member, it would represent the biggest change in the Nordic countrys defense and security policy since World War II, when it fought against the Soviet Union.

During the Cold War, Finland stayed away from NATO to avoid provoking the Soviet Union, instead opting to remain a neutral buffer between the East and the West while maintaining good relations with Moscow and also with the United States.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said the military alliance would welcome Finland and Sweden  both of which have strong, modern militaries  with open arms and that he expects the accession process to be speedy and smooth.

NATO officials say the Nordic duos accession process could be done in a couple of weeks. The most time consuming part of the procedure  ratification of the countrys protocol by the existing NATO members  could be completed in less time than the four or so months it took West Germany, Turkey and Greece to join in the 1950s, when there were only 12 members to ratify their applications.

These are not normal times, one NATO official said this week, discussing the possible applications of Finland and Sweden. The official was briefing reporters about the accession process on condition that he not be named as no application has been made by the two countries.

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Lorne Cook in Brussels, and Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, contributed to this report.

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Follow the APs coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, Alaska  The U.S. Army is poised to revamp its forces in Alaska to better prepare for future cold-weather conflicts, and it is expected to replace the larger, heavily equipped Stryker Brigade in the state with a more mobile infantry unit better suited for the frigid fight, Army leaders say.

Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said she expects to make a final decision soon about the Alaska troop change, saying she will likely convert the Stryker unit, which uses heavy, eight-wheeled vehicles, to an infantry brigade.

I think right now the purpose of Army forces in Alaska is much more about creating an extreme cold weather capable formation that could be used in Europe or the Indo-Pacific, Wormuth told The Associated Press on a recent trip to Alaska to meet with senior commanders and troops. Were trying to get to a place where we have Arctic capable forces  forces that can survive and operate in that environment.

The U.S. has long viewed the Arctic as a growing area of competition with Russia and China, particularly as climate change brings warmer temperatures and opens the sea lanes for longer periods of time. But officials have acknowledged that the U.S. lags behind those nations. Russia has taken steps to increase its military presence there, and China views the region as economically valuable for shipping and natural resources.

The changes in the Army were under consideration well before U.S. tensions with Russia soared following its invasion of Ukraine.

Under the new Army plan, the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, now based in Alaska, would be converted to a light infantry brigade. Combined with the divisions 4th Infantry Brigade Combat team, the two units will become the 11th Airborne Division, based in Alaska. And the large Stryker vehicles, which are somewhat old, would be replaced by other vehicles that are more suitable for the icy and snowy terrain, Wormuth said.

The greater focus on cold-weather war includes a move to conduct major training exercises for the Alaska-based troops in their home state, under the weather conditions they would face in an Arctic fight. The troops had been scheduled to go to the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana, in March, but Army leaders decided to keep them in Alaska so they could train under the frigid temperatures and frozen terrain that they would encounter in any cold-weather battle.

I think it really makes sense to have forces trained in the Arctic environments that they would be used for, Wormuth said after spending two days at the still snowy base. If were going to have ground forces in Alaska, thats what we need them to be able to do. They cant get that experience going to the Mojave Desert or to Fort Polk.

Last year, in an initial trial event, Pacific-based forces stayed in Hawaii for their scheduled exercises at the National Training Center in Californias Mohave Desert. Commanders said they have learned from these first two moves, as they try to recreate conditions and relocate personnel and equipment from well-established training centers to more remote locations.

During her visit to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Wormuth met with commanders who called the training shift a success. Maj. Gen. Brian Eifler, commander of U.S. Army Alaska, said the benefits outweighed any shortfalls created by the need to build the infrastructure for the training exercise in the remote north.

Youre getting the best of both worlds, without losing too much, Eifler said. We did get a lot more out of it than we thought we would.

Eifler said that while they didnt have as many training observers or civilian role players as they would have at one of the training centers, the trainers that did come were able to learn more about Arctic weather operations.

In addition, Eifler said, the change avoided the costly and time-consuming shipment of vehicles, weapons and other equipment to Louisiana and back. The lengthy packing and shipping process before and after a training exercise in Louisiana or California often forces troops to be without their weapons systems and other equipment for weeks.

During briefings at the Alaska base, commanders said the training included large-scale combat operations under extreme weather conditions in what they called the most challenging environment on earth. They said that 10,000 troops  including Canadian Army and Air forces  were involved in the exercise.

But they said the exercise also underscored the need for better cold-weather vehicles, including those capable of carrying Arctic infantry forces.

Gen. Joseph Martin, the vice chief of the Army who was in Alaska this year, said the service has been studying what would be the best type of vehicle for the troops. Is the Stryker the right vehicle for an Arctic warrior? In the winter, you need vehicles that can move across snow, he said.

In addition, he said, the vehicle also needs to be able to operate in the spring or summer thaw, when the ground turns to mud.

As Wormuth wrapped up her visit, she suggested that the decision on the Stryker Brigade is moving forward soon. Any final decision would need approval from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

If youre going to do big movements of equipment and things like that, the summer is a pretty important window because its a lot easier to move vehicles around than doing it in the dead of winter, she said.

And in conversations with congressional lawmakers, including during a hearing this week, she made clear that the change would not reduce the number of soldiers in Alaska. Instead, she said that while the infantry brigade will be smaller, the Army would offset that loss by increasing the size and capabilities of the headquarters.

More broadly, she talked with commanders in Alaska about the potential need for more changes as the U.S. militarys Arctic strategy evolves.

The U.S., Wormuth said, has resisted moves to militarize the Arctic, even as Russia has expanded its military presence and basing there. But, she said, will that mindset continue given what the Russians are doing in Ukraine? Or will that get revisited? Will that create a window to think about things differently?

Commanders said there are questions about whether one of the Pentagons combatant commands  such as European Command or Northern Command, based in Colorado  should take full ownership of the Arctic and the U.S. military role there. Wormuth said the issue needs further discussion, and any decision may be years away.
MANILA, Philippines  U.S. President Joe Biden called Ferdinand Marcos Jr. on Thursday to congratulate him on his apparent landslide victory in the Philippine presidential election, Manilas ambassador to Washington said.

Biden is among the first world leaders to recognize the electoral triumph of the namesake son of the ousted dictator, whose candidacy has alarmed human rights activists and pro-democracy groups.

President Biden told him Washington is looking forward to working with him and cited the shared history of the longtime treaty allies, Philippine Ambassador Jose Manuel Romualdez told The Associated Press, adding the two spoke for more than 10 minutes.

Biden also aims to expand cooperation on a wide range of issues, including the fight against COVID-19 outbreaks, the climate crisis, fostering economic growth and respect for human rights, according to a White House statement.

Marcos Jr. had more than 31 million votes in the unofficial count from Mondays elections in whats projected to be one of the strongest mandates for a Philippine president in decades. His vice presidential running mate, Sara Duterte, appeared to have also won by a landslide.

Marcos Jr. cited the robust relations between Manila and Washington and said his administration would work to continue building them. He invited Biden to attend his inauguration on June 30, but the U.S. leader said he was dealing with urgent concerns that may prompt him to stay in the U.S. and would instead send a high-level delegation, Romualdez said.

Marcos Jr.s declared victory Wednesday, saying it was a boost to democracy and promised to seek common ground across the political divide, his spokesman, Vic Rodriguez, said.

To the world: Judge me not by my ancestors, but by my actions, Rodriguez quoted him as saying.

The election outcome was an astonishing reversal of the army-backed but largely peaceful People Power uprising that ousted Marcoss father in 1986  a democratic triumph in Southeast Asia where authoritarian regimes flourish.

Marcos Jr., 64, campaigned on a vague national unity theme while avoiding volatile issues in an effort hard-line leftist groups and survivors of the elder Marcoss dictatorship likened to whitewashing of his fathers crimes. On Tuesday, he appeared overcome with emotions while visiting his fathers grave, which was moved to the national heroes cemetery under current President Rodrigo Duterte.

Several of Marcos Jr.s key election rivals have conceded defeat, though the closest, Vice President Leni Robredo, a human rights lawyer who ran on a promise of badly needed reforms, has only acknowledged his massive lead. The U.S. State Department said the elections and subsequent vote count followed international standards without any major incident.

The tabulated results still must be confirmed by Congress. Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte would then start their single, six-year term leading a Southeast Asian nation battered by the COVID-19 pandemic, wealth inequality, Muslim and communist insurgencies, and political divisions, which were only inflamed by the turbulent presidencies of their fathers.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Vice President Wang Qishan had sent congratulatory messages to Marcos and Sara Duterte on Wednesday, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said in Beijing.

At present, the China-Philippines relations are in a critical stage of development, facing important opportunities and broad prospects, Zhao told reporters Thursday at a daily briefing. We attach great importance to the relations with the Philippine side, and we stand ready to work with the Philippines to adhere to good neighborliness and common development and further deepen our comprehensive strategic cooperative relations so as to benefit two countries and the two peoples.

Marcos Jr. has said he wants to pursue closer ties with China, though Beijing during the outgoing Dutertes presidency showed no willingness to compromise on their conflicting territorial claims in the South China Sea. It prompted Manila to lodge an unusually large number of diplomatic protests against Beijing over Chinas increasingly aggressive actions in the busy waterway.
RAMALLAH, West Bank  Thousands gathered to mourn a slain Al Jazeera journalist in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah on Thursday, as the head of the Palestinian Authority blamed Israel for her death and rejected Israeli calls for a joint investigation.

Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American reporter who covered the Mideast conflict for more than 25 years, was shot dead Wednesday during an Israeli military raid in the West Bank town of Jenin. Journalists who were with her, including one who was shot and wounded, said Israeli forces fired upon them even though they were clearly identifiable as reporters.

Israel says it is investigating the incident. It initially suggested she might have been shot by Palestinian militants, without providing evidence, but has since backtracked. Israel is calling for a joint investigation with the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the West Bank and cooperates with it on security.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas angrily rejected that proposal, saying we hold the Israeli occupation authorities fully responsible for killing her.

They cannot hide the truth with this crime, Abbas said in an address as her body lay in state with a Palestinian flag draped over it in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where the Palestinian Authority is headquartered.

They are the ones who committed the crime, and because we do not trust them, we will immediately go to the International Criminal Court, Abbas said.

The ICC launched an investigation into possible Israeli war crimes over a year ago. Israel has rejected that probe as being biased against it.

Hussein al-Sheikh, a senior aide to Abbas, said that the Palestinians would conduct their own independent probe and convey the results with high transparency. He rejected an Israeli request to conduct its own ballistic analysis on the bullet.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett accused the Palestinians of denying Israel access to the basic findings required to get to the truth. He called on the Palestinian Authority to not take any steps to disrupt the investigation or to contaminate the investigation process.

Abu Akleh was killed while covering an Israeli military raid in Jenin, which has emerged as a militant bastion in recent weeks as Palestinians have carried out a series of deadly attacks and Israel has launched military raids across the occupied West Bank.

The Qatar-based Al Jazeera accused Israel of deliberately killing her and vowed to take legal action. Reporters who were with her said there were no Palestinian militants in the area.

Israeli officials initially suggested Abu Akleh was struck by militant fire and released a video showing gunmen firing at Israeli forces in a narrow alley inside the Jenin refugee camp. They later backtracked after an Israeli human rights group released its own video showing the site of the shooting was several hundred meters away from where Abu Akleh was killed.

Her death was met with an outpouring of grief across the Arab world. The 51-year-old was well-known as a veteran on-air correspondent for Al Jazeeras Arabic-language channel. Her reporting shed light on the harsh realities of Israeli military rule, which is well into its sixth decade with no end in sight. She was also a U.S. citizen.

Her body was to be brought to Jerusalem, where she was born, for burial on Friday.

The killing sparked international condemnation and widespread calls for accountability. U.N. Secretary General Antonio Gutteres called for an an independent and transparent investigation to ensure those responsible are held to account.

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz on Wednesday promised such an inquiry, saying he was in touch with U.S. and Palestinian officials and hoped for cooperation between Israel and the Palestinians.

We are trying to figure out exactly what happened, he said. I dont have final conclusions.

Asked about the investigation and Israels offer for the Palestinians to participate, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday that U.S. officials stand ready to assist either party in any way that we can.

Neither side has asked for our assistance at this time and such a request would be required in order for us to do so, she said.

Abu Aklehs death could draw new scrutiny of Israels military justice system, which is being examined as part of the ICC probe. It also threatened to further strain often rocky relations between the army and the international media.

Rights groups say Israel rarely follows through on investigations of deadly encounters with Palestinians, and that when it does, it often hands down lenient punishments.

Her death comes amid a wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence that has been fueled by tensions at a key Jerusalem holy site.

At least 18 people have been killed in Palestinian attacks in recent weeks, as well as more than 30 Palestinians, most of them involved in attacks or clashes with Israeli forces. Among the slain Palestinians were an unarmed woman and at least two apparent passersby, fueling criticism that Israel often uses excessive force.

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Krauss reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press writer Ilan Ben Zion in Jerusalem contributed.
SINGAPORE, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Singapore reported 3,645 new cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, bringing the total tally to 1,232,559.

Of the new cases, 409 cases were detected through PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests and 3,236 through ART (antigen rapid test) tests, according to statistics released by the Ministry of Health.

Among the PCR cases, 387 were local transmissions and 22 were imported cases. Among the ART cases with mild symptoms and assessed to be of low risk, there were 3,111 local transmissions and 125 imported cases, respectively.

A total of 265 cases are currently warded in hospitals, with seven cases in intensive care units.

Three more patients have died from complications due to COVID-19 infection, bringing the death toll to 1,361, the ministry said.

Singapore's Minister for Health Ong Ye Kung said on social media Thursday evening that despite the recent uptick in COVID-19 cases, there is no evidence of a new wave.

"With strong resilience to the virus due to vaccinations and recovery from past infections, we should be able to see through this uptick of cases, without any adjustments to current Safe Management Measures," He said. 
JERUSALEM  Israel advanced plans for the construction of more than 4,000 settler homes in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, a rights group said, a day after the military demolished homes in an area where hundreds of Palestinians face the threat of expulsion.

It was a jolting illustration of Israels policies in the territory it has occupied for nearly 55 years. Critics, including three major human rights groups, say those policies amount to apartheid, a charge Israel rejects as an attack on its very legitimacy.

Hagit Ofran, an expert at the anti-settlement watchdog group Peace Now, told The Associated Press that a military planning body approved 4,427 housing units at a meeting on Thursday that she attended. The state of Israel took another stumble toward the abyss and further deepened the occupation, she tweeted.

Spokespeople for the Israeli government and the military body in charge of civilian affairs in the West Bank did not respond to requests for comment.

Its the biggest advancement of settlement projects since the Biden administration took office. The White House opposes settlement construction and views it as an obstacle to any eventual peace agreement with the Palestinians.

There was no immediate comment from the administration on Thursdays decision. But last week, when the first reports emerged of the impending settlement approval, State Department spokeswoman Jalina Porter reiterated that the U.S. strongly opposes settlement expansion.

U.N. Mideast envoy Tor Wennesland condemned the announcement, calling the settlements a major obstacle to peace that undermines hopes for a two-state solution.

Continued settlement expansion further entrenches the occupation, encroaches upon Palestinian land and natural resources, and hampers the free movement of the Palestinian population, he said.

Most of the international community considers the settlements illegal and supports a two-state solution to the conflict. But neither the United States nor other world powers have given Israel  the stronger party  any incentive to accede to such an arrangement. Israel says Palestinian leaders have rejected proposals by previous governments that would have given them a state.

Israel views the West Bank as the biblical and historical heartland of the Jewish people. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who once led the main settler organization, is opposed to Palestinian statehood, but his government has taken steps to improve economic conditions for Palestinians.

Israel approved some 3,000 settler homes in October, brushing aside a rebuke from the U.S., its closest ally. Peace talks with the Palestinians broke down more than a decade ago, in part because of Israels continuing construction on lands the Palestinians want for a future state.

On Wednesday, Israeli troops demolished at least 18 buildings and structures in the West Bank following a Supreme Court decision that would force at least 1,000 Palestinians out of an area Israel designated as a firing zone in the early 1980s.

BTselem, another Israeli rights group, said 12 residential buildings were among the structures that were demolished, in villages in the arid hills south of the West Bank city of Hebron.

Residents of the Masafer Yatta say they have been living in the region, herding animals and practicing traditional desert agriculture for decades, long before Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 war. The Supreme Court sided with the military, which says there were no permanent structures in the area before it was designated a training zone.

Whats happening now is ethnic cleansing, Sami Huraini, an activist and a resident of the area, told the AP. They are trying to expel the people from this land, saying they never lived here permanently, which is a lie.

He said residents of the area where the demolitions were carried out are determined to remain there. The people are staying on their land and have already started to rebuild, he said.

The military declined to comment on the demolitions.

Neighboring Jordan, which made peace with Israel in 1994, condemned both the settlement expansion and the forced displacement of Palestinians, calling it a a flagrant violation of international law.

Israel has built more than 130 settlements across the West Bank that today are home to nearly 500,000 settlers, who have Israeli citizenship. Nearly 3 million Palestinians live in the territory under open-ended Israeli military rule. The Palestinian Authority exercises limited self-rule over parts of the West Bank and cooperates with Israel on security matters.

The Palestinians want the West Bank to form the main part of a future state, along with east Jerusalem and Gaza, all territories seized by Israel in the 1967 war. Israel annexed east Jerusalem in a move not recognized internationally, and Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade on Gaza after the Palestinian militant group Hamas seized power there in 2007.

The Palestinians view the expansion of settlements in the West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem as a major obstacle to any future peace deal because they reduce and divide up the land on which such a state would be established.

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Associated Press writer Ilan Ben Zion in Jerusalem contributed.
OMAHA, Neb.  During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the meat processing industry worked closely with political appointees in the Trump administration to stave off health restrictions and keep slaughterhouses open even as the virus spread rapidly among workers, according to a congressional report released Thursday.

The report by the Houses Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis said meat companies pushed to keep their plants open even though they knew workers were at high risk of catching the coronavirus. The lobbying led to health and labor officials watering down their recommendations for the industry and culminated in an executive order President Donald Trump issued in spring 2020 designating meat plants as critical infrastructure that needed to remain open.

Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn, who leads the subcommittee, said U.S. Department of Agriculture officials and the industry prioritized production and profits over the health of workers and communities as at least 59,000 workers caught the virus and 269 died.

The shameful conduct of corporate executives pursuing profit at any cost during a crisis and government officials eager to do their bidding regardless of resulting harm to the public must never be repeated, Clyburn said.

Former Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, who now leads the University System of Georgia, declined to comment Thursday. A spokesman for the university system said Perdue is focused on serving the students of Georgia.

The report is based on communications among industry executives, lobbyists and USDA officials and other documents the committee received from government agencies, Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, JBS, Cargill, National Beef, Hormel and other companies. Those firms control 85% of the beef market and 70% of pork production nationwide.

The North American Meat Institute trade group said the report distorts the truth and ignores the steps companies took as they spent billions to retool plants and purchase protective gear for workers.

The House Select Committee has done the nation a disservice, the trade groups President and CEO Julie Anna Potts said. The Committee could have tried to learn what the industry did to stop the spread of COVID among meat and poultry workers, reducing positive cases associated with the industry while cases were surging across the country. Instead, the Committee uses 20/20 hindsight and cherry picks data to support a narrative that is completely unrepresentative of the early days of an unprecedented national emergency.

A major union that represents workers at the processing plants condemned the way the Trump administration helped the industry.

We only wish that the Trump Administration cared as much about the lives of working people as it did about meat, pork and poultry products, when we wanted poultry plants to shut down for deep cleaning and to save workers lives, said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

The report said meat companies were slow to take measures to protect workers from the virus and pushed to make government recommendations to require masks to be worn, install dividers between work stations and encourage social distancing in their plants optional.

But JBS spokeswoman Nikki Richardson said the company did everything possible to ensure the safety of our people who kept our critical food supply chain running.

Tyson Foods spokesman Gary Mickelson echoed that sentiment and said Tyson has worked closely with both the Trump and Biden administrations, along with state and local officials, to respond to the pandemics challenges.

Smithfield spokesman Jim Monroe said the industry reacted quickly, and Smithfield has spent more than $900 million so far to protect workers. He said it was appropriate for meat companies to share their concerns with government officials as the pandemic unfolded.

But the report cited a message that a Koch Foods executive sent a lobbyist in the spring of 2020 that said the industry shouldnt do more than screen employees temperatures at the door of plants. The lobbyist agreed and said, Now to get rid of those pesky health departments!

To that end, the report said USDA officials  at the behest of meat companies  tried to use Trumps executive order to stop state and local health officials from ordering plant shutdowns.

Even with those efforts, U.S. meat production fell to about 60% of normal during spring 2020 because a number of major plants were forced to temporarily close for deep cleaning, widespread testing and safety upgrades, or operated at slower speeds because of worker shortages. Companies closed plants in consultation with health officials after outbreaks were confirmed.

Throughout the pandemic weve worked hard to maintain safe and consistent operations. At the same time, we have not hesitated to temporarily idle or reduce capacity at processing plants when we determined it necessary to do so, Cargill spokesman Daniel Sullivan said.

Documents the companies provided to the committee showed that meat companies pushed hard for the executive order partly because they believed it would help shield them from liability if workers got sick or died  something a federal appeals court later rejected in a lawsuit against Tyson over worker deaths at an Iowa plant. Emails show the companies themselves submitted a draft of the executive order to the administration days before it was issued.

Early on in the pandemic, meat companies knew the virus was spreading rapidly among their workers because infection rates were much higher in the plants and their surrounding communities. The report said that in April 2020, a doctor at a hospital near a JBS plant in Cactus, Texas, told the company and government officials in an email that there was clearly a major outbreak at the plant because every COVID-19 patient at the hospital either worked there or was related to a worker. Your employees will get sick and may die if this factory remains open, the doctor warned.

The report also highlighted the way meat companies aggressively pushed back against safety recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. That led to the final guidance including language that effectively made the rules optional because it said the recommendations should be done if feasible or where possible.

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The story has been updated to correct the spelling of former Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdues last name on the first reference.
COLUMBUS, Ohio  Despite being found innocent of murder charges related to multiple patient deaths, a doctor determined that practicing medicine again in Ohio would be impossible following a yearslong ordeal and so chose to surrender his medical license, his attorney said.

William Husel, 46, was acquitted last month of 14 counts of murder following accusations that he ordered excessive amounts of painkillers for patients in the Mount Carmel Health System. He was charged in 2019 with 25 deaths, but a new prosecutor reduced the counts before the trial began in March.

Husel still faced an administrative charge of failing to cooperate with a medical board investigation into the criminal allegations. He agreed on May 5 that he was guilty of that charge and on Wednesday the board revoked his license.

As a practical matter, the publicity, shall we say, the aura around the entire event made practicing again in Ohio unlikely, Husels attorney, Doug Graff, told The Associated Press on Thursday.

So that this was an appropriate way to resolve the matter, without going through another set of hearings, Graff said.

Husel could practice in other states, though its unclear what the former physician plans to do, his attorney said.

I dont know what his future holds, and Im sure at this point he doesnt either, Graff said. He added: He was pleased to get the criminal charges resolved in his favor, and this was the way to get the matter resolved with the medical board.

Prosecutors said ordering such dosages for a nonsurgical situation indicated an intent to end lives. Husels attorneys argued he was providing comfort care for dying patients, not trying to kill them.

After the verdict was announced, Husels lead attorney, Jose Baez, said prosecutors didnt produce a shred of evidence to back up their claims.

Two jurors who found Husel not guilty gave interviews to multiple media outlets this week, and one of them, Damon Massey, said he felt that on at least some charges Husel was guilty but that the prosecution didnt prove its case.

Husel was fired by the Mount Carmel Health System, which has reached settlements totaling more than $16.7 million over the deaths of at least 17 patients, with more lawsuits pending.
WASHINGTON  The Biden administration is canceling three oil and gas lease sales scheduled in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Alaska, removing millions of acres from possible drilling as U.S. gas prices reach record highs.

The Interior Department announced the decision Wednesday night, citing a lack of industry interest in drilling off the Alaska coast and conflicting court rulings that have complicated drilling efforts in the Gulf of Mexico, where the bulk of U.S. offshore drilling takes place,

The decision likely means the Biden administration will not hold a lease sale for offshore drilling this year and comes as Interior appears set to let a mandatory five-year plan for offshore drilling expire next month.

Unfortunately, this is becoming a pattern  the administration talks about the need for more supply and acts to restrict it, said Frank Macchiarola, senior vice president of the American Petroleum Institute, the top lobbying group for the oil and gas industry.

As geopolitical volatility and global energy prices continue to rise, we again urge the administration to end the uncertainty and immediately act on a new five-year program for federal offshore leasing, he said.

The lease cancellations come as gas prices have surged to a record $4.40 a gallon amid the war in Ukraine and other disruptions that have pushed prices $1.40 a gallon higher than a year ago. Consumer prices jumped 8.3% last month from a year ago, the government said Wednesday.

A federal appeals court in New Orleans, meanwhile, is considering a challenge to a moratorium on new federal leasing that Biden imposed soon after taking office in January 2021. Biden said the administration needed to consider the effect of new drilling on climate change and conduct proper environmental reviews.

Louisiana and 12 other states challenged Bidens order, saying laws passed in response to the 1970s oil crisis require lease sales on federal lands and waters.

The Biden administration failed to grapple with prior analyses of the planned sales to give a valid reason for postponing or canceling them, Louisiana Deputy Solicitor General Joseph Scott St. John told a 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel this week.

The three-judge panel did not indicate when they will rule.

Environmental groups hailed the latest lease cancellation, saying the administration needs to do more to curb greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels that are driving climate change.

To save imperiled marine life and protect coastal communities and our climate from pollution, we need to end new leasing and phase out existing drilling, said Kristen Monsell, oceans legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group.

Republicans denounced the decision as harmful to consumers and U.S. national security.

The Interior Departments decision approaches levels of irresponsibility and reckless stupidity never seen before, said Rep. Garret Graves, R-La. We are paying record prices for gasoline and to heat and cool our homes. Rather than using American energy sources to help solve the problem and lower prices, the Biden administration continues to carry out policies that benefit Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and other countries, Graves said.

New leasing will not lower current gas prices, countered Dustin Renaud, a spokesman for the environmental coalition Healthy Gulf. It takes several years for new leases to begin producing oil, he noted, adding that the industry is already sitting on over 8 million acres of unused offshore leases.

The state challenge to Bidens leasing order has not yet gone to trial, but a federal judge blocked the order in a preliminary injunction last year, writing that since federal law does not state the president can suspend oil lease sales, only Congress can do so.

After U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty ruled for the states, the Interior Department held an offshore lease sale last fall, which a federal judge in Washington, D.C. later blocked.

The administration has appealed Doughtys ruling, but has scheduled onshore lease sales next month in eight mostly Western states. However, the administration scaled back the amount of land offered for drilling and raised royalty rates by 50%.

Biden has come under pressure to increase U.S. crude production as fuel prices spike because of the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine. The United States and other nations have banned imports of Russian oil, driving up prices worldwide.

Biden also faces pressure from Democrats and environmental groups urging him to do more to combat climate change, even as his legislative proposals on climate and clean energy remain stalled in a sharply divided Congress.

Interior cannot conduct new offshore oil and gas lease sales until it has completed a required five-year plan. The current plan expires June 30, and administration officials have not said when or if a replacement will be released.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said last month that the oil and gas industry is set with the amount of drilling permits at its disposal. She defended Biden administration actions to scale down federal leasing, saying that industry has about 9,000 permits that have been approved but are not being used.

The industry is free to use these permits in a way they see fit. They just havent acted on those, Haaland told a House committee last week.

Oil companies say they have increased production as the economy recovers from the coronavirus pandemic, but they have been reluctant to ramp up production further, citing a shortage of workers and restraints from investors wary that todays high prices wont last. Decisions by the OPEC+ oil cartel, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, to only modestly increase supplies to the world market have also kept prices high.

Major oil companies reported surging profits in the first quarter and are sending tens of billions of dollars in dividends to shareholders, along with stock buybacks that have sharply increased the value of investor holdings.

Democrats accuse the industry of price gouging and have vowed to bring legislation cracking down on price manipulation to votes in the House and Senate. A bid to impose a windfall profits tax on oil producers has generated little support in Congress.

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Associated Press writer Janet McConnaughey in New Orleans contributed to this report.
One New Mexico cannabis company is looking to help out wildfire evacuees in northern New Mexico.

Seven Point Farms  a legacy operator with retail locations in Albuquerque, Cedar Crest and Socorro  plans to donate 50% of its May profit from its Albuquerque dispensary to the Las Vegas Community Foundation, with a focus on those affected by the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire. The company will also donate 10% of profit to wildfire evacuees from its Socorro and Cedar Crest dispensaries as well.

It was kind of a no brainer, Seven Point Farms executive director Robert Jackson told the Journal. Were in a really good place and Seven Point Farms is really passionate about being part of the community.

Jackson said many board members have been directly affected by the fires ripping across New Mexico and that it played a part in the company deciding to donate some of its revenue.

But Jackson said helping people out isnt new for Seven Point Farms. The company also works with the Last Prisoner Project, which is dedicated to cannabis criminal justice reform, and the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico.

Jackson said he encourages other cannabis businesses to get in on helping New Mexicans out who have been displaced by the fires.

People are losing their homes, Jackson said. And if we can help them get their footing, that would be a great thing. I think that this (is a) helpful thing to do in this time.

Editors note: An earlier version of this story included an incorrect description of the amount Seven Point Farms plans to donate to benefit people displaced by wildfire. The company plans to donate half its profit in May. The story has been updated.
Copyright  2022 Albuquerque Journal

Albuquerques first housing development dedicated to deaf, deaf-blind and hard-of-hearing folks is officially underway  finally.

PAH! Hiland Plaza, located near San Mateo and Central, draws its name from the American Sign Language (ASL) sign meaning finally, a nod to the projects near 20-year effort to be built, according to Laurie Frappier, Greater Albuquerque Housing Partnership director of community relations.

This is a huge gift to us and a huge opportunity to our community; its really the result of 20 years of work through various frustrations, what we thought would be successes (and) false starts, Chad LeBlanc, Deaf Culture Center of New Mexico president, said via a sign language interpreter at a virtual groundbreaking event held Thursday morning.

Built through a partnership between the Greater Albuquerque Housing Partnership and the Deaf Culture Center of New Mexico, the development will feature 92 apartment units with one-, two- and three-bedroom layouts, with preference given to deaf, deaf-blind and hard-of-hearing individuals. It will also include a small community park.

The apartment complex is only the fourth development of its kind in the country.

It will also be home to 23 affordable units set aside for people using housing vouchers from the Albuquerque Housing Authority, according to Dan Foster, housing development director for the Albuquerque Housing Authority.

Such special design features as strobe fire alarms will be incorporated into the building since the development caters primarily to deaf individuals.

Construction is anticipated to take 15 months and pre-leasing is set to begin in the fall.

Hartman + Majewski Design Group are the architects for the project which will be constructed by Jaynes Corp. with special development support from Green Insight.

Financing and funding was provided by the New Mexico Mortgage Finance Authority, Raymond James and PNC Bank.

Monarch Properties will manage the development upon completion.

For more information, or to fill out an interest form, visit www.dcc-nm.org/pahhilandresidentinterestform.
KUALA LUMPUR, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Nurses have played a key role in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, from treating patients to the successful implementation of the country's national immunization program, Malaysian Health Minister Khairy Khairy Jamaluddin said on Thursday.

In a ceremony to mark the International Nurses Day 2022 celebrations organized by the Malaysian Nurses Association (MNA) in the administrative capital of Putrajaya, Khairy said their efforts and those of other frontliners have made it possible for the country to move towards an endemic phase.

"Nurses have treated patients, dispensing the vaccine shots with the syringe into the arms of millions of Malaysians and that has enabled us to slowly shift to endemicity," he said in his speech.

"Their contributions must not be forgotten as they had sacrificed their time, energy, safety and lives to be at the frontline while not knowing how dangerous the virus was during the early months of the pandemic," he added.

Meanwhile, in a separate ceremony, Health Ministry Director-General Noor Hisham Abdullah launched an exhibition at the National Museum showing the evolution of the uniform of nurses in the country's history.

Noor Hisham said the exhibition would allow the public to see how the profession has developed and to foster greater appreciation for the country's nurses.

"This is seen as a sign of appreciation to the nurses as a front line officer in providing the best health services to society," he said in a brief speech.

May 12 marks International Nurses Day. It is a special day observed every year to mark the anniversary of Florence Nightingale's birth and to celebrate the contributions that nurses make to the society. 
Bhaskar Das, who recently quit as Chief Strategy Officer of Republic Media Network, has joined Unica Token, a start-up in the Metaverse and NFT space that was set up in September 2021. Das took charge from yesterday (May 11 2022) as Director Content Creation.

Das had joined Republic Media Network as Group President in January 2019. In September 2020, he was elevated to the role of Chief Strategy Officer.

Das had earlier worked with The Times of India Group, where he was President. He started as a trainee with TOI in 1980 and rose through the ranks to become Head of Advertising and Sales in Gujarat, Sales Head of the Eastern Region in Kolkata, Gujarat Profit Center Head, and Director Response (Ad Sales). In 2005, he was elected President and a member of the TOI Board of Directors.

He was also Group CEO of Zee Media Network, as well as Executive President at Dainik Bhaskar Group.
Dell Futurist is a program by Dell India for youthful and ambitious thinkers who wants to create a future where their passion transforms into their careers by enabling technology. The program has talked about different passions such as Visual Arts, Music, and Gaming, as they choose Sustainability and Art as the theme of the latest segment. The students are provided with a masterclass which helps them to build their passion with confidence and given the opportunity to be mentored by the best in the field.

Dell Futurist invited students to present their idea of sustainability with a project or art and raise awareness in their own unique way. Partnering with 4000 colleges and universities across India, the competition encouraged students to think about sustainability and highlight the stark reality of many ecological problems in India. The winners were mentored by the best in the industry to help them build their case for their future.

Digital-first creative agency, The Glitch, part of VMLY&R, conceptualized and executed the competition. The agency collaborated with eco-consultant Anirudh Sharma from Graviky Labs and Kunel Gaur managed by Art&Found to create a personalised masterclass educating students and allowing them to build sustainable project ideas and art.

Five winners were selected from across the country who participated to co-create the final, 35-foot installation in Delhi, a city with one of the worst air quality indexes in the world. Drawn with ink made from filtering carbon and other pollutants from the air, it is one of the biggest eco-friendly murals in the country. Despite the third wave of COVID which brought a lot of movement restrictions, the team took the right advantage of technology by conducting AMA sessions with the students to plan and design the mural virtually and ultimately paint it in Delhi.

Commenting on the program, Reaching the young, creative, aspiring minds who are inspired is crucial for us as a brand as our products are clear enablers in this journey and celebrate their process. Dell Futurist is for youthful and enthusiastic ones who desire to pursue their passions as their careers. Dell's flagship digital program intends to connect the passion areas for youth, and their future aspirations in terms of their professions and technology. We not only help them nurture their skills and get access to subject matter experts but also the leaders that inspire them!, Mayuri Saikia, Director  India Consumer Marketing, Dell Technologies.

We didnt want to create a token campaign that hypes the problem of pollution. For us, it was important to build sustainability into the mindsets of students and show them that they can make an impact on the world. The campaign was about giving them a canvas that combined sustainability, creativity, and technology. said Varun Anchan, Associate Vice President, Flux@The Glitch.

Rahul Dcruz, Associate Creative Director, Flux@The Glitch added, Dell Futurist Sustainability+Art has been built over a span of 4 months, with partners from across the country and 4000 colleges and universities, to create Indias most sustainable mural in the worlds most polluted city. For us, the success of the campaign isnt just the mural but the fact that it was co-created with students who will take the baton forward of sustainability and art.
With a continued commitment to serve the community and on the occasion of its 25th Anniversary in the country, Indias leading consumer durable company, LG Electronics India announced the launch of Karein Roshni - Light For Every Sight, a CSR initiative. Under the aegis of this initiative, LG has announced to support 8700 cataract Eye surgeries across India through 5 charitable Hospitals.

LG has announced its latest CSR initiative with an aim to support underprivileged. The company has pledged to support 8700 cataract eye surgeries across India through five charitable hospitals namely - Dr. Shroff's Charity Eye Hospital, Delhi, Icare Eye Hospital, Noida, Sankara Eye Foundation, Coimbatore, H V desai Eye Hospital,Pune,Sri Sankaradeva Nethralaya,Guwahati.

Commenting on the initiative, Younglak Kim-MD,LG Electronics India said, Over the past 25 years, our aim has not just been to make meaningful innovations that create convenience for our consumers, but also elevate the lives of the people. Our latest KAREIN ROSHNI- Light For Every Sight CSR initiative is an effort to offer a gift of vision to the people who cannot afford quality care. LG has always been committed to introduce meaningful interventions. We are thankful to all our partner hospitals and the people associated with this initiative for supporting us in this cause.

Dr. R.V. Ramani;Padma Shri Awardee;Founder & Managing Trustee;Sankara Eye Foundation India said India has a huge population of visually impaired people.1/3rd of Worlds population of blind live in our Country. The majority of the visual impairment is either preventable or curable.Majority of Patients suffer from Cataract.While the efforts taken by the Governmental and Non-Governmental Agencies to combat blindness started yielding results, the Pandemic over the past 2 to 3 years came as a bolt from the blue.Community Eye Care surgeries could not be pursued in the last 2 years.As a result, a huge backlog of cataract Patients has been accumulated across India.Only a concerted effort from all like-minded organisations would help in clearing the backlog of pending cataract surgeries.LG getting involved in this Humanitarian Cause will help mitigate the suffering of Cataract Patients.We at Sankara Eye Foundation India, across the Country, are glad to join hands with LG to provide the Gift of Vision to the Millions."

Dr. Umang Mathur- Executive Director, Dr. Shroffs Charity Eye Hospital, Delhi said, Shroff Hospital, being one of the torch-bearer of the eye care industry, it gives me immense pleasure to associate with LG on this new initiative. I believe avoidable blindness is still a big challenge in India and initiatives like KAREIN ROSHNI help us move towards our goal of eradicating needless blindness. I wish we can spread more awareness with our work and be the reason for vision.

Cataract is the leading cause of avoidable blindness in India. There is a backlog of over 22 million blind eyes (12 million blind people) in India, and 80.1% of these are blind due to cataract. The annual incidence of cataract blindness is about 3.8 million.This partnership will contribute towards saving the sight of countless who cannot afford a simple surgery. 700 cataract surgeries will be supported by LGEIL under their CSR programme.We are grateful to LG Electronics India Private Ltd for their support towards this initiative. With this partnership, we hope to reach the unreached and ensure that quality eye care is available to everyone, said Mr. Parvez Bilimoria, Executive Director- H V Desai Hospital (unit of The Poona Blind Mens Association).

On the occasion, Dr. Sushil Choudhry- Managing Trustee ICARE Eye Hospital & Post Graduate Institute (unit of Ishwar Charitable Trust),Noida said, Blindness is not only a health problem but is one of the most important social problems worldwide with enormous economic implications. Blindness is mainly a problem of developing countries which is preventable in at least 80% of cases. The WHO/NPCB (National Programme for Control of Blindness) survey has shown that there is a backlog of over 22 million blind eyes (12 million blind people) in India, and 80.1% of these are blind due to cataract. The annual incidence of cataract blindness is about 3.8 million. Cataract is responsible for 50-80% of bilaterally blind and this is avoidable and treatable.We are grateful to LG ELECTRONICS INDIA PRIVATE LTD for trusting ICAREs mission of eradicating avoidable blindness and supporting us by approving cataract surgeries for the needy and elderly rural population.Our constant endeavour is to reach out to these people and help them not only to regain their eyesight but once again live a life of dignity.

LG Electronics has always believed in enriching the lives of people and through this initiative, the brand is set to lend its support to the cause of helping underprivileged visually-impaired people regain their vision. LG Electronics is continuing this programme since 2018.
Nippon Paint India has launched Rangon Ke Badshah, a unique, pan India program to uplift, reward and recognize the garage painter community and identify Indias top car painters.

This 8-month long initiative which is the first of its kind for car painters in the Indian automotive market, has been launched today and will end on 14th January 2023. This program aims to connect with over 10,000 car painters across the country through a unique nationwide outreach that will include skill contests, loyalty benefits as well as rewards & recognition with the top prize of a Tata Tiago car.

The scheme is based on a simple points tally, from which the winners will be identified. To ensure that painters from each part of the country have equal opportunities, the company has segmented the country into 45 city clusters and each city cluster champion will win a motorbike. The company will also provide personal accident insurance of Rs 2 Lac to thousands of painters.

For the future generations of the painter community, the company has also announced merit based, education grant of up to Rs 12,000 per child per annum, towards school fees reimbursement of deserving children of the participating painters. Most importantly, every participating painter will earn monthly rewards based on points accumulated in a month, based on Nippon Paint products purchases, with direct bank transfers. The points will be uploaded in Nippon Paint SEN (Sher E Nippon) app using the QR code that is available on every Nippon Paint can. The monthly winners, calculated based on the number of points, will also be felicitated with exciting prizes.

Winning painters from each city cluster will also be provided with skill training by Nippon Paint through its international trainers. In the second phase of the contest, the city cluster champions will participate in a skill contest that will carry equal weightage for selection of the national winner.

Nippon Paint India is a part of the Nipsea Group, a subsidiary of Nippon Paint Group from Japan, the largest coatings group in the Asia Pacific and the fourth largest globally in terms of revenue.

Announcing the Initiative, Shae Toh Hock, Senior Vice President, Nipsea Group and Managing Director, Nippon Paint India said It would be fair to say that the painter community has played an integral part in our growth in India. They have appreciated our products and our bond with the painter community is sacred. So, it is my pleasure to launch Rangon Ke Badshah which is the search for Indias top car painters. This is a very good program that will not only reward the painters for buying our products but also recognize their skill, talent and buying behavior. We believe that painters form a major part of our ecosystem, and it is important for us to reach out to them and work towards their betterment.

Announcing the initiative, Hitesh Shah, Vice President at Nippon Paint India said "Despite the significant rise in demand for automotive paints in the aftermarket due to rebounding economy, the financial condition of Indian garage painters hasn't really improved. Through our initiative Rangon Ke Badshah, we wish to touch the lives of over 10,000 painters and help in uplifting them both socially as well as financially besides enhancing their skills and capabilities. We are blessed with the support of our painter community, and we would love the encourage the talent and potential of the painters who will be participating in this Rangon Ke Badshah contest.

The entries for the Rangon Ke Badshah contest are now open and painters across India who wish to participate in this competition can easily register themselves by downloading the Sher E Nippon app from the Google Play Store. These are exciting times for garage painters and as per Nippon Paint, there is a lot more that is in store for their painter friends.
Its never easy to excavate diamonds out of coal mines. In a country of 1.3 billion people, spotting young talent and nurturing it is equally difficult. This is where Zee CSR along with Give India has come together for Born to Shine initiative -- a launchpad for talented budding child artists. The initiative seeks to make a difference by recognising young talent in Indian art forms and providing scholarships to help them shine. The scholarship is a way of empowering girls and attempting to revive Indian art forms.

India, as a country, offers abundant talent especially when it comes to myriad art forms, but very rarely are these talents recognized and honored. This has led to a fall in number of artisans in various art forms as there is a lack of motivation among artists who are apprehensive about nurturing their talent with limited means. Born to Shine aims to break these barriers and also help young girls realise their ambitions of emerging as Indias next-generation role models. We want to ensure that child prodigies get the complete care and attention they deserve to be able to achieve their fullest potential.

Through Born to Shine, we are not just offering scholarships but also creating an ecosystem where we can identify, nurture and guide child prodigies to success. Zee has always been focused on creating the extraordinary and in joining hands with Give India, we have now got a chance to nurture and mentor extraordinary talent.

Who can apply?

Any girl who has achieved mastery in any art form and is below 15 years can apply for the Born to Shine scholarship. The reward is a scholarship of three years that will ensure these prodigies can reach their fullest potential. The 6 weeks application process will be open across all languages and geographies and will help in shortlisting 100-300 child prodigies. The top thirty across the country will receive scholarships for honing their skills and accomplishing maestro status.

Through this initiative, we plan to reach out to more than 60,000 schools and make selections without any kind of bias or discrimination. Both virtual and physical formats will be used to select the candidates.
ISLAMABAD, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Pakistani Minister for Commerce Syed Naveed Qamar said on Thursday that his country has been taking special measures to further enhance trade ties and connectivity with Central Asian countries to boost the national economy.

Pakistan has been working on a policy to enhance trade and connectivity with Central Asia, and the government has already taken several measures to materialize the policy, the minister said.

He said that Pakistan and Afghanistan have already finalized and implemented the main operational part of the transit trade agreement which would ensure the free movement of trucks between the two countries.

Similarly, Pakistan and Uzbekistan have signed a transit trade agreement and an agreement on preferential trade, which provides preferential access of products of one country to the other by eradicating trade barriers, Qamar said.

The country also established joint working groups on trade with Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan to ensure economic cooperation by holding business forums, exhibitions, and seminars and eradicating technical barriers to trade by harmonizing standards, he said.

Economic cooperation in the spheres of trade, banking, and customs has been agreed upon with Iran, according to the minister. Pakistan and Iran have also signed a memorandum of understanding to establish six joint border markets that will benefit locals. 
MANILA, May 12 (Xinhua) -- The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) of the Philippines said Thursday that the country has seen the highest quarterly export performance in the last six years.

The export volume reached 19.4 billion U.S. dollars in the first quarter this year, increasing by 9.8 percent compared to the previous year.

In March alone, the Southeast Asian country's monthly exports reached 7.2 billion U.S. dollars, or 5.9 percent higher compared to March 2021.

Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez said the data shows that the Philippines continues to sustain export growth in a much better position than pre-pandemic levels and has been able to catch up as global trade expands.

Lopez said he expects the Philippine economy to rebound and grow in the coming months. "The only uncertainty is the possible global slowdown towards the second half of the year," Lopez said.

The DTI said exports in electronics, other mineral products, copper cathodes and sections of cathodes, coconut oil, and processed food and beverages propelled the growth. Ten other export commodity groups also recorded an increase in export sales this quarter.

In terms of markets, the United States ranks first as the country's largest export market in the first quarter, and China was the Philippines' top export destination for March. 
With a subject like abortion, where people are easily controlled by their passions, it becomes easy to base our opinions on what we feel as opposed to logical thinking about the issue. Thousands of years ago, Jewish Sages were dealing with the same issue of when/if/how abortion should be permitted or forbidden. With the national chaos regarding a potential reversal of Roe v. Wade, this ancient wisdom and unique understanding is more valuable than ever.

The ancient Sages were supported by their communities, and so were able to devote great thought about many important issues, including abortion. To understand their conclusions, the entire argument must be followed.

In Judaism, there is a huge importance placed on pro-creation, based on the blessing found in Genesis 1:28 that we should be fruitful and multiply that is repeated to Jacob (Gen 35:11). But we also believe that sexuality is not only for pro-creation, but for pleasure based upon the words of Exodus 21:10, a man must not diminish his wifes duty of marriage. It is accepted as far back as 2000 years ago that the obligation to pro-create is upon the man (the commandment is given to men), and not to women.

The man is required to be fruitful and multiple, but not the woman. (Mishna Yevamot 6:6). This is a recognition of a womans rights, and a mans responsibility. It is her body, and she should not be forced to make a decision between having children or being celibate. In Judaism, while there is a commandment for pro-creation, there is also a commandment for pleasure, and so no argument can be devised against or for abortion based on human sexuality being used only for the purpose of creation (this is different than many other faiths).

The traditional set of laws regarding abortion begin with the legal status of the fetus. The Talmud clearly states, the fetus is regarded as one of the limbs of the mother (Gittin 23b). This understanding is based on specific biblical understandings. If an animal is bought, and then found to be pregnant, the future animal belongs to the new owner. (Talmud Bava Kama 78a). If a pregnant woman converts, her child does not have to go through conversion upon birth (Talmud Yevamot 78a), and a fetus has no rights of acquisition (Talmud Bava Batra 142a). Most importantly, it says in Exodus 21:22 that if a pregnant woman is hurt by a man so that her unborn baby dies, the man is to be punished by paying what the judges determine; but if that she dies then the perpetrator is executed. The death of a fetus is a tort charge, punishable by monetary relief; while the death of a mother is a capital crime. This biblical text demonstrates that killing a fetus is criminal, although not a capital crime.

At first glance, it might seem that since the fetus has no legal rights, abortion would be allowed in any instance. This is not the case.

From the time of ancient Sages through the Middle Ages until today, it is a Jewish law that a person has no right to inflict damage upon the human body, even upon himself. We are responsible for every part of our body as a Divine gift. Based on this understanding, since the fetus is considered a limb of the mother; abortion by choice is forbidden because it is equivalent to hurting ones self.

With rights always comes responsibility, and so from a traditional Jewish perspective, abortion is criminal without basing the argument on anything to do with the rights of the fetus. This part of the argument is based entirely on the rights and responsibilities of the woman.

But Judaism and the Rabbis of 2000 years ago additionally take other ethical considerations into the decision making process, and has a concept known as secrets of God. This is the understanding that there are certain issues that we can theorize about, but can never really know for sure. They are not unknown, they are unknowable.

One of these secrets is ensoulment: at what point does the soul enter the body? There is a lot of discussion and varied opinions on it among the Sages and texts. Some say that ensoulment happens at conception; others at 40 days; and still others say that there is no soul until the crown of the baby is exposed.

Although it is now accepted as Catholic dogma that ensoulment occurs at conception, this was actually not part of Church doctrine until the influence of the Pythagorean Greek movement in the third century by Father Tertullian; was confirmed by St. Gregorty of Nysa in the 4th century; and accepted by Augustine in the 5th century. Even into the 6th century, the famed Justinian Code exempted abortions any time before 40 days.

But in Judaism, we recognize that the ensoulment is a secret of God, and we do not make legal distinctions based on something that is unknowable. So even though the fetus is considered part of the mother, our Sages allowed for abortions if the mothers life was endangered (Talmud Sanhedrin 72b), in the same way that an arm may be amputated if it puts the mothers life at risk.

This concept of the fetus being a life-threatening risk to the mother is called a rodef, or pursuer. If the fetus is threatening the life of the mother, it may be aborted based on this concept, even into the third trimester. Although elective abortion is a crime as we have shown, the life of the mother is more important than the extension of her through the unborn baby.

But this too has limits. As soon as the greater part of the head has emerged, or the completion of 36 weeks, the baby is now considered its own life and may not be touched, for we do not set aside one life for another (Sanhedrin 72b). At that point, even if the birthing process is suddenly life threatening to the mother, we do not allow the child to be aborted. Who is to say that the baby is threatening the mothers life at that point, and not the mother threatening the newborn babys life? Solutions other than abortion must be attempted since they are at that point, two separate lives. We must save her by other treatments. (Pahad Yitzhak).

Remembering that the fetus is considered a limb of the motherthis understanding is ALL about womens rights and not the fetus. In the same way that you would not cut off your arm because of a scratch (although you might have to amputate because of a severe injury or sickness in order to live); we are not allowed to abort a fetus because it is inconvenient.

Judaism also recognizes that psycho/emotional wellbeing influences physical health, and if a womans physical life was truly endangered because of her psycho/emotional state, then abortion could in theory be permissible. There are currently many modern liberal Rabbis who use this argument to justify elective abortions. While this can theoretically be true, it is an extremely rare case (possibly incest or rape) where a pregnant womans distress is so great that it would cause her physical death. A rodef is not a pursuer with intent to harm someone emotionally, but exclusively a physical threat to life.

Understanding this basic principle, in conjunction with the legal status of the fetus, makes it clear that ethically it is ludicrous to abort a fetus unless there is a real risk to the mothers physical life.

There is the additional obligation (for both men and women) to not diminish the Divine image. By needlessly amputating an arm, or by needlessly aborting, the Divine image is being diminished as a limb is being needlessly removed. Only in the case of a clear threat to the mothers life, either through physical danger or a psycho/emotional danger that is so great that it will cause the death of the mother, is abortion allowed.

By removing the issue of ensoulment, the entire debate is one revolving around not only a womans rights, but a womans responsibilities. If the baby is not a rodef, an actual pursuer of the mothers life, then abortion is prohibited. If the baby is a rodef, then abortion is permitted even into the third trimester. But once the baby is either at 36 weeks or the crown is visible, abortion is not allowed in any circumstance.

Abortion is never to be used as a form of birth control. Even in the horrible cases of rape and incest, the question is whether the pregnancy and birth will cause the mother to die (being so emotionally disturbed that she is suicidal). While non-therapeutic abortion is clearly not a capital crime of murder, it is a crime nonethelessbecause of the womans, not the fetuss rights.

If looked at through this traditional Jewish lens, abortions are not permitted without reason at all, let alone in the third trimester as is the proposed laws in some states. Similarly, it is ridiculous to prohibit all abortions without exception, as abortions are required if there is a legitimate threat to the mothers physical life. Both positions, from the Jewish perspective, are too absolute, and miss the mark entirely.

There is a saying that two Jews equals three opinions, four rabbis, and five synagogues: a demonstration of the cultural bias to look at multiple perspectives on any issue. But the traditional Jewish view is one that has a value to be looked at by all sensible people, especially during these passionate times. The debate is not one of pro-life vs. pro-choice, but rather what are the rights and responsibilities of a woman in making choices. Abortion is never to be used as a prophylactic, and only used in cases where the mother is likely to die.

I encourage all of us to explore these and other arguments on both side of the issue carefully, and to embrace that all women have the right to make a choicebut one that not only takes into account their rights, but their inherent responsibilities.

Rabbi Michael Barclay is the Spiritual Leader of Temple Ner Simcha in Westlake Village (www.NerSimcha.org), the author of Sacred Relationships: Biblical Wisdom for Deepening Our Lives Together, and can be reached at Rabbi@NerSimcha.org

Photo credit: drsuparna CC BY-SA 2.0 license
According to the propaganda narrative of the media, Donald Trump and the Republican Party foment insurrection and illegitimacy in American politics. Only the noble left, with its commitment to democracy, can defend America and its institutions and rule of law. This is hogwash and anyone free from the tyrannic propaganda of the media knows it. In reality, the left peddles insurrectionist language and promotes the idea of American illegitimacy so as to endorse insurrectionist behaviorin the name of democracy though.

Joe Scarborough, one of the most annoying individuals to ever purvey television propaganda, has recently called the Supreme Court illegitimate. So have other liberal opinion writers. And what does all this talk of Court illegitimacy bring? Insurrectionist beliefs. It is an announcement for haters of America to begin burning property and launching violent protests aimed at desecrating the rule of law in the United States. It is the go-ahead for the army of Bolshevik street-warriors to assail American institutions and the freedom they uphold.

YouTube screengrab

I was just a child, but I do recall the hoopla over the 2000 election. Memory is short, but liberal writers and activists militantly wrote opinion pieces decrying the stolen election. Jonathan Chait, 12 years later, in New York Magazine, wrote that the 2000 election was stolen. Even more recently, Terry McAuliffe, the ungracious loser of the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election, spewed that the 2000 election was stolen. Twenty years after the election, many liberals cannotwill notaccept the 2000 election. Their language of a stolen election implies what? Insurrection and illegitimacy.

Though George W. Bush won his 2004 reelection with a majority of the popular vote, expanding and building upon his support for the War on Terror and the toppling of Saddam Hussein at the time, Christopher Hitchens of Vanity Fair wrote of election irregularities in my native state of Ohioa full two years after the fact. The concern over irregularities didnt just fade away after the election and inauguration.

I recall sitting in class the morning after the nationwide election with the classroom television on as my teacher was watching the continued count before the election was called. Despite Bushs victory, Barbara Boxer and other congressional Democrats voted against certifying the Ohio election results. No one complained then and called Barbara Boxer a traitor.

Not only has the left consistently claimed election fraud and illegitimacy, but they also now claim the entire country is illegitimate. The United States is an illegitimate nation, an unworthy republic, a country that has pillaged and stolen its way to power. Freedom is an illusion. Our institutions are corrupt and rotten to the core. They must, because they are illegitimate and unworthy, be destroyed. So much for protecting American democracy and the rule of law. The very language of the left implies insurrection and in some circles, there are open calls for it.

If the left cared about the United States, as some in the media claim they do, then they wouldnt use language that implies the opposite. But that doesnt matter because we all know the facade. They present themselves as holier than thou, the true guardians and defenders of the made-up American spirit theyve conjured out of the lust of their distorted hearts and seek to impose that spirit on the rest of us. Those who seek to stop the coming totalitarian imposition by the left are pilloried as totalitarians. Double-speak at its finest.

By arguing and subtly-to-now-explicitly condemning the United States and calling entire institutions of the country illegitimate, the left is preparing the real insurrection against America. If there is nothing legitimate about the country, if all institutions, including the last institutions against totalitarian restructuring, are demonized and destroyed in the court of public opinion. Then the burning and looting of America we saw just a few years ago and the continual low-scale looting of America permitted by Bolshevik Democrats today, can manifest in full force.

America must burn because all of its institutions and laws were originally enacted by white supremacists. There can be no redeeming such institutions and laws. Only by destroying America can a new America be made. But that wont fly. So softer language is sometimes used. Transformation. Reform. Realizing our ideals. That is mere sophistry to distract from the destabilizing and totalitarian policies the left aims to actualize.

The real insurrection brewing in America isnt on the right despite the constant talk and promotion of this view. It is meant to hide the reality. It is from the left that the real insurrection is brewing and coming.

Transformation of the Supreme Court (destroying the Supreme Court). Transformation of the Presidential election process (destroying the Electoral College). Transformation of the First and Second Amendments (destroying the First and Second Amendments). Transformation of the economy (destroying the market economy and replacing it with government control and cronyism). The talk of transformation hides the insurrectionist mentality of the left.

The left wants to destroy and alter the organs and institutions of American government to suit their own tyrannical desires. Patriotic conservatives, derided by Joe Biden as ultra MAGA, seek the restoration of the promise of American self-governance and the autonomy of states and communities from the federal leviathan. The left wants to implement its one-size fits all California politics across the entire country. Patriotic Americans want to be able to live their lives as they see fit without the interference of San Fransickos telling them how to live.

The militant and violent venom now directed at the Supreme Court is because the left sees, and has long seen (since the days of FDR), the Court as the last bastion of the rule of law preventing their totalitarian and insurrectionist ambitions from becoming reality. By delegitimizing the Court, the left opens the final door to their political insurrection and enacting their totalitarian agenda. The Court, with its duty to uphold the Constitution, is the last institution committed to the rule of law, upholding the American republic, and defending the true democratic spirit of America: self-governance independent of Beltway Bureaucracy.

Paul Krause is the editor of VoegelinView. He is the author of The Odyssey of Love: A Christian Guide to the Great Books, The Politics of Plato, and contributed to The College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters.
On May 3, President Joe Biden visited the Lockheed Martin plant in Troy, Alabama. He was there to thank the company and its workers for building the weapons being sent to Ukraine to defend against the Russian invasion, in particular the Javelin anti-tank missile. He told the employees Youre allowing the Ukrainians to defend themselves. And, quite frankly, theyre making fools of the Russian military in many instances. Biden referenced America as the arsenal of democracy, citing not just World War II but also Iraq and Afghanistan. And every worker in this facility and every American taxpayer is directly contributing to the case for freedom. And thats something we can all be incredibly proud of, in my view, he declared.

This appearance undoubtedly disturbed those on the Left who had welcomed Biden as a pacifist who would pull America inward, renouncing the assertive foreign policy and military buildup of President Donald Trump. Though both presidents had wanted to pull out of the endless wars of the Middle East, President Trumps motive was to shift resources to meet the real challenges of Great Power competition posed by China and Russia. Bidens career, however, has been characterized by a desire for complete withdrawal in the face of conflict to avoid escalation. He had advised President Barack Obama not to go after Osama bin Laden and feared that Trumps strike against Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani would spark a war with Iran. In both cases, he acknowledged that the targeted men had been responsible for the deaths of Americans. As one of his first acts as president, he cut off all aid to the Saudi-led coalition fighting Irans proxy insurgency in Yemen. and then collapsed Afghanistan. His initial reaction to the Russian invasion threat was to open the door for Vladimir Putin by assuring him that Ukraine was outside the U.S.-NATO defense perimeter and no Americans would fight for Kyiv.

Particularly chagrined by Bidens visit to the Troy weapons plant was William Hartung of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (Nation Books, 2012). The book makes the standard leftist argument that rather than provide the United States with the equipment and technology it needs to defend its interests in a contentious world, Lockheed Martin has used its capitalist power to drive a bellicose foreign policy simply to enrich itself.

On the Democracy Now PBS program, Hartung claimed this is also the motive behind the effort to arm Ukraine. He stated, Well, this is a bonanza for the companies. You know, theyre going to profit from this in so many ways, it makes my head spin. But youve got the $3 billion in direct arms, which is a substantial amount for these companies. Then youve got countries like Germany increasing their Pentagon -- military budgets to buy things like Lockheed Martin F-35s for billions of dollars, or Poland buying General Dynamics tanks So, between the arms to Ukraine, arming the European buildup, the Pentagon being jacked up far beyond what is needed even to address the Ukraine crisis, these companies, which already get -- you know, the top five get $150 billion a year from the Pentagon. Thats just going to go up and up. So, this is kind of unfortunate for the world, but its good financial news for these companies. Its unfortunate for the world that the West defends itself from aggression? Hartungs loyalties clearly do not lie with the country in which he lives.

The Quincy Institute wants a world in which the U.S. is not the preeminent power. It sees the emergence of a multipolar world in the 21st century where economic power is more evenly shared across nations. It thus favors the rise of rival powers like China that can offset Americas lust for domination. A May 5 post advises against The Folly of Pushing South Korea Toward a China Containment Strategy. Instead, both South Korea and China should be included in non-traditional security activities of the Quad such as infrastructure and climate change. The Quad is the alignment of India, Australia, Japan, and the U.S. which the Quincy experts want to see demilitarized as a counter to China.

Another Quincy member is Andrew J. Bacevich, a prolific opponent of any American policy not based on appeasement and retreat. The day after President Biden made his request to Congress for $33 billion in aid to Ukraine, $20.4 billion of which would be military support, the flagship of mainstream liberal opinion, the New Republic, ran a piece by Bacevich. For American politicians and pundits given to giddiness -- and to distracting attention from recent failures -- the proxy war in Ukraine is the perfect foreign quarrel. It is rejuvenating Cold Warstyle militarized globalism as the cornerstone of U.S. national security policy he wailed. He denounced the typically dovish Damon Linker for observing that The Ukraine invasion marks a return to a world primarily dominated by competition and hostility among states. Yet, this is exactly the case, though it would be more accurate to note that this is less of a return than a confirmation that we never left a contentious world. For Bacevich the enemy is always at home. He blames the reckless expansion of NATO even as Putins brutality justifies the concern that motivated that growth in NATO membership; that Russian imperialism would reappear. But forget Putin -- the real villain is described in the TNR headline The Ukraine War is Ballooning Americas Military-Industrial Complex.

On May 9, President Biden signed the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act Of 2022 which will make it easier to provide military aid to Ukraine and other Eastern European countries. The bill passed the Senate by voice vote and the House by a 417-10 margin. Biden chose the date marking Victory in Europe Day to sign the bill as Lend-Lease had been originally conceived as a way for the U.S. to aid those fighting Nazi aggression before the U.S. entered the war itself. This reference indicated that Biden has not changed his views at their core. As he said at Lockheed Martin, Youre making it possible for the Ukrainian people to defend themselves without us having to risk getting in a third world war by sending in American soldiers fighting Russian soldiers. So, he is still opposed to direct military action out of fear of escalation. Still, there has been some encouraging movement. He justified support for Ukraine, Because if you dont stand up to dictators, history has shown us they keep coming. They keep coming. Their appetite for power continues to grow. The question is whether he will remember this vital lesson of history when dealing with China, Iran, North Korea, and any other threat from ambitious would-be conquerors. And will he also recall that, as in WW II and numerous other contests, eventually we had to join the fight ourselves for the forces of liberty to prevail.

William R. Hawkins is a former economics professor who has written widely on defense and foreign policy issues for a variety of scholarly and popular publications. He has also served on the staff on the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Image: Free SVG
Tucker, President Trump, and Governor Ron DeSantis are the three  the troika of leadership for the MAGA and America First movement.

You can tell that this is true by the way the enemies of MAGA and America First  the Progressives, the globalists, the Deep State  have already begun to fire on these three warriors. The Patriot movement loves Tucker, Trump, and DeSantis because of the enemies they have made.

Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Lindsey Graham, Mitt Romney  these people will be in no way the future leaders of the Republican Party. The base and grassroots of the party will not accept their leadership or adhere to their motivations. They are done. Over.

MAGA and America First need warriors and leaders who are not afraid and who do not get cowed by the BLM and Antifa mobs. In this battle for the soul of America's future, in these foxholes of our culture wars, most Republicans want to be fighting with a real fighter, a true believer of the cause, who does not flinch. And that is Tucker, Trump, and DeSantis. That is why Tucker, Trump, and DeSantis are the leaders in 2022 and 2024.

Tucker. Tucker Carlson's monologue is must-watch TV for conservative voters. Many conservatives stopped watching FOX News after election night because it appeared that the network was in on the steal. Many conservatives today look at FOX news as the "controlled opposition." But not Tucker!

Tucker says what Patriots are thinking and feeling. Tucker wonders about what conservatives are wondering about. Tucker appears to embody some of the best characteristics of Reagan, Jefferson, and C.S. Lewis. In some ways, Tucker is the linguist for Trump's tweets.

Of all the media, Tucker and Tucker alone appears to be willing to take on all the sacred cows of the Deep State, the media left, and Big Tech. From the Russia-Ukraine war to COVID to transgenderism and CRT in public schools to the 2020 election...Tucker takes on all of them and more.

Many wonder how Tucker is still alive. How has he not committed suicide with three bullets to the back of the head? How has pornography not mysteriously shown up on his laptop? Without question, Tucker is in the sights of the surveillance Deep State communities, yet he does not flinch.

Tucker's fight is the conservative fight. Tucker's battles are MAGA battles. And MAGA nation and America First movement will follow him. We know we can trust Tucker to be uncompromising in the fight for America's future. He will not be canceled.

Trump. President Trump won the election in 2016. And most Republicans truly believe he won the election of 2020. A great deal of Democrats believe that also. More and more evidence appears to be coming out to support this fact. That is why Progressives are trying to make it illegal for Trump to run again in 2024.

Much like when Andrew Jackson was cheated out of the presidency in the 1800s, Trump, like Jackson, is coming back with a vengeance. And his supporters, like Jackson's, marvel at it. MAGA nation and the America First movement want Trump back as the presidential nominee in 2024 and will fight to get him back in the White House.

Just recently, Trump's endorsements won in all of the 22 Republican primaries he endorsed. Obviously, President Trump is the leader of the Republican party, and his nomination is assured if he wants it.

As more and more evidence is coming out about the Election of 2020, Trump becomes more and more popular among Republican voters. From Mollie Hemingway's Rigged to True the Vote to Dinesh D'Souza's recently released 2000 Mules, Americans are beginning to feel that election fraud in 2020 was not just a theory, but a fact. And they're mad as hell about their votes not counting. Trump is the tip of the spear of this anger.

Trump hits all the right notes in leading MAGA and America First in the 2022 midterms as well as the 2024 presidential election. Trump is the author and originator of MAGA and America First. And it appears that Trump's Supreme Court nominations will overturn Roe v. Wade. He gets all the credit for this remarkable achievement.

Trump and his fellow believers know that you can't focus on 2022 or 2024 until you fix what happened in 2020. Once 2020 is fixed, 2022 and 2024 become much more likely.

DeSantis. Should Donald Trump decide not to run for the GOP nomination in 2024, Governor Ron DeSantis would be next up. DeSantis is the heir apparent for the Patriots  the nation's leading governor in America, who represents all things MAGA and all things America First.

Conservatives love DeSantis because he is a warrior. He not only fights, but wins. DeSantis is almost always victorious in the State of Florida's issues as well as fighting against Biden's regime.

No other governor in America has fought so well and won so often as DeSantis against the Deep State's CDC. DeSantis does not allow himself to be intimated or canceled against the BLM and Antifa woke mobs. Conservatives love his bravery. He put on a civics lesson in his battle against what was at one time thought to be the untouchable Disney. And he just recently signed into law a 1.2-billion-dollar tax cut for all Floridians.

DeSantis has turned the "purple" state of Florida into a bright red state, and his re-election is all but in the bag. DeSantis is hitting on all the right notes in fighting for Florida, fighting for MAGA and America First, and making sure in the 2024 election that Florida stays red. Patriots trust DeSantis; their fight is his fight.

With the midterm elections of 2022 in just a few months, Tucker, Trump, and DeSantis will be crucial for the Patriots and GOP winning back the House and the Senate. As long as the midterms are not stolen, as long as there is election integrity in the key "purple" congressional districts and "purple" states, it could be a landslide for MAGA and America First.

One must remember, Progressives go by Stalin's old adage, "I don't care who votes; I care only who counts the votes." Look for the enemies of MAGA and America First to do everything they can to destroy this troika of leadership. You know that Tucker, Trump, and DeSantis are "over the target" the way their enemies ruthlessly attack them.

Come to think of it, a Trump-DeSantis GOP ticket sure sounds strong and victorious. Add Tucker in the position of chief of staff or press secretary, and it sounds even better. Then put Ted Cruz in as attorney general, or put him on the Supreme Court. Next, add Rand Paul as either CDC director or secretary of defense, and then those Deep State elitists will lose their minds. Yeah...let's do that.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
As a lifelong conservative and a retired teacher, I welcome all efforts to wrest control over education from the leftist educrats. I long for a day when we can send our kids to public schools and know they are being educated, not indoctrinated. But indoctrinated they are, and one of the main vehicles is the seemingly innocuous "Advisory" module.

As parents, we send our children to public schools to learn English, math, science, history, and other subjects deemed desirable by our society. Our schools also teach propaganda aimed at transforming America into something like the America that President Obama longed for when he said he wanted to transform America during his administration.

Recently, conservative groups critical of Obama's vision have challenged those school boards and politicians suspected of trying to help Obama transform America. The defeat of Terry McAuliffe in Virginia and opposition to Critical Race Theory show that parents and taxpayers are wising up to the leftward march of American public education.

As I said, I support wresting control of American public education from the leftist educrats. Even as we celebrate the victory of Governor Youngkin and the attention on CRT that is making the news on a regular basis, however, we must not underestimate the educrats' power. They will not go away quietly. They are true believers, and they expect that conservatives will lose interest in this fight.

A telling thing happened during the Wuhan Flu Emergency in 2020, when most American students were sent home to receive online classes. As students transitioned from in-class education to online education, several school boards around America asked parents not to monitor their children's online classes. In this "era of transparency," I found those requests disquieting. What was going on during those class sessions that teachers did not want parents to see?

In the last years of my teaching experience, something called "Advisory" became more and more prominent in our school. What is Advisory, you ask? Advisory is the umbrella covering non-academic instruction given to students. This is a period where left-of-center propaganda is imposed on the young. This is what many conservatives call social engineering.



Image: Students by freepik.

Since education for K12 is compulsory in the USA, students must sit through the type of left-of-center indoctrination that many parents across America are now opposing. Subjects in Advisory cover diversity, equity, and inclusion training. LBGT advocates see and use Advisory as a place to promote their agenda. Educators use the word "Advisory" to describe these non-academic sessions because it sounds innocuous enough and suggests that the audience has some choice in the experience, but that's not true.

Can you unsee a picture or unhear music? In a compulsory setting, educators subject students to unorthodox ideas about society. They have been doing this for years. Sometime later, parents hear their children voice these unorthodox ideas and wonder, "Where is all this crap coming from?" Well, if you are a taxpayer, you are paying for it. Many teachers resent teaching it, but the students are still forced to sit through it. Who came up with this brilliant idea, anyway?

The usual suspects are responsible for Advisory lessons. The Human Rights Campaign, the NAACP, and the Democrat party all contribute to the stew fed to our young during Advisory. Still, it's not a full meal, so who can object to giving our kids a snack?

Well, I object. I don't want to pay for the foolishness that makes our young what Rush Limbaugh used to call "mind-numbed robots." If you still have kids in public school, call the administration and tell them you want to opt your child out of Advisory. This has precedence in schools. If, for example, a novel is being taught in English that parents find objectionable, they can request another reading.

Such requests will let educrats know we are on to them and their Advisory lessons. We must not let up. As Lefty Driesell used to say, we need to stay on them like "white on rice" and reclaim our public schools.

Norm L. Guy is a pseudonym.
Abortion, which is the killing of a human life, has been since its beginning inextricably linked to eugenics. That hasn't escaped thoughtful black observers such as Fox Business's Charles Payne, nor the GOP's Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, both of whom have effectively called out this appalling fact, much to the benefit of everyone.

Abortion, which involves targeting the most helpless, is never otherwise. We all know how black lives don't matter to the newspapers and networks in crime-infested blue cities. It's even more of a problem with abortion targeting the even more helpless, who are black babies in the womb. After all, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger famously promoted birth control, the predecessor to abortion, as a means of getting rid of "the unfit," and you can figure out who that all too often turned out to be. The Bolsheviks introduced abortion in 1920 explicitly to break up families in order to make the survivors loyal only to the state. Prior to that, abortion was unthinkable. The left now tries to hide that sordid past, but even today, the ugly truth slips out.

This brings us to Joe Biden's Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, who, rather than get into the "my body, my choice" weeds of the street screamers baying outside the homes of Supreme Court justices, put out her own dry economic analysis on the value of abortions to society.

According to Fox News, as reported by BizPac Review:

"Yesterday, Janet Yellen, who is our secretary of the treasury, she was up on Capitol Hill and she had an extraordinary claim that said that if abortion went away, it would be bad for the economy," co-host Steve Doocy recounted. "Eliminating the right of women to make decisions when and whether to have children would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades," Yellen claimed.

Charles Payne heard the dog whistle in that one and took out the trash:

Carrying out Janet Yellen's "logic" to its fullest would mean the near extinction of Black people in America. But also according to her logic all those abortions would be great for the economy and those allowed to be born into.  https://t.co/PktD64Q2Ks  Charles V Payne (@cvpayne) May 11, 2022

After all, if a little abortion is good for the economy, why not a lot of it? Why not get rid of all of the black people through abortion and have the best economy ever? It's the same disgusting logic the left employs in arguing for raising the minimum wage, which leads to the idea that if raising the minimum wage to $15 is a good for the economy, why not raise it to $100 an hour for an even better economy?

Abortion targeting the black community is a more serious topic than the minimum wage  the logic of Yellen is basically to max the economy out by getting rid of poverty, which would mean getting rid of Black people, who are disproportionately poor. Leave aside the matter that a declining population is not a good thing anywhere in the world for any country's prospects for economic growth. Yellen left that part out.

Payne was keying off a retort by Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who pointed out that yes, he was born poor, but his mother chose to give him life anyway, and he's glad to be here. There's some kind of vile bias against poor people in this abortion argument, which in the end always hits black people the hardest.

It's rather amazing how this racist pattern in abortion arguments always seems to come to the fore. Might that be because abortion is racist? You don't get this kind of problem popping up again and again without there being some kind of connection that's inherent in the problem.

Fortunately for all of us, Payne and Scott had the fortitude to say that quiet part out loud.

Image: Twitter screen shot.
This week, Sen. Chuck Schumer will put an abortion proposal for a Senate vote.

This is the story:

The bill Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is bringing for a vote Wednesday is the Women's Health Protection Act. It's been criticized by pro-choice Republican Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, as "overly broad," including striking down state limits on abortion, even bans on gender-based abortion. Murkowski and Collins also say they're worried the bill would remove conscience protections for religious hospitals. Collins has indicated that she will vote against the bill. Murkowski's office did not respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital. Schumer on Thursday pushed back on the idea that the act would do what Collins and Murkowski say it would.

It won't make it, and it's not because of the filibuster. In other words, a different proposal calling for access to rare and safe abortions plus giving states the opportunity to regulate the practice could pass. It would attract a few GOP senators.

I am pro-life but do understand that many Americans want some European-type solution  i.e., access, but limits on abortion after so many weeks.

The problem for the Democrats is that "follow the science" now leads them to a point of "heartbeats" and "in the womb images" that make the 40-year-old "it's my body" argument hard to make.

The proposal will fail, and the pundits will move to analyze which side won the round. I think it will be a wash, but don't be surprised if a frustrated left blames the Democrats for doing nothing when they had larger majorities under President Obama.

We are here to a large extent because Democrats were not willing to compromise one bit over regulations.

PS: Click for my videos and podcasts at Canto Talk.

Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.
CANBERRA, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese has been declared the winner of the third leaders' debate ahead of the Australian election.

Albanese and Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Wednesday night went head-to-head on key issues for the final time before the election on May 21.

The debate, which was hosted by Network Seven, was significantly calmer than Sunday night's second contest and addressed the rising cost of living, climate change, anti-corruption commissions, child care and wage growth.

Of 160 undecided voters asked to judge the leaders, 50 percent said Albanese was the winner and 34 percent Morrison. Sixteen percent said they were still undecided.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Thursday published the results of a survey of 135,053 voters.

It found that voters' overall rating of Morrison has fallen from four out of 10 in the lead-up to the 2019 election to 3.3.

By comparison, respondents rated Albanese 5.1 out of 10 on average.

In order to form a government for the first time since 2013, Labor must have a net gain of at least seven seats in the lower house of Parliament -- the House of Representatives -- on May 21.

According to a poll of 19,000 voters across the country published by News Corp Australia on Wednesday, the Opposition is set to win 12 seats.

The poll found the Coalition is set to lose four seats in Victoria, two in Morrison and Albanese' home state of New South Wales, two in Western Australia and one each in Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania, with another six seats considered too close to call. 
Democrats have sought, and failed, 51-49, to pass a bill that would have made abortions legal nationwide up until the day of birth. That puts them in the same company as China, North Korea, and Canada.

According to Fox News:

Vice President Kamala Harris presided over the vote on the Women's Health Protection Act. It needed 60 votes to advance, but died in a 51 to 49 tally with West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin joining with all 50 Republicans in voting no. President Biden immediately condemned Republicans for blocking the abortion rights legislation at a time when "women's constitutional rights are under unprecedented attack." He called on voters to elect more Democrats in November, so the legislation can get passed next year.

That's some company to be in, given that it's mostly the craziest totalitarian regimes with no regard for human life who allow abortion up until the day of birth.

Most countries, in fact, have limits on abortions. France and Germany limit them to the first twelve weeks, with some exceptions. Democrats want abortions to happen up to birth or around 40 weeks.

They are clearly the extremists.

Here's PolitiFact, of all sources:

There are only four countries in the world that have  that legalize abortion after five months  China, North Korea, Canada and the U.S.

We are continually told that Democrats are the empathetic party. Is there anything moral or empathetic about a party that refuses to give medical care to a newborn baby, accidentally born, in an abortion mill? Because that's what frequently happens.

Just read this, written by former rep. Ron Paul, years ago, as to what he saw going on in hospitals doing abortions:

Dr. Ron Paul on abortion: pic.twitter.com/GthoLezy6Z  Natalie F Danelishen (@Chesschick01) May 3, 2022

If a woman, outside an abortion facility, gives birth and decides she doesn't want the baby, and rather than give it up for adoption, or take it to a fire station or whatever the law provides, instead lets the baby die, she will be charged with murder, as everyone recognizes that the baby is a human being with constitutional rights. But under the current abortion logic of today, if a doctor, mother, or abortionist lets a baby die gasping in an abortion mill, it is called "reproductive choice."

The media and other Democrats should stop pretending they are the party of science and that they believe in equal treatment under the law. They should also stop the talking points that they are empathetic, and Republicans don't care.

Democrats in Congress failing to allow a vote on the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, for one:

Our government's most sacred duty is to safeguard the right to life for all Americans, including the most vulnerable. That's why pro-life leaders in Congress are demanding a vote on the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act to ensure that every newborn receives equal care, no matter the circumstances of their birth.

The media and other Democrats continually cite polls that say people oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, yet they rarely if ever cite polls that say a much bigger majority oppose late-term abortions, because facts don't matter when extremists are pushing their agenda.

A survey conducted by You.gov with the pro-life group Americans United for Life found that 66 percent of U.S. adults who identify as pro-choice opposed third-trimester abortions, and 68 percent oppose abortions the day before a baby is born. As expected, the opposition was stronger among all adults surveyed: 79 percent rejected late-term abortion, and 80 percent opposed day-before-birth abortion.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a health adviser to President Obama and thenvice president Biden says that at age 75, people have lived long enough and should not take anything to prolong your life, including vaccines.

Why would anyone trust Democrats to oversee his health care when they won't even support health care for the most vulnerable, newborn babies, and the elderly?

Isn't it idiotic when Democrats claim that any limits on abortion harm the economy while they claim that unlimited illegal immigration helps the economy?

It appears that most of the media, Biden, and other Democrats have joined the extremist Ultra MAPA party: Make America Poor Again. Every solution of the Democrats seeks to transfer more power, money, and freedom from the people to the powerful, greedy government. They seek to destroy the fossil fuel industry, which gives the people reasonably priced energy and makes the country thrive. They want to take away choice on health care. They strive to make more people dependent on the government instead of striving to give people the opportunity to move up the economic ladder.

I am a proud member of the middle-of-the-road, commonsense Ultra MAGA party. There is nothing extremist about wanting smaller government, fewer regulations, lower taxes, career criminals behind bars, secure borders, freedom of choice on health care, parental rights in schools, people using facilities that match their body parts, and capitalism.

The choice of whom to vote for gets easier every day. Basic advice: Do not vote for whom the WaPo, the NYT, and most major news outlets support. They are for the leftist extremists who are set out to remake, and destroy, America

Let's go Brandon!

Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.
When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, it sent shockwaves through Washington. For the first time in modern U.S. history, an individual had won the highest office purely on grassroots support and by challenging the Washington Democrat-led establishment.

Trump was a threat to the status quo in Washington. The establishment knew they not only had to personally denigrate him, but also delegitimize his victory to prolong their relevance.

They first concocted the Trump-Russian Collusion hoax. The mainstream media amplified the lie with their breathless coverage. The proponents of this hoax couldn't tell how Russia meddled with the ballots or how the votes were altered; they just knew it had happened. If you asked questions, you were accused of spreading "Russian disinformation."

The cacophony caused the appointment of a special counsel.

For the next two years, the media hysterically covered "leaks" from the office of the special counsel. With every leak, they claimed that "the walls are closing in on President Trump." This was a daily occurrence. If you followed their coverage, you would not be blamed for believing that it was not a question of if, but when Trump would be forced to resign in shame.

The hoax cost $32 million in taxpayer money and caused more than two years of uncertainty. It probably cost the GOP the midterms in 2019.

In the end, the report came out, and there was no evidence of collusion. President Trump was obviously found not guilty.

The media should have felt embarrassed to be proven so egregiously erroneous for such a prolonged period. They should have issued groveling apologies to all, beginning with President Trump. They should have promised instant remedial action and pledged to improve.

But nothing even remotely such as that occurred. Upon being exposed as hoaxers, they merely moved on, as if nothing had occurred. Some insisted that there was collusion, but Trump was sly enough to cover his tracks from Mueller.

Instead of being punished for their bogus reporting, the prime propagators of the hoax won one of these most prestigious prizes for journalism.

In 2018, both the New York Times and the Washington Post were awarded the Pulitzer "for deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation's understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the president-elect's transition team and his eventual administration."

Among the members of the Pulitzer Board was past Pulitzer-winner Carlos Lozada, non-fiction book critic and associate editor at the Washington Post. That is to say, an employee of the Post was among the jury to award the Post.

Despite their spurious reporting being exposed, both the Post and the Times continue to hold the awards.

This year, the Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize again, this time for its coverage of the Jan. 6 protests that went overboard, causing the fracas at the Capitol.

The NYT also won for both its national and international reporting. Rutgers UniversityNewark professor Salamishah Tillet was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in criticism for her New York Times essays on race in arts and culture.

Among the members of the Pulitzer Board were Gail Collins, opinion columnist at the New York Times, and Carlos Lozada, non-fiction book critic and associate editor at the Washington Post.

Hence, a jury including employees for the Washington Post and the NYT voted to award the Pulitzer to the Post and the NYT.

These, and the 2018 award, were clear cases of conflicts of interest.

But we are living in times where neither the Pulitzer nor the media care about being fair. Worse, they do not even care to appear fair or hide their conflict of interest from the outside world.

If there is any accomplishment of liberals that is worth studying, it is how they managed to build their establishment by hijacking various organizations. Today, administrative and government agencies, educational institutes, corporate houses, NGOs, showbiz, intergovernmental organizations, the media, and even juries for prestigious prizes have been co-opted by the left.

The Pulitzer wins for the WaPo and NYT mean that if individuals merely adhere to the establishment groupthink, they can be rich and successful, and they can also win awards. Talent or skill or hard work or bravery or independence is not needed. They do not have to deliver anything extraordinary. They just have to follow conventional orders and function as stenographers to the establishment.

The coverage of the Trump Russia Hoax and the Jan. 6 protests didn't require reporting from perilous war zones in search of the truth. There was no analysis or deduction of a complex political scandal or a financial scam. The reportage was based on leaks, conjectures, overstatements, and blatant falsehoods.

Once upon a time, journalists existed to hold the powerful accountable. The mistrust of authority should be inherent among journalists. They always maintained a safe distance from the powers that be in order to be able to cover a subject fairly.

Those days are over.

In current times, journalism is chosen as a profession merely to climb up the hierarchy and rub shoulders with the powerful. The journalists turn into loyal terriers for the powerful. They crawl when asked to bend and prostrate themselves when asked to crawl.

When they have served their master faithfully, a biscuit is tossed in their direction in the form of a Pulitzer, which they proudly flaunt.

What an unmitigated disgrace.

Image: Vladimir Babenko via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Among the most fervent war hawks in America today is Alexander Vindman, a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army and a former member of the NSC, who now works at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies Foreign Policy Institute. His previous claim to fame was as a witness who testified about former president Donald Trump's call to Ukrainian officials in the second impeachment trial of Trump. He became an instant hero to the crowd at MSNBC and other anti-Trump major media (is there any other kind?). Vindman also reportedly claimed that Trump "bears an enormous burden of responsibility" for the Russia-Ukraine war, even though Russia's aggression against Ukraine has occurred during the Obama and Biden administrations. There was no Russian aggression against Ukraine on Trump's watch.

Vindman has now taken to the pages of Foreign Affairs to urge U.S. policymakers to "embrace the goal of Ukrainian victory" against Russia by throwing caution to the wind. The United States, he writes, is not doing enough to help Ukraine win this war. We should forget about building a stable relationship with Russia and instead provide Ukrainian forces with sufficient military weaponry to take the war to Russia's territory, Vindman counsels. We need to "discard the desire" to seek a compromise with Russia for a negotiated peace.

Vindman writes that our aid thus far has been too "incremental." Too many of our policymakers, he says, are acting based on a "flawed assessment of the risk of escalation and the potential consequences of a Russian defeat." The United States should provide Ukraine with weapons that can reach far inside Russia to destroy "militarily relevant targets" there. "There can be no return to business as usual with Russia," according to Vindman, "as long as Putin rules from the Kremlin." In other words, our policy toward Russia should be regime change.

Vindman writes that his recommendations carry "obvious risks," including cyber-war, Russian conventional attacks on NATO arms shipments, a broader European war, and even nuclear escalation (a risk that he claims has been "overstated and remains exceptionally small"). Stepping up arms shipments, including deep-strike weapons, Vindman assures us, will not likely "provoke any meaningful retaliation from Moscow." He claims that the nuclear threshold for Moscow "remains almost impossibly high." And he is convinced that peace can come about only with a Ukrainian victory  and that, he writes, must also be our goal.

The Biden administration's recent call for more than $34 billion in new assistance to Ukraine, Vindman claims, is not enough. We need to supply Ukraine with "more advanced military technology and the comprehensive training to accompany arms shipments from the West." NATO, he writes, should establish warehouses of military supplies just across the border from Ukraine in Poland, Romania, and Slovakia  presumably, Russia will not attack those warehouses due to its alleged fears of escalation. And then, after Ukraine's victory, he writes, the United States should help rebuild Ukraine via a new "Marshall Plan," followed swiftly by Ukraine's admittance to the European Union, further poking the Russian bear.

Vindman concludes that if Russia wins the war in Ukraine it will result in "irreversible damage to the liberal order, international law, security norms, and global stability." Those abstract words are Vindman's substitute for any analysis of precisely what vital national security interests of the United States are at stake in the Ukraine war. He identifies none because there is none.

No wonder Vindman doesn't like Trump. It was Trump who tried to stop the "endless wars" of past administrations while seeking to avoid unnecessary new wars. It was Trump who instinctively understood what John Quincy Adams meant when he said that America should not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. And it was Trump who attempted to pursue policies  policies resisted at every turn by the military hierarchy  in accordance with George Washington's prudent counsel in his Farewell Address not to act abroad based on sentiment for any other nation, but always to look to America's interests exclusively.

Today, we are risking World War III precisely because we have abandoned the foreign policy traditions of Washington and Adams. God help us if the Biden administration follows Vindman's advice.

Image: DW News via YouTube.
Should American citizens be treated differently from migrants illegally entering the country? How about our men and women who serve in the military? Many would likely answer yes, but that's not the way it appears to be playing out when it comes to COVID vaccine mandates.

Recently, the brother of Col. Alexander Vindman, of impeachment infamy, expressed his support for a prosecution team that secured a first-in-the-nation conviction of a lieutenant for failing to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Regardless of where one stands on the issue of mandates, the double-standard when it comes to the new vaccine policy announced for migrants is hard to accept. In the midst of firing members of the military for not getting jabbed, the Biden administration has declared the pandemic over for the purposes of turning migrants away from the southern border (i.e., use of Title 42) and stated it will no longer be implementing COVID mitigation measures such as testing and vaccines for migrants entering the country. The idea that those not legally in the country are entitled to more liberty and autonomy than American citizens may strike many as puzzling.

Given the migrant numbers, the contradiction in treatment is staggering. More than 2.4 million illegal migrants have come in contact with Border Patrol agents since President Joe Biden took office, and that number does not include those who are not caught. The CBP encountered 221,303 illegals in March 2022 alone, the thirteenth straight month of over 150,000 encounters  a trend never before recorded. Many of these people are ferried to various cities in the U.S. and, since they are no longer tested or vaccinated, could spread COVID-19 to unsuspecting U.S. citizens who come in contact with them.

Is this double-standard acceptable to most Americans? How many Americans fully understand the differing levels of treatment? This is what drives my organization, the Center to Advance Security in America (CASA), to be so active. We have sent Freedom of Information Act requests to the federal government to find out the basis for these policies and how they are being implemented, so the public can be properly informed of why American citizens should be subject to tighter restrictions than those illegally entering our country.

The American people need to know. And they will, if CASA has anything to say about it.

Adam Turner is the director of the Center to Advance Security in America.

Image: Martin Leveneur.
For a few years, Google has somewhat forgotten that Android Tablets existed. Having fully given up on tablets a few years ago, and making Android adapt to these larger screens (albeit terribly). But now that Google has its own tablet coming out next year, it remembers that tablets exist and is updating about 20 of its own apps for tablets.

The apps that Google is updating to work better on tablets include YouTube Music, Google Maps, Messages, Google Play, Gmail, Google Home, and Google TV among others. By the time that the Pixel Tablet comes out next year, well likely have most of Google apps updated for tablets.

Its a continuation of Android 12L

Last year, after Google started rolling out Android 12 to everyone, it then announced Android 12L. It was a beta version of Android that would be an update to Android 12 in the form of a Pixel Drop.

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It was a pretty small update to Android 12L, but it had some big updates for Foldables and tablets. This was Googles attempt at making Android 12 work better on these larger displays. Like the Galaxy Z Fold 3 and other tablets. As it would take better advantage of the larger screen there. By also including a dock at the bottom, a lot like on Chrome OS or macOS.

Its about time that Google started to take tablets seriously again, instead of just letting Apple own the tablet space. Samsung has never given up on tablets, even though Google did. Samsung continued to release some of the best tablets ever made. Sadly though, Googles Android software let them down. So while the Galaxy Tab S series were very powerful, the software just couldnt take advantage of that.

But we expect that to change next year with the Pixel Tablet launching, likely in the fall.
MOSCOW, May 12 (Xinhua) -- The Russian military said that it had obtained new information revealing details of "the Pentagon's inhuman experiments on Ukrainian citizens" in a psychiatric hospital in Ukraine's Kharkov region.

"The main category of the experimental subjects was a group of male patients aged 40-60 with a high stage of physical exhaustion," said Igor Kirillov, chief of the Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defense Forces of the Russian Armed Forces, on Wednesday.

"In order to conceal their belonging to the United States, the experts who conducted the biological research arrived through the territories of third countries," he said at a briefing, adding that the foreign researchers were evacuated in January 2022.

Some large pharmaceutical companies, including those affiliated with the Pentagon, have been involved in the U.S. military biological activities in Ukraine, he said.

Russian specialists carried out work directly in two biological laboratories in Mariupol and found that the United States used the city as a regional center for the collection and certification of the cholera pathogen, Kirillov said. 
(ANSA) - ROME, MAY 12 - Italian police on Thursday arrested 31 people in connection with an alleged international narco trafficking ring that laundered its proceeds with works of arts.

The gang allegedly had strong links to South American drug traffickers, fugitives from justice and leading members of organised crime groups, police said.

The police operation was carried out in various Italian regions as well as in the Netherlands, Spain and Lithuania.

A modern-art gallery in Amsterdam was impounded.

Police said the gang used it to launder drug profits by buying art works.

The co-owner of the art gallery is an art merchant specialising in the works of cult British street artist Banksy, Andrea Deiana, police said.

Deiana is also "an extremely important international narcotics broker, able to organize supplies for hundreds of kilos," said police.

Deiana, police said, was in "stable contact" with both South American narcos and with one of the world's most important drug traffickers, Italy's Raffaele Imperiale, extradited at the end of March from the United Arab Emirates where he had been enjoying a "golden escape from justice" in Dubai.

A Milanese web entrepreneur and start-up founder who is on trial for drugging, raping and filming two Italian models, Alberto Genovese, was among those placed under investigation for drug trafficking.

Genovese allegedly bought 100 grammes of ketamine an cocaine in November 2019 that was "destined for sale or distribution," police said. (ANSA).


Slovenia: explosion at chemical factory injures people Residents urged to stay indoors and close windows

(ANSA) - BELGRADE, MAY 12 - This morning an explosion occurred at a chemical factory in the town of Kocevje, in Slovenia, the Slovenian news agency STA reported. The explosion caused a fire and a tick smoke over the city. According to a preliminary estimate, more than 20 people were injured in the incident. Since the origin of the fire is not clear, residents were urged to stay indoors and close the windows. According to the Slovenian Civil Protection and Disaster Relief, the fire has now been put out, STA informed. (ANSA).





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Abbas calls journalist Abu Akleh 'voice of the nation' At reporter's funeral, says Israel is responsible



prev

next Official funeral of Al-Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh

Related Associated Israeli army denies reporter killed by their snipers

(ANSAmed) - TEL AVIV, MAY 12 - "We are today saying goodbye to Shireen Abu Akleh, who was the voice of the truth and the voice of the nation," Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas said Thursday at the Muqata palace in the West Bank in front of the body of the Al Jazeera journalist killed on Wednesday in Jenin.



"We place the full responsibility (for her death) on Israel.



We refuse to carry out a joint investigation with Israelis, who committed this crime. We do not trust them," Abbas said.



He added that the case would soon be submitted to the International Criminal Court. Beside the president were Prime Minister Muhammed Shtayeh and Minister Hussein a-Sheikh.



The van carrying the coffin was escorted by a crowd when it left from a Ramallah hospital to the Muqtada and the presidential palace was also filled with people.



The reporter - who was Orthodox Christian - will be buried on Friday in a Jerusalem cemetery. (ANSAmed).




Barcelona approves surname change for child killed by father Case of gender-based 'vicarious violence'

(ANSAmed) - MADRID, MAY 12 - The Spanish authorities have authorised the 'post-mortem' change of the surname of Leo, a child killed by his father last summer in Barcelona.



Spanish media reported the news, quoting the lawyers representing the child's mother.



This case of infanticide is being treated as an alleged case of 'vicarious violence': a type of gender-based violence in which the attacker tries to indirectly cause the most pain possible to the victims (normally their female partners or former partners) by harming their children.



In this case, the father of the child was found dead a few days after having killed the child. His body was found in a hotel room.



One of the reasons for the authorisation of the change of the child's surname was the emotional impact that the fact he was buried with that surname had on his relatives, reported the Catalan public broadcaster in an online article. (ANSAmed).




Spanish PM says gas price ceiling to be 40 euros/MWh Measure to be passed on Friday

(ANSAmed) - MADRID, MAY 12 - The Spanish government will on Friday in a special Council of Ministers meeting approve a 40 euros/MWh ceiling on gas prices for which it has received EU approval.



The news was given by Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who said that "we will in this way reduce bills that families and businesses are paying".



He was speaking during an event on EU aid for post-COVID recovery.



Sanchez said that, with this gas ceiling, the maximum cost will be around half of the current cost.



A similar measure, he added, will also be approved in Portugal, another country that the EU has granted an exception to as concerns the functioning of the energy market.




Abbas calls journalist Abu Akleh 'voice of the nation' At reporter's funeral, says Israel is responsible

(ANSAmed) - TEL AVIV, MAY 12 - "We are today saying goodbye to Shireen Abu Akleh, who was the voice of the truth and the voice of the nation," Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas said Thursday at the Muqata palace in the West Bank in front of the body of the Al Jazeera journalist killed on Wednesday in Jenin.



"We place the full responsibility (for her death) on Israel.



We refuse to carry out a joint investigation with Israelis, who committed this crime. We do not trust them," Abbas said.



He added that the case would soon be submitted to the International Criminal Court. Beside the president were Prime Minister Muhammed Shtayeh and Minister Hussein a-Sheikh.



The van carrying the coffin was escorted by a crowd when it left from a Ramallah hospital to the Muqtada and the presidential palace was also filled with people.



The reporter - who was Orthodox Christian - will be buried on Friday in a Jerusalem cemetery. (ANSAmed).




Israeli army denies reporter killed by their snipers Preliminary inquiry, army wants to examine bullet

(ANSAmed) - TEL AVIV, MAY 12 - The Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh was not in the line of fire of Israeli snipers on Wednesday at the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank during an Israeli operation against Palestinian militants, Israeli military radio reported on Thursday.



The radio cited a preliminary investigation conducted Wednesday night by the Israeli army.



The position of each soldier was reconstructed on a map of the area, with special attention to the behaviour of the snipers in positions to protect soldiers entering an ally.



The broadcaster said that, judging from their positions, it was possible to ascertain that they were not in a line of fire with the journalist, who they said was in a lateral area.



The broadcaster added that the army is still highly interested in seeing the bullet taken from the journalist's body, since they claim it might be compatible with the M16 rifles used by soldiers or with the Kalashnikovs used by the militants. (ANSAmed).




Portugal: abortion not criteria for doctors' evaluation Proposal for bonuses only for those with no patients that abort

(ANSAmed) - LISBON, MAY 12 - A proposal in Portugal that would result in family doctors getting lower pay state bonuses for having patients who undergo a voluntary termination of pregnancy has been rejected, Portuguese media reported on Thursday.



This week the Portuguese health ministry is assessing new evaluation criteria for the quality of 'Model B' health centers to judge which are the most efficient and which will thus get bonuses for the doctors working at them.



Among the evaluation criteria proposed was the lack of any voluntary termination of pregnancy and the contraction of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), which proponents of the criteria say would show that the center was working effectively in the field of family planning.



The news led to protests and polemics, especially from organisations and unions of doctors and medical personnel, as well as women's rights groups, who said that the proposal was unacceptable and discriminatory.



There were concerns that both doctors and women patients could be subjected to pressure over a decision that - those against it said - should instead be free and could depend on many personal circumstances.



Abortion was made legal in Portugal in 2007 after a referendum. (ANSAmed).




The Mayor of London has praised the high standards of legalised cannabis farms in the US, as he announced the formation of a new group to consider the decriminalisation of the drug in Britain.

Sadiq Khan said former justice secretary Lord Charlie Falconer QC will be the chair of the first London Drugs Commission, which will assess the effectiveness of UK drug laws.

It comes as Mr Khan continued his four-day tour of the US, which has included visits to New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles and saw him chat with late-night TV host James Corden and Love Actually director Richard Curtis on Wednesday evening.

On Wednesday he met LA mayor Eric Garcetti, and visited a cannabis dispensary and farm in the city to see what lessons could be learned in the UK in responding to the challenges of drugs.

Speaking at the Traditional cannabis dispensary and cultivation centre in downtown LA, Mr Khan told the PA news agency that an honest, open conversation was needed about UK cannabis laws, adding that visiting the facility had been fascinating.

We need to have an honest, open conversation about the evidence in relation to the history of cannabis and our laws in the UK and our experience of the health consequences in relation to crime and the community, he said.

Mr Khan (left) on Wednesday met his Los Angeles counterpart Eric Garcetti (Stefan Rousseau/PA)

The best way to do that will be with the drugs commission weve now set up.

You can hear from the experts, thats one thing, but seeing it for yourself  hearing from those who cultivate and grow this plant has been fascinating.

On his opinion of the facility, he continued: (It) is quite clearly heavily regulated, there are really high standards, no corners are being cut, theyre readily inspected by the city, by the experts.

Its important to see for ourselves what the parallel world of legalised cannabis looks like as a compare and contrast.

What I hope the London Drugs Commission will do is look [at] what happens elsewhere in the world where the laws have been changed.

Mr Khan later visited Gorrila RX Wellness shop in the Crenshaw area of the city, which stocks 1,900 brands of cannabis-related products including beverages, edibles and coffee beans.

Kika Keith, owner of the shop, said the decriminalisation of cannabis in the UK would tremendously help Londons black community.

The people of colour in London should have opportunities to learn about the workforce opportunities, the entrepreneurship  it should really be a diversified industry, she told PA.

Mr Khan also visited the Islamic Centre of Southern California in Los Angeles (Stefan Rousseau/PA)

Ms Keith, who is the first black female owner of a cannabis shop in LA, added: The cannabis industry is the fastest-growing workforce, it gives us the opportunity to get into new jobs, new careers that were never established.

It gives us opportunities for ownership and  its a real opportunity to build communities if we do it in the right way.

The mayors visits form part of a fact-finding mission to investigate an international evidence-based approach to reducing drug-related harm in the capital.

LA decriminalised cannabis in 2016 after which arrests related to the drug in California dropped by 56%.

Children at the Islamic Centre of Southern California interacted with the mayor during his visit (Stefan Rousseau/PA)

The commission being launched by Mr Khan will examine the effectiveness of UK drugs laws, with a particular focus on cannabis, but will not consider class A drugs.

Cannabis is currently classed as a class B drug, with a maximum sentence of five years in prison for possession.

University College London has been appointed to provide world-class evidence-based research and assessment to the Commission on the criminal justice, health and economic implications for any potential change in policy.

Mr Khan said Lord Falconer would bring decades of experience to the role as head of the body and that more needed to be done to tackle the epidemic caused by the illegal drug trade.

The London Drugs Commission will be led by Lord Falconer (Hannah McKay/PA)

Lord Falconer said: Im honoured to have been appointed chair of the London Drugs Commission.

It is a real opportunity for there to be a thorough look at the effectiveness of our drugs laws and policy on cannabis.

We need rigorously to identify what is the best approach to reduce harm to our communities. A national debate is long overdue.

We aim to make recommendations to bring about effective and lasting change.
ANKARA, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Turkey's tourism sector is negatively affected by the Ukrainian crisis, but the country is optimistic to increase its revenue for 2022 by targeting Western tourists.

Turkey's Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy told the HaberTurk broadcaster on Thursday that the government has set a target of 42 million tourists and 35 billion U.S. dollars in tourism income for 2022.

Turkey had a record number of tourists in 2019, but its tourism revenue regressed in 2020 due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.

The government wanted to attract more foreign holidaymakers in the summer, but the Russia-Ukraine crisis has dealt a blow to the tourism industry, he added.

However, the Turkish government aims to attract more visitors from Western countries.

"Our alternative markets are Western tourists," he explained, noting the initial data for the tourist arrivals proved this.

Russian and Ukrainian tourists were the main sources of income for the Turkish tourism industry, particularly for resorts along Turkey's Mediterranean coast.

Ersoy said that Turkey has received more than 20 million tourists from the two countries in the past three years. In 2021, 4.7 million Russians and nearly 2 million Ukrainians visited Turkey.

Turkey attracted a total of 30 million foreign tourists and achieved 24.5 billion dollars in revenue in 2021, he added. After receiving 45 million tourists in 2019 and generating a total of 34.5 billion dollars in revenue, Turkey suffered losses of over 70 percent in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. 
Sportswoman and conservationist Sacha Dench is launching a new expedition to track the 6,000-mile migration route of ospreys from Scotland to west Africa.

Ms Dench is leading the journey through 14 countries this summer to gather data and highlight the impacts of climate change and human activities on the birds of prey and other wildlife, after the original trip was postponed due to Covid.

Ms Dench, dubbed the human swan, is not yet able to fly following a paramotor accident during the Round Britain Climate Challenge last year, in which Dan Burton, a member of her support staff, was killed.

She was attempting a world-first circumnavigation of mainland Britain to raise awareness about climate change when she was seriously injured in the accident in the western Highlands of Scotland in September.

Paramotorist Sacha Dench was badly injured last year (Andrew Milligan/PA)

As a champion free diver, Ms Dench intends to dive to investigate some of the wetland sites that are important to fish-eating ospreys while the journey will be captured from the air, land and underwater by the team.

Ospreys became extinct as a breeding bird in England in 1840 and in Scotland in 1916, and though they have since slowly recolonised  helped by reintroductions  they remain in low numbers in Britain.

The Flight Of The Osprey expedition by Conservation Without Borders, founded by Ms Dench, will focus on the threat they and other wildlife, habitats and people face from climate change and human activities, including power lines, overfishing, plastic waste and fishing debris.

She said a recent report by the UN science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, had highlighted that climate change and human activity is causing widespread disruption and affecting the balance of nature.

She added: This expedition will shine a light on the challenges these issues present for migratory birds along the East Atlantic Flyway between Europe and Africa, by focusing on the story of the osprey.

And it wont just help the osprey. It will help to pinpoint the things that we humans can do to help ospreys and a wide range of other migratory birds and animals whose lives, like our own, depend on healthy, unpolluted land and oceans, she said.

Ahead of a speech at the official launch event in London on Thursday evening, Conservation Without Borders supporter and actress Joanna Lumley, said: Ever since Sacha told me about this extraordinarily exciting trip following the osprey, I have been longing to know that it will actually take place.

Since her life-threatening accident, Sacha has somehow transformed herself into the Human Phoenix, rising above her dreadful injuries and facing the world with even more determination than before  and now at last the thrilling journey will go ahead.

If bravery has a mortal form, it is to be found in Sacha. This is nail-biting stuff, concerning our planet and its migratory birds, and I shall be following the team every wingbeat of the way.
Bank bosses should face jail if they fail to prevent money laundering, a cross-party group of MPs has said.

Launching a manifesto to tackle economic crime, members of parliamentary groups on anti-corruption and fair business banking warned that Britains defences against dirty money had been overrun and called for wide-ranging reform.

As well as making senior executives criminally liable for failing to prevent economic crime, the group called on the Government to treble the amount of money it spent on enforcement over the next three years to 300 million and provide more protection for whistleblowers.

Labours Dame Margaret Hodge said: Our financial services and our defences against dirty money have been overrun. London is now the laundromat for washing dirty money and we cant go on like this.

Although the Government promised to bring in a second Economic Crime Bill in the Queens Speech on Tuesday, Dame Margaret said many MPs feared it would not go far enough and would press the Government to take tougher measures.

Conservative MP Kevin Hollinrake said making executives criminally liable would be the sea change we need.

He compared it to changes that made construction company executives liable for failing to prevent accidents at work.

Mr Hollinrake said: Suddenly when that happened the deaths and serious injuries dropped like a stone, because that focuses the attention, its not just a cost of doing business.

Calling for more funding for enforcement agencies, Dame Margaret pointed to a 35% fall in money laundering prosecutions in the last five years, saying: Our agencies are completely outgunned and are simply not fit for purpose.

The Government has already committed to spending 100 million over the next three years on economic crime enforcement, with another 300 million coming from the private sector through the economic crime levy, but MPs want to see that commitment increased to match those private funds.

Campaign group Transparency International UK welcomed the proposals, with director of policy Duncan Hames saying: This manifesto is a compelling call for Government to act here in Britain on the scourge of economic crime and corruption.

We join these MPs in demanding an end to secrecy in Britains offshore financial sectors, an overhaul of the private sectors dirty money defences, and a significant increase in funding for law enforcement to go after money launderers.

Now is the time for Government to press forward against the kleptocrats who hide their dirty money here.

But both Dame Margaret and Mr Hollinrake acknowledged there were vested interests who would lobby against their proposals.

Mr Hollinrake said: If youre a chief executive of a big bank, are you going to like the prospect of having your collar felt if things go wrong in your bank? Youre not, so you then go to the Treasury therefore and say dont do that.
The Queens famous Diamond Diadem and jewels from the monarchs collection are to go on show at royal residences to mark the Platinum Jubilee.

Set with 1,333 brilliant-cut diamonds, the priceless crown, made for George IVs extravagant coronation in 1821, has been worn countless times by Elizabeth II during her reign and is probably the most well recognised of all her pieces of jewellery.

The Queen wearing the Diadem as she returns to Buckingham Palace after the State Opening of Parliament in 2010 (Dominic Lipinski/PA)

The Queen, who asked the Prince of Wales to open Parliament and read the Queens Speech for the first time on Tuesday, usually wears the diadem for her journey to and from the State Opening.

The crown will be on view with other historic jewellery in the State Rooms of Buckingham Palace during the Royal Collections summer opening from July 22 to October 2 as part of an exhibition exploring the Queens accession.

It features a narrow band of diamonds edged with pearls, surmounted by four crosses-pattee, the front cross set with a pale yellow brilliant diamond, and floral sprays of a rose, a thistle and shamrocks representing national emblems.

One of Dorothy Wildings photographs of the Queen in 1952 (Royal Collection Trust/Queen Elizabeth II 2022/PA)

In 1952, just days after she acceded to the throne, the Queen wore the diadem for official portraits by Dorothy Wilding, which formed the basis for the monarchs image on millions of postage stamps from 1953 to 1971.

A selection of 24 of Wildings historic photographs from the sessions will be on display.

Visitors will also be able to examine other heirloomed pieces of jewellery worn by the Queen for her sittings with Wilding including the Delhi Durbar necklace.

The Delhi Durbar Necklace and Cullinan VII Pendant (Royal Collection Trust/Queen Elizabeth II 2022/PA)

The Queen photographed by Wilding wearing the Delhi Durbar necklace (William Hustler and Georgina Hustler/Royal Collection Trust/PA)

Incorporating nine emeralds, the glittering necklace also features an 8.8 carat diamond pendant cut from the Cullinan diamond, the largest diamond ever found.

It was made for the Queens grandmother Queen Mary for the 1911 Delhi Durbar staged in India to mark George Vs coronation.

At Windsor Castle, a series of the Queens emblem brooches will be presented including the poignant Flame-Lily Brooch, the emblem of Zimbabwe, which was pinned to the Queens mourning clothes after the death of her father George VI.

The Queens Flame-Lily brooch (Royal Collection Trust/Queen Elizabeth II 2022/PA)

Dressed in black and wearing the Flame Lily Brooch, the new Queen sets foot on British soil for the first time since her accession (PA)

The new Queen wore the piece when she set foot on British soil for the first time as monarch after flying back from Kenya where she was on an official tour.

The Queen often wears brooches that represent the emblems of Commonwealth countries while visiting or meeting their representatives.

Royal fans will also be able to see the Canadian Maple Leaf Brooch, worn by Princess Elizabeth on her first visit to Canada in 1951 and many times since, and the New Zealand Silver Fern Brooch, presented by the Women of Auckland on Christmas Day in 1953.

The Queens well known Maple Leaf Brooch will also be among the priceless items on public view (Royal Collection Trust/Queen Elizabeth II 2022/PA)

The Queen wearing the Maple Leaf Brooch and the colours of the Canadian Flag during a tour to Canada (John Stillwell/PA)

Also there will be the Australian Wattle Brooch which was a gift on her first visit to Australia in 1954, and the Sri Lanka Brooch, given to the Queen during a state visit in 1981.

The Sri Lanka brooch was presented by the Mayor of Colombo and is set with pink, blue and yellow sapphires, garnets, rubies and aquamarine.

The Sri Lanka Brooch (Royal Collection Trust/Queen Elizabeth II 2022/PA)

The Queen wearing the brooch to meet the President of Sri Lanka in 2015 (John Stillwell/PA)

The Windsor exhibition, from July 7 to September 26, will focus on the Queens Coronation and will include the Coronation Dress and Robe of Estate.

At the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, a display, from July 3 to September 25, commemorating past jubilees will feature a collection of outfits worn by the Queen during her Silver, Golden and Diamond Jubilee celebrations

A pale turquoise dress and coat embroidered with scattered silver flowers with a coordinating hat by the Queens senior dresser Angela Kelly will be exhibited for the first time.

Angela Kelly outfit worn by the Queen on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee in 2012 (Royal Collection Trust/Queen Elizabeth II 2022/PA)

The Queen waves to the crowds following the service of thanksgiving for her Diamond Jubilee (Dominic Lipinski/PA)

The Queen wore the ensemble to a thanksgiving service at St Pauls Cathedral and a Guildhall luncheon during the Diamond Jubilee festivities of June 2012.

Also there will be the ceremonial key to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, which is presented to the monarch at the start of Royal Week at the Palace each summer.
Serial killer Levi Bellfield has become engaged to a female visitor who he plans to marry in jail.

The Government said it has launched an urgent review into whether it can stop evil monster Bellfield from marrying his fiancee, who is described in the Sun newspaper as a besotted blonde-haired woman in her 40s.

Bellfield is one of a handful of prisoners currently serving a whole-life term, meaning he will never be released, after being convicted of the murders of schoolgirl Milly Dowler, 19-year-old Marsha McDonnell, and French student Amelie Delagrange.

Prisons minister Victoria Atkins described Bellfield as an evil, evil monster who has left a trail of despair and grief in his wake while Downing Street said the Prime Minister was sickened and appalled by the news of the intended marriage.

Serial killer Levi Bellfield is an inmate at HMP Frankland in County Durham (Owen Humphreys/PA)

She told ITVs Good Morning Britain: My heart goes out to the families because, yet again, this appalling human being is on the front pages (of newspapers) and theyre having to think about him.

But she did not say, when asked, whether she could actually stop the wedding going ahead, citing Article 12 of the Human Rights Act and the right to marry.

She added: Im appalled that someone like this can make an application to get married  were looking into it very carefully. Watch this space please.

Boris Johnsons spokesman that while the Governments intended new British Bill of Rights was designed to prevent abuses of the Human Rights Act, he could not be definitive on whether it will address the issues in the Bellfield case.

The spokesman added: Everyone, including the Prime Minister, is disgusted by the reporting we have seen today.

The 53-year-old killer would need the permission of the governor at HMP Frankland to marry at the category A prison.

Rules state the prison governor can raise an objection to the facility being named on the notice of marriage as the place where the service is carried out.

The governor must discuss with the National Offender Management Service if there are concerns that any security risks cannot reasonably be overcome, or if there are concerns that either party is getting married under duress.

Prisons minister Victoria Atkins has ordered an urgent review of the case (Kirsty OConnor/PA)

While prison marriages are rare, they are not unheard of.

In 2017, Charles Bronson  one of the UKs longest serving and most notorious prisoners  married former soap actor Paula Williamson, while WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange tied the knot with Stella Moris two months ago at Belmarsh high security jail while he awaits extradition to the US over espionage charges.

The Sun said Bellfield got down on one knee to propose in front of prison staff at the facility in County Durham.

A Ministry of Justice spokesman said: An application has been received and is being considered in the usual way.

Bellfield was given a whole life term for murdering Ms McDonnell, 19, in 2003, and murdering Ms Delagrange, 22, and attempting to murder Kate Sheedy, 18, in 2004.

He was already serving this sentence when he went on trial for killing schoolgirl Milly, who was snatched from the street walking from school to her home in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, in March 2002.

Bellfield was found guilty of abducting and killing the 13-year-old following a trial at the Old Bailey in 2011.
A 3D digital image of where Sheku Bayoh was restrained by officers before he died has been shown to an inquiry investigating his death.

Mark DeGiovanni, from Advanced Laser Imaging (ALI), a company used to create accurate 3D impressions of scenes, gave a demonstration at the public hearing in Edinburgh on how the remodelled scene was built.

Mr Bayoh, 31, died after being held down by police officers in the Hayfield area of Kirkcaldy, Fife, in May 2015.

His family have questioned whether his race played a part in his death.

A screenshot of ALIs recreated 3D digital image of the scene where Sheku Bayoh was restrained (screenshot from Sheku Bayoh inquiry/PA)

Using police data and images from the time, laser scanners and drone footage, which captured more than 2,500 high-quality images of the location, ALI was able to remodel the scene to how it was at the time Mr Bayoh died to help with the investigation, the inquiry heard.

Mr DeGiovanni said the recreated image has certain features that were present at the time of his death but which have now changed.

For example, in Hayfield Road, the 3D remodel shows a footpath and pavement near where Mr Bayoh was restrained were different at the time of his death to how they are now.

The inquiry was shown various images of the newly remodelled scene, one of which included a symbol to mark where a knife Mr Bayoh had been carrying was found.

Mr DeGiovanni then demonstrated how to interact with the 3D image by zooming in and out of certain areas and by inserting a figure of a man.

ALI was used to recreate the scene where Diana, Princess of Wales died during an inquest that was held about a decade after her death.

Mr DeGiovanni said there are many parallels between ALIs work on Dianas inquest and the inquiry into Mr Bayohs death.

The inquiry, before Lord Bracadale, continues.
Early on in Top Gun: Maverick, Tom Cruise hops on his sleek motorcycle, wearing Aviator sunglasses and a leather jacket with patches, and speeds into a time machine. No, that's not right. It's actually us who take a trip back.

More than 30 years after Cruise smirked his way to the cocky heights of the '80s as the maverick Navy pilot codenamed Maverick, he effortlessly picks up the character in a new chapter of Top Gun that is an absolutely, thoroughly enjoyable ride  a textbook example of how to make a sequel.

Top Gun: Maverick satisfies with one foot in the past by hitting all the touchstones of the first film  fast motorcycles, the song Danger Zone, military fetishisms, humorless Navy bosses, shirtless bonding sports, the hard deck, bar singalongs and buzzing the tower  and yet stands on its own. It's not weighed down by its past like the last Ghostbusters sequel, but rather soars by using the second to answer and echo issues with the first.

Cruise is, of course, back, reprising his rebel test pilot now based in a forgotten corner of the Mojave Desert, a mere captain when he should be a general because he keeps bucking authority. The years have not calmed Maverick from his impulsive, hot-headed style. Pilots do, he argues; they don't ruminate. You think up there, you're dead, he states. This is Cruise at his most Cruise-iest, coiled, sure and arrogant, teeth gleaming in the sunshine.

His once-rival Iceman  Val Kilmer  is back, too, a huge Navy muckety-muck now. And even Goose is back, by way of his son, the similarly mustachioed Miles Teller, who is strikingly similar looking to Anthony Edwards, the actor who played the doomed wingman in the first film. That death looms large for Maverick even 30 years on: Talk to me, Goose, he'll whisper to himself.

Some things have changed, of course. The F-14A Tomcats have been replaced by the F/A-18 and the all-male cocky pilots of the first film have been infiltrated by a few cocky women. Unfortunately, it seems these are the last days of envelope-pushing men and women in naval aviation; pilotless aircraft are more reliable and they're next. The future is coming and you're not in it, Maverick is told by an imperious officer played with delicious calm fury by Jon Hamm.

But Maverick, on the edge of extinction, has one last job for the Navy: Train a group of young hotshots for a dangerous bombing mission in Iran. One potential snag: The young hotshots he must train include Goose's son, codename Rooster. Will Maverick be responsible for cooking another Goose?

Director Joseph Kosinski brings a visceral feel to the film, somehow making us feel claustrophobic in the wide open sky as pilots swoop and swerve. He wonderfully alternates between loud scenes outside with airplane engines roaring and quiet ones indoors of people almost whispering. He also switches from brilliant sun to dark interiors.

One welcome touch in the screenplay by Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer and Christopher McQuarrie is a new love interest for Maverick. Jennifer Connelly plays a divorced bar owner who has both a townhouse, a beach house, a sailboat and a Porsche, so business is good. But she's also not a push-over for on-again-off-again Maverick and, in a key scene, she's the comfortable pilot of a boat and he's the clueless one.

This is a more thoughtful Maverick, more gloomy. Top Gun: Maverick is in some ways a meditation on what happens to gifted rebels later in life. He is riven by guilt and in one scene he is picked up and unceremoniously tossed out of a bar by the very same hotshots that he was 30 years ago. Worst, he's called pops. What is remarkable is that Cruise looks to have indeed found a way to thwart time. His chiseled body and still-boyish face are indistinguishable from the pilots three decades his junior during a football game on the beach.

The film handles Maverick's personal stuff  wooing the barmaid, repairing his relationship with Goose's kid  while also fulfilling its promise as an action movie. There are jets pulling 10Gs, the metal sound of cockpit sticks pulled in gear, epic dogfights and the whine of machinery balking at the demands put on it. The action even takes a few unexpected and thrilling turns. So jump on Maverick's bike, hug him tight and join him on the highway to the danger zone.

Top Gun: Maverick, a Paramount Pictures release that hits theaters May 27, is rated PG-13 for sequences of intense action and some strong language. Running time: 131 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.

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MPAA Definition of PG-13: Parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.

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Online: http://topgunmovie.com

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Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits
The logo of Chainalysis is seen on their exhibition stand at the Delta Summit, Malta's official Blockchain and Digital Innovation event promoting cryptocurrency, in Ta' Qali

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Chainalysis, the New York-based blockchain data platform company, said on Thursday it had raised $170 million of new funding, bringing its valuation to $8.6 billion.

The funding round, its sixth since the company's launch, was led by GIC, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund. Previous investors such as Blackstone, Bank of New York Mellon, and venture capital firm Accel also participated.

"There is a whole transformation happening where the world of finance's operating systems are moving to crypto. Our company will have a big opportunity in this market," Michael Gronager, Chainalysis co-founder and chief executive officer told Reuters in a phone interview.

"We are growing in regions such as Europe and Asia-Pacific. So far up until now, we had basically no presence in South America, so that is another growth area for us. Clearly, we're investing in international expansions," he added.

While government agencies have long acknowledged the importance of blockchain data and analysis, demand has reached new highs in the past year for risk management and business intelligence products from exchanges, decentralized finance platforms, and financial institutions entering the cryptocurrency space, Chainalysis said in a statement.

Crypto's increasing adoption and acceptance have also led to greater regulatory scrutiny, furthering demand from institutional users for Chainalysis services.

GIC and BNY Mellon confirmed their investment in Chainalysis in a statement. Blackstone and Accel also confirmed their investments in separate e-mails to Reuters.

"Chainalysis is in a unique position of running an SaaS (software as a service) business in the cryptocurrency space due to the stability of its business model as well as the increasing demand for trust and safety in the overall industry," said Choo Yong Cheen, chief investment officer of private equity at GIC.

SaaS is also referred to as "on-demand" software.

BNY Mellon said its investment in Chainalysis was a "natural progression" of an already established and "productive alliance".

In June last year, Chainalysis raised $100 million, led by investment firm Coatue.

(Reporting by Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss; Editing by Mark Potter)
FILE PHOTO: A pressure gauge is pictured at a Ukrainian gas compressor station in the village of Boyarka

By Kate Abnett

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union's plan for countries to buy gas jointly could maximise supplies and ensure better contract terms in the coming years, but is unlikely to help in the event of a sudden supply cut off, analysts and EU officials said.

Pressure on Europe to secure alternative gas supplies increased on Thursday after Moscow imposed sanctions on European subsidiaries of state-owned Gazprom and Ukraine stopped a gas transit route, pushing prices higher.

To become more independent of Russian gas and build a buffer against supply shocks, the EU in April launched a platform to pool demand and jointly buy gas. The dash for alternative supply has acquired further urgency after Russia cut gas supply to Bulgaria and Poland.

But together or alone, EU gas buyers face a market of soaring prices and tight supply. European gas prices hit record highs after Ukraine's invasion by Russia, which supplies 40% of EU gas, following months of climbing prices.

"It's very hard to see that there is any non-committed gas in the market. Why would the EU find new gas that the member states at the current prices could not find?" said Christian Egenhofer of the Centre for European Policy Studies.

EU leaders said in March they would work on joint gas buying "with a view to next winter". The executive Commission, however, appears to be looking to the longer term.

A draft Commission document, part of a package to cut reliance on Russian energy to be published next week, said the joint buying platform would work "notably to establish long-term partnerships with energy supplying countries".

Analysts said the EU could potentially use its clout as the world's biggest gas buyer to negotiate longer-term contracts, also for hydrogen or imports of low-carbon electricity.

"Where I think it could potentially help is when setting contractual terms with large suppliers," said Jacob Mandel, Senior Associate at Aurora Energy Research.

But first, Brussels would need to navigate the complexity of coordinating negotiations and purchases among the EU, national governments and individual companies - and avoid potential legal issues over EU competition rules posed by large companies banding together.

Under the EU plan, Commission and EU government officials would negotiate deals, but it is not clear at what point companies would be involved, or what say they would have on prices and contract terms.

Because participation in the EU scheme is voluntary, it also raises the question of whether enough big buyers would join to create a powerful negotiating bloc.

Bulgaria, Poland, Spain and the Czech Republic are among the countries interested, EU officials said. The biggest EU gas buyer, Germany, also supports the plan, but it will be up to companies to decide to participate, a German official told Reuters.

One EU official said some large energy firms were reluctant, howver, since they can already negotiate their own deals with major suppliers. "The big ones don't see a business case in it for them," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

(Reporting by Kate Abnett, additional reporting by Gabriela Baczynska; editing by Jan Strupczewski and Barbara Lewis)
Finlands leader is expected to publicly say for the first time that his country wants to join Nato, after the Nordic country and Sweden signed security pacts with the UK.

The BBC said the anticipated announcement  the first step towards joining the military alliance  from Finnish president Sauli Niinisto was prompted by a significant rise in public support for Nato membership following Russias invasion of Ukraine.

It comes after Boris Johnson on Wednesday signed deals which could see British troops sent to the two northern European nations in the event of a Russian incursion from 21st century tyrant Vladimir Putin.

The Prime Minister said the parallel agreements would help defend each country should it come under threat as he met with leaders in both nations over a whirlwind 24 hours on Wednesday.

Mr Johnson said the UK would come to Finlands assistance, including with military support, in the event of an attack on the country.

Asked during a press conference in Helsinki alongside Mr Niinisto if there would be British boots on the ground on Finnish territory during a possible conflict with Russia, he said: I think the solemn declaration is itself clear.

Boris Johnson says the UK would come to Finlands assistance, including with military support, in the event of an attack on the country (Frank Augstein/PA)

And what it says is that in the event of a disaster, or in the event of an attack on either of us, then yes, we will come to each others assistance, including with military assistance.

But the nature of that assistance will of course depend upon the request of the other party.

But its also intended to be the foundation of an intensification of our security and our defence relationship in other ways as well.

(PA Graphics)

Meeting with Swedish prime minister Magdalena Andersson earlier in the day, Mr Johnson said the UK will not hesitate to act in the event of an attack on the country.

The British Prime Minister said it was a sad irony that the security assurance declaration was signed days after marking VE Day, but was more important than ever under the grim circumstances following Russias invasion of Ukraine in February.

Speaking alongside his Swedish counterpart at her Harpsund country retreat on Wednesday, he added: The many carcasses of Russian tanks that now litter the fields and streets of Ukraine, thanks to Swedish-developed and British-built NLaws (anti-tank weapons), certainly speak to how effective that co-operation can be.

Most importantly, this is an agreement that enshrines the values that both Sweden and the UK hold dear, and which we will not hesitate to defend.

Mr Johnson, deploying some of his strongest language yet to condemn the Russian president, told a press conference: This week, many of us have been paying tribute to the brave men and women who secured victory and peace in Europe 77 years ago.

So its a sad irony that weve been forced to discuss how best to fortify our shared defences against the empty conceit of a 21st century tyrant.

Ms Andersson said she was very happy to sign the bilateral agreement while Mr Niinisto said the declaration would deepen the cooperation we already have.

Both European countries have been considering the prospect of Nato membership in the face of Mr Putins ongoing military aggression.

Speaking after signing the pact, Mr Niinisto said he did not view joining the military alliance as a zero sum game.

Joining Nato would not be against anybody, the Finnish president said.
CHICAGO (AP)  President Biden on Wednesday labeled his predecessor, Donald Trump, the great MAGA king and continued sharp criticism against Republicans ahead of midterm elections that could be bruising for Democrats.

I think its important that, as we go forward, youre gonna hear me talking more about not only what weve done, but what theyre trying to do," the president told an evening Democratic fundraiser crowd of about 40 at a Chicago hotel.

The party that controls the presidency usually loses seats during the next election and, with inflation reaching its highest levels in 40 years, Biden's party could see its control of Congress wiped out in November. To try to counter that, Biden has in recent days begun decrying ultra-MAGA Republicans  a reference to Trumps Make America Great Again campaign slogan.

He told the fundraiser that the Democratic National Committee is already devoting more time and money to promoting the differences between his party and the GOP, adding, "We have to make sure we keep this clear contrast on either side.

The president also said he has not done enough to promote his administration's accomplishments, including a $1 trillion, bipartisan infrastructure package approved by Congress last fall.

One of the things that I think we have to do is not just talk about what weve done  we dont do that enough and thats my fault," he said.

President Biden speaks at the 40th International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) International Convention at McCormick Place, Wednesday, May 11, 2022, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

But Biden also added, Because of how outrageous some of the things that former President Trump has done and said, I think we found ourselves in the position where it was almost like, How could that happen? How could that be?"

When an attendee's cell phone rang, the president joked: I know thats Trump calling. He always does that.

His remarks at the fundraiser followed a speech earlier Thursday in which Biden offered a new nickname for Trump, who himself enjoys bestowing often unflattering monikers on political opponents.

Under my predecessor  the great MAGA king  the deficit increased every single year he was president, he told the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers conference, which was also being held in Chicago. "The first year of my presidency, the first year, I reduced the deficit.

During the conference and fundraiser, Biden also repeated criticism he's offered lately of Republican Florida Sen. Rick Scotts 11-point plan. It was released in February and suggests imposing a modest tax increase on many of the lowest-paid Americans, while opening the door for cutting Social Security and Medicare.

I call it the ultra-MAGA plan, Make America Great Again plan, Biden told the union conference. At the fundraiser he struck a similar note, saying, "I think we have to point out how radical it is ... so people are reminded whats at stake here.
A citizen selects books on a counter at a book fair in Istanbul, Turkey, May 9, 2022. (Xinhua/Shadati)

ISTANBUL, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Nezahat Yeniceri, a retired primary school teacher and an author on child development, has rented a kiosk at a book fair in Turkey's Istanbul to directly interact with young people, listen to their problems, and introduce her new titles.

"My books are written as guidelines for parents of teens who are stuck between being an adult and a child," Yeniceri told Xinhua at a 10-day open-air fair recently launched in a park in Besiktas, a central district on the European side of the city.

Some buyers hope her books would help their parents understand how to treat a teenager, she added, noting that almost all of her books are sold at discounted prices.

The Macka Book Days named after the neighborhood runs until Sunday, allowing local citizens, especially the young people on a tight budget, to own books at affordable prices.

New books and used ones in various genres were put on sale at the fair, including comics, science fiction, and classics. Some banners read "cash offered for secondhand books," encouraging people to resell their books for some pocket money.

While book lovers can buy a book for 8 Turkish liras (about 0.52 U.S. dollars), two for 15, and three for 20 at some kiosks, the price of two secondhand books can be as low as 10 liras at the fair.

"Sometimes we encounter young people who covet a look but could not afford it. In such cases, we give them the book as a gift. It's not all about money after all," Yeniceri said.

Nazmiye Bagci Caylioglu, who shares the kiosk with Yeniceri, is also a retired primary school teacher and a veteran writer.

"Economic troubles, of course, hit households. Families are large, children are studying, costs have increased, kitchen expenses have expanded, but booklovers always try to budget for the books," Caylioglu told Xinhua.

Caylioglu had worked as a teacher for mentally handicapped children for the last ten years of her long career in education.

"Sometimes schools organize fair visits. I see that some students can buy the book they want, some cannot ... I tell those who can't afford it that their parents pay in advance for their book. I give the book to them as a gift, so their feelings don't get hurt," she said.

Sema Saglar, a resident of the neighborhood, had Yeniceri sign a book for her daughter.

"The fair is great. I am very glad that they organized a book fair ... It's been especially a great opportunity for students," she told Xinhua.

Saglar is pleased to see some books selling at half price. She pays at least 30 to 40 liras for a book in bookstores, but here she can find the same book for 10 to 15 liras.

Turkey's publishing has been hit hard by the depreciation of the lira as the industry heavily relies on imported inputs for printing and publishing.

The Turkish currency has lost almost 60 percent of its value against the greenback since 2021.

Since the beginning of this year, paper prices have climbed at least 60 to 70 percent, and publishers are struggling to print books. 
President Joe Biden on Thursday addressed the U.S. reaching the milestone of 1 million coronavirus deaths.

"One million empty chairs around the family dinner table," Biden said in a pre-taped video message. "Each irreplaceable, irreplaceable losses. Each leaving behind a family or community forever changed because of this pandemic. Our heart goes out to all those who are struggling."

Biden is ordering flags be flown at half-staff at the White House and all federal public buildings and grounds until sunset on May 16 in remembrance of those who lost their lives to the virus.

PHOTO: President Joe Biden makes a statement regarding the 1 million COVID-19 related deaths that have occurred in the United States, on May 12, 2022 in Washington, D.C. (ABC News)

MORE: 'Unthinkable tragedy': U.S. COVID-19 death toll surpasses 1 million

His remarks kicked off a second virtual summit focused on the global response to the ongoing health crisis and preventing future pandemics. The United States is co-hosting the event alongside Belize, Germany, Indonesia and Senegal.

Biden also noted the U.S. is not alone in its grief.

"Around the world many more millions have died," he said in the video message. "Millions of children have been orphaned, with thousands still dying every day. Now is the time for us to act. All of us together. We all must do more, must honor those we have lost by doing everything we can to prevent as many deaths as possible."

PHOTO: The American flag flies at half-staff at the White House in Washington, D.C., May 12, 2022, as the Biden administration commemorates 1 million American lives lost due to COVID-19. (Susan Walsh/AP)

Biden on Thursday reiterated his call for Congress to pass more COVID-19 aid.

In March, Biden requested an additional $22.5 billion to combat the virus, warning that the country's testing, vaccine and treatment supplies were running low.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are trying to forge ahead with a slimmed down $10 billion coronavirus assistance package. Senate Republicans previously blocked it over the administration's plan to lift Title 42, a pandemic-era rule restricting migration at the U.S. border.

Democrats tried to link the COVID-19 package to supplemental aid for Ukraine to ensure its passage but the two measures were decoupled earlier this week.

Biden said Thursday that the emergency coronavirus funding is "vital to protect Americans."

The pre-taped message marking 1 million deaths was more muted than Biden's address on 500,000 virus deaths in February 2021, when he and Vice President Kamala Harris stood in front of the South Portico of the White House and held a moment of silence as well as a candle-lighting ceremony.

Biden orders flags to half-staff as US records 1 million COVID deaths originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
The Seattle Storm placed two players in the WNBA's COVID-19 health and safety protocols on Wednesday, prompting renewed criticism of the league's policy mandating commercial flights from one of the league's most prominent players.

The Storm announced that three-time All-Star and 2018 league MVP Breanna Stewart and backup guard Epiphanny Prince would miss Wednesday's game against the Phoenix Mercury in protocols. It wasn't immediately clear if Stewart and Prince tested positive or were considered close contacts. It's also not clear how long they'll be sidelined.

Stewart and Prince are the second and third WNBA players to enter COVID-19 protocols since the start of the season on Friday. Washington Mystics guard Natasha Cloud landed in protocols on Tuesday. It's also not clear whether or not she tested positive for COVID-19.

Breanna Stewart's not the first player to link the league's flight policy to her placement in protocols. (Abbie Parr/Getty Images)

Cloud criticized the league's travel policy mandating commercial flights after she landed in protocols, insinuating that she was exposed to the coronavirus while traveling.

"Shoutout to the @WNBA for flying us commercial during a pandemic. (And no mask mandates)," Cloud wrote on Twitter.

Stewart likewise criticized the use of commercial flights on Wednesday shortly after the Storm announced her placement in protocols.

Fly commercial they say https://t.co/WrQs9voXGD  Breanna Stewart (@breannastewart) May 12, 2022

The use of charter flights is banned in the WNBA as part of the league's collective bargaining agreement. Since not all franchises have the budget to charter flights, doing so is considered a competitive advantage.

The Storm opened their season at home against the Minnesota Lynx on Friday before traveling to face the Las Vegas Aces on Sunday and for Wednesday's road game against the Mercury.
Eamon Ore-Giron's work draws from artistic and musical traditions from throughout the Americas. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

What can be conveyed with a circle or a square or a slender band of color? Perhaps it's an outline of architecture. Or a pattern that summons a musical beat. Or the sensation in the retina when a ray of sunlight slips between mountain peaks and illuminates a high-altitude landscape. Maybe it's the histories, brutal and sublime, embedded in some of those forms.

Look closely and this is some of what materializes in "Infinite Regress," a series of paintings by Los Angeles artist Eamon Ore-Giron, on view through late May at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. In his solo show, "Competing with Lightning / Rivalizando con el relampago," linen canvases, earthy in appearance, serve as backdrops to cosmic arrangements of circles and rays of gradient color that recede into the horizon. All of it is framed by stepped architectonic structures that are rendered in luminous gold.

His elemental patterns can be found across cultures  in ancient temples or the early 20th century paintings of Russian suprematist Kazimir Malevich. But the ways in which Ore-Giron brings them together and remixes them is singular.

"When I started to think about what is my take on abstraction," he says, observing a row of works-in-progress in his Eastside studio, "I always saw it through the lens of lineage."

That lineage contains many threads.

Ore-Giron, 48, is the son of an Indigenous father from Peru and an Irish American mother from Arizona. He was born and raised in Tucson, but has spent periods in Mexico City, San Francisco and Guadalajara.

He spent a formative stint in Huancayo, a mining and agricultural hub in the central Peruvian highlands where his family is from  a region that is home to deep traditions in music and dance. There, in the late 1990s, he apprenticed with Peruvian painter Josue Sanchez, an artist whose work draws, in modern ways, from Andean art and craft.

"He taught me how to use highly-saturated colors in ways that could give them a bit more weight," says Ore-Giron. "When you think of highly saturated colors, you think of Latin American work. In architecture, you think of [Luis] Barragan. Those are colors that in the palette of minimalism in the U.S.  no, you would never do that. But [Josue] gave me license to explore that in a sophisticated way."

In Ore-Giron's early figurative paintings, that brilliant color palette materialized in scenes tinged by the surreal.

At the MCA Denver are paintings such as "Cookin' 1" and "Cookin' 2," both from 2002, which show his aunt and his cousin making humitas, Peruvian fresh-corn tamales. It's an intimate scene, until you move in close and realize that the walls of the kitchen resemble the sky and the women's bodies are penetrated by floating wisps of clouds.

What might a mountain spirit look like in the 21st century? Perhaps like two women cooking.

Other early works feature chonguinada dancers, in which performers of the central highland dance don rosy-cheeked masks and parody colonial Spaniards. Ore-Giron has set these against horizons of flat color, giving the performers an otherworldly feel. In addition, some canvases feature a recurring mestizo character from Andean folklore known as El Chuto.

"He is kind of magical and he's a clown and he's also kind of mischievous," says Ore-Giron. "I've always identified with that character as an artist. Somewhat the clown in this dance that is kind of serious and has very serious undertones."

Ore-Giron is an affable figure, an enthusiastic conversationalist who, in a single sitting, can veer from the multimedia canvases of Peruvian Modernist Jorge Eielson to the performances of German conceptualist Joseph Beuys to a wild anecdote about inhabiting a tiny room in Mexico City that once served as a dwelling for chickens. In between, he might jam in a comic analysis of how he views himself as the hybrid son of a Peruvian immigrant father and American mother  what he calls "this identity of being half."

"I think my father is the coca leaf and I'm the cocaine," he says. "He was this pure leaf that grew up out of the ground. I'm the processed, mind-altering product for the American market."

Eamon Ore-Giron creates his patterns by hand  without the aid of masking tape or stencils. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

After leaving Arizona, Ore-Giron completed his undergraduate degree at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1996, studying under figures such as underground filmmaker George Kuchar and multimedia artist Carlos Villa. In 2004, he landed at UCLA, where he completed his master's degree in fine arts. Since then, Los Angeles has been home base  though he has lived abroad and in other parts of the U.S. for short spells.

This peripatetic life perhaps accounts for the polyglot nature of his artistic career.

In addition to painting, Ore-Giron has created videos inspired by Peruvian mining towns and created installations out of musical instruments. Over the years, his work has popped up at the Hammer Museum's "Made in L.A." biennial and an exhibition about cultural power at SFMOMA.

He has also worked in concert with other artists  including notable collaborations with Tijuana-born artist Julio Cesar Morales. Calling themselves Los Jaichackers, the pair once crafted a room-size mirrored cube that functioned as sculptural listening station and remix studio. It was a highly visible (and audible) part of the 2008 group exhibition "Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

A separate work by the duo, "Subterreanean Homesick Cumbia," is on view at the Vincent Price Art Museum in East L.A., as part of the group show "Sonic Terrains in Latinx Art."

The piece was inspired by a legend about the accordion's arrival in South America. As the story goes, a German ship loaded with instruments sunk near the mouth of the Magdalena River, depositing accordions all over Colombia's shores. In their video, Los Jaichackers return the instrument to its watery origins, showing an accordion bobbing alongside a riverboat to a bubbling soundtrack of cumbia.

Music is not incidental to Ore-Giron's work.

He has a deep knowledge of Latin American music  of the sort pumped at working-class dance parties  and he has a long-running side hustle as a DJ. Though to describe his DJ work as a "side" hustle is a misnomer, since DJing has been a through-line in his creative output since the beginning. (Ore-Giron has played guitar since he was a kid.) As DJ Lengua  "DJ Tongue," in case you're wondering  he has been part of a musical movement that has dipped into cumbia of the Mexican, Colombian and Peruvian variety and made it groovier: slowing it down and fusing it with the sounds of electronica.

With fellow DJ Sonido Franko (Joseph Franko, who is based in the Bay Area), Ore-Giron once established a small record label, Unicornio Records, whose big claim to fame is that it released Chicano Batman's first album.

The fame, however, is only in hindsight, since that first album was a flop. "We had a thousand records," recalls Ore-Giron, referring to real-deal vinyl, his preferred musical medium. "When a thousand records come to your house  it's like twice the size of a barbecue. And they are really heavy."

That experience didn't stop him from pursuing other musical projects. Last month, Ore-Giron teamed up with Samy Ben Redjeb of the Analog Africa label to release a compilation of hallucinatory cumbias rebajadas, the reduced-tempo cumbias popularized by Mexican sonideros beginning in the 1960s. "Saturno 2000: La Rebajada de Los Sonideros," as the album is titled, is a trippy tour of synth-soaked tunes from all over the continent made extra spacey by their languid pace.

Yet as critical as music is to Ore-Giron's life, it is painting to which he has devoted the most focus over the last half-dozen years. "I had to be honest with myself and be like, youre a painter, youve always been a painter," he says, "and you don't have multiple lives to live."

It is on his paintings that the Denver exhibition is focused.

This includes his early figurative works, as well as numerous canvases from his "Talking S" series. Begun in 2017, the series engages the deities of pre-colonial myth  deities that have become a daily part of Latin American iconography: the Aztec gods Coatlicue and Quetzalcoatl, as well as Amaru, a serpent deity from the Andes. Deployed as national symbols by the Indigenism movements of the early 20th century, these gods now regularly materialize in murals, restaurant menus and earrings on Etsy.

Ore-Giron digests them through the language of art.

"It's a subversion," he says. "How do you simultaneously refine a Modernist aesthetic and blend it with some aspect of Indigenous design and forms that are inspiring and beautiful and tie it into the legacy Indigenismo?"

There's a lot going on beneath his spare forms.

His "Infinite Regress" paintings, however, are Ore-Giron's best-known works.

The paintings, begun in 2015, elegantly synthesize the myriad strains that have engaged his interests over time. The linen, in its raw, unprimed state, conveys brownness of earth and of skin, as well as the rough texture of textiles. Motifs echo Andean Indigenous architecture, with its endless ascending steps  a design that appears frequently in Inca textiles and functions as a symbol of transition, from one worldly state into the next.

His color palettes, which can range from brilliant orange and blue to crepuscular pinks and purples, seem to evoke land, sky and light in its myriad reflective and refractive states. And, of course, there is gold: the ore for which Peru is best known, the ore that was stripped from Inca temples then shipped off to Spain, the ore that in the pre-Hispanic era was associated with the divine power of the sun, the ore transformed into economic asset by colonialism.

"People love 'Infinite Regress,' they are gorgeous works," says MCA curator Miranda Lash, who organized the artist's solo show. "But the conceptual motivations behind the paintings should not be sanitized. These are not just renderings of celestial bodies. There are direct references to the motivations behind colonialism. There's a deliberateness in the choice of materials and colors."

If the pieces also feel as if they have a rhythm and cadence, it's perhaps because they contain music in their fabrication.

The circular patterns in Ore-Giron's paintings are achieved by tracing the acetate dubplates he employs as a DJ. As the artist tells Jace Clayton (known as DJ Rupture) in a conversation published in the show's catalog: "I'm interested in the synesthetic quality to the paintings."

Certainly, there is a dynamism to the works that can't easily be conveyed in photographs.

In photographs, Ore-Giron's paintings can look flat. But in the MCA Denver's galleries, which are punctured by skylights, it's another story. On the windy April morning I visited the museum, the light conditions seemed to be continuously shifting. When a cloud was overhead, the paintings grew quiet; when the sun returned, the colors and the shimmer of gold came chattering back to life. It was a remarkable effect.

Ore-Giron's art can elude tidy categorization. How do you sum up a body of work that has engaged so many materials and so many ideas over time? How do you pin a label on an artist whose life has been defined by having each foot in many places at once?

"My work is about identity on some level," says the artist. "It's not the insecurity of identity, but a reflection of identity. The reflection of this kaleidoscopic effect of Latin America. When people talked about pan-Americanism, people think of this idea of unity, but it's a cacophony. It is still a cacophony."

That cacophony, in Ore-Giron's hands, can be stirringly, cosmically beautiful.

Eamon Ore-Giron's "Infinite Regress" series reflect a culmination of ideas he has explored for decades. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
LONDON  Finlands leaders said it intended to apply for NATO membership without delay  prompting Russia to threaten that it would be forced to take retaliatory steps if the Nordic country joins the Western military alliance.

Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin and President Sauli Niinisto released a joint statement on Thursday announcing their support for Finland  which shares an 810-mile border with Russia  to join the alliance.

NATO membership would strengthen Finlands security, the statement said. As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defence alliance. The leaders added that Finland must apply without delay and expressed hope that the steps needed to make the decision would be taken rapidly within the next few days.

Marins Social Democratic Party is expected to announce a decision about joining on Saturday, with the five-party governing coalition in Helsinki expected to announce on Sunday.

Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin speaking on Wednesday. (Franck Robichon/Pool via AP)

For a country to be accepted into NATO, there is a list of minimum requirements. This includes having a functioning democracy, treating minority populations fairly and having the ability to make military contributions to NATO operations. Once a country meets the basic requirements, it is asked to join a membership action plan, which prepares it for membership. However, this does not guarantee a place in the alliance.

Although NATO has an open door policy for aspiring members, Ukraine has been unable to be formally admitted. The ongoing unrest in regions across Ukraine  from the annexed peninsula of Crimea to the Russian-backed separatist regions in the east  has worried NATO members. For the first month of the Russian invasion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked the alliance to allow Ukraine to join. But in March, he admitted that he did not expect his country to join anytime soon. Zelensky praised Finlands decision on Thursday following a phone call with Niinisto.

It was the pretext of stopping Ukraine from joining NATO, and ultimately pushing back on the alliances eastward expansion, that was one of Russian President Vladimir Putins reasons for invading its neighbor. But that has seemingly backfired on the Kremlin leader. Putins aggressive foreign policy has instead sent other European countries, such as Finland and Sweden, into applying for NATO membership. Since the war in Ukraine began on Feb. 24, Finnish public support for the country to join NATO has jumped from 20-30% to 76%, according to a poll published by broadcaster YLE.

At a press conference on Wednesday, Niinisto said Moscow had only itself to blame: You caused this. Look at the mirror.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Finnish President Sauli Niinisto in Kyiv in 2019. (Sergei Chuzavkov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

The Kremlin responded to the announcement by saying that Finlands membership is definitely a threat to Russia. As we have said many times before, NATO expansion does not make the world more stable and secure, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. [Russias reaction] will depend on what this expansion process will entail, how far and how close to our borders the military infrastructure will move.

Russias Foreign Ministry added in a statement: Finland joining NATO is a radical change in the countrys foreign policy. Russia will be forced to take retaliatory steps, both of a military-technical and other nature, in order to stop threats to its national security arising.

Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto told the European Parliaments Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday that it was Russias unpredictable behavior and its readiness to wage high-risk operations that led to Finlands decision.

Meanwhile, Sweden is also expected to announce its decision to join the alliance in the coming days. On Thursday, it was announced that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had signed security pacts with both Sweden and Finland. Johnson said the agreements would aid both countries if they came under threat.

Boris Johnson boards a plane at London Stansted Airport on Wednesday. (Frank Augstein/Pool via Getty Images)

Asked whether British soldiers would be sent to Finland if there were possible conflict in Russia, Johnson said: I think the solemn declaration is itself clear. And what it says is that in the event of a disaster, or in the event of an attack on either of us, then yes, we will come to each others assistance, including with military assistance.

_____

What happened last week in Ukraine? Check out this explainer from Yahoo Immersive to find out.
LONDON (Reuters) - Michael Franzese was a high ranking member of the Italian-American Colombo crime family before he walked away from his life in the mafia nearly 30 years ago.

Since then, Franzese has sought to deter youngsters from joining organised crime groups, and has pursued a new career as a motivational speaker, author and commentator.

"I go into juvenile halls, I speak to young people all the time... and tell them what it means to be on the street and where they're going to eventually end up," Franzese told Reuters in an interview.

"People, especially on the street, view Cosa Nostra mafia as the ultimate gang in the world so when I speak, they listen. I have credibility with them and that's important. And I think I've been able to have a tremendous impact over the past 25 years with a lot of young people."

New York-born Franzese, 70, is now bringing stories of his past and reformed life to the UK, kicking off a ticketed tour on July 2.

"There's some things that I'll talk about that I haven't spoken about before that I think people are going to be really interested in," he said of his tour, called "An Evening with Michael Franzese - The Real Goodfella".

Franzese dropped out of university after his father, Colombo underboss John "Sonny" Franzese, was jailed for a bank robbery in 1967. He became a caporegime, or captain, involved in various dealings including a massive gasoline bootlegging scheme, and was briefly portrayed in 1990 mob movie "Goodfellas".

He said making the decision to leave the mafia was "gut-wrenching" but said he now felt "blessed" to be out.

"Almost everybody I know in that life, everybody, is either dead or in prison for the rest of their lives," said Franzese, who spent time in jail in the 1990s for racketeering charges.

"I just want to be known as a guy that just did the right thing after doing the wrong thing for quite some time."

(Reporting by Marie-Louise Gumuchian, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien)
A single word is all it takes for Dr. Colleen McNicholas, the last abortion provider in Missouri, to describe a future without Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that legalized abortion nationwide, which is poised to be struck down by the Supreme Court: Catastrophe.

As the medical director of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, McNicholas has seen the ripple effects of S.B. 8, the law Texas passed last year that rendered abortion illegal after a fetal heartbeat could be detected, usually halfway through the first trimester.

Dr. Colleen McNicholas at Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, Missouri's sole abortion clinic. (Lawrence Bryant/Reuters)

The new restrictions pushed Texas women to seek abortions in neighboring states, limiting access for women there. It caused a ripple effect, National Abortion Foundation policy director Melissa Fowler told Yahoo News, a logistical nightmare that, abortion providers say, was precisely the point of such legislation.

Meanwhile, many other states across the Midwest and Southeast had taken their own steps over the years to make it more difficult for abortion providers to stay open. Our opponents have been creative, Fowler says. All of this has been part of a strategy.

McNicholas saw firsthand how S.B. 8 created a regional crisis, a likely portent for the rest of the country in a post-Roe world. As Texas implemented its six-week ban, that meant that nearly all of the folks looking for an abortion were going to be pushed out of Texas, McNicholas told Yahoo News in a phone interview. The problem is that all the states around Texas  theyre all already restricted-access states. Theyre already one- or two-clinic states.

There are now six such states  including Missouri. Missouri once had five abortion clinics. Today, only the Planned Parenthood in St. Louis remains, the culmination of activism that sought a repeal of Roe but also focused on more immediate, and local, goals.

A defiantly large blue banner graces a side of the nondescript building where McNicholas works under heavy security.

Still here, the banner says.

An abortion rights demonstrator in front of the U.S. Supreme Court building on Tuesday. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

Across the country, anti-abortion activists persuaded state legislatures to pass targeted regulation of abortion providers, or TRAP, laws. Abortion providers had to seek admission privileges at local hospitals. Clinics had to adhere to ambulatory care standards and face penalties if, for example, their hallways were deemed too narrow.

And a federal judiciary  including the Supreme Court  that was filling up with conservative Trump appointees indicated that those new laws would survive legal challenges.

There was only one Trump appointee on the Supreme Court when it declined to hear a challenge to the 2015 TRAP law in Arkansas, effectively leaving it in place. Since then, two more Trump appointees have made the Supreme Court even more conservative, and ever more willing to take on Roe itself.

The potential reversal of Roe could occur in a landscape in which abortion providers are not only more regulated but also becoming more sparse. There were 2,042 abortion providers in the United States in 1995, according to the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion rights research group. By 2017, that number had fallen to 808.

The scarcity creates untenable waiting periods. We are seeing and hearing from patients that some of those clinics are at four-, five- and six-week waiting periods. And the truth is, we know that abortion is a time-sensitive service, McNicholas said.

The most restrictive bans, like the six-week one in Texas, go into effect right around the time, on average, when a woman learns she is pregnant. Anti-abortion activists have relied on advances in obstetrics to argue that the embryo, then the size of a seed, is a living person. Abortion rights activists maintain that the only purpose of such arguments is to make it more difficult for women to have an abortion, or to discourage them altogether.

A rally for abortion rights in Houston on May 7. (Mark Felix/AFP /AFP via Getty Images)

The Texas law meant that some women seeking abortions in the state  where roughly 50,000 to 55,000 people had abortions each year from 2014 to 2021, according to the Texas Tribune  had to go elsewhere.

So as the Texans are filling the schedules of the Oklahoma clinics, now Oklahomans need a place to go, McNicholas said of the regional strain. Oklahoma passed its own six-week ban earlier this month.

Because of the states trigger laws, Oklahomas four clinics will automatically close if Roe is struck down. The clinic system in this region, its just not robust enough to take the loss of so many clinics, a spokesperson for a regional abortion provider told CNBC.

The shortage is the point, McNicholas said. For some folks, it pushes them beyond the limits of abortion access.

But experts say that women determined to have an abortion will find a way to do so, potentially using unsafe methods or relying on inept care.

Weve learned a lot from the experience of Texas, Fowler of the National Abortion Federation said, describing a network of providers, activists and supporters ready to mobilize for a post-Roe world. The infrastructure is in place, she said. And weve been doing this for years.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Federal prosecutors have opened a grand jury probe into whether former U.S. President Donald Trump mishandled classified records that ended up at his Florida residence, the New York Times reported on Thursday, citing two people briefed on the issue.

Prosecutors have issued a subpoena to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to obtain the documents, the report said. Authorities have also made interview requests to people who worked in the White House in Trump's final days in office, it said.

A grand jury probe suggests the Justice Department has advanced in its inquiry, which began after NARA said it had recovered 15 boxes of documents, including classified records, that Trump took to his Mar-a-Lago estate when he left the White House in January 2021.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Trump has previously confirmed that he agreed to return certain records to the Archives, calling it "an ordinary and routine process."

A federal law called the U.S. Presidential Records Act requires the preservation of memos, letters, notes, emails, faxes and other written communications related to a president's official duties.

(Reporting by Rami Ayyub; Editing by Tim Ahmann and Grant McCool)
Yura Nechyporenko, 15, hugs his uncle at the grave of his father, Ruslan Nechyporenko, at the cemetery in Bucha, Ukraine. (Petros Giannakouris / Associated Press)

As Finland's leaders dealt him a blow by announcing their support for joining NATO, Russian President Vladimir Putin reaffirmed his determination to maintain Moscow's sway over eastern Ukraine as Russian missiles pounded the area.

Putin, in a message released by the Kremlin on Thursday, offered his support to Leonid Pasechnik, the head of pro-Russia separatists in the self-proclaimed Luhansk Peoples Republic, part of Ukraine's eastern Donbas region.

I am sure that through our joint efforts we will defend the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Luhansk republic, Putin said, as his war on Ukraine began its 12th week.

The Russian leader's message was backed by a torrent of Russian airstrikes and artillery barrages along the 300-mile-long eastern battlefront, including on a steel mill where the last pocket of Ukrainian military resistance remains in the strategic southeastern port city of Mariupol.

The fightingcame amid the dramatic announcement by Finland's president and prime minister of their support for joining NATO, paving the way for an expansion of the U.S.-led military alliance that Putin partially blamed for his decision to invade Ukraine.

Finland, a historically neutral country that shares an 830-mile land border with Russia, is expected to be joined soon by Sweden in seeking membership in the 30-member security pact.

NATO membership would strengthen Finlands security, President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said in a joint statement Thursday. As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defense alliance. Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay.

Kremlin officials warned that they saw Finlands move to join NATO as a threat. Another expansion of NATO does not make our continent more stable and secure, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, according to the Interfax news agency.

Finnish President Sauli Niinisto gestures during a news conference with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in Helsinki on Wednesday. (Frank Augstein / Associated Press)

The addition of the two Nordic states to NATO would underscore how badly Putin has miscalculated the worlds response to his invasion of Ukraine, which has failed to achieve its initial military objectives, prompted Europe to begin weaning itself off Russias most valuable export  fossil fuels  and compelled nonaligned states to pick sides.

"This is monumental," said Aglaya Snetkov, a Russia expert and lecturer in international politics at University College London. "This reverses decades of foreign policy.

"Putins initial plan of drawing a line in the sand between Russia and NATO and reversing the latters expansion has spectacularly backfired," she added. "This is precisely what Russia did not want: NATO expansion."

The Kremlin responded by saying that Putin had already set in motion a strengthening of Russian defenses along its western flank. But Snetkov said Moscow would likely struggle to mount a significant response if Finland and Sweden joined NATO, given the vast deployment of Russian forces in Ukraine.

"It is bogged down in Ukraine, has pulled its troops from its other borders," Snetkov said. "Realistically, what can it do? If it doesnt respond, which I think is likely, this shows yet again the weakness of Russia and that it's full of empty threats."

More than a dozen Russian armored vehicles were destroyed crossing the Siversky Donets River near the village of Bilohorivka in Luhansk, according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, which posted pictures on Facebook of charred tanks and the remnants of two pontoon bridges. The photos could not be independently verified.

The village was the target of a Russian strike over the weekend that hit a school-turned-shelter, killing about 60 civilians, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The Ukrainian military said Thursday morning that it had repulsed nine Russian attacks over the last 24 hours in Luhansk and Donetsk, while admitting that Russian advances in the region had achieved partial success.

Russian airstrikes continued to rain down on the Azovstal steel works in Mariupol, where the city's last defenders have been holed up for weeks. The dire situation prompted Kyiv to offer the release of Russian prisoners of war in exchange for the safe evacuation of injured soldiers trapped inside the mill.

Negotiations were ongoing Thursday, said Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk, but none of the options discussed so far was ideal.

A Ukrainian serviceman receives treatment inside the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, Ukraine, on Tuesday. (Dmytro 'Orest' Kozatskyi / Azov Special Forces Regiment)

The defenders, members of the Azov regiment, have refused to surrender despite heavy bombardment and quickly depleting sources of food, water and medicine.

Only a fraction of Mariupols 400,000 residents are believed to remain in the shattered city, which Mayor Vadym Boychenko said was reduced to a medieval ghetto. Many of the citys evacuees have fled about 120 miles northwest to the town of Zaporizhzhia, which was hit by Russian shells and grenades, the Ukrainian military said Thursday.

More than 8 million people are now displaced within Ukraine, with nearly half fleeing homes in the countrys east, according to the International Organization for Migration. Meanwhile, more than 6 million have fled Ukraine since Russian invaded 11 weeks ago, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Ukraine's human rights chief alleged that about 3,000 Mariupol residents were being held in prisons controlled by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. Lyudmyla Denysova alleged on social media that some of the detainees were being interrogated under coercion and enduring terrible living conditions. The claims could not be independently verified.

Three people were killed and 12 injured after Russians launched missiles at a local school, a college dormitory and private homes in Novgorod-Siversky, a city in the northern Chernihiv region, Ukrainian military officials said Thursday.

The United Nations' top human rights representative Thursday blamed the Russian military and its proxies for most of the war's civilian deaths.

According to our information, while such incidents can be attributed to both parties to the conflict, most of these casualties appear attributable to the Russian armed forces and affiliated armed groups, High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet told a special session of the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council.

She said the vast majority of the casualties were caused by explosive weapons, including heavy artillery and missiles.

The council is expected to vote on a resolution repeating its demand for the immediate cessation of military hostilities against Ukraine. The U.N. General Assembly suspended Russia from the body last month amid allegations of atrocities by Russian forces in the suburbs of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, where bodies of civilians bearing signs of torture and summary execution have been uncovered.

Russia's determination to continue its war against Ukraine has spooked other neighboring countries, including Finland, a country of 5.5 million people, which had up to now refrained from joining NATO so as to not provoke Moscow. Putin has long viewed NATOs expansion, particularly its addition of former Eastern Bloc nations such as Poland, Lithuania and Romania after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, as an existential threat to Russia.

Attitudes in Finland toward NATO changed after the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, which sparked the largest conflict in Europe since World War II. Polls show that 76% of the population now supports joining the defense pact, a dramatic swing from late 2017 during the countrys centennial, when only 19% favored membership.

"The Finnish population looked at Ukraine and said, 'Russia could do this to Finland,'" said Charly Salonius-Pasternak, a security expert at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. "At the same time, there's the realization that Russia talks about using nuclear weapons in a way Finland cannot address. Finland has no deterrence for nuclear weapons. The only way to do that is to become a NATO [members]."

Germany, too, has changed its security calculus, pledging a $100-billion boost in military spending to reach targets set by NATO that it had failed to meet for years.

Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, buoyed by Germany's shifting position, called on German companies to pull out of the country and relocate to Ukraine.

"As Russia keeps committing heinous atrocities in Ukraine, revenues of foreign companies still doing business in Russia are stained with Ukrainian blood, Kuleba posted on Twitter. I urge German businesses to pull out of Russia and relocate to Ukraine. This will be a sincere contribution to peace in Europe."

But European officials will need more than just U.S. support to bring Moscow to heel, which is one reason why European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was in Tokyo on Thursday meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Her visit followed one by Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin on Wednesday.

Von der Leyen and Kishida called on China  which has steadfastly refused to criticize Russia over Ukraine  to do more to exert influence on the Kremlin to bring an end to the war.

"Russia's invasion of Ukraine is not just a matter for Europe, but it shakes the core of the international order, including Asia. This must not be tolerated," said Kishida, whose government has joined Western sanctions against Russia.

King reported from Lviv and Pierson from Singapore. Times staff writer Jenny Jarvie contributed from Atlanta.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
A group of shoplifters lit a fire inside a Target in Fort Lauderdale before making their getaway, police said.

The drama happened shortly after 9 p.m. Wednesday at store in the Coral Ridge Mall at 3200 N. Federal Hwy.

Police say the fire was started by people attempting to steal merchandise. Employees put out the fire and no one was injured.

Police told WPLG-Local10 they believe the robbers set the fire to distract employees while they escaped.
During a closed-door speech Monday to the National Republican Congressional Committee, former President Donald Trump told the invited guests that we are coming back with vengeance in an apparent reference to his as-yet-unannounced decision to seek a return to power in 2024.

Given that Trump has resumed holding rallies nationwide, continues to dominate Republican primary polling and has, since losing to Joe Biden in 2020, repeatedly hinted that he plans to mount another White House bid, its not exactly a closely guarded secret that he wants his old job back. Equally unsurprising is the promise that a second Trump term would hold its share of political payback.

Trump, after all, has repeatedly spoken over the years about how exacting revenge is a guiding principle.

If somebody hits you, youve got to hit em back five times harder than they ever thought possible. Youve got to get even. Get even, Trump said in a 2012 speech.

Seven years later, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon remarked that if the then president won reelection in 2020, Youre going to get pure Trump off the chain. Four years of Donald Trump in payback mode.

In further anticipation of a second Trump term, Bannon this week went after former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who had detailed numerous instances of what he saw as Trump's faulty judgment in a new book.

When we come to power, dont think you're going to be skipping away from this, Bannon said of Esper.

Donald Trump at the Kentucky Derby on Saturday. (Peter Casey/USA Today)

Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham warned in October that a Trump victory in 2024 would usher in four years of reprisals.

Hes clearly the frontrunner in the Republican Party, Grisham said in an interview with ABCs "Good Morning America."

Everybodys showing their fealty to him. Hes on his revenge tour, for people who dared to vote for impeachment. And I want to just warn people that once he takes office if he were to win, he doesnt have to worry about reelection any more. He will be about revenge, he will probably have some pretty draconian policies.

Rep. Tom Rice of South Carolina was one of 10 House Republicans who voted in 2021 to impeach Trump for "incitement of insurrection" for his role in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol that year. That vote, Rice knows, effectively painted a target on his back because Trump is "driven by revenge."

He is, of anybody Ive ever met, hes probably the most spiteful, vengeful person Ive ever met, Rice said in an April interview with Meet the Press.

Of the Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, just six, including Rice, are seeking reelection. The former president has endorsed GOP challengers in each race.

Trumps revenge tour, as Grisham has put it, also takes aim at those who refused to go along with his false contention that the 2020 election was fraudulent.

On Wednesday, Trump issued a statement criticizing Republicans who still supported the reelection of Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp. Trump wants Kemp defeated over the governors refusal in December 2020 to block the certification of the vote in Georgia and hand Trump the swing state's electoral votes.

Gov. Brian Kemp campaigning in Glennville, Ga., April 14. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images)

Today, the worst election integrity Governor in the country, Brian Kemp, loaded the great state of Georgia up with RINOs. Thats right, he had them all. Chris Christie, Doug Ducey from Arizona, and Pete Rickets from Nebraska, Trump said in a statement, adding that the grouping represented just a continuation of bad elections and a real RINO if you vote for Brian Kemp.

While most Republicans who may have to again work with Trump should he win in 2024 are careful not to publicly criticize Trump out of fears of retribution, Christie didnt hesitate to return fire.

Insightful commentary about three Republican Governors who were overwhelmingly reelected by their people from a former President who lost to Joe Biden. Maybe the R in RINO really stands for re-elected, he tweeted Wednesday.

Yet, according to polls on a hypothetical rematch between Trump and Biden, the 45th president appears to have a good chance at becoming the 47th.

For former Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele, if those polls are right, Trumps effort to weed out dissent from the GOP regarding the false claim that election fraud cost him the 2020 election will extend beyond members of Congress.

His four years would be consumed with validating his lie, Steele told the New Republic. His four years would be consumed with retribution against those who, in his view, wronged him, and [he] would then corrupt the instruments of power in Washington, from Congress  because hed have a compliant, complicit House and Senate Republicans who would do every bidding that he put in front of them  and then corrupt the various institutions that would be required to execute his revenge, which would include the Department of Justice, etc.

William Barr, attorney general during the Trump administration. (Nathan Congleton/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)

In January, the former president offered yet another possible preview of how hed settle scores if he wins reelection: pardoning those convicted for crimes committed on Jan. 6, 2021, when his supporters attempted to block the congressional certification of the Electoral College vote.

If I run and I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly, he said at a campaign rally in Conroe, Texas. And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.

On Dec. 15, 2020, immediately after the Electoral College count confirmed Bidens victory over Trump, former Attorney General William Barr tendered his resignation to the then president. The schism followed disagreements about whether the election had been marred by fraud and whether Justice Department could intervene to overturn the results.

I told him that all this stuff was bulls*** about election fraud, Barr told NBC News.

In his memoir, One Damn Thing After Another, Barr has since offered his own take about what ultimately guides the former president.

That Trump, of all people, should consider himself an arbiter of ideological purity  a man whose political allegiances oscillated randomly for decades  is comical, Barr wrote. In reality, he has no concern with ideology or political principle. His motive is revenge, and it is entirely personal.
BEIJING, May, 12 (Xinhua) -- The United States should stop trying to encircle China militarily if it doesn't want a war with the latter, alerted an article published Tuesday by the Mises Institute.

"In point of fact, China doesn't threaten us. The U.S. is threatening China," Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., founder and chairman of the Mises Institute in Alabama, said in an opinion piece titled Why the Warmongers Are Wrong about China.

The expert said that the United States "has pursued an increasing military encirclement of China's periphery and has forced Beijing to respond in tandem."

"These kinds of provocations are part of a broader effort of China containment, which spawn tensions and inevitable responses from Beijing, which is then accused of being aggressive and expansionist. This all creates a vicious circle of militarization from both sides as China strives to defend its 'national sovereignty' against perceived foreign intrusion," explained Rockwell. 
Kathy Barnette, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania. (Matt Rourke/AP)

PITTSBURGH  Just days before Pennsylvanias primary elections, the Republican Senate nomination has been turned upside down with a late surge from Kathy Barnette, a virtual unknown whose sudden rise has riled former President Donald Trump and his allies.

Multiple polls this week have shown Barnette within striking distance for the nomination to replace retiring GOP Sen. Pat Toomey. Shes a conservative commentator who moved to the state about eight years ago and failed in a bid for a Philadelphia-area House seat in 2020. She lost the safe Democratic seat by 20 points, a result she blamed on voter fraud.

Although Barnette has spent a fraction of her rivals' outlay on television ads, a confluence of events  late endorsements, an alliance with the gubernatorial frontrunner, a lack of enthusiasm for other options and a viral ad about her own mothers decision not to have an abortion after being raped at age 11  has pushed her into contention.

Its also opened her to new scrutiny, including questions about her biography, her embrace of conspiracy theories and her incendiary comments about Islam, which she once said should be banned in the USA.

Barnettes explosive rise threatens to make next Tuesday the second straight week that a Trump-backed candidate has lost a high-profile Republican primary, after Trumps pick for governor in Nebraska was defeated this Tuesday.

In Pennsylvania, Trump has backed former daytime talk show host Dr. Mehmet Oz. Until the past week, Oz and former hedge fund CEO David McCormick had been locked in a tight contest for the top spot.

Pennsylvania Senate candidate Mehmet Oz, accompanied by former President Donald Trump, speaks at a campaign rally in Greensburg, Pa., on May 6. (Gene J. Puskar/AP)

On Thursday, Trump said Barnette will never be able to win the General Election this November against a Democratic candidate.

She has many things in her past which have not been properly explained or vetted, but if she is able to do so, she will have a wonderful future in the Republican Party  and I will be behind her all the way, Trump said.

Top Trump allies, like former Ambassador Richard Grenell and Fox News host Sean Hannity, have also spent recent days warning that Barnette is unelectable and could cost Republicans their chance of retaking the Senate.

Grenell has used his Twitter account, where he has 875,000 followers, to cast Barnette as a left-wing radical on race, as well as an anti-Muslim and antigay bigot. Hannity, an outspoken supporter of Ozs candidacy, said on his show Wednesday night that Barnette has a very troubling history of attacking Donald Trump.

Former Ambassador Richard Grenell, who has been a leading critic of Barnette's candidacy. (Tom Brenner/Reuters)

But over the past few days, Barnette has also gained new allies. The influential and well-funded Club for Growth, which is locked in a grudge match with Trump that arose out of a disagreement over which Senate candidate to support in Ohio, this week started running $2 million in TV ads for Barnette.

And the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group, on Tuesday endorsed her.

In addition, Steve Bannon, the far-right media personality and sometime Trump adviser, embraced Barnette on his podcast Monday. Barnette is a true-blue MAGA candidate and her victory would be a message from the grassroots that they want candidates who are dependably MAGA more than they want candidates who Trump endorsed, Bannons website said.

Even before her recent surge, Barnette was creeping up on Oz and McCormick, who have spent months  and millions from their respective individual fortunes  pummeling each other on the TV airwaves. And over the past week, Barnettes polling numbers have gone from around 12% in the RealClearPolitics average to 21%, effectively tying her with Oz and McCormick.

Attendees at a candidate forum in Newtown, Pa., applaud Barnette on Wednesday. (Matt Rourke/AP)

Barnettes rise, experts said, is linked to her alliance with right-wing state Sen. Doug Mastriano, the leading GOP contender for governor in a nine-person primary. Mastriano and Barnette have endorsed each other, have campaigned with each other in heavily Republican areas of the state and have both promoted baseless conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen by the Democrats.

I think the bulk of her rise can be attributed to the fact that the Mastriano voters have realized that Doug has endorsed her too, said Republican consultant Christopher Nicholas, who is working for a lower-tier gubernatorial candidate, Charlie Gerow, but is not involved in the Senate race.

People said she did good in debates, Nicholas told Yahoo News. Yeah, but so did the other candidates. What is different is the fact that shes endorsed by [Mastriano].

At a rally Wednesday evening, Mastriano didnt mention Barnette, but her literature was included in preassembled bags for attendees. One man wore a shirt that said PA A-Team on the back and listed Mastriano, his running mate Teddy Daniels and Barnette. And at a recent rally for Oz headlined by Trump, Mastriano supporters placed fliers and magnets on cars in the parking lot.

Barnette campaigning in Camp Hill, Pa., on April 2. (Matt Rourke/AP)

Republicans in Pennsylvania and at the national level are not optimistic about Mastrianos chances of winning a crucial governors seat this fall against Democratic Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who is running unopposed for his partys nomination.

Mastriano aside, Barnette is an appealing option for Pennsylvania Republicans for a number of reasons. Shes a Black woman in a party still dominated by older white men. She has benefited from the brutal campaign Oz and McCormick waged against each other while she remained under the radar. And shes so far been able to embrace Trump and his policies while downplaying the importance of his endorsement.

MAGA does not belong to President Trump, she said at an April debate. Our values never, never shifted to President Trumps values. It was President Trump who shifted and aligned with our values.

Yet questions are also being raised about her resume ahead of the Tuesday primary. Salena Zito, a national political reporter for the Washington Examiner who is popular in conservative circles, submitted questions to Barnettes campaign about some of the claims made on the candidates website.

Barnettes campaign bio says that she served her country proudly for 10 years in the Armed Forces Reserves where she was accepted into Officer Candidacy School. She worked with two major financial firms in corporate America and sat on the board of a pregnancy crisis center for five years. It also says she was an adjunct professor of corporate finance.

Barnette in Newtown, Pa., on Wednesday. (Matt Rourke/AP)

Zito asked for details about where and when she was a professor, her time in officer candidate school and the financial firms where she worked. But Barnettes campaign declined to answer the questions, citing a need for privacy, other than to say she attended basic training at Fort Dix Army Reserves.

Her website does state that she worked for A.G. Edwards and Sons and for Bank of America Capital Asset Management. But the campaigns response prompted Zito to criticize it for trying to run out the clock.

She could be hiding nothing. She could be hiding everything. We dont know because there are no answers, Zito wrote. All candidates should face scrutiny and pointed questions about their biographies, their positions, their life experiences, and their work experiences. Barnette, to date, has not faced them.

Zito also compared Barnette to Christine ODonnell, a right-wing activist who defeated a popular mainstream Republican in a Delaware Senate primary in 2010. ODonnell then lost the general election in a landslide to Democrat Chris Coons.

The conventional wisdom has been that the race would be between Oz and McCormick. Oz has hit McCormick for being soft on China and alleging hes pro-Biden. McCormick has hit Oz for being a Hollywood liberal, his dual citizenship with Turkey, and his flip-flopping on key issues such as abortion.

Republican Senate candidates David McCormick, left and Mehmet Oz. (Matt Rourke/AP, Marc Levy/AP)

Unlike in Ohios Senate primary earlier this month, where Trumps endorsement led to a steady increase in polling for eventual winner J.D. Vance, Oz has not seen a similar climb. At the recent Trump rally for Oz, the celebrity doctor was at times booed, with some attendees telling Yahoo News that they were confused why Trump had backed him.

Trump, however, has stayed in Ozs corner, telling rally-goers that McCormick  a former hedge fund CEO and the husband of former Trump aide Dina Powell  is a liberal Wall Street Republican.

Another potential drag on both Oz and McCormick is that theyve both been criticized for swooping in from more Democratic states to attempt to buy a winnable Senate seat. Both McCormick, who has Pennsylvania roots but has lived in Connecticut for years, and Oz, who attended medical and business school in Philadelphia but has lived in a New Jersey mansion for the last two decades, established Pennsylvania residency only in the last year.

I can promise the people of Pennsylvania, when these carpetbaggers lose, you will never see them again, Barnette said at a televised debate last week.

Barnette with other Republican candidates at a forum in Newtown. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the frontrunner in the Democratic primary, joked this week that he was surprised he could brag about being from Pennsylvania in a race for the states U.S. Senate seat. In his final ad before the primary, Fetterman said hes taking on every politician, insider and out-of-state rich guy trying to take over Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania is likely Democrats best hope of picking up an extra Senate seat in what is expected to be a tough November election for the party. Republican leader Mitch McConnell is hoping to wrest the Senate back from Democratic control, but that may prove impossible if the GOP cant retain Pennsylvanias open seat.

At an event in Kentucky last month, McConnell said Republicans were looking at their best midterm elections in decades, before warning that the GOP could still manage to screw this up by picking bad candidates.

In the Senate, if you look at where we have to compete in order to get into a majority, there are places that are competitive in the general election, he said.

So you cant nominate somebody whos just sort of unacceptable to a broader group of people and win. We had that experience in 2010 and 2012.
Ukrainian defense officials on Wednesday said they believe Russian President Vladimir Putin still intends to capture Kyiv in order to absorb the country as a new Russian state into its federation.

Deputy Chief of the Main Operations Department of Ukraine's Armed Forces, Oleksiy Gromov, told reporters that Russias aim in concentrating its efforts in eastern and southern Ukraine is part of a bigger plan to take the entire nation.

RUSSIA LOOKS TO REINFORCE TROOPS ON SNAKE ISLAND, OFFICIALS WARN IT COULD 'DOMINATE' WESTERN BLACK SEA

Russia withdrew its efforts to take the capital city of Kyiv in late March after it failed to make any major advances following a months-worth of attempts to take the city from three different directions.

A woman walks by a metro station in downtown Kyiv, as Russia celebrates Victory Day, which marks the 77th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, in Kyiv, Ukraine May 9, 2022. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

The Kremlin then refocused its efforts in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions to the east and announced its aim to take over Ukraines regions along the Black Sea  a move that if successful would not only give Russia port city domination but a path to target neighboring Moldova.

NATO COUNTRY IS ALLOWING NATIONALS TO JOIN UKRAINE'S ARMY, FIGHT RUSSIA

"We consider his attempts to take control of the territory of Odesa, Mykolayiv and partly Zaporizhzhya oblasts, create a land corridor to the Transnistrian region of the Republic of Moldova, capture the territory of central Ukraine, capture Kyiv, stage re-elections," Gromov said during a press briefing in reference to Putins objectives.

A woman walks by a metro station in downtown Kyiv, as Russia celebrates Victory Day, which marks the 77th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, in Kyiv, Ukraine May 9, 2022. REUTERS/Carlos Barria REUTERS/Carlos Barria

The deputy chief said Moscow will attempt to rely on pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine and eastern Moldova in the separatist region of Transnistria to help it create a new state and incorporate it into Russia  a move that would reunite former Soviet Union territory under Moscow's rule.

Gromovs warnings Wednesday were the starkest yet to be outlined by Ukrainian authorities, though officials have been warning against these suspicions for weeks.

TOPSHOT - Ukrainian soldiers rest at their position near Lyman, eastern Ukraine, on April 28, 2022, amid Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Photo by YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP via Getty Images) YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP via Getty Images

Head of the Kyiv City Military Administration Mykola Zhirnov said last month that authorities expect Russia will take a second stab at Kyiv and asked that all women, children and elderly persons do not yet return to their homes in the areas surrounding the capital, Ukrainian news outlet Pravda reported.

Similarly, Kyiv Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko warned in early April "The fact that the enemy has withdrawn from Kyiv doesnt mean that they have relinquished their desire to capture the capital."
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Commentary: Xi's words shed light on role of youth in national rejuvenation drive

Xinhua) 08:04, May 12, 2022

Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, delivers a speech at a ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Youth League of China (CYLC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, May 10, 2022. (Xinhua/Li Xueren)

BEIJING, May 11 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese leadership has once again underscored what role the youth should play in the nation's rejuvenation drive.

In a speech on Tuesday, Chinese President Xi Jinping urged members of the Communist Youth League of China (CYLC) to be responsible, have firm convictions and work hard as the 73.7 million-strong organization celebrated its centenary.

The younger generation, according to Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, should do their best to help realize national rejuvenation -- the greatest dream of the Chinese people since the Opium War of 1840.

The destiny of any generation is closely connected with the era they live in. The youth have more opportunities to achieve their dreams when they chime with the cause of the Party and the people.

The pursuit of the Chinese Dream is a relay race. Since completing the building of a moderately prosperous society in all respects in 2021, China has now embarked on a new journey -- building a great modern socialist country in all respects by the mid-21st century.

Standing at a new historical juncture, Chinese youth in the new era should take on their responsibility, and they will be blessed with a spacious and promising platform.

In his speech, Xi urged youth league members to "always stand on the high ground of ideals and convictions."

Ideals and convictions serve as a beacon for life and pursuits. They determine a person's position and direction. Young people need to observe society, reflect on life, and create a future on the strength of wisdom.

Xi said they should aim high at an early age and cultivate the trust in the Party, the confidence in socialism with Chinese characteristics and the belief in Marxism from the bottom of their heart.

The importance of hard work was also highlighted by Xi.

The rejuvenation of the Chinese nation will be no easy task. It will not be achieved by simply "beating drums and gongs." Daunting challenges are inevitable in this new journey.

Chinese youth in the new era must work hard. Xi said the younger generation is the most energetic and enterprising and the least conservative force in society. The cause of the Party and the people could not have developed without the arduous dedication made by generations of young people.

Chinese youth will always be the vanguard force in realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and meeting challenges in a world undergoing changes unseen in a century.

(Web editor: Peng Yukai, Liang Jun)
YEREVAN, MAY 12, ARMENPRESS. The Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan met with the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of the Netherlands Mark Rutte in The Hague, ARMENPRESS was informed from the Office of the Prime Minister.

Mr. Rutte attached importance to the official visit of the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia to the Netherlands and the development of cooperation between the two countries in all spheres.

During the meeting, the interlocutors also emphasized the development and expansion of economic relations between the two countries, the implementation of relevant measures to expand business ties. They expressed confidence that there is a great potential for economic cooperation between Armenia and the Netherlands, the realization of which will contribute to the increase of trade turnover.

The parties touched upon the Armenia-EU relations, the situation around Nagorno Karabakh, the processes taking place in the international arena.

Then, the Heads of Government of the two countries issued statements.

Mark Rutte, in particular, said,

Thank you very much. It is a great pleasure for me to welcome and receive Nikol Pashinyan and some members of his government here.

The Netherlands and Armenia are geographically several thousand kilometers apart, but in other respects the distance between our countries is small. We are the appreciator of cultural values. An exhibition opened at the Drents Museum yesterday, and I hope to visit it soon. We also have excellent diplomatic relations that have existed for 30 years. The opening of the Embassy of the Netherlands took place in Yerevan, which confirms our excellent bilateral relations.

The visit of Prime Minister Pashinyan is taking place at a very right time, because the Armenian government has very big plans after last year's elections. We have many topics to talk about, there are very big plans. Armenia has made great investments, it is following the path of democracy, although sometimes there are difficult situations and conditions. Following the velvet revolution under the leadership of Prime Minister Pashinyan, great changes have taken place, corruption and many other wrongdoings have been fought. I am greatly convinced that the reforms will be very effective, all Armenians will benefit from it. I highly appreciate Mr. Pashinyan, I highly appreciate the activities of his government, I promised him that we will support in every way.

Although there are many positive achievements, unfortunately, the catastrophic war in Ukraine saddens everyone. Of course, we talked about that today. Our position is very clear: this terrible war must end, all parties must sit at the table and start negotiations. Only this can lead to lasting peace. Unfortunately, Armenia well understands what war means, and that is why it is so important that Armenia and Azerbaijan have recently begun negotiations to reach an agreement on Nagorno-Karabakh in the near future. We emphasize its importance; we support the Minsk Group Co-Chairs. It is a very difficult dialogue after so much grief. Mr. Pashinyan made very clear about that in the parliament. I expressed my respect for that, the efforts of the Armenian government in that regard, we wholeheartedly welcome and we will continue to welcome. Of course, we have not finished our conversations yet, we will sit at the table soon, but I would like to take this opportunity to thank Mr. Pashinyan and the ministers for the visit.

During this visit, we reaffirmed what unites our nations. It promises very good, positive cooperation in the future. I personally welcome all that, thank you again, I hope we will meet again."

Nikol Pashinyan particularly said,

Honorable Mr. Prime Minister,

First of all, I would like to thank you for the warm welcome and the invitation to pay an official visit. I must state that this is the first official visit of the Armenian leader to the Kingdom of the Netherlands. And I have had several opportunities to say today that the fact that this official visit is taking place at this time, I assess it not only as the expression of our rich historical relations and well-developed trade and economic relations, but also as the support of the Netherlands, personally your, Mr. Prime Minister, to the Armenian democracy, the agenda of democratic reforms adopted by our government. This is my first visit to the Netherlands, I am very impressed with your wonderful and beautiful country. And, of course, it is an additional impetus, it encourages us to further develop relations in all spheres, to encourage the further development of human, cultural and economic ties between our countries. I must also express my gratitude to you, Mr. Prime Minister, for the positions you expressed regarding the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and for your clear support for the peace agenda adopted by the Government of the Republic of Armenia. I must say that yes, we received at last years early parliamentary elections, which I am pleased to say was unequivocally assessed by the international community as free, in line with democratic standards, a mandate from our people to adopt and implement the peace agenda. The agenda of our bilateral relations is very rich, we hope to move forward in all directions. We are very interested, we discussed on several occasions today, in particular, the issue of wider application of agricultural technologies in Armenia. We know that the Netherlands is the most developed country in terms of agricultural-technologies, and we are happy and thankful that both the government and the business community we met today are interested in further developments in these areas. The role of the Kingdom of the Netherlands  your government is very important in supporting democratic reforms. The role of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and your government is very important in supporting democratic reforms. Of course, our main partner in this issue is the European Union, and of course, the support of EU member states is important. I must state that in 2021 the Armenia-EU Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement entered into force, which, in fact, is the joint agenda of democratic reforms. And we are determined to fully implement that agenda, we are determined to open an era of peaceful development for our country and our region. We also discussed the processes taking place in Armenia-Turkey relations, Armenia-Azerbaijan relations. And I am happy to say that, in fact, we state that we have a common understanding of these processes, a common understanding that the peace agenda must really be implemented. But we all know that this is not possible without the support of the international community, we are glad that our agenda is understood by our international partners. Let me thank you again for this warm welcome and express confidence that as a results of the visit a new impetus will be given to the further development of our relations.

Thank you."

Nikol Pashinyan and Mark Rutte answered the questions of the journalists.

The visit of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to the Kingdom of the Netherlands has ended.
No takeover plan: Sri Lanka military, Central Bank chief threatens to quit

Colombo/New Delhi: As Sri Lankan troops patrolled the streets of Colombo on Wednesday, some of them in armoured vehicles, the Indian government categorically refuted speculative reports in a section of the Sri Lankan media that New Delhi will send its armed forces to the island nation that is currently witnessing huge unrest following an economic collapse.

The Indian high commission in Colombo tweeted: The high commission would like to categorically deny speculative reports in the media and the social media about India sending troops to Sri Lanka. These reports and such views are also not in keeping with the position of the government of India. The spokesperson of the MEA clearly said yesterday that India is fully supportive of Sri Lankas democracy, stability and economic recovery.

It may be recalled that on Tuesday night, the Indian high commission in Colombo also dismissed fake and blatantly false reports in a section of the Sri Lankan media and the social media which had alleged that some Sri Lankan politicians and their families had fled to India to escape the public wrath.

Emphasising the importance of democracy after the violence on Monday that led to the resignation of Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, India had said Tuesday it fully supported democracy, stability and economic recovery in the island nation. New Delhi is watching the developments in its bankrupt and debt-ridden southern neighbour closely as Chinese influence has grown rapidly there in the past few years.

India had sent troops to the island nation as a peacekeeping force at the invitation of the Sri Lankan government way back in 1987 during the Tamil insurgency that gripped it in the mid -1980s. But it proved to be an unhappy experience due to the fighting that erupted between the Indian Army and the LTTE that spearheaded the insurgency. The Indian troops eventually returned in 1990, but the insurgency lasted nearly two decades, with the Sri Lankan Army finally decimating the LTTE in 2009.

Armoured trucks with soldiers riding on top rolled into some areas of Colombo. Defying the curfew, some protesters regrouped opposite the office of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to continue demonstrations that began over three weeks ago. The police announced over loudspeakers that it was illegal to stay in public places during the curfew.

Videos posted on the social media showed lines of military trucks moving out of the capital, along with soldiers riding on motorbikes, and setting up checkpoints across the nation amid fears that a political vacuum may pave the way for a military takeover.

The defence ministrys top official, Kamal Gunaratne, denied speculation of a military takeover at a press conference held with the nations Army and Navy chiefs. None of our officers has a desire to take over the government. It has never happened in our country and it is not easy to do it here, Mr Gunaratne said. President Rajapaksa is a former top Army officer and remains the countrys official defence minister. Mr Gunaratne said the Army will return to its barracks once the security situation normalises.

The Prime Ministers departure has created an administrative vacuum with no Cabinet, which dissolved automatically with his resignation.

Navy commander Nishantha Ulugetenne said the former PM, Mahinda Rajapaksa, was being protected at a naval base in Trincomalee on the northeastern coast.

Meanwhile, Sri Lankas central bank on Wednesday urged the President and Parliament to quickly restore political stability, warning that the economy faces a threat of further collapse within days. Even for us to make progress on debt restructuring, we need a stable government. A Cabinet, a Parliament, a Prime Minister, a finance minister are all needed, said the central banks governor, Nandalal Weerasinghe. He has threatened to resign if the political leaders cannot restore stability.

I have informed all political parties that I will resign if there will be no political stability, said Mr Weerasinghe, who has been in the job only for a month. When I took over, the crisis was as bad as this, and I hoped it would be resolved quickly so that the central bank could perform the job required, he said.

Mr Weerasinghe had just begun negotiating with the IMF for a possible bailout package. Since Monday, with the PMs resignation, there is no functioning finance minister. Mr Weerasinghe said the countrys foreign reserves were not enough to import even the essential goods.
Momentum on vaccination and treatment has faded even as new, more infectious variants rise and billions across the globe remain unprotected

Washington: President Joe Biden will appeal for a renewed international commitment to attacking COVID-19 as he convenes the second global COVID-19 summit at a time when faltering resolve at home jeopardises that global response.

Eight months after he used the first such summit to announce an ambitious pledge to donate 1.2 billion vaccine doses to the world, the urgency of the U.S. and other nations to respond has waned.

Momentum on vaccinations and treatments has faded even as new, more infectious variants rise and billions across the globe remain unprotected. Congress has refused to meet Biden's request to provide another $22.5 billion in what he has called critically needed aid funding.

The White House said Biden will address the opening of the virtual summit Thursday morning with prerecorded remarks and will make the case that addressing COVID-19 must remain an international priority. The U.S. is co-hosting the summit along with Germany, Indonesia, Senegal and Belize.

The U.S. has shipped nearly 540 million vaccine doses to more than 110 countries and territories, according to the State Department  by far more than any other donor nation.

After the delivery of more than 1 billion vaccines to the developing world, the problem is no longer that there aren't enough shots, but a lack of logistical support to get doses into arms. According to government data, more than 680 million donated vaccine doses have been left unused in developing countries because they were set to expire soon and couldn't be administered quickly enough. As of March, 32 poorer countries had used fewer than half of the COVID-19 vaccines they were sent.

U.S. assistance to promote and facilitate vaccinations overseas dried up earlier this year, and Biden has requested about $5 billion for the effort through the rest of the year.

We have tens of millions of unclaimed doses because countries lack the resources to build out their cold chains, which basically is the refrigeration systems; to fight disinformation; and to hire vaccinators, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said this week. She added that the summit is going to be an opportunity to elevate the fact that we need additional funding to continue to be a part of this effort around the world.

We're going to continue to fight for more funding here, Psaki said. But we will continue to press other countries to do more to help the world make progress as well.

Congress has balked at the price tag for COVID-19 relief and has thus far refused to take up the package because of political opposition to the impending end of pandemic-era migration restrictions at the U.S.-Mexico border. Even after a consensus for virus funding briefly emerged in March, lawmakers decided to strip out the global aid funding and solely focus the assistance on shoring up U.S. supplies of vaccine booster shots and therapeutics.

Biden has warned that without Congress acting, the U.S. could lose out on access to the next generation of vaccines and treatments, and that the nation won't have enough supply of booster doses or the antiviral drug Paxlovid for later this year. He's also sounding the alarm that more variants will spring up if the U.S. and the world don't do more to contain the virus globally.

To beat the pandemic here, we need to beat it everywhere, Biden said last September during the first global summit.

The virus has killed more than 995,000 people in the U.S. and at least 6.2 million globally, according to figures kept by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.

Demand for COVID-19 vaccines has dropped in some countries as infections and deaths have declined globally in recent months, particularly as the omicron variant has proved to be less severe than earlier versions of the disease. For the first time since it was created, the U.N.-backed COVAX effort has enough supply to enable countries to meet their national vaccination targets, according to vaccines alliance Gavi CEO Dr. Seth Berkley, which fronts COVAX.

Still, despite more than 65% of the world's population receiving at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose, fewer than 16% of people in poor countries have been immunized. It is highly unlikely countries will hit the World Health Organization target of vaccinating 70% of all people by June.

In countries including Cameroon, Uganda and the Ivory Coast, officials have struggled to get enough refrigerators to transport vaccines, send enough syringes for mass campaigns and get enough health workers to inject the shots. Experts also point out that more than half of the health workers needed to administer the vaccines in poorer countries are either underpaid or not paid at all.

Donating more vaccines, critics say, would miss the point entirely.

It's like donating a bunch of fire trucks to countries that are on fire, but they have no water, said Ritu Sharma, a vice president at the charity CARE, which has helped immunize people in more than 30 countries, including India, South Sudan and Bangladesh.

We can't be giving countries all these vaccines but no way to use them, she said, adding that the same infrastructure that got the shots administered in the U.S. is now needed elsewhere. We had to tackle this problem in the U.S., so why are we not now using that knowledge to get vaccines into the people who need them most?

Sharma said greater investment was needed to counter vaccine hesitancy in developing countries where there are entrenched beliefs about the potential dangers of Western-made medicines.

Leaders must agree to pursue a coherent strategy to end the pandemic instead of a fragmented approach that will extend the lifespan of this crisis, said Gayle Smith, CEO of The ONE Campaign.

GAVI's Berkley also said that countries are increasingly asking for the pricier messenger RNA vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna, which are not as easily available as the AstraZeneca vaccine, which made up the bulk of COVAX's supply last year.

The emergence of variants like delta and omicron have led many countries to switch to mRNA vaccines, which seem to provide more protection and are in greater demand globally than traditionally made vaccines like AstraZeneca, Novavax or those made by China and Russia.
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Caught under camouflage while testing in Michigan, the Hornet will premiere in August for the 2023 model year. Gifted with a Honda-esque front end that looks a little pedestrian compared to the Tonales face, the compact-sized utility vehicle is pictured on dime-a-dozen rubber shoes from Goodyear and generic wheels devoid of center caps for obvious reasons.Likely finished in black, the prototype shows two half shafts out back, confirming all-wheel drive. We can further notice an exhaust muffler, but its nigh on impossible to tell if were dealing with a combustion-only powertrain or a plug-in hybrid . Considering that Alfa Romeo has confirmed these very options for their compact crossover, Dodge might follow suit.The base specification is dubbed Q4, which flaunts a 2.0-liter turbo four-cylinder engine shared with the Giulia and Stelvio, plus nine forward ratios for the automatic transmission. Of course, its the 9HP from ZF Friedrichshafen thats widely known for slow shifts and noisy operation.Alfa Romeo quotes a best-in-class standard horsepower rating of 256 ponies, along with 295 pound-feet (400 Nm) of torque. The GME T4 is further shared with the likes of the Cherokee, Grand Commander, Grand Cherokee 4xe, Wrangler and Wrangler 4xe, and a couple of Maseratis.The plug-in option is referred to asQ4 AWD, and curiously enough for a contemporary sport utility vehicle, it features a six-speed tranny. A 15.5-battery complements the 90-electric motor on the rear axle. Up front, youll find a 1.3-liter turbocharged four-cylinder engine that delivers 272 horsepower in combination with the aforementioned motor.Alfa Romeo estimates more than 30 miles (48 kilometers) of range on a full charge, which is alright for urbanites. The big question is, what kind of pricing should we expect from Dodge? The Challenger is the most affordable of the bunch at $30,825 while the Durango is the most expensive at $36,995 before destination charge. Over at Alfa Romeo, make that $43,350 for the Giulia and $45,550 for the Stelvio. Given these circumstances, the all-new Hornet might start in the mid-$30,000 region. Or slightly lower if it'sas standard.
MAGicaALL specializes in magnetic and electric power solutions for aviation and has collaborated with Airbus previously for the development of a tilt-wing UAM (urban air mobility) demonstrator.Now, its new-generation electric motor called the MAGiDRIVE will power the new Airbus eVTOL in a customized version.MAGiDRIVE is described as a lightweight brushless motor with a high torque (up to 50 Nm/kg), also claiming to be the easiest to use direct drive system in the industry. Another advantage is that its highly integrated, offering a fully-enclosed air-cooled propulsion unit that contains the motor and the control system.This is perfect for the CityAirbus eVTOL prototype, not requiring additional design adjustments in order to fit in the propulsion unit.The motors rugged design with low vibration was another plus, which will help make the future air taxi more reliable and efficient. The ultra-silent four-seater is designed to reach 75 mph (120 kph) while being no louder than a household vacuum cleaner.The two partners have worked on a detailed customization for the electric propulsion system that will power the future CityAirbus, so that its up to par with its innovative architecture.The CityAirbus NextGen was unveiled in September 2021 as a culmination of the extensive research that Airbus has conducted in the field of electric aircraft since 2014. The first flight demonstrations are scheduled to take place in Ingolstadt, Germany, with support from several local airports.
"Being Pro-Life Means Starting with Love"





Video of Senator Sasse's speech is available here or by clicking the image above.



NEWS PROVIDED BY

U.S. Senator Ben Sasse

May 11, 2022



WASHINGTON, May 11, 2022 /Christian Newswire/ -- U.S. Senator Ben Sasse, an outspoken pro-life advocate and author of the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, spoke on the Senate floor ahead of the vote on Schumer's radical pro-abortion bill.



Full transcript below.

Mr. President,



Abortion is a heavy issue. In this body we're used to debating marginal tax rates and debating spending bills, but this issue is different. This debate cuts to the heart of who we are, what we owe each other, and what kind of society we want to preserve, and what kind of society we want to build. The moral weight of this debate is heavy.



Social media, of course, makes it worse, makes it ugly. Makes it stupid. There's too little grace, there's not enough compassion. Honesty and genuine good-faith disagreements are really hard to come by.



To talk about abortion, well, we need to actually listen to each other, and we need to try to understand the best arguments of the other side and take those arguments seriously.



For Democrats, debating well has to start with recognizing that most Americans believe that unborn lives deserve to be protected at some point during a pregnancy. It is deeply human, and deeply compassionate to recognize the humanity of an unborn life. Scientific advances like ultrasounds give us a glimpse into the lives of the unborn. First in black and white, and now in 3D, and it's going to be clearer and clearer over time what that little baby is. Any honest conversation about abortion must grapple with the fact that every abortion begins with two lives, and destroys one of them. It's deeply wrong to ask Americans to participate in an act that they know takes an innocent life.

For Republicans to debate well, we need to be willing to be honest about the fact that for some women, pregnancy can be frightening and painful. Many situations are not ideal situations. Pregnancy changes a woman's life in a way that is absolutely unique in human experience. There is no equivalent to pregnancy. There is no example we can compare it to. That's why the pro-life cause is not, and cannot ever, primarily be about legislation or about policy, as important as those can be. The pro-life cause must start with active compassion for moms and babies, and especially women whose first thought upon learning that they were pregnant was "I can't do this."

To the pro-life movement, I want to recognize your patience and your perseverance over decades. We should commend the ethic of love, persuasion, and prudence that has brought us to the place we're at today.

Pro-lifers show up for women, and for babies, every single day. I see it all over Nebraska, and I know that it's true across all 50 states. Pro-lifers and especially pro-life women, support women through pregnancy care centers. They work in local communities to build support networks. They're persuading their neighbors and growing a movement that supports life. We don't have the massive war chests, the army of lawyers, and the fancy PR shops that Planned Parenthood does, but what we do have is truth and love.

Thousands of pregnancy care centers provide women and their babies with free help, lots of free help. The volunteers who show up every day to help these women obviously don't do it for money, they do it out of love. Thousands of pro-life families adopt kids every year, and their hearts overflow with love as they welcome a new child into their family. That's the core meaning of the pro-life movement. It's not about legislation first, or about legislation second, or about legislation third.

Advocates for abortion on demand are doing a lot of fear mongering. We've heard some bizarre speeches on the floor in the last couple of days that are so disconnected from the reality of the text of the legislation that's before us. So much of what they're pushing is wildly out of touch with the public, and wildly out of touch with modern science. We already know that America's abortion laws are far, far more permissive than Europe's, and that on this subject, our laws have a lot more in common with the human rights abusers China and North Korea, than with anything in French law.

The legislation before us today would make our laws even more extreme. Depending on how you count, we have the fourth to seven most extreme pro-abortion laws of any of the 200 nations on earth, and the legislation before the Senate today would make the US position even more extreme.

There was a time when the Democratic Party talked about abortion as 'safe, legal, and rare.' Safe, legal, and rare. Not anymore. This legislation is not from your mom's Democratic Party.

In recent years, we've taken votes on my legislation, the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. It's a pretty simple, straightforward bill that aims to protect babies who survive botched abortions. There are no restrictions on abortion access in my bill, just a simple requirement that if a baby is born alive in an abortion clinic, she must receive the same level of care she would have received had she been born in the hospital. That's it. Yet Senator Schumer, and the abortion lobby, have filibustered this legislation over and over. It is so weird.

So here we are today. The abortion industry's lobbyists have bullied leader Schumer and all but one courageous Democratic senator - my friend Joe Manchin - into an extreme position that doesn't reflect even the majority opinion in the Democratic party today, let alone the majority position among Americans.

This bill today is ugly, winner takes all politics. It is full of aggressive, pro-abortion provisions. Let's consider just a few:

One, it would formally create a national right to abortion up until the moment of birth in all 50 states, and it would undo even state-based partial birth abortion bans.



Two, today's legislation would prohibit states from requiring parental consent to perform abortions on a child.



Three, it would prohibit states from passing any laws to ban sex selective abortions. It would ban any laws that states would have to try to prevent sex selection abortions.

It would create a right for non-doctors to perform abortions, putting women at severe risk of complications and botched procedures.



It would create a right for non-doctors to perform abortions, putting women at severe risk of complications and botched procedures. And it would remove conscience protections that keep Americans from being forced to perform or fund abortions if they have moral objections. Think about that. It would force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions. That's new. That's gross.

Where's the tolerance? Where's the compassion? Where's the humanity? Where's the attempt to understand that the majority of Americans want there to be prohibitions on abortions at some point in the pregnancy?

Americans don't want the kind of radicalism we see in this bill before us today. In recent polling, 65 percent of Americans say they support banning abortion in the second trimester, and 80 percent of Americans support banning abortion in the third trimester. Why? Well, one of the reasons is because they've seen a lot of images of what a baby looks like in utero in the second and third trimester. So just to reiterate, contrary to the last, I guess, a couple speeches ago, the last speech on this topic on the floor, 80 percent of Americans want to see abortion banned in the third trimester. It's hard to get 80 percent of Americans to agree on anything. And yet, 80 percent agree that third trimester abortions, the kind of thing that this bill wants to make sure is explicitly championed. States could not prevent and prohibit third trimester abortions. That's what this bill is about.

This bill is incredibly extreme. There is no moderation in this bill  just brutal indifference hiding behind euphemisms. Fortunately, it won't pass.

Unfortunately, our debate about it isn't very honest here.

Fortunately, the pro-abortion lobby isn't winning. Majority Leader Schumer will earn kudos from Planned Parenthood for this show-vote today, but he's not going to convince anyone.

As we look beyond today's gross vote, as we look to the future, our focus should be on continuing to grow the power of the pro-life coalition in this country. We can and we must build support across the country for an ethic that protects life. I want to lock arms with pro-life Democrats, and work to build a culture of life. If we can pair certain pro-life laws with increased spending on prenatal care, and safety nets for struggling moms, count me in. I'm for that kind of big new coalition. Let's do it.

This movement is about hearts and minds. We've got to have difficult conversations in love. And we've got to reject the kind of extremism that Senator Schumer is putting on the floor today, pursuing this bill. We've got to focus our work on our local communities, on changing our neighbors' minds, on understanding each other and on setting an example by putting moms and babies first.

The answer after this bill fails today is to remember that love is stronger than power. And that's why life is going to win. Being pro-life means being pro-science, pro-mom, and pro-baby. It means starting with love, not with legislation. And happily, it definitely doesn't mean starting with the grotesque legislation that will be voted down this afternoon.

Thank you, Mr. President.
This is not the first time we see the Santa Monica-based micromobility company striving to come up with a solution to some of the biggest challenges in this industry, such as parking or riding the scooters in the wrong places, such as sidewalks, and so on. Last year, Bird teamed up with Swiss company u-blox, (which develops chips and modules for wireless communication and positioning) to come up with the Smart Sidewalk Protection system, meant to prevent riders from riding on sidewalks.Now, the company addresses yet another big issue commonly found in urban environments: parking. Bird launched an augmented reality-powered parking technology called Visual Parking System (VPS), a scalable tool that uses Googles ARCore Geospatial API. This technology allows Bird to geo-localize parked scooters with pinpoint accuracy, using Googles global 3D scanning, AR (augmented reality) technology, and Google Maps Street View data from around the world.With the new VPS, Bird riders will park the scooters more consciously, adhering to parking guidelines and keeping ramps and walkways unobstructed. According to Bird CTO Justin Balthrop, the new parking technology will help the company meet cities number one need, which is proper parking , in a way thats never been possible before. It will also allow it to do that at scale in cities all over the world, leveraging Googles technology and complex data.In order to use the VPS, riders have to use Birds app, which is compatible with both iOS and Android devices. When riders want to end their ride, they scan the surrounding area with the camera on their smartphone. Bird then compares in real-time the images provided by the rider to those in Googles knowledge base of data and its Street View images, to figure out if the scooter should be parked in that area or not. If the spot is not a good one, the rider wont be able to end his ride until he corrects the scooters parking.Birds city partners have access to the VPS for free, with the technology currently being tested in San Francisco, San Diego, and New York. More than 400 partner cities will eventually be added to the list.
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Volkswagens U.S. adventure is a prime example of monumental failure. Having the hearts and wallets of the Americans with the Beetle and the Microbus in the 50s, Volkswagen somehow botched it all with the following generations of Vanagons, Eurovans, and Rabbits. Even today, despite having a plant in Chattanooga, Volkswagen cant find much to brag about its American endeavor.There are many reasons why Volkswagen did not crack the U.S. market. From overengineering its vehicles to the lack of a proper truck to take on the Big Detroit Three, there are plenty of excuses. In the end, everything is about not getting what the U.S. customers really want. The good news is that Volkswagen is willing to learn, and the Scout revival might be exactly the missing ingredient to succeed.The first thing that Volkswagen is doing differently this time is using a name that is iconic for the U.S. not least for its formidable off-roaders. Secondly, Volkswagen will create a separate, independent company to make the r evived Scout brand successful. More important than that, Volkswagen is willing to put a long leash on the new company, which will operate as an independent entity under the Volkswagen Group umbrella. This is the same as Audi or Porsche.Although the first rumors only made waves a couple of days ago, Volkswagen of America executives hinted at the revival of the Scout brand a year ago. It is clear that Volkswagen only made its intentions official now, but things were in motion long before that. Thats why the announcement that Scout will have a prototype ready as early as next year does not come as a surprise. Mind you, Volkswagen will not use its existingplatform to build it.Everything about Scout will be new for Volkswagen, although it might not necessarily be entirely new. The long-time partnership with Ford might indicate that Scout could use some of Fords know-how in electric vehicles. The F-150 Lightning looks like a strong offering in the EV truck segment, we cant see why Volkswagen would want to reinvent the wheel.Not only the architecture would be new for Volkswagen, but also the sales model for the electric truck andthat Scout will produce as early as 2026. This has become obvious as Volkswagens plans regarding the Scout brand were not discussed with the companys dealers association, as confirmed by Automotive News yesterday. This indicates Volkswagen might want a direct-sale model, similar to what other EV makers use in the U.S. and elsewhere.Every detail that we have learned so far points to a start-up mindset for the new Scout entity. This should allow for a more agile execution of the companys plans, something that Volkswagen was not able to achieve previously. This would not only enable Volkswagen to take a path that the German behemoth dared not, but will also open the faucet to private investors to finance the new company, without any burden on Volkswagens coffers.
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If things go according to plan, Lordstown will sell an electric pickup truck before Tesla is able to present the production version of the Cybertruck. Apart from that, the deal created a new automaker (Foxconn) and saved another one (Lordstown), which also received more money than we had previously expected.The plant was sold for $230 million, but Foxconn also paid Lordstown Motors around $27 million in operating and expansion costs. That brings the total to $257 million. On top of that, the Taiwanese company is also investing $100 million in the joint venture that will manufacture Lordstown Motors' electric pickup trucks at the factory. Foxconn has 55% of this joint venture, which would make it put $55 million on the deal, but it lent Lordstown Motors the $45 million thestartup needed for its part. You could consider that this would make the total be $302 million. However, the truth is that the $55 million Foxconn is investing in the deal also exempted Lordstown from disbursing this amount. That said, we prefer to consider the startup has received $357 million from the Taiwanese titan. The amount could be even higher after Foxconn paid $50 million in LMC Class A common stock, but that was before the plant purchase was closed.The new joint venture is called MIH EV Design LLC. It has the same name as the MIH Open Platform Foxconn developed, and that is not by chance. The new company has the goal of developing new Lordstown commercial vehicles for the U.S. market and other OEMs internationally. That suggests that Lordstown Motors would be willing to license its cars for other companies to produce them under their brands in different markets. Foxconn already has one client for its manufacturing services with the new factory: Fisker, with the Project PEAR All things considered, it is clear that the Lordstown Endurance will be a unique product. It will be the only one entirely developed by the EV startup and possibly the only one with in-wheel motors. The MIH Open Platform is quite flexible, but it is not even remotely similar to what Lordstown initially conceived. As long as it does not bite the dust, that will be enough for its investors and employees.
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It was in 1999 that Wim Ouboter invented the Micro Scooter, the vehicle that led to the creation of Micro-Mobility and eventually to the Microlino. The first electric bubble cars to reach reservation holders will have a series of distinctive elements, beginning with numbered plates. Forget about the 500 that appear in the video below.According to Merlin Ouboter, the initial idea was to limit the series to only 500 units, but the plans changed faster than it was possible to make new plates for the video. That is far from surprising: with at least 24,000 pre-orders, this limited series could be much more significant. The problem is that it would lose the exclusive status Microlino wants it to have.The companys CMO (chief marketing officer) and co-founder said that these reservation holders would have a priority in getting the Pioneer Series. However, your location will play an important role in getting these vehicles because of the distribution channels already in place. As the first deliveries should happen in Switzerland and Germany, customers in these countries will probably get all the 999 units.The numbered plate will be followed by special Pioneer badges, standard sunroof, premium vegan leather and suede interior, portable Bluetooth speaker, and two colors that only the Pioneer Series will ever offer: Atlantis Blue and Torino Aluminium. The presentation video shows the Microlino can greet its owners: Steve, Frida, Elon... Probably when he is visiting Giga Grunheide and is not burning fuel with his private jet.The only battery pack available for it is the intermediary one, offering 10.5. The Swiss company must have achieved some gains with it because it now says it will provide 177 kilometers (110 miles) of range instead of 175 km (109 miles). BMZ supplies the battery pack with ternary cells. The Microlino 1.0 had LFP cells , but Microlino went with the more energy-dense chemistry to make thelighter.Although we saw some reports that production would start in September, that is incorrect. The production line is just finishing the last pre-production vehicles and will begin making the Microlino 2.0 immediately afterward. Thats why the official presentation of the electric bubble car will happen on May 24. Microlino will broadcast the event on YouTube.We asked Ouboter about how much the Pioneer Series will cost. He told us that this would be revealed by the online configurator, expected to go live a few days after the premiere of the Microlino 2.0. The Microlino CMO promised the Pioneer Series is just the first of the limited editions planned for the bubble car.
Orbex describes its recently revealed Prime as the first of a new generation of European launch vehicles, with the space rocket having the mission of launching a new category of very small satellites to orbit. The aerospace also boasts of the fact that its Prime micro-launcher is the first European-developed one to reach this stage of technical readiness.The worlds largest 3D-printed rocket is 19 m (62.3 ft) long and is made in the U.K. and Denmark. Prime is a two-stage rocket powered by seven engines, of which six on the first stage will propel it into the sky, to an altitude of around 80 km (50 miles). The other engine on the second stage of the rocket will help Prime complete its flight so that it can release its payload of small, commercial satellites into Earths orbit. Orbex will use its custom-made, high-precision metal 3D printer to print the engines of the rocket.As aforementioned, the rocket is environmental-friendly, being powered by bio-propane, which is produced from renewables and helps Prime cut carbon emissions by 96 percent, compared to space launch systems that use fossil fuels. Moreover, the rocket has been engineered to be reusable , which means it will not leave any debris on orbit or Earth.Next on the plate for Prime is to start a series of tests in Scotland, at a test facility close to the companys headquarters. The tests are meant to help rehearse and optimize the launch procedures. Orbex plans to launch Prime later this year, from Space Hub Sutherland, a new spaceport now in construction on the North Coast of Scotland.
A most touching and awesome story comes out of Florida this week, and, for once, it doesnt involve the uber-famous  Florida man  whos always up to no good . This time, a lot of men were up to a lot of good, being able to work together and successfully land a Cessna 208 Caravan plane after the pilot suffered a mid-flight medical emergency and had become incapacitated.The Caravan, a turboprop single-engine plane designed as a utility aircraft , took off from the Bahamas, heading to Florida. Mid-flight, one of the two passengers onboard radioed for help, saying in a very calm voice, I've got a serious situation here. My pilot has gone incoherent. I have no idea how to fly the airplane. Neither did he know the location of the plane.An air traffic controller from Fort Pierce responded, urging the newly-minted pilot to keep the wings level and to continue flying along the coast while they located the aircraft by radar. Once it reached Boca Raton, Palm Beach International Airport took over. As it happened, air traffic controller Robert Morgan, who took over the difficult mission, was a certified and experienced flight instructor, and even though he had never flown a Caravan himself, he was still able to guide the passenger pilot to a safe landing. CNN reports that Morgan and the passenger pilot met and hugged after the landing, which the former rated a 10 out of 10. In fact, the unwilling pilot became somewhat of a legend because, while there have been cases of passengers landing planes before, for whatever reason, this was the first time one had landed this particular model of Cessna , which is more complicated to operate and comparatively more powerful So not only did a passenger land a plane, but he was able to land a Caravan  and to land it beautifully, like a proper pilot. CNN affiliate WPBF has footage of the landing (see below), and you can judge for yourself. For what its worth, CNN notes that, while the passenger had zero flight experience, he did have some aviation knowledge and had watched other pilots fly.The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is investigating the incident. The pilots condition remains unknown as of the time of press.
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Over in the United Kingdom, customers who pony up 500 pounds sterling (make that 610 dollars) secure access to test drive opportunities and access to exclusive launch events. Now imagine someone telling their significant other: Love, Ive gained exclusive access to the regional launch event of a Renault. But on the other hand, the French automaker says that 7,000-plus customers have expressed interest thus far.Whats even more curious, Renault hasnt even mentioned how much the Megane E-Tech costs in the United Kingdom. As were sitting here, waiting for the price list to be published, the French automaker is much obliged to share a few specs and the standard goodies of the Megane E-Tech lineup.First things first, all three models are front-driven EVs powered by a 160-electric motor. A 60-battery is common across the board, delivering up to 280 miles (450 kilometers) on a single charge as percertification. AC/DC rapid charging up to 130 kW is standard as well, translating to 186 miles (300 kilometers) of range in roughly 30 minutes.By joining the Priority List, customers can now secure their place in the queue to be one of the first to own what is set to be one of the most exciting and in-demand electric vehicles available, gingerly declared Guillaume Sicard, country head and big kahuna at Renault in the United Kingdom Kicking off with the Equilibre, the most basic of specifications rocks 18-inch alloys, LED headlights, a heated steering wheel, heated front seats, a rearview camera, wireless phone connectivity, lots of safety features, a 12.3-inch digital instrument cluster, a 9.0-inch touchscreen, Android Automotive OS with Google services for the infotainment system, and over-the-air updates. Next up, the Techno adds adaptive cruise control with speed limiter and lane centering, blind spot recognition and intervention, and rear cross traffic alert with rear automatic braking.20-inch wheels are on the menu as well, along with adaptive LED headlights, signature lighting, dynamic turn signals, dual-zone climate control, 48-color ambient lighting, wireless phone charging, automatic wipers, as well as the full range of Google services. At the very top of the lineup, the Launch Edition stands out with even fancier wheels, a gold-painted F1 blade up front, nine-speaker premium audio from Harman Kardon, Around View 3D cameras, as well as a digital rearview mirror.To whom it may concern, all three have already been priced in Germany, the largest market for new cars in Europe. The Equilibre is 37,100 (approximately $38,460), the Techno starts at 40,100 ($41,570), and the Iconic is the closest model to the Launch Edition at 47,500 ($49,240).
Had he still been alive, prosecutors would have probably proved that this is what Cory Taylor did. In 2020, during a routine traffic stop, police discovered 138 pounds (62.5 kg) of marijuana in the back of the van he was driving. As impressive as this bust was, it was just the beginning.In a follow-up operation, including visits to two properties Taylor owned in New Salem and Holyoke, police discovered dozens of vehicles, weapons and millions in cash. The cars, which are more relevant to our interests, were stacked up for storage inside a converted firehouse in Holyoke. In total, there were 37 of them, each in very good, collectible condition All these assets were seized by the Northwestern District Attorney's Office right away. Taylor got out on bail and went missing for several weeks, until his body was found. The District Attorneys Office is now unloading 39 of those 37 vehicles, through auction house Stanley J. Paine Auctioneers, Fox Auto reports.The actual event will take place on June 4, at the Orange, Massachusetts municipal airport, but early online bidding is open  and very heated. Once you scroll through the listing, you will understand why: the collection includes 13 fourth-generation Toyota Supras , five E46 BMW M3s, a pair of Honda S2000s, two Nissan 350Zs, two Mitsubishi Lancer Evolutions, and others. All are in good condition, regardless of the miles they show on the odometer.The media outlet notes that this lot, despite its controversial provenance, is poised to setting a bunch of new records , and early bidding does seem to hint at that. For instance, a 1993 Toyota Supra is at $125,000 as of this writing, while a 98 one has already been offered $155,000. Stanley Paine told Fox Auto that a $5,000 deposit is required before bidding, to show that bidders are serious about their offers.
In 2020, the mtu Series 4000 was hitting a milestone with the delivery of 3,000 units. Two years later, it scored another performance, obtaining approval from Rolls-Royce Power Systems to operate with alternative fuels. The extensive testing, including in the field, confirmed that the Series 4000 and Series 1600 diesel engines can replace conventional fuel with Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil (HVO), Biomass to Liquid (BtL), or Power to Liquid (PtL).Out of these alternative fuels, HVO seems to be the most promising. According to Rolls-Royce , the mtu engines running on HVO demonstrated the same load capacity, maximum power, and fuel consumption as diesel engines. HVO also has better storage stability compared to biodiesel, in addition to being a drop-in fuel, meaning that no hardware or software modifications are required for its use.Made from used cooking oil, animal fats, or vegetable waste, HVO can cut CO2 emissions by 90% if renewable energy is used for the entire process, from manufacturing to logistics. Plus, particulate emissions are reduced by 80%, and nitrogen oxide emissions by 8%. Pilot customers also confirmed these results.The mtu engines have numerous applications in various industries, but the proven compatibility with sustainable fuels makes them particularly interesting for the energy industry and data center sector. Emergency power systems, for example, can also benefit from HVOs extended stability.Rolls-Royce is actively implementing several strategies for the goal of achieving 35% greenhouse gas savings by the end of the decade. These include a new generation of hydrogen engines and offering conventional engines that can run on sustainable fuels efficiently, including ones for aviation and the maritime industry.
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We say this because Europeans will probably remember that a few decades ago there was another mildly famous XM-branded vehicle, and it definitely wasnt wearing a blue roundel badge on the front.That car was the Citroen XM, one of the last French cars designed by the ill-fated Bertone styling house and with no relation with BMW whatsoever.That said, BMWs upcoming XM has a totally different explanation for its name, with X symbolizing the standard xDrive all-wheel-drive system that the vehicle will feature. The M, on the other hand, stands for Motorsport GmbH, making the SAV the first of its kind.Citroen fans will never mistake the two-row crossover for a French sedan, thats for sure, especially since its being exclusively tuned by BMWs M division.That said, its the XMs looks that are the real controversy, with the model having been previewed by a concept car in late 2021. Even a former BMW designer gave it less than stellar reviews, but BMW could apparently care less about critical design opinions With that in mind, the massive-coupe is slotting above the recently facelifted three-row X7 in BMW's SUV/SAV lineup, so expect everything to be turned to 11, including the design, performance and lastly, pricing.The Concept XM also offered a preview of at least one of the powertrains , with BMWs tried and true 4.4-liter twin-turbo V8 being partnered with an electric motor and a Li-ion battery pack to create a whopping 750 horsepower.Essentially a performance plug-in hybrid, the crossover should also offer an electric-only range of about 50 km (31 miles), but keep in mind that the 200-electric motor will have to carry around 2.7 tons of vehicle inmode.The massive weight is probably why the following pre-production prototype of the XM looks like its torturing its tires in almost every corner of the Nurburgring Nordschleife in this spy video.Expect the BMW XM to be unveiled later this year as a MY 2023, with cars arriving in showrooms a few months after its official unveiling.
More Than Jewelry We work to provide daily encouragement and inspiration to a world suffering unprecedented anxiety and depression since the pandemic hit in 2020.



"Each piece carries a deeper and spiritual meaning reminding you that God is still in control, and we can trust Him, because He loves us." -- Jamie Wilson





Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven 2 Corinthians 4:6



NEWS PROVIDED BY

Gravie's LLC

May 12, 2022



INDIANAPOLIS, Ind., May 12, 2022 /Christian Newswire/ -- Anxiety and depression have more than tripled since the pandemic hit the United States. Gravie's is working to battle that by providing jewelry that has a message of strength and courage.



Every piece of jewelry carries a message to encourage the wearer, uplift them, or simply bring a smile to their face.



When you wear a piece of jewelry, you see it multiple times throughout your day. Everyone you come into contact with will see it. It's in your photos, and a part of the impression that you leave on others. Chose something that represents who you are and what you believe in. The unique pieces often serve as conversation starters and a chance to share your faith.



The newest collection features Roman Glass earrings and necklaces. Each of these pieces are inlaid with fragments of Roman Glass- which is glass that was discovered during archeological excavations of the temples in the Holy Land, Israel. Hand- crafted in Israel, each piece is unique and comes with a certificate of authenticity.



More than jewelry, Gravie's also provides daily encouragement through inspirational quotes, stories, scriptures and humor that you can access for free through our social media pages or by signing up for emails.



Gravie's began selling faith-based products in February of 2022 and is founded by Jamie Wilson, a wife and mother of two little girls. Based out of Indianapolis, IN, we donate a portion of all proceeds to operation underground rescue, to help put an end to child sex trafficking.



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Lavrov organized the talks with Ararat Mirzoyan and Jeyhun Bayramov in Tajikistans capital Dushanbe as part of Russias apparent efforts to regain the initiative in the peace process.

Moscow accused the European Union and the United States last month of trying to hijack the process and use it in the standoff over Ukraine.

"I hope that today's meeting will make it possible to move forward along the path that was outlined by our leaders," the Russian news agency RIA Novosti quoted Lavrov as saying at the start of the talks held on the sidelines of meeting of top diplomats of ex-Soviet states.

He alluded to the Russian-brokered agreements to stop the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh, open transport links between Armenia and Azerbaijan and demarcate their border.

We believe that there is a good prospect, a good opportunity to achieve  the full implementation of the tripartite statements in full," Bayramov said, for his part.

In a statement issued after the talks, the Russian Foreign Ministry said the three ministers reaffirmed the commitment to strict compliance with all provisions of those agreements. They also discussed planned negotiations on an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty, it said, adding that Moscow is ready to facilitate them.

The trilateral encounter followed Lavrovs separate talks with Bayramov and Mirzoyan. The latter was reported to tell Lavrov that a newly formed Armenian-Azerbaijani commission on the border demarcation will hold its first session in Moscow next week.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev agreed to set up the commission before the end of April when they met in Brussels on April 6. European Council President Charles Michel, who hosted the summit, said they also plan to move rapidly towards negotiating the peace treaty.

Russia responded by accusing the West of trying to sideline it and claim credit for the Armenian-Azerbaijani agreements.

Mirzoyan also indicated in Dushanbe that a Russian-Armenian-Azerbaijani working group dealing with economic and transport issues will resume its work in Moscow May 16 after a nearly five-month hiatus.

The groups Russian co-chair, Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Overchuk, visited Yerevan and met with Pashinian on Thursday.
Bakersfield, CA (93308)

Today

Sun and clouds mixed. High 93F. Winds WNW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Clear to partly cloudy. Low 62F. Winds NNW at 5 to 10 mph.
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Bakersfield, CA (93308)

Today

Considerable clouds early. Some decrease in clouds later in the day. High 93F. SSW winds shifting to NW at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

A few clouds overnight. Low 61F. Winds NNW at 10 to 15 mph.
17th Annual National Church Security Conference



NEWS PROVIDED BY NOCSSM May 12, 2022



"Every church has gone to a Church Security Seminar. We present more of a technical conference." Says Chuck Chadwick (President of NOCSSM) "The NOCSSM annual conference is not a conference to recant old cases, try to convince the church to take up arms or to teach the newest choke hold. Each year we have new speakers and new subject matter to add to our attendee's security skill set."



Speakers this year will include: DALLAS, May 12, 2022 / Christian Newswire / -- The National Organization of Church Security & Safety Management (NOCSSM) will present its 17th Annual National Church Security Conference to be held at Watermark Community Church in Dallas, Texas on August 13th, 2022."Every church has gone to a Church Security Seminar. We present more of a technical conference." Says Chuck Chadwick (President of NOCSSM) "The NOCSSM annual conference is not a conference to recant old cases, try to convince the church to take up arms or to teach the newest choke hold. Each year we have new speakers and new subject matter to add to our attendee's security skill set."Speakers this year will include:

Chuck Chadwick - President and Founder of NOCSSM, Former Mega-church security director with over 4 decades of experience in Private Security and 2 decades in Church Security. Chuck heads the largest state licensed volunteer multi-church security force in America. Preeminent Authority in Church Security. https://nocssm.org/



Scott Stewart  VP of Tactical Analysis. Torchstone Global company. https://www.torchstoneglobal.com/

Dr. Sean Lawler  Tactical Firearms Instructor/Medic for a Federal Law Enforcement Agency.



Matt McCarthy  Stop the Bleed



Nate McDougall - Security Director of Watermark Community Church Dallas https://watermark.org NEWS PROVIDED BY While not all churches have the degree of concern as a mega-church, every church wants to meet the unthinkable with a degree of preparedness.



The one-day conference is the best training attendees can get and a great value to every church.



For further details go to www.NOCSSM.org



About NOCSSM

NOCSSM is the Oldest and Largest church security organization in America and has continually served churches through its website resources, educational tools and affiliated educational and professional companies. http://www.nocssm.org



SOURCE National Organization of Church Security & Safety Management (NOCSSM)



CONTACT: Chuck Chadwick, 214-305-5616, cchadwick@nocssm.org



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CHESTERFIELD, Mo. (AP) _ Amdocs Ltd. (DOX) on Wednesday reported fiscal second-quarter profit of $158.5 million.

On a per-share basis, the Chesterfield, Missouri-based company said it had net income of $1.28. Earnings, adjusted for amortization costs and stock option expense, came to $1.54 per share.

The results beat Wall Street expectations. The average estimate of three analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research was for earnings of $1.24 per share.

The provider of computer systems integration posted revenue of $1.15 billion in the period.

For the current quarter ending in July, Amdocs expects its per-share earnings to range from $1.23 to $1.29.

The company said it expects revenue in the range of $1.14 billion to $1.18 billion for the fiscal third quarter.

_____

This story was generated by Automated Insights (http://automatedinsights.com/ap) using data from Zacks Investment Research. Access a Zacks stock report on DOX at https://www.zacks.com/ap/DOX
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LIMA, Peru (AP)  About 10 million people speak Quechua, but trying to automatically translate emails and text messages into the most widely spoken Indigenous language family in the Americas was long all but impossible.

That changed on Wednesday, when Google added Quechua and a variety of other languages to its digital translation service.

The internet giant says new artificial intelligence technology is enabling it to vastly expand Google Translates repertoire of the worlds languages. It added 24 of them this week, including Quechua and other Indigenous South American languages such as Guarani and Aymara. It is also adding a number of widely spoken African and South Asian languages that have been missing from popular tech products.

We looked at languages with very large, underserved populations," Google research scientist Isaac Caswell told reporters.

The news from the California companys annual I/O technology showcase may be celebrated in many corners of the world. But it will also likely draw criticism from those frustrated by previous tech products that failed to understand the nuances of their language or culture.

Quechua was the lingua franca of the Inca Empire, which stretched from what is now southern Colombia to central Chile. Its status began to decline following the Spanish conquest of Peru more than 400 years ago.

Adding it to the languages recognized by Google is a big victory for Quechua language activists like Luis Illaccanqui, a Peruvian who created the website Qichwa 2.0, which includes dictionaries and resources for learning the language.

It will help put Quechua and Spanish on the same status, said Illaccanqui, who was not involved in Google's project.

Illaccanqui, whose last name in Quechua means you are the lightning bolt, said the translator will also help keep the language alive with a new generation of young people and teenagers, who speak Quechua and Spanish at the same time and are fascinated by social networks.

Caswell called the news a very big technological step forward" because until recently, it was not possible to add languages if researchers couldn't find a big enough trove of online text  such as digital books, newspapers or social media posts  for their AI systems to learn from.

U.S. tech giants dont have a great track record of making their language technology work well outside the wealthiest markets, a problem thats also made it harder for them to detect dangerous misinformation on their platforms. Until this week, Google Translate was offered in European languages like Frisian, Maltese, Icelandic and Corsican  each with fewer than 1 million speakers  but not East African languages like Oromo and Tigrinya, which have millions of speakers.

The new languages will roll out this week. They won't yet be understood by Google's voice assistant, which limits them to text-to-text translations for now. Google said it is working on adding speech recognition and other capabilities, such as being able to translate a sign by pointing a camera at it.

That will be important for largely spoken languages like Quechua, especially in the health field, because many Peruvian doctors and nurses who only speak Spanish work in rural areas and are unable to understand patients who speak mostly Quechua, Illaccanqui said.

The next frontier, or challenge, is to work on speech, said Arturo Oncevay, a Peruvian machine translation researcher at the University of Edinburgh who co-founded a research coalition to improve Indigenous language technology across the Americas. The native languages of the Americas are traditionally oral."

In its announcement, Google cautioned that the quality of translations in the newly added languages still lags far behind" other languages it supports, such as English, Spanish and German, and noted that the models will make mistakes and exhibit their own biases." But the company only added languages if its AI systems met a certain threshold of proficiency, Caswell said.

If theres a significant number of cases where its very wrong, then we would not include it," he said. Even if 90% of the translations are perfect, but 10% are nonsense, thats a little bit too much for us."

Google said its products now support 133 languages. The latest 24 are the largest single batch to be added since Google incorporated 16 new languages in 2010. What made the expansion possible is what Google is calling a zero-shot or zero-resource machine translation model  one that learns to translate into another language without ever seeing an example of it.

Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta introduced a similar concept called the Universal Speech Translator last year.

Google's model works by training a single gigantic neural AI model on about 100 data-rich languages, and then applying what it's learned to hundreds of other languages it doesn't know, Caswell said. Imagine if youre some big polyglot and then you just start reading novels in another language, you can start to piece together what it could mean based on your knowledge of language in general, he said.

He said the new group ranges from smaller languages like Mizo, spoken in northeastern India by about 800,000 people, to more widely spoken languages like Lingala, spoken by around 45 million people across Central Africa.

It was more than 15 years ago  in 2006  that Microsoft got some positive attention in South America with a software feature translating familiar Microsoft menus and commands into Quechua. But that was before the current wave of AI advancements in real-time translation.

Harvard University language scholar Americo Mendoza-Mori, who speaks Quechua, said getting Google's attention brings some needed visibility to the language in places like Peru, where Quechua speakers are still lacking in many public services. The survival of many of these languages will depend on their use in digital contexts, he said.

Another language scholar, Roberto Zariquiey, said he's skeptical that Google could make an effective language revitalization tool for Quechua, Aymara or Guarani without closer participation from community groups in the region.

Languages are deeply linked to lives, to cultures, to ethnic groups and political organizations, said Zariquiey, a linguist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. This should be taken into account.

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The new languages added are: Assamese, Aymara, Bambara, Bhojpuri, Dhivehi, Dogri, Ewe, Guarani, Ilocano, Konkani, Krio, Lingala, Luganda, Maithili, Meiteilon (Manipuri), Mizo, Oromo, Quechua, Sanskrit, Sepedi, Sorani Kurdish, Tigrinya, Tsonga and Twi.

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O'Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.
The proposed installation of a famed 70-foot statue of a blue saxophone isn't quite carrying a tune with a handful of neighbors in the southeast Houston neighborhood where the public art could potentially live.

Bob "Daddy-O" Wade's giant artwork "Smokesax" drew onlookers for two decades while outside the now-shuttered Billy Blues nightclub near the intersection of Richmond and Fountain Viewa "landmark" of its time until it was disassembled and placed in storage in 2013, according to Molly Glentzer in the Houston Chronicle. That's where the sax has sat ever since, while the Orange Show Center for Visionary Artwhich took ownership of the sculpture from businessman Phil Kensinger in 2012raised funds to have it refurbished, moved and installed in a new permanent location.

Plans to find an enduring site for the piece have been in the works since it was removed in 2013. However, just last fall the Orange Show started making moves to place the art piece just south of Fonde Park, where the park meets the Brays Bayou greenway traila gateway from the miles-long trail to the beloved park in southeast Houston, a little over a quarter-mile from the Orange Show's headquarters along Munger Street.

Cody Duty/Houston Chronicle

At its base, Smokesax will overlook a new pedestrian plaza that also includes a performance stage, seating and bike racks. The sculpture will actually face away from the street and toward the trail, offering weight to its intention as a pedestrian amenity.

"As the first piece of public art on Brays Bayou, the sculptures new location, as well as its sheer scale, will inspire Houstonians to gather and create for many years to come," said Tommy Ralph Pace, executive director of the Orange Show.

Attitudes from representatives within the Fonde Civic Club aren't as enthusiastic. Karina Blest, president of the club, told City Council members Tuesday that the organization is decidedly against the project under the guise that there wasn't any public input in deciding Fonde Park as the location, also lamenting there could be parking problems in the nearby neighborhoods from people driving in droves to see the art piece.

Blest also claimed the installation was part of a scheme by the Orange Show to completely "appropriate" the city-run Fonde Park, a falsehood echoed on the civic club's website that Blest and company are using to sway residents against the project. The assertion hinges on a November press release from the Orange Show that announced planned upgrades to its property, wherein Orange Show leaders said the upgrades will "integrate with Fonde Park."

Orange Show leaders meant that their expansion project, which would reach their property's border with Fonde Park, would make the entire space a cohesive experience for anyone who visits, not that the Orange Show was attempting to take ownership of the park.

Cody Duty/Houston Chronicle

"It's alarming to us," Blest said at City Council. "Recently during a short online meeting, we were assured by both our councilman, the parks [department] and the Orange Show, which are in a partnership, that the park would remain a public park. The issue is not that the park will remain open to the public. The issue is, whose interest will Fonde Park serve?"

City Council Member Robert Gallegos, who represents District I where Fonde Park is located, and Mayor Sylvester Turner both assured those present that Fonde Park would always remain under the city's thumb. Gallegos even asked Blest to stop repeating the claim.

"The Orange Show is not taking over Fonde Park," Gallegos told Blest during Tuesday's City Council meeting. "I wish yourself and some of your officers [would] please refrain from stating that, because that is not true."

In February, the Orange Show was set to meet with members of the Fonde Civic Club to discuss the proposal, but their invitation was rescinded at the last-minute, according to several people with knowledge of the situation. Gallegos confirmed that series of events during a public comment session Tuesday. The council member last week also hosted a meeting between residents and the Orange Show to discuss the project. As for parking, Pace said the Orange Show is adding hundreds of spaces and will direct visitors to their property for a short walk to Smokesax.

Cody Duty/Houston Chronicle

During her speech to City Council on Tuesday, Blest might have let slip the real reason she's against the project.

"If somebody else here who lives in a neighborhood would like that Smokesax to be placed in your public community area, please let the Orange Show know," Blest said.

"The beauty of it is in the eyes of the beholder," Turner responded, iterating that the project was on public property and not subject to voter approval. "It's not about the Orange Show agenda. It's just about putting public art in all of our public spaces, especially in communities that have not had access to public art, period."

While the Orange Show continues to raise funds for the project, it will still need approval from the Houston Permitting Center. There is no clear timeline on when construction of the plaza and reassembly of the Smokesax will commence.
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Protestors gathered for a third time outside Port Neches High Schools football stadium Monday night.

The group was smaller than the previous two protests, but five people gathered in favor of replacing the tribal-themed mascot held signs outside the school board meeting and district retiree service recognition ceremony.

Ken Doiron, a 2021 Port Neches-Groves High School graduate, spoke to people leaving the building.

Were here to spread information about why the mascot is harmful and wrong, she said into a bullhorn, pointing to a QR code on a sign linking to a letter from a concerned citizen.

Doiron asked people walking past to visit the link, which explains why it harms the Native students who go here, the real Native children who have to see people dance in their cultural attire, which also isnt accurate.

Related: Protesters against tribal-themed mascot return to board meeting

The group organized in solidarity with the South Texas Movement for Indigenous People, she said.

Dylan Ward, who is Cherokee, said he has been spoken out about the tribal-themed mascot for years. The 2010 Port Neches-Groves High School graduate also uses the name Yonausdi, which means little bear in Cherokee.

I really started going down the path of activism when I started learning about the way the Cherokee people really see it, he said.

Ward said he researched indigenous activists dating back to the early 90s and 00s that spoke out against the use of Native mascots, arguing only stereotypes would remain while their actual culture would be erased.

Its not just offensive, it is a cultural problem, he said. We are losing our culture in the Cherokee Nation. We are losing our language. It is becoming a dead language.

Its really hard to come back to it whenever you have these stereotypes they are teaching these children.

Related: Community protests trival-themed mascot

When Ward began protesting the mascot years ago, he thought educating the community would prompt change, he said, but his outcry went ignored.

If you were doing it to honor us, you would be listening to what all these different tribes and nations are saying, he said.

Indigenous people speaking out on social media platforms about the Port Neches-Groves High School dance teams performance at Disney World in March brought national attention to the issue, Doiron said, which prompted their recent protests.

A Change.org petition started two years ago to remove the mascot now has over 12,000 signatures.

Were working up the numbers, she said. We have people to come out and support us.

An organization called Community for Change made up of PNG alumni and Indigenous people has been advocating to replace the mascot for years, Dorion said.

Related: Cherokee Nation Chief responds to local school's Disney performance

We sent open letters, we did call-ins, we sent emails, we left voicemails, she said. And the response was little to none. They ignored it.

Even if they dont listen to us, they will see us and they will hear us, and theyll know we exist. As for right now, thats enough.

Former students from other Mid-County schools also joined the protest.

Leyla Traweek, a 2019 Nederland High School graduate, said, even as a bystander from a rival school, PN-Gs dance never seemed appropriate.

Ive always thought there was just something completely not right about this, she said. I just want to educate people about the actual harm that it can bring to Indigenous communities and to educate people who dont really understand and think that it is a non-issue.

The Enterprise attempted to speak to multiple community members, who all declined to comment on the protest.

Eleanor Skelton is a contributor to The Beaumont Enterprise.
Rohingya children look through a bamboo fence at Camp-1W in Ukhia, Coxs Bazar, Bangladesh, April 22, 2022.

Rohingya living in southeastern Bangladesh said their movements have been further restricted after several hundred refugees were nabbed at Coxs Bazar beach just after Eid al-Fitr, a time when many Muslims go on holiday.

Already, Rohingya are not permitted to leave the sprawling refugee settlements that house nearly 1 million people who fled violence in Myanmar.

Now, police are not allowing them to visit other camps freely, several Rohingya leaders and refugees told BenarNews, while a new camp-to-camp movement pass has been introduced in at least two of the camps.

BenarNews obtained two copies of the pass, which states that Rohingya are required to obtain signatures from three different people  the head of their camp and two community leaders  before visiting any other camp.

Of the two passes, one was issued in Camp-15, in Ukhia sub-district. A Rohingya leader there, Md. Habib, told BenarNews that he had been instructed by officials to issue the pass as the trend of visiting by Rohingya had increased.

Recently I have arranged a pass for a woman of my camp as one of her relatives passed away in another camp, Habib said while declining to elaborate.

Mohammad Islam, another Rohingya, told BenarNews: A few days ago, I sought permission from the camp in-charge to visit my sister in another camp. She is very ill. But the authorities did not give me permission yet.

Police who have jurisdiction over Camp 15 said they learned about the pass when questioned by journalists.

We did not issue such a pass. It may be an effort of other authorities, Kamran Hossen, an additional superintendent of police of the Armed Police Battalion-8, told BenarNews.

An official at the Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commission  the central government agency that oversees the camps  gave a similar response.

We are not aware of the new pass, Shamsud Douza, the additional refugee relief and repatriation commissioner, told BenarNews.

On condition of anonymity because they were afraid of repercussions, several Rohingya told BenarNews that greater restrictions on their movement began following Eid al-Fitr, the holiday that ends the fasting month, Ramadan.

On May 4 and 5, a total of 656 Rohingya people were held by police at different places in Coxs Bazar district after they left their camps to celebrate the holiday, according to police. The Rohingya were returned to their camps and were not charged.

On Thursday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Bangladesh authorities had introduced a draconian permissions system for movement within camps, and were reportedly planning to institute the policy across all camps.

A total of 926,561 Rohingya live in Bangladesh camps, according to the UNHCR. Of that number, about 738,000 fled Myanmar following a campaign of persecution and violence launched by the military in August 2017, termed ethnic cleansing and possible genocide by the United Nations.

Bangladesh is home to 34 registered refugee camps  mainly in Coxs Bazars Teknaf and Ukhia sub-districts.

Some Rohingya compared the new requirements to oppressive conditions they had faced in Myanmar, HRW said.

Human Rights Watch spoke with five Rohingya refugees who described being beaten by APBn officers and other officials at camp checkpoints over the past few days, it said, using an acronym for the Armed Police Battalion.

We live in camps surrounded by barbed wire fencing, with no options for celebration, so we went [to a nearby beach] to celebrate Eid, the report quoted an unnamed Rohingya as saying.

The person also said: But they detained us, and then charged us each 200 to 500 taka [U.S. $2.30 to $5.75] for transportation back to camp.

When asked about the allegation, APBn spokesman Kamran Hossen said rumors about law enforcers were being spread to create instability in the camps.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) did not immediately reply to a BenarNews email request for comment.

18 detained

Elsewhere, police on Thursday reported detaining 18 Rohingya in northeastern Moulvibazar district after they allegedly entered Bangladesh illegally from Tripura, India.

The group, which included 10 children, comprised four families traveling from different places in India, Moulvibazar Sadar police station inspector Rabiul Haque said.

There are an estimated 18,000 Rohingya and asylum-seekers registered with the UNHCR in India.
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, in Greensboro, N.C., on April 14, 2022.

The United States is highlighting its commitment to Southeast Asia by holding a leader-level summit with ASEAN members this week in Washington despite being in the midst of dealing with the Ukraine turmoil, analysts said.

But Washington is not likely to present a coherent economic strategy to reduce Southeast Asias overreliance on China and that will take some of the shine off the affair, they added.

U.S. President Joe Biden and his counterparts will likely discuss Indo-Pacific security, Myanmar, Ukraine and economic ties during the two-day meeting beginning Thursday. Analysts said they expect little in terms of outcome, barring perhaps a joint statement frowning on Beijings expansionism in the South China Sea.

The significance of the summit is that it is being held, said Bilahari Kausikan, chairman of the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore.

The meeting is the message, that while a war is raging in Ukraine, the U.S. is holding a summit with ASEAN. It underscores that the U.S. is capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time, said the former diplomat speaking at a webinar on Tuesday hosted by The Stimson Center, a Washington-based think tank.

Leaders from eight of 10 Association of Southeast Asian Nations are expected to attend  the Myanmar juntas leader has not been invited, and the Philippines outgoing president chose not to attend. The summit, only the second hosted by the United States, commemorates 45 years of ties with ASEAN.

For Greg Poling, a Southeast Asia analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, much of this summit is about symbolism  and symbolism matters in diplomacy.

This summit is a big deal because the Indo-Pacific is a priority theater and ASEAN is central to the U.S.s Indo-Pacific strategy. President Biden has yet to meet many of the Southeast Asian leaders in person, so the summit would be an opportunity to do that and will show that his commitment to the region is more than just rhetoric, Poling told BenarNews.

Biden met virtually with his ASEAN counterparts during an October 2021 summit. He has met Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who came to Washington in March, and Indonesian President Joko Jokowi Widodo on the sidelines of the November 2021 Climate Summit in Glasgow.

Southeast Asia is one of Washingtons top priorities, the Biden administration has stressed time and again. It sees the area as crucial due to Beijings outsized influence there. Since last year, top officials including U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin have visited the region.

Beijings concerns

China, for its part, has cautioned ASEAN members about the summit through a statement issued Sunday after talks between Foreign Minister Wang Yi and his counterpart in Cambodia, this years chair of the regional bloc.

The moves to introduce the Cold War mentality into the region and incite and create camp confrontation will undermine the peace and development that the region has enjoyed for many years. Asian countries should stay vigilant and reject such moves together, the Chinese foreign ministry statement said.

Kurt Campbell, the U.S. National Security Council's coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, countered those concerns on Wednesday.

President Biden will be direct, he will talk about a desire to compete peacefully  he does not want Southeast Asia to descend into a new Cold War, Campbell said in an online webinar about the summit. We recognize that any initiative simply designed for competition will have difficulty gaining altitude in Southeast Asia. It must be based on the needs and desires of Southeast Asian people.

South China Sea

Southeast Asia analyst Hunter Marston, for one, expects an end-of-summit statement containing strongly worded language against Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea.

ASEAN states are a little more forward-leaning when it comes to a U.S.-ASEAN summit. If you look at the Sunnylands Declaration, it was a lot more assertive, [and] more in line with Washingtons talking points, said Marston, an international relations analyst at Australian National University.

He was referring to the 2016 U.S-ASEAN summit at the Sunnylands estate in southern California, the first held in the United States. Its closing statement underlined mutual respect for the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and equality of all nations, and, in two clauses, a shared commitment to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

Analyst Anne Marie Murphy noted that ASEAN has become tougher in terms of language regarding the South China Sea over the last couple of years.

So I do think you will see strong statements in support not of a free and open Indo-Pacific (FOIP), but for principles underlying it, said Murphy, a professor at Seton Hall Universitys School of Diplomacy and International Relations.

But since Cambodia, which is pro-China, serves as ASEAN chair this year, the statement may be watered down, another expert said.

On SCS, they might make a stronger statement, but there has to be consensus  Cambodia wont want a stronger statement, Joshua Kurlantzick, senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, told BenarNews.

China claims nearly the entire South China Sea, including waters within the exclusive economic zones of ASEAN members Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and non-member Taiwan.

While ASEAN member Indonesia does not regard itself as party to the South China Sea dispute, Beijing claims historic rights to parts of that sea overlapping Indonesia's exclusive economic zone as well.

Ukraine

Another focus of the summit will be Russias invasion of Ukraine, according to the analysts.

Dewi Fortuna Anwar, an international affairs analyst at the state-funded National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) in Indonesia, said it was not going to be easy for the U.S. to find common ground on sanctions with ASEAN members.

ASEAN countries have their own policies, she said, noting that some members rely on Moscow for defense needs or are historically aligned to Russia.

Still, U.S. officials could approach some countries bilaterally, CFRs Kurlantzick said.

The administration may try to press some important Southeast Asian partners, like Vietnam, to distance themselves more from Russia, and press others, such as Indonesia and Thailand, to adopt more critical stances as well, he said.

Thai protesters call for the release of prisoners charged under the nations Lese-Majeste royal defamation law during a rally outside the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok ahead of the U.S.-ASEAN summit in Washington, May 10, 2022. [AFP]

Myanmar

The post-coup crisis in Myanmar may be on top of the list of subjects discussed at the U.S.-ASEAN special summit, but analysts predict it will fall to the bottom of expected outcomes.

All who spoke to BenarNews said participants would reiterate the unimplemented five-point consensus agreed to by the Myanmar junta and ASEAN leaders in April 2021, just weeks after the Feb. 1, 2021, coup.

Everyone will nod their heads and reiterate the five-point consensus, thats it, said Derek J. Grossman, senior defense analyst at the Rand Corp.

The only move that has hurt the Myanmar military is ASEAN barring the junta leader, and junta representatives, from last years ASEAN summit and other meetings.

Malaysia has been pressing other ASEAN members to engage with the opposition civilian National Unity Government (NUG) of Myanmar.

Engaging NUG as a bloc will not have many takers, because ASEAN doesnt want to pick sides in an internal fight, CSISs Poling said.

The missing link

The one area where the summit could have had a breakthrough would have been in furthering economic ties, the analysts said.

Washington has really dropped the ball on this, Australian National Universitys Marston said.

He was referring to the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, announced in October 2021 and touted as a game changer that would rival Beijings economic might in the region. The framework was to be launched in April, but has been delayed perhaps until next month.

Murphy, of Seton Hall, agreed that expanding economic ties is one thing the United States could do to reassure Southeast Asia of its commitment and reduce the regions vulnerability to Chinese coercion.

However, since Trump withdrew from the TPP, Biden is extremely constrained, she said, referring to the massive Trans Pacific Partnership, a trade deal forged during the Barack Obama administration and dropped by his successor.

Campbell, of the U.S. National Security Council, defended the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework.

I dont need to tell anyone trade is politically contentious in the U.S., but we have constructed an approach that meets many critical challenges of trade and investment  such as digital trade, clean energy and the like  in a contemporary, 21st Century setting, he said.

Campbell said that what he has heard from Southeast Asian officials is that they want economic engagements with a variety of countries, not just with one country.

Steady engagement with their neighbor in the north, practical and continual engagement with the U.S., but also, more of a role with India, they want a role Europe  they want diversified relations, he said.

Alvin Prasetyo and Dandy Koswaraputra in Jakarta contributed to this report.
Malaysian Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah listens to a question during an interview with BenarNews at his hotel room in Washington, May 11, 2022.

ASEANs special envoy to Myanmar has welcomed the idea of engaging informally with Myanmars NUCC, a body of opposition stakeholders, and its parallel civilian government, as the junta has reneged on a promise to put the country back on a democratic path, Malaysias foreign minister said in an interview Wednesday.

Meetings with opposition stakeholders could be held via video conference calls and other means if the junta prohibits such meetings in-person, Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah told BenarNews after an informal gathering here with other top diplomats from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations ahead of a leader-level summit here with the United States.

I thought the ASEAN special envoy, in his concluding remarks  though I cannot speak on his behalf  ... in some ways welcomed the idea of engaging the NUG and the NUCC and the other stakeholders, Saifuddin said.

Two other ministers spoke along the same lines, but not necessarily mentioning the NUG and the NUCC.

He was referring to the National Unity Government, Myanmars parallel, civilian-led government, and to the National Unity Consultative Council. The council is a more representative body, which includes members of the NUG, civil society groups, ethnic armed organizations, and civil disobedience groups.

Saifuddins proposals at Wednesdays meeting in Washington included strengthening the role of the blocs envoy to Myanmar and ensuring that the United Nations special envoy to the country, Noeleen Heyzer, is invited to relevant ASEAN meetings.

Heyzer could not attend an ASEAN meeting last week to coordinate humanitarian aid to Myanmar because the Burmese junta does not recognize her.

I mentioned that the U.N. secretary generals special envoy needs to be invited to all of the relevant meetings, regardless what the junta is saying. You cannot allow the junta to dictate who is to be invited, Saifuddin noted having told meeting with the ASEAN ministers.

If it is an ASEAN meeting, then it is ASEAN that should decide who is to attend. And in this context we should invite Dr. Noeleen Heyzer.

Two weeks ago, the Myanmar junta reacted furiously when Saifuddin said he planned to propose that the ASEAN envoy must engage informally with NUG. In its response, the junta branded the NUG terrorist groups.

Judging from that response, the Burmese generals wont be happy to learn that Saifuddin said he was planning to have his first in-person meeting with the NUGs foreign minister, Zin Mar Aung, in Washington on Saturday. He said he planned to solicit her opinion on how the people of Myanmar can move on.

We need to be more creative

The foreign ministers of the ASEAN member-states are in Washington with their countries leaders to participate in the U.S.-ASEAN summit.

Saifuddin said the ministers had planned the informal meeting here to mainly discuss the crisis in post-coup Myanmar and the non-implementation of a five-point agreement that the junta agreed to with ASEAN to return the country to peace and democracy.

The juntas reneging on the agreement notwithstanding, ASEAN members plan to stick with the five-point consensus, Saifuddin said.

We are very much still on board with the five-point consensus, but I think many of us are quite frustrated , Saifuddin acknowledged.

I think we need to be more creative and that is why, for example, we [need to] start naming the stakeholders the NUG, the NUCC, all of them.

The points of the consensus call for a constructive dialogue among all parties; the mediation of such talks by a special envoy of the ASEAN chair; and a visit to Myanmar by an ASEAN delegation, headed by the special envoy, to meet with all parties.

BenarNews asked Saifuddin if he believed the NUG should attend the U.S.-ASEAN summit, because the junta is being kept out of ASEAN meetings and Washington is following the regional blocs lead on that. The NUG foreign minister was in Washington, as of Wednesday.

Well, we have not come to that point. My suggestion to the ASEAN meeting this morning was to engage informally. We, as you know, many of us are democrats at heart and our countries are democracies, the Malaysian minister said.

But at the same time, we do not want to, you know, to do something that is probably beyond what we can handle. So I thought the best way forward for now is to engage with the NUG informally.

Meanwhile, when a senior Biden administration official was asked Wednesday about who would represent ASEAN member-state Myanmar at the summit, he replied well have more to say on this tomorrow.

We have had diplomatic engagement with the government in exile. We are in discussions about the best way to represent what has transpired in Burma and how to represent that in the meeting, the senior administration official told Radio Free Asia, the parent company of BenarNews, in a briefing to media.

I think one of the discussions has been to have an empty chair to reflect our dissatisfaction with whats taken place and our hope for a better path forward.
U.S. President Joe Biden called Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the presumptive winner of the Philippine presidential election, to congratulate him Thursday for his landslide victory even though official tallies have yet to be announced.

This came as the Marcos transition team began filling his likely cabinet because the next six years comprising his term are expected to be crucial as the Southeast Asian nation moves to recover from the COVID-19 crisis and its economic fallout. Marcos is the son of Ferdinand E. Marcos, the late Filipino dictator whose brutal rule included 14 years of martial law.

In a brief telephone conversation on Thursday morning (Manila time), Biden expressed his hope of boosting the relationship with Manila that was tested by the administration of outgoing leader Rodrigo Duterte, who moved the country closer to Beijing and away from Washington.

President Biden underscored that he looks forward to working with the president-elect to continue strengthening the U.S.-Philippine Alliance, while expanding bilateral cooperation on a wide range of issues, including the fight against COVID-19, addressing the climate crisis, promoting broad-based economic growth and respect for human rights, the White House said in a statement.

Marcos father, who ruled from 1965 to 1986, was one of Americas staunchest allies in Southeast Asia. At the height of the Cold War, he crucially allowed the U.S. military to maintain two large bases on Philippine soil, at Subic Bay and the Clark air field.

Bidens conversation with Marcos came a day after Chinese President Xi Jinping sent him a similar congratulatory message.

The Philippines, an archipelago nation, lies in the middle of the contested South China Sea and is one of the claimant countries involved in territorial disputes. Beijing claims the waterway almost in its entirety and has embarked on a program of military expansionism that includes the construction of artificial islands.

In recent years, U.S. administrations have been trying to counter the growing Chinese military presence by dispatching aircraft carriers into the South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait.

Attorney Vic Rodriguez, the spokesman for Marcos Jr., said Manilas relationship with Washington stood to improve in the new administration, but he did not elaborate.

As far as our relationship with the United States, under the administration of President-Elect Bongbong, I assure you now that it will get better, Rodriguez told Manila broadcaster ABS-CBN News Channel, using a popular nickname for Marcos.

Economy will be a priority

Marcos has yet to release his blueprint for the economy or plans to solve other problems facing the nation. Throughout his campaign, he spoke about uniting the Philippines, one of the regions oldest democracies.

During his first public news appearance Wednesday night, Marcos Jr. said he was choosing his economic team carefully, but did not give any specifics.



The economic managers are going to be critical for the next several years because of the pandemic and economic crisis, so that is something that we are looking at very carefully, he said.

Marcos Jr. said he would work with the executive committee who helped with his campaign along with experts in various fields.

His father and the family patriarch, Ferdinand E. Marcos, was one of Asias most infamous dictators who declared martial law in 1972.

The Marcos family, whose actions created bitter divisions among Filipinos that linger today, is known to have plundered up to U.S. $10 billion from the nations coffers before a Peoples Power uprising ousted Marcos Sr. from power in 1986, forcing the family to flee to Hawaii. Two years after Marcos Sr. died in 1989, his survivors returned to the Philippines and resumed their political efforts, culminating with this weeks election.

Protesters prepare signs ahead of an anti-Marcos rally at Liwasang Bonifacio in Manila, May 12, 2022. [Jojo Rinoza/BenarNews]

Economic boost

Meanwhile, the economy grew by more than 8 percent in the first quarter of the year, according to government data released on Thursday.



The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) reported that main contributors for the 8.3 percent growth in the gross domestic product (GDP) were the manufacturing and retail trades.

I think that the big driver of this growth is our full reopening of our economy. I think that is the single most important driver, Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Karl Kendrick Chua told journalists.

Our strong economic performance moves us closer to achieving our growth target of 7 percent to 9 percent this year, but we will not rest on our laurels. We will continuously work hard to strengthen our domestic economy against heightened external risks such as the Russia-Ukraine conflict and Chinas slowdown, Chua said.

Michael Ricafort, chief economist of Rizal Commercial Banking Corp., among the largest private domestic banks in the Philippines, told television ANC that without Russias invasion of Ukraine, it would have been easy for the Philippines to reach its 2022 growth target.

If not for that, the 7 percent would have been easily achieved this year but definitely, we have seen the further reopening of many sectors, many industries like tourism, Ricafort said.

Later this year, its possible well be back to pre-COVID level. The country will be back to its growth path because this has been ongoing, he said.

Carlos Dominguez, the finance secretary, said the government restored many jobs by shifting to a more endemic mindset, accelerating vaccinations and implementing lockdowns that targeted only areas of highest risk while allowing the majority to work and earn a living.

Even as the world was hit hard by the pandemic, our resolve to pursue reforms did not waver and even bolstered our economys prospects. The pandemic may have pushed back our timetable, but not our targets and resolve, Dominguez said.

The Philippine economy is a strong and steady ship ready for whatever storms that might lie ahead. We have set the sails for the next administration to achieve rapid and more inclusive growth in 2022 and beyond, he said.

After partial unofficial counts following Mondays vote showed Marcos Jr. had likely won, the American financial services giant J.P. Morgan dropped the Philippines to the bottom of an investment list behind Vietnam, Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia.

Marcos spokesman Rodriguez argued that the J.P. Morgan statement should be taken in the context of a political statement rather than from the standpoint of economic managers.

Basilio Sepe in Manila contributed to this report.
Last year, Sara Duterte-Carpio was widely seen as the heir-apparent to her father, Philippine leader Rodrigo Duterte, as he prepared to wrap up his tumultuous presidency in June 2022.

But after signaling in October that she would not run for president or be the standard bearer for her fathers party, instead she later paired up with presidential hopeful Ferdinand Marcos Jr., and  according to analysts  boosted him to an apparent landslide victory in this weeks general election.

Now, Duterte-Carpio, 43, is on the cusp of running away as the winner of the vice-presidential polls. Unofficial results show her garnering 31 million votes  more than three times the number cast for her closest opponent. In the Philippines, the president and vice president are elected separately.

Thank you to you all who believed and trusted me in my decision to run as vice-president, Duterte-Carpio told her supporters on Tuesday. We shall continue to guard our votes until we have reached the proclamation.

Her running mate, Marcos, the namesake son of the late Filipino dictator, is poised to become the first Marcos to occupy Malacanang, the presidential palace in Manila, in 36 years.

While the post of vice president is traditionally a position reserved for a person who would replace the president in case of an emergency, Duterte-Caprio has made it clear she would not be happy with only being a seat warmer.

On Wednesday, Marcos granted her that wish. He announced that he would appoint her to serve as secretary of education in his administration.

[O]ur incoming vice president has agreed to take the brief of the Department of Education, Marcos told a small group of Filipino and foreign correspondents in Manila.

So Inday Sara said she can do it. She is a mother. She wants to make sure that her children are well trained and well educated, Marcos said. Thats the best motivation that we can hope for.

Duterte-Carpio, who is the mayor of Davao City and who succeeded her father in that post in the southern Philippine city, is popular but known for being tough. She has often drawn comparisons to her father, the former mayor who is infamous for his blunt, profanity-laden rhetoric, and being tough in fighting crime. As mayor, his daughter once punched a government official in front of news cameras.

But in the run-up to Mondays general election, Duterte-Carpio projected a warm and friendly demeanor on the national stage.

As most politicians on the campaign trail do, she was often seen smiling on stage, posing for photographs, and tirelessly shaking hands with supporters. She seemed to show no glimpse of her reputation as the hardboiled mayor from down south.

She also consistently called for unity  the main rhetorical plank in Marcos electoral platform  and tried not to attack her opponents personally.

In 2021, she led early surveys gauging peoples presidential preferences, way ahead of Marcos Jr., for the highest public office in the land. Her father and key supporters, including the main political party, had expected her to seek election to succeed the elder Duterte, who will leave office next month due to constitution-stipulated term limits.

Political experts say her popularity helped buoy the Duterte-Marcos tandem to victory.

Had the presidential daughter, who was leading in all pre-election surveys by comfortable margins, decided to stick to her original plan, I believe Marcos Jr. would have opted out of the race altogether, if not sunk into political retirement, said Richard Javad Heydarian, an assistant professor of political science at De La Salle University in Manila.

In retrospect, Sara Duterte was a shoo-in for the presidency, which is precisely why the outgoing president, Rodrigo Duterte, was initially incensed with Marcos Jr., who he publicly lambasted as a weak leader and a spoiled brat. In short, the Dutertes have served as the curtain raisers for the return of the notorious political dynasty to the Malacanang presidential palace, Heydarian told online news Asia Times on Wednesday.

Sara Duterte-Carpio shows her inked right index finger after casting her ballot at the Daniel R. Aguinaldo National High School in Davao City, southern Philippines, May 9, 2022. [Handout from Duterte-Carpio office]

From mayor to VP

Duterte-Carpio, who is a lawyer and a colonel in the Philippine Army Reserves, has long been groomed for public office and carved out a political path similar to her fathers. But instead of emulating his traditional populist style, she has taken on a more pragmatic and level-headed approach.

A bachelor of science graduate in respiratory therapy from a college in her hometown of Davao, as a young woman, she said she had planned to pursue a career as a pediatrician. But she later studied law, following in her fathers footsteps.

In 2010, she first became Davao City mayor, switching roles with her father, who replaced her as deputy mayor to circumvent constitutional limits for elected officials running for the same office thrice.

But if the father thought that the daughter would be a rubber-stamp mayor, he was wrong. She repeatedly and publicly defied him on several issues, friends and advisers say.

When Duterte became president in 2016, she also branched out and found new political allies. Her regional political party, Hugpong ng Pagbabago, became dominant in local politics. Some Manila-based politicians flew to the south to get her endorsement and pledge loyalty.

Last year, she said that she would help prosecutors from the International Criminal Court investigate her father over thousands of killings linked to his administrations drug war, provided they secure a permit from the national government.

The Duterte-Marcos alliance began more than six years ago when Marcos Jr. ran for vice presidency but narrowly lost to Leni Robredo, the runner-up in the current presidential vote.

President Duterte has publicly admitted that the Marcoses contributed to his campaign funds and one of his first official acts was to transfer the dictators remains to the National Heroes Cemetery in Manila. It was a promise that he said he made to the Marcos family.

But perhaps Duterte-Carpios name stuck in the public mind after that much-publicized punching incident. The court sheriff, Abe Andres, refused to press charges and decided to keep to himself.

The first daughter subsequently apologized.

Duterte-Carpio is married to lawyer Manases Carpio. They have three young children.

Subel Rai Bhandari in Bangkok contributed to this report.
Muslims hug each at the Salahuddin Mosque in Yala province, southern Thailand, on Eid al-Fitr, May 2, 2022.

A 40-day Ramadan halt in violence that Thailand and the main southern rebel group agreed to in April has largely held intact, with locals and officials saying they hope its relative success is a step toward a permanent peace.

Under the Ramadan Peace Initiative, which is due to expire on May 14, the Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN) separatist rebels and Thai security forces agreed to cease hostilities throughout Islams holy month of fasting and into mid-May.

And, in a first, unarmed rebels were allowed to visit their families during Ramadan in Thailands majority Muslim Malay southern border region, otherwise known as the Deep South.

A senior Thai military official said the truce has shown it is possible for the two sides to reach an agreement despite years of fighting in the heavily militarized border region near Malaysia.

After the success of the peace initiative as agreed upon, it is evident that both sides can cooperate on the matter, Col. Kiatisak Neewong, spokesman for the militarys ISOC-4 regional command, told BenarNews on Thursday.

The Thai peace dialogue panel will bring this up during the next talks in Malaysia and discuss how to boost the already achieved peace to be permanent in the Deep South.

The peace initiative was agreed to at the end of the latest round of in-person peace talks between Thai negotiators and the BRN that were brokered by Malaysia and took place at a hotel in the Kuala Lumpur area on March 31-April 1.

BRN rebels were not immediately available for comment on the truce. Malaysian facilitators of the talks did not respond to BenarNews either.

Since the start of Ramadan in early April, the military had recorded five incidents of violence but they were mostly unrelated to the insurgency, Kiatisak said. Four incidents had to do with personal disputes and drug addiction, while one was carried out by another separatist group, the Patani United Liberation Organization, or PULO.

In that attack on April 15, one villager was killed and three members of a police bomb squad were injured in twin roadside bombings in Pattani, one of the provinces in the Deep South. PULOs leader claimed the group had carried out the attack in the middle of Ramadan because it was sidelined from the peace talks and wanted to be included.

According to the ISOC-4 spokesman, 266 rebels had visited their families during Ramadan, while some had stayed at a military-hosted peace center.

More than half of them will continue to stay with their families. Some of the rebels were mum on what they wanted to do. They may go back to the jungle, but we will talk to them again, Kiatisak said.

For the group who want to stay, we will look for jobs for them  But most importantly, they must not break the laws again.

A chance to have peace

After five years in hiding, a suspected insurgent called Mae, 34, took the opportunity to visit his home during Ramadan for the first time since he fled.

I learned that the military had accused me of being an insurgent member and wanted to arrest me, so I went into hiding. I had to move every two to three days, Mae, who wished to be identified only by one name for security reasons, told BenarNews.

He denied being a BRN member and said he never felt safe during his five years as a fugitive.

I asked myself: Have I done anything wrong? Why do I have to flee? From where did the [military] get this misinformation about me? he said. Ive no answer, and I often cried due to my unfortunate situation.

When Mae heard about the truce, he said he told his family to sign him up for it. His relatives informed ISOC-4 so that he would not face any harm or harassment.

Its a good program, which gives us a chance to have peace, Mae said.

His mother, Yo, said she was delighted to be reunited with her son.

There was not a day when I felt happy or slept well after he was gone, Yo said. Now, I feel relieved that I have my son back with my family. He is not an insurgent, but the military wanted to arrest him for some reason.

The Thai military declined to give details on individual cases.

Another insurgent, Sof, 57, who acknowledged that he was with the BRN, said he joined the program to visit his family because he was tired of life on the run.

I felt exhausted having to flee always, so I thought Id come back home. Now, Im happy to have returned to be with my family, Sof, who also wished to be identified only by one name for his personal safety, told BenarNews.

During my escape, I cried all the time. After I returned, my wife told me that our son wanted sweets, but she had no money to buy him some. She cried, feeling pity for herself. I wont do anything like that again.

Both Mae and Sof said they wished for the truce to continue.

Last week, Gen. Wanlop Rugsanoah, the general who heads the Thai delegation in the peace talks, rated the truce as a success and said the two sides would meet again in July or August to advance peaceful cooperation.

Thai Muslims pray at the main stadium on the day of Eid al-Fitr in the Deep South's Narathiwat province, in Thailand, May 2, 2022 [Matahari Ismail/BenarNews]

Meanwhile, a Brussels-based conflict research organization said in April that the truce would, if successful, demonstrate BRNs unity of command, produce a tangible outcome from the talks and improve the conditions for public consultations.

However, the initiative is best understood as a unilateral reduction of hostilities on each side rather than a negotiated ceasefire, the International Crisis Group (ICG said in a report published April 19.

There were no special provisions for monitoring... nor did the Thai side agree to lift its special security laws for the southern region, ICG added.

Three special laws allow the security forces more freedom in operating in the south, including immunity from prosecution for officers conduct during the line of duty and detention of suspects for up to 37 days without charges.

In 2013, the then government and rebels had agreed on a similar peace initiative during Ramadan, which Malaysia pushed for. It failed due to a lack of trust and a series of murders, indicating an apparent effort to sabotage the ceasefire after the first week of lull, according to ICG.

Violence in the Deep South had been on a downward trajectory since 2012. However, last year saw a steep rise in incidents of violence for the first time in nine years, from 335 in 2020 to 481 in 2021, a 44 percent increase, Deep South Watch, a local think-tank, said in January.

In January this year, BRN and Thai officials met outside Kuala Lumpur for talks. The two sides agreed to work towards public consultations, violence reduction, and finding political solutions to the insurgency.

They met again in March and agreed to the Ramadan truce.

The Thai government should devote greater resources to its delegation, while BRN needs to narrow the gap between its armed and political wings. As facilitator, Malaysia should respect the conflict parties choice of the dialogues format and substance, ICG said in their April report.

Muzliza Mustafa in Kuala Lumpur contributed this report.
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A veteran Al Jazeera correspondent who was shot dead while reporting on an Israeli raid in the West Bank was a highly respected and familiar face in the Middle East
A first-of-its-kind federal study of Native American boarding schools that for over a century sought to assimilate Indigenous children into white society has identified more than 500 student deaths at the institutions so far
Victims of a nationwide fraud orchestrated from the Berkshires will get their money back, following guilty pleas by three men linked to a criminal scheme that proved amazingly successful, until a package delivery firm grew suspicious.

Nine people in seven states were persuaded in 2020 to send thousands of dollars in cash to people who claimed to be federal agents. In fact, they were three men in their 20s operating at times from an apartment above a smoke shop on Columbia Avenue in Adams.

On Monday, two of those men  who had been charged with conspiracy, stealing by false pretenses and stealing from those over age 65  entered guilty pleas to lesser charges, but not before providing $212,924 in restitution, the Berkshire District Attorneys Office said Wednesday.

District Attorney Andrea Harrington said in a statement that the fraud victims supported a plea agreement that returned most of their lost money. While sparing them, many of whom are aging and live out of state, from having to travel to Massachusetts to testify, she said.

Two cousins, Ajaykumar Chaudhari, 26, of Pownal, Vt., and Jitendra Chaudhari, 29, of Williamstown, pled guilty Monday to single counts of larceny over $1,200 by single scheme and to an attempt to commit a crime  larceny over $1,200, Harringtons office said.

The two mens guilty convictions were filed by the court for two years, sparing them jail time. However, if they are found to have broken laws in the future, that could change. The court can impose a sentence on this guilty finding, said Andrew McKeever, Harringtons spokesman.

Another member of the Chaudhari family, Parth Chaudhari, pled guilty in December to the same charges. All three are responsible for the restitution, Harringtons office said. Parth Chaudhari was sentenced to time served, which was about eight months.

The mens arrests were announced June 15, 2020.

McKeever said restitution is on its way to those defrauded by the trio. The court and the Commonwealth has all of the money but it hasnt been distributed yet.

Elaborate ruses

As The Eagle reported in 2020, victims of the fraud were frightened by concocted stories of blood and retribution into sending wads of cash by FedEx. The ploys included claims of stolen identities and pursuits by federal agents. As people fell into the elaborate traps, the Chaudharis were alleged to have instructed them not to tell family members.

A 85-year-old woman from Wapakoneta, Ohio, wrapped $49,000 in cash in aluminum foil, placed it in a shoebox and packed it with Snickers bars. That box was recovered by Pittsfield police before being delivered by FedEx, authorities said in 2020.

The callers claimed to represent agencies like the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of the Treasury, on occasion using the names of actual employees, in case their targets looked them up online, police said at the time of the arrests.

Quote A 85-year-old woman from Wapakoneta, Ohio, wrapped $49,000 in cash in aluminum foil, placed it in a shoebox and packed it with Snickers bars.

One victim from Virginia drove nearly eight hours through the night with her mother and fiance to retrieve a FedEx package she had sent from the companys Pittsfield depot, after realizing shed been scammed. Inside the box: $13,000.

Shed been told a felon in Texas had stolen her identity and that blood had been found inside a car rented in her name.

The caller said the womans bank accounts would be frozen because of the identity theft. In an interview with The Eagle, she said she was told the only way to clear her name was to withdraw the required amount of cash and mail it, for which she would be reimbursed by the government.

Despite being told not to speak of the arrangement, she spilled the beans to her boyfriend, who reportedly told her shed been scammed and added, Go get your money.

The men were arrested after a three-month investigation that included a raid on the Adams apartment. That search, authorities say, turned up tens of thousands of dollars in cash, a script believed to have been used to defraud people during phone calls, fake passports and drivers licenses from different states.

That search was one of 27 conducted in June 2020, Harringtons office said Wednesday.

The investigation was handled by the Adams Police Department and the Berkshire State Police Detective Unit, aided by the Berkshire County Sheriffs Office and by police in Lanesborough, North Adams, Pittsfield, Williamstown and in Hoosick Falls, N.Y., the DAs office said.
PITTSFIELD  Plea negotiations are underway in the case against a local man accused of possessing and disseminating child pornography, a prosecutor said Wednesday.

Robert H. Whipple Jr., 55, of Pittsfield, is being held on $1,500 bail on allegations he accessed, viewed and disseminated at least two videos depicting child pornography. He admitted that he downloaded, viewed and retained the target video, according to a state police report.

His criminal case originated in Central Berkshire District Court in September, when he pleaded not guilty to the allegations.

The case moved to Berkshire Superior Court last month after a grand jury handed up indictments charging Whipple with possession of child pornography, third offense, possession of child pornography and dissemination of visual material of a child in a state of nudity or sexual conduct.

He was arraigned on those charges Wednesday via videoconference from the Franklin County Jail.

Assistant District Attorney Melissa Brooks said the third offense possession charge alone carries a recommended sentence of 8 to 10 years, but she noted two of his prior cases were based on the same set of underlying facts.

Regardless, she said, he was facing about a decade in prison on the charge of distributing child pornography.

The defendant is likely going to be incarcerated for some time," she said during the hearing before Judge Maureen Hogan.

Noting the case is "fairly strong," she said prosecutors are in the process of negotiating a plea.

Whipple is due back in court for a pretrial hearing on Aug. 16, but the attorneys indicated his case may be resolved via a plea sooner than that.
LENOX  Consider it a necessary baby step toward winning eventual state funding for significant renovations at Lenox Memorial Middle and High School.

The School Committee recently voted unanimously to submit a grant request to the Massachusetts School Building Authority to address environmental and structural problems at the building, including ongoing asbestos infiltration.

Other priorities supporting the need for renovations include potential loss of accreditation because of obsolete science classrooms and labs; increasing energy conservation and decreasing energy-related costs, and replacement of, or additions to, obsolete buildings lacking enough classroom space.

Some of the specific concerns listed in the document sent to the state include:

 Space, compliance and safety issues in the high school science classrooms.

 Locker rooms built in 1965 not fully compliant with equity laws.

 More than 40 percent of teachers required to share classrooms.

 Gender equality issues in the restrooms.

 Floor and wall cracking/separation taking place throughout the building.

The preliminary statement of interest, signed by Superintendent Marc J. Gosselin, Town Manager Christopher Ketchen and School Committee Chairman Robert Vaughan, was sent to the building authority by the April 29 deadline for this years submissions.

It places the school district somewhere in a long line of applicants from other districts statewide, including Berkshire Hills Regional School District in Great Barrington.

There are no cost projections yet for any work that eventually might be approved by the MSBA, typically a partial match with local taxpayer funding.

This is just the beginning, were just trying to get MSBAs attention, Vaughan said. He noted that it took 15 years for the state authority to approve funding support for the Central Berkshire Regional School Districts rebuild of Wahconah Regional High School in Dalton, which cost nearly $73 million.

So this could be years down the road, he said. We hope not, we hope that theyll pay attention to us pretty quickly. We hope it wont be as long as Central Berkshires, but we have to recognize that a lot of towns across the commonwealth submit every year. The MSBA evaluates them on the needs for their buildings, so we dont know where we fit in.

In the statement filed with the MSBA, Vaughan noted that he focused on exterior walls, the asbestos problem and the perception among faculty, and perhaps parents and students that a portion of the building is unsafe.

He also pointed out that the three science classrooms in the high school wing have been an issue for 20 years or more with facilities that are outdated or dysfunctional.

The towns Select Board also voted recently to support the statement of interest, as required by the MSBA.

This is not an endorsement of doing this project, its just to get us to stand in line for consideration, said Select Board Chair Marybeth Mitts. She pointed out that the Berkshire Hills Regional School District is re-applying to the state to support funding for a renovated or rebuilt Monument Mountain Regional High School.

Im not sure how the school building authority is going to look at a request like ours when were a district of less than 1,000 students, she added.

A just-completed engineering report from DRA Architects in Waltham, presented to the School Committee recently, reviewed physical deficiencies inside and outside the original 1966 high school building, which was expanded 25 years ago to include a middle school wing, a library, auditorium and gym space.

The report did not cover environmental concerns involving additional asbestos removal.

The contamination first emerged in March 2021 when a fierce windstorm caused small amounts of debris containing the fire-retardant substance to fall from the ceiling in a number of classrooms and offices, and part of the cafeteria.

The school district spent close to $650,000 on a cleanup of the dislodged material containing asbestos, requiring LMMHS to close the building for six weeks. In 2019, interior wall and tile repairs cost at least $320,000.

New cracks are appearing and there is additional infiltration of asbestos fibers from window frames, requiring further environmental work and air quality monitoring, the statement to the building authority noted. So neither solution has provided a permanent fix, according to the document.

With the exception of environmental issues, the good news is that the building has been generally well-maintained, Carl Franceschi, the president of DRA, told the School Committee. The things weve identified are not unusual for a building of this vintage.

He explained that there are not critical things that need investment immediately, if you were to renovate, there are many that dont meet code or could be greatly improved with a replacement.

Franceschi urged continued investment into the building since the state likes to help those who help themselves, but you want to be smart about it.

Energy conservation upgrades can be addressed while awaiting a MSBA decision on potential grants. He also urged upgrades of the schools HVAC (heating, ventilation and air-conditioning) system.

The document submitted to the state acknowledges that submission of the statement of interest does not guarantee the acceptance or approval of a formal application, the awarding of a grant, or any other funding from the authority. Nor does it commit the Lenox school district to file an application for funding to the building authority.

Any eventual capital project involving a state grant and local funding would require two-thirds approval by voters at an annual or special town meeting.
Most of Berkshire County is wired for high-speed internet, but not every household can afford it.

Now, a $65 billion federal initiative that is part of President Joe Bidens Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is designed to close that gap here and across the U.S. using tax dollars and the help of large internet providers.

Residents can find out whether they qualify based on income or participation in various government assistance programs, or if they live on Tribal lands.

As of May 1, 6,265 households in the Berkshires have enrolled, according to federal data.

Under the Affordable Connectivity Program, qualifying households will pay no more than $30 per month for high-speed internet, for as long as the programs funds are available. Depending on the company, some will only be able to give a $30 discount on internet bills.

The 20 largest internet providers have agreed to either cut prices or hike internet speeds for the best use of taxpayer dollars going towards the program, according to a fact sheet from the White House. Those companies have pledged to offer high-speed plans for $30 or less. Others can only offer a $30 discount.

Combined with the program benefit, some households could get service for free.

Other providers that serve the Berkshires, including Hughes Network Systems LLC and EARTHLINK, LLC are also participating in the program. A search tool linked by the White House website can help people find these 1,300 providers who will give the program discount.

The White House website also has more information and links for residents to find out if they are eligible and how to apply.

Websites of large providers like Spectrum also provide links to the application and explain how the program works. Spectrums site says that new households applying could get 100 Mbps download speeds for just $29.99 per month, and includes a modem, in-home WiFi and self-installation at no additional charge.

Spectrum also says that qualified households receive up to a $30 monthly credit toward Internet service  which means eligible customers can get Spectrum Internet 100 at no monthly cost.

The program also offers a discount on a computer or tablet from some companies.

Broadband connectivity has long been a sore spot in the Berkshires, but thats largely changed in the last few years with a big push by the countys more rural towns,, as well as the state. Some towns are being connected now.

The Massachusetts Broadband Institute and the state are still working to help get infrastructure into those remaining areas that dont have the building blocks, said Brian Noyes, director of communications and marketing for the states MassTech Collaborative.

High-speed internet is available to about 94 percent of Berkshire County households, according to Federal Trade Commission data.

Not all households subscribe to an internet provider. Only 70.5 percent of households have subscriptions for some type of internet service, including DSL, according to Census data crunched by Microsoft in 2020. Microsofts own data showed that 73.3 percent are using the internet at broadband speeds.

But using Microsoft data, USA Today reported last year that only 39 percent of Berkshire County households have broadband.

Regardless, the Biden administration and lawmakers are launching a campaign to get the country online. Massachusetts and some other states plan to text millions of residents who are eligible for subsidized internet.

The office of U.S. Rep. Richard Neal, D-Springfield, will highlight the program on social media and in-person visits, said Margaret Boyle, Neals director of communications.

Boyle said it is the more rural communities in western and central Massachusetts that need attention, since they tend to have wider digital divides.

Town officials in Sheffield, for instance, have said they are aware that a number of residents dont have an internet subscription because they cant afford it.

State Rep. William Smitty Pignatelli, D-Lenox, says he doesnt hear a lot of constituents complain about not being able to afford internet, but he knows there are pockets of neighborhoods where people are quietly going without service.

Broadband is expensive, he said. I know I cringe every time I get my bill.

Pignatelli would love to take this federal plan a step further by having companies give state-subsidized housing a price break, for instance.

In congregate housing, there should be a bulk discount [for internet], he said. Youve got one line coming in, you dont need to send out 50 different bills.
If the Supreme Court does overturn Roe v. Wade, the impact in the business sector will be immense, columnist Bill Schmick writes. Citigroup, one of the largest banks in the U.S., has been targeted by conservatives who believe the company is pro-abortion and want the House and Senate to cancel the companys contracts to issue credit cards to lawmakers.
A view of some of the marshes at Parker River National Wildlife Refuge, which is located on Plum Island, a barrier island located off the northeast coast of Massachusetts.
Massachusetts Department of Transportation officials now expect to bring in about 95 percent as much in tolls this year as they did in fiscal year 2019, the last year before the pandemic sparked long stretches of reduced travel and rewired commuting patterns.
IDAHO FALLS - The Idaho Falls Police Department took to social media Thursday to welcome Skadi, a new potential K9 officer, to its team. Skadi, a 6-month-old Belgian Malinois mix, was adopted by the IFPD from the Blackfoot Animal Shelter and Rescue and will be training to become a single-purpose Explosives Detective K9 officer with her partner, Detective David Shanor.

The IFPD says that Skadi, formerly named Hitachi, came to the Blackfoot Animal Shelter and Rescue as a transfer from the Front Street Animal Shelter in Sacramento, California. Skadi was surrendered to the shelter when her prior owners determined that her high drive was not a good fit for their home. Skadi was transferred and spent about a week with the Blackfoot Animal Shelter before being adopted yesterday by the Idaho Falls Police Department.

Skadi is quite young and has great potential, said Jessica Clements, IFPD Public Information Officer. So far, she is showing the drive needed for this role and our department is very excited to have her here. Over the coming months as she matures, our hope is that drive continues, her training goes well, and she becomes a valued member of the IFPD team.

If all goes well, Skadi is in line to become an IFPD Explosives Detective K9. Skadi and her handler are expected to serve the Idaho Falls community and be part of the Idaho Falls Region 7 Bomb Squad, a fully accredited bomb squad commanded by an Idaho Falls Police Lieutenant and made up of officers from IFPD and deputies from the Bonneville County Sheriffs Office. The Idaho Falls Regional Bomb Squad serves Idaho Falls, Bonneville County, and the greater Eastern Idaho region into the border areas of Montana and Wyoming.

The Idaho Falls Police Department currently has an Explosives Detective K9 who is approaching retirement. According to the department, bringing Skadi on at this time is intended to ensure minimal disruption when it is time for the current K9 to retire.

The Idaho Falls Police Department says they have been working with shelters around the region for some time now in the hopes of finding a suitable adoptable dog.

"We are grateful for the Blackfoot Animal Shelter and Rescue for bringing Skadi to the region and allowing our agency to adopt her," said the IFPD in a release.
CLARKSTON - At its regularly scheduled meeting on Wednesday, the Port of Clarkston Board of Commissioners narrowed the field of candidates for the Executive Director position down to three finalists: George Cress, Christopher Rasmussen, and Marc Thornsbury.

These are highly qualified candidates," said Chair Mark Brigham. "All have exceptional previous port, management, finance and economic development experience.

One of the three will replace Wanda Keefer, who has served in that position since May 2006.

The three finalists will participate in an interview process on May 18 & 19, 2022. The Port of Clarkston is inviting the public to meet the candidates at a reception which will be held on Wednesday, May 18, from 5:00  6:30 PM. The reception will be held at the Holiday Inn located at 700 Port Drive, Clarkston, in the Riverboat Room.

Then, on Thursday, May 19, each candidate will be interviewed by two separate panels and will be given a tour.

The Executive Director is appointed by and serves at the discretion of the Board of Commissioners.

Three Finalists

George Cress

George Cress has been the City Planner for the City of Pendleton, Oregon, since 2018. Prior to that, he was the Director of Light & Power for the City of Forest Grove, Oregon, from 2011-2017, Director of Real Estate & Planning for the Port of Longview, Washington, from 1995-2011, and he was Economic Development Director for Columbia County, Oregon, from 1988-1995. Mr. Cress has a master's degree in Public Administration and a bachelors degree in Economics.

Christopher Rasmussen

Christopher Rasmussen is currently the Director of Operations for the Port of Port Angeles in Washington. He has been with the port since 2015, first serving as Facilities Manager, then Public Works & Operations Manager, prior to becoming the Director of Operations. Prior to joining the Port of Port Angeles, Mr. Rasmussen was a Project Manager for Razz Construction, Inc., a civil construction company in Bellingham, Washington, from 2005-2015.

Marc Thornsbury

Marc Thornsbury was most recently Executive Director for the Port of Klickitat in Washington, where he served in that position from 2007-2020. Prior to that, he was Manager for TLR-Total Logistics Resource, a freight transportation company in Portland, Oregon, from 1997-2007. Thornsbury was also Owner and General Manager of Advanced Computer Management for several years earlier in his career. He has a bachelor's degree in Business Administration.

The Port of Clarkston looks forward to continuing its momentum in creating jobs and contributing to the communitys financial well-being, said Mark Brigham.
NAMPA  Ben Adams and Thomas Netzley, both Republicans, are running to become senator of District 12.

There are no other candidates in this race; whoever wins the primary contest effectively wins the seat.

A VETERAN AND A DIESEL MECHANIC

Ben Adams served in the U.S. Marine Corps and was first elected in 2020 to District 13, House Seat B. With new districts created through the redistricting process, Adams decided to run for Senate in the new District 12.

The Senate tends to act as a rubber stamp for the executive branch, Adams said. He believes younger senators could help change that.

I think that its important for the Senate to have a broad range of perspectives, Adams said. Im a millennial. Im a conservative, so I guess having some of the new generation in the Idaho Senate, I dont think its going to be a bad thing. It brings new perspective to old problems.

Adams highlighted the passage of a bill that will end emissions testing in Ada and Canyon Counties next year as one of his main accomplishments in office so far. He also pointed to the Houses passage of the Coronavirus Pause Act. Gov. Brad Little ultimately vetoed it, and the Senate was unable to override it, he said.

Thomas Netzley is a diesel mechanic who moved to Idaho from Montana in 2018 after graduating. Originally from Sacramento, California, he had worked as a data center technician for an eBay contractor and later for Twitter before going to trade school in Wyoming to transition to work that was more rewarding, he said

Since moving to Idaho, he feels as though he has witnessed the erosion of personal freedoms, including medical freedom, and is running for office to do something about it.

I think the quality of leadership we have, their willingness to take authoritarian measures that are contradictory to what the people voted them in for  it revealed to me how were just kind of voting in more of the same people, Netzley said. Thats why I thought we needed a change, some people who actually stand up for your regular, everyday conservatives here in Idaho.

ADAMS PRIORITY HIGHLIGHTS: PROPERTY TAXES, STATE SOVEREIGNTY

One of Adams top priorities he would tackle if elected is property tax, he said. Hed like to curtail the distribution of some money toward state agencies.

When times are good, you save, Adams said. I would like to do a government growth freeze in the state of Idaho for two years and put all of that money toward eliminating primary residence property taxes and shifting that over to the state.

Last year, the House discussed a bill that would have eliminated property taxes in lieu of a 2% sales tax increase, Adams said. He felt ambivalent about the bill, saying it eliminated one tax to raise another.

The state has spent $300 million this year to grow government agencies in the state, Adams said. He estimates it would cost $717 million to eliminate those property taxes.

Instead of the cities and counties collecting those taxes, the cities and counties would receive that money from the state and it would be because we werent growing state government, he said.

Adams would also prioritize legislation that protects state sovereignty, including directing how members of the Idaho National Guard are deployed. Oftentimes, guardsmen and women are sent by the federal government to war, he said.

The federal government hasnt shown any signs of being able to reign themselves in, and we as a state have a responsibility to intercede between our citizens and the federal government, he said. This is us essentially telling the federal government, you need to do your job before you take our sons and daughters and sacrifice them on the altar of war, he said.

The U.S. has not formally declared war since 1941, he said, and continues to fight proxy wars, and feels war should be a last resort. He does not think that all conflict has to be avoided, but he does think a formal declaration from the federal government should be involved, he said.

NETZLEYS PRIORITY HIGHLIGHTS: PRO-LIFE, MEDICAL FREEDOM

If elected, Netzley says he would work to protect the lives of unborn children, he said.

The end goal, though it may be a pipe dream, is that abortion is viewed as murder and treated the same, whether its murder or murder for hire, Netzley said. I know a lot of people think of that as an extreme view and think its hardline and doesnt show compassion, and I do think theres definitely a strong sense of compassion and understanding and working with people that needs to be first and foremost so its not just a damnation if you will.

He recognizes that there are many philosophies within conservative spheres about how to approach the issue, and he is willing to collaborate. For example, some people may not want to condemn the mother while other people may be against fines, he said.

Theres all these little different caveats and parts of the pro-life industry and I think if its saving kids, Ill work with any of them, he said.

One of Adams priorities within medical freedom is ensuring that employees are not discriminated against based on vaccination status, and that employees should not have to divulge that information to employers, he said, saying it is similar to asking intrusive questions about intimate relationships or sexually transmitted diseases.

These are just things that are taboo, he said. Theyre not conversations we should be having about our personal medical history, and so to discriminate or require people to divulge this type of information  I dont think that that is respecting peoples freedom and autonomy.

FUNDRAISING HIGHLIGHTS

Adams has raised $9,605 from 24 donors, according to the Idaho Secretary of States campaign portal. Donors appear to include individuals and companies such as UP Railroad and Idaho Fence Masters. Donations from PACs include the Idaho Dental PAC and the Idaho Chooses Life PAC.

Adams also has donations from the Committee to Elect Judy Boyle, and Bruce Skaug for Legislature.

Netzley has raised $1,500 from five donors that all appear to be individuals, including Brian Lenney, who is running for senator of District 13.
Bioangels will raise Rs 350 crore investment for startups

Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) has collaborated with the Indian Angel Network (IAN) to launch an angel investor network, BioAngels.

BioAngels is the countrys first sector-focused angel investor group to fuel the growth of startups from Biotech  the sunrise sector. Sub-domains include medtech, healthtech, pharma, cleantech and agritech. The biotech sector has the potential for cascading multiplier effect to contribute to Indias economic growth target of a $5 trillion economy by 2025.

BioAngels is an inclusive platform that engages early-stage investors from India and overseas from different angel investor groups, to fund and nurture high-quality startups, with both money and mentoring backed with critical sectoral expertise. BioAngelss vision is to become the platform of choice for investors and innovative startups to build globally competitive companies.

BIRAC, the not-for-profit Public Sector Enterprise of Department of Biotechnology, Govt of India, has been instrumental in supporting the technology led startups right from ideation, incubation, and acceleration for commercialization. By partnering with IAN, it fills up a critical gap of Angel money requirement to make Startups VC investment ready by unlocking high quality business mentoring and industry networks for the startups.
A 48-member delegation comprising senior officials and business leaders from Oman are currently visiting India

The 10th Session of the India-Oman Joint Commission Meeting (JCM) discussed on fast tracking of approvals for the registration of Indian pharmaceutical products already registered by US FDA, UKMHRA and EMA.

The meeting was co-chaired by Piyush Goyal, Union Minister of Commerce & Industry, Consumer Affairs, Food & Public Distribution and Textiles, Government of India and Qais bin Mohammed al Yousef, Minister of Commerce, Industry and Investment Promotion of the Sultanate of Oman, who is in India now with a 48-member delegation comprising senior officials and business leaders.

A joint release of a Market Research Report commissioned by the Embassy of India, Muscat on the pharmaceutical sector in Oman highlighted strategies and opportunities for Indian companies in Oman in this sector.

Discussions were held on all Memorandum of Understanding (MoUs)/ Agreements under discussion, including standards and metrology, India-Oman Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement, India-Oman Bilateral Investment Treaty, Invest Oman and Invest India, and Rupay card acceptance in Oman etc.
American businesses optimistic about Chinese market

08:49, May 12, 2022 By Li Zhiwei ( People's Daily

As trade ties between China and the United States run deep and closely intertwined, many American companies are reasonably optimistic about the Chinese market and plan to increase investment, Craig Allen, President of the U.S.-China Business Council (USCBC) told Peoples Daily.

Photo taken on April 25, 2022, shows that more than 200 new vehicles manufactured by U.S. carmaker Teslas Shanghai Gigafactory are transported to Yantai Port, east Chinas Shandong province. (Peoples Daily Online/Tang Ke)

Win-win cooperation between China and the U.S. plays a key role in driving world economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Many voices have been heard from the American business community urging its government to cooperate with China instead of decoupling so that the two countries could work together for a more peaceful and prosperous world.

Founded in 1973, the USCBC has actively served as a trade bridge between the two countries, which has attracted more than 200 U.S. member companies doing business in China, including many of the worlds iconic brands. The membership is still growing.

Aerial photo taken on March 28, 2022, shows cranes are carrying out container loading operations orderly in Jinhua city, east Chinas Zhejiang province. (Peoples Daily Online/Hu Xiaofei)

Most of the USCBC members have invested in China for decades with a long vision and commitment, as China remains one of the most essential markets in the world. According to a 2021 survey conducted by USCBC among 107 U.S. firms operating in China, up to 95 percent of the respondents said they were profitable in the past year, and over 40 percent said they will increase investments.

China continues efforts to deepen reform and opening up, optimizing an active and friendly business environment for foreign investors. American businesses that we talk to are reasonably optimistic about the future, Allen added.

Its the most impressive accomplishment of China to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and improve their quality of life, Allen marked, looking forward to more high-quality goods and services in the country with the continuous improvement of living standards.

Chinas trade with the U.S. in 2021 reached a record $755.6 billion, up nearly 30 percent year-on-year. Another record shows that the U.S. goods exports to China increased by 21 percent to $149 billion, said a USCBC recent report.

2021 saw strong trade ties between China and the U.S. Agricultural exports and a big boost to the economies of the U.S. states with large agricultural sectors.

All 50 U.S. states exported goods and services to China and benefited from the 858,000-strong American jobs supported by these exports, Allen said. Greater stability can bring more opportunities to businesses and people in both countries.

Imposing tariffs and decoupling from China are not good for the country, for the U.S., and for the world, Allen said, stressing the positive aspects of economic globalization.

We should reject trade blocs and spheres of influence in favor of enhancing the positive aspects of globalization that have improved standards of living for billions of people over the last several decades, Allen said. The world needs China and the U.S. to play a positive role in continuing this contribution to a global public good.

(Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun)
The award is to recognise outstanding contributions to techno-entrepreneurship development

Bengaluru-based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) has won the National Technology Business Incubator Award instituted by the Department of Science & Technology (DST), Government of India.

In a prize ceremony to mark Indias 23rd National Technology Day in New Delhi C-CAMP CEO and Director, Dr Taslimarif Saiyed received the award in presence of Minister of Science and Technology and Earth Sciences, Dr Jitendra Singh, Department of Biotechnology, GoI secretary, Dr Rajesh Gokhale, DST secretary, Dr S. Chandrasekhar and Techonology Development Board, GoI secretary, Rajesh Pathak.

The bioincubator established at C-CAMP with support from Bionest, BIRAC, NITI Aayog-AIM, Ktech-Govt of Karnataka, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Govt of India currently has 40 resident incubatees, 10 non-resident incubatees across India and the globe and has supported 25 graduated incubatees over the years.

C-CAMP has a portfolio of 5 licensed/spin-off technologies fostered by its translational research programme incubated out of C-CAMP Bioincubator.
Savanna Premium Cider has always prided itself on being one of the most innovative brands in SA. Its latest product innovation, the deliciously crisp and dry Savanna Chilled Chilli with hints of chilli and ginger, is taking South African taste buds by storm. But the innovation doesn't stop there, as Savanna now takes a bold step into the tech and digital AI space and unleashes Gugu, a spicy new voice assistant, for the people of South Africa.

"How would Alexa behave if Alexa was South African? This is the exact question that led us on this year-long journey. What makes this work special is that it's insight-based tech  not just tech for tech's sake. Gugu embodies that particular brand of spice we are all so familiar with within this country, and the result is hilarious and addictive. She has an answer for everything, so we apologise in advance for the loss of productivity users may experience, explains Steph van Niekerk, Grey Advertising Africa creative director.Developed for Savanna by Chakalaka Norris, the charismatic spokesperson for Chilled Chilli, Gugu would be like Alexa if Alexa were a certified Black Twitter member.But what does Gugu actually do? If you ask her, she can do anything any other AI can do, except she won't because she simply refuses to solve people's problems for them. Unless that problem needs a Savanna Chilled Chilli, then for some reason, if you ask nicely, shes happy to put you in touch with that spicy game.Tilesh Bhaga, creative technologist of Grey Advertising Africa, explains: "The Gugu voice assistant was built as a progressive web app based on React.js, allowing its capabilities to extend beyond just a standard website. The brains of Gugu live on a Google AI tool called dialogflow. The user would input a command that is either text or speech, converted to text. This input is then sent to the Google AI to interpret the order. Based on the response back from the AI, we determine the correct audio answer to match the text and prompt that.Visit gugu.savanna.co.za for an up-close and personal experience of the deliciously Siyavanna spiciness. Ask her anything you want, but be warned  you better be ready for how she'll come at you.#AskGugu #SpicyButChilled #SiyavannaSouthAfrica #StaySafeSavanna promotes responsible drinking. Not for persons under 18.For more information, follow Savannas social media channels or go to www.savannacider.com Instagram: @savannaciderFacebook: @SavannaCiderTwitter: @SavannaCiderYouTube: SavannaCider
New York-based Private Label Manufacturers Association (PLMA) has once again honoured retailers for their innovation in private labels across a wide variety of categories at its 2022 Salute to Excellence Awards on 8 May 2022, which saw Woolworths walk off with five awards.

Source: Supplied

Only new products introduced within the past 12 months and currently available for purchase by consumers in stores, online or through catalogues are eligible for the awards which span food and non-food categories, mass retail channels including national and regional supermarkets, mass merchants, warehouse clubs and specialty retailers.This year, 450 products from 51 retailers from 20 countries covering 69 categories were considered. The winning products were judged based on product concept, taste & appearance, packaging & presentation, and value for money.Woolworths continue to reap countless awards year after year. This impressive collection of accolades achieved by Woolworths is a clear reflection of the hard work done by the R&D team and their ongoing quest to innovate and develop products that are the difference customers have come to know and expect. "Bottled & Flavoured Water" for Woolworths Food Sparkling Spring Drink Coconut & Pineapple Flavoured. Comments from the judges included: "New and surprising, "Very nice concept", "Very refreshing", "Winner!", "Environment friendly packaging, social purpose!" "Nutritional Bars & Shakes" for Woolworths Food 5 Berry & Yoghurt Smoothie bars with the following remark from one of the judges: "Amazing fruity and fresh taste. Nice presentation" "Eco Friendly Cleaning" for Woolworths Earth Friendly Coco Scrubber Plastic Free with the judges acknowledged it as a "Good idea", "Super original!", and "Innovative". "Household Articles for the Woolworths Earth Friendly 100% Bamboo Swab Plastic Free. Judges made a special mention of the size: Nice size and Perfect size, good quality, along with applauding the concept: Good concept, 100% Bamboo  ECO friendly!" "Pet Care" for its Woolworths Posh Pets Urine Destroyer Lemon Verbena Fragranced. Feedback from the judges including notes on it being a good, interesting product with a nice smell.All products are currently available at your closest Woolworths store and online or on the app.
Matilda Wormwood from Pexels

Trend one: The worth-it equation

Image: Supplied

Trend two: The great disconnect

Image: Supplied

Trend three: Making the office worth the commute

Image: Supplied

Trend four: Distinguishing flexibility from always on

Image: Supplied

South Africa is at a long-awaited inflection point: the lived experience of hybrid work. To help local organisations navigate this era of uncertainty, the Work Trend Index combines insights from studies of thousands of people, trillions of productivity signals in Microsoft 365 and labour trends on LinkedIn.Were simply not the same people that went home to work in early 2020. Employees in South Africa are rethinking what they want from work and voting with their feet when these new expectations arent met. The challenge ahead for every organisation is to adapt to changing employee priorities while still balancing business outcomes in an unpredictable economy, says Colin Erasmus, director of Modern Workplace and Security at Microsoft South Africa.The Index uncovers four urgent trends business leaders in South Africa need to know in 2022.Perhaps one of the most valuable insights from the Index is that employees have a new worth it equation and are more likely to prioritise health and well-being over work than before the pandemic. This is particularly the case in South Africa, which forms part of a region where 50% of employees report high feelings of daily stress.Its also clear employees are acting on this newfound priority to achieve a better work-life balance. In fact, more than half of employees in the broader Middle East and North Africa region say they are prioritising a new job in 2022.Managers feel wedged between leadership and employee expectations. They believe leadership is out of touch with employees and dont feel empowered to help their teams. Employees agree, with around 84% of workers across the broader region saying they are not engaged.Managers can help provide a bridge between evolving employee expectations and leadership priorities, but, according to the Work Trend Index, most lack the influence and resources to make changes on behalf of their team. In fact, almost 70% of managers in the Middle East and Africa say they are battling to empower their people.Forward-thinking companies like Old Mutual in South Africa have begun drawing on tools such as Microsoft Viva to better equip managers. The company has been on an intentional journey, building an environment that truly cares for employees. A key step in this journey was providing managers with insight into the ways people are working. Viva helped them achieve exactly that, enabling managers to identify key patterns, better understand their teams and create the best possible working experiences for them.While most employees in South Africa favour the idea of a hybrid working model, the Work Trend Index shows people are generally unsure of when to come into the office and why. Many employees also feel the commute is unnecessary and would rather spend valuable time with family.It means leaders are faced with a key challenge - making the office worth the commute. The Index reveals, however, that few companies globally have created new team norms, such as hybrid work meeting etiquette, to ensure time together is intentional. The biggest opportunity for business leaders is to reimagine the role of the office and create clarity around why, when, and how often teams should gather in person.Though employees prize their newfound flexibility, theres still a need to combat digital exhaustion. Leaders across the broader region report equal to or higher productivity levels than before the pandemic, but this has taken a toll on employee work-life balance.For the average Teams user, meetings, chat, workday span, and after-hours and weekend work have all risen over the past two years. In fact, since February 2020, the average Teams user saw a 252% increase in their weekly meeting time.If leaders want to offer employees true flexibility, they must shift focus from activities to impact. Views of productivity are changing and according to the Work Trend Index, most employees feel its important for employers to reward impact over hours worked.Businesses have an opportunity and responsibility to engage the shift to hybrid with a growth mindset. The best leaders will create a culture that embraces flexibility and prioritises employee well-beingunderstanding that this is a competitive advantage to build a thriving organisation and drive long-term growth, concludes Erasmus.
Cabinet has given the go ahead for the implementation of South Africa's Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LP Gas) Strategy to be implemented. This was announced on Thursday, 12 May, by minister in the presidency Mondli Gungubele during a briefing on the outcomes of Wednesday's Cabinet meeting.

The strategy seeks to expand the LPG industry in the country. LPG will contribute meaningfully to the diversification of sources of energy.The strategy will, amongst other interventions, regulate the pricing in the value chain and support the manufacturing of LPG cylinders in the country. It will also educate the public about the benefits of using LPG as an alternative form of energy, Gungubele said.Earlier this year, Gungubele said the strategy would also deal with the structural features of the current LPG market, existing infrastructure, the pricing structure, and the current local manufacturing capacity of LPG cylinders.
One of America's largest beer brands, Coors has debuted its 'chillboards' - minimally branded rooftop billboards, painted with a reflective white roof coating, proven to cool a building down, with less of a need to use aircon on those hotter days.

Image supplied

The minimally branded rooftop installations are located on top of apartment buildings in Miami and painted with Mule-Hide Finish reflective white roof coating, a formula proven to reflect 85% of sunlight. On one rooftop tested, Coors Light discovered the ad lowered the surface temperature of the roof by as much as 50 degrees.The science behind Chillboards is actually pretty simple, dark surfaces absorb sun rays, but specially formulated white coating reflects them, resulting in a cooler temperature, said Marcelo Pascoa, vice president of marketing for the Coors Family of Brands. We realise not everyone will be able to paint their roofs white, but we hope to inspire Americans to make choices that reduce energy usage and puts a few dollars back in their pockets.The new rooftop Coors Light ads, which have different phrases like, Chillboards and Ads Nobody Can See, But Everyone Can Feel, are written in the typeface coolest, designed to cover more than 95% of the surface space in the reflective white paint.Simple and cost-friendly initiatives like Coors Light Chillboards can have a significant impact on the quality of life for renters and homeowners, says Jane Gilbert, Miami-Dade Chief Heat Officer. If more communities started seeing the value of painting roofs white, we could cool down millions worldwide.
While doctors play an instrumental role in the success of the hospital environment by making key decisions pertaining to patient medical diagnoses and treatment, nurses are another important cog in the healthcare wheel, and are often the unsung and under-appreciated heroes of the medical world.

Source: 123RF

Covid-19: the industry disruptor

Addressing the shortage of medical personnel

Success is a team effort

A track record of substantial funding raised

Providing over 90% of global healthcare, nurses are crucial to primary healthcare and most often represent the frontline of patient and facility relations.Their roles are far-reaching, providing patient care and support, educating the public about illnesses and diseases, and even advocating for health interventions. Overall, the nursing profession has evolved far beyond what it was at conception.According to Pfizer South Africa medical director, Dr Bha Ndungane-Tlakula, it is important to acknowledge the role of nurses in todays healthcare system, particularly as the world pays homage to the nursing profession on 12 May, International Nurses Day and the anniversary of the birth of Florence Nightingale.Revered as the founder of modern nursing, Nightingale embodied what modern-day nursing entails and her principles have led to more structured nursing practices worldwide, explains Ndungane-Tlakula.In South Africa, the role of nurses and their importance was placed in the spotlight more than ever before as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and the countrys increasingly strained healthcare system. It also exposed South Africas shortage of professional nurses in the system and highlighted the need for nurses in both public and private healthcare facilities.Notably, South Africas 2030 Human Resources for Health Strategy suggests that if no substantial action is taken now, by 2025, the country will face a shortage of around 34,000 registered nurses. Given that there were only 71,707 registered professional nurses in 2019 in the country and that 47% of registered nurses will have retired in the next 15 years - owing to the retirement age for the profession being set at 65 10 - solutions to the healthcare shortage must be addressed now to ensure a sustainable future.The shortage of healthcare professionals and its impact on healthcare delivery in the rural parts of South Africa has long been a topic of discussion, and with 32.65% of the South African population residing in rural areas, at Pfizer, we made the decision to partner with innovative nurse-led programmes such as Unjani Clinics Network to address the shortage, adds Ndungane-Tlakula.The Pfizer Foundation is a charitable organisation established by Pfizer Inc. It is a separate legal entity from Pfizer Inc. with distinct legal restrictions. With a network of 111 professional black female nurse-owned clinics, the initiative, funded through The Pfizer Foundations Global Health Innovation Grants programme, provides quality, affordable and accessible primary healthcare to underserved communities in South Africa, and aims to empower these nurses, create permanent employment, and develop a sustainable clinic model for providing primary healthcare in often rural areas.The collaboration between Pfizer South Africa, The Pfizer Foundation and Unjani Clinics dates back to 2016 and funding has been allocated annually since then, says Ndungane-Tlakula.The initiative has seen great success, particularly as more than 84% of the South African population are dependent on the already overburdened public healthcare system.The partnership has led to the funding and establishment of eight clinics in total, five on behalf of Pfizer South Africa and three from The Pfizer Foundation. Furthermore, as all Unjani Clinic facilities are nurse-owned, the partnership has empowered eight nurses to own their healthcarefacilities and created permanent employment for 31 community members.The eight clinics have, to date, provided more than 136,247 consultations to the communities within which they operate.In addition, a basic ultrasound programme was introduced in 2017 and 2018, in which 57 clinics in the Unjani Clinic Network received ultrasound equipment and the necessary training to provide affordable sonar services to confirm pregnancy and determine gestational age, adds Ndungane-Tlakula. Since then, basic ultrasound services have become a standard practice at all Unjani Clinic facilities and over 90,000 ultrasounds have been recorded.The initiative also provides training programmes to empower nurse-preneurs with the skills to become successful businesswomen, with one nurse, Sister Molly Segobola, who owns a clinic in Hammanskraal, having graduated from the Unjani Clinic five-year Enterprise Developmentprogramme in 2021.Additionally, as many as 13 leaders from the YES programme - a joint venture between government and the private sector - are deployed across Unjani Clinics Pfizer facilities, with three taking part in the Health Promotion Officer Learnership programme through the TDI.Lynda Toussaint, chief executive officer at Unjani Clinics, applauds Pfizers efforts to bolster community healthcare through the Unjani Clinic initiative, stating that, to date, as much as R12.9m in funding has been allocated to the cause.The partnership with Pfizer has provided us with very necessary funding to try and bridge the gap between the often, ineffective facilities in several impoverished communities, and quality medical services and medical interventions. We are thankful for their generosity and commitment and look forward to many more years of improving access to affordable healthcare in communities across South Africa, she says.Initiatives such as Unjani Clinics would only be possible with the dedication of professional nurses, and as the bedrock of the healthcare system, its imperative that society recognise their importance.Nurses do more than merely look after patients while on treatment; they save lives. As the largest profession in the healthcare sector, it isimportant to increase the number of nurses in the country by recognising their importance and empowering them to ensure a vastly improved South African healthcare system for future generations, says Ndungane-Tlakula.
Account Manager (Digital: Media & Data)

Remuneration: cost-to-company Location: Parktown, Johannesburg Education level: Diploma Job level: Mid Own transport required: Yes Job policy: Employment Equity position Type: Permanent Reference: #AMMedia&Data Company: King James

Job description

Responsible for the continued administration of the accounts to ensure that there is a good relationship between client and agency

Liaise with clients, attend client meetings, and write client contact reports

Write briefs and schedule on Chase, work closely with Traffic; Group Client Service (Creative & Production) where necessary

Day to day running of the account and keep reports / briefs / timings up to date and all parties informed

Updating client status documents

Management of the strategy, media planning and buying with assistance of the Account Director

Understand the role of media and mediums and able to review media proposals with the Media department and clients

Review cost estimates with Ops, and present to clients

Work closely with the Account Director on budget control and management of billings

Provide support to Account Director and Digital Media, Data & SEO team

Keep abreast on competitor activity, reviewing and sharing amongst team

Keep abreast with new trends in digital technology in accordance with industry best practice

Quality control assurance

Relevant tertiary qualification in Marketing or Business Management

Proficient in MS Office (i.e., Word / Excel / PowerPoint etc.)

Minimum 3 years working experience as an Account Manager in a Digital Advertising Agency

Campaign Management Experience

Well versed in Digital

A good command of the English language (both written and verbal)

Strong time management skills

Strong administrative skill

Strong multitasking skills (ability to work on multiple briefs at any given time)

Team player with the ability to work independently

Ability to remain calm in a pressurized environment

Ability to receive constructive criticism and advice

Accountable

Deadline driven

Reliable

Resilient

Proactive

Meticulous with attention to detail

Self-starter

Other: Comfortable to work on site (King James office) and comfortable to work on alcohol brands

King James  Part of Accenture Song is currently looking for a proactive, hands-on Account Manager who has a knack for digital media. We are a focused and performance driven team of individuals, who pride themselves on delivering quality work for our clients. We are looking for someone who is loyal, accountable and wants to grow their skillsetInterested in joining the purple blood team? Submit a concise CV to careerskj@kingjames.co.za. Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted. Should you not hear from us within 1 week after submitting your application, kindly consider your application as unsuccessful. Posted on 12 May 16:39, Closing date 31 May
Campaign Manager - Digital/Media/Data

Remuneration: cost-to-company Location: Woodstock, Cape Town Education level: Diploma Job level: Mid/Senior Own transport required: Yes Job policy: Employment Equity position Type: Permanent Reference: #CampManager Company: King James

Job description

Keep abreast with current trends in accordance with industry best practice

Link all clients with Google Analytics to provide more in-depth reporting  heavily dependent on Analytics offering being created; however, they can be responsible to ensure the best tracking possible is utilised (whether it be personally or through someone else implementing it, the ownership/accountability lies with them).

Ensure that wherever possible, conversion tracking is enabled

Keep in contact with Google Int

Keeping current accounts healthy

Liaise with Management on the departments performance

Proficient in Digital Media Planning

Propose new Digital channels for a client when they become available and are relevant

Ability to set KPIs for campaigns and budgets if they are not pre-defined

Conduct research and find the insight in the research for proposals and campaigns

Identify the right audiences and channels for a campaign

Effectively manage media channels to deliver on Cost, Quality, and Timing targets

Creative thinking on campaign execution using multiple Digital media channels

3rd party liaison and booking

Successfully implement social campaign set-ups

Implement media plans

Manage budgets spends accurately

Manage program execution and financial performance while ensuring that we deliver to KPIs

Supply digital assets to 3rd party providers

Monitor campaigns while running and drive enhancements

Conduct pacing on campaigns

Review live data and recommend changes to affect overall campaign performance

Achieve and in most cases exceed KPIs for the business

Proactively use optimisations and insights for future campaigns/iterations

Extract and provide data on Always On and Campaign performance

Derive insights and propose tactics and recommendations

Meet and exceed KPIs and reporting on secondary KPIs

Propose changes and channel experimentation for enhanced results with CRO or Paid Media Specialist team members

Achieve above the industry average on results (CPC, CTR, CPL)

Relevant tertiary qualification in Digital Marketing

Proficient in MS Office (i.e., Word / Excel / PowerPoint etc.)

Minimum 4 years working experience as a Campaign Manager in an Advertising Agency or Digital Advertising Agency

Well versed in Digital (full Digital eco-system)

An understanding and working knowledge of the modern ad operations process

An understanding and working knowledge of standard performance metrics

A record of accurate reporting with world-class insights

An understanding of budget pacing and corrective measures

An understanding of budget allocations and budget management

An understanding of KPI measurement, tracking and optimisations

Working knowledge of creative reviews, critiques, and best practices

Working knowledge of volume / reach research, KPI establishment and measurement

An understanding of UTM tracking parameters and platform pixel usage

Informed knowledge of Websites and UX (for KPI setting on a lead model)

Intimate knowledge of the Google Adwords and media offering across all areas (GDN, PPC, Programmatic, Social) and staying on top of all new offering

Knowledge of programmatic service providers and their offerings

Intimate knowledge of analytics and reporting tools

A good command of the English language (both written and verbal)

Strong time management skills

Strong administrative skill

Strong multitasking skills (ability to work on multiple briefs at any given time)

Strong ability to glean insights from data for reporting purposes

Team player with the ability to work independently

Ability to remain calm in a pressurized environment

Able to receive constructive criticism and advice

Accountable

Deadline driven

Solution driven

Reliable

Resilient

Proactive

Meticulous with attention to detail

Self-starter

Other: Comfortable to work on site (King James office) and comfortable to work on alcohol brands

King James  Part of Accenture Song is currently looking for a skilled Campaign Manager who has a knack for digital media. We are a focused and performance driven team of individuals, who pride themselves on delivering quality work for our clients. We are looking for someone who is loyal, accountable and wants to impart and grow their skillsetMedia Planning:Implementation:Optimisation:Reporting:Interested in joining the purple blood team? Submit a concise CV to careerskj@kingjames.co.za. Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted. Should you not hear from us within 1 week after submitting your application, kindly consider your application as unsuccessful. Posted on 12 May 18:54, Closing date 31 May
Digital Media Strategist

Remuneration: cost-to-company Location: Woodstock, Cape Town Education level: Diploma Job level: Mid/Senior Own transport required: Yes Job policy: Employment Equity position Type: Permanent Reference: #DigMediaStrat Company: King James

Job description

Interrogate and understand client briefs to translate into effective strategies

Build and manage strong client relationships

Work with agency brand strategists, creative and operational teams to ensure Digital Media lens is applied upfront  relationship health drives strength of integration

Attend client briefing sessions - feedback, Q&A and reverts

Develop digital media roadmap for clients that grows digital maturity

Ensure objectives and KPIs are being met or adjusted when necessary, relating to Media Strategies  required to work with Campaign Managers and Paid Media Specialists to track campaign performance against strategy

Where applicable, engage media owners and specialist suppliers to enhance strategy and channel recommendations.

Represent the media team in pitches and compiles relevant documentation to support RFP / new business proposals

Build and strengthen client relationships through knowledge and expertise

Keep abreast on industry trends, new ad formats and digital innovation in accordance with industry best practices

Develop and define the digital media strategies for:

Annual Planning



Campaigns



Always On



Tactical

Present the digital media strategy to client team and deliver on requirements

Demonstrate and show an unrivalled understanding of the digital landscape, industry tools and data interpretation

Ability to set KPIs in accordance with industry benchmarks aligned to client budgets

Audience mapping and segmentation abilities to enable excellent targeting

Research on consumer insights (digital media) and constantly update changes in behaviour

Able to plan with small to large media budgets

Ensure objectives and KPIs are being met or adjusted when necessary, relating to Media Strategies  required to work with Campaign Managers and Paid Media Specialists to track campaign performance against strategy

Where applicable, engage media owners and specialist suppliers to enhance strategy and channel recommendations.

Represent the media team in pitches and compiles relevant documentation to support RFP / new business proposals

Build and strengthen client relationships through knowledge and expertise

Keep abreast on industry trends, new ad formats and digital innovation in accordance with industry best practices

Relevant tertiary qualification

Proficient in MS Office (i.e., Word / Excel / PowerPoint etc.)

Minimum 5 years working experience as a Digital Media Strategist in an Advertising Agency or Digital Advertising Agency

Well versed in Digital (full digital eco-system / digital media landscape)

Strong focus on performance media

In-depth understanding of performance media tactics: Re-marketing / A/B testing / CRO

A good command of the English language (both verbal and written)

Strong time management skills

Strong presentation skills

Strong data analysis and interpretation skills

Strong multitasking skills (ability to work on multiple briefs at any given time)

Understand the creative agency process and partners to develop high performing campaigns

Team player with the ability to work independently

Ability to remain calm in a pressurized environment

Able to receive constructive criticism and advice

Creative

Accountable

Deadline driven

Solution driven

Reliable

Resilient

Proactive

Meticulous with attention to detail

Other: Comfortable work on site (King James office) and comfortable to work on alcohol brands

King James  part of Accenture Song is currently looking for a Digital Media Strategist to join their Media & Data team. The purpose of the Digital Media Strategist is to develop an in depth understanding of the clients business and marketing goals and translate channel strategies into focused KPI objectives. It is imperative that the Digital Media Strategist builds key relationships within clients businesses to drive digital media spend competencies.Interested in joining the purple blood team? Submit a concise CV to careerskj@kingjames.co.za. Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted. Should you not hear from us within 1 week after submitting your application, kindly consider your application as unsuccessful. Posted on 12 May 19:43, Closing date 31 May
It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.

 Sage of Baltimore, H.L. Mencken

Celebrated White House Press Secretary, full-on Slay Queen, and notorious Swamp creature Jen Psaki officially announced her departure on May 5th.

Word of her exit was met with a chorus of fawning thank you for everything and good lucks from her adoring fanbase  the journalists ostensibly tasked with asking her tough questions.

Psaki will take up a new job as a talking head at MSNBC, to cash out millions on her government service. To boot, shell almost certainly nab a multi-million-dollar, tell-all memoir book deal about her stunning bravery standing up to MAGA terrorists and misogynist trolls.

Thats how the Deep State/corporate media-industrial complex revolving door works.

What spectacle of corruption the American people have laid bare before them is a shameless, open-air circle jerk.

There is no longer even the veneer of separation between the state and the media tasked with holding the state to account.

The media, in theory, should function as independent and adversarial to the state as a check on institutional power  the sole justification for its existence.

But what happens when the media is the state?



Psakis replacement is a woman of color named Karine Jean-Pierre. Psaki essentially admitted in her hand-off lovefest press conference that Jean-Pierre is a diversity hire:

So, I just want to take the opportunity to celebrate and congratulate my friend, my colleague, my partner in truth, Karine Jean-Pierre, the next White House Press Secretary

First , as you all know, she will be the first Black woman , the first out LGBTQ+ person to serve in this role, which is amazing, because representation matters . And she is going to  she will give a voice to so many.

Jean-Pierres immutable characteristics, which are not accomplishments, are what Psaki led with in her introduction.

Note the emphasis. Psaki didnt say Jean-Pierre is eminently qualified, a consummate professional, etc.  plus shes a sacred Person of Color lesbian immigrant, so thats a bonus.

Instead of prioritizing Jean-Pierres qualifications, vapid identity stuff came first and foremost.

To paraphrase: Your most impressive feature  the singular reason we handpicked you  is on account of your skin color and your genitalia and who you grant access to that genitalia.

How insulting!

On the LGBTQ4GF150+++ front, Jean-Pierre is a lesbian. Her partner is CNN talking head Suzanne Malveaux. Chances are, once Jean-Pierre gets done shilling for the Biden administration, shell join Malveaux in the CNN studio if MSNBC doesnt scoop her up first.

They met at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in North Carolina.

And you thought incest was illegal in the civilized world!



Check out Jean-Pierres opining moralizations when asked what her new appointment means  as if climbing the slimy government hierarchy, sacrificing whatever integrity you had to begin with at each step, is some grand exercise in virtue:

You know, I used to teach college students And they would ask me How did you get to where you got to? And I would say to them Follow your passion. Follow what you believe in  And, yes, youll be knocked down and youll have some tough times. And it wont be easy all the time, but the rewards are pretty amazing , especially if you stay true to yourself .

Gag me with a spoon!

The only thing that slithering into the position of chief WH propagandist proves is that one is willing to tell even the most outrageous lie with a straight face. And even beyond just maintaining a straight face, delivering calculated lies with an air of unearned moral superiority.

Jean-Pierre probably couldve made an honest living selecting any one of thousands of career paths that didnt require manipulating unsuspecting marks as task #1 in the job description.

How many bombings of poor brown People of Color overseas  whom she purports to represent  will Jean-Pierre justify from that podium in the coming years in the name of national security?

How many sleazy Wall St. talking points, penned by Bidens handlers, will she regurgitate on cue from her pre-written talking-point notecards like a good girl?

How many Orwellian Constitutional abuses will she cheerlead from her bully pulpit in the name of The Science or public health or equitable speech or whatever fashionable think tank contrivance de jour?

How many logical inconsistencies will she utter, unchallenged, from that perch in service of mopping up whatever remains of American civil liberties?

Ben Bartee is a Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Follow his stuff via Armageddon Prose, Substack, Patreon, Gab, and Twitter. Please support his independent operations however you can.

Bitcoin public address: 14gU3aHBXkNq8bDqmibfnubV7kSJqfx5LX
For all the people outside the UK who dont understand what the Queens Speech actually is, its a farcical state occasion in which the Queen (or, in this case, Prince Charles since her majesty is ill/secretly dead/having mobility issues) makes a speech about what her government intends to do for the next 12 months.The Queens Speech was interesting this year.

Of course, the Queen doesnt actually write the speech, or have any input on its content, or have any control at all over what her government intends to do. Shes just a mouthpiece in a big gold hat.

Its the UK equivalent of the State of the Union, only done in Halloween costumes made out of shiny stolen rocks.

The whole thing is nothing but a grand, gilt statement of intent from the British Deep State, wrapped in mink and draped in medals they never earned. Its a joke, but it is worth listening to.

Or, if you have a sensitive stomach, you can just read the full text the next day on the UK governments website (thats what I do).

A lot of the content is entirely predictable.

More money to Ukraine, with a promise the UK will lead the way in championing security around the world. More online censorship via the Online Safety Bill. A compulsory register for homeschooled children via the Schools Reform Bill.

Theres also mention of securing the constitution by introducing the UKs own Bill of Rights. We broke down that particular Trojan Horse back in February.

But the part I found most interesting is the stated plan to encourage agricultural and scientific innovation at home via the proposed Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill.

The proposed bill (which, for some reason is not available through the parliament website) follows on from DEFRAs announced loosened regulation of genetic research back in January.

To quote the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB), the legislation would take certain precision breeding techniques out of the scope of restrictive GMO rules.

Essentially, this would see new gene-edited foods as distinct from old-fashioned genetically modified foods, and therefore not subject to the same rules and oversight.

The claimed distinction is that gene editing, as opposed to genetic modification, doesnt introduce DNA from other species. Therefore, in effect, is merely speeding up what could potentially naturally happen over time.

Now, you might think this is just semantics, and that such a law will just provide a loophole for ALL genetically modified foods to simply rebrand themselves as genetically edited foods, and thereby avoid regulation. But that is disgustingly cynical and shame on you for even thinking it.

All in all, this is pretty on-message stuff, and not especially surprising. Whats noteworthy is  by pure happenstance, Im sure  it appears to coincide with a renewed push on the GM food front in other countries all over the world.

In December 2021, Switzerland added an amendment to its moratorium on GMO crops, permitting the use of certain gene editing techniques.

Last month, Egypt announced their new strain of GM wheat. Just two days ago, Ethiopias National Agricultural Biotechnology Research Center announced they had researched, and the country will now be growing, genetically modified cotton and maize.

Despite Russias sweeping ban on the cultivation and/or importing of genetically modified crops, they have nonetheless created a 111 billion Ruble project to create up to 30 varieties of genetically edited plants and farm animals.

Britains deregulation of GM food is always described as a post-Brexit move  with the EU chided around the world for its precautionary principle on GM crops  and yet as long ago as last April, the EU was calling for a rethink on GM crops.

In fact, just today, European Biotechnology Magazine reports:

The EU Commission has launched its final consultation on the deregulation of new breeding techniques in agriculture

WHY THIS? WHY NOW?

So, were seeing a sudden increase in the variety of GM crops available and a simultaneous push for deregulation of the industry in Western nations.

Why would they be doing this now?

Well, there is a food crisis.

Or, more accurately, they have just created a food crisis. And as the cliched Hegelian dialectic inevitably goes, their manufactured problem is now in need of their contrived solution.

We should expect to see genetic engineering pitched as a solution to our food crisis in the very near futurelike yesterday. Or indeed, two months ago.

Thats how fast they work now, with barely a pretence at concealing the plan. Spitting out the answer so fast they make it obvious they knew the question beforehand.

On March 15th, when the special operation in Ukraine was less than 3 weeks old, the Time was already headlining:

War forces farmers to think again about GM crops

and reporting:

Genetic modification could make Britains food system less susceptible to geopolitical turmoil

A week later Verdict published an article titled Improving food self-sufficiency with GM crops during geopolitical crises

Last week, the Times of Israel asked:

Can gene editing help farmers satisfy the rising demand for food?

Four days ago, the Manila Times published an article titled In times of food scarcity: Revisiting genetically modified crops.

Two days ago (so before the Queens speech specifically mentioning the gene editing bill), Scotlands Press & Journal ran an opinion piece headlined: Scottish Government must lift GM crop ban to ease cost of living crisis.

Yesterday, the information services company IHS Markit published an article on GM regulation in Europe, in which they claimed:

The Ukraine-Russia conflict has demonstrated the fragility and vulnerability of global and European food supply chains. Around the world, governments in leading agricultural-producing countries are now catching up with the United States, both to better legislate gene-edited (GE) products, as well as differentiate them from the older Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) technology, and its negative connotations to some consumers, commentators, farmers, retailers, politicians and lawmakers.

And just today, the Genetic Literacy Project published an article by Ukrainian-Canadian David Zaruk, railing against the EUs precautionary principle on GMOs and calling for an embracing of new technology to prevent widespread hunger and increase food sovereignty.

It goes on and on and on.

LETS NOT FORGET CLIMATE CHANGE, GUYS

Of course, its not all about the food crisis  giving corporate giants free rein to genetically alter all the food we eat will also be good for the planet. They talk about that a lot recently.

On February 8th this year, the University of Bonn published a new study claiming Genetic engineering can have a positive effect on the climate

On February 24th this year, the Cornell-based NGO Alliance for Science published an article claiming GMOs could shrink Europes climate footprint, based on the study mentioned above.

In a response to the Queens Speech, the UKs National Institute of Agriculture and Botany claimed that genetic modification will make farming more sustainable.

In a reminder were not just talking about crops but genetically engineering livestock as well, in February Deutsche Welle suggested that genetically altered Climate sheep and eco pigs could combat global heating.

Three weeks ago, Stuff.NZ asked simply:

Can GM save the planet?

The narrative is clearly set: Genetically engineered food will save us all from the food crisis, and global warming too. Plus anything else they can think of.

THE KNIVES ARE OUT FOR ORGANICS

Not content with the semi-constant fluffing of the GM business, the MSM are also turning their guns on organic farming and giving it both barrels.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Ukraine Crisis Reveals the Folly of Organic Farming: As food prices skyrocket, the world needs to admit it cant live without modern, efficient agriculture.

The Telegraph blames organic farming policies for tipping Sri Lanka into bloody chaos

The Allliance for Science article mentioned above goes out of its way to criticise the EUs pro-organic farm to fork plans, claiming [organic farming] has lower yields and would be associated with increases in global [greenhouse gas] emissions by causing land-use changes elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Erik Fyrwald, the CEO of the Swiss agrochemicals group Syngenta (so possessing somewhat of a conflict of interests), told Swiss newspaper NZZ am Sonntag that the West must stop organic farming to help future food crisis, adding that organic farming is worse for the planet, because ploughing up fields releases more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

We already saw wellness cults accused of peddling anti-vax conspiracy theories last year, this will easily extend to organic farmers and their customers.

NOTE: In an interesting (again, probably totally accidental) parallel, the currently simmering Bird Flu outbreak has also hit organic and free-range farmers hard, with one (sponsored) Guardian article asking if year-round bird flu could spell the end of free-range eggs.

CONCLUSION

Having just seen how the Covid19 vaccine campaign unfolded, its not hard to see how the pro-GM push will go from here. Genome-edited crops and farm animals are going to become the new settled science.

They will be sold to the public as cheaper, more nutritious, better for the environment and good for preventing future pandemics (yes, they literally did say that already).

Naturally, anyone who resists the push for gene-edited food, and/or mourns the planned death of organic farming, will be accused of questioning the science.

Eating British GM foods will be doing your part and helping Ukraine, while people who want more expensive organic products will be deemed unpatriotic or selfish.

Just as we saw Covid sceptics denounced as spreading Russian disinformation, despite Russias willing complicity in the Covid lie, those who argue against genome-edited food will be said to be sharing Russian talking points or doing Putins work for him despite Russia being well onboard the gene-editing train.

It all gets very predictable from there. Organic farmers will probably be anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist Russian spies by the end of the summer.

This probably explains why Bill Gates was buying up so much farmland last year, too.


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 EDITORS NOTE: This story contains graphic elements that may be upsetting to some readers.

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FILE Ex-massage therapist Michael Petrowski was sentenced to more than four years in prison Wednesday after pleading guilty to sexual assault.

 EDITORS NOTE: This story contains graphic elements that may be upsetting to some readers.

Disgraced massage therapist Michael Petrowski was sentenced to 50 months in prison on Wednesday after pleading guilty to 11 counts of sexual assault last summer.

The verdict was handed down by Judge Patrick Sullivan, who addressed Petrowski directly in a Brandon courtroom during sentencing.

Sullivan spent the bulk of his opening statement recounting the 57-year-olds various offences, which all took place in his capacity as a local massage therapist.

Petrowski was initially arrested on Nov. 29, 2019, after two women told police he made inappropriate comments while touching them in a sexual manner.

Following the initial reports, six more women made allegations of similar incidents between February and August 2019, with some additional victims coming forward at a later date.

By February 2020, more than a dozen complaints had been filed against Petrowski. The massage therapist eventually pleaded guilty to 11 counts of sexual assault in July 2021.

"These assaults all involved touching and fondling breasts of the victims in a sexual manner," Sullivan said on Wednesday. "Many of the victims describe Mr. Petrowski coming uncomfortably close to their genital and anal regions."

However, the judge reminded the court that count No. 11 is the most serious of these charges, since it involved Petrowski penetrating the victim with his fingers.

Sullivan said he had to consider several mitigating factors when determining a sentence.

A variable was the severe emotional and psychological distress Petrowski had inflicted on the complainants, which was made apparent during the reading of several victim impact statements in past court appearances.

"The victim impact statements detailed the shame, depression and anxiety left in the wake of the assaults," Sullivan said.

"The ability of these victims to trust others and to feel safe and secure in their personal lives has been significantly undermined. The long-term impact of these assaults is difficult to gauge, but certainly the memory of these incidents will be with the victims for the rest of their lives."

Additionally, the judge said he had to consider the fact that Petrowski used his position as a massage therapist to repeatedly take advantage of women who were "often vulnerable and in a state of undress."

"Mr. Petrowskis behaviour was predatory," Sullivan said. "This was not a one-time crime of opportunity. This was a sustained pattern of Mr. Petrowski taking advantage of his clients in a vulnerable state and, in my view, this raises his moral culpability."

Sullivan also consulted with related case law in determining Petrowskis sentence, including the recent Supreme Court of Canada decision in R. v. Friesen.

"The court in Friesen specifically stated it is an error to assume that an assault that involves touching is inherently less physically intrusive than an assault that involves fellatio, cunnilingus or penetration," he said.

"As stated in Friesen, sexual violence that does not involve penetration is not relatively benign and is still extremely serious."

Despite his condemnation of Petrowskis actions, Sullivans 50-month sentence is a reduction of the 60 months (or five years) that was recommended by Crown attorney Andrew Sieklicki back in March.

Sullivan said the reduced sentence is partially because of Petrowskis guilty plea, which prevented the victims in the case from having to go through a preliminary inquiry and a trial.

In Sullivans eyes, Petrowski has displayed genuine remorse through his admission of guilt and participation in seven hours of professional counselling.

"This is, in and of itself, not a significant amount of time spent in treatment and much of this time, it seems, was dedicated to completing a variety of diagnostic assessments, as opposed to rehabilitative efforts," the judge said.

"Nevertheless, I am of the view that the voluntary engagement of counselling services and the comments of the assessor corroborate that Mr. Petrowskis remorse is genuine."

Petrowski did not have a criminal record before these charges were brought before him.

However, Sullivan said his final decision was not swayed by certain arguments made by defence attorney Saul Simmonds, who suggested in the past that the judge should consider the broader social impact harsh sentencing will have on Petrowskis life outside of prison.

"Of course, what else could Mr. Petrowski have expected?" Sullivan said on Wednesday. "What other outcome could have flowed from assaulting nearly a dozen women in a small community through the abuse of a position of trust? These are the natural collateral consequences of this type of offending."

While Petrowski appeared in court on Wednesday, he did not provide any remarks to Sullivan or his victims more broadly.

During a previous court appearance in March, the former massage therapist did publicly apologize to his victims, stating "I cannot say Im sorry enough."

On top of this 50-month sentence, Sullivan also slapped Petrowski with a 10-year weapons prohibition and clarified that he must register as a sex offender.

 kdarbyson@brandonsun.com

 Twitter:@KyleDarbyson
The federal government is moving to improve access to abortion and reproductive health information in Canada.

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The federal government is moving to improve access to abortion and reproductive health information in Canada.

Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos announced on Wednesday more than $3.5 million in funding for two initiatives that are involved with reproductive health.

Action Canada will receive $2.1 million over three years to improve information and referral services. The funding will also be used to cover some travel and accommodation costs for people seeking abortions.

The National Abortion Federation Canada will get $1.4 million in funding also over three years to train health-care providers to perform abortions and ensure facilities have the capacity to provide the service.

"These investments reflect our belief that women and women alone have the right to make decisions about their bodies, as well as our unequivocal commitment to ensure comprehensive and accessible reproductive health care for all in Canada," Duclos said.

This is not new funding, he said. Its coming from a $45-million commitment over three years that was announced in the latest federal budget.

"In 2022, in this country, sexual and reproductive rights are human rights  plain and simple," said Duclos. "The situation now ongoing in the United States does remind us that we cannot take our rights for granted."

Last week, a leaked draft of a U.S. Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, a decision that legalized abortion across the country, brought the contentious procedure back into the spotlight.

While that is an American legal issue, Canadas Women and Gender Equality Minister Marci Ien said she has grave concerns about the draft opinion and what it could mean for women.

"Many of the women that Ive talked to, some had to pause, just to reflect on the information because it was hard to look at that. Canadian women know, and they know well, that its important to protect this."

In the Liberals last election platform, the party promised to establish regulations under the Canada Health Act to ensure access to reproductive services across the country.

Ien said those same abortion services would be accessible to American women, but they will have to pay for it themselves either out of pocket or through private insurance.

Seven more announcements related to the fund will be made in the coming months, but Duclos did not elaborate. This commitment promises to fund efforts to increase accessibility for vulnerable populations, train people to provide the service, create public awareness campaigns and provide logistical support to people who have to travel long distances to access abortion services.

"What is the point of having a right to something that is impossible to access?" said Frederique Chabot, director of health promotion for Action Canada. "Making sure abortion is accessible to everyone is the conversation that matters."

In earlier comments, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said after the draft opinion was leaked, he asked Duclos and Ien to look at the legal framework around abortion to be sure that reproductive rights for women are protected now and into the future.

Currently, there is no federal law in Canada governing access to abortion. Former Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney attempted to pass legislation on abortion after the Supreme Courts 1988 R. v. Morgentaler decision, but failed. In a 5-2 decision, written by Chief Justice Brian Dickson, the court ruled that Section 251 of the Criminal Code  which banned abortions except those approved by a committee of doctors  violated Section 7 of the charter, which guarantees the right to life, liberty and the security of the person.

The Sun contacted the local Womens Resource Centre and the Sexuality Education Resource Centre for comment but didnt receive a response by press time.

 kmckinley@brandonsun.com, with files from The Canadian Press

 Twitter: @karenleighmcki1
More than 500 Peguis First Nation flood evacuees will arrive in Brandon by Friday with assistance from the Canadian Red Cross and the Wiijiwan BEAR committee.

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CHELSEA KEMP/THE BRANDON SUN Around 500 Peguis First Nation flood evacuees are expected to arrive in Brandon by Friday.

More than 500 Peguis First Nation flood evacuees will arrive in Brandon by Friday with assistance from the Canadian Red Cross and the Wiijiwan BEAR committee.

Lisa Ramsay of the Elspeth Reid Family Resource Centre and Tammy Hossack of the Brandon Friendship Centre and Brandon Bear Clan were on hand at the Victoria Inn Imperial ballroom Wednesday to help evacuees seeking haven in Brandon. The duo are members of the Wiijiwan BEAR (Brandon Evacuee Aboriginal Responders), a network of Indigenous and community services that assist those evacuated to Brandon.

"There was a need for an additional support system for folks that are visiting our community for a time," Ramsay said. "A lot of people come in an emergency situation and because of the stress and the trauma of their experience, they might forget certain items at home."

Wiijiwan BEAR includes the Brandon Friendship Centre, Brandon Bear Clan Patrol, Brandon Urban Aboriginal Peoples Council, St. Matthews Anglican Church, Elspeth Reid Family Resource Centre and the Salvation Army, who are working to support those displaced by disasters. The committee is partnering with the Red Cross to add a layer of culturally based information and support.

A state of emergency was declared in the Peguis community on April 28 due to flooding. Peguis chief and council issued a flood warning for the week of May 9 based on the rain forecast. A mandatory evacuation remains in effect for all residents. To date, around 1,900 nation members have fled the community.

The Wiijiwan BEAR had less than 24 hours to prepare for the Peguis arrivals this week.

"We organize amongst ourselves and because weve done it a few times now, we know what people typically want or need," Ramsay said. "Were just trying to be as accessible and as helpful as possible. We want this to be as warm as a reception as we can possibly provide."

Wiijiwan BEAR launched in 2017 to provide boots-on-the-ground cultural support in times of crisis. The group saw there was a need for additional aid for evacuees and worked to bring together a network of people to provide essential resources.

"We have to do things to show that we care," Ramsay said.

The committee is working with the Peguis communitys leaders to provide adequate care.

"We follow their lead," Hossack said.

It has been powerful to see what local agencies can do for people when they join forces, she said. At times, it can feel like theyre working in silos, but the Wiijiwan BEAR committee offers a chance to think outside the box by bringing unique people together to share the workload and resources.

"Well do good work if we work together. Thats a nice side-effect of this," Ramsay said.

The city is in the early stages of the Peguis evacuation, Ramsay said, and there is an atmosphere of stress, shock and exhaustion from those arriving in Brandon. People are typically tired when they walk through the doors of a hotel due to the travels they have undertaken and the trauma of leaving their homes.

"We all feel safer and better when were at home and connected to our own people in our own home communities. When you are separated from that, when you are forced from that, its extraordinarily stressful," Ramsay said.

"Everyone is still positive, happy and friendly, and its a tough time. The resilience of people is amazing," Hossack added.

Requests for donations and updates on the situation can be found on the Wiijiwan Facebook page. Donations can be dropped off at the Elspeth Reid Family Resource Centre or the Brandon Friendship Centre.

As of Wednesday, evacuees are filling 50 hotel rooms in Brandon, said Canadian Red Cross spokesperson Jason Small.

The city was selected as a hub based on the availability of hotel rooms. Red Cross staff and volunteers aiding in the evacuation are a mix of people from Brandon, Winnipeg and other parts of Canada.

The non-profit works with the federal governments Indigenous Services to provide disaster support to any First Nation in Manitoba that requests aid. The Red Cross is activated when the community makes the decision to evacuate and, in some cases, will help co-ordinate transportation out of the area.

The Red Cross sets up hotels for people and ensures three meals a day are available to evacuees. A reception centre is on hand where people can register for available support and resources. Small said evacuees need to be registered with the Red Cross to access all available supports and can also pick up supplies.

The Red Cross works with different community organizations like Wiijiwan BEAR and local tribal councils to connect with resources in the community during times of crisis.

"Wiijiwan has been a great partner for a number of years now in helping us provide support," Small said. "They do work very closely with our team to provide whatever extra supports community members need."

 ckemp@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @The_ChelseaKemp
A flight carrying 300 Ukrainian refugees to Winnipeg from Warsaw, Poland, will arrive on May 23, the federal government announced Wednesday.

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A flight carrying 300 Ukrainian refugees to Winnipeg from Warsaw, Poland, will arrive on May 23, the federal government announced Wednesday.

The refugees arrival was announced by Premier Heather Stefanson on Tuesday, but no date had been set.

Westman Immigrant Services said it is ready to welcome any refugees that settle in the area, but the organization is still waiting for information on who will be arriving on the flight and where they will be sent.

Ukraine has been fending off a military invasion by Russian forces since Feb. 24, when soldiers crossed into the country through Belarus from the north, Crimea from the south and the cities of Luhansk and Donetsk in the southeast.

That plane will be the first of three heading from Poland to Canada, with further flights arriving in Montreal on May 29 and in Halifax on June 2.

In a media release, federal Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Minister Sean Fraser said spaces on the flights are being made available to people approved through the Canada-Ukraine authorization for emergency travel program on a first-come, first-served basis.

Once arrived, the refugees who have not made arrangements will be provided with 14 days of accommodations.

As was announced Tuesday, the refugees arriving in Manitoba will be transported to the provinces Ukrainian Refugee Reception Centre to co-ordinate the settlement process. The province reports that more than 340 people from Ukraine have been through the centre thus far.

Speaking to the Sun on Wednesday, Westman Immigrant Services community outreach manager Hannah Holt said she believes some of those refugees will end up in Westman. However, the organization is still waiting to receive information on who will be arriving and where theyll be sent.

"Were always ready to receive any newcomers: Ukrainian, Syrian, Afghanistan, anybody," she said.

"With that flight in particular and the announcement today, its going to be on a first-come, first-served basis, so anyone whos approved for the queue at visa will get contacted by [Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada] with information on how to register. I dont think communication has even started yet, so we dont even know where theyre planning on going. But as soon as we start filling those seats and if theyre going to be coming to Brandon or any one of our regional locations, were ready."

To date, Holt said there are records of WIS assisting approximately eight families from Ukraine to settle across Westman with paperwork for a few more still being processed.

If and when more refugees are settled in Westman, Holt said WIS and its partners at organizations like Tryzub have their arms wide open to welcome them.

Should any assistance or resources be needed for incoming refugees, WIS will let locals know through its social media pages.

Tryzub, which is Brandons local Ukrainian-Canadian organization, announced through its Facebook group on Wednesday that a solidarity rally for Ukraine will be held at 4 p.m. Sunday at Brandon City Hall.

Participants are encouraged to wear vyshyvanka (Ukrainian embroidered shirts) and bring blue and yellow accessories.

 cslark@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @ColinSlark
SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  South Korea says North Korea has fired a total of three short-range ballistic missiles toward the sea.

FILE - This photo distributed by the North Korean government shows what it says is a test-fire of a Hwasong-17 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), at an undisclosed location in North Korea on March 24, 2022. Independent journalists were not given access to cover the event depicted in this image distributed by the North Korean government. The content of this image is as provided and cannot be independently verified. Korean language watermark on image as provided by source reads: "KCNA" which is the abbreviation for Korean Central News Agency. Yoon Suk Yeol takes office as South Korea's president Tuesday, May 10 amid heightened animosities over North Korea's nuclear program. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP, File)

SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  South Korea says North Korea has fired a total of three short-range ballistic missiles toward the sea.

South Koreas Joint Chiefs of Staff says the three missiles launched from the Norths capital region on Thursday afternoon flew toward the waters off the countrys eastern coast.

The launches came just hours after North Korea confirmed its first case of the coronavirus since the pandemic began.

They could underscore North Koreas determination to press ahead with its efforts to expand its arsenal despite the virus outbreak to rally support behind the leader, Kim Jong Un, and keep up pressure on its rivals amid long-dormant nuclear diplomacy.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. APs earlier story is below:

North Korea fired a suspected ballistic missile toward the sea on Thursday, South Korea and Japan said, in the latest of a series of weapons demonstrations this years and just hours after it confirmed its first case of the coronavirus since the pandemic began.

Japan's Defense Ministry said the projectile fired by North Korea was a possible ballistic missile. It gave no other details.

South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a brief statement that the missile flew toward North Korea's eastern waters. It also gave no details.

Earlier Thursday, North Korean state media confirmed the countrys first COVID-19 infections as leader Kim Jong Un ordered nationwide lockdowns to slow the spread of the virus. Kim also ordered officials to bolster the countrys defense posture to avoid any security vacuum.

North Korea has test-launched a spate of missiles this year in an apparent attempt to put pressure on its rivals amid stalled nuclear diplomacy. Some experts say that despite the elevated anti-virus steps, North Korea would likely continue its weapons tests to try to strengthen national unity.

Thursdays launch was North Koreas 16th round of tests this year. They have included the Norths first test of an intercontinental ballistic missile since 2017, and there are also signs that the North is preparing to conduct its first nuclear test in five years at a remote testing ground in its northeast.
Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Book critics Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll cast their eyes over recent fiction and non-fiction releases. Here are their reviews. Fiction pick of the week Credit: City on Fire

Don Winslow, HarperCollins, $32.99 Don Winslows latest gangster novel has a timeless gloss and the ambit of tragedy. City on Fire takes us back to 1980s New England, where two organised crime empires  one Irish, one Italian  have formed an alliance to control illicit trade. The peace between them crumbles with the arrival of a beautiful woman, a Helen of Troy whose presence sets jealousy aflame. Danny is a cool-headed, middle-ranking member on the Irish side. He longs to go straight, but life has other plans. As violence escalates and the body count rises, he is drawn into ruthless leadership and must find a strategy to help his family survive the brutal gangland war that no one seems able to prevent. Soon he controls a criminal dynasty that stretches from Rhode Island to Vegas and Hollywood. Winslow has written an organised crime saga that sits somewhere between the intimate and the epic, between Mystic River and The Godfather, and stands with the best in its genre.

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Credit: Sister Stardust

Jane Green, Fiction HQ, $29.99 Talitha Getty was a 1960s It girl, actress and socialite, doomed to an early grave by the age of 30, probably from a drug overdose. You couldnt ask for a better celebrity to hitch to a nostalgia trip into the Swinging Sixties, and Jane Greens Sister Stardust invents a now elderly widow, Claire, who was long ago swept up in her world. The novel is a shamelessly starstruck piece of froth that name-drops constantly  Talitha attracted everyone from the Rolling Stones to Rudolf Nureyev  and it homes in on the period where Talitha held debauched court from a palace in Marrakesh with her oil tycoon husband John Paul Getty jnr. Her tragic end comes after she tries to get clean: Talitha didnt live long enough to become a triumph of style over substance abuse, to quote Marianne Faithfull, who survived those years. Green touches on abuse and self-sabotage in the free love and Bohemian drug culture, but theres little emotional heft and the authors shallow, gossipy style makes it more of a breathless confection for Boomers than anything. Credit: The Improbable Life of Ricky Bird

Diane Connell, Simon & Schuster, $32.99

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Ricky Bird is a 12-year-old tomboy who escapes into stories when her real life is turned upside down. Her parents have divorced and she moves with her mother into a London council flat, where she draws unwanted attention from her mums new boyfriend. Meanwhile, her young brother Ollie has become terribly sick, and her mum is too distracted by the anxieties of that to notice what is happening to her daughter. The onset of puberty heightens Rickys turmoil, but her dauntless spirit and outlandish imagination provide a refuge from the bleak realities she faces, and sometimes the children in this novel seem wiser than the adults. Ollie is an old soul; Ricky  as one adult recognises  is a writer at heart, and her vivid narration buoys a novel through dark and desperate undercurrents. The Improbable Life of Ricky Bird has been compared to Curious Incident and Shuggie Bain, and its true that Diane Connell lends unique voice to a child struggling to make sense of an adult world. Credit: The Natural History of Love

Caroline Petit, Affirm Press, $32.99 A bitter inheritance trial in Melbourne in 1902 sets the stage for Caroline Petits well-researched and vividly imagined historical romance, where truth is every bit as strange as fiction. In Brazil, 1852, 16-year-old Carolina Fonceca lives on a remote sugar plantation when a beguiling stranger comes into her life and changes it forever. The French consul, the Count de Castelnau, has fallen desperately ill on a naturalist expedition and takes time to recuperate with Carolinas family. They share a passion for evolutionary science, and fall in love, but the count already has a wife and children in France. Rather than face disgrace in their homelands, false identities are assumed, and a new life begins in colonial-era Melbourne.

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Its a gambit that a wily lawyer must uncover decades later if hes to win a large inheritance from the Fonceca clan for his client. Petit doesnt seem entirely in command of fictional technique and style, but the true story is so fascinating that it holds your attention anyway. Non-fiction pick of the week Credit: The Matter of Everything

Suzie Sheehy, Bloomsbury $29.99 You may not know what a particle accelerator is, or, the more formidably named particle collider (they smash atoms so that scientists can observe what happens), but you will be familiar with how particle physics effects everyday life, especially in medicine  CT scanners, for instance. Physicist Suzie Sheehy (Oxford and Melbourne universities), in this fascinating and highly readable study, takes us through the last hundred years of the great quest of physics (to understand matter, the stuff were made of) and how it behaves  from Wilhelm Rontgens accidental discovery of X-rays and the ripple effect of that, to the contemporary conclusion that only 5 per cent of matter is known, the rest being dark matter. Sheehy, who examines 12 pivotal discoveries, is a rare beast in that she is not only an expert but a first-rate communicator.

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Credit: am I black enough for you?

Anita Heiss, Vintage $34.99 When Anita Heiss was young she was often asked how she could be Indigenous when her father was Austrian  something that stayed with her into adulthood when her aboriginality was questioned in the media in 2009, leading to the first edition of am I black enough for you? Ten years on, this is the revised, updated version. Its a combination of memoir and statement, often focusing on identity and Australias fixation with it. In many ways, in going back through her family history  Indigenous mother, European father, Catholic education, country and urban upbringing, among other things  this amounts to a portrait of the complex nature of identity that defies simplistic reduction, Heiss equally at home with her Indigenous heritage and personal sacred sites like Maroubra beach, as she meditates on Gustav Klimt in Vienna. Credit: Accidental Gods

Anna Della Subin, Granta $39.99 Columbus didnt set out to be deified, but he was mistaken for a god by the islanders he encountered when his ship arrived in the Pacific as if descended from heaven. Along with Cook, who was greeted as a god when he arrived at Hawaii (but who made the fatal mistake of returning), they were accidental gods. Men, often as not white imperialists, deified.

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The Essex Serpent



Apple TV+

At the end of the 19th century the natural sciences, in which there had been major developments in the preceding decades, were the height of fashion, and hobbies such as collecting fossils were in vogue among the middle classes. But when wealthy Londoner Cora Seaborne (Claire Danes) is left a relieved widow when abusive husband dies, and suddenly free to devote herself to amateur palaeontology, even those who support her progressive leanings  Dr Luke Garrett (Frank Dillane), an ambitious pioneer in the burgeoning heart surgery field, and her socialist maid and companion Martha (Hayley Squires)  are taken aback. But after reading a newspaper article about sightings of a sea dragon in Essex, packs up her autistic son Francis, her books and her fossil collection and promptly heads to rural Essex.

Claire Danes and Tom Hiddleston in The Essex Serpent.

On the bleak marshes, the villagers believe a recent earthquake has released a winged serpent (loosely based on a real 17th-century legend), which has come to punish them for their sins (serpents were hot in Victorian times). When a local girls body is found washed up in the estuary the community is gripped with fear; theyre still somewhat pagan in these parts, and soon villagers are hanging skinned moles from trees and keeping night fires burning to ward off the serpent.

Cora, having read the works of Darwin, is convinced the beast might be a surviving plesiosaur that has escaped extinction, and is determined to teach the locals some rational science. Then she meets the scholarly Reverend William Ransome (Tom Hiddleston), and theres some instant Victorian-era chemistry between them, despite their clash of science and faith; William isnt pleased with the locals superstitious beliefs, but neither does he want Cora telling them the serpent may be real, even if it might have a logical explanation. He sees religion as providing security to his anxious parishioners  and the study of geology and evolution as a fad.
Actor Craig McLachlan has denied giving false evidence to his defamation case after he claimed he had never used a particular vulgarism to refer to women  and was then shown a limerick to suggest he did.

McLachlan, 56, is suing the ABC and The Sydney Morning Herald in the NSW Supreme Court over an investigation published in January 2018 which alleged he harassed female performers during the 2014 stage production of The Rocky Horror Show.

Craig McLachlan arrives at the Supreme Court this week with his wife Vanessa Scammell. Credit:Oscar Colman

He is also suing actor Christie Whelan Browne, who appeared in the stories. The media organisations and Whelan Browne have argued the defences of truth and contextual truth, with 11 witnesses to give evidence that they were harassed by McLachlan.

On Thursday, McLachlan was cross-examined by the media organisations barrister about a comment he apparently made during the tour, that Whelan Browne was a c--- who would not be coming back from medical leave.
Victorias health minister has blamed federal government neglect for mounting pressure on the states hospitals and their workforce, warning the strain on the healthcare system is simply untenable without Commonwealth investment.

Martin Foley said the situation was expected to worsen in winter as cases of COVID-19 and influenza rise, with medical colleges and unions repeatedly sounding the alarm on staff burnout and warning that Victoria is on the edge of a mass departure of healthcare workers.

What we need is hard commitments to deal with the mounting funding challenges, he said, accusing Canberra of deliberately and willfully ignoring the ongoing pressure placed on health services by the pandemic.

The total silence from the Commonwealth government around health funding in this election campaign has been beyond disappointing.
However, he strongly warned against leaving patients in corridors where there was no oxygen, power, monitoring or call bells for them to ring if they were in pain. Weve got to put the patients at the centre of all this, Khorshid said. On Thursday Victorian Health Minister Martin Foley blamed federal government neglect for the mounting pressure on the states hospitals and their workforce, warning the strain on the healthcare system is simply untenable without Commonwealth investment. Foley said the situation was expected to worsen in winter as cases of COVID-19 and influenza rose.

Loading What we need is hard commitments to deal with the mounting funding challenges, he said, accusing Canberra of deliberately and willfully ignoring the ongoing health pressures of the pandemic. Labor leader Anthony Albanese has promised to sit down and negotiate with premiers, but has not committed to increasing hospital funding, warning of budgetary restraints. Each year the Commonwealth pays what it paid the previous year plus 45 per cent of the growth in state and territory hospital costs, capped at 6.5 per cent growth. However, all states and territories have written to federal Health Minister Greg Hunt seeking a 50/50 split and for the cap to be abolished, a change that would cost the states a combined $5 billion and the Commonwealth an extra $20.5 billion.

Earlier this week, Australasian College for Emergency Medicine Victorian chair Mya Cubitt said rising numbers of people being admitted to emergency departments must be shared throughout the hospital. Cubitt said it was unfair to leave one emergency nurse with 50 or 60 patients as she recounted distressing cases where patients were forced to wait days for a bed or had been receiving end of life care in overcrowded emergency departments. She told radio station 3AW on Monday a 98-year-old woman was forced to wait two days in an emergency department recently. She also detailed cases of two patients, who had left emergency departments after becoming fed-up with how long they had been forced to wait. Both later died, she said. The stories go on and on, she said. Judkins said an escalation system moving patients out of emergency departments and into hospital corridors and wards had already been used in the US during emergencies.

They identified that, at a time of crisis, patients who were stable and safe can go to the wards on a trolley and wait in a waiting area in the corridor, or ward until a bed becomes available, instead of waiting in the overcrowded ED, he said. For example, patients who break a bone, could be cared for by an orthopaedic team even if their ward was full, rather than staying in the ED for days. Lisa Fitzpatrick, secretary of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federations Victorian branch, warned moving hordes of non-urgent emergency patients could significantly add to the workloads of nurses in other wards. She also questioned the practicality of the proposal, noting there were still roughly 1500 staff furloughed per day.

We cant just send a patient to a ward with no nursing staff or not enough nursing staff, she said. Some wards throughout the state have closed at the moment because of staff furloughing. David Story, head of the department of critical care at the University of Melbourne, said hospitals must do everything in their power to lure back thousands of healthcare workers who had left emergency departments and other wards to work elsewhere. Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation Victorian secretary Lisa Fitzpatrick. Credit:Luis Ascui While Story agreed urgent measures were needed to ease the pressure on EDs, he echoed Fitzpatricks safety concerns and said an escalation policy must be carefully trialled to ensure patient and staff welfare. Wilson, who has called for a health summit to address the crisis, said the GP shortage fuelling pressure on EDs must also be addressed.

Loading People need to be able to see GPs at short notice with acute illnesses rather than booking in for next Wednesday and ending up in an ED, he said. Access to general practice is number one to solving some of the overload on the system. Doctors warn cases of patient deaths reported in the media are just the tip of the iceberg and delays are leading to serious harm. Earlier this week, a review was launched into the death of eight-year-old Amrita Lanka who died 21 hours after attending the emergency department at Monash Childrens Hospital with stomach pain.



Research indicates that long stays in the ED significantly increase the risk of patient deaths. A study released this year involving more than 5 million patients concluded that for every 82 patients who faced a delay transferring to another bed in the hospital beyond six to eight hours, there was one extra death. The state governments budget last week included a promise of up to 7000 new health workers and a $12 billion pledge to help repair the entire system, but medical groups and unions warn the impacts of those funds might not be felt for years. A Victorian Health Department spokeswoman said it was in constant discussions with public health services about new models of care to manage the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The collaboration and adaptability our system displayed during the coronavirus pandemic, shows the commitment of our health services and healthcare staff to improving systems and patient outcomes, she said.

Loading A spokesman for federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said the Morrison governments strong economic management guaranteed the essential health services that Australians rely on. This record investment ensures that Australias health system is ranked as one of the best health systems in the world and continues to adapt and respond to the changing health needs of Australians, he said. He said hospital funding to Victoria has more than doubled from $3.3 billion in 2012 to $6.9 billion in 2022. The funding increase outpaced inflation by about 5 per cent, but in that time, according to government figures, Victorias population increased more than 15 per cent.
Network Ten sounds like it is putting together an election night panel with a difference. Once again Project host Waleed Aly will be at the desk for 10 News First: Your Decision. Election Night. He will be joined by news reading icon Sandra Sully, national affairs editor Hugh Riminton and news presenter Narelda Jacobs.

On Wednesday Ten announced others involved include Project regular, the Walkley-winning Jan Fran, the Coalitions Social Services Minister Anne Ruston, along with Labor shadow industry minister Ed Husic. Tens media release is spruiking its program as an intelligent, engaging, insightful, interactive and informative election night.

But there is one highly intriguing name missing from the publicity missive.

CBD hears Tens energetic political editor, Peter van Onselen, who will be co-hosting the telecast, wanted a moderate Coalition voice on the panel. Step forward high-profile government critic Rachelle Miller, who is set to form part of Tens line-up, negotiations permitting.
Severe thunderstorms with intense rainfall of up to 160 millimetres are predicted to hit parts of south-east Queensland on Friday, as flood warnings are extended and emergency services remain on alert.

The Bureau of Meteorology issued a minor flood warning for Brisbane City late on Thursday, with a major flood warning still in place for Warrill Creek and the Bremer River near Ipswich.

Heavy rainfall and possible flash flooding were forecast for the early hours of Friday, as the bureau warned there could be six-hourly rainfall totals between 100 and 160 millimetres in the Wide Bay and Burnett regions.

Moderate flood warnings were in place for the Mary River - Gympie and the Sunshine Coast were put on emergency alert - as well as the upper Brisbane and Stanley rivers.
A friend and former comrade of war veteran Ben Roberts-Smith has denied soldiers in their patrol planted objects on the bodies of Afghan prisoners to disguise unlawful killings as legitimate battlefield encounters.

The former Special Air Service Soldier, dubbed Person 11, was called by Roberts-Smiths lawyers to give evidence in the decorated former soldiers defamation case against The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Canberra Times.

Ben Roberts-Smith outside the Federal Court in Sydney earlier this month. Credit:Nick Moir

He has rejected allegations he shot a handcuffed Afghan prisoner in the village of Darwan in 2012 after Roberts-Smith, his patrol commander, kicked the man off a cliff. The rules of engagement that bound the SAS provided that prisoners could not be killed.

Person 11, whose identity cannot be revealed for national security reasons, has also rejected an allegation his patrol planted a radio on the Afghan mans body to make him appear to be a Taliban spotter relaying the movements of coalition forces to insurgents.
Warning: This story contains graphic content and the name and images of a deceased Indigenous person.

As Veronica Nelson lay critically ill in a jail cell during her final hours, the prison nurse in charge of her medical care sat in the health centre nearby watching a film.

Nelson, an Indigenous inmate being held on remand, was suffering from severe heroin withdrawals and an undiagnosed medical condition when she repeatedly buzzed the intercom, at times wailing, to ask for help.

Nurse Atheana George arrives at the Coroners Court of Victoria on Thursday. Credit:Justin McManus

Stop  youre keeping other prisoners awake, one prison officer replied.
The chef at a new restaurant in the South West labelled better than Michelin-starred venues in France and Italy by a top critic, is teaming up with the folks at Fleur to create a playful and out of the box five-course menu.

Pulled together by head chefs Shane Middleton from Fleur in Perths CBD and Seth James of Frui Momento in the Margaret River region, the menu will be served to around 40 guests this month (people quick enough to buy tickets to the special event that sold out within a day).

Seth James, the head chef at Frui Momento and Shane Middleton, the head chef at Fleur.

Frui Momento opened late last year, in collaboration with Larry Cherubino winery.

Critic Rob Broadfield described it in his review as excellent, comforting, adult, sophisticated and stylish.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott has begged Liberals in his old seat of Warringah to get behind controversial candidate Katherine Deves in an attempt to stop volunteers from abandoning her campaign to help the Liberal cause elsewhere.

The more I see of Katherine Deves, the more impressed I am with her courage, with her common sense, with her decency and with, quite frankly, her capacity to win this seat back for the Liberal Party, Abbott said in a video sent to members by the Liberal Partys Warringah federal electorate conference on Thursday.

So I really do urge all Warringah Liberals to get behind our candidate. She is our candidate, shes doing a good job, and she deserves to be supported.

Whatever faults we might see in the selection process, weve got to do this, to get behind her for our community, for our party, for our country, and to help give the Morrison government the victory that our country needs.
Latest News NAB, ANZ hike variable rates Westpac and CBA are also set to lift their rates in May

ANZ welcomes e-conveyancing law The NSW government move will simplify the process of buying or selling a property, ANZ head says

In March, Melbourne non-bank commercial lender Equity-One was acquired by Westlawn Finance Limited.

Located in northern NSW, Westlawn has nine branches that provides a range of financial service including personal loans, mortgage broking, business loans, and insurance broking.

Equity-One managing director Dean Koutsoumidis (pictured) said it was business as usual since the acquisition had been finalised.

When we met with the directors of Westlawn and their parent company COG [a finance broker aggregator and equipment leasing business for SMEs], the synergies between our businesses were instantly apparent, Koutsoumidis said.

Essentially, life is the same as before the acquisition with no change of chef in the kitchen.

Read more: Will Labor's home-buying scheme help brokers?

Koutsoumidis said Equity-One wanted to continue doing what it was known for and to keep growing.

One of our objectives is to combine the synergies of the businesses. COG has an extensive network of brokers, and we want to be able to offer our services to that brokerage and add value there, he said.

Koutsoumidis said when the acquisition happened, he couldnt believe how fortunate all Equity-One stakeholders including investors, broker group, service groups and advisers were.

There was nothing negative at all, he said.

Without a doubt, Westlawn have put more wind in our sail and as they have been around for a long time  they know what they are doing.

Read more: Banks are all the same, say first home buyers

Koutsoumidis said Equity-One clients would benefit from the acquisition by the fact it was still doing much of the same thing.

We want to lend more to our broker network who refers us work across Australia, he said.

To be able to expand on what we are doing and doing it well. Westlawn businesses are also well established and will sit nicely alongside Equity-One. We have been around for a long time, and we plan on sticking around for a long time.

The managing director said its strong suit is helping clients who are not bank ready yet.

Our sweet spot helps commercial borrowers get on with projects when the banks arent dancing, he said.

We are not planning on changing who we are or who we are relevant too. Its important to keep relevant and current with your clients.

Equity-One will continue to deliver on its service of efficiently settling loans for its clients, its smooth after settlement service, and how it looks after people who want to discharge a loan.

At each touchpoint there needs to be a good customer experience, and we are constantly mindful of that. We will not rest on our laurels.

Koutsoumidis said in the non-bank space he had seen the market mature year in and year out.

These days there is more choice for brokers and borrowers, and we see our brokers as professionals who are aware of the marketplace and offer a variety of options to well-educated clients, he said.

Borrowers have high expectations and are aware of market trends. People are savvy and have information at their fingertips about who they are contemplating transacting with.
Latest News NAB, ANZ hike variable rates Westpac and CBA are also set to lift their rates in May

ANZ welcomes e-conveyancing law The NSW government move will simplify the process of buying or selling a property, ANZ head says

Industry leaders representing lenders, non-banks, and fintechs have praised outgoing MFAA CEO Mike Felton, who announced his retirement on Tuesday.

During an at times emotional speech at the MFAA 2022 annual conference in Melbourne, Felton (pictured) said told the crowd that he will retire in the spring after more than five years leading the Mortgage and Finance Association of Australia.

Read more: MFAA CEO Mike Felton retires

Mortgage Choice interim CEO Anthony Waldron (pictured) said Felton had been an incredible bastion for the mortgage broking and finance industry.

He has been a tireless advocate for his members, and I have been privileged to work closely with him on numerous industry initiatives and regulatory issues over the last six years at both a lender and aggregator level, Waldron said.

Mike is leaving the MFAA at a time when demand and trust for mortgage brokers is at its highest levels, and this reflects his constant dedication as CEO and support for an industry we all love. I wish Mike a wonderful retirement and know that his legacy leaves the industry well-positioned for future growth.

Pepper Money general manager, mortgages and commercial lending Barry Saoud (pictured) wanted to recognise and thank Felton for his advocacy and support of the mortgage broking industry through his leadership of the MFAA.

During his time at the MFAA, Mike played a pivotal role in pursuing the best possible outcomes for brokers and their customers in the face of significant challenges and disruptions, Saoud said.

Our industry has been very fortunate to have had a strong and passionate leader in Mike and I take this opportunity to thank him for his immense contribution to our industry.

Read more: Labor might consider limiting clawbacks

Asset finance fintech Nodifi chief revenue officer Alex Brgudac (pictured) said Felton had shaped the MFAA into a strong team with a clear vision and forceful alignment.

The work Mike has put in from the time he started has paid dividends very quickly when you consider all the things that have hit our industry over the past five-and-a-half years, Brgudac said.

He represents the good will and best intentions of the broker channel.

Brgudac said Felton had sacrificed a lot professionally and personally during his time as CEO.

I know first-hand how many hours he puts in, often seven days a week. It comes as a great sacrifice, and I want to extend my thanks to him for serving our industry so well.

In his opening speech at the national conference, Felton said he believed now was the right time for him to end his full-time working career.

To reduce my workload and to start doing some things I have sacrificed and havent had enough time to do. In representing you all, I can honestly say I have given 1,000% to this role and treated it as my own business.

Felton said the industry was now in the strongest position it has ever been and more importantly was in a sustainable position, which was a tremendous testament to mortgage brokers and the amazing work they do.

He would continue as head of the peak industry body until spring.
major said on Thursday it expected sales in India this year to surpass its pre-Covid numbers as it battles a chip shortage and logistic bottlenecks.

In the first two quarters of the calendar year 2022, the company sold around 9,000 units. That is compared to 15,538 units in 2018, followed by 13,786 units in calendar year 2019, before Covid-19 pulled down sales. The company sold 7,893 and 11,242 units in 2020 and 2021.

Post Covid we have seen a huge comeback from the market. Our demand currently is one of the best ever demands we have seen in our existence in India. During the first quarter we did close to 4,000 cars and now an order bank of around 5,000 cars we have moving forward. This kind of a strong booking, order bank, we have never seen in the past, said Santosh Iyer, vice president, sales and marketing, India

The current spike in order is also driven by the all-new C-Class in India, with a price starting at Rs 55 lakh (ex-showroom). The new brand got an order bank of Rs 600 crore or around 1,000 units  out of which 70 per cent came from existing customers of the company. Even before the launch, we opened it up for only Mercedes Benz customers. That is something new we tried out more for loyal customers so that they dont miss out, he said.

The company said that it is seeing a change in the buying pattern of luxury cars by customers. The share of the market below Rs 50 lakh was close to 40 per cent pre-Covid. Now, it is only 24 per cent. On the other hand, the above Rs 1 crore market, which was 12 per cent, increased 29 per cent. We are seeing a strong demand for super luxury cars. Demand side is not a big challenge now. The challenge is to keep these customers, Iyer added.

He said company a chip shortage and shipping are challenges. We are not able to cater to the increased demand because of the chip shortage and also due to logistic supply challenges related to ships delay and container non-availability, he said. While the companys sedan range has a waiting period of two to five months, SUV range extends from two months to 12 months. We are trying to get components by air, so that we can ensure the cars are produced and give them to customers on time, he said.

The company plan to localise its electric vehicle brand EQC, launched in January 2020, by the end of this year. "By the end of this year, we would see localisation of EQS in Pune. By 2025, we will also have one EV in every segment, he added. EQC has a range of 700 kilo meter.
Stating that has put behind its crises and has emerged stronger, Bharti Group Chairman referred to OTT (over the top) business to point out that digital revenue should become meaningful. He was speaking at a virtual CII summit on Thursday.

Today Airtels balance sheet is healthy. Its strong. And we are now down to two and half players for a country of the size of India. The company has become very very strong and battle-hardened now, Mittal said.

But while telcos such as Airtel lost out on SMS revenue with the advent of WhatsApp, Mittal is hoping to bring value-added services for customers. Our digital revenue should become meaningful in its own right to over a billion dollars in the next few years, he said. Our have woken up very late. Trillions of dollars of valuation have transferred to the OTT players whether its Facebook, Google or e-commerce players.They all ride on usWe spend billions and they enjoy trillions of valuationWe just cant let everything go out.

Mittal recounted the companys existential challenge in 2002, the Supreme Court adjusted gross revenue verdict, regulatory challenges and competition with rivals over the last two decades.

I wish we had lost this (AGR) case in 2005, just because we won the case you never paid the money and finally when we lost in Supreme Court, it came back to haunt us. So it was backbreaking, Mittal remarked.

The government has computed Airtels AGR dues at over Rs 43,000 crore.

While Vodafone Idea has struggled to raise funds, Mittal said Airtel has been able to raise around $18 billion in the past 30-34 months through rights issue and stake sales in tower businesses.

Mittal also spoke on organisational culture. You must have a culture that works. When you mix and match it and when you strap culture from outside it does not work, Mittal said. Citing the example of Vodafone Idea merger, Mittal said: You had different work cultures coming together  Vodafone with its open MNC culture with Idea with its Indian culture focused on financial result orientation.

Mittal said the merged entity could have become a fabulous combination of two large and could have continued to retain the number one rank. But it just did not work, Mittal stated.
Ather Energy, Indias leading electric two-wheeler company, raised $ 128 million on Thursday in a Series E round of funding led by the National Investment and Infrastructure Funds (NIIF) Strategic Opportunities Fund (SOF) and Hero MotoCorp, a significant shareholder in Ather, which has again invested and continues to hold its stake at 35 per cent after the fresh infusion, apart from other investors.

While the move does not put Ather in the unicorn club, it definitely brings it within striking distance. The move comes at a time when the electric scooter industry is showing signs of slowing down after heady growth in the last three months- as high as 58 per cent in the month of March over February and 15 per cent in February over January in terms of registrations.

In April, registration of electric scooters was slightly in the negative over March. This is primarily due to the persisting and worsening shortage of components and crucial chips after the Russia-Ukraine war which might continue till 2023. And of course the spate of electric two-wheeler fires which has forced manufacturers to recall over 6,000 of them, leading to consumer concerns.

The funds will be used by to expand manufacturing facilities, invest in research and development, charging infrastructure, and grow its retail network. Tarun Mehta, CEO of Ather Energy, said, The company is expected to increase its capacity from 10,000 a month to 35,000 a month by this year and we are already building a new factory. We should hit 1 million capacity only sometime next year.

Mehta says that the company is already generating revenues of over Rs 100 crore a month and hopes to double the number in FY23. His projection is that if the shortage of chips does not worsen, the industry should be able to hit 100,000 scooters a month by the end of the year from around 40,000-50,000 at present.

The founder elaborates that the money will also be used to build two more platforms of scooters apart from the single platform on which it works now. However, it will not be for building a motorcycle yet. The cash will also help the company support its 100 odd suppliers who provide it with customised components as they have built the scooter from scratch. Mehta says they will support suppliers so that they can ramp up production to 60,000- 70,000 a month .

The company says that its monthly sales in April 2022 hit 3,779 units. And the order book for Ather Energys flagship product, the Ather 450X, is growing at 25 per cent quarter-on-quarter. already has a robust retail sales network across the country, with a presence in 32 cities and is planning to hit 100 cities by Diwali and have over 300 stores by the end of the year. Mehta says that the company has already crossed the run rate of Rs 100 crore and is expecting to double it for this financial year. According to Haitong, the companys market share was 6.9 per cent in February behind Hero Electric, Ampere Vehicles, Okinawa and Ola Electric in sales.

Commenting on the investment from NIIF, Mehta said, "The switch to electric is inevitable and FY22 was the turning point for electric two-wheeler adoption in India. We are super excited to have come on board as an investor. They have recently been at the forefront of the countrys green transition through their investments and initiatives, and we look forward to our association.

For NIIF, this is their first direct investment in the manufacturing sector and in the electric mobility space. This is SOFs fourth investment after its investments in two infrastructure financing NBFCs (Aseem Infrastructure Finance and IFL) and a national healthcare chain (Manipal Hospitals).

Padmanabh Sinha, executive director & chief investment officer  Growth Equity of says,  Aligned to Indias green transition mission, the two-wheeler industry is expected to grow significantly in the coming years. has indigenously designed and developed superior, well-tested products with a high degree of domestic sourcing of components and adaptability to Indian conditions."
Tata Sons on Thursday announced the appointment of Campbell Wilson as CEO & MD of .

Wilson was until recently the CEO of Scoot, a low-cost subsidiary of Singapore Airlines. He has 26 years of aviation industry expertise across both full service and low-cost airlines.

Commenting on the appointment, N Chandrasekaran, Chairman, said, I am delighted to welcome Campbell to . He is an industry veteran having worked in key global markets cutting across multiple functions. Further, Air India would benefit from his added experience of having built an airline brand in Asia. I look forward to working with him in building a world-class airline.

50-year-old Wilson started off as a Management Trainee with SIA in New Zealand in 1996. He then worked for SIA in Canada, Hong Kong and Japan before returning to Singapore in 2011 as the founding CEO of Scoot, which he led until 2016. Wilson then served as the Senior Vice President Sales & Marketing of SIA, where he oversaw Pricing, Distribution, eCommerce, Merchandising, Brand & Marketing, Global Sales and the airlines overseas offices, before returning for a second stint as the CEO of Scoot in April 2020.

Wilson holds a Master of Commerce (1st Class Honours) in Business Administration from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

Speaking on the occasion, Wilson said, It is an honour to be selected to lead the iconic Air India and be a part of the highly respected Tata Group. Air India is at the cusp of an exciting journey to become one of the best airlines in the world, offering world-class products and services with a distinct customer experience that reflects Indian warmth and hospitality. I am excited to join Air India and Tata colleagues in the mission of realising that ambition.

Wilson's appointment comes months after former Turkish Airlines chairman Ilker Ayci declined the Tata's offer to be the chief executive officer and managing director of Air India as "some sections of the Indian media" have attempted to "colour" his appointment in an undesirable manner.

The group took over Air India from the government on January 27.

After a competitive bidding process, the government had on October 8 last year sold Air India to Talace Private Limited, a subsidiary of the Tata Group's holding company, for Rs 18,000 crore.
American automaker on Thursday said that it had withdrawn plans to manufacture (EVs) in India and it wont invest in the country under the performance-linked incentive (PLI) scheme.

After careful review, we have decided to no longer pursue EV manufacturing for exports from any of the Indian plants. We remain grateful to the government for approving our proposal under the PLI and for being supportive while we continued our exploration. Indias previously announced business restructuring continues as planned, including exploring other alternatives for our manufacturing facilities. We continue to work closely with unions and other stakeholders to deliver an equitable and balanced plan to mitigate the impacts of restructuring, the company said in a statement.

Fords application, selected under the PLI scheme, was among the 20 other automakers that the Ministry of Heavy Industries had shortlisted under its Champion OEM scheme. The Centre is giving incentives worth Rs 45,016 crore to attract automakers to increase their manufacturing in India.

At that time, the company said it was exploring the possibility of using one of its plants in India to produce electric cars for exports.

In February, the Centre announced that the American automaker was among those entities which qualified for its PLI where the core objective is self-reliance. In Fords case, it was made amply clear that this meant production of EVs and components for overseas markets.

The decision of to opt out of EV production in India has cast doubt on the future of workers at the companys now-shut Chennai plant.

It was on September 9 that Ford India announced the shutdown of its manufacturing units at Maraimalai Nagar in Tamil Nadu and Sanand in Gujarat. The state government was in talks with Tata Motors and also Ford India later for EVs.

Tamil Nadu was betting big on EVs, with the state even extending its talks with players like Tesla. In October and December, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin had held a couple of rounds of talks with key Tata Motors officials, including Group Chairman N Chandrasekaran and Executive Director Girish Wagh.

Last year, the company said it would stop manufacturing vehicles in India but retain the engine-making and technology services business (Global Business Services) as part of restructuring its India operations. Approximately 4,000 employees are expected to be affected by this.

The move was prompted by the mounting losses, slowdown in the passenger vehicle market, and the crisis the pandemic brought.

Ford had been rethinking its India operations even before it had initiated discussion with Mahindra & Mahindra in 2019. It decided to cease manufacturing after considering all options, including contract manufacturing, he added.

It is the fourth US automaker to shrink India operations -- after Harley Davidson, UM Motorcycle, and General Motors -- in less than five years amid poor sales, high operating losses, high fixed costs, and a market that has failed to live up to the parent companys expectations.
Smartphone maker India is increasing smartphone production capacity in India to start exporting devices from the country this year, a senior company official said on Thursday.

India director, business strategy, Paigam Danish told PTI that the company will make its flagship device X80 series also in India where it has increased annual production capacity to 60 million devices per annum from 50 million in 2021.

"This year we have plans to start exporting from India. That is the reason why we are increasing production capacity. It will be able to cater to the demand of the Indian market as well as enable us to start exporting 'made in India' products," Danish said.

Vivo has committed to invest Rs 7,500 crore in India, out of which it has already invested Rs 3,500 crore by 2023. The company had invested Rs 1,900 crore till 2021 from the total outlay.

"By the investment of Rs 7,500 crore, which we have already proposed, this production capacity will reach 120 million (devices) annually. It is not just for Indian market needs but it will also be leveraged for export," Danish said.

Vivo had 15 per cent market share in the Indian smartphone segment in the first quarter of 2022 with shipment of 5.5 million devices, according to market research and analysis firm IDC.

According to a Counterpoint research report, Vivo became the top 5G brand in the Rs 10,000-20,000 price bracket segment in the March 2022 quarter.

Danish said that the company's strategy is to cater to customer needs and be on top of their mind this year to grow the business.

He said that the company has built a network of over 70,000 retailers over the years and enhanced product experience for the customers, which will help the company achieve leadership position in India.

"We have grown our share in the premium segment as well. Vivo X80 series is part of our strategy to further strengthen it," Danish 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.)
Unilevers Chief Executive Officer Alan Jope, who ended his three-day visit to India on Thursday, praised India as one of the best-performing markets for the company even in difficult times, according to a source.

During his trip, Jope met various teams at the companys India unit Hindustan (HUL) and its management committee, and visited modern trade (hypermarkets and supermarkets) and general trade outlets.

He also addressed the summer interns at the office. India is one of Unilevers priority markets along with the US and China.

HULs revenue crossed Rs 50,000 crore in FY22 and it reported a volume growth of 3 per cent. In the January-March quarter, the company reported a flat volume growth and revenue increased 10.7 per cent on the back of price increases. Post announcing its January-March earnings, Jope told investors that in India the market is growing well ahead of the market with business winning an excess of 75 per cent.

Our brands are successfully championing and opening up new demand spaces in India. For example, laundry capsules, the development of the mayonnaise market with Hellmann's and this is all with a relentless focus on product superiority and consistently excellent operational execution, and we have been able to navigate tricky market conditions, we're well placed for the challenges ahead, Jope told investors.
Indian tax officials froze $478 million worth of deposits lying in local bank accounts of China's Corp in February as part of an investigation into alleged tax evasion, according to two sources and a court filing reviewed by Reuters.

The fund freeze by tax authorities, being reported for the first time by Reuters, comes on top of another legal tussle Chinese smartphone giant faces where it has challenged - successfully so far - a block on $725 million of its funds by another Indian enforcement agency for alleged illegal foreign remittances.

In the income tax case, authorities blocked 37 billion rupees ($478 million) in February under a legal provision that allows officials to take such actions to protect New Delhi's revenue interests, a court document showed. Xiaomi did not respond to a request for comment.

The spokesperson for the declined to comment. Two sources with direct knowledge said the amount blocked by tax inspectors was a fallout of the December raids conducted at Xiaomi India offices for alleged income tax evasion.

That investigation, said one of the sources, concerns allegations the Chinese company purchased smartphones from its contract manufactures at inflated costs in India, allowing it to record a smaller profit by selling them to customers and evading corporate income taxes.

It is not clear if the company appealed the decision. The freeze by the was cited by Xiaomi in a May 4 court filing in southern Karnataka state, where it is challenging the other bank account seizure done by the federal crime fighting agency, the Enforcement Directorate, in the royalty case.

The Directorate says Xiaomi illegally made foreign remittances to certain entities "in the guise of" royalties even though it did not avail any service from them, an allegation the company denies. The Indian court has put on hold the Directorate's decision until May 23 on Xiaomi's appeal.

Referencing the two probes, Xiaomi states in its court document it "has cooperated in each of these investigations and provided all requisite information."

India's "put under lien" $478 million of its deposits by an order dated Feb. 18, 2022, Xiaomi stated in its filing.

Chinese have struggled to do business in India since 2020, when a border clash occurred between the two nations. India has cited security concerns in banning more than 300 Chinese apps since then, including popular ones, such as TikTok, and tightened norms for Chinese investing in India.

Xiaomi recently hit the headlines with accusations that its executives faced intimidation from Indian Directorate's officials, drawing public rebuttals from the agency and words of support from the Chinese government.

Xiaomi saw its share of the Indian smartphone market quadruple from just 6% in 2016 to 24% last year, making it the market leader, according to Counterpoint Research.

(Reporting by Aditya Kalra and Munsif Vengattil in New Delhi; Additional reporting by Abhirup Roy; Editing by Alexandra Hudson)

(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 High Court of Karnataka has extended more relief to Chinese firm Technology India Pvt Ltd by allowing it to use overdraft facilities from banks for purposes other than paying royalties.

The company had sought to use Rs 1,000 crore for its day-to-day expenditure.

The order by the HC on Thursday came after the company approached it seeking clarification on an earlier order.

"It is clarified that petitioner is at liberty to take an overdraft and make payments from such an overdraft excluding royalty, it is a matter between it and the bank, the court said, clarifying its May 5 order.

The HC last week ordered a stay on the Enforcement Directorate's order freezing Rs 5,551 crore in the accounts of in India. approached the HC seeking clarification as the banks were not allowing it to use the funds for its day-to-day activities though the Court had allowed it.

On Thursday, Xiaomi's counsel submitted before the HC that it was being targeted for being a Chinese company. It was claimed that Xiaomi has 25 per cent share of the smartphones market in India and other with 75 per cent market share were also paying royalties for the last 12 years to the same foreign .

"There is no action against them because I am Chinese and they are not Chinese, that is the only restriction. They only want to wreak vengeance on China, that is the problem," the counsel alleged.

The ED sought directions from the court to reinstate the freeze on the accounts. The HC, however, extended its stay on the ED order and adjourned the hearing of the case to May 23.

The ED claims that Xiaomi had transferred Rs 2,500 crore to three foreign companies; two in the US and one in China as royalties earlier this year.

The vacation bench of the HC of Justice Siddappa Sunil Dutt Yadav in its order on Thursday said, "The interim order earlier granted is extended till next date."



The Additional Solicitor General M B Nargund informed the Court that an application for vacating of stay order will be filed during the course of the day.

The court however said that the "matter requires hearing so far as the further interim order sought by the petitioner. Due to paucity of time matter cannot be heard. Adjourned to May 23."



The ED ordered the freeze on the accounts of the company on April 29, 2022. It had claimed that the company had made illegal payments to foreign entities under the guise of royalties violating the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA).

(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.)
South Africa: Cabinet welcomes major investment milestones

Minister in the Presidency, Mondli Gungubele, says Cabinet has welcomed the fruition of major investments and achievements made by local and international companies in the country.

He was on Thursday briefing media on the outcomes of the Cabinet meeting held on Wednesday.

South Africa welcomes investments into our country and is committed to creating favourable conditions for inclusinve growth and transformation of the economy, Gungubele said.

Some investments and economic boosts received include:

The opening of the R800 million Corobrik state-of-the-art brick manufacturing plant in Driefontein, Gauteng. The company is expected to invest a further R200 million to expand its KwaZulu-Natal based concrete facility.

Mining giant Anglo Americans launch of a hydrogen powered truck, which is expected to give a significant boost to the countrys green hydrogen economic hopes.

Irish food company, the Kerry Group, opened a R650 million plant in KwaZulu-Natal.

The launch of the new locally manufactured Isuzu D-Max bakkie, which forms part of the companys R1.2 billion investment commitment (made in 2019) to the country.

Corobrik is one of several local businesses that have responded to President Cyril Ramaphosas call on South African and international enterprises to invest in this country.

Cabinet noted that the fledgling hydrogen economy has been given a boost with the launch of a hydrogen-powered truck by Anglo American. The hydrogen economy has been identified as a strategic priority for our countrys green economy and to drive economic growth and employment.

The Kerry Group has had a presence in South Africa since 2011 and their further investment is a sign that South Africa remains an investment desitnation of choice, he said.

Gungubele said in particular, the launch of Isuzus new flagship bakkie is a boon for the countrys auto-manufacturing industry.

The new generation D-MAX crowns Isuzus commitment to South Africa and is one of the successes achieved under the Automotive Production Development Programme (APDP). The APDP is a production incentive scheme for the motor industry aimed at promoting production volumes in the specified motor vehicle industry, promoting added value in the automotive component industry, thus creating employment across the automotive value chain.

Approximately R2.8 billion will be generated in local content production value through the lifecycle of the APDP. The investment will secure more than 1 000 direct jobs at the plant and indirectly employ 24 000 people, contributing significantly to community upliftment in the region, Gungubele said.

Turning to the Investing in African Mining Indaba held in Cape Town this week, Gungubele said the platform is one of the biggest for engagement and collaboration for all stakeholders in the industry.

Cabinet is confident that the mining indaba will assist in promoting South Africa as an investment destination of choice, he said.

International and regional relations

Gungubele said Cabinet reflected on several engagements President Ramaphosa has had with leaders both on the continent and other parts of the world  including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Cabinet also welcomed President Ramaphosas recent interactions with President Joe Biden of the United States, President Emmanuel Macron of France and President Hakainde Hichilema of Zambia on different platforms.

These engagements allowed the President to strengthen bilateral relations and cooperation between South Africa and partner States on key regional and international issues, including finding a peaceful solution to the conflict in Ukraine, he said.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2022-05-12. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
China strives to improve business environment for higher vitality of market entities

People's Daily) 08:59, May 12, 2022

Chinas continuous efforts to deepen its reforms to streamline administration, delegate power, improve regulation and upgrade services for building a world-class business environment have greatly vitalized market entities and made important contributions to promoting high-quality economic and social development.

Photo taken on April 15, 2022 shows people applying for engineering construction approvals at a one-stop service center in Ningdu county, Ganzhou, east Chinas Jiangxi province. (Peoples Daily Online/Zeng Rongfeng)

So far, the number of market entities across the country has exceeded 150 million, with an average annual increase of more than 12 percent. The number of private enterprises in the country increased fourfold in the past decade.

As of the end of 2020, the time needed for starting a company in China had been reduced to less than four workdays, down from 22.9 since the country kicked off its national business system reform in 2014.

It used to take six months for us to get a business license, but now we can get it in just one workday the soonest possible, said Phyllis Cheung, CEO of McDonalds China.

Cheung explained that in the past, her company had to apply for a series of certificates when opening a new restaurant, such as business license, food business license, organization code certificate, tax registration certificate, social insurance registration certificate, and pollutants discharge license.

According to Cheung, some of the certificates have merged into one today and some have been canceled, which significantly saves time for enterprises.

While streamlining approvals, China is also working to improve its management. It launched the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System in 2017, which strengthens supervision on delegated matters when they are being handled and after they have been handled.

Shanghai recently issued a guideline to instruct work resumption of industrial enterprises and established a white list mechanism for major enterprises. Photo taken on April 29, 2022 shows employees working in a workshop of Weben Smart Manufacturing System (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. (Peoples Daily Online/Jiang Huihui)

As of March this year, more than 700 entities had been listed as enterprises with serious illegal and dishonest acts by market regulation authorities across the country, and their information has been disclosed on the system.

Besides, China is constantly enhancing its services for enterprises by optimizing business procedures. In the past, if an enterprise made a mistake when filling an application form, then it had to go to the department in charge again and refill the form. Today, thanks to e-government services, enterprises can apply for certificates online.

So far, 31 provincial-level regions in China have electronized business registration procedures since the country piloted a national electronized registration program in 2016.

According to Zhou Hui, who runs a private vocational school in Changzhou, east Chinas Jiangsu province, it took him about one and a half months to apply for a permit for running private vocational schools in the past, but the same application only takes a day nowadays.

Employees of a bulk packaging bags producer in Suqian, east Chinas Jiangsu province work on a production line, on May 8, 2022. (Peoples Daily Online/Zhang Lianhua)

The survival and development of market entities rely on business environment. Great environment makes great enterprises. Relevant departments across China, upholding the vision that business environment means productivity, have constantly optimized business environment with multifaceted measures, which has continuously stimulated the passion of market entities for investment, said Liu Quanhong, director of the International Economics Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Macroeconomic Research.

To cope with the impacts of COVID-19 on some market entities, a new version of the new regulation on market entity registration unveiled last year allows market entities with management difficulty to register for suspension, which has provided a buffer zone for these entities.

The business suspension rule is quite considerate and helps enterprises lower cost. It is lending a hand to us, said Wu Jieping, owner of a tech firm based in Shenzhen, south Chinas Guangdong province.

According to a plan advancing the modernization of China's market regulation over the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-2025), the country will improve its market regulation system and efficiency eying on the general market, quality and supervision. It will promote the modernization of market regulation, strive to build an international business environment that is market-oriented and law-based, and vitalize the market.

An official with the State Administration for Market Regulation told Peoples Daily that the department will further advance pilot programs on improving the business environment and make the market entry and exit mechanism more open, transparent, standard and efficient, so as to set more examples in business environment building and better serve the high-quality economic and social development of the country.

(Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun)
Bride Srijana seen moments before she collapsed and died at the wedding ceremony at Madhurawada in Visakhapatnam on Wednesday evening. (By Arrangement)

Visakhapatnam: A young bride collapsed and died during the marriage ritual, moments before the groom was to tie the nuptial knot. She is suspected to have consumed some poisonous substance.

In another incident, a groom died by suicide a few hours before his marriage in the city.

The first incident was reported from Madhurawada under PM Palem police limits here on Wednesday evening. The girl, Srujana, was rushed to a local hospital by her family members but the doctors pronounced her dead on arrival.

Tempers ran high with families of the bride and groom abusing each other for the sad turn. They lodged separate police complaints against each other.

The police said Srujana was being married to Nagothi Sivaji. The bride collapsed just as the groom finished applying the traditional paste of jiggery and comin paste on her head.

The family elders thought she might have collapsed due to fatigue owing to the prolonged wedding rituals and hectic pre-wedding photo shoots over the past three days. But doctors stated that she had consumed some poison. The police found a packet of highly poisionous datura seeds.

A case of suspicious death was registered, the PM Palem police said.

In another incident, a 27-year-old youth committed suicide a few hours before his marriage here on Wednesday morning. The body of Pati Dinesh was found at his house in Malkapuram.

The police said Dinesh worked as a contract supervisor in HPCL and recently resigned due to personal reasons. His parents Venkateswara Rao and Venkata Lakshmi had arranged his marriage.

Dinesh told his friends that he could maintain the family with little means of income. He left the house three days ago, leaving a letter in which he said that he would end his life. Family members searched him out and made him agree to the marriage. The muhurat was in the evening. He ended his life in the morning.
The Mumbai bench of National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) on Thursday gave more time to file its reply to the insolvency petition moved by Bank of India against the company under Section 7 of the (IBC).

Bank of India has sought admission of its insolvency petition against and the appointment of an interim resolution professional (IRP). The matter will be next heard on June 6.

Separately, Amazon has moved an intervention application under Section 65 of IBC in the mattera move that is opposed by Bank of India on the grounds that the US commerce giant does not have any locus on the matter as it is not a creditor of . Amazon has also written a letter to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) alleging collusion by Future Retail and banks to deny its rights. In the letter it has said that Future Retail should not be allowed to go into bankruptcy proceedings as that would impact its rights further.

Future Retail, described as corporate debtor, has sought more time to file a reply to the insolvency petition moved against it citing constraints that many of its directors terms have expired. Further, it also alluded to a writ petition filed in the Supreme Court against the default notices sent by the banks to the company.

In the writ petition, Future Retail has alleged that the defaulted notices by the banks were erroneously issued despite the corporate debtor and the lenders being in discussion and negotiations since December 2021, wherein the company had expressed its intention to adhere to the framework that was put in place but informed its inability to do so because of orders and injunctions passed in arbitration and related proceedings filed by Amazon. Further, on January 1, 2022, the company and the lenders agreed to set up an asset sale committee to monetize the small-format stores of the company and recover their dues under the framework put in place.

The Supreme Court has not passed any interim order but it has taken cognizance of the writ petition and has adjourned the matter, said Shyam Kapadia, Counsel representing Future Retail.

Hence, there is no urgency in the case to be admitted today and the corporate debtors right to reply should not be taken away, Kapadia said. He was responding to Ravi Kadams remarks asking for urgent admission of the matter. Kadam was appearing on behalf of Future Retail.

One reads in the newspapers that the stores of the company have been taken over by Reliance. Therefore, the security of banks is getting imperiled and prejudiced seriously. Therefore, there is an urgent need as public money is involved to appoint an IRP and admission of the petition, Kadam said.

The insolvency plea against Future Retail was first heard by the on April 28, where it granted time to Future Retail to file its response.

Commenting on Amazons move to file an intervention application, Ashish Pyasi, Associate Partner Dhir and Dhir Associates, said, In general, only the main parties are heard and intervention is not permitted. The scope of under insolvency code is limited as same is under summary jurisdiction. In the present case also, Amazon is neither the petitioner nor the corporate debtor. So their intervention will be scrutinized by the very closely.

Future owes over Rs 15,000 crore to its 26 lenders. Future Group, in 2020, had decided to engage in a slump sale of its unlisted and listed to Reliance Retail for a consideration of around Rs 25,000 crore to address its ballooning debt. However, Amazon, which had acquired 49 per cent in Future Coupons in 2019 that owns 10 per cent in Future Retail, accused Future Retail of breach of contract for its agreement with Reliance Retail. Recently, in a regulatory filing, Reliance Industries had informed that the deal with Future Retail will not fructify as the company's secured creditors had voted against the scheme.
In a first for a private company in India, Skanda Aerospace Technology Pvt Ltd (SATPL) on Thursday announced its plan to invest Rs 250 crore to set up a gearbox manufacturing facility at Hyderabad.

SATPL is a joint venture (JV) between the Hyderabad-based Raghu Vamsi Machine Tools (RMVT) and Texas-based Rave Gears LLC.

This production facility will be Indias first private company with the capability to manufacture gears and gearboxes. Given the growing demand for helicopters manufactured by Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL), there is likely to be a significant demand for gearboxes and drive trains.

Rave Gears, which will function as technology provider, will hold 55 per cent of SATPL, while RVMT & Investors will hold the remaining 45 per cent. The JV company will invest Rs 250 crore and provide employment to 1,000 workers in the next 3-5 years.

Rave Gears has also committed to provide Skanda Aerospace with assured annual orders to the tune of $9 million.

Rave Gears is a designer, manufacturer and system integrator of gears and precision drive trains catering to aerospace, defence, Formula 1 racing and industrial customers worldwide. Among Rave Gears customers are major original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) such as Boeing, Bell, Collins, BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, McLaren and Nascar.

Raghu Vamsi is a supplier of high-precision products and sub-assemblies to OEMs such as Boeing, GE Aviation, Eaton and Honeywell. It has been in the precision manufacturing business for the last 15 years and is eyeing a predicted market size of $937 million.

According to its Managing Director Vamsi Vikas Ganesula, Raghu Vamsi has almost doubled its turnover during each of the last three years. The total turnover amounted to about Rs 150 crore last year.

Like most in the precision manufacturing business, Raghu Vamsi has found growth to be a capital-intensive business, with each precision manufacturing machine costing in the region of $3 million.
Power trading solutions provider Ltd (PTC) on Thursday said it is undertaking necessary steps to complete all compliances with respective regulators and a meeting of its board to declare financial results would be called shortly.

The company said that its arm PTC Financial Services Ltd will shortly hold a board meeting for the approval of financial results and subsequent to that will declare its financial results.

With the proper functioning of the board at PTC Financial Services (PFS), the subsidiary has conducted two board meetings in April 2022, PTC said in a statement.

Market regulator Sebi in January had asked PTC and its arm PFS to address corporate governance and other issues raised by its former chairman and outgoing independent directors before holding a board meeting. The regulator had also asked the to file an action taken report in four weeks.

PFS was hit by controversy in January following en masse resignations of its independent directors who alleged corporate governance lapses.

Following the resignations, the company's CMD Rajib K Mishra had said that there will be a fair inquiry into alleged corporate governance issues at its subsidiary PTC Financial Services Ltd (PFS).

PTC in a statement on Thursday said a board meeting to declare the financial results would be called shortly.

"We have made significant progress. All the compliance issues are being addressed. With the proper functioning of the board at PFS, PFS has conducted two board meetings in April 2022. PFS will call its board meeting for approval of financial results shortly and subsequent to that will declare its financial result in compliance with the SEBI LoDR," Mishra said.

The company also said that on April 27, 2022, it had informed about the appointment of a forensic audit firm to examine the issues highlighted by former independent directors.

(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 Police has arrested four Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) officers for allegedly conducting a fake on an IT firm there to extort money, officials said on Thursday.

These four accused officers had allegedly gone to on Wednesday to conduct a "search" even when they are not posted there and had no case or mandate for such an operation, they said.

The employees of the firm smelled rat in the conduct of the officers, rounded them up and called police, the officials here said.

Senior officials said as part of the agency's zero-tolerance towards corruption policy, strictest possible action will be initiated against the accused officials.

(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 Lucknow Bench of on Thursday rejected the plea seeking to open 22 closed rooms in the to ascertain the presence of the idols of Hindu deities.

The hearing seeking an investigation over 22 rooms of the concluded on Thursday.

The plea was filed by Rajneesh Singh, a BJP youth media in-charge, before the Lucknow Bench of that sought the directions to the Archaeological Survey of India to probe the 22 closed doors in the to ascertain the presence of the idols of Hindu deities.

The plea sought the constitution of a fact-finding committee and the submission of a report by the ASI. The plea also cited the claims by some historians and some Hindu groups about the monument being an old Shiva Temple.

(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 proposed demolition drive to remove illegal encroachments in the capital will on Thursday be carried out in the surrounding areas of K.N. Katju Marg in north Delhi's area.

According to the Office of Assistant Commissioner, North Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC), the special encroachment removal drive is fixed by the North DMC along with other departments to remove temporary and permanent encroachment from the government land, footpaths, and pedestrian pathways.

Earlier on Wednesday as well, the Municipal Corporation continued its drive to demolish illegal encroachments in several parts of the capital even as the Left parties protested against the government accusing them of spreading communal atmosphere.

The places where the demolition was carried out were Tilaknagar, Dwarka, Lodhi Road, Najafgarh, Aya Nagar among several other areas. Meanwhile, the demolition was not conducted in New Seelampur as an adequate number of police force could not be provided.

A day ago, more than a dozen Left-wing organisations took out a citizens' march to the Delhi Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal's residence.

Even though all the protesters were stopped amidst heavy police force, they kept raising slogans against the bulldozers. At the same time, with placards in their hands, they accused the government of spreading the 'communal atmosphere' in Delhi.

Several Left parties like the CPI, CPI-M, CPI(ML), AIFB, RSP, etc., took part in the demonstration.

"This protest is against the bulldozers that are being rolled over the poor people across the country. There are constant attacks in the name of removal of encroachment," All India Kisan Mahasabha secretary Purushottam Mishra told IANS.

He said that the government is engaged in dividing the country by doing communal politics and diverting the public attention from real issues. "We will keep protesting across the country against this bulldozer campaign," he said.

--IANS

uj/dpb

(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.)
Ltd and the government on Wednesday signed an agreement to transform 34 state polytechnics and 43 Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) into futuristic Centres of Excellence (CoEs) at an investment of about Rs 2,756 crore.

Officials said that the Memorandum of Agreement aimed to upgrade the technical institutes covering all aspects of curriculum, training and equipment in consonance with the latest industry needs.

As a part of the MoA, Ltd would invest Rs 2,390 crore while the government would contribute Rs 366 crore with 12,000 sq feet area in each technical institute for setting up technology labs and workshops.

government's Principal Secretary, Skill, Employment and Entrepreneurship Department B. Kalyan Chakravarthy and ata Technologies Ltd MD Warren Harris signed the MoA.

Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, who was also present, termed the day as historic for higher education and skill empowerment, and said that while celebrating one year in office of the present government, "we resolved to make every moment for the development of Assam".

About the inauguration of "Gunotsav 2022" which has aimed at bringing about qualitative development of education in the state, he said that the partnership with Ltd would unleash a transformative phase of education in consonance with the need of the fourth industrial revolution characterised by interconnectivity and smart automation.

He said that Assam would produce 15-20,000 technically efficient youths in a year.

The entire upgradation project will take off by May 10 next year as PWD (Building) will implement the project under the expertise of Tata Technologies Ltd.

--IANS

sc/vd

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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An IAF sergeant at the record office here was arrested for allegedly leaking classified and sensitive information about defence installations and personnel to a Pakistan-based "agent", police said on Thursday and claimed he was "honey-trapped".

The accused has been identified as 32-year-old Devender Narayan Sharma, who was working as an administrative assistant (GD) at the (IAF) Record Office at Subroto Park here, they said.

During investigation, it was found that Sharma was allegedly "honey-trapped" by a Pakistan-based woman with whom he shared sensitive documents related to personnel, national security and defence, police said.

On May 6, the Crime Branch arrested the sergeant for allegedly leaking the sensitive information through WhatsApp to the "agent of adversary country" after deceitfully obtaining information and documents from computers and other files, according to police.

According to police, Sharma had also received money from the agent for the leaked information.

On the basis of a complaint received by the Indian Air Force, a case under the Official Secrets Act was registered and the sergeant was arrested on May 6 and dismissed from service, they said.

During investigation, incriminating evidence such as electronic gadgets and documents were seized, they said, adding further probe is on in the matter.

Last year in July, two people, including an army man, were arrested under the Official Secrets Act for allegedly providing classified documents to Pakistan spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

The development had come after a 34-year-old vegetable supplier at the Pokhran Army base camp was held for allegedly getting sensitive documents from an army man for money and providing them to the ISI.

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The India-Russian joint venture, Aerospace, successfully fired the extended-range version of Air Launched Cruise Missile (ALCM) from a fighter aircraft on Thursday, striking a target at a range of 400 km from the aircraft.

The ALCM launch went off as planned and the missile achieved a direct hit on its designated target in the region.

This was the first launch of the extended-range ALCM from the aircraft.

This launch has proved that the IAF has the capability to carry out precision strikes from its aircraft against surface targets on land or sea, over very long ranges.

The extended-range capability of the missile, coupled with the high performance of the Sukhoi-30MKI aircraft, gives the IAF (Indian Air Force) a strategic reach and allows it to dominate the future battlefield, stated a defence ministry release.

A Sukhoi-30MKI squadron is based in Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu, from where it can undertake missions over the Arabian Sea, or the northern Indian Ocean. Its fighters are armed with the ALCM and there are provisions for mid-air refuelling to enable these aircraft to undertake long missions at extended ranges.
Minister for Industries Gudivada Amarnath released AP Logo during the Curtain Raiser program at Secretariat on Wednesday, Industries department Special Principal Secretary Karikala Valavan, APIIC Vice-Chairman, and MD JVN Subramanyam (left) are also seen. Photo BY ARRANGEMENT.

VIJAYAWADA: For the first time, Chief Minister Jaganmohan Reddy will attend the 52nd annual World Economic Forum summit in Davos. He will be there for a week from May 22 and seek to attract investments to Andhra Pradesh.

Minister for industries Gudivada Amarnath released APs logo for the summit, with the theme, Andhra Pradesh People, Progress & Possibilities here on Thursday.

The minister said the CM will address the global summit on the subject, 2030 Industrial Development Agenda and participate in a series of meetings with business and other leaders.

The state delegation will also include ministers Gudivada Amaranath and Buggana Rajendranath, MP Midhun Reddy, chairman of APIIC Govinda Reddy and some senior IAS officers apart from a delegation of CII.

The AP delegation will be hosting at least three state sessions -- on healthcare on May 23; on Education & Skilling on 24 and on Transition to Decarbonized Economy the same day.

The delegation would meet with the Minister of Finance of Bahrain, Salman Al Khalifa, as also James Zhan, director-general of UNCTAD; Luc Remont, executive vice-president of Schneider Electric; Takeshi Hashimoto, president and CEO of Mitsui OSK. Lines; Bernard Charles, CEO & Pascal Daloz, COO of Dassault Systems; Pedro Gomez, head of Mobility and Sustainability of WEF; Sheila Alrowaily of Saudi Aramco Investments, among others.

Minister Amarnath said the high-level delegation from AP will participate in the WEF annual meeting. Some 13 bilateral meets across thrust sectors and three dedicated state sessions to focus on Industries, Infrastructure, Health, Education and Skilling will be held.

The summit from May 22 to 26 brings together around 2,200 business leaders, political leaders, economists, celebrities and journalists to discuss global, regional, and industry challenges.

The minister said. Under the guidance of CM Jagan, Andhra Pradesh is now elevated from being a forum member associate at the World Economic Forum to the prestigious position of a forum platform partner. We will sign the Platform Partnership for Shaping the Future of Advanced Manufacturing and Value Chains with the WEF in the presence of Prof. Klaus Schwabb, founder and chairman of WEF.

Andhra Pradesh will thus have access to full participation in the CEO-level interactions, public figure dialogues, projects and workshops of the platform. The partnership will also grant access to join peer-level communities of common interest such as our Industry Action Groups and Strategy Officers communities, annual meetings and high-level exchanges including WEFs Sustainable Development Impact Summit and Global virtual discussions, he said.

He said AP ranked third in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.
In what can be termed as a big victory for the Hindu petitioners, a court in Varanasi on Thursday rejected the demand for the removal of advocate commissioner for the video survey of the Gyanvapi mosque.

The court has appointed two additional advocates to assist the advocate commissioner.

The Muslim petitioners had sought the removal of advocate commissioner Ajay Mishra on the grounds that he was doing the video survey of areas in the Gyanvapi mosque that are not specified in the order.

The court further said that the video survey will continue and will be completed by May 17.

The court further said that anyone who tries to stall the survey should be dealt with sternly.

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Observing that the Opposition in the country is weak, spiritual leader said he believes that for a healthy democracy, it is essential that has a stronger Opposition, one that is constructive as well.

" needs a stronger Opposition, a constructive Opposition. The (current) Opposition is very weak. Lack of leadership in the Opposition can make any democracy appear not as a democracy," Ravi Shankar, the founder of the Art of Living Foundation, told PTI in an interview.

"Democracies do need a stronger Opposition -- conservative, creative Opposition that is missing in . Of course, West Bengal has shown that with free-and-fair elections, no party can meddle with the institutions of India, and the judiciary is quite strong. But the lack of a central Opposition, a strong leader will make the country look like it is autocratic, but it is not. We are such a huge democracy. People have power," Ravi Shankar said.

The Indian spiritual leader is currently on a two-month tour of the United States, travelling to various cities and spreading the message of peace and the need of it in a post-Covid world.

Asserting that India is a vibrant democracy and the held in the country are free and fair, he said at the level, there needs to be a strong opposition party, which is currently missing.

On Tuesday, Ravi Shankar met a group of Congressmen during which they discussed mental health. A day earlier he addressed the Delaware General Assembly, in which he focussed on dealing with mental health challenges and establishing peace.

The spiritual leader highlighted the importance of using one's own breath to achieve inner peace and mental well-being. The Art of Living founder offered his unequivocal support to make Delaware the "Happiest State" by committing to tackle mental health issues across all sections of the community, including students, veterans, prison inmates, physicians, professionals and more.

"We are proud to honour and thank Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar's humanitarianism, spiritual leadership and commitment to peace here in the United States and across the world," Delaware Governor John Carney said.

Ravi Shankar's 2022 US tour began in Miami where he addressed a conference of physicians on the role of meditation for mental health and overall well-being. He continued to Boston where he shared his thoughts about destigmatising mental health at the Harvard University. This was followed by a dialogue with healthcare providers and administrators on prioritising healthcare workforce well-being, hosted by the Children's Hospital and the National Geographic Society.

He then spoke on the crisis of youth mental health with the US surgeon general at the George Washington University.

Before arriving in Delaware, the spiritual leader launched the "I Stand for Peace" campaign in Washington, DC on May 6. He also launched the initiative in Philadelphia on May 8 with a pledge for Philadelphia to be a "Peace City" and a rollout of programmes to strengthen mental health, resilience and overall wellness indicators within the American community. Both the events were attended by more than 2,000 people.

Asserting that India's DNA has always been peace and non-violence, Ravi Shankar said there is a misconception in the west about India's stand on the war in Ukraine, wherein people think that New Delhi is supporting an aggressor, which is not the case in reality.

"First of all, we must make clear to the world that we stand for peace. We are not for war. It is a misconception that we are siding with the war. Our prime minister has said this several times that we stand for peace," he said.

He noted that there is a lot of anger among people post the COVID-19 pandemic. This Ravi Shankar said needs to be addressed and that is what he is working on.

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External Affairs Minister on Thursday spoke to his Saudi counterpart Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud with a focus on bilateral strategic ties and the impact of the conflict.

Jaishankar said the conflict and its political, energy and economic fallout figured in the conversation.

"A good discussion with FM @FaisalbinFarhan of . Reviewed our bilateral cooperation and the Strategic Partnership Council's progress.

"Also spoke about the conflict and its political, energy and economic fallout," the external affairs minister tweeted.

In reflection of their strategic ties, India and signed the Strategic Partnership Council Agreement in 2019 to coordinate on important issues and bilateral cooperation in diverse areas.

Jaishankar also spoke to the Foreign Minister of Iceland Thordis K Gylfadottir and discussed a range of issues including the situation in Ukraine.

"A warm conversation today with FM @thordiskolbrun of Iceland. Underlined the importance of 50 years of diplomatic relations. Followed up on the recent India-Nordic Summit. Exchanged views on Ukraine," he tweeted.

The conversation between Jaishankar and Gylfadottir came over a week after Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his counterparts from the five Nordic countries including Iceland held a summit in Copenhagen.

At the summit, India and the Nordic countries expressed serious concern over the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and called for an immediate cessation of hostilities.

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Justice Rajiv Shakdher of the Delhi High Court Wednesday ruled in favour of criminalising and said the continuance of this immunity under the Indian Penal Code is "egregiously problematic" as it emasculates the woman's right to trigger prosecution against her husband for non-consensual intercourse.

The exception exists on the law book even though sex workers, as well as wives who are separated from their husbands continue to be invested with the right to prosecute the offender under the rape law, he said.

Justice Rajiv Shakdher, who headed the division bench which delivered the split verdict on criminalising marital rape, stated that although the right to withdraw consent forms the core of the woman's right to life and liberty and the exception (MRE) makes no allowance for the circumstances in which a wife may say no to sex with her husband, which only exacerbate the lack of autonomy and sexual agency which stands embedded in the provision.

What makes the continuance of MRE on the statute egregiously problematic is, while it emasculates the woman's right to trigger prosecution against her husband for non-consensual sex, women, who are sex workers or are separated from their husbands, are invested with this right, said Justice Shakdher.

Besides this, MRE makes no allowance for the circumstances in which a wife may say 'no' to sex. For example, a wife may refuse to engage in sexual activity with her husband when she is ill or is menstruating, or is unable to engage in sexual activity because of a sick child. The wife may also want to keep away from sexual activity in a situation where the husband has contracted an infectious, sexually transmissible disease, such as HIV; her refusal in such a situation may emanate not only on account of concern for herself but also, to protect the progeny which may result from such communion, he added.

Justice Shakdher asserted that the fact that the rapist is the husband of the victim does not make the act of sexual assault any less injurious, degrading, or dehumanizing and emphasised that leaves not only physical scars but also much deeper scars on the psyche of the victim.

The right to withdraw consent at any given point in time forms the core of the woman's right to life and liberty which encompasses her right to protect her physical and mental being. Non-consensual sex destroys this core by violating what is dear to her, which is, her dignity, bodily integrity, autonomy and agency, and the choice to procreate or even not to procreate, he said.

Justice Shakdher also opined that the argument that striking down marital rape exception would result in the lodgement of false cases is based on a notion which is not backed by any empirical data.

He said that a vast number of women do not report sexual assaults because of the stigma attached to it and that the data of the National Family Health Survey, which was carried out under the aegis of the central government for 2015- 2016, revealed disturbing aspects concerning spousal sexual violence, both, from "current husbands" as well as "former husbands"; apart from the fact that 99% of the sexual assault cases remain unreported.

Therefore, the apprehension expressed that there will be a deluge of false cases against offending husbands does not appear to be correct. If the NHFS data is taken into consideration, it establishes that 9.9 out of 10 cases of sexual assault in India go unreported. Thus, the contention that because there is a possibility of false cases being lodged and, therefore, the courts should refrain from striking down MRE even if it is unconstitutional, is in my view, a contention which is completely unmerited, stated the judge who added that the courts in India are fully equipped to deal with false cases.

The judge, while holding that the exception was violative of Articles 14(Equality before law), 15 (prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth), 19(1) (A) (right to freedom of speech and expression) and 21 (right to life and personal liberty) of the Constitution, that sexual assault by the husband on his wife needs to be called out as rape and non-consensual sex in a is an antithesis of what matrimony stands for in modern times i.e. the relationship of equals.

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Taking a dig at chief for her remarks on the country's economy, the BJP said on Wednesday she was raising communal frenzy for petty political gains and to provoke people.

Targeting the central government, the former J and K chief minister said the Sri Lankan economic and political crisis should serve as a wake-up call for India.

What happened in Sri Lanka should serve as a wake-up call. Since 2014, India is being whipped into a communal frenzy & imagined fears. It is treading the same path of hyper nationalism & religious majoritarianism. All at the cost of disrupting social cohesion & economic security, Mehbooba tweeted.

Reacting to her remarks, chief spokesperson of J-K BJP Sunil Sethi said, "Tweets of Mufti indicate her frustration on growth of India as the world leader and destructive situation existing in Pakistan, whose economy is in shambles as also its very existence. Being frustrated because of pathetic conditions in Pakistan, she is venting her anger towards India."



He said such statements are being made to provoke public sentiment.

"Other recent tweets of Mufti indicate her bent of mind in raising communal frenzy for petty political gains," Sethi said.

He said India is a strong economy and has taken care of its people during the Covid pandemic which was appreciated by the world.

In new India, there is no place for such political blackmailing which unfortunately was tolerated and accepted during Congress regimes at Centre, the BJP leader said.

"Gone are the days when such elements like Yasin Malik had easy access to even the prime minister of the country despite being involved in genocide of Kashmiri pandits and targeted killings of security personnel. Mufti should have learnt lesson from this," Sethi said.

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on Wednesday said the appointment of a "trade minister" in was a routine process and there was "no change" in its trade policy with India.

On Tuesday, media reports said Qamar Zaman had been made Pakistan's "trade minister in New Delhi", giving rise to speculation of a thaw in the present frigid bilateral trade relations between the two neighbours.

Pakistan's Ministry of Commerce issued a statement on Wednesday, saying Ministry of Commerce manages 57 Trade Missions in 46 countries which includes the post of Minister (Trade and Investment) in New Delhi, India."



There is no change in Pakistan's policy on trade with India, the ministry clarified. It further said that the Post of Minister (Trade and Investment) in exists for more than two decades and has no connection with the operationalisation of trade with India or otherwise in the current context.

The current cycle for selection of Trade and Investment Officers (TIOs), including New Delhi, was initiated in December 2021 and the final recommendations of the Interview Board were sent to the Prime Minister's Office on January 4, 2022 which was during the previous government's term led by Imran Khan.

The present government has given the final approval on the recommendations of the previous government for selection of 15 TIOs, the ministry said.

The appointment of Minister (Trade and Investment) New Delhi, therefore, may not be seen in the context of any relaxation of trade restrictions with India, it said.

Tensions between India and have spiked since abrogated the Article 370 of the Constitution to revoke the special status of Jammu and Kashmir on August 5, 2019.

India's decision evoked strong reactions from Pakistan, which downgraded diplomatic ties and expelled the Indian envoy. also halted bilateral trade with India.

India has categorically told the international community that the scrapping of the Article 370 was its internal matter. It also advised Pakistan to accept the reality and stop all anti-India propaganda.

India has told Pakistan that it desires normal neighbourly relations with Islamabad in an environment free of terror, hostility and violence.

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By Nidhi Verma

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India's has begun talks with Qatar to renew a multi-year gas deal despite market "turbulence", making new long-term contracts difficult as sanctions on Russian fuel have squeezed an already tightly supplied market.

India's top gas importer has till end-2023 to renew its long-term liquefied natural gas (LNG) deal with Qatar Gas to beyond 2028, its head of finance Vinod Kumar Mishra told an analyst call after the Petronet announced quarterly earnings.

He said it was not a "perfect environment" to initiate new long-term deals as market was tight and European companies were aggressively scouting for contracts to cut dependence on Russia after Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.

Qatar is already in talks with Germany for long-term gas supplies, helping Europe's biggest economy cut dependence on Russian energy sources.

Petronet, however, hopes Qatar would lower gas prices for India, mirroring contracts signed with Bangladesh, Pakistan and China, where prices are linked to a slope of 10.2% of the Brent crude.

In contrast, India's existing LNG deal with Qatar is based on a slope of about 12.67% of the Brent price.

"We have already started negotiations but the environment is not like that people may agree to it because of lot of turbulence in the market," he said, adding his company would buy more volumes if Qatar offered favourable pricing terms.

Due to high spot LNG prices some Indian customers have switched to alternative fuels, he said.

India's gas demand is set to surge as Prime Minister Narendra Modi aims to raise the share of natural gas in the country's energy mix to 15% from 6.7%.

Mishra said recent government decision mandating GAIL (India) Ltd to import gas for meeting rising demand from transport and households sector would help increase utilisation of capacity at its terminals and raise the company's revenue.

Earlier in the day, Petronet's chief executive A.K. Singh also said Petronet is looking for 0.75-1 million tonne of LNG in immediate term to meet the rising demand.

(Reporting by Nidhi Verma; editing by David Evans)

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Sahara chief Subroto Roy is expected to appear before the Patna High Court on Thursday to explain how he would return the money of investors.

A single bench of justice Sandeep Kumar, during the last hearing on April 27, had directed him to physically appear before the high court on May 11 and inform how he could return the money of investors. As he was unable to come to Patna on May 11, the case was adjourned for May 12.

According to sources, Subroto Roy has reached Patna and would appear before the court any time from now on.

During the hearing on April 27, the Patna High Court had asked the lawyer of named Umesh Prasad Singh to submit a detailed report on how will return the money of investors of Bihar.

In reposnse, Singh had given some alternate methods to return the amount of investors but Justice Sandeep Kumar was not interested in it. He firmly told the lawyer that the court will not tolerate further excuses of Subroto Roy.

Currently, more than 2000 cases pertaining to alleged fraudulency of are filed in Patna High Court. Though, the actual numbers of duped persons are in lakhs. Many of them have already died.

--IANS

ajk/shb/

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Several Sikh political and religious organisations on Wednesday decided to start a united struggle for the release of from the community lodged in different jails across the country.

It was decided in a meeting called by the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) for discussing and strategising the release of Sikh .

The organisations, while expressing unity, expressed commitment to the efforts to be made in future for the release of Sikh and pledged to play lead roles in this struggle.

During the meeting, three resolutions were unanimously passed regarding the release of Sikh prisoners, including forming a joint committee, meeting the country's President, Prime Minister, Home Minister, and chief ministers and governors of different states.

Also, it has been resolved to appeal to all the Sikh members of Parliament (MPs) irrespective of their political parties to raise their voice for the Sikh prisoners in both the houses of Parliament.

The Sikh MPs have also been urged to take along all those MPs who are justice loving and speak for human rights, said the SGPC in a statement.

During the meeting, SGPC chief Harjinder Singh Dhami has been authorised to set up the joint committee which will give a future programme, about which, he said that very soon a committee will be formed.

"The committee will include members from all the 'Panthic' parties and bodies", said Dhami.

He said although different representative bodies of the Sikh 'Panth' (community) are making efforts for the release of Sikh prisoners, now the joint efforts will be carried forward.

During his address, Shiromani Akali Dal president Sukhbir Singh Badal said that the message of unity of this 'Panthic' meeting is very important for the entire and this movement shall constantly continue in future as well.

He said the political divisions are on one side while these collective efforts for the Panthak interests would yield great results.

Appreciating the efforts of the SGPC, Shiromani Akali Dal (Amritsar) president Simranjit Singh Mann assured cooperation. He said this meeting held after a long time is historic in itself which will definitely yield good results.

On this occasion, head of Damdami Taksal Baba Harman Singh Khalsa said that the Sikh 'Panth' should make concerted effort and take decisive measures.

In the meeting, those who addressed it included head of Dal Baba Bidhi Chand Baba Avtar Singh Sursingh, Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (DSGMC) president Harmeet Singh Kalka, former DSGMC president Paramjit Singh Sarna, Manjit Singh GK, Baljit Singh Daduwal, and Baba Naurang Singh from Tarna Dal, among others.

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The United States will share technologies used to make Covid-19 vaccines through the World Health Organization and is working to expand rapid testing and antiviral treatments for hard-to-reach populations, President said on Thursday.



Speaking at the second global Covid-19 summit, Biden called on Congress to provide additional funds so that the U.S. may contribute more to the global pandemic response.



"We are making available health technologies that are owned by the United States government, including stabilized spike protein that is used in many Covid-19 vaccines," Biden said in his opening speech.

The summit, jointly hosted by the United States, Belize, Germany, Indonesia and Senegal, is being held virtually on Thursday for countries to discuss efforts to end the pandemic and prepare for future health threats.



It is set to build on efforts and commitments made at the first global summit in September, including getting more people vaccinated, sending tests and treatments to highest-risk populations, expanding protections to health-care workers, and generating financing for pandemic preparedness.



It has gathered more than $3 billion in new funding to fight the pandemic, the White House said, including over $2 billion for immediate response and $962 million in commitments to the World Bank pandemic preparedness fund.



The contributions include the United States contributing an additional $200 million to a global health fund for future pandemic preparedness at the World Bank, bringing its total contribution to $450 million, it said.



The European Union said it was providing 300 million euros for vaccination support, and $450 million for the preparedness fund. NGOs, philanthropies, and the private sector made over $700 million in new commitments.



Several generic drugmakers that will produce versions of Pfizer's Covid-19 antiviral treatment Paxlovid have agreed to sell the medicine in low- and middle-income countries for $25 a course or less, the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) said on Thursday.

At least 14 other countries as well as the WHO, European Commission, private-sector companies like Google, and non-governmental organizations, are attending the summit.

"This summit is an opportunity to renew our efforts, to keep our foot on the gas when it comes to getting this pandemic under control and preventing future health crises," Biden said.



He called on world leaders to consider how their countries could contribute further to the global pandemic response.



"That is why I continue to call on Congress here at home to take the urgent action to provide emergency COVID-19 funding," he said.



"The request also includes $5 million to keep up our global partnership in the fight against COVID-19, to sustain our efforts to get shots in people's arms all around the world." Biden has asked Congress for over $22.5 billion in additional COVID-19 response funds, including $5 billion for international aid, but lawmakers have failed to pass any funding bill and those negotiating the package have been unable to agree on how to pay for the global response.

While additional U.S. funding may be stuck, the commitment to share 11 COVID-19 technologies with the UN-backed Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) should help improve access to vaccines, treatments, and tests in lower-income countries by allowing them to work on generic versions, the WHO said.



"It's through sharing and empowering lower-income countries to manufacture their own health tools that we can ensure a healthier future for everyone," said WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.



The technologies will be licensed by the U.S. National Institutes for Health to the WHO's COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP) and the MPP, initiatives set up to share know-how with manufacturers all around the world, allowing them to work on generic versions of key COVID-19 tools.



Scientists at the NIH worked with Moderna to develop its COVID-19 shot.



The United States has delivered over 500 million doses of vaccines to over 100 countries as part of the 1.2 billion doses it pledged at the first summit in September and has already committed over $19 billion in funding for vaccines, tests, treatments, and other forms of assistance, Biden said.



"There is still so much left to do. This pandemic isn't over," said Biden. "Today, we mark a tragic milestone here in the United States, 1 million COVID deaths, 1 million empty chairs around a family dinner table. Each irreplaceable."



(Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein; Additional reporting by Jennifer Rigby in London, Michael Erman in New York, and Chris Gallagher in Washington; Editing by Leslie Adler and Nick Zieminski)

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Hyderabad: Babburi Shirisha, the first linewoman in the country, received her appointment order from energy minister G. Jagadish Reddy here on Wednesday. 20-year-old Shirisha, a native of Siddipet, has been posted in Medchal circle of Telangana State Southern Power Distribution Company Limited (TSSPDCL).

Shirisha expressed happiness over her selection. Women could succeed in all fields, if opportunities were provided, she said. I will work hard and incre-ase the reputation of the organisation, she said and thanked Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao and TSSPDCL chair-man and managing director Raghuma Reddy for providing her the job opportunity.

Speaking on the occasion, Jagadish Reddy said that TSSPDCL set a record by appointing the first linewomen in the country.

It may be recalled that Babburi Sirisha, along with another woman V. Bharathi, a native of Mahabubabad district, approached the High Court when they were restrained from applying for the post usually held by men in 2019.

They could get an order in favour of them and applied for the post and cracked the exam. However, the TSSPDCL withheld their result forcing them to move to the High Court once again. The court, after hearing the case, directed the TSSPDCL to issue appoi-n-tment letters to them after testing their skills.

Earlier, Telangana Transco recruited 200 linewomen for the first time in history of the power sector. So far, only linemen served in the electricity sector, which is believed to be a critical job including electricity pole climbing.
A day ahead of the 'Chintan Shivir' in Udaipur, the has said that will be a new milestone of "hope, aspiration and change as India is enduring a painful and vicious assault on its democracy, economy and societal harmony".

Addressing a press conference the party general secretary Randeep Singh Surjewala said, " was born out of a determined struggle to liberate India and its people from the shackles of oppression, discrimination, bigotry and the policy of divide and rule. In these trying times, when "Divide and Rule" has become the state policy, we resolve to re-dedicate ourselves to "nav sankalp", that is, to once again propel India onto the path of progress, prosperity and societal harmony."

"The road map shall provide a way forward not only to the Party to meet up with the current set of reverses and challenges, but will also pave the way for a resilient, strong and inclusive Nation," he added.

The Congress said that insurmountable "wealth inequality" in India means that the wealth of the 142 richest Indians has gone up by Rs 30 lakh crore in one year whereas the income of 84 per cent of the Indian Households dropped drastically. "Instead of receiving Rs 15 lakh in every account, the existing savings of common people have been lost," he said.

"The freefall of the Indian economy has resulted in the Indian Rupee falling to an abysmal level of US $1 Rs 77.50. On the other hand, India's debt has shockingly risen from Rs 55 lakh crore in the year 2014 to Rs 135 lakh crore in the year 2022. The Modi government takes a debt of Rs 4,000 crore daily. Every Indian has a debt of Rs 1,00,000 on his/her head," he said.

--IANS

miz/dpb

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In an unprecedented move, Chief Minister on Wednesday removed Director General of Police (DGP) Mukul Goel from his post for inefficiency and neglecting his work, an official statement said.

Additional Director General of Police (Law and Order) Prashant Kumar has been given the additional charge of the state's police chief, Additional Chief Secretary (Information) Navneet Sehgal told PTI.

Goel has been made the Director General (DG) of the Civil Defence department, the statement said.

It added that Goel was removed from the post of DGP for neglecting official work, not taking interest in departmental work and inefficiency.

Goel, a 1987-batch IPS officer, was appointed the police chief in June last year.

Before that, he had served as an additional director general of the Border Security Force.

Born in Muzaffarnagar, Goel has a B.Tech degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

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The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) has set aside an order by the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) and held that corporate insolvency proceedings cant be initiated on the payment of salary arrears and other remuneration as they are time-barred.

said this is in the matter of Omega Laser Products B.V, a Dutch company, and a shareholder of its Indian arm. A former managing director(MD) of the company had moved the seeking payment of salary arrears from the Indian arm of the Company.

The appellate tribunal ruled that the former MDs plea would be time-barred by limitation for initiating insolvency against the Indian arm, on the ground that it had been filed beyond a period of three years.

The said there was no acknowledgement of the debt by the Board of Corporate Debtor in terms of Section 18 of the Limitation Act, 1963. It held that the majority of the claims were barred by time.

The appellant had filed a petition under Section 9 of the (IBC) against the order.

The dispute started when the former MD had claimed he was entitled to Rs 3 lakh remuneration from January 16, 2010, which was revised on August 1, 2014, to '4 lakh per month but the payment fell short of the agreed sum. Meanwhile, the Indian arm of the Company alleged that such a revision of salary had to be sanctioned by the Board and there was no document to prove this.

The NCLAT, however, after examining the merits of the case, concluded that there was no specific approval either of the payment of arrears of any fixation of the MDs remuneration or increase of his salary/perks. The also held that there was no crystallized quantum of an amount that could be claimed as salary/remuneration fixed by the Board of the Corporate Debtor as contemplated under Section 196 of the Companies Act, 2013.

Relying on one of the judgments of the Supreme Court, the tribunal held that It is not within our domain under to decide the issue of the fixation of the salary of the MD but to ascertain if there is any dispute regarding the issue.

The former managing director claimed his salary was more than the stipulated amount. But this claim was not supported by any company documents. The Board never approved this supposed increase in salary. Moreover, the MD filed a petition in 2021 so any arrears are barred by limitation," he added, the Court, noting the merits of the case, allowed the appeal, said Sarojanand Jha, founding partner, Vedanta Legal, who was the lawyer for the appellant.

Commenting on what the future course of action can be for the parties, he added, The respondent (former MD) can file an appeal in the Supreme Court against the NCLAT order.
Public sector lender plans to invest about Rs 1,000 crore over the next three years for building a ecosystem, including a super-app.

The Bengaluru-based bank will unveil its super app (yet to be named) next month. This would involve revamping the mobile banking platform with 262 features replicating branch banking, K Satyanarayana Raju, executive director, told Business Standard. The super-app is in the beta testing phase to get feedback on functioning and ease of use.

Raju said the lender has already spent about Rs 800 crore in the last two fiscals on the digital eco-system, including mobile banking, data analytics and systems. The part of savings on operating expenses has been deployed for investment in the digital backbone.

Fellow public sector banks, which already have a super app, include State Bank of India  Yono, Bank of Baroda  Bob World and Union Bank of India. Super-apps straddle financial services on the platform to provide seamless experience. This would mean increasingly more and more customers will skip banking apps for specific activities and use only Super-app.

With the advance of digitisation, a super-app would cease to be a unique edge for banking entities. In fact, it would become the important pillar of set-up for omni-channel customer experience set-up.

Last year, the bank set up a business analytics vertical with two wings  one for data analytics for regulatory requirements and another for lead generation plus data mining of customer information.

Now we are strengthening the vertical by doubling the staff strength with specialists to 40. Plus, the bank has built an API banking stack for corporate banking. The integration of this facility is complete, he said.

As for the retail side of business, the lender is working on building an end-to-end digital lending platform which is expected to be functional by September 2022. The board has already approved a proposal to invest Rs 200 crore for developing a digital lending platform, Raju said.
An estimated 4.8 million have been lost in since the start of the military conflict between Russia and Ukraine, according to a new brief published by the Labour Organization (ILO).

The brief titled "The impact of the crisis on the world of work: Initial assessments" estimates that if hostilities were to escalate employment losses would increase to seven million. However, if the fighting was to cease immediately a rapid recovery would be possible, with the return of 3.4 million jobs, Xinhua news agency reported.

According to the brief, Ukraine's has been severely affected. Since the beginning of the military conflict on February 24, more than 5.23 million refugees have fled to neighboring countries. The refugees comprise mainly women, children and persons over the age of 60. Of the total refugee population, approximately 2.75 million are of working age.

The study estimates that the crisis in may also create labor disruption in neighboring countries, mainly in Hungary, Moldova, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. If the military conflict continues, Ukrainian refugees would be forced to remain in exile longer, putting further pressure on the labor market and social protection systems in these states and increasing unemployment in many of them.

The significant economic and employment disruptions affecting Russia are having significant ripple effects in central Asia, especially in countries whose economies depend on remittances from the Russian Federation, such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the brief said.

If the hostilities and the sanctions against Russia lead to job losses for migrant workers in Russia and these migrant workers return to their countries of origin, there will be severe economic losses in central Asia as a whole, the brief said.

The military conflict between Russia and Ukraine has also shocked the global economy, further complicating recovery from the Covid-19 crisis. This is likely to affect growth in employment and real wages, and put additional pressure on social protection systems.

The brief estimated that the fallout from the Ukraine crisis may worsen labor market conditions and reverse some of the gains made in many high-income countries, which have recently witnessed signs of a stronger labour market recovery.

The situation is particularly hard in low and middle-income countries, many of which have been unable to fully recover from the impact of the Covid-19 crisis, it said.

--IANS

int/shs

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The Biden administration has taken the Quad, the informal grouping of Australia, India, Japan and the United States, to the leadership level, the White House said on Tuesday on the eve of its US-ASEAN Special Summit.

"We are the first administration that has taken the -- that is the United States, Australia, India and Japan -- to the leader level. We have had a number of meetings and they will meet in Tokyo at the president's travel," a senior administration official told reporters on the eve of the US-ASEAN summit.

Leaders of ASEAN countries started arriving in the American capital on the eve of the historic summit that US President is hosting for them.

"We have decided for the first time in seven decades to share sensitive nuclear submarine technology with another country. We launched AUKUS that binds and bonds Australia, Great Britain and the in a fundamental endeavour to deliver on the promise of nuclear-powered submarines," the official said.

"But this partnership will also include more areas of technology cooperation with other countries. We will have more to report on that as we go forward. I think what we have also seen is substantial engagement in the Pacific," the official said.

"Clearly, the Indo-Pacific is a broad region and too often we speak a lot about Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia, India. But it is equally important to focus on the Pacific and you will be seeing indications of that going forward," the official said.

The Biden administration has also broadened and deepened its discussion with Europe and Asia about each other. "We have seen unprecedented Indo-Pacific cooperation in the challenges that Europe has faced since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, more generally," the senior administration official added.

This is the first time in its 45-year history that ASEAN leaders will be welcomed together to Washington, DC.

"There is a daily urgent set of demands as the West, the transatlantic community is engaging deeply on what is going on at the battlefield in Ukraine. That obviously takes an enormous amount of time, focus, energy and resources currently of the senior leadership," the official said.

"But it is also the case that there is a deep recognition that fundamental long-term challenges are playing out in the Indo-Pacific. The US is committed and determined to ensuring that our engagement in the region is broad, broad-based and sustained," the White House official said.

"So part of that will be the hosting of the summit. Part of it will be the trip to South Korea and Japan. And as part of each of those stops, there will be a range of engagements, including the fourth meeting at the leader level in just over a year. That will be hosted by (Japanese) Prime Minister (Fumio) Kishida in Tokyo on May 24, next week or the week after next," the official added.

On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other senior Congressional leaders will welcome the ASEAN leaders to the Capitol for a bipartisan working lunch. After that, the ASEAN leaders will meet senior American business leaders and CEOs to discuss ways of strengthening economic cooperation between one of the most dynamic regions on the planet and the US.

They will be joined by the secretary of commerce and the US trade representative. There will be discussions at this session about the key challenges ahead in technology, post-Covid recovery, issues associated with climate and energy.

In the evening, Biden will be hosting the ASEAN leaders for an intimate dinner in the White House, for an opportunity to listen to the leaders about their aspirations for where they want to take ASEAN and how the US can help in that in the period ahead, the official said.

On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Tony Blinken will host the ASEAN leaders for a working lunch at the State Department and it is focussed primarily on maritime cooperation, pandemic recovery and health security.

Harris will also host a discussion with the ASEAN leaders and other cabinet officials from across the interagency regarding climate action, clean energy and sustainable infrastructure, the official said.

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Pakistan Foreign Minister Zardari claimed on Thursday that a Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) minister had threatened him with the imposition of martial law a night before the no-confidence motion against ex-Prime Minister Imran Khan was passed, media reports said.

In his address to the National Assembly, Zardari said that the PTI minister had asked him to either accept early elections or martial law would be imposed in the country, Geo News reported.

The Foreign Minister said that despite PTI's repeated attempts to defeat the no-confidence motion against the former premier, their bids were foiled and the no-trust vote was successful in ousting Imran Khan.

Zardari also demanded an investigation into the events leading up to and post the no-confidence motion voting.

Ex-Deputy Speaker Qasim Suri had termed the no-trust motion against Khan "unconstitutional" and dismissed it on April 3, and following this, Khan advised President Arif Alvi to dissolve the assemblies and the latter followed suit.

But the then Opposition filed a plea in the Supreme Court seeking the nullification of the government's move. The top court on April 7 declared the government's decision to dissolve the assemblies and Suri's ruling against the Constitution, Geo News reported.

The SC had asked to hold the voting on the no-confidence motion on April 9, but Khan had the Speaker prolong the session. But near midnight, the Speaker resigned from office.

Being the senior member of the panel of chairs, PML-N MNA Ayaz Sadiq chaired a session on early April 10 and held the voting on the no-confidence motion, which ultimately led to Khan's ouster.

--IANS

san/arm

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Indian American Congressman Ro Khanna on Tuesday advocated the need for the Biden Administration to provide more strategic to so that New Delhi can protect itself against on its border.

"In my time in Congress, I have been leading the initiative to have the US provide more strategic to to protect itself against on its border," Khanna said.

"I will continue to find ways to make sure can choose US weapons over Russian ones," he said in a statement after a meeting with community Leader Ajay Bhutoria, wherein they had conversations on advancing stronger US-India ties at all levels -- people to people, business to business and industry to industry.

"Both the democracies -- India and the US -- need each other for global stability and specifically in the Indo-Pacific region. The formation of Quad with Australia, Japan, India and the US is playing a strong role in balancing the influence of and to counter the influence of China, the US needs to build a stronger partnership with India in the defence sector and supply the required to India," Bhutoria said.

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and the on Thursday agreed to step up their sanctions against as leaders from the two sides raised concerns about the war's impact in the Indo-Pacific, where they seek to strengthen their partnership and increase engagement amid China's growing assertiveness.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who held talks in Tokyo with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Charles Michel, told a joint news conference that supports tough sanctions against and ample support for Ukraine because the war shakes the foundation of the world order not only in Europe but also in Asia.

Security in Europe and in the Indo-Pacific are inseparable, Kishida said.

The EU leaders said they want to take a greater role and responsibility in the region and agreed to bolster cooperation in a range of areas including digital transformation, renewable energy and climate.

The Indo-Pacific is a thriving region. It is also a theater of tensions. Take the situation in the East and South seas or the constant threat of (North Korea), von der Leyen said at the news conference, referring to rising tensions over Beijing's increasingly assertive maritime actions and Pyongyang's missile and nuclear threats.

We want to take more responsibility in a region that is so vital to our prosperity, she said.

Von der Leyen added that Russia's barbaric war against Ukraine has raised concerns about China's growing influence and ambitions.

Michel said cooperation on Ukraine is critical in Europe and also important in the Indo-Pacific.

We believe that must stand up to defend the multilateral system that it benefited from in developing its country," he said, noting the EU wants to deepen our cooperation on a more assertive .

Japanese Foreign Ministry officials said the EU's move reflects a major shift away from China amid growing concerns over Beijing's human rights issues and other problems in the region.

quickly joined other countries in imposing sanctions following Russia's invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. There is growing fear in Tokyo that the war may embolden China to take more assertive military actions in the East and South China seas, where Beijing's vast territorial claims have overlapped with those of its smaller neighbors.

Japan has frozen the assets of Russian leaders, including President Vladimir Putin, and government officials and billionaires close to him as well as key banks. It has also restricted trade and announced a decision to phase out imports of Russian coal and crude oil.

Von der Leyen will leave Japan after a working lunch on Thursday, while Michel will travel to Hiroshima, where he is set to pay tribute Friday to atomic bombing victims.

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Live news updates: appointed a new prime minister on Thursday, as its embattled president seeks a way out of the country's worst economic crisis since independence that has sparked widespread protests.



Ranil Wickremesinghe, a political veteran who has been prime minister of the island nation five times before, must try to address financial chaos and heal political divisions as he sets out to form a coalition government.

"We are facing a crisis, we have to get out of it," Wickremesinghe told Reuters as he left a temple in the main city of Colombo shortly after his swearing-in. Asked whether there was a possible solution, he replied: "Absolutely."
Chennai: Alleging Rs 54 crore estimated loss in the purchase of 40,000 tonne rice to be sent to Sri Lanka in lines with a Tamil Nadu government decision, a PIL petition has been filed in the Madras High Court to scrap the proposal and consequently direct the authorities concerned to take steps to purchase the rice through the Union Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution and the Food Corporation of India (FCI) in New Delhi.

When the public interest litigation petition, also praying for a direction to the Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption (DVAC) to conduct an inquiry in to the matter, came up for hearing on Thursday, a vacation bench of Justices G R Swaminathan and Senthil Kumar Ramamurthy posted it after summer vacation, so as to enable the authorities concerned to file their counter-affidavits.

According to petitioner A Jaishankar of Tiruvarur, Chief Minister M K Stalin announced in the state Assembly on April 29 during that 40,000 tonne of rice will be provided to the Sri Lanka to help the citizens who are facing acute hardships due to economic crises in that country.

Pursuant to this, the Tamil Nadu Civil Supply Corporation on May 5 submitted a proposal to the Finance and Consumer and Co-operative departments to grant permission to purchase the rice. It was stated in the said proposal that the Corporation had conducted a meeting with various rice millers and they have agreed to supply rice at the rate of Rs 33 per kg, including all expenses except transportation cost.

After negotiations, the rice millers agreed to supply 40,000 tonne of any one of three varieties of par-boiled rice--Co-51, ADT-45 and Andhra Ponni at the rate of Rs 33.50 net per kg including transportation, loading, unloading, handling, toll charges, bag with printing and all other relevant expenditure upto delivery point at Chennai/Tuticorin Ports. The total cost was arrived at Rs 134 crore and the government on May 9 granted the financial sanction.

Petitioner contended that the authorities concerned had taken a hasty decision to purchase such a huge quantity of rice without approaching the Union Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution and the FCI, from where the rice can be purchased at subsidised rate. The provisions of Tamil Nadu Transparency in Tenders Act were given a go-by. The way in which they had acted raised a lot of suspicion, he submitted.

Petitioner pointed out that the price of rice per quintal (100 kg) is Rs 2,000 in the open market sales scheme for 2022. If the authorities concerned had opted to purchase the rice under the said scheme, it would have brought down the expenditure from Rs 134 crore to just Rs 80 crore, resulting in saving about Rs 54 crore.

Following criticism in the social media, the government had issued a press release later, wherein it was stated that the central government was supplying rice only for the public distribution scheme (PDS) under subsidised rate of Rs 20 per kg and it cannot be purchased from them and sent to any other country. The State wanted to project as if the government had taken a decision to purchase high quality rice and it cannot be compared with the one supplied by the FCI under the PDS scheme, petitioner contended. The government indirectly stated that the PDS rice supplied by the FCI was low quality and hence, it decided to purchase on nomination basis. The government had also warned that if anyone raises the issue, he/she will face appropriate legal action.

The authorities concerned had completely failed to either enquire with the Union government or the FCI for supply of rice and there was no mention in the GO or in the press release that Centre had rejected their request. The State government had taken a 'hasty' decision without verifying this aspect and without analysing the other modes of purchase and thereby committed serious error, which would amount to Rs 54 crore loss to the exchequer, the petitioner contended.
By Stephanie Kelly

(Reuters) - Oil prices eased in early Asian trade on Thursday, taking a pause after rising more than 5% in the previous session following new Russian sanctions on some European gas companies.

On Wednesday sanctioned 31 companies based in countries that imposed sanctions on Moscow after invaded in February.

That created unease in the market at the same time that Russian gas flows to Europe via fell by a quarter. It was the first time exports via have been disrupted since the invasion.

Brent crude futures fell 9 cents to $107.42 a barrel by 0013 GMT. WTI crude futures fell 13 cents to $105.58 a barrel.

Prices have risen over 35% so far this year, bolstered by supply concerns after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February.

The is still haggling over an embargo on Russian oil, which analysts say would further tighten the market and shift trade flows. The vote needs unanimous support, but it has been delayed as Hungary has dug in its heels in opposition.

Price gains have been limited by worries about demand destruction in China, as it attempts to curb the spread of coronavirus.

"Until we see some significant policy support coming through in China or policymakers adopt an alternative strategy to COVID (which seems very unlikely), oil prices could remain capped near term," said Stephen Innes, managing partner at SPI Asset Management.

(Reporting by Stephanie Kelly; editing by Richard Pullin)

(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 co-chairman of the Peoples Party (PPP), Asif Zardari, has made it clear that in the country will only be held after poll reforms are introduced and the National Accountability Laws are amended.

Zardari, a senior political leader who played a key role in the vote of no-confidence motion moved by the opposition parties last month against former premier Imran Khan, said would be held once the incumbent coalition government completes both tasks.

"I have also talked to (PML-N) on this and we agreed that we can go to polls as soon as the reforms and targets are met.

"We have to change laws and improve them and then go to . Whether it takes three or four months, we have to work on implementation of policies and improving the electoral process," Zardari told a press conference here on Wednesday.

He also said the coalition government headed by Nawaz Sharif's brother had no issue with voting rights and representation of overseas Pakistanis in elections.

Asked about Wednesday's statement by Defence Minister Khawaja Asif that one could not rule out the possibility of elections before November, Zardari said the PML-N leader had his own views and was bound to listen to his party's directives.

He said the PPP and the PML-N had decided that until electoral reforms were brought, there would be no talk about the new army chief's appointment.

Zardari also said the army was "apolitical" for the first time.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Prime Minister on Wednesday met his older brother and former premier in London for consultation on key political and economic issues facing the country.

Shehbaz accompanied by a group of senior leaders of his Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party traveled to London on a private trip, according to his party members.

His 10-member delegation consisted of Defence Minister Khawaja Asif, Information Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb, Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal, Power Minister Khurram Dastagir, Finance Minister Miftah Ismail and Railways Minister Khawaja Saad Rafiq, among .

A video clip showed the elder Sharif patting his younger brother. A photo of the prime minister hugging his brother was also shared. Another photo showed the two Sharifs chairing the meeting.

However, no details of the meeting or its agenda have been shared so far.

The PML-N delegation dashed to London as political and economic pressure mounted on the government which is expecting organised protests by ousted premier Imran Khan who is demanding early elections.

The bigger concern is the deteriorating economic situation and inability to control the prices of daily items used by common citizens.

Khan lashed out at the trip, saying at a public meeting on Tuesday that the entire cabinet was going to meet a "corrupt and convicted" person, that too on taxpayers' money.

Earlier, PM Shehbaz Sharif, 70, departed for London via a British Airways flight shortly after midnight on Tuesday. He is expected to stay in London for two to three days.

Three-time premier Nawaz Sharif, 72, against whom several corruption cases were launched by the government of Khan, had left for London in November 2019 after the Lahore High Court granted him four-week permission to go abroad for his heart treatment.

Khan, 69, who was removed from office in early April through a Parliament vote, accused the US of conspiring to dislodge his government, citing communication from the country's ambassador in Washington. The US government has bluntly denied the allegations multiple times.

PML-N leader Shehbaz, 70, assumed the office of the prime minister on April 11. The term of the current House ends in August, 2023.

Nawaz was removed from power in 2017 after a decision by the Supreme Court against him. He was later convicted separately in two corruption cases in 2018.

Sharif was given a 10-year prison sentence for owning property in London called the Avenfield case, but was released two months later when the court suspended the sentences, pending a final judgement.

But in December 2018 he was jailed for corruption again, this time for seven years, related to his family's ownership of steel mills in Saudi Arabia called the Al-Azizia Steel Mills case.

In both cases, he failed to provide the money trail to procure these foreign assets.

Sharif was in jail when allowed to go to London for four weeks for medical treatment but never came back.

(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 key members of Muslim League-N, led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, met on Wednesday with their party's supreme leader in London and briefed him about the country's economy.

The PML-N leaders said that the meeting revolved around 300 billion Pakistani rupees which is immediately required to stabilise the economy of the country, ARY News reported citing the sources privy to the details of the sitting.

As per the PML-N sources, the country will receive two billion dollars from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on deferred payment while the conversation with the Monetary Fund has been at an advanced level.

"The party huddle also consulted over the cases against former Prime Minister Imran Khan and the Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) leadership," sources said.

The party will consider the options with regard to Nawaz Sharif's return to again after the budget session. The PML-N meeting was decided for the compulsory consultation with the former Finance Minister Ishaq Dar over the key economic decisions, according to ARY News citing sources.

Meanwhile, in the meeting, the PML-N leaders opposed the election alliance with the Pakistan People's Party. The party leaders opined that a 'Charter of Democracy' can be inked with the PPP but an election alliance is unlikely, a party leader said.

In the first session of the crucial PML-N huddle, it was decided that there will be no early elections in Islamabad and the primary focus of the present government should be on providing economic relief to the citizens and taking long-term economic decisions.

The six-hour-long meeting was held among Pakistan Prime Minister, his brother and the party supremo and other leaders, including Khwaja Asif, Miftah Ismail, Marriyum Aurangzeb, Atta Tarar, Rana Sanaullah, Ishaq Dar, Ayaz Sadiq, at an undisclosed location in London, The News citing sources.

Notably, PTI chairman has been continuously calling for early general elections in the country since he lost the no-confidence motion in the National Assembly.

Sources said that sought suggestions on various issues, including early elections from all the party leaders, and everyone agreed that the PML-N should implement the economic agenda for the remaining term and then announce the next elections in consultation with the coalition partners.

Soon after the meeting, Information Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb said that the party leaders and Prime Minister presented a full report on Pakistan's social, economic and political situation to the supremo and briefed him on the agenda of the government and its planning.

Nawaz Sharif is our Quaid. The meeting between Nawaz Sharif and was long overdue. We have inherited today's Pakistan in a written-off situation and we needed to review the whole situation to formulate a plan. This was a private delegation," she said, as per The News .

arrived in London to meet his brother Nawaz Sharif on Wednesday.

Nawaz, who is convicted in a corruption case, has been living in London on the pretext of ill health since 2019. The former Pakistan PM sought extensions to prolong his stay in London on medical grounds.

(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 PMK and VCK have urged the Centre not to give political asylum to former Prime Minister of Mahinda Rajapakse.

In a statement on Thursday, the youth wing leader of the PMK and former Union Minister Dr. Anbumani Ramadoss said that the Indian government must not consider giving political asylum to Mahinda Rajapakse, who has resigned as the Sri Lankan Prime Minister and is said to be hiding in Trincomalee.

Ramadoss said that Mahinda Rajapakse was facing serious charges of genocide against the Tamil population of the island nation during the civil war in that country in 2009.

He said that there were reports that the former Sri Lankan Prime Minister is likely to come to India along with his family through sea route and called upon the Centre not to give him any consideration. He said that the United Nations Human Rights Commission was taking evidence against Mahinda Rajapakse on the crimes committed by him during the last stages of the Civil war that rocked Lanka.

The PMK leader said that the former Prime Minister of the island nation must be tried for war crimes with the help of India and other countries.

The VCK has also appealed to the Centre not to consider any asylum to Mahinda Rajapakse as there was a case of genocide against him.

Thol Thirumavalavan, VCK MP said in a statement on Thursday that the Centre must never consider granting asylum to Mahinda Rajapakse, and said that the UNHRC is taking evidence against him for the crimes committed during the civil war against the Tamil population.

--IANS

aal/dpb

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said on Thursday it would apply to join NATO "without delay", with Sweden expected to follow, as Russia's invasion of Ukraine looked set to bring about the very expansion of the Western military alliance that Vladimir Putin aimed to prevent.



The decision by the two Nordic countries to abandon the neutrality they maintained throughout the Cold War would be one of the biggest shifts in European security in decades. Moscow called Finland's announcement a direct threat to Russia, and threatened retaliation, including unspecified "military-technical" measures.

It came even as Russia's war in Ukraine was suffering another big setback, with Ukrainian forces driving Russian troops out of the region around the second largest city Kharkiv, the fastest Ukrainian advance since forcing to withdraw from the capital and northeast more than a month ago.



NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the Finns would be "warmly welcomed" and promised a "smooth and swift" accession process.



and Sweden are the two biggest EU countries yet to join NATO. Finland's 1,300-km (800-mile) border will more than double the length of the frontier between the U.S.-led alliance and Russia, putting NATO guards a few hours' drive from the northern outskirts of St Petersburg.



" must apply for NATO membership without delay," President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said in a joint statement, hoping steps to take the decision would "be taken rapidly within the next few days".



Asked whether Finland's accession posed a direct threat to Russia, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: "Definitely. NATO expansion does not make our continent more stable and secure.

"This cannot fail to arouse our regret, and is a reason for corresponding symmetrical responses on our side," Peskov added.

Russia's foreign ministry said Moscow would be forced to take "retaliatory steps, both of a military-technical and other nature", giving no further details. Russian officials have spoken in the past about potential measures including stationing nuclear-armed missiles on the Baltic Sea.



'LOOK AT THE MIRROR' Asked on Wednesday if Finland would provoke by joining NATO, Niinisto said: "My response would be that you caused this. Look at the mirror."

Five diplomats and officials told Reuters that NATO allies expect both countries to be granted membership quickly, paving the way for an increased troop presence in the Nordic region to defend them during a one-year ratification period.



Putin, Russia's president, cited NATO's potential expansion as one of the main reasons he launched a "special military operation" in Ukraine in February.



NATO describes itself as a defensive alliance, built around a treaty declaring that an attack on one member is an attack on all, granting U.S. allies the protection of Washington's superpower might including its nuclear arsenal.



Moscow regards that as a threat to its security. But Putin's decision to invade Ukraine has changed Nordic public opinion, with political parties that had long backed neutrality now embracing the view that is a menace.



Finland in particular has centuries of uneasy history in Russia's shadow. Ruled by the Russian empire from 1809-1917, it fought off Soviet invasions on the eve of World War Two, and accepted some Soviet influence as the price of avoiding taking sides in the Cold War. Since it and Sweden joined the EU in 1995, they have aligned more firmly with the West.



Thursday also saw an intensification of disputes over Russian supplies of energy to Europe - still Moscow's biggest source of funds and Europe's biggest source of heat and power.



Moscow said it would halt gas flows to Germany through the main pipeline over Poland, while Kyiv said it would not reopen a pipeline route it shut this week unless it regains control of areas from pro-Russian fighters. Prices for gas in Europe surged.



In Geneva, the U.N. Human Rights Council decided on Thursday to launch an investigation into possible war crimes by Russian troops during their occupation of the area near Kyiv, before they were driven out at the end of March.



U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said there were many examples of possible war crimes, including unlawful killings and summary executions.



Moscow denies deliberately attacking civilians. Its ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva said the West was "organising another political rout to demonize Russia".



On the front lines, Ukraine has mounted a counter-offensive in recent days, ousting Russian forces from villages north and east of Kharkiv they had held since the start of the invasion.



Reuters journalists have confirmed that Ukraine is now in control of territory stretching to the banks of the Siverskiy Donets River, around 40 km (25 miles) east of Kharkiv. To the north, the Ukrainians have been pushing towards the Russian border. In the latest advance, they announced on Wednesday the recapture of the village of Pytomnyk, halfway to the frontier.



"The withdrawal of Russian forces from the Kharkiv Oblast (region) is a tacit recognition of Russiaas inability to capture key Ukrainian cities where they expected limited resistance from the population," Britain's defence ministry said.



Ukraine's general staff said the Russians were regrouping to prevent further Ukrainian advances near Kharkiv.



Russia's retreat has begun to make it possible for some residents to return to recaptured villages around Kharkiv. But areas remain unsafe - littered with mines and booby traps.



The invasion has displaced more than 8 million people within Ukraine and the number of refugees to flee the country now exceeds 6 million, U.N. data showed.



(Reporting by Reuters bureaus

Writing by Peter Graff, Alexandra Hudson

Editing by Mark Heinrich, William Maclean)

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By Rupam Jain and Neha Arora

MUMBAI/NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Russian importers are reaching out to small Indian businesses to secure fresh produce, auto parts, medical devices and other key goods that are growing scarce due to sanctions, people familiar with the matter in both and said.

Private sector players in have met with potential suppliers in India's big cities and are opening specialised bank accounts at home for roubles-to-rupees transactions, with the blessing of the two governments, the sources said.

As the conflict drags on and sanctions tighten around Russia's economy, the stakes have risen both for Russian businesses needing overseas goods and for big global companies wanting to avoid those businesses, lest they run afoul of sanction rules.

In India, one of the most prominent world economies to continue trade with Russia, this has put the spotlight on small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as a potential trade route that, while limited in size, could remain under the sanctions radar.

"It is absolutely clear that large Indian conglomerates having exposure to the West will not conduct business with Russian companies," said a senior Indian foreign ministry official based in New Delhi.

"But SMEs can export and settle payments through banks that are not under the Western sanctions regime."

The official, who requested anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media, said representatives from Russian chambers of commerce were travelling to New Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru to identify companies willing to set up new subsidiaries or joint ventures to export goods to .

They are especially seeking consumer durables, spare parts for the transport sector, medical devices, construction materials for large infrastructure projects, and frozen food ahead of the winter season, the official said.

Among them was a Russian trader in Mumbai this week to meet exporters of vegetables and spare parts for the public transport sector.

"We are not facing any food shortages right now but it is critical to secure a steady supply chain in the next 60 days," the trader said.

Three other senior government officials and one banking official based in New Delhi, Moscow and St. Petersburg said Russian companies were actively opening accounts in Commercial-Indo Bank LLC, a joint venture between two Indian banks with headquarters in Moscow.

ROUBLES-TO-RUPEES

These so-called Nostro accounts, used in the Soviet era mainly to settle transactions by converting home currency to a foreign currency, provided a direct roubles-to-rupees payment mechanism for trade between the two countries when tensions were high between Washington and Moscow.

Officials at the Commercial-Indo Bank and its two parent banks, the State Bank of and Canara Bank, did not respond to questions from Reuters.

The Indian embassy in Moscow and Russia's industry and trade ministry declined to comment. India's trade and foreign ministry did not comment.

A senior government official with close knowledge of the matter in New Delhi added that Russia was offering dedicated ships for cargo along with insurance and re-insurance, since no European bank would provide it, although sources at India's finance and foreign ministries said terms were still under discussion.

New Delhi has not joined the widespread condemnation of Russia, its second-largest supplier of defence equipment and a valued source of oil imports, as well as a potential export market.

"But it is critical to ensure that the West does not get upset with India's increased economic involvement, as New Delhi cannot jeopardise its ties with the West," said Nandan Unnikrishnan, the head of Eurasian Studies at Observer Research Foundation, a private-sector think tank.

India's total merchandise trade with Russia is relatively modest, at about $8.1 billion in 2021 or about 1.2% of India's total trade, although two Indian officials estimated that exports to Russia would rise by more than $500 million in the next three months, as trade channels open up for small Indian businesses.

An Indian exporter in Kolkata, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter, said that after war broke out many traders stopped dealing with Russian buyers, fearing defaults, but their wariness was easing.

"People have started selling goods to Russia again, and in the past few weeks Russia has ramped up purchases of tea and coffee."

(Additional reporting by Rajendra Jadhav, Nupur Anand in Mumbai; Editing by Edmund Klamann)

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Sri Lanka's main Opposition SJB has split over the choice of the next prime minister as its leader Sajith Premadasa is unwilling to be the prime minister in the interim government under embattled President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

In a late-night televised address to the nation, the President on Wednesday refused to quit but promised to appoint a new Prime Minister and a young Cabinet this week which would introduce key constitutional reforms to curb his powers, amid protests over the nation's worst economic crisis that ousted his elder brother who is under protection at a naval base following violent attacks on his aides.

The main Opposition Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) split came out in the open when its leading figure Harin Fernando told reporters that he had decided to remain independent of the party.

He said that party leader Premadasa was unwilling to be the prime minister in the interim government.

This is not a time to put conditions and shirk our responsibility, every passing minute without a government would be disastrous, Fernando said, adding that he would support any interim prime minister to run the country.

has been without a government since Monday when Gotabaya's elder brother and prime minister resigned after violence erupted following an attack on the anti-government protesters by his supporters. The attack triggered widespread violence against Rajapaksa loyalists, leaving nine people, including two police officers, dead.

Premadasa has taken the moral ground that he would not agree to be the prime minister under the corrupt Rajapaksas, SJB leader Fernando said.

Premadasa would become the prime minister only if President Gotabaya Rajapaksa resigned, he said.

The SJB wrote a four-point letter to the President on Wednesday night.

It included conditions like he should step down during a specified period of time; he should not interfere in the day-to-day running of the government; the Cabinet for the interim government needs to be appointed not at his wish and the executive presidency must be abolished.

If President Gotabaya Rajapaksa would be agreeable, Premadasa would become the prime minister.

The group, which became independent of the ruling coalition that had suggested three names for the premier, said they would agree with the President's choice.

The President appoints the person who in his opinion could command the support of Parliament. So let him first make the appointment and we can consider when it reaches Parliament, Anura Yapa, a legislator of the group, told PTI.

The President, in his address on Wednesday night, said the person who commands parliamentary majority would be appointed the prime minister.

Former prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, who met the President on Wednesday evening, is speculated to become the new prime minister of the interim government.

Wickremesinghe has just his seat in the 225-member assembly but reported to have secured the support from a broader section to handle the interim administration.

Mahinda, the 76-year-old People's Party (SLPP) leader known for his brutal military campaign against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) during his presidency from 2005 to 2015, resigned on Monday.

He is being protected at the Trincomalee naval base after he was evacuated from his official residence, Defence Secretary Gen (retd.) Kamal Guneratne said on Wednesday.

Mahinda, who served as the country's prime minister thrice, saw his private residence set on fire on Monday. He, along with his wife and family, fled his official residence - Temple Trees - and took shelter at the naval base in Trincomalee after a series of deadly attacks on his supporters.

A curfew is in force across the island nation after mobs burned down the ancestral home belonging to the ruling Rajapaksa family amid mounting anger for their mishandling of the economy, leading to the island nation's worst economic crisis.

Over 250 people were injured in the clashes which also saw scores of properties belonging to ruling party politicians being set on fire.

is facing its worst economic crisis since gaining independence from Britain in 1948. The crisis is caused in part by a lack of foreign currency, which has meant that the country cannot afford to pay for imports of staple foods and fuel, leading to acute shortages and very high prices.

Thousands of demonstrators have hit the streets across Sri Lanka since April 9 seeking the resignation of the Rajapaksa brothers.

The powerful Rajapaksa clan has dominated Sri Lankan for years. Gotabaya is the last Rajapaksa family member in office and the resignation of his brother as prime minister did nothing to placate demonstrators or bring calm in the island nation.

Meanwhile, the nationwide curfew that was imposed following the violent incidents was lifted on Thursday at 7 AM for seven hours and will be reimposed at 2 PM, the President's Office announced.

Curfew will thereafter be in effect until 6 AM on Friday.

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Over 40 people were injured when a passenger plane of China's Airlines with 122 people onboard veered off the runway and caught fire while taking off in the country's southwest Chongqing city on Thursday.

All 113 passengers and nine crew members aboard the from Chongqing to Nyingchi in the Autonomous Region have been safely evacuated, Airlines said.

Over 40 people who sustained minor injuries have been hospitalised, Global Television Network (CGTN) reported.

Video footage posted by Central Television (CCTV) showed flames and billowing black smoke from the fuselage of the Tibet Airlines plane on the tarmac at Chongqing Jiangbei airport, Hong Kong-based South Morning Post reported.

People could be seen running from the plane after escaping via an evacuation slide at the rear door.

CCTV said the fire had been extinguished and the runway closed.

The aircraft was about to depart for Nyingchi in Tibet when the fire started.

The airline has said that the accident is under investigation.

This is the second incident involving a passenger plane in China in recent weeks.

On March 12, a Boeing 737 aircraft from Kunming to Guangzhou had crashed in Tengxian county of the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region. All the 132 people on board, including nine crew members, were killed.

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The gas transmission system operator of (GSTOU) has accused of interrupting Russian gas transit through to the consumers in and Europe.

Sergiy Makogon, head of the GSTOU, said on Wednesday that Gazprom has stopped transportation of gas from to the gas measuring station Sokhranivka, thus suspending supplies to Ukraine's eastern Donetsk and Lugansk regions, Xinhua news agency reported.

The GSTOU said that it was forced to suspend the Russian gas transit to Europe via the territories in eastern Ukraine controlled by Russian forces due to "force majeure".

The gas transit via the Sokhranivka and the border compressor station Novopskov were halted over unauthorized interference in technical processes and withdrawals of gas, the GSTOU said.

"The actions of the occupiers led to the interruption of gas transit," it said.

Novopskov is the gas compressor station in the conflict-affected Lugansk region, which pumps up to 32.6 million cubic meters of gas per day via Sokhranivka or a third of Russia's gas transit to Europe.

The GSTOU said it is ready to reroute the gas flows from Sokhranivka to the Sudzha physical interconnection point located in the territory controlled by Ukraine.

A similar transfer of capacity from Sokhranivka to Sudzha took place from Oct. 12 to 25, 2020 due to scheduled repairs, the GSTOU said.

According to it, Sudzha has a capacity of pumping 72 million cubic meters of gas per day.

On March 31, the GSTOU said that 44 gas-distributing stations in Ukraine suspended their operations due to the damage caused by shelling in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

On March 10, Makogon said that the daily transit of Russian gas via Ukraine almost doubled since the start of the conflict to a contracted maximum of 109 million cubic meters per day.

On April 12, local media reported that Russia's gas transit through Ukraine fell to about 68 percent of the contracted maximum.

In 2021, Ukraine transited some 41.6 billion cubic meters of Russian gas to consumers in Europe, down 25 percent from 2020.

--IANS

int/shs

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Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy interacts with Ministers at the cabinet meeting at Secretariat on Wednesday. Photo BY ARRANGEMENT.

VIJAYAWADA: Andhra Pradesh State Cabinet, chaired by Chief Minister Jagan on Thursday, has decided on early start of the agriculture season, approved the AP Export Promotion Policy 2022-27 and the AP Logistics Policy 2022-27.

A separate meeting was held by CM Jagan with all cabinet ministers, after the normal cabinet meeting, to discuss the Gadapa Gadapaku Mana Prabhutvam mass contact programme. The CM directed the ministers to participate in the programme without fail and explain to the people about the good work done by the government.

CM Jagan directed the ministers and MLAs to go to every house. If people cite their problems, they should be addressed immediately.

He stressed the need for party leaders, MLAs and ministers to mingle with the public for the next two years in view of the 2024 elections and blunt the edges of the false campaigns of the Opposition parties on the mass contact programme and on the governments development and welfare activities.

Briefing media after the cabinet meeting, Irrigation Minister Ambati Rambabu said the state government would start the Kharif season early by releasing water to Godavari delta from June 1 and the Krishna delta and Guntur channel from June 10.

Water will be released to farmers of the ayacuts of Somasila, Gandikota, Chitravati, Brahmam Sagar projects from July 10 and from the Nagarjuna Sagar project from July 15. Water will be released to ayacut farmers of Rayalaseema region under Gorakallu reservoir, Owk, Gandi and SRBC from June 30.

These dates are announced in advance so that farmers will be prepared.

Information and Public Relations Minister Chelluboina Venugopal said the cabinet has approved the AP Export Promotion policy 2022-27 and the AP Logistics Policy 2022-27. The cabinet also approved a bioethanol project to Krishak Bharati Cooperative Ltd ( KRIBHCO) at Sarvepalli in Venkatachalam of SPSR Nellore district. The cabinet gave its nod for creation of 16 additional posts in Lokayukta.

Venugopal said cabinet has also approved upgradation of a primary health centre to community health center in Pamarru of Krishna district and also the setting up of a Government Degree College for Women in Pulivendula.

The cabinet also sanctioned 26 teaching and 10 non-teaching posts.

The cabinet decided to raise a loan of Rs 1,600 crore from financial institutions for development of agriculture and agricultural marketing activities including improving connectivity from farmgate to markets, primary processing facilities, rythu bazars, farmgate infrastructure and facilities in market yards.

The minister said the cabinet has sanctioned eight posts of deputy managers and 22 assistant managers in State Cooperative Marketing Federation and the setting up of an Agriculture University with MRR Charitable trust in the name of Late Mekapati Goutham Reddy at Udayagiri in SPSR Nellore district.

The minister listed out the allotment of land to various entities for development works.

He said the cabinet has given its nod for the Matyakara Bharoasa on May 13, the YSR Rytu Bharosa on May 16, the launch of Animal Ambulance on May 19, the distribution of 3000 tractors and 402 combined harvesters in 4,014 community hiring centers on June 6, the YSR Crop Insurance scheme on June 14 and the Amma Vodi on June 21.
New Delhi, May 12: will be hoping that the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) shows solidarity with Moscow's stance and the aims of its ongoing 'special military operation' in when the foreign ministers of the bloc meet in Dushanbe on Friday.

The situation in is set to take centre stage with the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, who is currently visiting Oman, also scheduled to hold a number of bilaterals on the sidelines of the CIS meeting in the Tajikistan capital.

said that an exchange of views is expected on topical regional and topics, as well as "promising areas" for the development of multifaceted cooperation within the Commonwealth.

"Particular attention will be paid to issues of security and strengthening ties in the cultural, humanitarian and scientific fields," Alexei Zaitsev, the Deputy Director of the Information and Press Department of the Russian Foreign Ministry, had said in Moscow, last week.

Ahead of the foreign ministers' gathering in Dushanbe, a meeting of the Working Group for monitoring the economic situation in the CIS member states was held in Moscow today.

As many as nine issues have been included in the draft agenda for Friday's meeting with the ministers planning to exchange views on "topical issues" and on issues of interaction within the Commonwealth.

As the Russian President Vladimir Putin, and also possibly Nato members, prepare for a long haul in Ukraine, Moscow has intensified interaction with the countries in the region.

On May 3, Putin and Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko discussed preparations for the upcoming meeting of the leaders of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) which is expected to take place later this month.

A few days before that, Putin had dialled President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev where issues of interaction within the framework of the CSTO were also touched upon .

"The mood for the comprehensive strengthening of Russian-Kazakh relations of alliance and strategic partnership was confirmed," the Kremlin had said after the telephone conversation between the two leaders on April 29.

Armenia's Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, himself under a lot of pressure at home over the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, had paid a two-day official visit to on April 19-20.

"Russia is Armenia's strategic partner, we effectively cooperate in the Eurasian Economic Union, the CIS, the Collective Security Treaty Organisation. It is no secret that Russia has a key role to play in ensuring security and stability in our region," Pashinyan had said standing alongside Putin at the Novo-Ogaryovo presidential residence outside Moscow.

Releasing inside details about the Armenia PM's recent visit to Moscow, a Yerevan-based news and analytic agency said today that Putin was "very pleased" with Pashinyan's visit this time.

"Since the start of the Russian-Ukrainian war, they [i.e., Russia] have been closely monitoring the behavior of official Yerevan, and believe that Armenia has behaved better than even its longtime Central Asian allies - particularly Kazakhstan," reported News.am today.

Ahead of his trip to Dushanbe, Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan had travelled to Washington and held meetings with top Biden administration officials, including the US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.

"Ararat Mirzoyan emphasized the support provided by the United States to Armenia for the strengthening of democracy, sustainable development and the fight against corruption. Anthony Blinken, in his turn, highly assessed the democratic reforms implemented in Armenia, and underscored the continuous support of the American side to them," said the Armenian Foreign Ministry after the May 2 meeting between Mirzoyan and Blinken.

The Uzbek delegation to Dushanbe will be led by the interim Minister of Foreign Affairs Vladimir Norov. Tashkent had angred Moscow with its pro- statments in March but since then supported further development of interaction between Russia and Uzbekistan in the CIS, the SCO and, in general, in the foreign policy courses.

(The content is being carried under an arrangement with indianarrative.com)

--indianarrative

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has cut natural to a unit of seized by in retaliation for western penalties over the war in .

Germania GmbH and its subsidiaries are no longer receiving all contracted volumes, German Economy Minister Robert Habeck said. Europes biggest economy and the largest buyer of Russian gas is receiving gas from alternative sources and can cope with the disruption, he said.

Moscow prohibited dealings with Germania and its various subsidiaries now under the control of Germanys energy regulator. That includes energy supplier Wingas GmbH, a European gas storage business, the London-based trading arm of Gazprom and EuRoPol Gaz, owner of the Polish section of the Yamal-Europe pipeline connecting to .

last month temporarily took control of Gazprom Germania to safeguard security of supply.

Finland said on Thursday it would apply to join "without delay", with Sweden expected to follow, as Russia's invasion of looked set to bring about the very expansion of the Western military alliance that Vladimir Putin aimed to prevent.

The decision by the two Nordic countries to abandon the neutrality they maintained throughout the Cold War would be one of the biggest shifts in European security in decades. Moscow called Finland's announcement a direct threat to Russia, and threatened retaliation, including unspecified military-technical measures.
Ukraine's top prosecutor disclosed plans Wednesday for the first war crimes trial of a captured Russian soldier, as fighting raged in the east and south and the Kremlin left open the possibility of annexing a corner of the country it seized early in the invasion.

Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said her office charged Sgt Vadin Shyshimarin, 21, in the killing of an unarmed 62-year-old civilian who was gunned down while riding a bicycle in February, four days into the war.

Shyshimarin, who served with a tank unit, was accused of firing through a car window on the man in the northeastern village of Chupakhivka. Venediktova said the soldier could get up to 15 years in prison. She did not say when the trial would start.

Venediktova's office has said it has been investigating more than 10,700 alleged war crimes committed by Russian forces and has identified over 600 suspects.

Many of the alleged atrocities came to light last month after Moscow's forces aborted their bid to capture Kyiv and withdrew from around the capital, exposing mass graves and streets and yards strewn with bodies in towns such as Bucha. Residents told of killings, burnings, rape, torture and dismemberment.

Volodymyr Yavorskyy of the Centre for Civil Liberties said the Ukrainian human rights group will be closely following Shyshimarin's trial to see if it is fair. "It's very difficult to observe all the rules, norms and neutrality of the court proceedings in wartime," he said.

On the economic front, Ukraine shut down one of the pipelines that carry Russian gas across the country to homes and industries in Western Europe, marking the first time since the start of the war that Kyiv disrupted the flow westward of one of Moscow's most lucrative exports.

But the immediate effect is likely to be limited, in part because can divert the gas to another pipeline and because Europe relies on a variety of suppliers.

Meanwhile, a Kremlin-installed politician in the southern Kherson region, site of the first major Ukrainian city to fall in the war, said officials there want Russian President Vladimir Putin to make Kherson a "proper region" of -- that is, annex it.

"The city of Kherson is Russia," Kirill Stremousov, deputy head of the Kherson regional administration appointed by Moscow, told Russia's RIA Novosti news agency.

That raised the possibility that the Kremlin would seek to break off another piece of Ukraine as it tries to salvage an invasion gone awry. annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula, which borders the Kherson region, after a disputed referendum in 2014, a move denounced as illegal and rejected by most of the community.

Kherson, a Black Sea port of roughly 300,000, provides Crimea with access to fresh water and is seen as the gateway to wider Russian control over southern Ukraine.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it would be "up to the residents of the Kherson region after all to decide whether such an appeal should be made or not". He said any move to annex territory would have to be closely evaluated by legal experts to make sure it is "absolutely legitimate, as it was with Crimea".

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak mocked the notion of Kherson's annexation, tweeting: "The invaders may ask to join even Mars or Jupiter. The Ukrainian army will liberate Kherson, no matter what games with words they play."



Inside Kherson, people have taken to the streets to decry the Russian occupation. But a teacher who gave only her first name, Olga, for fear of Russian retaliation said such protests are impossible now because Moscow's troops "kidnapped activists and citizens simply for wearing Ukrainian colours or ribbons". She said "people are scared of talking openly outside their homes" and "everyone walks on the street quickly".

"All people in Kherson are waiting for our troops to come as soon as possible," she added. "Nobody wants to live in Russia or join Russia."



On the battlefield, Ukrainian officials said a Russian rocket attack targeted an area around Zaporizhzhia, destroying unspecified infrastructure. There were no immediate reports of casualties. The southeastern city has been a refuge for civilians fleeing the Russian siege in the devastated port city of Mariupol.

Russian forces continued to pound the steel plant that is the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance in Mariupol, its defenders said. The Azov Regiment said on social media that Russian forces carried out 38 airstrikes in the previous 24 hours on the grounds of the Azovstal steelworks.

The plant, with its network of tunnels and bunkers, has sheltered hundreds of Ukrainian troops and civilians during a months-long siege. Scores of civilians were evacuated in recent days, but Ukrainian officials said some may still be trapped there.

In his nightly address Tuesday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggested Ukraine's military is gradually pushing Russian troops away from Kharkiv, the country's second-largest city and a key to Russia's offensive in the Donbas, the eastern industrial region whose capture the Kremlin says is its main objective.

Ukraine is also targeting Russian air defences and resupply vessels on Snake Island in the Black Sea in an effort to disrupt Moscow's efforts to expand its control over the coastline, according to the British Ministry of Defence.

Separately, Ukraine said it shot down a cruise missile targeting the Black Sea port city of Odesa.

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The United States clashed with China and Russia on Wednesday over their strong opposition to the US push for new UN sanctions on over its missile and nuclear programs.

The debate at a UN Security Council meeting put a spotlight on the enormous gap between the two sides and the near impossible task the Biden administration faces in trying to get the council to adopt a new sanctions resolution. China and Russia both have veto power and say they want to see new talks and not more punishment for the North.

US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, this month's council president who called the meeting, said the Security Council can't wait until conducts additional provocative, illegal, dangerous acts -- like a nuclear test.

She said the Democratic People's Republic of Korea -- the country's official name -- has conducted 17 ballistic missile launches so far this year.

Assistant UN Secretary-General Khaled Khiari told the council that has launched more missiles in the past five months than in the prior two years combined.

The council imposed sanctions after the North's first nuclear test explosion in 2006 and tightened them over the years seeking to rein in its nuclear and ballistic missile programs and cut off funding.

But Thomas-Greenfield said that for the last four years, two members -- a clear reference to China and Russia -- have blocked every attempt to enforce the sanctions and update the list of individuals, companies and other entities subject to asset freezes and travel bans.

In the sanctions resolution adopted in December 2017, the Security Council committed to further restricting petroleum exports to North Korea if it conducted a ballistic missile launch capable of reaching intercontinental ranges, Thomas-Greenfield said. This year, North Korea has launched at least three ICBMs, and the council has remained silent, she said.

A proposed US draft resolution would halve oil exports, among other sanctions.

The US ambassador said the council needs to speak with a strong and unified voice to condemn North Korea's behavior.

Thomas-Greenfield told reporters last week the US would like the council to vote on the resolution in May, and she urged members on Wednesday to support the measure and show that the council will respond to threats to peace and security and to blatant violations of its resolutions.

Chinese Ambassador Zhang Jun expressed regret that the United States remains enamored superstitiously of the magic power of sanctions.

He said that the direct talks between the US and North Korea in 2018 produced positive results and a de-escalation of the situation on the Korean peninsula, but that the United States created the current impasse by not reciprocating to what he said were Pyongyang's positive initiatives.

Zhang said the US holds the key to breaking the deadlock and should take concrete actions to respond positively to North Korea's concerns and create conditions for an early resumption of dialogue.

The US draft resolution is centered on furthering sanctions, which is not an appropriate way to address the current situation, he said.

Asked by reporters later how China will vote on the US draft resolution, Zhang replied: We have proposed other options, and we have told them that we will not support the current U.S. draft resolution.

Last fall China and Russia circulated a draft resolution urging the Security Council to end a host of sanctions on North Korea, and Zhang expressed hope Wednesday that council members will give serious consideration to it.

Russia's deputy UN ambassador, Anna Evstigneeva, echoed Zhang's opposition to new sanctions.

Unfortunately, so far the council has only tightened restrictions ignoring the positive signals from North Korea, she said.

She expressed regret that over the last four years the council didn't react to North Korea's dismantling of its nuclear test site and compliance with the moratorium on nuclear testing. She said there is a need for political and diplomatic solutions to peacefully resolve the issues on the Korean peninsula.

Khiari, the UN assistant secretary-general, told the council that there are indications of resumed construction activities at the Punggye-ri nuclear test site, which was declared shut down in 2018.

Zhang said Beijing wants to avoid a new nuclear test explosion, so that's why we do not want to have additional sanctions that might force one of the parties to take more proactive measures.

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Longtime lawmaker Ranil Wickremesinghe was sworn in as Sri Lankas new prime minister by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa who had pledged to form a new government to end political instability while defying calls to step down for his role in the crisis.

His appointment came after opposition leader Sajith Premadasa had written to the president to say he is willing to lead an interim government under certain conditions.

Wickremesinghe, the 73-year-old leader of United National Party (UNP), was appointed prime minister after he held closed-door talks with Rajapaksa on Wednesday.

Wickremesinghe, who has served as the country's prime minister for four times, was in October 2018 fired from the post by then President Maithripala Sirisena.

However, he was reinstalled as the prime minister by Sirisena after two months.

Members of the ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), a section of the main Opposition Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) and several other parties have expressed their support to show majority for Wickremesinghe in Parliament, PTI reported quoting sources.

The UNP, the oldest party in the country, had failed to win a single seat from districts, including Wickremesinghe who contested from the UNP stronghold Colombo in 2020 parliamentary polls.

Wickremesinghe is widely accepted as a man who could manage the economy with far-sighted policies, and is perceived as the Sri Lankan politician who could command cooperation.

A magistrate has barred 13 members of Gotabaya Rajapaksas ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna party, including his brother and former premier Mahinda Rajapaksa, from traveling overseas, Bloomberg reported quoting local media said.

Sri Lankas stocks index on Thursday jumped over three per cent after being closed for two days on the speculation of the appointment of a new Prime Minister and political stability in the island nation, dealers said.

Today the market bounced back after the political limbo was broken following the announcement of the appointment of the prime minister, an analyst said.The main All Share Price Index (ASPI) closed 3.17 per cent or 237.99 points up at 7,754.62 at the close.
Satellites help run the internet and television and are central to the Global Positioning System. They enable modern weather forecasting, help scientists track environmental degradation and play a huge role in modern military technology.

Nations that dont have their own satellites providing these services rely on other countries. For those that want to develop their own infrastructure, options are running out as fills up.

I am a research fellow at Arizona State University, studying the wider benefits of and ways to make it more accessible to developing countries.

Inequity is already playing out in access to satellites. In the not-so-distant future, the ability to extract resources from the Moon and asteroids could become a major point of difference between the haves and have-nots. As policies emerge, there is the risk that these inequities become permanent.

Where to park a satellite

Thanks to the rapid commercialization, miniaturization and plummeting costs of satellite technology in recent years, more countries are able to reap the benefits of space.

CubeSats are small, cheap, customizable satellites that are simple enough to be built by high school students. Companies such as SpaceX can launch one of these satellites into orbit for relatively cheap  from $1,300 per pound. However, there are only so many places to park a in orbit around Earth, and these are quickly filling up.

The best parking is in geostationary orbit, around 22,250 miles (35,800 kilometers) above the equator. A in geostationary orbit rotates at the same rate as Earth, remaining directly above a single location on Earths surface  which can be very useful for telecommunications, broadcasting and weather satellites.

There are only 1,800 geostationary orbital slots, and as of February 2022, 541 of them were occupied by active satellites. Countries and private companies have already claimed most of the unoccupied slots that offer access to major markets, and the satellites to fill them are currently being assembled or awaiting launch. If, for example, a new spacefaring nation wants to put a weather satellite over a specific spot in the Atlantic Ocean that is already claimed, they would either have to choose a less optimal location for the satellite or buy services from the country occupying the spot they wanted.

Orbital slots are allocated by an agency of the United Nations called the International Telecommunication Union. Slots are free, but they go to countries on a first-come, first-served basis. When a satellite reaches the end of its 15- to 20-year lifespan, a country can simply replace it and renew its hold on the slot. This effectively allows countries to keep these positions indefinitely. Countries that already have the technology to utilize geostationary orbit have a major advantage over those that do not.

While geostationary orbital slots are the most useful and limited, there are many other orbits around Earth. These, too, are filling up  adding to the growing problem of space debris.

Low Earth orbit is around 1,000 miles (1,600 km) above the surface.

Satellites in low Earth orbit are moving fast in a highly congested environment. While this may be a good place for Earth imaging satellites, it is not ideal for single communication satellites  like those used to broadcast television, radio and the internet.

Low Earth orbit can be used for communications if multiple satellites work together to form a constellation. Companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are working on projects to put thousands of satellites into low Earth orbit over the next few years to provide internet across the globe. The first generation of SpaceXs Starlink consists of 1,926 satellites, and the second generation will add another 30,000 to orbit.

At the current rate, the major space players are rapidly occupying geostationary and low Earth orbits, potentially monopolizing access to important satellite capabilities and adding to space junk.

Access to resources in space

Orbital slots are an area where inequity exists today. The future of space could be a gold rush for resources  and not everyone will benefit.

Asteroids hold astounding amounts of valuable minerals and metals. Later this year, NASA is launching a probe to explore an asteroid named 16 Psyche, which scientists estimate contains over US$10 quintillion worth of iron. Tapping huge resource deposits like this and transporting them to Earth could provide massive boosts to the economies of spacefaring nations while disrupting the economies of countries that currently depend on exporting minerals and metals.

Another highly valuable resource in space is helium-3, a rare version of helium that scientists think could be used in nuclear fusion reactions without producing radioactive waste. While there are considerable technological obstacles to overcome before helium-3 is a feasible energy source, if it works, there are enough deposits on the Moon and elsewhere in the solar system to satisfy Earths energy requirements for several centuries. If powerful spacefaring countries develop the technology to use and mine helium-3  and choose not to share the benefits with other nations  it could result in lasting inequities.

Existing space laws are not well suited to handle the complicated web of private companies and nations competing for resources in space. Countries are organizing into groups  or space blocs  that are uniting on goals and rules for future space missions. Two notable space blocs are planning missions to set up bases and potential mining operations on the Moon: the Artemis Accords, led by the U. S., as well as joint Chinese and Russian plans.

Right now, the major players in space are establishing the norms for exploiting resources. There is a risk that instead of focusing on what is best for everyone on Earth, competition will drive these decisions, damaging the space environment and causing conflict. History shows that it is hard to challenge international norms once they are established.

Moving forward

Access to space is critical for the functioning of a modern nation. Space access will only become more important as humanity rapidly advances toward a future of space hotels and colonies on Mars.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, the founding document of space law, says that space should be used for the benefit and in the interests of all countries. The policies taking shape today will dictate whether this is the case in the future.

Theodora Ogden, Research Fellow in Emerging Space Countries, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Sri Lankan President Gotabaya has defied calls to resign, pledging instead to form a new government after violent clashes this week left eight people dead in an escalation of a monthslong crisis over food and fuel shortages.

I will give the opportunity for the new government and new PM to start a new program to take the country forward, he said in a televised address, adding that after stability is restored, he will discuss curbing his executive powers with all political parties.

Gotabaya earlier extended a nationwide curfew until Thursday morning, after government supporters on Monday initiated attacks on protesters who had camped out for weeks in downtown Colombo to call for his ouster. opponents then attacked ruling-party lawmakers and burned some of their houses, prompting key family members to effectively go into hiding.

His brother Mahinda Rajapaksa quit as prime minister leading to the dissolution of the cabinet, leaving no government in place to negotiate with the Monetary Fund and creditors on $8.6 billion of debt due this year. A deal is essential stabilize the nations finances and help the government provide essential goods to the island nations 22 million people.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa is refusing to step down, and the opposition has declined his offers of a unity government without constitutional change that would reduce the powers of the presidency.

He needs to give the country a timeframe on what will happen, Jehan Perera, executive director at the National Peace Council in Colombo, said of the president. This is one way he can redeem himself as a statesman before things get worse.

Heres what could happen next:

1. President Is Impeached



Under Sri Lankas constitution, removing a president is difficult and time consuming. First a resolution must be passed by two-thirds of parliament explaining why a president is unfit for office, then it must be investigated by the Supreme Court, and then if judges agree with the findings lawmakers need to vote again.

Officials in the ruling Peoples Front party say they still command a majority in parliament, and last week they proved they had the numbers in a vote for a new deputy speaker. Its unclear if the violence, which led to attacks on the houses of more than two dozen lawmakers and former ministers linked to the Rajapaksas, and the death of a ruling party lawmaker, changed that equation at all.

2. President Forms Unity Government With Opposition



Now that his brother is gone as prime minister, Gotabaya Rajapaksa has made another overture to the opposition to form an all-party government. The main opposition parties have consistently rejected his offer, as the president would still retain large powers.

The influential Buddhist clergy and the Bar Council of proposed an interim government that would run the country for 18 months while lawmakers draw up constitutional amendments to curb presidential powers. But any government that doesnt have broad-based support is likely to be unstable.

3. President Dissolves Parliament, Holds Fresh Elections



The constitution doesnt allow the president to dissolve parliament until midway through its five-year term, which isnt until February 2023. But it does allow the parliament to request a dissolution before then by passing a resolution.

While some opposition leaders have floated this option in recent days, elections will also be expensive and time consuming. And even if the opposition wins, Gotabaya Rajapaska would still retain key powers as the president. He has the power to appoint a prime minister who in his opinion commands the parliament majority, and he will have a large say in naming and firing cabinet ministers. He can also assign himself to any ministry portfolio.

This is why the opposition has put forward a bill to clip the powers of the presidency rather than pushing for an election. The previous cabinet under Mahinda Rajapaksa had also put in motion the writing of a new bill to curb the executive presidency.

While an election could possibly give the opposition the two-thirds majority it needs to change the constitution, that may need the endorsement of a referendum and will possibly get tied up in the Supreme Court -- all of which could drag on for months.

4. President Resigns, Flees the Country



This is what the protesters are hoping for with their chants of Go Home Gota, and cant be ruled out if the violence spreads. If the president resigns, then immediately whoever becomes prime minister would take over, with the house speaker as next in line.

Then parliament has one month to elect his replacement by an absolute majority through a secret ballot, according to the constitution. Any lawmaker would be eligible, including an outsider who takes a party list position ahead of the vote. The new president will hold office for the remainder of the term, which ends in 2024.

Nishan De Mel, executive director of Verite Research, said Gotabaya Rajapaksa has three main options: resignation, impeachment or a compromise that includes reducing presidential powers. He has been resisting all three options, De Mel said.

5. Military Coup



While has a history of authoritarian rule, if anyone stages a coup it will likely be to help the Rajapaksas. The brothers have run Sri Lanka for 13 of the past 17 years, often with an iron fist. Gotabaya Rajapaksa is widely credited with putting an end to a 26-year separatist conflict with ethnic Tamil rebels, and has appointed more than two dozen serving or retired military officers into key posts.

Gotabaya Rajapaksas top allies include Sri Lankan army chief General Shavendra Silva, who has been sanctioned by the U.S. on allegations of war crimes committed during the last phase of the conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and Kamal Gunaratne, secretary to the defense minister who stands accused of similar actions. Both men have denied wrongdoing.

Silva has told foreign diplomats that Sri Lankas army would uphold the constitution and was prepared to provide security and protection to the state as necessary.

For now Rajapaksa has given powers to the military under the emergency to detain people a without warrant for 24 hours while private property can be searched.

In a country where we dont have a prime minister and a cabinet and the emergency rule brings broad powers to an executive with broad ties to the military, that combination is extremely dynamic, said Bhavani Fonseka, a Colombo-based senior researcher for the Center for Policy Alternatives. It can lead to scenarios that Sri Lanka has not seen before even with the civil war.
Field Marshal Sarath Fonseka on Thursday categorically refused to accept any post in a government headed by President Gotabaya .

Fonseka, who is credited with the annihilation of the LTTE, strongly condemned any attempt to mislead the public through false propaganda after it was reported that the President had contacted Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) MP to offer premiership to him.

I categorically refuse to accept any post in a government headed by Gotabaya Rajapaksa, he said.

In a statement on his official Facebook account, Fonseka strongly condemned any attempt to mislead the public through false propaganda.

I, too, stand unconditionally on the main demands of the entire Sri Lankan nation through a peaceful, non-violent people's struggle.

Field Marshal Fonseka said he is extremely sensitive to the demands of the anti-government protesters at Galle Face, close to the Presidential Secretariat, who have raised their voices on behalf of the country, the public, and future generations.

From the beginning, I have wholeheartedly blessed the brave youth who have been in the struggle and I will never be a partner in resolving the Rajapaksas' crisis without holding discussions with the protesters at Galle Face, he said.

Sri Lanka's embattled President Gotabaya on Wednesday refused to quit but promised to appoint a new Prime Minister and a young Cabinet this week which would introduce key constitutional reforms to curb his powers, amid protests over the nation's worst that ousted his elder brother Mahinda .

Violence erupted in on Monday after supporters of former prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa attacked peaceful anti-government protesters demanding his ouster over the country's worst that led to acute shortages of staple food, fuel and power.

Over 200 people have also been injured in the violence in Colombo and other cities.

(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 has tweeted that he had a conversation with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to discuss defensive aid for .

"We appreciate the high level of dialogue with and support in our struggle," Zelensky was quoted as saying by Xinhua news agency

In their talks, the parties touched upon the sanctions against Russia over its conflict with and the cooperation between and in the energy sector.

According to a statement issued Wednesday by the German government, the two leaders exchanged views on specific and practical options for further supporting Ukraine during the phone conversation.

Scholz also expressed his condolences to Zelensky over the passing of Leonid Kravchuk, the first president of independent Ukraine.

On Tuesday, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said the government of was working with the country's enterprises to provide modern weapons to Ukraine.

Baerbock said that in the coming days Germany would begin training Ukrainian soldiers on using mobile howitzers.

--IANS

int/shs

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday got emotional while interacting with the daughter of a beneficiary of the government schemes who was visually challenged.

The Prime Minister, while interacting with the beneficiary, asked him if he imparts education to his daughters, to which the latter said that one of the three daughters wanted to become a doctor.

PM Modi asked the reason for the daughter to choose the medical profession as a career, to which she said, "I want to become a doctor because of the problem that my father is suffering from".

Getting emotional on the response of the girl, the Prime Minister maintained a few moments of silence and lauded her strength.

"Your compassion is your strength," he said.

The Prime Minister was virtually addressing a gathering, Utkarsh Samaroh, in Gujarat's Bharuch.
KRBL rose 7.43% to Rs 218.30 after the company said that it received substantial relief against the impugned tax demand raised by the income tax department.

The Income Tax Appellate Tribunal has granted relief for income tax demand of Rs 97.88 crore for the appeals filed by the company. It also dismissed all the appeals for income tax demand of Rs 1170.36 crore filed by the income tax department (ITD) for the subject years.

As result, the tax demand is reduced to approximately Rs 0.96 crore.

KRBL said it is evaluating available legal remedies for the income tax demand of Rs 0.96 crore, sustained by the Tribunal.

During the year ended 31 March 2019, KRBL had received assessment orders along with demand notices, with respect to assessment years 2010-11 to 2016-17, aggregating to Rs 1269.20 crore (including interest).

The company contested the tax demand notices before CIT (Appeals), New Delhi.

During the year ended 31 March 2020, CIT (Appeals) granted partial relief on certain issues in favor of the company vide orders dated 11 March 2020 and correspondingly, Income tax demand stood reduced to Rs 98.83 crore (including interest).

Later, KRBL filed appeals before Tribunal for additions sustained by CIT (Appeals), and correspondingly the ITD had also filed appeals before the Tribunal in respect of the relief allowed by CIT (Appeals).

Now, the Tribunal vide its aforesaid consolidated order has allowed the appeals filed by the company and dismissed all the appeals filed by the ITD.

KRBL is a basmati rice producer and has fully integrated operations in every aspect of basmati value chain, right from seed development, contract farming, procurement of paddy, storage, processing, packaging, branding and marketing.

KRBL reported 50% drop in standalone net profit to Rs 73 crore despite a 3% rise in revenues to Rs 1,154 crore in Q3 FY22 over Q3 FY21.

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Premier Explosives has signed a contract with Ministry of Defence (Army) at New Delhi on 11 May 2022, for supply of NFM - new family of Munitions for a total value of Rs.44.58 crore (including GST), to be delivered within twenty four months from the effective date of contract.

The production of these items will be done from the company's facility at Katepally.

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Here is the best of Business Standards pieces for Thursday

The governments decision to re-examine and reconsider the sedition law under Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code after seeking to defend it in the Supreme Court raises considerable hope for the cause of human rights and civil liberties in India, argues our lead editorial. Read here

The governments unexpected decision to review the sedition law has set off fevered public debate.

But it would be premature to conclude that India is about to enter some sort of Golden Age of freedom of expression, writes Kanika Datta

In other views:

Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah argues why regulators dont need constitutional status. Read here
Trinamool Congress General Secretary on Wednesday said that Home Minister maintained silence over the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC) during his two-day visit to Assam, however, he announced the plan to implement CAA in .

He alleged that the CAA is being 'used' by the leaders as a carrot on a stick. "CAA is a political tool and we should not get into this trap," Banerjee said while addressing a public event here. The General Secretary said that the Home Minister had varied on the CAA in and Assam. "This is a testament to the kind of that the BJP-led government is doing. They are using this issue as a 'Jumla'. The Citizenship Amendment Bill was passed in the Lok Sabha in 2019 and within a month, it came to force and became CAA. You usually need 3-4 months to formulate the rules of a new Act, but it has been more than two and half years and the centre has sought six extensions but is still unable to form the rules of the CAA," said the leader. He also said that his party will continue to oppose the CAA and termed it a "draconian bill". "We oppose this draconian bill. In West Bengal, said that the CAA will be implemented after the COVID-19 pandemic is ebbed. In Assam, he is mum on the issue. This hypocrisy of the Union Home Minister is now out in the open. How can those people be termed illegal who voted you (BJP) in power? In Assam, the list was prepared after spending Rs 1600 crore and in the list around 19 lakh, people were excluded. It is a botched up list," he added. Reacting to the Union Home Minister's remark that the government is not cooperating with the Centre to tackle the infiltration issue, Banerjee said that the Home Ministry should safeguard their borders.

"It is the responsibility of the Border Security Force that comes under the Home Ministry. I would be happy to see if they can put any information on the Bengal government's non-cooperation in this matter," said Banerjee. "Some people say Hindus are in danger and some others say Muslims are in danger. But, I will say, take off your spectacles of communalism, you will see that it is India, that is in danger," he added. Speaking about next year's assembly polls in Tripura, and Meghalaya, the leader said that the TMC will take head-on in both the states. "We have become the primary opposition in Meghalaya and Tripura too we have started our unit where we contested the local body elections to the best of our ability. Next year, when we go to the polls, TC will put its entire might to make sure that, we can defeat the autocratic forces. We are not in Assam to replace anyone. We will visit every people with our vision of the development of the state and make sure that the ideology of TMC reaches every people. We will do everything possible to oust the corrupt government from power in Assam," he said. The TMC General Secretary on Wednesday visited the historic Kamakhya temple and offered his prayer to Goddess Kamakhya. He also addressed a party workers' meeting held at ITA Machkhowa and inaugurate the party's Assam unit office.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
As Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy gears up to attend the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos later this month, the state government on Thursday said his meetings there would focus on various investment opportunities and international partnerships.

Ahead of his visit to the Swiss ski resort town of Davos for the global summit from May 22-26, the state government said in a statement it is planning to take the growth story of to this global forum, highlighting the efforts that are in place to meet the Sustainable Development Goals, adopt sustainable manufacturing and transition to a decarbonized economy.

Leading a high-level delegation from the state, the chief minister will have at least 13 bilateral meets across the thrust sectors and three dedicated state sessions to focus on industries, infrastructure, health, education and skilling.

The 52nd Annual Meeting of the WEF, which was initially slated for January 17-22 this year but got postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, will bring together thousands of business leaders, international political leaders, economists, celebrities and journalists to discuss global, regional, and industry challenges.

has been elevated from being a 'Forum Member Associate' at the World Economic Forum, to the position of 'Forum Platform Partner', due to which the state government will now have access to full participation in the CEO-level interactions, public figure dialogues, projects and workshops of the platform.

The statement also quoted WEF President Berge Brende as saying that Reddy's "commitment to building Andhra Pradesh on the foundations of transparency, the decentralization of power, and technological innovation is noteworthy."



The state government said its delegation will be interacting with over 35 global companies, world leaders and experts to hold targeted discussions on mutual avenues of collaboration, on areas such as sustainable manufacturing, logistics, financial and capital markets, FMCG and consumer goods, renewable energy and technology services.

"As the Government of Andhra Pradesh is focused on building quality infrastructure to drive the next era of industrialisation, the delegation will also be evaluating various investible opportunities across the potential sectors to elevate the partnership with the Government of Andhra Pradesh," it added.

During his meetings, the chief minister will also deliberate on latest approaches and strategies to support the revival of manufacturing and identify specific areas for public-private and international cooperation to help update and upgrade industrial strategies.

The state delegation, in association with industry body CII, will also be hosting various state sessions in Davos, including on healthcare, education and skilling, and transition to decarbonized economy.

Andhra Pradesh will also have a pavilion in Davos, where it will showcase the rapid strides being made by the state.

"Focusing primarily on integrated, comprehensive social development policies initiated by the state, the overall theme of Andhra Pradesh will highlight the strong paradigm shift the state has made towards people-centric decentralized governance through 15,006 village and ward secretariats, Rythu Bharosa Kendras (Flea Markets to Farmers)," it said.

Besides, port-led industrial corridor development, prosperity and opportunities across various sectors of growth, renewable energy landscape, and SDG-driven growth will be highlighted.

The chief minister's delegation would include his ministers Gudivada Amarnath and Buggana Rajendranath, Member of Parliament PV Midhun Reddy, APIIC Chairman Mettu Govinda Reddy and senior IAS officers, among others.

The statement said the delegation is planning to meet several global leaders at the WEF summit to translate the state's sustainable developmental measures into long-term investments in sustainable solutions, by working together with international and cross-industry communities and opinion makers.

(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.)
mining secretary Pooja Singhal earlier arrested and remanded to the custody of the ED in a suspected was suspended by the government on Thursday, an official said.

The ED had produced her before a special Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) court of Prabhat Kumar Sharma after two consecutive days of questioning by the central probe agency on Tuesday and Wednesday.

She was sent to Birsa Munda Central Jail, Hotwar, on Wednesday night after the ED took her on remand for five days.

"The government has suspended Pooja Singhal with immediate effect under the provisions of All India Services (Discipline and Appeal Rules, 1969), the official said.

Reacting to the arrest, Chief Minister Hemant Soren had said Wednesday, the state government "will initiate whatever legal action it has to take in this subject".

He said the alleged irregularities "occurred during BJP tenure and that should be probed."



It was during the BJP tenure that a clean chit was given to her in 2017. All those who gave her the clean chit should be probed. "You (BJP) make her do the wrong and you (also) give her a clean chit," the CM said.

The money laundering investigation against Singhal and others pertains to a case in which former Jharkhand government junior engineer Ram Binod Prasad Sinha was arrested by the agency on June 17, 2020, from West Bengal.

He was booked under the PMLA in 2012 on the basis of state vigilance bureau FIRs against him.

The against Singhal is linked to alleged embezzlement of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme funds in the state.

The ED had alleged, irregularities were found in the accounts of the scheme while she served as the deputy commissioner and district magistrate of Chatra, Khunti and Palamu between 2007 and 2013.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Prime Minister asserted on Thursday that he has no intention of slowing down while recalling an opposition leader's observation that becoming PM twice was enough accomplishment.

Modi was addressing via video link beneficiaries of Gujarat government's financial assistance schemes for widows, elderly and destitute citizens.

One day a very big leader met me. He regularly opposes us politically, but I respect him, Modi said. He was not happy over some issues, so he had come to meet me, the PM added.

He said, Modi ji, the country has made you prime minister twice, so what more do you want now. He was of the opinion that if one becomes prime minister twice then he has achieved everything, the PM said.

He doesn't know that Modi is made of a different mettle. The land of Gujarat has made him. That's why I do not believe in taking it easy, like whatever has happened has happened and now I should rest. No. My dream is saturation, 100 per cent coverage of the welfare schemes, he said.

Modi did not mention anybody's name during his speech, which came a month after NCP chief Sharad Pawar met him in Delhi and raised the issue of the central agencies' action against Shiv Sena MP Sanjay Raut and the family members of Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar.
Google will finally bring its Pixel 6a smartphone to India, after a gap of nearly two years.

Google was not able to sell Pixel in India due to its 'Soli Radar chip' on the front, which utilised the 60GHz frequency band banned for commercial use in India.

Speaking to Android Central, the company confirmed that the Pixel 6a will be sold in India "later in 2022."

Google's last new smartphone for India was Pixel 4a, which made a delayed debut in India in October 2020.

The newly-launched Pixel 6a is coming soon to Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Spain, Taiwan, the UK and the US.

"Pixel 6a is packed with the same powerful brains, Google Tensor, and many of the must-have features as our premium phones Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, at a lower price of $449," Soniya Jobanputra, Director of Product Management at Google, said in a statement late on Wednesday.

The India pricing of the smartphone is yet to be announced.

The device will come in three finishes -- Chalk, Charcoal and Sage.

"Pixel 6a helps capture your most important moments with a Camera Bar that includes dual rear cameras: a main lens and an ultrawide lens," said the company.

Pixel 6a comes with the same highly accurate speech recognition as Pixel 6 Pro. That includes features like Recorder, Live Caption and Live Translate.

Pixel 6a comes with an all-day battery that can last up to 72 hours when in the Extreme Battery Saver mode -- a first for Pixel phones, said the company.

The device will be available for pre-order starting at $449 on July 21 and on shelves on July 28.

--IANS

na/

(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 race to acquire Ambuja Cements and ACC seems to be entering the final lap now. The two top contenders -- Gautam Adani and Sajjan Jindal -- are now vying to take over the two leading domestic cement companies owned by international building materials giant Holcim which is now exiting India after 17 years. There are some other contenders too, like Indias top cement maker Ultratech. But why do all these leading firms want to buy Holcims stake? And why did the Switzerland-based company decide to quit India which contributes 27% of its global sales volumes.

Holcims decision to pull the plug on an emerging market like India has indeed baffled many. But, if reports are to be believed, it is doing so due to its commitment to check global warming. Similarly, but not on that scale, a 55-year-old engineer from Ladakh has been doing his bit to spread awareness about climate change for decades now. is now a familiar name in India, thanks to his now resounding voice on climate change and innovations in the cold mountains. His latest one is a carbon-neutral solar building that stays warm even in freezing conditions and can help clean the toxic air of Delhi and NCR. Business Standard's Nazia Iqbal caught up with him in Ladakh to know more.

Like the weather, markets too are going through a volatile phase. Volatility in the secondary market against the backdrop of US Fed rate hike and ongoing Russia-Ukraine war has seen two companies  Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) and Delhivery -- trim the size of their initial public offers in May. Will more companies follow the suit as the markets are likely to remain choppy?



It may have hit the economy and markets adversely, but the pandemic was in a way good for the Indian pharma industry. India makes about 60% of the worlds vaccines and 20% of generic drugs. The US is a major export destination. On its part, the US administration carries out regular inspections at offshore drug making units to ensure that they stick to the standards. In one such recent check, the US FDA has issued Form 483 to a firm. This episode of the podcast demystifies the Form 483 and more.
Hyderabad: The state unit chief of BJP, Bandi Sanjay Kumar on Wednesday said it was time people showed the door to the TRS government, which, under Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao, was diverting rice earmarked for the poor.

Speaking at Kothapet village in Shadnagar mandal, on day 28 of his Praja Sangrama Yatra, he demanded the state government to ensure that the 11 kg of rice as mutually agreed upon must be supplied to each member of BPL families free of cost. He pointed out that the Centre is keeping up its promise of giving five of the 11 kgs whereas the TRS government was adding just one more kg and selling the remaining five kg in the open market illegally.

Sanjay alleged that the government was lying on supply of drinking water to households under Mission Bhagiratha scheme. Many villages were not getting water even once a week, he said.

Ironically, every village has at least 10 belt shops selling liquor. The KCR government wants to make money through liquor sales but is not keen on supplying drinking water to the people, he said.

Accusing Rao of stoking differences among various caste groups for achieving political gains, the BJP leader called upon people to thwart such devious plans.

As long as the TRS is in power, you cannot expect anything good happening for villages. I urge you to give a chance to the BJP and we will show how a peoples government ought to function, he added.

Sanjay slammed the state government for levying professional tax on LIC agents, whose livelihood was not considered as a profession in any other state.

We will pressurise the state government to withdraw this tax, he said, while talking to leaders of LIC Agents Association at Jadcherla.
After a hiatus of two years, the US Food and Drug Administration resumed its onsite inspections of drug manufacturing units outside its borders  including China and India. It has been following this practice to make sure that all the medicines which enter into the country follow the set standards. Most inspections were put on hold in March 2020, when the world was hit by the pandemic.

Indian pharmaceutical companies, on their part, try to adhere to the norms as any departure may hit their export adversely.

In one such inspection at Sun Pharmas Halol facility this month, the team issued a Form 483. The next morning of May 10, the share price of Sun Pharmaceutical Industries fell over four per cent. So, apparently, the Form 483 and 10 observations made in it were not good for the firm.

The company said that it was preparing a response to the observations, which would be submitted to the USFDA within 15 business days.

The Food and Drug Administration has the responsibility of protecting in the US. In its own words, on the one hand, it does this by ensuring the safety, efficacy, and security of both human and veterinary drugs, biological products, and medical devices. On the other hand, the FDA is responsible for ensuring the safety of the US' food supply. It also deals with cosmetics and products that emit radiation.

According to the USFDA, an FDA Form 483 is issued to the management of the firm being inspected. It is issued at the end of the inspection if the FDA's investigators find that they have observed any conditions that might constitute violations of the Food Drug and Cosmetic Act and related Acts of the US.

Observations are made when the investigators find that the conditions or practices observed indicate that any food items, drugs, devices or cosmetics have been adulterated. Or, if in their judgement, these products are being prepared, packed, or held under conditions in which they might become adulterated or rendered injurious to health.

On their part, the company that has been inspected is supposed to respond to the Form 483 in writing, along with its corrective action plan. The FDA expects that subsequently, the company will implement said plan expeditiously.
Tech giant Apple announced it will no longer produce the iPod Touch, marking the end of an era for a popular music player that transformed how many music fans consume their favorite songs, since its debut about two decades ago. From phonographs to portable music players, such devices have shaped a variety of consumer trends and peoples lifestyles over decades

May 13, 2022 08:57 PM
HYDERABAD: Telangana BJP president Bandi Sanjay Kumar on Thursday lambasted the state government for allocating a plot of land in Banjara Hills in the city to the TRS to build its party office.

The Modi government gave 1.4 lakh houses to the poor in TS, but the TRS government did not, he told villagers at Pulimamidi in Ranga Reddy district on the 29th day of his Praja Sangrama Yatra.

The TS BJP chief said, The money for the 4,935 square yard plot would have been enough to build houses for everyone in Pulimamidi village, and also given pensions on time.

Sanjay also said despite the Centre releasing funds for distribution of wages under the employment generation scheme, the TRS government was not distributing the wages on time. If the state is not paying the wages on time, then file criminal cases against the officials, Sanjay said.
CAMEROUN :: Blends in honor of Professor KENGNE FODOUOP (exclusive documents) :: CAMEROON

Followers and admirers of Professor Kengne Fodouop, have decided to devote scientific mixtures to him, as a tribute to all of his work.

Below are the different articulations of this collective work which, we hope, will be the icing on the cake of a long and rich career carried out with passion and dedication by this man who embraced geography as one enters orders. .

Download the original text in pdf version here (english)
Clay sculpture maker in China revitalizes the traditional handcraft via short videos

09:05, May 12, 2022 By Wang Hao, Li Xiaoqing ( People's Daily

Lets go get some saplings, said a villager. Then a truck rumbled out of a village; villagers carefully selected saplings at a stall; and then the saplings were planted with the help of crane.

A craftsman makes clay sculpture in the shape of Chinese zodiac sign of sheep in Yangqitun village, Xunxian county, central Chinas Henan province. (Peoples Daily Online/Wang Zirui)

These realistic scenes come from a short video showing country life on Chinese short video-sharing platform Kuaishou. Whats so special about the video, which has been viewed over 700,000 times, is that the people and settings in it are made from mud.

The short video was made by Zhu Fujun, a clay sculpture maker in Sixiatou village, Xunxian county, central Chinas Henan province.

Zhu has posted short videos on Kuaishou to tell stories about his hometown with mud figurines, vehicles and houses he made. Known as Nibage on Kuaishou, which means the guy who plays with mud in Chinese, he has attracted more than three million followers on the platform.

Making clay sculptures, also known as Mud Cuckoos, is a long tradition in Xunxian county as well as national intangible heritage in China. Villagers in the county knead the premixed mud over and over again, paint patterns on it, and then color it, eventually creating lifelike clay sculptures.

Clay sculptures made by craftsmen in Xunxian county, central Chinas Henan province. (Peoples Daily Online/Li Shengli)

If people blow at the little holes in these clay sculptures, they will make quick notes that sound like the call of cuckoo, which is why the sculptures are called Mud Cuckoo.

As more and more young and middle-aged residents of the village leave their hometown to seek work in other places, the inheritance of Mud Cuckoo making once faced serious challenges.

Fortunately, a short video of clay sculpture made by Zhu unexpectedly drew wide attention to the traditional handcraft and led to its revitalization.

In 2017, a video of clay sculpture made by Zhu received over two million views, which made him pleasantly surprised and ignited his passion for creation. He began to busy himself with scripting his short videos, making clay sculptures and interacting with netizens.

Gradually, more and more people joined him in making the videos. We learned from online courses how to move the camera and dub the videos and what kind of stories netizens like. As our videos become more popular, many people come to seek advice from us on shooting techniques, Zhu said.

While the quality of his videos has been continuously raised, Zhu has also improved his craftsmanship for making Mud Cuckoos. We also learned from Wang Xueren, a provincial-level inheritor of the national intangible heritage, Zhu said, adding that although clay sculptures are small artworks, they still require plenty of skills.

As his short videos receive increasing likes, Mud Cuckoos have also become more widely known.

During my first livestreaming show for selling clay sculptures, nearly 200 orders were placed and all the products I prepared for that show were sold out within seconds. I never expected clay sculpture to be so popular with netizens, Zhu recalled.

Zhu has also motivated his fellow villagers to join him in promoting Mud Cuckoos. He introduced the history of the traditional handcraft in his videos and recorded how senior residents in the village make clay sculptures at their homes. We have helped more than 100 craftsmen sell nearly 100,000 clay sculptures, Zhu said.

Short videos have revitalized rural culture. We encourage young people to make high-quality short videos and promote the digitization of excellent rural cultural resources, said Zhou Xiaohan, vice president of Kuaishou pan-knowledge and paid business.

Nowadays, videos of intangible cultural heritage are posted on Kuaishou every three seconds, with a cumulative views exceeding 224.5 billion, Zhou said, adding that more than 190 million monthly follow and learn agricultural knowledge through the platform.

Digital technologies have injected impetus into rural culture and brought folk crafts, customs and other forms of excellent rural traditional culture back to life.

China has called for efforts to pool data resources including rural cultural relics, intangible cultural heritage, regional opera varieties, and agricultural civilization sites to enrich the reserves of Chinese cultural heritage and realize digital preservation of core rural cultural resources.

Zhu Fujun (left), a clay sculpture maker in Sixiatou village, Xunxian county, central Chinas Henan province, introduces Mud Cuckoos, clay sculptures made with a traditional local handcraft, to netizens via livestreaming. (Photo/www.hebiw.com)

During the countrys 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) period, the central government of China will continuously support the implementation of projects for the construction of national smart library system and digital construction of public culture to further facilitate digital public culture construction.

With continuous improvement in digital information infrastructure, the increasingly wide application of digital technologies in rural areas will help more traditional handcrafts brim with renewed vitality.

(Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun)
News at 4Cs

Cape Cod Community Colleges Bridget Burger Receives Fulbright Specialist Award to Iceland

The U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board have announced that Bridget Burger, Director of the Cape Cod Regional STEM Network and STEM Starter Academy at Cape Cod Community College, has received a Fulbright Specialist Program award. Burger will complete a project at the Husavik Academic Center in Iceland that aims to exchange knowledge and establish partnerships benefiting participants, institutions, and communities both in the U.S. and overseas through a variety of educational and training activities within STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education.

I am honored to receive this Fulbright award to launch STEM Husavik, a regional STEM Network in Northeast Iceland, Burger said. This Fulbright project will connect Husavik educators, students, scientists, businesses, and organizations and equip them with best practices, resources, and opportunities in STEM education. Later this year the Husavik and Cape Cod STEM Networks will engage in collaborative projects focused on the Blue Economy and other sustainability and ocean science issues that both regions are facing. This project will build a bridge between our institutions and our communities and can inspire new solutions to the complex problems we face. It is my hope that my efforts will empower members of both networks to create a bright future through STEM.

Burger is one of more than 400 U.S. citizens who share expertise with host institutions abroad through the Fulbright Specialist Program each year. Recipients of Fulbright Specialist awards are selected on the basis of academic and professional achievement, demonstrated leadership in their field, and their potential to foster long-term cooperation between institutions in the U.S. and abroad.

Bridget makes an immense, positive impact on our College students and K-12 students we work with leading the Cape Cod Regional STEM Network and STEM Starter Academy, said John Cox, President of Cape Cod Community College. We are thrilled that she has been recognized as a leader in her field by the Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. Shell represent the College and our Nation well, sharing her expertise in STEM education and student engagement. Our students across the region will benefit from the knowledge she returns with.

The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to build lasting connections between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. The Fulbright Program is funded through an annual appropriation made by the U.S. Congress to the U.S. Department of State. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations, and foundations around the world also provide direct and indirect support to the Program, which operates in over 160 countries worldwide.

Since its establishment in 1946, the Fulbright Program has given more than 400,000 students, scholars, teachers, artists, and scientists the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research, exchange ideas, and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns.

Fulbright recipients address critical global issues in all disciplines, while building relationships, knowledge, and leadership in support of the long-term interests of the United States. Fulbright alumni have achieved distinction in many fields, including 60 who have been awarded the Nobel Prize, 88 who have received Pulitzer Prizes, and 39 who have served as a head of state or government.

For further information about the Fulbright Program or the U.S. Department of State, please visit http://eca.state.gov/fulbright or contact the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs Press Office by telephone 202-632-6452 or e-mail ECA-Press@state.gov.
ATLANTA (May 11, 2022)  The Carter Center condemns the killing of Al Jazeera news correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American, and calls for an independent investigation into the incident. The perpetrators must be brought to justice.

Abu Akleh was killed on May 11 while covering an Israeli military incursion into the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank. Another journalist, Ali Al Smoudi, was shot in the back. The Jenin camp is in the occupied West Bank and has been under Israeli blockade for weeks. It has been at the center of confrontations between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers, who raid the Palestinian refugee camp on a regular basis.

Her death comes a year after the Israeli air force destroyed a building in Gaza hosting the offices of media organizations, including Al Jazeera and the Associated Press. The targeting of journalists in the Palestinian territories is a human rights violation and appears to be motivated by a desire to obscure the brutality of the occupation and to silence crucial voices.

The Carter Center calls on Israeli authorities to guarantee the safety of journalists and to respect human rights, including freedom of the press, said Paige Alexander, Carter Center CEO. We applaud U.S. Ambassador Nides call for a thorough investigation into her death.

According to Al Jazeera and the other journalists at the scene, the journalists had made themselves known to the Israeli soldiers, and Abu Akleh was wearing a press jacket and helmet when she was shot.

Even though witnesses described the situation before the shooting as calm, Israeli police initially blamed Palestinian bullets for Aklehs death and raided her family house in the Beit Hanina neighborhood in East Jerusalem, where hundreds of people had gathered following the news of her death. The police attempted to remove Palestinian flags and stop the crowd from playing national Palestinian songs.

Abu Aklehs funeral will take place on May 12 in the West Bank city of Ramallah. She will be buried in Jerusalem, but many of her friends and colleagues will not be able to attend her burial because Israeli restrictions prevent most West Bank Palestinian citizens from visiting East Jerusalem.

For More Information:

In Ramallah: Qais Asad, qaisassad@cartercenter.org

In Atlanta: Soyia Ellison, soyia.ellison@cartercenter.org
In an article published by Vanity Fair last year, Tran said she she believes Raya is a gay character. So much so that when she was in the booth recording dialogue for the film, she felt some romantic feelings going on there between Raya and Namaari.

Once again emphasizing that she wasnt speaking on anyones behalf but her own, she explained how much it meant to her that queer fans were relating to the films characters.

I think if youre a person watching this movie and you see representation in a way that feels really real and authentic to you, then it is real and authentic, she said. I think it might get me in trouble for saying that, but whatever.

The trouble Tran was likely alluding to is that Disney has refused to acknowledge any type of relationship between the Raya characters.

Despite the claims of some Disney higher-ups  Disney corporate president Karey Burke recently said that as a mother of two queer children she supports Disney introducing many LGBTQIA characters in our stories  the company has been exceptionally slow at introducing queer characters into its productions. In fact, executives in various divisions of the company, including the Disney Channel and Pixar Animation Studios, have been accused of actively eliminating LGBTQ characters from the companys productions.

Disney has long tried to appease as broad an audience as possible, but recent public attacks from conservative politicians targeting the companys more progressive moves may force Mickeys gloved hand. For Tran, its clear where Disney should be focusing its efforts.

I want to live in a world where every single type of person can see themselves in a movie like this, she said in the Vanity Fair interview. Theres a lot of work to be done in that respect. Id love to see a Disney warrior who  I dont know, can I say this without getting in trouble? I dont care  is openly in the LGBTQ community. I would love to see representation in terms of someone who maybe isnt able-bodied. And Im hopeful. Well see.
What is the motivation behind the proposal? According to Hawley:

The age of Republican handouts to Big Business is over. Thanks to special copyright protections from Congress, woke corporations like Disney have earned billions while increasingly pandering to woke activists. Its time to take away Disneys special privileges and open up a new era of creativity and innovation.

Looking at the bigger picture, Hawleys move against Disney comes as Republican lawmakers from across the country ramp up their anti-Disney rhetoric. Hawleys bill is very specifically targeted at Disney, as the law would only affect motion picture studios and theme park companies with a market capitalization of more than $150 billion.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has regularly and publicly spoken out against The Walt Disney Company, and last month signed a bill to strip Disney World of its self-governing status after the company criticized the Florida Parental Rights in Education (Dont Say Gay) bill.

In an open letter requesting more stringent ratings for kids TV programming, five U.S. senators denounced Disney corporate president Karey Burke for saying that she hopes the company introduces many LGBTQIA characters into our stories. The letter also condemned Disney for its opposition to the Florida education bill.

What special copyright protections is Hawley referring to? The Walt Disney Company has played a major role in establishing and modifying modern U.S. copyright law.

The Mickey Mouse character was first widely introduced in the 1928 short film Steamboat Willie. At the time, copyright law protected Disneys ownership of the character for 56 years (28 years with a 28 year extension), as indicated by Hawleys release.

However, as that period came to an end, Disney lobbied hard in favor of reforming those laws and eventually got the Copyright Act of 1976 passed. A couple decades later, the company was again able to delay Mickeys move into the public domain through the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which is sometimes mockingly referred to as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. That extension is due to lapse in 2024.

Will Disney be able to extend its copyright again? Its too early to say for sure, but several Republican lawmakers have already indicated that they wont support an extension, none more harshly than Rep. Jim Banks (R-In.). In an open letter to Disney CEO Bob Chapek, Banks said:

Given Disneys continued work with a Communist Chinese regime that does not respect human rights or U.S. intellectual property and given your desire to influence young children with sexual material inappropriate for their age, I will not support further extensions applicable to your copyrights, which should become public domain.

What exactly will hit the public domain if an extension isnt granted? Initially, only the copyright for Steamboat Willie will expire, meaning that only the original Mickey design from that film will hit the public domain, not the Mickey were familiar with today. The film itself will still belong to Disney, and trademarks will continue to protect Disneys financial interests, controlling the commercial use of its characters.

Will Hawleys bill pass? Almost certainly not, given that the Senate is currently controlled by Democrats. The hastily-written proposal is based on copyright law that predates tv and the internet. The 28-year term Hawley refers to, for example, was established in the Copyright Act of 1909.

And, as pointed out by The Verges Sarah Jeong, who often covers copyright issue, the proposal is illegal for several reasons:

The requirement for an application for an extension is, similarly, an outdated legal formality that was abandoned by the Copyright Act of 1973, barred from future law when the United States signed onto the international copyright treaty known as the Berne Convention in 1988, and further precluded by a succession of trade agreements (for example, NAFTA in 1994, KORUS in 2007). A reduction of copyright terms to 28 years is also barred by international law.

Would there be advantages to more serious versions of copyright reform? For artists? Definitely. For starters, artists dont live for 95 years past the date of their creations and dont need the types of copyright protections that big businesses are fighting for. Also, additions to the public domain add to the pool of characters, stories, and ideas available to artists. For example, F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby entered the public domain year, and shortly after an animated feature adaptation was announced.

Many critics of modern copyright law are quick to point out the hypocrisy of Disneys lobbying. The company has made billions adapting public domain works such as Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, The Jungle Book, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and The Snow Queen (reimagined as Frozen), yet the company takes extraordinary efforts to keep its own properties locked up.

What has been the response to Hawleys proposal? For the most part, derision. Nearly unanimously, industry trades are dismissing Hawleys bill as a PR stunt.

Deadlines Ted Johnson gives the bill little chance for success:

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) managed to get outsized attention for legislation that likely will go nowhere: A bill that targets Disney by reversing copyright protection for large media conglomerations.

The Hollywood Reporters Winston Cho is equally pessimistic, and contextualized the political nature of the proposal:

The proposal brought by Hawley is unlikely to pass given the Democratic majority in the Senate. Even so, Republican lawmakers appetite to attack Disney to attract conservative voters places the company in the increasingly untenable position of trying to play both sides of the aisle.

And according to Jeongs piece in The Verge:
The school was established in Budapest in 1880, initially named the Hungarian Royal National School of Arts and Crafts. The animation department started 42 years ago in 1980, says Jozsef Fulop, rector and head of the animation program. It was a kind of a joint-venture between the school and the Pannonia Film Studio, which was a state-owned animation film company in Hungary.

How the program works

Mome Anim offers a three-year undergraduate BA program and a two-year masters program. The BA guides the students into different stages of professional animation filmmaking, says Fulop. It introduces all of the important artistic roles in animation productions such as storyboards, concept and layout artists, character and background design, and so on, and covers all of the important animation techniques from cgi to stop-motion. During those three years, they also learned about teamwork while developing and producing varying animation content, commissioned projects, and individual artistic shorts. The focus is on developing individual perspectives and finding a personal artistic tone.

The MA program, which is also available in English, takes it all a bit further, helping to guide students towards a career in animation while continuing to develop as a director and lead animation artist. The main focus is content development, adds Fulop.

In terms of courses, students can choose between practical (i.e. hands-on) or theoretical studies. Liberal arts, business, philosophy, art, film, animation history, dramaturgy, and other subjects are covered in theory courses. On the practical side, the courses are project-based with a goal of guiding students into professional animation filmmaking.

It covers all the stages of animation filmmaking, from content development to production and post-production processes, says Fulop. These types of courses offer a learning-by-doing system.

And the cost? Well, if youre Hungarian or have EU citizenship, there are no fees in most cases. For the rest of the planet, the cost is 2,000 ($2,172) per semester for the BA and 2500 ($2,716) per semester for the MA program.

MOME Anim enrolls between 80-90 students. The BA Program accepts about 1519 new people each year, selected from 250300 applicants. The MA program accepts about 12 students annually.

In terms of overall department goals, MOME Anim aims to nurture the next generations of directors and animation artists and to give them the tools to, as Fulop puts it, develop and implement projects individually or as the lead of a developing or production team. In addition to the regular course, MOME Anime is part of Animation San Frontiers, a training program established in 2008 that involves other renowned animation schools like The Animation Workshop, Gobelins, and Filmakademie Baden-Wurttenberg. Through content development and talent management, adds Fulop, we execute/implement projects, incubation and research activities.

The school also has a strong relationship with the Hungarian and Central European animation industries. Not only do guest lecturers from different studios regularly come to MOME Anim, but students are required to intern at studios. In fact, some graduation films end up as co-productions with these studios.

Perspectives from students

Back when I applied in 2008, there wasnt really any other good option to study animation in Hungary, says Reka Bucsi (2013 graduate). MOME is by far the best place to study applied arts, because of the community, teachers, and international opportunities you get to travel to workshops and festivals during your studies.

Flora Anna Buda (2018 grad) says, I was very scared to send my application to MOME because I heard that people had to pitch their projects at the end of every semester in the spotlight with a microphone in their hands. I was just a very shy person then, so I was trying to get into the Fine Art Academy, where people could draw in quiet solitude. Luckily, I wasnt accepted, so I gathered all my courage and gave a shot to MOME. After the first few months, I realized why it was so important that we learn to pitch, and that is one of the many reasons Im really grateful that I didnt shy away from this challenge.

Expectations met?

Acceptance is all well and good, but how did the department deliver on assorted expectations?

I knew it was going to be tough, says Luca Toth (2011 grad), but I didnt expect it to be as tough as it was at the beginning. I didnt come from an animation background and catching up was very difficult for me.

Im very honest about it; I didnt have any defined expectations when I applied, says Buda. I was a very enthusiastic and naive student, and I took all the opportunities that came to me, always searching for new challenges and trying to get the most out of the tasks. I had a lot of fun and freedom during my studies. I would say I miss a little bit more diversity and even more encouragement to use different materials, techniques, and ways of storytelling, which I think was also partly my responsibility. The good thing is that there were opportunities to discuss these needs and opinions.

Says Bucsi, I didnt like some of my teachers, but the ones I did were very important to me. I also expected to be surrounded by people with the same interests, which was very important. To this day, my closest friends and collaborators are people I met at MOME. I have no idea what I would do without having these people work next to me every day.

Nadja Andrasev (2015 grad) offers the following perspective: I feel that the graduating classes have a high level of attention on them, and since the school applies for government funding for the diploma films, the MA students can make at least one film during their studies in which the director is able to hire a professional crew to help in areas where they need help the most. On the other hand, I was able to attend for 6 years without properly learning how to animate, even if this was only my own fault. During the BA years, I was mostly involved in stop motion films, and during the MA, everything I did on my film took so much time, that actually animating the scenes was out of the question.

Improvements?

At any school, some experiences are likely to be overlooked or ignored all together. I wish we had more time for animating in 2d, says Bucsi. I learned most of that from books and online classes, as we only had a couple of months for that. MOME introduces the students to many different techniques, and even though I wasnt interested in making puppet animation, I had to make a film and study how to make puppets. Meanwhile, I just wanted to get better at classical 2d animation. There is also a lack of studying different software. Everything was happening on paper.

Luca Toth adds, I had a hard time at MOME at the beginning. Most of my classmates had some experience in animation, and I was way behind them. For example, our first year started with a three-week class about 2d animation on paper. They gave us a complicated character called the courier (it was the character design of one of our teachers), and we had to make it walk, run, jump into water, push, or pull a heavy object, plus we had to make a cube fall from the sky. We had to do this in just three weeks! That class was my personal hell. I didnt think I could ever be an animator, and to be honest, one of my teachers repeatedly told me that as well. I almost failed that year. In the later years, I also had quite a few encouraging and very inspirational tutors as well.

Community

The sense of community and the importance of communication were important aspects of all the graduates experiences at MOME, both during and after their studies. One of the most valuable things was to learn how to confidently talk about my personal work and defend my ideas, says Bucsi. I learned how to filter input from people I thought were relevant to my work so that I didnt get confused by teachers who simply werent a good fit for what I wanted to do.

Toth stresses that the most valuable takeaway from any school is community: Seeing each others work and talking about it with your classmates, getting feedback from tutors, and being part of a network that has a deep drive to make good quality animation is the most precious thing that I could get from any school. And I have to say, its not that common in my experience to have this. 

For Andrasev, the network of friends and contacts she developed at MOME remains essential to her animation career today. I made great personal connections and learned from my teachers, and even more importantly, my friends, as much as I could, she said. I think Im able to put together a great crew who can benefit my projects in the best possible way. So in a way, I feel that it is OK that I dont have all the skills to make a film all by myself, because I would like to have my friends or people I admire professionally involved when I work on something.

Pictured at top: Entropia by Flora Anna Buda.
Photo: The Canadian Press Pipes for the Trans Mountain pipeline project are seen at a storage facility near Hope, B.C., Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2020.The federal government has approved a new, approximately $10-billion loan guarantee for the pipeline project. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward

The federal government has approved a new, approximately $10-billion loan guarantee for the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, a move it says is common practice and does not reflect any additional public funding for the high-profile, over-budget oil pipeline.

The Trans Mountain pipeline is Canada's only oil pipeline system from Alberta to the West Coast. It was bought by the federal government in 2018 for $4.5 billion after previous owner Kinder Morgan Canada Inc. threatened to scrap the pipeline's planned expansion project in the face of environmentalist opposition.

The construction project  which will essentially twin the existing pipeline, raising daily output to 890,000 barrels  is now 50 per cent complete. However, in February, Trans Mountain Corp. revealed that the project's price tag has ballooned to $21.4 billion, up from an earlier estimate of $12.6 billion.

At that time, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said that there would be no additional public funding for the pipeline. She said Trans Mountain, a Crown corporation, would need to secure third-party funding to complete the project, either through banks or public debt markets.

News of the $10-billion loan guarantee, which was approved by cabinet on April 29 through the Canada Account at Crown corporation Export Development Canada, has been criticized by environmental groups and opposition politicians who see it as Freeland going back on her word.

"This is a huge new subsidy from a government that promised voters last fall that it would eliminate fossil fuel subsidies," said Julia Levin of Environmental Defence, adding critics have suggested that Trans Mountain's skyrocketing price tag means the project is no longer economical. "It also comes just a few months after Minister Freeland told Canadians that there would be no more public spending on TMX."

"It was clear from the get-go they're going to pay whatever it costs to get TMX through," said NDP Charlie Angus.

But on Wednesday, the Department of Finance issued a statement saying that the federal government has not spent any money to put the new loan guarantee in place.

The statement said Trans Mountain has secured up to $10 billion in third-party financing for construction costs from a group of Canadian financial institutions, and the government is providing a loan guarantee on behalf of the corporation as part of that process.

"This is a common practice which puts in place an insurance policy for the institutions that have invested in the project  it does not reflect any new public spending," the statement said.

The government said there have been no changes to the cost estimate outlined in February and the estimated 2023 completion date for the pipeline project remains in place.
Photo: The Canadian Press Free Reformed Church in Chilliwack, B.C., is seen as people attend Sunday Service, in Chilliwack, B.C., on Sunday, February 21, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

British Columbia's Crown Prosecution Service has confirmed it dropped two dozen COVID-19 violation tickets against three Chilliwack, B.C., pastors who continued in-person worship services in violation of provincial public health orders.

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, which represents the pastors, says the fines would have totalled $55,200.

The Crown dropped seven tickets against Pastor John Koopman of the Chilliwack Free Reformed Church, 11 tickets against Pastor James Butler of the Free Grace Baptist Church and six tickets against Pastor Timothy Champ with the Valley Heights Community Church.

The justice centre says in a news release that police began ticketing churches for ignoring health orders to hold services starting December 2020, and the three pastors amassed 66 tickets between them.

The prosecution service says in a statement that Crown lawyers reviewed the 24 charges and found that the "assessment standard was no longer met," but noted similar cases remain before the court.

The justice centre says there are still more than 20 outstanding tickets against pastors and churches in the Fraser Valley, and it plans to defend them "vigorously."
Photo: The Canadian Press Haven Lurbiecki and New Democrat MLA Rick Glumac are shown in the British Columbia legislature in Victoria, B.C., after Glumac proposed from the floor of the assembly in this image provided by Speaker Raj Chouhan on Wednesday May 11, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-Raj Chouhan

Politicians ask a lot of questions in British Columbias legislature, but for New Democrat member Rick Glumac, his question posed Wednesday was especially important.

Glumac, the member for Port Moody-Coquitlam, stood in the legislature to acknowledge all the partners who support the unique work that politicians in the legislature do, saying it certainly isnt a normal job.

He noted that his partner, Haven Lurbiecki, was in the legislatures gallery and he told her that every day she made the world better and filled his heart with love.

Amid applause and cheers from his colleagues, Glumac asked her to marry him.

Lurbiecki wasnt on camera, but Glumac said that he thought she said yes, and he went up to the gallery with a ring box in hand in order to make it official.

Speaker Raj Chouhan later posted a photo of the happy couple on his Twitter feed, saying he thought it was the first such proposal in any Commonwealth Parliament, but Australian MP Tim Wilson asked his partner to marry him in 2017 while he was speaking on a same-sex marriage bill.
Photo: Crossword-Solver

A new study finds that residents of the Great White North favour a funny emoji above all others.

Crossword-Solver analyzed 9 million geotagged tweets to reveal the most used emoji on Twitter in every country and then ranked them in popularity.

In Canada, the "face with tears of joy" emoji was the most widely used, followed by the simple red heart. The funny trend continued for the third highest-ranked emoji, which is also a face with tears of joy but turned on its side (rolling on the floor laughing).

Wordle has grown in popularity in countries across the globe, with the fourth and fifth most popular emojis being the green and yellow colour squares the web-based word game uses to show guesses. The Canadian flag follows in the sixth spot, with Wordle's black square claiming seventh overall.

Canadians were either abundantly thankful or praying, as the "praying hands" emoji placed eighth. The flame emoji landed in the ninth position, with the "heart eyes" emoji rounding out the top ten.

Emojis around the world

The study found that the most popular emojis in the world are either laughing or loving faces with tears of joy; the red heart ?? is typically the second most used emoji worldwide.

The laughing face with tears of joy is the most common emoji in 75 countries.

Report authors caution that "emojis are not a universal language," however. In China, for example, the clapping hands emoji suggests making love, while sending thumbs up to a Greek may be seen as offensive.
Photo: The Canadian Press

The family of a man shot dead by Montreal police has reached a settlement with the city in connection with a lawsuit they filed over his death.

Pierre Coriolan died on June 27, 2017, when police shot him after they responded to a disturbance call at his home.

A Quebec coroner's report into Coriolan's death released earlier this year said the police intervention reflected a lack of training among officers in dealing with people in crisis.

Six police officers responded to the call involving Coriolan, and their intervention lasted just over five minutes, with police using a stun gun, batons and rubber bullets before opening fire three times.

Coriolan's two sisters sued the City of Montreal over his death, with a trial set to begin today.

The law firm representing the family says its clients were satisfied with the settlement and didn't wish to comment further.
Photo: The Canadian Press

The head of Newfoundland and Labradors Crown energy corporation says her team is working hard to solve the software issues plaguing the Muskrat Falls hydro project.

Jennifer Williams, chief executive officer of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro, would not say directly if she agreed with a recent report saying full power was at least a year away, and maybe longer.

The report from Liberty Consulting Group says significant problems persist with the software that operates the transmission line connecting the Muskrat Falls power station in Labrador to the island of Newfoundland.

The report released Tuesday by the province's utilities board says "new defects" were found with the software and it "remains impossible" to predict when everything will be fixed.

Williams said during a news conference Wednesday that Newfoundland and Labrador is preparing for delays by keeping a generating station outside the town of Holyrood, N.L., near St. John's, operational until 2024.

Past government reports say the Holyrood generating station burns about 18,000 barrels of oil a day in peak winter months.
Re Ricky Daytona's letter Reasons for leaving Kelowna (Castanet, May 6)

For two years now, I have seen Ricky Daytona constantly send letters to Castanet.

He has complained about being censored or "cancelled" notwithstanding the fact he is constantly posting. For someone who isn't allowed to speak, he talks an awful lot.

Most recently, he implored us to leave the (Kelowna), because this city and country are just generally negative and he listed several reasons why.

He said in his most recent letter "People should be in control of their lives and make their own decisions." Well, as I sit here by the water, sipping my delicious black Americano on this beautiful sunny Saturday, I personally feel pretty free at this moment. I will do what I want today, and I will feel good about it. So that begs the question, what does Ricky want to do that he feels he can't? As a law-abiding citizen, with a strong sense of patriotic and civic duty, I do not feel held down at all.

He said people can improve their lives by leaving Kelowna due to the cost of living and shelter price reductions, taxation benefits, better weather, access to fresh organic produce, more favourable political climates and better investment opportunities (that) exist in many other countries around the world.

Cost of living? Sure. Cost of living is based on supply and demand. If you want to live in a very in demand place like Kelowna, you are going to pay more. If you want to live somewhere cheap, it's going to be somewhere people don't want to go. It's probably more rural and regressive, which might be a better emotional fit to Ricky, as it seems he may fit in more.

Better weather in Canada? Yeah, good luck with that one. I don't think this one requires discussion. Outside Canada? Sure, there are places with better weather. He mentions Costa Rica. Costa Rica is a beautiful place but I am not sure I'd want to live my entire life in a third world country. Further, these "snow birds" often fly back to Canada when they need health care because it's just not high quality there.

Access to fresh organic produce? Has Ricky never visited a grocery store in Kelowna? My fridge is filled with organic produce.

More favourable political climates? I suppose this one is subjective. Canada is not the place for you if you don't value technological progress and associated economic evolution, a stable political climate and a secular state. If you value unregulated capitalism and religion, you are probably more comfortable in Russia or maybe the U.S. Ricky might fit in better in one of these more conservative cultures. Ricky also lists Costa Rica as a desirable place. It is common knowledge that most Latin American countries (including Costa Rica) are rife with political corruption. Canada is not perfect, but would any reasonable person suggest the political climate in Costa Rica is better than Canada?

Near the end of his letter, he states: "At this point those who bought their exit pass will feel a huge sense of relief." Then he notes "Yet still they came, in droves."

I have three points to address these assertions:

1. How is it possible people are dying to leave, yet (others are) coming in droves? This is clearly contradictory. I think its more likely Ricky feels subjective negative emotions about our beautiful home and country, and it is his belief most people share those beliefs. More likely, considering people are "coming in droves", the truth is Kelowna is a very desirable place to live and Ricky is on the periphery, constantly writing about his distaste for our home and country. Is Ricky a patriotic Canadian and British Columbian? I am sure he would say yes, but his language and actions suggest otherwise.

2. Could the market correct as Ricky suggests? Sure. We are seeing it now, after the most recent fever dream, but my above points still hold as Kelowna is still one of the most desirable places to live in North America. The market is cyclical. It will go up, correct and repeat. Ricky is a capitalist, and he should be aware that this is how markets work.

3. Will he put his money where his mouth is? He notes many of us (him included) have gained from real estate prices. It's peculiar he feels negative despite the fact he is profiting off this country and the city we live in. Would he have made similar gains if he lived in Costa Rica (very unlikely).

So, if this place is so bad, why doesn't he pack his bags and move to another more conservative area?

Kelowna is liberalizing fast, as young educated people move here, and I believe this will only add to his anxiety.

Ricky, this just might not be the right place for you.

Scott Barnes, Kelowna
Photo: The Canadian Press Quebecor president and CEO Pierre Karl Peladeau addresses the media company's annual meeting in Montreal on Thursday, May 9, 2019. Quebecor Inc. reported its first-quarter profit edged higher compared with a year ago. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson

Quebecor Inc. is mulling a move into the wireless market outside Quebec, with CEO Pierre Karl Peladeau saying Shaw Communications Inc.'s wireless business offers one potential avenue.

In a release Thursday, he said the ground is ripe for growth beyond the telecom's traditional stomping grounds. The Competition Bureau's opposition to Rogers Communication's Inc.'s $26-billion bid to acquire Shaw and remarks from the federal Industry Department, "allow us to look with increasing favour on the expansion of our wireless business," Peladeau stated.

He cited the prospect of either acquiring Shaws Freedom Mobile if Rogers is compelled to divest it, or launching a telecom offering in provinces where Quebecor has built up the spectrum licences needed to transmit wireless signals.

"We believe that these alternatives position us very favourably, as governmental and administrative authorities, including the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, pursue the public policy of establishing the conditions for true competition in wireless services in Canada," Peladeau said in comments accompanying the Montreal-based firm's first-quarter results.

Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne has said a full takeover of Shaw by Rogers would be "fundamentally incompatible" with the policies of the Trudeau government.

The CRTC has also issued a decision that allows regional operators to lease access to the networks of major Canadian telecommunications companies, provided they have local frequency spectrum themselves. The regulatory conditions surrounding this decision are still pending.

The opportunities are many and the alternatives promising," Peladeau said.

Several times in recent years, Peladeau has said Quebecor was considering an incursion into other provinces. The company says it views the Quebec market as quite mature and that the rest of Canada, where competition is weaker, would offer lucrative opportunities.

Questioned on the subject Thursday, the CEO confirmed that his statements indicate greater determination to extend Quebecor's scope. But he reiterated Quebecor could do so with or without Freedom Mobile under its roof.

The answer is simple: yes, Quebecor is able to start its wireless activity outside of Quebec due to the acquisition of licenses during the auctions that took place last year," he told analysts on a conference call.

In 2021, the company acquired 294 blocks of spectrum in the 3500 MHz band for $830 million. More than half of the investment is concentrated in four Canadian provinces: Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta and British Columbia.

Telus Corp. and BCE Inc., however, asked the Federal Court last summer to block Quebecor's purchase of 5G spectrum in Western Canada, stating the company didn't meet the requirements to bid on airwaves there.

The market frowned following Peladeau's statements, with Quebecor shares falling more than six per cent or $1.69 to $26.42 in midafternoon trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

However, Jerome Dubreuil of Desjardins Capital Markets said investors have no reason to fear the breakout gambit. We continue to believe that the stock is attractively priced as the market is overestimating the risk related to a potential out-of-Quebec expansion," he said in a note.

On Thursday Quebecor reported its first-quarter profit edged higher compared with a year ago.

The company said its net income attributable to shareholders totalled $121.4 million or 51 cents per share for the quarter ended March 31 compared with a profit of $121.3 million or 49 cents per share a year earlier.

Revenue for the quarter totalled $1.09 billion, down from $1.09 billion in the first three months of 2021.

Quebecor said its adjusted income from continuing operations amounted to 54 cents per share, up from 52 cents per share in the same quarter last year.
The Department of Fisheries and Oceans is investigating a crew aboard a Zodiac vessel that was seen photographing a grey whale less than a metre from the animal.

The incident on Wednesday just off Skidegate in Haida Gwaii was concerning and a violation of special distancing rules designed to protect whales, says Adam Jackson, field supervisor with the conservation and protection branch of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

The encounter was filmed and posted on Facebook, alerting fisheries officers. Some residents speculated the crew was from a National Geographic vessel in the area, but Jackson did not comment on that.

All boats must maintain a 100-metre distance from any whale, or 200 metres when the whale is resting or with a calf, said Jackson.

Jackson said the investigation is ongoing and fisheries officers have a suspect vessel but have not yet been able to conduct any interviews to confirm its involvement.

The Fisheries Act allows up to $100,000 in fines for getting too close to a whale, he said, but its up to courts to decide on a penalty based on the severity of the incident.

Jackson said Haida Gwaii is a place to enjoy nature, and to see people treating the whales in that way is rather disheartening.

Marine zoologist Anna Hall said she was surprised by the photos and the proximity of the vessel to the whale given the amount of attention thats been given over the past decade in our coastal waters about giving these animals some space.

She said there is always a danger of boat strikes for both the whale and humans on board, but the proximity of the vessel also adds extra stress for the whale.

These grey whales have just undergone a huge migration from winter calving grounds in Mexico and are making their way back to the cold waters of B.C. and Alaska for the summer months when they are feeding, so its a really important time of year for them to ensure they get enough calories so they can make the return trip next fall, Hall said.

This is the feeding season and theyve just swam thousands of kilometres to get here. They need some space to feed well so they can continue on their lives.

Incidents of boats getting too close to whales can be reported to a DFO hotline at 1-800-465-4336. Jackson advised taking note of vessel names and licence numbers.
Photo: The Canadian Press Former B.C. premier Christy Clark speaks to media in Vancouver, B.C., Monday, July 31, 2017. Clark says Canadas natural gas industry is losing ground on the international arena because of government over-regulation while Australia makes more gains in the Pacific market. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ben Nelms

Former British Columbia premier Christy Clark says Canadas natural gas industry is losing ground internationally because of government over-regulation, while Australia makes more gains in the Pacific market.

Speaking as part of a panel on North American energy security at the Canada Gas and LNG conference Thursday, Clark said regulation certainty and simplicity is needed with less overreach from the federal government.

Clark, who is now an adviser at the law firm Bennett Jones, said the United States has eclipsed the Canadian gas sector and it would like to make sure that it remains at a disadvantage.

She said Canada can't play a role in trading its natural resources when it doesn't have pipelines to Southeast Asia.

Clark, as the B.C. Liberal leader, came from behind to win the 2013 provincial election with promises of a debt-free B.C., based on a liquefied natural gas windfall that could wipe out provincial debt and create thousands of jobs.

She told the group at the Vancouver Convention Centre that the world is going to need natural gas for the foreseeable future and Canada can fulfil that demand.

Canada also has a better relationship with Indigenous people compared with Australia, which gives this country a business advantage, Clark said.

"(The) Australian government is a lot less committed to reconciliation," she said.
The history of the Church is full of many Japanese / Japan Catholic saints, who received recognition for great deeds or meritorious conduct. Many lost their lives in defense of the faith. Many were also honored for their contributions to the Church and their community.

Filter 136 Japanese / Japan Saints A-Z by typing in the 'Search' box below.
Ethiopia prohibits cement plants employing agents to sell cement

12 May 2022

The Ministry of Industry in Ethiopia has directed cement factories to exclude agents from the market network ,and sell the product directly, according to Addis Standard.

In a letter dispatched to 10 cement factories, the ministry asked the factories to indicate in a letter the names and number of agents they had excluded. State Trade Minister, Hassen Mohammed, told the news outlet that the ministry is working to shorten the commercial chain, adding that agents were one of the reasons for the stretching of the commerce chain and were not supported by law. He underscored that the ministry would enforce strict measures against cement factories still employing agents for distribution from now onwards.

The minister stated that to observe and regulate the market processes, the ministry has ordered cement plants to provide information as to their production and distribution lines over the past nine months. Mr Hassen noted that cement commerce would operate on a non-interference basis whereby wholesalers would acquire it directly from the factories. He, however, said that governmental development organisations and other governmental projects would be regarded differently.

It was also stated that agents have been selling the cement to wholesalers at increased prices, causing long chains of commerce and impacting the final customer to purchase at three times more expensive than when it left the factory. A Ministry of Industry, Ethiopian Investment Commission and the Ministry of Trade study revealed that agents were operating on family networks with the factories, and sometimes the factories themselves are behind the agents themselves.

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Dianne Henry, 54, of Chattanooga won her battle with cancer and went to be with the Lord on Tuesday, May 10, 2022, surrounded by her family.

Dianne along with her husband, Patrick was the owner of Scenic City Cars. She was a UT graduate, a U.S. Air Force veteran, and a member of Abbas House. She was a devout Christian who loved the lord. Diannes favorite place to visit was anywhere with a sand, a beach, and sunsets.

She was preceded in death by her father, William Aaron Acuff Sr.

Dianne is survived by her husband, Patrick Henry; son, Nicholas (Tori) Henry; mother, Beulah Bolton; sister, Angela (Larry) Dodson; seven other siblings and their families. Her animals brought joy to her heart  Louis, Copper and Sheckler.

Graveside services with military honors will be held at 1:30 p.m. on Monday, May 16, at Chattanooga National Cemetery.

Arrangements are by Wann Funeral & Cremation Center at the foot of historic Lookout Mountain, St. Elmo, 423 821-7551.

To share memories, photos or condolences please visit www.wannfuneralhome.com.
Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tn.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fl.) along with Rick Scott (R-Fl.), Mike Braun (R-In.), Ben Sasse (R-Ne.), Tom Cotton (R-Ar.), and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) introduced the Preventing PLA Acquisition of United States Technology Act of 2022.The bill would prevent any federally funded U.S. research from being shared or conducted jointly with Chinese entities that participate in the Chinese Communist Partys Military Civil-Fusion strategy. This national development strategy aims to mobilize non-military resources and expertise in China to increase the capabilities and lethality of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA).As a result, international exchange with ostensibly civilian institutions in China is now highly vulnerable to PLA appropriation. Specifically, the legislation would prohibit U.S. research agencies, as well as universities, colleges, and private companies that receive federal funding, from engaging in STEM research or technical exchange with Chinese entities of concern in areas of cutting-edge technology that could improve the PLAs ability to wage war against the United States and its allies.The Chinese Communist Party cannot continue to steal technology from America for use in their Military-Civil Fusion strategy, Senator Blackburn said. The United States innovative spirit keeps our military advanced. This bill would stop the CCP in their tracks by securing that spirit.The Chinese Communist Party is our number one threat. Beijing will lie, cheat, and steal to become more powerful than the United States, Senator Rubio said. All too often, our nations scientists and experts partner with their Chinese counterparts without understanding how their research will be weaponized by the Chinese military. My bill will prevent this type of collaboration and protect federally funded research from falling into the hands of the Peoples Liberation Army.We know Communist China steals American technology and intellectual property and will stop at nothing in its quest for world domination, Senator Scott said. The Preventing PLA Acquisition of United States Technology Act of 2022 will address the serious threat Communist China poses to our technology, national security, and the private information of American citizens.The United States shouldnt be in the business of funding Chairman Xis aspirations for military supremacy, Senator Sasse said. Through its MCF strategy, the CCP intentionally blurs the lines between academic research, the commercial private sector, and defense industry to build the next generation of Chinese weapons designed to challenge the United States. We shouldve cut federal funding for US agencies, higher education, and private companies that engage in research or technical exchanges with Chinese entities involved in this strategy years ago. We cant make it easy for the CCP to beat the United States.Its no secret the Chinese Communist Party has stolen American intellectual property, yet colleges, universities, and private companies in the United States continue to partner with China for research, Senator Cotton said. Our bill will end these partnerships to ensure the CCP cant use our research as a weapon against us.
As part of the process mandated by the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will conduct five-year status reviews of 35 endangered or threatened fish, wildlife, and plants. These species are found primarily in the Southeastern United States, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, but are also known to occur in Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Texas, and Virginia. These species are found primarily in the Southeastern United States, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, but are also known to occur in Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Texas, and Virginia.

The public is invited to provide information and comments concerning these species on or before July 12, 2022. However, we will continue to accept new information about any listed species at any time.

These five-year reviews will ensure listing classifications under the ESA are accurate and recommend changes in status where appropriate based on the latest science and analysis. In addition to reviewing the classification of these species, five-year reviews present an opportunity to track species recovery progress. These reviews may benefit species by providing valuable information to guide future conservation efforts.

Information gathered during a review can assist in making funding decisions, considerations related to reclassifying species status, conducting interagency consultations, making permitting decisions, and determining whether to update recovery plans, and other actions under the ESA.

The 21 endangered species and 14 threatened species in this announcement are listed below:

Endangered Fish and Wildlife: Black Warrior waterdog, Puerto Rican sharp-shinned hawk, Puerto Rico nightjar, yellow-shouldered blackbird, orangefoot pimpleback (pearlymussel), boulder darter, pygmy madtom, Key Largo woodrat, red wolf, and Anthonys riversnail.

Endangered Plants: Alabama canebrake pitcher-plant, Brauns rock cress, Catesbaea melanocarpa, Florida prairie-clover, gentian pinkroot, longspurred mint, Mitracarpus maxwelliae, Rugels pawpaw, Ruths golden aster, scrub plum, and Shorts goldenrod

Threatened Fish and Wildlife: Inflated heelsplitter, yellow lance, Pearl darter, Louisiana pinesnake, and yellow-blotched turtle

Threatened Plants: Cumberland rosemary, Everglades bully, Florida bonamia, Florida crabgrass, Godfreys butterwort, higo chumbo, pineland sandmat, scrub buckwheat, and seabeach amaranth

The five-year reviews seek information on: (1) species biology, including population trends, distribution, abundance, demographics, and genetics; (2) habitat conditions, including amount, distribution, and suitability; (3) conservation measures that have been implemented; (4) threat status and trends; and, (5) other new information, data, or corrections, including taxonomic or nomenclatural changes; identification of erroneous information contained in the ESA list; and improved analytical methods.
Joker, a K-9 officer with the Bradley County Sheriffs Office, was seriously injured after being shot multiple times during a pursuit in September. He spent nine days in intensive care at an animal hospital in Chattanooga before being released. Joker returned to work in December and tracked down three suspects on his first day back.

Legislation to strengthen the penalty for those who harm a law enforcement or service animal in Tennessee, sponsored by State Rep. Mark Hall, R-Cleveland, has been approved by the General Assembly.



House Bill 1646, also known as Jokers Law, creates a Class D felony for knowingly and unlawfully killing a police dog, fire dog, search and rescue dog, service animal or police horse.

Chattanoogan Alan Pressley presented two shadowboxes and gifts to Joker.
Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, on Thursday introduced legislation that appropriates $10 million in additional resources to the U.S. Supreme Court to address unprecedented security threats to the justices and their families.

No one could have predicted that a draft opinion would be leaked from the Court, resulting in vile rhetoric, intimidation, and threats against the justices and their families, said Senator Hagerty. These are uncharted waters, and we must ensure that one of our most sacred American institutions has the security it needs. The Senate took an important step earlier this week by authorizing additional protection for family members of the justices, but this must be coupled with appropriate emergency funding to provide more security resources. Failing to act in this hour of obvious need would be shameful and could be disastrous.

Officials at the court have indicated to Senator Hagerty that additional resources are needed now to ensure the justices are protected.

The proposal from Senator Hagerty is fully paid for by moving previous appropriations for federal-government-related security over to the Supreme Court. This funding will provide a critical bridge that gives the Court liquidity and flexibility to immediately procure necessary security personnel and other resources.

Earlier this week, the Senate adopted the Supreme Court Police Parity Act, introduced by Senators John Cornyn (R-TX) and Chris Coons (D-DE), which extends security protection to Supreme Court Justices families in line with what is provided to certain Article I and Article II officers and their families.
Oaklyn Consulting, a Chattanooga-based mergers, acquisitions and capital-raising consulting firm, announced that Monty Bruell has joined the firm as a partner. He will be based in Atlanta.Mr. Bruell, who will focus on serving the needs of small- to mid-sized minority- and women-owned business enterprises (MWBEs), is an entrepreneur, business consultant and investment advisor with more than 25 years experience. In 2021, Mr. Bruell ran for mayor of Chattanooga, highlighting a message of addressing economic disparities in Chattanooga and around the country.Im thrilled to join Oaklyn Consulting, and Im energized by our potential to help successful women- and minority-owned businesses strategize for the future by raising capital, acquiring other businesses or selling, Mr.Bruell said. Theres a pent-up demand among small- and mid-sized businesses for specialized M&A advisory services to help navigate complex transaction decisions, and we look forward to applying Oaklyn Consultings consultative approach specifically to help the owners of MWBEs.Mr. Bruell has been a principal for MRB Consulting since 2012, working directly with clients on a project basis to develop and execute strategies to launch and scale early-stage start-ups in preparation for funding and growth. He has also been a board member and shareholder for Georgia point-of-sale software company Rapid RMS since 2013. He graduated from Harvard University with a bachelors in economics."Oaklyn Consulting specializes in mergers, acquisitions, capital raising and other significant financial transactions for small- and mid-sized businesses with up to $100 million in sales," officials said. "Oaklyn acts as a consultant rather than a broker and bills hourly, enabling its advisors to provide objective advice. This approach helps companies and investors determine their best course of action in even the most complex situations."Were pleased to welcome Monty to our team, and with his talents we look forward to deepening our focus on an underserved segment of business owners in Atlanta and the Southeastern U.S., said Frank Williamson, CEO of Oaklyn Consulting. Our strength at Oaklyn is that while we handle the highest stakes, most complicated transactions, we offer empathetic guidance that considers each clients unique circumstances.
The Lines Orchids site on Signal Mountain is going back on the marker, Walden Mayor Lee Davis said Thursday.

The mayor said he was informed this week by real estate developer Stuart Bush, the surviving member of the Lines Orchids LOP, that previous plans for development of the property have been discarded.

The new plans will conform with Waldens new land use plan, according to Mr. Bush, Mayor Davis said.

I view it as a very positive development, he added.

Previous plans  strenuously defended by Bushs late partner in the LOC, landowner/developer/attorney John Anderson  were rendered moot when Bradley County Judge J. Michael Sharp ruled on August 2, 2021, that Walden town officials 2019 decision to rezone a piece of property so it could be used for a grocery store complex was illegal, arbitrary and capricious.

As proposed by Anderson, the development would have been located on the former Lines Orchids site, and would have contained a 43,000-square-foot grocery store, 10,000 square feet of retail and/or office space, a gas station and a parking lot for 220 vehicles.

The judge agreed with plaintiffsarguments that former Mayor Bill Trohanis and Alderwoman Sarah McKenzie erred when they voted in 2019 to approve the VC-1 rezoning request, despite the fact that the project failed to include five of the six required components. For example, plaintiffs pointed out, as proposed the development included neither residential properties nor an internal network of streets, both of which are mandatory in a village center.

In a related development, Mayor Davis said he was contacted several times on Thursday by people who reported reading on Facebook that the town of Walden has been negotiating with Publix about possibly building a grocery store on the former Lines Orchids property. That came as news to him, he said, noting that he has not been involved in any such negotiations.
The city of Chattanooga is launching a new outreach effort to encourage area businesses to bid on city contracts, amid efforts to streamline formerly arcane processes and procedures that some companies have said were overly burdensome.

Mayor Tim Kelly has directed city officials to simplify the experience of doing business with the city as part of an effort to attract more local businesses to bid on city contracts and purchases, and bring back those who may have stepped away in previous years.

The purchasing expo will be held on Thursday, May 26, from 9 a.m. to noon at the Avondale Community Center, 1305 Dodson Avenue. Register here.

Kevin Bartenfield, who joined the city in 2021 as the chief procurement officer, said he has been working to reduce the amount of time it takes vendors to get paid, and has also modernized the citys vendor portal as part of the ongoing overhaul.

The whole team is working hard to make doing business with the city a pleasant experience that also protects the tax dollars with which weve been entrusted, said Mr. Bartenfield. Were excited to re-introduce the city to potential vendors and discuss opportunities.

Event attendees will be able to meet with city purchasing decision-makers, learn more about the citys efforts to build a more equitable and diverse vendor ecosystem, as well as sign up and register as potential suppliers and receive training to begin receiving opportunities to sell goods and services to the city.

We hope that our diverse communitys business owners will take advantage of this opportunity to meet our citys decision-makers and get plugged into the city purchasing process, as we work together to create a more prosperous Chattanooga, said Tamara Steward, chief equity officer.

Purchasing representatives from Hamilton County and EPB will also be present at the event, along with small-business support agencies such as Bright Bridge, CoLab, Score, TN Small Business Development Center, UTC Procurement Technical Assistance Center, and Pathway Lending.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee on Thursday called on organizations across the state to donate summer camp spots for Tennessee kids in foster care during National Foster Care Month.

Earlier this month, Secretary of State Tre Hargett was one of the first to offer free spots for kids in foster care at the Tennessee State Library & Archives summer camp, said Governor Lee. We thank Secretary Hargett for his generosity and welcome support from organizations across Tennessee.

Organizations willing to donate a summer camp experience to kids in foster care should apply here.

Tennessee foster families who are interested in donated spaces should submit information here.

Additionally, during the month of May, more than 100 churches have partnered with Tennessee Fosters Hope by inviting their congregations to serve as foster families, offer support to foster families and provide training about trauma-based care.

Champion Churches across Tennessee are engaging their congregations to support foster families in meaningful ways, said Governor Lee. I commend their partnership and welcome more churches to join our mission to secure more permanent, loving homes for kids in foster care.

Churches in every Tennessee community are invited to serve families through Tennessee Fosters Hope.

Individuals can also provide direct support to foster families by donating summer camp supplies to meet needs in their local communities.








Chicago Fire is one of the most popular shows on TV right now. Fans cant get enough of Kelly Severide (played by Taylor Kinney) and the rest of the crew at Firehouse 51. One cast member says the scenes are so realistic that people walking by sometimes mistake the action for real-life accidents.

Chicago Fire Season 10

The cast of Chicago Fire | Elizabeth Sisson/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

Chicago Fire Season 10 is coming to a close (heres when the Chicago Fire Season 10 finale airs). The big event everyone is waiting for is Severide and Stella Kidds wedding. Another thing we cant wait for is the return of Matt Casey (played by Jesse Spencer). He moved to Oregon so he could help take care of his late friends children, but he promised Severide he would be his best man. This is what will bring Casey back to the Windy City.

Just like most TV season finales, there will be some twists and turns. Stellarides wedding will reportedly not go as planned, reports TV Line. We have no idea what this means, but we cant wait to see what happens.

The wedding is indeed  were headed towards a finale that is going to be very memorable, co-showrunner Derek Haas tells the publication. The Kidd-Severide build-up has been a long time coming and the event, were Chicago Fire, so if you think its going to be one thing, it might not exactly happen the way all the characters have it in mind to happen.

Chicago Fire scenes are so realistic that fans think the accidents are real

During an interview with You and Me This Morning, former Chicago Fire star Charlie Barnett says some scenes are so realistic that people think a real accident has occurred. He recalled a scene where a plane crashes on the highway. People thought the crash was real and began calling emergency services.

We were trying to tweet [the news station] at the same time, says Barnett. WGN, we found out that they had picked it up, and there was I guess, one of the crew guys had found out or something. The funniest story[people] were sitting there videotaping us, [and] they see all the firefighters around us. The woman is like, I see these people doing things, but it doesnt look like anyone is helping anyone! (Read about Barnett and how his Chicago Fire dismissal broke him.)

Is the fire on Chicago Fire real?

If youve ever wondered if the fire is real on Chicago Fire, the answer is yes. Real fire is used on the set. Jayson Crothers, a cinematographer for Chicago Fire from 2014 to 2018, tells American Cinematographer, every couple of episodes we have a big burn.

Crothers says fires that take place outdoors are filmed on location and fires that take place indoors are held in a controlled environment on what is called a Burn Stage in a converted warehouse. The cinematographer says the set-up process can take a long time. (Read about Taylor Kinneys house fire and how it caused him to become a fire safety advocate.)

Every setup on the Burn Stage takes between 45 minutes and an hour to set up, says Crothers. We design our setups to get as many edits as we can within a single setup, but they never run very long. He tells the publication that scenes wont run any longer than 20 or 30 seconds because the heat can become intense.

RELATED: Chicago Fire: Casey Returns for Season 10 Finale

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The Duggar family might have been keeping a big secret from the general public before 2015. However, the sexual abuse inside their home wasnt a secret to their social circle. Reportedly, Josh Duggars inappropriate behavior was well known to members of their home church. According to recently unsealed court documents, Joshs behavior and Jim Bob and Michelle Duggars handling of the situation led to a rift in the familys social circle. So, just how many people knew what happened? A lot.

Court documents revealed how quickly the Duggars social circle learned about Josh Duggar

Josh Duggar molested four of his sisters and a family friend in 2003 and 2004. Initially, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar informed the Holt family of Joshs actions. Jim and Bobye Holt were close friends to Jim Bob and Michelle. Their daughter, Kaeleigh Holt, was dating Josh at the time. After the Holts informed their daughter of the situation, she ended her courtship with Josh and wrote details of the abuse in a letter.

Josh Duggar | Washington County Sheriffs Office via Getty Images

According to court documents, Kaeleigh slipped the letter into a book. In 2006, Kaeleigh lent the book to a family friend who discovered the note and passed it on to others. After that, the Duggar familys larger social circle was made aware of the incidents. According to Kaeleighs testimony, Michelles family member, Rachel Hutchins, was also aware of the incidents. Kaeleigh noted that many of the parents in their social circle discussed what happened.

Kaeleigh Holt testified that Michelle and Jim Bob Duggars handling of the situation led to a social rift

The Duggar family and the Holt family had been incredibly close for years. Still, how Jim Bob and Michelle handled Josh Duggars behavior led to division inside the families home church. According to Kaeleighs testimony in the Duggar sisters lawsuit against the city of Springdale, the families social circle was divided.

The Holt family appeared in the Duggar familys first TLC special but disappeared from the spotlight shortly after. Bobye Holts testimony at Josh Duggars child pornography trial was the first time the family publicly acknowledged a relationship between Josh and Kaeleigh Holt.

Kaeleigh has since gone on to marry someone else. Josh Duggar married Anna Duggar in 2008. They have seven children together. TLC canceled 19 Kids and Counting in 2015 after police reports regarding the molestation came to light. According to the Ashley Reality Roundup, Kaeleigh addressed the relationship on her Instagram following Bobye Holts testimony.

A family insider blew the whistle on the Duggar family

Everything that happened led to a serious and significant rift just as the Duggar family landed their TLC specials. The special led to other television appearances. While the family members were regulars on several talk shows, they never appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show. They were supposed to appear on the show in 2006, though. For years, rumors swirled that Winfrey canceled the appearance after receiving an email about the molestation.

The Duggar family | Bill Clark/Roll Call/Getty Images

As it turns out, Winfrey did cancel the appearance following an email tip. The production company behind the show also contacted the police regarding the information. The tipster, according to court documents, was a Duggar family insider. An unknown person placed an additional tip to a child welfare hotline in Arkansas. The tips led to the police investigation and subsequent report that was released to the public in 2015.

How to get help: If you or someone you know has been sexually abused, text HOME to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 for free and confidential support.

RELATED: Duggar Family News: Lawsuit Motion Reveals Josh Duggars Ex-Girlfriend Penned Letter That Uncovered Sexual Abuse
Jill and Derick Dillard recently sold their home and are planning a big move. While the couple didnt share exactly where they are headed, if Dericks address for practicing law is any indication, they arent straying too far. Derick and his family might be heading to Oklahoma. Derick lived in Oklahoma while earning his bachelors degree.

Jill and Derick Dillard announced their big move in April

Jill and Derick have shared a fair bit of news in recent months. The couple announced their third pregnancy in late February. A couple of weeks later, they revealed that baby number 3 is a boy. They shared that they would be packing up and moving out of their Lowell, Arkansas, home via Instagram in late April.

The couple purchased the home in 2019, and it was plenty big enough to accommodate their family. The two-bath, 4-bedroom home features an open concept living space, and a large level backyard. According to Realtor, the home was listed for sale on April 14 for $279,000. There is a pending offer on the property. Derick and Jill paid $187,000 for the house in 2019.

Are Derick and Jill Dillard moving to Oklahoma?

Jill and Derick did not state where they were moving in their Instagram announcement. The couple did indicate that they were selling their home to accommodate a job offer Derick had received. Duggar family followers were quick to make some guesses based on the Dillards travels in recent months. One commenter suggested they were moving to Oregon after the family recently vacationed there. Jill revealed that they were not planning a move to the West Coast.

Jill Dillard and husband Derick Dillard | D Dipasupil/Getty Images for Extra

If his updated work address is any indication, the couple is headed to a small town in Oklahoma that borders Arkansas. A Reddit user uncovered official records that list Dericks work address as a courthouse in Stilwell, Oklahoma. According to public records, Derick was admitted to the bar on April 7, just days before listing their home for sale.

Stilwell isnt too far from where they currently live. The town is just an hour from their current home. It is also an hour away from the Duggar familys Springdale, Arkansas compound. Derick has not announced who his new employer is, and the family hasnt shared whether they have purchased a new home.

Jill would be the third Duggar to leave the state of Arkansas

Assuming Jill and Derick leave Arkansas and settle somewhere in Oklahoma, theyll be the third couple to set down roots in a new state. Jinger Vuolo was the first Duggar family member to leave Arkansas. Jeremy Vuolo was raised in Pennsylvania and worked in Texas when he met Jinger through Jessa and Ben Seewald. After their wedding in 2016, Jinger joined him in Laredo, Texas. They have since moved to Los Angeles for Jeremys studies.

Justin Duggar shocked Duggar family followers in 2020 when he announced his courtship and, in short order, his engagement to Claire Spivey. At just 18, Justin was considerably younger than his siblings when he started courting. The couple married in February 2021. While it initially looked like Justin and Claire would settle in Arkansas after Jim Bob gifted them property, it was not meant to be. Justin remodeled and sold the house ahead of his wedding. Justin and Claire live in Texas, close to her family.

Josh Duggar | Washington County Sheriffs Office via Getty Images

The rest of the married Duggar kids have stayed close to home. Joseph and Kendra Duggar own a cabin situated on the Duggar family property. Anna Duggar is believed to be living in a warehouse on the acreage. She and her husband, Josh Duggar, moved into the warehouse while renovating another home. Josh has since been tried and convicted on two child pornography charges. He is awaiting sentencing but could face up to 20 years in prison. There is no word on where Anna could land once sentencing is complete. Anna sold the house they were working on ahead of Joshs trial.

RELATED: Duggar Family News: Jill Dillard Might Be Making a Conscious Effort to Keep Kids off Instagram
The world recognizes actor John Wayne for his involvement in Western filmmaking and conservative politics. However, he strongly considered himself to be a liberal until people told him otherwise. Wayne once talked about gay rights, calling the celebration of LGBTQ identity abnormal and compared it to honoring tuberculosis victims.

John Waynes infamous Playboy interview put him in hot water

John Wayne | Art Zelin/Getty Images

Scott Eyman explored the personal life and career of Wayne in John Wayne: The Life and Legend. He touched on the infamous Playboy interview that continues to reappear to this day. However, Eyman discussed the actors statements surrounding Black populations and the LGBTQ community. As a result, the interview reopened the political wounds that he incurred after making The Green Berets regarding the Vietnam War.

Wayne used a slur to describe the gay narrative in the Oscar-winning movie Midnight Cowboy, explaining that such topics shouldnt be in motion pictures. Additionally, he dug into some sensitive racial issues that continue to haunt his legacy.

I believe in white supremacy until the Blacks are educated to a point of responsibility, Wayne said. I dont believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.

John Wayne once compared the abnormal act of celebrating gay rights to tuberculosis victims

Folks seem upset that some are calling for John Wayne Airport to be renamed. Fun fact: John Wayne was a white supremacist:



"I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to the point of responsibility." (Playboy magazine interview, 1971.)



The more you know  George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) June 28, 2020

Eyman explained that a year after the Playboy interview, Wayne was made the grand marshal of the Rose Bowl Parade. However, the USC Daily Trojan called the selection, a gross insult to Blacks, to American Indians and to Americans of any race who believe in equality. John Wayne is a blatant racist.

However, things went to another level when a reporter asked Wayne about his stance on gay rights. The actor wasnt expecting to hear that question, given the initial pause in his response.

I think gay people, personally, Wayne began with a pause. You know, Im an older man, and Ive been thrown in a lot of experiences, and I have a feeling that its abnormal and its certainly not the natural way we were put on earth.

Wayne continued: So I see no reason to jump with joy because somebody is gay, and I dont see any reason for waving a flag for all the wonderful things gays have done for the world any more than youd say, Oh, boy, hooray for the tuberculosis victim! Its abnormal to me.

The actor said that he didnt judge people for their private lives

I have tried to live my life so that my family would love me and my friends respect me. The others can do whatever the hell they please. #JohnWayne pic.twitter.com/0M2xPqd6Gh  John Wayne Official (@JohnDukeWayne) February 11, 2022

However, Wayne wanted to emphasize that he didnt have a hatred for gay people, despite what much of the public believed. Nevertheless, he still never saw the point in celebrating LGBTQ identity.

Now, as far as having them live their own life, I feel that a man has a right to live his life the way he wishesas long as he doesnt interfere with me having my rights, Wayne said, according to Eyman. So I have nothing against them, but I certainly see no reason to jump with joy about it.

RELATED: John Wayne Shouted a Gay Slur to Describe Kirk Douglas Costume Choice
Kate Middleton has put her own spin on the royal hat tradition in recent years by wearing padded headbands. Instead of fascinators, the style icon regularly chooses to wear a piece from her padded headband collection to accessorize an outfit. But royal fans wont believe how much that headband collection is worth.

Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton | Samir Hussein/WireImage

Kate Middleton loves Jane Taylor headbands

The Duchess of Cambridge often wears padded headbands from her favorite designers to royal events like christenings, weddings, church services, and Remembrance Days. Some of her choices have made bold statements by featuring embellishments or decadent fabrics.

At Prince Louis christening in July 2018 she chose a white pearl-adorned Jane Taylor headband with netting and floral appliques. A few months later, she chose another band from the same designer for Remembrance Day service. It was a crescent-moon shaped piece in a gorgeous shade of forest green.

For the Christmas Day service on the Sandringham Estate in 2018, Middleton chose a berry tone for her 1960s-inspired Jane Taylor Halo Band. For Christmas a year later, she opted for a teal pleated headband from Taylor.

At Archie Harrisons christening in 2019, Kate wore a pink velvet-plaited Juliette Botterill Millinery Abaca Plaided Band. And for the Royal British Legion Festival of Remembrance in London back in November 2019, the duchess wore an embellished black headband with a little sparkle from Zara.

Royal fans wont believe how much the Duchess of Cambridges headband collection is worth

Kates headband collection is extensive, and it costs a whopping 10,000 (approximately $12,500)! One of the most expensive pieces in her collection is a bespoke blue piece from Jane Taylor known as the Diamond Crepe Pleated Band. She first wore it back in 2019 for Easter Sunday service at St. Georges Chapel, and its worth around 975 ($1230).

One of the most affordable in her collection is a black padded velvet band from Lele Sadoughi that Kate wore for her visit to Dublin in March 2020. At the time, the classic style retailed for about 70 ($88).

Kate Middleton just took the padded headband trend to the extreme

During a recent appearance at Westminster Abbey for Anzac Day  a national day of remembrance in Australia and New Zealand  the Duchess of Cambridge took the headband trend to the extreme.

She arrived wearing an Alexander McQueen coat dress with a red poppy pinned to the label and black suede pointed-toe pumps. She accessorized the look with Princess Dianas Collingwood pearl earrings, a black clutch purse, and a white boucle, puffed-up headband by Jane Taylor that made her inches taller known as the Calypso Halo.

Kate Middleton Makes Surprise Appearance Alongside Prince William to Mark Anzac Day https://t.co/8QE8Z6vrPi  People (@people) April 25, 2022

Its a work of art that costs 830 ($1,050), and the design is a white band with a black bow at the back. The brands website describes it as A sensational all-rounder halo headpiece made from iconic British tweed  ideal for weddings, smart events, and races  topped off with a fetching tuxedo satin bow at the nape of the neck for a smart finish.

Kate attended the Anzac Ceremony along with Prince William on behalf of Queen Elizabeth.

RELATED: How Kate Middleton Subtly Paid Tribute to Queen Elizabeth Daily on Her Caribbean Tour
TL; DR:

Prince William and Kate Middleton visited the U.K. city of Manchester on May 10, 2022.

They were there to honor the victims of the 2017 terrorist attack at Manchester Arena.

During an emotional speech, Prince William mentioned his own grief and remembered those who have died.

Prince William has previously opened up about grieving his late mother, Princess Diana.

Kate Middleton and Prince William | Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty Images

Prince Williams Manchester visit alongside Kate Middleton included an emotional speech from the Duke of Cambridge. In it, the 39-year-old touched on his own grief, referencing Princess Dianas death in 1997 when he was 15, and the comfort in remembering.

Prince William and Kate Middleton visited Manchester to honor victims of the Manchester Arena terrorist attack

William and the Duchess of Cambridge went to Manchester, England, to pay tribute to the victims of the Manchester Arena bombing that took place at a 2017 Ariana Grande concert. 22 people were killed and others wounded after a bomb was detonated shortly after Grandes final song.

Kate and William visited a memorial dedicated to the victims called the Glade of Light. The Duchess of Cambridge laid a bouquet of flowers in honor of the victims. In addition to Williams speech, the pair also attended a private reception at Manchester Cathedral. There they met with some of the victims families as well as emergency service workers who were there at the scene.

Additionally, Kate wore honeycomb earrings which, per People, were a nod to the community.

Were here at the The Glade of Light Memorial Garden today in central Manchester to commemorate the victims of the 2017 terrorist attack in Manchester Arena  The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (@KensingtonRoyal) May 10, 2022

Prince Williams Manchester speech included a comment about his own grief

During Kate and Williams Manchester visit the Duke of Cambridge made an emotional speech. Addressing guests, the father of three looked back on visiting Manchester in the wake of the terrorist attack.

I remember only too well the shock and grief on the faces of those I met when I visited Manchester in the days following the atrocity, William said. And the rawness of emotion at the Commemoration Service, held at your Cathedral just here, a year later. Five years on I know that the pain and the trauma felt by many, has not gone away.

He continued, saying he too is someone who lives with his own grief.

As someone who lives with his own grief, I also know that what often matters most to the bereaved is that those we have lost are not forgotten, he said. There is comfort in remembering. In acknowledging that, while taken horribly soon, they lived. They changed our lives. They were loved and they are loved.

It is why memorials such as the Glade of Light are so important, he added before noting it was why he and Kate so wanted to be amongst you today.

Prince William previously talked about what he did after Princess Dianas death: You try to understand what happened

Years before Williams Manchester visit and his emotional speech, the Duke of Cambridge opened up about losing his mother. In the 2017 HBO documentary Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, he and Prince Harry reflected on their haunting final phone with Diana and the aftermath of her death.

Slowly, you try to rebuild your life, you try to understand what happened. I kept myself busy, as well, to allow you to get yourself through that initial shock phase. Were talking maybe as much as five to seven years afterward, William said. You know, there was times when you look to someone or something for strength and I very much felt she was there for me.

In 2021, the Duke of Sussex and William unveiled a statue of Diana at Kensington Palace. More recently, in April 2022, Harry shared hes felt Dianas constant presence, especially in the last few years.

RELATED: Prince William Reveals Why 1 Tina Turner Song Reminds Him of Princess Diana: It Brings Back Lots of Memories of My Mother
Ever since Prince Harry and Meghan Markle signed their mega-deal with Netflix, royal watchers have been discussing it at length. One of the biggest questions among fans and experts alike is when are the Sussexes going to produce some content for the streaming platform? Now that Meghans first project was canceled a biographer who previously worked with the Duke of Sussex has a message for the couple.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle speak on stage at Global Citizen Live New York | Gotham/WireImage

What programming Harry and Meghan said they were making after signing the Netflix deal

It was back in September 2020 when Variety reported that duke and duchess had inked a mega-deal with the streaming giant reportedly worth upwards of $100 million.

The prince and former Suits star later released a statement regarding the content they would be creating for Netflix saying: Our lives, both independent of each other, and as a couple have allowed us to understand the power of the human spirit: of courage, resilience, and the need for connection. Through our work with diverse communities and their environments, to shining a light on people and causes around the world, our focus will be on creating content that informs but also gives hope.

Despite that deal, the pair still hasnt produced anything for Netflix.

After the duchesss show was canceled expert says the couple cant just take the money and run

Meghan Markle speaking with Prince Harry at the Invictus Games sitting volleyball event | Karwai Tang/WireImage

In July 2021, Meghan and Harrys company, Archewell Productions, announced Meghan was working on a childrens animated series. But in April 2022, Netflix axed the upcoming animated program titled Pearl.

Royal commentator Angela Levin, who worked with Harry a few years back while doing a biography on the prince, spoke about the couples deal and Meghans show calling it a disaster.

Not only a disaster but the fact that it was announced last July and apparently theres still nothing to show for it, Levin said (per Express), adding, Being a royal opens every door for you but if you leave you cant just take the money you have to do some work.

The series the Sussexes reportedly have in the works now

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry laughing during day two of the Invictus Games | Patrick van Katwijk/Getty Images

It was reported that during Harrys trip to The Hauge, Netherlands for the Invictus Games in April 2022 that a camera crew was on hand filming what will be the Sussexes first series for Netflix. The documentary is titled Heart of Invictus.

A statement on Meghan and Harrys Archewell website said: Since the very first Invictus Games back in 2014, we knew that each competitor would contribute in their own exceptional way to a mosaic of resilience, determination, and resolve. This series will give communities around the world a window into the moving and uplifting stories of these competitors  As Archewell Productions first series with Netflix, in partnership with the Invictus Games Foundation, I couldnt be more excited for the journey ahead or prouder of the Invictus community for continuously inspiring global healing, human potential, and continued service.

RELATED: Body Language Expert Analyzes the Way Meghan Markle Pushed Prince Harry Away and Walked Off After TV Kiss
Shailene Woodley has certainly worked with her fair share of talented actors. In her 25-year career, shes worked alongside everyone from Meryl Streep to Molly Ringwald. Naturally, the actor has developed personal relationships with quite a few of her co-stars over the years. However, one person whom she is particularly close with is George Clooney. In fact, she thinks of the Oceans Eleven star as a kind of big brother.

The Descendants stars George Clooney and Shailene Woodley | Leonard Adam / Contributor

How did George Clooney and Shailene Woodley meet?

Back in 2011, Clooney and Woodley worked together on a film called The Descendants. The film follows a family in Hawaii whose world is turned upside down after an accident leaves their matriarch in a coma. In the film, Clooney and Woodley play father and daughter and had natural chemistry on screen. And it seems that on-screen chemistry lent itself to a real-life relationship.

RELATED: Theo James on Shailene Woodley: Luckily, Shes Not a Douchebag

Though Woodley started acting at the age of 5, she didnt know too much about Clooney before filming with him. The Endings, Beginnings actor admits that she didnt watch a lot of movies growing up. Though shed seen Clooneys film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? she didnt think of him as a movie star. Instead, she got to know him a person rather than a celebrity.

Clooney was like a big brother to the Divergent star

I didnt think about him as a mentor like that wasnt the narrative or the role that I placed him in, Woodley shared with 92nd Street Y. For me, it was like he was a kind of a father in a way. Not an actual father, but he had the role of big brother/dad.

RELATED: Shailene Woodley Explains Why She Got Rid of Her Belongings at Age 19

Continuing on, Woodley shared that she was able to confide in Clooney about things that made her uncomfortable. Furthermore, The Fallout star explained that the ER alum often forced her to get out of her shell. There was just always a sort of symbiotic deep care and playfulness to our relationship, she explained.

The Descendants was a very special experience for Woodley

Woodley also revealed that Clooney was very candid with her about the realities of filmmaking. Though shed been working in the industry for 13 years when she booked The Descendants, it was her first feature film. Clooney was quick to tell Woodley that their experience was fairly atypical and she should take the opportunity to really appreciate the experience.

Im very lucky, Woodley shared about working with Clooney. You know he was the guy who at The Descendents was like, Look, not every actually no other films that you ever are on will be like this. Were filming in Hawaii for five months with Alexander Payne and youre filming with me, youre working with me. Were working 10-11 hour days, which never happens, and were all barbecuing at night together. He was like this will never ever exist so you need to soak up this experience.

It seems that Woodley took her big bothers words to heart and made the best out of the experience. But what does Clooney think about Woodley? In the aforementioned interview he was quoted and had only the best things to say about the Divergent star. Before I ever had a daughter, Shailene was my daughter and I couldnt be prouder to be friends with her.

RELATED: Shailene Woodley Reveals What Kind of Clay She Prefers to Eat
In the HBO Max series The Staircase, Sophie Turner plays Margaret Ratliff, one of Michael Petersons adopted daughters. Thanks to the Netflix series of the same name from French documentarian Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, most have heard of Petersons story and many have theories about how Kathleen died. Turner recently spoke about the theories surrounding Kathleen and Michael Peterson, admitting shes so done talking about what happened. Find out why.

Patrick Schwarzenegger as Todd Peterson, Sophie Turner as Margaret Ratliff | HBO Max

How did Kathleen Peterson die?

Kathleen died in her Durham, North Carolina home at the bottom of a staircase. Authorities presumed Michael was responsible for Kathleens death, believing he beat her with a fireplace blow poke.

Lestrades Netflix docu-series examines Kathleens death and Michaels case from a legal standpoint. According to Michaels lawyer David S. Rudolpfs website, the documentary focused on the flaws of the criminal justice system in general and junk science.

Rudolf also explains Kathleens cause of death: exsanguination. Not blunt force trauma to her brain, not a fractured skull, not strangulation, he writes. Loss of blood.

Evidence from Kathleens autopsy hints at a bird of prey attacking Kathleen, causing the lacerations on her head. We thought in 2003 [her wounds] were due to the scalp splitting when her head hit a flat surface, such as a wall or a floor, as explained by Werner Spitz in Episode 1 [of Netflixs The Staircase], Rudolf writes. However, by the time Rudolf had enough evidence to support this theory, it was too late to present the idea in court.

The Staircase cast spent a lot of time talking about Kathleen Petersons death on set

For years, true crime lovers have been talking about the many ways Kathleen could have died. The cast of HBO Maxs The Staircase did the same while filming the series.

As a guest on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon, Turner talked about working on The Staircase. This show is about [the Michael Peterson case], but its not another telling of the same thing, Turner explained. It actually is about the making of the documentary, on top of the case thats going on, because theres layers and layers and layers of corruption.

Fallon asked if Turners opinion of the case changed while working on the HBO Max series. She replied: Im so done talking about what happened. Everyone had theories. I was theorizing for so long, and then by this point, Im just like, Im over it.

Sophie Turners character wavers in The Staircase on HBO Max

Initially, Turners Margaret stands with the fictional Michael Peterson (Colin Firth). I think its really important to see the behind the scenes on why these people are where they are and where they stand, Turner told TV Line of the fictional Peterson kids. She alludes to the HBO Max series giving viewers an explanation of those choices.

She also teases Margarets change of heart. As the series goes on, she  grows up and realizes regurgitating your parents or other peoples opinions on things is no good for your mental health, Turner added. Shes growing up and realizing maybe my parents arent perfect  maybe this man isnt the man I thought he was.

Watch new episodes of The Staircase on HBO Max weekly.

RELATED: The Staircase: Who Was Michael Petersons First Wife, Patricia Peterson?
[SPOILER ALERT: Spoilers ahead for The Challenge: All Stars 3 Episode 2.]

22 competitors who previously qualified for the finals in the flagship series are still competing in Paramount+ hosted reality series The Challenge: All Stars 3, fighting for the $250,000 grand prize. Host TJ Lavin introduced a new twist in the premiere, which gives the daily challenge winners the power to sabotage another player, which is used for the first time during episode 2. Additionally, a player quit moments before their elimination round. Who went home during The Challenge: All Stars 3 Episode 2?

The cast of The Challenge XXX: Ultimate Fan Experience on stage | Lars Niki/Getty Images

Sylvia and Wes used the first sabotage in The Challenge: All Stars 3

Following Cynthia Roberts and Tyler Duckworths elimination, the competitors faced off in another daily mission.

Armed with her sabotage advantage due to winning the last challenge, Sylvia Elsrode debated whether to use it against Kendal Darnell, noting shes super quiet, or KellyAnne Judd considering her a threat.

It's go time! So excited for you to see what we have in store for you. watch the trailer for #TheChallengeAllStars3 NOW, and stream the season premiere on @paramountplus on 5/11! @ChallengeMTV pic.twitter.com/CWlxzixOwG  Wes Bergmann (@WestonBergmann) April 20, 2022

RELATED: The Challenge: All Stars: KellyAnne Judd Says Men Had an Advantage Over Women in Final

However, Wes Bergmann encouraged her to take them in as allies instead. Instead of taking his advice, Sylvia threw the first shot at KellyAnne by sabotaging her with a one-minute delay in the daily mission.

Wes sent his to his rival, Jordan Wiseley. Before the mission, Melinda Collins revealed she rolled her ankle four times during last seasons finals and is still having sharp pain.

Tina Bridges rubbed Jonna Mannion the wrong way after losing the daily mission

For the challenge, Out of Reach, the contestants suspended 35 feet over water and swung themselves far enough to knock over a key box.

After retrieving the key, they had to swim back to shore and open a box that held puzzle pieces. Due to the sabotage, KellyAnne and Jordan had to wait one minute before starting the puzzle.

They're baaaack! Whether for redemption, good times, or to see if they've still got it, the All Stars are hungry for more!



Catch the premiere of #TheChallengeAllStars3 WED, MAY 11TH only on @paramountplus! pic.twitter.com/C3cklPxfeB  The Challenge (@TheChallenge) April 22, 2022

The fastest six men and women to complete the challenge formed the Authority. Yes Duffy and Kendal overwhelmingly won, followed by Jonna Mannion, Brad Fiorenza, Kailah Casillas, and the sabotaged Jordan Wiseley.

Before the group met to deliberate, that days female loser Tina Bridges approached Jonna and threatened her not to vote in her allies Veronica Portillo or Melinda to compete against in elimination. It rubbed last seasons winner the wrong way, who felt Tina tried to intimidate her into playing her game.

Melinda Collins quit during The Challenge: All Stars 3; who else went home?

When the Authority revealed which male and female they wanted to save, Roni Chance, Mark Long, Nehemiah Clark, Syrus Yarbough, Melinda, and Veronica were possible options.

Ultimately, they decided on Mark and Melinda. However, Melinda quit prior to the elimination due to her ankle as she felt she couldnt compete on it.

 TRIGGER WARNING  The All Stars are hitting rewind  with the Challenge time capsule but not all of these memories are good ones.



Don't miss the -episode premiere of #TheChallengeAllStars3 streaming THIS WEDNESDAY on @paramountplus! pic.twitter.com/DlGQu8KqFj  The Challenge (@TheChallenge) May 9, 2022

Laterrian Wallace faced off against Mark in the Lights Out elimination in which the first player to power off a light beam while tethered to a giant bar won.

Mark pulled out the win, sending home Laterrian and earning his star. Even though Melinda quit, Tina still acquired her star, giving her the most with three. The Challenge: All Stars 3 airs Wednesdays on Paramount+.

RELATED: The Challenge: Where Was All Stars 3 Filmed?
TL; DR:

Manuel Garcia-Rulfo plays lawyer Mickey Haller in the new Netflix series The Lincoln Lawyer.

The show is based on a book by Michael Connelly titled The Brass Verdict.

Connellys Harry Bosch character appears in The Brass Verdict but he wont be in The Lincoln Lawyer.

RELATED: The Lincoln Lawyer: Netflix Release Date and Time, Plot, and Cast

Mickey Haller is on the case. Manuel Garcia-Rulfo plays a Los Angeles lawyer struggling to get back on his feet after a personal crisis derailed his career in Netflixs new series The Lincoln Lawyer. Its based on a book by crime novelist Michael Connelly.

The Lincoln Lawyer is based on a book by Michael Connelly

Mickey Haller made his print debut in the 2005 novel The Lincoln Lawyer. That book was turned into a 2011 movie starring Matthew McConaughey. Rather than retell the story previously covered in the film, Netflixs version of The Lincoln Lawyer adapts Connellys second Mickey Haller book, 2008s The Brass Verdict. (Both Prime Videos Bosch and Freevees new series Bosch: Legacy also feature characters created by Connelly.)

[L-R] Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as Mickey Haller, Jazz Raycole as Izzy in Netflixs The Lincoln Lawyer | Lara Solanki/Netflix  2022

In both the book and the show, Haller inherits a murdered defense attorneys practice. That includes a high-profile murder case involving a wealthy man accused of killing his wife. While the series diverges from the book in some ways, it sticks to the source material in one key way that also helps distinguish it from the McConaughey movie.

The shows creators (who include The Practice producer David E. Kelley) were dealing with an iconic movie with Matthew McConaughey, Connelly recently told the Tampa Bay Times.

How do you make it your own? he said. They went back to the books. In the books, Mickey Haller is Mexican American. His mother is from Mexico. Garcia-Rulfo is Mexican.

Will Bosch and The Lincoln Lawyer overlap?

In Connellys books, Haller and detective Harry Bosch are half-brothers and the two sometimes work together on their respective cases. In The Brass Verdict, Harry Bosch is in charge of investigating the murder of the lawyer whose practice Haller takes over.

However, Titus Welliver, who plays Harry in Bosch and Bosch: Legacy, wont be making any surprise appearances in the Netflix series. Nor will The Lincoln Lawyer star Garcia-Rulfo be popping up in Freevees new show. Each is made by a different company Connelly explained, which means there wont be any crossover.

The Netflix series is about redemption, EP says

Mickey Haller is back! Streaming on Netflix worldwide starting May 13. Based on The Brass Verdict (2008), the second book in the series. Mickey takes over the law practice of a murdered defense attorney.  Michael Connelly (@Connellybooks) May 8, 2022

When the Netflix series begins, its been a year since Hallers been in a courtroom. He stepped away from his practice after developing an addiction to painkillers following a surfing accident. Though hes now in recovery, his substance abuse damaged both his career and his relationship with his two ex-wives (played by Screams Neve Campbell and Becki Newton) and his teen daughter (Krista Warner). The 10-episode first season follows him as he tries to overcome his past mistakes while juggling multiple cases.

Mickey really has this deep-seated sense of right and wrong, and the first season is very much a redemption story, The Lincoln Lawyer executive producer Ted Humphrey told TVInsider.

The Lincoln Lawyer premieres May 13 on Netflix.

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RELATED: Bosch: Legacy: Denise G. Sanchez Talks Working With Madison Lintz on Bosch Spinoff [Exclusive]
Sherri Shepherd is set to launch her new daytime talk show, Sherri, this fall now that The Wendy Williams Show is coming to an end. The 30 Rock alum is bringing her experience from her co-hosting gig on The View from 2007 to 2014. Shepherd was a guest co-host at the Hot Topics table during a legendary brawl between Rosie ODonnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck in 2007 and her actions after the high-profile blowup earned her some favor with show creator Barbara Walters.

Former co-host of The View Sherri Shepherd | Lou Rocco/ABC via Getty Images

Sherri Shepherd was vying for a permanent seat on The View

Shepherd was in the running for a chair of her own at The View table in 2007 and was apparently in competition with comedian Kathy Griffin. They were both assigned days to serve as guest co-hosts on the show and Shepherd noted her good fortune of being present for the now-famous fight between Hasselbeck and ODonnell.

What cemented me coming on was Rosie ODonnell got into it with Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Shepherd told Sunny Hostin on the Behind the Table podcast in 2021, according to ABC News. The permanent co-host position was between Kathy Griffin or [me]. This is how God be moving. They gave Kathy Griffin the Friday, and they gave me Thursday. So we each had a day and all of the stuff happened on Thursday.

The on-air uproar began with co-host Joy Behar criticizing then-President George W. Bush. The conversation snowballed into a shouting match between ODonnell and Hasselbeck over the Iraq war. At one point, Behar and Shepherd walked away from the table and tempers eventually settled down. The argument between the two TV personalities made headlines and ODonnell left the show a month later.

The View: Sherri Shepherds Co-Hosting Career Almost Ended Because of One Conversation

Sherri Shepherd kept quiet about The View fight

Shepherd recalled trying to reason with her co-hosts after the emotional feud.

After it ended, I said, Elisabeth Youve got to calm down, Shepherd told Ramin Setoodah in his book, Ladies Who Punch. Then I was with Rosie. She said, I cant take this. Im so tired of this. It was like watching your parents fight.

It didnt take long for news outlets to start contacting Shepherd for some inside details on the disastrous dispute, but the Brian Banks star kept mum.

When I left, everybody in the world called me, Shepherd remarked. They wanted to know if they could fly me out to talk about it. I said, Its none of my business. And it would be a disservice, because I didnt know the behind the scenes.

Barbara Walters appreciated Sherri Shepherds refusal to spill secrets

Apparently, Griffin thought she could win marks with viewers by stirring the pot and continued to reference the ODonnell-Hasselbeck spat when she resumed her guest seat.

When Kathy came on the next day, she kept trying to go there and make jokes, Shepherd shared. They were really uncomfortable. They knew I could keep my mouth shut.

Setoodah noted that Shepherds discretion won over Walters and likely earned her the permanent co-hosting gig.

I think that impressed Barbara Walters and [then executive producer] Bill Geddie, Shepherd said. So I got the job of the co-host.

RELATED: This Co-Host From The View Learned She Was Fired From the Show in a News Article
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One question Im often asked is Is it hard to be a Christian and a journalist?

Whenever I speak to young people about my job, this inquiry pops up almost every time. I always think it odd. I was raised deep inside the cocoon of a nondenominational evangelical church myself, so I know the question reflects presumptions about the world outside. But I still cant quite nail down why it bothers me so much.

Many conservative Christians are told that the media is evilalmost as bad as Democrats, or maybe worse. Thats the way I grew up. Just like Hollywood and universities, I was taught that the media were secular, godless liberals; that they hated us and our values.

Sometimes it came from a speaker at church. More often it came from the media and messaging centers that dominated evangelical culture. This was conservative talk radio for sure. But I also heard this from conservative political organizations like the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition, and others. I heard it in places like the Teen Mania conferences where I went to get fired up for Christ and sign up for overseas mission trips.

So, when kids ask me if its hard to be a Christian and a journalist, I know they have a certain picture in their heads. They visualize me going to work surrounded by debauched atheists who did lots of drugs and had lots of drunken sex and read atheist propaganda.

When recently elected US Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) told stories about orgies and cocaine, which were later refuted, he seemed to be working off the same assumptions that drove the questions I got from students just a little younger than he.

Conservative Christians are far more hostile toward the media now than they were when I was growing up. Some of my own family members have told me I should be ashamed of myself for doing my job. In fact, most people dont like the mediaand thats bad for society. The media shares some of the blame for that, as Ive written recently for Yahoo! News.

But after working in journalism for 20 years, my Christian faith is deeper and stronger because of this job. As Ive worked on a book about growing up evangelical and then becoming a mainstream journalist, one thing has become increasingly clear to me: Being a journalist has actually made me a better Christian.

Journalism has empowered many of the most noble, the most Christian elements of my character. I have been discipled for two decades in how to discern what is true and false, andprobably more importantlyhow to discern when there are no easy answers or solutions. I have been trained in pursuing truth without regard to whom it offends.

I have also been given a sense of humility about what we can know for sure and how often we need to acknowledge that our point of view is limited and incomplete. This is sometimes called epistemological modesty, and it is a quality that we badly need more of in our discourse.

Many crisis merchants love to pretend that the answers to our challenges as a nation are simple. It allows these self-proclaimed leaders to build mini empires for themselves through social media likes and followers, viewers on prime-time TV or listeners on talk radio. They whip people into a frenzy of anger and fear and reap a harvest of dollars.

In addition, I have experienced the incredible benefit of expertise. One of the journalists chief jobs is to identify experts and separate them out from those who claim to have insightto talk to them and then translate their expertise for the reader. The effect is transformative. A set of facts might look one way, or one-dimensional, until one talks to an expert.

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From a very young age, I latched on to the idea that Christianity is a faith that believes in truth. Ive always loved the way that Jesus stood for truth. I am the way, the truth and the life, Christ said (John 14:6). At another point, he promised that his Spirit would guide you into all the truth (16:13).

When he was about to be executed, Jesus told Pontius Pilate, The reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth (18:37). Elsewhere, Christ said that the truth will set you free (8:32).

But there are many constraints that make it harder for most people to pursue truth todayand yet being a journalist has freed and equipped me to do just that.

Most people form a point of view about the world based on which groups they spend time with and which groups they are a part of. The groups they belong to shape their identity: their family, their church or affinity group, their political party, their profession. Even bigger than that, their group defines the story they believe they are living in.

A persons worldview and story then filters what information they take in and what they reject.

Whatever group you are in, it will punish you for believing or saying the wrong things and reward you for supporting what they support. This problem exists in all groups, mainstream journalism included. Most journalists in the mainstream media live in places that skew left politically, and so they either grow up with that perspective or come to be influenced by it in big and small ways.

However, journalism is one of the few circles in which speaking up against ones own group, against groupthink in ones own culture, is generally encouraged and rewarded. It is far more valued than in most other tribes.

There are other groups like this, people who belong to professional societies that hold what former CIA director Michael Hayden called Enlightenment values: gathering, evaluating, and analyzing information, and then disseminating conclusions for use, study, or refutation.

In his book The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch notes that the worlds of scholarship, science, research, statistical analysis, regulation, and law all elevate these values in addition to journalism.

I have had a varied career. For eight years, I worked for a conservative newspaper, TheWashington Times. Then I spent a year and a half helping Tucker Carlson start the Daily Caller. Then I worked at a liberal website, The Huffington Post. And for the past seven-plus years, Ive worked at Yahoo! News.

My stint at The Washington Times set the tone for my career. There were ways in which that newspaper had institutional biases set by the owners and the top editors. But those of us reporting the news were fiercely committed to following facts wherever they led.

Ive always lived by that code in my two decades in journalism, and heres the key: The industry, on the whole, has rewarded that pursuit.

I have been free to listen, to consider, to agree or disagree, and to follow whichever direction the evidence pointed to on each issue. In this respect, I feel I am paid to move in a Christian directionone that remains apart from arguments motivated by ideology or group membership.

That is because, as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, Christians should always have a prophetic presence in the world, rather than be beholden to any power or principality or political party.

The church must be reminded that it is not to be the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state, King said. It must be the guide and the critic of the statenever its tool. As long as the church is a tool of the state it will be unable to provide even a modicum of bread for men at midnight.

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But Christians cannot be the conscience of the state if we are not first the conscience of whichever political party we belong to. We have the difficult task of belonging to political parties and working for the good of the country through those institutions, while also standing apart from those parties to criticize them at times for their weaknesses, errors, and corruptions.

The more one stands outside political powers, parties, and groups, the more one is free to pursue the truth where it leads. And the more one pursues the truth, the more one will see the many areas for constructive critique at every point along the ideological aisle.

This is what it means to stand with one foot planted in the kingdom of man and the other planted in the kingdom of God: to be a border-stalker, as artist Makoto Fujimura calls it.

Christians should cross many borders. They should belong to parties and stand outside of them. They should even cross between parties at times, never pledging unswerving allegiance to either. They should be deeply invested in working toward the good of this country and this world, while remembering that their citizenship is in heaven and their hope is in Christ, come what may.

By crossing back and forth across different borders to increase understanding and tear down lies, especially those stemming from reductionist caricatures and misleading confusion, Christians can carry out the call to be agents of truth, nuance, and healingto engage in culture care rather than culture war.

Jon Ward is chief national correspondent for Yahoo! News, author of Camelots End, and host of The Long Game podcast. His second book, Testimonya story of growing up evangelical and then becoming a mainstream journalistwill be released in April 2023 by Brazos Press.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moores newsletter. Subscribe here.

As leak after leak from the United States Supreme Court indicates, the Roe v. Wade decision that has legalized abortion for nearly 50 years likely will soon be gone.

The question of where a pro-life ethic goes from here wont be decided by courts or even legislatures, but by the state of the church in Americaand thats a far more complex realm. In fact, for pro-life Christians like me, the warning should be that it is possible to win and lose a culture of life at the very same time.

Both sides of the abortion debate have voices warning their compatriots of overreach. Some pro-life governors seem unprepared to talk in interviews about exceptions for rape and incest or the legality of IUDs and other contraceptive devices.

And many are warning pro-choice activists that they are in danger of losing public opinion by protesting at the homes of justices or seeking to pass wildly expansive bills at the state level guaranteeing nine months of legal abortion for any reason.

For decades, some of us have argued that a hearts and minds strategy alone is not enough to deal with this issue. One cannot make the case that unborn children are our neighbors without seeking to protect their most basic rights by law. And those of us who are so-called whole life advocates have argued that a hearts-and-minds strategy toward women in crisis alone is not enough.

We must have real action, from advocating for a government safety net to supporting church congregations willing to care for the poor and their children. In so doing, we oppose the idea we see often with some on racial injustice questionsJust get people saved, and racial issues will take care of themselves.

But while we need more than just a hearts-and-minds strategy, we also need nothing less. If the American people dont care about the humanity of their imperiled neighborwhether the pregnant woman or the preborn childno set of laws will hold for long.

Perhaps the greatest danger here is not what focus groups or polling data say about abortion, but something that has nothing to do with abortion at allthe moral credibility of the American church.

To see a model of how possible it can be to win and lose a cultural debate at the same time, we need only look across the Atlantic to Ireland.

A recent book by historian Fintan OToole examines the seemingly sudden collapse of Catholic cultural influence in the land of Saint Patrick, in ways that could be a premonition of what could happen to evangelical America.

OToole writes, for instance, about the unchallenged influence of the long-serving archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid. This influence was such that the archbishop could call a radio network to account for playing a song by Cole Porterthe lyrics of which (Im always true to you, darling, in my fashion) the cleric found to represent a circumscribed morality.

One reviewer frames the matter bluntly, writing, The only circumscribed morality McQuaid was prepared to tolerate was the abuse of young boys and girls by priests, and of women from many backgrounds by nuns in the infamous Magdalene Laundries.

The churchs influence was unquestionableIreland stood apart from the rest of Western Europe on the moral matters of abortion, contraception, divorce, and so on.

And yet, as OToole argues, the churchs influence was far-reaching in other ways too. He writes that when numerous instances of molestation by clergy were discovered, the parents of the children harmed seemed inclined to apologize to the church for the difficulties these abusive priests faced.

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This was the churchs great achievement in Ireland, OToole writes. It had so successfully disabled a societys capacity to think for itself about right and wrong that it was the parents of an abused child, not the bishop who enabled that abuse, who were quite apologetic.

It had managed to create a flock who, in the face of an outrageous violation of trust, would be concerned as much about the abuser than those he had abused and might continue to abuse in the future, he continues. It had inserted its system of control and power so deeply into the minds of the faithful that they could scarcely even feel angry about the perpetration of disgusting crimes on their own children.

Although some evangelical leaders would tell us that language of gaslighting and spiritual abuse are just vague therapeutic slogans for the deconstructing, these terms describe perfectly what OToole saw in the abusive church systems in Irelandand they just as easily describe what many have experienced in American evangelical contexts.

The end resultperhaps for born-again America as for Catholic Irelandis a church with an inordinately powerful force of cultural influence, if not moral authority, that finds itself suddenly without the credibility to enforce its orthodoxy at all.

The reason? People could not withstand what OToole calls the most shocking realization of all, which was the recognition by most of the faithful that they were in fact much holier than their preachers, that they had a clearer sense of right and wrong, a more honest and intimate sense of love and compassion and decency.

The church in Ireland is now a hollow presence culturally compared to what it once was. Abortion is now legal in Ireland, after a popular referendum in 2018 repealed the laws preventing it. Abortions are, in fact, free through the nations public health service. Divorce, as of 2019, is liberalized as well.

Did these massive and unpredictably sudden changes happen because of dramatically improved mobilization or messaging tactics by the (to use an American framing) cultural left? No.

Many researchers believe that the cultural shifts in Ireland were due, in large part, to a backlash against the church itself. Was this backlash because of cultural forces of secularization warring against the church? No. It was because people who once revered the church came to realize that the church did not itself believe what it taught.

OToole points to the previous cultural necessity of obtaining an annulment by a church board to end a marriage. He notes that one of the churchs board members was a priest credibly accused of sexual predation on minorsand under the authority of leaders who were credibly accused of covering up the abuse.

The corruption of any institution does not, of course, decide the morality or immorality of any action, nor the rightness or wrongness of any belief. Martin Luther believed the medieval Roman church was wrong about indulgences and purgatory but right about the efficacy of the sacraments and the existence of a heaven and a hell. And yet, as Jesus put it, Woe to the person through whom the stumbling block comes, (Luke 17:1 NASB).

I wrote above that the cultural collapse of the Irish church was the end result of their very public hypocrisies and scandals, but that isnt quite right. As a Christian, I do not believe the end result is Irelands turn away from the church, or any other sociological or historical shift.

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Rather, the true end result is the judgment of God. And while that is far less quantifiable, it should be far more terrifying.

What the pro-life movement needs most from American evangelicalism is not more of our cultural or political influence. Indeed, much of what must be done to achieve that sort of influence is itself part of the crisis of our credibility.

Short-term cultural influence without moral authority can lead to some gains. But long-term, those gains cannot be sustained. More importantly, what can be lost by an influential but carnal church is far more than what can be gainedand that which is lost can be very difficult to recover.

What the world needs most from evangelical America is that we be a people who really believe what we say. Whether the world agrees or disagrees with us on abortion, or any other matter, they need to see us love vulnerable childrenwhether in the womb, in abusive homes, in foster care, or in our own pews.

They need us to stand for justice not only in the public arena but, more importantly, by holding ourselves to a high standard of integrity and accountability.

They need us to demonstrate what we say we believethat all of life is lived before the face of God and nothing can be covered up before the judgment seat of Christ. They need to witness the testimony that the new birth we claim is more than just a brand.

Influence can be important, if it is used the right way. But credibility is more important still. And the next generation, born and unborn, is counting on us to recover it.

Russell Moore leads the Public Theology Project at Christianity Today.
Ministry had been going so well in Irpin, Ukraine.

Over the past decade, the population of Kyivs northwest suburb swelled to 90,000, and Irpin Bible Church (IBC) grew with it. The Baptist congregation grew to include 700 adults, with an additional 300 children. And in 2019, 12 members launched a church plant in the New Blocs neighborhood, where 15,000 Ukrainians lived in multi-story apartment complexes with no church of any kind.

Meeting previously in a basement office, last December the church planters purchased a stand-alone building from a local bank, grateful to have their own location amid a shortage of rental space. With a ground-floor capacity of 200 people, the congregations 60 members anticipated additional growth.

Three months later, the Russians invaded.

Hostomel was the first suburb to fall, being home to the regional airport. The assault on Irpin and neighboring Bucha began February 27, attempting to encircle Kyiv.

IBC senior pastor Mykola Romanuk was in the US at the time, while his family relocated to western Ukraine. He returned on March 5, only to leave later that day when tanks first breached the suburb. The next day, a member of his congregation who had returned to Irpin to assist with evacuations was killed alongside a mother and her two young childrena tragedy witnessed and shared worldwide by The New York Timesas Russian forces shelled the humanitarian corridor.

By March 14, Russia occupied half the suburb, including the church plants quarter. IBCs sanctuary remained secure, but 200 of its members fled to 20 nations across Europe, while another 500 scattered across western Ukraine. Romanuk was in Rivne, 200 miles west of Kyiv, with about 70 of his congregants. Services resumed online while the stalwart faithful tried to serve 4,000 mostly elderly residents left behind in Irpin.

Dozens were killed in Russian atrocities.

On March 16, Ukraine announced a counterattack. The army recaptured the suburb on March 28. But fighting continued in Bucha for another two days, during which time Russia increased its seemingly random barrage of missiles into Irpin. One hit the church plant, destroying its roof and the second floor Sunday school classrooms.

There were no military personnel in the area.

Any building can be rebuilt, said Romanuk. Compared to the destruction of the city and the many who died, it is no big deal.

Image: Joel Carillet

While some Ukrainian Protestants see church buildings as holy, he added, the majority Orthodox Christians view sanctuaries as a sacred space to connect with God, imbued with divine aura. No food is allowed inside; certainly not a bathroom toilet.

This has impacted relief efforts. Of the eight Orthodox churches in Irpin, only two had service annexes. Though only one was damagedand its priest killed in an airstrikeit was only the annexes that opened to shelter their neighborhood members, he said. One Orthodox priest tried to help more broadly.

In our theology, the church is a place for service and worship, said Romanuk. Now it has become a home for the homeless, catering to the needs of all.

Leading IBC since 2009, he returned with his wife and daughter on April 3, living in the church basement with 40 of Irpins displaced residents. His apartment is undamaged, though a shell hit the neighboring complex. But though electricity returned to half the suburb on April 20, the Romanuks reside in their place of ministry.

The community is welcomed during morning and afternoon shifts to charge their cell phones. Up to 200 people are served a daily lunch. At 6 p.m. there is a Christian film or spiritual lecture. Home furnishings are given to those who need it, while 30 elderly and disabled people are delivered food and medicine.

And in the past three weeks, church members have begun light repair and plastic covering of broken windows and roofs, before coming rains cause further damage.

Other evangelical ministries in Irpin have made similar pivots to better serve their battered community.

Image: Joel Carillet

We understand that a seminary is not a buildingit is our students and staff, said Igor Yaremchuk. But now the war has taken them out of the classroom, with countless opportunities to practice their ministry skills.

President of Irpin Biblical Seminary (IBS) since 2008, he keeps daily contact with the schools 837 students via an evening prayer group via social media. Every week he prepares a 10-minute devotionalA Cup of Coffee with the Rectorin which he encourages faithfulness amid difficulty and provides updates about the school.

The worst came on March 20.

Also located in Ukrainian-controlled Irpin, IBS remained connected to the utility grid. The campus welcomed 1,000 people a day to draw water and charge cell phones, while giving shelter to 200 people who lost their homes.

The Ukrainian counterattack was already underway, and Yaremchuk believes Russia shelled each of the five connected seminary buildings because of this community contribution. Their iconic green roofs were destroyed, along with the kitchen and all second-floor classrooms.

With Gods help, we will restore it, he said. But it was sad and painful.

Image: Joel Carillet

The campus is being cleared of debris, but repairs will wait until the situation stabilizes. Russia could return to attack Kyiv. But if the status quo holds, IBS plans to resume theological education in Septemberin person if possible, online if necessary. Currently it offers one course only, taught by linked professors in the United States.

The topic could not be timelier: Counseling in Critical Situations.

While he cannot be sure how much each of the 700 registered students can commit to the coursework, Yaremchuk hears many stories about their active ministry. The influence of the Baptist Union institution is felt in relief work and psychological care throughout the nation and in Eastern Europe, he said. And the gospel is sharedespecially in bomb shelters.

He compared Ukraine to the church in Acts 8:14. When persecuted and scattered, members evangelized.

The war is terrible, but it has been good for Ukrainian souls, said Yaremchuk. And in a Europe that is spiritually dead, our Bible Belt refugees are bringing a religious revival.

Image: Joel Carillet

Mission Eurasia is a good example.

Having relocated to Irpin from Moscow to escape renewed pressure on evangelical ministries, Sergey Rakhuba never expected Russian President Vladimir Putin would follow him to Ukraine.

The Mission Eurasia president purchased its suburban headquarters from a local bakeryswitching the facilitys focus to offering the bread of life. But when the area fell to occupying forces, the Russian military commandeered the ministry as a barracks, making use of its two apartments and 38-person second-floor dormitory.

Ammunition was stored in the basement. Bibles were stacked to barricade windows. And when the unit finally retreated on March 28, it burned the religious literature and blew up its weapons.

The building went with it.

We shed tears. There are so many memories, said Rakhuba. It was our mission hub not just for Ukraine, but for all of Eurasia.

Image: Joel Carillet

But now, there are two hubs in Poland providing relief for refugees, with the international work in 14 former Soviet nations coordinated from Moldova. And four western Ukrainian hubs serve the internally displaced, with Lutsk printing and distributing ten times the Bibles that were destroyed in Irpin.

Young leaders trained in our center are now leading service on the front lines, said Rakhuba. Gods victory will be bigger than the destruction.

Image: Joel Carillet

Romanuk sees a spiritual silver lining also.

New Blocs Baptist Church resumed weekly worship on May 8. The day also marked the first service in Hostomel, where 35 people joined a new IBC plant launched to accompany the churchs relief work there.

And it was the fourth meeting at IBCs undamaged main campus, with 50 members who had returned to the now-liberated suburb. They were joined by another 50 believers whose churches have not yet restarted, along with 100 others from the community at large.

Having accepted their trial, Irpin evangelical leaders maintain hope.

When you see your city destroyedall month longyou understand it could hit you also, said Romanuk. But despite our sadness, God has given us more ministry than before.
4 things to know about new White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre

Karine Jean-Pierre will serve as the new White House Press Secretary, replacing the departing Jen Psaki. She will become the second White House Press Secretary to serve under President Joe Biden and the seventh woman to serve as press secretary overall.

Jean-Pierre, who has served as the White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary since Biden took office in January 2021 and has delivered White House press briefings in Psakis absence, will assume the role Friday.

In a statement last week, Biden unveiled Jean-Pierre as Psaki's replacement, saying she possesses the experience, talent and integrity needed for this difficult job.

"[S]he will continue to lead the way in communicating about the work of the Biden-Harris Administration on behalf of the American people," Biden said.

Biden outlined Jean-Pierres resume, which includes work for the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org, the ACLUs Reproductive Freedom Initiative and the Center for Community and Corporate Ethics.

She has also worked on both former President Barack Obamas successful presidential campaign, Bidens 2020 presidential campaign and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Martin OMalleys unsuccessful campaign.

A Haitian-American born in Martinique, an overseas region of France, Jean-Pierre was raised in New York City and attended Columbia University. Over the years, Jean-Pierre has developed a reputation as a loyal operative for the Democratic Party and a staunch critic of the Republican Party.

The following pages highlight four things to know about the new White House spokeswoman.

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Christian ministry provides platform for Iranian women to speak out against honor killings, abuses

Amid a string of honor killings targeting Iranian women, a Maryland-based Christian media network that broadcasts biblically-based programming in Iran is using its platform to draw attention to the treatment of women under the country's legal system.

The multimedia organization SAT-7, which has an international headquarters in Cyrpus and broadcasts Christian programs into countries where people can't easily access the Gospel, is utilizing its programming to discuss honor killings and other topics often considered "taboo" in Iran. SAT-7 is providing Iranian viewers with a 24/7 "public platform to speak out."

The media network broadcasts faith-based and educational programming in Farsi through online channels for people in Iran, allowing Iranian women an opportunity to watch an uncensored program that highlights social issues in their country, such as honor killings.

"Under Iran's law, the life of a female human being is worth half that of a male," one viewer was quoted as saying in a Tuesday statement shared by the organization. "While these injustices and inhumane laws exist, no one will have equal human rights, whether boy or girl, man or woman."

According to a travel advisory from the United Kingdom, Islamic law in Iran is "strictly enforced," requiring women to cover their heads and most of their bodies when in public places. Muslim women may be whipped if they enter into a relationship with a non-Muslim.

In a statement, local SAT-7 presenter Sally Momtazi said that Article 1108 of Iran's civil code states that women can be deprived of financial support for refusing sex to their husbands.

According to Cornell Law School, the law requires women to "satisfy the sexual needs of their husbands at all times."

"Our aim is to show women that their value comes from being created in the image of God, that he loves them, that salvation through Christ is available to them, and that God has not forgotten the suffering people of Iran," SAT-7 USA President Rex Rogers said in a statement.

The broadcasting ministry cited the case of Mona Heydari, a 17-year-old child bride beheaded in February by her husband and his brother in western Iran's Khuzestan province.

As the Women's Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) reported, Heydari was forced to marry her cousin at 13 and had a 3-year-old son at the time of her death.

She fled to Turkey after being denied a divorce, despite telling her family she was abused. Heydari was murdered a few days after returning home, and a viral video showed her husband carrying her severed head through the Khashayar neighborhood of Ahvaz.

The commander of the State Security Force in Ahvaz reportedly declared that the motive for the murder was "family differences."

SAT-7 claimed this case is only the "latest in a string of honor killings in Iran."

According to an October 2020 study from The Lancet psychiatry journal, about 8,000 honor killings occurred in Iran between 2010 and 2014. The journal explained that honor killings are intended to punish women who disgrace their families by refusing to enter a forced marriage, if they are raped, have a sexual relationship, commit adultery or get divorced.

Through May and early June of 2020, three honor killings took place in Iran less than a month apart from one another. Rayhaneh Ameri's father killed her in June of that year for returning home late, later confessing to the murder after being caught.

In May 2020, 14-year-old Romina Ashrafi's father beheaded her for running away with a man who had groomed her. That same month, an 18-year-old girl reportedly died after her brother set the house on fire as punishment for her having married an older man.
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.
Megachurch pastor says honor is 'absent' in today's culture of 'toxicity': 'We have a different calling'

Pastor Julie Mullins of Floridas multi-site Christ Fellowship Church told her congregation on Sunday that showing honor to God is mainly absent in todays culture and that Christians are often becoming part of the world's "toxicity."

Mullins, who, along with her husband, Todd, leads a congregation averaging over 30,000 members across a dozen campuses in South Florida, warned in her sermon that dishonoring or devaluing God and other people could cause unanswered prayers and doors of blessings to be slammed shut.

Mullins said that what she has seen in over 35 years of ministry and even in Mark 6, where people scoffed at Jesus being just a "carpenter's son," is that "an atmosphere of dishonor" will "prevent" God's "blessing, His favor and supernatural work in our relationships and in our lives."

"Because it speaks to how this atmosphere of [dishonor] can actually shut the door on everything that Jesus wants to release into our homes and into our church," she said. "Let's look at the definition of dishonor. It comes from the Greek word Atimos ... 'to treat as common and ordinary.' It doesn't say mean or harsh or rude. This passage, they were just treating Jesus as common. He is the kid down the street. But Jesus is not common. And the reality that we can have a personal relationship with the Creator of the universe, there is nothing ordinary about this."

Mullins said that people often pray for God to open a door. However, there "are some doors that only honor can open."

"We live in a culture [where]  I know that what I'm saying is completely countercultural  all you have to do is turn on the TV, get on social media, and disrespect and dishonor are at an all-time high, Mullins told the church.

I mean, people are canceling people out just because they don't agree with them. They're ranting words of discouragement and disparagement over people's lives, and it is blocking the work that God wants to do. And as God's people, we are called to something different.  We have a different calling. We have just become so desensitized to its toxicity, that we become, many times, a part of it.

Mullins said that although it seems like honor is almost completely absent in our culture, it's everywhere in Scripture.

She said the topic of honor is found roughly 147 times throughout Scripture. And most often, she noted, mentions of honor in the Bible are about how to treat other people.

God's word is clear about who we as believers are expected to honor.  It says, first of all, that all honor begins first and foremost with our honor to God, Mullins emphasized, citing 1 Timothy 1:17.

We are called to honor God for who He is, not just for what He does.  He is our Creator. He is our Redeemer. He is our Savior. We honor Him because He sent His Son to this earth to suffer and die so that we can be restored into right relationship with Him. We honor Him, and we honor the authority that God's Word has over our lives.

The pastor said one reason todays culture is suffering from this epidemic of dishonor is because they have forgotten to honor God, honor His ways, honor His work.

In 1 Samuel 2:30, Mullins noted that the Bible says that those who honor me, I will honor. Mullins said Christians aren't supposed to honor God only for the reward but because it's a spiritual principle.

She said that God tends to bless those who honor Him because honoring God opens the door for a spiritual inheritance that is going to live way beyond us.

It's just a spiritual principle. When we honor Him, He will honor us. We see it all throughout the Bible. When Abraham honored God and left all he knew to step in and follow God, God honored him by giving him the children of Israel and made him the father of many nations, Mullins preached.

We see this in Noah when he decided to obey God even though it didn't make any sense. His obedience saved his entire family and future generations. We see it in Mary when she honored God by saying: not my will, but yours. We see that He honored her by delivering salvation into the world through her.  All throughout Scripture, we see that when we honor God, He rewards us.

Mullins said Christians can show honor to God by honoring other people.

When we honor people, we place high value, we highly esteem, we treat them as precious and weighty. And this starts with the people that are closest to us, Mullins said, referring to how spouses are to honor one another in marriage and how children are to be obedient to parents.

Honor should also extend to the outside world, Mullins said.

It says in Scripture that we're to take honor, to deliver honor as Christ followers, to deliver honor into our world, into our sphere of influence, Mullins said, pointing the audience to Romans 13.

She said the passage could be summarized to mean that followers of God are called to honor our city, our state, and our national authorities and local leaders.

At Christ Fellowship, we want to be known as the house of honor that honors our authorities. We may not always agree.  As a matter of fact, we're not going to agree with all the policies and the decisions. But we can disagree without being dishonoring, Mullins advised.

And when it's hard for us to speak words of honor, we're going to take on a posture of prayer because  we're going to pray for our leaders. Because we know that when we pray, it actually opens the door for the supernatural to enter into rooms that we can't walk into. And why would we want to slam the door on that? I believe that when we open the door [and], we pray for our leaders that God can do more incentives in a minute than man can do in centuries.

Mullins mentioned earlier in the sermon that sometimes Christians think their prayers arent being answered because they have sinned or are not showing enough faith.

But Mullins believes some Christians cannot see Gods supernatural power at work in their lives because of dishonor.

It's just because of dishonor. And you're not being rude or ugly. That's not what the definition [of dishonor] is. It's just treating God's work and God's people as ordinary and common. See, I just wonder if this atmosphere of dishonor disrupts the supernatural, I wonder if the opposite is true. If an atmosphere of dishonor disrupts the supernatural, what could an atmosphere of honor release in the supernatural? Mullins asked.
The little known case that led to gay marriage and abortion

While last week's leaking of a draft U.S. Supreme Court opinion on abortion triggered protests over fears the high court could soon overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the draft authored by Justice Samuel Alito also referenced a sometimes "overlooked," yet very influential case.

Known as Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case centered on a legal challenge to an 1879 law in Connecticut that banned the use of contraceptives, even for married couples. The law was challenged by Estelle Griswold, the head of the Connecticut chapter of Planned Parenthood, and C. Lee Buxton, a gynecologist who had opened a birth control clinic in New Haven.

In a 7-2 ruling authored by Justice William O. Douglas, the high court struck down the law, concluding that a right to privacy existed in the Constitution, albeit not explicitly.

The present case, then, concerns a relationship lying within the zone of privacy created by several fundamental constitutional guarantees, read the majority.

And it concerns a law which, in forbidding the use of contraceptives rather than regulating their manufacture or sale, seeks to achieve its goals by means having a maximum destructive impact upon that relationship.

The case has been cited in several other high-profile Supreme Court rulings throughout the years.

Rob Boston of the progressive group Americans United for Separation of Church & State, wrote in 2019 that Griswold was an important, if sometimes overlooked, ruling that definitely touches on issues of church-state separation.

The right to privacy outlined in the decision gave Americans a powerful shield to fend off intrusive actions by conservative religious groups determined to meddle in our most intimate affairs, wrote Boston.

The following page highlights five notable Supreme Court cases that cited Griswold v. Connecticut in their majority opinions. These include decisions regarding abortion, homosexuality and same-sex marriage.

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UMC high court rules annual conferences cannot leave denomination amid LGBT debate

The United Methodist Churchs highest court has ruled that annual conferences, the regional bodies of the denomination that are headed by bishops, cannot unilaterally disaffiliate from the Church.

The United Methodist Judicial Council issued a decision on Tuesday, concluding that annual conferences cannot legally leave the UMC unless General Conference approves a process for them to do so.

The ruling comes as the Global Methodist Church, which is meant to be a conservative alternative to the UMC, was officially launched at the beginning of May, with many congregations and a couple of annual conferences seeking to affiliate with the new denomination.

The UMC has faced an ongoing debate over whether the denomination should change its official stance labeling homosexuality incompatible with Christian teaching. This stance includes banning the ordination of noncelibate homosexuals and barring clergy from blessing same-sex marriages.

Known as Decision 1444, the ruling concluded that there was no basis in Church law for any annual conference to adopt stopgap policies, pass resolutions, take a vote, or act unilaterally for the purpose of removing itself from The United Methodist Church.

Absent General Conference legislation, any vote and actions taken by an annual conference to separate are unconstitutional, null and void, and of no legal force or effect, continued the decision.

Decision 1444 noted that although a section of the UMC Book of Discipline, known as paragraph 572, allows conferences outside of the U.S. to become autonomous, this measure only applies to conferences abroad.

There is no parallel provision or process for U.S. annual conferences, explained the Judicial Council. Whether or not this was intended, the judiciary must take care to not encroach on the constitutional prerogatives of the legislature.

Therefore, we hold that the process and requirements of paragraph 572 cannot be viewed as minimum standards for any annual conference to separate from The United Methodist Church.

At present, the UMC has 53 annual conferences in the US, plus 80 annual conferences based overseas in Africa, the Philippines, and Europe, according to UM News.

Two annual conferences, Northwest Texas and South Georgia, recently sought to leave the UMC, with the former taking an aspirational vote last year to join the GMC once it was formed.

The Wesleyan Covenant Association, a conservative UMC group, recently announced that 107 congregations in Florida had begun processes aimed at leaving the UMC for the GMC.

107 Florida Methodist churches have chosen to initiate the process to depart the Florida Conference of The United Methodist Church  107 represents approximately 20% of the 560 United Methodist Churches in the Florida Conference, claimed the Florida chapter of the WCA.

This broad group of churches include both large and small congregations along with Anglo, African American, Latino, Korean, and other ethnic communities of faith. These churches will align with the new Global Methodist Church (GMC) which launched on May 1, 2022.
Christian leaders and controversies: The case of Francis Collins

There is always a dilemma for Christians in best handling and reacting to the positions and counsel of Christian leaders. Often these are people we have grown to trust and respect as followers of Christ.

Their convictions at times are consistent with Christian principles and biblical wisdom. They champion appropriate positions and defend causes from a historically Christian perspective. They gain traction and respect even among cultural, political, and religious opponents because of the internally consistent strength of their arguments and their winsome and gracious demeanor.

And yet, it is impossible for any fallen and sinful person to be right all the time. Similarly, it is quite possible  and regularly demonstrated  that the unregenerate are not always wrong.

As a case in point, contrast Dr. Francis Collins and President Donald Trump.

Trump, not convincingly a born-again Christian, became president in large measure because he promised to represent conservative Christians and their concerns. His appointing of originalist judges to federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as his attendance at events like the annual March for Life while he was in office (this was unprecedented for a president), were encouragements to many Christians. Yet his demeanor was consistently characterized as non-Christian. Such may well have cost him re-election. Christians and conservative political analysts will debate for decades whether he was a net positive or negative influence on America. Clearly, both cases can be made. Different Christian voices have weighed in on the matter. Many Christians, even conservatives, felt that Trump used them for his personal gain and prestige.

In certain notable ways, a case could be made that the Francis Collins situation at times echoes the debate over Donald Trump among Christians.

Dr. Francis Collins, the famous geneticist, was and is vocally Christian. He has clearly identified as such, and he has taken heat for it. For example, in the summer of 2009, after his nomination as director of NIH by President Barack Obama, outspoken atheist Sam Harris attacked Collins in the New York Times as unfit for the job because of his religious convictions.

Collins became known to many Americans during his direction of the Human Genome Project through the 1990s. In February 1998, Scientific American profiled Dr. Collins with the headline Where Science and Religion meet: The U.S. head of the Human Genome Project, Francis S. Collins, stives to keep his Christianity from interfering with his science and politics. That article quoted Dr. Collins saying he is intensely uncomfortable with abortion. He said that he does not advocate changing the law and is very careful to ensure his personal feelings on abortion do not affect his political stance.

The article went on to say: researchers and academics familiar with Collins work agree that he has separated his private religious views from his professional life. He shows no influence of religious beliefs on his work other than a generalized sensitivity to ethics issues in genetics.

In essence, what these people were saying is that Francis Collins is such a good scientist because you can hardly tell he is a Christian from his work.

As a much younger biology professor at the time, I was aghast at this. A Christian has separated his religious views from his professional life. Why is that a good thing?

I emailed Dr. Collins at the time, asking him if Scientific American had it right. Maybe the article misunderstood Collins? My email was never answered. Not that I expected that it would be, given my obscurity and his standing and responsibilities. Still, the article troubled me, as I was always left with the lingering question.

Dr. Collins went on to launch the BioLogos Foundation, a Christian/science interface organization that advocates for the reconciliation of modern science and Christianity. The idea is that nature and Scripture are both from God and ultimately are not in conflict. This reflects Dr. Collins Christian convictions and his love of science, the study of Gods physical world. Give Dr. Collins credit for leveraging his popularity, leadership qualities, and obvious pastoral instincts for the noble cause.

Ultimately, I met Dr. Collins several years ago at a conference and heard him speak. There is no reason he would remember our quick contact in an elevator any more than he would remember my email. However, one cannot help but be impressed by his genuine humility and his concern for the spiritual health of the people around him. He has made it clear that he believes that Jesus Christ is incarnate and divine and that humans are made in the image of God (although he rejects the historic Adam), and that salvation is real.

Yet, inconsistencies remain. Dr. Collins seems to allow his science to inordinately arbitrate over biblical truth, or at least when the two are portrayed as in conflict. As his professional life has unfolded, it has become clear that the Scientific American article had gotten a lot right. It is fair to say that he has remained uncertain about when human life begins. He concedes that the fertilized egg is alive at conception, but believes that maybe it is not quite human. Consequently, in his 2010 book, The Language of Life, he advocated for experimentation using excess human embryos from in vitro fertilization (IVF) that are stuck in cryo-storage with uncertain futures, so that some good could come from them. He has never publicly disavowed human embryonic research because he sees its potential fruitfulness. In fact, as late as last summer, experiments involving human embryonic cells and mice was supported by NIH funding at the University of Pittsburgh.

There are ongoing ramifications of Dr. Collins acceptance of abortion as the law of the land. The Scientific American article in 1998 mentioned that Dr. Collins was concerned that embryonic genetic testing might lead to abortions of fetuses that have conditions that are less than disastrous. The article did not suggest what he would consider less than disastrous. For instance, would my great-nephews Downs syndrome condition be considered less than a disaster?



Princeton bioethicist and legal scholar, Dr. Robert George, made a clearer case in his 1998 address to the American Political Science Association Convention, stating, once I was a child, once I was an infant, once I was an embryo, I cannot say I was once an egg or a sperm. However, it is clear that the viable sperm and egg are quite alive. Also, it is good to remember what we say in the Apostles Creed. He was conceived  born  suffered  died  and  rose again.

What human is not on that trajectory of life and death? The Bible teaches that we all are.

This leaves many conservative Christians convinced that Dr. Collins would rather come down on the side of a quote from his old boss, President Barack Obama. In March 2009, Obama signed an executive order that lifted President George W. Bushs 2001 ban on federal funding of human embryonic research. Today  we will lift the ban on federal funding for promising embryonic stem cell research, stated Obama. We will vigorously support scientists who pursue this research. And we will aim for America to lead the world in the discoveries it one day may yield. Obama continued, Promoting science isnt just about providing resources  it is also about protecting free and open inquiry. It is about letting scientists like those here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and  that we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.

Obama insisted that Im going to let scientists do science. Im going to remove politics, religion, and ideology from that.

Of course, the reality is that such a thing cannot be done. The presidents own politics and ideology were clearly stated and inserted.

One would hope that Dr. Collins would be more comfortable with the principles articulated in President George W. Bushs 2006 State of the Union Address. A hopeful society has institutions of science and medicine that do not cut ethical corners, and that recognize the matchless value of every life, stated Bush. Tonight, I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research  human cloning in all its forms  creating or implanting embryos for experiments  creating human-animal hybrids  and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos. Human life is a gift from our Creatorand that gift should never be discarded, devalued, or put up for sale.

These are all ethical issues that have confronted Dr. Francis Collins as a man of science and of faith. The issues more recently included COVID mask and vaccine mandates. To many in the evangelical community, the pro-life appeals he made for the mandates have rung increasingly hollow, and his seeming inconsistencies have been bothersome.

Os Guinness, in his book, The Magna Carta of Humanity, brings out a principle that every intentional Christian should keep in mind: The notion of arguing on behalf of the true, the right, and the good lies behind the biblical principle of corrigibility. Guinness quotes Jewish Hebrew scholar Jonathan Sacks, We are all open to challenge. No one is above criticism, no one is too junior to administer it, if done with due grace and humility.

This requires knowing scripture and applying its logical conclusions, consistently. Otherwise, our ability to be salt and light is diminished, and we can be played. Francis Collins needs to add salt and light. Many of us have admired him, and we expect more from him in his Christian witness to science.
Pastor Scott Sauls shares keys to combatting anxiety, depression: Resurrection 'changes everything'

In a society rife with anxiety, depression, regret and disappointment, Pastor Scott Sauls is on a mission to encourage believers that God can redeem even the deepest pains  but it requires engaging in community both with Him and others.

We're coming out of a season where I think all of those burdens  regret, hurt, fear  have been amplified by all the things that the pandemic has brought into most people's realities, Sauls, the pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tennessee, told The Christian Post.

Community is upended, which ... does give evidence to people feeling disappointed and hurt by relationships that maybe don't feel as significant or committed or deep as we once thought or felt they were, he continued. And so I think that's been an alarming reality for a lot of people.  Everybody feels unmoored and kind of insecure, in general, because of what's been taken away from us, collectively and personally, by pandemic realities and everything that goes with it. I think it's just made people feel a lot less stable and a lot less certain.

It was out of concern for the health of the Body of Christ that Sauls penned his forthcoming book, Beautiful People Dont Just Happen: How God Redeems Regret, Hurt and Fear in the Making of Better Humans. The book is due out next month.

Sauls stressed that the answer to the hurt people feel today is the Gospel and being united with Christ.

I wrote the book because of a general sense that people are in a disoriented, hard place, he said. That doesn't seem to be resolving, and I think the Gospel is the answer now as it's always been to those things.

In his book, Sauls delves into how the Gospel helps believers give an honest voice to their emotions, combat debilitating thoughts, discover Gods heart for the brokenhearted, and genuinely live a life of contentment in any circumstance.

And he speaks from personal experience and is candid about his own struggles with negative self-talk, regret and how the divine counter-voice of God helps him respond to such thoughts.

I still kind of kick myself for things I did decades ago, not just days ago, but decades, he shared. That kind of self-talk  that's the accuser entering into the picture and bringing up those memories and wanting to define us by our guilt and by our shame."

"Jesus died for those sorts of things and gave His life for those sorts of things so that we can know that its all cleared and we can be renewed with His forgiveness and grace," he added.

A key way to combat regret and pain and give an answer to negative thoughts, the pastor said, is becoming rooted in Scripture and "abiding" in Christ. He said pursuing Christ in the ordinary, mundane seasons of life daily prepares believers for the cataclysmic moments where we feel our need for God the most.

It's like eating; reading the Bible and going to church, for instance  sometimes not incredibly exciting, you just do it because you believe what God says, that He's going to use it," he said. "It's not going to return to Him not accomplishing something, it's not going to come back to Him void."

Scripture provides numerous examples of giving a voice to anger, sadness and regret in a healthy way, Sauls stressed.

He said even negative emotions are given by God  but navigating them well takes wisdom.

In a lot of the Western world, especially, we want to run away from sadness as fast as we can, he contended.

We want to medicate it. We want to numb it. We want to addict ourselves to things that will enable us to run away from this precious emotion that God has put in us as sort of a release valve to enable us to express our distress over how the world is."

He said how the world is "because of the fall" is not the world that it will be in "the new Heaven and the new earth.

So, we're stuck in this in-between time, and we need healthy ways to express the sorrow, Sauls said.

One healthy expression of sorrow is lament, an action Sauls described as the "produce of distressed emotion." He said lament is modeled by biblical heroes from the Prophet Jeremiah to King David in the book of Psalms.

"There's a huge difference between cynicism on the one hand and just flat out negativity and just kind of that sourpuss sort of approach to the world and  legitimate, humble expression of hurt, he said.

I'm trying to encourage more honest expression of things like sorrow, which are also an invitation to relationship.

He encouraged Christians to share their sorrows and hurts with others in their communities and cultivate transparency in relationships, emphasizing that we are not meant to suffer alone.

I'm trying to provide space and maybe even permission for people who are reluctant because [they] don't want to be a burden to anybody, meanwhile, you're really dying inside, and that's not a good thing either, he said.

Another thing that Ive found in my years as a pastor is that if you're going to confide your sorrows to me and my wife, it's actually going to make us freer to live honestly with you. And so there's a mutual healing effect as long as none of us falls into cynicism and negativity and spiteful, victim-entitlement attitudes, but instead, we just legitimately enter into the sorrow of what it means to live in a fallen world.

Though there are complex reasons people are hesitant to enter into the pain of others, Sauls said that in his experience, everybodys wired to be a caregiver.

We were made to care, he said, citing the story in John 4 where Jesus asks the Samaritan woman for a drink.

It may be awkward to try to enter into that as a way of life of giving and receiving care, but that's what real community is, so it's worth a try, he said.

Until Christs return, this fallen world will be riddled with regret, pain and hurt  but Christians dont have to live burdened by this reality. Instead, Sauls said, they can find contentment and peace despite their circumstances through the hope of the Gospel and community with others.

He quoted The Lord of the Rings to remind believers that, ultimately, everything sad is going to come untrue due to Christs resurrection.

The Gospel is something that is rooted in time, space, history and verified by over 500 eyewitnesses who claimed to have encountered Jesus Christ after He rose from the dead, the pastor said. And that changes everything.

The future is always brighter than the past or the present in Christ, he added. Our long-term worst-case scenario is the resurrection and everlasting life. And so no matter how bad it gets here, if somebody is in Christ, the best is always yet to come.
A Christian economist on the threat of 'Christian' Socialism

I was recently joined by Dr. Peter Jacobsen on the Business in the Kingdom podcast on the Edifi network. Dr. Jacobsen teaches economics at the Gwartney Institute (Gwartney Institute | Angell Snyder School of Business | Ottawa University) at Ottawa University in Kansas, where he also heads up the MBA program and is one of the hosts of the Faith and Economics podcast. To listen my interview with Dr. Jacobsen, click below.

Below is a lightly edited transcript of that interview:

Jerry: Let's talk about Christian economics. As a Christian economist, when you meet people who panic about economic inequality or the rise of Socialism, what do you say to them?

Peter: You know, I've had generally positive responses from the people in my church. Actually, I think there's a decent amount of respect for each other's opinions here, I don't know if that means they support them. I think some people tend to be surprised, especially if I'm speaking, for example, to someone older in the church, and they ask what to do with the rise of socialism. I have a different answer for socialism in the church and out of the church because I think these are different questions. I think socialism as it stands today...once upon a time the goal of socialism was to create material well-being, and so before the Soviet Union rose the idea was that we're going to have equality, and in doing that bring about everybody having wealth. This was the stated claim. After the Soviet Union falls, the argument pivots. There's a kind of existential fear on the part of socialist intellectuals that maybe we can't actually generate the same wealth that capitalism can generate. And so instead the oppressed-labor-class becomes the oppressed-whatever-class, and the final goal actually becomes a movement towards equity.

I think socialism can be better understood asnot everyone, but by and largeas a movement based on some sort of religious desire. I was on a panel with a few different people talking about this at the Association for Private Enterprise Education conference last year. I think we need to treat Christian socialism as an alternative religion from Christianity, a non-Christian Christian religion. That doesn't mean that someone couldn't have some mistaken economic ideas and also be a Christian, but I do think that embedded in socialism is this alternative system of values, this alternative end time theory, all of this stuff.

Jerry: An alternative doctrine of the fall, the invention of private property.

Peter: Yes, that's exactly right.

Jerry: Did you intentionally call it a 'non-Christian Christian theory'?

Peter: Yes. I guess a better way to say it would be if someone described themselves as a Christian socialist, to me that sounds very similar to describing themselves as a Christian Caesar worshiper, right? It's almost a contradiction in terms.

Jerry: When you said non-Christian Christian theory, something occurred to me: it does tap into something Christian. It weaponizes the Christian concern for the victim.

Peter: Yeah, I think that's right. Socialism could thrive without Christianity when it was being a system of engineering, which is what it was in the Soviet Union. That's why the Soviet Union was able to persist as basically an attempted atheist society, though really more worshipping a specific version of like sciencism: scientific engineering of society. But when that fell apart, there was the pivot towards oppression of groups and victimhood. And I agree that that was specifically very easy to pair with, and have a parasitical relationship with, Christianity in the west.
Former 'pro-choice' director makes pro-life film The Matter of Life: The truth struck me

A formerly "pro-choice Christian" turned pro-life advocate wants others to open their eyes to the truth.

Tracy Robinson, the director and producer of the upcoming documentary The Matter of Life," never in her wildest dreams thought she would be tackling the abortion topic.

Her journey to creating the film to be shown later this month in theaters nationwide began in 2016 after working as a contractor in a pregnancy resource center in California. There, she recalled being touched" by what the organization was doing to help women.

When it came to the abortion issue  even as an evangelical Christian  I was still very on-the-fence and apathetic at best," Robinson shared in an interview with The Christian Post.

"I felt that I was personally pro-life, but it seemed wrong to try to enforce my preference onto others."

On the documentary's website, Robinson says that she "was a pro-choice Christian" even though she never gave herself that label at the time.

Her opinion changed drastically after being invited to an apologetics conference in 2016 by a staff member of the pregnancy center. She listened to speaker Alan Shlemon of Stand to Reason talk on the topic "The Case Against Abortion." She said his clear, concise argument for the full humanity of the unborn child from the moment of conception changed her heart.

The truth struck me, she described. That evening, I felt the vision to make this message into a feature-length documentary that was downloaded to me. I knew there were so many young adults in my shoes who deserved to be informed but never were  perhaps they attended public school and neither their family nor their church ever broached the topic.

Robinson was curious to find out how it got to the point where abortion was something accepted and even legislated by society.

I didnt know about Roe v. Wade or the truth behind Planned Parenthood. In reading books and watching Youtube, I discovered a multi-faceted pro-life movement and many powerful and redeeming stories therein," she said. "And I wanted to tell that story, too."

So she did. Robinson used her own money and the help of some donors to make the film that will hit theaters nationwide on May 16 and May 17 via Fathom Events.

The Matter of Life shares both the pro-choice and pro-life arguments, humanizing the opposing sides. Something Robinson said was important to do was to humanize the person youre talking to  in other words, validate their concerns and good intentions.

I didnt want The Matter of Life to convey the pro-life message while condemning people or leaving bodies behind, so to speak, she said.

I wanted The Matter of Life to unravel the abortion issue rather than preach to the choir or speak to an audience thats already convinced. And I didnt want to be abrasive in the messaging ... in a way that would leave bodies behind in the process of disseminating truth."

"I wanted the film to address valid concerns that people have regarding the issue while being sympathetic to those concerns," she continued.

The film shares the staggering LifeWay Research statistic that nearly four out of 10 women whove had an abortion attended church at least monthly at the time of their abortion. The research firm also found that seven out of 10 women who have had an abortion identify as Christian.

Robinson said it is essential that churches embrace pregnant women who may be considering abortion.

From the beginning, I knew that my target audience would be Christians because, at the very least, those are the people that would be willing to watch the film, she said. In the film, Roland Warren, CEO of Care Net, makes the point that this is an issue for us as Christians,  We need to overturn Roe v. Wade in our own pews. It occurred to me that this film was being made in order to be a rallying cry for more Christians to confront the issue of abortion.

The Church has a great opportunity to love their congregation 40% more when it comes to the abortion crisis  by serving people in need whether they are facing a pregnancy or a troubling memory of abortion in their past, Robinson continued. Im happy to say that many people who have watched the film at a pre-screening have been inspired and compelled to action.

The Matter of Life features ministries that help support pregnant women, such as Embrace Grace, which equips churches to come alongside pregnant single women with community and support.

Save the Storks is also highlighted for their work in implementing mobile medical units known as Stork Buses that turn church parking lots into a place of respite, answers and resources for women in crisis pregnancies.

Heartbeat International, a vast network of Pregnancy Help organizations, is also shown in the film.

Robinson said that OptionLine.org runs a 24/7 pregnancy helpline that she believes every church should know about when a young woman "comes through the doors in need of pregnancy resources in her community.

The church has an opportunity to be the hands and feet of Jesus in approaching the abortion crisis in our communities, she said. When we actively try to rescue peoples children from abortion, we model His grace, in that Christ saved us when we could not save ourselves. And no matter what burden we carry of sin and shame, He is powerful to forgive and carry that weight on the cross forever.

Recalling her inspiration from the messaging at the pro-life conference she attended with her friend years earlier, Robinson said that she was struck by the fact that Shlemon didn't need the Bible or religious arguments to make the case against abortion.

He simply used the science of embryology as the basis of pro-life philosophy and logic, she said. Even more surprising was learning about several different secular pro-life groups, including Secular Pro-life, Feminists for Life, New Wave Feminists, Pro-life San Francisco and PAAU. They are some of the most bold, outspoken people Ive ever met."

Terrisa Bukovinac [of the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising] makes a statement in the film: Being pro-life is the most progressive value that we can have. It protects the most innocent, most vulnerable among us, Robinson echoed.

This is my interpretation: many people associate progressivism with being inclusive, especially to segments of the population that have been marginalized or victimized. These pro-life progressives or secularists are unique in that they understand that aborted preborns fit into the category of victim. They see the reality that abortion is the victimization of and violence against a people group based on their size, age and other immutable characteristics.

Nevertheless, Robinson believes the abortion movement is a spiritual battle.

Margaret Sanger and her philosophy was grounded in eugenics, the idea that people with less desired characteristics are not worthy of life, she maintained. Who I think right now is behind the pro-choice movement are people that love money. Abortion is a profitable business.

At the end of the day, I believe abortion is a spiritual battle first. Satan hates humankind and he seeks to steal, kill and destroy it. Abortion is a form of destruction, of course, but also devastation  it has a negative ripple effect on mental health and families, she continued. But I am not discouraged because the enemy does not win in the end. God is faithful. He will take what was meant for evil and use it for the saving of many lives.

The Matter of Life features powerful testimonies of former doctors who once performed abortions.

With the recent news of a leaked initial draft opinion suggesting the U.S. Supreme Court could overturn Roe V. Wade, Robinson said it is crucial now more than ever that Christians show their support for the pro-life cause.

The 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling granted women the constitutional right to have an abortion, a highly debated interpretation of privacy rights in the 14th Amendment.

I believe it was likely a wake-up call for everyone, Robinson said of the leaked documents, believing it was leaked for "activist purposes on the pro-abortion side."

"But again, what man meant for evil, God will use for good  for the saving of many lives. (Genesis 50:20). ... Maybe the draft leak was a wake-up call for churches to ready themselves for the growing needs in their community. I believe its also sparked peoples attention to this issue to the point that they are willing to learn more about it and be open to the truth."

Robinson urged pro-life supporters to get their tickets to "The Matter of Life" sooner rather than later to ensure theaters wont cancel showings.

Activation first starts with education," she said. "People who have been on the fence have been enlightened by this film."
3 takeaways from polls on abortion, protests and the 2022 election

Polls taken over the past week purport to show how the American people feel about topics related to abortion as the possibility of a reversal of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide looms large.

Many have taken to the streets to protest after Politico published a story last Monday containing the contents of a leaked initial draft opinion in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health.

The opinion, which is not final, received the support of five of the court's nine justices and declared that Roe was egregiously wrong from the start and must be overruled. All five of the justices who formed the majority in the draft opinion were appointed by Republican presidents, and the sixth Republican-appointed Justice, Chief Justice John Roberts, did not sign the opinion.

Multiple polls conducted in the past week have asked Americans for their thoughts on the Roe decision itself, abortion limits in general and protests outside the homes of U.S. Supreme Court justices, among other issues.

The following pages highlight the findings from three separate polls illustrating Americans attitudes about abortion policy.

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After girl, 3, dies in botched exorcism at Pentecostal church, ritual takes spotlight

Officials at a small Pentecostal church in San Jose, California, confirmed that a 3-year-old girl died within their walls last September after undergoing a botched exorcism, bringing a renewed spotlight on the practice of expelling demons from individuals believed to be possessed.

Rene Huezo, who leads Iglesia Apostoles y Profetas where 3-year-old Arely Naomi Proctor died, and is also her grandfather, insists that they were simply trying to follow the Bible when the girls mother brought her to the church seeking deliverance from demons.

If you read the Bible, youll see that Jesus casts away demons and made sick people healthy again, Huezo told The Mercury News in a recent interview. Its not when I want to do it, its when God, in his will, wants to heal the person. The preacher is like an instrument of God; what we do is what God says.

The Santa Clara County Medical Examiners office ruled that Arely Naomi Proctors death was a homicide caused by asphyxiation and arrested her mother, Claudia Hernandez, in January on felony child abuse charges.

According to a police report, at around 8:12 p.m. on September 24, 2021, the San Jose Police Department, Hernandez reported that her daughter passed away at the church located at 1094 S 2nd Street. When police responded to the scene they found, Hernandez, Pastor Huezo who is her father as the childs uncle.

After the child was pronounced dead at Valley Medical Center at 8:59 p.m., officers learned that the suspects believed the child was possessed by a demon and they were at the church praying for her.

Hernandez told police that her daughter was possessed by an evil spirit and that she attempted to stick her finger down the victims throat and squeezed the victims neck to induce vomiting, the report said.

The child fell asleep several times as Hernandez pushed down on the victims throat with her hand. Hernandez further stated that her daughter suffered bruises around her eyes, throat/neck, and chest during the ordeal. She also told police that they waited for one to two hours after her daughter passed before calling 911.

In a subsequent interview with police, Hernandez revealed that the night before she brought her daughter to the church, she started to believe her daughter was possessed because she would wake up and scream or cry periodically.

She said she and her brother prayed for her daughter in a bedroom until they decided to drive her to the church at 6:30 a.m. on Sept. 24.

Defendant still believed the victim to be possessed. Defendant stated she held the victim around her waist and neck to help her throw up, which she believed would help her get the spirit out. At times Defendant attempted to open the victims mouth with her hands. At some point, victims grandfather arrived at the church to assist them in prayer, the police report said. After that, defendant, victims uncle and victims grandfather were all holding victim attempting to cause her to vomit. One individual was holding victim by the neck, while one held her around her abdomen, and the last held her around her legs.

Hernandez and her family then spent several hours trying to induce vomiting until her daughter vomited a clear/purple liquid.

She told police that she suspects her daughter, who was given nothing to eat since about 9 p.m. a day earlier, died between 6 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. on Sept. 24.

Days before she was arrested in January, Hernandez told her followers on YouTube,I could sit here and be negative  be sad about the whole situation that she passed away.

But its like, there is no point because it is what it is. Its many reasons why God took her. What if something would have happened to her, what if she would have had a sickness? It is what it is. I gotta be positive about the situation. You know, like at least shes not suffering, she said. Thats what Im thankful for, that shes not gonna grow up in that world, like in that world we live in.

According to The Mercury News, Iglesia Apostoles y Profetas meets in the back of a house and serves about 25 members of the local Salvadoran and Mexican community.

Timothy Wadkins, a theology professor at Canisius University, criticized the use of exorcism on a 3-year-old as unusual and relegated the practice to the radical fringe of Pentecostals.

Its certainly true that the sort of radical fringe of Pentecostals believe in exorcisms and practice them and believe people can be possessed by the devil, Wadkins told The Mercury News. They believe that laying your hands on people and calling the devil out in the name of Jesus is a way to rid them of their possessions. You dont see that too often in Pentecostal circles today, but you do see them in the radical fringe.

David K. Bernard, author of Spiritual Gifts andgeneral superintendent of the United Pentecostal Church International, which boasts more than 5 million adherents globally and some 800,000 in the U.S., challenged Wadkins characterization of the status of the practice of exorcism in the Pentecostal Church.

All branches of historic Christianity have taught the existence of evil spiritual forces such as demons and have practiced exorcism, or prayer to expel them. The Roman Catholic Church, with which Canisius College is affiliated, still practices exorcism, Bernard said in a statement to The Christian Post.

Pentecostals today also practice exorcism. For example, if someone manifests severe spiritual and emotional disturbance in the context of worship, Pentecostals will pray in the name of Jesus Christ for the person to be delivered and healed. They also recognize that many problems can have physical and psychological components or causes, for which they recommend appropriate treatment, he added. Probably the professor was referring to aberrant, sensational practices or techniques by fringe groups, which most Pentecostals dont accept. Nevertheless, most Pentecostals today, not just a fringe group, believe in the importance of prayer for deliverance from forces of evil.

In the Handbook of Pentecostal Christianity, theologian Keith Warrington also explained that even though they have diverse views about the demonic and exorcism, Pentecostals, in general, accept that the devil and influential demons exist.

Citing multiple Scriptures from the New Testament, Pentecostals maintain that demons, who are ruled by Satan, are antagonistic to God and often harm those they inhabit, either with an illness or by impelling the victim to self-harm.

Demons are also described as dirty or unclean and evil.

Since the devil is characterized as being involved in temptation, Pentecostals assume that demons have a similar role, oppressing Christians and initiating negative behavior. Consequently, they subscribe to the view that such malevolent forces need to be excised wherever possible, Warrington notes.

Pentecostals believe that casting out demons, or exorcism, is part of the Gospel commission, the authority contained therein being available to all Christians (Matthew 10:8; Mark 16:15-20; Luke 9:1), he adds.

Pentecostals believe demons attack both Christians and non-Christians through oppression and possession. For Christians, the attack can run the gamut of temptation, through persistent oppression of the mind, to total control of a specific area of ones life.

While non-Christians can be dominated by demons, Pentecostals maintain that Christians can overcome demonic influence with supernatural power they get through prayer, self-discipline and maintaining a close relationship with God.

Most Pentecostals would accept that, on some occasions, sickness or suffering may be caused by the presence of demons that need to be exorcised (Matthew 9:32-34, 12:22-29; 17:14-21), Warrington writes. However, it is not to be assumed that, because an illness was associated with demonic activity in the Gospels (Matthew 12:22-29), such an illness always results from demonic activity (Mark: 31-37).

It was noted that while the approach to exorcisms can vary among different Pentecostal groups, to prepare for the ritual, those involved in the process usually pray, sometimes fast and lean on the gift of discernment to diagnose the situation and offer a prognosis.

Although a methodology is not prescribed, nor may one be identified in the Bible, the use of the name of Jesus (Mark 16:17; Acts 16:18) and the incorporation of a command that the demon leave its victim (Mark 1:25) are of importance, Warrington says.

The theologian also warned that believers need to be careful when dealing with exorcisms to avoid getting this ministry wrong.

Although Pentecostals do not distinguish between leaders or clergy and laity functioning in exorcism, they have generally expressed caution in areas relating to the demonic, a caution driven partly by awareness of the dangers associated with getting this ministry wrong, Warrington says. Few would claim to have a gift of exorcism, and the role of exorcist has not been adopted within Pentecostalism.

While exorcisms arent very popular in Western culture today, some Pentecostals believe that the role of the demonic in many Western contexts is more subtle and disguised than elsewhere Warrington explains.

Rather than assume that the limited number of exorcisms in the West indicates an absence of the demonic, they argue that the paucity of such phenomena may actually point to the ubiquity of the demonic in the Western world, Warrington notes. It is probable, they assert, that demonic activity in the West is even more dangerous by its devious nature; believers must be aware that the battle is not always overt but subliminal and no less undermining. The Bible, the Spirit, as well as other believers are all recognized as potentially playing a significant part in combating demonic activity.
CCP threatens 7 Hong Kong Catholic churches over Tiananmen Square remembrance mass

Seven Hong Kong Catholic churches, which were to hold mass to commemorate the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989 by the Chinese Communist Party, found threatening signs posted in front of their buildings, according to reports.

The posters that appeared on Thursday carried an image of Cardinal Joseph Zen, former bishop of Hong Kong who supported the democracy movement, and warned that public functions in remembrance of the Tiananmen Massacre violate the controversial national security law, which was passed last year, AsiaNews reported.

It's believed that a pro-CCP group was behind the threats.

The Justice and Peace Commission of the city diocese said the masses would go ahead as planned.

Hong Kong authorities had also banned an annual candlelight vigil Friday, which is held every year on June 4 to remember the sacrifice of thousands of Chinese citizens who were demanding freedom and democracy in 1989.

Despite the warnings, thousands of people in Hong Kong defied the ban and took part in the candlelight vigil, The Wall Street Journal reported, saying people started walking toward the citys Victoria Park, where it is held each year. Many people held their phones up with the flashlights shining at around 8 p.m. Friday.

Friday morning, police had arrested Chow Hang Tung, vice-chairwoman of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, which organizes the vigil, according to The Telegraph. Police also arrested a 20-year-old food delivery man for promoting an unauthorized assembly.

Last year, Hong Kong implemented the mainland China-imposed national security law after delaying legislative elections as pro-democracy candidates could have won due to anger among the citys people against that law.

The law, which went into effect without a review by Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam, has four categories of crimes: succession, subversion of state power, local terrorist activities and collaborating with foreign or external foreign forces to endanger national security.

In 1997, China had agreed to a one country, two systems arrangement to allow certain freedoms for Hong Kong when it received the city back from British control. The security law undercuts the promised autonomy.

The law also positions Beijing as over the Hong Kong judicial system in cases deemed related to national security, China Aid said earlier. This means that the judges in these cases must be Beijing-approved. Hong Kong residents can now also be taken to China, where they will face a courtroom with allegiance to the government.

The U.S.-based persecution watchdog International Christian Concern also warned that Chinas notorious legal system and its lack of transparency can easily criminalize anybody and place them in jail. Many Chinese pastors and Christians, such as Pastor Wang Yi, elder Qin Derfu, Pastor John Cao, are now imprisoned for trumped-up charges, such as subversion of state power, illegal border crossing, and illegal business operation.

After the passage of the new security law, former U.S. President Donald Trump approved sanctions on Chinese officials and banks and also ended Hong Kongs preferential treatment, saying it will now be treated the same as mainland China.
Jailed Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai honored at National Catholic Prayer Breakfast

WASHINGTON  A notable media entrepreneur and religious freedom advocate currently imprisoned in Hong Kong was honored with an award at the 2021 National Catholic Prayer Breakfast for his commitment to advancing the mission of the Catholic Church as a layperson.

Jimmy Lai, the 73-year-old founder of Apple Daily, a pro-democracy publication critical of the Chinese government, was honored with the 2021 Christifideles Laici Award at the annual National Catholic Prayer Breakfast Tuesday at the Marriott Marquis Hotel.

Named after a 1988 apostolic exhortation written by Pope St. John Paul II, the Christifideles Laici Award is presented to lay Catholics who embark on individual missions on behalf of the Church and the world and work to stir and promote a deeper awareness among all the faithful of the gift and responsibility they share, both as a group and as individuals, in the communion and mission of the Church.

Lai, who also founded the now-defunct Hong Kong-based periodical Next Magazine, could not accept the award in person because he has been imprisoned in Hong Kong for the past 10 months.

Sharing Lais story at the event, National Catholic Prayer Breakfast Founder Joseph Cella reported that the activist was jailed because of his efforts to defend and expand human dignity and to live out and uphold the mission of the Catholic faith in addition to supporting fundamental human rights in China.

It is an honor of the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast Board of Directors to salute and thank Mr. Jimmy Lai for his courageous work for freedom, human rights, justice and support for the Catholic Church in China as the 2021 recipient of the Christifideles Laici Award, he announced.

The award expresses honor and gratitude for fidelity to the Church, exemplary, selfless and steadfast service in the Lords Vineyard.

Cella explained that Lai has consistently advocated for a free press in China informing the world about the political and religious persecution that occurs every day in China. He credited Lai with inspiring millions to defend their God-given rights and supporting the dignity of the individual through his ardent support of the Catholic Church.

Additionally, Cella praised Lai as a man of extraordinary means serving ordinary men and women longing for freedom and the opportunity to fully and freely practice their faith.

A video montage of Lai was played. The video included a clip of Lai asserting that the [Chinese Communist Party] is very afraid of organization because if you have a faith, you could easily organize together and oppose them because our religion, which is the foundation of morality and values which the CCP does not have."

"This is where they are most vulnerable," Lai said in the clip. Chinese people are looking for a faith in addition to their life."

In April, Lai was sentenced to 14 months in prison for unauthorized assembly related to pro-Democracy protests in 2019.

After the montage concluded, William McGurn, a member of The Wall Street Journal editorial board who once served as chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush, accepted the award on Lais behalf.

McGurn noted that his relationship with Jimmy is personal because Lai is McGurns godson.

Hes in prison today for a simple reason, McGurn said. His publications told the truth about China and Hong Kong. And though communism comes in many flavors  Soviet, Chinese, Cuban  the one thing that unites them all is that communism can never tolerate truth or truth tellers.

According to McGurn, Jimmy was received into the Catholic Church just before the British returned Hong Kong to China in 1997."

"For many of us who lived through those times, it was a dark moment," McGurn said. "Jimmys baptism then came as a sign of hope amid the gloom, like a small green shoe breaking through the concrete.

Jimmy believes we were created for truth and that it is our job to speak the truth, especially  when no one else will at whatever the cost," he added. "How else could a man so willingly exchange the comfortable life of a Hong Kong multimillionaire for the prison cell of a Chinese dissident?

McGurn recalled how he received an email from Lais wife shortly after his arrest containing a photo of the media entrepreneur in chains and handcuffs in prison. She asserted that "the security forces were doing it to Jimmy to humiliate him."

But McGurn said he told her not to worry since the people of Hong Kong see those handcuffs and chains as badges of honor because every man, woman and child in Hong Kong knows that Jimmy chose those handcuffs and chains.

Because of his personal wealth, Lai had the ability to leave Hong Kong and live in one of his apartments in Paris and Tokyo and Taipei," McGurn detailed.

Stressing that no one would have blamed him if he had, McGurn remarked that if you thought that was ever a possibility, you dont know Jimmy Lai.

Jimmy submitted to the chains and the handcuffs as an act of solidarity with the thousands of fellow Hong Kongers far less famous than he is, people who did not have the choice he did and were likewise arrested, McGurn added. We are already seeing the fruits of Jimmys witness in the baptisms of some of his fellow prisoners. So while Jimmy may be stuck in prison, his soul remains free.

McGurn compared Lai to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Soviet dissident who once wrote: Bless you, prison. Bless you for being in my life. For there, lying on the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe but the maturity of the human soul.

Urging the audience to pray for Lai and other political prisoners, McGurn told the audience to never, ever let anyone tell you your prayers are wasted because theres a good man unjustly held in a prison cell on the other side of the world who would tell you that your prayers are what keeps him going.

According to the National Catholic Prayer Breakfasts website, the annual gathering was first held in 2004 in response to Saint John Paul IIs call for a new evangelization. In the past, prominent politicians, including former Vice President Mike Pence and former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Paul Ryan, have spoken at the event.
Taliban criticized for ordering women to cover faces in public, other restrictive edicts

The Taliban's new decree requiring women to conceal their faces and wear a full-body covering in public has been met with condemnation, particularly from Afghan women facing another restriction on their freedom since the Islamic terrorist group's takeover of Afghanistan.

Taliban Chief Haibatullah Akhunzada issued the latest decree requiring women to cover their faces and bodies in public on Saturday at a function in Kabul, according to reports.

"They should wear a chadori [head-to-toe burqa] as it is traditional and respectful," the Taliban Chief said in the decree.

The Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice ministry announced the new decree on the same day from Akhunzada at a media conference, reports Al Jazeera.

The dress code is only the latest restriction imposed by the Taliban on women over the past few months.

In December, the ministry imposed travel restrictions on women, forbidding them from journeying more than 45 miles without a close male relative.

The reintroduction of dress code requirements resembles the Taliban's previous rule in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.

During that time, the regime forced many women to wear burqas. While some women wear headscarves today, most Afghan women living in more urban areas like Kabul do not conceal their faces.

The decree includes punishments for Afghan women's fathers or closest male relatives, who may be fired from their jobs or imprisoned if their female relative does not cover her face outside the home.

"While more than 35 [million] people are on the edge of starvation, the Taliban's only priority seems to be women's clothing," former Afghan Parliament Member Fawzia Koofi wrote in a tweet.

"Women of Afghanistan have always dressed up according to Islamic principles. Burqa is a traditional wear and has always been an individual choice and never compulsory in Islam."

While more than 35m people are on the edge of starvation,Talibans only priority seems to be womens clothing. Women of Afg have always dressed up according to Islamic principles. Burqa is a TRADITIONAL wear & has always been an individual choice and NEVER COMPULSORY in Islam. pic.twitter.com/FtJdnBpPgM  Fawzia Koofi (@Fawziakoofi77) May 7, 2022

According to The Telegraph, the Taliban may jail male guardians of women who violate the rule for three days. The decree declares women should not leave the house if they do not have any work to do outside the home.

Tamim Asey, executive chairman of the Institute of War and Peace Studies think tank, told the newspaper that the "Taliban have turned Afghanistan into an open air natural prison for women."

As Politico reported Sunday, the Taliban's governing body is heavily divided amid a worsening economic crisis due to the lack of assistance and recognition from Western nations.

In March, Taliban leaders said that Afghan girls should not be allowed to continue their education after completing the sixth grade, claiming that letting older girls attend school violated Islamic principles.

This conflicted with Taliban officials' promises to the media weeks before the school year began that all girls would be permitted to attend school.

Akhunzada reportedly favors stricter requirements for women and girls, including women rarely leaving their homes and marrying at a young age. Some Taliban leaders, however, have ignored harsher edicts on women to avoid undermining the group's efforts to transition into a legitimate governing body accepted by other countries.

"These edicts attempt to erase a whole gender and generation of Afghans who grew up dreaming of a better world," Obaidullah Baheer, a visiting scholar at New York's New School who also served as a former lecturer at the American University in Afghanistan, told Politico.

"It pushes families to leave the country by any means necessary. It also fuels grievances that would eventually spill over into large-scale mobilization against the Taliban."

In September, the United Nations condemned the Taliban for banning demonstrations and using violence against women peacefully protesting against the Taliban assuming leadership of Afghanistan. Taliban fighters beat and detained multiple women and 15 journalists during demonstrations in Kabul.

"As Afghan women and men take to the streets during this time of great uncertainty in their country to press peacefully for their human rights to be respected  including women's right to work, to freedom of movement, to education and political participation  it is crucial that those in power listen to their voices," Ravina Shamdasani, the spokesperson for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a statement at the time.

The Taliban called the protesting women "agents of America."

"Their government doesn't count us as citizens of this country even though we are half of the population," a protesting woman said in a Wall Street Journal report. "We don't care if they beat us or even shoot us, we want to defend our rights. We will continue our protests even if we get killed."

Following the U.S. military's pull out of Afghanistan last year, critics warned that the Taliban takeover would have dire consequences for the freedom of Afghan women after a "long struggle for basic freedoms and opportunities" after the Taliban's defeat in 2001.
Wikipedia removes page of Senate candidate conceived in rape

A U.S. Senate candidate in Pennsylvania is accusing Wikipedia of trying to cancel her by deleting her Wikipedia page as her campaign gains momentum in the days leading up to the primary election.

Kathy Barnette, one of several Republican candidates vying for the open U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania who has been the focus of recent national media reports highlighting the fact she was conceived in rape, took to Twitter on Tuesday to complain that Wikipedia had pulled her page down with about a week left to go until the primary election.

On May 17, Republicans and Democrats will select nominees to run in the general election scheduled for November to replace retiring Republican Sen. Pat Toomey.

When they cancel me, theyre cancelling you, Barnette, a veteran and former homeschooling mother, proclaimed. No one said this would be easy. They dont like giving up power. They forget that the true power is with the people, though.

When they cancel me, theyre cancelling you.



Wikipedia just pulled my page down with a week left to go in the election.



No one said this would be easy. They dont like giving up power.



They forget that the true power is with the people, though. pic.twitter.com/jKN6drK6sX  Kathy Barnette (@Kathy4Truth) May 10, 2022

Barnette, who also served as an adjunct finance professor, shared a screenshot of the talk section of the article that once bore her name, which indicates that this page was recently deleted (within the last 24 hours). The screenshot listed Monday as the date of the pages deletion.

A hard copy of a list of deleted Wikipedia pages from Monday includes a discussion about the justification for removing Barnettes Wikipedia page. This person is still not notable, the page states.

Those searching for Kathy Barnette on Wikipedia will instead be redirected to the page for the 2022 United States Senate Election in Pennsylvania because sources nearly all surround her candidacy or [her] previous failed candidacy for Congress. Wikipedia editors maintain that Barnette does not meet the sites notability guidelines for politicians.

Barnette unsuccessfully ran for Pennsylvania's 4th Congressional District in 2020.

Specifically, the encyclopedia defines politicians and judges who have held international, national, or (for countries with federal or similar systems of government) state/province-wide office, or have been members of legislative bodies at those levels as notable.

Politicians who have been elected to such offices but have not yet assumed them are also considered notable, as are major local political figures who have received significant press coverage.

Wikipedia classifies major local political figures who have received significant press coverage as notable. Just being an elected local official, or an unelected candidate for political office, does not guarantee notability, although such people can still be notable if they meet the general notability guideline, the website explains.

According to the general notability guideline, [a] topic is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list when it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject.

While Wikipedia has concluded that Barnette fails to meet the notability guidelines at this time, the encyclopedia notes that if Barnette wins the election the article can be recreated.

The latest polls of the Pennsylvania Republican Senate primary race suggest that Barnette winning the primary election is a possibility.

After spending months polling in single digits, recent surveys of Pennsylvania Republican Primary voters have seen a surge in support for Barnette, whose two main opponents are physician and television personality Dr. Mehmet Oz and hedge funder manager Dave McCormick.

The latest RealClearPolitics average of polls on the Republican Senate nomination in Pennsylvania show Oz leading with 22.3% followed by Barnette at 21%, McCormick at 20% and all other candidates in single digits.

Barnette has yet to lead in a poll conducted of the race thus far, although she came in second in the two most recent polls.

In a survey conducted by FOX 29/Insider Advantage from May 7 to May 9, Oz leads with 23%, with Barnette capturing 21% support and McCormick receiving 19% support. A poll conducted by the Trafalgar Group from May 6 to May 8 shows Oz on top with 25% support and Barnette in second place at 23%. In that poll, McCormick received 22% support among those surveyed.

A poll conducted by Fox News from May 3 to May 7 shows Barnette at 19%, coming in third behind McCormick (20%) and Oz (22%).

Former President Donald Trump has endorsed Oz in the primary, but concerns about carpetbagging allegations stemming from Ozs longtime residency in New Jersey and insufficient and inconsistent support for conservative principles could prevent the TV personality from clinching the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat.

As abortion has become a significant issue in American politics following the publication of a Politico story containing an initial draft Supreme Court opinion that suggests the court could overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide, Barnette has caught the attention of the pro-life movement.

The pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List Tuesday announced its endorsement of Barnette one week before the Republican primary.

We are excited to endorse Kathy Barnette for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, said SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser in a statement Tuesday. Kathy is a courageous advocate for life who exposes the human cost of abortion.

Dannenfelser praised Barnettes deeply compelling personal story as a baby conceived in rape whose mother chose not to abort her. The activist maintained that it ought to stir consciences across our nation, as she is proof that every child has dignity and deserves a chance and every mother deserves our support to choose life.

"[T]here could not be a sharper contrast between Kathy and pro-abortion Democrats like John Fetterman, who want to impose abortion on demand until birth," Dannenfelser said.

Fetterman even calls abortion sacred and cant name a single limit on abortion he supports, she added. Kathy will fight back against the radical Biden-Schumer agenda and stand up for the values of Pennsylvanians. We urge Keystone State voters to send her to Washington at this pivotal moment for life in America.

Currently, nonpartisan political handicappers, including the Cook Political Report, Politico, RealClearPolitics and the University of Virginia Center for Politics, rate the Senate election in Pennsylvania as a toss-up.

Inside Elections has labeled the race Tilt Republican, indicating a very narrow advantage for the GOP. The Senate currently has a 50-50 split between Democrats and Republicans, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote in favor of Democrats. Republicans need just one seat to take control of the Senate.
Anti-CRT candidates overwhelmingly win school board races across Texas

School board candidates opposed to critical race theory won nearly every election in the largest counties in Texas as concerns about the direction of public education continue to loom large in American politics.

The group 1776 Project PAC, which works to elect school board candidates who want to reform our public education system by promoting patriotism and pride in American history by abolishing critical race theory and The 1619 Project from the public school curriculum, announced on Twitter Saturday that every single one of our endorsed candidates just won their school board races in Texas.

The 1776 Project PAC endorsed 15 candidates in Texas, and all but one of them won their races outright, with one race headed to a runoff.

Encyclopedia Brittanica defines critical race theory as an intellectual and social movement and loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category designed to oppress and exploit people of color.

We are the 1776 Project PAC and every single one of our endorsed candidates just won their school board races in Texas.



Do you want to rid your kids school of CRT and other left-wing agendas?



Run for school board and apply for our endorsement here: https://t.co/YKiXLINFJipic.twitter.com/BBsuldnLRI  1776 Project Pac (@1776ProjectPac) May 9, 2022

According to The Dallas Morning News, in the Southlake Carroll Independent School District, candidates supported by the 1776 Project PAC beat their challengers by more than 2-1 to win both of the seats on the ballot. The strong performance by conservative candidates extended to other school districts based in the populous counties including and/or surrounding Dallas.

In the Frisco Independent School District, two of the three seats went to candidates supported by the 1776 Project PAC, who beat their opponents by smaller margins. In Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District, a 1776 Project PAC-backed challenger defeated an incumbent school board member in one of two contested races.

Three candidates supported by the 1776 Project PAC defeated their challengers outright in school board races for the Mansfield Independent School District. A fourth race headed to a runoff election will feature a 1776 Project PAC-backed candidate facing off against another candidate at a later date. All three 1776 Project PAC candidates won contested school board races in the Keller Independent School District (see here, here and here).

In the Spring Branch Independent School District in the Houston area, three candidates supported by the 1776 Project PAC received twice as many votes as the closest competitors in their respective school board races. While the 1776 Project PAC endorsed 15 candidates in this years school board elections, additional conservative organizations threw their support behind candidates who also performed well in Saturdays elections.

True Texas Project, which exists to educate and motivate citizen engagement in all levels of government and believes in constitutional government, national sovereignty, fiscal responsibility, personal responsibility, and rule of law, also saw several of its recommended candidates perform well in school board races. Both of the group endorsed candidates in the Dripping Springs Independent School District in the Austin area won their school board races.

True Texas-backed candidates won one of two races in the Clear Creek Independent School District, in the Houston area, and all three races in the Allen Independent School District, two of three races in Carrollton-Farmers Branch Independent School District, and one of three seats in the Lewisville Independent School District. One of the organizations preferred candidates is heading to a runoff in the Richardson Independent School District race.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott weighed in on the election, citing the results as evidence that parents are more involved and active in school elections and school policies than ever before. Maintaining that no one cares more about children than their parents, he predicted that the power of parents will continue to expand in Texas.

Conservatives won school board elections across Texas.



Parents are more involved and active in school elections and school policies than ever before.



No one cares more about children than their parents.



The power of parents will continue to expand in Texas. https://t.co/yg2giHfPD6  Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) May 8, 2022

The Texas school board elections come as parents and community members across the United States have confronted school boards about sexually explicit material available in school libraries and included as part of school curriculum and school districts embrace of critical race theory.

Concerns about the curriculum in public schools have led states to take action. In states including North Dakota and Idaho, lawmakers have banned their schools from teaching critical race theory. In contrast, Florida has passed a measure banning school officials from discussing sexual orientation and gender identity topics with students in kindergarten through third grade.

Launched last year, 1776 Project PAC has previously endorsed school board candidates in Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Most of the groups endorsed candidates emerged victorious in their respective elections in each state.
White Evangelicals twice as likely as other groups to support bans on abortion: Pew

A new poll reveals that white Evangelicals are twice as likely as other religious groups to support the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which looks increasingly likely following the leak of a draft United States Supreme Court opinion in a case surrounding Mississippis 15-week abortion ban.

Pew Research Center released the results of a survey examining Americans attitudes on abortion Friday, four days after Politico published a draft majority opinion in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health. The draft opinion, authored by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, indicates that a majority of justices have found that Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide, was egregiously wrong and must be overruled.

Pew conducted the survey from March 713, three months after oral arguments in the Dobbs case had concluded and about a month after Alito authored the draft opinion in the case centered on Mississippis 15-week abortion ban. The survey found that overall, 8% of Americans believe that abortion should be illegal in all cases with no exceptions, while 19% of Americans thought the killing of preborn babies should be legal in all circumstances with no exceptions.

Broken down by religious demographic, the results revealed that 21% of white Evangelicals wanted to completely ban abortion while 5% expressed a desire for abortion to be legal in all cases. Among Catholics, 13% indicated support for legal abortion in all cases compared to 10% who wanted a complete ban. Black Protestants supporting legal abortion with no exceptions outnumbered those who wanted to ban abortion with no exceptions by 20% to 7%.

Thirteen percent of white mainline Protestants reported support for legal abortion without exceptions compared to 6% who wanted a complete ban. The gap between those who want abortion to be legal in all circumstances and those who want a total ban on the procedure was highest among the religiously unaffiliated, with 34% indicating support for the former position and 2% agreeing with the latter.

A majority of white Evangelicals (53%) think that abortion should be illegal in most cases, along with 32% of Catholics, 31% of white mainline Protestants, 21% of black Protestants and 13% of the religiously unaffiliated. A majority of the religiously unaffiliated (51%) believe that abortion should be legal in most cases, along with pluralities of white mainline Protestants (47%), black Protestants (46%) and Catholics (43%). Just 19% of white Evangelicals told Pew that they wanted abortion to remain mostly legal.

Members of each religious demographic surveyed elaborated on what specific exceptions to abortion bans they favored. Majorities of all religious subgroups agreed with a statement declaring that abortion should be legal if pregnancy threatens womens life/health. The religiously unaffiliated demonstrated the highest support for allowing abortion if a womans life or health is in danger at 87%, followed by 77% of white mainline Protestants, 71% of black Protestants, 69% of Catholics and 51% of white Evangelicals.

An equal share of religiously unaffiliated Americans (87%) reported that abortion should be legal if the pregnancy resulted from rape, while support for the rape exception was lower among white mainline Protestants (75%), black Protestants (71%), Catholics (66%) and white Evangelicals (40%). At least half of all religious subgroups maintained that how long a woman has been pregnant should matter in determining whether it is legal or illegal to have an abortion.

White mainline Protestants (64%) and Catholics (63%) were the most likely to agree with the aforementioned statement, while smaller shares of white Evangelicals (56%), black Protestants (50%) and the religiously unaffiliated (50%) did. When asked if their religious views were extremely or very important in shaping their position on abortion, 73% of white Evangelicals answered in the affirmative.

By contrast, 51% of black Protestants, 41% of Catholics, 28% of white mainline Protestants and 7% of the religiously unaffiliated cited their religious beliefs as extremely or very important in influencing their views on abortion.

Overall, 36% of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in most cases. Twenty-seven percent think the procedure should be illegal in most cases, 19% want to see abortion legal in all cases with no exceptions, 8% said that abortion should be illegal in all cases with no exceptions, 6% wish to see abortion legal in all cases with some exceptions when abortion should be against the law, and 2% expressed support for the idea of making abortion illegal in all cases with some exceptions when abortion should be legal.

Support for legal abortion among the American public as a whole decreases the further a woman gets into her pregnancy. Pew asked the 71% of respondents who think abortion should be legal in some cases/illegal in some cases whether they supported legal abortion at six weeks, 14 weeks and 24 weeks gestation.

Including the 19% of respondents who think abortion should be legal in all cases and the 8% who believe abortion should be illegal in all cases, support for legal abortion drops from 44% at six weeks to 34% at 14 weeks and 3% at 24 weeks. At the same time, support for keeping abortion illegal rises from 20% at six weeks to 27% at 14 weeks and 54% at 24 weeks.

Should the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade as expected, the states will be responsible for determining their abortion laws. Twenty-one states will restrict abortions to either the first six weeks of pregnancy or completely ban the procedure, 16 states will continue to permit abortions as the right to abortion has been codified into state law, 10 states will continue to enforce existing abortion laws, and three states might soon have referendums where voters will have the opportunity to amend or affirm existing abortion laws.
Activists attack Catholic church, spray paint abortion, anarchist graffiti on entrance doors

Police in Colorado are investigating another attack on a Catholic church after abortion slogans were spray-painted on the doors and glass panels broken at Saint John XXIII Catholic Church of Fort Collins. Authorities are investigating the vandalism as a bias-motivated crime.

According to a statement posted on Facebook by the Fort Collins Police Services, the church was vandalized around 1:15 a.m. Mountain time on May 7. Anarchist imagery and the slogan my body, my choice was spray-painted on entrance doors and glass was shattered.

No damage was found inside the church, and the scene was processed for evidence," stated Fort Collins Police Services. "Due to the location and nature of the graffiti content, police are investigating this as a bias-motivated crime.

The statement also quoted Police Chief Jeff Swoboda, who advised those with knowledge of the perpetrator who committed the vandalism to come forward so the "suspect can be held accountable."

Using fear and destruction to make a point is completely unacceptable. If you want to make your voice heard, do it by exchanging thoughts and ideas, not by committing criminal acts, he said.

The vandalism occurred days after Politico published the contents of a leaked draft majority opinion that indicated the U.S. Supreme Court might overturn Roe v. Wade.

The document, written in February, pertains to the case of Dobbs v. Jackson, which centers on whether Mississippi can enforce a law banning most abortions after 15 weeks into a pregnancy.

Although the draft was not a final decision, many pro-choice activists are staging demonstrations across the country.

Backlash to the leaked draft opinion has included multiple reports of vandalism targeting various pro-life churches and advocacy groups.

In Denton, Texas, a pregnancy resource center was attacked over the weekend, with an unknown party spray-painting messages like not a clinic and forced birth is murder on its building.

Last week, another Colorado church, Sacred Heart of Mary Church in Boulder, was vandalized with spray-painted messages that read, "Abortion Saves Lives" and "My Body My Choice."

The attack on Sacred Heart also included graffiti sprayed on some of the church's statues and windows were shattered by the vandals.

On Sunday, the office of the pro-life group Oregon Right to Life was set on fire when someone threw incendiary devices at the facility. According to the group, no one was in the office at the time.

Oregon Right to Life Executive Director Lois Anderson said in a statement that her organization was thankful for the quick action of our first responders committed to maintaining a safe environment to operate in this community.

Understandably, our team is shaken up by this attack. We are committed to taking proper precautions to protect the safety of our staff as we move forward, stated Anderson.
Taco Bell launches a 'Drag Brunch experience' in select cities featuring local 'queens and kings'

Taco Bell has announced a new "Drag Brunch" campaign to promote mental health awareness for LGBT people and invite customers at Taco Bell Cantinas in select cities to watch drag performances while they eat.

The campaign was launched last month by the corporation and its Taco Bell Foundation, a nonprofit that seeks to "educate and inspire the next generation of Americas leaders."

Each show is hosted by drag performer Kay Sedia and features performances from local drag queens and kings, and individuals ages 18 and up are invited to reserve a spot at the brunches. In addition to the drag show, the Mexican fast-food chain is offering attendees a new $5 Bell Breakfast Box, Cinnabon Delights coffee and mimosas.

Every brunch is also intended to highlight the It Gets Better Project, a nonprofit organization that exists to "empower" LGBT people around the globe. The group's work includes educating others about the LGBT experience and using media programming to "spark" sexual orientation and gender identity conversations.

We understand the importance of creating safe spaces for the LGBTQIA+ community and are thrilled to provide a unique experience that spotlights and celebrates the wonderful artform of drag and its influence in culture with their chosen families, said Taco Bell's Chief Brand Officer Sean Tresvant in a statement included in a now archived press release.

As USA Today reported last week, Taco Bell held its first drag brunch on May 1 at its flagship Cantina in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Vegas show featured local drag performers Coco Montrese, Mirage Amuro and Anetra.

Taco Bell plans to bring the drag brunch to its Chicago Cantina on May 22, then Nashville on May 29. Its last two known tour dates are June 12 and June 26 in New York and Fort Lauderdale, respectively.

The idea for the drag brunch came from Taco Bell's LGBT employee resource group, Live Mas Pride, which contains over 100 members. The group launched in 2020 to help foster "positive environments" for LGBT people and "elevate" the voices of the community.

"Taco Bell Drag Brunch was concepted by Live Mas Pride, Taco Bell's LGBTQIA+ Employee Resource Group, which has played a major role in driving awareness of and meaningfully supporting LGBTQIA+ communities both within Taco Bell and the communities we serve and operate in," Tresvant said.

Brian Wenke, executive director of the It Gets Better Project, also expressed excitement, stating that the campaign is designed to "celebrate the LGBT community" and "engage LGBTQ+ youth around their career aspirations and future potential."

Taco Bell and the Taco Bell Foundation did not immediately respond to The Christian Post's request for comment.

In recent years, numerous corporations have voiced their support in various ways for the LGBT community.

On June 1, the Discovery+ service will air a new series produced by Tyra Banks called "Generation Drag." The series will center around teenagers exploring their gender identities and participating in a drag show.

During Pride Month last June, the fast-food chain Burger King took a swipe at competitor Chick-fil-A when it announced that it would donate nearly half of the proceeds from its sales of chicken sandwiches to the LGBT activist group Human Rights Campaign.

On March 11, Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Chapek apologized to employees via a letter for not taking a firmer stance against Florida's HB 1557. The law prohibits sexual orientation and gender identity instruction in kindergarten through third grade and requires schools to notify parents about any healthcare services their child receives on campus.

Disney was initially neutral about the legislation, but the company joined critics in deriding it as a "Don't Say Gay" bill after LGBT employees and supporters criticized the company for not taking a harder stand. The company released a March 28 statement condemning the bill, declaring that it "should never have passed and should never have become law."

In the days following the corporation's calls for the bill's repeal, leaked video footage obtained by the Manhattan Institute's Christopher Rufo showed Disney employees discussing their efforts to promote an LGBT message in its children's programming.

Another video features Disney Diversity and Inclusion Manager Vivian Ware sharing how "last summer, we removed all of the gendered greetings in relationship to our live spiels."

"We no longer say 'ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls' but instead use phrases like, 'Hello, everyone' or 'Hello, friends,'" she said.

In April, Disney aired a "Protect Our Families" public service announcement from LGBT advocacy organization GLAAD on its channels. The video featured a family with a daughter who identifies as a boy. The mother in the video accused politicians of "trying to tear [her] family apart" because her daughter is a trans-identifying woman.
America is readier than ever to repeal Roe

In 1983, the last effort by pro-life forces to pass federal legislation providing full protection for the unborn failed on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Stunned by this defeat after a decade of grassroots mobilization, the pro-life movement turned in new directions. The most momentous of these was a campaign of support for mothers and babies, led by pregnancy care services and policymakers allied with them.

An argument can be made that, in terms of services and policies, America was not ready for the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 1983. Today, on the threshold of the Supreme Court itself reversing Roe v. Wade, America is much closer to readiness.

If this article catalogued all the policy initiatives that have occurred and expanded over the past four decades, it would run to dozens of pages and involve all 50 states and territories.

The list precedes Roe v. Wade but has grown in scope and now covers not only health insurance and income support, but grassroots (and largely free) pregnancy services, tax relief for families and children, adoption and charitable donation credits, programs to deal with sex trafficking, fatherhood programs, maternity homes, job training, addiction care, and much more besides.

The extent of these changes and the number of women affected are impressive. In 1965, Congress enacted the Medicaid and Medicare programs, covering maternity care through a federal-state partnership for millions of poor women. The program needs a variety of reforms and better financial management, but its scope is undeniable, reaching 42% of all women and more than 50% in states like Texas and Mississippi.

In the 1980s, explosive growth occurred in pregnancy help centers, founded and supported by citizen groups and churches. Three major networks grew rapidly  Heartbeat International, Care Net, and the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates.

The centers increasingly medicalized, augmenting material support and counseling, and now the centers employ, as paid staff or volunteers, more than 10,200 licensed health care professionals nationwide. Some 3,000 sites, including brick-and-mortar locations and mobile units, reach 2 million people per year, with extremely high satisfaction rates.

Under the first Bush administration, pro-life leaders, including National Commission on Children Co-Chair Kay Coles James, helped spearhead the fight for a federal child tax credit available to all income-tax paying families.

Despite initial legislative defeat in the House, those leaders persuaded the new Republican Congress under Speaker Newt Gingrich to include a $500 per child tax credit for working families as the crown jewel of his Contract with America. Since its enactment, the law has literally returned trillions of dollars to families to invest in their children.

Not long after, pro-life groups were key to the enactment of federal and state adoption tax credits. These benefits were designed to recognize and defray the high cost of adoption and make it more affordable for low- and middle-income families.

The credits are also designed to reduce the cost of extended foster care to the states. Today some states, like Florida, are providing additional benefits, like free state university and community college tuition, to adopted children. The maximum federal credit is now $14,400.

But wait, theres more. While most pregnancy center work remains privately funded, centers across the nation increasingly benefit from state-funded programs loosely grouped under the category A2A, alternatives to abortion.

These projects, now found in 14 states, help fund pregnancy assistance that goes beyond the calendar of immediate needs centers originally addressed. They recognize that pregnancy is a life-altering experience and that maternal and family needs do not end at birth.

The projects, even those that reject government funding on principle or because of the centrality of their religious mission, face sharp criticism from legal abortion advocates, but they carry on, providing residential and job preparation services to women who reject abortion as a solution.

Today, the National Maternity Housing Coalition includes dozens of residences nationwide affiliated through Heartbeat International, which works with its own network of more than 3,000 pregnancy help centers in 971 locations worldwide. These groups realize that hundreds of thousands of women remain to be reached in the United States alone, and they are in it for the long haul.

Affiliates of the National Maternity Housing Coalition need not be religious, but they are required to adhere to the Commitment of Care and Competence, which establishes standards of excellence and truthfulness in this lifesaving and Christ-centered work.

Increasingly, in the potential wake of a reversal of Roe v. Wade, pro-life states are updating their policies, securing new funding streams for pregnancy centers, and seeking to address maternity care deserts within their borders.

Forty years ago, the pro-life movement endured major defeat in Congress. Today it is winning triumph after triumph, saving life after life, all across the nation, with a focus on providing life-affirming choices and support to the incredible women we call mom.

Originally published at The Daily Signal.
Be very wary of the US thought police

It was astonishing when I first read about the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Disinformation Governance Board.



In my 20 years of government service fighting terrorism, the most complicated element of our work was protecting the sanctity of free speech while preventing radicalization. We watched young Americans leave their families to either marry a stranger or die in a foreign war but could do nothing about it because they had not committed a crime. They believed the persuasive pleas of the recruiters and wanted to be part of something bigger than themselves.

Civil rights groups, free speech activists, and others were very wary of our efforts. They claimed we were infringing on religious freedom and free speech by monitoring the recruiters activity. Back then, the social media giants wanted no part in censoring online profiles unless they advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. or encouraged acts of violence. We understood it as Americans; we are not in the business of policing ideas, however unpopular they may be.

The Supreme Court even established an imminent threat standard to ensure we did not regulate grossly unpopular or hateful speech. So, it was not until groups like ISIS and Al-Shabab were officially designated as foreign terrorist organizations that criminal charges could be imposed for recruitment and/or material support.

Fast forward to today, and this new board is tasked with addressing the threat of disinformation. The repeated use of the word threat by DHS Secretary Mayorkas should be a cause for concern. It purposely creates connectivity between disinformation and the potential for physical harm, so there is a crime that can be investigated and eventually prosecuted.

We already have laws to address any potential harm stemming from intentionally providing false information. There are civil penalties in defamation and slander cases and criminal charges for perjury or obstruction of justice against government officials. However, the Constitution does not allow the government to punish the exaggeration of a story or having a different opinion from the cultural norm.



Look, for example, at all the controversy surrounding the Hunter Biden laptop. What was commonly touted as a wacky MAGA conspiracy was eventually demonstrated to be fact. Same with the research about the utility of masks in fighting off COVID infections and the risks associated with vaccines. Just because something may sound outlandish to some does not mean its false. The power of free speech is that the marketplace of ideas allows our opinions to evolve and change with new data. Isnt that how we defeated slavery and gave women equal rights?

This recent push to criminalize unpopular speech started with the backlash against the parental rights movement. Passionate and angry parents at school board meetings triggered the Justice Department to issue a memo about prosecuting the threat to school officials. Soon after, DHS issued a National Terrorism Advisory, warning of a heightened terrorism threat caused by disinformation introduced by foreign or domestic actors. Consider the language of the bulletin very carefully:

"These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence."

The alarming conclusion is this: Our leading national security agency says the most significant domestic terrorism threat today is from people who share unpopular ideas with others, which could make them angry enough to commit a crime. To address this apparent threat, they create a Disinformation Governance Board to advise the operational departments of DHS on who to investigate and possibly prosecute for these alleged crimes.



I am shocked and dismayed this is happening in the public service sector, where I dedicated most of my professional career. How is the U.S. government suddenly the arbiter of truth? And why is lack of public trust defined now as a potential terrorism threat?

As if the unconstitutionality of regulating truth in the public square was not bad enough, the choice to govern the Disinformation Board makes it obvious who is the intended target of this effort. Nina Jankowicz, a clearly left-leaning social activist, has already labeled opponents of CRT disinformers and considers gender-based harassment online to be a national security threat, equal to terrorism.

U.S. law enforcement power should never be partisan. We saw how damaging that was during the Russian collusion debacle when corruption in senior leadership tarnished the stellar reputation of the FBI. DHS and FBI officials are also never meant to be the thought police. We pride ourselves on that as Americans. Thankfully, many legislators are voicing their objections to this partisan attempt to silence opposition.

Marsha Blackburn from Tennessee wrote to DHS that the federal government has no place interfering with the rights of all Americans to speak publicly about their political views  In fact, the Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear that this kind of core political speech is the primary object of First Amendment protection. Ranking Senator Rob Portman said, I do not believe that the United States government should turn the tools that we have used to assist our allies counter foreign adversaries onto the American people.



It is no secret that the U.S. has directly engaged in disinformation campaigns in countries worldwide to defeat communism, totalitarianism, and in many cases, terrorist recruitment. The American people should not tolerate its government now turning around to tell us what truth we can or should believe.

As Christians, even those who try to remain apolitical must realize we will be the greatest casualty of this effort. Our truth about who Jesus Christ is as God incarnate and that life begins with conception can easily be weaponized against us when the arbiter does not believe in Gods word. Look at the underwhelming response by law enforcement as the radicals torch Christian nonprofits and harass conservative Supreme Court judges at their homes. Nothing is being done to stop those crimes as if their truths or legal rights do not matter.

There are dark days ahead of us, For the wrath of God is revealed from Heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness (Romans 1:18).
I am a Christian, Jamaican, middle-aged, cis-gender heterosexual woman. A mother of two married to a cis-gender man.

These are some of the main identity markers that I gladly embrace. So what exactly am I going to be talking about today?

FOLLOW ME DOWN MEMORY LANE

In the late 90s when I was a teenager, Ron Kenoly and his sons came to perform at a concert at a prominent church here in Kingston. A group of my friends and I had been given permission to attend and we were all super excited.

During an extra long band change a few of us and one of our chaperones decided to walk around. The concert was at night and the venue was a beautiful amphitheatre that offered gorgeous city views.

We stopped at one particular point up on the hill and started laughing uncontrollably at a joke somebody gave (details of that fail me now two decades later). We caught the attention of a young guy who appeared to be around our age. He came over and said hi; he was with his older cousins. They were visiting from North America and the conversation turned to us answering questions about life in Kingston and them telling us what they had been up to since arriving in Jamaica. They were quite good looking but more importantly very polite and entertaining.

We parted ways and my friends and I rushed back down the hill to our previous spot near the front of the stage. The MC announced the next act; Ron Kenoly and the Kenoly Brothers. We started cheering and clapping because we were all huge fans of their songs "I love to love you Lord" and You are my joy.

The three men walked out on stage with their mics, my friends and I looked at the stage, looked at each other, looked back at the stage and began shrieking and jumping up and down hysterically. Ron Kenoly's sons, Sam and Ronald, were the two older cousins that we had just been hanging out with up on the hill. We had been chatting up a storm with celebrities and had no idea the whole time.

Just like up on the hill, we caught their attention. They not only saw us but smiled and pointed knowingly towards our group. Even more hysterical screaming and jumping up and down ensued, along with shrieks of "THEY SAW US!", in disbelief. We nearly died (teenage girl definition). By this time we had also drawn quite a number of stares from those around us, looks of disdain at the very loud, juvenescent behaviour they were observing.

Looking on it really would have appeared as if we were just a bunch of star struck, air headed girls with hormonal celebrity crushes who had completely forgotten where they were and the very purpose of the concert. They were cute, yes indeed but it ran so much deeper than that. A friends older cousin who had also been with us up on the hill calmly turned towards me in the midst of our squealing and gave me a nod and smile. She understood the significance of the moment but had far more self control and decorum than we did. Have you ever experienced anything like that though? Where someone you admire acknowledges you whether in a big way or small, and makes you feel seen and special when you were expecting to simply blend into the crowd?

HE KNOWS MY NAME

There have been several times in my adult life where I have felt completely overwhelmed, frightened and intimidated by the turn of events in my life. There have been quite a few moments where I have looked death in the face and truly not known if Id make it, but here I am. Experiences like those can often leave you feeling like God is a distant, looming overlord who takes pleasure in moving and shaking the lives of humans any which way He pleases, like pieces on a chess board.

The LORD directs the steps of the godly. He delights in every detail of their lives. (Psalm chapter 37 verse 23)

Thankfully Ive had just as many moments where Ive watched how things transpired and I am left in awe of Gods love and care for me. The NLT version of this verse tells us that God delights in every detail of our lives. Doesnt that just blow your mind in the best possible way?

I have observed Gods hand moving on my behalf in seemingly insignificant ways such as me finding money on the ground to buy a cookie as a broke university student, to totally life changing things like the very existence of my children.

Imagine, in this life when wars, deadly diseases, genocides and all manner of evils are present the God of the entire universe thinks about the things that I think about. The never ending question of What am I going to make for dinner tonight? is actually important to Him because it is important to me. Those moments where it feels like God pauses on His eternal stage to look at me in the midst of everybody, smile lovingly and say Danelle, I see you, have had me over the years screaming and jumping up and down literally and figuratively just like a hysterical teenage girl. I hope to never stop being blown away by his amazing love for me.
The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine announced that they hold "credible information" that Ukrainian forces have committed mistreatment of Russian prisoners during the war.

Matilda Bogner, head of the UN mission, said on Tuesday that they obtained "credible information oftorture, ill-treatment and incommunicado detention by Ukrainian Armed Forces of prisoners of war belonging to the Russian armed forces and affiliated armed groups."

She added that the ill-treatment is being conducted among captured Ukrainian and Russian soldiers who are forced to perform humiliating acts, statements, confessions, and apologies.

"This violates fundamental rules of international humanitarian law. Ukraine and Russia must promptly and effectively investigate all allegations of torture and ill-treatment of prisoners of war," Bogner stated.

The UN official also urged both camps to "effectively control" and "instruct" their forces to seize further violations from happening, as per a report from The Hill.

Throughout the battle, Ukraine and Russia have traded prisoners several times, resulting in the return of scores of Ukrainians and Russians to their respective troops.

UN Urges Both Camps To End Hostilities

According to Bogner, the UN has discovered at least 204 incidents in which Russian authorities took Ukrainians, mostly men, to Belarus before reaching Russia for pre-detention proceedings.

She suggested that the "best way" to stop the violations is to "end the hostilities." Though Bogner also reminded Ukrainian and Russian troops to spare civilians.

"However, while they are ongoing and for as long as they last, parties must in the conduct of operations take constant care to spare the civilian population, civilians and civilian objects and commit to protecting every civilian woman, man and child and those hors de combat that fall under their control," Bogner noted.

UPDATE:@UNHumanRights Monitoring Mission in #Ukraine has so far confirmed 7,061 civilian casualties, including 3,381 killed and 3,680 injured. Real figures are probably much higher.



"Every civilian death is a tragedy," says Matilda Bogner, head of the Mission. pic.twitter.com/6YEhFvRln4  UN Geneva (@UNGeneva) May 10, 2022

The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission also accused Russia of war crimes such as going after civilians, abusing women, and forcing civilians to flee Ukraine for Russia.

Read Also: Sri Lanka Prime Minister Resigns Amid Violent Protests Over Worsening Economic Crisis

Violations Caught On Cam

In late March, the UN Human Rights Commission released a report detailing 45 cases of ill-treatment and torture perpetrated by civilians, policemen, and members of Ukraine's territorial defense forces. According to the report, a "large number" of the recordings it examined documented the offenses, which targeted pro-Russian soldiers, raiders, curfew breakers, and several others in Ukraine-controlled territory.

The report pointed out the concern of the proliferation of publicly available online footage showing interrogations of POWs by Ukrainian forces following their arrest. POWs are forced to apologize to Ukrainians, trash their command, admire Ukrainian armed forces, or call on families to halt the war, according to the National Post.

The report also stated that a captured Russian soldier was allegedly "threatened with castration on tape."

The New York Times reported that Ukrainian forces had used illegal cluster bombs at least two times. The United Nations has stated that Ukraine must investigate the occurrences to ensure that those responsible for using these bombs are made liable.

Per UN media release, Bogner's remarks came ahead of a Human Rights Council special session on Ukraine set for Thursday in Geneva. To date, the Council has conducted 34 special sessions.

During an urgent debate on Russia's invasion of Ukraine during the last regular session, members resolved to create an impartial international commission of inquiry to investigate all alleged human rights abuses related to the war.

Related Article: US Intel: Why Vladimir Putin Could Declare Martial Law in Russia Amid War With Ukraine

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
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WASHINGTON (AP)  President Joe Biden stepped up his administration's response to a nationwide baby formula shortage Thursday that has forced frenzied parents into online groups to swap and sell to each other to keep their babies fed.

The president discussed with executives from Gerber and Reckitt how they could increase production and how his administration could help, and talked with leaders from Walmart and Target about how to restock shelves and address regional disparities in access to formula, the White House said.

The administration plans to monitor possible price gouging and work with trading partners in Mexico, Chile, Ireland and the Netherlands on imports, even though 98% of baby formula is domestically made.

The problem is the result of supply chain disruptions and a safety recall, and has had a cascade of effects: Retailers are limiting what customers can buy, and doctors and health workers are urging parents to contact food banks or physicians' offices, in addition to warning against watering down formula to stretch supplies or using online DIY recipes.

The shortage is weighing particularly on lower-income families after the recall by formula maker Abbott, stemming from contamination concerns. The recall wiped out many brands covered by WIC, a federal program like food stamps that serves women, infants and children, though the program now permits brand substitutes. The Biden administration is working with states to make it easier for WIC recipients to buy different sizes of formula that their benefits might not currently cover.

About half of infant formula nationwide is purchased by participants using WIC benefits, according to the White House.

Clara Hinton, 30, of Hartford, Connecticut, is among that group. She has a 10-month-old daughter, Patiennce, who has an allergy that requires a special formula.

Hinton, who has no car, has been taking the bus to the suburbs, going from town to town, and finally found some of the proper formula at a box store in West Hartford. But she said the store refused to take her WIC card, not the first time that has happened.

Hinton said her baby recently ran out of formula from an already opened can she got from a friend.

She has no formula, she said. I just put her on regular milk. What do I do? Her pediatrician made it clear Im not supposed to be doing that, but what do I do?

In Utah, fellow WIC card holder Elizabeth Amador has been going store-to-store every day after she finishes work at a call center in Salt Lake City in desperate search of one particular formula her 9-month-old daughter needs. She recently was down to only one can, but had four cans on Thursday. She said she wont stop her cumbersome daily routine until she knows the shortage is over.

It sucks, you know because of high gas prices, Amador said. Were having to drive everywhere to find formula. Its stressing.

Some parents are also using social media to bridge supply gaps.

Ashley Maddox, a 31-year-old mother of two from San Diego, started a Facebook group on Wednesday after failing to find formula for her 5-month-old son, Cole, at the commissary on the Navy base.

I connected with a gal in my group and she had seven cans of the formula I need that were just sitting in her house that her baby didnt need anymore, she said. So I drove out, it was about a 20-minute drive and picked it up and paid her. It was a miracle.

She said there was already a stigma attached to being a non-breastfeeding mom and that the group has become supportive. To not be able to have that formula, its scary, she said.

Jennifer Kersey, 36 of Cheshire, Connecticut, said she was down to her last can of formula for her 7-month-old son, Blake Kersey Jr., before someone saw her post on a Facebook group and came by with a few sample cans. She said she and others in the group are helping each other, finding stores that might have the formula in stock and getting it to mothers who need it.

At first I was starting to panic, she said. But, Im a believer in the Lord, so I said, God, I know youre going to provide for me' and I just started reaching out to people, Hey do you have this formula?"

Kimberly Anderson, 34, of Hartford County, Maryland, said her 7 1/2-month-old son takes a prescription formula that has been nearly impossible to find locally. She turned to social media and said people in Utah and Boston found the formula, which she paid to have shipped.

They say it takes a village to raise a baby," she said. Little did I know my village spans the entire U.S. as I ping friends, family for their zip codes so I can check their local Walmarts to have them ship directly to me."

Shortages of basic goods have been a problem since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Access to medical supplies, computer chips, household appliances, cars and other goods has been hurt by closed factories and outbreaks of the virus, as well as storms and other climate-related events.

Parents desperately searching for infant formula on retailer websites such as Amazon and Google are being served up with products intended for toddlers, including powdered toddler goat milk and plant-based milk powders.

One banner ad across Amazon offers organic non GMO formula for babies & toddlers, but a closer inspection of the products image shows that it is only intended for children over 12 months. Other ads for toddler milk appear on Amazons website on pages for out-of-stock infant formula.

Toddler milk cans often closely resemble that of infant formula, but the ingredients are distinct, with toddler milks sometimes boasting more sugar, calories, said Frances Fleming-Milici, UConns Director of Marketing Initiatives at the Rudd Center who has study toddler milk packaging. Toddler milk also does not follow FDA standards for formula.

Its not like youre buying a pair of shoes. This is a little bit more serious, Fleming-Milici said. Its serving up something that you should not be giving to your child.

Dr. Navneet Hundal, a pediatric gastroenterologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said she and other pediatricians have been grappling with the formula shortage for months. Formula companies have stopped giving out samples that she could pass on to parents, she said. She advises new parents to talk to their pediatricians to see if there are other brands of formula that they can safely give their newborns.

This is ruling our clinical practices right now, she said.

A safety recall compounded the challenges.

The Food and Drug Administration warned consumers on Feb. 17 to avoid some powdered baby formula products from a Sturgis, Michigan, facility run by Abbott Nutrition, which then initiated a voluntary recall. According to findings released in March by federal safety inspectors, Abbott failed to maintain sanitary conditions and procedures at the plant.

The FDA launched its investigation after four babies became sick with a rare bacterial infection after consuming formula manufactured at the plant. All four were hospitalized and two died. Chicago-based Abbott said in a statement, there is no evidence to link our formulas to these infant illnesses. Samples of the bacteria collected from the infants did not match those found in the companys factory, Abbott noted.

Abbott said that pending FDA approval, we could restart the site within two weeks. The company would begin by first producing EleCare, Alimentum and metabolic formulas and then start production of Similac and other formulas. Once production began, it would take six to eight weeks for the baby formula to be available on shelves.

On Tuesday, the FDA said it was working with U.S. manufacturers to increase their output and streamline paperwork to allow more imports.

We recognize that this is certainly a challenge for people across the country, something the president is very focused on and were going to do everything we can to cut red tape and take steps to increase supply, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters.

Meanwhile, the shortage got politicized Thursday as Republicans including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott criticized the Biden administration for providing baby formula to babies in detention at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Biden, in a Thursday letter to the Federal Trade Commission, pressed the independent agency to bring all of the Commissions tools to bear to investigate and act in response to reports of fraud or price gouging as a result of the supply disruptions.

It is unacceptable for families to lose time and spend hundreds of dollars more because of price gougers actions, he wrote to FTC Chair Lina Khan.

___

Eaton-Robb reported from Columbia, Connecticut. Associated Press writers Mike Catalini in Trenton, New Jersey, Steve LeBlanc in Boston, Brady McCombs in Salt Lake City and Amanda Seitz in Washington contributed to this report.
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KYIV, Ukraine (AP)  Finlands leaders Thursday came out in favor of applying to join NATO, and Sweden could do the same within days, in a historic realignment on the continent 2 1/2 months after Russian President Vladimir Putins invasion of Ukraine sent a shiver of fear through Moscows neighbors.

The Kremlin reacted by warning it will be forced to take retaliatory military-technical steps.

On the ground, meanwhile, Russian forces pounded areas in central, northern and eastern Ukraine, including the last pocket of resistance in Mariupol, as part its offensive to take the industrial Donbas region, while Ukraine recaptured some towns and villages in the northeast.

The first war-crimes trial of a Russian soldier since the start of the conflict is set to open Friday in Kyiv. A 21-year-old captured member of a tank unit is accused of shooting to death a civilian on a bicycle during the opening week of the war.

Finlands president and prime minister announced that the Nordic country should apply right away for membership in NATO, the military defense pact founded in part to counter the Soviet Union.

You (Russia) caused this. Look in the mirror, Finnish President Sauli Niinisto said this week.

While the country's Parliament still has to weigh in, the announcement means Finland is all but certain to apply  and gain admission  though the process could take months to complete. Sweden, likewise, is considering putting itself under NATO's protection.

That would represent a major change in Europe's security landscape: Sweden has avoided military alliances for more than 200 years, while Finland adopted neutrality after its defeat by the Soviets in World War II.

Public opinion in both nations shifted dramatically in favor of NATO membership after the invasion, which stirred fears in countries along Russia's flank that they could be next.

Such an expansion of the alliance would leave Russia surrounded by NATO countries in the Baltic Sea and the Arctic and would amount to a stinging setback for Putin, who had hoped to divide and roll back NATO in Europe but is instead seeing the opposite happen.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said the alliance would welcome Finland and Sweden with open arms.

Russia's Foreign Ministry warned that Moscow "will be forced to take retaliatory steps of military-technical and other characteristics in order to counter the emerging threats to its national security.

NATO's funneling of weapons and other military support to Ukraine already has been critical to Kyiv's surprising success in stymieing the invasion, and the Kremlin warned anew in chilling terms Thursday that the aid could lead to direct conflict between NATO and Russia.

There is always a risk of such conflict turning into a full-scale nuclear war, a scenario that will be catastrophic for all," said Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Russias Security Council.

While Russia's advance in the Donbas has been slow, its forces have gained some ground and taken some villages.

Four civilians were killed Thursday in three communities in the Donetsk region, which is part of the Donbas, the regional governor reported.

Britains Defense Ministry said Russias focus on the Donbas has left its remaining troops around the northeastern city of Kharkiv vulnerable to counterattack from Ukrainian forces, which recaptured several towns and villages around the city.

Russian strikes Thursday killed at least two civilians on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraines second-largest city, local authorities said.

The attacks also damaged a building housing a humanitarian aid unit, municipal offices and hospital facilities, Vyacheslav Zadorenko, the mayor of the suburban town of Derhachi, wrote in a Telegram post.

None of the sites "had anything to do with military infrastructure, Zadorenko said.

Fighting across the east has driven many thousands of Ukrainians from their homes.

It is terrible there now. We were leaving under missiles, said Tatiana Kravstova, who left the town of Siversk with her 8-year-old son Artiom on a bus headed for the central city of Dnipro. I dont know where they were aiming, but they were pointing at civilians.

Ukraine also said Russian forces had fired artillery and grenade launchers at Ukrainian troops around Zaporizhzhia, which has been a refuge for civilians fleeing Mariupol, and attacked in the Chernihiv and Sumy regions to the north.

Overnight airstrikes near Chernihiv, in northern Ukraine, killed at least three people, Ukraine's military said. It said that Russian troops fired rockets at a school and student dormitory in Novhorod-Siversky and that some other buildings, including private homes, were also damaged.

In his evening address to the nation, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the assaults.

Of course, the Russian state is in such a state that any education only gets in its way," he said. "But what can be achieved by destroying Ukrainian schools? All Russian commanders who give such orders are simply sick and incurable.

Noting that Thursday is International Nurses Day, Zelenskyy said the Russian military had damaged 570 medical facilities since the invasion began on Feb. 24 and fully destroyed 101 hospitals.

Twelve Russian missiles struck an oil refinery and other infrastructure in the central Ukrainian industrial hub of Kremenchuk on Thursday, the region's acting governor, Dmytro Lunin, wrote in a Telegram post. In early April, he said, the refinery, which had been the last fully functional one in Ukraine at the time, was knocked offline by an attack.

In the southern port of Mariupol, which has largely been reduced to smoking rubble with little food, water or medicine, or what the mayor called a medieval ghetto, Ukrainian fighters continued to hold out at the Azovstal steel plant, the last stronghold of resistance in the city.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said negotiations were underway with Russia to win the release of 38 severely wounded Ukrainian defenders from the plant. She said Ukraine hoped to exchange them for 38 significant Russian prisoners of war.

___

Yesica Fisch in Bakhmut, David Keyton in Kyiv, Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Mstyslav Chernov in Kharkiv, Jari Tanner in Helsinki, and other AP staffers around the world contributed.

___

Follow APs coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
A federal appeals court on Wednesday reinstated a Republican-backed Texas law that prohibits large social media companies from banning users over their political viewpoints.

The decision hands a win to Republicans who have long criticized social media platforms such as Twitter for what they call anti-conservative bias  disapproval that was amplified when President Donald Trump was banned from Twitter for violating the platforms rules on inciting violence during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

The order did not evaluate the law on its constitutionality but instead allows the law to go back into effect while the case proceeds in district court, according to a statement from one of the plaintiff groups. The ruling came from a three-judge panel on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals  which is often considered the most conservative appeals court in the country  and was not accompanied by a written opinion explaining the decision at the time of publication.

Two large industry trade groups that represent companies such as Google and Twitter sued to block the law last fall.

In December, a federal district court judge ruled in favor of the groups and blocked the law while the lawsuit continues, reasoning that the First Amendment protects a companys right to moderate content and called parts of the law prohibitively vague. As a result, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton appealed the district judges decision to the circuit court.

Passed during a special session last year, House Bill 20 also requires social media platforms with more than 50 million monthly users to publicly disclose information about content removal and account suspensions.

HB 20 is an assault on the First Amendment, and it's constitutionally rotten from top to bottom, Chris Marchese, counsel for the NetChoice industry trade group, tweeted after the ruling. So of course we're going to appeal today's unprecedented, unexplained, and unfortunate order by a split 2-1 panel.

The decision comes as businessman Elon Musk is poised to buy Twitter and possibly remake the companys moderation policies  a move that conservatives have cheered. Musk recently said he would reinstate Trumps account if the acquisition is completed.

Sadly, we have a handful of people in America today who want to control the town square, who want to control social media and want to enforce silence, state Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, said in support of the bill last year. If you have a viewpoint different from theirs, they want to shut you up. Thats not the American way, and that is not the Texas way.

The law does not provide any specific civil penalties for breaking the law, besides allowing users to sue to recuperate their court costs from the company found in violation. The law also empowers the attorney general to pursue violations.

The Texas attorney generals office said in a tweet late Wednesday that the appeals court made the right decision and said it would continue defending the Texas law.

Disclosure: Google has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.
This article, Facebook and Instagram Turn Off AR Filters In Texas and Illinois, originally appeared on CNET.com.

Meta has turned off augmented reality filters for Facebook and Instagram in Texas and Illinois due to facial recognition and privacy laws in those states.

Although Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said its AR technology is "not facial recognition," it's temporarily shutting down its AR filters and avatars in both states to prevent "meritless and distracting litigation." The decision comes a day after a settlement was reached in an ACLU lawsuit filed in Illinois against Clearview AI, a facial recognition company that was selling its database to private companies.

Meta said it will create an opt-in experience to bring those AR effects back to its platforms soon. AR effects are also turned off across Messenger, Messenger Kids, Facebook and Portal in both Texas and Illinois.

The company maintains that the tech it uses to create its AR effects and applications isn't facial recognition technology and isn't used for identification purposes.

"The technology we use to power augmented reality effects like avatars and filters is not facial recognition or any technology covered by the Texas and Illinois laws, and is not used to identify anyone," Meta said in a statement. The company shut down its Face recognition system last year, erasing the face scan data of more than 1 billion users.

Facebook has faced scrutiny over its facial recognition technology in recent years, with a judge awarding a landmark $650 million settlement in favor of users in a class-action suit in Illinois last year. Texas is also suing the social media giant over its use of facial recognition technology, asserting that it didn't appropriately obtain consent for Texans' biometric data, which violates the state's privacy laws.
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LANSING, Mich. (AP)  Republicans running for Michigan governor met in their first debate Thursday night, all staunchly opposing abortion before the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling is potentially overturned while disagreeing on exceptions and whether former President Donald Trump won the state's 2020 election.

Trump, who lost to Joe Biden by 154,000 votes and has pushed bogus claims of mass fraud, has not yet endorsed a candidate in August's GOP primary.

Four of eight candidates on stage  former conservative news host Tudor Dixon, real estate broker Ryan Kelley, pastor Ralph Rebandt and chiropractor Garrett Soldano  falsely said Trump carried Michigan. Two, state police Capt. Michael Brown and financial adviser Michael Markey, said he did not. Perry Johnson and Kevin Rinke, businessmen who have spent millions of their own money to campaign, did not say either way. Rinke refused to answer, while Johnson said he needs to see more data.

The candidates also differed over abortion, which, if the U.S. Supreme Court overrules Roe, would be nearly totally banned under a 1931 state law that remains on the books. It would allow one exception, to protect the pregnant woman's life.

Dixon, Johnson, Kelley, Rebandt and Johnson opposed exceptions for rape and incest. Brown, Markey and Rinke supported them.

Two candidates in the crowded field of political newcomers, top contender James Craig and longshot Donna Brandenburg, did not attend the event that lacked fireworks and featured a lot of criticism of Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. The one-hour, 45-minute debate in Howell was organized and moderated by the Livingston County Republican Party and the Lansing-based MIRS news outlet, drawing 700 people who paid $75 each as part of a fundraising dinner. Craig's absence drew a shot from Soldano, who asked if he could answer a question for him.

Craig had a prior speaking commitment at the Mechanical Contractors Association's annual meeting, according to his campaign.

The chief looks forward to upcoming debates and opportunities to share his message with the voters, the campaign said.

Both MIRS and the Livingston County GOP said Craig, Detroit's former police chief, committed to the debate before pulling out.

I guess he still runs from the sideline. (He's) not leading from the front, Soldano said.

Most of the candidates said the COVID-19 vaccine has helped seniors and those with underlying medical conditions avoid death, though Kelley and Rebandt said it is not helping to combat the coronavirus. Brown said he did not know.

Some backed repealing Michigan's individual income tax. Others got behind significant cuts in state funding for public universities. Many called for Whitmer to be criminally investigated for nursing home orders she issued early in the pandemic and criticized her for closing schools. All said they would sign legislation to forbid instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade, backing a Florida measure that opponents have dubbed the Don't Say Gay law.

Another debate, which was sanctioned by the Michigan Republican Party, is planned for June 2 at the Detroit Regional Chamber's policy conference on Mackinac Island.

The winner of the Aug. 2 primary will advance to challenge Whitmer in November.

Three top GOP candidates, including Craig, are facing challenges to their petition signatures that, if successful, could keep them off the ballot.

___

Follow David Eggert at https://twitter.com/DavidEggert00
TUCSON, Ariz. (AP)  A federal appeals court on Thursday upheld a judge's ruling overturning a federal agency's approval of Toronto-based Hudbay Minerals Inc.'s plan for a new open-pit copper mine in southeastern Arizona.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that the U.S. Forest Service's approval of a permit for the Rosemont Mine project in a valley on the eastern flank of the Santa Rita Mountains near Tucson went beyond what is allowed under a federal mining law.

The appellate court cited the planned use of Coronado National Forest land for long-term storage of waste rock, not actual mining, and the lack of valuable minerals on that property.

Hudbay Minerals officials said in a statement Thursday they were reviewing the ruling and would continue to pursue alternative plans for mining part of the Rosemont copper deposit on nearby private lands.

A coalition of environmental and tribal groups challenging the mining hailed the appellate court's decision, the latest in a series of legal obstacles to the project.

This momentous decision makes it clear that Hudbays plan to destroy the beautiful Rosemont Valley is not only a terrible idea, its illegal, said Allison Melton, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity.

Hudbay has another mine project in the works on the western flank of the Santa Ritas.
BOISE, Idaho (AP)  Federal prosecutors say an Idaho woman who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, siege of the U.S. Capitol should be sentenced to two months in jail and ordered to serve community service in part because it was her second time forcing entry into a capitol building.

Pam Hemphill of Boise pleaded guilty earlier this year to one misdemeanor count of parading, demonstrating or picketing in the Capitol Building. In exchange, prosecutors dropped three additional misdemeanor charges.

In a sentencing memo filed in Hemphills case on Wednesday, the federal prosecutors noted that just a few months earlier Hemphill was part of a group of protesters that forced their way into an Idaho Statehouse gallery with limited seating, shattering the window of a door in the process.

Hemphill and other members of the far-right group Peoples Rights were at the Boise Capitol because they were angry over coronavirus-related restrictions, and Hemphill bragged about her actions in Boise while talking to other rioters at the U.S. Capitol last year as they sought to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

In fact, Hemphill may be the only defendant to be sentenced by the court so far who participated in not one, but two capitol building breaches within a year, the federal prosecutors told the court.

Hemphills attorney, Nathan Silver II, declined to comment on the case.

Like many other defendants who have been charged in connection with the siege, Hemphill posted videos to social media sites that showed her in Washington, D.C., in the days surrounding the insurrection and at the Capitol when it was happening.

In one video, she compared breaking windows at the federal building to actions protesters at the Idaho Statehouse had taken. In another, she said she avoided getting into trouble after being found inside the Capitol by telling police that she became lost after being pushed into the building by the crowd. The videos were later removed.

She encouraged others to come to the Capitol for a "WAR on social media, even before she arrived, and further encouraged others out in Washington, D.C. on the evening of January 5 to occupy the Capitol and break the glass like they did in Boise, the prosecutors wrote.

Hemphill also lied to FBI agents when she was arrested, the prosecutors said, claiming she had been pushed into the Capitol by other rioters and saying she helped law enforcement officers keep rioters out of the Capitol.

The prosecutors asked the judge to sentence Hemphill to 60 days incarceration, three years of probation, 60 hours of community service and $500 in restitution. Hemphill is scheduled to be sentenced on May 18.
CHILLICOTHE, Mo. (AP)  A man is dead after he doused himself with liquid and set himself on fire after being stopped by police for erratic driving, Chillicothe police said.

Police said in a news release the events began Wednesday evening when people reported a man was approaching businesses south of Chillicothe and asking for a lighter while carrying a container of flammable liquid.
LEWISTON, Maine (AP)  Kari Morissette, executive director of the Church of Safe Injection, an organization dedicated to harm reduction for drug users, has died. She was 33.

Under her leadership, the organization became certified to operate needle exchange programs in Westbrook, Lewiston, Rumford, Bethel and Dixfield. Morissette recently lobbied for an expansion of the states Good Samaritan law that encourages people to report drug overdoses without fear of arrest. The governor signed the bill into law.
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP)  Louisiana has begun construction of a $67 million project to create miles (kilometers) of oyster reefs to protect the shoreline in a New Orleans suburb.

Money for the Biloxi Marsh Living Shoreline comes from an $8.8 billion restoration fund set up in a settlement with BP after the 2010 oil spill.

A contractor is building breakwaters out of material that will both protect wetlands behind it from wave erosion and provide a place suitable for oyster larvae to settle and grow, creating oyster reefs, the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority said Thursday.

The project is in St. Bernard Parish, southeast of the nearly 40,000-acre (16,000 hectare) Biloxi Wildlife Management Area, which the agency described as home to fish, shrimp, crabs, and waterfowl, and a high-tide refuge for mammals.

The protective breakwater were constructing will reduce shoreline retreat and stabilize hundreds of acres of marshland," said Chip Kline, chairman of the authority. "By sustaining the marshland, we strengthen the critical buffer between hurricane storm surge and the city of New Orleans.

The Biloxi Marsh Living Shoreline will provide approximately 11 miles (nearly 18 kilometers) of shoreline protection in an area that has lost nearly 16,000 acres (6,500 hectares) of coastal land since the 1930s, Executive Director Bren Haase said.

The agency said parts of the shoreline have receded as much as 48 feet (14.6 meters) a year.

With this project, were constructing shoreline protection along Eloi Bay near the mouth of Bayou la Loutre to reverse this process and provide better protection to the region, Haase said.

St. Bernard Parish President Guy McInnis said, The unique challenges we face in coastal Louisiana require innovative solutions like those being implemented by the CPRA. Im glad to see this kind of innovation directed to such an important restoration effort."
Glacier research carried out on Mount Qomolangma

Xinhua) 09:24, May 12, 2022

Photo taken with a mobile phone shows a view of the East Rongbuk glacier on Mount Qomolangma, May 6, 2022. The new comprehensive scientific expedition on Mount Qomolangma, as part of China's second scientific research survey of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, is the country's first scientific research above an altitude of 8,000 meters on the peak.

More than 270 scientific research members from five teams are participating in the expedition.

The glacier and pollutant research team led by Kang Shichang, a researcher with the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), will monitor pollutants, the Rongbuk glacier and ice lake changes, as well as the greenhouse gas emissions from rivers and lakes covering the high-altitude area from the Mount Qomolangma base camp to the East Rongbuk glacier. (Xinhua)

Photo taken with a mobile phone shows a view of the East Rongbuk glacier on Mount Qomolangma, May 7, 2022. The new comprehensive scientific expedition on Mount Qomolangma, as part of China's second scientific research survey of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, is the country's first scientific research above an altitude of 8,000 meters on the peak.

More than 270 scientific research members from five teams are participating in the expedition.

The glacier and pollutant research team led by Kang Shichang, a researcher with the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), will monitor pollutants, the Rongbuk glacier and ice lake changes, as well as the greenhouse gas emissions from rivers and lakes covering the high-altitude area from the Mount Qomolangma base camp to the East Rongbuk glacier. (Xinhua)

Photo taken with a mobile phone shows a view of the East Rongbuk glacier on Mount Qomolangma, May 6, 2022. The new comprehensive scientific expedition on Mount Qomolangma, as part of China's second scientific research survey of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, is the country's first scientific research above an altitude of 8,000 meters on the peak.

More than 270 scientific research members from five teams are participating in the expedition.

The glacier and pollutant research team led by Kang Shichang, a researcher with the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), will monitor pollutants, the Rongbuk glacier and ice lake changes, as well as the greenhouse gas emissions from rivers and lakes covering the high-altitude area from the Mount Qomolangma base camp to the East Rongbuk glacier. (Xinhua)

Photo taken with a mobile phone shows members of the glacier and pollutant research team walking past the East Rongbuk glacier on Mount Qomolangma, May 7, 2022. The new comprehensive scientific expedition on Mount Qomolangma, as part of China's second scientific research survey of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, is the country's first scientific research above an altitude of 8,000 meters on the peak.

More than 270 scientific research members from five teams are participating in the expedition.

The glacier and pollutant research team led by Kang Shichang, a researcher with the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), will monitor pollutants, the Rongbuk glacier and ice lake changes, as well as the greenhouse gas emissions from rivers and lakes covering the high-altitude area from the Mount Qomolangma base camp to the East Rongbuk glacier. (Xinhua)

Kang Shichang (front) checks the working materials on Mount Qomolangma, May 6, 2022. The new comprehensive scientific expedition on Mount Qomolangma, as part of China's second scientific research survey of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, is the country's first scientific research above an altitude of 8,000 meters on the peak.

More than 270 scientific research members from five teams are participating in the expedition.

The glacier and pollutant research team led by Kang Shichang, a researcher with the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), will monitor pollutants, the Rongbuk glacier and ice lake changes, as well as the greenhouse gas emissions from rivers and lakes covering the high-altitude area from the Mount Qomolangma base camp to the East Rongbuk glacier. (Xinhua/Jiang Fan)

Photo taken with a mobile phone shows a member of the glacier and pollutant research team working at the East Rongbuk glacier on Mount Qomolangma, May 6, 2022. The new comprehensive scientific expedition on Mount Qomolangma, as part of China's second scientific research survey of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, is the country's first scientific research above an altitude of 8,000 meters on the peak.

More than 270 scientific research members from five teams are participating in the expedition.

The glacier and pollutant research team led by Kang Shichang, a researcher with the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), will monitor pollutants, the Rongbuk glacier and ice lake changes, as well as the greenhouse gas emissions from rivers and lakes covering the high-altitude area from the Mount Qomolangma base camp to the East Rongbuk glacier. (Xinhua)

Photo taken with a mobile phone shows a view of the East Rongbuk glacier on Mount Qomolangma, May 7, 2022. The new comprehensive scientific expedition on Mount Qomolangma, as part of China's second scientific research survey of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, is the country's first scientific research above an altitude of 8,000 meters on the peak.

More than 270 scientific research members from five teams are participating in the expedition.

The glacier and pollutant research team led by Kang Shichang, a researcher with the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), will monitor pollutants, the Rongbuk glacier and ice lake changes, as well as the greenhouse gas emissions from rivers and lakes covering the high-altitude area from the Mount Qomolangma base camp to the East Rongbuk glacier. (Xinhua)

Aerial photo shows a view of the East Rongbuk glacier on Mount Qomolangma, May 8, 2022. The new comprehensive scientific expedition on Mount Qomolangma, as part of China's second scientific research survey of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, is the country's first scientific research above an altitude of 8,000 meters on the peak.

More than 270 scientific research members from five teams are participating in the expedition.

The glacier and pollutant research team led by Kang Shichang, a researcher with the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), will monitor pollutants, the Rongbuk glacier and ice lake changes, as well as the greenhouse gas emissions from rivers and lakes covering the high-altitude area from the Mount Qomolangma base camp to the East Rongbuk glacier. (Xinhua/Jiang Fan)

Photo taken with a mobile phone shows a member of the glacier and pollutant research team walking past the East Rongbuk glacier on Mount Qomolangma, May 6, 2022. The new comprehensive scientific expedition on Mount Qomolangma, as part of China's second scientific research survey of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, is the country's first scientific research above an altitude of 8,000 meters on the peak.

More than 270 scientific research members from five teams are participating in the expedition.

The glacier and pollutant research team led by Kang Shichang, a researcher with the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), will monitor pollutants, the Rongbuk glacier and ice lake changes, as well as the greenhouse gas emissions from rivers and lakes covering the high-altitude area from the Mount Qomolangma base camp to the East Rongbuk glacier. (Xinhua)

Aerial photo taken on May 1, 2022 shows members of the glacier and pollutant research team heading for the East Rongbuk glacier on Mount Qomolangma. The new comprehensive scientific expedition on Mount Qomolangma, as part of China's second scientific research survey of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, is the country's first scientific research above an altitude of 8,000 meters on the peak.

More than 270 scientific research members from five teams are participating in the expedition.

The glacier and pollutant research team led by Kang Shichang, a researcher with the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), will monitor pollutants, the Rongbuk glacier and ice lake changes, as well as the greenhouse gas emissions from rivers and lakes covering the high-altitude area from the Mount Qomolangma base camp to the East Rongbuk glacier. (Xinhua/Sun Fei)

Photo taken with a mobile phone shows a member of the glacier and pollutant research team working at the East Rongbuk glacier on Mount Qomolangma, May 5, 2022. The new comprehensive scientific expedition on Mount Qomolangma, as part of China's second scientific research survey of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, is the country's first scientific research above an altitude of 8,000 meters on the peak.

More than 270 scientific research members from five teams are participating in the expedition.

The glacier and pollutant research team led by Kang Shichang, a researcher with the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), will monitor pollutants, the Rongbuk glacier and ice lake changes, as well as the greenhouse gas emissions from rivers and lakes covering the high-altitude area from the Mount Qomolangma base camp to the East Rongbuk glacier. (Xinhua)

Combo photo shows Kang Shichang before the research (L) taken on May 1, 2022; and Kang Shichang after a research task of East Rongbuk glacier on Mount Qomolangma taken on May 9, 2022. The new comprehensive scientific expedition on Mount Qomolangma, as part of China's second scientific research survey of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, is the country's first scientific research above an altitude of 8,000 meters on the peak.

More than 270 scientific research members from five teams are participating in the expedition.

The glacier and pollutant research team led by Kang Shichang, a researcher with the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), will monitor pollutants, the Rongbuk glacier and ice lake changes, as well as the greenhouse gas emissions from rivers and lakes covering the high-altitude area from the Mount Qomolangma base camp to the East Rongbuk glacier. (Xinhua/Jiang Fan)

Photo taken with a mobile phone shows a view of the East Rongbuk glacier on Mount Qomolangma, May 6, 2022. The new comprehensive scientific expedition on Mount Qomolangma, as part of China's second scientific research survey of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, is the country's first scientific research above an altitude of 8,000 meters on the peak.

More than 270 scientific research members from five teams are participating in the expedition.

The glacier and pollutant research team led by Kang Shichang, a researcher with the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), will monitor pollutants, the Rongbuk glacier and ice lake changes, as well as the greenhouse gas emissions from rivers and lakes covering the high-altitude area from the Mount Qomolangma base camp to the East Rongbuk glacier. (Xinhua)

Photo taken with a mobile phone shows the base camp of the glacier and pollutant research team at an altitude of 5,800 meters on Mount Qomolangma, May 6, 2022. The new comprehensive scientific expedition on Mount Qomolangma, as part of China's second scientific research survey of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, is the country's first scientific research above an altitude of 8,000 meters on the peak.

More than 270 scientific research members from five teams are participating in the expedition.

The glacier and pollutant research team led by Kang Shichang, a researcher with the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), will monitor pollutants, the Rongbuk glacier and ice lake changes, as well as the greenhouse gas emissions from rivers and lakes covering the high-altitude area from the Mount Qomolangma base camp to the East Rongbuk glacier. (Xinhua)

(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun)
A new phone app that provides customers with a free digital avatar takes high-quality facial-recognition photos.

Thousands of individuals have already uploaded their photos to the New Profile Pic app's servers in exchange for the free avatar. Many people are unaware that Linerock Investments, the firm behind the app, is headquartered in an apartment building overlooking the Moscow River, next to Russia's Ministry of Defense and barely three miles from Red Square.

Warnings Issued Over New Profile Pic App

People must be extremely cautious when submitting images or personal data to a fresh new website, according to Jake Moore, Global Cybersecurity Advisor, ESET Internet Security. According to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists Offshore Leaks database, Linerock Investments Ltd is based in Moscow. A shareholder is located in Panama City, while a director is located in Russia.

FaceApp, a St. Petersburg-based firm, launched in 2017 and allowed customers to upload an image to be aged using Artificial Intelligence. Security experts issued warnings after a viral challenge about the quantity of data the app was transmitting to Russia.

Users who agree to download the app post their location, device information, and other images on their social network feed. According to the spokesperson, they do not disclose any user data in ways that are not specified in their Privacy Policy. They claim that the photographs are routed to their Amazon servers for processing and that no one can see them. According to them, the photographs are destroyed after two weeks, Daily Mail reported.

The software has been downloaded over 1 million times and reviewed by over 30,000 people, according to the Google Play Store. On the App Store, it is the most popular free app. However, the fact-checking website 'Snopes' claims that there is little evidence that this software is any more intrusive in its data collecting than other applications.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists offshore leaks database shows that Linerock Investments Ltd has an address in Moscow and is also linked to the British Virgin Islands, as per Independent. Some analysts suspect, however, that the program, which uses face recognition technology, is transferring photos and data to the Kremlin.

Read Also: US Intel: Why Vladimir Putin Could Declare Martial Law in Russia Amid War With Ukraine

How To Protect Yourself?

Although there is no proof that New Profile Pic is a scam at this time, you should always do due diligence before using new apps. Experts' suspicions of a Russian-based hack or fraud are also being shared on Twitter, with one user labeling the New Profile Pic app a phishing scam.

"The NewProfilePic app in Russian controlled and likely to contain malware," a second Twitter user said. Meanwhile, Cyber HelpLine, which offers professional guidance to victims of cybercrime and online security concerns in the United Kingdom, revealed that the website's overall trust score is only 14%.

Although there is no proof that New Profile Pic is a scam at this time, you should always do due diligence before using new apps. Before downloading a service, check the privacy policy to see whether you consent to reveal personal information without realizing it. You should also use a strong password, biometric features, or two-factor authentication to safeguard your device, according to The Sun.

Related Article: Identity Verification Systems: Ensuring the Integrity of Your Data

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
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WASHINGTON (AP)  Erin Houchin braced for the worst when a mysterious group started buying television ads last month in her highly competitive southern Indiana congressional race.

Houchin assumed she would face a negative blitz, like the one that crushed her in 2016 when she ran for the same seat. But, in fact, the opposite happened.

American Dream Federal Action, a super political action committee financed by a cryptocurrency CEO, saturated the district with ads promoting Houchin as a Trump Tough conservative who would stop the socialists in Washington. That push helped secure her victory last week in a Republican primary.

All you can do is hold your breath, Houchins longtime consultant, Cam Savage, said of when they learned about the ad buy. It could help you, but the fear is it will end you.

The impact of the unsolicited helps shows how cryptocurrency tycoons are emerging as the new political power players. They are pouring millions of dollars into primary elections as they try to gain influence over members of Congress and other government officials who are crafting regulations.

This year, for the first time, industry executives have spent nearly $20 million so far, according to records and interviews.

Its a delicate but deliberate march by companies that make money based in part on evading government attention.

More than $100 million also has been spent lobbying since 2018 by crypto companies, as well as those who potentially stand to lose if the industry goes mainstream, records show.

The push comes as the Biden administration and Congress consider new regulations and set funding levels for agencies that will oversee crypto.

What do they want? They want no regulation, or they want to help write the regulation. What else is new? asked Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, an industry critic.

Cryptocurrencies are a digital asset that can be traded over the internet without relying on the global banking system. Theyve been promoted as a way for that those with limited means to build wealth by investing in the next big thing.

But theyre also highly speculative and often lack transparency, which substantially increases risk. On Thursday, cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, plunged in value.

Jan Santiago, deputy director of Global Anti-Scam, an organization that helps victims of cryptocurrency fraud, said the industry has been reluctant to police bad actors.

Unless it affects their bottom line or public reputation, I dont think theres any financial incentive for them, he said.

There are signs that crypto is going mainstream. Fidelity Investments, one of the nations largest providers of retirement accounts, announced earlier this month it will start allowing investors to put Bitcoin in their 401(k) accounts.

And there are indications that the government is increasing scrutiny.

The Securities and Exchange Commission unveiled a plan last week that would nearly double the size of its staff focused on cryptocurrency oversight. Days later, the Justice Department indicted the CEO of a cryptocurrency platform and mining operation, alleging he orchestrated a $62 million global investment fraud scheme.

Meanwhile, members of Congress and the administration have raised concerns that Russian oligarchs could turn to cryptocurrency to evade U.S. sanctions put in place when Russia invaded Ukraine.

But at least one lawmaker has been an active participant in promoting the allure of crypto riches.

Rep. Madison Cawthorn, a conservative Republican from North Carolina, touted a new crypto coin in a video posted to social media, emphatically declaring, This is going to the moon, baby, while urging viewers to visit the coins website and get on the train. But after an initial spike, it plunged in value and is now worth a small fraction of a penny.

Cryptocurrency advocates in Congress acknowledge problems but argue the roughly $2 trillion industry has matured.

Im confident that bitcoin protects consumers, said Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., who has invested in the currency. Im not confident that all cryptocurrencies protect consumers. In fact, Im willing to bet that the majority of those are fraudulent.

Many cryptocurrency proponents vehemently opposed regulation. But lobbyists say thats now a settled debate and their aim is to convince skeptics not to have too heavy a regulatory hand.

Perianne Boring, founder of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, makes the case for developing accounting standards for the industry to help crypto firms become publicly traded companies.

Because there are no standards, many businesses are hesitant to touch cryptocurrency, said Boring, whose group has spent nearly $2 million lobbying the federal government.

Some lobbyists are hoping that a wave of campaign spending could help, much of it directed to Democratic primary races.

Folks in crypto are, all of a sudden, happy to go to political fundraisers, said Kristin Smith, the executive director of the Blockchain Association. Smith, whose group has spent about $4 million on lobbying since 2018. She added, The government could actually come in and really mess it up if we arent constructively engaging.

That's fostered sense of resentment among some Democrats. In suburban Atlanta, Democratic Reps. Carolyn Bourdeaux and Lucy McBath, are squaring off after their districts were merged during redistricting. A crypto-affiliated super PAC is backing McBath, paying for $2 million in TV advertising that praises her.

They are not doing this out of the goodness of their heart. They are doing this because they want something, Bourdeaux said.

A spokesman for the group Protect Our Future said the expenditures have nothing to do with cryptocurrency regulation.

Crypto super PACs are also active in other marquee races, including Pennsylvanias Democratic Senate primary, where $212,000 was spent last week on ads backing John Fetterman, the states Democratic lieutenant governor. The ads say Fetterman wont get schmoozed by lobbyists or bossed around by politicians.

But overall, the spending is on such a scale that it has generated questions about the industrys motives.

It tells every Democrat that, if you have a primary, they could come in with $2 million," said Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Financial Services subcommittee overseeing investor protection. "They are certainly making a point.
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DALLAS (AP)  The Dallas police chief said Thursday that they don't believe a shooting at a hair salon in Dallas' Koreatown area that injured three women was a hate crime.

In this particular case, we have no evidence to point that hate is a factor, and to say otherwise would be irresponsible for us, to have a community live in fear, Dallas police chief Eddie Garcia said.

If there were a nexus to hate, we certainly would be conducting outreach to ensure our community knows, Garcia said.

Authorities are still searching for a man dressed all in black who shot the three women Wednesday afternoon at Hair World Salon, which is in a shopping center with many businesses owned by Korean Americans. Police say the shooter drove off in a maroon minivan.

The three women were taken to a hospital with injuries that weren't life-threatening, police said.

The daughter of one of the injured women said her mother told her that the man, who she didn't recognize, calmly walked in, opened fire and then left.

He was calm. He just walked up to it and then stood there  didnt walk around  but stood there and shot like 20 shots and then just calmly went out, said Jane Bae, who wasnt there but had spoken with her mother.

Dallas Police Sgt. Warren Mitchell told KDFW that police believe the shooter shouted something when he came in, but police hadn't figured out what it was.

Police said they were looking into reports of a dispute earlier in the day involving a customer to see if it's connected to the shooting. Were not ruling it out, but right now I dont want to relate the two unless Im for sure, Mitchell said.

Bae said that her mother, who owns the salon, and a salon worker were shot, in addition to a customer.

She said her mother said the worker who was shot had spotted the man with a gun heading toward the salon and ran toward the door shouting no' and tried to lock it, but wasn't able to do so it in time.

Bae said her mother doesn't recall the shooter saying anything.

She said her mother was shot in the feet, and the salon worker was shot in the arm. She didn't know about the customer's injuries.

On April 2, a drive-by shooting was reported at the shopping center where the salon is located, police said. Police got multiple calls related to that incident. Police said they are investigating it but did not say if they believed there was any connection.

Jarely Martinez, who works as a dental assistant in an office in the shopping center, said she didn't hear the gunshots on Wednesday but heard the sirens from emergency vehicles and walked out and saw a woman covered in blood.

She said she wasn't working on April 2, but a window of the dentist's office was damaged in that shooting.

It feels a little nerve-wracking coming to work, Martinez said Thursday.
COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP)  Denmarks top prosecuting authority said Thursday that it would seek to have a former defense minister's parliamentary immunity lifted so he could be charged with illegally disclosing "highly classified information.

The office of the director of public prosecutions said it would contact Denmark's parliament, the Folketing, regarding the immunity of Claus Hjort Frederiksen. He served as the country's defense minister from November 2016 to June 2019.

Details of the accusations against Hjort Frederiksen could not be given because of the special nature of the case that involves sensitive information, the Danish Ministry of Justice said in a statement.

Hjort Frederiksen, who has been a lawmaker in parliament since 2005 and is a senior member of Denmark's opposition Liberals, faces up to 12 years in prison if convicted of the unauthorized disclosure of highly classified information.

Danish media have speculated the case might be linked to allegations that Denmarks foreign secret service helped the United States spy on European leaders, including former German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

In a December television interview, Hjort Frederiksen spoke about a secret eavesdropping deal the United States and Denmark made in the late 1990s.

I must risk a prison sentence. ... I have informed (Danish officials) that this agreement existed, he said.

The deal gave the Danish intelligence community a lot of useful information and the status of a trusted partner of the U.S., Hjort Frederiksen said.

Danish broadcaster DR has reported that the Danish Defense Intelligence Service, known in Denmark by its acronym FE, conducted an internal investigation in 2014 into whether the U.S. National Security Agency had used its cooperation with the Danes to spy on Denmark and neighboring countries.

The probe, codenamed Operation Dunhammer, concluded that the NSA eavesdropped on political leaders and officials in Germany, France, Sweden and Norway.

Hjort Frederiksen responded to prosecutors' moves Thursday by lashing out at the Social Democratic government.

I sincerely hope that the public and all members of the Folketing can now gain insight into what it is that the government believes that I have done that is considered treason, he told Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet.

Hjort Frederiksen told broadcaster TV2 that according to my understanding I have not revealed any secrets. This whole case started in 2013 when (former NSA contractor Edward) Snowden leaked papers he got hold of from the NSA. These documents revealed details of secret U.S. eavesdropping programs.

It has been widely discussed, he told TV2 on Thursday.

Hjort Frederiksen, 74, was defense minister from November 2016 to June 2019. He also was the chairman of the Danish parliaments Intelligence Services Committee from 2019 to 2020, and a former minister for finance (2009-2016) and for employment (20012009).

Danish media also have speculated that the case could be connected to the December arrest of Denmarks former foreign intelligence chief. Lars Findsen was held in pre-trial custody on a preliminary charge of disclosing highly classified information before an appeals court ordered his release in February.

In Denmark, preliminary charges are one step short of formal charges but allow authorities to keep criminal suspects in custody during an investigation.

Details of the allegations against Findsen, who was suspended in August 2020, also are unknown, and the case has been shrouded in secrecy.
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PHOENIX (AP)  Arizonas nearly eight-year hiatus in using the death penalty ended with the execution of Clarence Dixon for killing a college student 44 years ago, making him the sixth person to be put to death in the U.S. so far this year.

Dixon's death Wednesday for the 1978 killing of 21-year-old Arizona State University student Deana Bowdoin broke the lull in Arizonas use of capital punishment caused by a 2014 execution that critics say was botched and the difficulty that state officials faced in sourcing lethal injection drugs.

Dixon's death appeared to track the states protocol, though the medical team had some difficulty finding a vein to administer the lethal drugs. They first tried his arms and then made an incision in his groin area. That process took about 25 minutes.

After the drugs were injected, Dixons mouth stayed open and his body did not move. The execution was declared completed about 10 minutes after he was injected.

Another Arizona death row prisoner, Frank Atwood, is scheduled to be executed on June 8 in the killing of 8-year-old Vicki Lynne Hoskinson in 1984. Authorities have said Atwood kidnapped the girl.

The childs remains was discovered in the desert northwest of Tucson nearly seven months after her disappearance. Experts could not determine the cause of death from the bones that were found, according to court records. Arizona now has 112 prisoners left on the states death row.

In the final weeks of Dixons life, his lawyers tried to postpone the execution, but judges rejected the argument that he was not mentally fit to be executed and did not have a rational understanding of why the state wanted to execute him. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a last-minute delay of Dixons execution less than an hour before the execution began.

Dixon earlier declined the option of being killed in Arizonas gas chamber that was refurbished in 2020  a method that has not been used in the U.S. in more than two decades. He had been on death row since his 2008 conviction.

Dixons death was announced late Wednesday morning by Frank Strada, a deputy director with Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry.

Strada said that shortly before he was executed with pentobarbital, Dixon declared: The Arizona Supreme Court should follow the laws. They denied my appeals and petitions to change the outcome of this trial. I do and will always proclaim innocence. Now, lets do this (expletive).

And as prison medical staff put an IV line in Dixons thigh in preparation for the injection, he chided them, saying: This is really funny  trying to be as thorough as possible while you are trying to kill me.

Leslie James, Bowdoins older sister and a witness to the execution, told reporters after it was conducted that Deana Bowdoin had been poised to graduate from ASU and was planning a career in international marketing. James described her sister as a hard worker who loved to travel, spoke multiple languages and wrote poetry.

She characterized the execution as a relief but criticized how long it took to happen: This process was way, way, way too long, James said.

The last time Arizona executed a prisoner was in July 2014, when Joseph Wood was given 15 doses of a two-drug combination over two hours in an execution that his lawyers said was botched. Wood snorted repeatedly and gasped more than 600 times before he died, and an execution that normally would take 10 minutes to complete lasted nearly two hours. The process dragged on for so long that the Arizona Supreme Court convened an emergency hearing during the execution to decide whether to halt the procedure.

States including Arizona have struggled to buy execution drugs in recent years after U.S. and European pharmaceutical companies began blocking the use of their products in lethal injections.

Authorities have said Bowdoin, who was found dead in her apartment in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe, had been raped, stabbed and strangled with a belt.

Dixon, who lived across the street from Bowdoin, had been charged with raping Bowdoin, but the rape charge was later dropped on statute-of-limitation grounds. He was convicted of murder in her killing.

In arguing that Dixon was mentally unfit, his lawyers said he erroneously believed he would be executed because police at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff wrongfully arrested him in another case  a 1985 attack on a 21-year-old student. His attorneys conceded he was lawfully arrested by Flagstaff police.

Dixon was sentenced to life in prison in that case for sexual assault and other convictions. DNA samples taken while he was in prison later linked him to Bowdoins killing, which had been unsolved.

Prosecutors said there was nothing about Dixons beliefs that prevented him from understanding the reason for the execution and pointed to court filings that Dixon himself made over the years.

Defense lawyers said Dixon was repeatedly diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, regularly experienced hallucinations over the past 30 years and was found not guilty by reason of insanity in a 1977 assault case in which the verdict was delivered by then-Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sandra Day OConnor, nearly four years before her appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Bowdoin was killed two days after that verdict, according to court records.

___

This story has been updated to correct the last name of the prisoner on first reference. He is Clarence Dixon, not Clarence Davis.

___

Billeaud reported from Phoenix. Associated Press writer Bob Christie in Phoenix contributed to this report.
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BRUSSELS (AP)  Its likely to be the quickest NATO enlargement ever and one that would redraw Europes security map. Finnish leaders announced Thursday their belief that Finland should join the worlds biggest military organization because of Russia's war in Ukraine. Sweden could soon follow suit.

Should they apply for membership, the move would have far-reaching ramifications for Northern Europe and trans-Atlantic security.

No doubt, it will also anger their large neighbor Russia, which blames, at least in part, its war in Ukraine on NATOs continued expansion closer to its borders. It's unclear how Russian President Vladimir Putin might retaliate. The Kremlin said Thursday that it certainly won't improve European security.

The following is a brief look at what Finland and Sweden's membership in the 30-country NATO alliance could mean, with the Nordic partners expected to announce their intention to join within days.

FINLAND AND SWEDEN

Not neutral like Switzerland, Finland and Sweden traditionally think of themselves as militarily nonaligned.

But Russias war in Ukraine and Putins apparent desire to establish a Moscow-centered sphere of influence has shaken their security notions to the core. Just days after he ordered the Feb. 24 invasion, public opinion shifted dramatically.

Support in Finland for NATO membership has hovered around 20-30% for years. It now stands at over 70%. The two are NATOs closest partners but maintaining good ties with Russia has been an important part of their foreign policy, particularly for Finland.

Now they hope for security support from NATO states  primarily the United States  in case Moscow retaliates. Britain pledged on Wednesday to come to their aid.

THE NORDIC REGION

NATO membership for the two, joining regional neighbors Denmark, Norway and Iceland, would formalize their joint security and defense work in ways that their Nordic Defense Cooperation pact hasn't.

NORDEFCO, as its known, focuses on cooperation. Working within NATO means putting forces under joint command.

Accession would tighten the strategic Nordic grip on the Baltic Sea  Russias maritime point of access to the city of St. Petersburg and its Kaliningrad exclave.

Finland and Sweden also join them, along with Iceland, at the heart of the triangle formed with the North Atlantic and maritime areas in the Arctic, to where Russia projects its military might from the northern Kola Peninsula. Integrated NATO military planning will become a lot simpler, making the region easier to defend.

NATO

Finland and Sweden are NATOs closest partners. They contribute to the alliances operations and air policing.

Most importantly, they already meet NATOs membership criteria, on functioning democracies, good neighborly relations, clear borders and armed forces that are in lock-step with the allies. After the invasion, they formally boosted information exchanges with NATO and sit in on every meeting on war issues.

Both are modernizing their armed forces and investing in new equipment. Finland is purchasing dozens of high-end F-35 warplanes. Sweden has top quality fighter jets, the Gripen.

Finland says its already hit NATOs defense spending guideline of 2% of gross domestic product. Sweden too is ramping up its military budget and expects to reach the target by 2028. The NATO average was estimated at 1.6% last year.

RUSSIA

Putin has demanded that NATO stop expanding and in his May 9 speech blamed the West for the war.

But public opinion in Finland and Sweden suggests that he has driven them into NATOs arms.

If Finland joins, it would double the length of the alliances border with Russia, adding a further 1,300 kilometers (830 miles) for Moscow to defend.

Putin has promised a military, technical response if they join. But many troops from Russias western district near Finland were sent to Ukraine, and those units suffered heavy casualties, Western military officers say.

So far, Moscow is doing nothing obvious to dissuade the two  apart perhaps from a couple of incidents where Russian planes entered their airspace. The Kremlin said Thursday that its response could depend on how close NATO infrastructure moves toward Russia's borders.

Some at NATO worry that the Russians might deploy nuclear weapons or more hypersonic missiles to the Kaliningrad exclave, across the Baltic Sea wedged between allies Poland and Lithuania.

___

Karl Ritter in Stockholm, and Jari Tanner in Helsinki, contributed to this report.
Anthony Fauci delivered a bizarre commencement address on Saturday at the University of Michigan, where he implied freedom of speech should be the next lockdown target.

After botching the Covid pandemic, team Fauci needs a backup plan to reduce their accountability in the upcoming midterm elections.

Fauci sang from the same song sheet recently used by other officials in the Biden Administration. Their top priority has become to control information and demonize those who dare to question the powers-that-be, in order to limit the political fallout that would otherwise drive liberals out of office.

It is our collective responsibility not to sink to a tacit acceptance of the normalization of untruths, Fauci urged the college graduates.

Ironically, this was a combined graduation of several years for students who were denied a timely commencement ceremony because of the very misguided restraints imposed by Fauci.

A generation ago, liberal speakers urged college graduates to embark on the lifelong pursuit of free inquiry that they were supposedly encouraged by higher education to embrace. Todays liberals urge the opposite approach, to lock down debate and criticism of anything contrary to what Leftist elites dictate.

There Fauci stood, maskless, giving an address that lasted not even 15 minutes in bestowing his words of wisdom during the "Comeback Commencement." Much of America has stopped listening to Fauci altogether; as recently as two weeks ago he had to reverse his statement that the pandemic was over because the White House tells us the opposite.

Apparently not even the media can restore credibility to a man who has so often contradicted himself.

Prior to the onset of the pandemic, Fauci disparaged mask-wearing as paranoid, and after the pandemic began he criticized drug store masks as ineffective, yet before long Fauci became insistent on mandatory mask mandates, even for schoolchildren having little to fear from Covid.

Fauci has demanded mandatory vaccination, but recently the federal government had to reverse its recommendation for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine because of the severe injuries it apparently caused. Last week federal agencies admitted to 60 confirmed cases of a deadly clotting disorder known as thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome associated with the vaccine.

The chant by public health authorities of anecdotal and no evidence of harm caused by Covid vaccines stopped last week as the government confirmed nine deaths from the vaccine adverse effect. It took the federal government more than a year to admit to this vaccine-related harm after it was identified in early April 2021, then recognized but ignored by the Biden Administration.

On Sunday, despite being fully vaccinated with boosters, New York Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul tweeted to the public that she just tested positive for Covid. Cases have recently risen in New York to high rates not seen since January.

Against this backdrop, a new $10 billion spending bill for Covid has stalled in Congress, as congressional leaders instead focus on sending four times as much money to the government of Ukraine. It remains to be seen how Congressmen will explain to voters this fall that they prioritized sending money to a distant war before helping Americans against Covid.

Faucis odd phrase decrying a tacit acceptance of the normalization of untruths sounds eerily like the Disinformation Governance Board that was revealed on April 27 by another functionary in the Biden Administration. The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, spilled the beans about that agency in his testimony to Congress.

Last Friday, the commencement speaker at the University of Minnesota Medical School graduation was Andy Slavitt, MBA, who was a senior Covid advisor to Biden. Slavitt criticized President Trumps approach in 2020, while praising liberal New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for his tightfisted extreme lockdown.

But many more Americans have died from the coronavirus under Biden than under Trump, and a tidal wave of new infections is predicted. The latest estimate is that 100 million Americans will be infected by coronavirus this fall, which may be rattling the economy now. Despite this, Biden demands that Congress place greater importance on rushing $40 billion in new funding to Ukraine before helping Americans harmed by Bidens mishandling of the Covid pandemic.

Mandatory vaccination has not averted the continued harm caused to millions of Americans by Covid. There is a loss in credibility by public health officials, who long pushed forced vaccination and masking that appears to have accomplished nothing or worse.

Perhaps realizing the public no longer believes the sermonizing by Fauci and others, Democrats shift their game plan to control information and silence dissent. Fewer will realize how badly the socialists approach to the Covid pandemic has failed if criticism of it is marginalized and blocked.
WASHINGTON (AP)  A House panel issued subpoenas Thursday to House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and four other GOP lawmakers in its probe into the violent Jan. 6 insurrection, an extraordinary step that has little precedent and is certain to further inflame partisan tensions over the 2021 attack.

The panel is investigating McCarthys conversations with then-President Donald Trump the day of the attack and meetings the four other lawmakers had with the White House beforehand as Trump and his aides worked to overturn his 2020 election defeat. The former president's supporters violently pushed past police that day, broke through windows and doors of the Capitol and interrupted the certification of President Joe Biden's victory.

The decision to issue subpoenas to McCarthy, R-Calif., and Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Andy Biggs of Arizona and Mo Brooks of Alabama is a dramatic show of force by the panel, which has already interviewed nearly 1,000 witnesses and collected more than 100,000 documents as it investigates the worst attack on the Capitol in two centuries.

The move is not without risk, as Republicans are favored to capture back the House majority in this fall's midterm elections and have promised retribution for Democrats if they take control.

After the announcement, McCarthy, who aspires to be House speaker, told reporters I have not seen a subpoena" and said his view on the Jan. 6 committee has not changed since the nine-lawmaker panel asked for his voluntary cooperation earlier this year.

They're not conducting a legitimate investigation, McCarthy said. "Seems as though they just want to go after their political opponents.

Similarly, Perry told reporters the investigation is a charade and said the subpoena is all about headlines.

Neither man said whether he would comply.

The panel, made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans, had previously asked for voluntary cooperation from the five lawmakers, along with a handful of other GOP members, but all of them refused to speak with the panel, which debated for months whether to issue the subpoenas.

Before we hold our hearings next month, we wished to provide members the opportunity to discuss these matters with the committee voluntarily, said Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Democratic chairman of the panel. Regrettably, the individuals receiving subpoenas today have refused and were forced to take this step to help ensure the committee uncovers facts concerning January 6th.

Rep. Liz Cheney, the panels Republican vice chair, said the step wasnt taken lightly. The unwillingness of the lawmakers to provide relevant information about the attack, she said, is a very serious and grave situation.

Congressional subpoenas for sitting members of Congress, especially for a party leader, have little precedent in recent decades, and it is unclear what the consequences would be if any or all of the five men decline to comply. The House has voted to hold two other noncompliant witnesses, former Trump aides Steve Bannon and Mark Meadows, in contempt, referring their cases to the Justice Department.

In announcing the subpoenas, the Jan. 6 panel said there is historical precedent for the move and noted that the House Ethics Committee has issued a number of subpoenas to Members of Congress for testimony or documents, though such actions are generally done secretly.

We recognize this is fairly unprecedented," said Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, the other GOP member of the panel, after the committee announced the subpoenas. "But the Jan. 6 attack was very unprecedented.

Kinzinger said it is "important for us to get every piece of information we possibly can.

McCarthy has acknowledged he spoke with Trump on Jan. 6 as Trumps supporters were beating police outside the Capitol and forcing their way into the building. But he has not shared many details. The committee requested information about his conversations with Trump before, during and after the riot.

McCarthy took to the House floor after the rioters were cleared and said in a forceful speech that Trump bears responsibility for the attack and that it was the saddest day I have ever had in Congress  even as he went on to join 138 other House Republicans in voting to reject the election results.

Another member of the GOP caucus, Washington Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, said after the attack that McCarthy had recounted that he told Trump to publicly call off the riot and said the violent mob was made up of Trump supporters, not far-left antifa members, as Trump had claimed.

Thats when, according to McCarthy, the president said, Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are, Herrera Beutler said in a statement last year.

The GOP leader soon made up with Trump, though, visiting him in Florida and rallying House Republicans to vote against investigations of the attack.

The other four men were in touch with the White House for several weeks ahead of the insurrection, talking to Trump and his legal advisers about ways to stop the congressional electoral count on Jan. 6 to certify Joe Biden's victory.

These members include those who participated in meetings at the White House, those who had direct conversations with President Trump leading up to and during the attack on the Capitol, and those who were involved in the planning and coordination of certain activities on and before January 6th, the committee said in a release.

Brooks, who has since been critical of Trump, spoke alongside the former president at the massive rally in front of the White House the morning of Jan. 6, telling supporters to start taking down names and kicking ass before hundreds of them broke into the Capitol.

Perry spoke to the White House about replacing acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen with an official who was more sympathetic to Trumps false claims of voter fraud, and Biggs was involved in plans to bring protesters to Washington and pressuring state officials to overturn the legitimate election results, according to the panel. Jordan, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, spoke to Trump on Jan. 6 and was also involved in strategizing how to overturn the election.

Several of their efforts were detailed in texts released to the panel by Meadows, who was Trumps chief of staff at the time.

11 days to 1/6 and 25 days to inauguration, Perry texted Meadows on Dec. 26, 2020. "We gotta get going!

___

Associated Press writer Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pa., contributed to this report.
Newly purchased Lavender Ridge will continue its care for patients at its four assisted-living facilities in Illinois, though it will do so under the StoneBridge umbrella.

StoneBridge, owned by the Lierman family, purchased the four properties earlier this month.

According to Morgan County property records, the Jacksonville location at 750 W. Walnut St. was sold to the Lierman Family Co. XX LLC in a $6.7 million deal. The company also purchased locations in Effingham, Mount Vernon and Olney.

Melissa Hartrich, a spokeswoman for StoneBridge, said the addition of the four Illinois locations increases StoneBridge's properties to 22.

"At StoneBridge we believe its a privilege to care for residents as they age," Hartrich said. "Thats why were committed to the best possible care for each individual resident and their families at every StoneBridge location.

"With similar culture and a common commitment to providing the best memory care, the combination of these two companies is a wonderful fit for StoneBridge and Lavender Ridge."

StoneBridge is a family-owned company started more than 50 years ago by Gloria Lierman, who was a nurse. The business has remained in the family.

"StoneBridge was founded by nurse Gloria Lierman over 50 years ago, she instilled a family-centered and care-oriented culture that is alive in our hearts today," Hartrich said.

The purchase of Lavender Ridge is not expected to alter the services offered at the Jacksonville location.

"Were not here to change what Lavender Ridge does, only help do things better," Hartrich said. "Memory care has been part of the StoneBridge offering for many years and we understand the challenges, the nuances of caring for people with special aging needs."



The purchase will provide more resources for all the locations under the StoneBridge umbrella, Hartrich said.

StoneBridge offers memory care, rehabilitation care, assisted living and skilled nursing services for its patients.

"Our goal is to continue to provide the high-quality care and services that the Jacksonville community has come to expect from this facility," Hartrich said. "We are committed to remaining consistent with current operations by retaining all current staff and programming to the best of our abilities knowing that consistency is key in the lives of our residents."
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP)  Nineteen years after a woman was raped near Topeka, a man has been convicted of the crime after authorities determined his DNA linked him to the crime.

Pernell Adam Mack Jr., was convicted Wednesday of rape, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated burglary, aggravated robbery and aggravated criminal sodomy, District Attorney Mike Kagay said in a news release.
Michael Sohn/AP

DETROIT (AP)  Mercedes-Benz is telling the owners of more than 292,000 vehicles in the U.S. to stop driving them due to a problem that could cause the brakes to fail.

The German automaker is recalling the vehicles and says it will offer free towing so the owners can get them to a dealership for service. The recall covers certain ML, GL and R-Class vehicles from the 2006 through 2012 model years.
Former President Donald Trump must fulfill numerous requirements to avoid a civil contempt judgment being reinstated against him, including paying $110,000 in penalties and explaining how his namesake firm handled Post-it notes, according to a New York judge.

Judge Arthur Engoron requested sworn declarations explaining the Trump Organization's document retention and destruction procedures, as well as a study of five boxes associated with Donald Trump that was stored off-site. The restrictions must be completed by May 20, or the judge will reinstate the contempt finding and apply it retrospectively.

Judge Conditionally Lifts Donald Trump's Civil Contempt Order

Engoron agreed to let Trump put the money in an escrow account while he appealed the contempt verdict. "I want the fee paid," he told Trump's lawyer. "That fine is now $110,000." When Trump's attorneys presented more sworn declarations, including one from Trump, describing his efforts to comply with the New York attorney general's office's request for records, the court suspended the clock on the punishment as of last Friday.

In a statement, New York Attorney General Letitia James said Wednesday's contempt ruling sends a clear message to Donald Trump and his company, which she claims has sought to obstruct the investigation for years, that no one is above the law, as per CNN.

Following a private phone call with the parties involved in the case, Engoron gave his order. In April, lawyers for the attorney general indicated that James' civil probe is on track to end in a lawsuit against Trump, his family business, and top company officials.

Investigators claim they've found proof that Trump Organization officials routinely undervalued firm properties by hundreds of millions of dollars to profit themselves. As James' almost three-year investigation concludes, Trump has said, through his attorney Alina Habba, that he has no more evidence to personally hand over since he never puts anything in the paper, whether by email or text.

When Engoron asked about Trump's fondness for writing on Post-it notes, assistant Attorney General Kevin Wallace claimed the government had discovered proof that the digitally averse Trump did so daily. In a parallel criminal probe to James', the Trump Organization's long-serving chief financial officer Weisselberg and the corporation pled not guilty to criminal fraud charges. Prosecutors claim they participated in a daring 15-year tax evasion plan in which they avoided paying over $1 million in taxes.

Read Also: China "Working Hard" to Strengthen Military for Taiwan Takeover, Says Top US Intelligence Exec

Judge's Criteria in Line With Letitia James' Conditions

Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan DA, has stated that the investigation he took over might still end in Trump being charged. However, the resignations of two of the investigation's top detectives, who indicated they believe Trump is guilty of several felonies, have led many to assume he will not face criminal charges.

Lawyers representing Trump and his adult children, Ivanka and Don Jr., were set to argue against a separate Engoron ruling forcing them to sit for depositions in James' inquiry before the Appellate Division, First Department later Wednesday, according to New York Daily News.

Trump added in a second affidavit filed with the petition that no pertinent papers had not yet been produced. He also stated that he had two cell phones: one for personal use that he gave in March for search as part of the subpoena and another that he submitted in May. Also, he was just granted a second phone that he solely uses to post on Truth Social, the social media network he founded after being banned from Twitter, Facebook, and other sites.

Engoron's criteria for relieving the contempt finding were broadly by James's office's requirements in its response Monday to Trump and his legal team's long submission last week in which they claimed they had exhausted all efforts to locate the requested data.

The conditions sought by James's office were: Trump submitting another affidavit detailing his and his company's document retention and destruction policies; allowing the outside firm Trump hired, HaystackID, to finish going through 17 boxes kept at an off-site storage facility, and for that company to issue a report on its findings and turn over any relevant documents, Market Watch reported.

Related Article: Trump-Backed Nebraska Gubernatorial Candidate Loses Republican Primary Amid Sexual Assault Investigation

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ABUJA, Nigeria (AP)  A student was beaten and burnt to death Thursday by fellow students in northwestern Nigeria after she was accused of making a blasphemous social media post, witnesses and police said.

Deborah Samuel was killed in the Shehu Shagari College of Education in Sokoto state after being accused of making a social media post that blasphemed ... Prophet Muhammad," according to a police statement. Two students have been arrested in connection with the incident.

Authorities also closed the school indefinitely, in a bid to calm frayed nerves in that part of Nigeria where residents have in the past violently reacted to actions or comments deemed anti-Islamic.

Samuels killing caused outrage and shock among many Nigerians on social media.

The incident highlights the deep religious tension in Africas most populous country that's almost evenly divided between Christians in the south and Muslims in the north. An atheist was in April sentenced to 24 years in prison over a social media post a court in the northern Kano state found to be blasphemous against Islam.

Witnesses said Samuel, a second-year college student whose age was not made public, was immediately attacked by her fellow students after she criticized a religion-related post on the students' WhatsApp group.

She was angry the way Muslims were talking about Islamic affairs in that WhatsApp group, which made her to make some un-Islamic utterances against Prophet Mohammed, said Basharu Guyawa Isa, a resident and human rights activist in Sokoto.

The school authority quickly deployed security personnel to protect Samuel but they were overpowered by angry youths.

Students forcefully removed the victim from the security room where she was hidden by the school authorities, killed her and burnt the building, said Sokoto police spokesperson Sanusi Abubakar.

A video of the incident posted on social media and verified by The Associated Press showed Samuel lying on the ground as she was stoned and beaten with planks. The young men surrounding her then dumped tires on her, and set them ablaze.

Abubakar said two students have been arrested in connection with the incident while an investigation directed by Sokoto Governor Aminu Tambuwal is underway.

The suspects in the viral video on Twitter were spotted and will be (identified) soon, he said.
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SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  North Korea imposed a nationwide lockdown Thursday to control its first acknowledged COVID-19 outbreak after holding for more than two years to a widely doubted claim of a perfect record keeping out the virus that has spread to nearly every place in the world.

The outbreak forced leader Kim Jong Un to wear a mask in public, likely for the first time since the start of the pandemic, but the scale of transmissions inside North Korea wasn't immediately known.

A failure to slow infections could have serious consequences because the country has a poor health care system and its 26 million people are believed to be mostly unvaccinated. Some experts say North Korea, by its rare admission of an outbreak, may be seeking outside aid.

However, hours after North Korea confirmed the outbreak, South Koreas military said it detected the North had fired three suspected ballistic missiles toward the sea. It was its 16th round of missile launches this year  brinkmanship aimed at forcing the United States to accept North Korea as a nuclear power and negotiate sanctions relief and other concessions from a position of strength.

The official Korean Central News Agency said tests of virus samples collected Sunday from an unspecified number of people with fevers in the capital, Pyongyang, confirmed they were infected with the omicron variant.

In response, Kim called at a ruling party Politburo meeting for a thorough lockdown of cities and counties and said workplaces should be isolated by units to block the virus from spreading. He urged health workers to step up disinfection efforts at workplaces and homes and mobilize reserve medical supplies.

Kim said it was crucial to control transmissions and eliminate the infection source as fast as possible, while also easing inconveniences to the public caused by the virus controls. He insisted the country will overcome the outbreak because its government and people are united as one.

Despite the elevated virus response, Kim ordered officials to push ahead with scheduled construction, agricultural development and other state projects while bolstering the countrys defense posture to avoid any security vacuum.

North Koreas state TV showed Kim and other senior officials wearing masks as they entered a meeting room, although Kim removed his mask to speak into a set of microphones. Still photos distributed by KNCA showed Kim unmasked and sitting at the head of a table where all other officials remained masked.

South Koreas Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korean affairs, couldn't immediately confirm whether it was the first time state media showed Kim wearing a mask since the start of the pandemic. Kim has previously spoken to huge crowds without a mask as he praised the country's earlier pandemic response, and his decision to be seen with a mask could be aimed at raising public vigilance.

North Korea, which has maintained strict anti-virus controls at its borders for more than two years, didnt provide further details about its new lockdown. But an Associated Press photographer on the South Korean side of the border saw dozens of people working in fields or walking on footpaths at a North Korean border town  an indication the lockdown doesn't require people to stay home, or it exempts farm work.

The measures described in state media and Kims declaration that economic goals should still be met could indicate that North Korea is focusing more on restricting travel and supplies between regions, analyst Cheong Seong-Chang at South Koreas Sejong Institute said.

North Koreas government has shunned vaccines offered by the U.N.-backed COVAX distribution program, possibly because they have international monitoring requirements.

Seoul's Unification Ministry said South Korea is willing to provide medical assistance and other help to North Korea based on humanitarian considerations. Relations between the Koreas have deteriorated since 2019 amid a stalemate in nuclear negotiations and the North's increasingly provocative weapons tests.

In Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Beijing is offering North Korea help in dealing with the outbreak. North Korea has reportedly rejected previous Chinese offers of domestically developed vaccines.

Kim Sin-gon, a professor at Seouls Korea University College of Medicine, said North Korea is likely signaling its willingness to receive outside vaccines, but wants many more doses than offered by COVAX to inoculate its entire population multiple times. He said North Korea would also want COVID-19 medicines and medical equipment shipments that are banned by U.N. sanctions.

Omicron spreads much more easily than earlier variants of the coronavirus, and its fatality and hospitalization rates are high among unvaccinated older people or those with existing health problems. That means the outbreak could cause a serious situation because North Korea lacks medical equipment and medicine to treat virus patients and many of its people are not well-nourished, Kim Sin-gon said.

Ahn Kyung-su, head of DPRKHEALTH.ORG, a website focusing on health issues in North Korea, said North Koreas admission of the outbreak is likely designed to press its people harder to guard against the virus as China, which shares a long, porous border with the North, has placed many of its cities under lockdown over virus concerns.

North Korea will also likely stress lockdowns, although the experience of Chinas zero-COVID policy suggests that approach doesnt work against the fast-moving omicron variant, said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor of international studies at Seouls Ewha Womans University.

For Pyongyang to publicly admit omicron cases, the public health situation must be serious, Easley said.

North Koreas previous coronavirus-free claim had been disputed by many foreign experts. But South Korean officials have said North Korea had likely avoided a huge outbreak, in part because it instituted strict virus controls almost from the start of the pandemic.

Early in 2020  before the coronavirus spread around the world  North Korea took severe steps to keep out the virus and described them as a matter of national existence." It all but halted cross-border traffic and trade for two years, and is believed to have ordered troops to shoot on sight any trespassers who crossed its borders.

The extreme border closures further shocked an economy already damaged by decades of mismanagement and U.S.-led sanctions over its nuclear weapons and missile program, pushing Kim to perhaps the toughest moment of his rule since he took power in 2011.

North Korea had been one of the last places in the world without an acknowledged COVID-19 case after the virus first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019 spread to every continent including Antarctica. Turkmenistan, a similarly secretive and authoritarian nation in Central Asia, has reported no cases to the World Health Organization, though its claim also is widely doubted by outside experts.

In recent months, some Pacific island nations that kept the virus out by their geographic isolation have recorded outbreaks. Only tiny Tuvalu, with a population around 12,000, has escaped the virus so far, while a few other nations  Nauru, Micronesia and Marshall Islands  have stopped cases at their borders and avoided community outbreaks.

North Korea's outbreak comes as China  its close ally and trading partner  battles its biggest outbreak of the pandemic.

In January, North Korea tentatively reopened railroad freight traffic between its border town of Sinuiju and Chinas Dandong for the first time in two years, but China halted the trade last month due to an outbreak in Liaoning province, which borders North Korea.

___

Associated Press journalists Lee Jin-man in Paju, South Korea, Ken Moritsugu in Beijing and Nick Perry in Wellington, New Zealand, contributed to this report.
PHOENIX (AP)  Federal authorities investigating a fatal crash last month near Phoenix say the helicopter went into a near vertical descent for unclear reasons when it was about to land.

The National Transportation Safety board issued its preliminary report Thursday in the April 15 crash of a Robinson R22 helicopter at Gila Bend Municipal Airport about 70 miles (112 kilometers) southwest of Phoenix.
ATLANTA (AP)  A judge has dismissed conservative cable news channel One America News Network from a defamation lawsuit filed by two Georgia election workers after the two sides reached a settlement.

Fulton County election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Shaye Moss in December sued OAN, its owners and its chief White House correspondent over debunked claims that the mother-and-daughter pair introduced suitcases of illegal ballots while working as ballot counters at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta in November 2020 and committed other acts of fraud to try to alter the outcome of the presidential election in Georgia.

The terms of the settlement agreement were not disclosed, but both sides described it as fair.

Freeman and Moss on Wednesday filed a motion to dismiss OAN from the lawsuit, and U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell signed off on the dismissal Thursday.

The two women had also sued former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a lawyer for former President Donald Trump, saying he amplified the lies about them during frequent appearances on OAN. Their claims against Giuliani continue: They filed an amended complaint Wednesday in federal court in Washington.

OAN on Monday tweeted a clip from its broadcast with an anchor describing an updated report from Georgia officials. A voiceover then says state officials have concluded that there was no widespread voter fraud by election workers who counted ballots at the State Farm Arena in November 2020. The results of this investigation indicate that Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Shaye Moss did not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct while working at State Farm Arena on election night." The clip goes on to mention the settlement between the network and the two women.

In fact, Georgia officials concluded in late 2020, shortly after the allegations against the two women surfaced, that the pair had done nothing wrong.

Moss and Freeman also filed a separate defamation lawsuit against The Gateway Pundit, its owner Jim Hoft and his brother Joe Hoft, a contributor to the conservative website. That lawsuit is pending in federal court in Missouri.

After narrowly losing the presidential election in Georgia, Trump made unproven claims that widespread fraud led to his loss in the state. He particularly zeroed in on Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold that includes most of Atlanta.

Moss has worked for the Fulton County elections department since 2012 and supervised the absentee ballot operation during the 2020 election. Freeman, her mother, was a temporary election worker, verifying signatures on absentee ballots and preparing them to be counted and processed.

When their names circulated online along with allegations that they had engaged in fraud, the two women said they were subjected to intense harassment, both in person and online.
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP)  Puerto Ricos governor announced Thursday that he was rejecting a proposed $12.4 billion budget filed by a federal control board overseeing the islands finances and would submit his own version as the U.S. territory emerges from bankruptcy.

The announcement is the latest clash between the board and Gov. Pedro Pierluisi, who criticized it for insisting on reducing government costs by nearly $100 million.

Were not going to give up in our fight, he said.

Pierluisi said estimated future collections are high enough to offset government costs and that he would submit a separate budget on Friday.

A spokeswoman for the board said there would be no immediate reaction.

The budget that the board submitted to legislators on Wednesday would have been the first balanced one since Puerto Rico filed for the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history after announcing in 2015 that it was unable to pay its more than $70 billion public debt load. The debt was accumulated through decades of mismanagement, corruption and excessive borrowing.

The board noted that its proposed budget dedicates almost 70% of revenue to education, public safety, health, pensions and economic development. It also contains pay increases for public workers that have long demanded them.

The budget is consistent with Puerto Ricos path to fiscal responsibility and provides the government with the stability that is critical in this time of global economic uncertainty, said board chairman David Skeel.

The board has stressed that it will remain in place by law until four consecutive budgets are approved.
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SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  North Korea fired three short-range ballistic missiles toward the sea on Thursday, its neighbors said, the latest in a series of weapons demonstrations this year and one that came just hours after it confirmed its first case of the coronavirus since the pandemic began.

The launches could underscore North Koreas determination to press ahead with its efforts to expand its arsenal despite the virus outbreak to rally support behind the leader, Kim Jong Un, and keep up pressure on its rivals amid long-dormant nuclear diplomacy.

Thursdays launches were the Norths first weapons fired since the inauguration of new conservative South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Tuesday.

North Korea has a history of rattling new governments in Seoul and Washington in an apparent bid to boost its bargaining chips in future negotiations. The North Korean nuclear threat will likely top the agenda when Yoon meets visiting U.S. President Joe Biden in Seoul next week.

South Korea, Japan and the U.S. condemned the test of the weapons, which were launched from the Norths capital region on Thursday afternoon.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan condemned the launch when he spoke by phone with his South Korean counterpart, Kim Sung-han, according to a White House statement. The two also discussed President Joe Bidens visit to South Korea next week, Bidens first to an Asian country during his presidency. Biden is also scheduled to visit Japan during the whirlwind trip.

The missiles plunged into the waters between North Koreas eastern coast and outside of Japans exclusive economic zone, Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi said. There was no report of damage to aircraft or vessels.

South Koreas military said it boosted its readiness and surveillance while maintaining close coordination with the United States. It called on the North to immediately halt its repeated missile firings.

South Korea and Japan released similar flight details, saying the weapons traveled about 350-360 kilometers (217-224 miles) at a maximum altitude of 90-100 kilometers (56-62 miles).

Earlier Thursday, North Korean state media confirmed the countrys first COVID-19 infections as Kim ordered nationwide lockdowns to slow the spread of the virus. Kim also ordered officials to bolster the countrys defense posture to avoid any security vacuum.

In recent months, North Korea has test-launched a spate of missiles in what experts call an attempt to modernize its weapons and pressure the United States and its allies into accepting it as a nuclear state and relax sanctions on the North. Some observers say that despite the elevated anti-virus steps, North Korea would likely continue to build its arsenal with weapons tests to boost public morale and strengthen loyalty for the Kim leadership.

North Koreas latest missile firings appear excessive to what would be needed to test and improve military capabilities, Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, said. These launches look like a show of strength after the Kim regime publicly admitted to a coronavirus outbreak.

A statement issued after a meeting chaired by Yoon's national security adviser Kim Sung-han said South Korea would seek practical and stern measures in cooperation with the international community to respond to the growing North Korean threat.

The North Korean weapons tested recently included a variety of nuclear-capable missiles that could potentially reach South Korea, Japan or the mainland U.S. In March, North Korea ended its self-imposed suspension on huge weapons tests since 2018 with a launch of its biggest missile capable of reaching the entirety of the American homeland.

The U.N. Security Council has typically imposed punishing sanctions on North Korea after it carried out nuclear and long-range missile tests. But that didn't happen in March because veto-wielding members are divided over Russia's war in Ukraine.

Last Saturday, South Korea detected a North Korea ballistic missile launch likely from a submarine, the first such test since last October. There are also signs that the North is preparing to conduct its first nuclear test in nearly five years at a remote testing ground in its northeast.

___

Yamaguchi reported from Tokyo.
MADRID (AP)  A government proposal that could make Spain the first country in Europe to allow workers to take menstrual leave has sparked debate over whether the policy would help or hinder women in the workplace.

A leaked draft of new legislation that the Spanish Cabinet is expected to discuss Tuesday proposed giving workers experiencing period pain three days of optional leave a month, with two additional days permitted in exceptional cases.

It was not clear if the leave would be paid or unpaid, or whether it would be offered as flexible hours that employees would have to make up within a specific time frame.

Jose Luis Escriva, Spain's minister for inclusion, social security and migration, sought Thursday to temper expectations, describing the leaked proposal as a draft that was still under discussion within the coalition government.

The Ministry of Equality, one of four ministries led by the hard-left junior partner in the Socialist-led Spanish government, was behind the proposed bill, according to private news radio network Cadena SER, which first reported the measure.

The ministry told The Associated Press it had not leaked the draft and that the version the Cabinet considers could undergo revisions.

Spain's secretary of state for equality, Angela Rodriguez, floated the idea of providing some sort of menstrual leave in March.

Its important to be clear about what we mean by painful period, she told El Periodico newspaper. Were not talking about a slight discomfort, but about serious symptoms such as diarrhea, fever and bad headaches.

While a handful of private companies across Europe have adopted period policies, enacting a nationwide approach would make Spain a pioneer in Europe. Parts of Asia, ranging from Japan to South Korea, have long had menstrual leave rules, though the extent to which they are used has been debated.

Italy briefly flirted with the idea in 2016, proposing a bill that would have provided three fully paid days off to workers who obtained medical certificates. The proposal failed to progress before the parliamentary term ran out in 2018.

One of Spain's major labor unions panned the draft legislation, saying it could lead to women facing workplace discrimination.

Im not sure if were doing a disservice to us women, Cristina Antonanzas of the General Union of Workers, or UGT, told Cadena Ser. The idea that women required time off work while menstruating risked stigmatizing women, she added.

Others described a monthly leave policy as long overdue.

If we men had periods, this leave would have come decades ago. That is the problem, Inigo Errejon, the leader of the left-wing party Mas Pais, said on Twitter.

A handful of local governments in Spain already have embraced the idea. The Catalan city of Girona said in June 2021 that it would allow its more than 1,300 municipal employees up to eight hours of menstrual leave a month and give them up to three months to make up any time used.

Similar policies were adopted for municipal workers in the Catalan municipalities of Ripoll and Les Borges Blanques, as well as in the eastern city of Castellon de la Plana.

___

AP reporter Joseph Wilson reported from Barcelona, Spain. Frances DEmilio in Rome contributed to this report.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP)  A man who stars on a TV show called The Bear Whisperer has been accused of illegally killing a black bear in Alaska's Kenai Fjords National Park and lying about where it was killed.

The U.S. Attorney's Office filed misdemeanor charges last Friday against Harvey Neil Anthony of Maine and Nature Productions Inc. Anthony goes by the name of Blaine Anthony in the television series he also produces, the Anchorage Daily News reported.

An online court records system did not show an attorney listed for Anthony. There was no immediate response to an email seeking comment sent to Nature Productions Inc. on Thursday by The Associated Press. The charging documents said Anthony is the company's sole shareholder.

Hunting is prohibited in the park, which is at the edge of the Kenai Peninsula. Black bears, brown bears, mountain goats and moose are among the wildlife found in the park.

Prosecutors alleged that Anthony and Nature Productions Inc. used footage from hunting trips in 2015 and 2017 in episodes of the show, including footage of two black bear kills within the Kenai Fjords National Park.

The charges are related to a 2017 incident in which prosecutors allege Anthony shot and killed a black bear inside the park. The charging documents said he falsely reported where the bear was killed.

The documents said Anthony participated in at least eight black bear hunting trips on and around the Kenai Peninsula between 2011 and 2019 and was accompanied on the trips by a film crew on a boat operated by a person identified only as a resident of Alaska.

A virtual arraignment hearing is scheduled for next month.

The Anchorage Daily News reported that The Bear Whisperer first aired in 2011 and is a hunting show that focuses on Anthonys interactions with animals. A website for the show said it was under construction.
Right off Michigan's U.S. Highway 31, a developing food scene comes together each year during an event called Taste of Muskegon.

The 16th annual Taste of Muskegon is set to bring more than 30 food trucks and restaurants to Hackley Park, 250 W. Webster Ave., on Friday, June 10, and Saturday, June 11.

"The restaurants and food trucks have put together some incredible menus this year," Lisa Kraus, marketing director for Taste of Muskegon said in a recent press release. "We are continually awed by the culinary talent in Muskegon. We always look forward to bringing our community together to celebrate a taste of all Muskegon has to offer."

Photo provided/Taste of Muskegon

Awards for Taste of Muskegon's best plates are set to be announced Saturday afternoon and include both judged and public votes. So be sure to vote for your favorites. Also on Saturday, United Way's Ride United will start and end at Taste of Muskegon.

During the event, eateries prepare a special menu of up to four items and attendees will be able to order items in exchange for tickets bought at the door. Tickets cost $1 each, per the Taste of Muskegon website.

Photo provided/Taste of Muskegon Photo provided/Taste of Muskegon Family activities at Taste of Muskegon have included face painting, ax throwing, balloon animals, a corn maze, a bounce house and a 33-foot obstacle course.

Event organizers announced the participating vendors in a press release on Tuesday, May 10.

New this year to Taste of Muskegon, though not all are new to the Muskegon area:

Melt Gourmet Sandwiches

Pennant Pizza & Wings

Pierogi Shack

The Hideout

Unruly Kitchen

Taste of Muskegon 2021 Taste Place Award winners returning this year include:

Tiki Boiz - People's Choice Award, Best Taste Award, Sustainability Award

Burl & Sprig - Best New Bite Award, Best Lite Bite Award

Bone Ends - Best Beer and Bacon Award

Photo provided/Taste of Muskegon

Other returning favorites:

Abeshi Ghanaian Cuisine

Aldea Coffee

Aloha Hawaiian Shave Ice

Carlson's Almonds

Corine's Cakes & Catering

Curry Kitchen and Naan Pizza

DaKidd BBQ & Catering

Dr. Rolf's BBQ

Fatty Lumpkins

Frostbite Shaved Ice

G&L Chili Dogs

Hamburger Mikey

Happy Matt's Kettlecorn

Ice Box Brand Ice Cream Bars

Mylan's Waterfront Grille

Navarro's Mexican Takeout

OVK BBW

Rad Dad's Tacos & Tequila

Sutton Concessions

The Only Cannoli

Uncle Bill's Taco Wagon

Wonderland Distilling Co.

Yodels Frozen Yogurt

Event organizers announced in January the festival's date was moving to honor the Juneteenth holiday, so visitors can attend celebrations for both.

Photo provided/Taste of Muskegon

Usually held in June, the event was pushed back to the fall last year out of concern for COVID-19. Taste of Muskegon was held virtually in 2020 due to the pandemic.

"We did not miss a year due to COVID but we did turn it into Taste Tour," a spokesperson for Taste of Muskegon said. "Rather than coming to the park in 2020, you drove to the restaurants that offered Taste Flights. We moved the main event in the park to September in 2021 and ran Taste Tour in June. The restaurants are local businesses that have been struggling due to COVID-19 so we had to find a way to keep the event going, canceling was not an option. Our local restaurants are still trying to recover so it is so important to keep choosing local."

Visit here to learn more about the restaurants and events at Taste of Muskegon 2022.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP)  Top Republican leaders in Tennessee say they don't have plans to ban contraceptives as they await a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court on whether the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade case will be overturned.

Earlier this month, a leaked draft opinion suggested the nation's highest court is poised to abolish a nationwide right to abortion. The news quickly sparked concern from some reproductive rights advocates, who warned if SCOTUS does overturn Roe then lawmakers may look to impose restrictions surrounding emergency contraception and IUDs.

However, Tennessee's Republican Gov. Bill Lee, Senate Speaker Randy McNally and House Speaker Cameron Sexton all said this week that they are not currently considering banning contraceptives in the Republican-controlled state even as they support and push for strict anti-abortion laws.

I cant promise what members may or may not file next year, but I dont have an issue with oral contraceptives," Sexton told The Associated Press on Thursday.

However, Sexton said that he had received questions on whether the General Assembly will attempt to stop pregnant women from going out of state to get an abortion. He did not say whether he supported such proposals; instead, the Republican said he's waiting on the Supreme Court to issue their official decision on Roe.

Were all pontificating on what it may or may not be off of a draft, and so its hard to pontificate until you actually know what the opinion is, he said.

Lee, who has signed off on some of the strictest abortion restrictions in the country, also said he is not considering a contraception ban nor any attempts to criminalize women who seek out abortions.

"There is no law in our books that deals with emergency contraception and there are no plans for such," Lee told reporters on Thursday.

A spokesperson for Senate Speaker Randy McNally said any attempt to conflate contraception and abortion was a flagrant attempt to change the conversation," stressing that contraceptives will continue to be available, however the high court rules on Roe.

(McNally) has also voted to make contraceptives available over the counter, said Adam Kleinheider in an email. He has not and would not support additional restrictions on contraceptives.

Erroneous information about contraception in Tennessee recently spread widely on social media after a former Democratic congressional candidate tweeted that Tennessee just banned Plan B and made it a crime punishable by a $50,000 fine to order it. While Pam Keith eventually deleted the false statement, the post earned tens of thousands of shares and retweets.

Instead, Tennessee recently enacted a law that will impose strict penalties for distributing abortion pills via mail or delivery services and also bars pharmacists from dispensing the drugs. Medication abortion is not the same thing as emergency contraception, also known as Plan B or the morning-after pill.

Plan B contains a concentrated dose of the same drug found in many regular birth-control pills. If a woman takes Plan B within 72 hours of unprotected sex, she can lower the risk of pregnancy significantly. Plan B is different from the abortion pill: If a woman already is pregnant, Plan B has no effect.

___

Associated Press writer Jonathan Mattise contributed to this report.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has signaled its potential intent of ending the invasion of Ukraine and instead will integrate the Kherson region, based on an intelligence expert's knowledge.

Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov told reporters that "residents of Kherson must decide for themselves" whether or not they will appeal for "integration of the region into the Russian territory."

Russia's Potential End of the War

The official refused to be drawn on the possibility of a referendum, arguing that he had already said what he wanted to say. However, former DIA officer Rebekah Koffler said Moscow was already planning to proceed with a referendum to provide "legal justification" for the country to integrate Kherson.

In a statement, Koffler explained that this was simply standard Russian statecraft and noted that in 2014, 95.5% of Crimean residents voted in support of joining Russia. Does this mean that Putin and Russia are thinking of ending the war in Ukraine?

Koffler, the author of "Putin's Playbook: Russia's Secret Plan to Defeat America," also believes that integrating Kherson would be enough for Putin to say that he was successful in his current phase of the invasion, as per Fox News.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also said that completion of the "special operation" in Ukraine would result in the stopping of the West's attempts to "promote a unipolar world." The official had called the situation an attempt to undermine international law.

Read Also: UN Investigates 'Credible' Allegations of Torture by Ukraine Defense Forces Against Russian War Prisoners

The deputy head of the Russian regional military-civilian administration, Kirill Stremousov, also added that by the end of May, a bank for converting money to Russian rubles would start operating in Kherson. The official added that there were no plans to create a separate republic such as those sought in the eastern Donbas region.

According to USA Today, Stremousov also noted that there would be no referendums, saying it would be a decree based on an appeal from the Kherson regional leadership to the Russian president. Peskov said that the decision would ultimately lie on the people of the region, adding that it would be closely evaluated by experts to make sure its legal basis was absolutely clear.

Trials of War Crimes

The situation comes as three Russian prisoners of war accused of targeting or murdering civilians, and a soldier who allegedly killed a man before raping his wife, is set to be placed under the hand of the law. They will be facing the first war crimes trials amid the Russian-Ukraine war.

Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova has led her office since the beginning of the invasion and has registered more than 10,700 crimes. A handful of the cases have now been filed or are ready to be submitted in what marks a watershed moment two months after the beginning of the invasion.

A 21-year-old commander of the Kantemirovskaya Tank Division, Vadim Shysimarin, is currently in Ukrainian custody. The individual is expected to be the first to face trial over his alleged murder of a 68-year-old Ukrainian man. The sergeant is believed to have been fighting in the Sumy region in northeast Ukraine when he killed the civilian on Feb. 28, The Guardian reported.

Related Article: Russia Bombs School in Eastern Ukraine Amid Reports That Russian Troops Struggle To Make Military Gains in Donbas

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CENTERVILLE, Texas (AP)  A Texas prisoner serving a life sentence for murder escaped from a transport bus Thursday after stabbing the driver, setting off a search in a rural county between Dallas and Houston, authorities said.

Multiple law enforcement agencies were searching an area off an interstate in Leon County for Gonzalo Lopez, 46, who was convicted in 2006 of killing another man along the Texas-Mexico border.
One of the only organizations of its kind in Michigan, The Breaking Bread Village, created by Erin Patrice at the start of the pandemic, is gaining international attention on its second birthday.

The organization promotes honest conversations on some of society's current and most difficult topics and continues to gain followers as people are refreshed by its vision.

At The Breaking Bread Village, Patrice, who is also the host, aims to engage in thoughtful dialogue with people from all different races, backgrounds and cultures  thus demonstrating more similarities among individuals than once believed to be.

"You can separate as much as you want, but we are literally all in this together," Patrice said. "And, until we realize that and listen to each other and have some empathy, its not going to get any better."

The Breaking Bread Village Follow on Instagram and Facebook. Check out the website. Listen to the podcast. Watch conversations on Youtube. See More Collapse

"I have a big picture of what I want to see in the world I live in," Patrice said in a 2021 interview with the Daily News. "And, I know that I cant light the whole world on fire, but what I can do is light a little torch in my space. Thats what Im trying to do with The Breaking Bread Village. Im trying to light that fire in my environment and help the people around me better see the other people around them."

Patrice's goal to light the "whole world on fire" may come to fruition as The Breaking Bread Village has been invited to attend the "biggest Black history expo and cultural market in Europe." The expo is hosted by an organization called Black History Activity Books and is set to feature guest speakers, performances and more than 200 exhibitors.

Patrice would represent The Breaking Bread Village at the event in Birmingham and has done so at various events across the United States. Many of her speaking engagements focus on the importance to foster transparent and empathetic conversations.

This spring, Patrice traveled to Cincinnati to host a live show. The next live show is expected to be either in Washington or Indianapolis.

Saginaw Valley State University honored Patrice in January with the 2022 Martin Luther King Jr. Drum Major Award for her community work with The Breaking Bread Village which exemplifies the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision.

Originally based on the idea that "it takes a village," The Breaking Bread Village has intentionally created a safe space that is free of judgment.

Discussing complex issues like racial inequality, politics and gender inclusivity can be difficult, but the conversations are critical and happening at The Breaking Bread Village, Patrice said. She uses two "very powerful tools," which are listening and empathy, to bridge gaps and create bonds between people who normally would not have them.

One of the most positive experiences Patrice has had so far in her year-long journey with The Breaking Bread Village was going to the home of one of the first American educators on diversity, 87-year-old Jane Elliott.

Known for her "Blue eyes/Brown eyes" exercise, which she first conducted with her third-grade class in 1968, Elliott sat down with Patrice to "break bread" and discuss the state of our nation today. Elliott is excited to see what gaps The Breaking Bread Village continues to bridge between people who may believe they are too different from each other to ever agree on anything.

"What I loved about it was that we didnt agree on everything, but we were able to talk about it with love and hope," Patrice said. "It was like talking to an old friend, very chill yet powerful and something that I will never forget. I adore her."

Archived conversations, including the one with Elliott, can be viewed on The Breaking Bread Villages website. Other conversations feature topics like abortion, gun control, being a Muslim in America and much more. The conversations are live-streamed to Facebook and YouTube concurrently.

The Breaking Bread Village is underneath the umbrella of another one of Patrices efforts called 4 Steps 2 the Sun, which is a community outreach organization focused on "bringing voice to those that need help being heard, giving those blinded by misunderstandings the sight to see otherwise and light and love to those trapped in the dark."

To donate to The Breaking Bread Village so it has the funds to travel to the United Kingdom, visit here.
SPOKANE, Wash. (AP)  The insurgent candidate backed by former President Donald Trump appears to be stalling in a crowded field of Republicans challenging the GOP incumbent for a U.S. House seat in conservative central Washington state.

Rep. Dan Newhouse, a four-term congressman, has drawn primary challengers thanks in part to being among the few in his party who voted to impeach President Donald Trump. Perhaps the best known outside candidate in Washington's 4th Congressional District's intraparty feud is Loren Culp, who's running against his own Republican Party as much as he is against Newhouse.

Culp, a former small town police chief who lost the 2020 governor's race to Democrat Jay Inslee but refused to concede, won Trump's endorsement in February, but has lagged other candidates in reported fundraising figures.

Trumps influence among GOP voters is being tested in midterm elections across the country this year as he looks to flex his power and punish his enemies ahead of a possible 2024 presidential campaign. Trump has vowed to take down the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him over the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, and four have already announced they wont be seeking re-election. So far, Trump has found mixed success in his endorsement record, but it's still early in the primary season.

In addition to Culp, four other GOP candidates are running against Newhouse in the Aug. 2 primary. Because of Washingtons top-two system, two Republicans could end up on the fall ballot. The top two primary vote-getters advance, regardless of party.

Todd Schaefer, a political scientist at Central Washington University, said he has been surprised by how little money Culp has raised, given his high-profile run for governor two years ago.

On paper he should have good name recognition, Schaefer said. You would think hed get a lot of grassroots support.

Culp was invited to visit with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in late February. Trump's endorsement of Culp read in part: Loren Culp is running against RINO Congressman Dan Newhouse ... Loren will always defend your personal liberty, our under-siege Second Amendment, election integrity and law enforcement."

The other GOP challengers in the race are Jerrod Sessler, a Navy veteran and former NASCAR driver who has raised the most money; Corey Gibson; state Rep. Bradley Klippert, R-Kennewick; and Benanacio Garcia III.

As of the March 31 filing deadline, Culp had raised just $191,000 and had just $23,000 in cash on hand. Sessler had raised $444,000 and had $146,000 in the bank. Democrat Doug White had raised $230,000 and also had $146,000 in the bank. Gibson, Klippert and Garcia had raised little money.

Culps campaign has declined to return telephone calls from reporters but has made statements on Facebook. He lashed out recently at Republican Party officials who do not share his conservative views.

The party can come and go ... the Constitution is first and foremost, Culp said. God, family, country. Thats whats important.

Culp served as a police officer and then police chief of the small town of Republic for a decade. His job was eliminated because of budget cuts shortly after the 2020 election. He has since moved to Moses Lake.

Schaefer isn't surprised so many Republicans decided to challenge Newhouse.

The vote to impeach Trump put a target on him, Schaefer said, noting that Newhouse otherwise seems a good fit for the district. The 4th runs from the Canadian border to the Columbia River through the agricultural heartland of the state east of the Cascade Range. The district is home to apple and cherry orchards, vineyards and wineries and a bounty of other farm crops and its biggest population centers are the Tri-Cities and Yakima.

Newhouse, who won 66% of the vote in 2020, so far has run a low-key campaign campaign, although he has veered to the right in an effort to fend off the challengers.

Newhouse, first elected in 2014, has raised $1.2 million and had $928,000 in the bank as of March 31.

Dan is going to win because voters see that hes a real conservative who works hard and gets results for the people he serves, Newhouse campaign manager Derek Flint wrote in an email to The Associated Press.

The Washington State Republican Party will not endorse a candidate prior to the primary, chair Caleb Heimlich said.

The party last year decided it was disappointed with Newhouse and U.S. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington's 3rd District for voting to impeach Trump. The party said it would treat the incumbents and any GOP challengers as equals this year.

We want to make sure we hold the seat, Heimlich said. Its up to the voters of the 4th Congressional District who they want to represent them.

Heimlich predicted that two Republicans will likely emerge from the primary to the general election in what is considered the states most conservative district.

But Schaefer said with so many Republicans in the primary, it is possible that White, the lone Democrat in the race, could finish in the top two and advance to the November general election.

But whoever gets the Republican nomination will have the advantage, in the general election, Schaefer said.

The endorsement of Culp continued Trumps pattern of seeking to oust politicians who have refused to echo his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Trump has also endorsed Joe Kent, a challenger to Herrera Beutler.

Like Trump, Culp has lobbed false claims of widespread voter fraud.

He refused to concede the 2020 gubernatorial race after losing to Inslee by 545,000 votes. Culp also filed a lawsuit over the results but quickly withdrew it after his attorney was threatened with sanctions for making meritless claims in a court of law.
LONDON (AP)  Britains economy grew at the slowest pace in a year during the first quarter as retailers and manufacturers were hurt by supply disruptions and higher prices, raising concerns that the country may be headed for a recession.

Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic activity, rose 0.8% in the period, slowing from 1.3% in the previous quarter, the Office for National Statistics said Thursday. Monthly estimates indicate GDP shrank by 0.1% in March.

The figures suggest the economy had less momentum than we thought even before the full hit from the cost of living crisis has been felt, said Paul Dales, chief U.K. economist at Capital Economics. The risk of recession has just risen.

Growth is slowing as manufacturers and retailers struggle to overcome supply bottlenecks following the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine fuels rising food and energy prices. Retail sales figures show British consumers are already reducing spending as economists forecast the U.K. will see the biggest drop in living standards in more than six decades this year.

Thursdays figures underscore how the U.K.s recovery from the pandemic has slowed over the past year.

Four straight quarters of economic growth mean GDP is now back above pre-pandemic levels for the first time, the ONS said.

But the first-quarter growth rate was the slowest since the first quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 5.6%.

Treasury chief Rishi Sunak blamed the slowdown on Russias invasion of Ukraine and other global challenges, noting that Britains economy is still growing faster than those of the U.S., Germany and Italy.

The U.K. economy recovered quickly from the worst of the pandemic and our growth in the first few months of the year was strong  but I know these are still anxious times, he said in a statement.
Eds: This story was supplied by The Conversation for AP customers. The Associated Press does not guarantee the content.

John Ziker, Boise State University

(THE CONVERSATION) Twenty-five years ago, when I was a young anthropologist working in northern Siberia, the Indigenous hunters, fishers and trappers I lived with would often stop and solemnly offer something to the tundra. It was usually small, such as coins, buttons or unlit matches. But it was considered essential. Before departing on a hunting or fishing trip, Id be asked if I had some change in my outer coat. If I didnt, someone would get me some so it was handy. We left other gifts, too, such as fat from wild reindeer to be fed to the fire.

I was intrigued. Why do these things? Their answers were usually along the lines of, We are the children of the tundra, or we make these sacrifices so that tundra will give us more animals to hunt next year.

These practices are part of what I and other anthropologists call traditional ecological knowledge. Beliefs and traditions about the natural world are central in many Indigenous cultures around the world, bringing together what industrialized cultures think of as science, medicine, philosophy and religion.

Many academic studies have debated whether Indigenous economies and societies are more oriented than others toward conservation or ecology. Certainly the idealized stereotypes many people hold about Indigenous groups being one with nature are simplistic and potentially damaging to the groups themselves.

However, recent studies have underscored that conservationists can learn a lot from TEK about successful resource management. Some experts argue that traditional knowledge needs a role in global climate planning, because it fosters strategies that are cost-effective, participatory and sustainable.

Part of TEKs success stems from how it fosters trust. This comes in many different forms: trust between community members, between people and nature, and between generations.

Defining TEK

Looking more closely at the components of TEK, the first, tradition, is something learned from ancestors. Its handed down.

Ecological refers to relationships between living organisms and their environment. It comes from the ancient Greek word for house, or dwelling.

Finally, the earliest uses of the term knowledge in English refer to acknowledging or owning something, confessing something and sometimes recognizing a persons position or title. These now-obsolete meanings emphasize relationships  an important aspect of knowledge that modern usage often overlooks but that is especially important in the context of tradition and ecology.

Combining these three definitions helps to generate a framework to understand Indigenous TEK: a strategy that encourages deference for ancestral ways of dwelling. It is not necessarily strict laws or doctrine, or simply observation of the environment.

TEK is a way of looking at the world that can help people connect the land they live on, their behavior and the behavior of the people they are connected to. Indigenous land practices are based on generations of careful and insightful observations about the environment and help define and promote virtuous behavior in it.

As an American suburbanite living in a remote community in Siberia, I was always learning about what was proper or improper. Numerous times people would tell me that what I or someone else had just done was a sin in respect to TEK. When someones aunt died one year, for example, community members said it happened because their nephew had killed too many wolves the previous winter.

Similarly, after stopping to assess the freshness of some reindeer tracks on the tundra, one hunter told me, We let these local wild reindeer roam in midwinter so they will return next year and for future generations. Here, TEK spells out the potential environmental impacts of greed  which, in this case, would mean overhunting.

Concepts like these are not isolated to Siberia. Much work has been done examining the parallels among ancestral systems of deference in Siberia, Amazonia, North America and other regions.

Trust and tradition

These examples illustrate how TEK is a set of systems that promote trust through encouraging deference for ancestral ways of dwelling in the world.

Moderation of self-interested behaviors requires such trust. And confidence that the environment will provide  caribou to hunt, say, or ptarmigan birds to trap  depends on the idea that people will treat the environment in a respectful manner.

Previously, Ive studied prosociality  behavior that benefits others  in northern Siberian practices of food-sharing, child care and use of hunting lands.

These aspects of life depend on the idea that the real owners of the natural resources are ancestors and that they punish and reward the behaviors of the living. Such ideas are encouraged by elders and leaders, who commend virtuous and prosocial behavior while connecting negative outcomes with selfishness.

Trust is an essential component of reciprocity  exchange for mutual benefit  and prosociality. Without trust, it does not make sense to take risks in our dealings with other people. Without trust we cannot cooperate or behave in nonexploitative ways, such as protecting the environment. This is why it is advantageous for societies to monitor and punish noncooperators.

Put another way, minimizing ones resource use today to make tomorrow better requires trust and mechanisms to enforce it. This is also true in larger social formations, even between nations. Groups must trust that others will not use the resources they themselves have protected or overuse their own resources.

Lessons from TEK

Today, many environmental experts are interested in incorporating learnings from Indigenous societies into climate policies. In part, this is because recent studies have shown that environmental outcomes, such as forest cover, for example, are better in Indigenous protected areas.

It also stems from growing awareness of the need to protect Indigenous peoples rights and sovereignty. TEK cannot be extracted. Outsiders need to show deference to knowledge-holders and respectfully request their perspective.

One idea societies can adopt as they combat climate change is the importance of trust  which can feel hard to come by these days. Young activist Greta Thunbergs Fridays for Future initiative, for example, highlights the ethical issues of trust and responsibility between generations.

Many outdoor enthusiasts and sustainability organizations emphasize leaving no trace. In fact, people always leave traces, no matter how small  a fact recognized in Siberian TEK. Even footsteps compact the soil and affect plant and animal life, no matter how careful we are.

A more TEK-like  and accurate  maxim might say, Be accountable to your descendants for the traces you leave behind.

The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts. The Conversation is wholly responsible for the content.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP)  A West Virginia higher education governing board approved nursing degree programs at two universities Thursday.

The West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission gave the nod to bachelor of science in nursing programs at Concord and Glenville State.

Glenville's program will be operated starting in fall 2023 through a partnership with Marshall University, while Concord will offer its own nursing program starting next spring.

In December, Gov. Jim Justice cited a nursing shortage caused by the coronavirus pandemic in announcing the state would use federal stimulus funding to aggressively recruit and train nurses over the next four years. The two new programs are among 27 across the state that have received a total of $25.5 million from the Justice administration.

We are tremendously grateful to Gov. Justice for providing this historic funding to support the expansion of nursing education programs across West Virginia, Higher Education Chancellor Sarah Armstrong Tucker said in a news release. Through these new projects, our postsecondary education community will be better positioned to help shore up West Virginias nursing workforce  which, in turn, will help support our nurses working tirelessly on the front lines right now.

The commission also approved university status for Bluefield State College. The change also must be approved by the state Legislature and the Bluefield State board of governors.
Catherine Falls Commercial/Getty Images

CENTERVILLE, Texas (AP)  A Texas prisoner serving a life sentence for murder escaped from a transport bus Thursday after stabbing the driver, setting off a search in a rural county between Dallas and Houston, authorities said.

Multiple law enforcement agencies were searching an area off an interstate in Leon County for Gonzalo Lopez, 46, who was convicted in 2006 of killing another man along the Texas-Mexico border.
A group of international scientists on Thursday unveiled the first-ever image of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, a breakthrough follow-up to the similar image of a black hole from another galaxy in 2019. But the Milky Way's black hole was more difficult to capture, scientists said, and could result in a better understanding of our galaxy.

The image of the black hole, officially called Sagittarius A* (Sgr A* for short), is a composite of data compiled from telescopes from all over the globe through the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration. The dark part in the center is the actual black hole itself, where light cannot escape. Bright gases that form a ring-like shape help define the black hole, formed by light bending as it gets sucked deeper into the void.

"These unprecedented observations have greatly improved our understanding of what happens at the very center of our galaxy," said Geoffrey Bower, an EHT scientist from Academia Sinica's Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taipei. "[They] offer new insights on how these giant black holes interact with their surroundings."

Boston Globe/Boston Globe via Getty Images

While the new image depicts a closer, smaller black hole than the one captured in 2019, the snapshot was a lot more difficult to produce than the earlier photo, according to scientists on the team.

The first image of a black hole, released in 2019, showed the M87* black hole in the far-away Messier 87 galaxy. Experts used an "Earth-sized" telescope to capture it, which in reality was created with data collected from eight radio telescopes in 2017 and took years to analyze with supercomputers.

The recent image of the Milky Way's black hole was captured with 10 radio telescopes and similarly analyzed by supercomputers, but this go-round was a bit trickier. The first black hole was much larger, meaning the gases appeared to move slowly as they orbited the object. The Milky Way's black hole was much smaller than the first, so the gases had a shorter distance to travelmaking them appear faster although they were traveling at the same speed.

"This means the brightness and pattern of the gas around Sgr A* was changing rapidly as the EHT Collaboration was observing it," said Chi-kwan Chan of Steward Observatory and Department of Astronomy and the Data Science Institute of the University of Arizona. "[It's] a bit like trying to take a clear picture of a puppy quickly chasing its tail."

Boston Globe/Boston Globe via Getty Images

To compensate, scientists this time had to use new tools and software to create the composite image. The image released Thursday is "an average of the different images the team extracted, finally revealing the giant lurking at the center of our galaxy for the first time," according to a press release from EHT.

More than 300 scientists from 80 research institutions across the globe contributed to the effort.

"Now we can study the differences between these two supermassive black holes to gain valuable new clues about how this important process works," said Keiichi Asada, an EHT scientist also from Academia Sinica in Taipei. "We have images for two black holesone at the large end and one at the small end of supermassive black holes in the universeso we can go a lot further in testing how gravity behaves in these extreme environments than ever before."

Now, scientists are geared toward adding more telescopes to their network in hopes of creating the first moving images of black holes in the near future.
America is experiencing a widespread shortage of baby formula, and Gov. Greg Abbott appears to believe that what stock is available should be directed toward a particular group of infants in the country.

The Texas governor issued a statement Thursday claiming the Biden administration was "providing baby formula to illegal immigrant holding facilities" while American families struggled to find such supplies themselves.

"Children are our most vulnerable, precious Texans and deserve to be put first," Abbott said. "Yet, President Biden has turned a blind eye to parents across America who are facing the nightmare of a nationwide baby formula shortage. While mothers and fathers stare at empty grocery store shelves in a panic, the Biden Administration is happy to provide baby formula to illegal immigrants coming across our southern Border."

Abbott went on to call the Biden administration "out-of-touch" and accused it of failing to protect Americans.

"Our children deserve a president who puts their needs and survival firstnot one who gives critical supplies to illegal immigrants before the very people he took an oath to serve," the statement concluded.

Abbott's claims follow similar outcries from other GOP officials earlier this week. One such figure was Florida Republican Rep. Kat Cammack, who on Wednesday tweeted a photo contrasting what she alleged to be full stocks of baby formula on shelves at a McAllen, Texas border patrol processing center to empty shelves at an unnamed location "right here at home."

"The first photo is from this morning at the Ursula Processing Center at the U.S. border. Shelves and pallets packed with baby formula," Cammack wrote. "The second is from a shelf right here at home. Formula is scarce. This is what America last looks like."

Some were quick to point out that the alleged full shelves Cammack pointed to mostly held packs of apple sauce.

Cammack later told the New York Post the image of full shelves were sent to her by a border patrol agent.

"They're receiving pallets and more pallets of baby food at the border," Cammack said.

On Thursday the White House issued a statement saying that the president had spoken with baby formula manufacturers earlier in the day and is working on ways to address supply shortages caused by recent recalls, including ramping up imports from other nations.

"President Biden has directed his administration to work urgently to ensure that during the Abbott Nutrition voluntary recall, infant formula is safe and available for families across the country," the White House stated. "Today, President Biden spoke with retailers and manufacturers, including Wal-Mart, Target, Reckitt, and Gerber, to discuss ways we can all work together to do more to help families access infant formula."
Gone are the days of Snapchat-style bunny ears and smoothed-out face filters on Instagram and Facebook for Texans. At least for now.

As of Wednesday, Meta, the parent company for Facebook and Instagram, has temporarily disabled augmented reality filters on the social platforms for Texas and Illinois due to facial recognition laws in the states. The decision follows a class-action lawsuit settled in Illinois restricting the use of biometric data.

Attorney General Ken Paxton also filed a lawsuit in February against Meta accusing the company of misusing its facial recognition technology. The lawsuit states companies like Meta can't use Texans' biometric information and keep it stored within their systems without their consent or knowledge beforehand.

Some Texans logging on to Instagram and Facebook Thursday were caught off guard by the changes and upset to learn it was not a glitch. Many took to social media to air their frustration with the ban. "Texas is a wild state," one user wrote on Twitter Wednesday. "First they banned books that speak the truth on slavery in America, then banned abortions, immigrants, and now Instagram filters. Yet no license is needed to carry a pistol. This joint seem like a spoof or parody."

"IG removing the catfish filters as hot girl summer approaches. May the realest baddies survive," wrote another Twitter user. Another posted, "No abortions or filters?!? Texas hates women fr."

Some vowed to swear off the platforms entirely now that they are unable to use filters. On Twitter, a user wrote, "If Instagram doesn't put their filters back I'll never use stories again idc." Another Twitter user stated, "Apparently texas banned filters so you guys will never catch a selfie from me ever again."

Others suggested that Texas leaders like Paxton have their priorities misplaced. "Texas would rather sue Facebook/IG over filters than protect womens rights," wrote one social media user. "Texas can ban IG filters but cant figure out a way to fix the teacher shortage because of how the state treats teachers. We love our priorities," another wrote.

On the other hand, some welcomed the end of filtered photos because of their damage to self-image. "I hope the whole world bans IG filters like Texas did cause yall really be hating your real faces and its weird," wrote a Twitter user.

However, Texans may not have to see the hashtag "no filter" over and over again for long. Meta announced it plans to give users the option to opt-in soon, stating "We are taking this step to prevent meritless and distracting litigation under laws in these two states based on a mischaracterization of how the features work."
According to a recent story, those close to President Biden are concerned that his son's well-heeled lawyer buddy might cause headaches for the White House - and remind voters of Hunter Biden's problematic international business transactions.

According to The New York Times, the president's aides are concerned about Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris' intention to undertake a vigorous public defense of Hunter Biden, including disputing the tale behind The Post's exclusive October 2020 discovery of his notorious laptop.

Kevin Morris Worries for White House Over Hunter Biden Probe

As per New York Times, they're also concerned about Morris' $2 million-plus loan to the first son to pay off his tax debts and cover his living expenses, which could be similar to the money he received while serving on the board of a Ukrainian oligarch's company and pursuing deals with a Chinese tycoon.

Instead, Joe Biden's supporters want his scandal-plagued son to stay out of the spotlight and complete a federal grand jury inquiry in Wilmington, Delaware, without facing charges.

Hunter Biden is being investigated for tax evasion, money laundering, and lobbying law crimes. Morris was recently confirmed to be dealing with a documentary about Hunter Biden's life even though he came under scrutiny for his business dealings, and he was alleged Tuesday of spying on the filmmakers behind the independent film 'My Son Hunter,' which is set to portray the Biden family in an unflattering light, New York Post reported.

Meanwhile, Hunter Biden attempts to resolve the Justice Department's investigation into possible tax fraud, money laundering, and lobbying law violations. For months, Trump-appointed US prosecutor David Weiss has been debating whether there is enough evidence to charge Hunter Biden.

However, time is running out. After years of inquiry, the investigation is coming to a close. Hunter Biden wants the inquiry to end without any criminal or civil charges being filed. Hunter Biden's 20-year federal prosecutor, David Weiss, will have to decide whether there is enough evidence to seek a federal grand jury indictment in an investigation that could include other members of the Biden family, including Joe Biden's brother, James Biden, and possibly the president himself, as per Red State Observer.

Read Also: President Joe Biden Urged To Resign as Sen. Rick Scott Gathers GOP Support for Demand, Claiming POTUS Is Confused, Unwell

Hunter Biden, DOJ Could Reach Settlement

The Justice Sector is anticipated to make a final decision in the coming months on whether to file criminal or civil charges or try to reach a settlement that could include a hefty fine, according to the report, which noted that if prosecutors want to press charges against the president's 52-year-old son, allies prefer a settlement. Attorney General Merrick Garland will ultimately decide whatever decision is made.

The Justice Department was contacted for comment on the claim by the Washington Examiner, while the New York Times reported that numerous attempts to contact Biden through his counsel failed. The rest of the piece focused on Kevin Morris, a well-known Hollywood lawyer who gave Biden more than $2 million to pay back taxes and maintain his family, as well as Morris' contributions to the legal and media strategy.

Since 2018, the federal government has been investigating Biden's financial activities, including millions of dollars in transactions and money transfers linked to Ukraine, China, and Russia. According to the article, some of the data related to a laptop thought to belong to Biden are being investigated for potential breaches of tax, money laundering, and foreign lobbying rules.

In April of last year, Biden claimed to be 100 percent convinced that he would be exonerated of wrongdoing after revealing the existence of an investigation into his tax troubles shortly after the 2020 election. A grand jury in Wilmington, Delaware, has been gathering evidence in recent months. A witness was even asked to identify the infamous huge guy described in negotiations about a Biden-related Chinese business transaction.

According to a source, the query arose when this person, who has not been identified, was presented a piece of evidence before the grand jury. The response was not reported, however, some have speculated that the "big person" is Vice President Joe Biden, raising the possibility that the commander in chief would be implicated in a federal criminal probe.

The White House has insisted that the president is not engaged and that Hunter Biden did not commit any crimes thus far. Suppose Republicans get control of one or both houses of Congress in this year's midterm elections. In that case, they are eager to launch their probes into the Hunter Biden case, according to the Washington Examiner.

Related Article: [Report] Hunter Biden Had $2 Million Tax Bill Paid by Hollywood Lawyer; US President's Son Awaits Findings of Personal Finances Investigation

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WFO LUBBOCK Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Wednesday, May 11, 2022

_____

SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING

The National Weather Service in Lubbock Texas has issued a

* Severe Thunderstorm Warning for...

North central Castro County in the Panhandle of Texas...

* Until 815 PM CDT.

* At 744 PM CDT, a severe thunderstorm was located 4 miles north of

Easter, or 7 miles south of Hereford, moving northeast at 15 mph.

HAZARD...60 mph wind gusts and quarter size hail.

SOURCE...Radar indicated.

IMPACT...Hail damage to vehicles is expected. Expect wind damage

to roofs, siding, and trees.

* This severe thunderstorm will remain over mainly rural areas of

north central Castro County.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...

For your protection move to an interior room on the lowest floor of a

building.

_____

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
Experts revealed that the sixth mass bleaching event has affected 91% of the Great Barrier Reef this year amid the growing threat of climate change.

Rising temperatures bringing about warmer waters are believed to be the cause of the incident and are based on new findings from an Australian government agency. In March, scientists from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) confirmed that this was the sixth mass bleaching event of the reef on record and is the fourth since 2016.

Sixth Mass Bleaching Event

But the report released on Tuesday, the Reef snapshot summer 2021-22, found that nearly every coral reef surveyed this year across the 2,300-kilometer system was impacted by the bleaching event. Coral reefs are known to be some of the most vibrant marine ecosystems on Earth.

Between a quarter and one-third of all marine species rely on reefs at some point in their life cycle. However, the rapid warming of the planet due to human emissions of heat-trapping gases has resulted in above-average water temperatures. This has led to stress events in the oceans, including mass bleaching, as per CNN.

The bleaching event is known to occur when water temperatures are much warmer than normal but the recent study found that for the first time, it has come amid La Nina. This weather event is characterized by cooler-than-normal temperatures across the equatorial Pacific Ocean.

Read Also: [PHOTOS] Hubble Telescope Pictures Show Stunning View of "Grand Design" Galaxy, Surviving Star From Supernova

The scientists from the maritime park authorities and the Australian Institute of Marine Science surveyed a total of 719 shallow water reefs found between the Torres Strait and the Capricorn Bunker Group at the southern end of the reef system. Out of all of the observed reefs, 654 were found to have some bleaching.

According to The Guardian, the report also published a map that shows the most severe and extreme bleaching occurred in the region that covers the areas most visited by tourists. It also noted that inshore and offshore reefs were severely affected by the bleaching event.

The Great Barrier Reef and Climate Change

Scientists from the maritime park authority were not available for comment regarding the report on Tuesday night. Dr. David Wachenfeld, the authority's chief scientist, said in March climate was changing and our planet and reef are about 1.5 degrees centigrade warmer compared to 150 years ago.

Wachenfeld noted that with the weather changing so unpredictably, unexpected events are now slowly becoming anticipated. A campaign manager with the Australian Marine Conservation Society, Lissa Schindler, said that the report was "devastating news for anyone who loves the reef" and called it further evidence that cutting fossil fuel emissions should be a top priority for the next government.

She stressed that the bleaching event occurred during a La Nina year that is usually accompanied by more cloud cover and rain. Schindler said that the weather phenomenon should have been a welcome reprieve for the reef to allow it ample time to recover. Schindler also called for both major parties of the country to increase their 2030 emissions reduction targets in response to the latest bleaching event, ABC reported.



Related Article: Extreme Heat Wave in India Kills 25, Highlighting Threat of Rising Temperatures Caused by Climate Change

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There are a number of pathways for nurses to immigrate to Canada.

How to immigrate to Canada as a nurse in 2022 There are a number of pathways for nurses to immigrate to Canada.

How to immigrate to Canada as a nurse in 2022 There are a number of pathways for nurses to immigrate to Canada.

How to immigrate to Canada as a nurse in 2022 There are a number of pathways for nurses to immigrate to Canada. Shelby Thevenot Aa Accessibility Font Style Serif

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The pandemic has exacerbated the need for nurses in Canada. One of the ways to fill job vacancies in the industry is to offer pathways to permanent residency for foreign nurses.

Canada was experiencing nursing shortages even before the pandemic. Since COVID-19 swept the world in March 2020, the federal and provincial governments have been adding programs to encourage more nurses to come into the labour force.

Ontario, for example, is planning to invest $342 million over the next five years to hire more than 13,000 healthcare workers to the province. BC has promised to provide up to $16,000 to about 1,500 internationally educated nurses to cover application fees, English language tests, and educational upgrading. Also, Quebec is investing $65 million to recruit and train nearly 1,000 nurses from francophone countries.

Discover if You Are Eligible for Canadian Immigration

With all these incentives for nurses, you may be wondering how you can move your career to Canada. Or if you are in Canada already, you might want to learn which immigration programs are available to you.

Before we list some of the main immigration pathways for nurses, it is good to keep in mind that this is not an exhaustive list. Canada has more than 100 economic immigration programs alone. Because nursing is oftentimes considered skilled work nurses may be eligible for just about any program that has skilled work as a requirement.

NOC code and skill level are important for eligibility

Nursing falls into one of two categories in the Canadian governments National Occupation Classification (NOC). Registered nurses and registered psychiatric nurses fall under NOC skill level A and the code is NOC 3012. Licenced practical nurses, NOC 3233, fall under skill level B.

These codes and skill levels are important in determining which immigration programs you are eligible for, what other criteria you must meet for a particular program, and whether you were invited to apply in a given provincial immigration draw. Keep these in mind as you learn more about Canadian immigration programs for nurses.

Express Entry programs for nurses

Nurses may be eligible for the Federal Skilled Worker Program (FSWP) and the Canadian Experience Class (CEC). These two federal immigration programs are managed by the Express Entry system.

Express Entry is an online system that manages immigration applications for the federal government. Hopeful Canadian immigrants submit their profiles to the system and get a score based on the Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS).

Express Entry candidates get points based on their skilled work experience, age, education, and official language ability, among other factors. The highest-scoring candidates get invited to apply for permanent residence in bi-weekly Express Entry draws.

Although draws for CEC and FSWP candidates have been paused during the pandemic, Immigration Minister Sean Fraser announced that they would return in early July. Also, the processing standard for new applicants would return to six months.

FSWP eligibiliity

The FSWP requires an applicant to have at least one year of continuous work experience within the past 10 years in a skilled occupation. The work experience may have been completed abroad. An FSWP applicant also must score a Canadian Language Benchmark (CLB) 7 in English or French on all four language competencies: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. In addition, they must score at least 67/100 on the six-factor test that assesses candidates education level, language skills, and whether they have a job in Canada.

CEC eligibility

The CEC requires one year of skilled work experience within the last three years. The work experience must have been completed in Canada. People applying with work experience at an NOC 0 or A skill level (such as registered nurses) must have at least a CLB 7. Those applying with NOC skill level B experience need a CLB 5.

Neither program requires a person to have a job offer, but having one may increase your likelihood to receive an invitation to apply for permanent residence.

Discover if You Are Eligible for Canadian Immigration

Provincial Nominee Program

Although the federal government gets the final say on who can immigrate to Canada, the provinces can nominate certain candidates through the Provincial Nominee Program (PNP). Some PNPs are dedicated specifically to nurses, others just require skilled work experience. Sometimes, PNPs will hold immigration nomination draws specifically for nurses.

Multiple provinces have more than one program that welcomes nurses. Sometimes PNPs draw candidates from the Express Entry system and invite them to apply for a provincial nomination. If these candidates are nominated, they get 600 CRS points added to their Express Entry score. This award is more than enough to allow the candidate to be invited to apply for permanent residence.

Here is a list of some of the PNP pathways for nurses.

To find more, CanadaVisa offers a PNP finder to help people match with the best PNP for their Canadian immigration journey.

Quebec

Quebec operates its own immigration system. While Canada still has the final say on Quebec immigration applications, certain programs like the PNP and Express Entry are not available in Quebec.

Instead, Quebec offers its Regular Skilled Worker Program and the Quebec Experience Program. Nurses may be eligible for either of these programs. Both of these programs require the workers to have a working knowledge of the French language.

Discover if You Are Eligible for Canadian Immigration

 CIC News All Rights Reserved. Visit CanadaVisa.com to discover your Canadian immigration options.
The Canadian Parliament's Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration questioned the immigration minister on the 2.1 million people in IRCC's backlog.

Minister Fraser says processing standards could return to normal by end of calendar year

Minister Fraser says processing standards could return to normal by end of calendar year The Canadian Parliament's Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration questioned the immigration minister on the 2.1 million people in IRCC's backlog.

Minister Fraser says processing standards could return to normal by end of calendar year The Canadian Parliament's Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration questioned the immigration minister on the 2.1 million people in IRCC's backlog.

Minister Fraser says processing standards could return to normal by end of calendar year The Canadian Parliament's Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration questioned the immigration minister on the 2.1 million people in IRCC's backlog. Shelby Thevenot Aa Accessibility Font Style Serif

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Immigration Minister Sean Fraser appeared today before the Canadian Parliaments Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration to participate in the committees new study on IRCCs application backlogs and processing times.

The parliamentary committee is comprised of elected federal government officials. Their mandate is to monitor federal policy relating to immigration and multiculturalism, as well as oversee the immigration department and refugee board. They conduct studies and make recommendations to guide immigration policy. Minister Fraser was invited on behalf of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) to participate in the committees backlog study, which began last Thursday.

As of April 29, IRCCs inventory had more than 2.1 million applicants waiting on decisions for citizenship, immigration, and temporary residence. The temporary residence inventory has doubled since April 2021, in part due to the Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel (CUAET), a measure put in place to support people fleeing from Ukraine.

Discover if You Are Eligible for Canadian Immigration

Processing standards to be met by end of year

Fraser also told the committee that IRCC will aim to return processing times to their standard for the majority of business lines by the end of the calendar year.

I think well be able to do iton a majority of lines of businesspotentially this calendar year, Fraser said, and where we cant do it, we should be broadcasting those timelines.

Processing standards refer to the goal IRCC sets to process an application. Standards do not always reflect actual processing times.

IRCCs efforts to improve wait times for applicants include adding more staff to its 11,000 employees, as well as modernizing the immigration system. Fraser said the $827 million budget to digitize the current system will transform immigration in Canada. Already, efforts to modernize have helped IRCC make 156,000 permanent residency applications in the first quarter of 2022.

IRCC also has $85 million to speed up processing for certain lines of business, such as PR card renewals. IRCC Assistant Deputy Minister of Operations Daniel Mills said these PR card renewals were being processed in an average of 120 days in December, but by now it has been reduced to 65 days.

Changes to Express Entry

During the two-hour meeting, Fraser hinted that further changes were coming to the Express Entry system.

Im very excited about new flexibilities were going to be pursuing in the Express Entry system which will allow us, with more precision, to target workers to fill gaps in key sectors as soon as possible under the current system, Fraser said before being cut off due to a shortage of time. The minister did not elaborate further throughout the rest of the meeting.

One of Frasers mandates as minister is to expand pathways to permanent residence for international students and temporary foreign workers through Express Entry. The minister had previously suggested that occupation-specific Express Entry draws could be a possibility for the future.

Notice of correction: This story previously said that Minister Fraser said standards would return to normal by 2023. The story has been corrected to reflect the Ministers actual words.

Discover if You Are Eligible for Canadian Immigration

 CIC News All Rights Reserved. Visit CanadaVisa.com to discover your Canadian immigration options.
While viable general-purpose quantum computing is still a way off, D-Wave Systems has just deployed its third cloud-based quantum annealing system and has updated its coding tools to tackle new categories of enterprise optimization problems.

Like its predecessors, D-Waves third Advantage system can be accessed via D-Waves own Leap quantum cloud or, beginning May 12, AWSs Amazon Braket service. The new machine is hosted at the University of Southern Californias Information Sciences Institute in Marina Del Rey, Calif.; the others are at D-Waves headquarters in Burnaby, British Columbia, and in Germanys Forschungszentrum Julich supercomputing center.

D-Waves Advantage boasts over 5,000 qubits, seemingly putting it ahead of quantum rivals such as IBM, which announced plans earlier in the week to build a 4,000-qubit machine by 2025.

But not all qubits, which are a measure of a quantum computers processing capacity, are equal. D-Wave uses a technique called quantum annealing in its machines, whereas most other companies working on quantum computing  including IBM, Quantinuum (a subsidiary of Honeywell), Rigetti Computing, and IonQ  are using a quantum gate-based approach. (In October 2021, D-Wave said it had also started researching quantum gates, but the company doesnt have any gate-based products on the market yet.)

Quantum annealing can be used to improve certain kinds of optimization algorithms, but its not the general-purpose computing tool that gate-based quantum computers are intended to be.

Gate-based vs. annealing quantum systems

Error-corrected gate-based systems will be capable of simultaneously working with larger quantities of data than quantum annealing systems, said Murray Thom, D-Waves vice president of product management. Thats going to be really important in applications like quantum chemistry simulation, or if youre working with differential equations, he said. Gate-based systems may also pose a threat to many of todays encryption algorithms, an eventuality that enterprises are beginning to prepare for.

On the other hand, quantum annealing works well for optimization problems where the goal is to find a maximum in a hilly landscape of solutions (or the minimum in a series of valleys) in the shortest time. Conventional computing might take a hill-climbing approach, repeatedly varying parameters to find a solution a little better than the current one, until it has found the local maximum  but perhaps not the highest hill on the map. Quantum annealing offers a way to hop to another, perhaps higher, hill and climb to the top of that one instead, and derives its name from a classical computing technique called simulated annealing that takes a similar approach but uses random numbers rather than physical quantum phenomena to find higher hills to climb.

A white paper published by D-Wave in 2021 showed how a classical computing system and a hybrid quantum annealing system would ultimately converge on the same optimum result given enough time, but that the quantum annealing system would deliver a better result if time was limited.

Viable gate-based systems are a way off yet, while D-Waves quantum annealing systems are on the market and have already been used by companies wanting to test out their potential to speed up optimization. Thom pointed to Volkswagen, which has used D-Wave systems to look for ways to optimize the ordering of paint-shop jobs by scheduling to minimize changes of paint type.

To help CIOs put its Advantage computers to work on problems like that, D-Wave has developed a series of hybrid solvers for optimization problems that can break up calculations into chunks, using its quantum annealing systems to nudge classical computing systems toward better solutions then reporting back on the best one found in a given time.

Optimizing optimization

D-Wave has now enhanced its cloud-based Constrained Quadratic Model (CQM) hybrid solver to find optimal solutions to problems involving continuous variables, where previously it could handle only integers and other discrete data types.

This will equip enterprises to experiment with, for example, calculating vehicle routes based on continuous quantities such as distance and wait time, or optimize loading of trucks to minimize the space between differently shaped cartons.

This is really going to allow CIOs to get some answers to important questions theyre considering in terms of Where in my organization is quantum computing going to really have its biggest impact? said D-Waves Thom.

What potential customers really need is a way to identify which problems are susceptible to being accelerated by quantum annealing systems, and which ones quantum annealing cant help with.

For now thats more of a manual process: D-Wave sends in a team of experts to examine the computing problems a company wants help accelerating, advise them on which ones to focus on, and help build a proof of concept.

Thats very attractive to CIOs who are looking at how to make their businesses more efficient, Thom said, adding that it can help them respond in the kind of market stresses that theyre seeing today.
Wilkes Barre, PA (18701)

Today

Mostly cloudy this morning. Scattered thunderstorms developing this afternoon. High around 80F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50%..

Tonight

Cloudy skies this evening will become partly cloudy after midnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 62F. Winds light and variable.
In Ukraine, a refrigerated train carrying the remains of Vladimir Putin's dead soldiers was videotaped, with gold purportedly plundered from people discovered in their wallets.

The Ukrainian army allowed media access to the carriage near Kyiv, with one colonel telling reporters that Moscow refuses to accept responsibility for its deaths. A mound of bodies in white body bags placed at one end of the carriage was seen on video from inside the train. Morgue employees revealed to reporters gold in the troops' pockets, which had been plundered from Ukrainian people.

Russia Faces Apparent Setbacks

According to Kyiv, more than 25,000 Russian servicemen have been killed since Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his forces into Ukraine on February 24. Only about 1,300 deaths have been confirmed by the Kremlin.

The gold jewelry discovered on the Russian victims was shown to Al Jazeera reporters by Ukrainian mortuary personnel. Soldiers are suspected of robbing Ukrainian people. The modest trove contained many golden necklaces and rings.

Putin's army has been accused of looting in Ukraine, while Ukrainian and international prosecutors are probing hundreds of additional possible war crimes committed by Russian soldiers, including mass murder, torture, and rape. On February 24, Russian forces entered Ukraine in what the Kremlin describes as a special military operation to defend Donbass. The campaign is now on its 77th day, Daily Mail reported.

Ukrainian estimates that more than 25,000 Russian servicemen have died in the fighting. According to Russia's Land Forces, 25,500 Russian servicemen have killed in the three-month combat.

Putin's troops have also lost 1130 tanks, 199 aircraft, 156 helicopters, 509 artillery systems, and 2741 armored personnel carriers, according to the report. The Kremlin, on the other hand, has stated that the amount is closer to 1,300 individuals, with no mention of equipment losses.

On Monday, the White House accused Putin of preaching revisionist history during his Victory Day speech. The Russian dictator said that the West had driven Russia into reaction by encroaching on their borders with NATO. Putin's address, according to White House press secretary Jen Psaki, was revisionist history in the guise of lies, according to Express.

Read Also: Passenger With No Flying Experience Successfully Lands Airplane in Florida as Pilot Suffers Medical Emergency During Flight

Russian Troops Steal Ukrainian Crops

Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials claim that Russian troops in Ukraine are transferring essential agricultural products to Crimea, adding to their list of grievances against Russian occupiers, while local sympathizers advocate for the country's integration into Russia.

A column of Russian trucks stocked with Ukrainian grain departed the seized town of Enerhodar on Tuesday with a Russian military escort, according to the military administration of the Zaporizhzhia region.

It was reportedly headed towards the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow captured from Ukraine in 2014. Vegetables and sunflower seeds are also stolen, according to the administration. Requests for response were not returned by the Kremlin or the Russian Ministry of Defense, as per Live Mint.

The Russian Ministry of Defense and the Kremlin did not reply to calls for comment. The first war crimes trial of a captured Russian soldier has been revealed by Ukraine's top prosecutor. Sgt. Vadin Shyshimarin, 21, was prosecuted by Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova in the killing of an unarmed 62-year-old civilian who was shot while riding a bicycle with February, four days into the conflict.

Shyshimarin, a tanker, was accused of shooting a guy through a vehicle window in the northeastern village of Chupakhivka. According to Ms. Venediktova, the soldier might spend up to 15 years in prison. She refused to disclose when the trial would begin. Venediktova's agency has investigated over 10,700 suspected Russian war crimes and identified over 600 individuals.

Telegraph reported that many of the alleged crimes were exposed last month as Moscow's soldiers abandoned their attempt to take Kyiv and retreated from the area around the city, uncovering mass graves and dead scattered across streets and yards in villages like Bucha. Murders, burnings, rape, torture, and dismemberment were all reported by residents.

Related Article: UN Investigates 'Credible' Allegations of Torture by Ukraine Defense Forces Against Russian War Prisoners

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Wilkes Barre, PA (18701)

Today

Cloudy skies during the morning hours followed by scattered showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. High 81F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms during the evening, then partly cloudy overnight. Low 61F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 50%.
State governments across the country are flush with cash. As the Covid-19 recession began in the spring of 2020, observers feared that state-government revenues would collapse. But after a minor decline in the second quarter of 2020, state and local tax receipts rebounded sharply, rising 1.9 percent over the whole of 2020 and by 10 percent in 2021.

The windfall in state revenue is a consequence of the strong economic recoveryand of unprecedented transfers from the federal government. While state coffers swelled with revenue, they also received huge amounts of federal aid. The CARES Act, passed in early 2020, along with a subsequent relief package passed in December 2020, provided a total of $400 billion in help to state and local governments. Though it was obvious by then that state governments were already seeing surpluses, Congress passed the American Rescue Plan in March 2021, providing an extra $350 billion in aid to states and localities. Including these federal transfers, total revenue for state and local governments swelled by 10.9 percent in 2020 and by 13.7 percent in 2021the largest surge in state and local revenue in 48 years.

With such a windfall, states spent more but still ended up with record budget surpluses. State and local government spending increased by 7.3 percent in 2021, yet by early 2022 all 50 states were in surplus, with 29 states boasting one of at least $1 billion. In addition to running surpluses, states have seen labor markets tighten, with unemployment falling to record levels while millions of job openings have gone unfilled. At the same time, the migration of people and businesses from high-tax to low-tax states accelerated during the pandemic.

Thus, many states have begun cutting taxes. Though the federal government has imposed restrictions on using the federal aid money for tax cuts, revenue is fungible, and states own-source funds are also growing rapidly. Twenty-nine states enacted significant tax cuts in 2021, and 33 have passed or are considering major tax changes in 2022. Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Utah have already reduced individual income taxes. While the details of the reforms vary, they have typically led to a flattening of the income-tax structure. Some of the changes, like those in Iowa and Kentucky, are part of a long-term plan aimed at reducing or possibly eliminating the state income tax.

But while the economic and fiscal climate seems ripe for tax reform, some of the more ambitious reform plans have been stymied. Each of us has been involved in efforts to undertake fundamental tax reform by eliminating the state income tax in our home states (Mississippi and Wisconsin, respectively). While these plans have received broad support, they have also met with resistance, offering lessons for future reformers.

States must balance important trade-offs when designing a tax system. The government must generate revenue to provide services to the public, but taxes distort the economy by reducing incomes or raising costs. An optimal tax policy would yield the required revenue while impeding economic activity as little as possible. Because taxes on both labor income and savings reduce investment, a system based on consumption taxes has significant advantages to one based on income taxes.

Governments often fail to heed this advice. Policymakers tend to overstate revenue losses from tax reductions, as they estimate the impact of tax changes naively, anticipating no behavioral changes or increased dynamism from lower taxes. Moreover, most states impose both a sales tax and an income tax, worsening the distortionary effects of taxation. When both income and consumption are taxed, a given dollar of income gets taxed first, when it is earned, and then later when the remainder is used for consumption. Since the federal government also taxes income, state-level income taxes compound the distortionary effects. And because income taxes fall heavily on pass-through businesses, they can reduce business investment in much the same way that a corporate tax does for corporations. These distortions can be especially large for those with high incomes.

Mississippi considered a gradual elimination of its income tax in 2021, when lawmakers proposed the Tax Freedom Act. The legislation would have increased the personal exemption to exclude a growing number of residents from the income tax in conjunction with realized revenue targets. Within a decade, the policy would have eliminated the income tax entirely. To replace the forgone revenue, the law proposed to increase the state sales tax from 7 percent to 9.5 percent, while also increasing excise taxes on tobacco, vaping products, and vehicles. The one exception to the sales tax increase was a proposed reduction to 4.5 percent in the sales tax imposed on groceries.

Though this bill passed the Mississippi house, it never became law. Neither did a simplified version of the proposal that passed the house in 2022 with bipartisan support. Instead, a compromise between the state house and senate resulted in a more modest reform, exempting income up to $10,000 from taxation and reducing the top tax rate from 5 percent to 4 percent over the next three years. Ultimately, lawmakers failed to transition from a system that taxes both income and consumption to one that taxes only consumption.

In Wisconsin, with a divided state government, the situation was different. A tax reform proposal authored by one of us considered the hypothetical effects of an immediate elimination and a six-year phaseout of the states income tax. Income taxes in Wisconsin are higher and account for a larger share of the state budget than in Mississippi. The Wisconsin proposal would have increased the state sales tax from its current 5 percent up to 8 percent, resulting in a substantial net tax cut while transforming the states tax structure.

When the plan and analysis were released in December 2021, they received broad support from business and political interests in Wisconsin. To date, however, no state politicians have endorsed the plan or drafted legislation to implement it. This reticence may reflect mundane political calculus. But it may also have stemmed from opposition to the sales-tax hike, which would be needed to fund the state government absent a massive spending reduction. Shortly after the rollout of the reform proposal, a state senator released his own plan to get rid of the income tax. Yet he proposed only to cut income-tax rates without enacting commensurate hikes, apparently on the hope that such cuts would boost economic activity enough to generate additional revenue. While tax reform has a beneficial dynamic impact on spending, very rarely do tax cuts fully pay for themselves.

Though neither proposal passed, both would have brought economic benefits. With a colleague, one of us analyzed the original tax reform proposal that originated in the Mississippi House of Representatives in 2021. The Mississippi proposal was approximately revenue-neutral, with the increased sales tax compensating for nearly all of the forgone revenue from the elimination of the income tax. Furthermore, the proposal would have increased real gross domestic product in Mississippi by $371 million per year. Thus, despite being approximately revenue-neutral, the reform would have generated significant economic benefitseven assuming conservatively that the reform would not have any effect on the economic growth rate or on net migration into Mississippi from those fleeing higher-tax states.

The Wisconsin plan, by design, was not revenue-neutral, and would lead to an average net tax cut of roughly $1,700 per household. This would precipitate a long-run reduction of 12.6 percent of state tax revenue, roughly half the revenue loss that would be estimated if one ignored the behavioral and dynamic effects of the reform (as state agencies typically do). But the estimated economic effects of the tax reform in Wisconsin were substantial. The reform would boost state output by roughly 1 percentage point per year for each of the first five years, with a total long-run output gain of 7.9 percent. The Wisconsin economy would be about $28 billion larger after the reform than otherwise. In a time of tight labor markets, the reform would have led to an employment gain of 6.9 percent, or about 175,000 jobs. The plan would also increase after-tax income by 9.4 percent, fueling a rise in consumer spending of about 7.2 percent.

What can we learn from these proposals? Some critics argued that eliminating the income tax while simultaneously raising the sales tax was akin to robbing Peter to pay Paul. Conventional wisdom maintains that any tax system that generates the same amount of revenue is unlikely to bring positive economic effects, overlooking the benefits of removing distortions to economic activity.

While income-tax cuts give benefits to all taxpayers (or at least no losses), changing the composition of taxes generates winners and losers. Though the majority of taxpayers came out ahead in both of the proposals, some individuals could face a higher tax burden, at least initially.

The proposals distributional effects affected their political palatability. Since higher-income households pay the majority of income taxes, they would see the most gains from eliminating the income tax; lower-income households and retirees typically consume a larger share of their income, and this spending would have been subject to a higher rate. Still, the proposals did exempt food and other necessities from the sales tax (as in Wisconsin) or lowered the sales tax on such goods (as in Mississippi), while leaving alone current low-income support plans, including Wisconsins relatively generous EITC program. To overcome this political hurdle, lawmakers could offer to strengthen such programs or to enact other measures such as pre-bates (lump-sum transfers to credit against sales-tax payments) to provide further support for lower-income households.

Others raised objections that were examples of dispersed benefits and concentrated costs. For example, retailers were concerned about higher sales taxes on their revenues, even as consumer spending would have increased. The proposals tried to minimize such political frictions by leaving the sales-tax base essentially unchanged, though the tax code is riddled with inefficient exemptions lacking economic justification. For example, in Wisconsin less than half of all personal consumption is subject to the sales tax, with most services, in particular, being exempt. A strong economic argument could be made to broaden the sales tax base but doing so would surely invite intense lobbying by the affected sectors and potentially sink any reform efforts.

Additional factors made politicians themselves less likely to support the reforms. First, the planning horizon for state legislators is relatively short: it lasts until the next election. While the reforms generated substantial long-run gains, transition costs and delays in adjustment meant that the full benefits would not be felt by many voters during the current election cycle. The promise of future economic gains competed with the short-term political costs of a tighter budget or charges of favoring the wealthy.

Second, the elimination of the income tax also eliminates a main source of political favors. The income-tax code contains numerous deductions and exemptions that confer special benefits to certain constituencies. These proposals not only threatened to remove these existing benefits but also foreclosed the prospect of granting future favors through the income-tax code.

As our own experiences suggest, even well-designed tax reforms that would benefit a state can be hard to enact. Nonetheless, reasons for optimism remain. States increasingly seem to recognize that tax codes need updating.

North Carolina is a prime example. The state reformed its tax code in 2013 and again in 2021. In 2013, North Carolina had the highest tax rates on both individual and corporate income in the southeastern United States. In 2013, the state eliminated its progressive income tax (switching to a flat tax) and lowered the tax rate on income. Lawmakers expanded the standard deduction and capped itemized deductions. At the same time, they committed to a schedule of tax-rate reductions in the future if revenue targets were met. These triggers were reached in 2014 and 2015, and the state then lowered the flat rate. Lawmakers also gradually reduced the corporate income-tax rate, from 6.9 percent in 2013 to 3 percent in 2017. In 2021, the state passed a law that will lower the flat rate on individual income taxes to 3.99 percent and completely eliminate the corporate income tax by 2030.

Iowa, too, enacted significant reforms. Like North Carolina, its changes also came with a phased-in plan for future reductions based on tax triggers. Its new law will move the state from a system with nine tax brackets on individual income to a single flat tax of 3.9 percent in 2026 and will reduce its corporate tax rate as well. Neither state has fully eliminated the income tax, but each demonstrates that structural change is possible.

States compete to attract workers and businesses. Evidence of the significant economic benefits of tax reform will encourage more such efforts as states try to maintain or improve their competitiveness. Under these conditions, more sweeping proposals might get another hearing.

Photo: mediaphotos/iStock
Termeni de referinta pentru selectarea unui expert/ e care va presta servicii de instruire in drepturile omului pentru tinerii care se pregatesc sa paraseasca sistemul de protectie
When the Prince of Wales gave the Queen's Speech for the first time yesterday, he seemed sincerely affected. The successor to the kingdom was shown in his Royal Navy uniform scrutinizing his mother's crown, which was symbolically placed on a table in place of her throne.

Buckingham Palace said on Monday that the Queen had "reluctantly" decided to skip this year's State Opening of Parliament owing to chronic mobility issues, in an 11th-hour decision.

Prince Charles Mobbed by Crowd

Instead, Queen Elizabeth II sat in Windsor, watching her son perform one of her most important constitutional tasks on television. She had only missed the occasion twice before in her reign, when the speech was read by the then Lord Chancellor in 1959 and 1963, when she was pregnant with Prince Andrew and Prince Edward, respectively.

She took formal action this time, obtaining a Letters Patent, giving Prince Charles and the Duke of Cambridge the authority to conduct the ceremony on her behalf. Many saw their attendance in the House of Lords together as a melancholy symbol of things to come since it signaled a fundamental change in their responsibilities as a future king and Prince of Wales.

The 73-year-old prince sat on the consort's throne, which once belonged to the Duke of Edinburgh and has been used by Prince Charles in recent years. The Queen's missing throne was still in place next to him, with the monarch's Imperial State Crown resting on a velvet cushion in front of him, Daily Mail reported.

The heir to the throne and Prince William gave a feeling of continuity among the pomp and ceremony in the absence of the Queen, and Prince Charles' delivery of the Queen's Speech was a highly symbolic event. The decision has been regarded as a significant shift in the prince's obligations in his position of assisting his 96-year-old mother, given the Queen's advanced years.

Based on the advice of royal doctors, the monarch reluctantly withdrew and delegated her role to the prince and the duke, but watched as Prince Charles sat not on the sovereign's throne, which had been removed, but on the consort's throne, which had previously been occupied by his father, the Duke of Edinburgh, and which Charles has used in recent years.

A place remained next to him, under the magnificent canopy, where the Queen's missing throne is typically found, with the monarch's Imperial State Crown in front on a velvet cushion, according to Express.

Read Also: NASA Reveals Terrifying Sound of Black Hole, Fans Call It 'Scary' and 'Cool'

Prince Charles' Speech is Still Queen Elizabeth's

Prince Charles came in a Rolls-Royce, adorned with medals and gold-braided royal regalia, and proceeded through the Sovereign's Entrance. He did not, however, take a seat on the ornately carved and gilded Sovereign's Throne. He utilized the Consort's Throne instead, which is similar but an inch shorter.

When Charles gave the speech, which was drafted by the government and outlined the government's aims for the year, the term my government had to be replaced with Her Majesty's government, which had to be repeated again and over.

The appearance of Prince Charles and his eldest son, Prince William, in the House of Lords was a remarkable visual event in a power transfer that is still taking place. Queen Elizabeth II, who is 96 years old, has reduced her public appearances and steadily ceded more responsibilities to Charles and other senior royals.

The queen, on the other hand, does not appear to be willing to stand aside. The exceptional powers she granted Charles to allow him to open Parliament were temporary, not permanent.

According to royal writer Robert Lacey, the queen, Prince Charles, and Prince William work closely together. However, Lacey highlighted that Elizabeth is still in charge and that this isn't a regency - a name that brings up ideas of the incapacitated King George III in Britain, as per Washington Post.

Related Article: Will Prince Harry Attend Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee? Experts Say Monarch Appoints Counselors To Replace Prince Andrew, Duke of Sussex

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A new report by the Media Development Foundation outlines how local news in Ukraine has operated since Russia invaded on February 24, 2022. Unsurprisingly the study, which surveyed thirty-nine regional, independent news publishers, shows a radical transformation in many operations, but also the enormous resiliency of the local press.

MDF, a media expertise hub headquartered in Kyiv, has for years published annual reports on the state of local media in Ukraine. The idea to conduct a special wartime edition was led by Andrey Boborykin, executive director of Ukrayinska Pravda, one of Ukraines largest independent news organizations. After Boborykin and some colleagues relocated to western Ukraine, they noticed that many media managers seeking help through their Ukrainian Local News Emergency Fund were responding in vastly different ways.

Everything has been disrupted by war, says Boborykin. Some publishers were quite well prepared for that and were responding to this challenge in a very rational and effective way, and some were totally, by all means, not. They hoped this report would provide a clearer picture of the local media landscape during wartime and provide recommendations.

Ukrainian media are now almost entirely reliant on emergency grant funding to stay afloat as local advertising has all but disappeared. According to MDF, around 81 percent of local newsrooms applied for international aid in the two months after the invasion began. This includes applications to international donors; government funds, like the US Agency for International Development (usaid), which committed $131 million in aid to Ukraine; and fundraisers from individual donors organized by groups like MDF and the Lviv Media Forum. (The Tow Center previously wrote about a GoFundMe campaign in support of local Ukraine media that has so far raised more than 940,300 euros.)

Notably, though, around 19 percent of newsrooms havent applied for grants at all. Tanya Gordiienko, a Ph.D. student of media and communications at the Mohyla School of Journalism and a lead editor of the report, says this largely comes from a lack of confidence about whether big donors would want to support smaller, regional newsrooms in Ukraine. This is something that I think we should take into account and work onexplaining to regional media that they are an important part of the ecosystem and their voices should be heard, explained Gordiienko.

Available funds were by far the largest concern among those surveyed, with 69 percent of respondents noting this challenge. While around a quarter of regional newsrooms reported having enough funds in their coffers to budget on a monthly basis, a few outlets are operating on such thin margins that only a week or two of funds remain. A small number of employers have been unable to pay salaries, and a share of media professionals now work on a voluntary basis.

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In the years preceding the invasion, independent media in Ukraine struggled to monetize their products and transform their organizations into sustainable businessesissues similar to what local newsrooms face globally, including those in the US. Boborykin says that reader revenue in Ukraine is almost nonexistent and many local outlets are struggling to implement an effective digital strategy.

He also pointed to the disruption of the local advertising markets by the tech platforms, namely Meta (formerly Facebook) and Google, which continue to exert a stranglehold on digital advertising and online news distribution worldwide. The [local Ukrainian] media dont have the resources to appropriately launch native advertising or any other sorts of direct monetization, says Boborykin. And the platforms, which are now among the largest funders of news globally, have done relatively little to directly fund newsrooms in Ukraine both prior to and amid the Russian invasion.

While Googles and Metas respective journalism initiatives have provided some direct support to Ukrainian news organizations in the past, its been scant. Meta so far has partnered with nine different organizations in Ukraine for its third-party fact-checking efforts, and a Meta spokesperson told Tow that in response to the war, theyve expanded this capacity across the region. The Google News Initiative also launched a Hands-on Machine Learning course in partnership with the data-journalism-focused Ukrainian publication Texty in December 2020.

However, neither the MJP nor the GNI has launched expansive programs specific to Eastern Europe, like recent investments across Latin America. Ukrainian media were also noticeably absent from the list of countries that received funding from the GNIs covid-19 Journalism Emergency Relief Fund (JERF), one of its most expansive global initiatives to date, which boasted $39.5 million offered to more than 5,600 newsrooms across 115 countries for general spending. While the MJP, in tandem with the European Journalism Center, launched a covid-19 emergency fund that funneled money to 28 countries across Europe in 2020, only 3 Ukrainian newsrooms were chosen out of 162 total news organizations, and no freelance journalists were selected.

A Google spokesperson told Tow in an email that, for many years, [Google has] worked with journalists and news organizations in Ukraine and Central and Eastern Europe to support them as they adapt to the changes the internet has brought, which includes products that drive traffic to their sites, [Google] ad products they can use to make money online, and training and innovation programs. While Google did outline for Tow the ways its programs have supported some Ukrainian journalists over the past seven years, it has not provided direct cash funding to assist publishers in Ukraine like it did for newsrooms in other countries during the covid-19 crisis. And the European Innovation Challenge that Google launched last week, which Ukrainian publishers can apply for, may present significant challenges for newsrooms that wish to do so, as MDF found that 38 percent of respondents indicated an inability to plan ahead amid the wara necessity for drawing up plans to innovate in the industry.

Meta similarly has not provided direct emergency relief funding to Ukrainian media during this period of crisis. A spokesperson for the tech company pointed Tow via email to Metas third-party fact-checking initiatives and some product work it has done since the onset of the war to connect people in Ukraine with timely information and resources.

Boborykin believes this patchwork of projects is a start, but by far not enough. Hes especially frustrated that the tech giants lack of support comes amid disinformation campaigns on widely used platforms in Ukraine, such as Facebook and YouTube, that he believes are comparable to those in Myanmar or China. (Both campaigns used Facebook to promote genocide, of the Rohingya and Uighur populations, respectively.) Boborykin also recently spoke with Coda Story on Meta enforcing one size fits all policiesintended to curb Russian propagandathat are now restricting independent Ukrainian media from publishing vital, sometimes graphic content under the same rules. (The Tow Center has created a comprehensive list since the onset of the war on actions taken globally by platforms, publishers, and governments affecting the information ecosystem in Russia and Ukraine.)

This unrestricted, readily available cash funding is sometimes the most urgent need but is currently missing from the crisis response of many philanthropic, corporate, and government funders. James Deane, cofounder of and consultant to the International Fund for Public Interest Media, told Tow in an email that the destruction of Ukraines business model for journalism highlights in especially stark detail that the most immediate challenge for public interest media is how to mobilize, allocate and disburse funding so that it reaches the bank accounts of media institutions who need it.

According to Deane, media support thus far has focused primarily on editorial and business developmenttrainings, mentoring, tool kits, and morewith the transfer of money both secondary to and contingent on strategies like sustainability. He added that the volume of money available to support independent media around the world is woefully insufficient. (The IFPIM recently announced a call for funding across seventeen countries, including Ukraine, and hopes to raise a billion dollars for global media support.)

MDF additionally found that the war has taken an extreme psychological and emotional toll on staffaround 61 percent reported experiencing as muchstemming not only from exhaustion and fears for safety but also from increased responsibilities in roles not related to their qualifications. According to the report, relocations have exacerbated emotional breakdowns and conflicts, frequent air raids have triggered anxiety and disrupted sleep, and productivity has suffered for nearly half the newsrooms surveyed.

One of the most hopeful findings to come out of the MDF report, though, is the number of respondents with strategic post-victory plansa little more than 61 percentwho hope to report on liberated cities and launch new storytelling formats as a way to revitalize their communities.

In the meantime, keeping the independent Ukrainian press operational is what some are hoping will help Ukraine both survive the war and continue functioning as a democratic society. Gordiienko says that regional media may seem to be a bit old-fashioned, not so fancy as the bigger media with more resources, but Ukrainians are relying on local news to evaluate life-threatening concerns in real time, like whether to seek shelter or leave a city altogether. Yeah, regional media have a lot of issues, but we cannot abandon them; we need to support them, to help them develop and keep their communities informed.

You can read the full wartime edition of the state of regional, independent news in Ukraine here.

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Gabby Miller is a Senior Reporting Fellow at the Tow Center studying newsroom cutbacks amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.
CAIRO (AP)  The United Nations was seeking $144 million on Wednesday needed to fund the salvage operation of a decaying tanker full of oil moored off the coast of Yemen, a ship whose demise could cause an environmental disaster.

The amount includes $80 million to transfer the more than 1 million barrels of crude oil the FSO Safer is carrying to storage, said David Gressly, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Yemen.

The pledging conference, co-hosed by the UN and the Netherlands, comes more than two months after the U.N. and Yemens Houthi rebels reached an agreement to transfer the tankers contents to another vessel. The agreement also includes a UN commitment to provide within 18 months a replacement equivalent to the FSO Safer suitable for export.

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appealed for funds to implement the plan the UN reached with the Houthis to avert a disaster that could also disrupt traffic through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.

Todays event is a critical step to preventing a catastrophe that would affect Yemen, the region and the world, he told the pledging conference in a video message.

The Iranian-backed Houthis control Yemens western Red Sea ports  including Ras Issa, just 6 kilometers (about 4 miles) from where the FSO Safer has been moored since the 1980s.

The Houthis on Tuesday criticized the U.N. for allegedly not presenting an operational plan to maintain the tanker, more than two months since they signed the memorandum of understanding, a statement that could complicate U.N. efforts to raise funds.

There was no immediate comment from the U.N. on the Houthi statement but the organization previously accused the rebels of delaying its maintenance plans.

Gressly said the vessel is slowly rusting and going into significant decay, and could explode, causing massive environmental damage to Red Sea marine life, desalination factories and international shipping routes.

Every day that passes, every month that passes, every year that passes, increases the chance that the vessel will break up and spill its contents, he told reporters earlier this week.

Gressly said the U.N. estimates that about $20 billion would be needed to just clean up an oil spill, which would likely impact nearby countries, including Saudi Arabia, Djibouti and Eritrea. He also said the first phase of the salvage should be completed by the end of September, otherwise it could face turbulent winds that start in October.

The Japanese-built tanker was sold to the Yemeni government in the 1980s to store up to 3 million barrels of export oil pumped from fields of Marib province, currently a battlefield. The ship is 360 meters (1,181 feet) long with 34 storage tanks.

Since 2015, annual maintenance on the ship has come to a complete halt. Most crew members, except for 10 people, were pulled off the vessel after the Saudi-led coalition entered Yemens civil war in 2015 on the side of the internationally recognized government.

Yemens conflict started in 2014 when the Houthis took control of the capital and much of the countrys north, forcing the government to flee to the south, then to Saudi Arabia.

Internal documents obtained by The Associated Press in 2020 show that seawater has entered the engine compartment of the tanker, causing damage to pipes and increasing the risk of sinking. Rust has covered parts of the tanker and the inert gas that prevents the tanks from gathering inflammable gases, has leaked out. Experts say maintenance is no longer possible because the damage to the ship is irreversible, according to an AP report.

The U.N. has repeatedly warned that the tanker could release four times more oil than the notorious Exxon Valdez disaster off Alaska in 1989.

About the photo: This satellite image provided by Maxar Technologies shows the FSO Safer tanker moored off Ras Issa port, Yemen on June 17, 2020. David Gressly, the UN humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, said Wednesday, May 11, 2022, that the U.N. is seeking $144 million needed to fund the salvage operation of the FSO Safer, a decaying tanker full of oil moored off the coast of Yemen. The ships demise could cause an environmental disaster. (Maxar Technologies via AP, File)

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CHICAGO (AP)  A Chicago man who posted online to urge others to join massive crowds that were looting downtown businesses in the summer of 2020 was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison Tuesday.

James Massey, 23, pleaded guilty in February to inciting and participating in a riot. He admitted in a plea agreement with prosecutors that he posted multiple videos and messages on Facebook calling for people to travel to downtown Chicago to engage in property damage and looting.

Massey was later captured on surveillance video helping to loot and destroy four businesses, including a cellphone store and a marijuana dispensary, the Chicago Tribune reported.

U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly rejected a defense request for probation, saying Massey hurt legitimate protesters calling attention to the issue of police misconduct after high-profile incidents including the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in late May.

Rioting erupted in more than 20 U.S. cities after the May 25 killing of Floyd, which was videotaped by bystanders and broadcast on national television. Verisks Property Claim Services projected that insured losses would reach $2 billion  a new record for damages associated with civil unrest.

Massey has been in custody at the Metropolitan Correctional Center since August 2021 when he was arrested while trying to illegally purchase a handgun at an Indiana gun store while free on bond. With good behavior, he would eligible for release in about five months.

Massey apologized to the court, saying the kind of behavior he engaged in that night was behind him.

Massey was arrested after an investigation revealed that he posted a series of sometimes profane messages and videos on Facebook on Aug. 9, 2020, in which he urged people to take part in the widespread violence that erupted in the city that day and the next.

After police shot a man who had opened fire on officers on the citys South Side, Police Superintendent David Brown said there was a social media post urging people to form a car caravan and converge on the business and shopping district. Further ratcheting up the tensions in the city was a video that circulated on Facebook falsely claiming that Chicago police had fatally shot a teenager.

Massey told others that the looting would start at 12 a.m. and that they should Bring YA TOOLS SKI MASKS AND GLOVES.

Prosecutors say Massey said in a video posted later: I aint missing out. I am ready to steal.

After sending other messages, such as WE LIE TOGETHER WE DIE TOGETHER, prosecutors said in the complaint that Massey is seen on surveillance video walking to a store with a tire iron in his hand while another person smashed the store window. They alleged he entered a store, grabbed some coats then took part in vandalizing a convenience store and a cellphone store.

During the rioting, vandals smashed windows of dozens of businesses and made off with clothing, cash machines and anything else they could carry. Two people were shot and more than a dozen police officers were injured in the rioting that ended with more than 100 arrests.

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SEATTLE (AP)  A federal judge in Seattle has declined to order Sen. Elizabeth Warren to retract statements she made criticizing a book that promotes misinformation about COVID-19 and suggesting that companies that sold it might face liability.

U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein on Monday issued an order rejecting the request by the publisher and authors of the book The Truth About COVID-19, which accuses the global elite of using the pandemic to grab unprecedented power.

The publishing company, Chelsea Green of White River Junction, Vermont, and the authors, including prominent anti-vaccine propagandist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., sued the Massachusetts Democrat last fall. Kennedy is a nephew of President John F. Kennedy and the son of his slain brother, former U.S. attorney general, civil rights activist and Democratic presidential contender Robert F. Kennedy.

The lawsuit said a letter Warren sent to Amazon complaining about the companys sale of the book amounted to censorship. The plaintiffs sought a preliminary court order requiring Warren to publicly retract her letter and banning her from issuing further such letters.

The book is by Dr. Joseph Mercola, a Florida osteopath who has a long history of selling unapproved health products, and Ronnie Cummins, an activist against genetically modified food. It features a foreword by Kennedy.

It promotes unproven and possibly dangerous treatments for the coronavirus, Warren said, while falsely suggesting COVID-19 vaccines approved by the government have not been properly tested. The Food and Drug Administration has warned Mercola to stop offering vitamin D and other products as safe and/or effective for the treatment or prevention of COVID-19.

In a letter last September, Warren accused Seattle-based Amazon of peddling misinformation, saying the companys search algorithms promoted the book. Warren suggested Amazons actions were unethical, unacceptable, and potentially unlawful, and she asked the company to review its algorithms.

Two days later, another bookseller, Barnes & Noble, stopped sales of the work.

Chelsea Green, along with the books authors, sued, saying the book contains factual information and reasonable opinions protected by the First Amendment. Warrens veiled threats that Amazon or other booksellers could face legal repercussions for selling the book amounted to unlawful government censorship, the lawsuit said.

But in her order denying the request for a preliminary injunction, Rothstein noted that Warren is just one senator, far removed from the power to legally punish booksellers for continuing to sell the book.

The threat of legal sanctions can act as an unlawful restriction on speech, but a threat will only be perceived as such if there is a realistic chance the threatened action can be carried out, Rothstein wrote. Defendant Warren does not have any unilateral investigative authority, and there is no immediate statutory basis for her statement that Amazons practices are `potentially unlawful.

The lawsuit continues but the judge wrote that the plaintiffs were unlikely to succeed on the merits of their claim that Defendant Warrens letter constitutes a prior restraint on speech.

The book continued to be offered for sale on Amazons website.

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COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP)  A relatively rare East Coast earthquake centered just northeast of South Carolinas capital city jolted large numbers of state residents awake early Monday, rocking the Southern state at a preliminary 3.3 magnitude, authorities said.

There were no immediate reports of any damages or injuries, although more than 4,000 people contacted the U.S. Geological Survey to report what they felt.

The pre-dawn temblor lasted only seconds, but a number of people took to social media to describe being shaken from sleep when the quake hit shortly after 1:30 a.m.

There have been dozens of low-magnitude quakes since last December, when a 3.3 magnitude tremor originated in the same area, near Elgin, about 21 miles (34 kilometers) northeast of downtown Columbia, South Carolinas capital city.

Those awakened early Monday reported feeling the earth shaking for several seconds, some even describing what sounded like a heavy truck moving nearby.

But geological officials noted that, while the events are unsettling, central South Carolinas loose soil and lack of significant bedrock  coupled with the Monday earthquakes shallow depth of about 1.9 miles (3.1 kilometers) below the earths surface  mean such rumbles are felt more significantly in a place like South Carolina than they would perhaps be along the San Andreas fault system, in California.

Theres definitely been a `swarm here over the past several months, Amy Vaughan, a geophysicist and seismic analyst monitoring the quake for USGS National Earthquake Information Center in Colorado, told The Associated Press by phone. This is not an area that is capable of producing what we would consider a big one, of much larger magnitudes.  A 3.3 is a larger deal when it occurs somewhere like South Carolina.

Noting that the 3.3 magnitude is an early assessment and could change, Vaughan added that reports had been pouring in to the 24-hour quake monitoring center.

I have not heard of any damage reports so far but have had over a thousand  reports, she said.

Still, she called it alarming for sure and said some lesser aftershocks were possible in coming days or weeks. She noted there were quakes of a preliminary 2.0 or higher in April and March and others going back little more than four months in the region  and a 3.3 quake last December.

South Carolina typically averages 20 earthquakes a year, according to the South Carolina Emergency Management Division. Elgin is along a large fault system that extends from Georgia through the Carolinas and into Virginia.

Last year, the area near Jenkinsville _ about 40 miles (60 kilometers) west of this group of tremors _ registered six small earthquakes in over a week.

According to emergency management officials, about 70% of South Carolina earthquakes are located in the Middleton Place-Summerville Seismic Zone, about 12.4 miles (20 kilometers) northwest of Charleston.

In 1886, that historic coastal city was home to the largest recorded earthquake in the history of the southeastern United States, according to seismic officials. The quake, thought to have had a magnitude of at least 7, left dozens of people dead and destroyed hundreds of buildings.

That event was preceded by a series of smaller tremors over several days, although it was not known that the foreshocks were necessarily leading up to something more catastrophic until after the major quake.

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A recent study, which is part of the country's Indian Boarding School Initiative, found that the United States forcibly assimilated Native American children from more than 400 federal boarding schools nationwide.

The program led to more than 50 associated burial sites, a figure that could grow exponentially as the research continues to unfold more details. The report, which was released on Wednesday by the Interior Department, expands the number of schools that have been known to have operated for more than a century.

Indian Boarding Schools

The schools started in the early 19th century and coincided with the removal of many tribes from their ancestral lands. The boarding schools' dark history, in which children were taken from their families and prohibited from speaking their Native American languages and abused, has been felt deeply across Indian Country and through several generations.

Many of the forcibly assimilated children in the schools never returned home to their families or tribes. The investigation into the controversy has discovered more than 500 deaths at 19 different schools. However, the Interior Department said the death toll would likely increase to the thousands or even tens of thousands, as per NPR.

The report said that many of the children were buried and left in unmarked or poorly maintained burial sites, far from their Indian Tribes, Alaska Native Villages, the Native Hawaiian Community, and families. More often than not, hundreds or even thousands of miles was the distance between their final resting place and their homes.

Read Also: [Report] Russia Refuses To Take Back Fallen Troops; Ukraine Is Forced To Fill Refrigerated Train with Dead Bodies

Last year, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced the federal Indian Boarding School Initiative that outlines some of the conditions that Native American children at the time endured. It also featured a list of the boarding schools in the country and identified more than 50 marked or unmarked burial sites.

According to CNN, the review found that from 1819 to 1969, there were 408 federal schools located in 37 different states. It also discovered that the greatest concentration of schools was found in what is now the state of Oklahoma which had 76 institutions. Arizona came second with 47, and New Mexico came third with 43.

Strictly Systematized Lifestyle

The children and teenagers brought to the schools were subject to "systematic militarized and identity-alteration methodologies" by the federal government. This included being given English names, getting haircuts, wearing military or other uniforms, and being banned from exercising their religions.

The rules that the government then used "were often enforced through punishment, including corporal punishment, such as solitary confinement." The list of consequences included flogging, withholding food, whipping, slapping, or cuffing,

The Indian Boarding Schools were mostly located at active or decommissioned military sites across the United States. The report added that every single day the children were inside was so strictly systematized that they had "little opportunity to exercise any power of choice."

The investigation also found that there was "rampant physical, sexual, and emotional abuse" and noted that disease, malnourishment, overcrowding, and lack of health care were problems within the schools. Some institutions were also found to have forced several children to sleep in one bed, CBS News reported.

Related Article: UN Investigates 'Credible' Allegations of Torture by Ukraine Defense Forces Against Russian War Prisoners

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United States President Joe Biden hosts Southeast Asian leaders in a meeting at the White House to discuss international security matters as the Democrat attempts to shift priorities to China and its growing media influence in the region.

The talks will be held amid Russia's continued invasion of Ukraine, which has been Washington's top foreign policy priority since it began on Feb. 24. The meeting also signals the US's commitment to the region where it is currently engaged in a tussle for dominance with China.

Biden Hosts Summit of Southeast Asian Leaders

The world leaders will discuss critical issues, including the post-COVID economic revival, climate change, and the Myanmar coup. They will have two days starting on Thursday and will be in the presence of leaders from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). It is a bloc of 10 countries that make up the world's seventh-largest economy when put together.

The former secretary-general of ASEAN, Ong Keng Yong, said that he was expecting security issues to be on the table during the summit of the world leaders. The official noted that it was unavoidable that geopolitics and international security matters would be raised and discussed, as per CNBC.

The White House also said that the summit would "demonstrate the United States' commitment to ASEAN and commemorate 45 years of U.S.-ASEAN relations." American officials have often stressed the "centrality of ASEAN" to its Indo-Pacific strategy to contain China, a global powerhouse.

Read Also: China "Strongly" Opposes US Launch of Guided-Missile Destroyer in Taiwan Strait, Calls Move a Threat to Peace

A senior administration official on Wednesday acknowledged that the war between Russia and Ukraine had suddenly created daily demands that consumed the time and energy of the US president and his team. However, they said that Biden remained concerned about and focused on the need to prevent China from dominating the Indo-Pacific region.

According to the New York Times, the US president will also be traveling to Japan and South Korea from May 20 to May 24. The trip will focus on China, but officials have not provided details about it. However, Biden is expected to meet with fellow leaders of the other so-called Quad countries, namely India, Japan, and Australia.

China's Growing Media Influence

The leaders from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations will meet with Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday. They will also talk with other lawmakers before gathering at a Washington hotel to discuss business opportunities with Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and executives from American industries.

President Biden also plans to host the leaders for what his administration said would be an intimate dinner at the White House on Thursday evening. The Asian leaders will also meet with Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday along with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Later that day, they will meet with Biden at the White House.

The situation comes as China has been working on not just trade and investment but also on its influence in Southeast Asia. In the last decade, Beijing has slowly but steadily expanded its media influence in the countries in the region in four key ways as a means of shaping their views, Defense One reported.

Related Article: US Warns China of Possible Military Action if Beijing Establishes Base in the Solomon Islands

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The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, with its ongoing multibillion-dollar sale, gave a welcome surprise to its over 5,000 employees on Wednesday: a one-time $5,000 bonus each.

The announcement was delivered by Bill McBeath, president, and CEO of the hotel-casino, at The Chelsea theater, a 40,000-square-foot venue at the Cosmo that was packed with employees for a company function, per a Review-Journal report.

The celebration celebrated Blackstone's almost decade-long ownership of the resort, which is currently being sold to MGM Resorts International and a real estate company.

The bonuses, which the Cosmopolitan's owner, New York financial firm Blackstone, is giving to all of the resort's estimated 5,000 employees, come amid a tight labor market and as the glamorous property prepares to change hands.

Acknowledging the Employees' Everyday Efforts

Tyler Henritze, Blackstone Real Estate's head of strategic investments, said that the company is "incredibly proud of what we accomplished at The Cosmopolitan" and that none of it would have been possible without the resort's amazing employees' hard work and dedication, which the company is "thrilled to recognize."

The company has also acknowledged the employees' efforts in maintaining "a youthful, exuberant brand" while working amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Daniel Espino, Cosmopolitan chief people officer, said that every single employee "makes the difference' every single day. "Whether you clean the rooms, cook the food, are dealing cards, serving drinks, at the front desk."

Read Also: President Joe Biden Blames Inflation on Vladimir Putin as Prices Surge; POTUS Highlights Incapability To Take Control of the Situation

Edgar Rives, who has been working as a cook for nine years in the employee cafeteria, says the incentive was "amazing" and "a big surprise," as reported by KSNV News 3, Las Vegas.

McBeath remarked that the resort had donated more than $9 million to charity over the previous seven years, and he presented two employees with vacation tickets to San Diego and Hawaii: Staci Stafford, a housekeeping staff trainer, and Samira Harbali, a resort waitress.

The Culinary Union, which represents workers at several Las Vegas casinos, issued a statement celebrating Blackstone's news that the Cosmopolitan's workforce will get roughly $30 million in incentives.

In a statement, Culinary Union Secretary-Treasurer Ted Pappageorge said, "It's the right thing for a company to share a portion of their profits with employees who have worked so hard to make the property successful."

Changing of Ownership

The Cosmopolitan, which opened in 2010, is one of the Strip's flashier, pricier hotels. Though, it suffered financial problems shortly after it began its operations. According to CNN, Blackstone purchased it in 2014 for $1.7 billion and spent nearly $500 million refurbishing its more than 3,000 guest rooms, casino floors, and common areas with restaurants and bars.

In September, Blackstone revealed that it would sell the Cosmopolitan for $5.65 billion, about $4 billion more than it paid for it five years ago. MGM Resorts International is acquiring Cosmopolitan's operations side for more than $1.6 billion as part of the agreement and will pay the new landlords an initial yearly rent of $200 million.

The upcoming sale is the next step for an elite Las Vegas hotel that opened during the greatest economic downturn in decades and was initially in the red.

Related Article: Passenger With No Flying Experience Successfully Lands Airplane in Florida as Pilot Suffers Medical Emergency During Flight

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Facts about Russia-Ukraine conflict: Russian gas delivery to Europe via Ukraine drops 25 pct

Xinhua) 09:30, May 12, 2022

BEIJING, May 11 (Xinhua) -- The following are the latest developments regarding the conflict between Russia and Ukraine:

Russian gas supplies to Europe through the Ukrainian territory plummeted by nearly 25 percent from Tuesday to 72 million cubic meters on Wednesday, Russian energy giant Gazprom said.

Ukraine has left only one entry point for transit to Europe, which significantly reduces the reliability of gas supplies, Gazprom spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov said.

The Gas Transmission System Operator of Ukraine announced on Tuesday that it would close the Sokhranivka entry point on the eastern border on Wednesday due to force majeure. Gazprom was notified of the Ukrainian decision on Tuesday.

Russia remains committed to contractual obligations, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Wednesday when asked whether Russia will seek alternative gas routes to Europe.

- - - -

The Russian Foreign Ministry said Tuesday that Russia has chosen not to participate in an upcoming special session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) on Ukraine, calling the event biased.

"Unfortunately, our arguments and explanations with regard to the true goals of the special military operation and the situation on the ground are being completely ignored," the country's foreign ministry said in a statement, citing spokesperson Maria Zakharova.

The UNHRC announced Monday that it will hold a special session on Thursday "to address the deteriorating human rights situation in Ukraine stemming from the Russian aggression."

- - - -

Visiting German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on Tuesday said the government of Germany is working to provide modern weapons to Ukraine, the Ukrainian government-run Ukrinform news agency reported.

"We are working with German enterprises to ensure that Ukraine receives the most modern weapons," Baerbock told reporters during a press conference with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba.

- - - -

The Ukrainian government has approved the seizure of Russian assets in Ukraine, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said on Tuesday.

"Today, the Cabinet of Ministers approved a document according to which Russian assets in Ukraine are transferred to the state, or rather to the state enterprise 'National Investment Fund,'" Shmyhal wrote on Telegram.

The Russian assets will be placed under the management of the National Investment Fund of Ukraine and will be used for strengthening the Ukrainian army, supporting the people and rebuilding infrastructure, Shmyhal said.

- - - -

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov met with U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan on Wednesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry said.

The diplomats discussed "a number of issues on the bilateral agenda," the ministry said in a brief statement, without disclosing details.

(Web editor: Peng Yukai, Liang Jun)
Excellent communication is always about the listener. It's about the reader, the customer; it always has been about how to best treat and understand your customers. So, it's essential to know how to speak your clients' language in business.

Before the internet was even in discussion, businesses used to write pamphlets and letters about products and solutions or how everyone was a specialist. But no one goes to a store or a website because of what you have to offer; they go because of their desires, needs, or problems. There's something they need, whether a product or a service. If you fill a person's need, you get a sale! It's simple as that.

So, the right solution in this ever-evolving digital world is to use artificial intelligence for language solutions.

The importance of speaking your clients' language

When it comes to supporting your clients' expectations, bringing excellent customer experiences is vital for business, especially since the start of the pandemic. If you want to grow and maintain customer loyalty, the first thing you should do is to provide native language support. A couple of companies truly offer it, which is a sign that there are many opportunities to distinguish yourself with multilingual support.

Reasons why providing language support will bring you success.

You will increase sales - 75% of consumers are likely to buy from a brand if their website or product information is available in their native language. Imagine all the deals you are losing for not adopting deep adaptive MT. It will help make your business speak the language of your customers. You will handle translation in hundreds of language pairs; adaptive machine translation is a fast, reliable, private service in principal dominions. So, if you want those sales to grow, get machine translation, and you're done!

You will contact a broader market - no matter how much you think English is broadly verbal across the world. In reality, 90% of consumers won't consider buying something from an English website if they don't understand English. Thus, it's essential to tap into a pool of markets and get an international audience interested in your business. For this to happen, you must speak their language.

You'll see; it's totally worth your while and efforts. Recent studies have shown that 70% of customers react positively to companies that provide flexible language solutions. Try machine translation and anonymisation technology.

Building brand loyalty - recent research has shown that customers are loyal to products that share native language support, as 29% of businesses lost consumers because they don't offer multilingual support. Customers feel more loyal to a company that shares support in their native language and are willing to switch brands because of poor client experience. Wanting to initiate a conversation in Chinese, but no one in the team speaks, makes a client impatient and less likely to accept issues with the products or services. That's why communicating with your clients in every language is essential - you'll help establish trust and excellent customer support.

Gaining a competitive advantage - few companies offer language support. Only 28% of users actually experience support provided in their native language. This means your company has the opportunity to differentiate itself. Just think about it - let's say you had experiences with other companies that sell similar products. One brand provided language support, quickly answering all your questions, while the other company didn't have such support. Which company would you prefer in the future? The answer is probably obvious. Most consumers will pay more for a product due to the exceptional client support they get from a business.

Now that you know the importance of adopting multilanguage support let's see what you can do to implement it in your business.

What is the scope of language support?

First, you need to understand the scope of the required language. Find out which language comes into your inbox most often? What is the most common language demanded by your clients? Know your clients' preferred way of communicating and use it. Also, while language is essential, other factors play an essential role; some clients just want to contact you through phone, social media, or email. But one thing is clear: millennials prefer to chat on social media, while the part of consumers (about 53%) prefer the non-voice support. Personalize the help you offer to your clients and see what is convenient for both parties. Once you start managing foreign language conversations, you might consider a multilingual support team.

Learn to Speak "Customer" Language

How to communicate best with your clients? The words you choose can control the path your client relationships take. Businesses must find balance and build a common vocabulary with their clients. If your business is in the process of employing AI or wishes to improve the customer care process, you need to improve your business language.

Ways to build a shared language:

Get to know your audience.

Let them get behind your business.

Introduce chatbots or AI into your customer service system.

Build your chatbot system.

Communication with your clients is an art. It's worthwhile for you to develop a common language with clients - robots can do plenty of work, but an even excellent service will inevitably require human intervention.

Make your clients happy by speaking their native language! Customers can make or break your business. Ignoring this power or neglecting speaking in clients' language, you miss creating a powerful connection with your audience. Make information accessible and understandable in many languages - it will help you stand apart and share exceptional client experiences. 72% of clients spend plenty of time on websites in their language. So, you must take steps to make sure your content resounds in any language.

Do you want to try out machine translation and anonymization technology? Request a free demo from a reputable company today.

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Volkswagen's all-electric pickup and rugged SUV is launching under its iconic Scout branding, which returns as the off-road electric vehicle (EV) subsidiary of the German automaker.

With the auto industry moving forward with its latest environment-friendly vehicles and ditching fuel-powered engines, Giant automakers like Ford and Volkswagen are already rolling out their EVs to their loyal following.

However, according to the latest report by InsideEVs, there has been a recent trend wherein various automakers are entering the electric car market with a blast, capitalizing on their iconic nameplates.

To be more specific, the American automaker Ford has already introduced its electrified version of its muscle car icon, the Mustang.

On top of that, the gas-guzzling Hummer got its all-electric version. The controversial yet iconic "Back to the Future" automobile, the DeLorean, is also making its comeback as an EV.

Volkswagen Teases Electric Pickup, Rugged SUV

This time around, the German carmaker VW joins the latest bandwagon as it electrifies the Scout badge.

As per a news story by The Verge, the electric off-roading brand of Volkswagen is primarily focusing on the United States market, initially debuting a rugged SUV (R-SUV) and a pickup truck.

However, it is worth noting that Volkswagen plans to re-introduce Scout as a separate electric off-roader brand.

It would be launching as a subsidiary of the Germany-based firm, akin to other brands under its umbrella, namely Bentley, Audi, Lamborghini, Porsche, and Skoda.

Read Also: Volkswagen and Porsche Cars Are In Burning Abandoned Felicity Ace Cargo Ship; What's The Cause?

The CEO of the Volkswagen Group, Herbert Diess, confirmed its upcoming all-electric R-SUV and pickup in his latest statement.

The VW boss said that the automaker is now "taking the opportunity to further strengthen our position in one of the most significant growth markets for EVs."

Volkswagen and US Market

Diess further disclosed that VW is working on releasing an offering to the "highly attractive pickup and R-SUV segment." He said that the move is part of its goal to "become a relevant player in the US market."

The Verge noted in its report that VW trails behind other carmakers in the US, grabbing a minority slice of the pie in the market.

That said, it appears that the German automaker is looking to expand that with its future all-electric off-roading vehicles.

Scout Brand Resurrection

The off-roading Scout brand plans to showcase the initial prototypes of its pickup and R-SUV EVs sometime in 2023.

Meanwhile, the production for the two off-roading EVs is scheduled to start three years after its launch or in 2026.

Related Article: Volkswagen Fans, Their EVs are Pretty Much Sold Out for the Year Already
A Turkish AnadoluJet flight's take off was aborted after its passengers received photos of plane crashes on their phones.

The plane was preparing to take off when the passengers received the photos and alerted the crew. The captain then made the decision to head back to the terminal so that everyone could get out of the plane and the luggages and aircraft could be inspected.

The flight was eventually cleared to leave five hours later. The incident happened two weeks after a family from the US caused a security scare at the same airport by bringing out an unexploded artillery shell.

Flight Aborts Take Off as Passengers Receive Plane Crash Photos

The take-off of a Turkis AnadoluJet flight was aborted after passengers began receiving plane crash photos on their phones.

According to the BBC, the plane was already taxiing at the Ben Gurion Airport in Israel when the captain made the decision. The flight had 160 passengers onboard who informed the crew of the images they received. The crew then informed the captain.

All of the passengers and crew were asked to disembark from the plane. Luggages were likewise inspected once more.

Per the BBC, passengers were given the option to reboard the plane after it was inspected or to stay in Israel.

How were the Photos Sent to the Passengers?

The BBC reports that all the phones who received the disturbing images were iPhones and that the photos were received via AirDrop.

A report by UNILAD has added that the photos include the wreckage of the Turkish Airlines flight that crashed in Amsterdam in 2009. Nine people had died due to the crash. There is also a photo of the Aseana Airlines flight that killed three when it crashed in San Francisco in 2013.

Airports Authority spokesman Ofer Lefler ruled out the possibility of a cyberattack, according to UNILAD. In fact, the BBC reports that "Several young Israelis were identified as suspects and are being questioned."

Related Article: iPad Signal Helps in Rescue of Plane Crash Survivors: Full Details of Rescue Efforts

Second Security Scare in Two Weeks

The BBC report notes that this incident comes just two weeks after a family from the United States caused a bomb scare at the same airport after showing security personnel an unexploded artillery shell.

The family picked up the shell at Golan Heights, which is known as a "site of wars between Israel and Syria," per a separate report by the BBC. A member of the family showed it to a security personnel and asked if it could be placed in a suitcase.

"The official ordered her immediate vicinity to be cleared, but another passenger who misheard her started shouting 'terrorists shooting,' triggering mass panic," the BBC reports. Chaos ensued as passengers ran away, leading to one passenger needing hospital treatment.

The family was planning to take it home to the US as a souvenir.

Read Also: Sriwijaya Indonesia Flight SJ182 Crash: Rescue Team Located the Black Box, What Does It Do?
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Google Glass may have failed, but the tech company is ready to invest in the technology once again with its new AR glasses.

Google gave viewers a sneak peek at its new AR glasses at the Google I/O 2022 on May 11. Through a short video that showcased what the company has been working on, it looks like this latest project of Google is after breaking down language barriers.

In the demo video, Viva and Yoshiko, one an English speaker and the other a Mandarin Chinese speaker, tried Google's prototype AR glasses.

Andy Boxall of Digital Trends said that the Google's life-changing AR smart glasses demo gave him shivers. He said that it's a piece of technology that he truly loves  the one that can change lives.

AR Glasses Offer Subtitles for the World

In Google's demo video, the AR glass users were able to see translations appear right before their very eyes. This is while they are wearing the device and conversing with another individual.

According to Mashable, it looks like those wearing the AR glass had subtitles following them around, just like a mobile 24/7 real-time transcription service.

In a blog, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, emphasized the importance of living in the real world with an emphasis on technology that assists in improving those real-world experiences.

It appears like Google learned its lesson from its Google Glass experiment nearly a decade ago, where privacy and safety concerns regarding the device were raised by critics.

Pichai highlighted in a blog how augmented reality can help improve everyday lives.

"These AR capabilities are already useful on phones and the magic will really come alive when you can use them in the real world without the technology getting in the way. That potential is what gets us most excited about AR: the ability to spend time focusing on what matters in the real world, in our real lives," Pichai wrote.

Read Also: Google Glass Price, Release Date Hinted At: How Much And When?

Potential Uses of AR Glasses

If you have experienced communicating with someone using a different language, you would understand the difficulty of the situation. You would then know the impact of the AR glasses technology in your life.

You would usually use Google Translate to communicate with another person using a different language. While the app is useful and would solve the problem of language barriers, it can still be difficult and at times, awkward. The glasses would have changed that situation completely.

Pichai said that it can be challenging to understand someone who speaks a different language. He then noted what could possibly happen when Google use the advancements in translation and transcription to solve the problem.

According to CNET, one of the most interesting parts of its new glasses initiative is a focus on utility. The ability to be understood, or to understand, is actually useful. The glasses, in fact, are trying to assist.

The prototype glasses are focused on delivering language in a line of sight experience.

Related Article: Google Glass May Soon Be Used At Work
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Google confirmed during the I/O 2022 on May 11 that it's adding transcripts and auto-translated video captions for YouTube on mobile devices, with support for 16 languages.

YouTube New Features Help To Easily Navigate and Search

Google claimed in a blog that video is becoming a fundamental part of how we share information, communicate, and learn. They recognized that when you come to YouTube, you are looking for a specific moment in a video.

Ergo, Google wants to help you get there faster.

The inclusion of transcript and auto-translated video captions is part of Google's work to make YouTube videos easier to navigate and search, building on existing features like auto-generated chapters, according to Engadget.

Last year, Google launched the auto-generated chapters to make it easier to jump to the part you're most interested in.

Over the next year, the tech company has a plan to increase the number of YouTube videos with auto-generated chapters to 80 million from the current 8 million.

The new features are great for creators because it saves them time making chapters. Google is now applying multimodal technology from DeepMind, the company said in a blog. The technology simultaneously uses text, audio, and video to auto-generate chapters with greater accuracy and speed.

The updates to YouTube's auto-translation features come after Google removed community captions in 2020. This leaves some users high and dry, particularly in Japan and Korea.

However, by 2021, Google was openly experimenting with auto-translation tools on YouTube.

Next month, Google plans to add auto-translated captions to Ukrainian YouTube content as part of the company's larger effort to increase access to accurate information about the war.

Read Also: YouTube Offers Podcasters Up to $300K to Embrace Video Format

Transcripts and Auto-Translated Captions Are Useful for YouTube Mobile Users

One of YouTube's most useful features is the captions. There are times that we cannot hear a video's audio, and captions can help us by allowing us to watch a video even if your phone is muted.

Meanwhile, transcripts will be auto-generated using Google's speech recognition models, just like automatic captions, with the added difference that you'll be able to read them down in a list form similar to the auto-transcripts in the Google Recorder app, according to Android Police.

Another new feature that we're getting from Youtube is the auto-translated captions for Youtube mobile. This feature has been available for a long time on the web version of YouTube. According to Android Police, if a video has captions, you can go into its settings and tap on "Auto-translate," select your preferred language, and you'll have subtitles adapted to your language.

The new features are useful in a lot of scenarios. Since our phones are becoming one of the main ways to access YouTube, the fact that mobile users can now translate subtitles will help creators reach audiences from all around the world, regardless of what language they're speaking, as per Android Police.

YouTube is an American online video sharing and social media platform launched by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim on February 14, 2005. It is owned by Google, and it is the second most visited website, right after Google itself.

Related Article: YouTube Shorts Videos Now Accessible Everywhere With a New Splicing Feature to Boot
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Enjoyers of incredibly obnoxious people on planes getting punched, rejoice. Recently, one of the online bits of news du jour was video of what seemed to be a class-A dickhead continuously bothering Mike Tyson until the boxer finally stood up and delivered a couple choice blows to his noggin. Based on the video and the information of the other travelers, it seemed pretty clearly deserved, but you still never know if it was all a master plan to extort some sort of settlement or damages from Tyson, by a guy weaponizing his talents of being a massive pain in everybodys ass.

Lucky for Tyson, it was announced today that there will be no charges brought against him for the aerial attack, with reports that basically, in the most formal and legal way possible, say yeah, that guy needed to get hit. The district attorney cited in part the conduct of the victim leading up to the incident when explaining why no charges would be brought. Honestly, thats pretty impressive, and if this guy is capable of change, it should be a motivating moment for him to do so. When the justice system of the United States comes together and decides that youre an asshole? Thats quite an eye-opener.

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The victim, to his credit, did also request that charges not be brought in the case, which I guess is a singular redeeming moment for him. That would have been the ultimate dick move, to not only be so annoying as to goad Mike Tyson into punching you in the head, but then forcing him and other people on the flight to go through the further drawn out annoyance of testimony, trial, and so on.

Knowing that the victim was drunk when it happened, I can also understand that, even if youre the plaintiff, having the details of a s**tfaced outing reviewed and examined in court seems like maybe the biggest nightmare of all time. Its not too surprising he wanted to take his licks and retreat. I mean hey, the guy was flying first class, so hes probably doing fine.

Top Image: birzer/Pixabay
NASA and Boeing are finalizing plans for the CST-100 Starliner spacecraft's second uncrewed test flight.

The team revealed that the Starliner mission will launch on May 19.

Launch of Boeing's Cst-100 Starliner Capsule

Starliner, we are go for launch.



In today's Flight Readiness Review, Boeing, @NASA and its international partners gave a "go" for Orbital Flight Test-2.

Thank you, NASA, for working side-by-side with us to prepare for #OFT2.



Learn more: https://t.co/AsIXVDWQHn pic.twitter.com/DeiOdXFND9  Boeing Space (@BoeingSpace) May 11, 2022

A spokesperson for the aerospace company and NASA officials said that Boeing's CST-100 Starliner capsule is on track for its critical May 19 test launch.

According to Digital Trends, the mission comes after a failed attempt to send the Starliner to the ISS in December 2019, when technical problems prevented the spacecraft from reaching its intended orbit. A second attempt, in August of last year, also failed due to technical issues that prevented the launch from taking place.

Read More: NASA Boeing Starliner Launch Revealed: New Test Flight Window, Update on Major Glitch That Caused Delay

What's the Reason for the Delayed Launch?

Space.com explained that for troubleshooting, Boeing and NASA rolled Starliner and its United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket off the launch pad. Investigators discovered the likely reason for the valve problem: the nitrogen tetroxide (NTO) oxidizer reacted with moisture in the air, producing nitric acid. The nitric acid then reacted with the aluminum valve housing, resulting in corrosion products that made the valves inoperable.

During a conference call with the media on May 3, Boeing representatives and NASA officials said that the initial diagnosis was correct and that the problems had been addressed.

Steve Stich, NASA's Commercial Crew Program Manager, said, "It's been a hard eight months, I would say, but very fulfilling that we've resolved the problem with the oxidizer isolation valves and we're headed on toward launch."

What Happens After a Succesful Launch?

Digital Trends reported that NASA will have another vehicle to use for astronaut trips alongside SpaceX's successful Crew Dragon spacecraft if Boeing can show the safety and reliability of their Starliner capsule in the forthcoming test flight.

The mission is part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, which involves the space agency collaborating with private companies to design and test human spaceflight technology.

How Many Days Will the Boeing Spacecraft Stay on the ISS?

Space.com reported that on March 12, Boeing also handed the OFT-2 Starliner a new service module, which was mated to the crew capsule.

If all goes according to plan on OFT-2, Starliner will dock with the ISS roughly a day after launch and stay for five to ten days.

OFT-2 will be Starliner's second attempt at an uncrewed test flight to the International Space Station. The first attempt, in December 2019, was cut short due to a series of technological issues that prevented Starliner from connecting with the station.

Boeing has a NASA contract to ferry NASA personnel to and from the International Space Station using Starliner. The capsule will not be able to carry a crew until it completes an uncrewed test flight to the orbiting lab; nevertheless, the company hopes to complete its crewed test mission before the end of the year.

Related Article: SpaceX Is Now First In Race to Bring NASA Astronauts To The International Space Station After Boeing Announces It Will Repeat Starliner Test
On March 21, the White House released a statement from President Biden regarding the nations cybersecurity, including recommendations for private companies. As the conflict in Ukraine continues, the presidents administration cited evolving intelligence that American organizations could face the ripple effects of cyberattacks sparked in Eastern Europe. While the statement addresses what the government will do to limit this impact, it also points out the reality is that much of the Nations critical infrastructure is owned and operated by the private sector and the private sector must act to protect the critical services on which all Americans rely.

So what cybersecurity recommendations did the statement include for private companies?

The first set of recommendations were best practices that all organizations should already be following, including:

Multifactor authentication

Patching against known vulnerabilities

Employee education to limit the effectiveness of phishing attempts

Next, the statement focused on data safety practices. This included encryption and maintaining offline backups of company data.

However, where the statement focused on proactive measures companies can take to modernize and improve their cybersecurity posture, the instructions were vague: Deploy modern security tools on your computers and devices to continuously look for and mitigate threats.

Although this recommendation is on the right track, the detail it lacks is typical of the cybersecurity learning curve. The distance between best practices and achieving robust enterprise cybersecurity is significant. Too often enterprise cybersecurity becomes complicated or siloed, sometimes negating or limiting sound investments in cybersecurity while prolonging inferior practices and tools. Simply adding the newest tools to your stack wont provide the unique security your organization requires.

The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) within the Department of Homeland Security does provide some more actionable recommendations. Locking down unused ports and protocols, enabling network logging (which was covered in detail in an August 2021 executive order), and keeping your antivirus software up to date are all important. However, these cybersecurity tools and techniques are most effective when deployed against known and identified cyberthreats, such as known malware signatures, previously exploited vulnerabilities, and other identified indicators of compromise.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and the extremely uncertain situation in Ukraine only amplifies the crucial necessity of securing digital infrastructure, as the likelihood of innovative cyber tactics making their way beyond the conflict and into networks around the world is heightened. What starts as an exploit deployed locally could quickly become ransomware-for-hire available to bad actors targeting victims globally.

So, what does it look like for an enterprise deploying modern security tools on computers and devices to continuously look for and mitigate threats? A combination of tools is needed to fully secure the vulnerabilities and operations of every global enterprise. But the foundation for any modern cybersecurity strategy, including a zero-trust architecture, relies on complete, incorruptible visibility into what is happening in your organizations global network. For this reason, we believe that a comprehensive approach to network visibility coupled with a network detection and response (NDR) solution should be the keystone in any cybersecurity strategy.

What does this visibility really look like? Its the ability to drill into a security alert and, within a handful of clicks, identify the exact application, server and location experiencing an issue. Its recognizing threats in the attack lifecycle, as soon as they appear as an anomaly in your network  as opposed to when they exploit a known vulnerability and trigger a preprogrammed security alert. Not all NDR tools are capable of providing this comprehensive visibility, but NETSCOUTs Omnis Cyber Intelligence is. It leverages network packet data, the incorruptible foundational layer of the network, at scale, to detect threats such as those described above.

Learn more about Omnis Cyber Intelligence, NETSCOUT'S network detection and response solution.

All organizations need perimeter security tools such as NETSCOUT Arbor Edge Defense, network firewalls, and endpoint detection and response (EDR) to have both visibility and enforcement capabilities at the edges of the network. But that visibility and enforcement is tied to the network areas and tooling around it.

With an NDR tool as the keystone of your enterprise security strategy, deep context and insight into what is happening within your network is clear and apparent. The data these tools generate can then be shared with a security information and event management (SIEM) tool for reporting; firewalls or EDR management for immediate action on specific devices; or a security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platform for sophisticated orchestration of security policies across the enterprise. NETSCOUTs Omnis Cyber Intelligence provides visibility not only at the edge, but in all areas of the network, detecting threats and anomalies everywhere  including lateral movement.

As new threats and exploits spill out from conflicts and hacker innovation around the globe, relying on a prevention strategy alone will not secure a global enterprise against cyberthreats. With networks continuing to expand in scale and complexity, even the most experienced security teams cant identify every vulnerability before its exploited. Having a robust system in place that can detect anomalous behavior within your network before it becomes an attack, and then respond to it, is how the American private sector needs to ready itself to ensure that the critical infrastructure it manages will continue to deliver as planned.

Learn more about our network detection and response solutions.
It seems some projects under Meta's Reality labs division aren't meant to be.

According to a recent report from Reuters, a Meta spokesperson confirmed that the company is preparing cutbacks in its Reality Labs division in the form of axing or postponing some of its projects to refocus on hardware products and the metaverse.

It is unknown which of Reality Labs' projects are canceled or postponed until further notice.

Reality Labs Cutbacks Details

According to Reuters' report, Meta's Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth told the company's Reality Labs division staff during a weekly Q&A session on May 10 to expect announcements regarding changes within the division within a week, according to a summary of Bosworth's comments during the Q&A session.

The Meta spokesperson confirmed that Bosworth told Reality Labs staffers that it could no longer afford to do some projects, while it would have to postpone others. Bosworth told this without specifying which projects were canceled or postponed.

However, one project that Reality Labs is sure to not be canceled nor postponed is Project Cambria, which is Meta's high-end VR headset that is expected to release this fall.

Read More: iPod Touch Already Sold Out Completely in the US  a Day After Apple Discontinued It

The spokesperson added that Meta is not planning to lay off anyone from Reality Labs as part of the changes, which is something that is either happening or has happened within Meta's many teams and divisions.

Engadget mentioned in its report that the postponement and/or cancelation of some of Reality Labs' projects is the latest blow to Meta's ambitions to re-orient the company towards the metaverse rather than its social network, specifically Facebook and Instagram.

Meta's Investor Woes And Recruitment Freeze

Meta was recently caught in a tight spot; the spending level of company CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the metaverse has worried company investors due to the payout being years away.

This concern is evidenced by Reality labs' increased operating cost from $1.83 billion to $2.96 billion.

Meta's Reality Labs is the division crucial to Meta's ambition to become the gateway into the metaverse.

Other pieces of evidence that worried investors include Meta's stock falling by nearly 50%, negatively offsetting the company's growth in the past five years, and the company's slow growth.

This slow growth, which cost the company $10 billion in lost revenue, is caused by Apple's ad tracking changes and younger users switching from Facebook and/or Instagram to TikTok.

The increased operating cost is negatively affecting Meta so badly, that it was forced to freeze recruitment efforts in early May, with the company's engineering team being the first to be affected by the freeze while Reality Labs was said to be least affected by Meta's many teams and divisions.

Zuckerberg was said to have acknowledged the woes of Meta's investors in a call with them on April 27, saying that investment in the metaverse "differed from past product launches" as virtual reality has a high barrier of entry and that it includes hardware.

He also added that Meta's overall profitability wouldn't grow in 2022 due to the investments made in the metaverse and ad revenue not growing as quickly as initially expected.

Related Article: Meta Won't Be Hiring Anyone Anytime Soon  Here's Why and When It Will Start
A year ago today, U.S. President Joe Biden released the ambitious Executive Order on Improving the Nations Cybersecurity following a series of devastating and destructive cyberattacks. The executive order (EO) triggered an avalanche of rulemakings across the federal government to meet dozens of now mainly achieved deadlines to implement the order's objectives.

The Biden administration premised the EO on elevating the government's protection and response capabilities across a wide range of digital technology systems and services, from moving the federal government to cloud services and zero-trust architectures to improving software supply chain security. The idea was to strengthen government infrastructure cybersecurity while also raising the cybersecurity bar for government vendors, including tech giants, who must likewise meet the EO's objectives.

Now at the one-year mark, it's worth looking at how well the order stands up, how effective it has been, and whether it has missed any relevant cybersecurity concerns despite its wide-ranging nature.

Cybersecurity executive order is just what we needed

Most cybersecurity and policy experts agree that the EO has fostered much-needed and long-overdue changes. Michael Daniel, president and CEO of the Cyber Threat Alliance and cybersecurity coordinator under President Obama, tells CSO, "Whether you're talking about software bills of material, or you're talking about the push for multi-factor authentication across the federal enterprise, the cybersecurity executive order provided the foundation for the ongoing activity and is the lodestar for the administration's priorities."

Daniel says that a year is not a sufficient time frame to adequately assess the order, which contemplates actions that have yet to take place. "What the EO set in motion will take another couple of years to play out, particularly when you're talking about changes to things like the federal acquisition rules. That takes a long time. So many of these things are still in motion and will continue to play out over the next couple of years."

"I'm pleased with the degree to which this executive order has driven and continues to drive activity. Not all executive orders do that," Bob Kolasky, senior vice president for critical infrastructure at Exiger and former assistant director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), tells CSO. "This was the president in his role as CEO of the largest enterprise in the country, the U.S. government, saying, 'I want my CISO team, my risk team, to take cybersecurity more seriously.' It has had an impact on the broader cybersecurity across the U.S., including state and local governments and critical infrastructure."

"But it was, first and foremost, 'Let's get our own house in order. Let's modernize our own house as much as possible. I think there's early evidence that it has accomplished that," says Kolasky.

"I think the order was pretty comprehensive and detailed and just what we needed, even if it was overdue," Chris Wysopal, co-founder and CTO of Veracode, tells CSO. "It's been such a long time since the federal government has really done anything about the security of software. So, I think it was a huge step in the right direction."

A natural response to SolarWinds, other security events

The EO followed a series of high-profile and scary cybersecurity incidents, including the SolarWinds supply chain attack by Russian threat actors, the infiltration of Microsoft Exchange servers by Chinese espionage operators, and a ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline. The U.S. has not experienced a comparable string of damaging cybersecurity incidents since the EO was released but its inaccurate to say that a relative calming of destructive activity is a consequence of the order.

If there has been a diminution of seriously disruptive events since last May, it's just "the natural response to the crescendo of events that you're talking about was an increased focus on cybersecurity both inside and outside of government," Daniel says. Moreover, he adds, "These things always seem to go in cycles."

Kolasky agrees, particularly when it comes to ransomware incidents. "I think there are other steps that the administration and critical infrastructure have taken and ways that we've shaped what's going on in terms of ransomware that have been more impactful than the executive order," he says

Wyospal rejects the premise that malicious actions have simmered down. "I don't know if I would say things have calmed down," he says. "I think we've readjusted the baseline of what we think is normal. There are serious ransomware events all the time."

But Wyospal does think that the EO has forced some tech suppliers to take cybersecurity more seriously. "The mere existence of the executive order gets organizations, especially the suppliers that are building software, to think more about 'I have to secure the software I'm delivering,' or 'I have to secure my development and pipeline from malicious intruders,'" he says.

What's missing from the cybersecurity EO?

Did the EO miss any critical cybersecurity elements despite its all-encompassing nature? Not really, Daniel says. "As hard as it is to get the policies written and agreed to it's even harder to go and make them work and make them work in practice. I wouldn't want the White House pushing out a whole slew of new executive orders because I think that would dilute the effort that is still needed on what they've already laid out."

Other adjacent initiatives should be high priority right now, such as "implementing the incident reporting legislation that Congress passed," Daniel says. "That means developing a regulation actually to implement it. That's a big piece that CISA now has to do in addition to all these activities in the executive order."

Kolasky suggests that the executive order as written is already a full plate. "You do want to have a manageable agenda of things," he says. "Focusing on zero trust, contract improvement, and software supply chain security all strike me as good starting points for what federal networks should be doing."

Wysopal says, "I think the thing that's missing, but they've alluded to [in the EO], is expanding it to cover more software. The initial requirements around what they deem critical software involve things like hypervisors and operating systems and network security devices, and things that have to operate at increased privileges."

"That is all well and good. That's where you would want to start, with the highest risk stuff, but we've seen plenty of breaches that have come in through run-of-the-mill websites, Wysopal says. So that's where I think it needs to go in the future, realizing that most software is putting the government at risk. It's not just critical software."
FAIRFIELD  The man filling the shoes of outgoing Superintendent of Schools Mike Cummings has done the job before.

Officials announced Stephen Tracey will be filling the role of interim superintendent starting July 1 while the school board looks for his permanent replacement.

Im happy to announce that Dr. Tracey will once again be joining us as the interim superintendent of schools while the board conducts its superintendent search, BOE Chair Christine Vitale said in a Tuesday night meeting. Were very excited to welcome Dr. Tracey back, just for his knowledge of the district and existing relationships and familiarity with the work of the district.

Vitale said Tracey will be invited to an upcoming board meeting so he can meet with Cummings and get an overview of the districts goals and priorities, as well as meet staff and community stakeholders.

Tracy is a familiar face in Fairfield, having filled the same interim role in 2016 and 2019.

Tracy has decades of educational experience, beginning as a public school history teacher in Westchester, N.Y. He then served as assistant superintendent in Farmington before becoming New Milfords superintendent, a role he held from 1985 to 1993 and again as an interim in 2018.

He was the senior vice president at Edison Schools from 1993 to 2007, and then Derbys superintendent from 2008 to 2012. He then became a superintendent of schools with the state Department of Children and Families, working with students in foster and residential care until he retired in 2015.

Tracey has returned to work in interim assignments along the way when called upon.

The board also voted to form a search committee to fill the superintendent role permanently and contracted Cooperative Educational Services to help with that search. Vitale noted the superintendent search will not be public.

Cummings announced his resignation in early April, saying at the time that he decided to semi-retire and accept the part-time superintendency of Pomfret Community School. He said he was at a point in his life where he needs to be more available to his family.

joshua.labella@hearstmediact.com
NEW MILFORD  Housatonic Valley Health Districts Medical Reserve Corps, which serves New Milford, Washington and other area towns, will be participating in American Red Cross SleevesUp campaign.

As part of the campaign, through Aug. 1, health district volunteers, family, friends and community members can pledge to donate blood at a blood drive in a location most convenient for them.

Lisa Morrissey, New Milfords health director, said she supports the campaign and encourages those who can, to donate blood.

Theres been an overall shortage in blood donations since the pandemic started, Morrissey said. This is such a great way to support our community and to help save lives.

Morrissey added the great part about a virtual blood drive is that everyone can participate as its convenient for them, by location or time. Its so easy to do and yet very personal and impactful.

Ruth Quattro, public health communications coordinator at the health district, said virtual programs are a great way to bring together community members close and far.

Our hope is that this virtual blood drive will chip away at the blood shortage while bringing others together. By pledging to donate blood, you are helping others near and far, Quattro added.

The health district located in New Milford is planning to schedule an in-person blood drive for the fall.

Benefits to donating blood include a mini-free health screening prior to donation, a healthier heart and vascular system, and building a sense of community and purpose by helping someone in need, a release about the virtual blood drive campaign said.

To find a local blood drive, visit the American Red Cross website, and put in a zip code.

The Housatonic Valley Health District serves New Milford, Oxford, Southbury, Washington, and Woodbury.

Eligibility requirements for donating blood can be found at the American Red Cross website. To learn more about how donating blood, visit Housatonic Valley Health Districts emergency preparedness website at hvhd.us.

For more information, call 203-264-9616.
WASHINGTON (AP)  Many parents are hunting for infant formula because of a combination of short- and long-term problems that has hit most of the biggest U.S. brands.

Millions of babies in the U.S. rely on formula, which is the only source of nutrition recommended for infants who aren't exclusively breastfed.

Here's a look at what's behind the problem and what parents can do:

WHY IS THERE A SHORTAGE?

Ongoing supply disruptions have combined with a recent safety recall to leave many pharmacy and supermarket shelves bare.

The problems began last year as the COVID-19 pandemic led to disruptions in labor, transportation and raw materials  economy-wide issues that didn't spare the formula industry. Inventory was further squeezed by parents stockpiling during COVID-19 lockdowns.

Then in February, Abbott Nutrition recalled several major brands of powdered formula and shut down its Sturgis, Michigan, factory when federal officials began investigating four babies who suffered bacterial infections after consuming formula from the facility.

Abbott is one of only a handful of companies that produce the vast majority of the U.S. formula supply, so their recall wiped out a large segment of the market.

WHAT IS IN BABY FORMULA?

Most formulas contain protein from cow's milk that's been altered to be easier to digest and enhanced with extra nutrients needed for growth and development. The Food and Drug Administration sets specific nutritional requirements, including minimum amounts of protein, fat, calcium and a number of vitamins. Formula makers achieve those levels by adding various sugars, oils and minerals.

The formulas are designed to mimic breast milk, though studies have repeatedly shown better health outcomes for babies who are breastfed.

WHY CAN'T ALL MOTHERS RELY ON BREAST MILK?

Health professionals recommend exclusively breastfeeding babies until they are 6 months old. But federal figures show that only 1 in 4 are relying solely on breast milk at that age.

Mothers face a number of challenges to long-term breastfeeding, including returning to work and finding the time and equipment needed to pump breast milk. About 60% of mothers stop breastfeeding sooner than they had planned, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

State and federal laws have been enacted to encourage breastfeeding by requiring break time and accommodations for mothers of infants.

Rates of breastfeeding have consistently been lower among Black babies than other groups. About three quarters of Black babies are breast fed in infancy, below the national average of 84%, according to the CDC.

WHAT SHOULD PARENTS DO IF THEY ARE HAVING TROUBLE FINDING FORMULA?

Talk with your pediatrician or call a local food bank to see if they can help locate some options. Experts also recommend checking with smaller stores and pharmacies, which may still have supplies when larger stores run out.

Most regular baby formulas contain the same basic ingredients and nutrients, so parents shouldn't hesitate to buy a different brand if they're having trouble finding their regular one.

Some infants require specialty formulas due to allergies, digestive problems and other medical conditions. Parents should talk to their doctor if they cant find those products, which manufacturers usually distribute through pharmacies and clinics.

Families that qualify for WIC  a federal program similar to food stamps that pays for about half the formula used in the U.S.  can also contact their local agency.

Health officials also warn against buying formula via social media websites or outside of conventional retailers because they could be counterfeit.

WHY ARE PARENTS TOLD NOT TO USE MAKE-YOUR-OWN FORMULA RECIPES ONLINE?

Many do-it-yourself formula recipes are made from cows milk and granular sugar that may be difficult for young babies to digest. They also lack the specific vitamins and proteins found in breastmilk and FDA-approved formulas that are needed for basic nutrition.

Particularly for small babies, many of these formulas and mixtures that are found online dont contain even the most basic nutrient mixes that babies need to survive, said Dr. Steven Abrams, a pediatrician at the University of Texas, Austin.

Abrams also stressed that parents should never dilute infant formula.

WHAT ARE RETAILERS DOING TO KEEP FORMULA IN STOCK?

Several national chains have limited the number of containers customers can purchase in stores and online. For CVS and Walgreens, the limit is three per customer. Target limits purchases to four per person when buying online.

Amazon said Thursday it is working to keep the products available on its website and monitoring third-party sellers for price-gouging.

If we identify a price that violates our policy, we remove the offer and take appropriate action with the seller, a company spokesperson said in a statement.

WHEN ARE SUPPLIES LIKELY TO IMPROVE?

Health regulators recently announced several steps designed to boost supply, including allowing faster importation of formula made overseas. Typically, 98% of baby formula consumed in the U.S. is made domestically, according to federal officials.

The FDA is working with Abbott to fix the violations that triggered the shutdown of its Michigan plant, which produces Similac, EleCare and several other leading powdered formulas.

The company says its products have not been directly linked to the bacterial infections in children, pointing out that genetic samples collected from its factory did not match those found in several infants who got sick.

The Chicago-based company said this week that, pending FDA approval, it could restart manufacturing at its plant within two weeks. After that it would take another six to eight weeks before new products hit store shelves.

But even then, experts caution that many of the industrywide issues will continue to restrain supplies.

This is going to be a problem and it's not going away for at least a period of several months, Abrams said.

___

AP Business Writer Dee-Ann Durbin contributed from Detroit. Follow Matthew Perrone on Twitter: @AP_FDAwriter

___

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.
With COVID-19 rates in Connecticut rising steadily, some experts are questioning whether it is seasonality of the virus or other factors at play.

One year ago, on May 10, 2021, COVID-related hospitalizations were about where they are right now.

At the time, there were 280 people fighting COVID infections in Connecticut hospitals, according to state data, about on par with hospitalizations now. The state said Tuesday there were 316 patients in Connecticut hospitals with a COVID infection.

That 280 from last year, however, represented a continuing decrease in hospitalizations. A week earlier, on May 3, 2021, there were 343 COVID hospitalizations in the state. A week later, on May 17, 2021, the number was down to 170.

This year, COVID is apparently on the rise. On Monday, the state said there were 276 hospitalizations, 80 fewer than were reported on Tuesday.

COVID-19 cases are also rising. The state said Tuesday that 8,741 additional COVID cases had been identified over the previous seven days out of 70,577 reported tests. The seven-day positivity rate of 12.39 percent was the highest it has been since the winter.

The numbers havent been spiking, but they certainly have been rising, said Dr. Ulysses Wu, chief epidemiologist at Hartford HealthCare. He called it a Jersey Shore wave as opposed to a Hawaiian Pacific Coast wave.

Pedro Mendes, a disease modeler at the University of Connecticut, said he does not believe seasonality is an important factor in the spread of the coronavirus, but rather it comes down to more infectious variants and a lack of mitigation efforts.

I dont think seasonality plays a big role with this virus, he wrote in an email. I think what we are seeing is a combination of less protection (almost no one is wearing masks these days) and the B.2.12.1 variant of omicron.

BA.2.12.1 is one of two dominant coronavirus strains in Connecticut, comprising as much as 23 percent of the total samples tested, according to Yale researcher Nathan Grubaugh. BA.2 is the more dominant variant, comprising the majority of tested samples.

Wu said he believes seasonality still is a factor to consider.

We should expect a spike toward the end of fall, end of October, early November, he said, but that variants will play a larger role. Variants will always undo seasonality.

Like Mendes, Wu believes social behavior is also an important aspect. He said people are demonstrating a binary approach to COVID: It either doesnt exist or it completely exists, with most people acting as though it does not exist.

People dont care. Theyve stopped caring a while ago, Wu said. Once all the mask mandates went away, thats when they stopped caring. The social behaviors have all gone away. People are living life like normal.

Wu said he does not expect the latest wave to smooth out in the near future. Connecticut residents should expect COVID-19 numbers to remain high, he said.

I dont anticipate them going down for a long time, he said. At the earliest, end of May, early June.
GROTON  A Norwich woman was arrested Wednesday afternoon after police say she struck a motorcycle at a traffic signal and then tried to flee the scene.

Groton police officers, paramedics and personnel from the Poquonnock Bridge and U.S. Naval Submarine Base fire departments responded to a reported motor vehicle accident involving a car and motorcycle shortly after 5 p.m. Wednesday.

The crash occurred near the area of Route 12 and Ohio Avenue. Police said the motorcycle, a 2005 Yamaha XVS 1100, had been heading south on Route 12 and slowed for a traffic signal at the Ohio Avenue intersection. The driver of a Ford Crown Victoria behind the bike failed to stop at the red light, police said, striking the back of the motorcycle.

The rear of the bike became lodged under the cars front bumper, as the car pushed the bike into the intersection with the rider still on it, police said. The car then crashed into a light pole on the west shoulder of the road as well as the metal guardrail, police said.

The vehicle continued forward for some distance before the car stopped south of Ohio Avenue, and the rider was able to get off the bike, police said.

The car driver attempted to leave, however, a witness blocked in her vehicle preventing her from doing so, police said. Police said the car driver was uninjured during the crash.

Police identified her as 41-year-old Darcy Morrissette, of Norwich.

Morrissette was charged with driving under the influence, possession of drug paraphernalia, second-degree breach of peace, third-degree criminal mischief and first-degree reckless endangerment.

She was also charged with failure to obey a control signal, failure to drive in the proper lane, evading responsibility and driving without a license, according to police.

The rider of the Yamaha, a 19-year-old man from Bozrah, was conscious and alert at the scene when first responders arrived, police said. He was transported to Lawrence and Memorial Hospital for what police said appeared to be non-life-threatening injuries.

Police said Morrissette was not cooperative at the scene and was taken to the police department for processing. She was held on $5,000 bond.

Any witnesses to the crash, or anyone with information, can contact Groton police at 860-441-6712.
Google is updating its Google Maps to a more intuitive and immersive view of the app. During this year's Google Developers Conference, aside from the big announcement on Google's Health Connect app, it also unveiled the new look of Maps.

Google Maps' immersive view would give users a glimpse of what a certain location would look like, not just from bland street drawings but with an accurate visual render.

Google Maps' Immersive View

Google Maps was first launched with the primary purpose of assisting users in arriving safely at their destinations. Through the years, it has progressed to become much more than it once was; now, it is a helpful companion when users are looking for the ideal restaurant or information about a local go-to spot.

In addition to that, Google is launching a new way to navigate with Maps today, and it's all thanks to recent developments in artificial intelligence. The company's focus on AI made it possible for them to create a detailed digital model of the world by combining billions of Street View images with aerial photographs.

As reported by The Verge, Liez Reid, the VP of engineering at Google, stated that the combination of imagery was extremely useful to help their team paint a realistic picture of what it truly looks like to be at a certain location.

Reid also compared the functionality of the feature to the "magic" offered by Google Earth's massive zoom, but on a more local scale. She also mentioned that Google has been working on it for some time. The VP mentioned that they even have a demo from years ago, although it did not really work and they pushed through.

However, the development of technology in recent years has made the process appear quite natural.

Google believes that through an immersive point of view, users can make the best decisions possible before they head out.

Through Google Maps' Immersive View, users will be able to get a feel for a neighborhood, landmark, restaurant, or popular venue before ever stepping foot inside. The Immersive View gives a new experience which will allow users to experience what it's like to be there even before they go there in person.

As you navigate through them, it appears as though you are playing a video game with medium graphics that is set in a real world that is precisely scaled.

Read Also: Apple Employees Criticize Work-From-Home Policy in Open Letter

How Does it Work?

Users can utilize the feature when it launches in their cities or the cities they are planning to go to. Users can quickly plan their itinerary in the app if they are planning a quick trip to New York for a food trip.

Another great factor with these newly upgraded maps is their capacity to accurately provide photos of what the surrounding neighborhood looks like for a certain museum, restaurant, or tourist attraction.

Useful information such as weather conditions, photos of what a location looks like at different times of day, and spotting crowded areas or busy spots will also be available when the Immersive View rolls out.

When looking for a place to dine, users can just slide down their app to the street level to investigate nearby restaurants and view helpful information, such as real-time foot traffic and traffic in the immediate area. With AI, users can even look inside restaurants to get a quick sense of the atmosphere of the place before going into the establishment.

According to Google, the immersive view will function on almost all mobile phones and other electronic devices. Later on this year, it will roll out in cities such as Los Angeles, London, New York City, San Francisco, and Tokyo, with more cities to follow soon after.

Read Also: Google Says Chinese Hacking Group is Targeting Russian Government Agencies
(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

Daniel Merino, The Conversation

(THE CONVERSATION) Parents and doctors have known about childhood ADHD  attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder  for decades, but it is only recently that the medical field has started to recognize, diagnose and seriously study ADHD in adults. In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we explore what adult ADHD looks like, how it is diagnosed today and the many new treatments available to help those with the disorder live better lives.

The name attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder is a pretty good description of this common condition, but it can manifest in a few different ways. Some people only struggle with paying attention, some people can focus on tasks but are constantly fidgeting or dealing with excessive energy and some people exhibit both attention problems and hyperactivity. But for those who study ADHD, it is how these symptoms affect peoples daily lives that is most important.

Tamara May is a senior research fellow at Monash University in Australia. She says that ADHD affects the way our executive functions work. These are things like how we pay attention, how we sort of moderate ourselves, how we plan and organize, time management and how we switch attention. As May explains, many people with ADHD are forgetful and bad at time management and these issues can affect many aspects of daily life. It means that you underachieved academically or you had to drop out. It means that your interpersonal relationships are impacted, you cant maintain friendships or youre heavily relying on a partner to do all your organizing.

Thankfully, as awareness of adult ADHD has grown, so has the body of knowledge on how to treat it, both with drugs and also with behavioral therapy. Laura Knouse is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Richmond in the U.S. and studies how therapy can help adults with ADHD. She says that, according to most recent research, the best nonmedication treatments fall under this umbrella of something we call cognitive behavioral therapy. I like to simplify that and just say a skills-based treatment, a treatment thats going to help you figure out how to structure your environment and how to structure your time and develop the strategies that youre going to need to make your goals real, even in the presence of having ADHD in your life.

In the full episode of the podcast, we talk in depth with Knouse about what these therapies are, how they work in concert with medication and whats next for treatments. Then we end the episode with Tamara May, digging into how perceptions of adult ADHD  both within medicine and culture more generally  have changed in recent years, and what it means for those who have it.

Wed love to hear what you think about The Conversation Weekly podcast and are running a listener survey about the show, which should take about five minutes to complete. Thank you!

This episode was produced by Mend Mariwany, with sound design by Eloise Stevens. Our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. You can find us on Twitter @TC_Audio, on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via email. You can also sign up to The Conversations free daily email here.

You can listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed, or find out how else to listen here.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/adult-adhd-what-it-is-how-to-treat-it-and-why-medicine-ignored-it-for-so-long-podcast-182534.
KRIVOLAK, North Macedonia (AP)  U.S. troops joined forces from Britain, France, Italy and allied countries in the region Thursday in a military exercise held in NATOs newest member, North Macedonia, aimed at displaying deployment readiness along the alliances eastern borders.

Nearly 10,000 soldiers from 19 nations are taking part in NATOs planned Swift Response exercises as Russia's war in Ukraine continues for a 12th week. The exercises are being held in five separate locations, spanning from Norway to North Macedonia, military officials said.
ATLANTA (AP)  A Georgia judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by former U.S. Sen. David Perdue that alleged fraudulent or counterfeit ballots were counted in the state's most populous county during the 2020 general election.

Perdue filed the lawsuit, along with an individual voter, in December a few days after he announced that he would be challenging Gov. Brian Kemp in the Republican primary. Among other things, the suit sought access to examine absentee ballots, saying that would allow the petitioners to prove that there had been fraud in Fulton County.

Investigators with the secretary of states office found no evidence to support the fraud claims, but that hasnt stopped former President Donald Trump, Perdue and others from continuing to spread them.

The suit was similar to another filed by a group of voters that was dismissed in October because a judge found the group hadn't alleged a particularized injury and therefore didnt have standing to sue. That ruling has been appealed.

Perdue and voter Elizabeth Grace Lennon argued that their state constitutional rights to equal protection and due process have been violated. Perdue claims his particularized injury was that he was a candidate for reelection in November but failed to achieve a majority, forcing him into a runoff with Democrat Jon Ossoff that Perdue lost. Lennon says she sought to cast an in-person early vote in October 2020 but was told someone had already submitted a mail ballot in her name.

In an order dated Wednesday dismissing the lawsuit, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote that it is not really about Perdue's loss or Lennon's personal voting experience. Its core claims, he notes, are that several batches of absentee ballots were scanned multiple times and thousands of unlawful counterfeit absentee ballots were counted and certified in Fulton County.

Those are claims that were repeatedly pushed in the aftermath of the 2020 election by people who allege that widespread fraud caused the presidential election to be stolen from Trump. Perdue, who is trailing Kemp in polls as the May 24 Republican primary grows near, has made claims of a stolen and rigged election a central pillar of his campaign and frequently talks about the lawsuit while campaigning.

The lawsuit asks the judge to declare that county officials violated the petitioners' equal protection and due process rights, but such a declaration requires that they demonstrate that if the court doesnt act, their interests will be harmed in the future, McBurney wrote. Instead, they asked him to make a declaration about something that had already happened in the past, and the court cant do that, he wrote.

The lawsuit also asks the judge to issue a series of orders that would empower the petitioners experts to intrude upon the sealed ballot materials of tens of thousands of Fulton County voters, hunt for speculative voter fraud or error, and then determine for themselves what the actual vote count should have been in the Election, McBurney wrote.

This quixotic journey will not take place, he added.

Perdue harshly criticized the ruling saying it was another example of how the establishment continues to cover up what happened in 2020, and we will vigorously appeal the decision.

The lawsuit excoriates county officials for having negligently, willfully, wantonly, outwardly, maliciously or corruptly and unapologetically acted with malfeasance' thereby causing electors in Fulton County to experience disenfranchisement, dilution, debasement, and corruption of their vote in the General Election, but it doesnt seek a remedy for the alleged violations of the petitioners' rights, McBurney wrote.

The lawsuit seeks a declaration that the court is unable to provide and without such a declaration, the petitioners' requests are left supported only by sour grapes which make a wine this Court will not serve, McBurney wrote.

___

Associated Press writer Jeff Amy contributed to this report.
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COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP)  South Carolina senators unanimously approved a compromise Wednesday that would allow the state to hold true early voting and the House quickly approved the bill raising the possibility voters could head to the polls for two weeks before the June 14 primary.

Senators decided instead of getting to approve the governor's appointments to the state election board, they would add qualifications for the members and the executive director and give legislative leaders permission to ask a court to let them kick out anyone who does not meet those requirements.

Even though the bill passed both the House and Senate unanimously last month, the Senate's initial insistence they get to approve or reject the the governor's appointments to the five-member State Election Commission angered House supporters and the governor.

The House refused to reconsider the bill and even attached their version to a number of unrelated proposals until the compromise was reached this week.

What we have here is better than advice and consent on the board," said Sen. Chip Campsen, a Republican from the Isle of Palms who worked on the agreement.

Senators would still get to vote on the executive director.

A few hours after the Senate unanimously approved the compromise, the House followed with a 108-1 vote. Gov. Henry McMaster has said he supports the bill outside of the issue with the Senate.

Republican Rep. Brandon Newton said early voting will go in place as soon as the bill is signed. That could be before the end of the week. State election officials didn't immediately respond to an email asking if they can have early voting in place by the end of May.

The bill was a compromise between Democrats and Republicans that won total support from each group. It would open polling places for regular early voting for two weeks before elections, excluding Sundays. That would make South Carolina the 45th state to allow anyone to vote outside of Election Day without an excuse.

For many years, South Carolina has allowed people to cast absentee ballots in person, but they had to include an excuse for why they could not be at the polls on Election Day. Under the proposal, the state would go back to mail-in absentee ballots.

The bill also would make voter fraud a felony, increasing fines and possible jail time for people who try to vote under a false name, vote more than once or poll managers who intentionally break the law.

The proposal requires audits of at least 5% of all votes in a county in the days after an election.

The new requirements for board members and the executive director include prohibiting actions that go against state election law and making statements that discredit the states election rules.

The election board angered lawmakers during the 2020 election when it did nothing to Executive Director Marci Andino after she considered ballot drop boxes and eliminating witness signatures on absentee ballots without their approval during the COVID-19 pandemic. Senators also were upset the governor did not use his power to fire the director.

Other requirements for board members include being a registered voter in the state for five years and the executive director would need to have at least three years of experience in election administration. Candidates for both roles could not contribute to campaigns or serve as officers in political parties.

___

Follow Jeffrey Collins on Twitter at https://twitter.com/JSCollinsAP.
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SHELTON  New high-density development projects may be coming to halt for the time being.

The Planning and Zoning Commission, at its meeting Tuesday, set a public hearing for June 1 on whether to institute a temporary moratorium on acceptance, review and approval of high-density residential projects.

City corporation counsel Fran Teodosio told the commissioners that the zoning regulations need clarification regarding high-density developments - which include the apartment buildings cropping up throughout the city but mainly downtown.

Its a good idea to slow that down, Teodosio said about these developments so the commission can reexamine its regulations.

Im not saying these are good or bad. This just offers a chance to talk about controls over this, said Teodosio, who then told the commission this call comes from Mayor Mark Lauretti.

There are too many requests for apartment complexes to be able to process in an orderly time frame as required under the statute, Lauretti told Hearst Connecticut Media. The city has to rethink its approach towards high density housing in a number of different locations throughout the city.

Lauretti said putting a hold on these types of developments will not hurt us at all.

Those opposed to additional high-density projects downtown have criticized what they say is a shortage of municipal parking to support the developments. Apartment projects are regularly approved with less than two parking spaces per unit.

But Lauretti called the idea that there is no or limited downtown parking comical.

Twenty years ago, there was nothing downtown. No one was going there. There was blight, homelessness, dilapidated buildings. Now look at where we are, Lauretti said. This is all part of our growing pains. Every successful place has the same issues.

Lauretti said his plan calls for a moratorium citywide, except for downtown, specifically the Canal Street area.

All the downtown applications have onsite parking, Lauretti said.

Lauretti also said that plans are in the works for a shuttle service, which would bring people to and from the Conti lot, which is used for municipal parking downtown. Also, while no plans are in the works now, a downtown parking garage is probably part of the citys future, he said.

No final decisions - including if this would be for the whole city or just specific zones - have been made. The commissioners stated that they would discuss those options, along with the time period in which it will be in effect, after closing the public hearing.

Commissioner Ruth Parkins said certain districts could be excluded, if the commission agreed.

We need to step back, take a deep breath, and look at the whole picture, said commission chair Virginia Harger, adding that the commission constantly wrestles with the parking issue.

We need the time to sit down and look at everything and make sure we are moving in the right direction for everyone, she said. We do not want to shortchange the city or the applicants. We want to be fair.

Parkins said one concern is a flood of applications coming in prior to the start of any moratorium.

"While in some instances, such as PDDs (Planned Development Districts), the commission can use its discretion, those applications submitted in a timely manner must, by statute, be accepted and processed under current regulations, Harger said.

brian.gioiele@hearstmediact.com
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BUCHA, Ukraine (AP)  As he listened to his father die, the boy lay still on the asphalt. His elbow burned where a bullet had pierced him. His thumb stung from being grazed.

Another killing was in progress on a lonely street in Bucha, the community on the outskirts of Ukraines capital, Kyiv, where bodies of civilians are still being discovered weeks after Russian soldiers withdrew. Many had been shot in the head.

The 14-year-old Yura Nechyporenko was about to become one of them.

Survivors have described soldiers firing guns near their feet or threatening them with grenades, only to be drawn away by a cooler-headed colleague. But there was no one around to restrain the Russian soldier that day in March when Yura and his father, 47-year-old Ruslan, were biking down a tree-lined street.

They were on their way to visit vulnerable neighbors sheltering in basements and homes without electricity or running water. Their bikes were tied with white fabric, in a sign they traveled in peace.

When the soldier stepped from a dirt path to challenge them, Yura and his father immediately stopped and raised their hands.

What are you doing? Yura remembers the soldier asking. The soldier didnt give Yuras father time to answer.

The boy heard two gunshots. His father fell, mouth open, already bleeding.

A shot hit Yuras hand, and he fell, too. Another shot struck his elbow. He closed his eyes.

A final shot was fired.

___

This story is part of an ongoing investigation from The Associated Press and Frontline that includes the War Crimes Watch Ukraine interactive experience and an upcoming documentary.

___

Yuras extraordinary account alleging an attempted killing by Russian soldiers stands out as international justice experts descend on Bucha, a center of the horrors and possible war crimes in Ukraine. More than 1,000 bodies have been found so far in Bucha and other communities around Kyiv. In Bucha alone, 31 children under the age of 18 were killed and 19 wounded, according to local authorities.

All children were killed or injured deliberately, since the Russian soldiers deliberately shot at evacuating cars that had the signs CHILDREN and white fabric tied to them, and they deliberately shot at the homes of civilians," the chief prosecutor of the Bucha region, Ruslan Kravchenko, told the AP.

The U.N. human rights office says at least 202 children across Ukraine have been killed in Russias invasion, and believes the real number to be considerably higher. The Ukrainian government's count is 217 children killed and over 390 wounded.

The AP and Frontline, drawing from a variety of sources, have independently documented 21 attacks where children were killed that likely meet the definition of a war crime, ranging from the discovery of a child in a shallow grave in Borodyanka to the bombing of a theater in Mariupol. The total number of child victims in the attacks is unknown, and the accounting represents just a fraction of potential war crimes.

Yura is a teenager growing into himself, spindly and spotted, with dark circles pressed under his eyes. Adulthood has been rushed upon him. As he lies on the floor of his familys home to demonstrate what happened, he shows the healing holes in his elbow.

His mother, Alla, takes deep breaths to calm herself. Yura, sitting up, wraps an arm around her, then puts his head on her shoulder.

On that awful day, Yura survived the attempted killing by the awkward grace of that teenage constant, his gray hoodie. It was shot instead of him, and he felt it move.

Yura lay on the street for minutes afterward, waiting for the soldier to walk away.

Then Yura ran. He reached the kindergarten where his mother worked, and where some residents used the basement as a shelter. They were shocked to see the boy and gave him first aid.

He realized he needed to go home. He returned to the streets, not knowing where the next soldier might be.

When he arrived home, his family called the police. The police said they could do nothing because they didnt control the area, according to the family. The ambulance service said the same.

The police told the family that officers didnt know what to do with the case, according to the boys uncle, Andriy. A prosecutors report describes the killing and attempted killing in a few bare sentences, including the loss of a cellphone belonging to Yura's father. He would have been of help now  he'd been a lawyer.

Kravchenko told the AP that they continue to work on Yuras case, and expressed confidence that crimes committed during Russias invasion of Ukraine can be successfully investigated. Among other things, footage from dozens of surveillance cameras in Bucha is being analyzed, and an identification album of Russian soldiers faces is being assembled.

In March, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court announced that investigations into crimes against children in particular will benefit from a new trust fund. Children account for half or more of those affected by conflict, but are often labeled as too vulnerable to testify or as having inaccurate memories, according to Veronique Aubert, the special adviser on crimes involving children to the prosecutor of the ICC.

Yuras case is unusual.

Prosecutors may want to take up this case because the victim is still alive and can potentially testify, said Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University and former special counsel for the U.S. Defense Department. It may be difficult if not impossible for a defendant to claim they were somehow justified in trying to kill a child.

___

It was left to Yuras family to retrieve his fathers body.

They did it the following day. Yura's grandmother, who is in her 70s, pleaded with Russian soldiers to let her approach the body.

With their guns cocked, they let her walk ahead of them. Another soldier in the distance shouted, Dont come here or well kill you. But he didnt fire.

They brought Yura's father home in a wheelbarrow. He was rolled in a carpet and placed on an old wooden door. Amid the sounds of shelling and gunfire, they buried him in the yard behind the woodshed, in one of many makeshift graves hurriedly dug during the monthlong Russian occupation.

Yura and his family left Bucha the next day along a rare evacuation corridor. The wounded boy walked first through the streets, holding a stick tied with a white towel, with a white sling around his arm. The family had to pass the scene of the shooting.

As they walked closer to the evacuation point, Russian soldiers asked where they were going. They asked what had happened to Yura.

I was shot by a Russian soldier, the boy replied.

At that, his mother was terrified. I felt everything collapse inside me, she recalled. I thought they would shoot us all.

She asked the soldiers to let them pass, saying it was getting late. They did.

The family left town that day.

___

The gray hoodie, bloodied at the elbow, is now the centerpiece of the familys search for justice. The top seam of the loose fabric has been sliced. Yuras mother insists that it's evidence and can't be thrown away.

The family returned to Bucha in mid-April, after the Russians withdrew. They dug up Yuras father and buried him again in a local cemetery.

The boys family continues to play detective, scouring the area of the shooting for further evidence and theorizing on the trajectory of bullets. They question neighbors and analyze holes in a metal fence.

As the family shows the AP the scene, Yura wanders in the grass beside the street, head down, looking for bullet casings. He is confident he could identify the Russian soldier, even though the soldier wore a balaclava over part of his face.

Yura will finish ninth grade this year, once electricity returns and he can resume online classes. Until then, he is volunteering like his father did, visiting older residents.

His mother is thinking of sending him overseas for the sake of his mental health. She needs some distance, too.

Im never alone physically, but its possible to be alone mentally, she said, near tears. I try to avoid this.

Her sons case is still a faint source of hope. There are courts and these courts will work, she believes. No one should go through what her son did.

Yura fears they already have.

Its not only me who wants justice, he said. People in Ukraine are still possibly being tortured and killed even now.

Yura turned 15 on April 12. It was a quiet birthday. His father, a good cook, usually grilled to celebrate it.

On April 25, a day after Orthodox Easter, the family again gathered at the grave to mark 40 days after Ruslans death, by local custom. Food blessed by a priest in Bucha for Easter  dyed eggs, bread  was laid out along with homemade pickles, chocolate and wine. A plastic bag of food was hung on the wooden cross.

Yura stood apart, quietly lighting a candle and placing it on the grave. Then he pulled a hoodie, a black one, over his head to block the chill.

The boys uncle, Andriy, watches him closely these days. Yura has always been a good kid, but he's become edgy and restless, moving from one task to another. Andriy fears the trauma of surviving death will catch up with Yura and mourns his nephew's damaged childhood.

This tears my soul apart, said Andriy, in tears. What we see is suffering after suffering ... (Russian President Vladimir) Putin just decides to make us suffer, and we do.

___

Frontline producer Tom Jennings contributed to this story.

___

Follow the APs coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
Quick quiz: Who won the 2020 Democratic Iowa caucuses? Who won for Republicans in 2016? How about 2012?

Hint: None of them became president.

Iowa, of course, is first in the quadrennial presidential nominating contest, and therefore receives outsized attention from candidates. Many wannabes will start haunting fairgrounds around the state years in advance, hoping to generate some buzz, all in the hopes that a strong showing there will catapult them into the White House.

It sometimes even works. Iowa, along with New Hampshire, which holds the first presidential primary soon after Iowas caucuses, holds doggedly onto its position as political bellwether, cherishing the attention it receives from candidates and the national media, along with the attendant economic benefits. But its long past time for those states to step aside in favor of a better, more representative candidate.

For instance, Connecticut.

National Democrats have declared its time for a change, and 18 state Democratic parties have expressed interest in being chosen as the first state to hold a presidential primary vote in 2024. Since incumbent presidents are basically guaranteed to be renominated, the process is likely to be something of a formality the next time through. But going forward, someone else will come first and go a long way toward shaping the presidential nominating contest.

Connecticut makes more sense than anyone.

For starters, were a diverse state. Its not always clear if you never leave the suburbs, but the percentage of Black and Hispanic residents in Connecticut is not far off the national averages, and far closer to the U.S. numbers than overwhelmingly white states like Iowa and New Hampshire.

Connecticut has a lot in a small area. We have cities, we have farms, we have bedroom communities, we have manufacturing, we have corporate headquarters and we have strip malls, sometimes all within a few miles of each other. You can explore any aspect of America within a half-hour drive, from forgotten factory town to booming suburb. Weve got it all.

Its true Connecticut is a left-leaning state, but anyone with basic familiarity with our state knows there are all kinds of people here. And there are a lot of us  3.5 million people in the third-smallest area geographically makes us one of the most densely populated states in the union, which means you can meet a lot of people in a short time.

For those who are still wondering, Pete Buttigieg won the most delegates in the 2020 Iowa caucuses, though Bernie Sanders got more votes. Ted Cruz won for Republicans in 2016, and in 2012 Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum finished within a few dozen votes of each other. Of that group, Romney was the only one to even win his partys nomination, which goes to show that the importance of voting first may be somewhat overstated.

Still, if it wasnt a big deal, states wouldnt be vying with each other for the role. It will be months before the national party decides whether Iowa and New Hampshire will be dethroned, but good for Connecticut Democrats for seeking the position. Its time our state had its place in the sun.
Ukrainians are undergoing the hellish attacks that Syrians suffered for years from Russian-supplied weapons to dictator Assad and from direct Russian bombing by its air force. On April 4, four children were killed by Syrian regimes artillery shelling on Maaret al-Naasan village. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the children were killed on their way home to school. On the same day Russian planes bombed in other areas of northwest Syria.

Assad-Russian attacks are pitiless, with marketplaces, schools and medical facilities often targeted. In 2016, Doctors Without Borders reported that Hospitals in opposition-held parts of Syria are refusing to share GPS coordinates with Russian and Syrian authorities because of repeated attacks on medical facilities and workers. Normally facilities would make that information public because that would prevent attacks, but in Syria it was giving Russia/Assad coordinates that was used to make bombing hospitals easier. In Syria, Russian planes often used a double-tap strategy, bombing a target once and then waiting a while and bombing the rescue workers who came to dig victims out of the rubble.

It seems obvious that the world should rush to send supplies to Syrians right now both for humanitarian reasons and to divert some of Putins attention from Ukraine. There is much that can be done. Several million residents and internally displaced Syrians live in the northwest Idlib area that is not under Assad control. I asked a Syrian whats needed most and he said, Everything. He mentioned bread, plus warm clothing and boots for winters. Trailers should be sent in to replace the thousands of tents people have been living in year after year. Syrians really need solar-powered generators to supply electricity. Concrete should be sent to reinforce hospitals and shelters from bombings. Government and citizen contributions to the Syrian rescue workers Syria Civil Defence (better known as the White Helmets) should be increased.

Then there is the special case of Al-Rukban. Its a windswept desert area on the Iraq and Jordan border of Syria where perhaps 12,000 Syrians are living. Theyre Syrians who fled both Assad and ISIS attacks. Its under siege by Assad forces and troops of the Russian army. The area is within a within 55-kilometer exclusion zone around a U.S. base called al-Tanf established in 2016 as part of the U.S.-backed coalitions effort to fight the so-called Islamic State in Syria with Russian agreement. Even though the Syrian men from the camp secure the al-Tanf base, the U.S. will not supply Al-Rukan. If the rationale in the past has been to not upset Russia, post-Ukraine invasion world conditions compel a complete rethinking. Immediately furnish the area with food and supplies and give it regular medical services.

Another thing that should be done is to highlight the continuing horrors of Assad prisons. Tens of thousands have been put in detention by security forces. In 2016 Amnesty International released a terrifying report on Sednaya Prison explaining that from 2011 through 2015 over 17,000 prisoners had been executed or died because of torture or other conditions in Sednaya. That was six years ago, so the total numbers are worse now. We in Promoting Enduring Peace are highlighting two cases. One is of the family of Rania Alabbasi. She is a former Syrian chess champion who was arrested with her husband, six children and her secretary in 2013. None of them have been heard from since. Ranias brother Hassan told me that 5,000 children have been taken away by security forces. The other case were highlighting is that of a U.S. citizen. He is a therapist named Majd KamAlmaz. In 2017 he went to Damascus to pay respects after his father-in-laws death and he was picked up by police. His family has heard nothing about him or his conditions of detention ever since.

Well be holding an online event at 1 p.m. on Saturday, May 14, to keep alive the hopes of families of prisoners. It will feature members of the families whose loved ones have been disappeared. See PEPeace.org for details.

There is more than one way to resist Putins aggression against Ukraine. Yes, support Ukrainians directly, but also create a second front with humanitarian aid for Syrians. Its the smart thing to do and the right thing to do.

Stanley Heller is administrator of Promoting Enduring Peace, founded in 1952. He can be reached at Stanley.heller@pepeace.org. The website is PEPeace.org.
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Stress, sadness, anxiety, isolation. I am a student whose mental health has been impacted by all of these struggles due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In a world where human connection and communication is essential for students to learn and grow as individuals, this has been sadly stripped away only to be left with uncertainty and hopelessness. I want to be a voice for U.S. college students and provide solutions that have helped me with my mental health as a student during the pandemic as well as point out what colleges and universities need to recognize.

According to a survey performed by activeminds.org, 80 percent of college students report that COVID-19 has negatively impacted their mental health. Since the pandemic first developed in December of 2019, students are still unaware of services at their universities that can provide them with mental health services. More than 55 percent of students say they would not know where to go if they or someone they knew needed mental health services. Most college campuses in Connecticut are lacking in resources, offering TED talks and outdated advocacy videos that provide little connection with the viewer. Counseling services are also restricted by the number of sessions you are able to attend and there are frequently not enough counselors available. These resources should be limitless and always accessible.
Children learn how to play the gayageum, a 12-string Korean zither. Courtesy of Goryeong County



'Gugak is valuable cultural asset that gives insight into past'



By Dong Sun-hwa



"Gugak," or Korean traditional music, has faced many trials and tribulations in the course of its history.



During Japan's 1910-45 colonial occupation of Korea, Japan attempted to assimilate Koreans by suppressing gugak, which was important to Koreans' national spirit and identity. Industrialization and westernization prompted Koreans to appreciate more music from other parts of the world, but to this day, gugak has managed to stand the test of time.



The gugak community, however, fears another crisis is arriving. In April, the Ministry of Education released the draft of a new curriculum for music education in elementary, middle and high schools, which will come into effect in 2025. But the new curriculum doesn't have any standards of achievement for students regarding gugak, or any guidelines on which parts or elements of gugak should be taught.



This change created an immediate backlash from numerous gugak musicians, who accused the government of "reducing the emphasis on gugak while only promoting Western music."



Lim Mi-sun, a gugak professor at Dankook University's music school, points out that schools will no longer be obligated to provide gugak education if this new curriculum takes effect as planned.





Lim Mi-sun, a gugak professor at Dankook University's music school / Courtesy of Lim Mi-sun

"As of now, all schools must teach gugak to their students because they should meet the minimum standards of achievements set by the government," Lim said in an interview with The Korea Times in southern Seoul, Wednesday. "But if it does not establish any standard for gugak, as can be seen in the new curriculum, the publishers of music textbooks can leave out content about gugak from their publications, leading schools to skip gugak education and only focus on teaching Western music."



Lim explained that there is another serious problem.



"The Ministry of Education even eliminated the list specifying what teachers should teach to help their students get a glimpse of Korean traditional music. It just classified gugak together with other music genres to give a general guideline, but gugak has a lot of distinctive elements. 'Sigimsae,' for instance, refers to the notes or short melodies that come at the front or at the back of a note to make it sound more attractive. The genres originating from the West do not have such elements, but the new curriculum does not even mention this point."



After its draft was unveiled, veteran gugak musicians held a press conference at the Jeonghyo Gugak Cultural Foundation in Seoul, May 4, criticizing the government for diminishing gugak education at this time when Korean culture is enjoying its heyday around the world. Among the speakers was Lee Young-hee, 83, who is designated an Intangible Cultural Heritage Master of Gayageum Sanjo and Byeongchang. The gayageum is a 12-string Korean zither and sanjo is folk music that is played solo with the gayageum. "Byeongchang" refers to playing the gayageum and singing at the same time.





Veteran gugak musicians speak at a press conference at the Jeonghyo Gugak Cultural Foundation in Seoul, May 4, to criticize the government for not promoting gugak education. Newsis



"After K-pop boy group BTS sang 'Arirang,' numerous people across the globe came to know about our traditional folk song," Lee remarked. "A lot of them are now aware of the excellence of Korean culture, and gugak, the core of our national culture, has contributed to this."



The musicians demanded the normalization of gugak education so that young students can appreciate the time-honored traditional music as part of their formal education. Currently, about 30 percent to 40 percent of the content in music textbooks is related to gugak, according to the gugak circle.



The conference took place only about two weeks after 139 gugak-related institutions  including the Korean Traditional Music Association and the Society of Study for Korean Music Education  released a statement slamming the education ministry for "not conducting proper research prior to revising the curriculum." They also demanded the removal of the ministry officials who were in charge of the curriculum revisions.



The ministry denied that it was attempting to reduce the teaching of gugak, adding that the draft would be updated to reflect the opinions of people in the gugak community. It is scheduled to have a meeting with gugak musicians on May 18 to discuss the issue further.





Lee Young-hee, 83, who was designated as an Intangible Cultural Heritage Master of Gayageum Sanjo and Byeongchang / Courtesy of the Cultural Heritage Administration
STORY LINK Pound Euro Exchange Rate News: GBP/EUR Recovers Lost Ground Despite Disappointing UK Data

The Euro (EUR) Stutters as Fears Continue to Grow around Protracted Ukraine Conflict

Pound (GBP) Firms Despite Poor Economic Data

GBP/EUR Exchange Rate Forecast: Ukraine Situation to Further Soften Euro?

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The Euro (EUR) is faltering against the Pound as the resurgence of geopolitical risk-aversion weighs heavily. With Finland now set to join NATO, much to the chagrin of the Kremlin, the ongoing crisis in Ukraine shows no signs of abating.Russia has previously stated that Finlands move to join NATO was a threat to Russia. The countrys foreign ministry said in a statement:Finland joining NATO is a radical change in the countrys foreign policy. Russia will be forced to take retaliatory steps, both of a military-technical and other nature, in order to stop threats to its national security arising.Brexit concerns also make an unwelcome appearance as a potential trade war could further hamper both the single currency and Sterling. With UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss warning that she was prepared to negate the agreement of the Northern Ireland Protocol, the EU responded that it was prepared to suspend trade deals with the UK unless an agreement can be reached.The Pound (GBP) is recovering modestly against the Euro despite the latest UK GDP figures printing below market forecasts. Growth in the first quarter of 2022 missed projections of a 1% expansion and slowed to 0.8%, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), down from 1.3% at the end of 2021. The accompanying month-to-month data reported a surprising 0.1% contraction in the month of March, this comes after growth stalled in February.With the economic horizon only growing darker, fears of a recession loom, and combined with the Bank of Englands (BoE) continued dovish outlook, economists at Commerzbank report that the BoE will have to tighten its monetary policy further, potentially hampering Sterling:The BoE is continuing its gradual tightening of monetary policy. However, it is likely to act less restrictively than expected by the market. The pound should suffer increasingly from this. Another burdening factor is that the European Central Bank (ECB) is also likely to initiate its monetary policy turnaround in July. We, therefore, expect (GBP/EUR) to trade (lower) in the course of the year.Despite the Russia Ukraine conflict affecting both Pound and Euro, any further negative news is likely to disproportionately impact the single currency. And with Finlands official application to join NATO to take place in the next few days, and with no end in sight for the conflict, the Euro could slide further against the Pound.Providing a possible headwind to sterling is a potential trade war on the back of comments made by Truss and the Northern Ireland Protocol, which will weigh heavily on both the Euro and the Pound, unless the two sides can reach an agreement.With no further major data this week, all eyes will be on the unfolding situation in Ukraine and how Russia responds to Finland joining NATO.

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Deloitte Anjin's headquarters located on Yeouido, Seoul / Courtesy of Kim Do-hyung



By Anna J. Park



Doubts and concerns are rising as to whether Deloitte Anjin, one of big four accounting firms in Korea, is failing at internal controls, as it not only turned out to have received the largest number of corrections from the financial regulator in audit reports during the past few years among the top four accounting firms, but also has been engaged in some of the most scandalous financial fraud cases.



According to the data compiled by the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), the country's Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) detected a total of nine violations from November 2017 to May last year in Deloitte Anjin's audit reports on listed companies. The SFC inspects local accounting firms' audit reports on listed companies on a regular basis to determine whether the firms are faithfully implementing auditing roles.



During the same period, the three other major firms, Samil PwC, KPMG Samjong and EY Korea were corrected four, five and four times, respectively. During the last three business years alone, Deloitte received a total of six corrections, while Samil PwC and EY only had two and one violation each.



The firm's past track records of audit report violations are strengthening the market's doubtful perspective on the accounting company, following a recent Woori Bank embezzlement case, where an employee of the bank siphoned a total of 61.4 billion won ($47.5 million) from the bank over the period of six years from 2012 to 2018.



The majority of the money is an Iranian firm's payment for the botched takeover of Daewoo Electronics, which Woori Bank had kept as the failed acquisition deal's main manager. Due to the U.S. sanctions on Iran, the bank was prevented from returning the money back to the Iranian firm for years. It was during this time that the employee siphoned the money into his own accounts.



During the six years when the embezzlement took place, Deloitte Anjin, which served as the lender's auditor for the whole time, issued an unqualified opinion, meaning that the bank's financial statements are fairly and appropriately presented.



The FSS launched an inspection into the accounting firm at the end of last month, stressing that if the bank's auditor turns out to have been negligent, the firm could be held accountable, either by penalty or by a jail term for the officials responsible.



Regarding the case, Deloitte Anjin said the audit on the bank was conducted in a standard and professional manner.



"We have performed our audits in accordance with the professional standards and stand by our audit opinions. We are fully cooperating with any inquiry by the FSS and respect their role in protecting the capital markets. We will continue to serve our clients in this regard and in accordance with applicable professional standards," the company's official told The Korea Times.



Despite the firm's position, the accounting firm's past engagement in Daewoo Shipbuilding's accounting fraud case in 2017, along with nine other audit violations detected by the SFC from 2017 and 2021, add fuel to market watchers' skepticism as to whether Deloitte Anjin has been failing to properly manage its internal controls.


China slams Australia for irresponsible remarks on China-Solomon Islands cooperation

Xinhua) 09:40, May 12, 2022

BEIJING, May 11 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson on Wednesday slammed Australia for making irresponsible remarks on the China-Solomon Islands security agreement, urging Australia to cease wantonly criticizing Solomon Islands' independent foreign cooperation and stop exerting pressure and coercion.

According to media reports, Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne recently met her Solomon Islands counterpart Jeremiah Manele in Brisbane, Australia. Payne said that Australia holds concerns about the China-Solomon Islands security agreement, including the lack of transparency.

"Since Australia declares its 'respect for Solomon Islands' sovereign decision-making,' it should act like it said," spokesperson Zhao Lijian said at a daily news briefing, noting the Pacific Island countries, including the Solomon Islands, are sovereign and independent countries, not a backyard of anyone.

Zhao said that China has briefed on its security cooperation with the Solomon Islands on many occasions. He once again defended the signing of the inter-governmental framework agreement on security cooperation between China and the Solomon Islands as a right of two sovereign states.

"It is normal cooperation in law enforcement and security, and consistent with international law and international customary practices," Zhao said, adding the security cooperation between the two countries is open and transparent and does not target any third party. It proceeds in parallel with the Solomon Islands' existing cooperation with other partners and regional mechanisms and conforms to the common interests of the Solomon Islands and the South Pacific region.

"What we really need to worry about is the fact that Australia, without communication and consultation with the Pacific Island countries, pieces together military blocs and stimulates the arms race together with countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, and brings nuclear proliferation risks to the South Pacific region," Zhao said.

"It is the deeds of Australia that is neither open nor transparent, which countries in the region are deeply concerned about," Zhao said.

(Web editor: Peng Yukai, Liang Jun)
Dealers work at Hana Bank's office in Seoul, Thursday. Yonhap



By Lee Min-hyung



Korean companies are delaying their listing plans amid weakening investor sentiment prompted by aggressive tightening of global monetary policy.



As the tumbling benchmark KOSPI keeps setting a new yearly low each day, a group of companies is on track to withdraw their initial public offering (IPO) plans.



OneStore, a local app market operator, was scheduled to go public on the main bourse before the end of the month. But it decided recently to drop the plan, as its desired offering price did not match that of institutional bids.



With chilly investor sentiment being felt here and abroad, this also came as a burden for the firm's listing. The KOSPI extended its losses once again Thursday, setting a new low with a drop of more than 1 percent from the previous day.



Given the U.S. Federal Reserve has not yet entered what is considered very big rate hikes, stocks from emerging markets including Korea's are exposed to possible risks of additional falls throughout the end of 2022 when the Fed and the Bank of Korea will keep pushing for tightening monetary policies.



Tailim Paper, a paper products producer here, also decided not to go public for a similar reason as One Store. The paper manufacturer said Wednesday it would delay the IPO timeline, and "try again at an opportune time when the company can be valued properly."



The announcements from the two companies have drawn criticism from investors, but market insiders said it is understandable for them to make such a decision, reflecting on the rapidly plunging stock market and diminishing demand from investors due to global monetary uncertainty.



"The Korean stock market is under a growing burden, as Wall Street is on the decline amid growing fears over the rising prices," Mirae Asset Securities analyst Seo Sang-young said. "Investor sentiment will likely remain weak, as the Fed will not back away from its stance of aggressive rate hikes."



The latest decision from the two companies is expected to discourage other firms' listing plans during this period of economic uncertainty here and abroad.



Early this year, Hyundai Engineering delayed its IPO schedule, when the local stock market lost its vibrancy after enjoying strong performance last year when the main bourse set a new historic high on pandemic-sparked liquidity expansion here and abroad. At that time, the company's post-IPO value was estimated to top as high as 10 trillion won. SK Shieldus, a cybersecurity service affiliate of SK Telecom, also withdrew its IPO bid recently in response to lackluster stock performance here.


Oh, how easy it has been to laugh.

The size of Peter Andre's manhood  speculated as anything from an acorn to a chipolata to a remote control  has become part of British water cooler conversation thanks to its inclusion in the most ill-advised court case since, well, Johnny Depp sued me a couple of years back.

It's the centre of every meme, WhatsApp joke and Twitter banter thread known to man, thanks to the inclusion of Rebekah Vardy's legendary 2004 News of the World kiss and tell interview about the then I'm A Celebrity star in the toxic Wagatha Christie trial, where she is suing Coleen Rooney for accusing her of leaking stories.

It's easy to assume Pete would be able to cope with these largely good-natured taunts

Because, you know, when given the excuse to joke about a high-profile celebrity's anatomy through the respectable veil of a High Court case, you've surely just got to, right?

It's easy to assume Pete would be able to cope with these largely good-natured taunts; after all, this is a bloke whose world famous 'eight-pack' abs have been a key part of his appeal since his 90s Mysterious Girl fame.

Having known Pete well for many years, his happy go lucky Aussie/Brit/Greek nature often belies a more complex character, who is deeply sensitive and aware of where he stands in the public consciousness.

So today, Pete snapped.

In an emotional social media video, which he has obviously been thinking about for some time, he made it clear that the public dissemination of his private parts is more than not just very funny, it's downright hypocritical.

Just imagine in this woke world, if Peter had dared to make the same comments about a woman's body. Pictured, Rebekah Vardy leaves the Royal Courts of Justice in London today

Just imagine in this woke world, if Peter had dared to make the same comments about a woman's body.

Not only would he be immediately cancelled by the social media mob, the jibes would not be allowed to ricochet far and wide across the internet.

'Now Pete isn't being some overly little sensitive snowflake here,' says Dan Wootton (pictured)

As Pete explained humbly: 'Just think how it feels that if a man, or if I had said this, about her anatomy, or a man said something about a woman's anatomy, and made up something, whatever, I don't know  you can use your imagination of saying something very unflattering.

'There would be outrage, there would absolute outrage. But because it's been said about me, it's been the butt of all jokes, I've took it for 15 years.'

Now Pete isn't being some overly little sensitive snowflake here.

He's actually silently endured nearly 18 years of gags about his private parts without a peep in public.

He explained: 'You know some of you are gonna go, 'oh get over it, don't say anything whatever'. You've got to understand, what's even worse is it's brought up in a High Court, and the lawyer is bringing it up... and it's brought up again. And the only one that sits there and takes hit after hit about it is me.

'And I just I'll be laughing about it for a while, but think about how it would feel if it was the other way around, that's all I'm saying. '

There is a wider point here about how straight men are expected to shrug off comments about their body, while being told at the same time they're being sexist Neanderthals if they dare to compliment a woman on how they look.

I completely understand why he's had enough with the hypocrisy around his treatment, especially now it's being reported in national newspapers alongside the war in Ukraine.

At 49-years-old, he's married and has children old enough to know they don't want their dad's bits being discussed through no fault of his own.

It also needs to be considered what Rebekah  the famed WAG of Leicester City striker Jamie Vardy  says are the circumstances surrounding the interview she sold to the News of the World, which she claims she was coerced into by her partner at the time.

As she said in court: 'I was forced into a situation by my ex-husband to do this. It is something that I deeply regret... It is not nice to read and I understand why this is being used and to me this is mudslinging and I was also threatened with mudslinging by Rooney's team.'

Pete also acknowledged that today in his video, which struck the right tone, as he explained Rebekah has 'admitted that the story was made up' and 'she did that because her ex-husband forced her to do it'.

Now I know exactly how it feels to be dragged into this Wagatha Christie saga against your will  because today it happened to me too!

Coleen's lawyer Desperate David Sherbourne  the same bloke who unsuccessfully represented Depp in his case against me  tried to make my cordial but professional relationship with Rebekah some sort of smoking gun that proved she'd been leaking stories to my former newspaper The Sun.

All this court case has done is renew the circus of the revelations for Coleen, Rebekah and poor Pete. Pictured, Coleen and Wayne Rooney leave the High Court today

He had previously attempted to obtain my private communications with Rebekah and her former agent Caroline Watt, which would have been a gross invasion into a journalist's right to go about their job.

I have nothing to hide and have been open about the fact that when Coleen made her Instagram revelation that it was 'Rebekah Vardy's account', I was very worried about Rebekah on a human level, given she was seven months pregnant at the time.

Rebekah has broken down in court several times because the impact of those days, where she became a punching bag for what felt like the entire country, nearly broke her.

I also found the whole situation deeply hypocritical given I know more than I would like to about the way the Rooneys have manipulated the media over the years.

So, yes, this court case was unwise, I believe, because now it's all being dragged up again.

But I do understand why Rebekah felt the need to try and clear her name so she can finally move on, just like why I understand Pete cannot handle another day of 'acorn vs remote' talk.

And that's the problem with engaging lawyers like Desperate David  a court case over these sorts of relatively minor revelations that are nothing more than tittle tattle doesn't help anyone involved.

'I let everyone have their laugh and I let everyone say what they wanted to say,' Pete sighed, deeply frustrated in his Instagram video.

All this court case has done is renew the circus of the revelations for Coleen, Rebekah and poor Pete.

We've had our fun. Can't we all make a solemn promise to never speculate on his penis in public ever again?
Official posters for the Seoul International Book Fair 2022, featuring the event's three ambassadors  from left, Korean authors Eun Hee-kyung and Kim Young-ha, and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist Colson Whitehead / Courtesy of the Korean Publishers Association





By Park Han-sol







The Seoul International Book Fair (SIBF) 2022, known as the largest book and publishing trade show in Korea, will return to a grand scale next month at COEX in southern Seoul, as a new kind of book fair tailored to the ongoing pandemic situation.







Book lovers from across the country are expected to flock to the annual event to attend a series of lectures, seminars and exhibitions  hosted by the Korean Publishers Association under the theme of, "One Small Step," from June 1 to 5.







This year's edition will invite over 180 local companies, as well as international pavilions and publishers from a dozen countries.







The guest country of honor for the five-day fair is Colombia  the first time for a Latin-American nation  as Korea and Colombia celebrate their 60th anniversary of diplomatic ties this year. Earlier last month, Korea participated as the guest of honor at the Bogota International Book Fair.







With "Colombia: Creative, Diverse and Fraternal" as the overarching theme, some 30 Colombian authors will take part in panel discussions, talk sessions and film screenings to introduce varied aspects of contemporary literature and writers of the Latin-American country.







Notable sessions include, "Contemporary Colombian Women Writers," which will discuss the roles and achievements of female novelists, and "Voices of Diversity," which will invite indigenous poets and researchers to examine the ethnic, regional and cultural diversity present in the country's literary scene.







In-person lectures led by experts of diverse backgrounds  one of SIBF's signature programs  are once again expected to be a big part of the festival.







On the opening day, best-selling writer Kim Young-ha will talk about the value of paper books as he likens them to one complex architectural structure born from infinite imagination.







Lee Suzy, who became the first Korean illustrator to win the distinguished Hans Christian Andersen Award this year, will take visitors on a journey into the world of picture books, which she says have the power to deliver universal messages beyond the barriers of age, language and nationalities.







One session will feature two female writers  Kang Hwa-gil, known as a trailblazer of women-led thriller novels in Korea, and Yun Ko-eun, the first Korean author to win the Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger Award from the United Kingdom's Crime Writers' Association  to share their views on the current state of Korea's literary scene.







The fair's lineup for international speakers is just as noteworthy.







Renowned French writer Herve Le Tellier, who won the prestigious Goncourt Prize in 2020 with his one-million-copy bestseller, "The Anomaly," will speak on the survival and cultural influence of novels in the age of OTT short-form content.







A panel discussion with representatives from Shakespeare and Company, the iconic English-language bookstore nestled in Paris, and Portugal's Lello Bookstore, will focus on how some bookshops around the world survived through the pandemic and managed to adhere to their core values amid trying times.







A global issue conference featuring selected publishers from the U.K. and the United States will explore how recent works of Korean contemporary fiction were able to come under the global spotlight and become recognized for their literary achievements.







Three major exhibitions will take place at the fair this year.







In addition to the main show, "One Small Step," which will showcase local brands and books recognized for taking a small, yet meaningful step forward to break away from social stereotypes in the field of media, fashion and retails, "BBDK (Best Book Design of Korea)" will highlight 30 winning works of the annual book design competition held from 2020 to 2022. "Book in the Post-media Age" will present an archival exhibition revolving around the country's digital book culture.


The 'hard rain' is about to fall. Ministers have been given a month to draw up plans to cut civil service numbers by a fifth.

Not before time. At long last, the storm clouds are gathering over a self-serving, sclerotic bureaucracy grown fat and lazy and over-ripe for fundamental reform.

Boris Johnson yesterday ordered a cull of 91,000 civil service jobs. That may only take the total headcount back to where it was in 2016, but it's a start.

Initially, the Government hopes to achieve 3.5 billion in savings through natural wastage, by freezing recruitment and not replacing staff who leave.

While any attempt to slash the public sector wage bill is welcome, this modest initiative doesn't go anywhere near far enough.

It's more of a light drizzle than a hard rain. What the corridors of Whitehall need is a hurricane-force hosing down.

Ministers should start by tackling head-on the institutionalised culture of absenteeism, which has developed over the past two years.

Jacob Rees-Mogg's characteristically courteous efforts to persuade his members to go back to work full-time were met with a preposterous attack by the First Division Association, writes RICHARD LITTLEJOHN

Otherwise, even if they do manage to succeed in cutting the payroll by 91,000, will anyone actually notice?

Most Government offices are still practically deserted, despite the lifting of Covid restrictions, as the debilitating cult of 'working from home' has become set in stone.

If services to the public were running as smoothly as a top-of-the-range Tesla on full charge, that might not be a problem.

Instead, applications for everything from driving licences and passports to tax rebates are suffering from intolerable delays, as staff sit at home munching Hobnobs and gawping at daytime TV, while pretending to be taking part in Zoom meetings.

The DVLA in Swansea is a well-documented basket case, with fewer than 20 per cent of employees on deck at any one time.

All efforts to enforce normal, pre-pandemic working have met with entrenched resistance from the unions.

This week the leader of the First Division Association, which represents top civil servants on six-figure salaries, launched a preposterous attack on Jacob Rees-Mogg's characteristically courteous efforts to persuade his members to go back to work full-time.

Dave Penman protested on behalf of his members currently enjoying 'hybrid' working that it is 'not efficient to be paid 150,000 a year to wander round offices'.

He clearly has no conception of how ridiculous he sounds. Or what the job description of a manager actually is.

Dave Penman, leader of the FDA union, protested it is 'not efficient to be paid 150,000 a year to wander round offices'

Can you imagine anyone claiming that it was not efficient for Jurgen Klopp to be paid 15 million a year to wander round the training ground at Liverpool FC?

Somehow, I can't imagine Man City's Pep Guardiola being quite as successful if he decided to spend the lion's share of his time at home on a Peloton before a big game while his players took the dog for a walk.

Judging by his mugshot in yesterday's Mail, Penman looks like one of those truculent TUC dinosaurs I used to deal with in the 1970s and 1980s when I was a labour correspondent.

We all now know how well that turned out, after Maggie Thatcher defeated the miners and Rupert Murdoch saw off the print unions at Wapping.

If Penman's not careful, he's going to end up as extinct as the Scargills of yesteryear. And his members will be buried with him.

Intriguingly, alongside the headline figure of 91,000 job cuts, the Government is also planning to introduce Artificial Intelligence (AI) to replace thousands of tasks currently done manually by civil servants.

Why not? If we can bank and shop securely online without ever coming into contact with a human being, then why can't we do likewise when it comes to renewing a passport or driving licence?

If Amazon can issue a refund at the click of a mouse, then it shouldn't be beyond the capability of HMRC to approve a tax rebate online in seconds.

Sadly, the civil service is stuck in the past and fiercely protective of its over-complex, antediluvian practices.

The manual unions in the car industry and the Print learned the hard way. When I covered British Leyland in Birmingham, they were still metal-bashing by hand.

BL's biggest plant, Longbridge, was effectively run by the Communist shop steward Derek 'Red Robbo' Robinson.

At a time when rivals in Japan and Europe were modernising rapidly, Britain's unions fought tooth and nail against progress.

Any attempt to streamline Mini manufacture with modern technology was guaranteed to be greeted with an all-out strike.

I can remember a gloating 1979 advertising poster for the new Fiat Strada, put together on a fully automated, computer-controlled production line.

It read: 'Built by Robots, Not by Robbos.'

Whitehall in London, home of the Civil Service. Any civil servant refusing to return to their desks five days a week by June 1 should be sacked without compensation, writes RICHARD LITTLEJOHN

Within a few years, BL was dead as a dodo, taking 180,000 jobs with it.

Dave Penman is the Red Robbo of Whitehall and his members are little more than cannon fodder, hastening their own demise.

If ministers stay strong, AI will see off bone-idle WFH civil service grunts as surely as new tech swept away the wheeltappers and shunters of old.

In the short term, the Government should do what this column has been advocating since the summer of 2020. Issue an ultimatum, just as Ronald Reagan did to America's striking air traffic controllers.

Any civil servant refusing to return to their desks five days a week by, say, June 1 should be sacked without compensation.

Sure, the unions would wail and gnash their teeth, but the imminent threat of the dole queue in the face of a cost-of-living crisis would certainly concentrate the minds.

In the medium term, the Government has a far more serious  indeed, sinister  problem.

And that is the obstructionist attitude of our most senior public servants, who increasingly defy the instructions of ministers and the will of the British people.

Remainers to a mandarin, they seem hell-bent on stopping Boris Johnson reaping the benefits of a hard-won Brexit, and throwing a grenade in the path of any measure they consider to be excessively Conservative.

The outgoing Australian High Commissioner in London recently exposed how blatantly the pro-Brussels upper echelons of the civil service had tried to scupper an Anglo-Australian trade deal.

George Brandis, Australian High Commissioner to the UK, has spoken out about dealing with the Civil Service while working on an Anglo-Australian trade deal

George Brandis said he had encountered 'reluctance bordering on hostility', especially within Defra, the food and environment department.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, these arrogant, unelected Sir Humphreys take the view that ministers are here today, gone tomorrow, so they need take no notice of them.

Their primary loyalty is not to the voters who pay their fat salaries and gold-plated pensions, but to the EU and the Left-wing freemasonry Common Purpose, which has infiltrated every single branch of Government and so-called 'public service'  including the police, who increasingly become involved in politically motivated investigations.

They also know how to exploit the weakness in ministers they can intimidate.

The prime incarnation of this repellent species was Mark 'Three Jobs' Sedwill, who was to Theresa May what Rod Hull was to Emu.

At least Boris managed to get rid of Sedwill, who floated off with a peerage to lucrative sinecures with Rothchilds investment bank and Lloyd's of London.

But not before moving heaven and earth to derail Brexit and landing us with a potentially disastrous threat to national security in the form of the deal to let the Chinese Communist Party's contractor build our 5G infrastructure  a dreadful mistake which is now having to be unravelled.

Only yesterday we learned that Chinese-made CCTV cameras on our streets contain hidden microphones which can be used to spy on the public.

Sedwill may be gone, but others like him remain in post. They make no attempt even to disguise their contempt for democratically elected ministers.

Former Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill left his role in the Civil Service after Boris Johnson became Prime Minister

While Boris still has his majority, he should seize his chance. It's time to clean house, to rid Whitehall of its entrenched culture of complacency, inertia and entitlement.

The Prime Minister should get rid immediately of any department head still refusing to insist on staff returning to work.

But even that won't be enough. As I wrote back in June 2020 when Sedwill was finally shown the door, the entire culture and ideology of the civil service must be overhauled ruthlessly and without delay.

The horribly dysfunctional Home Office should be broken up and those civil servants attempting to sabotage the Rwanda deal fired on the spot.

As for the Foreign Office, all you need to know is that during the retreat from Afghanistan, the most senior FO official Sir Philip Barton failed to return from his Dordogne chateau until 11 days after the fall of Kabul. So it's little wonder that his minions are under no pressure to return to their own desks.

Barton and his entire top team at the Foreign Office should be sacked and replaced by people from the private sector who see their job as representing Britain abroad, not acting as emissaries for foreign governments in London.

Dominic Cummings  Boris's former Mad Monk  identified the rot and the solutions.

Dominic Cummings, former advisor to Boris Johnson, 'identified the rot and the solutions' to the Civil Service, writes RICHARD LITTLEJOHN

It was Cummings who promised the hard rain, but imploded after a series of run-ins with the permanent civil service (and Carrie Antoinette) and is long gone.

Boris desperately needs another Clint Eastwood-style enforcer to take on the Blob. Someone with the inside knowledge and bottle to get the job done.

There's no better candidate right now than Lord Frost, the man who got Brexit over the line in the teeth of ferocious opposition.

Can Boris keep his nerve, send for Frost, fix bayonets and cut a swathe through Whitehall?

We know he likes his Churchillian posturing, which he's employed to great effect over Ukraine.

But an even harder test awaits on the Home Front.

Maggie Thatcher had the resolve to take on and defeat the miners. This is Boris's chance to break the civil service stranglehold once and for all.

Let the hard rain fall.
Q My son, aged eight, is sensitive and is starting to pick up on news about climate change, Covid-19, and the war in Ukraine. He is particularly concerned about the war and, as its ongoing, Im not sure how best to reassure him. How can I talk to him without making things worse?

A It can be hard to find the right moment and words to talk to children about distressing things. You may want to protect him, yet the reality is your son is likely to hear about these alarming issues from friends, school and the media.

Children listen to casual comments and may worry without telling you. I recall my mother saying that when I was five they hadnt yet paid the TV licence and I was convinced my father was heading for prison.

Its good your child is telling you his worries so you can help make sense of whats happening and contain it. Check in with him occasionally, at meal times (rather than bedtime). Before jumping in, ask him what he knows about the war. Listen quietly and let him ask you more.

An anonymous person seeks advice on how to talk about the war in Ukraine. They are concerned about how to best reassure their eight-year-old son

Use open questions so you can gauge his feelings and understanding. Show him youre taking him seriously. Acknowledge that its natural to worry, but assure him he is safe. He might prefer to draw a picture about his feelings, and you can talk to him about it.

Your children take cues from you  if you talk constantly about worrying things and look upset, they will pick up on this. You dont need to pretend all is rosy, and you could say it makes you sad, too. But be reassuring. Keep explanations simple.

According to childrens charity Unicef, its important for young people to know action is being taken to resolve the conflict. Give them positive information about international agencies working to keep people safe. They may like to donate clothes, toys or pocket money to a charity. Try to paint a hopeful view of the future and explain conflicts can be ended.

Look out for signs of anxiety, such as being clingy, upset, irritable or withdrawn. Your son may be tearful and need reassurance or complain of physical symptoms like tummy pains or headache. His sleep or appetite may also be affected.

To build resilience, admit you worry too. Share coping techniques like deep breathing, distractions or talking things over.

Children might try counting back from five or learn a slowbreathing exercise. Repeating a phrase such as I can do this or It will be OK can help. Picturing their favourite animal or place, or singing to themselves can be helpful diversions.

Clare (pictured) advises using open questions so that you can gauge how your child is feeling and their understanding

Congratulate your child when they deal with difficult situations, stay calm or contain their fears. They can be remarkably robust in times of anxiety, which can help them build resilience.

Although anxiety is normal and often short-term, if it persists and is affecting their general wellbeing, consider seeking professional help. Techniques such as cognitive behavioural therapy are proven to help reduce anxiety in children.

When it comes to cold water swimming, I usually brave it only in summer  until I spent a day with TV ice man Wim Hof. Inspired, I tried a dip in the sea at Easter, although it was a numbing nine degrees. After a few slow, deep breaths I took the plunge. It was surprisingly easy. Oddly I didnt feel cold, just tingly. You might wonder why people do this. But evidence shows it helps tune up the immune system, cuts inflammation and boosts mood. Cold water is also used to speed up healing in muscle and ligament injuries. Best to try this after a few cold showers, and dont do it with a medical condition.

Why Im going wild for weeds

Clare says summer is an ideal time for foraging, when the leaves on plants such as dandelions are at their best

Early summer is an ideal time for foraging, when the leaves on plants such as dandelions are at their best. My favourite is what I thought was wild garlic leaves, which, when cooked, turn into garlicky flavoured greens. But having shared a photo on Instagram, my audience pointed out Id actually got a threecornered leek. Thankfully, being part of the same group of plants, they are safe to eat and share the anti-inflammatory substance allicin. Blitz it with olive oil, parmesan, pine nuts and seasoning to make a foraged green pesto.
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A woman who used to work for the prime suspect in Madeleine McCann's disappearance recalled how he used to always have young girls around him, and beat up a teenager he was paying for sex.

Sabine Wojtkowick was an employee at Christian Brueckner's kiosk in Braunschweig, Germany, which he opened in 2012, aged 36.

Speaking in Channel 5's Madeleine McCann: The Case Against Christian B, which aired last night, Sabine recalled seeing Christian B 'kissing' young girls aged 16 to 17 in his kiosk.

She added she never liked him and considered him a cold character who was 'a pig of a man'.

The convicted sex offender, know as Christian B, has been named as a prime suspect in the disappearance of three-year-old Madeleine McCann, who was snatched from her bed in a holiday resort in Praia Da Luz in 2007.

Sabine Wojtkowick worked for Christian B in the kiosk he kept in Braunschweig and recalled seeing him kissing young girls and recalled one particular teen who was seeing him for money.

'I never liked him,' Sabine told investigative journalist Mark Williams-Thomas, who led the documentary's investigation into Christian B, and met with her in Germany.

'He was so unapproachable, he never talked much.

'He just said, "This has to be done and when I return, this will be finished",' she added.

The convicted sex offender, know as Christian B, has been named as a prime suspect in the disappearance of three-year-old Madeleine McCann, who was snatched from her bed in a holiday resort in Praia Da Luz in 2007

Madeleine McCann was snatched from her bed in a holiday resort in Praia Da Luz in 2007 while her parents were out

What do we know about Maddie murder suspect Christian Brueckner and his criminal past? 1976: Christian Brueckner (pictured) is born in Wurzburg under a different name, believed to be Fischer. He was adopted by the Brueckner family and took their surname. 1992: Christian Brueckner is arrested on suspicion of burglary in his hometown of Wurzburg, Bavaria. 1994: He is given a two-year youth jail sentence for 'abusing a child' and 'performing sex acts in front of a child'. 1995: Brueckner arrives in Portugal as an 18-year-old backpacker and begins working in catering in the seaside resorts of Lagos and Praia da Luz. But friends say he became involved with a criminal syndicate trafficking drugs into the Algarve. September 2005: He dons a mask and breaks into an apartment where he rapes a 72-year-old American tourist. The victim was bound, gagged, blindfolded and whipped with a metal cane before being raped for 15 minutes. She said afterwards that he had clearly enjoyed 'torturing' her before the rape. April 2007: He moves out of a farmhouse and into a campervan now linked to the crime. The farmhouse is cleaned and a bag of wigs and 'exotic clothes' is found. May 3, 2007: Madeleine McCann is snatched at around 10pm from her bed as her parents eat tapas with friends yards away. Brueckner's mobile phone places him in the area that night. He returns to his native Germany shortly after that. October 2011: He is sentenced to 21 months for 'dealing narcotics' in Niebull, in northern Germany. In 2013 police released a photofit of a man seen lurking near the McCann apartment and Scotland Yard said that suspect last night had not yet been ruled out of the probe 2014: He moves to Braunschweig where he starts running a town-centre kiosk. He then goes back to Portugal with a girlfriend. 2016: He is back in Germany. He is given 15 months in prison for 'sexual abuse of a child in the act of creating and possessing child pornographic material'. May 3, 2017: Brueckner is said to be in a bar with a friend when a ten-year anniversary appeal following Madeleine's disappearance is shown on German television. He is said to have told him in a bar that he 'knew all about' what happened to her. He then showed his friend a video of him raping a woman. MailOnline understands the friend went to police shortly afterwards. June 2017: He heads back to Portugal and extradited again to Germany. The reason was a sentencing of the Braunschweig district court to 15 months' imprisonment for the sexual abuse of a child. August 2018: After his release from prison he lives on the streets. But he was jailed again for drug offences. First Prosecutor Hans Christian Wolters addresses the media during a press conference on the Madeleine McCann case at the public prosecutor's office in Braunschweig September 2018: Brueckner is arrested in Milan, Italy and extradited to Germany and put on trial for raping the American tourist in 2007 after a DNA match to hair found at the crime scene. July 2019: He is jailed for 21 months for drug dealing in the northern German resort of Sylt. August 2019: Brueckner is charged with the rape of the American tourist in Praia da Luz in 2005. December 2019: He is convicted of rape of extortion of the tourist based on DNA evidence. He is given a seven year sentence, but this has not been imposed pending an appeal. June 3, 2020: Scotland Yard and the German police reveal that that they have identified a suspect in the Maddie McCann case June 4, 2020: Prosecutors in Braunschweig, where he lives, say they believe Madeleine McCann has been murdered, says spokesman Hans Christian Wolters. He is named in the German press as the prime suspect. May 4, 2021: Kate and Gerry McCann post a statement on the Official Find Madeleine Campaign website saying they still cling to the hope of seeing their daughter again as they prepare to mark her 18th birthday on May 12. April 21, 2022: Christian Brueckner, now 44, is made an 'arguido', a formal suspect, by Portuguese authorities. But he has not been charged. Advertisement

She moved on to talk about the young girls she would see with Christian B in the kiosk, saying they looked to be about '16 or 17 years old,' and adding 'he kissed all of them there'.

She also mentioned a 16-year-old Russian teen she saw with Christian B.

'He abused her, that's why she ran,' she said.

She recalled asking the teenager what she wanted from 'such and old guy' and the girl replied: 'Well, money. I sleep with him.'

Sabine said she asked the girl: 'Are you stupid?'.

'I just saw her leaving with green and blue bruises the next morning. I thought he was a pig of a man,' she continued.

'Men who beat women have nothing in their brains.'

When Mark asked her if she thought he could be capable of taking Madeleine McCann, Sabine replied: 'I don't know. But I believe whoever beats up women, could do anything. That's not a real man for me.'

The documentary explores the leads that point to Christian B's alleged involvement in Madeleine's disappearance.

He was identified as a murder suspect by German prosecutors in June 2020, but he has yet to be charged.

In April this year, he was made a 'formal suspect' by Portuguese authorities.

A statement was issued by the Portimao section of the Faro department of criminal investigation and prosecution which, according to a translation, said that a person was made an 'arguido'  which translates as 'named suspect' or 'formal suspect.'

The statement did not name Brueckner, but said the person was made an 'arguido' by German authorities at the request of Portugals public prosecution service.

It said the investigation had been carried out with the co-operation of the English and German authorities.

Jim Gamble, the former head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop) who worked on the investigation into the childs disappearance, told BBC Breakfast: 'Well, this breakthrough could mean everything or it could mean nothing.

'My own gut feeling on it  from the moment the Germans began to release information two years ago  was that this was the best fit.

'You have proximity, you have opportunity, and you have a profile with regards to an offender that absolutely fits in a way that no others have.'

He added: 'This is all positive. And from my own position, and I wouldnt be surprised if charges did follow.'

The move by Portuguese authorities could allow Brueckner, who is in prison in Germany, to be transferred to the Algarve for formal questioning.

The German newspaper Bild reported that Brueckners lawyer, Friedrich Fuelscher, said the Portuguese decision appeared to be a 'procedural trick.'

In Portuguese law, an arguido status can be a preliminary move ahead of an arrest being made or charges brought.

The Metropolitan Police continue to treat Madeleines disappearance as a missing persons inquiry.

Brueckner is currently servicng a seven-year jail term for a brutal 2005 sex attack on a 72-year-old woman, and had his application for early release rejected by the German authorities.

Prosecutors are investigating him over the rape of a Irish tour guide Hazel Behan in the Algarve as well as a sexual assault in Praia da Luz on a ten-year-old German girl a month before Madeleine disappeared.

He is also being probed over an indecent exposure in a children's playground in the Algarve.

Recently, the convicted sex offencer wrote to MailOnline to claim he had nothing to do with Madeleines disappearance almost 15 years ago.

In all the notes  handwritten in near perfect English  Brueckner explained how he feels he is being persecuted by prosecutors and police and even accuses them of fitting him up.

But MailOnline showed the letters to handwriting expert Tracey Trussell, who reported back with a three-page expert analysis of his distinctive handwriting, describing it as perfect, too perfect.

Tracey added: 'On closer inspection there is much more going on than meets the eye. It looks almost eerily unnatural  slow, contrived, mechanical and robotic  unforgiving in its transmission and deliverance.

The writer comes across as super cool, unflappable, calm and collected, not easily rattled, because the slant of the writing is vertical or upright.

'Hes also incredibly polite and well mannered, the left margin is dead straight, the script is legible and there are a number of arched or arcade shaped letters throughout,' she added.

'Hes motivated to present himself in the best possible light, and hes hiding something.
A schoolgirl who Kate Middleton featured in her photography book has received a handwritten letter from the Duchess of Cambridge after being declared free from cancer.

Mila Sneddon, six, from Falkirk, spent two years receiving multiple rounds of chemotherapy after being diagnosed with leukaemia in November 2019.

The schoolgirl was kept away from her father Scott and sister Jodie at the height of the pandemic to stay healthy, with her story touching the nation and the Duchess of Cambridge who decided to feature her as one of 100 photos in her lockdown book, Hold Still.

Mila's mother Lynda took to Twitter to praise Kate for sending a 'beautifully' handwritten letter to mark her daughter reaching the end of her treatment.

Mila Sneddon, six, (pictured) from Falkirk, received a handwritten letter from the Duchess of Cambridge after ending her cancer treatment

The Duchess made good on a promise she made to wear pink, Mila's favourite colour, when they first met in person at the Palace of Holyroodhouse

Lynda shared a heartwarming photo of Mila holding the cherished letter in its envelope with a large smile.

Captioning the snap, Lynda wrote: 'Very grateful to receive a beautiful handwritten letter from @KensingtonRoyal. Such a beautiful keepsake for Mila to look back on for many years to come (content of which will not be disclosed) such a lovely gesture thank you Catherine Duchess of Cambridge.'

Mila, whose first interaction with Kate came after she rang the bell at the Team Jack Cancer Centre in April has previously referred to the Duchess as her 'best friend'.

She spoke to the mother-of-three, 40, on the phone prior to meeting in-person in May 2021 and was in awe when they coordinated in pink princesses dresses as discussed.

Wearing a ME+EM's silk shirt dress with a floral face mask, Kate told the schoolgirl: 'Hi Mila, look at you. I want to give you a big squeezy cuddle, it's so nice to meet you in person.'

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge shared the sentimental meeting with their almost 14 million Instagram followers.

Mila went on to meet the Duchess twice last year, first at Holyroodhouse in May where she also met Prince William

Mila coordinated with the Duchess of Cambridge by wearing a pink dress for their meeting at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh

The post was captioned: 'In the week prior to lockdown last year, Milas family took the difficult decision to isolate in different households to protect Mila, who at this point was only 4 months into her chemotherapy journey for leukaemia.

'The Duchess spoke to Mila on the phone a few months ago following her image being selected as one of the final 100 for the #HoldStill2020 project - hoping one day that theyd meet and wear their pink dresses together.

'Today, Mila and her family visited the Palace of Holyroodhouse to visit The Duchess for tea and a tour of the palace.'

Mila met Kate again during the Duchess' Christmas carol service at Westminster Abbey in December 2021

The post racked up over 4 million views, with Mila given a second chance to meet Kate and the Royal Family at the Together At Christmas community carol service held at Westminster Abbey in 2021.

The little girl's mother said the Duchess had a 'gentle soul' and had made Mila feel comfortable during their meetings.

'Those moments made Mila feel really special and it was a good distraction from her treatment.

'Now shes recognised as the happy little girl who met Kate Middleton and not the poor little girl with cancer,' she added.

What are the symptoms of leukaemia in children? Fatigue and pale skin - this is because leukaemia can cause anaemia which makes a child feel weak, tired and light-headed. Infections and fever - children with leukaemia lack normal white blood cells which would normally help fight infection. Rash - children may have small, dark spots that look like common rashes if the leukemia cells spread to the skin Easy bruising or bleeding - this includes frequent nosebleeds, bleeding gums and bleeding a lot from small cuts. Bone or joint pain - this is caused by a build up of leukaemia cells near the surface of the bone or inside the joint. Swelling of the abdomen - leukaemia cells may collect in the liver and spleen causing them to enlarge. Loss of appetite and weight loss - if the spleen and liver swell, they can press against the stomach causing loss of appetite. Swollen lymph nodes - some leukaemias spread to the lymph nodes causing them to swell. Source: American Cancer Society Advertisement

Mila's school cheered when it was revealed that she is now clear from the rare form of cancer.

'Thinking about when I just first started my treatment. It is really hard for people to get past this far, Mila told ITV.

Mila's letter from the Duchess comes as another mother posting under the Twitter handle @megsmi83 revealed her daughter also received a note from Kate after writing to her eldest son.

Mila's letter from the Duchess comes as another mother posting under the Twitter handle @megsmi83 revealed her daughter Bella (pictured) also received a note from Kate

She shared a photo of her daughter Bella beaming as she held the typed letter and a snapshot of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

Meg captioned the snap: ' Thankyou to @KensingtonRoyal for their beautiful response to Bella.

'She wrote to Prince George, telling him about her passion for climate change and saving the planet. Thankyou for acknowledging a dream and making a day  #DukeandDuchessofCambridge #RoyalFamily'

The post has already racked up over 1,000 likes with followers praising Kate's 'sweet' gesture.
Charlotte, 29, (pictured) has been single for five years

VITAL STATISTICS Single for five years, no children. CURRENT ROLE Lettings manager. WOULD LIKE TO MEET Someone ambitious who is good-looking, tall and takes care of himself. Hell be family-oriented. Advertisement

CHARLOTTE, 29

Dating Past

Ive had three long-term relationships, but unfortunately I have been cheated on so Im cautious about going down that road again.

Ive also had lazy partners; its as though I end up with the reluctant foot soldiers rather than the knights in shining armour!

Pre-Date Nerves?

None, I dont get nervous. I went into the date as open-minded as possible and with no expectations. I was excited and intrigued because Ive never been on a blind date.

First Impressions?

We bonded over being the naughty ones in our family

Glen is charming and goodlooking. We kissed on the cheek to say hello, and clicked straight away. Hes slim and dark-haired with a beard, and has a lovely smile. He was wearing a T-shirt with black jeans and I wore a floral dress.

Easy To Talk To?

CHARLOTTE'S VERDICT: 8/10 LIKED? Glen is easy-going REGRETS? None COFFEE OR CAB? Coffee Advertisement

We talked about our lives outside work, but also about what were looking for in our next relationship. We both want one that is drama-free. Weve been single for a while and thats because neither of us want to have to carry someone. I value my independence, and I dont necessarily need to settle down. Glen liked this about me, calling me a breath of fresh air.

I had a truffle starter followed by chicken; he went for prawns and then a different style of chicken. We shared a bottle of white wine.

Embarrassing Moments?

Nothing embarrassing  we just laughed a lot together. Although Glen did ask me for my Instagram within what felt like five seconds. It shows confidence, I suppose.

Did Sparks Fly?

Im not sure. Glen is a great guy, but what puts me off is that we dont live near each other. Im in Kent and hes in Milton Keynes. Im not sure its fair to pursue a relationship when we live so far apart.

See him again?

Im open to meeting up with Glen again because we had such a good time together, but Im not sure if anything will progress between us because of the distance.

What do you think he thought of you?

I hope he thought Im funny and that he enjoyed the date. We ended it on a high, waving across to one another on the Tube platform. Hes a funny guy.

Would your family like him?

Yes, were clearly both the naughty ones in our family, the ones who are guaranteed at family events to drink that bit too much.

Glen, 31, (pictured) has been single for three years

GLEN, 31

Dating Past

Ive been dating on and off throughout my 20s. Ive had two long-term relationships, but Ive not felt ready to settle down.

Pre-Date Nerves?

VITAL STATISTICS Ive been single for three years, and have no children. CURRENT ROLE IT management. WOULD LIKE TO MEET Someone who has some ambition in life, is family-oriented, kind-hearted and wants to plan a future together. I avoid women who are self-absorbed. Advertisement

I was a little nervous as I havent been on a blind date before. I arrived at the restaurant after Charlotte but, in my defence, she arrived early and was having a strawberry mojito at the bar.

First Impressions?

Good, because Charlotte and I were well matched from a fashion perspective. She was wearing a lovely pink flowery dress from Zara. I had on a flowery jacket with a pink T-shirt  also from Zara. Charlotte is bubbly and cute. She has brown hair with blue-green eyes and a good figure. We greeted one another with a casual hug.

Easy To Talk To?

The date ended with a hug not a kiss  I was being a gent

We didnt stop talking. While I wouldnt describe either of us as the black sheep, were the ones who do things differently in our respective families. For example, were both adventurous and regularly go rock climbing.

GLEN'S VERDICT: 9/10 LIKED? Charlotte. We had great chemistry REGRETS? My time keeping COFFEE OR CAB? Coffee Advertisement

I also enjoy singing and Charlotte seemed impressed by the R&B covers Ive posted on social media.

Embarrassing Moments?

Other than being late? No, thankfully the rest of the date was fun, but chilled. We laughed a lot.

Did Sparks Fly?

Yes, we got on well. I did find Charlotte attractive. It was natural for us to exchange social media profiles and weve kept in touch since. The date ended with a hug and not a kiss  thats because I was being a gent and didnt want to overstep any boundaries.

See her again?

Yes, its highly likely and besides Id like to. Im in London soon, and will be in touch to see if Charlotte wants to meet up.

What do you think she thought of you?

Im not sure. Hopefully Charlotte liked me and thought I was a laugh because Im always cracking jokes. We sent each other funny videos of our journey home after the date; Ill take that as a positive sign.

Would your friends like her?

Im usually the joker and the life and soul of the party at social gatherings. Charlotte is the same; my friends would like her because shes funny and quick-witted.
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It's almost summer so start looking around for that perfect season staple: the sundress. Dua Lipa is showing us how it's done as she stepped out in Berlin on Wednesday to visit an art gallery. For the occasion, she sported this vibrant daisy-printed sundress that's guaranteed to turn heads.

We love the oversized daisy print, the dropped armholes and the length which, when because it's cut on the bias, produces this incredible fabric movement at the hem. A front slit completes the look.

Dua's maxi dress hails from Marni and, specifically, it's the Dripping Daisy printed jersey maxi dress available at Farfetch.

Marni Dripping Daisy maxi dress at Farfetch We love this oversized daisy print maxi dress from the Italian brand.

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The bias cut produces movement at the hem.

If you have dough to spend, make this yours. Shop

Simply stunning! Dua Lipa stepped out for a day at a Berlin art gallery wearing this daisy print maxi dress that has us green with envy

Marni is a quirky Italian brand that has boatloads of celebrity fans, among them Emma Roberts, Sarah Jessica Parker and Chrissy Teigen. Bold, clashing prints, bright bold colors and oversized florals are some of the label's signatures.

Dua's Marni Dripping Daisy dress is a perfect example of the brand's aesthetic. The daisy looks like it has been spray-painted on the white dress with residue dripping down the front. So much fun!

This dress, or a similar one from our picks, will carry you through summer. Dress it down with sneakers, or kick it up with heels. And add a simple cardigan or blazer for colder evenings or a day in the office.

Twinset floral-print tiered maxi dress at Farfetch Twinset's bold floral print sundress channels Dua's Marni dress. We love the oversized florals, tonal black background and tiered hem.

This dress will provide lots of movement and drama and can be dressed up or down.

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River Island black floral bodycon midi dress This vibrant black-and-white floral midi dress is just perfect, in our opinion.

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Volcom Stormy Tropix maxi dress at Zappos We can see Volcom's Stormy Tropix dress going easily from the beach to the street and beyond.

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Gibsonlook high-low ruffle edge maxi dress at Nordstrom This Gibsonlook floral black sundress features a little color, specifically the blue petals of the large flowers.

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Stephanie Kelly looked like every other stunning model walking the catwalk at Australian Fashion Week on Wednesday night.

The 26-year-old from Sydney had her long blonde hair styled to perfection as she wore clothes designed by Bondi Born, Manning Cartel and Blanca in the 'Future of Fashion' show.

But what the audience couldn't see from the sidelines was that Stephanie suffers from a chronic illness and has spent more time in hospitals, surgery rooms and ICU than she has living her life.

Not only was Stephanie born with a multitude of life-threatening heart conditions and a potassium wasting disorder that saw her spend her teenage years in a wheelchair, but a horror car accident in 2018 left her stomach and intestines 'paralysed' - forcing her to be fed by a tube for 16 hours a day.

The 26-year-old from Sydney had her long blonde hair styled to perfection as she wore clothes designed by Bondi Born, Manning Cartel and Blanca in the 'Future of Fashion' show

But what audience members couldn't see from their perches on the sidelines was that Stephanie is a chronically ill young woman who has almost spent more time in hospitals, surgery rooms and ICU than she has outside of those stark white walls

'I was the first diagnosed case of postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) at the Sydney Royal Children's Hospital,' she told FEMAIL of the condition that affects your blood flow.

For Stephanie the disease meant she couldn't stand up without fainting for years, and resigned herself to rehab and a wheelchair while doctors frantically tried to find the right concoction of medication that would allow her to stand unaided.

She was also diagnosed with heart complications like Supraventricular tachycardia (SVT) and Atrial fibrillation (AF) as a young child, both of which saw her ending up needing a defibrillator 'more times than she could count'.

'I would be sleeping... doing nothing and suddenly my heart would be beating at 200 beats a minute,' she said.

'They had to use these medications that stop your heart'.

Stephanie was such a firm fixture at the children's hospital until she was 17 that the young woman was granted a 'Make A Wish' by the Starlight Foundation. She settled on a trip to Perth with her mum over a 'crowded' encounter with her teen crush at the time, Justin Bieber.

The 26-year-old from Sydney is planning her wedding to fiance Adam Tompkin, the pair have just purchased a piece of land and her new 'mum car' - a BMW X3 M Competition - sits proudly in the driveway

Not only was Stephanie born with a multitude of life-threatening heart conditions and a potassium wasting disorder that saw her spend her teenage years in a wheelchair, but a horror car accident in 2018 left her stomach and intestines 'paralysed'

After finishing school in the hospital and working with a renowned doctor on her POTS, Stephanie was finally able to stand again in 2013.

With the world at her feet the remarkable woman chose to study nursing to give back to the professionals who had been her constant support for so long.

She got a job at Westmead Children's Hospital in 2014 after completing her assistant nursing course. Then came TAFE to study as an enrolled nurse before she landed her dream job in 2016 at the children's hospital she grew up in.

'I was quite well during this time, I was sort of used to it. I didn't have any heart surgeries while I worked,' she said.

Stephanie was studying to become a registered nurse in March 2018 when a fateful trip to Max Brenner with Adam after work one night saw another driver T-bone their car at a roundabout. The car slammed into her on the passenger side.

'I would be sleeping... doing nothing and suddenly my heart would be beating at 200 beats a minute,' she said. 'They had to use these medications that stop your heart' (Pictured with Adam)

She was also diagnosed with heart complications like Supraventricular tachycardia (SVT) and Atrial fibrillation (AF) as a young child, both of which saw her ending up needing a defibrillator 'more times than she could count'

'I immediately remember having no feeling in my left arm and feeling really sore around my rib cage. It was a whirlwind of a year from then,' she said.

Stephanie had a left brachial plexus injury, two slipped discs in her neck and a twisted rib cage after the accident, seeing her return to the familiar white walls of the hospital once again.

She was on medication for nerve pain for 18 months before doctors started to note down peculiar symptoms she was experiencing: vomiting, a lack of hunger and terrible stomach pain.

'I was losing weight extremely fast. I was 75 kilos after the accident, went down to 65 in a month, and then 60,' she said.

The young nurse was eventually diagnosed with gastroparesis and intestinal failure, a rare result of the nerve medication coupled with her pre-existing medical conditions.

'It basically means your stomach and intestines can no longer absorb nutrients like they used to. They're asleep, or paralysed. I was given a number of types of feeding tubes - NJ, GJ, G and J - but ultimately I was losing too much weight to sustain just these measures,' she said.

In 2020, just after Covid hit and hospitals were essentially locked down from the rest of society, doctors decided Stephanie would need a TPN, or total parenteral nutrition, which is a method of feeding that bypasses the gastrointestinal tract.

She got a job at Westmead hospital in 2014 after completing her assistant nursing course. Then came TAFE to study as an enrolled nurse before she landed her dream job in 2016 at the children's hospital she grew up in (Pictured on the wards second in from the right)

'It basically means your stomach and intestines can no longer absorb nutrients like they used to. They're asleep, or paralysed. I was given a number of types of feeding tubes - NJ, GJ, G and J - but ultimately I was losing too much weight to sustain just these measures,' she said

'I knew what a TPN was, I'm a nurse after all. I wasn't totally sold on the idea at first because it can lead to metabolic issues and even sepsis later on,' she said.

'So I agreed to do it in the hospital rather than at home because it would mean I'd spend two weeks in hospital out of every month, rather than having to use the tube every day.'

Stephanie did gain some much-needed weight after her first TPN stint but unfortunately the kilos would fall off as soon as she left the hospital room. It was an uphill battle for months.

She lost her gall bladder to sepsis after a particularly nasty infection entered her central line and was starting to give up on ever feeling 'better' again.

'I was so depressed after that. Adam and I ended up doing a 30-hour round trip to Adelaide to pick up our poodle Oatley, which did end up making me feel a whole lot better,' she said

Stephanie got engaged to Adam in November last year. They plan to wed in mid next year

'I was so depressed after that. Adam and I ended up doing a 30-hour round trip to Adelaide to pick up our poodle Oatley, which did end up making me feel a whole lot better,' she said.

At the beginning of 2021 Stephanie agreed to having her TPN at home, which involves hooking up the fluid to a Hickman line in her chest for up to 16 hours a day.

'I use the IV pole when I'm at home but I also have a backpack I can carry around with the liquid in it, so I can go out while it's working,' she said.

Stephanie can still eat certain foods with her family and friends but she has to empty the contents of her stomach using a special tube because it won't be absorbed.

'I'll eat for the social and mental aspect of it, not because it provides me with any nutrition,' she explained.

Stephanie can still eat certain foods with her family and friends but she has to empty the contents of her stomach using a special tube because it won't be absorbed

'It's funny because I'm technically the sickest I've ever been but I'm also the most stable I've ever been.'

While her goal isn't to be on TPN forever - she hopes further research will result in a better method in time - Stephanie is using her platform on social media - and at the upcoming fashion show - to show how 'tubies' can live a fairly normal life and thrive.

'I'm hoping my journey will spread awareness and promote diversity and inclusivity by showing everyone that I can live a normal, wholesome life even with medical devices,' she said.

'There are so many young men and women who have these devices, that are consumers in fashion, beauty and tech. More importantly there are so many children who have feeding tubes, central lines, wheelchair users, amputees and much more.

'I think that people from all walks of life should be represented in mainstream media.'

You can find Stephanie Kelly on her Instagram page or on TikTok.
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Low cut silk trousers, chainmail bras and see-through dresses were on constant rotation at Australian Fashion Week as designers ramped up the sexy for the new season.

You wouldn't know Australia was just a few short months away from winter as models at Bec and Bridge, Michael Lo Sordo and St Agni donned barely-there ensembles at Carriageworks in Redfern, Sydney, without fear of showing a bare hip or nipple.

At Bec and Bridge, designers Bec Cooper and Bridget Yorston debuted their collection titled TWENTY-ONE, a celebration of the brand's milestone anniversary, inspired by the music, the grit and the grunge of the '90s.

At Bec and Bridge, designers Bec Cooper and Bridget Yorston debuted their collection titled TWENTY-ONE, a celebration of the brand's milestone anniversary, inspired by the music, the grit and the grunge of the '90s

The Siren Midi Dress ($850) features a crochet style made from an ombre dyed knit and complimented by metallic payette sequins

The ERIK-YVON show was awash with colour at Afterpay Australian Fashion Week (pictured)

'It's marrying archival silhouettes with nostalgic throwbacks from our late '90s roots, all reinterpreted through a super-modern lens,' the founders said.

The Siren Midi Dress ($850) features a crochet style made from an ombre dyed knit and complimented by metallic payette sequins.

'The sheer and chic, event wear style is designed to skim along the body to create a fitted and flattering silhouette. The midi dress features a scoop neckline and scoop low back,' the website read.

Meanwhile Michael Lo Sordo incorporated his signature diamante detailing with low back slip dresses and chainmail bralettes and blazers for the ultimate date night outfit.

Meanwhile Michael Lo Sordo incorporated his signature diamante detailing with low back slip dresses and chainmail bralettes and blazers for the ultimate date night outfit

Over at St Agni, a brand born in the bohemian backyard of Byron Bay, there were plenty of midriffs and bralettes on show and matched with baggy trousers to enhance their lithe frames

The Nichol and Ford runway show also championed a number of daring looks, including a completely backless number (left)

Stylist Elliot Garnaut likened the skimpy outfits to designers taking bigger chances now that we're living in a post-pandemic world

Over at St Agni, a brand born in the bohemian backyard of Byron Bay, there were plenty of midriffs and bralettes on show and matched with baggy trousers to enhance their lithe frames.

Some likened the show to looks that wouldn't have been astray on Carrie Bradshaw, the main character in Sex and the City.

Stylist Elliot Garnaut likened the skimpy outfits to designers taking bigger chances now that we're living in a post-pandemic world.

Emma Pills (right) stands with her model at Fashion Week

One Mile debuted its Resort collection with a series of sheer tops and skirts (pictured)

'From cut-outs to naked dressing we have seen so much more skin shown in the past two years than ever before,' Mr Garnaut told news.com.au.

'For me, the adaptation to everyday life - show the parts of your body that you feel most sexy and confident about.

'The low-slung pants and cropped dresses and shirts are very apparent on the runway this year, which is giving consumers the confidence to own their body, and to feel empowered to rock those shapes that are most suited to you. Don't feel like you have to have everything hanging out, because you don't.'
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Princess Beatrice and Edo Mapelli Mozzi looked every inch the glamorous power couple as they attended a preview of the equestrian extravaganza that will be shown during the Queen's Platinum Jubilee celebrations.

The 33-year-old royal and her husband, 38, were treated to a preview of A Gallop Through History, which will form part of the Royal Windsor Horse Show.

For the occasion, mother-of-one Bea picked a very stylish maxi dress from the trendy designer The Vampire's Wife with a vibrant floral print.

The Royal Windsor Horse Show, which kicked off last night and will run until Sunday, is the Queen's favourite event of the year, butit was announced the 96-year-old Monarch would not attend this year due to mobility issues.

The couple, who reportedly baptised their daughter Sienna in early May, left the eight-month-old at home to represent the sovereign.

Princess Beatrice, 33 and her husband Edo Mapelli Mozzi, 38, made a glamourous pair as they attended a preview of the show, which will air during the Queen's Platinum Jubilee celebrations

The mother-of-one appeared to be having a good time on her night out at the Royal Windsor Horse Show last night and gave the public a wide grin

Beatrice put on a very glamourous display in the colourful gown, which reached to the floor with a tiered train and highlighted her petite waist.

She paired it with platform heels and kept the rest of the look discreet.

Jewellery-wise, she opted for a silver bracelet and a gold bracelet on each wrist, and statement dropped earrings in silver shaped like feathers.

The mother-of-one sported a glamourous makeup, with a trait of eyeliner circling her blue eyes and mascara adding volume to her lashes.

Eugenie looked very glamourous in a maxi dress from the trendy designer The Vampire's Wife in a liberty print, which is beloved by celebs

She completed the look with a healthy dose of bronzer and a pink lipstick.

Meanwhile, Edo looked dapper in a black velvet blazer, which he wore over a white shirt and a black bow tie.

The couple looked relaxed as they arrived at the show and seemed to be enjoying their time out.

Beatrice looked like she enjoyed the preview of the show created in honour of her grandmother. She was seen waving enthusiastically from her car at the end of the evening.

This outing comes as it was revealed that Beatrice and Edo as well as Princess Eugenie, 32, and her husband Jack Brooskbank, along with several other royals, won't make an appearance on the balcony of Buckingham Palace during the Queen's Jubilee celebrations.

The Queen's granddaughter enthusiastically waved at the crowds who had gathered to see the preview of the show. A member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police followed her car

The cast of the show, which includes 1,000 performers, conducted three cheers to Princess Beatrice during the charity preview

The balcony appearance, which is often seen as the centrepiece of major royal occasions, including Trooping the Colour and weddings, usually sees the Queen's extended family gather to watch a flypast and is a rare chance for fans to see the entire extended family together.

Following his ejection from public life, after settling a civil court case in America over allegations of sexual abuse against Virginia Giuffre (which he vehemently denies), it was inconceivable that Beatrice and Eugenie's father Prince Andrew would be given a spot.

Despite earlier claims that the Queen offered Prince Harry and Meghan Markle a space on the platform, they too have been left off the list, although they quickly announced today that they will be in London for the celebrations with their two children.

The Kings Guard from Norway, in navy uniforms, also performed during the charity preview and will perform in June for the Queen

The Kings Guard from Norway held bayonets during the performance and were accompanied by their own marching band during the show

The show also included performers from Azerbaijan in gold and red costumes who literally played with fire during last night's preview in Windsor

One female performer wowed the crowd with an expert split balanced on top of two galloping horses during last night's preview

However, in paring the list down to just 16 people to avoid potential diplomatic pitfalls, the Queen has been forced to omit a number of well-liked family members including her much-loved grandchildren and their families.

Her cousins, including Prince Michael of Kent, and their families, with whom the Queen enjoys a warm relationship are also out in the cold, with a total of at least 34 royals absent from the balcony.

The final balcony lineup will boast the Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall; the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and their children; the Earl and Countess of Wessex and their children; the Princess Royal and Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence; the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester; the Duke of Kent, and Princess Alexandra.

The very popular Top Secret Drum Corps came all the way from Switzerland to perform during the charity preview in Windsor and did a trick where they juggle each other's drumsticks

The rhythm of the night! The Top Secret Drum Corps did not miss a bit during last night's preview. They will do it all again in London for the Queen's Jubilee in June

The Queen's other adult grandchildren, Peter Philips and Zara Tindall have been excluded with their families, even though their mother Princess Anne and stepfather Sir Timothy Laurence will join the Queen.

In a formal statement about the decision, Buckingham Palace said: 'After careful consideration, The Queen has decided this years traditional Trooping the Colour balcony appearance on Thursday 2nd June will be limited to Her Majesty and those Members of the Royal Family who are currently undertaking official public duties on behalf of The Queen.'

There are exceptions, however. Prince Anne's husband Vice Admiral Sir Tim Laurence, who is not a working royal, and the Queen's granchildren Lady Louise and James, Viscount Severn, and her great-grandchildren George, Charlotte and Louis are included.

Going out with a bang! The King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery showed off their firepower during last night's show and took the canons out

The Palace spokesman added: 'The Cambridge and Wessex children are also expected to appear as is Sir Tim Laurence, who the Queen is happy to attend as a frequent attendee and support for the Princess Royal on official engagements.'

The announcement follows reports that her Majesty herself may not appear on the balcony, due to the 96-year-old's limited mobility.

It is believed that aides are working on a 'plan B', with an insider saying: 'It could still happen but it is by no means guaranteed that we will see the Queen on the balcony during the Jubilee.'

While recent balcony appearances have been more focused on senior members of the Firm, normally, there are no restrictions on which family members are present for Trooping of the Colour, the Queen's official birthday.

The King's Troop put out a show-stopping performances with their horses and their canons last night before they set the canons loose

The troops arrived galloping into the arena last night and went on to delight the crowds - which included Princess Beatrice - with their performance

Dancers from the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo in traditional dancing attire put their best foot forward for a dazzling show to the sound of a live marching band

Jumping with excitement! The dancers showed how their skills in their colourful blue, red, purple and green outfits while men in kilt stood to attention behind them

One the traditional Scottish dancers finished their performance, the Massed Pipes and Drums took centre stage during last night's show

Emerald Storm Dancers from Northern Ireland burst onto the scene in flaming red costumes and showed off their moves, kicking their legs high into the air
Students participate in a dancing party to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Kim Jong-un's election as the top state leader at the Arch of Triumph plaza in Pyongyang, North Korea, April 11. Officially, not a single person has been infected with COVID-19 in North Korea. AP-Yonhap



By Jung Min-ho





Hakim Djaballah

The COVID-19 pandemic has swept across the world for more than two years. North Korea, however, is still completely free of the disease, according to its official data.



The latest data available on the World Health Organization website shows "there have been 0 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 0 deaths" in the isolated state between Jan. 3, 2020 and May 10 of this year.



Hakim Djaballah, former CEO of Institut Pasteur Korea and a virologist currently based in New York, believes that North Korea's COVID-free claim is most likely a lie.



"It is very hard to imagine any country being COVID free let alone North Korea," Djaballah told The Korea Times. "I do not believe their claim, given what has been happening near its borders."





Visitors walk across the Yalu River Broken Bridge, right, next to the Friendship Bridge connecting China and North Korea in Dandong in northeastern China's Liaoning province, in this Sept. 9, 2017, file photo. About two weeks ago, China suspended railroad freight operations with North Korea. AP-Yonhap



Two weeks ago, China suspended railroad freight operations with North Korea "in light of the current epidemic situation" in the Chinese border city of Dandong. The city government ordered all residents to swiftly return home and stay there, but it did not give any other details.



North Korea has appeared to imitate China's zero-COVID strategy, which involves draconian lockdowns. But unlike China, North Korea lacks food supplies and government efficiency. Moreover, it is unclear how much of the country's population is vaccinated  a critical factor for the pandemic to become endemic. Even if North Korea can pursue this strategy for a while, it would not be sustainable, Djaballah said.









"Given the current situation in North Korea, I doubt very much that they can successfully apply the zero-COVID policy as China has been doing," he said. "I find it counterproductive to continue with such policies for North Korea and even for China. I do not think that North Korea is capable of keeping the virus at bay, given what we know about its capabilities."



On Monday, North Korea called for making more efforts to prevent the spread of the virus amid a growing number of fever patients, though the possible cause of sickness has not been made clear. The Rodong Sinmun, the official mouthpiece of the Workers' Party, urged the public not to let its guard down.



There is little information about vaccination in North Korea, including how many people, if anyone at all, have been vaccinated and what kind of vaccines may have been administered. But based on the situations in other countries, it is reasonable to assume that the virus will not disappear without infecting a certain number of people.



"I imagine that, with Omicron, many countries should have had at least 50-60 percent of their population already infected and recovered from it due to its mild symptoms  They're now on their way to dampen down COVID with the only fearful exception of the appearance of a new and deadly variant," Djaballah said. "The circulating Omicron and its variants have been helpful in pushing toward an equilibrium with the virus, hopefully sending it into hibernation and we will not hear about it for many years to come."



"In any case, North Korea can open its doors to independent observers to visit and assess the situation."





South Korea's new President Yoon Suk-yeol takes an oath during his inauguration ceremony at the National Assembly in Seoul, Tuesday. AP-Yonhap
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Prince William ripped up the royal rulebook by ditching formality and sharing a heartwarming embrace with an emotional royal fan, who just so happened to be his namesake, during his visit to Scotland yesterday.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge warmly greeted royal fans in Kennishead, Glasgow as they embarked on the first of their two-day tour of the country yesterday.

During their visit the couple visited the Wheatley Group site, to see first-hand how they are transforming the lives of disadvantaged or vulnerable people, including those at risk of homelessness.

As they greeted local residents after the visit, William, 39, shared an affectionate hug with local man William Burns, 66, who was overcome with emotion as he embraced the future king.

Prince William was seen sharing a heartwarming embrace with an emotional man as he heard about the challenges of homelessness in Scotland

As they greeted local residents, William, 39, shared an affectionate hug with local man William Burns, 66, who was overcome with emotion as he embraced the future king

The protocol surrounding touching the Royal Family has historically been so strict that a simple breach like a hand on the back, even by a well-meaning dignitary, was enough to spark outrage.

While older generations of royals might have seen a lack of contact as a way to communicate a higher status - it appears the Duke and Duchess are attempting to be more approachable.

There are no obligatory codes of behaviour when meeting a member of the Royal Family, but many chose to observe traditions, which is to bow or curtsey.

The tender moment saw the Duke break strict royal protocol, in a move that echoed the tactile nature of his late mother Princess Diana.

Prince William and Kate Middleton posed for selfies with locals during their visit to the Wheatley Group site in Kennishead in Glasgow

The Duchess of Cambridge looks delighted as she meets members of the public during a visit to the Wheatley Group in Glasgow

Perfecting his selfie pout! the Duke appeared in high spirits as he leaned in for a snap with a member of the public in Glasgow

Strike a pose! Kate looked delighted as she waved to cameras during the visit to the Wheatley Group in the Scottish city yesterday before putting on an animated display with crowds

The Duke and Duchess appear to have put on their finest charm offensive during the visit, with Kate, 40, seen beaming as she cuddled up and cooed with newborns.

During their relaxed engagements, William appeared playful as he goofed around with children, before the royal couple posed for selfies with locals.

Their new easygoing approach could also be part of an attempt to to modernise the Royal Family after their Belize, Jamaica and the Bahamas trip which was hit by public relations gaffes and protests.

In fact, royal sources claimed recently that in wake of the tour, the couple want to be known by their first names instead of their titles and are considering getting rid of bows and curtsies.

'The general consensus was that the tour seemed out of date, out of touch, too formal and stuffy', a royal source told the Mirror.

'So now it's more "Wills and Kate" instead of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge... "Just call me Wills" type of thing.

'They want to try to avoid the bows and curtsies in public, be more approachable, less formal, less stuffy, and break away with a lot of the tradition and focus on a modern monarchy.'

The news comes as the Queen moves ahead with slimming down the Monarchy and the Palace announced that only senior Royals, which do not include Prince Harry and Meghan and Prince Andrew, will be on the palace balcony for the showpiece Platinum Jubilee celebration.

Wheatley Homes is Scotlands leading housing, care and property-management group aiming to tackle homelessness and support vulnerable tenants during the cost of living crisis.

Kate Middleton and Prince William posed for selfies and played with children as they put on their finest charm offensive during a whirlwind tour of Scotland yesterday

Another baby! Having been charmed by one tiny tot earlier in the day, the Duchess was then left grinning after meeting a newborn during a walkabout

During one of their engagements today, the Duke and Duchess appeared particularly taken by two-year-old Olivia Wilson, who had tumbled to the ground - with Kate helping her to her feet

During their visit the royal couple met Wheatley Homes Glasgow tenant Joanne Wales, 31, who opened the front door of her new-build home to welcome Their Royal Highnesses.

Inside they met son Jason, four, and heard from Joanne how the energy-efficient house design is helping reduce her energy bills.

Joanne said: 'With four young kids then energy bills is a big concern. There's always a need for a new pair of shoes or new clothes.

'I had a meeting with the energy advice team and they gave me great tips on how to use my electricity to keep my bills low. I don't need to put the heating on as much during the day in my new home. It's made a big difference.'

The Duke and Duchess were met in Kennishead by John MacLeod, Glasgow Deputy Lieutenant, accompanied by his wife, Mariella McLeod.

They were introduced to Wheatley Group Chief Executive Martin Armstrong, Wheatley Group Chair Jo Armstrong and Bernadette Hewitt, the tenant Chair of Wheatley Homes Glasgow.

Wheatley Group Chair Jo Armstrong said: 'We were delighted to welcome the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and show them how Wheatley Group is 'Making Homes and Lives Better'.

The mother-of-three was elegant in a tonal outfit for the engagements in Glasgow yesterday, pairing a cornflower blue blouse with smart navy trousers

Goofing around! Prince William didn't hold back while playfully chatting to the toddler yesterday during his visit to Glasgow

A very royal play-date! Prince William appeared charmed by little Olivia during the visit to Wheatley Homes Glasgow yesterday

And it wasn't long before Kate joined in with Prince William to help out with the youngster, who was wearing a pink outfit for the occasion

The Duke and Duchess helped two-year-old Olivia up after she tumbled to the ground during their visit yesterday (pictured)

'They were very interested in the work of our Foundation, about how Wheatley is giving young people the best start in life and also how we are creating new job and training opportunities so customers can reach their full potential.

'We also explained how Wheatley is playing a key role across Scotland in tackling homelessness and giving people a home of their own.'

The Duke of Cambridge is a long-standing campaigner for the homeless and is patron of Centrepoint, which helps homeless young people get back into education, training and employment.

The charity was William's first patronage and the royal took over the role from his late mother Princess Diana.

In 2009, the Duke decided to spend the night rough sleeping in order to understand the plight of the homeless at Christmas, staying out in temperatures as low as minus 4c in an alleyway near Blackfriars bridge.

The Prince said afterwards that the experience had helped to deepen his understanding of life on the streets, calling the charity's work 'desperately important'.
Villains better beware, because Prince Louis's favourite superhero has been revealed.

Speaking to locals as she visited a homelessness charity centre near Glasgow yesterday, the Duchess of Cambridge, 40, revealed her youngest child, who just turned four, is a big fan of Spider-Man.

She made the revelation while speaking to local mother Joanne Wales and her son Jason, who is the same age as Louis, as she joined Prince William on a two-day whirlwind tour of Scotland, People reported.

William and Kate were visiting the Wheatley Group site in Kennishead to see first-hand how they are transforming the lives of disadvantaged or vulnerable people, including those at risk of homelessness.

Speaking to locals as she visited a homelessness charity centre near Glasgow yesterday, the Duchess of Cambridge, 40, revealed her youngest child, who just turned four, is a big fan of Spiderman. Pictured with schoolchildren at St. John's Primary School, Port Glasgow

Louis, who just turned four, is a big fan of Spiderman. His parents also revealed he used to be obsessed with Mary Berry when he was two

Speaking to Joanne and Jason, Kate learned that the Glasgow boy's favourite superhero was Spider-Man as he showed her his collection of action figures.

'Louis, our little boy, loves Spider-Man too,' she said.

Prince Louis is not the only one of the Cambridge children to share an affinity with spiders.

His big sister Charlotte, who turned seven last week, revealed in an exchange with Sir David Attenborough in 2020 for the Earthshot Prize that she liked spiders.

The Duchess of Cambridge released lovely pictures of Louis running on the beach to mark his fourth birthday

Her father Prince William revealed in 2021 that: 'Charlotte is a massive fan of spiders and loves looking at them and learning about them, so they go on spider hunts so that she can see them up close and then let them go.'

Kate Middleton has also enjoyed sharing a glimpse into her children's interests in the past.

In 2020, she revealed that Louis, then two, was fascinated by Mary Berry, and that one of his first words was 'Mary,' likely after the master baker.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge with Olivia Wilson, two, during a visit to the Wheatley Group in Glasgow

Kate Middleton read a story with Laura Molloy and her 10-month-old son Saul Molloy during a visit to St. John's Primary School yesterday

Yesterday, Kate and William met Joanne Wales, 31, as she opened the front door of her new-build home to welcome Their Royal Highnesses. Inside they met son Jason, four, and heard from Joanne how the energy-efficient house design is helping reduce her energy bills.

Joanne said: 'With four young kids then energy bills is a big concern. There's always a need for a new pair of shoes or new clothes. I had a meeting with the energy advice team and they gave me great tips on how to use my electricity to keep my bills low.

'I don't need to put the heating on as much during the day in my new home. It's made a big difference.'

The Duke and Duchess were met in Kennishead by John MacLeod, Glasgow Deputy Lieutenant, accompanied by his wife, Mariella McLeod.

They were introduced to Wheatley Group Chief Executive Martin Armstrong, Wheatley Group Chair Jo Armstrong and Bernadette Hewitt, the tenant Chair of Wheatley Homes Glasgow.

Wheatley Group Chair Jo Armstrong said: 'We were delighted to welcome the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and show them how Wheatley Group is 'Making Homes and Lives Better'.

'They were very interested in the work of our Foundation, about how Wheatley is giving young people the best start in life and also how we are creating new job and training opportunities so customers can reach their full potential. We also explained how Wheatley is playing a key role across Scotland in tackling homelessness and giving people a home of their own.'
A mother-of-two has been left devastated by her 'scary' eyebrows after a Microblading session went wrong.

Crystal Weinstock, 37, from Houston, Texas, decided to try microblading and paid $340 for the privilege.

But she was shocked to find the makeup artist had made her eyebrows so much bigger and bolder that her little girl was too terrified to come anywhere near her.

Crystal, a dentist hygienist, said: 'I had been thinking about getting microblading on my eyebrows for quite some time.

Crystal Weinstock, 37, from Houston, Texas, decided to try Microblading and paid $340 (275) for the privilege

The mother-of-two was shocked to find the make-up artist had made her eyebrows so much bigger and bolder her little girl was too terrified to come anywhere near her

The dental hygienist, pictured before the procedure, thought having microblading was a good idea because filling and shaping her eyebrows was taking too long as a busy mother

'As a busy mother, I found that trying to fill in my brows and make sure they were the right shape took so long. I thought that having microblading would be a great idea.

'I never in a million years could have guessed that they would have turned out like they did. It was horrifying. When my three-year-old daughter saw me the following day, she actually got frightened and freaked out.

'I'm now having to have removal sessions to try and break down the pigment and I may have to have laser treatment. It could take up to a year to get them looking better.'

Crystal said she attended her first micro blading session in November last year, however due to bleeding, the session was cut short and the pigment didn't stick.

So she tried a second session four weeks later, in December.

Crystal added: 'I was so excited to have perfect eyebrows and not have to worry about doing them myself. I was shown a picture of what my brows would be like after and I loved it. So in December, I went back for my second session.

'The bleeding happened again but this time we carried on hoping the pigment would stay. I left the appointment happy with how they were looking but unfortunately it didn't last as the pigment didn't stick to my skin.

The treatment involves small needles piercing the skin adding semi-permanent pigment to create a fuller brow.

Crystal added: 'The semi-permanent make-up artist said she did some research on how she could get the pigment to stay better and talked about the nanoblading technique.

She feels very humiliated by her thick brows and is hoping her removal sessions will work quicker than initially feared, which can be up to a year

'After lots of back and forth, I didn't get my next session until the end of April. She told me her equipment had arrived and to meet her at the salon. It was quite late and last minute, but I was looking forward to hopefully having some better results.'

After arriving at the salon, Crystal said the pair were chatting and catching up while the semi-permanent make-up artist mapped out her eyebrows.

She claimed she told the make up artist they were mapped out too thick and she wanted her new brows to follow the natural growth of her own eyebrows.

Crystal said: 'I said that I just wanted my brows to be filled in rather than made any bigger. I was reassured they wouldn't be too thick because she would be filling in within the lines. I was in a great mood and I couldn't wait to see my eyebrows.

Crystal hopes to return to her original look (here), but it will cost a lot of money and travel to attend her removal sessions in California, 2571 miles away from her home in Houston

But after a couple of hours Crystal felt too much time had passed and felt the make up artist going back and forth too often.

'After a couple of hours it felt a little too much. I could feel a lot of going back and forth, over and over again.

'At the end of the session, she looked and told me not to freak out. She thought she might have gone too high with the hair stroke, but it was fine because she would order remover to correct it.

'When I took that first glance in the mirror I couldn't believe my eyes. It was horrifying.'

Crystal claimed she was told it would look better when the swelling went down. But the following morning, she woke up and her eyebrows looked no better than the night before.

She added: 'My daughter came into my bedroom to wake me up and she got such a fright. She started freaking out. I saw the fear in my daughter's eyes and my heart dropped.

'I was trying to stay calm and do some research on how I could fix them, but I was mortified.

What is Microblading? Microblading is a tattooing technique in which a small handheld tool made of several tiny needles is used to add semi-permanent pigment to the skin. Microblading differs from standard eyebrow tattooing because each hairstroke is created by hand using a blade which creates fine slices in the skin, whereas eyebrow tattoos are done with a machine and single needle bundle. Microblading is typically used on eyebrows to create, enhance or reshape their appearance in terms of both shape and color. It deposits pigment into the upper region of the dermis, so it fades more rapidly than traditional tattooing techniques, which deposit pigment deeper into the skin. Source: Wikipedia Advertisement

'The lady was messaging me saying she had ordered some removed and it would be there within a few days.

'After googling 'botched eyebrows' I realized mine was much worse than the ones I was seeing so I started panicking even more.

'I began reaching out to other semi-permanent make-up artists and managed to get booked in for an emergency removal at Her Velvet Hands in Houston.

'Botch Ink makes a saline solution that is poured into the open wounds to try and break down the pigment. You then have to wait for it to scab and wait for the results.'

Crystal has now found a clinic in California, 2,571 miles away from her home in Houston, and has to fly to attend her appointments, who is committed to reversing the treatment.

'I have recently had my second removal session by Erica Kovitz of Beverly Hills Microblading in California. She is committed to helping me on this reversal journey and has even set up a GoFundMe page for travel expenses that I will incur for the remainder of the process.

'I am in the stage of waiting for that to scab over. It's all a waiting game.

'I am trying to figure out what I will do next. It could take up to a year of removals and laser to get it sorted. Some of the harsher lines seem to be lessening, but it is still so obvious.

'I didn't think it would be this bad and take so much work.'

Crystal feels humiliated and is embarrassed to share her story and pictures but she hopes her experience will help others.

She said: 'Although it is embarrassing to share my story, I hope it makes people realize how important it is to check credentials and show artists that are getting into the field that their clients are real people that have to deal with the consequences.'

The semi-permanent makeup artist has been contacted for a right of reply.

To donate to help Crystal, visit her GoFundMe page here.
Meghan Markle has voiced her support for working mothers and shared a new charity initiative in the US.

The mother-of-two, 40, announced in a statement that her and Prince Harry's Archewell Foundation is launching a 'National Business Coalition for Child Care,' in collaboration with the Marshall Plan for Moms charity, in the hope of pushing for more childcare solutions in the business world.

The Duchess of Sussex, who lives in Montecito with Harry, 37, their son Archie, three and their ten-months-old daughter Lilibet, is advocating for companies to listen to the needs of their employees in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic.

In a statement, the California-native said working mothers 'shoulder so much' since Covid-19.

Meghan Markle, 40, has praised working mothers and announced a new Archewell collaborations with the Marshall Plan for Moms US charity for a 'National Business Coalition for Child Care.' (pictured during the Invictus Games in The Hague on April 17)

The Marshall Plan for Moms is a US-based charity pushing for more flexibility and policies in the workplace to help working mothers juggling careers and parenting duties.

'Families everywhere, and especially working moms, are asked to shoulder so much,' Meghan said.

'This has only been heightened by the pandemic, with increased caregiving responsibilities, rising prices, and economic uncertainty. As its been said many times, it takes a village to raise a child,' she added.

'Today, were sending a message that childcare isnt just a community imperativeits a business imperative,' she added. 'Creating a stronger workforce starts with meeting the needs of families.'

The Duchess of Sussex, who lives in Montecito with Harry, 37, their son Archie, three and their ten-months-old daughter Lilibet, is advocating for companies to listen to the needs of their employees in the aftermaths of the coronavirus pandemic

According to research for the Marshall Plan for Moms in partnership with McKinsey & Company, 69 per cent of mothers with children under five are more likely to go for employers who offer on-site childcare or financial aid to pay for childcare.

Other organisations joining the coalition include, Patagonia, Athletes Unlimited. and Fast Retailing, which owns Uniqlo, Comptoir des Cotonniers, GU, Princesse Tam-Tam, and Theory.

Members will work to pursue solutions to provide childcare and support for their employees.

They have also vowed to demonstrate how they are taking spaces to that effect within their organisations, and to share their policies, data and practices to show how they are tackling the issue internally.

They will also speak out publicly about the importance of childcare in the US economic landscape.

It is not the first time Meghan has come out as a parenting advocate.

Last year, she made a political statement as she wrote a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer advocating for paid family leave.

'I'm not an elected official, and I'm not a politician,' Markle, who is long rumored to be keen on a career in politics, wrote. 'I'm writing to you at this deeply important time - as a mom - to advocate for paid leave.'

Harry and Meghan have confirmed they will take part in the Queen's Platinum Jubilee celebrations in June

The extraordinary 1,030-word letter  handed out to supportive media to share  asked Pelosi and Schumer to consider her plea 'on behalf of my family, Archie and Lili and Harry'.

The duchess depicted humble beginnings, saying that her family struggled when she was young despite her well-documented middle class upbringing in which she attended private primary and secondary schools on her Emmy award-winning lighting director father's $200,000-a-year salary.

And she now lives in a $14million sprawling mansion in Montecito, California, complete with designer touches and has signed a series of lucrative deals with Spotify and Netflix thought to be worth well over $150million.

The news of this new Archewell ventures comes as it was confirmed the Duke and Duchess of Sussex would take part in the Queen's Platinum Jubilee celebrations in the UK come June.

A spokesperson for the couple said: 'Prince Harry and Meghan, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are excited and honored to attend The Queens Platinum Jubilee celebrations this June with their children.'

However, it was announced that Harry and Meghan, alongside his cousins and several other members of the royal family, won't make an appearance on the balcony of Buckingham Palace during their visit.

The balcony appearance, which is often seen as the centrepiece of major royal occasions, including Trooping the Colour and weddings, usually sees the Queen's extended family gather to watch a flypast and is a rare chance for fans to see the entire extended family together.

Following his ejection from public life, after settling a civil court case in America over allegations of sexual abuse against Virginia Giuffre (which he vehemently denies), it was inconceivable that Beatrice and Eugenie's father Prince Andrew would be given a spot.

Despite earlier claims that the Queen offered Prince Harry and Meghan Markle a space on the platform, they too have been left off the list, although they quickly announced today that they will be in London for the celebrations with their two children.
Two sisters who always suspected their dad had fathered a secret daughter during the Second World War left BBC viewers in tears as they finally met their half-sibling.

Last night's emotional episode of DNA Family Secrets saw Janet Dabbs, 62, and Liz George, from Bath, search for their half-sister after hearing rumours of a secret baby in their childhood.

Their late father was a British prisoner of war during World War Two and fathered a child in Austria, likely with a local woman whom he met while working on nearby land.

After testing their DNA, the sisters discovered a paternal match with a 76-year-old Austrian woman named Renate - who said she had wanted to know who her father was for her entire life.

Viewers were left 'blubbering' after watching their touching reunion, where Renate said that she felt her two half-sisters were the beginning of a 'new family'.

Last night's emotional episode of DNA Family Secrets saw Janet Dabbs, 62, (left) and Liz George (right), from Bath, meet their 76-year-old half-sibling Renate (middle) for the first time

Renate (pictured as a child) who was born in Austria in early 1946 to Liz and Janet's father and an Austrian woman he met on the land while in a British prisoner of war camp

Janet first heard rumours of a secret daughter from one of her parents' friends when she was just nine - however never questioned her mother or father about her theory.

'My dad was a soldier in World War Two and he was a prisoner of war in Austria,' she explained. 'When I was about nine or ten, my mum and dad had some friends round.

'They're just chatting and one of the guests said "What's this Danny I hear you have a daughter in Austria".

'My ears just kind of prick up and I said, "What? Wow, really?" and from what I remember these people were kind of ejected from the house

'I think I must have gone upstairs to tell my sister Elizabeth this story. I never mentioned it to either of my parents.'

Their late father was a British prisoner of war during World War Two and fathered a child in Austria, likely with a local woman who me met while working on nearby land

When her mother was in her eighties Janet decided to ask her about the child, determined to discover whether she had a half sibling before her mum passed away.

How British soldiers found themselves imprisoned in prisoner of war camps during WWII Allied forces who were captured by Nazis were imprisoned in prisoner of war camps, or POW camps. Camps existed throughout the Third Reich during the Second World War - including in Hitler's homeland of Austria. The camps held British, American, French, Polish and Soviet military personnel. The camps rarely upheld to terms set out in the Geneva Convention of 1929 - which was signed and agreed to by Germany. Conditions were poor, with little food or sanitation and inmates were forced to carry out hard labour. Over 170,000 British prisoners of war were taken by German and Italian forces during the Second World War. Advertisement

She said: 'I think I must have gone back to being that little girl again and she immediately went quite rigid and really didn't want to discuss it at all. That to me was enough confirmation it was true. She didn't deny it.'

Janet continued: 'I didn't think my parents were particularly secretive. My dad was always quite open, he used to talk about his experiences in the past, his experiences in the war.

'He used to entertain us with different stories but never touched on the fact he had a child in Austria.'

Neither Janet or Liz pushed their mother on the subject, with Janet adding: 'You knew you weren't supposed to know, so you kind of lived with that secret.'

Liz added: 'The narrative Janet and I have developed has come from the black and white stories told by our father and they were coloured in in our imaginations.

'Is it just our childhood fantasy that's driving this forward? This is something Janet thought she heard....But did she really hear it? Where is the truth in all of this?'

The pair met with Professor Turi King, a Professor of Public Engagement and Genetics at the University of Leicester, who warned the sisters that it was unlikely they would find anything.

She said: 'There were 170,000 British soldiers taken as prisoners of war by the Germans and the Italians during World War Two.

'It's a huge population in size, so it's not surprising you don't have information. What I do have to say is I'm concerned this is quite a long shot.'

As they waited for the results of their DNA test, Liz reflected on her late father's life, speculating that as his health declined towards the end of his life he may have started to feel a sense of 'regret'.

They explained that Janet first heard rumours of a secret daughter from one of her parents' friends when she was just nine - however never questioned her mother or father about her theory

The pair met with Professor Turi King, a Professor of Public Engagement and Genetics at the University of Leicester, who warned the sisters that it wa unlikely they would find anything

'I think he did decline and I wonder whether what he had experienced in his past life was beginning to play on his mind or, that actually he could have he should have and there was an element of regret there,' she said.

Despite their slim chances, Professor King was able to find a match in Renate, whose daughter was on a DNA database.

She told the sisters: 'DNA was really the only way we could try and answer this question.

'I really felt this was going to be a long shot. I am so pleased to tell you, I was totally wrong.

Despite their slim chances, the pair were told Professor King was able to find a match in Renate, whose daughter was on a DNA database

Renate was delighted by the news of two sisters, sharing a video message from Austria with her daughter Claudia in which she shared her excitement about meeting the pair

'I uploaded your DNA to one of the databases and immediately I could see you had a half-sister.'

The sisters discovered they had a relation called Renate who was born in Austria in early 1946.

'That is so amazing, said Janet. 'That is wonderful. So we do have a big sister. It would be so lovely if someone was looking for us as well'.

Renate was delighted by the news of two sisters, sharing a video message from Austria with her daughter Claudia in which she shared her excitement about meeting the pair.

After a lifetime apart, the three sisters were finally reunited in an emotional meeting that took place in Austria, with the trio immediately sharing a warm embrace upon meeting

An emotional Renate was seen touching her sisters' faces before saying she was 'so happy' and thought the women were 'so lovely'

She said: 'I am very happy to learn that you exist and I have so much joy and a few tears.

'I always wanted to know my whole life where I'm from and who my father is. I am very curious about my new family.'

After a lifetime apart, the three sisters were finally reunited in an emotional meeting that took place in Austria, with the trio immediately sharing a warm embrace upon meeting.

An emotional Renate was seen touching her sisters' faces before saying: 'I am so happy. So lovely'.

Viewers were moved to tears after watching the programme, with one teasing the show should come with a 'tissue warning'

'You have been in our hearts and in our minds for 50 years, you are your fathers daughter', replied Janet.

After Renate was shown a photograph of their father, she said: 'This photo means so much to me and I am emotionally touched because this is my father.

'This is my dad. This is the beginning of a new family'.

Viewers were moved to tears after watching the programme, with one teasing the show should come with a 'tissue warning'.

One wrote: 'What a great programme #DNAFamilySecrets is. Might have made my eyes a bit leaky, but such an uplifting and fascinating watch. So pleased for all involved in tonight's episode.'

Meanwhile another added: 'Great to have #DNAFamilySecrets back, an interesting and heartfelt episode.'

A third penned: 'Jeez! What a way to start #DNAFamilySecrets catching up today, it should come with a tissue warning.'
Queen Letizia was the picture of elegance as she stepped out in a recycled outfit during a visit to a remote Spanish region today.

The monarch showed off her fondness for sustainable dressing as she sported a sleeveless green Carolina Herrera blouse which she has owned for at least ten years, having first worn the piece in 2012.

Letizia, 49, paired the blouse with favourite floral skirt which the royal has donned on multiple occasions as she met royal fans during a visit to Las Hurdes, an autonomous community in the province of Caceres.

The Spanish royal was joined by husband King Felipe on the trip, which marks the centenary of the visit of King Alfonso XIII to the historic region in 1922.

Queen Letizia was the picture of elegance as she stepped out in a recycled outfit during a visit to a remote Spanish region today

Spanish Queen Letizia happily posed for pictures during her visit to the Las Hurdes area on the centenary of the visit of King Alfonso today

Mother-of-two Letizia sported a sleeveless pussy-bow garment by Venezuelan designer Carolina Herrera, which the royal has worn on multiple public outings over the years She paired the emerald piece with a long white teacup skirt featuring a brightly coloured floral pattern.

Their Royal Highnesses travelled Pinofranqueado where they were warmly greeted by eager fans and happily posed for pictures before watching local children perform a dance in their honour.

Mother-of-two Letizia sported a sleeveless pussy-bow garment by Venezuelan designer Carolina Herrera, which the royal has worn on multiple public outings over the years.

She paired the emerald piece with a long white teacup skirt featuring a brightly coloured floral pattern, which she last donned in 2018 during a public appearance in Haiti.

Looking typically polished, Letizia opted for minimal jewellery, aside from a delicate gold geometric ring, while sporting a pair of simple nude wedge heels.

Their Royal Highnesses travelled Pinofranqueado where they were warmly greeted by eager fans and watched local children perform a dance in their honour

The Spanish royal was joined by husband King Felipe on the trip, which marks the centenary of the visit of King Alfonso XIII to the historic region in 1922

Queen Letizia was seen waving and smiling at royal fans as she stood alongside husband King Felipe during a visit to the village of Pinofranqueado, Spain

Her brown tresses were loose around her shoulders while for her make-up look the Spanish monarch opted for a peach-toned eyeshadow, light eyeliner and touch of bronzer.

King Alphonse reportedly visited Las Hurdes after a report from doctor Gregorio Maranon, who made the king aware of the multiple sanitary problems and lack of medical assistance available in the region.

The region, which is based in Extremadura, covers an area of 470 square kilometres and is currently regarded as a Site of Community Importance by the European Union.

It's been a busy week for the royal, who on Tuesday attended a Commemorative event for the World Day of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Valencia.

World Red Cross and Red Crescent Day is a global day to celebrate the uniqueness and unity of our International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement.

The royal looked typically polished, she opted for minimal jewellery, aside from a delicate gold geometric ring, while sporting a pair of simple nude wedge heels

The couple were welcomed by local officials and many local people lined the streets to greet them
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If in doubt about what to wear, tailoring is always the answer.

Maggie Gyllenhaal showed us how to do the oversized trend well when she attended a literary event in Germany, wearing a taupe trouser suit, which is by Joseph.

The brand is known for its classic pieces, and can count the Duchesses of Cambridge and Sussex as fans. High praise indeed!

We love the flattering fluid shape, longline design and double-breasted cut of this blazer. It looks super chic as a suit, but would work well with blue jeans and a white tee for a more casual take.

The 'Joni' is available in a few different colors - some of which are in the sale! Don't forget the matching 'Morissey' trousers too.

Joseph 'Joni' soft wool jacket There's a reason British brand Joseph has stuck around for decades. Known for luxury wardrobe staples and impeccable tailoring, it should be on your wish list if it isn't already. Maggie's blazer is currently 60% off so hurry before you miss out! Shop

Stylish: She layered her taupe blazer over a black lace cami vest that peeked out beneath the plunging lapel

Alternatively, bag a similar blazer from Boohoo, Frankie Shop, Nasty Gal or 4th & Reckless.

Neutrals are the new black!
Queen Maxima of the Netherlands wowed in a royal blue dress as she stepped out with her husband King Willem-Alexander on Thursday.

The royal, 50, presented the Appeltjes van Oranje awards at Noordeinde Palace with her husband, 55.

The annual awards recognise three outstanding or innovative projects that have succeeded in bringing different groups of people together.

Queen Maxima of the Netherlands wowed in a royal blue dress as she stepped out with her husband King Willem-Alexander on Thursday to present the Appeltjes van Oranje awards at Noordeinde Palace

For the occasion, the Queen looked elegant in a midi dress which donned a white floral pattern.

She completed the ensemble with white stilettos and a matching white clutch bag.

Her blonde locks were styled in glamorous curls while her makeup enhanced her pretty features.

Meanwhile, King Willem-Alexander looked dapper in a blue suit and a crisp white shirt, which he paired with an orange tie.

Stunning: For the occasion, the Queen looked elegant in a midi dress which donned a white floral pattern

The Queen completed the elegant ensemble with white stilettos and a matching white clutch bag

The Orange Fund was founded in 2002 as the National Wedding Gift from the people of the Netherlands to the royal couple on their wedding day.

As its patrons, King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima are closely involved with the Fund.

The fund supports projects relating to social cohesion and participation, such as small-scale community initiatives, mentoring projects for young people and meeting places.

Her blonde locks were styled in glamorous curls while her makeup enhanced her pretty features

Meanwhile, King Willem-Alexander looked dapper in a blue suit and a crisp white shirt, which he paired with an orange tie

King Willem-Alexander shook hands with one of this years winners on stage and presented him with an award

It comes after the Queen visited a medical facility for chronically ill children in Amsterdam yesterday.

She travelled to the capital to open Jeroen Pit House, which will welcomes children who need round the clock care.

The state of the art building also includes a sensory room and a home cinema to provide escapism to the patients staying there and their families.

The royal couple posed with this years winners at the annual awards which recognise three outstanding or innovative projects that have succeeded in bringing different groups of people together

Jeroen Pit House in Amsterdam has been two years in the making, with some aspects of its construction delayed by the covid-19 pandemic.

The house was meant to open in February, but eventually opened its doors this week, with Maxima doing the honours.

Built around a communal kitchen and living-space the aim of the house is to make the transition from hospital to home easier for the children and their families.

On top of providing accommodation, the house's staff will also educate parents on how to tackle life at home with chronically ill children.
The winner of the national competition to find a Platinum Pudding fit for the Queen has been unveiled.

And what could be more quintessentially British... than a trifle?

The Lemon Swiss Roll and Amaretti trifle inspired by the Queens wedding menu beat more than 5,000 entrants to find a desert which will go down in the annals of history along with the Victoria Sponge and Coronation Chicken.

It was created by Jemma Melvin, a 31-year-old copywriter and keen amateur baker from Southport, Merseyside, who was taught by her grandmother.

She said the thought of having her pudding re-created up and down the country for Big Jubilee Lunches in June  as well as being sold in royal food store Fortnum & Mason  as an absolute pleasure.

Jemma Melvin, a 31-year-old copywriter and keen amateur baker from Southport, Merseyside, has been unveiled as winner of the national competition to find a Platinum Pudding fit for the Queen

The Lemon Swiss Roll and Amaretti trifle inspired by the Queens wedding menu beat more than 5,000 entrants to find a desert which will go down in the annals of history along with the Victoria Sponge and Coronation Chicken

Her triumph was revealed in a BBC programme The Jubilee Pudding: 70 Years in the Baking which followed the competition to celebrate the monarchs seven decades on the throne by finding an original and celebratory cake, tart or pudding fit for royalty.

The winning trifle wowed judges, including Dame Mary Berry, Masterchefs Monica Galetti and Buckingham Palace Head Chef, Mark Flanagan, at the first mouthful  and it can be easily recreated by people at home.

Their decision to pick Jemmas trifle  consisting of lemon curd Swiss roll on the bottom, St Clements jelly, lemon custard, amaretti biscuits, mandarin coulis, fresh whipped cream, candied peel, chocolate shards and crushed amaretti biscuits on top  was unanimous.

The Duchess of Cornwall, who is Patron of The Big Jubilee Lunch, was a surprise special guest at the filming of the final and announced the winning recipe.

The amateur baker was inspired by make the lemon flavoured dessert after learning the Queen had lemon posset at her wedding to Prince Philip

The final five recipes shortlisted for the Queen's Platinum Jubilee Pudding contest JEMMAS LEMON SWISS ROLL AND AMARETTI TRIFLE Jemma's Lemon Swiss Roll and Amaretti Trifle is an impressive and crowd-please summer dessert Prep time: over 2 hours | Cook time: 35 minutes | Serves: 20 Try this impressive trifle as a crowd-pleasing summer dessert. For this recipe you will need 2 Swiss roll tins, measuring approximately 24cmx34cm / 9inx13in and a trifle dish with capacity of approximately 3.5 litres/6 pints. However, you could always halve the recipe to serve 10. For shortcuts to this recipe, see Jemmas Top Tips below INGREDIENTS For the Swiss rolls: 4 large free-range eggs

100g/3oz caster sugar, plus extra for dusting

100g/3oz self-raising flour,

sieved Butter, for greasing For the Lemon curd: 4 large free-range egg yolks

135g/4oz granulated sugar

85g/3oz salted butter,

softened 1 lemon, zest only

80ml/2fl oz fresh lemon juice For the St Clements jelly: 6 gelatine leaves

6 gelatine leaves 4 unwaxed lemons 3 oranges 150g/5oz golden caster sugar For the Custard: 425ml/15fl oz double cream

3 large free-range egg yolks

25g/1oz golden caster sugar

1 tbsp cornflour

1 tsp lemon extract For the Amaretti biscuits: 2 free-range egg whites

170g/6oz caster sugar

170g/6oz ground almonds

1 tbsp amaretto

Butter or oil, for greasing For the Chunky mandarin coulis: 4 x 397g tinned mandarins

45g/1oz caster sugar For the Jewelled chocolate bark: 50g/1oz mixed peel

1 tbsp caster sugar (optional)

200g/7oz white chocolate, broken into pieces

To assemble: 600ml/20fl oz double cream 1. To make the Swiss rolls, preheat the oven to 180C/ 160C Fan/ Gas 4. Grease and line the 2 Swiss roll tins with baking paper. In a large bowl, beat the eggs and sugar together with an electric hand whisk for approximately 5 minutes or until light and pale. Using a metal spoon, gently fold in the flour. Divide between the two tins and bake for 1012 minutes or until the sponges are lightly golden and cooked through. 2. Sprinkle some extra caster sugar on two sheets of baking paper then turn the sponges out onto the sugared paper. Peel off the paper from the underside and, while still warm, roll them both up from the short end into a tight spiral using the paper to help. Leave to cool. 3. To make the lemon curd, place the egg yolks, granulated sugar, butter, lemon zest and lemon juice in a glass bowl over a saucepan of simmering water (dont let the bowl touch the water). Whisk until combined and whisk continuously as the curd cooks until thickened. This should take about 15 minutes. Pour into a clean bowl and set aside to cool. 4. To make the St Clements jelly, soak the gelatine leaves in cold water for 5 minutes to soften. Using a vegetable peeler, peel 6 strips from a lemon and 6 strips from an orange and put these into a saucepan with the sugar and 400ml/ 14fl oz water. Bring to a simmer over a medium heat, stirring occasionally until the sugar has dissolved. Remove from the heat and discard the peel. Squeeze the water out of the gelatine and stir into the pan until dissolved then leave to cool. Squeeze the lemons and oranges, so you have 150ml/5fl oz of both lemon and orange juice. Stir into the pan then strain the jelly through a fine sieve into a jug and chill until cool but not set. 5. To make the amaretti biscuits, preheat the oven to 180C/ 160C Fan/ Gas 4. In a large bowl, beat the egg whites until firm. Mix the sugar and almonds gently into it. Add the amaretto and fold in gently until you have a smooth paste. 6. Place some baking paper on a baking tray and lightly brush with butter or oil. Using a teaspoon, place small heaps of the mixture approximately 2cm/ in apart, as they will expand during cooking. Bake for approximately 1520 minutes or until golden brown. Remove from the oven and set aside to cool. 7. To make the chunky mandarin coulis, strain two tins of mandarins. Discard the juice and put the fruit into a saucepan with the sugar and heat gently until broken down. Remove from the heat. In a small bowl, stir the arrowroot with 2 tablespoons cold water to make a paste, then add to the warm mandarins. Add the lemon juice and mix well before pouring into a large bowl. Strain the remaining two tins of mandarins and add the fruit to the bowl then leave to cool completely. 8. To make the jewelled chocolate bark, if the peel feels wet or sticky, roll in the caster sugar to absorb any moisture. Melt the white chocolate in a bowl sitting over a saucepan of gently simmering water. Pour the white chocolate onto a baking tray lined with baking paper and scatter over the mixed peel. Leave to set then break into shards. 9. To assemble, unroll the cooled Swiss rolls and spread with the lemon curd. Roll back up again and slice one into 2.5cm/ 1in slices and place upright around the bottom edge of the trifle dish so the swirl is visible. Slice the other Swiss roll into thicker pieces and use these to fill the bottom of the dish, ensuring the top is roughly the same level as the slices that line the edge. Use off-cuts of sponge to fill any gaps. 10. Pour the St Clements jelly over the Swiss roll layer and set aside in the fridge to completely set. This will take approximately 3 hours. Once set, pour over the custard then arrange a single layer of amaretti biscuits, keeping a few back for the top. Pour over the mandarin coulis. In a large bowl, whip the double cream until soft peaks form then spoon this over the coulis. Crumble over the reserved amaretti biscuits and decorate with the chocolate bark shards JEMMAS TOP TIPS: To simplify this recipe, you can use ready-made versions for most of the components and just make the Swiss rolls and mandarin coulis from scratch. For the lemon curd, use 300g/10oz ready-made lemon curd. Instead of the St Clements jelly, use 1 packet of lemon-flavoured jelly and follow the packet instructions to make 568ml/1 pint. For the custard, use 500ml/18fl oz ready-made custard. For the biscuits, use 100g/ 3oz ready-made amaretti biscuits. Instead of making the jewelled chocolate bark, you can finish this trifle by scattering over the reserved amaretti biscuits, mixed peel and 50g/1oz white chocolate chunks KATHRYNS PASSIONFRUIT AND THYME FRANGIPANE TART This fruit and herb sweet tart is filled with frangipane and cream cheese and topped with jelly Prep time: over 2 hours | Cook time: 40 minutes | Serves: 12 This fruit and herb sweet tart is filled with frangipane and cream cheese and topped with jelly. For this recipe you will need a 25cm/ 10in fluted tart tin. Instead of using freshly squeezed passionfruit to create the juice, you can replace this with 180ml/ 6fl oz ready-made passionfruit juice. INGREDIENTS For the Pastry: 230g/8oz plain flour, plus extra for dusting

125g/4oz unsalted butter

75g/2oz icing sugar

1 free-range egg yolk

1 tsp vanilla paste

3 tbsp full-fat milk For the Frangipane: 85g/3oz unsalted butter

85g/3oz caster sugar

85g/3oz ground almonds

15g/oz plain flour

1 free-range egg

1 tbsp amaretto For the Passionfruit jelly: 175ml/6fl oz passionfruit juice (from approximately 8 very large passionfruits, sieved)

8 small thyme sprigs

12g/oz powdered gelatine

70ml/2fl oz cold water

1 tsp vanilla extract For the Cream cheese filling: 340g/11oz cream cheese

Pinch of salt

1 tsp vanilla paste

50g/1oz icing sugar

110ml/3fl oz double cream To decorate: Handful of cherries, raspberries and blueberries

A few small mint leaves

Edible gold leaf (optional) 1. To make the pastry, mix the flour, butter and sugar in a stand mixer with a paddle attachment until the butter is broken down. Add the egg yolk, vanilla and milk, then mix until it comes together. Wrap in cling film and leave to rest for at least 30 minutes in the fridge. 2. Once chilled, roll out on a floured surface and line a 25cm/10in fluted tart tin, making sure to leave an overhang. Put it back in the fridge for a minimum of 30 minutes. Preheat the oven to 200C/ 180C Fan/ Gas 6. Blind bake the pastry, filled with baking beans, for 15 minutes then remove the beans and cook for an additional 5 minutes. Let the pastry cool for 10 minutes. 3. To make the frangipane, put all the ingredients in a bowl and mix until combined. Spread a thin layer in the tart shell and smooth before putting it in the oven. Cook for 20 minutes. 4. To make the passionfruit jelly, bring the passionfruit juice and thyme sprigs to a simmer in a saucepan, turn off the heat and leave for 30 minutes. Dissolve the gelatine in the cold water and set aside. Bring the passionfruit mixture back to a simmer, remove from the heat and then add the bloomed gelatine, sugar and vanilla paste and whisk until the gelatine has dissolved. Sieve the mixture into a bowl and leave to cool. 5. To make the cream cheese filling, put the cream cheese, salt, vanilla paste and icing sugar in a bowl, and whisk with an electric whisk until combined. In a separate bowl, whisk the double cream to soft peaks, then combine with the cream cheese mixture using a spatula. Measure 30ml/1fl oz from the passionfruit jelly liquid and mix this in until combined. 6. To assemble, once the tart is cool, use a vegetable peeler to shave the pastry overhang so it is level with the tin. Add the cream cheese mixture and spread it out evenly and as level as possible which should leave a small gap on the top for the jelly. Pour over the cool liquid jelly and chill in the fridge for at least 3 hours, or ideally overnight. 7. To decorate, top with whole cherries, raspberries, blueberries, and a few mint leaves in a crescent shape along one side. Add some gold leaf to the fruit for extra pizzazz. SAMS JUBILEE BUNDT CAKE Sam's Jubilee Bundt Cake is packed with homemade jam, which is flavoured with Dubonnet, said to be a favourite drink of Queen Elizabeth II Prep time: 20 minutes | Cook time: 45 minutes | Serves: 16 Create a showstopping centrepiece for your street party or special occasion. The homemade jam is flavoured with Dubonnet, said to be a favourite drink of Queen Elizabeth II. If youre short on time, you can replace the homemade jam with 300g/ 10oz ready-made raspberry jam. For this recipe you will need a 20cm/ 8in silicone bundt mould, a 23cm/ 9in springform cake tin, 1 small and 1 large star-shaped piping nozzle and piping bags INGREDIENTS For the Bundt cake: 285g/10oz butter, softened

285g/10oz caster sugar

5 large free-range eggs

285g/10oz self-raising flour

2 tsp vanilla extract

2 tbsp full-fat milk For the Sponge: 225g/8oz butter, softened, plus extra for greasing

225g/8oz caster sugar

4 large free-range eggs

225g/8oz self-raising flour

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 tbsp milk For the Jam: 115g/4oz strawberries

115g/4oz raspberries

100ml/3fl oz Dubonnet

225g/8oz granulated sugar For the Buttercream: 285g/10oz butter, softened

500g/1lb 2oz icing sugar, sieved

2 tsp vanilla extract

2 tbsp full-fat milk To decorate: Approximately 18 glace cherries, halved

8 raspberries

8 blueberries

Icing sugar 1. Preheat the oven to 200C/ 180C Fan/ Gas 6. To make the bundt cake, mix together the butter and caster sugar in a mixer or large bowl until light and fluffy. Add one egg at a time with one tablespoon of flour. Mix until the egg is only just incorporated into the mix. Using a metal spoon, fold in the remaining flour a third at a time and finally fold through the vanilla and milk. 2. Transfer the mix to the bundt mould and cook for 45 minutes. Insert a skewer into the middle of the cake to check it is cooked. Use kitchen foil to cover the top should it need a little longer and to avoid it turning too brown on top. Leave to cool to room temperature then turn out of the mould and set aside. 3. To make the sponge, follow the same steps as for the bundt cake but using the measurements for the sponge. Grease a 23cm/ 9in springform cake tin and line with baking paper. Pour the mixture into the tin and cook for 30 minutes. Insert a skewer into the middle of the cake to check it is cooked. Use kitchen foil to cover the top should it need a little longer and to avoid it turning too brown on top. Leave to cool to room temperature then turn out of the tin and set aside. 4. To make the jam, chop the strawberries into quarters and put them in a bowl. Cover with the Dubonnet and let them soak for 10 minutes. 5. Strain the fruit, reserving the Dubonnet, and add them to a saucepan along with the raspberries, granulated sugar and 2 tablespoons of the reserved Dubonnet. Increase the heat to mediumhigh until the mixture has a full rolling boil. Reduce the heat to medium, stirring continuously, and simmer away for approximately 25 minutes or until the jam has thickened. Remove from the heat and allow to cool 6. To make the buttercream, use an electric mixer or whisk to beat the butter until light. Add a third of the icing sugar and continue to beat until well incorporated. Add the vanilla extract, milk and remaining icing sugar and mix until the buttercream is light and fluffy. This will take approximately 3 minutes. 7. To assemble, slice the sponge cake in half and spread all but 3 tablespoons of the jam on the bottom half of the sponge. Using a piping bag, pipe two thirds of the buttercream on top of the jam using a large star-shaped nozzle then place the other half of the sponge cake on top. 8. Trim the base of the bundt cake to ensure it is flat. Place the remaining jam into the centre top of the sponge cake and place the bundt cake on top. Using the small star-shaped nozzle, pipe the reserved buttercream decoratively around the exposed sponge and place the halved cherries on top to cover the join between the sponge and the bundt. Use the remaining buttercream to stick the raspberries and blueberries in place  with a raspberry on the very top of each bundt peak and the blueberries around the outside, then dust with icing sugar. SHABNAMS ROSE FALOODA CAKE This pretty pink-and-white cake looks beautiful as its topped with edible flowers and gold leaf, and it also tastes amazing with light vanilla and rose flavours Prep time: 1 hours | Cook time: 25 minutes | Serves: 12 This pretty pink-and-white cake looks beautiful as its topped with edible flowers and gold leaf, and it also tastes amazing with light vanilla and rose flavours. For this recipe you will need two 20cm/ 8in cake tins, a piping bag fitted with a wide plain nozzle and a pastry brush. For a simpler way to decorate this cake, you can use ready-made edible cake decorations such as flower shapes and gold stars. INGREDIENTS For the Sponges: 225g/8oz unsalted butter, softened, plus extra for greasing

2 tbsp full-fat milk

A few strands of saffron

225g/8oz caster sugar

200g/7oz plain flour

25g/1oz cornflour

2 tsp baking powder

Pinch of salt

4 large free-range eggs, at room temperature

1 tsp vanilla extract For the Icing: 1 tsp basil seeds

240ml/8fl oz double cream

120g/4oz icing sugar, sieved

500g/1lb 2oz mascarpone, at room temperature

4 tbsp rose syrup For the Falooda: 25g/1oz vermicelli noodles ( nest)

1 tsp rose syrup To assemble: 2 tbsp rose syrup

100g/3oz rose petal jelly

100g/3oz glace fruits, finely chopped

25g/1oz flaked almonds

Edible flowers or rose petals

Flaked pistachios

Gold leaf (optional) 1. To make the sponges, preheat the oven to 180C/ 160C Fan/ Gas 4. Grease the sides of two 20cm/ 8in cake tins lightly with butter and line the bases with baking paper. Heat the milk, then add the saffron strands and leave to infuse and cool to room temperature. 2. Cream together the butter and sugar in a large bowl, whisking together until very light and fluffy. In another bowl, mix together the flour, cornflour, baking powder and salt. One at a time, add an egg with a tablespoon of the flour mixture to the butter and sugar, mixing well between each addition. Scrape down the sides and gently but gradually whisk in the rest of the flour mixture, followed by the saffron milk and vanilla. 3. Divide the cake batter evenly between the two lined tins and smooth the tops. Bake for 20-25 minutes  or until the tops are golden and a toothpick inserted into the centre of the cakes comes out clean. Remove from the oven and leave on a rack to cool for 10 minutes before turning out, removing the baking paper and leaving to cool completely. 4. To make the icing, soak the basil seeds in a small bowl of cold water for 15 minutes then drain through a sieve. 5. In a medium bowl, beat the cream and icing sugar together until thick then whisk in the mascarpone until smooth. Set 4 tablespoons aside in a small bowl and divide the rest into two bowls, one with slightly more than the other. To the bowl with slightly less fold in the basil seeds and 3 tablespoons rose syrup. Leave the larger bowl plain and to the small bowl containing 4 tablespoons of the mixture, add 1 tablespoon rose syrup. Put them all in the fridge to firm up for 20 minutes. 6. To make the falooda, cook the noodles in boiling water for 1 minute then drain and cool under cold running water. Leave to dry before mixing with the rose syrup. 7. To assemble, use a pastry brush to add 1 tablespoon of rose syrup onto the flat side of each sponge, then place one sponge syrup-side up onto a serving plate. Spread over most of the basil seed and rose cream, then use a piping bag with a wide plain nozzle to pipe the remaining cream all the way around the edge, to create a wall which will keep all the filling in place. Add the vermicelli mixture, rose petal jelly, chopped glace fruit and almonds to the centre, then place the second sponge on top, syrup-side down. 8. Generously ice the top and sides with the plain bowl of cream, then use the small bowl of pink icing to create decorative pink streaks up the sides. Chill in the fridge for 1 hour or so to firm up. Cover with edible flowers or rose petals, flaked pistachios, and the optional gold leaf.

SUSANS FOUR NATIONS PUDDING An elegant white chocolate mousse is paired with a punchy fruit compote on top of a biscuit base laced with Welsh cakes  all finished with plenty of vibrant summer berries. Prep time: over 2 hours | Cook time: 35 minutes | Serves: 12 Bring the best of British ingredients together in this celebratory pudding. An elegant white chocolate mousse is paired with a punchy fruit compote on top of a biscuit base laced with Welsh cakes  all finished with plenty of vibrant summer berries. For ideas on how to simplify this recipe, see Susans handy tips. For this recipe you will need a 20cm/ 8in savarin mould and 10 small 4cm/ 1in semi-sphere moulds. INGREDIENTS For the Fruit compote: 100g/3oz rhubarb

50g/1oz strawberries

50g/1oz raspberries

1 tbsp caster sugar

 tsp vanilla extract For the Welsh cakes: 115g/4oz plain flour, plus extra for dusting

 tsp baking powder

45g/1oz caster sugar

1 tsp ground cinnamon

50g/1oz unsalted butter, plus extra for greasing

45g/1oz currants 

free-range egg, beaten

Pinch of salt For the Biscuit base: 40g/1oz butter

40g/1oz caster sugar

40g/1oz ground almonds

 free-range egg, beaten

35g/1oz dark chocolate, melted For the White chocolate mousse: 10g leaf gelatine

600ml/20fl oz whipping cream

300g/10oz white chocolate To decorate: 250g/9oz strawberries

125g/4oz raspberries

Edible flowers 1. To make the fruit compote, chop the rhubarb and strawberries into small pieces  no bigger than 1cm/ in in size. Place in a saucepan with the raspberries, sugar and vanilla then bring to the boil. Leave to cook for 5 minutes until the fruit has softened but still holds its shape then set aside to cool. Once cooled, pipe or spoon into 10 small 4cm/ 1in semi-sphere moulds and freeze for a minimum of 2 hours. Pass any remaining compote through a sieve and refrigerate. 2. To make the welsh cakes, put the flour, baking powder, sugar, cinnamon and a pinch of salt into a bowl. Then, rub in the butter until the mix is crumbly. Stir through the currants and the egg until you have a soft dough. 3. On a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough until approximately 1.5cm/ in thick. Cut out rounds using a 6cm/ 2in cutter, re-rolling any excess. Grease a large frying pan with butter and place over a medium heat. Cook the Welsh cakes for about 3 minutes on each side, until golden brown and cooked through. Leave to cool. 4. To make the biscuit base, preheat the oven to 200C/ 180C Fan/ Gas 6. Once the Welsh cakes are cool, blitz 3 of them in a food processor until they become a fine crumb. 5. Cream together the butter, sugar, ground almonds and the egg, then mix in the melted chocolate and blitzed Welsh cakes until it forms a dough. The mixture will be sticky so roll between two sheets of baking paper until it is the thickness of a pound coin and just a bit larger than the size of the base of the 20cm/8in savarin mould. Remove the top sheet of baking paper. 6. Transfer the remaining sheet of baking paper with the rolled out dough onto on a baking tray. Bake for 15 minutes. While still hot, place the savarin mould on top of the biscuit and use as a template to cut out a 20cm/8in disc. Cut out the central circle too so you are left with a biscuit ring that matches the shape of the savarin mould. For ease, cut this ring into 4 quarters so you can add it to the base of the pudding when it is ready. 7. To make the white chocolate mousse, soak the gelatine leaves in cold water. Meanwhile, bring 150ml/ 5fl oz whipping cream to a gentle boil. Once the gelatine leaves have bloomed, squeeze the water from them and add to the boiled cream, stirring to make sure it all dissolves. Finely chop the white chocolate and place in a large bowl then pour over the hot cream. Stir until all the chocolate has completely melted, then set aside to cool. 8. Line the savarin mould with cling film, leaving some to overhang at the edges, keeping the surface of the cling film as smooth as possible. In a separate bowl whisk the remaining 450ml/16fl oz whipping cream to soft peaks then fold it into the melted white chocolate. Use a piping bag or spoon to neatly pipe the mixture into the silicone pudding mould then tap the whole thing on your work surface a couple of times to knock out any air bubbles. Gently remove the frozen fruit compote from the moulds then insert them into the mousse. Press them down, but not so far that they poke through the sides or top, then add the quarters of the biscuit to cover the base and press gently. Freeze the whole pudding for a minimum of 3 hours, or ideally overnight. 9. To decorate, carefully turn out the pudding onto a large plate 30 minutes before serving, using the cling film to gently lift away the mould. Toss the strawberries and raspberries in the reserved blitzed fruit compote then use to decorate, along with some edible flowers. SUSANS TOP TIPS To simplify the fruit inserts, use 200g/ 7oz ready-made mixed fruit compote. Reserve 2 tablespoons of the compote for later, then divide the rest between the moulds. If you dont have any semi-sphere moulds, you can freeze the mixture in 10 small ice cube holes instead. Using a silicone mould for the pudding will make it easier to remove. If youre using a metal savarin mould, leave at room temperature for a few minutes to warm a little before turning out as above, using the clingfilm to help you remove the pudding. Recipes gifted by Fortnum & Mason. Log on to BBC Good Food www.bbc.co.uk/food; Fortnum & Mason www.fortnumandmason.com and The Big Jubilee Lunch www.thebigjubileelunch.com to enjoy for the commemorative weekend and beyond, alongside recipe cards and expert baking tips. Advertisement

She gave Jemma a warm hug and told her: Many congratulations.

Dame Mary Berry, chair of the judging panel, said: Its absolutely wonderful, I think Britain is going to be so delighted and The Queen too.

Jemma, who started baking when she was six, said: Oh my! I have to tell my grandma first.

'She is the person that taught me how to bake and I am so excited to tell her. Shes going to be so proud, I cant wait, I cant wait.

Her recipe came out tops in the all-women final, fulfilling the criteria of being fit for a queen, have a memorable story, taste just right, be perfect for home bakers and with the potential to stand the test of time

I am so happy. I am so happy. Thank you so much, Mary. Its been an honour as well to have your feedback. Its just meant the world to me so thank you.

The thought of people recreating my pudding, especially round the Jubilee, is just a total pleasure.

Her recipe came out tops in the all-women final, fulfilling the criteria of being fit for a queen, have a memorable story, taste just right, be perfect for home bakers and with the potential to stand the test of time.

Jemma, who lives with her long-term and chief taster partner, James, and their rescue-dog Bella, said: My inspiration is both my gran and my nan.

Dame Mary Berry, chair of the judging panel, said the pudding was 'absolutely wonderful', revealing 'Britain is going to be so delighted and The Queen too'

My gran is with us but sadly my nan is not. They are both extremely important to me. My gran taught me how to bake but my nans signature dish was a trifle.

A wonderful, poised lady, just like our Queen. She used to make a wonderful trifle, but hers was laced with sherry and decorated with kiwi fruit and flaked chocolate, but this trifle is elevated and fit for The Queen herself.

I found out that The Queen had lemon posset at her wedding so I decided the pudding had to be based around the lemon flavour. My gran and my nan, they very much liked lemon as well, so it all just slotted into place.

She added: I think itll be perfect for Jubilee celebrations as its refreshing for Summer. It can also be made in a large dish or in individual portions  whichever youd prefer.

Fortnum & Mason Executive Pastry Chef and Judge, Roger Pizey, said he thought that people would be making Jemmas trifle for at least the next 50 to 100 years without a doubt

Jemma said her boyfriend, fortunately, has hollow legs but that she also used her family and friends as guinea pigs for her desert.

However as she was sworn to secrecy, she couldnt tell them what she was actually trying the recipe out for.

Even my boyfriend didnt really know what he was tasting at the time, she said.

She said going to Fortnum & Mason to make her pudding for the final was a surreal experience.

Im a northern girl from a northern town, a seaside town. Its so outside of my normal life, she said.

The copywriter said going to Fortnum & Mason to make her pudding for the final was a surreal experience

Asked what she plans to do for the Jubilee weekend, she said: Im going to be making my recipe for my gran at her street party.

Fortnum & Mason Executive Pastry Chef and Judge, Roger Pizey, said he thought that people would be making Jemmas trifle for at least the next 50 to 100 years without a doubt.

Judge Monica Galetti added: I love lemon and sometimes people hold back, and theyre scared to put that lemon into it, and as youre eating it youre thinking, oh it cant get any better.

I got chunks of the amaretti biscuit that have soaked up the cream and theyre chewy and I am so happy right now.

The Big Jubilee Lunch is being organised by the Eden Project, who each year encourage communities to come together over food.

More than 60,000 have signed up to this years event which will be held on June 5 as part of the official Platinum Jubilee celebrations.

The winning recipe will be available online via the BBC Good Food, The Big Jubilee Lunch www.thebigjubileelunch.com or to buy in Fortum and Mason, where all profits will be donated to Centrepoint and The Big Jubilee Lunch, part of the Eden Project.
A private Catholic elementary school is apologizing after it accidentally sold roses with thongs in them to its young students for Mother's Day.

St. Anselm School, which is located in the Parkwood area of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and charges up to $4,950 per year in tuition, held a sale in honor of Mother's Day last week - offering its pupils faux flowers that they could purchase for their moms.

However, to the institution's horror, which hosts grades pre-K through eighth, the fake red roses that they sold actually contained sexy lingerie in them.

One mother, named Rachel Tremblay, received the gift from her young daughter and took a video of her and her husband discovering the kinky underwear inside.

A Philly Catholic school is apologizing after it accidentally sold roses with thongs in them to its students for Mother's Day

St. Anselm School (pictured), located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania held a sale in honor of Mother's Day, offering its pupils faux flowers that they could purchase for their moms

However, to the institution's horror, which hosts grades pre-K through eighth, the fake red roses that they sold actually contained sexy lingerie in them

One mother, named Rachel Tremblay, received the gift from her young daughter and took a video of her and her husband discovering the kinky underwear inside

It has since gone viral, leaving many people on the internet in shambles.

'Open it,' she could be heard saying to her husband, as he slowly pulled the red, lacy undergarment out from the center of the rose.

'Oh my God, I see it already,' he exclaimed. 'That's hilarious.'

'Thank you St. Anselm's,' joked Rachel.

The clip was shared to Facebook, where it has since received more than 212,000 views.

And many people quickly flooded the comment section with their reactions to the hilarious mishap.

It was posted on Facebook where it has since gone viral, leaving many people on the internet in shambles

'Open it,' she could be heard saying to her husband, as he slowly pulled the red, lacy undergarment out from the center of the rose

Many people quickly flooded the comment section with their reactions to the hilarious mishap.

'I'm so mad my daughter didn't get me one,' joked one viewer. 'I ended up with a rock painted like a ladybug. How inconsiderate of her.'

'Things sure have changed since I went there,' said someone else.

Another person added, 'I think this goes against all of their teachings lol.'

'Guess dads will get banana hammocks for Father's Day,' wrote a different user. 'School seems more interesting since I graduate in '91.'

'Hilarious!' read a fifth comment. 'The school must have been mortified.'

'Made my day,' said another person. 'Hysterical.'

Another added, 'Wow, someone messed up big time!'

'Thank you St. Anselm's,' joked Rachel, while her husband added, 'Oh my God, that's hilarious'

The school responded to the Mothers Day mix-up, writing in an email, 'It has come to our attention that the roses sold at our Mothers Day sale were not the flowers originally intended'

It said it was going to 'determine how the error occurred' and 'take steps to prevent a further recurrence'

A spokesperson called it 'an unfortunate mistake,' adding that the school 'apologizes deeply' for any 'embarrassment and discomfort that was caused'

The school has since responded to the Mothers Day mix-up, writing in an email to parents, which was obtained by 3 CBS Philly, 'It has come to our attention that the roses sold at our Mothers Day plant sale were not the single faux flowers originally intended.

'Instead, the item was a Valentines Day gift intended for adults. The administration will determine how the error occurred and take steps to prevent a further recurrence.'

Ken Gavin, a spokesperson from church governance Archdiocese, which runs the school, called it 'an unfortunate mistake' in a statement to Newsweek, adding that Archdiocese 'apologizes deeply.'

'There is no evidence that these were intentionally made available,' he said.

'We sincerely regret any embarrassment and discomfort that was caused and wish all mothers in the community a Happy and Blessed Mother's Day with hearts full of gratitude.'
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield speaks to South Korea's Ambassador to the U.N. Cho Hyun before a security council meeting at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, May 11. Reuters-Yonhap





The U.N. Security Council (UNSC) convened an emergency meeting Wednesday to discuss North Korea's recent missile provocations but failed to produce a tangible outcome due to opposition from China and Russia.







The special session of the 15-member council came at the request of the U.S., which condemned North Korea's recent missile tests as "a blatant violation of multiple Security Council resolutions."







"Let's be clear. The DPRK is not undertaking its activities defensively in response to threatening behavior. This is self-initiated, unprovoked campaign of ballistic missile launches that threatens its neighbors and attempts to undermine this council," U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield said in the session, also attended by the representatives of South Korea and Japan.







DPRK stands for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the North's official name.







The top U.S. representative to the U.N. said her country remains committed to engagement with North Korea, but insisted the UNSC needs to take action to prevent further provocations by Pyongyang.







"It's time to stop providing tacit permission and to start taking action," said Thomas-Greenfield, noting Pyongyang has launched 17 missiles, including at least three intercontinental ballistic missiles, this year.






A woman was branded a 'psycho b***h' after she revealed the extensive list of social media rules that she forces her boyfriend to live by - from not following any new women after they start dating to blocking his previous flings.

Natalia Reinoso, from Canada, does not want her man to be looking at any other women online.

She detailed the intense rules that she makes her potential suitors follow, to ensure that their attention is strictly on her.

From not liking any girls' photos on social media to not searching for any female usernames online, Natalia outlined the strict regiment that her partner will have to stick to on TikTok.

A woman was branded a 'psycho b***h' after she revealed the extensive list of social media rules that she forces her boyfriend to follow

Natalia Reinoso, from Canada, detailed the intense rules that she makes her potential suitors live by, to ensure that their attention is strictly on her

From not liking any girls' photos on social media to not searching for any female usernames online, Natalia outlined the strict regiment that her partner will have to stick to on TikTok

Her video quickly went viral - gaining more than three million views since it was posted last month, and some people on the internet called her 'controlling' and 'toxic' for the detailed list of requirements.

Natalia's video quickly went viral - gaining more than three million views since it was posted last month, and some people on the internet called her 'controlling' and 'toxic' for the detailed list of requirements

'Controversial rules I make my boyfriend follow - Instagram addition,' she began in the clip.

Before reading through her social media regulations, Natalia admitted that her guy friends called her a 'psycho b***h' for them - however, she insisted that 'almost every single one' of her past boyfriends have followed the rules.

'I was telling my guy friends and they called me a psycho b***h,' she said.

'Disclaimer: almost every single one of my boyfriends has followed these rules. So if you're like, "Oh my God, I could never," it's OK, somebody else will.'

Her first rule is that her boyfriend will have to unfollow anyone that he previously had a romantic interaction with.

'Number one, block anyone you've had a romantic interaction with,' she explained.

Natalia admitted that her guy friends called her a 'psycho b***h' for them - however, she insisted that 'almost every single one' of her past boyfriends have followed the rules

Her first rule is that her boyfriend will have to unfollow anyone that he previously had a romantic interaction with. The second is that he's not allowed to follow any new women

Her third rule is that her boyfriend isn't allowed to search girls' names in the handle bar. She also said her man will not be allowed to like other women's pictures

'Obviously people you slept with is a no, no. And if I find out you held a b***hes hand and you're still following her, you're done.

Natalia Reinoso's social media rules for her boyfriend 1) Block anyone you've previously had a romantic interaction with 2) No following new women 3) No searching girls' usernames in the handle bar 4) No liking girls' photos 5) No replying to other women's Instagram Stories 6) No more than one girl per scroll on your explore page 7) If someone posts more than one bikini pic in a row - you must unfollow her 8) No clicking on girls' LinkTrees Advertisement

'Number two, no following new women since the day we start dating.

'Three, no searching girls names in the handle bar. Like, what are you searching for? But really - what are you searching for? Because you should find it in me.'

For her fourth rule, she said her man will not be allowed to like other women's pictures, and her fifth mandate was that he can't reply to any girl's Instagram Stories.

She continued: 'Number four, no liking girls photos. Every guy knows that girls don't like this, so the fact that you're continuing to do it knowing internationally that women don't like this, is a slap in the face. So period, point blank no.

'Number five, no story replying. Number six, no more than one girl per scroll on your explore page.

'I know that your explore page is what you click on. Want to know how I know? Because one time, I asked a guy to stop and he did.

'So for the duration of our entire relationship there wasn't one girl on his explore page so I know that the rest of you guys are [liars].'

Finally, she insisted that her boyfriend has to stop following anyone who posts numerous bathing suit pictures in a row.

She added that he also isn't allowed to click on any women's LinkTrees - which is a website that normally contains links to their other social media accounts.

Other rules include not being allowed to reply to any girl's Instagram Stories, unfollowing anyone who posts more than one bikini pic in a row, and not clicking on women's LinkTrees

Finally, she stated that she doesn't want to see more than one girl per scroll on her man's explore page

'Number seven, if she posts more than one bikini pic in a row - unfollow. You should just know, just read my mind. Lastly, no clicking on LinkTree.'

Natalia's rules sparked a debate between viewers - with some defending her for setting 'boundaries' and others slamming her and calling her 'insecure.'

'I really hope this is a joke because this is so controlling,' wrote one person.

Another added, 'People like this are really so insecure.'

'For me, it's more about respect than being insecure,' someone else replied. 'Like, why would you want to do these things if you have a significant other? Especially on Insta?'

'But having a man respect these boundaries versus have a man "follow rules" is absurd,' a different user fired back. 'Imagine if a man said these things.'

Natalia's rules sparked a debate between viewers - with some defending her for setting 'boundaries' and others slamming her and calling her 'insecure'

'It's not even about being insecure it's literally respect,' agreed another TikToker.

'I think if you trusted your partner, the thought of asking these things wouldn't even cross your mind,' read a sixth comment.

'Am I the only one that feels some of these are a bit much?' asked someone else.

'Boundaries are a good thing to have but this is just insanely controlling behavior rooted in insecurity,' wrote one viewer. 'Trust is important in a relationship.'

'People are really saying this is controlling/toxic but I'm like... This is the bare minimum,' read another comment.

'All I know is he probably has found a better way to go around your rules. Never set rules 'cause if a man is gonna cheat he's gonna cheat regardless,' said someone else.
Emmy Rossum has revealed that she developed blisters from the 'heavy' fake breasts she had to wear while filming her new Peacock miniseries 'Angelyne.'

The actress, 35, opened up about physically transforming into the buxom Los Angeles billboard queen in a profile for The Hollywood Reporter, explaining she spent about four to five hours in makeup daily.

'The physicality of the character was challenging. The body is heavy, yet it has to feel light and effervescent,' she told the magazine of emulating the pop-culture icon.

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Emmy Rossum, 35, opened up about transforming into Los Angeles billboard queen Angelyne for her upcoming Peacock miniseries in a profile for The Hollywood Reporter

The real-life Angelyne (pictured) grew a cult following after giant billboards bearing her likeness appeared around Hollywood in the 1980s

To achieve Angelyne's famous bust (left), Rossum had a 3-pound breastplate glued to her torso that caused her blisters during filming (right)

A 3-pound breastplate was glued to her torso to achieve Angelyne's famous bust, causing irritation to her skin.

She also donned two pairs of contact lenses and heavy eye makeup that led to tear duct issues. A platinum blonde wig and bleached brows completed the look.

'I found it to be completely liberating to look in the mirror and not see myself at all,' she said. 'At first, its unnerving. But feeling lost gives way to this real liberation  from myself and the hang-ups that can impede a performance.'

Rossum got through the physical discomfort by focusing on 'how lucky' she felt to be playing the mysterious Angelyne.

Rossum (right) also suffered tear duct issues from wearing two pairs of contact lenses and heavy makeup to transform into the pop icon (left)

A platinum blonde wig and bleached brows completed Rossum's look in the series (pictured)

'This opportunity is really every actors dream,' she said. 'You raise your hand and you say, "Hey, Id like to play this, and this is how I envision the story."'

Rossum and her husband, 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail, both executive produced the five-episode limited series about Angelyne.

Esmail, who shares a one-year-old daughter with his wife, admitted to finding her transformation to be unnerving at times.

'When I say that there are times where I did not recognize her because she was lost in this person, I really mean it,' he told The Hollywood Reporter. 'This is my wife Im talking about. Its kind of eerie.'

'The physicality of the character was challenging. The body is heavy, yet it has to feel light and effervescent,' Rossum told The Hollywood Reporter of emulating Angelyne

With dark curly hair and eyes, the actress looks nothing like the buxom blonde in real life

Angelyne, now 71, (pictured in 1997) granted the series the rights to her life, trademarks, art, and music catalog

Angelyne, who was born Ronia Tamar Goldberg, grew a cult following after giant billboards bearing her likeness inexplicably appeared around Hollywood in the 1980s.

Rossum recalled seeing one of Angelyne's billboards in Los Angeles when she was starting out as a child actress.

'In retrospect, its a very curated image, but it had a lot of impact on me,' she said. 'I remember seeing a woman who was totally empowered in her body, in her sexuality, in her womanhood in a way that I certainly was not at 13  somebody that had captured the citys attention, seemingly magically.'

'Angelyne' is based on a 2017 expose by The Hollywood Reporter that revealed Angelyne's true identity as the daughter of Polish parents who fled the Nazis' concentration camps to start a new life in Los Angeles.

Rossum dazzled in a black strapless gown with jeweled embellishments on the pink carpet at the premiere of 'Angelyne' in Los Angeles on Wednesday night

Rossum and her husband, 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail (pictured in 2019), both executive produced the five-episode limited series, and he admitted his wife's transformation was 'eerie'

The upcoming miniseries premiered in Los Angeles on Wednesday night, and Rossum dazzled in a black strapless gown with jeweled embellishments on the pink carpet.

She told Variety that the real-life Angelyne, now 71, granted the series the rights to her life, trademarks, art, and music catalog, which airs on May 19.

'It was so important to me that she be involved in this and that we were able to faithfully recreate her iconic billboards,' Rossum said.

'And it was really, really important to me that she be paid for her contribution, not just to the show, but to pop culture over the last 50 years.'
Women the world over know the feeling. You've walked into a room, ready for a big event.

You are looking your polished best; hair, make-up and outfit carefully chosen from a list of possible contenders.

And then your heart sinks  at the sight of another woman wearing exactly the same as you.

Unless, that is, you're Spain's supremely chic Queen Letizia, who appeared at an event in Madrid last week wearing the exact same 59.99 Mango dress as one of the attendees. Was she mortified by the mirror image? Not a bit of it.

Reaching out to the woman  a professor of law, whom Queen Letizia was honouring for her work  she immediately found humour in the situation, embracing her with such warmth to ease her embarrassment.

What could have been an awkward moment instantly dissolved into peals of laughter. There was even a sense of conspiratorial empathy.

Would this have happened a decade ago? I doubt it.

The fact that we are increasingly seeing more examples of what I call accidental twinning is largely down to the fact that a combination of fabric, pattern and manufacturing technology has seen a massive improvement in the fit, cut and make of many High Street pieces, making them attractive to many more women.

Gone are the days when fashion-conscious women wouldn't dream of diluting their designer clothes with a flick of High Street fun.

Queen Letizia of Spain, left, and law professor Inmaculada Vivas Teson in a black and white Mango dress, 59.99

Models Sara Sampaio, left, and Emily Ratajkowski both wearing Cushnie Et Ochs dress costing around 300

Jane Seymour, left, and Paris Hilton attend The Colleagues And Oscar de la Renta's Annual Spring Luncheon at the Beverly Wilshire Four Seasons Hotel in April 2018

This is a wonderful development, both democratising fashion while effectively bringing superior products to a much wider audience.

On the other hand, the devastation of the pandemic has wreaked havoc on many smaller fashion businesses with many well-known brands closing as a result of Covid.

This means that there is less choice for women today, so the potential of bumping into someone wearing the same style is higher than ever.

A girlfriend of mine has a rule that she never wears this season's designs to any big event because she believes that it reduces the risk of walking into someone wearing the same look.

I applaud this, not least because in this world of mass over-consumption why do we always feel the need to wear something new?

I would argue that it's far cooler and more individual to re-wear and re-style our much loved treasures.

Accidental twinning will always be inevitable. It has happened to me on numerous occasions, but being the designer of said pieces, I always took it as a huge compliment.

Mary, Crown Princess of Denmark, right, and businesswoman Nina Wedell-Wedellsborg in Britt Sisseck dresses, 600

Actress Jaime King, left, and socialite Nicky Hilton in French Connection sequinned leopard print dresses

Kris Jenner, right, and friend Shelli Azoff in a dress believed to be Prada at the Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence in 2013

One day in the design studio, five of us arrived in the exact same signature Wakeley Air Shirt. We were all different ages, shapes and sizes and all styled completely differently.

It was a thrill to see, as I have always loved the challenge of creating a piece that many different women can wear yet make it their own.

Remember, there is no shame to be had in accidental twinning.

This is brilliantly illustrated by Trinny Woodall's Trinny's Friday Twinning  she and her colleague Chloe (completely different shapes, sizes and age) are filmed wearing the same outfits but they are creating totally different make-up looks for themselves and then individualise the look with different styling and accessories.

A sparkling smile and great posture can transform anyone and any look.

And at the end of the day we are all our own women  even if we are wearing the same thing.

At least Princess Anne was amused!

By Esther Rantzen for The Daily Mail

If a charity ball with Princess Anne doesn't merit a new evening dress, I don't know what does.

And so it was, 35 years ago this month, that I arrived at a hotel in London's Park Lane, with my late husband Desmond Wilcox, dressed in a cream chiffon concoction, with matching scarf, designed by Frank Usher.

Figure-hugging and strapless, it was a daring departure for me. Almost, I worried, out of my league. But as I set foot inside the glittering pre-ball reception, I felt a sense of confidence.

Until, that is, I spotted Bruce Forsyth with his gorgeous wife Wilnelia. She was dressed in exactly the same gown.

Being about a foot taller than me  and an ex-Miss World to boot  there were no prizes for guessing who looked infinitely more glamorous.

Desmond Wilcox, Esther Rantzen, Bruce Forsyth and wife Wilnelia at the Roaring 20's Ball at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London in May 1987

This was a fashion disaster and something had to be done. Springing into action, Wilnelia draped my chiffon scarf over my shoulders, and tied hers around her waist in a bid to make us look different.

As the photographers started to arrive, Brucie said 'I'm in charge', and stood between us. And we got away with it, I think.

Although I did confess our fashion faux pas to Princess Anne later that evening and she looked wryly amused. As Wilnelia taught me, it's just a matter of utilising accessories and holding your nerve.

It happened again a few years ago, when I attended a formal event at my old Oxford college.

I'd been asked to make a speech honouring the principal and, as I arrived in a long jacket, I noticed she and I were wearing the same dress.

I wore my jacket throughout lunch and then rose to make my speech, peeling off my outer layer to reveal our identical outfits.

There we were, two identical peas in a pod. It got a much better laugh than any of my prepared jokes.
The team at RM Williams are offering up 90 pairs of their world-famous boots to celebrate the leather company's 90th birthday.

And all fans have to do is snap a picture in their favourite RMs on Instagram, tag the company and use the hashtag #RMW90YEARS.

You can also enter as many times as you like, provided you use a different picture each time.

You can get your hands on a limited-edition pair of RM Williams boots by taking photos of your favourite pair of the company's shoes

The company is giving away 90 pairs of shoes as part of their 90th birthday celebrations and hundreds of people have already entered the competition

The RM Williams brand as been an integral part of the leather goods landscape for nine decades.

Founded by Reginald Murray Williams, the brand was founded with the idea of selling high-quality leather goods, primarily saddled to horsemen.

But before too long it became a well-known name in good quality riding boots revered for comfort and durability.

The lucky winners of the 90th birthday competition will be able to choose between limited edition pairs of the iconic Craftsman for men or the Lady Yearling boots.

These 90th birthday editions will be available in chestnut and black.

'In celebration of our 90th Anniversary, our classic Craftsman and Lady Yearling will be topped by RMW iconic limited-edition tugs. You will make a statement,' a spokesperson said.

'Each pair of boots will be finished with a special engraved limited-edition plaque, reminiscent of the premium Signature style.'

Competition for the boots is fierce, with more than 700 RM Williams fans taking to Instagram with pictures of their feet already.

The shoes on offer are the Lady Yearling and the Craftsman, which both retail from $595

And it isn't just adults entering the competition - this baby appeared to be very relaxed in her leather boots

The competition is open to residents of Australia, New Zealand, UK and USA.

One woman shared pictures of her gold RM Williams boots and admitted to being obsessed with the brand in a bid to win a fresh set of shoes.

And it appears the shoes are perfect for every occasion. Some people are pictured on outdoor adventures, others working with livestock while many pair them with their wedding suit or the fanciest of evening wear.

The boots appear to be loved for all kinds of occasions - from yard work and riding to glitzy events and Sunday lunches

The competition ends at 11.59pm AEST on May 25, with winners notified on May 26 via Instagram or email.

For every entry received, RM Williams is also donating $5 to Aussie charity Thread Together, which partners with fashion brands to donate unsold, brand new clothing to those in need.

The shoes offered in the competition retail from $595 per pair.
An all-in-one face mist said to be used by Queen Isabella of Hungary to charm a king 35 years younger than her has been dubbed a 'must-have' for 2022.

Caudalie's reinvented $74 Beauty Elixir is a powerful formula beloved by makeup artists and celebrities that preps skin, sets make up, gives an instant glow and tightens pores instantly.

The refreshing scent is infused with rose and orange blossom, grape, mint, lemon balm and rosemary and is the ideal priming base and setting spray between layers of makeup for a long-lasting and smooth finish.

An all-in-one face mist said to be used by Queen Isabella of Hungary to charm a king 35 years younger than her has been dubbed a 'must-have' for 2022

Caudalie's reinvented $74 Beauty Elixir is a powerful formula beloved by makeup artists and celebrities that preps skin, sets make up, gives an instant glow and tightens pores instantly

The unisex buy is also a great aftershave for men as it contains essential oils and plant extracts that clarify and brighten the complexion.

The refreshing French spritz, which has been used by the likes of Reese Witherspoon and Karlie Kloss to achieve a red carpet worthy glow, is inspired by the beauty elixir used by 17th century Queen Isabella of Hungary.

According to legend, the Queen used an 'Elixir of Youth' to attract younger suitors including the King of Poland when she was in her 70s; this product was inspired by that same concoction.

The refreshing French spritz, which has been used by the likes of Reese Witherspoon and Karlie Kloss to achieve a red carpet worthy glow, is inspired by the beauty elixir used by 17th century Queen Isabella of Hungary

It was first launched in 1997 and quickly became a cult classic thanks to its 100 per cent natural, plant-based formula.

Since, it's had thousands of rave reviews from customers who rave about its refreshing scent and instant skin rejuvenation properties.

'This product is popular for a reason. I've seen many beauty secret videos with this face list and had to try it. It leaves my face feeling refreshed and has a nice scent,' a delighted shopper wrote.

Since, it's had thousands of rave reviews from customers who rave about its refreshing scent and instant skin rejuvenation properties

'The first time I saw this on display I sprayed all over entire face while standing in line and I love the way it smells. I noticed my face has a glow and it gives your skin a beautiful foundation before applying make up,' another added.

'I love the yellow halo you get on the top of the bottle because you know it's filled with amazing ingredients.'

You can purchase the Beauty Elixir Toner in Australia for $74 at Sephora.
Britain's current drug shortages are partly being fuelled by EU red tape that blocks pharmacies from sharing in-stock medicines.

Industry bodies want No10 to ditch the rule so they can trade medications and help end the 'postcode lottery' for HRT, blood pressure drugs, antibiotics, and dozens of other medications plagued by supply issues, MailOnline can reveal.

Pharmacies were once allowed to sell up to 5 per cent of their stock to other stores without needing a special licence that costs almost 1,000 a year.

Known as the '5 per cent rule', it enabled individual pharmacies to sell their supplies to ones experiencing high demand. But it was scrapped in 2012 to align the UK with Brussels' regulations.

Despite the UK leaving the bloc officially at the end of 2020, the rule remains in place.

Trade bodies argue the 5 per cent rule should be reintroduced immediately, even if it ends up barely making a dent on the current crisis.

Fears are growing that the UK could soon find itself short of painkillers, steroids, anti-depressants and blood pressure medications, too.

The crisis for HRT has left desperate women tipping each other off about pharmacies with supplies, swapping medications in car parks and paying eye-watering premiums online.

Pharmacy industry groups are calling for No10 to reintroduce a rule allowing pharmacies to more freely share drug supplies that was scrapped to align with EU regulations

The National Pharmacy Association (NPA), which represents community pharmacists, is one of those calling for the rule to be brought back now the country has left the EU.

Jasmine Shah, its head of advice and support services, told MailOnline: 'Pharmacies should also be able to share medicines with each other if one or more run short of a particular line.

'This flexibility was available to pharmacies until a few years ago but it was curtailed to comply with an EU directive.

The Mail's manifesto to fix the HRT crisis 1. Allow pharmacists to dispense substitutes if the prescribed HRT is out of stock Currently, if an HRT product is unavailable, a pharmacist cannot substitute another product without consulting the prescribing GP, forcing patients to go back and forth between doctor and pharmacy. This could be avoided if pharmacists are allowed to alter prescriptions themselves. They should also be able to move stock between different pharmacies. 2. End the postcode lottery Local areas all have different formularies  or lists  of approved HRT products, meaning women face a postcode lottery of treatments. A national list of all approved HRT products would ensure women have equal access, and that alternative treatments are available faster. 3. Immediately introduce the once-a-year payment for HRT medication An annual prescription payment for HRT, which could save women up to 200 a year, is planned for April 2023. This must be implemented urgently, especially during the cost-of-living squeeze, so all women can afford treatment. 4. Bring forward mandatory requirement for medical students to be taught about the menopause A curriculum change needs to be introduced sooner than January 2023, when it is planned. This will ensure all doctors have the training to recognise menopause symptoms, which will help reduce the rate of misdiagnoses. 5. Provide menopause information to women at their NHS health check Everyone who doesnt have a pre-existing medical condition is invited for a free check-up every five years between the ages of 40 and 74. Women should be given information at these health checks to raise awareness of the menopause and treatment options. Advertisement

'This should now be reintroduced.'

Labour MP Carolyn Harris, a co-chair of the UK menopause taskforce, also said she supported the reintroduction of pharmacy sharing.

'In principle, as long as it is limited to 5 per cent, this is a good solution to a problem that thousands of people up and down the country are facing,' she said.

'It worked well in the past and would save patients the anxiety of travelling around different pharmacies trying to locate stock themselves.'

However, she added that products need to be available for pharmacies to share and therefore Britain needed to boost its HRT supplies first.

'Shortage of supply countrywide will not be solved by allowing pharmacies to share medicines if they are simply not available anywhere in the first place,' she said.

The 5 per cent rule enabled community pharmacies to transfer limited amounts of drugs between each other and other health care providers such as small hospitals without paying for a licence.

This allowed a pharmacy with excess stock of a particular medication to transfer it to other pharmacies that needed them.

However, this exemption was scrapped in 2012 to align with EU legislation which required anyone undertaking such transfers or sales to hold an authorisation to do so.

With the NPA warning hundreds of community pharmacies are facing closure due to the financial impact of Covid, few can afford the cost of an annual licence.

Four drugs are classified as being in severe shortage by the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee (PSNC) which negotiates NHS deals with the Government.

Three of these are HRT medications, Oestrogel, Ovestin and Premique.

The other is a specific dosage of the antidepressant called fluoxetine, sold under the brand Prozac.

But 59 other medications are also considered to be in short supply by the PSNC and the Government.

These medications include treatments for hay fever, hypertension as well dosages of antibiotics and painkillers.

Global demand for these drugs is so high that they have been added to a price concession list.

This list sets the the Government is willing to pay more for drugs prescribed to NHS patients when pharmacists cannot be purchased at the usual price.

There were about 512,000 NHS prescriptions written for 'female sex hormones and their modulators' in England in February, the latest official data shows, compared to 265,000 in March 2017. Many of these will be HRT medications but some may include other female hormone drugs such as contraceptives

These price concessions can range from just 74p for skin creams to treat eczema to 146 per pack for some cancer medications.

It allows pharmacies  which actually do the buying  to claim the additional cost of procuring drugs back when they provide the prescribed medications to patients.

Hormone Replacement Therapy Q&A How does HRT work? Hormone replacement therapy eases symptoms including brain fog, disturbed sleep and hot flushes by replacing hormones that are at a lower level as women approach the menopause. HRT can come in the form of patches, tablets or gels which are available on prescription through the NHS. How much does it cost? A single NHS prescription charge costs 9.35, or 18.70 if a woman needs two types of hormones. This is often provided on a short-term basis, meaning regular payments  once a month, or every three. The Government has pledged to make annual prescriptions available, but this wont be implemented until next April. Many have now resorted to buying HRT for up to eight times the NHS price online. Why is there a crisis? NHS England data shows that prescriptions for HRT have more than doubled in five years following an increase in campaigning and media coverage. Besins Healthcare  which makes Oestrogel, used by 30,000 women in the UK  has expressed regrets that extraordinary demand has led to shortages. Other products have been affected as women switch to alternatives. What can be done? The British Menopause Society has advised women struggling to find Oestrogel to discuss other products with their GP. However, some experts have noted that women are often on a particular HRT regime that is specifically tailored to their needs. Can the pharmacist help? If a pharmacy is out of stock, a patient must first be referred back to their GP to be given a prescription for an alternative. The Royal Pharmaceutical Society has called for pharmacists to be able to make minor changes to a prescription to provide a suitable alternative. In addition, patients face a postcode lottery as pharmacies often cannot share stock with each other. Is it dangerous to swap your HRT medicine? Medical professionals have warned that sharing or swapping HRT products could lead to serious side effects that can be debilitating, not least because different products will have different dosages. Trading with others also could mean accidentally using out-of-date medicine. When will the crisis end? Besins has said it is doing everything we can to increase supplies to wholesalers and pharmacies across the country. The company said it is on track to meet growing demand in June. What are ministers doing? The Health Secretary has appointed an HRT tsar to help tackle the crisis. Madelaine McTernan, the woman responsible for securing Covid vaccines for the UK, will lead efforts to address shortages. Sajid Javid said he will leave no stone unturned to make sure women get the HRT they need. Advertisement

This list ballooned to 67 medications in March, one shy of the highest ever recorded number which was 68 in January this year.

While the number of medications on the list, updated monthly, has now dropped to 59 for April, the figure is still above the average over the past decade.

Ms Shah said worsening global drug supply issues were driving the rising number of medications on the list.

'Supply issues have been escalating year on year and worsening,' she said.

'Various factors have increased the fragility of the generic medicines market, such as the consolidation of production of generic medicines at just one or two global manufacturing units,' she said.

Britain imports many ingredients for medicines from China and India, the former of which has been hit by a number of draconic lockdowns as part of Zero Covid policy that has devastated both its manufacturing and shipping industries.

Manufacturers of dozens of the UKs most commonly used drugs, such as blood pressure pills, painkillers and anti-depressants, have also reported struggling with a rising costs of raw materials.

Some have also accused No10 of being too fixated with Covid to listen to warning about drug supplies like those used for HRT.

This week the Association of Independent Multiple Pharmacies said the number of patients facing issues with obtaining medications is likely to be at least 500,000.

Ms Shah added the ongoing supply issues meant pharmacists were spending extra time to source medications at permitted prices, and sometimes even being forced to take a gamble on if a drug would later be added to the list.

'In addition to the increases in workload, the situation has put immense financial pressure on pharmacies that have been forced to purchase medicines at inflated prices without knowing whether they will be adequately reimbursed,' she said.

'Pharmacies have displayed great professionalism and put patients first by continuing to supply medicines to patients in good faith, despite knowing that they may be doing so at a loss.'

She also warned that the situation could get worse with consequences for both patients and the taxpayer.

'If adequate steps are not taken and generic medicine shortages and price increases continue as they are, then there could be detrimental ramifications for community pharmacies, patients, the NHS, taxpayers and the public,' she said.

Royal Pharmaceutical Society president, Professor Claire Anderson, is also calling for the rules governing restricting pharmacists to be changed.

'We spend hours tracking down stock and working together to help patients, but would rather be talking to patients about their health than managing supply problems,' she said.

One rule she was particularly keen to see changed was for pharmacists to be able to make minor changes to prescriptions if a medication is out of stock.

The current system means if a particular brand or dosage of a drug is unavailable a pharmacist cannot substitute it for another product, without consulting the prescribing GP.

This, as has been the case with some women battling to get HRT, has forced patients to go back-and-forth between their doctor and pharmacist multiple times.

On rising drug shortages a Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: 'The UK has some of the cheapest generic medicines in Europe and good continuity of supply.'

The Government did not respond to pharmacy industry pleas to scrap the EU trade limiting directive.

Health minister Sajid Javid has continually promised action on Britain's HRT crisis.

Earlier this month he appointed a new HRT tsar Madelaine McTernan who is reportedly working to secure menopause medications from countries with excess supplies in Europe and North America.
Watching your child take their first steps is meant to be one of the most exciting milestones as a new parent.

But for Natasha and Alex Finney, their elation soon turned to horror after spotting what turned out to be cancer in their 11-month-old.

As AJ walked unaided for the first time, they noticed he had an unusual cloudiness in his right eye.

Alarmed, they took him to see doctors, who rushed through tests and diagnosed him with retinoblastoma.

Due to the size of the infant's cancer, medics had to remove his eye straight away in a three-hour operation  one day after his first birthday.

AJ, from Bolton, now has one artificial eye following the procedure in December.

Mrs Finney told MailOnline her son is doing 'amazingly well' considering everything he has been through.

The teacher, 29, said her son is a 'happy little boy who is now up on his feet, walking around everywhere and developing a cheeky, contagious personality'.

Watching your child take their first steps is meant to be one of the most exciting milestones as a new parent. But for Natasha and Alex Finney, their elation soon turned to horror after spotting what turned out to be cancer in their 11-month-old. As AJ walked unaided for the first time (pictured), they noticed he had an unusual cloudiness in his right eye

Doctors confirmed AJ had retinoblastoma, a tumour in the retina that can be seen through the pupil. Pictured: AJ on November 25, the day he was first taken to his GP

Mrs Finney said AJ's seven-year-old sister, Alice (pictured with AJ and her parents), has been 'amazing' at adapting to having a partially-sighted sibling

WHAT IS RETINOBLASTOMA? Retinoblastoma is a rare type of eye cancer that can affect young children, usually under the age of 5. Its symptoms include an unusual white reflection in the pupil, a squint, a red or inflamed eye and poor vision. Retinoblastoma happens when retina eye cells  which are supposed to grow very quickly and then stop growing during a baby's early development  continue to grow and form a cancer. Depending on the size of the tumour. If it is small, laser and freezing treatments that aim to destroy the tumour will be carried out. If it is larger, youngsters may undergo surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Some children may suffer sight loss or need to have their eye removed. Between 40 and 50 cases of retinoblastoma are diagnosed in the UK every year. The figure equates to one in 15,000 to 20,000 newborns. Around four in 10 cases are diagnosed in the first year of life and incidence rates drop to a very low rate after five years of age. Around two-thirds of retinoblastomas are diagnosed in one eye only. More than nine in 10 cases are detected early and cured before the cancer spreads outside the eyeball. Source: NHS, Children with Cancer UK Advertisement

Speaking of the day they were first alerted to AJ's retinoblastoma, Mrs Finney said: 'While changing AJ's nappy, he cried a lot.

'When he got up, taking his first steps in the process, we were over the moon.

'But then we noticed a cloudiness in his eye and decided to get him into the doctors that day.'

AJ was referred to a specialist eye hospital by his doctor, where he had vision tests, pressure readings and ultrasound scans.

The consultant thought it could be retinoblastoma, a tumour in the retina that can be seen through the pupil.

Mrs Finney and her partner, a commercial agent, were told not to Google the cancer but they decided they needed to know more about their son's condition.

She said: 'The standout word was "cancer". Our hearts sunk lower than we knew was possible, we were devastated.'



Typical retinoblastoma symptoms include a squint, a change in iris colour, a red or inflamed eye and poor vision.

They can also include an unusual white reflection in the pupil, sometimes referred to as a cat's eye.

When the tumour forms, light reflects off the cancer's surface, causing the child's dilated pupil to appear white in flash photos or dim light.

Retinoblastoma happens when retina eye cells fail to stop growing during a baby's development, forming a tumour.

Between 40 and 50 cases of retinoblastoma are diagnosed in the UK every year, equating to one in 15,000 to 20,000 newborns.

If the tumour is small, laser and freezing treatments will be carried out to destroy it. If it is larger, youngsters may undergo surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

Some children may suffer sight loss or need to have their eye removed.

Mrs Finney said: 'We weren't aware of retinoblastoma before AJ was diagnosed, so we wouldn't have known any typical signs or symptoms of it.

'Although AJ had a visible squint quite early on, we weren't concerned as Alex and his mum also have a slight squint, so we assumed it was hereditary.

'Since AJ's diagnosis, we have discovered that a squint is the second most common sign of retinoblastoma'.

The week after his tests in late November, the family travelled to the specialist retinoblastoma ward at Birmingham Women's and Children's Hospital to have AJ's eyes examined under anaesthetic, where the retinoblastoma diagnosis was confirmed.

Mrs Finney said: 'We weren't really given any other option other than removal of his right eye, purely due to the size of AJ's tumour.

'Alex and I were devastated, and it took us a while to digest what we were being told.'

AJ had his right eye removed the day after his first birthday in a three-hour procedure.

His mother said it 'felt like the longest three hours' of their lives but it was a 'huge relief' when surgeons said the operation had been a success.

Medics were able to remove all of his cancer, meaning he does not require regular medication or treatment.

She said: 'When we collected him from recovery, it was bittersweet as we were so excited to have him back with us, but equally it was hard to see him all bandaged up.'

Due to the size of the infant's tumour, medics had to remove his eye straight away in a three-hour operation  one day after his first birthday. AJ now has one artificial eye, while his healthy left eye is monitored for tumours. But fortunately none have so far been spotted

Birmingham Women's and Children's Hospital confirmed AJ had retinoblastoma. Mrs Finney said: 'We weren't really given any other option other than removal of his right eye, purely due to the size of AJ's tumour. Alex and I were devastated, and it took us a while to digest what we were being told'

Medics were able to remove all of AJ's cancer, meaning he does not require regular medication or treatment. She said: 'When we collected him from recovery, it was bittersweet as we were so excited to have him back with us, but equally it was hard to see him all bandaged up'

The one-year-old stayed in hospital for five days, with his parents only allowed to be with him for one hour each day due to Covid restrictions.

Mrs Finney said it was 'really difficult to accept' that her son would go through life partially sighted.

She said: 'The first thing that people would notice was "his beautiful eyes" and although I knew that he would always be beautiful to our family, I became conscious that it wouldn't be the first thing people noticed about him anymore.

'However, even now, people will comment on AJ's beautiful eyes as well as his cheeky smile. As long as we know that AJ is happy, we are happy too.'

She said that strangers have been left 'amazed' when they have been told one of his eyes is artificial and one little girl called it his 'magic eye'.

Mrs Finney said her family feels 'extremely lucky' that AJ's left eye is healthy at the moment but they remain 'extremely vigilant for any signs of changes'.

She said: 'Having vision in one eye only hasn't seemed to affect him too much, but he bumps into door frames from time to time.

'He is very much a lefty now  choosing to do almost every one-handed task with his left hand but as this is the side where he has vision, we can understand that and are constantly tweaking our parenting to suit AJ's needs, such as sitting him on our right knee to do peekaboo on his left hand side.'

Mrs Finney said it was 'really difficult to accept' that her son would go through life partially sighted. She said: 'The first thing that people would notice was "his beautiful eyes" and although I knew that he would always be beautiful to our family, I became conscious that it wouldn't be the first thing people noticed about him anymore. 'However, even now, people will comment on AJ's beautiful eyes as well as his cheeky smile. As long as we know that AJ is happy, we are happy too.' Pictured: AJ and his mother celebrating his first birthday

Mrs Finney said her family feels 'extremely lucky' that AJ's left eye is healthy at the moment but they remain 'extremely vigilant for any signs of changes'. Pictured: AJ and his father in January

Mrs Finney said: 'As a one-year-old, AJ is a happy little boy who is now up on his feet, walking around everywhere and developing a cheeky, contagious personality day-by-day.

'He loves to clap hands and make a mess of the front room by emptying his ball pit, launching three balls across the room at a time  all 300 of them.'

She said: 'For myself and Alex, it's been difficult to comprehend what we've been through, partly because it has all happened so fast so we've had new information to digest quite regularly throughout the last few months.'

AJ's seven-year-old sister Alice has been 'amazing' at adapting to having a partially-sighted sibling and , Mrs Finney said.

'AJ's sister, Alice (7) has been amazing at just adapting to having a partially sighted sibling and understanding that he requires a lot of care and attention - we're extremely proud of her!

The Childhood Eye Cancer Trust (CHECT) is urging parents to be on the lookout for the cancer.

Patrick Tonks, chief executive of CHECT said: 'Symptoms can be quite subtle, and children often seem well in themselves which can make it hard to diagnose.

'We are extremely grateful that in AJ's case, his symptoms were recognised, and an urgent referral was made so that he could receive treatment.'

In a message to other parents, Mrs Finney said: 'If anyone is worried that their child has retinoblastoma, please go to your GP as soon as possible but don't panic.

'There are so many different scenarios when it comes to retinoblastoma and the treatment that AJ has received is completely different to that of other retinoblastoma warriors that we are now in contact with.

'The retinoblastoma community is strong and there is always someone there to chat to whenever you're feeling lonely, worried or anxious'.


Health chiefs warned thousands of patients across the country could be affected

The figures include 201 deaths, more than double the 78 logged two years ago

Safety incidents logged by paramedics England skyrocketed 77% in the last year

The NHS ambulance crisis has led to a surge in avoidable deaths and injuries  with response times for emergency call-outs at record highs.

Heart attack patients can now expect to wait an hour after a 999 call, which health bosses have blamed on record demand following the pandemic.

Serious safety incidents logged by ambulance trusts in England have skyrocketed 77 per cent in the last year compared to before the pandemic, official figures show.

They are cases in which an error or lack of care resulted in unexpected or avoidable death, or serious harm.

There were 551 serious safety incidents in the 12 months to March 2022, compared to 312 in the year to March 2020.

The most recent data include 201 unintended deaths, more than double the pre-pandemic number.

Health chiefs warned thousands of patients across the country could be let down by the struggling ambulance service, as not all staff report their concerns.

A mother today told how her nine-year-old daughter fractured her skull when she fell off her bike but was told the ambulance wait would be 10 hours.

The case should have been classified as an 'urgent' category three case, meaning an ambulance should have arrived within 120 minutes.

The number of safety incidents logged by ambulance trusts in England has skyrocketed 77 per cent in the last year compared to before the pandemic, official figures show. The reports  which paramedics log with the NHS when an incident risks long-term harm or death to a patient  jumped from 312 in the year to March 2020 to 551 in the 12 months to March 2022. The figures, which mainly reflect harm due to 'access, admission or transfer' problems, include 201 unintended deaths, more than double the 78 logged two years ago

NHS England data shows medics took an average of one hour, one minute and three seconds last month to respond to emergency calls, such as heart attacks, strokes, burns and epilepsy, in March. The figure is up from 42 minutes and seven seconds in February and is the longest time on record (red bars). It is also more than triple the NHS target of 18 minutes

WHAT DO THE LATEST NHS PERFORMANCE FIGURES SHOW? The overall waiting list has jumped to 6.2million. This is up from 6.1million in January and is the highest number since records began in August 2007. There were 23,281 people waiting more than two years to start treatment at the end of February, down slightly from January but nine times more than April 2021. The number of people waiting more than a year to start hospital treatment was 299,478 in February, down from 311,528 the previous month. A record 22,506 people had to wait more than 12 hours in A&E departments in England in March. The figure is up from 16,404 in February and is the highest for any calendar month since record began in 2010. A total of 136,297 people waited at least four hours from the decision to admit to admission in March, another all-time high. Just 71.6 per cent of patients were seen within four hours at A&Es last month, the lowest percentage ever recorded. NHS standards set out that 95 per cent should be admitted, transferred or discharged within the four-hour window. The average category one response time  calls from people with life-threatening illnesses or injuries  was nine minutes and 35 seconds. This is up from eight minutes and 51 seconds in February and is the longest average response time since current records began in August 2017. Ambulances took an average of one hour, one minute and three seconds last month to respond to category two calls, such as burns, epilepsy and strokes. This is up from 42 minutes and seven seconds in February and is the longest time on record for this category of call-outs. Response times for category three calls  such as late stages of labour, non-severe burns and diabetes  averaged three hours, 28 minutes and 13 seconds. This is up from two hours, 16 minutes and 13 seconds in February and is again a record. Advertisement

The ambulance safety incidents data, obtained by the BBC, do not all relate to long ambulance delays.

But wait times for the most to least life-threatening ambulance calls all hit record levels in March, figures show.

The average category one response time  calls from people with life-threatening illnesses or injuries  was nine minutes and 35 seconds, only slightly over the nine minute one second target.

But ambulances took an average of one hour, one minute and three seconds to respond to category two calls, such as burns, epilepsy and strokes.

The NHS target is for these patients to be seen within 18 minutes.

Response times for category three calls  such as late stages of labour, non-severe burns and diabetes  averaged three hours, 28 minutes and 13 seconds.

Category threes are supposed to be treated within two hours.

All of the waits are the longest time since records began in August 2017.

One unidentified paramedic told the BBC that the waits were having a 'dangerous impact' on the safety of patients.

He said: 'We are doing the job to provide emergency care and to save lives, but actually now we are just an extended ward of the hospital.

'I'm meant to care for a patient who had been in the back of my ambulance for 14 hours, but nobody has ever really taught me how to look after someone like that.'

Another unnamed paramedic, who also works as a call handler, told the BBC it is 'soul-destroying' looking at a screen which shows hundreds of people waiting for an ambulance.

She said: 'Do the delays mean people are dying? Absolutely, but we also need to be educating people on when someone really needs an ambulance.'

The medic said an elderly man with abdominal pain - classified as a category two call that should see an ambulance arrive within 18 minutes - waited for 15 hours.

When paramedics eventually arrived, the man had died.

Meanwhile, a mother today told the BBC of how her daughter faced a 10-hour wait for a category two ambulance call.

Sam Clark, from Hertfordshire, said her daughter Willow was left with a fractured skull and a nine-inch cut across her leg after falling off her bike in October.

Ms Clark said it was a 'really bad incident' and passers-by called for an ambulance.

Despite explaining her nine-year-old had suffered a 'severe head injury' and that her leg was 'badly hurt', call handlers said it would be a 10-hour wait so to get to hospital themselves.

Paramedics are supposed to arrive within 18 minutes, on average, for this type of incident, and within 40 minutes for nine in 10 calls.

Willow was immediately admitted to the trauma departments once they got to hospital and medics said she should not have had to move due to injuries to her back and neck.

Ms Clark said: 'It's the first time I've ever had to phone an ambulance and I was so disappointed.

'When we really needed it, help just wasn't there and it should have been.'

The graph shows the NHS England waiting list for routine surgery, such as hip and knee operations (red line), hit a record high 6.18million in February. The figure is 46 per cent higher than pre-pandemic levels and 1.3 per cent more than in January. Official figures also revealed that the number of patients forced to wait more than two years (yellow bars) stood at 23,281 in February, which is 497 patients (two per cent) less than one month earlier

NHS data shows a record 22,506 people had to wait more than 12 hours in March from a decision to admit to actually being admitted (yellow bars). The number is up from 16,404 in February, signalling a 37 per cent month-on-month jump, and is the highest since records began in August 2010. And just 71.6 per cent of patients in England were seen within four hours at A&Es last month, the lowest percentage in records going back to November 2010 (red line)

Willow's case was not logged as a serious safety incident because it did not cause her long-term harm or death.

East of England Ambulance Service said it asked patients to get to emergency departments themselves at the time because it was under pressure from a high volume of 999 calls.

Dr Katherine Henderson, an A&E consultant and president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, told the BBC: 'There is a crisis in our ability to get an ambulance reliably to someone who needs one.

'The fact that we are struggling to guarantee somebody an ambulance in a timely way moves us into a whole new territory as a patient safety issue'.

The Association of Ambulance Chief Executives (AACE), which represents services across the whole UK, told the broadcaster delays transferring patients into hospitals was worsening the ambulance crisis, effectively reducing capacity by a third.

Martin Flaherty, managing director of AACE, said: 'The potential harm... could be impacting thousands of patients every month, with obvious knock-on effects on the morale and wellbeing of staff.

'Every possible effort is being made to prioritise those patients whose conditions are most serious.

'Sadly, given the loss of capacity associated with handover delays, this is simply not always possible to achieve.'

An NHS England spokesperson said: 'The safety of patients is our absolute priority and it is a good thing that more staff are being encouraged to report all incidents to help prevent repetition.

'There's no doubt the last few months have been some of the toughest ever for NHS staff, with ambulances responding to the highest number of 999 calls on record over the past year, while more than a tenth of all hospital beds have been filled by people fit to be discharged to services such as social-care providers.'
Thirteen more children in the UK have been struck down by a mystery hepatitis that has been spotted in more than 20 countries.

There have now been 176 cases of the deadly liver disease among children under the age of 10 in Britain, with the majority (128) in England.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said it was also probing a 'small number' of suspected cases in children over 10.

It came as a child in Ireland has become the latest casualty of the outbreak, with a second child receiving a liver transplant.

The latest death is thought to bring the global fatality toll to nine, with five reported in the US and three in Indonesia. There have been none in Britain so far.

There have been around 350 cases of 'severe hepatitis of unknown origin' in children recorded in 21 countries since April.

At least 26 youngsters have required liver transplants, according to the latest World Health Organization (WHO) update last week.

Experts have warned the current cases may be the tip of the iceberg due to poor surveillance in some countries.

Scientists are puzzled as to what is causing the unusual illness, but the main theory is that it is triggered by a group of viruses that normally cause the common cold.

There have been around 350 cases of 'severe hepatitis of unknown origin' in children recorded in 21 countries since April

Ireland's Health Service Executive (HSE) did not disclose the age of the latest victim but said its cases have been among children under the age of 12.

Since March, six children have been hospitalised with hepatitis in Ireland, which the HSE claimed 'is more than would usually be expected over this period of time'.

The HSE said none of the cases in Ireland were linked and they were not linked to any of the patients in the UK. None had Covid, either.

Ireland is working closely with the WHO and colleagues in the EU and Britain to identify the cause of the illnesses.

Parents are advised to go to their GP if their child develops symptoms of hepatitis, which include pale, grey-coloured stools, very dark urine, or a yellowing of the eyes and skin.

The common viruses that cause hepatitis: hepatitis viruses A, B, C, and E; have not been detected in any of the cases reported worldwide.

In its most recent update on May 9, the WHO said there had been 348 probable cases of hepatitis of unknown origin since the first was reported in Scotland in April.

All of the cases are among children aged 11 months to five years and 'many' tested positive for adenovirus.

The virus has not yet been identified in the liver tissue samples analysed 'and therefore, could be a coincidental rather than a causal factor', the WHO said.

In new guidance this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US has told doctors treating children with hepatitis to take liver samples for analysis.

US STATES WITH CASES: The above map shows the 26 states that have confirmed or suspected hepatitis cases according to the CDC. Massachusetts and Hawaii became the 25th and 26th states to reveal they are probing suspected cases of the illness (yellow), with Puerto Rico also having reported at least one case

Three quarters of the UK's hepatitis-stricken children have tested positive for adenoviruses, analysis suggests.

Scientists are probing whether a mutated strain of adenovirus has evolved to become more severe, or if a lack of social mixing during the pandemic weakened children's immunity. They can't rule out an old Covid infection being involved.

In a bizarre twist last week, health chiefs in the UK are also investigating whether 'dog exposures' are to blame.

The UKHSA said last week that a 'high' number of the British children with hepatitis were from families which own dogs.

Officials did not explain how dogs could potentially be to blame, but they are known carriers of adenovirus strains.

However, health officials have ruled out the Covid vaccine as a possible cause because the majority of the ill British children haven't been vaccinated due to their young age.

Hepatitis is usually rare in children, but experts have already spotted more cases in the UK since January than they would normally expect in a year.
Survivors of heart attacks could have better life expectancy as scientists have developed a new treatment that can mend damaged heart tissue.

Human hearts are very poor at repairing themselves  after a heart attack, scar tissue is left which is less elastic.

But now scientists from Germany, Sweden and the drug company AstraZeneca have created a new therapy using stem cells that could do this more efficiently.

They were able to regenerate heart cells in pigs using human ventricular progenitor (HVPs) cells.

These cells play a crucial role in the formation of the organ during development and can turn into specialised heart cells where required.

Reported in the journal Nature Cell Biology, the scientists hope to start clinical studies in humans within the next two years.

Human hearts are very poor at repairing themselves  after a heart attack, scar tissue is left which is less elastic. But now scientists have developed a new treatment using stem cells (stock)

WHAT ARE STEM CELLS? Stem cells are a basic type of cell that can change into another type of more specialized cell  such as bone, muscle or cartilage  through a process known as differentiation. Think of stem cells as a fresh ball of clay that can be shaped and morphed into any cell in the body. Babies have more stem cells because they grow in embryos as embryonic stem cells, used to help the rapidly growing baby form the millions of different cell types it needs to grow before birth. In adults they act as repair cells, used to replace those we lose through damage or ageing. The use of the cells is increasingly being used in medicine because they have a unique ability to naturally repair a wide range of injuries inside the body. They have so far been used to regrow torn Achilles tendons and could repair heart muscle which is damaged when the organ fails. Advertisement

Previous studies used heart cells grown from stem cells have resulted in patients suffering side effects such as irregular heartbeats and fatal arrhythmia.

The new approach uses the more flexible HVP cell.

Scientists studied the complex molecular processes involved in the repair of damaged areas of the heart muscle.

The study was carried out by researchers from the Technical University of Munich, Sweden's Karolinska institute and the Covid jab maker AstraZeneca.

Professor Karl Laugwitz of TUM said: 'In laboratory investigations, we were able to show how HVPs can, in a sense, track down damaged regions in the heart, migrate to injury sites and mature into working heart cells', and prevent the formation of scar tissue.

The team used pigs to study the effectiveness of treating a damaged heart because of their physiological similarity to humans.

The researchers said their results show that damage to the heart can be reliably repaired even in large animals with no serious side effects observed.

Dr Regina Fritsche-Danielson, Head of Research and Early Development at AstraZeneca said: 'The treatment successfully demonstrated the formation of new cardiac tissue and importantly, improved cardiac function and reduced scar tissue.'

Professor Kenneth Chien, from the Karolinska Institutet, added: 'This represents the culmination of two decades of our work trying to find the ideal cell to rebuild the heart.'

The next step will be to translate their current research findings to develop a treatment for human heart patients over the coming years.

Many heart disease conditions result in the death of heart muscle cells and blood vessels.

They are replaced by fibrotic scar tissue, which causes further deterioration of heart function.




The nominee to serve as South Korea's new point man on North Korea said Thursday he will "positively consider" a push for visiting Pyongyang as a presidential envoy to meet leader Kim Jong-un.







Speaking to lawmakers during his confirmation hearing, Kwon Young-se, a veteran politician tapped as unification minister, said he will discuss the issue with the other members of President Yoon Suk-yeol's national security team, after assuming the post.







"Whether it's in the form of a special envoy or anything else, I personally hope to have an opportunity for candid talks on improving inter-Korean relations, including denuclearization, after considering relations between the Koreas," he said.







His message adds to speculation that Yoon of the conservative People Power Party, who has signaled a "principles-based" tough approach toward the nuclear-armed North, may seek to send a special delegate there in a bid for a breakthrough in frosty inter-Korean relations. Even if the Yoon government offers to send a special envoy to Pyongyang, it is uncertain whether the reclusive Kim regime will accept the proposal, given its years-long refusal to resume dialogue.







Regarding Yoon's comments during his campaign of a possible need for a preemptive strike against the North, Kwon made clear this was not an option to be sought hastily due to several realistic constraints.







"We will first (try to) bring them to dialogue before talking about regime stability or economic assistance," he said.







Taking office earlier this week, Yoon stated he will offer an "audacious plan" to help improve the North's economy if the reclusive country takes steps to abandon its nuclear weapons. (Yonhap)






Most smokers diagnosed with head and neck cancer were still puffing on cigarettes two years after treatment, a new study finds.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis, tracked 89 people in their 60s who smoked at least five cigarettes a day when they were diagnosed.

Of the 61 who were still alive two years after treatment, as many as 38  or 60 percent  were still smokers.

The researcher team suggested many failed to give up smoking because they went 'cold turkey' at diagnosis  cutting out all cigarettes  risking a relapse. They called for smokers who were suffering from cancer to be offered counselling and medication to help them quit the habit.

Smokers with the cancers were three times more likely to quit in the first six months after diagnosis than at any other time, they said.

The above graph shows the proportion of patients with head or neck cancer that were still smoking (dark blue) or had quit (brown area) from six to 24 months following treatment

The above shows the proportion of patients diagnosed with head or neck cancer who were still smoking (dark blue), had stopped smoking (brown) or died (light blue) from six to 24 months following treatment. All had smoked at the time of diagnosis

About 66,000 Americans are diagnosed with head and neck cancer every year, estimates suggest, with up to three in five surviving for half a decade after diagnosis.

Tobacco and alcohol both raise someone's risk of suffering from the diseases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.

But occupational exposures  such as to dust or asbestos on building sites  or catching certain viruses can also raise the risk.

What is head and neck cancer? Head and neck cancers include those that start in several places in the head and throat. These can include the sinuses  spaces behind the nose , the tongue, the larynx or voice box, and the roof of the mouth. About 66,000 Americans are diagnosed with these cancers every year, estimates suggest. Survival rates show up to three in five will survive for half a decade following diagnosis. Symptoms of the cancers include the following: Swelling in the jaw;

Unusual bleeding or pain in mouth;

Lump or thickening in affected area;

Bleeding through the nose;

Blocked sinuses that don't clear. Scientists say alcohol and tobacco are the major risk factors for the cancers. But occupational exposures  such as to dust or asbestos on building sites  and catching certain viruses could also raise someone's risk. Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Advertisement

In the study  published Thursday in JAMA Otolaryngology  scientists tracked patients who came to the University of Minnesota's head and neck surgery clinic between 2009 and 2017.

Participants had been smoking for at least 16 years on average, and had attempted to quit about five times.

In the first six months after surgery 32 smokers quit (32 percent), but 52 continued to use cigarettes.

By the two years mark of the patients still alive there were 23 (40 percent) who had smoked at diagnosis but since quit.

Over this period eight smokers who managed to quit later relapsed.

A total of 27 patients died.

The study did not look into methods smokers used to drop cigarettes.

However, the medical researcher who led the study, Dr Tyler van Heest, and others wrote in the paper: 'Among active smokers with throat and neck cancer, prior tobacco use cessation attempts are most often un-assisted "cold turkey" attempts.

'An intervention combining cognitive behavioral therapy and [medication] was the only intervention to show significantly higher smoking cessation rates compared with a usual care control group.'

They pointed to a 2020 study which found smokers with the cancers who were given twice weekly counselling sessions and medication were twice as likely to quit as those who only got counselling sessions.

Smokers who successfully quit the habit had used cigarettes for about 16 years on average, and were having about 12 cigarettes a day when they were diagnosed with the cancers.

They had tried to quit about 10 times previously, with the longest time they went without cigarettes being a year and one month.

For comparison, among those who did not quit they had been smoking for 28 years on average, and were having 18 cigarettes a day.

They had tried to quit about five times previously, with their longest period without cigarettes being 306 days.

The study also found smokers were most likely to try to drop the habit within the first six months of diagnosis.

The scientists suggested this may have been because they were motivated by the recent diagnosis, and were getting less enjoyment or ease from smoking.

They added that cigarettes could also be triggering pain in the throat due to the impact of chemotherapy and other cancer treatments.

They concluded: 'The results of this cohort study suggest that a significant proportion of patients with head and neck cancer who are daily smokers at the time of diagnosis continue to smoke after treatment.

'Those who successfully quit smoking were most likely to do so in the first six months after treatment, which could potentially serve as a preferred window for smoking cessation interventions.'
North Carolina has doubled its reported total of hepatitis cases, from four to nine, as the mysterious infections continue to pop up around the country.

State health officials reported the updated figures on Wednesday night, WRAL reports. North Carolina was among the first states to report a case of the disease late last month.

In total, the U.S. has recorded 115 confirmed or suspected cases of the condition in 26 states and Puerto Rico. Five children died from the disease, and 15 required liver transplants.

Missouri officials also increased the state's running total of confirmed and suspected hepatitis cases to ten on Wednesday as well.

Also Thursday, Irish officials reported the country's first death from the condition, marking at least ten worldwide from the mysterious liver illness.

The exact cause of the mysterious hepatitis is currently unknown. The adenovirus - which is often associated with the common cold - is the lead suspect, though not all children who have had the disease so far have tested positive for it.

Q&A: What is the mysterious global hepatitis outbreak and what is behind it? What is hepatitis? Hepatitis is inflammation of the liver that is usually caused by a viral infection or liver damage from drinking alcohol. Some cases resolve themselves, with no ongoing issues, but a fraction can be deadly, forcing patients to need liver transplants to survive. What are the symptoms? People who have hepatitis generally have fatigue, loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, dark urine, light-colored stools and joint pain. They may also suffer from jaundice  when the skin and whites of the eyes turn yellow. Why are experts concerned? Hepatitis is usually rare in children, but experts have already spotted more cases in the current outbreak than they would normally expect in a year. Cases are of an 'unknown origin' and are also severe, according to the World Health Organization. It has caused up to two deaths and 18 liver transplants. What are the top theories? Co-infection Experts say the cases may be linked to adenovirus, commonly associated with colds, but further research is ongoing. This, in combination with Covid infections, could be causing the spike in cases. The WHO reported adenovirus has been detected in at least 74 of the cases. At least 20 of the children tested positive for the coronavirus. Weakened immunity British experts tasked with investigating the spate of illnesses believe the endless cycle of lockdowns may have played a contributing role. Restrictions may have weakened children's immunity because of reduced social mixing, leaving them at heightened risk of adenovirus. This means even 'normal' adenovirus could be causing the severe outcomes, because children are not responding to it how they did in the past. Adenovirus mutation Other scientists said it may have been the adenovirus that has acquired 'unusual mutations'. This would mean it could be more transmissible or better able to get around children's natural immunity. New Covid variant UKHSA officials included 'a new variant of SARS-CoV-2' in their working hypotheses. Covid has caused liver inflammation in very rare cases during the pandemic, although these have been across all ages rather than isolated in children. Environmental triggers The CDC has noted environmental triggers are still being probed as possible causes of the illnesses. These could include pollution or exposure to particular drugs or toxins. Advertisement

Cases of the mysterious hepatitis have been detected in 26 states, including: Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wisconsin.

At least one case has also been reported in the territory of Puerto Rico.

The CDC has refused to reveal where the five U.S. deaths occurred, citing 'confidentiality issues'.

But at least one was in Wisconsin, where the Department of Health confirmed last month it was probing a fatality linked to the illness.

In a press conference last week, the CDC's deputy director for infectious diseases, Dr Jay Butler said most of the youngsters had 'fully recovered' following the illness.

He said scientists were still probing cases to establish a cause but that adenoviruses were 'top of the list'.

However, Butler added it was unclear whether an adenovirus infection alone was causing the illness or if it was linked to an immune reaction to a particular strain or something the children had been exposed to.

He stressed, however, that the CDC was not recording a significantly higher number of hepatitis cases in children than it expected for this time of year.

'I think we are seriously considering whether or not this may be something that has happened ata low level for a number of years, and we just haven't documented it,' he said.

Last week the World Health Organization said it was investigating 50 possible causes of the illness.

Hepatitis is normally rare in children, but earlier this year the UK raised the alarm over a mysterious outbreak in children after spotting more cases in January than it would normally expect.

Other countries quickly followed, with the U.S. reporting its first nine cases in Alabama last month. Each of those children required hospital care.

CDC chiefs admitted they had been aware of the cases but did not raise an alert initially because it appeared to be an isolated incident.

They have since issued a health notice asking any states with mysterious hepatitis cases to report them.

Top experts fear health officials will not get to the bottom of what is behind the outbreak for at least another two months, however.

Parents are being told that despite the spate of cases there is an 'extremely low' risk of their child coming down with hepatitis.

They are being advised to keep an eye out for the key warning signs, however, been told that their children face a very low risk of coming down with hepatitis.

Jaundice  the yellowing of the skin and whites of eyes  is the most common sign, followed by vomiting and pale stools.

Dr Meera Chand, the director of emerging infections at the UK Health Security Agency, said: 'It's important parents know the likelihood of their child developing hepatitis is extremely low.

'However, we continue to remind everyone to be alert to the signs of hepatitis  particularly jaundice, look for a yellow tinge in the whites of the eyes  and contact your doctor if you are concerned.

'Our investigations continue to suggest that there is an association with adenovirus and our studies are now testing this association rigorously.

'We are also investigating other contributors, including prior SARS-COV-2, and are working closely with the NHS and academic partners to understand the mechanism of liver injury in affected children.'

Most of the cases have been detected in the UK and U.S., which have some of the strongest surveillance systems.

The liver inflammation condition has also been spotted in Spain (22), Israel (12), Italy (9) and Denmark (6), among other countries.
A mother-of-two's jaw 'turned to mush' and lost all of her teeth after what she believes was a bungled root canal.

Meighan Maselli, from Saratoga County in New York state, had root canal treatment in 2017. What was supposed to be a routine dental procedure turned out to be the start of an 18-month nightmare.

She claims she heard a 'crack' in her jaw as she was treated, but did not flag it because she presumed it was part of the treatment.

But within days she was in agony and went to the local emergency department, where she was diagnosed with osteomyelitis in her jaw  infection in the bone.

It can occur after a broken bone, when normally harmless bacteria can seep inside a bone and infect it.

Looking back, Ms Maselli believes the crunch she heard on the dentist chair was part of her jawbone breaking.

Over the following six months when the pain did not subside and her jaw began to rot, she was forced to go under the knife.

Medics replaced her entire lower jaw with metal rods and took her teeth out for good to prevent further infection.

She was forced to live with rods in her face for a full year before doctors grafted her a new jawbone using bones from other parts of her body.

The former nursing assistant, who is now unemployed, said she has lost 170 pounds (77kg) since the start of her ordeal because she struggles to eat.

Meighan Maselli (pictured before her dental ordeal), from Saratoga County in New York state, had root canal treatment and two teeth removed in 2017

What was supposed to be a routine dental procedure turned out to be the start of an 18-month nightmare. She claims she heard a 'crack' in her jaw as she was treated, but did not flag it because she presumed it was the sound of her teeth being pulled. She's pictured above after a third operation in September 2019, where her jaw had to be rebuilt

Medics replaced her entire lower jaw with metal rods and took her teeth out (shown) for good to prevent further infection

Ms Maselli, who still suffers from excruciating pain, said she barely leaves her home in case she gets cold, because shivering tenses her jaw and causes 'the worst pain'.

She said: 'I was a beautiful girl with a young son at the time and he is traumatized by this.'

In April 2017, Ms Maselli had a root canal and two molars removed by a surgeon, as they had become too infected to be saved by a filling.

She said: 'I felt it, this hurt  he couldn't get them out and I heard a crack. I didn't know if it was jaw or tooth.

'The next day it was painful. I didn't have anything, no antibiotics.'

After five days of non-stop pain, she went to hospital where an X-ray revealed she had osteomyelitis in her lower jawbone.

WHAT IS OSTEOMYELITIS? Osteomyelitis is a painful bone infection that usually affects the legs. It usually goes away if treated early with antibiotics. If not, it can cause permanent damage. Anyone can develop osteomyelitis and it can occur spontaneously. Around two to five people per 10,000 suffer from the condition. But people are more at risk if they have recently broken a bone, suffered an injury that has left a wound or have a weakened immune system. Osteomyelitis sufferers are usually treated with a four to 12-week course of antibiotics, which may initially require a hospital stay so the drugs can be administered through a drip in more severe cases. However, some people require surgery to remove the damaged part of the bone if a build up of pus develops inside it or if the infection has lasted for a long time and caused the bone to die. Sometimes multiple surgeries are required to treat the infection. Medics might need to use muscle and skin from other parts of the body to repair the area near the affected bone. Advertisement

Most cases of osteomyelitis are caused by staphylococcus bacteria, types of germs commonly found on the skin or in the nose of even healthy individuals.

Germs can enter a bone in a variety of ways, including the bloodstream, which is why it is more common after a broken bone.

People are more susceptible if they have a weakened immune system. It is most common in children.

Ms Maselli claims hospital doctors refused to treat her and told her to go back to the dentist.

She went home, but woke up the next day with a huge abscess under her chin and green pus came out of her jaw whenever she touched it.

Ms Maselli rushed to the emergency department at Albany Memorial Hospital and was given a two-week course of antibiotics.

She said: 'The abscess was still there and it's just getting worse. It hadn't gone down at all, every night I was in pain.

'I was on the floor crying and there was nothing I could do. I didn't sleep, I couldn't eat, I couldn't do anything.

'I had green pus dripping down the back of my mouth, when you pressed on my jaw green stuff came out the back.'

In November 2017, she visited Albany Medical Center, and after seeing her condition, nurses quickly rushed her to see a doctor.

She said: 'He came out and said "get her down to CAT scan now".

'My jaw, from the back of my mouth to the middle of the chin where the abscess was, was gone.

'He said "your teeth are sitting in mush" and there was nothing they could do for me.'

After being redirected from two more medical facilities, she was finally sent to an oral surgeon at Montefiore Hospital, 170 miles from her home city.

She said: 'They said they were going to take out the lower half of my infected jaw and were essentially going to clean it all out and put a rod in there.

'I was petrified, I was so scared. My biggest fear was my teeth, always has been; I didn't have bad teeth I always went to the dentist.'

Osteomyelitis sufferers are usually treated with a four to 12-week course of antibiotics, which may initially require a hospital stay so the drugs can be administered through a drip in more severe cases.

However, some people require surgery to remove the damaged part of the bone if a build up of pus develops inside it or if the infection has lasted for a long time.

Sometimes multiple surgeries are required to treat the infection. Medics might need to use muscle and skin from other parts of the body to repair the area near the affected bone.

Ms Maselli had her first six-hour surgery in January 2018 and went home a few days later, although her face was still hugely swollen.

She said: 'My whole face was numb, it had swollen up to the size of a balloon. I've had multiple caesareans and this has all been worse.

Ms Maselliwoke up the next day with a huge abscess under her chin and green pus came out of her jaw whenever she touched it. Ms Maselli rushed to the emergency department at Albany Memorial Hospital and was given a two-week course of antibiotics

'I didn't know your face could swell as big as it did, I didn't know it was humanly possible.'

In March 2018, during a check up, she was told the rod had made the infection worse and she must have another eight-hour surgery to rebuild her jaw using bone from her hip.

She said: 'I was so scared when they were talking about taking bones from another place in my body  I had never been through anything like this.

'I came out with a scar on my hip four inches long that goes right up to middle of my back.

'The lower part of my face is numb, from the middle of my lip to the corner of my mouth and my chin down I have no feeling, and this started after that surgery.'

Despite all the procedures, her face still felt irritated and she returned to Albany Medical Center in June 2018.

Another CAT scan showed the hip bone that had been moved to her face had died  which can occur due to a lack of blood supply  and was moving up through her lip.

Surgeons removed it from her jaw and tried to clean the area, and also removed all her teeth to prevent any further infection from spreading.

After they were satisfied that any infection from the dead bone had passed, she was underwent a third operation in September 2019 rebuild her jaw using bone from her shinbone.

During the 18-hour procedure, medics also took muscle from her breast to reconstruct part of her neck.

She said: 'I remember crying, I had a scar on my chest that went down below my breast all the way up to my neck, and I had staples all the way round.

'I had tubes coming out of my legs and a breathing tube.

Ms Maselli had her first six-hour surgery in January 2018 and went home a few days later, although her face was still hugely swollen. She said: 'My whole face was numb, it had swollen up to the size of a balloon. I've had multiple caesareans and this has all been worse'

'My face was so swollen, it was purple and had blood all over, they tried to clean me but there was so much blood. I had chunks of blood in my hair and ears.'

Ms Maselli said: 'It was scary  I had no skin, it was like yellow. It was all muscle, you could see the muscle they used from my breast.'

Since then she has had three more surgical procedures to thin down the thick skin on her neck that had been added from her breast to protect her jaw during the surgery.

Ms Maselli said her frequent hospitalisations and surgery complications have stopped her from working since her original root canal in 2017, forcing her 19-year-old daughter Deonna act as her carer.

She said: 'When I do eat it's always soft foods, I live on eggs, pasta, chicken and hamburgers.

'But textures are hard for me so typically I eat a few bites then my jaw gets tight and tired.

'I can't even go outside in the winter months unless absolutely necessary because shivering is the absolute worst.

'Because it tenses your jaw so much, for me, it's probably the worst pain of this.'

While fortunately all her procedures were covered by insurance, she wants to share her story to help others suffering as a result of medical complications to feel less alone.

She said: 'People shouldn't be treated this way, where do you go when it's too hard medically to prove who is at fault?

'I've called so many doctors to see if they can help me and everybody tells me to go back where it started. I cry every day. It is the worst.

'The first thought and last thought of my days are always regarding my face in some way.

'The amount of stress on my body, it's like going to bed being 32 and waking up looking 70. I want other people like me know that they're not alone.'

Ms Maselli added: 'I've lost half my breast as part of this surgery I had, I have got scars on my hip, my leg and my face.

'I'm 36 now and I'm disabled, I have no teeth, and I'm stuck at home not working

'We're struggling, my kid can't leave home to go to college as she is working full time to help me pay my bills.

'Half of my jaw had been eaten away before anyone took me seriously. If I can avoid looking in the mirror I do.'
A U.S. Government-backed website used by up to 300,000 people a month to help them fight drug addiction could cause deaths because it contains 'invalid' information, a doctor has claimed.

The site  called FindTreatment.gov  was set up in 2019 by then-President Donald Trump to link hundreds of thousands of Americans to their nearest clinic for battling drug dependency.

But Dr Cara Poland, an addiction specialist at a hospital in Michigan, warned the site now has 'out-of-date' information on what addictions clinics treat, and which insurance plans and age groups they accept.

Other experts alleged the site was not 'gold standard', and needed to include information on the quality of care given by clinics.

But a spokesman for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)  which runs the site  rejected the claims, arguing they made weekly updates whenever they were made aware of changed details.

He added that the website also surveys all clinics every year to ensure its information is up to date.

It came as the U.S. hit a record 108,000 deaths from drug overdoses in 2021, with opioids such as fentanyl behind more than three in five fatalities.

Experts called for action, saying the figures showed the U.S. had passed yet another 'devastating milestone'. A spokesman for the White House's drug addiction office called the figures 'unacceptable'.

Pictured above is the website's homepage, which allows Americans to search for the nearest clinic specializing in treating drug addiction near them

But Dr Cara Poland, an addiction specialist at a hospital in Michigan, (left) warns the site now has 'out-of-date' information on it which could lead to deaths.

The above graph shows the CDC estimates for the number of deaths triggered by drug overdoses every year across the United States. It reveals figures have now reached a record high, and are surging on the last three years

Record 108,000 Americans died of a drug overdose in 2021 Deaths from drug overdoses in the U.S. hit their highest level since records began last year, provisional figures showed Wednesday  with opioids including fentanyl behind nearly three in five fatalities. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated there were 107,622 fatalities linked to overdoses during 2021, or one every five minutes, marking a 15 percent uptick on the previous year's record of 93,655 drug deaths and the seventh 12-month period in a row where they have risen. Opioids including fentanyl were linked to the majority of fatalities, or 80,800, followed by psychostimulants such as methamphetamine at nearly 33,000. It was possible for more than one drug to be linked to a fatality. Only one state  Hawaii  saw its deaths from overdoses decline last year, with Appalachian states like West Virginia, Tennessee and Pennsylvania remaining the nation's hotspots for fatalities. Advertisement

The website carries the details of more than 13,000 clinics across all 50 U.S. states.

They offer people help with addictions to all drugs including fentanyl, cocaine and methamphetamines.

But slamming the website, Poland warned KHN: 'It's scary, because if you go to use the site, it's got invalid information on it.

'[With this] people give up and they can't find treatment, and there we risk losing a life.

'It's being treated as a gold standard tool, but it's not.'

Frank Greenagel, an addiction social worker in New Jersey, told the publication that the website needed to allow patients to sort clinics by quality.

He said it was 'misguided' to rely on state licensing, because clinics often list services on these that they never actually provide.

Other doctors, however, said the problems the website faced were more likely down to a lack of addiction treatment clinics available  an issue the website alone cannot solve.

Currently, the site allows users to filter clinics by treatment  detox, inpatient or outpatient  and whether or not they offer medication for opioid use disorder.

It does not include categories allowing clinics to be listed by the types of care offered, or whether they are more successful.

The initial vision when the website was founded was that it would make it easier to link Americans struggling with drugs to their nearest addiction clinic.

A SAMHSA spokesman said the website 'endeavors to keep tools current'.

When it is told about inaccurate information  such as an incorrect address, telephone number or type of service offered  an update is made.

They added that the website generally trusts state health departments to ensure that any clinic they are accrediting offers good quality treatment.

When the website was launched then-counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway said: 'We know that the drug crisis is indiscriminate, so we want the response to be indiscriminate.

'We designed it with human-centered principles in mind. We used real words for real people.'

It comes as deaths from drug overdoses in the U.S. hit their highest level since records began last year, provisional figures showed Wednesday  with opioids including fentanyl behind nearly three in five fatalities.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated there were 107,622 fatalities linked to drug overdoses during 2021, or one every five minutes, marking a 15 percent uptick on the previous year's record of 93,655 drug deaths and the seventh 12-month period in a row where they have risen.

Opioids including fentanyl were linked to the majority of fatalities, or 80,800, followed by psychostimulants such as methamphetamine at nearly 33,000. It was possible for more than one drug to be linked to a fatality.

The above map shows the percentage change in drug overdose deaths by state across the U.S., each has seen a rise except for Hawaii. In Oklahoma deaths did not increase or decrease compared to previous years

Opioids including fentanyl (black line) were behind almost three in five fatalities from a drug overdose, CDC figures showed. The black opioids line includes deaths from synthetic opioids (brown) natural and semi-synthetic opioids (green), heroin (blue), and methadone (purple)

Only one state  Hawaii  saw its deaths from overdoses decline last year, with Appalachian states like West Virginia, Tennessee and Pennsylvania remaining the nation's hotspots for fatalities.

To combat the growing drug crisis last month President Joe Biden's administration announced a national drug control strategy that aimed to tackle the crisis focused on untreated addiction and trafficking.

Survey figures from 2020 showed that among the 41.1 million people who needed treatment for substance use disorders (SUD), only 2.7 million (6.5 percent) had received treatment at a specialist facility in the last year.

The administration is seeking to expand access to life-saving treatments such as naloxone, drug test strips and syringe services programs.

It has also requested a budget increase for border control and drug enforcement agencies to stem the flow of illegal drugs.
Rolls-Royces outgoing boss delivered some much-need cheer to long-suffering shareholders as the company emerges from the pandemic.

At his final annual general meeting as chief executive of the engineering giant, Warren East hailed significant progress as the return of aeroplanes to the skies has boosted business.

The FTSE 100 group  which is paid by customers according to how many hours aircraft fitted with its engines fly  was hammered by the grounding of planes in the pandemic.

Recovery: At his final annual general meeting as chief exec Warren East (pictured) hailed 'significant progress' as the return of planes to the skies boosts business

East, who in February announced he would leave at the end of the year, also welcomed higher defence spending.

Speaking at the company AGM, the 60-year-old said: We have made significant progress on the path to recovery from the impact of Covid-19 and are emerging as a better balanced and more resilient business with a sustainable future.

East added: It has been a privilege to lead Rolls-Royce.

Shares in the company, which is still looking for a successor, rose 1.1 per cent, or 0.88p, to 81.38p.

The Derby-based engineer expects to turn a profit for the second year in a row, after a 4billion loss in 2020. The firm was forced to raise 7.3billion of emergency funds in 2020 to stay afloat.

In a trading update ahead of the AGM, Rolls said flying hours of passenger planes fitted with its engines were up 42 per cent higher in the first four months of the year than in the same period a year earlier.

Passenger demand is recovering on routes where travel restrictions have been lifted, such as in Europe and the Americas, but additional Covid-19 restrictions have resulted in fewer flights in China where the situation is still evolving, said East, who has overseen 10,000 job cuts at Rolls.

Laura Hoy, an analyst at investment firm Hargreaves Lansdown, said: Rolls-Royce hasnt been able to catch a break over the past few years, but were finally starting to see green shoots amid a budding recovery.
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John Allore, 58, was 14-years-old when his sister, Theresa disappeared from her Quebec college dormitory in 1978. He has spent the last 20 years obsessively investigating her murder that remains unsolved to this day

A man who has spent the past two decades desperately trying to prove that his teenage sister's 'overdose death' was actually a brutal murder has spoken out about his roller coaster 20-year investigation, detailing how he exposed a myriad of horrifying new evidence, from links to a rapist serial killer - to a deathbed confession from a potential suspect.

John Allore was just 14 years old when his older sister, Theresa, was murdered in 1978, in a case that remains unsolved to this day. In 2002, when internet crime blogs were virtually nonexistent, Allore created the website, 'Who Killed Theresa?' and dove headlong into solving the mystery that haunted his family for years.

After a brief, botched police investigation, Theresa's case went cold until 2001 when Allore launched his own post-mortem inquiry into her devastating death, which he documented tirelessly on his website.

His investigation - which was marked by many twists, turns, roadblocks, corruption, fallouts with police, and a suspected cover-up - eventually led him to a convicted rapist and murderer named Luc Yolande Gregoire.

In the process, Allore reconnected with his high school girlfriend, Patricia Pearson, who had since gone on to become a famous crime writer, and together they detailed his decades-long research in the book, 'Wish You Were Here,' released this earlier this month in the US.

But the biggest bombshell had yet to come: a deathbed confessional from a local criminal with a long rap sheet, named Regis Lachance - sending Allore back down the rabbit hole to square one: Who really killed Theresa Allore?

In the fall of 1978, the 19-year-old straight-A student went missing from her dorm room at Champlain College in Quebec. She wasn't seen again until five months later, when the spring thaw revealed her semi-nude body, lying face down in ten inches of marshy backwash. The coroner observed strangulation marks around her neck, but strangely omitted that detail from his final report.

Cops immediately dismissed her death as a drug related, despite toxicology indicating that there was no trace of drugs or alcohol in her system. 'People who overdose aren't found naked, lying facedown in a water ditch,' said Allore. 'My sister was murdered.'

So began, one loving, thoughtful family's descent into a living nightmare.

Now almost 45 years later, Allore, 58, is the father of three daughters, living in North Carolina and working as the budget director for the city of Durham.

He admits that he didn't think much about his sister's death in the years interim, 'We tried to operate as best we could as if nothing had changed and didn't really realize we were doing a fairly crappy job at it,' he tells DailyMail.com.

But in 2001, 23 years after Theresa's disappearance, a knock on his front door brought it all back. Local police in his small North Carolina suburb were investigating the murder of a young girl that they suspected was buried under his house.

'I figured, if this Podunk police force can go to that level of effort, what the hell is wrong with the Quebec police?' Thus prompted Allore's obsessive 20-year-long quest for answers in the unsolved murder of his sister.

Theresa Allore, 19, mysteriously vanished from her dormitory at Champlain College in Quebec in 1978. Her body was found five months later, lying naked, face down in a marshy farm culvert, with signs of strangulation around her neck. Despite the unusual circumstances, cops were hard-pressed to attribute her death to a drug overdose even though toxicology reports showed no trace of narcotics in her system

In the months leading up to Theresa's murder, a spate of sexual attacks occurred on campus, but police failed to crack down on the violence. 'I was watching them speculate all these crackpot theories, that she was a runaway, or that she was a drug addict or that she was pregnant and ashamed so she went and hid herself at a monastery, or that she was a lesbian - as if for some reason, that would be cause for you to disappear,' said Allore, (pictured above) with his sister

Theresa's body was found one mile away from her dormitory in a pond formed by the spring runoff. One week later, her disposed wallet was spotted, ten miles away, on farmland off a back-country road. Police speculated that friends of Allore panicked and dumped her body after she accidentally overdosed. 'People who overdose aren't found lying facedown in a water ditch,' said Allore. 'My sister was murdered'

A 'FAMILY'S DESCENT INTO A LIVING HELL' - THERESA VANISHES AMIDST A SPATE OF SEXUAL ATTACKS ON CAMPUS AND COPS SPECULATE DRUG OVERDOSE

'I am an ordinary man with a normal family; it was the circumstances that surrounded us that seemed like fiction,' Allore says in the book.

The last time he saw Theresa was one month before she went missing, over the Thanksgiving holiday in 1978. His mother Marilyn recalls feeling really happy, yet ominously had a strange sense 'that something was about to change.'

In the years between, Allore moved to New York to study performing arts, and eventually settled in North Carolina to raise a family. But as much as he tried putting the past behind him, he was never able to stare down the demons of grief until the murder of a local woman hit too close to home.

Allore reached out to his high school girlfriend, Patricia Pearson, who had carved out an illustrious career in crime writing as an adult. Together, they probed the dark corners of Montreal's seedy underbelly, scavenged through Theresa's police file for clues, cross referenced newspaper archives of crime blotters, interviewed former detectives, friends, potential witnesses, and consulted with dozens of criminologists.

Twenty years later, their potential suspect list has narrowed down to two people: Jean Luc Gregoire, a sexual murderer who died in prison in 2015, and a now-deceased career criminal named Regis LaChance.

There are multiple accounts of where Theresa was last seen on the day she disappeared, November 3, 1978. But a whole week would pass before anyone realized that she was officially missing.

One friend recalled seeing her leave the dining hall on foot around dusk. Another girl was certain that she had seen Theresa on the staircase of her dormitory around 9pm. Nonetheless, when she failed to show up to arranged plans with friends later that night - none of them raised alarm bells.

Her friends began to worry midweek when they hadn't seen, or heard from her. They poked around her room and locker, but nothing looked out of place. They assumed she might have decided to visit friends in Montreal last minute, or perhaps visit her boyfriend out West.

Theresa had a habit of hitchhiking. She lived in a residence about five miles from main campus and many students resorted to hitchhiking if they missed the last bus. Had she set out to buy a pack of cigarettes and met with nefarious forces along the way?

During this time, there had been a series of sexual assaults on campus that were ignored by the police: Did Theresa fall victim to the unknown perpetrator?

At first, police and campus officials treated Theresa's case as a runaway and suggested that she disappeared because she had 'lesbian tendencies' and would probably need psychiatric help when she turned up.

'They speculated all these crackpot theories,' Allore told DailyMail.com, 'They said she was a runaway, drug addict, that she ran off to join a cult, or that she was pregnant and ashamed or that she was a lesbian - none of which make sense or would matter anyways.'

They speculated all these crackpot theories... they said she was a runaway, a drug addict, that she ran off to join a cult

'It drove my parents to be gas-lit, you begin to doubt your own instincts,' Allore said to DailyMail.com.

Theresa's body was found five months later, less than one mile from her dormitory by a muskrat trapper hunting along the banks of a farm drainage ditch.

She had been stripped down to her brassiere and underwear, with bruises under both armpits suggesting she was still alive when her body was dragged to that location. The coroner also observed strangulation marks around her neck, but that information was inexplicably withheld from her family for 20 years.

'It wasn't until I discovered that missing document from the final autopsy, that I began to suspect what I think in my bones always knew: that she was the victim of a sexual murder,' Allore says.

One week after her body was uncovered, Theresa's disposed wallet was found ten miles away, on farmland off a back-country road.

After a quick incompetent investigation, police concluded that the stellar student, who never had any history of drug abuse, had likely become a victim of the 1970s drug culture. They further alleged that her friends panicked and threw her body into a creek. The final coroner's verdict, submitted in 1983 concluded that she died a 'violent death of undetermined nature' and the case went cold.

For decades the Allore family lived without answers. Like many other students at Champlain College, Theresa had a habit of hitchhiking from her dormitory to the main campus. Her family wondered, 'Had she set out to buy a pack of cigarettes and met with nefarious forces along the way? Did she fall victim to the unknown perpetrator that was assaulting girls on campus that fall?' Without any leads, the Allores were forced to accept the unfounded police theory that Theresa died of a drug overdose. Even though it didn't add up, they had no context for doubting their authority at the time. John's older brother, Andre, who was also a student at Champlain College said: 'I thought I hadn't known her as well as I'd assumed'

'I am an ordinary man with a normal family; it was the circumstances that surrounded us that seemed like fiction,' said Allore. The last time he saw his sister was one month before she went missing, over the Thanksgiving holiday in 1978. His mother Marilyn recalls feeling really happy, yet had a strange sense 'that something was about to change.' Allore (center) is pictured next to his brother Andre (right), sister Theresa (far right) and parents Marilyn and Bob. In the aftermath, Allore tells DailyMail.com: 'We tried to operate as best we could as if nothing had changed and didn't really realize we were doing a fairly crappy job at it'

Allore moved to New York to study performing arts, and eventually settled in North Carolina to raise a family. He admits that he didn't think much about his sister's murder in the years interim until a knock on his front door in 2001 would change all that. Local police in his small North Carolina suburb were investigating the murder of a young girl that they suspected was buried under his house. 'I figured, if this Podunk police force can go to that level of effort, what the h*** is wrong with the Quebec police?' Thus began Allore's obsessive two-decade-long DIY- investigation into Theresa's murder

Allore posted his findings to the website, 'Who Killed Theresa Allore?' At first, he said his intention was to catalogue other instances of criminal, investigative failures at the hands of the Quebec police; but eventually his investigation uncovered what he describes as 'police negligence at best, or a coverup at worst.' He unearthed compelling evidence that linked Theresa's murder to a sexual serial killer named Luc Yolande Gregoire

Even though the pieces didn't fit, the family had no context for doubting police authority. John's older brother, Andre, who was also a student at Champlain College at the same time his sister said: 'I thought I hadn't known her as well as I'd assumed.'

For Allore, uneasy acceptance gradually gave way to skepticism and the unsupported police theory that Theresa died of a drug overdose 'wasn't just convenient, it was downright outrageous,' he told DailyMail.com.

To help him with his research, Allore reached out to his high school girlfriend, Patricia Pearson, who had since gone on to become a famous crime writer in adulthood. Together they detailed compelling evidence that Theresa was one of many victims murdered by a previously unknown serial killer named Luc Yolande Gregoire - he died in prison in 2015 after being convicted of only one murder. Shortly after finishing the book, a new breakthrough in the case came in the form of a deathbed confession by a local criminal who admitted to killing and dumping the body of a female coed in 1978

'Why would friends strip Theresa of her clothes and wallet if her overdose was an accident?' he wondered. The notion also seemed 'crazy' to Pearson, who echoed his incredulity: 'Some students took a friend who had died accidentally, and coolly, systematically, turned her into a Jane Doe?'

At the time, Montreal was a boiling pot of violence and Lennoxville, (where Champlain College is located) was 'an area ripe with crime activity, with a vibrant and thriving underworld of what was then, an emerging element of organized crime,' Allore explained.

A spate of sexual attacks occurred on campus in the months leading up to Theresa's murder - but student protests fell on deaf ears as cops remained laser focused on prioritizing property theft crimes.

Multiple victims came forward describing an unidentified assailant as 'basically the same  young man wearing jeans and a green parka,' reported the student newspaper.

In February of 1978, one woman cited as Jane Doe in a local story described how 'a young white man, about five foot four, in blue jeans and a green parka, leapt out from the shadows and grabbed her purse.' When she resisted, he pinned her to the ground and smashed her in the head with a board. The man fled the scene when a neighbor was woken by the screams.

'Will someone have to get raped before the police will stop shrugging off the problem and start trying to solve [it]?' complained one female student in an editorial. By then, there had been as many as eight rapes reported in 1978.

'So all of that told me that these women were an inconvenient truth to the police force,' Allore told DailyMail.com. 'They were more accustomed to playing cops and robbers.'

'It was completely a misogynistic take that women were collateral damage within that crime rubric.'

MISSING EVIDENCE AND POLICE CORRUPTION: JOHN ALLORE LAUNCHES HIS OWN DIY INVESTIGATION

Allore launched his investigation in 2001 by focusing on other unsolved murders that occurred in Quebec during that time. 'A lot of people were under the false assumption that I was trying to find some elusive unifying, serial killer to rule out, but that's not what I was doing,' he says. 'What I was cataloging were instances of criminal, investigative failures at the hands of the Quebec police.'

What he uncovered were two other murders that had taken place within a few mile radius from where Theresa's body was found in Sherbrooke, all within 18 months of one another.

First was 20-year-old, Louise Camirand, a petite brunette woman (similar in appearance to Theresa) who disappeared in March 1977. Camirand's nude body was discovered strangled in a forest, 20 minutes south of Sherbrooke. Her murder remains unsolved.

In the immediate wake of Theresa's disappearance in November 1978, two hunters told police they spotted 'a neatly folded pile of women's clothing on a tree stump in the forest.' Allore later made the connection that Theresa's clothing was a mere hundred meters, on the same side of the road, from where Camirand was found dead.

Ten-year-old Manon Dube disappeared in January 1978, one day after the failed attack on the college coed whose screams alerted neighbors. Like Theresa, Dube was found submerged in water and her body was not far from where Theresa's wallet was found disposed. Her murder also remains unsolved.

Allore learned very early in his bootstrap investigation that the Surete du Quebec (the police force serving the Quebec province) were not going to be helpful in his truth-finding mission.

'They had said I could see all of the contents of my sister's file. They had nothing to hide,' but they changed their minds once Allore was in their office. In an attempt to pacify him, they allowed him access to a handful of witness statements and a few notes from the original investigation, but barred him from reading the final report, statements from suspects and photos of the crime scene.

Stymying his investigation further was the fact that police destroyed all evidence pertaining to Theresa's case five years after she was murdered - putting a definitive end to the possibility of testing for forensic evidence.

Allore was stonewalled again when he asked for proof of a document authorizing the destruction of critical evidence. The Surete du Quebec corporal in charge glibly responded: 'If it's not in the file, then maybe it got destroyed.'

'At first I thought it was just incompetence, but when you have the Montreal police, the provincial police, the Longueuil police, the Labelle police all systematically disposing of evidence, plus when you have evidence disappearing within the medical labs - that is a systemic failure that points to collusion for me,' says Allore to DailyMail.com.

Theresa's body was discovered just one mile from her dormitory in April, 1979. 15 miles away, hunters reported they had seen a neatly folded pile of womens clothing on a tree stump in the forest, one day after Theresa went missing. Then, one week after her body was uncovered, a farmer found her wallet 10 miles away, on the side of the road near his field

Allore's investigation was stymied when he discovered that Quebec police destroyed all evidence pertaining to Theresa's case - which ruled out the future possibility of testing for forensic evidence. 'At first I thought it was just incompetence, but when you have the Montreal police, the provincial police, the Longueuil police, the Labelle police all systematically disposing of evidence,' he says, 'That is a systemic failure that points to collusion for me'

A cluster of similar murders and sexual attacks had taken place within a few mile radius from where Theresa's body was found in Sherbrooke, all within 18 months of one another. 'All of them were naked bodies found outdoors, mostly strangled, all of them had odd things with missing purses and shoes,' Allore tells DailyMail.com. Kim Rossmo, a criminologist who pioneered criminal geoprofiling, called it 'highly suspicious, and not likely to be a chance occurrence'

Theresa's red wallet was found disposed among weeds on the side of a back-country road, 10 miles away from where her body was discovered. Her purse was never located. When Allore asked police how the wallet ended up there - they speculated that wild animals might carried it

THREE DEAD FEMALES DUMPED IN FIELDS AND FORESTS: ALLORE LINKS THERESA'S MURDER TO A SEXUAL SERIAL KILLER

Eventually, Allore and Pearson's investigation led them to a man named Jean Luc Gregoire, a diagnosed sociopath who worked as a roofer from Sherbrooke with a drink problem. In 1993, he was convicted of homicide and sentenced to life in prison for abducting 22-year-old Lailanie Silva from her job at 7-Eleven before violently raping and strangling her.

Speaking to multiple criminologists, the amateur sleuths were able to draw parallels to a string of unsolved violent crimes that occurred in Montreal around the same time that Gregoire was out on bail in the late 70s for other crimes.

'There was a wave of sexual murders in the summer of '77, almost one-per-month in Montreal and the surrounding areas.'

Jean Luc Gregoire was a diagnosed sociopath who worked as a roofer in Sherbrooke. He died in 2015 while serving a life sentence in prison for abducting 22-year-old Lailanie Silva from her job at 7-Eleven before violently raping and strangling her in 1993. Allore, thinks he also might have been responsible for the murders of Theresa, Louise Camiron and Manon Dube

The crimes bore striking similarities to Theresa's case: 'All of them were naked bodies found outdoors, mostly strangled, all of them had odd things with missing purses and shoes,' Allore explains.'

All of them describe the modus operandi of their attacker as practically identical to Gregoire, a short guy, with a bowl-haircut, muscular build, strong hands who used a variety of weapons from a roofing tile, to a screwdriver and spoke French and English. 'I mean it was Luc [Gregoire] or somebody astoundingly like Luc.'

Gregoire's crime spree occurred within the vicinity of Champlain College, and where Theresa's wallet was later found.

Through tireless digging, Allore found a police composite drawing of an individual wanted for the rash of sexual crimes in the Montreal paper, in July 1977.

'And it is fr****** Luc Gregoire!' he says. 'The sunglasses, the bowl-cut, the whole d*** thing. the whole thing. And I've never shared it with anybody.'

One of the last assault reports during that time belonged to Ms. X, she was the daughter of the farmer who discovered Theresa's wallet on his property, which notably wasn't far from where 10-year-old Dube's lifeless body was discovered that same year.

According to the statement on file, Ms. X was out jogging on Route 143 on the afternoon of April 30, 1979, when she noticed a man leaning against a parked car, with his pants down exposing himself.

Furthering Allore's suspicion was a previously overlooked report from Ms. X, dated from the fall of 1978 - (just one week before Theresa's death) - detailing a separate incident that occurred around 7:30 at night while she was walking her dog. A man speeding down the empty farm road jumped out of his car and began to chase her. Ms. X was mercifully saved when cops pulled up to write the man a ticket for blocking the road.

Police later told Allore that she had 'made up' the entire story.

What struck co-author Patricia Pearson as unusual was the way Gregoire's cross-referenced the personal belongings of his victims. Theresa's wallet was found so coincidentally on the farm where Ms. X had escaped ambush, and her clothes were seen in the woods not far from Louise Camirand's dead body.

'If this wasn't the same man it was an awfully similar psyche,' wrote Pearson.

A SHOCKING DEATHBED CONFESSION TURNS ALLORE'S CASE UPSIDE DOWN

By 2020, Allore was putting the finishing touches on his book and ready to put the 40 year nightmare that haunted his family to rest. Though he could never be certain without DNA evidence that Jean Luc Gregoire was responsible for Theresa's death, he was able to find closure in what he thought most likely happened.

The Canadian release of his book, 'Wish You Were Here,' garnered tremendous media attention that eventually piqued the interest of a woman who went to the police in September 2021 with information that her father, Gerald Lachance, made a deathbed confession that he 'picked up a girl in Lennoxville in 1978' with his brother, Regis, and they 'had their way with her and disposed of her in a culvert near Compton.'

Allore went back down the rabbit hole, where he still finds himself today.

'The fact of the matter is, there is a profile of two pretty good suspects here,' he says.

'This woman reached out to me because she first told this story to the police and they ignored her for about three months to the point where she almost started to believe that she hadn't met the police.'

He alleges that cops did not dispute the story when he confronted them in December 2021.

'At first I thought, "Do I really wanna go down this path?"' recalls Allore, feeling like he was suddenly on the brink of re-opening Pandora's box. 'But I knew that I had an obligation to pursue it.'

Independently corroborating this woman's claim is a distant cousin named Roger, who also revealed that his father and uncles, were brought in to the police station for questioning in 2004 over a 35-year-old cold case that happened in 1978.

Theresa is pictured with her brother, Andre, who was also a student of Champlain College at the time she was murdered. Andre was the first in the family to raise questions over what happened to Theresa in the mid 1990s. 'Andre was an actor in all of this. Andre was the one who reported her missing. So I would say the trauma runs much deeper with him,' Allore says to DailyMail.com

Just as Allore was ready to put the nightmare of his sister's murder to rest, a stunning deathbed confession turned everything upside down. A local woman said her father, Gerald Lachance told her that he 'picked up a girl in Lennoxville in 1978' with his brother, Regis, and they 'had their way with her and disposed of her in a culvert near Compton'

Routing through Theresa's file, Allore learned that the original police investigation had only taken a cursory look at four male students as potential suspects. All four of the 'suspects' were Champlain kids who had done nothing particularly suspicious on the night of November 3, 1978, when Theresa disappeared. They all seemingly had some association with the drug culture on campus; but when the background checks had come up clean, the inquiries were dropped

'There was a wave of sexual murders in the summer of '77' said Allore, who believes Luc Yolande Gregoire was responsible for at least three of them. 'All of them were naked bodies found outdoors, mostly strangled, all of them had odd things with missing purses and shoes.' What struck Pearson as unusual was the way he cross referenced the personal belongings of victims. Theresa's clothes were found 90 meters away from Louise Camirand's body, and her wallet was discovered on the farm where another woman had escaped an ambush by an assailant that matched Gregoire's description

The stunning breakthrough in Theresa's case emboldened Allore's belief that there was a police cover-up involved in his sister's murder.

Regis Lachance, was a career criminal with prior convictions for gross indecency, fraud, theft, breaking and entering and arson. Regis was also a known police informant.

'You name it, it happened in this family,' says Allore. 'They never worked an honest day in their lives, it was always sur la table - under the table, she said.'

'My sister died of fr*****n horrible death and an entire community, including the media, including its police force, its justice system turned a blind eye to it,' Allore says. 'So when you asked, how did I feel when this informant came forward with a deathbed confession, I had to take on that burden because Theresa will always be my older sister'

In a complex web of criminality, Lachance was implicated in an arson-for-hire case that was set up by Sherbrooke police in order to frame another criminal they wanted to nab for other crimes in the area. It's important to note that this arson happened over the same weekend that Theresa went missing.

If one of the lead suspects in Theresa's disappearance was also a police informant testifying in a very high-profile criminal trial, 'It would have tremendously compromised the police force and their investigation and eventual prosecution in that trial,' Allore surmises.

This theory was backed up by a former member of Quebec law enforcement who was sympathetic to Allore's efforts. Gilles, as he refers to him, offered to help, provided his identity remained anonymous.

'This isn't Mayberry,' said the police insider. 'In the seventies, Sherbrooke was a tough town. A lot of bad things happened here. The line between cops and robbers was pretty thin.'

'It wouldn't surprise me if they were involved in a cover-up,' he told Allore. 'You've got to keep an open mind. You've got to look at everything.'

'Bottom-line, with Regis Lachance as the star witness in another trial, cops wouldn't want it coming out that he was the lead suspect in the murder of a girl whose body has just turned up during the middle of the courtroom drama,' Allore tells DailyMail.com.

'One of the most corrupt police forces in the world is the Surete du Quebec,' he says. 'They talk about a few bad apples, they were all bad apples!'

Today, if Allore had to choose between two compelling suspects: Luc Gregoire, or Regis Lachance, he without hesitation selects the latter.

The case against Gregoire was always circumstantial, he explains. 'And while I have no witness testimony that Regis committed murder; what I do have is the fact that his niece said they committed Theresa's murder. And I have Roger saying that the brothers were hauled into the Sherbrooke police department for committing a murder in 2004.'

That account is backed up by the newspapers at the time, that reported the Sherbrooke police called in two suspects about a 35 year old cold case. 'So what Roger is saying aligns with the facts.'

JON VOWS TO KEEP THERESA'S CASE OPEN AND ACTIVE: 'MY SISTER DIED A HORRIBLE DEATH AND AN ENTIRE COMMUNITY TURNED A BLIND EYE TO IT'

As of today, the investigation into Theresa's murder is still active, but her brother is prepared to live without conclusive answers surrounding the mysterious violence that befell her.

'I think we all know that the end game here is that the offender is probably deceased, so there's no justice process available,' he tells DailyMail.com. Instead, he's willing to settle for knowing what happened to Theresa - even without incontrovertible evidence to back it up.

He takes pride in knowing that his efforts spearheaded the founding of Quebec's first cold case unit.

'Police are now saying that they will go forward to some cold case families and say, "This is what we think happened, but we're not completely sure, meaning it's unresolved, but it's the best that we can do, and maybe that will give you some sense of resolution."

'That's a big turnaround for them,' he says. 'They would normally go, 'Well, the case is open until closed. No, one's come forward. Sorry.'

Allore admits to struggling with the 'mental and emotional gymnastics' of separating the current Surete du Quebec detective assigned to Theresa's case with his agency and predecessors that failed repeatedly in the past.

'My sister died of fr*****n horrible death and an entire community, including the media, including its police force, its justice system turned a blind eye to it.'

Theresa was last seen on the staircase of her dormitory (pictured) at Champlain College around 9pm. The residence is located five miles away from main campus and like many students, Theresa often resorted to hitchhiking if she missed the last bus
Desperate taxi drivers are hooked on opiates they are convinced will help them work through the night improve their sex lives.

A report on the treatment of 12 drivers found they were addicted illegal kamini balls, containing morphine and codeine.

The opiates are smuggled into Australia in bags of rice and sold under the counter at hundreds of small ethnic grocers, sources told Daily Mail Australia.

Jeremy Hayllar, clinical director of the Alcohol and Drug Service in North Brisbane, said the patient in the trial, released on Friday, confirmed they bought their drugs in this manner.

But use and supply of the drug, which is banned from importation and sale in Australia, could be much wider.

'This is a cash product with 200 times profit [of what it costs] so every grocery store has it,' one Brisbane man told Daily Mail Australia.

'You can get it in all Indian grocery store but they will not give to any Aussie or white guy.'

A Queensland report on the treatment of 12 Brisbane ride-share drivers who became unwittingly hooked after consuming illegal kamini balls, containing morphine and codeine has been released

An ayurvedic website, Ayur Times, lists main ingredient of Kamini Vidrawan Ras as 'Papaver somniferum' which is another name for opium poppies

He said its use was 'very common' among young southeast Asian men, including Indians, Pakistanis, and Sri Lankans.

He claimed it was smuggled into Australia in large rice and grain shipments and distributed through grocery stores.

'Grocery stores get whole containers sent and they hide this product in rice bags and with cereals. If they get 100kg of rice in one container it's easy to get two bags filled with kamini,' he said.

The addicted Brisbane cab drivers told doctors their peers said kamini could help them stay awake longer and was also a sexual stimulant.

The patients, with an average age of 33, developed such severe opioid use disorder that only two were able to entirely give up the drug since commencing treatment.

The men who underwent treatment for opiate dependence

Laboratory analysis showed on average each ball contains 2.7mg of morphine and 1mg of codeine - which the liver turns into morphine

In one case, a driver was so desperate to get hold of his kamini balls he drove 50km to get more, Dr Hayllar said.

Another driver told doctors the grocery store he went to was 'thriving' because of the kamini sales.

Dr Hayllar helped treat 12 people, 11 men and one woman who is a partner of one of the men, who had to undergo treatment in Queensland for opiate withdrawal between January 2020 and June 2021.

He said it was important to note the patients were 'all employed all had spouses and kids and were upstanding, working members of the community'.

The drug is sold as sometimes sold as Multani Kamini Vidrawan Ras balls, or as Ayurvedant Kamini Vidravan Ras tablets.

The patients treated by Brisbane doctors said grocery stores sold them as 'ayurvedic medicine'.

Ayurveda or Ayurvedic medicine is a system of traditional medicine native to India.

An ayurvedic website, Ayur Times, lists the main ingredient of Kamini Vidrawan Ras as 'Papaver somniferum' which is another name for opium poppies - which is what heroin is made from.

Laboratory analysis showed on average each kamini ball contains 2.7mg of morphine and 1mg of codeine - which the liver turns into morphine.

The website also claims kamini is an aphrodisiac and is 'helpful for sustaining a penile erection for a long time and increases pleasure in the love act'.

Dr Hayllar said some patients were taking up to 30 kamini balls a day. With each ball costing up to $7 that could cost a user up to $200 a day.

He said the kamini issue emerged in Brisbane in 2021.

However, when users ran out of their usual supplies because of Covid supply chain delays, they started appearing at Brisbane GPs showing signs of severe withdrawal.

'People couldnt get hold of it and became distressed from withdrawal and started looking for help,' Dr Hayllar said.

Withdrawal from opiates can include extreme anxiety, nausea or vomiting, muscle aches, a runny nose, sneezing, diarrhea, sweating and fever. Men can also experience spontaneous ejaculations while awake.

There are multiple reports of the 'under the counter' sale of opioid kamini in southeast Asian grocery stores in several major Australian cities

Case study: chef to opium addict A 35-year-old man lost his job as a chef in the COVID-19 shutdown, he was driving for a ridesharing company. He used kamini for 5 months, taking 5-6 balls daily, having been told by colleagues it would give him energy to work longer hours. He smoked 1-2 cigarettes a day with no other substance use. Stopping kamini use caused him significant withdrawal symptoms: insomnia, pain in his limbs, feeling hot and cold, and cravings. He recovered with buprenorphine (a drug used to treat opioid use disorder) patches. Although he relapsed on two occasions (the second time after losing another job), his daily use remained at five balls or less, and he also quit smoking. Source: Drug and Alcohol Review, 2022. Advertisement

'We put the word out and it turned out there were a number more cases over 18 months to two years,' Dr Hayllar said.

'When the first cases happened it wasnt clear what the cause was, but the patients looked as though they were in opioid withdrawal, but they didn't seem to be using known opioids,'

'We thought 'how do we explain this?'

Truck drivers and ride share drivers of southeast Asian origin are understood to be using kamini each day

When the doctors began interviewing patients, the sources of the drugs and wider problem became clear.

'The [patients] sought help after supplies of the herbal drug dried up during the Covid-19 pandemic, or because they could no longer afford to feed their habit,' the Drug and Alcohol Review journal reported.

'All patients were treated for opioid addiction.

'Although Kamini is classified as an illegal import by the Therapeutic Goods Administration, the patients confirmed that it is readily available "under the counter" in many Brisbane grocery stores.'

Dr Hayllar agreed it was unlikely the problem is confined to Brisbane.

'It's likely to be an issue in other cities too  at least one patient has been seen in Perth, also there are cases in far north Queensland and there have been cases in Sydney and Melbourne,' he said.

Sources Daily Mail Australia spoke to claimed the kamini trade happens in every major Australian city and is based on a hidden trade of opium products distributed through hundreds of ordinary grocery stores

Expat southeast Asian communities often view kamini as a traditional medicine and not a dangerous illegal drug - however it is banned and harmful

'The anecdotally we have been told a lot of individuals are using kamini.'

In 2020, the south Auckland Unit of the Auckland Opioid Treatment Service reported treating 10 men who were addicted to kamini.

One man contacted Daily Mail Australia to confirm: 'I know about that drug and it is very popular in the Indian community,' he said.

Dr Hayllar said the report was produced to raise awareness about the dangers of kamini.

Expat southeast Asian communities often view kamini as a traditional medicine and not a dangerous illegal drug.

In one online Indian community group a Melbourne man said he believed kamini is 'good for temporary pain relief or if you are feeling low'.

'Actually its the combination of red bull and viagra,' he said.

Another Melbourne man claimed 'most truckies of the southeast Asian background have their own crops in their backyards which they flaunt and share with much pride with everyone'.

One Darwin commenter in a social media group said, 'I had [kamini] once and I could not go toilet for three days, got constipated.'

Daily Mail Australia contacted several Ayurvedic medicine specialists for comment.
A group of regional councils have called for a major Australian defence hub to be moved closer to their area amid emerging security threats in the South Pacific.

The plan would see the 'high readiness' 7th Brigade of the Australian Army, currently based at Gallipoli Barracks in Enoggera, Brisbane, moved to Rockhampton in Central Queensland.

The area's Regional Organisation of Councils put its defence strategy forward on Wednesday in a $4.5billion plan that would involve building new army bases in Central Queensland, giving the Australian Defence Force scope to launch longer missiles.

Members of the 16th Regiment armed with RBS-70 look on as US Army Apache Attack helicopters strut their stuff at the Shoalwater Bay Training Area in Queensland

Defence Minister Peter Dutton (centre) has said the only way to preserve peace in the South Pacific 'is to prepare for war and be strong as a country, not to cower, not to be on bended knee and be weak'

The 7th Brigade (pictured) could be shifted up north to Central Queensland, based in Rockhampton under the plan proposed by Central Queensland councils

Its goal is to better position the nation to face off against potential security threats in light of last month's signing of a security pact between the Solomon Islands and China.

Tensions have been high between Australia and Solomon Islands since the island nation, located around 2,000km from the Queensland coast, signed up to the security deal.

CQROC, which consists of various councils including the Rockhampton, Livingstone, Gladstone, Banana, Woorabinda and Central Highlands shires, want federal support for the plan.

Their 48-page plan outlined the ADF's urgent need to boost military advantage, arguing the need for defence reinforcement had 'accelerated faster than anticipated'.

The councils claimed the plan would create over 20,000 jobs, bring in an influx of residents and create an economic boom for the less populated parts of the state.



The strategy involves establishing an Army barracks in Rockhampton, as well as an RAAF base at the airport.

It proposes the now Brisbane-based 7th Brigade, and future US Marines and British Armed Forces rotations, should be moved to the barracks in Rockhampton.

Other parts of the plan include setting up a Fleet Base North at Gladstone Port and a School of Armour at Shoalwater Bay Training Area.

The council are also requesting federal support for a centralised depot of Army armoured vehicles.

CQROC deputy chair and Livingstone Shire Mayor Andy Ireland said the new bases will put the nation in a better position to counter threats and promote strength within.

The Councils said the 'high readiness' 7th Brigade of the Australian army, based in Enoggera at Brisbane (pictured), is urgently needed in the northern parts of Queensland

'Building new bases in the region will enable quicker response times to strategic threats in the region - more training more often - better security for our Northern Approaches and the South Pacific and more secure and self-reliant supply chains,' Cr Ireland said in a statement.

'A centralised armoured vehicle storage and maintenance depot could be built at Shoalwater Bay Training Area to overcome the challenge of moving the ADF's new over-size and over-mass combat vehicles between bases and training areas.'

If delivered the move is forecast to create 21,866 new jobs and bring an additional 36,618 residents to Central Queensland in a $4.5bn economic boost to the region, though no timeline for the plan had yet been established.

The ambitious plan comes after Federal Defence Minister Peter Dutton warned last April that the country should brace itself in view of the emerging tensions.

'The only way you can preserve peace is to prepare for war and be strong as a country, not to cower, not to be on bended knee and be weak,' he said on Anzac Day.
'Hundreds' of Western volunteers who fought the Islamic State in Syria are now on the front lines in Ukraine, DailyMail.com can reveal.

Americans, Brits and Canadians are among a host of fighters who have again decided to risk their lives for a foreign people on the front lines of a brutal war.

Some have become official members of the Ukrainian military, others are volunteer combat medics  and many say they felt compelled to help in the face of what they claim was inaction from the West.

In exclusive interviews, a British and an American medic said they have set up a new 'Nightingale Squadron', shipping medical supplies and teaching frontline first-aiders how to use them.

A 35-year-old British former banker who goes by the pseudonym Macer Gifford volunteered in Syria from 2014 alongside the Kurdish force or YPG, later named the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

He said he set up a unit there that ferried about 700 casualties to hospital, including from the bitter fighting around the siege of ISIS's last stronghold in Raqqa, and trained around 600 people in battlefield aid.

British former banker Macer Gifford, 35 (left) and Tennessee-based US Army veteran Brennan Philips (right) have volunteered to form a 'Nightingale Squadron', providing medical supplies to Ukrainian military amid Russia's invasion

The freedom fighting volunteers stocked their armored Land Rover with 170 first aid kits and 'tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment' to donate to Ukrainian forces

American Brennan Philips, who previously volunteered in Syria, is seen delivering a rousing speech to Ukrainian soldiers in video shared with DailyMail.com

Now he has traveled to the frontlines in Ukraine, driving an armored Land Rover packed with 170 first aid kits and 'tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment', bought with donations.

'People thought internationalism had died a death. Now I believe it's come back,' he said.

'I've been truly amazed by the people who have gone out to Syria. And it does not surprise me at all that of those people that went to Syria, about 70 per cent of them have since ended up in Ukraine.

'There's potentially hundreds of people in Ukraine now that were in Syria and Iraq. I know at least 20 of them myself personally,' he added. 'It's just an honor to be a part of it.

'The urgency in which the Ukrainian people have called for support, it genuinely moved me. And the same feeling that I felt before going to Syria is the same feeling I'm getting now.'

One of Gifford's former SDF comrades and fellow Brit, Aiden Aslin, was captured by Russian forces after a 45-day siege in Mariupol, in the southeast region of Donbass, Ukraine.

'The last we heard from Aiden was that he was surrounded, he had run out of ammunition, he had run out of food,' said Gifford, adding that he and his unit of Ukrainian marines were forced to surrender.

'Mariupol is exactly what happened in Raqqa and Mosul: an intense street to street battle. There were snipers everywhere. There were explosives IDs everywhere. Tanks were literally battling in the streets, and people were dying and being left where they fall,' he said.

Last month Aslin, 28, was marched out on Kremlin state TV with a big red mark on his forehead and a swollen eye, days after his unit surrendered.

Philips and Gifford have also been providing training, including CASEVAC (casualty evacation) training to Ukrainian forces (pictured)

Brennan Philips (pictured in Syria) a former cavalry scout who was deployed to Iraq while serving in 2005, told DailyMail.com he joined the SDF in part because of guilt over America's 'hasty and disorganized withdrawal' from the region that he believes helped ISIS' rise.

He previously spent ten months in Iraq fighting ISIS alongside the YPG and other Western volunteers.

Upon his return to Britain in 2016, he was arrested on suspicion of terror charges but was acquitted and returned to Iraq for a second tour of duty with the YPG.

Known by his social media alias Cossack Gundi, he moved to Ukraine in 2018 after falling in love with a woman from Mykolaiv and joined the nation's armed forces.

For weeks Aslin had been fighting Russian forces in Mariupol as a fully paid member of Ukraine's army, but surrendered to the invaders two days ago after his team ran out of supplies and ammunition following 48 days of conflict in and around the besieged port city.

Philips and Gifford's 'Nightingale Squadron' vehicle

A video obtained by DailyMail.com shows his last message, describing his unit's predicament hours before he was taken as a prisoner of war by the Russians.

'Each day that he's in Russian hands is a worry for us. The longer it goes on, the worse it'll be for him,' his brother, Nathan Wood, told DailyMail.com from the family's home in Nottingham, England.

'It's a race against time really to get him back in Ukraine or Britain.'

Another Brit, Shaun Pinner, 48, served with Aslin in the Ukrainian forces' 36th Marine Brigade and has also been captured and paraded on Russian state TV.

Gifford said volunteering for foreign wars was nothing new  pointing to the 'thousands of Brits, Americans and Europeans' who joined rebels fighting the fascist regime of Francisco Franco in Spain last century, and Americans who volunteered in the Eagles squadrons in the UK's Royal Air Force before the US joined the war against the Nazis.

The Nightingale Squadron has been gathering further donations online to buy more medical supplies to resupply the beleaguered Ukrainian citizens' brigades

The volunteers have been shipping medical supplies and teaching frontline first-aiders how to use them

Some volunteers said they felt compelled to help in the face of what they claim was inaction from the West. Pictured: Boxes of medical and military supplies

'For me, going out to Syria, fighting alongside the Kurds against ISIS was an act of political solidarity. I'm a humanitarian, I believe in democracy,' he said.

'What we were faced in Syria, was a threat against the very survival of the communities there.

'Ukraine has got so much potential as a country, it's such a beautiful place. And what they need now is Britain, America  in fact, all the world's support in defeating Russia.'

Gifford said he is gathering further donations to his fundraiser page to buy more medical supplies to resupply the beleaguered Ukrainian citizens' brigades.

Brennan Philips, a Tennessee-based US Army veteran, volunteered alongside Gifford in Syria and has joined him again to set up the Nightingale Squadron in Ukraine.

Philips, a former cavalry scout who was deployed to Iraq while serving in 2005, told DailyMail.com he joined the SDF in part because of guilt over America's 'hasty and disorganized withdrawal' from the region that he believes helped ISIS' rise.

He revealed that the conflict in Ukraine is not the first time he will have faced down Russian soldiers  after a close shave with alleged Spetsnaz (Russian special forces) in Syria.

While on a mission to build an alliance with a Syrian Arab Army force in Qamishli, near the border with Turkey, he said he was ambushed by Iranian Revolutionary Guardsmen and Spetsnaz officers.

'They were in disguise in UN vehicles,' he said. 'They pulled around in a van. Spetsnaz opened a side door, and a camera popped out of the top and started filming us.

'I called the fixer. I said, I don't care how you get us out of here, but get us out of here.'

Gifford  pictured with Ukrainian soldiers, one of whom wanted to hide his identity - said he is not surprised that many of his fellow Western volunteers in Syria have ended up in Ukraine

That night, Philips said, a bomb on the back of a moped was detonated in front of a nearby cafe, killing seven civilians  and Russian TV was broadcasting footage of them saying they were 'CIA agents' responsible for the bombing.

'It was a taste of who the Russians are and how they operate,' he said.

Philips, 36, said that the Russians were already putting out 'disinformation' about his captured friend Aslin, claiming he was fighting alongside the neo-Nazi Azov battalion.

In fact, Aslin was fighting with the 36th brigade of Ukrainian marines which he officially joined in 2018.

Other disinformation includes the supposed capture of an American 'mercenary'  when in fact a Russian soldier just found the passport of a US volunteer who is now safe in Poland, according to his family.

A video posted on Facebook shows an alleged Chechen soldier gloating that they captured the American, whose family asked that he remain anonymous.

The Chechen showed his passport to the camera and claimed the man is a 'US special services representative' and 'working on Donbas territory'.

'They help destroy the civilian population,' a translation with the video said. 'And somebody has a problem with us Chechens? These are the people ready to fight until the last Ukrainian. They will all find their orphanage here in the Ukrainian land.'

Philips said he fought alongside Aslin, 28, in Syria before the Brit moved to Ukraine in 2018 to be with his Ukrainian fiancee, and was one of the last people to speak to the captured soldier.

He said though Aslin's unit put up an incredible defense, now Mariupol has fallen it will be near impossible to retake.

One of Gifford's former SDF comrades and fellow Brit, Aiden Aslin, was captured by Russian forces after a 45-day siege in Mariupol, in the southeast region of Donbass, Ukraine

For weeks Aslin had been fighting Russian forces in Mariupol as a fully paid member of Ukraine's army

'Mariupol is in the European steppes. It's flat wheat fields all around. There are no avenues of approach that you can do stealthily and undetected. And operating in urban terrain is the worst,' he said.

'And we're dealing with an enemy who does not care about striking an ambulance, killing Red Cross workers, or striking children's hospitals.'

In his interview, Philips begged fellow Westerners to fight what he claimed was a 'learned helplessness' and 'fatalism', adding that 'wherever you're at, whatever you do, you can do something' to help the Ukrainians.

And in a furious message to the Russian people, he added: 'to Russian citizens, you're fascist now.'

'It is an embarrassment for one to say that they are Russian on the international stage because of the actions, not of the Russian people, but of your leadership, of Putin himself,' he said.

'The only people who can change that is you No one wants World War Three.

'You all do have the power to change it.'
A Tory committee chairman has lashed out at plans to allow residents the chance to vote on whether or not their neighbours are granted planning permission, branding them 'utter madness'.

Housing Secretary Michael Gove has said giving the public a greater say in the planning process will build support for new housing developments amid warnings that a shortage of homes could hit support for the Tories.

The Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill announced in the Queen's Speech on Tuesday is expected to enable local communities in England to stage referendums over the style and size of extensions, new homes and conversions on their street.

But reports that residents may be given the chance to vote on their neighbours' planning permission have been described as 'utter madness' by Huw Merriman, who chairs the Commons Transport Committee.

The Conservative MP for Bexhill and Battle tweeted on Wednesday evening: 'Utter madness. What's next; 'I veto the colour of your front door or your car on the drive'?

'The aspirational party I joined under Thatcher didn't hold a poll, or deny hard-working people the chance to improve their homes, based on neighbour envy'.

Reports that residents may be given the chance to vote on their neighbours' planning permission have been described as 'utter madness' by Huw Merriman (pictured), who chairs the Commons Transport Committee.

Utter madness. Whats next; I veto the colour of your front door or your car on the drive? The aspirational party I joined under Thatcher didnt hold a poll, or deny hard-working people the chance to improve their homes, based on neighbour envy https://t.co/vceffTp5Z9  Huw Merriman MP (@HuwMerriman) May 11, 2022

But the Department for Levelling Up, Housing, Communities said the move to give residents greater say over developments in their area would not be focused on vetoing or blocking certain projects.

Ministers are said to hope that the new legislation will encourage support for more intensive development by allowing residents to make improvements to their properties that would significantly increase their value.

However, some senior Conservatives have warned the Government's failure to meet its manifesto pledge to build 300,000 homes a year was letting down hundreds of thousands of people desperate to get on the housing ladder.

Mr Gove acknowledged the target was unlikely to be met this year and said while it was important to build more homes that was not the only criterion ministers had to consider.

He said there was understandable resistance among communities to new developments because too often they were of poor quality, without the requisite infrastructure and built in the wrong location.

Housing Secretary Michael Gove (pictured) has said giving the public a greater say in the planning process will build support for new housing developments amid warnings the shortage of homes could hit support for the Tories.

'People have been resistant to development because too often you have simply had numbers plonked down simply in order to reach an arbitrary target.

'You have had dormitories not neighbourhoods,' he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

'I think it is critically important that even as we seek to improve housing supply you also seek to build communities that people love and are proud of.

'It is no kind of success if simply to hit a target, the homes that are built are shoddy, in the wrong place, don't have the infrastructure required and are not contributing to beautiful communities.

'I am not bound by one criterion alone when it comes to development.

'Arithmetic is important but so is beauty, so is belonging, so is democracy and so is making sure that we are building communities.'

Mr Gove added that he did not want to be 'tied to a Procrustean bed', a reference to the Greek myth of Procrustes who tortured people to make them fit into a one-size-fits-all bed.

Housing secretary Robert Jenrick warned that the Government was set to miss the 300,000 homes-a-year target 'by a country mile'. (Pictured: PM Boris Johnson at Stansted Airport on Wednesday)

His comments came after former housing secretary Robert Jenrick warned that the Government was set to miss the 300,000 homes-a-year target 'by a country mile'.

Speaking in the Commons Queen's Speech debate on Tuesday, Mr Jenrick raised concerns that the number of homes built under Boris Johnson's first year in office would be the 'high-water mark' for 'several years to come'.

'It is a matter of the greatest importance to this country that we build more homes.

'Successive governments have failed to do this.

'There's always an excuse,' he said.

'We've got to get those homes built because we're letting down hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens.

'People are homeless today because we're failing to build those houses.

'Young people's rightful aspiration to get on the housing ladder is being neglected because we're not building those homes.'

Labour's shadow housing secretary Lisa Nandy said Mr Gove's suggestion that the Government would miss its own house-building target showed the Tories 'can no longer claim to be the party of homeownership'.

She said: 'Another day, another broken promise.

'Under the Conservatives, housing has become less affordable, spending on rent has skyrocketed and homeownership has gone down.

'All this puts more pressure on families facing a cost-of-living crisis.

'We need a government that will take action now to help people who are struggling with rising bills and prices, and that will invest to give them the long-term security of owning their own home.'
North Korea's ballistic missile / Korea Times file



North Korea fired a suspected ballistic missile toward the sea on Thursday, South Korea and Japan said, in the latest of a series of weapons demonstrations this years and just hours after it confirmed its first case of the coronavirus since the pandemic began.



Japan's Defense Ministry said the projectile fired by North Korea was a possible ballistic missile. It gave no other details.



South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a brief statement that the missile flew toward North Korea's eastern waters. It also gave no details.






Following an epic share price decline of more than 27% this week, Coinbase issued a stark warning to customers: Your crypto is at risk if the exchange goes bankrupt.

According to Coinbase's official website, the company has more than 98 million verified users. It is the largest cryptocurrency exchange platform in the United States.

Coinbase's CEO Brian Armstrong attempted to calm shareholders in a series of tweets one of which read: 'Your funds are safe at Coinbase, just as theyve always been.'

Despite Armstrong's claims, in an SEC filing the company referred to customers as 'unsecured creditors' in the event that Coinbase went belly-up.

Coinbase's CEO Brian Armstrong attempted to calm shareholders in a series of tweets one of which read: 'Your funds are safe at Coinbase, just as theyve always been'

Coinbase shares tumbled 30% on Wall Street after a regulatory filing by the company revealed any crypto it held for customers 'could be subject to bankruptcy proceedings'

This means that customers' crypto assets would be considered the property of Coinbase by bankruptcy administrators.

The SEC filing, Staff Accounting Bulleting 121, requires crypto platforms to include customer's crypto holdings as assets and liabilities on balance sheets.

Armstrong wrote on Twitter that the company is at 'no risk of bankruptcy' despite the filing, which he said was made so that company would be in compliance with SEC regulations.

The new regulation is designed to protect crypto traders by giving them more in-depth knowledge about the company's contingency plan in the event of bankruptcy.

Armstrong began his Twitter speech shortly after his company's earnings report was made public

Armstrong tweeted: 'This disclosure makes sense in that these legal protections have not been tested in court for crypto assets specifically, and it is possible, however unlikely, that a court would decide to consider customer assets as part of the company in bankruptcy proceedings even if it harmed consumers.'

In the first quarter of 2022, Coinbase posted a loss of $430 million amid a 19% drop in monthly users. The company has said that trading is likely to keep going down in the second quarter.

Another contributing factor has been the falling price of bitcoin.

At the time of writing, the price of bitcoin is $28,434.70, down 8% from yesterday. This is the first time bitcoin has fallen below $30,000 since July 2021.

Coinbase's shares, which tend to track the health of the wider crypto sector, have lost around 85 per cent of their value since its debut on Wall Street in April last year.

In their May 2022 earnings report, the company bragged about their first Super Bowl ad which came with the slogan: 'Less talk, more Bitcoin.'

The report says the ad reached 40 million households and generated millions of social media mentions 'resulting in significant improvements in our brand awareness, favorability, and consideration, among our target audience.'

Alesia Haas, chief financial officer of Coinbase Global Inc.

The ad cost the company $14 million and the day after Super Bowl Sunday, the company's share price fell nearly 2%, according to Reuters.

Coinbase Chief Financial Officer Alesia Haas said on a call with analysts on May 11 that the company decided to spent money on 'diversifying product lines' rather than focus on profits, reports CNBC.

In January 2022, Brian Armstrong bought a five acre estate in Bel Air at a cost of $133 million.

According to Coinbase's earnings report, the company said that they hold $256 billion in crypto and fiat money on behalf of their customers.

When a user opens a Coinbase account and buys cryptocurrency, the company holds that crypto on the application's wallet. This 'means the individual is giving away at least part of their control over their own funds,' according to Fortune Magazine.

Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February, Coinbase announced in a statement that they had suspended the accounts of 25,000 Russian Coinbase wallets.

The statement accused those account holders of 'engaging in illicit activity, many of which we have identified through our own proactive investigations.'

Crypto exchanges do not have a federal protection such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that protects customers of traditional banks in the US.

In the first quarter of 2022, Coinbase posted a loss of $430 million amid a 19% drop in monthly users. The company has said that trading is likely to keep going down in the second quarter

The money that customers deposit at traditional banks is protected to the tune of $250,000, in the event that the bank in question goes bankrupt.

There is the option of personal cryptocurrency insurance for traders.

On Twitter, Armstrong issued an apology to shareholders for not being more open about the company's new SEC filing saying they 'didn't communicate proactively when the risk disclosure was added.'
A mother-of-three who endured a messy divorce at 47, then slept with eight tinder-dates in a year and documented it in a memoir, says dating is her 'superpower'.

In her book, Available, published in June 2021 and newly released in paperback, Laura Williams, 51, documents what dating divorced after 40 is like in the internet age, and how exploring her sexuality helped her to heal and find herself.

Williams had been married to her husband for 22 years by the time she was 47 years old. The couple had three kids together, an apartment in Manhattan, and a house in the country.

Author Laura Williams, 51, called dating in midlife her 'superpower' in a recent interview with the New York post

Her 2021 memoir, Available, which documents her divorce and experience dating online in her 40s, has recently been released in paperback

'Our sex life wasn't great anymore. There wasn't really any passion between us.' Williams told the New York Post. 'But I had expected that.'

Then one day 4 years ago her husband admitted to her that he was having an affair. She promptly told him to leave, filed divorce proceedings, downloaded Tinder and was dating within 5 months.

'I was 47 years old and I expected to be with the same man for the rest of my life,' she told the Post.

Last year in an interview on the divorce counseling blog Grace Untethered, Williams talked about how the divorce rocked her like a death and left her questioning who she was.

Williams was married to her husband for 22 years before he confessed to having an affair and they split. Above left, Williams on her wedding day at 25 year old. Right, Williams recently

Williams at 21 years old with her later ex-husband, right. Williams posted this photo on her Instagram, talking about how little she knew when she was so young

'Death and divorce, and I'm not saying one is preferable to the other but I can say for myself that the experience was akin to grieving,' Williams said to Grace Untethered host Holly Herzog, 'The loss of my identity was so jarring that I really questioned, who am I if I'm not the wife?'

Williams - who had started dating her ex-husband at 20 years old - decided to take the divorce as an opportunity and indulge in the dating scene that she had never experienced in her 20s.

She downloaded Tinder and began blindly swiping right on dates.

She told the post that the experience opened up a part of herself that had been dormant for years.

At 47 Williams began dating again. She bedded eight men she met on Tinder over 12 months and rediscovered herself in the process

'You now have the freedom to do whatever you want,' Williams said, 'If you want to sleep with two men on the same day, you can. If you want to have a tryst in the middle of the day, you're free. The only person who can judge you is yourself. And if you're fine with it, screw everyone else.'

For twelve months she dove headlong into the sex and dating scene, bedding eight different men and later documenting the experience in her memoir. Williams writes about afternoon hotel trysts, a middle of the night meet up across town wearing nothing but a silk gown and a winter coat, and lunch-date quickies.

Williams described the experience as an eye opening look into her identity through her desires.

'[The question was] do I feel like sleeping with you now?' Williams told the Post, 'And it's a literal yes or no. I don't really care about anything else. You don't even have to be a good person. It doesn't matter.'

During her dating Williams also tried to better understand men, using her post-coital pillow talk to probe the opposite gender's minds by asking them a series of quick questions.

'What do you like about this? How do you feel about that?,' she told the Post, 'Because I missed out on knowing that. And I wanted to understand adult men.'

Williams told the Post that she hopes her memoir will help women understand their own identities, and become more in touch with how their sexuality can heal them

She told the Post that midlife-dating is her 'superpower,' and rather than feeling down on herself over her age, she found her age and independence empowering.

'I didn't buy into the theory that because I was older, I was less desirable. Men were very attracted to the fact I was a strong woman who didn't want anything from them and was calling the shots,' Williams said.

Though now Williams is in something of a relationship, she prefers not to label it.

'I've gotten attached to someone. But I still hold out the openness to say, 'If I wanted to have a one-night stand with someone, I could still do that.'

Williams told the Post that she hopes her memoir will help other women to realize how much is out there for them, and how sex can be a powerful ally in overcoming heartbreak.

'The sex was important to me. It made me alive when I felt dead inside,' she said, 'I found strength that I didn't know I had. And I also found openness and sexual curiosity that I didn't ever in a million years imagine I was capable of.'
Relatives of those killed in one of the deadliest structural building failures in American history have agreed a settlement of almost $1 billion, at the end of an accelerated judicial process designed to bring rapid closure to the families.

The $997 million payout for the Surfside, Florida tragedy was announced in a Miami court hearing on Wednesday, overseen by Circuit Court Judge Michael Hanzman.

Family members of the 98 people who died in the June 2021 horror sued the building's insurers, developers of a neighboring apartment building, an engineering firm that warned of the tower's structural issues, and other defendants.

The case was settled in unusually quick fashion, and was the final payout was significantly higher than predicted.

The initial pool of insurance money to settle both claims for victims who lost their homes and those who lost family members was $50 million, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The land on which the 12-story Champlain South tower sat has been sold for $120 million.

The Champlain Tower South in Surfside, Florida, collapsed on June 24, 2021

The tower collapse left 98 people dead, and is one of America's worse ever structural failures

Rescuers are pictured on June 27 sifting through the rubble in the search for survivors

Hanzman said he wanted the insurance proceeds to go to the victims rather than be used in legal fees from protracted litigation.

'It was as difficult a case as one gets,' Judge Hanzman said during Wednesday's hearing.

'For results like this to happen a lot of things have to break your way.'

The 40-year-old building with some 136 apartments collapsed before dawn, when many residents were asleep.

The devastating scenes shocked the nation, and frightened millions of people living in aging condo buildings.

Structural engineers had issued minor warnings, but nothing of serious concern, and there were no mitigating factors like extreme weather to cause the collapse.

The Champlain Tower building is seen before the tragedy

The remaining apartments were demolished on July 4 (pictured) in a controlled explosion

Plaintiff attorneys had always sought the sum close to $1 billion, but attorneys thought the settlement overly ambitious.

Lawyers for the residents and their relatives said the units lost ranged in valued from about $400,000 to about $2.9 million, and the settlement needed to include compensation for trauma and potential punitive damages a jury might award.

Attorneys at the hearing didn't disclose the breakdown of how much individual defendants were paying as part of the settlement.

The lawsuit also contended that work on the adjacent Eighty Seven Park tower damaged and destabilized a building in dire need of major structural repair.

Champlain Towers, the lawsuit claims, 'was an older building in need of routine repairs and maintenance, but it was not until excavation and construction began on the luxury high-rise condominium project next door' that the building became unsafe.

'The collapse was entirely preventable,' the lawsuit says.

In November, a lawyer for the developers of Eighty Seven Park denied being responsible.

'The construction of Eighty Seven Park did not cause or contribute in any way to the tragic events of June 24, 2021, notwithstanding unfounded allegations to the contrary,' said David B. Weinstein, a lawyer for the development team behind Eighty Seven Park, at the time.

They have not commented on the settlement.

Many families wanted a memorial to be constructed on the grounds of the building's South tower, but their plans were foiled when the property was sold for $120 million.

A total of 55 apartments in the 136-unit condo complex collapsed, with around 80 percent of the building reportedly being occupied.

Officials said at the time they believed the building had been 'substantially full.'

Friends and family of New Yorker Estelle Hedaya, 54, said they received so little of the victim's remains that they could easily lift her casket.

'I could have lifted it with my pinkie,' her best friend Lisa Shrem told the Washington Post.

After the initial recovery effort at the site was complete, officials moved the rubble to a location 14 miles from the condos, near Miami International Airport.

The rubble has been separated into two piles, based on supposed value of the evidence it might hold.

The portions that crews have determined to contain possible remains are moved inside a warehouse, while the rest is left outside.

Relatives of the victims embrace on July 15 during a candlelit vigil for those who died

Mourners on June 27 stop by the makeshift memorial for the 98 who died

Marcus Joseph Guara, 52, the youngest of the three siblings, lived on the eighth floor, in Unit 802, with his wife Anaely Rodriguez, 42, and their 11-year-old and 4-year-old daughters, Lucia and Emma. All were killed in the collapse

So little of New Yorker Estelle Hedaya's remains were found in the collapse of the Surfside condo in Miami. Her best friend Lisa Shrem said: 'I could have lifted it [her casket] with my pinkie'

A woman adds flowers to the memorial on June 28

The county has requested a judge's permission to dispose of debris they consider irrelevant to the investigation.

'It's very sad to hear how Miami-Dade County wants to throw everything away in the trash and make us forget and move past this,' said Martin Langesfeld, 24, who lost his twin sister, Nicole, and her new husband, Luis Sadovnic, 28, in the collapse.

'They were people with families and emotions. And they cannot be thrown away with trash.'

Many families aren't convinced all the remains have been found.

Throughout the four searches, crews continued to produce more and more remains.
A volunteer counsellor claims she has been sacked from the Australian Breastfeeding Association for 'hate speech' after she repeatedly using the word 'mother' instead of the transgender inclusive term 'parent'.

Jasmine Sussex said she lost her role because she 'excessively' used the word mother in social media posts, after the association partnered with Rainbow Families NSW to promote the use of gender neutral language.

The move has divided members of the nation's peak breastfeeding group, which has previously introduced course material for counsellors encouraging them to advise transgender women, who were born men, that they can induce lactation.

However, despite her claims, the ABA has denied that Ms Sussex was 'disciplined for the use of the word mother', suggesting there was another reason for her departure from the group.

During a Radio 2GB segment on Thursday, Ms Sussex said of the saying 'mother': '95 per cent of breastfeeding counsellors use that word.'

'That is our language. We know only women can breastfeed.'

Jasmine Sussex (pictured) was fired from her volunteer counsellor position with the Australian Breastfeeding Association

'It is a really small group in the association that are struggling with reality.'

The association has said emerging research suggests biological men can breastfeed, and have introduced a training booklet titled: Breastfeeding, Chestfeeding and Human Milk Feeding.

However, the mother-of-three, who has worked for 15 years advising mums on breastfeeding, argues there are only a 'couple of cases' worldwide of men producing nipple secretions and the unknown liquid is 'not mother's milk'.

'ABA says we should support all parents who want to human milk their babies,' Ms Sussex told Daily Mail Australia.

'But men shouldn't breastfeed because breastfeeding if for the baby.

'Natal males can take feminine hormones to grow breasts. But there is no evidence that any male induced milk is equivalent to mother's milk.

'We have no idea if the substance is even milk. It's absolutely a human experiment on babies.'

The association has provided course material (pictured) to counsellors urging them to advise transgender women they can induce lactation

Ms Sussex said the ABA has brought out training videos urging counsellors to support biological men to breastfeed, with one clip saying transgender women are often eager to do so.

The mother said she supports human rights for all people but believes it is a delicate balance between ensuring transgender women's gender identity rights are met as well as babies' rights to safety and welfare.

'Im happy to support how people identify, but sex matters when it comes to birthing and breastfeeding,' she said.

'A [biological] man doesnt have a right to breastfeed a baby, [that desire] its a psychological demand.

'Men will never be able to breastfeed babies, and they need to stop trying.'

Ms Sussex said she was told by the ABA when she lost her position that counsellors are bound by code of ethics stating they will not discriminate on the basis of gender identity.

She is currently fighting to remain a part of the association and is waiting to find out if her membership will also be cancelled.

Ms Sussex said she supports human rights for all but her concern lies with the welfare and safety of babies

'We are at the stage that they are looking at whether I should be expelled as a voting financial member of the association,' she said.

'This is really serious. This is about women having freedom of speech, freedom of conscious, freedom of association.

'All of these things are being taken from us.'

A spokeswoman from the Australian Breastfeeding Association told Daily Mail Australia 'no breastfeeding counsellor has been disciplined for their use of the word ''mother'' or ''mum'' within the ABA'.

'The Board has found certain conduct of certain counsellors that contravened its Code of Ethics and Constitution, leading to their resignation as volunteer counsellor,' they said.

'It is possible for a person who has never been pregnant (including those who are past menopause or who have never had ovaries), to produce some milk to varying levels. This is called induced lactation.

'We do not advise on the use of medications, or other treatments to build a milk supply, these should be discussed with persons doctor, as there is the chance of adverse side effects.'

The spokesperson said that breastfeeding counsellors are qualified to provide general breastfeeding information only and denied the ABA had erased sexed language in relation to its breastfeeding information and support services.
A Russian consulate in Australia may soon have a pro-Ukrainian address in what a local council is calling a 'symbolic protest'.

The Woollahra Municipal Council, in Sydney's eastern suburbs, passed a motion on Monday to rename the street where the Russian consulate is located.

After two hours of debate, councillors passed the motion to rename Fullerton Street to Ukraine Street.

The Woollahra Municipal Council in Sydney's eastern suburbs has passed a motion to rename the street that the Russian Consulate of Australia (pictured) is located on. If approved Fullerton Street will be changed to Ukraine Street

Councillors, residents and Australia's Ukrainian Embassy have thrown their support behind the name change.

Councillor Luisa Elsing introduced the motion as a small protest against Russia's invasion of Ukraine, according to ABC news.

'I know the people who live in Woollahra and the people who live around the consulate are very keen to make their position clear,' Ms Elsing told the council.

'People saying how devastated they are [about the war in Ukraine] and how they want us at Woollahra Council to throw whatever support we have available to us.'

Councillor Matthew Robertson seconded the motion and said: 'We have to do everything in our power, it's as simple as that.'

The motion has received over 300 letters of support and more than 1,000 have signed the online petition.

Countries around the world have renamed the streets on which Russian diplomatic buildings are found. In Lithuania, the road leading to the Russian embassy in the country's capital was renamed to 'Ukrainian Heroes Street' on May 9 (pictured, worker changing the street signs)

A mock 'President Zelensky Way' sign was erected at the entrance to the Russian Embassy on March 8 in Washington (pictured)

Andrew Mencinsky, Vice President of the Ukrainian Council of NSW, said the renaming would act as a 'daily reminder of Ukraine's sovereignty'.

'Look, it's not going to stop the war but it gives hope to the people of Ukraine because they know they're not alone, people are supporting them,' Mr Mencinsky said.

Approval will have to be given by the Geographical Names Board before the street is officially renamed.

The Consulate General of the Russian Federation in Sydney told Daily Mail Australia that it has no intention to influence the rename decision but is concerned council is following a 'political trend'.

'The Woollahra Council has not informed us of any decision yet, however, it would make sense for the Council to consult the local community first,' the Consulate General said.

'The Russian Consulate General is a diplomatic mission cannot and has no intention to influence its decision.

'One wonders how comfortable the residents will be to find the historic name of the street they live on suddenly changed for no other reason than to follow the political trend of the day.'

A Ukrainian supporter (pictured, right) confronted Russian supporters in response to the war in Ukraine outside the Russian Consulate in Sydney

If passed, Sydney will join a slew of countries worldwide renaming the streets that Russian diplomatic buildings reside on.

In Latvia, the road leading directly to the Russian embassy was officially renamed to 'Independent Ukraine Street', while in Lithuania's capital of Vilnius the Russian embassy, as of Wednesday, is found on 'Independent Ukraine Street'.

A mock road sign honouring the Ukrainian President was erected outside the Russian embassy in Washington D.C. Wisconsin Avenue was transformed to 'President Zelensky Way' on Sunday.

Other countries have faced calls to rename the streets outside Russian embassies.

Leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats Alex Cole-Hamilton is calling on Scotland to rename Melville Street in Edinburgh to 'Zelensky Street.'

Meanwhile, in London's Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, campaigners want the street where the Russian Embassy is located to be called 'Zelensky Avenue' to showcase Britain's support of Ukraine and its people.

Sydney's Russian consulate has been the site of pro and anti-Russian rallies over the past two weeks with both groups bearing the flags and insignia of their homeland.

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Fighting is now concentrated in the east of the country.
Disturbing police bodycam footage has shown the moment a man was violently tasered and pepper sprayed in his motel room.

Luke Arthur Marsh, 39, was arrested in November last year at the motel in Watson, Canberra, after officers told him he had breached the peace.

Magistrate James Stewart on Wednesday cleared Mr Marsh of a charge of resisting a public official in the ACT Magistrates Court where the footage was played.

Mr Marsh was pinned down by multiple officers before he was tasered and sprayed.

He then repeatedly shouted out 'I can't breathe! I can't breathe!'.

Luke Arthur Marsh, 39, was arrested in November last year at the motel in Watson, Canberra, with officers telling him he had breached the peace. He was tasered and pepper sprayed

Police were called to the motel by paramedics who said a man who appeared to be intoxicated was aggressively yelling at them while they were treating another patient.

Paramedics said they saw the man walking towards the motel's car park, which is where Mr Marsh was spotted by police.

In the footage, the officers are outside Mr Marsh's room, asking him to open the door.

He calls out 'f**k off' while one officer tells the man he has 'serious concerns that you're going to continue to act in a violent matter'.

The officers then warn Mr Marsh they're going to ram the door down.

Moments later, the officers are given a key to open the door, and push past a bicycle that was put up by Mr Marsh to barricade himself inside.

'You're acting in a violent matter and you have been since we got here,' the officer calls out to the man.

Mr Marsh was arrested by multiple officers. He asked why he was being arrested and was on Wednesday cleared of a charge of resisting a public official

A scuffle ensues as the officers arrest Mr Marsh, who was told to lie on the floor and put his hands behind his back.

The man calls out asking why he was being arrested to which an officer replied it was for 'breaching the peace'.

Mr Marsh is then tasered several times and pepper sprayed in his face.

'Come on, oh my God, what is this?' he calls out.

'I can't breathe,' he then says over and over and the officers cough as the spray fills the room.

Defence lawyer Daniel Turner said police only assumed Mr Marsh was the man yelling at the paramedics because he was in the vicinity at the time, according to court documents, the Canberra Times reported.

He said it couldn't be proven the 39-year-old was the one breaching the peace.

The confronting footage shows Mr Marsh being tasered and pepper sprayed by police. Magistrate James Stewart described the footage as 'disturbing'

Magistrate Stewart agreed and said there was no evidence in the footage to suggest Mr Marsh had been violent.

He acquitted Mr Marsh of the resisting charge, and said he was concerned one officer was seen holding his taser before entering the room.

He also found that police were not acting in their functions to enter his room, as they couldn't establish he was the one who breached the peace.

Mr Stewart said police should review the footage for training purposes.

'That footage needs to be watched and rewatched, and I don't particularly want to do that,' he said.

'I found it disturbing.'

ACT Policing said it noted Mr Stewart's comments about the footage.

'The circumstances of this arrest have been referred to AFP Professional Standards for consideration,' it said.

'ACT Policing has robust training and review systems in place and if operational issues are identified, then a range of options are in place to ensure those issues are addressed.

'Anyone who has concerns with the conduct of an officer can make a complaint via the AFP website.'
A man has been extradited from Western Australia to NSW after being accused of defrauding a vulnerable man of more than $400,000.

In June 2020, NSW detectives from Cumberland Police Area Command began investigating reports a 58-year-old man had been defrauded of a large sum of money.

Police say the man, who has an intellectual disability, was befriended by a work colleague who went with him to a bank numerous times between November 2014 and January 2016 and coerced him into withdrawing money.

With the help of WA Police, the man (pictured) was arrested on Monday at a home in the Perth suburb of Kelmscott

The man (pictured) was extradited to NSW on Wednesday and charged with knowingly dealing with the proceeds of crime and dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception

The man realised more than $435,000 had been withdrawn from his account in early 2020 and went to police.

Last month, detectives were granted an arrest warrant for a 52-year-old man living in WA.

With the help of WA Police, the man was arrested on Monday at a home in the Perth suburb of Kelmscott and NSW police applied for his extradition.

The 52-year-old man will appear at the Downing Centre Local Court (pictured) on Thursday

He was extradited to NSW on Wednesday and charged with knowingly dealing with the proceeds of crime and dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception.

He was refused bail to appear at Downing Centre Local Court on Thursday.
A 'deceitful' welfare cheat who scammed taxpayers of almost $109,000 over five years has been ordered to pay it all back.

Karen Delores Swartz grimly clutched a gold sequined cushion as she arrived home on the Sunshine Coast on Wednesday.

The grandmother walked free from court after being released on a good behaviour bond, but looked stony-faced as she contemplated a decade of repayments.

She failed to tell Centrelink she got a job as a nurse in 2014 while she was receiving a carer's payment - and got away with receiving the benefit until a data match caught her out in 2018.

A 'deceitful' welfare cheat who scammed taxpayers of almost $109,000 over five years has been spotted grimly clutching a gold sequined cushion after being ordered to return the money

Grandmother Karen Delores Swartz looked stony-faced despite walking free from court after being released on a good behaviour bond on Wednesday

Maroochydore nurse Karen Delores Swartz, 59, (pictured) received almost $109,000 in government assistance she wasn't entitled to between 2014 and and 2019

Swartz, 59, was sentenced to three years' jail in the Maroochydore District Court, but was immediately released on a five-year good behaviour bond.

Her lawyer Mark Dixon said his client 'buried her head in the sand', and ignored dealing with the issue as she was suffering from depression, the Courier Mail reported.

She was caring for her elderly mother while also fighting her own mental health battles.

Mr Dixon added that if his client served jail time she would be forced to sell her home, which would have repercussions for her family.

Swartz received $108,753 in government assistance she wasn't entitled to between January, 2014 and March 2019.

Judge Nathan Jarro described her actions as 'greedy conduct' and 'deceitful'.

He highlighted the fact she had used a separate bank account where she was receiving additional income.

Because she has already repaid $4,729, she must must repay $104,024.56 - which would take around 10 years of fortnightly minimum repayments.

Swartz was sentenced to three years in jail for the crime.

She was detected after the Australian Taxation Office discovered she was still receiving payments she wasn't entitled to because she was employed.

She failed to tell Centrelink she got a job as a nurse in 2014 while she was receiving a carer's payment for looking after her elderly mother
A relative of Ian Thorpe's ex boyfriend Ryan Channing has slammed vile rumours claiming the 32-year-old had HIV when he suddenly died in Bali.

Channing was a successful model, lawyer and businessman from Perth before his shock death on the Indonesian resort island on Sunday.

The only detail his family have confirmed about his passing is that it was not the result of Covid, even though he was hospitalised in Sydney with the virus eight weeks ago.

His skincare company, The Blaq Group, confirmed on Thursday that Channing had been battling health issues for a few months prior to his death, but the nature of those issues is unknown.

Trolls took to Channing's Instagram page overnight on Wednesday to spread unverified rumours that he took his own life, and that he had HIV - a serious illness that attacks the immune system.

But Abbey Channing, a young relative of the skincare brand creator, hit back - politely asking people not to 'make assumptions about somebody's death'.

Ryan Channing (pictured left) used to date former Olympian Ian Thorpe (right), until they broke up in 2019

Abbey Channing (pictured) politely asked people not to speculate about her relative's death

One man wrote: 'You will notice Ryan went to hospital with Covid.'

'Classic reaction from an otherwise young, healthy male who is immunocompromised because of HIV.'

The young woman graciously responded: 'Please don't make assumptions about somebody's death.'

Another man wrote: 'Only 32 years and always the picture of health.'

'Suicide is a terrible thing, mental health funding needs to be improved.'

After someone asked how he knew Channing took his own life, Ms Channing again wrote: 'Please don't make assumptions about somebody's death.'

Daily Mail Australia has reached out to Ms Channing for comment.

Following Channing's death on Sunday, people began to spread unverified rumours (pictured)

Social media users said Channing (pictured) had HIV, and that he died by suicide. The cause of death has not been revealed

His skincare company, The Blaq Group, posted an emotional tribute on Thursday - remembering the 32-year-old for his 'fun loving spirit'.

'It is with heavy heart that we share the news that The Blaq Group founder, Ryan Channing, has passed away at the age of 32.

'Ryan had been battling with health issues over the past few months and died in hospital after being taken suddenly ill on Sunday May 9th whilst on holidays in Bali.'

'His inspiration led to the creation of highly regarded skincare brands, Flight Mode and Generation Skin as well as the flagship brand Blaq which strives to empower equality through its distinctive messages of acceptance and inclusivity.'

The shock death was announced on Instagram on Wednesday by his younger brother Jake.

'Seeing as the news headlines beat my whole family to posting about this unfortunate time in our lives, it's with a heavy heart I announce that my brother Ryan has recently passed away on Sunday the 8th of May at 32 years of age,' Jake wrote.

Channing's skincare company, the Blaq Group, confirmed he had health issued in an emotional tribute

Channing's sister Charis also wrote a tribute, and later shared it on her Instagram stories with the caption 'heartbroken' (pictured)

'As we seek answers and try come to terms with the heartbreaking loss of my beautiful big brother, we ask for your prayers, support and privacy, he will be forever loved, never forgotten and forever young.

'To my big brother, I love you, I'll see you one day soon you'll be missed more than you know.'

Their sister Charis wrote: 'Saying goodbye to you on Sunday was the hardest thing my family and I have ever had to do. 32 years young, you're gone too soon.

'As we seek answers and try come to terms with the heartbreaking loss of my brother, we ask for your prayers, support and privacy.

'I know you will be looking down on us and we love you lots.'

Charis also shared the tribute on her Instagram stories with the caption 'Heartbroken'.

Charis Channing (left) says she's heartbroken over the loss of her brother Ryan (right)

Channing (pictured) was a successful model and businessman from Perth

A friend told News Corp that Channing, a successful businessman, had been 'battling health issues' for some time.

'Everyone is distraught,' one close friend said.

'It is just so sad and everyone is shocked.'

Channing was the first long term boyfriend of former Olympic swimming champion Thorpe after coming out as gay.

The pair were in an on-again, off-again relationship for four years until they split for good in 2019.

Channing's last Instagram post was a photo from Sydney's St Vincent's Hospital eight weeks ago after testing positive to the virus.

'Covid got me GEWD (good)', he told his 21,000 followers.

Channing posted a picture from Sydney's St Vincent's Hospital eight weeks ago saying 'Covid got me GEWD (good)', after testing positive to the virus

Ryan Channing's shattered family have vowed to seek answers of his shock death

However, it's not clear whether the virus or its after effects may have played any role in his sudden death.

A representative for Thorpe said his thoughts were with Ryan's family.

Channing was most recently running a skincare company The Blaq Group, which he founded and owns brands Blaq, Flight Mode and Generation Skin.

'Generating millions of annual unit sales in both Australia and internationally across his three brands, Ryan has earnt his reputation as one of Australia's most influential ecommerce entrepreneurs,' his LinkedIn bio states.

Last July he revealed he was filming a pilot for a new reality show on Netflix in Los Angeles, called The Skintrepreneurs, which would follow his business activities.

Channing was a model who spent time living and working abroad in New York, Paris and Milan before going to university to study commerce, marketing, intellectual property and international law.

Ryan Channing (pictured left with Ian Thorpe) was Ian's first public boyfriend since he came out as gay in an interview with Michael Parkinson in 2014

Channing said he and Thorpe (pictured together) split because they were spending too much time apart

He said his time in the modelling industry gave him an eye opening insight into the beauty industry and what consumers want in a beauty product.

He was best known to most Australians for his relationship with Thorpe, one of the country's greatest ever Olympians.

At one point in their relationship, Channing and Thorpe were actively considering having a child via surrogacy.

When discussing their plans to have a baby in 2019, Channing told Daily Mail Australia: 'Becoming parents is something that Ian and myself would love to make happen.

Jake Channing (left) confirmed the shock passing of his beloved brother Ryan Channing (right)

'Unfortunately the laws in Australia are difficult for same sex males in regards to surrogacy - California state law has really progressed in this space which makes it the best option legally.

'Something I would love to see progress further in Australia so same sex couples don't have to travel abroad to achieve their family goals.'

Channing founded his skincare business in 2018, aiming to provide gender-neutral products that were all Australian-made and natural.

He was dubbed one of Australia's most influential ecommerce entrepreneurs when he took his business international to the US and Europe.

A year after splitting with Thorpe, Channing revealed in June, 2020 he was engaged to engineer Leevon Baptiste.

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Two prominent Liberal commentators have savaged Scott Morrison's Coalition for very different reasons - with one arguing the party has gone too far to the left, while the other claims Scott Morrison's government is alienating wealthy, inner-urban voters by lurching to the right.

Outspoken pair Peta Credlin and Niki Savva both attacked Mr Morrison's strategy in their influential columns on Thursday, as new polling shows the Coalition is bleeding voters in wealthy inner-city electorates concerned about climate change, while also losing regional votes to minor right-wing parties.

Ms Credlin, a Sky News host and Tony Abbott's former chief of staff, said the Liberal and National parties were in danger of 'standing for nothing' if they continued to try and appeal to wealthy, inner-city moderates who were well insulated from economic difficulties.

Meanwhile, Niki Savva, an ex-adviser to former Liberal treasurer Peter Costello, said the Liberal Party's focus on conservative issues is pushing inner-city voters away from the Coalition and into the arms of the so-called 'teal independents', who are campaigning on action on climate change and a federal integrity commission.

Political pundit Peta Credlin (pictured) said the Liberal Party has not been conservative enough and alienated its base with progressive policy stances

In her critique, Ms Credlin wrote the Liberal Party faces some 'tough soul-searching' post election should they lose seats in their heartland to the independents as Labor candidates sweep up voter's first preferences.

Ms Credlin said Liberal moderates lurching further to the left to compete with independents were alienating the party's conservative base and seeing the party hemorrhage votes to so-called right-wing 'splinter parties', such as the United Australia Party and Pauline Hanson's One Nation.

'Id argue the biggest risk to the government is not losing one or two wealthy seats to the green-left but losing quiet Australians to conservative splinter parties, with their ill-disciplined preference flows, that dont try to sit on both sides of the political fence.,' Ms Credlin wrote in the Australian.

However, Ms Savva countered in her column for The Age that the party was in real danger of losing it's once heartland in the inner-city because of Mr Morrison's focus on transgender issues and the challenge from the well-funded independents.

Ms Savva argued the Liberals were 'hollowing out' the party in inner-city seats by imposing ultra-conservative candidates like Katherine Deves in a bid to win over disaffected Labor voters in western Sydney and the Hunter region.

She said the move was backfiring and pushing undecided voters to the more moderate independents.

Niki Savva (pictured) has said the Liberal Party will lose inner-city seats at the election because of Mr Morrison's stance on transgender issues and the rise of the 'teal' independents

Ms Savva recalled Mr Morrison's opposition to same-sex marriage in 2017, and his refusal to condemn Israel Folau's homophobic rants in 2019.

'Senior Liberals fear Morrison has deliberately sealed the fate of a clutch of moderates already struggling to survive,' she wrote in The Age.

Ms Savva wrote that multiple Liberal insiders were disappointed with Mr Morrison's comments about Deves at a press conference after she recanted her apology for transphobic comments on Sky News,

Mr Morrison had said he was 'absolutely pleased' to have been able to recruit and appoint his captain's pick in Warringah, calling her a 'strong female Liberal candidate... that's what being a Liberal is all about,' he said.

His comments showed he was out of touch even amongst many in his own party, claimed Ms Savva.

Ms Savva (pictured) hit out at her former party's 'crude political tactics' targeting the rise of independents in swing seats

'It is fatuous for Morrison to congratulate himself for choosing Deves when she makes Craig Kelly (another of Mr Morrison captain's picks) look rational, and after he and his party have so badly mishandled the threat from the teal independents.

'The crude political tactics, the sledging, the denigration of obviously articulate, accomplished women for daring to challenge the Liberals best and brightest was a manifestation of the sort of behaviour which had alienated those voters in the first place.'

Ms Savva lashed out at the Liberal party's treatment of the teal independents so far in the election lead up, calling it a 'petty' and 'patronising' campaign. She wrote Liberal moderates were losing position to those independents because of voters' intense dislike of Mr Morrison.

Credlin, on the other hand, believed the party needed to forget the independents in inner-city seats and refocus on rural and conservative votes.

Credlin said her former party had been bullied into a climate plan by the media and independents (Pictured: Scott Morrison with the infamous lump of coal he brought into Parliament House in 2017)

She believes the party's focus on climate change has alienated regional voters and instead pushed them to minor conservative parties like the United Australia Party.

Ms Credlin lamented 'bullying' from the media and inner-city 'modern Liberal' MPs for making the government look weak on climate change, and talked up the importance of the National Party in retaining Queensland and Western Australian seats for the Coalition.

The Prime Minister, she wrote, had been unfairly made to look shamefaced about the moment he brought a lump of coal into parliament - and had been largely absent from teal seats as a result.

She also criticised the LNP for offering no fourth term agenda beyond promises based on cash splashes and defence.

'If the government loses, the Coalition will have to think long and hard about what it stands for and who it represents,' she wrote.

Mr Albanese was declared the winner of Wednesday night's debate, as new polling data reveals the Labor Party is on track to win the May 21 election

'Morrison won in 2019 thanks to the quiet Australians but many feel ignored ever since. The reality is, with less than two weeks to go, if you don't stand for something, you end up standing for nothing.'

The latest YouGov poll has predicted a big Labor victory over the incumbent Coalition, with the ALP set to win 80 seats compared with a combined 63 for the Liberal and National parties.

The poll revealed the ALP could form a majority government with multiple Coalition seats predicted to fall to independents.

According to its results, the LNP is bleeding first preferences in seats where voters are turning their eyes to issues of integrity in politics and climate action.

Independents are clawing ground from the Liberal Party in inner-city seats like Wentworth in Sydney, and lead in the polls in blue-ribbon seats such as Warringah, Kooyong, and Goldstein.

Teal independents have centered their campaign on attacking the LNP's track record on the government's parliamentary behaviour, including scandals involving frontbenchers and failure to introduce legislation on a Federal anti-corruption body.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg's seat of Kooyong is slated to tip to independent, Dr Monique Ryan, 53-47 on a two-party basis, despite heavy Liberal campaign spending in the seat.

The Liberal Party is tipped to put forward Defence Minister Peter Dutton as its next leader should the PM stand down in defeat and Josh Frydenberg not be re-elected.

After Wednesday night's leadership debate Seven's audience of undecided voters resoundingly favoured the Labor leader.
People watch a TV screen showing a news program reporting about North Korea's missile launch with file footage at Seoul Station, Thursday. AP-Yonhap



By Yi Whan-woo



North Korea fired three suspected ballistic missiles toward the East Sea, Thursday, marking the first major provocation since President Yoon Suk-yeol took office two days earlier.



The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said it detected the three, possibly short-range missiles, being launched from Sunan area in Pyongyang around 6:29 p.m.



They traveled 360 kilometers to a maximum altitude of 90 kilometers at a top speed of Mach 5.



"This is a grave provocation that must be suspended right away," the JCS said.



It went on to say, "The military has strengthened monitoring activities and vigilance and is maintaining a full readiness posture in close cooperation with the United States."



The National Security Office (NSO), during an emergency meeting presided over by its new chief Kim Sung-han, denounced the launch as a "two-faced act coming in the wake of the pandemic."






Tributes have poured in for a 'much-loved' young woman who was stabbed to death inside a flat in Birmingham - as the alleged 'killer' is charged with her murder.

Shannon Stanley, 27, was discovered with multiple knife wounds at a property on Mount Pleasant, in Small Heath, at 12.30am on Tuesday.

Pablo Hoad, also 27, was arrested from a house near the scene around half an hour later, and has now been formally charged with murder.

A 24-year-old woman was also arrested on suspicion of murder on Tuesday but has since been released on police bail.

Locals said they were 'shocked' that such a 'horrific' crime could happen 'on their doorstep'.

West Midlands Police released the first picture of murdered Shannon as her family paid an emotional tribute to her.

In a statement, her family said: 'Shannon was a much-loved daughter, sister, niece and cousin. She had many friends that also loved her dearly.

Shannon Stanley, 27, was discovered with multiple knife wounds at a property on Mount Pleasant, Small Heath, at 12.30am on Tuesday

'She will be missed by us all and we ask as a family that we are allowed to grieve privately at this sad time.'

Mr Hoad remains in police custody and is set to appear at Birmingham Magistrates Court tomorrow.

Shannon was pronounced dead at the scene despite the best efforts of medics and police say her family are now being supported by specialist officers.

A West Midlands Police spokeperson added: 'We're continuing our enquires in the area and thank everyone who has helped so far by supplying information and CCTV.'

Neighbours living on the street reacted with horror to the death on their doorstep and said they believed the property was used as student accommodation.

One resident, who did not want to be named, said: 'There's always people coming and going from that address.

'I think it might be used as student accommodation. I know the woman living there had only been there a year or two so she may have been a student too.

'It's a pretty horrific thing to happen on your doorstep, we are a close-knit community so this has shocked everyone. Your heart goes out to the families involved.'

Pablo Hoad, also 27, was arrested from a house near the scene around half an hour later, and has now been formally charged. (Pictured: Mount Pleasant, Small Heath, where Shannon Stanley was stabbed to death)

A West Midlands Ambulance Service spokeswoman said previously: 'We were called at 12.19am in the early hours of Tuesday morning to reports of an incident at an address on Mount Pleasant in Small Heath, Birmingham.

'Two ambulances, a paramedic officer and a MERIT trauma doctor and critical care paramedic attended.

'Upon arrival we found a woman. She was assessed and had sustained life threatening injuries. She received advanced trauma care from ambulance staff.

'Unfortunately, it became clear that nothing more could be done to save her and she was confirmed deceased.'

Anyone with information is asked to contact police via Live Chat at west-midlands.police.uk quoting log number 78 of May 10.
Nine months after a newlywed couple were found shot dead at a Utah campsite, police publicly identified a suspect for the first time and said the man has since killed himself.

Adam Pinkusiewicz confessed to killing the two women before his death, the Grand County Sheriff's Office said in a statement.

He used to work at the same McDonald's restaurant as Crystal Turner, 38, who was gunned down along with her wife, Kylen Schulte, 24. The pair were married since April of last year.

A family friend found the couple on August 18 - two days after they were reported missing - near Moab, a tourist town known for its sweeping desert landscapes. They were camping in the South Mesa area of the La Sal Mountains, and Pinkusiewicz was in the area too.

Pinkusiewicz fled Utah and killed himself within weeks of the slayings, Sheriff Steven White said. Police are identifying him publicly now because they recently learned of his confession to a 'third party' before his death.

Pinkusiewicz mentioned specific details that had not been publicly shared, including the location of the bodies. Authorities don't believe there are any other suspects.

Adam Pinkusiewicz confessed to a 'third party' that he killed a couple near Moab, Utah, before his death

Crystal Turner, 38, left, and Kylen Schulte, 24, shown together before their death in August 2018. The couple were camping when they were murdered by Pinkusiewicz

The couple married in April 2021 and were found dead nine months after they were shot dead

'If nothing else, it will be closure for the family,' White said.

A motive for the double homicide has not yet been publicly shared.

White declined to say where Pinkusiewicz killed himself. Police are investigating whether he was the 'creepy,' intimidating man Schulte told friends they saw near their campsite shortly before their deaths.

Investigators had long considered Pinkusiewicz a person of interest and had tried to find and talk to him. Authorities say the case is still open, and they're still processing new evidence from his recently located car, also found by local authorities, and seeking new information.

Family and friends pleaded for help to try and resolve the case case, hoping a breakthrough would lead to its conclusion.

They even contacted Duane 'Dog the Bounty Hunter' Chapman, lately known for publicly offering his services to resolve the Gabby Petito case.

Pinkusiewicz, was thought to be a homeless worker at McDonalds, and was believed to be living a 'van lifestyle'. Police are still looking for 2007 Toyota Yaris

Schulte and Turner went camping in the South Mesa area of the La Sal Mountains, and were coworkers of Pinkusiewicz, who was also in the area

Authorities in Utah are investigating whether Pinkusiewicz was the 'creepy,' intimidating man that Schulte referred to friends, who was camping near their tents before their deaths

Turner, right, worked at the same McDonald's location as Pinkusiewicz before her death

There were even rumors linking the double homicide to Petito's disappearance before she was found dead.

The 22-year-old and her fiance, Brian Laundrie, had driven through Utah and the Moab area at one point during their cross-country road, six days before the two women were found dead.

The FBI eventually confirmed in January that there were no correlation between the two cases.

Additionally, White said Pinkusiewicz was relatively new to the Moab area and lived 'van lifestyle,' hinting that he did not have a main address. Police are still searching for his 2007 Toyota Yaris.

The father of one of the victims, Sean-Paul Schulte, was emotional upon learning the news on Wednesday. He told the Salt Lake Tribune he was 'elated' and 'very happy.'

'Grand County Sheriff's Office was right. The case is very solvable,' Schulte added. 'I hope they can process the evidence and close the case.'

Turner and Schulte are believed to have been last seen at Woodys Tavern, close to the campground where they were living while they drove into Moab for work.
A couple fined 1,000 for having dinner with two friends in lockdown yesterday hit out at police for treating Keir Starmer more leniently than normal people like us.

They were penalised for an incident a few weeks before, and a few miles from, the infamous Beergate curry in Durham.

Officers ignored their explanation for socialising with far fewer people than the Labour leader.

Chris Brown, 32, and wife Gemma, 37, went to another couples house for a steak dinner and few drinks in March last year.

But during the evening two police officers knocked on the door saying they had been told 18 people were partying inside.

Mrs Brown said they invited the officers in to show them only four people were present and explained that their hosts were a support bubble for her husband because of his mental health problems.

He was being treated for depression following the death of a close friend.

All four later received letters informing them they had been fined 200 for breaching Covid regulations.

Anger: Chris and Gemma Brown

Mrs Brown, a beauty therapist and mother of two, initially contested the fine believing they had not broken the law last March 6.

She eventually paid 560 in February after bailiffs came to her house.

Her husband pleaded not guilty to breaking Covid laws when the case came before Newton Aycliffe magistrates last Friday.

However the window and door installer changed his plea to guilty when he found he could end up paying out more than 1,000 if he lost.

He was fined 200 and ordered to pay 200 costs and a 34 surcharge.

Commenting on a comparison with the Labour leaders case, Mrs Brown said: Its different for people in power as they get away with it.

The police wouldnt deal with them in the same way as us normal people.

It has cost us 1,000 to have dinner with two friends.

None of the restrictions made any sense either.

You can go to work with a group of people but cant have a drink with two friends.

We didnt believe we had committed a crime and didnt think we had done anything wrong.

We were bubbled up because of Chriss mental health.

He was suffering a lot, not being able to see people apart from me. He was very down.

She said the two officers did not take their arguments seriously.

The couple live in the village of Burnhope, near Durham, and visited their friends three miles away in Stanley at a time when restrictions banned indoor socialising.

Mrs Brown said Sir Keir should still receive a fine and criticised the Prime Minister for breaking Covid rules with his Downing Street staff: They put the restrictions in place and they should practice what they preach.

There have been claims that because of the Dominic Cummings Barnard Castle case Sir Keir is unlikely to be issued with a fixed penalty notice even if he is found to have broken the rules from the gathering at the miners hall in Durham on April 30 last year.

In May 2020 police said that Boris Johnsons former chief aide might have breached restrictions but it would not take retrospective action as this would amount to treating him differently to other members of the public.

When Durham police made that decision in respect of Mr Cummings, the local MP was quick to write to Mr Johnson to say that the public demanded the adviser be sacked. The MP was Mary Foy who was pictured with Sir Keir in the Beergate video.

Durham Constabulary refused to comment yesterday.
Having vowed to resign if hes fined over Beergate, Keir Starmers political career could self-destruct in a matter of seconds before long.

Avoiding headlines about that beer and curry during lockdown must have felt like Mission Impossible for Labours leader  so how fitting that Sir Keir is now dressing like the film franchises main character.

In a bomber jacket and T-shirt eerily similar to those worn by Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, Sir Keir also showed off a pair of Hugo Boss trainers thought to be worth 200 as he left his London home yesterday.

The former lawyer and Hollywood star, both 59, also happen to share a taste for Indian cuisine.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer pictured leaving his home in north London on Wednesday amid criticism over Beergate

The Opposition leader wore a bomber jacket and T-shirt eerily similar to those worn by Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt

Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt and his IMF team in a publicity shot for Mission Impossible - Fallout in 2018

Cruise made headlines last summer after eating at Ashas in Birmingham while filming the latest Mission Impossible movie.

He reportedly enjoyed his chicken tikka masala so much that he ordered a second serving.

Clearly a fan of sequels, Cruise has reprised his most famous role of Pete Mitchell in Top Gun: Maverick, which arrives in UK cinemas at the end of the month some 26 years after the original.
Australians travelling in Europe this northern spring will no longer have to wear masks at airports or on planes.

The European Union said from Monday masks will no longer be required at European airports and on planes, amid the widespread easing of Covid-19 restrictions across the continent.

However, individual EU member states can still require masks.

The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) said it hoped ditching masks would mark 'a big step forward in the normalisation of air travel'.

Australians travelling in Europe this northern spring will no longer have to wear masks at airports or on planes. Pictured is a woman on a plane wearing a mask

The step was taken after considering vaccination levels and naturally acquired immunity, as well as the lifting of restrictions in a growing number of European countries.

EASA executive director Patrick Ky cautioned that passengers should still behave responsibly.

'A passenger who is coughing and sneezing should strongly consider wearing a face mask, for the reassurance of those seated nearby,' he said.

The new recommendations take effect from Monday but rules for masks may still vary by airline if they fly to or from destinations where the rules are different.

Germany's health ministry said it will continue to require all passengers over the age of six to wear medical masks on flights to, from or within the country, though they can be removed during meals.

Andrea Ammon, director of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, said although the wearing of masks would no longer be compulsory, it was important to remember that 'together with physical distancing and good hand hygiene, it is one of the best methods of reducing transmission'.

Airports are advised not to impose distancing requirements if these are likely to lead to a bottleneck.

From Monday, May 16, wearing face masks on flights in Europe will no longer be compulsory. Pictured are people on a plane

People are pictured on a flight, not wearing masks, as it was before the Covid-19 pandemic

Airlines welcomed the changes and called for a consistent approach to mask mandates.

'We believe that mask requirements on board aircraft should end when masks are no longer mandated in other parts of daily life, for example theatres, offices or on public transport,' said Willie Walsh, director-general of the International Air Transport Association.

Separately, the French government has announced that people will no longer have to wear facemasks in any forms of public transport from next Monday.

Health minister Olivier Veran said that the decision is part of policies to lift most restrictions as the pandemic is slowing down in the country.
This is Rambo, the bull just sold for a world record 189,000.

The Limousin was declared champion at the breed's spring show in Carlisle before being put up for auction.

Competition judge Patrick Greaney described him as the best bull he had ever seen.

Bidding started at 5,250 but soon smashed the previous breed record of 147,000.

Rambo was sold by Welsh breeder Gerwyn Jones to a partnership of two herds from Cumbria and Cheshire.

Iain Scott, speaking for the buyers, said after Saturday's sale: 'Rambo is possibly the best bull we have seen offered. He will be going straight to stud.'

Looking pleased with himself: Rambo the world record-breaking bull is pictured after he was sold for a world record price of 189,000

Mr Greaney said: 'He is 100 per cent correct with power throughout  a super top and without the coarseness that can sometimes come with this.'

He added: 'I slept well the night before the judging, but I didn't sleep well once I had seen him. I knew an incredible sale would be coming.'

Speaking on behalf of the two buyers, farm manager Iain Scott said: 'Rambo is possibly the best bull we have ever seen offered for sale at Carlisle. His breeding line is exceptional. He has width, depth of muscle as well as being correct on his feet and legs.

'With all the previous attributes, he still retains his breed character through his head. Rambo will be going straight to stud to have semen taken.'

Mr Jones told the British Limousin Cattle Society after the weekend sale: 'After working with experienced breeders for a long time, I knew Rambo was something special, which was confirmed by the interest and offers received at home prior to the sale.

'Due to the attention he was attracting, I was concerned it may deter under bidders, thankfully this was not the case. I am delighted that my first pedigree registered Limousin has sold so amazingly well.'

Meanwhile, the next-best price of 31,500 was paid for the reserve overall champion.

This was April 2020-born Goldies Relish from Dumfries breeder Bruce Goldie. By Ampertaine Opportunity, and out of Goldies Harmony, he sold to the Mash family's Buckinghamshire-based Brockhurst herd.
Scott Morrison's new attack ad has been ruthlessly mocked by voters as being so annoying it's driving them to vote for the other side.

The Liberal Party's latest commercial 'Dear Labor' - aired widely on TV - revises lyrics from the nursery rhyme 'There's a Hole in the Bucket' to rip into Anthony Albanese's ALP.

'There's a hole in your budget, dear Labor,' a sing-song voiceover says. 'More taxes are coming, more taxes, more taxes, there's a hole in your budget, dear Labor, a hole.'

A voiceover then claims the Opposition 'hasn't balanced a budget in over 30 years' while coins are seen spilling from a hole in the bottom of a rusty 'Labor' bucket.

The ad has been slammed on social media with one commentator describing it as the 'worst political advertisement so far' this election campaign.

Others claimed it is even more annoying than the ads Clive Palmer has blanketed the country with all year.

A screengrab from the 'Dear Labor' ad where a voiceover appropriates lyrics from the nursery rhyme 'there's a hole in my bucket'

'I'd like a Royal Commission into that 'hole in your budget' song ad. I don't care who made it, I'm voting for whoever didn't make it,' one wrote.

'It's worse than every United Australia Party ad combined,' another agreed.

'Will the 'hole in your budget' ad from the LNP make even more people decide they need to be voted out?' another asked.

'The anger whenever that ad comes on will be directed straight at the idiots responsible for it,' another said.

'I think the Liberal party needs to ask for a refund from whoever came up with that absurd ad of hole in your bucket,' another Aussie tweeted.

Daily Mail Australia has approached the Liberal Party for comment over the criticism.

New polling has forecast that Labor would win the election in its own right and secure a majority of 80 seats if voters were sent to the polls this week.

According to a comprehensive YouGov MRP poll commissioned by The Australian, the Coalition would be diminished to just 63 seats in the House of Representatives.

The poll predicted Labor would win 12 seats giving the party a majority of five seats in Parliament.

New polling claims Scott Morrison's Coalition could be reduced to just 63 seats in Parliament at next Saturday's election

The criticism of the Coalition's new ad comes just days after the Liberal Party was forced to release a counter-advert blasting a Labor TV and radio commercial - 'that's not my job' - which many consider the most effective of the campaign so far.

The Coalition says the clips used were taken out of context and mashed together for dramatic effect, releasing a counter-ad calling the ad a 'lie'.

The first clip featuring Mr Morrisons' line 'that's not my job' is from a Today show interview with Karl Stefanovic and Allison Langdon on August 19, 2020.

Stefanovic asked: 'Why haven't you personally lost patience with Dan Andrews' and the PM replied: 'Because that's not my job.'

Mr Morrison says the response was not an excuse but an explanation of why he was not criticising the Victoria premier over the state's huge Covid outbreak.

The second clip is from a press conference in Queensland on October 11, 2020.

The Prime Minister was defending his policy allowing Aussies to access their superannuation early when he said: 'I'm not going to go around telling Australians how to spend their own money, that's not my job.'

In the third clip, the Prime Minister was being interviewed by Tara Brown on 60 Minutes on March 22, 2020.

Asked if he was frightened by the pandemic, he replied: 'It's not my job to do that'.

Coalition campaign spokesman Simon Birmingham claimed Labor has been 'caught out lying to the Australian public' by falsely implying the PM was making excuses.

Asked if the commercial was frustrating, Mr Morrison told Ray Hadley on radio 2GB on Tuesday: 'Well, yes.

Mr Albanese (pictured) stormed to victory in the third leaders' election debate as Aussies voted from pubs in key electorates on Wednesday night

'I mean, the three quotes they're using. I was asked, should I be afraid of the pandemic? No, no, that isn't my job to be afraid of the pandemic.

'Is it, is it my job to shout down the phone at a state premier while you're trying to manage a pandemic?

'No, I don't think that's a smart idea when we're all trying to work together and get through the pandemic.'

Mr Albanese stormed to victory in the third leaders' election debate on Wednesday night as undecided Aussies voted from pubs in key electorates.

Labor earned 50 per cent of the vote in contrast to Mr Morrison's 34 per cent, while 16 per cent of voters remaining undecided.
A father-to-be is urging the public to help find the coward who violently punched him inside a hotel bathroom and left him fighting for his life.

Adam Whetstone, 32, had been attending a music concert at the Bridgeway Hotel in Adelaide last month, before being brutally assaulted.

He spent several days in intensive care, and has been left with expensive medical bills.

Adam Whetstone, 32 (pictured), had been attending a music concert at the Bridgeway Hotel in Adelaide last month, before being brutally assaulted

Mr Whetstone told 9News Adelaide that he was left with no memory of the incident and has relied on details from witnesses to try and piece together the exact events of that night.

'As I've gone into the toilet, the door has hit into someone else,' Mr Whetstone said.

The incident prompted another man to approach him.

'I've tried to laugh it off as a joke, but he said 'do you think this is funny?'

Mr Whetstone said he replied to his assailant: 'I said something like 'you don't need to arc up' and he's just turned around and king-hit me.'

Mr Whetstone (pictured) told 9News Adelaide he was left with no memory of the incident and has relied on details from witnesses to try and piece together the exact events of that night

With Mr Whetstone lying unconscious and face down on the bathroom floor, the offender filmed and mocked him before posting it on social media a short time later.

'Wanna get slapped down on the floor, way to talk s*** cuz, get slapped out,' can be heard in the video.

The injuries sustained by Mr Whetstone left him in intensive care with fluid on the lungs and serious head injuries.

'I had swelling on the brain, a fractured nose, and a busted-up, swollen face,' Mr Whetstone said.

It had been the first time in years that he had gone out and now Mr Whetstone says he does not want to go out again.

The attack was believed to be only one of several violent altercations at the hotel that night.

No one has been charged over the incident.

Anyone who may have been at the venue and saw the incident is being urged to contact South Australia Police.
Vladimir Putin continues to be humiliated in Ukraine as his forces are pushed further away from Kharkiv, the country's second-largest city to the east and a crucial target for the warring dictator.

The front lines of the war are being increasingly re-drawn as Volodymyr Zelensky's troops liberate more villages and towns to the north of the city - suggesting they are now within firing range of Vovchans'k - a key supply hub linking Russia's Belgorod to its front lines in Donbas.

If confirmed, it means Ukraine will be better placed to disrupt and cut off Putin's supply lines, potentially turning the war in their favour.

The village of Ruska Lozova, which sits between Kharkiv and the Russian border, has also now taken centre stage in Ukraine's fight back against the invaders.

Recently liberated by senior military commanders, the village is just five miles from Kharkiv and is now the first line of defence against advancing Russian forces from the north.

From Ruska Lozova, troops from Ukraine's army, territorial defence and national guard are hoping to help push the Russians back even further along a 32km (20 mile) front line, reports the BBC.

Russian paratroopers on a BMD-4 infantry fighting vehicle shoot from an anti tank missile in Kharkiv on May 11, 2022

Tetyana Pochivalova reacts outside her destroyed house in Vilhivka village, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, near Kharkiv, Ukraine, May 11, 2022

Local residents wait in a line to receive humanitarian aid in Kharkiv, amid Russian invasion of Ukraine, as Putin's forces continue to be pushed back to Russia's border

Residents help investigators to exhume bodies from a grave in the yard of a home in the village of Stepanky, near Kharkiv, on May 11, 2022

Soldiers there say they believe most Russians have left and that they are fighting Ukrainian separatists from the Donbas region.

The fighting itself in Kharkiv has also reportedly become less intense, with shelling attacks from Putin's forces falling from dozens daily to just a few, while both sides opt to use more drones to seek out their enemies' tanks and guns.

However troops have been amassing in the Russian city of Belgorod, just across the border, suggesting Putin may be planning a counter-offensive.

Residents are still being evacuated across the Kharkiv region, with tragic pictures from Wednesday showing homes and apartment building destroyed.

Others are choosing to stay, and were seen queueing for humanitarian aid, while some helped war crimes investigators exhume bodies from makeshift graves.

It comes after Ukraine's gas pipe operator announced that it will cut off a supply hub in a Russian-controlled part of Donbas which transports up to a third of its gas into Europe, starting Wednesday.

It marks the first time that pipelines carrying gas - the lifeblood of Russia's economy and vital source of funding for its military - have been affected by the war, which has now been grinding on for more than two months.

Gazprom, Russia's energy supplier, confirmed that the rate of gas flowing into Europe had fallen by around a quarter after supplies through the pipeline that Ukraine had threatened to cut fell to zero.

Ukrainian counter-attacks to the north of Kharkiv have forced Russian troops back to the border (pictured, a Ukrainian soldier fires a mortar in the area)

Russian forces appear to be retreating from Kharkiv, which has been under attack since the first day of the war (pictured, medics cover a dead Russian soldier with a sheet)

Ukraine's counter-attack north of Kharkiv threatens Russian supply lines into Donbas, where heavy fighting is currently underway. Kyiv's men continue to hold out in Mariupol despite heavy shelling, while Russia is suffering losses trying to hold Snake Island

The move has the potential to push already-high energy prices in Europe up even further, though they remained stable in early trading.

Ukraine blamed the decision to close the pipeline on Russian 'occupation forces' interfering with the pipe, including by siphoning off gas.

Sergei Kupriyanov, a spokesman for Gazprom, questioned that reasoning and said it would be 'technically impossible' to re-route supplies to another pipe.

The news emerged as Ukraine's military continued to inflict humiliating losses on Russia - all-but pushing them away from the northern outskirts of Kharkiv.

The city, which sits just 20 miles from the Russian border, has been under attack since the first day of the war and has been among the most-heavily bombed including the first known use of cluster munitions.

But it now appears that Russia's troops are beating a retreat back across their own border to the north, and across the Donets river to the east after a series of successful Ukrainian counter-attacks.

Ukraine's commanders confirmed the capture of Cherkas'ki Tyshky, Rus'ki Tyshky, Bairak and Rubizhne in an update late Tuesday.

Reports overnight then suggested they had pushed further and captured Ternova - just two miles from the border - and Lyptsi, around six miles from the frontier.

It puts Ukrainian forces around 10 miles from Vovchans'k, a Ukrainian city that contains a key highway and rail line that is being used to supply forces in Donbas.

The dead bodies of two Russian soldiers lie alongside a road to the north of Kharkiv in a village that was recently re-taken by Ukrainian forces

A Ukrainian soldier is pictured in woodland north of Kharkiv, where counter-attacks have pushed Russian forces back to the border

A Ukrainian mortar crew adjusts their fire as they rain shells down on Russian positions north of Kharkiv, during counter-attacks

Artillery can now almost certainly range that city, meaning Ukraine can at least disrupt and perhaps sever supply lines to the crucial frontline - slowing or perhaps stalling the Russian advance.

Retired US General Jack Keane, now working for the Institute for the Study of War think-tank, said Tuesday that he believes Russia is now having to divert forces from Donbas back to Kharkiv to secure the rear areas.

'It just underscores the challenges they [the Russians] have,' he said.

Similar Ukrainian counter-attacks were seen in the areas around Kyiv shortly before the Russian offensive ground to a halt and then turned into a retreat.

But President Volodymyr Zelensky sought to lower expectations in his overnight address early Wednesday, saying that while Ukraine's armed forces are showing 'superhuman strength' to fight off Russia, victory is far from assured.

'The Armed Forces of our state provided us with good news from the Kharkiv region. The occupiers are gradually being pushed away from Kharkiv,' he said.

'But I also want to urge all our people, and especially those in the rear, not to spread excessive emotions. We shouldn't create an atmosphere of specific moral pressure, where certain victories are expected weekly or daily.'

'The Armed Forces are doing everything to liberate our land and our people. To liberate all our cities - Herson, Melitopol, Berdyansk, Mariupol and all others.'

Despite his calls for patience, foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba gave an interview in which he said that victory in Donbas would mean Ukraine pushing to re-take all of its territory from Russia - including areas occupied before the latest war.

Speaking to the Financial Times, he said that Ukraine initially believed victory would be the withdrawal of Russian troops to positions they occupied before the invasion.

But 'now if we are strong enough on the military front, and we win the battle for Donbas, which will be crucial for the following dynamics of the war, of course the victory for us in this war will be the liberation of the rest of our territories.'

Burnt cars are pictured through the glass of a damaged car in Saltivka neighbourhood, Kharkiv, as Russian forces are pushed away from the city

Neighbours in a shelled village near Kharkiv inspect the damage after Ukrainian counter-attacks forced Russian troops away from the city

Destroyed cars are pictured amongst the ruins of a building in Saltivka neighbourhood, Kharkiv, after Russian forces were pushed out of the region

Russia - while far from defeated in Donbas - has yet to make any significant gains despite announcing the start of its offensive there almost a month ago.

Heavy fighting continues around Izyum - where the bulk of Russia's forces are concentrated - as they attempt to push south towards the city of Kramatorsk.

Battles are also raging in woodland on the outskirts of Severodonetsk, around 60 miles to the west, as Putin's men try to surround and capture the city.

Hundreds of miles to the south, in Mariupol, the last Ukrainian defenders of the city are still holed up inside the Azovstal steel works making an heroic last stand as Russian forces close in from the north and east.

The Ukrainian-held cities of Mykolaiv, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia and Odesa continue to be bombarded from Russian forces occupying Kherson and Melitopol, in the south.

However, these are thought to be 'fixing' operations to pin Ukrainian troops in place and stop them reinforcing elsewhere rather than a precursor to an attack.

Fighting also continues around Snake Island, a strategically important spit of land 80 miles south of Odesa, which has been attacked by Ukraine in recent days.

British intelligence says Russia has 'repeatedly' tried to reinforce its garrison there, despite a series of drone and jet strikes by Kyiv - one of which destroyed a helicopter as it was unloading troops.

The island became vulnerable to attack after Ukraine sank the Moskva battleship which was providing it with air defence, the UK's Ministry of Defence said, and is now having to expend men and equipment trying to re-take it.

'If Russia consolidates its position on Snake Island with strategic air defence and coastal defence cruise missiles, they could dominate the north-western Black Sea,' the MoD added.

Ukrainian troops calculate their next move as they carry out counter-attacks against Russian positions to the north of Kharkiv

Russia is now more than two months into what was supposed to be a days-long war that was originally intended to topple the government and install a Moscow-friendly puppet regime.

But an attack on Kyiv from Belarus stuttered, stalled, and then turned into a humiliating retreat - forcing Russia to concentrate on taking Donbas instead.

Moscow confirmed its offensive in the region got underway on April 19 with a huge artillery barrage along a frontline stretching for hundreds of miles, followed by ground attacks that have inched forward into Ukrainian territory.

But there has been no major breakthrough of Ukrainian lines in the weeks since then, and Russia has gained no significant territory or seized any major cities.

Instead it has been dragged into brutal town-by-town fighting, with Kyiv saying it has suffered colossal losses.

The outcome of the Donbas fight is seen as key to the outcome of the war.

If either Russia or Ukraine can achieve decisive victory over the other, then it will embolden them to push on to other objectives.

For Ukraine, it would mean pushing Russia out of all its territories - spelling disaster for Putin an the possible end of his regime.

For Russia, it would mean trying to capture Mykolaiv and Odesa to choke Ukraine off from its lucrative Black Sea coast - before perhaps returning to Kharkiv and Kyiv.

If neither side can inflict a killing blow, then the Donbas could devolve into a trench-warfare stalemate, as it did back in 2014.
A woman from the Bronx who helped her then-boyfriend dismember and dispose of her friend's body says 'justice was served' after he was sentenced to 27-years to life in jail - though she avoided prison by testifying against him.

Ciara Martinez, 31, testified against Daquan Wheeler under a cooperation agreement on Friday in the death of Lisa Marie Velasquez, 25, in 2018. She was then sentenced Tuesday to time served on a conspiracy charge, according to the New York Post.

She was initially charged three years ago with criminal facilitation, hindering prosecution, concealment of a human corpse, tampering with physical evidence and conspiracy.

Wheeler, 34, was convicted of murder, manslaughter, and concealment of a human corpse in April. Martinez last appeared in court two days ago, when she exclusively spoke to DailyMail.com about her relief from the case's outcome.

Ciara Martinez, 31, testified against her former lover in court on Friday after he murdered her friend before dismembering her body with her help. Upon her arrest in 2018, Martinez was charged with criminal facilitation, hindering prosecution, concealment of a human corpse, tampering with physical evidence and conspiracy. However, her prison sentence was reduced to time served on a conspiracy charge on Tuesday

Daquan Wheeler was sentenced on May 7, to 27 years to life for his murder of Lisa Marie Velasquez, 25, in August 2018

Wheeler was also charged with manslaughter, and concealment of a human corpse in April

Lisa Marie Velasquez, 25 was said to have died from at least 14 blows to the head from Wheeler's hammer and suffered multiple blunt impact injuries. Wheeler killed her after learning she had filed a domestic abuse report with the NYPD, claiming harassment after getting involved in a fight with Martinez

Grisly evidence: Investigators in protective suits are pictured examining black trash bags containing some of Velasquez's remains in August 2018

'I'm just glad that justice was served. This is all behind me now,' she said. 'This is all behind the family. I just want to move on with it. I was cleared. I will no longer be coming to court anymore. And hopefully my name will also get cleared from the credit that I had in this.'

Wheeler killed Velasquez at an apartment he shared with the mother of his child, Martinez, whom she had gone there to help with due to a domestic dispute.

Wheeler suddenly became extremely angry after he found out that Velazquez had filed a report with the NYPD, accusing him of harassment.

He struck Velazquez in the head with a hammer and repeatedly hit her with the tool 14 times before wrapping an electrical cord around her neck, prosecutors added.

He then dragged Velasquez's body into a bathtub, dismembered her with a machete and placed her remains in three trash bags with Martinez's help.

'It was a horrifying series of acts,' Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark said, adding that she hoped Wheeler's longtime sentence gives Velasquez's family and friends 'some measure of peace during this nightmare they are living.'

Visitors found Velasquez's arms and feet in three trash bags under a pier in Barretto Point Park in Hunts Point. Two bags containing her head and torso were found about two miles away in Crotona Park.

Velasquez was only 12 when her mother was murdered in 2006 - a decade prior to her death

Friends and family wore special shirts in memory of the victim ahead of Wheeler's sentencing on May 7

Friends and family of Velasquez are seen at Wheeler's sentencing on Friday

Velasquez and her two siblings (pictured), who also witnessed the brutal murder of their mother

Martinez and Wheeler even had a meal together before disposing the body of Velasquez, the New York Daily News reports. Martinez also helped clean up the Longfellow Avenue apartment she had been sharing with Wheeler.

'She was my friend,' Martinez told reporters of Velasquez as she was being led in handcuffed out of the police station after her 2018 arrest. 'I loved her.'

The victim's grandmother, Iris Ginel, took Velasquez in when she was 12-years-old along with her siblings, David and Vanessa.

The three witnessed the brutal murder of their mother, 37-year-old Marilyn Ginel, at the hands of ex-boyfriend Robert Coakley in 2006.

Ciara Martinez and Daquan Wheeler, both 31, being detained in August, 2018 in connection to the killing of Lisa Marie Velasquez, 24

With assistance from his then-girlfriend, who held Marilyn down, Coakley stabbed, strangled and beat the woman to death.

Coakley was said to have warned the children that 'if you tell anybody I killed your mother, I'll kill you.' Marilyn was nine months pregnant with her fourth child at the time of her death.

Her ex-boyfriend was convicted of murder and is currently serving 25 years-to-life behind bars.

Family members for Lisa Valasquez leave the Bronx corthouse in New York after her murder

Velasquez was last seen leaving her apartment at the Melrose Houses on August 21, 2018. According to police, she never returned.

'She came to my mother's house. She grabbed her bag. She left in a rush. She said she had to help a friend who was in danger. And then she ran out,' Velasquez's aunt Jacqueline Perez told the Daily News back in 2018.

Police sources said Martinez and Wheeler had been arguing at their home on Longfellow Avenue. When Velasquez came to her friend's aid, both women called police to file a domestic abuse report, accusing Wheeler of harassment.

The victim, who would have been 27-year-old this year, was reported missing the next day by another aunt who lives in her building.

'The type of animal who would do this to another human being she was tortured,' Perez stated. 'She didn't deserve this. She didn't deserve to die this way. Whether she was a good girl or a bad girl, she didn't deserve this.'
President Yoon Suk-yeol speaks during a pre-recorded speech to the second virtual Global COVID-19 Summit, Thursday, making his debut on the international diplomatic stage as the president. Captured from White House live stream



By Nam Hyun-woo



President Yoon Suk-yeol made his debut on the international diplomatic stage, Thursday, promising a $300 million contribution to an international initiative on COVID-19 response.



During his speech at the second virtual Global COVID-19 Summit, Yoon stressed Korea's role and responsibility in the world's battle against the pandemic.



"Korea has been making contributions to the international society's efforts to end COVID-19 and build a sustainable global response system for healthcare," Yoon said. "We will continue making contributions to the global efforts to see the end of the pandemic, and will play our role and fulfill our responsibility."



To this end, Yoon promised that Korea will make a $300 million contribution to the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A).



Launched in April 2020, ACT-A is a program on accelerating development, production and equitable access to COVID-19 tests, treatments and vaccines. It is a collaboration of global health organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), Gavi the Vaccine Alliance, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a slew of others.



So far, Korea has made contributions worth $210 million to the COVID-19 Vaccines Advance Market Commitment, a pillar of the ACT-A program.



Yoon also noted Korea's plan to establish a global biomanufacturing training hub, saying it will play a significant role in helping developing nations to develop and manufacture their own COVID-19 vaccines.



In February, Korea, the WHO and the WHO Academy announced the establishment of the hub, saying it will serve all low- and middle-income countries wishing to produce biologicals, such as vaccines, insulin, monoclonal antibodies and cancer treatments.



Yoon added that Korea is supporting the establishment of Financial Intermediary Funds under the World Bank, which he said will help the global community to cope with new epidemics and other new healthcare crises efficiently.



"COVID-19 and other health crises that threaten all of humanity cannot be resolved by efforts of just one or a few countries," Yoon said. "If more countries unite and cooperate, we will be able to get through many crises. Korea will also play its role as a responsible member of international society, and will keep in mind that it is a way toward the prosperity of humanity."


Heartwarming photos have emerged of a toddler meeting her Australian family after she was found wandering alone barefoot at a church in Mexico.

Two-year-old Adelynn was found alone outside the chapel in Cancun on May 3, as authorities search for her mother Tahnee Shanks, 32, and dad Jorge Aguirre Astudillo who have both been reported missing.

Little Adelynn's uncle Ben Shanks and grandmother Leanne had flown from Queensland to Mexico to bring her home.

On Thursday the toddler met other relatives including cousins for the first time in Mackay, Queensland after landing safely in Australia.

Two-year-old Adelynn is seen with her grandmother and uncle after landing safely in Australia. She was found wandering barefoot in Mexico

On Thursday the toddler met other relatives including cousins for the first time in Mackay, Queensland after landing safely in Australia

Tahnee's other brother Dan Shanks said it was relief knowing Adelynn was safe.

'It's bittersweet but it's something,' he told the Courier Mail.

'Now I can focus on Tahnee 100 per cent.'

The Shanks family say they won't give up on looking for Tahnee.

An image of a burnt out van on the side of the road in Mexico has now surfaced, with the van allegedly being held as evidence in the case.

Mexican police have also seized a video of a woman being forced into a van and are investigating whether it is linked to Ms Shanks' disappearance.

Adelyn had previously been cared for by Mexican child welfare authorities before her grandmother Leanne (left) and uncle Ben (right) arrived

Police are reportedly investigating whether Ms Shanks and her missing partner Mr Astudillo were targeted by criminals in a random attack.

Adelynn had previously been cared for by Mexican child welfare authorities before her relatives arrived. She was given an emergency Australian passport.

Ms Shanks' brother Daniel earlier said 'three eyewitnesses' saw Mr Astudillo leave his daughter Adelynn outside the Chapel of the San Archangel.

Mr Shanks told the ABC that his sister, who is from Queensland's Whitsundays, claimed she was on a vacation with her family in a small fishing village with poor reception but something felt off.

'I'm assuming I was talking to him (Astudillo),' he said.

Ms Shanks had been holidaying around the Yucatan peninsula and was set to return to Australia after her relationship broke down with her partner Mr Astudillo.

It was revealed last week that Ms Shanks, from Queensland, had disappeared and her two-year-old daughter Adelynn (pictured together) was found dumped at a church

The distraught sibling said Ms Shanks had stopped using social media days before she went missing - which was unusual for the mother.

'Look, it is very out of character, she is always on social media, she is always posting photos of her and Addie constantly, it is a constant stream of it, so for her to drop off, we knew something was wrong,' Mr Shanks told Sunrise in the days after his sister disappeared.

Ms Shanks' relatives have barely slept in the nine days Tahnee has been missing.

Her brother Dan spoke to her just two days before she disappeared.

He is fearing the worst and relatives in Australia are preparing to look after Adelynn indefinitely.

Jorge Aguirre Astudillo has not been seen since May 2 when he was with Australian native Tahnee Shanks, the mother of his two-year-old daughter

Mr Shanks also said his sister was due to fly home to Australia on June 22, after splitting from Mr Astudillo, after he reportedly cheated on her.

Quintana Roos general attorney Oscar Montes de Oca Rosales said the couple had visited Cancun for a day and then planned to drive back to Merida.

On the way there they turned around and returned to Cancun where they then disappeared and Adelynn was later found by herself.

Mr de Oca Rosales said Mr Astudillo had a domestic violence claim against him from a previous girlfriend, but both he and Ms Shanks were being treated as victims in the investigation into their disappearance.

The Shanks family say they are confident Mexican authorities are doing what they can to find the missing mum.

The family has offered a $5,000 reward for Tahnee's safe return.

Tahnee Shanks (pictured middle) was on vacation with her ex-partner (right) and her daughter (left) when she vanished in Mexico, a continent away from any of her family

Tahnee Shanks' family raised the alarm after they were made aware of photos being circulated of little Adelynn wandering Cancun alone late at night

The last known photos of Ms Shanks and Mr Astudillo show them in Las Coloradas, Yucatan, 93 miles from where their daughter was found in Cancun on Mexico's tropical southern tip.

Ms Shanks moved eight years ago from Australia to Merida, Mexico. She split from her partner a year after Adelynn was born.

'She would have been home months ago,' Daniel Shanks told ABC.

'She thought she could get home easily, but America had shut down visas for Mexican-born people for a period because of Covid. She's had to go and get an Australian citizenship and passport for Addy to try and divert around that issue.'

Witnesses say they saw a man pass Adelynn to a stranger in front of a church in the 220 Quintana Roo district.

The devoted mum's social media pages are full of happy snaps of her little girl.

The mother had been traveling the world since she was 18 and describes herself on social media as a 'Happy Hippy Ginger Ninja meeting around the world one country at a time.'

Australian mother Tahnee Shanks (pictured with her ex-partner Jorge Aguirre Astudillo) has gone missing in Mexico

Before she went overseas, she worked in Australia as an assistant nurse looking after the elderly, which she described as a rewarding career.

'The travel bug bit me in 2010 taking me on my first 18 month journey through Asia and parts of Europe volunteering and couch surfing my way across the country,' the freelance writer wrote on a travel blog for the Whitsundays.

Shanks returned home and saved for two years and then headed back overseas traveling through Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and the United States before settling in Mexico.

She is described as having a fair complexion, and has red hair, light brown eyes, 5 feet 4 inches tall, thin build and has a distinctive tattoo along her right thigh.
A Las Vegas strip resort thrilled its 5,400 workers at an employee appreciation and awards buffet by announcing that the winner of a $5,000 bonus was 'every one of you'.

The CEO of The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, Bill McBeath, took to the stage at the lavish ceremony to make the stunning announcement that will cost the casino an 'unprecedented' $27 million.

The event room exploded with joy and ticker tape as the thousands of assembled employees celebrated and hugged each other as they grasped the generosity their one off 5,000 bonus.

'It's you, every single day, that makes a difference,' said Daniel Espino, Cosmopolitan chief people officer. 'Whether you clean the rooms, cook the food, are dealing cards, serving drinks, at the front desk.'

More than half of the resort's 5,400 workers attended the noontime midweek event, where executives from Cosmopolitan and private equity firm Blackstone Real Estate Americas, which owns the casino, credited them with maintaining 'a youthful, exuberant brand' while working through the coronavirus pandemic.

Employees of The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas celebrate at an event announcing cash bonuses for employees, Wednesday, May 11, 2022, in Las Vegas. Blackstone, the corporate owner of The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, surprised employees at an appreciation event

The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas CEO Bill McBeath (above) took to the stage at the lavish ceremony to announce that a $5,000 bonus would go to each and every member of staff

'It's amazing!' said Edgar Rives, a cook for nine years in the employee cafeteria, after a round of high-five hand slaps and hugs with dancing co-workers at The Chelsea theater at the Las Vegas Strip property. 'Its a big surprise.'

The 55-year-old El Salvador immigrant and U.S. citizen said hell leave it to his wife to decide how to spend the money.

McBeath noted the resort had donated more than $9 million to charities during the last seven years, and he awarded vacation trips to San Diego and Hawaii to two company employees: Staci Stafford, a housekeeping worker trainer, and Samira Harbali, a server at the resort.

Employee Paolo Crow said she would plan a trip with her family with the money. 'Maybe I'll go back to Spain and have a quick visit.'

Her co-worker Raymond Ilano found himself speechless. 'I can't event put it into words. I've been here since pre-opening,' he said.

'Oh my gosh, how amazing was this? I have no words, I'm still in shock,' said Costar Jessica Ragin. The gratitude I feel is just amazing. The sentiment when I talk to everyone is OMG.'

Company representatives said the all-employee bonus announced Wednesday will cost the resort more than $27 million.

The eyewatering bonus is especially generous in light of the pounding the Nevada economy has taken during the Covid-19 pandemic.

More than half of the resort's 5,400 workers attended the noontime midweek event organised to thank them for their efforts

The event room exploded with joy and ticker tape as the thousands of assembled employees celebrated and hugged each other as they grasped the enormity of their employer's generosity

Las Vegas casinos lost $206 million last year due to pandemic restrictions, according to The Nevada Gaming Control Boards annual Nevada Gaming Abstract, released in January.

All casinos and many other businesses statewide were closed from mid-March to early June 2020.

Blackstone, the New York-based private equity firm, owns the approximately 3,000-room, two-tower property. It plans in coming weeks to complete a $1.6 billion sale of property operations to casino giant MGM Resorts International.

The Cosmopolitan is one of the flashier Las Vegas strip resorts which sits between two other MGM-owed Strip properties: Bellagio and the multi-resort City Center complex.

It opened in 2010 but quickly hit financial trouble, leading to its purchase by Blackstone in 2014 for $1.7 billion. Blackstone spent about $500 million renovating its 3000 plus guestrooms, casino floors and hospitality spaces.
Anthony Albanese said he reflected modern Australia after being asked for his thoughts on potentially being the first Australian PM with an Italian name.

The Opposition leader appeared in Gladstone to visit an oil refinery where he announced Labor's plans to construct an Australian battery manufacturing industry.

A reporter referred to ex-PM Paul Keating's 1996 comment that: 'When you change the government, you change the country'.

'You will be the first Italian Australian to win and Ed Husic will be the first Muslim Australian in the cabinet. Have you thought about how that will change the country?'

Mr Albanese replied that he was 'heartened' by his support from Australians with foreign heritage.

Anthony Albanese claimed Scott Morrison has an 'allergy to the ABC' while speaking in Gladstone on Thursday (pictured)

'Members of the Italian community are saying to me that they are going to vote Labor for the first time in their life because they want an Australia that reflects modern Australia,' Mr Albanese said.

'I have a non-Anglo-Celtic name, and so does our Senate leader as well. I think it send a message out there hopefully to multicultural Australia that you can achieve anything in this country.'

He also pointed out he the raft of popular Premiers with foreign names including Annastacia Palaszczuk in Queensland, ex-Premier Gladys Berejiklian of NSW and Steve Bracks of Victoria who is of Lebanese descent.

'A fellow called Peter Malinauskas just got elected in South Australia.'

'I think it's a very positive thing.'

Mr Albanese was born and raised in Sydney by his single mother Maryanne Ellery in public housing.

She had told him his father had died in a car crash after they had met overseas and wed, but when he was 15-years old she revealed a different story.

'We sat down just after dinner one night and she, it was very traumatic for her, I think, to tell me that in fact that wasn't the case, that my father might still be alive,' he previously told 7.30.

'She'd met him overseas, fallen pregnant with me, had told him and he had said, basically, that he was betrothed to someone from the town in Italy where he was from,' he said.

Maryanne had adopted his father's name, worn engagement and wedding rings, and Mr Albanese believed it was because of the guilt she felt as a Catholic woman with a child out of marriage in the 1960s.

Several decades later after having his own son, he made the decision to track his father down with the help of Carnival Cruises boss Ann Sherry - whose company had bought the cruise business through which the pair met.

A photo from the ship the Fairsky, aboard which Anthony Albanese's parents Carlo Albanese (top left) and Maryanne Ellery (bottom right) met during a trip between Sydney and London

He eventually met his father in the Italian town of Barletta and discovered he had a half brother and sister.

'The bell rung ... and the door opened, he walked in and opened his arms to me and we embraced.'

He has since returned to Italy on several occasions to meet his extended Italian family.

Mr Albanese's father Carlo died in 2014.

The Opposition leader was in Gladstone as Labor tries to win the seat of Flynn held by a margin of more than 7 per cent by the Coalition.

While fronting press there, he also slammed Prime Minister Scott Morrison for shunning the ABC during the election campaign.

Mr Morrison was subjected to a tough grilling by 7.30's Leigh Sales in early April - days out from calling the election - but has since largely steered clear of the national broadcaster.

'I cannot believe that the national Prime Minister will be the first one during a campaign who has not appeared on any ABC programs,' Mr Albanese said.

The ABC had been set on securing one of the three leader's debates but they went to Channel 9, Sky News and Channel 7 (pictured: Wednesday night's debate)

'It is like I has an allergy to the ABC. No debate on the ABC, no appearance on Q&A, no appearance on RN Breakfast, no appearance on ABC Breakfast, no interviews on Insiders, on the major programs, and no appearance yet at the National Press Club.' he said.

Scott Morrison has popped up on the ABC but his appearances have been very rare.

On Monday, ABC radio host Virginia Trioli erupted at the PM for failing to appear on her Melbourne show after struggling to interview him for three years.

But moments later he appeared with ABC radio host Sabra Lane for a somewhat relaxed 10-minute interview on her AM program.

Candidates have traditionally appeared on the ABC's 7.30 for an interview during the campaign but this has not happened.

The network has been criticised for its left-leaning stance, with outspoken political commentator Andrew Bolt recently hitting out at the program for airing an 'eight-minute smear' against Mr Morrison over an 'unbalanced' segment which detailed his governments failings since 2019.

'People who watch 7.30 aren't swing voters, they're rusted on,' one senior government official was quoted as saying earlier this year.

And while the ABC was set on securing at least one leader's debate, they went to Channel 9, Channel 7 and the conservative Sky News Australia.
An alleged cult follower who left Australia 35 years ago when her two-year-old daughter vanished has been charged with murder and extradited back from New Zealand to Sydney.

Ellen Craig, 60, arrived under police guard on Thursday morning after being arrested in Palmerston North, north of Wellington, over the death of her daughter Tillie in 1987.

Police will allege Ms Craig was a follower of the Ministry of God cult, which was run at the time by Alfio Nicolosi, also known as Alexander Wilon. Nicolosi/Wilon has been charged with accessory after the fact to murder and misconduct with regard to a corpse.

Back then, Nicolosi/Wilon claimed to possess divine powers and said his followers should obey the word of God or be punished.

Wilon, who his followers knew as 'Papa', would preach the word of God and claim to pass on divine messages from an oracle known as 'Monet'.

Ellen Craig (above with baby Tillie) left Australia in 1987 but has now been extradited back to Sydney and charged with her two-year-old's alleged murder in 1987

Tillie Craig went to live in the Ministry of God cult near Oberon NSW with her mother, a cult follower of leader known as 'Papa' who claimed to possess divine powers

Alfio Nicolosi (centre) aka Alexander Wilon ran the Ministry of God cult in which he passed on divine messages from an oracle known as 'Monet' and told followers to obey the word of God or be punished

Last year NSW Police searched Wilon's property at Porters Retreat about 42km south of Oberon, in NSW's Central Tablelands, but found no remains of toddler Tillie Craig.

Homicide squad detectives arrested Wilon last November and applied to have Craig extradited to Australia.

The arrests come after Strike Force Betrand was launched in October 2019 after police received information relating to the alleged murder of Tillie at Porters Retreat in 1987.

A 70-year-old man has been arrested at a Porters Retreat property (pictured) over the alleged murder of a little girl in 1987

NSW Police carried out a search warrant on the NSW Central Tablelands property (pictured) on Tuesday as part of Strike Force Bertrand

Detectives were told the toddler was allegedly fatally assaulted by Craig around July of that year and that Wilon/Nicolosi allegedly helped the woman dispose of the child's remains.

Around the time Craig left Australia for New Zealand, Tillie's biological father Gerard Stanhope had been in a desperate search for his daughter and believed she may have been taken out of the country.

Cold case detectives carried out a search warrant at the Porters Retreat property , with police divers scouring surrounding creeks as officers seizing a number of items, including a gun.

Homicide Squad Commander, Detective Superintendent Danny Doherty, praised the efforts of investigators for their tenacity during their inquiries over the past two years.

'Strike Force Bertrand detectives have conducted an extensive, thorough and protracted investigation into this alleged murder that occurred more than three decades ago,' Det Supt Doherty said.

Police officers examine a number of items found on the property, including a gun

'These allegations were only brought to the attention of NSW Police in October 2019, and it is due to the tenacity and dedication of our officers, that two individuals have now been charged.

'The level of violence allegedly used upon this child is abhorrent and left a father without his daughter or knowledge of her death for 34 years.

'The NSW Police Force will always thoroughly investigate new information relating to historical alleged crimes and have worked tirelessly to ensure justice is finally served for this little girl,' Det Supt Doherty said.


Calum von Moger, 31, reportedly jumped out of a second storey window and injured his spine this week

Australian bodybuilder and 'Mr Universe' Calum von Moger was beset by a series of unfortunate events before he jumped through a second-storey window.

Prior to the incident, the 31-year-old was an international celebrity and three-time Mr Universe winner who inspired thousands of people to get fit and lead healthier lives.

Moger, who has been living between California and his family home near Melbourne, is in a stable condition in hospital with severe spinal injures after the fall on May 6.

The reason for the incident has not been released. However, it was just the latest in a string of misfortunes to arise in Moger's life.

Over the past five years, the gym junkie - once dubbed Arnold Schwarzenegger 2.0 - suffered a knee and bicep injury that left him incapacitated for a year, found out he was the father of a little boy named Kairos, and his house in California burnt down.

Earlier this year, he appeared in Melbourne Magistrates' Court after he allegedly rammed another car and chased the driver with a machete, before police allegedly found cannabis, ice and testosterone in his possession.

He was charged with criminal affray and drug possession, was on bail and reportedly living with his brother in Melbourne while awaiting his next court mention on May 26.

Moger was reportedly kicked of his family's home before he jumped out the window. But those who follow him closely online say he hasn't been the same since his bull terrier, Rex, choked to death on a chip last year.

Calum von Moger's beloved bull terrier Rex (pictured together) choked to death on a chip last year

Calum was shattered when Rex (pictured together) died. His lizard Baz also passed away at around the same time

The strongman explained in a YouTube video that tragedy struck when he briefly left the house after moving to Texas in early 2021.

'I left the house for 20 minutes to go to the store and I guess he got into one of the rooms and there was a bag of chips and he choked on a chip,' Moger said.

'I came back, looked for him and found him on the floor with his head in the chip bag - I thought it was a bad joke, and then I went down and I couldn't do anything.'

Moger tried giving Rex CPR, doing compressions, and raced him to the vet - but there was nothing anyone could do.

He described the situation as the worst thing that has ever happened to him - including the moment he was involved in an abseiling incident and spent a year trying to recover in 2019.

Just weeks earlier, his rescue dragon lizard, Baz, tragically died during a three-day power outage following heavy snowfall.

People who follow Moger closely on social media say he wasn't the same after his dog, Rex, died

Moger played a young Arnold Schwarzenegger (pictured together) in the 2018 film Bigger and was dubbed 'Arnold 2.0' in the bodybuilding world

Moger had an abseiling accident and severely injured his knee and bicep. Pictured: Just after the injury, and after rehabilitation

Moger doesn't know why the lizard passed away because they're supposed to live for at least a decade, but he only had Baz for four years.

A year prior, the gym junkie announced that he had learned he was the father of a little boy, Kairos, following a paternity test.

Moger said he was excited to be part of Kairos' life, but wanted nothing to do with the boy's mother. He frequently posts pictures of the toddler on Instagram.

The bodybuilder grew up in a large family with his parents and five siblings near Geelong in regional Victoria.

In the documentary Calum von Moger: Unbroken, he described himself as a daredevil who was always trying to keep up with his brothers.

Moger (pictured with a friend) released his own documentary titled Calum von Moger: Unbroken on Netflix in 2019

Moger discovered he was a father and pledged to look after his young son, Kairos (pictured together)

The film detailed Moger's rise through the bodybuilding ranks to a point where he was dubbed 'Arnold 2.0' and how that came crashing down following a significant knee and bicep injury while abseiling.

'I was pretty broken - pretty heartbroken,' he recalled.

In the same year he nearly lost his home due to devastating fires in California.

'This year was the most challenging, I had these terrible injuries, the house, the fires, so many things that are trying to knock me off my feet - it's either going to make ya or break ya,' he said.

He started lifting weights at 14 and began entering competitions, but his big break came in 2017 when he was cast as young Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 2018 movie Bigger.

Moger (pictured second left) started bodybuilding at 14. He has five siblings (pictured together with their father)

Moger (far right, in red) and his family grew up on a property in regional Victoria

Moger quickly rose to fame after uploading videos of his physique and training online, amassing a following of more than 3 million on Instagram.

He tried a range of professions before pursuing bodybuilding full time, such as lifesaving, landscaping, touring adventure groups, skippering yachts and the army.

When Australia was devastated by bushfires in 2019/2020, Moger launched a GoFundMe and raised more than $40,000 for the Wildlife Conservancy Fund.

'Even if you don't live in Australia, your contribution to this cause will mean so much to me, my friends and family,' he wrote.

'This is the sad reality of Australia in 2020. Any help is appreciated and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.'

Just days before he jumped out the window, Moger posted a bizarre social media post saying he 'messed up bad many times'.

Calum von Moger, 31, shared bizarre social media posts in the days before the incident (pictured)

Moger was seen puffing on a vape in one video shared to Instagram last week

'But I don't care about dwelling on negative thoughts of the past. All I care about is that I learn from my mistakes and become a better person.

'I'm trying my hardest to stay strong but I have my days too.'

Another Instagram post featured a bizarre clip of him behind the wheel of his car with a parrot Ronnie on his shoulder, saying 'catch ya later... alligator' - in a hi-vis singlet.

Fellow bodybuilder and Youtuber Nick Trigilli said Moger was in a 'rough spot' at the time of the incident.

Moger had reportedly been kicked out of his family's home in Australia in recent times.

'I hope this is rock bottom for him and he can get his life back,' Trigilli said.

Daily Mail Australia has reached out to Moger's family for comment.

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Millions of Australians are set to receive hundreds of dollars in credit towards their power bill.

Hikes in the cost of petrol, electricity and food has seen many Australian households struggling to make ends meet, prompting state government's to offer the free cash.

Here's a breakdown of the payments for each state:

Millions of Australians are entitled to rebates and payments to help them pay for their energy bills

Western Australia

In Western Australia, millions of residents are expected to receive $400 credit towards their power bill.

Synergy and Horizon Power customers in WA will have the one-off credit added to their electricity accounts from July.

New South Wales

In New South Wales, households with dependent children are eligible to an $180 credit on an energy bill.

Those receiving the payment in New South Wales must have been the recipient of the Family Tax Benefit (FTB) for the previous financial year and have had your entitlement to the FTB payments finalised by Centrelink.

Check your eligibility and apply at the Service NSW website.

South Australia

Eligible South Australians on low or fixed incomes can apply for help with the cost of energy bills for their principal place of residence.

They can receive up to $233.60 a year to cover energy payments, including fuels used to generate energy (eg LPG bottled gas and petrol). The concession is calculated as a flat rate per day and is indexed each financial year.

To apply for the payment visit the South Australia government website.

Queensland

Queensland pensioners and seniors may be eligible for the Electricity Rebate - $340.85 per year and the Reticulated Natural Gas Rebate - $76.19 per year.

To apply for the rebate, contact your power and gas provider. You can apply over the phone or ask your retailer to send you an application form. You will need to provide certain details and have copies of your bills and concession card handy so you can verify your eligibility. Rebates are automatically deducted from your bill.

Meanwhile, Queensland households experiencing problems paying their electricity or reticulated natural gas bills as a result of an unforeseen emergency or a short-term financial crisis can receive $720 once every two years.

To be eligible you must be responsible for paying the outstanding bill and meet one of the following:

have an income equal to or less than the Australian Governments maximum income rate for part-age pensioners; contact Services Australia or the Department of Veterans' Affairs for details of the maximum income rate

be part of your energy provider's hardship program or payment plan.

For more details on the emergency payment in Queensland, click here.

Victoria

Every household in Victoria is set to receive a $250 cash handout to help with the rising cost of living, as Dan Andrews launches a $250million cash splash.

Payments will start from July 1, with Victorians simply having to sign up to the Energy Compare website to become eligible for the huge cash splash.

The scheme was initially rolled out to ease the financial burden of struggling families during Covid-19, but has since been extended.

The Power Saving Bonus was originally only available for Pensioner Concession Card and Health Care Card holders in the state, including those claiming Jobseeker, Youth Allowance, Austudy and Abstudy.

With the schemes combined together for the most vulnerable in Victoria, up to $800 will be available.

Premier Daniel Andrews heaped says the one-off energy payment would go a long way to help families

Residents will need to head to Energy Compare and register their details through the website before they can receive the one-off payment. For more details, click here.

The scheme will open on July 1 and run until June 30 2023.

Northern Territory

Members of the Northern Territory (NT) Concession Scheme can claim a concession on household electricity costs for their main place of residence. This excludes any household used for business or commercial purposes.

You can get up to $1,200 per annum for electricity (8000kW).

For more details on the payment, click here.

Australian Capital Territory

The ACT Government offers an annual combined rebate of up to $700 through the Utilities Concession Scheme for low income households.

From 1 July 2021 the annual concession amount will permanently increase to $750.

In the 2021-22 financial year an additional $50 rebate will also be provided to eligible households, resulting in a total concession of $800.

The concession covers electricity, natural gas, water, and sewage.

Eligible households include: Centrelink Pensioner Concession Card holders, Low Income Health Care Card holders, ACT Service Access Card holders, Veterans Affairs Pensioner Concession Card holders and, Gold Card holders.

For more details, click here.

Federal government payments for struggling families

The energy payments come after the federal government handed out $250 cash boosts to struggling families last month.

More than six million pensioners, carers, veterans, job seekers, eligible self-funded retirees and concession card holders received the payment.

More than six million pensioners, carers, veterans, job seekers, eligible self-funded retirees and concession card holders received the payment can receive a $250 cash payment from the federal government

The measure is one of the key components of Treasurer Josh Frydenberg's fourth budget, which was delivered in March and included plans to help millions of vulnerable Australians struggling to keep up with soaring.

Another 10 million Australians will get up to $1,500 back in their next tax return under the government's pre-election cash-splash Budget which also slashed petrol excise.

Australians earning less than $126,000 will from July 1 get an existing tax offset of up to $1,080 plus a bonus $420 to help manage the rising cost of living in a $4.1billion policy.

The government is spending $3 billion to slash fuel duty in half for six months  saving an average household $300 over six months and families with two cars $700.

Treasurer Josh Fyrdenberg said the Government's plan to help the economy recover after the Covid-19 pandemic was working, with unemployment predicted to reach 3.75 per cent in September, the lowest level since 1974.

'Three years ago we said to the Australian people that under the Coalition, the economy would be stronger. We delivered,' he said in his speech.

Treasurer Josh Fyrdenberg said the Government's plan to help the economy recover after the Covid-19 pandemic was working, with unemployment predicted to reach 3.75 per cent in September, the lowest level since 1974
Fallen TV star Andrew O'Keefe has offered a humble apology for a recent court outburst, telling a judge he understands how difficult the job is.

During a court appearance on Thursday, OKeefe admitted to disrespecting Magistrate Daniel Reiss at a bail hearing in Sydneys Central Local Court last week.

O'Keefe had accused the magistrate of having 'no interest in justice' during the hearing.

'I do wish to offer an apology unreservedly,' Mr OKeefe told the court.

'My behaviour last time was quite disrespectful to the court.

Troubled TV star Andrew O'Keefe has offered a grovelling apology for a recent court outburst

'I come from a family that has experience in the judiciary; my father was a judge, I know how difficult the job is.'

Mr O'Keefe's father, Barry O'Keefe, served as the justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales from 1993 to 2004 and the Commissioner of the Independent Commission Against Corruption from 1994 until 1999.

Magistrate Reiss said he accepted the apology and would take no further action, de-escalating a situation that had seen OKeefe earlier warned his behaviour might be found to be in contempt of court.

The former Australian TV star was arrested in January on charges that he choked, punched, and pushed a sex worker.

Since he has been in custody police have also alleged he was in possession on 1.5g of marijuana.

Mr O'Keefe has pleaded not guilty to all charges and claims he acted in self defence against the sex worker.
The distraught parents of dead model and businessman Ryan Channing have vowed to get to the bottom of his sudden death in Bali as they emerged to hold a memorial dinner at a restaurant near where he died.

Channing, 32, the former lover of Olympic legend Ian Thorpe, died while holidaying with his family on the tourist island on Sunday night.

Just hours before bravely joining his friends at a Kuta restaurant on Wednesday night, his mother Joy Channing posted a moving tribute where she promised to 'seek answers and come to terms with the heartbreaking loss'.

'Ryan lived life to the fullest,' Mrs Channing said. 'Constantly surrounded by excitement and creativity, with an undeniable drive to seek perfection in everything.

'To be part of Ryan's world, and to be swept up in his adventures and triumphs was a privilege for all of us,' she said.

'We will need time to comprehend how we will navigate the rest of our lives without his physical presence around us'.

Ryan Channing's parents (centre) bravely joined some of his Balinese friends for a memorial dinner on Wednesday

Channing travelled to Bali two weeks ago and met up with his parents who were already holidaying there. His sister Charis is was also there

Channing's mother Joy said they're still trying to 'seek answers and come to terms with the heartbreaking loss'. Pictured: Channing with his family

Mrs Channing and her husband Steve were pictured at Mano Beach House surrounded by eight close friends for a dinner in their son's honour.

'#ryanchanningmemorial', one friend said on the post.

Channing travelled to Bali two weeks ago and met up with his parents who were already holidaying there. His sister Charis is was also there.

He often split his time between Bali, Australia and the United States for business purposes and recently adopted a dog while overseas with his partner, Leevon Baptiste.

It's understood Channing had a financial interest in the resort he and his family stayed at, the Tagoo Luxury Villas.

The villa manager helped to plan Wednesday's memorial dinner with his family.

Channing lived a jet-set lifestyle and 'sought perfection' in every aspect of his life.

His family say 'Ryan's radiant star cannot be extinguished by his sudden departure from our world' and hope he'll be' quietly sharing in our adventures and triumphs forevermore'.

Channing (pictured) was understood to have had a financial stake in Tagoo Luxury Villas in Bali and frequently travelled there. He adopted this puppy with his partner while on the island

Ex-boyfriend Ian Thorpe told Daily Mail Australia on Thursday he wanted privacy and said he wished the same for Channing's family.

'My thoughts are with them and I hope their privacy is respected. It's a difficult time.'

Channing's skincare business, The Blaq Group, issued a statement on Thursday confirming his death; noting he'd been battling health issues for months.

Just eight weeks ago he was in hospital fighting Covid-19.

'Covid got me GEWD (good)', he told his 21,000 followers at the time.

Channing was the first long term boyfriend of former Olympic swimming champion Thorpe after coming out as gay.

Channing was the first long term boyfriend of former Olympic swimming champion Thorpe (pictured together) after coming out as gay

The pair were in an on-again, off-again relationship for four years until they split for good in 2019.

Last July Channing revealed he was filming a pilot for a new reality show on Netflix in Los Angeles, called The Skintrepreneurs, which would follow his business pursuits.

Prior to becoming a businessman, Channing travelled the world working as a model in New York, Paris and Milan before going to university to study commerce, marketing, intellectual property and international law.

He said his time in the modelling industry gave him an insight into the beauty industry and what consumers want in a product.

Channing founded his skincare business in 2018, aiming to provide gender-neutral products that were all Australian-made and natural.
Millions of Aussies could be hit with a $222 fine and risk a criminal conviction if they fail to vote in the upcoming federal election.

Any Australian citizen over the age of 18 who is on the electoral roll and forgets to vote will receive a $20 penalty from the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), which could jump to $222 and even a court date if left unpaid.

More than 17.2 million Aussies are enrolled to vote in the election on Saturday, May 21, with thousands already having their say at pre-polling centres across the country.

More than 500 pre-polling centres opened on Monday, which will operate between 8am to 6pm to allow residents to cast their vote early.

Millions of Australians could be hit with a $222 fine and risk a criminal conviction if they fail to vote in the upcoming federal election (pictured, Queensland police officers in 2021)

More than 17.2 million Aussies are enrolled to vote in the election on Saturday May 21, with thousands already having their say in pre-polling centres (pictured, voters in Sydney in 2019)

There are certain caveats that can excuse people who are unable to vote on May 21, who can vote early either in person or post.

However, AEC commissioner Tom Rogers, said Australians should still consider elections as 'in-person events' that can unite the country every three years.

'If you can vote on election day then that's what you should do,' Mr Rogers said.

'However, if your circumstances might prevent you from doing that then you need to think about the early voting options available, and vote according to your circumstances.'

AEC figures reveal 16.4 million Australians were enrolled to vote in the 2019 federal election with 92 per cent of the population voting.

Australia is one of only 16 countries that actively enforces mandatory voting.

In 2016 Darwin man Frank Bost refused to vote on principle and took his case to court.

The latest YouGov poll has predicted a landslide Labor victory over the Coalition (pictured, Opposition leader Anthony Albanese and Prime Minister Scott Morrison)

More than 500 pre-polling centres opened across the country on Monday which will operate from 8am to 6pm (pictured, voters at a pre-polling centre in Sydney on Tuesday)

He pleaded guilty to violating the Commonwealth Electoral Act and was ordered to pay $308 including a fine as well as the Australian Electoral Commission's legal fees.

A similar thing happened in 2016 to Tasmanian woman Emma Louise Pearce.

Ms Pearce failed to vote at the 2016 federal election and was taken to court by Commonwealth prosecutors.

After telling the court she disagreed with the voting system she was hit with a $180 fine, legal costs, and a criminal conviction.

Australia is one of only 16 countries that actively enforces mandatory voting (pictured, people queue to cast their vote at a centre in Homebush on Tuesday)

The latest YouGov poll has predicted a landslide Labor victory over the Coalition, with the ALP set to win 80 seats compared with a combined 63 for the Liberal and National parties.

The poll revealed the ALP could form a majority government with multiple Coalition seats predicted to fall to independents.

Independents are gaining ground from the Liberal Party in inner-city seats like Wentworth in Sydney, and lead in the polls in seats such as Warringah, Kooyong, and Goldstein.

After Wednesday night's leadership debate Channel Seven's audience of undecided voters resoundingly favoured Labor leader Anthony Albanese.

Countries with mandatory voting Argentina - voluntary if aged 16-18 Australia Belgium Bolivia - not enforced if aged 70+ Brazil - voluntary if illiterate, aged 16-18, or 70+ Ecuador - voluntary if aged 16-18 or 65+ Liechtenstein Luxembourg - voluntary if aged 70+ Nauru North Korea - only one candidate Peru - voluntary if aged 75+ Samoa Singapore Switzerland - only in one canton Turkey Uruguay Advertisement




A protester marching outside of Justice Amy Coney Barrett's house claimed the Supreme Court justice's views on abortion may be influenced by her lack of experience with pregnancy and birthing.

Justice Barrett, 50, is a mother of five biological children, and two adopted children.

The comments from the protester come the day before the Supreme Court justices are due to gather on Thursday for their first scheduled meeting since the leak of a draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade.

A protester (right) outside of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett's house said the judge's views on abortion may be due to her inexperience with pregnancy on Wednesday

The photographer (left) she was speaking with clarified that Barrett is the biological mother of five children. 'Not everybody wants to have, five kids,' the protester said after a pause

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The protester was one of seven who were marching outside of Barrett's home in Falls Church, Virginia, clad in costumes referencing Margaret Atwood's novel 'The Handmaid's Tale,' in which women are forced to be impregnated and give birth against their will.

Speaking to a photographer, the woman claimed Barrett's views on abortion could be influenced by the fact that she is an adoptive mother, and doesn't know what it's like to be pregnant.

'It's also possible that the fact that she's an adoptive mother is influencing her inability to see what it's like to carry a pregnancy to term,' the protester said in footage obtained by Fox News Digital.

'Well she's had five kids by herself,' the photographer responds.

Holding up her hands, the protester pauses before changing tact.

'Not everybody wants to have five kids, or four kids, or one kid.'

Her handmaid bonnet flipped off her head shortly after, before she snatched it back into place.

Another protester, holding a sign that said 'Keep your rosaries off my ovaries,' said that she had no problem with religion, but that faith should not influence the law in America.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett is a famously devout catholic and conservative judge. She was appointed by former president Donald Trump

Barrett is the mother of five biological children and two adopted children. She is pictured above with four of them at the White House in September, 2020

'We have no problem with Catholicism,' she said, 'However, in this country, there's a separation of church and state. So somebody's religion, no matter what that might be, cannot dictate how they carry out their job as a public official.'

Amy Coney Barrett is a notably devout catholic.

The protesters marched in Barrett's cul-de-sac for about 30 minutes before departing in their cars.

Protestors have descended on the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices since the leak of the draft to overturn Roe last week.

Protesters have gathered outside of the homes of conservative judges since the draft-decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was leaked last week

Protesters marched to Justices John Roberts' and Brett Kavanaugh's homes last Saturday

On Saturday dozens of demonstrators gathered in the rain in DC and marched towards the homes of conservative Justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh.

Images of coat hangers were chalked on the street outside the justices' homes, an apparent attempt to reinforce the pro-choice argument that overturning Roe v. Wade will not put an end to abortion, but instead will end safe abortions.

'Keep abortion safe and legal,' the pro-abortion protesters chanted while they stood in the streets holding candles and signs.

Others shouted: 'Your life is a lie!' and 'We will not go back!'

Outside Roberts' house they yelled 'you don't care if people die!'

Earlier this week, the Senate passed legislation to beef up security for Supreme Court justices.

The bipartisan bill, which passed by voice vote with no objections, aims to ensure justices and their families are protected as the court deliberates abortion access and whether to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision.

The Supreme Court's nine justices are due to gather in private for their first scheduled meeting since the leak of a draft opinion last week.

Roberts' neighbors looked on as protesters marched to his Chevy Chase, Maryland, home

The meeting Thursday in the justices' private, wood-paneled conference room, could be a tense affair in a setting noted for its decorum. No one aside from the justices attends.

Thursday's conference comes at an especially fraught moment, with the future of abortion rights at stake and an investigation underway to try to find the source of the leak.

Chief Justice John Roberts last week confirmed the authenticity of the opinion, revealed by Politico, in ordering the court's marshal to undertake an investigation.

Roberts stressed that the draft, written by Justice Samuel Alito and circulated in February, may not be the court's final word. Supreme Court decisions are not final until they are formally issued, and outcomes in some cases have changed between the justices' initial votes shortly after arguments and the official announcement of the decisions.

The Senate failed in a 49-51 vote to codify abortion rights Wednesday afternoon in a bill that even some moderate abortion rights supporters said went too far.

The bill was expected to fail but gave Democrats a chance to put on a public display of support for abortion rights - even Vice President Kamala Harris showed up to the Capitol to preside over the vote.

Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA), Rep. Nikema Williams (D-GA) and Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) lead a march of Democratic women members of the U.S. House of Representatives through a tunnel in the U.S. Capitol to gather outside of the U.S. Senate chamber to protest and advocate for abortion rights

Even Vice President Kamala Harris, who would break a tie in the split Senate if the bill wasn't subject to a filibuster, showed up to the Capitol to preside over the vote

A group of fired-up female members of the House Progressive Caucus marched toward the Senate side chanting 'my body, my decision' as the upper chamber voted on the House-passed bill.

The bill would have needed 60 votes, 10 from Republicans, to pass, but failed to garner even a simple majority as Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., voted against it, as did pro-choice Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski, Alaska, and Susan Collins, Maine. Murkowski and Collins had submitted their own more narrow bill to codify abortion rights, the Reproductive Choice Act, but Schumer refused to put it up for a vote.
Foreign Minister Park Jin speaks during a press conference at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Seoul, Thursday. Yonhap



North Korea fires missiles for first time since Seoul's leadership change



By Kang Seung-woo



South Korea will bolster diplomacy focusing on economic security as the Yoon Suk-yeol administration is seeking enhanced cooperation with the United States in the area, new Foreign Minister Park Jin said, Thursday.



He also stressed that the shared values of South Korea and the U.S. such as liberal democracy and market economy should evolve actively in response to rising new challenges and a changing strategic environment.



Park, a four-term lawmaker, took office earlier in the day even though his confirmation report had not been adopted by the National Assembly amid objections from the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK).



His emphasis on economic security comes days ahead of Yoon's first meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden next week. The American president is scheduled to arrive in Seoul on May 20, with the summit slated for the following day.



Economic security and North Korea are expected to feature high on the summit agenda, as Washington is seeking to rally allies to rearrange supply chains that exclude China  a top priority of the Biden administration as part of its efforts to curb Beijing's global influence.






Defence Minister Peter Dutton fears a minority Labor-Greens government is a very real prospect - with the minor party calling for Australia to halve defence spending.

A YouGov MRP poll of almost 19,000 voters across Australia showed Labor leader Anthony Albanese's party gaining 11 seats at next Saturday's federal election, which would enable the ALP to govern in its own right as a majority government.

However during a radio interview on Thursday Mr Dutton questioned the accuracy of the poll, which included an average of just 125 voters surveyed in each of the 151 House of Representatives electorates.

He suggested Labor leader Anthony Albanese would be more likely to form a minority government with Greens leader Adam Bandt, whose party wants to halve defence spending despite China's more aggressive stance on territory in the South China Sea.

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Defence Minister Peter Dutton (pictured with Ukraine Ambassdor Vasyl Myroshnychenko) is warning a minority Labor government with the peacenik Greens is a very real prospect despite opinion polls showing an ALP majority

Labor leader Anthony Albanese on Thursday acknowledged China had been more assertive under the leadership of President Xi Jinping

'It's a recipe for disaster but I bet my house on the fact that if Anthony Albanese had to form government, and could only do so with the assistance of the Greens, he would walk over any of his friends to do it in a heartbeat,' he told 2GB broadcaster Ray Hadley.

Mr Albanese, who comes from Labor's left faction and holds the gentrified Sydney inner-west seat of Grayndler, on Thursday acknowledged China had been more assertive under the leadership of President Xi Jinping.

'What I say is that China has changed its posture; they are more aggressive in the region,' he told reporters.

The Opposition Leader also declared Labor would continue to be supportive of the US alliance, after President Joe Biden formed an AUKUS defence alliance with Australia and the UK to counter the rise of China.

'We need to, in the words of the Biden administration, have competition without catastrophe,' Mr Albanese said.

But as recently as January 22, Mr Albanese told the National Press Club in Canberra the Chinese Communist Party deserved praise for lifting millions out of poverty, with his speech failing to mention the deaths during the 1960s Cultural Revolution.

'The rise of China is a fact of our times. And China deserves a great deal of credit for lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty,' he said.

'They have achieved that. It's a great economic achievement.'

Mr Dutton suggested Labor leader Anthony Albanese would be more likely to form a minority government with Greens leader Adam Bandt (pictured rear with senator Lidia Thorpe), whose party wants to halve defence spending despite China's more aggressive stance

Should Labor form a minority government with the Greens, it would have to make concessions to the minor party.

Jordon Steele-John, the party's peace and disarmament spokesman, last year called for defence spending to be slashed by $312billion by 2026 so more money can be spent on housing commission blocks and mental health services.

The Perth-based senator for Western Australia also wants American military bases in Australia to be closed, including the satellite and missile surveillance complex at Pine Gap near Alice Springs in the Northern Territory.

In the 2021-22 Budget, Australia's defence spending made up 2 per cent of gross domestic product but the Greens wanted that slashed to 1 per cent by 2026.

Senator Steele-John argued halving defence spending could see more money spent on social housing and mental health.

'This funding could be used to build 1 million homes, ending homelessness,' he said.

Jordon Steele-John, the party's peace and disarmament spokesman, last year called for defence spending to be slashed by $312billion by 2026 so more money can be spent on housing commission blocks and mental health services

Former Labor prime minister Julia Gillard in September 2010 formed a minority government with the Greens, after Mr Bandt won the seat of Melbourne, and New South Wales regional independents Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor.

Mr Dutton pointed out that during that period, Mr Albanese was government leader in the House of Representatives.

'Anthony Albanese was central to all of those negotiations back in the Oakeshott-Windsor days and if you're going to stitch together a coalition with these Green independents, these fake independents, and the actual Green member Adam Bandt, you can't govern frankly in that scenario because they'll be running off in every different direction and it won't give you the stability that you need in government,' he said.

'Let's be very clear about that.

Former Labor prime minister Julia Gillard (front, left) in September 2010 formed a minority government with the Greens, after Adam Bandt (pictured top right) won the seat of Melbourne, and New South Wales regional independents Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor (also pictured are former treasurer Wayne Swan, former Greens leader Bob Brown, front right, and senators Rachel Siewert, Christine Milne and Sarah Hanson-Young)

'For Anthony Albanese to be able to say he wouldn't form a minority government with the support of Adam Bandt  it's a complete nonsense.'

A Newspoll published on May 8 had Labor leading the Coalition 54 to 46 per cent, on a two-party basis.

But with a primary vote of 39 per cent, compared with 35 per cent for the Coalition, it would need to rely on Greens preferences, with the minor party having a first-preference vote of 11 per cent, compared with 5 per cent for One Nation.

Should the ALP win the election, as the opinion polls are suggesting, Mr Albanese would be the first Labor leader with previous ministerial experience to have won from Opposition since September 1914 when Andrew Fisher was wartime leader.
President Joe Biden hosts Southeast Asian at the White House Thursday after engaging in some delicate diplomacy in the region by phoning Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., the son of the former dictator of the Philippines.

Biden called Marcos Jr, known as Bongbong, to congratulate him on his apparent landslide victory. His apparent victory has alarmed human rights groups.

'President Biden told him Washington is looking forward to working with him and cited the shared history of the longtime treaty allies,' Philippine Ambassador Jose Manuel Romualdez told The Associated Press.

Marcos Jr. had more than 31 million votes in the unofficial count from Mondays elections in whats projected to be one of the strongest mandates for a Philippine president in decades.

Biden is hosting leaders from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations as his administration makes an extended effort to demonstrate that the United States hasn't lost focus on the Pacific even while dealing with Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The group has prohibited Myanamar's military junta from participating in its gatherings other than by sending nongovernmental leaders until there is progress on a five-point 'consensus' program.

President Joe Biden is hosting leaders from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Washington on Thursday, May 12. The group has discussed an empty chair to highlight the absence of Myanmar's military junta

Biden is convening ASEAN leaders at the White House

Chinese President Xi Jinping (L) and Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi pose for pictures during a welcoming ceremony at the Presidential Palace in Naypyidaw on January 17, 2020

Former Congressman Ferdinand "Bong-Bong" Marcos Jr., the only son of the late Philippine strongman Ferdinand Marcos, is mobbed by supporters who gathered outside the Senate building in Manila following his testimony Tuesday, Oct. 7, 1997 on the alleged ill-gotten wealth of his family. Biden called to congratulate him on his apparent landslide win

An official who briefed reporters said there were discussions within the group about possibly having an empty chair during the gathering to highlight the country's absence.

The country has been gripped by crisis since the army ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021

Biden will begin his talks over dinner Thursday evening with leaders from the eight ASEAN nations attending the two-day summit. It will be the group's first meeting at the White House. Leaders will take part in more formal talks at the State Department on Friday.

He is also expected to have 'private time' with each member of the group.

The ASEAN nations include Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Leaders from the other two ASEAN members, Myanmar and the Philippines, are not expected to attend the summit.

The special summit in Washington comes before Biden departs next week for a whirlwind visit to South Korea and Japan - his first visit to Asia as president - for talks with those two countries' leaders. He'll also meet during the trip with leaders from the Indo-Pacific strategic alliance with the U.S. known as the Quad: Australia, India and Japan.

Biden has sought to put greater focus on the Quad and improving relations with Pacific nations in the early going of his presidency as he sees a rising China as the most threatening economic and national security adversary to the United States.

Biden, who vowed to make the Pacific a greater focal point of U.S. policy, has seen his attempt at an 'Asia pivot' complicated by the most serious fighting in Europe since World War II, which has consumed much of his foreign policy bandwidth in recent months.

A top White House Asia policy adviser said the administration remains committed to stepping up relations with southeast Asian nations to address climate, economic and education initiatives.

'There has been a sense that in previous administrations that we had set off with a determined pace to focus on East Asia or in the Indo-Pacific and then find ourselves with other pressing challenges that perhaps draws (us) away a little bit,' Kurt Campbell, coordinator for Indo-Pacific Affairs on the White House National Security Council, said at an event on Wednesday hosted by the U.S. Institute of Peace. 'I think there is a deep sense that that cant happen again.'

Outgoing Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte is skipping the summit.

Foreign ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) pose for a photo during a photo session in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Feb. 17, 2022. From left are Malasian Saifuddin Abdullah, Philippine Teodoro Locsin Jr, Singaporean Vivian Balakrishnan, Cambodian Prak Sokhonn, Indonesia Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi, Laotian Saleumxay Kommasith and ASEAN Secretary General Lim Jock Hoi. President Joe Biden is hosting leaders from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Washington on Thursday, May 12

The Biden administration condemned the military coup that led to the ouster of Suu Kyi. She was convicted by a military court last month of corruption and sentenced to five years in prison in the first of several corruption cases against her. Suu Kyi has denied the charges.

Biden is also expected to address the situation in Myanmar with ASEAN leaders, as well as discuss China and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Campbell said the administration expects the private talks will be 'direct, polite, but maybe a little bit uncomfortable at times' as the U.S. and ASEAN members are not on the same page on all issues.

Biden has called for Russia to be disinvited from Novembers scheduled Group of 20 summit because of its invasion of Ukraine. ASEAN member Indonesia, which holds the presidency of the Group of 20 this year, has resisted the calls to pull Moscows invitation.

At a virtual summit with ASEAN leaders last year, Biden said Washington would look to start talks with Pacific nations about developing a regional economic framework. Campbell said that the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework would be under discussion during this year's summit, though it was unclear how substantive the talks would be.

Japans Washington ambassador, Tomita Koji, said at another forum in Washington earlier this week that the framework could be launched during Bidens upcoming visit to Japan.
A Los Angeles-area mother allegedly killed her three of her children because she believed that they were possessed by demons - and was hospitalized just hours before the bodies of her children were recovered, it was revealed Wednesday.

Angela Dawn Flores, 38, was taken to a local hospital just before 1 a.m. on Sunday after a neighbor reported to authorities that she had entered their property with a copy of the Bible and a candle, according to The San Bernardino County Sun.

Flores had recently moved from Kansas to Los Angeles.

She appeared in court Wednesday on three counts of murder after she allegedly killed her children, Natalie Flores, 12, Kevin Yanez, 10, and Nathan Yanez, 8, admitting later to police that she was aided by her unnamed 16-year-old son.

She is being held on $6 million bail.

Neighbor Prisila Canales told KTTV that she heard Flores screaming late on Saturday night along the 225000 block of Victory Boulevard in West Hills in the San Fernando Valley.

Angela Dawn Flores, 38 admitted to killing her three children with the help of her teenage son. The former real estate agent recently lived in the Kansas City area

A bailiff looks at Angela Dawn Flores, 38, not visible, as she answers questions during her hearing in the Van Nuys Superior court Wednesday, May 11, 2022, in Van Nuys

The most recent visible post on Flores' Facebook profile is a photo of a sign that reads: 'Evangelist: A person who seeks to convert others especially by public preaching. A zealous advocate of a cause'

Three children were found dead Sunday. The mom had been put on a stretcher by paramedics the night before after she allegedly lit candles and opened a Bible in a neighbor's yard

On Monday, flowers and stuffed animals were left outside the one-story ranch style home

It is unclear what happened between the mother's outburst and her children being found. Above, LA County worker Tiana Baudin leaves toys at a makeshift memorial at the home

'I couldn't see anybody and I kept hearing, 'My family is abusing me!' And just kept hearing screaming, but I couldn't make out what she was saying,' Canales said.

'I can hear her saying, 'Ow, ow, ow.' I guess they were trying to arrest her or restrain her. They brought her out on the stretcher and she was laying down and would just pop up out of nowhere and yell, 'Where's my bible? Where's my Bible?'

Canales told the Los Angeles Times that she saw Flores walk to her next-door neighbor's yard to open a Bible and light candles.

The police were called and paramedics arrived at midnight. Flores was put on a stretcher and asked for her Bible as she tried to shake herself free.

The mom then walked into her next-door neighbor's yard for a solo religious ceremony, said neighbor Prisila Canales (above). The next morning, her kids were found dead

'The screaming you heard; you knew she was not OK,' Canales said. 'I can still hear her screaming.'

Around 7:40 a.m. later that morning, LAPD officers responded to Flores' home after receiving a report of someone armed with deadly weapon. At that time, Flores' 16-year-old son was taken into custody.

Flores' teenage son was the person who called the police, reports ABC Los Angeles.

In the evening, Flores was arrested after she admitted to killing her own children, authorities said. They have been named as 12-year-old Natalie Flores, 10-year-old Kevin Yanez and 8-year-old Nathan Yanez.

The home is in the Woodland Hills neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley

Flores had just moved to the home about three months ago, neighbors say

The abused child unit in the LAPD's Juvenile Division is investigating the cause and manner of the children's deaths, according to the LA Times

Two of Flores' children attended Ivy Academia in West Hills

Kevin and Nathan Yanez were students at Ivy Academia, a charter school in West Hills, a neighborhood in the western San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles.

Flores previously lived in the Kansas City area and worked at a construction company there, according to her Facebook page.

The most recent visible post on Flores' profile is a photo of a sign that reads: 'Evangelist: A person who seeks to convert others especially by public preaching. A zealous advocate of a cause.'

Outside of the family's home in West Hills, a shrine to the children has been created by neighbors.

Officials have not yet revealed how and when exactly the children died.

On May 11, Flores appeared in Van Nuys Courthouse. During her appearance, Flores said that she wished to delay her hearing as she faces three counts of murder.

Judge David Yaroslovsky granted the request. Her bail was set a $6 million. Flores will appear in court again in August.

Flores is being represented by a public defender in the case and is being held at the women's jail in Lynwood, California.

While in juvenile court, Flores' unnamed 16-year-old son pleaded not guilty to the crime of assisting his mother in one of the horrific murders. He is being held at Sylmar Juvenile Hall.

The entrance to Sylmar Juvenile Hall where Flores' teenage son is being held. He pleaded not guilty to helping his mother to kill one of his siblings

Flores' son will appear in court again on May 25

A neighbor who live a block away said he heard muffled cries from a child Saturday night. Above, an unidentified man pits a wooden bath brush in the trash at the Woodland Hills home

Police were seen going in and out of the one-story ranch style home on Sunday. The night before, a neighbor heard the mother scream, 'My family is abusing me!'

The teenager will appear in juvenile court again on May 25.

Flores divorced a man named Jacob Corona in 2005, who told the Los Angeles Times that a week before the horror, Flores called him and began to ramble about religion.

Corona said: 'She was telling me all this stuff about God. She didnt sound right. I dont really know what happened.'

He added that he shares a child with Flores but that child was not harmed in the incident. The child does not live with the suspect.

Corona went on to say: 'She was not really religious before. But then she was talking about death. I told her, Whats going on? My head was going over so many things, but I didnt think anything of it.'

Neighbor Stephen Hayes, 71, said he saw the family riding bikes. 'They look like nice, normal people. It is one of the nicest looking houses in the block,' he said

Neighbor Stephen Hayes, 71, said he saw the family riding bikes.

'They look like nice, normal people. It is one of the nicest looking houses in the block,' he said.

A neighbor who live a block away said he heard muffled cries from a child Saturday night.

'I thought I was just dreaming,' he said. 'I thought West Hills was supposed to be safe. Nothing is safe nowadays.'
In a lighter moment during a gruelling campaign, Scott Morrison broke out laughing in the middle of one of his famous photo ops after overhearing a reporter recording her piece to camera just metres away.

Mr Morrison spent Thursday morning pledging millions to mental health and campaigning with Liberal MP Bridget Archer in her marginal Tasmanian seat of Bass.

Following the morning's announcement Mr Morrison stopped by Beauty Point Bowls Club with media cameras in tow for one of his signature photo opportunities.

Pictured: Mr Morrison overheard the reporter described him as 'bowling his way through Bass' and started to laugh as he prepared to bowl

Pictured: Sky News reporter Andrea Crothers cracked up after the PM overheard her lawn bowls-inspired pun

The Prime Minister paused his campaigning in the heavily contested seat of Bass to send a few down at the Beauty Point Bowling Club with TV crews

With the poise of a pro, Mr Morrison lined up the jack and prepared to roll a bowl.

A metre or so away, Sky News host Andrea Crothers didn't miss the opportunity to squeeze in a piece to camera.

'Scott Morrison bowling his way through Bass for the fourth time...' Ms Crothers started, but couldn't continue after Mr Morrison began laughing at her terrible pun.

When your PTC pun game puts off the play  @ScottMorrisonMP #auspol pic.twitter.com/ONEL0lLptU  Andrea Crothers (@abcrothers) May 12, 2022

Ms Crothers then realised she'd been overheard and began laughing herself.

Mr Morrison has become known as the king of photo opportunities, one of the reasons for his popular online moniker 'Scotty from Marketing'.

The prime minister is famous for participating in made-for-TV opportunities where he tries his hand at a worker's job in a factory or retail outlet, even sparking a popular twitter handle #ScottyFromPhotoOps.

Tools for the job: Mr Morrison was accompanied by boom microphones and cameras on the green

Scott Morrison drills a hole at Norship shipyard engineering facility on Day 18 of the 2022 federal election campaign, in Cairns. Veteran broadcaster Neil Mitchell has asked the prime minister why he does 'silly photo opportunities' on radio

In February - before the election had been called - the prime minister was widely criticised after he washed the hair of a young woman at a hair salon on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula

In Tasmania, earlier in the campaign, Mr Morrison was filmed struggling to open a whiskey barrel and stamping zinc at the Hobart Nyrstar smelter.

Most famously he washed the hair of a young woman in a Mornington Peninsula hair salon in February before the election had been called, widely criticised by commentators at the time.

'The images of the Prime Ministers hands massaging the apprentices scalp and temples stirred a visceral reaction in thousands of us, including me. Not in a good way,' reacted former Liberal MP Julia Banks in an opinion column.

Mr Morrison during his infamous welding incident in February this year, when he removed his safety mask

He also copped flak for an eye-sight endangering gaffe, which no blue-collar Australian would ever make.

Mr Morrison was seen lifting up his welding helmet before firing up his welder and exposing his retinas to the intense light.

At the time opposition leader Anthony Albanese hit out at the PM, telling Nova 'If you want someone to weld without a mask on and play a ukulele...kind of...then Scott's your guy.'

'I think people want him to do his job, and his job was to order enough vaccines and rapid antigen tests. His job was to plan (for) the crisis in aged care,' the Labor leader said.

Mr Morrison draws whiskey from a barrel at Lark Whiskey Distillery on Day 19 of the 2022 federal election campaign, north of Hobart, Tasmania

Mr Morrison plays pool with residents at Lifestyle Communities Mount Duneed retirement village on Day 22 of the 2022 federal election campaign in South Geelong, Victoria

But the PM has since hit back at his critics, saying at the start of the month he did the photoshoots because he enjoyed learning what the country's apprentices were up to.

'I know you enjoy campaigning, but do you ever get sick of those silly photo opportunities?' Top-rating 3AW breakfast host Neil Mitchell asked Mr Morrison.

'I don't see them that way Neil,' Mr Morrison responded.

'Whether it's cutting hair or working in tool shops or whatever  we've got 220,000 trade apprentices in trades right now, What I enjoy doing is standing there with an apprentice who shows me what they're learning. And then I'll have a go at it,' Mr Morrison explained.

'I'm trying to understand what they're learning, and I'm really proud of what they're doing.'
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Britain's airport chaos has spread to Leeds Bradford, with travellers complaining of 'total chaos', hours-long queues and missed flights caused by delays.

Frustrated holidaymakers said they stood for more than three hours to get through security, with some feeling faint or bursting into tears as their flight times neared.

Are YOU stuck in airport queues today? Email jack.wright@mailonline.co.uk Advertisement

In Birmingham at 4am this morning, people raged they were stuck in a 'mile-long' queue - while photos from Manchester show a massive queue of travellers snaking through the airport's terminal building.

Airport bosses are blaming an industry-wide problem with staffing shortages caused by Covid self-isolation and mass layoffs during the pandemic.

At Leeds Bradford, one traveller claimed there was just one staff member checking the passports of around 3,000 people - with some waiting outside the terminal. He raged: 'The airport aren't interested. Get there early they say, but you're still going to queue for three hours.'

Two police officers were seen monitoring the 'standstill' queues during yesterday's chaos, Leeds Live reported.

Another holidaymaker said she missed her flight to Fuerteventura despite arriving at Leeds Bradford three hours before take-off, adding: 'There was total chaos. After having no customer services available it was clear the whole of the airport was a queue'.

She told the BBC: 'There were families crying, there were people feeling faint. I was in disbelief.'

On Twitter, one person warned: 'For anyone coming to #leedsbradfordairport it really is as bad as people are saying. 3 hours at least this morning for security'.

Another said: 'Huge queues at #leedsbradfordairport for security, Get there early even for fast track.'

One passenger told Leeds Live: 'I've been to this airport many times before and never seen queues quite like it - it really is as busy as everyone has been saying. Not the most thrilling thing to have to do on the way to a much-anticipated holiday.'

Travellers pictured at huge queues at Leeds Bradford Airport early on Thursday, May 12, 2022

Holidaymakers snaking around Manchester Airport's terminal early on Thursday, May 12, 2022

Passengers queueing at Birmingham Airport early this morning, Thursday May 12, 2022

Travellers at Birmingham Airport vented their fury as they queued for 'a mile'

Are YOU stuck in airport queues today? Email jack.wright@mailonline.co.uk Advertisement

A spokesperson for Leeds Bradford Airport told MailOnline: 'We would like to apologise to passengers impacted by queues at LBA.

'We're working hard to overcome these challenges, that are impacting airports across the country, through recruitment and training initiatives, while managing queues safely.'

Tweeting from Birmingham, one person claimed: 'Unbelievable. We followed your advice and got here just 2 hours before and were now queueing with hundreds of others in a security line which is taking forever - not impressed at all #whatawaytostartaholiday'.

Another said: 'This is the worst I've ever seen at an airport. Unbelievable queues today. 400m long'. Later, he added: 'Scrap that. Queue is about 1 mile long - literally'.

One Twitter user posted: '@bhx_official the queue this morning is a disgrace. Why after days of this have you not sorted it!!!??? #birminghamairport'.

A Birmingham Airport spokesperson told MailOnline: 'Queues were long but managed and moving this morning as we helped many of the more than 14,000 customers booked to fly out of BHX today.

'As always, we ask customers to arrive at the airport at the time your airline advises - and to help us help you keep queues moving by removing any liquids, gels, pastes and electrical items from your bags before our security x-ray scanners.'

MailOnline has contacted Manchester for comment.

Yesterday there were also delays for holidaymakers in Bristol, while in Manchester, one passenger told of waiting 40 minutes for the airbridge to get off the plane.

Elsewhere, there were also questions over baggage, as another traveller reported losing their wallet in the chaos.

One flyer tweeted: 'The queues at Birmingham Airport are worse than the media are reporting! Give yourself at least 5hrs before your flight!'

Another traveller wrote: 'OMG queues for security are ridiculous!!! Anyone flying from here at the moment I'd suggest turning up at least 4hrs before your flight is due to depart.'

Passengers departing from Birmingham Airport on May 10, 2022

Holidaymakers and commuters flying from Bristol experience lengthy queues, May 10, 2022

Heathrow bosses say 7.5million MORE travellers than expected are set to fly this year to prompt fears of further chaos at the terminals Heathrow bosses revealed some 7.5 million more travellers than expected are set to fly this year, sparking fears of further disruption at the terminals. The west London airport said it was increasing its passenger number forecast for 2022 from 45.5 million to nearly 53 million. This 16% rise follows a 'strong' April, with 5.1 million people using the travel hub. Heathrow said outbound leisure travellers and people cashing in airline vouchers obtained for trips cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic are driving the recovery in demand, which it expects to last throughout the summer. The forecast means Heathrow expects passenger numbers to reach 65% of pre-pandemic levels this year - a 'realistic assessment', the airport insisted. Advertisement

A third said: 'Yet another ridiculously poor experience at BHX this AM. Security queue both upstairs and downstairs. Time for the management team to resign.'

Airports up and down the UK continue to face staffing issues in the wake of Covid restrictions.

Travel chiefs say the issues have been exacerbated by a huge increase in demand for travel following two years of Covid-enforced disruption.

Some have warned the staffing issues, which came to a head last month as people rushed away for the first restriction free Easter Bank Holiday in more than two years, could last as long as a year.

And last week EasyJet announced plans to remove seats on some of its planes this summer so that it can operate flights with fewer cabin crew as it too battles staffing issues.

Yesterday a Birmingham Airport spokesman said: 'Queues were managed and steadily moving this morning as we helped many of the more than 14,000 customers booked to fly out of BHX today.

'As always, we ask customers to arrive at the airport exactly when your airline advises - and to help us help you keep queues moving by removing any liquids, gels, pastes and electrical items from your bags before our security x-ray scanners.'

A Bristol Airport spokesperson said: 'We apologise to customers impacted by above average queue times during early morning peak operations on Tuesday 10 May; airline check-in/bag-drop did not exceed 35 minutes with security experiencing a maximum queue time of 40 minutes.

'We work closely with all business partners to ensure staffing levels are sufficient to provide a good service to passengers with an average queue time of 30 minutes for security during peak times.

'However, on some occasions staff shortages can impact on waiting times and service standards. We constantly review resourcing across all areas and adapt plans to meet demand and build in resilience where possible.

'We have seen a strong increase in passenger numbers since the end of all COVID-19 travel restrictions. There is a huge pent-up demand for travel which has built up over the past two years during the pandemic and we are expecting a busy summer.

'Whilst recruiting and training new colleagues for the airport can take time, the Bristol Airport team and business partners will be working hard to ensure all customers have a smooth and easy journey through our terminal.

'We advise all customers to arrive in the terminal a minimum of two hours before scheduled flight departure time to allow sufficient time to complete all the necessary check-in, bag-drop, security, and boarding processes ahead of their flight.'

Are YOU stuck in airport queues today? Email jack.wright@mailonline.co.uk
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A tearful Deborah James today revealed that she has planned her death and wants to 'slip away' while 'listening to her family' after 'one last cuddle with my children'.

The 40-year-old said she has started her 'to-do death list' to support son Hugo, 14, and daughter, Eloise, 12, when she is gone, and has urged her husband Sebastien to find love, with the caveat: 'Dont be taken for a ride, dont marry a bimbo'.

Deborah says she has written letters for her children to help them with their first dates and wedding days, and will buy Hugo 'a nice pen or wallet or cufflinks' and Eloise 'Tiffany bracelets and earrings' to remember her - as well as some presents and postcards from her for the future.

And her funeral is also planned where she will be cremated, but she hopes her ashes will be kept in the family kitchen 'for a while' before being scattered.

The teacher turned podcaster has moved millions as she announced in a heartbreaking message that active treatment for her bowel cancer was stopping and that she was moving to hospice at home care to die.

The mother-of two is preparing to spend her final hours on her parents' lawn surrounded by family, drinking Champagne, having been told by her hospice nurses: 'You are dying, you can drink what you like.'

In a tearful final newspaper interview she said last night: The one thing my family know is I am petrified of being alone. I dont want to die alone. And when asked about the end of her life approaching she said: "I have moments when I just sob uncontrollably, but I can't spend my last few days crying, it would be such a waste. So I'm trying to compartmentalise my death'.

It came as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge paid tribute to the cancer-stricken BBC podcaster, declaring that she has 'captured the heart of the nation', after her fundraiser passed 3.3million today and is rising at a rate of 1million every 24 hours.

Deborah James has written letters and bought gifts for her children Hugo, 14, and daughter, Eloise, 12, and wants to cuddle them for the last time before she dies

Deborah James explained how she'd had 'hard conversations' with the children, but put her full faith in husband Sebastien Bowen - a London banker with whom she has been married more than 13 years. She has urged him to find love again as long as it's not a 'bimbo'

Deborah James (pictured), 40, announced earlier this week in a heartbreaking message that active treatment for her bowel cancer was stopping and that she was moving to hospice at home care

The nation has been moved by her tragic story in recent days, with at least 1million in donations now being made every day made on the Bowelbabe Fund for Cancer Research UK page she set up. Today it surpassed 3million (pictured)

The heartbreaking interview with The Times she also revealed how she will record letters for her children to open after she's died, including advice for them on how to act on a first date or what to do on their wedding day.

Ms James said she's been in hospital for months, but since undergoing hospice care, she has been planning her last hours on the lawn with her family and drinking champagne, as staff joked with her: 'You are dying, you can drink what you like.'

The nation has been moved by her tragic story in recent days, with at least 1million in donations now being made every day to her Bowelbabe Fund for Cancer Research UK page, which she set up.

Ms James earlier spoke of wanting to die at her parents' house in Woking, to spare son, Hugo, 14, and daughter, Eloise, 12, from constant reminders in their London home, which she won't visit again because of the stairs. She said: 'I can't use my legs any more and I'm incredibly weak... my husband must lift me for everything'.

She explained how she'd had to break the news to the children, but put her full faith in husband Sebastien Bowen - a London banker she married back in 2008.

The couple briefly split up seven years later and began divorce proceedings, but soon got back together after agreeing to counselling to be on better terms for their children.

Speaking to The Times she revealed she has issued him with strict instructions to her incredible husband Sebastien Bowen to find love again after her death.

'It's been hideous telling my children. My husband Sebastien has been incredible, he has dropped everything and is with me 24/7. My first thought was [that] I don't want my children to see me like this. I didn't think I would be able to speak to them without crying, but I'd love one last cuddle with them.

We have had a string of emotional conversations that have escalated very quickly from supportive care to end-of-life care.

My husband Sebastien has been incredible, he has dropped everything and is with me 24/7.

My first thought was [that] I dont want my children to see me like this. I didnt think I would be able to speak to them without crying, but Id love one last cuddle with them.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have paid tribute to cancer-stricken BBC podcaster Deborah James, after her fundraiser passed 3 million today

In a tweet, William and Kate said: 'Every now and then, someone captures the heart of the nation with their zest for life & tenacious desire to give back to society.' Pictured, the couple during their visit to Glasgow, Scotland, today

On Monday, Miss James, announced that despite having 17 tumours removed and undergoing new procedures she has been moved to hospice care because her body simply isnt playing ball.

Deborah James' announcement that she is moving into hospice care in full: In an emotional post shared to Instagram, Deborah said her body 'was not playing ball' and she was spending 'most of the day sleeping' 'The message I never wanted to write. We have tried everything, but my body simply isn't playing ball. My active care has stopped and I am now moved to hospice at home care, with my incredible family all around me and the focus is on making sure I'm not in pain and spending time with them. 'Nobody knows how long I've got left but I'm not able to walk, I'm sleeping most of the days, and most things I took for granted are pipe dreams. I know we have left no stone unturned. But even with all the innovative cancer drugs in the world or some magic new breakthrough, my body just can't continue anymore. 'In over 5 years of writing about how I thought it would be my final Christmas, how I wouldn't see my 40th birthday nor see my kids go to secondary school - I never envisaged writing the one where I would actually say goodbye. 'I think it's been the rebellious hope in me. 'But I don't think anyone can say the last 6 months has exactly been kind! It's all heartbreaking to be going through but I'm surrounded by so much love that if anything can help me through I hope that will. 'Bowelbabe Fund 'I always knew there was one thing I always wanted to do before I died. I have always over the years raised as much awareness and money for the charities that are closest to me. @cr_uk @royalmarsden @bowelcanceruk 'As a result, the @bowelbabefund is being established and I'd love nothing more than for you to help it flourish. Please visit bowelbabe.org for all the info and to donate (link in Bio). 'All I ask if you ever read a column, followed my Instagram, listened to the podcast or saw me dressed as a poo for no reason. Please buy me a drink to see me out this world, by donating the cost to @bowelbabefund which will enable us to raise funds for further life saving research into cancer. To give more Deborah's more time! 'Right now for me it's all about taking it a day at a time, step by step and being grateful for another sunrise. My whole family are around me and we will dance through this together, sunbathing and laughing (I'll cry!!) at every possible moment! 'You are all incredible, thank you for playing your part in my journey. No regrets. 'Enjoy life x Deborah' Advertisement

She said she is now trying to compartmentalise her death so that she can focus on her to-do death list which includes making memory boxes and recording letters and funny messages for her children.

I know materialistic things dont matter, but I want to buy Hugo a nice pen or wallet or cufflinks, she said. Im going to buy my daughter some Tiffany bracelets and earrings.

They will have all the memories, but I want them to have a few presents in the future. I also want to write them postcards, but I have to be honest, I get really tired.

She added: At 12 and 14 I hope they will remember me, but [they are] still very young, so my image will fade and they will have to rely on videos or photos.

She has also imparted instructions for her husband, whom she married in 2008.

I want him to move on, she said. Hes a handsome man, Im, like, Dont be taken for a ride, dont marry a bimbo, find someone else who can make you laugh like we did [together].

Miss James has moved to her parents bungalow in Woking as she is no longer able to use the stairs in her townhouse in Barnes, south west London because cancer is eating me up.

She said she wants to die listening to my family, adding: I just want to hear their banter and the normal buzz of life as I go.

She has planned her funeral to ease the burden on her loved ones and would like to be cremated.

Im the kind of person that wouldnt mind staying in the top drawer in the kitchen for a while, she said.

In a tweet, William and Kate said: 'Every now and then, someone captures the heart of the nation with their zest for life & tenacious desire to give back to society.

'Bowelbabe is one of those special people. Her tireless efforts to raise awareness of bowel cancer & end the stigma of treatment are inspiring.

'We are so sad to hear her recent update but pleased to support the Bowelbabe Fund, which will benefit the The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust among others.

'Deborah, our thoughts are with you, your family and your friends. Thank you for giving hope to so many who are living with cancer. W & C.'

This evening, the managing director of The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity, Antonia Dalmahoy, thanked all of those who have donated.

'The national outpouring of love and support for Deborah and her Bowel Babe Fund has been absolutely phenomenal and has really lifted her spirits,' she said.

'We'd like to thank everyone who has donated to the Fund, for The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity, Cancer Research UK and Bowel Cancer UK. This sum of money will make a huge difference to people with cancer and create a lasting legacy for Deborah.'

It came after she said she is is preparing to 'surrender to the inevitable' and is in end-of-life hospice care surrounded by her family, in a heartfelt 'final' newspaper column. Ms James wrote that her body had been left 'emaciated' by five years of battling bowel cancer.

Charities and organisations set to benefit from the fundraising have lined up to thank her for her efforts.

Michelle Mitchell, chief executive at Cancer Research UK said: 'Since being diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2016, Deborah James has shown an incredible commitment to campaigning, fundraising and raising awareness of cancer.

'Even in this most challenging time, her determination to raise money and awareness is inspiring and we're honoured to be supporting Deborah and her family in establishing the Bowelbabe Fund.

'This fund will raise awareness of cancer alongside funds for clinical trials and research into personalised medicine, with the aim of creating new and kinder treatments for cancer patients and giving them more time with their loved ones.

'The fund will support the work of Cancer Research UK and those causes she and her family are passionate about, for example Bowel Cancer UK, The Institute of Cancer Research and The Royal Marsden.

'We've been overwhelmed by the support for the Bowelbabe Fund so far, massively exceeding its target within hours. It's a true testament to how many people's lives Deborah has touched with her honesty, humour and compassion.'

BBC podcast host Deborah James, who has incurable bowel cancer, previously choked back tears today as she thanked everyone who donated to her cancer fundraiser that raised a staggering 2.5 million. It has surpassed 3million

A spokesperson from The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity added: 'Deborah is an absolute inspiration to so many people with cancer, and a passionate supporter of The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity. It's typically selfless of her to spend what precious time she has left fundraising for us, Cancer Research UK and Bowel Cancer UK.

'The Bowel Babe Fund will, as Deborah has set out, help fund clinical trials and research into personalised medicine for cancer patients and supporting campaigns to raise awareness of bowel cancer. This may include developing new drugs, and new ways of diagnosing cancer at an earlier stage.

'As well as this fundraising legacy, Deborah's work over the last five years to raise awareness of the symptoms of bowel cancer and the importance of early diagnosis in improving survival, will have saved and extended countless lives.'

Ms James had earlier spoken of her connection with her family to the BBC, saying they were 'really loving' and that she 'adored' them.

Ms James told the BBC: 'I have a really loving family who I adore. Honestly, they're incredible and all I knew I wanted was to come here and be able to relax knowing that everything was okay.

'I've had some really hard conversations during the last week. You think, 'Gosh, how can anyone have those conversations?' and then you find yourself in the middle of them.

'And people are very nice, but you're talking about your own death and I've had five years to prepare for my death.'

The interviewer told the mother-of-two, 'I know it's not easy', as she struggled to speak around her tears, to which he eventually replied: 'It's hard. It's really hard.

'The thing that I know, because I trust my husband - he's just the most wonderful man and so is my family, and I know that my kids are going to be more than looked after and surrounded by love.

'You always want to know as a mother - are your kids going to be okay? And my kids are going to be fine. But it doesn't mean I'm not going to miss every chance I could have had with them.'

Remembering her former podcast co-host Rachael Bland, who died of breast cancer in 2018, Ms James told the BBC: ' I'm really scared. I don't know how she could deal with such a 'this is what I'm going to do' [approach], I'm petrified.

'I can't make a deal with the devil anymore unfortunately. I just feel gutted not to have more life, 'cos you know me, I love life so much.

'But I do hope that all of our stories and the podcast and everything we've shared over the past few years has saved lives.

'I just knew that I wanted to ensure I could leave enough money for them to do something meaningful, that would mean that we could fund projects that I myself would have benefited from 5 years ago to give me life.

'Because you just never know do you, when that next breakthrough is going to come, but I know we have the skills and passion in this country to make things happen, but we just need to fund it properly.'

Ms James told host Tony Livesey how she was still making her way through a list of 'death admin' she needed to do, but the priority was remaining as comfortable as possible.

'I can't walk, I can't stand, I can't go to the loo - I can't do really basic stuff. I've been doing a lot of sleeping. Just spending time watching people that I love, to just know that they are okay.

'The more I tell myself that they are going to be okay, I know they are surrounded by love. I know they are surrounded by support - they will be fine.'

Signing off tearfully in the final episode of her podcast, she told listeners: 'That's it from me, I can't believe it, which is a very sad thing to say. I'm pleased I've got to the point where I can say it. We'll see each other again, somewhere, somehow, dancing. Until then, please, please, just enjoy life because it's so precious. All I want right now is more time and more life.'

She then joked: 'And check your poo. I can't leave on any other word except from check your poo.'

The mother-of-two has spent months recovering after she almost died in January due to a medical emergency

The mother-of-two, who has faced a challenging six months with her cancer treatment, said she felt 'heartbroken'

BBC podcast host Deborah James, who has incurable bowel cancer, revealed in April after she was discharged after more than a month in hospital. Pictured, leaving the Royal Marsden Hospital

Deborah, who has incurable bowel cancer, revealed how she 'nearly died' in January in an 'acute medical emergency'. She shared this photo from hospital

At the start of the year, Deborah, who shares her children Hugo, 14, and Eloise, 12, with her husband Sebastien, announced she had 'nearly died' in hospital, calling it the 'hardest' part of her 5-year cancer battle, and was admitted as an in-patient earlier this month.

She was told early on in her diagnosis that she might not live beyond five years  a milestone that passed on Christmas of 2021.

Writing in her Instagram post, she said: 'Nobody knows how long I've got left but I'm not able to walk, I'm sleeping most of the days, and most things I took for granted are pipe dreams. I know we have left no stone unturned.

'But even with all the innovative cancer drugs in the world or some magic new breakthrough, my body just can't continue anymore.'

'In over 5 years of writing about how I thought it would be my final Christmas, how I wouldn't see my 40th birthday nor see my kids go to secondary school - I never envisaged writing the one where I would actually say goodbye.

'I think it's been the rebellious hope in me.'

Tributes to Deborah called her a 'true inspiration' and a 'force to be reckoned with' when it came to talking about bowel cancer.

Her podcast co-host, Lauren Mahon, shared a lengthy tribute on Instagram, saying that hearts have been 'shattered into thousands of pieces' by Deborah's announcement and are simultaneously 'completely bursting with pride'.

Ms Mahon said that she is 'not ready to accept what's happening right now' and asked for people to keep Deborah's parents, siblings and family in their 'hearts, thoughts and prayers'.

She also urged people to support the new fundraising campaign, Bowelbabe Fund, for Cancer Research UK.

Deborah's fundraising efforts, adding: 'She did it! Bowelbabe did that. Let's keep it going. Two mil anyone? Proud doesn't cut it anymore. It's awe.

It has since raised more than 3million in less than 72 hours after it was launched. It will be spent on funding clinical trials and research into personalised medicine that could result in new treatments for cancer patients, and continued support to raise awareness of cancer.

Discussing how difficult the last six months have been, James said while she was really happy that the 'big gun chemo' she endured has slowed her cancer's growth, which had been 'on the march', it had been an exhausting time.

In the summer, James was told she had an aggressive new tumour that had wrapped itself around her bile duct - requiring a life-saving stay in hospital - and a stent fitted to stop her liver from failing.

The stent fitted to stop her liver failing 'stopped working' in December.

She explained to her followers at the time how hopes at having a 'quick replacement operation' had turned into a 'nightmare'.

She said: 'I'm now at the mercy of hopefully some super 'magic medicine miracle' - but then I always have been, and any chance is a chance right?

'All I ever say Is all I want is hope and options.'

Last year, James shared that her cancer, which has been kept at bay by pioneering treatment, was back again and she was forced to endure a 12th operation.

The West London mother-of-two, a deputy head, was diagnosed 'late' with incurable bowel cancer in 2016. She has frequently said that as a vegetarian runner, she was the last person doctors expected to get the disease.

After sharing her experiences on living with the disease on social media, Deborah became known as the 'Bowel Babe' and began writing a column for the Sun.

In 2018, Deborah joined Lauren Mahon and Rachael Bland to present the award-winning podcast You, Me and the Big C on Radio 5 Live.

Bland tragically died of breast cancer on September 5th that year; her husband Steve Bland now co-presents the show.
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Russia has suffered yet another battlefield humiliation after Ukraine successfully thwarted its attempt to cross a river in Donbas, destroying dozens of vehicles and inflicting heavy casualties.

Satellite images lay bare the scale of the failure with the remains of two pontoon bridges drifting in the Donets River at Bilohorivka, west of the city of Lysychansk, surrounded by the ruins of tanks and armoured vehicles.

It appears Russian commanders were attempting to surround Lysychansk - and its sister city of Severodonetsk - with the crossing, but saw their sneak-attack turn into a massacre when Ukraine correctly guessed their plans.

'Maxim', a Twitter user claiming to be a Ukrainian military engineer, says he identified the spot where Russia was most-likely to try crossing the river on May 7 and told his commanders to listen out for the sound of tugboat engines pushing a pontoon bridge into place as a sure sign that a crossing was imminent.

On the morning of May 8 Russia blanketed the river with smoke by burning nearby fields and throwing smoke grenades, he said, but commanders detected the sound of boat engines and called in artillery strikes which caused devastating losses.

It came as Ukraine's generals said Russia's offensive in the Donbass has largely stalled, with Putin's troops forced on to the defensive north of Kharkiv as counter-attacks push the invaders back across their own border.

In a late-Wednesday update, Ukraine's commander said there had been no major attacks around Izyum - where the bulk of its Donbas force is located - or in Mykolaiv or Kryvyi Rih, hundreds of miles to the south, where it has been forced to reinforce its units after taking casualties.

To the north of Kharkiv, commanders said 'occupying forces moved to the defence in order to slow down the pace of the offensive of our troops'. It means the only section of frontline that remains active is around Severodonetsk - where the bridge ambush took place - Donetsk and Mariupol, where Ukrainian defenders are still holding out.

Russia attempted to bridge the Donets River to the west of the city of Lysychansk on May 8, apparently hoping to surround Ukrainian defenders dug in there - but were found out and massacred

Newly-released images of the ambush show dozens of destroyed Russian vehicle littering both banks of the river along with sections of pontoon bridge left floating in the water

The remains of at least three Russian tanks and another four armoured infantry vehicles are seen on one bank of the river, along with other pieces of wreckage poking out from under the water

A Ukrainian military engineer who took part in the operation claims he correctly predicted where the Russians would try to put their bridge, allowing artillery to bombard the area

Observers have so-far counted the wrecks of at least 58 Russian vehicles including tanks, armoured infantry carriers, trucks and even one tugboat that was blown up trying to position the bridge

Ukrainian forces are trying to hold the cities of Severodonetsk and Lysychans'k from Russian troops, which have almost managed to surround them. The river crossing attempt was designed to complete the encirclement, but was foiled

Finnish leaders say country must apply to join NATO 'without delay' Finland's president and prime minister have said the country must submit an application to join NATO within days, dramatically ramping up tensions between Russia and the West. President Sauli Niinisto and prime minister Sanna Marin made a joint statement today saying they will join the security alliance 'without delay', despite Kremlin threats it would secure 'the entire destruction' of the country and 'the most undesirable consequences'. The decision is a spectacular backfire for Putin who invaded Ukraine in part through fears of NATO expansion, with the Western pact's presence on Russia's borders now set to double from 754 miles to 1,584 miles. A special committee will announce Finland's decision on a membership bid on Sunday although it could take until October before the country is formally admitted to the pact. When asked what he would say to Russia, Niinisto replied: 'You caused this. Look in the mirror.' Sweden is expected to follow Finland with its own bid which could come as soon as next week, with a parliament debate on Monday followed by a special cabinet meeting where the formal decision to apply will be taken, Daily Expressen said. The major policy shift which completely rewrites Europe's post WWII alignment comes a day after Boris Johnson signed security pacts with Helsinki and Stockholm pledging Britain would come to their aid if they come under Russian attack. In their statement today, Niinisto and Marin said: 'Now that the moment of decision-making is near, we state our equal views, also for information to the parliamentary groups and parties. 'NATO membership would strengthen Finland's security. As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defence alliance. 'Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay. 'We hope that the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days.' Finland, which shares an 830-mile border and a difficult past with Russia, has previously remained outside the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation to maintain friendly relations with its eastern neighbour. Sweden is expected to imminently follow Finland with an application to join the Western military pact. The Nordic nations have been rattled by Moscow's war against its pro-Western neighbour, which has bolstered domestic support for joining the alliance - and the security that membership would provide. Advertisement

Speaking about the moment the Severodonetsk ambush took place, Maxim said: 'Roughly 20 minutes after recon unit confirmed the Russian bridge was being mounted, heavy artillery engaged against Russian forces, and then aviation chipped in as well. I was still in the area, and I have never seen or heard such heavy combat in my life.

'After one day of combat, 9th May morning the bridge was down. Some Russian forces - roughly 30 to 50 vehicles and infantry - were stuck on the Ukrainian side of the river with no way back. They tried to run away using the broken bridge. Then they tried to arrange a new bridge.

'Aviation started heavy bombing of the area and it destroyed all the remains of Russians there, and the other bridge they tried to make. Rumors say it's 1,500 Russian dead. Their strategic objective was to cross the river and then encircle Lysychansk. They miserably failed.'

Russian troop losses in the bombardment are almost impossible to estimate, but online observers have so-far counted 58 destroyed vehicles including at least seven tanks and dozens of armoured infantry carriers.

At least one tugboat appears to have been wiped out, along with two pontoon bridges left floating in the river with shell-holes visible in the top of them.

It is just the latest defeat for Putin's forces, after a successful Ukrainian counter-attack pushed Russian troops away from the city of Kharkiv and back across the border. It means Ukrainian artillery can now threaten the town of Vovchansk, which contains a key highway and rail line supplying Russian forces in Donbas.

Ukrainian commanders said late Wednesday that Russia's offensive has now halted around Izyum, Kherson and Melitopol as Putin's men are forced onto the defensive after running out of momentum.

If confirmed, it means the only active section of the frontline is in the southern portion of the Donbas - between Severodonetsk and Avdiivka, where limited Russian attacks are taking place - and in Mariupol where Ukrainian troops are still holding out inside the Azovstal steel works.

Though the fight is far from over, a stalled Russian advance and Ukrainian counter-attacks are what preceded Russia's retreat from Kyiv earlier in the war. A similar retreat from Donbas would spell disaster for Putin.

In its Thursday-morning update on the frontline, Britain's Ministry of Defence said: 'Russia's prioritisation of operations in the Donbas has left elements deployed in Kharkiv vulnerable to the mobile, and highly motivated, Ukrainian counter-attacking force.

'Despite Russia's success in encircling Kharkiv in the initial stages of the conflict, it has reportedly withdrawn units from the region to reorganise and replenish its forces following heavy losses.

'Once reconstituted, these forces will likely deploy to the eastern bank of the Donets River, forming a blocking force to protect the western flank of Russia's main force concentration and main supply routes for operations in the vicinity of Izyum.

'The withdrawal of Russian forces from Kharkiv is a tactic recognition of Russia's inability to capture key Ukrainian cities where they expected limited resistance from the population.'

Ukraine announced it will hold its first war crimes trial over the Russian invasion, as Moscow accused Kyiv of shelling a Russian city in the war's latest flashpoint.

The conflict has devastated cities and displaced millions, with fears also growing of its broader international impact as gas supplies to Europe were disrupted by a halt in Russian flows through Ukraine.

Kyiv has repeatedly accused Russian troops of committing atrocities since the invasion began on February 24, and Ukrainian authorities said Wednesday they would launch the first war crimes trial of the conflict.

The prosecutor general's office said Vadim Shishimarin, a 21-year-old Russian service member, is accused of killing an unarmed 62-year-old civilian as he fled with four other soldiers in a stolen car.

Two sections of destroyed pontoon bridge with blast-holes in them are seen floating in the Donets River after a successful ambush by Ukrainian defenders led to heavy Russian casualties

A column of burned-out Russian vehicles sits alongside the remains of what once may have been barns or warehouses on the banks of the Donets River, after a Ukrainian barrage

At least one Russian tank and half a dozen armoured infantry transports are seen scattered through woodland near the Donets River, after a failed crossing led to heavy losses for Putin's forces

Ukraine claims Russia used smoke from fires similar to this one to shroud the crossing, but the sound of tugboat engines pushing the pontoon bridges into place gave the game away and allowed artillery to strikes

Putin loses another senior commander as Ukraine continues to butcher Russia's top brass Russia has lost another of its top officers in Ukraine in just the latest blow to Vladimir Putin's military. Lt Col Albert Karimov, 39, was a highly-decorated special forces officer in the GRU military intelligence. His funeral is being held today in the village of Tirlyansky in his native Bashkortostan region. Russia has not disclosed the circumstances of his death during Putin's 'special military operation' in Ukraine which has seen tens of thousands of his forces killed. Nine Russian generals are also known to have died with reports that the US has assisted Ukraine with intelligence to allow them to target Putin's top brass. Karimov is the 41st known colonel to have died in the war which has devastated Russia's senior ranks. This is a rate of around one colonel every two days. The GRU is seen as Russia's most secretive and - until recently - most effective intelligence service. Britain says a GRU hit squad was behind the poisoning with Novichok of its ex agent Sergei Skripal - who had defected to Britain - and his daughter Yulia in 2018. In the Cold War, a GRU agent under diplomatic cover in London, Captain Yevgeny Ivanov, triggered the fall of a Tory government after he seduced Christine Keeler, the lover of British war minister John Profumo. A friend of Karimov said the GRU colonel's death was a 'great loss'. From his school days, he was remembered as 'active and intelligent'. Advertisement

'The man died on the spot just a few dozen metres from his home,' said a statement from prosecutor Iryna Venediktova's office.

Shishimarin faces possible life imprisonment if found guilty.

Venediktova's office has said it has received reports of more than 10,000 alleged war crimes, with 622 suspects identified.

The Russian invasion has sparked an exodus of nearly six million civilians, many of whom bear accounts of torture, sexual violence and indiscriminate destruction.

The UN Human Rights Council is due to hold a special session on Ukraine on Thursday.

Moscow has focused on eastern and southern Ukraine since it failed to take Kyiv in the first weeks of its campaign.

Ukraine's forces were boosted by what Kyiv described as the recapture of four villages around the northeastern city of Kharkiv, close to the border with Russia.

In the Russian city of Belgorod, around 70 kilometres (43 miles) from Kharkiv, authorities said one person was killed and six injured by Ukrainian shelling.

Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said it was 'the most difficult situation' facing the border region since Russia sent its troops into Ukraine 11 weeks ago.

Authorities in Russian regions bordering Ukraine have repeatedly accused Ukrainian forces of launching attacks.

In April, Gladkov said Ukrainian helicopters carried out a strike on a fuel storage facility in Belgorod.

In southern Ukraine, the pro-Kremlin authorities in the city of Kherson urged Putin to annex the region.

Kherson was the first major Ukrainian city to fall in the current conflict. It lies north of Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014.

Kirill Stremousov, deputy head of Kherson's Moscow-installed administration, said there would be a 'request to make Kherson region a full subject of the Russian Federation'.

The Kremlin replied it was up to the residents of Kherson to 'determine their own fate'.

Ukrainian presidential aide Mykhaylo Podolyak said Kherson would be liberated and 'the invaders may ask to join even Mars or Jupiter'.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has framed his nation's resistance to the Russian invasion as a 'war against tyranny', but the fierce fightback has carried a heavy cost.

In a rare release of battle casualty figures, Ukraine's National Guard said Wednesday that 561 of its members have been killed and nearly 1,700 wounded since the invasion began.

Neither the defence ministry in Kyiv nor its counterpart in Moscow has provided official death counts, but in mid-April, Zelensky said between 2,500 and 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed.

Artillery explodes inside the Azovstal steel works in Mariupol on Wednesday, as Russian forces continue their attempts to take the complex - where Ukrainian defenders are staging a last-stand

Smoke rises from the ruins of buildings inside the Azovstal steel works, which has now been under siege by Russia for more than two weeks but has still not been captured

A mostly-collapsed apartment building is seen in Mariupol - a city that has been near-totally destroyed in more than two months of fighting between Ukraine and Russia

A view of part of the city of Mariupol shows that almost every building bears the marks of heavy shelling and fires, after Russia's bombardment near-totally destroyed it

Digging equipment brought in by Russia attempts a clean-up of badly damaged apartment buildings in Mariupol, as those who fled say almost nothing of the city remains

Ukraine's effort to hold the Russian-speaking Donbas region in the east has also become increasingly desperate.

'They come in waves,' volunteer fighter Mykola said of the repeated Russian attempts to push past a strategic river near a rural settlement called Bilogorivka.

Much of the world has moved to isolate Putin as punishment for the invasion.

Russia 'is today the most direct threat to the world order with the barbaric war against Ukraine,' European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in Tokyo Thursday after meeting Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

Kishida, whose government joined the tough measures against Moscow, added: 'Russia's invasion of Ukraine is not just a matter for Europe, but it shakes the core of the international order including Asia. This must not be tolerated.'

Russia has been hit with a wave of punishing economic sanctions that have started to take a toll on its foreign exchange reserves.

Zelensky said Wednesday that he had spoken with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz about boosting penalties on Moscow.

'Step by step we are doing everything to make the aggressor feel the biggest pain from the aggression,' the Ukrainian leader said.

But ramping up the embargoes has not been straightforward, with concern among some nations in Europe that rely on Russian gas.

Kyiv said Wednesday that Russia had halted gas supplies through a key transit hub in the east.

The stoppage caused supplies to plunge by 25 percent in Germany, which is dependent on Russia for its energy and has rejected an immediate full embargo on Russian gas.

The invasion of Ukraine has also prompted Sweden and Finland to consider NATO membership, with Finnish leaders announcing their intention to apply for membership 'within days' on Thursday morning.

Putin is sure to react angrily to the news, having forced Helsinki into a pact of neutrality to ensure its territory could never be used to attack Russia that has held since the end of the Second World War.

Sweden's neutrality goes back even further, to the Napoleonic wars. Stockholm is expected to follow Finland's lead, viewing its neighbour's security as vital to its own.

A Ukrainian commander in Mariupol appealed directly to Elon Musk on Wednesday, asking the world's richest man to intervene on behalf of those trapped by Russian forces in the southern port city.

The war has devastated Mariupol, where Ukrainians have sustained a pocket of resistance at a steel factory.

Iryna Yegorchenko, 43, learned Wednesday that her soldier son Artem had died protecting the Azovstal plant.

'I suddenly felt relieved,' she told AFP.

The 22-year-old was crushed during the collapse of a structure and 'quickly went to God', said Yegorchenko, who lives in Kyiv.

'He decided to defend his homeland, his people... I have nothing to be ashamed of as a mother.'

Russian infantry fighting vehicles open fire with anti-tank missiles during an attack in Kharkiv, before a Ukrainian counter-attack which forced these units back across the border

Tetyana Pochivalova weeps outside her destroyed house in Vilhivka village, north of Kharkiv, which has recently been recaptured by Ukrainian forces counter-attacking in the region

Destroyed houses in Slatino village, north of Kharkiv, in areas which have been recently recaptured by Ukrainian forces

Destroyed houses are pictured in Vilhivka village which was recently recaptured by Ukrainian forces north of Kharkiv

Trashed furniture and other belongings lie outside a destroyed house north of Kharkiv, after it was recaptured by Ukraine

Ukrainian soldiers in front of a damaged Russian BMP on the outskirts of Kharkiv, after successful counter-attacks
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been rushed out of a campaign event in Tasmania by his security detail after being confronted by an angry voter.

The Liberal leader was approached by a local man named Trevor Sofield at the Ashgrove Cheese Dairy Door in the island state's northern seat of Lyons, who was wishing to express his disappointment at the federal government's handling of the Solomon Islands.

Mr Sofield, who claims to have worked for the government in the past, repeatedly attempted to speak with Mr Morrison but was 'manhandled' by his team, instead turning to the media scrum in attendance and sharing his views.

#WATCH: One of the first High Commissioners to the Solomon Islands Trevor Sofield tried to approach the PM at an event in Northern Tasmania. The PMs security detail prevented him from talking to Scott Morrison. @SBSNews #ausvotes pic.twitter.com/lq4U3hUDDx  Shuba Krishnan (@ShubaSKrishnan) May 12, 2022

Trevor Sofield confronted Scott Morrison at a dairy cafe in Tasmania on Thursday afternoon to express his disappointment at the mismanagement of the Solomon Islands

Mr Morrison was then whisked away by his security team, rushing down into the cafe's carpark and into his private car, flanked by cameras and other local residents

'I was high commissioner of the Solomon Islands for four years. We have lost the plot in the South Pacific. Given my experience, I know what I'm talking about,' Mr Sofield told reporters.

'The Prime Minister's party has lost my vote. I'm from the electorate of Bass, and because they've totally mishandled our strategic interests, our national interests, I'm no longer voting for them.'

Mr Morrison was then whisked away by his security team, rushing down into the cafe's carpark and into his private car, flanked by cameras, Mr Sofield and other local residents.

Mr Sofield claims he was 'manhandled' by members of the PM's security detail after trying to 'express his views' on the Solomon Islands

Mr Morrison had been in attendance at the dairy cafe in the key seat of Lyons on Thursday after losing the third leaders' debate

Mr Sofield was caught on video attempting to walk through a crowd following the Prime Minister prior to delivering his address, but was repeatedly prevented by a member of Mr Morrison's team.

'I beg your pardon, don't touch me, this is a public space,' the Tasmanian said as the PM could be seen speaking to workers in the background.

'I would like to express my views. These minders are terrible.'

'I was high commissioner of the Solomon Islands for four years. We have lost the plot in the South Pacific. Given my experience, I know what I'm talking about,' Mr Sofield said

He eventually gave up and welcomed journalists and camera crews to surround him, before explaining his anger at Mr Morrison's government.

'When I was in foreign affairs, I was one of our initiators of our policy. We have lost the plot,' he said.

Mr Sofield was a professor at the University of Tasmania for 10 years, working in the facility's tourism department.

The university's website describes him as a 'retired Australian ambassador' who completed 90 projects internationally in planning and development for poverty alleviation and protected area management, including in the South Pacific.

China's security agreement with the Solomon Islands could see military bases built by Beijing within 2,000kilometres of Australia

China announced the historic security agreement with the Solomon Islands in March - sparking fears they could build a military base less than 2,000km from Australian shores.

A spokesman for the Communist country's foreign ministry said both nations have signed off on a framework for the deal, just two days before an American contingency arrive to warn the Solomons against signing the agreement.

'The purpose of China-Solomon security co-operation is to promote social stability and long-term peace and security in Solomon Islands, which is in line with the common interests of Solomon Islands and the South Pacific region,' foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said on Tuesday.

China have released no details about the agreement, nor when it was agreed, but a statement from the Solomon Islands confirmed the deal had been 'initialled' on March 31 and would be confirmed later.

Australia and the US fear China will attempt to build bases throughout the Pacific, with Minister for the Pacific Zed Seselja urging Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands Manasseh Sogavare to abandon the deal last week.

China said the deal was 'public, transparent, open and inclusive, not directed at any third party, and is parallel to and complementary to the existing bilateral and multilateral security co-operation mechanisms in Solomon Islands' - but US officials believes it 'leaves the door open' for Chinese aggression in the Pacific.
While Veronica Nelson screamed out in pain and made distressing call after call for help, the only nurse in her Melbourne prison wing was watching a movie.

Veronica died in her cell at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre in January 2020 after more than a dozen requests including for more anti-nausea medication after she vomited up an early dose.

Prison guards called nurse Atheana George three times during the night to ask about Veronica, but the nurse said she didn't believe the Indigenous woman seemed that unwell.

Veronica Nelson (pictured) died in her cell at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre in January 2020 after making more than a dozen calls over the intercom system for help

Ms George did see Veronica once during the night, passing her medication including Panadol through a trap in the cell door.

In the few steps Veronica took walking from the bed to the door Ms George said she appeared steady on her feet, was alert and responsive.

'According to my opinion, my point of view, she was looking OK at that stage,' she said.

The inquest has previously heard from a prison guard who accompanied Ms George to Veroncia's cell, who said she told the nurse that Veronica looked very unwell.

But Ms George denied that conversation and said it was because she had been treated so terribly by that particular guard in the past that she didn't ask for the door to be opened to assess Veronica.

'She treated me badly ... I don't want to talk any more,' Ms George said, breaking down.

'Because of her I was so scared to ask her to open the door that day.'

Veronica's body was found three hours after her last call for help. She died from an undiagnosed condition in the context of drug withdrawals, for which she was receiving medication. (Pictured: The Dame Phyllis Frost Centre where Veronica died)

Ms George said she didn't think Veronica looked unwell enough that it was necessary for her to open the door, but also that had she not been afraid of that officer she would have asked for it to be opened.

She never told anyone she was afraid of the officer.

Ms George was called twice more during the night by another guard about Veronica but did not go to see her again.

Showed footage of herself watching a film, Ms George told the inquest she sometimes put on movies or music for background noise because it could be scary being in the nursing office alone.

But an inquest into Veronica's death heard there is hours of footage of Ms George sitting watching the screen.

Ms George accepted that had she opened the cell door she might have seen that Veronica needed emergency medical treatment, got her to hospital and that could have saved her life.

Lawyers for Veronica's mother Aunty Donna Nelson told Ms George they will submit that either she is lying - which she denied - or that her assessment of Veronica through the cell trap for less than a minute was 'totally incompetent'.

'Maybe my assessment was not accurate but, yeah, maybe my assessment was not that accurate,' Ms George responded.

The inquest is continuing.
Raging Vladimir Putin could retaliate against Finland for announcing its intention to join NATO by turning off their gas supplies as soon as tomorrow, politicians fear.

Finnish MPs have been warned that Russian exports could be halted tomorrow in response to today's announcement, according to Iltalehti.

This morning, president Sauli Niinisto and prime minister Sanna Marin said they want to join the security alliance 'without delay', with Sweden set to follow suit within days, drastically ramping up tensions between Russia and the West.

The Kremlin had previously threatened it would secure 'the entire destruction' of the country and 'the most undesirable consequences', and today said it would 'be forced to take retaliatory steps', both 'military-technical and other'.

There were already fears that Putin would exact revenge on Helsinki by turning off the taps by May 23 when the next gas bills are due from Finland to Russia, causing havoc to industry and food. But there are now fears the Kremlin could act sooner.

Politicians told reporters they have discussed a potential gas crisis, with Ville Tavio, chairman of the Basic Finnish Parliamentary Group, saying: 'Preparations have been made for this and it is expected that this can happen.'

Earlier, Russian state TV accused the US of erecting a 'new iron curtain' in Europe in a furious response to Finland announcing its intention to join NATO.

The major policy shift was announced today in a joint statement by President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin (pictured) today

Finland, which shares an 830-mile border and a difficult past with Russia, has previously remained outside NATO

A Number 10 spokesman said the UK is 'fully committed to NATO's open door policy' and said the only threatening behaviour in Europe has been Russia's invasion.

The decision is a spectacular backfire for Putin who invaded Ukraine in part through fears of NATO expansion, with the Western pact's presence on Russia's borders now set to double from 754 miles to 1,584 miles.

When asked what he would say to Russia, Niinisto replied: 'You caused this. Look in the mirror.'

After the announcement, Russian state TV's Olga Skabeyeva said: 'The main beneficiary here is America and Biden. And the main aim is a new iron curtain from the Barents to the Black Sea.'

Meanwhile Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the move was 'definitely' a threat to Russia and warned it would make Europe more unstable.

He said Finland had made 'unfriendly steps' against Russia and it was a cause for regret and a reason to impose a symmetrical response.

Asked whether this presented a threat to Russia, Peskov said: 'Definitely. NATO expansion does not make our continent more stable and secure.'

Sweden is expected to follow Finland with its own bid which could come as soon as next week, with a parliament debate on Monday followed by a special cabinet meeting where the formal decision to apply will be taken, Daily Expressen said.

President Sauli Niinisto and prime minister Sanna Marin released the anticipated statement this morning

Russian state TV has accused the US of erecting a 'new iron curtain' in Europe in response to the decision

British soldiers participate in an exercise as NATO allied troops carry out Swift Response 22 exercises during a media open day at Krivolak army base, North Macedonia

Italian paratroopers parachute after jumping from C-130 aircraft in today's NATO drills

Sauli Niinisto (pictured during a meeting with Boris Johnson yesterday) believes the move would strengthen Finland's security

A special committee will announce Finland's decision on a membership bid on Sunday although it could take until October before the country is formally admitted to the pact.

The major policy shift which completely rewrites Europe's post WWII alignment comes a day after Boris Johnson signed security pacts with Helsinki and Stockholm pledging Britain would come to their aid if they come under Russian attack.

In their statement today, Niinisto and Marin said: 'Now that the moment of decision-making is near, we state our equal views, also for information to the parliamentary groups and parties.

'NATO membership would strengthen Finland's security. As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defence alliance.

'Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay.

'We hope that the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days.'

Finland, which shares an 830-mile border and a difficult past with Russia, has previously remained outside the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation to maintain friendly relations with its eastern neighbour.

Earlier this morning, former prime minister Alexander Stubb said: 'I have been waiting for this day for 30 years.

'Announcement on Finnish NATO membership imminent.'

British soldiers prepare for Swift Response 22 exercises carried out by NATO allied troops

The exercises involve around 4,600 soldiers from North Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, Greece, Italy, as well as France, the UK and the US

A British Chinook helicopter transports a howitzer and a truck during the Swift Response 22 military exercise

Sweden is expected to imminently follow Finland with an application to join the Western military pact.

The Nordic nations have been rattled by Moscow's war against its pro-Western neighbour, which has bolstered domestic support for joining the alliance - and the security that membership would provide.

After today's announcement, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said the eventual membership process would be 'smooth and swift'.

'This is a sovereign decision by Finland, which NATO fully respects. Should Finland decide to apply, they would be warmly welcomed into NATO,' Stoltenberg said.

Denmark's Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen also said he will push for a quick admission process.

'Denmark will of course warmly welcome Finland to NATO. (It) will strengthen NATO and our common security,' Frederiksen said on Twitter. 'Denmark will do everything for a quick admission process after the formal application.'

Meanwhile Volodymyr Zelensky 'commended' Finland's readiness to apply to join the NATO alliance in a phone call with Niinisto.

'We also discussed Ukraine's European integration. And - defence interaction,' he wrote on Twitter.

NATO enhanced Forward Presence battlegroup tanks and infantry fighting vehicles fire during Iron Spear exercises in Latvia yesterday

Mr Johnson and Finland's President Sauli Niinisto both met the media at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki, Finland, on Wednesday

Why are Sweden and Finland not in NATO? Both Finland and Sweden have been militarily non-aligned since WWII. Sweden maintained its policy of neutrality - which had begun in the early 19th century - throughout the war wanting to avoid being drawn into a conflict that was engulfing the nearby powers of Germany and the Soviet Union. Instead, Sweden profited from its neutrality by exporting iron ore to the Nazis and sharing military intelligence with the Allies and training their refugee soldiers. Meanwhile Finland changed sides in the conflict, first being invaded by Joseph Stalin and assisting the Nazis, before fighting against Hitler's troops. When NATO was formed in 1949 for a Western military alliance, Sweden decided not to join and continue its neutrality, introducing a security policy that secured its non-alignment in peace and neutrality in war. In 1994, Stockholm decided to join the NATO programme Partnership for Peace (PfP), aimed to build trust between member states and other European countries, but until now it has not signalled a desire to fully join the alliance. Finland is also a PfP member but has similarly stated its desire to remain neutral since the war. The EU member state was part of the Russian Empire and won independence during the 1917 Russian revolution but it nearly lost it fighting the Soviet Union in World War Two. Having been invaded by Russia in 1939 and sharing a long border with the superpower, Finland wanted to stay out of future conflicts, giving it the freedom to maintain a strong relationship with Moscow and the West while enjoying a free market economy. Advertisement

Any NATO expansion is bound to spark anger from Vladimir Putin, who has warned Sweden and Finland against joining.

The Russian tyrant has historically pushed back at any eastward expansion of the alliance and has strongly condemned any notions of Ukraine joining. He claimed Ukraine's closeness with the West was one reason behind his invasion.

Moscow lawmaker Vladimir Dzhabarov recently warned Finland that a formal application would mean 'the destruction of the country', while another Kremlin spokesman Alexander Grushko threatening 'the most undesirable consequences'.

But Moscow's mounting warnings and threatening rhetoric appear only to have strengthened Finland's and Sweden's resolve to join.

It comes after Britain pledged yesterday to come to Sweden and Finland's aid should either of the countries come under Russian attack.

Boris Johnson signed security pacts with his Swedish and Finnish counterparts during visits to the countries on Wednesday.

The pacts could see British troops sent to the two nations in the event of a Russian invasion from '21st century tyrant' Putin - who has threatened 'military and political consequences' should either country join the NATO alliance.

Johnson said the countries must be free to decide whether to join NATO without 'fear of retaliation' in a stark message to Putin.

The PM said the 'mutual security assurances' would see the countries involved come to each other's aid in the event of an attack.

Asked whether British troops could be sent to Finland in the event of a Russian invasion, the PM said: 'Yes, we will come to each other's assistance including with military assistance.'

He said the UK would be prepared to offer Sweden 'whatever Sweden requested', if Moscow followed through with threats of a military offensive.

Speaking at a press conference in Helsinki alongside Niinisto, Johnson said the two countries would 'always come to one another's aid'.

'The security declaration, the solemn declaration we have signed today, ensures that our two nations can intensify our partnership and take it to unparalleled heights, both latitudinal and metaphorical,' he said.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Sweden's Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson signed documents as they met at her summer residence in Harpsund, Sweden

'From the high north, to the Baltics and beyond, our armed forces will train, operate and exercise together, marrying our defence and security capabilities and formalising a pledge that we will always come to one another's aid.

'Because this is not a short-term stop gap, Sauli.

'This is not a short-term stop gap as you consider Nato membership, but an enduring assurance between two nations, an assurance that brings us ever closer as we face the challenges of today, the threats of tomorrow, side by side.'

Iro Sarkka, a NATO expert from the University of Helsinki, told AFP before the announcement that Niinisto, who had refrained from revealing his stance on membership, had nonetheless dropped hints that he was leaning toward supporting a bid.

'The president no longer talks about the EU defence option or the role of Finland as the mediator between the East and the West,' she said.

On Wednesday, the Finnish parliament's defence committee also concluded that membership of NATO would be the 'best option' for Finland's security, as the Russian invasion had eroded the security situation in Europe.

Putin has issued a series of threats through his Kremlin loyalists towards Finland and Sweden if they try to join NATO

When Russia last tried to seize Finland... and failed More than 80 years ago, the small Finland took on the might of the Soviet Union when dictator Joseph Stalin ordered an invasion after its government refused to give up substantial territory. The Winter War of 1939-1940  which began less than three months after the start of the Second World War  saw Finland's forces use innovative tactics to defy Russia's hopes for a quick, emphatic victory that could have landed Stalin control of the whole country. Instead, Soviet troops  who numbered around one million  were fiercely resisted for nearly three months, with dramatic photos showing how vehicles and equipment had to be abandoned in the face of the opposition and freezing conditions. In that time, Russia suffered more than 300,000 casualties  including 126,900 deaths - and lost up to 3,500 tanks and around 500 aircraft. By comparison, Finland lost 25,900 men out of an original force of around 300,000. Stories of Finnish heroics include that of a Finnish farmer who became the deadliest sniper in history after killing 505 Soviet troops. In the fighting, Finland also pioneered the use of the improvised grenade the Molotov cocktail, which was named after the Soviet Union's foreign minister. Ultimately however, the sheer numerical superiority of the Soviet Union's forces took its toll and Finland's government was eventually forced to sign a peace agreement that forced them to give up around ten per cent of their territory. Despite the defeat, Finland emerged with its sovereignty intact and its international reputation enhanced, whilst the Soviet Union was kicked out of the League of Nations and was condemned by other world leaders for the illegal invasion. Finnish sniper Simo Hayha emerged a hero after racking up the most sniper kills in the history of warfare. Aged 33 when the war broke out, Hayha quickly acquired a fearsome reputation, striking the enemy unseen and unheard from hidden positions up to 300 yards from his target. Nicknamed The White Death, Hayha was a prime target for the Soviets, who targeted him with mortars and heavy artillery to halt his killing spree, which once claimed 25 men in one day. Finland then allied with Nazi Germany against the Soviets in what was known as the Continuation War in 1941, with Helsinki trying to retake its lost territories. After a ceasefire was agreed in the Moscow Armistice in 1944, Finland was ordered to expel Nazi troops stationed in the country, prompting the Lapland War with Germany. At the Paris Peace Treaty, Finland was classified as an ally with Nazi Germany and ordered to pay reparations. The country then pursued a policy of neutrality, maintaining a free market economy and democracy despite enjoying a strong relationship with the Soviet Union. Advertisement

A large majority in Finland's parliament backs membership.

'It is 100 per cent certain that Finland will apply and quite likely that it will be a member by the end of the year,' researcher Charly Salonius-Pasternak of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs told AFP before Thursday's announcement.

For Finland, the next step is for the President and Ministerial Committee on Foreign and Security Policy - a body made up of the president, prime minister and up to six other cabinet ministers - to meet on Sunday.

The committee will make the formal decision for Finland to submit an application, with the proposal then presented to parliament.

After an official bid is submitted to the alliance, lawmakers in all 30 NATO member states would need to ratify its application, a process that can take months.

Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said on Tuesday he believed Finland could be a full NATO member 'at the earliest' on October 1.

'The NATO secretary general has said that this process will take between four and 12 months. My own impression is that it might be closer to four months than 12 months,' Haavisto said.

Swedish prime minister Magdalena Andersson said her country would be safer as a result of the mutual assistance agreement with the UK. 'Are we safer with this declaration? Yes we are. Of course this means something.'

Finnish president Sauli Niinisto echoed the feeling later, saying the deal with the UK 'increases enormously Finnish security'.

He added he did not view joining the military alliance as a 'zero sum game'. 'Joining Nato would not be against anybody,' the Finnish president said.

Describing the declaration as a 'pivotal moment in our shared history', Mr Johnson added: 'It's pivotal because... the Russian invasion of Ukraine has changed the equation of European security and it has rewritten our reality and reshaped our future.

'We've seen the end of the post-Cold War period and the invasion of Ukraine sadly has opened a new chapter'.

Finland shares a lengthy land border with Russia and is only about 250 miles from St Petersburg.

Russia's February 24 invasion of Ukraine has led to a swift turnaround in Finnish and Swedish public opinion in favour of NATO membership, which until recently had little backing.

A poll published Monday by Finnish public broadcaster Yle showed that a record 76 percent of Finns now support joining the alliance, up from the steady 20 to 30 percent registered in recent years.

Public opinion has also surged in Sweden, albeit to lower levels, with around half of Swedes now in favour.

Sweden's ruling Social Democratic Party said Monday it would announce its position on the NATO issue on May 15. A favourable stance would provide a clear parliamentary majority for an application.

Elisabeth Braw, an expert on Nordic countries' defence at the American Enterprise Institute, told AFP that even though Stockholm appears more hesitant than Helsinki, she believes the two countries 'will do the application at the same time'.

Traditionally accustomed to lengthy consensus-building debates on major issues, Sweden has been caught off-guard by Finland's swift turnaround.

'The Social Democrats in Sweden have always said: 'We'll think about this when Finland joins'... because they thought Finland would never join', Braw said.

A policy reversal for the party, which ruled for an uninterrupted 40 years between the 1930s and 1970s, would be historic.

Sweden is officially non-aligned militarily, although it is a NATO partner and abandoned its position of strict neutrality after the end of the Cold War.

Finland has a long history with Russia. In 1917 it declared independence after 150 years of Russian rule.

Spanish servicemen take part in NATO military exercises during the Iron Spear 2022 drills in Latvia yesterday

Spanish troops of NATO enhanced Forward Presence battlegroup pose for a picture during Iron Spear 2022 military exercise in Adazi military field

During World War II, its vastly outnumbered army fought off a Soviet invasion, before a peace deal saw it cede several border areas to the Soviet Union.

During the Cold War, Finland remained neutral in exchange for guarantees from Moscow that it would not invade.

So the turnaround in sentiment on NATO would have been unthinkable just a few months ago.

As recently as January, Marin said membership was 'very unlikely' during her term.

But after two decades of public support for membership remaining steady at 20-30 per cent, the war caused a huge surge.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov euphemistically warned the move would 'not improve' the security situation in Europe.

'We have repeatedly said that the alliance remains a tool geared towards confrontation and its further expansion will not bring stability to the European continent,' Peskov said.

Any membership bid must be accepted by all 30 NATO states, a process that could take months although members have indicated they want to fast-track the bid.




Independent lawmaker Lee Sang-jik was stripped of his National Assembly seat Thursday after the Supreme Court upheld a suspended prison sentence imposed on him by lower courts for election law violations.







The top court confirmed district and appellate courts' sentence of a suspended prison sentence of 16 months for Lee, who was formerly affiliated with the Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), on several counts of Public Official Election Act violations.







Lee was charged with offering traditional liquor and books worth 26 million won ($21,711) as gifts to 377 voters in his constituency in Jeonju, 240 kilometers south of Seoul, on three occasions in 2019. He was also accused of sending text messages to party members in an attempt to influence the party primaries for the 2020 National Assembly elections in his favor.







A lawmaker loses their seat if they are given a confirmed prison term or a fine of more than 1 million won for violating election and political funding laws.







The 59-year-old Lee, also known as the founder of Korean budget carrier Eastar Jet, left the DPK in September 2020 amid controversy over unpaid wages, mass layoffs and corruption allegations surrounding his company and family.







He is currently serving a six-year prison term after being convicted by a Jeonju district court in January this year for embezzlement of company funds and breach of trust involving Eastar Jet. (Yonhap)






This is the horrifying moment a group of Russian soldiers gunned down a pair of defenceless Ukrainian civilians in Kyiv before leaving them to die in the street and looting their office.

CCTV footage captured five members of Putin's forces as they approached The Camper Group - a mobile home showroom on the E40 highway west of Kyiv opposite a bike shop - where they accosted two men sitting in their office.

The Russians arrived in a stolen van on which the V sign had been hastily emblazoned with black paint and stalked towards the showroom, weapons drawn.

The two civilians approaching with their hands up in the air, were frisked for weapons before being asked for cigarettes.

After a brief exchange, the unsettling conversation appeared to conclude and the two civilians turned to walk away.

But moments later, two of the soldiers nonchalantly raised their rifles and blasted several shots into the Ukrainians' turned backs, then sauntered off to plunder their office.

Two of the Russian soldiers nonchalantly raised their rifles and blasted several shots into the Ukrainians' turned backs, then sauntered off to plunder their office

The civilians can be seen walking away down the street as a Russian soldier in the background prepares to shoot them in cold blood

The incident took place at the Camper Group - a mobile home showroom on the E40 highway west of Kyiv

After gunning down the unarmed civilians, Putin's soldiers spilled into the showroom and were filmed emptying out valuables from drawers and desks as they poured themselves a drink and toasting to their success

One of the men, whose family chose not to name him according to CNN, seemingly died instantly in the cold-blooded attack on March 16.

But the other, 65-year-old security guard Leonid Plyats, lay on the ground until the Russians had left before painstakingly hobbling back to the office to call for help.

CCTV footage showed how Plyats dragged himself into the building, trousers soaked in blood, to contact the local territorial defence group.

But the blood loss was so severe that the old man died before he could be reached by the volunteers.

The harrowing incident took place in the early days of the war, when Russian troops were still trying in vain to force their way into the Ukrainian capital.

After gunning down the unarmed civilians, Putin's soldiers spilled into the showroom and were filmed emptying out valuables from drawers and desks as they poured themselves a drink and toasting to their success.

Minutes later, a small group of Ukrainian volunteers arrived on the scene and opened fire on the Russians, forcing them back into their vehicles.

The ragtag bunch of volunteers were outgunned and had to retreat, leaving Plyats to slowly succumb to his injuries.

The Russian contingent eventually fled the scene, leaving the would-be rescuers to rush to Plyats and administer first aid.

The aged guard had managed to tie a tourniquet around his leg, but he simply couldn't hold on any longer and bled out on the floor of the building.

Two volunteers, Sasha and Kostya, told the BBC they managed to speak to Plyats on the phone before he died.

'We talked to him on the phone, we tried to calm him. We told him, it's ok. Everything will be ok.

'We said we were on our way. Maybe that helped him... But unfortunately, by the time we made it, he was dead.'

CCTV footage from the aftermath of the shooting showed streaks of bright red blood covering the white tiled floor after Plyats' body was dragged out.

CCTV footage showed how Plyats dragged himself into the building, trousers soaked in blood, to contact the local territorial defence group

The office and the street where the cold-blooded murder of the Ukrainian civilians took place can be seen to the left of this image showing the Camper Group showroom

More than 10,000 war crimes have been registered for investigation by Iryna Venediktova's office - and small number of them are ready to be submitted for trial (Ukraine's prosecutor general Iryna Venediktova pictured left, speaking with German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, right)

Vadim Shysimarin, a 21-year-old tank division soldier, will be the first Russian tried on Ukrainian soil for war crimes over his alleged murder of an elderly civilian, Venediktova said

A member of the local civilian defence group explained that the civilians staying at the showroom had been told to leave two days earlier as Russian troops advanced on the area.

But he said the pair refused to leave and wanted to continue showing up to work.

'We hoped for the humanity of the Russian soldiers, but unfortunately they had none,' the fighter said solemnly.

The Ukrainian prosecutor general's office confirmed the incident was being investigated as yet another war crime committed by Russian forces on Ukrainian soil.

More than 10,000 war crimes have been registered for investigation by Iryna Venediktova's office - and small number of them are ready to be submitted for trial.

Vadim Shysimarin, a 21-year-old tank division soldier, will be the first Russian tried on Ukrainian soil for war crimes over his alleged murder of an elderly civilian after his case was filed at a criminal court this week.

Shysimarin allegedly used an AK-74 assault rifle to gun down the unarmed 68-year-old Ukrainian man who was riding his bike in Sumy.

'He is here [in Ukraine], we have him,' said Venediktova, who later added that a total of 36 suspects have been lined up for prosecution so far.
A group of good Samaritans sprang out of their cars at a busy West Palm Beach intersection to save the life of a mother who had passed out at the wheel and was coasting into traffic.

Laurie Rabyor, 63, lost consciousness at the wheel of her car at the intersection on Woolbright Road and Congress Avenue around midday on May 5.

An heroic team of motorists worked together to bring the car under control in the teeth of heavy traffic and avert a disaster.

'Thank you so much. I don't know how to thank you,' Laurie Rabyor told CBS12 News yesterday. She said they saved her life. 'I wish I was a millionaire, so I could buy y'all a boat.'

In video released by Boynton Beach Police Department, a women identified as a co-worker of Laurie's is seen abandoning her car to bravely run out into the intersection as Laurie's car drifted into harm's way.

A group of good Samaritans sprang out of their cars at a busy West Palm Beach intersection on Woolbright Road and Congress Avenue to save the life of a mother who had passed out at the wheel and was coasting into traffic

Laurie Rabyor, 63, lost consciousness at the wheel of her car at the intersection around midday on May 5

In video released by Boynton Beach Police Department, a women identified as a co-worker of Laurie's is seen abandoning her car to bravely run out into the intersection as Laurie's car drifted into harm's way

She tries to open the door of the moving car while signaling to other drivers of the emergency taking place

As the car drifts across the intersection all the way to the other side, more drivers get out of their car to step up and try to rescue the situation, including one in US army fatigues who ran all the way across the notoriously busy junction

The combined strength of six people brings the car to a halt and a woman hands a dumbbell she fetched from her car to a man who uses it to break one of the rear windows

She tries to open the door of the moving car while signaling to other drivers of the emergency taking place.

Are YOU one of the good Samaritans? Contact: newsUS@dailymail.com Advertisement

As the car drifts across the intersection all the way to the other side, more drivers get out of their car to step up and try to rescue the situation, including one in US army fatigues who ran all the way across the notoriously busy junction.

The combined strength of six people brings the car to a halt and a woman hands a dumbbell she fetched from her car to a man who uses it to break one of the rear windows.

Once they have access to the car, the team of heroes wheel it to the parking lot of a nearby 7-Eleven, where they where a nurse provides Laurie with medical attention until the fire department arrives.

Laurie expressed the gratitude that her daughters had towards the team of good Samaritans and said she would like to return the dumbbell which was still in her car to its owner.

Her medical emergency was attributed to a combination of high blood pressure pills and fasting ahead of a medical procedure which caused her to get dizzy.

As Laurie tried to pull over she started to convulse. 'When I started to pull over is when I went out and started to convulse. I didn't wake up till the next day,' she said.

Laurie Rabyor originally hails from Naugatuck, Connecticut, according to Facebook. She is a mother to two daughters and a grandmother to boys.

Boynton Beach police hope to honor the good Samaritans and are seeking their identities.

Eventually they intend to organize a gathering in which they can all meet Laurie, fully-recovered and in high spirits, and share an emotional reunion.
A woman who drowned in a lake killed herself after fearing a chronic eye problem made her look 'disfigured', an inquest has heard.

Christine Foster, 60, was reported missing by her family on November 18 last year, before her body was pulled from the water in Orrell Water Park in Orrell, Wigan, Greater Manchester, the following day.

An inquest at Bolton Coroner's Court heard Ms Foster had been suffering with a chronic eye problem for some time prior to her death.

The hearing was told Ms Foster, who lived in Billinge, Merseyside, underwent an operation on a cyst on her right eye in 2020.

After it failed to resolve the problem, she contacted several other hospitals to see if they would treat her but they refused.

Ms Foster had threatened to end her own life if the issue could not be fixed, the inquest heard.

In the days prior to her death, she told loved ones she could 'no longer cope'. The knock-back 'deeply affected' Ms Foster, says her mother, Rose Shone.

After the UK went into lockdown in 2020, she said Ms Foster's mental health began to deteriorate further after she was furloughed from her job as a veterinary grooming manager.

Christine Foster, 60 (pictured), from Billinge, Merseyside, who drowned in a lake, killed herself after fearing a chronic eye problem made her look 'disfigured', an inquest at Bolton Coroner's Court heard

Ms Shone said this made her daughter become 'lonely' and she started to 'cut people off'.

When Ms Foster's workplace eventually reopened, the inquest heard that her position was filled by someone else.

Ms Shone said her daughter was left 'angry and upset' by the decision, and started to become increasingly worried about money.

She said she also noticed that her daughter was not eating properly.

Ms Shone said: 'She was hardly eating anything. I could see this in her physical appearance. She stopped dressing. In the past, she had been very proud of her appearance.'

The inquest heard Ms Foster was referred to mental health services in October last year after she threatened to kill herself if her eye problem was not resolved.

Dr Jaswinder Saini, a consultant psychiatrist at Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust, said that during an assessment Ms Foster had told her the infection was affecting 'all aspects of her life'.

Dr Saini added that the 60-year-old spoke about wanting another opinion.

She said Ms Foster had reassured her that she had no plans to end her own life and she was therefore deemed to be at 'low risk' of suicide.

A plan was then made for a home treatment team to visit Ms Foster two to three times a week.

Samantha Horsfall, a home treatment practitioner at the trust, carried out an assessment with Ms Foster on October 23.

She told the inquest that Ms Foster had appeared 'fixated' by her eye and was 'debilitated by anxiety'.

Ms Horsfall said: 'She was quite helpless about her situation. She was neglecting herself and was not eating.

'The anxiety was all-encompassing and she found it very hard to look at anything other than the issues with her eye.'

Ms Foster was reported missing by her family on November 18 last year, only for her body was pulled from the water in Orrell Water Park in Orrell, Wigan, Greater Manchester (pictured), the following day

Ms Horsfall said Ms Foster told her she had contacted a private eye clinic in London and was considering travelling down to see a consultant.

Ms Horsfall said: 'Christine saw herself as extremely disfigured. She was not, but Christine saw herself differently.'

Several weeks before her death, the inquest heard that Ms Foster was left 'devastated' when her beloved dog Grace had to be put down.

Ms Foster's friend, Christine Milliken, described her as 'generous' and 'animal-mad' and said the pair spoke several times a day.

During a telephone conversation on November 14, she said Ms Foster had a 'complete meltdown'.

Ms Milliken said: 'She was crying and screaming about her eye and said she could not cope with the pain.'

On the evening of November 17, Ms Foster expressed similar concerns during a visit to her mother's home address.

Ms Shone said: 'She was crying and said she could no longer cope and her eye was not getting any better.'

When Ms Foster failed to visit her the following day, Ms Shone went to her daughter's house where she found a note saying goodbye. Police were contacted and a search was launched for Ms Foster.

An inquest at Bolton Coroner's Court (pictured) heard Ms Foster had been suffering with a chronic eye problem for some time prior to her death. The hearing was told Ms Foster, who lived in Billinge, Merseyside, underwent an operation on a cyst on her right eye in 2020

Later that evening, officers found her coat and keys next to a lake in Orrell Water Park - a short distance from her home. An underwater search team pulled Ms Foster's body from the water the following morning.

Pathologist Dr Stephen Wells told the inquest that a post-mortem examination had given her cause of death as 'drowning'.

He said toxicology results showed Ms Foster had consumed alcohol and the anti-depressant mirtazapine prior to her death, but that he did not believe they had contributed towards her death.

Police coroner's officer Andrew Pickles told the hearing that there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding Ms Foster's death. After being informed of her daughter's death, Ms Shone said she was 'not surprised'.

Ms Shone said: 'When you watch someone over a period of months worsening in every way, to her she had nothing to live for. When the dog died that was the top hat on it.

'She did not take these decisions overnight. It was over a period of time.'

Dr Lee Roby, a GP at Hall Green Surgery in Upholland, told the hearing that Ms Foster had reported that a cyst on her eye was causing her 'significant problems' and that she had seen several specialists about it.

He added that she had been prescribed anti-depressants after being diagnosed with mixed anxiety and depressive disorder in 2021.

Recording a conclusion of suicide, assistant coroner Rachel Syed said she was satisfied that Ms Foster had intended to take her own life.

Miss Syed said: 'It's clear that she submerged herself in the water with a clear intention of ending her own life.

'There are extensive letters in her own handwriting in which she clearly expressed her intention to end her own life. This was a very well thought out plan by Christine.'
The EU today batted away pleas to overhaul the Northern Ireland protocol saying the bloc cannot 'solve all the problems created by Brexit'.

Commission vice-president Maros Sefcovic insisted there is no prospect of the bloc changing his negotiating mandate to resolve the deadlock.

In a speech to MEPs, he said: 'We will not renegotiate the protocol. The EU is united in this position.'

But, after talks with Mr Sefcovic failed to secure a breakthrough, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss warned that the EU is leaving the UK with 'no choice' about acting unilaterally to axe the post-Brexit rules.

The standoff came after Attorney General Suella Braverman concluded that it would be legal to axe swathes of the post-Brexit rules for the province because they are causing social unrest.

There have been claims that Boris Johnson is preparing to trigger the move within days, despite warnings from the US and Europe.

According to the Foreign Office, Ms Truss told Mr Sefcovic the protocol was 'the greatest obstacle' to forming a new Northern Ireland executive.

The spokesman said: 'The Foreign Secretary noted this with regret and said the situation in Northern Ireland is a matter of internal peace and security for the United Kingdom, and if the EU would not show the requisite flexibility to help solve those issues, then as a responsible government we would have no choice but to act.'

Foreign Secretary Liz Truss (right) is speaking to commission vice-president Maros Sefcovic (left) as the standoff escalates in the wake of Stormont elections

Attorney General Suella Braverman is said to have concluded that it would be legal to axe swathes of the post-Brexit rules for the province because they are causing social unrest

Sectarian tensions have been rising in Northern Ireland, while Sinn Fein became the biggest party for the first time in elections last week

The PM has insisted that the Good Friday Agreement is more important than the Northern Ireland Protocol, dismissing suggestions of any possible escalatory response from the EU as 'crazy'.

But today he took a more emolient stance, merely saying there is a 'real problem' that must be 'fixed'.

'Look, Northern Ireland is an incredible place, it's got a fantastic future,' he said on a visit to Stoke.

'At the moment, very sadly, the institutions of democracy, the political governance of Northern Ireland, has collapsed.

'The institutions set up under the Good Friday Agreement aren't functioning. The executive, the assembly  they can't form.

'That's a bad thing at any time, that's a bad thing now when the people of Northern Ireland need leadership, they need a regional, a provincial government that will focus on the cost of living, on healthcare, on transport, on things that matter in their everyday lives.

'They haven't got that. That's a real, real problem. And the reason they don't have that is because there's one community in Northern Ireland that won't accept the way the protocol works at present  we've got to fix that.'

Ms Truss has warned she will 'not shy away' from taking action, accusing the EU of proposing solutions that would 'take us backwards'.

According to a government readout of the conversation, Ms Truss told Mr Sefcovic the EU 'bore a responsibility to show more pragmatism and ensure the protocol delivered on its original objectives'.

'The Foreign Secretary reiterated that the UK's proposals to fix the protocol, including green and red channel arrangements, backed up by a bespoke data-sharing system, would ensure the removal of trade barriers between Great Britain and Northern Ireland while protecting the EU single market,' she said.

'The Foreign Secretary outlined why EU proposals would take us backwards, by creating more checks and paperwork.

'Vice President Sefcovic confirmed that there was no room to expand the EU negotiating mandate or introduce new proposals to reduce the overall level of trade friction.'

But Mr Sefcovic said in a statement following the call 'simply not acceptable' for the UK to axe the protocol.

'It continues to be of serious concern that the UK Government intends to embark on the path of unilateral action,' he said.

'I am convinced that only joint solutions will work. Unilateral action, effectively disapplying an international agreement such as the protocol, is simply not acceptable.

'This would undermine trust between the EU and UK as well as compromise our ultimate objective  to protect the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement in all its dimensions, while ensuring legal certainty and predictability for the people and businesses in Northern Ireland.

'Such unilateral action will also undermine the conditions which are essential for Northern Ireland to continue to have access to the EU single market for goods.'

Ms Braverman has reportedly advised that legislation to override the protocol would be legally sound because of the 'disproportionate and unreasonable' way it has been implemented by the EU.

She has submitted evidence accusing the EU of undermining the Good Friday Agreement by creating a trade barrier in the Irish Sea, and warned of 'societal unrest' in Northern Ireland.

However, there are signs of tensions in the Cabinet over the step, with Michael Gove and Rishi Sunak said to be concerned about the impact on the economy amid the Ukraine war and cost-of-living crisis.

Mr Gove stressed yesterday he was 'super-cool' with the approach being taken by Ms Truss.

Mr Johnson played down the risks yesterday, telling BBC News: 'Let's face it, we're talking about really, in the scheme of things, a very, very small part of the whole European economy, and I think 0.4 per cent of the value of the whole of the EU economy in Northern Ireland.

'It is crazy. I didn't think there's any need for drama. This is something that just needs to be fixed.'

Speaking to ITV's Peston programme, Jacob Rees-Mogg said the UK would not involve itself in any trade war with the EU.

'Tit-for-tat retaliation of that kind is the economics of the schoolground and it would damage British consumers at a time of rising (prices),' he said.

Irish foreign minister Simon Coveney said this morning that Brussels wanted 'compromise'.

But he warned: 'Clearly, if the UK breaches international law, if it undermines a protocol that is about protecting the integrity of the EU single market, then the EU can't ignore that.'

He told RTE radio that there was still a 'landing zone' for an agreement between the two sides.

'We're not going to do it under the threat of British Government's language and briefing of the media which says if the EU doesn't give us everything we want, well, then we're going to legislate ourselves to override international law,' he said.

Northern Ireland minister Conor Burns last night that the UK Government would have to take unilateral action over the protocol if it could not resolve issues with the EU.

Speaking to LBC's Tonight With Andrew Marr programme, he said: 'If the EU are saying to us that, and they're not, I don't think, yet at the position of saying there's nothing more to talk about, then we will have to take actions to prioritise stability in Northern Ireland, powersharing in Northern Ireland, to protect the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement, and that will mean intervention unilaterally, yes.'

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has said: 'No-one should unilaterally cancel, break or in any way attack the settlement.'

The White House stressed the need for talks to continue to resolve the issues, with a spokesman saying: 'The best path forward is a pragmatic one that requires courage, co-operation and leadership.

'We urge the parties to continue engaging in dialogue to resolve differences and bring negotiations to a successful conclusion.'

Democratic Unionist Party leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson reiterated his call for the Government to take action.

Boris Johnson (pictured in Sweden yesterday) insisted that the Good Friday Agreement is more important than the Northern Ireland Protocol, as he dismissed suggestions of any possible escalatory response from the EU as 'crazy'

He told Sky News: 'The protocol is harming Northern Ireland, it's harming our economy, it is undermining political stability here, so I think in those circumstances, and in order to safeguard the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement and political institutions, the UK Government is well within its rights to act in these circumstances.'

Officials working for Ms Truss are drawing up draft legislation to unilaterally remove the need for checks on all goods being sent from Britain for use in Northern Ireland.

Ms Truss is understood to be poised to take further action in coming weeks if negotiations with the EU continue to stall.

The proposed law would allow businesses in Northern Ireland to disregard EU rules and regulations and remove the power of the European Court of Justice to rule on issues relating to the region.

Crucially, it would in parts override the protocol agreed by Mr Johnson in 2019 and mean the UK had breached its obligations under the Brexit agreement.

But it has been argued that the protocol will not be completely overridden, with measures being considered to ease the issues on the ground in Northern Ireland.
UK universities' research excellence is evenly spread across the four nations of the UK, with experts stating this will help with the Government levelling up agenda.

The Research Excellence Framework (REF), which covers 157 universities submitting the work of 76,000 academic staff, found that overall, 41per cent of submitted research was 'world-leading', while a further 43per cent was 'internationally excellent'.

At least 15per cent of research was considered world-leading in three-quarters of the UK's universities, while more than 80per cent of research was judged world-leading or internationally excellent across each UK nation and English region.

The results will mean a funding boost for universities that have done well in the rankings.

High scores in the REF, carried out by Research England, mean institutions have more access to 2 billion of public research funding.

Experts have said this will help with the Government's levelling up agenda and could highlight previously overlooked 'pockets of excellence'.

While universities in the Russell Group were ranked highly, other universities, such as Northumbria, had leaped up the rankings.

Oxford University, pictured, topped the rankings of the best research institutions in the UK

University College London, pictured, was number two on the prestigious list

The University of Cambridge, pictured, was among the 84 per cent of UK colleges whose works was described as either world-leading or internationally excellent

Northumbria University recorded the largest growth in research power, moving up 27 places to 23rd across the UK from its previous position in 2014.

Vice-Chancellor, Andrew Wathey, said that the outcome 'moves us clearly into territory formerly the preserve of the Russell Group of universities'.

'Northumbria is the first modern university to cross the clear, blue water that separated the old and the new parts of the sector, and others are following,' he added.

Northumbria previously rose from 80th place to 50th in 2014, during the last REF. The university said that this made Newcastle, where Northumbria University is situated, combined with Durham, a 'northern research powerhouse', with the largest city-area concentration of researchers outside London.

'This is important for the economy of the North East, for inward investment - public and private - for future collaboration between the universities and business, and for the levelling up impacts of research,' Professor Wathey added.

Edinburgh University, pictured, was the top college in Scotland according to the research

Manchester University was the highest rank college in the north of England

Steven Hill, research director at Research England, said: 'I think that the UK research system is well placed to meet the Government's ambitions for levelling up'.

Sarah Richardson, editor of Research Professional News, told the PA news agency that their analysis showed the top universities had lost some of their market share of research excellence.

Between them, Oxford, UCL, Cambridge, King's, Imperial and LSE had lost 2.4 percentage points of market share between 2014 and 2021, she said, while the universities increasing in market share by at least 0.3 percentage points were Northumbria, Exeter, Manchester Metropolitan, Liverpool and Cardiff.

She said that the gap between the top universities and others across the country 'looks narrower', and that 'it's enough of a shift to suggest an encouraging trend, that the rest of the country is closer to those institutions than previously thought'.

'What the REF does is, it will highlight where there's already excellent research taking place around the country,' she said, adding that the shift predated the Government's 'huge focus' on levelling up.

King's College London, pictured, was the second college in the capital on the list

The Government might see the results from universities around the country as a way of furthering this agenda, where there were 'pockets of excellence that have gone below the radar', she said.

Oxford University had the highest volume of world-leading research, and made the largest submission of research compared with any other university, submitting more than 3,600 researchers into 29 subject areas.

Professor Louise Richardson, the university's vice-chancellor, said that the results showed Oxford was a 'research powerhouse'.

University College London came second, with 93per cent of its research graded 'world leading' and 'internationally excellent'.

Its research scored a 'grade point average' of 3.50 (out of 4), rising from 3.22 in 2014, with a total of 3,432 of its academics involved in the submission.

Northumbria University, pictured, has joined Durham and Newcastle as part of a 'northern powerhouse' of university research

Cambridge University was third, Edinburgh fourth and Manchester fifth. At Cambridge, 93per cent of submissions were ranked 'world-leading' or 'internationally excellent' and 91per cent of STEM submissions were also ranked in these categories.

Stephen Toope, Cambridge University vice-chancellor, said that the results 'highlight the strength of our research environment and outputs, and the significant impact that our research has across the world'.

Dinah Birch, professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool, who chaired the REF panel on arts and humanities, said that the range of the research and its wider benefits was 'astonishing'.

'Everything from the fiction of Anthony Trollope, to the nature articles that make up the substance of the universe, to the identification of new materials for manufacturing innovation, are a dizzying array of intellectual discovery,' she said.

Unions have said that the REF process is a 'bureaucratic nightmare' which can entrench inequality, given how the results impact funding allocations.

University and College Union (UCU) general secretary, Jo Grady, said: 'The UK is home to outstanding researchers and produces world leading research, year in, year out.

'But the Research Excellence Framework remains a flawed, bureaucratic nightmare and emblematic of a research culture obsessed with arbitrarily designating institutions or departments as 'winners' or 'losers'.

'It is a drain on the time and resources of university staff, and funding often entrenches structural inequalities.'
Dramatic footage has emerged of the getaway car being torched shortly after a notorious bikie and his brother were gunned down in a hail of bullets.

Comancheros sergeant-at-arms Tarek Zahed, 41, is off life support and in a stable condition in hospital after he was shot 10 times in the head, body and legs at Bodyfit Gym in Auburn in Sydney's west on Tuesday night.

His brother, Omar, 39, was also shot several times and couldn't be revived.

As police gave an update on the extent of Zahed's horrific injuries, footage has emerged of one of the getaway cars being set alight by a mysterious figure in a nearby suburb a short time after the deadly shooting.

The person was captured throwing accelerant onto the Audi Q7 before it erupted into flames with a loud explosion seconds later.

Comanchero hardman suffered horrific injuries after he was shot 10 times. His brother, Omar, was also shot but died. (Pictured: Tarek with Omar)

Instigators believe the person responsible in the torching of the car likely suffered burns.

A melted Glock pistol was later retrieved from the burnt wreckage of the getaway car.

Fired cartridge cases were also left behind at the scene, which are now being forensically examined.

The gunmen remain on the run as Strike Force Leary ramps ups its investigation.

Zahed suffered horrific injuries, including to his right eye after one of the bullets ended up in his skull.

'His long term prognosis is unknown but he's survived his surgery,' Homicide Squad Detective Inspector Danny Doherty said.

BodyFit gym remained closed on Thursday as management spoke out about the incident which put innocent lives at risk.

'Obviously we are devastated but our priorities are purely with our people,' BodyFit chief executive Nat Grosvenor said.

'We're very grateful that our staff and members are all safe and well.'

Footages has emerged of accelerant being thrown onto one of the getaway vehicles before its erupted into flames second later

It comes as Zahed's youngest brother requested to be released from custody to attend Omar's funeral this Friday.

Abdul Zahed, 37, is currently behind bars charged with a string of offences including prohibited drug supply. He was allegedly in possession of 95 rounds of ammunition when he was arrested.

He applied to the NSW Supreme Court to be immediately granted bail to care for his sick mother and attend his brother's funeral.

Adbul's barrister Peter Lange told the court on Thursday the shooting had left the ailing family matriarch without two sons to care for her, The Daily Telegraph reported.

Justice Stephen Rothman refused bail but urged Corrective Services to allow Abdul to attend his brother's funeral under supervision.

'I have great sympathy for (Abdul) and his family,' Justice Rothman told the court.

'I have no doubt his mother would benefit from comfort from the applicant  I think the worst thing that can happen to a parent is the death of a child.

An underworld source said Zahed had continued going to the gym leading up to the attack, despite constant warnings from both police and his associates to be cautious and not follow the same routine.

Notorious bikie Tarek Zahed's biggest mistake was sticking to a routine, according to one Sydney gangster in the criminal underworld.

'Anyone with a hit on their head makes sure they don't have a routine,' the source told The Daily Telegraph.

'But Tarek f**ked it, the dumb c**t said he was going to gym last night, like he did the same time the night before, the night before and the nights before.'

The gangster asserted that the 'boys' in the gym' would see Zahed 'every night' at the same time and know exactly 'where and when to get him'.

He explained that gyms are the perfect place to carry out a shooting because targets are 'not armed'.

He said no one goes to the gym with weapons in case they're pulled over by the police.

Last November a gangland shooting was carried out at World Gym in Prospect, NSW.

Alameddine associate, Murat Gulasi, suffered a gunshot wound to his leg on his way to a gym workout with three other men.

The underworld source said it was ultimately his routine that was his downfall.

He said if someone sticks to a routine with a bounty on their head, they 'asking to get knocked'.

'If you go to McDonald's every day at 10am, you'll get shot at McDonald's at 10am'.

An underworld source told The Daily Telegraph that Zahed continued going to the gym leading up to the attack despite constant warnings from both police and his associates

The source said gyms are the perfect place to carry out a shooting because targets are 'not armed'. Last November a gangland shooting was carried out at World Gym in Prospect, NSW. Alameddine associate, Murat Gulasi, suffered a gunshot wound to his leg

Underworld sources and detectives had all told the Balenciaga-clad crime lord to keep a low profile after a huge price was put on his head.

But instead the TikTok gangster flaunted his chiselled physique on social media while working out at Bodyfit Gym in Auburn in Sydney's west, leading killers straight to him.

The ruthless enforcer had been a marked man for weeks, with gangland rivals putting a seven figure bounty on his head, believed to be worth between $1million and a staggering $7million.

On Tuesday night, someone almost got their bumper payday.

Despite the warnings about the hitmen hunting him, Zahed refused to stay away from the gym. As a result, he was cut down in a hail of bullets alongside his younger brother Omar, 39, on Tuesday evening.

The pair had been told to get out of town just days earlier.

'The two brothers were warned last Thursday,' revealed NSW state crime commander Michael Fitzgerald.

'Their lives have been at risk for some time.

'They decided not to follow our recommendations to leave this state.'

Tarek Zahed was cut down in a hail of bullets at the Bodyfit Gym in Auburn in Sydney's west, alongside his younger brother Omar

Omar was killed instantly, but miraculously, Tarek Zahed has grimly held on to life after being shot at 10 times, including bullets to his head, leaving him critically injured

Zahed was the savage king of the eshays, with his three-quarter length trackpants and innocuous subtly-branded white $895 Balenciaga t-shirts, surrounded by goons with trademark crossbody manbags.

His fearless propensity for instant ruthless violence earned him a terrifying reputation and his gangland power grab had put the massive price on his head.

Zahed was in the crosshairs of Sydney's escalating gang war after his profile soared in the past year and he returned to Australia from a failed bid to flee to Lebanon.

The shaven-headed bikie boss had tried to get Lebanese citizenship but was foiled by an Interpol alert from Australian police warning of his drug world connections.

He flew back to Australia but relocated to Victoria after court restrictions in NSW - which limited his movements - made his underworld life too hard.

In January, he interrupted the Australian Open final between Rafael Nadal and Daniil Medvedev in Melbourne when he returned late to his seat.

The crowd turned on him with abuse as he ambled down the aisle, holding up play midway through the crunch match, and the umpire ordered him: 'Just sit in the nearest seat.'

Another video clip gave a clear insight into his volatile fury.

He was caught on CCTV talking to younger associate Mohamed Aouli at a private birthday function in Crown Casino's a'Mare restaurant in Sydney's Barangaroo.

Zahed leads him to a toilet before suddenly unleashing savage blow after blow as his sidekicks herd the unwitting victim back inside, before the door closes.

Zahed - the Comanchero's sergeant-at-arms - was in line to take control of the national bikie gang network after leader Mick Murray was jailed while awaiting trial for a 2019 murder.

Police on Wednesday admitted that the Comancheros was Australia's 'largest criminal organisation.'

It follows links between the bikie gang and the Alameddine crime family - where the bikies act as brutal enforcers.

Zahed has been in and out of jail after setting his dog on one man, stamping on another man's skull in a drug row - leaving him brain damaged - and shooting another after a wild street fight

Zahed has effectively been the recent leader of the NSW Comancheros since state boss Mark Buddle fled overseas in 2016 after he was linked to the murder of a Sydney security guard.

And Zahed's own life of crime dates back 27 years to 1995 when he was first convicted of assault.

Since then, Zahed has been in and out of jail after setting his dog on one man, stamping on another man's skull in a drug row - leaving him brain damaged - and shooting another after a wild street fight.

More recently, the Comancheros had been linked to an alleged $1million drugs haul of meth and MDMA seized by police in Bankstown last December which saw two other members of the bikie gang arrested.

Zahed was also said to have been making enemies while living in Victoria, which may also have sparked the hit.

Tarek Zahed was also said to have been making enemies while living in Victoria, which may lso have sparked the hit

But police phone call intercepts from 2020 also revealed he was on the hit list of the Alameddine's deadly rivals, the Hamzy clan.

Investigators are also probing whether the latest shooting is linked to the execution of Mahmoud 'Brownie' Ahmad two weeks earlier.

Detectives admit there is no shortage of suspects, even within the Comancheros.

'The gangland murder a few weeks ago is one of the lines of inquiry but we can't discount an internal conflict either,' said homicide squad chief Danny Doherty.

'There's opportunities for people to take their place and there's a real power struggle within organisations for people to take their place.'

Even before Tuesday's shooting, one police source admitted: 'We don't know who would want that to happen.

'In that world, someone's always wanting to kill someone. They are always upset.'

Police chiefs have now set up a separate Strike Force Leary to probe the shooting and work with Strike Force Raptor which was also boosted by another 30 officers from 115 to 145 detectives.

'It is shocking, disturbing and unacceptable. When it happens in a public place, at 8pm, at a gym, it will not be tolerated,' NSW police minister Paul Toole said.

'If you are part of Sydney's underworld, we are going to hunt you down. We will actually kick down doors.

'We will raid homes, we will raid businesses, we will harass you, we will disrupt your everyday life to stop this kind of activity out. It is unacceptable.

'If you are involved, an associate then I say to you right now, you better rethink your actives. We will come after you and lock you up.'
A toddler has completely severed his right thumb in a horror incident on a shopping centre escalator.

Louis Fairchild was with his mother Anora travelling up an escalator at Broadway shopping centre in inner Sydney on Saturday when the accident unfolded.

The young boy was holding onto the rail of the escalator when a sharp piece of metal protruding from underneath the hand rail reportedly sliced off his thumb.

Toddler Louis Fairchild (pictured) has completely severed his right thumb in a horror incident on a shopping centre escalator

'Lewis was crying and he held his hand out and it was bloody,' Louis' devastated mother recalled to 7NEWS.

Anora said the piece of metal 'yanked out his tendons' and 'went through the bone'.

She added that her boy's thumb was practically 'hacked' off.

Louis was rushed to Sydney Children's Hospital and operated upon. The procedure took several hours, according to his mother.

The medical staff were unable to save the toddler's thumb.

Louis is currently at home recovering from the ordeal, with further surgical procedures a possibility.

The young boy was holding onto the rail of the escalator when a sharp piece of metal protruding from underneath the hand rail (pictured) reportedly sliced off his thumb

Louis' mother Anora Fairchild (left) is now calling on shopping centres to inspect their escalator hand rails closely. (Pictured with Louis' father Joseph)

Anora is now calling on shopping centres to inspect their escalator hand rails closely.

'My family has suffered an unspeakable amount of heartache. Lewis will likely live the rest of his life without using his right thumb,' she said.

'We could not have ever imagined a quick trip to our local shopping centre would be our worst nightmare that we can't wake up from.'

A Broadway Sydney spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia: 'Our thoughts are with the child and his family, and the health and safety of all of our customers and staff remain our highest priority.'

'We have tried to make contact with the family following the incident.'

Management at Broadway Sydney are investigating the incident.

Lawyers representing the centre are in discussions with the family's solicitor.
Hospital bosses want an unconscious 12-year-old boy tested to see if he is brain dead - and have asked a High Court judge for permission.

The court is preparing to make a ruling over the future of a young boy who has not regained consciousness after suffering brain damage more than a month ago.

Archie Battersbee, 12, was found unresponsive at home in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, with a ligature around his neck on April 7 and has not awoken since.

His parents, Hollie Dance and Paul Battersbee, have insisted on more time before switching off Archie's life support, although his treatment team at The Royal London Hospital considers he is likely brain dead.

Hollie Dance, 46, pictured with her son Archie, 12, who has been unresponsive since he was found with a ligature around his neck at home in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, on April 7

Doctors treating Archie at the Royal London Hospital believe that he is brain-stem dead but his parents Hollie Dance and Paul Battersbee oppose switching off his life support treatment

Fiona Paterson, for Barts Health NHS Trust, which runs the hospital, told the judge the 'priority' is a decision on whether Archie should have the brain-stem test

Mrs Justice Arbuthnot in the Family Division of the High Court is scheduled to consider the case at the private hearing in London today.

Fiona Paterson, for Barts Health NHS Trust, which runs the hospital, told the judge the 'priority' is a decision on whether Archie should have the brain-stem test, which she said is 'endorsed nationally' and would be done in a way that ensures any risk is 'minimised'.

Ms Paterson wants the judge to rule that the test is in Archie's best interests.

But Bruno Quintaville, for his parents, said they are 'very concerned' that their son had not received treatment to relieve swelling on his brain.

His parents, Hollie Dance (above) and Paul Battersbee, have insisted on more time before switching off Archie's life support

His parents are 'very concerned' that their son had not received treatment to relieve swelling on his brain. Pictured, Paul Battersbee outside the High Court in London

'The concern is that he may be suffering every day more damage which could have been avoided,' he said.

Ms Dance, 46, said: 'Archie had a severe brain injury only four weeks ago, there's not been enough time to see what he can do.

'I've refused the brain stem testing to declare him brain dead. It's too soon.

'He has squeezed my fingers with a tight grip. I think that's his way of letting me know he's still here and just needs more time.

'We don't know the extent of the damage but I would rather have some of Archie than none of Archie just to wake up every morning and kiss his beautiful little face.

'I am fighting for as much time as possible to watch and wait.'

Archie's brother Tom, 22 and sister Lauren, 20 come every day to visit him and try to get him to respond. His family talks to him and plays his favourite song, Lucis Dreams by Juice WRLD , along with voice notes from his friends.

Archie's sister Lauren set up an Instagram page 'Spread the purple wave' with regular updates on Archie's condition

'I would rather have some of Archie than none of Archie just to wake up every morning and kiss his beautiful little face,' said his mother Hollie

'Hope is what I am holding on to at the moment,' said Ms Dance. 'Where there is life there's hope.

'Until it's God's way, I won't accept he should go. I know of miracles when people have come back from being brain dead.

'He may not be the same as he was but if there's a possibility he could live a happy life after this, I want to give it to him.'

Barrister Fiona Paterson, representing Barts Health NHS Trust, told the court that Archie's treating team 'consider it highly likely that he is, in fact, brain-stem dead.'

They say that any movements from Archie are reflexes.

She said: 'Even if Archie is not brain-stem dead, his treating team consider that it is highly unlikely that he will ever recover consciousness and consequently it is in his best interests that his mechanical ventilation be withdrawn.'

Archie's elder brother Tom, 22, comes to the hospital every day to visit him and tried to get him to respond

Hollie and Archie's dad, Paul Battersbee, want to give Archie more time to see if his condition improves before making a decision about withdrawing his life support

Archie's sister Lauren set up an Instagram page 'Spread the purple wave' with regular updates on Archie's condition.

Miss Dance has speculated that Archie may have been taking part in a 'online challenge' when he was hurt.

A campaign organisation called the Christian Legal Centre says it is supporting Archie's family.

'We are standing with Archie and his family every step of the way,' said the centre's chief executive, Andrea Williams.

'We want to give him every chance of life.'
A furloughed couple were 'unfairly' dismissed - after being made redundant in the first coronavirus lockdown.

Lorry driver David Pointon and sales administrator Jessica Thursfield took kitchen appliance supplier Swift Electrical Wholesalers to an employment tribunal after being made redundant.

Two other axed employees from the company, which is based on an industrial complex in Fenton, near Stoke-on-Trent, were also included in the case heard at Birmingham County Court.

Now a judge has ruled that all four employees were 'unfairly' dismissed - with three of them sharing 8,000 compensation.

David says he and Jessica were both made redundant just two months after being furloughed in 2020.

The 50-year-old says agency workers were hired just a week later.

David, who had worked for the company for 15 years, said: 'At the time of being furloughed the Government is giving you 80 per cent of your money.

Lorry driver David Pointon and sales administrator Jessica Thursfield (pictured) took Fenton-based kitchen appliance supplier Swift Electrical Wholesalers to an employment tribunal after being made redundant

'But in my house, it was myself and my partner so we were losing 40 per cent of our income collectively.

'It was difficult and uncertain because you didn't know what was going to happen but you did feel like your job was safe. It was due to the coronavirus pandemic that we got furloughed.

'We got letters in the post saying we were up for redundancy. I was shocked because I had never had a day off sick since I'd been there, I'd had no time off, and had a good record with the customers.

'In my opinion, the scoring systems used to get rid of people were unfair.'

The tribunal heard that the company, which provides national trade distribution service to kitchen studios, electrical appliance retailers, and builders merchants 'essentially' had new owners from March 2019.

During 2019 and into early 2020, the tribunal heard the management was looking at the business with a view to making efficiency savings, particularly in light of the March 2020 Covid lockdown.

The tribunal heard by May that year, 45 out of the company's 61 employees had been put on furlough, including Mr Pointon and his partner.

According to the tribunal, it was at this point that management had decided redundancies were 'necessary' and at risk staff were informed via a letter in June that the company was considering cut backs.

Employment Judge Christopher Camp, in his ruling, wrote: '(These) letters were a little disingenuous, in that it is clear from the respondents own evidence that by the time these letters were written, redundancies were not merely a possibility  specific numbers of redundancies in specific areas had been planned.'

The company then held face-to-face meetings with three of the tribunal claimants, while Mr Pointon had a telephone interview, in management discussed redundancies with staff - including a scoring system to inform the selection process.

According to the tribunal, the scoring system included areas such as length of service, disciplinary record and approach to customer service.

After the scoring process, the four staff were among those selected for redundancy.

In his judgment, Judge Camp said the company had in the case of one of the claimants 'unnecessarily rushed' the warning of a possibility to notification within three working days.

He also criticised the 'lack of any real or any adequate consultation' over the redundancy scoring system with employees, as well as the 'apparent absence' of consideration of voluntary redundancies or of furlough or of job-sharing as an alternative to redundancy.

'In my view, these factors by themselves make these dismissals unfair,' said Judge Camp.

Jessica was not eligible for compensation, despite being 'unfairly dismissed', because the judge ruled she would have likely been made redundant even if fair process was followed.

Determined David, from Berryhill, has since described the court ruling as 'brilliant and fantastic'. He now works at JCB.

He added: 'I decided, on behalf of myself and the other three people including my partner, to take it to a tribunal for unfair dismissal.

'We saw it as a culling. We couldn't afford any expensive solicitors for the tribunal so I took it upon myself.

'The outcome was brilliant and fantastic. I put a lot of work in. We got compensation judging on the situation.

'Due to Covid it gets reduced to 40 per cent. We got paid out and I bought myself a number plate for my car.

'We were over the moon. At the end of the day it wasn't about the money, it was about proving a point.'

The couple both worked at kitchen appliance supplier Swift Electrical Wholesalers (pictured) which is based

David told Stoke-on-Trent Live: 'It wouldn't surprise me if there are hundreds of people up and down the country in the same situation and I say 'don't be afraid'.

'If you think you have been mistreated then get onto ACAS straight away. You will need an ACAS reference number to carry on with the case. Take the company to a tribunal.

'There were times - we got a letter saying we might end up with 25,000 court fees - when we were thinking how would we be able to pay that? But we believed we were right, put our faith in the justice system, and prevailed.'

Swift Electrical Wholesalers has declined to comment on the case when approached by Stoke-on-Trent Live.
A shamed NHS worker has been jailed for taking cocaine into one of Britain's biggest music festivals that needed 693 officers to police it.

Courtney Healy, 21, was found with 14 wraps of cocaine in her bag during last year's Creamfields festival on a weekend off from her NHS care worker job.

Healy travelled more than 200 miles from Wales to the four-day electronic dance music festival, recently labelled as 'the world's biggest drug festival in Europe'.

Courtney Healy, 21, drove 200 miles from Wales to the music festival with the intention to smuggle 14 wraps of cocaine. She was found with 8.9 grams of the class A drug worth up to 1,100

Creamfields music festival has recently been labelled as the 'world's biggest drug festival in Europe' and needed 693 officers to police the 2021 event

She was found with 8.9 grams of cocaine in a search tent worth between 420 - 1,100, which she claimed she was taking in for her friends.

A text message revealed that she was smuggling the drugs for a man already in the festival who had offered to pay her 200.

The NHS worker claimed she was taking the drugs in for her friends but texts later revealed she was smuggling cocaine for a man already inside who had offered her 200

Defending, Bernice Campbell described Healy as having a 'devil-may-care' attitude to drugs but said at the time she was going through a 'low point' in her life

Prosecuting, Richard Edwards, told how there was multiple messages in a group chat including Healy asking her friends how they were taking their drugs in.

One person responded: 'Oh my god I am dreading this, you are all smackheads.'

Sentencing Healy for three years, Judge Steven Everett, said: 'You can't be both - a health care support worker and somebody that is involved in the supply of terrible class A drugs'

In another message talking about marijuana, Healy said: 'I smoke it every day. I feel like I might rip someone's head off otherwise.

'My mum would actually send me to jail if she found out I done it.'

Defending, Bernice Campbell described Healy as having a 'devil-may-care' attitude to drugs but said at the time she was going through a 'low point' in her life.

She added that it's a 'terrible, terrible' shame for Healy that she was just the 'go-between' rather than being concerned in the onward supply of drugs.

The court heard how Healy, of Maesteg, near Bridgend, South Wales, now 'lost a promising career' as a health care support worker in the NHS.

She pleaded guilty to possession of cocaine with the intent to supply at Chester Crown Court and was jailed for three years.

Sentencing her, Judge Steven Everett said: 'Yes, she can hang her head. This is not a naive young woman is it?

'It shows she is completely enveloped in the drug culture and is very blase about it.'

'You can't be both - a health care support worker and somebody that is involved in the supply of terrible class A drugs. And you chose the latter.'

In a similar case, Judge Patrick Thompson slammed the 'enormous drain' on taxpayers caused by drug issues at the music festival when sentencing David Bemrose, 33, for a similar offence.

Bemrose, who attended the same festival as Healy, was sentenced to two-and-a-half-years for attempting to smuggle cocaine and ecstasy that was concealed up his bottom.
China welcomes upcoming visit of UN human rights chief

Xinhua) 09:43, May 12, 2022

BEIJING, May 11 (Xinhua) -- China welcomes the upcoming visit of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet to China in May, said a spokesperson for China's foreign ministry on Wednesday.

Bachelet's trip to China will take her to the country's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The preparatory team of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has arrived in China and is currently undergoing quarantine in accordance with relevant anti-COVID-19 protocols, spokesperson Zhao Lijian told a daily press briefing.

"The preparatory team has begun work and the two sides are discussing the specific arrangements for the visit," he said.

(Web editor: Peng Yukai, Liang Jun)


Gov't urged to come up with more centralized approach to policy formulation



This is the first in a series of contributions from experts to highlight various issues President Yoon Suk-yeol and his administration should address during his presidency.  ED.



By Steve Hamilton



The Republic of Korea will see an increased number of migrants in the years to come. This reality has already been unfolding regardless of who won the recent presidential election. Understanding and accepting both the need for migrants and the benefits of well-managed migration to Korea is key to successful migration policies.



The reality of the demographic challenges faced by previous and future administrations in Korea requires continued preparation for the inevitable dramatic reduction in the working age population. A continued commitment to managed migration will be a key element to help alleviate some problems associated with the decline of the population. Migrants bring with them not only the skills needed to sustain a robust Korean economy but also an entrepreneurial drive that helps sustain a growing economy ever reliant on new ideas and fresh perspectives.





Steve Hamilton/ Courtesy of International Organization for Migration Seoul Office
Calling a man 'bald' is sex harassment, an employment tribunal has ruled after an employee complained about being called a 'bald c***'.

Tony Finn had worked for the West Yorkshire-based British Bung Company for almost 24 years when he was fired in May last year.

He took them to the tribunal claiming, among other things, that he had been the victim of sex harassment following an incident with factory supervisor Jamie King.

Mr Finn alleged that during a shop floor row that almost erupted in violence in July 2019, Mr King had referred to him as a 'bald c***'.

Hair loss is much more prevalent among men than women so using it to describe someone is a form of discrimination, a judge found.

Hair loss is much more prevalent among men than women so using it to describe someone is a form of discrimination, a judge found. Stock picture

The ruling, made by a panel of three men who in making their judgement bemoaned their own lack of hair, comes in a case between a veteran electrician and his manufacturing firm employers.

It compared calling a man bald to commenting on a woman's breasts.

The tribunal heard that Mr Finn was less upset by the 'Anglo Saxon' language than the comment on his appearance.

The allegation resulted in the panel - led by Judge Jonathan Brain - deliberating on whether remarking on his baldness was simply insulting or actually harassment.

The panel said: 'In our judgment, there is a connection between the word ''bald'' on the one hand and the protected characteristic of sex on the other.

'(The company's lawyer) was right to submit that women as well as men may be bald. However, as all three members of the Tribunal will vouchsafe, baldness is much more prevalent in men than women.

Tony Finn had worked for the West Yorkshire-based British Bung Company (pictured) for almost 24 years when he was fired in May last year

'We find it to be inherently related to sex.'

As part of its ruling, the panel raised a previous tribunal case where a man was found to have sexually harassed a woman by remarking on the size of her breasts to rebut the firm's point.

'It is much more likely that a person on the receiving end of a comment such as that which was made in (that) case would be female,' the tribunal said.

'So too, it is much more likely that a person on the receiving end of a remark such as that made by Mr King would be male.

'Mr King made the remark with a view to hurting the claimant by commenting on his appearance which is often found amongst men.

'The Tribunal therefore determines that by referring to the claimant as a 'bald c***'...Mr King's conduct was unwanted, it was a violation of the claimant's dignity, it created an intimidating environment for him, it was done for that purpose, and it related to the claimant's sex.'

Describing the argument with Mr King - who is 30 years his junior - Mr Finn told the tribunal, held in Sheffield, South Yorkshire: 'I was working on a machine that I had to cover awaiting specialist repair. The covers were taken off, and it was apparent that Jamie King had done this.

'When I spoke to him about it, he began to call me a stupid old bald c*** and threatened to ''deck me.''

Mr Finn said he had been left 'fearful for my personal safety'.

The tribunal heard he then wrote a statement about the incident with his son Robert, who was a police officer, on official West Yorkshire Police paper.

When this was handed to his bosses at the firm - a family business that makes traditional wooden cask closures for the brewing industry - they at first believed that he had reported the incident as a crime.

Mr Finn told them that it was not his intention to make the statement appear like an official police document. However, the firm accused him of trying to intimidate them and fired him for misconduct.

As well as upholding his sex harassment claim, the tribunal ruled the company had dismissed him unfairly because instead of waiting to hear from police after they complained about his son's involvement, which they claimed they would, they sacked him two working days later.

Mr Finn won claims of unfair dismissal, wrongful dismissal, being subjected to detriments and sex harassment.

He lost an additional claim for age discrimination after the tribunal ruled that Mr King had not called him 'old' but simply a 'bald c***'.

Mr Finn's compensation will be determined at a later date. However, any pay out will be reduced after the tribunal ruled he had contributed to his dismissal through his conduct.
Ukraine is set to hold its first war crimes trial since Russia's invasion began, for a 21-year-old service member accused of gunning down an unarmed 62-year-old from a car window.

Vadim Shishimarin faces life in prison for allegedly killing the civilian with a Kalashnikov rifle as he fled with four other soldiers in a stolen car in a village in Sumy on February 28, just days after the start of the war.

The man was pushing a bicycle by the side of the road when he was shot in the head and 'died on the spot a few dozen metres from his home', the Ukrainian prosecutor general said.

Ukraine is set to hold its first war crimes trial since Russia's barbaric invasion, for Vadim Shishimarin, 21

Iryna Venediktova (pictured in Bucha on Tuesday), the prosecutor general, is launching her first war crimes case since the invasion

Investigators have collected evidence of his involvement, finding him 'in violation of the laws and customs of war combined with premeditated murder'.

If sentenced, he faces 10 to 15 years or life in prison.

Iryna Venediktova, the prosecutor general, said: 'Shishimarin is actually physically in Ukraine. We are starting a trial not in absentia but rather directly with the person who killed a civilian, and this is a war crime.'

Ukrainian video blogger Volodymyr Zolkin appeared to interview Shishimarin in a YouTube video posted on March 19, according to the Washington Post.

In the clip, the alleged killer said his unit was told they would be taking part in military exercises in southwestern Russia 200 miles from Ukraine in January.

Buildings are reduced to rubble in Mariupol where Russia is accused of targeting civilians in the port city

The town of Bucha in the outskirts of Kyiv revealed a scene of horrors after it was recaptured by Ukraine, with mutilated civilian corpses lining the streets

He was later captured when his column was surrounded while they tried to return wounded soldiers to Russia.

The footage then shows Shishimarin calling his father, saying: 'They treat us well here.'

The father then tells Zolkin: 'He is just a soldier. I don't think he knew where he was going. You say he invaded, and we are told that they were defending the country. He didn't know. He was told to. You hear one thing and we another.'

The clip ends with Shishimarin urging fellow Russians to not join the war effort and protest instead.

Kyiv has repeatedly accused Russian troops of committing atrocities since the invasion began on February 24.

Russian shelling has targeted schools and hospitals, with thousands of civilians feared killed in the brutal campaign.

There are also allegations of mass rape, torture and execution being carried out by Putin's forces.

Nina, 66, gestures as she shows her destroyed house in Pidhaine, Ukraine, with many residential buildings hit by shelling

The town of Bucha in the outskirts of Kyiv revealed a scene of horrors after it was recaptured by Ukraine, with mutilated civilian corpses lining the streets.

Venediktova's office has said it has received reports of more than 10,000 alleged war crimes, with 622 suspects identified.

The Russian invasion has sparked an exodus of nearly six million civilians, many of whom bear accounts of torture, sexual violence and indiscriminate destruction.

The UN Human Rights Council is due to hold a special session on Ukraine on Thursday.

Moscow has focused on eastern and southern Ukraine since it failed to take Kyiv in the first weeks of its campaign.

Ukraine's forces were boosted by what Kyiv described as the recapture of four villages around the northeastern city of Kharkiv, close to the border with Russia.

In the Russian city of Belgorod, around 43 miles from Kharkiv, authorities said one person was killed and six injured by Ukrainian shelling.

Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said it was 'the most difficult situation' facing the border region since Russia sent its troops into Ukraine 11 weeks ago.

Authorities in Russian regions bordering Ukraine have repeatedly accused Ukrainian forces of launching attacks.

In April, Gladkov said Ukrainian helicopters carried out a strike on a fuel storage facility in Belgorod.
Junior Downing Street staff being made to carry the can for Partygate are preparing to wreak a 'nightmarish' revenge on Boris Johnson, it was claimed today, as Scotland Yard revealed it has now dished out more than 100 fines.

Ex-No10 aide Dominic Cummings said staff who were 'thrown under the bus' after being told boozy events were legal were threatening to reveal all to the Covid Inquiry next year.

The Prime Minister's former consigliere lashed out online as Mr Johnson and senior ministers endured a walk of shame on a Cabinet awayday.

After the Metropolitan Police revealed the total number of Partygate fines had more than doubled, The Prime Minister and his Cabinet paraded in front of television cameras ahead of a meeting in Stoke-on-Trent.

But they all refused to engage with questions about the latest tranche of fines, which raised the total from the 50 announced in April.

Many gave friendly greetings to the reporter asking questions but refused to say much else.

Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries said she was 'too busy trying to make sure my heels don't fall through the cracks' of cobbles when asked about the latest batch of Covid fines.

Writing on Twitter Mr Cummings said that junior staff had been told that Mr Johnson's team was working to 'ensure all No10 events are lawful' before they were fined by the Metropolitan Police.

'Also Tory MPs haven't twigged: PM throwing all these junior staff under bus to cops makes his life nightmarish in Covid inquiry,' he added.

'Am getting lots of texts today like ''I can't WAIT for the inquiry, I took lots of notes'.'

Labour MP Chris Bryant dubbed Downing Street 'the most lawbreaking workplace in Britain by a country mile' in light of the new fines.

Downing Street indicated that Boris Johnson (pictured today in Stoke with MP Jonathan Gullis) has not received a new fine. He previously paid a 50 FPN for attending his birthday Party in June 2020 which indoor gatherings were against the law.

Writing on Twitter Mr Cummings said that junior staff had been told that Mr Johnson's team was working to 'ensure all No10 events are lawful' before they were fined by the Metropolitan Police.

Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries said she was 'too busy trying to make sure my heels don't fall through the cracks' of cobbles when asked about the latest batch of Covid fines

Home Secretary Priti Patel and Brexit Opportunities minister Jacob Rees-Mogg joined their Cabinet colleagues at Middleport Pottery in Stoke-on-Trent

Chancellor Rishi Sunak offered a strong hint that more help for Britons could come in August when the energy regulator once again updates the energy price cap

The Prime Minister later ducked more questions in a television interview.

Asked if his previous statements about not knowing rules were broken in Downing Street could be true given the Metropolitan Police fines, he said: 'As soon as I have any more to say about that, you will be among the very first to know.'

Asked if he thought Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer had acted out of 'honour' by saying he would resign if issued with a fine over so-called 'beergate', Mr Johnson issued a similar response.

He added: 'What we are doing here in Stoke is making sure that we focus on the thing that I think matters most to the people of this country right now, and that is getting us through the post-Covid aftershocks.'

Mr Johnson went on to talk about the need to tackle the cost of living crisis, energy bills and supply chain issues.

In the first update in a month, detectives working on the Operation Hillman probe into boozy gatherings in the corridors of power have doubled the number of fixed-penalty notices (FPNs) issued.

The last update, which took place before the local election campaign period, said there had been 50 fines for officials and politicians.

Boris Johnson said thius afternoon that neither he nor wife Carrie had received a new fine. They previously paid a 50 FPN each for attending his birthday party in June 2020 which indoor gatherings were against the law.

A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: 'As of Thursday 12 May, Operation Hillman, the investigation into breaches of COVID-19 regulations in Whitehall and Downing Street, has made more than 100 referrals for fixed penalty notices (FPNs) to the ACRO Criminal Records Office.

'These referrals have continued to be made throughout the period since our last update on Tuesday 12 April and the investigation remains live.'

Some of the latest tranche of fines is reported to relate to a Christmas Party in No10 in December 2020.

Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner said Downing Street had 'racked up the dubious distinction of receiving more fines on the Prime Minister's watch than any other location'.

Liberal Democrat Leader Ed Davey said: 'Boris Johnson stood up in Parliament and said Covid rules were followed in Number 10 at all times.

'Now 100 fines have been issued by the police over partygate. It shows the shocking scale of the law-breaking in Johnson's Downing Street and the extent of his lies.'

Cabinet Secretary Simon Case (pictured today in Stoke) is also not believed to have been fined by police

Some of the latest tranche of fines is reported to relate to a Christmas Party in No10 in December 2020.

Mr Johnson's official spokesman confirmed following the Met's update that neither the PM nor Cabinet Secretary Simon Case were among those fined in the latest tranche.

'With regards to the Cabinet Secretary and the Prime Minister, I don't have any update ... the position (is) we will update you if that were to change,' he said.

Pressed on whether it was his understanding that the PM and Mr Case were not among those hit with the most recent set of penalties, the spokesman said: 'That's correct, yeah.'

He added: 'You'll know that the Prime Minister has on a number of occasions apologised and made clear that there were things we simply did not get right, and that he is sorry for how this matter has been handled.

'Obviously that remains the case. And like I say, he will have more to say at the conclusion ... and when the Sue Gray report is published.'

The Prime Minister said he was 'sure we'll have plenty to say about that when the thing's finished' when asked about the extent of law-breaking in Downing Street as he arrived for a Cabinet meeting in Staffordshire on Thursday.

Ministers dodged questions on whether they still had faith in the PM when asked about the latest development at the same event.

Home Secretary Priti Patel failed to say whether or not she still supported Mr Johnson, while Health Secretary Sajid Javid also chose not to answer when asked why the PM would not resign, despite Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer's promise to do so if he is handed a fixed penalty notice.

Brexit opportunities minister Jacob Rees-Mogg made clear his continued backing of the Prime Minister, saying he 'deserves' his support.

Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries and Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi also said they still had faith in their leader when asked about the fines as they attended the Staffordshire meeting.
A teenage kingpin whose growing drugs empire led to terror on the streets of Liverpool has been sentenced to over nine years behind bars.

17-year-old Harry O'Brien was just 16 when he took over as leader of a squad of drug dealers behind three shootings and a firebombing in the city's Dingle suburb.

Granted automatic anonymity because of his young age, journalists at the Liverpool Echo won a court challenge to name O'Brien when he was jailed for nine years and three months on April 28.

O'Brien used ruthless tactics to gain control of his turf, which would be shocking from a seasoned crime boss, let alone a teenager.

One attack saw bullets fired from an Audi at a BMW, as the two cars raced side-by-side through the city at night. A stray bullet flew through the front door of an 'entirely innocent' family's home and landed on their hallway stairs.

Another time, a gunman on an electric bike peppered a family's living room with bullets and fired into another victim's bedroom.

Finally, O'Brien had petrol poured through the letterbox of a house and set it ablaze, as a mother and her children ran for their lives.

17-year-old Harry O'Brien led a crime group who brought terror to the streets of Liverpool with three shootings and a firebomb. Police say the streets are safer now that he has been jailed for nine years and eight months

At Liverpool Crown Court, Judge Neil Flewitt QC said he had no doubt they were 'the manifestation of a feud' between O'Brien's gang and 'others' with 'whom they had a real or perceived grievance, the nature of which has not emerged'.

Judge Flewitt said: 'Unhappily, the lives of wholly innocent people, including young children, were put at risk by the callous and cowardly actions of all those involved.'

The court was told O'Brien planned and took part in all three shootings, 'orchestrated the arson', and the cannabis plot was 'his enterprise'.

David Temkin, QC, prosecuting, said Harry O'Brien was 'at the heart of the criminality' while his 'lieutenants' Michael McClean, then 16, and Aaron Donohoe, then 19, were given 'managerial responsibility' over his drug trade.

Daniel Lawler, 19, joined O'Brien as 'trusted' henchman and carried out two of the shootings, which all involved the same Glock semi-automatic gun - never recovered by police.

At the age of just 16, cannabis dealer O'Brien became the boss of a teen crew behind three terrifying shootings and a firebombing

The first shooting took place late on December 29, 2020, after the unknown occupants of a silver BMW X5 driving around Dingle Lane deliberately 'rammed' into another BMW on which was being driven by O'Brien's mother, with O'Brien, McClean, Donohoe and an unknown fourth male in the car as passengers.

O'Brien's mother rang police at 10.30pm to report the crash as her son and his gang fled.

Mr Temkin said: 'What happened next was revenge.'

Armed with a loaded gun, O'Brien, McClean, Donohoe and the fourth male set off in the Audi, with banned driver McClean at the wheel.

Three shots were fired at the BMW on Dingle Lane, with one piercing the front door of a 'shocked' couple and their seven-year-old child's home.

Mr Temkin said: 'They were in the process of going to bed. They heard screeching car tyres and found a bullet on the hallway stairs.'

The QC said evidence given by Lawler at trial revealed O'Brien was in 'some sort of dispute' with 'the Franchetti and Rosario family'.

Aaron Donohoe (left), 20, was a lieutenant of teenage drug boss Harry O'Brien (right), 17

Over the next three weeks, O'Brien arranged to buy a Sur-Ron electric bike. O'Brien and Lawler set off on the bike - one armed with the pistol - on January 8 last year. Just after 8:45pm, Donna Rosario rang police to say shots were fired at her home.

Mr Temkin said: 'She, her partner Ian Franchetti, and their daughter were at home in the living room at the time.'

Three bullets were found embedded in her living room wall and ceiling.

A third shooting occurred just after 1am on January 20. O'Brien and Lawler, on the same bike, targeted the Heffey family, firing at an upstairs bedroom where 24-year old Joel Heffey was asleep, an associate of the Franchetti group.

Finally, the gang targeted the house of Claire Bowness, at home with her three teenage children, who was a member of the Rosario family.

Mr Temkin said this arson attack was the 'brainchild' of O'Brien, who sought the help of a 14-year-old boy, from Toxteth, who cannot be named for legal reasons.

O'Brien also enlisted Sian Kanu, then 19, who recruited Mohammed Mohammed, then 19, to carry out the attack. On the morning of February 5, Mohammed filled a petrol canister and poured it through the letterbox of Ms Bowness's home to start a fire.

Mr Temkin said: 'The fire spread some way into the property, moving from the hallway, to the staircase and to the upper floor.

'Claire Bowness and the Rosario children, with their dog, managed to escape out of the rear of the property. However, they all required medical treatment for smoke inhalation.'

On February 12, police raided the home of O'Brien's grandparents, who lived next door to him in the suburb of Aigburth. They found 13,590 in cash in a plastic bag in the loft. One note bore their grandson's fingerprint.

O'Brien was also seen with wads of cash in Liverpool city centre on April 26.

He was arrested at his aunt's home on July 1, where police found some 5,000 of cannabis plus cash, mobile phones, two knives and an axe.

Police also raided the home of Nathan Kelly, 28, a customer of O'Brien's gang, on April 21, where two revolvers were retrieved along with other ammunition.

Following a spate of arrests, those said to be involved in the shootings and arson attack were charged with conspiring to possess a firearm, and to commit arson, both with intent to endanger life.

Ahead of a trial, O'Brien admitted lesser offences of conspiring to possess a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence, and conspiring to commit arson being reckless as to whether life would be endangered, which the Crown accepted.

He had already admitted conspiracy to supply cannabis. Richard Pratt QC, mitigating, said O'Brien had 'diagnoses in the past of ADHD' and was described as 'a risk taker'.

Mr Pratt added: 'It may well be those illnesses, through no fault of his own, have contributed to this conduct.'

Judge Flewitt locked O'Brien up for nine years and eight months, with an extended three years on licence. He must serve at least two-thirds of that sentence behind bars, before he can apply for parole.

Lawler, 21, of Woolton, was found guilty of the firearm plot and admitted unrelated charges of dangerous driving and handling stolen goods. He was locked up for eight years, with an extended two years on licence. He too must serve at least two-thirds of that term.

McClean, 18, of Toxteth, admitted the cannabis and firearm plots. At trial he admitted two counts of possessing a prohibited firearm and possessing ammunition. He was locked up for eight-and-a-half years.

Donohoe, 20, of Toxteth, admitted the cannabis and firearm plots, on the basis he was only involved in the first shooting. He was locked up for six years and four months.

Jurors couldn't reach a verdict against Kanu, 20, of Toxteth, on the arson plot. He later admitted participating in the criminal activities of an organised crime group. He was locked up for two years and three months.

Also at trial, the unnamed boy, now 15, admitted the arson plot. He was handed a two-year Youth Rehabilitation Order, with a six-month home curfew, between 8pm and 7am daily.

Mohammed, 20, of Toxteth, and Kelly, 28, of Belle Vale, will be sentenced at later dates.
Cabinet ministers today headed to Stoke-on-Trent for an away-day as Boris Johnson urged Whitehall departments to renew efforts to find 'innovative' ways to support Britons through the cost-of-living crisis.

Their visit to Staffordshire comes amid grim economic warnings as official figures showed the UK economy plunged into the red in March.

It has fuelled further fears of recession and Chancellor Rishi Sunak this morning admitted the country faces 'anxious times'.

There is already huge pressure on Mr Sunak and his Treasury team to come up with another package of support for stuggling households.

The Chancellor today offered a strong hint that more help could come in August when the energy regulator once again updates the energy price cap.

But, despite the prospect of additional Government action to come this summer, it means Britons still face many more weeks without extra support.

Cabinet ministers were due to continue their discussions on other means of helping Britons through the cost-of-living crisis, after the PM's call for 'innovative' solutions.

It emerged last month that one Cabinet brainstorming session saw ministers float ideas such as introducing looser childcare rules, allowing Britons to get an MOT for their cars only every two years, and pushing for tariff-free food imports.

But the suggestions also attracted claims that the Government is looking to address the cost-of-living crisis on the cheap, without extra spending.

Boris Johnson urged Whitehall departments to renew efforts to find 'innovative' ways to support Britons through the cost-of-living crisis

The PM has gathered his Cabinet ministers in Stoke-on-Trent for an away-day. Their visit to Staffordshire comes amid grim economic warnings as official figures showed the UK economy plunged into the red in March

Cabinet ministers were due to continue their discussions on other means of helping Britons through the cost-of-living crisis, after the PM's call for 'innovative' solutions

Chancellor Rishi Sunak offered a strong hint that more help for Britons could come in August when the energy regulator once again updates the energy price cap

Home Secretary Priti Patel and Brexit Opportunities minister Jacob Rees-Mogg joined their Cabinet colleagues at Middleport Pottery in Stoke-on-Trent

Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries said she was 'too busy trying to make sure my heels don't fall through the cracks' of cobbles when asked about the latest batch of Covid fines

In his opening remarks during the Cabinet meeting at a pottery in Stoke, the PM said: 'We're going to make sure we use all our ingenuity, all our compassion, everything we need to do to help people through the difficult aftershocks of Covid, and the inflationary pressures that we're seeing, particularly on the costs of energy.

He added this week's Queen's Speech had given ministers 'the legislative firepower to deliver on tackling the underlying issues  the things that are driving up prices, particularly for energy, for people's transport, for the education people need.

'That is why I think the Queen's Speech is so important  infrastructure, education, technology  those are the things that we need to focus on  particularly cutting the cost of energy.'

Mr Johnson urged ministers to show 'no lack of resource and compassion now  we're going to have be very, very committed, very, very radical, very, very forward-thinking  but stick to the basics of our thinking about getting people into high wage, high-skilled jobs'.

'Folks, we're going to get through this, it's going to take a lot of focus  but jobs, jobs, jobs is the answer  that is how we will unite and level up across the whole country, and get on with delivering on the mandate that the people gave us two-and-a-half years ago,' he continued.

As they arrived at the Cabinet meeting, ministers were tight-lipped about the revelation that more than 100 fines have now been dished out to people working in Downing Street for Partygate breaches of Covid laws.

Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries said she was 'too busy trying to make sure my heels don't fall through the cracks' of the cobbles on the site when asked about the latest batch of Covid fines.

Ahead of the Stoke away-day, Downing Street said the PM had 'called on Cabinet colleagues and departments to double down on exploring innovative ways to ease pressures on household finances' as well as 'promoting the support that is available but not widely taken up.'

Last month, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps was said to have raised the idea of allowing vehicles to be checked less often, potentially saving drivers hundreds of pounds.

Mr Johnson apparently asked for faster progress on reducing the required ratio between adults and children in childcare settings - something that could reduce costs.

Cutting tariffs on imports of food not produced in the UK was also thought to been suggested around the Cabinet table.

Last month, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps was said to have raised the idea of allowing vehicles to be checked less often

The PM apparently asked for faster progress on reducing the required ratio between adults and children in childcare settings

Economic activity dipped 0.1 per cent month-on-month in March, with revised figures showing zero progress in February

John Lewis chief urges faster action on cost-of-living crisis The Government should act before the summer to tackle the cost of living, the boss of John Lewis has said. Sharon White called on ministers to take the same 'decisive action' seen during the coronavirus pandemic amid rising energy prices. Speaking on Peston, which airs at 10.45pm on ITV, Ms White said: 'I think the time absolutely has come for action, whether it's an emergency budget or whether it's another vehicle. 'As I say, I think we're all really nervous about what's going to happen in October, so when energy bills potentially go up again by up to 1,000, it's winter.' Asked if she wanted action now, she said: 'I do, I think there ought to be action before the summer, so the decisive action that we saw - I thought the Government did incredibly well at pace and scale during Covid - I think we need to see the same decisive action taken at speed and at pace because otherwise... those are impacts across millions of households right across the country.' Ms White said action should be taken even if it means a temporary hit to public finances. Households have seen soaring energy bills, with inflation forecast to hit 10 per cent and welfare payments and wages falling behind the increase in prices. Advertisement

The Cabinet away-day was also arranged to discuss the Government's new legislative agenda, as set out in this week's Queen's Speech.

The Parliamentary set-piece occasion drew criticism for failing to offer immediate support on the cost-of-living.

Mr Sunak today reiterated that he would wait until the full impact of global energy price volatility is known, before acting.

With the war in Ukraine continuing to exacerbate the worldwide energy crisis, it is expected that Ofgem will announce in August another huge hike in gas and electricity bills as Britain heads into autumn and winter.

One energy boss this week predicted annual bills could soar close to 3,000 when an increased price cap comes into force from October.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak said he 'stands ready' to do more to help households with their energy bills when the price cap is raised again.

'I've always said I stand ready to do more as we learn more about the situation,' he told Sky News.

'On energy prices in particular, the price cap protects people for some months to come.

'But I've said when we have a clearer picture about what happens with energy bills, we stand ready and I stand ready to support people further.'

The Financial Times reported Mr Sunak was looking to announce a major new support package in August.

Ahead of the Cabinet day-trip, Mr Johnson said: 'I'm delighted to bring Cabinet to Stoke-on-Trent today - a city which is the beating heart of the ceramics industry and an example of the high skilled jobs that investment can bring to communities.

'This government is getting on with delivering the people's priorities and tackling the issues that matter most to the public.

'This week we've set out how we'll use new landmark legislation to grow our economy to address the cost of living, and level up opportunities for communities across the country.'
This is the audacious moment a Russian tank is obliterated just outside Mariupol, with its turret shooting up hundreds of feet into the air.

Amazing video shot by Chinese state TV channel Phoenix shows the sudden blast in eastern Ukraine, which saw the Russian tank wiped out instantaneously.

It's not clear what sort of weapon was used to detonate the immense explosion, but it must have been hefty to trigger such a blast.

Bizarrely, the tank's turret stayed perfectly intact as it flew 250ft (76m) into the air above the busy road into war-torn Mariupol, south-eastern Ukraine.

The Chinese journalist who shot the footage said her driver had to slam on the brakes to avert the blast.

Phoenix TV wrote: 'Reporter Lu Yuguang escaped death during the interview in eastern Ukraine [as] the driver needed emergency deceleration to avoid danger.'

It added: 'Phoenix Satellite TV dispatched a frontline interview team from eastern Ukraine to go to the Mariupol Azov Steel Plant on May 6 to discuss the evacuation of civilians by the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Russian Military Organization.'

The massive explosion took place just outside Mariupol in south-eastern Ukraine: Phoenix TV

The reporter's car had to slam the brakes, the Chinese outlet said, in order to avert disaster

The strike footage appears to be the latest sign of what defence experts have termed the 'jack in the box' effect in Russian tanks.

A fatal design flaw dating back to the Gulf War leaves Putin's maligned weapons of war little more than 'mobile coffins'.

Sam Bendett, an adviser with the Russian Studies Program at the Center for a New American Security, told CNN: 'What we are witnessing with Russian tanks is a design flaw.

A fatal design flaw in Russian tanks dating back to the Gulf War has made them 'sitting ducks' for Ukrainian attacks, blasting the turret up to two storeys into the air, defence experts said

'Any successful hit ... quickly ignites the ammo causing a massive explosion, and the turret is literally blown off.'

Western militaries have learned from the flaw and their tanks now have compartmentalised ammunition.

Steven Zaloga, an expert on Russian and Soviet armour, told military site Task & Purpose: 'If you see film footage of a hit followed by the ammunition fire, typically what happens is that one propellant casing goes off  or one or two  because of a penetration.

'The explosion of the first propellant case tends to trigger more.

'And so, what you often-times see is a sequence where one propellant case or a couple of propellant cases go off and then the stowage down in the autoloader goes up, basically like a string of firecrackers.'

Smoke rises amid ruins of Mariupol's Azovstal steel works, which is under a weeks-long siege
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The United States has eclipsed one million COVID-19 deaths, the White House announced Thursday, the first nation to reach the grim total during the pandemic that has dominated life for the past two years.

President Joe Biden paid his respects to the families of the one million Americans, telling grieving relatives that he knows 'the pain of that black hole in your heart'.

The one million mark is a stark reminder of the staggering grief and loss caused by the pandemic even as the threat posed by the virus wanes in the minds of many people. It represents about one death for every 327 Americans, or more than the entire population of San Francisco or Seattle.

According to some popular pandemic counters, like ones published by Johns Hopkins University and the New York Times, America is still a few thousand deaths away from one million, but will likely reach the mark in the coming days. This is because different organizations use different means to gather a record data, leading to slightly different figures.

The mark is also reached as the virus has a resurgence, with both cases and deaths trending upwards once again after around three straight months of rapidly falling after the winter Omicron surge. The U.S. is recording 86,834 cases a day, a 36 percent jump over the past week. Deaths from the virus have fallen 33 percent during that time, to 381 per day.

President Joe Biden today paid his respects to the families of the one million Americans who died from Covid-19, telling grieving relatives that he knows 'the pain of that black hole in your heart'

BA.4 and BA.5 Covid strains that are believed to be immune to natural antibodies detected in over a dozen countries, WHO reports The BA.4 and BA.5 strains of Covid, but part of the Omicron lineage, have now been detected in over a dozen countries each, the World Health Organization (WHO) warns Both strains, which were also first detected in South Africa just like BA.1, are believed to be able to evade natural antibodies formed by previous Covid infection BA.4 has been sequence less than 700 times in 16 countries, the WHO reports BA.5 has been detected less than 300 times in 17 countries We dont know how this variant will behave, how these subvariants will behave in other countries that had a dominant wave of BA.2, Dr Maria Van Kerkhove of the WHO said during a news briefing If the strain can evade natural antibodies, it means it can potentially restart the outbreak - just as Omicron did in late 2021 when it arrived and evaded vaccine immunity Experts believe that almost everyone across the U.S. and Europe was infected by Omicron when it first took over the world in late 2021 This is a welcome prospect, as it means the population likely has enough natural immunity to protect itself Advertisement

Biden said he acknowledged the 'unrelenting' pain of those who have lost loved ones during the pandemic, as the president marked the devastating milestone of one million deaths in the US.

He called on residents to 'remain vigilant against this pandemic' and said it was 'critical' for Congress to fund resources like testing, vaccines and treatments.

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020. By that point the virus had already claimed 36 lives in the United States.

In the months that followed, the deadly virus spread like wildfire, finding fertile ground in densely populated urban areas such as New York City and then reaching every corner of the country

The President said in a statement: 'Today, we mark a tragic milestone: one million American lives lost to COVID-19.

'One million empty chairs around the dinner table. Each an irreplaceable loss. Each leaving behind a family, a community, and a nation forever changed because of this pandemic. Jill and I pray for each of them.'

He added: 'To those who are grieving, and asking yourself how will you go on without him or what will you do without her, I understand.

'I know the pain of that black hole in your heart. It is unrelenting. But I also know the ones you love are never truly gone. They will always be with you.'

Biden's son Beau, a US veteran who served in the US, died aged 46 in 2015 after battling brain cancer. Beau attained the rank of Major in the U.S. Army and National Guard, joined the military in 2003 and and deployed to Iraq in 2008 while he was the Attorney General for the state of Delaware.

'As a nation, we must not grow numb to such sorrow,' Biden said. 'To heal, we must remember. We must remain vigilant against this pandemic and do everything we can to save as many lives as possible.'

For many, the toll of more than one million deaths was difficult to comprehend.

'It's unfathomable,' Diana Berrent, one of the first people in New York state to catch Covid-19, said of the toll that far exceeds epidemiologists' worst predictions made at the outbreak of the crisis in spring 2020.

'I know the pain of that black hole in your heart. It is unrelenting. But I also know the ones you love are never truly gone. They will always be with you,' Biden said. The President's son Beau, a US veteran who served in the US, died aged 46 in 2015 after battling brain cancer. Pictured: Beau with Jill and Joe Biden after he was elected state attorney general in Wilmington, Del. in 2006

Then, New York City was the virus epicenter. Hospitals and morgues overflowed and the sound of ambulance sirens rang down empty streets as then-president Donald Trump responded chaotically in Washington.

Two years on, and life in the Big Apple is largely back to normal as residents attempt to put the collective trauma of the virus that has killed 40,000 New Yorkers.

Cases are starting to jump once again in the city now, even as the return to 'normal' continues. According to most recent data from May 8, the city is averaging 3,320 cases per day, as cases have begun to spike once again after reaching a low point at the start of March.

Daily deaths caused by the virus have remained in the single digits since early March, though, even reaching a low point of around two deaths per day in the latter stages of April.

New York City is also one of the hotspots of the next strain of the virus that officials fear could become dominant in the near future.

The BA 2.12.1 variant was first detected by New York State officials in late-April. It is the most infectious strain of the virus yet, with a 27 percent growth advantage over the BA.2 'stealth' variant.

According to most recent data Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the new strain makes up 43 percent of cases, growing from 33 percent the week before. It will likely take over as the dominant strain in the coming weeks.

The stealth variant remains dominant, making up 56 percent of active cases. The BA.1 strain that dominated the world over winter has been relegated to only making up one percent of cases. The CDC has not sequenced a case of the Delta variant - which was dominant over summer - in over three months.

Covid cases in New York City are starting to rise once again, reaching over 3,300 per day as of the most recent data report on May 8

Despite rising cases, deaths from Covid in the Big Apple have flatlined, and remained in the single digits over the last two months

The BA 2.12.1 strain (red) now makes up 43% of sequenced COVID-19 cases in the U.S., growing from 33% the week before. The BA.2 'stealth' variant (pink) remains dominant, making up 56% of cases

BA 2.12.1 (red) makes up two of every three cases in the New York and New Jersey region, the CDC reports. In every other region, the 'stealth' variant (pink) is still dominant

Four months after the first Covid case in the US, by June 2020, the US death toll had surpassed the total of the country's military deaths in World War One and it would exceed the American military losses of War World Two by January 2021 when more than 405,000 deaths were recorded.

The disease has left few places on Earth untouched, with 6.7 million confirmed deaths globally. The true toll, including those who died of COVID-19 as well as those who perished as an indirect result of the outbreak, was likely closer to 15 million, the WHO said.

Tracking the COVID-19 pandemic is not an exact science. The John Hopkins University has recorded 998,000 Covid deaths in the US whilst a Reuters tally has recorded more than 1 million deaths.

Meanwhile, the CDC reported more than 995,000 Covid deaths in the US whilst a New York Times database recorded 997,000.

The variation is due to how each organization counts COVID deaths. For example, Reuters includes both confirmed and probable deaths where that data is available.

Biden called on Congress to provide more funding for testing, vaccines and treatments, something lawmakers have been unwilling to deliver so far.

The lack of funding - Biden has requested another $22.5 billion of what he calls critically needed money - is a reflection of faltering resolve at home that jeopardizes the global response to the pandemic.

Eight months after he used the first such summit to announce an ambitious pledge to donate 1.2 billion vaccine doses to the world, the urgency of the U.S. and other nations to respond has waned.

Momentum on vaccinations and treatments has faded even as more infectious variants rise and billions of people across the globe remain unprotected.

The White House said Biden will address the opening of the virtual summit Thursday morning with prerecorded remarks and will make the case that addressing COVID-19 'must remain an international priority.' The U.S. is co-hosting the summit along with Germany, Indonesia, Senegal and Belize.

Some of the images associated with COVID deaths are forever burned in the collective mind of Americans: refrigerated trucks stationed outside hospitals overflowing with the dead; intubated patients in sealed-off intensive care units; exhausted doctors and nurses who battled through every wave of the virus.

Millions of Americans eagerly rolled up their sleeves to receive COVID vaccines after distribution began in late 2020. By early 2021, the virus had already claimed a staggering 500,000 lives.

At one point in January of that year, more people died from COVID-19 every day on average than were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.

COVID-19 preyed on the elderly and those with compromised health, but it did not spare healthy youth either, killing more than 1,000 children. Researchers estimate 213,000 U.S. children lost at least one parent or primary caregiver during the pandemic, taking an immeasurable emotional toll.

While nestling in big cities, coronavirus has also ravaged rural communities with limited access to medical care.

The pandemic had a disproportionate impact on native communities and communities of color. It hit harder where people lived in congregate settings, such as prisons, and decimated entire families.

It exposed inequalities deeply entrenched in U.S. society and set off a wave of change affecting most aspects of life in the United States.

With the COVID-19 threat subsiding after the Omicron wave last winter, many Americans have shed masks and returned to offices in recent weeks. Restaurants and bars are once again teeming with patrons, and the public's attention has shifted to inflation and economic concerns.

But researchers are already working on yet another booster shot as the virus continues to mutate.

'By no means is it over,' said top U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci at a recent event. 'We still are experiencing a global pandemic.'

'I think we are in a place where psychologically and socially and economically, people are largely done with the pandemic,' said Celine Gounder, an infectious disease expert at New York University.

'(But) the pandemic is not over. So you have a disconnect between what is happening epidemiologically and what's happening in terms of how people are responding,' she told AFP.

Among the most at-risk are the unvaccinated, lower-income populations, uninsured people and communities of color, she says.

America recorded its first Covid-19 death, on the West Coast, in early February 2020. By the next month, the virus was ravaging New York and the White House was predicting up to 240,000 deaths nationwide.

But those projections were way off.

Trump was late to back social distancing, repeatedly undermined top scientist Anthony Fauci, peddled unproven medical treatments, and politicized mask-wearing - before eventually being hospitalized with the virus himself.

In New York and other northeastern urban centers, hospitals become overwhelmed and morgues failed to keep up with the dead.

'There were nurses that said if they closed their eyes at night they could hear the patients struggling to breathe and they couldn't get it out of their heads,' recalled Boston nurse Janice Maloof-Tomaso.

Ideological clashes over curfews and mask and vaccine mandates ensued as America racked up the world's highest death toll.

But Trump did pump billions of dollars into vaccine research and by mid-December 2020, the first vaccines were available for health care workers.

Deaths kept soaring, however, amid a slow take-up of shots in conservative areas of the country, and in February 2021 the country counted 500,000 dead.

Biden and many Democratic governors enforced mandates but Republican-led states like Florida and Texas outright banned them, highlighting America's patchwork of rules that made forming a unified response to the pandemic difficult.

'We went from 'stay home and save lives' to let it rip,' recalled 47-year-old Berrent, who, after her illness in 2020, founded the group Survivor Corps for people looking for information about long-haul Covid or a current infection.

'The question is no longer, 'Have you had Covid?' It's, 'How many times have you had Covid, and what symptoms do you still have?''

The U.S. has shipped nearly 540 million vaccine doses to more than 110 countries and territories, according to the State Department - by far more than any other donor nation.

After the delivery of more than 1 billion vaccines to the developing world, the problem is no longer that there aren't enough shots but a lack of logistical support to get doses into arms.

According to government data, more than 680 million donated vaccine doses have been left unused in developing countries because they were set to expire soon and couldn't be administered quickly enough. As of March, 32 poorer countries had used fewer than half of the COVID-19 vaccines they were sent.

U.S. assistance to promote and facilitate vaccinations overseas dried up earlier this year, and Biden has requested about $5 billion for the effort through the rest of the year.

'We have tens of millions of unclaimed doses because countries lack the resources to build out their cold chains, which basically is the refrigeration systems; to fight disinformation; and to hire vaccinators,' White House press secretary Jen Psaki said this week.

She added that the summit is 'going to be an opportunity to elevate the fact that we need additional funding to continue to be a part of this effort around the world.'

'We're going to continue to fight for more funding here,' Psaki said. 'But we will continue to press other countries to do more to help the world make progress as well.'

Congress has balked at the price tag for COVID-19 relief and has thus far refused to take up the package because of political opposition to the impending end of pandemic-era migration restrictions at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Even after a consensus for virus funding briefly emerged in March, lawmakers decided to strip out the global aid funding and solely focus the assistance on shoring up U.S. supplies of vaccine booster shots and therapeutics.

Biden has warned that without Congress acting, the U.S. could lose out on access to the next generation of vaccines and treatments, and that the nation won't have enough supply of booster doses or the antiviral drug Paxlovid for later this year. He's also sounding the alarm that more variants will spring up if the U.S. and the world don't do more to contain the virus globally.

'To beat the pandemic here, we need to beat it everywhere,' Biden said last September during the first global summit.
A Carlsberg director was sacked after successfully organising a 'p**s up' in a brewery because it breached lockdown rules, an employment tribunal has heard.

Martin Entwistle invited eight friends for beers in the Taproom of Carlsberg's London Fields Brewery (LFB) in Hackney, north London, on 6 June 2020 despite strict Covid regulations having been enforced due to a 'vulnerable' member of staff.

An employment tribunal hearing, in Cambridge, was told that after dinner and drinks he gave his friends a late-night 'guided tour' of the London brewery which descended into 'boisterous, alcohol-fuelled horseplay'.

Their escapades were captured on CCTV and as a result he was told his behaviour was 'unbecoming' of a managing director and he was sacked for gross misconduct.

Mr Entwistle, who now runs online retailer All About The Beer, then brought claims of unfair dismissal and breach of contract against Carlsberg, saying enforced rules were put across on an email as 'nothing more' than 'guidelines'.

But the tribunal has now dismissed his claims - saying the regulations were 'clear and unmistakable' as mandatory rules and not voluntary guidance.

Mr Entwistle had worked as the Managing Director of Danish brewing company Carlsberg's LFB and Taproom in Hackney, north London.

In light of the Covid 19 pandemic, the company had introduced measures to reduce the risk of infection at the site.

At the time of the drink up on 6 June 2020, restrictions had just been lifted from a complete lockdown, with the public able to meet up to six people in an outdoor setting and only two people were allowed to meet indoors, in both cases while being socially distanced.

Carlsberg director Martin Entwistle (pictured) was sacked after organising a 'p**s up' in London Fields Brewery in Hackney because it breached lockdown rules, an employment tribunal has heard

Larger gatherings were only permitted for work purposes, provision of voluntary or charitable services or at an educational facility where the gathering is 'reasonably necessary' for the purposes of education.

Non-essential retail shops were not to open for another 11 days.

The tribunal also heard that in preparing for the return of a 'vulnerable' female member of staff - named only as 'K' - the company had detailed extra rules in an email sent to all employees.

The 'mandatory directives' enforced in June included 'no one' being allowed to enter the brewery area 'unless there is an emergency'.

The rules added: 'This includes when the Brew Team are not at work, and should generally be the case regardless.'

Their escapades in the Taproom (pictured) were captured on CCTV and as a result he was told his behaviour was 'unbecoming' of a managing director, and he was sacked for gross misconduct

The tribunal noted it showed no one was wearing face masks, and that 'at least one' of the party had engaged in 'boisterous, alcohol-fuelled horseplay' whilst in the brewery.

After the party, a number of staff raised concerns about their managing director's conduct, and a disciplinary investigation began.

The investigation found Mr Entwistle had 'demonstrated ignorance' of social distancing guidelines and 'failed to control the behaviour' of his friends.

Mr Entwistle (pictured) had worked as the Managing Director of Danish brewing company Carlsberg's LFB and Taproom in Hackney, north London. In light of the Covid 19 pandemic, the company had introduced measures to reduce the risk of infection

But despite accepting he 'had not set a good example', Mr Entwistle disagreed that his conduct was 'unbecoming' of the lead of the LFB operation.

The tribunal also heard he challenged the 'validity' of the Covid measures sent in the earlier email, arguing they were simply 'guidance and nothing more'.

Mr Entwistle sought to 'justify' his entry to the brewery by saying he knew vulnerable staff member 'K' - who had been shielding for three months prior to her return - wouldn't be at work for another four days.

In September 2020 he was sacked for his 'extremely irresponsible' act of gross misconduct, and told he had committed a 'very serious error of judgement'.

Mr Entwistle appealed the decision, arguing that while it had been 'wrong' to take a group into the brewery it had not caused 'any danger or risk to any employee or visitors'.

His appeal was rejected and he brought claims of unfair dismissal and breach of contract to an employment tribunal.

However, Employment Judge Claude Forde dismissed his claims and concluded that the Covid rules regarding the brewhouse were 'unmistakably' mandatory rules.

The LFB is located under railway arches, boasts a 15-hectolitre (1,500 litres) brew kit, has a 3,000 hectolitre (300,000 litres) onsite capacity and, in 2011, was the first commercial brewery to open in Hackney in over a century.

It was bought by the Carlsberg Marston's Brewing Company for a reported 4m in 2017, and shut in December last year.

Judge Forde said: 'I find that the information set out in the [June] email contained rules that were clear and unmistakable in terms of their intention and purpose.

The LFB (pictured) is located under railway arches, boasts a 15-hectolitre (1,500 litres) brew kit, has a 3,000 hectolitre (300,000 litres) onsite capacity and, in 2011, was the first commercial brewery to open in Hackney in over a century. It was bought by the Carlsberg Marston's Brewing Company for a reported 4m in 2017, and shut in December last year

'Staff working at LFB on the night in question for whom Mr Entwistle had responsibility were alarmed and concerned at his actions; such that they raised their concerns with those that manage him.

'I find that the acts of Mr Entwistle while in the brewery and in the days after amount to a clear and substantial breach of the contract of employment.

'His decision to contravene the rule regarding unauthorised entry to the brewery, his failure to have regard to the health and safety of his fellow employees and his attempts to post-rationalise his action after the event are all serious matters.

'In other words, his actions - as I have identified individually and cumulatively - amounted to gross misconduct.'

The London Fields Brewery was shut down by Carlsberg Marston's Brewing Company in December last year after it decided to sell the brand.
The White House on Thursday condemned North Korea for another series of ballistic launches  which come just days before President Joe Biden is set to visit Seoul.

The admonition came in a statement from White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who spoke to his new Republican of Korea counterpart Kim Sung-han.

The two 'condemned the DPRK's ballistic missile launches, including the launches today, as a violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions and committed to maintain close coordination to address the threats posed by the DPRK and to advance our shared objective of the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,' according to the statement.

North Korea's 16th known weapons test this year comes days before President Biden's planned visit to Seoul

The pair also conferred on details about Biden's visit to Korea and 'strengthening our cooperation across a range of shared foreign policy priorities,' according to the readout.

Biden heads out next week for his first trip to Asia as president, where he will meet Korean President Yoon Seok-youl before heading to Japan.

North Korea fired three ballistic missiles towards the sea off its east coast on Thursday, South Korea and Japan said, in the latest tests aimed at advancing its weapons program.

This file picture taken on March 24, 2022 and released from North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on March 25, 2022 shows North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (C) walking near what state media report says was a new type inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) before its test launch at an undisclosed location in North Korea

North Korea often times its missile launches during times of international tension. Here People watch a TV showing a file image of North Korea's missile launch during a news program at the Seoul Railway Station in Seoul, South Korea, Saturday, May 7, 2022

An overview of what state media reports is the launch of the "Hwasong-17" intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in this undated photo released on March 25, 2022

Biden is set to meet South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan spoke to his South Korean counterpart

Three short-range ballistic missiles were fired at around 18:30 (0930 GMT) from the Sunan area of North Korea's capital, Pyongyang, where an international airport is located and where it fired its largest intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the Hwasong-17, on March 24, South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said.

The missiles flew approximately 360 km (224 miles), reaching an altitude of 90 km and a maximum velocity of Mach 5, the JCS said. Although the U.S. condemned the launches as a violation, the U.S. military said it did not pose an immediate threat to America or its allies.

Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi said the missiles flew about 350 km, to the maximum altitude of around 100 km, before landing outside Japan's territorial waters.

'A series of missile launches when the invasion of Ukraine is taking place is unacceptable,' he told reporters, adding that Tokyo had lodged a protest against North Korea through its embassy in Beijing.

North Korea's 16th known weapons test this year came hours after it reported its first COVID-19 outbreak, declaring a 'gravest national emergency' and ordering a national lockdown.

The launch was also the first since the inauguration this week of conservative South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, who has signalled a hard line against the North's weapons development.

Yoon's national security office issued a statement condemning the launch and saying it 'deplored the duplicitous conduct' of firing ballistic missiles and ignoring the plight of its people in the middle of a COVID outbreak.

But Yoon's office said it would not link humanitarian aid to political differences with North Korea and the new president's nominee as minister responsible for inter-Korean ties, told his confirmation hearing he would prepare humanitarian assistance for Pyongyang, including COVID treatment, syringes and other medical supplies.

Some analysts have suggested that such humanitarian assistance could create an opening to restart stalled diplomacy with North Korea.

However, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said the United States has no current plans to share vaccines with North Korea and that North Korea had repeatedly refused vaccine donations from the COVAX global vaccine sharing project.

The spokesperson said that while Washington continued to support international efforts aimed at the provision of critical humanitarian aid to the most vulnerable North Koreans, North Korea 'continues to exploit its own citizens and divert resources from the countrys people to build up its unlawful nuclear and ballistic weapons programs.'

The official said Pyongyang had created significant barriers to the delivery of assistance by closing its borders and rejecting offers of international aid.

The latest launches come amid concerns that North Korea may be about to resume nuclear bomb testing suspended since 2017. U.S. and South Korean officials have said this could happen as early as this month.

U.S. President Joe Biden is due to visit South Korea and Japan next week and North Korea will be high on his agenda.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed late last month to expedite the country's buildup of its nuclear arsenal amid stalled denuclearisation talks with the United States.

In its last weapons test on Saturday, the North used a submarine-launched ballistic missile, a type it has been aggressively developing in recent years.

In a statement, the U.S. military said it was closely consulting with its allies and partners over Thursday's launch. 'The missile launch highlights the destabilising impact of the DPRKs illicit weapons program,' it said.

The State Department also condemned the launch, while saying it remained committed to a diplomatic approach with North Korea and reiterating a call for Pyongyang to return to dialogue. (Reporting by Hyonhee Shin in Seoul and David Brunnstrom in Washington; Editing by Alison Williams and Alistair Bell)
BBC director-general Tim Davie has admitted the broadcaster's biggest challenge will be staying 'relevant' as he warned the Government must consider the stakes before slashing the crisis-hit corporation's funding.

Mr Davie, 55, made the comments after he was quizzed about 'levelling up' at Deloitte's media and telecoms conference before adding: 'Our biggest challenge is "Are we relevant?" We want to be relevant.

'Storytelling from the ground up... we are very focused on pushing money out, people out. It's all about local economic growth - we are very bullish on that,' he explained.

He also insisted the BBC still represents 'great value for the licence fee', despite recent rows with Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries - who has promised changes to its funding model will be made 'well ahead' of its 2027 charter renewal.

Debates over its future funding have raged on amid an exodus of top broadcasting talent after BBC Breakfast presenter Dan Walker joined Jon Sopel, Emily Maitliss and Andrew Marr in walking away this year.

Mr Davie warned that the Government needs to consider what kind of broadcast environment it wants in the UK when deliberating on the future of the corporation.

He also claimed the BBC was not 'trying to be Netflix', despite mounting pressure from streaming services such as Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video in recent years.

Thousands of over-55s have swapped their TV guides for a US-provided streaming subscription, with many making the move over during the pandemic.

BBC director-general Tim Davie has admitted the broadcaster's biggest challenge will be staying 'relevant' as the crisis-hit corporation continues to face a myriad of issues

Debates over the BBC's future funding have raged on amid an exodus of top broadcasting talent after Breakfast presenter Dan Walker joined Jon Sopel, Emily Maitliss and Andrew Marr in walking away this year

Mr Davie also discussed public perception and said the 'stakes are very high about what kind of society we live in', in a reference to the BBC's future funding model.

He said: 'Listen to the public. What are we? Storytellers, a democracy.

'My biggest thing is the stakes are very high about what kind of society we live in.'

Mr Davie added: 'I believe we will still offer great value for the licence fee. We have some choices to make. I think we will still be able to offer a great service.'

The broadcaster had made vigorous efforts to attract the vaunted 16-34 demographic since former BBC boss Lord Hall of Birkenhead instigated a 'lurch to youth' in 2020.

Programmes beloved by an older generation, including Eggheads, had budgets slashed or were axed entirely amid a rush to prioritise the 'lives and passions' of younger viewers.

After these changes, a 2020 Ofcom report found satisfaction levels with the BBC were waning among older and more middle class viewers.

Mr Davie also claimed the BBC was not 'trying to beat Netflix', despite mounting pressure from streaming services such as Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video in recent years

Nadine Dorries (pictured outside Downing Street) has signalled the death knell for the licence fee by saying the Government is ready to implement a new way of funding the BBC

BBC Three was also part of an 80m relaunch in February in a bid to woo the vaunted 16-34 demographic.

Despite staunch criticism of the move, Mr Davie said the cost was 'relatively small' and that the channel acts 'as a good shop window' for its content.

Mr Davie also suggested the BBC's drama budget could be cut and repeats a more common occurrence.

'We make 31 dramas a year, we'll probably have to make less,' he told the Voice of the Listener and Viewer conference.

'What I'm not willing to do is compromise on quality. You may end up with services like BBC Four, which are great but primarily archive services.

'Are they repeats? Yes. Are they of value? Yes. We'll still have thousands of hours of origination, but I would rather do less and protect quality.'

It comes as the BBC is understood to have set aside 50million for market research into people's viewing habits and how to reach diverse audiences.

The cash will be used over a four-year period to track what viewers watch and provide an insight from a range of demographic groups.

A jargon-riddled notice inviting firms to take on the work says up to 42million could be spent on data collection and processing and brand tracking studies.

A further 7million could go to research sampling harder-to reach, niche and diverse audiences. The remainder will focus on childrens viewing.

The project, to run from 2023 to 2027, comes after director-general Tim Davie warned of brutal cuts to popular programmes because of the Governments two-year licence fee freeze.

BBC Breakfast host Dan Walker (pictured left) announced he was joining Channel 5 to be lead anchor on its revamped 5News team earlier this year

His former Breakfast co-star Louise Minchin also left last year as she looked to spent more quality time with her family

BBC veterans Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel left the BBC for Global, the owners of LBC, to front a new show and a podcast

Earlier this year the BBC denied it was facing a top talent 'brain drain', despite losing a number of its star presents.

At least five of its top broadcasters have departed in recent months, with at least four going to the BBC's direct rivals.

Breakfast host Dan Walker became the latest to join a rival firm earlier this year, when he quit Auntie for Channel 5.

He followed his former co-host Louise Minchin, who quit to spend more time with her family, out of the doors at Broadcasting House.

Leading broadcaster Andrew Marr meanwhile swapped BBC for LBC, along with veterans Emily Maitlis and John Sopel, who also joined Global earlier this year.

Maitlis, who hosted Newsnight, had a series of impartiality complaints against her because of her tweets and on-air comments about the pandemic.

Marr is said to have admitted he was prompted to leave the BBC because of his desire to speak freely on major issues, including climate change and politics.

Leading presenters Andrew Neil and Simon McCoy have also left the BBC in the past year.




Police have launched an investigation into allegations that former Culture Minister Hwang Hee took political funds from a state utility agency in return for facilitating business favors, officials said Thursday.







Hwang, a two-term lawmaker of the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea, allegedly received a total of 10 million won ($7,818) in political funds from an executive of Korea Water Resources (K-water) between 2019 and 2020 after a legislative bill proposed by him was approved a year earlier, according to Rep. Kim Yea-ji of the ruling People Power Party.







The bill, initiated when Hwang was a member of the parliamentary committee on infrastructure, allows K-water to build and rent buildings for profits in the state-designated smart-city district in the southern port city of Busan.







Police are currently looking into confiscated materials after raiding the K-water's headquarters in the central city of Daejeon earlier this month and seizing the materials.







"Details of the investigation cannot be disclosed," a police official said about the case. (Yonhap)






An Aldi customer has had a painful fall at her local supermarket when she slipped on a handful of grapes that were on the ground.

Single mother-of-two Jenny briefly stopped at her local Aldi in Greensborough in Melbourne, Victoria to buy groceries on April 27.

As Jenny walked through the produce section to get a basket for her groceries, she slipped on several grapes lying on the floor and fell onto the hard ground.

Single mother-of-two Jenny (pictured) had a painful fall at her local Aldi supermarket when she slipped on a handful of grapes that were on the ground

She suffered bruising on her arm and legs, as well has a back injury and a badly-sprained ankle.

'I really did just walk in to spend money in ALDI to buy groceries and feed my kids for the night, and the next minute I'm on my backside,' she recalled to 7News.

The grapes were located right next to the stack of baskets, with some falling onto the ground.

Jenny was in shock and had only realised she'd had fallen when her daughter and a nearby customer rushed over to help.

'When I looked, there were grapes on the side and under my boots. You could see them, shredded on the floor,' she said.

'I don't know how many grapes were on the floor but it was obviously multiples.'

The shift manager at the scene allegedly admitted to Jenny that grapes left on the floor was a known issue at the store and 'always happening'.

Jenny claims she was on the floor in pain for two hours - mainly assisted by other shoppers, not staff.

She said the shift manager at the store had 'no idea' what to do and appeared to have 'no training'.

The manager reportedly refused requests from paramedics to move Jenny from the floor as she said the store was 'responsible for her'.

Jenny briefly stopped at her local Aldi store in Greensborough (pictured) in Melbourne, Victoria to buy groceries. As Jenny walked through the produce section to get a basket for her groceries, she slipped on several grapes lying on the floor and fell onto the hard ground.

The shift manager at the scene allegedly admitted to Jenny that grapes left on the floor was a known issue at the store and 'always happening'. (stock image)

Jenny was eventually taken to hospital and discharged the following day.

She claimed she cannot work, cannot walk or sit comfortably, and now needs to have expensive MRI exams for her injuries.

She has expressed concerns over the bills she'll receive for undergoing MRI exams and whether Aldi will reimburse her, explaining that she is only on a 'low income' and lives 'week-to-week'.

Jenny said she wants a 'commitment' from Aldi before undergoing the examinations.

She claimed she's had limited communication from Aldi since the incident and didn't receive a phone call from until nine days after the fall.

An area manager briefly spoke to her, but Jenny said he was 'pretty dismissive'.

It is understood ALDI Australia has launched an investigation into the incident and is in communication with the customer.

Daily Mail Australia has reached out to Aldi for comment over the matter.
Former MP Tracy Brabin has revealed how her fight against 'everyday sexism' as West Yorkshire mayor is partly being driven by her experience of being trolled over a dress she wore in the House of Commons.

The ex-Coronation Street actress was subject to fierce abuse for the off-the-shoulder outfit she donned during a parliamentary debate in 2020.

At the time, Ms Brabin revealed how the dress - which cost 35 from ASOS - had prompted people to tell her she looked like 'a slag', 'hungover', 'a tart', 'about to breastfeed', 'a slapper', 'drunk', and 'just been banged over a wheelie bin'.

She later sold the black dress, which had slipped down her arm as she spoke at the Commons despatch box, for more than 20,000 at a charity auction with the proceeds going to Girlguiding.

Ms Brabin left the Commons in May last year after being elected West Yorkshire mayor.

Speaking to The Times about the dress row, the 61-year-old described how the incident 'uncovered this split in the universe where the misogynists just fell on my head'.

She described how she had rushed to an urgent question in the Commons from a music event, which was related to her brief as a shadow culture minister, and so was not necessarily dressed for Parliament.

Tracy Brabin was subject to fierce abuse for the off-the-shoulder outfit she donned during a House of Commons debate in 2020

She later sold the black dress, which had slipped down her arm as she spoke at the Commons despatch box, for more than 20,000 at a charity auction

The former MP, who is now West Yorkshire mayor, has made sure local police are recording misogyny

'I was called a slag, a slapper, a tart, drunk; someone said I looked like Id just been banged over a wheelie bin,' she said.

'It uncovered this split in the universe where the misogynists just fell on my head.

'It was all about the dress  but the reason I was in there was to haul the government to the Commons.'

Ms Brabin also told the newspaper she is now using the experience to tackle hate crimes against women and to call out 'everyday sexism'.

One of Ms Brabin's priorities as mayor was to make sure police were recording misogyny in West Yorkshire, which they have been doing since December.

She has hailed the move as a 'significant step forward' to misogyny being made a specific crime.

Ms Brabin has also put the safety of women and girls at the heart of a three-year police and crime plan for her region.

Her work also stems from her experience as a student, when she helped secure the conviction of a man who tried to rape her.

'Lots of women dont have that justice,' she said.

'It does help to be in a position where you feel you can be open and honest (about your) experience. There is a job of work to be done with men to understand that.'

When she previously spoke about the ordeal in the Commons, soon after she had been elected as an MP in 2016, Ms Brabin described herself as 'one of the lucky ones' for seeing justice done.

She told the Commons debate: 'I had managed to memorise his car number plate, and he was caught an hour later.

'He went to court; not many do. He pleaded guilty; I did not have to go through the horrors of a trial.

'He was sentenced; I did not have to look over my shoulder, checking if he was following me.

'He was a stranger; I did not have to wake up in the same bed as him, or go to work with him as my boss.'
North Korea has tested-launched another ballistic missile, South Korea has said, making it the 16th weapon tested so-far this year.

The rocket was fired towards the sea off North Korea's east coast on Thursday, Seoul announced, and said it is analysing the launch to work out exactly what was tested.

It is the latest in a flurry of weapons tests as Kim Jong Un attempts to restart a missile programme that paused during nuclear negotiations with Donald Trump that ultimately came to nothing.

And it comes just hours after a mask-wearing Kim declared North Korea's first official case of coronavirus and ordered the whole country into lockdown and declared a 'severe national emergency'.

North Korea test-launched a ballistic missile into the sea off its east coast today, hours after Kim Jong Un confirmed the country's first official Covid case

Kim chaired an emergency meeting of the country's top politburo to announce a country-wide lockdown to stamp out cases of Omicron

The country is widely thought to have suffered waves of coronavirus before now, but has never acknowledged an outbreak before or officially imposed lockdown.

North Korea has no known vaccine programme, making it population particularly vulnerable to infectious variants such as Omicron.

State-run KCNA news agency said samples taken from patients sick with fever in Pyongyang on Sunday were 'consistent' with the Omicron variant.

The country's top officials held a politburo meeting to discuss the outbreak and announced they would implement a 'maximum emergency' virus control system.

KCNA said Kim told the meeting that 'the goal was to eliminate the root within the shortest period of time.'

'He assured us that because of the people's high political awareness ... we will surely overcome the emergency and win the emergency quarantine project,' it said.

Kim called for tighter border controls and lockdown measures, telling citizens 'to completely block the spread of the malicious virus by thoroughly blocking their areas in all cities and counties across the country,' KCNA said.

All business and production activities will be organised so each work unit is 'isolated' to prevent the spread of disease, it added.

Despite the decision to elevate anti-virus steps, Kim ordered officials to push ahead with scheduled construction, agricultural development and other state projects while bolstering the country's defence postures to avoid any security vacuum.

North Korea is widely thought to have suffered Covid outbreaks before now, but has never officially confirmed having a case

Pyongyang has implemented strict health measures before due to Covid (pictured, in November) but has never gone into a full-scale lockdown

North Korea also appears to be pushing ahead with its weapons testing despite the outbreak, having already conducted a host of tests earlier this year.

The most-recent launch before today was a submarine-launched ballistic missile, which it has been aggressively developing in recent years and tested on Saturday.

Perhaps the most eye-catching test was back in March, when Pyongyang tested the Hwasong-17 - its longest-range ICBM ever created.

The weapon, designed to carry nuclear warheads, flew 3,880 miles almost straight upwards before crashing back down 680 miles from where it was launched around 71 minutes later.

If fired on a standard trajectory it could range at least 8,000 miles, putting almost the entire planet including the whole of the United States within reach.

Believed to be about 82 feet long, the Hwasong-17 is the North's longest-range weapon and, by some estimates, the world's biggest road-mobile ballistic missile

The test brought to an end a moratorium on long-range tests negotiated by Trump and crossed what was previously a red line for the US.

South Korea's military responded with live-fire drills of its own missiles launched from land, a fighter jet and a ship, underscoring a revival of tensions.

It said it confirmed readiness to execute precision strikes against North Korea's missile launch points as well as command and support facilities.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, requested an open Security Council meeting on the launch while the White House also imposed fresh sanctions on individuals and entities linked to the missile programme.
A minister has condemned drunkenness in Westminster after it emerged there were nine booze-fuelled security incidents in a single month.

The Parliamentary authorities revealed figures for breaches in March in response to a Freedom of Information request.

Five of the episodes involving 'intoxicated persons' were referred to the Serjeant-at-Arms, and some resulted in Commons passes being suspended.

However, none are thought to have directly involved MPs.

Asked about the details supplied to Times Radio, justice minister Victoria Atkins said: 'I do, yet again, find myself saying ''this is a place of work''.

'This is not how people should be conducting themselves in the workplace.'

She added: 'The House of Commons is not a place where we sleep for the night, it is not a place where we turn up completely drunk and out of control.

Justice minister Victoria Atkins condemned drunkenness in Westminster after it emerged there were nine booze-fuelled security incidents in a single month

'This is a place of work.

'And it is a great privilege for any member of parliament (and staff) to work in the Palace of Westminster.'

There has been a clamour for cultural change at Westminster after it emerged last month that former Tory MP Neil Parish had watched pornography in the House of Commons - although there is no suggestion he had been drinking. He later resigned blaming a 'moment of madness'.

Speaking after the allegations were first made, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said there was a wider cultural problem.

'This is a problem, I think, about the overall culture of the House of Commons,' he said.

'It is late sitting, long nights with bars, and that very often leads, and it has done for decades, to behavioural challenges.'

He said the mix of long hours, high pressure and alcohol could be 'poisonous', adding: 'My advice to any MP is actually avoid the bars  finish a day's work and go home.'

A House of Commons spokesman said: 'Parliament's Behaviour Code makes clear that all staff should be treated respectfully at all times.

'Those who choose to drink in Parliament must do so responsibly, and our venues reserve the right to refuse to serve anyone alcohol if they believe that the person is, or likely to become, intoxicated.

'The Parliamentary Health and Wellbeing Service is on hand to offer support to members, peers, staff of either House and the Parliamentary Digital Service, with physical, mental health or wellbeing issues.'
A British passenger has been arrested after starting a huge brawl on a Wizz Air flight to Crete, throwing punches at other travellers and even the pilot, holidaymakers said.

The mass fight started shortly after the flight landed on the Greek island and saw women and men injured in the melee on Tuesday night.

The passenger and his friend were badly behaved throughout the flight and his anger boiled over when he was told police would escort him to the airport, according to witnesses.

A British passenger has been arrested after starting a huge brawl on a Wizz Air flight to Crete

Tourists said the pair were smoking and vaping throughout the journey, threatening fellow travellers, and were drunk before they even got on the plane.

Stewardesses continued to serve them alcohol despite the pair claiming they had been drinking since 10am and other passengers saying they had had enough.

The pilot then emerged from his cockpit in an attempt to calm down the situation but he was then thumped, witnesses said.

Police eventually dragged the blood-stained man away from the plane with his trousers around his ankles.

Dramatic footage shows screaming passengers demanding the man be taken off the flight as he wildly swings his arms.

The mass fight started shortly after the flight landed on the Greek island and saw women and men injured in the melee on Tuesday night

Tourists said the pair were smoking and vaping throughout the journey, threatening fellow travellers, and were drunk before they even got on the plane

The flight departed Gatwick at 6pm and saw two men in their 30s from South London involved in the commotion.

They were joined by a third man who had a litre of vodka with him on board.

A woman, 37, travelling to Crete with her husband, told The Sun: 'The man and his friend had been so loud and abusive throughout the whole flight.

'But something clicked when the air stewardess told them they would be taken off the plane by police when we landed.

'It kicked off and he was just swinging punches as a group of guys tried to restrain him.

The flight departed Gatwick at 6pm and saw two men in their 30s from South London involved in the commotion

Police eventually dragged the blood-stained man away from the plane with his trousers around his ankles

'The pilot came out and the guy hit him. He seemed okay but was understandably pretty shaken up. It was disgraceful.'

Some passengers escaped through the rear exit but then had to wait two hours at security while they gave police statements, meaning many missed their transfers.

A scheduled return flight to the UK had to be cancelled while blood was cleared up.

Stranded Britons had to wait another 24 hours for the next flight home.
NATO military support for Ukraine risks sparking nuclear war with Russia, Putin ally and ex-president Dmitry Medvedev warned.

In a fiery post to nearly one million Telegram users this morning, Medvedev wrote: 'NATO countries pumping weapons into Ukraine, training troops to use western equipment, sending in mercenaries and the exercises of alliance countries near our borders increase the likelihood of a direct and open conflict between NATO and Russia.

'Such a conflict always has the risk of turning into a full-fledged nuclear war.'

Now serving as deputy chairman of the influential Kremlin Security Council, Medvedev was President of Russia from 2008 to 2012 while Putin was term-limited.

Medvedev, pictured holding a Russian rifle, said NATO risks sparking 'full-fledged nuclear war'

Putin (left) confers with Medvedev (right) at his famous Kremlin desk in January 2020, days before Medvedev relinquished the premiership and joined the President's Security Council

Medvedev appointed Putin prime minister during that period. When Putin was allowed to become president once again, Medvedev stepped aside.

He took the premiership until 2020, at which point Putin nullified term limits and moved Medvedev to his current role.

Medvedev accused NATO countries of 'sending in mercenaries' to fight for Ukraine and intentionally playing up the prospect of nuclear war.

Medvedev (pictured in March) also slammed Europe's leaders 'squeaking their little voices'

His stormy post continued: 'The endless talk by foreign analysts about a war between NATO and Russia continues unabated.

'The cynicism of Western 'talking heads' is becoming more and more blatant.

'The thesis that Russia frightens the world with a nuclear conflict is being pushed to the top of the agenda.

'Even [Donald] Trump recently came out with this, though, understandably, just to spite [President] Biden.

'And of course the Europeans are squeaking their little voices.'

The Security Council deputy chairman pictured at Putin's subdued Victory Day parade, May 9

He also warned the West: 'I want to articulate very clearly once again the things that are so obvious to all reasonable people. You don't have to lie to yourself and others.

'You just have to think about the possible consequences of your actions.

'And don't choke on your own saliva in paroxysms of Russophobia.'

Medvedev, 56, is one of three men alive whose finger has been on Moscow's nuclear button.

The other two are Putin and ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Medvedev (picture date unknown) is one of three living Russians to have served as President

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has continued to falter as Kyiv forces make crucial gains around Kharkiv, close to the Russian border.

The striking statement came hours after the Finnish government confirmed it would apply to join NATO.

Alliance leader Jens Stoltenberg said Helsinki will be 'welcomed with open arms' and that its access would likely happen 'quickly'.

Sweden's government is set to announce whether it will table a NATO entry bid on Sunday.
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A luxury superyacht owned by the man who transformed Starbucks from a Seattle coffee bean store into a global brand has arrived in UK waters.

The vessel, named Pi, is worth an estimated 118 million and was spotted entering Falmouth harbour yesterday morning before moving to Pendennis Shipyard later in the afternoon.

The ship was built in 2019 by a Dutch company named Feadship. It is the 21st largest vessel the company has ever made with dimensions of 254ft in length and 37ft wide, positioning it as the 195th largest yacht in the world. With two engines, it can reach speeds of 18.4 knots.

It is owned by Howard Schultz, ranked by Forbes magazine as the 209th richest person in the world, with a net worth of 3.68billion.

The 118m superyacht owned by Starbucks boss Howard Schultz pulled into Falmouth, Cornwall, yesterday morning, pictured

The superyacht, which was completed in 2019, is understood to be in the UK to undergo a refit at Pendennis Shipyard

Pi can host up to 12 guests and 18 crew members and has its own helicopter pad, glass-bottomed swimming pool and onboard spa facilities

The vessel is owned by American businessman Howard Schultz who transformed Starbucks from a Seattle coffee bean store into a world-wide empire

The superyacht's interior was designed by Sinot Yacht Design, who create spaces such as this example, although it is not the design used inside Pi

Pi can host up to 12 guests and 18 crew members and has its own helicopter pad, glass-bottomed swimming pool and onboard spa facilities.

It belongs to the American businessman who bought the coffee chain in the 1980s. He is ranked by Forbes as the 209th richest person in the world, with a net worth of 3.68bn. The 68-year-old is currently chief executive of the company, a job he has also filled previously.

It is likely that the superyacht is undergoing some work at Pendennis Shipyard, which is one of the worlds leading superyacht refit and custom build facilities. The site employs over 450 skilled tradespeople and has completed more than 300 refit projects and 30 custom-made build projects on some of the most iconic yachts in the world.

Schultz is credited as Starbucks founder despite the company being founded in 1971 by Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker at Seattles Pike Place Market.

Back then, Starbucks was merely a coffee bean store but it became a full-fledged cafe after Schultz bought it in the early 1980s. Later he transformed it into the international coffee shop brand.

The businessman made most of his billion-dollar fortune thanks to Starbucks. He served as the chief executive officer from 1986 to 2000 and returned during the financial crisis of 2007-08.

The Pi has room for 12 guests who can enjoy luxurious environments similar to these, though this is not the actual yacht

The Pi arrived in Falmouth yesterday where it went in for a refit. It is not known what the inside of the yacht currently looks like

Rich yacht owners can specify a level of luxury such as this with a table laid out for 22 people (not the actual Pi)
Signs for Waldorf Astoria were brought into Washington, D.C. on Thursday to replace 'Trump International Hotel' lettering that was removed from the hotel location in the federally owned Old Post Office building.

The change in scenery on Pennsylvania Avenue comes after the lease sale was finalized earlier Wednesday from the Trump Organization to Hilton's luxury hotel and resort brand.

Workers removed the 'TRUMP' lettering from the former president's hotel in Washington D.C. on Wednesday evening as the sale to Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. is finalized.

The Trump International Hotel was officially shuttered this week after the Trump Organization reached a $375 million agreement to sell the D.C. property to a Miami-based investor CGI Merchant Group.

The deal reached with CGI represents a 25 percent discount from the $500 million the Trump Organization previously sought in 2019 for sale of the property's lease.

Waldorf Astoria signs where brought into D.C. Thursday as the luxury Hilton brand takes over the hotel in the Old Post Office Building that until Wednesday had 'Trump International Hotel' plastered across its marquee

The golden lettering that read 'Trump International Hotel' was removed from the facade of the Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue on Wednesday evening into Thursday morning

Workers arrived Wednesday evening to remove the former president's name from the facade of the Old Post Office and Clock Tower after sale of the property officially closed

Workers removed 'Trump' lettering from the building as the hotel prepares to relaunch this summer as Hilton's luxury brand Waldorf Astoria following a $375 million lease sale

Hours after the deal officially closed Wednesday, workers descended on the Pennsylvania Avenue location and began taking down signs from the facade of the building.

Trump initially boasted that the hotel netted more than $150 million during his presidency, but the Democrat-run House Committee on Oversight and Reform said in October that he actually lost more than $70 million on the hotel during that time  even though the location was a popular spot for lobbyists and right-wing pundits to stay.

The Old Post Office and Clock Tower, owned and leased out by the federal government, will now be relaunched as Hilton's luxury brand Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts and attempt to break away the historic building' association with Trump.

'We took a dilapidated and underutilized government building and transformed it into one of the most iconic hotels in the world,' the former president's middle son Eric Trump told NBC News in a statement. 'We are incredibly proud of what we accomplished.'

Eric is Trump Organization's executive vice president.

The marquee that used to say 'Trump International Hotel' is now blank after workers removed the holden lettering on Wednesday evening

Workers cover the signage for Trump International Hotel before removing it on Wednesday, May 11, 2022

the Waldorf Astoria will open this summer after the Miami-based investor CGI Merchant Group purchased the lease for $375 million

The location lost $70 million during Trump's presidency and was the center of ethics scandals

The New Waldorf Astoria Washington, D.C. location is expected to open by early summer.

Trump's hotel in the nation's capital has been the center of ethics scrutiny and scandals during his time as president, with lawsuits claiming he used the property for government events to enrich his family's business.

In January 2020, D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine filed a lawsuit against then-President Trump's inaugural committee and business and claimed it had 'abandoned' its purpose as a nonprofit by overpaying to book event space at Trump International Hotel.

The Trump Organization responded at the time with: 'The AG's claims are false, intentionally misleading and riddled with inaccuracies.'

The Trump lettering will no longer appear on the Pennsylvania Avenue hotel, which was converted from the Old Post Office building and is leased out by the federal government

The Benjamin Bar, with its iconic blue and gold design, was a popular watering hole for Republican politicians and lobbyists during Trump's presidency

'The rates charged by the hotel were completely in line with what anyone else would have been charged for an unprecedented event of this enormous magnitude and were reflective of the fact that hotel had just recently opened, possessed superior facilities and was centrally located on Pennsylvania Avenue,' the statement added.

'The AG's after the fact attempt to regulate what discounts it believes the hotel should have provided as well as the timing of this complaint reeks of politics and is a clear PR stunt.'

The iconic Benjamin Bar also became a popular watering hole for White House and Republican Capitol Hill workers, as well as other Trump allies, during his administration.

Over the last few months the hotel had a much less 'open door' policy, with individuals needing reservations to even get through the alleyway to enter the bar and restaurant area.
A man reportedly snatched a four-year-old boy on a high street in Liverpool who was out shopping with his mother.

Police received reports that the young boy was grabbed after he and his mother were approached outside Top Class Shoe Repairs on Walton Vale road on Tuesday 10 May at around 12.45pm.

The mother alleges the suspect then carried the four-year-old across the road.

She told officers that she followed the man and grabbed her son back before heading into a nearby shop.

The stranger - described as an Asian man in his early 30s, around 5ft 5in tall, of stocky build - then walked off in the direction of an Iceland supermarket, towards Rice Lane, which is 43 yards away from where he snatched the boy in Top Class Shoe Repairs.

Police are asking anyone who may have witnessed the incident to contact them with more information, while, the mum posted a warning on Facebook.

A four-year-old boy was reportedly picked up outside Top Class Shoe Repairs on Walton Vale in Liverpool (pictured), on Tuesday 10 May at around 12.45pm

The warning has been shared by thousands of local residents.

Community Policing Inspector Sarah Rotherham said: 'We have launched an investigation into this incident to establish the full circumstances.

'This took place in the day on a relatively busy road and we are appealing for anyone who witnessed the incident to contact us.

'I also urge people who were in the vicinity at that time to please check your CCTV and dashcam footage which may have captured the incident.

The four-year-old boy's mother reported to police that the man who snatched her child went in the direction of Iceland, southwards from the shoe repair shop, on Walton Vale, towards Rice Lane in Liverpool

'I'd also like to assure everyone that we take any reports of this nature extremely seriously.

'We'll act on all information provided and are absolutely determined to find this man to ensure that no such incidents happen again.'

Anyone with information is asked to contact @MerPolCC or 101 quoting reference 20000320202. You can also contact the independent charity Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.
A mother has been left fuming after her 12-year-old daughter's teacher invited her to an after-school arts club that was actually a gender and identity group.

Erin Lee, whose child was at Wellington Middle School in Colorado up until this year, slammed Jenna Riep for getting the youngster to go to the Genders & Sexualities Alliance event.

She told how her daughter came home and revealed a speaker told them they may be transgender if they were not comfortable in their bodies.

The horrified mother claimed they also asked kids who they were sexually attracted to and informed they could be queer while being shown a 'Genderbread person'.

The bizarre diagram has been used in some woke schools and workplaces to claim anatomical sex is 'male-ness' or 'female-ness' - but has been criticized by some academics.

Lee also alleged the youngsters were even asked to keep details of the meeting a secret and warned their parents were not safe.

The lesson, which district officials have since defended, spurred the concerned mother to pull the child out of the public school, and enroll her into an $8K-a-year private school.

Erin Lee, whose daughter attended Wellington Middle School up until this year, says her daughter sent her a text message asking to go to an after-school art club her art teacher had invited her. The group was actually a Gender and Sexuality [Alliance] club

The group also saw her daughter participate in a ' Genderbread person activity,' Lee said - a lesson in which organizers explicitly asked her daughter and other students in the room about their sexual identity, using a kid-friendly diagram of a gingerbread man (pictured)

The child was reportedly invited to the after-school program by her art teacher Jenna Riep (left), who told her it was an art group. Kimberly Chambers (right) told kids that if they were not fully comfortable in their body that they may transgender and that members of their family were not safe to talk to

Lee told DailyMail.com Thursday that the incident began after her daughter sent her a text message asking to go to an after-school art club, saying art teacher Riep had invited her.

Controversial 'Genderbread Person' graphic that teaches children gender is decided in the brain The 'Genderbread Person' is a recently surfaced education tool used by schools and companies to teach students and workers that anatomy doesn't always determine gender. The bizarre diagram has been used in some woke schools and workplaces to claim anatomical sex is 'male-ness' or 'female-ness' - but has been criticized by some academics. The model breaks down the concepts of gender into three aspects: sex, gender identity, gender expression. Sexual orientation is also measured in the strange graphic, due to its supposed connection to gender identity and expression. The diagram is used to determine what sex a student or worker is sexually attracted to - with many schools using it to inform children that they could be gay. Critics have branded the learning material - which was distributed by the Biden administration to his state's department of education earlier this year - as 'unscientific nonsense.' Last month, GOP Pennsylvania state Rep. Aaron Bernstine sent a letter last week to his state's Secretary of Education questioning the material, which he said had been 'distributed' by the US DOE to the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE), 'and is an option to be used in curriculum for students in the 6-7 age range.' 'There is no reason to be having these conversations with such young children, and it is unacceptable,' Bernstine stated in a press release. 'The classroom is not the place to push this ideology onto them.' Whether the diagram is included in a US public school's curriculum content, is determined by each individual school district or charter school. Advertisement

She and her husband, Jonathan, then gave their permission for the child to attend - however, upon picking up the schoolgirl from the supposed art club, the pair quickly realized something was wrong.

She told Fox News: 'When we picked her up from that program after school, we could see on her face that something was incredibly wrong.

'It wasn't art club, it was GSA, or Gender and Sexuality [Alliance] is what they're calling it now,' the irate mother explained.

'They told the kids that if they're not fully comfortable in their body, then they are transgender.

'So essentially told my daughter if she's not 100 percent comfortable in her body, that she is transgender.'

The lesson was led LGBTQ activist Kimberly Chambers, emails obtained by the Parents Defending Education advocacy group show. Chambers - the head of LGBTQ advocacy group SPLASH Youth of Northern Colorado - spoke as a school board-approved guest.





'She explained to my daughter that if she is not 100% comfortable in her female body, then she's transgender,' Lee explained, revealing that the outside speaker then told the middle-school-aged children that they were not safe around their parents.

'She then told the kids that parents aren't safe, and that it's OK to lie to them about where they are in order to attend this meeting,' the mom, who has since enrolled her daughter in a private Christian school but still has a son at the public school, said.

Lee said the speaker - who delivered the lesson to the group on May 4 of last year - then gave the students her personal contact information and encouraged them to contact her on social media platforms such as Discord and What'sApp.

'She doubled down that parents aren't safe [and] that heterosexuality and monogamy are not normal,' Lee further revealed.

After confronting school staffers and guest speaker Chambers about the lesson, The Poudre School District confirmed the existence of the club, and asserted that conversations in its GSA groups 'may be confidential' given the' sensitive' nature of the meetings' discussions.

'In PSD, we promise to create and uphold equitable, inclusive, and rigorous educational opportunities, outcomes, and experiences for all students,' the district said in a statement to DailyMail.com.

Lee (at left) said her daughter (at right) sent her and her husband Jonathan (middle) a text message asking to go to the after-school art club that her art teacher had invited her to. The pair gave their permission, but upon picking her up from the class, Lee said they knew something was wrong. She has since pulled the kid from the public school, where her second oldest son (pictured) currently still attends. The family also has an infant son

Chambers (at far left) - the head of LGBTQ advocacy group SPLASH Youth of Northern Colorado - spoke as a school board-approved guest

The incident took place at Wellington Middle School in Colorado on May 4. Poudre School District confirmed the existence of the club, and asserted that conversations in its GSA groups 'may be confidential' given the' sensitive' nature of the meetings' discussions. Lee said she has since pulled her kid from the public school

'As a district, we are committed to making our schools safe spaces in which all students can learn.

'Genders and Sexualities Alliances, or GSAs, were established as safe spaces for members of the LGBTQIA+ community, allies, and any individual to come together with the goals of ensuring inclusivity, safety, and support.

'Discussions in GSAs may be confidential given that they can sometimes be sensitive in nature (i.e. a student may be 'out' with specific friends but not with the community at large),' it went on, adding that the GSA was 'school-sponsored' and approved by the district.

The district declined to comment on the allegations made by Lee 'to protect the privacy of the student and their family.'

District brass further asserted that they had addressed the issue with Lee 'on multiple occasions over the past year,' and that her daughter is no longer enrolled in the district.

Lee said the school also confirmed the meeting is always held in secret.

Email correspondence obtained by Parents Defending Education between Chambers and art teacher Riep show the LGBTQ advocate expressing concerns over the mother's complaints concerning the club.

The messages, sent on May 6 and May 7 following Lee's complaints to the school and district, show Chambers asking school staff to remind the mom that 'the room is a safe space and that she should not share the names of her friends in attendance.'

She also told a seemingly worried Riep that emails and phone conversations she had had with Lee should be recorded and thought of as 'evidence.'

'Hello! This is private and I will be responding with a bcc for all of you, but it's important for you to know the response messaging that I send out,' Chamber wrote in one email sent to Riep and Katie Delahunt, a guidance counselor at Wellington Middle.

'You can forward my response to admin at [Wellington Middle School], they probably will receive similar messages from this parent.

'Tread lightly because this parent has HUGE potential to coming in to understanding or rejecting their child.

'I'll respond with what we know to work so far- but it's always a gamble and a kids' access comes in to view,' Chambers went on.

Email correspondence obtained by Parents Defending Education between Chambers and art teacher Riep show the LGBTQ advocate expressing concerns over the mother's complaints concerning the content being presented at the club

'If you know which parent this is, can you politely remind their student that the room is a safe space and that she should not share the names of her friends in attendance?'

She then wrote, 'I'll reply to the email with you all bcc'd in the next hour or so. Any conversation with this parent should have the impression in our minds as 'evidence', verbiage is everything. Thanks!'

The next morning, Riep responded: 'Hey Kimberly, Sorry I am just responding, this has been a lot to process. The family has reached out the school a couple times this week, we are trying to get to a good place with them.

'I really appreciate you taking the time to write thoughtful response. Thank you so much for your support and time, I'd love to get some advice sometime this summer on how I can best support students if something like this happens again.

Chambers responded shortly thereafter, assuring the art teacher not to worry over Lee's complaints to the school and district, citing that they had 'strong ally' in Kristen Draper, a board member for the Poudre School District who also volunteers with SPLASH.

Chambers also cited the Equal Access Act - a guidance that says federally funded schools cannot deny students the right to conduct meetings over religious, political, or philosophical content - as a reason that 'parents don't have to approve which clubs and activities their children participate in.'

'As needed,' Chambers wrote, 'You have a strong ally in our Board of Education, who can help your admin with responses and base them on the Equal Access Act where parents don't have to approve which clubs and activities their children participate in (which will probably be the next attempt by this parent).

Chambers told a worried Riep that they had 'strong ally' in Kristen Draper, a board member for the Poudre School District who also volunteers with SPLASH

'Kristen Draper has been briefed on this parents' outreach and she is ready to respond if anyone needs it.

'She is very available to you via email, even if you Admin just want advice, and has fielded all of the other middle schools as they began GSA's and pushed through these barriers.'

The woke activist went on to assert that their handling of the situation would serve as a precedent for future conflicts of similar nature.

'If there is additional work that I can do on my side, please let me know, how this is handled will set a precedence for other parents as they hear about it, so a strong first allyship is key.'

Chambers then asked: 'Have you been able to check in with to make sure she is okay?'

In the next email, Riep revealed that the child had left the school, spurring Chambers to advise the staffer to perform a wellness check on the unidentified student.

She cited one 'former extreme case,' where she said 'a parent had been so concerned' about what was being taught to their child in a GSA group,' that the child 'wasn't allowed to leave home without family until they decided his 'gender identity' was 'nonsense.'

Chamber said the 13-year-old student was then removed from Liberty Commons Charter, also part of the Poudre School District, and sent to a boarding school.

According to Chambers, the student attempted suicide twice after being pulled from the school.

Chambers went on to assure Riep that they were not in the wrong, and touted their efforts as heroic.

'It's a lot of work being an ally in these situations, but it's rewarding in the end. I have requested to join the Wellington community group right after our session but haven't been admitted as of yet. Thanks again.'

DailyMail.com reached out to Chambers Thursday for comment regarding the GSA group and Lee's claims, but did not immediately hear back.

Lee, meanwhile, says it's time for families to withdraw their young students from woke public schools such as those in the Colorado school district, to properly protect their children.

She said she called the police to report the incident, who said they were unable to help due to the fact that the lesson occurred in a classroom and there was no accusation of physical touch or exposure of body parts.

Lee told New American Magazine that her daughter is now attending a private, Christian school and is 'doing much better.'




Candidate registration began Thursday for the June 1 local elections and parliamentary by-elections amid expectations that the results could serve as an early bellwether for the new government of President Yoon Suk-yeol.







The National Election Commission (NEC) will receive candidacy registration on Thursday and Friday before the official 13-day campaign period kicks off May 19.







Up for grabs in the local elections are mayoral and gubernatorial posts, local council seats and education board chiefs across the nation. Contests for big city mayors and provincial governors, such as Seoul mayor and Gyeonggi Province governor, are considered key races in the polls.







This year's elections have drawn greater attention as seven National Assembly seats are also at stake in parliamentary by-elections, and political heavyweights, such as former presidential candidates Lee Jae-myung and Ahn Cheol-soo, have declared their bids.







Ahn, former head of Yoon's presidential transition committee, is aiming for the seat representing the Bundang A district of Seongnam, just south of Seoul, as the ruling People Power Party (PPP) candidate, while Lee is hoping to win the seat in the Gyeyang B district in Incheon, 40 kilometers west of Seoul, as the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) candidate.







The race for Seoul mayor will mainly be between current Mayor Oh Se-hoon and former DPK Chairman Song Young-gil, while the contest for Gyeonggi governor will largely be between former Finance Minister Kim Dong-yeon of the DPK and former lawmaker Kim Eun-hye of the PPP. (Yonhap)


Naomi Judd's heartbroken daughter Ashley revealed she'd spent the day with her mother, and had stepped outside to greet a guest before finding her dead with a gunshot wound in an upstairs room.

The singer, 76, shot herself at her Tennessee farm on April 30 - a day before being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame - after battling her mental health, Ashley told Good Morning America on Thursday.

Ashley, 54, choked back tears as she drip-fed more details about the iconic singer's suicide last month in her first television interview on the tragedy.

Ashley and her sister Wynonna, 57 - who performed with Naomi for years in The Judds - first open up about her death at the Country Music Hall of Fame ceremony on May 1.

Meanwhile Naomi's husband Larry Strickland, 76, has remained tight-lipped, releasing a short statement saying he was going through a 'heartbreaking time'.

Country Music Hall of Famer Naomi Judd (right) killed herself with a gun, her daughter has revealed. Naomi is pictured with her daughters Wynonna (left) and Ashley (center) in 1997

'She used a weapona firearm,' heartbroken Ashley Judd shared in an interview with Good Morning America. 'So that's the piece of information we're very uncomfortable sharing'

Ashley told GMA: 'I appreciate so deeply and really want to start by thanking everyone for their outpouring of love and condolences and that my sister and I, we have a depth of gratitude.

'I'm here as an individual sitting with you by myself, but both my sister and Pop have sort of deputized me in certain ways to speak on behalf of the family at this early time - before things about the 30th of April become public without our control.

'You know, whether it's the autopsy or the exact manner of her death, and so that's really the impetus for this timing, otherwise it's obviously way too soon and so that's important for us to say up front.

'I think that I would start with my mother knew that she was seen and she was heard in her anguish and that she was walked home.

'When we're talking about mental illness, it's very important to be clear and make the distinction between our loved one and the disease. It's very real, and it is enough to - it lies. It's savage and, you know, my mother - our mother - couldn't hang on until she was inducted into the Hall of Fame by her peers.

'That is the level of catastrophe of what was going on inside of her, because the barrier between the regard in which they held her couldn't penetrate into her heart and the lie the disease told her was so convincing.

'[The lie] that you're not enough, that you're not loved. That you're not worthy and I mean her brain hurt. It physically hurt.

'And I'm tasked with an exceedingly difficult task in disclosing the manner of the way my mother chose not to continue to live. And I've thought about this so much because once I say it, it cannot be unsaid and so - because we don't want it to be a part of the gossip economy - I will share with you that she used a weapon.

'Mother used a firearm so that's the piece of information that we are very uncomfortable sharing, but understand we're in a position that, you know, if we don't say it, someone else is going to.'

Ashley discovered Naomi shortly after she killed herself. The singer died at her home in Franklin, Tennessee (pictured) on April 30

Wynonna Judd and Naomi Judd are pictured at the 2022 CMT Awards on April 11

Naomi (left) and Wynonna Judd (right), performing as the mother-daughter duo The Judds, scored 14 No. 1 songs in a career that spanned nearly three decades. They are pictured at the CMA Music Festival in 2009

Ashley, who was visiting Naomi's Tennessee home on the day she died, also detailed her last moments with her mother.

'It was a mixed day,' Ashley told GMA. 'I visit with my mom and Pop every day when I'm home in Tennessee. So, I was at the house visiting as I am every day, and mom said to me: 'Will you stay with me?'

'I said, 'of course, I will.'

The actress had stepped outside to greet a family friend and when she went to notify her mother that their guest had arrived, she found her dead.

'I went upstairs to let her know that the friend was there and I discovered her. I have both grief and trauma from discovering her.

'My mother is entitled to her dignity and her privacy and so there are some things that we would just like to retain as a family.

'I want to be very careful when we talk about this today that for anyone having those ideas or those impulses, you know, to talk to someone, to share, to be open to be vulnerable. There is a national suicide hotline.

'I went upstairs to let her know that the friend was there and I discovered her,' Ashley shared. 'I have both grief and trauma from discovering her'

Naomi Judd is pictured with her daughters, Wynonna and Ashley in an undated photograph

Wynonna (left) and Naomi Judd (right) are pictured with Dolly Parton in 1987

Ricky Skaggs presents Ashley Judd the medallion that would have been given to her mother Naomi Judd during The Judds' Country Music Hall of Fame induction on May 1

Naomi Judd shows off her Nashville-area farmhouse on Oprah Winfrey Network in Jan. 2016

Ashley also shared what it's like to love someone struggling with mental illness.

'I really accepted the love my mother was capable of giving me because I knew she was fragile, so when I walked around the back of their house and came in the kitchen door and she said 'there's my darling, there's my baby and she lit up,' I savored those moments,' she said.

'And every time we hugged and she drank me in, I was very present for those tactile experiences because I knew there would come a time when she would be gone, whether it was sooner or whether it was later, whether it was by the disease or another cause.

'Mom was a brilliant conversationalist. She was a star. She was an underrated songwriter, and she was someone who suffered from mental illness, you know, and had a lot of trouble getting off the sofa except to go into town every day to The Cheesecake Factory where all the staff knew and loved her.

'And I know everything about them because she told me everything about them. Duane at Walgreens who needs to get a dog - that's the way she was.

'She always had $100 bills stuffed in her bra, passing them out to the janitorial staff. An unfailingly kind, sensitive woman.

'She was very isolated in many ways because of the disease and yet there were a lot of people who showed up for her over the years, not just me.'

Ashley also shred a letter from her sister, Wynonna, addressing her mother's passing.

'This is from sister and we talked a lot about doing this together and what she shared is just so her,' Ashley said before reading aloud: 'Thinking a lot about you today. I love you four exclamation points. I've been looking at photos of us when we were little, laugh out loud, good lord in capitals, you were such a cutie pie.

'I laugh and I cry and I thank god we have each other. I need to take some time to process and I need this time to myself. I'm not ready yet to speak publicly about what happened, so I know you understand why I'm not there today.

'We will do this piece differently. We have each other and I'm grateful we're connected as we walk together through this storm. I just can't - I just can't believe she's gone.

'I'm here. This will take time. I love you, dear sister, I'm proud of you and I'm here whenever you need me,' Wynonna's letter concluded.

Naomi Judd shows off her round kitchen table

Naomi Judd is pictured with her children in an undated photo

Wynonna (left) and Ashley Judd (right) are pictured at the County Music Hall of Fame

Wynonna, Ashley and Naomi Judd (left to right) are pictured at the Academy Awards in 1998

Naomi had written extensively about her struggles with depression, and even referenced suicide in an open letter published in People magazine in 2018.

'For everyone mourning the death of someone who committed suicide, an inevitable question arises: Why did this happen? Unfortunately, we don't have very good answers,' she wrote.

'We do know that suicidal behavior accompanies many behavioral brain disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression. Suicide is actually one of the leading causes of preventable death among these mental illnesses.'

In her 2018 essay, Naomi Judd advocated for more research into the nature of suicide.

'To understand this issue better, we have to bring the study of suicide into mainstream neuroscience and treat the condition like every other brain disorder,' she wrote.

'People who commit suicide are experiencing problems with mood, impulse control and aggression, all of which involve discrete circuits in the brain that regulate these aspects of human experience, but we still don't understand how these circuits go haywire in the brains of suicide victims.'

She described what depression feels like to her in an interview with People magazine while promoting her 2016 book.

'Nobody can understand it unless you've been there,' she said.

'Think of your very worst day of your whole life  someone passed away, you lost your job, you found out you were being betrayed, that your child had a rare disease  you can take all of those at once and put them together and that's what depression feels like.'

Naomi Judd (second from right) appeared on The View alongside Meredith Vieira (left), Rosie O'Donnell (second from left) and Star Jones (right) in 2001

Actress Ashley Judd (left) and her mother, singer Naomi Judd (right), arrive at the Los Angeles premiere of Olympus Has Fallen in Los Angeles on March 18, 2013

Wynonna (left) and Ashley Judd (right) break down during The Judds induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville on May 1, 2022

Naomi took her own life the day before she and Wynonna were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. The Judds scored 14 No. 1 songs in a career that spanned nearly three decades.

In addition to The Judds, Eddie Bayers, who played on many of the duo's records, Ray Charles and Pete Drake were also inducted into the Hall of Fame on May 1.

Ashley and Wynonna broke down in tears during the induction ceremony.

'My mama loved you so much,' Ashley said to the crowd gathered. 'And I'm sorry that she couldn't hang on until today,' she said through tears.

'I didn't prepare anything tonight because I knew Mom would probably talk the most,' Wynonna told the audience in Nashville.

'I'm gonna make this fast, because my heart's broken, and I feel so blessed. It's a very strange dynamic, to be this broken and this blessed. Though my heart's broken, I will continue to sing, because that's what we do.'

Ashley Judd posts about Naomi Judd's death on April 30

Larry Strickland, Ashley Judd's father and Naomi's husband of 32 years, said: 'Naomi Judd's family request privacy during this heartbreaking time'

The pair cited a bible verse and lamented that Naomi hadn't lived to receive the honor herself.

'Your esteem for her and your regard for her really penetrated her heart and it was your affection for her that did keep her going in the last years and please come see Pop,' Ashley said, referencing her father and Naomi's husband, Larry Strickland.

Ashley also paid tribute to sister Wynonna, who was also inducted alongside her mother as part of the country music duo The Judds.

'While this is so much about The Judds as a duo, I want to take a moment to recognize my sister, a GOAT,' she said, meaning 'Greatest of All Time.'

Wynonna Judd talked about the family gathering as they said goodbye to her and she and Ashley Judd recited Psalm 23.

'Though my heart is broken I will continue to sing,' she said.

The daughters kept their sense of humor amid the sadness, as Wynonna said: 'I didn't prepare much to say, because I assumed mama would be doing all the talking.'

'Newspapers don't get a lot right these days but when they said you were Elvis-like, they got it.'

The next day Ashley posted a heartbreaking Instagram message declaring herself 'Speechless' and telling Naomi: 'Be free, my beautiful mother. Be free.'

The Judds were to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame on Sunday. The duo is pictured performing in 1988

Naomi Judd (left) and Wynonna Judd (right), of The Judds, perform at the Girls' Night Out: Superstar Women of Country in Las Vegas in April 2011

The mother-daughter performers scored 14 No. 1 songs in a career that spanned nearly three decades. After rising to the top of country music, the duo called it quits in 1991 after doctors diagnosed Naomi with hepatitis.

The Judds' hits included Love Can Build a Bridge in 1990, Mama He's Crazy in 1984, Why Not Me in 1984, Turn It Loose in 1988, Girls Night Out in 1985, Rockin' With the Rhythm of the Rain in 1986 and Grandpa in 1986.

The pair last performed together at the CMT Music Awards of April 11, singing Love Can Build a Bridge. They were accompanied by a gospel choir.

The Judds had also recently announced a farewell tour, the first by Naomi and Wynonna in more than a decade.

The short, 10-date tour, which was being produced by Sandbox Live and Live Nation, was to start on September 30 in Grand Rapids, Michigan and wrap up October 28 at Nashville's Bridgestone Arena.

They first got attention singing on Ralph Emery's morning show in early 1980, where the host named them the 'Soap Sisters' because Naomi said she used to make her own soap.

After the success of 'Mama He's Crazy,' they won the Horizon Award at the 1984 CMA Awards. Naomi started her speech by saying, 'Slap the dog and spit in the fire!'

Daughter Ashley Judd is an actress known for her roles in such movies as 'Kiss the Girls,' 'Double Jeopardy' and 'Heat.'

Larry Strickland, who was a backup singer for Elvis Presley, was married to Naomi Judd for 32 years.

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline provides 24/7, free and confidential support for people in distress, prevention and crisis resources for you or your loved ones. For confidential help, call the Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or click here.

'Mother used a firearm... if we don't say it, someone else will': Ashley Judd reveals details of Naomi's death in first TV interview since 'I appreciate so deeply and really want to start by thanking everyone for their outpouring of love and condolences and that my sister and I, we have a depth of gratitude,' Ashley Judd told GMA. 'I'm here as an individual sitting with you by myself, but both my sister and Pop have sort of deputized me in certain ways to speak on behalf of the family at this early time - before things about the 30th of April become public without our control. 'You know, whether it's the autopsy or the exact manner of her death, and so that's really the impetus for this timing, otherwise it's obviously way too soon and so that's important for us to say up front. 'I think that I would start with my mother knew that she was seen and she was heard in her anguish and that she was walked home. 'When we're talking about mental illness, it's very important to be clear and make the distinction between our loved one and the disease. It's very real, and it is enough to - it lies. It's savage and, you know, my mother - our mother - couldn't hang on until she was inducted into the Hall of Fame by her peers. 'That is the level of catastrophe of what was going on inside of her, because the barrier between the regard in which they held her couldn't penetrate into her heart and the lie the disease told her was so convincing. '[The lie] that you're not enough, that you're not loved. That you're not worthy and I mean her brain hurt. It physically hurt. 'And I'm tasked with an exceedingly difficult task in disclosing the manner of the way my mother chose not to continue to live. And I've thought about this so much because once I say it, it cannot be unsaid and so - because we don't want it to be a part of the gossip economy - I will share with you that she used a weapon. 'Mother used a firearm so that's the piece of information that we are very uncomfortable sharing, but understand we're in a position that, you know, if we don't say it, someone else is going to. 'It was a mixed day. I visit with my mom and Pop every day when I'm home in Tennessee. So, I was at the house visiting as I am every day, and mom said to me: 'Will you stay with me?' 'I said, 'of course, I will.' The actress had stepped outside to greet a family friend and when she went to notify her mother that their guest had arrived, she found her dead. 'I went upstairs to let her know that the friend was there and I discovered her. I have both grief and trauma from discovering her. 'My mother is entitled to her dignity and her privacy and so there are some things that we would just like to retain as a family. 'I want to be very careful when we talk about this today that for anyone having those ideas or those impulses, you know, to talk to someone, to share, to be open to be vulnerable. There is a national suicide hotline. 'I really accepted the love my mother was capable of giving me because I knew she was fragile, so when I walked around the back of their house and came in the kitchen door and she said 'there's my darling, there's my baby and she lit up,' I savored those moments. 'And every time we hugged and she drank me in, I was very present for those tactile experiences because I knew there would come a time when she would be gone, whether it was sooner or whether it was later, whether it was by the disease or another cause. 'Mom was a brilliant conversationalist. She was a star. She was an underrated songwriter, and she was someone who suffered from mental illness, you know, and had a lot of trouble getting off the sofa except to go into town every day to The Cheesecake Factory where all the staff knew and loved her. 'And I know everything about them because she told me everything about them. Duane at Walgreens who needs to get a dog - that's the way she was. 'She always had $100 bills stuffed in her bra, passing them out to the janitorial staff. An unfailingly kind, sensitive woman. 'She was very isolated in many ways because of the disease and yet there were a lot of people who showed up for her over the years, not just me.' Ashley also shred a letter from her sister, Wynonna, addressing her mother's passing. 'This is from sister and we talked a lot about doing this together and what she shared is just so her,' Ashley said before reading aloud: 'Thinking a lot about you today. I love you four exclamation points. I've been looking at photos of us when we were little, laugh out loud, good lord in capitals, you were such a cutie pie. 'I laugh and I cry and I thank god we have each other. I need to take some time to process and I need this time to myself. I'm not ready yet to speak publicly about what happened, so I know you understand why I'm not there today. 'We will do this piece differently. We have each other and I'm grateful we're connected as we walk together through this storm. I just can't - I just can't believe she's gone. 'I'm here. This will take time. I love you, dear sister, I'm proud of you and I'm here whenever you need me,' Wynonna's letter concluded. Advertisement

Naomi Judd spoke about falling into an 'dark, absolutely terrifying hole', said she considered suicide and underwent electroshock therapy to treat depression before her death at age 76: Daughters say they lost their 'beautiful mother to mental illness'

Naomi Judd, who died at the age of 76 on April 30, had battled with her mental illness for many years and previously admitted to undergoing electro-shock therapy and having considered suicide in recent years.

She told the Today Show in 2017 that after The Judds stopped touring, she didn't get off the couch for two years, falling into 'extreme' and 'severe' depression.

'[Fans] see me in rhinestones, you know, with glitter in my hair, that really is who I am,' she said. 'But then I would come home and not leave the house for three weeks, and not get out of my pyjamas, and not practice normal hygiene. It was really bad.

'When I came off the tour I went into this deep, dark absolutely terrifying hole and I couldn't get out,' she added. 'I spent two years on my couch.'

She said she even scouted out a bridge near her family's farm to jump from.

'That's how bad it can get,' she said. 'It's hard to describe. You go down in this deep, dark hole of depression and you don't think that there's another minute.'

She said that one night, her husband and daughter Ashley called 911 and she entered therapy, eventually undergoing ECT (electroshock therapy) to 'jump start' the chemicals in her brain.

Naomi Judd, the Kentucky-born singer of the Grammy-winning duo The Judds and mother of Wynonna and Ashley Judd, has died at age 76

Wynonna Judd, Ashley Judd and Naomi Judd during 'Kiss The Girls' Premiere at Paramount Theatre in Hollywood, California

Wynonna Judd, left, and Naomi Judd arrive at the CMT Music Awards on Monday, April 11

Wynonna Judd's final Instagram post before Naomi's death showed off her excitement to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame

Naomi Judd posts a picture of her book 'River of Time' on Instagram with caption: Only by telling our stories will more people understand. Only by telling the truth will we stop the stigma. I've told my story. And now you can tell yours. You are not alone. I'm still here

Naomi had spoken publicly and written books over the years about her struggles with mental health issues.

Her daughters announced her death the day before The Judds were set to be formally inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame at a medallion ceremony in Nashville.

'We are shattered. We are navigating profound grief and know that as we loved her, she was loved by her public. We are in unknown territory,' Ashley and Wynonna's statement read.

The mother-daughter performers scored 14 No. 1 songs in a career that spanned nearly three decades.

After rising to the top of country music, they called it quits in 1991 after doctors diagnosed Naomi with hepatitis.

The Judds' hits included Love Can Build a Bridge in 1990, Mama He's Crazy in 1984, Why Not Me in 1984, Turn It Loose in 1988, Girls Night Out in 1985, Rockin' With the Rhythm of the Rain in 1986 and Grandpa in 1986.

Wynonna Judd, left, and Naomi Judd arrive at the CMT Music Awards on Monday, April 11, 2022, at the Municipal Auditorium in Nashville, Tenn.

Naomi pictured in Universal City in March 2018

Wynonna Judd, left, and her mother, Naomi Judd, of The Judds, perform during the halftime show at Super Bowl XXVIII in Atlanta on Jan. 30, 1994

The Judds had also recently announced a farewell tour, the first by Naomi and Wynonna in more than a decade.

The short, 10-date tour, which was being produced by Sandbox Live and Live Nation, was to start on September 30 in Grand Rapids, Michigan and wrap up October 28 at Nashville's Bridgestone Arena.

'What I'm looking forward to most is celebrating Judd music with the fans,' said Wynonna in a statement when the tour was announced. 'Mom and I have had quite the journey over the last 38 years, and the fans have been with us through it all. This tour is a celebration for them.'

The Judds sang on the CMT Music Awards telecast and walked the red carpet just this month. The show aired live on CBS April 11.

'Honored to have witnessed 'Love Can Build a Bridge' just a few short weeks ago,' singer Maren Morris posted on Twitter on Saturday.

Dolly Parton and Wynona and Naomi Judd perform 'Stand By Your Man,' as part of a five woman group vocal, at the 35th annual Academy of Country Music Awards

Judd stands behind President George H.W. Bush at a rally just prior to the 1992 Presidential Election

The Judds flanking legendary comedian Bob Hope and his wife Doloris

Born Diana Ellen Judd in Ashland, Kentucky, Naomi was working as a nurse in Nashville, when she and Wynonna started singing together professionally.

Their unique harmonies, together with elements of acoustic music, bluegrass and blues, made them stand out in the genre at the time.

'We had a such a stamp of originality on what we were trying to do,' Naomi Judd told The AP after it was announced that they would be joining the Country Music Hall of Fame.

The Judds released six studio albums and an EP between 1984 and 1991 and won nine Country Music Association Awards and seven from the Academy of Country Music. They earned a total of five Grammy Awards together on hits like 'Why Not Me' and 'Give A Little Love.'

The Judds sang about family, the belief in marriage and the virtue of fidelity. Because Naomi was so young looking, the two were mistaken for sisters early in their career.

Judd and her husband Larry Strickland at a 2004 event for Musicares

The Judd sisters with Natalie Cole and Lyle Lovett

Naomi with daughter Ashley Judd and husband Larry Strickland

The Judds first got attention singing on Ralph Emery's morning show in early 1980, where the host named them the 'Soap Sisters' because Naomi said she used to make her own soap.

After the success of 'Mama He's Crazy,' they won the Horizon Award at the 1984 CMA Awards. Naomi started her speech by saying 'Slap the dog and spit in the fire!'

Daughter Ashley Judd is an actor known for her roles in such movies as 'Kiss the Girls,' 'Double Jeopardy' and 'Heat.'

Larry Strickland, who was a backup singer for Elvis Presley, was married to Naomi Judd for 32 years.

Larry Strickland, Naomi Judd, JT Hodges and Kasey Hodges attend the private screening of the movie 'Christmas Stars' at the Franklin Theater on November 25, 2019

Naomi with daughter Ashley at the premiere of Resurrection in Los Angeles in 1997

In her book ' River of Time: My Descent into Depression and How I Emerged with Hope ' she writes about struggles a single mother and a survivor of domestic abuse and sexual assault

Judd posted an Instagram photo from a mental health conference in 2017, seen here with Carlos Zarate Jr, the chief of the National Institutes of Mental Health

Naomi faced hard times and battled depression, as she admitted in one of her several books.

She claimed to have put herself through nursing school to support her daughters before pursuing her Nashville dreams with Wynonna, becoming the Judds.

In her book 'River of Time: My Descent into Depression and How I Emerged with Hope' she writes about struggles a single mother and a survivor of domestic abuse and sexual assault.

At the height of their popularity, Naomi lived through the previously incurable Hepatitis C virus, having been pronounced cured five years after the diagnosis.

After finishing the last Judds tour in 2011, she battled depression and anxiety through treatment.

She called River of Time 'her poignant message of hope to anyone whose life has been scarred by trauma.'
Police bodycam footage has emerged of The Flash star Ezra Miller being arrested in Hawaii in March after spitting in someone's face, and shows the actor berating cops while protesting that they're 'transgender' and don't want to be searched by a man.

Miller, 29, was arrested on March 28 after allegedly spitting in someone's face in a bar during a game of darts in Hilo, Hawaii.

In the bodycam footage taken of their arrest at Margarita Village, the furious actor complains that they were the real victim of assault, before demanding to know the police officers' full names and badge numbers.

Weeks after that incident, Miller faced a second arrest in Hawaii over claims he threw a chair at a woman's head after he refused to leave her home when asked.

Ezra Miller is shown being arrested in Hilo, Hawaii, on March 28 after allegedly spitting in someone's face and pulling a microphone away from another person as they tried to sing karaoke

Miller is shown being arrested by cops on March 29 after spitting in someone's face at a Margarita Village in Hilo, Hawaii

A Nerf gun owned by Miller was filmed being put into an evidence bag during his arrest

'I've been assaulted for NFT crypto art. What's your name and your badge number?'

Miller was referring to NFTs - digital images or videos which can be sold as pieces of artwork in their original formats.

Miller, who uses they and them as pronouns, is shown in their mugshot

'Tell me your name and your badge number! Full name!

'Tell me your name and your badge number! Tell me your name and your badge number now!

'I'm being arrested for disorderly conduct? I was assaulted,' they fume.

They then talked about their 'ninth amendment rights' to not be 'unlawfully persecuted for a crime of no designation'.

They were booked for disorderly conduct.

The seven-minute video also shows them being put in handcuffs and complaining: 'Do not touch my ring!'

Miller than talks about his 'ninth amendment rights' to not be 'unlawfully' persecuted for a crime of 'no designation'.

'I claim my fourth amendment rights to not be searched and seized.'

'Do not touch my ring. Hey! You just touched my penis!

'Please don't do that! I'm transgender non-binary I don't want to be searched by a man!

The Margarita Village in Hilo, Hawaii, on March 28, Warner Bros canceled Miller's projects afterwards

Inside the bar where Miller was arrested. The incident began when they grabbed a microphone from a 23-year-old woman

'I'm transgender non-binary and I don't want to be searched by a man!

'Those are nerf guns. Those are fake they are a toy.

'Please don't take them from me the flash ring means a lot to me. It's very valuable.'

Miller is shown again in a different mugshot a month after the March 29 incident

The arrest was one of several for Miller.

In April, they were arrested for throwing a chair at someone's head at a party.

That saw the woman said to have been attacked by Miller left with a scar on her forehead after being struck by a chair she said he'd thrown.

Miller was charged with second-degree assault over the incident.

The day after their arrest for spitting in someone's face, Warner Bros held an emergency meeting to halt projects which they were involved in.

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 bailed Miller out of jail on a $500 bond 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.'

Ezra Miller poses for photographers upon arrival at the premiere of the film 'Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald', at a central London cinema, Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2018. The actor has since had Warner Bros projects put on hold

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 they were 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 extremely rare two-headed snake has stunned its handlers by bucking all predictions of its imminent demise as it approaches its 17th year.

The black rat snake, which is really snakes sharing one slithering body, has grown to five feet long and has already exceeded the life expectancy of its regular counterparts in the wild.

The rare serpent was found by a boy in his yard in the small town of Delta, Missouri, in 2005 and brought to Cape Girardeau Conservation Nature Center.

The existence of a two-headed snake was already a one-in-a-100,000 long shot, and that it would live to such a ripe old age made it a one-in-a-hundred-million wonder, according to Snake expert Steve Allain, a council member of the British Herpetological Society.

He said: 'I know of another two-headed snake that survived until it was 20, so it's isn't impossible for them to survive that long.

'However, it is extremely unlikely. I'd say that it's likely one in a hundred million.'

This extremely rare two-headed snake, found in a back yard in Missouri in 2005, has managed to survive into its seventeenth year

The black rat snake, which is really two black rat snakes sharing one slithering body, has grown to five feet long and has already exceeded the life expectancy of its regular counterparts in the wild

Pictured: An x-ray of the two-headed snake. The snakes share a stomach so technically handlers only need feed one of them but they feed them both to stimulate their natural instincts and provide some mental enrichment

Alex Holmes, a naturalist at the conservation center, described some of the challenges he faced keeping such an unusual snake alive.

'A normal snake their size would be capable of eating full-sized mice with ease,' he said.

'But their conjoined spine makes it more difficult to swallow all but very small, young mice, which they take thawed from frozen.

'The heads are quite competitive when they eat so we cover one head at a time with a drinking cup and feed each individually.

'We wait a period of time to make sure the food has passed their junction to avoid a 'traffic jam' from the left and right head's meals meeting in the esophagus.

'They share a stomach but we feed them both to stimulate their natural instincts and provide some mental enrichment.'

In the wild, the snake - which strictly-speaking is two snakes sharing one body - might never have made it.

'Most conjoined hatchlings would not survive,' said Alex.

'Our 'twins' have a hard time deciding which way to go, arguing as sisters do - which is fine for a life of leisurely captivity.

'But if a hungry hawk, skunk, or raccoon came along in the wild that slow reaction to danger would make them an easy meal.' Even in captivity, however, survival is rare.

The existence of a two-headed snake was already a one-in-a-100,000 long shot, and that it would live to such a ripe old age made it a one-in-a-hundred-million wonder

The heads are quite competitive when they eat so handlers cover one head at a time with a drinking cup and feed each individually

Snakes can be born with two heads when an individual egg is fertilized and starts to divide into twins, but doesn't fully separate. In this case, the developing embryo split partially at the top but failed to separate further down, as can be seen in this x-ray

Paul Rowley, a herpetologist at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, said it was impossible to calculate such long odds.

He said: 'It's difficult enough with any normal hatchling or newborn snake - within a group there will be some that are gonna die for no known real reason.

'But with animals that are conjoined like snakes with two heads, you've got problems with how compatible are they to each other, what organs are shared, and how they're cared for.

'And, again, it's like any conjoined twins - if one gets ill or one has organ failure or problems, it's obviously going to affect the other one. So you're doubling the problem.

'To last 17 years is a real achievement.'

Snakes can be born with two heads when an individual egg is fertilized and starts to divide into twins, but doesn't fully separate.

In this case, the developing embryo split partially at the top but failed to separate further down. It's exact date of birth is unknown.

Black rat snakes reach sexual maturity at seven years for males and nine years for females.

Their main predators are foxes, hawks and owls, which they scare away by imitating the rattle of a rattlesnake by coiling its body and vibrating its tail in dead leaves.

They are shy creatures which shun confrontation, but have been known to strike when feeling threatened. They are not venomous.
A Texas woman says she's lost over $800,000 to scammers attempting to extract money from her to 'save' actor Leonardo DiCaprio from the Church of Scientology.

The woman, 54, told The Daily Beast she was first contacted by a person claiming to be the Oscar-winning actor and activist via Twitter, shortly after she joined the social media platform in 2018.

'Denise' - as the article referred to her to protect her anonymity - is an English-born freelance writer who works for trade publications and writes corporate manuals, in addition to working on a memoir and a graphic novel.

She had also recently lost her husband, who had built up over $1million in savings with his construction business, and had two grown daughters who no longer lived with her.

It was in that state that she received a direct message on the social media giant from whom she believed was DiCaprio, from an account she followed on Twitter.

A Texas woman says she's lost over $800,000 to scammers attempting to extract money from her to 'save' actor Leonardo DiCaprio from the Church of Scientology

'Denise' eventually learned of a greater difficulty plaguing 'Leo': that he was enslaved by the Church of Scientology

'He learned that I loved to cook. We were texting one night when I was making homemade ravioli, and he said that Camila needed to learn how,' she says, meaning DiCaprio's girlfriend, Camila Morrone

'Leo' told her that David Miscavige was known as 'his Holiness' and that he had a mark that proved his place within the church

After initially scoffing at the idea that she was messaging with DiCaprio, the things he described himself as doing seemed to both predict and match up with what she read about the Titanic star in the news.

'He was working with Quentin Tarantino at the time, but he was polite and never disclosed too much. I did, however, know about his filming schedule and a New York and European trip,' Denise said. 'I learned of these trips well before the information hit the internet.'

She slowly began to open up to the person she thought to be DiCaprio, learning private 'details' about the actor.

'He learned that I loved to cook. We were texting one night when I was making homemade ravioli, and he said that Camila needed to learn how,' she says, meaning DiCaprio's girlfriend, Camila Morrone.

'We developed a terrific friendship within a couple months and he always insisted that I call him 'Leo,' Denise added.

After initially scoffing at the idea that she was messaging with DiCaprio, the things he described himself as doing seemed to both predict and match up with what she read about the Titanic star in the news

The messages then started to turn into Gmail hangouts, emails, and phone calls, which she said were 'difficult for him' because Morrone would 'try to listen in.'

Eventually, a month into their trading of messages, 'Leonardo DiCaprio' told 'Denise' he loved him.

'I jokingly called him a 'pedophile' because of the children he dates. But he quickly corrected me,' she said. 'Leo' told her he had actually had one of his most meaningful relationships with an older woman.

However, 'Denise' eventually learned of a greater difficulty plaguing 'Leo': that he was enslaved by the Church of Scientology.

He showed her a letter that he claimed was from the church demanding he pay $750,000 and claiming that his entire personal fortune was controlled by Scientology and he couldn't access it without payment.

The person claiming to be DiCaprio told 'Denise' that he needed her help and asked if she could assist him with getting a loan.

'He couldn't do anything without their approval, including traveling or making any major purchases,' she said. 'They organized and paid for his existence. He admitted then that his relationship with Camila Morrone was arranged by the church.'

She adds that the person on the other end would tell her that the 'CSI' (Church of Scientology International) held his cash in a secret vault in California and that it had committed human trafficking offenses, in addition to 'slavery, rape and every financial crime under the sun.'

'Leo' told her that David Miscavige was known as 'his Holiness' and that he had a mark that proved his place within the church.

She was stunned by what 'DiCaprio' told her about the extent of his bondage to the church, which he referred to in messages as 'the CSI,' for Church of Scientology International.

'Denise' said that the things 'Leo' claimed the CSI did made her worry for her own safety in addition to his, adding that she purchased a gun for the first time in her life.

Karen Hollander was an executive at the Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre

She said that she would see photos of DiCaprio appearing brooding at Art Basel in Miami and it would convince her that she had to help

In September, 'Denise' finally gave in and wired $6,000 to a man named Kenneth in Georgia whom 'Leo' claimed was a 'trusted aid.'

She continued to wire money to six different 'trusted aids' throughout 2018, totaling $256,000.

'Denise' would often worry that she was being taken for a ride but truly believed 'Leo' was a victim who need to be freed.

She said that she would see photos of DiCaprio appearing brooding at Art Basel in Miami and it would convince her that she had to help.

'I couldn't imagine anyone being so tormented,' she says.

DiCaprio, however, is not a Scientologist, though he is somewhat close with actor Ethan Suplee, a member of the church and a member of DiCaprio's infamous 'P***y Posse' in the 1990s.

'Everyone knew it,' a source told The Daily Beast. 'Ethan was in the posse and Leo was around a lot of Scientologists, but we all knew that the rule was, he didn't want to hear anything about it.'

Suplee was even asked by then-Celebrity Centre president Karen Hollander to recruit DiCaprio.

'Ethan said no fucking way,' another source said.

DiCaprio, despite a friendship with a member, appears to have no legitimate connection to the religion.

DiCaprio, however, is not a Scientologist, though he is somewhat close with actor Ethan Suplee, a member of the church and a member of DiCaprio's infamous 'P***y Posse' in the 1990s

However, 'Denise' would send 'Leo' money in multiples of $5,000 or $50,000, which she had convinced herself was legit because she had found out the lifetime memberships to CSI cost $5,000 and patron-level memberships cost $50,000.

'I accused 'Leo' a few times of paying church fees for members that he had recruited, but he neither denied nor confirmed my accusations.'

She was further convinced that DiCaprio was in financial trouble when she saw him flying commercial in January 2019. The real DiCaprio said it was because of environmental concerns.

In March 2019, she was making bigger payments than ever, sending two checks to a company of New Jersey that 'Leo' said was run by a friend for $71,500.

Things got stranger, however, when 'Leo' said he didn't get the cash. 'Denise' confirmed with her bank that payment had been delivered.

She eventually rationalized their arguments by believing the Church of Scientology was taking the money before he could get it.

She eventually contacted the FBI in an attempt to clarify why 'Leo' wasn't getting the money.

With that, she told 'Leo' she was done sending him money ever again, but he responded with a long message:

'To the woman who owns my heart. I started flirting with you because you were the hottest girl I had ever laid my eyes on despite seeing millions and thousands around my profession and my environ [sic] the #HOLLYWOOD.

'Now I have fallen in love with you because you have the most beautiful heart I have ever felt.

'I love you. If I could be anything I would be your tear, so I could be born in your eye, live down your cheek and die on your lips. My thoughts are free to go anywhere, but it's surprising how often they head in your direction.

'Your love is the only armor I need to fight all of this life's battles. Before I was in a relationship with you, I was suffering from commitment phobia.

'After being in a relationship with you, I am suffering from an addiction call [sic] love.'

Both Suplee and actor Tobey Maguire were notoriously friends with DiCaprio throughout the 90s

She then spent $6,000 on Apple products and attempted to mail them to Georgia to be certain the church wasn't stealing from 'Leo.'

Throughout 2019, she continued to have her doubts about his identity but she continued to send him money, having totaled $620,455 by the end of 2019.

Throughout 2020 and 2021, having started to suspect that 'Leo' was multiple people, 'Denise' slowed down the donations, giving less but still giving.

In response, 'Leo' and his aides became much more intense and an agent with the church, 'Merlinda Guzman' was 'downright abusive' toward her.

'Merlinda' threatened 'Denise,' saying if she didn't send more money, she would never get it back.

Attempting to do damage control, 'Leo' sent 'Denise' an email he'd written to Miscavige.

However, by March, she discovered that both 'Leo' and 'Merlinda' were emailing her from outside the United States.

His response: 'You have no idea what the brotherhood is truly capable of,' referring to Scientology.

Eventually, she started receiving emails from a man named 'Derek' who claimed to work for DiCaprio and said he was trying to send Denise all of her money back in a box of cash.

After consulting with an FBI agent who said this was a bad idea, she told them to cancel the delivery.

At this point, the writer with the Daily Beast began to explain to her that Scientologists did not speak that way and that many of the men 'Denise' gave money to had Nigerian last names around a time when the United States' Department of Justice arrested 24 mostly Nigerian scammers for running internet grifts.

Despite having given 'Leo' $813,000, she claimed finally confirming this wasn't really Leonardo DiCaprio was relieving after nearly four years.

'Denise' has lost a lot of her life savings and will likely never recover the money but says she still has some money and a car that has resale value - she also won't lose her house - but will be less able to financially help her children.

The author contacted 'Leo', 'Merlinda' and 'Derek', never hearing back.

'This has been a nightmare that I desperately needed to wake up from,' Denise said.

Representatives for DiCaprio did not respond to a request for comment.
A woman who allegedly stole $200,000 in watches from a man she met at a Miami nightclub has been captured on surveillance cameras leaving his luxury apartment building.

The woman, who reportedly introduced herself as Cynthia, was seen in the elevator waving her arms around while smoking a vape as she left the One Paraiso condos at about 5am on April 23.

The 35-year-old man reportedly brought her back to his 36th floor apartment for the night for 'more drinks and to hang out' after meeting at a nightclub police reported.

He is yet to be identified by police.

'What we do know is the victim met this suspect at a nightclub,' Miami Police Officer Kiera Delva told CBS Miami. 'She was a complete stranger to him.'

The woman (pictured) introduced herself as Cynthia before going back to the man's 36th floor condo at One Paraiso in Miami, Florida on April 22

Cynthia allegedly stole several watches, worth $200,000, from the unidentified 35-year-old she met at a Miami nightclub

Additional surveillance footage, which was not released by police, showed the pair entering the elevator about 1.30am.

Police said the man 'fell asleep' at some point during the night and woke up about 10.30am to find his watches - worth more than $200,000 - missing.

Authorities have noted that they do not think the man was drugged during the time of the heist.

The woman reportedly left the high-end residence in a rideshare car, which police believe may have been a Toyota Camry.

Law enforcement is unsure if Cynthia is the woman's legal name and are 'checking databases' as part of their investigation.

The woman has been described as white with a medium build and long brown hair and was last seen wearing a brown tie-dye top, shorts and black sandals and had a brown, medium-sized purse.

Authorities are certain the 'brazen' thief will strike again, but had not previously been 'on our radar'.

'There's no doubt she'll strike again,' Delva told CBS Miami.

The woman waved her arms about as she smoked a vape while in the lift of the One Paraiso condos on April 23

After getting off the elevator, she reportedly got into a rideshare car and police are worried she will strike again

The alleged crime took place at the One Paraiso luxury condos in Miami, Florida

Police reminded citizens to be wary about taking home 'strangers' after a night out.

'When you get to know someone or meet them for the first time, they are still considered to be a stranger, so we do not recommend you invite them up to your place or residence,' Delva told CBS Miami.

'Normally places have a lounge area where people can sit around or talk and that is what is recommended.'

DailyMail.com has contacted the Miami PD for comment.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday that the administration backs Finland and Sweden applying to join the powerful NATO alliance.

'We would support a NATO application by Finland and Sweden, yes,' Psaki said when asked directly at her daily White House press briefing.

She was less direct when asked to draw distinctions between those nations and Ukraine, whose own application was put into limbo but is now being aided by billions in U.S. aid as it seeks to repel Russia's invasion.

'We know that they have been close and valued defense partners,' she said, pointing to a 'range of requirements' for nations seeking to join the powerful military alliance.

Those include 'addressing a range of issues like corruption and how you would participate in the defense of the collective NATO Alliance. But I will let them speak to that. We of course support the NATO's open door policy and the aspirations of any country to apply to join. But I think this speaks to our long standing relationship and military partnerships with Finland and Sweden,' Psaki said.

'We would support a NATO application by Finland and Sweden, yes,' White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday

Asked about how Russia might respond  in the wake of the Kremlin's outburst at the move, Psaki took to quoting Finland's president. 'As it relates to Russia, you cause this look at the mirror,' she said.

'NATO is a defensive alliance. It's not an offensive Alliance. Both Finland and Sweden are close and valued defense partners of the United States and NATO. They're thriving democracies. They've worked closely with NATO for years. There's no aggressive intent from NATO, from the United States from Finland or Sweden ... to Russia,' she said.

'This is President Putin who caused this. Look at the mirror,' she concluded.

Russian state TV has accused the US of erecting a 'new iron curtain' in Europe in a furious response to Finland announcing its intention to join NATO, as the Kremlin's spokesman it will make the world less 'stable.'

This morning, president Sauli Niinisto and prime minister Sanna Marin said they want to join the security alliance 'without delay', with Sweden set to follow suit within days, drastically ramping up tensions between Russia and the West.

A senior Russian leader and the Kremlin had previously threatened it would secure 'the entire destruction' of the country' and 'the most undesirable consequences', and today said it would 'be forced to take retaliatory steps', both 'military-technical and other' against the 'threat'.

'As we have said many times before, NATO expansion does not make the world more stable and secure,' said Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov, one of the country's top officials who fall under U.S. and European sanctions following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

He was coy about how Russia would respond. 'It will depend on what this expansion process will entail, how far and how close to our borders the military infrastructure will move,' he said.

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said Finland would be 'warmly welcomed.'

'This is a sovereign decision by Finland, which NATO fully respects. Should Finland decide to apply, they would be warmly welcomed into NATO, and the accession process would be smooth and swift,' Stoltenberg said.

'Finland is one of NATO's closest partners, a mature democracy, a member of the European Union, and an important contributor to Euro-Atlantic security,' he continued.

The decision is a spectacular backfire for Putin who invaded Ukraine in part through fears of NATO expansion, with the Western pact's presence on Russia's borders now set to double from 754 miles to 1,584 miles.

When asked what he would say to Russia, Niinisto replied: 'You caused this. Look in the mirror.'

In the latest of Russia's brandishing of nuclear threats, Putin ally and ex-president Dmitry Medvedev warned NATO support for Ukraine risks nuclear war.

Medvedev wrote on Telegram: 'NATO countries pumping weapons into Ukraine, training troops to use western equipment, sending in mercenaries and the exercises of alliance countries near our borders increase the likelihood of a direct and open conflict between NATO and Russia.

'Such a conflict always has the risk of turning into a full-fledged nuclear war,' he added.

Now serving as deputy chairman of the influential Kremlin Security Council, Medvedev was President of Russia from 2008 to 2012 while Putin was term-limited. Medvedev appointed Putin prime minister during that period. When Putin was allowed to become president once again, Medvedev stepped aside.

After Finland's announcement, Russian state TV's Olga Skabeyeva said: 'The main beneficiary here is America and Biden. And the main aim is a new iron curtain from the Barents to the Black Sea.'

Peskov said the move was 'definitely' a threat to Russia and warned it would make Europe more unstable.

He said Finland had made 'unfriendly steps' against Russia and it was a cause for regret and a reason to impose a symmetrical response.

Sweden is expected to follow Finland with its own bid which could come as soon as next week, with a parliament debate on Monday followed by a special cabinet meeting where the formal decision to apply will be taken, Daily Expressen said.

The major policy shift was announced today in a joint statement by President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin (pictured) today

President Sauli Niinisto and prime minister Sanna Marin released the anticipated statement this morning

Russian state TV has accused the US of erecting a 'new iron curtain' in Europe in response to the decision

Finland, which shares an 830-mile border and a difficult past with Russia, has previously remained outside NATO

Sauli Niinisto (pictured during a meeting with Boris Johnson yesterday) believes the move would strengthen Finland's security

A special committee will announce Finland's decision on a membership bid on Sunday although it could take until October before the country is formally admitted to the pact.

The major policy shift which completely rewrites Europe's post WWII alignment comes a day after Boris Johnson signed security pacts with Helsinki and Stockholm pledging Britain would come to their aid if they come under Russian attack.

In their statement today, Niinisto and Marin said: 'Now that the moment of decision-making is near, we state our equal views, also for information to the parliamentary groups and parties.

'NATO membership would strengthen Finland's security. As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defense alliance.

'Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay.

'We hope that the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days.'

Finland, which shares an 830-mile border and a difficult past with Russia, has previously remained outside the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to maintain friendly relations with its eastern neighbor.

Earlier this morning, former prime minister Alexander Stubb said: 'I have been waiting for this day for 30 years.

'Announcement on Finnish NATO membership imminent.'

Sweden is expected to imminently follow Finland with an application to join the Western military pact.

The Nordic nations have been rattled by Moscow's war against its pro-Western neighbour, which has bolstered domestic support for joining the alliance - and the security that membership would provide.

After today's announcement, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said the eventual membership process would be 'smooth and swift'.

'This is a sovereign decision by Finland, which NATO fully respects. Should Finland decide to apply, they would be warmly welcomed into NATO,' Stoltenberg said.

Denmark's Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen also said he will push for a quick admission process.

'Denmark will of course warmly welcome Finland to NATO. (It) will strengthen NATO and our common security,' Frederiksen said on Twitter. 'Denmark will do everything for a quick admission process after the formal application.'

Meanwhile Volodymyr Zelensky 'commended' Finland's readiness to apply to join the NATO alliance in a phone call with Niinisto.

'We also discussed Ukraine's European integration. And - defense interaction,' he wrote on Twitter.

NATO enhanced Forward Presence battlegroup tanks and infantry fighting vehicles fire during Iron Spear exercises in Latvia yesterday

Mr Johnson and Finland's President Sauli Niinisto both met the media at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki, Finland, on Wednesday

Why are Sweden and Finland not in NATO? Both Finland and Sweden have been militarily non-aligned since WWII. Sweden maintained its policy of neutrality - which had begun in the early 19th century - throughout the war wanting to avoid being drawn into a conflict that was engulfing the nearby powers of Germany and the Soviet Union. Instead, Sweden profited from its neutrality by exporting iron ore to the Nazis and sharing military intelligence with the Allies and training their refugee soldiers. Meanwhile Finland changed sides in the conflict, first being invaded by Joseph Stalin and assisting the Nazis, before fighting against Hitler's troops. When NATO was formed in 1949 for a Western military alliance, Sweden decided not to join and continue its neutrality, introducing a security policy that secured its non-alignment in peace and neutrality in war. In 1994, Stockholm decided to join the NATO programme Partnership for Peace (PfP), aimed to build trust between member states and other European countries, but until now it has not signalled a desire to fully join the alliance. Finland is also a PfP member but has similarly stated its desire to remain neutral since the war. The EU member state was part of the Russian Empire and won independence during the 1917 Russian revolution but it nearly lost it fighting the Soviet Union in World War Two. Having been invaded by Russia in 1939 and sharing a long border with the superpower, Finland wanted to stay out of future conflicts, giving it the freedom to maintain a strong relationship with Moscow and the West while enjoying a free market economy. Advertisement

Any NATO expansion is bound to spark anger from Vladimir Putin, who has warned Sweden and Finland against joining.

The Russian tyrant has historically pushed back at any eastward expansion of the alliance and has strongly condemned any notions of Ukraine joining. He claimed Ukraine's closeness with the West was one reason behind his invasion.

Moscow lawmaker Vladimir Dzhabarov recently warned Finland that a formal application would mean 'the destruction of the country', while another Kremlin spokesman Alexander Grushko threatening 'the most undesirable consequences'.

But Moscow's mounting warnings and threatening rhetoric appear only to have strengthened Finland's and Sweden's resolve to join.

It comes after Britain pledged yesterday to come to Sweden and Finland's aid should either of the countries come under Russian attack.

Boris Johnson signed security pacts with his Swedish and Finnish counterparts during visits to the countries on Wednesday.

The pacts could see British troops sent to the two nations in the event of a Russian invasion from '21st century tyrant' Putin - who has threatened 'military and political consequences' should either country join the NATO alliance.

Johnson said the countries must be free to decide whether to join NATO without 'fear of retaliation' in a stark message to Putin.

The PM said the 'mutual security assurances' would see the countries involved come to each other's aid in the event of an attack.

Asked whether British troops could be sent to Finland in the event of a Russian invasion, the PM said: 'Yes, we will come to each other's assistance including with military assistance.'

He said the UK would be prepared to offer Sweden 'whatever Sweden requested', if Moscow followed through with threats of a military offensive.

Speaking at a press conference in Helsinki alongside Niinisto, Johnson said the two countries would 'always come to one another's aid'.

'The security declaration, the solemn declaration we have signed today, ensures that our two nations can intensify our partnership and take it to unparalleled heights, both latitudinal and metaphorical,' he said.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Sweden's Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson signed documents as they met at her summer residence in Harpsund, Sweden

'From the high north, to the Baltics and beyond, our armed forces will train, operate and exercise together, marrying our defence and security capabilities and formalising a pledge that we will always come to one another's aid.

'Because this is not a short-term stop gap, Sauli.

'This is not a short-term stop gap as you consider Nato membership, but an enduring assurance between two nations, an assurance that brings us ever closer as we face the challenges of today, the threats of tomorrow, side by side.'

Iro Sarkka, a NATO expert from the University of Helsinki, told AFP before the announcement that Niinisto, who had refrained from revealing his stance on membership, had nonetheless dropped hints that he was leaning toward supporting a bid.

'The president no longer talks about the EU defence option or the role of Finland as the mediator between the East and the West,' she said.

On Wednesday, the Finnish parliament's defence committee also concluded that membership of NATO would be the 'best option' for Finland's security, as the Russian invasion had eroded the security situation in Europe.

Putin has issued a series of threats through his Kremlin loyalists towards Finland and Sweden if they try to join NATO

When Russia last tried to seize Finland... and failed More than 80 years ago, the small Finland took on the might of the Soviet Union when dictator Joseph Stalin ordered an invasion after its government refused to give up substantial territory. The Winter War of 1939-1940  which began less than three months after the start of the Second World War  saw Finland's forces use innovative tactics to defy Russia's hopes for a quick, emphatic victory that could have landed Stalin control of the whole country. Instead, Soviet troops  who numbered around one million  were fiercely resisted for nearly three months, with dramatic photos showing how vehicles and equipment had to be abandoned in the face of the opposition and freezing conditions. In that time, Russia suffered more than 300,000 casualties  including 126,900 deaths - and lost up to 3,500 tanks and around 500 aircraft. By comparison, Finland lost 25,900 men out of an original force of around 300,000. Stories of Finnish heroics include that of a Finnish farmer who became the deadliest sniper in history after killing 505 Soviet troops. In the fighting, Finland also pioneered the use of the improvised grenade the Molotov cocktail, which was named after the Soviet Union's foreign minister. Ultimately however, the sheer numerical superiority of the Soviet Union's forces took its toll and Finland's government was eventually forced to sign a peace agreement that forced them to give up around ten per cent of their territory. Despite the defeat, Finland emerged with its sovereignty intact and its international reputation enhanced, whilst the Soviet Union was kicked out of the League of Nations and was condemned by other world leaders for the illegal invasion. Finnish sniper Simo Hayha emerged a hero after racking up the most sniper kills in the history of warfare. Aged 33 when the war broke out, Hayha quickly acquired a fearsome reputation, striking the enemy unseen and unheard from hidden positions up to 300 yards from his target. Nicknamed The White Death, Hayha was a prime target for the Soviets, who targeted him with mortars and heavy artillery to halt his killing spree, which once claimed 25 men in one day. Finland then allied with Nazi Germany against the Soviets in what was known as the Continuation War in 1941, with Helsinki trying to retake its lost territories. After a ceasefire was agreed in the Moscow Armistice in 1944, Finland was ordered to expel Nazi troops stationed in the country, prompting the Lapland War with Germany. At the Paris Peace Treaty, Finland was classified as an ally with Nazi Germany and ordered to pay reparations. The country then pursued a policy of neutrality, maintaining a free market economy and democracy despite enjoying a strong relationship with the Soviet Union. Advertisement

A large majority in Finland's parliament backs membership.

'It is 100 per cent certain that Finland will apply and quite likely that it will be a member by the end of the year,' researcher Charly Salonius-Pasternak of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs told AFP before Thursday's announcement.

For Finland, the next step is for the President and Ministerial Committee on Foreign and Security Policy - a body made up of the president, prime minister and up to six other cabinet ministers - to meet on Sunday.

The committee will make the formal decision for Finland to submit an application, with the proposal then presented to parliament.

After an official bid is submitted to the alliance, lawmakers in all 30 NATO member states would need to ratify its application, a process that can take months.

Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said on Tuesday he believed Finland could be a full NATO member 'at the earliest' on October 1.

'The NATO secretary general has said that this process will take between four and 12 months. My own impression is that it might be closer to four months than 12 months,' Haavisto said.

Swedish prime minister Magdalena Andersson said her country would be safer as a result of the mutual assistance agreement with the UK. 'Are we safer with this declaration? Yes we are. Of course this means something.'

Finnish president Sauli Niinisto echoed the feeling later, saying the deal with the UK 'increases enormously Finnish security'.

He added he did not view joining the military alliance as a 'zero sum game'. 'Joining Nato would not be against anybody,' the Finnish president said.

Describing the declaration as a 'pivotal moment in our shared history', Mr Johnson added: 'It's pivotal because... the Russian invasion of Ukraine has changed the equation of European security and it has rewritten our reality and reshaped our future.

'We've seen the end of the post-Cold War period and the invasion of Ukraine sadly has opened a new chapter'.

Finland shares a lengthy land border with Russia and is only about 250 miles from St Petersburg.

Russia's February 24 invasion of Ukraine has led to a swift turnaround in Finnish and Swedish public opinion in favour of NATO membership, which until recently had little backing.

A poll published Monday by Finnish public broadcaster Yle showed that a record 76 percent of Finns now support joining the alliance, up from the steady 20 to 30 percent registered in recent years.

Public opinion has also surged in Sweden, albeit to lower levels, with around half of Swedes now in favour.

Sweden's ruling Social Democratic Party said Monday it would announce its position on the NATO issue on May 15. A favourable stance would provide a clear parliamentary majority for an application.

Elisabeth Braw, an expert on Nordic countries' defence at the American Enterprise Institute, told AFP that even though Stockholm appears more hesitant than Helsinki, she believes the two countries 'will do the application at the same time'.

Traditionally accustomed to lengthy consensus-building debates on major issues, Sweden has been caught off-guard by Finland's swift turnaround.

'The Social Democrats in Sweden have always said: 'We'll think about this when Finland joins'... because they thought Finland would never join', Braw said.

A policy reversal for the party, which ruled for an uninterrupted 40 years between the 1930s and 1970s, would be historic.

Sweden is officially non-aligned militarily, although it is a NATO partner and abandoned its position of strict neutrality after the end of the Cold War.

Finland has a long history with Russia. In 1917 it declared independence after 150 years of Russian rule.

Spanish servicemen take part in NATO military exercises during the Iron Spear 2022 drills in Latvia yesterday

Spanish troops of NATO enhanced Forward Presence battlegroup pose for a picture during Iron Spear 2022 military exercise in Adazi military field

During World War II, its vastly outnumbered army fought off a Soviet invasion, before a peace deal saw it cede several border areas to the Soviet Union.

During the Cold War, Finland remained neutral in exchange for guarantees from Moscow that it would not invade.

So the turnaround in sentiment on NATO would have been unthinkable just a few months ago.

As recently as January, Marin said membership was 'very unlikely' during her term.

But after two decades of public support for membership remaining steady at 20-30 per cent, the war caused a huge surge.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov euphemistically warned the move would 'not improve' the security situation in Europe.

'We have repeatedly said that the alliance remains a tool geared towards confrontation and its further expansion will not bring stability to the European continent,' Peskov said.

Any membership bid must be accepted by all 30 NATO states, a process that could take months although members have indicated they want to fast-track the bid.
An outspoken former Portland State professor - who quit last year citing the university's 'wokeism' - said he was confronted by students and faculty who told him to f**k off because his questions 'inflicted trauma.'

Peter Boghossian was a full-time assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University for 10 years until his scathing public resignation letter in September, in which he called it a 'social justice factory' that drives 'intolerance of divergent beliefs.'

But Boghossian's chapter with the university seems far from over. On Tuesday, he claimed to have been confronted by students and faculty who allegedly told him to 'f*** off.'

'Today, faculty and students in Portland State University's sociology department confronted me. They claimed that I was inflicting trauma on people by asking questions,' Boghossian wrote in a tweet.

'...some of these people were telling me to f*** off.'

It is unclear what led to the confrontation or what kind of questions Boghossian was asking. DailyMail.com has reached out to Boghossian.

Meanwhile, the university denied having knowledge of the exchange in the tweet.

'I can say that Portland State respects and supports free speech and the robust debate of ideas as the underpinning of a diverse education at a public university,' a PSU spokesperson told DailyMail.com.

Last year, Boghossian shared his resignation letter with Bari Weiss, a former New York Times columnist who quit her role at the paper after claiming to encounter the same refusal to consider non-liberal ideas that Boghossian describes at PSU.

Since his highly publicized resignation, Boghossian has toured the country giving conferences about freedom of speech, 'wokeism,' and social justice in American classrooms. He has partnered with renowned universities such as Purdue, UC Berkeley, Brown, and Colorado State University.

Boghossian said in his letter last year that college staff were abdicating their 'truth-seeking mission' and instead driving intolerance of 'divergent reliefs' by squashing any view that was not liberal

On Tuesday, former PSU professor Peter Boghossian claimed to have been confronted by students and faculty who allegedly told him to 'f*** off

Peter Boghossian was a full-time assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University for 10 years until his scathing public resignation letter in September

'Today, faculty and students in Portland State University's sociology department confronted me. They claimed that I was inflicting trauma on people by asking questions,' Boghossian wrote in a tweet

In the aftermath of his resignation, Boghossian received support for his letter from conservative personalities, including podcast host and former TV host Megyn Kelly, comedian Rob Schneider, Fox commentator Tammy Bruce and historian Niall Ferguson.

He argued in the letter that the university had become a 'dogma factory' where free inquiry was no longer possible.

'They weaponized officers of diversity, equity, and inclusion,' Boghossian told FOX in an interview last year.

'I've been accused of microaggression when I asked for the evidence for microaggressions,' he continued. 'Microaggressions' refers to acts of subtle and possibly unintentional discrimination.

'Having conversations is impossible. Having robust debates about certain topics is impossible,' the former professor went on.

'So think about the injustice we are doing to our students when we are creating these large ecosystems that don't allow that. They don't allow questioning, they don't allow challenging. So students are particularly brittle when they hear the other side of the debate,' he said.

Boghossian said in his letter that college staff were abdicating their 'truth-seeking mission' and instead driving intolerance of 'divergent reliefs' by squashing any view that was not liberal.

'Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues,' he wrote.

Since his highly publicized resignation, Boghossian has toured the country giving conferences about freedom of speech, 'wokeism,' and social justice in American classrooms

He argued in the letter that the PSU had become a 'dogma factory' where free inquiry was no longer possible

Boghossian said he was harassed on campus with swastikas written on bathroom walls with his name next to them, purely because he had challenged the university's ideas.

He claims that at one time flyers went around campus depicting him with a Pinocchio nose, that he was spit on and that colleagues told students not to take his class.

Boghossian said the harassment became worse when he produced a series of hoax papers in an effort to prove that academic journals would print them without checking, so long as they seemed to align with left-wing views.

From 2017 to 2018, Boghossian and two other scholars wrote 20 papers with absurd premises related to social justice. Four of them were eventually published in reputable journals.

They included papers on dog rape and an adaptation to Hitler's Mein Kampf. The left reacted badly to it, saying he'd 'wasted editors' time.

The' study was meant to 'reboot' conversations around topics like gender, race and sexuality, the authors wrote in Aero Magazine.

'We undertook this project to study, understand, and expose the reality of grievance studies, which is corrupting academic research,' they said.

Among their works was an article in Cogent Social Sciences that alleged penises were the product of the human mind and responsible for climate change.

Their papers included the phrases 'gender-performative, high fluid social construct', 'exclusionary to disenfranchised communities', and 'isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity'.

Last year, Boghossian questioned why outlets he considers to be liberal media like NPR and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow haven't asked him to speak

From 2017 to 2018, Boghossian and two other scholars wrote 20 papers with absurd premises related to social justice. Four of them were eventually published in reputable journals

Boghossian said the university accused him of 'not receiving approval to experiment on human subjects' after the trio was found out by reporters at the Wall Street Journal, cutting their hoax short.

'Shortly thereafter, swastikas in the bathroom with my name under them began appearing in two bathrooms near the philosophy department.

'They also occasionally showed up on my office door, in one instance accompanied by bags of feces.

'Our university remained silent.

'When it acted, it was against me, not the perpetrators.'

He also described a Title IX investigation against him in the 2016-2017 school year, when a student seemed to have accused Boghossian of beating his wife.

'My accuser, a white male, made a slew of baseless accusations against me, which university confidentiality rules unfortunately prohibit me from discussing further. What I can share is that students of mine who were interviewed during the process told me the Title IX investigator asked them if they knew anything about me beating my wife and children.

'This horrifying accusation soon became a widespread rumor,' he wrote.

'Universities can enforce ideological conformity just through the threat of these investigations.'

Title IX is a 1972 civil rights law that prevents discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance.

Boghossian said the university failed to take action after a tenured professor interrupted his discussion with author Christina Hoff Sommers and evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying in March 2018.

He also said activists pulled speaker wires from one of his panels and that someone triggered a fire alarm at another.
A video posted online shows the moment a live streamer confronted Andy Dick in a ramshackle trailer, accusing the comedian of molesting him in his sleep after discovering a lube-like substance in his butt.

Dick, 56, was arrested Wednesday morning on suspicion of sexually assaulting a man at an RV campground at O'Neill Regional Park in Orange County, Southern California where he was reportedly living with a group of live streamers.

A livestream of his arrest was shown on YouTube and footage posted to the channel 'Captain Content RV' afterwards revealed the events in the lead up, including the confrontation inside the trailer.

A young man, who goes by the name 'JJ', can be seen telling another person in the RV that he believed Dick had molested him in his sleep.

The accuser's name has not been released by police.

'I was just in bed right now, and I smelled certain parts of my body  [I was] in the other RV with Andy, and  the last thing I remember, we were on the phone with his fiancee  I smelled parts of myself and they smell like artificial smells,' he says while appearing slightly disorientated.

The man said he thought there was some sort of lotion or lubricant in his butt.

Andy Dick is pictured in an RV at a campground at O'Neill Regional Park in Orange County before he was arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting a man on Wednesday, May 11

The arrest and lead up were livestreamed with footage posted to YouTube later of a young man (pictured) who goes by the name 'JJ' telling another person in the RV that he believed Dick had molested him in his sleep

'JJ' is heard in the original livestream then trying to confront Dick about the alleged incident.

Dick, who is heard saying that he's on the phone with his 'baby's mama' denies the allegation, and then is heard asking, 'Did you take my blow?'

'No, I didn't even take it whenever it was offered,' the man replies.

The man then asks Dick, 'Why did you assault me in my sleep?'

Dick denies the accusations and tries to block the camera with his foot.

'I never assaulted you in your sleep,' he responds. 'Can you leave me alone?'

Another video posted online shows Orange County Sheriff's Department deputies arriving at the campground at about 11:15am local time before handcuffing dick and escorting him to a patrol car.

The comedian is being held on a $25,000 bail at Orange County's Central Jail and is scheduled to be in court on Friday.

Police from the Orange County Sheriff's Department on Wednesday swarmed the modest trailer parked at California's O'Neill Regional Park which charges $20 a day per vehicle

Dick, dressed in a gray hoodie and black joggers, was hauled away in handcuffs before being placed inside a patrol car

Additional details of the alleged incident were not released, but deputies say the accuser was taken to a nearby hospital to be examined.

Sgt. Scott Steinle confirmed to Page Six that the Special Victims Unit is involved in this situation and 'part of their investigation is to make sure that the victim is taken care of physically and that would also include a potential physical exam'.

Dick was evicted from his apartment last summer and had reportedly been living with a group of livestreamers in an RV at the camp site which charges $20 a day per vehicle.

His friend Elisa Jordana, 33, revealed on her YouTube show, Kermit and Friends last year that Dick had been staying at hostels and at one point stole 'cutlery, a wine glass, and plates' from a steakhouse.

'He asked for a doggie bag so he could put all that in,' she recalled, in addition to alleging he told the waitress he wanted to sleep with her.

During Wednesday's arrest Dick wore a gray hoodie and black joggers as he was hauled away in handcuffs before being placed inside a patrol car.

Deputies then searched Dick's trailer. No additional details were provided.

The arrest and events leading up to it were broadcast on the Captain Content RV YouTube channel

Officers are seen here handcuffing Dick before placing him in the patrol car

Dick's arrest on Wednesday is not the first time the controversial comedian has been in trouble with the law.

Last month, Las Vegas police conducted a welfare check at the home the comedian was staying in after a man he was with pulled a gun during an argument that was featured on a live feed, TMZ reported.

In the video, one can hear Andy telling his host, 'Don't shoot the gun'.

According to the news outlet, fans of Dick were concerned and believed the actor's life was in danger, but when police arrived, Dick told them he was fine wanted to stay.

Over the decades, Dick has been transparent about his alcohol and drug abuse, following a string of arrests and controversial behavior that have made news headlines.

Dick, who is known for his roles in NewsRadio, Inspector Gadget and Road Trip, was dropped from two movies in 2017 - Raising Buchanan and Vampire Dad - over alleged complaints that he groped members of the production. However, no one formally came forward.

'I didn't grope anybody. I might have kissed somebody on the cheek to say goodbye and then licked them,' Dick told The Hollywood Reporter following his removal from the film.

'That's my thingI licked Carrie Fisher at a roast. It's me being funny. I'm not trying to sexually harass people.'

Dick was interviewed later that same year by TMZ who sought him out for comment regarding the string of sexual harassment scandals that rocked Hollywood in 2017.

He appeared to make light of the allegations against Harvey Weinstein and actor Kevin Spacey, saying they were probably 'just trying to get a date'.

Dick then threatened to grope the cameraman but at another point in the interview he tearfully admitted to contemplating suicide every day.

The comedian has been open about his alcohol and drug abuse, and has had a string of arrests that have made news headlines over the decades

In November 2021, Dick was arrested for felony domestic battery after he allegedly hit his boyfriend in the head with a liquor bottle.

According to police, Dick and his boyfriend had been at his home when they got into a heated argument that quickly turned physical. When police were called, they determined there was enough evidence to arrest the comedian, as his boyfriend was allegedly bleeding from a sizable wound on his head.

Dick was released after he posted $50,000 bond.

In October 2021, Dick was arrested for allegedly hitting his boyfriend in the face with a frying pan.

Las Vegas police conducted a welfare check at a home Dick was staying last month after a man he was with pulled a gun during an argument that was featured on a live feed

In June 2021, the actor was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon for allegedly attacking a male partner with a metal chair.

Dick also made his $50,000 bail after that altercation.

In 2019, the actor was sentenced to 14 days in jail after being convicted of sexual battery for allegedly squeezing a woman's rear end. He was released after a single night due to jail overcrowding.

A mugshot of comedian Andy Dick taken in 2011 after he was arrested at a restaurant in Temecula, California for acting disorderly

The same year, he was seen on video being slammed to the ground after he got into a fight with an Uber Eats driver while seemingly intoxicated.

He previously pleaded not guilty to one count of misdemeanor sexual battery in April 2018 after he allegedly groped an Uber driver's crotch.

Dick's estranged wife Lena Sved received a domestic violence restraining order against him in 2018, which required him to move out of their home and remain 100 yards away from her and their adult children: Lucas, 33, Jacob, 27, and Meg, 24.

In 2012, he was arrested for allegedly grabbing a 17-year-old girl's top and pulling it down to expose her breasts.

He was later found with marijuana and pleaded guilty to misdemeanor drug and battery charges, for which he was sentenced to three years of probation.

In 2010, he was arrested for allegedly grabbing a man's genitals while intoxicated at a West Virginia bar.

In 2007, Dick groped Ivanka Trump during an interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live and was pulled off stage by Kimmel's security staff.

She was greeted by Dick, who asked Ivanka for a 'big, wet kiss' right off the bat Kimmel later told Extra.

The situation spiraled with Dick rubbing his hands on Ivanka's thighs and knee while she politely tried to stop the unwanted advances.

Kimmel proceeded to stop Dick from touching Ivanka before continuing the interview.

Dick continued to touch Ivanka, first trying to grab at Ivanka's ponytail and then touching her arm, before security dragged him off the stage.
Four fishermen have had a frightening encounter with a giant shark who began biting down on their charter boat.

The men were on an annual fishing trip in Coral Bay, Western Australia on Wednesday when the attack happened.

Footage show the three metre bronze whaler shark chomping on the boat's propeller.

A giant shark (pictured) has given four fishermen the shock of their lives after they found it chomping down on their boat

The men were fishing on Coral Bay and had unknowingly caught the shark on the end of one of their lines.

After fighting with it for an hour, the shark emerged from the ocean and headed for the propeller at the back of the charter boat.

The animal then attempted to swallow the propeller as the fishermen tried to figure out what to do next.

'He took a liking to the engine and he hung on there for a good few minutes,' captain Matt Zen told 9News.

'We started to get a bit worried about how we were going to get him off.'

The shark gave up trying to consume the propeller five minutes later and returned to the deep.

The boat was not damaged from the encounter.

The four men were on an annual fishing trip together - which they call 'Fever Fishing' - in Coral Bay, Western Australia on Wednesday

The bronze whaler shark bit the propeller as the fishermen tried to figure out what to do next. It eventually gave up after five minutes and returned to the sea

It comes just weeks after a fellow Aussie YouTuber had a close call with a tiger shark who bit into his paddleboard.

Brodie Moss, who runs the channel YBS Youngbloods was enjoying the open sea on his paddleboard when he came across a shark chasing a turtle in the water.

It wasn't long before Moss found himself observing the encounter from only a metre away as the turtle and pursuing tiger shark swam underneath his board.

'Tiger shark and this turtle - big showdown, and I'm right in the thick of it,' the West Australian ocean enthusiast can be heard saying as he filmed the chase.

It comes just weeks after fellow West Australian Brodie Moss (pictured) had a close call with a tiger shark who bit into his paddleboard while he was enjoying the open sea

Moss continued to paddle away and swears to himself as the shark closed in on the turtle.

The turtle manages to get away and swims under the YouTuber's paddleboard again with the tiger shark still in pursuit.

'Oh this is intense, they're underneath me!' Moss said. 'I don't know if I'm in the best position right here.'

The tiger shark then turns around, raises its head above the ocean and proceeds to take a bite out of the YouTuber's board.

The Australian YouTuber captured his terrifying encounter with a tiger shark who took a bite out of his board while he was paddleboarding

The momentum from the bite causes Moss to fall off his board into the ocean and drop his GoPro.

It appeared the daredevil was okay following the terrifying encounter as he wrote in the caption of the clip that the incident was not the shark's fault.

'A humbling reminder for myself that it's their ocean and I'm just a visitor! I love sharks and this little accident was not the big fellas [sic] fault,' he wrote.
A retired Indian couple are taking their only son to court for more than 500,000 as they claim his failure to produce a grandchild has caused them 'mental agony'.

Sajneev Prasad, 61, and wife Sadhana, 57, filed a petition against son Shrey Sagar and his wife Shubhangi, who married in 2016 and do not have any children.

The marriage was arranged and they were even sent to Thailand for their honeymoon to produce an heir, Sajneev said.

Shrey and Shubhangi must have a child within a year or pay up, the parents claim.

Sajneev Prasad (left) and wife Sadhana (right) are demanding 530,000 from their son and daughter-in-law - or a child within a year, according to court documents in Haridwar, India

Pilot Shrey was trained in the US at his parents' considerable expense. He returned to India in 2007 as the recession caused an industry slowdown.

Shrey has since worked as a pilot in India - and lives separately from Shubhangi, who also works.

The mother and father gifted the couple an Audi worth 63,000 and paid for their luxurious wedding reception at a five-star hotel.

They claim they've spent 25million rupees (265,000) on their son since he was born.

They now want the exact same amount back - and another 25million in damages.

'We killed our dreams to raise him', Sajneev told The National World.

'It is a dream of every parent to become a grandparent. We had been waiting for years to become grandparents.

The married couple (third from left and third from right) pose for wedding photos in 2016

'We had been trying to convince our son and his wife but they paid no heed to our demands. We are heartbroken that we will die without seeing [a] grandchild.'

Sajneev also wrote in the parents' court submission: 'My son has been married for six years but they are still not planning a baby. At least if we have a grandchild to spend time with, our pain will become bearable.

'We also had to take a loan to build our house and now we are going through a lot of financial hardships. Mentally too we are quite disturbed because we are living alone.'

The charge submitted to Haridwar District Court was listed as 'mental agony and harassment'.

This case portrays the truth of society. We invest in our children, make them capable of working in good firms. Children owe their parents basic financial care. The parents have demanded either a grandchild within a year or compensation of Rs 5 crores: Advocate AK Srivastava pic.twitter.com/uH04Q8jEua  ANI UP/Uttarakhand (@ANINewsUP) May 11, 2022

It is technically labelled a 'domestic violence' case.

Prosecuting lawyer Arvind Kumar Srivastava said the petition will be taken up for hearing by the court in northern India on May 17, AFP reported.

Shrey and Shubhangi will then be formally contacted.

India has a strong joint family system with many generations including grandparents, nephews, aunts and uncles often living in the same household.

However, in recent years the trend has shifted, with young couples preferring to move away from their parents or siblings, and wives - such as in this case - opting to work rather than focus on having children and staying at home.
A notice installed at the National Election Commission office in Jongno District, Seoul, Thursday, reads that 20 days are left until the June 1 local elections. Yonhap



By Lee Hyo-jin



Candidate registration for the June 1 local elections and parliamentary by-elections began on Thursday for a two-day period, according to the National Election Commission (NEC), amid widespread anticipation that the upcoming elections will act as a litmus test for the Yoon Suk-yeol administration.



The election watchdog said it will accept registrations until Friday, with the 13-day official campaign period kicking off on May 19. Candidates can campaign on the streets, put up election posters and send campaign materials to voters until May 31, while early voting will take place on May 27 and 28.



Up for grabs in the local elections are 17 provincial governor and mayor positions, as well as posts for local council members and the heads of regional education offices. On the sidelines of the quadrennial local elections, the country will pick seven lawmakers, after those seats were vacated as those who were elected in those districts have resigned in order to run for mayoral and gubernatorial posts.



The upcoming elections, which will be held three weeks after President Yoon Suk-yeol took office, are widely expected to be a bellwether of Yoon's early presidency, showing the public's opinion of the new government.



The minor ruling conservative People Power Party (PPP) seeks to clinch another victory following two successful previous elections  the March 9 presidential election and the Seoul and Busan mayoral by-elections held in April 2021. Meanwhile, the liberal Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), now the main opposition party, seeks to reverse its losses through a big revival.



The by-elections are drawing attention after the former presidential candidates  Lee Jae-myung and Ahn Cheol-soo  declared their bids. DPK special advisor Lee lost the presidential race by a razor-thin margin, while Ahn merged his campaign with Yoon's just days before of the presidential election.



Lee, the former governor of Gyeonggi Province, will run for the parliamentary seat representing Incheon's Gyeyang-B District, which has been vacant since former DPK Chairman Song Young-gil resigned to run in the Seoul mayoral election. Ahn will run for the seat representing Bundang-A District in Seongnam City, Gyeonggi Province, left by Kim Eun-hye of the PPP, who served as Yoon's spokesperson on his presidential transition team.





Officials of the National Election Commission (NEC) accept candidate registrations ahead of the June 1 local elections at the commission's office in Jongno District, Seoul, Thursday. Joint Press Corps
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Russia's top commander General Valery Gerasimov has been suspended, a top adviser to the Ukrainian president has claimed, while a clutch of other officers have been sacked or arrested amid a rumoured purge of top brass.

Oleksiy Arestovych, a veteran of military intelligence and one of President Zelensky's inner circle, claimed late Wednesday that Gerasimov - the chief of staff of the Russian army - has been suspended as Putin looks for senior commanders to blame over his blundering invasion of Ukraine.

Arestovych, speaking to dissident Russian lawyer and politician Mark Feygin on YouTube last night, said: 'According to preliminary information, Gerasimov has been de-facto suspended. They are deciding whether to give him time to fix things, or not.'

He added: 'The commander of the first tank army of the western military district Lieutenant General Sergei Kisel has also been arrested and fired after the first tank army was defeated near Kharkiv.'

Two further army commanders have been fired due to heavy battlefield losses, according to information released on a Telegram channel run by the Ukrainian interior ministry, which also claimed the commander of the Black Sea fleet has been sacked and arrested and his vice admiral has been placed under investigation.

Arestovych stressed that his information is 'preliminary', but it comes after Gerasimov failed to appear during Russia's Victory Day parade in Moscow on Monday which he was widely expected to attend. It also comes after he was reportedly wounded by shrapnel in Ukraine when Putin sent him there in order to turn the war around.

Putin's army - once championed as the world's second-best - has been handed a series of humiliating battlefield defeats in just two months of fighting in Ukraine that has seen more than 10,000 troops killed, hundreds of tanks destroyed, its Black Sea flagship sunk and Russia's international standing trashed.

Just yesterday, it was revealed that Russian troops were massacred while trying to cross a river in the Donbas after Ukraine discovered their sneak-attack and unleashed an artillery barrage that destroyed at least 58 vehicles.

Suspended: General Valery Gerasimov, chief of staff of the Russian armed forces, has been suspended - according to 'preliminary' information put out by one of Zelensky's top advisers, Oleksiy Arestovych

Lieutenant General Vladislav Ershov (left) has been fired as 6th army commander, according to information from Ukraine's interior ministry, while Lieutenant General Sergei Kisel (right), commander of the 1st tank army, has been sacked and fired

'Sacked and arrested': Admiral Igor Osipov, commander of Russia's Black Sea fleet, has been removed from his post and arrested, according to information from the interior ministry in Kyiv

Major General Arkady Marzoev (left), commander of the 22nd army, has reportedly been sacked, while Vice Admiral Sergei Pinchuk (right), deputy commander of the Black Sea fleet, is allegedly under investigation

'After the failure in Ukraine - repressions and purges in the Russian army,' a post from the Find Your Own Telegram feed, run by Kyiv's interior ministry, said late yesterday.

'The Commander of the Black Sea Fleet, Admiral Igor Osipov, was removed from his post and arrested. [There are] Investigative actions in relation to... first deputy commander of the fleet, Vice Admiral Sergei Pinchuk.

'Due to the large losses of personnel, weapons and military equipment, [Russia] fired: Commander of the 6th Army, Lieutenant General Vladislav Ershov; ommander of the tank army of the western military district, Lieutenant General Sergei Kisel and one of the deputy commanders.

'[Also] Commander of the 22nd Army Corps of the Southern Military District, Major General Arkady Marzoev.'

If confirmed, it would mark the largest purge of senior military commanders during the conflict so far and represent a tactic admission by Putin that the invasion has largely been a failure.

Despite being forced to retreat from Kyiv in the first phase of the war and failing to make a breakthrough in the Donbas in the second, Putin has continued to insist that his military is achieving all of its targets on time and in accordance to the plan - statements echoed by his lapdog officials and puppet propagandists.

But the goals have continued to change. Initially, the aim was to seize Kyiv in a rapid attack designed to topple the government and install a puppet regime - revealed by a Russia state media article that was mistakenly published just days after the war started which preemptively declared victory.

Once it became clear that Russia lacked the manpower to take Kyiv, it retreated - but generals claimed that had been the goal all along. Kyiv, they said, had now been demilitarized which would allow them to focus all of their efforts on liberating Donbas: A region in the east that Putin has declared to be independent.

But Russia has yet to make any significant gains on this front, even in Mariupol - the heavily besieged southern city where Ukrainian troops are holed up in a huge steel works - instead inching forward in a hugely bloody advance that is draining both men and resources.

Putin was thought to have ordered his generals to produce a victory for him to brag about during Monday's Victory Day parade in Moscow. In the end, he simply avoided the topic of victory in Ukraine altogether - saying simply that troops were fighting 'for our people in Donbass, for the security of our Motherland, for Russia.'

He also made no mention of officially declaring war on Ukraine - a move that many had feared because it could lead to a full mobilisation of Russia's military reserves or a general conscription, with new recruits poured on to the battlefield in an attempt to achieve victory at any cost.

It could indicate little more than unrealised hype built around a day that - by its nature - is heavy on symbolism but light on action. Or, viewed another way, it could indicate a change of thinking within the Kremlin and perhaps the start of a climb-down after months of sabre-rattling.

Russia attempted to bridge the Donets River to the west of the city of Lysychansk on May 8, apparently hoping to surround Ukrainian defenders dug in there - but were found out and massacred

Newly-released images of the ambush show dozens of destroyed Russian vehicle littering both banks of the river along with sections of pontoon bridge left floating in the water

The remains of at least three Russian tanks and another four armoured infantry vehicles are seen on one bank of the river, along with other pieces of wreckage poking out from under the water

The massive explosion took place just outside Mariupol in south-eastern Ukraine: Phoenix TV

Ukraine claims its territorial defence troops destroyed the tank using a Swedish-made Carl Gustaf rocket launcher that costs just 18,000

The missile then exploded inside the tank, ripping apart its rear engine compartment with such force that its armour plating was bent outwards

Aside from its battlefield defeats, Russia has been hammered economically and politically over the war - sliding into the worst recession for three decades as a result of lost trade and sanctions pressure, while also being isolated on the world stage.

Backing from Beijing for the invasion, which seemed almost certain before the fighting broke out, has been half-hearted - Chinese state media has pushed Russian narratives about the world, but its diplomats have also vocally supported Ukrainian sovereignty and abstained from key votes at the UN.

And, on Thursday, Finland's prime minister and president took the much-anticipated step of saying they are in favour of joining NATO with a formal application expected within days. It comes after Britain and America gave the country guarantees to come to its defence if Russia attacks before membership is ratified.

The move is likely to prompt Sweden, which shares an exposed coast and border with Finland, to follow suit - putting an end to decades of neutrality.

Russia's Foreign Ministry warned the country would take retaliatory 'military-technical' steps and said the move would 'inflict serious damage to the Russian-Finnish relations as well as stability and security in Northern Europe.'

Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russia's Security Council chaired by President Vladimir Putin, said that 'there is always a risk of such conflict turning into a full-scale nuclear war, a scenario that will be catastrophic.'

But even as the globe-shaking repercussions of the invasion spread, the conflict on the ground slogged on, with Ukraine's military recapturing some towns and villages in the country's northeast but acknowledging that Russian forces have seen 'partial success' farther south in the eastern industrial heartland of the Donbas.

Western officials say Russia has gained ground and taken some villages but has not managed to seize any cities.

Associated Press reporters heard explosions Thursday and saw plumes of smoke near the town of Bakhmut, an area of the Donbas that has seen heavy fighting. The Ukrainian military said that Russian forces were 'storming' two villages near Bakhmut, but the source of the blasts wasn't immediately clear.

Russian advances in the east follow weeks of their stubborn efforts to push through Ukrainian defenses in the Donbas. It's unclear how significant the Russian gains have been.

But any gains in the east may have come at expense of territory elsewhere. Britain's Defense Ministry said Russia's focus on the Donbas had left its remaining troops around the northeastern city of Kharkiv vulnerable to counterattack from Ukrainian forces, which recaptured several towns and villages around the city.

Still, Russian rocket strikes Thursday killed one person and wounded three in a suburb of Kharkiv, the regional governor said. Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, has suffered heavy Russian bombardment during the war as Russia sought to encircle it.

Fighting across the east has driven thousands of residents from their homes. Evacuees wiped away tears as they carried their children and belongings onto buses and vans to flee.

Ukraine struck the Moskva - Russia's Black Sea flagship - with two home-made missiles on April 14, causing it to catch fire and then sink into the body of water it was supposed to be protecting

It is thought that hundreds of sailors went down with the ship, though the exact death toll is unclear because Russia has refused to disclose it or confirm that Ukraine shot the ship

'It is terrible there now. We were leaving under missiles,' said Tatiana Kravstova, who left the town of Siversk with her 8-year-old son Artiom on a bus headed to the central city of Dnipro. 'I don't know where they were aiming at, but they were pointing at civilians.'

Meanwhile, Ukraine's military also said Russian forces had fired artillery and grenade launchers at Ukrainian troops in the direction of Zaporizhzhia, which has been a refuge for civilians fleeing Mariupol, and attacked in the Chernihiv and Sumy regions to the north.

Overnight airstrikes in Chernihiv killed three people and wounded 12, according to local media citing emergency services. The regional governor said the strikes on the town of Novhorod-Siverskyi damaged a boarding school, dormitory and administrative building.

The military governor of the southern Ukrainian region of Kryvyi Rih accused Russia of using prohibited cluster bombs and phosphorus munitions. The claim could not immediately be verified. Ukraine has previously accused Russian forces of using such munitions in the Donbas, and Ukrainian authorities have launched investigations into their use.

In the southern port city of Mariupol, which has seen some of the worst destruction of the war, Ukraine offered to release Russian prisoners of war in exchange for the safe evacuation of badly wounded fighters trapped inside the Azovstal steel mill, the last redoubt of Ukrainian forces in the ruined city.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said that negotiations were underway to release the wounded. She said there were different options, but 'none of them is ideal.' Russia hasn't confirmed any talks on the subject but seems unlikely to agree to any such swap as the release of the fighters would be a major morale boost for Ukraine.

Russia's forces have taken control of the rest of the city, which they besieged for weeks, as residents ran short of food, water and medicine, though Petro Andriushchenko, an adviser to the Mariupol mayor, said Thursday that troops have resumed water supplies to two neighborhoods as a test.

'The occupiers turned Mariupol into a medieval ghetto,' said Mayor Vadym Boychenko in comments published by City Hall, as he called for a complete evacuation of the city.

Officials said in recent weeks that about 100,000 residents could still be trapped in Mariupol, which had a prewar population of over 400,000. Russian and Ukrainian authorities have periodically agreed to cease-fires to evacuate residents, and repeatedly blamed each other when those efforts failed.

Putin reaffirmed Russia's determination to ensure territory in the Donbas held by Moscow-backed separatists never returns to Ukraine in a congratulatory message Thursday to the head of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic.

On the eve of its invasion, Russia recognized the separatists' claim to independence in Luhansk as well as in the other Donbas region of Donetsk. Moscow sought to justify its offensive by claiming, without evidence, that Ukraine was planning to attack areas held by separatists and that it intervened to protect people in those regions.

Putin also said Thursday that Russia would withstand tough Western sanctions - imposed in response to the invasion - though he said they were provoking a global economic crisis.

Speaking to officials during a meeting on the economy, Putin said that Western nations have been 'driven by oversized political ambitions and Russophobia' to introduce the restrictions that 'hurt their own economies and well-being of their citizens' as well as people in the world's poorest countries.
This is the devastating moment a newlywed TV journalist broke down over the body of her prosecutor husband after he was assassinated while honeymooning on a Colombian beach.

Marcelo Pecci, 45, was shot dead in front of his wife Claudia Aguilera in Isla Baru outside the Caribbean city of Cartagena on Tuesday.

The execution took place moments after Aguilera, who worked for television network Unicanal, and Pecci, who has been waging a war on drug cartels, announced they were expecting a baby.

The high-profile couple, from Paraguay, had just uploaded a photo to Instagram of themselves embracing on the sand behind a pair of baby sneakers.

'The best wedding gift is... life bringing you closer to the most beautiful testimony of love,' Aguilera wrote on her account.

Aguilera told Colombian law enforcement investigators that the two suspects approached them on the beach at the Decameron Hotel and did not say a word before one of them shot Pecci, once in the face and once in the back.

Paraguayan prosecutor Marcelo Pecci (left) was celebrating his honeymoon with his wife Claudia Aguilera (right) in the island of Baru near the Colombian city of Cartagena when a man shot him dead Tuesday.

Claudia Aguilera huddles over the body of her husband, Paraguayan prosecutor Marcelo Pecci, after he was shot dead while the couple was celebrating their honeymoon after getting married in April

A video also emerged Thursday that showed one of the assailants leaving the jet ski rental shop where they got the watercraft that was used to carry out the assassination.

The rental shop owner, whose name has been withheld due to security concerns, became suspicious of the suspect after he returned the jet ski after having used it for only 15 of the 30 minutes he had been allotted.

'We saw that those who had rented returned very soon and handed over the jet ski with the respective vests to the managers,' he recalled.

'And about 10 minutes later, we received a call from the Decameron Hotel that a person had been injured with the jet ski. At the moment, we thought that they had run over, but later we realized that it was a murder.'

Colombian authorities have offered a reward of 2 billion pesos, approximately $488,000, for information leading to the capture of the individual, who was wearing a fedora.

Police chief General Jorge Luis Vargas told the media that Pecci's murder was most likely linked to his prosecutions of high-profile money laundering and drug trafficking cases in Paraguay.

'We're talking about a transnational crime system, highly planned, in which it's probable that a large amount of money was spent to carry out the murder,' Vargas said.

Paraguayan prosecutor Marcelo Pecci (left) wed Unicanal journalist Claudia Aguilera (right) in April and the paired traveled to Colombia for their post-nuptial celebration.

Just hours before the assassination the couple had revealed they were expecting their first child and posted on Instagram a photo of them embracing on a beach in Isla Baru with pair of baby sneakers in the sand

Colombian newspaper El Tiempo reported that authorities are looking into whether the murder was linked to the investigation Pecci participated with the Drug Enforcement Administration that helped identified members of Hezbollah in Paraguay.

One of the suspects, Lebanon national Nader Mohammed Farhat, was extradited from Paraguay to Miami in June 2017 to face money laundering charges.

Pecci wed Aguilera in April and the paired traveled to Colombia last week for their post-nuptial celebration.

A senior official with Paraguay's national police, Nimio Cardozo, arrived in Colombia's capital to assist the investigation, along with U.S. drug and other federal agents.

Appearing at the same news conference, Cardozo stressed that only a few people knew of Pecci's planned vacation.

'We will not stop until we have caught those responsible, materially and intellectually, for this despicable act,' he said.

A suspect (center) in the assassination of Paraguayan prosecutor Marcelo Pecci is captured on camera walking away from a jet ski rental shop on a beach in Isla Baru outside Cartagena, Colombia
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A pensioner pictured sharing an emotional embrace with Prince William says he was overcome with emotion because he was once estranged from his own child and their hug felt like 'a son hugging a father'.

William Burns, 66, warmed the hearts of millions of Britons yesterday after being pictured sharing a tearful embrace with the future king of England during his visit to Glasgow.

The touching moment took place as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge greeted royal fans in Kennishead as they embarked on the first of their two-day tour of the country on Wednesday.

But during the visit, Prince William ripped up the royal rulebook by ditching formality and sharing the embrace with an emotional Mr Burns. He also stopped for a selfie with his wife Ellen.

Mr Burns, a grandfather-of-25 and a social housing resident who lives in Kennishead, a neighbourhood to the south of Glasgow, said he became emotional because the moment reminded when a 'son hugs a father'.

And the moment had a particular significance for Mr Burns, a father-of-six, who once fell out with one of his sons during an incident which led to him being evicted.

The eviction, which led to grandfather-of-twenty five Mr Burns briefly being made homeless, came after the tragic death of his first wife Jean, who passed away while in his arms.

So when asked about his emotional embrace with Prince William, Mr Burns said: 'I am a grandfather. It felt like a son hugging a father.

'It was the way he hugged me. I didn't expect that really to be honest. It was a boost. I've never felt anything like it in my entire life before and my existence as a human being.

William Burns, 66, warmed the hearts of millions of Britons yesterday after being pictured sharing a tearful hug with the future king of England during his visit to Glasgow

As they greeted local residents after the visit, William, 39, shared an affectionate hug with Mr Burns (pictured here with his wife Ellen) who was overcome with emotion as he embraced the royal

The former chef first moved to the area when he was nine from the island of Tiree in the Hebrides, in 1969-1970. Eight years later, aged 17, he married his first wife, Jean. The pair were married for three decades until her tragic death

Now retired, the former chef first moved to the area when he was nine from the island of Tiree in the Hebrides, in 1969-1970.

He was born at Rottenrow maternity hospital, before his parents returned to the Highlands.

'My mother and I came back to Glasgow, when I was six years old. It was after my father passed away,' he said. 'She got a home across the road from where I live now and worked in a soap factory.

'Before I was born, my brother Stephen was born handicapped. he died aged 30. I am a little handicapped too.

'I have had a stroke and a couple of heart attacks. I have Raynaud's disease which makes the ends of my fingers go blue and my chest feels very tight.

'I'm at risk of further heart attacks so I have to be careful, but I'm still here.

'As a kid, I wore a kilt until then but when I came to Glasgow my mother put me in trousers. I had to learn English and I did well in school.'

Mr Burns studied electronics at Glasgow Cardonald College before going on to work for the TV rental company DER. He also worked as a chef in a Chinese restaurant.

When he was 17, he married the love of his life, his first wife Jean Edie.

'She fell pregnant and I had to marry her,' Mr Burns said, chuckling. 'I fell in love with the girl and she did the same with me. 'We were married in 1970.'

The pair were married for three decades until her tragic death.

'My first love died in my arms, we were married for 30 years,' Mr Burns, a father-of-six and a grandfather-of-twenty-five, said.

'I met Ellen and after the eviction I asked Ellen if I could move in with her and then we got married,' said Mr Burns. 'She's a lovely lady. We have been married four years in September. We've never been on a honeymoon. We've never been anywhere'

Mr Burns said he was evicted after one of his son's received four anti-social behaviour orders, which led to a row between him and the son

The couple raised six children, Michelle, James, Adele, Stephanie, Kerry and stepson Matthew. He has 25 grandchildren.

'Matthew was Jean's son but I took him as my own,' Mr Burns said.

Things soon turned from bad to worse for Mr Burns, who was later evicted from the home he shared with Jean during their marriage.

Mr Burns said he was evicted after one of his son's received four anti-social behaviour orders, which led to a row between him and the son - who he also later described as his wife's child.

Speaking about the eviction, he said 'The man who came to evict me kept apologising but I told him he was just doing his job.'

But Mr Burns's luck soon turned and he quickly moved in with his now wife, Ellen, who took him in when he was at his lowest. The pair later married and remain together to this day.

'I met Ellen and after the eviction I asked Ellen if I could move in with her and then we got married,' he said.

Mr Burns, now suffers from the chronic lung condition emphysema, a lung condition where a person's air sacs - known as alveoli - are damaged

'She's a lovely lady. We have been married four years in September. We've never been on a honeymoon. We've never been anywhere.'

Mr Burns, now suffers from the chronic lung condition emphysema, a lung condition where a person's air sacs - known as alveoli - are damaged.

It causes shortness of breath and when alongside chronic bronchitis makes up the often life-limiting condition chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Mr Burns was hailed a hero in local newspapers in the late 1970s when he chased a gang of machete wielding thugs who planned to rob a local Asian convenience store.

Despite his difficult life, Mr Burns remains optimistic and described meeting Prince William as a 'boost'.

He said he originally went out to see the Prince after seeing 'all the commotion and excitement' at his arrival.

'I thought I would go down for a peek-about. My wife was down there and I was standing talking to people who know me well because I am one of the longest people living here.

'I saw Kate and thought, that lady is wonderful. She is beautiful and clearly a beautiful person. I was standing with my wife when William came over to the crowd.

'I decided to meet the chap and I went to shake the man's hand when he asked my name.

'When I told him my name was William, he said, 'My name is William too.' I said, 'I know that' and he laughed. He had his hand on my shoulder.

'He had his hand on my shoulder and then hugged me. I was quite emotional. I was overjoyed.

'I am a grandfather. It felt like a son hugging a father. It was the way he hugged me. I didn't expect that really to be honest. It was a boost. I've never felt anything like it in my entire life before and my existence as a human being.'

Mr Burns was also full of praise for the Prince, who he said will make a 'great King'.

'I told him about the housing association providing safe homes for the people and he said that was fantastic. He's not King yet but he will be a good King for Scotland as well as the whole of the UK.

'He'll do well for Britain. He will be a fantastic King and he will keep Scotland and Britain together.'

His wife Ellen also revealed William joked with her that she didn't know how to use a mobile phone after she asked him for a selfie.

The Prince then took the cherished shot for her. Ellen said: 'I asked the Prince if I could get a photo with him and he said, 'No bother. You don't know how to use the phone, do you?'. 'He took the phone and turned the camera around. So he took the selfie.

The Prince then took the cherished shot for her. Ellen said: 'I asked the Prince if I could get a photo with him and he said, 'No bother. You don't know how to use the phone, do you?'. 'He took the phone and turned the camera around. So he took the selfie

Prince William was seen sharing a heartwarming embrace with an emotional man as he heard about the challenges of homelessness in Scotland

'My husband was worried he would get the jail for hugging the Prince but it was the Prince who hugged him.

'Princess Di hugged people and I think he copies his mum. Kate was gorgeous. It was a beautiful moment.'

Having met with Prince William, Ellen said the royal reminded her of his mother, Princess Diana. She said: 'William reminds me of his mum. He is always helping people. He reminds me of his mammy.'

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge had visited the Wheatley Group site in Glasgow, to see first-hand how they are transforming the lives of disadvantaged or vulnerable people, including those at risk of homelessness.

Despite the joy of the occasion, he also admitted he was worried that he and William would get into trouble for ripping up the royal playbook by ditching formality and sharing the heartwarming embrace with Mr Burns.

'I won't get the jail hopefully and I hope William won't get into trouble for giving me a hug'

An insider involved in the royal visit said: 'William said he didn't want suits and security. He wanted to meet the people.'

Prince William and Kate Middleton posed for selfies with locals during their visit to the Wheatley Group site in Kennishead in Glasgow

Prince William, Duke of Cambridge meets students during a visit the University of Glasgow on May 11, 2022 in Glasgow

The Duke and Duchess were visiting the University of Glasgow to talk with students about mental health and wellbeing, particularly pertinent during what is exam season at the University

'I had a meeting with the energy advice team and they gave me great tips on how to use my electricity to keep my bills low. I don't need to put the heating on as much during the day in my new home. It's made a big difference.'

The Duke and Duchess were met in Kennishead by John MacLeod, Glasgow Deputy Lieutenant, accompanied by his wife, Mariella McLeod.

They were introduced to Wheatley Group Chief Executive Martin Armstrong, Wheatley Group Chair Jo Armstrong and Bernadette Hewitt, the tenant Chair of Wheatley Homes Glasgow.

Wheatley Group Chair Jo Armstrong said: 'We were delighted to welcome the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and show them how Wheatley Group is 'Making Homes and Lives Better'.

The protocol surrounding touching the Royal Family has historically been so strict that a simple breach like a hand on the back, even by a well-meaning dignitary, was enough to spark outrage.

While older generations of royals might have seen a lack of contact as a way to communicate a higher status - it appears the Duke and Duchess are attempting to be more approachable.

There are no obligatory codes of behaviour when meeting a member of the Royal Family, but many chose to observe traditions, which is to bow or curtsey.

The tender moment saw the Duke break strict royal protocol, in a move that echoed the tactile nature of his late mother Princess Diana.

The Duchess of Cambridge looks delighted as she meets members of the public during a visit to the Wheatley Group in Glasgow

Strike a pose! Kate looked delighted as she waved to cameras during the visit to the Wheatley Group in the Scottish city yesterday before putting on an animated display with crowds

The Duke and Duchess appear to have put on their finest charm offensive during the visit, with Kate, 40, seen beaming as she cuddled up and cooed with newborns during yesterday's tour.

During their relaxed engagements, William appeared playful as he goofed around with children, before the royal couple posed for selfies with locals.

Their new easygoing approach could also be part of an attempt to modernise the Royal Family after their Belize, Jamaica and the Bahamas trip which was hit by public relations gaffes and protests.

In fact, royal sources claimed recently that in wake of the tour, the couple want to be known by their first names instead of their titles and are considering getting rid of bows and curtsies.

'The general consensus was that the tour seemed out of date, out of touch, too formal and stuffy', a royal source told the Mirror.

'So now it's more 'Wills and Kate' instead of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge... 'Just call me Wills' type of thing.

'They want to try to avoid the bows and curtsies in public, be more approachable, less formal, less stuffy, and break away with a lot of the tradition and focus on a modern monarchy.'

The news comes as the Queen moves ahead with slimming down the Monarchy and the Palace announced that only senior Royals, which do not include Prince Harry and Meghan and Prince Andrew, will be on the palace balcony for the showpiece Platinum Jubilee celebration.

Kate Middleton and Prince William posed for selfies and played with children as they put on their finest charm offensive during a whirlwind tour of Scotland yesterday

Another baby! Having been charmed by one tiny tot earlier in the day, the Duchess was then left grinning after meeting a newborn during a walkabout

During one of their engagements today, the Duke and Duchess appeared particularly taken by two-year-old Olivia Wilson, who had tumbled to the ground - with Kate helping her to her feet

During their visit the royal couple met Wheatley Homes Glasgow tenant Joanne Wales, 31, who opened the front door of her new-build home to welcome Their Royal Highnesses.

Inside they met son Jason, four, and heard from Joanne how the energy-efficient house design is helping reduce her energy bills.

Joanne said: 'With four young kids the energy bill is a big concern. There's always a need for a new pair of shoes or new clothes.

'I had a meeting with the energy advice team and they gave me great tips on how to use my electricity to keep my bills low. I don't need to put the heating on as much during the day in my new home. It's made a big difference.'

The Duke and Duchess were met in Kennishead by John MacLeod, Glasgow Deputy Lieutenant, accompanied by his wife, Mariella McLeod.

They were introduced to Wheatley Group Chief Executive Martin Armstrong, Wheatley Group Chair Jo Armstrong and Bernadette Hewitt, the tenant Chair of Wheatley Homes Glasgow.

Wheatley Group Chair Jo Armstrong said: 'We were delighted to welcome the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and show them how Wheatley Group is 'Making Homes and Lives Better'.

The mother-of-three was elegant in a tonal outfit for the engagements in Glasgow yesterday, pairing a cornflower blue blouse with smart navy trousers

Goofing around! Prince William didn't hold back while playfully chatting to the toddler yesterday during his visit to Glasgow

A very royal play-date! Prince William appeared charmed by little Olivia during the visit to Wheatley Homes Glasgow yesterday

And it wasn't long before Kate joined in with Prince William to help out with the youngster, who was wearing a pink outfit for the occasion

The Duke and Duchess helped two-year-old Olivia up after she tumbled to the ground during their visit yesterday (pictured)

'They were very interested in the work of our Foundation, about how Wheatley is giving young people the best start in life and also how we are creating new job and training opportunities so customers can reach their full potential.

'We also explained how Wheatley is playing a key role across Scotland in tackling homelessness and giving people a home of their own.'

The Duke of Cambridge is a long-standing campaigner for the homeless and is patron of Centrepoint, which helps homeless young people get back into education, training and employment.

The charity was William's first patronage and the royal took over the role from his late mother Princess Diana.

In 2009, the Duke decided to spend the night rough sleeping in order to understand the plight of the homeless at Christmas, staying out in temperatures as low as minus 4c in an alleyway near Blackfriars bridge.

The Prince said afterwards that the experience had helped to deepen his understanding of life on the streets, calling the charity's work 'desperately important'.
Kevin McCarthy and Representative John Katko tore into Biden's southern border policies, claiming his actions have allowed for increased crime in American cities and caused the spike in fentanyl overdose deaths.

'We'll do everything in our power to make sure Title 42 is not lifted,' the House Republican Minority Leader told DailyMail.com Thursday during an event honoring fallen law enforcement officers.

'We do not have a secure border,'McCarthy added, 'and because of that, every single city is a border city.'

Kato, who is the ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee, said that the day President Biden took office he destroyed national security in the U.S.

'The president can say anything he wants, but on January 20, with the stroke of the pen, he literally destroyed security at the southern border,' Katko told DailyMail.com during a press conference Thursday.

McCarhty and Katko of New York joined police officers on a bicycle and motorcycle ride through Washington, D.C. on an overcast Thursday morning for the second annual Back the Blue Tour.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy joined law enforcement during a bicycle and motorcycle ride through D.C. on Thursday for the 'Back the Blue' bike tour ending at the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial

Homeland Security Committee Ranking Member John Katko donned his American Flag helmet (pictured) during a ride with law enforcement on Thursday for the 'Back the Blue' bike tour

McCarthy said during a press conference at the memorial Thursday that President Biden's policies have led to the massive spikes in crime  including at the southern border

McCarthy passes the U.S. Capitol on bicycle Thursday alongside a member of the United States Capitol Police

The ride ended at the National Law Enforcement Memorial in northwest D.C. to mingle, hold a press conference and drink some Black Rifle Coffee Company coffee, which has a brew called 'Thin Blue Line' in honor of law enforcement officers.

McCarthy said that Republicans are prepared to back up police if they regain a majority in Congress, including more funding.

'You had a number of Democrats who wanted to actually defund the police,' the leader said. 'You've got a high number of retiring based upon some of that.'

'Crime has become one of the No. 1 issues in this country where people feel unsafe to go outside  and a lot of that is driven by the policies that we see from the other side of the aisle. We will reverse them,' he assured.

McCarthy took a bicycle ride with U.S. Capitol Police Officers to the National Law Enforcement Memorial as part of their 'Back the Blue' bike tour Thursday, May 12, 2022

'The president can say anything he wants, but on January 20, with the stroke of the pen, he literally destroyed security at the southern border,' Katko told DailyMail.com during a press conference Thursday

McCarthy detailed that 'the American Security Task Force that will soon be rolling out our law enforcement agenda.

'It's not a defund of police, but a funding of the police,' he added.

While violent crime rates in U.S. cities have spiked during Biden's time in office, the topic has also sparked intense debate regarding the southern border as crime has increased among cartels and drug and human smugglers.

'On crime, it's hard not to also think about the border  southern border  and I'm wondering with Title 42 still set to end of this month, what are Republicans doing to try to either prepare for that influx or maybe stop title 42 from actually ending?' DailyMail.com asked McCarthy on Thursday.

'Fire and foremost, title 42 should not be lifted,' McCarhty insisted. 'For everyone who doesn't understand title 42 simply says if you're coming across the border illegally, you can be removed back to your country. I think that's an appropriate thing to do.'

'Our border's not secure and what has happened to them? More than a million people have come across this border,' he added.

Title 42 is set to end in less than two weeks on May 23, which internal predictions say will lead to a tripling of migration at the southern border amid already record high numbers of encounters.

Black Rifle Coffee Company was handing out coffee at the memorial. The pro-military, pro-police company has a roast called 'Thin Blue Line', where some proceeds go toward benefit law enforcement officers and their families

McCarthy stands and speak with Capitol Police and other law enforcement at the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in northwest Washington, D.C. on Thursday

McCarthy slammed Biden's policies as allowing for more fentanyl to cross the border undetected and said more people than ever on the Terrorist Watchlist are getting through.

Katko said that while he has been working on border issues since 1994, 'I've never seen the border like it is now'

'Every single law enforcement, every single community in this country is being affected by it,' the congressman added. 'We're burying our children at rapid rates, like Kevin noted, because of the fentanyl that's coming across. The cartels have never been more powerful.'

'The answer is quite simple,' Katko proposed. 'Keep 42 in place.'

Katko said that if Republicans regain a majority in November they will make it a priority to finish building the border wall and implement electronic supplemental security systems to the border, as well as reinstate the Remain in Mexico policy.
Smart motorways without a hard shoulder are three times more lethal to break down on than those that retain the safety lane, a report found yesterday.

And the chance of such crashes resulting in minor injuries were nearly two-thirds higher on those roads, according to the National Highways analysis.

It also emerged that life-saving technology designed to alert traffic officers to vehicles marooned in live lanes is missing as many as 100 incidents a month.

The stopped vehicle detection (SVD) technology is flagging around 1,000 incidents monthly.

But more than 10 per cent are not being spotted, National Highways boss Nick Harris said.

It comes after this newspaper revealed how SVD failed to detect a lorry which broke down on a stretch of the M3 with its hard shoulder permanently removed.

Smart motorways without a hard shoulder have a poorer safety record for crashes involving stopped vehicles than conventional motorways, new figures show (stock image)

There are three main categories of smart motorway  ALR: No hard shoulder.  Dynamic hard shoulder running (DHS): The hard shoulder is opened as a live lane during busy periods.  Controlled: A permanent hard shoulder, with traffic flow controlled via variable speed limits. Advertisement

A van smashed into the back of the lorry five minutes after it stopped on the inside lane last week, leaving the driver with serious injuries and causing a pile-up.

It is believed a nearby bridge was blocking radar signals used in SVD technology, meaning the lorry went undetected. A Daily Mail investigation last year found more than one in ten safety cameras on the roads were either broken, misted up or facing the wrong way.

In January, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps ordered that around 100 miles of smart motorway projects be paused until more safety data becomes available.

But another 100 miles of the schemes are going ahead. Vehicles often become marooned in live traffic on these roads because their hard shoulder is turned into an extra lane.

Yesterday Mr Harris said 'of course we want it [SVD] to work even better', but defended the rollout of smart motorways.

He said that when data on incidents involving moving vehicles is included, all-lane running (ALR) smart motorways are safer than conventional ones.

However, the analysis shows there are still more serious injuries or deaths on ALR roads than the two other types of smart motorway, which either retain the hard shoulder permanently or use it as a live lane intermittently.

Edmund King, president of the AA, said: 'The five-year average shows that when a vehicle is stopped in a live lane of any form of smart motorway, it is worse across all safety metrics when compared to a motorway with a permanent hard shoulder.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps published a smart motorways evidence stocktake and action plan in March 2020, which included 18 measures to boost safety and public confidence in the roads

'Last month, more than eight out of ten drivers told us they would find breaking down on a smart motorway a stressful experience compared to just 57 per cent who would be stressed breaking down on a motorway with a permanent hard shoulder.

'This clearly shows that most drivers are still not convinced that removing the hard shoulder is a smart move.'

Claire Mercer, whose husband Jason was killed on a stretch of the M1 with no hard shoulder in 2019, said: 'You can come up with all the statistics you like. But all it should come down to is common sense, because what's more dangerous, breaking down in a live lane or breaking down on a road with a hard shoulder to pull onto?'

A emergency refuge area on the M3 smart motorway near Camberley in Surrey

Pulvinder Dhillon, 68, from London, was killed after her car was struck by a van

Yesterday's report found that, from 2016-2020, there were 0.06 serious injuries or deaths per billion vehicle miles travelled after motorists broke down on 'controlled' smart motorways, which permanently retain the hard shoulder.

But on ALR smart motorways, the figure was 0.19  more than three times higher.

For conventional motorways the figure was 0.09, meaning ALR smart motorways are more than twice as lethal as these roads.

For collisions involving minor injuries, the rate was 0.20 on controlled motorways and 0.18 on conventional. But for ALR it was 0.33  65 per cent higher.

When incidents involving moving vehicles are included, there were 1.38 people seriously injured or killed on ALR roads, 1.30 on 'controlled' and 1.17 on 'dynamic hard shoulder' smart motorways, which use the hard shoulder as a live lane at peak times only. The figure for conventional was 1.45.

Mr Harris said: 'Our very clear ambition is to get ALR to the same level of performance on stopped lane incidents as conventional motorways. I don't think SVD is a magic solution, but it is part of it... we want it to work even better.'
The is the moment a Chicago cop was shot in the neck by a serial-criminal and Porsche thief who hid a gun in his crotch and fired 50 rounds at officers from the backseat of a squad car.

The Civilian Office of Police Accountability released the chilling bodycam footage on Thursday showing Lovelle Jordan, 27, shooting three officers on arrival at a station in the West Side on July 30, 2020.

The criminal had been arrested for attempting to steal a 2018 Porsche in the Austin neighborhood.

Officers had seen Jordan enter the vehicle according to a 2020 police report and when they attempted to remove him from the car, he 'vigorously resisted arrest'.

Cops could be seen on bodycam footage wrestling with Jordan, with one officer completely on top of him, as they worked to handcuff the criminal.

'You're f**king ballsy, I'll tell you,' one of the officers can be heard saying. He can also be heard telling Jordan not to 'worry' about the weed on him while they searched him.

Lovelle Jordan, 27, (pictured) exits a squad car at Grand Central Police Station on July 30, 2020 before opening fire and shooting three police officers with a gun he had stashed in his crotch

Lovelle Jordan, 27, had been arrested for attempting to steal a Porsche on North Avenue in Chicago's 25th District

Jordan had been arrested several times in the past (pictured) and was sentenced to 31 years in prison in April 2022 but died on April 19 from unknown injuries

Jordan started screaming that he had his phone in his pocket and curled up his legs claiming it was because he 'got scared' - but he was actually hiding a gun in his crotch area.

As officers attempted to roll him onto his left side, Jordan can be seen trying to keep his groin area facing the ground to avoid the gun being detected.

Jordan even convinced officers to 'put the handcuffs on the front' because he has a 'medical' condition and had 'insulin in the car' which only made it easier for him to reach his weapon.

As officers pull him off the ground, the Officer Jason Cloherty, 49, said: 'It's over, don't play f**king games.' Authorities managed to find Jordan's phone, money, and drugs, but had not located the weapon.

Officer Jason Cloherty, 49, (pictured) attempted to remove Jordan from the backseat of the police vehicle when he was shot point blank

Cloherty managed to roll toward the back of the vehicle (pictured) after being shot to protect himself and later managed to stand back up to return fire

Cloherty's bodycam footage shows blood streaming on to the pavement and he can be heard struggling to breathe

Upon arriving to the Grand Central District Station, Cloherty attempted to remove Jordan from the backseat, but the convict produced a semi-automatic gun and shot the officer in the neck.

He can be seen on his bodycam footage falling backward and making a choking sound.

Several rounds can be heard as another officer screams: 'Shots fired, shots fired at the police.'

The hit officer can be seen rolling toward the rear of the vehicle to protect himself as blood dripped heavily on the pavement and he began struggling to breathe.

Cloherty was eventually able to stand up and began firing back at Jordan who was hiding between a vehicle and a wall before walking into a station, where several other officer instructed him to sit down and a woman appears to help him inside the building.

Jordan managed to shoot two other officers before he was shot in the arm and was reportedly left paralyzed.

Cloherty was transported to a hospital and survived his injuries. Officers James Rowe and James Kurth, who was also shot, survived their injuries, as well. All three were transported and admitted into the hospital.

Cloherty and another officer handcuffed Jordan (pictured) who resisted arrested and attempted to keep officers away from his groin area by claiming he was 'scared'

Cloherty attempted to hide between a wall and a vehicle at the police station after firing around 50 rounds at officers, injuring three

The six officers who were involved in the shooting were honored in September 2020 for their work.

Jordan was charged with six felony counts of attempted murder, one felony count of aggravated possession of a stolen motor vehicle, two felony counts of drug possession, one felony count of illegal possession of a weapon by a felon, one felony count of being an armed habitual criminal, and two misdemeanor counts of resisting arrest.

At the time of his arrest, he was on parole for gun charges and had just been released from electronic monitoring the month prior.

In April 2022, Jordan was sentenced to 31 years in prison and died on April 19 from unknown injuries.

The footage of the 2020 was released in May 2022 after the Civilian Office concluded their investigation in March.

Crime has continued to rise in the Windy City in 2022, with overall crime up 36 percent. However, shooting incidents are down 13 percent this year.
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NATO has put on a show of strength in Europe in a message to Vladimir Putin as thousands of soldiers from 19 nations take part in war games across the continent.

The Swift Response 22 exercises in North Macedonia involve 4,500 troops from the US, Britain, France, Italy and other allied nations and are taking place against the backdrop of Russian aggression against perceived Western expansion.

There are similar military drills being held across five locations in Europe this month, to show Finland what they will soon be joining.

Swift Response involves parachute drops, helicopter-borne air assaults and sees French paratroopers and an Italian working to a British chain of command.

Exercise Hedgehog is also taking place on the Estonia-Latvia border this month featuring 18,000 NATO troops in the biggest military exercise in Estonia which takes place every four years.

Today, Finland announced it intends to start the formal application process to join the military pact, more than doubling NATO's presence on Russia's borders from 754 miles to 1,584 miles.

The decision is a spectacular backfire for Putin who invaded Ukraine in part through fears of Volodymyr Zelensky joining the US-led alliance.

Over the past 10 days, soldiers from Albania, France, Greece, Italy, North Macedonia, Montenegro, the UK and the US have taken part in the exercises in North Macedonia, which have included parachute jumps at several locations around the country.

NATO has put on a show of strength in Europe in a message to Vladimir Putin as 10,000 soldiers from 19 nations take part in war games across the continent

Italian paratroopers parachute after jumping from C-130 aircraft in today's NATO drills

British soldiers participate in an exercise as NATO allied troops carry out Swift Response 22 exercises during a media open day at Krivolak army base, North Macedonia

A British Chinook helicopter transports a howitzer and a truck during the Swift Response 22 military exercise

Soldiers take part in the NATO military exercise 'Flaming Sword 2022' at a training range near the village Maisiejunai

NATO forces' U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopters fly by during the NATO exercise 'Swift Respone 22' at the Krivolak Army Training Area, near Negotino

Recent exercises involved around soldiers from North Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, Greece, Italy, as well as France, the UK and the US

British soldiers prepare for Swift Response 22 exercises carried out by NATO allied troops

North Macedonia formally joined NATO in March 2020. The small Balkan country of 1.8million people has an active military of about 8,000 personnel.

'I think it's a fantastic demonstration of what we can do as an alliance and our ability to project combat power if asked to do so and how quickly we can do it,' Maj. Gen. Peter B. Andrysiak, U.S. Army Deputy Commanding General for Europe and Africa, told reporters after an hourlong display in North Macedonia.

The purpose of the exercises is to showcase the ability for large ground combat operations for member states and allies.



Earlier, Russian state TV accused the US of erecting a 'new iron curtain' in Europe in a furious response to Finland announcing its intention to join NATO.

The 'Swift Response 22' exercises involve forces from the US, Britain, France, Italy and other allied nations and are taking place against the backdrop of Russian aggression against perceived Western expansion

NATO exercise 'Swift Response 22' is part of the exercise 'DEFENDER EUROPE 22' at the Krivolak Army Training Area

British soldiers attend the NATO exercise 'Swift Response 22' at the Krivolak Army Training Area, near Negotino

Spain's F-18 jet fighter takes part in the NATO military exercise 'Flaming Sword 2022' at a training range near the village of Maisiejunai

Today, Finland announced it intends to start the formal application process to join the military pact, more than doubling NATO's presence on Russia's borders from 754 miles to 1,584 miles

British communications officers in North Macedonia take part in the NATO drills as a show of strength for the military alliance

Italian paratroopers jump from a C-130 aircraft as NATO allied troops carry out Swift Response 22 exercises

The exercises demonstrate the NATO states' ability to deploy anywhere around the world and that its soldiers can operate together professionally and successfully

US Black Hawk helicopters take part in the Swift Response 22 military exercise at the Krivolak Military Training Center

This morning, president Sauli Niinisto and prime minister Sanna Marin said they want to join the security alliance 'without delay', with Sweden set to follow suit within days, drastically ramping up tensions between Russia and the West.

The Kremlin had previously threatened it would secure 'the entire destruction' of the country and 'the most undesirable consequences', and today said it would 'be forced to take retaliatory steps', both 'military-technical and other'.

A Number 10 spokesman said the UK is 'fully committed to NATO's open door policy' and said the only threatening behaviour in Europe has been Russia's invasion.

When asked what he would say to Russia, Niinisto replied: 'You caused this. Look in the mirror.'

After the announcement, Russian state TV's Olga Skabeyeva said: 'The main beneficiary here is America and Biden. And the main aim is a new iron curtain from the Barents to the Black Sea.'

To show Finland what they will be joining, forces are holding the military drills in five locations across Europe

NATO enhanced Forward Presence battlegroup tanks and infantry fighting vehicles fire during Iron Spear exercises in Latvia yesterday

Spanish servicemen take part in NATO military exercises during the Iron Spear 2022 drills in Latvia yesterday

Spanish troops of NATO enhanced Forward Presence battlegroup pose for a picture during Iron Spear 2022 military exercise in Adazi military field

Meanwhile Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the move was 'definitely' a threat to Russia and warned it would make Europe more unstable.

He said Finland had made 'unfriendly steps' against Russia and it was a cause for regret and a reason to impose a symmetrical response.

Asked whether this presented a threat to Russia, Peskov said: 'Definitely. NATO expansion does not make our continent more stable and secure.'

Sweden is expected to follow Finland with its own bid which could come as soon as next week, with a parliament debate on Monday followed by a special cabinet meeting where the formal decision to apply will be taken, Daily Expressen said.

The major policy shift was announced today in a joint statement by President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin (pictured) today

President Sauli Niinisto and prime minister Sanna Marin released the anticipated statement this morning

Russian state TV has accused the US of erecting a 'new iron curtain' in Europe in response to the decision

Finland, which shares an 830-mile border and a difficult past with Russia, has previously remained outside NATO

Sauli Niinisto (pictured during a meeting with Boris Johnson yesterday) believes the move would strengthen Finland's security

A special committee will announce Finland's decision on a membership bid on Sunday although it could take until October before the country is formally admitted to the pact.

The major policy shift which completely rewrites Europe's post WWII alignment comes a day after Boris Johnson signed security pacts with Helsinki and Stockholm pledging Britain would come to their aid if they come under Russian attack.

In their statement today, Niinisto and Marin said: 'Now that the moment of decision-making is near, we state our equal views, also for information to the parliamentary groups and parties.

'NATO membership would strengthen Finland's security. As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defence alliance.

'Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay.

'We hope that the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days.'

Finland, which shares an 830-mile border and a difficult past with Russia, has previously remained outside the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation to maintain friendly relations with its eastern neighbour.

Earlier this morning, former prime minister Alexander Stubb said: 'I have been waiting for this day for 30 years.

'Announcement on Finnish NATO membership imminent.'

Sweden is expected to imminently follow Finland with an application to join the Western military pact.

The Nordic nations have been rattled by Moscow's war against its pro-Western neighbour, which has bolstered domestic support for joining the alliance - and the security that membership would provide.

After today's announcement, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said the eventual membership process would be 'smooth and swift'.

'This is a sovereign decision by Finland, which NATO fully respects. Should Finland decide to apply, they would be warmly welcomed into NATO,' Stoltenberg said.

Denmark's Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen also said he will push for a quick admission process.

'Denmark will of course warmly welcome Finland to NATO. (It) will strengthen NATO and our common security,' Frederiksen said on Twitter. 'Denmark will do everything for a quick admission process after the formal application.'

Meanwhile Volodymyr Zelensky 'commended' Finland's readiness to apply to join the NATO alliance in a phone call with Niinisto.

'We also discussed Ukraine's European integration. And - defence interaction,' he wrote on Twitter.

Mr Johnson and Finland's President Sauli Niinisto both met the media at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki, Finland, on Wednesday

Why are Sweden and Finland not in NATO? Both Finland and Sweden have been militarily non-aligned since WWII. Sweden maintained its policy of neutrality - which had begun in the early 19th century - throughout the war wanting to avoid being drawn into a conflict that was engulfing the nearby powers of Germany and the Soviet Union. Instead, Sweden profited from its neutrality by exporting iron ore to the Nazis and sharing military intelligence with the Allies and training their refugee soldiers. Meanwhile Finland changed sides in the conflict, first being invaded by Joseph Stalin and assisting the Nazis, before fighting against Hitler's troops. When NATO was formed in 1949 for a Western military alliance, Sweden decided not to join and continue its neutrality, introducing a security policy that secured its non-alignment in peace and neutrality in war. In 1994, Stockholm decided to join the NATO programme Partnership for Peace (PfP), aimed to build trust between member states and other European countries, but until now it has not signalled a desire to fully join the alliance. Finland is also a PfP member but has similarly stated its desire to remain neutral since the war. The EU member state was part of the Russian Empire and won independence during the 1917 Russian revolution but it nearly lost it fighting the Soviet Union in World War Two. Having been invaded by Russia in 1939 and sharing a long border with the superpower, Finland wanted to stay out of future conflicts, giving it the freedom to maintain a strong relationship with Moscow and the West while enjoying a free market economy. Advertisement

Any NATO expansion is bound to spark anger from Vladimir Putin, who has warned Sweden and Finland against joining.

The Russian tyrant has historically pushed back at any eastward expansion of the alliance and has strongly condemned any notions of Ukraine joining. He claimed Ukraine's closeness with the West was one reason behind his invasion.

Moscow lawmaker Vladimir Dzhabarov recently warned Finland that a formal application would mean 'the destruction of the country', while another Kremlin spokesman Alexander Grushko threatening 'the most undesirable consequences'.

But Moscow's mounting warnings and threatening rhetoric appear only to have strengthened Finland's and Sweden's resolve to join.

It comes after Britain pledged yesterday to come to Sweden and Finland's aid should either of the countries come under Russian attack.

Boris Johnson signed security pacts with his Swedish and Finnish counterparts during visits to the countries on Wednesday.

The pacts could see British troops sent to the two nations in the event of a Russian invasion from '21st century tyrant' Putin - who has threatened 'military and political consequences' should either country join the NATO alliance.

Johnson said the countries must be free to decide whether to join NATO without 'fear of retaliation' in a stark message to Putin.

The PM said the 'mutual security assurances' would see the countries involved come to each other's aid in the event of an attack.

Asked whether British troops could be sent to Finland in the event of a Russian invasion, the PM said: 'Yes, we will come to each other's assistance including with military assistance.'

He said the UK would be prepared to offer Sweden 'whatever Sweden requested', if Moscow followed through with threats of a military offensive.

Speaking at a press conference in Helsinki alongside Niinisto, Johnson said the two countries would 'always come to one another's aid'.

'The security declaration, the solemn declaration we have signed today, ensures that our two nations can intensify our partnership and take it to unparalleled heights, both latitudinal and metaphorical,' he said.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Sweden's Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson signed documents as they met at her summer residence in Harpsund, Sweden

'From the high north, to the Baltics and beyond, our armed forces will train, operate and exercise together, marrying our defence and security capabilities and formalising a pledge that we will always come to one another's aid.

'Because this is not a short-term stop gap, Sauli.

'This is not a short-term stop gap as you consider Nato membership, but an enduring assurance between two nations, an assurance that brings us ever closer as we face the challenges of today, the threats of tomorrow, side by side.'

Iro Sarkka, a NATO expert from the University of Helsinki, told AFP before the announcement that Niinisto, who had refrained from revealing his stance on membership, had nonetheless dropped hints that he was leaning toward supporting a bid.

'The president no longer talks about the EU defence option or the role of Finland as the mediator between the East and the West,' she said.

On Wednesday, the Finnish parliament's defence committee also concluded that membership of NATO would be the 'best option' for Finland's security, as the Russian invasion had eroded the security situation in Europe.

Putin has issued a series of threats through his Kremlin loyalists towards Finland and Sweden if they try to join NATO

When Russia last tried to seize Finland... and failed More than 80 years ago, the small Finland took on the might of the Soviet Union when dictator Joseph Stalin ordered an invasion after its government refused to give up substantial territory. The Winter War of 1939-1940  which began less than three months after the start of the Second World War  saw Finland's forces use innovative tactics to defy Russia's hopes for a quick, emphatic victory that could have landed Stalin control of the whole country. Instead, Soviet troops  who numbered around one million  were fiercely resisted for nearly three months, with dramatic photos showing how vehicles and equipment had to be abandoned in the face of the opposition and freezing conditions. In that time, Russia suffered more than 300,000 casualties  including 126,900 deaths - and lost up to 3,500 tanks and around 500 aircraft. By comparison, Finland lost 25,900 men out of an original force of around 300,000. Stories of Finnish heroics include that of a Finnish farmer who became the deadliest sniper in history after killing 505 Soviet troops. In the fighting, Finland also pioneered the use of the improvised grenade the Molotov cocktail, which was named after the Soviet Union's foreign minister. Ultimately however, the sheer numerical superiority of the Soviet Union's forces took its toll and Finland's government was eventually forced to sign a peace agreement that forced them to give up around ten per cent of their territory. Despite the defeat, Finland emerged with its sovereignty intact and its international reputation enhanced, whilst the Soviet Union was kicked out of the League of Nations and was condemned by other world leaders for the illegal invasion. Finnish sniper Simo Hayha emerged a hero after racking up the most sniper kills in the history of warfare. Aged 33 when the war broke out, Hayha quickly acquired a fearsome reputation, striking the enemy unseen and unheard from hidden positions up to 300 yards from his target. Nicknamed The White Death, Hayha was a prime target for the Soviets, who targeted him with mortars and heavy artillery to halt his killing spree, which once claimed 25 men in one day. Finland then allied with Nazi Germany against the Soviets in what was known as the Continuation War in 1941, with Helsinki trying to retake its lost territories. After a ceasefire was agreed in the Moscow Armistice in 1944, Finland was ordered to expel Nazi troops stationed in the country, prompting the Lapland War with Germany. At the Paris Peace Treaty, Finland was classified as an ally with Nazi Germany and ordered to pay reparations. The country then pursued a policy of neutrality, maintaining a free market economy and democracy despite enjoying a strong relationship with the Soviet Union. Advertisement

A large majority in Finland's parliament backs membership.

'It is 100 per cent certain that Finland will apply and quite likely that it will be a member by the end of the year,' researcher Charly Salonius-Pasternak of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs told AFP before Thursday's announcement.

For Finland, the next step is for the President and Ministerial Committee on Foreign and Security Policy - a body made up of the president, prime minister and up to six other cabinet ministers - to meet on Sunday.

The committee will make the formal decision for Finland to submit an application, with the proposal then presented to parliament.

After an official bid is submitted to the alliance, lawmakers in all 30 NATO member states would need to ratify its application, a process that can take months.

Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said on Tuesday he believed Finland could be a full NATO member 'at the earliest' on October 1.

'The NATO secretary general has said that this process will take between four and 12 months. My own impression is that it might be closer to four months than 12 months,' Haavisto said.

Swedish prime minister Magdalena Andersson said her country would be safer as a result of the mutual assistance agreement with the UK. 'Are we safer with this declaration? Yes we are. Of course this means something.'

Finnish president Sauli Niinisto echoed the feeling later, saying the deal with the UK 'increases enormously Finnish security'.

He added he did not view joining the military alliance as a 'zero sum game'. 'Joining Nato would not be against anybody,' the Finnish president said.

Describing the declaration as a 'pivotal moment in our shared history', Mr Johnson added: 'It's pivotal because... the Russian invasion of Ukraine has changed the equation of European security and it has rewritten our reality and reshaped our future.

'We've seen the end of the post-Cold War period and the invasion of Ukraine sadly has opened a new chapter'.

Finland shares a lengthy land border with Russia and is only about 250 miles from St Petersburg.

Russia's February 24 invasion of Ukraine has led to a swift turnaround in Finnish and Swedish public opinion in favour of NATO membership, which until recently had little backing.

A poll published Monday by Finnish public broadcaster Yle showed that a record 76 percent of Finns now support joining the alliance, up from the steady 20 to 30 percent registered in recent years.

Public opinion has also surged in Sweden, albeit to lower levels, with around half of Swedes now in favour.

Sweden's ruling Social Democratic Party said Monday it would announce its position on the NATO issue on May 15. A favourable stance would provide a clear parliamentary majority for an application.

Elisabeth Braw, an expert on Nordic countries' defence at the American Enterprise Institute, told AFP that even though Stockholm appears more hesitant than Helsinki, she believes the two countries 'will do the application at the same time'.

Traditionally accustomed to lengthy consensus-building debates on major issues, Sweden has been caught off-guard by Finland's swift turnaround.

'The Social Democrats in Sweden have always said: 'We'll think about this when Finland joins'... because they thought Finland would never join', Braw said.

A policy reversal for the party, which ruled for an uninterrupted 40 years between the 1930s and 1970s, would be historic.

Sweden is officially non-aligned militarily, although it is a NATO partner and abandoned its position of strict neutrality after the end of the Cold War.

Finland has a long history with Russia. In 1917 it declared independence after 150 years of Russian rule.

During World War II, its vastly outnumbered army fought off a Soviet invasion, before a peace deal saw it cede several border areas to the Soviet Union.

During the Cold War, Finland remained neutral in exchange for guarantees from Moscow that it would not invade.

So the turnaround in sentiment on NATO would have been unthinkable just a few months ago.

As recently as January, Marin said membership was 'very unlikely' during her term.

But after two decades of public support for membership remaining steady at 20-30 per cent, the war caused a huge surge.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov euphemistically warned the move would 'not improve' the security situation in Europe.

'We have repeatedly said that the alliance remains a tool geared towards confrontation and its further expansion will not bring stability to the European continent,' Peskov said.

Any membership bid must be accepted by all 30 NATO states, a process that could take months although members have indicated they want to fast-track the bid.
At least five people were arrested after a brawl broke out at an annual gathering at Florida's Lake George simply - and apparently appropriately - known as 'mayhem.'

The lake, about 40 miles from Daytona, holds 'Mayhem at Lake George' every year where dozens of boats and hundreds of people gather to party and enjoy the water.

The fight, which was caught on video, took place both on and around a deck where a DJ had set up to spin records on the water.

Several men are throwing punches back and forth in the fight. At least one person suffered a serious head wound from the brawl.

At least one pair of scrappers drags the one another from atop the DJ booth into the lake.

At least five people were arrested after a brawl broke out at an annual gathering at Florida's Lake George simply - and apparently appropriately - known as 'mayhem'

The fight, which was caught on video, took place both on and around a deck where a DJ had set up to spin records on the water

Several men are throwing punches back and forth in the fight. At least one person suffered a serious head wound from the brawl

At least one pair of scrappers drags the one another from atop the DJ booth into the lake

The lake, about 40 miles from Daytona, holds 'Mayhem at Lake George' every year where dozens of boats and hundreds of people gather to party and enjoy the water

The DJ himself grabs a microphone and attempts to keep the peace among the revelers.

'People are just out there to have a good time, but like anything else, when you have a huge concentration of people like this and you have alcohol involved, you do have some incidents,' Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood said.

The injured man was difficult to get to because of the mass of humanity and boats separating him from local authorities.

'It took a while to get the medical attention to him. It took a while to get him to a landing zone where air one had to improvise to land which was a feat in itself. They landed on basically a postage stamp,' Chitwood said.

The injured man was taken to land then flown to a hospital. Chitwood said his office was investigating the incident and charges were pending.

'People are just out there to have a good time, but like anything else, when you have a huge concentration of people like this and you have alcohol involved, you do have some incidents,' Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood said

Chitwood's crew made a total of 42 stops throughout 'Mayhem' and gave at least 50 warnings and wrote eight citations for the crime of Boating Under the Influence

The DJ himself (pictured right) grabs a microphone and attempts to keep the peace among the revelers

The injured man was difficult to get to because of the mass of humanity and boats separating him from local authorities

The injured man was taken to land then flown to a hospital. Local Sheriff Mike Chitwood said his office was investigating the incident and charges were pending

Chitwood's crew made a total of 42 stops throughout 'Mayhem' and gave at least 50 warnings and wrote eight citations for the crime of Boating Under the Influence.

The sheriff clarified that most of the people there were well-behaved and first responders were there for about 12 hours.

'As a community, you have to put all these resources out there because something horrible could go wrong,' Chitwood said.

Five people were arrested, three for 'BUI' and two for disorderly conduct.

Chitwood says he's hopeful a new law that will go into effect in July that cracks down on 'pop-up events' could be used to deter the costs to the county.
German investigators said Thursday they foiled a 'Nazi terror attack' targeting a school as they arrested a 16-year-old boy overnight suspected of planning the bombing.

Police in the city of Essen stormed the teen's room in the early hours of the morning, taking him into custody and uncovering 16 'pipe bombs', as well as anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim material.

Essen police said they also found spears and other sharp weapons at the property.

'The police prevented a nightmare,' said Herbert Reul, interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) state.

Some of the pipe bombs found contained nails, but officers did not find any detonators, Reul said, adding there were 'indications suggesting the young man has serious psychiatric problems and suicidal thoughts'.

Material found so far in the suspect's room include his own writing which constituted 'a call for urgent help by a desperate young man.'

The suspect was allegedly planning to target his current school, the Don Bosco gymnasium, or another where he studied previously.

Police vehicles are parked in front of the Don Bosco High School in Essen, Germany, Thursday, May 12, 2022. Police in the western German city of Essen seized weapons from the apartment of a 16-year-old student allegedly plotting an attack on a local school

Police officers carry objects, including several stabbing weapons and spears, from the suspect's home in Essen, Germany, Thursday, May 12, 2022

Don Bosco gymnasium (pictured) was closed on Thursday along with a second educational institution as investigators undertook fingertip searches as the locations to ensure that no bombs had been placed on site

'All democrats have a common task to fight against racism, brutalisation and hate,' said NRW's deputy premier Joachim Stamp, as he thanked police for 'preventing a suspected Nazi terror attack'.

The suspect is being questioned while investigators continue to comb his home for evidence.

Investigators believe the boy was acting alone.

They said the police had been tipped off by another teen who informed them that the young man 'wanted to place bombs in his school', located about 800 metres from his home.

Don Bosco gymnasium was closed on Thursday along with a second educational institution as investigators undertook fingertip searches as the locations to ensure that no bombs had been placed on site.

The director of the Don Bosco gymnasium said in a statement: 'The school community is shocked and dismayed by the apparently planned attack and the first police findings, the results of which we are still awaiting.

'We should not engage in speculation. We are happy and grateful that the information about the planned crime could prevent the worst. We would like to thank the school management, all those responsible and the officials of the investigating authorities for their careful and level-headed approach.'

Germany has been rocked by several far-right assaults in recent years, sparking accusations that the government was not doing enough to stamp out neo-Nazi violence.

In February 2020 a far-right extremist shot dead 10 people and wounded five others in the central German city of Hanau.

Relatives, friends and politicians commemorate the dead of the Hanau mass shooting at the grave of Ferhat Unvar, Hamza Kurtovic and Said Nesar Hashemi, three of the victims, at a memorial service at the main cemetery in Hanau on the first anniversary on February 19, 2021

One year ago a local far-right extremist named Tobias Rathjen shot dead nine people of immigrant descent at two bars in Hanau before killing his mother and shooting himself (memorial graffiti pictured in Hanau)

Large amounts of material championing conspiracy theories and far-right ideology were subsequently found in the gunman's apartment.

And in 2019, two people were killed after a neo-Nazi tried to storm a synagogue in Halle on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur.

Germany's centre-left-led government under Chancellor Olaf Scholz took office in December pledging a decisive fight against far-right militants and investigators in April carried out country-wide raids against 'neo-Nazi networks', arresting four suspects.

The suspects targeted in the raids were believed to belong to the far-right martial arts group Knockout 51, the banned Combat 18 group named after the order in the alphabet of Adolf Hitler's initials, US-based Atomwaffen (Atomic Weapons) Division or the online propaganda group Sonderkommando 1418.

German authorities were also battling to clean extremists from within their ranks.

Last year, the state of Hesse said it was dissolving Frankfurt's elite police force after several officers were accused of participating in far-right online chats and swapping neo-Nazi symbols.
Outgoing White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Thursday she'll miss Fox News' Peter Doocy, bragged she did more briefings than all Trump press secretaries combined and said the hardest part of the job were the personal threats, some of which had her kids name on them.

Psaki will hold her last press briefing of President Joe Biden's administration on Friday. She reflected on her 15 months on the job during a breakfast with reporters that was sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.

She revealed she's received death threats, has had people threaten to come to her house, and that her kids have been threatened by name.

'The thing that has been hardest personally is I have had threats. I have had nasty letters, texts to me with my personal address, the names of my children. It crosses lines, you know, and that's when it becomes a little scary,' she said.

Psaki, 43, has two children, aged six and four. Her husband, Greg Mecher, has served as a Democratic staffer on Capitol hill.

'I'm, in many ways, a public figure. People can like me dislike me, that's okay. You know, it's, I believe in I'm very much in freedom of speech. My kids are 6 and 4 And I worry about their safety. And that is a real concern to me and has been so and that can be of concern to public officials,' she said.

She said some of the threats were reported to the Secret Service.

'There is a circulation of my address among the Arlington Republican Party,' she said.

Outgoing White House press secretary Jen Psaki reflected on her time on the job ahead of her final briefing; Psaki leaves high-profile job on Friday

Jen Psaki said the hardest part of her job is that she and her children have received threats - Psaki, her husband and kids are seen at the annual Turkey Pardoning at the White House this past November

Psaki is not the first press secretary to be threatened.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was Trump's first spokesperson, received Secret Service protection during her tenure due to threats and after being confronted in restaurants by critics of the Trump administration.

In her reflection on her job, Psaki said coming in after the turbulent Trump years, she was focused on reestablishing and rebuilding 'trust with the public and trust in institutions and trust with the media.'

'I've done more press briefings than every single Trump press secretary combined,' Psaki noted.

The Trump administration did not hold many press briefings. Stephanie Grisham, during her tenure, did not hold a single one. Donald Trump tended use Twitter and campaign rallies to communicate with the public.

Biden's administration sought to reset relations with the press. Psaki held her first briefing on Biden's first day in office. She has has answered reporters' questions nearly every weekday of the almost 500 days that Biden has been in office.

After Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, she is the most known face of the Biden administration.

She is set to leave the high-profile job on Friday and will be replaced by her principal deputy, Karine Jean-Pierre, who is poised to become the first black person and openly gay person to serve as White House press secretary.

After Friday's final briefing, Psaki will have done 225 press briefings. The four people who held the job under President Donald Trump did a combined 205 briefings, according to data from Martha Joynt Kumar of the White House Transition Project, which tracks this kind of data.

Psaki said she will miss Fox News' Peter Doocy (center); the two clashed many times during her press briefings

White House press secretary Jen Psaki speaks to member of the media aboard Air Force One last Friday - she will hold her last press briefing this Friday

After Friday's final briefing, Psaki will have done 225 press briefings. The four people who held the job under President Donald Trump did a combined 205 briefings

Psaki received rock star status among some members of the Democratic Party during her briefings, particularly when she delivered what were called 'Psaki bombs,' her deft comebacks to tough questioning, usually from Fox News White House Correspondent Peter Doocy.

'I will miss him,' Psaki said of Doocy.

'I think we have a very good professional relationship,' she said.

Psaki had to defend herself last month after she was asked on a podcast Doocy was a 'stupid son of a b***h' or just played one on TV.

'He works for a network that provides people with questions that, nothing personal to any individual including Peter Doocy, but might make anyone sound like a stupid son of a b***h,' she had said.

But Psaki said Monday the Biden administration was not 'focused here on a fight with Fox.'

'We have healthy debates and discussions. Doesn't mean I agree with his line of questioning on most days,' she said of Doocy.

Psaki is a longtime Democratic operative.

'I have worked more in the White House than anywhere else in my career,' she noted on Thursday.

She served as communications director during President Barack Obama's administration. And she served as John Kerry's spokesperson at the State Department when he was secretary of state.

Between the Obama and Biden administrations she was a political commentator on CNN.

She has not said what she will do next but it's been reported she will sign a contract with MSNBC.
President Yoon Suk-yeol places his right hand on his chest to pay tribute to the national flag during the first Cabinet meeting of his administration at the presidential office in Yongsan District, Seoul, Thursday. Joint Press Corps





By Nam Hyun-woo







President Yoon Suk-yeol on Thursday appointed Foreign Affairs Minister Park Jin and Interior and Safety Minister Lee Sang-min, even though the ministers' confirmation reports were not adopted by the National Assembly amid objections from the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK).







The move is interpreted as Yoon's intention to meet the quorum for his first Cabinet meeting held later in the day.







A presidential aide told reporters on condition of anonymity that Yoon has approved the appointments of Park and Lee.







Unlike appointing the prime minister, a president does not need the Assembly's approval in naming ministers.







President Yoon Suk-yeol shakes hands with Foreign Affairs Minister Park Jin during the first Cabinet meeting of the Yoon administration at the presidential office in Yongsan District, Seoul, Thursday. Joint Press Corps




A P&O Ferries vessel was found to have a record number of faults by inspectors, including dirty working conditions, rescue boats that didn't work and fire safety failures.

The Pride of Kent was detained in Dover for six weeks in March by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA), which found 47 failures on the ship.

It comes after the company suddenly sacked 800 staff in March and replaced them with agency workers in an effort to cut costs, a move that infuriated unions and politicians.

The Pride of Kent, pictured here alongside the Pride of Canterbury in Dover, was found to have a record number of faults

This led to most of P&O Ferries' vessels being detained and inspected by the MCA, which then reported faults with them to the Paris Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), an alliance of maritime authorities from 27 nations, including the UK.

The MOU listed the deficiencies, but only provided limited details.

Analysis by the PA news agency found the examination of Pride of Kent uncovered the most failures of any of the 1,209 Port State Control inspections of ro-ro ferries - which vehicles can be driven on to and off from - within the Paris MOU in the past three years.

The Pride of Kent was detained after failing an initial examination on March 28.

Thirteen of its 47 failures related to fire safety, including the fire detection system being 'not as required', a 'lack of training' on fire drills and inadequate escape routes.

Ten areas of concern with labour conditions were highlighted, such as locations 'not hygienic', an issue with medical care and 'unsafe' electrics.

The crew had a 'lack of training' in how to navigate the ferry and a 'lack of familiarity' with operating its machinery.

Fast rescue boats were 'inoperative' and the provision of lifebuoys was 'not as required'.

Pride of Kent failed two further inspections, before passing at the fourth attempt on Monday.

A P&O Ferries spokesman said: 'We take the safety of our passengers and crew very seriously and look forward to all of our ships welcoming tourist passengers and freight customers again.

'We would like to thank the MCA for their continued engagement in assessing our ships to ensure they meet the highest safety standards.'

Pride of Kent will resume sailings between Dover and Calais 'in the next two weeks', the spokesman added.

The company was blasted by politicians, trade unions and workers after it abruptly sacked 800 staff in March. Pictured are people protesting outside P&O offices in Dover after the sackings

The ferry was first launched in 1991 and can carry up to 2,000 passengers.

Politicians and trade unions raised concerns about the safety of P&O Ferries following the mass sackings.

These have been strongly disputed by the company.

Last week, chief executive Peter Hebblethwaite hit out at 'misinformation' about the firm.

Measures aimed at ensuring seafarers are paid at least the UK's national minimum wage were included in the Queen's Speech on Tuesday.

The Government will introduce legislation banning ferries from docking at UK ports if they pay their workers below that level.

The Spirit of Britain and Pride of Canterbury pictured at the Port of Dover earlier this month. The Spirit of Britain was given permission to resume cross-Channel services at the beginning of May

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said the 'disgraceful actions' of P&O Ferries 'do not represent the principles of our world-leading maritime sector'.

The UK minimum wage for people aged 23 and above is 9.50 per hour.

P&O Ferries pays its new crew an average of 5.50 per hour, which it insists is in line with international maritime laws.

The operator has said it would 'fully welcome' measures to increase pay for all seafarers in British waters as it wants 'a level playing field'.

Irish Ferries, which also uses a low-cost labour model, began competing with the company on the Dover to Calais route in June 2021.
The Taliban has banned men and women from sitting together in restaurants and ordered that public parks are open for each sex on different days.

Women have stopped being issued driver's licenses and are ordered to cover their whole bodies in western city Herat, Afghanistan's third largest.

The formerly liberal city is also the site of a Taliban prison where women are being held without trial simply for taking taxis without male companions.

Other 'immoral offences' prompting women to be locked up include schoolgirls posing for photos with male classmates.

Taliban fighters in armoured cars participate in a military parade in Herat on April 19 this year

Women were pictured behind bars without trial at Herat Central Jail by an ITV crew last week - with the guilty's 'immoral behaviour' including taking taxis without male supervision

It's the latest sign of the Taliban's brutal repression of human rights and women's rights.

The backward slide is also further proof that the radical Islamist group is breaking its promise to rule the country less strictly than during its previous repressive reign.

A Taliban official at the local Ministry for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice confirmed today that authorities have 'instructed that men and women be segregated in restaurants'.

Riazullah Seerat told AFP business owners had been verbally warned that the rule applies 'even if they are husband and wife'.

The Taliban (pictured during the April 19 parade) has moved from a war footing to a regime

One Afghan woman who did not wish to be identified said the manager told her and her husband to sit separately at a Herat restaurant on Wednesday.

Safiullah - a restaurant manager who like many Afghans goes by only one name - confirmed he had received the ministry diktat.

Restaurant manager Safiullah said: 'We have to follow the order, but it has a very negative impact on our business.'

Seerat added his office has issued a decree that Herat's public parks should be segregated by gender, with men and women permitted to visit only on different days.

'We have told women to visit parks on Thursday, Friday and Saturday,' he said.

'The other days are kept for men who can visit for leisure and for exercise.'

Women wanting to exercise on those days should find a 'safe place or do it in their homes', he added.

A burqa-clad women searches through garments at a Herat market last week. Women are now ordered to cover their whole bodies when appearing in public, a new Taliban diktat states

The Taliban previously promised a softer rule than their first stint in power from 1996 to 2001, which was marked by human rights abuses and global condemnation.

But they have increasingly restricted the rights of Afghan girls and women, who have been prevented from returning to secondary schools and many government jobs.

In Herat authorities have ordered driving instructors to stop issuing licenses to female motorists.

Women across the country have been banned from travelling alone.

Last week the authorities ordered them to cover fully in public, preferably with a burqa.

Women were pictured protesting the new burqa decree in Kabul on May 10. Placards read 'Don't take women hostage'. Men are now responsible for their wives' failure to follow the law

Earlier this week footage taken by an undercover camera crew inside Herats central jail found women were incarcerated for minor infringements of ultra-strict clerical law.

Some claimed they had been tasered and beaten, while others told how they were being pressurised to marry members of the Taliban in exchange for their freedom.

The footage, filmed by British Iranian journalist Ramita Navai for an ITV documentary, showed dozens of women huddling in courtyards and more than 50 locked in cells.

One Taliban commander is said to have demanded that a father consent to his daughters marriage by putting a gun to his head.

The film crew found some women had committed suicide by setting themselves on fire or drinking bleach to escape domestic violence after the Taliban, which swept back into power in September last year.

Afghan women shout anti-Taliban slogans in protest against restrictions in December 2021

Khalid Hanafi, acting minister for the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, which replaced the previous womens ministry, said: We want our sisters to live with dignity and safety.

Islamic principles and Islamic ideology are more important to us than anything else.

In March, the Taliban also backtracked on its promise to reopen schools to girls aged 11 and above.

The group was ousted in 2001 by a US-led coalition for harbouring Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, but returned to power after Americas chaotic departure from Afghanistan last year.

Ex-US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (left) poses with Taliban political affairs chief Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (right) in Qatar, September 2020 as they agree plans for America's exit

In the past few months, its leadership has fought internally as it struggles to transition from a war footing to government.

This unrest has pitted hardliners against more pragmatic group members  especially over the issue of women and education.

Although universities opened earlier this year across much of the country, lessons in many areas have been erratic.

Many Afghans have also been outraged at the decision by some younger Taliban to educate their daughters in Pakistan to get around the school closures.
Republicans are sounding the alarm after discovering baby formula is being sent to border facilities while American mothers are facing empty shelves amid massive shortages.

And President Joe Biden's administration is struggling to respond, unable to reassure parents when there will be more formula on empty grocery store shelves and where they can turn to for help.

GOP Representative Kat Cammack tweeted Thursday two images, one showing full shelves of baby formula and food from a processing center at the southern border and another showing empty shelves where baby formula was supposed to be at an American grocery store.

'The first photo is from this morning at the Ursula Processing Center at the U.S. border. Shelves and pallets packed with baby formula,' Cammack wrote. 'The second is from a shelf right here at home. Formula is scarce.'

'This is what America last looks like,' she added.

Meanwhile, concerned parents are begging the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to reopen the nation's largest baby formula plant after the nationwide shortage has left their infants hungry and ill.

But the White House on Thursday defended the closure of the Abbott plant but officials couldn't say when it would reopen.

'The reason we're here is because the FDA took a step to ensure that babies were taking safe formula. There were babies who died from taking this formula so they were doing their jobs,' White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at her daily press briefing.

President Joe Biden got personally involved on Thursday when he met with executives from infant formula manufactures and retailers including Target, Walmart and Nestle's Gerber to discuss the issue.

Biden spoke with manufacturers Reckitt and Gerber about their efforts to increase production.

'Both companies stated that they are operating 24/7 with Gerber, increasing the amount of their infant formula available to consumers by approximately 50% in March and April. Reckitt is supplying more than 30% more product year to date,' the White House said in a readout of the president's meeting.

And his administration announced additional steps it was taking to boost the production of baby formula.

But officials were short on specifics. They couldn't say when the Abbott plant would reopen, they couldn't say when more baby formula would be for sale and Psaki couldn't offer any options when asked who parents can call for help.

The White House defended the FDA's closure of the Abbott plant that resulted in a shortage of baby formula; 'There were babies who died from taking this formula so they were doing their jobs,' White House press secretary Jen Psaki said

GOP Representative Kat Cammack tweeted Thursday outrage over border centers being fully stocked with baby formula while American grocery stores are seeing massive shortages and empty shelves where formula should be

The administration did acknowledge the frustration.

'We absolutely recognize the frustration of parents and family,' a senior administration official said on a briefing call with reporters but added: 'I don't have a particular timeline for you' when asked when parents would see some relief.

The officials also didn't know when Abbott Nutrition's Sturgis, Michigan, plant - one of the largest producers of formula - would be back online.

'We do not today have an estimate for accessibility will come on line. But as we just said that the administration is working around the clock to do everything we can to to bring as much production to market,' the official said.

Abbott said that pending FDA approval, 'we could restart the site within two weeks.'

Once production began, it would take six weeks to eight weeks for the baby formula to be available on shelves.

Among the steps the administration announced was cutting red tape when it comes to the size of the formula.

'We recognize that this is certainly a challenge for people across the country, something the President is very focused on and we're going to do everything we can to cut red tape and and take steps to increase supply on the marketplace,' Psaki said.

Manufacturers typically make multiple sized containers of the product and government programs like WIC often limit what size can be purchased. The administration is working to change those limits to ease the burden on manufactuers and let them rush out one size.

Officials also said the administration would work to increase the imports of baby formula but would have more details available on that at a later date.

And the administration is calling on state attorneys general to crack down on price gouging. Formula has been going for up to $120 a can as desperate parents try to feed their children.

Biden sent a letter on the matter to the Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan on Thursday.

'It is unacceptable for families to lose time and spend hundreds of dollars more because of price gougers actions,' he wrote.

'I therefore ask that the Commission further examine whether there is price gouging in infant formula occurring, thoroughly investigate complaints brought to you through channels such as your fraud hotline, and that you bring all of the Commissions tools to bear if you uncover any wrongdoing. We know State attorneys general are also examining this issue and may be valuable partners in this effort.'

Republican Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marco Rubio of Florida have called on the administration to use the Defense Production Act to get more formula produced.

The White House did not rule it out.

'We're gonna keep every option on the table,' the senior administration official said.

Psaki also said it was an option.

'You have to ensure that it would actually achieve what you're trying to achieve,' she said of using the act.

The formal shortage came in part due to a voluntary recall of several lines of powdered formula from Abbott Nutrition, which is the largest formula manufacturer in the U.S.

Meanwhile, more than 100 House Republicans are demanding that the administration do more to address the crisis.

'This issue is a matter of life and death, and it is time this administration treats it with the appropriate urgency it deserves,' the GOP lawmakers said in the letter to the president on Wednesday.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that there needs to be immediate action to address the baby formula shortage in the U.S., but Congress isn't holding hearings on the issue until the end of the month as mothers scramble to feed their babies.

'You know, everybody has suggestions about 'we make sure it never happens again.' And that's important,' she said during her weekly briefing Thursday.

'But right now, the baby's crying, the baby's hungry. We need to address it right now,' she added. 'And I think we have good focus on it.'

The nationwide share of out-of-stock baby formula hit 40 percent in April

Texas, Tennessee, Missouri, Iowa, North Dakota and South Dakota, seemingly hardest hit by the shortages, reported out-of-stock rates of about 50 percent

Joe Biden prioritizing baby formula production and supply chain during urgent shortage President Biden has directed his administration to work urgently to ensure that during the Abbott Nutrition voluntary recall, infant formula is safe and available for families across the country. Today, President Biden spoke with retailers and manufacturers, including Wal-Mart, Target, Reckitt, and Gerber, to discuss ways we can all work together to do more to help families access infant formula. On February 17, the largest infant formula manufacturer in the countryAbbott Nutritioninitiated a voluntary recall of several lines of powdered formula. This came after concerns about bacterial contamination at Abbott's Sturgis, Michigan, facility after four infants fell ill and two died. The federal governmentincluding the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Department of Agriculture (USDA), Department of Justice (DOJ), Department of Transportation (DOT), U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Commerce (DOC), and the White Househas worked diligently over the last few months to address the shortfall in infant formula production while the Sturgis plant remains offline, including working with other infant formula manufacturers to increase production, expediting the import of infant formula from abroad, and calling on both online and in store retailers to establish purchasing limits to prevent the possibility of hoarding. As a result, more infant formula has been produced in the last four weeks than in the four weeks preceding the recall  despite one of the largest infant formula production facilities in the U.S. being offline. Families across the country remain concerned about the availability of infant formulaespecially families that depend on specialty formulas for which the Sturgis facility is a key supplier. These 20 specialty formulas are used by about 5,000 infants as well as some older children and adults with rare metabolic diseases, and Abbott Nutrition is the only supplier for some of these formulas. Today, President Biden is announcing additional steps to bolster our work to get infant formula onto store shelves as quickly as possible without compromising safety. These steps include: Cutting Red Tape to Get More Infant Formula to Store Shelves Quicker : Manufacturers typically produce many different sizes of the same type of infant formula. Simplifying product offerings allows manufacturers to increase the speed and scale of their infant formula production, stabilizing the overall volume of formula available in the market. The type of formula that companies make and distribute is impacted by the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), administered by USDA. About half of infant formula nationwide is purchased by participants using WIC benefits, based on both federal requirements and additional rules set by individual states that have a large effect on the availability and distribution of infant formula in a given state. To help further increase manufacturers' ability to meet demand and distribute formula, USDA is working with states to make it easier for vulnerable families to purchase the formula they need with their WIC benefits. USDA is urging states to allow WIC recipients to use their WIC benefits on a wider variety of products so that if certain sizes or types of formula are out of stock, they can use their benefits on those that are in stock. And, USDA is urging states to relax their requirements that stores keep a certain amount of formula in stock. This will offer relief to retailers and allow companies to manage inventories to meet demand. Some states are already doing this. All fifty states should. These actions will make it easier for vulnerable families to get the necessary nutritional support for their infants. Calling on the FTC and State Attorneys General to Crack Down on Any Price Gouging or Unfair Market Practices Related to Sales of Infant Formula : Parents looking to feed their child should not be taken advantage of by unscrupulous retailers unfairly jacking up prices. There have been several reports that actors are purchasing formula at retail stores and reselling it online at a markup several times the retail price, especially specialty brands of formula that have experienced the most disruption. These actions not only are costing families hundreds of dollars for formula they need, but drive scarcity on the market. Since February, the FDA has worked with companies, calling on them to issue purchasing limits to help limit such predatory behavior. Many responsible retailers have responded to that call. Now, DOJ is engaging with state attorneys general to encourage them to use their powers to monitor and address price gouging in the infant formula market, and urging them to devote more resources to monitoring predatory behavior in the market for infant formula. And, the President today asked the Federal Trade Commission to use all its available tools to monitor and investigate reports of illegal and predatory conduct. Increasing the Supply of Formula Through Increased Imports : The U.S. normally produces 98% percent of the infant formula it consumes, and trading partners in Mexico, Chile, Ireland, and the Netherlands are key sources of imports. But given the production and distribution issues leading to local short supplies of infant formula, the FDA will, in the coming days, announce specific new steps it is taking concerning importing certain infant formula products from abroad. More information on actions that the FDA announced earlier this week to address the shortage of infant formula can be found here. The Biden-Harris Administration will continue to monitor the situation and identify other ways it can support the safe and rapid increase in the production and distribution of baby formula. Advertisement

Despite the calls for immediately figuring out the shortage, Democrats in Congress have not shown urgency in their policy  instead spending the week focusing on passing $40 billion in aid to Ukraine and pushing for action on codifying Roe v. Wade.

'For a long time now Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, of the Appropriations Committee... has been addressing this issue,' Pelosi said on the topic of baby formula shortage. 'And when I say addressing that includes investigating, looking for other possibilities because  in anticipation just to make sure that something like this would not happen.'

'And we look forward to what the President has to say,' she added, indicating that action won't come from Congress until a White House plan is laid out.

Product recalls, supply chain shortages, and other factors have set off a scramble by some parents to locate enough formula to feed their young children.

The Virginia firm Datasembly released a report revealing a nationwide out-of-stock rate of 43 per cent for formula, putting low income families and those with special needs at risk.

President Joe Biden will meet with industry leaders amid the baby formula shortage as mothers and fathers scramble to find food for their infants

Lawmakers are also pressing for action, but have scheduled hearings that don't start for weeks as the severe shortage continues.

They will hold a hearing in two weeks on infant formula shortages, the House Energy and Commerce Committee said on Wednesday, as it called the situation 'increasingly alarming.'

The House of Representatives panel, which is scheduled to meet May 25, did not name any company executives or other witnesses, but said it would release more details before the meeting.

The hearing will focus on the shortage's causes, efforts to increase production, and what action is needed 'to ensure access to safe formula across the nation,' the committee chair, Representative Frank Pallone, a Democrat, said in a statement.

'The nationwide infant formula shortages are increasingly alarming and demand Congress' immediate attention,' he said.

Pallone said lawmakers stood ready to work with President Joe Biden's administration to resolve the shortage, although it is unclear what specific steps Congress or the White House can take to boost supplies near-term.

Lawmakers will hold a hearing in two weeks on infant formula shortages

House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold hearing on May 25

'The nationwide infant formula shortages are increasingly alarming and demand Congress' immediate attention,' said Rep. Frank Pallone, chair of the committee

Meanwhile, Sen. Mitt Romney slammed the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for 'risking the lives of infants across the nation' by forcing America's biggest baby formula plant to stay closed while desperate parents scramble to feed their children.

'The responsibility falls on the FDA and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to protect infant health by ensuring they have access to safe formula,' Romney penned Tuesday in a letter to FDA Commissioner Robert Califf and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.

'Given the serious implications of the current shortage on infant health, I am deeply concerned about the apparent lack of an effective mitigation strategy and urge both agencies to move as fast as possible to safely resolve this situation.'

Romney wants the agencies to do more to ensure the availability of baby formula, citing 'serious implications of the current shortage on infant health,' and asked for an update on the investigation into the alleged contaminated formula that forced the recall and shutdown of the Abbott Laboratories plant in Sturgis, Michigan.

The plant ceased operation nearly three months ago after a bacterial infection caused deaths of two children and other serious illnesses. Abbott has since denied its plant is responsible for the deaths.

The manufacturer also issued a nationwide recall on its powder baby formulas in February, exacerbating months of spot shortages at pharmacies and supermarkets.

Now, pediatricians, healthcare experts and politicians are urging the FDA to reopen the plant and distribute Abbott's formula to families in need.

'There's still some risk from the formula because we know there are problems at the plant and FDA hasn't identified a root cause,' said Sarah Sorscher of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. 'But it's worth releasing because these infants might die without it.'

The FDA issued a statement to DailyMail.com on Tuesday, alleging it was working with U.S. manufacturers to increase their output and streamlining paperwork to allow more imports.

An Abbott spokesperson also confirmed the manufacturer was 'doing everything we can to address the infant formula supply shortage,' which includes priorities production of formula products and importing products from the company's FDA-registered facility in Ireland on a daily basis.

The company said on Wednesday it could resume infant formula production within two weeks at its Michigan plant as it works with the FDA. From then, it would take six to eight weeks before the product is available on store shelves.

Sen. Mitt Romney (pictured on May 4) slammed the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for 'risking the lives of infants across the nation' by forcing America's biggest baby formula plant to stay closed while parents across the nation are scrambling to feed their children.

Food safety experts are also demanding the FDA reopen America's biggest baby formula plant - the Abbott Laboratories plant in Sturgis, Michigan

Sen. Romney argues the FDA and USDA have a 'responsibility' to mitigate the impacts of the shortage.

'Please provide a comprehensive update on the progress of the investigation, estimated timeline to completion, efforts to coordinate with other federal agencies, including the USDA, and any other authorities that may be necessary to help relieve the formula shortage,' he urged.

'Between the risk of ingesting contaminated formula, and the risk of malnutrition from an inability to receive said formula, the FDA is an exceedingly difficult position protecting infant health.

'I appreciate the FDA's efforts to support case-by-case release of essential product, but the pace of release is far slower than demand felt across our nation. In its attempt to balance safety from contaminated product and safe infant development through formula access, FDA is achieving neither objective.'

The Republican legislator also criticized the quality of the FDA's inspections at the Abbott plant, citing instances of possible contamination dating back to 2019.

'I am alarmed to see documented instances of non-descript contamination in September 24, 2021, and inadequate sample testing to prove formula products met microbiological quality standards in 2019,' Romney wrote.

Sen. Mitt Romney has questioned the FDA's inspection process and is demanding to know what steps were taken to ensure the 'contaminated products did not leave the facility' after initial inspections in 2019 and 2021

'This documentation suggests FDA's routine inspection authority is insufficient to meet consumer safety demands, yet its hammer of near-shutdowns of facilities causes a ripple effect throughout the country.'

The FDA, which claims Abbott failed to maintain sanitary conditions and procedures at its Michigan manufacturing plant that was linked to a cluster of infant Cronobacter sakazaki infections, published its initial inspection findings in March 2022.

The findings showed the facility didn't maintain clean surfaces used in producing and handling the powdered formula. Additionally, inspectors found a history of contamination with the bacteria, including eight instances between fall 2019 and February of this year.

An Abbott spokesperson told DailyMail.com Tuesday that 'thorough investigation' by the FDA and Abbott revealed 'infant formula produced at our Sturgis facility is not the likely source of infection in the reported cases and that there was not an outbreak caused by products from the facility'.

Regardless, Romney has questioned the FDA's inspection process and is demanding to know what steps were taken to ensure the 'contaminated products did not leave the facility' after initial inspections in 2019 and 2021.

Retailers including Target, CVS and Walgreens have begun limiting formula purchases to three containers per customer. An barren shelf meant to store formula is pictured Tuesday at a Target store in Tulsa, Oklahoma

More than half of U.S. states are seeing out-of-stock rates between 40 percent and 50 percent, according to the firm, which collects data from 11,000 locations

Nationwide about 40 percent of large retail stores are out of stock of baby formula, up from 31 percent in mid-April, according to Datasembly, a data analytics firm.

More than half of U.S. states are seeing out-of-stock rates between 40 percent and 50 percent, according to the firm, which collects data from 11,000 locations.

For now, pediatricians and health workers are urging parents who can't find formula to contact food banks or doctor's offices. They warn against watering down formula to stretch supplies or using online DIY recipes.

'For babies who are not being breastfed, this is the only thing they eat,' said Dr. Steven Abrams, of the University of Texas, Austin. 'So it has to have all of their nutrition and, furthermore, it needs to be properly prepared so that it's safe for the smallest infants.'

TIMELINE SHOWS HOW AMERICA'S LARGEST BABY FORMULA PLANT CEASED PRODUCTION Abbott Laboratories, the biggest baby formula supplier in the U.S., ceased production at its Michigan plant in February 2022 amid reports of fatal bacterial infections. A timeline of events shows reveals the shut down was the plant had previously been under scrutiny by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). September 2021: The FDA conducted a four-day inspection of the Abbott Laboratories plant in Sturgis, Michigan. The inspection report revealed the plant 'did not maintain' clean and sanitary conditions in at least one building that manufactured, processed, packaged or held baby formula. FDA officials also observed poor hand washing among Abbott plant staff who 'worked directly with infant formula.' The FDA also noted an instance of improper equipment maintenance and temperature control. October 2021: A whistleblower sends the FDA a 34-page document outlining potential concerns with the Sturgis plant. The document, which was made public by Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro in April 2022, was written by a former plant employee. The employee accused the plant of lax cleaning practices, falsifying records, releasing untested infant formula, and hiding information during an FDA audit in 2019, among other issues. January - March 2022: The FDA conducted multiple inspections at the Sturgis plant over the course of three months in 2022. A ten-page inspection report revealed multiple violations at the facility. The agency alleged the plant failed to ensure that all surfaces that contact infant formula were maintained to prevent cross-contamination. The report states the facility 'did not establish a system of process controls' to ensure the baby formula 'does not become adulterated due to the presence of microorganisms in the formula or the processing environment.' Officials also alleged the plant failed to disclose in an investigation report whether a health hazard existed at the facility. Additionally, the report stated plant workers were did not wear the 'necessary protective material' when working directly with infant formula. February 17: U.S. health officials urgently warn parents against using three popular baby formulas manufactured at the Abbott plant in Michigan. Investigators claim the products were recently linked to bacterial contamination after an infant died and three others fell ill. Abbott voluntarily recalled several major brands and shut down its Sturgis plant. The FDA also said it is investigating four reports of infants who were hospitalized after consuming the formula, including one who died. February 28: Abbott Laboratories expanded its recall of Similac baby formulas after a second infant who was exposed to the powdered baby formula died. April 15: Abbott releases a statement alleging it is working closely with the FDA to restart operations at the Sturgis plant. Week of April 24: The nationwide share of out-of-stock baby formula hit 40 percent. Texas, Tennessee, Missouri, Iowa, North Dakota and South Dakota, seemingly hardest hit by the shortages, reported out-of-stock rates of about 50 percent. May 10: Abbott releases a statement to DailyMail.com claiming 'thorough investigation' by the FDA and Abbott revealed 'infant formula produced at our Sturgis facility is not the likely source of infection in the reported cases and that there was not an outbreak caused by products from the facility'. Abbott claims they are 'working closely with the FDA to restart operations' at the plant, with the spokesperson noting: 'We continue to make progress on corrective actions and will be implementing additional actions as we work toward addressing items related to the recent recall'. The FDA told DailyMail.com it was holding discussions with 'Abbott and other manufacturers to increase production of different specialty and metabolic products' but refused to say when the Sturgis plant could reopen. Sen. Mitt Romney issued a letter to the FDA and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) urging leaders to address the formula shortage and work to prevent future threats to infant health. May 11: Lawmakers on Capitol Hill announce plans to hold a hearing in two weeks on infant formula shortages. Abbott announced it would take up to ten weeks for the company to get baby formula to retailers once the Sturgis plant reopens. Abbott also said: 'After a thorough review of all available data, there is no evidence to link our formulas to these infant illnesses.' Advertisement

The shortages are especially dangerous for infants who require specialty formulas due to food allergies, digestive problems and other conditions.

'Unfortunately, many of those very specialized formulas are only made in the United States at the factory that had the recall, and that's caused a huge problem for a relatively small number of infants,' Abrams said.

After hearing concerns from parents, the FDA said last month that Abbott could begin releasing some specialty formulas not affected by the recalls 'on a case-by-case basis.' The company is providing them free of charge, in coordination with physicians and hospitals.

Food safety advocates say the FDA made the right call in releasing the formula, but that parents should talk to their pediatricians before using it.

'Always talk with your pediatrician if you have concerns about your baby's nutrition and feeding your baby,' Dr. Sarah Abrams, of Akron Children's Hospital in Ohio, told Fox News.

'Switch to other formula brands or types of formula,' she advised to parents struggling to find product, 'but talk to your pediatrician first, especially if your baby must use a hydrolyzed or amino acid-based formula.'

The pediatrician also shared that due to the Abbott recall, parents have been fearful of that other brands of formula may have been contaminated.

'I have been told that due to the recall, [parents] were afraid to use the formula they had, even if it wasn't one that was recalled,' she explained. 'And if they do find formula, they worry about the limits of how much formula they can buy at one time.

'They are calling our office and we are helping them by reaching out to local formula representatives.'

Despite the results of the investigation and pressure from experts and concerned parents, it remains unclear when Abbott's Michigan plant might reopen.

The FDA said the company is still working 'to rectify findings related to the processes, procedures and conditions' but refused to say when the plant can resume operations.

Other infant formula makers are 'meeting or exceeding capacity levels to meet current demand,' the agency stated Tuesday.

Among other steps, the FDA said it was waiving enforcement of minor product labeling issues to increase availability of both U.S. and imported products.

'We recognize that many consumers have been unable to access infant formula and critical medical foods they are accustomed to using and are frustrated by their inability to do so. We are doing everything in our power to ensure there is adequate product available where and when they need it,' FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf, M.D. told DailyMail.com in a statement.

'Ensuring the availability of safe, sole-source nutrition products like infant formula is of the utmost importance to the FDA. Our teams have been working tirelessly to address and alleviate supply issues and will continue doing everything within our authority to ensure the production of safe infant formula products.'

Baby formula is particularly vulnerable to disruptions because just a handful of companies account for almost the entire U.S. supply, analysts allege.

Industry executives say the constraints began last year as the COVID-19 pandemic led to disruptions in ingredients, labor and transportation. Supplies were further squeezed by parents stockpiling during lockdowns.

Then in February, Abbott recalled several major brands and shut down its Sturgis, Michigan, factory when federal officials concluded four babies suffered bacterial infections after consuming formula from the facility. Two of the infants died.

When FDA inspectors visited the plant in March they found lax safety protocols and traces of the bacteria on several surfaces. None of the bacterial strains matched those collected from the infants, however, and the FDA hasn't offered an explanation for how the contamination occurred.

For its part, Abbott says its formula 'is not likely the source of infection,' though the FDA says its investigation continues.

Abbott claims they are 'working closely with the FDA to restart operations' at the plant, with the spokesperson on Tuesday noting: 'We continue to make progress on corrective actions and will be implementing additional actions as we work toward addressing items related to the recent recall'.

Meanwhile, parents are across the nation are issuing alarming calls for help as they try to find ways to nourish their children.

Laura Stewart, a 52-year-old mother of three who lives just north of Springfield, Missouri, has been struggling for several weeks to find formula for her 10-month-old daughter, Riley.

Riley normally gets a brand of Abbott's Similac designed for children with sensitive stomachs. Last month, she instead used four different brands.

'She spits up more. She's just more cranky. She is typically a very happy girl,' Stewart said. 'When she has the right formula, she doesn't spit up. She's perfectly fine.'

A small can costs $17 to $18 and lasts three to five days, Stewart said.

Like many Americans, Stewart relies on WIC - a federal program similar to food stamps that serves mothers and children - to afford formula for her daughter. Abbott's recall wiped out many WIC-covered brands, though the program is now allowing substitutions.

Parents across the nation are scrambling to feed their children because supply disruptions and a massive safety recall have swept many products off store shelves

Baby formula is stored in a locked case, with shelves half empty, at a Walmart store on Tuesday

Brian Dittmeier, Senior Director of Public Policy at the WIC Association told DailyMail.com in a statement Tuesday that the 'unprecedented scope of this infant formula recall has serious consequences for babies and new parents.'

'Assurances from manufacturers that production has ramped up have not yet translated to new product on the shelf. Each day that this crisis continues, parents grow more anxious and desperate to find what they need to feed their infants,' the statement said.

'Unlike other food recalls, shortages in the infant formula supply affects a major  or even exclusive  source of nutrition for babies. Inadequate nutrition could have long-term health implications for babies. Supply shortages are particularly acute for infants who require specialty formulas to address allergies, gastrointestinal issues, or metabolic disorders; adequate substitutes with other brands may not be easily identifiable.

'Every day, we hear from parents who are hurt, angry, anxious, and scared. The lives of their infants are on the line. It is time for answers and accountability as we all work to improve the supply and ease the worries of parents enduring this national crisis.'
A top police union boss has blasted the decision to dramatically-shorten the sentences for two lawyers who admitted firebombing an empty NYPD van during the 2020 BLM riots.

Patrick J. Lynch, President of the New York City Police Benevolent Association, hit out as it was revealed Colinford Mattis, 35, and Urooj Rahman, 33, now face just two years in jail.

The pair had originally faced up to life behind bars after torching the van in Brooklyn in May 2020, days after George Floyd's murder at the hands of Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin.

But the disgraced former lawyers had their terrorism charges reduced to conspiracy to commit arson thanks to a plea deal, according to a letter filed Tuesday.

Prosecutors have said they'll ask for the pair to be given between 18 and 24 months behind bars, although the sentencing judge has the discretion to impose a sentence of up to five years.

During a hearing at Brooklyn Federal Court in October 2021, the pair were still facing 10 years behind bars - but are now set to score a much lighter sentence.

Lynch told Fox News: 'The judge must reject this request. There is absolutely no justification for lowballing the sentence for an anti-police terrorist attack.'

Colinford Mattis, 35, a corporate attorney (pictured above) agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit arson, according to a letter filed on Tuesday by prosecutors for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York

A wrecked van is pictured after it was firebombed by two lawyers who now face just 18 months to 24 in jail

'It's bad enough that these dangerous criminals have been allowed to sit at home for the past two years,' Lynch said.

'Handing them a below-guidelines sentence would give a green light to other anti-police radicals who seek to advance their cause through violence. The judge must reject this request.'

Initially, Mattis - a corporate attorney - and human rights lawyer Rahman were looking at a 40-year mandatory minimum count and life imprisonment, when they were arrested on May 30 2020.

Despite the wanton destructiveness of their crimes, the firebug pair have spent most of the last two years in home confinement.

The government's previous plan was a 10-year sentence with terrorism enhancement, based on an October 2021 Brooklyn federal court hearing which involved Mattis and Rahman each pleaded guilty to one count of possessing and making a destructive device.

Boss of the NYPD union Patrick Lynch, pictured, has condemned the short sentences

Tuesday's letter asked that the U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan to convert a May 18 hearing scheduled for debate over the terrorism enhancement to a change of plea hearing, prosecutors said.

They the defendants lack of prior criminal history, plan to replace the original indictment, Law.com reported.

An initial complaint alleges that surveillance footage shown captured Rahman tossing a Molotov cocktail at an unoccupied NYPD vehicle parked near the 88th Precinct in Brooklyn, New York, and then fleeing in a tan minivan. Mattis was the alleged getaway driver.

Cops chased the pair and are said to have noticed the equipment used to build the petrol bombs while placing them under arrest.

That included a lighter, a bottle filled with toilet paper, a liquid believed to be gasoline, and a tank filled with gasoline.
One of Boris Johnson's former ministers told Joe Biden to butt out of the Northern Ireland Brexit row today, saying the UK didn't need 'lectures' from outsiders.

Lord Frost used an appearance at a conservative think tank in Washington DC to attack the US president for intervening in Britain's ongoing stand-off with Brussels.

Earlier this week the White House issued a slapdown to the Prime Minister after he threatened to alter the trade agreement agreed after the UK left the EU, because it is unpopular with unionists in Northern Ireland.

The president's spokesman told Mr Johnson to instead show 'leadership' and keep talking to EU envoys about the argument, which centres on a trade border Mr Johnson agreed to in the Brexit agreement, but now wants to remove.

Asked about Mr Biden's interventions today after a speech to the Heritage Foundation, Lord Frost suggested his administration did not really understand Northern Ireland.

'I know the administration is looking at this very closely. I'm not convinced the niceties are well understood,' the peer and former Brexit minister said.

'I get slightly frustrated when we are told by a third party, albeit a very important one in this context, how to manage these issues.

'It is our country that faced terrorism, faced the Troubles. I am old enough to remember having to check under my car every morning, as a diplomat, before I went to work. Most people were very affected in one way or another by this.

'So we don't need lectures from others about the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement. We are well aware of this and nobody wants to go back to it.

'In the end it has got to be our judgement about what is needed to preserve that agreement and preserve the unity of the country and the consent of everybody in Northern Ireland for these arrangements.'

Lord Frost used an appearance at a conservative think tank in Washington DC to attack the US president for intervening in Britain's ongoing stand-off with Brussels.

Earlier this week the White House issued a slapdown to the Prime Minister after he threatened to alter the trade agreement agreed after the UK left the EU, because it is unpopular with unionists in Northern Ireland.

The sausage war spat that threatens to undo the Brexit agreement The row over the Northern Ireland Protocol began almost as soon as the Brexit agreement with the EU came into force. The UK's departure from the block required the two sides to find a square peg that would fit into a round hole: how to avoid a hard border (IE checkpoints) between Ulster and Ireland and yet introduce a viable customs border between the EU and a new external 'third party' state. The protocol avoids a hard border between by effectively keeping the North inside the EUs single market. But it requires checks on goods crossing the Irish Sea from Britain. This compromise incensed unionists who felt that it 'othered' an integral part of the UK. The UK began talks seeking to alter the terms of the agreement, despite it having been signed off by the PM just months earlier. And it introduced a waiver on checks on food and agricultural produce to ease supply problems in supermarkets. After a year of further negotiations between various ministers and Brussels got nowhere, unionists took action into their own hands in February. DUP first minister Paul Givan resigned in February in an effort to force movement. This action left the Executive unable to fully function, due to the way it was set up to share power under the Good Friday Agreement. While ministers remained in post, they were restricted in the actions they could take. Since 1998, when the governance system was devised as part of Northern Ireland's historic peace accord, the first minister has always been a unionist. But that all changed last week, when Sinn Fein became the largest party at Stormont for the first time ever. But the DUP has insisted that it will not return until its demands over the protocol are met. It means that the assembly is still non-functioning. Since the election ministers have begun to again talk of replacing the protocol with domestic UK legislation. This would be illegal under international law and could cause the whole Brexit agreement to collapse. The Biden administration has also taken a dim view, urging continued talks to solve the problem. Advertisement

The EU today batted away pleas to overhaul the Northern Ireland protocol saying the bloc cannot 'solve all the problems created by Brexit'.

Commission vice-president Maros Sefcovic insisted there is no prospect of the bloc changing his negotiating mandate to resolve the deadlock.

In a speech to MEPs, he said: 'We will not renegotiate the protocol. The EU is united in this position.'

But, after talks with Mr Sefcovic failed to secure a breakthrough, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss warned that the EU is leaving the UK with 'no choice' about acting unilaterally to axe the post-Brexit rules.

The standoff came after Attorney General Suella Braverman concluded that it would be legal to axe swathes of the post-Brexit rules for the province because they are causing social unrest.

There have been claims that Boris Johnson is preparing to trigger the move within days, despite warnings from the US and Europe.

According to the Foreign Office, Ms Truss told Mr Sefcovic the protocol was 'the greatest obstacle' to forming a new Northern Ireland executive.

The spokesman said: 'The Foreign Secretary noted this with regret and said the situation in Northern Ireland is a matter of internal peace and security for the United Kingdom, and if the EU would not show the requisite flexibility to help solve those issues, then as a responsible government we would have no choice but to act.'

The PM has insisted that the Good Friday Agreement is more important than the Northern Ireland Protocol, dismissing suggestions of any possible escalatory response from the EU as 'crazy'.

But today he took a more emolient stance, merely saying there is a 'real problem' that must be 'fixed'.

'Look, Northern Ireland is an incredible place, it's got a fantastic future,' he said on a visit to Stoke.

'At the moment, very sadly, the institutions of democracy, the political governance of Northern Ireland, has collapsed.

'The institutions set up under the Good Friday Agreement aren't functioning. The executive, the assembly  they can't form.

'That's a bad thing at any time, that's a bad thing now when the people of Northern Ireland need leadership, they need a regional, a provincial government that will focus on the cost of living, on healthcare, on transport, on things that matter in their everyday lives.

'They haven't got that. That's a real, real problem. And the reason they don't have that is because there's one community in Northern Ireland that won't accept the way the protocol works at present  we've got to fix that.'

Ms Truss has warned she will 'not shy away' from taking action, accusing the EU of proposing solutions that would 'take us backwards'.

According to a government readout of the conversation, Ms Truss told Mr Sefcovic the EU 'bore a responsibility to show more pragmatism and ensure the protocol delivered on its original objectives'.

'The Foreign Secretary reiterated that the UK's proposals to fix the protocol, including green and red channel arrangements, backed up by a bespoke data-sharing system, would ensure the removal of trade barriers between Great Britain and Northern Ireland while protecting the EU single market,' she said.

'The Foreign Secretary outlined why EU proposals would take us backwards, by creating more checks and paperwork.

'Vice President Sefcovic confirmed that there was no room to expand the EU negotiating mandate or introduce new proposals to reduce the overall level of trade friction.'

But Mr Sefcovic said in a statement following the call 'simply not acceptable' for the UK to axe the protocol.

'It continues to be of serious concern that the UK Government intends to embark on the path of unilateral action,' he said.

'I am convinced that only joint solutions will work. Unilateral action, effectively disapplying an international agreement such as the protocol, is simply not acceptable.

'This would undermine trust between the EU and UK as well as compromise our ultimate objective  to protect the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement in all its dimensions, while ensuring legal certainty and predictability for the people and businesses in Northern Ireland.

'Such unilateral action will also undermine the conditions which are essential for Northern Ireland to continue to have access to the EU single market for goods.'
A former director of data science at Thomson Reuters said he was fired for sharing research on the company's internal social media platform that showed police killed more unarmed white people than black people and that the Black Lives Matter movement allegedly caused the deaths of thousands.

Zac Kriegman, who worked at Thomson Reuters for six years before being fired last summer, claimed he was let go from his $350,000 job because he stood against the company's reporting conventions on BLM in order to dispel what the 'false narrative' that black people were the largest victim of police violence.

In a piece first published on Bari Weiss's Substack, Common Sense, Kriegman said he shared with collogues concerns that reports saying unarmed black people are killed by police at a disproportionately higher rate than their white counterparts was not accurate.

The Washington Post, which has led the effort to document fatal police shootings, found that police had killed 3,024 white people and 1,596 black people since 2015.

The findings highlight that black people were disproportionately affected by the shootings as they make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population, but Kriegman said the rhetoric was incomplete and when he tried proving it, he said he received backlash from fellow white co-workers.

'I was publicly derided as a 'troll,' 'confused,' 'laughable,' and 'not worth engaging with or even attempting to have an intelligent conversation' with,' Kriegman wrote.

Zac Kriegman, a former director of data science at Thomson Reuters, claimed he was wrongfully fired after sharing his research on race and police killings with colleagues

Kriegman's research claimed that black people were not disproportionately killed by police when compared to their white counterparts and Black Lives Matter's instance that they were fueled anti-cop sentiments that caused crime and violence to rise in communities of color

The Washington Post's reported that while more unarmed white people have been killed by police since 2015, Black people have been disproportionately affected as they only represent 13 percent of the population but make up 1,596 of the deaths so far

Thomson Reuters said it does not discuss specific employee issues and that 'Reuters, the news division of Thomson Reuters, reports on topics related to race and equality and the BLM organization in a fair, unbiased and independent manner, consistent with the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles'.

Kriegman had argued that rather at looking at the population as a whole to see who was truly more impacted by police violence, reporters needed to instead take into account what racial groups police felt more threatened from.

To this end, Kriegman cited the FBI's research into the racial demographics of those who had killed or assault police officers.

The FBI's data, which records violence against officers from 2010 to 2019, found that there were 199 instances of black people attacking officers but 537 cases of where white people were the offenders.

He said these instances better aligned with the Washington Posts findings, concluding that unarmed black people are not disproportionately affected by the police killings.

Kriegman added that the rhetoric that they were only fueled anti-police sentiments, which he claimed has led to the uptick in crime nationwide, specifically in predominantly black neighborhoods.

He cited the Ferguson Effect, a controversial theory that claimed crime rose nationwide following backlash against police over the shooting of Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.

Although the theory has been disputed, with crime upticks only recorded in large cities, Kriegman said Black Lives Matter's claims have led to the same results now.

'I have avidly followed the research on the movement and its impacts, which has led me, inexorably, to the conclusion that the claim at the heart of the movement, that police more readily shoot black people, is false and likely responsible for thousands of black people being murdered in the most disadvantaged communities in the country.'

Kriegman claimed that rather than using population figures as a whole, journalists should use who police feel threatened by, citing the FBI's data that shows more white people have killed or assaulted police officers between 2010 and 2019

Kriegman claimed that the higher ups at Thomson Reuter ignored the alleged bullying he faced. He has filed a complaint with Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination for being allegedly 'fired in retaliation for complaining about a racially hostile work environment'

Kriegman said he wanted his research to open up conversations into how they could better report the issue and 'accurately' depict the reality of police shootings.

Instead, he saw his post get taken down because it was allegedly 'antagonistic' and 'provocative'.

He claimed one colleague at Thomson Reuters had told him: 'I do not believe that there is any point in trying to engage in a blow-by-blow refutation of your argument, and I will not do so.

'My unwillingness to do so doesn't signal the strength of your argument. If someone says, 'The KKK did lots of good things for the communityprove me wrong,' I'm not obligated to do so.'

Kriegman claimed his bosses at Thomson Reuters stayed quiet while he endured the criticism, and when he emailed HR about the alleged attacks, he was told he would be fired if he discussed his experience on the company's internal channels.

The data scientist said he doubted the company would fire him and proceeded to email his colleague and company leadership about the situation, and he was terminated three days later.

Kriegman filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination in July for being allegedly 'fired in retaliation for complaining about a racially hostile work environment'.

The case is the latest instance of a professional in journalism claiming they received backlash for failing to conform to a woke mob.

Former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss quit her job at the paper in 2020 with a resignation letter that went viral where she railed against the liberal newspaper's alleged bias and said it no longer served journalism.

Weiss claimed that the papers private Slack channel was filled with bullying and harassment against those who failed to conform to woke ideology and said the editors 'live in total fear of internet mobs.'

Former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss (pictured) quit her job at the paper in 2020 after claiming their Slack channel was dominated by woke bullies

Former New York Times tech reporter Nellie Bowles (above) announced she left the New York Times to work for her wife's Common Sense Substack after being 'bullied' at the paper

'Normal people who watch others being attacked, they have a perfectly human response - they stay quiet,' Weiss said on her Honestly podcast last fall. 'The threat of public shaming has been massively, enormously, amazingly effective. It has led to an epidemic of self-silencing and fear.'

Weiss' wife, Nellie Bowles, a former tech reporter at the Times, said she too was bullied out last November by colleagues who allegedly leaked stories to embarrass her.

She claimed she began at the paper as a 'very happy, lauded bulldog liberal of a writer' but that the outlet and the culture in general shifted toward a 'charismatic new ideology' that she felt pressured to 'cheer on or otherwise carefully ignore.'

'When I didn't, I became suspect,' she wrote. 'My colleagues started leaking stories to other publications to embarrass me.'

Bowles added that she was particularly bothered by being contacted by a magazine reporter who was asked her about her co-workers being angry at her for going to CHAZ [Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone] in Seattle during the racial justice protests in 2020.

'Efforts by well-meaning bosses to intervene only made it more frenzied,' she continued. 'At first it was crazy-making, like a breakup or a betrayal, a feeling so many in my position have written about beautifully already in this newsletter.'

CHAZ was a protest movement that closed off six blocks of Seattle for over three weeks by protesters after the Seattle Police Department left its building within the zone. Four shootings took place in the police-free zone during the protest. Bowles visited and published a story about the movement in August.

Bowles said that those who have made similar decisions made it easier and 'more fun' to quit and get 'outside' the 'old newspapers and mainstream TV networks' which she slammed as 'docile and predictable.'

Conservative talk show host Amber Athey also slammed woke culture after she was fired from her Washington D.C. radio station for making fun of Vice President Kamala Harris' clothes in March.

Amber Athey, a co-presenter on conservative news talk station WMAL tweeted about Kamala Harris wearing a brown suit during the State of the Union address that was deemed 'racist'

'Kamala looks like a UPS employee  what can brown do for you? Nothing good, apparently,' Athey wrote in the March 1 tweet using an old UPS tagline

Amber Athey, who worked on a morning show at news station WMAL, wrote a joking tweet about the color of the suit Harris was wearing.

'Kamala looks like a UPS employee  what can brown do for you? Nothing good, apparently,' Athey wrote in the March 1 tweet, referring to an old UPS tagline.

She wrote on The Spectator, a conservative magazine she works for, that there was no sign of any offense being caused by the pithy comment until a few days later.

'All of a sudden, the Kamala tweet was being re-framed as racist and dozens of Twitter accounts were bragging about contacting my employers about my 'bigotry,'' Athey wrote.

These clashes against woke culture were not secluded to only America, as Canadian Broadcasting Corporation journalist Tara Henley made the stunning claim that she quit the company in January due to 'woke' policies implemented by senior staffers that hindered her ability to do her job.

Writing on her own Substack, slammed CBC brass for what she called 'a radical political agenda that originated on Ivy League campuses in the United States.'

She claimed the news outlet has yielded to 'far-left ideology' that has left employees obsessing over race and which demographic should receive more coverage.

Renowned Canadian media personality Tara Henley has announced she's quit the company due to 'woke' policies implemented by senior staffers that hindered her ability to do her job
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Dr Katherine Henderson, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, today admitted she would be 'worried' about family members who needed an ambulance being able to access one in a 'timely way'

A top emergency medic admitted today that she would consider calling a taxi or giving a lift to a loved one who needed to get to the hospital, rather than call an ambulance.

Dr Katherine Henderson, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said she was 'worried' about family members who needed an ambulance being able to access one in a 'timely way'.

The medic, who is also an emergency consultant at Guy's and St Thomas' trust in London, said she would be 'looking very carefully' at alternative ways of getting to hospital if a loved one fell ill, including taxis or getting a lift.

It comes amid an ambulance crisis that has seen some patients told to wait 15 hours for paramedics.

NHS England data today showed ambulance waits fell in April compared to March but were still higher than nearly all other months since records began.

Experts said despite the 'small reductions' in waiting times, patients are still facing 'frightening waits'.

And serious safety incidents logged by ambulance trusts in England skyrocketed 77 per cent in the last year compared to before the pandemic, separate data shows.

Ambulance figures for April show waits for paramedics fell compared to March but were higher than nearly all other months since records began. Ambulances took an average of 51 minutes and 22 seconds to respond to category two calls, such as burns, epilepsy and strokes. This is nine minutes and 41 seconds quicker than one month earlier

NHS's never-ending crisis sends waiting list for ops to ANOTHER high with 6.4MILLION patients now in queue The number of people in the queue for routine NHS treatment in England has soared to another high and record numbers are facing 'frightening waits' in A&E. As the crisis in the health service deepens, official statistics show one in nine people (6.4million) were waiting for elective operations such as hip and knee replacements and cataracts surgery by March  up from the 6.18m stuck in February. There are now 306,000 who have been waiting for more than a year for their operation, up 2 per cent, and 16,796 have been seeking treatment for more than two years, down slightly. Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, has promised to cut one-year-plus waits to zero by 2025, using the 1.25 per cent National Insurance hike that came into effect last month. Separate data on A&E performance in April shows a record 24,138 people were forced to wait 12 hours or more to be treated, three times longer than the NHS target and the worst figure on record. Just seven in 10 patients were seen within four hours of arriving at 'absolutely packed' emergency departments, a slight recovery from last month, making it the second-lowest rate ever recorded. Medics warned access to urgent care has become a 'serious issue'. Ambulance figures for April show 999 waits fell compared to March but were higher than nearly all other months since records began. Experts said the 'small reductions' in waiting times mean patients still face 'frightening waits'. Health chiefs today pleaded with Britons to get taxis or lifts from people to ease pressures, saying they would be 'worried' about loved ones being able to get an ambulance 'in a timely way'. One mother today told how of how her nine-year-old daughter fractured her skull when she fell off her bike but was told the ambulance wait would be 10 hours  15-times longer than the 40-minue target. Advertisement

Asked on BBC Radio 4's Today programme whether she would fear for herself or a loved one who had to dial 999, Dr Henderson said: 'I would be worried whether it would be possible to get an ambulance to them in a timely way.

'I would be looking very carefully at what alternatives I had but we shouldnt have to do that.'

Asked whether this included getting a taxi or a lift, she said 'exactly'.

Dr Henderson said: 'This is more serious than we've ever seen it. We've never broken the commitment to get an ambulance to a patient in a timely way.

'It's part of the NHS constitution that we will get care to emergency patients without unnecessary delay.

'And this is the first time in my career, over 20 years as a consultant, when that has become a serious issue.'

She warned 'an increasing number of patients' are making their own way to hospital, with the walk-in queue now including 'patients who should have come by ambulance'.

This makes it difficult to know who is in the queue and how serious their illness is because they have not been assessed by paramedics who 'are very skilled at helping us prioritise', forcing doctors to be 'very, very vigilant', Dr Henderson said.

She said: 'Weve got big queues, we cant get flow out of our departments. The reason there is this problem, the underlying reason is that emergency departments are absolutely packed.'

Dr Henderson added: 'We sometimes start the morning with more patients waiting to go up to the ward than cubicles that we have and thats at the beginning of the day.

'We cant then get new patients in because we have no space. We end up with patients in corridors, we end up with patients in any clinical area that we can manage to put them.'

It comes as medics today warned the NHS ambulance crisis has led to a surge in avoidable deaths and injuries  with response times for emergency call-outs at record highs.

Serious safety incidents logged by ambulance trusts in England have skyrocketed 77 per cent in the last year compared to before the pandemic, official figures show.

They are cases in which an error or lack of care resulted in unexpected or avoidable death, or serious harm.

There were 551 serious safety incidents in the 12 months to March 2022, compared to 312 in the year to March 2020.

The most recent data include 201 unintended deaths, more than double the pre-pandemic number.

Health chiefs warned thousands of patients across the country could be let down by the struggling ambulance service, as not all staff report their concerns.

A mother today told how her nine-year-old daughter fractured her skull when she fell off her bike but was told the ambulance wait would be 10 hours.

The case should have been classified as an 'urgent' category three case, meaning an ambulance should have arrived within 120 minutes.

Separate NHS ambulance data released today shows paramedics are arriving faster than March, which saw the worst wait times since records began in August 2017, but are still missing targets.

The average category one response time  calls from people with life-threatening illnesses or injuries  was nine minutes and two seconds. This is 33 seconds faster than March.

Ambulances took an average of 51 minutes and 22 seconds to respond to category two calls, such as burns, epilepsy and strokes. This is nine minutes and 41 seconds quicker than one month earlier.

Response times for category three calls  such as late stages of labour, non-severe burns and diabetes  averaged two hours, 38 minutes and 41 seconds. This is 49 minutes and 32 seconds faster than March.

Dr Sarah Scobie, deputy director of research at health charity Nuffield Trust, said there is a 'very long way to go to return to even pre-pandemic levels'.

And 'small reductions' in ambulance response times 'should also be seen in the context of continuing frightening waits for patients', she said.
The Biden administration adamantly denied that its multi-million dollar harm reduction program would help dole out crack pipes to addicts, but smoking kits distributed all over the east coast include such paraphernalia.

The Washington Free Beacon visited five harm reduction organizations in New York City, Boston, Richmond, Va., Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, and every single one included crack pipes in their safe smoking kits.

All of the centers were non-profit health organizations and governmental agencies, exactly the types of groups eligible to apply for funding under the Biden administration's $30 million grant program.

Asked if there were steps in place to prevent organizations from using these dollars for crack pipes on Thursday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said: 'This is a conspiracy theory being spread out there.'

While the Biden administration has not announced whether any of these groups will receive federal funding, many safe smoking kits distributed by such groups include crack pipes, and it remains to be seen if the Biden administration will filter out groups that do.

Contents of safe smoking kits vary from one organization to another, and not all may contain crack pipes. All of the five organizations the Free Beacon visited included not only crack pipes in their kits but also utensils to use heroine, cocaine and crystal methamphetamine, without requiring any sort of rehabilitation along with the free drug kits.

None of these five specific groups responded to requests for comment about whether they applied for the federal grant. The Biden administration is set to announce grant recipients on May 15.

The Washington Free Beacon visited five harm reduction organizations in New York City , Boston, Richmond, Va., Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, and every single one included crack pipes in their safe smoking kits

'They were never a part of the kit,' said press secretary Jen Psaki of crack pipes. 'It was inaccurate reporting'

This safe smoking kit is doled out by Charm City Care Connection in Baltimore, Md.

The kits also often include sanitary items for addicts to utilize when using to mitigate the spread of disease.

A survey by the Free Beacon of two dozen other harm reduction organizations found that not all distribute safe smoking kits, but those that do typically include crack pipes. The few that don't include them said they are willing to but don't have the resources to do so.

The kits drew bitter condemnation from Republicans after a Free Beacon report in February signaled that the $30 million program would go towards safe smoking kits that included crack pipes.

The White House repeatedly denied that any funding under the program would go towards crack pipes.

'They were never a part of the kit,' said press secretary Jen Psaki of crack pipes. 'It was inaccurate reporting.'

'We've been very clear that we are not providing funding for crack pipes,' Psaki added in a later press briefing, calling the matter 'an issue that is not an issue.'

The affair began when a Health and Human Services (HHS) spokesperson reportedly told the Washington Free Beacon that included in these kits these kits could be pipes for users to smoke substances like crack cocaine and crystal methamphetamine, or 'any illicit substance.'

Days later HHS put out a statement contradicting its previously reported remarks. 'No federal funding will be used directly or through subsequent reimbursement of grantees to put pipes in safe smoking kits. The goal of harm reduction is to save lives.'

This safe smoking kit is doled out by The Spahr Center in Corte Madera, Calif., and includes a crack pipe

The statement said that HHS will instead prioritize the 'use of proven harm reduction strategies like providing naloxone, fentanyl test strips, and clean syringes.'

Asked what the safe smoking kits might contain Psaki said at the time: 'alcohol swabs, lip balm, other materials to promote hygiene and reduce the transmission of diseases like HIV and hepatitis.'

'I would note that what we're really talking about here is steps that we're taking as a federal government to address the opioid epidemic,' Psaki added.

HHS could not be reached for comment on a comprehensive list of allowable items, but such kits also typically include a rubber mouthpiece to prevent cuts and burns, brass screens to filter contaminants and disinfectant wipes, according to Harm Reduction International.

And as Republicans mounted for a fight putting forth bills to ban the distribution of crack pipes, HHS Sec. Xavier Becerra said in a statement that no federal funding 'will be used directly or through subsequent reimbursement of grantees to put pipes in safe smoking kits.'

Also funded under the grant are harm reduction vending machines, including stock for the machines, medication to reverse a drug overdose, medication lock boxes, infectious disease testing kits, safe sex kits, medication and needle disposal kits, vaccination services and wound care supplies.

The $30 million Harm Reduction Program grant is funded through the 2021 American Rescue Plan, and therefore is 'not subject to the same syringe funding restrictions as other federal grants,' HHS says.

The grant program lasts three years and includes 25 awards of up to $400,000.

It is against the law to sell or distribute drug paraphernalia - including such pipes - unless authorized by state, local or federal law.

After the administration's adamant denial that it would fund the pipes, the Drug Policy Alliance said the decision to 'remove pipes from safe smoking equipment is deeply disappointing.'

'This is a missed opportunity to be preventative of more deaths due to overdose,' the group wrote on Twitter. 'Giving clean drug-using equipment such as a pipe & syringe reduces transmission of disease including Hep. C & HIV.'

'Harm reduction works to meet people where they are at, and keep people free of diseases and alive so they have a chance of recovery and healing,' the group added.
This is the holidaymaker who was run over and killed on a zebra crossing in Ayia Napa by a beach buggy allegedly driven by a British man who was high on drugs.

Camilla Christina Pamdahl, 46, had left her five-year-old daughter at the kids club of the hotel where she was staying so she could visit a local supermarket.

But as she crossed the road at the resort of Ayia Napa she was hit by the black and red buggy, which was being driven by a man police believe was Manraj Singh Sidhu, 25, from Bedfordshire.

Camilla, who was from Gothenburg, Sweden, had arrived in Cyprus on April 29, with her daughter for a week's holiday and was staying at the Sunwing Family resort, which is Swedish owned.

Camilla Christina Pamdahl, 46, (pictured) was run over and killed on a zebra crossing in Ayia Napa by a beach buggy allegedly driven by a British man who was high on drugs

Police believe Manraj Singh Sidhu, 25, from Bedfordshire, was high on drugs and struck a mother-of-one while he was driving a beach buggy

Images from the scene show the twisted remains of the buggy stood horizontally across the road next to the pedestrian crossing and another car

Paramedics raced to the scene and she was transferred to nearby Famagusta Hospital where she was declared dead.

Manager Louis Misseris told MailOnline: 'It is very sad. I saw the accident as I arrived at the hotel and saw the road was blocked by the police.

'I decided to go and check it wasn't one of our guests because the zebra crossing is right outside the hotel and at first the police were not able to say.

'Then after about an hour or so one of the staff from the kids club told us that a little girl hadn't been picked up and it was then we realised the victim was one of our guests.

'The police gave us the name and we checked and she was staying with us  she had arrived the Friday before and should have left a week later.

Restaurant owner Theodora Marinova, who was working at the time, said: 'I heard and saw everything. I took one of the table cloths from the restaurant to make her more comfortable and the doctor was holding her hand'

He added: 'It's so terrible  she had been in here for dinner with her daughter a few days before.' Pictured: Camilla Christina Pamdahl with her husband Jonas

'She had just taken the chance to go shopping and left her daughter at the club for a few minutes. It's very sad. The father came the following day to pick her up and take her back to Sweden.

'We informed the guests about what had happened and everyone was shocked, we are thinking about putting some flowers at the scene in the next few days.'

Restaurant owner Theodora Marinova, who was working at the time, said: 'I heard and saw everything. I was getting ready for the evening service when I heard a huge bang.

'I looked outside and saw the buggy and a car on the zebra crossing and so I ran to see if I could help, some of the people in the restaurant having dinner came as well.

'I saw a woman on the floor and there were two guys in the buggy, one looked hurt and the driver shook him as if to wake him up and then they both jumped out and ran away.

'One of them ran right past me and then the next thing a doctor from the hotel where the lady was staying came to help.

Police officers are seen at the scene of the crash in Ayia Napa on Wednesday night

The Briton fled the scene on foot after the incident whilst Pamdahl, who was on holiday in Cyprus with her five-year-old daughter, was rushed Famagusta general hospital where she was declared dead on arrival

The scene of the crash shows the mangled beach buggy next to a car in Ayia Napa

'I took one of the table cloths from the restaurant to make her more comfortable and the doctor was holding her hand.

'The ambulance was here very quickly and they took her to hospital but I heard she didn't make it. It's so terrible  she had been in here for dinner with her daughter a few days before.'

Sidhu appeared in court yesterday in nearby Paralimni accused of causing death by dangerous driving and being under the influence of drugs.

Sidhu, of Shefford, Bedfordshire, was remanded in custody until next week, as his parents sat at the back of the court after having flown in to support him.

The 25-year-old man allegedly hit Camilla Christina Pamdahl, 46, on a pedestrian crossing as he overtook a car whilst drunk and under the influence of cannabis in the Mediterranean resort town on May 4 night, police said. Pictured: The scene

The British tourist quickly abandoned his vehicle and left a passenger inside but he was tracked down by police within hours and arrested at 11.30pm local time, cops say. Pictured: Ayia Napa's Nissi Avenue

The rental buggy had overtaken a stopped car last week before fatally hitting Pamdahl on a pedestrian crossing on Ayia Napa's Nissi Avenue

Police say he tested positive for cannabis and he has also been charged with several other driving offences including having no insurance and fleeing the scene of an accident.

Another witness, who asked not to be named, said: 'There were definitely two people in the buggy and they both ran away after the accident but then one came back.

'It wasn't the driver, it was the passenger and then the guy who rents the sand buggies also arrived and was here when the police arrived.'

Police later found Sidhu after issuing his photograph and asking for help in locating him and he was found around 11.30pm almost five hours after the incident.

A Cyprus police source told MailOnline: 'We have spoken to the passenger and he has given us a statement. At the moment he is not facing any action but the investigation is continuing.'


The main opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) on Thursday expelled Rep. Park Wan-joo over a sexual misconduct case, the party's spokesperson said.





The three-term lawmaker who previously served as the DPK's top policymaker was reportedly questioned by the DPK's ethics inspection team over allegations that he harassed a female assistant last year.





The DPK's emergency committee decided to kick out Park and plans to refer him to the National Assembly's ethics reporting center for an additional penalty, according to DPK spokesperson Shin Hyun-young.





"We are very sorry that a sexual misconduct case happened inside the party," Shin said. "We will not reveal details of the case to prevent secondary victimization."





The DPK said a police probe on Park has yet to be conducted.





The DPK leadership issued a public apology later in the day, vowing to strictly handle the matter based on the zero tolerance principle.





"On behalf of the DPK, I apologize to the victim, the victim's family and the general public," Park Ji-hyun, a co-head of the DPK's interim leadership committee, said.





"The DPK will deal with gender violence more sternly going forward and promises that we will uncover the truth in other ongoing cases and will bring the toughest disciplinary measures without exceptions," Park said.





Rep. Yun Ho-jung, DPK floor leader and committee co-head, also apologized and vowed to take stringent steps against those responsible.





The DPK is worried that Park's case would undermine its efforts in the June 1 local elections and parliamentary by-elections.





Park is the latest DPK heavyweight disgraced in a sexual misconduct case over the past four years.





An Hee-jung, once deemed a powerful presidential candidate of the DPK, is currently in jail for raping one of his former female secretaries. He resigned as governor of South Chungcheong in 2018 in the face of sexual abuse allegations.





In 2020, Oh Keo-don and Park Won-soon  former Busan and Seoul mayors - were also accused of sexually harassing female subordinates in April and July, respectively. (Yonhap)








A priest accused of deliberately running over a suspected robber after officiating a wedding in the southeastern Brazilian state of Sao Paulo is under investigation.

Father Gustavo Trindade, 37, launched his vehicle into the thief, Angelo dos Santos, 40, who had allegedly stolen three hooded sweatshirts and a t-shirt from the Sao Sebastiao Church's parish house in the municipality of Santa Cruz Rio do Rio Pardo on Saturday.

A security camera captured the priest speeding down the street in a white sedan before jumping the sidewalk and plowing into the thief and building.

He subsequently reversed back into the avenue and sped away.

Father Gustavo Trindade (pictured) is being investigated by Brazilian authorities in the state of Sao Paulo for the attempted murder of Angelo dos Santos, a suspect who had stolen three hooded sweatshirts and a t-shirt from the Sao Sebastiao Church's parish house while the priest was celebrating a couple's wedding Saturday

Security camera footage showed the priest speeding down the street in a white sedan before jumping the sidewalk and plowing into the thief and building

Dos Santos was arrested and taken to a nearby hospital, where he remained hospitalized until Monday.

Father Trindade was on the run until Wednesday when he appeared before the Santa Cruz Rio do Rio Pardo courthouse accompanied by two lawyers.

Judge Pedro de Castro rejected a Civil Police request to hold the priest in pre-trial detention, arguing that he was not a flight risk.

The incident certainly surprised Tatiane de Fatima and Alex Aparecido, who were married by Father Trindade, according to Brazilian news outlet G1.

De Fatima said the priest calmed her down while she waited to tie the knot with Aparecido, whom she had been in a relationship for three and a half years

Angelo dos Santos was arrested and taken to a nearby hospital, where he remained hospitalized until Monday

Father Gustavo Trindade (right) officiated the wedding of Tatiane de Fatima (left) and Alex Aparecido (center) moments before he mowed down a suspect identified as Angelo dos Santos

Tatiane de Fatima credited Father Gustavo Trindade with calming her nerves as she waited to marry her boyfriend Alex Aparecido before the priest launched his car into a suspect who had broken into the church's parish house

'Until then, I didn't know him, but he was super attentive, he laughed, he joked with us before and during the ceremony,' the bride said. 'He told me to stay calm down, that I was supposed to breathe, that everything would work out. He was super calm.'

She added that most of the 100 guests had left the ceremony and she stuck around at the church to take additional photos when she learned of the accident without knowing that Father Trindade has been involved.

'Whether you like it or not, this will end up marking the history of my wedding day,' de Fatima said. 'There's no way around it.'
A woman with a peanut allergy has died after suffering a fatal anaphylactic shock in West London.

Tania Kaur Khasriya, 24, dined at a restaurant in Southall in July 2018 where she accidentally ate a peanut.

She never regained consciousness and passed away four years later.

The student from Ealing was diagnosed with the deadly nut allergy when she was just a year old, in 1998.

Opening her inquest today, Coroner Lydia Brown said: 'She had an anaphylactic shock to eating a peanut in a restaurant in July 2018 and has since suffered a disorder of consciousness.'

She was rushed to Ealing Hospital for treatment, but was relocated to a nursing centre after her condition failed to improve.

Ms Khasriya never regained consciousness from the reaction and passed away on April 27 this year after doctors withdrew palliative care.

Tania Khasriya was immediately rushed to Ealing Hospital in West London after consuming a peanut at a restaurant in Southall

Her death was put down to three causes  persistent disorder of consciousness, hypoxic brain injury and anaphylaxis due to peanut allergy.

The Coroner called it a 'complex inquiry' and adjourned the inquest to a later date.

Coroner Ms Brown said the restaurant, unnamed as of yet during the inquest.

The hearing will look at reports from the palliative care consultant at the care home, as well as information from the London Ambulance Service.

Ms Khasriya spent her last years at Chalfont Lodge nursing centre in Buckinghamshire, which is purpose built to help people with neurological conditions, physical disabilities and dementia.

West London Coronor's court heard the 'complex' case after her sister identified her body

Peanuts are a common food allergy, with around 2% of children affected in the UK.

It is the most common cause of food-related deaths and is due to a type 1 hypersensitivity reaction of the immune system in those who have it.

Charity website Anaphylaxis Campaign said that hospital admissions for food allergies have increased by 500 per cent since 1990.

Up to 20 per cent of patients struggle daily with the fear of a possible asthma attack or anaphylactic shock.
A makeshift memorial has been set up on the sidewalk near the place she died and has been filled with flowers and stuffed animals for the sixth-grader

The 13-year-old's death was ruled as suspicious but police did not reveal how she died despite an autopsy

Police found her body in the Westside Linear Park stream and have since ruled her death a homicide

The Conestoga Middle Schooler was last seen on Sunday evening, but wasn't reported missing until Monday about 1pm and she was deemed a 'runaway'

Milana Li, 13, was found dead in a stream in Beaverton, Oregon - near Portland - on Tuesday afternoon

The mysterious death of an Oregon schoolgirl whose body was found in a stream after her mother reported her missing almost 24 hours after she disappeared is being treated as a homicide.

Milana Li, 13, had not been seen since 4pm Sunday when she was spotted around her family's apartment near Murray Boulevard and Scholls Ferry Road but was only reported missing at 1pm the following day.

The teenager's mother told police the schoolgirl was a 'runaway' and was possibly wearing 'plaid pajamas with white writing on the side and a dark hooded sweatshirt' when she vanished.

Her body was found in the Westside Linear Park, near the intersection of Barrows Road and Horizon Boulevard at about 3pm Tuesday after cops were called to the area on a report of 'suspicious circumstances,' the Beaverton Police Department said in a statement.

The Conestoga Middle School sixth-grader's body was taken to the autopsy lab, where her death was ultimately ruled a homicide but it is unclear how she died.

Milana Li, 13, was found dead in a stream in Beaverton, Oregon - near Portland - on Tuesday afternoon. The Conestoga Middle Schooler was last seen on Sunday evening, but wasn't reported missing until Monday around 1pm and she was deemed a 'runaway.' Police found her body in the Westside Linear Park stream and have since ruled her death a homicide

Police found the girl's body in the Westside Linear Park, near the intersection of Barrows Road and Horizon Boulevard (pictured) on Tuesday around 3pm after being called to the area on a report of 'suspicious circumstances,' the Beaverton Police Department said in a statement

'The circumstances surrounding Lis death are suspicious. This is an ongoing investigation,' the Beaverton Police Department wrote in a statement.

Police said they 'do not believe there is a continued threat to our community'.

A makeshift memorial has been set up in the park near the stream where Li's body was found.

Multiple candles, baby dolls, stuffed animals, and flowers have been laid on the sidewalk and a rainbow balloon waves in the wind as cars drive.

Savanna Tinline, a classmate of Li's, planted lavender near the stream with her mother in honor of the girl.

'Looking at the memorial, the flowers on the hard concrete, Savanna's mother Krista told KOIN 6. 'I wanted something more permanent and she said: "Mom, can we go down there? She really liked purple flowers."'

'We wanted something that will just stay there for her,' Savanna said.

Malikai Johnson, eight, and his mother Kortnie also visited the memorial and dropped off a small Beanie Baby to honor Li.

'We have a couple friends that were her friends that were like really, really depressed and were very sad, so thats why we came, and we did this for them,' Malikai told KATU 2.

Kortnie said she would be keeping a close eye on her son as a result of the homicide, despite normally feeling safe in the area, KATU 2 reported.

'Like the other day he said: "Im gonna scooter down to some friends houses," and as a mom, you hesitate and youre like: "Well, how far? Im gonna follow you just to make sure." And now this happened, and Im like: "Well, now Im gonna bike ride with you because Im not comfortable 100% yet,"' Kortnie said.

A makeshift memorial has been set up on the sidewalk near the place she died and has been filled with flowers and stuffed animals for the sixth-grader

Mary Stanley, a grandmother who walks the trial regularly with her granddaughter, told KATU 2: 'We walk this trail, we love this trail, its just a good way to get exercise, get fresh air, meet people.

'It broke my heart, honestly, both her and I this morning. When we heard, we just wanted to cry because, like I said, if it were my daughter, I dont even know how I would react.'

Stanley revealed she and her granddaughter had prayed the night before for Li's safe return and said seeing the memorial was 'very hard.'

Beaverton Police Department reported they had 'several tips' from the community and are actively investigating.

Her family has set up a GoFundMe page for her funeral expenses, which has since raised $26,000 of it's $50,000 goal, as of Friday morning.

DailyMail.com has attempted to contact the Beaverton PD for comment.
Vicky White, who said she was taking Casey White for a mental health evaluation, ran away with him on April 29

Vicky White spoke of the importance of staying 'on the straight and narrow' just hours before the veteran corrections officer sprang Casey White from jail and walked out on her life and 17 years of unblemished service, DailyMail.com can reveal.

Speaking exclusively to DailyMail.com, Deborah Burbank, who counted Vicky as a lifelong friend, revealed, 'My daughter saw Vicky that morning and she said she acted like she always did.'

Burbank explained that her daughter, who did not wish to be named, had been in trouble with the law before and spent time in Lauderdale County Jail in Florence, Alabama.

On Friday April 29, the day of 38-year-old White's escape, Burbank's daughter was at the jail visiting a friend when she ran into Vicky who was on shift in her capacity as assistant director of corrections.

Burbank said, 'Vicky spoke to my daughter and said how proud she was of her for getting her life back on track. She said how important it was to stay on the straight and narrow.

'We've spoken about it since, and she's thought about it, but she says Vicky was just like she always was. She gave no indication that anything was up. We're all just shook.'

Speaking exclusively to DailyMail.com, Vicky White's lifelong friend Deborah Burbank spoke about the hours before Vicky went on the run

Hours after Vicky had a run-in with Burbank's daughter, she broke inmate Casey White, 38, out of the jail and went on the run with him for 11 days, until they were captured Monday

Today Burbank, 57, who grew up just two miles from Vicky, 56, and went to both elementary and high school with her, is struggling to believe that the woman she knew for more than five decades could have blindsided her so completely.

She said, 'Vicky was just a good person. She was always supportive, always helping people  my daughter, nephews, friends. She would do anything for anyone.

'And she was always a good girl, a family girl. When we were younger, I would smoke weed and drink. Vicky never participated in any of that, but she was still my friend.'

Casey White is seen in his mugshot, taken on Monday after he was recaptured

According to Burbank, Vicky did not go into the prison service because she felt any vocation but simply because a friend had told her that there were jobs going at Lauderdale County Jail.

She said, 'She applied, and she enjoyed her work. She took great pride in it.'

Burbank revealed that prisoners held a prayer vigil for Vicky at the jail on Tuesday night after learning of her death.

She said, 'There's a lot who are angry with Casey and blame him for this.'

Casey, who was arraigned on the charge of Escape in the First Degree Tuesday night, is now being held in the maximum security William E Donaldson Correctional Facility in Jefferson County, Alabama. He is due to stand trial on a capital murder trial next month.

As for Vicky's motivations Burbank said, 'The only thing I can think is that you just don't know where your heart can lead you.

'I should know I've had four awful husbands.

'Vicky only had one and she stayed friends with him to the end. I guess we can all fall in love and do crazy things.'

But however confused Burbank is by her friend's actions she is certain of one thing. She said, 'Vicky was not suicidal. She did not deliberately pull that trigger and shoot herself.

'You can hear on that (911) tape. Vicky was not suicidal when they got up to her.'

If anything, Burbank said, the audio released by Vanderburgh County Sheriff's Department appears to suggest that Vicky was concerned with the couple's safety.

She can be heard saying, 'Stop, stopthe airbags will go off and kill us.' According to law enforcement Vicky was driving and had a gun in her right hand.

At one point an officer can be heard stating that Vicky 'has her finger on the trigger.'

It is unclear if Vicky was holding the weapon when the car careened off the road in Evansville, Indiana, and into a ditch having been rammed by officers who gave chase in the brief multi-vehicle pursuit that ended the fugitive couple's stint on the lam.

They had made it less than 300 miles before deciding they had driven enough and, according to Vanderburgh County Sheriff Dave Wedding, holed up in an old Motel 6  now called Motel 41  to mull over their next move.

Burbank is adamant, 'You can hear Vicky hollering, ''Casey.'' She was talking about getting up and running. She was not suicidal. I don't care if they say they found the gun in her hand, I do not believe she pulled the trigger and shot herself on purpose.

'None of this makes any sense to me but whatever she did I just can't believe that.'

Pictured is Vicky White's home in Lexington, Alabama. Burbank, 57, grew up just two miles from Vicky, 56, and went to both elementary and high school with her

According to Burbank, Vicky did not go into the prison service because she felt any vocation but simply because a friend had told her that there were jobs going at Lauderdale County Detention Center. She said, 'She applied, and she enjoyed her work. She took great pride in it'

The two were found 219 miles away from the jail they left in Alabama on April 29. The manhunt spanned three states

The couple's days as fugitives came to an end with Vicky's death from a gunshot wound moments after their car was rammed off the road and into a ditch.

The pair were carrying $29,000 in cash, four handguns and an AR-15 rifle and were prepared for a shootout when they were captured, an Indiana sheriff said on Tuesday.

The end of the manhunt left authorities trying to piece together what happened during the 11 days that elapsed after Vicky White escorted Casey White from a Florence, Alabama, jail for what she falsely claimed was a mental health evaluation.

She also told her coworkers that she felt ill and planned to see a doctor afterward.

No one realized that the two were missing until around 3.30pm.

The inmate and Vicky appeared to have had a jailhouse romance, Alabama authorities said last week. Despite sharing a last name, they were not related.

As for Vicky's role in the escape, Vanderburgh County sheriff Dave Wedding said: 'He was not forcing her. It was a mutual relationship.'

At the time of the breakout, Casey White was serving a 75-year prison sentence for attempted murder and other offenses and was awaiting trial on charges of stabbing a woman to death during a 2015 burglary.

If convicted, he could get the death penalty.

Investigators believe the pair spent about six days holed up at in the Motel 41.

Authorities discovered wigs intended to hide their identities.

Casey White, in the white t-shirt, was serving a 75-year prison sentence for attempted murder and other offenses when he fled. He was also awaiting trial on charges of stabbing a woman to death during a 2015 burglary

Casey White is seen in dashboard camera footage released by police in Indiana being taken into custody on Monday

The pair were caught Monday afternoon after leading US Marshals on a car chase that lasted 'less than a few minutes'. They had been in Evansville, Indiana, since May 3

The couple had just $29,000 of the $90,000 Vicky had withdrawn when they were caught on Monday

Sheriff Wedding said investigators do not believe the two had relatives or other contacts in Evanston which is in southwest Indiana, close to both the Kentucky and Illinois borders.

'They thought they'd driven long enough. They wanted to stop for a while, get their bearings straight and then figure out the next place to travel,' the sheriff said.

Authorities closed in on them after the manager of a car wash reported that a man closely resembling the giant 260-pound Casey White had been recorded by a surveillance camera getting out of a pickup truck.

Investigators said they located the pickup, then learned that the pair may have switched to a Cadillac, which was then spotted outside a motel nearby.

They arrived in Evansville on May 3 and were helped by a local man whose identity remains unknown. He booked them into the $44-a-night motel, so they avoided going to the front desk where they might have been recognized.

Casey White told investigators after his capture that 'he was probably going to have a shootout at the stake of both of them losing their lives,' the sheriff said.

Audiotape of a 911 call shows Vicky blamed Casey for their capture in her last moments. 'You had to stay in some f***ing motel,' she is heard saying.

The inmate appeared by video Tuesday in an Indiana courtroom, where he waived extradition. He was sent back to Florence and appeared in court there on Tuesday.

He was remanded to the William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility, a maximum security lock-up near Bessemer, Alabama.

Vicky White, assistant director of corrections at the Lauderdale County jail, had put in for retirement ahead of the escape, and the day of the breakout, April 29, was her last day of work.

She had been honored by her workmates who voted her employee of the year for the fifth time in her career.
Two Texas fathers who were arrested for allegedly disrupting Round Rock Independent School District board meetings are now suing, claiming their right to free speech was violated.

Jeremy Story and Dustin Clark were escorted out of school board meetings after speaking out against Superintendent Hafedh Azaiez in two separate incidents at the end of 2021.

Azaiez had previously been accused of trying to get his mistress to abort their baby and then assaulting her when she refused but was never criminally charged.

Story and Clark were booted from the building when they brought up allegations of misconduct against Azaiez during the meetings in August and September.

Days after the second incident in September, both Story and Clark were arrested by the sheriff's office on disorderly conduct charges.

Now, in a lawsuit filed months later that was obtained by Fox News Digital, the fathers claim the district violated their rights to petition the government for redress and violated their rights to exercise free speech without retaliation.

'The overall trend is basically a conspiracy among many of them to remove and restrain the civil rights of citizens whom they disagree with,' Jeremy Story, told Fox News Digital on Thursday.

'They ultimately have gone to great lengths to silence parents who disagree with them and ultimately to conceal their own malfeasance.'

Round Rock father Jeremy Story is pictured being removed from a school board meeting in August 2021 after bringing up a protective order against Azaiez

Both Story (left) and Clark (right) were charged with hinder proceeding by disorderly conduct in 2021, are now suing the district, claiming their free speech rights were violated

Story told Fox News Digital he hoped the lawsuit will become 'a landmark case to reverse the loss of parental rights across the country and to give parents a voice back in their kids' education.'

'We want our public education system to simply educate our children and when we send our children to the public school, we are not submitting to be co-parents with the federal government,' he added.

The lawsuit comes months after the September 17 arrests of Story and Clark, which calls the disorderly charges 'false' and 'trumped-up,' claiming they 'did not constitute a basis for arrest because they were simply exercising their constitutional right to participate in the board meeting.'

In August 2021, Story - a father of seven - attempted to voice his concerns about the allegations against Azaiez, prompting then-Board President Amy Weir to cut him off, warning him not to speak about a topic unrelated to the meeting's agenda. Police then escorted Story out of the meeting.

Weir previously told Fox News that 'there has never been an attempt to silence Mr. Story.'

She added that Story wrote on a card indicating what he would say at the meeting, and he wrote that 'unlike the board, citizens are not required to speak on items on the agenda,' thus indicating that 'he was planning to speak on a topic not listed for the meeting,' Weir said.

In September 2021, Clark, a father of four, also mentioned the allegations of misconduct against Azaiez, during a school board meeting that was set up with just 18 chairs in a room that could 300 people and prevented members of the public from entering.

'These actions seemed to be an effort to intimidate parents and control the optics by arbitrarily restricting the capacity of parents and community members allowed in the boardroom,' Clark previously told Fox News Digital.

The school board passed a tax increase at that meeting, an increase that the lawsuit claimed was illegal.

Clark was removed from the building and school district officials blamed COVID restrictions on the reduced capacity.

In September, Dustin Clark, who has children in the Round Rock district, was arrested after speaking out against Azaiez during a meeting (pictured)

A few days after the September incident, both Story and Clark were arrested by the sheriff's office on charges of hinder proceeding by disorderly conduct.

Story called on the school board to investigate its own members, but the board voted against the investigation.

In the lawsuit filed Wednesday, the fathers claimed the board of trustees 'failed to operate openly, and violated the Texas Open Meetings Act by deliberating in secret and deciding that Azaiez should be hired in a later sham vote.'

They also demanded a tempora

0ry restraining order and court injunctions to prevent the defendants from enforcing 'arbitrary spacing rules at board meetings using the Limited Public Comment and pretextual COVID-19 seating rule to limit criticism.'

Jenny LaCoste-Caputo, a spokeswoman for the school district, told Fox News Digital it had not yet been served with the suit and declined comment.

Round Rock Independent School Superintendent Hafedh Azaiez is on a paid administrative leave after being accused of trying to get his mistress to abort their baby and then assaulting her last year

School Board President Amy Weir (pictured) has been accused of saying she would protect Azaiez from misconduct accusations

The scandal in the Round Rock Independent School District has been brewing for months, and when the school district learned of the allegations against Azaiez, it hired an independent investigator and placed the superintendent on paid administrative leave.

Azaiez had been accused by his mistress of trying to force her to abort their baby and of assaulting her when she refused, prompting the woman to obtain a protective order against him.

He returned to work in March after the school board voted 5-2 to bring him back from paid administrative leave.

No criminal charges were filed against Azaiez, and the protective order against him has expired.

The mistress, who has not been named, described Azaiez as manipulative, controlling and 'very rough' in their intimacy. She claimed that Azaiez, who was married, told her he was estranged from his wife and was only waiting for his children to grow up to file for a divorce.

The superintendent's lover wrote in her affidavit that she told Azaiez about her pregnancy on June 24, 2021, after he had just signed the contract naming him Round Rock's new superintendent.

According to the filing, Azaiez blamed the woman for their affair and pregnancy, and then allegedly started to threaten her on phone calls and in text messages.

'He asked me to have an abortion so he would not lose his career and family. I was very upset at this, and I said no to an abortion and told him that I had made up my mind to have the child,' the woman, who was nine weeks pregnant at the time, wrote.

'He said this child was a mistake and so was I, he wanted nothing to do with this child, he did not want it,' she continued. 'He said I was lying, and he was not the father of the child.'

A few days later, she wrote that Azaiez started to intimidate her 'by telling me he was in a position of power...he then said no one would believe me if I said he was the father and that he would tell everyone I was crazy and make me look crazy'.

The mistress said she repeatedly implored Azaiez to inform the school board of her pregnancy, but she claimed the newly hired superintendent bragged to her that then-School Board President Amy Weir 'had offered to protect him, she was informing him of everything and guaranteed him he would not lose his job,' according to the court document.

The petitioner continued: 'In the past I had heard conversations between him and the school board preside plotting things and keeping things from other school board members.'

The filing alleged that on July 6, Azaiez called his mistress, accusing her of informing the school board of her pregnancy behind his back. He allegedly reiterated that Weir would protect him and the woman 'was going to pay for him losing his career and family'.

Later that same day, Azaiez allegedly came to his pregnant girlfriend' home and again tried to convince her to get an abortion, but she refused.

'He became so angry he grabbed my arms with force, shaking me and shoving me until he threw me to the floor,' she claimed.

When the woman threatened to call the police, she said Azaiez took away her phone, but then told her he did not mean to do this and left.

The woman claimed that after the attack, she developed a bleeding and was told by her doctor that she could miscarry. It's unclear whether the woman brought the pregnancy to term.

According to the protective order application, the mistress was left fearing for her life and her baby's life after someone broke into her home in the Austin area in mid-July and stole items containing her personal information, including her iPad, laptop, and journals, but not her jewelry, cash or other valuables.

His attorney told Fox News Digital that she has 'incontrovertible' evidence proving that the assault never happened, but she did not say what it is. She also revealed that Azaiez and his mistress have 'amicably' reached a confidential settlement agreement.
Thousands of Palestinians on Thursday honoured Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh across the occupied West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem, a day after she was shot dead during an Israeli army raid.

Israel and the Palestinians have traded blame over the killing of Palestinian-American Abu Akleh, 51, a veteran of the Qatar-based network's Arabic service, during clashes in the Jenin refugee camp.

The United States, European Union and United Nations have backed calls for a full investigation into what Al Jazeera labelled a deliberate killing 'in cold blood', but the Palestinian Authority (PA) has rejected holding a joint probe with Israel.

In a sign of Abu Akleh's stature among Palestinians, she received what was described as a full state memorial at the Ramallah compound of president Mahmud Abbas.

A Sudanese demonstrator carries a poster of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was shot dead on May 11, while covering a raid in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, during an anti-coup demonstration in the capital

A condolence event is held for Al Jazeera's journalist Shireen Abu Akleh who was shot dead by Israeli forces during a raid in West Bank. The United States, European Union and United Nations have backed calls for a full investigation into what Al Jazeera labelled a deliberate killing 'in cold blood'

Thousands lined the route as her coffin, draped in the Palestinian flag, was driven through the West Bank city, where a street is to be renamed in her honour.

Many held flowers, wreaths and pictures of the slain journalist, who has been widely hailed for her bravery and professionalism through her coverage of the conflict.

'This crime should not go unpunished,' said Abbas, adding that the PA held Israel 'completely responsible' for her death, and had 'rejected' an Israeli proposal for a joint investigation.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett had said Wednesday it was 'likely' Abu Akleh was killed by stray Palestinian gunfire - but Defence Minister Benny Gantz later conceded that it could have been 'the Palestinians who shot her' or fire from 'our side'.

On a visit to Tehran, Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani blamed 'Israeli occupation forces' for the 'heinous crime'.

Bennett on Thursday accused the PA of blocking Israel from accessing 'the basic findings that would be necessary in order to reach the truth,' and warned them not to 'taint the investigative process.'

Sudanese demonstrators come out in support for the Al Jazeera journalist. An initial autopsy and forensic examination were conducted in Nablus in the Israel-occupied West Bank hours after her death, but no final conclusions have been disclosed

Draped in a Palestinian scarf, mourner Tariq Ahmed, 45, described the death as a 'tragedy for all the nation', comparing his grief to that he felt at the funeral of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

'I have not felt this pain since Arafat died,' Ahmed said.

Another mourner, 45-year-old Hadil Hamdan, said that 'Shireen was part of our lives', adding that 'her voice entered every home, and her loss is a wound in our hearts'.

Abu Akleh, a Christian born in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, is scheduled to be buried in the city on Friday.

As her coffin began its journey to Jerusalem to the drumbeat of a marching band, crowds chanted slogans demanding an end to Palestinian security cooperation with Israel.

Israel had publicly called for a joint probe and stressed the need for Palestinian authorities to hand over the fatal bullet for forensic examination.

The European Union has urged an 'independent' probe while the United States demanded the killing be 'transparently investigated', calls echoed by UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet.

But senior PA official Hussein Al-Sheikh, a close Abbas confidant, said the Palestinian 'investigation would be completed independently'.

He added that Abu Akleh's family, the United States, Qatar and 'all official authorities' would be informed of the results.

An initial autopsy and forensic examination were conducted in Nablus in the Israel-occupied West Bank hours after her death, but no final conclusions have been disclosed.

Israel on Thursday advanced plans for 4,427 Jewish settler homes in a move likely to inflame further tensions between Israel and Palestine

Tensions had already risen with a wave of attacks that have killed at least 18 people in Israel since March 22, including an Arab-Israeli police officer and two Ukrainians

A source in the Palestinian attorney general's office said the results of a preliminary report on the bullet were expected as early as Thursday evening.

In a move likely to further inflame West Bank tensions, Israel on Thursday advanced plans for 4,427 Jewish settler homes.

About 475,000 settlers already live in the West Bank, alongside some 2.7 million Palestinians, in communities widely regarded as illegal under international law.

Settlement monitor Peace Now warned the announcement 'deepens the occupation,' while right-wing Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked, a member of Bennett's religious nationalist Yamina party, hailed a 'day of celebration for the settler movement.'

Tensions had already risen with a wave of attacks that have killed at least 18 people in Israel since March 22, including an Arab-Israeli police officer and two Ukrainians.

A total of 31 Palestinians and three Israeli Arabs have died during the same period, according to an AFP tally, among them perpetrators of attacks and those killed by Israeli security forces in West Bank operations.
The House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol has subpoenaed five Republican lawmakers to learn about their conversations with Donald Trump and other information they have about the day.

The summons includes House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy of Calfornia along with GOP Reps. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Andy Biggs of Arizona, and Mo Brooks of Alabama.

The lawmakers either participated in meetings at the White House, had direct conversations with President Trump leading up to and during the attack, or were involved in the planning and coordination of certain activities on and before January 6th, the committee said in a statement.

'The committee just found that before we close the loop on our investigation, the members should come in should they choose and offer a response to the information we found,' Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, chairman of the panel, told reporters on Capitol Hill.

If any of the lawmakers refuse, the Democratic-controlled House could vote to hold them in contempt of Congress. From there, the Justice Department would decide whether or not to formally pursue charges.

'I have not seen this subpoena. I guess they sent it to you guys before they send it to me,' McCarthy told reporters on Capitol Hill. 'Look, my view on the committee has not changed. They're not conducting legitimate investigation. That seems as though they just want to go after their political opponents.'

He didn't answer questions on whether he would comply with it.

Rep. Biggs said it was a 'witch hunt.'

'The January 6 Committees ongoing, baseless witch hunt is nothing more than an effort to distract the American people from the Democrats and Bidens disastrous leadership,' he tweeted.

House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy was subpoenaed by the committee investigating January 6th insurrection at Capitol - reporters in the Capitol surround him to ask about the news

The panel also has subpoenaed Rep. Jim Jordan (above), a close Trump ally

Committee wants to know about lawmakers' conversations with Donald Trump - above then President Trump at the January 6 rally outside the White House

All five had been asked previously - and refused - to voluntarily testify before the panel.

'We're forced to take this step,' the Jan. 6 panel said of the subpoenaes.

The move is a dramatic escalation in the committee's investigation and follow weeks of internal debate on whether to try to force Republicans to testify behind closed doors.

Congressional subpoenas for sitting members of Congress, especially for a party leader, are almost without precedent.

They come as the panel is preparing for a series of public hearings this June.

Rep. Perry said the subpoenaes were sent for 'headlines.

'This is all for headlines and sensationalization,' he said. 'The fact that they send it to the press before they send it to the members just proof it's all about headlines.'

McCarthy has admitted to speaking with Trump on the day MAGA supporters stormed the Capitol to try and stop the certification of the 2020 election. But he's offered few details of that conversation.

Jordan also spoke with Trump. He is a close ally of the former president and was deeply involved in efforts to contest the 2020 election results.

Perry has continuously disputed the validity of Biden's victory in Pennsylvania.

The panel previously said it wants to discuss Perry's attempted effort to install former Department of Justice official Jeffrey Clark as acting attorney general when the DOJ resisted Trump's false claims of voter fraud.

It also said it believed Perry was communicating with Mark Meadows, who was then the White House chief of staff, via an encrypted app, Signal.

In Biggs' case, the committee wants to know about his participation 'in certain planning meetings' with the White House before Jan. 6th. They also want to know about his conversations about having former Vice President Mike Pence 'unilaterally refuse' to accept votes certified states.

The committee's interest in Biggs is on the heels of an April 22 court filing in which lawmakers accused him of being an active participant in White House meetings after the 2020 election, where he and other Republicans brainstormed ways to keep Trump in power. Biggs is also accused of encouraging protesters to come to Washington on Jan. 6 as well as persuading state legislators and officials that the election was stolen.

The January 6th panel also has subpoenaed Republican Reps. Mo Brooks of Alabama (left), Andy Biggs of Arizona (center) and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania (right)

The panel wants to ask Brooks about his recent comments following a spat with Trump after the former president pulled back his endorsement. Brooks said Trump 'asked me to rescind the election of 2020' weeks before leaving office.

Brooks spoke at the Jan. 6th rally on the Ellipse, where he famously said: 'Today is the day American patriots start down names and kicking ass.' He also came up on a leaked House leadership call where leaders fretted about lawmakers calling out fellow members of the conference.

The committe also has expressed an interest in talking to Republican Rep. Ronnie Jackson of Texas but he was not among those subpoenaed. Jackson served as Trump's personal physician and has been an ardent defender of the former president.
The Los Angeles judge who presided over Blac Chyna's failed defamation case against members of the Kardashian clan has thwarted her attempt to have him disqualified from an upcoming trial, DailyMail.com can reveal.

The reality star, real name Angela White, 34, filed a Statement of Disqualification against Judge Gregory Alarcon earlier this week, accusing him of being 'hostile and extremely biased' and not giving her a fair trial.

The legal action came days after a jury of seven women and five men found in favor of the Kardashian family in Chyna's lawsuit and did not award her any damages.

Chyna's legal team asked the chief justice of LA Superior Court to disqualify Judge Alarcon and remove him from her second, upcoming trial against ex Robert Kardashian.

Blac Chyna - pictured leaving court on April 27 - sought to have Judge Gregory Alarcon removed from her upcoming case against ex Rob Kardashian, citing 'extreme bias'

Judge Gregory Alarcon - seen in an April 19 court sketch - has been serving on the bench for close to 30 years. Prior to that he was the Deputy Attorney General for the State of California

But Judge Alarcon refused to refer the issue to his boss, and instead, decided himself to order that the request be 'stricken', ruling the motion 'discloses no legal grounds for disqualification'.

He also hit back at Chyna's claims in a statement saying: 'I am not prejudiced or biased against or in favor of any party to this proceeding or their counsel.

'All rulings made by me in this action have been based upon facts and arguments officially presented to me and upon my understanding of the law.'

Chyna's attorney, Lynne Ciani, told DailyMail.com exclusively that she is now asking California's Court of Appeal to kick Judge Gregory Alarcon off the case.

She wants the judge removed from Chyna's upcoming trial against Kim Kardashian's brother Rob, who she accused of posting 'revenge porn' photos of her on the internet.

'Judge Alarcon did not permit the presiding judge or a different judge to rule in plaintiff's (Chyna's) comprehensive and meritorious statement of disqualification,' Ciani told DailyMail.com after the judge's decision.

Chyna, 34, lost her $108million lawsuit in which she accused the Kardashians of defamation and 'intentional interference with contracts' that led her to lose money on TV, personal appearances and social media 'influencing'

Kim, Kylie Jenner, Khloe and their mother, family matriarch Kris Jenner, were all named as defendants in the case

'An unbiased judge would have allowed another Los Angeles Superior Court Judge to review plaintiff's statement of disqualification and decide for him or herself whether Judge Alarcon should have been disqualified.

'Instead, the biased judge ruled that he is not biased, thereby depriving Angela White of justice once again.'

Ciani cited two of what she called 'the many blatant judicial errors' committed by Judge Alarcon during the trial involving four of the reality TV superstar clan  Kris and Kylie Jenner and Kim and Khloe Kardashian.

One involved the judge's clerk allegedly asking the Kardashians for their autographs  which prompted her re-assignment to another courtroom.

Chyna's lawyer Lynne Ciani says that Judge Gregory Alarcon of being 'undeniably hostile and extremely biased.' Shortly after being ruled against in her defamation lawsuit against the Kardashians, Chyna is facing investigation for an altercation inside of a Los Angeles bar

The other was Kardashians' attorney Michael Rhodes upsetting Chyna when he showed her nude pictures of herself while he was questioning her about a legal document during the trial.

Judge Alarcon 'did nothing' about his clerk's 'misconduct' and 'egregious conflict of interest,' said Ciani  who also condemned the judge's 'abhorrent mishandling of Michael Rhodes' unlawful showing of naked photos of Ms. White to her during key cross-examination testimony.'

In the trial that ended May 2, the Kardashian women were accused of defaming Chyna and intentionally interfering with her contract with the E! network for the show Rob and Chyna, leading to the Keeping Up with the Kardashians spinoff being canceled after only one season.

But Judge Alarcon is also scheduled to preside soon over lawsuit against her Rob and Chyna co-star, Rob Kardashian, 35  her former fiance and father of her five year-old daughter Dream  accusing him of posting 'revenge porn' nude photos of her on the internet after they had broken up.

Now that the judge has denied her effort to have him kicked off the bench, Chyna, said Ciani, 'will be forced to file a Writ of Mandate....to ensure she receives a fair trial by removing Judge Alarcon from that case.

(L-R) Khloe Kardashian, Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner and Kris Jenner were seen in a courtroom sketch attending the legal proceedings on April 19. The family attended most of the proceedings during the case but were not present when the verdict was read out as they were in New York City to prepare for The Met Gala

Chyna accused the Kardashians of plotting to cancel her hit reality show Rob & Chyna

'Moreover, the Writ of Mandate will request that Judge Alarcon also be removed from being able to rule on any post-judgement motions in the defamation and intentional interference with contract case against Kris Jenner, Kim Kardashian, Khloe Kardashian and Kylie Jenner to ensure Ms. White is treated fairly in connection with any such post-judgment motions,' Cianni said in a statement.

While jurors didn't completely exonerate the Kardashians in the trial that ended last week, they also didn't believe Chyna deserved any of the $108million in damages she was seeking.

It was that devastating defeat that prompted Ciani to file her motion to disqualify Judge Alarcon and blasted the Kardashians' attorney, Michael Rhodes who called the move 'a baseless effort to save face after losing at trial,' in court documents.

In a written objection to Ciani's bid to have the judge removed from the case, he added that the motion 'is devoid of any legal basis to disqualify Judge Alarcon from presiding over further matters I'm this action.

'While plaintiff (Chyna) and her counsel, Lynne Ciani, are understandably disappointed about the jury's defense verdict following an emotionally charged trial, their effort to make a scapegoat of Judge Alarcon is frivolous, dishonest and deserving of sanctions,' Rhodes said.

'Highlighting the frivolity of plaintiff's disqualification motion is the fact that Ms. Ciani failed to file her motion until after the jury found against her client.

'This delay reveals the true motivation underlying plaintiff's motion: to salvage Ms. Ciani's reputation by deflecting blame for her own shortcomings at trial and generate further publicity for plaintiff.

'Far from any appearance of bias or prejudice, Judge Alarcon demonstrated considerable tolerance towards Ms. Ciani despite her failure to understand and apply basic rules of evidence.'

Blac Chyna waves as she leaves Los Angeles Superior Court in Los Angeles, Friday, April 29 after the judge threw out part of the case against the Kardashian family

E!'s Keeping up with the Kardashian ended its 20-season run in June 2021

Rhodes called Giani's judge disqualification request 'untimely' and went on: 'Plaintiff (Chyna) claims Judge Alarcon exhibited an 'undeniably hostile and extremely biased' attitude towards her and Ms. Ciani since April 19 and 20  the day both sides presented opening arguments to the jury.

'Yet Plaintiff and her counsel nonetheless proceeded without complaint as Judge Alarcon presided over a 10-day trial.

'In the days and weeks that followed, plaintiff and her counsel had ample time to raise her completely misguided allegations about Judge Alarcon's impartiality.'

Rhodes said the Kardashians 'have long maintained that the case and trial were part of a well-orchestrated publicity campaign.

'Plaintiff makes money as a so-called social media 'influencer'  as she admitted from the stand (as part of her absurd damages claims), the more 'real fans' she has on her social media accounts, the more potential money she can make.'

Judge Alarcon has scheduled May 19 for a court conference to decide a date for the trial in Chyna's 'revenge porn' lawsuit.
Louisiana prosecutors have charged three state police troopers accused of beating a black motorist, hoisting him to his feet by his hair braids and bragging in text messages that the 'whoopin' would give him 'nightmares for a long time.'

The misdemeanor simple battery charges in the 2020 arrest of Antonio Harris come amid mounting scrutiny of the state's premier law enforcement agency over allegations of excessive force - particularly against black people - and an institutional instinct to cover it up.

Jacob Brown, Dakota DeMoss and George 'Kam' Harper, who are white, were seen on body-camera video piling onto Harris following a high-speed chase that ended next to a cornfield in rural Franklin Parish.

The three former state troopers slapped and punched Harris even though he had surrendered face down with his arms and legs splayed.

State police had arrested the troopers in February 2021 on felony charges of malfeasance in office, but local prosecutors elected not to bring that count last week when filing a bill of information in Franklin Parish. Misdemeanor simple battery in Louisiana carries up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine.

'Obviously we would have liked stronger charges but we're still hopeful the Department of Justice will bring a case,' said Harris' attorney, Michael Sterling.

Attorneys for the former state troopers declined to comment Thursday. A state police spokesperson did not immediately comment on the charges.

In this May 23, 2020 image from Louisiana State Police body camera video, law enforcement applies an electric weapon to the back of black motorist Antonio Harris as other officers restrain him on the side of a road after a high speed chase in Franklin Parish, Louisiana

Jacob Brown (left), Dakota DeMoss (center) and George 'Kam' Harper (right), who are white, were seen on body-camera video piling onto Harris following a high-speed chase that ended next to a cornfield in rural Franklin Parish

The Louisiana State Police has been accused of several acts of excessive force in recent years

Harris' case began after Brown pulled him over for a minor traffic violation on Interstate 20. The trooper conducted a criminal history check and discovered Harris had a suspended drivers license and outstanding warrants.

Harris sped away from the traffic stop in a Hyundai Sonata, leading troopers on a 29-mile chase that reached speeds of 150 miles before it was finally stopped with the help of a tire-puncturing spike strip.

Even though Harris had already surrendered, DeMoss, the first arriving trooper, delivered a 'knee strike' and slapped him in the face with an open palm before powering off his body-worn camera, court records show.

Harper, meanwhile, punched Harris in the head several times with a fist "reinforced" by a flashlight and threatened to "punish" Harris, while Brown pulled the mans hair, an internal investigation concluded. DeMoss can later be seen on the footage lifting Harris to his feet by his braids.

Investigators determined Brown never informed state prosecutors that any body-worn camera video of the arrest existed.

'They kept saying ''Stop resisting'' but I was never resisting,' Harris told investigators. 'As soon as they got to me, one of them kneed me in my face. One of them was squeezing my eyes'

Even though Harris had already surrendered, DeMoss, the first arriving trooper, delivered a 'knee strike' and slapped him in the face with an open palm before powering off his body-worn camera, court records show

An internal investigation found the troopers filed 'wholly untrue' reports claiming the man kept trying to flee, refused to obey commands and fought with troopers before they began to pummel him with what Brown called 'tactical strikes.'

'They kept saying ''Stop resisting'' but I was never resisting,' Harris told investigators. 'As soon as they got to me, one of them kneed me in my face. One of them was squeezing my eyes.'

The troopers also later exchanged 14 text messages peppered with 'lol' and 'haha' responses in which they boasted about the beating and mocked Harris, who spit up blood and suffered from sore ribs and stomach pain for days after the arrest.

'He gonna be sore tomorrow for sure,' Brown wrote in one of the texts. 'Warms my heart knowing we could educate that young man.'

Brown, Harper and DeMoss, who were part of a notoriously violent division of troopers patrolling the northeastern part of the state, were arrested in the case last year.

DeMoss and Harper were fired and Brown, who in October pleaded not guilty in a separate federal case accusing him of pummeling another black motorist 18 times with a flashlight, resigned.

DeMoss has also come under investigation for his role in the death of another black man, which authorities initially blamed on a car crash at the end of a chase before the Associated Press last year published troopers' long-withheld body-camera video showing a violent arrest.

Harris' arrests is among at least 12 cases over the past decade in which an investigation found troopers or their bosses ignored or concealed evidence of beatings, deflected blame and impeded efforts to root out misconduct.

Dozens of current and former troopers said the beatings were countenanced by a culture of impunity, nepotism and, in some cases, outright racism.

Ronald Greene is pictured in an undated photo taken before his May 2019 death after leading Louisiana State Troopers on a high-speed chase

Video taken from Trooper Dakota DeMoss' body camera shows the violent of arrest of Greene. Louisiana State Police initially reported that he had died in a car crash

A federal grand jury in Lafayette has been hearing testimony in the case following a months-long investigation into whether the troopers used excessive force.

It remains unclear whether the US Justice Department intends to move forward with a civil rights case.

A similar uncertainty hangs over the federal investigation into the deadly 2019 arrest of Ronald Greene, another black motorist beaten by state police.

A federal grand jury also has been hearing testimony in that case, in which troopers stunned, punched and dragged Greene before he died on a rural roadside in Union Parish, outside Monroe.

The Justice Department is increasingly skeptical it can bring a successful case against the troopers.

State lawmakers, meanwhile, are probing allegations of a cover-up in Greene's death and voted Wednesday to hold the former head of the state police in contempt for defying a subpoena and refusing to turn over the handwritten journals he kept while leading the agency.

Former Col. Kevin Reeves was separately held in contempt Thursday for not complying with a subpoena from the commission that oversees discipline of state troopers. Reeves' attorney, Lewis Unglesby, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Advertisement

The family of the hero passenger who landed a plane in Florida with no experience after the pilot became incoherent say they're proud and impressed of the interior designer.

Darren Harrison, 39, has been identified as the passenger who took over a Cessna 208 Caravan traveling from Leonard M. Thompson International Airport in Marsh Harbor, the Bahamas on Tuesday and safely landed the plane at at the Palm Beach International Airport in Florida after the pilot suffered a medical emergency and fell unconscious.

Harrison currently works as a lead commercial and residential flooring specialist at Sunshine Interiors, a family-owned interior design company based in Florida.

The 39-year-old has spent 16 years in the flooring industry after being introduced to the business by his father and now works on commercial projects throughout the state of Florida, according to his employers.

Matthew Harrison, 37, told the New York Post that his older cousin Darren, who serves as vice president at Sunshine Interiors, was returning from a fishing trip in the Bahamas to his pregnant wife.

Darren Harrison, 39, (pictured) has been identified as the passenger who took over a Cessna 208 Caravan and safely landed the plane in Florida after the pilot suffered a medical emergency and fell unconscious

Harrison (right) is pictured with air traffic controller Robert Morgan who printed out a layout of the cockpit of a Cessna 208 Caravan airplane to help the 39-year-old land the flight

Harrison currently works as a lead commercial and residential flooring specialist at Sunshine Interiors, a family-owned interior design company based in Florida

Matthew said he could not believe his own relative was behind the miraculous landing.

'I was like, 'Wait, that's my cousin?' Matthew told the Post.

Matthew said he did not know his cousin could be so calm under immense pressure.

'That was insane. I'm impressed too, he was so calm, I've never known him to be that calm before,' he said.

But Darren's uncle, Glenn Harrison, said he knew his nephew to be able to keep his cool.

'I know he was probably scared to death but it doesn't surprise me him doing what he did,' Glenn told The Post. 'He's pretty good about keeping his cool, it doesn't surprise me he kept his composure, followed directions and everything turned out great.'

Matthew said he texted Darren's wife to let her know how proud of his cousin he was.

'I messaged his wife and said, ''Will you reach out to him and let him know I'm super impressed and proud of him, that's amazing,'' Matthew told the Post.

'She said, ''I know that's not like a phone call you expect to get''and when he told her what happened she said, ''You did what?'' Matthew said, laughing.

Harrison quickly sprang into action after his pilot became incapacitated.

He was aided by Robert Morgan, an air traffic controller, who printed out a picture of the cockpit controls to to guide the passenger through the steps of flying and landing the plane as he struggled with the navigation system.

'I just feel like it was probably meant to happen,' Morgan told WBPF. 'I knew the plane was flying like any other plane. I just had to keep him calm, point him to the runway and tell him how to reduce the power so he could descend to land.

'Before I knew it, he was like, ''I'm on the ground. How do I turn this thing off?''

Once he landed, Morgan said, he ran out to meet Harrison and the two hugged on the tarmac.

'It felt really good to help somebody, and he told me that he was going to go home tonight to see his pregnant wife.'

Air traffic controller Robert Morgan, right, printed out a picture of a Cessna 208 Caravan plane to help guide a passenger through the steps of flying and landing the plane as he struggled with the navigation system Tuesday afternoon

Harrison has spent 16 years in the flooring industry after being introduced to the business by his father and now works on commercial projects throughout the state of Florida, according to his employers

Morgan had never flown a Cessna 208 Caravan plane, he later revealed, but is an FAA-certified flight instructor with around 1,200 hours of flying time under his belt

Air traffic control recordings have revealed just how tense the situation was as Harrison, who had no flying experience, tried to safely landed the Cessna light aircraft - a feat that one JetBlue pilot said was 'nothing short of a miracle.'

In the audio, obtained by DailyMail.com, Harrison could be heard telling air traffic control in Fort Pierce, while flying over the Florida coastline around 70 miles north of his destination.

'My pilot has gone incoherent. I have no idea how to fly the airplane.'

An air traffic control agent then replied: 'Roger. What's your position?'

Harrison replied: 'I have no idea. I can see the coast of Florida in front of me. And I have no idea.'

The audibly shocked air traffic controller in Fort Pierce then told Harrison that he would try and locate the plane when the emergency call came through over his radio.

'Maintain wings level and just try to follow the coast, either north or southbound,' the controller said.

'We're trying to locate you.'

For the next four minutes, audio showed that Harrison remained remarkably calm as he tried to work out what to do and wait for the air traffic controller to find his aircraft.

'Have you guys located me yet?' he asked after a while.

'I can't even get my nav screen to turn on. It has all the information on it. You guys have any ideas on that?'

Harrison was eventually found flying off the coast of Boca Raton, and Morgan, at the Palm Beach airport, eventually managed to talk him down as he guided him on how to land the plane. air traffic control at Palm Beach airport managed to talk him down, guiding him how to land the plane.

The landing was a little wobbly, but ultimately safe and successful according to air traffic control, who were clearly astounded at the 39-year-old's ability to settle the plane on the runway with no prior experience whatsoever.

'You just witnessed a couple passengers land that plane,' the dumbfounded air traffic controller said over the radio.

Another pilot on the runway said: 'Did you say the passengers landed the plane?'

'That's correct,' control responded.

'Oh, my gosh. Great job!'

The pilot, who remained unconscious was later taken to the hospital as a result of the unknown illness. His condition remains unknown.

An aviation expert told CNN it is not uncommon for small turboprop airplanes such as the Cessna 208 Caravan to fly with only one pilot, particularly when the flights are private.

An FAA spokesperson confirmed they were investigating the incident and said the pilot suffered a 'possible medical issue' - though did not provide further details on his condition.

The Cessna 208 Caravan is seen coming in to land on Tuesday at Palm Beach airport

Harrison didn't even know how to turn the navigation system on, and did not know the plane's location other than 'off the Florida coast'

The flight path of the Cessna 208 Caravan, piloted by a passenger, is displayed hereby flgithradar24. The passenger turned south and flew roughly 70 miles towards Boca Raton before heading north again to land at Palm Beach International

Air traffic controller Robert Morgan (pictured) has worked as an air traffic controller for 20 years and is an FAA certified flight instructor with around 1200 hours of flying time under his belt

The pilot was taken to hospital, and the passenger safely made it off the plane

Justin Dalmolin, a JetBlue pilot, was told to delay his takeoff to give the unnamed Cessna passenger space and time to land the plane.

'The level of difficulty that this person had to deal with in terms of having zero flight time to fly and land a single engine turbine aircraft is absolutely incredible,' said an amazed Dalmolin.

He told ABC 25: 'The incredible part is not just flying the aircraft but obviously the most difficult thing which is configuring the aircraft for approach and landing. And then landing it, and that to me, for a zero time pilot.

'I remember my first days when I first started flight training, I was white-knuckled and sweating for my first ten hours of training.'

Dalmolin said it was lucky it was daylight so that Harrison could see where he was going because it would have been extremely difficult if it the saga had unfolded overnight or in heavy fog.

'You know it's nothing short of a miracle and I'm really glad for them and their families they had such a great outcome,' said Dalmolin.

John Nance, an aviation expert, also told ABC 25 that the landing of such a complex plane by someone without any flying history was a remarkable feat.

'This is the first time I've ever heard of one of these being landed by somebody that has no aeronautical experience,' Nance said.

'The person on the airplane who had no aeronautical experience listened very carefully and obviously followed instructions with great calm.

'That's what made the difference.'

Do you know the brave passenger who landed the plane? Contact newsUS@dailymail.com
China under fire for raising THAAD issue again



Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan has come under criticism for his seemingly inappropriate statement during his meeting with President Yoon Suk-yeol on Tuesday. Wang, who came here to attend Yoon's inauguration ceremony as Chinese President Xi Jinping's special envoy, offered a five-point proposal designed to promote bilateral relations further. Most notably, he cited the need for the two countries to "properly handle sensitive issues." China has used this expression when attempting to demand the withdrawal of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system from Korea.



Seoul and Beijing agreed to terminate the dispute on THAAD issues and mend their soured relations in October 2017. Despite the agreement, China's Xi repeatedly called on former President Moon Jae-in to "properly handle the issue." It is inappropriate for Wang to raise the issue again in the meeting with Yoon as he was visiting to congratulate him on taking office. Critics said Wang's remark can be interpreted as bullying.



It is also improper for Xi to convey his invitation for Yoon to visit China via Wang. This can be problematic in light of the strict principle of reciprocity in the diplomatic world. Xi has not visited Seoul since July 2014. In comparison, former President Park Geun-hye visited Beijing in September 2015, while Moon also visited China twice. Though Xi and other ranking Chinese officials revealed Xi's intention to visit Korea many times, they failed to put the pledges into practice.



Against this backdrop, criticism has been growing that China was trying to use Xi's possible Korea visit as diplomatic leverage to drive a wedge between South Korea and the United States. China's official media outlets focused on the "sensitive issues" without referring to Xi's invitation to Yoon, which shows the real motives of Wang's visit here. China should have said that Xi wanted to meet Yoon at a convenient time, without specifying the exact place in consideration of Korea's stance. Given this, it was proper for Yoon to express his hope to meet Xi in Seoul while appreciating Xi's invitation.



China is installing a radar system, estimated to be far more sophisticated than THAAD, in Shandong province, only 500 kilometers from Seoul. Given this, it is totally inappropriate for China to continue raising the THAAD issue, citing security concerns. Worse still, China has remained silent on North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's statement indicating the possible use of nuclear weapons against South Korea. It has also blocked the move by the United Nations to take retaliatory measures against Pyongyang for its firing of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).



Moon deserves criticism for his low-profile attitude toward China, prompting it to take such "haughty" stances in its relations with Seoul. It is high time for the two countries to join efforts to open a new era of bilateral relations based on common prosperity and peace. This is all the more significant as this year marks the 30th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two nations.


Republican lawmakers Marjorie Taylor Greene and Dan Crenshaw traded blows on Twitter as they renewed their bitter feud - this time over a $40 billion Ukrainian aid bill.

Crenshaw has clashed repeatedly with rightwing firebrand Greene over her bombastic approach to politics.

And on Wednesday, he suggested her opposition to the humanitarian and military assistance bill was part of an effort to woo the Russian establishment and its state-controlled media.

'Still going after that slot on Russia Today huh?' he said as they traded barbs on the wisdom of backing Ukraine.

Their spat brought to the surface divisions between Republicans in handling the war in Ukraine, and whether it risked increased blowback from Moscow.

Reps. Dan Crenshaw and Marjorie Taylor Greene went to war on Twitter over Ukraine on Wednesday, exposing divisions in the Republican Party and renewing their bitter feud

Crenshaw's comments about funding Ukraine triggered an angry response from Greene

And it was a reminder of the way the pair clashed last year when Greene said the former Navy SEAL was 'firing blanks' after he complained about 'grifters' and 'performance artists' in their party.

Their latest showdown followed a 368-57 House vote, with only Republicans opposing a measure to give billions in military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine.

Opponents cited its impact on the U.S. national debt or fears of becoming too deeply involved in the conflict.

Crenshaw made clear his support.

'Yeah, because investing in the destruction of our adversarys military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea,' he tweeted.

'You should feel the same.'

At that point Greene piped up, suggesting he was effectively advocating for a proxy war against Moscow.

'You speak as if Ukrainian lives should be thrown away, as if they have no value,' she responded.

'Just used and thrown away. For your proxy war?

'How does that help Americans? How does any of this help?'

Throughout the conflict, a wing of Trump-allied Republicans has been wary of backing Ukraine too heavily against Vladimir Putin's invasion.

They have blamed N.A.T.O. expansion in Europe for pushing Moscow to invade, bringing accusations that they were parroting Putin's talking points.

Hence, Crenshaw's jibe about seeking a slot on Russia Today.

Crenshaw used an appearance in Houston, Texas, last year to condemn 'performance artists' as 'the ones you think are more conservative because they know how to say slogans real well'

But it is not the first time the two have clashed.

Greene has a record of making incendiary comments, from sharing QAnon conspiracy theories to apparently condoning violence against Democrats.

And several House Republicans have said that the likes of Greene are drowning out more moderate voices with extreme views.

Crenshaw is among those who fear a vocal fringe could deter voters in the midterm elections.

'There are two types of members of Congress: there is performance artists and there is legislators,' Crenshaw said during a campaign event in Houston, Texas, in December.

'Performance artists are the ones who get all of the attention, the ones you think are more conservative because they know how to say slogans real well.

'They know how to recite the lines that they know our voters want to hear.'

He went on to point to members of the House Freedom Caucus, which includes the likes of Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Jim Jordan, for failing to vote with former President Trump.

Greene defended her approach, saying that

'What you hear so often is not true,' said the former Green Beret, who has found a niche as Trump supporter that is not afraid to speak out against the worst excesses of the MAGA movement.

'Its not true. We have grifters in our midst I mean in the conservative movement.

'Lie after lie after lie because they know something psychologically about the conservative heart.

'Were worried about what people are doing to do to us, what people are going to infringe upon us, thats the nature of conservatism.'

Greene quickly hit back in a tweet.

'Recent attacks from our conference on the @freedomcaucus not only misses the mark, it tells more about the guy shooting with blanks,' she wrote on Wednesday.

'It's a lot better for him to move to the right than disappoint the audience he performs for.'
A former rising Bloomberg journalist who quit her job and divorced her husband to pursue a doomed relationship with infamous 'Pharma Bro' Martin Shkreli - before she was dumped through his lawyers - has said she has no regrets.

Christie Smythe, 39, said she is much happier since giving up the 'perfect little Brooklyn life' with her financier husband for Shkreli after she started covering him for work in early 2015 - when she broke the news of his arrest for securities fraud.

Although the romance came to an end when Shkreli broke up with her through his lawyers after she went public with the relationship in an Elle magazine feature, the former reporter says she bears no ill feelings.

'Part of me will always love Martin  I absolutely don't have any regrets about what, you know, what has transpired,' Smythe told Fox Digital News.

'So we are friends, we talk. I am looking forward to seeing what he does when he gets out [of jail]. I am very excited to see him ... I imagine that there will be a very big hug,' she added about his September 2023 release.

Shkreli is serving a seven-year sentence after being charged with running a pyramid scheme to prop up his pharma empire in 2015. He was already known as one of the most hated men in America for jacking up the price of a life-saving AIDS drug from $13.50 to $750.

Smythe has also launched her own endeavors after giving up her journalistic career to pursue the unlikely romance.

She plans to publish a memoir titled 'SMIRK: How I Fell in Love With the Most Hated Man in America' - in reference to Shkreli's infamous smirk at a congressional hearing that scrutinized his actions, which ultimately earned him the 'Pharma Bro' alias.

'You will be taken along on my journey from when I was a plucky Bloomberg legal reporter trying to ascend a career ladder, to my collision with an errant young striver whose many missteps and impulsive decisions caused him to fall directly in my path,' her website promises about the upcoming book.

'This is great, I am proud of you and thank you for thinking about my feelings as well. I hope it is a smash hit,' Shkreli allegedly wrote in an email about the book.

Christie Smythe, 39, said she is much happier since giving up the 'perfect little Brooklyn life' with her financier husband for Shkreli after she started covering him for work in early 2015 - when she broke the news of his arrest for securities fraud

Although the romance came to an end when Shkreli broke up with her through his lawyers after she went public with the relationship in an Elle magazine feature, the former reporter says she bears no ill feelings

Shkreli is serving a seven-year sentence after being charged with running a pyramid scheme to prop up his pharma empire in 2015

Speaking to Fox, Smythe said she didn't agree with the way an Elle profile characterized her relationship with Shkreli, adding that people had literally interpreted she had knowingly abandoned happiness to be with Shkreli.

'The framing was that I throw away my life for Martin Shkreli, and yeah, I kind of object to that characterization because my life has continued. I did not threw anything away. In fact, I am in a much happier place now than I used to be,' Smythe told the outlet.

'I had an Instagram perfect life ... and I just wasn't happy with my entire situation.

Smythe said that she felt drawn to Shkreli right after meeting him but did not trust her own instincts. Eventually, however, she said she realized the criminal mastermind was not what everyone said he was.

'I got to know him and developed such a close relationship with him ... And what I liked about him is that he was extremely open honestly, very earnest, very smart,' she said.

'Smart in a way there is not just one thing he knows about, or just one thing he is good at. He is an intellectually curious person on a level I rarely see, so I was very intrigued by that.'

Smythe left Bloomberg in 2018 and got divorced from her husband in 2019. She had said she would wait for Shkreli while he served the remaining of his sentence. She also said she had frozen her eggs.

'This is great, I am proud of you and thank you for thinking about my feelings as well. I hope it is a smash hit,' Shkreli allegedly wrote in an email about the book

Smythe, 39, quit her job, divorced her husband, and froze her eggs for imprisoned former CEO Martin Shkreli

Smythe (on her wedding day) said she was living a 'perfect Brooklyn life' with her ex-husband, Pimco executive Devin Arcoleo, 36, until she encountered Shkreli

Smythe went public with the romance in 2020 - much to the disapproval of Shkreli, who had warned her not to talk to the media about it. She said she was motivated to do the interview on Elle because she wanted to advocate for him in the event he became infected with COVID.

'I was very worried he would get sick and there wouldn't be anybody to advocate for him. So, I thought, you know what, I [have] to go public. People are going to pay attention to this and then at least I'll have a voice if he gets sick,' Smythe told Fox.

But Shkreli did not react well to the news and broke up with her through his lawyers.

'We are still friends, you know, nothing more. Because there is really no way of having a romantic relationship with someone in prison, where I can't even see him. It has been two years since I have seen him because visiting protocols are a nightmare, she added.

Shkreli, who once led Turing Pharmaceuticals, is currently serving seven years in prison for defrauding investors. He became infamous for suddenly raising the price of the drug Daraprim in 2015 by 5,000 percent - from $13.50 a pill to $750.

He also drew attention in 2015 when he purchased for $2 million the sole edition of an album by rappers Wu-Tang Clan titled 'Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.'

In 2018, he was sentenced to seven years in prison on an unrelated matter for lying to investors about the performance of two hedge funds he ran, withdrawing more money from those funds than he was entitled to get, and defrauding investors in a drug company, Retrophin, by hiding his ownership of some of its stock.

Shkreli was ordered to forfeit $7.3 million as part of his unrelated prison sentence and is due to be released from prison in September 2023.

Smythe is pictured with her ex-husband. They started going to couple's counselling when she began working on stories about Shkreli. Her husband warned her Shkreli was using her

The pair first met in 2015 soon after she found out that he was under federal investigation for securities law violations.

Then, after his arrest, he contacted her when he'd been bailed out of jail.

For weeks afterward, she says he 'toyed' with her by promising an on-the-record interview only to give one to one of her competitors.

Eventually, he called asking for her advice because he needed a new lawyer. She said she was flattered.

They met again at a wine bar near his Murray Hill apartment where, she says, they bonded over their childhoods and the fact that neither of them went to Ivy League schools.

She then wrote a paper for a class she was taking at Columbia where she described being drawn in by him and how he manipulated reporters to his advantage. Her professor told her, she says, that the lines had become too muddied for her to be impartial in her reporting of her case.

'Maybe I was being charmed by a master manipulator,' she said.

The couple wrote back and a forth

They mailed each other several letters during the unlikely romance

Nonetheless, she decided she wanted to write a book about him. In 2017, she drafted a proposal.

He then invited her to hear him speak at an event where he complimented her on stage, saying: 'Even if you find an honest reporterI made friends with one, she's here right now.'

She recalls how afterwards, they were in a bar drinking with some of the audience members who had come to hear him speak, when he went to the bathroom.

She stepped in to entertain the crowd. 'It almost felt like I was a political wife,' she said.

Shkreli's trial began in 2017. By then, Smythe had taken book leave from Bloomberg.

She went to court every day to watch the trial and sometimes sat with his supporters, she claims, to gain an understanding of who they were for her book.

While he 'trolled' other reporters, including The New York Post's Emily Saul, Smythe fell deeper for him.

'He trolls because he's anxious and he really, really wants to be somebody,' she said.

Before he was convicted, the pair spent time together at his apartment. She claims it was 'for research'.

Even her husband warned her: 'He is just using you.' He also said she was risking her professional reputation by 'getting too sucked into this bad person'.

She then went to visit him in jail and bought $30 of snacks from the vending machine because she didn't know what he would like.

She ended up heating up a hamburger for him in the microwave.

In court, prosecutors read out some of their communications. She said it was only then that she realized she had become 'part of the story'.

She told her editors she could no longer cover the trial for Bloomberg but continued going to court and trying to sell the movie rights to her book, which publishers had passed on by this point.

Before getting entangled with one of the most hated people in the world, Smythe lived 'the perfect little Brooklyn life' with her dog and husband whom she divorced

She remembers dashing around the courtroom to greet people, claiming she felt like she was 'giving a dinner party.'

After he was sentenced to seven years, she kept visiting him in prison and acting as an 'advocate' for him online. She defended him on Twitter so much that her editors hauled her in for a meeting.

She quit, agreeing that she could no longer be impartial.

She and her husband also decided that year to part ways. She does not attribute their divorce entirely to Shkreli but says: 'I'm not going to say it was wrong for him to be concerned.'

She continued visiting him but insists nothing physical had happened between them until then.

Then, in the visitors room, she told him she loved him.

'I told Martin I loved him. And he told me he loved me, too,' she said. She then asked if she could kiss him and he said yes.

They even discussed prenuptial agreements and she says she has frozen her eggs to be able to have kids with him when he gets out.

When he found out she was discussing their romance publicly, he stopped communicating with her.

His scheduled release date from a low-security federal prison is September 2023.
An Air Force crew has been disciplined for landing a Hercules aircraft at Martha's Vineyard to pick up a vintage BMW motorcycle one of them owned.

The crew from the 403rd Wing of the Hurricane Hunters in Mississippi have been punished for 'abusing government assets' after they were seen loading up the vintage bike onto their aircraft on March 25.

The five-person team was reportedly downgraded after Air Force leadership found out about the excursion on March 27, according to CNN Politics, meaning each member lost ratings or credentials that they will have to earn back and could potentially push them under their required number of flight hours to be able to fly.

The military also grounded the men, forcing another crew to pick up the members and the aircraft, according to KFOR 4 News.

'We hold our reservists to the highest standards of conduct and these actions are not tolerated,' Colonel Stuart Rubio, the commander of the 403rd Wing, said in a statement, viewed by CNN Politics.

The 403rd Wing of the Hurricane Hunters from Mississippi fly their Hercules (pictured) into Martha's Vineyard's Airport on March 25 to pick up a vintage BMW motorcycle owned by one of the crew members

The crew reportedly left Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi and traveled to Quonset Air National Guard Base in Rhode land on March 24. A day later, they made an unscheduled, 15-minute stop at Martha's Vineyard on March 25 before continuing onto their scheduled stop in Mather, California

The crew reportedly left Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi, where their wing is based, and traveled to Quonset Air National Guard Base in Rhode land on March 24.

A day later, they made an unscheduled, 15-minute stop at Martha's Vineyard on March 25 to pick up their loot.

The crew continued on their scheduled route to Mather, California, where they picked up equipment for an atmospheric river mission.

'While performing an off-station training mission, a US Air Force Reserve crew with the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, 403rd Wing, Keesler Air Force Base, Mississippi, made an unplanned stop at Marthas Vineyard Airport, Massachusetts, March 24,' Lieutenant Colonel Marnee Losurdo told the Martha's Vineyard Times in March.

While at the famous vineyard, the crew was seen by witnesses loading up a 1970 BMW R75/5 motorcycle that belonged to one of the crew members, CNN Politics reported. The bike reportedly remains in California, the Sun Herald reported.

The crew reportedly picked up a 1970 BMW R75/5 motorcycle (example pictured) which one of the crew owned and is now in California, where the plane was grounded and had to be picked up by another crew to return to base

Witnesses, who were dining at the Plane View Restaurant, were astonished to see a massive Hercules aircraft touching down briefly on the runway.

Doug Ulwick, described the plane as 'freaking huge' and he watched the crew dropped the cargo ramp and collect the motorcycle before quickly taking off agan.

'We heard the noise before we saw the plane. [You] don't see that everyday,' he posted on his social media, according to the Martha's Vineyard Times.

Tristan Israel, a county commissioner, told the Martha's Vineyard Times: 'I saw a vintage BMW motorcycle. I used to own old vintage BMW motorcycles, so thats how I know.

The crew landed the large aircraft at the small airport, which only has two runways, on March 25 for a quick pitstop to pick up the vintage bike

The airport is located in the center of the vineyard and is only a 700 acres big

'I was eating next to the window. We looked out and we saw the plane. We saw people walking a vintage motorcycle up to the plane.'

The airport can support all kinds of jet, but is mainly used by private, small aircrafts. Although, major airlines like Delta, American, and Jet Blue do fly into the airport seasonally. The almost 700-acre airfield has two runways. For reference, a large airport, like JFK, sits on almost 5,000 acres.

DailyMail.com has reached out to the Air Force for comment.
'After what we saw the Supreme Court did on abortion,' Adams said, referring to the court's recent leaked Roe vs. Wade draft - 'we should be very afraid'

Eric Adams has warned New Yorkers that they should be 'very afraid' of what will happen in their city if the Supreme Court strikes down a long-held state law requiring gun owners to have a license in order to carry a firearm.

America's highest court - which has come under fire in recent weeks for a leaked draft that would overturn women's federal abortion rights - is expected to issue a decision in the case, brought by a New York gun group that wants the permit law repealed, in the coming weeks.

The law the group seeks to repeal took effect in 1911, and requires licenses for New Yorkers to possess firearms small enough to be concealed.

During a press conference in Harlem Thursday, Adams told reporters that he suspects the court will toss the century-old gun guidance.

'After what we saw the Supreme Court did on abortion,' Adams said, 'we should be very afraid.'

Eric Adams warned New Yorkers that they should be 'very afraid' of what will happen in their city if the Supreme Court strikes down a long-held state law requiring gun owners to have a license in order to carry a firearm, at a press conference in Harlem Thursday

The tough-on-crime mayor went on to explain how he believes cities like New York are being overlooked by lawmakers looking to nix the law - which requires Big Apple residents to obtain a concealed carry permit before being allowed to carry a gun on the city's streets.

'In densely populated communities like New York, this ruling could have a major impact on us,' Adams, 61, said, before adding that his team was exploring potential ways to respond to the expected ruling.

'We are now looking with our legal experts to see what we can do,' said Adams, who campaigned last year on cleaning up the city's crime-ridden streets.

'But we should all be concerned.'

The lawsuit behind the looming guidance was filed by the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association (NYSRPA) last year, and was sent to the US' top court in November after being dismissed by New York's circuit court - the second tier of the country's court system.

The suit argues the licensing law comes in violation of the Second Amendment, since it only allows concealed carry permits to be issued to those who can show 'proper cause' for keeping a hidden weapon on their person in public - a stipulation that is rarely met by gunowners applying for the permit.

During oral arguments in the case last year, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito - the jurist who penned the leaked Roe vs. Wade repeal draft - conceded that it was not fair that 'law-abiding people' are barred from carrying firearms on the city's crime-riddled subway system, while lawbreakers continue to carry weapons illegally.

'All these people with illegal guns: Theyre on the subway, walking around the streets, but ordinary, hard-working, law-abiding people, no,' Alito told New York states solicitor general Barbara Underwood. 'They cant be armed.'

The statement from the jurist perturbed gun control advocates, who saw the remark as a sign that Alito and his right-leaning contemporaries on the court were plotting to rescind the law.

The law the group seeks to repeal took effect in 1911, and requires licenses for New Yorkers to possess firearms small enough to be concealed

A recent mass shooting in the city's subway system spawned renewed debate over concealed carry laws in New York state, after a masked shooter struck further fear in New Yorkers after popping a smoke canister on a crowded train in Sunset Park lass month, before opening fire - 33 times - on those inside, injuring 10.

Both Second Amendment and gun control advocates have used the incident to strengthen their respective arguments - with those in favor of the law arguing that unarmed citizens on the train car were left defenseless during the attack, while those whom oppose it say the law would not have stopped the suspect, Frank James, from buying the firearm, purchased legally in Ohio, a state with more lax laws.

Adams, who has touted efforts to address the city's rampant gun violence and crime-ravaged subway system since being sworn in as mayor earlier this year, said he believes the city will 'carve out' zones where guns will be prohibited - such as schools and subways - if the guidance is upheld by the court.

'This is going to be a legal battle for some time, but the lawyers are looking at it,' he said. 'We're not sleeping on this ruling, on this decision that's coming down.'

Meanwhile, the mayor has struggled to address gun violence in the city in the four months he has been in office, with gun violence nearly double what it was in 2019

The city saw its latest shooting on Tuesday, where a gunman killed a 31-year-old man and injured two others at a deli in the Bronx, just a day after Adams was pictured rubbing shoulders with celebrities at the Met Gala while wearing a tuxedo that read 'End Gun Violence' on the back.

America's highest court recently came under fire in recent weeks for a leaked draft that would overturn women's federal abortion rights. The jurists are expected to issue a decision in the gun case, brought by a New York gun group that wants the law repealed, in the coming weeks

Also on Tuesday, another shootout in the Bronx saw an NYPD officer shot by a suspect who had been on the streets awaiting sentencing for a prior gun charge.

The officer was the eighth cop to get shot in the city this year.

Gun arrests are up 28 percent, and the NYPD has removed 2,600 illegal guns from the streets this year, Adams said during the presser, touting the numbers.

However, major crime is still up 41 percent compared to last year.

Adams said he expects to get crime under control by the end of January.

'New Yorkers should be living in a safe city right now, based on the actions of the police department,' the mayor said, before blaming woke city officials for lax laws that see repeat offenders released while awaiting sentencing.

'The problem is we did our job of getting guns off the street. Keeping the shooters off the streets is still failing,' Adams said. 'And so unclog our courts, start to sentence these shooters, modify those parts of the laws that allow shooters to come back onto our streets - those are the pieces that we need that are missing.'
Serial killer Levi Bellfield's request to get married in prison is 'inconceivable' and a wedding is unlikely to happen because of the risk he would pose to his fiancee, Dominic Raab has said.

Bellfield, who is serving two whole life sentences for the murders of Marsha McDonnell, Amelie Delagrange and Milly Dowler, has asked for permission to marry a woman while in custody.

The Sun first reported the killer got down on one knee and proposed to the woman in front of staff at HMP Frankland in County Durham.

The woman, who has not been named, is understood to have first written to Bellfield two years ago, and now visits him weekly.

Serial killer Levi Bellfield (pictured), who is currently serving two whole life sentences for murdering Marsha McDonnell, Amelie Delagrange and Milly Dowler, has asked for permission to marry a woman while in prison

Mr Raab, who is justice secretary and Deputy Prime Minister, said the 53-year-old is a 'dangerous serial killer' and suggested any nuptials in prison are unlikely to happen.

When asked what powers he has to stop the wedding, Mr Raab, who is also deputy prime minister, criticised the Human Rights Act.

Speaking to the PA news agency on Thursday, he said: 'The Human Rights Act puts all sorts of obstacles in our way in that regard, which is I think one more reason why we are introducing a Bill of Rights to add a bit more common sense.

'What I can tell you is it is inconceivable that the prison or the Ministry of Justice would authorise that marriage unless the very significant concerns about the safeguarding were addressed; we've asked for a risk assessment in relation to that.

Justice secretary Dominic Raab (pictured) said it was 'inconceivable' that Bellfield is allowed to get married behind bars

'Clearly, we're dealing with a dangerous serial killer.'

Mr Raab said it is 'very difficult to see' how the safeguarding concerns could be overcome.

The Government outlined its plans to replace the Human Rights Act with a new Bill of Rights in Tuesday's Queen's speech.

Former bouncer and wheel-clamper Bellfield's bid to wed is 'exactly the kind of case' which shows the new legislation is needed, Mr Raab said

He added: 'We need written down in UK law a clear set of rights. They shouldn't be trumped by elastic interpretations of human rights.'

Former justice secretary Robert Buckland said people will be 'rightly shocked' to hear he has become engaged, with director of the Centre for Crime Prevention, David Spencer, calling the marriage an 'insult' to his victim's families.

Bellfield got down on one knee to propose to his visiting bride-to-be in front of prison staff at HMP Frankland in County Durham, The Sun reported.

Bellfield is currently in HMP Frankland (pictured) in County Durham. It is reported he got down on one knee and proposed in front of staff at the prison

A Ministry of Justice spokesman confirmed Bellfield is engaged and said: 'An application (to get married) has been received and is being considered in the usual way.'

The bid is not thought to be at an advanced stage, with the killer needing the prison governor's permission to marry at the category A men's prison, it is understood.

Bellfield was given a whole life term for murdering Ms McDonnell, 19, in 2003, and murdering Ms Delagrange, 22, and trying to murder Kate Sheedy, 18, in 2004.

He was already serving his sentence when he went on trial for killing schoolgirl Milly, who was snatched from the street walking home from school in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, in March 2002.

He was found guilty of abducting and killing the 13-year-old following a trial at the Old Bailey in 2011.
Troubled comedian Andy Dick has gone from making millions to being arrested for felony sexual battery at a $20-a night RV park where he lived with a group of livestreamers - the latest in a long string of bizarre behavior and run-ins with the law.

Dick, 56, is considered to be one of the most recognizable comics of his time, but also a controversial one who has struggled with drug addiction and made headlines for his numerous arrests, sexual misconduct allegations, and bizarre behavior.

This week, the comedian made headlines again when he was arrested on Wednesday at an RV campground at O'Neill Regional Park in Orange County, Southern California.

Dick was taken into custody on suspicion of sexually assaulting a man in the RV where he was staying with livestreamers since being evicted from his apartment last year and is now held on $25,000 bail until his scheduled appearance on Friday.

The comedian's net worth also appears to have significantly dropped in recent years, plunging from an estimated $3 million in 2016 to $2.5 million in 2018 according to The Richest and to a mere $300,000 according to Celebrity Net Worth.

Andy Dick, 56, has gone from making millions to being arrested for felony sexual battery at a $20-a night RV park in Southern California where he lived with a group of livestreamers

The comedian is pictured in an RV at a campground at O'Neill Regional Park in Orange County before he was arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting a man on Wednesday, May 11

A livestream of his recent arrest was shown on YouTube and footage posted to the channel 'Captain Content RV' afterwards revealed the events in the lead up.

A young man, who goes by the name 'JJ', can be seen telling another person in the RV that he believed Dick had molested him in his sleep as he could feel some sort of lotion or lubricant in his butt.

'I was just in bed right now, and I smelled certain parts of my body  [I was] in the other RV with Andy, and  the last thing I remember, we were on the phone with his fiancee  I smelled parts of myself and they smell like artificial smells,' he says while appearing slightly disorientated.

'JJ' is heard in the original livestream then trying to confront Dick about the alleged incident.

Dick, who is heard saying that he's on the phone with his 'baby's mama' denies the allegation, and then is heard asking, 'Did you take my blow?'

'No, I didn't even take it whenever it was offered,' the man replies.

'JJ' man then asks Dick, 'Why did you assault me in my sleep?'

Dick denies the accusations and tries to block the camera with his foot.

'I never assaulted you in your sleep,' he responds. 'Can you leave me alone?'

Sgt. Scott Steinle confirmed to Page Six that the Special Victims Unit is involved in this situation and 'part of their investigation is to make sure that the victim is taken care of physically and that would also include a potential physical exam'.

The incident comes just a month after police were called to an apartment in Las Vegas where Dick had been staying with a Twitch streamer, who apparently pulled a gun on a third man during a chaotic scene caught on camera.

Footage of the livestream shows Dick with a relatively unknown internet personality who goes by the name Wappy Flanker online, at whose apartment Dick had apparently been sleeping at.

The shocking video, which was attempting to raise money to help the beleaguered comedian, then shows a third man join the pair at Flanker's place - where an argument quickly breaks out.

Flanker then pulls out a gun and warns the man to leave as Dick can be heard in the background saying 'Don't shoot the gun.'

TMZ reported that authorities were alerted to the situation after someone who was watching the live stream called for a welfare check.

Commenters online began to speculate that Dick was being held hostage at the meager apartment - though Dick reportedly told police that he wanted to remain at the home.

Police from the Orange County Sheriff's Department on Wednesday swarmed the modest trailer parked at California's O'Neill Regional Park which charges $20 a day per vehicle

Dick, dressed in a gray hoodie and black joggers, was hauled away in handcuffs before being placed inside a patrol car

Officers are seen here handcuffing Dick before placing him in the patrol car and taking him into custody

Dick's friend Elisa Jordana, 33, revealed on her YouTube show, Kermit and Friends last year that Dick had been staying at hostels and at one point stole 'cutlery, a wine glass, and plates' from a steakhouse.

'He asked for a doggie bag so he could put all that in,' she recalled, in addition to alleging he told the waitress he wanted to sleep with her.

Dick, who got his first major break on the Ben Stiller Show in 1992 and is known for his roles in NewsRadio, Inspector Gadget and Road Trip, was dropped from two movies in 2017 - Raising Buchanan and Vampire Dad.

The comedian was accused of groping members of the production but no one came forward to formally complain.

'I didn't grope anybody. I might have kissed somebody on the cheek to say goodbye and then licked them,' Dick told The Hollywood Reporter following his removal from the film.

'That's my thingI licked Carrie Fisher at a roast. It's me being funny. I'm not trying to sexually harass people.'

Dick was interviewed later that same year by TMZ who sought him out for comment regarding the string of sexual harassment scandals that rocked Hollywood in 2017.

He appeared to make light of the allegations against Harvey Weinstein and actor Kevin Spacey, saying they were probably 'just trying to get a date'.

Dick then threatened to grope the cameraman but at another point in the interview he tearfully admitted to contemplating suicide every day.

A mugshot of comedian Andy Dick taken in 2011 after he was arrested at a restaurant in Temecula, California for acting disorderly

In November 2021, Dick was arrested for felony domestic battery after he allegedly hit his boyfriend in the head with a liquor bottle.

According to police, Dick and his boyfriend had been at his home when they got into a heated argument that quickly turned physical.

When police were called, they determined there was enough evidence to arrest the comedian, as his boyfriend was allegedly bleeding from a sizable wound on his head.

Dick was released after he posted $50,000 bond.

In October 2021, Dick was arrested for allegedly hitting his boyfriend in the face with a frying pan.

In June 2021, the actor was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon for allegedly attacking a male partner with a metal chair.

Dick also made his $50,000 bail after that altercation.

A man who punched Dick claimed he grabbed his genitals prior to the incident that was captured on CCTV video - with Dick seen falling to the pavement after being punched

In 2019, the actor was sentenced to 14 days in jail after being convicted of sexual battery for allegedly squeezing a woman's rear end but was released after a single night due to overcrowding.

The same year, he was seen on video being slammed to the ground after he got into a fight with an Uber Eats driver while seemingly intoxicated.

In 2019, Dick was reportedly knocked unconscious during an attack in New Orleans, and was taken to hospital to be observed for 'a possible brain bleed.'

David Hale, 46, claimed Dick grabbed his genitals prior to the incident.

Andy Dick went too far during an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in 2007, repeatedly touching future First Daughter Ivanka Trump's hair and legs

The publication quotes a law enforcement source who states: 'Hale claims he had watched Dick perform at One Eyed Jacks and was saying goodbye to him when Dick grabbed Hales genitals.

'Hale told investigators he became incensed, and Dick reacted by winking at him, ultimately leading Hale to punch Dick'.

The comedian previously pleaded not guilty to one count of misdemeanor sexual battery in April 2018 after he allegedly groped an Uber driver's crotch.

Dick's estranged wife Lena Sved received a domestic violence restraining order against him in 2018, which required him to move out of their home and remain 100 yards away from her and their adult children: Lucas, 33, Jacob, 27, and Meg, 24.

In 2012, he was arrested for allegedly grabbing a 17-year-old girl's top and pulling it down to expose her breasts.

He was later found with marijuana and pleaded guilty to misdemeanor drug and battery charges, for which he was sentenced to three years of probation.

Video from the live stream shows Dick, who was with the personality known as Wappy Flanker, as a third man joined them at Wappy's place where an argument broke out

The live stream was seeking donations for Dick, pictured towards the top, who appears to be sleeping on a cot in the living room

In 2010, he was arrested for allegedly grabbing a man's genitals while intoxicated at a West Virginia bar.

In 2007, Dick groped Ivanka Trump during an interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live and was pulled off stage by security staff.

She was greeted by Dick, who asked Ivanka for a 'big, wet kiss' right off the bat Kimmel later told Extra.

The situation spiraled with Dick rubbing his hands on Ivanka's thighs and knee while she politely tried to stop the unwanted advances.

Kimmel proceeded to stop Dick from touching Ivanka before continuing the interview.

Dick continued to touch Ivanka, first trying to grab at Ivanka's ponytail and then touching her arm, before security dragged him off the stage.
The wife of a man accused of sexually assaulting a bridesmaid just days before their 2019 wedding has taken the stand to defend him.

Nicole Norris, 30, testified in Monroe County, Pennsylvania court on Wednesday that one of her bridesmaids was 'conscious and aware' of what she was doing with her then-fiancee Daniel Carney, 30, when she caught the two of them in the shower on August 30, 2019, according to WNEP.

The prosecutors, though, say Norris was not there the entire time the two of them were in the shower of the men's locker room at the Shawnee Inn in Smithfield Township, so she could not have fully known what had happened.

The bridesmaid, an unnamed then-29-year-old woman from Oregon, claimed in the aftermath that, although she did not remember exactly what had happened, she had 'woken up' twice during the encounter.

Nicole Norris, 30, defended her husband, Daniel Carney, 30, (pictured here in the profile picture for their wedding registry) in court as he stands accused of sexually assaulting a bridesmaid just days before their 2019 wedding

Nicole reportedly claimed in court that the bridesmaid, who has not been named, was conscious and aware of what she was doing when Nicole found her and Daniel in the shower of a men's locker room on August 30, 2019

She said she remembers Carney grabbing and biting her, and later that her bikini bottoms were off and Carney was on top of her.

Carney claims that the encounter was 'consensual' and insists that the bridesmaid actually initiated it.

He was later arrested for simple assault, involuntary assault and involuntary deviate sexual intercourse of an unconscious person.

Carney is now standing trial for attempted rape and attempted sexual assault.

The entire saga unraveled in August 2019 during a pre-wedding outing with members of Nicole and Daniel's wedding party.

They had spent the days before the wedding drinking and rafting on the Delaware River in the Pocono Mountains, where the Maid of Honor claimed Carney and his friends had asked the unnamed bridesmaid to flash other boaters for free beer.

By the time they got back to shore on August 30, Nicole reportedly noticed the bridesmaid was extremely intoxicated and had asked Daniel to help her out of the raft and into the parking lot, the Morning Call reports.

But as everyone else got back to the hotel, they reportedly realized they had not seen Daniel and the bridesmaid, so Nicole went looking for them and found them in the shower of the men's locker room.

She reportedly then started screaming at Daniel, the bridesmaid later told the authorities, and ran out to tell the Maid of Honor what had happened.

The Maid of Honor, who has not been named, testified on Tuesday that she told Nicole she should call off the wedding, WNEP reports, but two days later - on September 1 - the wedding went forward as planned.

It is unclear whether the victim remained a bridesmaid in the wedding.

The wedding party had been staying at the Shawnee Inn in Smithfield Township in the Pocono Mountains (pictured)

One day after the wedding, the alleged victim described the incident to local police

But the day after the wedding, the bridesmaid went to police saying she felt 'extremely violated and upset,' and was checked out by local doctors and nurses.

Police later found that on the morning of the wedding, Carney had texted the bridesmaid saying he was sorry and he was happy to marry Nicole, as he also asked her to take the so-called morning after pill.

'I'm as happy as ever to marry Nicole, and I know this is terrible as well, but my d*** was out in the shower,' he wrote, according to the Washington Post.

'We never did do it, but would you consider taking Plan B to make damn certain just in case? There is almost no chance, but still.

'Please tell me yes, I'm begging you.'

They also reportedly found surveillance footage, which police said, showed Carney turning around and pulling her into the locker room as she was 'extremely unsteady' on her feet.

After the incident, Carney told authorities he 'felt like he was taken advantage of by the victim,' according to Morning Call, before ultimately admitting that he pulled her into the locker room.

Carney claimed in court on Tuesday that the bridesmaid initiated the sexual encounter, as he admitted to asking her to take a Plan B pill - claiming it was at Nicole's behest

But in court on Wednesday, WNEP reports, Carney testified that the alleged victim followed him into the men's locker room.

He also said she was conscious and the entire encounter was consensual, claiming that the bridesmaid followed him into the shower and they started kissing.

Carney claims she initiated the sexual encounter, and reportedly admitted to asking her to take Plan B before the wedding, claiming Nicole asked him to text her about that.

Doctors and nurses have also testified in the trial claiming that they saw the bridesmaid in the aftermath of the alleged sexual assault with bruises all over her body, and submitted ER records and charts into evidence.

Prosecutors, though, say the injuries could have been from the rafting experience, as the girl admitted to falling three times, WFMZ reports.

The trial was expected to wrap up on Thursday.
Velasquez reportedly has four prior arrests and was deported from the US in 2020

She and her son will be staying with relatives after their home was deemed unlivable

Pham said she checked her son's 'entire body' for injuries after entering his room where Jayden was sleeping

He was driving on Wantagh Parkway when lost control of his pickup crashed into the home narrowly missing Pham's 13-year-old son Jayden Trinh

Blas Flores-Velasquez, 42, was taken into custody and charged with intoxicated driving after plowing into Thu Pham's Long Island home at 1am on Thursday

Blas Flores-Velasquez, 42, who has four prior arrests, was taken into custody and charged with intoxicated driving, leaving a scene of an incident, property damage, and operating a vehicle by an unlicensed driver.

An out-of-control pickup plowed through a fence and crashed into a Long Island home, narrowly missing a sleep 13-year-old boy.

Driver Blas Flores-Velasquez, 42, who has four prior arrests, was taken into custody and charged with intoxicated driving, leaving a scene of an incident, property damage, and operating a vehicle by an unlicensed driver two hours after crashing into a home on Long Island.

Velasquez, who police said was deported from the US in 2020, was driving on the Wantagh Parkway when he lost control and hit the Cypress Lane home shortly before 1am on Thursday.

Homeowner Thu Pham, 52, said she heard a 'boom' and went to check on her son Jayden Trinh.

'And then we just turned and got out the room and turn on the light,' she told ABC.

'I saw the whole door was gone. I went to my son's room and saw there was a hole. 'I didn't know there's a car that went through there. I went to see what happened to my son.

'He was only one foot away...My son just woke up, and the whole thing was on top of him. One feet closer, and my son was gone, you know.'

The truck also plowed through the shared fence before ending up in the neighbor's lawn, where it was later towed

Wooden boards have been placed where the truck plowed through, while the bed is literally with clothing and hangers from the collapsed closet

She said checked his 'entire body' to see if 'everything was okay' after discovering the 'closet was collapsed on the bed.'

Velasquez's truck completely went through the home and ended up in the neighbor's backyard, destroying a large chunk of the shared fence.

'I was really confused,' Trinh said, who had originally thought the family home was being robbed, according to the New York Post. 'Everybody was panicking. We called the cops.'

Trinh (left) said he woke up 'confused' and thought someone had robbed the home. His mother Thu Pham (right) said she immediately ran to her son's room and checked his 'entire body' for injuries after seeing the closet completely 'collapsed' on the bed

'I got up, and I saw the guy who hit our house. He was like: "Sorry"...and then he left.' Velasquez fled the scene on foot, but appeared on surveillance footage returning to the scene a few minutes later to get something from his truck before vanishing back to wooded area near the parkway.

'It could have been a lot worse, Trinh told CBS News. '[I'm] glad I didn't die last night.

His mother agree, telling CBS News: 'I feel a lot better now, I see my son and nothing's wrong with him.'

The family has now been displaced and is going to stay with relatives while their house, which has been ruled unlivable, gets repaired.

No injuries were reported.

Velasquez was walked out of the Nassau County Police Headquarters on Thursday afternoon
The White House on Thursday defended the closure of the Abbott plant that resulted in a shortage of baby formula but officials couldn't say when parents will see more products on the empty grocery store shelves.

'The reason we're here is because the FDA took a step to ensure that babies were taking safe formula. There were babies who died from taking this formula so they were doing their jobs,' White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at her daily press briefing.

President Joe Biden got personally involved on Thursday when he met with executives from infant formula manufactures and retailers including Target, Walmart and Nestle's Gerber to discuss the issue.

And his administration announced additional steps it was taking to boost the production of baby formula.

But officials were short on specifics. They couldn't say when the Abbott plant would reopen, they couldn't say when more baby formula would be back on shelves and Psaki couldn't offer any options when asked who parents can call for help.

The White House defended the FDA's closure of the Abbott plant that resulted in a shortage of baby formula; 'There were babies who died from taking this formula so they were doing their jobs,' White House press secretary Jen Psaki said

Administration officials couldn't say when paretns may see more baby formula on shelves

The administration did acknowledge the frustration.

'We absolutely recognize the frustration of parents and family,' a senior administration official said on a briefing call with reporters but added: 'I don't have a particular timeline for you' when asked when parents would see some relief.

The officials also didn't know when Abbott Nutrition's Sturgis, Michigan, plant - one of the largest producers of formula - would be back online.

'We do not today have an estimate for accessibility will come on line. But as we just said that the administration is working around the clock to do everything we can to to bring as much production to market,' the official said.

Among the steps the administration announced was cutting red tape when it comes to the size of the formula.

'We recognize that this is certainly a challenge for people across the country, something the President is very focused on and we're going to do everything we can to cut red tape and and take steps to increase supply on the marketplace,' Psaki said.

Manufacturers typically make multiple sized containers of the product and government programs like WIC often limit what size can be purchased. The administration is working to change those limits to ease the burden on manufactuers and let them rush out one size.

Officials also said the administration would work to increase the imports of baby formula but would have more details available on that at a later date.

And the administration is calling on state attorneys general to crack down on price gouging. Formula has been going for up to $120 a can as desperate parents try to feed their children.

Republican Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marco Rubio of Florida have called on the administration to use the Defense Production Act to get more formula produced.

The White House did not rule it out.

'We're gonna keep every option on the table,' the senior administration official said.

Psaki also said it was an option.

'You have to ensure that it would actually achieve what you're trying to achieve,' she said of using it.

Texas, Tennessee, Missouri, Iowa, North Dakota and South Dakota, seemingly hardest hit by the shortages, reported out-of-stock rates of about 50 percent

The nationwide share of out-of-stock baby formula hit 40 percent in April

The shortages have been worsening since February 17 when, after the death of two infants, manufacturer Abbott announced a 'voluntary recall' for formula made at its factory in Michigan -- including Similac, a brand used by millions of American families.

A subsequent investigation cleared the formula, but production has yet to resume, exacerbating already ongoing scarcity caused by supply chain problems and labor shortages.

Abbott said that pending FDA approval, 'we could restart the site within two weeks.'

Once production began, it would take six weeks to eight weeks for the baby formula to be available on shelves.

Republicans have pounced on the administration for the shortage.

'I think we need to take a moment and think about the fact that, in Joe Biden's America, it seems like it's easier to get a crack pipe and a government-funded smoking kit than it is to find baby formula,' said Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida, a father of a four-month-old.

Last week the average out-of-stock rate for baby formula was 43 percent, according to Datasembly, which collected information from more than 11,000 retailers.

Elise Stefanik, part of the House Republican leadership and a new mother herself, said she had contacted the US Food and Drug Administration in February but received 'no substantive response.'

'Joe Biden simply has no plan. In fact, when Joe Biden's White House was asked about the shortage, they laughed. Shameful,' she told reporters.

Her Republican House colleague Anne Wagner of Missouri said her state was one of six where more than half of the normal supply of baby milk was out of stock.

'I've heard stories of moms firsthand -- my own daughter-in-law -- bartering for baby formula on Facebook,' she said.

'Pregnant women are asking if they should start stockpiling. They're anxious during a time of high stress and anxiety.'

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill will hold a hearing in two weeks on infant formula shortages, the House Energy and Commerce Committee said on Wednesday, as it called the situation 'increasingly alarming.'

The House of Representatives panel, which is scheduled to meet May 25, did not name any company executives or other witnesses, but said it would release more details before the meeting.

The hearing will focus on the shortage's causes, efforts to increase production, and what action is needed 'to ensure access to safe formula across the nation,' the committee chair, Representative Frank Pallone, a Democrat, said in a statement.

'The nationwide infant formula shortages are increasingly alarming and demand Congress' immediate attention,' he said.
As Sadiq Khan posed for pictures, standing between rows of plants at a licensed cannabis business in Los Angeles this week, Londoners can only hope their mayor resisted any temptation to sample the product.

The drugs mood-altering and hallucinogenic effects are well known  and Khan has already shown hes amenable to ending Britains ban on marijuana.

Despite going to LA on a fact-finding mission to learn how the city had fared since recreational marijuana became legal in California in 2018, there were signs the Labour politician was looking to be impressed.

For while the ownership, management and staffing of Americas multi-billion-dollar legal marijuana industry is 98 per cent white  prompting many African-Americans to complain they are being excluded from the pot gold rush  Khan visited one of the handful of black-run businesses that has managed to thrive.

At the Gorilla Rx Wellness cannabis dispensary, he heard good news about how legalisation can empower black people.

Thats exactly what the young voters probably want to hear, as polls show they are in favour of marijuana legalisation in general.

But if Khan is envisaging similar businesses springing up in London, there is another side of the trade that he should take into account.

Had the mayor looked a little further afield, he would have found a very different story as I did when I recently visited LA following reports that, far from flourishing, its legal cannabis industry is on its knees.

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan walks through cannabis plants which are being legally cultivated at a factory in Los Angeles

A vendor makes change for a marijuana customer at a cannabis marketplace in Los Angeles, where recreational marijuana became legal in 2018

At The Higher Path, a cannabis shop in the affluent suburb of Sherman Oaks, customers sit in a waiting room festooned with potted plants while staff check your ID to ensure you are 21 and havent reached your daily one-ounce cannabis purchasing limit.

You are then buzzed through a steel door by an armed security guard into an Aladdins Cave of cannabis products: cannabis-laced soft drinks, tinctures, chocolate, chewy sweets, vapes and the dried plant itself.

As a business it looks impressive, and yet its owner, Jerred Kiloh, told me he was struggling to stay afloat, along with the rest of the citys licensed pot trade.

For these legal traders are surrounded  and heavily outnumbered  by unlicensed and illegal cannabis dispensaries that sell almost identical-looking products at half the price. The same goes for an army of cannabis delivery services.

They dont sell authorised cannabis made by Californias tightly controlled and heavily taxed 8,000 licensed growers, but untaxed and untested pot that may contain harmful additives or be dangerously potent.

Additives have been found to include a pesticide, Eagle 20, that releases highly toxic formaldehyde and mustard gas when heated.

Checks on buyers IDs and ages are perfunctory or non-existent while the supposedly tamper-proof packaging and clear labelling of the cannabis products  including a government health warning  is either missing or counterfeit.

Occasionally, police raid these dispensaries, but brazen owners re-open them within days.

This largely unchecked black-market activity has brought the legal cannabis industry to the brink of collapse.

Mr Kiloh, head of the United Cannabis Business Association, predicts half of the states 823 legal pot shops will have closed within a year.

Most are surviving only by selling some of their cannabis on the black market.

The mayor was seeing how legalised cannabis production operates in California on day three of a planned five-day visit to the US

Mr Khan (left) pictured alongside Mayor of Los Angeles Eric Garcetti at City Hall on Wednesday

Nobody is making money anywhere in the legal supply chain, Mr Kiloh told me.

He blames the states legalisation law, which taxes marijuana so heavily that the price of an eighth of marijuana doubled virtually overnight from $30 (24) to $60 (49). Naturally, many customers continued to buy it illegally for half the price.

And the mess in California is being repeated in other states such as Oklahoma, Washington and Michigan, which have also legalised the drug.

While 18 states have allowed marijuana for recreational use, usually after convincing voters it will be a huge tax earner, California remains the worlds biggest single recreational marijuana market, worth some 11.5billion a year, including the legal and illegal drug.

One of the justifications for legalisation was that it would benefit black people, who have suffered most from it being criminalised.

However, African-American cannabis entrepreneurs have been among those hit hardest, many complaining that theyve lost all their money trying to run a legal business.

About 80 to 90 per cent of Californias cannabis market remains illegal. Last year, the state seized more than 1.2million illegal cannabis plants.

Contrary to the airy platitudes of proponents in both the UK and US about legalisation driving down crime, drug criminals are thriving.

Californians were assured that legalising dope would incapacitate the black market. In fact, it has invigorated it.

Drug cartels had before stayed out of Californias illicit marijuana trade as the drug was too cheap and had too many suppliers.

But now that legal cannabis is relatively expensive, the ruthless gangs see the potential to make a fortune.

Cannabis-related violent crime has soared. During a single spree over one weekend last November, armed robbers raided 25 licensed dispensaries in Oakland, near San Francisco, stealing large amounts of marijuana and shooting at staff and police.

And yet, because Left-wing state prosecutors have changed the law to make cultivating illegal marijuana a less serious crime, offenders can expect to be let off with no more than a $1,000 (820) fine.

Cannabis businesses complain that the police usually arent interested in making arrests. Complicating the nightmare, most consumers say they dont know the difference between whats legal and illegal.

The scale of the disaster may not have yet filtered through to the mayor of London, but the cannabis crisis in California should give pause for thought.

Americas thriving pot black market is not the only lesson that the mayor can take home.

Another worrying misconception is that cannabis is essentially harmless or even  based on evidence of its usefulness as a painkiller  benign.

Some US doctors were always worried the country had moved too fast in legalising cannabis when little was known about its health effects.

Mr Khan has visited New York and Silicon Valley, California, before he made his way to Los Angeles and hopes to use the trip to attract investment to the capital

Those fears have only grown: experts are increasingly alarmed about the drugs links with mental health problems, with possible damage to brain development in young users and evidence that using it vastly increases the risk of developing schizophrenia and other mental disorders.

Its also thought to be responsible for an alarming condition known as cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome (CHS) or scromiting, a gastrointestinal illness in which victims start vomiting uncontrollably.

Studies suggest up to 12.5 per cent of the USs regular cannabis users suffer from it.

And despite the pro-cannabis lobbys insistence that the drug isnt addictive, the number of Americans describing their heavy use of it as a disorder has doubled since the early 2000s, says to the USs National Institutes of Health.

Health experts are worried about the increasingly potent cannabis variants that are available.

In January, Sir Robin Murray, of Kings College London, said the increased potency of cannabis means it is no longer a relatively safe drug.

He said that the growing strength of ultra-potent forms of the drug called skunk  which dominates the UK market and which is still half the strength of many variants on sale in California dispensaries  was responsible for the UK having among the highest rates of psychosis in Europe.

He also warned parents underestimate the mental health risks posed by ultra-strong cannabis, revealing that skunk causes a third of the psychosis cases he sees at his south London practice.

Sir Robin noted that in the US states that have legalised cannabis, the price has fallen, potency has shot up and both cannabis use and addiction have increased.

Sadiq Khan will hopefully have seen that if even California, birthplace of the hippie utopia, cannot make legal pot work, there may need to be another solution to Britains drug problem.

The capital is in total gridlock, crime is out of control... yet the Labour mayor is posing in an LA cannabis factory

By Claire Ellicott, Political Correspondent for The Daily Mail

Priti Patel yesterday slapped down London mayor Sadiq Khan after he announced a commission to look at decriminalising cannabis in Britain.

The Home Secretary pointed out that Mr Khan has no power to legalise illicit substances, and said his time would be better spent focusing on tackling drug and knife crime in the capital.

It came after the mayor praised the high standards of legalised cannabis farms in California during a taxpayer-funded US tour.

He also said he was launching a new London Drugs Commission, headed by former justice secretary Lord Falconer QC, to consider the decriminalisation of the class B drug in Britain.

The body will examine research from University College London, but will not look at changing the law on class A drugs.

Mr Khan said an honest, open conversation was needed about UK cannabis laws and he hopes the panel will look at what happens elsewhere in the world where the laws have been changed.

But Miss Patel said: Sadiq Khans time would be better spent focusing on knife and drug crime in London.

The mayor praised the high standards of legalised cannabis farms in California during a taxpayer-funded US tour

Home Secretary Priti Patel (pictured attending a Cabinet away day at Middleport Pottery in Stoke-on-Trent on Thursday) has criticised Mr Khan

The mayor has no powers to legalise drugs. They ruin communities, tear apart families and destroy lives.

During his four-day tour to the US, billed as a fact-finding mission, Mr Khan visited a Los Angeles cannabis dispensary and farm as well as a shop that sold products infused with the drug.

Describing the farm as heavily regulated, he said: Its important to see for ourselves what the parallel world of legalised cannabis looks like as a compare and contrast.

He added: Hearing from those who cultivate and grow this plant has been fascinating.

Once the commission has completed its work, it will make recommendations to Londons City Hall, the Government, the police, and public health services.

Labour distanced itself from the plans, with a spokesman saying the party does not support changing the law on drugs.

About 2.6million people in the UK used cannabis in the year to March 2020, according to the Office for National Statistics, and the main drug offence recorded in England and Wales last year was possession of cannabis,

Mr Khans spokesman said the mayors flights were provided free by United Airlines, adding: The mayor is committed to keeping the costs of the visit to a bare minimum and maximising value for money.
By Casey Lartigue Jr.





Trolls are a fact of life on the internet. Some newspapers, blogs and websites even freeze their comments sections because of disgruntled people targeting them and their readers.



As crude and rude as internet trolls are, even some of them take it easy when they learn that someone has suffered, such as victims of sexual assault or domestic violence.



I would like to suggest that internet trolls also take it easy on North Korean refugees who have overcome a lot. I have seen many of them break down as they discuss things that happened to them or their family members in North Korea or China, and many struggle with PTSD years after escaping to freedom. South Korea is number one among developed countries in its suicide rate; North Korean refugee rates are supposedly even higher.



Last year, I did some YouTube interviews with North Korean refugee Eunhee Park. She mentioned she often got punished in North Korea for the way she dressed, and that fashion was a way for her to express herself her individuality and learning. Dressing how she wanted in freedom motivated her to escape (that's my characterization). Some South Koreans harshly criticized her for this opinion and said fashion was a frivolous reason to escape to freedom (as if they know what's an appropriate reason to escape from a totalitarian regime).



Eunhee considers me to be a mentor so I responded with some old uncle-like feedback. In North Korea, criticism is a threat because people can have you arrested for what you do or say. In the mostly free world outside of North Korea, people can gossip, spread rumors, distort facts and even lie about you on YouTube videos, blogs or SNS. However, it is very difficult for them to have you arrested for something you say.



My exchanges with Eunhee had me wondering: could there be context to North Korea that makes North Korean refugees more uncomfortable than others about criticism?



Han Song-mi, co-author with me of the book, "Greenlight to Freedom," says in her memoir that she dreaded weekly mandatory self-criticism sessions in North Korea even more than being forced to watch public executions.



She explained that the occasional public executions were traumatic. She had nightmares and couldn't sleep for weeks after witnessing them.



On the other hand, the self-criticism sessions she was forced to attend were even more troubling. Typically, about 30 North Koreans in her area were forced to gather every Monday evening to criticize themselves and each other. She says that her mind was never at ease during the week because she had to think bad things about herself and her neighbors.



They were at risk of confessing something that could get them punished or spied on. They grew up with criticism, had their self-esteem destroyed by a cruel dictatorship determined to keep them servile, and are put in no-win situations that developed North Korea into a low-trust society. Getting out of North Korea can be liberating, but there are plenty of people ready to punch them in the face online with often childish busybody attacks that may have them recalling their days in North Korea.



A few years ago, some internet trolls and sympathizers of North Korea began negative chatter about North Korean refugees having cosmetic surgery. I talked with some North Korean refugees about it. Universally, whether they had surgery done or not, they responded, "Why should it matter to others? Isn't this a free country?" I explained that people are free to gossip about the personal choices of others, and they often do so, especially when they are unsatisfied with their own lives.



Some North Korean refugees explained that, for the first time in their lives, they controlled their own heads and bodies. People who grew up in freedom might not understand that feeling of individual control. Another North Korean refugee said that the North Korean government strips individuality away from North Koreans. In freedom, she felt free to experiment, to change her hair style or color, and even to have plastic surgery.



A male North Korean refugee said he had cosmetic surgery for problems dating back to his days in the North Korean military. A former member of North Korea's elite said that he and some other former North Koreans seek to hide their identities. Another North Korean refugee woman said she can't afford cosmetic surgery but would do so because of her low self-esteem. Some people have knee-jerk responses about anyone having cosmetic surgery, but could there be a different context for North Korean refugees?



Recognizing that some are quick to misunderstand, I will be clear that people have the right to analyze others critically. They may not realize when they target North Korean refugees that there is a history and context of North Korea that may make them more sensitive to criticism.





Casey Lartigue Jr. is co-author along with Songmi Han of the book, "Greenlight to Freedom," and co-founder along with Eunkoo Lee of Freedom Speakers International (FSI).




Foreign criminals could be forced to pay for their own immigration detention costs under a new plan by Scott Morrison.

The prime minister has drawn up a 15-page 'plan for protecting our borders' after intelligence agencies sounded the alarm over an increase in people smuggling.

Joint Agency Taskforce Operation Sovereign Borders warned the country could experience an increase in the number of boats illegally crossing the Indo-Pacific.

The OSB taskforce believes the 'opportunistic maritime people smuggling ventures may look to test Australia's deterrence, disruption and response capabilities'.

Foreign criminals could be forced to pay for their own immigration detention costs under a new plan by Scott Morrison

The prime minister has drawn up a 15-page 'plan for protecting our borders' after intelligence agencies sounded the alarm over an increase in people smuggling

Taxpayers are currently forking out $456 a day to pay for the accommodation, food and healthcare of each foreign criminal.

The plan put forward by the Coalition to make foreign criminals foot the bill could save taxpayers $216million a year.

Boosting border staff numbers, increasing support for refugees and upholding all OSB enforcement powers are among the changes included in theplan.

The Greens released its immigration policy on Thursday revealing its intention to scrap the Australian Border Force, end boat turnbacks and close offshore detention.

Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews warned the drastic approach could force Labor to soften its policies in the case of a hung parliament.

'Labor's promise to abolish temporary protection visas, a key pillar of Operation Sovereign Borders, demonstrates the clear choice at this election between strong borders and weak borders,' Ms Andrews said.

'The Greens' policy to abolish the Border Force is a very dangerous policy that would undermine everything we have achieved to make our country safer  and we know the risk is that it's a policy Labor would have to bargain on in a hung parliament.'

A senior government source warned people smugglers were waiting for a change of government to ramp up their illegal operations.

Taxpayers are currently forking out $456 a day to pay for the accommodation, food and healthcare of each foreign criminal

Mr Albanese doubled down on his border policy during the final leader's debate on Wednesday

'There's a high risk that they're gearing up for another crack at the people-smuggling trade if the government changes,' they told The Australian.

Opposition leader Anthony Albanese has insisted his government will maintain a tough stance against people smugglers and keep offshore detention centres open.

Mr Albanese doubled down on his border policy during the final leader's debate on Wednesday.

'The key to keeping our borders strong are the elements of the plan that would turn back boats, which we support, offshore processing, which we support, and settlement in third countries, which we support,' he said.

'Anyone who comes by boat will not get any visa here in Australia, they won't be allowed to settle here in Australia. We have the same position on all of those issues.'
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Deborah James has been honoured with a Damehood after raising 4million for charity since Monday as she revealed she was receiving end-of-life care.

The Queen led praise for the 40-year-old BBC podcaster, saying she was 'pleased' to approve the damehood, while the Prime Minister said 'if ever an honour was richly deserved, this is it'.

The former headteacher was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2016 and has kept her more than 500,000 Instagram followers up to date with her treatments. She has now raised more than 3.8 million with her Bowelbabe Fund for Cancer Research UK.

On Thursday night, Number 10 confirmed that James is to be made a dame, saying: 'The Queen has been pleased to approve that the honour of damehood be conferred upon Deborah James.'

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said: 'If ever an honour was richly deserved, this is it. Deborah has been an inspiration and her honesty, warmth and courage has been a source of strength to so many people.

'Through her tireless campaigning and by so openly sharing her experience she has not only helped in our fight against this terrible disease, she has ensured countless others with the Big C have not felt alone.

'I hope this recognition from Her Majesty - backed I'm sure by the whole country - will provide some comfort to Deborah and her family at this difficult time. My thoughts are with them and Deborah should know she has the country's love and gratitude.'

Deborah James has been honoured with a Damehood after raising 3.8million for charity since Monday as she revealed she was receiving end-of-life care

Deborah James has written letters and bought gifts for her children Hugo, 14, and daughter, Eloise, 12, and wants to cuddle them for the last time before she dies

On Thursday night, Number 10 confirmed that James is to be made a dame, saying: 'The Queen has been pleased to approve that the honour of damehood be conferred upon Deborah James.' Pictured, Deborah James (left) with her family on Mother's Day this year

Deborah James explained how she'd had 'hard conversations' with the children, but put her full faith in husband Sebastien Bowen - a London banker with whom she has been married more than 13 years. She has urged him to find love again as long as it's not a 'bimbo'

Deborah James (pictured), 40, announced earlier this week in a heartbreaking message that active treatment for her bowel cancer was stopping and that she was moving to hospice at home care

The nation has been moved by her tragic story in recent days, with at least 1million in donations now being made every day made on the Bowelbabe Fund for Cancer Research UK page she set up. Today it surpassed 3.8 million (pictured)

She has now revealed her shock at being made a Dame, telling The Sun: 'I don't know what to say. I'm blown away and feel incredibly honoured. I don't feel like I deserve this. I can't tell you what this means to my family, it's so much to take in.'

Ms James said that she would love for the fundraiser to reach 5 million by the weekend.

Dame Deborah's children Hugo and Eloise said they were 'speechless' and 'so, so proud', while husband Seb said a damehood was 'something that she would never have dreamt of but it is so truly deserved'.

Damehoods and knighthoods are usually listed in the New Year or Queen's Birthday Honours, but in exceptional circumstances some are announced at other times.

The teacher-turned-podcaster has moved millions as she announced in a heartbreaking message that active treatment for her bowel cancer was stopping and that she was moving to hospice at home care to die.

The mother-of two is preparing to spend her final hours on her parents' lawn surrounded by family, drinking Champagne, having been told by her hospice nurses: 'You are dying, you can drink what you like.'

In a tearful final newspaper interview she said last night: 'The one thing my family know is I am petrified of being alone. I don't want to die alone.' And when asked about the end of her life approaching she said: 'I have moments when I just sob uncontrollably, but I can't spend my last few days crying, it would be such a waste. So I'm trying to compartmentalise my death'.

She said she has started her 'to-do death list' to support son Hugo, 14, and daughter, Eloise, 12, when she is gone, and has urged her husband Sebastien to find love, with the caveat: 'Don't be taken for a ride, don't marry a bimbo'.

Dame Deborah said she has written letters for her children to help them with their first dates and wedding days, and will buy Hugo 'a nice pen or wallet or cufflinks' and Eloise 'Tiffany bracelets and earrings' to remember her - as well as some presents and postcards from her for the future.

Her funeral is also planned where she will be cremated, but she hopes her ashes will be kept in the family kitchen 'for a while' before being scattered.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge also paid tribute to the cancer-stricken BBC podcaster, declaring that she has 'captured the heart of the nation', after her fundraiser passed 3.3million yesterday and continues to rise at a rate of 1million every 24 hours.

Steve Bland, co-host of the You, Me And The Big C podcast alongside Deborah James, praised the bowel cancer campaigner after her research fundraising initiative reached 4 million.

Appearing on BBC Breakfast, he said: 'It is amazing, but this is what Deborah does. Deborah deals in the extraordinary. This is what she has done for five years.

'Everyone is focusing on the last five days, but actually Deb has been doing this for five years, ever since she was diagnosed with incurable cancer five years ago, and since then she has just been trying to help people.

'She has been banging the drum over and over and over and over - on bowel cancer symptoms, working hard to get drugs approved that she knew would help her but help loads of other people too.

'While the last five days have been amazing - the 4 million is incredible - there are people all over the country walking around enjoying their children's birthday parties because she has basically saved their lives.'

Bland said James had messaged him to say she would be watching the interview from her parents' home in Woking, Surrey, where she is receiving end-of-life care.

He added: 'I don't know what target she will have in her mind now. Five, I guess.'

In the heartbreaking interview with The Times, Deborah also revealed how she will record letters for her children to open after she's died, including advice for them on how to act on a first date or what to do on their wedding day.

Ms James said she's been in hospital for months, but since undergoing hospice care, she has been planning her last hours on the lawn with her family and drinking champagne, as staff joked with her: 'You are dying, you can drink what you like.'

The nation has been moved by her tragic story in recent days, with at least 1million in donations now being made every day to her Bowelbabe Fund for Cancer Research UK page, which she set up.

Ms James earlier spoke of wanting to die at her parents' house in Woking, to spare son, Hugo, 14, and daughter, Eloise, 12, from constant reminders in their London home, which she won't visit again because of the stairs. She said: 'I can't use my legs any more and I'm incredibly weak... my husband must lift me for everything'.

She explained how she'd had to break the news to the children, but put her full faith in husband Sebastien Bowen - a London banker she married back in 2008.

The couple briefly split up seven years later and began divorce proceedings, but soon got back together after agreeing to counselling to be on better terms for their children.

Speaking to The Times she revealed she has issued him with 'strict instructions' to her 'incredible' husband Sebastien Bowen to find love again after her death.

'It's been hideous telling my children. My husband Sebastien has been incredible, he has dropped everything and is with me 24/7. My first thought was [that] I don't want my children to see me like this. I didn't think I would be able to speak to them without crying, but I'd love one last cuddle with them.

'We have had a string of emotional conversations that have escalated very quickly from supportive care to end-of-life care.

'My husband Sebastien has been incredible, he has dropped everything and is with me 24/7.

'My first thought was [that] I don't want my children to see me like this. I didn't think I would be able to speak to them without crying, but I'd love one last cuddle with them.'

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have paid tribute to cancer-stricken BBC podcaster Deborah James, after her fundraiser passed 3 million yesterday

In a tweet, William and Kate said: 'Every now and then, someone captures the heart of the nation with their zest for life & tenacious desire to give back to society.' Pictured, the couple during their visit to Glasgow, Scotland, on May 11

On Monday, Miss James, announced that despite having 17 tumours removed and undergoing new procedures she has been moved to hospice care because her 'body simply isn't playing ball'.

Deborah James' announcement that she is moving into hospice care in full: In an emotional post shared to Instagram, Deborah said her body 'was not playing ball' and she was spending 'most of the day sleeping' 'The message I never wanted to write. We have tried everything, but my body simply isn't playing ball. My active care has stopped and I am now moved to hospice at home care, with my incredible family all around me and the focus is on making sure I'm not in pain and spending time with them. 'Nobody knows how long I've got left but I'm not able to walk, I'm sleeping most of the days, and most things I took for granted are pipe dreams. I know we have left no stone unturned. But even with all the innovative cancer drugs in the world or some magic new breakthrough, my body just can't continue anymore. 'In over 5 years of writing about how I thought it would be my final Christmas, how I wouldn't see my 40th birthday nor see my kids go to secondary school - I never envisaged writing the one where I would actually say goodbye. 'I think it's been the rebellious hope in me. 'But I don't think anyone can say the last 6 months has exactly been kind! It's all heartbreaking to be going through but I'm surrounded by so much love that if anything can help me through I hope that will. 'Bowelbabe Fund 'I always knew there was one thing I always wanted to do before I died. I have always over the years raised as much awareness and money for the charities that are closest to me. @cr_uk @royalmarsden @bowelcanceruk 'As a result, the @bowelbabefund is being established and I'd love nothing more than for you to help it flourish. Please visit bowelbabe.org for all the info and to donate (link in Bio). 'All I ask if you ever read a column, followed my Instagram, listened to the podcast or saw me dressed as a poo for no reason. Please buy me a drink to see me out this world, by donating the cost to @bowelbabefund which will enable us to raise funds for further life saving research into cancer. To give more Deborah's more time! 'Right now for me it's all about taking it a day at a time, step by step and being grateful for another sunrise. My whole family are around me and we will dance through this together, sunbathing and laughing (I'll cry!!) at every possible moment! 'You are all incredible, thank you for playing your part in my journey. No regrets. 'Enjoy life x Deborah' Advertisement

She said she is now trying to 'compartmentalise' her death so that she can focus on her 'to-do death list' which includes making memory boxes and recording letters and 'funny messages' for her children.

'I know materialistic things don't matter, but I want to buy Hugo a nice pen or wallet or cufflinks,' she said. 'I'm going to buy my daughter some Tiffany bracelets and earrings.

'They will have all the memories, but I want them to have a few presents in the future. I also want to write them postcards, but I have to be honest, I get really tired.'

She added: 'At 12 and 14 I hope they will remember me, but [they are] still very young, so my image will fade and they will have to rely on videos or photos.'

She has also imparted instructions for her husband, whom she married in 2008.

'I want him to move on,' she said. 'He's a handsome man, I'm, like, 'Don't be taken for a ride, don't marry a bimbo, find someone else who can make you laugh like we did [together].'

Miss James has moved to her parents bungalow in Woking as she is no longer able to use the stairs in her townhouse in Barnes, south west London because 'cancer is eating me up'.

She said she wants 'to die listening to my family,' adding: 'I just want to hear their banter and the normal buzz of life as I go.'

She has planned her funeral to ease the 'burden' on her loved ones and would like to be cremated.

'I'm the kind of person that wouldn't mind staying in the top drawer in the kitchen for a while,' she said.

In a tweet on Wednesday, William and Kate said: 'Every now and then, someone captures the heart of the nation with their zest for life & tenacious desire to give back to society.

'Bowelbabe is one of those special people. Her tireless efforts to raise awareness of bowel cancer & end the stigma of treatment are inspiring.

'We are so sad to hear her recent update but pleased to support the Bowelbabe Fund, which will benefit the The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust among others.

'Deborah, our thoughts are with you, your family and your friends. Thank you for giving hope to so many who are living with cancer. W & C.'

That evening, the managing director of The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity, Antonia Dalmahoy, thanked all of those who have donated.

'The national outpouring of love and support for Deborah and her Bowel Babe Fund has been absolutely phenomenal and has really lifted her spirits,' she said.

'We'd like to thank everyone who has donated to the Fund, for The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity, Cancer Research UK and Bowel Cancer UK. This sum of money will make a huge difference to people with cancer and create a lasting legacy for Deborah.'

It came after she said she is is preparing to 'surrender to the inevitable' and is in end-of-life hospice care surrounded by her family, in a heartfelt 'final' newspaper column. Ms James wrote that her body had been left 'emaciated' by five years of battling bowel cancer.

Charities and organisations set to benefit from the fundraising have lined up to thank her for her efforts.

Michelle Mitchell, chief executive at Cancer Research UK said: 'Since being diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2016, Deborah James has shown an incredible commitment to campaigning, fundraising and raising awareness of cancer.

'Even in this most challenging time, her determination to raise money and awareness is inspiring and we're honoured to be supporting Deborah and her family in establishing the Bowelbabe Fund.

'This fund will raise awareness of cancer alongside funds for clinical trials and research into personalised medicine, with the aim of creating new and kinder treatments for cancer patients and giving them more time with their loved ones.

'The fund will support the work of Cancer Research UK and those causes she and her family are passionate about, for example Bowel Cancer UK, The Institute of Cancer Research and The Royal Marsden.

'We've been overwhelmed by the support for the Bowelbabe Fund so far, massively exceeding its target within hours. It's a true testament to how many people's lives Deborah has touched with her honesty, humour and compassion.'

BBC podcast host Deborah James, who has incurable bowel cancer, previously choked back tears today as she thanked everyone who donated to her cancer fundraiser that raised a staggering 2.5 million. It has surpassed 3million

A spokesperson from The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity added: 'Deborah is an absolute inspiration to so many people with cancer, and a passionate supporter of The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity. It's typically selfless of her to spend what precious time she has left fundraising for us, Cancer Research UK and Bowel Cancer UK.

'The Bowel Babe Fund will, as Deborah has set out, help fund clinical trials and research into personalised medicine for cancer patients and supporting campaigns to raise awareness of bowel cancer. This may include developing new drugs, and new ways of diagnosing cancer at an earlier stage.

'As well as this fundraising legacy, Deborah's work over the last five years to raise awareness of the symptoms of bowel cancer and the importance of early diagnosis in improving survival, will have saved and extended countless lives.'

Ms James had earlier spoken of her connection with her family to the BBC, saying they were 'really loving' and that she 'adored' them.

Ms James told the BBC: 'I have a really loving family who I adore. Honestly, they're incredible and all I knew I wanted was to come here and be able to relax knowing that everything was okay.

'I've had some really hard conversations during the last week. You think, 'Gosh, how can anyone have those conversations?' and then you find yourself in the middle of them.

'And people are very nice, but you're talking about your own death and I've had five years to prepare for my death.'

The interviewer told the mother-of-two, 'I know it's not easy', as she struggled to speak around her tears, to which he eventually replied: 'It's hard. It's really hard.

'The thing that I know, because I trust my husband - he's just the most wonderful man and so is my family, and I know that my kids are going to be more than looked after and surrounded by love.

'You always want to know as a mother - are your kids going to be okay? And my kids are going to be fine. But it doesn't mean I'm not going to miss every chance I could have had with them.'

Remembering her former podcast co-host Rachael Bland, who died of breast cancer in 2018, Ms James told the BBC: ' I'm really scared. I don't know how she could deal with such a 'this is what I'm going to do' [approach], I'm petrified.

'I can't make a deal with the devil anymore unfortunately. I just feel gutted not to have more life, 'cos you know me, I love life so much.

'But I do hope that all of our stories and the podcast and everything we've shared over the past few years has saved lives.

'I just knew that I wanted to ensure I could leave enough money for them to do something meaningful, that would mean that we could fund projects that I myself would have benefited from 5 years ago to give me life.

'Because you just never know do you, when that next breakthrough is going to come, but I know we have the skills and passion in this country to make things happen, but we just need to fund it properly.'

Ms James told host Tony Livesey how she was still making her way through a list of 'death admin' she needed to do, but the priority was remaining as comfortable as possible.

'I can't walk, I can't stand, I can't go to the loo - I can't do really basic stuff. I've been doing a lot of sleeping. Just spending time watching people that I love, to just know that they are okay.

'The more I tell myself that they are going to be okay, I know they are surrounded by love. I know they are surrounded by support - they will be fine.'

Signing off tearfully in the final episode of her podcast, she told listeners: 'That's it from me, I can't believe it, which is a very sad thing to say. I'm pleased I've got to the point where I can say it. We'll see each other again, somewhere, somehow, dancing. Until then, please, please, just enjoy life because it's so precious. All I want right now is more time and more life.'

She then joked: 'And check your poo. I can't leave on any other word except from check your poo.'

The mother-of-two has spent months recovering after she almost died in January due to a medical emergency

The mother-of-two, who has faced a challenging six months with her cancer treatment, said she felt 'heartbroken'

BBC podcast host Deborah James, who has incurable bowel cancer, revealed in April after she was discharged after more than a month in hospital. Pictured, leaving the Royal Marsden Hospital

Deborah, who has incurable bowel cancer, revealed how she 'nearly died' in January in an 'acute medical emergency'. She shared this photo from hospital

At the start of the year, Deborah, who shares her children Hugo, 14, and Eloise, 12, with her husband Sebastien, announced she had 'nearly died' in hospital, calling it the 'hardest' part of her 5-year cancer battle, and was admitted as an in-patient earlier this month.

She was told early on in her diagnosis that she might not live beyond five years  a milestone that passed on Christmas of 2021.

Writing in her Instagram post, she said: 'Nobody knows how long I've got left but I'm not able to walk, I'm sleeping most of the days, and most things I took for granted are pipe dreams. I know we have left no stone unturned.

'But even with all the innovative cancer drugs in the world or some magic new breakthrough, my body just can't continue anymore.'

'In over 5 years of writing about how I thought it would be my final Christmas, how I wouldn't see my 40th birthday nor see my kids go to secondary school - I never envisaged writing the one where I would actually say goodbye.

'I think it's been the rebellious hope in me.'

Tributes to Deborah called her a 'true inspiration' and a 'force to be reckoned with' when it came to talking about bowel cancer.

Her podcast co-host, Lauren Mahon, shared a lengthy tribute on Instagram, saying that hearts have been 'shattered into thousands of pieces' by Deborah's announcement and are simultaneously 'completely bursting with pride'.

Ms Mahon said that she is 'not ready to accept what's happening right now' and asked for people to keep Deborah's parents, siblings and family in their 'hearts, thoughts and prayers'.

She also urged people to support the new fundraising campaign, Bowelbabe Fund, for Cancer Research UK.

Deborah's fundraising efforts, adding: 'She did it! Bowelbabe did that. Let's keep it going. Two mil anyone? Proud doesn't cut it anymore. It's awe.

It has since raised more than 3million in less than 72 hours after it was launched. It will be spent on funding clinical trials and research into personalised medicine that could result in new treatments for cancer patients, and continued support to raise awareness of cancer.

Discussing how difficult the last six months have been, James said while she was really happy that the 'big gun chemo' she endured has slowed her cancer's growth, which had been 'on the march', it had been an exhausting time.

In the summer, James was told she had an aggressive new tumour that had wrapped itself around her bile duct - requiring a life-saving stay in hospital - and a stent fitted to stop her liver from failing.

The stent fitted to stop her liver failing 'stopped working' in December.

She explained to her followers at the time how hopes at having a 'quick replacement operation' had turned into a 'nightmare'.

She said: 'I'm now at the mercy of hopefully some super 'magic medicine miracle' - but then I always have been, and any chance is a chance right?

'All I ever say Is all I want is hope and options.'

Last year, James shared that her cancer, which has been kept at bay by pioneering treatment, was back again and she was forced to endure a 12th operation.

The West London mother-of-two, a deputy head, was diagnosed 'late' with incurable bowel cancer in 2016. She has frequently said that as a vegetarian runner, she was the last person doctors expected to get the disease.

After sharing her experiences on living with the disease on social media, Deborah became known as the 'Bowel Babe' and began writing a column for the Sun.

In 2018, Deborah joined Lauren Mahon and Rachael Bland to present the award-winning podcast You, Me and the Big C on Radio 5 Live.

Bland tragically died of breast cancer on September 5th that year; her husband Steve Bland now co-presents the show.
U.S. Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Michael Carpenter said tens of thousands of Ukrainians have been deported to Russia or Russian-controlled territory

A senior U.S. diplomat on Thursday laid out in the starkest terms how Moscow is forcibly deporting tens of thousands of Ukrainians to Russia or Russian-controlled territory, and that thousands have been processed through so-called 'filtration centers' where they have been beaten and tortured.

It is the latest evidence of Russia's brutal tactics as it pursues a stalled invasion that has failed in its key objectives.

Last month, President Joe Biden labeled Russia's Ukraine war as a 'genocide.'

Although other officials did not follow up with the sort of formal declaration that would trigger further intervention, the latest comments will increase pressure on Western nations to do more.

U.S. Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Michael Carpenter described some of the evidence that could form the basis of criminal trials.

'As many eyewitness accounts have described in detail, Russia is subjecting many of these civilians to brutal interrogations in so-called filtration camps, a process Russia planned before its further invasion of Ukraine on February 24,' he said in a speech to the OSCE permanent Council in Vienna.

'During this so-called filtration process, Russias forces reportedly process and interrogate detained Ukrainian citizens to identify anyone with ties to the Ukrainian government or military, as well as individuals with pro-Ukraine convictions.'

He described how detainees' cell phones have been taken away, passwords coerced from their owners, and social media and messages scanned for evidence of opposition to Russia's war against Ukraine.

Carpenter did not shy from using strong language in his speech or on Twitter

Tetyana Pochivalova outside her destroyed house in Vilhivka village, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, near Kharkiv, as the civilian toll from the invasion grows every day

Ukrainians stand in line to receive humanitarian aid in Kharkiv, Ukraine, 11 May 2022. The Ministry of Defence of Ukraine announced on 10 May that Ukrainian troops had recaptured Kharkiv and villages north and northeast of the city

Vladimir Putin has seen his troops fail to capture the capital Kyiv, and plans for a rapid invasion and capitulation have given way to a brutal, grinding war

In some cases, passports have been reportedly confiscated, he continued.

'The United States assesses that Russia's forces have relocated at least several thousand Ukrainians for processing in these filtration camps, and evacuated at least tens of thousands more to Russia or Russia-controlled territory, sometimes without telling evacuees of their final destination,' he said.

'From Mariupol alone, we assess that Russia's forces have forcibly displaced thousands of civilians into Russian territory.

'Numerous eyewitness accounts indicate that filtering out entails beating and torturing individuals to determine whether they owe even the slightest allegiance to the Ukrainian state.'

Survivors described how they feared being taken to the Ukrainian province of Donetsk, run by Russian sympathizers, where they faced a 'dark fate.'

'According to one survivor, "If a person was suspected of being a 'Ukrainian Nazi', they took them to Donetsk for further investigation or murder. Everybody was afraid to be taken to Donetsk, the ambassador continued.

'Another survivor recounted a conversation she overheard between two Russian soldiers as she and her family were undergoing filtration outside of Mariupol.

'"What did you do with people who didnt pass the filtration?" one soldier asked. The response: "Shot 10 and stopped counting."'

Carpenter said that such displacements breached international humanitarian law.

'Mr. Chair, we must not allow this evil to stand,' he said.

'The United States will continue to help Ukraine defend itself against Russias war of aggression, end the unconscionable war crimes committed by members of Russias forces, and hold those responsible to account.'

Carpenter delivered his powerful account on the day Ukraine prepared for its first war crimes trial since Russia's invasion began, for a 21-year-old service member accused of gunning down an unarmed 62-year-old from a car window.

Vadim Shishimarin faces life in prison for allegedly killing the civilian with a Kalashnikov rifle as he fled with four other soldiers in a stolen car in a village in Sumy on February 28, just days after the start of the war.

In Geneva, the U.N. Human Rights Council passed a resolution to set up an investigation into possible war crimes by Russian troops in the Kyiv area and beyond before they were driven out at the end of March, a move that Russia said amounted to political score-settling.

Ukrainian forces are trying to hold the cities of Severodonetsk and Lysychans'k from Russian troops, which have almost managed to surround them. The river crossing attempt was designed to complete the encirclement, but was foiled

Russia attempted to bridge the Donets River to the west of the city of Lysychansk on May 8, apparently hoping to surround Ukrainian defenders dug in there - but were found out and massacred

Newly-released images of the ambush show dozens of destroyed Russian vehicle littering both banks of the river along with sections of pontoon bridge left floating in the water

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said there were many examples of possible war crimes, including unlawful killings and summary executions.

The man was pushing a bicycle by the side of the road when he was shot in the head and 'died on the spot a few dozen metres from his home', the Ukrainian prosecutor general said.

Meanwhile, Russia suffered another huge setback on the battlefield.

Ukrainian forces drove Russian troops from the region around the country's second biggest city of Kharkiv in their fastest advance since pushing Moscow to withdraw from around the capital Kyiv.

And they thwarted a Russian attempt to cross a river in Donbas, destroying dozens of vehicles and inflicting heavy casualties.

Satellite images lay bare the scale of the failure with the remains of two pontoon bridges drifting in the Donets River at Bilohorivka, west of the city of Lysychansk, surrounded by the ruins of tanks and armoured vehicles.
Angela Rayner attacked the Prime Minister over Partygate fines yesterday  despite the fact that she is under investigation for allegedly breaking lockdown rules.

Scotland Yard announced the number of fines issued for illegal Whitehall gatherings had doubled to more than 100, although there were no new penalties for Boris Johnson or his wife, Carrie.

Sir Keir Starmer and Mrs Rayner, his deputy, have both pledged to resign if Durham Constabulary fines them over the forces Beergate investigation into a gathering at the Durham Miners Hall on April 30 last year.

Despite the probe into her own actions, Mrs Rayner said: Boris Johnsons Downing Street has now reached a century of fixed-penalty notices for their partying.

They have racked up the dubious distinction of receiving more fines on the Prime Ministers watch than any other location.

The Shadow Chancellor faces fines over a gathering just like Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer

Labour have dismissed an election 'booze row' after Sir Keir Starmer enjoyed a beer after a day on the campaign trail in April 2021

Boris Johnson made the rules, and then broke them at record-breaking scale.

'Britain deserves better.

Mr Johnson has already acknowledged that he was fined over his birthday gathering at Downing Street in June 2020, and pledged to make any additional fines public.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Carrie Johnson were both fined over the event, when Mr Johnson was said to have been surprised with a cake.

The police investigation into a dozen gatherings continues, with no indication of when it will reach its conclusion.

Senior civil servant Sue Gray will not publish her report into the parties until all police fines have been handed out  despite the fact Scotland Yard is unlikely to carry out any further interviews.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson was fined over his birthday gathering at Downing Street in June 2020 but has not faced any new fines since

The force requested that the report was not published while its investigation was ongoing so as to avoid influencing evidence from interviewees.

Interviews are understood to have concluded, but the Metropolitan Police will not formally confirm that no more will take place in case new evidence is presented.

Scotland Yard said yesterday: As of May 12, Operation Hillman, the investigation into breaches of Covid-19 regulations in Whitehall and Downing Street, has made more than 100 referrals for fixed-penalty notices.

These referrals have continued to be made throughout the period since our last update on April 12, and the investigation remains live.

The Prime Ministers spokesman confirmed that Mr Johnson had not been issued with another fine.

He said: Youll know that the Prime Minister has on a number of occasions apologised and made clear that there were things we simply did not get right, and that he is sorry for how this matter has been handled.

'Obviously, that remains the case. He will have more to say at the conclusion... and when the Sue Gray report is published.
News content created by British publishers generates around 1billion in UK revenue for Google and Facebook every year, a leading academic has found.

Professor Matthew Elliott from Cambridge University said both US tech giants relied on journalism to keep users engaged, which was crucial to their business models.

Yet, despite helping the platforms to earn at least 16billion every year in the UK, the media organisations that created the content received 'little, if any' compensation.

Any profits generated as a result of the investment publishers put into creating first-rate journalism should go to them rather than Google and Facebook, Professor Elliott said.

'The fact that high-quality news content generates wider benefits to society makes this problem acute,' he added.

News content is highly important for digital platforms because it keeps users engaged and provides valuable data for online advertising, according to a new study

Paul Zwillenberg, chief executive of the Daily Mail and General Trust, yesterday said the Daily Mail invested a lot in journalism and 'deserves to be fairly rewarded'.

Speaking at the Deloitte and Enders Media and Telecoms conference 2022, he criticised the 'unfair' deal, telling the audience: 'The value of journalism in the UK  for newspapers, both regional and national, magazines, and broadcasters  is approximately 1billion.'

Not only should payment for content be fair, he said, but that it was also 'important that the rules of engagement are clear'.

'What do I mean by that? I mean algorithms that are fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory. Free from bias and self-preference.'

The News Media Association, which represents UK national and regional papers, published the study.

It has led to renewed calls for the Digital Markets Unit (DMU) to urgently be given the powers it needs to level the playing field between news publishers and online giants.

News content is highly important for digital platforms because it keeps users engaged and provides valuable data for online advertising, the study said.

Entitled the Value of News to Digital Platforms in the UK, it found around two thirds of Google search results in the UK showed up links to news articles.

This can appear through direct search queries or those that appear indirectly but capture the attention of the user and help give a better answer.

News content similarly benefits Facebook in keeping its users interested, which is critical to the social media giant's business.

Its algorithms have been developed to maximise user engagement, which in turn enables it to sell more ads and collect more user data with which to target these ads.

Google earned 10.8billion and Facebook made 5.3billion in the UK in 2021, according to estimates based on company reporting.

News content is highly important for digital platforms because it keeps users engaged and provides valuable data for online advertising, the study said. Entitled the Value of News to Digital Platforms in the UK, it found around two thirds of Google search results in the UK showed up links to news articles

But Professor Elliott said: 'They share little, if any, of these revenues with the publishers on whose news content they rely.

By considering how much revenue Google and Facebook might lose if news content were to be withheld, it is estimated that the value of news to the platforms is about 1billion a year.

'If the public is to continue to be served with high-quality news, the benefits from the investment in journalism made by news publishers should mainly accrue to them, not Google and Facebook.'

The draft Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill was announced earlier this week in the Queen's Speech.

It will empower the DMU to force tech giants to comply with codes of conduct  or face fines of up to 10 per cent of annual turnover.

Mr Zwillenberg said: 'It's now firmly on the agenda and we're now at a point where can open a new chapter and actually discuss what is a fair and level playing field.'

Meta said Facebook's New Feed in 2021 sent over 180 billion clicks to news publishers at no charge to them, with the additional traffic worth an estimated 7.4bn.

A spokesman also highlighted the investments it had made in journalism, including 12.5m in the Community News Project, a partnership with the NCTJ to help local newsrooms and improve diversity.

He said last year the company had also launched Facebook News, a dedicated surface for national and local news that had paid tens of millions of pounds to hundreds of news sites to be part of its service.
A teenager has been rushed to hospital after being shot in south London.

Police were called to Brixton Hill, Lambeth, following reports of a firearm discharge on May 12 at 7.15pm.

Officers at the scene found a male in his late teens with a gunshot wound.

He has been rushed to hospital, but no further information about his condition has been released.

A witness on social media claims they saw a car crash on Acre Lane, near to the town hall, before a number of people got out of the vehicle and fired multiple shots from a handgun.

Police were called to Brixton Hill, Lambeth, following reports of a firearm discharge on May 12 at 7.15pm. Officers at the scene found a male in his late teens with a gunshot wound

Speaking to My London, one witness passing by on a bus, said: 'The bus stopped and we heard then saw this big silver 4x4 crash and there were these guys running out of it, then we heard six gunshots and a guy with a rifle ran by the bus.

'It's the first time I've ever experienced something like that.'

The Met says a crime scene remains in place and the road - at the junction with Effra Road - is closed to traffic.

At this early stage, there have been no arrests and enquiries continue. Anyone with information is asked to call police via 101 quoting reference CAD 6825/12May.

According to a witness passing by the scene on a bus, people were 'shaking and crying' when they heard the gun shots and crouched down for safety.

The anoymous witness told My London: '[The bus] was probably about 70/100 meters away. It was pretty loud and you could tell straight away what it was - a car crash then multiple gun shots

'Our bus was stopped when it was happening, then I crouched down for safety'

At this early stage, there have been no arrests and enquiries continue.
Boris Johnson has ordered ministers to slash the size of the Civil Service by a fifth to free up billions for tax cuts.

The Prime Minister used a 'cost of living' Cabinet meeting in the Midlands yesterday to order his top team to redouble their efforts to ease the financial pressure on struggling families.

Mr Johnson told the Daily Mail: 'We have got to cut the cost of government to reduce the cost of living.'

He said the Civil Service had become 'swollen' during the pandemic and more than 90,000 jobs had to go.

And he suggested the billions saved could be ploughed into tax cuts, saying: 'Every pound the Government pre-empts from the taxpayer is money they can spend on their own priorities, on their own lives.'

Ministers were given one month to come up with plans to cut the size of the Civil Service by 91,000  almost a fifth of the current total.

The move would save about 3.5 billion a year, freeing up resources to help ease the cost of living through tax cuts or other measures.

Jacob Rees-Mogg defended the move today in the face of union anger, saying it would simply remove staff brought in to deal with Covid and the 'aftermath of Brexit'.

The Brexit Opportunities Minister told Sky News: 'I know it sounds eye-catching but it's just getting back to the civil service we had in 2016... since then we've had to take on people for specific tasks.

'So dealing with the aftermath of Brexit and dealing with Covid, so there's been a reason for that increase, but we're now trying to get back to normal.'

From L to R: Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi, International Trade Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan, Health Secretary Sajid Javid, Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak during a regional cabinet meeting at Middleport Pottery in Stoke on Trent on Thursday

Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg arrives to attend the Cabinet meeting on Thursday

A picture from Jacob Rees-Mogg showing an empty ministry office as civil servants continue to work from home

Dave Penman, general secretary of the FDA union for civil and public service workers, accused the Government of 'picking a number out of the air'.

He told BBC Radio 4's Today Programme that part of civil servants' jobs was to look at efficiency.

'They've already committed to 5 per cent cuts in their budgets as part of the spending review,' he said.

'That kind of ongoing efficiency is what the civil service does all the time. But if you're going to just simply pluck a figure out of the air and say it's now 90,000 because there's a convenient point in time where we liked the number, that's not a serious way to look at what does a government want to do and how can it deliver that in the most effective and efficient way.'

The PM's chief of staff, Steve Barclay, is also investigating plans to use new technology, including artificial intelligence systems, to improve efficiency at struggling agencies such as the Passport Office and DVLA.

Mr Johnson said the public 'deserve better' from organisations which have allowed huge backlogs to build up.

And he remains convinced of the need to get more officials back at their desks, adding: 'We need to get back into the habit of getting into the office, getting into the workplace.

'There will be lots of people who disagree with me, but I believe people are more productive, more energetic, more full of ideas, when they are surrounded by other people.'

But the PM said technology also had a major role to play in improving efficiency  and potentially cutting the cost of official documents such as passports. 'I'm not antediluvian about technology,' he said.

'Things like Zoom and Teams can increase productivity, rather than just be an excuse for people to stay at home.

'We should be asking ourselves, why does it cost so much for a passport? Often it's because the cost has been jacked up over the years to support the cost of the organisation providing them.

'What is the chief driver of those costs? Headcount. If we can do more with AI... potentially it could be cheaper.'

The move will put ministers on a collision course with the powerful Civil Service unions, which are already complaining bitterly about a Government drive to persuade thousands of staff to return to their desks after the pandemic.

There were fresh calls yesterday for Rishi Sunak to cut taxes after official figures showed that the economy unexpectedly shrank by 0.1 per cent in March  even before the latest round of energy price hikes last month.

Mr Johnson led a Cabinet meeting on Thursday in which he ordered his top team to redouble their efforts to ease the financial pressure on struggling families

NatWest chairman Sir Howard Davies urged ministers to focus on helping the worst-off households, pointing out that the poorest fifth of the population will have to cut their non-essential spending by 20 per cent.

Meanwhile, Mr Johnson followed Chancellor Mr Sunak in saying he would look at introducing a windfall tax on the profits of energy giants to help struggling families.

BP sought to head off pressure for such a levy by announcing it would reinvest all its profits from North Sea oil and gas over the next decade back into the UK.

The PM's plan to reduce civil servant numbers comes at a time when ministers are grappling with the so-called Whitehall 'Blob' over a range of issues, including Brexit.

A Government source said the Civil Service had become bloated during the pandemic and needed to be cut down.

The source said it was right that the Government makes renewed efforts to tighten its belt in the same way that businesses and families are doing.

'All businesses are looking at ways they can reduce their costs and increase performance and government should be no different,' the source said.

'We have seen the Civil Service headcount rise by 90,000 since 2016. A lot of that was pandemic-related and it was the right thing to do at the time.

'But we are past the pandemic now and we cannot let this bigger state become the new normal  we need to get back to pre-pandemic levels.

The Prime Minister has said the Civil Service became 'swollen' during the pandemic and more than 90,000 jobs had to go

Prime Minister Boris Johnson during a tour of Churchill China Factory in Stoke-on-Trent on Thursday

'It will help save a substantial amount of money, freeing up resources that could be used to help people with the cost of living.'

The current Civil Service headcount stands at 475,000, the highest level since 2010. Ministers have been given two years to reduce that total by 91,000.

Downing Street declined to put a figure on the estimated savings, but the average civil servant earns 28,100, with other costs such as National Insurance and pensions adding around 10,000 to the wage bill.

Based on these figures, cutting 91,000 jobs would save about 3.5 billion a year.

Government sources said ministers would focus initially on reducing numbers through 'natural wastage', such as recruitment freezes.

But Jacob Rees-Mogg warned the Cabinet yesterday that compulsory redundancies may be needed.

He said the cuts would restore the Civil Service to the size it was a decade ago, adding: 'It has been done before and it can be done again.'

Mr Rees-Mogg, the minister for government efficiency, outlined the plans to the Cabinet yesterday when ministers gathered in Stoke-on-Trent to discuss ways to accelerate action on tackling the cost of living.

He said that on current projections the Civil Service was due to expand over the next three years, 'despite the requirements of Brexit and the pandemic now receding'.

Ministers were told that 30,000 to 40,000 civil servants leave every year, meaning major reductions could be achieved through recruitment freezes.
A mother who was left fuming after a teacher tricked her 12-year-old daughter into attending a trans identity class has claimed the school admitted it was held in secret on purpose.

Erin Lee said Wellington Middle School in Colorado was open about 'intentionally' not telling parents about her child being lectured on gender and identity.

She said the institution told her they could not let them in on the guest speaker event because they had 'to offer a safe space for students'.

Her daughter had been invited by her art teacher Jenna Riep for an after school arts class that actually turned out to be a Genders & Sexualities Alliance event.

She told how her daughter came home and revealed a speaker told them they may be transgender if they were not comfortable in their bodies.

The horrified mother claimed they also asked kids who they were sexually attracted to and informed they could be queer while being shown a 'Genderbread person'.

The bizarre diagram has been used in some woke schools and workplaces to claim anatomical sex is 'male-ness' or 'female-ness' - but has been criticized by some academics.

Lee also alleged the youngsters were even asked to keep details of the meeting a secret and warned their parents were not safe.

The lesson, which district officials have since defended, spurred the concerned mother to pull the child out of the public school, and enroll her into an $8,000-a-year private school.

Meanwhile authorities were said to be seeking an LGBT coordinator to oversee all grades on a salary of up to $95,000-a-year.

Erin Lee, whose daughter attended Wellington Middle School up until this year, says her daughter sent her a text message asking to go to an after-school art club her art teacher had invited her. The group was actually a Gender and Sexuality [Alliance] club

The group also saw her daughter participate in a ' Genderbread person activity,' Lee said - a lesson in which organizers explicitly asked her daughter and other students in the room about their sexual identity, using a kid-friendly diagram of a gingerbread man (pictured)

The child was reportedly invited to the after-school program by her art teacher Jenna Riep (left), who told her it was an art group. Kimberly Chambers (right) told kids that if they were not fully comfortable in their body that they may transgender and that members of their family were not safe to talk to

Lee told DailyMail.com school bosses 'seemed empathetic to our situation but confirmed that the meeting intentionally happened in secret, with parental knowledge, because the school has to offer a safe space for students'.

She told how that the incident began after her daughter sent her a text message asking to go to an after-school art club, saying art teacher Riep had invited her.

Controversial 'Genderbread Person' graphic that teaches children gender is decided in the brain The 'Genderbread Person' is a recently surfaced education tool used by schools and companies to teach students and workers that anatomy doesn't always determine gender. The bizarre diagram has been used in some woke schools and workplaces to claim anatomical sex is 'male-ness' or 'female-ness' - but has been criticized by some academics. The model breaks down the concepts of gender into three aspects: sex, gender identity, gender expression. Sexual orientation is also measured in the strange graphic, due to its supposed connection to gender identity and expression. The diagram is used to determine what sex a student or worker is sexually attracted to - with many schools using it to inform children that they could be gay. Critics have branded the learning material - which was distributed by the Biden administration to his state's department of education earlier this year - as 'unscientific nonsense.' Last month, GOP Pennsylvania state Rep. Aaron Bernstine sent a letter last week to his state's Secretary of Education questioning the material, which he said had been 'distributed' by the US DOE to the Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE), 'and is an option to be used in curriculum for students in the 6-7 age range.' 'There is no reason to be having these conversations with such young children, and it is unacceptable,' Bernstine stated in a press release. 'The classroom is not the place to push this ideology onto them.' Whether the diagram is included in a US public school's curriculum content, is determined by each individual school district or charter school. Advertisement

She and her husband, Jonathan, then gave their permission for the child to attend - however, upon picking up the schoolgirl from the supposed art club, the pair quickly realized something was wrong.

She continued: 'We were completely caught off guard and ill-equipped to help our daughter make sense of what had happened to her.

'We feel so fortunate that she broke the rule and told us what happened.

'We fear how far her teacher, this external influencer and her peers also influenced by these adults would push her down the path of adopting the transgender label.

'Our first action was to immediately contact the woman who had given her personal information to our child.

'Her response was delusional and seemed to double-down on everything she had done and her need to target younger and younger children.'

The lesson was led by LGBTQ activist Kimberly Chambers, emails obtained by the Parents Defending Education advocacy group show. Chambers - the head of LGBTQ advocacy group SPLASH Youth of Northern Colorado - spoke as a school board-approved guest.





'She explained to my daughter that if she is not 100% comfortable in her female body, then she's transgender,' Lee explained, revealing that the outside speaker then told the middle-school-aged children that they were not safe around their parents.

'She then told the kids that parents aren't safe, and that it's OK to lie to them about where they are in order to attend this meeting,' the mom, who has since enrolled her daughter in a private Christian school but still has a son at the public school, told Fox News.

Lee said the speaker - who delivered the lesson to the group on May 4 of last year - then gave the students her personal contact information and encouraged them to contact her on social media platforms such as Discord and What'sApp.

'She doubled down that parents aren't safe [and] that heterosexuality and monogamy are not normal,' Lee further revealed.

After confronting school staffers and guest speaker Chambers about the lesson, The Poudre School District confirmed the existence of the club, and asserted that conversations in its GSA groups 'may be confidential' given the' sensitive' nature of the meetings' discussions.

'In PSD, we promise to create and uphold equitable, inclusive, and rigorous educational opportunities, outcomes, and experiences for all students,' the district said in a statement to DailyMail.com.

Lee (at left) said her daughter (at right) sent her and her husband Jonathan (middle) a text message asking to go to the after-school art club that her art teacher had invited her to. The pair gave their permission, but upon picking her up from the class, Lee said they knew something was wrong. She has since pulled the kid from the public school, where her second oldest son (pictured) currently still attends. The family also has an infant son

Chambers (at far left) - the head of LGBTQ advocacy group SPLASH Youth of Northern Colorado - spoke as a school board-approved guest

The incident took place at Wellington Middle School in Colorado on May 4. Poudre School District confirmed the existence of the club, and asserted that conversations in its GSA groups 'may be confidential' given the' sensitive' nature of the meetings' discussions. Lee said she has since pulled her kid from the public school

'As a district, we are committed to making our schools safe spaces in which all students can learn.

'Genders and Sexualities Alliances, or GSAs, were established as safe spaces for members of the LGBTQIA+ community, allies, and any individual to come together with the goals of ensuring inclusivity, safety, and support.

'Discussions in GSAs may be confidential given that they can sometimes be sensitive in nature (i.e. a student may be 'out' with specific friends but not with the community at large),' it went on, adding that the GSA was 'school-sponsored' and approved by the district.

The district declined to comment on the allegations made by Lee 'to protect the privacy of the student and their family.'

District brass further asserted that they had addressed the issue with Lee 'on multiple occasions over the past year,' and that her daughter is no longer enrolled in the district.

Lee said the school also confirmed the meeting is always held in secret.

Email correspondence obtained by Parents Defending Education between Chambers and art teacher Riep show the LGBTQ advocate expressing concerns over the mother's complaints concerning the club.

The messages, sent on May 6 and May 7 following Lee's complaints to the school and district, show Chambers asking school staff to remind the mom that 'the room is a safe space and that she should not share the names of her friends in attendance.'

She also told a seemingly worried Riep that emails and phone conversations she had had with Lee should be recorded and thought of as 'evidence.'

'Hello! This is private and I will be responding with a bcc for all of you, but it's important for you to know the response messaging that I send out,' Chamber wrote in one email sent to Riep and Katie Delahunt, a guidance counselor at Wellington Middle.

'You can forward my response to admin at [Wellington Middle School], they probably will receive similar messages from this parent.

'Tread lightly because this parent has HUGE potential to coming in to understanding or rejecting their child.

'I'll respond with what we know to work so far- but it's always a gamble and a kids' access comes in to view,' Chambers went on.

Email correspondence obtained by Parents Defending Education between Chambers and art teacher Riep show the LGBTQ advocate expressing concerns over the mother's complaints concerning the content being presented at the club

'If you know which parent this is, can you politely remind their student that the room is a safe space and that she should not share the names of her friends in attendance?'

She then wrote, 'I'll reply to the email with you all bcc'd in the next hour or so. Any conversation with this parent should have the impression in our minds as 'evidence', verbiage is everything. Thanks!'

The next morning, Riep responded: 'Hey Kimberly, Sorry I am just responding, this has been a lot to process. The family has reached out the school a couple times this week, we are trying to get to a good place with them.

'I really appreciate you taking the time to write thoughtful response. Thank you so much for your support and time, I'd love to get some advice sometime this summer on how I can best support students if something like this happens again.

Chambers responded shortly thereafter, assuring the art teacher not to worry over Lee's complaints to the school and district, citing that they had 'strong ally' in Kristen Draper, a board member for the Poudre School District who also volunteers with SPLASH.

Chambers also cited the Equal Access Act - a guidance that says federally funded schools cannot deny students the right to conduct meetings over religious, political, or philosophical content - as a reason that 'parents don't have to approve which clubs and activities their children participate in.'

'As needed,' Chambers wrote, 'You have a strong ally in our Board of Education, who can help your admin with responses and base them on the Equal Access Act where parents don't have to approve which clubs and activities their children participate in (which will probably be the next attempt by this parent).

Chambers told a worried Riep that they had 'strong ally' in Kristen Draper, a board member for the Poudre School District who also volunteers with SPLASH

'Kristen Draper has been briefed on this parents' outreach and she is ready to respond if anyone needs it.

'She is very available to you via email, even if you Admin just want advice, and has fielded all of the other middle schools as they began GSA's and pushed through these barriers.'

The woke activist went on to assert that their handling of the situation would serve as a precedent for future conflicts of similar nature.

'If there is additional work that I can do on my side, please let me know, how this is handled will set a precedence for other parents as they hear about it, so a strong first allyship is key.'

Chambers then asked: 'Have you been able to check in with to make sure she is okay?'

In the next email, Riep revealed that the child had left the school, spurring Chambers to advise the staffer to perform a wellness check on the unidentified student.

She cited one 'former extreme case,' where she said 'a parent had been so concerned' about what was being taught to their child in a GSA group,' that the child 'wasn't allowed to leave home without family until they decided his 'gender identity' was 'nonsense.'

Chamber said the 13-year-old student was then removed from Liberty Commons Charter, also part of the Poudre School District, and sent to a boarding school.

According to Chambers, the student attempted suicide twice after being pulled from the school.

Chambers went on to assure Riep that they were not in the wrong, and touted their efforts as heroic.

'It's a lot of work being an ally in these situations, but it's rewarding in the end. I have requested to join the Wellington community group right after our session but haven't been admitted as of yet. Thanks again.'

DailyMail.com reached out to Chambers Thursday for comment regarding the GSA group and Lee's claims, but did not immediately hear back.

Lee, meanwhile, says it's time for families to withdraw their young students from woke public schools such as those in the Colorado school district, to properly protect their children.

She said she called the police to report the incident, who said they were unable to help due to the fact that the lesson occurred in a classroom and there was no accusation of physical touch or exposure of body parts.

Lee told New American Magazine that her daughter is now attending a private, Christian school and is 'doing much better.'
Russia has accused Finland of 'pushing above its weight' as the country signalled its intention to join NATO.

Putin's EU ambassador vowed to bolster defences on the Russia and Finland's shared 800-mile-long border if it decided to join the alliance.

Vladimir Chizhov said if Finland joined it would lead to 'certain military-technical measures, like improving or raising the degree of defence preparations along the Finnish border'.

A move would 'certainly necessitate rethinking of Russian defence posture' but not 'necessarily [involve] troops and tanks, but certain preparations like radars, perhaps', he told Sky News.

Reservists of the Karelia Brigade at a shooting practice during a defence exercise in Taipalsaari near Lappeenranta and close to the border with Russia, south-eastern Finland

Putin's EU ambassador Vladimir Chizhov (pictured today) said if Finland joined NATO it would lead to 'certain military-technical measures, like improving or raising the degree of defence preparations along the Finnish border'

A Leopard battle tank of the Armoured Brigade is seen during the Army mechanised exercise Arrow 22 exercise at the Niinisalo garrison in Kankaanp'', Western Finland, on May 4

Finnish soldiers take part in the Army mechanised exercise Arrow 22 exercise at the Niinisalo garrison in Kankaanpaa, Finland, May 4

Finland's President Sauli Niinisto makes a point during a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki, Finland, Wednesday, May 11

A former British ambassador to Russia has said there may be 'much more Russian nuclear deployment in the Baltic' areas in response to Finland potentially becoming a NATO member in light of the war in Ukraine.

Sir Tony Brenton told BBC's Newsnight programme the Kremlin may think 'it expands their view of NATO as a threat to them'.

He said: 'They will be very conscious especially as this war winds its way to a conclusion that their conventional forces have not produced the results they hoped for.

'They will be increasingly inclined therefore to use their nuclear strength as a demonstration they need to be taken seriously.

'I think we need to resign ourselves to the likelihood of much more Russian nuclear deployment in the Baltic area as a response to Finland's accession to NATO, when it comes, and Sweden's very likely one as well.'

Today, Finland announced it intends to start the formal application process to join the military pact, more than doubling NATO's presence on Russia's borders from 754 miles to 1,584 miles.

The decision is a spectacular backfire for despot Vladimir Putin, who invaded Ukraine in part through fears of Volodymyr Zelensky joining the US-led alliance.

It came as over the past 10 days, soldiers from Albania, France, Greece, Italy, North Macedonia, Montenegro, the UK and the US have taken part in the exercises in North Macedonia, which have included parachute jumps at several locations around the country.

NATO has put on a show of strength in Europe in a message to Vladimir Putin as 10,000 soldiers from 19 nations take part in war games across the continent

Italian paratroopers parachute after jumping from C-130 aircraft in today's NATO drills

British soldiers participate in an exercise as NATO allied troops carry out Swift Response 22 exercises during a media open day at Krivolak army base, North Macedonia

A British Chinook helicopter transports a howitzer and a truck during the Swift Response 22 military exercise

Soldiers take part in the NATO military exercise 'Flaming Sword 2022' at a training range near the village Maisiejunai

NATO forces' U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopters fly by during the NATO exercise 'Swift Respone 22' at the Krivolak Army Training Area, near Negotino

Recent exercises involved around soldiers from North Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, Greece, Italy, as well as France, the UK and the US

British soldiers prepare for Swift Response 22 exercises carried out by NATO allied troops

North Macedonia formally joined NATO in March 2020. The small Balkan country of 1.8million people has an active military of about 8,000 personnel.

The purpose of the exercises is to showcase the ability for large ground combat operations for member states and allies.



Earlier, Russian state TV accused the US of erecting a 'new iron curtain' in Europe in a furious response to Finland announcing its intention to join NATO.

The 'Swift Response 22' exercises involve forces from the US, Britain, France, Italy and other allied nations and are taking place against the backdrop of Russian aggression against perceived Western expansion

NATO exercise 'Swift Response 22' is part of the exercise 'DEFENDER EUROPE 22' at the Krivolak Army Training Area

British soldiers attend the NATO exercise 'Swift Response 22' at the Krivolak Army Training Area, near Negotino

Spain's F-18 jet fighter takes part in the NATO military exercise 'Flaming Sword 2022' at a training range near the village of Maisiejunai

Today, Finland announced it intends to start the formal application process to join the military pact, more than doubling NATO's presence on Russia's borders from 754 miles to 1,584 miles

British communications officers in North Macedonia take part in the NATO drills as a show of strength for the military alliance

Italian paratroopers jump from a C-130 aircraft as NATO allied troops carry out Swift Response 22 exercises

The exercises demonstrate the NATO states' ability to deploy anywhere around the world and that its soldiers can operate together professionally and successfully

US Black Hawk helicopters take part in the Swift Response 22 military exercise at the Krivolak Military Training Center

This morning, president Sauli Niinisto and prime minister Sanna Marin said they want to join the security alliance 'without delay', with Sweden set to follow suit within days, drastically ramping up tensions between Russia and the West.

The Kremlin had previously threatened it would secure 'the entire destruction' of the country and 'the most undesirable consequences', and today said it would 'be forced to take retaliatory steps', both 'military-technical and other'.

A Number 10 spokesman said the UK is 'fully committed to NATO's open door policy' and said the only threatening behaviour in Europe has been Russia's invasion.

When asked what he would say to Russia, Niinisto replied: 'You caused this. Look in the mirror.'

After the announcement, Russian state TV's Olga Skabeyeva said: 'The main beneficiary here is America and Biden. And the main aim is a new iron curtain from the Barents to the Black Sea.'

To show Finland what they will be joining, forces are holding the military drills in five locations across Europe

NATO enhanced Forward Presence battlegroup tanks and infantry fighting vehicles fire during Iron Spear exercises in Latvia yesterday

Spanish servicemen take part in NATO military exercises during the Iron Spear 2022 drills in Latvia yesterday

Spanish troops of NATO enhanced Forward Presence battlegroup pose for a picture during Iron Spear 2022 military exercise in Adazi military field

Meanwhile Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the move was 'definitely' a threat to Russia and warned it would make Europe more unstable.

He said Finland had made 'unfriendly steps' against Russia and it was a cause for regret and a reason to impose a symmetrical response.

Asked whether this presented a threat to Russia, Peskov said: 'Definitely. NATO expansion does not make our continent more stable and secure.'

Sweden is expected to follow Finland with its own bid which could come as soon as next week, with a parliament debate on Monday followed by a special cabinet meeting where the formal decision to apply will be taken, Daily Expressen said.

The major policy shift was announced today in a joint statement by President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin (pictured) today

President Sauli Niinisto and prime minister Sanna Marin released the anticipated statement this morning

Russian state TV has accused the US of erecting a 'new iron curtain' in Europe in response to the decision

Finland, which shares an 830-mile border and a difficult past with Russia, has previously remained outside NATO

Sauli Niinisto (pictured during a meeting with Boris Johnson yesterday) believes the move would strengthen Finland's security

A special committee will announce Finland's decision on a membership bid on Sunday although it could take until October before the country is formally admitted to the pact.

The major policy shift which completely rewrites Europe's post WWII alignment comes a day after Boris Johnson signed security pacts with Helsinki and Stockholm pledging Britain would come to their aid if they come under Russian attack.

In their statement today, Niinisto and Marin said: 'Now that the moment of decision-making is near, we state our equal views, also for information to the parliamentary groups and parties.

'NATO membership would strengthen Finland's security. As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defence alliance.

'Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay.

'We hope that the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days.'

Finland, which shares an 830-mile border and a difficult past with Russia, has previously remained outside the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation to maintain friendly relations with its eastern neighbour.

Earlier this morning, former prime minister Alexander Stubb said: 'I have been waiting for this day for 30 years.

'Announcement on Finnish NATO membership imminent.'

Sweden is expected to imminently follow Finland with an application to join the Western military pact.
President Joe Biden welcomed Southeast Asian leaders to the White House Thursday with a $150 million promise to help with infrastructure and security as part of a package to hit back at the growing influence of China.

The leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations posed for a family photograph on the South Lawn of the White House at the start of a two-day summit.

Officials said they hope the gathering with remind the region that Washington is still focused on the Indo-Pacific region and the rise of China - despite the distraction of the war in Ukraine.

At the end of last year, China promised $1.5 billion in development assistance to ASEAN nations to help with the pandemic.

'We need to step up our game in Southeast Asia,' a senior U.S. administration official said before the summit.

'We are not asking countries to make a choice between the United States and China. We want to make clear, though, that the United States seeks stronger relationships.'

The new commitment includes $40 million for infrastructure intended to help decarbonize the region's power supply and $60 million in maritime security.

The summit kicked off against a backdrop of delicate diplomacy after Biden phoned Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., the son of the former dictator of the Philippines.

President Biden welcomed the 10 leaders of the ASEAN nations to the White House Thursday

The leaders are in Washington for a two-day summit and appeared for a family photo

The summit is designed to remind the region that Washington remains committed to tackling the rise of China, whose leader Xi Jinping is seen here on a video call with Biden last year

THE SOUTHEAST ASIAN LEADERS WHO LINED UP ON THE SOUTH LAWN FOR FAMILY PHOTO His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah of Brunei His Excellency Joko Widodo, President of the Republic of Indonesia His Excellency Hun Sen, Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Cambodia His Excellency Lee Hsien Loong, Prime Minister of the Republic of Singapore His Excellency Prayut Chan-o-cha (Ret.), Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Thailand His Excellency Phankham Viphavan, Prime Minister of the Lao Peoples Democratic Republic His Excellency Pham Minh Chinh, Prime Minister of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam His Excellency Dato Sri Ismail Sabri bin Yaakob, Prime Minister of Malaysia His Excellency Dato Lim Jock Hoi, Secretary- General of the Association for Southeast Asian Nations His Excellency Teodoro L. Locsin, Jr., Secretary of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of the Philippines Advertisement

Biden called Marcos Jr, known as Bongbong, to congratulate him on his apparent landslide victory. His apparent victory has alarmed human rights groups.

'President Biden told him Washington is looking forward to working with him and cited the shared history of the longtime treaty allies,' Philippine Ambassador Jose Manuel Romualdez told The Associated Press.

Marcos Jr. had more than 31 million votes in the unofficial count from Mondays elections in whats projected to be one of the strongest mandates for a Philippine president in decades.

Biden is hosting leaders from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations as his administration makes an extended effort to demonstrate that the United States hasn't lost focus on the Pacific even while dealing with Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The group has prohibited Myanamar's military junta from participating in its gatherings other than by sending nongovernmental leaders until there is progress on a five-point 'consensus' program.

An official who briefed reporters said there were discussions within the group about possibly having an empty chair during the gathering to highlight the country's absence.

The country has been gripped by crisis since the army ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021

Biden will begin his talks over dinner Thursday evening with leaders from the eight ASEAN nations attending the two-day summit. It will be the group's first meeting at the White House. Leaders will take part in more formal talks at the State Department on Friday.

He is also expected to have 'private time' with each member of the group.

President Joe Biden is hosting leaders from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Washington on Thursday, May 12. The group has discussed an empty chair to highlight the absence of Myanmar's military junta

Biden is convening ASEAN leaders at the White House

Chinese President Xi Jinping (L) and Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi pose for pictures during a welcoming ceremony at the Presidential Palace in Naypyidaw on January 17, 2020

Former Congressman Ferdinand "Bong-Bong" Marcos Jr., the only son of the late Philippine strongman Ferdinand Marcos, is mobbed by supporters who gathered outside the Senate building in Manila following his testimony Tuesday, Oct. 7, 1997 on the alleged ill-gotten wealth of his family. Biden called to congratulate him on his apparent landslide win

The ASEAN nations include Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Leaders from the other two ASEAN members, Myanmar and the Philippines, are not expected to attend the summit.

The special summit in Washington comes before Biden departs next week for a whirlwind visit to South Korea and Japan - his first visit to Asia as president - for talks with those two countries' leaders. He'll also meet during the trip with leaders from the Indo-Pacific strategic alliance with the U.S. known as the Quad: Australia, India and Japan.

Biden has sought to put greater focus on the Quad and improving relations with Pacific nations in the early going of his presidency as he sees a rising China as the most threatening economic and national security adversary to the United States.

Biden, who vowed to make the Pacific a greater focal point of U.S. policy, has seen his attempt at an 'Asia pivot' complicated by the most serious fighting in Europe since World War II, which has consumed much of his foreign policy bandwidth in recent months.

A top White House Asia policy adviser said the administration remains committed to stepping up relations with southeast Asian nations to address climate, economic and education initiatives.

'There has been a sense that in previous administrations that we had set off with a determined pace to focus on East Asia or in the Indo-Pacific and then find ourselves with other pressing challenges that perhaps draws (us) away a little bit,' Kurt Campbell, coordinator for Indo-Pacific Affairs on the White House National Security Council, said at an event on Wednesday hosted by the U.S. Institute of Peace. 'I think there is a deep sense that that cant happen again.'

Outgoing Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte is skipping the summit.

Foreign ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) pose for a photo during a photo session in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Feb. 17, 2022. From left are Malasian Saifuddin Abdullah, Philippine Teodoro Locsin Jr, Singaporean Vivian Balakrishnan, Cambodian Prak Sokhonn, Indonesia Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi, Laotian Saleumxay Kommasith and ASEAN Secretary General Lim Jock Hoi. President Joe Biden is hosting leaders from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Washington on Thursday, May 12

The Biden administration condemned the military coup that led to the ouster of Suu Kyi. She was convicted by a military court last month of corruption and sentenced to five years in prison in the first of several corruption cases against her. Suu Kyi has denied the charges.

Biden is also expected to address the situation in Myanmar with ASEAN leaders, as well as discuss China and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Campbell said the administration expects the private talks will be 'direct, polite, but maybe a little bit uncomfortable at times' as the U.S. and ASEAN members are not on the same page on all issues.

Biden has called for Russia to be disinvited from Novembers scheduled Group of 20 summit because of its invasion of Ukraine. ASEAN member Indonesia, which holds the presidency of the Group of 20 this year, has resisted the calls to pull Moscows invitation.

At a virtual summit with ASEAN leaders last year, Biden said Washington would look to start talks with Pacific nations about developing a regional economic framework. Campbell said that the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework would be under discussion during this year's summit, though it was unclear how substantive the talks would be.

Japans Washington ambassador, Tomita Koji, said at another forum in Washington earlier this week that the framework could be launched during Bidens upcoming visit to Japan.
Lee Jae-hwan, the CEO of One Store, speaks during a press conference announcing the company's initial public offering (IPO) plan at a hotel in Seoul, May 9. Courtesy of One Store



By Baek Byung-yeul



Lee Jae-hwan, the CEO of SK Group's mobile app market subsidiary One Store, is facing fierce criticism over flip-flopping regarding the firm's botched initial public offering (IPO), according to industry officials, Thursday. On Monday, Lee told reporters that One Store would push ahead with the IPO under any circumstances, but two days later, it announced that it would withdraw the listing, raising questions about his leadership and tarnishing its corporate image.



"It is unfortunate that SK Shieldus, an affiliated company, withdrew its listing, but we plan to keep pushing ahead with the listing because the industry is different from One Store and we think there is a lot of growth potential," Lee told reporters during a press conference held in Seoul, Monday.



During the conference, Lee cited SK Shieldus, a subsidiary of SK Group's ICT investment company, SK Square, and a security company that provides both physical security and cybersecurity services. On May 6, the security company abandoned its IPO plan due to weak investor sentiment



But the One Store CEO assured that his company would have no problem with the listing as it has high growth potential, unlike SK Shieldus.



Kim Sang-don, the chief financial officer of One Store, also dismissed the controversy over the high valuation of the company, saying, "One Store's corporate value is somewhat undervalued because a fairly high discount rate has already been applied to the public offering price."



However, the two executives' over-confidence didn't last two days as the company withdrew its listing on Wednesday.



"During the IPO process, we received positive reviews from most institutional investors about our fundamentals, including growth, profitability and stability. But, investor sentiment has been sharply dampened by deepening uncertainties in the global economy, so we decided to withdraw the listing," a One Store spokesman said. "The company will push for a listing on the stock market again when the best time comes."



Contrary to the company's explanation, an industry official in the local IT industry said that One Store was wrong in valuing itself too highly.



"One Store originally calculated its IPO price by comparing itself to Apple, Alphabet and Kakao. The company corrected its comparison by comparing itself to Tencent, Naver, Kakao and Nexon but its move can be interpreted as the company having tried to set its IPO price too high," an official from a local IT company said, asking for anonymity.



Like Google Play and Apple's App Store, One Store operates a mobile app market in Korea. The company has been expanding its presence here, where Google and Apple have dominated, by receiving less commission fees from both app developers and mobile app users.



Market tracker Mobile Index's data showed that One Store had the second-largest share in Korea's app market, with 13.8 percent in 2021. The figure lagged far behind Google's share of 74.6 percent, but was greater than Apple's 11.6 percent.


Feared former bikie boss Toby Mitchell has taken an extraordinary public swipe at the outlaw club that booted him from the top job.

Mitchell, 45, hit Instagram overnight to post an apparent warning to the Mongols, which expelled him on April 1.

Positioned at the centre of a posse of burly blokes, some of them former Mongols, Mitchell tagged the photo in capital letters: 'What the f**k did you think would happen'.

Toby Mitchell - third front from right - hit social media to take a swipe at his former club

Toby Mitchell has hit Instagram to take a swipe at his former club

Sam 'The Punisher' Abdulrahim featured in the Instagram photo with Mitchell

The photo appears to have been snapped along Melbourne's Southbank - a mere stone's throw from Mitchell's highrise home.

Among those featured in the photo are the gangs former national sergeant-at-arms Mark Balsillie and and boxer Sam 'The Punisher' Abdulrahim.

Both men had been unceremoniously booted from the Mongols just days after Mitchell was shown the door.

Abdulrahim had once been mates with the now dead gangster Nabil 'Mad Lebo' Maghnie, who himself was suspected of trying to murder Mitchell outside Doherty's Gym back in 2011.

The menacing boxer, who was jailed for culpable driving after causing the death of an 88 year old woman while speeding in his Ferrari  had been sitting with Kadir Ors at a bus stop in September 2016 when George Marrogi turned-up and started shooting.

Ors was killed but Abdulrahim walked away without not so much as a scratch.

Marrogi, who was jailed for 32 years over the Ors hit, remains the head of the Notorious Crime Family gang.

Mitchell has made a lifetime of criminal connections after initially rising to the rank of sergeant-at-arms with the Bandidos.

He has been shot a whopping seven times over the years in separate shootings and now requires dozens of medications just to continue getting out of bed in the morning.

When not being shot, Mitchell likes to post photos to his 300,000-plus Instagram followers - recently posting a video of a barber rubbing lotion into his tattooed mug.

Nabil 'The Mad Lebo' Maghnie was once suspected of shooting Toby Mitchell. He was killed years later in a hail of bullets

Gang boss George Marrogi has been linked to mates of Toby Mitchell

Dozens of Mongols have reportedly left the club in recent times, with underworld insiders suggesting the club is doomed.

The angst reportedly began when a bunch of Queenslanders took control of the club last month.

Just days ago Daily Mail Australia reported Melbourne was on the cusp of an all out gangland war the likes it has not seen since the infamous Underbelly War.

Between January 1998 and August 2010 36 Melbourne underworld figures were murdered.

An underworld insider told Daily Mail Australia Melbourne was experiencing arguably 'the most unstable period since the gangland war on numerous fronts'.

'The emergence of Marrogis NCF and his prison bust on conspiracy charges has all sorts of implications. There is lot of money at stake, a lot of drugs, huge money,' he said.

A barber massages Toby Mitchell's head in a bizarre Instagram post

Toby Mitchell has more than 300,000 Instagram followers

Mitchell rates himself as a bit of a fashion icon when not dodging bullets

Recent turmoil among Australia's bikie gangs has seen Comancheros boss Mick Murray charged over the 2019 murder of Mitat Rasimi and just days ago his likely successor shot in Sydney.

Tarek Zahed remains in hospital after being shot up to 10 times in a busy Sydney gym in an ambush that claimed the life of his brother Omar Zahed.

The arrest of hundreds of crooks around Australia in June last year has created a further vacuum in Melbourne's underworld.

Authorities sensationally carried out the country's biggest ever organised crime bust, announcing 224 people had been arrested as a result of an elaborate sting using technology designed by the FBI.

While Mitchell is not expected to begin rolling with a new bikie gang, the Instagram post suggests he has no immediate plans to commence a regular day job.

'It's been decades since its been this unstable. And you just have to take a look at Sydney,' the insider said.

'I mean they're not going to go and get jobs at Bunnings, are they.'
Royal Mail is building a fleet of 500 drones to carry mail to remote communities all over the UK, including the Isles of Scilly and the Hebrides.

The postal service, which has already conducted successful trials over Scotland and Cornwall, will create more than 50 new postal drone routes over the next three years as part of a new partnership with London company Windracers.

Drones, or UAVs (uncrewed aerial vehicles), can help reduce carbon emissions and improve the reliability of island mail services, Royal Mail claims.

They offer an alternative to currently-used delivery methods that can be affected by bad weather  ferries, conventional aircraft and land-based deliveries.

They can also take off from any flat surface (sand, grass or tarmac) providing it is long enough.

Drones are usually thought of as small devices, but each of Royal Mail's craft have a hefty wingspan of over 30 feet (10 metres).

Royal Mail is building a fleet of 500 drones to carry mail to remote communities in the UK including the Isles of Scilly and the Hebrides. Royal Mail has already conducted four drone trials over the last 18 months. The most recent one was in the Shetland Islands

Drones are usually thought of as small devices, but each of Royal Mail's craft have a hefty wingspan of over 30 feet (10 metres)

ROYAL MAIL DRONE TRIALS In December 2020, Royal Mail made its first drone delivery to a remote lighthouse on the Isle of Mull using a smaller vertical take-off and landing uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV). In May 2021, it conducted a one-month trial from the Cornish mainland to the Isles of Scilly, using a larger fixed wing UAV to deliver essential mail, PPE and Covid testing kits to the islands. In October 2021, it trialled scheduled, autonomous flights for two weeks between Kirkwall and North Ronaldsay (both in the Orkney Islands) with Windracers Ltd. Royal Mail's last trial carried mail between Tingwall Airport in Lerwick to Unst, Shetland Islands. Advertisement

The first routes identified for the new service include the Isles of Scilly, Shetland Islands, Orkney Islands and the Hebrides, although plans will be subject to approval by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA).

'On time delivery regardless of our customers location or the weather, whilst protecting our environment is our goal,' said Simon Thompson, chief executive officer at Royal Mail.

'Even though we go everywhere, Royal Mail already has the lowest CO2 emissions per parcel delivered, this initiative will help reduce our emissions even further.'

Each twin-engine UAV has a 32-foot wingspan and incorporates a 'high-reliability' autopilot system.

They can carry up to 100kg of mail of all shapes and sizes for two daily return flights between the islands.

After being picked up from the landing sites, letters and parcels are then delivered by the local postie in his or her van  so human workers aren't being completely replaced quite yet.

Royal Mail wants to secure more than 50 drone routes supported by up to 200 drones over the next three years.

But longer term, the ambition is to deploy a fleet of more than 500 drones servicing all corners of the UK.

Chris Paxton, head of drone trials at Royal Mail, told the BBC that the drones were originally designed to deliver aid in Africa.

The postal service will create more than 50 new postal drone routes over the next three years, as part of a new partnership with logistics drone company Windracers

After being picked up from the landing sites, letters and parcels are then delivered by the local postie in his or her van

Royal Mail has already conducted four drone trials over the last 18 months; the last one over the Shetland Islands in April carried mail between Tingwall Airport in Lerwick to Unst Airport  a 50-mile flight each way

They are much like a small plane, except that they don't have a pilot on board, and fly a programmed route autonomously, based on an inputted postcode.

The drones are monitored along the way to ensure they are completely safe; there are safety pilots at either end of the route too who are able to take control of the drone if needed.

The drones are also less likely to be affected by bad weather such as fog and heavy rain than conventional aircraft.

'There is no need for the pilot to be able to see where they're going, which means they can fly in fog,' Paxton said.

'And because they're flying rather than going on the sea, they're also not relying on tides.'

Royal Mail has already conducted four drone trials over the last 18 months; the last one over the Shetland Islands in April carried mail between Tingwall Airport in Lerwick to Unst Airport  a 50-mile flight each way.

Royal Mail wants to secure more than 50 drone routes supported by up to 200 drones over the next three years. But longer term, the ambition is to deploy a fleet of more than 500 drones servicing all corners of the UK

In May 2021, Royal Mail conducted a one-month trial from the Cornish mainland to the Isles of Scilly, using a larger fixed wing UAV to deliver essential mail, PPE and Covid testing kits to the islands

Unst has a population of around 630 people and is Britain's most northerly inhabited island.

The other trials involved flights on the Isle of Mull in Scotland, Isles of Scilly off the Cornish coast and between Kirkwall and North Ronaldsay on the Orkney Islands back in October.

Royal Mail made the UKs first drone package delivery the on the Isle of Mull in 2020, using a much smaller device.

The single package  a jumper from Selfridges  was carried in the body of a small Skyports UAV to a remote lighthouse in Tobermory.

In October, Royal Mail started a two-week test of scheduled, autonomous flights between Kirkwall and North Ronaldsay in the Orkney Islands in conjunction with Windracers Ltd
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In an historic first, astronomers have captured a remarkable image of a supermassive black hole at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy.

The eagerly-anticipated picture, revealed to the world today, shows Sagittarius A*  which is roughly 4.3 million times the mass of our sun and is located about 27,000 light-years away from the Earth.

Because of its distance from us, experts said it appears the same size in the sky as a donut on the moon.

It comes just over three years after the same astronomers revealed the first ever photograph of a black hole.

The two black holes bear striking similarities, despite the fact that Sagittarius A* is 2,000 times smaller than Messier 87, which is located in a distant galaxy 55 million light-years away.

In a highly-anticipated string of press conferences held simultaneously around the world, the team behind the Event Horizon Telescope shared their findings after teasing a 'groundbreaking Milky Way galaxy discovery'.

While announcing the new image, the University of Arizona's Feryal Ozel called the black hole 'the gentle giant in the centre of our galaxy'.

It was also described as 'the glue that holds the galaxy together'.

Black holes are regions of space where the pull of gravity is so intense that nothing can escape, including light.

Therefore the image released depicts not the black hole itself, because it is completely dark, but the glowing gas that encircles the phenomenon in a bright ring of bending light, known as the accretion disc.

The ring is roughly the size of Mercury's orbit around the sun, which is about 40 million miles (60 million km) across.

In an historic first, scientists have captured a remarkable image of a supermassive black hole at the heart of our Milky Way

The eagerly-anticipated picture, revealed to the world today, shows Sagittarius A*  which is roughly 4.3 million times the mass of our sun and is located about 27,000 light-years away from the Earth

In a highly-anticipated string of press conferences held simultaneously around the world, the team behind the Event Horizon Telescope shared the findings from their observations, calling the moment a 'groundbreaking Milky Way galaxy discovery'

It comes just over three years after the same astronomers revealed the first ever photograph of a black hole, Messier 87 (pictured left). Sagittarius A* is shown right as a comparison

WHAT IS SAGITTARIUS A* AND HOW WAS IT CAUGHT ON CAMERA? Sagittarius A* - abbreviated to Sgr A*, which is pronounced "sadge-ay-star" - owes its name to its detection in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. Its existence has been assumed since 1974, with the detection of an unusual radio source at the centre of the galaxy. In the 1990s, astronomers mapped the orbits of the brightest stars near the centre of the Milky Way, confirming the presence of a supermassive compact object there - work that led to the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics. Though the presence of a black hole was thought to be the only plausible explanation, the new image provides the first direct visual proof. Because it is 27,000 light years from Earth, it appears the same size in the sky as a donut on the moon. Capturing images of such a faraway object required linking eight giant radio observatories across the planet to form a single 'Earth-sized' virtual telescope called the EHT. These included the Institute for Millimeter Radio Astronomy (IRAM) 30-meter telescope in Spain, the most sensitive single antenna in the EHT network. The EHT gazed at Sgr A* across multiple nights for many hours in a row - a similar idea to long-exposure photography and the same process used to produce the first image of a black hole, released in 2019. That black hole is called M87* because it is in the Messier 87 galaxy. Advertisement

Astronomers said the discovery provides overwhelming evidence that the object is indeed a black hole, and yields valuable clues about the workings of such giants, which are thought to reside at the centre of most galaxies.

Scientists had previously seen stars orbiting around something invisible, compact, and very massive at the centre of the Milky Way.

This strongly suggested that the object was a black hole, and today's image provides the first direct visual evidence of it.

Although it is not possible to see the black hole itself, because it is completely dark, glowing gas around it reveals a telltale signature: a dark central region (called a shadow) surrounded by a bright ring-like structure.

The new view captures light bent by the powerful gravity of the black hole.

'We were stunned by how well the size of the ring agreed with predictions from Einstein's Theory of General Relativity,' said EHT Project Scientist Geoffrey Bower from the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taipei.

'These unprecedented observations have greatly improved our understanding of what happens at the very centre of our galaxy, and offer new insights on how these giant black holes interact with their surroundings.'

The EHT team's results are being published today in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Dr Younsi, a UKRI Stephen Hawking Fellow at the UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory, said: 'Our results are the strongest evidence to date that a black hole resides at the centre of our galaxy.

'This black hole is the glue that holds the galaxy together. It is key to our understanding of how the Milky Way formed and will evolve in the future.

'Producing this image is the result of a monumental effort by hundreds of scientists over five years.

'It was especially challenging because of the haze of stars, dust, and gas in between Earth and the galactic centre, as well as the fact that the pattern of light from Sgr A* changes quickly, over the course of minutes.

'But now we have comprehensive findings, and this work opens a new chapter in our understanding of black holes.'

In April 2019, astronomers revealed they had captured an image of a black hole 310 million trillion miles (500 million trillion km) away in a galaxy called M87.

Messier 87 was described by scientists at the time as 'a monster', measuring some 24 billion miles (40 billion km) across  three million times the size of the Earth.

That was also imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope, a network of eight linked telescopes, showing a glowing ring of red, yellow and white surrounding a dark centre.

The eight telescopes collected 5 petabytes of data  or the 'equivalent of 5,000 years of mp3s,' or 'a lifetime of selfies for 40,000 people.'

The astronomers said the discovery provides overwhelming evidence that the Sagittarius A* object is indeed a black hole, and yields valuable clues about the workings of such giants, which are thought to reside at the centre of most galaxies

The black hole was imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope (pictured), a network of eight linked telescopes

This artist's impression shows the anatomy of a black hole, including its event horizon, singularity and accretion disc

WHAT IS AN EVENT HORIZON? The event horizon is theoretical boundary around a black hole where not light or other radiation can escape. When any of that material gets too close to the edge of the hole, known as the event horizon, its atoms are ripped apart. The nuclei disappear below the horizon, the much lighter electrons get caught up in the black hole's intense magnetic field and tosses them around at high speed. This twisting motion causes them to release photons, which is the main source of emission from matter close to the black hole. Advertisement

The observations from the Event Horizon Telescope can now be counted among of the most significant scientific breakthroughs of the century.

As well as looking alike, both Sgr A* and M87 behaved as predicted by Einstein's 1915 theory of General Relativity, which holds that the force of gravity results from the curvature of space and time, and cosmic objects change this geometry.

Despite the fact Sgr A* is much closer to us, astronomers said imaging it presented unique challenges.

Gas in the vicinity of both black holes moves at the same speed, close to the speed of light. But while it took days and weeks to orbit the larger M87*, it completed rounds of Sgr A* in just minutes.

The brightness and pattern of the gas around Sgr A* changed rapidly as the team observed it, 'a bit like trying to take a clear picture of a puppy quickly chasing its tail,' said EHT scientist Chi-kwan Chan of the University of Arizona.

The researchers had to develop complex new tools to account for the moving targets.

The resulting image  the work of more than 300 researchers across 80 countries over a period of five years  is an average of multiple images that revealed the invisible monster lurking at the centre of the galaxy.

Scientists are now eager to compare the two black holes to test theories about how gasses behave around them  a poorly understood phenomenon thought to play a role in the formation of new stars and galaxies.

Probing black holes  in particular their infinitely small and dense centres known as singularities, where Einstein's equations break down  could help physicists deepen their understanding of gravity and develop a more advanced theory.

Black holes are extraordinarily dense objects with gravity so strong that not even light can escape, making viewing them quite challenging.

A black hole's event horizon is the point of no return beyond which anything  stars, planets, gas, dust and all forms of electromagnetic radiation  gets dragged into oblivion.

The international collaboration that makes up the Event Horizon Telescope effort includes observatories in the South Pole, Europe, South America, Africa, North America, and Australia  all of which must be pointed directly at the object to measure the surrounding activity.

The project began in 2012 to try to directly observe the immediate environment of a black hole.

In 2019, scientists lifted the veil on the first images ever captured of a black hole. Pictured is M87, in the Virgo galaxy cluster

Thursday's announcement was made in simultaneous news conferences in the US, Germany, China, Mexico, Chile, Japan and Taiwan.

There are different categories of black holes.

The smallest are so-called stellar-mass black holes formed by the collapse of massive individual stars at the ends of their life cycles, while there are also intermediate-mass black holes.

Finally there are the supermassive black holes that inhabit the centre of most galaxies. These are thought to arise relatively soon after their galaxies are formed, devouring enormous amounts of material to achieve colossal size.

The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy that contains at least 100 billion stars. Viewed from above or below it resembles a spinning pinwheel, with our sun situated on one of the spiral arms and Sagittarius A* located at the centre.

The M87 black hole is far more distant and massive than Sagittarius A*, situated about 54 million light-years from Earth with a mass 6.5 billion times that of our sun.
Astronomers in Germany have spotted a fiery 'nova explosion' from a white dwarf for the very first time.

Researchers observed the event, thanks to data from the joint German-Russian eROSITA X-ray telescope, which is stationed in space about 900,000 miles away.

The X-ray flash  dubbed YZ Reticuli  completely overexposed the centre of eROSITA's detector, which records emitted photons.

White dwarfs are the incredibly dense remains of sun-sized stars after they exhaust their nuclear fuel, shrunk down to roughly the size of Earth.

Sometimes such dead stars flare back to life in a super hot explosion and produce a fireball of X-ray radiation.

These nova explosions occur from white dwarfs in a binary system  a system that consists of two stars that are gravitationally bound.

Astronomers have spotted a fiery explosion on a white dwarf, called a nova explosion, for the very first time. Pictured is the researchers' recreation of the event, which occurred in 2020

Overexposed image picked up of the nova explosion event by the eROSITA X-ray telescope, which launched in 2019

The researchers have now been able to observe such an explosion of X-ray light for the very first time, which came from a white dwarf in the constellation Reticulum.

WHAT IS A WHITE DWARF? A white dwarf is the remains of a smaller star that has run out of nuclear fuel. While large stars  those exceeding ten times the mass of our sun - suffer a spectacularly violent climax as a supernova explosion at the ends of their lives, smaller stars are spared such dramatic fates. When stars like the sun come to the ends of their lives they exhaust their fuel, expand as red giants and later expel their outer layers into space. The hot and very dense core of the former star - a white dwarf - is all that remains. White dwarfs contain approximately the mass of the sun but have roughly the radius of Earth, meaning they are incredibly dense. The gravity on the surface of a white dwarf is 350,000 times that of gravity on Earth. They become so dense because their electrons are smashed together, creating what's caused 'degenerative matter'. This means that a more massive white dwarf has a smaller radius than its less massive counterpart. Advertisement

Although the observation was made by eROSITA back in July 2020, it has only just been detailed in a new study, led by astronomers at Friedrich-Alexander-Universitat Erlangen-Nurnberg (FAU) in Erlangen, Germany.

'It was to some extent a fortunate coincidence, really,' said study author Ole Konig at FAU. 'We were really lucky.

'These X-ray flashes last only a few hours and are almost impossible to predict, but the observational instrument must be pointed directly at the explosion at exactly the right time.'

eROSITA is floating in space at Lagrange Point 2 (L2), an area of balanced gravity between the Sun and Earth about 900,000 miles (1.5 million km) away.

eROSITA has been surveying the sky for soft X-rays since 2019, although due to the breakdown of cooperation between Germany and Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, the instrument stopped collecting data on February 26, 2022.

Less than a year after it started operations, on July 7, 2020, eROSITA measured strong X-ray radiation in an area of the sky that had been completely inconspicuous only four hours prior.

When the X-ray telescope surveyed the same position in the sky four hours later, the radiation had disappeared. Therefore, the the X-ray flash must have lasted less than eight hours.

X-ray explosions such as this were predicted by theoretical research back in a 1990 study but have never been observed directly until now.

These fireballs of X-rays occur on the surface of white dwarfs  stars that were originally comparable in size to the sun before using up most of their fuel made of hydrogen and later helium deep inside their cores and shrinking down.

White dwarfs, which are mainly made up of oxygen and carbon, are similar to Earth in size but contain a mass that can be similar to that of our sun.

Pictured here is eROSITA, a joint German-Russian X-ray telescope, prior to its launch in 2019

eROSITA is stationed in space about 900,000 miles away at Lagrange Point 2 (L2), an area of balanced gravity between the Sun and Earth (artist's depiction)

WHITE DWARF IS SPOTTED 'SWITCHING ON AND OFF' IN 30 MINUTES A white dwarf star has been spotted 'switching on and off' in just 30 minutes, researchers reported in 2021. Using data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), the team from Durham University witnessed the phenomena in the star system TW Pictoris, 1,400 light years from Earth. They found that rather than taking months for the brightness to increase then drop again, it was only taking about half an hour, and was likely due to a fast magnetic field. Read more: White dwarf star is spotted 'switching on and off' in 30 minutes Advertisement

'One way to picture these proportions is to think of the Sun being the same size as an apple, which means Earth would be the same size as a pin head orbiting around the apple at a distance of 10 meters,' said Professor Jorn Wilms, also at FAU.

Trying to explain a white dwarf, the researchers said you should imagine shrinking an apple to the size of a pin head. This tiny particle would retain the comparatively large weight of the apple.

Just a teaspoon of matter from the inside of a white dwarf easily has the same mass as a large truck.

White dwarfs are so hot they glow white, but the radiation from them is so weak that it is difficult to detect them from Earth.

In a binary star system (a solar system with two stars), white dwarfs can be accompanied by another star that is still burning.

In this case, the enormous gravitational pull of the white dwarf draws hydrogen from the shell of the accompanying star.

In time, this hydrogen can collect to form a layer only a few meters thick on the surface of the white dwarf.

In this layer, the huge gravitational pull generates enormous pressure that is so great that it causes the star to reignite, leading to a huge explosion during which the layer of hydrogen is blown off.

The X-ray radiation of an explosion like this is what hit the detectors of eROSITA on July 7, 2020 producing an overexposed image.

White dwarfs are the incredibly dense remains of sun-sized stars after they exhaust their nuclear fuel, shrunk down to roughly the size of Earth (artist's impression)

White dwarfs are so hot they glow white, but the radiation from them is so weak that it is difficult to detect them from Earth

'Using the model calculations we originally drew up while supporting the development of the X-ray instrument, we were able to analyse the overexposed image in more detail during a complex process to gain a behind the scenes view of an explosion of a white dwarf, or nova,' said Professor Wilms.

The explosion generated a fireball with a temperature of around 327,000 degrees Kelvin, making it around sixty times hotter than the Sun.

Since these novae run out of fuel quite quickly, they cool rapidly and the X-ray radiation becomes weaker until it eventually becomes visible light.

This visible light reached Earth half a day after the eROSITA detection and was observed by optical telescopes.

'A seemingly bright star then appeared, which was actually the visible light from the explosion, and so bright that it could be seen on the night sky by the bare eye,' said Konig.

Seemingly 'new stars' such as this one have been observed in the past and were named 'nova stella', or 'new star' on account of their unexpected appearance.

Since these novae are only visible after the X-ray flash, it is very difficult to predict such outbreaks and it is mainly down to chance when they hit the X-ray detectors.

The new study has been published in the journal Nature.
Micah Richards struggled to contain his excitement at Manchester City signing Erling Haaland and said it demonstrates just how well City do their transfer business.

The Premier League leaders - who extended their lead over Liverpool back to three points after Kevin De Bruyne scored all the goals in their 4-1 victory at Wolves - announced on Tuesday they had signed the Norway striker ahead of next season in a 51million deal.

City beat Real Madrid to the 21-year-old Borussia Dortmund star's signature, and he had also been linked with Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Paris Saint-Germain and Manchester United in recent months.

Manchester City announced the signing of Borussia Dortmund star Erling Haaland on Tuesday

And Micah Richards struggled to contain his excitement at the Norwegian signing for the club

But Sportsmail understands a deal between City and Haaland's camp was completed last week after first reporting last month that the club had agreed terms with the Norway international's representatives.

And speaking after City's win at Molineux on Wednesday night, 'more than excited' Sportsmail columnist Richards believes it demonstrates City's ruthlessness in the transfer market because they got their man for a third of his current value.

'I'm so excited. They got him for 51m. He's probably worth 150m in today's market,' Richards told Sky Sports.

'With so many interested in him, him coming to City sets a massive example with how well City do their business.

Richards paid tribute to City's transfer business (pictured L-R: City manager Pep Guardiola and director of sport Txiki Begiristain)

'The deal does add up but the thing about Haaland, imagine him playing in a side like Man City.

'Just when you need a Plan B, he's always going to add something different. It's a massive coup and I'm more than excited.'

Richards also lauded Haaland's Champions League exploits, having scored 15 goals in 13 matches and with no single player having scored more goals before turning 21 than Haaland in the competition's history.

But the former City defender insists his arrival should not see the departure of Gabriel Jesus, whose agent confirmed on Wednesday he had held talks with Arsenal.

Richards also lauded Haaland's Champions League goal return of 15 in 13 matches to date

Gunners boss Mikel Arteta was coy when pressed on the matter but he is looking for a new striker and Jesus wants to prove himself as a lead striker.

'His [Haaland's] Champions League goals record is extraordinary for someone so young. He's going to score goals in this team,' Richards added.

'I believe in him... I wouldn't sell Jesus right now. Haaland is different to any option City have.'
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Swiss explorer and photographer Stefan Forster admits that he is no stranger to dodging alligators and hiking for weeks in pursuit of the perfect photo.

And an impressive new photobook shows that his efforts pay off handsomely.

Taken across 10 years and 60 photo tours and expeditions, Chasing Light, published by teNeues, showcases some of his best-ever shots, taken in some of the world's most remote and challenging places.

And they are breathtaking.

The 150-plus images in the tome showcase rare weather events in exotic places, once-in-a-lifetime animal scenes and Mother Nature at her most ferocious, in locations from Africa to Iceland.

In the foreword to his book Forster writes: 'I paddled by kayak along the west coast of Greenland; camped in the forests of Alaska and Canada; climbed volcanoes without permission; [and] waited, shivering with frost, for months to see an aurora. Our planet has endless fascinations. I have gathered a photographic record of natures unparalleled beauty.' Scroll down for a sneak peek at some of the most astounding photos from the book.

This dramatic image shows Icelands Fagradalsfjall volcano. Forster said: 'The true majesty and power of Icelands Fagradalsfjall volcano only becomes apparent from the air. This panorama was assembled at the end of June 2021 from 22 individual shots to show one of the volcanos most violent eruptions since it first became active in March. Large quantities of lava flowed into the surrounding valleys for more than 16 hours'

This stunning picture of the evasive Northern Lights was taken in Narsarsuaq, Greenland. Forster remembers: 'Effectively, everything was perfect on this particular night. Low tide had opened a path to the icebergs, the sea surface was a mirror in the calm air, and the Northern Lights were glowing directly behind this transparent iceberg. Probably the most beautiful aurora borealis of my lifetime'

In the book, Forster acknowledges that this shot is probably the rarest photograph he'll ever take in his lifetime. He explains: 'Here come the heaviest rains in decades over the Wolwedans dunes in Namib-Naukluft National Park, and Im in the centre of the action with my camera. All told it took me eight trips to Namibia before I finally caught up with rain'

'This spot on Langisjor, a lake on the Icelandic plateau, is a personal refuge for me,' Forster writes in the book. 'I walked its shores for weeks, camped atop a peak by myself and looked out into the distance. This aerial image consists of 16 individual exposures taken in the summer of 2016 and stitched together into a panoramic image'

This luminous image was taken at the Vatnajokull ice cap in Iceland where Forster says: 'Thanks to a tripod and long exposure times its possible photographically to capture daylight shimmering through the glaciers'

Pictured is the Studlagil Canyon in northeastern Iceland. Forster explains: 'The first pictures of this canyon, formed by basalt columns, hit the Internet a few years ago. Photographers were fascinated by their surreal shapes, so its not surprising that a few years later, Studlagil Canyon became one of the most frequently photographed places in northeastern Iceland'

In this image sunbeams stream down on the Grand Canyon. Forster reveals: 'This image was shot at the less touristy North Rim of the Grand Canyon. For the photographer in me, sunrays through haze are among the most beautiful of all atmospheric appearances'

In the book, Forster explains how this image was taken in Alaska on one of the greatest adventures of his life. He writes: 'Together with one of Switzerlands best-known bear experts, Remo Sommerhalder, I hung out with the grizzly bears in Katmai National Park for ten days. Because we were the first photographers flown into these isolated coves after the hard winter, we had the enormous bears all to ourselves. The landscape is breathtaking all on its own, but the bears in the foreground are the icing on the cake'

'Had I planned this image of wild muskox on the Greenland ice sheet, I might have spent years waiting for this moment,' Forster explains. 'I got this image far away from civilisation during the course of hours executing my approach of a large herd of muskox. I must have gotten too close, for the cows formed a kind of protective wall around the calves. The symmetry of this wall could not have been better'

This image was taken in the snow-drenched hills of St Gallen in Switzerland. Forster reveals: 'When winter comes, the rolling hills of the St Gallen highlands are transformed into gorgeous white snowy dunes. Many deciduous tree species are found here in a very small area, each spaced precisely the same distance apart. Everything came together the day this photo was taken: fresh, deep snow and fog just touching the tops of these three trees'
Scott Disick finally sees what the Kardashian family has been seeing for weeks - his ex Kourtney Kardashian and fiance Travis Barker kissing - in the new episode of The Kardashians.

The 38-year-old reality star has been kept at a distance throughout the inaugural season of the Hulu series, with Scott finally getting to congratulate Kourtney and Travis during Kris Jenner's birthday/housewarming party.

Khloe Kardashian perhaps said it best - 'So awkward' - while Kourtney and Travis make out with Scott in the same room.

Scott sees: Scott Disick finally sees what the Kardashian family has been seeing for weeks - his ex Kourtney Kardashian and fiance Travis Barker kissing - in the new episode of The Kardashians

Distance: The 38-year-old reality star has been kept at a distance throughout the inaugural season of the Hulu series, with Scott finally getting to congratulate Kourtney and Travis during Kris Jenner's birthday/housewarming party

Awkward: Khloe Kardashian perhaps said it best - 'So awkward' - while Kourtney and Travis make out with Scott in the same room

Scott's presence at the party wasn't even going to happen, initially, until Kris had a birthday lunch with Scott... who was annoyed and knew there was something bigger she was doing for her birthday.

Kris meets Scott Disick at Maria's Italian Kitchen, with Scott saying he missed her.

Kris says they haven't been at the restaurant since Keeping Up With the Kardashians, as Scott asks if they know what the new show is called.

Birthday lunch: Scott's presence at the party wasn't even going to happen, initially, until Kris had a birthday lunch with Scott... who was annoyed and knew there was something bigger she was doing for her birthday

Missed: Kris meets Scott Disick at Maria's Italian Kitchen, with Scott saying he missed her

'Kardashians, I think. We were gonna call it The Disicks' as Scott interrupts, 'But then you felt like you don't invite me to half the s**t you do anymore anyways, so why call it The Disicks?'

Kris cheerfully adds, 'I invited you to lunch for my birthday,' as a stunned Scott realizes, 'This is our birthday lunch?'

Kris asks, 'Did you bring a gift?' as Scott says, 'This is not your birthday lunch,' and Kris says it is and Scott says, 'You're lying. We're gonna go to a diner for your birthday?'

Diner: Kris asks, 'Did you bring a gift?' as Scott says, 'This is not your birthday lunch,' and Kris says it is and Scott says, 'You're lying. We're gonna go to a diner for your birthday?'

'This is not a proper place you would go to to celebrate one's birthday, especially not your glamorous a**,' Scott adds, asking if there's a birthday party.

'Not really a birthday party, no grandkids, but a few of my kids are gonna come over. They haven't seen the house at all,' Kris tells Scott.

'Is that a party?' Scott sharply asks, as Kris says, 'We're gonna have dinner on Friday,' as Scott adds, 'Nobody told me.'

Not a party: 'Not really a birthday party, no grandkids, but a few of my kids are gonna come over. They haven't seen the house at all,' Kris tells Scott

Kris says she feels like she's, 'cheating on Kourtney if I tell you, because I would love for you to come over,' while a confused Scott says, 'Why would I not come over?'

'You told me I was your blood-related son when my parents died,' Scott tells Kris, who responds, 'I still feel the same way,' though Scott adds, 'You obviously don't.'

'I love my children unconditionally and I fall in love with their partners throughout the years,' Kris says in confession, adding that Scott was there the first day they filmed Keeping Up With the Kardashians.

Cheating: Kris says she feels like she's, 'cheating on Kourtney if I tell you, because I would love for you to come over,' while a confused Scott says, 'Why would I not come over?'

'So I think when stuff like this happens, it hurts all of us,' Kris says in confession, before telling Scott at their lunch, 'If you want to hang out, come hang out. It isn't something where I've really invited anybody to a party.'

A clearly frustrated Scott adds, 'You're obviously doing something and you're like embarrassed to keep it from me,' as Kris adds, 'I'm not doing anything.'

'It went from seeing your house to having a dinner, and your dinners are like catered, (party planner) Mindy Weiss is probably there. Is there valet parking?' Scott asks, and Kris says no.

Doing something: A clearly frustrated Scott adds, 'You're obviously doing something and you're like embarrassed to keep it from me,' as Kris adds, 'I'm not doing anything'

Scott adds in confession, 'I don't know how Kris is trying to push this past me as not a party. I mean, first it starts as, 'It's a house tour.'

At lunch, Scott asks if there's a chef for the party, and a smiling Kris says, 'Kind of,' and Scott asks what kind of food and Kris says Nobu.

'It's ridiculous. So it's a catered Nobu with a chef,' Scott says at lunch, adding in confession, 'Then it turns into a catered meal by one of the fanciest restaurants in the world.'

Kind of: At lunch, Scott asks if there's a chef for the party, and a smiling Kris says, 'Kind of,' and Scott asks what kind of food and Kris says Nobu

Scott complains that it started out, 'as a walk-through of your house,' and Kris says, 'It is and a meal.'

Back in confession, Scott complains, 'This sounds like the f***ing Oscars and you're trying to take me to lunch at Maria's for a chopped salad? What am I, chopped liver?'

Kris adds at lunch, 'If you and Travis are cool, then' as Scott insists, 'We're fine. For me to hear that you are having a little soiree and you don't think to invite me makes me feel like complete s**t, to be honest. I love you but how would you think I would feel?'

Cool: Kris adds at lunch, 'If you and Travis are cool, then' as Scott insists, 'We're fine. For me to hear that you are having a little soiree and you don't think to invite me makes me feel like complete s**t, to be honest. I love you but how would you think I would feel?

Kris adds in confession that, 'Kourtney met her soul mate. That's gotta be hard for Scott to absorb, but I never expected him to be so angry and wound up over this. He just needs to grow up and be a little more mature.'

Back at lunch, Scott says, 'It's like tainted. I'd rather just take you out to dinner, to be honest. I don't want to go to some place where I'm not wanted.'

Kris insists that he's, 'always wanted,' but Scott insists, 'I'm not. Could you imagine if I singled you out. Like it's just mean.'

Kris says, 'I don't have a mean bone in my body,' but Scott snaps back, 'You do,' as a stunned Kris says, 'Wow, that's shady' as Scott just shrugs.

Despite the contentious end to their lunch, Scott pulls up and enters the party, welcomed by Kris, as he gives Kris her present and gives Khloe a hug.

Scott arrives: Despite the contentious end to their lunch, Scott pulls up and enters the party, welcomed by Kris, as he gives Kris her present and gives Khloe a hug.

Kourtney admits in confession, 'To be in the same room together is not a bad thing. It's a great first step for everyone and it will take time for everyone to figure out what makes sense.'

Scott comes up to Travis and says, 'Congratulations, brother,' and gives him a quick handshake and hug, as Travis responds, 'Thank you, thank you.'

Scott gives Kourtney a hug and says 'Congrats' again, but Kourtney reminds him that he's seen her since, but he says, 'I haven't seen you both.'

Congrats: Scott comes up to Travis and says, 'Congratulations, brother,' and gives him a quick handshake and hug, as Travis responds, 'Thank you, thank you'

First step: Kourtney admits in confession, 'To be in the same room together is not a bad thing. It's a great first step for everyone and it will take time for everyone to figure out what makes sense'

Khloe admits in confession that it is 'so awkward for the other siblings involved. We don't know what to do. We just want to be respectful to each other's new lives. It's like we're always just ignoring this elephant in the room. It's bizarre and I don't know why we're always tiptoeing around something that's not even our f***ing relationship to tiptoe around. I'm exhausted just trying to explain this to everyone and I'm f***ing sweating.'

The guests all start to gather around the table, as Ellen notices that Kourtney and Travis are making out again, joking, 'they'll be here in about an hour.'

Ellen says it's, 'truly unbelievable,' as Scott gets a glimpse at Travis and Kourtney kissing, as Kris notices him watching, saying, 'this couldn't be more awkward.'

Awkward: Ellen says it's, 'truly unbelievable,' as Scott gets a glimpse at Travis and Kourtney kissing, as Kris notices him watching, saying, 'this couldn't be more awkward'

Ellen asks if that's the first time that's happened and Kris says, 'Yeah,' as Kourtney admits in confession, 'I know we were holding back. That I do know. We weren't like just fully going for it.'

'I didn't know that anyone was looking at us,' Kourtney admits in confession, as Kris tells Scott to sit next to Khloe, while Scott watches Kourtney and Travis' dynamic.

He adds in confession, 'She found someone. I'm happy for her. She's got a man who loves her, and she deserves it, because there were so many years where I didn't put her first.'

Yeah: Ellen asks if that's the first time that's happened and Kris says, 'Yeah,' as Kourtney admits in confession, 'I know we were holding back. That I do know. We weren't like just fully going for it'

Kris also told Kourtney the story about how Travis came over, and asked for her hand in marriage.

He goes, do you wanna know the real reason why I moved to Calabasas? Because I knew she lived in Calabasas and I knew she was the love of my life, and I didnt even know her like that but I just knew if I couldnt date her, be with her, because she was with someone else, that at least I could live by her.

Kourtney added, Ive never met a better human in my life. The thoughtfulness and just everything, as Kris said it was, such an amazing moment.
While his name has not been mentioned yet, fans have gotten their first glimpse at Kim Kardashian's sunny disposition as she starts her romance with Pete Davidson on the fifth episode of The Kardashians.

The 41-year-old Kim first met Pete while hosting Saturday Night Live in October 2021, and they started dating in November 2021.

Kim even smirked at the mention of 'BDE' (big d**k energy) during her surprise birthday lunch, as rumors of Davidson's own BDE have followed him since Ariana Grande left a cryptic tweet back in 2018.

Romance: While his name has not been mentioned yet, fans have gotten their first glimpse at Kim Kardashian's sunny disposition as she starts her romance with Pete Davidson on the fifth episode of The Kardashians

First dating: The 41-year-old Kim first met Pete while hosting Saturday Night Live in October 2021, and they started dating in November 2021

We get the first hints that Kim is dating Pete Davidson at Kris Jenner's birthday party, which was also the first time many of her family members and friends have seen her brand new house.

Scott Disick asked her how last night was, adding he facetimed her, but Kim says, I was probably busy, with a sly laugh.

Kim is next seen in confession, texting away, as a producer asks, Who are you texting, Kim? Kim smiles and says with a giggle, Leave me alone.

Busy: Scott Disick asked her how last night was, adding he facetimed her, but Kim says, I was probably busy, with a sly laugh

Texting: Kim is next seen in confession, texting away, as a producer asks, Who are you texting, Kim? Kim smiles and says with a giggle, Leave me alone'

The producer adds that she has a big smile on her face, asking, Does his name rhyme with feet? as Kim can only laugh.

Scott says that he has seen all these comments about how nice Pete is, as Kim only says he is, truly the sweetest, nicest human being on the planet.

Scott asks if shes just, having a good time, as Kim tells Scott and everyone else gathered, including Ellen Degeneres, 'Ill tell you guys later.'

Rhyme: The producer adds that she has a big smile on her face, asking, Does his name rhyme with feet? as Kim can only laugh

Nicest: Scott says that he has seen all these comments about how nice Pete is, as Kim only says he is, truly the sweetest, nicest human being on the planet'

Later: Scott asks if shes just, having a good time, as Kim tells Scott and everyone else gathered, including Ellen Degeneres, 'Ill tell you guys later'

Earlier in the episode, Kim was feverishly studying for the 'baby bar' exam, a.k.a. The First-Year Law Students' Examination.

While she told her family that she didn't want a party, they managed to throw her a surprise lunch party.

I honestly couldnt be more happy. It really warmed my soul that my whole family is here and all my best friends are here, Kim says in confession.

Surprise: While she told her family that she didn't want a party, they managed to throw her a surprise lunch party

Happy: I honestly couldnt be more happy. It really warmed my soul that my whole family is here and all my best friends are here, Kim says in confession

Khloe adds, There was this guy there that I had a crush on. He was like the hottest plastic Ken Barbie doll. He definitely does not have big d**k energy,' as Kim was seen smirking at the remark, before her romance with Pete was widely known.

Kourtney added that his nickname was Big Balls, but Khloe added, You can have big balls and not a big d**k, as someone else says, Big ball energy is not the same.

Khloe is in confession getting her hair brushed as she asks the crew, Whats the difference between BDE and BBE but no one has heard of that, with one saying, Im scared as Khloe starts to laugh.

Smirk: Khloe adds, There was this guy there that I had a crush on. He was like the hottest plastic Ken Barbie doll. He definitely does not have big d**k energy,' as Kim was seen smirking at the remark, before her romance with Pete was widely known

What the f**k are the balls gonna do for me? Khloe adds in confession, while at the party she says, I dont want BBE. Ill take BDE all day long.

Your tiny penis and you need these big balls? Thats mortifying, Khloe adds in confession, as she explains that BDE is, like youre just like cocky and confident because you have a big d**k.

Kourtney adds in confession, Who doesnt like confidence, you know? while Kris adds at the party that, later in life, they all lose their hair and they dont look the same and they have a pot belly.

Confession: What the f**k are the balls gonna do for me? Khloe adds in confession, while at the party she says, I dont want BBE. Ill take BDE all day long

Kim walks in with Tracy and says she loves them all, but Im kicking you all out because Ive got to study, adding in confession, Ive got one shot to do this test. One last shot. And if Im partying, then Im gonna mess it up, so Ive just gotta focus.'

While her romance with Pete Davidson was just heating up, her fallout with ex-husband Kanye West takes another dramatic turn.

Kourtney Kardashian was visiting her sister Kim, when she asked how everything was going with Kanye, as Kim revealed the latest bit of drama in their divorce saga.

Heating up: While her romance with Pete Davidson was just heating up, her fallout with ex-husband Kanye West takes another dramatic turn

Kanye: Kourtney Kardashian was visiting her sister Kim, when she asked how everything was going with Kanye, as Kim revealed the latest bit of drama in their divorce saga

He did an interview last night, saying that SNL got me to say that I divorced him,' as they replay the joke she told on SNL, which she revealed on last weeks episode that Kanye didnt like.

Kim revealed during a hike with Khloe that Kanye was mad about the joke because she used the word divorce and not that she had simply filed for divorce, and he was mad that she called him a rapper, saying he was so much more than that at this stage in his career.

They played the joke again where she said, When I divorced him, you have to know it came down to just one thing: his personality, which drew big laughs from the SNL audience, though Kanye apparently didn't think was funny.

Interview: He did an interview last night, saying that SNL got me to say that I divorced him,' as they replay the joke she told on SNL, which she revealed on last weeks episode that Kanye didnt like

Last week: Kim revealed during a hike with Khloe that Kanye was mad about the joke because she used the word divorce and not that she had simply filed for divorce, and he was mad that she called him a rapper, saying he was so much more than that at this stage in his career

I came prepared with my monologue and that really upset him. I showed him the monologue but he says he never read it, like he just didnt read the text, Kim adds.

Kanye had a hard time with what I said, as they play a clip from Kanyes interview.

SNL making my wife say I divorced him on TV because they just wanted to get that bar off and I aint never seen the papers. Were not even divorced, Kanye said in the interview.

Prepared: I came prepared with my monologue and that really upset him. I showed him the monologue but he says he never read it, like he just didnt read the text, Kim adds

Divorce: SNL making my wife say I divorced him on TV because they just wanted to get that bar off and I aint never seen the papers. Were not even divorced, Kanye said in the interview

Kourtney adds that he said that, because its not final, and Kim explains that he said, I havent signed the divorce papers.

Kourtney wondered, Well whats he waiting for? as Kim responds, I dont know, I ask him all the time.

'He says he will and then he says, "Well I dont want a divorce so Im not gonna sign em,"' Kim tells Kourtney.

Not final: Kourtney adds that he said that, because its not final, and Kim explains that he said, I havent signed the divorce papers.

Divorce: 'He says he will and then he says, "Well I dont want a divorce so Im not gonna sign em,"' Kim tells Kourtney

Kim adds in confession that she has always been, super protective of Kanye and not sharing a lot of the negative things that have happened, just because hes not here doing the show.

Also, if I do something on a reality show then its like, How dare she talk about it, and then he can do a song about it and, Thats so creative and expressive. Its always two different sides are being expressed two different ways, and one is respected and one is not, Kim says.

Im very sure now. I knew it had to be done when I filed, because I knew it just wasnt the right situation for me, and now I feel super good, Kim told Kourtney.

Protective: Kim adds in confession that she has always been, super protective of Kanye and not sharing a lot of the negative things that have happened, just because hes not here doing the show'

Kourtney added, I think youre like, Who am I now? as Kim confirmed, Yeah, youre right. I got to a point where I would just like ask him for advice for everything even down to what I wear. Even now Im having like panic attacks like, "What do I wear?"'

She added that Kanye, styled me all for SNL, then at the Wall Street Journal Magazine, I won the Innovator Award for SKIMS.

I was like, how do I wear something that hasnt been pre-vetted first? as Kourtney asked if it made her nervous if what she wore was a, bad outfit, and Kim replied, So nervous.

Kim added that Kanye called her after the Wall Street Journal awards, And he told me my career is over and he showed me a picture of Marge Simpson wearing something similar,' as Kourtney didnt know how to respond to that.

Who: Kourtney added, I think youre like, Who am I now? as Kim confirmed, Yeah, youre right. I got to a point where I would just like ask him for advice for everything even down to what I wear. Even now Im having like panic attacks like, "What do I wear?"
She has firmly cemented herself as one of the world's top supermodels.

And Irina Shayk showed off her fashion credentials as she posed in an ab-baring mesh crop top and silky skirt for a sultry photoshoot on Thursday.

In her latest campaign for Self-Portrait's Autumn/Winter 2022 Pre-Collection, the Russian beauty then changed into a busty denim corset.

Show-stopping: Irina Shayk, 36, struck a pose in an ab-baring mesh cropped top before changing into a busty denim corset for her latest campaign for Self-Portrait on Thursday

Looking simply sensational, she opted for a glimmering palette of makeup complete with a sweep of silver eyeshadow.

Throwing her arms behind her head, her brunette locks were slicked back into a chic updo as she flaunted her figure.

Irina paired the sexy corset top that she left partially unbuttoned with a figure-hugging black maxi skirt.

Sensational: Irina paired the sexy corset top that she left partially unbuttoned with a figure-hugging black maxi skirt

Sultry: For her third look, Irina switched up her top as she teamed a boucle cropped top with a matching jacket complete with frayed edges

For her third look, Irina switched up her top as she teamed a boucle cropped top with a matching jacket complete with frayed edges.

Irina previously ook to the beach at sunset in a leggy black dress with a thigh-high split and white polka dots as she posed at sunset when she debuted for the brand last year.

Sporting a pair of opaque black stockings, she added a pop of colour with some cherry red strappy stiletto heels.

Beach babe: Irina took to the beach at sunset in a leggy black dress with a thigh-high split and white polka dots as she posed at sunset in debut shots for the brand last year

Breathtaking: The model also climbed a tree as slipped into a stunning white lace dress with polka dot stockings while making her mark

Her brunette locks fell in front of her face in tousled waves as she opted for a more subtle makeup look.

The model had also climbed a tree as slipped into a stunning white lace dress with polka dot stockings.

Speaking about the fashion brand, Irina said: 'I loved working with self-portrait - a brand that celebrates women and loves to make them feel their best. Working with them really feels like family.'

Jaw-dropping: Irina showed off her model good looks as she switched between different styles

Stunning: Speaking about the fashion brand, Irina said: 'I loved working with self-portrait - a brand that celebrates women and loves to make them feel their best'

The brand that was founded in 2013 by Han Chong works to capture and celebrate 'different sides' of the Self-Portrait woman.

Creative Director Han explained: 'I wanted to shift our campaign into something that felt really strong, powerful and clean to represent the joy and confidence associated with our brand and to celebrate the spirit at the heart of this new collection.

'Irina is the perfect woman for us - she has so much character and personality, and is able to show the different sides of the self-portrait woman so effortlessly. I'm so pleased to work with her and that our creative relationship continues to evolve.'
The Repair Shop star Jay Blades has revealed that he ended up homeless and living in a hostel in London when he was in his twenties.

The TV presenter, 52, said he became homeless when he moved back to London, which he had fled from after getting into fights, after he had his first child and split up with his then-partner.

The father-of-three, who grew up in north-east London, said he could fit all his belongings in one carrier bag when he lived in a hostel before he was given social housing on the Victorian Peabody estate.

Struggles: The Repair Shop star Jay Blades has revealed that he ended up homeless and living in a hostel in London when he was in his twenties

Jay made the admission on Channel 5's new documentary series, There's No Place Like Home, where he revisited his old flat on the Peabody estate and other childhood haunts.

Speaking about when he was homeless, Jay said: 'At 21 I was all over the place, I had no direction, I left London because I was getting into loads of fights and there were people after me.

'My mum moved to Luton and I lived up there with her for a bit.

'I had my first child, and then split up with the missus, and moved back to London, then I ended up homeless and went into a hostel.

Looking back: Jay made the admission on his new documentary series, There's No Place Like Home, where he revisited his old flat on the Peabody estate (pictured)

'I had a supermarket carrier bag with all of my stuff in there and it wasn't a lot.

'I remember thinking, "is this what my life has come to, is this the end for me?"'

But the TV star was helped out of the hostel and was given social housing on the Peabody estate, which was built in 1910, along with three other young men.

When Jay lived on the estate, it had a strict list of 17 rules for tenants which banned dogs and wallpaper and said everyone had to be vaccinated against smallpox.

The Peabody estate was founded by American philanthropist George Peabody who wanted to provide affordable housing for Londoners living in slum conditions, but with rules on moral conduct.

Difficulties: The TV presenter, 52, revealed that he ended up homeless when he moved to London after he had his first child and split up with his then-partner

As he reminisced about living on the estate during the emotional visit to his former home, Jay said it was 'really nice being back' but quipped there was no 'moral conduct' when he lived there.

He said: 'I always thought this was just a normal council estate. I don't think moral conduct was happening when I was here.

'One of the people I lived with was a bit naughty and would steal our food. You would see him with the cornflakes box and he would say "no, I didn't do it".'

Jay said it was when he was living in the flat that he found voluntary work which kickstarted his career as a furniture restorer and designer.

In an earlier episode of the documentary, Jay also revealed he used to live amongst rats in his childhood home in Hackney, north-east London.

Reminiscing: As he reflected on his time living on the estate (pictured), Jay said it was 'really nice being back' during the emotional visit to his former home

He told how he was brought up in impoverished conditions, after his mother Barbara was abandoned by his father when he was a baby.

He said: 'When I was born my mum came to live here with my uncle. My mum got pregnant with the man who contributed towards my birth and he left her high and dry.'

Jay added: '[He] took all her money from her, said he was going to promise her this and that, and he didn't, he just disappeared. The time for my mum must have been quite desperate I would say.

'There was loads of rubbish everywhere, there was rats.'

Growing up: In documentary, he also told how he was brought up in impoverished conditions, after his mother Barbara (pictured) was abandoned by his father when he was a baby

Jay's new show with comes months after he starred in BBC documentary Learning to Read at 51, which saw the once-illiterate star tackle the written word after years of being unable to read.

The presenter learned how to read last summer using the same techniques children use, such as phonics.

Speaking to The Sun, Jay recalled how he was brought to tears when he received a letter from his daughter Zola, 14, who lives in Turkey with his ex-wife Jade, and was able to read it. Jay also has two other children from previous relationships.

He said: 'Reading is something most people do every day and I didn't know it would mean so much to me. It grabs you emotionally.

'It was the first letter Zola had ever sent me  she had never sent one before because she knew I couldn't read it.

Honour: It comes after Jay recently spoke of his surprise at The Repair Shop's popularity as he was made an MBE at Windsor Castle

'Reading her letter gave me everything I'd ever wanted but didn't think I would ever experience.'

Jay, who left school without any qualifications, suffers from dyslexia which went undiagnosed until he was 31.

Elsewhere, Jay also recently spoke of his surprise at The Repair Shop's popularity as he was made an MBE at Windsor Castle.

Jay was given the honour by the Prince of Wales on Tuesday for services to craft and in recognition of his work promoting heritage craft and restoration in the UK.

MBE: Jay was given the honour by the Prince of Wales on Tuesday for services to craft and in recognition of his work promoting heritage craft and restoration in the UK

The regular favourite on the BBC show - which sees members of the public bringing in worn out family heirlooms to be restored by a team of experts - said he never expected that the programme 'would become so big'.

Jay has starred in the programme since it started in 2017.

He said: 'I knew it was special, because you wouldn't have all of those different disciplines in the same building. You wouldn't have a ceramic next to a fine art next to woodwork and a clock restorer, you just wouldn't have that.'

He said that the rest of the team were 'over the moon' for him after receiving his MBE.

'They've all said: 'Do we have to bow, do we have to curtsy to you?' and stuff like that.

Popular: The regular favourite on the BBC show said he never expected that the programme 'would become so big'

'I've just said there's one request: as long as they can bring me a biscuit with my cup of tea, that's all I want,' he joked.

The presenter, when asked whether a particular object from the show stood out to him, said it was like 'picking your favourite child'.

'All of them are really special, all the individuals that bring an item in, all the items are dear to them and all the memories are so unique that you could never pick one I don't think.'

Jay stressed the importance of craft as part of a sustainable future, something which he spoke about with Charles as received the honour.

Achievement: Jay left school at 15, and has set up a charity encouraging young people who struggle academically to get involved in practical jobs, such as restoration and craft

'It's all about sustainability, it's all about teaching the next generation as to what they should be doing and what they can do, because some people think craft isn't accessible to them,' he said.

'I want craft to be accessible to everybody, from the poor side of town to the rich side of town, so everybody can access it.'

Jay left school at 15, and has set up a charity encouraging young people who struggle academically to get involved in practical jobs, such as restoration and craft.

He is also an ambassador for the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust, which provides people with up to 18,000 in funding to study a traditional craft.

Jay previously lauded his co-stars for giving him the 'confidence' to speak about his dyslexia.

Ceremony: He is also an ambassador for the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust, which provides people with up to 18,000 in funding to study a traditional craft

The TV personality whose disability prevents him from using the reading device, revealed he 'loves' working on the BBC programme since he can talk in 'the way that he feels' while filming.

Speaking exclusively to MailOnline at the recent RTS Awards, he opened up about how he's overcome hurdles in order to present to millions, despite being diagnosed with the disorder at the age of 31.

He said: 'No we do nothing like that, no autocue. The person who tells me about all the emails is Kirsten [Ramsay], in the emails they send, she let's me know what they're all about.

'There's no script. It's all as real as it looks and it's all done in one take so working on The Repair Shop is brilliant for a dyslexic cos you just talk the way that you feel. You say what it is you're feeling at the time.'

Having also featured in TV favourites including Jay Blades' Home Fix, Money for Nothing and Strictly Come Dancing, the furniture restorer claimed he cannot appear in a show that requires him to use a teleprompter.

He said: 'Everything has to be unscripted. A lot of the shows I do are unscripted. They're very accommodating to my, you call is a disability, they're very accommodating to that.'

Going on to gush about his pals at the factual programme, the Hackney native continued of his dyslexia: 'The confidence to speak about it comes from the people that are around you.

'So if you feel comfortable with them... at The Repair Shop we have a lovely family down there, they allow you to feel comfortable so you can open up and just be cool.

'So yeah you've got to have good people around you. If you haven't, you're in trouble.'

No Place Like Home continues on Tuesday at 9pm on Channel 5.
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks to guests gathered at the O'Connor Grain Farm in Kankakee, Illinois, May 11. AFP-Yonhap





The Biden administration has drafted an executive order that would give the Department of Justice vast powers to stop foreign adversaries such as China accessing Americans' personal data, according to a person familiar with the matter and excerpts seen by Reuters.







The proposal, which is being reviewed by government agencies, would also direct the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to prevent federal funding from supporting the transfer of U.S. health data to foreign adversaries, according to the excerpts.







The draft order reflects an effort by the administration to respond more aggressively to national security threats allegedly posed by Chinese companies that acquire reams of U.S. personal data, after failed bids by the Trump administration to bar Americans from using popular social media platforms TikTok and Wechat.







Former President Donald Trump tried to ban the apps in 2020 alleging data collected by them could be given to Beijing and used to track users and censor content. China and the apps have denied any improper use of U.S. data.







But the courts halted implementation of the bans and U.S. President Joe Biden eventually revoked them.







Spokespeople for the White House, the Department of Justice and the Commerce Department declined to comment. HHS also did not respond to requests for comment.






Married At First Sight's Olivia Frazer made sure all eyes were on her as she stepped out at Australian Fashion Week in Sydney on Wednesday.

The 28-year-old reality star showed off her sensational figure and boldly went underwear free in a racy thigh-split dress.

Olivia, who was portrayed as the villain on this year's season, attended several runway shows at Carriageworks with fellow MAFS bride Tamara Djordjevic.

Daring! MAFS bad girl Olivia Frazer went underwear-free in a slinky dress with a daring thigh split as she attended day three of Australian Fashion Week in Sydney on Wednesday

Olivia's frock had long sleeves, a thigh split and a backless design with racy tie-up detailing.

The teaching student teamed the daring dress with a pair of knee-high leather boots.

Olivia wore her blonde locks out and over her shoulders, showing off her new bangs, and her makeup included nude lipstick.

At one stage, she cheekily flashed her bare bottom.

Having a laugh: At one stage, she cheekily flashed her bare bottom

Bombshell: Olivia wore her blonde locks out and over her shoulders, showing off her new bangs, and her makeup included nude lipstick

Racy: Olivia's frock had long sleeves, a thigh split and a backless design with tie-up detailing

Pals: Olivia, who was portrayed as the villain on this year's season, attended several runway shows at Carriageworks with fellow MAFS bride Tamara Djordjevic (right)

Tamara, 30, opted for a more feminine look in a white and pink floral maxi dress.

The pair were joined by fellow MAFS bride Carolina Santos at one runway show.

It comes after Olivia told the Where's Your Head At? podcast earlier this week she was 'feeling really, really depressed' after her stint on MAFS.

'I've never had depression like this. I've honestly never been this close to, sorry to get a bit graphic, really thinking about taking my own life,' she said.

Reunion: The duo was joined by fellow MAFS bride Carolina Santos (right) at one runway show

Floaty: Tamara, 30, opted for a more feminine look in a white and pink floral maxi dress

Struggles: It comes after Olivia told the Where's Your Head At? podcast earlier this week she was 'feeling really, really depressed' after her stint on MAFS

She credited her boyfriend Jackson Lonie with supporting her on her darkest days.

'To have Jack be my absolute anchor, I think it speaks to the relationship and the man he is,' Olivia said.

The reality TV survivor said she'd only recently started to feel happy again.

Olivia was labelled this season's MAFS 'villain' after sharing a nude photo of rival bride Domenica Calarco among the cast, thereby outing her as an OnlyFans model.

She later refused to apologise for unearthing and sharing the picture.
She never fails to turn heads with her incredible sense of style.

And Laura Whitmore, 36, looked radiant as ever as she showed off her toned midriff as she attended PR guru Nick Ede's birthday birth at the W hotel as well as the launch of Shoreditch's newest establishment, Lalaland on Wednesday.

Her outing comes after it was revealed that Love Island bosses have reportedly had to take action and crack down on 'fame seekers' from applying for the show.

Green with envy: Laura Whitmore looked radiant as ever as she showed off her toned midriff while party hopping in London on Wednesday

The TV presenter, who is known for sporting eye-catching outfits looked gorgeous in a green suit jacket and matching high waisted flared trousers.

Laura effortlessly pulled off the seriously stylish outfit while she showed off her impressive physique in a cropped tie dye long sleeved top.

The BBC radio host opted for a pretty neutral pallet of make-up and wore her blonde tresses in soft waves.

Fabulous: The TV presenter, who is known for sporting eye-catching outfits looked gorgeous in a green suit jacket and matching high waisted trousers

Gesture: Laura was in a playful mood as she gave a wink to one of her friends in the bar

Three's company: At Nick Ede's birthday party she posed with the man of the hour as well as Laura Pradelska

Showing off her eye for style, the fashionista added a pair of pointed toe heels while she carried her possessions in a Mulberry handbag.

Other stars in attendance at the Lalaland launch were ex-TOWIE star Georgia Harrison who rocked a causal look channeling the 90's in a trendy bomber jacket.

Social media influencer and activist Felicity Hayward was also on the invite list on the night and stood out from the crowd wearing a star detail dress.

English actor Nick Blood looked smart in a autumnal striped jacket while Nigerian-British television, theatre and film actor Jimmy Akingbola looked dapper in a green suit.

Looking good: Earlier in the night, Laura attended the launch of Shoreditch's newest establishment, Lalaland

Looking good: Other stars in attendance on the night were ex-TOWIE star Georgia Harrison who rocked a causal look channeling the 90's in a trendy bomber jacket

Cute: Other stars in attendance on the night were, social media influencer and activist Felicity Hayward who in a star detail dress

Out out: English actor Nick Blood looked smart in a autumnal striped jacket

Smart: Nigerian-British television, theatre and film actor Jimmy Akingbola looked dapper in a green suit

Also stepping out on the night was socialite Chris Kowalski who was all smiles as he posed for a photo.

TV presenter Zoe Hardman looked chic at the glitzy event wearing an eye-catching orange ensemble with a mint green jacket.

Laura was later seen mingling with actor Jeremy Irvine a guest who all appeared to be enjoying the lush upmarket establishment,

Happy out: Also stepping out on the night was socialite Chris Kowalski who was all smiles as he stood for a photo

Eye for style: TV presenter Zoe Hardman looked chic at the glitzy event wearing an eye-catching orange ensemble with a mint green jacket

Chit chat: Laura was later seen mingling with actor Jeremy Irvine a guest who all appeared to be enjoying the lush upmarket establishment

The Irish presenters glamorous appearance comes after Love Island bosses have reportedly had to take action after it was suggested that that some hopefuls have been dumping their partners to get on the show.

The Sun reports that wannabe islanders have been keeping their relationships a secret and in some cases have even split up in a bid to secure a place on the ITV dating show.

But the publication adds that this move allegedly didn't wash with show bosses as they reminded potentials show stars that they have 'no interest in fame seekers.'

Uh oh: Love Island bosses have reportedly had to take action after it was suggested that that some hopefuls have been dumping their partners to get on the show, (stock image)

A source added to the publication that one budding islander, who was in talks with show bosses, was said to have promised their partner that they'd 'get back together' after the show after being unable to give up the opportunity to become famous.

An insider told the The Sun: 'Love Island bosses has no interest in fame seekers. Theyre savvy to Islanders who think the show is a quick fix to fame and fortune.

'As has always been the case, Love Island bosses cast single Islanders who are looking for love. Nothing else will fly with them. Viewers tune in to watch relationships blossom, it's as simple as that.'

A Love Island spokesman told MailOnline: 'Our only stipulation is Islanders must be over 18, single and looking for love.'

Not having it: The publication adds that this move allegedly didn't wash with show bosses as they reminded potentials show stars that they have 'no interest in fame seekers'

ITV have yet to reveal who has made it into the villa, but it's said that the selection process involves extensive questioning about a potential cast member's relationship status.

It comes as the excitement for series eight is already amping up as Love Island has shared its first teasers for the show proclaiming itself to be the 'OG of love' compared to other rival dating shows.

The two animated promos aired on TV for the first time on Saturday night during ITV's Britain's Got Talent advert break.

Love Island said: 'Love Island is the OG of dating shows and after 7 years of matchmaking, marriages and babies, for 8 weeks this summer, we're officially owning love. So stand down all you pretenders - Love Is Ours.'

Shocking: The Sun reports that wannabe islanders have been keeping their relationships a secret and in some cases have even split up in a bid to secure a place on the ITV dating show

The preview cheekily poked fun at shows Naked Attraction, Celebs Go Dating and Ex On The Beach, by showing a TV with the title 'Naked Celebs Go Dating On A Beach.'

A pink trainer squashes the TV, before the word 'LOVE' with a flag saying 'WE OWN IT', comes up next to the iconic Love Island pool and a little animated Millie Court with her keyboard from the infamous talent show last season.

Earlier this month it was claimed the ITV2 show's new sexy, young cast were just days away from filming the advert.

No way: A source added to the publication that one budding islander, who was in talks with show bosses, was said to have promised their partner that they'd 'get back together' after the show after being unable to give up the opportunity to become famous

A source told The Sun: 'The schedules are being put together now and fans can expect a long, hot summer of fun from the villa from June 6.

'Filming for the promotional adverts is beginning in the next couple of weeks and the ads will start in May.

A representative for ITV told MailOnline at the time: 'It's too soon for us to confirm the schedule.'

Meanwhile, Love Island is reportedly set for another series' as 'bosses begin plans for a 2023 winter' edition, just weeks before the summer cast are set the enter the villa.

First look: Love Island has shared its first teasers for its eight series proclaiming itself to be the 'OG of love'

ITV aired its first winter series in South Africa in January 2020, which was won by Paige Turley and Finn Tapp, having previously started in June every year since 2015.

Plans for a second winter series were shelved in 2021 amid concerns surrounding the pandemic, but according to The Sun, it is set to make a comeback.

A source revealed to the publication: 'Love Island bosses enjoyed the one and only series of Winter Love Island, but it was just before the pandemic raged so was shelved for 2021.

'When they started casting for this summers series they thought theres definitely enough talent to do a second series again so have started the plans for a 2023 Winter Love Island.

Teaser: The preview cheekily poked fun at shows Naked Attraction, Celebs Go Dating and Ex On The Beach, by showing a TV with the title 'Naked Celebs Go Dating On A Beach'

'The series generally is really important for them as it attracts the all-important younger viewers, so if they can get a second series in one year then everyone will be delighted.

The winter series concluded in February 2020, just weeks before the global coronavirus pandemic began with Prime Minister Boris Johnson enforcing a lockdown.

Alongside winners Finn and Paige, the cast included Demi Jones, twins Eve and Jess Gale, Natalia Zoppa, Luke Mabbott and Shaughna Phillips.
Influencer Elle Ferguson quit The Block last month due to a family emergency.

And it was back to reality for the 36-year-old tanning entrepreneur on Tuesday as she visited a Sydney salon for a hair appointment.

Elle cut a stylish figure in her signature off-duty outfit comprising denim shorts, a beige jacket and black top.

Stylish: Influencer Elle Ferguson cut a chic figure in denim shorts and a beige jacket as she left a hair salon in Sydney on Tuesday, after quitting The Block due to a family emergency

The businesswoman teamed her laid-back look with leather boots, a black handbag and a pair of square sunglasses.

She carried her phone as she walked back to her car after the pampering session.

Elle and her footy star fiance Joel Patfull pulled out of the latest season of The Block last month following a family emergency.

Edgy: The 36-year-old tanning entrepreneur teamed her signature off-duty look with leather boots, a black handbag and a pair of square sunglasses

The couple initially tried to stay on the show but left after they 'couldn't get a definitive answer' from producers as to whether Joel, 37, could 'come and go' from the building site in country Victoria to visit his ailing mother Trish in Adelaide.

Without assurances that he could regularly leave to visit his mum, who had broken her neck in a fall, the pair pulled the pin on the Channel Nine show.

In addition to her broken neck, Trish fractured her wrist and has also potentially broken her coccyx.

Stepping away: Elle and her footy star fiance Joel Patfull (left) pulled out of the latest season of The Block last month following a family emergency

Priorities: At the time of their exit, Elle wrote on Instagram: 'Wherever you are in the world, whatever you are doing, family always comes first'

At the time of their exit, Elle wrote on Instagram: 'Wherever you are in the world, whatever you are doing, family always comes first.'

She also shared a black-and-white image of Joel sitting with their luggage as they prepared to catch a flight to Adelaide.

A Nine spokesperson confirmed the pair's departure to Daily Mail Australia.

'Over the weekend, we were surprised to have one of our new contestant teams depart The Block a few days into filming for the upcoming season,' they said.

Back and forth: The couple initially tried to stay on the show but left after they 'couldn't get a definitive answer' from producers as to whether Joel, 37, could 'come and go' from the building site in country Victoria to visit his ailing mother Trish in Adelaide

'We wish them all the best for the future and we're excited to cast two new Aussies for the opportunity of a lifetime on The Block. The Block Tree Change will air as scheduled later this year.'

The new season of The Block is being filmed in the Macedon Ranges, a 40-minute drive from Melbourne.

After years of city renovations, the producers have opted for a 'tree change' by having the teams transform homes in rural Victoria.

Now the teams will each be building a home on 10 acres of land.
Lala Kent left fans stunned with her latest Instagram post, a recreation of a photograph of her ex-fiance Randall Emmett allegedly cheating on her in Nashville.

Seven months after an image of the 51-year-old producer walking with two women outside at a hotel emerged, the reality star, 31, shared an image of herself crossing a similar street that he did in Music City on Wednesday.

While she did not say anything about the picture, her 1.7 million Instagram followers called the move 'savage' and said they were 'dead over' the snap.

Wild: Lala Kent lefts fans stunned with her latest Instagram post, a recreation of a photograph of her ex-fiance Randall Emmett allegedly cheating on her in Nashville

In October, fans were shocked when PageSix claimed the mother-of-one had broken off her engagement of three years with Emmett.

The site added that he had cheated on the reality TV star when he was working on Nashville, Tennessee.

'Randall always lives a double life,' a source told the site. 'He lives the life of a husband or boyfriend, and then he lives the life of a serial partier and then goes on a bender.'

Subtle shade: Seven months after an image of the 51-year-old producer walking with two women outside at a hotel emerged, the reality star, 31, shared an image of herself crossing the same street in Music City on Wednesday

While she did not say anything about the picture, her 1.7 million Instagram followers called the move 'savage' and said they were 'dead over' the snap; Randall Emmett pictured in

Following the cheating allegations, Kent cleaned her social media pages of her ex and liked a post that accused him of cheating on her.

She even took to Instagram to share a video of herself moving into the Beverly Hills Hotel while Beyonces Sorry played.

Their split came just seven months after they welcomed their first child together, a daughter named Ocean.

Split: In October, fans were shocked when PageSix claimed the mother-of-one had broken off her engagement of three years with Emmett; seen in 2019

Kent and Emmett initially met in 2015, and they began a relationship not long after they made each other's acquaintance.

Prior to becoming involved with the actress, the producer was married to his first wife, Ambyr Childers, with whom he shared two children.

The two initially separated in 2015, and although they reconciled, they went on to formally dissolve their union in 2017.

The wedding that won't happen: In October, she also showed photos of the wedding dress she was supposed to wear for her 2020 wedding to Randall if the ceremony had not been delayed by the pandemic

Emmett and Kent went public with their relationship in 2018, and the Midnight in the Switchgrass director popped the question that same year.

The pair initially planned to have their wedding ceremony in April of 2020, although they postponed their plans in response to the ongoing state of the global pandemic.

The two later rescheduled their nuptials and went on to announced that they were expecting to bring a child into their lives last September.

Sad: Their split came just seven months after they welcomed their first child together, a daughter named Ocean

Kent eventually shared a picture of Ocean to her Instagram account for the first time not long after she gave birth in March.

Weeks before their parting, she said she was 'ready to go' with regard to having a second baby with Randall.

The television personality even spoke with People during Travel & Give's fourth annual fundraiser in West Hollywood about her desire to expand her family.

Two of a kind: Kent and Emmett initially met in 2015 and began a relationship not long after they met

During the event, Kent noted that the 'second' her daughter turned one, she and Emmett would be 'back at it with the calendar that shows ovulation.'

Kent also noted to the outlet that she may be 'oversharing' but 'that's how it goes.'

And in October she also showed photos of the wedding dress she was supposed to wear for her 2020 wedding to Randall if the ceremony had not been delayed by the pandemic.

Milestones: The pair went public with their relationship in 2018, and the producer popped the big question that same year

Lala said she was inspired to post some photos of the gown after a 'beautiful conversation' with her stylist.

'I wanted to share my wedding dress that I was going to wear on April 18th 2020,' the star captioned her slideshow. 'This dress was custom designed by [Alexandra Renee Scott].'

When asked if she was still going to be wearing it on her special day by a fan in her comment section, Kent replied she and her designer are 'going to start from scratch.'
Fame-seeking Married At First Sight star Nasser Sultan has been put on notice over his rowdy behaviour at Australian Fashion Week.

Security at Carriageworks, the Sydney venue where most of the runway shows are being held, have issued the 55-year-old with a stern warning to 'stop being a pest'.

The warning was given after Sultan was pictured harassing former NRL WAG Phoebe Burgess in the front row at the Oroton showcase on Tuesday.

'Pest': Fame-seeking Married At First Sight star Nasser Sultan (pictured at Carriageworks on Monday) has been put on notice over his rowdy behaviour at Australian Fashion Week

An apologetic Sultan told Daily Mail Australia he was 'really embarrassed' about his behaviour around Burgess, but denied gatecrashing the show or stealing anyone's seat, as had been previously reported.

'[The incident with security] really embarrassed me. I felt like a f**kwit... but I didn't take anyone's seat or sneak in,' the former music promoter said.

'I was invited to that show, saw Phoebe went over to say hello. Why can't you say hello to people these days?'

'Security were saying I stole Kate Waterhouse's seat. I did not. I was there for a few seconds just taking a photo with Phoebe and then moved back to my seat.'

'I felt like a f**kwit': Security at Carriageworks, the Sydney venue where most of the runway shows are being held, have issued the 55-year-old with a stern warning to 'stop being a pest'. (Sultan is seen here speaking to a doorman outside a runway show on Monday)

Snubbed: The warning was given after Sultan was pictured harassing former NRL WAG Phoebe Burgess (right) in the front row at the Oroton showcase on Tuesday

He added: 'They said I was being a pest and that the designers didn't want me at their shows... that's not true. I have been invited to many of shows.

'I have been going for years. I have no shame sitting in the back row. I am happy just to be there.'

During Tuesday's Oroton showcase, Sultan had briefly slipped into racing royalty Kate Waterhouse's seat when she moved away and tugged on Burgess' designer coat to try to get her attention.

Setting the record straight: An apologetic Sultan told Daily Mail Australia he was 'really embarrassed' about his behaviour around Burgess, but denied gatecrashing the show or stealing anyone's seat, as had been previously reported

However, the ex-wife of retired NRL star Sam Burgess turned her back on Sultan as he repeatedly asked for a photo and tried to start a conversation.

Sultan 'eventually gave up and walked off,' an onlooker told Daily Mail Australia.

But he buttonholed Burgess once again after the runway show when he walked up to her outside the Carriageworks venue in Eveleigh.

She politely agreed to a photo before motioning him to go away.
He went public with his romance with Liberty Love during a night out last week.

And Bobby Brazier and the daughter of famous DJ Don Letts appeared to be in excellent spirits as they attended the VIP launch for Wagtail, a new rooftop bar in London, on Wednesday.

The son of Jade Goody and Jeff Brazier, 18, cut a smart figure in blue trousers and a white T-shirt, which he wore underneath a black double breasted jacket.

Sweet: And Bobby Brazier and Liberty Love appeared to be in excellent spirits as they attended the VIP launch for Wagtail, a new rooftop bar in London, on Wednesday

He kept comfortable in a pair of white trainers and styled his brunette locks in a curled style as he posed with his new love interest.

Liberty, 21, flaunted her incredible figure in a clinging black gown, which she teamed with a pair of strapped brown heels.

She let her outfit do all the talking as she kept her accessories simple with a dainty gold necklace.

The influencer flaunted her striking good looks with a light dusting of make-up and styled her dark tresses in natural curls.

Dapper: The son of Jade Goody and Jeff Brazier, 18, cut a smart figure in blue jeans and a white T-shirt, which he wore underneath a black double breasted jacket

Smitten: The daughter of famous DJ Don Letts flaunted her incredible figure in a clinging black gown, which she teamed with a pair of strapped brown heels

Looking good: She let her outfit do all the talking as she kept her accessories simple with a dainty gold necklace

The pair couldn't stop themselves from smiling as they attended the launch of the rooftop bar and restaurant, which boasts 360 degree views of London's skyline.

Bobby was also seen chatting with the likes of Blithe Saxon, actress Naomie Harris and radio presenter Nick Grimshaw at the event.

Bobby and Liberty appeared to go public with their romance during a night out in Soho last week, with the couple looking cosy as they shared a kiss in the street.

Bobby and his new love interest packed on the PDA as they walked through London in pictures obtained by The Sun.

Liberty boasts more than 18,000 followers on Instagram and has her own YouTube page where she shares make-up tutorials and vlogs from her holidays abroad.

Pals: The pair couldn't stop themselves from smiling as they posed with Naomie Harris and Nick Grimshaw

Style: Bobby kept comfortable in a pair of white trainers and styled his brunette locks in a curled style as he posed up a storm

Having fun: Bobby was also seen chatting with the likes of actress Naomie Harris and radio presenter Nick Grimshaw at the party

She is the daughter of DJ Don Letts, a British film director, DJ and musician.

The Grammy winner was the videographer for The Clash and directed several of their music videos.

Bobby's outing comes after he recently admitted that he wasn't with his late mother 'long enough to miss her' before her death.

He said he 'misses what could've been' with his late Big Brother star mother Jade.

Friends: Bobby was also seen posing with Blithe Saxon, who cut a smart figure in black trousers and a matching waistcoat

Famous dad: Liberty is the daughter of DJ Don Letts, a British film director, DJ and musician. The Grammy winner was the videographer for The Clash

Exciting: They attended the launch of the rooftop bar and restaurant, which boasts 360 degree views of London's skyline

Dancing: Naomie and Nick were seen dancing the night away as they stood behind the DJ decks during the event

Jade died when her sons Bobby and Freddie were just five and four.

Speaking to The Face, Bobby said he is frequently told by people who knew his mother what a 'presence' she had.

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.

Pals: Skyfall star Naomie, 45, looked stunning in a vibrant green gown with a belt as she posed with Nick (right) and Afua Hirsch

Glam: Flossie Clegg and Lucas Wright showed off their edgy sense of style as they stepped out at the Wagtail launch party

Smart: The Tower actor Jimmy Akingbola (right) cut a dapper figure in an olive green suit while Clym Evernden looked suave in a black suit with a purple T-shirt

'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, added that he would loved to have seen what other people saw in his mother when she found fame.

Bobby lives with his father, his stepmother Kate Dwyer and brother Freddie and is currently carving out a career as a model.

Jeff previously praised his sons for their resilience in dealing with Jade's death at such a young age.

Vibrant: Afua stunned in a one-shoulder pink jumpsuit with red patterning and a puffed sleeve as she stepped out at the launch

Fashionable: Blithe Saxon (right) looked suave in a striped suit and a matching waistcoat while James Corbin looked stylish in a brown leather co-ord ensemble

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 I'm sure she was.

'When I look at Bobby and Freddie I see their mother's colourful personality shining through. I mean, Jade was one of the biggest characters out there and the boys have both inherited that from her.'

Family: It comes after Bobby said he 'misses what could've been' with his mother, who died from cancer aged 27 in 2009 when Bobby and Freddie were five and four (pictured in 2006)

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: 'It's not for parents to define a child's purpose but if this kid doesn't help thousands of people somehow I'll be very surprised.

'I'd give anything to have @freddybraz1er's 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.'
Tom Daley is fearless when it comes to experimenting with his style.

And on Wednesday, the Olympic diver, 27, showed off his style credentials in a teddy bear print two piece as he attended the launch of Moschino by Assoulin in London.

The outing comes after Tom confessed that he feels there is 'extra pressure' on same sex couples to be 'good parents'.

Standing out: Tom Daley showed off his style credentials in a teddy bear print two piece as he attended the launch of Moschino by Assoulin in London.

Making sure he was perfectly clad for the event held by Jeremy Scott, Tom looked model ready as he stood out from the crowd posing for photos.

He teamed the lime green outfit which was adorned with the label's famous teddy bear with a comfy pair of white trainers.

The nostalgic Moschino bear is also a fashion throwback and pays homage to Franco Moschino's iconic 1988 collection.

Designer: Tom teamed the lime green outfit which included a cluster of teddy bears throughout the look with a comfy pair of white trainers

Iconic: The nostalgic Moschino bear is also a fashion throwback and pays homage to Franco Moschino's iconic 1988 collection

Pals: Tom and Creative Director at Moschino Jeremy Scott pose happily for photographers as they stun in the designers kooky looks

The brand's Creative Director Jeremy Scott looked vibrant in an asymmetrical print purple suit as he was captured in a shot with world champion Tom.

Fashion queen Dame Joan Collins also stepped out on the night who looked radiant as ever in an all black ensemble.

The Dynasty star, 88, showed off her incredibly youthful visage as she posed for a photo with Jeremy.

Icon: Fashion queen Dame Joan Collins also stepped out on the night who looked radiant as ever in an all black ensemble.

Pablo Olea, the brands communications and public relations director also put on a vibrant display in one of the fashion houses custom made jackets.

Harrods personal shopper Lyubomir Stankov looked smart as he stepped out in one of the collections suits while businessman Andrea Soriente also wore a look from the Italian brand.

The outing comes after Tom confessed that he feels there is 'extra pressure' on same sex couples to be 'good parents'.

Colourful: Pablo Olea, the brands communications and public relations director also put on a vibrant display in one of the fashion houses custom made jackets

Well done: Creative Director at Moschino Jeremy Scott appears very pleased with the star-studded appearance on the night

Throwback: Creative Director at Moschino Jeremy Scott holds a catalogue showing Dame Joan Collins dressed in the designer some years ago

Vibrant: Harrods personal shopper Lyubomir Stankov looked smart in one of the collections suits while businessman Andrea Soriente also wore a suit from the fashion house

The athlete, who welcomed his son Robbie via surrogacy with his husband Dustin Lance Black, 47, three years ago, revealed that he sometimes feels judged by people when out in public.

Speaking to Giovanna Fletcher on her Happy Mum Happy Baby podcast, Tom explained: 'Being same sex dads, I felt a lot of extra pressure to be good parents and to be doing the right thing.'

He continued: 'You do always feel a bit judged when youre out in public because you want to be showing that youre doing the best you possibly can, and I think it can be weird sometimes for people to see two dads and a baby.

'We have to prove ourselves': Tom has said there is 'extra pressure' on same sex couples as he detailed parenting son Robbie Ray with husband Dustin Lance Black

'We always felt like we had to be the best parents that we could ever be and do all of the right things, we were desperate to be parents just like everybody else.

'It was that constant feeling of having to prove ourselves above and beyond.'

Tom discussed the complexity of same sex couples becoming parents as he revealed his worries that came when he first realised that he was gay.

Family: The Olympic diver who welcomed a son via surrogacy with his Screenwriter husband Dustin, 47, three years ago, revealed that he feels judged by people when out in public

He said: 'Once I started to realise that I was gay, it was like, how am I going to have children in the future? What does this look like for me? What are the options?

'Having to figure out exactly how that was going to work, looking down the routes of adoption, surrogacy and all of those different things.'

'It is a lot more complicated for same sex parents to have children and you have to really think about it and like really, really want to have kids in order to be able to make it work and its extremely complex for same sex couples in a number of different ways.'

Doting dad: Tom revealed his worries as he said: 'Once I started to realise that I was gay, it was like, how am I going to have children in the future? What does this look like for me?'

Tom detailed his and Lance's decision to welcome their son Robert Ray, now three, back in 2018 via surrogacy.

The star who lost his father Rob Daley back in 2011 at the age of 40, added that he wanted to 'pass on' their family genes, after tragically losing many family members.

Tom explained: 'Lance and I had lost so many people in our families and there was something about surrogacy that we were drawn to that just meant that we could pass on the people that wed lost, their genes and their thoughts, their feelings, their personalities and being able to bring someone into the world, that felt so extremely special.'

Adorable: Tom detailed his and Lance's decision to welcome their son Robert Ray, now three, back in 2018 via surrogacy

The Plymouth born diver and the American screenwriter, decided to go through with the process in the US, as Tom explained how in the UK both surrogates and parents are not afforded the same legal rights .

Tom previously explained they both provided sperm to fertilise their surrogate's eggs, but do not wish to know who the biological father is.

He added: 'We looked into it in the UK and in the US. In the UK its a lot more complicated because surrogates arent as well protected legally, intended parents arent protected legally, its just not safe, theres a lot of hurdles to have to jump over.

'In the US, everything is regulated in a way that keeps everyone safe and in the US the surrogacy process is a lot more streamlined.'

Cute: The couple chose to raise Robbie in London after the couple made the 'difficult' decision to choose to live in the UK despite negative reaction to their surrogacy

The couple chose to raise Robbie in London after the couple made the 'difficult' decision to choose to live in the UK despite negative reaction to their surrogacy.

Of their gratitude towards their surrogate he added: 'There are no words to describe how grateful you can be to someone our surrogate is so special, we speak to her all the time on Facetime with Robby.'

Speaking to BBC Radio at the time of their son's birth Tom said: 'In the US, where we've been working with our surrogate, the reception was incredibly warm, with almost no exception.'

But, he added, that in the UK 'We heard things that weren't so friendly. Maybe because there are misconceptions about surrogacy here.'
Alison Daddo has opened up about a devastating sexual assault she endured as a teenager.

The 52-year-old former model reveals details about the attack in her new book, Queen Menopause: Finding Your Majesty in the Mayhem.

The mother of three and wife of actor Cameron Daddo was just 17 years old and working as a model in Japan when the attack occurred.

Heartbreak: Alison Daddo (pictured this week) has opened up about a devastating sexual assault she endured as a teenager

In heart-rending passages in her book, Alison describes being at a party when she was grabbed, shoved into a closet and groped by a man.

A second man came to her aid and offered to walk Alison home.

But once they arrived, her rescuer pinned the teen to a bed and forced himself on her.

'Once his body was on top of mine, once his arms gripped mine, once I was unable to move, I gave in. I let the rape happen,' writes Alison of the horrific ordeal.

Candid: The 52-year-old model and wife of actor Cameron Daddo (pictured), revealed details about the attack in her new book, Queen Menopause: Finding Your Majesty in the Mayhem

Looking back, Alison writes: 'I had spent many, many therapy sessions understanding it, unpacking the idea that it was my fault... and once I was able to let that go and know that I was actually the victim in that, the healing really began.

'It's a scar now, not a wound anymore.'

She also spoke to Who magazine about her difficulties facing the memories of that night.

'I had silenced myself in so many ways from a young girl into my twenties and into my thirties as well, but once I hit 46, 47, 48, I thought, "I actually can't put a stopper in this anymore,"' she said.

Past trauma: The mother of three was just 17 years old and working as a model in Japan when the attack occurred

The heartbreaking disclosure comes after Alison shared how going through menopause led to body insecurities.

The teacher recently told Body+Soul she gained some weight and feared that her 57-year-old husband no longer found her changing body attractive.

'I know, for instance, that Cam's love language is physical. It's what he wants and needs and how he feels secure with me,' she said.

Details: In heart-rending passages in her book, Alison describes being at a party when she was grabbed, shoved into a closet and groped by a man, before later enduring a second assault

'A lot of the dislike of my body shape had to do with what I thought Cam wanted, or what Cam liked. Once he told me he didn't give a crap if I put on weight and that he loved me as a person, the more I addressed my own judgement of myself.'

Over time, Alison came to accept her new shape, but says she still has difficult periods where she feels less than confident.

'There are days where I go, "You're just a cute little 52-year-old with a tubby tummy," and then I'll put on a pair of jeans and think, "Oh, God, I look six months pregnant, I can't stand it." I still go back and forwards with it,' she said.

Fears: Alison recently said she gained weight and feared that her husband, actor Cameron Daddo (right), no longer found her changing body attractive. Pictured in 2019

'I'm so aware now of what women have been taught about their body shapes. They're constantly described by how they look. You've just got to love the shape you are.'

Alison was an It girl in the 1990s, gracing the covers of dozens of magazines during her successful modelling career.

She and Cameron wed in 1991 and have three children together, daughters Lotus, 24, and Bodhi, 14, and a son, River, 20.

The couple celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary last year.

Insecure: 'A lot of the dislike of my body shape had to do with what I thought Cam wanted, or what Cam liked' she said

The pair recently spoke about how they saved their marriage after the Models Inc. actor cheated on his wife in 1994.

His infidelity took place in America, after he had relocated there for his acting career.

Alison told the Sydney Morning Herald that her relationship 'evolved the most' during marriage counselling in the wake of his infidelity.

However it wasn't all smooth sailing, with the mother-of-three admitting they had 'a terrible experience' with their first therapist.

'Once he told me he didn't give a crap if I put on weight and that he loved me as a person, the more I addressed my own judgement of myself' Alison continued. Pictured in 2021

'It is so important to find the right therapist for you. The one we found was our second choice, as the first one was a terrible experience,' Alison said.

However once they found a decent counsellor, the long-term couple 'both wanted the relationship to work, so that was a good starting point'.

Last year, Daddo spoke about hurting his wife by cheating on her three years after tying the knot in 1991.

Cover star: Alison was an 'It-girl' in the 1990s, gracing the covers of dozens of magazines during her successful modelling career

The Australian star discussed his marriage on Nova FM's Separate Bathrooms podcast and admitted it's important to 'learn how to apologise'.

'We were told by Reverend Brian that married us. He said you're going to hurt your partner the most of anyone in your life. In my case, it's probably true,' Cameron said.

'So it's a good idea to learn how to apologise, mean it and then make the necessary actions, so you don't repeat it. That's a good lesson,' he added.
Former bikie associate Mark Judge had a taste of high society on Wednesday when he attended day three of Australian Fashion Week in Sydney.

The 43-year-old looked effortlessly cool in an all-black ensemble as he posed with a group of models and reality stars at Carriageworks.

Mark cut a stylish figure in jeans, a jumper and bucket hat as he crouched in front of four glamorous women, including Bachelor alum Kiki Morris and Australian Survivor star Shannon Lawson.

Stylish: Mark donned a sharp blazer for this photo with a model Elise Zecevic

He completed his look with black shoes and also wore a sharp blazer.

Popular: Ex-bikie associate Mark Judge (centre, crouching) posed with a group of models and reality stars at Australian Fashion Week in Sydney on Wednesday. He was joined by Bachelor alum Kiki Morris (right) and Australian Survivor star Shannon Lawson (second from right)

Mark, who grew up near Penrith in western Sydney, started out as a doorman for a Rebels motorcycle gang clubhouse.

In 2011, the 'ladies' man' was found bleeding to death on an upmarket Sydney street after he was violently stabbed nine times.

Mark was found collapsed on the footpath outside his apartment by two friends who were driving past after the attack.

Mark has since turned his life around and now makes a living as a designer watch seller with stores in Bondi and Melbourne.

All smiles: Mark, who grew up near Penrith in western Sydney, started out as a doorman for a Rebels motorcycle gang clubhouse. He now makes a living as a designer watch seller with stores in Bondi and Melbourne

He is also friends with billionaire heiress Francesca Packer, who is the granddaughter of media mogul Kerry Packer.

They met through mutual friend Sam Zachariah, her ex-boyfriend and Mark's former housemate.

In 2020, the pair were spotted celebrating their respective birthdays over dinner and drinks at Sydney cocktail bar Little Felix.
The pair tied the knot in a lavish ceremony last month.

And it seems newlyweds Brooklyn Beckham and his wife Nicola Peltz are still as loved-up as ever as the couple gave fans a glimpse into their first trip to London since tying the knot.

Aspiring chef Brooklyn, 23, stated that he was on a work trip during their stay as he took to his Instagram to share a picture of his wife, 27, trying to dodge the rain getting into a waiting car.

Loved-up: Brooklyn Beckham and his wife Nicola Peltz give fans a glimpse of their romantic trip to London posting to their Instagram accounts on Wednesday

He playfully captioned his story: 'Bring your wife to work day. She's not used to the English weather.'

It's not clear what work Brooklyn - who recently launched a YouTube series entitled Cookin' With Brooklyn - is up to in the capital.

The newlyweds also caught a snap outside the Glassblower pub in Soho as Nicola placed a tender kiss on her beau's cheek as he gave her a piggy-back.

Touring: The love birds also visited a clothing store that featured a selection of socks and hats

Star-studded: The down to earth duo also reshared a snap from a fan in local newsagents where fans appeared star struck by their presence

It's no Florida! He playfully captioned his story: 'Bring your wife to work day. She's not used to the English weather'

The duo also reshared a picture from a fan in local newsagents where onlookers appeared star struck by their presence.

They stopped for a quick snap at the door entrance with Nicola looking stylish in a pair of red flared trousers and a black sweater.

Meanwhile, Brooklyn looked relaxed as he wore a logo inspired half zip jumper which he later removed to give to his wife to keep warm in.

Fun: The newlyweds also caught a snap outside the Glassblower pub in Soho as Nicola placed a tender kiss on her beau's cheek as he gave her a piggy-back

Cute: The actress appeared in a playful mood as she blew some kisses to her husband on her Instagram stories

Happy: The billionaire heiress appeared to be loving London life as she made her first visit to the London capital after her wedding last month

The actress appeared in a playful mood as she blew some kisses to her husband on her Instagram stories.

The outing comes after Brooklyn shared a gushing post with his wife on Monday.

The chef, who is the eldest son of David and Victoria Beckham, said he was 'so lucky' to have his wife in the post.

Cute! Brooklyn shared a gushing post with his wife Nicola to Instagram on Monday

The photo was a mirror picture taken by Nicola, with Brooklyn planting a kiss on her neck.

The pair appeared to be topless in the shot, as Nicola sported a complexion highlighting makeup look with a winged eyeliner.

Brooklyn gushed 'Im so lucky to have you' in the caption, while his wife was quick to comment back 'Im so lucky  I love you so much!'

Low-key: The pair appeared to be topless in the shot, as Nicola sported a complexion highlighting makeup look

Loved-up: Brooklyn gushed 'Im so lucky to have you' in the caption, while his wife was quick to comment back 'Im so lucky  I love you so much!'

Solo: Nicola also shared some mirror selfies on her own to Instagram, as her blonde tresses were left to fall freely

The heiress also took to her own feed to share pictures from the same photoshoot moment, as another showed Brooklyn resting his chin on her shoulder.

She then showed off her dazzling new wedding ring in some solo snaps, which features an oval cut - finished with a yellow gold band.

Raising her hand to her face to show off the eye-wateringly glitzy ring, Nicola simply captioned the post: 'The ring'.

Rock! She showed off her massive new wedding ring in the snaps, holding her hand up to her face

Gleaming: Raising her hand to her face to show off the eye-wateringly glitzy ring, Nicola simply captioned the post: 'The ring'

Her blonde tresses fell freely in the pictures, as she seemed to be sporting some shorter bangs around the front.

The new ring is seemingly a replacement for the 350k engagement ring that Brooklyn gifted her back in 2020, which had an emerald cut.

The couple have been sharing a host of snaps to their respective social medias as they settle in to married life.

They tied the knot in a luxe ceremony at Nicola's sprawling family estate in Palm Beach, Florida - which reportedly cost around $3million.
Experts speak highly of China's human rights progress

Xinhua) 09:51, May 12, 2022

VIENNA, May 11 (Xinhua) -- Experts attending an international human rights seminar on Tuesday spoke highly of China's human rights development and highlighted China's efforts in promoting international dialogue and cooperation on human rights issues.

The 2022 China-Europe Seminar on Human Rights was held both online and offline on Tuesday, with separate venues in the Austrian capital of Vienna and the central Chinese city of Wuhan.

More than 100 human rights scholars, officials and representatives from international organizations attended the seminar, themed "Science and Technology and Human Rights."

Heinz Fischer, former Austrian president and president of the Austria-China Friendship Association (ACFA), told Xinhua on the sidelines of the seminar that he had visited China many times since the 1970s and witnessed the country's rapid socio-economic development and progress in human rights cause.

Fischer said China has transformed into a "highly industrialized" and "high-tech" country in decades.

"This is incomparable. This is very impressive," he added.

Hannes Fellner, a linguistics professor at the University of Vienna, said that China's poverty alleviation campaign, which lifted "hundreds of millions of people in China out of poverty," is "one of the greatest human rights feats in the history of humankind."

China has also succeeded in advancing the human rights cause with the help of science and technology, Fellner added.

Delegates at the seminar also applauded the seminar as an important platform to promote dialogue and mutual understanding on human rights issues between China and Europe.

Although China and Europe may have different approaches to human rights, "it is necessary to exchange opinions in such a seminar with high-ranking participants," said Fischer.

Gerd Kaminski, standing vice president of the ACFA, said the seminar helps promote dialogue on an equal basis and improve mutual understanding.

Chinese Ambassador to Austria Li Xiaosi told Xinhua that China and Europe have both attached great importance to the seminar since its inauguration in 2015.

Experts, scholars and officials from both sides have participated actively in the event and engaged in constructive dialogue to find consensus, which is conducive to the joint efforts to promote human rights development, Li said.

The 2022 China-Europe Seminar on Human Rights was co-hosted by the China Society for Human Rights Studies and the ACFA.

(Web editor: Peng Yukai, Liang Jun)


China said Thursday it was ready to "fully support" North Korea in its pandemic prevention efforts after Pyongyang reported its first official COVID-19 case and declared a national emergency.





North Korea, which imposed a rigid blockade of its borders at the start of the pandemic in 2020, had not previously reported any COVID-19 cases.





But samples taken from patients with fevers in Pyongyang "coincided with Omicron BA.2 variant", the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported Thursday, as leader Kim Jong Un and top officials announced they would implement the "maximum emergency epidemic prevention system."





China is North Korea's biggest trade partner and close ally.





"We sympathise with the current (coronavirus) outbreak situation in North Korea," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Thursday at a regular presser.





"As comrades, neighbours and friends, China is ready to provide full support and assistance to North Korea in its fight against the epidemic," Zhao said, without offering details on whether China will send vaccines, medical equipment or aid.





North Korea has so far rejected any kind of vaccine programme  even when offered supplies by the World Health Organization, China and Russia  and has tried to prevent an outbreak by sealing its borders.





Experts say the nation's 25 million people are vulnerable due to the lack of COVID-19 vaccines, and that the country's crumbling health infrastructure would struggle to deal with a major outbreak.





China is one of the biggest donors of COVID-19 vaccines to developing countries, but exports have dropped sharply in recent months as it battles major virus outbreaks in several provinces. (AFP)






Chris Evans was seen shooting scenes for his new action romance movie Ghosted in London on Wednesday.

The American actor, 40, cut a casual figure in dark jeans and a grey T-shirt and an overshirt, which he wore underneath a brown leather jacket.

He completed his ensemble with a sturdy pair of boots and slung a brown bag over one shoulder, while he also pulled a suitcase behind him.

New job: Chris Evans was seen shooting scenes for his new action romance movie Ghosted in London on Wednesday

Chris sported his signature facial hair and styled his dark locks in a slicked back style as he arrived to shoot scenes for Ghosted.

He has been busy working on his new film and was also seen shooting scenes in Tower Bridge on Tuesday.

Also spotted on the set was director of the film Dexter Fletcher, 56, who was joined by his wife Dalia Ibelhauptaite as he set out his vision for the flick.

Ghosted is an upcoming action romance film, in which the Captain America actor stars opposite Ana De Armas, with Adrien Brody and Amy Sedaris filling out the rest of the cast.

Looking good: The actor, 40, cut a casual figure in dark jeans and a grey T-shirt and a shirt, which he wore underneath a brown leather jacket

Luggage: He completed his ensemble with a sturdy pair of brown boots and slung a brown leather bag over one shoulder, while he also pulled a suitcase behind him

Last Wednesday, Chris and Ana, 34, were seen filming the movie across the pond in Washington, DC.

Their sizzling new scene saw the smouldering movie stars leaning toward each other and locking lips on a pier during a picturesque sunset.

The heartthrob appeared to be in bright spirits between takes, laughing uproariously as Ana gazed out to sea.

Principal photography began on the project this Valentine's Day, which is slated to be released on Apple TV+ at a currently unannounced date.

Filming: Chris sported his signature facial hair and styled his dark locks in a slicked back style as he arrived to shoot scenes for Ghosted

Schedule: He has been busy working on his new film and was also seen shooting scenes in Tower Bridge on Tuesday

Ana and Chris starred together in 2019's Knives Out and will also be seen alongside each other in the upcoming Netflix action-thriller The Gray Man.

The Gray Man is based on the 2009 novel of the same name by Mark Greaney, with the adaptation setting an expensive new record for the streaming service.

The film is reported to have a budget of $200million, which makes it the most expensive feature film that Netflix ever made.

The Gray Man centres on Court Gentry (Ryan Gosling), a CIA black-ops mercenary who unwittingly uncovers some of the agency's deepest and darkest secrets.

Good spirits: Chris seemed to be on top form as he chatted with his cast members and crew members on the set of Ghosted

Project: Ghosted is an upcoming action romance film, in which the Captain America actor stars opposite Ana De Armas, with Adrien Brody and Amy Sedaris filling out the rest of the cast

Chris plays Lloyd Hansen, an, 'unhinged former colleague' of Gentry who leads the international manhunt to kill him.

The star-studded cast includes Ana, Rege-Jean Page, Wagner Moura, Jessica Henwick, Billy Bob Thornton and Alfre Woodard.

Chris has reunited with directors Anthony and Joe Russo on The Grey Man, who directed them in 2014's Captain America; The Winter Soldier, 2016's Captain America: Civil War, 2018's Avengers: Infinity War and 2019's Avengers: Endgame.

Venture: Filming began on the project this Valentine's Day, which is slated to be released on Apple TV+ at a currently unannounced date

Busy: The American star was seen pulling a suitcase behind him as he arrived to film scenes in London

The Russo Brothers direct from a screenplay by their Marvel collaborators Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, along with Anna Waterhouse and Joe Shrapnel.

The Russo's will also produce alongside Mike Larocca, Chris Castaldi, Palek Patel and Joe Roth, with Markus and McFeely among the many executive producers.

Netflix will give the film a limited theatrical release on July 15, before arriving on the streaming service July 22.
Even with her trademark black sunglasses on, Dame Anna Wintour has one of the most recognisable faces in the world.

But that didn't prevent her being asked to provide photo identification to gain entry to a theatre show in New York.

And, judging by her expression, the American Vogue editor-in-chief was not impressed.

Oh no: Even with her trademark black sunglasses on, Dame Anna Wintour has one of the most recognisable faces in the world, but that didn't prevent her being asked to provide photo identification to gain entry to a theatre show in New York

'It did seem to be a case of 'Don't you known who I am?' remarks one observer.

Dame Anna, 72, who is said to have inspired Meryl Streep's fearsome editor in hit film The Devil Wears Prada, had to present proof of Covid vaccination in order to enter the venue.

While she had no problem showing her vaccine card, a health compliance worker then asked for photo ID, a protocol for all attendees.

Unimpressed: And, judging by her expression, the American Vogue editor-in-chief was not impressed

Reaction: 'It did seem to be a case of 'Don't you known who I am?' remarks one observer

A video recording of the incident shows a publicist quickly jumping in to let the health worker know it was OK for Wintour to be let in without proof of ID.

Anna was out to see the play Oh God, A Show About Abortion on its opening night, at the Cherry Lane Theatre.

Alison Leiby's one-woman play has been lauded by critics for its powerful message, relatability and timely relevance to the current political situation.

Rules: Dame Anna, 72, who is said to have inspired Meryl Streep's fearsome editor in hit film The Devil Wears Prada, had to present proof of Covid vaccination in order to enter the venue

Pandemic: While she had no problem showing her vaccine card, a health compliance worker then asked for photo ID, a protocol for all attendees

The show's run comes as the US Supreme Court looks set to overturn a landmark ruling that effectively legalised abortions across America, handing the power to decide whether or not to permit the procedure back to individual states.

A draft legal opinion, which was leaked to Politico, reveals five Republican-nominated judges - a majority of the court's nine judges - are in agreement on the issue which would be enough to force a change in the law  though their decision is not final until the ruling is officially published.

Partisan fighting over the issue began almost immediately after the leak, with Democrats vowing to defend abortion rights while Republican lawmakers demanded a probe into the leak as they denounced it as an attempt to 'intimidate' the justices into changing their minds.

Pulling strings: A video recording of the incident shows a publicist quickly jumping in to let the health worker know it was OK for Wintour to be let in without proof of ID

Important topic: Anna was out to see the play 'Oh God, A Show About Abortion' on its opening night, at the Cherry Lane Theatre

Neal Katyal, a former acting US Solicitor General under former President Barack Obama, said: 'This is the biggest step back for women in decades.

'It will have proven consequences. You can have now a flat ban on abortion in any state.'

In the leaked document, conservative Justice Samuel Alito writes that Roe v Wade - the 1973 Supreme Court ruling which found that excessive state regulation of abortion is unconstitutional - was 'egregiously wrong from the start' and 'must be overruled'.
She married her multi-millionaire Hollywood agent husband Patrick in May last year.

And on Thursday, Pia Whitesell (nee Miller) revealed the couple's family plans during an Instagram Q&A with fans.

The Chilean-born Australian model and actress, who is already a mother of two, was asked if she's planning to have a baby with Patrick, 57.

Baby on the brain? Pia Whitesell revealed whether she's planning on having a baby with new multi-millionaire husband Patrick during an Instagram Q&A on Wednesday

Pia revealed that their 'baby' is their new adopted rescue puppy Princeton.

'Will you have another baby?' Pia was asked.

She shared a picture of herself with the adorably cute Princeton and quipped: 'Got one'.

Cheeky: Pia revealed that their 'baby' is their new adopted rescue puppy Princeton

Puppy love: She also shared another sweet picture of Princeton napping in her arms when a fan asked how her day was going

She also shared another sweet picture of Princeton napping in her arms when a fan asked how her day was going.

'Soooo goood,' Pia wrote back.

Pia married her husband Patrick in May last year.

Newlywed: Pia married her husband Patrick in May last year

Her boys: She travelled abroad with her sons, Isaiah, 18, and Lennox, 13, and has been settling into life in Los Angeles. She welcomed son Isaiah when she was 19, with his father's identity being kept under wraps, and welcomed Lennox with ex-husband and AFL star Brad Miller

She permanently relocated from Sydney to the US in September.

Pia travelled abroad with her sons, Isaiah, 18, and Lennox, 13, and has been settling into life in Los Angeles.

She welcomed son Isaiah when she was 19, with his father's identity being kept under wraps, and welcomed Lennox with ex-husband and AFL star Brad Miller.

Patrick, the CEO of Hollywood talent agency WME, is worth an estimated US$440million (AU$630million).

Patrick's clients include Ben Affleck, Christian Bale, Matt Damon, Michelle Williams, Idris Elba, Jake Gyllenhaal, Hugh Jackman, John Krasinski, Jude Law, Ryan Reynolds and Denzel Washington.
DNA Family Secrets

Rating:

Madeleine McCann: The Case Against Christian B

Rating:

Do we have the right to dig up our parents' long-buried secrets? Gene testing and DNA databases now make it possible for anyone to discover their unknown relatives.

Stacey Dooley didn't stop to ask, on DNA Family Secrets (BBC2), whether this was fair to past generations who went to their graves believing their private lives would stay private.

The presenter took it for granted that nothing overrides our urge to know 'who we are'  and whether we have half-brothers or half- sisters who were never mentioned.

Not so long ago, an indignant mother or father could tell children asking awkward questions to mind their own business.

But there's no such thing as personal privacy now.

It seems anyone is entitled to find out anything they want  however uncomfortable or embarrassing that might be for others.

Stacey Dooley didn't stop to ask, on DNA Family Secrets, whether it was fair to past generations to dig up secrets

In Bath, 62-year-old Janet was consumed with curiosity about a conversation she overheard at a party half a century ago.

A churlish guest, perhaps half-cut, started asking her Dad, a former prisoner-of-war, about the daughter he'd left behind in Austria.

Janet never forgot the conversation, but when she tried to talk to her mother about it, many years later, she was met with silence.

That same silence was the only answer for Richard, 52, who was brought up in Liverpool by his unmarried mum and her parents.

'I never got a satisfactory answer,' he said, when asking about his father.

Stacey's researchers tracked down both Janet's half-sister and Richard's father  plus four half-siblings  by comparing DNA matches from across Europe.

In Austria, 76-year-old Renate was thrilled to meet Janet and her other sister, Liz.

She had wondered all her life who her father could have been, she said.

With all three of them in floods of happy tears, Renate declared: 'This is the beginning of a new family.'

But we didn't meet Richard's long-lost father, and a caption at the end of the show revealed that the two have yet to speak.

DNA evidence might prove the best hope for police ever to discover what happened to Madeleine McCann

Stacey is throwing hand-grenades into ponds to see what floats to the surface.

The third bit of detective work seemed more harmless, unravelling a few threads of the mixed-race ancestry of Glen, 47, in Oxford.

It seems the dad he never knew came from Trinidad, which at least gives him and his own children an excuse for a jolly good Caribbean holiday.

DNA evidence might prove the best hope for police ever to discover what happened to British child Madeleine McCann, abducted from an Algarve holiday resort 15 years ago.

But if such proof exists, it appears it hasn't yet been found.

Instead, German investigators are amassing circumstantial evidence to implicate a known paedophile who was in the area at the time, Christian Brueckner.

In this paper, tireless sleuth and former policeman Mark Williams-Thomas has already set out his reasons for believing Brueckner cannot be the culprit.

Madeleine McCann: The Case Against Christian B (C5) revealed how he reached that conclusion.

When he turned up at the gates of a house in Portugal to interview one potential witness, the man threw a knife at him before chasing him and his producer, brandishing a shovel.

At every turn, people who knew Brueckner testified that he is a vile man.

But key pieces of the puzzle, such as the mobile phone evidence that police hoped would condemn him, stubbornly failed to fit.

The mystery of Madeleine McCann might be one secret that is never solved.
Actress Jodi Gordon has been pictured for the first time since completing a 30-day recovery program at an exclusive clinic in Sydney.

The former soap star, 37, reunited with her eight-year-old daughter, Aleeia, after leaving the treatment centre on Wednesday.

Her first stop after checking out of the facility was a nearby McDonald's, where she had lunch with Aleeia and her mother, Bronwyn.

Back on track: Jodi Gordon has been pictured for the first time since completing a 30-day recovery program at an exclusive clinic in Sydney. The former soap star, 37, stopped by McDonald's for lunch with her eight-year-old daughter, Aleeia, and her mother, Bronwyn

Going home: She reunited with her daughter after leaving the treatment centre on Wednesday

Gordon, known for her roles in Neighbours and Home and Away, dressed casually in black pants, a white T-shirt and beige blazer as she dined outside with her family.

She had just completed an 'immersion therapy' program in the wake of her bitter break-up with prominent investment banker Sebastian Blackler.

In the aftermath of their split, she checked into The Sydney Retreat in Stanmore, where clients are offered a '30-day recovery program' for $8,800.

While she was staying at the clinic, a friend of Gordon's told Daily Mail Australia of her situation: 'Jodi is in a sensitive state.'

Laid-back: Gordon, known for her roles in Neighbours and Home and Away, dressed casually in black pants, a white T-shirt and beige blazer as she dined outside with her family

Family time: She had just completed an 'immersion therapy' program in the wake of her bitter break-up with prominent investment banker Sebastian Blackler

The Sydney Retreat expects 'respect and consideration' from its 'guests', who are housed in mostly shared rooms.

It advises on its website that it 'is not medical treatment', not covered by health insurance or Medicare, and residents must 'remain within the campus at all times', and 'leave... mobile phone and internet devices at home'.

At Windsor Local Court last month, Magistrate Leanne Robinson ordered that Gordon and Blackler, her boyfriend of 18 months, not contact each other until April 2024.

Therapy: In the aftermath of their split, she had checked into The Sydney Retreat in Stanmore, where clients are offered a '30-day recovery program' for $8,800

'Sensitive state': While she was staying at the clinic, a friend of Gordon's told Daily Mail Australia of her situation: 'Jodi is in a sensitive state'

Another condition of the AVOs taken out by police against the couple - and consented to by their lawyers without admissions - forbids them from stalking, harassing or assaulting one another.

Blackler's lawyer Michael Bowe told Daily Mail Australia the volatile romance between the pair was now over.

Neither Gordon nor Blackler, a 31-year-old Sydney wealth management firm portfolio manager, appeared in court last month.

The AVOs relate to an alleged altercation on April 3 in far north-western Sydney.

NSW Police were called to a bed and breakfast on the Sunday morning and arrested Blackler but later released him without charge.

Treatment program: The Sydney Retreat expects 'respect and consideration' from its 'guests', who are housed in mostly shared rooms

Court documents reportedly said when police asked Blackler about bruising and swelling to his left eye, he allegedly claimed his girlfriend 'hit him with a wine bottle', but declined to make a formal statement.

The AVO documents, obtained by The Australian newspaper, also said police found bruising on Ms Gordon's left eye and bottom lip, and three lumps on her forehead, but believed the injuries were days old.

Documents tendered to the court also alleged police 'fear domestic assaults are occurring between the parties with Gordon's consumption of intoxicating liquor exacerbating the violence'.

'There is clearly domestic violence occurring between the parties [but they] are reluctant to disclose how the injuries have been sustained,' the documents said.

Officers took out a restraining order against Gordon on behalf of Blackler, who was also issued with an AVO against the actress over the same alleged incident.

Police would not provide a statement when contacted by Daily Mail Australia.

The former couple had previously broken up in May 2021, but are understood to have rekindled their relationship in February this year after the expiry of an earlier AVO.

Court matter: At Windsor Local Court last month, Magistrate Leanne Robinson ordered that Gordon and Blackler, her boyfriend of 18 months, not contact each other until April 2024

Restraining orders: Another condition of the AVOs taken out by police against the couple forbids them from stalking, harassing or assaulting one another. The AVOs relate to an alleged altercation on April 3 in far north-western Sydney

This wasn't the first time police had taken out an AVO against Blackler on Gordon's behalf.

Police were called to Gordon's Double Bay apartment on November 27, 2020, over reports of an alleged domestic violence incident.

Officers subsequently took out an interim AVO to prevent Blackler from assaulting, threatening, stalking, harassing or intimidating Gordon

The following month, a court order was issued banning Blackler from assaulting or threatening, stalking, harassing or intimidating Gordon, but that expired at the end of 2021, after which they reconciled.

Gordon, who played Martha MacKenzie on Home and Away from 2005 to 2010, shares daughter Aleeia with her ex-husband, retired NRL star Braith Anasta.

The former couple married in 2012, welcomed their daughter in 2014, and separated a year later.

Over: The former couple had previously broken up in May 2021, but are understood to have rekindled their relationship in February this year after the expiry of an earlier AVO

Ups and down: This wasn't the first time police had taken out an AVO against Blackler on Gordon's behalf
He achieved global fame as the bearded warrior Jon Snow on Game Of Thrones.

But Kit Harington was virtually unrecognizable as he went clean shaven while accompanying his wife Rose Leslie to a New York event this Wednesday.

The couple were attending the premiere of the new HBO series The Time Traveler's Wife, in which Rose, 35, plays the title character.

Sizzling sensations: Kit Harington was virtually unrecognizable as he went clean shaven while accompanying his wife Rose Leslie to a New York event this Wednesday

Based on a novel by Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife stars rose as a sculptor married to a librarian who has a sci-fi genetic disorder.

His illness causes him to leap randomly backwards and forwards in time, at instances he can neither predict nor control.

Meanwhile his wife struggles to cope with his travels, which present problems not only because he vanishes for unpredictable stretches of time but also because whenever she gets pregnant the fetus appears to inherit his disorder.

The novel was previously adapted into a 2009 film that starred Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana in the two lead roles.s

Superstar: Kit achieved global fame as the bearded warrior Jon Snow on Game Of Thrones

Incoming: Rose and her co-star Theo James are pictured on The Time Traveler's Wife, which is scheduled to premiere on HBO on May 15

On the town: The couple were attending the premiere of the new HBO series The Time Traveler's Wife, in which Rose, 35, plays the title character

Looking fab: Rose, who hails from Aberdeen, wore her luxurious deep red locks down in waves for the premiere and complemented her hair color with a slick of scarlet lipstick

Dynamic duo: As the event rolled along she could be seen palling around with her dashing co-star Theo James, who plays her time-traveling husband

Rose, who hails from Aberdeen, wore her luxurious deep red locks down in waves for the premiere and complemented her hair color with a slick of scarlet lipstick.

She opted for a head-to-toe black ensemble that was cinched in to emphasize her enviable hourglass frame as she strode up the red carpet.

As the event rolled along she could be seen palling around with her dashing co-star Theo James, who plays her time-traveling husband.

Theo flashed his winning smile as he posed up in a silver suit, throwing in a casual touch by opting for an untucked polo shirt in lieu of a dress shirt.

Heartthrob: Theo flashed his winning smile as he posed up in a silver suit, throwing in a casual touch by opting for an untucked polo shirt in lieu of a dress shirt

Who's who: Based on a novel by Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife stars rose as a sculptor married to a librarian who has a sci-fi genetic disorder

Date night: The English heartthrob attended the premiere on the arm of his wife Ruth Kearney, whom he married the same year Rose tied the knot with Kit

Quartet: As the two leads Theo and Rose swanned about the premiere of their new show, they sidled up to their co-stars Natasha Lopez and Desmin Borges for a group shot

The English heartthrob attended the premiere on the arm of his wife Ruth Kearney, whom he married the same year Rose tied the knot with Kit.

As the two leads Theo and Rose swanned about the premiere of their new show, they sidled up to their co-stars Natasha Lopez and Desmin Borges for a group shot.

Natasha arrived at the fete in an ornate gown that featured a black lace sleeveless top but flared out in a skirt exploding with frills.

Glittering evening: Natasha arrived at the fete in an ornate gown exploding with frills, while Desmin buttoned a sky blue blazer over a darker blue polo-shirt

So sweet: Rose also posed for a heartwarming picture with child actresses Caitlin Shorey and Everleigh McDonell, who play younger versions of her character

Young thespian: Jason David, one of the child actors who plays a younger version of Theo's character, was among the attendees of the premiere as well

Meanwhile Desmin buttoned a sky blue blazer over a darker blue polo-shirt, combining formal and casual attire by clashing yellow sneakers against black slacks.

Rose also posed for a heartwarming picture with child actresses Caitlin Shorey and Everleigh McDonell, who play younger versions of her character.

Jason David, one of the child actors who plays a younger version of Theo's character, was among the attendees of the premiere as well.

Top brass: Coupling creator Steven Moffat, who has adapted The Time Traveler's Wife for television, glowed as he attended the premiere with his wife Sue Vertue

Come together: Sue, Theo, Steven, Rose and Natasha gathered together for a dazzling group shot with executive producer Brian Minchin and the premiere's director David Nutter

Fete: A cavalcade of the show's cast paraded across the red carpet, including Michael Park (left) in a baby blue suit and Taylor Richardson in a bias-cut midnight blue jumpsuit (right)

Coupling creator Steven Moffat, who has adapted The Time Traveler's Wife for television, glowed as he attended the premiere with his wife Sue Vertue.

Sue, Theo, Steven, Rose and Natasha gathered together for a dazzling group shot with executive producer Brian Minchin and the premiere's director David Nutter.

A cavalcade of the show's cast paraded across the red carpet, including Michael Park in a baby blue suit and Taylor Richardson in a bias-cut midnight blue jumpsuit.

Chelsea Frei, another actress on the show, radiated Old Hollywood glamour in a shimmering aquamarine gown with a slit up the side.

Glowing: Chelsea Frei, another actress on the show, radiated Old Hollywood glamour in a shimmering aquamarine gown with a slit up the side

Here and there: Peter Graham (left) teamed a simple burgundy suit with a white dress shirt and no tie, while Lily Chee (right) despite not being at the show could be spotted at the premiere

Smiling ear to ear: Kate Siegel exuded a similar air of throwback style, throwing a feather-trimmed black jacket over her shoulders while modeling a shining black floor-length frock

Kate Siegel exuded a similar air of throwback style, throwing a feather-trimmed black jacket over her shoulders while modeling a shining black floor-length frock.

Peter Graham teamed a simple burgundy suit with a white dress shirt and no tie, while Lily Chee despite not being at the show could be spotted at the premiere.

Josh Stamberg went for double-denim, putting on an acid wash jean suit and a white dress shirt with no tie and his top button beguilingly undone.
Newly engaged Married At First Sight couple Martha Kalifatidis and Michael Brunelli have finally reunited in London, after spending several weeks apart.

The loved-up pair, who plan to spend a few months working in Europe after being forced to leave their Sydney home due to mould issues, couldn't keep their hands off each other as they finally met up on Wednesday at Martha's swanky hotel.

Martha, 34, who was clad in a robe, filmed her racy reunion with Michael, 31, for Instagram as they hugged and kissed each other in an elevator.

'We're back': Newly engaged Married At First Sight couple Martha Kalifatidis and Michael Brunelli have finally reunited in London, after spending several weeks apart

'We're back,' Martha captioned the clip, which she filmed as Michael embraced her.

Before reuniting with Michael, Martha said she was 'nervous' to see her fiance again.

'He just arrived, he's upstairs and I'm just too nervous to go up and see him because it's been so long,' Martha wrote to her 641,000 followers.

Change of scenery: The loved-up pair plan to spend a few months working in Europe after being forced to leave their Sydney home due to mould issues

Nervous: Before reuniting with Michael, Martha said she was 'nervous' to see her fiance again

Martha has just arrived in London, after spending a few weeks in Italy for work.

The couple recently revealed they were packing up their North Bondi home and heading off to Europe for an extended working holiday.

Martha jetted off early, leaving Michael back in Bondi to do the heavily lifting before he eventually caught up with her in England.

Euro trip! Martha has just arrived in London, after spending a few weeks in Italy for work

Michael and Martha, who met on Married At First Sight in 2019, plan to spend at least two months in Europe this year to pursue business opportunities.

Last week, Martha called out her personal trainer fiance for causing a media frenzy by announcing they were 'moving' to Europe.

Michael had implied it was a semi-permanent move when he addressed fans on Instagram on April 26.

Calling him out: Michael and Martha, who met on Married At First Sight in 2019, plan to spend at least two months in Europe this year to pursue business opportunities

Speaking to The Kyle and Jackie O Show from Italy, Martha clarified they were not leaving Australia for good, and called Michael an 'idiot' for suggesting otherwise.

'No way, we are not moving overseas. Michael is such an idiot and I cannot believe he told everyone that,' she told hosts Kyle Sandilands and Jackie 'O' Henderson.

'He is just dense. He cannot be helped.'

Martha then explained what was actually going on.

She said there had been a 'mould issue' at their home in Bondi Beach, which meant they had to move all of their belongings into storage.

This housing problem coincided with Martha's planned trip to Italy with her business partner to attend the Cosmoprof beauty expo.

Michael had also booked a trip to the UK at about the same time to meet developers of his Tru Fit workout app.

Because they both had European trips planned, Martha decided, 'Why don't we just go over and stay [there] for a little bit because the timing's perfect?'
Uma Thurman and her mini-me daughter Maya Hawke were spotted on set of The Kill Room on Wednesday afternoon in New Jersey.

Thurman, 52, strolled around in a chic striped tunic with pages of the script in hand, while Maya, 23, relaxed on set in full costume as she waited for her next scene.

The Kill Room is centered on an assassin who becomes an overnight avant-garde star as a result of their involvement in a money-laundering scheme.

Mother-daughter duo: Uma Thurman and her mini-me daughter Maya Hawke were spotted on set of their upcoming film The Kill Room on Wednesday afternoon in New Jersey; The Kill Room is centered on an assassin who becomes an overnight avant-garde star as a result of their involvement in a money-laundering scheme

Thurman - who is set to play an art dealer in the forthcoming feature - styled her blouse with a loosely tied black-and-white necktie and a pair of black skinny jeans.

The Pulp Fiction actress walked along the sidewalk in a pair of black loafers before slipping into a pair of kitten heels.

Thurman covered up her golden hair with a bleached blonde wig with dark roots, which was worn down and styled in textured waves.

A pair of crystal earrings hung from her ears and she fastened a long, gold pendant chain around her neck.

Hot set: Thurman, 52, strolled around in a chic striped tunic with pages of the script in hand, while Maya, 23, fueled up on coffee beside her

Quality time: Before getting in front of the cameras, Thurman was seen spending time with her daughter, who she shares with ex-husband Ethan Hawke, 51

As for makeup, the model sported a soft brown smokey eyeshadow look and a pinky nude lip.

Before getting in front of the cameras, Thurman was seen spending time with her daughter, who she shares with ex-husband Ethan Hawke, 51.

She and the Training Day star also share son Levon, 20.

Costume: Thurman - who is set to play an art dealer in the forthcoming feature - styled her blouse with a loosely tied black-and-white necktie and a pair of black skinny jeans

Transformed: Thurman covered up her golden hair with a bleached blonde wig with dark roots, which was worn down and styled in textured waves. As for makeup, the model sported a soft brown smokey eyeshadow look and a pinky nude lip

Last-minute switch: The Pulp Fiction actress walked along the sidewalk in a pair of black loafers before slipping into a pair of kitten heels

Decked out: A pair of crystal earrings hung from her ears and she fastened a long, gold pendant chain around her neck

Thurman walked beside Maya with a hand on her back as they chatted and sipped on their respective refreshments.

Thurman hydrated with water, while Maya got her caffeine fix with an iced latte.

Maya cut a quirky figure for the day's shoot in an army green jumpsuit decked out with various patches on the chest and sleeves.

Quirky: Maya cut a quirky figure for the day's shoot in an army green jumpsuit decked out with various patches on the chest and sleeves

Trendy: She pounded the pavement in a pair of platform oxford shoes

Her auburn hair was styled in space buns with her bangs pinned out of her face.

The Stranger Things actress accessorized with a pair of funky earrings and pounded the pavement in a pair of platform oxford shoes.

The mother-daughter duo were joined on set by Magic Mike star Joe Manganiello, who showed off his muscles in a charcoal grey tee and a pair of skinny jeans.

The 45-year-old actor layered up the look with a black denim jacket and threw on some black lace-up shoes.

Cool girl: Her auburn hair was styled in space buns with her bangs pinned out of her face. The Stranger Things actress accessorized with a pair of funky earrings

Three's NOT a crowd! The mother-daughter duo were joined on set by Magic Mike star Joe Manganiello

In between takes, Joe was spotted cuddling his adorable Chihuahua Bubbles, who was wearing a fuzzy black dog shirt.

Joe appeared to be shooting a majority of his scenes with Thurman, but he was captured in a shot with Maya later in the day.

Development on The Kill Room was initially revealed to the public by The Hollywood Reporter this past April.

Thurman is set to reunite with her Pulp Fiction co-star Samuel L. Jackson on the project, which has not yet been given a release date.

Dog dad: In between takes, Joe was spotted cuddling his adorable Chihuahua Bubbles, who was wearing a fuzzy black dog shirt

Muscular: He showed off his muscles in a charcoal grey tee and a pair of skinny jeans

Thurman is set to portray an art dealer, while Jackson will play a crime boss. Joe was added to the cast last month, and his role is currently unknown.

Director Nicol Paone gave a statement to the media outlet where he called the script 'incredible' and expressed his excitement about being able to work with the movie's stars.

Getting to make The Kill Room...with Uma Thurman and Samuel L. Jackson is beyond my wildest dreams,' he said.

He added: 'Every moment they're onscreen, they are both enviable and eye-catching. I am eternally grateful to both of them for saying yes.'

And action! Joe appeared to be shooting a majority of his scenes with Thurman, but he was captured in a shot with Maya later in the day

In production: Development on The Kill Room was initially revealed to the public by The Hollywood Reporter this past April

Producers Jordan Yale Levine and Jordan Beckerman also expressed that 'the combination of Thurman and Jackson for this project is a dream come true.'

The pair then spoke about their confidence in the director's ability to create a spectacular movie.

'We are certain that Nicol is going to deliver a special film, and one that strikes the perfect balance between dark humor and edge-of-your-seat thrills,' they stated.

Production on the movie commenced earlier this year, with New Jersey and New York serving as filming locations.
They revealed earlier this week that that their upcoming seventh child would be a girl.

But Alec Baldwin and his pregnant wife Hilaria took some time off from family matters on Wednesday when they visited the Gagosian gallery in New York City.

The 64-year-old actor and his 38-year-old wife both looked blissful as they enjoyed a day to themselves with some colorful culture.

Culture trip: Alec Baldwin, 64, and his wife Hilaria, 38, enjoyed a rare day away from the kids as they visited a Takashi Murakami exhibit at Gagosian gallery in New York City on Wednesday

Alex was dressed casually for the gallery visit with a black jacket over an untucked grayblue shirt and dark pants.

He had on a set of brown loafers and had his salt-and-pepper hair swept back.

Hilaria rocked a casualchic look with a gray jumpsuit that was tied around her midriff to accentuate her burgeoning tummy.

She elevated her stature in striking beige open-toe heels, and she wore her highlighted brunette locks with delicate waves and a middle part.

Both brought along masks to slow the spread of the coronavirus, but Hilaria kept hers on for the photo while her husband pulled his down.

The two stood in front of a wall of Murakami artworks featuring colorful pixelated paintings featuring flowers with playful expressions.

In vogue: Murakami is known for cartoon-like artwork that blends pop art with more highbrow inspirations; pictured in 2019 in Paris

On the town: Alec wore a casual black jacket while Hilaria had a casualchic gray jumpsuit. She joked that they brought 'only one child... the one in the belly'

The exhibit, titled An Arrow through History, runs at Gagosian through June 25, though a virtual version of the show can be experienced by those who can't make it in person via the gallery's website.

The exhibit features a variety of NFT-related works, which appears to have been poorly timed, as NFT values and related cryptocurrencies have lately been cratering.

Murakami is known for his cartoonish artwork that blends pop art with highbrow art. His works are popular among celebrities, and he designed the cover artwork for Kanye West's hit 2007 album Graduation.

Earlier in the day, Hilaria shared that she and Alec were on a 'romantic spring walk with only one child... The one in the belly.'

She showed off a lovely soft smile while snapping the selfie, as her husband flashed a wider grin behind her.

Baby on board: Their relaxing day in the city came after they revealed earlier this week that they were expecting a baby girl

Their relaxing day in the city came after they revealed earlier this week that they were expecting a baby girl.

Hilaria revealed the child's sex in a sentimental video she posted to her Instagram account with the words 'I can't to meet you my daughter.'

The Boston-born influencer shared a visual keepsake for the unborn child along with Alec and their six children: daughters Lucia and Carmen Gabriela, eight; and sons Rafael Thomas, six; Leonardo Angel Charles, five; Romeo Alejandro David, three; and Eduardo "Edu" Pao Lucas, one.

Alec and Hilaria announced their 'surprise' baby news in March of this year, five months after his fatal Rust shooting that left Ukrainian cinematographer Halyna Hutchins dead.

'It's always been both fun and meaningful for me to find out what is the sex of my baby, yet, as I grow and learn, I want to do it a bit differently this time around,' Hilaria wrote in the caption.

'What will make our baby a loving, whole person? What matters? What will make them feel seen, free, and proud?'

Big news: Hilaria vowed to provide as good a life as we can' for their baby in her caption

She continued: 'I share with you our family's hopes and wishes, encouragement and advice for our new baby. I feel so much joy, watching these children, who are filled with love and the most simple, kind wisdom.'

'Hearing them share their words is one of my greatest gifts in life. Join us in honoring this whole little independent human, growing inside of me.'

Hilaria alluded to the tough times they've faced as a family when she announced their baby news in March, referring to their unborn child as a 'bright spot in their lives'.

'After many ups and downs over the past few years, we have an exciting up and a huge surprise: another Baldwinito is coming this fall,' Hilaria wrote.

Hilaria, who suffered two miscarriages before welcoming her fifth child, Edu, admitted that she didn't think anymore children were in her future, explaining that the news of her latest pregnancy came as something of a 'surprise' for the family.

It is not yet clear if their unborn daughter will follow the family tradition of being given a Spanish name, after Hilaria was accused of faking having Spanish roots in December 2020.
Ed Kavalee has spoken of how his biological father abandoned him as a child.

Kavalee's father, businessman Charles Keith Hyland, was 65 years old when he was born and refused to be involved in his son's life.

The comedian and radio host, 42, told Men's Health he never met his dad, who moved to Asia when he was young and made a fortune repurposing munitions factories as duck feather manufacturing hubs.

Candid: Ed Kavalee has spoken of how his biological father abandoned him as a child

The 2Day FM presenter also recalled the moment he learned his father had died.

'I knew he died because I was 11 years old and we were living at my aunty's. She came down to breakfast, put a Daily Telegraph in front of me and said, "Your father has died. Here's a photograph of him and here is a story about him,"' he said.

'That was the first and last time I ever knew of him.'

Distant: Kavalee's father, Charles Keith Hyland, was 65 when he was born and refused to be involved in his son's life. (Pictured Kavalee with his wife, Tiffiny Hall, and their son, Arnold)

Kavalee previously said he never felt his father's absence because his mother did 'an amazing job' as a single parent.

He also revealed Hyland was born in 1914 and there was a significant age gap between his father and mother.

'[He was born] in 1914 and I was born in 1979 which means he was 65 when I was born, which makes him an older parent,' Kavalee recalled during a radio interview.

Estranged: The comedian and radio host, 42, told Men's Health he never met his dad, who moved to Asia when he was a child and made a fortune repurposing munitions factories as duck feather manufacturing hubs. (Pictured in Melbourne on October 11, 2019)

'It took a fair amount of court cases for him to admit it, though.'

According to Kavalee, his father wouldn't acknowledge him until there was a paternity test that proved they were related.

He concluded by saying that Hyland 'never paid a cent' towards his upbringing and he would always remain indebted to his mother.
Her world came crashing down last year when she was filmed snorting a line of white powder off a cheap Kmart plate during one of Melbourne's six Covid lockdowns.

But Nadia Bartel has well and truly moved on from the scandal.

The former WAG-turned-fashion designer celebrated her 37th birthday in style on Wednesday night, ahead of her big Australian Fashion Week debut with her successful clothing label Henne.

37 and thriving! Nadia Bartel shows off her sensational figure in a revealing outfit as she celebrate her birthday and Fashion Week debut... following white powder scandal

The mother-of-two looked sensational in a Christopher Esber black backless crop top teamed with a pair of Dion Lee trousers and strappy stilettos by cult Los Angeles brand, Femme.

Nadia flaunted her sensational figure and flawless tan in the ensemble as she headed out to dinner in Sydney.

She wore her bayalage locks in a messy bedhead style and rocked a smokey eye and nude lip combo for makeup.

Stylish: The mother-of-two looked sensational in a Christopher Esber black backless crop top teamed with a pair of Dion Lee trousers and strappy stilettos by cult Los Angeles brand, Femme

Earlier in the day, Nadia attended the shows at Afterpay Australian Fashion Week before debuting her own fashion label at the event on Friday.

She dazzled in a white mini skirt and a white oversized T-shirt.

Nadia paired the ensemble with expensive accessories, including a white Bottega Veneta pouch and mint crocodile embossed leather boots by Paris Texas.

Nadia has continued to put her infamous white powder snorting scandal behind her.

Last year, she was filmed snorting a line off a cheap K-mart plate during one of Melbourne's six Covid lockdowns.

Damning footage from the gathering was posted online by her friend and business partner Ellie Pearson posted by mistake.

Nadia issued an apology on Instagram just 24 hours after the video leaked.

Fashionista: Earlier in the day, Nadia attended Afterpay Australian Fashion Week before she debuts her own fashion label at the event. She dazzled in a white mini skirt and a white oversized T-shirt teamed with mint Paris Texas boots

'Hi everyone, I have let you all down by my actions,' she wrote.

'I take full responsibility and I am committed to taking all necessary steps to ensure I make better choices in [the] future.

The ex-wife of Geelong great Jimmy Bartel and three other women were each fined $5,452 for breaking lockdown rules.
Nadia Bartel has fallen victim to a bizarre act of Wikipedia vandalism.

For several months, her Wikipedia page listed her middle name as 'Lorraine' - even though the former AFL WAG doesn't have a middle name.

An anonymous user quietly edited the article on October 25, 2021, to list her full name as 'Nadia Lorraine Bartel (nee Coppolino)'.

How unfortunate! Nadia Bartel has fallen victim to a bizarre act of Wikipedia vandalism

This subtle change went unnoticed until January 12 when another anonymous user - possibly Nadia herself - corrected the article and removed 'Lorraine' from her name.

In the revision history log, the user noted: 'Removed Lorraine as middle name as she has no middle name so that information isn't correct.'

It's unclear why the vandal changed Nadia's name on her Wikipedia page, which had only been created a month earlier, on September 4, 2021.

'Nadia Lorraine Bartel (nee Coppolino)': For several months, her Wikipedia page listed her middle name as 'Lorraine' - even though the former AFL WAG doesn't have a middle name

Edits: An anonymous user quietly edited the article on October 25, 2021, to list her full name as 'Nadia Lorraine Bartel (nee Coppolino)'. This change went unnoticed until January 12 when another anonymous user corrected the article and removed 'Lorraine' from her name

The name Lorraine is of French origin, and isn't a common first name for Italian girls.

Nadia has previously described herself as being 'from a traditional Italian family'.

The vandal may have edited the Wikipedia article to embarrass Nadia because the name Lorraine is considered quite old-fashioned.

Motives: The vandal may have edited the Wikipedia article to embarrass Nadia because the name Lorraine is considered quite old-fashioned

The fashion designer was born Nadia Coppolino, and changed her name to Nadia Bartel when she married AFL player Jimmy Bartel in 2014.

This appears to be the only change she has made to her name.

Last November, Nadia defended her decision to keep her famous ex-husband's surname after their divorce was finalised in August 2021.

Exes: The fashion designer was born Nadia Coppolino, and changed her name to Nadia Bartel when she married AFL player Jimmy Bartel (right) in 2014. This appears to be the only change she has made to her name

She explained her choice after a troll commented on her Instagram: 'Nadia, can you change your surname back, so you are no longer riding on the coattails of Jimmy's successful career?'

'I want the same last name as my children. Can I ask why you have such a problem with it? You don't know me,' she responded, referring to her sons Aston and Henley.

'Who knows what will happen for me in the future, but right now when they are so young it's hard to have a different surname to them.'

Explanation: Last November, Nadia defended her decision to keep her famous ex-husband's surname after their divorce was finalised in August 2021. She explained her choice after a troll asked why she was still 'riding on the coattails of Jimmy's successful career' by keeping Bartel
Katie Holmes looked radiant as she arrived to Balthazar restaurant for a MANGO event in New York City on Wednesday night.

The actress, 43, celebrated the grand opening of the fashion retailer's flagship store on 5th Avenue, alongside the likes of Tommy Dorfman and Annabelle Wallis.

Katie gave a glimpse at her flat midriff in a cropped white sweater top and a pair of high-waisted black trousers.

Radiant: Katie Holmes looked radiant as she arrived to Balthazar restaurant for a MANGO event in New York City on Wednesday night

She layered up her look with a beige linen button-up shirt and slipped her feet into a pair of black platform flip flops.

Her chest-length brunette hair was swept to one side and styled in curls.

Katie had a beige leather purse tucked under her arm as she strolled towards the restaurant's entrance.

The Dawson's Creek actress took to her Instagram Story during the star-studded function to share a snap of the night's curated menu, which featured Mango branding.

Grand opening: The actress, 43, celebrated the grand opening of the fashion retailer's flagship store on 5th Avenue, alongside the likes of Tommy Dorfman and Annabelle Wallis

Laidback aesthetic: Katie gave a glimpse at her flat midriff in a cropped white sweater top and a pair of high-waisted black trousers

Tommy Dorfman rolled up shortly after Katie in gorgeous lime green midi dress with puffed sleeves and sexy cut-outs at the waist.

The actress' shoulder length blonde hair was straightened and she strolled the sidewalk in a pair of gold strappy heels.

Annabelle Wallis also stepped out the evening in bold green look, but the Tudors star opted for a one-shoulder jumpsuit in a vibrant Kelly green shade.

The English actress, 37, paired her jumpsuit with a bright red hand bag that matched her bold scarlet lipstick.

Elegance: Tommy Dorfman rolled up shortly after Katie in gorgeous lime green midi dress with puffed sleeves and sexy cut-outs at the waist

Bold beauty: Annabelle Wallis also stepped out the evening in bold green look, but the Tudors star opted for a one-shoulder jumpsuit in a vibrant Kelly green shade

She also sported a pair of strappy red heels and accessorized with a beaded green bracelet and gold hoop earrings.

Annabelle's blonde hair was parted to one side and flowed down her back and chest in her natural wave pattern.

MANGO describes its clothing as containing the 'essence of Mediterranean style with a contemporary twist.'

The fashion giant was founded in Spain by brothers Isak Andic and Nahman Andic and offers a variety of items for women and men, including bedding, clothing and accessories.
She's a proud mother to one-year-old daughter Grace Warrior, who she shares with husband Chandler Powell.

And Bindi Irwin has shared her best parenting advice after enjoying her first year of motherhood.

'I think every parent should know it's okay if you don't do things exactly by the book. You have to find your own rhythm,' the conservationist, 23, told People magazine.

Advice: Bindi Irwin has shared her best parenting advice as she raises baby daughter Grace with husband Chandler Powell (pictured)

She said she had a 'whole plan' but when Grace was born, 'everything was thrown out the window'.

Bindi went on to say: 'At the end of the day, you know what works for your child.'

Chandler agreed, adding: 'There's a lot of information, opinions and advice that you get, and as a new parent you go and you feel a pressure to try and be the perfect parent, come up with the perfect routine.'

'I think every parent should know it's okay if you don't do things exactly by the book. You have to find your own rhythm,' the conservationist, 23, told People magazine

Bindi and Chandler welcomed their daughter on March 25, 2021, which coincidentally was the couple's first wedding anniversary.

'March 25, 2021. Celebrating the two loves of my life. Happy first wedding anniversary to my sweetheart husband and day of birth to our beautiful daughter,' the proud mum said at the time.

On Sunday, Bindi shared a sweet tribute to her daughter Grace as she celebrated Mother's Day in Australia.

Proud mum: On Sunday, Bindi shared a sweet tribute to her daughter Grace as she celebrated Mother's Day in Australia

The conservationist, 23, posted a photo on Instagram of herself with her baby girl, and wrote: 'Grateful every minute of every day that this beautiful girl chose me to be her mama.'

'Grace Warrior, I'm in awe of your kind heart, thoughtful mind and strong soul. You're going to achieve incredible things in this world, my little love,' she added.

'I'm thankful that I get to walk beside you on your journey. And I'll always be here to hold your hand along the way. I love you.'
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Hilaria Baldwin owned her growing baby bump as she modeled two ultra stylish maternity looks at the grand opening of Unsubscribed's flagship store in New York City on Wednesday.

The 38-year-old yoga instructor attended the star-studded event with her actor husband Alec Baldwin, 64, who placed a tender peck on his wife's head before heading inside.

The couple recently announced that they're expecting their seventh child together amid Alec's ongoing legal woes following the accidental shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of his film Rust last year.

Earlier this week, Hilaria and Alec revealed that they will be welcoming a daughter into their family.

Grand opening Hilaria Baldwin and husband Alec Baldwin attended the star-studded grand opening of Unsubscribed's flagship store in New York City on Wednesday

They already share daughters Lucia and Carmen Gabriela, eight; and sons Rafael Thomas, six; Leonardo Angel Charles, five; Romeo Alejandro David, three; and Eduardo "Edu" Pao Lucas, one.

Hilaria first appeared in a ruffled green maxi dress with spaghetti straps and a flattering V-neckline.

She had on a pair of beige sandals with wooden heels that showed off her ruby red pedicure.

Double take: The 38-year-old yoga instructor owned her growing baby bump as she modeled two ultra stylish maternity looks before even stepping inside the boutique. Hilaria first appeared in a ruffled green maxi dress, before slipping into a mint green jumpsuit

Adorable! Alec placed a tender peck on his wife's head before heading inside

Her highlighted brunette hair looked glamorous as it was swept to one side and styled in voluminous curls.

As for makeup, Hilaria leaned on her natural beauty by rocking black mascara and a glossy nude lipstick shade.

For her second look, the mother-of-seven slipped into a mint green jumpsuit with a ruffled tummy and short sleeves.

The garment perfectly hugged the star's baby bump and the tapered legs showed off her eye-catching heels.

Suave: While in her flowy dress, Hilaria cozied up to Alec just steps away from the store's entrance. The Beetlejuice star looked suave in a navy blue suede jacket layered over a grey blue button-up shirt

Browsing: Once inside the store, Hilaria eagerly made her way towards the racks which were filled with various pieces of neutral toned clothing

She posed for shutterbugs with her arms wrapped around her baby bump and a slight smirk on her face.

While in her flowy dress, Hilaria cozied up to Alec just steps away from the store's entrance.

The Beetlejuice star looked suave in a navy blue suede jacket layered over a grey blue button-up shirt.

He completed the look with some charcoal grey trousers and brown leather loafers.

Sizzling: Also in attendance was actress Minka Kelly, who sizzled in denim button-up shirt layered over a silky mustard toned slip dress

Shopping spree: Clearly loving the clothing brand's new location in the Big Apple, Minka struck a pose before a section of the gold clothing racks. She added height to her petite frame in a pair of brown suede platform heels and toted her essentials in a white purse

Alec's salt and pepper hair was styled in a neat coif and he sported light stubble.

Once inside the store, Hilaria eagerly made her way towards the racks which were filled with various pieces of neutral toned clothing.

Also in attendance was actress Minka Kelly, who sizzled in denim button-up shirt layered over a silky mustard toned slip dress.

The Euphoria star's brunette hair was parted down the middle and worn in loose waves that flowed down her back and chest as she strolled towards the Unsubscribed storefront.

Total pro: She posed with one hand on her hip and delivered a smoldering stare for the camera

She added height to her petite frame in a pair of brown suede platform heels and toted her essentials in a white purse.

Clearly loving the clothing brand's new location in the Big Apple, Minka struck a pose before a section of the gold clothing racks.

She posed with one hand on her hip and delivered a smoldering stare for the camera.

Alec and Hilaria announced their 'surprise' baby news in March of this year, five months after his fatal Rust shooting that left Ukrainian cinematographer Halyna Hutchins dead.

Bad timing: Alec and Hilaria announced their 'surprise' baby news in March this year, five months after his fatal Rust shooting that left Ukrainian cinematographer Halyna Hutchins dead

'It's always been both fun and meaningful for me to find out what is the sex of my baby, yet, as I grow and learn, I want to do it a bit differently this time around,' Hilaria wrote in the caption.

'What will make our baby a loving, whole person? What matters? What will make them feel seen, free, and proud?'

She continued: 'I share with you our family's hopes and wishes, encouragement and advice for our new baby. I feel so much joy, watching these children, who are filled with love and the most simple, kind wisdom.'

'Hearing them share their words is one of my greatest gifts in life. Join us in honoring this whole little independent human, growing inside of me.'

Baby on board: They recently revealed earlier this week that they were expecting a baby girl

Big news: Hilaria vowed to provide as good a life as we can' for their baby in her caption

Hilaria alluded to the tough times they've faced as a family when she announced their baby news in March, referring to their unborn child as a 'bright spot in their lives'.

'After many ups and downs over the past few years, we have an exciting up and a huge surprise: another Baldwinito is coming this fall,' Hilaria wrote.

Hilaria, who suffered two miscarriages before welcoming her fifth child, Edu, admitted that she didn't think anymore children were in her future, explaining that the news of her latest pregnancy came as something of a 'surprise' for the family.

It is not yet clear if their unborn daughter will follow the family tradition of being given a Spanish name, after Hilaria was accused of faking having Spanish roots in December 2020.
Jessica Biel said that Justin Timberlake's marriage proposal was both surprising and hilarious at the same time on Wednesday's The Late Late Show with James Corden.

The 40-year-old actress, wearing a white and green long shirt over black pants, told the story of her proposal after James congratulated her on coming closer to their 10th year wedding anniversary. The couple got married on October 19, 2012 in Italy.

'It was so sweet and so unexpected,' Jessica said of the marriage proposal. 'I had no idea it was coming.'

Proposal story: Jessica Biel said that Justin Timberlake's marriage proposal was both surprising and hilarious at the same time on Wednesday's episode of The Late Late Show with James Corden

Jessica said at the time she was with Justin in Montana and they had spent the day snowboarding.

'We were head to toe in snowboarding outfits, hats, gloves, everything,' Jessica said while adding that they were standing in waist-high snow. 'And all the sudden, he gets down onto his knees and just sinks into the snow. And then he looks up and pulls up this ring. It was the most lovely, surprising, hilarious.'

James then asked about being a parent and if her parents were strict with her.

'In some ways yes, and in some ways no,' Jessica said. 'I grew up with an indoor trampoline in my living room. So not really on some level and then a beer at a party was a hard no.'

Anniversary approaching: The 40-year-old actress, shown with Justin on Monday in Los Angeles, told the story of her proposal after James congratulated her on coming closer to their 10th year wedding anniversary

She said if she tried to skirt past her mother after being out that it was another story.

'I didn't get in trouble for jumping from the second story onto the trampoline and then swan diving onto the couch, but I did get in trouble when I rolled in at home and tried to go up the stairs without saying hi to my mom,' Jessica said. 'And she's like ''breathe in my face. You're out.'' And then she does the thing of ''wait till your father comes home.'' Then I'm in my room in a puddle of tears.'

James congratulated Jessica on her new Hulu show Candy based on a true crime story. Jessica said she plays suburban housewife Candy Montgomery who commits a horrific act of violence.

True crime: Jessica is shown in a still from her new Hulu show Candy based on a true crime story

'It's really exciting,' Jessica said of the five-part miniseries that began airing Monday on Hulu.

At the end of the show, Jessica played a game with fellow guest David Spade, 57, in which they had to decide who was telling them a true or false story. Jessica playfully played along laughing with David as they tried to guess who was telling the truth.

'You guys are good,' Jessica said after listening to their stories. 'I would hire all of you.'

Jessica and David guessed correctly in the end that a man who said he made a mold of his penis as a gift was telling the truth.

Game time: At the end of the show, Jessica played a game with fellow guest David Spade, 57, in which they had to decide who was telling them a true or false story
Gillian McKeith's daughter Afton has said she is 'really proud' to have recently won Miss USA Spokesmodel.

The daughter of the TV personality who was famed for repeatedly fainting while appearing on reality show I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here, looked sensational as she posed up a storm competing in the glamour event.

The red headed dancer, 22, told MailOnline that she 'worked really hard' preparing for the pageant - entering as the Sioux Falls contestant, which is a city in South Dakota.

Winner: Gillian McKeith's daughter Afton, 22, flashed her toned figure in a bikini as she was crowned Miss USA spokesmodel

Speaking exclusively to MailOnline, Afton shared: 'I am really proud to win because I worked hard preparing for the pageant. I got to also showcase my acting skills which was a major factor in my win and a passion of mine.

'The platform is a great way to bring awareness to the importance of health and fitness which was my main focus as there was a also fitness portion in the competition.'

Gillian also shared her pride for daughter Afton, explaining she was 'absolutely delighted' with the win.

The Scottish TV personality detailed: 'I am absolutely delighted that Afton won the competition. I am so proud of all her achievements!

Wow: The TV personality who was famed for repeatedly fainting on reality show I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here has not yet taken to social media to congratulate he daughter

Family life: The former You Are What You Eat presenter Gillian, 62, has another daughter Skylar, 26, with husband Howard Magaziner, 61

'Afton is a beautiful girl inside and out. I am looking forward to watching her journey in life,' concluded Gillian.

The pageant queen, who lists herself as a public figure, showed off her incredible physique in three stunning ensembles including a dazzling silver and maroon bikini showcasing her toned abs.

She wrote on Instagram: 'Excited to announce that I won the Miss South Dakota USA Spokesmodel Award! It was my first ever pageant! Thank you to everyone who supported me!'

Glam: For each look Afton kept her red tresses in loose curls as they cascaded down past her shoulders

For her second outfit change, Afton looked stylish in a plunging black mini dress as she added a pop of colour with a white manicure.

To finished the event of she stood out from the crowd in a glittering eye-catching red ball gown which she paired with towering platform heels.

The plunging ensemble featured sequin detailing on the top before flowing down into a full mesh skirt.

For each look she kept her red tresses in loose curls as they cascaded down past her shoulders.

Each appearance she wore a Sioux Falls white and black sash and opted for a bold red lipstick which looked stunning with the rest of her glam makeup.

Twins: The mother and daughter love to show off their slim physiques in matching ensembles, (pictured together in 2019)

Former You Are What You Eat presenter Gillian, 62, has another daughter Skylar, 26, with husband Howard Magaziner, 61.

Prior to the event, the influencer took to Instagram to share that she had won the South Dakota pageant which was her 'first ever' time competing.

Afton showed off her dazzling crown as she held up the award.

She penned: 'Excited to announce that I won the Miss South Dakota USA Spokesmodel Award! It was my first ever pageant! Thank you to everyone who supported me!'

Fashionista: Afton looked stylish in a plunging black mini dress as she added a pop of colour with a white manicure

Stylish: To finished the event of she stood out from the crowd in a glittering eye-catching red ball gown which she paired with towering platform heels

Afton studied musical theatre at The Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts in London which was attended by famous alumni including Sharon Osbourne, Naomi Campbell and Russell Brand.

She now lives in Beverley Hills, Los Angeles, and regularly shares modelling snaps to her 42k Instagram followers.

Afton revealed earlier this week that she is preparing to audition for the famous cheer squad the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.

Champ: Prior to the event, the influencer took to Instagram to share that she had won the South Dakota pageant which was her 'first ever' time competing
Jules Robinson looked nothing short of sensational as she arrived at The Curve Edit show at Afterpay Australian Fashion Week 2022 on Thursday.

The 40-year-old reality star - who lost almost 20kgs last year with help from Jenny Craig - showed off her svelte frame in a slinky red jumpsuit for the outing.

The polkadot number cinched in at her waist and featured a plunging neckline, which showed off just a hint of her cleavage.

Stunning! Jules Robinson looked nothing short of sensational as she arrived at The Curve Edit show at Afterpay Australian Fashion Week 2022 on Thursday

She teamed her look with an over-the-shoulder bag and a pair of orange heels.

Jules wore her hair in a casual straight style, and wore subtle makeup including a soft pink blush, mascara and a red lip.

Jules welcomed her first child, son Oliver, with her husband Cameron Merchant last year.

Lovely: The 40-year-old reality star - who lost almost 20 kilograms last year with help from Jenny Craig - showed off her svelte frame in a slinky red jumpsuit for the occasion

Chic: She teamed her look with an over-the-shoulder bag and a pair of orange heels

Pretty: Jules wore her hair in a casual straight style, and wore subtle makeup including a soft pink blush, mascara and a red lip

Strike a pose: The mother-of-one beamed as she posed for the camera

The pair officially married in January 2019, after meeting on the reality show Married At First Sight.

Last year, Jules confirmed she wanted to lose around 20kgs with the help of weight loss company Jenny Craig.

She later debuted her jaw-dropping figure in sleek activewear after confirming she was 'so so close' to achieving her weight loss aim after just 15 weeks.

Jules posed up a storm on Instagram in an exercise bra and tight black leggings, looking healthy and happy as she beamed at the camera.

Delighted: Last year, Jules debuted her jaw-dropping figure in sleek activewear after confirming she was 'so so close' to achieving her aim after just 15 weeks

'NSW gyms re open tomorrow!' Jules captioned the post. 'I'm returning healthier & fitter, maybe not stronger (pump class here I come) than I was going into the 3.5 month lock down - which is a great feeling and pretty amazing!'

She added that she achieved her goal due to 'determination' and help from Jenny Craig, adding: 'I'm so sooo close to my goal! So close!

'For any one wanting to know details.. I'm doing #rapidresultsmax and have been for 15weeks and I'm nearly at my 20 kilos goal, back to what I was pre pregnant.'

She says that 20 kilos had 'crept on' her figure after she had welcomed her son Ollie in October 2020.
Lottie Moss has settled into LA life just weeks after moving to the US to shoot more content after she was axed from highbrow modelling agency Storm.

The half-sister of Kate Moss shared a series of pics from legendary Hollywood hot dog spot Pinks on Wednesday while she cosied up to Los Angeles based artist and producer Cody Colacino.

Lottie, who has set up home in LA after her career hit 'rock bottom' over her explicit material, posed with her underwear on show in low-slung sweats for her fast food fix.

Fast food fix: Lottie Moss has settled into LA life just weeks after moving to the US after she was axed from highbrow modelling agency Storm, hitting hotdog hotspot Pinks on Wednesday

Lottie flashed her black lace underwear as she posed in a black crop top and her sweatpants inside Pinks.

Striking some cheeky poses with a hotdog statue, Lottie added a trucker hat and shades to her look while flashing her tattoos.

Over on her Stories the model revealed she was hanging out with musician Cody, sharing a photo of him resting his hand on her leg.

Cody meanwhile posted a selfie of the two sipping drinks together.

Making pals: The half-sister of Kate Moss also cosied up to Los Angeles based artist and producer Cody Colacino, in a photo shared on his Instagram

Racy: Lottie flashed her black lace underwear as she posed in a black crop top and her sweatpants inside Pinks

On Tuesday, the musician and producer posted a video of himself getting inked with an Anarchy tattoo on the palm of his hand.

While he added to his tattoo collection, Lottie could be seen in the background of the video smoking a cigarette in bed.



On Monday Lottie showed off her own fresh ink as she filmed her left arm being tattooed with a fanged skull in a post.

Cosy: Over on her Stories the model revealed she was hanging out with musician Cody, sharing a photo of him resting his hand on her leg

Close: On Tuesday the musician and producer posted a video of himself getting inked while Lottie could be seen in the background smoking a cigarette in bed

Lottie's updates also featured a puzzling selfie including a Band-Aid on her forehead simply captioned 'Ouch'.

Despite this, the fresh faced star appeared to be in otherwise good health, wearing a white printed shirt with her platinum blonde locks out in relaxed waves.

Her Stories also reposted other accounts' photos of tattoos, including one that said 'Suck my D**k' and another which inked 'I hate men'.

Ouch: On Monday Lottie took to Instagram to show off some fresh ink and a head injury in more posts from her new base in LA

Fresh ink: Supermodel Kate Moss's half sister filmed her left arm being tattooed with a fanged skull

It comes as the star last month vowed to send a plethora of nude images and 'rate' any pictures of penises that she receives from fans if they sign up to her $80 VIP OnlyFans service.

She took to the X-rated subscription site to reveal she was lowering her price from the usual $100-a-month in a special end of the month deal.

In a bid to get more subscribers, Lottie had penned: 'VIP SALE!! its the last day of the month so I'm doing something I never do for today only join my VIP for $80 (normally $100) and ill throw in some free nudes too you wont regret it.'

Fangs: The star, who has recently made the move to Los Angeles, filmed herself getting a new tattoo

She added a racy lingerie snap of herself as she promised fans that she would provide 'free unlimited chat, exclusive VIP only content and discounts, d**k ratings, custom requests and more.'

OnlyFans allows for public figures to charge fans a subscription to their site, where they often share content usually deemed too provocative for other platforms, and allows them to interact with subscribers through private messages.

Lottie has previously claimed that she is making 70,000 a month from the site.

Edgy: In a series of updates on her Instagram Stories, Lottie shared her brand new ink with social media followers

She lets users subscribe for free but charges fans extra to view racier content - including up to 1,000 for a naked video.

While Lottie is making money online, it seems her high-end modelling career has come to an end - as she won't follow in the footsteps of supermodel sister Kate.

While she was signed by respected agency Storm, they were said to have axed her over drug use, cosmetic surgery and the provocative OnlyFans content - after she admitting to heavy cocaine use.

Industry insiders have warned for months that Lottie was putting her promising fashion career in jeopardy by selling raunchy photos of herself on the platform.

Sources close to Storm Management suggested the firm, which has nurtured the careers of many successful young models including Cara Delevingne, 29, may have finally run out of patience with Lottie and permanently cut ties with her.

She was projected as an up and coming star, walking the catwalk for brands such as Tommy Hilfiger, modelling for Chanel and appearing in Vogue, with insiders saying she 'lost her way'.

Moved on: Lottie recently moved to Los Angeles to shoot more content after she was axed from modelling agency Storm when her career hit 'rock bottom' over her explicit material

After claims she had hit 'rock bottom' last year, Lottie hit back - posting to her Instagram story: 'if this is 'rock bottom' i'm good with it.'

The model later said she thought taking drugs was 'normal' in the industry as she alleged that she was given drugs when she was 'exhausted' at events.

Lottie claimed she didn't feel like people 'cared' about her 'wellbeing'.

She told the Call Her Daddy podcast: 'I think I just thought it was normal and I was going to these events and parties and I was exhausted, that was the only way I was getting through it.

'A lot of the time I would be showing up to set and I would not be happy and I didn't want to do it, I'd be crying my eyes out and they said, "we'll just get you some drugs, you can have a drink and then you'll be fine".

'It was very much like that, "oh you'll do this shoot, whether you're sober or not. It's going to happen".'
Carol Vorderman praised her son Cameron in a sweet Instagram post on Wednesday as the family celebrated him graduating from university.

The TV personality, 61, looked every inch the doting mother as she shared a carousel of pictures from the special occasion at Bristol University.

She proudly told her followers that Cameron, 24, had graduated with a Masters Degree in Animation and VFX despite struggling with a severe learning difficulties in his early life.

Congratulations! Carol Vorderman praised son Cameron, 24, in a sweet Instagram post on Wednesday as the family celebrated him graduating from university

Alongside the family snaps, Carol penned: 'It only just occurred to me that my little brood and I are an academic family. From left to right, Vorders....Masters degree in Engineering at Cambridge.

She also gave a special mention to her daughter Katie who is also a graduate: 'Cameron....Masters Degree in Animation and VFX, Dundee University. Dr Katie King.....Masters (Science) and PH.D. (Nanotechnology)...Cambridge

'Odd really but we haven't ever thought of ourselves as an academic family, we just love learning.... so there we are. The Vorder Kings'

Sweet: The TV personality, 61, looked every inch the doting mother as she shared a carousel of pictures from the special occasion at Bristol University

Graduate: The mum shared a series of proud snaps to document her son's graduation

Earlier in the day, the proud mum told her followers how excited she was to be attending her youngest child's ceremony which had been postponed from two years ago.

Taking to her grid she posted: 'Trying this lovely dress on from @clubllondon for my son Cameron's honours degree graduation this evening from @uwebristol.

'He got a First Class degree two years ago in Animation and his graduation back then was online. So tonight albeit 2 years behind the times, will be wonderful.

'Anyway more of that later. '#ProudMumma.'

Delayed: The ceremony had been postponed two years ago due to finally going ahead this week

Go time: Among the slew of snaps was a video of Cameron as he graduated, clad with a cap and gown

Gorgeous: Carol left fans gushing as she showed off her hourglass curves in her Instagram post

Excited: The proud mum told her followers how excited she was to be attending her youngest child's ceremony which had been postponed two years ago

Carol has previously spoken of her pride for son Cameron after he overcame severe learning difficulties in his early life.

Cameron, who has high spectrum autism, ADD, dyslexia and ADHD, overcame adversity in order to attain his undergraduate and then masters degree.

In November, Cameron graduated with a master's degree in Animation and VFX, with Carol documenting the ceremony on Instagram

She shared: 'Such a wonderful day @dundeeuni. So Cameron was in a special school with severe learning difficulties for most of his early life but he's worked hard and learned strategies and boy how he's turned it all around.

'I couldn't be prouder of him. We never dared to dream this day might come when he graduated with a first class honours last year and now a Masters degree in Animation and VFX.

'Thank you Dundee for giving him all that you have over the last year. Amazing.'
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Emily Blunt and Cillian Murphy looked deep in conversation on the set of their upcoming film Oppenheimer in Los Angeles on Thursday.

Emily, 39, looked chic in a period-appropriate navy blazer and coordinating pencil skirt teamed with UGG boots, whilst Cillian, 45, sported a charcoal suit as they took a walk around set during a break from shooting.

The film tells the story of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his contributions that lead to the creation of the atomic bomb.

On set: Emily Blunt looked sensational in a vintage blazer and pencil skirt whilst Cillian Murphy donned a suit as they filmed for upcoming movie Oppenheimer in Los Angeles on Thursday

Cillian will be taking on the lead role whilst Emily will be starring alongside him as his characters wife, Kitty Oppenheimer.

Emily's brunette locks were pulled back into a very 1950's hairstyle as she added a slick of cherry red lipstick to compete her vintage look.

The duo could be seen as they walked down the street with Emily clutching on to a drink whilst Cillian flicked through his lines.

Hard at work: The duo could be seen as they walked down the street with Emily clutching on to a drink whilst Cillian flicked through his lines

Kitty was born in Germany in 1910 and immigrated to the United States in 1913.

She initially studied music and biology and was married to two other men before marrying Oppenheimer in 1940.

The couple moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico, shortly after the start of World War II to work on the Manhattan Project, which Robert was the director of.

The research group was responsible for creating the first atomic bombs, and the devastating explosives would later be dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki later in the war.

Shortly after the bombs were detonated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki Oppenheimer began to lobby for the control of nuclear weapons to avert a nuclear war with Russia.

He was appointed the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission though he was also a target of the House Un-American Activities Commission as well.

Oppenheimer passed away in 1967 at 62 years of age from throat cancer after years of smoking cigarettes.

In character: Emily's brunette locks were pulled back into a very 1950's hairstyle as she added a slick of cherry red lipstick to compete her vintage look

Oppenheimer, which reportedly has a budget of $100million, is directed by Christopher Nolan.

Cillian has cultivated a long relationship with Nolan, who tends to work with many of his supporting actors repeatedly.

The two first worked together on 2005's Batman Begins, and Murphy appeared in its sequels The Dark Knight and The Dark Night Rises, along with Inception and Dunkirk.

Having started production in late February, Nolan is expected to take more than five months to shoot, which if he keeps on schedule it would go until the beginning of August.

Oppenheimer is the first film to shoot in IMAX black-and-white analog photography, although its not known whether it will be done entirely in black and white

New role: Cillian (left) will be taking on the lead role of J. Robert Oppenheimer (pictured right in 1963)

At work: Robert (Pictured in 1945) was part of the research group was responsible for creating the first atomic bombs, and the devastating explosives used in World War II

Oppenheimer will feature an incredible all-star cast including that also features Kenneth Branagh, Robert Downey Jr, Matt Damon, Gary Oldman, Rami Malek, Josh Hartnett and many more.

Damon plays Lieutenant General Leslie Richard Groves Jr, a United States Army Corps of Engineers officer who oversaw the construction of the Pentagon and directed the Manhattan Project.

Hartnett portrays Ernest Lawrence, who's among the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project.

The pioneering American nuclear physicist won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939 for his invention of the cyclotron, which is a particle accelerator.

Starring role: Emily plays Kitty (pictured right) was born in Germany in 1910 and immigrated to the United States in 1913. She initially studied music and biology and was married to two other men before marrying Oppenheimer in 1940

True story: The film tells the story of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer and his contributions that lead to the creation of the atomic bomb (Pictured left at Trinity Test Site in 1945)

Smart: Matt Damon (pictured on set last month) plays Lieutenant General Leslie Groves in the much-anticipated biopic

Going back in time: Robert Downey Jr (pictured April 2018) joins the cast as he is portraying Lewis Strauss (pictured right in 1954) who served two terms on the US Atomic Energy Commission

Cast: Josh Peck (pictured left on set) plays American physicist Kenneth Bainbridge, the director of the Manhattan Project's Trinity nuclear test during the development of the first atomic weapons

Lawrence would go on to be recognized for his work on uranium-isotope separation for the Manhattan Project.

Josh Peck plays American physicist Kenneth Bainbridge, the director of the Manhattan Project's Trinity nuclear test during the development of the first atomic weapons.

The film is being adapted adapted from the 2006 book American Prometheus: The Triumph And Tragedy Of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.

The book, which won the Pulitzer Prize, details Oppenheimer's personal life and his time leading the Manhattan Project in the early and mid-1940s.

Oppenheimer is set to be released on July 21, 2023, by Universal Pictures.

The current debut date is slated to come about two weeks before the harrowing anniversaries of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which happened on August 6 and August 9 in 1945.
Molly-Mae Hague kept a low profile on Wednesday as she was spotted exiting the PrettyLittleThing showroom in downtown LA.

The former Love Islander, 22, who is the brand's creative director, donned a casual ensemble as she was met by beau Tommy Fury, 23 who picked her up.

Shielding her eyes from the scorching sun, the blonde beauty crossed the busy street before Tommy, who she met on the ITV dating show in 2019, drove them off in their rented BMW convertible.

Shaded: Molly-Mae Hague,22 kept a low profile in a grey tracksuit and shades as was met by beau Tommy Fury, 23, outside the PrettyLittleThing store in LA on Wednesday

The influencer, who is enjoying a trans Atlantic holiday, opted for a large slate hoodie for the outing which she layered over a simple white tee.

The reality star wore grey joggers which she tucked into white socks as she sported a pair of beige slider sandals.

Her blonde tresses scraped back the star looked fresh face, accessorising the casual ensemble with a selection of gold jewellery.

Waiting: Tommy too cut a casual figure in a grey T-shirt as he waited behind the wheel for his other to emerge

Chilled: The reality star wore grey joggers which she tucked into white socks as she sported a pair of beige slider sandals

Tommy too cut a casual figure in a grey T-shirt as he waited behind the wheel for his other to emerge.

The couple, jetted off to the US earlier this week to enjoy a well-deserved holiday after Tommy's intense training for his fight against Daniel Bocianski.

With Molly-Mae recently sharing a gushing post to wish her boxer boyfriend a happy birthday on Saturday.

Walk about: The couple, who appeared on Love Island in 2019, jetted off to the US earlier this week to enjoy a well-deserved holiday after Tommy's intense training for his fight against Daniel Bocianski

Celebrations: Molly-Mae recently sharing a gushing post to wish her boxer boyfriend a happy birthday on Saturday

The handsome man was celebrating turning 23, as the pair headed to amusement park Six Flags Magic Mountain in California.

Sharing a post with her beau to Instagram Molly-Mae wrote: 'Happy born day baby! I love you !'.

The pair were ever the tourists in the shots, posing in front of the iconic Hollywood sign before sharing a kiss.

Day out: The handsome man was celebrating turning 23, as the pair headed to amusement park Six Flags Magic Mountain in California

The fashion mogul also shared the post to her story, writing 'my boy is 23 today'.

It was a day of food as the pair celebrated the sportsman's birthday, starting the day off at iHop, Tommy's favourite stateside restaurant.

After enjoying a feast, which included pancakes, eggs and a burger - Tommy and Molly-Mae headed to Six Flags.

They shared their typical amusement park lunch to Instagram, including chicken tenders, chips, onion rings and a stacked burger.

Before ending the day at Cheesecake Factory, where Tommy posted a natural snap of his girlfriend across the table.

Day out: They shared their typical amusement park lunch to Instagram, including chicken tenders, chips, onion rings and a stacked burger

Pancakes: It was a day of food as the pair celebrated the boxer's birthday, starting the day off at iHop, Tommy's favourite stateside restaurant

Detailing moments from the day, Molly-Mae shared that she had 'always wanted' to visit the theme park, revealing that they went on every ride.

Tommy took to his own Instagram grid, telling his 4million followers that he was 'blessed' - as he posed beside their rental car in Los Angeles.

Pose: Taking to his own Instagram grid, Tommy posed in front of the Hollywood sign by their rental car for some snaps

Grateful: The boxer said he was 'blessed' in the caption as he celebrated his special day

The boxer has been in training for the fight alongside his heavyweight champion brother Tyson Fury, as both brothers took home a win at Wembley.

Taking the chance for some quality time together, Tommy and Molly-Mae have been hitting all the US theme-parks - visiting Universal Studios on Thursday.

Molly-Mae described the trip to Universal as 'one of the best days of my life', as they shared a slew of snaps from the day.

Dream: Detailing moments from the day, Molly-Mae shared that she had 'always wanted' to visit the theme park
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The original Mallorcan Love Island villa was sold back in March for 3m, (2.57m) and the new location has finally been revealed.

And the new six-bedroom property has a stunning stone exterior and still has scaffolding up outside, ahead of the show's rumoured June 6 start date.

It was revealed earlier this year that bosses for the popular ITV2 dating series had started hunting for a new space in a bid to 'enhance the show', after filming at the same property for five years.

Under construction: Love Island has found a new home with builders seen hard at work on a rustic six-bedroom property ahead of the show's rumoured June 6 start date

Moving home: It was revealed earlier this year that bosses for the popular ITV2 dating series had started hunting for a new space in a bid to 'enhance the show', after filming at the same property for five years (pictured)

Building work is underway at the new rural property, but with scaffolding covering the stone walls, a completion date for construction looks a way off.

The new property sits at the foot of a hill in a rural area of the island. Season one and two of Love Island was filmed at a property in southern Majorca's Santanyi region before being moved to Sant Llorenc des Cardassar in the north-east.

In January 2020 the first Winter series of the show was filmed in South Africa, before the show returned to its normal setting of Mallorca for the 2021 Summer series, a year after the 2020 Summer series was cancelled due to the global pandemic.

The new villa is a lot more rustic in appearance and is spread over two floors, while the land surrounding the building appears to include a pool.

Rural retreat: Building work is underway at the new rural property, but with scaffolding covering the stone walls, a completion date for construction looks a way off

Prepping for the party: Workers appear to be constructing a decked area with an outdoor kitchen/bar area - a feature of the previous Love Island villas

Workers appear to be constructing a decked area with an outdoor kitchen/bar area - a feature of the previous Love Island villas.

Wooden screens were also seen being placed around the property to act as extra temporary sets for filming while various machinery and tractors are dotted around the fields surrounding the house.

The new property will still have a firepit and swimming pool and will be revealed this summer when the eighth series of the show returns to TV.

Lights, camera, action: Wooden screens were also seen being placed around the property to act as extra temporary sets for filming

It was confirmed earlier this year that the daring series was moving on from the Sant Llorenc des Cardassar villa in the north-east of the island.

Managing director of ITV's media and entrainment, Kevin Lygo, said Love Island was moving to a 'marvellous' new mansion in what appeared to be a bid to revitalise the show.

'We didn't own [the last property]. We rented it and we are choosing a new house for this summer so that is all secrecy,' Lygo told PA Media at the time.

Country living: Various machinery and tractors are dotted around the fields surrounding the house, which sits at the foot of large hills

Check out the view: The tree-lined hillside sits behind the isolated property, making for a stunning backdrop for filming

Not long to go guys! The new six-bedroom property has a stunning stone exterior and still has scaffolding up outside, ahead of the show's rumoured June 6 start date

Love Island bosses have reportedly had to take action after it was suggested that that some hopefuls have been dumping their partners to get on the upcoming series of the show.

The Sun reported this week that wannabe islanders have been keeping their relationships a secret and in some cases have even split up in a bid to secure a place on the ITV dating show.

But the publication adds that this move allegedly didn't wash with show bosses as they reminded potentials show stars that they have 'no interest in fame seekers.'

A source added to the publication that one budding islander, who was in talks with show bosses, was said to have promised their partner that they'd 'get back together' after the show after being unable to give up the opportunity to become famous.

An insider told the The Sun: 'Love Island bosses has no interest in fame seekers. Theyre savvy to Islanders who think the show is a quick fix to fame and fortune.

Studio space: Temporary spaces have been constructed on platforms around the main house to provide extra space for filming scenes such as the Beach Hut confessionals

'As has always been the case, Love Island bosses cast single Islanders who are looking for love. Nothing else will fly with them. Viewers tune in to watch relationships blossom, it's as simple as that.'

A Love Island spokesman told MailOnline: 'Our only stipulation is Islanders must be over 18, single and looking for love.'

ITV have yet to reveal who has made it into the villa, but it's said that the selection process involves extensive questioning about a potential cast member's relationship status.

It comes as the excitement for series eight is already amping up as Love Island has shared its first teasers for the show proclaiming itself to be the 'OG of love' compared to other rival dating shows.

Room to mingle: It was confirmed earlier this year that the daring series was moving on from the Sant Llorenc des Cardassar villa in the north-east of the island

Time for a refresh: Managing director of ITV's media and entrainment, Kevin Lygo, said Love Island was moving to a 'marvellous' new mansion in what appeared to be a bid to revitalise the show

The two animated promos aired on TV for the first time on Saturday night during ITV's Britain's Got Talent advert break.

Love Island said: 'Love Island is the OG of dating shows and after 7 years of matchmaking, marriages and babies, for 8 weeks this summer, we're officially owning love. So stand down all you pretenders - Love Is Ours.'

The preview cheekily poked fun at shows Naked Attraction, Celebs Go Dating and Ex On The Beach, by showing a TV with the title 'Naked Celebs Go Dating On A Beach.'

A pink trainer squashes the TV, before the word 'LOVE' with a flag saying 'WE OWN IT', comes up next to the iconic Love Island pool and a little animated Millie Court with her keyboard from the infamous talent show last season.

Earlier this month it was claimed the ITV2 show's new sexy, young cast were just days away from filming the advert.

Another move: Meanwhile a source told The Sun : 'ITV bosses think this is the right moment to refresh this element of the show, just as they did in series three back in 2017'

Major plans: 'Bosses are conscious of the fact that this is also an opportunity to consider all the new elements they could introduce to enhance the show even further'

Beach hut? A huge construction crew has been working around the clock to transform the villa in time for the arrival of the Islanders next months

Ready for the drama? A brand new cast of singletons will move in next month for the eighth series of the popular show

A source told The Sun: 'The schedules are being put together now and fans can expect a long, hot summer of fun from the villa from June 6.

'Filming for the promotional adverts is beginning in the next couple of weeks and the ads will start in May.

A representative for ITV told MailOnline at the time: 'It's too soon for us to confirm the schedule.'

Meanwhile, Love Island is reportedly set for another series' as 'bosses begin plans for a 2023 winter' edition, just weeks before the summer cast are set the enter the villa.

ITV aired its first winter series in South Africa in January 2020, which was won by Paige Turley and Finn Tapp, having previously started in June every year since 2015.

Long-term home: It was confirmed earlier this year that the daring series was moving on from the Sant Llorenc des Cardassar villa in the north-east of the island (contestants Tommy Fury and Molly-Mae pictured by the villa's pool in 2019)

Moving mountains: The property will remain on the Spanish island of Majorca but the new home is a much more rustic vibe

Plans for a second winter series were shelved in 2021 amid concerns surrounding the pandemic, but according to The Sun, it is set to make a comeback.

A source revealed to the publication: 'Love Island bosses enjoyed the one and only series of Winter Love Island, but it was just before the pandemic raged so was shelved for 2021.

'When they started casting for this summers series they thought theres definitely enough talent to do a second series again so have started the plans for a 2023 Winter Love Island.

'The series generally is really important for them as it attracts the all-important younger viewers, so if they can get a second series in one year then everyone will be delighted.

A source told The Sun : 'ITV bosses think this is the right moment to refresh this element of the show, just as they did in series three back in 2017'

The winter series concluded in February 2020, just weeks before the global coronavirus pandemic began with Prime Minister Boris Johnson enforcing a lockdown.

Alongside winners Finn and Paige, the cast included Demi Jones, twins Eve and Jess Gale, Natalia Zoppa, Luke Mabbott and Shaughna Phillips.

He added: 'It is going to be marvellous. Yes, it is going to be in Mallorca. It is going to be a great one [series].'

Meanwhile a source told The Sun: 'ITV bosses think this is the right moment to refresh this element of the show, just as they did in series three back in 2017.

'Bosses are conscious of the fact that this is also an opportunity to consider all the new elements they could introduce to enhance the show even further.'

They added: 'For fans of Love Island this is huge news and they'll be eager to see what the new villa looks like and how much it could change the show.'

First seasons: Season one and two of Love Island was filmed at a property in southern Majorca's Santanyi region (pictured)
She's the popular presenter who always looks glamorous while hosting The Project.

But on Thursday, Lisa Wilkinson gave fans a cheeky glimpse of how her hair appeared before her style team had the chance to primp, straighten and style it.

'Minutes to air hair. Lets do this!!' the 62-year-old captioned a candid image of herself in the studio, just moments before going live on Channel 10.

'Minutes to air hair!' On Thursday, Lisa Wilkinson gave fans a cheeky glimpse of how her hair appeared before her style team had the chance to primp, straighten and style it

In the photo, Lisa beamed at the camera while her unkept mane sat unbrushed atop her head.

The clock underneath Lisa revealed that she had less than four minutes to go until she was live on national television.

Despite having next to no time to tame the unruly tresses, Lisa appeared on the show moments later looking absolutely stunning as she sat with her co-hosts.

That's better! Despite having next to no time to tame the tresses, Lisa appeared on the show moments later looking absolutely stunning as she sat with her co-hosts

Her brunette locks were gently tousled into a casual beach wave, while her fringe gently swept across her face.

It comes after Lisa shared her shock as she learned about communal bathing on The Sunday Project last month.

Lisa was left flabbergasted after her co-host Hamish MacDonald narrated a news report on the rise in popularity of the experiences, revealing that at least four major bathhouses had opened in Australia in the past year.

Hamish, 40, said he and co-host Jan Fran had spent the commercial break 'educating Lisa about nudity and bathhouses', before she told viewers: '...I have learnt stuff tonight that I really didnt come here expecting to learn!'

Sleek: Her brunette locks were gently tousled into a casual beach wave, while her fringe gently swept across her face

Rove McManus was equally as shocked over the topic of discussion, adding: 'I dont feel comfortable bathing on my own, let alone with other people around.'

'And when youve got a perfectly good bath at home with a door that closes and locks, why would you move outside of that zone?' Lisa added.

Rove then asked Hamish about his own personal experiences with communal bathing, saying: 'Do you take your rubber duck when you got to one of your little communal baths?

'Do you flick your little friends with a towel?'

Discussion: It comes after Lisa was left flabbergasted after her co-host Hamish MacDonald (pictured) narrated a news report on the rise in popularity of communal bathing, revealing that at least four major bathhouses had opened in Australia in the past year

Jan Fran chimed in: 'I think were talking about a very different kind of bathhouse now though, Rove.'

He replied: 'When you say to me Hamish McDonald goes to a communal bath, you do not want to know where my heads going!'

Hamish went on to say that he and Jan had been discussing Turkish baths, otherwise known as Hammam.

Hamman is a type of steam bath or a place of public bathing associated with the Islamic world.

'Its a cultural experience. You can find it in Morocco. You can get a good scrub down with the loofah,' Jan said.

'Theres a very biggish woman who lifts things and moves things, and scrubs things. And I say bring that here, thats what we need  communal bathing 2.0.'

After Rove said he'd take part, Hamish said Lisa should follow suit - to which she replied: 'Thats three out of four [hosts]. Thats enough from The Project!'
Myleene Klass has joked that to recreate her iconic 2006 I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of here shower moment, she would have to tuck her boobs into her socks.

The 44-year-old presenter was asked by Lorraine Kelly on Thursday's Lorraine if she would be up for reenacting the bikini scene for the rumoured All Stars series.

Myleene quipped of the changes to her body over the past 16 years: 'I dont know. I might have to tuck them in my socks, Ive breastfed three babies since then.'

Incredible: Myleene Klass has joked that to recreate her iconic I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of here shower moment, she would have to tuck her boobs into her socks

She continued: 'It feels like a lifetime ago, and only yesterday, its that weird dichotomy. It was a really good time in my life.'

MailOnline exclusively reported last month that a brand new all stars version of I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! is set to be filmed in South Africa later this year.

The new stand alone show will run in addition to the usual annual ITV programme - which is set to return to the Australian jungle this year after two years in Wales - and is likely to air next summer.

Channel bosses have signed up Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly, both 46, to host the show and legendary contestants from the past will compete, taking part in trials while living in camp.

Iconic moment: The 44-year-old presenter was asked by Lorraine Kelly on Thursday's Lorraine if she would be up for reenacting the bikini scene for the rumoured All Stars series

Looking good! Despite her protestations Myleene still looks sensational in a bikini as shown in this 2021 holiday snap

It's thought the new spin-off will be a slightly shorter format of two weeks instead of the usual three.

The new pre-recorded show will either air in November, if plans for filming the live series Down Under are hit by Covid restrictions, or kept back to be broadcast in early 2023.

On Thursday morning, Myleene also spoke about her relationship with her fiance Simon Motson, after Lorraine commented on how happy she was that the star had found someone.

Myleene said: 'I feel really content in the relationship that we have. Its lovely that my children can see that, too. Weve got our blended family and its just lovely.'

Talented: She appeared on the show to discuss her book, They Don't Teach This at School, which includes First Aid tips, plus general life hacks

She added: 'Although Im laughing because I know hes having a nightmare getting the baby to school. Because the baby wanted to use his bike, then scooter, then walk and he let him do all those things, so I dont even know if hes in school yet.'

Myleene appeared on the show to discuss her book, They Don't Teach This at School, which includes First Aid tips, plus general life hacks.

She explained: 'Theres a section on plaits in the book because when I met my partner, as a single dad, he said, "I wish I could plait so I can do my daughters hair."

'And now he does all of our hair! Although Ava does say, "Could you do my hair because Sim, he pulls it really tight, its almost like getting a facelift!"'

Important: Speaking on the safety tips in her book, Myleene said: 'I really do believe in learning basic First Aid. I dont think its enough if you just know it we should all have access to it'

Speaking on the safety tips in her book, Myleene said: 'I really do believe in learning basic First Aid. I dont think its enough if you just know it we should all have access to it.

'Weve saved two lives - a baby because shed read what to do. And a husband saved his wife when she was choking on a piece of chicken.'

Myleene has previously stressed the importance of teaching first aid in schools after saving both her daughters from choking.

The radio presenter, recalled the moment she was caught off-guard when her daughter Ava, 14, choked on calamari while on holiday four years ago, and when Hero, 11, got a plastic star stuck in her throat when she was 18 months old.

Loved-up: She also spoke about her relationship with her fiance Simon Motson, after Lorraine commented on how happy she was that Myleene found someone (pictured in 2017)

Excerpts of her new book were published in The Sun last week ahead of the it's release this Thursday, with the former Hear'Say star outlining the importance of basic survival skills in the text.

She wrote : 'A couple of years ago we were relaxing on holiday and my defences were down, so when Ava started to choke on calamari I didnt immediately realise.

'Hero choked on a small plastic star when she was one and a half.'

The Smooth Radio host went on to describe the mechanics of what to do if someone is choking, and even shared a step-by-step guide to performing CPR.

Scary: The musician, who recently shared a video of her family learning CPR on Twitter, recalled the moment daughter Ava, 14, choked on calamari, and when Hero, 11, chocked a star

Myleene's book also touches on treating jellyfish stings and recognising the signs of a stroke.

She also reminds people to 'stop, drop and roll' if they become engulfed in flames, recalling the moment she jumped to the assistance of a woman when her hair extensions caught fire at the launch of one of her classical albums, and when the same happened to a member of a rival pop band at a nightclub.

The former I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! campmate has also shared her advice in some handy video explainers on Twitter, recreating emergency scenarios with her children.

In a post to her 430,000 followers last month, Myleene spoke of the importance of being prepared for dangerous situations.

She wrote: 'Just found out we helped a Mother save her babys life yesterday after she watched our video on choking.

'We are all feeling very emotional and relieved after hearing this news.

'All my safety vids are on TikTok but going to post here too. My book contains all this information BUT *DISCLAIMER* This is a DEMONSTRATION. DO NOT attempt or try this on anyone that doesnt require actual CPR.

'Stay safe, informed and empowered.

'NB. The rescue breaths are most relevant to children regarding CPR as the majority of accidents where this is required/used happens around water/pools.'
The Project slammed Josh Frydenberg on Thursday, after the politician declined multiple invites to appear on the news program.

Following a story on Frydenberg's campaign in the lead up to the election, Project host Waleed Aly announced: 'The treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, joins us now.'

The camera then cut to an empty chair with a mic pack and ear pieces draped over the back of it, before Frydenberg's name popped up on the screen.

Missing in action: The Project slammed Josh Frydenberg (pictured last week in Melbourne) on Thursday, after the politician declined multiple invites to appear on the news program

Waleed, 43, explained that the Channel 10 show had repeatedly invited Frydenberg to appear, however he'd declined each time.

'During this election campaign we have repeatedly tried to bring the treasurer to the hundreds of thousands of Aussies watching The Project,' he began.

'However, the treasurer has declined each of our eight invitations. We can't be sure why, the treasurer has had a great relationship with us in the past, but it seems to us he's just refusing to come on.'

Frustrated: Following a story on Frydenberg's campaign in the lead up to the election, Project host Waleed Aly (pictured) announced: 'The treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, joins us now

Speaking to the show's viewers, Waleed added that it was possible Frydenberg, 50, thought they had 'already made up your minds'.

'Or perhaps there are some other reasons he's worried about appearing. Either way, treasurer, the invitation is open,' he added.

'I'm sure there are Project viewers watching from the seat of Kooyong who would particularly like to hear from you.'

No-show: The camera then cut to an empty chair with a mic pack and ear pieces draped over the back of it, before Frydenberg's name popped up on the screen

Speaking out: Viewers of the show vented their frustration at Frydenberg's decision not to appear on Twitter, with one person blasting him as a 'coward'

Meanwhile, fellow panelist Lisa Wilkinson said she was 'surprised' by Frydenberg's decision not to appear on the program.

'All the polls are saying there are plenty of people who are undecided. It could come down to a handful of votes at the end of the day, but it is up to Josh Frydenberg as to whether or not he wants to join us,' said the 62-year-old.

Viewers of the show vented their frustration at Frydenberg's decision not to appear on Twitter, with one person blasting him as a 'coward'.

'@JoshFrydenberg the *no show* that invite really sounded like a "You are never coming on Channel 10 ever again, not even for charity." Ouch,' tweeted one viewer

'Josh Frydenberg won't appear on #TheProjectTV? More like FRIGHTENED-Berg, am I right??' tweeted another.

'Oooooooh snap #TheProjectTV just done an empty chair gig for @JoshFrydenberg because he won't go on the show...' wrote one viewer.

Added another: '@JoshFrydenberg the *no show* that invite really sounded like a "You are never coming on Channel 10 ever again, not even for charity." Ouch.'
The Soldiers are reforming to release a tribute song for The Queen in celebration of her 70th year Platinum Jubilee.

They are releasing a new single to show their gratitude to Queen Elizabeth II, and profits from sales will be going to charities supported by the Royal Family.

With over 70 years of combined service between them, Captain Gary Chilton, Lance Corporal Ryan Idzi (veteran) and Warrant Officer Richie Maddocks have served in the Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Return! The Soldiers are reforming to release a tribute song for The Queen in celebration of her 70th year Platinum Jubilee

The Soldiers were the first ever group of serving British servicemen to tackle the pop charts, with their 2009 debut album Coming Home reaching the Top 5 - outselling Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson.

It remained on the charts for some 3 months, eventually receiving double-platinum status, and the group raised over 400,00 for Army charities.

They then took a 10 year hiatus, and are reforming especially to record their heart-felt tribute to Her Majesty.

Celebration: The Soldiers are releasing a new single to show their gratitude to Queen Elizabeth II, and profits from sales will be going to charities supported by the Royal Family, (The Queen - pictured in July 2021)

Captain Gary said: 'Once we heard the song and saw the lyrics, we knew we wanted this to be our part of the Platinum Jubilee Celebrations.'

The track has been produced by multi award-winning producer Nick Patrick.

He has been nominated for 3 Grammys and has won 8 Album of the Year Classic BRIT Awards.

The track will be released on 20th May with a focus date of 3rd June.

Brave: With over 70 years of combined service between them, Captain Gary Chilton, Lance Corporal Ryan Idzi (veteran) and Warrant Officer Richie Maddocks have served in the Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan

The release of the song comes Dame Helen Mirren and Tom Cruise are set to lead the star-studded cast for a theatrical television broadcast marking the Jubilee.

The actress, 76, and the action star, 59, will star in the performance, which will be broadcast live on ITV from the grounds of Windsor Castle on May 15.

The show will be made up of four acts, with each one being overseen by a different celebrity host - Helen, the Top Gun star, Damian Lewis, Adjoa Andoh and Alan Titchmarsh.

Special occasion: They are reforming especially to record their heart-felt tribute to Her Majesty

The event, which will feature 1,300 performers and 500 horses, will look back through history from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

Dame Helen, who previously played the monarch in The Queen, will take on the role of Queen Elizabeth I, while a cast of Queen's Players will be introduced by a character called The Herald, played by Omid Djalili.

The Herald, who will narrate the performance, will take viewers through time with each act reflecting on key moments in history, including Elizabeth I's Tilbury Speech and James I and the Gunpowder Plot.

Celebrations: Dame Helen Mirren and Tom Cruise are set to lead the star-studded cast for a theatrical television broadcast marking the Queen's Platinum Jubilee

The Commonwealth and the four nations of the United Kingdom will be celebrated, while there will be military and equestrian displays from around the world including Azerbaijan, India, Oman, France, Norway, Switzerland, and Trinidad and Tobago.

Music will be provided by a 75-piece orchestra, with special performances from Keala Settle, Gregory Porter and Katherine Jenkins.

Other guests will include Andrew Lloyd Webber, Ant and Dec, Dame Joan Collins and Sir David Jason.
Keeley Hazell deceived the eye as she slipped into a jaw-dropping 'naked' illusion body image dress for a photo on Thursday.

Taking to her Instagram Story, the glamour model, 35, posed up a storm as she took to the changing rooms to try on the fun ensemble and joked that it was perfect wedding guest attire.

The dress which made sure to turn heads, is part of The Lotta Volkova x Jean Paul Gaultier latest collection of surrealist garments and costs 500.

'Wedding season ready': Keeley Hazell poked fun at the 500 Gaultier 'naked' illusion printed dress for a jaw-dropping changing room snap on Instagram on Thursday

Keeley wore her blonde locks down as she flicked her hair behind her shoulders to showcase the dress.

She opted for minimal makeup as she went fresh faced and displayed her incredible complexion.

Keeley hasn't shied away from flaunting her own ample assets in the past as her modelling career has seen her work with publications such as FHM, Loaded and Nuts.

Show-stopping: The dress which made sure to turn heads, is part of The Lotta Volkova x Jean Paul Gaultier latest collection of surrealist garments

Dress designer Lotta Volkova, explained in an Instagram post: 'It was an incredible honor to be able to discover the archives, obsess and fetishize - reimagine the iconic Jean Paul Gaultier collections in the context of 2022 reintroducing them into a contemporary wardrobe.'

The ready-to-wear collection features women's bodies printed on an array of clothing pieces including bikini's and mesh tops.

Keeley in currently in a relationship with American actor Jason Sudeikis after the pair re-kindled her on-again off-again romance.

Hot stuff! Keeley hasn't shied away from flaunting her own ample assets in the past as her modelling career has seen her work with publications such as FHM (Pictured in 2006)

In June last year, Jason and Keeley appeared to confirm their romance as they were pictured embracing while sightseeing in New York City, in exclusive pictures obtained by MailOnline.

According to E! news, an insider denied the rumours as they said: 'Jason and Keeley were never in a serious relationship. It was definitely never a serious thing.'

Jason and Keeley were apparently first romantically linked in February 2021 after having known each other for years.

The pair started spending more time with one another when Jason was filming Ted Lasso in London, sources told the news site.

They were then spotted holding hands in New York City, and apparently Jason sought comfort in Keeley following his his break up with Olivia Wilde.
With the end of Neighbours imminent, actresses Jacinta Stapleton, Freya Van Dyke and Lucinda Cowden were spotted filming scenes in Melbourne on Tuesday.

The trio were seen filming outdoors, with a cameraman capturing it all, as crew members chatted with them in between takes.

Jacinta, 42, clutched a broom as she stood on a street in a pair of distressed jeans, which she wore with a white T-shirt and white sneakers.

Action: With the end of Neighbours imminent, actresses Jacinta Stapleton (pictured), Freya Van Dyke and Lucinda Cowden were spotted filming scenes in Melbourne on Tuesday

Her long blonde hair was tied up in a high ponytail, and she filmed opposite both Freya, 18, and Lucinda.

Lucinda, 57, was all smiles on set in a boho print dress, which she accessorised with a black belt, brown boots and brown handbag.

Meanwhile, Freya wore a pair of cuffed jeans, which she paired with a red singlet top, black hooded jacket and high-top sneakers.

Caught on camera: The trio were seen filming outdoor scenes, with a cameraman capturing it all, as crew members chatted with them in between takes. Pictured, Freya Van Dyke (left) and Lucinda Cowden (right)

She held a bucket as she filmed a cleaning scene, with Jacinta seen scrubbing something up high with the broom.

On Wednesday, Neighbours released its final cast photo, depicting the show's beloved characters enjoying a picnic in a park.

The series announced that production would be ceasing on the long-running soap in a tweet back in March.

Cleaning up: Jacinta, 42, clutched a broom as she stood on a street in a pair of distressed jeans, which she wore with a white T-shirt and white sneakers

Taking care of business: Her long blonde hair was tied up in a high ponytail, and she filmed opposite both Freya, 18, and Lucinda

'We are so sorry to say that after nearly 37 years and almost 9,000 episodes broadcast we have to confirm that Neighbours will cease production in June,' they wrote.

'Following the loss of our key broadcast partner in the UK and despite an extensive search for alternative funding, we simply have no option but to rest the show.

'To our amazing, loyal fans, we know this is a huge disappointment, as it is to all of us on the team. We thank you for all your messages and support and promise to end the show on an incredible high. From here on, we are celebrating Neighbours.'

Happy to be there: Lucinda, 57, was all smiles on set in a boho print dress, which she accessorised with a black belt, brown boots and brown handbag

'We are so sorry to say that after nearly 37 years and almost 9,000 episodes broadcast we have to confirm that Neighbours will cease production in June,' they wrote

Network 10 addressed the end of the series in a statement to Australian media in March, admitting it had been a 'difficult decision'.

'Today, Fremantle confirmed that Neighbours will cease production in June, after nearly 37 years and almost 9,000 episodes,' a network spokesperson announced.

'This difficult decision came after the search for an alternative UK broadcast partner proved unsuccessful.'

'To our amazing, loyal fans, we know this is a huge disappointment, as it is to all of us on the team. We thank you for all your messages and support and promise to end the show on an incredible high. From here on, we are celebrating Neighbours,' said the show

They added that the series would 'not air on 10 Peach beyond September 2022', marking the end of its decades-long run.

'A much-loved stalwart of our program schedule for over 35 years it has been a staple of Australian television drama, and Australian cultural exports,' they added.

'Ramsay Street, Erinsborough, is a cul-de-sac recognised all over the world and has been home to Scott and Charlene, Des and Daphne, Dr Karl and Susan, Dee and Toadie, Aaron and David and many, many more neighbours.

Dressed down: Freya wore a pair of cuffed jeans, which she paired with a red singlet top, black hooded jacket and high-top sneakers

End of an era: Network 10 addressed the end of the series in a statement to Australian media in March, admitting it had been a 'difficult decision'

'Network 10 thanks the cast, crew, all the production team and Fremantle for bringing the perfect blend of soap and sunshine to audiences in Australia and around the world.'

They also praised 'the Australian fans and audiences for their continued support of the series'.

'Their encouragement particularly in the past few weeks has been incredible. It shows that our audience still want Australian scripted drama,' continued the statement.

Getting clean: She held a bucket as she filmed a cleaning scene, with Jacinta seen scrubbing something up high with the broom

'We have listened to them and there are exciting new local projects in the pipeline, which is great for our audience and for the local industry.

'We are confident that the cast, crew and writers will bring their distinctive warmth, style and humour to the Neighbours set as they embark on filming the final episodes over the coming months.'

Meanwhile, Fremantle - the production company behind the soap - said they had been unable to come up with 'alternative funding' for the series.

'Today, Fremantle confirmed that Neighbours will cease production in June, after nearly 37 years and almost 9,000 episodes,' a network spokesperson announced

'It is with sadness that after nearly 37 years and almost 9,000 episodes broadcast, we are confirming that Neighbours will cease production in June,' they began in a statement on Thursday.

'Following the loss of a key broadcast partner in the UK, and despite a search for alternative funding, we currently have no option but to rest the show.

'Everyone at Neighbours has been overwhelmed by the love and support from the audience since the news came out.

All over: They added that the series would 'not air on 10 Peach beyond September 2022', marking the end of its decades-long run

'The show has brought a sunny slice of Australia into the homes of millions of viewers around the world launching the careers of dozens of household names along way.

'But as this chapter of Ramsay Street comes to a close, we promise to do everything we can to give the show the send-off it deserves.'

Reports emerged in February that Neighbours' future was in jeopardy after British broadcaster Channel 5 announced it would no longer air the show.
Minnie Driver has spoken out about her public split with Good Will Hunting co-star Matt Damon.

The pair started a relationship after starring as love interests in the film and had a whirlwind romance from 1997 to 1998.

The 52-year-old actress appeared on the latest episode of ITV's This Morning on Thursday where she told Phillip Schofield and Rochelle Humes: 'It was dramatically reported on but I wouldn't change a second of it.'

Opening up: Minnie Driver has spoken out about her public split with Good Will Hunting co-star Matt Damon - pictured on This Morning on Thursday

Earlier in the day, Minnie spoke to Chris Evans on the Sky Breakfast Show, where she opened up about her time in Hollywood and their romance during that time.

She said: 'Matt Damon was just this lovely, talented, great person who was also very young and got famous very fast. And people don't always behave well in situations when you're under pressure.

'It was a very sweet romance that we had. And I really do look back on it with such fondness no matter how it ended up. It was just sort of dramatic and tabloid-y and was really unbelievable.'

Cute: The pair started a relationship after starring as love interests in the film and had a whirlwind romance from 1997 to 1998

She recalled what it was like to find out he dating other people through the press: 'At the time, it was weird, walking down the aisle in the supermarket with magazine covers in stereo of him making out with his new girlfriend after we'd broken up.

'We really did fancy each other, we really were good friends at that point. And they let us improvise a lot, there was a lot of real, the way in which we spoke to each other.'

Minnie is now engaged to Addison O'Dea, having been linked to him since 2019 and has a 13-year-old son Henry.

Relationship: The 52-year-old actress appeared on the latest episode of ITV's This Morning on Thursday where she told Phillip Schofield and Rochelle Humes: 'It was dramatically reported on but I wouldn't change a second of it.'

The actress cemented her rise to fame with the 1997's Good Will Hunting which earned her an Academy Award nomination.

Having been across the big and small screen since then, fame is something Minnie knows all too well, and described as 'disorienting.'

Speaking on moving country and finding herself, she said: 'I think there's this notion that when you go to somewhere like New York, when you're really young, and I had this opportunity to be this other person in a way, or to try on all these different identities, ideas and accents, and I didn't know who I was.

Family: Minnie is now engaged to Addison O'Dea, having been linked to him since 2019 and has a 13-year-old son Henry

'I knew who I was in England. And I knew all those things, which were to do with my hair and my upbringing, and having been ungainly, and, you know, a big girl, and now suddenly, I was the slim girl.

'And these agents saw something completely different in me. I started to wonder who that was. There's that whole chapter, which is about the exploration of, is it leaving yourself behind and becoming someone else? Or is it adding into the mix of who you are?'

Minnie recently claimed that her star-making turn almost didn't come to pass after now-disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein objected to her presence in The Goodwill Hunting.

Traumatising: It comes amid her claims that her star-making turn almost didn't come to pass after now-disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein objected to her presence in The Goodwill Hunting (pictured August 2021)

The film star claimed to the Times London over the weekend that the 70-year-old convicted sex offender said that 'Nobody would want to f*** her' ahead of productio

Despite Weinstein's offensive comments, the producers fought for her to remain on the picture, as did Matt Damon, who starred in the lead role and co-wrote the film with his friend and costar Ben Affleck.

'I remember feeling so devastated until I realised, "Hold on, just consider the source for a minute. That is an unutterable pig  why on earth are you worried about this f*** saying that you are not sexy?"' she recalled.

She added that she balanced the relief of not being targeted like some of Weinstein's other victims with the knowledge that he could still kneecap her career.

But there are ramifications of that: that maybe I am not going to be hired because people dont think I have the sexual quality that is required,' she continued. 'How awful to think that I was one of the lucky ones [who escaped him] because he didnt think I was f***able.

'And how amazing and wonderful that it has turned around and young men and women in my industry are not going to experience that.'
Dennis Quaid is starring as former US President Ronald Reagan in the biopic Reagan.

And he told KCLU this week that it at first he pushed away from playing the 40th President because he worried about playing a real person.

'I originally turned it down. I felt a tinge of fear up my spine and that's when I said yes. That's usually when I should do something, when it's out of my comfort zone,' said the ex husband of Meg Ryan.

No then yes: Dennis Quaid is starring as former US President Ronald Reagan in the biopic Reagan. And he told KCLU this week that it at first he pushed away from playing the 40th President because he worried about playing a real person

Quaid as Reagan: Here Dennis is seen as the President in a promo for the movie

And he also shared that he is a fan of the Republican.

'Ronald Reagan was my favorite president. I voted for him, I think I was 30 at the time. I had a rented apartment back then that I shared with a guy. He said, 'who did you vote for?' I said, 'Ronald Reagan.' He said, 'You are kicked out of the hippies.' But I loved Reagan and I voted for him twice.'

Quaid told KCLU reporter Caroline Feraday he filmed some parts of the movie at the Reagan Ranch in Goleta, Santa Barbara County.

'It's not open to the public and it's an amazing place. Much smaller than I would have thought. I realized when I went up there that Reagan was a very humble man. The house itself where he had Gorbachev and the Queen of England came too, is total of probably 1500 square feet.

On board: 'I originally turned it down. I felt a tinge of fear up my spine and that's when I said yes. That's usually when I should do something, when it's out of my comfort zone,' said the star; here he is seen with Laura Savoie in April

'They had a King-sized bed but it was two single beds zip-tied together. Their clothes were in the closet like they had just left and they were going to come back.'

Quaid told Variety in 2020 that the movie would appeal to people regardless of their political stance, insisting Reagan 'transcends politics'.

The star said: 'Reagan was a fascinating and multifaceted human being and this movie captures his humanity.

'We're making a movie for Republicans and Democrats alike since Reagan transcends politics.'

Hollywood star: Ronald Reagan is shown circa 1945 in a Hollywood headshot portrait

Reagan is being directed by Sean McNamara from a script written by Howard Klausner.

Penelope Ann Miller is playing Nancy Reagan with Mena Suvari portraying his first wife Jane Wyman.

Jon Voight also stars as a KGB agent who tracked Reagan for 40 years.

Production on the movie was halted for two weeks in 2020 due to a Covid-19 outbreak among crew members.

Shooting resumed on November 5 and relocated to California.

Reagan worked for Warner Bros. during his acting career before venturing into politics and made the majority of his films there, including the 1942 moody melodrama Kings Row that was nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture.

Kevin Dillon portrays Warner Bros. co-founder Jack Warner in the biopic.

Hollywood mogul: Kevin Dillon, shown in June 2015 in Hollywood, has been cast in the upcoming biopic Reagan

Film executive: Jack Warner, co-founder of Warner Bros Pictures Incorporated, is shown circa 1945

Kevin told Variety: 'What a great opportunity to work on a movie as epic as this.

'Acting with Dennis Quaid and playing Jack Warner, one of the founding fathers of Hollywood, is such a privilege.'

Producer Paul Joseph added: 'We are excited to have Kevin join our cast. He adds his incredible acting skills to our wonderful cast.'

Producer Paul Joseph added explained how Dennis was always 'first choice' to play the lead role.

'Dennis was always our first choice. He's one of the great actors of our time,' the producer declared.
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Stassi Schroeder had her dream wedding with Beau Clark at the Hotel de Russie in Rome, Italy, she confirmed to Instagram on Thursday.

The 33-year-old blonde reality TV star looked like a princess in her long off-white tulle wedding gown with a sweetheart neckline from designer Galia Lahav with a white veil and jewelry by Nicole Rose Kopelman.

And her husband Beau was dapper in a black tuxedo with a black bow tie as he held onto his wife in photos taken by Cinzia Bruschini Studio and shared to social media.

Her dream wedding has happened: Stassi Schroeder had her dream wedding with Beau Clark at the Hotel de Russie in Rome, Italy, she confirmed on Instagram on Thursday

And baby makes three: The couple were also seen smiling as they held their daughter Hartford Charlie Rose Clark, age one, who had on a dress that matched her mother's gown

Stassi noted the event planner was Alison Bryan Destinations as they walked down the aisle with friends and co-stars Katie Maloney and Tom Schwartz - who recently split but are on civil terms - looking on.

The couple were also seen smiling as they held their daughter Hartford Charlie Rose Clark, age one, who had on a white tulle dress that matched her mother's gown. The child also had on lace stockings and shiny gold shoes.

The lovebirds can also be seen kissing and hugging in an outdoor area in what looked to be part of their ceremony.

Stassi and Beau started their romance towards the end of 2017 and they became engaged in July 2019.

The two first officially wed in 2020 in a back yard with few in attendance due to COVID.

The stunning bride emerges: The siren got some help with her train as she walked into the back yard

More help for the beautiful bride in white: And in this image she had two attendants taking care of her dress

They had to wait until now to have a big, splashy wedding of their dreams with their friends in Italy.

The former reality star, who was fired from Vanderpump Rules over a racism scandal, was spotted in Italy the day before with some of her former co-stars to kick off her lavish wedding week.

Schroeder stunned in social media photos in a romantic white silk gown for her 'welcoming party' on Wednesday.

Your bride is here: Beau put his hands up to his face as he saw his bride in her gorgeous gown with a sweetheart neckline; her sweet diamond butterfly earrings could also be seen

She sure loves her man: Stassi beamed with love and happiness as she stared at her groom with a slight smile

Hooray for Mrs Clark: Beau put out his arms as he waited for his wife to come towards him in her white gown

The cameras are very close to this couple: She seemed to wipe away a tear as the photographers came in close

She greeted guests, including Vanderpump Rules exes Katie and Tom.

Stassi and Beau were spotted taking in the Roman sights on Tuesday with their daughter Hartford and some pals.

The canceled reality star appears to have shaken off her tumultuous few years, being axed from Vanderpump Rules, dropped by her team and losing her podcast over allegations of racism.

Stassi recently released her second book, Off With My Head: The Definitive Basic B***h Handbook to Surviving Rock Bottom, which shot to number eight on the NYT Best Seller List .

She stepped out on a beautiful spring day in Italy wearing a flouncy floral strapless top paired with wide leg khaki slacks and low stacked heels.

The kiss that says you're mine forever: The time kissed on the lips as man and wife; though they already got married before

The smooch that spells love: Stassi had one manicured hand on her husband's back as she leaned in for the kiss

Hugs for my honey: And Schroeder also used both arms to hug her husband with her engagement ring shining proudly

The blonde beauty wore her hair in a sleek low bun and enjoyed sight seeing and pizza with her family and friends.

After Hartford, one, went to bed that night, the grown ups headed out for dinner and drinks.

Images of their night on the town, walking down cobblestoned streets, were shared to social media.

After they said 'I do': The bride and groom beamed with joy as they greeted their friends after they said their vows

It's time to go: After becoming man and wife (again), they left side by side to take more photographs

Katie Maloney, who is still starring on Vanderpump Rules, headed across the pond with her soon-to-be ex husband Tom Schwartz to attend the event.

She posted several images of the girls dressed to impress while out for cocktails ahead of the main event later this week.

On Wednesday evening, Stassi and Beau invited guests of their destination wedding to get together at a welcome soiree.

Stassi turned heads in a jaw-dropping ivory silk Galia Lahav gown with a structured bodice, sweet heart neckline and high slit.

I'll drink to that: The groom appeared to be enjoying a spritzer as he stood on pea gravel next to his groomsmen

Wedding photos: At Villa Miani Stassi was seen posing in her gown against a mural with a chandelier off to the side

She and her husband appeared smitten in photos shared to social media.

Their 2020 nuptials were small.

The reality TV duo threw together an intimate and socially distanced affair in their backyard instead of their originally planned ceremony in Italy which has just now come to fruition.

'Today would've been our wedding day. We went and did it anyway,' Stassi captioned footage of their legal wedding. 'Hopefully Italian dream wedding oct 2021.'

Unfortunately for Stassi, 2021 came and went in the height of the coronavirus crisis and she wouldn't get her dream event until the following year.

Bravo cameras were expected to capture the ceremony, which would have been aired on season nine of the show, before Stassi was axed.

Stassi's past racially insensitive actions - she reported her black co-star Faith Stowers to the police in 2018 for a crime she did not commit - resurfaced in 2019 leading to her firing.

Ready to greet their guests! Stassi and Beau Clark were seen in Rome the night before for their welcoming party

All good! Soon-to-be ex husband and wife Katie Maloney and Tom Schwartz had no qualms about putting their divorce aside to celebrate their friend in Italy

Not only did she lose her part on the hit reality show, but Stassi's podcast Straight Up With Stassi was dropped from endorsement deals and she was let go by her PR agency.

The star has come out the other side of the scandal and recently released her second book, Off With My Head: The Definitive Basic B***h Handbook to Surviving Rock Bottom, which shot to number eight on the New York Times Best Seller List.

Stassi has maintained her relationships with most of her former co-stars and was seen in April celebrating Brittany Cartwright and Jax Taylor's son's first birthday along with Lala Kent, Kristen Doute, Katie Maloney and Tom Schwartz.
The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Erika 'Jayne' Girardi didn't realize that mixing her anti-depressant Lexapro with alcohol (a depressant) would increase intoxication.

In the trailer for season 12 - which premiered Wednesday - the 50-year-old reality star acting hungover and leaning back while saying: 'Oh my god! I'm so lit!'

Erika could also be seen falling down and shouting at her castmates, 'I don't give a f*** about anybody else but me!'

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Erika 'Jayne' Girardi didn't realize that mixing her anti-depressant Lexapro with alcohol (a depressant) would increase intoxication

'Well, look, I've been very open and honest. I mixed alcohol and antidepressants, which I didn't know that it would make you this drunk and it did,' Jayne (born Chahoy) told Us Weekly on Tuesday.

'I do not have a problem and lesson learned and we go on. I mean, are you gonna see a moment that, you know, you will probably be like, "Is that Erika?" And the answer is yeah. I mean, that was me.'

The Pretty Mess Hair founder is not 'embarrassed' but admits 'some of my behavior was not great, but it's also very real.'

'At that time, it was really difficult because there were moments that I didn't wanna get out of bed - more than moments, there were days and you have to do that,' said Erika, who joined the franchise in season six.

In the trailer for season 12 - which premiered Wednesday - the 50-year-old reality star acting hungover and leaning back while saying: 'Oh my god! I'm so lit!'

Erika told Us Weekly on Tuesday: 'I do not have a problem and lesson learned and we go on. I mean, are you gonna see a moment that, you know, you will probably be like, "Is that Erika?" And the answer is yeah. I mean, that was me'

'There were moments that I didn't wanna get out of bed': Jayne (born Chahoy) is not 'embarrassed' but admits 'some of my behavior was not great, but it's also very real'

'And let's be honest, you know, you're sitting at these parties and some of these women are kind of boring. So you have a drink [and then] you have another drink. And then you're like, "Where am I?" So, you know, it's not that I was drinking a lot. It's just that I was drinking while being medicated.'

Mixing Lexapro (aka escitalopram) with alcohol can cause drowsiness, increased depression/anxiety, decreased alertness/coordination, violent behavior, and suicidal thoughts - according to WebMD.

Estate trustees are suing Jayne for the return of $25M, which was allegedly used to pay her expenses for 12 years.

It's all a part of her estranged second husband Thomas Girardi's alleged embezzlement of a $2M settlement meant for the families of the victims of the fatal 2018 Lion Air plane crash.

The Pretty Mess Hair founder continued: 'Some of these women are kind of boring. So you have a drink [and then] you have another drink. And then you're like, "Where am I?" So, you know, it's not that I was drinking a lot. It's just that I was drinking while being medicated'

Warning! Mixing Lexapro (aka escitalopram) with alcohol can cause drowsiness, increased depression/anxiety, decreased alertness/coordination, violent behavior, and suicidal thoughts

In January, the Bravo-lebrity was dismissed from the fraud and embezzlement lawsuit against her husband in Illinois, but the plaintiff's attorney plans to refile in California.

The 82-year-old disbarred lawyer's bankrupt firm Girardi & Keese owes $101M and he currently lives at an assisted-living facility under the conservatorship of his younger brother Robert.

Tom is said to be suffering from dementia and Alzheimer's and Erika filed to end their 21-year marriage in 2020.

'No chance we are letting @erikajayne off the hook': In January, Erika was dismissed from the fraud and embezzlement lawsuit against her second husband Thomas Girardi (L) in Illinois, but the plaintiff's attorney plans to refile in California

Jayne defended: 'You can't go through what I have gone through the previous season and not feel something and not feel great and not want to have a good time. I wanted to have some fun'

Catch more of the Atlanta-born socialite - who's 'having sex with a secret admirer' - in the 12th season of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, which airs Wednesdays on Bravo

'It's part of the human experience. I mean, you can't go through what I have gone through the previous season and not feel something and not feel great and not want to have a good time,' Jayne defended.

'I wanted to have some fun. I wanted to not feel so heavy, and that's what I did.'

Catch more of the Atlanta-born socialite - who's 'having sex with a secret admirer' - in the 12th season of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, which airs Wednesdays on Bravo.
Octavia Spencer shot her castmate Gabrielle Union a look as they strolled through Griffith Park in Los Angeles on Thursday while filming season three of Apple TV+ series Truth Be Told.

The Nebraska-born 47-year-old wore a navy-blue pin-stripe short suit over a white top and matching sneakers selected by costume designer Jennifer Eve.

Gabrielle portrays an outspoken high school principal called Eva, who becomes embroiled in a problematic incident - according to Deadline.

Girrrrl! Octavia Spencer shot her castmate Gabrielle Union a look as they strolled through Griffith Park in LA on Thursday while filming season three of Apple TV+ series Truth Be Told

Production began on April 15 for the Oscar winner - turning 52 on May 25 - who executive produces and stars as true crime podcaster Poppy Scoville-Parnell.

On Monday, Octavia shared a behind-the-scenes video from her trailer while getting glam by make-up artist Valerie Noble and hair department head Kemi Cooks.

Also returning for season three are Ron Cephas Jones, who plays Poppy's father Leander 'Shreve' Scoville, and Tami Roman Youngblood, who plays Poppy's stepmother Lillian Scoville.

And Selena: The Series star Ricardo Chavira and In the Dark star Ana Ayora will reportedly have recurring roles in the third season.

Suited: The Nebraska-born 47-year-old wore a navy-blue pin-stripe short suit over a white top and matching sneakers selected by costume designer Jennifer Eve

Baller: Gabrielle portrays an outspoken high school principal called Eva, who becomes embroiled in a problematic incident

'Another season, another crime to solve!' Production began on April 15 for the Oscar winner - turning 52 on May 25 - who executive produces and stars as true crime podcaster Poppy Scoville-Parnell

Nichelle Tramble Spellman's dismally-reviewed anthology drama series is based on Kathleen Barber's 2017 novel Are You Sleeping.

Previous seasons featured Oscar nominee Kate Hudson, three-time Emmy winner Aaron Paul, and Emmy nominee Lizzy Caplan.

Oscar winner Reese Witherspoon is among the 22 producers on Truth Be Told.

BTS: On Monday, Octavia shared a video from her trailer while getting glam by make-up artist Valerie Noble and hair department head Kemi Cooks

'The gang is getting back together': Also returning for season three are Ron Cephas Jones, who plays Poppy's father Leander 'Shreve' Scoville, and Tami Roman Youngblood, who plays Poppy's stepmother Lillian Scoville (pictured April 19)

Ensemble: Selena: The Series star Ricardo Chavira (L) and In the Dark star Ana Ayora (R) will reportedly have recurring roles in the third season
England star Harry Maguire married his fiancee Fern Hawkins in a private ceremony in Cheshire on Thursday.

According to The Mirror, the Manchester United captain left the club's Carringdon training ground at midday and headed straight a registry office where Fern was waiting for him.

Details of the wedding were kept top secret even from the guests as attendees were reportedly told the venue of Crewe Registry Office in a text earlier that day.

Congrats! England star Harry Maguire married his fiancee Fern Hawkins in a private ceremony in Cheshire on Thursday

Making it official: The Manchester United captain left the club's Carringdon training ground at midday and headed straight a registry office where Fern was waiting for him (pictured leaving training on Thursday)

Harry and Fern, both 29, met when they were teenagers and have been together for the last ten years.

The couple, who have been engaged since 2018, kept details of the ceremony from all but their closest family and friends.

The publication reports that they are planning to take their vows again this summer in a romantic ceremony in France.

Harry was said to have been joined at the ceremony by his parents Zoe and Alan, who travelled from their home near Sheffield.

Secret: Details of the wedding were kept top secret even from the guests as attendees were reportedly told the venue of Crewe Registry Office in a text earlier that day

A source told the publication: 'It was a closely guarded secret to all but their closest family and friends.

'They wanted to be officially married in the UK before they head to France. That will be a fairytale wedding day for Fern.'

Harry's sister Daisy, 21, will reportedly be a bridesmaid at the more lavish ceremony, set to be held at a chateau in Burgundy.

His brothers Joe, 30, and Laurence, 25, will also be in attendance along with his teammate Jordan Pickford - who's wife Megan Davison will reportedly be another bridesmaid.

A source said: 'It was a closely guarded secret to all but their closest family and friends'

Plans: The publication reports that they are planning to take their vows again this summer in a romantic ceremony in France

Important guests: It's understood that Megan Davison - the wife of Harry's England teammate Jordan Pickford - is set to be a bridesmaid at the couple's impending French ceremony

Secret ceremony: Harry was said to have been joined at the ceremony by his parents Zoe and Alan, who travelled from their home near Sheffield

It has been said that Fern is 'very excited' about getting married at such a romantic venue after ten years with Harry, and is busy planning the wedding.

Fern and Harry have been dating since they were teenagers and met in their in hometown of Sheffield.

The couple share two daughters, Lillie Saint, three, and Piper Rose, two.

Fern announced their engagement in February 2018, after Harry whisked her off to Paris.

She penned at the time: 'On Saturday night, Harry made me the happiest girl in the world & asked me to marry him in the most perfect way [sic] #ISAIDYES #TheFutureMrsMaguire #17thFebruary2018'
Eddie Lucas of Below Deck fame is dishing on the series after revealing he will not be returning for the show's 10th season.

The reality TV star, 37, discussed his unceremonious exit from the series in an interview with the New York Post.

'I was not invited back to do another season,' he said. 'I actually didnt even get a phone call from them saying they hired someone else  which kind of goes to show what the production entails. Everyone on Below Deck is expendable.'

Opening up: Eddie Lucas of Below Deck fame is dishing on the series after revealing he won't return for the show's tenth season

Lucas also discussed the salaries on the show.

'There is somebody monetizing off of the show, but its definitely not us, ' Lucas said. 'Below Deck  regardless of it being the most popular show on Bravo  we are the lowest-paid cast members.'

He continued, 'While we do get paid better than a normal yachtie, of course, we are still not getting paid what people like the Housewives are making, which is a little frustrating, because theyre not really working  theyre just going out to dinner and fighting.'

In-depth interview: The reality show star, 37, discussed his unceremonious exit from the series in an interview with the New York Post

Not getting paid big bucks: 'There is somebody monetizing off of the show, but its definitely not us, ' Lucas said. (l-r) Ben Robinson, C.J. Lebeau, Kathleen Held, Adrienne Gang, David Bradberry, Alex Taldykin, Samantha Orme, Eddie Lucas

Members of the crew also reportedly have to get specialized licenses for what they do while many other reality stars do not.

Without a show to film for the first time in years, Lucas bought a house in his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, for over the asking price of $330,000.

'The goal has always been to settle down, put some roots down, buy a house,' he said in the interview. 'But its been difficult to be able to try and do that and for a lot of people my age and my generation, with housing prices the way they are, student loan debt at an all-time high, it is difficult.'

Longtime cast member: Eddie Lucas was a cast member on the show from seasons 1 to 3 before rejoining as a first officer in season 8 and 9. (l-r) Emil Kotze, Kate Chastain, Eddie Lucas, Captain Lee Rosbach, Amy Johnson, Leon Walker, Raquel Bartlow, Connie Arias

'The yachting industry that I did gave me more of a foundation to be able to reach those goals, but I still have student loans to pay off,' he continued.

Eddie Lucas was a cast member on the show from seasons 1 to 3 before rejoining as a first officer in season 8 and 9.

He was part of a controversy during the most recent season after one of his co-stars, Heather Chase, used the N-word on camera.

Though some accused Lucas of moving past the incident because he never brought up the incident on screen, he claimed he was told 'to not talk about it and not bring it up anymore.'
Olivia Colman was seen building sandcastles on the beach as she shot scenes for romantic movie Empire Of Light alongside her co-star Micheal Ward.

The actress, 48, cut a casual figure in a navy sundress as she filmed scenes on Camber Sands beach in East Sussex on Thursday.

She opted to go barefoot as she joined her co-star Michael, 24, in making sandcastles with an orange bucket and spade during shooting.

Shooting: Olivia Colman was seen building sandcastles on the beach as she shot scenes for romantic movie Empire Of Light alongside her co-star Micheal Ward

Sandcastles: The actress, 48, cut a casual figure in a navy sundress as she filmed scenes on Camber Sands beach in East Sussex on Thursday

Olivia was seen battling the strong coastal winds as her curly brunette tresses blew in front of her face, while she kept warm in a navy puffer coat in between takes.

Blue Story star Michael looked stylish in beige trousers and a checkered shirt, which he wore partially unbuttoned as he gave a flash of his toned physique.

The actors were also joined by the film's director Sam Mendes for the shoot, with the movie described as a love story set in the 1980s.

Along with Olivia and Michael, Empire Of Light will also star Colin Firth, Toby Jones and Crystal Clarke.

Building: Olivia could be seen shaping a sandcastle as she filmed scenes on the beach

Fun times: She opted to go barefoot as she joined her co-star Michael, 24, in making sandcastles with an orange bucket and spade during shooting

Keeping it casual: Blue Story star Michael looked stylish in beige trousers and a checkered shirt

Stars: The co-stars could be seen smiling and chatting as they stood around the sandcastle

Breaking: Olivia could also be seen stamping on the sandcastle elsewhere during filming

Looking good: Michael wore his shirt partially unbuttoned as he gave a flash of his toned physique

Windy: Olivia was seen battling the strong coastal winds as her curly brunette tresses blew in front of her face, while director Sam Mendes was also seen on set

Filming on the project began in early February in Margate and the seaside town was transported back to the 1980s as builders could be seen transforming the area surrounding the Dreamland amusement park.

In preparation for filming, workers could be seen taking the cinema back to its 1980s heyday, with boards outside advertising the crime comedy The Blues Brothers.

Referencing the film's title, the word Empire could be seen splashed across the advertising board, while the exterior was also decorated with classic film posters.

All smiles: Olivia flashed a huge smile as she spoke to her co-star Michael as they shot the beach scenes

Fun: Olivia could be seen walking across the sandcastle and stamping on it to destroy the sandcastle

Weather: Olivia was seen keeping warm in a navy puffer coat in between takes on Camber Sands beach

Beach day: Olivia and Michael could be seen chatting as they walked around their sandcastle during shooting

Co-stars: A windswept Olivia could be seen walking barefoot across the beach as she shot scenes with Michael

Battling the elements: Members of the crew could be seen using a large umbrella amid the windy weather

Cold: Olivia kept warm in a light jacket while Michael wore a Dry Robe as they chatted with director Sam between takes

The project marks the first time that frontman Sam is set to direct a film that he didn't pen with the assistance of a co-writer.

While plot details remains tightly under wraps, it is known the production is a love story 'set around a beautiful old cinema on the South Coast of England in the 1980s'.

Sam is producing Empire of Light alongside Pippa Harris through his Neal Street Productions, and he will also reunite with his longtime cinematographer Roger Deakins on the production.

Sandy: Olivia and Michael sat in the sand as they built a sandcastle while the crew filmed on

Scenes: The day of shooting at Camber Sands comes after filming on the project began in early February in Margate, with the seaside town being transported back to the 1980s

Filming: Empire Of Light marks the first time that frontman Sam is set to direct a film that he didn't pen with the assistance of a co-writer

Project: While plot details remains tightly under wraps, it is known the production is a love story 'set around a beautiful old cinema on the South Coast of England in the 1980s'

Aiming to release the film in late 2022, Sam said in a statement: 'I have long been an admirer of Searchlight and the dynamic way they have produced and released some of my favourite theatrical releases of recent years.

'This project is very close to my heart, and I couldn't be more delighted that it has found its ideal home.'

Olivia, who is known for her role as Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown's third and fourth seasons, recently starred in a Sky drama that saw her portray killer Susan Edwards, with David Thewlis playing her husband and accomplice Christopher.

The production was a family affair as the four-part drama, called Landscapers, was the first television screenplay written by Olivia's husband Ed Sinclair.
Fans of the late comedian Norm Macdonald will get to see him perform one last time, according to his sister-in-law Joyce Napier.

Eight months after the Saturday Night Live alum died of cancer at the age of 61 following a nine-year battle with leukemia, the Canadian TV journalist, 63, revealed her husband's brother secretly recorded a stand-up special.

'It turns out Norm left an hour of new material behind, recorded in his apartment during the lockdown,' she wrote. 'It'll be a Netflix comedy special soon. 'So, we have that. Which is precisely what Norm wanted.'

One final laugh: Fans of the late comedian Norm Macdonald will get to see him perform one last time, according to his sister-in-law Joyce Napier; seen in 2008

Napier wrote a tribute to Macdonald for CTV News, in which she described how the former Weekend Update legend's family and friends came together for a belated memorial service in Los Angeles last weekend.

'He chose to die privately, his cancer undisclosed to all but a tiny family circle. In an era when people write soul-baring essays about a torn rotator cuff, he kept his condition a secret from just about everyone,' she quipped.

Napier continued: 'Wed celebrated Norm... It was poignant, it was funny, it was lovely, and hes gone.'

Devastating loss: Eight months after the Saturday Night Live alum died of cancer at the age of 61 following a nine-year battle with leukemia, the Canadian TV journalist, 63, revealed her husband's brother secretly recorded a stand-up special; seen in 2003

David Spade said the recording 'definitely' made him cry as he watched the special alongside Macdonalds closest friends on Wednesday's episode of his Fly on the Wall podcast.

In September, Macdonald's longtime producing partner and friend Lori Jo Hoekstra was with him when he passed.

He told Deadline that Macdonald had been battling cancer for nearly a decade but remained adamant about keeping his diagnosis from family, friends and fans.

Mourning: Speaking of the event, David Spade (pictured last week) said he 'definitely cried' watching the special alongside Macdonalds closest friends

'He was most proud of his comedy,' Hoekstra said. 'He never wanted the diagnosis to affect the way the audience or any of his loved ones saw him. Norm was a pure comic. He once wrote that 'a joke should catch someone by surprise, it should never pander.' He certainly never pandered. Norm will be missed terribly.'

The famous comedian was best known for his work on Saturday Night Live where he worked as a cast member from 1993- 1998 and starred as the show's anchor on its Weekend Update segment.

In 2004, Comedy Central named him as one of the 100 Greatest Stand-Ups of All Time. Many famous comedians have named Macdonald's dry and witty deadpan comedy as an inspiration to their own careers.

Macdonald began his comedic career performing the circuit of comedy clubs in Canada where he developed his signature deadpan style. He was a contestant on Star Search in 1990 and secured his first television writing job on The Dennis Miller Show.

He then went on to write for Roseanne from 1992- 1993 before he joined the SNL cast.

In September, his death and secret cancer diagnosis was confirmed by his longtime producing partner and friend Lori Jo Hoekstra (pictured: Macdonald co-hosting the view on September 13, 2018)

Chevy Chase, who created SNL's Weekend Update, named Macdonald as the best anchor to ever host the segment. Macdonald's time at the helm of Weekend Update pushed the popular news commentary away from Chase's slapstick comedy take on to the more politically charged sharp approach that is still seen today.

He was noted for his strong commentary on O.J. Simpson despite reported instance from NBC executives to tone it down. After Simpson was found not guilty, Macdonald joked, 'Well, it is finally official: Murder is legal in the state of California.'

His sharp comedic criticism is believed to have led to his firing from the show in 1999. It is also alleged to have been one of the few decisions regarding the show that was not left to producer Lorne Michaels.

Macdonald was succeeded by comedian Colin Quinn who took over the coveted post.

Macdonald said he had arrived early to tape a segment, just hours after he told The Hollywood Reporter he wanted Louis CK and Roseanne Barr to get together and commiserate because they had lost everything to the #MeToo movement. (pictured: Macdonald, left, on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, right, in 2017)

The stand-up comedian went on to launch two failed sitcoms in the early 2000s: Norm and A Minute With Stan Hooper. But his career was eventually revived as he went on to star in a long list of popular movies and television shows up until 2020.

He had recurring roles on The Middle from 2010- 2018, Mike Tyson Mysteries from 2014- 2020, Sunnyside in 2015, Skylanders Academy from 2016- 2018, and The Orville from 2017- 2019, among others.

Macdonald often acted alongside fellow former SNL cast members in his films such as Billy Madison starring Adam Sandler, The Animal starring Rob Schneider, Dirty Work with Chevy Chase, and Dr. Dolittle starring Eddie Murphy.

His expansive career also had him in commercials and his podcast Norm Macdonald Live.

During an appearance on Conan in 2014, Macdonald told what many have since considered to be his best joke. He rambled on for several minutes about shaggy-dog tale about Quebec, beluga whales, and baby dolphins as the audience and host Conan O'Brien erupt in laughter.

The popular comedian made frequent appearances on late-night televisions shows where he was known for consistently having the hosts cracking up. But several years he was cancelled from appearing on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon due to remarks he made about the #MeToo movement during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

Macdonald said he was 'happy the #MeToo movement had slowed down a little bit,' claiming that people used to receive a second chance, but that the #MeToo movement gave 'no forgiveness.'

Macdonald said he had linked up Louis C.K, who was accused of sexual misconduct, and Roseanne Barr, who was fired from her show in May for racist comments, so they could talk about what had happened.

'There are very few people that have gone through what they have, losing everything in a day,' he said.

'Of course, people will go, "What about the victims?" But you know what? The victims didn't have to go through that.'

Macdonald was slammed online for his remarks, by people who thought he was dismissing those who had revealed themselves to be victims of sexual assault, and by others who saw his comments as trying to defend CK and Barr.

He then went on Howard Stern's radio show and told him that his appearance on The Tonight Show had been cancelled because his remarks on the social movement had made senior producers cry.

He later apologized for his comments in a tweet: 'Roseanne and Louis have both been very good friends of mine for many years. They both made terrible mistakes and I would never defend their actions. If my words sounded like I was minimizing the pain that their victims feel to this day, I am deeply sorry.'

According to his IMDB page, the Canadian star was slated to voice Grandpaws in the 'animated re imagining of one of the largest wildfire evacuations in Canadian history' titled Back Home Again which is currently in post-production.
Last year she kept her fans in the loop on her breast implant and capsule removal surgery.

And on her Instagram stories Wednesday night, Tamra Judge provided insight on her 'struggle' with menopause.

The 54-year-old Real Housewives of Orange County star gave fans a chance to ask her anything, and one of the questions posed was about her journey through menopause.

Candid: Last year she kept her fans in the loop on her breast implant and capsule removal surgery. And on her Instagram stories Wednesday night, Tamra Judge provided insight on her 'struggle' with menopause

Tamra was asked: 'Have you had menopause symptoms and how do you combat the tummy spread?'

The reality star answered the question with: 'I've gone thru menopause and its been a struggle. I take hormones, supplements and had to up my cardio. I'm definitely thicker in the middle then I want to be' [sic].

Menopause typically occurs in your 40s or 50s, with the average age of 51 in the United States, per the Mayo Clinic.

Tamra is mom to four children: Sophia, 16, Spencer, 21, Sidney and Ryan, 36.

Ask her anything: The 54-year-old Real Housewives of Orange County star gave fans a chance to ask her anything, and one of the questions posed was about her journey through menopause

Tamra left RHOC in January 2020 after 12 seasons on the hit Bravo show; she first appeared on the show in 2007 during season three.

Other questions fans posed included about her workout routine as well as about her her breast implant and capsule removal surgery she underwent last summer, which she had spoken up in detail about on her Instagram page.

On her workout routine, Tamra was asked if she does weight training or cardio, to which she answered both.

Candid: Other questions fans posed included about her workout routine as well as about her her breast implant and capsule removal surgery she underwent last summer, which she had spoken up in detail about on her Instagram page

Another question was about her friendship with Teddi Mellencamp, and how they met and became friends, to which she said: 'We met about 3-4 years ago at church in OC.'

Another question was if she has had any skin cancer, to which the star said she has had several, including melanoma.

When one fan asked if they think someone aged 58 is too old for long hair, Tamra said: 'I think you do what makes you happy & don't give two F's what other people think.'

Pose: Another question was about her friendship with Teddi Mellencamp, and how they met and became friends, to which she said: 'We met about 3-4 years ago at church in OC'

Real talk: Another question was if she has had any skin cancer, to which the star said she has had several, including melanoma

And another one: When one fan asked if they think someone aged 58 is too old for long hair, Tamra said: 'I think you do what makes you happy & don't give two F's what other people think'

More: The screen star happily answered fan questions on Wednesday night

Last year, she underwent breast implant and capsule removal surgery with plastic surgeon, Dr. Milind Ambe of Newport Surgery Center.

'Implants & capsules removed. Feeling tired & a little sore as expected,' she captioned an Instagram post. 'Im pretty sure not working out will be the hardest part for me.

The star has been giving updates day by day to her fans; one day after the surgery, Tamra said: 'I know it sounds crazy but I woke up today with rosy cheeks, No sinus congestion and happy thoughts. Im hoping I will continue to see health improvements as the weeks go on.'

Tamra claimed she was suffering from breast implant illness (BII), which can include a wide range of symptoms, including joint pain, chronic fatigue, anxiety and depression, according to Breastcancer.org.

Judge revealed her decision via Instagram Story one week prior to her surgery, where she expressed that she is 'tired of being tired and inflamed' before sharing a topless shot from the doctor's office.

Post op: Last year, she underwent breast implant and capsule removal surgery with plastic surgeon, Dr. Milind Ambe of Newport Surgery Center

'Explant surgery pre-op bye bye boobies,' captioned Judge, who covered up her nipples with a set of orange emojis in the snap as she clarified that this would be her second implant removal, with the last being '9 years ago.'

'5 years ago I put very small 125CC implants in,' she wrote, noting that she 'can't wait' to be rid of those 'very small implants.'

Judge has suffered from 'thyroid issues, swollen joints, fatigue, and bladder, sinus and gut inflammation' as a result of her implants, as recorded by People.

Judge, who has had her breasts altered 'five times' over the span of her life, explained to People in 2015 how her perspective on implants have changed over the years.

Journey to health: Judge, who had downsized her implants years ago on an episode of RHOC, made the decision to undergo explant surgery due to ongoing 'autoimmune issues' and what she described as breast implant illness

Following the birth of her now 36-year-old son Ryan, Judge decided to go under the knife for her very first breast augmentation.

She had them redone several times, including after the arrival of her 21-year-old son Spencer, before deciding to get them removed all together in 2012 and replaced with smaller implants.

Tamra told the outlet that when her breasts 'were big in the '90s, I loved them,' but her desire for ample cleavage dwindled due to 'lifestyle' changes.

'It's a lifestyle thing I guess, as you get older you don't want those big giant boobs.

'It is what it is. It's a personal choice and for me. I don't do it for the public or my husband. It's something you do to make yourself feel better,' she explained.

Tired of it: She revealed her decision via Instagram Story last year where she expressed that she is 'tired of being tired and inflamed,' common symptoms of autoimmune issues
Netflix teased out new photos from the upcoming show Boo, B*tch on Thursday.

The original series, which will star Lana Condor in the lead role as Erika, will be released on the platform July 8.

Along with four images, the streaming giant tweeted, 'Here is your first look at @lanacondor as Erika, a high school senior who seizes the opportunity to change her narrative...'

Upcoming: Netflix teased out new photos from the upcoming show Boo, B*tch on Thursday

As Erika, Lana seeks to 'start living an epic life... only to find out she's a ghost.'

The 25-year-old acting sensation also starred as a high school student in To All the Boys I've Loved Before, which debuted in 2018.

One still featured the Vietnamese-born entertainer wearing a blue top as she embraced costar Mason Versaw.

Another outtake featured her and Zoe Colletti scrunching their faces into startled and horrified expressions.

Message: Along with four images, the streaming giant tweeted, 'Here is your first look at @lanacondor as Erika, a high school senior who seizes the opportunity to change her narrative and start living an epic life...'

Lana also took to social media on Thursday to express her excitement over the forthcoming show.

'Honey (@netflix), Im home!!! My new show: BOO, B*TCH is coming to Netflix, July 8th, and you guys are simply not ready,' she wrote in an Instagram caption.

She fittingly added a ghost emoji and went on, 'Head to @netflixgolden for more exclusive first look pics.'

Premiere date: The original series, which will star Lana Condor in the lead role as Erika, will be released on the platform July 8

Outtake: Netflix shared multiple images from the anticipated show that premieres this summer

She gave a brief synopsis of the show as she wrote, 'Over the course of one night, a high school senior, whos lived her life safely under the radar, seizes the opportunity to change her narrative and start living an epic life, only to find out the next morning... shes a motherf*%king ghost.'

The post was liked more than 189,000 times by her 11 million followers on the popular photo-sharing app.

Condor included two photos, including one of her leaning against rows of blue lockers.

Encapsulating the young high school student, she wore a graphic t-shirt tucked into a pair of plaid pants.
Kendall Jenner was on the receiving end of some mean, green social media mockery on Thursday, after leaving internet users in stitches with her 'insane attempt' to cut up a cucumber.

The 26-year-old supermodel found herself at the center of online uproar following the debut of the latest episode of her family's Hulu show The Kardashians, during which her less-than-stellar culinary skills were put on full display for the cameras.

Ironically, Kendall has made just a handful of appearances on the show's premiere season - and after the hilarious backlash to her latest on-camera turn, she may well have wished that she'd kept it that way.

In the episode, the model and tequila brand owner is seen visiting her momager Kris' sprawling mansion in Calabasas, Los Angeles, where she decides that she wants to make herself a snack.

Turning down Kris' offer to have the family's professional chef whip something up for her - insisting that she's 'making it herself' and that chopping cucumber would be 'easy' - Kendall proceeds to try and slice up the fruit, bending her arms around in a very awkward fashion, while her mom looked on in bewilderment.

Slice: While checking out the Kardashian-Jenner matriarch's brand new house, she started making herself a snack... revealing that she doesn't know how to slice a cucumber properly

Soon after Kendall admitted that she was 'not a good cutter' and that she was 'kind of scared' of the knife, Kris promptly hollered for the chef, asking them to come in and 'cut this up for her'.

The hilarious moment has been met with much amusement on social media, where people have been very quick to mock the reality star for her lack of kitchen skills.

'Kendall Jenner not knowing how to cut a cumber and Kris proceeding to call for the chef is hilarious to me,' one fan wrote on Twitter, while another added: 'She probably had to cut her own cucumber 3 times in her life.'

Another wrote 'ask Hilaria' in reference to Hilaria Baldwin speaking in a fake Spanish accent and claiming to not know how to pronounce the word cucumber when appearing on national television.

Elsewhere, another fan chimed in: 'Why did this scene happen? Kris calling the chef to cut it for her but Kendall is such a big girl! She said she'd cut it. Then Scott comes in and Kris says Kendall is cutting a cucumber! Like she's a 1year old taking her first steps.'

'They have no life skills!' Kendall Jenner is savagely mocked online or being unable to cut a cucumber... after momager Kris has to call out for a chef

'Anytime you feel like you're bad at doing something, watch kendall jenner chop a cucumber,' another fan joked.

Hilariously, one Twitter user said: 'About an hour ago, I witnessed Kendall Jenner attempt to cut a cucumber on my tv screen. It made me feel a little superior but mostly poor.'

'Watching Kendall Jenner try to cut a cucumber was shocking and yet not surprising they have no life skills,' another fan said.

Meme-worthy: Fans set Twitter ablaze after witnessing the cringe-worthy moment on the Hulu show

In the episode, Kendall walks up to her mom's new house, with her beloved dog in tow, revealing in confession her, 'secret passion.'

'I feel bad cause I missed my mom's birthday and I didn't get to see her brand new house, which I was really excited about because one of my secret passions in life is interior design and architecture,' Kendall said in confession.

'She killed it, she really did,' Kendall adds,' with Kris telling her she's been working so much and she still doesn't know where everything is.

Kitchen: Kendall Jenner might be one of the most sought-after supermodels in the world, though some of the kitchen skills aren't quite up to par, as she revealed in the new episode of The Kardashians

Feel bad: 'I feel bad cause I missed my mom's birthday and I didn't get to see her brand new house, which I was really excited about because one of my secret passions in life is interior design and architecture,' Kendall said in confession

Killed it: 'She killed it, she really did,' Kendall adds,' with Kris telling her she's been working so much and she still doesn't know where everything is

Kendall starts pulling things from the fridge as Kris asks if she wants the chef to make her a snack, but Kendall says she'll do it herself.

Kendall says she just has to chop up some cucumber, adding, 'It's pretty easy,' but she starts cutting the cucumber quite awkwardly.

Kris tells her to 'be careful because I nicked myself the other day,' as Kendall awkwardly cuts thin slices of cucumber, adding, 'I know, I'm kinda scared.'

Fridge: Kendall starts pulling things from the fridge as Kris asks if she wants the chef to make her a snack, but Kendall says she'll do it herself

Slice: Kendall says she just has to chop up some cucumber, adding, 'It's pretty easy,' but she starts cutting the cucumber quite awkwardly

Scared: Kris tells her to 'be careful because I nicked myself the other day,' as Kendall awkwardly cuts thin slices of cucumber, adding, 'I know, I'm kinda scared'

'Don't cucumbers have seeds?' Kendall asks, before looking at the camera and saying, 'I'm definitely not a good cutter so don't zoom in on me.'

The camera does get a few shots of her cutting, as Kris calls the chef over to cut the cucumber for her, but Kendall insists, 'I'll do it, mom, I'm fine.'

Scott arrives, saying, 'the house looks even better during the day,' as Kris tells Scott that Kendall is cutting cucumber, which she finishes slicing for her snack.

Not a good cutter: 'Don't cucumbers have seeds?' Kendall asks, before looking at the camera and saying, 'I'm definitely not a good cutter so don't zoom in on me'

Scott: Scott arrives, saying, 'the house looks even better during the day,' as Kris tells Scott that Kendall is cutting cucumber, which she finishes slicing for her snack

They all go sit outside as their dogs are playing with each other, as Scott asks what's happening for Thanksgiving, adding, 'Did I get banned from that yet?'

Kris says they are doing Thanksgiving in Palm Springs, as Scott asks if he's invited or not.

'You're invited, I just have to figure out where everybody is staying now,' Kris says, adding there are, 'no more rooms available.'

Thanksgiving: They all go sit outside as their dogs are playing with each other, as Scott asks what's happening for Thanksgiving, adding, 'Did I get banned from that yet?'

Invited: Kris says they are doing Thanksgiving in Palm Springs, as Scott asks if he's invited or not

Kris adds in confession, 'Sometimes Scott can play a bit of a victim, and I feel like that's what's happening here right now. I just want everyone to be happy, but don't put me in the middle.'

Kendall asks if they were all together for Kris' birthday and Scott says they were fine, before asking why Kendall didn't invite him to her birthday.

'I didn't really invite anyone to my birthday,' adding that nobody came, but Scott insists that, 'everybody came.'

Victim: Kris adds in confession, 'Sometimes Scott can play a bit of a victim, and I feel like that's what's happening here right now. I just want everyone to be happy, but don't put me in the middle'

Birthday: Kendall asks if they were all together for Kris' birthday and Scott says they were fine, before asking why Kendall didn't invite him to her birthday

'I love you. I've been helping you throw your birthday parties for the past 10 years,' Scott says, asking if Kourtney and Travis went and Kendall insists, 'nobody went.'

'Oh, at the dinner at my house? Yeah but literally only Kourtney and Travis came, that wasn't a party,' Kendall says.

'Never in a million years would Kendall not invite me to a birthday dinner,' Scott adds, but Kris insists she, 'didn't have a birthday dinner.'

No party: 'Oh, at the dinner at my house? Yeah but literally only Kourtney and Travis came, that wasn't a party,' Kendall says

Never: 'Never in a million years would Kendall not invite me to a birthday dinner,' Scott adds, but Kris insists she, 'didn't have a birthday dinner'

Kris says she had a birthday party at a club, as Scott complains, 'I wasn't invited to that either.'

Kendall adds, 'I had a birthday dinner, mom. You were there at my house,' as Scott asks, 'So why wasn't I invited to that?'

'We've already went over this, Scott. It was actually all my friends,' as Scott added, 'Oh so you didn't want me there.'

Friends: 'We've already went over this, Scott. It was actually all my friends,' as Scott added, 'Oh so you didn't want me there'

Kendall responded, 'No, I wasn't going to invite family members, period,' but Scott added, 'But you invited everybody but me.'

'Just cause Kourt was gonna be there. It was very intimate,' Kendall says, but Scott doesn't understand, 'why I should be left out.'

'I'm not saying you should. That is not my business at the end of the day. Making Kourtney uncomfortable is not part of my business,' Kendall said.

Everybody: Kendall responded, 'No, I wasn't going to invite family members, period,' but Scott added, 'But you invited everybody but me'

Uncomfortable: 'I'm not saying you should. That is not my business at the end of the day. Making Kourtney uncomfortable is not part of my business,' Kendall said

'I'm so sorry that makes you sad and I'm not ever trying to leave you out, but what I'm saying is, by Kourtney being uncomfortable about something like that, that's not really my business,' Kendall explained.

Scott said he didn't never invite them when he had a girlfriend but Kendall says, 'That's so different, Scott.'

'You can't like take a second and like, 'Hey, I'm having a birthday, I think you might be uncomfortable?' Scott asks.

So different: Scott said he didn't never invite them when he had a girlfriend but Kendall says, 'That's so different, Scott'

Different: Scott said he didn't never invite them when he had a girlfriend but Kendall says, 'That's so different, Scott.'

Kendall admits she should have texted him, 'But I've been the one to have that attitude about it the entire time.'

Scott asked what that means and Kendall says that on the night of Kourt and Travis' engagement, she's the one who asked, 'What about Scott's feelings?'

Kris said that was true, and Scott got upset that she did all that and she still didn't invite him to her birthday.

Text: Kendall admits she should have texted him, 'But I've been the one to have that attitude about it the entire time'

'Kourtney, at the end of the day, is my sister, and of course I want her there. This dinner was literally 15 people. If it's an intimate dinner and I'm not willing to have an uncomfortable situation happen' Kendall says before being cut off by Scott who says he's upset.

Kendall says she's saying sorry and Scott says, 'I would never not invite you,' and Kendall says, 'But Scott, I'm saying sorry,' as Scott says, 'I've not heard you say sorry.'

They keep going back and forth before Kendall says, 'I'm literally I'm out,' before getting up from the table. 'This is so f***ing ridiculous. You won't let me speak, Scott.'

Sorry: Kendall says she's saying sorry and Scott says, 'I would never not invite you,' and Kendall says, 'But Scott, I'm saying sorry,' as Scott says, 'I've not heard you say sorry'

Ridiculous: They keep going back and forth before Kendall says, 'I'm literally I'm out,' before getting up from the table. 'This is so f***ing ridiculous. You won't let me speak, Scott'

'Because you didn't say anything,' Scott says as Kendall says he's talking over her as Scott says she didn't say, 'she had a f***ing party or a birthday.'

'No I didn't! I literally Scott, that was my mom. I literally said Yes mom I did. Scott, please replay the f***ing video,' Kendall says before walking out of her mom's house.

'I'm so over this s**t, Scott, for real,' Kendall adds before closing the door as Scott says, 'Oooh,' as Kris just hangs her head, as the episode comes to an end.'

Literally didn't: 'No I didn't! I literally Scott, that was my mom. I literally said Yes mom I did. Scott, please replay the f***ing video,' Kendall says before walking out of her mom's house

Kris: 'I'm so over this s**t, Scott, for real,' Kendall adds before closing the door as Scott says, 'Oooh,' as Kris just hangs her head, as the episode comes to an end'

Earlier in the episode Kendall was hanging out with Hailey Bieber in Miami, as Kendall gushes over Dior sunglasses that Kendall says are, so cute, as Hailey adds they are, so vintage.

I am in Miami with my friend Hailey. We are on the way to see some friends and we are just going to get some nice IV bags. Its what we consider a really fun day, Kendall adds in confession.

She adds that she has been a hypochondriac her whole life, literally since I can remember, and so I am obsessed with health right now.

Sunglasses: Earlier in the episode Kendall was hanging out with Hailey Bieber in Miami, as Kendall gushes over Dior sunglasses that Kendall says are, so cute, as Hailey adds they are, so vintage'

Miami: I am in Miami with my friend Hailey. We are on the way to see some friends and we are just going to get some nice IV bags. Its what we consider a really fun day, Kendall adds in confession

Kendall says health is her, number one priority, Id say, to the point where Im like eating myself alive thinking about my health.

She also opens up about having COVID-19, which she admitted during her brief appearance in the series premiere, adding, I wasnt really that sick. Id say I got pretty lucky.

Id say that my recovery was harder than my COVID, which was really weird to me, she said in confession.

COVID: She also opens up about having COVID-19, which she admitted during her brief appearance in the series premiere, adding, I wasnt really that sick. Id say I got pretty lucky'

She tells one of the NAD IV workers in Miami that, I dont know whats wrong with me. I talked to a doctor the other day and they said that post-COVID, sometimes you can have like heightened cortisol and my cortisol levels havent evened out yet, which he agrees with.

She tells Hailey that its, very strange, adding she is, two months out now and I still dont feel very good. I just feel f***ing weird.

They give her an NAD IV with extra Vitamin C, with Kendall saying in confession that, things like this, they comfort me. They help because it just makes me happy and I dont want anyone to judge me.

Strange: She tells Hailey that its, very strange, adding she is, two months out now and I still dont feel very good. I just feel f***ing weird'

No judging: They give her an NAD IV with extra Vitamin C, with Kendall saying in confession that, things like this, they comfort me. They help because it just makes me happy and I dont want anyone to judge me'

Hailey asks if doing NAD, multiple days in a row is fine, with one of the other workers saying, It wouldnt be harmful, but at a certain point you kind of saturate your receptors.

Kendall says that her and Hailey both are, really big on our health journey for sure, as Hailey adds, It makes for a great friendship.

Im gonna NAD for the rest of my life and Im never gonna age, Hailey proclaims with a laugh.

Mutliple: Hailey asks if doing NAD, multiple days in a row is fine, with one of the other workers saying, It wouldnt be harmful, but at a certain point you kind of saturate your receptors'
Dune: Part Two just added another legendary Hollywood talent.

Christopher Walken signed on to play the role of Emperor Shaddam IV in the highly-anticipated sequel based on Frank Herbert's novel Dune, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Dune was critically-acclaimed earning ten Academy Award nods and winning six of the coveted trophies.

Big move: Dune: Part Two just added another legendary Hollywood talent in Christopher Walken (pictured 2016)

Timothee Chalamet, Zendaya and Javier Bardem will reprise their roles from the initial film as will many others.

Walken, 79, is just the latest new arrival to the cast which now boasts Midsommar star Florence Pugh and Elvis actor Austin Butler.

The Catch Me If You Can actor's character will terrorize the populace of Arrakis, the planet Chalamet's Paul Atreides and his family were sent to in the original film.

mperor Walken: Christopher Walken signed on to play the role of Emperor Shaddam IV in the highly-anticipated sequel based on Frank Herbert's novel Dune

Returning cast: Timothee Chalamet, Zendaya and Javier Bardem will reprise their roles from the initial film as will many others (Chalamet left, Rebecca Ferguson right)

He will work with Stellan Skarsgard's evil Vladimir Harkonnen to put down a rebellion started by Chalamet and the Fremen, the planet's indigenous inhabitants who live in the inhospitable desert.

The film is currently set for release in October 2023.

Walken's role as the emperor will be his first in a movie since his film Wild Mountain Thyme came out in 2020.

Another newcomer: Florence Pugh will reportedly join the cast as Princess Irulan Corrino (pictured 2021)

Another new face: Austin Butler (pictured April 2022) will also join reportedly the Dune universe as Feyd-Rautha

He's appeared in a pair of television series since then including the Amazon Prime Video series The Outlaws and Ben Stiller's series Severance.

The former follows a group of strangers who have to work together while doing community service in England.

Severance centers around a group of office workers who have their memories surgically divided between work and their personal lives until a mysterious colleague helps them try to discover the truth.
Justin Long and Kate Bosworth were spotted while taking a stroll in New York City on Thursday afternoon.

The 43-year-old actor and the 39-year-old actress affectionately kept their arms around each other while taking in the city's sights.

The happy couple has been together for just over a year after meeting while working on a film project.

Better together: Justin Long and Kate Bosworth were spotted while taking a stroll in New York City on Thursday afternoon

Long kept it casual in an olive green t-shirt and a set of navy blue slacks while spending time with his girlfriend.

The Jeepers Creepers cast member also wore a set of black shoes, as well as a pair of sunglasses and a trucker cap.

Bosworth rocked a light yellow sleeved blouse on top of a set of distressed denim jeans during her outing.

The Blue Crush star also donned a set of black shoes, and covered up much of her beautiful blonde hair with a white cap.

Taking it easy: Long kept it casual in an olive green t-shirt and a set of navy blue pants while spending time with his girlfriend

Comfortable clothing: Bosworth rocked a light yellow sleeved blouse on top of a set of distressed denim jeans during her outing

Long and Bosworth first met last year while working on the Arkansas set of a yet-unnamed feature.

The actor was previously in a relationship with Drew Barrymore, although they went their separate ways in 2008.

He later began dating Amanda Seyfried in 2013, and they eventually split two years later.

Starting off strong: Long and Bosworth first met last year while working on the Arkansas set of a yet-unnamed feature

Recent past: He later began dating Amanda Seyfried in 2013, and they eventually split two years later

Bosworth was previously married to Michael Polish, with whom she tied the knot in 2013.

The pair remained together for eight more years before they separated last year.

Long and his now-girlfriend were first spotted in each other's company last spring, and the actor confirmed in December that he was in a relationship.

Former husband: Bosworth was previously married to Michael Polish, with whom she tied the knot in 2013, although they separated last year

Letting everyone know: Long and his now-girlfriend initially began being spotted in each other's company last spring, and the actor confirmed that he was in a relationship last December

It was later confirmed that he was seeing Bosworth the following month, and they were fist seen as a couple in March.

The actor spoke about his relationship during an episode of the Viall Files podcast, where he expressed that he did not feel as if he was ready to give too much information about his romance to the public.

'It's weird. I want to [talk about it], but I also want to be protective. I want to scream it from the rooftops, but I also want to be protective,' he said.

Making it known: It was later confirmed that he was seeing Bosworth the following month, and they were fist seen in each other's company in March

Valuing his privacy: The actor spoke about his relationship during an episode of the Viall Files podcast, where he expressed that he did not feel as if he was ready to give too much information about his romance to the public

He added: 'In this day and age, you don't have to share everything with everyone.'

The performer made a point of stating that he was ready to find 'the one' after the end of his most recent relationship.

Long then made a reference to Bosworth while noting that he had 'found' his ideal partner.
Natasha Kaplinsky showed off her new glamorous longer locks after ditching her signature bob while attending the Fragrance Foundation Awards in London on Thursday.

The former BBC News reader, 49, looked as chic as ever in a leggy white dress while debuting her dramatically different hairstyle.

Sporting a smooth complexion, Natasha looked in her element as she posed for the cameras at the 'Oscars of the fragrance industry' held at The Brewery.

Change! Natasha Kaplinsky showed off her new glamorous longer locks after ditching her signature bob while attending the Fragrance Foundation Awards in London on Thursday (pictured left at the event and right in 2019 with her classic bob)

The beauty flashed her toned and tanned pins in the white mini dress which featured a sparkly design and an in-built belt to draw attention to her slim waist.

She completed her look with matching white strappy heels and toted a glitzy clutch bag.

Natasha styled her new tresses into perfectly blow-dried curls and opted for a glamorous makeup look complete with a slick of bright red lip.

Stunning: The former BBC News reader, 49, looked as chic as ever in a leggy white dress while debuting her dramatically different hairstyle

Leggy: Sporting a smooth complexion, Natasha looked in her element as she posed for the cameras at the 'Oscars of the fragrance industry'

Wow: Natasha styled her new tresses into perfectly blow-dried curls and opted for a glamorous makeup look complete with a slick of bright red lip

Style: The beauty flashed her toned and tanned pins in the white mini dress which featured a sparkly design and an in-built belt to draw attention to her slim waist

Different: She had even shorter hair when she appeared on Strictly in 2004 (pictured with pro partner Brendan Cole)

Also at the event was actress Laura Pradelska who looked incredible in a bright green midi dress while posing up a storm.

It comes after last month Natasha revealed she was recently rushed to hospital after being bitten by her own dog.

The newsreader was trying to stop Dot, her 'fierce' Coton de Tulear, fighting with her other dog, a Tibetan Terrier named Molly, when the shocking incident occurred.

Glowing: Also at the event was actress Laura Pradelska who looked incredible in a bright green midi dress while posing up a storm

Stylish lady: The German actress showed off her figure in the skimpy dress which was cinched in at the waist

She told Great British Life: 'Dot is in my bad books. She was supposed to be this lovely little lap tap and she's turned out to be the fiercest.

'Recently I tried to separate her from Molly, fighting over a bone, and she bit me. I ended up in hospital.'

Despite the dramatic event, the self confessed 'Dr Doolittle' insisted she 'couldn't be without her dogs, adding: 'Life is a bit chaotic with them in it but never boring.'

Gals: Left to right: Bryony Blake, Natasha, Pips Taylor and Laura all posed together at the event

Glamorous night: The fashionable ladies all posed together on the red carpet in their stylish ensembles

Ouch: It comes after last month Natasha revealed she was recently rushed to hospital after being bitten by her own dog

The former Strictly winner shares a jaw-dropping five furry friends, comprising of Doodle, Dot, Scribble, Natasha, Teddy and Molly with her husband Justin Bower.

It came after last year Natasha revealed suffering multiple miscarriages left her feeling 'barren as a woman'.

The broadcaster struggled to conceive due to an undisclosed medical condition in the years after marrying Justin in 2005 and said the experience made her feel like she had 'let her husband down'.

Glam: Pips Taylor wowed in a sparkly dress and clutched a disco ball handbag

Confident: She completed her look with chunky glitzy heels and opted for a red lip

Bright: Bryony Blake looked great in an orange suit which she teamed with a black top underneath

Looking incredible: Annalise Fard wore a dramatic yellow gown for the event

Speaking on This Morning, Natasha told of the private heartache she felt before falling pregnant with son Arlo, who was born in 2008, and daughter Angelica, born two years later.

The TV personality explained what made it especially difficult was the feeling she was robbing Justin of the joy of fatherhood.

'I felt I could manage my own disappointment,' she said, 'But I desperately wanted to make Justin a father and I just felt barren as a woman.

'Anyone [who has suffered miscarriages] will know that feeling of letting your partner down, for me it was that heartbreak. I was going to take away that joy for Justin and that made it extra hard.'

Duo: She posed with Linda Key on the red carpet who wore a green maxi dress

Details: Bryony accessorised perfectly with gold heels and clutched a matching bag

Quirky: Brix Smith opted for a strange black dress

Legs eleven! Hayley Palmer dazzled in a glittering dress with a thigh high split
Selma Blair spoke about the shocking assault she allegedly suffered at the hands of her now ex-boyfriend Ron Carlson in an interview with People that was published Thursday.

The 49-year-old Hellboy star, who has lately been promoting her new memoir Mean Baby, called the attack a 'shocking thing,' especially since it allegedly occurred shortly after she had finished delving up earlier traumas for her book.

But the actress sounded defiant as she declared she was ready to put it 'behind' her.

Devastating: Selma Blair, 49, called her alleged assault by ex-boyfriend Ron Carlson 'shocking' in an interview with People published Thursday; seen together in October 2020 in LA

The alleged assault occurred in February and was followed up by a trip to the hospital for Selma.

'It was the most shocking thing,' she said while looking back on it.

'After I'd finished the book, I honestly thought, "Well, that's the dramatic portion of my life. That's done." He was charged with a felony. I look forward to it being behind me,' she added.

But since then, the Legally Blonde actress was back on the upswing.

'I'm in a good place,' she declared. 'I cannot believe all this happened in my life, and I'm still here and I'm okay.'

Following the alleged assault, Selma was able to obtain a restraining order against Carlson, whom she claimed tried to strangle her during an altercation at her home in Los Angeles.

More to come: She added that she thought the worst of her traumas were over after describing them in her new memoir Mean Baby

Photos of her taken shortly after the incident showed her  seemingly topless  with her head throne back and her neck extended to reveal what appeared to be red marks along the sides of her neck.

She also appeared to have dark bruises on her throat just below her chin, along with some bloodied scratches.

The photos were included as part of the documents for the actresses' restraining order request.

Blair claimed the incident occurred on February 22 after they had recently ended their long-term relationship, according to legal documents obtained by TMZ.

The Cruel Intentions star claimed that Carlson lunged at her following an argument, then jumped on top of her body and began to strangle her.

Carlson denied the claims and filed a petition for his own restraining order against the actress, which was denied.

In the legal docs, Blair  who is in remission for multiple sclerosis  alleged that Carlson 'strangled her, throttling her and shaking her head and shoulders aggressively' while she was lying on her sofa.

The report claimed that Blair had been medicated at the time of the alleged attack due to her ongoing illness and told Carlson that she had not been feeling well.

Terrifying: She claimed that Carlson attacked and strangled her at her home in Los Angeles on February 22; seen together in September 2020

Carlson had reportedly arrived at Blair's home to return a television set when he allegedly became violent and frustrated with her.

She claimed he screamed at her, raging: 'You f**ked up, you can't do anything, you can't love anybody, you're f**king useless, you cripple.'

The Legally Blonde star alleged that he added: 'I don't f**king deserve this, I can do so much better than you.'

Blair further detailed the incident in legal docs, claiming that she stuck her fingers into his eyes and mouth, and Carlson responded by covering her face and mouth with his hands.

She alleged at this point she lost consciousness as she was unable to breathe.

When police officers arrived at the scene and interviewed the actress, she claims her nose began to bleed heavily and she once again lost consciousness.

Paramedics then decided to take Blair to a hospital to evaluate her condition, the report claims.

Carlson was arrested for felony domestic violence with corporal injuries.

Different story: She went to the hospital to treat her injuries. Carlson claimed that she insulted his daughter and attacked him first before he fought back

In his version of events, Carlson claimed that he was at her home when she had asked him to sit with her.

Carlson alleged that Blair became 'angry and antagonistic' when he declined to sit with her, and claimed she got in his face and said, 'Your daughter is a f***ing loser.'

Blair has a 10-year-old son, Arthur, whom she shares with with ex Jason Bleick, while Carlson has a 12-year-old daughter from a previous relationship.

Blair's ex then claimed that she swung at him and struck him in his eye and attacked with both arms.

He said that Blair scratched him on the nose, eyes and cheeks.

He has denied attacking her and says that he only reached for her out of defense.

Carlson claimed that her bloody nose is part of a long-term medical issue and provided a text message as proof.

Digging deep: Selma opened up about a lifetime of alcohol abuse, revealing that she got drunk for the first time when she was just seven years old; seen in December in LA

Selma Blair has opened up about a lifetime of alcohol abuse, revealing that she got drunk for the first time when she was just seven years old  and became an 'expert alcoholic' even as a child.

The 49-year-old actress has detailed her struggles in her upcoming memoir, Mean Baby, sharing how she would sip alcohol to quell her anxiety through her school years.

In an excerpt of the memoir obtained by People, Blair described how her drinking got worse in college  and on more than one occasion, she was too drunk to fight off men who raped her.

'I have been raped, multiple times, because I was too drunk to say the words "Please. Stop,"' she said.

Looking back: The 49-year-old actress has detailed her struggles in her upcoming memoir, Mean Baby, and excerpt from which appears in People this week

Coming soon: Mean Baby will be released on May 17

In her memoir, Blair described the first time she got drunk as a 'revelation,' and how the effects of alcohol initially felt like the 'warmth of God' filling her up.

It was Passover, a Jewish holiday in which drinking wine is a big part of the ceremonial dinner, called a Seder.

She had been allowed small sips of Manischewitz wine at her family's Seders for years, but she got carried away the year she was seven.

Because 'no one was paying attention to my consumption level,' she drank enough Manischewitz to get more than a buzz.

'I got drunk that night. Very drunk. Eventually, I was put in my sister Katie's bed with her. In the morning, I didn't remember how I'd gotten there,' she recalled.

After that, she usually wouldn't drink to get drunk, but would have 'quick sips whenever my anxiety would alight,' making her barely tipsy.

Risky business: Blair described the first time she got drunk as a 'revelation,' and how the effects of alcohol initially felt like the 'warmth of God' filling her up

Practice: 'I became an expert alcoholic, adept at hiding my secret,' she said

'I became an expert alcoholic, adept at hiding my secret,' she wrote.

'It was hard. I dont know. But maybe it was easier. Maybe I never would have survived without a drink,' she told Savannah Guthrie on the Today show this morning.

Blair continued to drink throughout elementary school, middle school, and high school.

'I don't know if I would've survived childhood without alcoholism,' she told People. 'That's why it's such a problem for a lot of people. It really is a huge comfort, a huge relief in the beginning.

'Maybe even the first few years for me because I did start really young with that as a comfort, as my coping mechanism,' she said.

In college, her alcohol abuse worsened  and left her vulnerable to predators.

Early days: The first time the actress (pictured as a child) got drunk was on the Jewish holiday of Passover. Her parents weren't paying attention to how much Manischewitz wine she drank

Sneaky: After that, Blair (seen bottom left as a child) usually wouldn't drink to get drunk, but would have ' quick sips whenever my anxiety would alight,' making her barely tipsy

Getting by: 'Maybe even the first few years for me because I did start really young with that as a comfort, as my coping mechanism,' Blair (seen left as a child) said

During one spring break trip, after a day of binge-drinking, she said that she was raped by at least one man.

'I don't know if both of them raped me. One of them definitely did,' she wrote.

'I made myself small and quiet and waited for it to be over. I wish I could say what happened to me that night was an anomaly, but it wasn't,' she said, revealing that there were several time she was too drunk to fend off rapists.

'Only that one time was violent. I came out of each event quiet and ashamed,' she wrote.

Blair continued to drink into early adulthood  and then, it was in part to cope with her trauma.

'These were the things I drank to forget. I didnt drink for attention: I drank to disappear,' she said.

'You bury it. You really do. It's a big thing to have these things happen,' she said on Today. 'And to hold that shame in yourself.'

Dark days: In college, her alcohol abuse worsened, and on one spring break trip, at least one man raped her. She is pictured during her teenage years

Tragedies: 'I have been raped, multiple times, because I was too drunk to say the words "Please. Stop,"' the Cruel Intentions star (seen in her youth) said

Compelled: 'The desire to drink as much as I could, as often as I could, stayed with me and did not let go for more than 20 years,' Blair, pictured in Cruel Intentions, said

'The desire to drink as much as I could, as often as I could, stayed with me and did not let go for more than 20 years.'

On two occasions, she said, she tried to take her own life.

Things finally changed for her after a high-profile incident in 2016, when she became intoxicated and passed out on a plane in front of her four-year-old son.

Blair was flying to Los Angeles from Cancun, Mexico, when, according to TMZ, she started crying and complaining about a man abusing her.

The pilot called ahead to LAX to report that a passenger was mixing medication with alcohol, and Blair was reportedly carried from the plane on a stretcher.

'The thing that made me really stop drinking was that I could have died on that plane,' she said on the Today show this morning. 'I mean, now that I was a mother, it just changed everything.'

Blair has been sober since 2016, and she has worked on her trauma with a therapist.

Bottoming out: Things finally changed for her after a high-profile incident in 2016, when she became intoxicated and passed out on a plane in front of her four-year-old son

Hopeful: 'The thing that made me really stop drinking was that I could have died on that plane,' she said on the Today show this morning. 'I mean, now that I was a mother, it just changed everything'

The actress, who has also spoken candidly about having multiple sclerosis, said she also found it helpful to write about it in her memoir.

The new memoir also delves into her battle with MS, and she said on Today this morning that she realizes now there were 'so many things that were indicative of MS' earlier in her life.

'I do know for sure I had it by the age of 23. It was definitely there for so long,' she said.

Blair teased a few details when she announced her memoir on Instagram in December.

'Bit by scrap by journal pages and letters, I wrote my first book: Mean Baby,' she wrote.

'My mother always laughed when retelling the story of how the older neighborhood kids ran from our long ranch house at the end of the cul de sac. Dont go in there!!! Was the shocked cry. The Beitners have a mean baby. I was proud I could send older kids scrambling never to visit again.

'I lived up to my name. And then I grew up, grieved a life I felt a stranger in, and then I started to change. I had a child of my own. I floundered and had small but major successes. And I kept writing. Until my hands wouldnt cooperate. And I was diagnosed with MS. Finally,' she said.

Therapeutic: The actress, who has also spoken candidly about having multiple sclerosis, said she also found it helpful to write about it in her memoir

Signs: The new memoir also delves into her battle with MS, and she said she realizes now there were 'so many things that were indicative of MS' earlier in her life

'After the stem cell transplant I wanted to remember what I turned away from thinking about. My beloved mother died, and with fresh marrow recolonizing my cells, I have been given a new life.

'This is the maiden voyage for me. But it was through the support of my loves on here (Instagram) who have encouraged me to keep moving even in suspended grief, along with great recovery.

'So this is what I wrote. On scraps of paper. On my phone. Sent to my dear agent who held space while I wrote despite the fog in my brain. This is personal. Its my story and intended with love. Mostly.

'Mean Baby might have turned her gaze on a couple unsatisfactory outcomes. But truly.

'Without you I would have not been able to appreciate how even the meanest baby grows up. Thank you for being on this journey with me. It has been the most remarkable time. A survival course in acceptance. I recommend we all write our recollections. Especially at a time when seeing the words, even, is difficult.'
Married At First Sight star Domenica Calarco has confirmed the police investigation into her nude photo leak is still ongoing, after questions were raised about the source of the image.

The Sydney-based makeup artist, 28, appeared to confirm on Thursday that the photo at the centre of the controversy was discovered on Twitter or Reddit and not behind an OnlyFans paywall, which many fans had assumed was the case.

Taking to Instagram on Friday, Domenica said the origin of the photo was not relevant, and the reason why she made a complaint to police was because of 'what that image was used for and how it caused me pain and hurt'.

Setting the record straight: Married At First Sight star Domenica Calarco has confirmed the police investigation into her nude photo leak is still ongoing, after questions were raised about the source of the image

'That is the issue here,' she said in a video shared to her Stories.

'It is not where the image came from and sourcing the image off the internet. That has been dealt with [by] the image abuse commission.

'The issue that I have right now is the reason that the image was taken off the internet and how it was used with the intent to cause me harm.'

Domenica confirmed the police probe was ongoing and that the investigation had not been affected by her saying the photo may have been sourced from Twitter.

She also said she had never specified the image in question was from OnlyFans, only that it 'came off the internet'.

Controversy: The Sydney-based makeup artist, 28, appeared to confirm on Thursday that the photo at the centre of the controversy was discovered on Twitter or Reddit and not behind an OnlyFans paywall, which many fans had assumed was the case. Olivia Frazer (pictured) was the MAFS cast member who first discovered Domenica's OnlyFans side hustle

It comes after Domenica told Yahoo on Thursday that her OnlyFans was not even active at the time Married At First Sight was being filmed, so the only way anyone could have accessed her racy photos was via links on Twitter or Reddit.

'If you clicked the link [to my OnlyFans] you would've seen that it wasn't active and it would have taken you nowhere,' she told the website.

'It was all left online because, yeah, it was a link on a Twitter account or a Reddit account. Big deal.'

Domenica's Twitter account, launched in November 2020 with the handle @Sunday09692571, featured 'teasers' of her saucy OnlyFans content - including the nude photo that was exposed on MAFS.

Promo page: Domenica's Twitter account, launched in November 2020 with the handle @Sunday09692571, featured 'teasers' of her saucy OnlyFans content - including the nude photo that was exposed on MAFS

She reportedly deactivated her OnlyFans profile when MAFS producers asked her to, but rival bride Olivia Frazer was able to find the Twitter account.

A source claimed Olivia was trying to dig up dirt on Dom when she discovered her OnlyFans past, and saw it as a way to embarrass her rival.

'Olivia hit the jackpot when she found out Dom had actively promoted her OnlyFans profile on YouTube, and even had a Twitter page dedicated to it,' they said.

After reportedly being discouraged from taking legal action against Olivia and the other MAFS cast members while filming was taking place last year, Domenica called in the lawyers in March as the scandal unfolded on TV.

Police matter: Taking to Instagram on Friday, Domenica (pictured with Jack Millar) clarified that the origin of the photo was not important, and the reason why she made a complaint to police was because of 'what that image was used for and how it caused me pain and hurt'

She was pictured with her lawyer arriving at Newtown police station where it was believed she spent nearly three hours speaking to officers about her leaked nudes.

A NSW Police spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia on Thursday the investigation into the distribution of the intimate image was ongoing.

Radio host Kyle Sandilands has previously cast doubt on claims the 'nude photo scandal' was somehow a criminal act.

He said in March that Channel Nine 'has a team of lawyers' who ensure everything that goes to air is legally sound, making the police complaint a waste of time.

Furious: Radio host Kyle Sandilands (pictured) previously cast doubt on claims the 'nude photo scandal' was somehow a criminal act. He said in March that Nine 'has a team of lawyers' who ensure everything that goes to air is legally sound, making the police complaint a waste of time
A Kath & Kim superfan salvaged the door from the show's iconic Fountain Lakes home before it was demolished.

Melbourne artist James Lemon says he has no plans on selling the door and hopes it will be 'admired publicly' at the 'right museum'.

The waterfront property, which was the backdrop for the iconic Australian sitcom and is located 35 kms south-east of Melbourne in Patterson Lakes, is being renovated by the owner Jo Kelly as she prepares to rebuild a new family home.

A piece of history: Kath & Kim superfan and Melbourne artist James Lemon (pictured) salvaged the DOOR from the iconic Fountain Lakes home before it was demolished - and revealed it's not for sale

'My favourite thing about this door is that it's so s**t,' James told PEDESTRIAN.TV of the door's appeal.

'It's made of MDF, it's very much of its time and I never would have thought that I would look at a door with kind of a sense of preciousness about it. But here I am.'

James also said he plans to conserve the door.

Plans: James hopes the door will be 'admired publicly' at the 'right museum'. 'My favourite thing about this door is that it's so s**t,' James told PEDESTRIAN.TV of the door's appeal on Thursday

'Big news everyone. After a lot of prayer I made the decision to acquire an important piece into my collection. A real key object from the site. I'm going to keep it in its current state for the story it tells but I would like to stabilise it,' he wrote on Instagram.

'If you work in conservation please get in touch. Not for sale unless you're a museum in which case I'm happy to discuss.'

The owner Jo Kelly told Seven News earlier this month of her plans to renovate the property: 'We are rebuilding a home that we are going to live in. It will be extremely different.'

Changes: Kath & Kim's waterfront home is being demolished as the owner prepares to rebuild. Pictured, the cast of the iconic Australian sitcom

'It won't have any of the same brick work, curtains or kitchen that was in the original house,' she said.

During the series, the property's private pier was blocked by a high fence to give the show a more suburban feel. It has since been torn down.

In 2005, stars and creators of the series, Gina Riley and Jane Turner, spoke to The Age about transforming the house into Kath and Kim's humble home.

'The house gave us information,' Jane said, with Gina adding: 'Yes, we had never written in the script about the Good Room or the kitchen... but once we got the house all that just happened.'

New build: The owner Jo Kelly is demolishing the property, which is located 35 kms south-east of Melbourne in Patterson Lakes

Jo told Seven News earlier this month: 'We are rebuilding a home that we are going to live in. It will be extremely different'

'That sliding door (from the backyard to the family room) is like an entrance, a theatrical entrance.

'Those sorts of things were just so fantastic to use. The entrance always seems so theatrical to me, but also really real,' she said.

The property was sold in 2011 for $1.23 million and then again in 2014 for $1.3 million.

In the show, their home was located in the fictional suburb of Fountain Lakes.

History: The property was sold in 2011 for $1.23 million and then again in 2014 for $1.3 million

It comes after it was revealed that the beloved Australian sitcom could be getting a reboot 20 years after it first hit screens.

The show, which aired on the ABC and Channel Seven from 2002 to 2007, will make a return next year, according to Woman's Day.

The Melbourne home that was used as the central location for the series has been visited by crew members in recent weeks, neighbours said.

'It was unimaginable neighbours could keep TV's biggest secret under wraps much longer,' a source told the magazine.

Exciting! It comes after it was revealed that the beloved Australian sitcom could be getting a reboot 20 years after it first hit screens

The Kath & Kim reboot is said to be already in pre-production and is expected to air on a streaming platform, not a free-to-air TV channel.

An official announcement will be made later this month, Woman's Day reported.

The series also spawned the television movie Da Kath & Kim Code in 2005 and the feature film Kath & Kimderella in 2012.
Three-time Grammy nominee Halsey 'was called crazy and anxious and lazy among other things' in the eight years it took for her to be formally diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, Sjogren's syndrome, Mast Cell Activation syndrome, and Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia.

'I've been sick for a long time. My sicknesses just have their names now. I went to doctors for eight years trying to figure out what was wrong with me,' the 27-year-old biracial pop star - who boasts 68.8M social media followers - Instastoried on Wednesday.

'I changed my entire lifestyle. When I wasn't working I was essentially confined to my home for fear of how I'd feel when I woke up each morning. It took me a long time to get to even having a diagnosis so I'm celebrating!. Don't roll your eyes at your sick friends. They could be fighting a battle that they haven't named yet. [You] know?'

'I've been sick for a long time': Three-time Grammy nominee Halsey 'was called crazy and anxious and lazy among other things' in the eight years it took for her to be formally diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, Sjogren's syndrome, Mast Cell Activation syndrome, and Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia (pictured Thursday)

Ehlers-Danlos syndrome is a group of 13 hereditary disorders of connective tissue that affect your connective tissues - primarily your skin, joints, and blood vessel walls. Symptoms include pain, fatigue, overly flexible joints, and fragile/stretchy skin.

Sjogren's syndrome is a systemic autoimmune disease that causes extensive dryness and can cause fatigue, chronic pain, dysfunction of organs, neuropathies, and lymphomas.

Mast Cell Activation syndrome is a condition that causes increased risk of suffering Anaphylaxis (a potentially life-threatening allergic reaction).

Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia is a disorder where most of your blood stays in your lower body when you stand up, and in response, your heart rate jumps and your blood pressure lowers.

The 27-year-old biracial pop star Instastoried on Wednesday: 'My sicknesses just have their names now...It took me a long time to get to even having a diagnosis so I'm celebrating!. Don't roll your eyes at your sick friends. They could be fighting a battle that they haven't named yet'

'I'm on a treatment plan right now': Halsey's 'clarification' came the day after she revealed the cause of her chronic illness, which led to her being hospitalized 'a few times' with Anaphylaxis

The New Jersey native - whose pronouns are she/they - explained: 'I've known I've had autoimmune issues for most of my life, especially having endometriosis. It's kind of been exacerbated since having [my nine-month-old son Ender Ridley Aydin]'

Halsey's 'clarification' came the day after she revealed the cause of her chronic illness, which led to her being hospitalized 'a few times' with Anaphylaxis.

'I'm still looking for answers to the root cause of some of these things. They could potentially be another form of autoimmune disease. And I've known I've had autoimmune issues for most of my life, especially having endometriosis. It's kind of been exacerbated since having [my nine-month-old son Ender Ridley Aydin],' the New Jersey native - whose pronouns are she/they - explained.

'I'm keeping you guys updated because I know you're seeing the heart monitor and I'm sick all the time and I don't want anybody to be worrying. I'm on a treatment plan right now.'

Halsey - who suffers from bipolar disorder and ADHD - also discovered that she's 'allergic to everything' after undergoing a skin test last Friday.

Itchy bumps: Halsey - who suffers from bipolar disorder and ADHD - also discovered that she's 'allergic to everything' after undergoing a skin test last Friday

The About-Face Beauty founder lamented in a TikTok video: 'Just found out I'm allergic to coffee so there goes my entire personality'

She continued: 'And also potatoes, corn, spinach, ginger, garlic, milk, wheat, crab, shrimp, carrots, peppers, almonds, peanuts, cashews, blueberries, apricot, cantaloupe, grapes, onions, grapefruit, turkey, cauliflower, squash, hempwater, mustard, nutmeg, mackerel, celery, pear, rye, yeast, lemons, coconuts, bananas, peas, and soy'

Secretly wed? Luckily, Halsey has support from her rumored husband Alev Aydin (L, pictured February 14), whom she originally met in 2018 when he was hired to write her Sony Pictures biopic, which never materialized

'Just found out I'm allergic to coffee so there goes my entire personality,' the About-Face Beauty founder lamented in a TikTok video.

'And also potatoes, corn, spinach, ginger, garlic, milk, wheat, crab, shrimp, carrots, peppers, almonds, peanuts, cashews, blueberries, apricot, cantaloupe, grapes, onions, grapefruit, turkey, cauliflower, squash, hempwater, mustard, nutmeg, mackerel, celery, pear, rye, yeast, lemons, coconuts, bananas, peas, and soy.'

Luckily, Halsey (born Ashley Frangipane) has support from her rumored husband Alev Aydin, whom she originally met in 2018 when he was hired to write her Sony Pictures biopic, which never materialized.

The I Am Not a Woman, I'm a God hitmaker shared a TikTok video on Thursday of audio rehearsals for her 'f***ing crazy' 28-date Love and Power Tour from May 17-July 9.

'Rehearsals are going so well!' The I Am Not a Woman, I'm a God hitmaker shared a TikTok video on Thursday of audio rehearsals for her 'f***ing crazy' 28-date Love and Power Tour from May 17-July 9

'Tour starts in five days!' In it, Halsey rocks waist-length curly hair extensions while clad in a white Rolling Stones T-shirt and black skinny jeans

Flexible: The I Would Leave Me If I Could poet dramatically bent backwards while belting the 2014 track Hurricane off her debut studio album, Badlands

Uh-oh! However, Halsey realized she 'did a terrible job packing' for the tour, which kicks off in just five days at iTHINK Financial Amphitheatre in West Palm Beach, FL

In it, Halsey rocks waist-length curly hair extensions while clad in a white Rolling Stones T-shirt and black skinny jeans.

The I Would Leave Me If I Could poet dramatically bent backwards while belting the 2014 track Hurricane off her debut studio album, Badlands.

However, Halsey realized she 'did a terrible job packing' for the tour, which kicks off in just five days at iTHINK Financial Amphitheatre in West Palm Beach, FL.

'I'm really confident that I'm going to be able to do it in a way that's healthy where I can perform my best for all of you,' the Sing 2 actress reassured fans.

'So honored and excited!' On March 23, Halsey wrapped her role as Mandy Starr in the South Dakota-set action crime drama National Anthem, which is now in post production (pictured March 10)

'Best cast ever': Tony Tost's (L) film about a Lakota Ghost Shirt hitting the black market in a small town also stars Sydney Sweeney (R), Paul Walter Hauser (M), Eric Dane, and Simon Rex

'Honestly, I'm just so excited to be going on tour because it just keeps my mind off of everything and it keeps my body health because I'm so active. I'm doing cardio and stuff everyday. And I get to see you guys and I haven't toured in so long.'

On March 23, Halsey wrapped her role as Mandy Starr in the South Dakota-set action crime drama National Anthem, which is now in post production.

Tony Tost's film about a Lakota Ghost Shirt hitting the black market in a small town also stars Sydney Sweeney, Paul Walter Hauser, Eric Dane, and Simon Rex.
James Corden has praised Prince Harry as a devoted husband and father and revealed their children have play dates together.

The chat show host, 43, has become pals with Harry and his wife Meghan Markle and lives just an hour and a half away from the couple's sprawling mansion in Montecito, California.

Speaking to The Sun, James revealed he and wife Julia Carey have been for dinner with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and their kids also spend time together.

Praise: James Corden has praised Prince Harry as a devoted husband and father and revealed their children have play dates together (pictured in May 2022)

Asked if he had been to the couple's 11million home, James said: 'I have. It was more a sort of play date scenario [with the kids]. Then we went out for dinner after, it was lovely.'

James and Julia are parents to children Max, 11, Carey, seven, and Charlotte, four, while Prince Harry and Meghan share Archie, three, and Lilibet, 11 months.

Harry previously appeared as a guest on The Late Late Show shortly after he moved to Los Angeles with Meghan.

Adding that he knows Harry better than Meghan, James said he finds it hard to be 'judgemental' of the pair, seemingly referring to their decision to step down as senior members of the royal family and move to the US.

Friends: The chat show host, 43, has become pals with Harry and his wife Meghan Markle and lives just an hour and a half away from the couple's sprawling mansion in Montecito, California

He said: 'I have a huge amount of respect and admiration for Harry, and anyone who has been around him and spent time with him would feel exactly the same way.

'I think he is a devoted and loving husband and father and I think what they have done [in turning away from royal life] is incredibly brave and I'll always be in their corner.'

Although he is quitting his CBS chat show in 2023, James said he is also a big fan of Prince William and Kate Middleton and would love to have them as guests but added he is not 'holding [his] breath'.

James and his wife Julia are planning to relocate to the UK after his time on his CBS show has come to an end.

Pals: Harry previously appeared as a guest on The Late Late Show shortly after he moved to Los Angeles with Meghan

James said: 'I have a huge amount of respect and admiration for Harry, and anyone who has been around him and spent time with him would feel exactly the same way'

The comedian said they will start tentatively house-hunting when he is back in London next month.

The star also said that he would be open to hosting another chat show in the future but thinks it would be 'odd' to do something similar to The Late Late Show.

James said he never wanted the show to feel like it had overstayed its welcome and hopes there will still be other things for him to do.

James promised to 'go out with a bang' as he informed audiences of his decision to step down as the host of The Late Late Show.

Homeward bound: James and his wife Julia are planning to relocate to the UK after his time on his CBS show has come to an end (pictured in May 2022)

James said the show had 'changed my life' and promised there would be 'lots of tears' when his tenure came to an end.

'Seven and half years ago I started hosting this show and there's no other way to put it, it has changed my life,' he said.

'I never saw as it as my final destination, and I never want this show to overstay its welcome, I love making it and I really think in a year from now that will be a good time to move on and see what's out there.'

He added: 'We are all determined to make this the best year we have ever had...we are going to go out with a bang.

'The fact that you watch this...all over the world...is an absolute privilege for me and every single person who makes this show.'
She is set to make her big Australian Fashion Week debut with her popular fashion line Henne.

And Nadia Bartel celebrated the exciting milestone with her hard-working team and her sister and Henne co-founder, Michelle Ring, on Thursday evening.

The former WAG, who just celebrated her 37th birthday, turned heads as she left dinner at celebrity hotspot Mimi's in Coogee, Sydney.

Nadia's Neon Nights! Bartel showed off her abs in an eye-catching orange crop top as she left dinner at celebrity hotspot Mimi's in Coogee on Thursday night ahead of her Fashion Week debut

The mother-of-two showed off her impeccable abs in an eye-catching neon orange crop top teamed with black trousers and strappy heels.

She carried a Bottega Veneta clutch and accessorised with gold rings.

Nadia wore her bayalage locks out and complemented her tanned complexion with copper toned makeup.

The night before Nadia celebrated her birthday with another dinner with her Sydney-based pals.

Here come the girls! Nadia was celebrating her label's Australian Fashion Week debut with her Henne team

Chic accessories: She carried a Bottega Veneta clutch and accessorised with gold rings

Again, she looked sensational in a Christopher Esber black backless crop top teamed with a pair of Dion Lee trousers and strappy stilettos by cult Los Angeles brand, Femme.

Earlier in the day, Nadia attended the shows at Afterpay Australian Fashion Week before debuting her own fashion label at the event on Friday.

She dazzled in a white mini skirt and a white oversized T-shirt.

Coppertone girl! Nadia wore her bayalage locks out and complemented her tanned complexion with copper toned makeup

Team work! Nadia is set to make her big Australian Fashion Week debut with her popular fashion line Henne. She celebrated with her team and her sister and Henne co-founder, Michelle Ring, far right

Nadia paired the ensemble with expensive accessories, including a white Bottega Veneta pouch and mint crocodile embossed leather boots by Paris Texas.

Nadia has continued to put her infamous white powder snorting scandal behind her.

Last year, she was filmed snorting a line off a cheap K-mart plate during one of Melbourne's six Covid lockdowns.

Damning footage from the gathering was posted online by her friend and business partner Ellie Pearson posted by mistake.

Nadia issued an apology on Instagram just 24 hours after the video leaked.

Big day tomorrow: The Henne team enjoyed an early dinner ahead of their big day on Friday

Twinning! Nadia cuddled up to her sister Michelle for a happy snap inside the restaurant

37 and thriving! The night before Nadia celebrated her birthday with another dinner with her Sydney-based pals

'Hi everyone, I have let you all down by my actions,' she wrote.

'I take full responsibility and I am committed to taking all necessary steps to ensure I make better choices in [the] future.

The ex-wife of Geelong great Jimmy Bartel and three other women were each fined $5,452 for breaking lockdown rules.

Stylish: The mother-of-two looked sensational in a Christopher Esber black backless crop top teamed with a pair of Dion Lee trousers and strappy stilettos by cult Los Angeles brand, Femme
As an Oscar-winning force on stage and screen, Dame Judi Dench might not be as worried about the rising cost of living as the rest of us.

But the veteran actress, 87, is on a mission to help families save 1billion on house hold bills as she takes centre stage in a new TV advert.

Dame Judi has teamed up with MoneySuperMarket for its MoneySuperSeven campaign  involving a squad of money-saving specialists dedicated to saving Britain money through credit cards and car, home and travel insurance.

It pits her against the popular meerkats (pictured) of comparethemarket's longrunning advertising campaign.

Dame Judi Dench takes centre stage in a new MoneySuperMarket TV advert aimed at helping families save 1billion on house hold bills

She is the latest celebrity 'golden oldie' to turn her hand to TV adverts.

Dame Judi plays Eight, the mysterious leader of the squad, in a nod to her role as 'M', the head of MI6 in the James Bond franchise, a character she portrayed across seven films. 'You thought I'd retired? Hardly,' she tells one squad member.

'I've been otherwise engaged but now people's bills are going through the roof, so I'm back.'

Dame Judi proceeds to check in on the teams' money-saving progress, telling them to 'keep focused and stay on top of your game'.

The one-minute ad, which launches today, ends with Dame Judi saying: 'If we can't save Britain money now, no one can.'

The advert was shot by acclaimed British film director John Madden, who worked with Dame Judi on The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Dame Judi proceeds to check in on the teams' money-saving progress, telling them to 'keep focused and stay on top of your game'

The one-minute ad, which launches today, ends with Dame Judi saying: 'If we can't save Britain money now, no one can'

The new add pits her against the popular meerkats (pictured) of comparethemarket's long-running advertising campaign

The advert was shot by acclaimed British film director John Madden, who worked with Dame Judi on The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.

Lis Blair, of MoneySuperMarket, said: 'We are thrilled that Dame Judi has joined the MoneySuperSeven to steer the squad through its toughest challenge yet.'

She is the latest celebrity 'golden oldie' to turn her hand to TV adverts.

Veteran actress Dame Joan Collins and Sir Elton John have fronted commercials for Snickers while American movie legends Sylvester Stallone and Robert de Niro both worked with bread giant Warburtons.

De Niro faced some flak for teaming up with the Bolton-based bakers, which lead to a 15million dividend payout for bosses.

He told GQ: 'Should I think I should never have done that? I'm too good for that or something?

'And I said, f*** it, I'll do it. Why not? Don't hold it against me.'
$35-$75.00

Headliners Caroline Rhea, Craig Shoemaker and Cole Cosby come to Dayton June 11th to entertain and laugh the night away to Benefit Antioch Shrine

An evening of comedy at the Dayton Masonic Center

Saturday June 11th Antioch Shrine hosts a fundraising event at the Dayton Masonic Center featuring ABC`s Comedian of the year, two time Emmy winner, actor, Bob and Tom favorite Craig Shoemaker. Craig has been an actor and comedian for 30 plus years starring on shows such as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Parks and Rec, Netflix Comedy special "Daditude" and is also known as "The Lovemaster". Laughfest is also bringing actress and comedian Caroline Rhea to Dayton for this specail show. Caroline who starred in the TV series Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Hollywood squares, Comic Strip Live, HBO special "One Night Stand" and many more, was also the former host of the television show The Biggest Loser.

This event will be hosted by Philadelphia comedian Cole Cosby. Tickets onsale now.
Stompin' on the Street - FREE Community event offering shopping, Artisan Crafts, food and Country Music held in downtown Lebanon.

FREE Community event offering shopping, artisan crafts, food and country music held in downtown Lebanon

The Lebanon Country Music Festival is an annual festival held in Lebanon, Ohio to celebrate country music, family fun, and one-of-a-kind vendors.

Festivities kick-off on Friday evening. Saturday brings you amazing music, great food, drinks, and shopping with Main Street Lebanon merchants and visiting vendors.

Last year we had 12,000 people come and enjoy this festival and we want you to be a part of it this year as we grow with you! So come on and start Stompin in the Street!
On Monday 9 May, dramatic events rocked Sri Lanka. After months of economic turmoil, and weeks of mass mobilisations on the streets, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa made a desperate gamble to establish order and save his own political skin. But his brutal crackdown backfired in dramatic style. By nightfall, Mahinda was hiding in a naval base, whilst dozens of MPs residences were in flames. By the end of the day, eight people were dead including one MP and two police officers, and the hospitals were flooded with the injured.

This is an important before and after moment for the struggle. The more moderate layers have been left in a state of shock by the incidents of 9 May. Meanwhile, some of the self-appointed leaders are preparing to sell a compromise.

The most advanced layers of youth must not allow the lessons of these dramatic days pass by unlearned.

Mahindas last role of the dice

The enormous, elemental movement of the masses in Sri Lanka has now been ongoing for more than six weeks. As it has unfolded, the Rajapaksa brothers  President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa  could clearly see that they werent both going to get out of this with their political hides intact. Each has sought their own self-preservation at the others expense.

When Gota demanded Mahindas (pictured above) resignation, Mahinda decided that now was the time to strike, to unleash his thugs  this however backfired spectacularly / Image: Alexander Nikiforov, Wikimedia Commons

So on Friday, when Gota demanded Mahindas resignation, the latter was certainly not prepared to go quietly. Mahinda calculated that after more than a month on the streets, the movement was running out of steam by now. He decided that now was the time to strike, to unleash his thugs, and that once he cleared the movement off the streets there would be no need for him to resign at all! This is a valuable insight into the psychology of these gangsters.

On Monday 9 May, he put his plan into action. But as Marx once explained: Revolution sometimes needs the whip of counter-revolution to push it forward.

Mahindas counter-offensive backfired in spectacular fashion.

The violence of the counter-revolution

With powerful connections from his time in the presidency between 2005 and 2015, Mahinda was well placed to stage an unofficial crackdown. On Monday 9 May, utilising these links to the state and his substantial following of loyal goons, he prepared a showdown with the movement.

In the morning, lumpen gangs were bussed to a pro-government rally hosted by himself and his son and princeling of the Rajapaksa family, Namal, at the official Prime Ministerial residence at Temple Trees in Colombo. The paid attendees were plied with alcohol, then whipped up into a mob.

Then, to chants of we need Mahinda, they were sent from Temple Trees down to the permanent anti-government encampments a few hundred yards away: first to Maina Go Gama opposite Temple Trees itself, and then a few hundred metres away to Gota Go Gama at Galle Face Green.

"We need Mahinda" massive crowd inside Temple Trees urging Prime Minister to not to resign pic.twitter.com/oTn778l0aS  NewsWire  (@NewsWireLK) May 9, 2022

This was a well-coordinated and vicious assault. Hundreds of goons were brought in by the busload. Most were lackeys of the regime, although a number of prisoners were brought from the jails to riot for the day. Meanwhile, orders had been given to the police not to obstruct this pro-government mob but to step aside and let them create havoc.

The result was a brutal orgy of violence. Videos were soon circulating on social media of anti-government protesters being beaten with planks and sticks. Another showed pro-government thugs ripping the hijab off a Muslim woman and beating her to the ground. The tents of the occupation were trampled and torched, with similar scenes witnessed at Gota Go Gama in Kandy, a city in the centre of the island.

Footage of Government supporters assaulting protester at "GotaGoGama" pic.twitter.com/nAxkbQi1nX  NewsWire  (@NewsWireLK) May 9, 2022

Beating an unarmed woman right in front of more than a dozen of policeman. Wtf  pic.twitter.com/uuc8WO3FV5  Videha Dhothaka (@dhothaka) May 9, 2022

The people fight back

The counter-revolutionary violence swiftly ignited a powder keg of indignation and anger.

As the news spread, angry masses descended on the green from nearby road blockades that had been ongoing in protest at the lack of cooking gas. Workers left their workplaces in large numbers to come to the movements defence. The trade unions and student unions also put the call out for their members to go down to the sites of the attacks.

The masses fought back fiercely. Galle Face Green was quickly reclaimed.

From Temple Trees, pro-government goons fled into the shallow waters at the edge of Beira Lake. Only as night fell did the police (reluctantly) fish them out of the dirty water.

Supporters of the Prime Minister blocked by protesters after they jumped to Berawewa pic.twitter.com/7lbrr3hjER  NewsWire  (@NewsWireLK) May 9, 2022

Soon, the buses that had been used to bring prisoners and SLPP goons down to the protest sites were burnt out and smashed up. In one case a bus was dumped in a lake, whilst another was smashed using a JCB digger!

More buses which carried Rajapaksa supporters to Colombo attacked pic.twitter.com/afZ9bAGU20  NewsWire  (@NewsWireLK) May 9, 2022

Outside of Colombo, the eruption of anger was even more fierce. The masses full fury was directed at the ministers and MPs of this thieving government. An island-wide police curfew was declared but the masses remained undaunted. For their part, the police did little to stop the anti-government masses from staging their counter-attack.

It is clear that in the morning, the rank-and-file of the police were under orders to stand aside as the lumpen thugs smashed up Gota Go Gama. No doubt many reluctantly followed orders, and now took satisfaction in the masses counter-attack. Indeed, in at least one place police officers even joined the protest.

The ruling party, the SLPP, had sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind. Its offices were completely smashed to pieces. Every symbol of the ruling party was destroyed. A statue of the Rajapaksa patriarch was toppled. One ministers jeep was thrown in a lake. In another case, an MPs collection of Lamborghinis was torched.

Everywhere, the residences of ruling party MPs and government ministers were under siege by large anti-government protests. By evening, at least twenty to twenty-three such residences were smouldering ruins, burned to the ground by the masses  including the ancestral home of the Rajapaksa family itself.

The house of Government MP Sanath Nishantha who led a mob to attack Galle Face protesters completely destroyed pic.twitter.com/p1PpaGOgE2  NewsWire  (@NewsWireLK) May 9, 2022

Update: Johnston Fernando's residence in Kurunagala set on fire. pic.twitter.com/w1IqOiXEWF  DailyMirror (@Dailymirror_SL) May 9, 2022

Ancestral home of the Rajapaksa family in Medamulana, Hambantota set on fire by protesters. pic.twitter.com/QIEnREphjq  NewsWire  (@NewsWireLK) May 9, 2022

In the midst of the confusion, certain fears naturally circulated of agents provocateurs setting the fires. Is this likely? The way events unfolded would suggest not  firstly, it is doubtful that a bloody nose on such a scale was self-inflicted by the regime.

Secondly, were provocateurs at work on any serious scale, it would presumably be towards some end, such as providing the pretext for a coup.

But, as the instances of relative police passivity suggest, the ruling class cannot reliably rest on the armed bodies of the state  at least, not at this time. On Tuesday, the senior police officer who had collaborated with Mahindas riot a day earlier found himself surrounded and beaten by an angry anti-government crowd. Again, his officers failed to intervene to protect their own commander!

A coup or some other such intervention by the army at this time would be a very risky manoeuvre indeed! It could end disastrously for the regime, bringing the masses out in enormous numbers and causing the army to break down on class lines.

Mahinda out

As the full scale of the masses rage became evident, Mahinda Rajapaksa was not only forced to submit his resignation  he was forced to flee for his life!

Following his lead, government ministers began resigning. But the masses werent going to let them get away so easily. Road blockades were established on the highways and outside the airport to prevent MPs from trying to escape the country. Even police cars were stopped and checked by the people! When the car of one ruling party MP was blocked on a highway between Colombo and Kandy, he opened fire on protesters, killing one and injuring others. After trying to flee to a nearby building, he committed suicide, turning the gun on himself.

When it became known that Mahinda Rajapaksa was holed up at the highly fortified Trinco naval base, large crowds surrounded all its entrances. Many even took to boats to go around the base to ensure no private yacht carrying the former Prime Minister could escape the island! This movement has taken on breathtaking insurrectionary features across the entire country. And reflecting the sheer pressure from below, 2,000 trade unions called an all-out general strike.

But the call for a general strike was short lived. The explosive anger of the movement soon rattled the more moderate and middle-class elements, who have pulled back in fright  the trade union leaders among them.

Self-defence

Mondays dramatic events mark a fundamental turning point in the situation.

From day one, the movement has insisted upon its strict adherence to non-violence. It was the sincere hope of the overwhelming majority of the people that the Rajapaksas could be ousted peacefully. After Mondays events, huge numbers of workers, peasants and young people could clearly see that this is no longer tenable.

The movement has insisted upon its strict adherence to non-violence  after Mondays events, huge numbers of workers, peasants and young people could clearly see that this is no longer tenable / Image: Surekha Samarasena, Wikimedia Commons

However, as night fell on Monday, some of the middle-class layers in the movement, particularly on social media, began succumbing to nervousness. Terrified by the anger that the counter-revolution had provoked, they pleaded with the masses to return to the movements peaceable methods.

But had the people failed to come out en masse after Mahindas goons had attacked Maina Go Gota and Gama Go Gota, the violence would have been far, far worse. Rather than the violence of self-defence, the regime  having tasted blood and sensed weakness  would have gone in for the kill. They would have unleashed a reign of terror involving massive counter-revolutionary repression and the incitement of communal killings.

The response of the masses prevented that. As has always been the case in history, it is the counter-revolution that once again initiated violence. What we saw from the masses was self-defence. And self-defence is not only justified  it is absolutely necessary. What it is lacking is organisation and a clear programme. This is what gave Mondays outbreak a convulsive character.

No, we cannot condemn the violence of the masses. In the face of counter-revolutionary violence, self-defence is absolutely necessary. And the bloody nose the regime received will force them to move more carefully in future.

Leadership and programme

What is needed is clear organisation: committees of struggle and self-defence in the workplaces and communities, linked up on the district and national level. But more than this  and as a prerequisite of this  the movement needs clear leadership and a clear programme! This is precisely what it is lacking.

Up until now, the movement has, quite understandably, eschewed political parties  rejecting all of them in disgust and anger. But nature abhors a vacuum. Eventually, leadership must emerge. And indeed, a kind of leadership has emerged.

The failure of the trade union leaders to mobilise meant their abdication of the leadership of the movement. In their place, middle-class layers took up a position of predominance in the occupations and in the movement at large.

But these self-appointed, middle-class leaders have actively sought to prevent the discussion of any political or economic programme for the movement. They have effectively sought to maintain the movement in its earliest, most spontaneous form, preventing the masses from clarifying essential questions. This has caused mass confusion on matters of fundamental importance.

With the leadership preventing a democratically decided upon programme emerging from the movement, accidental groups have inevitably stepped forward with their own ideas.

With its prestige running high because of the powerful role the lawyers have played in the movement, the Bar Association of Sri Lanka (BASL) has stepped forward with a programme that it claims can offer a way out of the crisis. But this programme represents a complete sell out to the ruling class.

Their proposal calls for the formation of an interim national unity government of all the parties, with Gotabaya Rajapaksa still in power for four to six months! This government will (we are told) return the country to a prime ministerial system, after which the country will go to the polls to elect a new government.

And are the masses to remain on the streets for six months to ensure such an interim government honours its promises? To pose the question is to show the absurdity of this proposal.

Worse than this, BASL explains that such a government should also be tasked with seeking assistance from the IMF and other imperialist creditors. Confusion about the meaning of an IMF bailout is presently widespread in the movement, principally for a lack of a clear, socialist leadership able to explain the real character of imperialism.

BASLs programme even calls for more involvement for the chambers of commerce in the parliamentary process! i.e. direct representatives of the same capitalist class who have brought such a catastrophic situation to Sri Lanka in the first place!

For an organisation enjoying prestige in the movement to present such a programme is manna from heaven for the ruling class.

Where next?

After the 9 May incidents, the more moderate elements were left in a state of shock. They continued to harbour the utopian hope that the movement can succeed entirely peacefully through purely legal channels.

Meanwhile, the latest information is that Gota has attempted to implement the BASL proposals, having appointed Ranil Wickremesinghe  the sole MP of the right-wing UNP  as Prime Minister.

But it is not at all clear that these measures will successfully defuse the movement.

Firstly, the main objective of the movement is not yet achieved: Gota remains in power! Secondly, its not certain that the parties in parliament will even be able to arrive at an agreement themselves! The latest information is that both the SJB and the JVP have now said they will not join such a government. This will not be a step towards national unity but will be a continuing government of crisis.

And finally, the opposition is just as hated as the ruling party. It is unlikely that the masses will be placated by any such reshuffling at the top, even if the opposition can be brought on board. On Monday, it was noteworthy that SJB leader Sajith Premadasa was chased off under a barrage of kicks and insults when he tried to visit Gota Go Gama.

It is clear that BASL, despite its authority, does not speak for the whole movement, and it will have extreme difficulty in selling such a compromise. Among the more radical lawyers, voices of dissent have started to be raised against the attempted sell-out. The Young Lawyers Association for instance has demanded that BASL at the very least include Gotas resignation to its demands and that it reject the IMF bailout.

But whether the movement continues to move ahead, or temporarily ebbs as a result of the confusion sowed by some frightened middle-class leaders, it is clear that a turning point has been reached. The first serious test of the movement has exposed its weaknesses: its lack of programme and organisation, and the inadequacy of its self-appointed leaders.

And should a new government open the road for an IMF bailout, the masses will receive another bitter lesson about the real nature of the imperialists medicine.

It is time for the most class-conscious, revolutionary elements in the movement to learn the lesson and prepare for the next major test. That lesson is principally this: the most pressing task is the formation of a revolutionary party with a clear socialist programme. In the present situation, such a party would grow rapidly as its prognoses are confirmed by events and the masses learn for themselves the impossibility of solving their problems on a capitalist basis. In turn, a revolutionary party would cut through the confusion that presently exists in the movement and open the road to the struggle for power by the Sri Lankan working class.
Officials from the state school education said the results of the Class X examinations would be announced by June 25.  Representational image/DC

HYDERABAD: The academic year 2022-23 for Intermediate students is likely to be delayed by at least a month in the state due to the scheduled SSC public exams from May 23 to June 1.

Officials of the Board of Intermediate Examinations said a proposal to begin the intermediate academic year from July 1 would soon be sent to the government for approval.

Officials from the state school education said the results of the Class X examinations would be announced by June 25. Spot valuation of the SSC public exam papers is most likely to begin on June 12-13 as of current discussions and the results are expected tentatively by June 25 or June 26, said the official.

Reopening of intermediate colleges for first year students on June 1 is not possible. Given the delay in the academic year due to Covid, only classes for second year students can be expected in the month of June. The government can conduct bridge courses for students in one months time and guide them on which stream to pick for junior college, said Dr P. Madhusudhan Reddy, president, Government Junior Lecturers Association.
The farmers were busy drying their drenched paddy under the sun in the hope these could become normal and would be purchased by the government. (Representational Image/ DC)

ADILABAD: Farmers are knocking at the doors of the state government for help as large stocks of their paddy were drenched in the unexpected rain in recent days. They want the government to purchase the damaged paddy.

The farmers were busy drying their drenched paddy under the sun in the hope these could become normal and would be purchased by the government. Officials are offering Rs 1,960 for Grade -I and Rs 1,940 for grade -II quality paddy.

Farmers complained that the officials were cutting the weight in the name of high moisture content in the paddy that they brought to purchasing centres for sale.

In Rabi, paddy is cultivated on 64 acres in Adilabad district, 5,642 acres in Komaram Bheem Asifabad, 69,497 acres in Mancherial and 58,998 in Nirmal district.

Farmers who kept their paddy in their agriculture fields after the harvesting were planning to shift it to the paddy procurement centres. Paddy cultivation is massive in areas close to the canals of the Kadam irrigation project in Nirmal district. Some farmers cultivate paddy with the water drawn by motors from other areas.

There is no clarity on whether the district officials will purchase the drenched paddy. Farmers say they had not anticipated the rain.

Forest minister Allola Indrakaran said officials should complete paddy procurement from farmers by May 31 as pre-monsoon rains are forecast this time.

So far officials have purchased seven metric tonnes of paddy from the 86 paddy purchasing centres in Nirmal district. However, officials did not make any commitment about purchasing the drenched paddy, he said.

The minister told the officials to ensure that the payments are made within a week after procuring paddy from farmers. He said the paddy procurement target is 1.30 lakh metric tonnes and there are 43 rice mills that would handle this in Nirmal district.

Nirmal collector Musharaff Farooqui inspected the paddy purchasing centres in Havarga and Kistapur villages in Lokeshwaram mandal and asked the staff to speed up the procurement.

Sangepu Borranna of Rythu Swarajya Vedika said the officials are not purchasing the drenched paddy. They are cutting the 3.5 kg weight from each paddy bag in the name of high moisture content, he said.
New Delhi: Calling attention to the fact that India fully vaccinated almost 90 per cent of its adult population and more than 50 million of its children, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday evening said that the World Health Organisation (WHO) must be reformed and strengthened to build a more resilient global health security architecture. During his address at the second global virtual summit on COVID-19 hosted by the US President Joe Biden, PM also pitched for making the World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules, particularly the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), more flexible.

At the summit, the PM also called for streamlining WHO's approval process for vaccines and therapeutics to keep supply chains stable and predictable.

In his address, Mr Modi also emphasised on building a resilient global supply chain and enabling equitable access to vaccines and medicines. He said, As a responsible member of the global community, India is ready to play a key role in these efforts.

The PM said, The Covid pandemic continues to disrupt lives, supply chains and tests the resilience of open societies. In India, we adopted a people-centric strategy against the pandemic. We have made the highest ever allocation to our annual healthcare budget. Our vaccination programme is the largest in the world India manufactures four WHO approved vaccines and has the capacity to produce five billion doses this year. We supplied over 200 million doses to 98 countries, bilaterally and through COVAX. India has developed low-cost COVID mitigation technologies for testing, treating and data management. We have offered these capabilities to other countries.

He added, India's Genomics Consortium has contributed significantly to the global database on the virus. I am happy to share that we will extend this network to countries in our neighborhood. In India, we extensively used our traditional medicines to supplement our fight against COVID and to boost immunity, saving countless lives. Last month, we laid the foundation of WHO Centre for Traditional Medicine in India, with an aim to make this age-old knowledge available to the world.

The prime minister said there was a need for building a resilient global supply chain and enabling equitable access to vaccines and medicines. He said, It is clear that a coordinated global response is required to combat future health emergencies.

Later, in a statement on the Summit, New Delhi said, Other participants included co-hosts of the event - heads of state/Government of Belize in its capacity as chair of CARICOM, Senegal as chair of the African Union, Indonesia as president of G20 and Germany as president of G7 respectively. Secretary general of the United Nations, director general of WHO and other dignitaries also participated.
VIJAYAWADA: Social Welfare Minister Merugu Nagarjuna has advised officials to make good use of the Rs 17,403 crore SC Sub-Plan allotment, and avoid its misuse and diversions to other purposes.

The minister conducted a review meeting on the SC sub- plan at the Secretariat on Thursday. He said it is the responsibility of the authorities to make sure that every single paisa of the SC sub- plan funds are used for the development of the SCs.

He also pointed out that the unused funds of one financial year cannot be utilised for the same purpose for another financial year. Hence the funds sanctioned in this financial year should be utilized to the full during this fiscal itself.

He said chief minister Jagan has directed officials to utilize funds for the development of the slum areas through this SC sub-plan.

Minister Nagarjuna said the CM had sanctioned Rs 15,000 crore in year 2019-20 for the SC Sub-Plan, Rs 15,735 crore in 2020-21, and increased the allocation to Rs 17,403 crore this year. He urged the authorities to give priority to the basic needs of the people like drinking water, road laying, and sewage disposal systems in villages where the SC population lives in large numbers.

He said all the details of the work that are to be undertaken through this SC sub-plan must be submitted to the nodal agency. Only after getting the approval from the nodal agency should the work be undertaken.

Social welfare department secretary MM Nayak, its director Harshavardhan, Swachh Andhra Corporation MD Sampath and other officials participated in the meeting.
Following protests from private land owners, collectors have been asked to identify government lands, assigned lands, and other such lands that are suitable for realty ventures.  Representational image/DC

Hyderabad: Despite the stiff resistance from landowners and farmers to the state governments recent attempts for implementation of the land pooling scheme (LPS) in major towns, the revenue department has stepped up efforts to identify land parcels along highways and roads for implementing LPS in all major mandal and district headquarters. The government is keen on boosting revenues in the next two years so that it can overcome fund crunch and continue with its welfare schemes and development programmes.

With the Centre imposing restrictions on borrowings by states, the state government views LPS as a better alternative for mobilising funds.

The state government was forced to withdraw LPS notification in Warangal on Wednesday after it evoked sharp protests from landowners and farmers, who refused to give away their lands.

Notwithstanding the protests, the state government has instructed all district collectors to identify suitable land parcels, especially along highways and roads, which command huge real estate value, and submit a report by the month-end, to enable the government to launch LPS in major mandal and district headquarters.

Official sources said that the instructions were sent to the district collectors from the office of the Chief Commissioner of Land Administration (CCLA).

Following protests from private land owners, collectors have been asked to identify government lands, assigned lands, and other such lands that are suitable for realty ventures. They have also been asked to look for private lands wherever government lands were not available along highways and roads.

Sources added that collectors conveyed to the state government that it would be difficult to convince owners and farmers of private lands unless the government comes out with a clear LPS policy.

They pointed out that there was no uniformity in the present scheme as it offers variable benefits to landowners citing that one LPS offers 60:40 share of developed land between government and land owners while another offers 70:30. They said that a majority of land owners were demanding 50:50 share in developed ventures under LPS.

Some collectors have reportedly identified 500 acres of government land in the undivided Mahbubnagar district abutting Hyderabad-Bengaluru highway, 400 acres in Medchal-Malkajgiri district abutting NH-44 and 500 acres in Rangareddy and Vikarabad districts.

However, most of these are assigned lands, which were found to be in the possession of farmers, who are reluctant to hand them over to the government.
Revanth Reddy demanded that the government hold a special drive to issue caste, income and other certificates for unemployed youths to apply for recruitment exams.  DC Image

HYDERABAD: State Congress president A. Revanth Reddy questioned Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao for reportedly staying in his farmhouse, whereas farmers are worrying over procurement of paddy amid changing weather conditions.

The TPCC chief said the government had failed to purchase paddy, and middlemen were preventing farmer from getting the minimum support price. Farmers were being forced to sell the paddy at lower prices, he said. Untimely rains had adversely affected them.

On other issues, Revanth Reddy demanded that the government hold a special drive to issue caste, income and other certificates for unemployed youths to apply for recruitment exams.

Revanth Reddy along with TPCC leaders including CLP leader Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka, MPs N. Uttam Kumar Reddy and Komatireddy Venkat Reddy, MLC T.Jeevan Reddy, AICC secretaries G. Chinna Reddy, Vamshichand Reddy, S.A. Sampath Kumar will attend the party chintan shivir being in Udaipur from May 13 to 15.
Currently, the Taliban government is not helping its own cause of gaining world recognition  which will help it access overseas funds at a time when the country is in dire straits  by imposing severe restrictions on women and girls in serious violation of human rights. (Representational Image/ AP)

Since India evacuated its mission in Afghanistan once the Taliban retook Kabul in August 2021, practically under American aegis, after what came to be called the Talibans Doha negotiations with the United States, New Delhi is evidently doing a rethink. It seems likely that an Indian representation will soon be restored in Kabul, even if this will be small and not at the level of ambassador.

This is reflective of realistic thinking. Of course, there can be no question at present of according recognition to the Taliban regime. That is likely to happen when a broad consensus amongst the leading powers emerges. Currently, the Taliban government is not helping its own cause of gaining world recognition  which will help it access overseas funds at a time when the country is in dire straits  by imposing severe restrictions on women and girls in serious violation of human rights.

More basic is the issue that the Taliban regime is not considered representative at the domestic level within Afghanistan. If it were to accommodate into the government all Afghan factions and ethnic and political interests, as well as women, the world may view the regime in Kabul differently.

Since the Taliban rode to power militarily and not through an election process, the only plausible way to gain domestic legitimacy is through the holding of a Loya Jirga, the traditional Afghan national assembly that embraces the various ethnic and other political interests and operates on the basis of a negotiated consensus. As recently as last week, Moscow  which carries influence in Afghanistan  counselled the Taliban exactly on these lines. Former President Hamid Karzai, who chose not to leave the country after the Taliban takeover and is practically under house arrest, has advocated this course for months in media interviews.

Its an open question if the Taliban will heed this well-intended advice. However, Taliban interlocutors have reportedly hinted to the three high-profile hostages  besides Mr Karzai, Dr Abdullah Abdullah, virtually the Prime Minister in the erstwhile Ashraf Ghani government, and former Loya Jirga speaker Fazl Hadi Muslimyar  that a Loya Jirga is on the cards, and the convention could materialise before the summer is out.

If this is not without basis, it would appear that the strong likelihood of India resurrecting its presence in Afghanistans capital in a matter of weeks  as suggested in New Delhi  may not be wholly without linkage to the timing of the Taliban holding the Afghan grand assembly. Indeed, in recent months New Delhi and the Taliban authorities are believed to have been in touch at the level of senior security officials. Not long ago, an Indian team was in Kabul. Earlier, India had hosted the Taliban.

There could be other signs that might suggest a loosening up in Kabul. Dr Abdullah was permitted by the Taliban government to quietly visit his family in New Delhi recently on the occasion of Id-ul-Fitr. It was strictly a private visit. Earlier, Mr Muslimyar was allowed to meet his family in the UAE at the urging of Mr Karzai, who remains a central figure.

Interestingly, the former President, who stayed on in Kabul with his family when the Taliban took over, is himself yet to reach an agreement with the authorities to travel abroad for conferences or medical reasons.

Observers believe that when any of the republican trio travels out of the country, the other two are his guarantors, effectively speaking. If Mr Karzai too is permitted foreign travel, a message of opening up by the regime is apt to be conveyed. The three Taliban leaders who are said to be interlocutors with the hostages are mines minister Shahabuddin Delawar, intelligence chief Abdul Haq Wasiq, and young Anas Haqqani, brother of the powerful Siraj Haqqani, who heads what is now deemed the most influential Taliban faction. These important Taliban figures evidently bear a huge burden of public relations.

When the nearly 200-strong Indian mission in Kabul was being evacuated in a hurry following the re-capture of Afghanistan by the Taliban on August 15 last year, Indias ambassador, Rudrendra Tandon, was on record as saying that the situation in Afghanistan was complex and quite fluid.

In the event, the Indians pulled out in toto. In light of terrorist attacks on the Indian embassy in Kabul and Indian consulates in Heart, Jalalabad and Mazar-e-Sharif at the behest of our western neighbour, there was legitimate concern that Pakistani death squads in newly liberated Kabul could target Indians and Indian interests. Ambassador Tandon had reportedly adopted a nuanced stance, however, which would have meant retaining a very limited diplomatic presence alive in Kabul.

In conspicuous contrast with Indias stand, the other powers that had a direct bearing on regional geopolitics  China, Russia, Iran, the UAE and of course Pakistan, did not withdraw their presence from Kabul when the Taliban returned. As for the US, it operated through Qatars embassy in Afghanistan. Of course, none of these countries attract visceral Pakistani governmental hostility, as India does.

Evidently, the Indian position is now undergoing a measure of quiet re-calibration. It is likely that India rushing wheat to Afghanistan, where roughly half the population stands on the brink of starvation since the Taliban takeover, made an impression in Kabul even if the food aid was routed via the World Food Programme as Pakistan was dragging its foot on providing road access to Indian aid consignments.

Over the years, before the Taliban reoccupied Kabul, India had been accused by Pakistan of fomenting terrorist trouble against it by using the then Afghan government which was friendly towards New Delhi. Recent events have shown this allegation to be false. Of late, the Pakistan Air Force has been dropping bombs in the eastern Afghanistan provinces of Khost and Kunar to destroy the camps of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, which have sought shelter with the government of the (Afghan) Taliban in Kabul in order to escape Pakistani retribution.

When American influence was all-pervasive in Afghanistan before the return of the Taliban, as a fighting politico-military force the Taliban were given sanctuary by Pakistan. This was a conscious policy aimed at eventually dominating Afghanistan if the Taliban returned to rule Kabul. This has now come to pass but Kabul, as before, continues to remain at odds with Islamabad in the security sphere.

In such a complex situation, and with some probability that domestic politics in Kabul may perforce require the Taliban to accommodate other political and ethnic interests in the country, India cannot remain glued to its position of August 2021.
Washington: President Joe Biden will appeal for a renewed international commitment to attacking COVID-19 as he convenes the second global COVID-19 summit at a time when faltering resolve at home jeopardises that global response.

Eight months after he used the first such summit to announce an ambitious pledge to donate 1.2 billion vaccine doses to the world, the urgency of the U.S. and other nations to respond has waned.

Momentum on vaccinations and treatments has faded even as new, more infectious variants rise and billions across the globe remain unprotected. Congress has refused to meet Biden's request to provide another $22.5 billion in what he has called critically needed aid funding.

The White House said Biden will address the opening of the virtual summit Thursday morning with prerecorded remarks and will make the case that addressing COVID-19 must remain an international priority. The U.S. is co-hosting the summit along with Germany, Indonesia, Senegal and Belize.

The U.S. has shipped nearly 540 million vaccine doses to more than 110 countries and territories, according to the State Department  by far more than any other donor nation.

After the delivery of more than 1 billion vaccines to the developing world, the problem is no longer that there aren't enough shots, but a lack of logistical support to get doses into arms. According to government data, more than 680 million donated vaccine doses have been left unused in developing countries because they were set to expire soon and couldn't be administered quickly enough. As of March, 32 poorer countries had used fewer than half of the COVID-19 vaccines they were sent.

U.S. assistance to promote and facilitate vaccinations overseas dried up earlier this year, and Biden has requested about $5 billion for the effort through the rest of the year.

We have tens of millions of unclaimed doses because countries lack the resources to build out their cold chains, which basically is the refrigeration systems; to fight disinformation; and to hire vaccinators, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said this week. She added that the summit is going to be an opportunity to elevate the fact that we need additional funding to continue to be a part of this effort around the world.

We're going to continue to fight for more funding here, Psaki said. But we will continue to press other countries to do more to help the world make progress as well.

Congress has balked at the price tag for COVID-19 relief and has thus far refused to take up the package because of political opposition to the impending end of pandemic-era migration restrictions at the U.S.-Mexico border. Even after a consensus for virus funding briefly emerged in March, lawmakers decided to strip out the global aid funding and solely focus the assistance on shoring up U.S. supplies of vaccine booster shots and therapeutics.

Biden has warned that without Congress acting, the U.S. could lose out on access to the next generation of vaccines and treatments, and that the nation won't have enough supply of booster doses or the antiviral drug Paxlovid for later this year. He's also sounding the alarm that more variants will spring up if the U.S. and the world don't do more to contain the virus globally.

To beat the pandemic here, we need to beat it everywhere, Biden said last September during the first global summit.

The virus has killed more than 995,000 people in the U.S. and at least 6.2 million globally, according to figures kept by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.

Demand for COVID-19 vaccines has dropped in some countries as infections and deaths have declined globally in recent months, particularly as the omicron variant has proved to be less severe than earlier versions of the disease. For the first time since it was created, the U.N.-backed COVAX effort has enough supply to enable countries to meet their national vaccination targets, according to vaccines alliance Gavi CEO Dr. Seth Berkley, which fronts COVAX.

Still, despite more than 65% of the world's population receiving at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose, fewer than 16% of people in poor countries have been immunized. It is highly unlikely countries will hit the World Health Organization target of vaccinating 70% of all people by June.

In countries including Cameroon, Uganda and the Ivory Coast, officials have struggled to get enough refrigerators to transport vaccines, send enough syringes for mass campaigns and get enough health workers to inject the shots. Experts also point out that more than half of the health workers needed to administer the vaccines in poorer countries are either underpaid or not paid at all.

Donating more vaccines, critics say, would miss the point entirely.

It's like donating a bunch of fire trucks to countries that are on fire, but they have no water, said Ritu Sharma, a vice president at the charity CARE, which has helped immunize people in more than 30 countries, including India, South Sudan and Bangladesh.

We can't be giving countries all these vaccines but no way to use them, she said, adding that the same infrastructure that got the shots administered in the U.S. is now needed elsewhere. We had to tackle this problem in the U.S., so why are we not now using that knowledge to get vaccines into the people who need them most?

Sharma said greater investment was needed to counter vaccine hesitancy in developing countries where there are entrenched beliefs about the potential dangers of Western-made medicines.

Leaders must agree to pursue a coherent strategy to end the pandemic instead of a fragmented approach that will extend the lifespan of this crisis, said Gayle Smith, CEO of The ONE Campaign.

GAVI's Berkley also said that countries are increasingly asking for the pricier messenger RNA vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna, which are not as easily available as the AstraZeneca vaccine, which made up the bulk of COVAX's supply last year.

The emergence of variants like delta and omicron have led many countries to switch to mRNA vaccines, which seem to provide more protection and are in greater demand globally than traditionally made vaccines like AstraZeneca, Novavax or those made by China and Russia.
Colombo: A Sri Lankan court on Thursday imposed a ban on overseas

travel on former prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, his son and MP Namal Rajapaksa and 15 others in view of investigations against them for the deadly attack on peaceful anti-government protesters in Colombo this week.

The Fort Magistrates Court asked them to surrender their passports to the court due to the investigations taking place on the attacks on the GotaGoGama and MynaGoGama peaceful protest sites on Monday. At least nine people were killed and over 300 others injured in the violence.

The magisterial order came as a response to a request by the polices criminal investigation division who are conducting the investigations into the Mondays violence.

The court issued the bans on 13 legislators representing the ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), including Johnston Fernando, Sanath Nishantha,

Pavithra Wanniarachchi, C.B. Ratnayake, and Sanjeewa Edirimanne.

Senior Deputy Inspector General (SDIG) of the Western Province Deshabandu

Tennakoon is also in the list of people who need to remain in the country for

investigations into the violence.

The group was accused of brutally assaulting protesters opposite Mahinda

Rajapaksas prime ministerial residence and near the secretariat of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Mahinda Rajapaksa, in a show of political strength, rallied his grassroots supporters to force him not to resign his position as the prime minister.

By then the pressure had mounted on him from within the ruling coalition to resign to make way for the formation of an interim all-party government. He made a passionate speech and the charged up supporters attacked the protesters who had been for weeks demanding the resignation of the Rajapaksas, blaming them for the country's worst economic crisis.

A number of government MPs homes and offices were torched by enraged mobs around the country on Monday and Tuesday, in a wave of spontaneous violence that was triggered by the attack on anti-government protestors by supporters of Mahinda Rajapaksa.

Mahinda Rajapaksa resigned a few hours later and a curfew was imposed across the country. Mahinda Rajapaksa, known for his brutal military campaign against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) during his presidency from 2005 to

2015, saw his private residence set on fire on Monday.
Tata Sons has named Campbell Wilson, the head of Singapore Airlines' (SIA) budget carrier Scoot, as the new chief executive and managing director of Air India.

The appointment came about four months after the salt-to-software conglomerate took full control of the national carrier. Tatas original pick for the job turned it down amid political opposition and media coverage tied to his links with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Wilson, 50, started his aviation career as a management trainee with SIA in New Zealand in 1996. He worked for the airline in Canada, Hong Kong and Japan before returning to Singapore in 2011 as the founding CEO of Scoot, which he led until 2016. He then served as SIAs senior vice president of sales and marketing, before taking up a second stint as Scoot CEO in April 2020. SIA is a partner in Vistara, an airline owned by Tata Sons

Analysts said Wilson had his work cut out for him.

The working and reporting culture in India is significantly different from Singapore and as such, handling the workforce and culture at Air India would be a challenging task for the new CEO, said Rohit Tomar, managing partner at consulting firm Caladrius Aero Consulting LLP.

Wilson faces the mammoth task of turning around a debt-laden airline, with old aircraft, a huge workforce and falling market share. He will also have to help the Tatas revive and streamline its aviation assets, which include three unprofitable carriers. Last month, Tata Sons moved four Air India executives who held board positions to senior management roles, and filled a few key positions in its C-suite.

While Air India still controls prime slots at airports in India and abroad, Wilson will have to find ways to help the airline focus on regaining a global foothold and take control of markets where it lost out to Middle Eastern airlines.

Wilsons appointment has the Air India boards blessing, but is yet to get regulatory approval.

He will need some amount of learning about India and some amount of unlearning as well to run Air India, said Mark Martin, chief executive at aviation consultancy Martin Consulting LLC.
Pakistan Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari on Thursday said that the next elections could be "bloody" if all political parties did not agree to a basic code of conduct for polls.

Bilawal, who is also the chairperson of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), while addressing the National Assembly, said, "In light of the hateful situation, we have to come together on a code of conduct (for elections)if the political forces do not come togetherthen the next election will be bloody.

He said if the political parties chose to let go of democratic attitudes then it could lead to violent confrontation. "We need to reconsider our approach as things are already heading that way," he cautioned as Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) of Imran Khan demanded early elections.

He reiterated that the political parties formulate a basic code of conduct so that the country could be run and elections may be held peacefully.

He said allied parties wanted another "charter of democracy". Even if it doesnt see the light of day there should be at least some sort of code of conduct, he said. He said the elections should be held after electoral reforms and all parliamentary parties, including PTI, should be taken on board on this issue.

There is a need to sit together for electoral reforms involving all stakeholders, including civil society and political parties, to ensure free, fair and transparent elections, Bilawal said. In his speech, Bilawal also lashed out at former premier Imran Khan and others for allegedly abrogating the Constitution and attacking democracy.

The foreign minister claimed that a former minister of the Imran Khan government had approached him a day before the no-confidence motion, warning that martial law would be imposed if the Opposition did not agree to their demand for snap polls.

Despite the provocations [by Khan], all our institutions, including the judiciary and the establishment, continued to operate within the framework of the Constitution and law, and democracy prevailed, the foreign minister said.

Bilawals remarks about violence in elections came after Khan in his rallies warned of toppling the government through street power to pave the way for elections.

Khan, who was unceremoniously removed from office on April 9 through a no-confidence vote, has been holding big rallies to press the government to hold elections. He has also threatened to give a call for a march towards Islamabad after May 20.
Pakistan and China on Wednesday agreed to inject fresh momentum in their bilateral strategic ties by enhancing cooperation in various fields.

The agreement was reached at a virtual meeting between Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi. According to a statement by the Foreign Office (FO), the two foreign ministers discussed bilateral, regional and global issues of mutual interest.

The Foreign Minister underscored his determination to inject fresh momentum in the bilateral strategic cooperative partnership and add new avenues to practical cooperation, the FO said.

Also Read: CPEC works running behind schedule, only 3 out of 15 projects completed: Report

Minister Zardari appreciated the transformational impact of the $60-billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) on Pakistans infrastructure, energy, industrialisation, socio-economic development and improvement in livelihoods of the people.

The ambitious CPEC is a 3,000-km long route of infrastructure projects connecting China's northwest Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and the Gwadar Port in the western Pakistan province of Balochistan.

India has protested to China over the CPEC as it is being laid through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK).

Zardari underlined that Pakistan was committed to high quality development of CPEC and looked forward to fast-tracking key projects and accelerating industrial relocation to Pakistan, especially in CPEC Special Economic Zones (SEZs).

He conveyed that Pakistan enjoyed unique and time-tested bonds with China and appreciated the measures taken by the two sides to strengthen their All-Weather Strategic Cooperative Partnership.
Pakistan's Parliament on Thursday unanimously passed a resolution denouncing the alleged Indian attempt of demographic changes in Kashmir through a delimitation commission.

Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, who moved the resolution, said that the alleged Indian move is aimed at artificially altering the electoral strength of the Muslim majority in Jammu and Kashmir, state-owned Radio Pakistan reported.

The resolution "categorically rejected" the delimitation commission report and alleged that through the delimitation exercise, India is making attempts to further its "illegal actions of August 5, 2019 and subsequent measures."

Also Read | Explained: What J&K delimitation means

The delimitation panel, formed in March 2020, last week notified its final report giving six additional assembly seats to the Jammu region and one to the Kashmir Valley and bringing areas of Rajouri and Poonch under the Anantnag parliamentary seat. Jammu division will now have 43 assembly seats and Kashmir 47 in the 90-member House.

The resolution recalled that the Kashmir issue is an internationally recognised dispute and a long standing item on the agenda of the UN Security Council.

It demanded that India honours and fulfills the obligations under the international law, UNSC resolutions and the fourth Geneva Convention and refrain from bringing about any demographic changes in Kashmir.

The resolution reiterated Pakistan's unflinching commitment and solidarity with Kashmiris. It also asked the government to highlight and forcefully project the Kashmir cause at all bilateral and multilateral forums including the UN and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

Bilawal said that the whole exercise of delimitation in Kashmir is "illegal and in contravention of relevant UN Security Council Resolutions."

Also Read | Pakistan rejects Jammu & Kashmir Delimitation Commission report

He said that he has also addressed a letter to the President of the UN Security Council and the Secretary General of the UN in which he has highlighted the alleged changes in the demographic structure of Kashmir.

Bilawal said Pakistan will continue to reach out to the world to raise international awareness about Indian steps in Kashmir.

India's decision to abrogate the Article 370 of the Constitution to revoke the special status of Jammu and Kashmir on August 5, 2019 evoked strong reactions from Pakistan, which downgraded diplomatic ties and expelled the Indian envoy.

New Delhi has categorically told the international community that the scrapping of the Article 370 was its internal matter.

India has repeatedly told Pakistan that Jammu and Kashmir "was, is and shall forever" remain an integral part of the country. It also advised Pakistan to accept the reality and stop all anti-India propaganda.

India has said it desires normal neighbourly relations with Pakistan in an environment free of terror, hostility and violence.
India remains among the 30-odd nations where marital rape is not criminalised as the Delhi High Court split verdict on the issue on Wednesday gave little to cheer about to those fighting against the alleged discriminatory clause under Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code.

According to a UN Women report, most of these 34 countries were developing nations including Pakistan, China, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Haiti, Laos, Mali, Senegal, Tajikistan and Botswana.

Thirty-two per cent of women in India who have ever been married have experienced spousal physical, sexual, or emotional violence, according to the latest fifth round of the National Family Health Survey (NHFS-5).

It further revealed that 25 per cent of married women in the 18-49 years age group who have experienced spousal physical or sexual violence report having physical injuries, including seven per cent who have had eye injuries, sprains, dislocations, or burns and 6 per cent who have had deep wounds, broken bones, broken teeth, or any other serious injury.

Also Read: Continuance of marital rape exception egregiously problematic: Justice Shakdher

In the case of marital rape, India continues to adhere to the archaic colonial law where unwilling sexual contact between a husband and a wife is not recognised as a criminal offense.

One of the two exceptions provided under the Section 375 of India's Penal Code (IPC), the provision which defines all forms of sexual assault involving non-consensual intercourse with a woman as rape, states "sexual intercourse by a man with his wife, the wife not being under fifteen years of age, is not rape".

Activists alleged that this exception gives immunity to men from a punishable offence of rape when committed in a contract of marriage and violates the Constitution.

The Delhi High Court on Wednesday delivered a split verdict with one of the judges favouring striking down the provision, and the other holding it was not unconstitutional.

The division bench however granted leave to the parties to file an appeal before the Supreme Court.

In 2017, the Supreme Court did read down the marital rape exception but only to change the age, and held that it should read "the wife not being under eighteen years of age" -- and not 15 -- ensuring that the IPC was in line with the age of consent, which is 18.

The same year, the Centre in its affidavit had opposed the pleas, saying that marital rape cannot be made a criminal offence as it could become a phenomenon that may destabilise the institution of marriage and an easy tool for harassing husbands.

A group of petitions had challenged the very constitutionality of the marital rape exception under Section 375 IPC (rape).

Also Read: Marital rape: Delhi High Court delivers split verdict

Several experts, NGOs and women activists have been arguing against the exception clause for grossly violating married women's rights under Article 14 (Right to Equality) and Article 21 (right to life) of the Constitution.

Even the Justice Verma Committee, formed following the nationwide protests after the 2012 Delhi gang-rape case, had recommended removing the exception clause in Section 375 of the IPC that decriminalises marital rape in its report in 2013.

"The exemption for marital rape stems from a long outdated notion of marriage which regarded wives as no more than the property of their husbands.

"According to the common law of coverture, a wife was deemed to have consented at the time of the marriage to have intercourse with her husband at his whim. Moreover, this consent could not be revoked," the committee had said.

However, the recommendation was not part of the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act passed in 2013, and a Parliamentary panel on Home Affairs formed to examine the ordinance before the passage of the law had said, "the entire family system will be under great stress" should marital rape be criminalised.
Most political parties in the country hailed the Supreme Courts order on Wednesday that stays registering cases under the existing sedition law, even as Union Minister of Law Kiren Rijiju implied criticism saying there is a need for all institutions to respect the Lakshman Rekha.

We respect each other. Court should respect the government, legislature. The government should also respect the court. We have clear demarcation of boundaries, and that Lakshman Rekha should not be crossed by anybody, Rijiju told reporters after the Supreme Court rejected Centres plea against suspending the use of sedition law.

Senior Congress leader and former Union Minister of Law M Veerappa Moily slammed Rijiju for his remarks and asked whether Rijijus comment was also the Modi governments outlook.

Moily alleged that the Law Ministers statement indicated the evil intentions of the BJP government. Asserting that sedition law was against the ethos of India, Moily hailed the apex court as the guardian of the Constitution.

Also Read | From Disha Ravi to Arundhati, Supreme Court sedition law stay to impact several high-profile cases

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), however, argued that the Supreme Courts order on sedition law needs to be viewed in context of the governments positive suggestions. Party leader and an advocate in the Supreme Court, Nalin Kohli said the central government wished to examine the matter, which had been duly accepted by the court.

Senior BJP leader and former Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said the Prime Minister had taken an extraordinary courageous step (removed the word very) by saying that this colonial law, which was enacted by the British, shall be re-examined objectively by the Government of India.

At the same time, Prasad said that any plea of sedition has to be re-examined keeping the countrys safety and security in mind as also the civil liberties of citizens.

Politicos chirp in

In a tweet made in Hindi, former Congress President Rahul Gandhi said: Speaking the truth is patriotism, not treason. To tell the truth is love for the country, not treason. To listen to the truth is rajdharma (regal / royal / national duty), to crush it is Raj hath (regal / royal / national obstinacy) ... Don't be afraid!

A clear-cut message has gone today to suppressors and subjugators of public opinion, of dissent, of everyone who criticises the autocratic and dictatorial rulers and their policies that you can no longer suppress the voice of truth, said Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala.

TRS social media convenor Y Sathish Reddy tweeted: 96% of sedition cases filed against 405 for criticising politicians were registered after 2014, of which 70% are accused of making critical remarks against just #Modi & #Yogi. During CAA-protests, 22/25 cases involving 3,700 people were filed in BJP states! #SeditionLaw

96% of sedition cases filed against 405 for criticising politicians were registered after 2014, of which 70% are accused of making critical remarks against just #Modi & #Yogi. During CAA-protests, 22/25 cases involving 3,700 people were filed in BJP states!#SeditionLaw@KTRTRS pic.twitter.com/yIYfZ624mY  YSR (@ysathishreddy) May 11, 2022

This was posted along with an image of Indias political map that marked the number of sedition cases registered in each state (Please confirm this with AM as it is an image that only implies, not states unequivocally).

Also Read | SC puts hold on sedition law till Centre re-examines provisions

Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra tweeted: Victory! Supreme Court stays Sec 124A- no new cases can be filed, existing cases can apply for bail & release immediately

Victory!

Supreme Court stays Sec 124A- no new cases can be filed, existing cases can apply for bail & release immediately. Thank you to my lawyer Sr. Advocate Gopal Sankaranarayan for his 1 pager which swung the day! pic.twitter.com/8rp9Ztomnm  Mahua Moitra (@MahuaMoitra) May 11, 2022

Aam Aadmi Party MP Sanjay Singh said: Whosoever tries to raise voice against the BJP government, the BJP brings false cases to suppress such persons. This law was misused against me also in Uttar Pradesh.

Indiscriminate use of contentious law

While several political parties and leaders flagged the misuse of this law to suppress opinions/voices for arm-twisting, there were reactions via social media that sedition cases were also slapped in Opposition-ruled states; the latest being in Maharashtra against MP Navneet Rana and her MLA husband Ravi Rana.

In April, Congress-ruled Rajasthan had slapped a police case against Noida-based journalist Aman Chopra among various sections of the Indian Penal Code, including the section 124-A (sedition).

Many have been booked under the sedition law, notably Booker Prize winning writer and activist Arundhati Roy; noted journalist the late Vinod Dua, Bengaluru-based environmental activist Disha Ravi, former JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar and Kerala-based journalist Siddique Kappan.
Laos joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2013. One of the conditions of admittance was to establish an independent regulator for its telecom sector within two years.

The government had committed to do so by February 2015 as part of the accession agreement. Seven years later, however, and there still has been no sign of any firm plans being made to create an independent regulatory body. The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (MPT) retains the primary role in regulating the countrys telecom market. With the government also having a financial stake (in part or in whole) in every one of the major fixed-line and mobile operators, the MPTs position and decision-making is far from what could be considered independent.

The major problem created by this situation is that the telecom market  particularly the mobile segment, where at least some degree of competition is allowed to exist  has largely been stifled. The regulatory regime appears at times to be openly hostile to free market competition, and has cranked down on past attempts to increase the value of services through more competitive pricing offers. This, in turn, has led to an environment that offers few incentives for providers to invest in new infrastructure or improve service quality; sufficient returns on investment cannot be guaranteed with such strict pricing controls as well as the potential for political interference.

Fixed-line and mobile penetration levels have, as a result, remained much lower than whats seen in neighbouring South East Asian markets. Nevertheless, there are signs of growth in the mobile broadband segment as LTE network coverage slowly widens and, more recently, the countrys first 5G services start to come onstream. Residents in the capital will at least be able to enjoy high-speed services in the near future, while the rest of the country waits patiently to catch up with the rest of the world.

This report includes regulator and ITU market data updates to December 2019, Telecom Maturity Index charts and analyses, assessment of the global impact of Covid-19 on the telecoms sector, and other recent market developments.

Key developments:

LTC launches the first commercial 5G service in Laos.

Unitel completes 5G trials.

5G-based IT and telecom solutions (including IoT) deployed as part of Laos smart motorway network on the China-Laos Expressway.

Get a Full Copy of this Report

Developing Telecoms market report summaries are produced in partnership with BuddeCom, the worlds largest continually updated online telecommunications research service.

The above article is a summary of the following BuddeCom report:

Report title: Laos - Telecoms, Mobile and Broadband - Statistics and Analyses

Edition: March 2022

Analyst: Stephen Marshall

Number of pages: 93

Single User PDF Licence Price: US$890

Companies mentioned in this report: Lao Telecom (LTC), ETL, Unitel, Beeline, Planet Online, Huayuan Electronics

For more information or to purchase a copy of the full report please use the following link: https://www.budde.com.au/Research/Laos-Telecoms-Mobile-and-Broadband-Statistics-and-Analyses/?r=83
Hungary has commenced the next stage of its device replacement subsidy programme, which offers mobile users HUF20,000 (US$63.4) towards the cost of a 4G or 5G device if they currently only have access to a 2G or 3G handset.

Regulator NMHH (Nemzeti Media- es Hirkozlesi Hatosag / National Media & Infocommunications Authority) launched the first phase of the initiative in February. CommsUpdate notes that the scheme is aimed at retiring 3G phones across Hungary as operators prepare to shutter their 3G networks.

The NMHH noted in a statement that Vodafone Hungary and Yettel have announced that they will begin shutting down their 3G networks in several parts of the country this month. While the operators confirmed that they would continue shuttering their networks, neither has disclosed their planned timeframe for a complete shutdown.

Magyar Telekom however has confirmed plans to completely shut down its 3G network by 30th June. In its Q1 earnings report, the operator noted its total revenue was up 8.4% year-on-year to HUF175.9 billion (US$487 million), boosted by growth in mobile data as well as fixed broadband revenue.
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By TOM KRISHER, MICHAEL LIEDTKE and ADAM GELLER

Associated Press

As the uproar over Elon Musk's $44 billion buyout of Twitter reaches a crescendo, another Musk drama, still chaotic four years after it began, has been back in court.

Ironically, that spectacle started with a Musk tweet about doing an audacious deal. Then, with Wall Street awaiting his next move, the Tesla CEO changed directions, admitting that his plan to buy all the electric car maker's stock might be too much trouble. As regulators prepared to sue the billionaire for defrauding investors, he pondered his position in the corporate universe in a livestreamed interview while puffing on pot.





. . .
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By ANDREW SELSKY

Associated Press

SALEM, Ore.  The mayor of Bend, Oregon, a mountain town that has seen a population boom due to its recreational opportunities and scenery, called it quits on Monday, citing stresses from the pandemic, wildfires and homelessness.

So many historic changes in such a short time. I am simply exhausted, Mayor Sally Russell wrote in an open letter. It is in my own  and my family's  best interest to leave.





. . .
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SEATTLE  An apartment building at 1000 Queen Anne Ave. N. recently sold for $7.8 million, according to King County records.

The seller was the Durst family, which had owned the property for decades.





. . .
White House warns against violence after abortion protests: Singaporean media

Xinhua) 09:54, May 12, 2022

SINGAPORE, May 11 (Xinhua) -- The White House cautioned against violence and threats after protests surrounding a looming U.S. Supreme Court ruling on abortion, Singapore's Asian news network CNA said Monday.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki called for restraint, saying President Joe Biden "strongly believes in the Constitutional right to protest," but that should not "include violence, threats, or vandalism," CNA reported.

In Wisconsin, arson investigators were probing a fire on Sunday at an anti-abortion group headquarters, the media quoted a CBS report as saying.

The words "If abortions aren't safe then you aren't either" were spray-painted outside the building, according to CBS.

(Web editor: Peng Yukai, Liang Jun)
Holcim in share purchase talks with Adani, JSW groups for Ambuja Cements, ACC: report

The Holcim Group is reported to have initiated negotiations on a detailed share purchase agreement (SPA) with two Indian contenders  the Adani Group and the JSW Group  as part of the near $10 billion sale of listed Ambuja Cement and ACC.

Holcim is yet to hold any talks with the third likely contender, UltraTech, though the Kumarmangalam Birla group company is very much in the fray despite anti-trust worries, say reports.

The SPA talks are expected to be completed by end May, within which all suitors are expected to furnish full details of financing.

"Once the terms of the SPA are finalised, then there will be a short window to show up with the committed financing," said one of the persons. "At that point, whoever can move in first scalps the assets."

Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas is said to be advising Adani and Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas is working with the Birla Group while Khaitan & Co are legal advisors to the JSW Group.

The stocks of Ambuja and ACC have been extremely volatile since the sale reports emerged. The combined market value of Ambuja Cement and ACC was Rs 1.14 lakh crore on Monday.

UltraTech is still weighing options qs a bid by UltraTech will face scrutiny from Indias anti-trust watchdog, the Competition Commission of India (CCI). Ultratech currently accounts for 117 MTPA of the total 540 million tonnes per annum (MTPA) of capacity in the country. ACC and Ambuja together have 66 MTPA capacity.

Ultratech is also reported to be looking at options of joining forces with other contenders, sharing 25-30 MTPA of the new capacity.

An ET report, meanwhile, said that the Adani Group was looking at a Dubai-based group as the main vehicle for the buyout of the twin cement targets and has been in talks with Gulf investors, including IHC that recently invested $2 billion in the group. The infrastructure major is also reported to be finalising terms of promoter as well as share-backed financing from Barclays, Standard Chartered Bank and Deutsche Bank.

JSW Group, on the other hand, is relying on its own strength and bankroll nearly $2 billion as its equity, while raising nearly $1.75 billion in funding from a consortium including Carlyle, CVC, Advent and Oaktree Capital, say reports.

Holcim is keen to add new construction businesses outside cement as it seeks to move out of polluting sectors. The company agreed to take over Malarkey Roofing Products in December and Firestone Building Products in early 2021. It has been selling non-core assets to reduce debt and diversify through acquisitions. It sold its Brazilian unit for $1 billion last September and is also planning to cash out of its Zimbabwe operations.
SECI signs MoU with MHA to set up rooftop solar panels in CAPF and NSG campuses

Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) on Monday signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the union ministry of home affairs for harnessing the potential of solar energy on the available rooftop areas in the campuses of the Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) and National Security Guard (NSG).

Shri Ajay Kumar Bhalla, Union Home Secretary and Shri Indu Shekhar Chaturvedi, Secretary MNRE were present on the occasion.

Rakesh Kumar Singh, Joint Secretary, MHA and Suman Sharma, MD, SECI signed the MoU.

The MoU is a step ahead towards supply of green power to the country's security forces and reinforces the government's commitment towards a sustainable future. It will support MHA in implementing rooftop solar plants under RESCO model.

SECI is happy to serve the Government of India for fulfilling Indias climate commitments and look forward to expanding rooftop solar sector to the remotest corners of the country, Suman Sharma said while speaking on the occasion.

Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI), a PSU under the ministry of new and renewable energy (MNRE), is engaged in promotion and development of various renewable energy resources, especially solar energy, trading of power, R&D etc. SECI is also the designated implementing agency for many governments RE schemes like VGF schemes, ISTS schemes, CPSU schemes etc.
Stephen Donnelly has indicated there will be no major changes to the legal arrangements for the new national maternity hospital.

Concerns have been raised about any possible religious involvement in the maternity hospital if it is co-located on the St Vincents site, as planned.

A delay to Cabinet approval for the move has been used by the Government to attempt to quash and alleviate concerns that the new maternity hospital could be open to religious interference.

Opposition politicians on Wednesday spoke of a growing sense that the Government intends to push ahead with plans for the hospital despite the concerns of campaigners.

Donnelly, who took questions in the Dail on Thursday, said he did not anticipate any major changes to the legal agreement reached between the Government and the owners of the land on which the hospital will be built.

Mr Donnelly told the Dail: The building at Holles Street is no longer fit for purpose.

The National Maternity Hospital is currently located at Holles Street in Dublin city centre in a 130-year-old building.

The health minister said there is no religious influence in this new hospital.

He added: Ireland has a dark history when it comes to the Church and womens reproductive health.

I fully agree with the demand for a fully secular hospital.

There will no religious influence. There can be no religious influence.

There is no mechanism for any religious involvement  now or in the future, in the new national maternity hospital.

The nuns are gone and we are not handing over our new national maternity hospital.

This is a partnership between the State, St Vincents and the new national maternity hospital.

Sinn Fein health spokesperson David Cullinane questioned the need for the complex legal arrangements, as well as lengthy negotiations.

The clock is ticking, he warned.

On Wednesday, the Oireachtas Health Committee wrote to the Minister for Health to ask him to defer Cabinets approval of the co-location plan for the hospital.

He pressed Mr Donnelly on whether there could be fresh talks to change aspects of the legal agreements that have caused concern for campaigners.

Were not foreseeing any major changes in terms of documents, he said.

But he added that he was not ruling anything out.

The debate hasnt finished, were still in the middle of it. Were still in listening mode, he said.

Dr Peter Boylan is expected to tell an Oireachtas Health Committee later on Thursday afternoon that the phrase clinically appropriate in the new hospitals constitution is a major red flag.

Providing healthcare on the basis of this test removes autonomy from women and gives the sole decision-making capacity to doctors. These words qualify access to services and enshrine justification for refusing legally permissible treatments.

The concern about Catholic ethos is too acute to proceed unless and until there is full scrutiny of all correspondence between Ireland and Rome.

Dr Boylan, the former master of the National Maternity Hospital, will also ask NMH clinicians who have previously said that terminations take place at St Vincents Hospital to clarify if they take place under the 2018 Act, or with the aim of saving a patients life.

He will also question the governance arrangements for the hospital, and will argue that there is no security against a future conservative Minister for Health appointing three conservative state directors to the board of the NMH.

This is not independence, he will argue, calling the NMH co-location plans flawed.
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Louth schools were among the winners at this year's SciFest@DkIT2022 regional competition held on Tuesday 10 May at Dundalk Institute of Technology (DkIT). Schools from across the North Leinster and South Ulster region came together with hundreds of their second-level student peers to compete in the SciFest@DkIT 2022 regional competition at Dundalk Institute of Technology (DkIT). Almost 100 projects exhibited at SciFest@DkIT 2022 and the judges had a difficult task in shortlisting the regional winners.

Bush Post Primary School won the award DkIT Best Intermediate Life Science Award for their fantastic project How growing up with sisters affects the male brain in how they view women the project was created by Jenna Rice, Kayleigh Goss and Shauna Rice.

Colaiste Chu Chulainn won the award Scifest Chemistry Award (Student) and Royal Society of Chemistry Award (Teacher) for the project The effect of oxidation on pH of apples which was conducted by Breanna Winters and Ayodeji Sofola (pictured above) with the support of their teacher Mrs. Deirdre Dunford.

The second award picked up by Colaiste Chu Chulainn was the Business Excellence Institute Award which was received by Daniele Orlandi (pictured above) for his project An environmentally friendly thermos

The top prize on the day, the Best Project Award, went to Loreto Secondary School (Balbriggan) students Laetitia Nouaha, Sidra Shahzad, Melissa Asare for their excellent project titled The Impact of Covid-19 on the Mental Wellbeing of Teenage Girls. Students from Largy College (Clones) picked up the Runner-Up Best Project Award for their project Four seasons photovoltaic self-charging Rover: The Mars-PSR which also scooped the ESERO Discover Space Award (student and teacher awards) by students Dara Courtney, Joshua Brandon and Sean Clerkin supported by teacher Mrs Colette Smith.

SciFest@DkIT co-ordinator Dr Edel Healy, Head of School of Health & Science, DkIT said: Today on campus has been a great day, we opened our doors and welcomed the post primary students and their teachers from our region to Scifest 2022. The last time we were able to host such an event at DkIT was 2019. It was wonderful to see the inventiveness and ingenuity of all the projects. We can safely say the future is bright for STEM in the Northeast.

SciFest is an all-island STEM initiative which fosters active, collaborative and inquiry-based learning among second-level students. The programme operates throughout the school year and, being locally and regionally based and free-to-enter, is highly inclusive and accessible. Winners from each regional STEM fair go on to compete at a National Final in November. Winners from the national final compete at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) in America and in the Hong Kong Global Youth Science and Technology Bowl (GYSTB), attend the Long Night of Science in Berlin and participate in the Broadcom MASTERS International Programme in America. The SciFest programme is funded primarily by Intel Ireland and Boston Scientific.

Commenting on the SciFest@DkIT regional STEM fair Sheila Porter, SciFest Founder and CEO said: As we mark the 17th year of SciFest, more than 80,000 students have participated in the programme to date, and we are sure that 2022 will be another stellar year for projects in science, technology, engineering and maths. SciFest gives students an excellent opportunity to develop their interest in STEM and in inquiry-based approaches to learning, while developing their creative and problem-solving skills and learning to work in a team.

Interval guest speakers on the day whilst the judges made their final decision included Professor Keith Thornbury who is the Director of Smooth Muscle Research Centre in DkIT and an esteemed lecturer in the School of Health and Science. His centre has led out on the multi-disciplinary, cross-border project BREATH (Borders and Regions Airways Training Hub)

This year DkIT say they were also "absolutely delighted" to welcome Niamh Byrne from WuXi Biologics Ireland as their second guest interval speaker. Niamh Byrne holds the position of Manufacturing Lead for the Fed batch facility, MFG 7 and is also the chairperson of WuXi Biologics and WuXi Vaccines Joint Women in Stem Committee. Niamhs industry expertise and experience was an inspiration to all the young scientists who participated at the SciFest@DkIT event. Niamh provided an oversight of the company and types of roles that graduates may apply for within the Biologics Pharmaceutical sector.

Winners on the Day
Artist Mariana Clemente, from Porto in Portugal, came to Dundalk a year ago and fell in love with the town.

The launch of the talented Creative Spark print studio member's pop up art exhibition, depicting her memories from her year living in Dundalk through illustrations, drawings, prints and installations, takes places at An Tain Arts Centre this evening, Thursday May 12th at 7pm.

Marianna, who was an intern at Creative Spark's print studio and is now interning at An Tain, has just completed her masters in illustration and animation.

Her pop up exhibition 'No one ever goes to Dundalk', which celebrates her one year anniversary of moving here.

Marianna said she called her exhibition 'No one ever goes to Dundalk' because when she arrived at the airport in Dublin and asked how to get here that's the response she was given by a worker.

Marianna says she loves the town and living here.
40 million loan to Moroccos Agence Nationale des Ports (ANP)

Financing to enhance the climate resilience of selected Moroccan ports

Accompanying US$ 6.2 million grant from the Global Environment Facility

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is enhancing the climate resilience of ports along Moroccos Atlantic coastline by providing a 40 million loan to Agence Nationale des Ports (ANP).

The loan is the first to a Moroccan state-owned entity without a sovereign guarantee. It will comprise two tranches: a 15 million committed loan and 25 million of uncommitted capital. The loan will be supplemented by an investment grant of US$ 5.7 million from the Global Environment Facility (GEF).

EBRD President Odile Renaud-Basso and ANP signed the agreement at the Banks 31st Annual Meeting and Business Forum in Marrakech. Moroccan Minister of Equipment and Water Nizar BarakaMinister of Energy Transition and Sustainable Development Leila Benali, ANP General Director Nadia Laraki, GEF representatives and EBRD senior management attended the signing.

The EBRD will also furnish ANP with a comprehensive technical capacity package, funded by a US$ 500,000 grant from the GEF and a US$ 1 million grant from the Bank itself. The package aims to provide systematic support for the climate resilience of Moroccan ports. It will lead to the establishment of a working group, comprising key stakeholders in the Moroccan port sector, to facilitate informed and climate-aware decision-making, as well as better environmental management and standards for ANP.

Further technical assistance will support the effective implementation and monitoring of the project, as well as an improvement in ANPs financial reporting standards.

Minister of Equipment and Water Nizar Baraka said: The project is in line with Moroccos national strategic management plan, with ANP set to play a key role in large-scale infrastructure projects aimed at keeping up with changes in maritime transport and trade outside of Morocco.

EBRD President Odile Renaud-Basso said: The Bank is committed to promoting green transition and climate resilience in Morocco and in all economies where it operates. Supporting ANP, together with the GEF, in mainstreaming climate change adaptation measures in the port sector will provide a replicable model for Morocco and the region.

ANP General Manager Nadia Laraki welcomed the conclusion of the contractual process with the EBRD and thanked the GEF for its commitment. She also indicated that the sub-projects financed by the loan would reflect ANP's commitment to making climate change a real input to its strategic vision.

Morocco is a founding member of the EBRD and became an investee economy in 2012. To date, the EBRD has invested more than 3.4 billion in Morocco through 85 projects.
New EBRD credit line of 2 million to Komercijalna Banka Skopje

New finance for SME investments in sustainable, green technologies

Loans supported by donor-funded incentive grants

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is stepping up cooperation with Komercijalna Banka in North Macedonia by extending a new 2 million credit line. The proceeds will be used to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the country to reboot their businesses after the disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The loan was signed on 12 May during the EBRDs Annual Meeting, which took place in Marrakesh, Morocco.

Francis Malige, Managing Director of the EBRDs Financial Institutions Group, said: "We are very pleased that again together with Komercijalna Banka Skopje we can extend further support for local SMEs. The funds will help small businesses to invest in modern technologies and to recover from the negative effects caused by the pandemic."

Maja Stevkova Sterieva Ph.D., Chief Finance Officer and Member of the Board of Directors of Komercijalna banka AD Skopje, said: "Continuing with our efforts to support the national economy in this post-pandemic period, we are very glad that we can support SMEs with EBRDs credit line of 2 million. We are especially pleased that the funds from the credit line are intended primarily for investments in green energy and competitiveness, which is in line with our commitment to support and contribute to the development of sustainable businesses."

Komercijalna Banka will on-lend the funds to small firms, enabling them to invest in better-performing green technologies and to improve their working standards and processes. These investments should make local SMEs more compliant with European Union and international standards, therefore boosting their competitiveness in both domestic and foreign markets.

The SMEs will also benefit from grant incentives worth up to 15 per cent of the loan amount. The grants will be funded by Luxembourg, Norway and the United States of America, and other donors are expected to participate.

The credit line is part of the EBRDs new SME Reboot Programme that supports small firms recovery from the pandemic-induced slowdown. Komercijalna Banka Skopje is the first bank in the country to join the programme, which encourages SMEs to go beyond business as usual and invest in modern and sustainable technologies. Around 70 per cent of programme funding will be allocated to investments in energy-saving and green technologies, while the remainder will support investments in automation, increased productivity, product quality and safety.

Komercijalna Banka is a long-standing partner of the EBRD in its work supporting SMEs in North Macedonia; it has already extended over 7 million to local SMEs under the SME Competitiveness Support Programme.

The EBRD is a major institutional investor in North Macedonia. To date, it has invested more than 2.2 billion in 159 projects there. Supporting green energy is a priority for the Bank, as it addresses one of the countrys most pressing challenges: decarbonisation of its economy.
Donor commitment heading towards 1 billion for the response to the war

Funding will be deployed alongside the Banks own resources

Governors also approve in principle expansion to Sub-Saharan Africa and Iraq

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has received commitments heading towards 1 billion in donor funds to support its response to the war on Ukraine.

These funds, some of which are subject to national approval processes, will be used alongside the Banks own to help infrastructures and companies in Ukraine and other affected countries deal with the consequences of the Russian-led invasion.

The commitments were made during the Banks 2022 Annual Meeting and Business Forum held in Marrakech, Morocco.

The Banks Governors  who represent its 73 shareholders  expressed their solidarity with Ukraine and signalled their strong support for the EBRDs efforts to respond to the crisis.

They also asked the Bank to be ready to play an active part in the countrys reconstruction in the future.

Work in Ukraine is already underway, yesterday the Bank signed a deal to support Ukraines electricity transmission company, Ukrenergo, with strong backing from EU guarantees. Today the EBRD signed another deal to underpin food security, enabling Ukrainian agribusinesses to access funding facilities they urgently need.

The EBRD has pledged to invest an initial 1 billion this year in support of the Ukrainian economy, which will be a mix of donor and the Banks own funding.

A second resolution approved at the Annual Meeting backed in principle the Banks proposed expansion of activities into sub-Saharan Africa and Iraq.

This will not happen yet, because the Bank will be focusing intensively on helping in Ukraine and other countries affected by the war, and will lead to further discussions with its shareholders about the implementation of this decision.

This was the first Annual Meeting to be held in person since 2019, and the first to take place on the African continent.

More than 1,500 delegates attended and took part in discussions highlighting the Banks work in 38 economies, and in priority areas such as climate change mitigation, equality of opportunity, and the shift to digital.

It took place against the economic backdrop of rising prices, supply chain problems, concerns about energy and food security, and with the effects of the Covid pandemic still being felt. The EBRDs latest economic forecasts published earlier this week showed a marked down in growth forecasts, largely as the knock-on consequence of the war on Ukraine, since the previous projections released at the end of March.

The Bank has a strong track record of dealing with crises in its countries, and was the first international institution to announce a Resilience Package for Ukraine.

EBRD President Odile Renaud-Basso said: We have a clear strategy for our response to Ukraine, and it is already being implemented. I am very grateful for the support from our shareholders, and the donor funds will enable us to deliver impact in Ukraine in 2022 and beyond.

Because of the war we are being asked to provide more support in areas like working capital and emergency funding, and we are adapting very quickly to the changing needs.

As for the future reconstruction, the EBRD will have a very important role to play as the largest institutional investor in the country. We will be ready for this when the time comes.
A 46,000 stash of cocaine was found in a mans possession in a hotel car park after gardai had him under surveillance and now he has been jailed for three and a half years.

Judge Dara Hayes imposed a sentence of five years with the last 18 months suspended on Brian OHanlon at Cork Circuit Criminal Court.

Garda Linda OKeeffe testified that Detective Gardai Fergal Ashcroft and Declan Keane had a surveillance operation in place at the car park of Oriel House Hotel in Ballincollig on the occasion.

The handover of a package in the car park was witnessed by gardai.

Brian OHanlon was one of the two men walking through the carpark who was involved in the transaction.

He was arrested and there was a follow-up search at his home.

Elizabeth OConnell defence senior counsel said the accused was addicted to cocaine at the time of the offence but had since turned his life around.

Brian OHanlon of 60 Maple Lawn, Muskerry estate, Cork, pleaded guilty to having cocaine for sale or supply at the car park of Oriel House hotel in Ballincollig on July 17 2020.

The charge specified a quantity of drugs with a street value in excess of 13,000.

A second man was previously given a fully suspended jail term for his part in the drug crime.

Judge Hayes was told that the accused had been doing well in prison where he was working as a chef.
The climate crisis is making droughts more frequent and longer-lasting, a new UN report has announced.

The report, Drought in Numbers, 2022, was released Wednesday in honor of Drought Day at the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD)s 15th Conference of Parties (COP15) taking place in Abijan, Cote dIvoire from May 9 to 20.

The facts and figures of this publication all point in the same direction: an upward trajectory in the duration of droughts and the severity of impacts, not only affecting human societies but also the ecological systems upon which the survival of all life depends, including that of our own species. UNCCD Executive Secretary Ibrahim Thiaw said in a press release.

Humanity is at a crossroads when it comes to managing drought.



Drought In Numbers, 2022, launched today at #UNCCDCOP15 calls nations to make a strong commitment to making #drought preparedness and resilience a top priority globally 



Press release: https://t.co/DHG5Vp5M5a pic.twitter.com/DJDdG6Egzf  UN Convention to Combat Desertification (@UNCCD) May 11, 2022

The report found that drought frequency and duration has already increased by 29 percent since 2000. Droughts were also the deadliest natural disaster on a global scale; though they only represent 15 percent of natural disasters, they killed 650,000 people between 1970 and 2019. Between 1998 and 2017, the global economy lost around $124 billion due to drought.

Africa has suffered the most from this extreme weather event, AP News reported. It experienced 134 recorded droughts in the last 100 years, and more than half of them were in East Africa, which is in the midst of a devastating drought right now.

We used to be able to grow enough tomatoes that we could stay fed for 8 months, Kenyan farmer Kheira Osman Yusuf told AP News. We used to have luscious mango trees and papaya trees.

Osman said that she had not seen rain for more than a year, and that she sometimes has to risk drinking from the livestock reservoir.

India, Australia and the Americas also struggled with drought. In the U.S., the economy lost $249 billion due to drought and related crop failures since 1980 and several hundred billion dollars over the course of the entire 20th century, The Hill reported.

Currently, 2.3 billion people face water stress, which is about a third of the worlds population, AP News reported. However, that number is expected to double by 2050 if nothing is done.

This isnt the only drought impact that could worsen in the next 30 years, the UN press release said. By 2050, drought could affect more than 75 percent of the worlds population, 4.8 to 5.7 billion people could live in areas with water shortages for at least one month a year and as many as 216 million people could be displaced from their homes at least partially due to prolonged dry weather.

We are at a crossroads, Thiaw said in the press release. We need to steer toward the solutions rather than continuing with destructive actions, believing that marginal change can heal systemic failure.

One major solution touted by the report is land restoration. In Niger, for example, farmers developed an agroforestry system on five million hectares over a 20-year period, reducing drought risk and lowering costs per hectare to less than $20, The Hill reported.

One of the solutions to #Drought is land restoration, which addresses many of the factors of degraded water cycles and the loss of soil fertility. We must build and rebuild our landscapes better, mimicking nature wherever possible and creating functional ecological systems. pic.twitter.com/o66klArAo1  Ibrahim Thiaw (@ibrahimthiaw) May 11, 2022

The report follows another landmark UN publication released ahead of UNCCDs COP15 warning that up to 40 percent of the worlds land was degraded because of human activity.




France says grain output will be affected by dry weather

The French Ministry of Agriculture and Food said grain output in the country this year will be affected by dry weather, reducing yield potential for some crops, Reuters reported.

France, the European Union's largest grain producer, is facing low rainfall, adding to concerns of low global supply following Russia's invasion into Ukraine disrupting grain stocks from two major global suppliers.

An official from the ministry said low rainfall and dry conditions will affect cereal output.

Arvalis, a crop institute, told Reuters that the upcoming warm, dry weather forecast would cause significant damage to French grain crops.

The official said the ministry is observing field conditions, with rain important in the next two weeks to avoid yield losses in newly established plants such as corn.

Water restrictions have been imposed in some parts of France because of the below average rainfall during winter and early spring, but agriculture has been granted priority status.

- Reuters




JBS posts Q1 profit of nearly US$1 billion

Major Brazilian meatpacker JBS SA posted a Q1 profit of BRL 5.14 billion (~US$1 billion; BRL 1 = US$0.19), a 151% increase, surpassing projections thanks to its strong US business, Reuters reported.

The company's net sales was 20.8% up at BRL 90.8 billion (~US$17.6 billion), but in its financial statement, it said it remains affected by soaring worldwide grain prices, Brazil's sluggish economy, and declining pork exports to China.

North American beef operations remained robust, with net revenue up nearly 22% attributable to strong domestic demand, the revival of food service channels, and good retail sales, which also helped JBS' poultry business in the area. The US is a significant export platform for JBS.

Despite the slowness of some US port operations during the quarter, JBS said beef export volumes from the nation increased by more than 6%.

The company said Asia remains the most significant location for US beef exports, particularly China, which boosted beef import volumes by over 62% during this period.

In contrast, the firm said that US pork shipments to China have decreased, and that the US is currently the fifth largest pork exporter to China.

JBS said US Pork processors struggled as China recovered from African swine fever and may now be able to meet more of its own pork demand.

Despite a 5% decline in cattle processing due to China's temporary restriction on select Brazilian beef exporters, JBS's beef unit in Brazil was able to increase sales by 24.2% last quarter.

A rise in the price of domestic cattle, as well as a drop in local beef consumption, had a detrimental impact.

The company said about its Brazilian Seara processed foods division, that soaring corn and soymeal prices used as livestock feed were offset partly by the company's ability to raise product prices.

- Reuters




African swine fever detection kit developed in the Philippines shows promising results

An African swine fever (ASF) PCR detection kit developed by Philippines-based Manila Healthtek Inc is showing promising results in field tests, Business Mirror reported.

The product, named "GenAmplify African Swine Fever PCR Detection Kit", is currently undergoing field tests in animal diseases diagnostic laboratories under the Bureau of Animal Industry located in the cities of Tarlac, General Santos, and Tuguegarao, as well as one private laboratory Diamed Enterprise based in Los Banos.

The kit will make it affordable for swine farmers to conduct ASF tests on their hogs, allowing for quicker response time to prevent the spread of the disease.

Field tests have showed that the Manila Healthtek product is comparable to imported test kits.

Dr Ernesto Balolong Jr., director of research and development, Animal Health Division of Manila Healthtek, said because the kit is developed in the Philippines, the company can easily provide technical assistance to laboratories should there be issues.

- Business Mirror
A Mudzi artisanal miner died after the mine shaft he was working in collapsed while prospecting for gold.

Rangarirai Hwide (25) was panning for gold along Nyamuzizi River in Chifukura Village under Chief Nechombo together with his colleague Tedious Sami when the tragedy struck.

Sami had to call for the assistance of other villagers and they retrieved Hwides lifeless body and reported the matter to the police.

Mashonaland East provincial police spokesperson Inspector Simon Chazovachiyi confirmed the sad incident.

He urged members of the public to desist from unprofessional ways of conducting any mining activities but to use modern and safe means to avoid unnecessary loss of lives.

On May 10 this year, the now-deceased Rangarirai Hwide of Vhareta Village under Chief Nyamukoho in Mudzi and his colleague Tedious Sami of the same village allegedly hatched a plan to go and look for gold before proceeding to Nyamuzizi River in Chifukura Village under Chief Nechombo in Mudzi where on arrival Rangarirai allegedly entered into a mine shaft prospecting for the precious mineral.

While doing so, the shaft allegedly collapsed and buried him inside. His colleague then called for help resulting in nearby villagers rushing to the scene where they managed to retrieve Rangarirais lifeless body. A report was then made at Makosa police station who attended the scene. Herald
ZIMBABWE risks sinking into a deeper power crisis amid reports that the countrys power utility Zesa is on the brink of collapse due to an unsustainable tariff regime, NewsDay has learnt.

The power utility is also said to be drowning due to a US$37 million legacy debt, mostly caused by mining companies, revenue leakages, corruption and mismanagement over the years.

Government has insisted on unsustainable tariffs, largely to avoid a public outcry as the country heads towards the 2023 polls.

Currently, Zesa charges the equivalent of US$0,02 per kWh versus generation and import costs of between US$0,09 and US$0,11/kWh.

Industrialists yesterday suggested that the power utility should increase tariffs to guarantee availability of power to industries.

Miners, farmers and manufacturers have been depending on diesel during power outages that can last up to 18 hours.

Some companies such as Caledonias Blanket Mine, Zimbabwe Consolidated Diamond Company and Tanganda Tea Company have come up with alternative power sources such as solar plants, which have cost them millions of United States dollars to set up and maintain.

Information gathered by NewsDay yesterday indicated that Zesa has applied for a tariff review, but the government was yet to approve it.

Finance minister Mthuli Ncube said the country would have a cost-reflective tariff this year, but there is yet to be any movement in that regard.

Analysts yesterday said without a sustainable tariff, Zesa could sink.

Economist Eddie Cross said: Any measures by the government which require State-owned corporations to sell a product or service on the market at below production costs must be abandoned immediately as it automatically undermines the ability of the parastatal to be sustainable. With this situation, Zesas future is doomed because it wont be able to borrow money or secure a future of production and that is exactly the same problem being faced by South Africa.

Former Energy minister Fortune Chasi said Zimbabwe urgently needed a cost-reflective tariff to save Zesa from collapse and to avert an electricity crisis.

However, the new tariff should neither be inflated by greed and corruption nor legacy issues. The cost-reflective tariff is essential, but factors building up the overall cost must be justified, in other words it must be justifiable in reflecting the cost of generating or importing electricity, not something that is because of premiums arising from corruption and mismanagement, Chasi said.

Zesa had not responded to questions from NewsDay at the time of going to print.

But indications were that the parastatal was in distress after it recently extended a begging bowl to big miners constituting a group called the Energy Intensive Users Group to provide off-take guarantees in hard currency for joint access to power as electricity shortages wreak havoc in the country.

This was revealed recently at the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair by the Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company (ZETDC) chairperson Howard Choga, who said ZETDC was owed in excess of $1 billion by commercial and domestic consumers.

The power utility currently needs about US$2,5 billion to end load shedding and was battling to get its monthly foreign currency requirements of US$17 million from the central bank to import electricity.

The country has a power deficit of about 1 600MW. Newsday
The rumors were (mostly) true. Sony did indeed have a follow-up to its stellar WH-1000XM4 ready for a proper debut. Today the company announced the WH-1000XM5 ($400), its latest flagship noise-canceling headphones equipped with all of the things weve come to expect from Sonys 1000X line. This time around the company gave its premium cans a big exterior redesign. In the process, it massively increased comfort while also expanding the incredible performance in terms of noise cancelation and overall sound quality.

Design

One of the biggest changes for the 1000XM5 is the design. Sony slimmed down the headband while keeping the underside soft and cushiony. My only gripe with the new look is that you can see where the housing for the adjustable arms ends and the softer padding begins. You only see it when you take the headphones off, but its noticeable.

Sony Sony WH-1000XM5 SCORE 95 Engadget 95 Critics - Not yet scored N/A Users - Not yet scored N/A Pros Supreme comfort

Great sound

Powerful ANC

30-hour battery life Cons More expensive than the M4

Occasional audio issues on macOS

Sony also connects the headband to the ear cups in one spot on the M5, rather than the U-shaped bracket that mounted to the M4 in two places. Theres still plenty of swivel and rotation for the ear cups, so theres no sacrifice to movement. In fact, Id argue these changes give this new 1000X a more modern look, than all of the previous models. The lineup has a similar design up through the M4, so Sony was overdue for a big overhaul.

Despite only being four grams or 0.14 ounces lighter than the WH-1000XM4, this new version feels like it weighs a lot less when you put them on. The weight distribution is better, plus the synthetic leather ear cups are quite cushiony. I had no problem wearing these for hours at a time and at no point did I feel pressure around my ears or on the top of my head.

Billy Steele/Engadget

The outside panel of the right ear cup still houses the touch controls. Here you can play/pause with a double tap, skip tracks with a horizontal swipe or swipe vertically to adjust volume. Tap and hold summons your voice assistant and when you get a call, simply double tap to answer. All of those touch controls work well too, reliably accepting taps and swipes without error. On the edge of the left ear cup, there are physical buttons for power and noise cancellation. The former can also put the headphones in pairing mode and give you a battery level update while the latter cycles through a combination of ANC, ambient sound and off.

Software

As is the case with most of Sonys earbuds and headphones, the Headphones Connect app is where you tweak settings and enable a host features. When you fire up the software, a battery life percentage is prominently displayed on the right side, with tabs for Status, Sound, System and Services just below. The first, Status, gives you access to the finer details of Adaptive Sound Control or Sonys handy automatic switching of noise canceling settings based on activity or location.

Of course, if you choose to have things change based on where you are, youll have to give the app permission to track your whereabouts. If you do, you can set the M5 to automatically enable ambient sound when youre at the office, for example. Adaptive Sound Control can also be configured to change the EQ and enable/disable Speak-to-Chat for a particular location or activity.

Billy Steele/Engadget

The Status panel will also allow you to see which devices are currently connected since the M5 allows you to link up to two simultaneously. And lastly theres a media player here, which Ive never touched across several reviews. The Sound tab gives you access to Ambient Sound Control, the ability to enable/disable Speak-to-Chat, the equalizer and audio presets. If you recall, Speak-to-Chat automatically pauses the audio and activates ambient sound when it detects that youre speaking. In my experience, it could sometimes be fooled by coughs, but thats not the case anymore. You can also configure the headphones for 360 Reality audio, in addition to switching Bluetooth connection quality and employing DSEE Extreme. That latter uses AI to reproduce the frequency response thats typically lost to compression.

System is where you can enable multipoint connectivity, change voice assistants, disable the touch control panel and add functionality to the noise canceling button. You can also opt for that last control to activate Spotify Tap with either a double or triple press. And last but not least, Services is where you connect various apps for easy access. If you want to use Spotify Tap, for example, youll need to sync it with Headphones Connect here.

Sound quality

Billy Steele/Engadget

Sound quality has never been an issue with the 1000X line, and its definitely not on the M5. In fact, its yet another thing Sony upgraded on these headphones. New 30mm carbon fiber drivers handle the audio, including tracks in LDAC and DSEE Extreme. I thought the M4 was well-tuned for a range of genres, but the bass seems punchier here. Whether its the electronic collisions of The Glitch Mob, the grungy blues of Jack White or the driving bass in Kendrick Lamars catalog, the lower range is both pleasant and powerful, expanding the overall soundstage.

The difference between the M4 and the M5 is in the finer details. Theres more depth, making everything seem more immersive. But theres also more clarity, so the subtleties can shine. Im talking about things like the texture of someone strumming an acoustic guitar or Jack Whites iconic distortion soaring above the other instruments. Everything is still balanced, and the bass only provides the proper amount of oomph. Switch over to something entirely acoustic like bluegrass and the bass remains in check so the picking, and the highs, can cut through unhindered.

Whats more, activating DSEE Extreme doesnt make a huge difference in the sound quality. On other Sony devices, that algorithms ability to recover some of the detail lost to compression makes a noticeable impact. On the M5, the results are subtle, and on some songs I had a hard time picking up on any change at all. Its quite impressive.

I only have one complaint about sound quality, and it may actually be a Bluetooth issue rather than a true audio problem. When listening to music or watching a video on my MacBook Pro, I would occasionally experience quick dropouts or skips. It didnt happen often and, oddly, I never heard it when playing something on my iPhone. The audio stutters a bit just for a second, like youre watching a video on a bad internet connection, and then it continues. I tested both WH-1000XM5 units sent to me and noticed the issue on both. Ive reached out to Sony for more info on the potential cause.

Active noise cancellation
The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals has put a controversial Texan law that allows users to sue social media companies back into effect. As Houston Public Media notes, Texas introduced HB 20 last year after high-profile conservatives, including Donald Trump, were blocked on social media websites. A federal judge put HB 20 under temporary injunction in December, but that injunction has now been paused.

Under the law, users will be able to sue large social media platforms with more than 50 million active monthly users such as Facebook and Twitter if they believe they were banned for their political views. HB 20 also prohibits social networks from removing or restricting content based on "the viewpoint of the user or another person."

Trade industry groups NetChoice and the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) managed to secure an injunction against the law last year. They argued that HB 20 would lead to the spread of misinformation and hate speech on social networks and that it also violates the websites' First Amendment rights. The federal judge overseeing the case agreed that social networks have the right to moderate content under the First Amendment and also said that parts of the law are "prohibitively vague."

In a hearing for the appeal filed by Texas, the state's lawyers argued that social media platforms are "modern-day public squares." That means they can be required to host content that they deem objectionable and are banned from censoring certain viewpoints. The 5th Circuit judges sided with Texas, with one even telling the trade groups during the hearing that social networks like Twitter are not websites but "internet providers" instead.

NetChoice counsel Chris Marchese called HB 20 "an assault on the First Amendment" and "constitutionally rotten from top to bottom" on Twitter. The trade groups plan to appeal immediately, but for now, HB 20 is fully in effect.

As promised, our full statement. HB 20 is an assault on the First Amendment, and it's constitutionally rotten from top to bottom. So of course we're going to appeal today's unprecedented, unexplained, and unfortunate order by a split 2-1 panel. https://t.co/hChUkISHtO pic.twitter.com/UwdIVIHIn5  Chris Marchese (@ChrisMarchese9) May 11, 2022

A federal court blocked a similar law in Florida last year after the judge ruled that it violates Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that shields online platforms from liability for what their users' post. Florida also appealed that decision, which will be decided by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
The UK's Royal Mail wants to set up as many as 50 drone routes over the next three years to make deliveries to remote communities. The plan , which requires approval from the Civil Aviation Authority, would see the service secure up to 200 of the autonomous devices from logistics drone company Windracers.

The Royal Mail said the first communities to benefit would be the Isles of Scilly (off the coast of Cornwall in south-west England) and the Scottish islands of Shetland, Orkney and the Hebrides.

Test flights started last year . In the most recent one, held in April, the service was able to use a UAV to deliver mail to Unst, Britain's most northerly inhabited island, from Tingwall Airport on Shetland's largest island. That's a 50-mile flight each way.

The twin-engine drone used in the tests can carry a payload of up to 100 kg of mail and take two return flights each day. The Royal Mail said the device has a wingspan of 10 meters and can withstand difficult weather conditions with the help of its autopilot system. After the drone arrives at its destination, a postal worker will retrieve the mail and parcels and deliver them.

The Royal Mail claimed the drones would help it reduce carbon emissions and provide a more reliable delivery service to islands. It eventually hopes to have a fleet of more than 500 drones that will operate across the UK.
On May 5, A&E announced that they will be producing "The Gabby Petito Story."

It would be part of Lifetime's Stop Violence Against Women effort, they claimed.

Thora Birch, who will also play Gabby's mother, Nichole Schmidt, will direct the film.

The film intends to dramaticize Gabby's relationship with her boyfriend, Brian Laundrie, and what may have transpired during their cross-country car trip, which culminated in the vlogger's death.

The film will be shot in Utah and will begin production this summer. The film will also be released later this year.

However, it appears that not everyone is pleased with Gabby Petito's life being transformed into a film, since a statement from Nichole released by The AWARE Foundation stated that she and the whole Petito family disapproved of it.

"We felt our fans should know that the Lifetime movie about Gabby Petito has no relation to the Petito family, nor did they grant their consent," the foundation said in a statement.

They alleged that Lifetime just created the film on their own.

The AWARE Foundation of Virginia fights for those who are endangered or missing. The phrase is an abbreviation for "Always Watch and Recognize Your Environment."

Late last year, the Gabby Petito Foundation collaborated with the aforementioned charity and even they even worked with Joe Petito, Gabby's father, and Nichole, as they searched for the vlogger.



READ ALSO: Sorry Kim Kardashian: Reality Star Received FAKE Marilyn Monroe Hair [EXPERT]

Brian Laundrie's Estate Sued

The news that Gabby Petito's story would be turned into a Lifetime movie comes as Nichole Schmidt sues Brian Laundrie's estate for $30 million in a new lawsuit, alleging that Chris and Roberta Laundrie assisted their son in fleeing.

Nichole is also suing for wrongful death in Florida.

Brian is accused of murdering Gabby on purpose, according to the lawsuit. Nichole and Joe "incurred funeral and burial expenditures, and they have experienced a loss of care and comfort, as well as potential future companionship, society, and comfort" as a result.

Nichole's claim also requests that the case be tried by jury and that she be awarded compensatory damages.

Barry Spivey, the curator of Brian Laundrie's estate, maintains he is unaware of the litigation and admits that he is only playing a minor part.

READ MORE: Johnny Depp Possessed by 'Pirate Demons'? Pastor Makes Shocking Claims!
Thursday, May 12, 2022

Author: Gary D. McGugan

ISBN: 978-1-7779049-1-3

Gary D. McGugan's ASlippery Shadow takes off where his last novel, A Web ofDeceit, ended.

Once again, he offers amultilayered tale spotlighting the three familiar leading charactersthat were part of his previous novels.

We have Fidelia Morales,"chief honcho" of the savage criminal entity, TheOrganization, her brilliant financial adviser and former lover,Howard Knight, and Suzanne Simpson, CEO of the extraordinarilysuccessful multi-national company, Multima.

The kickoff finds Moralesshowing up in Singapore from Australia in her private jet with Knightand an IT expert loaned to her by the Singaporean crime boss, StanTan. As the narrative unravels, we will learn more about Tan, hisdeceitful antics, and how he plays an integral role in the thriller.

Morales is horrified whenlaw enforcement authorities apprehend her in Singapore. She isinformed that they will extradite her to Italy, where she is wanted.She will have to answer to serious criminal charges in Italy. Howlong she will be locked up, and will she be able to be released,emerges foremost in her mind? Popping up is the possibility that herconfinement was organized by Tan, whom she was to meet up on herlanding in Singapore, to consider prospective devious illicit antics.However, she speculates Tan may have double-crossed her.

Morales believes that theone individual, who is nearby and might help her, is Knight, providedshe could reach him. The Singaporean authorities let go of Knight andthe IT expert, but not before Knight is queried by three separateofficers seeking information about Morales for about an hour.

Before Knights' adventurewith Singaporean law authorities, Knight had illegally been inCambodia. The Organization had kidnapped him from a guest house inSiem Reap and smuggled him into Singapore with stops in Thailand andMalaysia. Incidentally, he had entered the witness protection programwith the FBI. He had handed over to them valuable intelligenceinvolving The Organization contributing to the arrest of several ofits members. He is continuously playing a dual game throughout thenarrative, with his cooperation with Morales and the FBI.

The story now veers toFlorida and Simpson. Multima's share price has collapsed.Unfortunately, this event occurred after the company lost a leader ofa division who killed herself rather than having to deal with theincriminating fallout of her poor personal decisions.

Not merely is Simpsongrappling with the fallout, but she further must contend with runninga major corporation in the initial stages of a global pandemic. Andto boost a little more tension, one of Multima's stores in Naples,Florida, has just been bombed. There will be other bombings,including Simpson's home.

To help her break out ofthe chaos, Simpson approaches James Fitzgerald, who will be soonretiring from Multima. For a hefty fee, he agrees to fill the vacantposition left open by the executive who committed suicide.

McGugan introduces anobscure figure identified as The Shadow to add a bit extrachicanery to the narrative. He keeps his readers speculating how TheShadow figures into the calamities of Morales and Simpson. Andif this isn't sufficient, he further throws in the kidnapping ofSimpson's best friend's father and the demand of fifty milliondollars for his release. There is also the possibility of theinvolvement of the Russian Mafia.

McGugan has generated achilling novel set in a menacing world incorporating an array ofcomplex criminal mysteries where readers will become enmeshed andtaken hostage. He also displays an excellent sense of timing. When weassume we know exactly how matters will emerge, he skillfullyblindsides us with shifts in the plot while implanting severaldisguised nefarious characters that wind up in unforeseen directionswith unpredictable results. At times, the action becomes immenselycontrived, but the worst thing I can say is that the narrative hasnonetheless wholly mesmerized me with its thrilling breakneck speed.

Follow Here To read Norm'sInterview With Gary D. McGugan.
Rackspace Technology is considering selling off parts of itself to bolster the money-losing San Antonio cloud company.

CEO Kevin Jones raised the possibility of such a move during a late Tuesday conference call with reporters and financial analysts to discuss the companys first-quarter results. Rackspace, he said, recently completed a strategic review after hearing from a potential buyer interested in one of its businesses.

We concluded that a sum of the parts of Rackspace Technology could be greater than our current enterprise value, Jones said.

Translation: The company could be worth more in pieces than its current form.

Its unclear which parts of the company, if any, could be put up for sale.

Everything is on the table, the CEO said. Were evaluating all options.

Whatever happens would be the latest twist in the history of Rackspace, considered the granddaddy of San Antonios modern technology sector.

On ExpressNews.com: Rackspace exploring sale of some of its businesses, San Antonio cloud computing companys CEO says

The possibility of a breakup drew some positive reviews.

We believe that Rackspace will be driving additional value whether through an outright sale or through improving the business and the operations, Raymond James analyst Frank Louthan IV said in a research note Wednesday. We believe a deal will ultimately be reached, as the business possesses proprietary, quality assets that are differentiated within the marketplace, particularly at the middle-market level, which should be attractive to potential buyers.

Jones said the company would provide details of the alternatives in September.

Without offering specifics of what could be sold, he noted Rackspaces growth in the public cloud market. Public clouds are subscription services shared with customers over the internet. By comparison, a private cloud is a service controlled by one business or organization. Rackspace is in both segments.

We have a public cloud business that is significantly scaled from 18 months ago, Jones said. Weve been proactively evaluating all of our strategic options to take advantage of the public cloud market opportunity and sharpen our focus.

Credit Suisse analyst Kevin McVeigh said in a research note Wednesday that Jones suggestion the companys businesses could be worth more than its total value is in part driven by the attractive growth profile of public cloud.

Rackspaces global workforce is about 6,500, including workers at its Windcrest headquarters.

Tumultuous history

Founded in 1998, San Antonios largest tech company has struggled.

On ExpressNews.com: Dizzying year sees Rackspace IPO, a dramatic restructuring and a mass layoff. Will the company live up to expectations in 22?

Rackspace first went public in August 2008 at $12.50 per share and climbed to about $80 in 2013. But by mid-2016, the company had lost about 60 percent of its market value amid fierce competition from large-scale cloud computing service providers.

That November, New York private-equity powerhouse Apollo Global Management took the company private in a $4.3 billion deal.

Rackspace had roots in the business of hosting websites for clients. But after struggling to compete in that market with heavyweights Amazon, Microsoft and Google, it moved to partner with the tech giants to help its customers move their data to the cloud.

It spent the next few years saddling up with Big Tech and going on an acquisition spree. Its aim was to position itself in a global cloud market expected to skyrocket to $520 billion by 2024, according to forecasts from Gartner, a tech-industry research and consulting firm.

Rackspace spent $1.7 billion to acquire four businesses from 2017 to 2019. They included Onica, a cloud services and management firm, and Datapipe, a managed services provider for private and public cloud customers.

Meanwhile, it posted a string of annual losses totaling $632 million.

Public struggles

In August 2020, Apollo reintroduced Rackspace to the stock market. Its market capitalization hit $4.2 billion. The first trading day didnt go well. After opening at $21 a share, shares fell nearly 22 percent to close at $16.39. Theyve been mainly sliding since, as the company has reported quarterly losses.

Analysts have said they didnt find Rackspaces string of losses concerning because the company had been growing, though it likely would need to achieve profitability within a couple of years to appease investors.

On ExpressNews.com: S.A. cloud company Rackspace shares keep falling despite better-than-expected results

Its share price fluctuated over the year and sank to a low of $7.28 in late February.

The low came as Rackspaces year-end results for 2021 fell short of Wall Street expectations. The company reported a loss of $218 million on revenue of $3 billion, an improvement from a loss of $246 million on revenue of $2.7 billion in 2020.

The company had just acquired Just Analytics, a Singapore-based computer software company specializing in cloud data and artificial intelligence. Rackspace also partnered with BT Group, a U.K. telecommunications and network provider serving customers in more than 180 countries.

Jones called the BT partnership the largest deal in company history, estimating it could be worth several hundred million dollars over multiple years. Rackspace said it expected to take on hundreds of new international customers as a result.

Analysts noted pluses and minuses, agreeing it would increase revenue but concerned the increased expense was a factor in the lower-than-expected forecast for the current quarter.

Arms race

After Apollo took over, Rackspace moved away from cloud-hosting, becoming a service company with a multicloud approach, said John Prevost, executive director of the Open Cloud Institute at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

He wasnt surprised by news that Rackspace could sell some businesses.

All of these companies are trying to figure out who they want to be when they grow up, he said. This whole world is in such flux right now. Its an arms race of products and different service offerings.

Its probably time for the company to refocus its business strategy, he said.

Theyre trying to figure out how to survive in this competitive landscape, Prevost said. The big companies are offering services that they dont offer. They can do anything they want in the space but they probably cant do everything. If they want to focus on areas where they can be world-class leaders, they have to pick and choose where they focus that energy.

Path to Redemption

Rackspace on Tuesday reported a first-quarter loss of $38.5 million on revenue of $775.5 million, an improvement from a loss of $64 million on revenue of $725.9 million a year ago.

This time, earnings and revenue both topped Wall Street expectations, but Rackspace stock fell the next two days and analysts lowered their expectations of performance. Its shares closed Thursday at $8.97, down more than 50 percent from a year ago.

Credit Suisse adjusted its target price to $15 from $19 a share while keeping an outperform rating.

Citigroup dropped its price target to $13 from $16 and held a buy rating.

JP Morgan adjusted the price to $11 from $13 while maintaining a neutral rating.

The Raymond James note, which included a section titled The Path to Redemption, upgraded to outperform and established a $12 price target.

The business has taken longer to gel than we had initially anticipated, thus we have been on the sidelines for some time, but we believe this gives management the ability to demonstrate marked improvement in the base business, or there will be a deal, Louthan said. Either way, we believe that investors can see a path to being rewarded within a reasonable period of time.

Diego Mendoza-Moyers contributed to this story.

eric.killelea@express-news.net
REHOVOT, Israel (AP) _ Nova Ltd. (NVMI) on Thursday reported first-quarter profit of $34.2 million.

The Rehovot, Israel-based company said it had net income of $1.07 per share. Earnings, adjusted for one-time gains and costs, came to $1.30 per share.

The maker of monitoring systems used in chip manufacturing posted revenue of $134 million in the period.

For the current quarter ending in July, Nova Ltd. expects its per-share earnings to range from $1.09 to $1.23.

The company said it expects revenue in the range of $133 million to $141 million for the fiscal second quarter.

_____

This story was generated by Automated Insights (http://automatedinsights.com/ap) using data from Zacks Investment Research. Access a Zacks stock report on NVMI at https://www.zacks.com/ap/NVMI
When Jessica Cisneros released the first TV ad of her Democratic primary runoff last week, it highlighted how her opponent, U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar of Laredo, was the only House Democrat to vote against legislation to codify Roe v. Wade.

But on May 24, you can have the last word, the ad said as it flashed images of womens faces.

Then, on Monday night, Politico published a leaked draft opinion by the U.S. Supreme Court indicating it plans to overturn the landmark abortion rights case.

With only three weeks to go until the May 24 election, abortion rights have reclaimed the national stage. The tight race between Cuellar, a moderate Democrat who famously opposes abortion, and Cisneros, a young progressive, represents the most vivid illustration of how the leaked opinion could reshape a number of the fast-approaching runoffs.

It just really ups the ante about why we need to be involved in this race, said Kristin Ford, a spokesperson for NARAL Pro-Choice America, which supports Cisneros. The leaked opinion increases the urgency and is yet another ominous sign of whats to come.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday confirmed the authenticity of the leaked opinion but said it does not represent a final vote of the court.

Cuellar was quiet on the news most of Tuesday before issuing an evening statement that said he opposes abortion but also denounced the likely ruling, saying it was without precedent and would further divide the country during these already divisive times.

I do not support abortion, however, we cannot have an outright ban. There must be exceptions in the case of rape, incest, and danger to the life of the mother, he said. My faith will not allow me to support a ruling that would criminalize teenage victims of rape and incest. That same faith will not allow me to support a ruling that would make a mother choose between her life and her childs.

Texas runoffs are in 21 days, but many Democrats are already looking to harness the energy for the November election. The Democratic nominee for governor, Beto ORourke, was among the first major Texas politicians to react to the Politico story Monday night, tweeting that it has never been more urgent to elect a governor who will always protect a womans right to abortion.

If the Supreme Court does overturn Roe v. Wade, President Joe Biden said in a statement, it will fall on voters to elect pro-choice officials this November.

Winning political power is the  only way to overcome this, ORourke said during an Instagram Live broadcast Tuesday afternoon with Cecile Richards, the former head of Planned Parenthood who serves as his national finance chair.

Later Tuesday afternoon, ORourke announced a rally for abortion rights Saturday in Houston.

But before the general election are the Texas runoffs, and they provide some clear choices for voters who care about abortion rights.

Cuellar is the last outlier among House Democrats on abortion.

By the time Cuellar joined Congress in 2005, the U.S. Houses influence on abortion was mostly relegated to arguments over whether government money should be used to fund abortions, both domestically and abroad.

In those debates, Cuellar often joined a small group of Democrats in siding with Republicans. For instance, in early 2012 he and 13 other Democrats gathered in support to watch President Barack Obama sign an exective order clarifying that no federal funds would be used to pay for abortions under his 2010 health care law. Only three of the Democrats who were there that day are still in office.

Nearly all of Cuellars like-minded Democrats from that era have since retired, lost reelection or moved more in line with the rest of the party on abortion.

The culmination of his isolation on abortion came in September. In response to the Texas abortion law, which essentially bans abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, the U.S. House passed the Womens Health Protection Act that would codify the right to an abortion at the federal level. It has not passed the Senate.

Cuellar was the lone Democrat to vote against it and did not shy away from his vote.

Its called conscience, Cuellar told the Laredo Morning Times in October. I am a Catholic, and I do believe in rights and right to life.  Sometimes people vote because of political [views], they think this is a Democratic or Republican issue. To me, its a matter of conscience.

The leaked opinion came ahead of a major campaign event for Cuellar: a Wednesday rally in San Antonio with House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, R-S.C.,the No. 3 House Democrat.

In a phone interview with The Texas Tribune, Cisneros described breaking a personal rule on Monday night of staying off social media in the evenings in order to check out the latest fashion trends at the Met Gala. She was stunned to discover instead that the Supreme Court was postured to go further than expected in rolling back abortion rights.

Its one thing, I guess, bracing yourself, knowing this was going to happen, and then its another seeing it actually happen and whats going to come down the line this summer, she said, referring to the Supreme Courts anticipated June ruling.

She said the news would not affect her campaign strategy going forward because abortion has always been central to her case against Cuellar  both this cycle and when she challenged him for the first time in 2020.

Unfortunately, a future where Roe is overturned is a future that we know Henry Cuellar has been fighting for, she said.

While other Democratic runoffs may not reflect such a stark divide on abortion rights, the topic is still relevant as advocates have taken sides in hopes of electing the strongest allies possible.

In the Democratic runoff for attorney general, abortion rights group have backed Rochelle Garza, a former attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, over Joe Jaworski, a Galveston lawyer and former mayor of the city. At the ACLU, Garza represented an undocumented teenager fighting to get an abortion, which she obtained after a federal appeals court ruled in her favor.

The role of the Texas Attorney General is increasingly important given last nights SCOTUS developments, Garza tweeted Tuesday morning. When Roe is repealed & states are left to cherry-pick their own abortion regulations, Texans last line of defense against forced pregnancy will be the AG.

Jaworksi is also a supporter of abortion rights and responded to the leaked opinion by outlining on Twitter how he would fight back against the end of Roe v. Wade as attorney general.

Ana Ramon, interim executive director of Annies List, which supports Garza, said the attorney generals race is one of the most crucial in Texas going forward. She said Garzas lived experience as a mother and lawyer fighting for abortion rights sets her apart in the runoff.

Of course, [positions on] issues are critical, but outcomes are even more critical, Ramon said, and we need that level of experience right now in Texas.

In the Democratic runoff for what could be the most competitive congressional district in November  the 15th District in the Rio Grande Valley  abortion rights organizations have endorsed Michelle Vallejo, a small-business owner and activist from Alton. Vallejo was quick to react to the Politico story, tweeting that it is time to elect more pro-choice women to congress and urging voters to show up to fight in the runoff.

Vallejos opponent, Ruben Ramirez, said in a statement Tuesday that the country cannot move backwards on abortion rights and that the leaked opinion only reconfirms our need to codify Roe v. Wade into law.

Then there are Democratic primary runoffs for the Texas Legislature where abortion rights could also take on even more signifiance. In Texas Senate District 27 in the Rio Grande Valley, Sara Stapleton-Barrera and Morgan LaMantia are competing to replace retiring Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr., a Democrat who has long split with his party on aborton rights, including voting for the almost-total ban on abortion that became law last year.

Lucio is backing LaMantia, who has said she nonetheless disagrees with him on abortion rights and would have voted against the near-total ban. But some abortion rights advocates see a more stalwart ally in Stapleton-Barrera, who challenged Lucio in 2020 and forced him to a runoff, which she lost by 7 percentage points.

In the Republican runoffs, the leaked opinion is less likely to reverberate given the Texas GOPs unity on the issue. Republicans in the Legislature virtually all supported the near-total abortion ban and another law last year to automatically outlaw abortion in Texas if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade.

One state House Republican, Rep. Lyle Larson of San Antonio, had a change of heart after voting for the almost-total ban and introduced a bill to provide exceptions for rape and incest. But it went nowhere, and Larson is not seeking reelection in his solidly red district.

In fact, in some GOP runoffs, Republicans are debating what more they can do to erradicate abortion beyond the new law, which supporters called the heartbeat bill because it bans abortions after an ultrasound can detect cardiac activity in an embryo. One of the candidates for Larsons seat, Mark Dorazio, says on his website that he fully support[s] Texas recent Heartbeat Bill and will continue to support legislation that seeks to end abortion altogether.

The Texas Tribune is a nonpartisan, nonprofit media organization that informs Texans  and engages with them - about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
Now Playing: Joyous bedlam erupted Wednesday at an employee appreciation and awards buffet at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas when the resort chief executive announced that all employees will receive a $5,000 bonus. (May 11) Video: Associated Press

LAS VEGAS (AP)  Joyous bedlam erupted Wednesday at an employee appreciation and awards buffet at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas when the resort chief executive announced that all 5,400 people who work there will receive a $5,000 bonus.

Its amazing! said Edgar Rives, a cook for nine years in the employee cafeteria, after a round of high-five hand slaps and hugs with dancing co-workers at The Chelsea theater at the Las Vegas Strip property. Its a big surprise.
WASHINGTON  Just weeks ahead of a closely contested Democratic runoff, U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar is facing allegations that he worked to discredit a former staffer in a sex discrimination lawsuit he settled last year.

The former staffer, Kristie Small, was fired in 2018 and sued Cuellar in 2019, alleging the longtime Laredo Democrat denied her request for parental leave and fired her for poor performance when she was in her third trimester.

A federal judge declined to toss out the case in 2020, pointing out that Cuellar had solicited statements from other members of his staff about Smalls performance only after he fired her, and that some of those statements were filed only after Small sued.

One former staffer said in a deposition in the case that Cuellar asked staff to write statements about Small while her work performance was still fresh in our mind. They said Cuellar asked for them to just kind of write something down so if we ever had to reference it for whatever reason, we had a statement to reference.

Staffers wrote statements about Small showing up to work late and leaving early, especially when Cuellar was out of town. They said she was sometimes difficult to get in touch with and failed to catch errors in news releases.

Perhaps Cuellar was simply looking for corroboration of Smalls poor performance, but a jury might also see this as an attempt to collect post hoc justifications, Trevor N. McFadden, the U.S. district judge overseeing the case, wrote in an order dismissing Cuellars request for summary judgment.

LAST WEEK: Looming abortion ruling supercharges Jessica Cisneros v. Henry Cuellar runoff election

The lawsuit was settled last August, two weeks after progressive immigration attorney Jessica Cisneros announced a second run against the longtime Laredo congressman. Court records do not indicate the amount of the settlement.

Cuellar said in a statement that he has consistently and adamantly denied any wrongdoing.

The court's opinion said flatly: The Office has strong arguments that Cuellar fired Small for legitimate reasons, Cuellar said.

Attorneys who represented Small in the case did not respond to a request for comment.

The allegations were detailed in a Jezebel article published this week, which drew outcry from womens groups supporting Cisneros, including EMILYs List. Cisneros said in a statement she was concerned by it.

How can we trust our congressman to fight for our families, health and rights if he does not even do that for his own employees? she said.

Its the latest potential setback for Cuellar, who is in the fight of his political life against Cisneros, a 28-year-old Laredo native who has far outpaced him in fundraising.

The FBI in January searched Cuellars Laredo home and campaign office. Cuellars attorney has said Justice Department prosecutors informed him that the congressman is not a target in the investigation.

The race has also become a sort of test case for how voters respond to a looming Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade after Cisneros, who came just 1,005 votes shy of Cuellar in the March primary, has refocused her campaign as one against the last anti-choice Democrat in the House.

Cuellar, who is Catholic, is the lone Democrat in the House who opposes legislation codifying abortion rights.

Its also a crucial time in the race, with early voting beginning on Monday.

Cuellar has touted support from Democratic leaders in the House, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Whip James Clyburn, who campaigned for the congressman in San Antonio earlier this month. He also has the backing of the business community, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which endorsed the congressman this week.

Paper trail raises questions

The Small case dates back to August 2018, when she was working as Cuellars newly hired acting chief of staff. Small, who learned she was pregnant after taking the job, wrote to Cuellar to request parental leave. The congressman replied that they could discuss the request, as well as a 90-day probationary period for new hires, which Small claims he had never mentioned before her request.

In a meeting in September, Cuellar told Small that she was failing to help take things off his plate, wasnt training staff adequately and was disregarding his instructions. He extended her probationary period another 30 days to see if she could improve.

Cuellar later submitted emails to the court in which he complained to Small about her performance.

Kristie please get involved more, he wrote in a June 19, 2018, email complaining about a draft of a letter inviting former President Donald Trump to the Rio Grande Valley.

In another email, from September of that year, Cuellar asked Small for guidance on how to vote on a bill that was coming to the floor. Small responded the next day: Sorry Sir I fell asleep early.

During the performance meeting, Small agreed with Cuellars assessment, but later said she was afraid that disagreeing would upset the congressman. She also asked for a raise in the meeting, citing the cost of putting her two kids in day care, according to court documents. Cuellar said they could talk about it after the 30 days were up.

In October, Cuellar fired Small for failing to improve in the areas he highlighted in the previous meeting.

McFadden wrote in his order that Cuellar produced a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason to fire Small: her poor job performance.

He said Small failed to prove that other similarly situated staffers were treated differently than she was and he dismissed her claim of pregnancy discrimination at Cuellars request, because it was the same as her sex discrimination claim.

However, McFadden said there were serious questions about whether the 90-day probation period had been applied equally to all of Cuellars employees.

In court filings, for instance, the offices legislative director claimed he did not have a performance review after 90 days like Small did. Another staffer said her probationary period was 30 days, not 90. And the employee handbook did not mention a probationary period until March 2019, well after Small was fired.

If the probationary period was applied inconsistently, a reasonable jury could find that Cuellar decided to give Small added, harsher scrutiny because she was pregnant and asked for leave, he wrote. It could also find that these motivations tainted his assessment of her job performance and carried over into his decision to fire her.

And McFadden wrote that Cuellars reasons for firing Small appeared to evolve over time. In court filings, for instance, Cuellar cited justifications for firing Small that the congressman had not mentioned in the September and October meetings that led to her termination, including that she mistreated female staffers and had repeatedly asked for a pay raise.
KIN MAN HUI/SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

A woman died Wednesday morning after she was hit by a car while standing on a sidewalk on the Northwest Side.

The woman was on the west side of Oak Hill Road near the intersection with Viva Max Drive shortly after 10:30 a.m. when she was struck by a gray Ford Edge, according to San Antonio police.
Hays Sheriff

A Salvadoran man has been charged with murder and multiple counts of tampering with evidence, according to a press release from the Hays County Sheriffs Office issued Thursday afternoon.

Officers responding to a call April 25 in the 2900 block of Main Street in Buda found a man dead of multiple gunshot wounds, an autopsy later showed.
An explosive device filled with gunpowder, ball bearings and metal arrowheads was discovered in the car of a man who had fallen asleep in his vehicle in a Northeast Side neighborhood, according to the San Antonio Police Department.

The device, which authorities have identified as a pipe bomb, was discovered Wednesday after a resident reported a suspicious person and vehicle parked in the neighborhood cul-de-sac, according to an arrest affidavit.

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Authorities have identified the man as Christopher Friedrich, 29, of San Antonio. Friedrich is being charged with possession of an explosive weapon, a third degree felony, jail records show. He also faces charges for failing to identify himself and for parole violation for an outstanding family violence warrant.

The explosive device, referred to as a pipe bomb in the affidavit, was discovered in the front passenger seat of Friedrichs vehicle, according to police. A plastic pellet gun, which police said resembled a real handgun, was also found in the vehicle.

Bexar County Sheriff's Office

When questioned by officers, Friedrich reportedly gave several false names and birth dates, according to the affidavit.

Authorities did not say where Friedrich was arrested. However, residents who posted on the Nextdoor social media app said the arrest took place in the Oak Ridge Village neighborhood near Wetmore Road and Thousand Oaks Drive.

Brian Yaclan, an investigator assigned to the San Antonio Arson Bureau, said in the affidavit that the device was capped with electrical tape on one end and a fuse on the other.

The device was capable of causing significant harm to the operator and those in close proximity, Yaclan wrote.

Yaclan did not say why Friedrich was in possession of the device or include a motive in the affidavit, records show.

timothy.fanning@express-news.net
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A new police union contract that enhances some disciplinary measures for officers accused of misconduct was approved by a fractured San Antonio City Council Thursday, despite calls from some community members to reject it for not instituting enough reforms.

District 1 Councilman Mario Bravo, District 2 Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez and District 5 Councilwoman Teri Castillo voted against the contract with the San Antonio Police Officers Association. The dissenters  in an 8 to 3 vote  said they heard what the contracts critics were asking for and wanted to echo their concerns that the new agreement doesnt include changes that would address them.

I will be honoring my commitments by voting no on this contract, Bravo said. I want to recognize this contract moves in that direction, but it falls short of where we need to be.

Castillo suggested that if there had been more agreement among council members, the city could have achieved more.

I realize that in a negotiation, we do not get everything we ask for, McKee-Rodriguez said. However, let me be clear that this contract still misses the mark.

Tension was palpable in the City Council Chamber Thursday, as some local organizers shouted responses to council members remarks  saying more reform is possible but there wasnt enough political will to make it happen.

Mayor Ron Nirenberg said he was grateful for the political will that the City Council has already demonstrated on public safety and police accountability.

Its taken a very long time to muster that, Nirenberg said. Thats why I say with confidence that this is a brand new day with regard to public safety contracts.

Misconduct investigations and discipline took center stage in this round of negotiations. Police union contracts have been in the national spotlight since summer 2020, when widespread protests erupted following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Many seeking police reforms have argued that unions have vast influence over the disciplinary process, sometimes tying cities hands. Deputy City Manager Maria Villagomez, who led the citys negotiating team, sought changes to address such concerns.

District 7 Councilwoman Ana Sandoval also expressed reservation about the contract not including enough improvements. But the deal pushes the city in the right direction, she said before she voted to approve it.

I know we wanna push the envelope further, Sandoval said. But I feel that any additional ask or negotiation at this point would require the sacrifice of some progress weve already made.

Others agreed that although additional changes are needed, what the city achieved in negotiations was the best deal it can get for now.

No matter how much we wish that we would get perfection, its naive of us to assume well ever get there, District 8 Councilman Manny Pelaez said.

Members of the police union last month overwhelmingly approved the agreement  by 86 percent of those who voted. The new contract will run through September 2026.

The City Councils approval concludes a year-long negotiation process that went more smoothly than that of past contracts. The last agreement expired in September but remained in place under an evergreen clause.

Disciplinary reforms achieved

Although activists hoped for a different outcome, they acknowledged progress in the contract.

Officials focused on reducing the occurrences of an officer being fired for inappropriate conduct only to be reinstated by an arbitrators decision, City Manager Erik Walsh said.

That was the point of attack that we zeroed in on, Walsh said.

Under the new contract, an arbitrator can reverse a termination only in cases where the chief fails to prove an officers conduct is detrimental to the department.

Also under the new deal, an officers past disciplinary record can be considered in issuing new discipline. The prior contract included limitations on that.

Another key change is the timeline in which an officer must be disciplined. The police chief now has 180 days from when he initially knew or should have known about an incident  instead of 180 days from the date of the alleged misconduct  to impose discipline.

The city also obtained adjustments to the investigative process under internal affairs for officers accused of misconduct.

Police officers must now be informed 24 hours before internal affairs questions them  down from 48 hours under the prior contract.

During an interview led by internal affairs staff, an officer can review statements, video recordings, audio recordings and photographs regarding the incident. Now, however, the officer wont be able to view statements or recordings from other officers being investigated.

Officers also arent able to take copies of interrogatories  written questions that police officers used to be able to take home to review and return at a later date.

On ExpressNews.com: The making of a deal: How San Antonio officials, police union shaped new contract in roughly a year

Discipline isnt the only area revised. The contract budgets wage increases that make San Antonio police officers the second-highest paid in the state behind Austin.

The 2,370 officers covered under the contract will receive wage increases of 3.5 percent in fiscal 2023 and 2024 and 4 percent in fiscal 2025 and 2026. Each officer will receive a lump sum payment equal to 2 percent of his or her annual salary within 30 days. In fiscal 2020, the most recent data available, the average salary for uniform police officers was $74,154.

The contract also adds a new family leave benefit of up to 160 hours, or four weeks, of leave after the birth, fostering or adoption of a child.

Activists sought civilian review board reform

A San Antonio nonprofit that works to improve police accountability had asked the City Council to reject the new police union contract, saying some activists top desires had not been met  namely, a more independent civilian review board.

Although we have made great strides in police discipline in this contract, there are still several key demands made by the community that remained absent throughout contract negotiations and now, said Ananda Tomas, executive director of ACT 4 SA.

ACT 4 SA consists of former organizers behind San Antonios Proposition B, a proposed charter amendment on the ballot last year that called for stripping the police union of its right to collectively bargain with the city. It was narrowly defeated.

Other organizations, including the Texas Organizing Project, joined them in calling for the City Council to reject the contract.

Tomas focused on at least two issues that she said the deal doesnt address. One is that officers can still use discretionary, or vacation, days in lieu of an unpaid suspension.

The other is that the contract governs San Antonios civilian police review board, known locally as the Complaint and Administrative Review Board, or the Citizen Action Advisory Board.

The board consists of seven uniformed officers and seven civilians who hear investigations of misconduct complaints made against police officers, use of force and more. The City Council approved new appointments to the board last week.

ACT 4 SA organizers want to see the review board removed from the union contract so that the city can create a more independent office of civilian oversight.

Nationally, police accountability activists have focused on such civilian oversight boards, arguing that officers retain too much influence over them. A fall 2020 study by the The Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University found that San Antonios police oversight board lacks the authority it needs to be effective.

At the height of the 2020 protests, at the urging of Nirenberg, city officials said a change to the board would be one priority in the union contract negotiations.

At one point, it was on the list of possible priorities headed into contract negotiations, but fell off for some unknown reason, Tomas said.

Nirenberg said Thursday that revisions to the review board were not part of the citys negotiating priorities. He instead focused on another outcome.

To make sure that officers who are disciplined for egregious misconduct had their disciplinary actions upheld, Nirenberg said. The CARB process was immaterial to making that happen.

If the City Council had disapproved the new contract, the city and union would have had to resume negotiations, eventually leading to another vote by police union members.

This is a vote on a contract that I believe is a fundamental change to what weve seen, Nirenberg said. A contract that is fiscally responsible, that is transparent, and that is accountable.

Staff writer Emilie Eaton contributed to this report.

megan.stringer@express-news.net
A Schertz man was sentenced Thursday to 14 years in federal prison for transporting a 13-year-old girl from Arkansas to Texas with intent to have sex with her.

The girl vanished from her home after going for a walk, news reports said.

Kraig David Van Winkle, 36, met the girl online and picked her up near her Springdale, Ark., home in January 2020 after they communicated on social media applications. Court records show the FBI located the girl two days later at his apartment in Schertz, and found evidence that Van Winkle used the girl in bondage situations for his sexual gratification.

Besides handing down the 168-month prison sentence, Chief U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia also ordered Van Winkle to serve 10 years of federal supervision after his release.

I apologize to the family I broke up, Van Winkle told Garcia. It was because of my own selfish needs. ...I want to get back out there and be the same person I was before all this occurrence happened.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Tracy Thompson read a letter from the teen and the girls mother, both asking the judge to impose a high sentence.

What happened impacted my mental health, the girls letter said. Ive been in therapy to process the trauma I went through. I have panic attacks from certain triggers.

Thompson told the judge that Van Winkle was 34 when he engaged in sexual acts with the girl, knowing she was a minor.

He states it was mutual, but shes 13, Thompson said. He drives 10 hours to her house. When he cant get ahold of her, he waits. The next morning, he says Im here and takes her. He made her ditch her phone so nobody can track her. He brings her down to Texas and sexually assaults her.

According to an FBI affidavit, Van Winkle arrived late to the girls town, and by then she had fallen asleep. He waited until the next day, and she left with him after she told her parents she was going for a jog, the affidavit said.

As they were driving, Van Winkle told the girl to throw her cellphone out of the window and into a storm drain to prevent law enforcement and her family from being able to track her, the affidavit said.

A review of her social media accounts by agents found she had been in contact with multiple individuals on social media platforms as late as December 2019, and had discussed dark sexual subjects including bondage, according to the affidavit.

The affidavit said a witness saw the girl get into a vehicle on Jan. 9 with a license plate registered to Van Winkle. Another witness reported seeing the same vehicle at a business near the childs home, and further investigation showed Van Winkle had traveled to and from Arkansas.

When the FBI showed up at his apartment on Jan. 11, 2020, Van Winkle opened the door, soaking wet and wearing only a towel. He tried to shut the door, but agents went in and found the girl nude in the tub.

After interviewing both, agents found Van Winkle had bought condoms and learned that the girl was periodically handcuffed, bound with rope, and had her mouth covered by tape during her stay at Van Winkles apartment. Agents confirmed Van Winkle performed sexual acts with the girl, the affidavit said.

guillermo.contreras@express-news.net | Twitter: @gmaninfedland
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The South San Antonio Independent School District will keep paying two superintendents  including the one its board suspended early in December.

The board voted 4-1 on Wednesday to extend the contract of Interim Superintendent Henry Yzaguirre another four months, with an automatic renewal of four months after that. Trustee Gilbert Rodriguez voted against it, and trustee Connie Prado abstained.

On the advice of the school districts lawyer, Mark Sanchez, the board took no action on the employment status of Marc Puig, the superintendent who was placed on paid leave Dec. 6 pending the outcome of an investigation into a conversation between Puig and trustee Ernesto Arrellano, then the board president, that was accidentally recorded.

Puigs salary for the 2021-2022 school year is $225,000 per year, according to the Texas Education Agency. Yzaguirre is currently being paid a daily rate of $886. He was also paid $6,195 for services rendered from Dec. 7 through Dec. 15, according to his contract.

If the districts investigation of Puig has begun, Puig is not aware of it, said his attorney, Neal Adams, before the meeting.

But the South San ISD spokeswoman, Alexis Castillo, and the districts state-appointed monitor, Abe Saavedra, said the investigation has started and is ongoing.

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Paying two superintendents puts the district in a more difficult financial situation, Saavedra said. I think the board is trying to come to a final conclusion, one way or the other, whether they will continue with Dr. Puig or not.

Saavedra, a former South San superintendent, said one of the first steps to make that decision is completing a summative evaluation of Puig, which the board unanimously approved Wednesday.

It includes everything that has occurred from the last evaluation until now, Saavedra said. Would the investigation be part of that? Most likely because that happened in that window. But it is not just that, it is everything that has occurred from evaluation to evaluation.

Puig was hired in June 2020. The board voted for a two-year extension of his contract on May 17, 2021, increasing his salary by $25,000, Adams said.

We are not aware of anything that happened between May 17, 2021 to the day he was suspended that would be any reason for him being suspended with pay, Adams said. He ought to be on his job performing his contract. He stands ready, willing and able to fulfill the terms of his contract.

Asked about the recorded conversation between Puig and the board president, Adams said it is a non-issue from a legal perspective.

Puigs relationship with the board began deteriorating in September, when he was reprimanded by the board for dereliction of his employment duties to the board, after a conflict regarding a personnel matter.

Puigs short conversation with Arrellano on Nov. 17, which was accidentally recorded after a meeting, featured Puig and Arrellano discussing hiring Arrellanos brother for construction consulting. Arrellano sounded enthusiastic but later said he was joking. The investigation was supposed to find out what was said during gaps in the transcript.

On ExpressNews.com: Departing South San ISD super to get $187K in separation agreement

Saavedra was appointed after a TEA investigation of the South San board that found a majority of trustees had acted outside their authority in taking over day-to-day operations of the district from the previous superintendent, Alexandro Flores. The current board is under a TEA investigation based on complaints that trustees interfered with Puigs duties, including his suspension of an employee.

claire.bryan@express-news.net
No names were mentioned.

None of the speakers who held court in the courtyard of Smoke BBQ+SKYBAR for Wednesdays get-out-the-vote rally on behalf of Congressman Henry Cuellar acknowledged that Cuellar actually has an opponent in the May 24 Democratic runoff.

If you hadnt been keeping up, you wouldnt know that the nine-term Laredo lawmaker  whose district includes a big chunk of San Antonios East Side and a sliver of downtown  is facing a rematch with progressive young immigration attorney Jessica Cisneros, who came out of nowhere in 2020 to nearly knock him off.

Without acknowledging Cisneros existence, the roster of speakers  headlined by Cuellar and Jim Clyburn, D-South Carolina, the third-ranking Democrat in the U.S. House  made persistent, unmistakable judgments on the choice being presented to Democratic voters.

A workhorse vs. a showhorse. Someone whos all action vs. someone whos all talk. A diplomatic, well-mannered legislative strategist vs. a confrontational left-wing purist.

Time and again, the audience of nearly 100 veteran party members were told that Cuellar has the juice on Capitol Hill, that his experience and personal connections cant be replaced.

Clyburn, the man who lifted Joe Biden out of the presidential-primary doldrums two years ago with a crucial endorsement, championed Cuellar as a good friend who is one of the 10 deputy chief whips enlisted by Clyburn to get bills across the finish line.

The rally had been planned well before Mondays blockbuster leak of a draft opinion from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito indicating that SCOTUS plans to overturn abortion rights in this country.

But a celebratory gathering for the lone House Democrat who voted only eight months ago against a landmark abortion-rights bill (the Womens Health Protection Act of 2021) couldnt help but feel weird and awkward under the circumstances.

Like the name of Cuellars opponent, the word abortion was conspicuous in its absence at the rally. The only hint of it came near the end from Texas House hopeful Josey Garcia, who promised to fight for your reproductive rights, and seemed to sense that she had brought up a touchy issue.

The questions about Cuellars Democratic bona fides are at least as old as his 2001 appointment to the Texas secretary of states office by Republican Gov. Rick Perry. The questions go beyond the issue of reproductive rights.

While Cuellar has stood with his party on some key pieces of legislation, such as the 2010 Affordable Care Act and last years $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, he has irritated progressives by opposing green-energy initiatives, taking money from private prisons, voting against financial regulatory reform and assuming a hawkish stance on border issues.

Clyburn had an answer for those critics.

People tell you that youve got to agree on everything. I dont agree with Henry Cuellar on everything, Clyburn said.

My goodness, I was married to the same woman for 58 years. We did not agree on everything. In fact, we did not agree on a lot of things.

Clyburn recounted a piece of advice his father gave him just before he headed out to college: The first sign of a good education is good manners.

The implication was that Cuellars knack for political compromise was a sign of good manners, while Cisneros uncompromising idealism demonstrated bad manners.

Cuellar furthered the point by hinting that Cisneros, if elected, would become the seventh member of The Squad, the new-generation ultra-progressive group led by New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

All six members of The Squad voted last November against the bipartisan infrastructure bill, because they were denied concrete assurances that the more ambitious Build Back Better bill would also reach the presidents desk.

An animated Cuellar, standing onstage in rolled-up shirtsleeves, cited that moment Wednesday, although he got the number wrong when he stated that five of our colleagues voted against the infrastructure package.

Im not going to mention any names, but theyre on TV very frequently, Cuellar added.

If those publicity-seeking purists had their way, Cuellar said, Texas would have been denied $35 billion in funding for roads, bridges, water projects, public transit, etc.

Wednesdays celebration of Cuellar provided no mention of the fact that the congressman has a murky legal cloud over his head. In January, FBI agents raided his home and campaign office. But it was the kind of day where elephants in the courtyard were ignored.

ggarcia@express-news.net | Twitter: @gilgamesh470
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Most of us are familiar with the idea that doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result is folly.

As our nation recognizes May as Mental Health Awareness Month, we have the opportunity to change our approach to mental health care in San Antonio. Do we have the resolve to choose a path beyond crisis intervention that addresses the mental health situations many of us will face?

San Antonio is often noted as the biggest small town in Texas. Indeed, we are a close-knit community, yet we have immense challenges.

A 2021 Bexar Facts poll noted that half of Bexar Countys adult residents mental health was impacted negatively by the pandemic.

RELATED: Commentary: Striving to meet mental health needs

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that more than a third (37 percent ) of high school students say they have experienced poor mental health. Without mental health support, those youth can grow to become the estimated 1 in 4 adults who suffers from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine.

San Antonio is striving to become a world-class compassionate city  a noble goal that speaks to who we are while honoring our history, culture and future.

As our community decides how to thoughtfully use funds granted by the American Rescue Plan Act, its time to invest in each other with a meaningful shift in addressing community mental health needs.

True compassion looks deeply at systemic issues and seeks solutions that are equitable and effective. We have that opportunity now to address mental health.

Studies and headlines tell us that we are in the middle of a mental health epidemic made worse by COVID-19 and likely to remain for many years. Our response historically has been to treat mental health issues only when they reach crisis level and threaten public safety rather than from a health and wellness perspective.

We need a system that addresses mental health concerns before someone becomes at risk of harm to themselves or others.

If we counterbalance and shift new investments to focus on public health through responsive, preventative approaches to mental wellness, we can change outcomes for generations.

MORE LIKE THIS: Commentary: Rethinking response to mental health crises

Investing in our people with solutions that create wellness and resilience is more than compassionate  its the key to a life well-lived. Importantly, these evidence-based solutions are already available.

Peer support is a recognized, highly effective approach. It is a first-encounter solution that leads to lasting wellness, and the Texas hub for recruiting, training and supervising the peer support ecosystem is right here in San Antonio.

Peer support is provided by someone with lived experience who is highly trained and part of a wellness ecosystem that focuses on what the person they are serving needs. Someone willing to authentically share struggles and successes through meaningful connection. There is no better way to simultaneously address the stigma of mental illness than connecting with one another through shared life experiences.

As our city determines investments in American Rescue Plan Act funding, its time to invest in each other.

Eric Estrada is the executive director of form communities (which includes the flagship program, San Antonio Clubhouse), a state-recognized leader in community-based mental health.
At the core of the frenzied interest in Elon Musks acquisition of Twitter is an intuition that I think is right: The major social media platforms are, in some hard-to-define way, essential to modern life. Call them town squares. Call them infrastructure. They exist in some nether region between public utility and private concern. They are too important to entrust to billionaires and businesses, but that makes them too dangerous to hand over to governments. We have not yet found a satisfying answer to the problem of their ownership and governance. But some arrangements are more worrying than others. There are fates worse than Musk.

TikTok, as we know it today, is only a few years old. But its growth is like nothing weve seen before. In 2021, it had more active users than Twitter, more U.S. watch minutes than YouTube, more app downloads than Facebook, more site visits than Google. The app is best known for viral dance trends, but there was a time when Twitter was 140-character updates about lunch orders and Facebook was restricted to elite universities. Things change. Perhaps they have already changed. A few weeks ago, I gave a lecture at a Presbyterian college in South Carolina, and asked some of the students where they liked to get their news. Almost every one said TikTok.

TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. And Chinese companies are vulnerable to the whims and the will of the Chinese government. There is no possible ambiguity on this point: The Chinese Communist Party spent much of the last year cracking down on its tech sector. They made a particular example out of Jack Ma, the highflying founder of Alibaba. The message was unmistakable: CEOs will act in accordance with party wishes or see their lives upended and their companies dismembered.

RELATED: Garcia: Elon Musks Twitter takeover illustrates how little we understand about free speech

In August 2020, President Donald Trump signed an executive order insisting that TikTok sell itself to an American firm or be banned in the United States. By the fall, ByteDance was looking for a buyer, with Oracle and Walmart the likeliest suitors, but then Joe Biden won the election and the sale was shelved.

In June, Biden replaced Trumps executive order, which was sloppily written and being successfully challenged in court, with one of his own. The problem, as Bidens order defines it, is that apps like TikTok can access and capture vast swaths of information from users, including United States persons personal information and proprietary business information. This data collection threatens to provide foreign adversaries with access to that information.

Lets call this the data espionage problem. Apps like TikTok collect data from users. That data could be valuable to foreign governments. Thats why the Army and Navy banned TikTok from soldiers work phones, and why Sen. Josh Hawley wrote a bill to ban it on all government devices.

TikTok is working on an answer: Project Texas, a plan to host data for U.S. customers on U.S. servers, and somehow restrict access by its parent company. But as Emily Baker-White of BuzzFeed News writes in an excellent report, Project Texas appears to be primarily an exercise in geography, one that seems well positioned to address concerns about the Chinese government accessing Americans personal information. But it does not address other ways that China could weaponize the platform, like tweaking TikTok algorithms to increase exposure to divisive content, or adjusting the platform to seed or encourage disinformation campaigns.

Lets call this the manipulation problem. TikToks real power isnt over our data. Its over what users watch and create. Its over the opaque algorithm that governs what gets seen and what doesnt.

TikTok has been thick with videos backing the Russian narrative on the war in Ukraine. Media Matters, for instance, tracked an apparently coordinated campaign driven by 186 Russian TikTok influencers who normally post beauty tips, prank videos and fluff. And we know that China has been amplifying Russian propaganda worldwide. How comfortable are we with not knowing whether the Chinese Communist Party decided to weigh in on how the algorithm treats these videos? How comfortable will we be with a similar situation in five years, when TikTok is even more entrenched in the lives of Americans, and the company has freedom it may not feel today to operate as it pleases?

MORE LIKE THIS: Klein: The rest of the world is worried about America

Imagine a world in which the United States has a contested presidential election, as it did in 2020 (to say nothing of 2000). If one candidate was friendlier to Chinese interests, might the Chinese Communist Party insist that ByteDance give a nudge to content favoring that candidate? Or if they wanted to weaken America rather than shape the outcome, maybe TikTok begins serving up more and more videos with election conspiracies, sowing chaos at a moment when the country is near fracture.

TikToks billion users dont think theyre looking at a Chinese government propaganda operation because, for the most part, theyre not. Theyre watching makeup tutorials and recipes and lip sync videos and funny dances. But that would make it all the more powerful a propaganda outlet, if deployed. And because each TikTok feed is different, we have no real way of knowing what people are seeing. It would be trivially easy to use it to shape or distort public opinion, and to do so quietly, perhaps untraceably.

In all of this, Im suggesting a simple principle, albeit one that will not be simple to apply: Our collective attention is important. Whoever (or whatever) controls our attention controls, to a large degree, our future. The social media platforms that hold and shape our attention need to be governed in the public interest. That means knowing whos truly running them and how theyre running them.

Im not sure which of the social network owners currently clear that bar. But Im certain ByteDance doesnt. On this, Donald Trump was right, and the Biden administration should finish what he started.
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Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush wasnt our first choice in the GOP primary for attorney general.

Our initial recommendation went to former Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman, who was supremely qualified for this office. But it was Bush who made the runoff against indicted Attorney General Ken Paxton. Bushs tenure as land commissioner has been mixed.

His office did a poor job handling Hurricane Harvey relief funds, with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development finding the Texas General Land Office discriminated against minority residents in how it sought to distribute flood mitigation aid.

His management of the Alamo reimagining project has had its fair share of missteps, but he has moved the project forward. His office consolidated management of the site and has taken important steps to bring proper reverence to the Cradle of Texas Liberty. But Bush has often seemed detached from controversial decisions about the Alamo and heated community debate.

RELATED: Ayala: County judge runoff may not be about identity politics, but about one candidates identity

Nevertheless, Bush has experience running a state agency, and Paxton has operated under a persistent ethical cloud. We recommend George P. Bush in the GOP runoff for attorney general.

Bushs campaign never responded to our many interview requests, and we generally try not to recommend candidates who refuse to meet with us. But Paxton is a deeply flawed incumbent, undeserving of the publics support.

Paxton, of course, was indicted in 2015 on felony securities fraud charges. He is also reportedly under FBI investigation. This is after a number of former aides accused Paxton of performing favors for Austin investor Nate Paul, who once was a campaign donor.

Allegations include helping Paul avoid foreclosure, the alleged removal of law enforcement files and the hiring of an outside attorney to benefit Paul.

Paxton has denied any wrongdoing, and he has downplayed these more recent allegations. But its amazing, and sad, that the states top lawyer would so consistently be embroiled in scandal.

Beyond this, it was Paxton who filed a frivolous lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 presidential election  a lawsuit the U.S. Supreme Court rejected and one legal expert called garbage.

MORE LIKE THIS: Democratic runoff candidates for Bexar County judge square off on property taxes, COVID-19

Still, Paxton continues to advance the Big Lie of widespread voter fraud. In 2021, his offices election integrity unit closed three cases at a cost of $2.2 million.

He has pressured the Republican-controlled Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which ruled 8-1 in December that the attorney general cannot unilaterally prosecute election cases. Paxton requested a rehearing and then urged the public to target the Court of Criminal Appeals to take those people out that voted the wrong way.

After reports surfaced that the Texas State Bar had filed suit against First Assistant Attorney General Brent Webster for his role in filing the lawsuit to overturn the 2020 presidential election (Paxton has said the Texas State Bar is also suing him), Paxton responded by saying his office would be investigating the Texas Bar Foundation for its possibly aiding and abetting the mass influx of illegal aliens.

Enough with this garbage.

Republican voters should consider the message that a vote for Paxton sends to all public officials  as well as what it would mean to reject such behavior. There is nothing conservative about wasting money on nonexistent voter fraud cases, lying about the presidential election outcome, or using the power of public office to intimidate or harass others.

On the Democratic side, we are sticking with our earlier recommendation of Rochelle Garza , who was once a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union. She faces Joe Jaworski, former mayor of Galveston.

RELATED: Editorial: Voter apathy strikes again, San Antonio

Garza lives in Brownsville, and she is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Houston Law Center. She would offer a remarkably different attorney generals office, one that would defend civil liberties, support voting rights and be free of this persistent ethical cloud.

Both Democratic candidates are extremely qualified to serve as Texas next attorney general.

Should Paxton win this primary runoff, as expected, those Republicans concerned by his ethics and behavior should cross party lines and vote for the Democrat on the ballot.

We understand why this could be difficult for some Republican voters  party identification is strong for many people, and it would mean making concessions on certain core issues  but good governance is a nonpartisan concern.
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When the polls closed on the Democratic primary on March 6, 2018, Vik Verma was pleased. His work as election field director for Kasha Williams, a three-term Longview city council member seeking a Gregg County commissioners court seat, was paying off.

In a typical race, if youre at 60 percent in-person votes and you hit 7 p.m. on election night, youre feeling pretty good, he said.

But as officials tallied an unusually large number of absentee ballots, the lead began to evaporate. By the time they finished, her opponent, Shannon Brown, had eked out a five-vote victory. Nearly half his total was mail-in ballots, whose use Texas law limits mainly to the elderly and disabled. Suspiciously, hundreds from the small precinct were from voters claiming to be disabled.

Whispers of improper vote-harvesting have long drifted through Precinct 4, which encompasses Longview and Gregg Countys primarily African-American south side. Outsized numbers of absentee ballots in Democratic primaries had become a pattern, said Jennifer Briggs, the county election administrator. This time it appeared to have flipped a race.

This election, Verma said, was stolen from us.

For Texas Republicans eager to portray an election system awash in fraud, Precinct 4 would provide a case study of what happened when the dog finally caught the car.

Attorney General Ken Paxton, who would later file a longshot lawsuit challenging President Joe Bidens win, dispatched an investigative team to the small precinct. Brown, his girlfriend and two associates were charged with 134 felony election crimes; the case was handed off to a Republican district attorney.

Within weeks of the indictment, a defeated Donald Trump, with the support of many Texas Republicans, launched a campaign to cast doubt on election integrity. In the Texas legislative session that followed, Gregg County Republicans led the effort to make it harder to vote by mail, invoking the hometown case.

Were here because were responding to some real problems in Texas, Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, said at the signing ceremony for his election reform bill. We have a county commissioner under indictment for mail ballot fraud. Anybody who tells you there is no voter fraud in Texas is telling you a very big lie.

But something happened after the political spotlight was switched off. Three months ago, District Attorney Tom Watson quietly announced the defendants suspected of stealing an election had pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor each. None saw jail time.

IN-DEPTH: How the the new Texas elections law follows up on Trumps voter fraud claims

Brown kept his office. He admitted only to asking a woman to vote for him while she possessed an absentee ballot. I should have better familiarized myself with all of the restrictions set forth in the election code, he wrote in a court-mandated apology.

After all the noise and posturing, The results were  interesting, said Griggs, the elections administrator.

To locals, how and why a poster case for urgent election integrity reform dissolved remains a mystery that officials have been uninterested in clearing up. Watson and Hughes did not return calls. Jonathan White, the head of Paxtons voter fraud unit, declined an interview request, as did state Rep. Jay Dean, R-Longview. Browns attorney said the commissioner was in a re-election campaign so was unable to address the matter.

Honestly, when all of this happened, and certain people choose this to be the face of voter fraud, I knew it would run its course, said Cheteva Marshall, who organized phone banks for Williams 2018 primary. I didnt believe there would be any harsh punishment. I believe it was used for political gain.

Youre chasing ghosts

For those convinced the countrys voting system is a hotbed of fraud, finding proof has been a snipe hunt.

None of the recounts, audits or lawsuits following the 2020 presidential election unearthed evidence of meaningful voter misdeeds. Of the millions of votes cast in six swing states Joe Biden won by a combined total of more than 310,000 votes, an AP investigation counted fewer than 475 potential fraud cases. Virtually all were individuals, acting alone.

The Texas attorney generals office has closed just over 100 cases charging people with cheating in elections from 2010 forward. Most of those, too, were one-offs, in which a voter intentionally or mistakenly mishandled paperwork or tried to cast a vote he wasnt entitled to.

Seven investigations alleged group efforts to influence an election with ten or more criminal charges. The 134 charges in Gregg County were the most in a single election by far. (Two pending cases have alleged comparable numbers.)

Experts say absentee voting is most susceptible to fraud. Yet prosecutors say it is not unusual for a complex election case to end in a plea bargain. Proving up a vote harvesting operation in a system designed for secrecy is difficult and time-consuming.

THE HUNT: Texas AG Ken Paxtons $2.2M voter fraud unit closed three cases in 2021. GOP lawmakers still boosted its budget.

In a podcast produced for the Texas Attorney Generals office, White, the election fraud unit chief, compared it to prosecuting shoplifting in a store that has deliberately removed its security cameras to protect shopper privacy. When you compare sales records to inventory you know stuff was stolen, he explained. But you just have no evidence; youre chasing ghosts. In a lot of ways, voter fraud investigation is the same way.

Several recent cases alleging concerted efforts to influence an election have fallen apart. In 2018, after Miguel Hernandez pleaded guilty to improperly returning a marked ballot in a West Dallas municipal election, then-Dallas County District Attorney Faith Johnson predicted: This is the first of many milestones in the ongoing investigation into voter fraud in Dallas County.

Yet the inquiry revealed only that a number of people received mail-in ballots they hadnt requested, said Andy Chatham, who led the investigation. There was no voter fraud, he said.

In March 2018, three Robstown residents were indicted on multiple counts of voter fraud from a 2016 election. A year later, a jury found utility board member Robert Gonzales not guilty. They did an extensive investigation, his attorney, Terry Shamsie, said. Its just small-town politics.

Another defendant admitted improperly helping a woman vote for her constable son, who was running unopposed. I cant explain what she was doing, Paxtons prosecutor, Lance Kutnick conceded, according to transcripts obtained by the Huffington Post. Kutnick declined comment.

National studies have concluded voting schemes broad enough to influence an election, while not unheard of, are extraordinarily rare. Yet the idea continues to animate much of the Republican Party, especially, where a majority nationally and in Texas - including politicians - say they believe Trump lost because of fraud. Paxton continues to assert that race was rigged with mail-in ballots, even as his beefed up election integrity unit at home has produced modest results.

All of which seemed to align the stars in the Gregg County case - a Republican establishment with compelling evidence of Democratic mail-in vote harvesting that subverted an election - into something of a unicorn constellation.

Ive walked all these streets

Precinct 4 spreads south of Longview roughly into a triangle encompassing the rural southeastern portion of the county. As a predominantly minority district, elected offices are nearly always held by African-Americans.

Ive walked all these streets, said Steve Crane, who has worked for local Democratic candidates for decades. He said the precinct has always produced numerous absentee ballots.

Crane said thats not surprising in an economically distressed area: many residents are elderly or sick and cant get to polling stations. Yet, he added, anyone who has worked elections here also knows that a group of locals has long hired itself out to help round up absentee ballots for those who want the support.

They would go out and get votes for you, said Frank Supercinski, who has worked in Gregg County Democratic politics for nearly a half-century. You ask elected officials if theyve ever done it themselves, theres no question about it. Theyre afraid if they didnt do it, they wouldnt get elected.

Texas law strictly limits the help outsiders can provide to mail-in voters, narrowly defining who can request, fill out and deliver ballots. Yet get-out-the-vote operations occasionally work the gaps, crossing the legal lines either by mistake or by knowingly pushing the definition of assistance.

In Precinct 4, Briggs said local voters had become so accustomed to the mail-in operation that We actually had people complain that the people hadnt come by to pick up their ballot  a violation of Texas law that prohibits middlemen from delivering completed ballots.

One of the men linked to the operation in 2018 explained he helped voters who avoided polls out of fear. Absentee is a way for us to vote without being harassed, without losing a job, without getting kicked off the plantation, Dewayne Ward said.

Another of the group, Charlie Burns, Jr., acknowledged helping plenty of candidates. In an interview on the front porch of the small wooden house hes lived in for 50 years, Burns, now 86, said he has swept up Precinct 4 votes for dozens of candidates  mostly Democrats, but also Longview Mayor Andy Mack. Macks office said he was unavailable for an interview.

Burns said he also helped elect Kasha Williams to city council. Verma confirmed her campaign paid the group to gather votes in the past, but in 2018 We made a conscious decision to stay away from the mail-ballot program, said Crane, the campaigns volunteer coordinator.

Even in an area accustomed to flurries of mail-in ballots, the numbers in the 2018 Democratic primary in Precinct 4 were stark. A total of 9 voters in Precincts 1, 2 and 3 requested absentee ballots because a disability prevented them from voting in person. In Precinct 4 the number was 367. While in-person voters convincingly supported Williams, Shannon Brown won more than 70 percent of the mail-in vote.

A recount confirmed his five-vote margin. When a judge tossed Williamss lawsuit challenging the election because of a blown deadline, that left a criminal prosecution as the remaining recourse.

Such efforts had fizzled in the past. This was not the first time that there had been complaints about voting irregularities in Precinct 4, said Carl Dorrough, Gregg Countys district attorney from 2008 and 2018. Usually what we wound up with was an allegation by someone that said someone did something wrong. Then the source would backtrack.

This time, a well-known pastor was persuaded to file an official complaint following Williamss loss. In his letter to the Secretary of States office, DeCarlo Nelson alleged voter fraud had tainted several recent Precinct 4 Democratic primaries. Reached at his church, Nelson declined comment.

Briggs said attorney general investigators collected box upon box of documents from her office. State investigators paired with local sheriffs deputies tracked down and interviewed dozens of voters in late 2018.

While some displayed clear disabilities preventing them from in-person voting, others described mere inconveniences - not valid excuses for mail-voting in Texas. Several appeared confused they had voted at all, suggesting ballots may have been cast in their names.

It was a fairly well-oiled machine over there, said Richard Anderson, a former county judge in neighboring Harrison County. They just got caught this time.

They really did their homework

In an early sign of how politically charged the Gregg County case was, two months after the 2018 primary state elected officials and law enforcement leaders gathered for an unusual press conference on the steps of the county courthouse - simply to announce the start of an investigation. I thought they were working for the fire department, their faces were so red, recalled James Mathis, a former justice of the peace who also lost a primary featuring many mail-in ballots.

Not long after charges were announced in September 2020, Dean and Hughes filed bills they said were necessary to protect election integrity. Each cited the Precinct 4 case to sell the legislation.

The criminal case seemed teed-up for a statement prosecution. A former police officer, District Attorney Watson was elected on his vow to aggressively push prosecutions. Paxtons office said it assembled more than 80,000 records in its Precinct 4 investigation. They really did their homework, Hughes said.

Yet Verma said unexplained delays forced the judge to order Paxtons office to send a representative to his court. District Judge Alfonso Charles did not respond to an interview request.

The plea deals were announced in late January and early February. Brown, his now-wife Marlena Jackson, Burns and Ward were each fined $2,000 and given a year of probation.

They also agreed to steer clear of a cluster of hotels and motels at a Longview highway interchange where poor residents can take weekly or monthly accommodationsan apparent indication that some of the mail-in votes had come from those addresses. Investigative summaries suggest deputies later had trouble locating some voters.

Jason Cassel, the attorney for Jackson, who was charged with 97 of the crimes, declined to discuss her case in detail. But he said while Texas restricts who can use an absentee ballot due to physical limitations, the definition of disabled was open to enough interpretation that prosecutors could have had a difficult time proving a fraud scheme.

It would have been a long trial, he said.

The voter fraud game

Briggs said some of the new laws, such as enhanced ID requirements for mail-in ballots, will likely make it harder for vote-harvesters to operate illegally. Other provisions seemed more political than practical, she said.

For example, new rules still permit candidates and parties to distribute mail-in ballot applications  while prohibiting elections administrators from sending them out unless requested. Its like were the ones they dont trust, she said.

Although its too early to tell how well the laws will prevent fraud, they do appear to have made it harder for some to vote. Harris County reported initially rejecting nearly 40 percent of mail-in ballots due to the new requirements. In Gregg County, Griggs said her office this spring rejected about twice as many mail-in ballots as usual.

Verma has left Texas. To him, the rhetoric and commotion following the 2018 election only yielded inverted justice. Brown represents Precinct 4, while Williams, who Verma described as once-in-a-generation real deal candidate, has since stayed away from politics. Reached at her Longview insurance agency, she declined comment.

The two parties played this for a game, Verma said. The Democrats just acted like Kashas case never happened. The Republicans say, See, theres wide-spread voter fraud! But they didnt really want to investigate this.

eric.dexheimer@chron.com
Jon Shapley, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

Former President Donald Trump is coming back to Houston later this month to speak to National Rifle Association members.

Trump will be part of a slate of speakers on May 27 at the George R. Brown Convention Center. Gov. Greg Abbott, State Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn and U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw are also scheduled to speak to the NRA Institute for Legislative Action Leadership Forum.
Above, 2020 George Floyd unrest in Washington, D.C., which treated the mass lawlessness with kid gloves. Now more leniency lies ahead in a new criminal code, not just for rioting but sex with minors.

By Eric Felten, RealClearInvestigations

May 11, 2022

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- But she told me she was 16 years old.

Under a new criminal code being considered by the District of Columbia city council, that statement would be what is called an affirmative defense to liability for an adult who has sex with a minor. Put more plainly, an adult accused of sexual activity with a minor could avoid culpability if found to have reasonably believed the childs claim at the time to have reached the age of consent.

This more lenient approach to child sexual abuse is just one of many changes being considered by the council. A sweeping new criminal code would redefine what counts as a crime in the nations capital, how those accused of crimes are tried, and how those convicted are punished.

Although many states are pushing back against progressive criminal justice reforms amid rising rates of violent crime, liberal jurisdictions from east to west continue to push for more lenient sentencing. Washington, D.C., stands out for its softer approach in the face of a crime problem illustrated by a homicide rate that jumped from 24 per 100,000 residents in 2019, to 29 in 2020, and then to 34 in 2021.

Proponents say the changes are designed to reduce the number of people arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated. As it now stands, the Districts criminal code is out-of-sync with current public norms and best practices, according to Richard Schmechel, a prime mover of its reform effort. Schmechel, until recently executive director of the D.C. Criminal Code Reform Commission, said the new approach will reduce errors, arbitrariness, and bias in the current system.

But critics warn that the changes now being considered will make it difficult to hold offenders responsible for crimes.

The proposed rewrite of the D.C. criminal code recommended by the reform commission, formed by the city council in 2016, would affect how the nations capital treats everything from murder to indecent exposure, from robbery to panhandling.

For example, it eliminates accomplice liability for felony murder, the legal principle that holds conspirators responsible if a killing is committed in the course of the crime. Currently, the wheelman waiting around the corner while his friend robs a bodega doesnt have to pull a trigger or even be armed to be prosecuted for felony murder if the clerk is killed.

Changes to felony murder laws have long been a goal of activists striving to limit prison populations. These laws impose sentences associated with murder on people who neither intended to kill nor anticipated a death, and even on those who did not participate in the killing, says Nazgol Ghandnoosh, a senior research analyst with The Sentencing Project, an anti-incarceration group active in the effort to rewrite the D.C. criminal code. Punishing a lookout for someone elses violent act violates the principle of proportional sentencing, which is supposed to punish crimes based on their severity, Ghandnoosh says. These excessively punitive outcomes violate widely shared perceptions of justice.

But Elana Suttenberg, special counsel at the U.S. attorneys office for the District of Columbia, warns that the underlying concept of shared liability is an important tool for law enforcement. In testimony prepared for the D.C. council, she noted that this is especially true when a group or gang is involved, especially if it is not clear which specific member was responsible for a killing. Suttenberg said the change could lead to the possibility that a gang rape perpetrated by two or more individuals that resulted in the victims death may result in no liability for murder, as it may not be possible to determine which defendant committed the lethal act.

Or consider the laws treatment of rioting. Currently, the District defines a riot as a public disturbance involving an assemblage of 5 or more persons which by tumultuous and violent conduct or the threat thereof creates grave danger of damage or injury to property or persons.

Leniency shown during the 2020 George Floyd riots aside, those who organize or encourage a riot face stiff penalties under the current code: If anyone is hurt in the rioting, or if the riot causes more than $5,000 in property damage, every person who willfully incited or urged others to engage in the riot shall be punished by imprisonment for not more than 10 years.

The newly proposed code would drop the language about incitement altogether, a change that would make it harder for authorities to hold those who promote rioting responsible. The new definition of rioting would require that police prove a long list of actions and occurrences before they are able to charge those involved in group violence. Under the new code, a rioter is not just one who knowingly commits or attempts to commit a criminal bodily injury, taking of property, or damage to property, but who is also reckless as to the fact 7 or more other people are each personally and simultaneously committing or attempting to commit a criminal bodily injury, taking of property, or damage to property, in the area reasonably perceptible to the actor. To make an arrest for rioting, police will have to have evidence of not just what the person being cuffed has done, but what others in a crowd were doing as well. Police would also have to somehow demonstrate that the actor was aware of what each of the others was doing. All of this in the midst of street melees. This new section can hardly be seen as empowering police to quell mob violence.

And though relaxing statutes involving the sexual exploitation of minors may seem a strange goal, it is not outside the progressive mainstream, which calls for reduced sentences even in such cases. Both in her work on the United States Sentencing Commission and as a federal D.C. circuit judge, newly seated Supreme Court Justice advocated for reduced sentences for those found guilty of possessing child pornography as well as violent offenders and drug dealers.

Even when the new code retains old offenses, the punishments recommended would be reduced. One of the key goals of those seeking to reduce prison populations has been to get rid of mandatory minimum sentences. Its such a critical part of creating reform, says Ghandnoosh. Currently, the mandatory minimum for those who commit premeditated first-degree murder is 30 years in prison. The minimum punishment for committing a crime of violence while armed with a firearm is five years behind bars. In the newly proposed code, there are no mandatory minimums at all.

There will, however, be new limits on the penalties judges will be able to hand out. The longest sentence that could be given for first-degree murder under the new code is 45 years. Some reformers think that is too severe. We advocate a maximum of 20 years, Ghandnoosh tells RealClearInvestigations. Still, she says, it is notable to move away from life sentences. This effort has been a key goal of billionaire activist George Soros, whose Open Society Foundations has funded the Sentencing Project for over two decades.

Perhaps the most consequential of the proposed reforms have to do with the minor-league offenses adjudicated at the courthouse: misdemeanors. They may be minor crimes, but the changes to prosecuting misdemeanors would have a major effect on the prosecution of more serious crimes.

Currently in the District of Columbia, felony prosecutions are heard by juries; a misdemeanor that goes to trial is, for the most part, heard by a judge. The commission recommends that misdemeanor defendants facing any possible incarceration be free to demand a jury trial. We respect the right to a jury in appropriate cases, says Suttenberg. But can the D.C. court system handle the added workload? Altogether, the eight courtrooms devoted to misdemeanors in the District hear somewhere between 110 and 170 cases a week; by contrast, each of the courtrooms reserved for felony trials schedule only one case a day. The D.C. Superior Court would soon be overwhelmed, bogged down in trying to find and empanel enough jurors and other time-consuming procedural requirements of jury trials. Creating new rights to demand a jury in misdemeanor cases will strain both court and prosecutorial resources, says Suttenberg.

If it is passed by the D.C. city council and signed by the mayor, the new code would provide a judicial sentence review for anyone who has served 15 years in prison. These second-look provisions are a key goal of the Sentencing Project. But others who have been part of the Districts criminal system are less enthusiastic about the decarceration that would follow. Our system is designed to give criminal defendants extraordinary protections at the time of trial. At some point, the process should be afforded a presumption of finality, says former D.C. Superior Court judge Stuart Nash. It seems fundamentally unfair to make the government defend the legitimacy of a result many years later, and even more unfair that the victim of a crime cannot rely on the finality of that result.

Sentencing reform is at the core of changes to the criminal code in the District. But the idea of sentencing reform is intentionally opaque, William Otis tells RealClearInvestigations. Reform of sentencing means reduction, says Otis, an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law School. Special counsel to President George H.W. Bush, Otis was also chief of the appellate sivision of the U.S. attorneys office for the Eastern District of Virginia. We tried being nice, he says of the lenient sentencing of the 1960s and 1970s. What we got in exchange was a gigantic increase in crime.

Between 1960 and 1990 the murder rate doubled in the United States. Crime shot up, Otis says, because we had the compassionate rehab-oriented policies liberals want to bring back now. The proposed rewrite of the D.C. criminal code would have been right at home in that era.

Cleanup in the Legislative Aisles

The District of Columbia is not the only place rewriting its criminal code  although rising crime is forcing reconsiderations elsewhere. Reform-minded Colorados legislature revised, if not reversed, last years reduction of the number of misdemeanors on its books, what had been Senate Bill 21-271. This year the legislature passed The Senate Bill 21-271 Clean Up. It was signed by the governor last month.

Colorados crime rate is soaring, with car theft up more than 80% from 2019 to 2021. And while it might be unfair to attribute such a rise to the 2021 code changes, since they took effect only two months ago, it doesnt help the cause of reform for changes to kick in when voters are experiencing the anxiety and uncertainty that comes with rising crime.

Similarly, New Hampshire in 2018 passed bail reforms making it significantly easier for those accused of violent crimes to get bail automatically. Many, such as Manchester Police Department chief Allen Aldenberg, have argued that the changes to bail laws put dangerous criminals on the street. Whats it going to take? Aldenberg asked state legislators. Someone being murdered by somebody thats out on bail two, three times over? New Hampshire lawmakers nearly passed legislation early this month to tighten the availability of bail. The narrow failure of the bill was an illustration of how difficult it is to undo changes to policing and prosecution once those revisions are on the books.

Like the District of Columbia, other jurisdictions have established official advisory groups setting out how to rewrite criminal laws, such as Californias Committee on Revision of the Penal Code. Several of its recommendations have already been adopted, including the elimination of mandatory minimum sentences in the case of non-violent crimes.

In its 2020 report, the California committee cited statistics it claimed showed there was no threat to public safety from the sort of reforms it recommended. According to the most recent data from the California Department of Justice, California has the lowest crime rates since comprehensive statewide statistics were first recorded in 1969, the committee reported, citing crime figures through 2019. This continues a 30-year trend of steadily decreasing crime rates. At the same time, the state has enacted laws that markedly reduced the number of people incarcerated in its state prison system.

But California crime statistics for 2020 proved to be less of an advertisement for the changes promoted by the committee. Overall, the rate of violent crime increased. For example, there were 104,756 aggravated assaults in 2019; in 2020 there were 113,539. Rape and robbery rates did fall slightly, but from 2019 to 2020 the homicide rate went up 31%. The rate at which police cleared homicides fell to its lowest in a decade.

Its simple, says John Lott, former chief economist for the U.S. Sentencing Commission. He tells RealClearInvestigations, If you make it less risky to commit a crime, you will get more of the crime.

Or, as William Otis puts it, This is not rocket science. If we go back to the failed policies of the past, we'll get the failed results of the past.

The sole beneficiaries of the sort of reforms being pursued in the District of Columbia, California, and Colorado will be criminals, says Otis. Is that what we need right now?
Defra has again been urged to do more to support struggling pig producers in England after a further tranche of funding was announced in Scotland.

Earlier this week, the Scottish government announced a final cash injection of 410,000 as part of its Pig Producers' Hardship Scheme.

Farmers in Northern Ireland, Ireland, France and other EU countries have also received direct support from government in recognition of the dire situation on pig farms.

For producers in England, who are also struggling with soaring costs of feed, labour, fuel, haulage and energy, Defra has repeatedly turned down their requests for support.

The National Pig Association (NPA) said the department must take similar action to support English producers, who were "standing on the brink of being forced to quit".

Survey data published by the industry body suggests there are still 100,000 pigs stuck on farms that should have gone to slaughter.

Farmers are losing in excess of 50 per pig due to the enormous gap between their cost of production and the price the supply chain is paying for pork.

NPA policy services officer, Lizzie Wilson: "Whilst we are pleased for our Scottish members, yet again our pig producers members are frustrated to learn that their Scottish counterparts are being financially supported by their government.

"The pig industry has already lost an estimated 10% of the breeding herd as producers have left the industry or cut down on production.

"Polling of British pig farmers by NPA shows that 80% will not be able to survive the next 12 months unless the gap between the cost of production and pig prices is significantly reduced.

"Our pig producers need help now, either from government or the rest of the supply chain."

Elsewhere in the UK, pig producers in Northern Ireland have benefited from numerous tranches of funding provided as a result of Covid-related export problems last year.

And in February, Irish agriculture minister Charlie McConalogue unveiled support worth 7 million for Ireland's pig producers amid soaring costs and low pig prices.

The fund is distributed through a flat rate payment of a maximum of 20,000 per individual commercial pig farmer sending more than 200 pigs per annum to slaughter.
Pembrokeshire Agricultural Society has announced a 1,000 bursary which is open to all qualifying students studying agriculture and related subjects.

The society's 2022 student bursary award has been launched to provide extra financial support to assist students whose family home is in the county.

The bursary is open to students studying agriculture, veterinary science, agricultural engineering, food technology, forestry or other subjects allied to agriculture.

The bursary is tax free and will be awarded to the student who, in the opinion of a panel of judges, has submitted the best dissertation on how the bursary will assist them to complete their course of study.

The last winner of the award was 21-year-old Gracie Morris, of St. Davids, who was in her final year at Harper Adams University studying BSc agriculture with crop management.

It was an honour and a privilege to have been awarded the Pembrokeshire County Show student bursary award in 2019," she said.

"The bursary enabled me to undertake research towards my final year dissertation on biofumigation to control Rhizoctonia solani in potatoes.

The bursary allowed me to be financially secure during my last year of studies. Most of my spare time was spent researching for my dissertation so having a part-time job alongside university was not not possible for me.

Gracie recommends qualifying students apply for the award: I would urge all Pembrokeshire students who study subjects that are clearly aligned to agriculture to apply for this bursary.

"It won't only assist with your studies but will also give you great experiences such as undertaking an interview which is a key employment skill. It will also assist in your future career within the agriculture industry.

The society said qualifying students must not have won the bursary previously, and must be studying or has been accepted to study agriculture or allied subjects at a UK college or university at A-Level or higher. The applicants' family home must also be in Pembrokeshire.

Rob James, chairman of the societys bursary sommittee said, A panel of independent judges, chaired by a representative of the society, will draw up a short list of candidates who will be interviewed.

The winning candidate will be asked to give a short presentation at a future meeting of the society's show council.

The standard of applications has always been exceptional which gives a lot of heart that there are a lot of very talented young people in our community.

"We are very much looking forward to receiving applications for this years bursary and hearing from the younger generation.

To enter, students must submit a dissertation of 1,000 words entitled How the bursary will assist my career progression.

The closing date for applications is Friday 1 July 2022.
Crop breeders have welcomed the government's plan to bring forward a new bill set to exempt improved crop varieties from restrictive GMO rules.

The announcement, made in the recent Queen's Speech, is the most significant policy development in UK plant breeding for more than 20 years.

The Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill plans to make controls on breeding technologies more science-based, aligning UK rules with other countries such as Australia, Japan and Canada.

The bill, seen as a major departure from EU policy, will apply to plants where gene editing is used to create new varieties similar to those which could have been produced more slowly through traditional breeding processes.

Techniques such as gene editing involve making desired changes to a plant or crop which could have occurred naturally or through conventional breeding, but more quickly and with greater precision.

The British Society of Plant Breeders (BSPB) has welcomed the announcement, saying it would help encourage UK research and innovation.

This would in turn develop healthier, more nutritious food, and to make farming systems more sustainable and resilient in the face of climate change.

BSPB chief executive Samantha Brooke said: "Developing an improved crop variety using conventional breeding  for example to improve its nutritional quality or resistance to disease - can take up to 15 years, but gene editing can help reduce that timescale significantly.

Without the contribution of plant breeding over the past 20 years, farmers would have produced 20% less food in this country, which means an extra 1.8 million hectares of land would have been needed to supply our food needs.

"That expansion would have impacted vulnerable ecosystems, and generated an extra 300 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.

Current regulations on conventional plant breeding and seeds were proven over years to support safer and more sustainable food production, Ms Brooke added.

She said this regulatory system could also embrace new crop varieties produced using precision breeding techniques, which replicated what plant breeders were already doing, but in a quicker and more targeted way.

The introduction of a Precision Breeding Bill sends a clear signal that the UK is set on a more pro-innovation trajectory outside the EU," she explained.

"It will certainly boost prospects for plant breeding companies large and small, as well as scientists in the public sector, to continue improving our food crops for the benefit of society and the environment.
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Jyran  Tandoor Dining & Lounge in Mumbai promises to take you on a delightful gastronomic journey that will leave you wanting moreWhen it comes to cuisines, Sofitel Mumbai BKC has a host of dining options that will appeal to the pickiest of eaters. One of these is Jyran  Tandoor Dining & Lounge. Jyran, which means lost love in Persian, is a name symbolic of hope and new beginnings. Inspired by the Northwest Frontier Province of India, the restaurant is designed with celebration and drama in mind. The interiors showcase intriguing influences from palace-style windows and a creative blend of furnishings in an art deco-inspired dining area. One foot in the door, and you will be transported to a magical place. We especially loved the outdoor lounge that is surrounded by water, highlighted by bowls of fire, and which offers al-fresco seating. The semi-private dining spaces with gossamer curtains ensure that you have all the privacy that you would want.The food at Jyran reveals a mastery over flavours and textures that is evident in all the dishes served. Chef Shadab Ahmed, with experience spanning over 25 years, has put a lot of thought and effort into each dish and it shows. We tried the Anar Badam Ke Aloo, Dahi Ke Kebab and Dal-Al-Jyran, and couldnt find fault with anything. To say that the food is rich and flavoursome would be an understatement. We ended our meal with Tabhak Jamun and Paan Kulfi, both incredible choices. The eclectic outlet also houses the Gin Bar, which hosts what could well be Indias largest collection of the best gins. The carefully-curated cocktails go well with the food on the restaurants well-thought-out menu.Jyran would work well for your next family dinner or that romantic date over the weekend.7 PM - 11.30 PMRs 2,500 for twoAlso Read: Review: Enjoy Sushi & Sake At Kyma Festival
Commentary: China, Germany should enhance cooperation during times of uncertainty

Xinhua) 09:58, May 12, 2022

BEIJING, May 11 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping had a virtual meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Monday. Facing complex changes in the international landscape and various challenges to world peace and development, the leaders of the two countries have been guiding bilateral relations from a high level, providing valuable momentum for greater China-Germany and China-EU cooperation.

Today, peace and development are under threat due to rampant hegemonism and exacerbated global divisions. The onset of the Russia-Ukraine conflict has reignited the flames of war in Europe.

Such an alarming increase in threats to global security and development has led to an urgent call for more stability and certainty in navigating these turbulent times.

In his meeting with Scholz, Xi said that under the current circumstances, it is particularly important for the two countries to maintain sound and steady growth of bilateral ties and better harness the stabilizing, constructive and steering role of this relationship.

This not only serves the interests of the Chinese and German peoples but will also contribute significantly to world peace and tranquility, he said.

There is no change in China's commitment to developing ties with Germany; there is no change in China's sincere wish for closer cooperation with Germany; and there is no change in China's conviction that China and Germany can make greater differences together, Xi emphasized.

These remarks shed light on the value and significance of China-Germany relations, pointing the way to future cooperation and dialogue between the two countries.

Meanwhile, past achievements have laid a solid foundation for the steady development of China-Germany relations. In the past five decades since the two countries established diplomatic ties, the bilateral relationship has shown great vitality, endurance, resilience and potential.

While Germany is China's most important trading partner in Europe, China has been Germany's top trade partner for six consecutive years. The trade volume between them has mushroomed to more than 250 billion U.S. dollars in 2021 from less than 300 million dollars at the very beginning of diplomatic relations.

Nearly 60 percent of German companies in China reported improved business operations last year, and 71 percent plan further investment in the country, according to a report released by the German Chamber of Commerce in China and KPMG.

As for the question of how China and Germany manage to develop together and contribute to each other's success, Xi offered an appropriate answer: It is essentially attributable to a commitment to mutual respect and win-win cooperation, a valuable piece of experience and important principle that should be upheld all along.

There is immense potential remains for the two countries to enrich their relations and deepen their mutually beneficial cooperation regarding climate change, macroeconomic policy, environmental protection, services trade, AI and digitalization.

In addition, China is speeding up its efforts to foster a new development paradigm, which means broader market opportunities for Germany and all other countries.

Xi called on the two sides to stand for true multilateralism, uphold international fairness and justice, defend the UN's central role in international affairs, safeguard basic norms governing international relations, promote an open world economy, and make global development more balanced, coordinated and inclusive.

He also expressed his hope for Germany's active support for and participation in the Global Development Initiative and the Global Security Initiative, with a view to building a community with a shared future for mankind.

Since Germany is a pivotal country in the EU, the continent's security is closely associated with Germany. Notably, the ongoing Ukraine crisis has pushed European security to a crossroads.

On this issue, China always stands on the side of peace and makes its conclusion independently based on the merits of each matter, working in its own way to promote peace and defuse tensions.

Xi has emphasized during that meeting: "It is important to make every effort to prevent the conflict from intensifying or magnifying to a point of no return."

For that purpose, the European side needs to show historical responsibility and political wisdom, bear in mind the long-term stability of Europe, and promote a solution in a responsible manner, Xi said, stressing that the security of Europe should be kept in the hands of Europeans themselves.

China's appeal for peace and stability has been widely welcomed in Europe and beyond. When reporting on the video meeting, many European media outlets, including Reuters, headlined Xi's call to prevent the Ukraine conflict from intensifying, fully reflecting how the international community supports China's take on this issue.

In an unsettled international situation, sound and steady growth in China-EU relations remains more crucial than ever.

The China-Europe relationship is not targeted at, subjugated to, or controlled by any third party, which is a strategic consensus that both sides must follow in the long run, Xi said.

Therefore, Xi highlighted the importance for China and the EU, with a dialectical and long-term view, with mutual respect and with the right perception, to increase communication and enhance mutual trust.

Deepening China-Germany and China-EU cooperation will serve the interest of both sides and even the whole world. By adhering to mutual respect, openness and inclusiveness; seeking common ground while reserving differences; and cooperating for win-win results, China-Germany and China-EU relations will indeed ride the wave of uncertainty towards a brighter future.

(Web editor: Peng Yukai, Liang Jun)
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Ranveer Singh is currently promoting his upcoming film, Jayeshbhai Jordaar. He will appear in the film as a Gujarati man who must save his wife and unborn child. In a recent interview, he expressed his desire to work in non-Hindi films as well, and says he has been discussing it with his wife Deepika Padukone, co-star Pooja Hegde, and others to better understand it.

In an interview with a major news outlet, he stated, I am dying to do an English film, which is my second language. I work predominantly in Hindi, but I would love to do something in English. I cannot speak Tamil, Telugu or Malayalam but I would love to. I keep talking to my peers and my colleagues, and I keep asking them how they work in different languages. I did a movie with Pooja Hegde recently and I was trying to understand how to do it. Deepika Padukone right now is doing Nag Ashwins film with Prabhas, which is in multiple languages. That is so exciting and I want to learn."

He also stated, I have collaborated with my counterpart actors from the South, like Mahesh Babu. I watched Dhanush, Allu Arjun, Ram Charan, Tarak (Jr NTR), Mahesh Babu, and I am a great admirer of their craft. One of my favourite movies and filmmakers of all time are all the people who work in Chennai - Mani Ratnam, AR Rahman - they are all legends! So, yes, I have a huge amount of love and respect and reverence and I never see it as the other. I see it as one. It will never be 'Us vs Them for me.

The actor is preparing for the May 13 release of Jayeshbhai Jordaar. Cirkus is also set to be released this year.
SYDNEY, May 12, 2022 - (ACN Newswire) - Novotech, the leading Asia Pacific biotech specialist CRO which has recently expanded its CRO services to the US, is pleased to sponsor the Pre-ASCO China Summit 2022 event titled: Go/No Go Decisions Based on Early Phase Oncology Trials ('The Summit').The Summit will feature insights from leading Novotech experts tapping decades of oncology clinical experience in the APAC region. They include:- Dr. Ramandeep Sharma, Senior Medical Monitor, Novotech- Dr. Vivian Gu, Head of Clinical Development & Regulatory, CMO, Novotech ChinaRegister here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/pre-asco-china-2-gono-go-decisions-based-on-early-phase-oncology-trials-tickets-330427145487Event Date:- China Time: 9:00-10:30 AM, Saturday, May 14, 2022- US EST Time: 9:00-10:30 PM, Friday, May 13, 2022- US PST Time: 6:00-7:30 PM, Friday, May 13, 2022Language: English, with Chinese simultaneous translationVenue: Live Zoom WebinarModerator:- Dr. Li Yan, CMO, Brii Biosciences; Managing Director, United States Chinese Anti-Cancer Association (USCACA)The Summit will start with a presentation by Novotech's Senior Medical Monitor Dr. Ramandeep Sharma titled: Approaches, Experiences, and considerations for early phase go/no go.A panel discussion will follow featuring leading clinical specialists including:- Dr. Jin Li, Shanghai East Hospital- Dr. Li Yan, CMO, Brii Biosciences; Managing Director, USCACA- Dr. Ramandeep Sharma, Senior Medical Monitor, Novotech- Dr. Vivian Gu, Head of Clinical Development & Regulatory, CMO, Novotech China- Dr. Xiaoxia Yan, Highthink- Dr. Jianmin Fang, Co-founder, CEO & CSO, RemeGen- Dr. Joseph Eid, Chief Medical Officer, Hengrui- Dr. Jon Wigginton, Senior Advisor and Chairman SAB, Cullinan Oncology; Former Head of Immuno-Oncology Early Clinical Development, BMSEarlier this month, Novotech announced the acquisition of US CRO, NCGS as part of a US service expansion program for its global base of clients.Novotech, which has a reputation for delivering full-service, high-quality expedited clinical trials in Asia-Pacific, can now offer its biotech clients clinical services in the US to support later phase global studies.NCGS was established in 1984 in South Carolina with a biopharma client base. NCGS has a workforce of about 300 professionals across the US.Novotech CEO Dr. John Moller said:"This is a strategic move to provide US-based expertise and infrastructure for our US clients wanting trials in APAC and the US, and for our APAC clients wanting US clinical programs.""Clients will receive seamless service, with a unified approach to systems and SOPs well developed," Moller said.Novotech has recently been benchmarked as a top 10 CRO among the world's leading CROs, and has signed 45 Leading Site Partnership agreements over the last 3 years.With more than 2,000 highly experienced professionals, clients benefit from strong site and Key Opinion Leader relationships, deep regulatory expertise, and the ability to accelerate clinical trials across the Asia Pacific and in particular China.Novotech recently announced a partnership and investment in tech firm Prospection to support accelerated clinical trials with healthcare data analytics using real-world data.Novotech has also partnered with virtual research organisation ObvioHealth to expedite trials leveraging remote technologies. This patient-centric approach improves subject retention and allows sponsors to reach populations outside major cities for clinical trial participation.About Novotech Health HoldingsNovotech Health Holdings Pte. Ltd. ("Novotech") is a leading Asia-Pacific biotech specialist CRO and consists of two operating brands, Novotech and PPC. Novotech is a CRO with integrated labs and phase I facilities providing drug development consulting and clinical development services. It has been instrumental in the success of approximately 3,700 clinical trials across all trial phases and broad range of therapeutic areas. Novotech is well positioned to serve biopharmaceutical clients conducting clinical trials in Asia and globally. For more information visit https://novotech-cro.com/contactMedia ContactDavid Jamescommunications@novotech-cro.comAU: +61 2 8218 2144USA: +1 415 951 3228Asia: +65 3159 3427Source: Novotech Health Holdings Pte LtdCopyright 2022 ACN Newswire . All rights reserved.
Sensitivity analysis shows after-tax NPV 10% of US$914 Million at US$4,200/t HPMSM

Montreal, Quebec--(Newsfile Corp. - May 12, 2022) - Manganese X Energy Corp. (TSXV: MN) (FSE: 9SC) (OTCQB: MNXXF) ("Manganese X", "MN", or the "Company") is very pleased to announce positive results from the independent Preliminary Economic Assessment ("PEA") for its wholly owned Battery Hill project (the "Project") located near Woodstock, New Brunswick. The PEA was prepared by Wood Canada Ltd. ("Wood"), an independent engineering services group with extensive experience in mining and mineral processing.

All dollar values are in US dollars unless otherwise stated.

PEA Highlights:

Robust Economics After-tax net present value using a 10% discount rate ("NPV10"): $486 million 25% internal rate of return ("IRR") Capital costs ("CAPEX") of $350 million with a payback of 2.8 years Average annual gross revenue of $177 million per year over the 47 years Project life Average annual gross revenue of $220 million over the first seven years Life of mine ("LOM") operating cost ("OPEX") of $122/t material processed

HPMSM Market Price Base case market price of $2,900/t for battery-grade high-purity manganese sulphate ("HPMSM") is well below the long-term forecast price of $4,200/t HPMSM estimated by CPM Group

Price Sensitivity Base case undiscounted after-tax cashflow: $3.4 billion Sensitivity analysis shows after-tax NPV10 reaches $914 million at $4,200/t HPMSM - see sensitivity analysis Table 1 below

Long Mine Life 40-year mine production life and seven years of stockpile reclaim feed Total LOM production of 3.2 million tonnes of HPMSM Average annual HPMSM production of 68,000 tonnes over the LOM Average annual HPMSM production of 84,000 tonnes in the first seven years of production

Low Environmental Impact Flowsheet produces a filtered residue leach product with initial acid-base accounting and non-acid generating test results showing no acid drainage risk

Project Objectives Project is now advancing towards a pilot project, pre-feasibility study as well as advancing a drilling program to upgrade and expand manganese resources



Sensitivity Analysis:

Table 1 - Selected Financial Metrics Sensitivity to Price

Metrics HPMSM Price ($/t) $1,400 $1,900 $2,400 $2,9001 - Base Case $3,400 $3,900 $4,400 $4,2002 Before-Tax Metrics Undiscounted Cashflow ($M) 1,483 2,945 4,407 5,869 7,331 8,793 10,255 9,670 NPV8 ($M) 168 527 886 1,245 1,604 1,963 2,322 2,178 NPV10 ($M)3 77 363 648 933 1,218 1,503 1,789 1,675 NPV12 ($M) 14 248 481 715 948 1,181 1,415 1,321 IRR (%) 13% 21% 28% 35% 41% 47% 52% 50% Payback Period (years) 6.2 3.7 2.7 2.1 1.7 1.5 1.3 1.4 After-Tax Metrics Undiscounted Cashflow ($M) 849 1,702 2,552 3,403 4,254 5,104 5,955 5,614 NPV8 ($M) 45 257 465 673 880 1,088 1,296 1,212 NPV10 ($M)3 (13) 156 321 486 651 815 980 914 NPV12 ($M) (54) 85 220 355 489 624 759 705 IRR (%) 10% 16% 21% 25% 30% 34% 37% 36% Payback Period (years) 7.2 4.5 3.4 2.8 2.4 2.1 1.9 1.9

Note: 1Base case $2,900/t HPMSM price is a risk managed price used for the PEA study. 2$4,200/t HPMSM represents long-term market price estimate from CPM Group. 3NPV10 is the base case.

Martin Kepman, CEO of Manganese X, states, "We are extremely pleased with the positive economics demonstrated by our PEA. Our Battery Hill Mineral Resource has the potential to be the most impressive manganese properties in North America and has several attributes that make it attractive for development and commercialization. Battery Hill has robust economics, strong value metrics and a short payback period for a relatively low capital investment. The PEA represents the most significant milestone to date for Manganese X and makes us the forerunner of becoming the first publicly traded company in Canada and the US to commercialize high-purity electric vehicle (EV) quality compliant manganese. Thanks to our proprietary extraction process, we can develop a superior quality manganese product by eliminating selenium, considered a toxic pollutant and yet utilized by some of the HPMSM producers worldwide to reduce their costs of production. Given selenium is a highly toxic element, its use negatively impacts the environment and is known to affect the quality of downstream products, particularly for high-end applications such as lithium-ion-battery production. Our final product should be able to justify a premium to the market price."

Martin Kepman continues, "The Company has been working diligently on corporate development beyond the PEA and is currently in discussion with a number of interested parties. This is a very exciting time in history for manganese as it relates to battery chemistry and the EV revolution, making it an equally exciting time for Manganese X. We intend to be at the forefront of a domestic supply as well as meeting the expectations of North American battery manufacturers."

Table 2 - Key Financial Outcomes

NPV10 $486 million IRR 25% LOM 40 years mine production

7 years stockpile reclaim OPEX $122/tonne processed CAPEX $350 million Average Annual Production HPMSM 68,000 tonnes Average Daily Mine Production Rate 1,000 tpd LOM Production Measured and Indicated Mineral Resource:

12.2 million tonnes @ 7.45% Mn Inferred Mineral Resource:

4.7 million tonnes @ 8.26% Mn HPMSM Market Price used in PEA Study $2,900/tonne Average Strip Ratio (Waste:Mill feed) 1.35 Pay Back Period 2.8 years Average LOM Annual Gross Revenue $177 million

Note: Numbers may not sum due to rounding

The PEA is preliminary in nature; it includes Inferred Mineral Resources that are considered too speculative geologically to have the economic considerations applied to them that would enable them to be categorized as Mineral Reserves, and there is no certainty that the preliminary economic assessment will be realized. Mineral Resources are not Mineral Reserves and do not have demonstrated economic viability.

PEA Summary

Mineral Resource Estimate Update:

The Mineral Resource estimate has been reported in accordance with NI 43-101 and was prepared by Mercator Geological Services Ltd. ("Mercator") with an effective date of 12 May 2022. The 2021 Mineral Resource statement has been renewed to reflect updated costs and an HPMSM price as per a market analysis report recently obtained. The Mineral Resource estimate is tabulated in Table 3.

Table 3: Battery Hill Deposit Mineral Resource Estimate - Effective Date May 12, 2022

Cut-off (Mn %) Category Tonnes (Million) Mn (%) Fe (%) 1.5 Measured 11.32 6.72 10.94 Indicated 23.82 6.24 10.50 Measured Plus Indicated 35.14 6.39 10.64 Inferred 27.72 6.46 10.73

Notes:

Mineral Resources were prepared in accordance with the CIM Definition Standards for Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves (MRMR) (May 2014) and CIM MRMR Best Practice Guidelines (November 2019). Mineral Resources are defined within an optimized pit shell with average pit slope angles of 45 and a 2.9:1 strip ratio (waste: mineralized material). Pit optimization parameters include: pricing of US $2,900 (CDN $3,625)/t for HPMSM (HPMSM = 32% Mn; CDN $1.25 to US$ 1.00 exchange rate), mining at CDN $7.43/t, a 3% gross metal royalty, combined processing and G&A (1,000 tpd process rate) at CDN $126.31/t processed, an overall Mn recovery to HPMSM of 78%, and a selling cost of US $65.00/t HPMSM. Fe content did not contribute to the pit optimization process but was applied for bulk density determination purposes (see note 6). Mineral Resources are reported at a cut-off grade of 1.5 % Mn within the optimized pit shell. The cut-off grade reflects the marginal cut-off grade used in pit optimization to define reasonable prospects for eventual economic extraction by open pit mining methods. Mineral Resources were estimated using Ordinary Kriging methods applied to 3 m downhole assay composites. No grade capping was applied. Model block size is 5 m by 5 m by 5 m. Bulk density was applied using a regression curve based on Mn % and Fe % block grades. Average bulk density for Mineral Resources is 3.01 g/cm3. Mineral Resources may be materially affected by environmental, permitting, legal, title, taxation, sociopolitical, marketing, or other relevant issues. Mineral Resources that are not Mineral Reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability. Figures may not sum due to rounding.

Infrastructure:

The Project is located approximately 6 km northwest of the town of Woodstock and is accessible to the east via a new two-lane road that connects with Highway 560. Key site infrastructure includes security and administration, crushing facility, process plant and ancillaries, sulphuric acid plant, mining facilities (truck shop and maintenance), waste rock storage facilities, run of mine mill feed stockpile and filtered residue storage area, sedimentation ponds, power, water and fuel supply and distribution. Filtered residue from the process plant will be trucked to the filtered residue storage area for the first 24 years of mine production after which residue will be trucked to the Moody Hill Pit 2 and backfilled.

Metallurgical Test Work:

Phase three of preliminary metallurgical test work completed by Kemetco Research Inc. ("Kemetco") has resulted in the refinement of a conceptual flowsheet and estimated mass balance to support the PEA. Test work focused on defining key process steps to establish major equipment requirements, reagent consumption and manganese recovery. The following main conclusions highlight the results drawn from this test program:

Leaching and neutralization optimization resulted in improved solid-liquid separation and allowed an incremental increase in recovery

Leach extractions on Moody Central mineralization were between 83 and 88%

Effective removal of calcium and magnesium from leach solutions was demonstrated with the removal of up to 90% of both elements from leach solution

Crystallization of manganese sulphate from evaporated and purified feed solutions was readily achieved

The overall recovery to HPMSM is estimated to be 78%

Final neutralized and washed solid residue samples showed little or no acid generation potential and all had positive neutralization potential. Toxicity characteristic leaching procedure (TCLP) tests were negative for all elements of concern.

Metallurgical Test Work Recommendations:

Leaching parameters, leach solution purification and the crystallization processes will require further definition and optimization for both recovery and impurity rejection

Additional locked-cycle testing is required on leach and neutralization, purification, crystallization and bleed stream treatment

Pilot plant testing will demonstrate the process and generate sufficiently large HPMSM samples for end-user testing.

Process Method:

The proposed process for treating Battery Hill manganese resources is a whole ore sulphuric acid slurry leach performed under conditions which result in formation of a filterable residue. Leach solution is neutralized with a calcium base, concentrated by evaporation and purified through a proprietary selective cation removal process. The purified liquor is then further evaporated to produce a crystalline manganese sulphate monohydrate product meeting all specifications for sale as a battery grade product.

Mining Method:

The PEA mine plan assumes conventional open pit mining using a contract mining equipment fleet at a total mining rate of 1.0 million tonnes per year to provide a mill feed of 365,000 tonnes per year, or 1,000 tonnes per day. The ultimate pits and mine plan use an elevated cut-off grade strategy to help drive the project economics. The use of a stockpile for mineralized material allows higher-grade material to be processed early in the mine life to enhance project economics and to sustain mill operations 24-hours per day, seven-days per week at a single, central processing facility. The mining operations will have a 40-year mine production life, with a two-year pre-production period, and seven years of stockpile reclaim feed.

Independent Qualified Persons Statements:

The PEA was prepared for Manganese X by independent Qualified Persons (QPs) as defined under NI 43-101 from Wood and Mercator and are listed below. The independent QPs have prepared and approved the scientific and technical information disclosed in this press release derived from their respective sections of the technical report:

Mr. Paul Baluch, P.Eng., Technical Director Civil/Structural/Architectural, Wood

Mr. Alan Drake, P.L.Eng., Manager Process Engineering, Wood

Dr. Greg Gosson, P.Geo., Technical Director Geology and Compliance, Wood

Mr. Matthew Harrington, P.Geo., Senior Resource Geologist, Mercator

Mr. Paul Teniere, P.Geo., Senior Associate Geologist, Mercator

Mr. Gil Violette, P.Eng., New Brunswick, Principal Hydrogeologist, Wood

Mr. Piers Wendlandt, P.E., Principal Mining Engineer, Wood

Data Verification:

QP Harrington performed standard validation checks on the Mineral Resource model.

QP Drake visited the Kemetco testing facilities and had discussions with those who performed the test work, identified the drill holes and the intervals in which the metallurgical test samples were taken.

QP Gosson discussed with the marketing expert from CPM Group regarding the basis of their market analysis and price forecast.

QP Teniere visited the Project site and compared select core intervals with original drill logs and sampled intervals, collected independent witness samples, reviewed quality assurance and quality control procedures, and completed a field inspection.

QP Violette visited the Project site during which he viewed drill core, completed field inspections of the Moody Hill target and surrounding areas, and assessed local infrastructure.

A description of the data verification methods for the Mineral Resource estimate is contained within the technical report previously filed on Manganese X's SEDAR profile (NI 43-101 Technical Report Battery Hill Project Mineral Resource Estimate, Woodstock Area, New Brunswick, Canada with effective date 18 June 2021).

Project Risks:

The geological interpretation and assumptions on grade continuity based on limited drilling may change with more detailed drilling.

There may be unrecognized metallurgical variability that could change the mine plan, metallurgical recoveries and/or process costs.

With more project definition and engineering input, the capital costs may change more than the contingency allowance.

Assumptions regarding supply demand forecasts for HPMSM, market entry strategy and HPMSM price may not be realized because of supply chain constraints.

Permitting remains uncertain until more detailed environmental base line studies are completed.

Community engagement is at an early stage and there is uncertainty regarding what is necessary for obtaining a social license to develop a mine.

Footprint for establishing the project infrastructure will require agreements from local landowners which is at an early stage of assessment.

Interpretation of the property agreements may be different to what has been assumed for the study.

About Manganese X Energy Corp.

Manganese X's mission is to advance its Battery Hill project into production, with the intent of supplying value-added materials to the lithium-ion battery and other alternative energy industries. The Company is also striving to achieve new environment-friendly more efficient methodologies, while processing manganese at a lower competitive cost. The company is the only publicly traded manganese company in North America moving rapidly toward commercialization of a manganese deposit.

Subsidiary Disruptive Battery Corp.'s mission is to develop an HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) air purification delivery system for cleaner and healthier air, aiming to mitigate COVID-19 and other contaminants on surfaces and in the air. For more information visit the website at www.manganesexenergycorp.com.

On behalf of the Board of Directors of

MANGANESE X ENERGY CORP.

Martin Kepman

CEO and Director

Email: martin@kepman.com

Tel: 1-514-802-1814

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Information:

This press release contains certain information that may constitute "forward-looking information" under applicable Canadian provincial securities legislation. Forward-looking information includes, but is not limited to, the results of the PEA, including statements relating to net present value, future production, future development and commercialization, estimates of cash cost, proposed mining plans and methods, cash flow forecasts, HPMSM recoveries, timing for permitting and environmental assessments, ability to acquire surface rights at a reasonable cost, realization of Mineral Resource estimates, capital and operating cost estimates, project and life of mine estimates, ability to obtain permitting by the time targeted, the timing and amount of estimated future production , exploration expenditures and potential upside and alternatives, the viability and efficacy of Manganese X's proprietary extraction process, including its ability to produce a superior manganese product, and its suitability for use in battery manufacturing. Readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.

Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of Manganese X to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. The PEA results are estimates only and are based on a number of assumptions, any of which, if incorrect, could materially change the projected outcome. There are no assurances that the Project will be placed into production. Factors that could affect the outcome include, among others: the actual results of development activities; project delays; inability to raise the funds necessary to complete development; general business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties; future prices of HPMSM or project costs could differ substantially and make any commercialization uneconomic; availability of alternative manganese sources or substitutes; actual manganese recovery; conclusions of economic evaluations; changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined; accidents, labour disputes, the availability and productivity of skilled labour and other risks of the mining industry; political instability, terrorism, insurrection or war; delays in obtaining governmental approvals, necessary permitting or in the completion of development or construction activities; Mineral Resource estimates relating to the Project could prove to be inaccurate for any reason whatsoever; additional but currently unforeseen work may be required to advance to the feasibility stage; even if the Project goes into production, there is no assurance that operations will be profitable; and risks related to the interpretation of the gross metal royalty ("GMR") set forth in the Company's option agreement dated April 22 2016 with Globex Mining Enterprises Inc. (the "Option Agreement", including with respect to: (i) the brevity and potential challenges the Company and other parties may face in regard to interpreting the terms of the GMR; (ii) determination of the reference prices that are to be used to value the metals and products that are produced from the Project; and (iii) the stage of production in the processing and value chain of deliverable metals within a production facility whereby the GMR becomes payable, all of which could have a significant impact on the determination of the GMR payable by the Company. The Option Agreement has not been the subject of any litigation to date and accordingly no findings or decisions have been made by any court or arbitrator regarding the specific interpretation of the Option Agreement.

Although Manganese X has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results to differ from those anticipated, estimated or intended. Forward-looking statements contained herein are made as of the date of this news release and Manganese X disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise, except as required by applicable securities laws.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined by the TSX Venture Exchange) accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/123711
eureKAREsupports eureKINGin EUR 150 million listing of the first EuropeanhealthcareSPAC dedicated to biomanufacturing

L aunch of eureKING represents a milestone in eureKARE 's mission to harness Europe's untapped leadership in biotechnology

eureKING's a mbition is to become a major European player for outsourcing of biopharmaceutical manufacturing

A solid project with seven founders, initiated and led by eureKARE,and a management team led by internationalhealthcare industry experts





Luxembourg, Belgium, and Paris, France - 12May 2022: eureKARE ("the Company"), a pioneering company focused on financing and building next generation biotechnology companies in the disruptive fields of synthetic biology and the microbiome, today announces the successful IPO on Euronext Paris (Professional Segment) of eureKING, the first European SPAC1 in healthcare dedicated to biomanufacturing that has been co-founded by eureKARE.

As founders of eureKING, eureKARE and its CEO Rodolphe Besserve bring biopharma expertise, combining novel industry monitoring and analysis with a strong track record of quick, agile and transparent investment processes.

Rodolphe Besserve, CEO of eureKARE and Co-Founder of eureKING, commented:"Since its inception, eureKARE has been committed to boosting innovation within Europe's biotechnology sector by providing companies with the right tools to grow, prosper and contribute positively to society, bringing Europe's underexploited innovative sciences to fruition. Pooling together eureKARE's expertise with that of key European industry leaders to create the first European healthcare SPAC dedicated to biomanufacturing, eureKING, is the next step in eureKARE's journey to continue supporting European innovation in biotechnology to even greater magnitudes."

eureKING's ambition is to become a major European player in the field of outsourcing of biopharmaceutical manufacturing and processing. eureKING intends to take a decentralized approach by providing a grouped offer of services. It will help meet the logistical and manufacturing needs of biotech companies and the pharmaceutical industry while supporting the development of new innovative therapies, regardless of the size or clinical development stage of these companies and their products.

eureKING intends to target companies specializing in three highly innovative, fast-growing segments: the production of biological products, cell and gene therapies and live biotherapeutics.

Michael Kloss, CEO and Co-Founder of eureKING, said:"eureKING's mission will be to support the development of the biomanufacturing industry in Europe, one of the most promising sectors of the healthcare industry today. A key element of this will be the support of eureKARE, whose wealth of experience in supporting innovation and companies within the biotechnology sector will be invaluable in bringing together within a single entity some of the most innovative European players in biomanufacturing and service to the biopharmaceutical industry in order to compete with the leading international CDMOs."

eureKING's seven founders have diverse and complementary backgrounds in healthcare and finance:

- Mr. Michael Kloss, CEO of eureKING, former Chairman and CEO of Panasonic Healthcare and former Chairman and CEO of Ascencia Diabetes Care,

- Mr. Gerard Le Fur (acting through and on behalf of his controlled affiliate named Red Blossom Consultants), former CEO of Sanofi-Aventis,

- Mr. Alexandre Mouradian, Co-Founder of eureKARE and President of the Mouradian Foundation

- Mr. Christophe Jean, Strategic Partner of the private equity fund Oraxys Environment 2, who has held several executive positions in major pharmaceutical groups such as Novartis, Ipsen and Pierre Fabre,

- Mr. Hubert Olivier, President of France and Belgium of the McKesson medical group, Chairman of OCP Repartition, Chairman of the Chambre Syndicale de la RepartitionPharmaceutique, former Vice-Chairman of GEMME (l'associationGEneriqueMemeMedicament) and former Chairman and CEO of Teva Sante France,

- Mr. Rodolphe Besserve (acting through and on behalf of his controlled affiliate named Muiscare SAS) CEO of eureKARE, former Managing Director at Societe Generale Corporate and Investment Banking; and

- and eureKARE SA, the first European network of biotech studios specialized in the creation, financing and support of innovative biotech companies, particularly in the fields of synthetic biology and microbiome. eureKING will benefit from the technology watch and expertise of eureKARE SA's pan-European team, which will be represented on the Board of Directors by Ms. Kristin Thompson.

- Ends-

About eureKARE

eureKARE is an investment company focused on financing and developing synthetic biology and microbiome innovation across Europe. Driven by the belief that synthetic biology holds the key to many of the world's most pressing health and environmental challenges, eureKARE's experienced team is focused on harnessing Europe's untapped leadership in the field to build the companies of the future. eureKARE is championing a new model of start-up creation and development to create a dynamic ecosystem of early and later stage ventures through its network of biotech studios. Backed by a proprietary AI tool, eureKARE's studios act as a bridge between academia and industry, helping to catalyze researchers' innovations into companies with access to all the ingredients they need to grow, prosper, and bring benefits to society.

About eureKING

Founded in March 2022, eureKING is a French SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) formed with the aim of acquiring European companies in the field of biomanufacturing, with the ambition of creating a leading bio-CDMO in Europe capable of meeting the growing outsourcing needs of this industry.

eureKING has chosen to focus on three highly specialized and strategic segments of the biopharmaceutical industry: the production of biologics, in particular new generations of monoclonal antibodies or complex proteins, the production of cell and gene therapies and the production of live biotherapeutics (with applications in the microbiome).

Led by an international management team of experienced healthcare industry talent, 100% dedicated to the eureKING project and its development strategy, and supported by a Board of Directors with complementary skills in the pharmaceutical and financial fields, eureKING aims at developing and promoting the promising biomanufacturing sector in Europe on an international scale.

For more information: www.eureking.com

Contacts

eureKARE SA

Michelle Wilson-Andre, Head of Communications

michelle.wilson@eurekare.eu (mailto:michelle.wilson@eurekare.eu)

Consilium Strategic Communications - Media Relations

Amber Fennell, SukainaVirji, Genevieve Wilson

eurekare@consilium-comms.co.uk

eureKING

info@eureking.com

NewCap - Media Relations

Nicolas Merigeau

+33

Arthur Rouille

+33

Disclaimer

This press release is not a prospectus but an advertisement provided for information purposes only. It does not constitute and should not be deemed to constitute an offer to the public of securities by eureKING, nor a solicitation of the public relating to an offer of any kind whatsoever in any country, including France.

A prospectus (the "Prospectus") has been approved by the Autorite des marches financiers (AMF) on May 6, 2022 under no. 22-134 solely for the purpose of listing of eureKING securities on the professional segment (compartimentprofessionnel) of the regulated market of Euronext Paris. A copy of the Prospectus is available on the AMF's website (www.amf-france.org) and on eureKING's website (www.eureking.com) and may be obtained free of charge from eureKING.

Potential investors should review the risk factors described in the Prospectus.

Investors should not subscribe for or purchase any securities referred to in this press release except on the basis of the information contained in the Prospectus.

The distribution of this press release may be subject to legal or regulatory restrictions in certain jurisdictions. Any person who comes into possession of this press release must inform him or herself of and comply with any such restrictions.

Prohibition of sales to European Economic Area, U.K. and Swiss retail investors

The Units (actions de preferencestipuleesrachetablesassorties de bons de souscriptiond'actions ordinaires de la societerachetables) are not intended to be offered, sold or otherwise made available to and should not be offered, sold or otherwise made available to any retail investor in the European Economic Area (the "EEA"), the United Kingdom (the "U.K.") or Switzerland.

For the purpose of the present press release, a "retail investor" means a person who is one (or more) of the following:

a) a retail client as defined in point (11) of Article 4(1) of Directive 2014/65/EU (as amended, "MiFID II");

b) a retail client as defined in point (8) of Article 2 of Regulation (EU) No 2017/565 as it forms part of U.K. domestic law by virtue of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (the "EUWA");

c) a customer within the meaning of Directive 2016/97/EU (as amended, the "Insurance Distribution Directive") where that customer would not qualify as a professional client as defined in point (10) of Article 4(1) of MiFID II;

d) a customer within the meaning of the provisions of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (as amended, the "FSMA") and any rules or regulations made under the FSMA to implement the Insurance Distribution Directive, where that customer would not qualify as a professional client, as defined in point (8) of Article 2(1) of Regulation (EU) No 600/2014 as it forms part of U.K. domestic law by virtue of the EUWA (the "U.K. MiFIR");

e) not a qualified investor as defined in Article 2(e) of the regulation (EU) 2017/1129 of 14 June 2017 (as amended, the "Prospectus Regulation"), including as it forms part of U.K. domestic law by virtue of the EUWA;

f) a retail client as defined in Article 4 Paragraph 2 of the Swiss Federal Act on Financial Services ("FinSA"), i.e. not a professional client as defined in Article 4 Paragraph 3 of FinSA.

g) A professional client that has opted in to be treated as a retail client pursuant to Article 5 Paragraphe 5 of FinSA.





Consequently, no key information document required by Regulation (EU) No 1286/2014 (as amended, the "PRIIPs Regulation"), including the PRIIPS Regulation as it forms part of UK domestic law by virtue of the EUWA (the "UK PRIIPS Regulation"), for offering or selling the Units or otherwise making them available to retail investors in the EEA, in the U.K. or in Switzerland has been prepared and therefore offering or selling the Units or otherwise making them available to any retail investor in the EEA, in the U.K. or in Switzerland may be unlawful under the PRIIPs Regulation the UK PRIIPS Regulation[, or the FinSA.

MIFID II and U.K. MiFIR product governance

Solely for the purposes of the manufacturer's product approval process, the EEA target market assessments (the "EEA Target Market Assessments") have led to the conclusion that:

a) in respect of the Units:

i. the target market is eligible counterparties and professional clients only, each as defined in MiFID II; and

ii. all channels for distribution to eligible counterparties and professional clients are appropriate;

b) in respect of the Preferred Shares and the Warrants:

i. the target market is retail investors, and investors who meet the criteria of professional clients and eligible counterparties, each as defined in MiFID II; and

ii. all channels for distribution to eligible counterparties and professional clients are appropriate.

Solely for the purposes of each manufacturer's product approval process, the U.K. target market assessments (the "U.K. Target Market Assessments") have led to the conclusion that:

a) in respect of the Units:

i. the target market is only eligible counterparties, as defined in the FCA Handbook Conduct of Business Sourcebook ("COBS"), and professional clients, as defined U.K. MiFIR; and

ii. all channels for distribution to eligible counterparties and professional clients are appropriate;

b) in respect of the Preferred Shares and the Warrants:

i. the target market is (a) retail clients, as defined in point (8) of Article 2 of the Prospectus Regulation as it forms part of U.K. domestic law by virtue of the EUWA, (b) investors who meet the criteria of professional clients as defined in U.K. MiFIR and (c) eligible counterparties as defined in the COBS; and

ii. all channels for distribution to eligible counterparties and professional clients are appropriate.

Notwithstanding the EEA Target Market Assessments and the U.K. Target Market Assessments, distributors should note that: the price of the Preferred Shares and the Warrants may decline and investors could lose all or part of their investment; the Preferred Shares and the Warrants offer no guaranteed income and no capital protection; and an investment in the Preferred Shares and/or the Warrants is compatible only with investors who do not need a guaranteed income or capital protection, who (either alone or in conjunction with an appropriate financial or other adviser) are capable of evaluating the merits and risks of such an investment and who have sufficient resources to be able to bear any losses that may result therefrom.

The EEA Target Market Assessments and the U.K. Target Market Assessments are without prejudice to the requirements of any contractual, legal or regulatory selling restrictions in relation to the offering.

For the avoidance of doubt, the EEA Target Market Assessments and the U.K. Target Market Assessments do not constitute: (a) assessments of suitability or appropriateness for the purposes of MiFID II or COBS or (b) recommendations to any investor or group of investors to invest in, or purchase, or take any other action whatsoever with respect to the Units, the Preferred Shares or the Warrants.

Each distributor is responsible for undertaking its own target market assessments in respect of the Units, the Preferred Shares and the Warrants and determining appropriate distribution channels.

France

In France, any offer of eureKING securities is addressed solely to investors acting for their own account and in accordance with the provisions of Article L. 411-2, 1 of the French Code monetaire et financier.

United Kingdom

This press release does not constitute an offer of securities to the public in the United Kingdom. In the United Kingdom, this press release is for distribution only to and is directed only at (a) "qualified investors" within the meaning of Article 2(e) of the Prospectus Regulation as it forms part of U.K. domestic law by virtue of the EUWA which are (b) (i) persons who have professional experience in matters relating to investments falling within the provisions of Article 19(5) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005 (the "Order") or (ii) "high net worth entities", "unincorporated associations" and other persons to whom it may otherwise lawfully be communicated, falling within Article 49(2)(a) to (d) of the Order (all such persons together being referred to as "Relevant Persons"). This press release must not be acted on or relied on, in the United Kingdom, by persons who are not Relevant Persons. Any investment or investment activity to which this communication relates is only available to Relevant Persons and will be engaged in only with Relevant Persons. Persons distributing this press release must satisfy themselves that it is lawful to do so.

United States of America

[This press release and the information it contains does not, and will not, constitute an offer to the public to subscribe for or sell, nor the solicitation of an offer to subscribe for or buy, eureKING's securities in the United States or any other jurisdiction where restrictions may apply. Securities may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an exemption from registration under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act"), it being specified that eureKING's securities have not been and will not be registered under the Securities Act and eureKING does not intend to register securities or conduct an offer to the public in the United States.

Switzerland

The offering of eureKING's securities is exempt from the requirement to prepare and publish a prospectus under the Swiss Federal Act on Financial Services ("FinSA") because such offering is made to professional clients within the meaning of the FinSA and eureKING's securities will not be admitted to trading on any trading venue (exchange or multilateral trading facility) in Switzerland. This press release does not constitute a prospectus pursuant to the FinSA, and no such prospectus has been or will be prepared for or in connection with the offering of eureKING's securities.

Canada

This press release and the information it contains do not, and will not, constitute an offer to the public to subscribe for or sell, nor the solicitation of an offer to subscribe for or buy, eureKING's securities in any province or territory of Canada.

Securities may not be offered or sold in Canada except in a transaction exempt from the prospectus requirements of applicable Canadian securities laws or pursuant to a prospectus that qualifies those securities in the relevant provinces and territories of Canada, it being specified that the eureKING's securities have not been and will not be qualified by way of prospectus under the securities laws of any province or territory of Canada and eureKING does not intend to qualify any such securities or conduct an offering to the public in Canada.

Israel

The securities offered by this press release have not been approved or disapproved by the Israel Securities Authority (the "ISA"), nor have such securities been registered for sale in Israel. The securities may not be offered or sold, directly or indirectly, to the public in Israel, absent the publication of a prospectus that has been approved by the ISA. The ISA has not issued permits, approvals or licenses in connection with this offering or publishing this press release, nor has it authenticated the details included herein, confirmed their reliability or completeness, or rendered an opinion as to the quality of the securities being offered.

This press release and the information it contains do not, and will not, constitute a prospectus under the Israeli Securities Law, 5728-1968, as amended (the "Israeli Securities Law"), and no such prospectus has been or will be filed with or approved by the ISA. In the State of Israel, this press release may be distributed only to, and may be directed only at, and any offer of the securities may be directed only at, (i) to the extent applicable, a limited number of persons in accordance with the Israeli Securities Law and (ii) investors listed in the first addendum to the Israeli Securities Law (the "Addendum") consisting primarily of joint investment in trust funds, provident funds, insurance companies, banks, portfolio managers, investment advisors, members of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, underwriters, venture capital funds, entities with equity in excess of NIS 50 million and "qualified individuals", each as defined in the Addendum (as it may be amended from time to time), collectively referred to as qualified investors (in each case purchasing for their own account or, where permitted under the Addendum, for the accounts of their clients who are investors listed in the Addendum). Qualified investors will be required to submit written confirmation that they fall within the scope of the Addendum, are aware of the meaning of same and agree to it.

1Special Purpose Acquisition Company
High-Performance Cable System Aimed at Bringing Speed and Capacity To Support Digital Transformation in Asia

HONG KONG, CHINA / ACCESSWIRE / May 12, 2022 / China Mobile International Limited (CMI)[1], China Unicom Global (CUG)[2] , Converge Information and Communications Technology Solutions, Inc. (Converge) and PPTEL SEA H2X Sdn. Bhd (PPTEL SEA-H2X)[3], reaffirmed their partnership to construct and operate the South East Asia Hainan - Hong Kong Express Cable System (SEA-H2X), a new submarine cable system that will connect Hong Kong SAR China, Hainan China, Philippines, Thailand, East Malaysia and Singapore, with options to extend to Vietnam, Cambodia, West Malaysia and Indonesia. The parties to the SEA-H2X Project have appointed HMN Technologies Co., Limited (HMN Tech) to build the cable in a fully funded project which will greatly enhance intra-Asian connectivity. With the Construction and Maintenance Agreement (C&MA) and Supply Contract with HMN Tech being effective on March 4, 2022, the parties also announced today that the Supply Contract has come into force.

At approximately 5,000 kilometers in length, the SEA-H2X cable will consist of at least 8-fiber pairs between Hong Kong SAR and Singapore, with a design capacity of 160 terabits per second to meet the growing bandwidth requirement in the region. The System is targeted to be ready-for-service in 2024 which help businesses and consumers benefit from increasing digital ties.

Employing state-of-the-art optical submarine transmission equipment, this high-performance submarine cable's completion will provide the needed additional bandwidth within the region and network diversity. The construction of SEA-H2X will respond to the high broadband (Internet) demand between Hong Kong SAR and Southeast Asia countries by providing needed capacity and faster transmission, and in preparation for the coming 5G era.

The SEA-H2X cable will be implemented by HMN Tech from the design, manufacturing and deployment of the system. Employing an open system model, SEA-H2X has the flexibility to choose best-in-breed Submarine Line Terminal Equipment (SLTE) from third-party vendors at a later date. HMN Tech's advanced Branching Unit (BU) and Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexer (ROADM) will benefit SEA-H2X in providing the ultimate flexibility of electrical power and optical fiber switches across multiple locations.

"CMI continues to focus on the digital economy development by expanding our digital infrastructure including cable systems, PoPs and data centers. We have been investing in various submarine cables due to the soaring demand for data usage in the Asia-Pacific region. We are honored to be a partner in SEA-H2X, which connects major cities such as Hong Kong, China and Singapore, along with Hainan, China, linking to locations in the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand in Southeast Asia. The SEA-H2X cable will provide high-speed, low-latency, and low-cost data connections for customers in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) region, to further accelerate economic development of its members. We sincerely hope construction plans for the SEA-H2X submarine cable can be successfully implemented and acted on as soon as possible," said Dr. Li Feng, Chairman and CEO of CMI.

"Submarine cable is irreplaceable in building robust, secure and accessible global network connections in the Digital Era. As an important large-bandwidth submarine system in the region, SEA-H2X will further upgrade connectivity to Hong Kong SAR, Hainan SEZ and Southeast Asia countries, boosting unimpeded trade, communication, financial integration along the route. We are proud to participate in this trans-Asia cable project. China Unicom Global Limited will prove ourselves in providing customers with cloud-network integration, smart, agile, and safe digital products and solutions. We sincerely hope the whole project achieve a well-rounded success," said Dr. Meng Shusen, Chairman and President of CUG.

"We are pleased to be a partner in this trans-Asia cable that will respond to the booming data traffic between Hong Kong SAR and Southeast Asia. This submarine cable system will boost the connectivity between our two PoPs located in Hong Kong and in Singapore. Further, this will serve as a crucial infrastructure to add diversity and redundancy to our international network. We are truly diversifying our international capacity portfolio as transpacific demand will be served by the Bifrost, and now trans-Asia demand will be served by SEA-H2X," said Converge CEO and Co-Founder Dennis Anthony Uy.

"PPTEL SEA-H2X is excited to participate in the SEA-H2X consortium, joining our partners in the region with our investment consisting of a trunk fibre pair and a branch into Sarawak, East Malaysia. PPTEL SEA-H2X is transforming the telecoms landscape in Malaysia from our home base in Kuching, where we are launching the first Tier IV Data Centre in the region in Q1 2022, co-located with our new CLS at Santubong. Our strategic location allows us to offer new low latency routings between China and Jakarta, via SEA-H2X and BaSICS (Batam Sarawak Internet Cable System), which is also expected to complete in Q1 2022. With extensive fibre reach throughout Malaysia and Indonesia through our partner XL, we are providing the backbone for the Sarawak government's Digital Transformation 2030 ambitions both domestically and internationally," said PPTEL CEO Jonathan Smith.

"It is our honor to provide the advanced turnkey submarine cable solution for SEA-H2X consortium members," said Mao Shengjiang, CEO of HMN Tech. "We are committed to developing innovative and reliable technologies, and to utilizing them in the critical telecom infrastructures, like SEA-H2X. HMN Tech's start-of-art technology and expert deployment abilities will contribute to the consortium to build a high-speed, large-capacity and low-latency system fast and successfully and to enhance intra-Asian connectivity."

###

PHOTOS:

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The SEA-H2X high-performance submarine cable system aims to bring speed and capacity to support the digital transformation in Asia. The System is targeted to be ready-for-service in 2024.

https://vod.todayir.com/cockpitnews/china_unicom_global/image_2.png

Key executives of the SEA-H2X Submarine Cable System consortium and the contractor gather to reaffirm their partnership to construct and operate the South East Asia Hainan - Hong Kong Express Cable System (SEA-H2X), a new submarine cable system that will connect Hong Kong SAR China, Hainan China, Philippines, Thailand, East Malaysia and Singapore, with options to extend to Vietnam, Cambodia, West Malaysia and Indonesia.

Clockwise: Dr. Li Feng, Chairman and CEO of CMI, Dr. Meng Shusen, Chairman and President of CUG, Dennis Anthony Uy, CEO and Co-Founder of Converge, Mao Shengjiang, CEO of HMN Tech and Sng Wei Kai, Executive Director of PPTEL

###

CMI Company Profile

China Mobile International Limited (CMI) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of China Mobile, mainly responsible for the operation of China Mobile's international business. In order to provide better services to meet the growing demand in the international telecommunications market, China Mobile established a subsidiary, CMI, in December 2010. CMI currently has over 70 terrestrial and submarine cable resources worldwide, with a total international transmission bandwidth of over 109T, and a total of 225 overseas PoPs. With Hong Kong, China as its launchpad, CMI has significantly accelerated global IDC development, creating a strong network for data centre cloudification. Leveraging the strong support by China Mobile, CMI is a trusted partner that provides comprehensive international information services and solutions to international enterprises, carriers and mobile users. Headquartered in Hong Kong, China, CMI has expanded its footprint in 36 countries and regions. For more information, please visit www.cmi.chinamobile.com.

CUG Company Profile

China Unicom Global is headquartered in Hong Kong, with 30 worldwide subsidiaries and over 130 global Points-of-Presence (PoPs), CUG endeavors on global business development, operation, and servicing outside Mainland China. China Unicom Global offers reliable end-to end global integrated telecommunication services and solutions, including global connectivity services, global Internet access, ICT services, cloud computing, Internet of things (IoT), video conferencing, unified communications, content, and security services, and provides personal customers with premium voice and mobility services. For more information, please visit: https://www.chinaunicomglobal.com

Converge Company Profile

Converge Information and Communications Technology Solutions, Inc. (PSE:CNVRG) is the fastest-growing fixed broadband service provider in the Philippines. It is the first to run an end-to-end pure fiber internet network in the country, providing Filipinos simple, fast, and reliable connectivity. Aside from broadband services, Converge also offers integrated data center and network solutions services.

With over 103,000 kilometers of fiber optic cable network, Converge has one of the most extensive fiber networks in the Philippines.

This fiber-powered network allows Converge to provide premium world-class digital experiences for residential, enterprise, and wholesale customers. Converge is ISO 9001 and CE2.0 Certified.

Go to https://www.convergeict.com for more information.

PPTEL SEA-H2X Company Profile

PPTEL SEA H2X Sdn. Bhd. (PPTEL SEA-H2X) is a subsidiary of PP Telecommunication Sdn. Bhd. (PPTEL) - a Sarawak-based, international telecommunication infrastructure provider. In line with the aspirations of the Sarawak Government's Digital Transformation Program, PPTEL is constructing the Sarawak International Internet Gateway (SIIG), comprising of 5 core components, namely,

Batam Sarawak Internet Cable System (BaSICS)

First International Submarine Cable System connecting Sarawak to the regional telecommunication hub of Singapore, wholly owned and managed by PPTEL. Tier IV Carrier Neutral Data Centre, accredited by Uptime Institute

Malaysia's first Tier IV "Zero Downtime" Data Centre serving mission critical businesses in the region. International Cross Border Terrestrial Fiber Network

A terrestrial fiber network connecting the Cable Landing Station & Data Centre in Santubong, to major towns across Sarawak, Kalimantan and Brunei Darussalam. Regional Internet Exchange

Sarawak is positioned to be the main Telecommunications Gateway for Borneo to connect directly to the regional telecommunication hubs of Hong Kong and Singapore. This regional internet exchange complements PPTEL's Data Centre, to provide direct connectivity to the multiple internet exchanges in the region, from Kuching, Sarawak. South East Asia Hainan Hong Kong Express (SEA-H2X) Submarine Cable System

PPTEL SEA-H2X's investment into a second international cable system bringing much needed capacity directly into Sarawak, to complement our existing services offered from PPTEL's Data Centre and Cable Landing Station at Santubong.

For enquiries, please email us - enquiries@pptelecom.com.my

HMN Tech Company profile

HMN Technologies Co., Limited is an advanced provider of innovative, reliable and flexible turnkey submarine network solutions on a global scale. To date, the company has deployed the submarine cable system with the length of over 80,000 km. HMN Tech provides end-to-end project development solutions, incorporating system design, permitting, marine survey, manufacture, integration and marine installation services with an on-going focus and commitment to customer support for network operators. Thanks to our robust product portfolio, in-depth expertise and strong R&D capabilities, we enable telecom carriers, oil and gas operators, and other industry players to achieve their business goals.

###

[1]China Mobile International Limited (CMI), an affiliate of CMCC Infrastructure 3 Limited

[2]China Unicom Global (CUG), an affiliate of China United Network Communications Group Company Limited

[3]PPTEL SEA H2X Sdn. Bhd (PPTEL SEA-H2X), an affiliate of PP Telecommunication Sdn Bhd



File: Intra - Asia enhances connectivity between Hong Kong, China and Southeast Asia with SEA-H2X submarine cable

SOURCE: China Unicom Global

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/701080/Intra--Asia-Enhances-Connectivity-Between-Hong-Kong-China-and-Southeast-Asia-with-SEA-H2X-Submarine-Cable
PRESS RELEASE

Paris, May 12th, 2022

HOPIUM PARTNERS WITH BRIDGESTONE TO DEVELOP BESPOKE TYRES FOR HYDROGEN-POWERED HOPIUM MACHINA

HOPIUM, the first French manufacturer of hydrogen-powered vehicles, is partnering with Bridgestone, a global leader in tyres and sustainable mobility solutions, to develop premium tyres for its high-end sedan, Hopium Machina.

The goal of the partnership is to design bespoke tyres with low rolling resistance technology, a major factor to enhance the vehicle's 1,000km driving range. The tyres will be created using Bridgestone's proprietary Virtual Tyre Development technology, providing significant benefits in terms of both efficiency and sustainability.

Under its overarching Bridgestone E8 Commitment, the company has pledged to support the realisation of a sustainable society by providing social and customer value throughout every area of its business and operations, together with partners.

Olivier Lombard, Hopium's CEO and founder said: "Since its start, Hopium has made it a point of honour to collaborate with the best in their fields. Today, this strategic agreement with a renown industrial world leader constitutes a major milestone in our ambitious roadmap. With considerable expertise in designing tyres and tyre technologies for newer types of mobility, Bridgestone will surely bring valuable learnings to the partnership, helping us live up to the challenges ahead."

Steven De Bock, VP Consumer Replacement and OE, Bridgestone EMIA said: "This exciting partnership with Hopium once again demonstrates our support for the next generation of innovative mobility pioneers. We're placing our recognised expertise at the service of a real game-changer in the field of zero-emission mobility and helping bring about a more sustainable future of mobility in the process."

ABOUT HOPIUM

Olivier Lombard, the youngest winner of the 24 hours of Le Mans, founded Hopium, a manufacturer of high-end hydrogen-powered vehicles, as an achievement resulting from his experience acquired on the racing circuits. With the automotive culture in his heritage, Olivier Lombard has driven for 7 years hydrogen- powered racing cars, making him the world's most experienced racer in this field. As an open-air laboratory, the race has allowed Olivier Lombard and his team to reflect on new mobility solutions to meet today's environmental challenges. While the transportation sector alone is responsible for 20% of greenhouse gas emissions, the company is positioning itself as a player in climate change. Hopium brings together a team of experts and leading partners at the forefront of innovation in the fields of hydrogen fuel cells, technology, and automotive engineering.

www.hopium.com

Follow us on Instagram, Linkedin, Youtube, Twitter.

ISIN: FR0014000U63

Mnemonic: ALHPI

CONTACT HOPIUM

Hopium

media@hopium.com Actifin

Financial communication

Jean-Yves BARBARA

+33 (0)6 64 11 18 33

jybarbara@actifin.fr Actifin

Financial press relations

Jennifer JULLIA

+33 (0)6 47 97 54 87

jjullia@actifin.fr

ABOUT BRIDGESTONE

Bridgestone in Europe, Russia, Middle East, India, and Africa (Bridgestone EMIA) is the regional Strategic Business Unit of Bridgestone Corporation, a global leader in tyres and sustainable mobility solutions. Headquartered in Zaventem (Belgium), Bridgestone EMIA employs more than 20,000 people and conducts business in 40 countries across the region.

Bridgestone offers a diverse portfolio of premium tyres, tyre technologies and advanced mobility solutions. The company's vision is to provide social and customer value as a sustainable solutions company. The Bridgestone E8 Commitment - a framework of eight values (Energy, Ecology, Efficiency, Extension, Economy, Emotion, Ease and Empowerment) - guides strategic priorities, decision making, culture evolution and sustainability actions towards the achievement of this vision.

For more information about Bridgestone in EMIA, please visit press.bridgestone-emia.com. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram , YouTube and LinkedIn.

CONTACT BRIDGESTONE

LIESBETH DENYS

Director Public Affairs and Communications

liesbeth.denys@bridgestone.eu

+32.478.78.26.22

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Full and original release in PDF format:https://www.actusnews.com/documents_communiques/ACTUS-0-74584-2022.05.11_hopium-et-bridgestone-signent-un-accord-strategique_en.pdf
Riga, Latvia, 2022-05-12 08:16 CEST -- Workland, a leading provider of flexible office space solutions, is expanding its network in the Baltics and reaches an agreement with Riga's greenest office complex Verde on long-term cooperation, becoming its fourth anchor tenant. As a result, it is planned to open an environmentally friendly coworking center Workland Verde in the Latvian capital city this autumn, investing over EUR 1 million. The new Workland center will be 1420 m2 large - it will occupy the whole second floor of the Verde A building, which will be turned into an inspiring and functional coworking space. It will house private offices of various sizes, coworking and open areas, as well as meeting rooms, thus providing a wide variety of space lease solutions for people preferring various kinds of working styles and valuing the sense of community and a flexible environment. There will be room for around 180 people at the center. "For some time already, we have been planning to expand our network of flexible office spaces in Riga, When the opportunity arose to set up a coworking center in the environmentally friendliest office building Verde, we saw consistency with our values regarding sustainability and a people-oriented working environment, so we decided to act," Workland founder and CEO Indrek Haal said, commenting on the choice of location. In 2022 Workland plans 40 percent growth in the Baltic market, providing over 7000 m2 of office space for lease on flexible terms. Altogether, 750 workstations will be set up in the three countries. Iveta Lace, Verde Commercial Director, says: "While planning the range of the Verde complex's additional services, we knew from the start that there must be coworking opportunities here. We are therefore glad that Workland, one of the industry's leaders in the Baltics, will be providing this service here. Experience shows that a lease of coworking space at this center is a good launch pad for startups, small or bigger corporates that later grow larger rapidly. Swiss telecommunications and software developer Swisscom is a great example of this - as it started operations in Latvia, it leased workspaces at the Workland Telegraph center in Riga Old City, but has now become our anchor tenant. We hope that this success story will motivate young entrepreneurs to work at the newly created coworking center, and who knows - perhaps in some time we will sit down for talks to seek more spacious premises for them at the Verde complex". Hybrid work is becoming the dominant style in many companies, which is why the Workland Verde center will be developed so that it could easily ensure the adjustability of premises depending on changes in the tenants' team or its needs. It will introduce the most advanced and environmentally friendly coworking office concept in Riga, designed by Lauder Architects. Igor Beloborodov, Workland COO: "When choosing new projects it is becoming more important for us to focus on sustainability - when seeking new development options, energy efficiency and sustainable solutions are the key factors. As the most environmentally friendly building in Riga, the Verde office complex was a project consistent with our values and plans. We are therefore inviting entrepreneurs looking to work and develop their business in a green, environmentally friendly environment, to apply for booking coworking offices at the Workland Verde." At the new Workland Verde coworking center, it will be possible to rent several smaller offices, ensuring privacy for teams of various sizes. In all offices, big and small, there will be plenty of light, unique interior solutions and up-to-date design. "In addition to the Workland premises, all our tenants will be able to also use the Verde building's amenities including additional services, a large terrace on the 5th floor where it will be possible to work as it will have outdoor workspaces, as well as to take a break from work, enjoying a fantastic view of the capital city's center," comments Agnese Pidrika, Workland centers manager in Latvia. As reported, Verde is the first project developed by Capitalica Asset Management in Latvia, with investments in the project exceeding EUR 65 million. Verde is being built under the leadership of Notus Developers, a subsidiary of SBA Group. The project's general contractor is LLC Velve, while Latvia's leading real estate agency Colliers is the exclusive lease partner. The office complex's tenants already include companies like Swisscom, Decta, KPMG Latvia, Swetch, Alppes Capital and Workland. About Verde Verde (www.verde.lv) will be the greenest A class office complex in Riga, at the Skanstes Quarter (1a R.Hirsa Street), the place opposite the Latvian Fire Fighting Museum, and the only A-class office complex the first stage of which will be opened in June 2022. The "VERDE" office complex comprises two office buildings with a total leasable area of 30 000 m2 (total floor space with underground parking lots - 45 000 m2). The complex has been developed in line with BREAM Excellent and the nZEB (nearly Zero Energy Building) standards. The unique signature of Verde will be superb greenery on 600 m2 large terraces with threes and other plants in each building, as well as a green backyard. Verde was ranked among the most sustainable projects in the competition "Sustainability in Architecture, Construction and Design 2020". The "green thinking" of Verde is embodied in the sustainable and modern architectural solution by award-winning Latvian architects Andris Kronbergs and Janis Zvejnieks (Arhis Architects) and brought to life by A-class energy efficiency and smart building management solutions. About Capitalica Asset Management and SBA Group Capitalica Asset Management (www.capitalica.lt) is an investment management company licensed and supervised by Central bank of Lithuania which is managing investment funds investing in commercial real estate in the Baltic States. Capitalica Baltic Real Estate Fund, managed by Capitalica Asset Management, owns the office complex Verde in Riga, the business centre 135 in Vilnius, the business centre Kauno Dokas in Kaunas and the shopping centre Luize in Klaipeda. The controlling stake (70%) of Capitalica Asset Management is held by SBA Group, one of the largest Lithuanian business groups, and another 30% is owned by A. Barstys' (CEO of Capitalica Asset Management) company Fox Holdings. SBA is one of the largest Lithuanian capital business groups. It consists of more than 30 companies operating in real estate, furniture manufacturing, textile manufacturing and investment management. The group employs around 5,500 people. Consolidated sales in 2020 amounted to EUR 342.5 million. About Workland Group Workland Group is the largest network of coworking spaces in the Baltics with 13 centers, of which two - Telegraph and Verde - are located in Riga, five in Tallinn, five in Vilnius and one in Kaunas. BaltCap, the largest private capital investor in the Baltics, together with the company's founder and management is the key shareholder of Workland. For more information: Andrius Barstys CEO of Capitalica Asset Management Andrius.Barstys@capitalica.lt +370 612 30260
DGAP-Ad-hoc: Majorel Group Luxembourg S.A. / Key word(s): Dividend/Dividend

Majorel Group Luxembourg S.A.: Majorel announces proposed dividend of EUR 0.32 per share



12-May-2022 / 08:30 CET/CEST

Disclosure of an inside information acc. to Article 17 MAR of the Regulation (EU) No 596/2014, transmitted by DGAP - a service of EQS Group AG.

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.





THIS ANNOUNCEMENT RELATES TO THE DISCLOSURE OF INFORMATION THAT QUALIFIED OR MAY HAVE QUALIFIED AS INSIDE INFORMATION WITHIN THE MEANING OF ARTICLE 7(1) OF THE MARKET ABUSE REGULATION (EU) 596/2014.

News Release

Majorel announces proposed dividend of EUR 0.32 per share

Luxembourg, May 12, 2022: Majorel Group Luxembourg S.A. (Euronext Amsterdam: MAJ) ("Majorel" or the ''Company"), a leading global provider of next-generation end-to-end customer experience (CX) solutions for digital-native and vertical leading brands, today announces its proposed dividend for 2021.

The Company proposes a dividend payment of EUR 0.32 per share, in line with analyst expectations, subject to shareholder approval at its Annual General Meeting on June 20, 2022, that will be held virtually.

If the dividend proposal is accepted at the Annual General Meeting, the payment schedule will be as shown in the table below:

Ex-Dividend date June 22, 2022 Record date June 23, 2022 Payment date July 15, 2022

Dividends are paid in Euros. A Luxembourg withholding tax of 15% will be applied on the gross dividend amounts. In order to benefit from exemption of Luxembourg withholding tax at source, an "Informative Memorandum" describing the procedure is available here.

For Majorel shares held via Euroclear Nederland, ABN AMRO is offering a dividend reinvestment plan (DRIP). Shareholders have the opportunity to reinvest their net dividend in ordinary shares of Majorel. Shareholders should make the decision to participate in the DRIP via their own bank, broker, custodian or financial institution.



FINANCIAL CALENDAR (INDICATIVE)

Capital Markets Day, London June 9, 2022

Annual General Meeting (virtual) June 20, 2022

H1 2022 Results August 30, 2022

Q3/9M Trading Update November 3, 2022

ABOUT MAJOREL

We design, build and deliver next-generation end-to-end CX solutions for many of the world's most respected digital-native and vertical leading brands. Our comprehensive east-to-west global footprint in 36 countries across five continents, with more than 73,000 team members[1] and 60 languages, allows us to deliver flexible solutions that leverage our expertise in cultural nuance, which we believe to be essential for true excellence in CX. We have deep domain expertise in tech-augmented front to-back-office CX. Additionally, we offer Digital Consumer Engagement, CX Consulting, and an innovative suite of Proprietary Digital Solutions for industry verticals. We are a global leader in Content Services, Trust & Safety. We believe the 'Majorel difference' to be our culture of entrepreneurship.

CONTACT

Investor Relations

Insa Calsow

EVP, Investor Relations

ir@majorel.com

Investor Relations

Michele Negen

SVP, Investor Relations

ir@majorel.com



Media Relations

Andrew Slater

SVP, Global Marketing & Communications

media@majorel.com

DISCLAIMER

This announcement is released by Majorel Group Luxembourg S.A. ("Company") and contains information that qualified or may have qualified as inside information for the purposes of Article 7 of the Market Abuse Regulation (EU) 596/2014 (MAR). This announcement is made for the purposes of MAR and pursuant to Article 2 of Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2016/1055.

[1] As of March 31, 2022.

12-May-2022 CET/CEST The DGAP Distribution Services include Regulatory Announcements, Financial/Corporate News and Press Releases.

Archive at www.dgap.de


Amsterdam-based nonprofit foundation Sovereign Nature Initiative launches Experimental Zone #1, a unique in-person event showcasing cutting-edge, regenerative blockchain technologies addressing sustainability challenges.

AMSTERDAM, May 12, 2022calls for everyday citizens, ecologists, artists, and technologists of the world to attend an innovative, in-real-life gathering in Amsterdam on May 21, 2022 to explore the possibility of a fundamental shift in the relationship between humans and nature.



Experimental Zone #1 , serves as a showcase for SNI, a Dutch-based nonprofit working at the intersection between ecology, economy and web3 technologies. Featuring tech teams and futurists alongside local musicians, dancers, and installation artists, this one-of-a-kind public event will bring together world-class artists, thinkers, and innovators to celebrate and explore the emerging ideas and technologies inside SNI's booming ecosystem.

This one-day event will kick off with an exciting showcase of SNI's new Germinator Program , seven new web3 technology projects developed during SNI's February hackathon that consider the value and identity of nature in innovative ways. Event attendees will be able to test these technologies and learn about their applications as they complement De Ceuvel's sustainability initiatives. The Germinator teams are mindful of the unintended externalities associated with software development, which is why SNI has chosen to partner with Unique Network , a scalable blockchain recognized for composable NFTs and sustainability. The Germinators recognize that building on Unique assures that their tech has a minimal footprint on the environment.

"At SNI, we strive to nurture a diverse community and build strong partnerships to help us explore creative and innovative ways to balance our relationship to the natural world we are integral part of. As our partner, Unique Network generously offered to support the participants of our Germinator Program with a considerable bounty allocation that will help them further develop their radical ideas," said Alessandro Mazzi, Head of Partnerships at SNI.

SNI's Germinator teams will be leveraging Unique's NFT capabilities for several applications throughout the event, such as rewarding positive ecological actions and volunteerism and generating value for De Ceuvel park by selling park-inspired nature NFTs, in addition to more advanced propositions like using dynamically changing NFTs to represent flora and fauna present at De Ceuvel.

"The Germinator Program is a journey that was designed to support seven technical teams from all over the world to bring to life the best ideas developed during the SNI Winter Hackathon in February 2022. What we hope to achieve is to enable visitors of De Ceuvel to experience the potential of web3 technologies to empower individuals and communities to relate, better value, and care for non-humans in urban ecologies," said Catherine Bischoff, CEO at SNI.

Following the Germinator Program presentations, EZ1 will invite attendees into sustainability workshops, tours, and activities throughout the day, including eclectic art and theory talks such as "Algorithms & Artistic Immersion, and Crypto-Ecology: Web3 Technologies for Conservation? EZ1 aims to bring together the foremost minds in the art, ecology, and technology worlds to reflect on the relationship between technology and nature and build the technologies needed to galvanize humanity to address the Anthropocene.

To learn more about Experimental Zone #1, please visit our website , and follow us on Twitter , LinkedIn , and Instagram for more updates.

For media inquiries, please contact: media@unique.network

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/05bdeb5c-2f57-4dd4-b8eb-25d9ed0feb34
HONG KONG, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Tencent Cloud, the cloud business of global technology company Tencent, today announced that Tencent has the largest market share and over 100% of year-on-year growth for "Communications Platform as a Service" (CPaaS) in China. This ranking is from the 2022 Gartner report "Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide, 2021".

As a cloud solution that features a range of functions such as instant messaging, audio and video calls, CPaaS has become an important digitalization tool that helps enterprises improve their operational efficiency internally and optimize customer experience externally.

According to Gartner's Market Guide for Communications Platform as a Service, among all enterprise software across the globe, the market growth rate of CPaaS is the highest, and it is forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate of around 30% through 2025. Meanwhile, the number of enterprises using CPaaS products to enhance their digital competitiveness will surge from 20% in 2020 to 95% in 2025.

With more than 20 years of technological foundation, insights and experience in applications such as QQ and Weixin, Tencent Cloud has developed an industry-leading CPaaS product matrix.

Instant Messaging (IM)

Tencent Cloud Instant Messaging (IM), currently serving over 100,000 customers worldwide with over 200 million daily active users, integrates diverse messaging capabilities such as one-to-one chat, group chat, chat room, and system notification into its SDKs and UIkit components for various platforms to help enterprises develop business quickly.

Tencent Real-Time Communication (TRTC)

Featuring leading advantages in key technological development such as ultra-high-definition, ultra-low latency, and large-scale interaction, TRTC supports the rapid growth and development of applications such as Tencent Meeting/ VooV Meeting and WeSing and has served more than 5,000 monthly active customers across different industries worldwide. Tencent Cloud's million-square-meter ultra-large-scale architecture technology won China Patent Gold Award, the most prestigious award in the intellectual property segment in China.

Leveraging the above CPaaS capabilities and Tencent Cloud's extensive content delivery network with over 2,800 global acceleration nodes across more than 70 countries and regions, Tencent Cloud will continue to explore the in-depth integration of digital technologies with the real economy in the government affairs, corporate services, finance, industrial sector, transportation, and e-commerce segments, assisting more enterprises to pursue digital transformation and enhancement.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
The 'Great Resignation' continues in 2022: Over a fifth (21%) of employees are actively seeking new job opportunities in 2022

Four-day work week closer than ever: Three quarters (75%) of employees would take a pay cut to achieve it

The biggest impact on employee satisfaction is flexibility: 45% say flexible working hours are key to happiness at work

Owl Labs, a global collaborative technology company, today launches its annual State of Hybrid Work study polling 10,000 full-time employees across UK, Germany, France, Netherlands and the Nordics* which reveals that flexibility is key to retaining top talent in 2022 and beyond. Over a third (37%) of European employees are prepared to decline a job if flexible hours are not offered and just over two thirds (69%) would accept a pay cut to have flexible hours.

As a result, offering flexibility and employee-first benefits are key to stemming the 'Great Resignation' which saw one third office workers change jobs in the past two years. 36% of employees would remain at their current company if both flexible working hours or a four-day work week were introduced, while over a quarter (27%) would stay with their current employer if they were given flexibility regarding where they work.

As businesses grapple with the evolving post-pandemic work landscape, managers must ensure that proximity bias doesn't compromise employee progression with over half (55%) of employers admitting that they tend to have more trust in full-time office workers than those who work remotely.

Flexible is the new hybrid

The nine-to-five is all but dead in today's working world. Almost eight in ten (79%) of Europeans feel they are just as, if not, more productive while working remotely compared to working from the office. While on average, the ideal work/office balance works out at three days in the office and two days working remotely, nearly a third (31%) of employees are worried they will be asked to return to the office full time with no hybrid option. European employees are eager to increase the number of days they work remotely, whilst full-time remote employees would like to work from the office one day a week showing that hybrid is the preferred option across the board. Full-time office workers' ideal split in France and the Netherlands would be 1.5 days remote and 3.5 days in the office, whilst in the UK, the Nordics and Germany their ideal split was 1.8 days versus 3.2 days respectively.

Unsurprisingly, over a quarter (28%) of European workers would not accept a job offer if they were expected to be in the office full time, while under a fifth (18%) would decline a new job opportunity if the position was fully remote. UK workers are the most likely (34%) to decline a job if they had to return to the office full time.

Consequently, almost one in two (46%) employees are concerned that working remotely will mean they have less of a say at work and will miss out on growth opportunities.

Proximity bias isn't exclusive to managers, over half (51%) of employees at all levels also said that they are more likely to engage with those they physically work with. French and British workers are most likely (57% respectively) to defer to people in the office. This is largely due to the fact that a third (33%) of European office workers find building relationships with remote colleagues more difficult. In fact, 47% cited infrequent small talk and 42% stated a lack of face-to-face socialising as the main reasons for making remote interactions challenging.

The possibility of the 'Great Retention' in 2022

To inspire the 'Great Retention' in 2022, employers will need to rethink their employee retention strategies and workplace policies. As it stands, of employees who didn't change jobs in the past two years, over a fifth (21%) are actively seeking new job opportunities in 2022. A four-day work week was one of the top benefits (36%) that would most likely convince an employee to remain in their current role. So much so that the majority (75%) of employees would take a pay cut in order to do so. Some employers (14%) have taken note and have already introduced a four-day work week.

Frank Weishaupt, CEO of Owl Labs says, "As we enter into this next phase of work, it's clear that employers across Europe need to provide flexibility over when, where and how their teams work to ensure they keep employees engaged. Giving individual workers more choice over how they work means managers need to be aware of any biases they have towards employees who spend less time in the office. Technology will play an important role in maintaining an immersive and equalised workplace. While the metaverse will take more time and adoption, simple changes to enhance the video conferencing experience will have a significant impact on overall team camaraderie and culture.

"It is also clear from our research that employees are demanding more from their employers when it comes to overall job satisfaction. Offering a robust and flexible set of employee benefits has never been more important to retaining top talent."

Keeping employees engaged with immersive technology

Technology will continue to play a crucial role in making employees feel connected and productive. Currently, a fifth (21%) of managers are concerned about maintaining cultural connection, team camaraderie and effective communication for their remote team members. Across the board, 31% of employees admitted that they find it harder to engage with colleagues online those in the Netherlands find it the hardest (37%).

Levelling up video conferencing tools will be an essential first step, with over one-third (38%) of employees saying there was room for video conferencing improvement. To make hybrid and flexible work more immersive, over a quarter (28%) of employees are keen to adopt an office metaverse, while a further 19% are open to working in virtual reality. Both Germany and the Nordics are the most excited (32% respectively) to engage with an office metaverse.

---ends---

Methodology:

The survey was conducted in February 2022 by Vitreous World in which 10,000 full-time employees across the UK, Germany, France, Netherlands and the Nordics* were interviewed in the UK (2000), France (200), Germany (2000), the Netherlands (2000) and Nordic countries (2000).

*The Nordics refers to Sweden, Finland, Norway Denmark

About Owl Labs

Owl Labs is a collaborative tech company making meetings more inclusive with immersive, 360-degree video devices. Built for modern businesses and classrooms, Owl Labs is dedicated to empowering hybrid and remote teams with its award-winning technology and robust product suite. The company's flagship product, the Meeting Owl, was honoured as one of TIME's Best Inventions and features a wifi-enabled, 360-degree camera, microphone, and speaker with proprietary AI technology. Owl Labs has raised 15.8 million in funding and is based in Boston, with remote and hybrid employees all over the world. To learn more about Owl Labs, visit www.owllabs.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220510005924/en/

Contacts:

Louisa Cervero

owluk@clarity.global
The world's most delicious peanut butter and chocolate treat declares May 'I Love Reese's' month in the UK and asks fans to showcase their love by sharing the unique ways they enjoy a Reese's Cup on Instagram @reesesuk for 'I Love Reese's Day' on 18th May

LONDON, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Let's face it. Whether you eat the whole Reese's Cup in one bite, stack a couple on top of each other, or strategically eat the chocolate before the peanut butter, you are winning. While the best consumption method is a heated topic of debate amongst our loyal fans, there's one fact that's undebatable: the love of Reese's Cups is a love like no other. To honor this everlasting bond and the hardworking Hershey makers behind the iconic cups, the Reese's brand has declared May 'I Love Reese's' month worldwide, giving fans yet another reason to enjoy the undeniable deliciousness of Reese's by sharing their special and sometimes quirky eating techniques on social media. Not that you needed a reason.

With an entire month of celebration, the love will reach a fevered pitch in the United Kingdom on May 18 with a special day solely dedicated to Reese's. In the lead up to the big day, we are putting out the call on digital and social media for the most creative, meticulous, and silly ways people eat their Reese's Cups to fuel the debate. So, prove it: show us how the way you eat a Reese's Cup is inarguably the best by sharing your method on Instagram @reesesuk using AnythingButOrdinary and ILoveReesesDay

"Our fans know that while there's definitely no wrong way to enjoy the undeniable magic of Reese's Cups, there's arguably the 'rightest' way," said Ahmad Nasser, Marketing Director Hershey AEMEA. "From the 'sammich' method (eating from the outer edges in) to the 'peeler' to the 'pro,' we get that the way you enjoy an iconic Reese's Cup is personal. And there's a new way to enjoy our Cups. Five Guys, The UK's favorite burger restaurant have added Reese's Peanut Butter Cups to their milkshake mix ins over the summer."

If we think you've nailed it, we may even share the spotlight on our channels, giving you plenty of bragging rights. Go ahead and let your peanut butter and chocolate obsession shine because while you may think you have the best way to eat a Reese's Cup, there's no wrong way and there will never be.

About The Hershey Company

The Hershey Company is headquartered in Hershey, Pa., and is an industry-leading snacks company known for bringing goodness to the world through its iconic brands, remarkable people and enduring commitment to help children succeed. Hershey has approximately 19,000 employees around the world who work every day to deliver delicious, quality products. The company has more than 100 brand names in approximately 80 countries around the world that drive more than $8.9 billion in annual revenues, including such iconic brand names as Hershey's, Reese's, Ice Breakers, and many others.

For more than 125 years, Hershey has been committed to operating fairly, ethically and sustainably. Hershey founder, Milton Hershey, created the Milton Hershey School in 1909 and since then the company has focused on helping children succeed.

To learn more visit www.thehersheycompany.com

Follow:

http://www.instagram.com/reesesuk

https://Instagram.com/fiveguysuk

https://fiveguys.co.uk/reeses

https://twitter.com/hersheycompany

https://www.linkedin.com/company/hershey-aemea/

Media Contact: Hannah Costa, HCosta@hersheys.com

Photo- https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1815848/Reeses.jpg

Logo- https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1815836/REESES_Logo.jpg
Regulatory News:

NOT FOR PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION OR RELEASE, IN WHOLE OR IN PART, DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, IN OR INTO THE UNITED STATES, AUSTRALIA, CANADA, JAPAN, SOUTH AFRICA OR ANY OTHER JURISDICTION IN WHICH IT WOULD BE UNLAWFUL TO DO SO

GeNeuro (Paris:GNRO) (Euronext Paris: CH0308403085 GNRO), a biopharmaceutical company developing treatments for neurodegenerative and autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis (MS), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and the severe neuropsychiatric consequences of COVID-19 (post-COVID), today announced the successful completion of a 7.7 million capital increase with cancellation of the preferential subscription rights through an international private placement only to certain qualified and institutional investors of 2,678,251 new ordinary bearer shares of GeNeuro with a par value of CHF 0.05 each (the "New Shares" and the "Offering", respectively).

The New Shares have been offered at a price of 2.86 each, including nominal value and issue premium (the "Subscription Price

Bryan, Garnier Co acted as sole global coordinator and sole bookrunner of the Offering.

"The successful completion of this private placement provides GeNeuro with the means to complete its post-COVID program with temelimab, which will be the first personalized therapeutic approach in this indication, as the study will only enroll patients who are positive to the pathogenic W-ENV protein," said Jesus Martin-Garcia, CEO of GeNeuro. "The presence of W-ENV in these patients provides a potential biological explanation for the very diverse neuropsychiatric symptoms many suffer from, and also a treatment opportunity by neutralizing W-ENV with temelimab."

In the Offering, GNEH SAS, a subsidiary of Institut Merieux and an existing shareholder of GeNeuro ("GNEH"), has subscribed to 1,398,601 New Shares in cash. In accordance with applicable Swiss laws and regulations, GNEH representatives on the Board of directors of the Company have not voted on board of directors' decisions relating to the Offering. As a result, following the Offering GNEH shall own 39.08% of the share capital and 39.29% of the voting rights of the Company on a non-diluted basis and 37.36%, respectively 37.55%, on a fully diluted basis.

The Company intends to use the net proceeds of the Offering to complete the funding for its planned post-COVID trial, complementing the grant received from the Swiss Federal Office for Public Health (FOPH). In parallel to the post-COVID program, GeNeuro continues its discussions in the multiple sclerosis area with regulatory authorities and with potential partners to define the best development path for combining temelimab with anti-inflammatory treatments, to treat relapses and disability progression which remains the key unmet medical need in MS.

The New Shares issued will represent 12% of the Company's share capital prior to the Offering on a non-diluted basis and 10.7% of the Company's share capital after the Offering.

Pursuant to applicable Swiss law, the Board of Directors of the Company, in accordance with Article 5bis of the Company's Articles of Association, as amended by its General Shareholders' meeting of May 27, 2020, approved on May 11, 2022, the issuance of the New Shares with cancellation of shareholders' preferential subscription rights by way of a book-built private placement intended solely to institutional and qualified investors (the "Capital increase

The Subscription Price represents a discount of 7.1% on the closing market price of the Company's shares on Euronext Paris on the last trading day preceding the closing date of the Offering, i.e. 3.08 on May 11, 2022.

Following the registration of the Capital Increase by the Commercial registry of Geneva, expected to occur on May 12, 2022, the Company's share capital will be composed of 24,999,028 ordinary bearer shares with a nominal value of CHF 0.05 each.

Based on the information available to the Company, the breakdown of the Company's share capital and voting rights before and after the Capital Increase is as follows:

Ownership and voting rights

before the Offering Ownership and voting rights

after the Offering Number of

shares and

voting rights % of the share

capital and

voting rights Number of

shares and

voting rights % of share

capital and

voting rights GNEH SAS (1) 8,370,094 37.50% 9,768,695 39.08% Eclosion2 Cie SCPC 6,367,608 28.53% 6,367,608 25.47% Invesco Ltd 1,661,017 7.44% 2,471,017 9.88% Servier International BV 1,365,659 6.12% 1,365,659 5.46% Total institutional investors 17,764,378 79.59% 19,972,979 79.90% Total employees and directors 147,750 0.66% 147,750 0.59% Treasury shares(2) 131,055 0.59% 135,116 0.54% Free Float 4,277,594 19.16% 4,743,183 18.97% TOTAL 22,320,777 100.00% 24,999,028 100.00% (1) A subsidiary of Institut Merieux (2) Shares held in treasury have their voting rights suspended in accordance with Swiss law.

The settlement and delivery and admission to trading date of the New Shares to be issued upon registration of the Capital Increase by the Commercial registry of Geneva (expected on May 12, 2022), is scheduled for May 16, 2022. The New Shares will carry immediate dividend and voting rights and will be listed on the regulated market of Euronext Paris market under ISIN CH0308403085-GNRO.

In connection with the Offering, GeNeuro has undertaken, subject to standard exceptions, not to issue equity securities or securities giving rise to equity securities for a 90-day period and GNEH SAS, Eclosion2 Cie SCPC, Servier and the directors, officers and key employees who hold shares or stock options of the Company have agreed to a 90-day lockup period, subject to standard exceptions.

Detailed information about the Company, specifically its activity, its earnings, and the corresponding risk factors, appears in the Company's 2021 Universal Registration Document filed with the Autorite des Marches Financiers ("AMF") on April 27, 2022 under number D.22-0364. As a result of admission to trading of the New Shares on Euronext Paris, the Company has prepared and submitted a prospectus for approval by the AMF. The Company intends to file with the AMF on May 12, 2022, an update to the 2021 Universal Registration Document which, together with the 2021 Universal Registration Document, a securities note, and a summary (included in the securities note), will form a prospectus. This prospectus will, upon its approval by the AMF, provide the most recent information available on the Company. The 2021 Universal Registration Document, and when approved, the update to the Universal Registration Document may be consulted, along with the Company's other regulated information and all its press releases, on its website (www.geneuro.com).

Forthcoming investor and industry events:

May 31, 2022 Annual general meeting of shareholders June 28, 2022 Gilbert Dupont Midcaps Forum

About GeNeuro

GeNeuro's mission is to leverage HERV biology to develop safe and effective treatments for the benefit of patients, by neutralizing causal factors encoded by HERVs that represent 8% of human DNA.

GeNeuro is based in Geneva, Switzerland and has R&D facilities in Lyon, France. It has rights to 17 patent families protecting its technology.

For more information, visit: www.geneuro.com

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Legal notice

This announcement is for information purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy or subscribe for the Company's shares in any jurisdiction. This announcement does not constitute a prospectus. Any purchase of, subscription for or application for, shares to be issued in connection with the intended offering should only be made on the basis of information contained in the prospectus and any supplements thereto, as the case may be.

This announcement and the information contained herein do not constitute either an offer to sell or purchase, or the solicitation of an offer to sell or purchase, securities of GeNeuro S.A. (the "Company").

No communication or information in respect of the offering by the Company of its shares may be distributed to the public in any jurisdiction where registration or approval is required. No steps have been taken or will be taken in any jurisdiction where such steps would be required. The offering or subscription of shares may be subject to specific legal or regulatory restrictions in certain jurisdictions. The Company takes no responsibility for any violation of any such restrictions by any person.

This announcement does not, and shall not, in any circumstances, constitute a public offering nor an invitation to the public in connection with any offer. The distribution of this document may be restricted by law in certain jurisdictions. Persons into whose possession this document comes are required to inform themselves about and to observe any such restrictions.

This announcement is an advertisement and not a prospectus within the meaning of Regulation (EU) 2017/1129 (the "Prospectus Regulation"), as implemented in each member State of the European Economic Area.

France

The Company's shares in connection with the Capital Increase are not being offered or sold, directly or indirectly, to the public in France to persons other than qualified investors.

A prospectus will be submitted to the approval of the French Autorite des marches financiers in relation to the listing of the New Shares resulting from the Private Placement. Any offer or transfer of shares of the Company or distribution of offer documents has only been and will only be made in France to qualified investors as defined by Article 2(e) of the Prospectus Regulation and in accordance with Articles L. 411-1 and L. 411-2 of the French Monetary and Financial Code.

European Economic Area and United Kingdom

With respect to the member States of the European Economic Area, other than France, and the United Kingdom, (each, a "Relevant State"), no action has been undertaken or will be undertaken to make an offer to the public of the shares requiring a publication of a prospectus in any Relevant State. Consequently, the securities cannot be offered and will not be offered in any Relevant State (other than France), (i) to qualified investors within the meaning of the Prospectus Regulation, for any investor in a Member State of the European Economic Area, or Regulation (EU) 2017/1129 as part of national law under the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (the "UK Prospectus Regulation"), for any investor in the United Kingdom, (ii) to fewer than 150 individuals or legal entities (other than qualified investors as defined in the Prospectus Regulation or the UK Prospectus Regulation, as the case may be), or (iii) in accordance with the exemptions set out in Article 1(4) of the Prospectus Regulation, or in the other case which does not require the publication by GeNeuro of a prospectus pursuant to the Prospectus Regulation, the UK Prospectus Regulation and/or applicable regulation in this Member States.

No action has been undertaken or will be undertaken to make available any shares of the Company to any retail investor in the European Economic Area. For the purposes of this press release, the expression "retail investor" means a person who is one (or more) of the following:

a retail client as defined in point (11) of Article 4(1) of Directive 2014/65/EU (as amended, "MiFID II"); or

a customer within the meaning of Directive 2016/97/EU, as amended, where that customer would not qualify as a professional client as defined in point (10) of Article 4(1) of MiFID II; or not a "qualified investor" as defined in the Prospectus Regulation; and

the expression "offer" includes the communication in any form and by any means of sufficient information on the terms of the offer and the shares to be offered so as to enable an investor to decide to purchase or subscribe the shares.

United Kingdom

This press release does not constitute an offer of the securities to the public in the United Kingdom. The distribution of this press release is not made, and has not been approved, by an authorized person ("authorized person") within the meaning of Article 21(1) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. As a consequence, this press release is directed only at persons who (i) are located outside the United Kingdom, (ii) have professional experience in matters relating to investments and fall within Article 19(5) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotions) Order 2005, as amended and (iii) are persons falling within Article 49(2)(a) to (d) (high net worth companies, unincorporated associations, etc.) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005 (the persons mentioned under (i), (ii) and (iii) together "Relevant Persons"). The securities of GeNeuro are directed only at Relevant Persons and no invitation, offer or agreements to subscribe, purchase or otherwise acquire the securities of GeNeuro may be proposed or made other than with Relevant Persons. Any person other than a Relevant Person may not act or rely on this document or any provision thereof. This press release is not a prospectus which has been approved by the Financial Conduct Authority or any other United Kingdom regulatory authority for the purposes of Section 85 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000.

United States

This document may not be distributed, directly or indirectly, in or into the United States. This document does not constitute an offer of securities for sale nor the solicitation of an offer to purchase securities in the United States or any other jurisdiction where such offer may be restricted. Securities may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act") except pursuant to an exemption from, or in a transaction not subject to, the registration requirements thereof. The securities of the Company have not been and will not be registered under the Securities Act, and the Company does not intend to make a public offering of its securities in the United States. Copies of this document are not being, and should not be, distributed in or sent into the United States.

This document may not be distributed, directly or indirectly, in or into the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan South Africa or any other jurisdiction in which it would be unlawful to do so.

Forward Looking Statements

This press release contains certain forward looking statements and estimates concerning GeNeuro's financial condition, operating results, strategy, projects and future performance and the markets in which it operates. Such forward-looking statements and estimates may be identified by words, such as "anticipate," "believe," "can," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "is designed to," "may," "might," "plan," "potential," "predict," "objective," "should," or the negative of these and similar expressions. They incorporate all topics that are not historical facts. Forward looking statements, forecasts and estimates are based on management's current assumptions and assessment of risks, uncertainties and other factors, known and unknown, which were deemed to be reasonable at the time they were made but which may turn out to be incorrect. Events and outcomes are difficult to predict and depend on factors beyond the company's control. Consequently, the actual results, financial condition, performances and/or achievements of GeNeuro or of the industry may turn out to differ materially from the future results, performances or achievements expressed or implied by these statements, forecasts and estimates. Owing to these uncertainties, no representation is made as to the correctness or fairness of these forward-looking statements, forecasts and estimates. Furthermore, forward-looking statements, forecasts and estimates speak only as of the date on which they are made, and GeNeuro undertakes no obligation to update or revise any of them, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220511006196/en/

Contacts:

GeNeuro

Jesus Martin-Garcia

Chairman and CEO

+41 22 552 4800

investors@geneuro.com

NewCap (France)

Mathilde Bohin/Louis-Victor Delouvrier (investors)

+33 1 44 71 98 52

Arthur Rouille (media)

+33 1 44 71 94 98

geneuro@newcap.eu

RooneyPartners (US)

Jeanene Timberlake (media)

+1 646 770 8858

jtimberlake@rooneypartners.com
Pre-Stabilisation notice

12 May 2022

Not for distribution, directly or indirectly, in or into the United States or any jurisdiction in which such distribution would be unlawful.

Rentenbank

USD fixed rate senior unsecured Notes due 2029

Pre-Stabilisation Notice

Commerzbank AG (contact: Daniela Olt-Farrelly; telephone: +49 69 13620) hereby announces, as Stabilisation Coordinator, that the Stabilising Managers named below may stabilise the offer of the following securities in accordance with Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2016/1052 under the Market Abuse Regulation (EU Regulation 596/2014).

The security to be stabilised: Issuer: Landwirtschaftliche Rentenbank Guarantor (if any): Federal Republic of Germany Aggregate nominal amount: USD 500,000,000 Description: Registered, fixed rate, senior unsecured Notes due 21 May 2029 Offer price: tbc Other offer terms: of the issuer's EMTN Programme, denoms 1k/1k, NSS format, RegS, payment date 19th May 2022 Stabilisation: Stabilisation Coordinator:

Stabilising Managers: Commerzbank

CIBC Capital Markets

Goldman Sachs Bank Europe SE

Standard Chartered Bank AG Stabilisation period expected to start on: May 12, 2022 Stabilisation period expected to end on: no later than 30 days after the proposed issue date of the securities Existence, maximum size and conditions of use of over-allotment facility. The Stabilising Managers may over-allot the securities to the extent permitted in accordance with applicable law. Stabilisation trading venue: Luxembourg SE

In connection with the offer of the above securities, the Stabilising Manager(s) may over-allot the securities or effect transactions with a view to supporting the market price of the securities during the stabilisation period at a level higher than that which might otherwise prevail. However, stabilisation may not necessarily occur and any stabilisation action, if begun, may cease at any time Any stabilisation action or over-allotment shall be conducted in accordance with all applicable laws and rules.

This announcement is for information purposes only and does not constitute an invitation or offer to underwrite, subscribe for or otherwise acquire or dispose of any securities of the Issuer in any jurisdiction.

This announcement is not for distribution, directly or indirectly, in or into the United States or any other jurisdiction in which such distribution would be unlawful.

END
AI-based exoskeleton supports heavy lifting and walking to improve overall business performance through advanced ergonomics and human augmentation

Live Cray X power suit demonstrations highlighting diverse logistics use cases at Multimodal

Dedicated German Bionic team now on the ground in UK & Ireland

AUGSBURG, Germany, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Coinciding with the establishment of a dedicated local team in the UK and Ireland, German Bionic is taking part at Multimodal 2022, the nation's premier logistics and supply chain management event. The Augsburg-based robotics specialist will offer live demonstrations at its stand to highlight how its smart, fully connected Cray X power suit can be effectively deployed in logistics, intralogistics as well as any other environments where frequent heavy lifting is involved. The lightweight, waterproof exoskeleton provides up to 30 kg support per lifting movement for the lower back as well as active walking assistance for the legs. The Cray X also incorporates the unique AI-based Smart Safety Companion early warning system for ergonomics., which helps businesses to optimize their manual handling processes, protect the health of their workers, and achieve their ESG goals. Multimodal 2022 takes place in Birmingham, UK, 14-16 June 2022. The German Bionic stand is located at Booth 8061, in close vicinity to the UKWA pavilion.

- Cross reference: Picture is available at AP Images (http://www.apimages.com) -

"With the deployment of our exoskeleton Cray X, businesses are revolutionizing their processes and systems in all areas of logistics and intralogistics. We look forward to demonstrating the potential of the intelligent German Bionic IO platform to Multimodal visitors with our increasingly versatile use cases," says Armin G. Schmidt, CEO of German Bionic.

Smart and sustainable: AI-based workplace safety and long-term performance gains

In the age of Industry 4.0, digitalization, connectivity and artificial intelligence are making systems grow together ever more intelligently, thereby creating the conditions for enhanced workplace safety and effectiveness. By deploying the award-winning fully connected German Bionic Cray X power suit, businesses are realizing the ideal case of humans and machines interacting seamlessly and intuitively with each other. The smart exoskeleton provides up to 30 kilograms of support per lifting movement at manual workplaces and is simultaneously integrated into the digital workflow via the German Bionic IO platform.

Visitors to the German Bionic stand at Multimodal in Birmingham will learn more about how companies can use the data collected by the Cray X in real time to make flexible adjustments to their processes. The on-site specialists will explain, for example, how the integrated AI-based Smart Safety Companion early warning system for ergonomics can prevent fatigue, incorrect posture, and poor lifting techniques, thus preventing overload-related errors and injuries. And how comprehensive reporting functions can give companies clear overviews of the effectiveness of their safety measures, thus opening up new potentials for workplace safety and business performance.

Revolutionary: First exoskeleton of its kind to support two body regions simultaneously

The latest generation of the smart exoskeleton opens new dimensions in human augmentation. "We have made the Cray X smarter, more powerful, and more versatile," says Norma Steller, CPO of German Bionic. "Smarter because we now incorporate our AI-based ergonomics early warning system - the Smart Safety Companion, more powerful because we are now using a 40 V battery platform and have completely revamped the battery management system, and more versatile because the new Cray X is also suited for outdoor use cases as it is now water and dustproof in accordance with the IP54 standard, supporting new use cases. But perhaps most revolutionary of all, our Crax X is the first exoskeleton of its kind to support two body regions at the same time: the lower back while lifting and the legs while walking."

Multimodal 2022 is the first specialist trade fair in the UK being hosted by the new German Bionic team on the ground dedicated to the UK and Ireland, running 14-16 June in Birmingham. Visitors can secure their demonstration slot at the event in advance by contacting the local German Bionic representative, Andy Bridgewater. The German Bionic stand is located at Booth 8061.

About German Bionic

German Bionic is a leading developer and manufacturer of smart power suits. Exoskeletons are human-machine systems that combine human intelligence with machine power by supporting or amplifying the wearer's movements. The Cray X from German Bionic is the world's first connected exoskeleton. Linked to the Smart Factory, it self-learns to reinforce lifting movements and prevent incorrect posture, thus becoming an intelligent link between humans and machines. In doing so, it delivers data that underscores its ability to protect the health of workers, measurably reduce the risk of accidents, and thereby make quantifiable improvements to work processes. In recognition of this innovative technology, which puts people back in the focus of Industry 4.0, German Bionic and the Cray X have received numerous awards, including the Bavarian and German Entrepreneur Awards, the Land of Ideas and Automatica Award, as well as a nomination for the prestigious Hermes Award at the Hannover Messe. German Bionic offices are located in Augsburg, Berlin, Boston, and Tokyo.

UK & Ireland representative:

Andy Bridgewater

Sales Manager UK & Ireland

+44 (0) 7946 027 568

a.bridgewater@germanbionic.com

Press contact:

Eric Eitel

Head of Communications

+49 (0) 175 338 04 53

ee@germanbionic.com

www.germanbionic.com
MUNICH, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- At Intersolar Europe 2022, held at Messe Munchen, Germany, Huawei shared its commitment to collaborating with partners and customers and empowering them with innovative FusionSolar Smart PV solutions for a better, greener, and smarter future. Under the theme of "Building a low-carbon smart society", Huawei invited its global clients and partners to experience the progress and potential of solar power at its exhibition booth. Huawei demonstrated how it combines solar with storage and intelligence to accelerate the deployment of solar power as mainstream energy and enable industries and households to benefit from green electricity.

I. FusionSolar Smart PV Solution 6.0+: Safe, Reliable, and with Higher Yields

Huawei's FusionSolar Smart PV Solution features the Smart String Inverter and has been widely recognized by customers for its delivery of clean solar power by integrating digital and power electronics technologies while promoting the digital and intelligent development of the PV industry.

A. Ensure Safety and Reliability for Power Plants

With increasing power in modules and inverters, safety on the direct current (DC) side has become a challenge for PV plants. After over two years of R&D efforts, Huawei launched the exclusive Smart String-Level Disconnector Technology (SSLD-TECH), achieving active DC disconnection and precise string-level disconnection. Based on an all-scenario design approach with high precision and fast response, SSLD-TECH accurately identifies and reliably cuts off common DC system faults. It can break reverse string connection/reverse current flow and inverter short circuit.

In terms of reliability, according to a report issued by TUV in March 2022, Huawei's Smart PV Solution has achieved a 99.999% availability based on the operation data of the 2.2 GW project in Qinghai, China. With durable modules and smart O&M, the world's largest power plants can run smoothly and efficiently.

B. Grid Forming

Developed by Huawei, the intelligent grid connection algorithm enables a PV system to be adapted to various grid scenarios. Specifically, it enables excellent performance in terms of frequency and voltage in a weak grid environment and comprehensively improves PV power plants' voltage and power control capabilities. When the value of SCR is as low as 1.2, the intelligent grid connection algorithm ensures that the inverter runs at full power without derating and successfully passes through high and low voltage continuously. This supports the stability of the power grid and addresses the global issue of large-scale grid-connected consumption of new energy.

In terms of power grid support, Huawei's Smart PV & Storage Solution can be used to build a voltage source power station, which is compatible with the power grid. This verified that Grid Forming technology can increase the proportion of new energy access this year, based on the integration of optical storage.

The Grid Forming technology completes technical verification in a weak grid environment, further accelerating PV power generation from "Grid Supporting" to "Grid Forming", and advancing solar power to become a main energy source.

C.Increase Power Generation and Make Optimal Investment

Huawei string inverters use multi-channel maximum power point tracking (MPPT) that solves the problem of string mismatch, and the Smart DC System (SDS) to achieve more than 1% increase in power generation through the integration of AI algorithms. In Guangxi, China, the solution increases power generation by 1.69%. Huawei cooperates with more than 10 brands of tracking solar panels to provide users with a better experience. Real-time data from multiple global projects shows that Huawei's smart PV solutions can significantly increase power generation and help customers shorten their investment payback period.

D. Smart O&M

Smart I-V Curve Diagnosis 4.0 has revolutionized traditional operation and maintenance methods. It is like a "CT scan" offering a complete online full-scale inspection of 100 MW power plants in 20 minutes, and automatically generating diagnosis reports. It can also scan regularly within flexible times, providing a better user experience. In addition, it supports 14 types of fault diagnosis, with a converge rate of more than 80% of main faults. The key indicators of IV detection, the recognition rate, accuracy rate, and recurrence rate are all greater than 90%. This meets the industry's highest level of CGC appraisal IV classification certification Level 4. In a real-life application, it helped the 30 MW project of a Malaysian customer save 2,000 hours of workload every year.

II. Smart String ESS: FusionSolar for Optimal Levelized Cost of Energy Storage (LCOS)

Energy storage plays an important role in electricity generation, transmission, distribution, and consumption within the clean energy system. An Energy Storage Solution (ESS) serves as a power reserve and a grid regulator and stabilizers simultaneously, providing valuable resources for peak shaving and frequency regulation.

Due to cell mismatch, conventional energy storage solutions are characterized by limited capacity, short service life, complex O&M, and significant safety risk, inhibiting their widespread application. With over ten years of R&D experience in ESS, Huawei integrates digital, power electronics and energy storage technologies in a unique smart string structure to overcome the limitations of lithium batteries. Suitable for peak shaving and frequency regulation, Huawei's Smart String ESS delivers a flexible and cost-effective solution with higher profit potential.

A. Optimal Investment

Huawei adopts four innovations to boost energy throughput in battery charging and discharging, offering a solution to cell mismatch.

The pack-level optimization of Smart String ESS enables independent charging and discharging of cells to prevent mismatch loss.

of Smart String ESS enables independent charging and discharging of cells to prevent mismatch loss. Rack-level optimization improves energy throughput by 15% or reduces the initial configurations by 15% at the same energy throughput by eliminating the risks of circulating currents.

improves energy throughput by 15% or reduces the initial configurations by 15% at the same energy throughput by eliminating the risks of circulating currents. With distributed cooling , temperature difference in the container can be controlled within 3C at a 0.5 C-rate, which extends the battery life by 50%.

, temperature difference in the container can be controlled within 3C at a 0.5 C-rate, which extends the battery life by 50%. The all-modular design, efficient and reliable, cuts the levelized cost of energy storage (LCOS) by 20% and generates more revenue.

B.Simplified O&M

The problem of cell mismatch is intensified during the operation of a PV plant, which requires routine shutdowns for the manual calibration of battery state of charge (SOC). Through Huawei's exclusive pack-level optimization, automatic SOC calibration is carried out without the need to pause operations. The easy replacement of faulty modules eliminates the need for onsite visits by experts, significantly reducing O&M costs. Pre-installed with battery cells, each container weighs less than 30 tons, making it easy to transport the container.

C. Safety and Reliability

Focusing on the end-to-end safety design, Huawei has implemented four-layer active shutdown and two-level passive isolation of ESS protection ensure all-around system safety.

In response to different business models, Huawei's Smart String ESS can be deployed flexibly to create value for customers. Huawei energy storage solution achieves the streamlined management of battery discharging with the Smart Rack Controller, ensuring longer, constant power output which is critical to frequency regulation. At the same time, Huawei's automatic SOC calibration and high availability address the industry challenges for ESS in frequency regulation scenarios, such as high SOC balance frequency and component failures, reducing operating expenses for customers. For peak shaving, the Pack Optimizer and the Smart Rack Controller increase power output by 15% during the life cycle, generating higher revenues for customers.

III. Commercial & Industrial Smart PV Solution 2.0: FusionSolar for a Sustainable Business

With increasing demand from enterprises to reduce electricity costs and carbon emissions, Huawei launched the 1+3 C&I Smart PV Solution 2.0, including an all-new three-phase inverter (SUN2000-50KTL-M3), a Smart String ESS (LUNA2000-200KWH-2H0), which can be coupled with the 100kW power conditioning system (PCS), and a smart PV optimizer (MERC-1100W/1300W-P). The C&I Smart PV Solution will help industries move into a low-carbon era with optimized electricity costs, active safety, and smart O&M for an enhanced experience.

The electricity consumption of enterprises usually peaks in the daytime, and the consumption curve is comparatively consistent with the PV curve. Electricity costs can be significantly reduced by using PV power for self-consumption and selling the remaining power to the grid at feed-in tariff rates. The installation of an ESS further boosts the self-consumption rate to more than 80%, and by taking advantage of critical peak pricing, the production costs can be lowered. These solutions can help customers build a low-carbon environment with improved competitiveness for green development.

A.Optimal Electricity Cost: As seen from case study comparisons, Huawei's C&I Smart PV Solution can increase power generation by more than 2% under the same conditions. To address shading issues commonly faced by the C&I sector, Huawei has launched the latest MERC-1100W/1300W-P optimizer, increasing installation volume by up to 30%. When the system capacity is elevated from 175kW to 200kW, 15% increase in installation volume can contribute 25,000 kWh of additional electricity. Thanks to its pack-level optimization, Smart String ESS improves energy throughput by 2%-5% during the service life, which further reduces the electricity cost.

B. Active Safety: The inverter is equipped with an AI-powered arc fault circuit interrupter (AFCI), which received the highest Level 4 certification from the CGC, to ensure safety for customers. The AFCI can detect arc fault locations in modules and distinguish noises from electric arcs, effectively eliminating false alarms and omissions. The combination of the leading SSLD-TECH and the AFCI provides dual protection for the system with precise DC fault detection and emergency disconnection. The four layers of ESS protection can prevent safety hazards, system faults and potential failures, drastically improving the system's safety.

C. Smart O&M: The installation of the optimizer enables module-level management and the real-time monitoring of the power plant operation, cutting O&M costs by 50%. The automatic SOC calibration of the ESS saves personnel site visit and reduces O&M costs.

IV. Residential Smart PV Solution 3.0: FusionSolar for a Better Life

Following the launch of the "1+3+X" Residential Smart PV Solution 2.0 in 2021, Huawei presented the upgraded "1+4+X" design this year. Featuring a smart energy controller which connects a module controller, an ESS, an EV charger, and a management system, the integrated solution enables a smart power consumption ecosystem. This enhances PV self-consumption rate to 90% from 70% in the previous generation, bringing an all-around clean energy experience to homes with lower electricity costs, active safety, and intelligent assistance.

EV Charger (FusionCharge AC AP07/22N-EU): To enable low-carbon living, Huawei has launched a new solar EV charger for residential use with easy indoor and outdoor installation, delivering convenient fast charging.

A. Optimal Electricity Cost: Slimmer and lighter, the brand-new SUN2000-600W-P Smart Module Controller performs well for high-power modules. The flexible design coupled with the optimizer is suitable for any rooftop while supporting shading conditions and multi-directional installation. Power generation can go up by 27%, as seen in a pilot case study. Compact and stylish, Huawei's Smart String ESS supports modular configurations and delivers high power throughput, allowing customers to enjoy efficient, clean energy.

B. Active Safety: The industry-leading AFCI technology can accurately detect arc faults and disconnect the inverter in 0.5 seconds. Meeting NEC 2017, which is one of the most stringent international safety standards, the smart optimizer supports automatic and manual activation in an emergency to bring the voltage of rooftop modules to zero. This helps to prevent electric shocks with rapid disconnection. The ESS also complies with VDE2510, one of Germany's strictest standards in system safety. All of these minimize the safety hazards of a residential PV system to give customers peace of mind.

C. Intelligent Assistant: The AI energy management assistant EMMA can offer accurate estimations of PV power generation and household electricity consumption by learning from big data about weather conditions and user habits. It automatically adjusts the system for the best working mode, delivering clean solar power while ensuring comfort.

The combination of PV and ESS provides backup power during outages, ensuring the smooth running of important appliances such as security systems, lighting equipment and refrigerators, eliminating customers' concerns about continuous power supply at home.

V. Smart Micro-grid Solution: Clean and Reliable Power Supply

According to World Bank, 840 million people live in off/unstable grid areas, where electricity from oil is still common. This traditional way of power generation results in high carbon dioxide emissions, high costs, and low efficiency, contributing to the widespread problem of the energy divide. Huawei has launched the Smart Micro-grid Solution to deliver optimal LCOE for 100 MW micro-grid projects with energy storage, providing a clean, safe, and reliable power supply with higher energy output and lower costs.

A. Optimal LCOE and Reliable Power Supply

The solution supports the seamless online transition of medium-voltage off/on-grid changeover and off-grid fault ride-through effectively to avoid power outage loss of US$2 million/MW compared to traditional power generation from oil. The solution delivers optimal power quality, helping to achieve zero-carbon generation and eliminate the energy divide.

B. Reduced System Costs

Compared to traditional power generation from oil, Huawei Smart Micro-grid Solution saves LCOE over 50%. Adopting a 2:1 PV/BESS ratio, the solution can reduce the initial configurations by up to 50%.

C. Active Safety

Equipped with SSLD-TECH, the Smart String Inverter enhances the active safety of power plants. The Smart String ESS features four-layer active shutdown and two-level passive isolation, preventing risks at the first place.

Huawei integrates information and communications technology (ICT), power electronics, and energy storage, and continues to collaborate with customers and business partners worldwide to build a low-carbon environment. The company is focused on achieving its goal of zero carbon and accelerating carbon neutrality for a greener, better future.

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MADRID (dpa-AFX) - Spanish telecom major Telefonica SA (TDE.L, TEF), on Thursday reported a decline in profit for the first quarter. In addition, for the full year, the company said it is on track to meet the targets For the first three-month period of 2022, the Madrid-headquartered company reported a net income of 706 million euros or 0.12 euro per share, compared with 886 million euros or 0.15 euro per share, reported for the same period, last year. Operating income before depreciation and amortization (OIBDA) increased to 3.75 billion euros, from 3.42 billion euros, posted for the March quarter of 2021. At the end of the first quarter, net financial debt moved down by 23.3 percent to 27.453 billion, on year-on-year basis. Revenues for the first quarter rose to 10.88 billion, from 10.34 billion, reported a year ago. Looking ahead, for the fiscal 2022, the company said that, 'the growth in both revenues and OIBDA is on track to meet the financial targets set by the company for the full year, which are to achieve low single digit growth in both items organically.' Copyright(c) 2022 RTTNews.com. All Rights Reserved Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

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Launch in Spain follows successful launches in Germany France in late 2021

Cazoo makes buying a car as simple as buying any other product online today

Sold over 65,000 cars online in the UK since its launch just over two years ago

Cazoo to become main sponsor of Valencia Real Sociedad from next season

Cazoo (NYSE: CZOO), Europe's leading online car retailer, which makes buying and selling a car as simple and seamless as ordering any other product online, today announced that it has now launched its service in Spain, delivering better selection, value, transparency, convenience and peace of mind to Spanish consumers when buying their next car.

Cazoo owns and reconditions its cars to the highest standard before offering them for delivery in just a few days and has hundreds of cars available in Spain (www.cazoo.com/es). With customers able to purchase a car entirely online and have it delivered directly to their door, Cazoo has been referred to as the 'Amazon of the used car market'.

Cazoo customers can review high quality, 360-degree images from the comfort of their home as well as the details of the car's features and history, try it out at home for up to 7 days to make sure they love it, or Cazoo will collect it for free. Every Cazoo car in Spain comes with a full 7-day money back guarantee as well as a 12-month warranty.

Cazoo was founded in 2018 by renowned British entrepreneur Alex Chesterman and has already sold over 65,000 cars in the UK since its launch just over two years ago as consumers have embraced the selection, value, transparency and convenience of buying and selling used cars fully online. Cazoo launched in France and Germany in December last year and has plans to launch in Italy later this year.

Cazoo has been one of the fastest growing businesses in Europe over the past few years, pioneering the shift to online car buying. It plans to continue to invest to further build out its brand and infrastructure as it looks to continue to transform the car buying and selling experience across the UK and in key markets across mainland Europe.

Alex Chesterman, Founder CEO of Cazoo said: "We are very excited to launch in Spain, following our recent launches in both France and Germany at the end of last year. We have reimagined car buying to make it simple and convenient whilst to give consumers total peace of mind when buying their next car. With Cazoo, you can purchase a used car entirely online, have it delivered to your door in a few days and have up to a week to make sure you love it. We have a great team in Spain and look forward to delivering the best car buying experience to consumers across the Spanish market."

About Cazoo www.cazoo.co.uk

Our mission is to transform the car buying and selling experience across the UK Europe by providing better selection, value, transparency, convenience and peace of mind. Our aim is to make buying or selling a car no different to ordering any other product online, where consumers can simply and seamlessly buy, sell, finance or subscribe to a car entirely online for delivery or collection in as little as 72 hours. Cazoo was founded in 2018 by serial entrepreneur Alex Chesterman OBE, is backed by some of the leading technology investors globally and is publicly traded (NYSE: CZOO)

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220512005076/en/

Contacts:

Lawrence Hall (Group Communications Director) lawrence.hall@cazoo.co.uk
Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Unbound Group Plc (UBG.L), a British multi-brand retail platform, said in a trading update on Wednesday that its core business, Hotter Shoes has posted a strong performance for the first quarter by registering a double-digit rise in revenue against the same period last year as well as an improvement in gross margin. Ian Watson, CEO, said: '.The development of the Unbound Group platform is gathering pace and we have secured a number of exciting launch partner brands within footwear and apparel. We are engaged in positive discussions with a number of additional potential partners that will further develop our footwear and apparel offer and launch our wellness proposition, to be followed by other target categories in phased implementations...' In addition, the Group has reiterated its guidance for the full year, ending on February 4, 2023. 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.
Data Management Innovator Expands Global Presence to Support Growing Customer Base

Arcitecta, a creative and innovative data management software company, today announced that it has opened its new EMEA headquarters in Munich, Germany, to support the company's current and growing business across Europe. Arcitecta also announced the appointment of Frank Radefeldt as senior vice president of customer success worldwide and managing director for Europe.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220512005037/en/

Frank Radefeldt, SVP of Customer Success Worldwide and Managing Director for Europe, Arcitecta (Photo: Business Wire)

"Arcitecta is experiencing strong demand and traction in Europe, driven by exponential data growth, the challenge of managing massive data volumes and the increasingly geo-distributed nature of today's workforces and workflows," said Jason Lohrey, Arcitecta's CEO and founder. "The new EMEA headquarters office underscores our commitment to supporting our customers with a regional presence and resources. We are also delighted to welcome Frank, an executive with a proven track record of devotion to customer success, to lead our operations in Europe and help organizations of all sizes solve their toughest data management challenges."

Radefeldt is a seasoned international technology leader who has served in various management and professional services roles for technology companies such as SGI, Splunk and McAfee over the past 15 years. During this time, he developed a reputation for building customer-focused sales and technical teams that drive customer success and desired outcomes.

"I first experienced the magic of Arcitecta's Mediaflux data management fabric while at SGI many years ago. It is a powerful platform that has become increasingly relevant as it solves key challenges that organizations are grappling with today but may not be aware that a solution exists," said Radefeldt. "l am excited to join such an innovative, customer-focused company. And I look forward to supporting organizations throughout Europe with leveraging metadata and increasing automation and ease of data management including moving massive data and metadata volumes quickly and securely across all networks to support their distributed workflows and requirements. Mediaflux helps significantly with making big data manageable again."

Arcitecta provides customers with innovative end-to-end data management solutions that radically simplify global data management. Its proven Mediaflux solution delivers highly scalable data management capabilities that allow for easy collaboration, data access and sharing and significant workflow efficiencies using a single system to manage and move the data optimally.Arcitecta's Mediaflux Livewire solution can transfer billions of files securely, reliably and globally at ultra-fast speeds and was recently awarded the "Most Complete Solution" and "Best Software Architecture" by the International Data Mover Challenge at Supercomputing Asia 2022.

Tweet thisArcitecta opens European office in Munich and expands global presence to support current and growing customer base with powerful Mediaflux datamanagement capabilities https://bit.ly/3Ft0p7y metadata datamover ISC2022 ISC

Upcoming ISC High Performance 2022 Interactive Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) Session

Arcitecta's CEO, Jason Lohrey, will join Matt Starr, Spectra Logic's CTO, Allan Williams, associate director at National Computational Infrastructure, and Nick Whalen, architect data engineering at Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, for an interactive discussion on the topic of Does HPC Really Need Data Management? The session will be held on Tuesday, May 31 from 1:00 2:00 pm CEST in Hall D at ISC 2022 in Hamburg, Germany. Register here for ISC 2022.

About Arcitecta

Arcitecta is a creative and innovative data management software company. Founded in 1998, Arcitecta builds the world's best data management platforms, enabling thousands of users worldwide in some of the most demanding data-driven environments. Long before "Big Data" became a buzzword, Arcitecta recognized that data would underpin every human endeavor and create a significant explosion in all forms of data during the coming decades. Arcitecta's flagship Mediaflux platform began with the vision to provide organizations with extraordinary technology for handling all forms of data, from small to very large and complex. Today, it forms the foundation for managing the simplest and the most complex data for all sizes of organizations and global enterprises, empowering them to simplify data-intensive workflows and accelerate time to insight from their data to improve business outcomes and people's quality of life.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220512005037/en/

Contacts:

Media Contact Information



Press@Arcitecta.com



US/EMEA Media Inquiries:

Denise Nelson, IGNITE Consulting

+1 925-858-5198



Australia/APAC Media Inquiries:

Emily King Arcitecta Marketing and Communications

+61 434 255 022
WARSAW, Poland, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The vast majority of refugees from Ukraine staying in Poland want to work, but more than half intend to return to their homeland immediately after the end of the war - according to the study "Refugees from Ukraine in Poland" prepared by the EWL Migration Platform and the Eastern Europe Study of the University of Warsaw.

The survey shows that the vast majority of refugees (as many as 94%) are women, and their average age is 38 years. At the same time, almost 2/3 of refugees are mothers with children who require special care, both in terms of psychological care and in terms of adapting work processes to the possibilities of caring for the family.

Among the refugees who crossed the Polish border after February 24, almost 2/3 have a university degree and represent professions considered to be scarce in Poland. The largest number are highly qualified specialists (17%), teachers and employees of the education sector (15%), employees of the service sector (14%) and sales and trade (13%). Among the refugees there are also representatives of the medical industry (6%, including doctors - 1%) and widely sought-after employees of the IT sector (2%).

The authors of the study pointed out that as many as 63% of refugees from Ukraine want to take advantage of special solutions introduced by the Polish government and take up paid work during their stay in Poland. Only one in five respondents declares to live on their own financial resources (20%), and only 6% count on the allowance provided for refugees.

According to Michalina Sielewicz, International Business Development Director of the EWL Migration Platform, although the study was conducted with the Polish market in mind, its results may also be of interest to Czechs, who have already issued refugees from Ukraine with over 330,000 visas giving them temporary protection with access to the labor market, health and social care and the education system. In the context of the lowest level of unemployment in the European Union and over 360,000 vacancies, we can assume that the Czech market will absorb refugees willing to work.

The majority of refugees (56%) want to return to Ukraine after the end of the war. Only every third declares their willingness to stay in Poland for longer. In turn, 12% of respondents intend to emigrate further. Most often they indicate such directions of migration as Germany (26%), the United States (16%) and the United Kingdom (11%).

It is worth mentioning that before the war, about 1.5 million Ukrainian citizens worked in Poland. After February 24, 2024, over 120,000 Ukrainian refugees have already started working in Poland, and over a million people have already received the PESEL number necessary to start working in Poland.

The special report was created after analyzing the results of the sociological study "Refugees from Ukraine in Poland", which was carried out between March 23 and April 3, 2022 by the EWL Migration Platform and the East European Study of the University of Warsaw. 400 Ukrainian citizens who decided to come to Polish after February 24, 2022 in connection with Russia's aggression against Ukraine were surveyed.
Paris, France, 11 May 2022

GeoPost/DPDgroup announces its withdrawal from the Russian market

We are deeply shocked by the violence of the war in Ukraine and by its devastating impact on the lives of millions of innocent people. We stand in solidarity with international sanctions and apply them without restriction.

We suspended all GeoPost/DPDgroup shipments to and from Russia on February 28th, 2022. Today, we are taking the decision to withdraw from the Russian market.

Established in 2004, GeoPost/DPDgroup's Russian subsidiary (DPD Russia) operates mainly domestic delivery services to individuals and small business customers. The company employs 3,000 people locally.

We are currently preparing an ownership transfer operation, in compliance with applicable regulatory requirements. Throughout the transition process, GeoPost/DPDgroup will continue to fulfil its obligations to its customers, suppliers, and employees. We anticipate a risk of impairment in the value1 of the company.

Upon completion the company will operate independently of GeoPost/DPDgroup which will have no more presence in Russia. GeoPost/DPDgroup will not benefit from this transfer of ownership.

In the face of this tragedy, we hope that peace will be restored in the nearest possible future.

1 On 31st December 2021, the value of the company for 100% of the shares was 128 million, based on its book value on GeoPost's balance sheet and a conversion rate of 1 EUR = 85.3 RUB.

About GeoPost/DPDgroup

DPDgroup is one of the world leading parcel delivery networks, aiming to be a reference in sustainable delivery and become a leading enabler of e-commerce acceleration.We combine innovative technology and local knowledge to provide a flexible and user-friendly service for both shippers and shoppers.

With 120,000 delivery experts operating in nearly 50 countries, and a network of 70,000 Pickup points, we deliver 8.4 million parcels worldwide each day - 2.1 billion parcels per year - through the brands DPD, Chronopost, SEUR, BRT and Jadlog. DPDgroup is the parcel delivery network of GeoPost. GeoPost posted sales of 14.7 billion in 2021. GeoPost is a holding company owned by La Poste group.

Press contact

service.presse@laposte.fr

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The "France Telecom Operators Country Intelligence Report" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The report provides an executive-level overview of the telecommunications market in France today, with detailed forecasts of key indicators up to 2026.

The report provides detailed analysis of the near-term opportunities, competitive dynamics, and evolution of demand by service type and technology/platform across the fixed telephony, broadband, mobile, and pay-TV markets, as well as a review of key regulatory trends.

The total telecom and pay-TV service revenue will grow at a CAGR of 1.8% over the 2021-2026 period, from $43.6 billion in 2021 to $47.7 billion by the end of 2026, supported by growth in revenues from revenue growth in the mobile data and fixed broadband segments.

Mobile data service revenue will grow from $16.0 billion in 2021 to $22.3 billion by 2026, at a CAGR of 6.9% over 2021-2026, driven by growing mobile internet subscriptions, growing adoption of relatively high cost 5G services, and increasing mobile data ARPU over the forecast period.

Scope

The overall telecom and pay-TV services revenue in France will grow at a CAGR of 1.8% during the forecast period 2021-2026, to reach $47.7 billion by 2026

Mobile data service revenues will grow at a CAGR of 6.9% over 2021-2026, driven by growing mobile internet subscription and increasing mobile data service ARPU over the forecast period

Fixed broadband service revenue will increase at a CAGR of 1.7% over 2021-2026, supported by steadily rising adoption of fixed wireless services, robust growth projected for cable subscriptions, and fiber roll outs from telcos supported by government initiatives to expand broadband coverage in the country

The Country Intelligence Report provides in-depth analysis of the following:

Demographic and macroeconomic context in France

The regulatory environment and trends: a review of the regulatory setting and agenda for the next 18-24 months as well as relevant developments pertaining to spectrum licensing, DTT migration, IoT regulations, etc

Telecom and pay-TV services market outlook: analysis as well as historical figures and forecasts of service revenue from the fixed telephony, broadband, mobile voice, mobile data, and pay-TV markets

The competitive landscape: an examination of the positioning of leading players in the telecom and pay-TV services market as well as subscription market shares across segments

Company snapshots: analysis of the financial position of leading service providers in the telecommunications and pay-TV markets

Underlying assumptions behind our published base-case forecasts, as well as potential market developments that would alter, either positively or negatively, our base-case outlook

Key Topics Covered:

Market Highlights

Demographic, Macroeconomic, and Regulatory Context

Demographic and Macroeconomic Context

Regulatory Context

Telecom Market Outlook

Total Telecom Service Revenue

Mobile Services Market

Fixed Services Market

Pay-Tv Service Market

Competitive Landscape and Company Snapshots

Competitive Landscape

Companies Mentioned

Orange S.A.

SFR

Bouygues Telecom

Free

Canal+

La Poste Mobile France

Lycamobile France

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/heemcp

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220512005579/en/

Contacts:

ResearchAndMarkets.com

Laura Wood, Senior Press Manager

press@researchandmarkets.com

For E.S.T Office Hours Call 1-917-300-0470

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NEW YORK, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The portable minimally invasive surgery simulators market was valued at $148.6 million in 2021, and it is expected to propel at a 13.9% CAGR and reach $479.9 million by 2030, according to the market research report published by P&S Intelligence.

This has mainly to do with the rising awareness of the learning based on simulation, implementation of laparoscopic simulation systems, fast digitization of the healthcare industry, technological developments in portable MIS simulators, and rising demand for minimally invasive treatments, which are quick and less painful and have a shorter recovery period.

The largest share in the portable minimally invasive surgery simulators market was held by the endoscopic category in 2021. The rising prevalence of intestinal disorders is resulting in the increasing demand for minimally invasive endoscopic surgeries. The main reasons are their economical nature and faster recovery as opposed to conventional surgeries.

Get the sample pages of this report at: https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/portable-minimally-invasive-surgery-simulators-mis-market/report-sample

Key Findings of Portable Minimally Invasive Surgery Simulators Market Report

Medical training centers are likely to propel with the highest CAGR in the coming years. This can be credited to the snowballing demand for simulation-based training because of the shortage of professionals.

Furthermore, the growing emphasis on the safety of patients has decreased the training experience for apprentice surgeons in the operation theater. Accordingly, to satisfy the need for appropriate skill development, medical training centers are swiftly integrating portable MIS simulators into their training module.

The share of the North American portable minimally invasive surgery simulators market was the largest, at 30.5%, in 2021. This was mainly because of the early adoption of innovative technologies by the stalwarts of the industry and end users.

Other than this, the major factors responsible for the growth of the market are the extensive collaborations among market players and growing expenditure on healthcare.

There are various technological advancements in the medical field that are fueling the demand for simulation. Several technologically advanced products let students and doctors obtain or improve their skills with the usage of AR, robotics, and AI.

In the recent past, VR trainers have been familiarized with skill development in minimally invasive techniques. The specific hand-eye coordination and the needed psychomotor skills for MISs can be learned with the use of VR simulation techniques.

Browse detailed report on Global Portable Minimally Invasive Surgery Simulators Market Revenue Estimation and Demand Forecast to 2030

Simulation-based learning helps in converting knowledge into practice, gathering quantifiable data on students and patients, and increasing safety for doctors and patients. Because of this and the increasing prevalence of injuries during surgeries, the portable minimally invasive surgery simulators market has been growing. The WHO states that risky surgical care procedures lead to complications in around 25% of the patients. Nearly 7 million surgical patients suffer from major problems, 1 million of whom die during or immediately after surgery.

Major market players are involved in partnerships and collaborations to maintain a competitive edge. For instance, VirtaMed AG and Memic Innovative Surgery Ltd. declared their partnership in February 2022 for developing a VR simulator program to help in surgical skills training for the Hominis Surgical System. Other players include CATHI GmbH, Laparo Sp. z.o.o., eoSurgical Ltd., MEDICAL-X, Mentice AB, Inovus Ltd., Olympus Corporation, Surgical Science Sweden AB, 3-Dmed, and CAE Inc.

Portable MIS Simulators Market Segmentation Analysis

By Type

Endoscopic

Flexible



Upper gastrointestinal endoscopy simulators





Bronchoscopy simulators





Colonoscopy simulators





Rhinoscopy simulators



Rigid



Laparoscopy simulators





Urology simulators





Gynecology simulators





Arthroscopy simulators

Cardiac

By End User

Academic Institutes

Medical Training Centers

Hospitals

Surgical Clinics

Regional Analysis

North America

U.S.



Canada

Europe

Germany



France



U.K.



Italy



Spain

Asia-Pacific

Japan



China



India

Latin America

Brazil



Mexico

Middle East and Africa

and U.A.E.



Saudi Arabia

Browse Other Related Reports

Global Surgical Robots Market Size and Demand Forecast Report

Global Surgical Simulation Market Size and Demand Forecast Report

Global Endoscope Market Size and Demand Forecast Report

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About P&S Intelligence

P&S Intelligence is a provider of market research and consulting services catering to the market information needs of burgeoning industries across the world. Providing the plinth of market intelligence, P&S as an enterprising research and consulting company, believes in providing thorough landscape analyses on the ever-changing market scenario, to empower companies to make informed decisions and base their business strategies with astuteness.

Contact:

Prajneesh Kumar

P&S Intelligence

Phone: +1-347-960-6455

Email: enquiry@psmarketresearch.com

Web: https://www.psmarketresearch.com

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VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / May 12, 2022 / Faraday Copper Corp. ("Faraday" or the "Company") (CSE:FDY) is pleased to provide a summary of its completed geological model for the Copper Creek project, located in Arizona, U.S. ("Copper Creek") and to provide an overview of the exploration plan for the remainder of 2022 and early 2023.

"The Company has reached another milestone with the delivery of an initial geological model, which provides a strong foundation for an updated mineral resource estimate for the Copper Creek project expected later this year. The model is supported by the integration of numerous empirical data sets," commented Paul Harbidge, President and CEO. "We're also very pleased to report our plans to expand the mineral footprint of the resources by improving the drill coverage in areas where drill data is limited and developing a portfolio of targets for future testing."

Highlights

Completed a geological model for the Copper Creek breccia and early halo style porphyry copper-molybdenum-silver ("Cu-Mo-Ag") deposit which provides the foundation for an updated mineral resource estimate due in Q3 2022;

Ongoing sampling of previously unsampled drill core to increase data coverage for the Copper Creek mineralization, which may potentially increase the mineral footprint of the project;

Increased Phase 1 diamond drill program from 5,000 metres ("m") to 6,000 m, with 6 drill holes completed to date for a total of 3,350 m; analytical results are pending;

Planned Phase 2 drill program to commence in Q4 2022, focused on increasing drill coverage in areas with limited drill data to obtain better information on the geometry and continuity of mineralized zones, breccias and porphyry intrusions; and

Initiated a generative study to define and prioritize a portfolio of targets for future testing in an underexplored district.

Summary

In this news release, we provide details on the work undertaken to develop a three-dimensional geological model as a basis for an updated Mineral Resource Estimate ("MRE") for the Copper Creek breccia and early halo style porphyry Cu-Mo-Ag deposit (Figure 1). The model integrated data including core logging information, petrography, age dating, multi-element geochemistry, spectral data and geophysical data.

To generate the geological model, we re-logged approximately 15,000 m of historic drill core and incorporated observations from Faraday's expanded 6,000 m diamond drill program. In addition, density, magnetic susceptibility and spectral data were collected systematically. Previously unsampled core from historic drilling was sampled and selected holes are being re-analyzed for copper and 47 additional elements. New holes drilled in 2022 will also be analyzed for the same element suite. All analytical results are expected in the second half of 2022.

Copper Creek is a Cu-Mo-Ag early halo porphyry system (Proffett, 2009) which is characteristic of deeply emplaced porphyry systems, formed at crustal depths of 5 kilometres ("km") to 6 km.

Mineralization is largely hosted in the 62-million-year-old (Laramide age) Copper Creek granodiorite, intruding slightly older andesitic to dacitic Glory Hole Volcanics. The Copper Creek intrusion is dominantly calc-alkaline granodiorite with a dioritic border phase and a roughly tabular shallowly west-dipping monzogranitic domain at depth. The Copper Creek granodiorite is intruded by several porphyry phases which generally occur as narrow dykes and become increasingly more mafic over time. Only the volumetrically minor late porphyry phases are universally less mineralized than the precursor rocks.

Alteration composed of muscovite, biotite and potassium feldspar is largely confined to the early vein halos. Intense quartz-sericite alteration is associated with breccias.

Mineralization is associated with breccias, magmatic cupola zones and subvertical and subhorizontal early halo veins. Copper bearing minerals are zoned from pyrite greater than chalcopyrite at shallow levels, grading into chalcopyrite dominant and chalcopyrite-bornite at depth. Sulphides are disseminated within vein halos and occur as fracture infill. Copper oxide mineralization is confined to the top 20 m from surface.

The Copper Creek district also contains over 400 mapped outcrops of magmatic-hydrothermal breccias. Some of these host high-grade Cu-Mo-Ag mineralization, which was the focus of modest historic underground production. The breccia hosted mineralization occurs near surface and has the potential for open pit exploitation. The breccias occur in two broad northwest oriented trends: the western and eastern breccias. Most of the known mineralization is confined to the eastern breccias. The current geological model has incorporated only 7 breccias (Mammoth, Childs Adwinkle, Old Reliable, Copper Prince, Copper Giant, Glory Hole, Holly) which have sufficient drilling to be used in the updated MRE.

Mammoth-Keel is the largest known breccia system on the project. Mammoth, blind to surface, is a coarse breccia with boulder size granodiorite clasts cemented by coarse euhedral quartz and later pyrite and chalcopyrite. The Keel zone likely represents the magmatic cupola into which mineralizing fluids were focused and from where they ascended to Mammoth. The Keel has a bornite-chalcopyrite-molybdenite sulphide assemblage and mineralization occurs in miarolitic cavities and veins. Between Mammoth and Keel, there is a sulphide-poor zone with intense sericite-carbonate-pyrite alteration.

No major post-mineral deformation has occurred other than an approximate 10-degree tilt to the west or northwest.

Next Steps

The learnings from this initial geological model and observations from current drilling will provide the framework for the Phase 2, 10,000 m diamond drilling program, scheduled to commence in Q4 2022. In addition, a generative study is underway to provide a portfolio of targets for future testing, in a district that remains underexplored.

Figure 1: Oblique view of the geological model for the Copper Creek project, Arizona, U.S. Section plane in the front of the image is northwest-southeast oriented.

Copper Creek Re-Logging Program

Copper Creek has a wealth of historic data and drill core. Over 200,000 m were drilled since 1914 and approximately 95% of the historic core is stored at the Company's San Manuel facility, Arizona. The core re-logging program was aimed at gaining an overview of mineralization styles, verifying historic data and refining geological interpretations.

Methodology

In addition to visual re-logging of the core, we also collected empirical data (Figure 2), which includes physical property measurements (magnetic susceptibility, density) and spectral mineralogy using a Terraspec Halo instrument. This spectral data was interpreted with the Aisiris cloud-based artificial intelligence system. Previously unsampled core and archived pulps are being analyzed to include copper and 47 additional elements by a 4-acid digestion method which provides critical data to assist with lithological, alteration and mineralization modelling in the future. Analytical results are pending.

The geological model for alteration and lithologies also relies on detailed logging by the previous operator, Redhawk Resources, Inc., ("Redhawk"), and well recognized expert consultants, on holes drilled between 2006 and 2012, largely in the American Eagle zone. Selected holes from the American Eagle zone were re-logged during the current program and information captured in historic logs has been audited. Multi-element geochemical data are available for a majority of the holes in the American Eagle zone and those were used to establish batholith zonation and alteration modelling. The data collected by Redhawk has not previously been incorporated into a formal three-dimensional geological model and previous mineral resource estimates were based on grade interpolation without consideration for geologic boundaries.

Interpretation of geology was hand drawn on cross sections, where appropriate, and together with the other technical datasets, was integrated into Seequent's Leapfrog software to generate the three-dimensional model.

Figure 2?: Data collection in the San Manuel facility at the Copper Creek project, Arizona, U.S.

The Copper Creek geology team examining and discussing new core. Collection of magnetic susceptibility data (foreground) and Terraspec data (background). Geologists hand drawing geological interpretations on cross sections.

Intrusive Rocks

The Copper Creek district is dominated by the 62-million-year-old Copper Creek batholith intruding the 63-million-year-old Glory Hole Volcanics. It intrudes Proterozoic metamorphic rocks in the eastern part of the district. The batholith is zoned with a gently west to northwest dipping compositional layering. The margin, near the contact to the hosting Glory Hole Volcanics has a diorite composition whereas the bulk of the intrusion is granodioritic. A distinct tabular monzogranitic domain can be delineated at depth, based on its immobile trace element signature and felsic, relatively coarse-grained appearance (Figure 3 and Figure 4). A series of narrow porphyry dykes or plugs intrude the batholith.

Figure 3?: Example of a downhole plot (drill hole RAE-11-057) of the thorium/scandium ("Th/Sc") ratio used to delineate compositional variation in the Copper Creek batholith. Core photographs illustrate subtle but discernable petrographic variations.

Figure 4: Northwest to southeast cross section showing the batholith zonation modelled based on Th/Sc ratio. The highest drill hole copper assay grades are located above the felsic domains in the batholith.

Principal Breccias

After the emplacement of the Copper Creek batholith and concurrently with the intrusion of some of the later porphyry phases, breccias, for which the district is renowned, were emplaced. The breccia textures and mineralogy vary between individual breccia bodies, which is a reflection of their relative emplacement depth, and proximity to the magmatic source (Figure 5). In general, the breccias experienced limited clast rotation and milling, and rock-flour matrix is largely absent. Although breccias have complex geometries in detail, they are vertically extensive. Diameters at surface range from 90 m to 430 m. There is no indication that the breccias breached the surface as diatremes at the time of emplacement since those would have experienced significant clast rounding and have a clastic matrix. The general characteristics of the main breccia bodies are summarized below.

Mammoth-Keel System

The Mammoth breccia, blind to surface, is a coarse-grained breccia characterized by boulder-sized clasts, cemented by euhedral quartz and coarse pyrite and chalcopyrite. Significant open space remains, and it is classified as a hydrothermal breccia. At depth, it transitions into quartz-sericite-pyrite altered granodiorite with occasional coarse quartz veins. The Keel zone is located below the Mammoth breccia and contains intense quartz stockwork grading into a magmatic cupola zone with miarolitic cavities in granodiorite at depth. Dominant alteration is potassium feldspar and biotite, and mineralization is intimately associated with a granodiorite porphyry phase. Sulphides are vertically zoned from pyrite-chalcopyrite in the Mammoth breccia to chalcopyrite greater than pyrite in the upper part of Keel, grading into bornite-chalcopyrite-molybdenite in the deeper zone of Keel. The Keel-Mammoth system is interpreted as a vertically continuous mineralized zone. Variations in mineralization and alteration are a result of changes in temperature and pressure gradients. The dimension of the entire system is 430 m by 270 m with a known vertical extent of 1,450 m.

Childs Adwinkle Breccia

Childs Adwinkle is a north-northwest elongated breccia system, from which approximately 300,000 tonnes of copper were produced in the 1930s. The Childs Adwinkle breccia consists of angular fragments of altered Copper Creek granodiorite with a cement of chlorite-quartz-sulphide-orthoclase. The breccia locally has the appearance of a brecciated pegmatite. Dimensions of the fragments range from 2 centimetres ("cm") to 4 m in size. Principal sulphide mineralization is chalcopyrite-bornite-molybdenite. Minor tennantite has also been noted. The dimension of the Childs Adwinkle breccia is 300 m by 140 m with a known vertical extent of 560 m.

Copper Prince Breccia

The Copper Prince breccia consists of two discrete breccia bodies, characterized as intrusive clast-dominated, crackle breccia and cement-rich breccia associated with sericite-quartz alteration, grading into potassium-feldspar alteration at depth. Copper oxide mineralization extends down to 20 m below surface, followed by a mixed oxide and sulphide zone to 40 m, after which chalcopyrite is the dominant sulphide. The dimension of the Copper Prince breccia is 200 m by 150 m with a known vertical extent of 320 m.

Copper Giant Breccia

Copper Giant is a polymictic breccia with angular clasts of hornfelsed Glory Hole Volcanics as well as granodiorite and granodiorite porphyry. There is minimal rock flour matrix and clasts are cemented by quartz, carbonate, coarse chlorite, chalcopyrite and lesser pyrite. The sulphides commonly occur late and open space remains. Dominant alteration is sericite and kaolinite. The breccia intruded the contact zone between the Glory Hole Volcanics and the Copper Creek batholith. The dimension of the Copper Giant breccia is 285 m by 170 m with a known vertical extent of 350 m.

Glory Hole Breccia

Several prominent outcrops of breccia occur in the Glory Hole area, which may also be referred to as the Globe breccia. Clasts are dominantly angular and composed of Glory Hole Volcanics. Border zones include shingle breccias and there is slightly more clast rotation evident away from the contact. Clasts are cemented by quartz and sulphides, of which pyrite commonly is greater than chalcopyrite. Breccias are affected by intense quartz-sericite alteration. Oxide copper mineralization is only dominant in the top 10 m below surface. The dimension of the Glory Hole breccia is 130 m by 90 m with a known vertical extent of 370 m.

Holly Breccia

The Holly breccia is located approximately 250 m south of the Glory Hole breccia and was historically drilled by reverse circulation, thus limiting textural and structural observation from drill core. A drill hole, part of Faraday's 2022 exploration program, has intersected intensely sericite-kaolinite altered polymictic breccia, with pyrite and chalcopyrite mineralization, at approximately 100 m below previous drilling. Assay results are pending for this drill hole. The dimension of the Holly breccia is 220 m by 100 m with a known vertical extent of 475 m.

Old Reliable Breccia

The Old Reliable breccia was partially mined in the early 20th century by underground extraction and again in the early 1970s by way of in-situ leaching. The breccia consists primarily of altered and angular to subangular fragments of pebble-sized Glory Hole Volcanics. The breccia cement consists of quartz, sericite, chlorite and sulphides, and the core of the pipe is strongly silicified. Mineralization consists of pyrite-chalcopyrite-chalcocite-molybdenite with oxide copper minerals significant in the upper 30 m from surface. The dimension of the Old Reliable breccia is 250 m by 190 m with a known vertical extent of 285 m.

Figure 5: Examples of breccia textures from the northwestern part of the Copper Creek resource area.

Glory Hole breccia; Old Reliable breccia; Copper Giant breccia; and Copper Prince breccia.

Note the angular nature of clasts, local open space and sulphide cement. Occurrence of chalcopyrite has been labelled ?with "cpy" and pyrite with "py".

American Eagle Zone

The American Eagle zone differs from the breccia hosted mineralization in that the bulk of the mineralization is contained in subvertical and subhorizontal zones of early halo veins, which are characterized by 1 cm to 10 cm wide biotite-muscovite-potassium-feldspar halos around veins (Proffett, 2009). Copper sulphides are disseminated in the vein halos and in the centre of the early halo veins, and copper grade is related to vein density. Early halo veins are paragenetically early and form in porphyry systems emplaced at 5 km to 6 km crustal depth. Sulphide mineralogy is vertically zoned from pyrite near surface to chalcopyrite and bornite at depth. Copper grades are highest within granodiorite above the upper contact of the felsic domain within the Copper Creek batholith. The dimension of the American Eagle zone is 500 m by 900 m with a known vertical extent of 500 m (Figure 4).

Widely spaced early halo veinlets are common throughout the district, including outside the American Eagle zone. These veins pre-date the breccias.

Alteration

The alteration related to early halo veins consist of biotite-muscovite-green sericite and potassium feldspar with disseminated sulphides and is confined to the halo of individual veins. Where early halo veins are abundant, this amounts to a moderate addition of potassium to the rock. More intense potassic alteration is localized in the Keel zone which is interpreted as a magmatic cupola zone (Figure 6). Some early halo veins are exploited by a later D-vein overprint which widens the muscovite alteration halo and can add additional sulphides including pyrite, chalcopyrite and locally, tennantite. The most intense alteration is recognized within and around hydrothermal breccia bodies. There, alteration is characterized by locally coarse muscovite and quartz, some kaolinite as well as lesser chlorite and carbonate and is interpreted to be broadly temporally related to D-vein overprint over the early halo style mineralization.

Hydrothermal alteration zonation and intensity at Copper Creek differs from typical porphyry systems in that potassic alteration is only locally intense and a surrounding propylitic halo is only weakly developed. Sericitic alteration around breccias is dominated by coarse muscovite and quartz (Figure 7). Argillic or advanced argillic alteration are largely absent from the resource area but are locally present in the western part of the district. Copper Creek displays similarities to other porphyry districts, such as Los Pelambres, Chile and Highland Valley, British Columbia, Canada where early halo type veins are prominent (Perello et al. 2012; Ryan et al. 2020).

Figure 6:? Alteration distribution at the Mammoth and American Eagle areas.

Northwest to southeast section through Mammoth-Keel and American Eagle areas, showing alteration as determined from geochemistry. Intense potassic alteration characterizes the Keel zone, whereas intense sericitic alteration is present at Mammoth and east of American Eagle. Note that geochemical data coverage is partial through Mammoth and Keel. Molar potassium/aluminum ("K/Al") versus sodium/aluminum ("Na/Al") diagram used to define alteration classes. The diagram shown in Figure B with data colored by point density. Main alteration trends are shown. The diagram shows that the bulk of the samples correspond to unaltered or weakly-altered granodiorite. Reference compositions are labelled (Grano: granodiorite; Dior: diorite; Monz: monzonite; Gran: granite).

Figure 7: Example of alteration from spectral mineralogy compared to geochemistry of drill hole G5. The intensely sericitized portion coincides with the Glory Hole breccia.

Mineralization

Mineralization occurs in three fundamental styles (Figure 8 and Figure 9).

High-grade mineralization is related to chalcopyrite and pyrite cement in breccias. Molybdenum grades vary between breccias with the most consistent grades observed at Childs Adwinkle.

The Keel zone represents a magmatic cupola. Mineralization in the upper part of the Keel zone consists of coarse chalcopyrite greater than pyrite, and fine-grained disseminated sulphides associated with discontinuous thin quartz veins, potassium feldspar alteration and anhydrite. The deeper part of Keel is characterized by myarolitic cavities filled with potassium feldspar and later bornite and chalcopyrite as well as molybdenite. This style can have high-grade mineralization.

American Eagle mineralization is dominated by early halo style veins. Mineralization is somewhat lower grade compared the above styles but forms a greater volume. Most of the copper occurs above the monzogranitic layer at depth but molybdenum is relatively high below that compositional boundary.

In general, silver correlates with copper, gold analyses are limited. However, gold is notable at Childs Adwinkle.

There is no significant supergene enrichment or near-surface leaching of copper mineralization.

Generally, copper oxide mineralization extends down to 20 m below the surface, with mixed oxide and sulphide mineralization down to 40 m.

Figure 8: Photographs of drill core, showing the vertical zonation through the Mammoth-Keel system and American Eagle:

Mammoth mineralization style with coarse quartz cementing large sericite-quartz altered granodiorite clasts. Coarse pyrite and chalcopyrite fill in open space. Coarse chalcopyrite with purple anhydrite and truncated A-type quartz vein in potassium-feldspar altered granodiorite in the upper Keel zone. Miarolitic cavity filled with bornite and chalcopyrite from the deep Keel Zone. Early Halo vein with chalcopyrite in central suture and disseminated in the vein halo from the American Eagle zone.

Figure 9: Paragenetic sequence of the Copper Creek mineralization.

Relative Timing and System Zonation

Cross cutting relationships indicate that early halo style mineralization occurred early in the development of the system but after the intrusion of pre-mineralization granodiorite porphyry. Mineralization at Keel is intimately associated with the intrusion of granodiorite porphyry and current interpretations suggest that the Mammoth breccia is the shallow expression of the same mineralizing system. In general, breccia style mineralization post-dates early halo veins, but it is currently not clear whether all breccias were emplaced at the same time.

The overall sulphide and alteration zonation within breccias is consistent with a slight west to northwest tilt. Mineralization at Holly, Glory Hole and Old Reliable breccias is dominated by pyrite greater than chalcopyrite. These are hosted by Glory Hole Volcanics which overlie the Copper Creek batholith. The Copper Prince, Copper Giant and Childs Adwinkle breccias, which are located farther to the northeast, have comparatively less pyrite and crosscut the Copper Creek batholith suggesting a deeper level of exhumation.

Breccia bodies likely have a magmatic root zone. The only breccia for which this can be demonstrated with confidence is Mammoth. Other breccia bodies lack the drill density at depth to confidently locate their likely source of magmatic fluids and metals.

Structure

Based on surface mapping and drilling data, the dominant early halo vein orientations are east-northeast striking and steeply north or south dipping, as well as flat lying, particularly, in the American Eagle zone. Brittle fractures and joint sets have a similar orientation to the steeply dipping veins. Major faults cross cutting the Copper Creek granodiorite and offsetting mineralization or alteration patterns have thus far not been recognized. However, an east-west striking zone of high fracture and vein density follows the main Copper Creek and represents a structural weakness zone. Based on the distribution of geological units as well as mineralization and alteration patterns, a slight west to northwest tilt of the district can be deduced.

Miocene extensional faults striking northwest separate the uplifted Copper Creek district from the downdropped San Pedro basin to the west.

Property-Scale Exploration

Of the roughly 400 breccia occurrences in the district, only 35 have been drilled and only 7 are currently included in the historic resource. The breccias occur in two parallel roughly northwest-trending trends, and all breccias included in the resource are part of the eastern breccia trend. Based on the district scale system zonation, as it is currently understood, the western breccias likely represent a shallower level of erosion than the eastern breccias, suggesting that exploration potential exists at depth. Geophysical data suggests that the American Eagle zone is associated with a high conductivity zone at depth. This high conductivity zone extends westward from American Eagle where drilling to date has been limited. Likewise, in the northwestern part of the property, a zone of high conductivity is present and may be related to a mineralized zone below the western breccias.

The 10,000 m, Phase 2 diamond drilling program is scheduled to commence in Q4 2022. The initial focus will be on expanding the drill data coverage in areas where shallow breccia hosted mineralization may be present, but where drilling was limited. These include the Holly breccia, American Eagle breccia and the southeast extension of Copper Prince. Angled oriented holes are planned for the deep American Eagle zone, where historic drilling was largely completed by vertical holes. Angled holes will provide better information on the geometry and continuity of mineralized zones, breccias and porphyry intrusions.

A generative study is currently underway which, firstly will involve the integration of all technical data layers including ground and airborne magnetics, Z-TEM electromagnetic data, geochemistry, age dating, petrography, surface mapping and mineralogical mapping from satellite data to develop a portfolio of targets. These targets will be ranked and prioritized by the addition of an economic analysis and a follow-up work program will be planned, with the aim of commencing field testing in Q4 2022.

References

Perello, J., Sillitoe, R.H., Mpodozis, C., Brockway, H., Posso, H. and Hedenquist, J.W., 2012. Geologic setting and evolution of the porphyry copper-molybdenum and copper-gold deposits at Los Pelambres, central Chile. Society of Economic Geologists, special publication No. 16, pp.79-104.

Proffett, J.M., 2009. High Cu grades in porphyry Cu deposits and their relationship to emplacement depth of magmatic sources. Geology, 37(8), pp.675-678.

Ryan, J., Hollis, L., Castillo, A., Byrne, K., Bayliss, S.M., Cronin, N., and Grubisa, G., 2020. Geology of the Highland Valley porphyry Cu- (Mo) deposits, south-central British Columbia. CIKM Special Volume 57: Porphyry Deposits of the Northwestern Cordillera of North America: A 25-Year Update, pp. 668-689.

Qualified Person

The scientific and technical information contained in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Faraday's VP Exploration, Dr. Thomas Bissig, P. Geo., who is a Qualified Person under National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101").

About Faraday Copper

Faraday Copper is a Canadian exploration company focused on advancing two copper projects in The United States of America. The Company trades on the CSE under the symbol "FDY".

For additional information please contact:

Stacey Pavlova, CFA

Vice President, Investor Relations & Communications

E-mail: info@faradaycopper.com

Website: www.faradaycopper.com

Cautionary Note on Forward Looking Statements

Some of the statements in this news release, other than statements of historical fact, are "forward-looking statements" and are based on the opinions and estimates of management as of the date such statements are made and are necessarily based on estimates and assumptions that are inherently subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of Faraday to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements and forward-looking information specifically include, but are not limited to, statements concerning development and future drilling of the Copper Creek property, the extent of future drilling at the Copper Creek property, the timing of Phase 2 exploration drilling, the intended areas for future drilling, the timing for commencing field testing, exploration potential of the Copper Creek property, and timing of the mineral resource estimate for the Copper Creek property.

Although Faraday believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements should not be in any way construed as guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements or information.

Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include without limitation: market prices for metals; the conclusions of detailed feasibility and technical analyses; lower than expected grades and quantities of resources; receipt of regulatory approval; receipt of shareholder approval; mining rates and recovery rates; significant capital requirements; price volatility in the spot and forward markets for commodities; fluctuations in rates of exchange; taxation; controls, regulations and political or economic developments in the countries in which Faraday does or may carry on business; the speculative nature of mineral exploration and development, competition; loss of key employees; rising costs of labour, supplies, fuel and equipment; actual results of current exploration or reclamation activities; accidents; labour disputes; defective title to mineral claims or property or contests over claims to mineral properties; unexpected delays and costs inherent to consulting and accommodating rights of Indigenous peoples and other groups; risks, uncertainties and unanticipated delays associated with obtaining and maintaining necessary licenses, permits and authorizations and complying with permitting requirements, including those associated with the Copper Creek property; and uncertainties with respect to any future acquisitions by Faraday. In addition, there are risks and hazards associated with the business of mineral exploration, development and mining, including environmental events and hazards, industrial accidents, unusual or unexpected formations, pressures, cave-ins, flooding and the risk of inadequate insurance or inability to obtain insurance to cover these risks as well as "Risk Factors" included in Faraday's disclosure documents filed on and available at www.sedar.com.

This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities in any jurisdiction to any person to whom it is unlawful to make such an offer or solicitation in such jurisdiction. This press release is not, and under no circumstances is to be construed as, a prospectus, an offering memorandum, an advertisement or a public offering of securities in Faraday in Canada, the United States or any other jurisdiction. No securities commission or similar authority in Canada or in the United States has reviewed or in any way passed upon this press release, and any representation to the contrary is an offence.

All of the forward-looking statements contained in this press release are qualified by these cautionary statements. Faraday does not intend, and does not assume any obligation, to update these forward-looking statements, except as required under applicable securities legislation. For more information on the Faraday, readers should refer to www.sedar.com for the Faraday's filings with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities.

SOURCE: Faraday Copper Corp.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/701070/Faraday-Copper-Delivers-Geological-Model-and-Exploration-Plan-for-the-Copper-Creek-Project
Strong Demand for BKR 5000 Drove Record First Quarter Bookings of $15.7M

Launched SaaS Solutions Business Unit Focused on the Public Safety Market

Supply Chain Constraints Continued To Impact Revenue Generation in Quarter

WEST MELBOURNE, FL / ACCESSWIRE / May 12, 2022 / BK Technologies Corporation (NYSE American:BKTI) (the "Company" or "BK") today announced financial and operating results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2022. The Company will host a conference call today, May 12, 2022, at 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time.

First Quarter 2022 Financial and Operational Highlights

Record bookings of $15.7 million driven by strong demand for BKR 5000

Supply chain constraints impacted revenue generation during the quarter; Shipments improved in March and have remained strong

Launched new SaaS solutions business dedicated to public safety market

Ended quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $6.4 million and minimal financial debt.

"Market demand for our BKR 5000 line of communications equipment and accessories remains strong and drove record first quarter 2022 bookings of $15.7 million," commented John Suzuki, CEO of BK. "The BKR 5000 has demonstrated success and consistency as a portable communications technology ideally suited not only for day-to-day land management and forestry maintenance, but also wildland fire and emergency response situations. Wildfire season, which has historically peaked in the July through October time period, is now longer in duration and intensity and our equipment plays an integral role in the effective communications infrastructure keeping first responders safe while in the field.

"During January and February we continued to contend with certain component shortages which hampered our ability to convert our record orders to revenue. While the supply chain challenges continue to persist, during March and to date in the second quarter we have seen the restoration of a more normalized shipping cadence.

Launch of SaaS Solutions Business Unit

"During the first quarter we launched our business unit dedicated to the development of software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions. A longstanding goal of BK has been to expand our offerings beyond the traditional land mobile radio (LMR) and we believe our establishment of this new division will more competitively position us as a leader in the rapidly changing public safety communications market. We've already filed for three patents related to these new services, and we're currently developing a BK branded smartphone application that will tether a first responder's BKR series radio to his or her smartphone, delivering an entirely new set of services to increase safety and productivity. Our goal is to create a scalable, high margin product focused on device interoperability. With these offerings, we have a significant opportunity to increase our market reach beyond fire rescue and mitigation to penetrate markets including the military, law enforcement, and emergency response, to name a few."

First Quarter 2022 Financial Review

Revenue decreased 23.1% to $6.6 million, compared with $8.6 million for the first quarter of last year. Gross profit margin was 22.4% compared to 36.4% for the same quarter of last year.

Selling, General & Administrative expenses totaled $4.9 million, compared with $4.0 million for the first quarter of last year.

Operating loss totaled ($3.4 million) compared with operating loss of ($853,000) for the first quarter of last year.

The Company recorded a net loss of ($3.9 million) or ($0.23) per basic and diluted share, compared with a net loss of ($0.7 million) or ($0.05) per basic and diluted share, as adjusted, for the first quarter of last year. In the first quarter of 2022, the Company recognized an unrealized loss of ($496,000) on its investment in FG Financial Group (FGF), compared with an unrealized gain of $205,000 in the same quarter of last year.

Working capital totaled approximately $21.7 million, of which approximately $11.1 million was comprised of cash, cash equivalents, and trade receivables. This compares with the working capital at year-end of 2021 of approximately $25.2 million, of which $18.8 million was comprised of cash, cash equivalents, and trade receivables.

Conference Call and Webcast

The Company will host a conference call and webcast for investors today, May 12, 2022, at 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time.

Shareholders and interested parties may participate in the conference call by dialing (888) 506-0062. International participants may join the conference call by dialing (973) 528-0011. All callers must use the access code 565081. The call will also be webcast at www.bktechnologies.com. Please allow extra time prior to the conference call to visit the site.

An online archive of the webcast will be available on the Company's web site for thirty (30) days following the call at www.bktechnologies.com. A replay of the conference call will be available one hour after completion of the call and will remain available until May 19, 2022. The replay may be accessed by dialing (877) 481-4010 (for domestic participants) or (919) 882-2331 (for international participants). All callers must use passcode 45306 to access the replay.

About BK

BK Technologies Corporation manufactures high-specification, American-made communications equipment of unsurpassed reliability and value for use by public safety professionals and government agencies. BK is honored to serve these heroes with reliable equipment when every moment counts. The Company's common stock trades on the NYSE American market under the symbol "BKTI". Maintaining its headquarters in West Melbourne, Florida, BK can be contacted through its web site at www.bktechnologies.com or directly at 1-800-821-2900.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements that are made pursuant to the "Safe Harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements concern the Company's operations, economic performance, and financial condition, including, but not limited to, statements regarding the Company's long-term strategic plan, and are based largely on the Company's beliefs and expectations. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance, or achievements of the Company, or industry results, to be materially different from any future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors and risks, some of which have been, and may further be, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing war in Ukraine and related sanctions, include, among others, the following: changes or advances in technology; the success of our land mobile radio product line; disruption in the global supply chain creating delays, unavailability and adverse conditions; successful introduction of new products and technologies, including our ability to successfully develop and sell our anticipated new multiband product and other related products in the planned new BKR Series product line and our announced SaaS solutions; competition in the land mobile radio industry; general economic and business conditions, including federal, state and local government budget deficits and spending limitations, any impact from a prolonged shutdown of the U.S. Government, the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing war in Ukraine, including the impact of related sanctions being imposed by the U.S. Government and the governments of other countries, impact of potential reprisals as a consequence of the war in Ukraine and any related sanctions; the availability, terms and deployment of capital; reliance on contract manufacturers and suppliers; risks associated with fixed-price contracts; heavy reliance on sales to agencies of the U.S. Government and our ability to comply with the requirements of contracts, laws and regulations related to such sales; allocations by government agencies among multiple approved suppliers under existing agreements; our ability to comply with U.S. tax laws and utilize deferred tax assets; our ability to attract and retain executive officers, skilled workers and key personnel; our ability to manage our growth; our ability to identify potential candidates for, and to consummate, acquisition, disposition or investment transactions, and risks incumbent to being a noncontrolling interest stockholder in a corporation; impact of the COVID-19 pandemic or the ongoing war in Ukraine on the companies in which the Company holds investments; impact of our capital allocation strategy; risks related to maintaining our brand and reputation; impact of government regulation; impact of rising health care costs; our business with manufacturers located in other countries, including changes in the U.S. Government and foreign governments' trade and tariff policies, as well as any further impact resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic or the ongoing war in Ukraine; our inventory and debt levels; protection of our intellectual property rights; fluctuation in our operating results and stock price; acts of war or terrorism, natural disasters and other catastrophic events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing war in Ukraine; any infringement claims; data security breaches, cyber-attacks and other factors impacting our technology systems; availability of adequate insurance coverage; maintenance of our NYSE American listing; risks related to being a holding company; and the effect on our stock price and ability to raise equity capital of future sales of shares of our common stock. Certain of these factors and risks, as well as other risks and uncertainties, are stated in more detail in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2021, and in the Company's subsequent filings with the SEC. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this press release, and the Company assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements or to update the reasons why actual results could differ from those projected in the forward-looking statement.

Company Contact:

IMS Investor Relations

John Nesbett/Jennifer Belodeau

bktechnologies@imsinvestorrelations.com

(203) 972-9200

(Financial Tables to Follow)

SOURCE: BK Technologies Corporation

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/701067/BK-Technologies-Announces-First-Quarter-2022-Results
COEUR D'ALENE, ID / ACCESSWIRE / May 12, 2022 / Idaho Strategic Resources, Inc. (NYSE American:IDR) ("IDR", "Idaho Strategic" or the "Company") is pleased to announce its newly added Lemhi Pass Rare Earth Element (REE) project and claim group in the Lemhi Pass area of central Idaho.

IDR's newest addition is a strategic land package consisting of 25 unpatented claims, covering an area of approximately 425 acres in the northeastern part of the Lemhi Pass District. The northeastern portion of Lemhi Pass contains the greatest concentration of veins where the large Lemhi Pass, Bull Moose, and Dan Patch faults either intersect or approach one another1. Although prior REE assay values within this area are very limited, this newest addition is a high-quality claim block covering most of the area's historical highest recorded REE values.

Idaho Strategics' CEO and President, John Swallow commented, "It is our belief (based on our decades of business and investing experience) that the markets, investors, and most people in general are now transitioning out of what mentally and financially worked in the past; including listening to those whose only experience is in fighting the last war. We feel very good about our minimal debt positioning, hard asset focus, and our growing gold production profile. As we continue to increase our Rare Earth Element (and other critical minerals) holdings, the addition of this new property package is a natural follow-on as we work through our list of important REE and other mineral occurrences."

Lemhi Pass is officially recognized as one of the most important critical mineral districts in the United States. It hosts a wide variety of critical minerals from technology metals, such as rare earths and niobium, to energy generating metals like thorium. The Company believes that while Idaho's REE-Th Belt is not yet as popular as the well-known Idaho Cobalt Belt, it has the potential to be an important source of the technology and energy metals required to support our nation's decarbonization goals and domestic supply chain security. Given the increased activity in the Lemhi Pass District over the past year, IDR has benefitted tremendously from its first-mover advantage, proven 'producer' status and the relationships it has developed with fellow Idaho stakeholders in the area.

Idaho Strategics' Vice President of Exploration, Rob Morgan commented, "The commercial potential of these types of REE deposits was first recognized in the 1950's but there was no demand then; that reality obviously changed over the ensuing decades with new uses in high-technology, defense, and clean energy. The lack of focus on REE's until recently creates an exciting opportunity for IDR because the Lemhi Pass District has experienced considerable documented prior work as well as possessing the potential for new discoveries given the vast number of covered and uncovered REE vein systems."

The Lemhi Pass District is in the southeastern part of the 70-mile-long by 10-mile-wide northwest trending belt (the Idaho REE-Th Belt) known for containing Rare Earth Elements and Thorium in abundance. The Idaho REE-Th Belt possesses most of the known REE lode occurrences in Idaho and extends from the Lemhi Pass District in the southeast through the Mineral Hill District. Within this 70-mile belt lies IDR's Roberts Property in the northwest, Diamond Creek Property in the middle, and our new Lemhi Pass Property in the southeast. (Figure 1)

The Lemhi Pass area was historically prospected for copper and gold until the sudden demand for uranium arose in the late 1940's following World War 2. This demand fueled U.S. government sponsored nationwide exploration for nuclear power related raw materials, which resulted in the discovery of thorium at Lemhi Pass in 1949. The commercial potential of these REE and thorium deposits was recognized by the 1950's; but the subsequent Cold War yet again shifted our nation's focus to uranium for its weaponization potential, minimizing the exploration work sponsored by the Dept. of Energy (DOE), Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and others. Thus, strategic interest in Idaho's REE-Th Belt faded until the implementation of two Executive Orders addressing REE's, and most recently by the Biden administration enacting the Defense Production Act to increase domestic mining and processing of critical materials for the large capacity battery supply chain and related technologies.

Figure 1: Rare Earth Lode deposits in Idaho

Source: https://www.idahogeology.org/pub/GeoNotes/GN44_Rare_Earth_Elements.pdf

1 Staatz, M.H., 1979, Geology and mineral resources of the Lemhi Pass thorium district, Idaho and Montana: U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1049-A, 90 p.

2 Staatz, M. H., 1972, Geology and description of the thorium-bearing veins, Lemhi Pass quadrangle, Idaho and Montana: U.S. Geol. Survey Bull. 1351, 94 p.

Qualified person

IDR's Vice President of Exploration, Robert John Morgan, PG, PLS is a qualified person as such term is defined in National Instrument 43-101 and has reviewed and approved the technical information and data included in this press release.

About Idaho Strategic Resources, Inc.

Domiciled in Idaho and headquartered in the Panhandle of northern Idaho, Idaho Strategic Resources (IDR) is one of the few resource-based companies (public or private) possessing the combination of officially recognized U.S. domestic rare earth element properties (in Idaho) and Idaho-based gold production located in an established mining community.

Idaho Strategic Resources produces gold at the Golden Chest Mine located in the Murray Gold Belt (MGB) area of the world-class Coeur d'Alene Mining District, north of the prolific Silver Valley. With over 7,000 acres of patented and unpatented land, the Company has the largest private land position in the area following its consolidation of the Murray Gold Belt for the first time in over 100-years.

In addition to gold and gold production, the Company maintains an important strategic presence in the U.S. Critical Minerals sector, specifically focused on the more "at-risk" Rare Earth Elements (REE's). The Company's Diamond Creek and Roberts REE properties are included in the U.S. national REE inventory as listed in USGS, IGS and DOE publications. Both projects are located in central Idaho and participating in the USGS Earth MRI program.

With an impressive mix of experience and dedication, the folks at IDR maintain a long-standing "We Live Here" approach to corporate culture, land management, and historic preservation. Furthermore, it is our belief that successful operations begin with the heightened responsibility that only local oversight and a community mindset can provide. Its "everyone goes home at night" policy would not be possible without the multi-generational base of local exploration, drilling, mining, milling, and business professionals that reside in and near the communities of the Silver Valley and North Idaho.

For more information on Idaho Strategic Resources click here for our corporate presentation, go to www.idahostrategic.com or call:

Travis Swallow, Investor Relations & Corporate Development

Email: tswallow@idahostrategic.com

(208) 625-9001

Forward Looking Statements

This release contains "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 that are intended to be covered by the safe harbor created by such sections. Such statements are based on good faith assumptions that Idaho Strategic Resources believes are reasonable, but which are subject to a wide range of uncertainties and business risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from future results expressed, projected, or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, among others: the risk that the newly acquired Lemhi Pass Rare Earth Element Project does not go into production, the risk that the mineral endowment of the Lemhi Pass District is not economic, the risks associated with the presence of thorium, the impact of supply chain risks and expanding needs of operations as inventory increases; an increased risk associated with production activities occurring without completion of a feasibility study of mineral reserves demonstrating economic and technical viability; environmental hazards, industrial accidents, weather or geologically related conditions; changes in the market prices of gold and silver and the potential impact on revenues from changes in the market price of gold and cash costs; a sustained lower price environment; risks relating to widespread epidemics or pandemic outbreaks including the COVID-19 pandemic; the potential impact of COVID-19 on our workforce, suppliers and other essential resources, including our ability to access goods and supplies, the ability to transport our products and maintain employee productivity; the risks in connection with the operations, cash flow and results of the Company relating to the unknown duration and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic; as well as other uncertainties and risk factors. Actual results, developments and timetables could vary significantly from the estimates presented. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Idaho Strategic Resources disclaims any intent or obligation to update publicly such forward-looking statements, whether a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

SOURCE: Idaho Strategic Resources, Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/701100/Idaho-Strategic-Resources-Announces-Addition-of-the-Lemhi-Pass-Rare-Earth-Element-Project-in-Central-Idaho
WHITE ROCK, BC / ACCESSWIRE / May 12, 2022 / TDG Gold Corp - (TSXV:TDG) (the "Company" or "TDG") is pleased to provide a progress update on the initial NI 43-101 Mineral Resource Estimate ("MRE") for its former producing gold-silver ("Au-Ag") Shasta mine, Toodoggone District, B.C. Resource modelling work is being undertaken for TDG by Moose Mountain Technical Services ("MMTS"), led by Sue Bird, P.Eng., and TDG expects to publish the Shasta initial MRE shortly.

The 8,048 metres ("m") of diamond drilling completed at Shasta in 2021 was primarily focused in the vicinity of the historical mine workings; plus one outlying target area located ~700 m south of the JM Pit, which encountered high-grade Au-Ag in the Cayley-Rainier Zone (see TDG news release Feb 07, 2022). The Shasta 2021 drilling tested ~22% of the exploration target range area published in TDG's news release of Mar 03, 2021 and ~12% of the overall footprint of known mineralization at Shasta (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Shasta 2021 drilling tested ~22% of the March 2021 Exploration Target Range Area.

MMTS has reported that the preliminary assays from the 2021 drilling correlate well with the historical published assays but with an observable low bias in the historical reported Au-Ag grades. The Shasta initial MRE will therefore focus on the area around the historical mine workings and is expected to cover ~40% of the 2021 published exploration target range area.

TDG's ongoing interpretative work indicates that Shasta is a breccia and fault block system that does not conform to a classic low sulphidation epithermal vein deposit model. The opportunity at Shasta is therefore multi-directional with key target areas of known mineralized footprint of Shasta remaining to be systematically and comprehensively explored.

TDG's 2022 exploration program is fully funded and will prioritize drill testing the known mineralization which extends south from the JM Pit for ~700 m to the high-grade Au-Ag intercepted in the Cayley-Rainier Zone (see Figure 2). TDG will also evaluate potential extensions of the 2021 drilling to the north, west and south; the potential for the Cayley-Rainier Zone to continue to the south; the undrilled central area; the other known outlying target zones with historically demonstrated mineralization; and, for a fault down dropped block of mineralization located deeper along the Shasta Fault.

Figure 2. Shasta 2022 Drill Target Areas.

QA/QC Update

Internal Quality Assurance/Quality Control ("QA/QC") on the 2021 assays is ongoing and TDG has identified a potential low bias in the blind certified reference materials ("CRMs") reported preliminary Au grades. TDG estimates that this may mean actual Au grades are 0% to 4% higher than the preliminary results TDG has previously reported. TDG is following up with the analytical laboratory (SGS Canada Inc.) to investigate. Pending the outcome of the investigation, TDG will determine if all 2021 samples need to be re-assayed for fire assay Au analysis. Subject to the timings and outcome of the ongoing QA/QC analysis, it is likely that the initial Shasta MRE will be calculated to an inferred category of resource.

Qualified Person

The technical content of this news release has been reviewed and approved by Steven Kramar, MSc., P.Geo., a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101.

This news release includes historical information that has been reviewed by the Company's geological team. The Company's review of the historical records and information reasonably substantiate the validity of the information presented in this news release; however, the Company cannot directly verify the accuracy of the historical data, including the procedures used for sample collection and analysis. Therefore, the Company encourages investors to exercise appropriate caution when evaluating these results. Further data review is underway, in order to verify the validity of the data for the anticipated NI 43-101 compliant mineral resource estimate.

About TDG Gold Corp.

TDG is a major mineral claim holder in the historical Toodoggone Production Corridor of north-central British Columbia, Canada, with over 23,000 hectares of brownfield and greenfield exploration opportunities under direct ownership or earn-in agreement. TDG's flagship projects are the former producing, high grade gold-silver Shasta, Baker and Mets mines, which are all road accessible, produced intermittently between 1981-2012, and have over 65,000 m of historical drilling. In 2021, TDG advanced the projects through compilation of historical data, new geological mapping, geochemical and geophysical surveys, and, for Shasta, drill testing of the known mineralization occurrences and their extensions. In 2022, TDG will prioritize drilling the known mineralization at Shasta which extends south for ~700 metres from the historical JM Pit. TDG currently has 96,343,142 common shares issued and outstanding.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

Fletcher Morgan

Chief Executive Officer

For further information contact:

TDG Gold Corp.,

Telephone: +1.604.536.2711

Email: info@tdggold.com

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

This news release contains forward-looking statements that are based on the Company's current expectations and estimates. Forward-looking statements are frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate", "suggest", "indicate" and other similar words or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from estimated or anticipated events or results implied or expressed in such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, among others: the actual results of current exploration activities; conclusions of economic evaluations; changes in project parameters as plans to continue to be refined; possible variations in ore grade or recovery rates; accidents, labour disputes and other risks of the mining industry; delays in obtaining governmental approvals or financing; and fluctuations in metal prices. There may be other factors that cause actions, events or results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which it is made 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. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and accordingly undue reliance should not be put on such statements due to the inherent uncertainty therein.

SOURCE: TDG Gold Corp.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/701085/TDG-Gold-Corp-Provides-Progress-Update-on-Shasta-Initial-Mineral-Resource-Estimate-Toodoggone-District-BC
Las Vegas, Nevada--(Newsfile Corp. - May 12, 2022) - GENERAL EUROPEAN STRATEGIC INVESTMENTS INC. (OTC Pink: GESI) (the "Company or GESI") is pleased to announce the signing of the Consortium Agreement for the Seismic and Electromagnetic Methods for Deep Mineral Exploration Project ("SEEMS DEEP"). GESI participates in the SEEMS DEEP Project through its wholly owned Finnish subsidiary Laakso Minerals Oy ("Laakso").

The Consortium Agreement of the SEEMS DEEP Project has been signed by all the Parties and has come into force.

The Parties include: the Geological Survey of Finland (GTK); Uppsala University, Department of Earth Sciences, Sweden; Bureau des Recherches Geologiques et Minieres (BRGM), France; Institute of Geophysics, Polish Academy of Sciences; Geopartner Geofizyka sp. z. o.o., Poland; GRM-Services, Finland; IRIS Instruments, France; Laakso Minerals Oy, Finland.

The Consortium Agreement specifies the relationship among the Parties, concerning the organization of the work between them, the management of the Project and the rights and obligations of the Parties concerning inter alia liability, access rights and dispute resolution.

Being now in full force, the Consortium Agreement shall continue and be in effect until complete fulfilment of all obligations undertaken by the Parties under the ERA-MIN3 funding rules.

Presentation of the first scientific results of the SEEMS DEEP Consortium will take place between the 18-22 September this year at the 4th Conference on Geophysics for Mineral Exploration and Mining of the European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers in Belgrad, Serbia.

Wolfgang Rauball, GESI's CEO, stated, "The SEEMS DEEP Project and the results of the unique Koillismaa Deep Hole, being drilled by the Geological Survey of Finland within the Laakso's reservation permit, will result in construction of high-confidence geomodel describing the geological structure of the large positive gravity and magnetic anomaly that potentially acted as a conduit for the mafic-ultramafic magma, which formed the nickel, cobalt and platinum group metals mineralization in the region. It is hopped that this work will define the potential for high-grade nickel, cobalt and platinum group mineralization at depth within the Korpuajarvi land-holding of Laakso Minerals Oy. The work on geomodelling has already started and we look forward to providing further updates."

About SEEMS DEEP:

The SEEMS DEEP Project is a part of the ERA-MIN3, a global innovative pan-European network of 24 European and non-European research funding organizations, aiming to strengthen the mineral raw materials community through the coordination of research and innovation programs.

The Project has been selected for financing by the referees after a strong competition of 146 pre-proposals for its scientific excellence, impact and implementation. The total budget of the Project is  2,182,518.

Other Participants alongside GESI include the: Geological Survey of Finland, Bureau des Recherches Geologiques et Minieres (France), Uppsala University (Sweden), Institute of Geophysics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, IRIS Instruments (France), GRM-Services (Finland), Geopartner Geofizyka (Poland).

The SEEMS DEEP Consortium is implementing the innovative scientific-research methods, approaches and ideas in discovering of the deep-seated ore deposits within Laakso's reservation permit through the development of a novel workflow, integrating seismic and electromagnetic methods.

The SEEMS DEEP workflow aims to substantially improve geomodels that will enable better decisions in exploration drilling, which in turn will lead to decreased exploration cost and a smaller environmental impact. Its ambition is to produce high-confidence earth models that add more value to the exploration project than several drill holes that might miss the exploration target and provide only point-like data.

Forward Looking Statements:

This release includes "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. Such statements include any that may predict, forecast, indicate, or imply future results, performance or achievements, and may contain the words "estimate", "project", "intend", "forecast", "anticipate", "plan", "planning", "expect", "believe", "likely", "should", "could", "would", "may" or similar words or expressions. Such statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause the Company's actual results and financial position to differ materially from those in such statements, which involve risks and uncertainties, including those relating to the Company's ability to grow. Actual results may differ materially from those predicted and any reported should not be considered an indication of future performance. Potential risks and uncertainties include the Company's operating history and resources, together with all usual and common economic, competitive, and equity market conditions / risks.

Contact:

Robert Seguin, V.P., Investor Relations

General European Strategic Investments Inc.

Robert.Seguin@gesi-usa.com

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/123765
HUNTLY, Scotland, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Aberdeenshire based offshore services business, OEG Offshore UK Ltd, has donated a container to the environmental charity, the Bailies of Bennachie, after their previous one was damaged during storm Arwen.

The Bailies work parties usually spend hundreds of hours on the hill doing jobs such as maintaining footpaths, improving drainage, re-building dykes and cutting back vegetation. In the last couple of years this has been halted by the COVID pandemic and the storms last autumn.

Now the Bennachie Visitor's Centre and car park has re-opened the work parties are set to resume. However, fallen trees on the Bailies container has caused irreparable damage making it impossible to use.

Operations Director at OEG Offshore, David Hunter said:

"We were sorry to hear of the damage to the container and wanted to help the Bailies continue their excellent work on the hill. I am delighted that we have been able to provide a new container and deliver it to the site so it can be put to good use right away."

The chair of the Bailies, Peter Stock commented:

"The Bailies of Bennachie is grateful to OEG, a global provider of topside and subsea services to the offshore energy industry, for stepping forward and helping. It is great for a community charity to have this support which will enable us to get back out on the hill and help provide sustainable access for all the people who use the paths."

"Contents from the old container will be transferred to the new one over coming weeks; in parallel with the ramp up of work party efforts on the hill to catch up on the significant backlog of work needing to be done."

"We are looking for new volunteers to join our work parties and would like to hear from anyone who is willing to spend some time maintaining paths on Bennachie. If you would like to know more, please email: workparties@bailiesofbennachie.co.uk"

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1816750/Bailies_of_Bennachie_and_OEG.jpg

For more information contact Fiona Cormack Outreach officer: outreach@bailiesofbennachie.co.uk.
DGAP-News: Cryptology Asset Group PLC / Key word(s): Statement/Cryptocurrency / Blockchain

Cryptology's estimated NAV per share as of 11/05/2022 is 7.07



12.05.2022 / 13:51

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.



Corporate News Cryptology Asset Group p.l.c. ("Cryptology")

Malta, 12.05.2022 Cryptology's estimated NAV per share as of 11/05/2022 is 7.07 Malta, 12.05.2022. Cryptology Asset Group (ISIN: MT0001770107; Ticker: CAP:GR), a leading European holding company for crypto assets and blockchain-related business models, announced its most recent weekly estimated Net Asset Value ("NAV") per share of 7.07. Crypto is down significantly over the past few days after $UST, an algorithmic stablecoin issued on the Terra (LUNA) network, lost its peg to the US Dollar. This sent UST and LUNA into freefall as markets were spooked by the lack of backing in the stablecoin. As a result, most crypto is down double-digits in the past 72 hours in one of the most volatile periods in crypto's history. Cryptology's updated estimated NAV figures come on the heels of Hauck & Aufhauser issuing an updated report on Cryptology's shares with a "BUY" rating and a price target of 13.00. Shares opened this morning around 6.50, meaning Hauck & Aufhauser is projecting well over a 50% price increase from current levels. Cryptology shares currently trade on several German exchanges including Borse Dusseldorf, Gettex and Tradegate. In order to increase trading liquidity and open up to new shareholder groups, Cryptology is currently exploring an international listing. About Cryptology Asset Group p.l.c. Cryptology Asset Group (ISIN: MT0001770107; Ticker: CAP:GR) is a leading European holding company for crypto assets and blockchain-based business models. Founded by Christian Angermayer's family office, Apeiron Investment Group, and crypto-legend Mike Novogratz, Cryptology is the largest publicly traded holding company for blockchain- and crypto-based business models in Europe. Noteworthy portfolio companies include crypto-giant and EOSIO software publisher B1, leading HPC provider Northern Data, commission-free online neobroker nextmarkets, and crypto asset management group Iconic Holding. Media Contact: Cryptology Asset Group p.l.c. Jefim Gewiet (COO) 66/67, Beatrice, Amery Street, Sliema SLM 1707 Malta E-mail: info@cryptology-ag.com

12.05.2022 Dissemination of a Corporate News, transmitted by DGAP - a service of EQS Group AG.

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.



The DGAP Distribution Services include Regulatory Announcements, Financial/Corporate News and Press Releases.

Archive at www.dgap.de


Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - May 12, 2022) - Santacruz Silver Mining Ltd. (TSXV: SCZ) (FSE: 1SZ) (the "Company" or "Santacruz") reports production of 1.39 million silver equivalent ounces from its Zimapan Mine in Mexico (the "Mexican Operations") and its operations in Bolivia (the "Bolivian Operations") which includes the a 45% interest in the Bolivar Mine and the Porco Mine, and a 100% interest in the Caballo Blanco group of mines and the San Lucas Trading Company. Santacruz acquired the Bolivian Operations from Glencore on March 18, 2022 (see the Company's press release dated March 18, 2022). Accordingly, Santacruz's first quarter production results include only 13 days production from the Bolivian Operations.

Consolidated First Quarter 2022 Production Highlights:

silver 469,829 oz (+47.6% vs Q4 2021 and +44.4% vs Q1 2021);

lead 1,493 tonnes (+47.5% vs Q4 2021 and +58.0% vs Q1 2021);

zinc 6,325 tonnes (+83.8% vs Q4 2021 and +176.8% vs Q1 2021);

copper 419 tonnes (-14.1% vs Q4 2021 and +18.4% vs Q1 2021)

Consolidated Production expressed in silver equivalent ounces 1,391,590 AgEq; (+ 65.3% vs Q4 2021, and +96.8% vs Q1 2021)

Carlos Silva, Santacruz's CEO, stated, "The inclusion of 13 days of production from our Bolivian Operations have made a significant contribution to our Q1 2022 operating results. Based on current metals prices, we expect that our cash flow from operations will fund the deferred purchase price for the acquisition of the Bolivian Operations from Glencore. At our Mexican Operations, we set a 2021 objective of replacing the production from the now closed Rosario mine by deploying its underground mining equipment to Zimapan to increase production at Zimapan with no additional capital investment. This equipment has been initially deployed on past producing areas at the Zimapan mine leading to an increase in tons mined with a small reduction in head grade resulting in increased production in Q4 21 and Q1 22. We continue to anticipate additional growth at Zimapan as the mine ramps up to higher throughput levels as well as improved silver head grades due to ongoing developments to higher grade areas over the next few quarters."

Mr. Silva added; "The acquisition of Glencore's Bolivian assets is a major development for our Company. We are continuing to advance the transition process, and similarities in culture, ideology and values appear to be resulting in a smooth and efficient progression of synergies with respect to the Bolivian Operations. We will keep executing our planned integration process with discipline and industry best practices while incorporating the Santacruz philosophy, with the goal of creating value to our stakeholders."

CONSOLIDATED PRODUCTION RESULTS - (Mexico and Bolivia Operations*)



Q1 2022 Q4 2021 Q1 2021 Material Processed (tonnes milled) 227,570 192,901 176,239 Silver equivalent production (oz) 1,391,590 842,027 706,978 Silver production (oz) 469,829 318,374 325,376 Lead production (tonnes) 1,493 1,012 945 Zinc production (tonnes) 6,325 3,442 2,285 Copper production (tonnes) 419 488 354 Average Head Grade (g/t Ag Eqv.) 235 184 176 Development (metres) 3,572 2,865 2,212



*Only 13 days of production from our Bolivian Operations has been included in the production results for Q1 2022.

MEXICO CONSOLIDATED PRODUCTION RESULTS



Q1 2022 Q4 2021* Q1 2021 Material Processed (tonnes milled) 191,413 192,901 176,239 Silver equivalent production (oz) 901,184 842,027 706,978 Silver production (oz) 307,371 318,374 325,376 Silver head grade (g/t) 69 76 82 Lead head grade (%/t) 0.72 0.60 0.60 Zinc head grade (%/t) 2.31 2.26 1.94 Copper head grade (%/t) 0.29 0.35 0.27 Silver recovery (%) 72.2 67.2 70.0 Lead production (tonnes) 1,214 1,012 945 Zinc production (tonnes) 3,380 3,442 2,285 Copper production (tonnes) 419 488 354 Average Head Grade (g/t Ag Eqv.) 192 184 176 Development (metres) 2,765 2,865 2,212



*The Rosario mine was placed on care and maintenance during Q3 2021 and as such no production numbers were reported for Q4 2021.

ZIMAPAN MINE PRODUCTION RESULTS - (Mexico)



Q1 2022 Q4 2021 Q1 2021 Material Processed (tonnes milled) 191,413 192,901 156,433 Silver equivalent production(oz) 901,184 842,027 646,085 Silver production (oz) 307,371 318,374 294,099 Silver head grade (g/t) 69 76 85 Lead head grade (%/t) 0.72 0.60 0.63 Zinc head grade (%/t) 2.31 2.26 1.99 Copper head grade (%/t) 0.29 0.35 0.31 Silver recovery (%) 72.2 67.2 70.0 Lead production (tonnes) 1,214 1,012 892 Zinc production (tonnes) 3,380 3,442 2,067 Copper production (tonnes) 419 488 354 Average Head Grade (g/t Ag Eqv.) 192 184 182 Development (metres) 2,765 2,865 1,724

BOLIVIA CONSOLIDATED Q1 2022 PRODUCTION RESULTS*

Q1 2022 BOLIVAR PORCO CABALLO BLANCO SAN LUCAS TOTAL Material Processed (tonnes milled) 9,612 10,237 5,669 10,640 36,157 Silver equivalent production (oz) 120,127 125,243 66,855 178,180 490,405 Silver production (oz) 49,742 35,476 26,099 51,140 162,458 Silver head grade (g/t) 191 138 152 165 162 Lead head grade (%/t) 0.63 0.66 1.54 1.08 0.91 Zinc head grade (%/t) 7.00 8.40 6.05 11.55 8.59 Silver recovery (%) 84.4 78.1 94.1 90.5 86.1 Lead production (tonnes) 54 56 79 90 279 Zinc production (tonnes) 636 822 331 1,155 2,944 Average Head Grade (g/t Ag Eqv.) 433 426 386 565 462 Development (metres) 183 201 423 - 808



*Only 13 days of production from the Bolivian Operations have been included in the production results set out in the table above for Q1 2022.

BOLIVIA CONSOLIDATED TOTAL Q1 2022 PRODUCTION RESULTS*

Q1 2022 BOLIVAR PORCO CABALLO BLANCO SAN LUCAS TOTAL Material Processed (tonnes milled) 67,424 45,461 67,836 73,428 254,149 Silver equivalent production (oz) 896,670 515,053 820,269 1,186,083 3,418,075 Silver production (oz) 368,860 147,723 312,376 364,931 1,193,890 Silver head grade (g/t) 192 116 160 182 167 Lead head grade (%/t) 0.64 0.64 1.57 1.29 1.08 Zinc head grade (%/t) 7.58 7.73 6.47 10.61 8.19 Silver recovery (%) 88.5 87.3 89.5 85.1 87.5 Lead production (tonnes) 386 246 963 779 2,374 Zinc production (tonnes) 4,788 3,350 4,143 7,309 19,590 Average Head Grade (g/t Ag Eqv.) 453 381 408 557 458 Development (metres) 1,685 1,744 892 - 4,321



*The table above includes all production in Q1 2022, including production which occurred while the Bolivian Operations were owned by Glencore (prior to completion of the acquisition of the Bolivian Operations from Glencore).

BOLIVIA AND MEXICO CONSOLIDATED PRODUCTION RESULTS -

(Considering a full Q1 2022 production for Bolivia and Mexico)*



Q1 2022 Material Processed (tonnes milled) 445,562 Silver equivalent production (oz) 4,319,260 Silver production (oz) 1,501,262 Silver head grade (g/t) 125 Lead head grade (%/t) 0.92 Zinc head grade (%/t) 5.66 Copper head grade (%/t) 0.12 Silver recovery (%) 83.9 Lead production (tonnes) 3,589 Zinc production (tonnes) 22,970 Copper production (tonnes) 419 Average Head Grade (g/t Ag Eqv.) 344 Development (metres) 7,086



*The table above includes all production in Q1 2022, including production which occurred while the Bolivian Operations were owned by Glencore (prior to completion of the acquisition of the Bolivian Operations from Glencore).

The Company has calculated the Ag Eq for the tables set out above using the following metal prices:

2022 Ag Eq was calculated using metal prices of: Ag $25.60/oz, Pb $0.94/lb, Zn $1.20/lb and Cu $4.01/lb.

2021 Ag Eq was calculated using metal prices of: Ag $25.00/oz, Pb $0.85/lb, Zn $1.05/lb and Cu $3.00/lb.

About Santacruz Silver Mining Ltd.

The Company is engaged in the operation, acquisition, exploration and development of mineral properties in Latin America, with a primary focus on silver and zinc, but also including lead and copper. The Company currently has four producing projects which include the Zimapan mine in Mexico and recently the Caballo Blanco mine, the Bolivar mine (45% interest) and Porco mine (45%). The Company also has a 100% interest in the San Lucas ore sourcing and trading business. The Company holds three exploration properties in its mineral property portfolio, being the La Pechuga Property (Mexico), the Santa Gorgonia Prospect (Mexico) and the Soracaya Prospect (Bolivia).

'signed'

Arturo Prestamo Elizondo,

Executive Chairman

For further information please contact:

Mars Investor Relations

Telephone: (778) 999 4653

scz@marsinvestorrelations.com

Arturo Prestamo

Santacruz Silver Mining Ltd.

Email: info@santacruzsilver.com

Telephone: (528) 183 785707

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.

Scientific and Technical Information

Scientific and technical information in this news release related to production results from Santacruz managed assets has been reviewed and approved by Wayne Corso P.E. Mr. Corso is independent of the Company as defined by National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101").

Zimapan Mine

Production at the Zimapan Mine is not supported by a feasibility study on mineral reserves demonstrating economic or technical viability or any other independent economic study under NI 43-101. Accordingly, there is increased uncertainty and higher economic and technical risks of failure associated with production operations at the Zimapan Mine. Production and economic variables may vary considerably due to the absence of a complete and detailed site analysis according to and in accordance with NI 43-101. Project failure may adversely impact the Company's future profitability.

Bolivian Operations

Production with respect to the Bolivian Operations is not supported by a feasibility study on mineral reserves demonstrating economic or technical viability or any other independent economic study under NI 43-101. Accordingly, there is increased uncertainty and higher economic and technical risks of failure associated with production operations at the Bolivian Operations. Production and economic variables may vary considerably due to the absence of a complete and detailed site analysis according to and in accordance with NI 43-101. Project failures may adversely impact the Company's future profitability.

Forward-looking information

Certain statements contained in this news release constitute "forward-looking information" as such term is used in applicable Canadian securities laws, including statements relating to production at the Zimapan Mine the Bolivian Operations and the Company's plans relating to such properties. Forward-looking information is based on plans, expectations and estimates of management at the date the information is provided and is subject to certain factors and assumptions. In making the forward-looking statements included in this news release, the Company has applied several material assumptions., including, but not limited to, assumptions as the Company's financial condition and development plans do not change as a result of unforeseen events, that the Company will receive all required regulatory approvals, and that future metal prices and the demand and market outlook for metals will remain stable or improve. Forward-looking information is subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause plans, estimates and actual results to vary materially from those projected in such forward-looking information. Factors that could cause the forward-looking information in this news release to change or to be inaccurate include, but are not limited to, the risk that any of the assumptions referred to above prove not to be valid or reliable; market conditions and volatility and global economic conditions, including increased volatility and potentially negative capital raising conditions resulting from the continued COVID-19 pandemic and risks relating to the extent and duration of such pandemic and its impact on global markets; risk of delay and/or cessation in planned work or changes in the Company's financial condition and development plans; risks associated with the interpretation of data (including in respect of third party mineralized material) regarding the geology, grade and continuity of mineral deposits; the uncertainty of the geology, grade and continuity of mineral deposits and the risk of unexpected variations in mineral resources, grade and/or recovery rates; risks related to gold, silver, base metal and other commodity price fluctuations; risks relating to environmental regulation and liability; the possibility that results will not be consistent with the Company's expectations, as well as the other risks and uncertainties applicable to mineral exploration and development activities and to the Company as set forth in the Company's continuous disclosure filings filed under the Company's profile at www.sedar.com. There can be no assurance that any forward-looking information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, the reader should not place any undue reliance on forward-looking information or statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking information or statements, other than as required by applicable law.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/123740
Latest Boxwood transaction continues the firm's momentum as a premier M&A advisor in the franchising industry

JUPITER, FL / ACCESSWIRE / May 12, 2022 / Boxwood Partners is pleased to announce the sale of Franchise FastLane ("FFL" or "the Company"), an outsourced franchise sales organization, to Southfield Capital.

Boxwood Partners, a leading boutique middle-market investment bank based in Jupiter, FL, acted as the exclusive sell-side advisor to Franchise FastLane on the transaction. The transaction was led by J. Patrick Galleher (Managing Partner), Brian Alas (Managing Director), Dan Martinson (Vice President), and John Atkinson (Associate). The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Co-founded by Ryan Zink and Carey Gille in 2017, FastLane has rapidly become the most recognizable franchise sales organization in the industry, awarding over 4,000 total territories in just 5 years. Franchise FastLane selectively partners with emerging franchise brands to bring them qualified franchisee leads, refine their sales process and drive accelerated development growth. The Company currently represents brands across various industries such as residential & commercial services, fitness, business services, child enrichment, automotive, health & wellness, and many others.

"Ryan and Carey have built a tremendous business, delivering top-tier client service through best-in-class culture, technology, and processes," said Brian Alas, Managing Director of Boxwood Partners. "Franchise FastLane has a unique value proposition in the franchising world. The partnership with Southfield will allow the Company to further accelerate the growth of their core service offerings while also providing the strategic vision and resources to expand the scope of services to support the needs of the Company's franchisor partners."

The Company's owners, Carey Gille and Ryan Zink, will remain involved in the business post-close with Ms. Gille continuing in her existing capacity as CEO and Mr. Zink serving as a Board Advisor.

"We sincerely appreciate Boxwood Partners' services as our sell-side advisor," said Ryan Zink, Co-Founder of Franchise FastLane. "Having gone through a transaction previously, I know how much time, energy and effort goes into the intensive process. Boxwood went above and beyond, and their knowledge of service businesses and the franchise landscape was invaluable as we navigated this transaction."

"We are extremely excited to partner with Southfield Capital," said Carey Gille, Co-Founder and CEO. "From the very beginning, there was cultural and strategic alignment, and we are thrilled to leverage our combined experiences in franchising and business services to take our franchisor partners to the next level of growth."

Taylor Dieckman and Zachary Rupiper with Koley Jessen served as the legal counsel while Elliot Davis served as the accounting advisor to the Company.

About Boxwood Partners

Boxwood Partners, LLC, is a boutique investment bank based in Jupiter, Florida with offices in Richmond, Virginia. Boxwood Partners combines a unique blend of senior-level transaction advisory, business operating experience, and proven process execution skills to give its clients a distinct advantage in the market. The firm's extensive relationships within the global capital and buyer communities (including U.S. and international private equity groups, corporations, and lenders) and other important transaction-related service providers such as consultants, attorneys, and accountants, ensure that the firm's clients receive the attention, service, and results they deserve.

For more information about Boxwood Partners, please visit www.boxwoodpartners.com.

About Franchise FastLane

Founded in 2017, Franchise Fastlane is an outsourced franchise sales organization (FSO) headquartered in Omaha, NE. The Company works with emerging franchisors, managing the entire franchisee sales lifecycle from initial lead generation to prospect qualification, all the way through deal closure. The Company leverages a rigorous diligence and onboarding process, an industry-leading technology platform, and exceptional sales executives to drive successful franchise development for its franchisor partners.

For more information, please visit www.franchisefastlane.com.

About Southfield Capital

Southfield Capital is a private equity firm that invests in high-growth, lower middle market companies in the outsourced business services sector. The firm targets companies with $4 - 15 million in EBITDA and partners with management to scale the business through a combination of organic and acquisition growth strategies.

For more information, please visit www.southfieldcapital.com.

SOURCE: Boxwood Partners, LLC

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/700929/Boxwood-Partners-Advises-Franchise-FastLane-on-Its-Partnership-with-Southfield-Capital
JACKSONVILLE, FL / ACCESSWIRE / May 12, 2022 / LFTD Partners Inc. ("LFTD Partners" or the "Company") (OTCQB:LIFD), the corporate parent of leading cannabis and psychedelics-lifestyle and consumer packaged goods manufacturer Lifted Made, today announced record quarterly revenue, net income, and diluted earnings per share for Q1 2022.

Financial Highlights - Q1 2022 compared to Q4 2021

Revenue up 41% to $18,088,877, up from $12,787,566 in Q4 2021

Net income up 118% to $2,944,793, up from $1,349,292 in Q4 2021

Basic earnings per share up 110% to $0.21 per share, up from basic earnings per share of $0.10 in Q4 2021

Diluted earnings per share up 125% to $0.18 per share, up from diluted earnings per share of $0.08 in Q4 2021

Financial Highlights - Q1 2022 compared to Q1 2021

Revenue up 439% to $18,088,877, up from $3,353,270 in Q1 2021

Net income up 376% to $2,944,793, up from $618,359 in Q1 2021

Basic earnings per share up 163% to $0.21 per share, up from basic earnings per share of $0.08 in Q1 2021

Diluted earnings per share up 350% to $0.18 per share, up from diluted earnings per share of $0.04 in Q1 2021

Q1 2022 is LFTD Partners' seventh consecutive quarter of positive GAAP-basis earnings per share.

During Q1 2022, sales of products under Lifted Made's hemp-derived products brand Urb Finest Flowers made up 96% of Lifted Made's sales; sales of products under Lifted Made's non-hemp-derived psychedelics products brand Silly Shruum made up the other 4% of Lifted Made's sales.

Nicholas S. Warrender, Vice Chairman and COO of LFTD Partners, and founder and CEO of Lifted Made, said, "Our tremendous quarter-over-quarter growth in revenue and profitability during Q1 2022 reflects Lifted Made's talented team and diversified product portfolio, including our award-winning brand of hemp-derived cannabinoid products Urb Finest Flowers and our psychedelics brand Silly Shruum which successfully launched in January. We are well on our way toward achieving our 2022 revenue goal of $75 million or more."

William C. "Jake" Jacobs, CPA, President and CFO of LFTD Partners, said: "Our balance sheet is continuing to strengthen, driven by our healthy EBITDA margin, which was 23% in Q1 2022. For example, despite recently paying down millions of dollars in debts and taxes, and building up millions of dollars worth of inventory, our cash on hand currently exceeds $3.4 million. Nevertheless, Lifted Made's runaway sales growth has made it very difficult to keep enough raw materials, packaging and finished inventory in stock. Consequently, LFTD Partners is continuing to explore the possibility of raising $10-$15 million in the form of debt that would be used to pay off our remaining $2.75 million note payable to Nick Warrender, to purchase Lifted Made's headquarters building in Kenosha for $1.375 million, and to add millions of dollars to Lifted Made's working capital so that its sales are less likely to be held back by a lack of raw materials and finished inventory as has happened often during the past two years."

About LFTD Partners Inc.

LFTD Partners Inc. (OTCQB:LIFD) is focused upon acquiring rapidly growing and profitable companies that sell branded hemp-derived cannabinoid products, emerging psychedelic products, and other alternative lifestyle products. LFTD Partners' first wholly-owned subsidiary is Lifted Made (www.LiftedMade.com), Kenosha, Wisconsin, which sells award-winning hemp-derived cannabinoid products and other psychedelic and alternative lifestyle products under its flagship brands Urb Finest Flowers and Silly Shruum. LFTD Partners also owns 4.99% of CBD-infused beverage and products maker Ablis (www.AblisBev.com), and of distillers Bendistillery Inc. d/b/a Crater Lake Spirits (www.CraterLakeSpirits.com) and Bend Spirits, Inc., all located in Bend, Oregon.

Please read LIFD's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission which fully describe our business and the Risk Factors associated therewith. Learn more by subscribing to our newsletters at www.LFTDPartners.com and www.LiftedMade.com.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements in this document are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such information includes the acquisition, financing, revenue growth, profitability, and product strategies, plans and expectations of LFTD Partners Inc. and Lifted Made. Such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause or contribute to the actual results of these companies' merger plans, financing plans, operations, or the performance or achievements of these companies differing materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Actual results, performance or achievements could differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking statements as a result of certain other factors, including the risk factors set forth in LFTD Partners Inc.'s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This press release does not constitute an offer to sell common stock or any other securities of LFTD Partners Inc.

CONTACTS:

Lifted Made

Attn: Nicholas S. Warrender, CEO

Phone: (224) 577-8148

Email: CEO@LiftedMade.com

Website: www.LiftedMade.com

LFTD Partners Inc.

Attn: William C. "Jake" Jacobs, CPA, President and CFO

Phone: (847) 400-7660

Email: JakeJacobs@LFTDPartners.com

Website: www.LFTDPartners.com

SOURCE: LFTD Partners Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/701086/LFTD-Partners-Inc-Reports-QoQ-Revenue-Up-41-Net-Income-Up-118-and-Diluted-EPS-up-125-During-Q1-2022
New additions include Chief Scientific Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Heads of Machine Learning and People Operations

New Alphabet "bet" is focused on the use of artificial intelligence to accelerate drug discovery

Isomorphic Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet, today announced the first phase of its management team. The company, established in November, was launched from Alphabet's DeepMind to build on the success of AlphaFold, DeepMind's work in protein folding that was heralded as the "Breakthrough of the Year" by Science and "Method of the Year" by Nature in 2021 Isomorphic Labs' mission is to use AI and machine learning methods to accelerate and improve the drug discovery process. The company is a pioneer in the emerging field of "digital biology" and aims to usher in a new era of biomedical breakthroughs in order to find cures for some of humanity's most devastating diseases.

The new leaders join founder and acting CEO Demis Hassabis, who is currently serving as CEO of both DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs. Together they comprise a truly multidisciplinary leadership team with expertise in domains across science, engineering, machine learning and business operations that will be needed to achieve the company's goal of dramatically improving how drugs are discovered and developed. Drug development is currently a lengthy, expensive and high-risk process that is poised to benefit from advances in the application of AI and computational methods. Studies peg the cost of bringing a molecule to market at more than $2.5 billion per drug and timelines approaching a decade; in fact, only about 12 percent of drugs entering clinical trials are ultimately approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

"We're thrilled to announce the formation of our extraordinary multidisciplinary leadership team that will allow us to deliver on our ambition to reimagine the entire drug discovery process from first principles, with an AI-first approach," said Hassabis. "The phenomenal success of AlphaFold demonstrated the huge impact that AI methods can potentially have on biology, and we plan to build powerful new predictive and generative models of biological phenomena to anticipate how drugs will perform and design novel molecules."

The new additions to the Isomorphic Labs team include:

MILES CONGREVE, PhD

Dr. Congreve joins as Chief Scientific Officer from Sosei Heptares in the same role, where he pioneered Structure-Based Drug Design for G Protein-Coupled Receptors (GPCRs). Previously he was director of chemistry at Astex Pharmaceuticals, helping to establish Fragment-Based Drug Design as a radical new approach to small molecule lead generation, and team leader at GlaxoSmithKline in medicinal chemistry and chemical technologies. In his 28-year career, Dr. Congreve has contributed to the design of 20 clinically evaluated drugs and he is co-inventor of Kisqali (Ribociclib), a marketed treatment for breast cancers. He is co-author of over 180 publications and patents. In 2015, he was co-recipient of the RSC Malcolm Campbell Memorial Prize for the seminal contributions to GPCR drug discovery made by Sosei Heptares. Dr. Congreve has a degree in biological chemistry from Leicester University and a PhD in synthetic chemistry from Cambridge University. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

SERGEI YAKNEEN, PhD

Dr. Yakneen joins as Chief Technology Officer, bringing over 20 years of experience in engineering, machine learning, product, life science, and medical research. Prior to this role he was senior vice president and chief technology officer at SOPHiA GENETICS, where he was responsible for the development and operation of a global AI-based molecular diagnostics and imaging software platform operating in more than 70 countries. He's held senior roles at Amazon, where he launched the first Canadian software engineering center; at BPS Inc., where he developed a best-in-class Governance, Risk, and Compliance platform; at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, where he led the Technical Working Group of the Pan Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Project, the world's largest cancer data analysis initiative; and at EMBL where he developed a cloud-based scientific workflow framework. Dr. Yakneen holds a degree in computer science and mathematics from the University of Toronto and a PhD in computer science from Heidelberg University, where he developed novel distributed algorithms for analyzing cancer genomes.

MAX JADERBERG, PhD

Dr. Jaderberg joins as Director of Machine Learning from DeepMind, where he was a research scientist, leading the Open-Ended Learning research team and pioneering numerous algorithms bringing together large-scale deep learning and reinforcement learning to achieve breakthrough results with AI. Prior to that, he was CEO and co-founder of Vision Factory, a company that specialized in image recognition technology with deep learning, which was acquired by Google in 2014 and subsequently became part of DeepMind. He is widely published in the top journals and conferences, with work now part of textbooks. His research interests are in AI, deep learning, reinforcement learning and generative modeling. Dr. Jaderberg completed his undergraduate degree in engineering science at the University of Oxford and his PhD with the Visual Geometry Group at the University of Oxford, where he developed state-of-the-art algorithms for image understanding.

ALEXANDRA RICHENBURG

Ms. Richenburg joins as Director of People Operations from Eigen Technologies, where she was senior vice president of people. She is skilled in the development and implementation of innovative people strategies that drive business growth and performance. She has held a variety of human resources roles at companies including Meridian Life Sciences, Bioline and Evotec. Ms. Richenburg is a graduate of the University of Edinburgh with a bachelor's degree in chemistry, medicinal and biological chemistry and earned a master's degree in human resources management from Oxford Brookes University.

The company is continuing to scale and is currently seeking talent at various levels with a focus on scientific, engineering and operational roles, along with biologists, medicinal chemists, biophysicists, clinicians, computational scientists, and machine learning experts to contribute to our mission of using AI to accelerate the drug discovery process. For information on open roles, please visit www.isomorphiclabs.com/join.

ABOUT ISOMORPHIC LABS

Isomorphic Labs is a subsidiary of Alphabet that was launched from Alphabet's DeepMind in 2021, with headquarters in London. It was founded and is led by AI pioneer Demis Hassabis, who also co-founded and leads DeepMind. As pioneers in digital biology, the company's mission is to use AI to accelerate drug discovery and ultimately find cures for some of humanity's most devastating diseases. Using its AI-first approach to drug discovery and biology, the company's ambition is to advance a new era of medical breakthroughs. For more information, go to www.isomorphiclabs.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220512005500/en/

Contacts:

For Media Inquiries

Kym White

+1 212 799 9565 or press@isomorphiclabs.com
Unified platform enables customers to share connectivity packages from industry peers and further reduce custom code

COPENHAGEN, Denmark, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Omada A/S ("Omada"), a global leader of Identity Governance and Administration (IGA), announced today that it has introduced the Omada Connectivity Community, a platform for like-minded customers to share connectivity packages used to integrate business applications with Omada deployments. This platform furthers Omada's approach for universal connectivity and enables customers to connect to the broadest set of business applications and systems without the need for custom code.

The average organization has added 65 business critical applications to its enterprise in the past 24 months, research shows. With each application comes new connectivity requirements for onboarding, assigning and provisioning access. Omada makes this easier for organizations through a configurable connectivity approach that's faster and more reliable than using code development. The Connectivity Community takes this a step further by providing a platform where users can submit their own connectivity packages and benefit from packages other users have submitted as yet another method for integrating business applications.

Within the Connectivity Community, customers can:

Seamlessly download connectivity packages: The Connectivity Community makes it easy for Omada customers to group, search, and find relevant connectivity packages. Community members can then install with a simple click of the mouse.

The Connectivity Community makes it easy for Omada customers to group, search, and find relevant connectivity packages. Community members can then install with a simple click of the mouse. Easily submit connectivity packages: Users fill in a simple form to submit connectivity packages directly from the Omada user interface. All packages are part of an existing Omada deployment, and this initiative creates a space for customers from different industries, sizes, and teams to share best practices with each other.

The Omada Connectivity Community is open to all customers, whether they deploy Omada in the cloud or on-premises. This initiative enables customers to be self-sufficient in how they integrate applications into their environments in a way that is secure, efficient and effective. The Omada approach supports common protocols like REST, OData, SCIM 2.0, SOAP and LDAP, as well as an SDK for applications without a common communication protocol.

Lars Bell, chief customer officer, Omada, said: "Providing our customers with the best possible experience includes giving them a variety of options to integrate their business applications. The Connectivity Community presents an exciting step forward to provide our customers with the ability to support one another and foster a community of identity governance and administration experts working with each other to help keep businesses efficient, secure and compliant."

About Omada

Omada, a global market leader in Identity Governance and Administration (IGA), offers a full-featured, enterprise-grade, cloud native IGA solution that enables organizations to maximize efficiency, reduce risk, and meet compliance. requirements. Founded in 2000, Omada delivers innovative identity management to complex hybrid environments based on our leading technology, proven best practice process framework, and best-in-breed deployment approach.

For more information, go to omadaidentity.com

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SHENZHEN, China, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- vivo, one of the first smartphone brands to receive Android 13 Beta, is making the system upgrade available to developers to optimize and deliver the brand new Android experience to vivo users. The X80 Pro will be vivo's first smartphone model eligible for the latest Android 13 Beta.

Enhanced user experience with improved security and privacy

Every Android upgrade delivers an improved interactive user experience, and Android 13 is no exception. This version's newly added Foreground Services (FGS) Task Manager shows a list of apps that are actively performing tasks in the foreground, enabling users to easily end foreground services from the notification drawer. In addition, Android 13 Beta provides developers with a separate API that allows users to select a preferred language for each app.

In terms of security and privacy, Android 13 Beta introduces a new system of permissions management and setting functions. It strengthens and protects user security and privacy in numerous scenarios, including notification runtime permissions, background motion sensors, exporting of context-registered receivers, and active downgrading of applications.

Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) Audio, Programmable Shaders, and Quick Settings placement are new features introduced to improve multimedia content processing, including photos and audio. The new version also includes battery resource utilization functions to improve battery life.

vivo users among the first to enjoy the upgraded Android experience

While Android system continues to roll out new iterations, vivo has been playing a proactive role in supporting developers to adapt and optimize their apps for the latest version of vivo's operating system, FuntouchOS. vivo's open platform has offered developer partners over 60 new capabilities in the past year alone. vivo has also integrated AI, IoT, media and system-based capabilities, intelligent hardware, and APP services through vivo SDK Manager, aiming to build a more convenient and integrated environment for developers.

Through the continuous exploration of smartphone system capabilities, vivo is committed to working with industry partners and developers to deliver an efficient, convenient, and creative user experience that can cater to any user scenario.

Starting today, developers can visit vivo's developer website at https://developer.vivo.com/ to download the Beta version of Android 13 Beta for application testing and optimization on the X80 Pro.

About vivo

vivo is a technology company that creates great products based on a design-driven value, with smart devices and intelligent services as its core. The company aims to build a bridge between humans and the digital world. Through unique creativity, vivo provides users with an increasingly convenient mobile and digital life. Following the company's core values, which include Benfen*, user-orientation, design-driven value, continuous learning and team spirit, vivo has implemented a sustainable development strategy with the vision of developing into a healthier, more sustainable world-class corporation.

While bringing together and developing the best local talents to deliver excellence, vivo is supported by a network of R&D centers in Shenzhen, Dongguan, Nanjing, Beijing, Hangzhou, Shanghai and Xi'an, focusing on the development of state-of-the-art consumer technologies, including 5G, artificial intelligence, industrial design, imaging system and other up-and-coming technologies. vivo has also set up an intelligent manufacturing network (including those authorized by vivo), with an annual production capacity of nearly 200 million smartphones. As of now, vivo has branched out its sales network across more than 60 countries and regions, and is loved by more than 400 million users worldwide.

*"Benfen" is a term describing the attitude on doing the right things and doing things right - which is the ideal description of vivo's mission to create value for society.

Stay informed of latest vivo news at https://www.vivo.com/en/about-vivo/news
BANGKOK, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Huawei Global Rail Summit 2022 brought together industry leaders, major stakeholders, key customers, and authoritative organizations to discuss the future of the rail industry in the Asia Pacific region. The Summit looks to invigorate the digital transformation of rail enterprises in the region and globally. Huawei uses the latest ICTs to help cities in Southeast Asia upgrade their infrastructure, creating new momentum for urban development and a digital APAC.

A satellite event to the long-standing Asia Pacific Rail 2022, the Summit was themed Driving Digitalization in Future Rail to Create New Value Together. Asia Pacific Rail is a long-standing event in the region, which has brought together over 25,000 industry leaders over the past 23 years. Huawei also hosted a booth at the event, showcasing some of the company's cutting-edge portfolio of rail industry solutions.

"As a leading global ICT solution provider, Huawei proposes smart railway and urban rail solutions with a full-service architecture based on diversified connectivity and unified digital platform, enabling rail digitalization and business intelligence." said Aaron Wang, Huawei's Senior Vice President for the Asia Pacific Enterprise Business Group.

"We are seeing a rapid increase in the digitalization of rail transport. Both railways and urban rails are shifting away from station-specific systems to using rail cloud infrastructure to interconnect services. There is also a push toward smarter, more integrated systems. We foresee these being rolled out on a large scale in the near future, which is why Huawei is already designing and launching intelligent, comprehensive solutions for the industry," said Xiang Xi, Vice President of the Huawei Global Transportation Business Unit.

The Huawei Global Rail Summit 2022 followed a packed agenda on innovation, digitalization, and future-proof rail transport.

Li Zhonghao, Director of the China Association of Metros, shared China's experience in the digital transformation of metro systems. The State Railway of Thailand and CRSC International looked at strategies to reshape connectivity, deploy innovative ICTs, and build robust communication infrastructure for railways.

The Huawei Global Rail Summit also saw the launch of the Future Railway Mobile Communications System (FRMCS) White Paper. Fresh off the press, the paper discusses the latest trends and innovative practices in mobile communications systems for railways and metro systems. Aimed at decision-makers and industry leaders, it sums up some of the most prominent technologies in the field today as well as sharing best practices on deploying top-of-the-line communications solutions.

In addition, Huawei also shared several best practices and showcased its solutions at a booth at the Asia Pacific Rail 2022. One of the highlights was the Urban Rail Wi-Fi 6 Vehicle-to-Ground Communication Network Solution. The solution enables near-real-time data transmission for rail transport. This vehicle-to-ground communication network is a whole new way for trains to share data, ensure safety, and promote efficiency. Trains can communicate with stations and command centers even when traveling at high-speeds, nearly eliminating information transmission delays.

The Summit demonstrated the industry's consensus on the need to go digital, and to do so quickly. Huawei looks forward to continued cooperation with industry customers and ecosystem partners. Huawei delivers innovative digital infrastructure to help the rail transport industries in the Asia Pacific region and around the world go digital. The company's low-carbon, smart rail solutions offer improved safety, efficiency, and experience, boosting urban development and creating new value for the industry to create digital city together.

For Huawei FRMCS white paper download:https://e.huawei.com/en/material/wireless/ab9bbc5ad15144bca82e16c6059d823d

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WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - A report released by the Labor Department on Thursday unexpectedly showed a slight increase in first-time claims for U.S. unemployment benefits in the week ended May 7th. The Labor Department said initial jobless claims crept up to 203,000, an increase of 1,000 from the previous week's revised level of 202,000. The uptick surprised economists, who had expected jobless claims to dip to 195,000 from the 200,000 originally reported for the previous week. The report showed the less volatile four-week moving average also edged up to 192,750, an increase of 4,250 from the previous week's revised average of 188,500. 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.
Growing practice of packaging for food & pharmaceutical products and surge in adoption of biopharmaceutical merchandises in emerging countries drive the growth of the global desiccant market.

PORTLAND, Ore., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Allied Market Research published a report, titled, "Desiccant Market by Type (Silica Gel, Activated Alumina, Activated Charcoal, Zeolite, Calcium Chloride, Clay and Others) and End use industry (Packaging, Food, Pharmaceutical, Electronics and Others): Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2021-2030." According to the report, the global desiccant industry generated $0.9 billion in 2020, and is expected to reach $1.5 billion by 2030, witnessing a CAGR of 4.9% from 2021 to 2030.

Drivers, Restraints, and Opportunities

Growing practice of packaging for food & pharmaceutical products and surge in adoption of biopharmaceutical merchandises in emerging countries drive the growth of the global desiccant market. However, high cost of investments restrains the market growth. On the other hand, increase in demand from the electronics industry presents new opportunities in the coming years.

Request PDF Brochure: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-sample/11965

Covid-19 Scenario

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the demand for desiccant from end use industries such as pharmaceutical and packaging increased considerably. However, the demand from the electronics industry happened to reduce due to several lockdown measures and manufacturing interruptions.

The disruptions in the supply chain presented challenges in acquiring desiccants in various end use industries. However, the supply chain has been regulated post-pandemic.

The silica gel segment to maintain its lead position throughout the forecast period

Based on type, the silica gel segment accounted for the highest market share in 2020, holding nearly two-fifths of the global desiccant market, and is expected to maintain its lead position throughout the forecast period. This is due to increased demand from the biopharmaceuticals sector and its usefulness in collecting or segregating different components of a drug. However, the activated alumina segment is estimated to witness the largest CAGR of 7.1% from 2021 to 2030, owing to rise in concerns related to water pollution by fluorine and its significance in the pharmaceutical industry.

Get Detailed COVID-19 Impact Analysis on the Desiccant Market @ https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-for-customization/11965?reqfor=covid

The food segment to maintain its leadership status during the forecast period

Based on end use industry, the food segment held the highest market share in terms of revenue in 2020, accounting for more than one-third of the global desiccant market, and is projected to maintain its leadership status during the forecast period. This is due to its usage as a drying agent for protection of certain food products. However, the pharmaceutical segment is projected to register the fastest CAGR of 5.7% from 2021 to 2030. This is attributed to increase in demand for pharmaceutical products that utilize desiccants.

Asia-Pacific, followed by North America, to offer lucrative opportunities

Based on region, Asia-Pacific, followed by North America, contributed to the highest market share in terms of revenue in 2020, accounting for nearly two-fifths of the global desiccant market, and is expected to continue its dominance by 2030. Moreover, this region is estimated to manifest the largest CAGR of 6.2% during the forecast period. This is attributed to high demand from end use industries such as pharmaceutical, electronics, and food in the region.

Leading Market Players

Fuji Silysia Chemical Ltd.

Desicca Chemicals Pvt. Ltd.

Tropack Packmitel GmBH

Oker-Chemie GmBH

Hengye, Inc.

Multisorb technologies

Clariant

Capitol Scientific, Inc.

W. R. Grace And Co.

Evonik Industries AG

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Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - May 12, 2022) - Appia Rare Earths & Uranium Corp. (CSE: API) (OTCQB: APAAF) (FSE: A0I.F) (FSE: A0I.MU) (FSE: A0I.BE) (the "Company" or "Appia") is pleased to announce that as part of a metallurgical collaboration with CanmetMINING focused on beneficiation testwork for the Alces Lake Rare Earth Project, the Company has extracted a bulk sample from the Alces Lake discovery and will ship it to CanmetMINING in the next few days. The primary focus for the test program will be to optimize and enhance the development of an Alces Lake Project flowsheet and to confirm other material testwork that has been previously conducted by other parties on the Alces Lake monazite.

Federal R&D assistance is provided through a collaboration agreement with CanmetMINING, under their Critical Minerals Research, Development and Demonstration program. This program targets research and development for upstream critical minerals processing and aims to stimulate the development of battery and permanent magnet value chains in Canada.

The test work is anticipated to include grinding, flotation, magnetic separation, ore sorting, and dense medium separation (DMS). CanmetMINING scientists will work closely with the Company and its consultants for mineral processing. The objective is to design and execute a comprehensive and optimal testing approach that will produce a high-grade rare earth mineral concentrate from the Alces Lake mineralized material.

A total of 0.9 tonnes of mineralized material was extracted from the Alces Lake Deposit and 0.6 tonnes will be shipped to SGS Canada's Lakefield facility in Ontario for crushing and sizing ahead of test work. The remainder of the sample will be shipped at a later date. Upon completion of the preparatory work, the sample will be shipped to CanmetMINING and the test programs will begin.

About CanmetMINING

CanmetMINING, a science and technology branch of the Lands and Metals sector of Natural Resources Canada, is a world-class leader in the development and deployment of green mining innovation technologies. Much of its research is undertaken in partnership with industry, provincial governments, other federal departments, universities and international agencies.

CanmetMINING's $47.7M Critical Minerals RD&D Program was funded through the Federal Budget 2021 to develop domestic critical raw materials value chains, and position Canada as a global supplier of choice for critical mineral products. R&D is focused on 3 key priority research areas: battery minerals, the Mining Value from Waste Program (MVfW), and rare earth elements and other critical minerals. This collaboration with Appia under the REE and other critical minerals area seeks to advance the production of permanent magnet raw materials in Canada.

2021 Drilling Results Received

The Company is now in receipt of all assay results from 2021 and is currently analyzing and evaluating the information. A summary of the results is expected to be released in the near future

Appia commenced drilling at Alces Lake in mid-March 2022 and plans to drill significantly deeper holes compared to the 100 holes (approximately 8,075 metres) drilled in 2021. This is designed to allow Appia to determine continuity at depth and along the identified REE mineralization trends as the company works towards the publication of a maiden resource estimate in accordance with NI 43-101 for the area. With high-grade REE mineralization now having been identified in many locations within an area covering approximately 27 km2 of the Alces Lake block, the Company believes the project has the potential to be a world-class source of high-grade critical rare earth bearing monazite.

About the Alces Lake Project

The Alces Lake project encompasses some of the highest-grade total and critical* REEs and gallium mineralization in the world, hosted within a number of surface and near-surface monazite occurrences that remain open at depth and along strike.

* Critical rare earth elements are defined here as those that are in short-supply and high-demand for use in permanent magnets and modern electronic applications such as electric vehicles and wind turbines (i.e: neodymium (Nd), praseodymium (Pr), dysprosium (Dy) and terbium (Tb)).

The Alces Lake project is located in northern Saskatchewan, the same provincial jurisdiction that is developing a "first-of-its-kind" rare earth processing facility in Canada (currently under construction by the Saskatchewan Research Council and scheduled to become operational in early 2023). The Alces Lake project area is 35,682 hectares (88,173 acres) in size and is 100% owned by Appia.

To ensure safe work conditions are met for the workforce, the Company has developed exploration guidelines that comply with the Saskatchewan Public Health Orders and the Public Health Order Respecting the Northern Saskatchewan Administration District in order to maintain social distancing and help prevent the transmission of COVID-19.

The metallurgical content in this news release was reviewed and approved by Mr. John Goode, P.Eng, Metallurgical Consultant to Appia's Board of Directors, and a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. The geologic content in this news release was reviewed and approved by Dr. Irvine R. Annesley, P.Geo, Advisor to Appia's Board of Directors, and a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101. SRC Geoanalytical Laboratories' management system operates in accordance with ISO/IEC 17025:2005 (CAN-P-4E), General Requirements for the Competence of Mineral Testing and Calibration Laboratories.

About Appia

Appia is a Canadian publicly-listed company in the rare earth element and uranium sectors. The Company is currently focusing on delineating high-grade critical rare earth elements and gallium on the Alces Lake property, as well as exploring for high-grade uranium in the prolific Athabasca Basin on its Otherside, Loranger, North Wollaston, and Eastside properties. The Company holds the surface rights to exploration for 105,026 hectares (259,525 acres) in Saskatchewan. The Company also has a 100% interest in 12,545 hectares (31,000 acres), with rare earth element and uranium deposits over five mineralized zones in the Elliot Lake Camp, Ontario.

Appia has 123.1 million common shares outstanding, 142.1 million shares fully diluted.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements: This News Release contains forward-looking statements which are typically preceded by, followed by or including the words "believes", "expects", "anticipates", "estimates", "intends", "plans" or similar expressions. Forward-looking statements are not a guarantee of future performance as they involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. We do not intend and do not assume any obligation to update these forward- looking statements and shareholders are cautioned not to put undue reliance on such statements.

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Market Regulator (as that term is defined in the policies of the CSE) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

For further information, please contact:

Tom Drivas, CEO and Director: (cell) 416-876-3957, (fax) 416-218-9772 or (email) appia@appiareu.com

Frederick Kozak, President: (cellular) 403-606-3165 or (email) fkozak@appiareu.com

Frank van de Water, Chief Financial Officer and Director, (tel) 416-546-2707, (fax) 416-218-9772 or (email) fvandewater@rogers.com

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/123785
Conference to Focus on Industry Strategies to Navigate Change and Celebrity Chef Insights

ALPHARETTA, Ga., May 12, 2022, a global provider of mission-critical enterprise software solutions, announced the theme, speakers and other key details for its annual Food and Beverage Symposium. The event, which takes place virtually on September 13, 2022, will focus on embracing a holistic approach to balance dynamic consumer demands and the imperatives of sustainability and food safety.



The Symposium will include a deep dive into the findings of the 2022 Global Food and Beverage Industry Trends Report, presented by Simon Ellis, Program Vice President at IDC, the global research firm commissioned by Aptean to conduct the study. The 2022 report will offer updated data, post-pandemic perspectives and key indicators of the future of the food and beverage industry. Event attendees will also have the opportunity to receive a copy of the report at the conclusion of the Symposium.

Celebrity chef Damaris Phillips will present the keynote speech at the Symposium, sharing her personal and professional experiences on adapting to changing consumer food expectations. As a Southerner who launched a career built on traditional regional cuisine, Ms. Phillips faced a unique challenge in her personal and professional journey when she married an ethical vegetarian. Drawing on tales from her kitchen, Ms. Phillips will provide excellent insight into how today's food and beverage landscape is changing as consumers increasingly consider the impacts of their own food choices on their health and that of the environment.

"At Aptean, our commitment as a provider of solutions for the food and beverage industry extends beyond delivering innovative enterprise software and deep expertise. The 2022 Food and Beverage Symposium provides attendees with access to important trend data and trusted experts and thought leaders who know and understand the industry," said TVN Reddy, Chief Executive Officer at Aptean. "Food and beverage businesses continue to navigate a highly dynamic landscape and the Symposium offers uniquely valuable information and practical guidance on the industry's most critical issues."

To learn more about Aptean's 2022 Food and Beverage Symposium or to register today, click here.

About Aptean

Aptean is one of the world's leading providers of purpose-built, industry-specific software that helps manufacturers and distributors effectively run and grow their businesses. With both cloud and on-premise deployment options, Aptean's products, services and unmatched expertise help businesses of all sizes to be Ready for What's Next, Now. Aptean is headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia and has offices in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. To learn more about Aptean and the markets we serve, visit www.aptean.com.

Aptean and Ready for What's Next, Now are Registered Trademarks of Aptean, Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

For Media Inquiries Please Contact

Nicole O'Rourke

Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer

Nicole.ORourke@aptean.com

(770) 715-0362

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/949c993b-f900-4bbe-ae2e-85887ba159b7
DOVER, DE / ACCESSWIRE / May 12, 2022 / Pacific Green Technologies, Inc. (the "Company" or "PGTK", (OTCQB:PGTK)) announces that it has entered into an agreement with Green Power Reserves Limited ("GPR"), wherein GPR has made an equity investment of 13 million (US$16.0 million) for a fifty percent shareholding in Pacific Green Battery Energy Parks 1 Limited ("PGBEP").

The proceeds from the investment will be used to provide the equity financing for the construction of the 99.98 MW battery energy storage system ("BESS") the Company is developing in Kent, England. As part of the investment, Paolo Revelli, Managing Director of GPR, has agreed to join the Board of Directors of PGBEP and its subsidiary, Richborough Energy Park Limited.

Scott Poulter, PGTK's Chief Executive, commented: "Paolo is a veteran portfolio manager who has been a pioneer in the renewables sector in the UK and Europe. We are delighted to have GPR as partners in developing Richborough Energy Park."

Paolo commented: "The BESS market in the UK is a rapidly-growing sector in the renewable energy mix, finding a partner capable of delivering projects at grid-scale was critical for us. Having seen Pacific Green's rapid transition from a single technology supplier in the marine industry to a fully-integrated renewable energy developer, we are confident in Pacific Green's delivery capabilities."

Scott added, "We are very pleased to have reached this milestone with Richborough Energy Park, as part of Pacific Green's 1.1 GW UK-based pipeline. With a grid connection in mid-2023, I anticipate many more updates with project milestones and new energy project announcements over the next weeks and months."

About Pacific Green Technologies, Inc.:

Pacific Green Technologies, Inc. is focused on addressing the world's need for cleaner and more sustainable energy. The Company offers BESS, Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) and Photovoltaic (PV) energy solutions to complement its marine environmental technologies and emissions control divisions.

For more information, visit PGTK's website:

www.pacificgreentechnologies.com

About Green Power Reserves Limited:

GPR, which is led by Paolo Revelli, is a special purpose vehicle focusing on battery storage in the UK. Mr. Revelli was formerly a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley and is currently a director of Quainstone Limited.

Notice Regarding Forward-Looking Statements:

This news release contains "forward-looking statements," as that term is defined in Section 27A of the United States Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Statements in this news release which are not purely historical are forward-looking statements and include any statements regarding beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions regarding the future. Such forward-looking statements include, among other things, the construction of the 99.98 MW BESS the Company is to develop in Kent; and any potential business developments in the UK and future interest in the Company's battery, solar and emissions control technologies.

Actual results could differ from those projected in any forward-looking statements due to numerous factors. Such factors include, among others, general economic and political conditions, the continuation of the investment and the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this news release, and the Company assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements, or to update the reasons why actual results could differ from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes that the beliefs, plans, expectations and intentions contained in this news release are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions will prove to be accurate. Investors should consult all the information set forth herein and should also refer to the risk factors disclosure outlined in the Company's annual report on Form 10-K for the most recent fiscal year, the Company's quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and other periodic reports filed from time-to-time with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Contact:

Scott Poulter, Chairman & CEO

Pacific Green Technologies

T: +1 (302) 601-4659

SOURCE: Pacific Green Technologies, Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/701112/Green-Power-Reserves-Becomes-Equity-Partner-in-Pacific-Greens-9998-Mw-Richborough-Energy-Park-Battery-Development
Philanthropist and Serial Entrepreneur Michael Sonnenfeldt and Wife Katja Goldman Provide Naming Gift for Israel's First-of-its-Kind School

NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / May 12, 2022 / Philanthropists Michael Sonnenfeldt and Katja Goldman have donated one of the largest single gift commitments in the history of Americans for Ben-Gurion University (A4BGU): $20 million. The donation establishes the new Goldman Sonnenfeldt School of Sustainability and Climate Change at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), the first of its kind in Israel. Through innovative research and solutions, the new school builds on BGU's history of developing groundbreaking technology to combat the climate change crisis.

"BGU is leading the world in adaptability research for climate change," says Michael Sonnenfeldt, Goldman-Sonnenfeldt Foundation Inc. co-founder and president. "For decades, their researchers have been developing leading-edge technology to help Israel adapt to a harsh desert climate. Now that much of the rest of the world faces similar conditions, this research has global and urgent applicability. We are proud to contribute to BGU's mission to address a global challenge with revolutionary solutions that allow humanity to survive, and thrive, amid global climate disruption."

A serial entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist, Sonnenfeldt is also the founder of TIGER 21, the premier peer membership organization for high-net-worth entrepreneurs, investors and executives. For more than 30 years, he has dedicated his efforts to solving sustainability challenges from food supplies to energy and environmental issues.

"This transformational gift is a tremendous vote of confidence for BGU's ability to effect change. For more than 50 years, we have been researching how to live in our desert. As the world is now coming to BGU to learn from this experience, with this gift, we are poised to leverage our experience for tackling a truly global problem," says BGU President Prof. Daniel Chamovitz.

The gift was pledged through A4BGU, which maintains David Ben-Gurion's vision for the Negev and the future of Israel through raising awareness, fundraising and programming to immerse the next generation of American leaders in both the Negev and BGU's vital work. It comes just after A4BGU hosted its virtual event, Celebrating the Remarkable 2, to drive greater awareness of BGU's climate change and environmental-related research in the U.S.

"We are deeply appreciative of Michael Sonnenfeldt and his wife, Katja Goldman, for this remarkable gift - the third single largest donation in our history," says Doug Seserman, CEO of A4BGU. "It couldn't come at a more perfect time. Climate change is the largest challenge facing the planet. By leveraging more than 50 years of research expertise in combating desertification, BGU's new School will ensure that a new generation of students and innovative scientists care for the planet for decades to come."

Over the past five decades, BGU researchers have developed sustainable technologies to tackle water and food scarcity amid a hostile and resource-strapped environment. BGU founded the new School in 2021 to leverage this rich history of cutting-edge research and the scientific talent across BGU's three campuses located in Beer-Sheva, Sde Boker and Eilat. This donation enables BGU to grow its life-changing research program across multiple disciplines, including agriculture, marine biology and alternative energy across its 150+ research labs. As a platform, the Goldman Sonnenfeldt School of Sustainability and Climate Change will enable the seamless integration of novel, multi-disciplinary approaches to education, research, and outreach as the world's environmental needs evolve in the decades to come.

As a past national president of A4BGU from 1989 to 1991 and a national board member from 1991 to 2013, Sonnenfeldt is currently a member of the board of governors of BGU. With a long-time connection to BGU, Sonnenfeldt received an honorary doctoral degree in 1995. He established BGU's Sonnenfeldt-Goldman Career Development Chair in Desert Research and named both the Joya Claire Sonnenfeldt Auditorium and the Forest Goldman-Sonnenfeldt Building for Solar Energy and Environmental Physics.

Photo credit: Dani Machlis

ABOUT AMERICANS FOR BEN-GURION UNIVERSITY

Americans for Ben-Gurion University plays a vital role in maintaining David Ben-Gurion's vision of an "Oxford in the Negev." By supporting a world-class academic institution that not only nurtures the Negev, but also shares its expertise locally and globally, Americans for Ben-Gurion University engages a community of Americans who are committed to improving the world. The Americans for Ben-Gurion University movement supports a 21st century unifying vision for Israel by rallying around BGU's remarkable work and role as an apolitical beacon of light in the Negev desert.

About Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev embraces the endless potential we have as individuals and as a commonality to adapt and to thrive in changing environments. Inspired by our location in the desert, we aim to discover, to create, and to develop solutions to dynamic challenges, to pose questions that have yet to be asked, and to push beyond the boundaries of the commonly accepted and possible.

We are proud to be a central force for inclusion, diversity and innovation in Israel, and we strive to extend the Negev's potential and our entrepreneurial spirit throughout the world. For example, the multi-disciplinary School for Sustainability and Climate Change at BGU leverages over 50 years of expertise on living and thriving in the desert into scalable solutions for people everywhere.

BGU at a glance:

20,000 students | 800 senior faculty | 3 campuses | 6 faculties: humanities & social sciences, health sciences, engineering sciences, natural sciences, business & management, and desert research.

Media Contact:

Brian Sherry

Stern Strategy Group

908-325-3860

bsherry@sternstrategy.com

SOURCE: Americans for Ben-Gurion University

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/701036/Americans-for-Ben-Gurion-University-Secures-20-Million-Donation-for-BGUs-School-of-Sustainability-and-Climate-Change
Along with streamlining medications for loved ones, caregivers look for tools to prevent their own burnout

BOSTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / May 12, 2022 / Monitoring medication is one of the defining responsibilities of a caregiver, according to a new survey from Medisafe , the leading medication engagement platform. As more friends and family take on the role of caregiver, 84% of respondents identify monitoring medications as one of their top responsibilities, followed by accompanying loved ones to doctor appointments (61%), and picking up prescriptions (??57%).

When it comes to the challenges associated with being a caregiver, 53% say that managing a loved one's medication regimen is the top burden, followed by staying on top of medication refills (36%), navigating symptoms and side-effects (30%), and managing their own caregiver burnout (34%). Twenty four percent of respondents indicated they act as a caregiver, as well as serve as a health proxy.

"The profile of today's caregiver is as diverse and dynamic as patients themselves. As patients' and caregivers' needs continue to evolve, we continue to look for new ways to make their jobs easier - whether that is through advanced medication management or the ability to easily upload documentation required for prescriptions," said Rotem Shor, Medisafe Chief Technology Officer and co-founder. "Offering the tools caregivers need in an easy-to-use platform is critical to both reducing caregiver burnout and improving patient outcomes."

With nearly 10 million users worldwide, Medisafe has been recognized as one of the best tools for managing caregiver challenges - and is showing long-term effectiveness in doing so. Of those Medisafe users who identify as caregivers and rely on the platform, 39% say they use the platform to track medications for themselves and/or someone else multiple times per day, and a majority of caregivers have been using Medisafe for over a year. Caregivers find that staying updated on medications and supplies rises to a bigger challenge (50%) when care extends beyond five months.

"Our goal is to not only deliver personalized support, but also become a leading digital health platform where patients and caregivers can rely on timely interventions and clear guidance toward better health," added Jen Butler, Medisafe Chief Marketing Officer. "By recognizing the important role of caregivers and developing new solutions that enable shared decisions and tracking, Medisafe is helping to advance the healthcare continuum by engaging all care partners."

The survey, conducted from April 6 - 25, 2022 included more than 3000 U.S. patients who use Medisafe's platform. To see the full survey results, visit https://infogram.com/cargiver-survey-real-time-data-you-should-know-1h8n6m35j70jj4x?live .

About Medisafe

Medisafe is the leading medication engagement platform that empowers patients to seamlessly manage their treatment journey. By combining advanced technology and behavior science, Medisafe reimagines the treatment journey to guide patients' specific journey needs and drive daily engagement. Its machine learning technology fuels the holistic patient engagement platform to personalize their support needs in a scalable fashion. By integrating existing patient support programs into its platform to extend capabilities, Medisafe is building a seamless future model of patient support and better health.

Nearly 10M registered patients and caregivers rely on Medisafe's platform, delivering double digit results toward improving outcomes. The company manages over two billion medication doses via iOS and Android smartphones and tablets. With an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars and more than 400,000 user reviews, Medisafe helps to create more daily engagement than Facebook or Twitter applications. Medisafe is a HIPAA and GDPR compliant solution and ISO 27001:2013 certified.

For information, contact:

Matt Longman

matt@medisafe.com

214-620-4364

SOURCE: Medisafe

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/701127/Medication-Management-Defines-and-Challenges-Caregivers-Medisafe-Finds
Scottsdale, Arizona--(Newsfile Corp. - May 12, 2022) - CSB Holdings ("CSB") and nCodeSystems Corp. ("nCodeSystems") have reached an agreement for a Strategic Partnership between the two companies to immediately pursue mutual business interests.

The agreement between CSB and nCodeSystems paves the way for large-scale commercialization and growth of technologies developed and owned by nCodeSystems. CSB will leverage its broad business base to offer access to proprietary user groups, investment funding, and potential technology collaborations through CSB Group alliances.

This move will also provide nCodeSystems with a direct entree for a European Corporate Center on the Island of Malta -the headquarters of CSB Group's international operations.

Malta is an ideal location to spearhead international business development across Europe and the Middle East. A full member state of the European Union, the island has an attractive tax system together with a network of double taxation treaties with over 70 countries. Malta has established itself as one of the fastest growing financial services centers within Europe and is a front-runner in the ICT, iGaming, Blockchain and Yachting industries.

The lead technology forwarded by nCodeSystems is an app known as 2gathr. The app offers unique ways to connect people by identity, alias, or hashtag search, but framed within the powerful properties created by using geolocation as an added dimension for discovery. 2gathr has the potential to disrupt current trends in the social media space and earn a place as a go-to technology for connecting communities and individuals in valuable new ways.



CSB Group envisions several ways it can incorporate the 2gathr app and its ability to help define and create new groups, connect like-minded people, share the discovery of groups, and act as a pivotal tool for online gatherings, direct messaging, and real-world events. The company may also seek ways to apply the technology for use with alliances and its associated brands.



This ability to connect communities through unique pathways also plays an essential role in the app's targeted marketing efforts. 2gathr plays host to areas and topics that allow for hyper-local advertising and sponsorships. These connections can result in very high user engagement and a significant boost to advertising ROIs.

Robert Fedder, CEO of nCodeSystems Corp. stated, "Our partnership with CSB Group is an opportunity for us to expand the 2gathr app and its user base immediately on a very large scale. They bring significant resources in financing, access to new users, and an incredibly valuable international network to nCodeSystems. Michael Zammit and his partners are experienced in growing and capitalizing companies like ours, and we're confident that this partnership will be a major step forward in the evolution of our app and its value."

Michael J. Zammit, CEO of CSB Group stated, "We see excellent potential in our new relationship with nCodeSystems and the company's 2gathr app. CSB Group continually looks to build relationships with leaders in the technology space. Having the ability to participate first-hand with a leading-edge company, as well as leverage its technology, could be a winning formula for our clients, investors, and technology and brand alliances."

The terms of the agreement remain undisclosed.

About nCodeSystems Corp.



nCodeSystems Corp. (ncodesystems.com) is a private software technology development company focused on creating disruptive products that improve lives through innovation. nCodeSystems Corp. released its lead product, the geolocation-driven social messaging app 2gathr, in beta during 2021. The 2gathr app offers a unique capacity to connect communities via search and exploration tools using geolocation as an added dimension for discovery. The 2gathr app (2gathr.net) is available for download on the Apple App store and Google Play store.

About CSB Group

Established in 1987, CSB Group offers diverse yet specialized business solutions and commercial services to a vast portfolio of corporate and private clients seeking to setup or relocate to Malta. Backed by local knowledge and with a global reach, the company's 360 approach provides value to their clients, while retaining a Human Touch that ensures customer satisfaction -a key element to their success. CSB's associated brands include Regus, the world's largest provider of flexible workplace solutions offering co-working and serviced office space; Malta Sotheby's International Realty; and Vacancycentre, a leading recruitment services provider specialized in servicing organizations' talent resource requirements across key industry sectors.

Press Contacts

For nCodeSystems Corp.:

Robert Fedder

rfedder@ncodesystems.com

For CSB Group

Michael J. Zammit

mjzammit@csbgroup.com

DISCLAIMER and FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

Certain statements contained herein are "forward-looking" statements (as such term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995). Because such statements include risks and uncertainties, actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. This press release may contain certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and such Forward-Looking Statements are intended to be covered by the safe harbors created thereby. Investors are cautioned that all forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties. All statements other than statements of historical fact in this announcement are forward-looking statements, including but not limited to the viability of the company's business plans, the effect of acquisitions on our profitability, the effectiveness, profitability, and the marketability of the Company's products; the Company's ability to protect its proprietary information; general economic and business conditions; the volatility of the company's operating results and financial condition; and other risks. These forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties and are based on current expectations, assumptions, estimates, and projections about the company and the industry. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent occurring events or circumstances or to changes in its expectations, except as may be required by law. Although the company believes that the expectations expressed in these forward-looking statements are reasonable, management cannot assure the public that their expectations will turn out to be correct. Investors are cautioned that actual results may differ materially from the anticipated results.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/123650
Today, Humanetics announced a new structure to focus innovation on Digital, Safety and Sensor Technology. These three business portfolios will operate under a single Humanetics umbrella. This evolution brings to fruition the long-term vision to unite all the operating companies within the Humanetics company.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220512005305/en/

Pictured: Chris O'Connor, President and CEO Humanetics; Karsten Newbury, President of Digital; Mark Westen, President of Safety; Barney Loehnis, President of Sensors. (Photo: Business Wire)

Humanetics will now be organized into three groups: Humanetics Safety, led by Mark Westen, comprised of ATDs, active safety robotic platforms, test equipment, and ATD lab management; Humanetics Digital, led by Karsten Newbury, encompassing CAE, ergonomic software, anthropometric 3D body model databases and a new Software Center of Excellence; and Humanetics Sensors, led by Barney Loehnis, which will combine the capabilities of HITEC, Fibercore and OpTek into an advanced Sensor Technology group.

Christopher O'Connor, CEO and President of Humanetics, commented: "Humanetics has been the most trusted partner in safety solutions for 70 years, and in the last decade we've extended our solutions to include the world's leading human simulation platforms, engineered sensors and precision engineering. It's long been our vision to bring all our incredible global businesses under the Humanetics' brand and our team is excited by the opportunities this will enable. Humanetics has always been about putting human well-being at the center of industrial design. Our mission is to help our customers make better products and better decisions that maximize performance. Our new organization is designed to do just that."

According to Karsten Newbury, President of Humanetics Digital, "We have an incredible set of digital technologies that make Humanetics the world's leading provider of human-based avatars, data models and simulation software. These digital twins complement our anthropomorphic test devices and robotic platforms. Together we are building more advanced software platforms to provide customers with better decision support tools and scenario management."

"The new structure will enable us to continue our product innovation around next generation ATDs, and build services around calibration, lab management and active safety," said Mark Westen, President of Humanetics Safety. "I'm very excited with our product roadmap. It now fully combines our software and hardware capabilities into an exciting future. I look forward to engaging our customers, and bringing the full power of our global digital, engineering and operational teams to market."

Barney Loehnis, President of Humanetics Sensors, adds, "What many customers don't realize is that much of our extraordinary innovation comes from our sensor technology group. A sensor is the interface between the digital and physical world, needed to control, optimize and engineer solutions. The next generation of safety technology, beyond simulation, will be driven by fiber optics, laser engineering and sensor technology. I am excited to help bridge the gap between the needs of our customers and our solutions."

Website: https://humanetics.humaneticsgroup.com/

About Humanetics

Humanetics is a Digital Industrial Technology company, and a leading provider of safety systems, anthropomorphic test devices, crash test equipment, simulation software, CAE models, precision sensors, fiber optics and cutting-edge laser material engineering solutions. Humanetics has over 850 employees across 24 facilities strategically located around the world with the global corporate headquarters located in Farmington Hills, Michigan, USA.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220512005305/en/

Contacts:

Barney Loehnis, Humanetics, CMO

bloehnis@humaneticsgroup.com +1 203 246 1397
Reaffirms Video's Permanent Impact on Talent Experiences Providing Authentic Experiences for Candidates, Recruiters, Employees and Hiring Managers

Phenom, the global leader in Talent Experience Management (TXM), today announced that Talentcube, the experience-driven video technology startup it acquired in 2021, will return to the popular "Die Hohle der Lowen" ("Lions Den") show where entrepreneurs pitch their business to potential investors and aspire to attract financing for future growth.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220512005624/en/

Carsten Maschmeyer (back center), German business leader and investor, celebrates with Talentcube a Phenom company during its return to the "Lions Den." Phenom

Debuting on May 16, the new Lions Den segment will revisit the successful investments made in Talentcube and its innovative video technology, culminating with being acquired by Phenom. Talentcube originally appeared on the show in 2017 and quickly won the support of well-known German business leader and investor Carsten Maschmeyer.

"Talentcube's video technology is a perfect example of the kind of groundbreaking technology we invest in to deliver value to people and businesses around the world through startups. The exit to the US unicorn has exceeded our expectations. We are proud to now be involved in Phenom," Maschmeyer stated.

Talentcube's founders envisioned a future where remote video hiring could be just as authentic and engaging as in-person hiring. As part of Phenom's Talent Experience Management (TXM) platform for candidates, recruiters, employees and hiring managers, that vision has become a reality providing seamless video functionality for a post-COVID, hybrid workforce and a differentiator in the increasingly competitive talent acquisition market.

"With skills shortages around the world, companies are looking to hire, develop and retain qualified employees as quickly and accurately as possible. Our video technology can deliver high-value experiences that benefit every talent stakeholder across the entire talent journey," said Sebastian Hust, Sr. Director, Talent Experience Strategy, Phenom.

Phenom's video technology helps recruiters and hiring teams qualify candidates faster and with confidence. As part of a holistic talent experience, recruiters can engage with and evaluate candidates beyond written words all within the Phenom CRM. Video Assessments directly reduces time to hire by alleviating screening bottlenecks while providing a consistent approach to screening organizations' best-fit candidates.

Recently recognized as a Strategic Leader in Fosway's 2022 9-GridTM for talent acquisition for the second consecutive year, visit phenom.com to learn why Phenom TXM is dramatically different and how it delivers experience and AI at scale. Visit talentcube.com to learn more about the upcoming segment.

About Phenom

Phenom is a global HR technology company with a purpose to help a billion people find the right job. With an expertise in building AI-powered, scalable solutions, Phenom Talent Experience Management (TXM) personalizes and automates the talent journey for candidates, recruiters, employees and management with its Career Site, Chatbot, CRM, CMS, SMS and Email Campaigns, University Recruiting, AI-Scheduling, Video Assessments, Talent Marketplace, Career Pathing, Employee Resource Groups, Gigs, Referrals, Hiring Manager and Analytics. As a result, employers improve their talent acquisition and talent management efforts by helping candidates and employees find the right job, recruiters identify and engage the right talent, and management optimizes HR strategy, process and spend.

Phenom was ranked among the fastest-growing technology companies in Deloitte Technology's Fast 500 for four years in a row, has been recognized in Business Intelligence Group's 2021 and 2022 Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards and won a regional 2020 Timmy Award for launching and optimizing HelpOneBillion.com.

Headquartered in Greater Philadelphia, Phenom also has offices in India, Israel, the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom. For more information, please visit www.phenom.com. Connect with Phenom on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220512005624/en/

Contacts:

Media Contacts:

Jannes Zwirner I jannes.zwirner@tonka-pr.com I +49.172.3650385

Julia Trzinski I julia.trzinski@tonka-pr.com I +49.179.6178513
Regulatory News:

CSL Limited (ASX: CSL; USOTC:CSLLY) yesterday announced an update regarding the Vifor Pharma AG acquisition. CSL has previously advised that it expected to be in a position to close the acquisition of Vifor Pharma AG by June 2022. While some antitrust authorities have approved the transaction, some approvals are still outstanding.

Delays in the regulatory approval process are not unusual. CSL and Vifor Pharma are continuing to work closely with the respective remaining competition authorities in their review of the tender offer. CSL and Vifor Pharma expect to provide an update to shareholders and investors as soon as there is more clarity on the timeline.

An exact closing and settlement date will be communicated once all regulatory approvals have been received. CSL remains confident of completing its acquisition of Vifor Pharma AG.

About Vifor Pharma Group

Vifor Pharma Group is a global pharmaceuticals company. It aims to become the global leader in iron deficiency and nephrology. The company is a partner of choice for pharmaceuticals and innovative patient-focused solutions across iron, dialysis, nephrology and rare conditions. Vifor Pharma Group strives to help patients around the world with severe, chronic and rare diseases lead better, healthier lives. It specializes in strategic global partnering, in-licensing and developing, manufacturing and marketing pharmaceutical products for precision patient care. Vifor Pharma Group holds a leading position in all its core business activities and includes the companies: Vifor Pharma, Sanifit Therapeutics, and Vifor Fresenius Medical Care Renal Pharma (a joint company with Fresenius Medical Care). Vifor Pharma Group is headquartered in Switzerland and listed on the Swiss Stock Exchange (SIX Swiss Exchange, VIFN, ISIN: CH0364749348). For more information, please visit viforpharma.com

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220512005641/en/

Contacts:

Contact and further information:

Nathalie Ponnier

Global Head Corporate Communications

+41 79 957 96 73

media@viforpharma.com
Registration now open for a free online event

VILNIUS, LITHUANIA / ACCESSWIRE / May 12, 2022 / Global businesses are increasingly more dependent on public web data. However, the process and technology for collecting that data - web scraping - is still not widely understood. To close the knowledge gap, a leading web scraping solutions provider, Oxylabs , is organizing a free online conference - OxyCon. The event will take place on the 7-8th of September, and the registration is now open for everyone.

Organized for the third time, OxyCon 2022 will cover a variety of technical and business topics, as well as practical tips on how to optimize the public web data gathering to get the greatest impact. The event will deep dive into data gathering systems, architecture and daily scraping challenges. This year's theme will be Shaping the Digital Future Through Web Scraping.

"Web scraping is behind many of the world's most popular business tools that help us get the needed information easier. It's also indispensable for data specialists who are in the constant hunt for fresh and accurate business insights. Hence, the digital future without web scraping is impossible - it's being strongly shaped by this technology and its importance will only increase", - Julius Cerniauskas, CEO of the OxyCon's organizer Oxylabs explains the event's theme.

The two-day event is intended for a diverse audience - developers, business owners, data scientists and analysts, students, and all those who want to get to know the web scraping technology better. The event's sessions will be divided into three major sections depending on the topic and audience.

The first section The World of Public Data Collection for Businesses will include leading business experts sharing their experience and best practices on using external data for optimal business outcomes. Developers will enjoy a dedicated set of sessions under the topic of Overcoming Scraping Challenges as a Developer, where scraping experts will share tips and tricks beneficial in daily work. Meanwhile the section Scraping Infrastructure Management and Solutions will Focus on Scalability - a pressing topic for growing businesses.

OxyCon, an annual knowledge sharing and networking opportunity for the web scraping community, was first organized in 2019. Last year's conference attracted more than 1000 participant registrations. The conference's sessions are available to watch online here .

About Oxylabs

Established in 2015, Oxylabs is a premium proxy and public web data acquisition solution provider, enabling companies of all sizes to utilise the power of big data. Constant innovation, a large patent portfolio, and a focus on ethics have allowed Oxylabs to become a global leader in the data acquisition industry and forge close ties with dozens of Fortune Global 500 companies. In 2022, Oxylabs was named the fastest-growing public data gathering solutions company in Europe in the Financial Times' FT 1000 list.

Media Contact:

Vytautas Kirjazovas

Email: press@oxylabs.io

Website: www.oxylabs.io

SOURCE: Oxylabs

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/701129/A-Leading-Web-Scraping-Conference-OxyCon-to-Come-Back-in-September
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - May 12, 2022) - Plant&Co. Brands Ltd. (CSE: VEGN) (FSE: VGP) (OTCQB: VGANF) ("PLANT&CO" or the "Company"), a modern health and wellness company curating delicious plant-based foods, is pleased to provide an update on its eCommerce business for its wholly owned subsidiary, Holy Crap Brands.

"Its has been a progressive quarter, and an even more progressive year for product development and revenue generation here at Plant&Co. Our more recent shareholder updates have been specific to acquisition execution in our restaurant vertical, however many shareholders have inquired about our CPG vertical and our progress on our growth plans. To that end I am pleased to give shareholders updates and highlights of our CPG business's eCommerce progress," said Shawn Moniz, CEO of Plant&Co.

CPG eCommerce Highlights: Holy Craps Brands

Total eCommerce sales revenue for the first 4 months of the year (January - April) increased by +30%

vs the same period in 2021.

The company recorded sustained organic growth with net new and repeat customer purchases across our

digital sales platforms of HolyCrap.com, Amazon.ca, and Amazon.com.

Total eCommerce sales revenue captured in April 2022 increased by +84% vs the same period in 2021.

The company recorded incremental sales from its new Oatmeal line attracting net new customers to our

brand, translating in increased sales accounted for across all product SKUs.

For the period of Q1 2022 vs the period of Q1 2021, the company recorded a total eCommerce sales

revenue increase of approximately +15%

The company recorded achievements for quarterly revenue targets as well as capturing double digit

growth from comparable quarters.

Continued execution of company sales initiatives has led to the capture of current sales achievements. The company continues to improve efficiencies in attracting new users to our base HolyCrap cereal range, and our continued focus on product development has led to the launch of a new cereal flavour, plus the launch of an entirely new product line of Oatmeal SKUs. These new products are attracting new users to the brand which contributed to our strong April growth.

"Alongside continued product development the company has been focused on producing forward-moving results. The CPG eCommerce numbers shared in this release are the result of the company's plans and execution which are now driving revenues and is also a reflection of how the company is successfully allocating resources to create shareholder value," said Shawn Moniz. "We look forward to continuing our achievements and further accelerating sales throughout 2022 and beyond."

About Plant&Co

Plant&Co. Brands Ltd. (CSE: VEGN) (FSE: VGP) (OTCQB: VGANF) is a modern health and wellness company curating delicious plant-based foods. It offers a growing number of plant-based food products through its brand portfolio of Holy Crap Foods, YamChops 'a plant-based butcher', LumberHeads Food Co., and Heal Wellness. For more information please visit: www.HolyCrap.com , www.YamChops.com , www.LumberHeads.com , www.HealWellness.ca , and www.PlantandCo.com.

Plant&Co. Brands Ltd.

Shawn Moniz

Chief Executive Officer

FOR FUTHER INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

ir@plantandco.com

(833) 375-2682

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor the Market Regulator (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release, which has been prepared by management.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

All statements in this press release, other than statements of historical fact, are "forward-looking information" with respect to the Company within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Forward-looking information is frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur, and include management's expectations related to the accretive nature of the Acquisition as well as the future performance of the Company or of Heal Wellness, management's anticipated growth of Heal Wellness through existing and new locations being established throughout 2022 and 2023, the successful sourcing of suitable new Heal Wellness locations by the Company, the success of the Company's discussions with respect to the potential of expanding the Heal Wellness stores via corporate and franchise locations, and any announcements related thereto, the introduction of new Heal Wellness products, as well as the Company's continuing search for accretive opportunities in 2022. Forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates at the date the statements are made and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements. There are uncertainties inherent in forward-looking information, including factors beyond the Company's control. There are no assurances that the business plans for Plant&Co. described in this news release will come into effect on the terms or time frame described herein. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking information if circumstances or management's estimates or opinions should change except as required by law. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. For a description of the risks and uncertainties facing the Company and its business and affairs, readers should refer to the Company's Management's Discussion and Analysis and other disclosure filings with Canadian securities regulators, which are posted on www.sedar.com.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/123797
HELSINKI (dpa-AFX) - Russia has warned Finland and Sweden against joining the NATO, saying there would be consequences. Finland's President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin announced their support for joining NATO. The Nordic country should apply to join the defense alliance 'without delay,' the leaders said in a joint statement Thursday. Addressing the European Parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs later in the day, Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said the accession of Finland to NATO would strengthen the security of the Baltic Sea region and northern Europe. Responding to these statements, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, 'As we have said many times before, NATO expansion does not make the world more stable and secure.' Finland acceding to NATO is a big booster for the alliance as Finland has a well-equipped, sophisticated military and shares 1340 kilometer border with Russia. The Finnish government is likely to apply for membership after receiving parliamentary approval next week. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg welcomed the move, and assured Finland's leadership that the process of membership in the alliance would be smooth and swift. Recent polls, especially after Russia's Ukraine invasion, show increasing public support for Finland joining NATO. Finland's western neighbor Sweden also is considering applying for NATO membership. 'Finland is Sweden's closest security and defense partner, and we need to take Finland's assessments into account,' Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde said on Twitter Thursday. 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 platform release further strengthens capabilities to prevent brand abuse, detect compromised credentials, visualize and prioritize threats, and defend attack surfaces

BOSTON, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Recorded Future, the world's largest intelligence company, today announced a major new release of its cloud-based Intelligence Platform with new capabilities for exposing and remediating threats to organizations' brands, identities, and attack surfaces.

Threats continue to accelerate and converge in today's digital-first world, and adversaries are taking advantage, infiltrating weak targets with cyber, physical, disinformation, and even kinetic attacks. With the latest release of its Intelligence Platform, Recorded Future expands on the most comprehensive coverage of intelligence across adversaries, their infrastructure, and targets, giving clients the visibility they need to take decisive action to disrupt adversaries.

"Staying a step ahead of state-sponsored and criminal threat actors has never been more challenging. With Recorded Future's latest release, organizations have powerful new tools to prevent brand abuse, detect compromised credentials, visualize and prioritize threats, and defend attack surfaces." - Craig Adams, Chief Product & Engineering Officer, Recorded Future

Real-Time, Internet-Wide Monitoring of Brand Threats

Only Recorded Future Brand Intelligence uses mass-scale machine learning to detect threats across the internet to a brand's logo, typo-squats, and malicious domains. Now, organizations are able to monitor past and current threats in real time with new functionality that surfaces threat details and provides playbooks for validating and responding to findings. Also added is internet-scale logo abuse detection with character recognition to initiate takedowns anywhere on the internet.

Going Beyond Multi-Factor Authentication

With over 10 billion identities and enhanced coverage across sources such as malware logs, data leaks, and credential harvesting, Recorded Future Identity Intelligence helps to detect compromised identities in real time, providing an extra layer of defense beyond multi-factor authentication. In addition, Identity Intelligence boosts the effectiveness of Identity Access Management (IAM) solutions through integrations that infuse intelligence into existing processes and workflows.

Protecting an Expanding Attack Surface

Proactive attack surface management is vital as cloud migration increasingly exposes organizations to a new and more complex attack surface. Recorded Future Attack Surface Intelligence provides a unified view of external infrastructure, prioritizing the riskiest assets for remediation based on vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and out-of-policy assets, and reduces an organization's attack surface.

Visualizing Threats Targeting Organizations and Governments

With Recorded Future Threat Intelligence, organizations can interactively prioritize threats and proactively hunt adversaries before they become a target. Recorded Future prioritizes the threat actors and TTPs specific to each organization; provides insight into the attack lifecycle and attacker behaviors aligned to the MITRE heatmap; and provides automatic downloads for YARA and Sigma rules based on emerging threats, enabling security teams to take immediate action.

Request a demo of the Recorded Future Intelligence Platform at:

https://go.recordedfuture.com/demo

About Recorded Future

Recorded Future is the world's largest intelligence company. Recorded Future's cloud-based Intelligence Platform provides the most complete coverage across adversaries, infrastructure, and targets. By combining persistent and pervasive automated data collection and analytics with human analysis, Recorded Future provides real-time visibility into the vast digital landscape and empowers clients to take proactive action to disrupt adversaries and keep their people, systems, and infrastructure safe. Headquartered in Boston with offices and employees around the world, Recorded Future works with more than 1,400 businesses and government organizations across more than 60 countries. Learn more at recordedfuture.com.

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/705622/Recorded_Future_Logo.jpg
MONTREAL, QC / ACCESSWIRE / May 12, 2022 / Valsoft Corporation Inc. ("Valsoft"), a Canadian-based company specializing in the acquisition and development of vertical market software businesses, is pleased to announce the acquisition of M&I Broadcast Services, a broadcast services software company that provides appealing, mission-critical software to the industry.

Based out of the Netherlands, M&I has several solutions across several broadcast platforms, including radio automation software OmniPlayer, as well as Nimbus Newsroom for radio, TV and online.

"What started in 1992 as a small idea, has grown into a beautiful company over the last 30 years. M&I Broadcast Services makes appealing, mission-critical software and has acquired a worthy and prominent position in the media industry. As I see myself as more of an entrepreneur than an investor, we went looking for a new owner. In Valsoft Corporation, we have found a great partner who can take M&I Broadcast Services to the next level," explains departing CEO Harold de Groot.

M&I becomes the second media-based company in Valsoft's portfolio and is now the 18th European company under the Valsoft banner.

"With this acquisition, Valsoft further strengthens its presence in the broadcasting space as we are excited about this industry and are actively looking for other rare opportunities," explained Michael Assi, CEO of Aspire, Valsoft's operational division. "M&I has a proven track record of providing its customers with quality, and we look forward to helping its strong team take M&I to new heights."

De Groot is stepping down from his duties as CEO due to time constraints, understanding that M&I deserves a full-time leader in place to partner with Valsoft's vision for the business.

"The company consists of talented and passionate employees and deserves a manager who can and should be on top of the business, customers and staff all year round, daily," added de Groot. "Unfortunately, due to my other activities and companies, I had less and less time to do so these past years. To help M&I grow and take the necessary next step, I have decided to step down as CEO in addition to the sale to Valsoft. I have the utmost faith in Raymond as my successor."

Raymond Lamphen a well-known figure in the (Dutch) broadcasting industry. He has worked for several broadcasting and media companies, such as Ericsson Broadcast Services.

"Due to my former functions, I know M&I very well and Harold for a fair number of years. From the many conversations we've had on our industry and the future of M&I, we found a lot of common ground. It is an honor to have been asked to pick up this challenging function. I can't wait to start fresh, together with the dynamic and skillful team at M&I, to help the company grow even further in the next few years. With Valsoft as a new owner, I have the utmost confidence we will succeed," says Raymond Lamphen.

About Valsoft

Established in 2015, Valsoft acquires and develops vertical market software companies, enabling each business to deliver the best mission-critical solutions for customers in their respective industries or niche. A key tenet of Valsoft's philosophy is to invest in well-established businesses and foster an entrepreneurial environment that molds companies into leaders in their respective industries. Valsoft looks to buy, hold, and create value through long-term partnerships with existing management.

About M&I Broadcast Services

M&I Broadcast Services makes appealing, mission-critical software for the broadcasting industry. With OmniPlayer they have set a new standard in radio automation and playout software. Most regional and nationwide stations in the Netherlands use OmniPlayer to create, manage, edit, play out and broadcast their content, news, and music flawlessly. With Nimbus Newsroom, they've created software that will let creators, journalists and editors make, edit, and bring news anytime, anywhere and from any device. M&I software is trusted by prominent European media companies such as RTL, DPG Media, Radio Italia and Talpa.

Valsoft was represented internally by David Felicissimo, General Counsel, Oliver Gray, Senior Legal Counsel (UK/Europe) and Elisa Marcon, Corporate Paralegal. Externally, Valsoft was represented by Luuk Hendricks, Partner, Boels Zanders NV, Madelene Leurs, Attorney-at-law, Boels Zanders NV.

For more information on the companies, please visit https://www.valsoftcorp.com and https://www.mibroadcastservices.nl/.

For further information:

Joey Strizzi

Director of Communications and Public Relations

Valsoft Corporation

j.strizzi@valsoftcorp.com

Office: 514-316-7647

Mobile: 514-258-0256

SOURCE: Valsoft Corp.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/701134/Valsoft-Continues-Global-Expansion-With-the-Acquisition-of-MI-Broadcast-Services
STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, CO / ACCESSWIRE / May 12, 2022 / WESTERN SIERRA RESOURCE CORPORATION (OTC PINK:WSRC) announces that its FORM 10 REGISTRATION Statement filed December 21, 2021, will be refiled pending response from the SEC concerning its December 31, 2021, year-end audit. The Company commissioned a year-end PCAOB audit on January 17, 2022, which was filed on April 14, 2022. The completion of the year-end audit became an SEC condition of the FORM 10 during the review period. Upon the revised effective date, WSRC will become an SEC full reporting company and begin filing Forms 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K.

WSRC Financing Update:

Since December 2021, WSRC has been negotiating a deal structure with, and satisfying due diligence requirements for, a private capital source prepared to fund the Company's operations through monetization of WSRC's land, water, and mining assets. This agreement is scheduled for final review by May 16, 2022, and contemplates up to $25 million in proceeds to retire existing debt and provide operating capital sufficient to fully fund the Company's various projects over the next 12 months-without dilution for its shareholders. Specific terms of the transaction will be announced upon completion of legal review.

In general, an initial round of capital is expected within the next 45 to 60 days in the amount of $10 million in exchange for a participation in future revenue generated by expansion and acceleration of the Company's current natural resource-related endeavors and utilizing the Company's $60+ million in appraised and audited assets.

Consistent with the terms of the agreement, WSRC intends to:

Incrementally utilize its land and water assets for cultivation of industrial hemp; manufacture of hemp-based construction materials; and to initiate development and subsequent construction of "green" affordable housing to help meet extraordinary pent-up demand. Initiate the modest but immediate processing and recovery of precious metals from tested above-ground material, and to subsequently scale into larger, ongoing mining operations at the Sage Hen location. Assay reports anticipate a potential recovery rate averaging $30,000 per ton using proprietary, environmentally friendly processing technologies. Fund the first of 12 helium production prospects, each governed by its own 3D seismic data set and under varying terms and agreement conditions. It is reasonable to assume that based on current supporting data, an average of one new prospect may be brought online over each of the twelve months following funding. Capitalize on multiple (but related) revenue generating and asset expanding opportunities that are expected to result from the above-mentioned core projects as they mature, and as operational efficiencies are achieved. The scale of funding anticipates such expansion.

About Western Sierra Resource Corporation:

Founded in 1907, Western Sierra Resource Corporation (a Utah corporation), has 114-year history as gold and silver mining company with projects in Arizona, Nevada, California, and Mexico. WSRC currently owns six precious metal reserves in Arizona. In 2014 the Company broadened its vision to include natural (and renewable) resources with its acquisition of water rights and associated infrastructure assets in Colorado for purposes of irrigating and cultivating industrial hemp; processing hemp for manufacture of various building products; and for construction of affordable homes utilizing hemp-based materials-among other beneficial uses. WSRC's intent is to become a broad-based resource company with high value and high-income generating assets including precious metals, real estate, water, agriculture, helium, and "green" technologies.

Forward Looking Statements:

This release includes "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. Such statements include any that may predict, forecast, indicate, or imply future results, performance. or achievements, and may contain the words "estimate", "project", "intend", "forecast", "anticipate", "plan", "planning", "expect", "believe", "likely", "should", "could", "would", "may" or similar words or expressions. Such statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause the company's actual results and financial position to differ materially from those in such statements, which involve risks and uncertainties, including those relating to the Company's ability to grow. Actual results may differ materially from those predicted and any reported should not be considered an indication of future performance. Potential risks and uncertainties include the Company's operating history and resources, together with all usual and common economic, competitive, and equity market conditions / risks.

Contact:

Western Sierra Resource Corporation

westernsierraresource.com

Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Telegram

@WSRCorp

SOURCE: Western Sierra Resource Corp.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/701126/Western-Sierra-Resource-Corporation-Status-Report-and-Financing-Update
TransPerfect, the world's largest provider of language and technology solutions for global business, celebrated its 30th anniversary at the company's ELEVATE global conference held in Amsterdam this past week. The four-day event was capped by an engaging and interactive session with Sir Richard Branson. Additional program keynotes featured Liz Wiseman, author of Impact Players and Multipliers, as well as Natalie Reynolds, author of We Have a Deal

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220512005705/en/

Sir Richard Branson speaks at TransPerfect's ELEVATE conference in Amsterdam. (Photo: Business Wire)

ELEVATE was TransPerfect's largest-ever internal event and the most ambitious professional development initiative in the company's history, with more than 330 sessions led by a combination of internal and external speakers. TransPerfect's Chief Technology Officer, Mark Hagerty, was honored by the company with a lifetime achievement award.

"At ELEVATE, our goal was to bring all divisions of TransPerfect together to highlight the importance of teamwork and innovation," commented Kevin Obarski, Chief Revenue Officer for TransPerfect. "It's essential that we continuously learn and raise our ability to deliver transformative solutions for our clients."

TransPerfect President and CEO Phil Shawe stated, "ELEVATE was a rare opportunity for us to come together, train, and collaborate on new ideas that will better support our customers. Special thanks to the TransPerfect team members who led sessions, sharing their knowledge and experience with colleagues."

About TransPerfect

TransPerfect is the world's largest provider of language and technology solutions for global business. From offices in over 100 cities on six continents, TransPerfect offers a full range of services in 170+ languages to clients worldwide. More than 6,000 global organizations employ TransPerfect's GlobalLink technology to simplify management of multilingual content. With an unparalleled commitment to quality and client service, TransPerfect is fully ISO 9001 and ISO 17100 certified. TransPerfect has global headquarters in New York, with regional headquarters in London and Hong Kong. For more information, please visit our website at www.transperfect.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220512005705/en/

Contacts:

Ryan Simper +1 212.689.5555

mediainquiry@transperfect.com
New product integration eliminates duplicative manual data entry for Bob customers that use Deputy to manage and schedule shift workers

LONDON, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- HR platform and people management disruptor HiBob has joined forces with Deputy , the workforce management app, to support overstretched HR managers and team leaders.

At a time when multiple industries are facing recruitment and employee retention challenges, the integration of the two HR software platforms will help companies and their employees save time by eliminating duplicative manual data entry for HR managers and team leaders. Both tools are used by thousands of businesses around the world to streamline employee administration and provide an easier, more collaborative world at work.

By synchronising data from Bob to Deputy, the product integration allows customers to manage their shift employees in Deputy without having to manually re-enter the data. Using this integration, the customer can create, activate, update, and deactivate a shift employee in one place, saving time and eliminating admin headaches. With the ongoing challenge of attracting and retaining top talent, this partnership enables HR and company leaders to focus on driving an overall positive employee experience.

"With our Deputy partnership, we are pleased to give our customers an enhanced solution for tracking time and attendance for shift work, lifting the administrative burden off of HR professionals. They are relieved of duplicative data entry and can focus their valuable time like retention and hiring," comments Ronni Zehavi, CEO of HiBob. "We believe that modern companies are offering more work flexibility than ever before in regard to when you work, how long you work, and much more - making the Deputy partnership a synergetic solution for increased flexibility. Together, we look forward to giving companies and their people a better overall work experience."

Both serving modern, mid-sized, multinational companies, HiBob and Deputy share commitments to increase employee engagement and productivity. Because of the two companies' dedication to being easy to use, efficient, and streamlined, HiBob and Deputy had many shared clients before the partnership began. The integration allows shared clients to easily sync employee information across the two platforms, while captivating new clients with the appeal of creating seamless HR processes and better employee experience.

David Kelly, General Manager EMEA at Deputy, said: "HR has so many challenges to continue to drive value in difficult circumstances - a skills and workforce crisis with a (rightly) ever more demanding employee base. And who want useful and highly integrated business tools that deliver personalised, relevant information at the right moment. Deputy and HiBob represent this new world of design led apps that employees enjoy."

For more information on the partnership, please click here .

About HiBob

HiBob was founded to modernise HR tech. HiBob's intuitive and data-driven platform, Bob, was built for the way people work today: globally, remotely, and collaboratively. Since its launch in late 2015, HiBob has achieved consecutive triple-digit year-over-year revenue growth, and become the HRIS of choice for more than 2,000 modern, midsize and multinational companies who understand that a powerful, agile HR tech suite is mission critical and a key driver of organisational success. Fast-growing companies across the globe such as Monzo, Happy Socks, Gong, Fiverr, and VaynerMedia rely upon Bob to help HR and managers connect, engage, develop and retain top talent. Learn more at www.hibob.com.

About Deputy

Deputy is on a mission to Simplify Shift Work for millions of workers and businesses worldwide. The company streamlines scheduling, timesheets, tasks and communication for business owners and their workers.

More than 300,00 workplaces globally use Deputy to manage rotas and effectively communicate with employees in real time, providing millions of shift workers with more flexibility and control over their schedules. Deputy's software gives businesses the tools they need to create a thriving workplace.

Visit www.deputy.com , or find us on Twitter , Facebook, the App Store or Google Play for more information.

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BANGKOK (dpa-AFX) - President Joe Biden will host ASEAN Leaders for a two-day U.S.-ASEAN Special Summit beginning in Washington on Thursday.



This is the first time in its 45-year history that ASEAN leaders will be welcomed together to Washington, D.C.



House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other senior Congress leaders will welcome the ASEAN leaders to the Capitol Hill for a bipartisan working lunch.



After that, the ASEAN leaders will move to the Willard, where they will meet senior American business leaders and CEOs to discuss ways of strengthening economic cooperation between the South-East Asia region and the United States.



They will be joined by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Raimondo and U.S. Trade Representative Ambassador Tai. There will be discussions at this session about key challenges ahead in technology, post-COVID recovery, issues associated with climate and energy.



President Biden will be hosting the ASEAN Leaders for a dinner at the White House at 6 PM ET.



On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken will host ASEAN leaders for a working lunch at the State Department, focused on maritime cooperation, pandemic recovery, and health security.



Harris will also host a discussion with ASEAN leaders and other Cabinet officials from across the interagency regarding climate action, clean energy, and sustainable infrastructure.



Later in the afternoon, President Biden will host a discussion with ASEAN leaders on how to deliver directly for people in the region and beyond.



Addressing the media ahead of the Summit, a senior Biden Administration Official said the leaders gather at a time fundamental long-term challenges are playing out in the Indo-Pacific, and that the United States is committed and determined to ensure that the twon sides' engagement in the region is broad-based and sustained.



During the Summit, the United States will also focus on efforts to promote respect for human rights, the rule of law, and good governance. 'And we will together address the ongoing crisis and challenges in Burma (Myanmar),' the administration official told reporters.







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NEW YORK, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- As per Zion Market Research study, The Air Quality Monitoring Market was worth around USD 4,391.5 million in 2021 and is estimated to grow to about USD 6,407.8 million by 2028, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 6.5 percent over the forecast period. The report analyzes the Air Quality Monitoring Market drivers, restraints/challenges, and the effect they have on the demands during the projection period. In addition, the report explores emerging opportunities in the Air Quality Monitoring Market.

Key Industry Insights & Finding of the Air Quality Monitoring Market Reports:

As per the analysis shared by our research analyst, the Air Quality Monitoring Market is expected to grow annually at a CAGR of around 6.5 % (2022-2028).

(2022-2028). Through the primary research, it was established that the Air Quality Monitoring Market was valued approximately USD 4,391.5 Million in 2021 and is projected to reach to roughly USD 6,407.8 Million by 2028.

Million in 2021 and is projected to reach to roughly Million by 2028. North America is predicted to dominate the market during the forecast period and will continue to do so throughout the projected time because of the presence of significant manufacturers in the area.

is predicted to dominate the market during the forecast period and will continue to do so throughout the projected time because of the presence of significant manufacturers in the area. The Asia Pacific region will grow considerably during the predicted period.

Zion Market Research published the latest report titled as"Air Quality Monitoring Market By Sampling Method (Active/Continuous Monitoring, Manual Monitoring, Passive Monitoring, Intermittent monitoring, and Stack Monitoring). By Pollutant (Chemical Pollutant, Nitrogen Oxides, Sulfur Oxides, Carbon Oxides, Volatile Organic Compounds, Other Chemical Pollutants, Physical Pollutant, and Biological Pollutant). By Product (Indoor monitors, Fixed Indoor Monitors, Portable Indoor Monitors, Outdoor monitors, Portable Outdoor Monitors, Fixed Outdoor Monitors, Dust & Particulate Matter Monitors, AQM Stations, and Wearable Monitors). By End Users (Government Agencies & Academic Institutes, Government and Residential Users, Petrochemical Industry, Power Generation Plants, Pharmaceutical Industry, Smart City Authorities, and Other End Users). and By Geography - Global and Regional Industry Overview, Market Intelligence, Comprehensive Analysis, Historical Data and Forecasts 2022 - 2028." into their research database.

Air Quality Monitoring Market: Overview

Both indoors and outdoors, an air quality monitoring system detects and monitors contaminants in the air such as carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide, sulfur dioxide, and volatile organic compounds. The requirement for air quality monitoring has grown as a result of the need to maintain air quality, as poor air quality contains harmful contaminants that cause health problems. The growth of the air quality monitoring market has increased due to an increase in awareness of the chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, cardiovascular difficulties, and lung cancer, all of which have become increasingly common as pollution levels have risen. Moreover, favorable government policies on air pollution monitoring and management, as well as an increase in public-private partnerships for air quality monitoring, have increased the demand for air quality monitoring systems. In recent years, increasing economic conditions in developing countries have hastened the pace of industrialization, resulting in higher levels of air pollution. Toxin emissions such as carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide poison the air. As a result, there has been an increase in the demand for air quality monitoring systems to regulate and monitor the amount of pollution in the atmosphere. Furthermore, indoor air pollution is becoming a major issue. As a result, house or building owners, industrial professionals, and facility workers install air quality monitors to ensure a healthy indoor environment. The global increase of the air quality monitoring market has been considerably fuelled by technological advancements and growing acceptance of the smart home concept.

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Industry Dynamics:

Air Quality Monitoring Market: Growth Dynamics

Drivers: Public and private efforts that promote environmental protection and public awareness.

A variety of positive initiatives have been implemented by the government, non-governmental organizations, and the corporate sector to minimize and reduce air pollution through public awareness campaigns and programs. Such programs and activities not only help to improve public awareness but also play a vital role in drawing international organizations' attention to the existing and future problems of air pollution that the globe faces. Many government and non-governmental groups work tirelessly to attract national and worldwide societies' attention to the devastation caused by air pollution on the health of living beings and the environment. The EPA (the United States Environmental Protection Agency), Clean Air in London (London), Little Ninja (UK), Earthjustice (US), and German VCD are some of the prominent public groups involved in raising public awareness about the environmental effects of air pollution (German Sustainable Transport Association). This feature is expected to boost market expansion in the approaching years.

Restraints: Expensive product.

The high installation and maintenance costs of traditional air monitoring systems limit market expansion. The high costs of purchasing, installing, and maintaining AQM sensors, as well as the establishment of AQM stations, are exacerbated by the implementation of stringent pollution control policies in mature markets, which necessitate regulatory compliance for effective air pollution monitoring, data collection, and data surveillance. As a result, the high installation costs of AQM stations, as well as the premium price of sophisticated monitoring systems, are expected to restrict their optimum market development over the research period-though mostly in emerging nations.

Directly Purchase a Copy of the Report @ https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/buynow/su/air-quality-monitoring-market

Opportunity: R&D and technological developments are ongoing.

Continuous R&D and commercialization of advanced AQM systems (such as miniaturized devices, nanotechnology-based systems, infrared spectroscopy, and remote-sensing instruments) are likely to provide considerable growth prospects for both established and developing AQM players. As a result, a growing number of industrial actors and research institutions are working on creating and commercializing sophisticated AQM solutions. For example, nanotechnology-based AQM solutions have various procedural advantages, including real-time monitoring capabilities, device downsizing, higher analytical efficacy, and low production costs. Pipeline development and expanded market availability of technologically sophisticated air pollution monitoring systems are expected to give opportunities for market growth in the future years.

Challenge: Reforms to reduce air pollution are being implemented slowly.

The sluggish implementation of air pollution rules is one of the primary issues associated with the market for air quality monitoring systems. Several growing countries (including China and India) have been accused of being reluctant to enact severe environmental pollution monitoring standards over the last decade. Similarly, a scarcity of well-trained and skilled technical professionals to carry out pollution monitoring and control measures, as well as a lack of R&D infrastructure to develop affordable air pollution monitoring technologies in developing countries, are stifling the implementation of effective pollution monitoring and control reforms.

Global Air Quality Monitoring Market: Segmentation

The Air Quality Monitoring Market is segregated based on Sampling Method, Pollutant, Product, and End User.

By Sampling Method, the market is classified into Active/Continuous Monitoring, Manual Monitoring, Passive Monitoring, Intermittent monitoring, and Stack Monitoring. In the forecast period, the stack monitoring segment is expected to increase at the fastest rate during the forecast period. The low operational cost of stack monitoring, the increasing government attention on regulatory compliance for industrial pollution monitoring, and the expanding emphasis on pollution monitoring and control are all likely to drive the market's expansion.

By Pollutant, the market is classified into Chemical Pollutant, Nitrogen Oxides, Sulfur Oxides, Carbon Oxides, Volatile Organic Compounds, Other Chemical Pollutants, Physical Pollutant, and Biological Pollutant. The chemical pollutants category held the highest proportion of the worldwide air quality monitoring systems market in the forecast period. Globally rising levels of chemical air pollutants are attributable to market growth. Furthermore, the adoption of strict pollution monitoring and control legislation, as well as the necessity to comply with them, increased public awareness, and the development and commercialization of innovative sensors are all contributing to the growth of this market sector.

By Product, the market is classified into Indoor monitors, Fixed Indoor Monitors, Portable Indoor Monitors, Outdoor monitors, Portable Outdoor Monitors, Fixed Outdoor Monitors, Dust & Particulate Matter Monitors, AQM Stations, and Wearable Monitors. In the forecast period, indoor monitors held the greatest proportion of the worldwide AQM products market. The growing installation of AQM stations, initiatives to raise public awareness about the health implications of indoor air pollution, increasing adoption of smart home and green-building technologies, and the growing preference for pollution-free indoor environments all contribute to this market segment's dominance. Market expansion is further aided by the ongoing development and commercialization of breakthrough AQM technologies, as well as government legislation requiring frequent monitoring of indoor air quality in workplaces.

Get More Insight before Buying@: https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/inquiry/air-quality-monitoring-market

List of Key Players of Air Quality Monitoring Market:

Thermo Fisher Scientific (US)

Emerson Electric (US)

General Electric (US)

Siemens AG ( Germany )

) Teledyne Technologies (US)

PerkinElmer Inc. (US)

Agilent Technologies Inc. (US)

Spectris plc (UK)

3M Company (US)

Company (US) Honeywell International Inc (US)

HORIBA Ltd. ( Japan )

) Merck KGaA ( Germany )

) TSI Incorporated (US)

Tisch Environmental (US)

Testo ( Germany )

Key questions answered in this report:

What are the growth rate forecast and market size for Air Quality Monitoring Market?

What are the key driving factors propelling the Air Quality Monitoring Market forward?

What are the most important companies in the Air Quality Monitoring Market Industry?

What segments does the Air Quality Monitoring Market cover?

How can I receive a free copy of the Air Quality Monitoring Market sample report and company profiles?

Report Scope:

Report Attribute Details Market size value in 2021 USD 4,391.5 Million Revenue forecast in 2028 USD 6,407.8 Million Growth Rate CAGR of almost 6.5 % 2022-2028 Base Year 2020 Historic Years 2016 - 2021 Forecast Years 2022 - 2028 Segments Covered By Product Type, By Application, and By End Use Forecast Units Value (USD Million), and Volume (Units) Quantitative Units Revenue in USD million/billion and CAGR from 2022 to 2028 Regions Covered North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa, and Rest of World Countries Covered U.S., Canada, Mexico, U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Argentina, GCC Countries, and South Africa, among others Companies Covered Thermo Fisher Scientific (US), Emerson Electric (US), General Electric (US), Siemens AG (Germany), Teledyne Technologies (US), PerkinElmer, Inc. (US), Agilent Technologies, Inc. (US), Spectris plc (UK), 3M Company (US), Honeywell International Inc (US), HORIBA, Ltd. (Japan), Merck KGaA (Germany), TSI Incorporated (US), Tisch Environmental (US), and Testo (Germany) Report Coverage Market growth drivers, restraints, opportunities, Porter's five forces analysis, PEST analysis, value chain analysis, regulatory landscape, market attractiveness analysis by segments and region, company market share analysis, and COVID-19 impact analysis. Customization Scope Avail customized purchase options to meet your exact research needs. https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/custom/2679

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Recent Developments

In 2021, Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. has been awarded a 20-month contract for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) research, which will provide a 3-D atmospheric data collection to emergency managers and forecasters in the United States .

. In 2020, BlueSky Air Quality Monitor (Model 8143) from TSI Incorporated (US) measures PM1, PM2.5, PM4, and PM10 mass concentrations, as well as temperature and humidity. These hyperlocal, cloud-based air quality monitors provide data interface through WiFi and come included with an SD memory card for duplicate date storage as an Internet of Things (IoT) solution.

Regional Dominance:

Growing consumer preference for clean air.

North America is predicted to dominate the market during the forecast period and will continue to do so throughout the projected time because of the presence of significant manufacturers in the area. Additionally, because of the growing consumer preference for clean air, the United States has an impact on the regional market. Governments in the region have enforced stringent consequences for monitoring air quality, which is likely to drive market growth. Furthermore, major manufacturers' well-established distribution channels contribute to market growth.

The Asia Pacific region will grow considerably during the predicted period. Countries in this market have seen considerable increases in GDP due to regional government spending on air quality monitoring systems, upgrading of public and industrial infrastructure, and increased use of cutting-edge environmental monitoring technologies, notably in rural areas. The initiative's goal is to monitor pollution levels and provide available air quality data for cities across India. Thus driving the regional market.

Global Air Quality Monitoring Market is segmented as follows:

Air Quality Monitoring Market: By Sampling Method Outlook (2022-2028)

Active/Continuous Monitoring

Manual Monitoring

Passive Monitoring

Intermittent monitoring

Stack Monitoring

Air Quality Monitoring Market: By Pollutant Outlook (2022-2028)

Chemical Pollutant

Nitrogen Oxides

Sulfur Oxides

Carbon Oxides

Volatile Organic Compounds

Other Chemical Pollutants

Physical Pollutant

Biological Pollutant

Air Quality Monitoring Market: By Product Outlook (2022-2028)

Indoor monitors

Fixed Indoor Monitors

Portable Indoor Monitors

Outdoor monitors

Portable Outdoor Monitors

Fixed Outdoor Monitors

Dust & Particulate Matter Monitors

AQM Stations

Wearable Monitors

Air Quality Monitoring Market: By End-User Outlook (2022-2028)

Government Agencies & Academic Institutes

Government and Residential Users

Petrochemical Industry

Power Generation Plants

Pharmaceutical Industry

Smart City Authorities

Other End Users

Air Quality Monitoring Market: By Region Outlook (2022-2028)

North America

The U.S.

Canada

Europe

France

The UK

Spain

Germany

Italy

Rest of Europe

Asia Pacific

China

Japan

India

South Korea

Southeast Asia

Rest of Asia Pacific

Latin America

Brazil

Mexico

Rest of Latin America

Middle East & Africa

GCC

South Africa

Rest of Middle East & Africa

Press Release For Air Quality Monitoring Market: https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/news/global-air-quality-monitoring-market

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SHANGHAI, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Arctech, the world's leading tracking, racking, and BIPV solutions provider, announced it has attended the Intersolar 2022 in Munich (Germany) from May 11th to 13th with the latest effort to include the 1P multi-point drive mechanism technology in its product portfolio, SkyLine II. Intersolar Europe is one of the most important, anticipated events in the international solar energy arena, bringing together key companies in the industry.

The SkyLine II has been Arctech's technology flagship at the Messe Munchen exhibition center, venue for this event. As PV modules have been designed in a larger format for increased power, which enlarged both tracker chord and length, posing a stability challenge to traditional single-axis trackers. As the new modules are no longer fully compatible with traditional flexible trackers, Arctech launched a new solution, SkyLine II.

Featuring a pentagonal torque tube and the synchronous multi-point drive mechanism, SkyLine II is the new-generation rigid horizontal single-axis tracker with an independent row and 1P architecture. Unlike the traditional flexible trackers that rotate excessively during wind events and have to be stowed at steep angles, the very stiff Skyline II safely stows at 0 deg without torsional distortion. The design allows the solar tracker for the highest stability at all tracking tilts. Additionally, the unique design with many fixed points generates independent "construction blocks", enabling the most versatile modularity to accommodate all panel sizes and the number of strings per tracker. Moreover, Skyline II only triggers wind stows at 22m/s, which leads to up to 2% more energy yield per year, hence a lower LCOE. These advantages, together with its structure, make SkyLine II one of the best trackers in terms of financial performance and environmental adaptability. Read the whitepaper on Increasing PV Energy Yield with Superior Stow Parameters to get to know more.

"Every year, we relish the opportunity of Intersolar to connect with our worldwide solar colleagues and partners. We welcome them to visit booth A6.370 to get to know Arctech's advanced solar tracker solutions. For us, Intersolar is about face time with our customers. We are helping move the industry forward and love being a part of this clean energy growth trajectory." Remarked Allen Cao, General Manager of International Business at Arctech.

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St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador--(Newsfile Corp. - May 12, 2022) - Sokoman Minerals Corp. (TSXV: SIC) (OTCQB: SICNF) ("Sokoman" or the "Company") would like to cordially invite you to visit us at Booth #825 at the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference (VRIC) to be held at the Vancouver Convention Centre West (1055 Canada Place, Vancouver) on Tuesday May 17 - Wednesday May 18, 2022.

Former Prime Minister of Canada Stephen Harper and Former President of Mexico Felipe Calderon are two of the marquee speakers at the 2022 Resource Investment Conference. VRIC will host more than 100 international keynote speakers covering the hottest topics in finance, economics and geopolitics on May 17th and 18th, 2022.

Also presenting are best-selling finance author Robert "Rich Dad" Kiyosaki, dozens of globally respected economists, legendary money managers, and investors. The conversations on stage will cover the most important investment opportunities and key issues in macro-finance.

The VRIC will include a marketplace of 225 investment opportunities in the mining industry, spanning early-stage exploration to advanced-stage producing mines.

For more information and/or to register for the conference please visit: https://cambridgehouse.com/vancouver-resource-investment-conference.

We look forward to seeing you there.

About Sokoman Minerals Corp.

Sokoman Minerals Corp. is a discovery-oriented company with projects in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. The Company's primary focus is its portfolio of gold projects; flagship, advanced-stage Moosehead, Crippleback Lake (optioned to Trans Canada Gold Corp.) and East Alder (optioned to Canterra Minerals Corporation) along the Central Newfoundland Gold Belt, and the district-scale Fleur de Lys project in north-central Newfoundland, that is targeting Dalradian-type orogenic gold mineralization similar to the Curraghinalt and Cavanacaw deposits in Northern Ireland. The Company also recently entered into a strategic alliance with Benton Resources Inc. through three, large-scale, joint-venture properties including Grey River, Golden Hope and Kepenkeck in Newfoundland. The Golden Hope project hosts a recently discovered zone of lithium-bearing pegmatite dikes that has returned significant grades of Li2O from surface sampling and diamond drilling including 8.4 m grading 0.95% Li2O from GH-22-01. The Grey River project was recently tested with five recon drill holes all of which returned gold values highlighted by 10.58 g/t Au over 1.80 m including 50.13 g/t Au over 0.35 m from GR-21-01.

Sokoman now controls, independently and through the Benton alliance, over 150,000 hectares (>6,000 claims - 1500 sq. km), making it one of the largest landholders in Newfoundland, in Canada's newest and rapidly-emerging gold districts. The Company also retains an interest in an early-stage antimony/gold project (Startrek) in Newfoundland, optioned to White Metal Resources Inc., and in Labrador, the Company has a 100% interest in the Iron Horse (Fe) project which has Direct Shipping Ore (DSO) potential.

Mineralization hosted on adjacent and/or nearby properties is not necessarily indicative of mineralization hosted on the Company's property.

The Company would like to thank the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador for financial support of the Fleur de Lys project through the Junior Exploration Assistance Program.

To learn more, please contact:

Timothy Froude, P.Geo., President & CEO

709-765-1726

tim@sokomanmineralscorp.com

Cathy Hume, VP Corporate Development, Director

416-868-1079 x 251

cathy@chfir.com

Thomas Do, IR Manager, CHF Capital Markets

416-868-1079 x 232

thomas@chfir.com

Website: www.sokomanmineralscorp.com

Twitter: @SokomanMinerals

Facebook: @SokomanMinerals

LinkedIn: @SokomanMineralsCorp

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.

Investors are cautioned that trading in the securities of the Corporation should be considered highly speculative. Except for historical information contained herein, this news release contains forward- looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially. Sokoman Minerals Corp. will not update these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof. More detailed information about potential factors that could affect financial results is included in the documents filed from time to time with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities by Sokoman Minerals Corp.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/123793
NEW YORK, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- As per Zion Market Research study, The global aquaponics market was worth around USD 872.7 million in 2021 and is estimated to grow to about USD 1807.29 million by 2028, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 12.9 percent over the forecast period. The report analyzes the digital remittance market's drivers, restraints/challenges, and the effect they have on the demands during the projection period. In addition, the report explores emerging opportunities in the digital remittance market.

Key Industry Insights & Finding of the Aquaponics Market Reports:

As per the analysis shared by our research analyst, the Aquaponics Market is expected to grow annually at a CAGR of around 12.9 % (2022-2028).

(2022-2028). Through the primary research, it was established that the Aquaponics Market was valued approximately USD 872.7 Billion in 2021 and is projected to reach to roughly USD 1807.29 Billion by 2028.

Billion in 2021 and is projected to reach to roughly Billion by 2028. North American area has the largest market share in the worldwide aquaponics industry.

Asia-Pacific region has the second-largest market share in the aquaponics industry, thanks to ongoing technological advancements.

region has the second-largest market share in the aquaponics industry, thanks to ongoing technological advancements. European region has the third-largest market share in the aquaponics market due to the presence of a well-established infrastructure.

Due to rising demand for low operating costs combined with high yields, the aquaponics industry is expanding in Latin America , the Middle East , and Africa .

Zion Market Research published the latest report titled as "Aquaponics Market By Type (Media Filled Growbeds (MFG), Nutrient Film Technique (NFT), Deep Water Culture (DWC), and Others), By Component (Bio Filter, Settling Basins, Fish tanks, Soil-free plant beds, Rearing Tanks, Aquaponic Produce, and Others), By Equipment (Pumps and Valves, Water Heaters, Fish Purge Systems, Aeration Systems, Water Quality Testing, and Others), By Application (Fish, Herbs, Fruits, and Vegetables), By End-User (Commercial, Home Production, and Research) and By Region - Global and Regional Industry Overview, Market Intelligence, Comprehensive Analysis, Historical Data, and Forecasts 2022 - 2028" into their research database.

Aquaponics Market: Overview

Aquaponics is a food-production method that combines aquaculture (the breeding of aquatic animals in tanks) and hydroponics (the growing of plants in water), in which nutrient-rich aquaculture water is delivered to hydroponically grown plants, where nitrifying bacteria convert ammonia to nitrates. Because all aquaponic systems are based on contemporary hydroponic and aquaculture farming techniques, the size, complexity, and types of foods grown in an aquaponic system can differ just as much as any other system found in a different agricultural field.

Because aquaponics is free of artificial fertilizers and crop protection chemicals, and fish waste serves as the principal nutrition for plants, the demand for organically grown crops has huge potential and an unexplored market for emerging aquaponic farms and aquaponic system vendors.

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Our Free Sample Report Includes:

2022 Updated Report Introduction, Overview, and In-depth industry analysis

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2022 Updated Regional Analysis with Graphical Representation of Size, Share & Trends

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Zion Market Research methodology

Industry Dynamics:

Aquaponics Market: Growth Dynamics

Drivers: Free from any interference of harmful fertilizers or pesticides.

There are no toxic fertilizers or pesticides present in the aquaponics culture's produce. The World Bank's Fertilizer Price Index is forecasting an upward trend. The fish waster, which grows in water solvents, is a wonderful natural fertilizer for these veggies. This also helps to cut down on the costs of using fertilizers in large-scale production. Furthermore, no expensive equipment is used, implying that the market is profitable in the long run.

Restraints: Competition from hydroponics and vertical farming.

Agricultural techniques such as hydroponics and vertical farming are causing a surge in the use of sustainable agricultural methods. This is offering a significant hurdle to the market's expected growth over the forecast period, which ends in 2028.

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Global Aquaponics Market: Segmentation

The global aquaponics market is segregated based on type, component, equipment, application, and end-user.

By Application, the global market is classified into Fish, Herbs, Fruits, and Vegetables. Fish has the largest market share and is expected to grow at the fastest rate over the projected period. The need for this segment is being driven by reasons such as rising global population, changing lifestyles, and increasing seafood demand for human consumption.

By Equipment, the global market is classified into Pumps and Valves, Water Heaters, Fish Purge Systems, Aeration Systems, Water Quality Testing, and Others. During the projected period, the others (grow lights for plants) category will have the biggest market share. The demand for this category is being accelerated by factors such as growing indoor farming and increasing utilization of grow lights in indoor farming.

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List of Key Players of Aquaponics Market:

Aquaponic Lynx LLC

GreenLife Aquaponics

Nelson & Pade Aquaponics

The Aquaponic Source

ECF Farm systems GmbH

MyAquaponics

Backyard Aquaponics

NutraPonics Canada Corporation

Symbiotic Aquaponic

Endless Food Systems.

Key questions answered in this report:

What are the growth rate forecast and market size for Aquaponics Market?

What are the key driving factors propelling the Aquaponics Market forward?

What are the most important companies in the Aquaponics Market Industry?

What segments does the Aquaponics Market cover?

How can I receive a free copy of the Aquaponics Market sample report and company profiles?

Report Scope:

Report Attribute Details Market size value in 2021 USD 872.7 Million Revenue forecast in 2028 USD 1807.29 Million Growth Rate CAGR of almost 12.9 % 2022-2028 Base Year 2020 Historic Years 2016 - 2021 Forecast Years 2022 - 2028 Segments Covered By Product Type, By Application, and By End Use Forecast Units Value (USD Million), and Volume (Units) Quantitative Units Revenue in USD million/billion and CAGR from 2022 to 2028 Regions Covered North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa, and Rest of World Countries Covered U.S., Canada, Mexico, U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Argentina, GCC Countries, and South Africa, among others Companies Covered Aquaponic Lynx LLC, GreenLife Aquaponics, Nelson & Pade Aquaponics, The Aquaponic Source, ECF Farm systems GmbH, MyAquaponics, Backyard Aquaponics, NutraPonics Canada Corporation, Symbiotic Aquaponic, and Endless Food Systems. Report Coverage Market growth drivers, restraints, opportunities, Porter's five forces analysis, PEST analysis, value chain analysis, regulatory landscape, market attractiveness analysis by segments and region, company market share analysis, and COVID-19 impact analysis. Customization Scope Avail customized purchase options to meet your exact research needs. https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/custom/2240

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Recent Developments

April 2021 - France -based indoor farming company Les Nouvelles Fermes raised EUR 2 million (approximately USD 2.4 million ) in its first round of funding by the investors from IRDI, the Banque des Territoires, Credit Agricole Aquitaine and the CIC. The company has plans to build the largest aquaponic farm in Europe , with this funding.

- -based indoor farming company Les Nouvelles Fermes raised (approximately ) in its first round of funding by the investors from IRDI, the Banque des Territoires, Credit Agricole Aquitaine and the CIC. The company has plans to build the largest aquaponic farm in , with this funding. 2019- Superior Fresh, the Midwest's premier aquaponic produce provider, has increased the size of its greenhouses from 6 to 13 acres and the size of its aquaculture facility from 40,000 to 100,000 square feet.

Regional Dominance:

Asia-Pacific region has the second-largest market share.

Because of the increasing use of modern farming techniques and the growing demand for organic food, the North American area has the largest market share in the worldwide aquaponics industry. The Asia-Pacific region has the second-largest market share in the aquaponics industry, thanks to ongoing technological advancements. Furthermore, increased demand for improved agricultural productivity in countries such as China and India drives the business. The European region has the third-largest market share in the aquaponics market due to the presence of a well-established infrastructure. Furthermore, easy technical process adoption was followed by an increase in per capita income. Due to rising demand for low operating costs combined with high yields, the aquaponics industry is expanding in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa.

Global Aquaponics Market is segmented as follows:

Aquaponics Market: By Type Outlook (2022-2028)

Media Filled Growbeds (MFG)

Nutrient Film Technique (NFT)

Deep Water Culture (DWC)

Others

Aquaponics Market: By Component Outlook (2022-2028)

Bio Filter

Settling Basins

Fish tanks

Soil-free plant bed

Rearing Tanks

Aquaponic Produce

Others

Aquaponics Market: By Equipment Outlook (2022-2028)

Pumps and Valves

Water Heaters

Fish Purge Systems

Aeration Systems

Water Quality Testing

Others

Aquaponics Market: By Applications Outlook (2022-2028)

Fish

Herbs

Fruits

Vegetables

Aquaponics Market: By End-User Outlook (2022-2028)

Commercial

Home Production

Aquaponics Market: By Region Outlook (2022-2028)

North America

The U.S.

Canada

Europe

France

The UK

Spain

Germany

Italy

Rest of Europe

Asia Pacific

China

Japan

India

South Korea

Southeast Asia

Rest of Asia Pacific

Latin America

Brazil

Mexico

Rest of Latin America

Middle East & Africa

GCC

South Africa

Rest of Middle East & Africa

Press Release For Aquaponics Market: https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/news/global-aquaponics-market

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President Guillermo Lasso said he hopes to develop further relations with the Israeli innovation ecosystem and offer additional opportunities for Israeli companies operating in Ecuador

The President is accompanied by Minister of Foreign Affairs Juan Carlos Holguin, Minister of Production, Foreign Trade & Investment Julio Jose Prado, and National Secretary for Public-Private Alliance & Development, Roberto Salas Guzman

TEL AVIV, Israel, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- President of Ecuador Guillermo Lasso made his first official visit to Israel this week in an effort to deepen bilateral relations with an emphasis on developing closer business, commercial, and innovation ties between the two countries. Leading a delegation of Ecuadorian entrepreneurs, President Lasso arrived today at Tel Aviv based Start-Up Nation Central, an organization that promotes Israeli innovation around the world, accompanied by Minister of Foreign Affairs Juan Carlos Holguin, Minister of Production, Foreign Trade & Investment Julio Jose Prado, and National Secretary for Public-Private Alliance & Development Roberto Salas Guzman. The delegation met with Start-Up Nation Central's CEO Avi Hasson and other senior executives and heard from them about what it takes to develop an advanced innovation ecosystem such as Israel's.

During the official visit, President Lasso presented for the first time in Israel the government's new "Ecuador Open for Business" strategy, which aims to attract investments and strengthen public-private partnerships. This is an open call to the Israeli tech ecosystem to better understand the market in Ecuador, which is ripe for investments and is a desirable destination for expanding technological activities through strategic partnerships.

Following the presentation, the Ecuadorian officials took part in a panel in which they heard from Avi Hasson; Boaz Albaranes, a partner at Mindset Ventures, and other high-level representatives of the Israeli tech ecosystem about ways in which Ecuador and Israel can find synergies and collaborate through innovation.

Start-Up Nation Central CEO Avi Hasson: "I would like to thank President Lasso and the senior Ecuadorian delegation for meeting with us. Our mission is to promote Israeli innovation to the world in order to help international entities solve global challenges and we are honored to be connecting Ecuador to the Israeli innovation ecosystem and its problem-solving capabilities. Israel's innovation and capabilities especially in the agrifood-tech sector can bring value to the Ecuadorian economy and we are sure this visit will help boost ties between the two countries".

Start-Up Nation Central is a non-profit organization that connects Israeli innovation to the world in order to help international entities solve global challenges. Immersed in the Israeli technology ecosystem, we provide a platform that nurtures business growth and generates partnerships with corporations, governments, investors, and NGOs to strengthen Israel's economy and society.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1816951/Credit_Liron_Cohen_Aviv.jpg
The Symposium Will Unveil the Future of Orthodontics for the Next Decade

Hong Kong, China--(Newsfile Corp. - May 12, 2022) - The 1st IOF International Orthodontic Symposium & Inaugural Meeting will be held from June,3rd ~ 5th, 2022. The meeting will be broadcasted live online and available all around the world. IOF (International Orthodontics Foundation) is an international academic organization in orthodontics and related fields.

The theme of the symposium is "Innovation and Transformation of Orthodontics-Advances in Research & Clinical Practice: A Look into the Future", which aims to focus on the current orthodontic academic progress and the global trends, to guide orthodontists in their field of expertise.

Fifteen elite orthodontic experts from China and across the world will unite to share stimulating presentations and facilitate academic exchanges. The two chairmen, Professor Ravindra Nanda, Editor-in-Chief of the "Progress in Orthodontics" and Adjunct Professor at the Forsyth Institute; and Professor Zhihe Zhao President of the Professor Committee, West China School and Hospital of Stomatology, Sichuan University, will deliver keynote speeches during this symposium.

Figure 1

To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/8404/123762_d39ecca364478b56_001full.jpg

IOF (International Orthodontics Foundation) is an international academic organization in orthodontics and related fields. Founded by CareCapital Group and a plentitude of professionals in orthodontics and related fields around the world, the Organization is committed to supporting cutting-edge research and providing quality training and education.

Founding members from North America, Europe, and China are devoted to making the foundation an academic platform for the orthodontic industry with international standards and practice, a global vision, and a strong commitment.

The founding members remain focused on improving patient care by providing comprehensive quality training and education, innovative and clinical research grants, and providing an international network to professionals for lifelong learning in orthodontics and related fields.

Globally, especially in many developing countries, there has been an increasingly growing gap between people's health and the supply of the orthodontics industry. According to the founders of IOF, providing high-quality orthodontic treatment for such a big number of patients requires multiple resources gathered together. The IOF experts need to pass on the expertise and they hope to pass on their hard-earned academic achievements and clinical experience to young practitioners all over the world. This will directly influence and promote the future development of the industry. The industry also needs to keep innovating. The industry must continue to effectively improve diagnosis and treatment, working procedures, and patient satisfaction by putting more work into developing and popularizing digital technology, new materials, and new tools. Lastly, the industry needs to create a wide network. An exchange and interaction mechanism for the orthodontic industry around the globe needs to be built so that individuals can share strengths as well as boost cooperation between academic and industrial circles, and build an international chain that includes: innovation, academics, technology, clinics, products, service, and experience. With these values, the industry will truly benefit patients around the world.

These challenges have catalyzed the birth of IOF and inspired this symposium. The 1st IOF International Orthodontics symposium will be held online from June,3rd ~ 5th, and will focus on key issues in the development of orthodontics today. Experts and academic leaders from all around the world, each with their own, unique perspectives will give keynote speeches, and explore solutions together. Additionally, the IOF will be officially inaugurated during the symposium and the first round of applications for the IOF Research Grants will be launched. This will provide more diversified chances for international cooperation between young scholars who are interested in innovative research in the orthodontics industry.

The topics of the symposium consist of four parts, which focus on recent advances in research and clinical practices, and the innovation and transformation of orthodontics and related field. The first part, "Clear Aligner Biomechanics and Treatments", will be discussed by several professors, specifically Chairman Ravindra Nanda, Editor-in-Chief of the "Progress in Orthodontics" and Adjunct Professor at the Forsyth Institute; Dr. Nikhilesh R Vaid, President of the World Federation of Orthodontists; and Professor Jin Zuolin, Director of Orthodontics Department, School of Stomatology of Fourth Military Medical University.

The second part is "Applications of Current 3D Technology in Orthodontics", and will be discussed by Dr. Theodore Eliades, director of the Clinic of Orthodontics and Pediatric Dentistry, and director of the Institute of Oral Biology at the Center of Dental Medicine, University of Zurich; Dr. Bjorn Ludwig, assistant professor of Department of Orthodontics, University of Homburg/Saar; and Professor Fang Bing, director of Orthodontics, Shanghai Ninth People's Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine.

The topic for the third is "Orthodontic Treatments vs Orthognathic Surgeries" by Professor Peter Ngan, Chair of the department of Orthodontics, School of Dentistry, University of West Virginia and Professor Li Weiran, director of Orthodontics, Peking University School and Hospital of Stomatology.

The final topic is "Artificial Intelligence Technology" which will be a discussion with Professor Ching-Chang Ko, chair of Orthodontics Department, Ohio State University; Professor Bai Yuxing, president of Beijing Stomatological Hospital, Capital Medical University; and Professor Zhao Zhihe, president of Professor Committee, West China School and Hospital of Stomatology Sichuan University.

During the symposium, Professor Ravindra Nanda will give a speech entitled "Is Acceleration of Orthodontic Tooth Movement Possible? Failures and Successes?" while Professor Zhihe Zhao will speak on the topic "Establishment of Intelligent Orthodontic Diagnosis and Treatment System". Prof. Kang (Eric) Ting, Executive Director of IOF and professor at the Forsyth Institute, will elaborate on the topic "IOF Research Grants", which will help more scholars and practitioners to get sponsors for their clinical research and development.

IOF warmly welcomes Orthodontists and relevant healthcare professionals to join the first IOF International Orthodontics Symposium online to discuss the theme with top global experts; and to share insights into the global trends, which aims to promote academic exchange between the West and the East and to boost technological innovation in the industry. IOF is committed to be a lifelong partner of orthodontic practitioners for creating shared values and for building a bright future.

Sign up here for the live webcast: https://iof-meeting.mctoday.cn/web/en/specialMeeting

Company: International Orthodontics Foundation Limited

Contact Person: Tong Zhou

Email: tong.zhou@iofglobal.org

Website: https://www.iofglobal.org

Telephone: +862155821505

City: Hong Kong

Address: Unit 1603, 16/F Tower 1, Silvercord 30 Canton RD TST KL, Hong Kong

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/123762
Nordea Bank Abp / Key word(s): Miscellaneous

Nordea Bank Abp: Changes in Nordea Bank Abp's own shares



12.05.2022 / 18:10





Changes in Nordea Bank Abp's own shares

Nordea Bank Abp

Stock exchange release - Changes in company's own shares

12 May 2022 at 18.00 EET

A total of 2,011 own shares held by the company were today transferred without consideration to participants in Nordea Bank Abp's ("Nordea") variable remuneration programmes.

Based on the resolution of the Board of Directors announced on 24 March 2022, Nordea has transferred 2,011 own shares held by the company to settle its commitments to participants in its variable remuneration programmes.

Following the transfer of own shares, Nordea holds 11,482,431 treasury shares for capital optimisation purposes and 6,073,651 treasury shares for remuneration purposes.

For further information:

Matti Ahokas, Head of Investor Relations, +358 40 575 9178

Group Communication, +358 10 416 8023 or press@nordea.com

The information provided in this stock exchange release was submitted for publication, through the agency of the contact persons set out above, at 18.00 EET on 12 May 2022.

This information is provided by RNS, the news service of the London Stock Exchange. RNS is approved by the Financial Conduct Authority to act as a Primary Information Provider in the United Kingdom. Terms and conditions relating to the use and distribution of this information may apply. For further information, please contact rns@lseg.com or visit www.rns.com.

End of Media Release


Oral presentation of pivotal Phase 2 clinical trial of Cami in relapsed or refractory Hodgkin lymphoma

ZYNLONTA diffuse large B-cell lymphoma data highlighted in several abstracts

ADC Therapeutics SA (NYSE: ADCT), announced today that results from the pivotal Phase 2 clinical trial of camidanlumab tesirine (Cami) in patients with relapsed or refractory Hodgkin lymphoma have been accepted for an oral presentation at the European Hematology Association 2022 Hybrid Congress (EHA2022), which will be held virtually and in Vienna, Austria from June 9-12, 2022.

"We continue to be encouraged by the data from our ongoing pivotal Phase 2 trial demonstrating the efficacy and safety of Cami as a single agent for patients with relapsed or refractory Hodgkin lymphoma," said Joseph Camardo, MD, Chief Medical Officer of ADC Therapeutics. "As we advance Cami toward a potential BLA submission, we look forward to sharing these data with the hematology community at EHA2022."

Details of ADC Therapeutics' oral presentation are as follows:

Camidanlumab Tesirine: Updated Efficacy And Safety In An Open-Label, Multicenter, Phase 2 Study Of Patients With Relapsed Or Refractory Classical Hodgkin Lymphoma (R/R CHL)

Presentation Date and Time: Friday, June 10, 2022, 11:45 am 12:00 pm CEST // 5:45 am 6 am EDT

Session Title: Hodgkin lymphoma Clinical

Session Room: Hall A8

Abstract Code: S201

Presenter: Carmelo Carlo-Stella, MD, Department of Biomedical Sciences, Humanitas University, and Department of Oncology and Hematology, IRCCS Humanitas Research Hospital, Milan, Italy

Details of ADC Therapeutics' poster presentations are as follows:

Health-Related Quality Of Life And Tolerability Of Loncastuximab Tesirine In High-Risk Patients With Relapsed/Refractory Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma Treated In A Phase 2 Clinical Trial (LOTIS 2)

Session Date and Time: Friday, June 10, 2022, 16:30 17:45 CEST // 10:30 am 11:45 am EDT

Location: Hall D

Abstract Code: P1717

Real-World Characteristics And Clinical Outcomes In Relapse/Refractory Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma Patients Who Received Car-T Therapy

Session Date and Time: Friday, June 10, 2022, 16:30 17:45 CEST // 10:30 am 11:45 am EDT

Location: Hall D

Abstract Code: 1182

Real-World Characteristics And Clinical Outcomes In Relapse/Refractory Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma Post Car-T Failure

Session Date and Time: Friday, June 10, 2022, 16:30 17:45 CEST // 10:30 am 11:45 am EDT

Location: Hall D

Abstract Code: 1181

Titles of ADC Therapeutics' abstracts accepted for publication only are as follows:

A Phase 2, Open-Label Study Of Loncastuximab Tesirine In Combination With Rituximab (LONCA-R) In Previously Untreated Unfit/Frail Patients With Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma (DLBCL) (LOTIS-9) [Trials in progress]

Long-term survival projections of loncastuximab tesirine-treated patients in relapsed or refractory (R/R) diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL)

Phase 3 Randomized Study of Loncastuximab Tesirine in Combination With Rituximab (Lonca-R) Versus Immunochemotherapy in Patients With R/R DLBCL (LOTIS-5) [Trials in progress]

Please note: times and locations are tentative and subject to change.

About Camidanlumab Tesirine (Cami)

Camidanlumab tesirine (Cami) is an antibody drug conjugate (ADC) comprised of a monoclonal antibody that binds to CD25 (HuMax-TAC, licensed from Genmab A/S), conjugated to the pyrrolobenzodiazepine (PBD) dimer payload, tesirine. Once bound to a CD25-expressing cell, Cami is internalized into the cell where enzymes release the PBD-based payload, killing the cell. This applies to CD25-expressing tumor cells and also to CD25-expressing Tregs. The intra-tumoral release of its PBD payload may also cause bystander killing of neighboring tumor cells, and PBDs have also been shown to induce immunogenic cell death. All of these properties of Cami may enhance immune-mediated anti-tumor activity.

Cami is being evaluated in a pivotal Phase 2 clinical trial in patients with relapsed or refractory Hodgkin lymphoma and a Phase 1b clinical trial as monotherapy and in combination with pembrolizumab in solid tumors.

About ZYNLONTA (loncastuximab tesirine-lpyl)

ZYNLONTA is a CD19-directed antibody drug conjugate (ADC). Once bound to a CD19-expressing cell, ZYNLONTA is internalized by the cell, where enzymes release a pyrrolobenzodiazepine (PBD) payload. The potent payload binds to DNA minor groove with little distortion, remaining less visible to DNA repair mechanisms. This ultimately results in cell cycle arrest and tumor cell death.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved ZYNLONTA (loncastuximab tesirine-lpyl) for the treatment of adult patients with relapsed or refractory (r/r) large B-cell lymphoma after two or more lines of systemic therapy, including DLBCL not otherwise specified, DLBCL arising from low-grade lymphoma and also high-grade B-cell lymphoma. The trial included a broad spectrum of heavily pre-treated patients (median three prior lines of therapy) with difficult-to-treat disease, including patients who did not respond to first-line therapy, patients refractory to all prior lines of therapy, patients with double/triple hit genetics and patients who had stem cell transplant and CAR-T therapy prior to their treatment with ZYNLONTA. This indication is approved by the FDA under accelerated approval based on overall response rate and continued approval for this indication may be contingent upon verification and description of clinical benefit in a confirmatory trial.

ZYNLONTA is also being evaluated as a therapeutic option in combination studies in other B-cell malignancies and earlier lines of therapy.

About ADC Therapeutics

ADC Therapeutics (NYSE: ADCT) is a commercial-stage biotechnology company improving the lives of those affected by cancer with its next-generation, targeted antibody drug conjugates (ADCs). The Company is advancing its proprietary PBD-based ADC technology to transform the treatment paradigm for patients with hematologic malignancies and solid tumors.

ADC Therapeutics' CD19-directed ADC ZYNLONTA (loncastuximab tesirine-lpyl) is approved by the FDA for the treatment of relapsed or refractory diffuse large b-cell lymphoma after two or more lines of systemic therapy. ZYNLONTA is also in development in combination with other agents. Cami (camidanlumab tesirine) is being evaluated in a pivotal Phase 2 trial for relapsed or refractory Hodgkin lymphoma and in a Phase 1b clinical trial for various advanced solid tumors. In addition to ZYNLONTA and Cami, ADC Therapeutics has multiple ADCs in ongoing clinical and preclinical development.

ADC Therapeutics is based in Lausanne (Biopole), Switzerland and has operations in London, the San Francisco Bay Area and New Jersey. For more information, please visit https://adctherapeutics.com/ and follow the Company on Twitter and LinkedIn.

ZYNLONTA is a registered trademark of ADC Therapeutics SA.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220512005635/en/

Contacts:

Investors



Eugenia Litz

ADC Therapeutics

Eugenia.Litz@adctherapeutics.com

+44 7879 627205

Amanda Hamilton

ADC Therapeutics

amanda.hamilton@adctherapeutics.com

+1 917-288-7023

EU Media

Alexandre Muller

Dynamics Group

amu@dynamicsgroup.ch

+41 (0) 43 268 3231

USA Media

Mary Ann Ondish

ADC Therapeutics

maryann.ondish@adctherapeutics.com

+1 914-552-4625
Finsbury Growth & Income Trust Plc - Transaction in Own Shares

For immediate release

12 May 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 778.80p 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 2,360,880; 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 222,630,423.

The figure of 222,630,423 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
IDAHO FALLS, ID / ACCESSWIRE / May 12, 2022 / Bank of Idaho on May 11 expanded its regional footprint into Eastern Washington, striking a deal to transition five HomeStreet Bank branches into Bank of Idaho. On the heels of that acquisition, Bank of Idaho is bringing on three experienced officers to open a loan production office in Pasco, Washington.

"We're delighted to get the opportunity to work with the professionals who make up these branches and become a part of their communities," Bank of Idaho President and CEO Jeff Newgard said. "We can't wait to show the people of Eastern Washington how much heart Bank of Idaho has to offer through our integrity, our courtesy and our unwavering support for the entrepreneurial spirit."

Bank of Idaho is a community bank with 10 branches across southern Idaho, five mortgage production offices and now five branches in Eastern Washington.

The new Loan Production team is made up of Brad Bartley, Sam McKinnis, and Julie Killian who share more than 70+ years of experience in originating agricultural and commercial loans for the people of Eastern Washington, which aligns perfectly with Bank of Idaho's passionate support and expertise of small businesses and agricultural loans.

"We are incredibly fortunate to move under the umbrella of Bank of Idaho, an institution with an unflinching commitment toward small business and the communities in which they thrive," Brad Bartley said "With their support, we are looking forward to facilitating the needs of our business community for years to come."

The successful acquisitions of the branches and the loan production office kick off a complete banking ecosystem in Eastern Washington. Customers will continue banking with the same friends and neighbors they have come to know at each branch, with both Bank of Idaho and HomeStreet dedicated to ensuring a smooth and easy transition.

When the deals officially close, it will mark the first time Bank of Idaho has increased its footprint beyond the borders of Idaho.

Newgard said the acquisition was appealing because the regions were so similar in their support for agriculture, local business and small-town sensibility.

"The people of Idaho and the people of Eastern Washington are connected by our values and our way of life," Newgard said. "We jumped at the opportunity to serve a population who understands and appreciates our community-first approach to banking. And as a result, our united footprint will mean stronger opportunities for everyone."

Once approved, the banks are scheduled to finish transitioning to Bank of Idaho branches by August 1. The loan production office is already open for business.

About Bank of Idaho

For 37 years, Bank of Idaho has been a financial fixture in the eastern Idaho community since the original location opened in downtown Idaho Falls, and where headquarters are still located today. Later expanding to include now 11 full-service locations, and 5 mortgage offices across the state. Stock for the Bank of Idaho Holding Company opened to public trading on the OTC-QX market under the symbol BOID October 2019. With community growth their first priority, Bank of Idaho focuses on small businesses, and is Idaho's leader in SBA lending. For more information, visit www.bankofidaho.com.

Contact: Tyler Kraupp

Phone: 208.390.0667

tylerkraupp@bankofidaho.net

SOURCE: Bank Of Idaho Holding Co

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/701154/Bank-of-Idaho-Adds-New-Loan-Production-Office-in-Eastern-Washington
Options Technology, the leading Capital Markets services provider, today announced the appointment of Marie-Louise Quigg as VP, Account Management.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220512005731/en/

Options Technology, the leading Capital Markets services provider, today announced the appointment of Marie-Louise Quigg as VP, Account Management. (Photo: Business Wire)

Marie-Louise joined Options through the firm's graduate programme in June 2015 with an MSc in Educational Multimedia from Queen's University Belfast. Over the last seven years, she has held a variety of roles, including; Technical Account Manager and Global Team Lead of the Managed Applications Technical Account Management Team. In July 2021, Marie-Louise was appointed as Options' Infosec Committee Chairperson. In her new role as VP, Account Management, Marie-Louise will be responsible for overseeing Managed Applications operations, project and product development, and partner and client relationships.

Commenting on the appointment, Options' President and CEO, Danny Moore, said, "Marie-Louise has a comprehensive knowledge that spans multiple areas of Options business. Since joining as a graduate, she has worked diligently across several teams, and in recent years she has taken on team lead and management roles and excelled in both. She is a valued contributor, and we look forward to continuing to support her career progression."

Marie-Louise Quigg added, "I'm honoured to be appointed VP, Account Management at Options. Since joining the team in 2015, I have enjoyed working my way up through the ranks, and today's appointment is fulfilling a career goal I have had since I joined as a graduate here. I look forward to taking this next step in the leadership team with Options".

Today's news comes as the latest in a series of announcements for Options, including Hosting Capabilities in Euronext Aruba IT3 Bergamo, Achieve VMware Cloud Verified Status in LHCand the appointment of Charlotte Montgomery as VP, Commercial Operations.

About Options (www.options-it.com):

Options Technology is the No. 1 provider of IT infrastructure to global Capital Markets firms, supporting their operations and ecosystems.

Founded in 1993, the firm began life as a hedge fund technology services provider. Today, the company provides high-performance managed trading infrastructure and cloud-enabled managed services to over 550 firms globally, providing an agile, scalable platform in an Investment Bank-grade Cybersecurity wrapper.

Options clients include the leading global investment banks, hedge funds, funds of funds, proprietary trading firms, market makers, broker/dealers, private equity houses and exchanges. With offices in 8 key cities; New York, Toronto, Chicago, London, Belfast, Hong Kong, Singapore and New Zealand, Options are well placed to service their customers both on-site and remotely.

In 2019, Options secured a significant growth investment from Abry Partners, a Boston-based sector-focused private equity firm. This investment has enabled Options to considerably accelerate its growth strategy to invest further in its technology platform and expand its reach in key financial centres globally.

Options has been named among the UK's leading growth companies in the 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018 and 2017 Sunday Times HSBC International Track 200 league table.

For more on Options, please visit www.options-it.com, follow us on Twitter at @Options_IT and visit our LinkedIn page.

About Abry Partners (www.abry.com)

Abry is one of the most experienced and successful sector-focused private equity investment firms in North America. Since its founding in 1989, the firm has completed over $82 billion of leveraged transactions and other private equity or preferred equity placements. Currently, the firm manages over $5.0 billion of capital across their active funds.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220512005731/en/

Contacts:

For further information, please contact:

Press Contact: Page McLaughlin

Email: page.mclaughlin@options-it.com
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / May 12, 2022 / Rockland Resources Ltd. (the "Company" or "Rockland") (CSE:RKL) is pleased to report exploration results from its listing property, the Old Timer Property, located in the Nelson Mining Division, southern British Columbia. Follow up work in 2021 was limited by severe forest fires that prevented field work during much of the summer field season. Subsequent to completing a Phase 1 exploration program in 2020/21, Rockland has optioned the Property to Silverfish Resources.

Old Timer Property - The Old Timer Property is road-accessible and located in southern British Columbia, approximately 17 km southeast of Nelson. The Property covers 2,020 hectares and straddles the northeast-trending contact between Triassic to Early Jurassic Ymir Group metasediments to the west, and Mid to Late Jurassic Nelson intrusive rocks to the east. The Old Timer Property represents the northern-most gold occurrence in the Ymir Camp. On the Property and elsewhere in the Ymir Camp, gold mineralization occurs in quartz-filled shear zones, and in general, the strongest gold mineralization is in sheared and metasomatic rocks near the Nelson intrusive contact.

Exploration results - During 2020-21, Rockland Resources Ltd. completed geological mapping, prospecting, rock, soil and stream sediment sampling, and a drone-based magnetic survey on the Old Timer Property. This completed the Phase 1 Exploration Program recommended in the NI43-101 technical report filed by Rockland on December 17, 2020. Total exploration expenditures on the Old Timer Property by Rockland to December 31, 2021 were $186,684.

The purpose of the program was to provide a geological and structural framework for mineralization, to visit, sample and assess known zones of mineralization, to assess the merits of detailed soil geochemical sampling as a method for evaluating known mineralization, and to determine if geological contacts, structures and known veins could be delineated on the basis of magnetic signature. Leapfrog 3D modelling of the Old Timer vein was also completed using Lidar data to accurately establish the positions and elevations of historic drill collars.

Three new zones of mineralization were identified during the 2020-21 work program. Detailed geochemical surveys indicated that veins can be traced using this method, while drone-based magnetics showed that magnetics provides a method for differentiating the granodiorite intrusive from hornfelsed metasediments. Magnetic data also appears to be effective at identifying vein structures and post-vein faults. The Idun occurrence is the most promising of the new targets that were identified. Idun covers a strong, persistent magnetic linear feature and two parallel, northeast-trending structures with quartz veining. Numerous historic exploration pits are present in the Idun area, and a rock sample from the dump of one working returned 9.8 ppm Au. Elevated gold values were also returned from a detailed soil geochemical lines to the north and south of the main Old Timer pit.

These preliminary results of the Phase 1 Program were encouraging, however, Rockland elected to pursue more advanced exploration targets for gold in Red Lake, Ontario, and lithium in Sonora, Mexico. As the Old Timer Property remains a property of merit, a decision was made to seek potential optionees for the Old Timer Property in order for Rockland to maintain an interest.

Silverfish Option - Rockland executed an option agreement on the Old Timer Property with Silverfish Resources Inc. ("Silverfish Agreement") on December 15, 2021. Under the terms of the Silverfish Agreement, Silverfish can acquire all of Rockland's 75% interest in the claims in exchange for staged payments of $72,500 and 1,350,000 shares to Rockland over a 3-year period and by incurring exploration expenditures of $1.35 million over the same period. The agreement is subject to a 2% Net Smelter Royalty (NSR) in favour of the underlying vendor, and to a 2 km Area of Interest.

Subsequent to the Silverfish Agreement, Silverfish filed an updated NI43-101 technical report on the Old Timer Property that recommended a two-phase, $460,000 program to further explore the Property. The Phase 1 program includes expanding the drone-based magnetic survey over the remainder of the Property, plus ground follow up in several areas of interest. Phase 2 includes diamond drilling and additional surface exploration. It is contingent on the results of the Phase 1 program.

QA/QC - During the 2021 work program, soil and rock sampling was conducted by, or under the direct supervision of Brad Ulry. P. Geo. Samples were bagged and secured in the field and shipped by bonded carrier directly to Activation Laboratories Ltd. (Actlabs) in Ancaster Ontario for preparation and analysis. Actlabs is accredited under ISO/IEC 17025:2017 and ISO 9001:2015 standards. Rock samples were analyzed for 62 elements by method Ultratrace 6 (four acid total digestion (hydrofluoric, nitric, perchloric, aqua regia)) of a 0.25 g sample split, which is then analyzed by ICP-OES or ICP-MS, depending upon element. For samples returning over 5 g/t Au, the coarse reject fraction was reanalyzed by method 1A4 (fire assay).

Brad Ulry, P.Geo, a qualified person under National Instrument 43-101, is the qualified person responsible for reviewing and approving the geological contents of this news release as they pertain to the Old Timer Property.

About Rockland Resources Ltd.

Rockland is engaged in the business of acquisition and exploration of mineral properties in North America. Rockland is exploring the Cole Gold Mines Property, Ball Township, Red Lake Mining Division, Ontario, the Elektra Lithium Property in Sonora, Mexico, and is looking to expand its property portfolio with additional advanced gold and lithium projects. The 568 ha Cole Gold Mines property hosts high-grade gold mineralization in a classic Red Lake-type structurally controlled gold environment located 30 kilometres west of the Cochenour, Campbell, Red Lake mine complex. The 41,818 ha Elektra Lithium project in the northern portion of the Sonora, Mexico is contiguous and on trend with the advanced Sonora lithium project being developed by Ganfeng Lithium Co. Ltd.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors

Dr. Richard H. Sutcliffe, P.Geo.

President and Director

For further information, please contact:

Mike England

Email: mike@engcom.ca

Neither the Canadian Stock Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS: This news release contains forward-looking statements, which relate to future events or future performance and reflect management's current expectations and assumptions. Such forward-looking statements reflect management's current beliefs and are based on assumptions made by and information currently available to the Company. Investors are cautioned that these forward looking statements are neither promises nor guarantees, and are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause future results to differ materially from those expected. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date hereof and, except as required under applicable securities legislation, the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances. All of the forward-looking statements made in this press release are qualified by these cautionary statements and by those made in our filings with SEDAR in Canada (available at WWW.SEDAR.COM).

SOURCE: Rockland Resources Ltd.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/701159/Rockland-Resources-Reports-Exploration-Results-From-the-Old-Timer-Property-British-Columbia-and-Options-Property-to-Silverfish-Resources-Inc
RIYADH, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Muslim World League (MWL) - the world's largest Islamic NGO - has today completed the Forum on Common Values among Religious Followers event in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia between 10-11 Shawal 1443 H, corresponding to 11-12 May 2022.

The Forum, for the first time in history, convened within Saudi Arabia Christian, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist religious leaders alongside Islamic leaders to explore shared values and a common global vision for interfaith cooperation. Approximately 100 religious leaders attended the first of its kind conference, including over 15 Rabbis.

Attendees and speakers at the included:

HE Muhammad Al-Issa: Secretary General of the Muslim World League

Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni (of Rome)

Cardinal Pietro Parolin: Vatican Secretary of State

His Holiness Bartholomew I: Ecumenical patriarch and spiritual leader to 300 million Orthodox Christians worldwide

His Eminence Ivan Zoria: Archbishop of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine

Rev. Father Daniil Matrusov: Representative of the Patriarch of Russia

Banagala Upatissa Thero: President of the (Buddhist) Mahabodhi society of Sri Lanka

Pastor, Rev. Walter Kim: President, National Association of Evangelicals (United States)

Mr. Ven Swami Awdheshanand Giri: Chairman, Hindu Dharam Acharya Sabha (India)

Rabbi Moise Lewin: Special Adviser to the Chief Rabbi of France

His Eminence Sheikh Dr. Shawki Allam: Grand Mufti of Egypt

Rabbi David Rosen: Director, International Interreligious Affairs, AJC (American Jewish Committee)

Ambassador Rashad Hussain: United States Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom

Dr. Ahmed Hasan Taha: Chairman, Iraqi Jurisprudence Council

Archbishop Prof. Thomas Paul Schirrmacher: Secretary-General, World Evangelical Alliance (Germany)

Areas of agreement between conference participants:

 The need to respect religious diversity and the unique characteristics of every religion/sect.

 Human rights are universal irrespective of religion, gender or race - and enforced through international law.

 The need for continued dialogue between religious leaders, institutions and communities to help pre-empt and defuse civilizational clashes.

 The need for religious leaders to engage in inter and muti faith work to counter extremist ideologies.

Recommendations from the Conference:

 Relevant national institutions and United Nations organs must do more to confront all forms of discrimination and exclusion against religious, cultural, and ethnic minorities; And work to create strong and effective legislation in doing so.

 Various platforms of influence; especially the media and social media platforms must remain mindful of the moral responsibility entrusted upon them.

 We appeal to all countries and the international community to do all they can to provide adequate protection for places of worship, to ensure free access to them, to preserve their spiritual role, and to distance them from intellectual and political conflicts and sectarian strife.

 Launching of a global forum called: "Religious Diplomacy Forum for Building Bridges" based on the influential role of religions in human societies, and the important role of religious followers in bridging the relationship between religions and cultures for the purpose of peacebuilding.

 To work on issuing an international compilation under the name: "The Encyclopaedia of Common Human Values".

 Inviting the United Nations General Assembly to adopt an international day for "Common Human Values" that celebrates the commonalities between religions and cultures around the world

Amongst the Conference's key goals are the following:

 Establish a set of values common to all major world religions, and a vision for enhancing understanding, cooperation, and solidarity amongst world religions.

HE Muhammad Al-Issa, Secretary General of the host organization, the Muslim World League, said:

"The aims of this conference aligns to the values of Muslim World League, which strives to build humanitarian partnerships for a more cooperative and peaceful world and more harmonious communities. This conference tackles some of the major issues of our day. As the world's largest Islamic NGO, headquartered in the birthplace of Islam in Saudi Arabia, we have a special responsibility to do this work. Whether it is to tackle climate change, to support refugees and vulnerable communities around the world, or simply to spread messages of peace and co-existence, the kind of interfaith trust and cooperation this event is fostering is desperately needed to support those real-world goals."

The forum supports the Muslim World League's mission to strengthen its global role as an independent international non-governmental organization dedicated to promoting Islamic values that call for peace, as stated in its statute and bylaws.

About the Muslim World League

The Muslim World League is an international non-governmental Islamic organization based in the Holy City of Makkah. It aims to present the true Islam and its tolerant principles, provide humanitarian aid, extend bridges of dialogue and cooperation with all, engage in positive openness to all cultures and civilizations, follow the path of centrism and moderation to realize the message of Islam and ward off movements calling for extremism, violence and exclusion for a world full of peace, justice and coexistence.

About H.E. Dr. Mohammad bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa

H.E. Dr. Mohammad bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa is the head of the world's largest Islamic NGO - The Muslim World League (spanning 1200 Islamic scholar across 139 countries). He is also one of the world's foremost Islamic scholars and theologians and convened over 6000 global Islamic religious leaders in Mecca in 2019 to endorse the Makkah Charter, one of the most important documents in recent Islamic theological history, outlining a universal set of human rights and values drawn from Islamic scripture. Dr Issa was also the most senior Islamic cleric ever to have visited Auschwitz in Poland out of respect for the victims of the Holocaust.

For interview requests or further information on the conference, please contact:

Elina Kuusio, +44 (0)207 060 3955, elina@unitascommunications.com. You can find more photographs from the event here.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1817053/Muslim_World_League_1.jpg

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1817051/Muslim_World_League_2.jpg

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1817050/Muslim_World_League_3.jpg

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1817054/Muslim_World_League_4.jpg

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1817052/Muslim_World_League_Logo.jpg
AMSTERDAM, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Katanox, the travel accommodation distribution and fintech platform, has raised $ 5.7 million from a group of financial, hospitality, and tech entrepreneur family offices to overhaul and reconfigure B2B distribution in hospitality. The group of investors includes Rappi and Yuno co-founder Juan Pablo Ortega, co-founder of fintech Dimebox and current co-founder and CEO of Founda Jan Joost Kalff, and founder of hospitality tech iTesso Bas Blommaart.

In addition to its raise, Katanox brings industry veteran Rob Torres on as non-executive director. Rob brings over 20 years of experience and his vast travel industry network to the company. He will be working with the founding team to partner with global hotel brands.

"I am very excited to grow my relationship with the team and apply best practices from the programmatic advertising industry for B2B distribution in hospitality. The Katanox team is building an intriguing set of solutions to bring transparency that's needed for the open distribution era," said Rob Torres, non-executive director at Katanox.

The Katanox team combines innovative technology along with decades of expertise in payments, travel and programmatic media technology, to advance the future of B2B distribution in hospitality. Katanox addresses the $150 billion corporate travel market by streamlining and improving the distribution of travel accommodations, which has historically been controlled by Online Travel Agencies (OTA's), Global Distribution Systems (GDS) and bedbanks.

"Out of necessity, we've seen many advancements and improvements in the travel sector spurred on by technology and digitalization. However, when it comes to lodging, it's the safe middle men who are controlling the market and stifling growth," said Mendel Senf, co-founder of Katanox. "We're bringing much needed change to the market by putting power back in the hands of accommodation providers by empowering them to control their own destination via the Katanox platform."

Removing barriers

This round unlocks international expansion and finances further development of the platform and integrations with Central Reservation Systems (CRS), Property Management Systems (PMS) and Payment Service Providers (PSP).

Global hotel chains are under severe pressure as a result of the slow Covid recovery of corporate travel, and are actively seeking to replace the expensive GDS and wholesalers because connectivity and contracting between them and the business travel agencies are too expensive.

Katanox brings together travel accommodations so travel sellers like Travel Management Companies (TMC) can assemble an end-to-end experience for their corporate clients. Giving them data streaming access and availability to directly search, book, pay and modify their booking at any time. On top of that, Katanox will introduce financial services like price freeze, travel now pay later, cancel/change fees as new revenue opportunities to both partners in the platform. Platformization is a proven model from fintech and other industries to radically cut costs and boost innovation through direct partnerships.

A transformative era for travel distribution

The International Air Transport Association (IATA), the trade association for the world's airlines has created an industry standard, known as New Distribution Capability (NDC) and Billing and Settlement Plan (BSP) which transforms the way airline products are retailed and paid for. Alternatively, the hotel and vacation rental industry lags behind in distribution and payment initiatives. The pandemic made it utterly clear that B2B distribution in hospitality is dictated by gatekeepers such as the GDS and OTA duopoly, held back by archaic software solutions and conditioned by monotonous pay-out providers like virtual credit cards.

The Katanox team, who has industry transforming experience in programmatic advertising and payments, sees parallels with advertising platforms who are connecting advertisers directly to publishers inventory or payment service providers which are connecting the fragmented world of payments and finance. Katanox is a global remote first company with a base in Amsterdam and has extensive hiring plans in engineering, business development and sales. Its team is spread over the globe from Amsterdam to London, Paris, Istanbul, Los Angeles and Mexico City.

Source: https://katanox.com/blog/katanox-raises-5-7-million-and-appoints-former-md-of-google-travel-and-current-expedia-executive-rob-torres-as-non-executive-director-as-it-scales-up-to-enable-direct-b2b-distribution-o/

About Katanox

Katanox is a travel accommodation distribution and fintech platform bringing together travel sellers and travel accommodation providers. Katanox facilitates distribution of travel accommodation inventory and payments. The platform aims to unlock the programmatic era for B2B distribution in hospitality. The team is led by Mendel Senf, Georgios Georgiadis, Imre Vogelezang and Paul Beukers, supported by a group of experienced industry professionals.
Expanded Company Operations to European Market

ESS Tech, Inc. ("ESS," "ESS, Inc." or the "Company") (NYSE:GWH), a U.S. manufacturer of long-duration batteries for utility-scale and commercial energy storage applications, today announced financial results for its first quarter of 2022 ended March 31, 2022.

"Our team continued to make substantial operational strides in the first quarter. We worked through supply chain challenges and have made significant headway in our efforts to diversify our supplier partnerships and secure component supplies. With this we expect to deliver on our production schedule and remain on track to ship 40 to 50 Energy Warehouses this year. We continue to make progress ramping our manufacturing operations to increase capacity while reducing unit costs. Our second semi-automated line was delivered in the quarter and we continued to execute on our design-for-manufacturability cost reductions. Although unanticipated challenges limited our ability to recognize revenue in the quarter, we believe our efforts to manage costs while maximizing production output are paying dividends," said Eric Dresselhuys, CEO of ESS. "I'm proud of our team for having navigated the industry-wide supply chain challenges. Our pipeline and backlog remain robust as countries around the world pull up their timeline for renewable energy generation mandates and the value proposition of our iron flow battery is stronger than ever."

Recent Business Highlights

Received delivery of our second semi-automated manufacturing line in the first quarter.

On March 16, 2022, ESS announced market expansion in Europe to meet strong demand in the region for the Company's long-duration energy storage solutions. ESS is scheduled to begin European deployment of its long-duration batteries during the second half of 2022. This market expansion includes the appointment of Alan Greenshields as Director of Europe, to oversee customer adoption and deployment of the Company's LDES solutions. Greenshields brings over 25 years of experience to ESS in senior executive roles and has held several board-level positions at battery technology companies.

Conference Call Details

ESS will hold a conference call on Thursday, May 12, 2022 at 5:00 p.m. EDT to discuss financial results for its first quarter 2022 ended March 31, 2022. Interested parties may join the conference call beginning at 5:00 p.m. EDT on Thursday, May 12, 2022 via telephone by calling (844) 200-6205 in the U.S., or for international callers, by calling (646) 904-5544 and entering conference ID 675891. A telephone replay will be available until May 19, 2022, by dialing (866) 813-9403 in the U.S., or for international callers, (929) 458-6194 with conference ID 679229. A live webcast of the conference call will be available on ESS' Investor Relations website at http://investors.essinc.com/.

A replay of the call will be available via the web at http://investors.essinc.com/.

About ESS, Inc.

ESS Inc. (NYSE: GWH) designs, builds and deploys environmentally sustainable, low-cost, iron flow batteries for long-duration commercial and utility-scale energy storage applications requiring from 4 to 12 hours of flexible energy capacity. The Energy Warehouse and Energy Center use earth-abundant iron, salt, and water for the electrolyte, resulting in an environmentally benign, long-life energy storage solution for the world's renewable energy infrastructure. Established in 2011, ESS Inc. enables project developers, utilities, and commercial and industrial facility owners to make the transition to more flexible non-lithium-ion storage that is better suited for the grid and the environment. For more information, visit www.essinc.com.

Use of Non-GAAP Financial Measures

In this press release, the Company includes Non-GAAP Operating Expenses and Adjusted EBITDA, which are non-GAAP performance measures that the Company uses to supplement its results presented in accordance with U.S. GAAP. As required by the rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), the Company has provided herein a reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures contained in this press release to the most directly comparable measures under GAAP. The Company's management believes Non-GAAP Operating Expenses and Adjusted EBITDA are useful in evaluating its operating performance and are similar measures reported by publicly-listed U.S. companies, and regularly used by securities analysts, institutional investors, and other interested parties in analyzing operating performance and prospects. By providing these non-GAAP measures, the Company's management intends to provide investors with a meaningful, consistent comparison of the Company's profitability for the periods presented. Adjusted EBITDA is not intended to be a substitute for net income/loss or any U.S. GAAP financial measure and, as calculated, may not be comparable to other similarly titled measures of performance of other companies in other industries or within the same industry. Further, Non-GAAP Operating Expenses are not intended to be a substitute for GAAP Operating Expenses or any U.S. GAAP financial measure and, as calculated, may not be comparable to other similarly titled measures of performance of other companies in other industries or within the same industry.

The Company defines and calculates Non-GAAP Operating Expenses as GAAP Operating Expenses adjusted for stock-based compensation and other special items determined by management as they are not indicative of business operations. The Company defines and calculates Adjusted EBITDA as net loss before interest, other non-operating expense or income, (benefit) provision for income taxes, and depreciation, and further adjusted for stock-based compensation and other special items determined by management, including, but not limited to, fair value adjustments for certain financial liabilities associated with debt and equity transactions as they are not indicative of business operations.

Forward-Looking Statements

This communication contains certain forward-looking statements, including statements regarding ESS and its management team's expectations, hopes, beliefs, intentions or strategies regarding the future. The words "anticipate", "believe", "continue", "could", "estimate", "expect", "intends", "may", "might", "plan", "possible", "potential", "predict", "project", "should", "would" and similar expressions may identify forward-looking statements, but the absence of these words does not mean that a statement is not forward-looking. Examples of forward-looking statements include, among others, statements regarding the Company's manufacturing plans, the Company's order and sales pipeline, the Company's ability to execute on orders and the Company's ability to effectively manage costs. These forward-looking statements are based on ESS' current expectations and beliefs concerning future developments and their potential effects on ESS. Many factors could cause actual future events to differ materially from the forward-looking statements in this communication. There can be no assurance that the future developments affecting ESS will be those that we have anticipated. These forward-looking statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties (some of which are beyond ESS control) or other assumptions that may cause actual results or performance to be materially different from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements, which include, but are not limited to, continuing supply chain issues; delays, disruptions, or quality control problems in the Company's manufacturing operations; the Company's ability to hire, train and retain an adequate number of manufacturing employees; issues related to the shipment and installation of the Company's products; issues related to customer acceptance of the Company's products; and the Company's need to achieve significant business growth to achieve sustained, long-term profitability. Except as required by law, ESS is not undertaking any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

ESS Tech, Inc. Consolidated Statements of Operations and Comprehensive Loss (Unaudited, in thousands, except share and per share data) Three Months Ended March 31, 2022 2021 Operating expenses Research and development 12,898 5,652 Sales and marketing 1,501 512 General and administrative 7,789 2,120 Total operating expenses 22,188 8,284 Loss from operations (22,188 (8,284 Other income (expense) Interest expense, net (29 (57 Gain (loss) on revaluation of warrant liabilities 15,664 (8,426 Gain (loss) on revaluation of derivative liabilities (138,141 Gain on revaluation of earnout liabilities 840 Other income (expense), net 4 (10 Total other income (expense) 16,479 (146,634 Net loss and comprehensive loss to common stockholders (5,709 (154,918 Net loss per share basic and diluted (0.04 (2.51 Weighted average shares used in per share calculation basic and diluted 151,683,819 61,693,067

ESS Tech, Inc. Consolidated Balance Sheets (Unaudited, in thousands, except share data) March 31,

2022 December 31,

2021 ASSETS Current assets: Cash and cash equivalents 212,331 238,940 Restricted cash, current 1,167 1,217 Accounts receivable, net 2,928 517 Prepaid expenses and other current assets 4,406 4,844 Total current assets 220,832 245,518 Property and equipment, net 10,056 4,501 Operating lease right-of-use assets 4,260 Restricted cash, non-current 75 75 Other non-current assets 261 105 Total assets 235,484 250,199 LIABILITIES AND STOCKHOLDERS' EQUITY Current liabilities: Accounts payable 1,745 1,572 Accrued and other current liabilities 6,615 6,487 Operating lease liabilities, current 1,310 Deferred revenue 6,859 3,663 Notes payable, current 1,817 1,900 Total current liabilities 18,346 13,622 Notes payable, non-current 1,483 1,869 Operating lease liabilities, non-current 3,612 Earnout warrant liabilities 636 1,476 Public warrant liabilities 8,042 18,666 Private warrant liabilities 3,815 8,855 Other non-current liabilities 101 552 Total liabilities 36,035 45,040 Commitments and contingencies (Note 10) Stockholders' equity: Preferred stock ($0.0001 par value; 200,000,000 shares authorized, none issued and outstanding as of March 31, 2022 and December 31, 2021) Common stock ($0.0001 par value; 2,000,000,000 shares authorized, 152,606,563 and 151,839,058 shares issued and outstanding as of March 31, 2022 and December 31, 2021, respectively) 16 16 Additional paid-in capital 745,752 745,753 Accumulated deficit (546,319 (540,610 Total stockholders' equity 199,449 205,159 Total liabilities and stockholders' equity 235,484 250,199

ESS Tech, Inc. Reconciliation of GAAP to Non-GAAP Operating Expenses Three Months Ended March 31, 2022 (Unaudited, in thousands) Three Months

Ended March 31, 2022 Research and development 12,898 Less: stock-based compensation (587 Non-GAAP research and development 12,311 Sales and marketing 1,501 Less: stock-based compensation (54 Non-GAAP sales and marketing 1,447 General and administrative 7,789 Less: stock-based compensation (2,119 Non-GAAP general and administrative 5,670 Total operating expenses 22,188 Less: stock-based compensation (2,760 Non-GAAP total operating expenses 19,428

ESS Tech, Inc. Reconciliation of GAAP Net Loss to Adjusted EBITDA Three Months Ended March 31, 2022 (Unaudited, in thousands) Three Months

Ended March 31, 2022 Net loss (5,709 Interest expense, net 29 Stock-based compensation 2,760 Depreciation 196 Gain on revaluation of warrant liabilities (15,664 Gain on revaluation of earnout liabilities (840 Other income (expense), net (4 Adjusted EBITDA (19,232

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220512005428/en/

Contacts:

Investors:

Erik Bylin

investors@essinc.com

Media:

Gene Hunt

Trevi Communications, Inc.

978-750-0333 x.101

gene@trevicomm.com
The Future of your Investment will be Determined by the Outcome of this Vote

Frastanz, Austria--(Newsfile Corp. - May 12, 2022) - Dear Fellow Shareholders of Gambier Gold Corp. (TSXV: GGAU) (the "Company"), Dear Fellow Gambier Shareholders,

Shareholders have not been told the full story and as you read further, you will find that in order for Gambier Gold Corp. ("Gambier" or the "Corporation") to succeed, change is required. We, FruchtExpress Grabher GmbH & Co KG, significant shareholders of Gambier, have a passion for the Corporation to succeed, have the best interests of Shareholders in mind and want management of Gambier to deliver results. As significant shareholders, we hold approximately 8,750,000 common shares representing approximately 18.926% of Gambier's issued and outstanding shares. Our interests are aligned with yours and we are motivated to maximize value for all.

The President and Chief Executive Officer, Michael Schuss, along with Chief Financial Officer, Geoff Balderson, have breached their fiduciary duties of loyalty and care which are owed by each director and officer to the Corporation and its shareholders under corporate law. Such behavior CANNOT continue and CANNOT remain hidden.

Key Highlights

In favour the of new Board of Directors and Management:

We continue to actively engage with shareholders, key stakeholders and potential shareholders. Increasing shareholder support base to around 50%.

Strengthening the team with the addition of two independent technical advisors, Bernie Kreft [Owner of a private prospect generator company and advisor of Kestrel Gold] and Robert Cameron [President & CEO at Commander Resources].

Strengthening the team with the addition of a CFO, Mark T. Brown [Executive Chairman at Alianza Minerals Ltd and President of Pacific Opportunity Capital Ltd].

We are in discussions with third parties about the addition of new projects to replace the loss of the Wicheeda property.

Since our last News Release, we have continued to try and work with the existing Board, who continue to fail to address questions and concerns.

Reason for concern about current Board of Directors and Management:

Failure to comply with British Columbia securities laws and regulations.

Extremely poor communication with shareholders, including out of date website and presentation.

Lack of accountability, blaming former geologists and directors on exploration results.

The lack of News Release regarding the disposal of Wicheeda. We recognize this was mentioned on the MD&A; however, we believe it should have had a separate News Release.

Geoff Balderson, current CFO of Gambier is involved in approximately twenty-five other publicly traded companies, has had multiple active 'Cease Trade Orders' against him for the failure to file financial statements.

Mr. Daniel Rodriguez, proposed Chief Executive Officer, commented, "I am grateful for this opportunity to be a part of the future of Gambier Gold. The company holds amazing exploration properties that warrant thorough attention. The shareholders of Gambier Gold, myself included, deserve the opportunity to have these properties explored. The current management has lacked transparency and accountability, blaming others for its failures, this I will not do. I am pleased to announce the addition of our proposed CFO, Mark Brown and technical advisors Bernie Kreft and Robert Cameron. This gives me confidence that we are moving in the right direction with strong support from the addition of more industry experts. To all shareholders of Gambier Gold please remember to vote the GREEN proxy in support of the future of Gambier."

Unfortunately, the self interested and oppressive actions of the existing members of the Board of Directors of Gambier, have given us no other option but to stand up for the rights of Gambier shareholders and to propose the election of a new board of directors (the "Shareholder Nominees") at the June 1, 2022 annual general meeting of shareholders of Gambier (the "Meeting"). We care deeply about seeing Gambier transitioned back into a properly functioning and transparently operated company with a board of directors that will act in the best interests of shareholders. You now have a choice and the opportunity to determine the next path forward for your investment in Gambier.

Once you read the information we are providing you and understand the full facts, we believe you will agree that the election of the Shareholder Nominees as directors will provide Gambier with the right Board of Directors to move Gambier forward without conflicting agendas.

Background and Reasons: Questionable and Damaging Behaviour of Incumbent Directors

Over the past several years, disclosure by the Corporation has been limited and we have fought behind the scenes for transparency and good corporate governance of Gambier. We stood up against self interested actions taken by Michael Schuss, Tor Bruland, Casey Forward and Geoff Balderson (the "Incumbent Directors"). We have, over the last year, contacted the Incumbent Directors and Officers of the Corporation on several occasions to express our concerns over how poorly Gambier was being managed. We are major shareholders and the Incumbent Directors have consistently failed to address our concerns. We asked for a change of the board of directors and, again, the Incumbent Directors and management declined to accommodate our request. As a result, we requisitioned a meeting of shareholders to change the board of directors on March 21, 2022 (which the Corporation has failed to disclose in breach of securities laws). The Corporation has now set an annual general meeting for June 1, 2022.

Gambier has built up an enviable portfolio of exploration projects. However, all of this is being threatened by the actions of the Incumbent Directors and the management team that they have appointed. It is important that you be made aware of the following serious concerns before you cast your vote:

Lack of Public Disclosure and Corporate Governance

Background

In our view current management of Gambier, have not properly managed the business and affairs of Gambier, and in our view the Incumbent Directors have failed to discharge their fiduciary duties or to properly manage or supervise the management of the business and affairs of Gambier. In particular:

There has been incredibly poor communication and even non-existent communication with Shareholders over the last year. For example, there were no news releases issued between May 10, 2021 and February 18, 2022. This lack of communication is further detailed below.

The Incumbent Directors failed to cause the Corporation to carry out a Winter Drill Program as was discussed in their News Releases. Further, Michael Schuss, Director, President and CEO, provided no operational update in the second half of 2021, despite our requests. The March 31, 2022 News Release was poorly drafted and did not evidence a sound exploration program. They tried to blame others for their failures.

There are a series of gaps in disclosure. The latest unaudited financial statements for the period ending December 31, 2021 do not set out the changes to the board of directors and there is no disclosure of an advisory board. We understand that Messrs. Michael Burns and Rafael Vaudrin resigned in February, 2022, which was stated in a News Release.

Michael Schuss spent an excessive amount of his time on Twitter rather than running the business of the Corporation. For example during the period April 11, 2022 to May 5, 2022, over 150 Twitter tweets/replies/retweets were released.

In our view, this lack of proper governance and disclosure by the Incumbent Directors has depressed the share price and placed the Detour West Property, the Corporation's main asset, at risk.

In addition, there has been an increase in the salary of the CEO (Michael Schuss) without any regard to the lack of performance. Mr. Schuss' total annual compensation to March 31, 2021 is disclosed as $56,500. In the management discussion and analysis for the nine months ended December 31, 2021 his total compensation is set out as $105,000 which, extrapolated over 12 months, would be $140,000, an annualized increase of 148%.

The business of the Corporation has deteriorated and is in need of significant cash injection. The Corporation will need to raise capital for future exploration and the confidence of the existing shareholder base as well as that of potential investors has been lost.





Both Mr. Michael Schuss and Mr. Geoff Balderson provided their agreement, in writing, to resign or not stand for re-election and then refused to follow through with this. Mr. Bruland and Mr. Forward were just appointed February 18, 2022 and appear to have no vested interest in the Corporation and hold no shares. The Vendors and Royalty holders of the Detour West Property, have also expressed their dissatisfaction with the current management.

No Response to our Concerns Who Stood Up for the Rights of Shareholders

We have tried on multiple occasions to improve the public disclosure with the Incumbent Directors, and had no response.

Instead of accepting their accountability and addressing our concerns regarding poor communication and questionable corporate governance practices, the Incumbent Directors have consistently failed to address our concerns.

We asked for a change of the board of directors and, again, they declined. Mr. Michael Burns and Mr. Rafael Vaudrin resigned in February, 2022 due to their concerns over management. We requisitioned a meeting of shareholders to change the board of directors on March 21, 2022 (which the Corporation failed to disclose), and the Corporation has now set an annual general meeting for June 1, 2022.

In accordance with the advance notice policy for the nomination of directors (the "Advance Notice Policy") in Article 10.11 of the Articles of Gambier, on April 11, 2022, we delivered an advance notice for nomination of directors (the "Nominating Shareholder Notice") for the nomination of the Shareholder Nominees for election to the board of directors to be included in the annual general meeting materials for the Meeting, as well as written Consents to Act of each of the five (5) Shareholder Nominees and the required information with respect to each of the five (5) Shareholder Nominees to be included in the annual general meeting materials. They declined to issue a news release disclosing this and refused to list the Shareholder Nominees in the proxy of management of the Corporation (a "Management Proxy") in an attempt to undermine shareholder choice.

Corporate Governance Concerns

Incumbent Directors breached British Columbia securities laws and regulations.

Incumbent Directors rejected our requests for information and open corporate governance.

Incumbent Directors opposed our request to appoint a new Board, even though agreeing, in writing, they would.

Incumbent Directors did not disclose that Geoff Balderson, the CFO has, according to the British Columbia Securities Commission, had seven cease trade orders issued in the last 10 years and which were in effect for more than 30 consecutive days (Lords & Company Worldwide Holdings Inc., Lida Resources Inc., New Wave Holdings Corp., Vinergy Capital Inc., Core One Labs Inc. (twice), and Argentum Silver Corp). Two of the cease trade orders are still in effect. One Cease Trade Order was issued May 3, 2022 after the April 25, 2022 Management circular date. We point this out to show a pattern of behaviour that undermines the Corporation.

Mr. Geoff Balderson is a director and/or officer of approximately 25 reporting companies, which does not leave the time for him to govern Gambier.

The Corporation failed to file its executive compensation disclosure on a stand alone basis no later than 180 days after the end of its most recently completed financial year, as is required under National Instrument 51-102 - Continuous Disclosure Obligations (" NI 51-102 ").





(" "). Failed to issue a news release on the sale of the Wicheeda property.

Impeding the Rights of Shareholders to a Fair and Transparent Process

In our opinion, Incumbent Directors purposely delayed the announcement of the Meeting to impede timely director nominations under the Corporation's advance notice policy for the election of directors (the "Advance Notice Policy").

The submission of the Nominating Shareholder Notice for the proposed Shareholder Nominees was not disclosed, nor included in the Management Proxy, impeding the fundamental right of shareholders to nominate directors to the board.

A special committee of the Incumbent Directors has not been formed to make decisions on all matters related to the contested Meeting. The special committee's mandate would be to act independently and in the best interests of shareholders, among other responsibilities.

Gambier's shareholders have a reasonable expectation that its directors will conduct the corporate governance of Gambier in a fair and transparent manner. By wrongfully dismissing our concerns, the Incumbent Directors have put their own self-interests ahead of Gambier's. Further, by not acknowledging the Nominating Shareholder Notice, the Incumbent Directors have attempted to undermine shareholder democracy.

An Ethical and Experienced Board Who Will Act In the Best Interests of Shareholders

With the following five (5) Shareholder Nominees, we hope to usher in renewal and change for the better. The Shareholder Nominees possess a collection of diverse experience with the relevant skills to place Gambier on a path to succeed. Importantly, the Shareholder Nominees have demonstrated a commitment to focusing on the best interests of shareholders across multiple organizations. They also have the shareholder mindset necessary to ensure that shareholder value is maximized.

Highlights of the highly skilled and experienced Shareholder Nominees:

Daniel Rodriguez. Mr. Rodriguez is currently head of Corporate Development with Warrior Gold Inc. with over 14 years of capital markets and financial service experience. Previously, he was an Investment Advisor with a focus on the junior mining sector and managed a retail branch bank for a top-tier Canadian bank.

Sven Gollan. Mr. Gollan is currently a director of Sego Resources Inc., Alianza Minerals Ltd. and Teako Gold Corp. He spent 16 years as an Investment/Private Banker in Germany and Austria and was active in the education and training of securities advisors and investment bankers. He recently also works with FruchtExpress Grabher GmbH & Co KG.

Owen Garfield. Mr. Garfield is a Chartered Mineral Surveyor based in the United Kingdom who worked for the Valuation Office Agency as a specialist mineral valuer for over 10 years. Mr. Garfield is currently the Managing Director and owner of a successful Surveying company in the United Kingdom, advising multi-national clients on major infrastructure projects.

Rafael Vaudrin. Mr. Vaudrin is a Professional Geologist, and former Director of Gambier. He is a Senior Project Geologist and has great expertise in field planning, data analysis, and drilling initiatives. Mr. Vaudrin will also provide the historical knowledge of the Corporation.

Sebastien Ah Fat. Mr. Ah Fat is a Professional Geologist with over a decade of experience in the mining and energy sectors. He is the Vice President of Exploration at Pacific Bay Minerals Ltd., a precious- metal-focused mining company, and the co-founder and Vice President of Exploration at Glacier Resources Corp., a lithium exploration company.

Detailed backgrounds for each Shareholder Nominee can be found in the Concerned Shareholder's Proxy Circular.

The Shareholder Nominees represent:

A slate of directors with diverse and relevant skills and experience, who have a history of value creation and a commitment to focusing on the best interests of shareholders across multiple organizations.

A highly experienced slate of directors who are focused on good governance, transparency and providing management with expert oversight.

A group that has a strong alignment with Gambier's shareholders. The Shareholder Nominees, along with FruchtExpress Grabher GmbH & Co KG, hold a significant number of shares of the Corporation (collectively holding approximately 19.834% of the issued and outstanding common shares), meaning our interests are aligned with yours. (Incumbent Directors hold just approximately 3.79% of the issued and outstanding common shares of the Corporation).

The Path Forward

Many of you have noted that Gambier has some of the best and largest landholdings and cover the northwestern part of the Abitibi Greenstone Belt within the Superior Province in Ontario. You have also lamented the fact that Gambier's share price should be higher and we have shared your concerns and frustrations.

Key Highlights

To this end, the Shareholder Nominees expect to take the following steps

Maintain the highest standards of accountability and transparency, through regular communication with shareholders.

Continue to build the team by bringing in more experts in the field including: Mark T. Brown, Robert Cameron and Bernie Kreft. Details of their experience are set out on pages 14 and 15 of the Concerned Shareholder's Proxy Circular.





Raise adequate funding to further proceed with the exploration and development of the assets mainly Detour West and Hemlo properties, including whatever actions the strategic review determines for the Detour West and Hemlo properties.

Carry out an internal audit on both the finances and the assets of the Corporation.





We are also reviewing a number of joint venture opportunities for the non-core projects. Additionally, we are reviewing with our technical team to prioritize and advance the main assets this upcoming field season. We hope to have the opportunity to continue with these positive initiatives.

Even after all the conflicts mentioned above, we still believe that we can take this opportunity to make Gambier all it can be. We are truly humbled to have such highly skilled and respected individuals in the industry join us on the proposed new board slate and the countless shareholders who support us in this effort to help take back your corporation.

Please allow us the opportunity along with a committed and experienced board to re-build the Gambier team that respects and acts in the best interests of its shareholders.

Vote Your Shares Today

You may soon read many false attacks leveled against us to deflect from the real issues that remain at the board level. I hope that as you read this letter and the Concerned Shareholder's Proxy Circular, you will be able to see beyond these attacks and recognize the truth that we have continued and will continue to work for you.

We have had the pleasure of speaking with many of you. Your support has been greatly appreciated, especially during these challenging times and we welcome you to continue to reach us if you have any questions or concerns. We would be pleased to hear from you and may be contacted by phone or email as provided below.

Vote only the GREEN voting form for a positive future that keeps you and your Corporation in mind. You deserve better and no longer should you come last. Vote for the committed Shareholder Nominees and ensure that your investment is protected.

Sincerely Yours,

FRUCHTEXPRESS GRABHER GMBH & CO KG

Per: "Felix Grabher"

Felix Grabher, Executive Director

THE FUTURE OF GAMBIER GOLD CORP.

Per: "Daniel Rodriguez"

Daniel Rodriguez, Proposed Chief Executive Officer

If you have any questions or require any assistance in executing your Green proxy or voting instruction form, please contact:

Daniel Rodriguez

Telephone: 604-353-4080

Email: ggau@fruchtexpress.at

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/123859
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - May 12, 2022) - Sanatana Resources Inc. (TSXV: STA) ("Sanatana" or the "Company") is pleased to announce, further to its news release of April 22, 2022, that it has closed a first tranche of its non-brokered private placement (the "Private Placement"). The first tranche consisted of 13,766,667 units of the Company (the "Units") at a price of $0.15 per Unit for gross aggregate proceeds of approximately $2,065,000.

Each Unit issued in the first tranche consisted of one common share of the Company (each, a "Common Share") and one-half of one common share purchase warrant (each whole warrant, a "Warrant"), with each Warrant entitling the holder thereof to acquire one common share of the Company (a "Warrant Share") at a price of $0.20 for a period of two years following the closing of the first tranche of the Private Placement.

Peter Miles, the Company's CEO commented, "With the close of the first tranche of this financing, Sanatana will have in excess of $4,000,000 on hand and expects to begin its 2022 exploration program June 1st with drilling commencing around July 1st. All aspects of the exploration program are in place including over 20 staff, camp facilities, drill and geophysical contractors and helicopter support. We look forward to commencing exploration shortly".

Simon Anderson, Anthony Dutton, Thomas Obradovich and Rose Zanic, insiders of the Company, subscribed for 333,333 Units ($49,999.95), 333,334 ($50,000.10), 500,000 Units ($75,000), 100,000 Units ($15,000) respectively, under the Private Placement (the "Insider Subscriptions"). The Insider Subscriptions constitute "related party transactions" within the meaning of Multilateral Instrument 61-101 - Protection of Minority Securityholders in Special Transactions ("MI 61-101"). The Company has relied on the exemptions from the formal valuation and minority shareholder approval requirements of MI 61-101 contained in Sections 5.5(a) and 5.7(1)(a), respectively, of MI 61-101 in respect of the Insider Subscriptions.

In connection with the Private Placement, the Company paid aggregate cash finder's fees totalling $18,000 and issued 120,000 finder's warrants (the "Finder's Warrants") to certain qualified arm's length finders. Each Finder's Warrant is exercisable into one Common Share (a "Finder's Warrant Share") at an exercise price of $0.20 per Finder's Warrant Share on or before May 11, 2024.

All securities issued pursuant to the Private Placement are subject to a statutory hold period expiring on September 12, 2022 in accordance with applicable securities legislation. The proceeds of the Private Placement will be used to fund the upcoming drilling and exploration of the Oweegee Dome project and for general working capital.

The securities offered pursuant to the Private Placement have not been, and will not be, registered under the U.S. 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 any applicable exemption from the registration requirements of the U.S. Securities Act and applicable U.S. state securities laws. This news release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy securities in the United States, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful.

About the Company

Sanatana Resources Inc. is a mineral exploration and development company focused on high-impact properties in Canada. With an award-winning technical team and experienced management and board of directors, Sanatana is based in Vancouver and is listed on the TSX Venture Exchange (TSXV: STA).

SANATANA RESOURCES INC.

(signed) "Peter Miles "

Peter Miles

Chief Executive Officer

For additional information on the Company, please contact Mr. Peter Miles, Chief Executive Officer at (604) 408-6680 or email investor@sanatanaresources.com. To be added to the email distribution list, please email ir@sanatanaresources.com with "Sanatana" in the subject line.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward Looking Information

This release includes certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". All statements in this release, other than statements of historical facts, that address events or developments that the Company expects to occur, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and are generally, but not always, identified by the words "expects", "plans", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "projects", "potential" and similar expressions, or that events or conditions "will", "would", "may", "could" or "should" occur. Although the Company believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include regulatory actions, market prices, and continued availability of capital and financing, and general economic, market or business conditions. Investors are cautioned that any such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs, estimates and opinions of the Company's management on the date the statements are made. Except as required by applicable securities laws, the Company undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements in the event that management's beliefs, estimates or opinions, or other factors, should change.

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its regulation services provider accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/123865
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / May 12, 2022 / Scorpio Gold Corporation ("Scorpio Gold" or the "Company") (TSXV:SGN) is pleased to announce the commencement of a phase II reverse circulation (RC) drilling program at its Goldwedge property located in Manhattan, Nevada.

Boart Longyear was selected to conduct the RC drilling program which commenced on March 29, 2022. The planned program consists of 59 RC drill holes with a total of 10,800m and drilling is expected to continue for the next 6-7 months. The program was designed around results encountered in the 2021 Phase I program. The target areas are situated around the Manhattan West and East pits, and between the Goldwedge underground and the open pits. The proposed drill holes on section will be targeting the lateral extent and continuity of the mineralization trending toward NW strike direction of the West Pit. The drilling will also be used to confirm the underground continuity potential in down dip direction of the Reliance Fault zone which is host to high-grade gold mineralization targets. Additional prospective areas expected to be tested during this campaign of drilling, include the SE continuity of the mineralization structure from the West Pit towards East Pit area and identified new parallel structures at both NE and SW sections of West Pit.

Additional planning to confirm structural continuity for some areas with a diamond drill holes (DDH) have been designed and consist of 33 holes with total of 7400m of core drilling.

A total of 12 RC drill holes have been completed to date, which represents 22% (2,350 m) of the planned RC drill program.

Table 1: Manhattan Mine Drilling - Significant Results for completed Phase II drill holes

Hole ID Azm

(deg) Dip

(deg) From

(ft) To

(ft) Width

(ft) Gold

(oz/T) From

(m) To

(m) Width

(m) Gold

(g/t) West Pit Area MWRC22-001 236.3 -73.1 340.0 345.0 5.0 0.021 103.7 105.2 1.5 0.72 415.0 430.0 15.0 0.026 126.6 131.2 4.6 0.89 695.0 700.0 5.0 0.035 212.0 213.5 1.5 1.20 MWRC22-002 238.4 -70.3 50.0 55.0 5.0 0.020 15.3 16.8 1.5 0.69 105.0 125.0 20.0 0.085 32.0 38.1 6.1 2.92 270.0 305.0 35.0 0.025 82.4 93.0 10.7 0.85 370.0 380.0 10.0 0.023 112.9 115.9 3.1 0.79 565.0 580.0 15.0 0.052 172.3 176.9 4.6 1.78 650.0 655.0 5.0 0.072 198.3 199.8 1.5 2.47 680.0 685.0 5.0 0.030 207.4 208.9 1.5 1.03 MWRC22-003 238.1 -62.0 15.0 20.0 5.0 0.064 4.6 6.1 1.5 2.20 160.0 175.0 15.0 0.896 48.8 53.4 4.6 30.72 Including 160.0 165.0 5.0 1.528 48.8 50.3 1.5 52.42 195.0 250.0 55.0 0.792 59.5 76.3 16.8 27.16 Including 195.0 205.0 10.0 4.249 59.5 62.5 3.1 145.74 265.0 320.0 55.0 0.062 80.8 97.6 16.8 2.12 Including 290.0 295.0 5.0 0.271 88.5 90.0 1.5 9.30 375.0 380.0 5.0 0.037 114.4 115.9 1.5 1.27 395.0 400.0 5.0 0.087 120.5 122.0 1.5 2.97 565.0 570.0 5.0 0.020 172.3 173.9 1.5 0.69 595.0 600.0 5.0 0.031 181.5 183.0 1.5 1.06 MWRC22-004 57.3 -50.3 70.0 75.0 5.0 0.032 21.4 22.9 1.5 1.10 255.0 275.0 20.0 0.142 77.8 83.9 6.1 4.85 Including 255.0 265.0 10.0 0.251 77.8 80.8 3.1 8.59 MWRC22-005 41.0 -55.2 175.0 185.0 10.0 0.091 53.4 56.4 3.1 3.10 275.0 285.0 10.0 0.034 83.9 86.9 3.1 1.15 440.0 460.0 20.0 0.160 134.2 140.3 6.1 5.48 480.0 485.0 5.0 0.062 146.4 147.9 1.5 2.13 MWRC22-006 60.9 -62.6 235.0 245.0 10.0 0.025 71.7 74.7 3.1 0.84 405.0 410.0 5.0 0.041 123.5 125.1 1.5 1.39 MWRC22-007 24.8 -60.1 10.0 15.0 5.0 0.121 3.1 4.6 1.5 4.15 505.0 510.0 5.0 0.023 154.0 155.6 1.5 0.79 MWRC22-008 40.3 -59.8 5.0 10.0 5.0 0.022 1.5 3.1 1.5 0.75 220.0 225.0 5.0 0.097 67.1 68.6 1.5 3.33 380.0 385.0 5.0 0.273 115.9 117.4 1.5 9.36 485.0 500.0 15.0 0.132 147.9 152.5 4.6 4.52 Including 495.0 500.0 5.0 0.265 151.0 152.5 1.5 9.09 MWRC22-009 42.3 -55.4 0.0 20.0 20.0 0.036 0 6.1 6.1 1.24 60.0 70.0 10.0 0.134 18.3 21.4 3.1 4.60 245.0 250.0 5.0 0.046 74.7 76.3 1.5 1.58 MWRC22-010 51.0 -60.5 5.0 20.0 15.0 0.020 1.5 6.1 4.6 0.69 180.0 185.0 5.0 0.032 54.9 56.4 1.5 1.10 200.0 205.0 5.0 0.045 61.0 62.5 1.5 1.54 235.0 265.0 30.0 0.034 71.7 80.8 9.2 1.17 440.0 485.0 45.0 0.349 134.2 147.9 13.7 11.98 Including 445.0 455.0 10.0 1.150 135.7 138.8 3.1 39.43 MWRC22-011 40.2 -61.2 90.0 95.0 5.0 0.020 27.5 29.0 1.5 0.69 135.0 140.0 5.0 0.126 41.2 42.7 1.5 4.32 160.0 165.0 5.0 0.776 48.8 50.3 1.5 26.62 MWRC22-012 39.0 -61.3 40.0 70.0 30.0 0.019 12.2 21.4 9.2 0.66 90.0 115.0 25.0 0.112 27.5 35.1 7.6 3.85 325.0 335.0 10.0 0.298 99.1 102.2 3.1 10.22 355.0 360.0 5.0 0.083 108.3 109.8 1.5 2.85 390.0 395.0 5.0 0.100 119.0 120.5 1.5 3.43

*Analytical results were by FA/Gravimetric finish procedure by Scorpio Gold's in-house analytical laboratory, which does not have ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation but implements a quality management system compatible with the ISO/IEC 17025 standards and maintains a paperwork trail suitable for future ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation. Duplicate samples were taken at the drill rig, samples with significant results >= 0.020oz/t are available to be sent to an external lab to certify all results. Further details of the Company's quality assurance and quality control program for the Goldwedge project are available at: GW QAQC.

Phase II drilling at the West pit area confirms strong mineralization trends with high-grade interceptions along the northwestern and southwestern sections. Highlights of the significant intercepts are as follows:

MWRC22-003 - intercepted 27.16g/t over 16.8m including 145.74g/t over 3.1m from 59.5m along the drill hole depth. Additional intercepts contain 2.12g/t over 16.8m including 9.3m over 1.5m from 80.8m depth along the drill hole.

- intercepted 27.16g/t over 16.8m including 145.74g/t over 3.1m from 59.5m along the drill hole depth. Additional intercepts contain 2.12g/t over 16.8m including 9.3m over 1.5m from 80.8m depth along the drill hole. MWRC22-008 - intercepted 4.52g/t over 4.6m from 147.9m along the drill hole depth and 9.36g/t over 1.5m from 115.9m depth along the drill hole.

- intercepted 4.52g/t over 4.6m from 147.9m along the drill hole depth and 9.36g/t over 1.5m from 115.9m depth along the drill hole. MWRC22-010 - intercepted 11.98g/t over 13.7m including 39.43g/t over 3.1m from 134.2m along the drill hole depth. Additional intercepts contain 1.17g/t over 9.2m from 71.7m depth along the drill hole.

- intercepted 11.98g/t over 13.7m including 39.43g/t over 3.1m from 134.2m along the drill hole depth. Additional intercepts contain 1.17g/t over 9.2m from 71.7m depth along the drill hole. MWRC22-011 - intercepted 26.62g/t over 1.5m from 48.8m along the drill hole depth.

Details of all assay results for completed drill holes reported in Table 1 above and locations depicted on Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: Completed Drill locations (blue dots) for Phase II Program showing significant grade intercepts at the Northwest and Southwest of the West Pit.

Gold mineralization at northwestern section of the West Pit have been identified within two different trends which are structurally controlled by the Brugher Cross fault striking in the NE-SW direction. Mineralization intercepted in MWRC22-003 are strongly associated with 'West Pit Main Trend' (Figure 1) which is predominantly drusy quartz-adularia veins occurring with coatings on fracture surfaces and oxidized Fe-stained pyrite within the Gold Hill Quartzite Phyllite units. This trend may be trending parallel to the Reliance Fault Zone (shear zone) which is host to high-grade mineralization.

Other mineralization trends were identified at the southwestern section of the West Pit during the drilling campaign which are presumably parallel structures striking in the NW-SE direction. Drill holes MWRC22-008 and MWRC22-009 located furthermost to the southwest intercepted mineralization structure anticipated to be a separate structure related to the 'Thrust Fault Trend' (Refer to Figure 1). The holes were predominantly drilled within the Gold Hill Formation and mineralization consists of fine disseminated pyrite, and minor quartz-pyrite veins with Fe staining and generally confined within the fault zone. Drill hole data reviewed indicated that no historical drilling has been conducted to confirm the continuity of the trend, so this opens a new prospective area for exploration in both NW and SE direction of the structure.

About Scorpio Gold

Scorpio Gold now holds a 100% interest in the consolidated Manhattan District in Nevada comprising the advanced exploration-stage Goldwedge property in Manhattan, Nevada with a fully permitted underground mine and a 400 ton per day mill facility and a 100% interest of the Manhattan Property situated adjacent and proximal to the Goldwedge property.

Scorpio Gold also holds 100% interest in the Mineral Ridge gold project located in Esmeralda County, Nevada.

The technical information contained within this release has been reviewed and approved by independent geological consultant, Peter Hawley, B. Eng., BSc., P.Geo., a Qualified Person as defined by NI 43-101.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

SCORPIO GOLD CORPORATION

Chris Zerga

CEO & Director

For further information contact:

Chris Zerga, CEO & President

Email: czerga@scorpiogold.com

Diane Zerga, General Manager

Tel: (775) 401-1637

Email: dzerga@scorpiogold.com

Website: www.scorpiogold.com

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

The Company relies on litigation protection for forward-looking statements. This news release contains forward-looking statements that are based on the Company's current expectations and estimates. Forward-looking statements are frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate", "suggest", "indicate" and other similar words or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur, and include, without limitation, statements regarding the Company's plans with respect to the exploration of its Manhattan Mine property. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from estimated or anticipated events or results implied or expressed in such forward-looking statements, including risks involved in mineral exploration programs and those risk factors outlined in the Company's Management Discussion and Analysis as filed on SEDAR. Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which it is made 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. Forward-looking statements are not a guarantee of future performance and accordingly undue reliance should not be put on such statements due to the inherent uncertainty thereof.

SOURCE: Scorpio Gold Corporation

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/701155/Scorpio-Golds-Phase-II-Drilling-Program-Encounters-Significant-Intercepts-1680-meters-Grading-2716-gt-Au-Including-31-meters-Grading-14574-gt-Au
St. Paul, Minnesota--(Newsfile Corp. - May 12, 2022) - PolyMet Mining Corp. (TSX: POM) (NYSE American: PLM), today filed its financial results for the three months ended March 31, 2022, and provided a business update.

The company made steady progress in litigation, continued its focus on optimization and engineering efforts related to the NorthMet Project, and maintained full compliance with all operating permits during the period, according to Jon Cherry, chairman, president and CEO.

"In the latest court decision, the Minnesota Court of Appeals in January affirmed nearly all aspects of the company's water discharge permit, an indication of steady and meaningful progress," Cherry said.

However, the court ruled that the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency must consider whether any discharges are the "functional equivalent" of a direct surface water discharge. The ruling stems from a U.S. Supreme Court ruling unrelated to PolyMet and issued more than a year after PolyMet's permit was issued. This functional-equivalence analysis is expected to be completed this year and to affirm earlier conclusions.

The water discharge permit is one of only three permits that remain on hold pending additional legal proceedings or regulatory process, which is anticipated to be largely addressed this year. The other two are the Permit to Mine and the federal wetlands (Section 404) permit.

The company made progress on the wetlands permit as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed a three-day section 401(a)(2) hearing under the Clean Water Act on May 5, in Cloquet, Minnesota. The hearing was held to determine if the project will violate water quality requirements within the reservation boundaries of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. State and federal agencies concluded during environmental review and permitting that the project will not affect water quality before reaching the reservation, which is 116 river miles downstream.

"We are confident the Corps will affirm the original conclusions by state and federal agencies that the PolyMet project will meet water quality standards downstream, including at the Fond du Lac boundary," Cherry said. "We are committed to bringing the former taconite site up to modern, safe mining standards and cleaning up legacy issues in the process."

Regarding the Permit to Mine, a contested case hearing by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources on the effectiveness of bentonite clay at the tailings impoundment is anticipated in the second or third quarter of this year. Several preliminary hearings already have been held.

To date, PolyMet has received favorable decisions in all six cases that have reached final conclusion - four federal and two state. More information on recent court developments can be found on the company's website at www.polymetmining.com/investors/news/ and on its SEDAR and EDGAR profiles.

Key Balance Sheet Statistics

(in '000 US dollars)



March 31, 2022



December 31, 2021



Cash

$ 5,331

$ 2,958

Working capital 1



(59,615)



(17,609)

Total assets



473,396



468,126

Total liabilities



121,225



110,519

Shareholders' equity

$ 352,171

$ 357,607

















1 Deficiency at March 31, 2022 primarily due to the $62.7 million convertible debt with Glencore being due March 31, 2023. Glencore has committed to provide financial support to enable the Company to continue its business operations for the next twelve months.

Key Income and Cash Flow Statement Statistics

(in '000 US dollars, except per share amounts)





Three months ended

March 31, 2022



Three months ended

March 31, 2021

Operations expense

$ 3,808

$ 3,576 Other expenses/(income):







Debt accretion and interest



2,026



780 Loss on refinancing



1,598



- Rehabilitation accretion



480



479 Gain on financial asset fair value



(152)



(812) Loss/(gain) on restricted deposits



837



(277) Other income - net



5



(49)









Loss for the period:



8,602



3,697 Loss for the period ($/share)



0.08



0.04









Cash used in investing activities

$ 2,162

$ 1,758









Weighted average shares outstanding 101,428,723



100,862,592

Loss for the three months ended March 31, 2022, was $8.6 million compared with $3.7 million for the prior year period. The increased loss was primarily due to non-cash charges related to debt refinancing, investments of restricted deposit, and interest expense partially offset by lower spend on project studies.

Capital expenditures for the three months ended March 31, 2022, was $2.2 million compared with $1.8 million for the prior year. The increase was primarily due to increased activities supporting legal defense of project permits.

The financial statements have been filed at www.polymetmining.com and on SEDAR and EDGAR and have been prepared in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards. All amounts are in U.S. dollars. Copies can be obtained free of charge by contacting the company at 444 Cedar Street, Suite 2060, St. Paul, MN 55101, or by e-mail at info@polymetmining.com. Project developments described above are derived from these documents and should be read in conjunction with them.

* * * * *

About PolyMet

PolyMet is a mine development company that owns 100% of the NorthMet Project, the first large-scale project to have received permits within the Duluth Complex in northeastern Minnesota, one of the world's major, undeveloped mining regions. NorthMet has significant proven and probable reserves of copper, nickel and palladium - metals vital to infrastructure improvements and global carbon reduction efforts - in addition to marketable reserves of cobalt, platinum and gold. When operational, NorthMet will become one of the leading producers of nickel, palladium and cobalt in the U.S., feeding the supply chain with high-demand, responsibly mined metals crucial to the manufacture of clean energy and clean mobility technologies such as wind and solar generation, battery storage and electric vehicles.

Located in the Mesabi Iron Range, the project will provide economic diversity while leveraging the region's established supplier network and skilled workforce and generate a level of activity that will have a significant effect in the local economy. For more information: www.polymetmining.com.

For further information, please contact:

Media

Bruce Richardson, Corporate Communications

Tel: +1 (651) 389-4111

brichardson@polymetmining.com

Investor Relations

Tony Gikas, Investor Relations

Tel: +1 (651) 389-4110

investorrelations@polymetmining.com

PolyMet Disclosures

This news release contains certain forward-looking statements concerning anticipated developments in PolyMet's operations in the future. Forward-looking statements are frequently, but not always, identified by words such as "expects," "anticipates," "believes," "intends," "estimates," "potential," "possible," "projects," "plans," and similar expressions, or statements that events, conditions or results "will," "may," "could," or "should" occur or be achieved or their negatives or other comparable words. These forward-looking statements may include statements regarding the ability to receive environmental and operating permits, job creation, and the effect on the local economy, or other statements that are not a statement of fact. Forward-looking statements address future events and conditions and therefore involve inherent known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements due to risks facing PolyMet or due to actual facts differing from the assumptions underlying its predictions.

PolyMet's forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs, expectations and opinions of management on the date the statements are made, and PolyMet does not assume any obligation to update forward-looking statements if circumstances or management's beliefs, expectations and opinions should change.

Specific reference is made to risk factors and other considerations underlying forward-looking statements discussed in PolyMet's most recent Annual Report on Form 40-F for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2021, and in our other filings with Canadian securities authorities and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Annual Report on Form 40-F also contains the company's mineral resource and other data as required under National Instrument 43-101.

No regulatory authority has reviewed or accepted responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/123868
Scottsdale, Arizona--(Newsfile Corp. - May 12, 2022) - Sibannac, Inc. (OTC Pink: SNNC), a Nevada corporation (the "Company"), announced the following:

Sibannac, Inc. has agreed in principle to acquire all NOHO brand assets from NOHO, Inc. (OTC Pink: DRNK) in a blockbuster three-way transaction. This transaction will result in bringing all NOHO brands and products into Sibannac to be managed under the Company's Campus Co. branding arm, which has been assembling a best-in-class marketing and branding team over the last year.

The Transaction

NOHO, Inc. has entered into a Letter of Intent to acquire Smog Armor, Inc., a special purpose acquisition company created to facilitate the transfer of the Smog Armor assets from Delaware-based, Creative Carbon Solutions, Inc. NOHO will acquire Smog Armor with convertible preferred shares which will not result in any immediate dilution of the common stock. Sibannac will then acquire the NOHO assets by following through ahead of schedule on its announced acquisition plan from, using warrants which will then be issued to NOHO for distribution to shareholders of record on July 29, 2022 .

The valuation of the acquisition is now being determined and will be announced to the public once the definitive agreements are in place. Sibannac intends on registering the warrants so that the NOHO shareholders will be able to convert them to free-trading shares. Sibannac will price the warrants at a discount to market at the time of distribution, to the benefit of NOHO shareholders. Any shareholder exercising the warrants will have to pay Sibannac the cash value of the warrants, which will be booked as income to the Company.

All three parts of the transaction are envisioned to close within a 24-hour period, anticipated to be within the next 30 days. Sibannac and the incoming management at NOHO will be discussing an ongoing relationship for some revenue sharing for NOHO's After Shot. Specific terms will be disclosed when the definitive agreements are executed.

Currently both companies are operated under the same management, with David Mersky serving as CEO of both firms. Management believes that the allocation of assets in the transactions will result in both companies becoming stronger after the transaction closes. In addition to NOHO's flagship Hangover product, the After Shot, Sibannac will be acquiring the RaD8 brand, under which several alternative health products are anticipated to be launched. Originally designated to sell Hemp-derived cannabis products, Sibannac has already developed a Kratom gummy to be produced in its FDA food facility in Scottsdale. In addition, through Sibannac's new collaboration with nationally renowned branding expert Gary Kehoe, the Company already has three new product categories identified to follow the commercialization of the Shot. Mr. Kehoe is the creative mind behind the product Zicam and holds over 30 patents, achieved during a storied career. Currently the Campus team is also developing the first product under Sibannac's flagship brand, to be announced in the near future. The Campus is also doing the marketing for Kehoe's Wilderness Whiskey Co.

With the addition of the NOHO brands, the Campus' portfolio is growing quickly. Recently, beverage leader Coca-Cola Beverages Northeast agreed to continue its long-standing relationship with Eric Stoll, as the former Lifetime Branding client migrates to the Campus with Stoll installed as Chief Marketing Officer. The Campus is proud to assume the role of support partner in developing their digital presence, a key part of their customer and local community relationship building.

"This is an absolute win-win for all parties. The NOHO brands will now be much stronger under the Sibannac umbrella and the NOHO shareholders are getting tremendous value in return with Smog Armor bringing in an ultra-talented executive team and a terrific product line with its patented green tech paint. As a large remaining shareholder following the closing, it was vitally important that the incoming team had the capabilities and assets to propel the company into future success and earnings. The transaction will result in the best allocation of assets for both companies," said Sibannac's CEO, David Mersky.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements.

This press release contains statements that constitute 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. These statements appear in a number of places in this release and include all statements that are not statements of historical fact regarding the intent, belief or current expectations of the Sibannac, Inc. (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; (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 actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward looking statements as a result of various factors. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements since they involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which are, in some cases, beyond the Company's control and which could, and likely will, materially affect actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements. The Company assumes no obligation to publicly update or revise these forward-looking statements for any reason, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the company's expectations include, but are not limited to, those factors that are disclosed under the heading "Risk Factors" and elsewhere in documents filed by the company from time to time with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulatory authorities.

Media Contact: IR@theCampusCo.com

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/123875
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - May 12, 2022) - Kuya Silver Corporation (CSE: KUYA) (OTCQB: KUYAF) (FSE: 6MR1) (the "Company" or "Kuya Silver") announces that it has amended the terms of its non-brokered private placement previously announced April 21, 2022 (the "Private Placement") and has closed its first tranche (the "First Tranche"). The Private Placement now consists of up to 2,222,222 units ("Units") at a price of $0.90 per Unit for aggregate gross proceeds of up to $2,000,000. The First Tranche is comprised of 653,334 Units and raised $588,000.60. The Company intends to use the proceeds from the Private Placement for general working capital purposes.

Each Unit consists of one (1) common share (each, a "Common Share") in the capital of the Company and one-half of one (1/2) transferrable common share purchase warrant (each whole warrant, a "Warrant"). Each Warrant entitles the holder to purchase one Common Share at a price of $1.20 per Common Share until the date which is two (2) years from the date of issuance. The Company may pay certain finders a 5% cash fee for introducing eligible participants to the Private Placement. In connection with the First Tranche, the Company paid a total of $7,900 to qualified non-related parties, in accordance with the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange (the "Exchange").

All securities issued under the Private Placement, including securities issuable on exercise thereof, are subject to a hold period expiring four months and one day from the date of issuance.

The Private Placement is subject to certain conditions including, but not limited to, the receipt of all necessary approvals, including the approval of the Exchange.

This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy nor shall there be any sale of the securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation, or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of such jurisdiction. This news release does not constitute an offer of securities for sale in the United States. The securities being offered have not been, nor will they be, registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and such securities may not be offered or sold within the United States absent registration under U.S. federal and state securities laws or an applicable exemption from such U.S. registration requirements.

About Kuya Silver Corporation

Kuya Silver is a Canadian-based mineral exploration and development company with a focus on acquiring, exploring, and advancing precious metals assets in Peru and Canada.

For more information, please contact the Company at:

Kuya Silver Corporation

Telephone: (604) 398-4493

info@kuyasilver.com

www.kuyasilver.com

Reader Advisory

This news release contains statements that constitute "forward-looking information," including statements regarding the plans, intentions, beliefs and current expectations of the Company, its directors, or its officers with respect to the future business activities of the Company. The words "may," "would," "could," "will," "intend," "plan," "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "must," "next," "potential," "progress," and similar expressions, as they relate to the Company or its management, are intended to identify such forward-looking information. Investors are cautioned that statements including forward-looking information are not guarantees of future business activities and involve risks and uncertainties, and that the Company's future business activities may differ materially from those described in the forward-looking information as a result of various factors, including but not limited to fluctuations in market prices, successes of the operations of the Company, continued availability of capital and financing, and general economic, market and business conditions. There can be no assurances that such forward-looking information will prove accurate, and therefore, readers are advised to rely on their own evaluation of the risks and uncertainties. The Company does not assume any obligation to update any forward-looking information except as required under the applicable securities laws.

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO U.S. NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES. ANY FAILURE TO COMPLY WITH THIS RESTRICTION MAY CONSTITUTE A VIOLATION OF U.S. SECURITIES LAWS.



To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/123876
Barbara IoT, a Bilbao, Valencia, and Madrid, Spain-based provider of a cybersecurity operating system to protect industrial equipment, raised 2.5M in funding.

The round was led by Caixa Capital Risc, the venture capital arm of CriteriaCaixa and lead investor through its Criteria Venture Tech fund, and Iberdrola, through Perseo, with participation from GoHub, Bizkaia Seed Capital and Basque Fondo.



The company intend sto use the funds to consolidate its leadership in the smart grid industry and to expand into new markets in the critical infrastructure sector.



Led by David Puron and Isidro Nistal, Barbara IoT has created a cybersecure operating system that allows it to connect and protect industrial equipment with an anti-hacker shield. Through its software, the company collects data from sensors and industrial equipment, and runs artificial intelligence algorithms to detect anomalies or automate processes in real time. The technology allows real-time processing and data analysis in photovoltaic plants, high and medium voltage grids, as well as substations. Barbara IoT is already working with multinationals in critical environments such as energy, water management, emergency services and more. Clients include Iberdrola, Cellnex, Grupo Red Electrica, Grupo DIA and Global Omnium.



FinSMEs

11/05/2022
Chingona Ventures, a Chicago, IL-based venture capital firm focused on pre-seed funding, closed its second fund, at $52m.

Investors include the Office of the Illinois State Treasurers Illinois Growth and Innovation Fund, Melinda Gates Pivotal Ventures, PayPal Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Insight Venture Partners, Foundry Group, Synchrony Ventures, The W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Wellington Asset Management, 50 South Capital, and other leading institutional asset managers.

Founded by Samara Mejia Hernandez, Chingona Ventures makes investments in founders whose backgrounds position them to create businesses in growth markets that are often overlooked-

The Fund will primarily invest in the FinTech, Future of Learning and Health and Wellness sectors. Building off the success of Fund I, where 80 percent of portfolio companies were led by diverse CEOs, Fund II will intentionally invest in the best founders possible, working to remove bias in the deal sourcing and selection process.

Hernandez immigrated to the US from Mexico at a young age and grew up in a low-income household. An engineer by training, Samara spent the early part of her career in the public markets at Goldman Sachs and then in the private sector working in venture capital before launching Chingona Ventures in 2019 as a sole General Partner.

FinSMEs

12/05/2022
On December 6, 2021, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi held a virtual meeting with Indian Ambassador to China Vikram Misri, who is leaving his post and returning to his country.

Wang Yi affirmed Vikram Misri's earnest performance of duties and hard work during his tenure. Wang Yi said that China and India are two ancient civilizations, two emerging economies, and neighbors that cannot be moved away. When we build mutual trust, even the Himalayas cannot stop us from friendly exchanges. Without mutual trust, it is difficult to bring the two sides together, even if there are no mountains in the way. China and India should become partners and friends. The important consensus that China and India should not be a threat to each other, but an opportunity for each other's development, which reached by the leaders of the two countries, should continue to be adhered to. The two sides should use the consensus as a guide and implement the "Wuhan Spirit" and the "Chennai Vision".

Wang Yi put forward the "three dos and three don'ts" for China-India relations. First, we need to understand each other and don't misunderstand and misjudge each other. Second, we need to take a long-term view and don't be disturbed by one moment or one thing. Third, we need to build each other up and don't wear each other out. The two sides can and should continue to stand together on major goals that involve the common interests of developing countries.

Vikram Misri said, he was honored to serve as India's ambassador to China for three years. Although India-China relations have experienced some twists and turns, bilateral relations are still full of opportunities. Both sides have maintained close communication, and various mechanisms have maintained continuous operation. Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar emphasized to you that India's strategic judgment on India-China relations has not changed and India is willing to work with China to understand each other's concerns and achieve mutual benefit and win-win results. Vikram Misri said, although there are still dark clouds in the sky, we have already seen the "silver lining in the dark clouds". I am willing to continue to make efforts to maintain and develop India-China relations.

Wang Yi said, you are right, as the dark clouds will eventually disperse and the sun will shine on the earth. We have full confidence in that. I hope that Mr. Ambassador will continue to be a supporter, defender and promoter of China-India solidarity and cooperation in your new post.
Industries in epidemic-hit areas expedite production resumption

Xinhua) 10:14, May 12, 2022

BEIJING, May 11 (Xinhua) -- While battling against the recent flare-ups of COVID-19 in parts of the country, China has been steadily promoting work resumption in the epidemic-affected areas.

With the epidemic situation gradually easing in Shanghai, major enterprises in the eastern Chinese metropolis have resumed stable production, as key industrial chains, such as automobiles, integrated circuits and biomedicine, continued to recover and ramp up production capacity.

All four factories of the U.S. manufacturing company 3M in Shanghai had resumed production by Saturday, the company said, adding that it will continue to improve its production capacity.

Since the resurgence of COVID-19 cases in March in Shanghai, 3M has not suspended its East China Distribution Center and the production of medical protective masks at its Caohejing base to ensure the stable supply of anti-epidemic materials, the company said.

"Now, 3M is gathering the strength of the entire company to actively deploy resources, so as to ensure the closed-loop production of epidemic prevention supplies," said Ding Hongyu, president of 3M China.

On Wednesday, a ship carrying 4,767 electric cars produced by U.S. automaker Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory left a Shanghai port for Slovenia, according to Shanghai customs.

It marked the first export shipment of Tesla cars from Shanghai since the company resumed production on April 19 after a hiatus of over 20 days amid the epidemic.

The company said its Shanghai factory has already started manufacturing vehicles for export to the Asia-Pacific and European markets.

"We believe that the epidemic situation is only a short test and challenge. We have seen the capacity of all sectors to cope with the challenges in the process of resuming work," said Tao Lin, vice president of Tesla. "We believe that production will soon return to normal."

According to a press conference held on May 5, over 70 percent of Shanghai's 1,800-plus major enterprises had resumed work and production.

Earlier this year, the southern city of Shenzhen, a tech hub and a major foreign-trade center in China, also saw a resurgence of COVID-19 infections.

The city took a series of measures, such as suspending public transportation and closing some businesses, from March 14 to 20, and successfully brought the epidemic situation under control. Thanks to the effective actions, businesses gradually resumed normal work and operation starting late March.

Sources with the on-demand delivery service provider Lalamove, known as Huolala in Chinese, said the company saw an obvious drop in the number of orders it received in Shenzhen from March 14 to 21.

However, the number of overall orders handled by the company in the city from March 1 to April 20 was almost equal to the same period last year, with 6,037 new drivers from Shenzhen joining the platform during this period.

During the first quarter, the total number of commercial entities in Shenzhen reached more than 3.85 million, with 88,065 newly registered ones. Over 90 percent of the newly-registered commercial entities are from the tertiary industry, according to the local government.

The city's electricity consumption came in at more than 8.3 billion kWh in April, a year-on-year growth of 0.1 percent and month-on-month growth of 8.8 percent, said the Shenzhen branch of the China Southern Power Grid.

The automobile manufacturing industry has been a main driving force for power consumption, showing an increase of 80 percent in April compared to the same period in the previous year. The electricity consumption of information-related services rose 8.5 percent year on year in April.

The northeastern province of Jilin, where over 60,000 cases were reported in the latest outbreak, cut off all COVID-19 transmission chains in communities by April 14. The provincial capital Changchun announced on May 1 that it has cleared all medium and high-risk areas for COVID-19.

Leading Chinese automaker FAW Group Co., Ltd. began work resumption on April 13 after a month-long suspension. Workers in its five main engine plants in Changchun are working in shifts while some production lines are operating at full capacity.

The company's daily output of complete vehicles has exceeded 4,000 units, and the capacity utilization rate of its factories in Changchun has recovered to 75 percent.

Li Risheng, a FAW employee, said many of his colleagues voluntarily gave up their holidays since the work resumption. "Everybody hopes to speed up the production to recover the losses incurred by the epidemic," he said.

All major express delivery firms including China Postal Express & Logistics, JD.com and SF Express, have seen their distribution centers in Changchun resuming work from April 24.

(Web editor: Peng Yukai, Liang Jun)
Business

AP

Ukraine to hold first war crimes trial of captured Russian

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine

Ukraines top prosecutor disclosed plans Wednesday for the first war crimes trial of a captured Russian soldier, as fighting raged in the east and south and the Kremlin left open the possibility of annexing a corner of the country it seized early in the invasion.

Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said her office charged Sgt. Vadin Shyshimarin, 21, in the killing of an unarmed 62-year-old civilian who was gunned down while riding a bicycle in February, four days into the war.

Shyshimarin, who served with a tank unit, was accused of firing through a car window on the man in the northeastern village of Chupakhivka. Venediktova said the soldier could get up to 15 years in prison. She did not say when the trial would start.

Venediktovas office has said it has been investigating more than 10,700 alleged war crimes committed by Russian forces and has identified over 600 suspects.

Many of the alleged atrocities came to light last month after Moscows forces aborted their bid to capture Kyiv and withdrew from around the capital, exposing mass graves and streets and yards strewn with bodies in towns such as Bucha. Residents told of killings, burnings, rape, torture and dismemberment.

Volodymyr Yavorskyy of the Center for Civil Liberties said the Ukrainian human rights group will be closely following Shyshimarins trial to see if it is fair. Its very difficult to observe all the rules, norms and neutrality of the court proceedings in wartime, he said.

On the economic front, Ukraine shut down one of the pipelines that carry Russian gas across the country to homes and industries in Western Europe, marking the first time since the start of the war that Kyiv disrupted the flow westward of one of Moscows most lucrative exports.

But the immediate effect is likely to be limited, in part because Russia can divert the gas to another pipeline and because Europe relies on a variety of suppliers.

Meanwhile, a Kremlin-installed politician in the southern Kherson region, site of the first major Ukrainian city to fall in the war, said officials there want Russian President Vladimir Putin to make Kherson a proper region of Russia  that is, annex it.

The city of Kherson is Russia, Kirill Stremousov, deputy head of the Kherson regional administration appointed by Moscow, told Russias RIA Novosti news agency.

That raised the possibility that the Kremlin would seek to break off another piece of Ukraine as it tries to salvage an invasion gone awry. Russia annexed Ukraines Crimean Peninsula, which borders the Kherson region, after a disputed referendum in 2014, a move denounced as illegal and rejected by most of the international community.

Kherson, a Black Sea port of roughly 300,000, provides Crimea with access to fresh water and is seen as gateway to wider Russian control over southern Ukraine.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it would be up to the residents of the Kherson region after all to decide whether such an appeal should be made or not. He said any move to annex territory would have to be closely evaluated by legal experts to make sure it is absolutely legitimate, as it was with Crimea.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak mocked the notion of Khersons annexation, tweeting: The invaders may ask to join even Mars or Jupiter. The Ukrainian army will liberate Kherson, no matter what games with words they play.

Inside Kherson, people have taken to the streets to decry the Russian occupation. But a teacher who gave only her first name, Olga, for fear of Russian retaliation said such protests are impossible now because Moscows troops kidnapped activists and citizens simply for wearing Ukrainian colors or ribbons. She said people are scared of talking openly outside their homes and everyone walks on the street quickly.

All people in Kherson are waiting for our troops to come as soon as possible, she added. Nobody wants to live in Russia or join Russia.

On the battlefield, Ukrainian officials said a Russian rocket attack targeted an area around Zaporizhzhia, destroying unspecified infrastructure. There were no immediate reports of casualties. The southeastern city has been a refuge for civilians fleeing the Russian siege in the devastated port city of Mariupol.

Russian forces continued to pound the steel plant that is the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance in Mariupol, its defenders said. The Azov Regiment said on social media that Russian forces carried out 38 airstrikes in the previous 24 hours on the grounds of the Azovstal steelworks.

The plant, with its network of tunnels and bunkers, has sheltered hundreds of Ukrainian troops and civilians during a months-long siege. Scores of civilians were evacuated in recent days, but Ukrainian officials said some may still be trapped there.

In his nightly address Tuesday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggested Ukraines military is gradually pushing Russian troops away from Kharkiv, the countrys second-largest city and a key to Russias offensive in the Donbas, the eastern industrial region whose capture the Kremlin says is its main objective.

Ukraine is also targeting Russian air defenses and resupply vessels on Snake Island in the Black Sea in an effort to disrupt Moscows efforts to expand its control over the coastline, according to the British Ministry of Defense.

Separately, Ukraine said it shot down a cruise missile targeting the Black Sea port city of Odesa.

Elsewhere, the governor of a Russian region near Ukraine said at least one civilian was killed and six wounded by Ukrainian shelling in the village of Solokhi, which is near the border. Belgorod Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkovs account couldnt be independently verified, but he said the village will be evacuated.

Ukraines natural gas pipeline operator said it moved to stop the flow of Russian gas through a compressor station in part of eastern Ukraine controlled by Moscow-backed separatists because enemy forces were interfering with the stations operation and siphoning off gas.

The hub handles about one-third of Russian gas passing through Ukraine to Western Europe. But analysts said much of the gas can be redirected through another pipeline from Russia that crosses Ukraine, and there were indications that was happening. In any case, Europe also gets natural gas from other pipelines and other countries.

Were losing a few percent in overall European gas supply, when you consider imports and domestic production as well, said Tom Marzec-Manser, an analyst at market intelligence firm ICIS. So this is not a huge cutoff to gas supplies for Europe.

Nor was it clear whether Russia would take any immediate hit, since it has long-term contracts and other ways of transporting gas.

Still, the cutoff underscored the broader risk to gas supplies from the war.

Yesterdays decision is a small preview of what might happen if gas installations are hit by live fire and face the risk of extended downtimes, said gas analyst Zongqiang Luo at Rystad Energy.

In other developments, Ukraines Foreign Ministry urged the global community to toughen sanctions on Russia, saying Russia is stealing Ukrainian grain and trying to sell some of it on global markets. The ministry estimates Russia may have already stolen up to 500,000 metric tons of grain valued at more than $100 million. The ministry said the theft amounts to looting, and any countries that purchase the grain may be accomplices.
THURSDAY

Academy for Lifelong Learning, 1:30 p.m., online. "Circle Art as Meditation," presented by Susanna Cohen, meditation teacher. Can art be used as a form of meditation even if one is not an artist? Inspired by a form of Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice, Cohen developed circle art while working with hospice patients. In this art form, participants design and paint in a deliberate, compassionate and meditative environment. Cohen has expanded its use to healing circles, conflict resolution settings and schools. Learn how to set up and use this accessible form of art. ALL invites nonmembers to attend one or two classes at no charge to see if they are interested in becoming a member. Email admin@academyforlifelonglearning.org if interested.

Album Club, 7 p.m., online. Join host Bob Santelli and Oregon State University student Thomas Mahler in discussing the classic album "Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs," the sole studio album by the English-American blues-rock band Derek and the Dominos, released in November 1970 as a double album. It is best known for its title track, and is often regarded as Eric Clapton's greatest musical achievement. Information: erin.sneller@oregonstate.edu.

University Theatre presents "On the Razzle" by Tom Stoppard, 7:30 p.m., Withycombe Hall, 2901 SW Campus Way, Corvallis. The show follows two silly assistants on an adventure in the city of Vienna, which leads to a wild chase, mistaken identity and a little romance. "On the Razzle" is adapted from the 19th-century Viennese farce "Einen Jux will er sich machen" by Johann Nestroy, which became the basis of Thorton Wilders "Matchmaker" and later "Hello, Dolly!" Tickets: https://oregonstatecla.universitytickets.com/w/event2.aspx?SeriesID=4.

SATURDAY

Friends of the Lebanon Public Library Giant Book Sale, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., Lebanon Senior Center, 80 Tangent St. The sale will feature the Friends' entire inventory of all genres of books, special editions and sets of books and DVDs, Blind Date books, carved vintage book art, book-themed gift items and more. Most books are priced 50 cents to $2. Credit/debit card and contactless payments now available on purchases of $5 or over. Proceeds support reading and arts programs at the library. Information: 541-730-3602 or friendslebanonorlibrary@gmail.com.

SUNDAY

North Central Park guided walking tour, 1 p.m.; meet outside First Presbyterian Church, 114 SW Eighth St., Corvallis. Diverse historic resources and walkability mark this downtown neighborhood tour. See Gothic, Queen Anne, Italianate, Colonial Revival and Arts and Crafts bungalow homes. The walk begins at the 1909 church and includes a 1940s courtyard apartment building and Corvallis' first college fraternity house. The tour guide is Courtney Cloyd. The event is free and registration is not needed. Information: 541-766-6819 or inga.williams@co.benton.or.us.

MONDAY

"Every 90 Seconds: Ending Violence Against Women," 11 a.m., Room 219, Ballard Extension Hall, 2591 SW Campus Way, Corvallis. Anne DePrince, distinguished professor of psychology at University of Denver, will discuss ways all kinds of people can help end violence against women. She will also sign copies of her new book, "Every 90 Seconds: Our Common Cause Ending Violence Against Women."

Items for this calendar are pulled from the user-generated calendar that runs on our websites. For further information, write to jane.stoltz@lee.net.

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School of Education at the CIES 2022 Conference

This year, the Comparative & International Education Society Conference took place in Minneapolis, USA, between 18th and 22nd of April 2022. The theme of the conference was Illuminating the Power of Idea/lism that sought to address the challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of nativism and fundamentalism.

The School of Education at the University of Glasgow was represented by members of two large projects involving staff from three its Research and Teaching Groups, and the Centre for Research and Development in Adult and Lifelong Learning. The Gendered Journeys project is led by Barbara Read and also involves Catherine Lido, Srabani Maitra and Bonnie Slade as Co-Is and Preeti Dagar and Daniel Leyton as researchers together with partners from the University of Rwanda and the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. The Centre for Sustainable, Healthy and Learning Cities and Neighbourhoods (SHLC) is a multi-partner project within which Mike Osborne and Michele Schweisfurth have been Co-Is, and Yulia Nesterova, a researcher. Both projects have been funded within the aegis of the UK Governments Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF).

Members of the Gendered Journeys project organised a panel session with three presentations. The first paper focussed on Rwandas structures of inequality in STEM, by Jane Umutoni and Josephine Malonza (University of Rwanda). The second paper addressed micropolitical experiences of disparities in India led by Srabani Maitra (University of Glasgow) and Saikat Maitra (Indian Institute of Management Calcutta). The third paper, by Bonnie Slade and Barbara Read (University of Glasgow), discussed some creative methods of collecting data online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Professor Bonnie Slade chaired the session, which ended with an engaging interaction with the audience regarding how gender shapes STEM choices, and the issues of harassment and bullying within STEM fields worldwide. Altogether, they tackled issues related to power struggles, structural inequalities and micro-cultural operations of misogyny and gender collusions.

For example, drawing on qualitative research with STEM female students in some of the leading universities in the eastern region of India, the team reported a culture of misogyny and gender collusions in STEM disciplines. The team reflected on how this culture is impacting female students studying engineering and other science-related fields. The team highlighted that these experiences often leave female students in STEM in affective situations marked by isolation, anger, and feelings of oppression. The panel called attention to the necessity of inclusive initiatives that explicitly address sexism and misogyny, and recognise the STEM field as part of a broader social context in which gender oppression persists.

The SHLC team presented two papers. The first paper relied on the newly collected SHLC data from the household survey conducted in the projects fourteen cities in seven countries in Africa and Asia (over 14,000 surveys in total and quite possibly the largest survey of its kind globally). Dr Yulia Nesterova and Michele Schweisfurth, discussed the levels of satisfaction with the quality of schooling in neighbourhoods of different income  from informal settlements to gated communities  in Bangladesh, India, Rwanda, and Tanzania. They highlighted that in order to address educational inequalities and achieve SDG4, researchers and policymakers need to adopt the neighbourhood lens to understand how opportunities and challenges are unevenly distributed across cities.

The second SHLC paper was presented by Professor Mike Osborne and Dr Yulia Nesterova as part of the panel organised by UNESCO-IIEP. The panels objective was to showcase how cities can be laboratories for innovation as they work to achieve SDG4 locally. Cities play a leading role in the urgent need to implement the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and particularly SDG 4, which aims to ensure universal access to quality education. Through a dedicated programme, Cities and Education 2030, a IIEP-UNESCO research team is considering the key role of cities in educational planning and management, as local elected authorities and privileged partners of ministries of education. IIEP-UNESCO first explored this growing phenomenon in four French cities and has since put together recommendations on how to improve the role of cities in educational planning and management. It has been more recently working with the Centre for Sustainable Learning Cities and Neighbourhoods to extend this work to the global south in Bangladesh, the Philippines and Rwanda.

In particular, during this panel, SHLCs team discussed how Kigali in Rwanda and Dhaka and Khulna in Bangladesh plan, monitor, evaluate, and finance education in their cities, how the cities build partnerships with diverse actors and stakeholders, and what challenges and opportunities they identify. This discussion was informed by the insights of Co-Is from Bangladesh (Dr Shilpi Roy) and Rwanda (Dr Vincent Manirakiza). More detail on this panel as a whole will be posted in a subsequent news item. A screen shot of panellists is below.
LONDON, May 11, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The cards and payments market in Spain is projected to grow at a CAGR of more than 8% during the forecast period. Cash remains the preferred method of payment in Spain in the year 2021. Nevertheless, with the Spanish government taking steps to improve banking penetration, increasing financial knowledge among citizens, and efforts by banks to promote electronic payments, payment cards grew in prominence during the review period (201721e).



The Spain cards and payments market research report offered by GlobalData Plc analyzes various payment card markets operating in the industry and provides detailed information on the number of cards in circulation, transaction values and volumes during the review period and over the forecast period. It also offers information on the countrys competitive landscape, including market shares of issuers and schemes.

Spain Cards and Payments Market Outlook

For more insights on the report, download a free sample

Spain Cards and Payments Market Highlights

The emergence of digital-only banks is likely to accelerate the shift towards electronic payments in Spain.

Contactless payments for public transport are gradually gaining traction in Spain amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Contactless technology is gaining prominence in Spain, with banks such as CaixaBank, Santander, and BBVA offering contactless cards.

Despite Spain being a cash-dominated society, cash payments are set to decline in line with the rising consumer preference for electronic payments.

Spain Cards and Payments Market Segmentation by Payment Instruments

Card-based payment

Merchant acquiring

Ecommerce payments

Buy now pay later payments

Mobile proximity payments

P2P payments

Bill payments

Alternative payments

The number of debit cards grew at a moderate rate during the review period. However, with the continued migration of low-value cash payments to debit cards they are increasingly being used for payments as opposed to ATM cash withdrawals. The rise in usage can partly be attributed to banks offering cards for niche segments as well as discounts at partner merchants. Debit cards are mostly used for payments rather than ATM cash withdrawals, with payments accounting for a significant share of total debit card transaction value in 2021.

For more insights on Spain cards and payments market segmentation, download a free sample

Leading Players in the Spain Cards and Payments Market

CaixaBank

BBVA

Santander

Sistema 4B

Sistemapay

Visa

Mastercard

Evo Payments

Comercia Global Payments

PayPal

Google Pay

Apple Pay

Samsung Pay

Paysafecard

Bizum





To know more about leading players in the Spanish cards and payments market, download a free sample

Spain Cards and Payments Market Overview

Market Size (2021) $280.38 billion CAGR >8% Forecast Period 2021-2025 Key Segments Card-based payment, Merchant acquiring, Ecommerce payments, Buy now pay later payments, Mobile proximity payments, P2P payments, Bill payments, and Alternative payments. Key Players CaixaBank, BBVA, Santander, Sistema 4B, Sistemapay, Visa, Mastercard, Evo Payments, Comercia Global Payments, PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Paysafecard, and Bizum

Spain Cards and Payments Market Report Scope

This report provides top-level market analysis, information and insights into the Spanish cards and payments industry, including 

Current and forecast values for each market in the Spanish cards and payments industry, including debit, credit, and charge cards

Detailed insights into payment instruments including cash, cards, direct debits, credit transfers, and cheques. It also includes an overview of the countrys key alternative payment instruments.

Ecommerce market analysis.

Analysis of various market drivers and regulations governing the Spanish cards and payments industry.

Detailed analysis of strategies adopted by banks and other institutions to market debit, credit, and charge cards.

Comprehensive analysis of consumer attitudes and buying preferences for cards

The competitive landscape of the Spanish cards and payments industry





Reasons to Buy

Make strategic business decisions, using top-level historic and forecast market data, related to the Spanish cards and payments industry and each market within it.

Understand the key market trends and growth opportunities in the Spanish cards and payments industry.

Assess the competitive dynamics in the Spanish cards and payments industry.

Gain insights into marketing strategies used for various card types in Spain.

Gain insights into key regulations governing the Spanish cards and payments industry.





FAQs

What was the annual value of card transactions in Spain cards and payments market in 2021?

The annual value of card transactions in the cards and payments market in Spain was $280.38 billion in 2021.

What is the Spain cards and payments market growth rate?

The cards and payments market in Spain is projected to grow at a CAGR of more than 8% during the period 2021-2025.

What are the key payment instruments in the Spain cards and payments market?

The key payment instruments in the Spain cards and payments market include card-based payments, merchant acquiring, e-commerce payments, buy now pay later payments, mobile payments, P2P payments, bill payments, and alternative payments.

Who are the key players in the Spain cards and payments market?

CaixaBank, BBVA, Santander, Sistema 4B, Sistemapay, Visa, Mastercard, Evo Payments, Comercia Global Payments, PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Paysafecard, and Bizum are some of the key players in the Spain cards and payment market.

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United States, Rockville MD, May 11, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Fact.MR published a recent report estimating that the global market for patient engagement solutions is forecast to grow at an astronomical rate of 8.6% during 2022-2032, surpassing $66.4 Billion. Streamlining hospital workflows in an effort to reduce human burden has led to an increase in demand for patient engagement solutions in the market. The demand for Patient Engagement Solutions Market is expected to rise over the forecast period and the market is projected to gain a global market size worth of US$ 29 Billion by the end of 2022.

Browse in-depth TOC on "Demand of Patient Engagement Solutions Market"

54 Tables, 111 Figures and 170 Pages

Implementation of patient engagement solutions increased at an impressive pace of 20.3% from 2015 to 2021. With the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare providers were forced to leverage options such as robotic surgery, electronic medical records, and telemedicine to more easily reach patients. The highly contagious nature of this disease discouraged any direct contact with patients.

Healthcare providers are continuously reinventing themselves to adapt to a rapidly changing market characterized by constant changes in consumer lifestyles, financial pressures, and technological advancements. Organizations are getting better at understanding their existing and prospective patients from a relationship-based approach instead of a transactional approach, as the industry has evolved. Patient engagement solutions offer the benefit of being accessible from any remote location. This is one of the principal benefits of such solutions in the market.

For Critical Insights on Patient Engagement Solutions Market, Request a Sample Report

https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=3078

How is Japan expected to contribute to the Growth of Patient Engagement Solutions Services?

The Japanese market for patient engagement solutions is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR of 14.6% during the forecast period. Japan's Patient Engagement Solutions have progressed steadily over the past few years. Drug companies and patients who hadn't realized its value have now had more chance to have discussions about clinical trials, and DIA is helping to foster those discussions in the market. In order to increase patient insight into their protocols, pharmaceutical companies have been trying to integrate informed consent forms into their databases. Meanwhile, there are still a number of challenges that must be overcome in order to promote these activities.

With the COVID-19 pandemic causing the environment to change, pharmaceutical companies and patients have had the opportunity to communicate. It is common in Japan for medical institutions to have their own template for informed consent forms (ICFs). Consequently, it is essential that all clinical sites explore ideas for implementing patient-friendly ICFs.

For instance, as part of their new patient engagement strategy, Japan's Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED) has published their Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) Guidebook, which details communication methods. COVID-19 has also led to increasing online interaction between rural/remote patients or patients with mobility problems, increasing opportunities to engage in these activities. Consequently, patient and pharmaceutical company communication opportunities have increased, which in turn leads to some more effective pharmaceutical industries in this region.

To learn more about Patient Engagement Solutions Services Market, you can get in touch with our Analyst at https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=AE&rep_id=3078

Key Segments Covered in the Patient Engagement Solutions Services Industry Survey

Patient Engagement Solutions by Delivery Mode : Self-Hosted Patient Engagement Solutions Software-as-a Services Patient Engagement Solutions Application Managed Service Patient Engagement Solutions



Patient Engagement Solutions by End User : Patient Engagement Solutions for Hospitals and Providers Patient Engagement Solutions for Healthcare Payers Patient Engagement Solutions for Pharmaceutical Companies



Patient Engagement Solutions by Region : North America Patient Engagement Solutions Market Europe Patient Engagement Solutions Market Asia Pacific Patient Engagement Solutions Market Latin America Patient Engagement Solutions Market Middle East & Africa Patient Engagement Solutions Market



Competitive Landscape

Increasing production and meeting consumer demand through cooperation between manufacturers results in higher profits and market shares. Top-of-the-line management services and software are provided by major suppliers of passenger services systems. Companies associated with these industries have collaborated with several governmental agencies.

YPrime, LLC, a leader in cloud-based eClinical solutions, has acquired Tryl, a software development company with a unique patient engagement solution. Tryl brings clinical data analytics together with dynamic personalization and behavioral science to boost patient engagement, reduce dropouts, and deliver outcomes. YPrime is acquiring all its staff, and its development capabilities, as well as its intellectual property, and those will integrate with its Patient Engagement Technologies.





On March 20, 2022, Microsoft announced enhancements to its Azure Health Data Services and updates to its Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and life sciences. Combined with the recent close of its acquisition of Nuance Communications, Microsoft is uniquely positioned to amplify an organizations ability to help others by leveraging trusted AI to address the biggest challenges transforming the future of healthcare for all.





Get Customization on Patient Engagement Solutions Market Report for Specific Research Solutions

https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=RC&rep_id=3078

Key players in the Patient Engagement Solutions Market

McKesson Corporation

Allscripts Inc.

Medecision Inc.

Cerner Corporation

IBM Phytel

Axial Exchange

Orion Health



Key Takeaways from the Patient Engagement Solutions Market Study

Self-hosted delivery mode of patient engagement solutions to expand at 8.9% CAGR

Revenue generated by patient engagement solutions for health management is expected to grow by 35%

Around one-fourth of the PE solutions require investments in financial health management in order to stimulate growth in the market

The North American market is predicted to generate an absolute opportunity of US$ 47 Billion by 2031

Japan to emerge as the fastest growing market, registering a whopping 14.6% CAGR

Global patient engagement solutions landscape to be worth US$ 29 Billion by 2022-end

Explore Fact.MRs Coverage on the Healthcare Domain-

Polymerase Chain Reaction Market Analysis - Rising investments in genetic engineering research and development, as well as competition for the discovery of new drugs for diseases such as HIV/AIDS and cancer, will boost growth prospects. PCR adoption in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries is expected to grow at an impressive 8.6 percent CAGR during the forecast period. The demand for PCR in clinical diagnostic labs and hospitals is expected to skyrocket.

PCR and Real-time PCR Molecular Diagnostics Market Forecast - The COVID-19 pandemic has boosted prospects for the growth of the PCR and real-time PCR molecular diagnostics market. Real-time (qPCR) and digital (dPCR) PCR tests have been used in a variety of healthcare settings to detect and diagnose potential cases. Because of its high sensitivity, healthcare providers have embraced PCR tests on a large scale. As a result of such trends, the global PCR and real-time PCR molecular diagnostics market is poised to soar to new heights, surpassing a significant revenue threshold in the coming decade.

Home Diagnostics Market Sales - Home diagnostics is a burgeoning market that is rapidly gaining traction in a world grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic. Home diagnostic kits, which are armed with advanced technology, allow users to check and monitor their health conditions in the comfort of their own homes. The United States of America had the largest market share of home diagnostics in North America, accounting for approximately 40% of market revenue, and is expected to maintain its lead throughout the forecast period.

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LONDON, Ontario, May 11, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In a release issued on May 10, 2022, by BLES Biochemicals Inc., please note that the headline has been updated, "BLES" has been corrected to say "BLEScathTM" in the fourth paragraph, the second sentence in the last paragraph has been changed, NIPPV has been added in the sixth paragraph, citation numbers updated, and a fourth citation has been added to the References section. The corrected release follows:

An Innovative Pulmonary Surfactant Delivery Solution for Neonates with NRDS

BLES Biochemicals Inc. is an established global player in providing innovative solutions for neonatal respiratory distress syndrome (NRDS).

We are excited to introduce a unique, single-use, intratracheal catheter with an integrated stylet, designed by clinical experts who understand the practice and importance of delivering exogenous pulmonary surfactant to neonates.

BLEScathTM is intended for the administration of bovine lipid extract surfactant suspension (BLES) using the minimally invasive surfactant therapy (MIST) / less invasive surfactant administration (LISA) technique for rescue treatment of infants with NRDS2. Health Canada has authorized BLEScathTM for sale in Canada.

BLEScathTM is intended for neonates at  28 weeks and or  1000 grams who do not require intubation or mechanical ventilation and meet the criteria for surfactant administration (i.e., oxygenation requirement met)2.

NRDS is a challenge mitigated by integrated scientific solutions. With the combination of BLEScathTM for use with BLES, we are equipped to provide a broader range of products to address and lead innovation for surfactant delivery to neonates experiencing NRDS. These neonates are unable to inflate the alveolar sacs in their lungs, resulting in progressive and diffuse atelectasis (collapse of lungs) and possible loss of life. Surfactant is an important component of NRDS treatment.

The LISA/MIST technique uses a small diameter catheter inserted into the trachea to deliver exogenous pulmonary surfactant to a spontaneously breathing patient supported by continuous positive airway pressure (nCPAP) or non-invasive positive pressure ventilation (NIPPV) to avoid intubation. The use of Magill forceps is often required to guide a thin catheter through the vocal cords and may impair the visual procedural field and may contribute to mucosal trauma3. BLEScathTM addresses these challenges with the integrated stainless steel (SS) stylet2.

Need to Know

The use of BLEScath TM and BLES  should be restricted to a highly supervised clinical setting with immediate availability of experienced neonatologists and other clinicians experienced with the general care of premature infants. Transient episodes of bradycardia and decreased oxygen saturation may occur during dosing 1, 2 .

and BLES should be restricted to a highly supervised clinical setting with immediate availability of experienced neonatologists and other clinicians experienced with the general care of premature infants. Transient episodes of bradycardia and decreased oxygen saturation may occur during dosing . BLEScath TM and BLES  are contraindicated in infants with active pulmonary hemorrhage 1,2 .

and BLES are contraindicated in infants with active pulmonary hemorrhage . DO NOT use BLEScath TM to administer any surfactant other than BLES 2 .

to administer any surfactant other than BLES . BLEScathTM is intended for intratracheal use only; do not introduce the catheter into other body openings2.

About BLES Biochemicals Inc.

BLES Biochemicals Inc. is an established global player in providing innovative solutions for treating NRDS. With over 40 years of research and the development of BLES, the leading pulmonary surfactant in Canada4, and now BLEScathTM , we strive to provide interventions that expand the standard of care practices.

Our researchers aim to complement existing practices and enhance neonatal care to alleviate NRDS-related mortality and morbidity. Many premature infants with NRDS may not have survived without treatment with an exogenous pulmonary surfactant, such as BLES. We believe that everyone deserves access to this therapy, and we work hard to make that a reality around the world. The innovation of BLEScathTM results from a continued commitment to that mission. We want to live in a world where every neonate with NRDS has access to life-saving pulmonary surfactant and associated delivery devices. Until this vision is realized, we continue to serve the underserved.

For more information, visit www.blesbiochem.com and www.blescath.com .

References

1.BLES Product Monograph, January 31, 2022.

2.BLEScathTM Instructions for Use (IFU) December 31, 2020.

3.Herting E, Hartel C, Gopel W. Less invasive surfactant administration. Current Opinion in Pediatrics. 2020;32(2):22834.

4.Data obtained from IQVIA Solutions Canada Inc.

Ben Reesor

General Manager

Contact:

Joan Slivocka

BLES Biochemicals Inc.

Product Marketing Manager

jslivocka@blesbiochem.com

519-457-2537 Ext 815

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/02172a7e-7d47-4325-870a-e818993599a5
English French

MONTREAL, May 11, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Knight Therapeutics Inc. (TSX:GUD) ("Knight" or the "Corporation") a leading pan-American (ex-US) specialty pharmaceutical company, announced today the voting results from the Annual Meeting of the Shareholders held virtually in Montreal, Quebec ("Meeting").



Election of Directors

Each director nominee listed in the Management Information Circular dated April 11, 2022 ("Circular") was elected as Director of the Corporation at the Meeting. Shareholders present in person or represented by proxy at the Meeting voted as follows:

DIRECTOR NOMINEE OUTCOME VOTES

FOR % FOR VOTES

WITHELD

%

WITHELD Jonathan Ross Goodman Elected 60,902,832 95.75% 2,701,678 4.25% James C. Gale Elected 63,265,174 99.47% 339,336 0.53% Samira Sakhia Elected 63,472,472 99.79% 132,038 0.21% Robert N. Lande Elected 60,537,287 95.18% 3,067,223 4.82% Michael J. Tremblay Elected 57,178,604 89.90% 6,425,906 10.10% Nicolas Sujoy Elected 60,678,074 95.40% 2,926,436 4.60% Janice Murray Elected 63,124,888 99.25% 479,622 0.75%

Appointment of external Auditors

Ernst & Young LLP were appointed as external auditors of the Corporation for the next year by a majority of the votes cast by the shareholders present or represented by proxy, and the directors were authorized to determine their remuneration. Shareholders present in person or represented by proxy at the Meeting voted as follows:

OUTCOME VOTES FOR % FOR VOTES WITHHELD % WITHHELD Appointed 63,633,816 99.78% 141,491 0.22%

Approval of unallocated rights under the Corporations employee share purchase plan (ESPP)

The resolution to approve unallocated rights under the Corporations employee share purchase plan for the ensuing three years, as described in the Circular, was approved by a majority of the votes cast by the shareholders present or represented by proxy. Shareholders present in person or represented by proxy at the Meeting voted as follows:

OUTCOME VOTES FOR % FOR VOTES AGAINST % AGAINST Approved 50,507,892 79.41% 13,096,618 20.59%

The results of the final votes regarding all matters subject to a vote during the Meeting will also be made available on SEDAR (www.sedar.com).

About Knight Therapeutics Inc.

Knight Therapeutics Inc., headquartered in Montreal, Canada, is a specialty pharmaceutical company focused on acquiring or in-licensing and commercializing pharmaceutical products for Canada and Latin America. Knight owns Biotoscana Investments S.A., a pan-Latin American specialty pharmaceutical company. Knights Latin American subsidiaries operate under United Medical, Biotoscana Farma and Laboratorio LKM. Knight Therapeutics Inc.'s shares trade on TSX under the symbol GUD. For more information about Knight Therapeutics Inc., please visit the company's web site at www.gud-knight.com or www.sedar.com.

Forward-Looking Statement

This document contains forward-looking statements for Knight Therapeutics Inc. and its subsidiaries. These forward-looking statements, by their nature, necessarily involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated by the forward-looking statements. Knight Therapeutics Inc. considers the assumptions on which these forward-looking statements are based to be reasonable at the time they were prepared but cautions the reader that these assumptions regarding future events, many of which are beyond the control of Knight Therapeutics Inc. and its subsidiaries, may ultimately prove to be incorrect. Factors and risks, which could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations are discussed in Knight Therapeutics Inc.'s Annual Report and in Knight Therapeutics Inc.'s Annual Information Form for the year ended December 31, 2021 as filed on www.sedar.com. Knight Therapeutics Inc. disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information or future events, except as required by law.
Newark, NJ, May 11, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- As per the report published by Market Research Place, the global solid state (smart) transformers market is expected to grow from USD 155.88 million in 2021 to USD 610.99 million by 2030, at a CAGR of 16.39% during the forecast period 2022-2030.

A solid-state transformer is also known as a smart transformer, a modern electrical energy device that provides bi-directional power flow. It is a combination of high-powered semiconductor components, control circuitry, and conventional high-frequency transformers, which provide reactive power compensation and harmonics reduction. Solid state transformers are used for various applications, ranging from alternative power generation to traction locomotives, power grid, electric industries, etc. These are used in a broad range of applications that facilitate the smooth transition from AC to DC and DC to AC, other than voltage conversion.

Competitive Strategy

To enhance their market position in the global solid state (smart) transformers market, the key players are now focusing on adopting the strategies such as product innovations, mergers & acquisitions, recent developments, joint ventures, collaborations, and partnerships.

In March 2021, Hitachi ABB Power Grids and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) agreed to work together for advanced development in Solid State Transformer (SST) technology. This project is part of the Singapore Governments flagship Energy Grid 2.0 initiative, which is aimed at shaping the next generation grid system and transforming energy management with the consolidation of several energy sources into a single intelligent network that is more efficient, sustainable, and resilient.

Get Free Sample Copy: https://www.marketresearchplace.com/report-detail/218856/request-sample

Market Growth & Trends

The solid state transformer has become the better option for replacing conventional copper and iron-based transformer for better power quality with the advancement of power electronic devices and circuits. These transformers can potentially provide significant benefits compared to traditional transformers like bidirectional power flow, high efficiency, superior power quality, high flexibility, and lower maintenance costs. These can be used in many areas where traditional or conventional transformers are used. These are preferred due to their reduced size, weight, and volume, high power density, higher efficiency, fault isolation, reactive power compensation, and improved power factors. However, its high cost is acting as a restraint for the market.

Key Findings

In 2021, distribution solid-state transformer segment dominated the market with the largest market share of 59.85% and market revenue of 93.29 million.

The type segment is divided into distribution solid-state transformer, power solid state transformer, and traction solid state transformer. In 2021, distribution solid state transformers dominated the market with the largest market share of 59.85% and market revenue of 93.29 million. Solid state transformers actively regulate the voltage and current. Some can convert the single-phase power into three-phase power and vice versa. Variations can input or output the DC powers to reduce the number of conversions for greater end-to-end efficiency.

In 2021, transportation segment accounted for the largest share of the market, with 58.72% and market revenue of 91.54 million.

The application segment is divided into energy, transportation, and others. In 2021, the transportation segment accounted for the largest share of the market, with 58.72% and a market revenue of 91.54 million. In recent years, the electrification of the transportation system has been crucial while considering the depletion of fossil fuels which last only for the next 50 years. Moreover, the extensive use of IC engine-operated vehicles emits CO2 to a large extent in the environment, which is dangerous to the environment.

Regional Segment Analysis of the Solid State (Smart) Transformers Market

North America (U.S., Canada, Mexico)

Europe (Germany, France, U.K., Italy, Spain, Rest of Europe)

Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, India, Rest of APAC)

South America (Brazil and Rest of South America)

The Middle East and Africa (UAE, South Africa, Rest of MEA)

Among all regions, Europe emerged as the largest market for the global solid state (smart) transformers market, with around 35.3% and 55.05 million of the market revenue in 2021. The market for smart transformers in the Asia Pacific region has been rising owing to prominent market players. Along with this, the Asia Pacific region has a large population base and encompasses the countries with the highest population, which led to rapid urbanization that propels the market's growth. This offers lucrative growth opportunities for solid state (smart) transformers in the region.

Read Complete Report with TOC: https://www.marketresearchplace.com/report/global-solid-state-smart-transformers-market-research-report-218856.html

Key players operating in the Global Solid State (Smart) Transformers market are:

ABB

General Electric

Alstom

Mitsubishi Electric

Siemens

Schneider Electric

Cooper Power Systems

Varentec

Amantys Limited

GridBridge

This study forecasts revenue at global, regional, and country levels from 2022 to 2030. Market research place has segmented the global solid state (smart) transformers market based on the below-mentioned segments:

Global solid state (smart) transformers market by Type:

Solid State Transformers

Power Solid State Transformers

Traction Solid State Transformers

Global solid state (smart) transformers market by End-User:

Energy

Transportation

Others

For Instant Purchase: https://www.marketresearchplace.com/checkout.html?reportid=218856&type=single

About the report:

The global solid state (smart) transformers market is analyzed based on value (USD Million). All the segments have been analyzed worldwide, regional, and country basis. The study includes the analysis of more than 30 countries for each part. The report analyzes driving factors, opportunities, restraints, and challenges for gaining critical insight into the market. The study includes porter's five forces model, attractiveness analysis, raw material analysis, supply, demand analysis, competitor position grid analysis, distribution, and marketing channels analysis.

Customization of the Report:

This report can be customized to meet the clients requirements. Please connect with our sales team (sales@marketresearchplace.com), who will ensure that you get a report that suits your needs. You can also get in touch with our executives on 1-201-465-4211 to share your research requirements.

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NEW ORLEANS, May 11, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ClaimsFiler, a FREE shareholder information service, reminds investors that they have until July 1, 2022 to file lead plaintiff applications in a securities class action lawsuit against Riskified Ltd. (the Company) (NYSE: RSKD), if they purchased or acquired the Companys Class A common stock in or traceable to the Companys July 2021 initial public offering (the IPO). This action is pending in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.



Get Help

Riskified investors should visit us at https://claimsfiler.com/cases/nyse-rskd/ or call toll-free (844) 367-9658. Lawyers at Kahn Swick & Foti, LLC are available to discuss your legal options.

About the Lawsuit

Riskified and certain of its executives are charged with failing to disclose material information in its IPO Registration Statement, violating federal securities laws.

The alleged false and misleading statements and omissions include, but are not limited to, that: (i) as the Company expanded its user base, the quality of the Companys machine learning platform had deteriorated (rather than improved as represented in the Registration Statement); (ii) the Company had expanded its customer base into industries with relatively high rates of fraud  including partnerships with cryptocurrency and remittance business  in which the Company had limited experience, and that this expansion had negatively impacted the effectiveness of the Companys machine learning platform; (iii) the Company suffered from materially higher chargebacks and cost of revenue and depressed gross profits and gross profit margins during its third fiscal quarter of 2021; and (iv) as a result of the foregoing, the Companys representations in its Registration Statement were materially false and misleading, and lacked a factual basis.

The case is Thomas v. Riskified Ltd., et al., No. 22-cv-03545.

About ClaimsFiler

ClaimsFiler has a single mission: to serve as the information source to help retail investors recover their share of billions of dollars from securities class action settlements. At ClaimsFiler.com, investors can: (1) register for free to gain access to information and settlement websites for various securities class action cases so they can timely submit their own claims; (2) upload their portfolio transactional data to be notified about relevant securities cases in which they may have a financial interest; and (3) submit inquiries to the Kahn Swick & Foti, LLC law firm for free case evaluations.

To learn more about ClaimsFiler, visit www.claimsfiler.com.
NEW ORLEANS, May 11, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ClaimsFiler, a FREE shareholder information service, reminds investors that they have until June 24, 2022 to file lead plaintiff applications in a securities class action lawsuit against Innovative Industrial Properties, Inc. (NYSE: IIPR, IIPR-PA), if they purchased the Companys securities between May 7, 2020 and April 13, 2022, inclusive (the Class Period). This action is pending in the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey.



Get Help

Innovative Industrial investors should visit us at https://claimsfiler.com/cases/nyse-iipr/ or call toll-free (844) 367-9658. Lawyers at Kahn Swick & Foti, LLC are available to discuss your legal options.

About the Lawsuit

Innovative Industrial and certain of its executives are charged with failing to disclose material information during the Class Period, violating federal securities laws.

The alleged false and misleading statements and omissions include, but are not limited to, that: (i) the Companys focus is to be a cannabis company lender rather than a real estate investment trust (REIT); (ii) the true values of the Companys properties are significantly lower than represented; (iii) the Companys top customers experienced significant issues; (iv) as a result, its top customers may not be able to continue making payments to the Company and it would face significant issues replacing these customers; and (v) as a result of the foregoing, the Companys financial statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times.

When the true details entered the market, the price of the Companys shares fell, damaging investors.

The case is Mallozzi v. Innovative Industrial Properties, Inc., et al., No. 22-cv- 2359.

About ClaimsFiler

ClaimsFiler has a single mission: to serve as the information source to help retail investors recover their share of billions of dollars from securities class action settlements. At ClaimsFiler.com, investors can: (1) register for free to gain access to information and settlement websites for various securities class action cases so they can timely submit their own claims; (2) upload their portfolio transactional data to be notified about relevant securities cases in which they may have a financial interest; and (3) submit inquiries to the Kahn Swick & Foti, LLC law firm for free case evaluations.

To learn more about ClaimsFiler, visit www.claimsfiler.com.
AMSTERDAM, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- As the climate crisis rages, the Sovereign Nature Initiative calls for everyday citizens, ecologists, artists, and technologists of the world to attend an innovative, in-real-life gathering in Amsterdam on May 21, 2022 to explore the possibility of a fundamental shift in the relationship between humans and nature.



Experimental Zone #1 (EZ1), held at Amsterdams city playground for sustainability De Ceuvel , serves as a showcase for SNI, a Dutch-based nonprofit working at the intersection between ecology, economy and web3 technologies. Featuring tech teams and futurists alongside local musicians, dancers, and installation artists, this one-of-a-kind public event will bring together world-class artists, thinkers, and innovators to celebrate and explore the emerging ideas and technologies inside SNIs booming ecosystem.

This one-day event will kick off with an exciting showcase of SNIs new Germinator Program , seven new web3 technology projects developed during SNIs February hackathon that consider the value and identity of nature in innovative ways. Event attendees will be able to test these technologies and learn about their applications as they complement De Ceuvels sustainability initiatives. The Germinator teams are mindful of the unintended externalities associated with software development, which is why SNI has chosen to partner with Unique Network , a scalable blockchain recognized for composable NFTs and sustainability. The Germinators recognize that building on Unique assures that their tech has a minimal footprint on the environment.

At SNI, we strive to nurture a diverse community and build strong partnerships to help us explore creative and innovative ways to balance our relationship to the natural world we are integral part of. As our partner, Unique Network generously offered to support the participants of our Germinator Program with a considerable bounty allocation that will help them further develop their radical ideas, said Alessandro Mazzi, Head of Partnerships at SNI.

SNIs Germinator teams will be leveraging Uniques NFT capabilities for several applications throughout the event, such as rewarding positive ecological actions and volunteerism and generating value for De Ceuvel park by selling park-inspired nature NFTs, in addition to more advanced propositions like using dynamically changing NFTs to represent flora and fauna present at De Ceuvel.

"The Germinator Program is a journey that was designed to support seven technical teams from all over the world to bring to life the best ideas developed during the SNI Winter Hackathon in February 2022. What we hope to achieve is to enable visitors of De Ceuvel to experience the potential of web3 technologies to empower individuals and communities to relate, better value, and care for non-humans in urban ecologies, said Catherine Bischoff, CEO at SNI.

Following the Germinator Program presentations, EZ1 will invite attendees into sustainability workshops, tours, and activities throughout the day, including eclectic art and theory talks such as Algorithms & Artistic Immersion, and Crypto-Ecology: Web3 Technologies for Conservation? EZ1 aims to bring together the foremost minds in the art, ecology, and technology worlds to reflect on the relationship between technology and nature and build the technologies needed to galvanize humanity to address the Anthropocene.

To learn more about Experimental Zone #1, please visit our website , and follow us on Twitter , LinkedIn , and Instagram for more updates.

For media inquiries, please contact: media@unique.network

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/05bdeb5c-2f57-4dd4-b8eb-25d9ed0feb34
New York, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Reportlinker.com announces the release of the report "US Cybersecurity Responsibility, Spending, and Posture" - https://www.reportlinker.com/p06276201/?utm_source=GNW





In the process, security issues were initially pushed aside or ignored altogether in the rush to enable remote workers and protect productivity.That resulted in many organizations unintentionally increasing cyber risk and needing to reexamine security postures.



This study surveyed budget influencing executives in the United States. The respondent profile is 30% C-level executives, 17% executive management, 21% director-level, 12% middle management, 10% senior management, and 10% manager-level.



This research provides a glimpse inside the minds of cybersecurity technology end users to determine what concerns them, what their security posture is, and what is most important to them when making purchasing decisions. It also provides insight on the security implications for American companies as a new and far-reaching second Cold War has erupted between the United States and Russia as a result of the Russo-Ukrainian war.

Author: Jarad Carleton

Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p06276201/?utm_source=GNW



About Reportlinker

ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.



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New York, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Reportlinker.com announces the release of the report "Global Vaccine Growth Opportunities" - https://www.reportlinker.com/p06276195/?utm_source=GNW





Spurred by the ongoing pandemic, vaccine developers have accelerated the pace of transformation, and the concepts of manufacturing decentralization, digitization of supply-chain, and increased outsourcing have taken center stage. Moreover, companies entering into public-private-partnerships to capitalize on the current situation are likely to establish synergistic relationships at all levels. The new vision in 2022 is focused on government authorities having several shifts in vaccine development programs and reaching zero-dose children to attain vaccination equity in emerging economies. The tailored and targeted approach used by logistics companies for individual vaccines is providing catalytic support to vendors in the vaccine industry. The adoption of innovative technologies and supply-chain resilience by manufacturers to improve their strategic position in the global vaccine market, while ensuring the accessibility of vaccines remains outcome-based in countries with unmet needs, is a prominently emerging business model. The rising focus on prophylactic management of COVID-19 in 2021-2022 is anticipated to shift toward novel delivery modes of traditional vaccines and on highly prevalent disease areas, such as RSV, HIV, and cancer. Technology transfer is crucial for outsourcing to CDMOs, and the shift toward the development of patient-centric models for vaccine delivery is paramount.

Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p06276195/?utm_source=GNW



About Reportlinker

ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.



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New York, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Reportlinker.com announces the release of the report "Digital Oilfield Market Report 2022-2032" - https://www.reportlinker.com/p06276322/?utm_source=GNW



The Digital Oilfield Market Report 2022-2032: This report will prove invaluable to leading firms striving for new revenue pockets if they wish to better understand the industry and its underlying dynamics. It will be useful for companies that would like to expand into different industries or to expand their existing operations in a new region.



The increasing need for manufacturing improvements, along with the broad adoption of digital technology in industrial processes, has generated new opportunities



The global oil and gas sector has lately seen a significant shift in supply economics, which has echoed across the supply chain. The increasing need for manufacturing improvements, along with the broad adoption of digital technology in industrial processes, has generated new opportunities to significantly reduce supply chain costs and inefficiencies. These possibilities are encapsulated in Digital Oilfield Technologies, which are a set of tools and disciplines merged into advanced software to improve operating efficiency. The digital oilfield enables operators to immediately identify efficiencies by utilising the data at their disposal, allowing them to better manage their operations and improve corporate performance.



Regional Market Insight



North Americas digital oilfield market share will grow dramatically as a result of increased investments in developing advanced automated technology



North Americas digital oilfield market share will grow dramatically as a result of increased investments in developing advanced automated technology for well operations. The simplicity with which data may be collected and analysed, as well as the deployment of effective wireless technologies, are all essential factors that promote technology adoption.



Recent advances in the digital oilfield in Europe and throughout the world have shifted the emphasis from technology to commercial acumen. Businesses must invest in cutting-edge technology that can manage real-time operations and offer access to previously untapped resources in order to remain competitive. The Digital Oilfields Concept has become a vital component of a successful business model for large oil and gas corporations; it is also essential to raise awareness of the current Digital Oilfield market for smaller producers.



What Are These Questions You Should Ask Before Buying A Market Research Report?

 How is the digital oilfield market evolving?

 What is driving and restraining the digital oilfield market?

 How will each digital oilfield submarket segment grow over the forecast period and how much revenue will these submarkets account for in 2032?

 How will the market shares for each digital oilfield submarket develop from 2022 to 2032?

 What will be the main driver for the overall market from 2022 to 2032?

 Will leading digital oilfield markets broadly follow the macroeconomic dynamics, or will individual national markets outperform others?

 How will the market shares of the national markets change by 2032 and which geographical region will lead the market in 2032?

 Who are the leading players and what are their prospects over the forecast period?

 What are the digital oilfield projects for these leading companies?

 How will the industry evolve during the period between 2020 and 2032? What are the implication of digital oilfield projects taking place now and over the next 10 years?

 Is there a greater need for product commercialisation to further scale the digital oilfield market?

 Where is the digital oilfield market heading? And how can you ensure you are at the forefront of the market?

 What can be the best investment options for new product and service lines?

 What are the key prospects for moving companies into a new growth path? C-suite?



You need to discover how this will impact the digital oilfield market today, and over the next 10 years:

 Our 387-page report provides 234 tables and 231 charts/graphs exclusively to you.

 The report highlights key lucrative areas in the industry so you can target them  NOW.

 Contains in-depth analyse of global, regional and national sales and growth

 Highlights for you the key successful trends, changes and revenue projections made by your competitors



This report tells you TODAY how the digital oilfield market will develop in the next 10 years, and in-line with the variations in COVID-19 economic recession and bounce. This market is more critical now than at any point over the last 10 years.



Forecasts to 2032 and other analyses reveal the commercial prospects

 In addition to revenue forecasting to 2032, our new study provides you with recent results, growth rates, and market shares.

 You find original analyses, with business outlooks and developments.

 Discover qualitative analyses (including market dynamics, drivers, opportunities, restraints and challenges), cost structure, impact of rising digital oilfield prices and recent developments.



This report includes data analysis and invaluable insight into how COVID-19 will affect the industry and your company. Four COVID-19 recovery patterns and their impact, namely, V, L, W and U are discussed in this report.



Global Digital Oilfield Market (COVID Impact Analysis) by Application

 Onshore Oilfield

 Offshore Oilfield



Global Digital Oilfield Market (COVID Impact Analysis) by Solution

 Hardware

 Software & Service

 Data Storage



Global Digital Oilfield Market (COVID Impact Analysis) by Process

 Reservoir Optimization

 Drilling Optimization

 Process Optimization

 Safety Management

 Other Solution



In addition to the revenue predictions for the overall world market and segments, you will also find revenue forecasts for 4 regional and 20 leading national markets:



North America Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market Outlook

 U.S. Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market Forecast & COVID Impact Analysis

 Canada Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market Forecast & COVID Impact Analysis

 Mexico Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market Forecast & COVID Impact Analysis



Europe Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market Outlook

 Germany Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market Forecast & COVID Impact Analysis

 Spain Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market Forecast & COVID Impact Analysis

 United Kingdom Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market Forecast & COVID Impact Analysis

 France Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market Forecast & COVID Impact Analysis

 Italy Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market Forecast & COVID Impact Analysis

 Rest of Europe Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market Forecast & COVID Impact Analysis



Asia Pacific Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market Outlook

 China Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market Forecast & COVID Impact Analysis

 Japan Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market Forecast & COVID Impact Analysis

 India Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market Forecast & COVID Impact Analysis

 Australia Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market Forecast & COVID Impact Analysis

 South Korea Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market Forecast & COVID Impact Analysis

 Rest of Asia Pacific Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market Forecast & COVID Impact Analysis



LAMEA Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market Outlook

 Brazil Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market Forecast & COVID Impact Analysis

 Turkey Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market Forecast & COVID Impact Analysis

 Saudi Arabia Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market Forecast & COVID Impact Analysis

 South Africa Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market Forecast & COVID Impact Analysis

 UAE Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market Forecast & COVID Impact Analysis

 Rest of Latin America, Middle East and Africa Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market Forecast & COVID Impact Analysis



The report also includes profiles and for some of the leading companies in the Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032, with a focus on this segment of these companies operations.



Leading companies and the potential for market growth

 3GiG

 ABB Ltd

 Baker Hughes

 Blue River Analytics

 Cognizant

 EVINSYS INC

 Futureon AS

 Halliburton

 Huvr Inc.

 Infosys Limited

 Intel Corporation

 Larsen & Toubro Ltd

 NOV Inc.,

 OleumTech

 PricewaterhouseCoopers

 Rockwell Automation, Inc.

 Schlumberger

 Schneider Electric SE

 Siemens AG

 Weatherford



Overall world revenue for Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 in terms of value the market will surpass US$25821 million in 2022, our work calculates. We predict strong revenue growth through to 2032. Our work identifies which organizations hold the greatest potential. Discover their capabilities, progress, and commercial prospects, helping you stay ahead.



How the Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market report helps you?



In summary, our 387-page report provides you with the following knowledge:

 Revenue forecasts to 2032 for Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market, with forecasts for application, solution, process each forecasted at a global and regional level discover the industrys prospects, finding the most lucrative places for investments and revenues

 Revenue forecasts to 2032 for 4 regional and 20 key national markets  See forecasts for the Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 market in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and LAMEA. Also forecasted is the market in the US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Germany, France, UK, Italy, China, India, Japan, and Australia among other prominent economies.

 Prospects for established firms and those seeking to enter the market including company profiles for 20 of the major companies involved in the Digital Oilfield Market, 2022 to 2032 Market.

Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p06276322/?utm_source=GNW



About Reportlinker

ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.



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Pune, India, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The global dental adhesive market size is expected to gain momentum owing to the rising prevalence of oral diseases during the forecast period. Fortune Business Insights publishes this information in an upcoming report titled, "Dental Adhesive Market, 2021-2028". Dental adhesives fill the dentures and gaps caused by bone shrinking. These adhesives provide temporary relief from the loosening dentures. According to World Health Organization (WHO), approximately 2.3 billion people suffer from dental caries every year globally. Increasing dental problems are expected to boost the market growth during the projected period.

Industry Development:

December 2020: 3M introduced a two-component system 3M Relyx Universal Resin Cement for dental adhesive application.





Get Sample PDF Brochure:

https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/enquiry/sample/dental-adhesive-market-105043





COVID-19 Impact:

Awareness of Oral Hygiene to Bolster Market Growth

Awareness regarding oral hygiene is increasing as rising cases of coronavirus. This has helped the dental care sector increase productivity by diagnosing and treating people with appropriate treatments. Rising denture issues have supported the product demands in the global market during the pandemic period. However, the restrictions imposed by the government have halted dental care services until a certain period which affected the profitability and revenue generation rate of the industry.

Segments:

The market is divided into cream/paste, powder, and other by product type.

On the basis of application, the market is trifurcated into dentures, pit & fissure, restorative, and others.

Based on end-users, the market is segregated into hospitals & clinics, dental academic & research institutes, and others.

Finally, by geography, the market is categorized into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa.





To get to know more about the short-term and long-term impact of COVID-19 on this market, please visit:

https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/dental-adhesive-market-105043





Dental Adhesive Market Report Coverage:

The report for the dental adhesives market focuses on a detailed analysis of new product launches introduced by the key players. Statistics of dental visits worldwide are assessed to evaluate market growth potential and product reach. Prevalence of oral diseases and awareness of oral hygiene is highlighted further in this report. Essential regulations and guidelines imposed for launching dental adhesives are discussed further, along with critical developments in the industry. Business expansion strategies such as mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships are highlighted further. The impact of covid-19 on the global dental adhesives market is evaluated in the report.

includes adhesives and sealants used in dental industry and dentistry applications. Europe accounts for a major share of the overall dental adhesive market; major factors driving the growth in this region include the rising geriatric population, growing government expenditure on oral healthcare across Europe, and higher reimbursement rates for dental procedures in Europe as compared to other regions.

The dental hospitals & clinics segment is projected to be the largest and fastest-growing end-use segment of the dental adhesive market during the forecast period. Increasing dental tourism forms a major revenue pocket for hospitals & clinics in countries such as South Korea, Brazil, Hungary, China, and India. As compared to other regions, these countries have a large number of private clinics than public clinics and are known for their low treatment costs; they also have a large number of qualified dentists.

Objectives Study of Dental Adhesive Market :

To define, segment, and project the global dental adhesive market, in terms of value and volume

To provide information about the factors (drivers, restraints, opportunities, and industry-specific challenges) influencing the growth of the market

To analyse competitive developments such as capacity expansions, new product launches, alliances, expansions, joint ventures, and mergers & acquisitions in the market

To define, describe, and forecast the market based on application, denture adhesives, and end-use

To analyse and forecast the market size, with respect to five main regions (along with their respective key countries), namely, North America, Europe, APAC, the Middle East & Africa, and South America

To strategically profile key players in the market and comprehensively analyse their core competencies

To strategically analyse micro markets with respect to individual growth trends, prospects, and their contribution to the overall market

To analyse opportunities in the market for stakeholders and provide details of the competitive landscape of the market

Drivers & Restraints:

Rising Prevalence of Oral Diseases to Stimulate Market Growth

The global dental adhesive market growth is expected to rise during the projected period due to the increasing prevalence of oral diseases. According to FDI World Dental Federation, oral diseases affect more than 3.5 billion people globally every year. This is expected to drive the market. Increasing cavity and tooth removal among the population is anticipated to increase product demand. In contrast, the high cost of dental care treatment is likely to restrict the market growth.





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Dental Adhesive Market Regional Analysis:

North America Dominates Market Share Due to Increasing Edentulism Cases

North America is expected to hold the most significant global dental adhesive market share during the forecast period. Launching new products in the region bolsters the market growth and sales rate of the key players in the market. According to the American College of Prosthodontics, 90% of the patients suffering from edentulism have dentures in the U.S., which leads to market growth during the forecast period.

Europe holds the second-largest position in the global market during the projected period. The adoption of dental adhesives in the regional market is expected to improve the sales rate of the products.

Competitive Landscape:

Key Players Launches New Product Range to Propel Market Growth

Forming strategic alliances and partnerships with organisations in supporting sectors will acquire a higher market share. Key players adopt various strategies to strengthen their market position, such as mergers, collaborations, and acquisitions that allow the businesses to develop their product portfolio and enhance overall organisational performance.

List of Key Players Profiled in the Global Market for Dental Adhesives:

3M

Dentsply Sirona Inc.

GlaxoSmithKline Plc.

Procter & Gamble Co.

Ultradent Products Inc.

Ivoclar Vivadent AG

Kuraray Noritake Dental

Tokuyama Dental Corp.

Den-Mat Holdings LLC.





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Fortune Business Insights delivers accurate data and innovative corporate analysis, helping organizations of all sizes make appropriate decisions. We tailor novel solutions for our clients, assisting them to address various challenges distinct to their businesses. Our aim is to empower them with holistic market intelligence, providing a granular overview of the market they are operating in.

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Dublin, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Global Noiseless Tire Market, By Vehicle Type, By Tire Construction Type, By Demand Category, By Price Segment, By Region, Competition Forecast and Opportunities, 2017-2027" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.



The global noiseless tire market is expected to grow at a significant rate during the forecast period. The growth can be attributed to the rising levels of noise pollution and advancements in tire technology. High-end investments by market players for research and development activities and increasing penetration of advanced vehicles are propelling the demand for noiseless tires.



Noiseless tires produce low noise or no noise at high speeds. Noiseless tires are in high demand among consumers as they improve the overall driving experience. While producing the tires after the tire is cured in its mold, manufacturers add a thick layer of foam or sound-absorbing sponge to the inner line of the tire, either as a continuous piece or comprised of several shorter sections to make the tires noiseless.



Increase in Demand for Noiseless Tires in Electric Vehicles Drives Market Growth

Growing environmental concerns and the stringent government policies and norms emphasizing the use of zero-emission vehicles lowering the adverse impact of greenhouse gases on the environment are fueling the sales of electric vehicles around the globe. The development of charging stations and the availability of subsidies and income tax rebates in several developing economies are accelerating the adoption of electric vehicles worldwide. Electric vehicles run on electricity and do not support engines, resulting in no noise while driving the vehicles. Noiseless or quiet tires are in demand among electric vehicle manufacturers as the noise source in electric vehicles is from tires. Surge in electric vehicle production, and with the purchasing power of consumers, the demand for noiseless tires is expected to witness significant growth in the forecast period.



Growing Sales and Production of Luxury Vehicles Supports Market Growth

Luxury vehicle manufacturers are constantly seeking innovative solutions to enhance the performance and comfort of drivers while driving an automobile. High-end investments by the market players in research activities to upgrade the existing infrastructure to lower the interior noise level are paving the way for market growth. The focus of manufacturers to lower the noise from various sources such as panels engine coming into the cabin of an automobile has resulted in a more peaceful ride for driver and passengers. Noise from other sources is minimized in the automobile due to ongoing advancements in technology, making the noise from tires more evident to the driver. Market players are rapidly adopting noiseless technology to provide a serene and comfortable riding experience to drivers.



Market Segmentation

The global noiseless tire market is segmented into vehicle type, tire construction type, demand category, price segment, regional distribution, and company. Based on vehicle type, the global noiseless tire market is divided into two-wheeler, passenger car, LCV, M&HCV, and OTR. Based on tire construction type, the global noiseless tire market is divided into radial and bias. Based on demand category, the global noiseless tire market is divided into OEM and Aftermarket. Based on price segment, the global noiseless tire market is divided into budget, ultra budget, and premium. To analyze the market based on region, the global noiseless tire market is studied in major regions, namely North America, Asia-pacific, Europe & CIS, South America, Middle East, and Africa.



Market Players

Michelin Group, Bridgestone Corporation, Continental AG, The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, Hankook Tire & Technology Co.Ltd., Pirelli & C. S.p.A., Yokohama Rubber Company, Limited, Cooper Tire & Rubber Company are among the major market players in the global platform that lead the market growth of the global noiseless tire market.



Years Considered for This Report:

Historical Years: 2017-2020

Base Year: 2021

Estimated Year: 2022

Forecast Period: 2023-2027

Objective of the Study:

To analyze the historical growth in the market size of global noiseless tire market from 2017 to 2021

To estimate and forecast the market size of global noiseless tire market from 2022 to 2027 and growth rate until 2027

To classify and forecast global noiseless tire market based on product type, application, fuel type, region, and competitive Landscape

To identify dominant region or segment in the global noiseless tire market

To identify drivers and challenges for global noiseless tire market

To examine competitive developments such as expansions, new product launches, mergers & acquisitions, etc, in global noiseless tire market

To identify and analyze the profile of leading players operating in the global noiseless tire market

To identify key sustainable strategies adopted by market players in the global noiseless tire market

Key Topics Covered:



1. Product Overview



2. Research Methodology



3. Executive Summary



4. Impact of COVID-19 on Global Noiseless Tire Market



5. Voice of Customer



6. Global Noiseless Tire Market Outlook

7. North America Noiseless Tire Market Outlook

8. Asia Pacific Noiseless Tire Market Outlook

9. Europe & CIS Noiseless Tire Market Outlook

10. South America Noiseless Tire Market Outlook

11. Middle East and Africa Noiseless Tire Market Outlook

12. Market Dynamics

12.1. Drivers

12.2. Challenges



13. Market Trends and Developments



14. Technological Development By Major Tire Manufacturers



15. Competitive Landscape

15.1. Company Profiles (Partial List of Leading Companies)

15.1.1. Michelin Group

15.1.2. Bridgestone Corporation

15.1.3. Continental AG

15.1.4. The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company

15.1.5. Hankook Tire & Technology Co. Ltd.

15.1.6. Pirelli & C. S.p.A.

15.1.7. Yokohama Rubber Company, Limited

15.1.8. Cooper Tire & Rubber Company



16. Strategic Recommendations

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/jbdv0u
Pune, India, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The haptic technology market size is projected to showcase considerable growth in the forthcoming years due to rising use of smart electronics. This information is published by Fortune Business Insights in its report, titled "Haptic Technology Market, 2022-2029". The technology is a kind of three-dimensional transmission technology that uses pressures, movements, or vibrations to create a sensory experience. The market's growth has been fueled by the increasing technology integration into consumer electronics devices.

Multiple Disruption in Production to Decline Sales Amid Pandemic

The coronavirus outbreak has resulted in a sharp decline in the business of haptic technology. The constant disruption of supply chain due to lockdown restrictions resulted in declined manufacturing and sales volume. The uplift of lockdown norms in several regions is expected to restart the operation of production facilities across these regions for manufacturing the product. After the situation normalizes, the product is expected to showcase substantial growth due to the increased consumption of electronic products.





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Market Segmentation

On the basis of component, the market for haptic technology is bifurcated into solution and software. By application, the market is segmented into consumer electronics, robotics, education, research, gaming, healthcare, automotive and transportation, and others. Based on geography, the market is divided into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa.

What Does the Report Contain?

The report has details on all the latest technology available in the market. The technological advances made in the industry has been highlighted and the potential opportunities associated with that. The report establishes the challenges of the market and advices various solution to them. It also mentions the growth stimulating factors, the restraints, consumption pattern, distribution channels, and all other vital information associated with the Haptic Technology Market.

Drivers & Restraints

Increasing Consumption of Electronic Devices to Spur Growth

The increasing demand for electronic devices such as smartphones, tablets, digital watches, headphones, earphones, notepads, and much more is fueling the requirement of energy storing devices. For example, the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSMA) Association projects that the number of unique subscribers is anticipated to be around 5.9 billion by 2025.The multiple advantages of the technology, such as improved touchscreen, audio, and visual impacts in screen touch applications, are likely to contribute to the rapid adoption of the electronics sector.

The growing trend of technology integration in augmented reality-enabled gadgets and gaming applications promises haptic technology market growth.





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Regional Insights

Rising Adoption of Smart Phones in North America to Generate Profits

North America is anticipated to hold a substantial haptic technology market share in the upcoming years. This is because of the high adoption of smartphones in the region. Moreover, as per data by GSMA Intelligence, 80% of the regional population have technology-based smartphones and is expected to grow up to 91% by 2025.

Asia Pacific is projected to showcase considerable growth in the forthcoming years. This is due to the presence of prominent manufacturers in the region and developing countries such as India and China. For example, as per the Indian Brand Equity Foundation, the Indian electronics industry is anticipated to showcase growth at the rate of 41 % by 2020 and reach a landmark of USD 400 billion.

Competitive Landscape

Prominent Players Focus on Product Innovation to Strengthen Their Market Position

The haptic technology market analysis of haptic technology is highly competitive with the presence of multiple prominent manufacturers globally. Several of these manufacturers are multinational companies and have production and sales rights in various regions. In addition to this, heavy investment by the prominent players in research and development has induced a strong dose of innovation in the market and is increasing product launches. The companies are also focused on partnerships with domestic players to expand their footprint across developing countries.

Industry Development:

February 2021: Faurecia and Immersion Corporation authorized a multi-year license agreement that facilitates Faurecia to obtain Immersion's haptic technology solutions. Faurecia will be able to create an interactive, complex haptic user interface that incorporates Immersion Corporation's cutting-edge technology.

List of Key Players Profiled in the Haptic Technology Market:

Citizen Electronics Co. Ltd.

Immersion Corporation

Cree Inc.

Everlight Americas Inc.

LG INNOTEK

Merck KGaA

Lumileds Holding B.V.

Nichia Corporation

OSRAM GmbH

Seoul Semiconductor Co. Ltd.

Stanley Electric Co.

Toyoda Gosei Co. Ltd.





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About Us:

Fortune Business Insights delivers accurate data and innovative corporate analysis, helping organizations of all sizes make appropriate decisions. We tailor novel solutions for our clients, assisting them to address various challenges distinct to their businesses. Our aim is to empower them with holistic market intelligence, providing a granular overview of the market they are operating in.

Contact Us:

Fortune Business Insights Pvt. Ltd.

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UK : +44 2071 939123

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Dublin, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Blood Glucose Device Market, Users Global Forecast 2022-2027, SMBG Components, Industry Trends, Growth, Insight, Impact of COVID-19, Company Analysis" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The report provides a detailed analysis of Self-Monitoring Blood Glucose Devices Industry. The global Self-Monitoring Blood Glucose Devices Market is expected to reach US$ 46.69 Billion in 2027.

Over time, typical lab diagnostic tests have only served to assist physicians in diagnosing disease. Patients with more fluctuating glucose levels, on the other hand, need their levels monitored every day. Also, patients who use insulin need to regularly monitor their blood glucose levels. As a result, a current diabetes care approach involving blood glucose meters by patients to promptly check their glucose levels and provide an accurate assessment of capillary glucose concentration is known as self-monitoring blood glucose (SMBG). Additionally, blood glucose monitoring aids diabetic patients in making daily management decisions such as food consumption, insulin dosage, and physical activity.



Self-Monitoring Blood Glucose Devices Industry is anticipated to expand with a CAGR of 4.12% from 2021 to 2027:

The increased prevalence of diabetes is attributable to the market growth of self-monitoring blood glucose gadgets. Furthermore, lifestyle changes, food choices, increased smoking, and alcohol intake are likely to increase diabetes prevalence rates. Again, as people become more aware of home monitoring and the importance of regular diabetes treatment to lower the risk of hyperglycemia, demand for self-monitoring blood glucose monitors is increasing.



In addition, the government is launching several programs to raise public awareness about early diagnosis. The National Diabetes Education Program (NDEP) collaborated with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the NIH. The National Diabetes Education Program (NDEP) strives to lessen the prevalence of prediabetes by delivering diabetes-related education to an eclectic group of people, including hard-to-reach inhabitants, faith-based communities, ethnic minorities, community-based organizations, and healthcare providers.



COVID-19 Influence on Self-Monitoring Blood Glucose Devices Industry:

The COVID-19 epidemic has augmented the growth of the Self-Monitoring Blood Glucose Devices Market. Due to the pandemic, a few market participants reported an increase in diabetes care revenue. For example, Abbott claimed in June 2020 that their glucose monitoring device FreeStyleLibre accounted for 59.3 percent of the company's sales growth in the first quarter of 2020. With the increased risk of coronavirus transmission among diabetes patients, a new focus has been on home usage monitoring devices to help patients regulate their blood glucose levels. According to the publisher, Self-Monitoring Blood Glucose Devices Market was US$ 36.64 Billion in 2021.



Global Self-Monitoring Blood Glucose Devices Market Segmentation:

The self-monitoring blood glucose devices industry is categorized into Type 1 Diabetes and Type 2 Diabetes perspective for Diabetes Population, Blood Glucose Devices (SMBG) Market (Test Strips, Lancet, Glucose Meter), Blood Glucose Device (SMBG) Users and Reimbursement of Blood Glucose Devices of 17 Countries (United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia, Kuwait, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia)



Competitive Landscape:

The leading worldwide self-monitoring blood glucose market players are Roche Diagnostic, Abbott Laboratories, Dexcom, Inc., Medtronic, B. Braun Melsungen AG, and DarioHealth Corp. According to the data, these firms have a global market presence and hold a significant portion of the market. At the same time, the remaining manufacturers are limited to other local or regional manufacturers. Recent mergers and acquisitions between the participants have aided the corporations in strengthening their market presence.

Key Topics Covered:



1. Introduction



2. Research & Methodology



3. Executive Summary



4. Market Dynamics

4.1 Growth Drivers

4.2 Challenges



5. Global Blood Glucose (SMBG) Market and Users

5.1 Blood Glucose Device Market (Type1 + Type 2) Diabetes

5.1.1 Type 1 Diabetes

5.1.2 Type 2 Diabetes

5.2 Test Strips Market and Forecast

5.2.1 Type 1 Diabetes

5.2.2 Type 2 Diabetes

5.3 Lancet Market and Forecast

5.3.1 Type 1 Diabetes

5.3.2 Type 2 Diabetes

5.4 Meter Market and Forecast

5.4.1 Type 1 Diabetes

5.4.2 Type 2 Diabetes

5.5 Global Diabetes Population (Type1 + Type 2)

5.5.1 Type 1 Diabetes Population

5.5.2 Type 2 Diabetes Population

5.6 Blood Glucose (SMBG) Device Users (Type1 + Type 2)

5.6.1 Type 1 Diabetes Blood Glucose (SMBG) Device Users

5.6.2 Type 2 Diabetes Blood Glucose (SMBG) Device Users



6. Share Analysis - Blood Glucose Device Market, Diabetes Population, SMBG User

6.1 SMBG Market Share

6.1.1 Total SMBG Market Share

6.1.1.1 Type 1

6.1.1.2 Type 2

6.1.2 Test Strips

6.1.2.1 Type 1

6.1.2.2 Type 2

6.1.3 Lancet

6.1.3.1 Type 1

6.1.3.2 Type 2

6.1.4 Blood Glucose Meter

6.1.4.1 Type 1

6.1.4.2 Type 2

6.1.5 Diabetes Population Share

6.1.5.1 Type 1 Diabetes

6.1.5.2 Type 2 Diabetes

6.1.6.1 Type 1 Diabetes

6.1.6.2 Type 2 Diabetes



7. United States



8. United Kingdom



9. Germany



10. Spain



11. Italy



12. Netherlands



13. Norway



14. Sweden



15. Switzerland



16. Australia



17. Kuwait



18. Brazil



19. Russia



20. India



21. China



22. South Africa



23. Saudi Arabia



24. Company Analysis

24.1 Roche Diagnostic

24.1.1 Overview

24.1.2 Recent Developments

24.1.3 Revenue

24.2 Abbott Laboratories

24.2.1 Overview

24.2.2 Recent Developments

24.2.3 Revenue

24.3 Dexcom, Inc.

24.3.1 Overview

24.3.2 Recent Developments

24.3.3 Revenue

24.4 Medtronic

24.4.1 Overview

24.4.2 Recent Developments

24.4.3 Revenue

24.5 B. Braun Melsungen AG

24.5.1 Overview

24.5.2 Recent Developments

24.5.3 Revenue

24.6 DarioHealth Corp

24.6.1 Overview

24.6.2 Recent Developments

24.6.3 Revenue



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/z5mtzk

Attachment
Dublin, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "US Financial Guarantee Market (2022-2027) by Product Type, Enterprise Size, End-User, Competitive Analysis and the Impact of Covid-19 with Ansoff Analysis" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.



The US Financial Guarantee Market is estimated to be USD 6.25 Bn in 2022 and is expected to reach USD 9.66 Bn by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 9.1%.



Market Dynamics

Market dynamics are forces that impact the prices and behaviors of the US Financial Guarantee Market stakeholders. These forces create pricing signals which result from the changes in the supply and demand curves for a given product or service. Forces of Market Dynamics may be related to macro-economic and micro-economic factors. There are dynamic market forces other than price, demand, and supply. Human emotions can also drive decisions, influence the market, and create price signals.



As the market dynamics impact the supply and demand curves, decision-makers aim to determine the best way to use various financial tools to stem various strategies for speeding the growth and reducing the risks.



Market Segmentation

The US Financial Guarantee Market is segmented based on Product Type, Enterprise Size, and End-User.

Product Type, the market is classified into Bank Guarantees, Documentary Letter of Credit, Standby Letter Credit, Receivable Financing, and Others.

Enterprise Size, the market is classified into Small Enterprises, Medium-Size Enterprises, and Large Enterprises.

End-User, the market is classified into Exporters and Importers.

Company Profiles

The report provides a detailed analysis of the competitors in the market. It covers the financial performance analysis for the publicly listed companies in the market. The report also offers detailed information on the companies' recent development and competitive scenario. Some of the companies covered in this report are Asian Development Bank, BNP Paribas, HSBC, Wells Fargo, etc.



Competitive Quadrant

The report includes Competitive Quadrant, a proprietary tool to analyze and evaluate the position of companies based on their Industry Position score and Market Performance score. The tool uses various factors for categorizing the players into four categories. Some of these factors considered for analysis are financial performance over the last 3 years, growth strategies, innovation score, new product launches, investments, growth in market share, etc.



Ansoff Analysis

The report presents a detailed Ansoff matrix analysis for the US Financial Guarantee Market. Ansoff Matrix, also known as Product/Market Expansion Grid, is a strategic tool used to design strategies for the growth of the company. The matrix can be used to evaluate approaches in four strategies viz. Market Development, Market Penetration, Product Development and Diversification. The matrix is also used for risk analysis to understand the risk involved with each approach.



The analyst analyses US Financial Guarantee Market using the Ansoff Matrix to provide the best approaches a company can take to improve its market position.



Based on the SWOT analysis conducted on the industry and industry players, the analyst has devised suitable strategies for market growth.



Why buy this report?

The report offers a comprehensive evaluation of the US Financial Guarantee Market. The report includes in-depth qualitative analysis, verifiable data from authentic sources, and projections about market size. The projections are calculated using proven research methodologies.

The report has been compiled through extensive primary and secondary research. The primary research is done through interviews, surveys, and observation of renowned personnel in the industry.

The report includes an in-depth market analysis using Porter's 5 forces model and the Ansoff Matrix. In addition, the impact of Covid-19 on the market is also featured in the report.

The report also includes the regulatory scenario in the industry, which will help you make a well-informed decision. The report discusses major regulatory bodies and major rules and regulations imposed on this sector across various geographies.

The report also contains the competitive analysis using Positioning Quadrants, the analyst's competitive positioning tool.

Key Topics Covered:



1 Report Description



2 Research Methodology



3 Executive Summary



4 Market Dynamics

4.1 Drivers

4.1.1 Increase in Financial Risk Involved in Business Transactions

4.1.2 Increasing Adoption of Financial Guarantees by SMEs

4.1.3 Digitalization of Banking Procedures to Obtain a Financial Guarantee

4.1.4 Quick Processing of Documents by Banks

4.2 Restraints

4.2.1 Collateral Demanded by Banks

4.2.2 Strict Assessment by The Banks Before Providing Financial Guarantee

4.3 Opportunities

4.3.1 Individuals and Businesses Improving Financial Credibility

4.3.2 Rise in Import and Export Activities in Developing Countries

4.4 Challenges

4.4.1 Risk Exposure



5 Market Analysis

5.1 Regulatory Scenario

5.2 Porter's Five Forces Analysis

5.3 Impact of COVID-19

5.4 Ansoff Matrix Analysis



6 US Financial Guarantee Market, By Product Type

6.1 Introduction

6.2 Bank Guarantees

6.3 Documentary Letter of Credit

6.4 Standby Letter Credit

6.5 Receivable Financing

6.6 Others



7 US Financial Guarantee Market, By Enterprise Size

7.1 Introduction

7.2 Small Enterprises

7.3 Medium-Size Enterprises

7.4 Large Enterprises



8 US Financial Guarantee Market, By End-User

8.1 Introduction

8.2 Exporters

8.3 Importers



9 Competitive Landscape

9.1 Competitive Quadrant

9.2 Market Share Analysis

9.3 Strategic Initiatives

9.3.1 M&A and Investments

9.3.2 Partnerships and Collaborations

9.3.3 Product Developments and Improvements



10 Company Profiles

10.1 Asian Development Bank

10.2 BNP Paribas

10.3 Barclays

10.4 Bank of Montreal

10.5 Citibank

10.6 HSBC

10.7 ICBC

10.8 ICICI bank Limited

10.9 Scotia Bank

10.10 Deutsche Bank

10.11 Wells Fargo



11 Appendix

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/gfaul9

Attachment
Burlington, Ontario, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- CanLift Equipment Ltd., one of Canadas largest privately-owned aerial lift equipment sales and rental companies, celebrates 13 years in business on May 14, 2022.

CanLift has grown exponentially over the last 13 years. Starting in a shared 3,500 square foot space, the initial two founders, Marko and Johnny Dragicevic, have expanded the company to two locations with over 35 staff working for the business. CanLift offers a variety of aerial lift, earthmoving, and material handling equipment with quick and reliable customer service across Ontario.

It has been incredible watching the growth of CanLift since 2009, says Johnny Dragicevic, Managing Partner at CanLift. I cant wait to see what the next 13 years has in-store for our company, team members, clients, and partners. We plan on many more years of providing excellent equipment and unbeatable customer service to our clients.

CanLift is proud of the advancements made to the company over the last 13 years and is committed to providing their customers and team members with continued innovation. The company is also dedicated to giving back to their community in various ways. For its anniversary, the team will be making a cash donation and supplying non-perishable food items to both the Burlington and London Food Banks.

Taking the customer experience to the next level is what made CanLift succeed and differentiate itself from other companies over the past 13 years. In 2019, CanLift expanded its services to offer a turnkey, full service solution to benefit all the companys clients including repair, maintenance, inspections and reconditioning with sandblasting, painting, and parts.

We started as a small, family-owned business in Oakville, that has now grown into a leading provincial construction company powering the aerial lift, material handling, and earthmoving equipment industries, said Marko Dragicevic, Managing Partner at CanLift. It is unbelievable to look back at where we started and where we are headed now.

As a result, given CanLifts history and evolution, it is important to remember its origins, where the company was at the beginning, and where it is going. CanLift has been dedicated to offering quality equipment and an outstanding customer experience from start to finish. The company and its team are committed to being reliable, loyal, and professional with every client that walks through the door.

CanLift will be exhibiting at the Canadian Concrete Expo (CCE) from May 18-19, 2022, at The International Center in booth 4109. Visit the expos website for more information: https://canadianconcreteexpo.com/

Want to read more about what CanLift has achieved over the last 13 years and any future plans? Visit CanLifts website or follow the company on social media.

CANLIFT: Established in 2009, CanLift Equipment Ltd. rents, sells, and services aerial work platforms and material handling equipment. After 13 years, CanLift is proud to be one of the largest independently-owned lift equipment providers in Ontario, Canada and offers a wide variety of construction machinery including boom lifts, scissor lifts, towable lifts, vertical mast lifts, and telehandlers from manufacturers like Skyjack, Genie, JLG, XCMG, CMC and others. CanLifts dedicated team of equipment experts will help you navigate your aerial work platform rental or purchase while ensuring prompt delivery and the best customer service in the industry.

-30-

Attachments
CHICAGO, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The announcement continues a trend of New Yorkers seeking, and receiving, more sustainable and cost-effective energy sources as utility prices surge.

Eligible enrollees across Western New York will be matched with the Portland solar farm, and will receive credits (savings) directly on their monthly utility bills to reflect solar power generated on their behalf. For instance, Solar Simplified customers in Lancaster, NY saved over $75,000 in 2021.

Residents and businesses in National Grid territorywhich includes the Town of Portlandface substantial, locked-in price increases for energy over the next three years. Enrolling in Solar Simplified's Community Solar program offers a welcomed chance to mitigate those price hikes, with solar energy credits reducing enrollees' monthly utility bills.

To ensure that the most in-need customer segments of Upstate New York have the opportunity to enroll, Solar Simplified is reserving a minimum of 20% of its Portland farm's capacity for Low-and-Moderate-Income (LMI) households. These customers, more than most, feel the pain of rising energy prices.

"We're eager to provide tangible help to New Yorkers who want to see their monthly utility bills shrink," said Aviv Shalgi, Co-Founder and CEO of Solar Simplified. "Anyone connected to National Grid New York will be able to harness the power of Community Solar, which means powering their lives without facing unreasonable costs. With our solar farm in Portland, we continue to introduce more New Yorkers to the merits of Community Solar."

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has touted the need for innovative solutions to rising energy bills in the state. With its announcement of the Portland solar farm, Solar Simplified, in collaboration with Abundant, has put forth one more option for those in the farm's vicinity. While Solar Simplified oversees all client-facing operations, Abundant handles the technological side of the solar farm.

Richard Lu, President & CEO of Abundant Energy Solutions, explained how the collaboration between Abundant and Solar Simplified is a natural fit: "We have developed a great partnership with Solar Simplified and their dedication to succeeding at customer acquisition and retention has made our Community Solar development pipeline incredibly efficient," Lu explained. "We are confident in their ability to scale quickly as we continue to expand in New York."

Residents, businesses and municipalities interested in learning more about Solar Simplified and Community Solar can contact Solar Simplified at (888) 420-9831 or cs@solarsimplified.com for details and enrollment information.

About Solar Simplified

Solar Simplified is a Community Solar platform that seamlessly matches homeowners, renters, and businesses with local solar farms. With no annual membership or enrollment fees, upfront costs, or lengthy contracts, Solar Simplified makes connecting to renewable solar energy simple and transparent. In turn, participants help support locally-produced clean energy and save money on their energy bills.

This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com.
TORONTO, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Mindset Pharma Inc. (CSE: MSET) (FSE: 9DF) (OTCQB: MSSTF) ("Mindset" or the "Company"), a drug discovery and development company focused on creating optimized and patentable next-generation psychedelic medicines to treat neurological and psychiatric disorders with unmet medical needs, today announced that it is making headway in progressing its Family 1 lead clinical candidate, MSP-1014, towards clinical trials. Recently, the Company engaged a UK-based Contract Research Organization (CRO), Clerkenwell Health , to prepare for an initial scientific meeting with regulators to discuss the companys initial plans for clinical development.



At Mindset, we are working diligently to advance MSP-1014 through the regulatory process as quickly as possible. We have selected an expert CRO, Clerkenwell Health, to lead the initial scientific discussions with the regulators in the UK as we start to pull together our clinical plans. Were invigorated by this next step and look forward to providing updates along the way, said James Lanthier, CEO of Mindset.

MSP-1014, Mindsets Family 1 lead candidate, in preclinical studies demonstrated an improved efficacy, with reduced potential side effects, and safety profile compared to first-generation drug candidate psilocybin. Given its improved pharmacological profile in preclinical models, Mindset has prioritized moving MSP-1014 to first in human (FIH) studies to confirm human safety, pharmacokinetic profiles and the effective human dose range. If MSP-1014 data translates, Mindset will have one of the first novel psychedelic drugs in human clinical trials with the potential to treat mood disorders, including major depressive disorder, substance misuse disorders and end-of-life angst associated with terminal illnesses, including cancer. The Company is in the process of manufacturing 1kg of pharmaceutical grade product to move into IND-enabling studies and subsequent human clinical trials as early as 2023.

Joseph Araujo, Chief Scientific Officer at Mindset, confirmed, In a side-by-side comparison, our extensive preclinical data shows there is clear differentiation from psilocybin. We are excited to move this drug candidate forward as quickly as possible to human trials to confirm that this data translates into meaningful benefits for patients who are waiting for new medicines.

Mindset continues to perform studies across various preclinical models with MSP-1014, from its Family 1, and its library of next-generation psychedelic compounds to show the differentiation of their novel drug candidates and to build a catalog of translational data as they prepare for human clinical trials. Mindset is developing several novel families of next-generation psychedelic compounds, as well as an innovative process to chemically synthesize psilocybin as well as its own proprietary compounds. The Company is working with Otsukas McQuade Center for Strategic Research and Development on its Families 2 & 4.

About Mindset Pharma Inc.

Mindset Pharma Inc. is a drug discovery and development company focused on creating optimized and patentable next-generation psychedelic medicines to treat neurological and psychiatric disorders with unmet needs. Mindset was established in order to develop next-generation pharmaceutical assets that leverage the breakthrough therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs. Mindset is developing several novel families of next-generation psychedelic compounds, as well as an innovative process to chemically synthesize psilocybin in addition to its own proprietary compounds. The company has a co-development agreement with the McQuade Center for Strategic Research and Development, a member of the Otsuka Pharmaceuticals family of companies, for its short-duration compounds, Mindset Families 2 & 4.

For further information on Mindset, please visit our website at www.mindsetpharma.com .

For more information, please contact:

Investor Contact:

Allison Soss/Tim Regan

KCSA Strategic Communications

Email: MindSet@kcsa.com

Phone: 212-896-1267/ 347-487-6788

Media Contact:

McKenna Miller

KCSA Strategic Communications

Email: MindSet@kcsa.com

Phone: 949-606-6585

Company Contact:

James Lanthier, CEO

Email: jlanthier@mindsetpharma.com

Jason Atkinson, VP, Corporate Development

Email: jatkinson@mindsetpharma.com

Phone: 416-479-4094

Forward-Looking Information

This news release contains certain "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities law. Forward looking information is frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate", "may", "will", "would", "potential", "proposed" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. These statements are only predictions. Forward-looking information is based on the opinions and estimates of management at the date the information is provided and 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. Additional information regarding risks and uncertainties relating to the Company's business are contained under the heading "Risk Factors" in the Company's annual information form for the financial year ended June 30, 2020 dated March 5, 2021. The forward-looking information included in this news release is made as of the date of this news release and the Company does not undertake an obligation to publicly update such forward-looking information to reflect new information, subsequent events or otherwise, except as required by applicable law.

NEITHER THE CANADIAN SECURITIES EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATIONS SERVICES PROVIDER HAVE REVIEWED OR ACCEPTED RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE.
Dublin, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Conveyor Systems Market by Type, Industry, and Load: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2021-2030" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.



The global conveyor system market was valued at $9,113.9 million in 2020, and is expected to reach $15,183.1 million by 2030, with a CAGR of 5.1% from 2021 to 2030. The conveyor system helps in transporting the loads from one point to the other. It helps in saving the labor costs, provides more accuracy, reduces risks, and reduces the error that could be made by humans. It helps in transportation of bulky and the heavier goods. The conveyor systems help in saving time that could be done manually by the humans, and it consists of belt, which is attached to two pulleys. Conveyor systems are used in the airports for transportation of the luggage from one point to another and similarly the conveyor systems are used as escalators.



The major driving factor of the global conveyor systems market is the growing automation for the industries. Automation across the industry helps in saving labor costs & time and increases the productivity. Automation further helps in handling larger volume with lower labor efforts. Automated conveyors help in increasing productivity by providing smart solutions such as handling larger volume of goods in smaller duration of time . In addition, companies are adopting lean manufacturing systems that is leading the companies to increase productivity by decreasing the amount of wastage during the manufacturing process, which leads to improved delivery performance. This results in surge in adoption of conveyor systems.



However, high initial expenses associated with conveyor is restraining the conveyor systems market, due to the cost associated with the supports, wire rope, truss, power source, belt, and hardware. In addition, other than the initial cost, the operation costs and the maintenance costs such as cost of fuel, repairs, insurance, registration, and tire rotation cost restrain the market growth.



On the contrary, the e-commerce industry is growing due the adoption of artificial intelligence in addition with the adoption of virtual reality and modifying the software. Conveyor systems are used in the e-commerce industry, due to their application such as faster delivery, reduced packaging cost, and effective packaging.



The global conveyor system market is segmented into type, industry, load, and region. Depending on type, the market is divided into belt, roller, pallet, overhead, and others. By industry, it is segregated into food & beverages, pharmaceuticals, transport & logistics, manufacturing, automotive, and others. On the basis of load, it is fragmented into bulk and load. Region wise, the market is analyzed across North America (the U.S., Canada, and Mexico), Europe (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and rest of Europe), Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, South Korea, India, and rest of Asia-Pacific), and LAMEA (Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa).



Competition Analysis

The major players profiled in the hot melt equipment market include Caterpillar, Daifuku Co., Fives, Interroll Group, Kardex, Kuka AG (Swisslog Holding AG), Mahindra Tsubaki Conveyor Systems Pvt. Ltd., Murata Machinery, Ltd., Siemens, Taikisha Ltd. Major companies in the market have adopted agreement, product launch, business expansion, partnership, and acquisition as their key developmental strategies to offer better products and services to customers in the conveyor system market.



Key Benefits

The report provides an extensive analysis of the current trends, future estimations, and dynamics of the conveyor systems market

In-depth conveyor systems market analysis is conducted by estimations for the key segments between 2021 and 2030

Extensive analysis of the market is conducted by following key product positioning and monitoring of top competitors within the market framework

A comprehensive analysis of four major regions is provided to determine the prevailing opportunities

The market forecast analysis from 2021 to 2030 is included in the report

The key market players operating in the market are profiled in this report and their strategies are analyzed thoroughly, which help to understand the competitive outlook of the market industry

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 Impacting Factors

3.2.2 Top Winning Strategies

3.2.3 Top Investment Pockets

3.3 Porters Five Forces Analysis

3.3.1 Equal Number of Raw Material Suppliers and Conveyor System Manufactures Maintains the Suppliers Bargaining Power at Moderate Level

3.3.2 Moderate Bargaining Power of Buyers Due to Moderate Switching Costs

3.3.3 Use of Industrial Robots and Automated Vehicles Have Increased the Threat of Substitutes

3.3.4 Need of Economy of Scale Keeps the Threat of New Entrants at Moderate Level

3.3.5 Presence of Global Brands and Plenty of Regional Players Increases the Competitive Rivalry

3.4 Market Dynamics

3.4.1 Drivers

3.4.1.1 Growing Trend of Automation in Industries

3.4.1.2 Lean Manufacturing System

3.4.2 Restraints

3.4.2.1 Huge Initial Investment

3.4.3 Opportunity

3.4.3.1 Growing E-Commerce Industry



Chapter 4 Conveyor Systems Market by Type

4.1 Introduction

4.2 Belt Conveyors

4.2.1 Key Market Trends

4.2.2 Key Growth Factors and Opportunities

4.2.3 Market Size and Forecast

4.3 Roller Conveyors

4.3.1 Key Market Trends

4.3.2 Key Growth Factors and Opportunities

4.3.3 Market Size and Forecast

4.4 Pallet Conveyors

4.4.1 Key Market Trends

4.4.2 Key Growth Factors and Opportunities

4.4.3 Market Size and Forecast

4.5 Overhead Conveyors

4.5.1 Key Market Trends

4.5.2 Key Growth Factors and Opportunities

4.5.3 Market Size and Forecast

4.6 Others

4.6.1 Key Market Trends

4.6.2 Key Growth Factors and Opportunities

4.6.3 Market Size and Forecast



Chapter 5 Conveyor Systems Market by Industry Vertical

5.1 Introduction

5.2 Food & Beverages

5.2.1 Key Market Trends

5.2.2 Key Growth Factors and Opportunities

5.2.3 Market Size and Forecast

5.3 Pharmaceuticals

5.3.1 Key Market Trends

5.3.2 Key Growth Factors and Opportunities

5.3.3 Market Size and Forecast

5.4 Transport & Logistics

5.4.1 Key Market Trends

5.4.2 Key Growth Factors and Opportunities

5.4.3 Market Size and Forecast

5.5 Manufacturing

5.5.1 Key Market Trends

5.5.2 Key Growth Factors and Opportunities

5.5.3 Market Size and Forecast

5.5 Automotive

5.5.1 Key Market Trends

5.5.2 Key Growth Factors and Opportunities

5.5.3 Market Size and Forecast

5.5 Others

5.5.1 Key Market Trends

5.5.2 Key Growth Factors and Opportunities

5.5.3 Market Size and Forecast



Chapter 6 Conveyor Systems Market by Geography



Chapter 7 Company Profiles

7.1 Emerson Electric Co.

7.1.1 Company Overview

7.1.2 Company Snapshot

7.1.3 Business Performance

7.1.4 Operating Business Segments

7.1.5 Strategic Moves and Developments

7.2 Daifuku Co. Ltd.

7.2.1 Company Overview

7.2.2 Company Snapshot

7.2.3 Business Performance

7.2.4 Operating Business Segments

7.2.5 Strategic Moves and Developments

7.3 Dematic Group S. A. R. L.

7.3.1 Company Overview

7.3.2 Company Snapshot

7.3.3 Operating Business Segments

7.3.4 Strategic Moves and Developments

7.4 Interroll Holding AG

7.4.1 Company Overview

7.4.2 Company Snapshot

7.4.3 Business Performance

7.4.4 Operating Business Segments

7.4.5 Strategic Moves and Developments

7.5 Siemens AG

7.5.1 Company Overview

7.5.2 Company Snapshot

7.5.3 Business Performance

7.5.4 Operating Business Segments

7.5.5 Strategic Moves and Developments

7.6 Swisslog Holding AG

7.6.1 Company Overview

7.6.2 Company Snapshot

7.6.3 Business Performance

7.6.4 Operating Business Segments

7.7 Taikisha Ltd.

7.7.1 Company Overview

7.7.2 Company Snapshot

7.7.3 Business Performance

7.7.4 Operating Business Segments

7.8 Vanderlande Industries Holding B. V.

7.8.1 Company Overview

7.8.2 Company Snapshot

7.8.3 Business Performance

7.8.4 Operating Business Segments

7.8.5 Strategic Moves and Developments

7.9 Tgw Logistics Group GmbH

7.9.1 Company Overview

7.9.2 Company Snapshot

7.9.3 Business Performance

7.9.4 Operating Business Segments

7.9.5 Strategic Moves and Developments

7.10 Ssi Schafer AG

7.10.1 Company Overview

7.10.2 Company Snapshot

7.10.3 Operating Business Segments

7.10.4 Strategic Moves and Developments

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/5d31b4

Attachment
New York, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Reportlinker.com announces the release of the report "Collaboration Display Market Research Report by Screen Size, Offering, Resolution, End-user, Application, Region - Global Forecast to 2027 - Cumulative Impact of COVID-19" - https://www.reportlinker.com/p06259875/?utm_source=GNW



The Global Collaboration Display Market size was estimated at USD 690.12 million in 2021 and expected to reach USD 742.46 million in 2022, and is projected to grow at a CAGR 7.76% to reach USD 1,080.67 million by 2027.



Market Statistics:

The report provides market sizing and forecast across five major currencies - USD, EUR, JPY, GBP, AUD, CAD, and CHF. It helps organization leaders make better decisions when currency exchange data is readily available. In this report, the years 2019 and 2020 are considered historical years, 2021 as the base year, 2022 as the estimated year, and years from 2023 to 2027 are considered the forecast period.



Market Segmentation & Coverage:

This research report categorizes the Collaboration Display to forecast the revenues and analyze the trends in each of the following sub-markets:



Based on Screen Size, the market was studied across Above 65 Inches and Up to 65 Inches.



Based on Offering, the market was studied across Hardware and Software and Services. The Hardware is further studied across Cameras, Displays, and Sensors.



Based on Resolution, the market was studied across 1080P and 4K/UHD.



Based on End-user, the market was studied across Corporate Offices, Educational Institutions, and Government Organizations.



Based on Application, the market was studied across Classrooms, Huddle Rooms, Offices, and Open Layouts.



Based on Region, the market was studied across Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, Middle East & Africa. The Americas is further studied across Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and United States. The United States is further studied across California, Florida, Illinois, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. The Asia-Pacific is further studied across Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand. The Europe, Middle East & Africa is further studied across France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, United Arab Emirates, and United Kingdom.



Cumulative Impact of COVID-19:

COVID-19 is an incomparable global public health emergency that has affected almost every industry, and the long-term effects are projected to impact the industry growth during the forecast period. Our ongoing research amplifies our research framework to ensure the inclusion of underlying COVID-19 issues and potential paths forward. The report delivers insights on COVID-19 considering the changes in consumer behavior and demand, purchasing patterns, re-routing of the supply chain, dynamics of current market forces, and the significant interventions of governments. The updated study provides insights, analysis, estimations, and forecasts, considering the COVID-19 impact on the market.



Cumulative Impact of 2022 Russia Ukraine Conflict:

We continuously monitor and update reports on political and economic uncertainty due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Negative impacts are significantly foreseen globally, especially across Eastern Europe, European Union, Eastern & Central Asia, and the United States. This contention has severely affected lives and livelihoods and represents far-reaching disruptions in trade dynamics. The potential effects of ongoing war and uncertainty in Eastern Europe are expected to have an adverse impact on the world economy, with especially long-term harsh effects on Russia.



This report uncovers the impact of demand & supply, pricing variants, strategic uptake of vendors, and recommendations for Collaboration Display market considering the current update on the conflict and its global response.



Competitive Strategic Window:

The Competitive Strategic Window analyses the competitive landscape in terms of markets, applications, and geographies to help the vendor define an alignment or fit between their capabilities and opportunities for future growth prospects. It describes the optimal or favorable fit for the vendors to adopt successive merger and acquisition strategies, geography expansion, research & development, and new product introduction strategies to execute further business expansion and growth during a forecast period.



FPNV Positioning Matrix:

The FPNV Positioning Matrix evaluates and categorizes the vendors in the Collaboration Display Market based on Business Strategy (Business Growth, Industry Coverage, Financial Viability, and Channel Support) and Product Satisfaction (Value for Money, Ease of Use, Product Features, and Customer Support) that aids businesses in better decision making and understanding the competitive landscape.



Market Share Analysis:

The Market Share Analysis offers the analysis of vendors considering their contribution to the overall market. It provides the idea of its revenue generation into the overall market compared to other vendors in the space. It provides insights into how vendors are performing in terms of revenue generation and customer base compared to others. Knowing market share offers an idea of the size and competitiveness of the vendors for the base year. It reveals the market characteristics in terms of accumulation, fragmentation, dominance, and amalgamation traits.



Competitive Scenario:

The Competitive Scenario provides an outlook analysis of the various business growth strategies adopted by the vendors. The news covered in this section deliver valuable thoughts at the different stage while keeping up-to-date with the business and engage stakeholders in the economic debate. The competitive scenario represents press releases or news of the companies categorized into Merger & Acquisition, Agreement, Collaboration, & Partnership, New Product Launch & Enhancement, Investment & Funding, and Award, Recognition, & Expansion. All the news collected help vendor to understand the gaps in the marketplace and competitors strength and weakness thereby, providing insights to enhance product and service.



Company Usability Profiles:

The report profoundly explores the recent significant developments by the leading vendors and innovation profiles in the Global Collaboration Display Market, including Avocor, Benq, Cisco, Clear Touch, Dongguan Riotouch Technology, Elo Touch, Google, Hitachi, IBV Solutions, Infocus, LG Electronics, Luidia, Microsoft, Newline, Panasonic, Planar Systems, Promethean World, Qomo, Samsung Electronics, Senses, Sharp, Smart Technologies, Sony Professional, Specktron, and Viewsonic.



The report provides insights on the following pointers:

1. Market Penetration: Provides comprehensive information on the market offered by the key players

2. Market Development: Provides in-depth information about lucrative emerging markets and analyze penetration across mature segments of the markets

3. Market Diversification: Provides detailed information about new product launches, untapped geographies, recent developments, and investments

4. Competitive Assessment & Intelligence: Provides an exhaustive assessment of market shares, strategies, products, certification, regulatory approvals, patent landscape, and manufacturing capabilities of the leading players

5. Product Development & Innovation: Provides intelligent insights on future technologies, R&D activities, and breakthrough product developments



The report answers questions such as:

1. What is the market size and forecast of the Global Collaboration Display Market?

2. What are the inhibiting factors and impact of COVID-19 shaping the Global Collaboration Display Market during the forecast period?

3. Which are the products/segments/applications/areas to invest in over the forecast period in the Global Collaboration Display Market?

4. What is the competitive strategic window for opportunities in the Global Collaboration Display Market?

5. What are the technology trends and regulatory frameworks in the Global Collaboration Display Market?

6. What is the market share of the leading vendors in the Global Collaboration Display Market?

7. What modes and strategic moves are considered suitable for entering the Global Collaboration Display Market?

Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p06259875/?utm_source=GNW



About Reportlinker

ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.



__________________________
New York, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Reportlinker.com announces the release of the report "Hydraulic Cylinder Market Research Report by Function, Specifications, Bore Size, Application, Industry, Region - Global Forecast to 2027 - Cumulative Impact of COVID-19" - https://www.reportlinker.com/p06257231/?utm_source=GNW



The Global Hydraulic Cylinder Market size was estimated at USD 13.63 billion in 2021 and expected to reach USD 14.55 billion in 2022, and is projected to grow at a CAGR 6.93% to reach USD 20.38 billion by 2027.



Market Statistics:

The report provides market sizing and forecast across five major currencies - USD, EUR, JPY, GBP, AUD, CAD, and CHF. It helps organization leaders make better decisions when currency exchange data is readily available. In this report, the years 2019 and 2020 are considered historical years, 2021 as the base year, 2022 as the estimated year, and years from 2023 to 2027 are considered the forecast period.



Market Segmentation & Coverage:

This research report categorizes the Hydraulic Cylinder to forecast the revenues and analyze the trends in each of the following sub-markets:



Based on Function, the market was studied across Double-Acting Hydraulic Cylinders and Single-Acting Hydraulic Cylinders.



Based on Specifications, the market was studied across Mill-Type Cylinders, Telescopic Cylinders, Tie-Rod Cylinders, and Welded Cylinders.



Based on Bore Size, the market was studied across 50150 MM, <50 MM, and >150 MM.



Based on Application, the market was studied across Industrial and Mobile.



Based on Industry, the market was studied across Aerospace & Defense, Agriculture, Automotive, Construction, Marine, Material Handling, Mining, and Oil & Gas.



Based on Region, the market was studied across Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, Middle East & Africa. The Americas is further studied across Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and United States. The United States is further studied across California, Florida, Illinois, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. The Asia-Pacific is further studied across Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand. The Europe, Middle East & Africa is further studied across France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, United Arab Emirates, and United Kingdom.



Cumulative Impact of COVID-19:

COVID-19 is an incomparable global public health emergency that has affected almost every industry, and the long-term effects are projected to impact the industry growth during the forecast period. Our ongoing research amplifies our research framework to ensure the inclusion of underlying COVID-19 issues and potential paths forward. The report delivers insights on COVID-19 considering the changes in consumer behavior and demand, purchasing patterns, re-routing of the supply chain, dynamics of current market forces, and the significant interventions of governments. The updated study provides insights, analysis, estimations, and forecasts, considering the COVID-19 impact on the market.



Cumulative Impact of 2022 Russia Ukraine Conflict:

We continuously monitor and update reports on political and economic uncertainty due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Negative impacts are significantly foreseen globally, especially across Eastern Europe, European Union, Eastern & Central Asia, and the United States. This contention has severely affected lives and livelihoods and represents far-reaching disruptions in trade dynamics. The potential effects of ongoing war and uncertainty in Eastern Europe are expected to have an adverse impact on the world economy, with especially long-term harsh effects on Russia.



This report uncovers the impact of demand & supply, pricing variants, strategic uptake of vendors, and recommendations for Hydraulic Cylinder market considering the current update on the conflict and its global response.



Competitive Strategic Window:

The Competitive Strategic Window analyses the competitive landscape in terms of markets, applications, and geographies to help the vendor define an alignment or fit between their capabilities and opportunities for future growth prospects. It describes the optimal or favorable fit for the vendors to adopt successive merger and acquisition strategies, geography expansion, research & development, and new product introduction strategies to execute further business expansion and growth during a forecast period.



FPNV Positioning Matrix:

The FPNV Positioning Matrix evaluates and categorizes the vendors in the Hydraulic Cylinder Market based on Business Strategy (Business Growth, Industry Coverage, Financial Viability, and Channel Support) and Product Satisfaction (Value for Money, Ease of Use, Product Features, and Customer Support) that aids businesses in better decision making and understanding the competitive landscape.



Market Share Analysis:

The Market Share Analysis offers the analysis of vendors considering their contribution to the overall market. It provides the idea of its revenue generation into the overall market compared to other vendors in the space. It provides insights into how vendors are performing in terms of revenue generation and customer base compared to others. Knowing market share offers an idea of the size and competitiveness of the vendors for the base year. It reveals the market characteristics in terms of accumulation, fragmentation, dominance, and amalgamation traits.



Competitive Scenario:

The Competitive Scenario provides an outlook analysis of the various business growth strategies adopted by the vendors. The news covered in this section deliver valuable thoughts at the different stage while keeping up-to-date with the business and engage stakeholders in the economic debate. The competitive scenario represents press releases or news of the companies categorized into Merger & Acquisition, Agreement, Collaboration, & Partnership, New Product Launch & Enhancement, Investment & Funding, and Award, Recognition, & Expansion. All the news collected help vendor to understand the gaps in the marketplace and competitors strength and weakness thereby, providing insights to enhance product and service.



Company Usability Profiles:

The report profoundly explores the recent significant developments by the leading vendors and innovation profiles in the Global Hydraulic Cylinder Market, including Actuant Corporation, Bosch Rexroth AG, Burnside Autocyl Ltd, Caterpillar Inc., Eaton Corporation Inc, HYDAC, JARP Industries, Inc., Jiangsu Hengli Hydraulic Co. Ltd., KAPPA Engineering, KYB Corporation, Ligon Hydraulic Cylinder Group, Marrel SAS, Parker-Hannifin Corporation, SMC Corporation, and Wipro Enterprises.



The report provides insights on the following pointers:

1. Market Penetration: Provides comprehensive information on the market offered by the key players

2. Market Development: Provides in-depth information about lucrative emerging markets and analyze penetration across mature segments of the markets

3. Market Diversification: Provides detailed information about new product launches, untapped geographies, recent developments, and investments

4. Competitive Assessment & Intelligence: Provides an exhaustive assessment of market shares, strategies, products, certification, regulatory approvals, patent landscape, and manufacturing capabilities of the leading players

5. Product Development & Innovation: Provides intelligent insights on future technologies, R&D activities, and breakthrough product developments



The report answers questions such as:

1. What is the market size and forecast of the Global Hydraulic Cylinder Market?

2. What are the inhibiting factors and impact of COVID-19 shaping the Global Hydraulic Cylinder Market during the forecast period?

3. Which are the products/segments/applications/areas to invest in over the forecast period in the Global Hydraulic Cylinder Market?

4. What is the competitive strategic window for opportunities in the Global Hydraulic Cylinder Market?

5. What are the technology trends and regulatory frameworks in the Global Hydraulic Cylinder Market?

6. What is the market share of the leading vendors in the Global Hydraulic Cylinder Market?

7. What modes and strategic moves are considered suitable for entering the Global Hydraulic Cylinder Market?

Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p06257231/?utm_source=GNW



About Reportlinker

ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.



__________________________
NEW YORK, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- CGS, a global provider of business applications, enterprise learning and outsourcing services, today announced World Trade Week (NYC), an organization promoting the importance of international trade to businesses across the United States, has recognized CGSs Applications Solutions Division and its BlueCherry Enterprise Suite for market leadership in global supply chain management.



As a company founded and headquartered in New York, this award is especially exciting  were honored to be recognized by World Trade Week NYC as a global supply chain leader, said Paul Magel, President, Applications Solutions division, CGS. In todays market more than ever, visibility, control and management across the entire global supply chain are no longer nice-to-haves, theyre must haves. Our business has grown to more than 500 customers across 20 countries, with over 250,000 global users. In 2021 alone, we added new customers in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Canada and Central America  and expect our international footprint to grow significantly over the next two to three years.

World Trade Week NYC is part of an annual nationwide celebration of international trade observed by business- and trade-related organizations across the United States during May. The mission of World Trade Week NYC is to promote the importance of international trade to the New York City metropolitan area economy. New Yorkers depend heavily on international commerce for their jobs, standard of living and the myriad goods and services available to its diverse population.

Trade organizations, businesses and other stakeholders come together both nationally and locally to promote and facilitate international trade in the U.S. economy. The New York tri-state regions trade and transportation community celebrates World Trade Week throughout the month of May, offering a full agenda of educational seminars, global business networking events and the International Trade Awards Breakfast that recognizes the exemplary achievements by practitioners in the field.

About BlueCherry

The CGS BlueCherry Enterprise Suite provides clients with comprehensive digital supply chain management solutions, available both in the cloud and on-premises, to drive their fundamental business processes. With a focus on the needs of high-growth organizations operating in consumer lifestyle products, retail, home goods, fashion and apparel, BlueCherry is a unified platform that provides supply chain visibility with the latest digital technologies. The BlueCherry Suite addresses the needs of the end-to-end supply chain, from planning and product development to manufacturing and sales.

For more information on the BlueCherry family of solutions, please visit www.BlueCherry.com, email sales@cgsinc.com, or visit our blog at www.cgsinc.com/blog.

About CGS

For nearly 40 years, CGS has enabled global enterprises, regional companies, and government agencies to drive breakthrough performance through business applications, enterprise learning and outsourcing services. CGS is wholly focused on creating comprehensive solutions that meet clients complex, multi-dimensional needs, and support clients' most fundamental business activities. Headquartered in New York City, CGS has offices across North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. For more information, please visit www.cgsinc.com and follow us on Twitter at @CGSinc and @BlueCherryCGS and on LinkedIn.

Media Contacts:

Mark D. Tullio, CGS

newsroom@cgsinc.com
Partnership with TerraPay Provides More Ways to Support Family and Friends in Ethiopia

Newark, NJ., May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- IDT Corporation (NYSE: IDT) - a global provider of fintech, cloud communications, and traditional communications services - today announced that its BOSS Money remittance service now offers direct deposit to approximately 40 million accounts across Ethiopian banks. The expanded service, powered by Terra Pay, enables BOSS Money customers in the United States to send cash directly to the bank accounts of family and friends in Ethiopia for receipt within minutes.

BOSS Money has attracted a loyal following in the Ethiopian diaspora because of our reliable cash pick-up service, low fees, and favorable exchange rates, said Alfredo OHagan, IDTs SVP for Consumer Payments. Now, we are pleased to offer direct deposit to 40 million accounts at Ethiopian banks in addition to cash pick up at over 4,600 branch locations.

BOSS Money customers can transfer up to US$100 to Ethiopia for as low as US$3.99 or up to US$2,999 for as little as US$6.99 through the BOSS Money and Boss Calling apps, while taking advantage of BOSS Moneys ultra-competitive exchange rates. The apps are free on the App Store and on Google Play . Senders utilizing either app or the bossrevolution.com website for the first time pay no fees on transfers up to US$300. Customers in the United States can also send cash from over 1,000 BOSS Money retailers across the country.

BOSS Moneys direct deposit option is available to account holders at the following Ethiopian Banks: Abay Bank, Addis International Bank, Awash International Bank, Bank of Abyssinia, Berhan International Bank, Bunna Bank, Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, Cooperative Bank of Oromia, Dashen Bank, Debub Global Bank, Development Bank of Ethiopia, Enat Bank, Lion International Bank, NIB International Bank, United Bank, Wegagen Bank, and Zemen Bank.

About IDT Corporation:

IDT Corporation (NYSE: IDT) is a global provider of fintech, cloud communications, and traditional communications services. We help families to share, communicate and support each other across international borders. We also enable businesses to transact and communicate with their customers with enhanced intelligence and insight.

Our BOSS Money international money remittance and mobile top-up services offer convenient and reliable value transfers. Our BOSS Revolution calling service provides dependable voice and messaging communications globally. Our National Retail Solutions  (NRS) point-of-sale retail network enables independent retailers to operate and process transactions more effectively while providing advertisers and consumer marketers with unprecedented reach into underserved consumer markets. net2phone s unified communications as a service solution provides businesses with intelligently integrated cloud communications and collaboration tools across channels and devices. Our IDT Global and IDT Express wholesale offerings enable communications service enterprises to provision and manage international voice and SMS services.

About TerraPay :

Headquartered in the Netherlands, TerraPay believes that the smallest payment deserves a borderless journey as safe as the largest. The company has been building an ever-expanding payments highway that empowers businesses to create transparent customer experiences with an uninterrupted, secure, and real-time global passage for every payment, however small or large. Registered and regulated across 26 global markets, TerraPay is a leading global partner to banks, mobile wallets, money transfer operators, merchants, and financial institutions, creating a more expansive and inclusive international financial ecosystem. With access to payments infrastructure that spans the globe, their partners become beacons of the promise of global financial inclusion. For more information, please visit terrapay.com

All statements above that are not purely about historical facts, including, but not limited to, those in which we use the words believe, anticipate, expect, plan, intend, estimate, target and similar expressions, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. While these forward-looking statements represent our current judgment of what may happen in the future, actual results may differ materially from the results expressed or implied by these statements due to numerous important factors. Our filings with the SEC provide detailed information on such statements and risks and should be consulted along with this release. To the extent permitted under applicable law, IDT assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

Contact :

Bill Ulrey

IDT Investor Relations

Phone: (973) 438-3838

E-mail: invest@idt.net

# # #
Camilla Krabbe Kongsted Christensen steps down as employee-elected member of the Board of Directors as she has resigned to take on a position outside NNIT. She is succeeded by alternate Kenn Kikkenborg Jensen as member of the Board of Directors.





Contact for further information

Pernille Fabricius



EVP & CFO

Tel: +45 3077 9500

Media relations:



Tina Joanne Hindsbo

Media Relations Manager

Tel: +45 3077 9578

tnjh@nnit.com

The NNIT Group provides a wide range of IT and consulting services internationally.

In Denmark, where the Group HQ is based, we are one of the leading IT companies, servicing both private and public sector customers across all industries. In the rest of Europe, Asia and USA, we are solely focused on companies within life sciences.

Supporting the entire supply chain, we help optimize internal company processes, production, sales and customer experiences:

We advise, build, operate and support, enabling digital transformation and customers to reap the full potential of their organizations. Our role is to foster innovation and make the mark our customers and we aspire to.

The NNIT Group consists of group company NNIT A/S and subsidiaries Valiance, SCALES Excellis Health Solutions, SL Controls, and prime4services. Read more at www.nnit.com.

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RIchmond, VA, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation (VIPC) announced another round of funding totaling more than $950,000 to 15 Virginia small businesses through its Commonwealth Commercialization Fund (CCF). Since 2012, more than $39 million has been distributed to Virginia startups, innovators, and entrepreneurs through VIPC's CCF program.

This new round of awards marks the first under CCFs private sector program, relaunched in January 2022. This competitive program seeks to fund high-potential, Virginia-based, for-profit technology companies at the pre-seed stage of commercialization and provides grants up to $75,000. Each award is matched by the company at a one-to-one minimum.

VIPCs CCF is Virginias premiere vehicle for putting dollars where many small businesses need it most: early-stage development, says Caren Merrick, Virginias Secretary of Commerce and Trade. The Commonwealth is a unique place for startups to thrive because, unlike many states, we have support mechanisms in place that accommodate funding customer discovery, technology development, pilot programs for proof-of-concept testing, and more. We want to help Virginia companies grow and lead the nation in innovation, opportunity, and job creation.

The following CCF private sector projects have been awarded through April 30, 2022:

Applied Impact Robotics Inc. | Mr. Fred Briggs

Autonomous Robotics for In-Service Crude Oil Storage Tank Inspections, $75,000, Energy, Sterling

BCMstrategy, Inc. | Ms. Barbara Matthews

Deep Technology Research and Commercialization: Applying Machine Learning and Stock Market Metadata Tags to Patented Public Policy Data, $75,000, IT, Woodbridge

CybrBase, Inc. | Mr. Mark Talbot

ICAP Training and Customer Discovery, $20,000, Transportation, Vienna

Evizia Inc. | Dr. Jason Reed

Demonstrate the Precyse Platform's Ability to Provide Genomic Diagnostic Results for Certain Rare Genetic Diseases, $74,928, Life and Health Sciences, Richmond

Grantable, Inc. | Mr. Philip Deng

Grantable.co - SaaS-Enabled Marketplace for Grant Funding and Services, $75,000, IT, Richmond

Happy Active Family LLC dba Happyly | Ms. Caitlin Isler

Happyly Personalization & Public Data Build, $75,000, IT, Arlington

Industrial Intelligence, Inc. | Mr. George Armbruster

Continuous Dust Accumulation Monitor Development, $75,000, Autonomous Systems, Williamsburg

Kinometrix, Inc. | Ms. Devina Desai

Lighthouse Labs Participation, $20,000, IT, Fort Belvoir

Perfusion Medical Inc | Mr. Gerard Eldering

IND Preparation for PEG20k IV Solution for Hemorrhagic Shock, $74,877, Life and Health Sciences, Reston

Resale Global, Inc dba Aravenda | Mr. Randy Howard

Resale Product Catalog Aggregator Project, $75,000, IT, Vienna

Royelles Inc | Ms. Mukami Kinoti Kimotho

Royelles  Game-Based Learning Project, $75,000, IT, Fairfax

SylLab Systems, Inc. | Mr. Bart Slowik

Post Quantum Encryption Scheme for IoT, $75,000, Cybersecurity/Cyber-Physical Systems, Manassas

Team Excel, Inc. | Mr. Johnathan Mayo

Team Excel Business Model Validation, $75,000, IT, Richmond

Terravive, LLC | Ms. Juliana Keeling

Development of a Novel Material to Replace Styrofoam and Eliminate Plastic Pollution, $72,778, Environment, Richmond

Transfoam LLC | Mr. Alec Brewer

Transfoam Business Development Strategy, $20,000, Advanced Manufacturing, Afton

"VIPC's CCF team continues to successfully select and fund diverse and innovative projects with tremendous economic development potential for the Commonwealth, says Bob Stolle, VIPC President and CEO. CCF plays an important role in VIPC's mission to connect innovators with opportunities. CCF recipients are an impressive group and an empowering endorsement of the tremendous talent, creativity, and innovation represented in Virginia."

CCF accepts applications and awards funding on a rolling basis to Virginias small business and academic community. Industry areas of focus include advanced manufacturing, aerospace, agriculture, autonomous systems, communications, cybersecurity and cyber-physical systems, energy, environment, IT (including data science and analytics), life and health sciences, modeling and simulation, nuclear physics, and transportation. For more information on the current funding opportunities and to apply, visit: https://www.virginiaipc.org/ccf-funding-opportunities.

###

About the Commonwealth Commercialization Fund (CCF)

The Commonwealth Commercialization Fund, or CCF, was launched on July 1, 2020 to foster innovative and collaborative efforts in Virginia. CCF combines two State legacy funding programs: the Commonwealth Research Commercialization Fund (CRCF) and the Virginia Research Innovation Fund (VRIF). CCF seeks technologies with a high potential for economic development and job creation that will continue to position the Commonwealth as a national leader in science- and technology-based research, development, and commercialization. As administrator of the CCF, VIPC supports CRCF and VRIF award recipients.

About Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation (VIPC)

Connecting innovators with opportunities. The nonprofit operations arm of the Virginia Innovation Partnership Authority (VIPA), VIPC is the commercialization and seed stage economic development driver in the Commonwealth that leads funding, infrastructure, and policy initiatives to support Virginia's innovators, entrepreneurs, startups, and market development strategies. VIPC collaborates with local, regional, state, and federal partners to support the expansion and diversification of Virginias economy.

Programs include: Virginia Venture Partners (VVP) | Virginia Founders Fund (VFF) |Commonwealth Commercialization Fund (CCF) | Smart Communities | Unmanned Systems | Entrepreneurial Ecosystems | Regional Innovation Fund (RIF) | Federal Funding Assistance Program (FFAP) for SBIR & STTR | University Partnerships | Startup Company Mentoring & Engagement. For more information, please visit www.VirginiaIPC.org. Follow VIPC on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

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NEW YORK, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Starfleet Innotech , Inc. (OTC Pink: SFIO) (" SFIO " or The "Company") caps off the first leg of its US roadshow with a successful showing at the Planet MicroCap conference in Las Vegas, strategic meetings with Silicon Valley partners in Palo Alto. Towards the end of the month, executives from the global conglomerate will be congregating in New York to cement the agreements necessary to establish a more concrete presence in the United States.



While we already have a presence in the United States through our office, key personnel, and strategic partners, our showcase in Las Vegas formally kicks off the next phase of our growth as a conglomerate, said Santiago Arnaiz, General Manager of Communications at SFIO. We recognize the crucial role that North America plays as fertile grounds to stage our global expansion. There are incredibly exciting projects being launched across the SFIO ecosystemin the Philippines, Dubai, Malaysia, and beyondall vital parts of our growth journey. Our job here in the US is to find partners interested in joining us on that journey. The reception so far has been promising.

As a global investment holding company, SFIO is focused on innovation through disruptive collaborations across its three key industries: Food and Beverage (F&B), Real Estate, and Technology. This translates to making strategic investments in high-growth businesses and building synergies across its diverse portfolio in order to provide maximum shareholder value.

SFIO currently maintains offices across New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, the Philippines, and the United States. Over the next few months, the SFIO team will be mobilizing across North America , building on its momentum in Las Vegas and San Francisco, towards establishing a more concrete presence in the region.

Last week, both Arnaiz and Chief Investor Officer Richard De Lima presented SFIO at the Planet MicroCap showcase to an audience of investors, fund managers, and family offices. In Toronto, CEO Jeths Lacson has mobilized a signed partnership with the companys Canadian distributor for Gorgeous Coffee and Epiphany Manuka Honey products . Under this agreement, the companys F&B products will be made available for purchase online through Amazon, and eventually through major retail outlets across North America.

Meanwhile, Chief Technology Officer Richard Prodigalidad met with technology partners in San Francisco and Palo Alto, including biotech wearable developer NeuroSky . Wearables developed by NeuroSky are set to be integrated into SFIOs real estate projects under the Moraya brand of wellness-oriented, tech-enabled townships. Deployed through Project Fort, a community health dashboard service and subsidiary of SFIO, these wearables will gather the data necessary to pioneer entirely new approaches to proactive community care .

In addition to ecosystem partners, Prodigalidad secured commitments to connect the increasing demand for tech talent across Silicon Valley with highly-skilled developers and designers based in the Philippinespositioning SFIO as the central hub in a global innovation ecosystem. More details on this new initiative will be shared in the months to come.

The work continues in connecting with investors and other growth enablers to take SFIO to the next level. We have a full lineup of meetings over the next few weeks, ranging from exploratory chats, follow-up sessions stemming from our recent participation at Planet MicroCap, and deep-dives into partnership agreements, said Arnaiz. It was exciting to get to sit down with our partners in Silicon Valley to kick off our co-creation efforts in technology. Im looking forward to doing the same in New York, representing our businesses like Epiphany Cafe with potential F&B partners.

Among these potential partners are major distributors, retail stores, manufacturers, and cafe franchiseswith whom SFIO hopes to bring its F&B businesses like Epiphany Cafe and Gorgeous Coffee into the country. To support these growth efforts, the company will be engaging with a US-focused IR firm to bolster its traction in this crucial market.

Our goal at SFIO is to bridge promising businesses from emerging economies with crucial growth enablers, many of which are based in the United States, said Arnaiz. Over the last year or so, weve been hard at work championing those promising businesses. Now were shifting our focus to the US, to build the other side of that global infrastructure. While here, well be looking to accomplish three things: strike strategic partnerships with institutional players, increase visibility on our global businesses, and gather the resources we need to get Starfleet soaring.

For media enquiries, please contact:

Craymond Yeong, PR & Marketing Specialist

Starfleet Innotech, Inc.

Phone: (+64) 21 0833 2966

Email: info@sfio.co.nz

Twitter: @SFIO_Inc

Facebook: @starfleetinnotech

YouTube: SFIO

About Starfleet Innotech, Inc.

Starfleet Innotech , Inc. (OTC: SFIO) is a global investment holding company focused on innovation through disruptive collaborations across its three key industries: Food and Beverage (F&B), Real Estate, and Technology. With a strong presence across New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, and the Philippines, SFIO makes strategic investments in high-growth businesses, building synergies across its diverse portfolio to provide maximum shareholder value. Guided by tradition, driven by innovation, and enabled by collaborationSFIO is on a hyper-growth path to build a thriving global business ecosystem, shaping the futures of its core industries.

FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS

The statements contained herein may contain certain forward-looking statements relating to Starfleet Innotech, Inc. Starfleet that are based on the beliefs of Starfleet as well as assumptions made by and information currently available to Starfleets management. These forward-looking statements are, by their nature, subject to significant risks and uncertainties. These forward-looking statements include, without limitation, statements relating to Starfleets business prospects, future developments, trends and conditions in the industry and geographical markets in which Starfleet operates, its strategies, plans, objectives and goals, its ability to control costs, statements relating to prices, volumes, operations, margins, capital expenditures, overall market trends, risk management and exchange rates.

When used herein, the words anticipate, believe, could, estimate, expect, going forward, intend, may, ought to, plan, project, seek, should, will, would and similar expressions, as they relate to Starfleet or Starfleets management, are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements reflect the Starfleets views at the time such statements were made with respect to future events and are not a guarantee of future performance or developments. You are strongly cautioned that reliance on any forward-looking statements involves known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Actual results and events may differ materially from information contained in the forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors, including any changes in the laws, rules and regulations relating to any aspects of Starfleets business operations, general economic, market and business conditions, including capital market developments, changes or volatility in interest rates, foreign exchange rates, equity prices or other rates or prices, the actions and developments of the Starfleets competitors and the effects of competition in the food manufacturer and service sector, technology applications and components, and real estate development. Sales and property management on the demand for, and price of, Starfleets products and services, various business opportunities that Starfleet may or may not pursue, changes in population growth and other demographic trends, including mortality, pandemics, morbidity and longevity rates, persistency levels, Starfleets ability to identify, measure, monitor and control risks in Starfleets business, including its ability to manage and adapt its overall risk profile and risk management practices, its ability to properly price its products and services, including property development capital expenditures and establish reserves for future policy benefits and claims, seasonal fluctuations and factors beyond the Starfleets control. Subject to the requirements of the Listing Rules, Starfleet does not intend to update or otherwise revise such forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. As a result of these and other risks, uncertainties and assumptions, forward-looking events and circumstances discussed herein might not occur in the way Starfleet expects, or at all. Accordingly, you should not place reliance on any forward-looking information or statements. All forward-looking statements herein are qualified by reference to the cautionary statements set forth in this section.
BOSTON, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Spring Lane Capital, a private equity firm focused on providing hybrid project capital for sustainability solutions in the energy, food, water, waste and transportation industries, announced today a $35M project equity commitment to Soluna Computing Inc., a developer of green data centers for cryptocurrency mining and other intensive computing. Spring Lane's commitment will help develop at least three behind-the-meter (BTM) projects designed to convert wasted renewable energy into clean computing services such as bitcoin mining and artificial intelligence. Soluna's total funding for data centers co-located with renewable energy assets has now reached $100 million.

"Soluna is the first company we've seen that is actually using bitcoin operations to directly address the global climate challenge, and we are thrilled to partner with John and his team to create 'additionality' through consumption of wasted renewable energy or 'spilled power,'" said Rob Day, Partner and Co-Founder of Spring Lane Capital. "Soluna's unique offering fixes both crypto's climate related issues and renewable power's grid problem. In an industry beset with greenwashing, Soluna offers a compelling solution for investment banks and technology giants who are increasingly betting on cryptocurrencies but are also concerned about its climate effects. No other developer provides a combination of low-cost mining, an inherent ESG benefit and an ability to transition towards other forms of green computing over time."

"We are thrilled to have a pioneering sustainability project finance firm like Spring Lane Capital support our mission to make renewable energy the world's primary energy source," said John Belizaire, CEO of Soluna Computing, Inc.

Through its solutions, Soluna is facilitating more penetration of renewables onto the grid and true "greening" of cryptocurrencies and data center operations. The developer consumes green power that otherwise would have been "spilled" and never generated because of the limitations of the electricity grid. By providing a reliable, local demand for the power generated by wind and solar farms, the Soluna variable data center solution can significantly boost the bottom line of wind and solar farm developers. This prevents the wind and solar farm from being shut down prematurely, while further encouraging those same developers to bring future additional renewables projects onto the grid.

Cryptocurrencies are a rapidly increasing climate and environmental problem, because of the fast-growing energy consumption required. While many in the cryptocurrency mining industry acknowledge this challenge, to date most of what has been touted as "green bitcoin" do not withstand scrutiny. Beyond cryptocurrency mining in particular, data centers are also a fast-growing consumer of electricity. Traditional data centers are connected to the grid 24/7/365 with a focus on resiliency and thus often rely on a carbon intensive grid. By focusing on frequently curtailed renewable generation, and with their proprietary variable data center design, Soluna is able to consume low-cost renewable energy for more than a majority of its energy while also providing struggling renewable generators with an additional revenue stream, creating true "additionality."

"Until now the few touted green crypto solutions have, in my opinion, been about getting to 'net zero' at best. Soluna has pioneered a way to power crypto using stranded energy assets from wind and solar farms. We knew they were different from our very first meeting, because the Soluna team was focused on solving a major problem for renewable power developers first, and this led them to this variable data center solution. Because it's stranded assets, it's cost effective. And from a green perspective, it solves a huge problem for the wind and solar energy sector while providing a wholly additive green energy solution for crypto, rather than so many other efforts that are either simply buying green power, or even worse are just using green rhetoric."

"The Soluna approach will allow for struggling renewable projects to remain profitable and therefore keep producing renewable power; stimulate further renewable capacity expansion as developers now have additional revenue streams to finance projects; and enhance the reliability of the grid by synchronizing supply and demand. As a result, the primary environmental benefit to the Soluna model will be further penetration of renewables onto the grid, in ways that would not happen without their variable demand solution," Day added.

Today's news follows Spring Lane Capital's announcement in April regarding a second close of approximately $50 million for its second private fund, bringing this fund's total AUM to $200M and Spring Lane Capital's total AUM to $350M. The fund finances entrepreneurs and project developers in the sustainable infrastructure sectors including food & ag, energy, water, waste and transportation. Spring Lane Capital announced a $151M first close of the second fund in November 2021.

About Spring Lane Capital:

Spring Lane Capital is a private equity firm based in Boston, MA and Montreal, QC focused on providing hybrid project capital for sustainability solutions in the energy, food, water, waste and transportation industries. The firm's structured financial model seeks to tap into some of the fastest growing segments of these markets, that more traditional forms of project capital cannot access due to their scale and the limitations of existing investment models. For more information, please visit springlanecapital.com.

Media Contact:

Cindy Stoller

Confluence Partners

917-331-0418

cstoller@confluencepartners.com

This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com.
Orlando, Fla., May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Vacation Innovations (VI or the Company), a leading provider of travel-related products, software, and services, today announced its Holiday Systems International (HSI) Operations Team was awarded the 2022 American Resort Development Association (ARDA) Award for Business Administration or Operations Team.

Vacation Innovations HSI Operations Team, led by Edwin Lugo and Iris Addison, has a significant impact on the performance of the brand and the success of the Company as a whole and was also awarded Best Team in the 2022 Perspective Magazine Awards. The Company acquired HSI in 2020 and has consistently been recognized for delivering superior products and services.

Our HSI Operations Team has played a key role in the success of this acquisition, leading our integration efforts and optimizing our combined products and services to deliver industry-leading platforms and solutions for our clients and resort and developer partners, said Bryan Rand, president of Vacation Innovations. Were proud to have been recognized by ARDA for our teams success and will continue working to innovate and contribute to the vacation ownership industry in meaningful ways.

The ARDA Awards Program recognizes the best nominees in vacation ownership across multiple categories and is one of the highest levels of recognition within the industry. Vacation Innovations was represented this year with two finalists.

Were thrilled to celebrate our teams recognition for all they do to deliver incredible products, services, and experiences within the vacation ownership industry, said Chad Newbold, CEO of Vacation Innovations. This award is a direct reflection of the dedication of our HSI Operations Team, as well as the rest of our organization, and our commitment to serving as a trusted partner within the industry.

Vacation Innovations continues to actively invest in its brands, programs, and technology, launching updates across its portfolio of brands throughout the remainder of 2022 and beyond. The Company is also a strong supporter of the industry, with membership in key industry associations including ARDA, the Asociacion Mexicana de Desarrolladores Turisticos (AMDETUR), the Canadian Resort & Travel Association (CRTA), the Cooperative Association of Resort Exchangers (C.A.R.E.), and more.

About Holiday Systems International

Founded in 1993, Holiday Systems International (holidaysystems.com) is a leading wholesale travel provider and developer of award-winning, travel-related rewards programs and technology, producing some of the most sophisticated software and user interfaces in the travel industry. HSI leverages its strategic relationships with properties and developers to provide nearly 600,000 members with exceptional travel opportunities and experiences. HSI was honored at GNEX in 2020 with the Perspective Magazine Awards for Best Consumer Product, Best Innovation, and Best Technology and in 2021 for Best Overall Company, Best Membership Program, and Best Marketing Professional.

About Vacation Innovations

Founded in 1999, Vacation Innovations (vacationinnovations.com) is a leading provider of travel-related products, software and services. Leveraging advanced digital marketing strategies, sophisticated software solutions, and decades of experience in vacation ownership, VI brings new vacation opportunities to a diverse audience of novice and seasoned travelers alike. The Vacation Innovations family of brands offers a wide range of travel services, including simplified resort rentals, online advertising and marketing products for by-owner timeshare sales and rentals, licensed timeshare brokerage and title transfer services, as well as customized owner services and product solutions for timeshare resorts, resort developers, HOAs and timeshare management companies. VI was honored at GNEX 2022 with the Perspective Magazine Awards for Best Overall Company, Best Membership Program, Best Team, and Best Marketing Professional.

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NEW YORK and AMSTERDAM, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- TransPerfect, the worlds largest provider of language and technology solutions for global business, celebrated its 30th anniversary at the companys ELEVATE global conference held in Amsterdam this past week. The four-day event was capped by an engaging and interactive session with Sir Richard Branson. Additional program keynotes featured Liz Wiseman, author of Impact Players and Multipliers, as well as Natalie Reynolds, author of We Have a Deal.



ELEVATE was TransPerfects largest-ever internal event and the most ambitious professional development initiative in the companys history, with more than 330 sessions led by a combination of internal and external speakers. TransPerfects Chief Technology Officer, Mark Hagerty, was honored by the company with a lifetime achievement award.

At ELEVATE, our goal was to bring all divisions of TransPerfect together to highlight the importance of teamwork and innovation, commented Kevin Obarski, Chief Revenue Officer for TransPerfect. Its essential that we continuously learn and raise our ability to deliver transformative solutions for our clients.

TransPerfect President and CEO Phil Shawe stated, ELEVATE was a rare opportunity for us to come together, train, and collaborate on new ideas that will better support our customers. Special thanks to the TransPerfect team members who led sessions, sharing their knowledge and experience with colleagues.

About TransPerfect

TransPerfect is the worlds largest provider of language and technology solutions for global business. From offices in over 100 cities on six continents, TransPerfect offers a full range of services in 170+ languages to clients worldwide. More than 6,000 global organizations employ TransPerfects GlobalLink technology to simplify management of multilingual content. With an unparalleled commitment to quality and client service, TransPerfect is fully ISO 9001 and ISO 17100 certified. TransPerfect has global headquarters in New York, with regional headquarters in London and Hong Kong. For more information, please visit our website at www.transperfect.com.

Contact:

Ryan Simper +1 212.689.5555

mediainquiry@transperfect.com

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/f7bad777-351b-4009-9ebc-6d5b30eada92
Washington DC, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MEDIA ADVISORY

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media Contact: Sara Schuttloffel

sschuttloffel@impact-net.org

(202) 383-4885

Iron Workers Local 44 Apprentices Test Their Mettle in Apprentice Competition

Who:

Iron Workers Local 44 in (Cincinnati) is holding its annual apprentice competition and open house. The apprentices will put their trade skills to the test in competition with each other including the famous column climb. Iron Workers Local 44 is proud to host the annual competition that is also a great industry networking opportunity for the business community in the tri-state area. Dont miss this opportunity to see ironworker apprentices in action!

What:

The apprentice competition consists of written test, layout instruments, welding, burning, knot tying, rod tying, ornamental, rigging and the column climb. Apprentices will compete against each other putting their skills to the test in rigging, rod tying, and column climb on May 13, 2022. Many Greater Cincinnati Area business leaders and prominent law makers will attend the event including Kentuckys 66th District Representative Ed Massey.

When:

May 13, 2022

9:00a.m. to 2:00p.m.

Agenda

9:00a.m. - 10:00a.m. Breakfast / Meet and Greet

10:00a.m. - 12:00p.m. Rigging competition

10:00a.m. - 12:00p.m Rod tying competition

12:00p.m. Column climb competition

12:30p.m. - 2:00p.m. Lunch and awards ceremony

Where:

Iron Workers Local 44 Training Center

1125 Victory Place, Hebron, Ky. 41048

Contact Sara Schuttloffel at sschuttloffel@impact-net.org or (202) 383-4885 for all media inquiries.

The International Association of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental and Reinforcing Iron Workers or the Iron Workers (IW) represents 130,000 ironworkers in North America who work in construction on bridges; structural steel; ornamental, architectural, and miscellaneous metals; rebar; and in shops. Its mission is to improve the working conditions of its members while promoting constructive relationships with their employers to increase work opportunities.
MIAMI, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Plaka, the go-to brand for high-quality woven sandals for women, is introducing two models from their comfort collection - Relief Flip Flops and Lagoon Sandals - just in time for the 2022 warm-weather season.

With over 2,500 Five-star reviews and many fans that loves the style, Plaka Relief is one of the best-selling flip flops on Amazon.

A shopper review: "Super cute!! Comfortable! And they gave me a toe ring with the flip flops.  Going back to order more colors and other styles. Love love love these."

The Plaka comfort collection sandals feature a patent-pending design sole that makes them extremely comfortable to wear every day, wherever a wearer goes. Plaka's sandals also reduce back and heel pain with superior arch support.

The flip flops and sandals, which are ideal for feet with narrow to medium width, are perfect for working from home, running errands, exploring local towns, or relaxing at the beach.

Plaka founder and CEO Sagi Ahiel said, "We pay great attention to the needs of our customers. Our comfort sandals were a big hit last year, and in response to the enthusiastic reviews we received, we have decided to add two beautiful models to the comfort series this spring."

Plaka sandals for women are the height of fashion without comprising on comfort. They complement any summer look, from a formal dressy outfit to casual boho beach chic. They are comfortable enough to wear while gliding gracefully through the airport and classy enough for a cruise, wedding, or an evening out on the piazza.

Prior to designing the new models, Plaka had been winning rave reviews from consumers and writers.

A writer for Travel + Leisure magazine shared, "The editor-loved shoe brand put its inventive spin on the casual footwear style, designing flip-flops that not only look super cute on, but also cushion your arches for optimal support  meaning you'll remain comfortable all day, whether you're at the pool, exploring a new city, or navigating the airport."

US Weekly wrote, "A really good pair of sandals is equal parts chic as it is comfortable, and we'll want to wear everywhere. That's exactly what the Plaka Flat Sandals are! This five-star Plaka sandal is basically a vacation in a shoe! The beachy design was inspired after the U.S.-based company visited Crete Island in Greece. The high-quality rope sandal was handcrafted with love and features a braided upper design. Now, it's not that uncomfortable rope that's tight and unflattering. This rope forms to each and every foot and stretches just enough without overstretching. Our feet will feel comfortable and secure when slipping into this pair."

Plaka sandals are available on Amazon and in selected boutiques around the nation.

For more information about the sandals, contact us at info@plaka-sandals.com

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Aurora, Colo., May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Colorado State University Global (CSU Global) President Pamela Toney has named Dr. Sandy Jones as the institutions new Vice President of Strategic Engagement. Her appointment was effective as of May 1. In her role, Dr. Jones will drive the universitys brand and reputation management, grow strategic partnerships with organizations at regional and national levels, and guide an impactful and seamless enrollment experience for prospective students.

As VP of Strategic Engagement, Dr. Jones will oversee marketing, communications, external relations, alumni relations, strategic partnerships, and enrollment. Her appointment signals CSU Globals increased focus on strengthening its ties in the community and developing partnerships with a variety of organizations from industry employers to service nonprofits, elevating opportunities for both its students and stakeholders.

Since Dr. Jones first joined us, she has been a catalyst for positive change, innovation, and high levels of performance. She embodies all of the attributes needed for this position, as well as brings a wealth of experience in higher education, said CSU Global President Pamela Toney. Our goal is to build and expand our relationships with community and industry partners to provide the best possible experience for our students, staff, faculty, and alumni. Dr. Jones is the right person to lead the charge.

Dr. Jones joined CSU Global in 2020 as the Director of Communications and External Relations, where she drove the universitys media and community relations, as well as internal communications. Dr. Jones began her career at the University of Southern California, overseeing student life on campus, and she continued this work at the University of California, Irvine where she served as Executive Director of all student fee-funded services and programs. From there, Dr. Jones transitioned to leadership of the community and local government relations office at UC Irvine where she earned several awards for her community engagement work, including two awards of excellence from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and a Golden Hub of Innovation award from a regional government association.

I am eager to take on this new role and continue to spread awareness of our university among students and potential partners on a global scale, said Dr. Jones. I would like to thank President Toney and the CSU Global community for this opportunity. I look forward to building more opportunities for alumni to mentor our students, partnering with the business community to become co-creators of their talent, and expanding awareness of CSU Globals many unique offerings. I am proud to be part of an institution that makes earning a degree possible for so many first-generation students and lifelong learners, and puts students success at the forefront of every decision.

A long-time supporter of the community, Dr. Jones holds several memberships in Aurora- and Denver-based organizations. She is currently in the 2021-2022 cohort of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce Leadership Denver, and is on the Board of Directors of The Butterfly Foundation, a nonprofit that aids those who have undergone tragedy and hardship. In addition to other accolades, Dr. Jones was honored as "Top 40 Under 40 to Watch" in 2012 by OC Metro magazine.

Dr. Jones earned a B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she graduated magna cum laude from the honors program; an M.Ed. from the University of Southern California, where she also earned a Remarkable Woman Award; and a Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration & Policy from University of California, Riverside, where she was a Chancellor's Distinguished Fellow.

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About Colorado State University Global

Colorado State University Global (CSU Global) offers career-relevant bachelors and masters degree programs for working adults and nontraditional learners. As the first 100% online, fully accredited public university in the United States, CSU Global is focused on student success as its number one priority. Embracing the land grant heritage as part of the Colorado State University System, CSU Global sets the standard for quality and innovation in higher education through its expert faculty who are recognized as industry leaders and trained in working with adults in an online learning environment. CSU Global offers accelerated eight-week courses that start every four weeks. Visit CSUGlobal.edu to learn more.
NEW YORK, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Vilcek Foundation is pleased to present Nari Ward: Home of the Brave, Ward's first solo exhibition with the foundation. The exhibition, curated by Vilcek Foundation President Rick Kinsel, will be on view from May 31, 2022, to Feb. 3, 2023.

Nari Ward: Home of the Brave includes a selection of works and installations by the Jamaican-born artist. The exhibition provokes an examination of the values espoused in iconic American symbols, including the American flag and the Statue of Liberty. The individual works invite viewers to question how the concepts of democracy, liberty, and belonging are experienced by immigrants, Black people, and other underrepresented communities whose experiences put them outside the dominant white narrative.

Ward was born in Jamaica and immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of 12; the family settled in Brooklyn, New York. Ward has lived in the New York City area ever since, earning his BA at Hunter College and his MFA at Brooklyn College. He became a U.S. citizen in 2011. Ward received the Vilcek Prize in Fine Arts in 2017 for his body of found-object assemblage artwork that invites both public discourse and intimate dialogue on topics including race, poverty, and Black and Caribbean diasporic identities.

"As a curator," Kinsel says, "it is especially exciting to be able to provide a platform for Ward's work. Ward challenges viewers to consider the conflicting attitudes towards immigration in the United States. In the past several decades we have seen a rise in anti-immigration sentiment across our country. National symbols like the American flag and the Declaration of Independence hold multiple meanings for historically under-represented groups, and Ward's work conveys the dualities within. The American flag can both be seen as the triumphant banner that waves 'O'er the land of the free/And the home of the brave' in our national anthem, and the banner that was carried by extremists that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021."

Symbols are powerful both as they were intended, and as they are appropriated. The power of Ward's work lies in part in his appropriation of everyday objects. Using shoelaces, discarded tires, and washing machine drums, he constructs works that are monumental for the concepts they address. Each of these works invites viewers to examine their own relationship to race, economics, power, and belonging in the United States.

Art historian and curator Erica Moiah James contributed the exhibition essay for Nari Ward: Home of the Brave. An assistant professor of African, Black, and Caribbean art at the University of Miami, James previously wrote on Ward's work for Nari Ward: Sun Splashed; in that volume, she contextualized Ward's work within the Caribbean diaspora, noting "complex relations and subject reformation at the heart of Caribbean modernities are mechanisms that are fundamental to the artist's thinking, formal vocabulary, and aesthetic production."

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Vilcek Foundation produced a video with Ward highlighting the installation of Lazarus (2019) at the foundation. In the one-and-a-half-minute video, Ward discusses the intent of the work, which uses thousands of shoelaces inserted into the gallery's walls to frame selected words from Emma Lazarus' poem, The New Colossus. In the video, Ward discusses how the process of installation is a vital part of how this meaning is conveyed and experienced: "When I was working with the laces, it was really important that they be in the wall; that it was part of the architecture. [Y]our relationship to the work within the space has something to do with how legible the work itself is."

Nari Ward: Home of the Brave is open to the public in the Vilcek Foundation's headquarters at 21 East 70th Street by appointment. Appointments may be made by emailing the Vilcek Foundation's art department at exhibitions@vilcek.org. Learn more and plan your visit via the Vilcek Foundation website, at the following link: Nari Ward: Home of the Brave.

Following the exhibition at the Vilcek Foundation, Nari Ward: Home of the Brave will be available for loan and display at other institutions.

Says Vilcek Foundation Curator Emily Schuchardt Navratil, "With this capsule exhibition, we hope to be able to share Ward's work and the mission and vision of the Vilcek Foundation with a wider audience." She says, "The initiative to develop exhibitions available for loan has grown out of our mission to foster appreciation for the arts, and our commitment to making the works included in the Vilcek Collection accessible to the public."

Learn more and plan your visit today: Nari Ward: Home of the Brave at the Vilcek Foundation

The Vilcek Foundation

The Vilcek Foundation raises awareness of immigrant contributions in the United States and fosters appreciation for the arts and sciences. The foundation was established in 2000 by Jan and Marica Vilcek, immigrants from the former Czechoslovakia. The mission of the foundation was inspired by the couple's respective careers in biomedical science and art history. Since 2000, the foundation has awarded over $6.4 million in prizes to foreign-born individuals and has supported organizations with over $5.5 million in grants.

The Vilcek Foundation is a private operating foundation, a federally tax-exempt nonprofit organization under IRS Section 501(c)(3). To learn more, please visit vilcek.org.

Contact

Elizabeth Boylan

Communications Manager

The Vilcek Foundation

(212) 472-2500

elizabeth.boylan@vilcek.org

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Image 1: Installation view of 'Nari Ward: Home of the Brave'





Two sculptures by artist Nari Ward on view at the Vilcek Foundation, 'TIRED G.O.A.T.' (2017), and 'Lazarus' (2019).









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Vancouver, British Columbia, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ehsAI is excited to announce the release of v2.11. This significant release comes on the heels of the fourth anniversary of the company and the 1-year anniversary of the software itself. ehsAI is an AI-powered software that extracts accurate data from EHS compliance documents, reducing analysis time from days to hours or even minutes.

With this new release comes an incredible 2x faster document analysis speed, making processing of compliance documents even faster. Our R&D team is breaking new ground, as the latest patents just issued illustrate, said Mahdi Ramezani, CTO.

What this means is that EHS professionals can now process a modestly sized permit or regulation in 5 minutes, half the time it took prior to the release. This can be a significant time savings for busy professionals tasked with managing ever-changing regulations such as those related to ESG.

In addition, this release now includes the State Regulation Importer, which makes EHS regulations from across the United States easily accessible to customers. Those users that opt into a beta version will be able to search for and deconstruct any EH&S regulation (covering over 5 million citations across the U.S.) into a checklist of compliance obligations. To date, access and timely updates of regulations at a granular level has been expensive and often unreliable. This new ehsAI feature will help any size company access critical data and create custom monitoring lists.

Intelex, which acquired ehsAI in 2020, will be able to provide this critically important feature to its users via this beta program. This is a game-changer for ILX users needing up to the minute access to any regulation, said Elie Mouzan, Chief Startegy Officer, Intelex.

ehsAI uses advanced algorithms to deconstruct, analyze, interpret and convert complex EHS regulations, permits, and legal documents into actionable compliance requirements. Through API integrations with EHS software solutions that trigger automated workflows, compliance activities and thresholds can be tracked, monitored and reported on, delivering completely automated compliance.

Marcel Guevara, VP of EHS Data for ehsAI, says, This access to state and federal regulations is the first step in a three-step release to provide EHS professionals the platform to access, monitor and keep updated all EHS obligations and tasks.

To learn more about ehsAI and how you can save time and money while ensuring compliance with state and federal regulations, please go to: https://ehsai.com/our-story/

About ehsAI

Based in Vancouver Canada, ehsAI is a fast-paced, well-patented and energetic company committed to integrity, diversity and innovation in EHS compliance management for businesses. ehsAI is a compliance automation technology company that uses artificial intelligence and deep learning to help organizations greatly reduce the costs and risks of permitting and compliance. ehsAIs customers include several top-tier Fortune 500 companies. ehsAIs award-winning innovation and leadership boast recognition from Environment + Energy Top Product of the Year, Environmental Business Journal (EBJ) Business Achievement Award, Environment + Energy Leader 100, BC Tech Technology Impact Award, Rocket Builders Emerging ICT Rockets and more. For more information visit www.ehsai.com.

About ILX

Intelex is a global leader in environmental, health, safety and quality (EHSQ) management software. Since 1992, Intelex employees across the globe have been committed to innovating and enabling organizations to send their employees home safely every day, leaving behind a more sustainable world to the generations that follow, and manage quality so that only the safest and highest quality products make it to market.

Intelexs scalable, web-based platform and applications have helped clients across all industries improve business performance, mitigate organization-wide risk, and ensure sustained compliance with internationally accepted standards. Almost 1,400 customers in 195 countries trust Intelex to power their EHSQ initiatives.
PARSIPPANY, N.J. and TORONTO, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Acrow, a leading international bridge engineering and supply company, today announced the promotion of Gordon Scott to Vice President Business Development and Operations at Acrow Canada. In this new role, Scott will take on the broader responsibility of managing strategic aspects of Acrow Canada and work closely with the executive management team to drive the continued growth of the Acrow Group as a whole. He is based in Acrow Canadas Toronto office and will report to Russ Parisi, Vice President and General Manager North America at Acrow.



Gordon has been instrumental to the growth and development of the organization within the Canadian market, said Parisi. During his tenure as Director of Sales and Operations, Gordon has been a driving force in reshaping and setting direction of our Canadian business. His knowledge and talent in engineering and a deep commitment to the team continues to be a cornerstone to our collective success.

Added Bill Killeen, Acrow CEO, Gordons well-deserved promotion reflects his tremendous success in expanding our business throughout Canada. His engineering expertise and extensive operations experience have given him the background necessary to advance Acrow Canadas position as the premier provider of modular bridging solutions throughout the country.

I am grateful for the opportunity to continue to support the infrastructure needs of Canadians with high-quality bridging solutions, said Scott. It is an honor to work with the entire Acrow team, each of whom has a strong commitment to service excellence.

Since joining Acrow in 2012, Scott has held positions of increasing responsibility, most recently as Director of Operations and Sales. He began his career as a structural engineer with Delcan, a Parsons Company. Scott received a bachelors degree in Civil Engineering from Western University and is a Licensed Professional Engineer.

About Acrow

Acrow has been serving the transportation and construction industries for more than 70 years with a wide range of modular steel bridging solutions for permanent, temporary, military and emergency use. Acrows extensive international presence includes leadership in the development and implementation of bridge infrastructure projects in over 150 countries across Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe and the Middle East. For more information, please visit www.acrow.com.

Media contact:

Tracy Van Buskirk

Marketcom PR

Main: (212) 537-5177, ext. 8; Mobile: (203) 246-6165

tvanbuskirk@marketcompr.com

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/1741b4da-4f0b-4a8c-a3d6-c6a17ef0e0fd
YORK, England, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The UK's National Railway Museum is seeking the help of rail fans across the United States to help celebrate the 100th birthday of one of the world's most recognizable steam locomotives - Flying Scotsman.

Built in Doncaster, England, in 1923, the engine became the first steam locomotive to officially reach 100 mph, capturing the hearts of people across the world.

Flying Scotsman turns 100 in 2023, and the locomotive's current owners, the National Railway Museum, have launched an appeal to find memories and stories of Flying Scotsman. These could feature as part of a new exhibition called Flying Scotsman: 100 Years, 100 Voices.

Charlotte Kingston, Head of Interpretation and Design at the National Railway Museum, said: "Often described as 'the people's engine,' we want to hear what Flying Scotsman means to you, and we particularly want to hear from people who have family memories of Flying Scotsman's famous trip to the United States. We hope that this exhibition will create a lasting and important chapter in the Flying Scotsman story."

Flying Scotsman famously visited the United States and Canada between 1969 and 1973 as part of a tour organized by British owner Alan Pegler. In 1969, Flying Scotsman was fitted with a cowcatcher, a bell and American-style whistle and set off from Boston along the eastern seaboard of the United States, visiting New York, Washington D.C., and ending in Houston, Texas.

The following year Flying Scotsman began another tour of U.S. towns and cities, which included Chicago and the National Railroad Museum at Green Bay, Wisconsin, before travelling to Canada and finishing at Niagara Falls on the Canadian/U.S. border.

The 1970 tour was beset by financial difficulties, and in a bid to balance the books, in 1971 Pegler arranged for the train to travel to Toronto and then San Francisco where it went on display at Fisherman's Wharf. The trip worked well operationally but was a financial disaster, and Alan Pegler was forced into bankruptcy, leaving Flying Scotsman stranded in the USA.

In 1973 Flying Scotsman was brought back to the UK after Sir William McAlpine arranged to pay creditors and to purchase the locomotive.

Flying Scotsman left the Doncaster workshops in February 1923 and was the first locomotive of the newly formed LNER (London and North Eastern Railway). Designed by Sir Nigel Gresley and numbered 1472, the locomotive was named 'Flying Scotsman' the following year when it was picked to attend the British Empire Exhibition in London and renumbered 4472.

To submit your memories of Flying Scotsman, visit: www.railwaymuseum.org.uk/flying-scotsman/your-moments-and-memories

For more information and to arrange interviews:

Simon Baylis, PR & Press Manager, simon.baylis@railwaymuseum.org.uk / (+ 44) 1904 686 299

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Image 1: Flying Scotsman September 1969. Photo credit: John Hillier.





Flying Scotsman being craned onto the ship 'Saxonia' at Liverpool Docks for its journey to the US.

















Image 2: Flying Scotsman in Post, Texas, June 1970. Photo credit: Emery Gulash / Morning Sun.









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English French

EDF Group launches a capital increase reserved for members of the EDF Group Savings Plan and the EDF International Group Savings Plan

Paris, 12 May 2022 - The EDF Group today announces the launch of the "ORS 2022" employee shareholding operation, a capital increase reserved for members of the EDF Group Savings Plan and the EDF International Group Savings Plan.

On 11 May 2022, EDF's Board of Directors decided on the principle of a capital increase reserved for members of EDF's Group Savings Plan (PEG) and International Group Savings Plan (PEGI). The capital increase will be carried out in accordance with the 22nd resolution approved by the General Shareholders' Meeting held today. The maximum amount of the capital increase that will be carried out will be approximately 0.6% of EDF's share capital, this amount may be increased to 0.7% in the event of oversubscription.

This operation is reserved for employees who can prove that they have been employed for at least 3 months1 by the company, by one of the French subsidiaries which are members of the PEG or by one of the subsidiaries whose registered office is in the United Kingdom which are members of the PEGI, as well as for retired employees of one or more participating companies of the EDF Group who still have assets within the PEG or the PEGI.

The capital increase will comprise a structured (or "leveraged") formula with a guarantee of the personal contribution, up to a limit of approximately 0.21% of EDF's share capital, and a so-called classic formula. It will be carried out through a Company Mutual Fund (Fonds Commun de Placement d'Entreprise - FCPE). A matching contribution will be offered to employees for the classic formula.

The shares offered are ordinary shares listed on Euronext Paris (Compartment A), with current dividend rights. The investment in the PEG or PEGI will be subject to a compulsory holding period of 5 years ending on 26 July 2027, except in cases of early release provided for by the regulations. Voting rights will be exercised by the supervisory board of the FCPE.

The subscription price of the shares is expected to be set on 28 June 2022. It will include a 30% discount compared to the reference price determined on the basis of the average opening price of the EDF share recorded on the Euronext Paris market during the twenty trading days preceding the day of the decision to set the subscription price.

The reservation period will run from 16 to 30 May 2022 inclusive and will be followed by a subscription/redemption period from 29 June to 1 July 2022. Delivery of the shares will take place on 25 July 2022 at the latest. The above dates are indicative and subject to change.

For all questions relating to the capital increase, beneficiaries may consult the information brochure and other documents made available to them, in particular on the website www.ors2022.edf.fr. Employees may also contact their human resources manager. Eligible retirees should contact their custodian account holder for details on how to subscribe to the capital increase.

Hedging transactions

The implementation of the structured formula is likely to generate hedging transactions (in particular purchases and sales of shares, share lending and borrowing and the conclusion of call options) on the part of the financial institution acting as counterparty to the exchange transaction (Credit Agricole CIB) - and possibly on the part of other financial institutions acting as counterparty to Credit Agricole CIB - before the implementation of the transaction (in particular during the period for setting the reference price) and throughout the duration of the transaction.

Information intended for the international market

This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy EDF shares. The reserved capital increase will only be carried out in countries where such a transaction has been registered or notified with the competent local authorities and/or following the approval of a prospectus by the competent local authorities, or in consideration of an exemption from the requirement to prepare a prospectus or to register or notify the transaction, where such a procedure is required.

More generally, the transaction will only be carried out in countries where all required registration procedures and/or notifications have been completed, approvals obtained, and procedures for consulting or informing employee representatives carried out.

This press release is not intended for, and should not be copied or sent to, countries in which such a prospectus has not been approved or such an exemption is not available or in which all required registration, notification, consultation and/or information procedures have not yet been completed or authorizations obtained.

Contact

For any questions regarding this transaction, eligible retirees should consult the website www.ors2022.edf.fr. Employees will be informed of the terms and conditions of the capital increase via internal communication channels.

This press release is certified. Check its authenticity on medias.edf.com

About dEDF

As a major player in energy transition, the EDF Group is an integrated energy company active in all businesses: generation, transmission, distribution, energy trading, energy sales and energy services. EDF group is a world leader in low-carbon energy, having developed a diverse production mix based mainly on nuclear and renewable energy (including hydropower). It is also investing in new technologies to support energy transition. EDFs raison detre is to build a net zero energy future with electricity and innovative solutions and services, to help save the planet and drive well-being and economic development. The Group is involved in supplying energy and services to approximately 38.5 million customers (1), of whom 29.3 million in France (2). It generated consolidated sales of 84.5 billion in 2021. EDF is listed on the Paris Stock Exchange.

(1) Since 2018, customers are counted per delivery site. A customer can have two delivery points: one for electricity and another one for gas.

(2) Including ES (Electricite de Strasbourg) and SEI.

1 On the last day of the subscription/redemption period

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Fort Myers, Florida, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Medical oncologist Michael Diaz, MD, President & Managing Physician of Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Institute, LLC (FCS), is the recipient of the Florida Society of Clinical Oncology (FLASCO) Dorothy Green Phillips Legacy Award 2022. The recognition was announced at FLASCOs Annual Gala held on May 6 in Orlando.

The Award, named in honor of Dorothy Green Phillips, who retired in 2019 after serving as FLASCO Executive Director, is presented annually to a FLASCO member whose contributions leave a lasting legacy. Phillips, known nationally as a trailblazer of innovative collaboration and a passionate advocate for cancer patients and providers, personally selected Dr. Diaz as this years honoree.

In announcing her selection, Phillips cited Dr. Diaz tireless efforts to be an example for his peers and an advocate for his patients. Dr. Diaz has spearheaded FLASCOs patient advocacy initiatives, leading to thousands of patients increasing their understanding of their disease journey, she said. He continually educates FLASCO members and partners on legislative policy issues that impact the practice of oncology. His passion has created a mindset that will continue into the future.

Dr. Diaz is a frequent presence in Tallahassee and in Washington, D.C., working to ensure that cancer patients have access to state of the art, affordable cancer care that is close to home. He served as FLASCO President from 2015-2017 and currently serves as Director of Patient Advocacy and as Federal Legislative Committee Chair.

FCS Chief Executive Officer Nathan H. Walcker said, Dr. Diaz is an exceptional physician and recognized nationally as a leader in community oncology. His contributions through the years have had enormous positive impacts that will benefit patients, providers and communities for years to come.

Dr. Diaz joined FCS in 2011 and provides care at two FCS office locations in St. Petersburg, Florida. He was named President & Managing Physician in 2021, after serving as Assistant Managing Physician for the statewide practice. He currently serves on the FCS Executive Board and as Director of Patient Advocacy. He is a Board member and Immediate Past Chair of the FCS Foundation, which provides non-medical financial assistance to qualified cancer patients in Florida.

The Florida Society of Clinical Oncology (FLASCO) is a statewide non-profit organization committed to facilitating and promoting multidisciplinary efforts for oncology practitioners and industry professionals to improve patient care in Florida.

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About Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Institute, LLC: (FLCancer.com)

Recognized by the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) with a national Clinical Trials Participation Award, Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Institute (FCS) offers patients access to more clinical trials than any private oncology practice in Florida. In the past four years, the majority of new cancer drugs approved for use in the U.S. were studied in clinical trials with Florida Cancer Specialists participation.* Trained in prestigious medical schools and research institutes, our physicians are consistently ranked nationally as Top Doctors by U.S. News & World Report.

Founded in 1984, Florida Cancer Specialists has built a national reputation for excellence that is reflected in exceptional and compassionate patient care, driven by innovative clinical research, cutting-edge technologies and advanced treatments, including targeted therapies, genomic-based treatment, and immunotherapy. Our highest values are embodied by our outstanding team of highly trained and dedicated physicians, clinicians and staff.

*Prior to approval

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OTTAWA, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Indigenous scholar, administrator and business leader Dr. Mark S. Dockstator, a member of the Oneida Nation of the Thames, has been appointed Chair of the Nature Foundationthe charitable arm supporting the national research and educational initiatives of the Canadian Museum of Nature. Dockstator also offers a special focus on Indigenous issues, with decades of experience in the public and private sectors, as well as academia.



Dockstator is an associate professor at Trent Universitys Chanie Wenjack School of Indigenous Studies and is a former President of the First Nations University of Canada in Regina, Saskatchewan. He received his doctorate in law from Osgoode Hall Law School, York University in 1994.

We are grateful to benefit from Marks proven leadership skills, critical thinking and deep respect for a world driven by sustainability, says Laura Evans, Executive Director of the Nature Foundation. As one of the first Indigenous persons to lead a national charitable foundation of this calibre, Mark provides a critical voice to weave reconciliations efforts into the Foundations initiatives, especially those focussed on Northern communities.

Dockstator, who lives in Oakville, Ontario, also serves on other boards including the Rideau Hall Foundation, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the Royal Military College.

Im honoured to accept this appointment and welcome discussions with the Foundation on the importance of looking at nature as being all inclusive, with impacts on so many levels. How can we, being a part of nature, bring our skills and interests together to build a sustainable world? says Dockstator. As a Foundation, with nature as its focus, we can guide and interest others to how and why they can be part of a sustainable future.

The overall mission of the Nature Foundation is to inspire investments in nature to fund projects that lead change, strengthen our collective understanding of a healthy natural world, and contribute to a sustainable future. With a particular focus on the Arctic and environmental issues such as climate change and loss of biodiversity, the Foundation elicits substantial philanthropic gifts to fund research in species discovery and change, global knowledge sharing, scientific training, and public education.

Dockstator draws from his personal experience in guiding his commitment to the Nature Foundation. Being First Nations, there is a natural connection to nature, the natural world and issues of sustainability, and that is ingrained in our traditional teachings, he explains. My family is very involved in learning from elders and traditional knowledge, and embedded in that philosophy is how we all have a responsibility as stewards of the land. This should be a driving factor, for humankind, to be stewards of the natural environment.

To date, the Nature Foundation has cultivated more than $6 million in philanthropic gifts. Among the highlights are:

$1 million endowment from Hatch for the Hatch Mineral Sciences Discovery Fund, providing funding for scientific training for the next generation of earth scientists and fieldwork.

$500,000 endowment from Brookfield to support the mentorship of undergraduate students in collections-based research and to advance Arctic field research

Over $1 million in support from Gilles Haineault to assist in acquiring the renowned Haineault Mont Saint-Hilaire Collection of minerals, a national treasure.

of minerals, a national treasure. A legacy gift from Drs. Stewart and Jarmila Peck for a visiting scientist fund and support of collections-based biodiversity research at the Canadian Museum of Nature

Among more recent philanthropic gifts is Foundation support for a new MITACS post-doctoral fellowship at Carleton University, starting in fall 2022. The researcher will investigate the way that the Canadian Museum of Nature and its predecessors marginalized knowledges, peoples, and places through its research and collection practices, with a focus on the Canadian North. The Nature Foundation has also secured $75,000 from a private family foundation for programs that will support the museum as a welcoming and accessible destination for Indigenous peoples.

More about Mark Dockstator

During his career, Dockstator has developed a specific expertise in Indigenous issues, and has served as principal investigator for national and regional research projects in Indigenous health, treaties, Indigenous languages and culture, education, and economic development.

He has served as founding Chair of the First Nations Statistical Institute, Senior Negotiator and Researcher for the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, President and CEO of Rama Economic Development Corporation, Special Advisor to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and Special Advisor to the Chief Commissioner of the Indian Land Claims Commission.

About the Nature Foundation

The Nature Foundation is an independent charitable entity supporting the Canadian Museum of Nature by inspiring philanthropic investments in nature for discovery, research and education to foster solutions for our future. The Foundation and its supporters advance fact-based science through vital funding that empowers the museums research, collections, and educational initiatives.

The Foundations Board is comprised of business leaders and changemakers from across Canada who share a commitment to inspiring investments in nature and a desire to support a sustainable future.

To discover more about the Nature Foundation, visit foundation.nature.ca or contact Laura Evans, Executive Director and Chief Advancement Officer (levans@nature.ca).

The Nature Foundation includes the following Board Directors:



Mark S. Dockstator, Ph.D., Oakville, ON, Chair of Board

Rob Crosbie, C.M., St. Johns, NL, Past Chair

Glenn Ives, FCPA, Vancouver, BC, Chair, Finance Committee

Shilpa Tiwari, Ph.D., Chair, Governance Committee

Don Bubar, M.Sc., P.Geo, Toronto, ON

Matt Creager, Halifax, NS

Sean Finn, Montreal, QC

Alexandria Marcotte, P. Geo, Toronto, ON

Joy Romero, P. Eng., MBA, Calgary, AB

Robyn Seetal, CPA, Calgary, AB

Hon. Monte Solberg, P.C., Calgary, AB

Michelle Valberg, Ottawa, ON

Information for media:

John Swettenham

Vice-President, Marketing and Public Affairs

Canadian Museum of Nature

613-868-8277; jswettenham@nature.ca



Dan Smythe

Head, Media Relation

Canadian Museum of Nature

613-698-9253; dsmythe@nature.ca
English French

May 12, 2022

NOT FOR PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION OR RELEASE, DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, TO U.S. PERSONS OR IN THE UNITED STATES, SOUTH AFRICA, CANADA, JAPAN OR AUSTRALIA

NOTICE TO HOLDERS OF THE EUR 550,000,000 BONDS DUE 2022 ISSUED BY KERING (THE ISSUER) AND EXCHANGEABLE INTO EXISTING ORDINARY SHARES OF PUMA (THE BONDS)

(ISIN: FR0013450483)

Kering hereby notifies Bondholders that, as a result of the Cash Dividend of 0.72 per Share payable to Puma shareholders of record on May 13, 2022 and which constitutes a Surplus Dividend, pursuant to Condition 7(d)(A), the Calculation Agent has determined that the Exchange Price is adjusted from 92.17 to 91.8292, effective May 12, 2022.

Capitalized terms not otherwise defined herein shall have the meanings given to them in the terms and conditions of the Bonds (the Conditions).

This notice does not constitute or form a part of an offer of or solicitation to purchase securities.

About Kering

A global Luxury group, Kering manages the development of a series of renowned Houses in Fashion, Leather Goods and Jewelry: Gucci, Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen, Brioni, Boucheron, Pomellato, DoDo, Qeelin, as well as Kering Eyewear. By placing creativity at the heart of its strategy, Kering enables its Houses to set new limits in terms of their creative expression while crafting tomorrows Luxury in a sustainable and responsible way. We capture these beliefs in our signature: Empowering Imagination. In 2021, Kering had over 42,000 employees and revenue of 17.6 billion.

Contacts

Analysts/investors

Claire Roblet +33 (0)1 45 64 61 49 claire.roblet@kering.com

Laura Levy +33 (0)1 45 64 60 45 laura.levy@kering.com

Julien Brosillon +33 (0)1 45 64 62 30 julien.brosillon@kering.com

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RADNOR, Pa., May 12, 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).



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

CANNOT VIEW THIS VIDEO? PLEASE CLICK HERE

TO VIEW OUR COMPLAINT, PLEASE CLICK HERE

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

Kessler Topaz is one of the worlds foremost advocates in protecting the public against corporate fraud and other wrongdoing. Our securities fraud litigators are regularly recognized as leaders in the field individually and our firm is both feared and respected among the defense bar and the insurance bar. We are proud to have recovered billions of dollars for our clients and the classes of shareholders we represent.

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 announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/f3c5b025-daca-4cf6-a322-70224b3efd94
CHARLOTTE, N.C., May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- LS Energy Solutions (LS-ES), a leading provider of grid-connected energy storage solutions, announces its contract with cleantech integrator Ameresco to supply an AiON-ESS energy storage system for a 6MW/6MWh project in Fort Detrick, Maryland. The project will supplement an existing 18MW solar facility and is expected to be operational in early 2023.



During the projects 20-year operating life, the AiON-ESS units will help the Fort Detrick Army Garrison lower its total electricity spend. This will be achieved by participating in frequency regulation, demand response, and energy supply markets within PJM , the worlds largest wholesale electricity market. The storage system will be microgrid-ready to support Armys resiliency goals at the Garrison in the future.

The project proves the all-around capabilities of LS-ES to meet customer needs with its flexible AiON-ESS platform. LS-ES will also support the project with warranties and replacement services for the AiON-ESS systems to ensure economic optimization throughout the projects lifetime.

We are honored to work with Ameresco to reduce utility costs and enhance the energy infrastructure at the Ft. Detrick Army Garrison, commented Steve Fludder, CEO of LS Energy Solutions. Our AiON-ESS provides all AC and DC energy storage functions in a single, easy to install and commission unit. We look forward to deploying more of these systems with Ameresco in similarly critical applications.



Were thrilled to be working with LS Energy Solutions to provide a dependable, all-in-one energy storage solution for Fort Detrick. said Tony Colonnese, VP of Energy Security Solutions at Ameresco.

To learn more about the Fort Detrick project and other energy storage applications, visit https://www.ls-es.com/ and https://www.ameresco.com/ .

About AiON-ESS

The AiON-ESS, a safe-by-design product, is available in two different scalable versions to meet users' varied energy storage needs. The AiON-ESS Power Series is for 1-hour applications, and the AiON-ESS Energy Series is for 2- to 6-hour applications. Both models combine the company's fourth-generation String Inverter System (SIS) with Tier-1 lithium-ion batteries in a modular format that enables configurations for a number of applications. Two models offer flexibility for applications that range from smaller-scale C&I storage systems to multi-hundred-megawatt utility applications. AiON-ESS systems have passed the rigorous UL9540 approval process, including a multi-point performance test, to meet the highest safety standards for energy storage products.

About Ameresco, Inc.

Founded in 2000, Ameresco, Inc. (NYSE:AMRC) is a leading cleantech integrator and renewable energy asset developer, owner and operator. The companys comprehensive portfolio includes energy efficiency, infrastructure upgrades, asset sustainability and renewable energy solutions delivered to clients throughout North America and Europe. Amerescos sustainability services in support of clients pursuit of Net Zero include upgrades to a facilitys energy infrastructure and the development, construction, and operation of distributed energy resources. Ameresco has successfully completed energy saving, environmentally responsible projects with Federal, state and local governments, healthcare and educational institutions, housing authorities, and commercial and industrial customers. With its corporate headquarters in Framingham, MA, Ameresco has more than 1,000 employees providing local expertise in the United States, Canada, and Europe. For more information, visit www.ameresco.com .

About LS Energy Solutions:

LS Energy Solutions, an LS Group company, is a leading provider of grid-connected energy storage solutions. The company brings over a decade of experience innovating energy storage and related technologies, from the first grid-connected lithium-ion storage system and to now having over 1 GW deployed across 250 projects. The company offers a flexible range of battery and power electronics systems for both front-of and behind-the-meter applications, supported by an advanced global manufacturing and testing infrastructure. LS Energy Solutions is a convenient and competitive one-stop supplier for energy storage, from advanced inverters and associated components to fully integrated all-in-one systems. For more information visit www.ls-es.com .
NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO U.S. NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR FOR RELEASE, PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION OR DISSEMINATION DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, IN WHOLE OR IN PART, IN OR INTO THE UNITED STATES

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Anfield Energy Inc. (TSX.V: AEC; OTCQB: ANLDF; FRANKFURT: 0AD) (Anfield or the Company) is pleased to announce that it has closed the previously announced bought deal private placement offering of 125,000,000 subscription receipts (the Subscription Receipts) of the Company at a price of C$0.12 (Issue Price) per Subscription Receipt for gross proceeds of C$15,000,000 (the Offering). The Offering was co-led by Haywood Securities Inc. (Haywood) and Red Cloud Securities Inc. (together with Haywood, the Underwriters).

The Offering was conducted in connection with the previously announced Transactions (defined below) of the Company, which are aimed at positioning Anfield as a well-funded uranium and vanadium development company solely focused in the southwest United States.

As disclosed in the Companys press release dated April 21, 2022, Anfield has entered into a settlement agreement with Uranium Energy Corp. (UEC) with respect to US$18.34 million owed to Uranium One Americas, Inc. and presently due and owing to UEC (the Indebtedness). UEC has agreed to the full settlement of the Indebtedness for US$9.17 million in cash plus US$9.17 million in securities of Anfield (the Debt Settlement). In addition, Anfield will complete an asset swap to exchange certain of its properties for properties of UEC (the Property Swap and, together with the Debt Settlement, the Transactions). It is anticipated that the Transactions will close in early June, 2022.

The net proceeds of the Offering will be used to fund the cash portion of the Debt Settlement, advancement of the Companys uranium and vanadium assets in the United States and for general working capital purposes.

The Subscription Receipts were issued pursuant to a subscription receipt agreement (the Subscription Receipt Agreement) entered into by the Company, Haywood, on behalf of the Underwriters, and Computershare Trust Company of Canada (the Escrow Agent). Pursuant to the Subscription Receipt Agreement, the gross proceeds of the Offering (less 50% of the Underwriters aggregate cash commission and all of the Underwriters expenses) (the Escrowed Funds) will be held in escrow pending satisfaction of certain conditions, including, amongst others, (a) the satisfaction or waiver of each of the conditions precedent to the Transactions with UEC and (b) the receipt of all required regulatory approvals in connection with the Transactions and the Offering, including the conditional approval of the TSX Venture Exchange (collectively, the Escrow Release Conditions).

Upon the satisfaction of the Escrow Release Conditions, each of the Subscription Receipts will automatically convert into one unit (a Unit) of the Company. Each Unit will be comprised of one common share of the Company (a Common Share) plus one Common Share purchase warrant (each whole such purchase warrant, a Warrant), with each Warrant entitling the holder thereof to acquire one Common Share (a Warrant Share) at a price of C$0.18 for a period of 60 months from the closing date of the Offering (the Closing Date). If the Escrow Release Conditions have not been satisfied on or prior to the date that is 90 days after the Closing Date, the Escrow Agent shall return the Escrowed Funds, including any interest earned thereon, to the holders of Subscription Receipts on a pro rata basis.

As consideration for the services provided by the Underwriters in connection with the Offering, the Underwriters received a cash fee equal to 6% of the aggregate gross proceeds of the Offering (the Cash Fee), with 50% of the aggregate Cash Fee paid at closing of the Offering, and the remaining 50% to be paid to the Underwriters from the Escrowed Funds. As additional consideration, the Underwriters were granted compensation option receipts (the Compensation Option Receipts) equal to 6% of the Subscription Receipts issued. Upon the satisfaction or waiver of the Escrow Release Conditions, each Compensation Option Receipt will be automatically converted, without payment of any additional consideration or further action on the part of the holder thereof, into a non-transferrable compensation option (a Compensation Option), which will entitle the Underwriters to purchase, at an exercise price equal to the Issue Price, one common share of the Company. The Compensation Options may be exercised at any time and from time to time for a period of 24 months following the Closing Date.

The Subscription Receipts were offered by way of private placement in all of the provinces of Canada, and in the United States on a private placement basis pursuant to exemptions from the registration requirements of the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended.

All securities issued in connection with the Offering are subject to a statutory four-month hold period expiring on September 13, 2022 in accordance with Canadian securities legislation.

MI 61-101 Disclosure

The Offering constitutes a related party transaction within the meaning of Multilateral Instrument 61-101  Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions (MI 61-101) as certain directors and officers of the Company purchased an aggregate of 5,625,000 Subscription Receipts. The Company has relied on exemptions from the formal valuation and minority shareholder approval requirements of MI 61-101 contained in sections 5.5(a) and 5.7(1)(a) of MI 61-101 in respect of related party participation in the Offering as neither the fair market value (as determined under MI 61-101) of the subject matter of, nor the fair market value of the consideration for, the transaction, insofar as it involved the related parties, exceeded 25% of the Company's market capitalization (as determined under MI 61-101). Further details will be included in a material change report to be filed by the Company. The Company did not file a material change report more than 21 days before the Closing Date as the details and amounts of the insider participation were not finalized until closer to closing and the Company wished to close the Offering as soon as practicable for sound business reasons.

This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy the Subscription Receipts in the United States. The securities offered pursuant to the Offering have not been and will not be registered under the U.S. Securities Act, or any states securities laws and may not be offered or sold within the United States except pursuant to an available exemption from the registration requirements of the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws.

About Anfield

Anfield is a uranium and vanadium development and near-term production company that is committed to becoming a top-tier energy-related metals supplier by creating value through sustainable, efficient growth in its assets. Anfield is a publicly traded corporation listed on the TSX Venture Exchange (AEC-V), the OTCQB Marketplace (ANLDF) and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (0AD). Anfield is focused on its conventional asset centre, as summarized below:

Arizona/Utah/Colorado  Shootaring Canyon Mill

A key asset in Anfields portfolio is the Shootaring Canyon Mill in Garfield County, Utah. The Shootaring Canyon Mill is strategically located within one of the historically most prolific uranium production areas in the United States, and is one of only three licensed uranium mills in the United States.

Anfields conventional uranium assets consist of mining claims and state leases in southeastern Utah, Colorado, and Arizona, targeting areas where past uranium mining or prospecting occurred. Anfields conventional uranium assets include the Velvet-Wood Project, the Frank M Uranium Project, the West Slope Project, as well as the Findlay Tank breccia pipe. A NI 43-101 PEA has been completed for the Velvet-Wood Project. The PEA is preliminary in nature, and includes inferred mineral resources that are considered too speculative geologically to have economic considerations applied to them that would enable them to be categorized as mineral reserves, and there is no certainty that the preliminary economic assessment would be realized. All conventional uranium assets are situated within a 200-mile radius of the Shootaring Mill.

On behalf of the Board of Directors

ANFIELD ENERGY INC.

Corey Dias, Chief Executive Officer

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.

Contact:

Anfield Energy Inc.

Clive Mostert

Corporate Communications

780-920-5044

contact@anfieldenergy.com

www.anfieldenergy.com



Safe Harbor Statement

THIS NEWS RELEASE CONTAINS FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS. STATEMENTS IN THIS NEWS RELEASE THAT ARE NOT PURELY HISTORICAL ARE FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS AND INCLUDE ANY STATEMENTS REGARDING BELIEFS, PLANS, EXPECTATIONS OR INTENTIONS REGARDING THE FUTURE.

EXCEPT FOR THE HISTORICAL INFORMATION PRESENTED HEREIN, MATTERS DISCUSSED IN THIS NEWS RELEASE CONTAIN FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS THAT ARE SUBJECT TO CERTAIN RISKS AND UNCERTAINTIES THAT COULD CAUSE ACTUAL RESULTS TO DIFFER MATERIALLY FROM ANY FUTURE RESULTS, PERFORMANCE OR ACHIEVEMENTS EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED BY SUCH STATEMENTS. STATEMENTS THAT ARE NOT HISTORICAL FACTS, INCLUDING STATEMENTS THAT ARE PRECEDED BY, FOLLOWED BY, OR THAT INCLUDE SUCH WORDS AS ESTIMATE, ANTICIPATE, BELIEVE, PLAN OR EXPECT OR SIMILAR STATEMENTS ARE FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS. IN PARTICULAR, THIS NEWS RELEASE CONTAINS FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION PERTAINING TO THE FOLLOWING: THE USE OF PROCEEDS FROM THE OFFERING, THE TIMING OF THE CLOSING OF THE TRANSACTIONS, AND THE ABILITY TO OBTAIN THE NECESSARY REGULATORY AUTHORITY AND APPROVALS IN CONNECTION WITH THE OFFERING AND THE TRANSACTIONS.

RISKS AND UNCERTAINTIES FOR THE COMPANY INCLUDE, BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO, THE RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH MINERAL EXPLORATION, AND FUNDING AS WELL AS THE RISKS SHOWN IN THE COMPANYS MOST RECENT ANNUAL AND QUARTERLY REPORTS AND FROM TIME-TO-TIME IN OTHER PUBLICLY AVAILABLE INFORMATION REGARDING THE COMPANY. OTHER RISKS INCLUDE RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH: SEEKING THE CAPITAL NECESSARY TO COMPLETE THE PROPOSED TRANSACTION, THE TIMING OF THE TRANSACTION, INCLUDING TIMING OF THE ESCROW RELEASE CONDITIONS BEING MET, THE COMPANYS ABILITY TO APPLY THE USE OF PROCEEDS FROM THE OFFERING AS ANTICIPATED, FUTURE CAPITAL REQUIREMENTS AND THE COMPANYS ABILITY AND LEVEL OF SUPPORT FOR ITS EXPLORATION AND DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITIES. THERE CAN BE NO ASSURANCE THAT THE COMPANY WILL BE ABLE TO COMPLETE THE PROPOSED TRANSACTION, THAT THE COMPANY WILL OBTAIN REGULATORY APPROVALS REQUIRED FOR THE TRANSACTION OR THE OFFERING, OR THAT THE COMPANYS EXPLORATION EFFORTS WILL SUCCEED OR THE COMPANY WILL ULTIMATELY ACHIEVE COMMERCIAL SUCCESS. THESE FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS ARE MADE AS OF THE DATE OF THIS NEWS RELEASE, AND THE COMPANY ASSUMES NO OBLIGATION TO UPDATE THE FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS, OR TO UPDATE THE REASONS WHY ACTUAL RESULTS COULD DIFFER FROM THOSE PROJECTED IN THE FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS. ALTHOUGH THE COMPANY BELIEVES THAT THE BELIEFS, PLANS, EXPECTATIONS AND INTENTIONS CONTAINED IN THIS NEWS RELEASE ARE REASONABLE, THERE CAN BE NO ASSURANCE THOSE BELIEFS, PLANS, EXPECTATIONS OR INTENTIONS WILL PROVE TO BE ACCURATE. INVESTORS SHOULD CONSIDER ALL OF THE INFORMATION SET FORTH HEREIN AND SHOULD ALSO REFER TO THE RISK FACTORS DISCLOSED IN THE COMPANYS PERIODIC REPORTS FILED FROM TIME-TO-TIME.

THIS NEWS RELEASE HAS BEEN PREPARED BY MANAGEMENT OF THE COMPANY WHO TAKES FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR ITS CONTENTS.
SAN FRANCISCO, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- AltruBio Inc. (AltruBio or the Company), a clinical stage biotech company dedicated to the development of novel therapeutics for the treatment of immunological diseases with high unmet medical needs, today announced that enrollment has been completed for the Phase 1 clinical study of neihulizumab (ALTB-168) in patients with steroid-refractory acute graft-versus-host disease (SR-aGVHD) or treatment-refractory acute graft-versus-host disease with 24 patients enrolled. This study is designed to establish pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, safety and efficacy in patients with SR-aGVHD.



We are pleased with the progress of ALTB-168, which has been clinically validated across multiple inflammatory conditions including psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis, ulcerative colitis, and acute GVHD, said Judy Chou, Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer of AltruBio. Despite headwinds and challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, we completed enrollment ahead of schedule, a testament to our ability as a company to manage challenging clinical trials. Furthermore, we see rapid enrollment of this study as a measure of confidence from physicians and their belief in the potential of ALTB-168 as a safer and more effective treatment for GVHD. We look forward to sharing efficacy and safety data from the Phase 1 study in the coming months.

Jesse Hall, M.D., Chief Medical Officer of AltruBio added, ALTB-168 demonstrated improved patient outcomes in patients with aGVHD, with benefits observed across all organs involved, including in difficult to treat GI disease. With over 190 patients dosed in four different indications, ALTB-168 has been well tolerated and has demonstrate the potential for durable response outcomes. We are encouraged by ALTB-168s first-in-class mechanism of action, and look forward to rapidly advancing our next generation, ALTB-268, antibody to the clinic. ALTB-268 is a more potent antibody and will allow for subcutaneous administration and is intended to target a broad range of chronic autoimmune diseases. We expect to file an IND in the second half of 2022.

ABOUT ALTB-168

Neihulizumab (ALTB-168) is an immune checkpoint agonist antibody that regulates T cell homeostasis. The unique mechanism of action provides a natural regulation of T cell homeostasis that induces cell death preferentially in late-stage activated T cells without affecting resting T cells and early-activated T cells. Because pathogenic T cells underlying the inflammatory conditions are usually in late-stage activated state, eliminating this population of cells can potentially result in controlling autoimmune inflammation of T cell associated diseases, such as GvHD.

ALTB-168 is being evaluated in a Phase 1 study (NCT03327857) to establish the pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, safety and efficacy profiles in patients with steroid-refractory or treatment refractory acute graft-versus-host disease (SR/TR-aGVHD).

ABOUT ALTRUBIO INC.

AltruBio is a privately held biotechnology company headquartered in San Francisco that is focused on developing novel therapeutics for the treatment of immunological diseases with high unmet medical needs. The company has leveraged its deep understanding of the role PSGL-1 plays as an immune checkpoint regulator protein to develop a platform for T-cell mediated immunological diseases. Its first-generation molecule, neihulizumab (ALTB-168), an immune checkpoint agonist antibody targeting PSGL-1/CD162 has achieved proof of mechanism in four autoimmune and inflammatory diseases including ulcerative colitis, steroid refractory acute graft-versus-host disease (SR-aGVHD), psoriatic arthritis, and psoriasis. The next-generation PSGL-1 agonist ALTB-268 is a tetravalent version of ALTB-168 and has demonstrated high potency via the same mechanism, which makes it suitable for subcutaneous administration in the proven indications and is advancing toward IND for multiple autoimmune and inflammatory disorders.

Note on Forward-Looking Statements

Statements made in this news release that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as expects, believes, intends, and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those projected in any forward-looking statement. Specifically, there are a number of important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated, such as the Company's ability to raise additional capital, and risks related to the Company's ability to initiate, and enroll patients in, planned clinical trials. You should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. The Company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events or developments, except as required by law.

Contacts

AltruBio Inc:

+1-415-655-6603

+886-2-2627-2707

info@altrubio.com

Media Contact:

Darren Opland, PhD

LifeSci Communications

+1-646-627-8387

darren@lifescicomms.com
AUSTIN, Texas, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Valiot leaders and Texas government officials alike see the company's AI-based value chain-oriented software as one that will bolster state growth, reshoring, and its overall GDP. Valiot CEO Federico Crespo and other members of his team met with Texas Secretary of State John Scott at the Texas Capitol on April 27 to discuss the role AI has on Texas' overall economy and manufacturing industries. "Connecting these two huge ecosystems is a unique opportunity," says Valiot CEO Federico Crespo. Government officials, along with team leads at Valiot are optimistic that manufacturing AI will provide benefits to the Texas economy. Bridging the local successes found in Monterrey, Mexico.

Texas manufacturing amounts to 13% of the state's annual output. Officials realize that a preferable reallocation of labor makes the state more competitive for long-run projects in a time of rising costs.

Crespo also met with Robert Allen, CEO at Texas Economic Development Corporation, to discuss the success other manufacturers have had by maximizing the use of AI throughout the value chain. At HEINEKEN, the implementation of Valiot's value chain services produced a significant ROI.

Sergio Rodriguez, VP of Operations at Heineken, adds: "The people who make the algorithms do not always know where the value in the facility is; Valiot did." Valiot's AI-powered technology helped the Monterrey-based brewery increase throughput while using existing infrastructure to identify and alleviate a production bottleneck at the filtration stage.

Crespo and Texas officials continue to discuss their shared vision for what this technology could accomplish within Texas manufacturing.

About Valiot: Valiot uses AI to unleash the true value of your value chain. It allows for self-regulated and smarter operations. It reduces human reliability and predicts optimal ways for your factory to run. Based in Austin, Texas, the company is continuously analyzing information to predict and fix production behaviors and bottlenecks. Rather than losing time tracking down handwritten manufacturing logs, rescheduling production sequences, and manually entering information into spreadsheets, operators are empowered to streamline and maximize the efficiency of multiple factories at once while having a better overview of the entire value chain.

Press Contact: Lightyear Strategies

Nima Olumi: nima@lightyearstrategies.com



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Image 1: Valiot & Texas Officials





Valiot Meets with Texas Government Leaders









This content was issued through the press release distribution service at Newswire.com.

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Chicago, IL, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- CHICAGO (May 12, 2022)  The Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance (DBSA), and its Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) will honor three clinicians for their contributions to mental health research at the 2022 Klerman Awards ceremony. The event will be held 5:00 p.m. CDT, Sunday, May 22 at Generations Hall in New Orleans.

The Gerald L. Klerman Awards is the highest honor DBSA gives to members of the scientific community. Presented each year to winners selected by the SAB, the award recognizes researchers whose work expands knowledge of the causes, diagnosis, and treatment of depression and bipolar disorder.

Gerald L. Klerman was an educator, researcher, clinician, author, and administrator who specialized in depression, schizophrenia, panic, and other anxiety disorders. Klerman conducted the first clinical trial showing the efficacy of medication and psychotherapy in preventing recurrent depression and led the first large-scale, multi-site study to understand the diagnosis, course, and genetics of major depression. Jimmy Carter appointed him head of the Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration from 19771980.

The Scientific Advisory Board is proud to recognize the breakthrough work being achieved by this years Klerman Awardees, said Dr. Roger McIntyre, SAB Chair. Their relentless pursuit of progress in mental health research ensures a brighter future of improved diagnosis and treatments for those living with depression and bipolar disorder. This year, the Klerman Awards ceremony celebrates these outstanding achievers in mental health research:

Carlos A. Zarate, Jr., MD (Senior Investigator Award)

Dr. Zarate is Chief, Experimental Therapeutics and Pathophysiology Branch, at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). At NIMH, Dr. Zarate created a long-standing research program that, for over 20 years, has focused on developing novel therapeutics for adults with mood disorders, including those with treatment-resistant depression (TRD), bipolar disorder, and suicidal ideation. His work has been internationally recognized, most recently by his election to the National Academy of Sciences in 2020 and by his appointment as a National Institutes of Health Distinguished Investigator in 2019. Dr. Zarate has also long been dedicated to improving clinical outcomes in underserved populations of individuals with mood disorders.

Vikram Patel, MD, PhD (Senior Investigator Award)

Dr. Patel is the Pershing Square Professor of Global Health at the Harvard Medical School. His research as a psychiatrist over the past two decades has generated evidence on the burden and impact of mental disorders and on strategies to deploy community resources for their prevention and care. Dr. Patels work has focused on common mental health problems, in particular depression, but hes also worked on a range of other mental health conditions across the life course, from autism to harmful drinking and psychoses. His earlier work showed that depression is a universal cause of human suffering, strongly associated with social disadvantage and deprivation, and leading to premature mortality, disability, and discrimination.

Emma Morton, PhD (Young Investigator Award)

Dr. Morton is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of British Columbia, and a member of the Collaborative RESearch Team to study psychosocial issues in bipolar disorder. Her research seeks to optimize the measurement and treatment of outcomes valued by patients living with mood disorders, with particular interest in the quality of life (QoL) of people living with bipolar disorder.

The Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance is a leading national organization focusing on mood disorders, including depression and bipolar disorder, which affect over 21 million Americans, account for over 50% of the nations suicides every year, and cost $23 billion in lost workdays and other workplace losses. Through its extensive online and print resources and nearly 400 support groups, DBSA reaches millions of people each year with in-person and online peer support.

# # #
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- BC Craft Supply Co. Ltd. (the "Company") is pleased to announce that the British Columbia Supreme Court (the "Court") approved the Company's proposal to its creditors as amended (the "Proposal") under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act (Canada) (BIA). On May 10, 2022, the Court granted an order (the Approval Order) approving the Proposal in accordance with its terms and the BIA.



The Proposal contemplates that the Company will pay each Affected Creditor (as defined in the Proposal) with a proven claim a cash distribution of 25 percent of its proven claim over eight equal quarterly tranches starting in June 2023 and ending in Q1 2025, with certain election options available to each Affected Creditor and the Company.

Each Claim of an Affected Creditor under the Proposal is subject to the following options:

a) By no later than June 1, 2023, which date may be extended by the written consent of the Proposal Trustee and the inspectors, either the Company or the Affected Creditor may elect to convert 50 percent of the aforesaid cash distribution to common shares of the Company at a deemed issue price of $0.50 a share, upon the commencement of the Company's trading on the Canadian Securities Exchange; and

b) An Affected Creditor may elect to receive cash payment equaling 12.5 percent of their claim exercisable by the Company instead of being subject to the above equity option.

The cash distributions will be funded from sales revenues, however, the payment of cash distributions may be accelerated in the event the Company is successful in raising capital and able to fund the cash distributions sooner than anticipated.

This is a momentous step forward for the Company, our stakeholders and the entire Canadian cannabis community. Craft cannabis has a rightful place in the Canadian market. The Proposal provides the best possible outcome for the Companys stakeholders and the ability for the Company to scale its winning brands like Grizzlers, Role Model, and Earth Dragon Organics said Matthew Watters, CEO. We are thankful for the trust in our team and look forward to showcasing what we can do.

The Company intends to implement the Proposal in accordance with its terms.

Information concerning the Company's restructuring and the Proposal can be found on website of the proposal trustee, Crowe Mackay & Company Ltd. (the "Proposal Trustee") at: https://www.crowemackayco.ca/engagements/recent-engagements. Any inquiries concerning the Proposal may be directed to the Proposal Trustee.

About BC Craft Supply Co. Ltd.

BC Craft Supply Co. Ltd. is a diversified wellness company advancing cannabinoid and psychedelic innovation and psychotherapy. The Company offers a reimagined vision for craft markets through collaboration, expertise, and adaptation. Its operations include:

CRFT a curator and aggregator of craft cannabis, providing advocacy and access for premium small-batch growers to Canadas cannabis market;

a curator and aggregator of craft cannabis, providing advocacy and access for premium small-batch growers to Canadas cannabis market; Feelwell Brands , a successful cannabinoid brand house licensed in the state of California; and

, a successful cannabinoid brand house licensed in the state of California; and AVA Pathways a pre-clinical biotech company focused on neuroplasticity and mental health applications using psilocybin and compounds derived from mushrooms.



BC Craft works with local artists cross-sector and remains fervently committed to keeping the art, technique, and purity of their pursuit.

Follow @BC_Craft on Twitter for the latest updates.

THE CANADIAN SECURITIES EXCHANGE (THE "CSE") HAS NEITHER APPROVED NOR DISAPPROVED THE CONTENTS OF THIS PRESS RELEASE. NEITHER THE CSE NOR ITS MARKET REGULATOR (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE CSE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE.

CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION:

This news release contains "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" (collectively, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of the applicable Canadian securities legislation. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements and are based on expectations, estimates and projections as at the date of this news release. Any statement that involves discussions with respect to predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions, future events or performance (often but not always using phrases such as "expects", or "does not expect", "is expected", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", "plans", "budget", "scheduled", "forecasts", "estimates", "believes" or "intends" or variations of such words and phrases or stating that certain actions, events or results "may" or "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken to occur or be achieved) are not statements of historical fact and may be forward-looking statements. In this news release, forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, the anticipated closing the Private Placement.

Forward-looking statements are necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable, are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which may cause the actual results and future events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, but are not limited to general business, economic, competitive, political, and social uncertainties. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements and information contained in this news release. Except as required by law, CRFT assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements of beliefs, opinions, projections, or other factors, should they change, except as required by law.

For further information:

Matthew Watters, CEO, and Director

Phone: (604) 687-2038.

Email: info@bccraftsupplyco.com

BC Craft Supply Co. Ltd.

Suite 810  789 West Pender Street

Vancouver, British Columbia

V6C 1H2
Calgary, Alberta, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- UFA Co-operative (UFA) will expand its petroleum business into key markets in central and eastern Saskatchewan. The first new sites in the expansion were announced today, UFA is building new petroleum locations in Weyburn and Yorkton. Additionally, UFA is in the process of developing several additional petroleum locations as part of a multi-year strategy that will see the 113-year-old member-owned co-operative expand to service major agribusiness, oil and gas and industrial centres throughout the province. These sites will complement UFAs existing 110 petroleum locations in Alberta and southwest Saskatchewan.

We believe in the value of giving our members and customers choice. People living in or nearby these communities will now have another option of where to spend their hard-earned dollars, says Scott Bolton, President and CEO of UFA. The expansion of our petroleum network is part of a concerted strategy to grow from being an Alberta-focussed fuel and agribusiness co-operative to a western-Canadian service leader.

Saskatchewans economy is attracting investments from forward-thinking organizations that recognize our provinces potential, Premier Scott Moe said. UFAs expansion not only means more jobs and more choice, but it is also a huge vote of confidence in Saskatchewans agriculture sector and we are excited to welcome their operations in more communities across our province.

UFA will leverage its agent operating model at the new sites, this business model allows UFA to partner with local entrepreneurs and business people to have them become commission-incentivized operators of the cardlock site and bulk delivery business. The combination of a strong supply chain, one of the largest cardlock networks in Western Canada, and strong agent partners are essential to the success of UFAs petroleum business.

UFAs petroleum network offers gasoline and clear and dyed diesel, high-speed satellite fuel pumps, DEF, and UFA, Shell and Chevron branded lubricant products. Additionally, as the exclusive distributor of Dieselex Gold, UFA is pleased to introduce its premium diesel offering to Saskatchewan. This top-tier product is engineered to enhance fuel-efficiency, reduce maintenance, and increase horsepower.

UFA is committed to investing in our network and in bringing our unique selection of products to the rest of Saskatchewan. The regions around Weyburn and Yorkton, and the other markets selected for additional locations, are key drivers of the provinces agribusiness and industrial economy, said Don Smith, Vice President, Petroleum and Innovation at UFA. The expansion project is a significant investment in the province of Saskatchewan and in the local communities where the new petroleum sites will be located. Along with looking at new opportunities for investment, UFA is deeply committed to giving back to rural communities in Saskatchewan, ensuring they thrive well into the future.

Attachment
Companies Mentioned in the Report: BASF, Ineos, LG Chemicals,Sabic, Alpek, Dow, Kaneka, Lotte Adv. Mat., Synthos, Total, Alfa Alpek, AMCO, Americas Styrenics, Brenntag, Cellofoam, CNPC, Cheil Industries, Dell Polymers, ENI, Entec, Formosa Chem., Nova Chemicals, Lone Star Chem., M Holland, Midwest Resins, National Plastics, Avient, Resinex, Resirene, Saudi Polymers, Styrotech, Trinseo, UNIC TEch., Versalis



NEW YORK, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- IndexBox has just published a new report: 'EU - Polystyrene - Market Analysis, Forecast, Size, Trends and Insights'. Here is a summary of the report's key findings.

EU Polystyrene Market Statistics

Imports $4,781.7 Million USD Exports $4,416.9 Million USD Top Importers Poland, Germany, Italy Top Exporters Belgium, France, Netherlands

The revenue of the polystyrene market in the European Union totaled approx. $4.9B in 2021. This figure reflects the total revenues of producers and importers (excluding logistics costs, intermediaries' margins, which will be included in the final consumer price). REQUEST FREE DATA

In 2021, consumption of polystyrene in primary forms was estimated at approx. 2.8M tonnes. Italy, Poland and France remain the largest polystyrene consuming country in the European Union, comprising more than 51% of the total volume. REQUEST FREE DATA

EU Polystyrene Production

In 2021, the amount of polystyrene produced in the European Union was estimated at 2.4M tonnes. The countries with the highest volumes of polystyrene production in 2021 were France, Italy and Belgium, with a combined 50% share of total production. These countries were followed by the Netherlands, Germany, Poland and Spain, which together accounted for a further 31%. REQUEST FREE DATA

EU Polystyrene Exports

Polystyrene exports surged to 2.4M tonnes in 2021, increasing by 22% against the year before. This figure includes trade between EU member countries. In general, exports, however, recorded a relatively flat trend pattern. Over the period under review, the exports reached the peak figure at 2.6M tonnes in 2010; however, from 2011 to 2021, the exports remained at a lower figure.

In value terms, polystyrene exports skyrocketed to $4.4B in 2021. Over the period under review, exports, however, continue to indicate a relatively flat trend pattern. The level of export peaked at $5.1B in 2013; however, from 2014 to 2021, the exports failed to regain momentum.

Exports by Country

Belgium (542K tonnes), France (427K tonnes), the Netherlands (322K tonnes) and Germany (319K tonnes) represented roughly 68% of total exports of polystyrene in 2021. Italy (159K tonnes) took the next position in the ranking, followed by Poland (109K tonnes). All these countries together occupied approx. 11% share of total exports. Hungary (101K tonnes), Austria (94K tonnes), the Czech Republic (76K tonnes), Greece (71K tonnes), Spain (48K tonnes) and Finland (36K tonnes) followed a long way behind the leaders.

From 2007 to 2021, the biggest increases were in Poland (+9.4%), while shipments for the other leaders experienced more modest paces of growth.

In value terms, the largest polystyrene supplying countries in the European Union were Belgium ($1B), France ($807M) and the Netherlands ($701M), with a combined 57% share of total exports. Germany, Italy, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Austria, Greece, Finland and Spain lagged somewhat behind, together comprising a further 40%.

Export Prices by Country

In 2021, the polystyrene export price in the European Union amounted to $1,865 per tonne, picking up by 62% against the previous year. Prices varied noticeably by the country of origin: the country with the highest price was the Netherlands ($2,176 per tonne), while Spain ($1,087 per tonne) was amongst the lowest. From 2007 to 2021, the most notable rate of growth in terms of prices was attained by the Czech Republic (+1.1%), while the other leaders experienced more modest paces of growth.

EU Polystyrene Imports

In 2021, the amount of polystyrene imported in the European Union soared to 2.6M tonnes, jumping by 16% on 2020. The total import volume increased at an average annual rate of +1.3% from 2007 to 2021.

In value terms, polystyrene imports surged to $4.8B in 2021. Total imports indicated a modest expansion from 2007 to 2021: its value increased at an average annual rate of +1.3% over the last fourteen years.

Imports by Country

In 2021, Italy (561K tonnes), Germany (378K tonnes) and Poland (347K tonnes) represented the largest importer of polystyrene in the European Union, committing 50% of total purchases. France (190K tonnes) occupied the next position in the ranking, followed by Spain (151K tonnes) and Romania (117K tonnes). All these countries together held near 18% share of total imports. Austria (101K tonnes), the Netherlands (88K tonnes), Belgium (85K tonnes), Sweden (74K tonnes), Portugal (68K tonnes), Hungary (61K tonnes) and Lithuania (54K tonnes) held a relatively small share of total supplies.

From 2007 to 2021, the biggest increases were in Sweden (+7.1%), while purchases for the other leaders experienced more modest paces of growth.

In value terms, the largest polystyrene importing markets in the European Union were Poland ($757M), Germany ($751M) and Italy ($606M), together comprising 44% of total purchases. These countries were followed by France, Spain, Romania, Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Hungary and Lithuania, which together accounted for a further 41%.

Import Prices by Country

In 2021, the polystyrene import price in the European Union amounted to $1,843 per tonne, jumping by 52% against the previous year. Prices varied noticeably by the country of destination: the country with the highest price was Sweden ($2,285 per tonne), while Italy ($1,081 per tonne) was amongst the lowest. From 2007 to 2021, the most notable rate of growth in terms of prices was attained by Sweden (+2.1%), while the other leaders experienced more modest paces of growth.

About IndexBox

IndexBox is a market research firm developing an AI-driven market intelligence platform that helps business analysts find actionable insights and make data-driven decisions. The platform provides data on consumption, production, trade, and prices for more than 10K+ different products across 200 countries.

For more information, please visit

Website https://www.indexbox.io

Twitter https://twitter.com/indexbox

YouTube https://www.youtube.com/IndexBox



LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/indexbox-marketing/

Product Coverage

Polystyrene in primary forms.

Related Links

Polystyrene Market

Styrene Market

Phenol Market

Toluene Market

Polyvinyl Chloride Market
HELENA, Ala., May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Mspark, a B2C Marketing Services company specializing in driving Rural Market brand growth, today announced LaDonna Gerhart as Vice President of Business Development.

LaDonna will lead Msparks team of Business Development Directors and spearhead efforts to build lasting, mutually beneficial partnerships with new clients.

LaDonnas background, experience, and expertise position her perfectly for this role, having successfully led and motivated high-performing sales teams throughout her career, Mspark CEO Greg Bogich said.

Most recently, LaDonna was Vice President of Membership Service for ClubCorp, the largest owner/operator of private clubs in the country, where she exceeded sales goals and objectives and turned around a previously under-performing team. Before ClubCorp, LaDonna was Executive Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Remington Hotels, a $1B+ hotel management company with over 89 properties.

Relative to Msparks industry, LaDonna spent 13+ years at Valassis, where she progressed from Customer Business Manager to Vice President of Strategic Sales. LaDonna also led New Business teams to exceed revenue targets annually while continually focusing on sales talent growth, development, and achievement.

LaDonna holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Lyon College. She lives in Dallas, Texas, with her husband, Rick.

About Mspark

Mspark, a B2C marketing services company, specializes in driving Rural Market brand growth and customer engagement strategies for national and local advertisers. By combining consumer and marketplace data, we craft coordinated campaigns using a seamless mix of shared mail, direct mail, trigger-based marketing, and digital advertising solutions such as display, retargeting, and Mobile ID tracking that drive the right audience behavior to achieve your marketing goals.

The Mspark portfolio of 3,000+ clients includes retail, financial, insurance, healthcare, CPG, restaurant, personal care, telecom, e-commerce, and home services providers across the U.S. For more information, visit mspark.com.

Contact:

Mspark

5901 Highway 52 East,

Helena, AL 35080

Phone: 205.620-6200

Email: contactus@mspark.com

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/5d318f70-3d1c-4d85-b2bd-c5ea40741630
BATON ROUGE, La., May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- APTIM, a global leader in waterways and flood control, has helped to complete an $80 million floodgate that will protect more than 30,000 residents from Atchafalaya River backwater flooding in six coastal Louisiana parishes. The Bayou Chene Floodgate is the largest of its kind in the world. Its completion marks a longstanding collaboration between APTIM and the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA), one with plans for growth as APTIM moves its headquarters onto Baton Rouges Water Campus this fall.

Following APTIMs successful emergency projects in 2016 and 2019, the St. Mary Levee District (SMLD) retained the company to permit and design the Bayou Chene Floodgate. The floodgate, which includes levees in and surrounding Bayou Chene, can be closed to stop the backwater flooding that travels northeast from the Atchafalaya River during high water events in the Mississippi River and Tributaries system. The project is an investment from CPRA using Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act funds and includes subconsultants T. Baker Smith, Miller Engineers and Associates, and Eustis Engineering Services.

At APTIM, we are empowered to make a difference, not just a living. The Bayou Chene Floodgate is a testament to the technical ingenuity and hard work of the APTIM team. It is also an expression of our commitment to make the communities of our home state more resilient, said APTIM CEO Mark Fallon.

The CPRA and SMLD hosted a ribbon cutting ceremony on April 29 for state and local leaders to celebrate the floodgates completion and its impact on St. Mary, Terrebonne, Lafourche, St. Martin, Assumption, and Iberville parishes. CPRA Chairman Chip Kline called the floodgate a gamechanger for the region, while Gov. John Bel Edwards applauded the decades-long effort required to finalize the permanent structure. SMLD officials expressed their gratitude and emphasized the impact the floodgate will have on their regions residents, businesses, and environments.

This region has relied on temporary measures to prevent backwater flooding since the 1970s, said Gov. Edwards. With the completion of this decades-long effort, the people of St. Mary and the five surrounding parishes can rest easier knowing theyre protected by a permanent flood control structure.

The three previous emergency closures were successful but costly and risky. Now with the completion of the permanent structure, we can close the Bayou in a timely manner with minimal impacts to the navigation interests, minimal risk to the team members, and with minimal environmental impacts to the region, said SMLD Executive Director Tim Matte.

APTIM has supported local levee districts and parishes/counties for more than 30 years through planning, design, and construction of levees and flood protection structures. Its team of waterways and flood control specialists offer a comprehensive range of flood control, hurricane protection, coastal engineering, science and technology, and port- and marine-related services. With hundreds of employees worldwide, the team ranks among the largest science and engineering groups dedicated to supporting clients in the coastal, marine, mining, and energy industries.

###

About APTIM

APTIM is a global industry leader headquartered in Baton Rouge, La. With more than 4,000 employees worldwide, APTIM specializes in critical infrastructure, technical and data solutions, program management, environmental services, resilience, sustainability, and energy solutions. Our dedicated people have proven experience and expertise to provide integrated services and solutions to government agencies, commercial and industrial clients, and energy customers. APTIM commits to accelerating the transition toward a clean and efficient energy economy; building a sustainable future for our communities and natural world; and creating an inclusive, equitable environment that celebrates the diversity of our people.
English French

MONTREAL, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- It is with great gratitude that the Social Reintegration and Inclusion Sector of the YMCAs of Quebec has received two new government grants to support its efforts in preventing homelessness and fighting sexual exploitation in Montreal.



The First Stop program receives $117,000 in funding from the ministere de la Securite publique

This funding, distributed over two years, will be used to increase the capacity of the YMCAs of Quebecs intervention team in fighting sexual exploitation east of downtown.

Young people can experience sexual exploitation in diverse ways: adults with bad intentions who take advantage of young men with intellectual disabilities, young women who exchange sex for a place to sleep, young drug users and runaways who fall into a network of exploitation, and so on.

In a complementary manner and in collaboration with existing resources in the area, this funding will help us meet the needs of sexually exploited young people in terms of support, follow-up, and guidance, all while acting proactively to reduce risk factors associated with sexual exploitation. Our goal is to reach and help at least 75 young people per year.

Genevieve Latour,

First Stop Program Supervisor | YMCAs of Quebec

Planning for Prison Release program receives $386,000 in funding from the ministere de la Sante et des Services sociaux

Thanks to a two-year federal grant from the Reaching Home program, additional outreach workers will join the YMCAs of Quebecs team, which will thus be able to triple the number of interventions carried out in the field. Additionally, thanks to a partnership with the Old Brewery Mission, a dozen supervised apartments will be made available to people just released from a detention centre to ensure they do not fall into homelessness and can benefit from the support of social actors, facilitating their reintegration into society.

The Planning for Prison Release program allows us to support and prepare the release of people incarcerated in a Montreal detention centre who will likely find themselves living on the street when they are released. The programs main goal is to break cycles of homelessness and criminal recidivism, and, to date, the results are very promising. Since 2018, over 440 people received follow-ups adapted to their needs, close to 2,000 interventions were carried out each year, and hundreds of collaborations were undertaken with community, correctional, and health services.

Isabel Gervais, M.Sc. Criminology

Planning for Prison Release program Supervisor | YMCAs of Quebec

About the YMCAs of Quebec and the Foundation

The YMCAs of Quebec is a charitable organization whose mission is to encourage and inspire all people to fulfill their potential, thrive and contribute to their community. The YMCAs of Quebec offers programs in more than 30 points of service and virtually across the province, as well as operating an International Language School, the YMCA Residence, and Camp YMCA Kanawana. As the first YMCA in North America, the YMCAs of Quebec has been present in Montreal since 1851 and its impact reaches over 13 boroughs on the island of Montreal.

Since 1984, the YMCAs of Quebec Foundation supports the mission of the YMCA and ensures its financial sustainability by promoting the impact it has on the community, raising funds and administering these funds responsibly.

Contact person:

Veronique Lettre

Director of Communications

Tel: 514-506-9897

Email: veronique.lettre@ymcaquebec.org
Long Beach, Calif., May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Organizers of the Advanced Clean Transportation (ACT) Expo, North Americas largest advanced transportation technology and clean fleet event, announced the winners of its 2022 ACT Expo Fleet Awards on May 10 and 11 at the Long Beach Convention Center in Southern California.

The ACT Expo Fleet Awards are the ultimate recognition of fleets and individuals who show true leadership in sustainable transportation  having shown a demonstrated commitment and success to using cleaner technologies to lower emissions from their fleet operations, and to increasing their use of domestically produced low carbon fuels. A diverse set of organizations from across North America were honored in multiple award categories, including:

Leading School Fleet: Twin Rivers Unified School District | The Twin Rivers Unified School District in McClellan Park, CA has been one of the most progressive and visible school bus fleet operators moving to battery-electric technology, with 40 zero emission buses already in operation. This is in addition to the 37 natural gas buses in its fleet. In recognition of its efforts to choose a path toward clean transportation for the benefit of its students and communities, the Twin Rivers USD was presented with the 2022 ACT Expo Leading School Fleet award.

The Twin Rivers Unified School District in McClellan Park, CA has been one of the most progressive and visible school bus fleet operators moving to battery-electric technology, with 40 zero emission buses already in operation. This is in addition to the 37 natural gas buses in its fleet. In recognition of its efforts to choose a path toward clean transportation for the benefit of its students and communities, the Twin Rivers USD was presented with the 2022 ACT Expo Leading School Fleet award. Leading Public Fleet: County of Sacramento | Since opening their first RNG (Renewable Natural Gas) fueling station in 2015, the County has rapidly scaled its alternative fuels operation. Starting out with 100 natural gas vehicles six years ago, in 2021 62% of all fuel consumed by the 2,500-plus vehicle fleet was alternative or renewable. The County of Sacramento continues to show leadership deploying advanced vehicle technology at breakneck speed, including RNG, battery-electric, and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. With its diverse fleet and accelerated scaling of clean fuel technologies, the County of Sacramento is the winner of the 2022 ACT Expo Leading Public Fleet award.

Since opening their first RNG (Renewable Natural Gas) fueling station in 2015, the County has rapidly scaled its alternative fuels operation. Starting out with 100 natural gas vehicles six years ago, in 2021 62% of all fuel consumed by the 2,500-plus vehicle fleet was alternative or renewable. The County of Sacramento continues to show leadership deploying advanced vehicle technology at breakneck speed, including RNG, battery-electric, and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. With its diverse fleet and accelerated scaling of clean fuel technologies, the County of Sacramento is the winner of the 2022 ACT Expo Leading Public Fleet award. Leading Private Fleet: Southern California Gas Company | Southern California Gas has long been one of the most progressive utilities in transitioning to natural gas service trucks, having started to use natural gas as a vehicle fuel more than 40 years ago. The company now has more than 1,000 fleet vehicles being fueled by renewable natural gas (RNG) and has recently started to deploy dozens of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as the launching point for a continued transition to hydrogen fuel in the future. The utility will replace 50% of its over-the-road fleet with clean fuel vehicles by 2025 and will operate a 100% zero-emission fleet by 2035. For its long-term leadership and continued investment, Southern California Gas Company is the winner of the 2022 ACT Expo Leading Private Fleet award.

Southern California Gas has long been one of the most progressive utilities in transitioning to natural gas service trucks, having started to use natural gas as a vehicle fuel more than 40 years ago. The company now has more than 1,000 fleet vehicles being fueled by renewable natural gas (RNG) and has recently started to deploy dozens of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as the launching point for a continued transition to hydrogen fuel in the future. The utility will replace 50% of its over-the-road fleet with clean fuel vehicles by 2025 and will operate a 100% zero-emission fleet by 2035. For its long-term leadership and continued investment, Southern California Gas Company is the winner of the 2022 ACT Expo Leading Private Fleet award. Transit and Mobility Award: Orange County Transit Authority (OCTA) | OCTA was one of the very first transit operators to switch to natural gas approximately 20 years ago. Today its nearly 500 CNG buses run on 100% renewable natural gas, while the transit agency is working to incorporate 100 battery-electric buses into its fleet. It also operates the largest hydrogen fueling station in the country to support a growing fleet of fuel cell electric buses. OCTA is a long-time sustainable transportation leader and this years ACT Expo Transit and Mobility award winner.

OCTA was one of the very first transit operators to switch to natural gas approximately 20 years ago. Today its nearly 500 CNG buses run on 100% renewable natural gas, while the transit agency is working to incorporate 100 battery-electric buses into its fleet. It also operates the largest hydrogen fueling station in the country to support a growing fleet of fuel cell electric buses. OCTA is a long-time sustainable transportation leader and this years ACT Expo Transit and Mobility award winner. Leading Off-Road Fleet: SSA Marine | SSA Marine, the worlds largest independent, privately held marine terminal operator, operates a wide range of hybrid-electric and battery-electric container handling equipment in its Oakland and Long Beach facilities, and will soon demonstrate a hydrogen fuel cell powered rubber-tired gantry crane (RTG). Additionally, SSA has converted all liquid fuel use in its Long Beach terminal to a blend of renewable diesel and biodiesel. With its ongoing commitment to innovation and clean fuels and technologies, SSA Marine is this years ACT Expo Leading Off-Road Fleet award winner.

SSA Marine, the worlds largest independent, privately held marine terminal operator, operates a wide range of hybrid-electric and battery-electric container handling equipment in its Oakland and Long Beach facilities, and will soon demonstrate a hydrogen fuel cell powered rubber-tired gantry crane (RTG). Additionally, SSA has converted all liquid fuel use in its Long Beach terminal to a blend of renewable diesel and biodiesel. With its ongoing commitment to innovation and clean fuels and technologies, SSA Marine is this years ACT Expo Leading Off-Road Fleet award winner. Leading Airport Fleet: Denver International Airport | In spite of operating a remarkably diverse fleet of on-road and off-road vehicles to meet the daily needs of one of the worlds largest airports, Denver International Airport has been able to already convert 25% of its 800-plus vehicle fleet to clean fuels such as CNG, battery-electric, and propane autogas. DEN now operates 95 CNG, 85 electric & 17 propane autogas vehicles in its fleet. For its ingenuity in alternative fuel implementation, Denver International Airport is this years ACT Expo Leading Airport Fleet award winner.

| In spite of operating a remarkably diverse fleet of on-road and off-road vehicles to meet the daily needs of one of the worlds largest airports, Denver International Airport has been able to already convert 25% of its 800-plus vehicle fleet to clean fuels such as CNG, battery-electric, and propane autogas. DEN now operates 95 CNG, 85 electric & 17 propane autogas vehicles in its fleet. For its ingenuity in alternative fuel implementation, Denver International Airport is this years ACT Expo Leading Airport Fleet award winner. Leading Carrier: Dependable Highway Express (DHE) | DHE has continued to lead in zero-emission freight transport with growing investments at its Ontario, California distribution facility including: two battery-electric tractors, 10 battery-electric box trucks, and 14 electric forklifts. To power its fleet of electric vehicles and its Ontario building, DHE has installed more than 2,300 solar panels that generate 1.29 GWh of renewable electricity annually. For leading the way, Dependable Highway Express (DHE) is the 2022 Act Expo Leading Carrier winner.

DHE has continued to lead in zero-emission freight transport with growing investments at its Ontario, California distribution facility including: two battery-electric tractors, 10 battery-electric box trucks, and 14 electric forklifts. To power its fleet of electric vehicles and its Ontario building, DHE has installed more than 2,300 solar panels that generate 1.29 GWh of renewable electricity annually. For leading the way, Dependable Highway Express (DHE) is the 2022 Act Expo Leading Carrier winner. In It for the Long-Haul Award: Schwans | Schwans Home Delivery operates more than 2,200 of its 3,000 trucks on propane autogas. It has been using propane to fuel its clean fleet deliveries since the 1970s, making it not only one of the longest-running alternative fuel vehicle users in history, but one of the most visible and recognized commercial fleets using clean fuel technology. For its long-term commitment and use of propane delivery trucks, Schwans is this years ACT Expo In It for the Long-Haul Award winner.

The list of award winners can be viewed on the ACT Expo site.

The annual ACT Expo Fleet Awards are such a great showcase of the hard work and dedication being put in by so many of our nations most progressive and sustainable fleets, and a fantastic way to recognize these leaders and the important work they are doing to drive the market for clean fuels and technology forward, said Erik Neandross, CEO at Gladstein, Neandross & Associates (GNA), a clean transportation firm and energy consulting firm and the host of ACT Expo. We had a record-breaking number of submissions this year and it was difficult to choose just one winner per category given the impressive initiatives we saw from each nominee.

In addition to the Fleet Awards, ACT Expo also features dozens of product debuts and major industry announcements, exemplifying the transportation industrys accelerating shift to low and zero emissions. The event highlights advanced vehicles spanning all weight classes, applications, and fuel types, including battery-electric, hydrogen fuel cell, propane autogas, and natural gas vehicles, along with autonomous and connected technologies and renewable fuels. Hundreds of clean commercial vehicles and fueling products will be on display in the expo hall, and in the two-day Ride & Drive. Participants are the first to learn about the major market trends and clean vehicle adoption plans of fleets across North America with the onsite launch of the 2022 State of Sustainable Fleets report.

For more information about ACT Expo, visit www.actexpo.com.

####

About the Advanced Clean Transportation (ACT) Expo

ACT Expo is North Americas largest conference and expo showcasing real-world application of the latest transportation technologies, drivetrains, and clean fuels. ACT Expo combines the best educational content in the industry with an innovative trade show floor showcasing the most innovative technologies on the market today. This year's conference took place May 9 to 12, 2022, in Long Beach, California and will return May 1 to 4, 2023 in Anaheim, CA. ACT Expo brings together thousands of attendees from across the advanced vehicle and alternative fuels industries. The annual event is produced by Gladstein, Neandross & Associates (GNA), the leading North American consulting firm specializing in market development for low- and zero-emission transportation technologies, infrastructure, and ultra-low carbon fuels for commercial transportation. Learn more at www.actexpo.com and www.gladstein.org.

Attachments
Philadelphia, PA, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- VSBLTY Groupe Technologies Corp. (OTCQB: VSBGF) (CSE: VSBY) (Frankfurt 5VS) (VSBLTY), a leading software provider of security and retail analytics technology, today announced that the company has been named a Channel Partner of the Year at Intel Vision 2022, which ended May 11. It is at this event that Intel leaders recognize partner companies for outstanding achievement.

The North America Channel Partner of the Year awards honor Intel partners that enhance technology innovation, sales growth, go-to-market strategies and marketing. These awards recognize the innovative solutions of Intel and its partners that are made possible through continued ecosystem collaboration.

VSBLTY was honored for providing enhanced customer engagement and audience measurement using AI-driven software Vector, and industry-leading VisionCaptor and DataCaptor.

Acknowledging the recognition on behalf of his company, VSBLTY Co-founder & CEO Jay Hutton said, It is a distinct honor to be selected as an Intel Channel Partner of the Year, and everyone at VSBLTYfrom our staff, clients and partners, to our Directors and Advisory Board membersare happy to share in this singular achievement.

VSBLTY technology provides enhanced customer engagement and audience measurement using machine learning and computer vision. Its industry leading VisionCaptor and DataCaptor software combine motion graphics and interactive brand messaging with cutting-edge computer vision measurement and insights. VSBLTYs AI driven software Vector provides enhanced facial recognition that is crucial to strengthening today's security requirements when recognizing weapons or suspicious persons in a crowd.

Investor Relations

CHF Capital Markets

Cathy Hume, CEO, +1-416-868-1079, x251

cathy@chfir.com

Harbor Access

Jonathan Paterson, 475-477-9401

Jonathan.Paterson@Harbor-Access.com

Graham Farrell, +1-416-842-9003

Graham.Farrell@Harbor - Access.com

CONTACT: Linda Rosanio, 609-472-0877

lrosanio@vsblty.net

About VSBLTY (http://vsblty.net/)

Headquartered in Philadelphia, VSBLTY (OTCQB: VSBGF) (CSE: VSBY) (Frankfurt: 5VS) (OTC: VSBGF) (VSBLTY) is the world leader in Proactive Digital Display, which transforms retail and public spaces as well as place-based media networks with SaaS-based audience measurement and security software that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning. Its proprietary technology effectively integrates with other digital retail solutions, including QR codes and mobile applications. The firm is also recognized for its leadership role in the growing Store as a Medium movement that enables brands to reach customers when and where buying decisions are being made while producing a new revenue stream for retailers.
Newark, NJ, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- As per the report published by MarketandResearch.biz, the global zinc dust market is expected to grow from USD 1.30 billion in 2021 to USD 1.90 billion by 2030, at a CAGR of 4.3% during the forecast period 2022-2030.

The increase the chemical application in multiple enterprises is anticipated to expand demand for the zinc dust market during the projection period. Further, the increase in customers' disposable income and the proliferation of urbanization are the driving factors of the market growth. Moreover, the fluctuating raw material costs & production price of zinc dust are the restraining factors of the market growth. Furthermore, technological advancement & innovation is the opportunities for market growth.

Competitive Strategy

To enhance their market position in the global zinc dust market, the key players are now focusing on adopting the strategies such as product innovations, mergers & acquisitions, recent developments, joint ventures, collaborations, and partnerships.

For example, in January 2019, Aterian Investment Partners declared the acquisition of United States Zinc, the manufacturer of zinc oxide & zinc dust. However, this acquisition will aid both the firms in the product proliferation in the international & domestic industry.

Get Sample Copy with TOC, Graphs & List of Figures @ https://www.marketandresearch.biz/sample-request/235057

Market Growth & Trends

The growth of the zinc dust market is driven by the increasing demand for zinc dust in the personal & cosmetics care industry. Furthermore, the unique sacrificing method of zinc dust carries the ability to prevent rust. Thus, it is widely utilized as an anti-corrosive agent in a comprehensive range of shielding coatings like marine, industrial, and yacht. Zinc dust is also employed as a medium for drug manufacturing procedures in the pharmaceutical enterprise. These factors are evaluated to boost the zinc dust industry growth during the projection period.

Moreover, the augmentation in construction in the developing region will lead to this heavy industry growth over the projection period, attracting more participants in China, Japan, and India. The increasing usage of renewable energy sources that are not consistently available necessitates ecologically valuable & long-term electrical energy storage. Also, a significant proliferation in the number of commercial, industrial, and residential projects is anticipated to support this industry growth of zinc dust worldwide. Further, the considerable increase in general construction projects will affect the demand for zinc ore in various applications. Geographically, developing nations such as South Korea, China, Japan, and India are becoming more essential due to the increasing cosmetics industry. Thus, the investors are paying more attention to these nations owing to the surge in demand for customer goods products.

Key Findings

In 2021, the paint grade type segment dominated the market with the largest market share of 36.19%.

The type segment is divided into chemical grade, paint grade, and others. In 2021, the paint grade type segment dominated the market with the largest market share of 36.19%. Zinc powder is utilized in zinc-rich paint to cover steel shells from corrosion. Also, zinc-rich paint is an important element of most heavy-duty layers, as employed in the security of significant structures such as steel bridges, offshore oil rigs, and petrochemical & powder industries.

In 2021, the chemical industrial segment dominated the market with the largest market share of 30.04%.

The end-use sector segment is divided into chemical industrial, paint industrial, pharmaceutical industrial, and other. In 2021, the chemical industrial segment dominated the market with the largest market share of 30.04%. Further, zinc dust & powders are generally utilized in the chemical enterprise to purify solutions or achieve other reductions via cementation. Due to the well-prominent electrochemical mechanism known as galvanic action, zinc dust has shown to be an excellent approach to shielding steel from corrosion. Additionally, zinc powders are utilized in multiple chemical applications such as Organo zinc in pharma, agro-chemistry, and life-science applications.

To Know More Additional Highlights and Key Points visit our report @ https://www.marketandresearch.biz/report/235057/global-zinc-dust-market-growth-2022-2028

Regional Segment Analysis of the Zinc Dust 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)

The North America region occurred as the largest market for the global zinc dust market with a market share of 43.17% and a market value of around 0.52 billion in 2021. North America currently dominates the zinc dust market due to the rising pharmaceutical industry. Furthermore, the Asia Pacific region is expected to show the fastest CAGR of 6.02% over the projection period. This growth is attributed to the growth of the chemical enterprise. Also, the zinc dust industry in China is growing at a high rate due to the high demand in the pharmaceutical industry in China is also aids in driving the industry growth in this region.

Key players operating in the global zinc dust market are:

EverZinc (Subsidiary of OpenGate Capital)

S. Zinc (Subsidiary of Aterian)

Numinor Chemical Industries Ltd

Hanchang

Silox India Private Limited

Metal Powder Company Limited (MEPCO)

Toho Zinc Co., Ltd

Hakusui Tech Co., Ltd

Pars Zinc Dust Manufacturing Co. (PZD)

Jiangsu Shenlong Zinc Industry Co., Ltd

Shandong Xingyuan Zinc Technology Co., Ltd

Luoping Zinc and Electricity Co., Ltd

Shijiazhuang Xinri Zinc Co., Ltd

Pinkto Chemicals

Vishnupriya Chemicals Pvt. Ltd

Shree Industrial Adsorbents Pvt. Ltd

Labdhi Chemicals

This study forecasts revenue at global, regional, and country levels from 2019 to 2030. The Market and Research has segmented the global zinc dust market based on below mentioned segments:

Global Zinc Dust Market by Type:

Chemical Grade

Paint Grade

Others

Global Zinc Dust Market by Application:

Chemical Industrial

Paint Industrial

Pharmaceutical Industrial

Other

To Purchase Research Report @ https://www.marketandresearch.biz/buy-now/235057/single

About the report:

The global zinc dust market is analysed based on value (USD Billion). All the segments have been analysed on global, regional and country basis. The study includes the 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 porters five forces model, attractiveness analysis, raw material analysis, supply, demand analysis, competitor position grid analysis, distribution and marketing channels analysis.

Customization of the Report:

This report can be customized to meet the clients requirements. Please connect with our sales team (sales@marketandresearch.biz), who will ensure that you get a report that suits your needs. You can also get in touch with our executives on +1-201-465-4211 to share your research requirements.

Contact Us

Mark Stone

Head of Business Development

Phone: +1-201-465-4211

Email: sales@marketandresearch.biz

Web: www.marketandresearch.biz
With Blended Learning, Charleston is Prioritizing High-Quality Curriculum and Flexibility of Instruction As Schools Rebuild From Pandemic Learning Losses



Charleston County Becomes One of the Largest Districts to Adopt Open Ups Nationally-Acclaimed EL Education Program

CHARLESTON, S.C., May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Open Up Resources, a nonprofit increasing equity in education by making the highest quality curriculum accessible to educators, and Kiddom, the first all-in-one education platform for high-quality digital curriculum, announced today a new partnership to bring the top-rated EL Education K-8 English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum to Charleston County School District (CCSD) in support of the districts blended learning efforts.

The partnership will provide teachers the ability to utilize the ELA curriculum on Kiddoms platform to share assignments digitally, communicate with students, and deliver personalized feedback on submissions, while prioritizing student reading proficiency and content knowledge of science and social studies. Additionally, the partnership will equip CCSD with a full-service, multi-year professional learning plan from EL Education to support teachers, plus access to peer-to-peer communications within Open Ups K-8 EL Education digital community.

Putting students at the heart of this work has been our tagline for a while, but we watched schools make the decision to opt-out of whats easier or more comfortable and that's the true evidence that we are putting students first, said Emilie Woody, Executive Director of Curriculum & Instruction, Charleston County School District.

Charleston County School District understands the tough challenges students and teachers are facing in this unprecedented moment. That is why they are moving forward with a research-based English Language Arts curriculum that is both innovative and effective in teaching the next generation of students. The fusion of the high-quality curriculum Open Up offers with Kiddoms easy-to-use digital platform will give teachers and students across 80 CCSD schools the tools they need to successfully increase reading proficiency and reverse learning losses during these uncertain times, said Jessica Reid Sliwerski, CEO of Open Up Resources.

The last couple years have brought so many classroom challenges into focus and we believe that high quality curriculum and digital tools that add value to teaching and learning are the solutions to those challenges, said Ahsan Rizvi, CEO of Kiddom. Were thrilled to work with the Charleston County School District as they implement EL Education and Kiddom to address these challenges head on by providing a platform that streamlines workflows for teachers and students, gives teachers actionable insights on student progress, and offers flexibility to differentiate learning as needed.

"By delivering hands-on, curriculum-aligned professional learning, we can empower teachers to make the most of our Language Arts curriculum. They'll be ready to bring the materials from Kiddom and Open Up to life in their classrooms, with practices designed for student engagement, growth, and equitable achievement," said Scott Hartl, President and CEO, EL Education.

ABOUT OPEN UP RESOURCES:

Open Up Resources is a 501(c)(3) that exists to increase equity in education by making the highest quality curriculum freely accessible to educators and providing implementation supports to the broadest number of teachers, empowering them to effectively and sustainably improve student outcomes in pre-K-12 English Language Arts and Mathematics. To learn more about Open Up Resources' mission and work, click here .

ABOUT KIDDOM:

Kiddom is the first all-in-one education platform for high-quality digital curriculum. It integrates curriculum management, instruction, assessment, and communication tools into one solution, saving schools valuable time, resources and money. With the flexibility to access and edit curriculum from any location, Kiddom is the only education platform that can effectively support teachers and learners engaging in in-class, blended, hybrid or distance learning scenarios, as well as in the quick pivots between them. Headquartered in San Francisco with an office in New York City, Kiddom is a team of passionate educators, designers, and developers building technology to enable all teachers and learners to unlock their full potential. To learn more, visit https://www.kiddom.co .

ABOUT EL EDUCATION

EL Education is a national nonprofit partnering with K-12 educators to transform public schools and districts into hubs of opportunity for all students to achieve excellent equitable outcomes. EL Education is guided by a vision of education equity embracing the genius in every child and by a reimagined definition of student achievement. EL Education offers research-proven resources and practices, including the acclaimed EL Education K-8 Language Arts curriculum, Core Practices, and aligned professional learning. EL Education was founded in 1991 and currently serves 440,000 students in diverse communities across the country. Learn more at ELEducation.org.

ABOUT CHARLESTON COUNTY SCHOOLS:

Charleston County School District (CCSD) is a nationally accredited school district committed to providing equitable and quality educational opportunities for all of its students. CCSD is the second-largest school system in South Carolina and represents a unique blend of urban, suburban, and rural schools spanning 1,300 square miles along the coast. CCSD serves approximately 49,000 students in 88 schools and specialized programs. CCSD offers a diverse, expanding portfolio of options and specialized programs, delivered through neighborhood, magnet, IB (international baccalaureate), Montessori, and charter schools. Options include programs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), music and other creative and performing arts, career and technical preparation programs, and military.

Jennifer Levanduski, Head of Marketing, jennifer@kiddom.co
MONACO, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Scorpio Tankers Inc. (NYSE:STNG) (Scorpio Tankers, or the Company) announced that the President of the Company, Robert Bugbee, has purchased call options on an aggregate of 20,100 common shares (or 201 call option contracts) of the Company for total consideration of $237,000. The call option contracts have a strike price of $15.00 and an expiration of January 2023.



About Scorpio Tankers Inc.

Scorpio Tankers Inc. is a provider of marine transportation of petroleum products worldwide. Scorpio Tankers Inc. currently owns, finance leases or bareboat charters-in 119 product tankers (42 LR2 tankers, two LR1 tankers, 61 MR tankers and 14 Handymax tankers) with an average age of 6.3 years. The Company has recently agreed to sell two LR1 tankers, three LR2 tankers, and one MR tanker. Additional information about the Company is available at the Company's website www.scorpiotankers.com, which is not a part of this press release.

Forward-Looking Statements

Matters discussed in this press release may constitute forwardlooking statements. The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 provides safe harbor protections for forwardlooking statements in order to encourage companies to provide prospective information about their business. Forwardlooking statements include statements concerning plans, objectives, goals, strategies, future events or performance, and underlying assumptions and other statements, which are other than statements of historical facts. The Company desires to take advantage of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and is including this cautionary statement in connection with this safe harbor legislation. The words believe, expect, anticipate, estimate, intend, plan, target, project, likely, may, will, would, could and similar expressions identify forwardlooking statements.

The forwardlooking statements in this press release are based upon various assumptions, many of which are based, in turn, upon further assumptions, including without limitation, managements examination of historical operating trends, data contained in the Companys records and other data available from third parties. Although management believes that these assumptions were reasonable when made, because these assumptions are inherently subject to significant uncertainties and contingencies which are difficult or impossible to predict and are beyond the Companys control, there can be no assurance that the Company will achieve or accomplish these expectations, beliefs or projections. The Company undertakes no obligation, and specifically declines any obligation, except as required by law, to publicly update or revise any forwardlooking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. In addition to these important factors, other important factors that, in the Companys view, could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed in the forwardlooking statements include unforeseen liabilities, future capital expenditures, revenues, expenses, earnings, synergies, economic performance, indebtedness, financial condition, losses, future prospects, business and management strategies for the management, the length and severity of the ongoing novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, including its effect on demand for petroleum products and the transportation thereof, expansion and growth of the Companys operations, risks relating to the integration of assets or operations of entities that it has or may in the future acquire and the possibility that the anticipated synergies and other benefits of such acquisitions may not be realized within expected timeframes or at all, the failure of counterparties to fully perform their contracts with the Company, the strength of world economies and currencies, general market conditions, including fluctuations in charter rates and vessel values, changes in demand for tanker vessel capacity, changes in the Companys operating expenses, including bunker prices, drydocking and insurance costs, the market for the Companys vessels, availability of financing and refinancing, charter counterparty performance, ability to obtain financing and comply with covenants in such financing arrangements, changes in governmental rules and regulations or actions taken by regulatory authorities, potential liability from pending or future litigation, general domestic and international political conditions, potential disruption of shipping routes due to accidents or political events, vessels breakdowns and instances of offhires, and other factors. Please see the Companys filings with the SEC for a more complete discussion of certain of these and other risks and uncertainties.

Contact Information



Scorpio Tankers Inc.

James Doyle  Head of Corporate Development & Investor Relations

Tel: +1 646-432-1678

Email: investor.relations@scorpiotankers.com
TORONTO, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hudbay Minerals Inc. (Hudbay or the company) (TSX, NYSE: HBM) and the U.S. Department of Justice today received a split decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (the Decision), which affirmed the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizonas (District Court) decision in July 2019 relating to the Rosemont copper project in Arizona. In the Decision, the Court of Appeals agreed with the District Courts ruling that the U.S. Forest Service relied on incorrect assumptions regarding its legal authority and the validity of Rosemonts unpatented mining claims in the issuance of Rosemonts Final Environmental Impact Statement. While Hudbay reviews the Decision, in any event, the company will continue to pursue its alternative plan to advance its Copper World project.



Since 2019, Hudbay has successfully discovered the Copper World deposits located on patented mining claims adjacent to Rosemont. The company has also acquired a private land package totaling approximately 4,500 acres to support an operation on private lands. The initial technical studies for Copper World have been completed and the results are being incorporated into a Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA) contemplating the development of the Copper World deposits in conjunction with an alternative plan for the Rosemont deposit. The PEA is expected to incorporate a two-phase mine plan with the first phase reflecting a standalone operation utilizing Hudbays private land for processing infrastructure and contemplating mining portions of Copper World and Rosemont located on patented mining claims. The first phase is expected to require only state and local permits and is expected to reflect an approximate 15-year mine life. The second phase of the mine plan is expected to extend the mine life and incorporate an expansion onto federal lands to mine the entire Rosemont and Copper World deposits. The second phase of the mine plan would be subject to the federal permitting process and the company expects it will be able to pursue the federal permits within the constraints imposed by the Decision, if any subsequent appeals are not successful. Hudbay expects the PEA to demonstrate positive economics for this low-cost, long-life copper project and the company is on track to publish the results in a NI 43-101 Technical Report in the second quarter of 2022.

Forward-Looking Information

This news release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian and United States securities legislation. Forward-looking information includes, but is not limited to, Hudbays expectations regarding the impacts of the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Hudbays expectations regarding the preliminary economic assessment of the Copper World project and a potential alternative development plan for the Rosemont deposit and Hudbays expectations regarding the economics and permitting requirements for the Copper World project. Forward-looking information is not, and cannot be, a guarantee of future results or events. Forward-looking information is based on, among other things, opinions, assumptions, estimates and analyses that, while considered reasonable by the company at the date the forward-looking information is provided, inherently are subject to significant risks, uncertainties, contingencies and other factors that may cause actual results and events to be materially different from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking information.

Should one or more risk, uncertainty, contingency or other factor materialize or should any factor or assumption prove incorrect, actual results could vary materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking information. Accordingly, you should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. Hudbay does not assume any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information after the date of this news release or to explain any material difference between subsequent actual events and any forward-looking information, except as required by applicable law.

About Hudbay

Hudbay (TSX, NYSE: HBM) is a diversified mining company primarily producing copper concentrate (containing copper, gold and silver), zinc metal and silver/gold dore. Directly and through its subsidiaries, Hudbay owns three polymetallic mines, four ore concentrators and a zinc production facility in northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan (Canada) and Cusco (Peru), and copper projects in Arizona and Nevada (United States). The companys growth strategy is focused on the exploration, development, operation and optimization of properties it already controls, as well as other mineral assets it may acquire that fit its strategic criteria. Hudbays mission is to create sustainable value through the acquisition, development and operation of high-quality, long-life deposits with exploration potential in jurisdictions that support responsible mining, and to see the regions and communities in which the company operates benefit from its presence. The company is governed by the Canada Business Corporations Act and its shares are listed under the symbol "HBM" on the Toronto Stock Exchange, New York Stock Exchange and Bolsa de Valores de Lima. Further information about Hudbay can be found on www.hudbay.com.

For investor and media inquiries, please contact:

Candace Brule

Vice President, Investor Relations

(416) 814-4387

candace.brule@hudbay.com
Hong Kong: Govt chemist named

The Government today announced that Assistant Government Chemist Lee Wai-on will take up the post of Government Chemist on May 16, succeeding Sin Wai-mei who will start her pre-retirement leave in November.

Secretary for the Civil Service Patrick Nip said Mr Lee possesses profound professional knowledge and experience while demonstrating proven leadership and management skills.

He is confident that Mr Lee will be able to lead the Government Laboratory to meet the challenges ahead.

At the same time, Mr Nip lauded Ms Sin for serving with professionalism and commitment in the civil service throughout the years, adding that she has made sustained efforts in leading the department to provide the community with quality analytical, forensic and advisory services.

He also wished Ms Sin a fulfilling and happy retirement.

This story has been published on: 2022-05-12. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Cargo throughput rises significantly at Shanghai airport

Xinhua) 10:20, May 12, 2022

SHANGHAI, May 11 (Xinhua) -- A total of 43,000 tonnes of import and export cargo were handled at Shanghai Pudong International Airport between May 1 and 10, up 59.3 percent over the same period in April, according to the airport's customs authorities Wednesday.

The figures show that the Pudong airport, a major global aviation hub, is gradually recovering vitality since Shanghai implemented tough control measures to contain the latest COVID-19 resurgence since late March.

Customs at the airport has made the whole declaration process paperless and offers personalized clearance plans for businesses in key industries such as integrated circuits, biomedicine and automobiles.

(Web editor: Peng Yukai, Liang Jun)
TORONTO, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- GCM Mining Corp. (TSX: GCM; OTCQX: TPRFF) announced today the release of its unaudited interim condensed consolidated financial statements and accompanying managements discussion and analysis (MD&A) for the three months ended March 31, 2022. All financial figures contained herein are expressed in U.S. dollars (USD) unless otherwise noted. Non-GAAP financial performance measures in this press release are identified with NG. For a detailed description of each of the non-GAAP measures used in this press release and a detailed reconciliation to the most directly comparable measure under IFRS, please refer to the Companys MD&A.



Lombardo Paredes, Chief Executive Officer of GCM Mining, commenting on the first quarter results, said, We have started off 2022 on a positive note, meeting our expectations for production, costs and cash flow in the first quarter. We are on track to once again meet our annual production guidance for 2022. Following the favorable Mineral Reserve and Resource update at Segovia that we announced in March, our exploration and mine geology teams have continued to execute the ongoing drilling campaigns at our four producing mines and the brownfield areas in our mining title. At our Toroparu Project in Guyana, we are advancing the infill drilling and the pre-construction activities. We are also completing the competitive bid process for the contract miner and selection processes for the power plant contractor and main civil works contractor are getting underway. We are on track to finalize the prefeasibility study in the third quarter of 2022, at which point formal construction of the project is expected to commence. The Company is also working with the local governmental agencies to finalize the mining license which is expected to be received in mid-2022.

First Quarter 2022 Highlights

GCM Minings gold production from its Segovia Operations totaled 49,951 ounces in the first quarter of 2022, up 2% over the first quarter last year. In April 2022, Segovia produced 18,321 ounces of gold bringing Segovias trailing 12 months total gold production as of the end of April 2022 to 208,130 ounces, up 1% over 2021. Expansion of the Companys processing plant at Segovia to 2,000 tpd is proceeding well and is expected to be fully completed by mid-2022. The Company is on track to meet its annual production guidance for 2022 of between 210,000 and 225,000 ounces of gold.





from its Segovia Operations totaled 49,951 ounces in the first quarter of 2022, up 2% over the first quarter last year. In April 2022, Segovia produced 18,321 ounces of gold bringing Segovias trailing 12 months total gold production as of the end of April 2022 to 208,130 ounces, up 1% over 2021. Expansion of the Companys processing plant at Segovia to 2,000 tpd is proceeding well and is expected to be fully completed by mid-2022. The Company is on track to meet its annual production guidance for 2022 of between 210,000 and 225,000 ounces of gold. The new polymetallic recovery plant constructed in 2021 at Segovia produced approximately 252,000 lbs of payable zinc and 338,000 lbs of payable lead in the first quarter of 2022. The concentrate production is currently being stockpiled as the Company finalizes the offtake contract with an international customer for shipments to commence before the end of the second quarter of 2022.





constructed in 2021 at Segovia produced approximately 252,000 lbs of payable zinc and 338,000 lbs of payable lead in the first quarter of 2022. The concentrate production is currently being stockpiled as the Company finalizes the offtake contract with an international customer for shipments to commence before the end of the second quarter of 2022. Consolidated revenue , all of which was sourced from the Segovia Operations in the first quarter of 2022, amounted to $101.3 million compared with $101.9 million in the first quarter last year, which included $5.1 million from Aris Gold Corporation (Aris) prior to the loss of control of Aris on February 4, 2021. Segovias revenue in the first quarter of 2022 was up 5% from the first quarter last year reflecting a 2% increase in the volume of gold sold to 53,645 ounces and a 3% increase in realized gold prices to an average of $1,860 per ounce.





, all of which was sourced from the Segovia Operations in the first quarter of 2022, amounted to $101.3 million compared with $101.9 million in the first quarter last year, which included $5.1 million from Aris Gold Corporation (Aris) prior to the loss of control of Aris on February 4, 2021. Segovias revenue in the first quarter of 2022 was up 5% from the first quarter last year reflecting a 2% increase in the volume of gold sold to 53,645 ounces and a 3% increase in realized gold prices to an average of $1,860 per ounce. At the Segovia Operations, total cash costs NG averaged $817 per ounce in the first quarter of 2022 compared with $825 per ounce in the first quarter of 2021. Including the Marmato mining operations owned by Aris, consolidated total cash costs were $862 per ounce in the first quarter last year.





averaged $817 per ounce in the first quarter of 2022 compared with $825 per ounce in the first quarter of 2021. Including the Marmato mining operations owned by Aris, consolidated total cash costs were $862 per ounce in the first quarter last year. All-in sustaining costs (AISC) NG per ounce sold for the Segovia Operations were $1,187 in the first quarter of 2022 compared with $1,120 per ounce in the first quarter last year. The year-over-year increase in Segovias AISC primarily reflects $3.2 million of fees, equivalent to about $60 per ounce sold, included in G&A expenses in the first quarter of 2022 related to the Companys ongoing arbitration proceedings with the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) in respect of its claim against the Republic of Colombia (the FTA Claim). Including Marmato, consolidated AISC in the first quarter last year was $1,164 per ounce.





for the Segovia Operations were $1,187 in the first quarter of 2022 compared with $1,120 per ounce in the first quarter last year. The year-over-year increase in Segovias AISC primarily reflects $3.2 million of fees, equivalent to about $60 per ounce sold, included in G&A expenses in the first quarter of 2022 related to the Companys ongoing arbitration proceedings with the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) in respect of its claim against the Republic of Colombia (the FTA Claim). Including Marmato, consolidated AISC in the first quarter last year was $1,164 per ounce. GCM Mining maintained its commitment to its exploration drilling campaigns in the first quarter of 2022, completing a total of approximately 8,700 meters of drilling at El Silencio and Sandra K and another approximately 6,500 meters through its brownfield drilling program at Cristales, Marmajito, Manzanillo and Vera.





in the first quarter of 2022, completing a total of approximately 8,700 meters of drilling at El Silencio and Sandra K and another approximately 6,500 meters through its brownfield drilling program at Cristales, Marmajito, Manzanillo and Vera. Adjusted EBITDA NG amounted to $45.2 million for the first quarter of 2022 compared with $46.3 million in the first quarter last year. This brings the trailing 12 months total adjusted EBITDA at the end of March 2022 to $170.5 million compared with $171.6 million in 2021.





amounted to $45.2 million for the first quarter of 2022 compared with $46.3 million in the first quarter last year. This brings the trailing 12 months total adjusted EBITDA at the end of March 2022 to $170.5 million compared with $171.6 million in 2021. Net cash provided by operating activities in the first quarter of 2022 was $24.2 million compared with $13.6 million in the first quarter last year which was net of $10.1 million used by Aris prior to the loss of control in early 2021. This brings the trailing 12 months net cash provided by operating activities at the end of March 2022 to $91.1 million, up from $80.6 million in 2021.





in the first quarter of 2022 was $24.2 million compared with $13.6 million in the first quarter last year which was net of $10.1 million used by Aris prior to the loss of control in early 2021. This brings the trailing 12 months net cash provided by operating activities at the end of March 2022 to $91.1 million, up from $80.6 million in 2021. Free Cash Flow NG in the first quarter of 2022 was $10.7 million compared with $2.5 million in the first quarter last year bringing the trailing 12 months Free Cash Flow at the end of March 2022 to $34.4 million, up from $26.2 million in 2021.





in the first quarter of 2022 was $10.7 million compared with $2.5 million in the first quarter last year bringing the trailing 12 months Free Cash Flow at the end of March 2022 to $34.4 million, up from $26.2 million in 2021. GCM Minings balance sheet remained strong with a cash position of $315.1 million at March 31, 2022. The Company also has $138.0 million of funding available for construction of its Toroparu Project in Guyana through a precious metals stream facility with Wheaton Precious Metals (Caymans) Ltd. Other than scheduled interest payments, the Company has no maturities of its long-term debt in the next 12 months.





remained strong with a cash position of $315.1 million at March 31, 2022. The Company also has $138.0 million of funding available for construction of its Toroparu Project in Guyana through a precious metals stream facility with Wheaton Precious Metals (Caymans) Ltd. Other than scheduled interest payments, the Company has no maturities of its long-term debt in the next 12 months. The Company returned a total of $4.6 million to shareholders in the first quarter of 2022 with payment of its monthly dividends totaling $3.5 million and the repurchase of approximately 0.3 million shares for cancellation at a cost of $1.1 million. In April 2022, the Company purchased and cancelled an additional 100,000 common shares under its Normal Course Issuer Bid.





totaling $3.5 million and the repurchase of approximately 0.3 million shares for cancellation at a cost of $1.1 million. In April 2022, the Company purchased and cancelled an additional 100,000 common shares under its Normal Course Issuer Bid. Income from operations in the first quarter of 2022 was $35.7 million, down from $39.1 million in the first quarter last year largely due to the increase in G&A, share-based compensation and social programs expenses which more than offset the benefit of the reduction in Segovias total cash cost NG per ounce sold in the first quarter of 2022 versus the first quarter last year.





in the first quarter of 2022 was $35.7 million, down from $39.1 million in the first quarter last year largely due to the increase in G&A, share-based compensation and social programs expenses which more than offset the benefit of the reduction in Segovias total cash cost per ounce sold in the first quarter of 2022 versus the first quarter last year. The Company reported net income of $5.2 million ($0.05 per share) in the first quarter of 2022 compared with $118.3 million ($2.02 per share) in the first quarter last year. Net earnings in the first quarter last year included the benefit of a $56.9 million gain on loss of control of Aris, the $42.8 million gain on financial instruments and an $8.9 million gain on sale of the Zancudo Project, offset partially by $9.8 million of transaction costs incurred by Aris in connection with the loss of control in early 2021.





of $5.2 million ($0.05 per share) in the first quarter of 2022 compared with $118.3 million ($2.02 per share) in the first quarter last year. Net earnings in the first quarter last year included the benefit of a $56.9 million gain on loss of control of Aris, the $42.8 million gain on financial instruments and an $8.9 million gain on sale of the Zancudo Project, offset partially by $9.8 million of transaction costs incurred by Aris in connection with the loss of control in early 2021. The Company reported adjusted net income NG for the first quarter of 2022 of $14.8 million ($0.15 per share) compared with $21.9 million ($0.36 per share) in the first quarter last year. The year-over-year decrease in adjusted net income in the first quarter of 2022 largely reflects the $4.0 million decrease in income from operations as noted above together with a $2.5 million increase in finance costs resulting from the Senior Notes issued in August 2021 and an increase in income tax expense due to the tax rate increase in Colombia effective in 2022.



Selected Financial Information

First Quarter 2022 2021



Operating data Gold produced (ounces) (1) 49,951 51,486 Gold sold (ounces) 53,645 55,317 Average realized gold price ($/oz sold) (2) $ 1,860 $ 1,812 Total cash costs ($/oz sold) (2) 817 862 AISC ($/oz sold) (2) 1,187 1,164 Financial data ($000s, except per share amounts) Revenue $ 101,322 $ 101,919 Adjusted EBITDA (2) 45,218 46,323 Net income 5,238 118,305 Per share - basic 0.05 2.02 Per share - diluted 0.05 1.28 Adjusted net income (2) 14,781 21,948 Per share  basic (2) 0.15 0.36 Per share - diluted (2) 0.14 0.31 Net cash provided by operating activities 24,209 13,617 Free cash flow (2) 10,688 2,497

(1) Includes production from the Marmato Project up to February 4, 2021, the date of loss of control of Aris.

(2) Refer to Non-IFRS Measures in the Companys MD&A.

March 31, 2022 December 31, 2021 Balance sheet ($000s): Cash and cash equivalents $ 315,064 $ 323,565 Gold Bullion (1) 2,688 4,479 Senior Notes due 2026  principal amount outstanding (2) 300,000 300,000 Convertible Debentures due 2024  principal amount outstanding (3) CA18,000 CA18,000

(1) The Company is maintaining a portion of its liquidity in gold bullion. As at March 31, 2022, the Company had 1,500 ounces in its gold bullion account (December 31, 2021  2,500 ounces).

(2) The Senior Notes were issued in August 2021 and are recorded in the Financial Statements at amortized cost. At March 31, 2022, the carrying amount of the Senior Notes outstanding, including accrued interest of $3.0 million, was $291.2 million (December 31, 2021 - $294.8 million, including $8.1 million of accrued interest).

(3) The Convertible Debentures are recorded in the Financial Statements at fair value. At March 31, 2022, the carrying amount of the Convertible Debentures outstanding was $20.2 million (December 31, 2021 - $19.5 million).



First Quarter 2022 Results Webcast

As a reminder, GCM Mining will host a conference call and webcast on Friday, May 13, 2022 at 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time to discuss the results.

Webcast and call-in details are as follows:

Live Event link: https://edge.media-server.com/mmc/p/d8dyrtvh Canada/ International Toll: 1 (647) 484-8332 PIN: 51372134# Canada Toll Free: 1 (866) 455-3403 PIN: 51372134# United States Toll: 1 (404) 400-0571 PIN: 51372134# United States Toll Free: 1 (866) 374-5140 PIN: 51372134# Colombia Toll: +57 601 485-0348 PIN: 51372134# Conference ID: EV00134454

A replay of the webcast will be available at www.gcm-mining.com from Friday, May 13, 2022 until Friday, June 10, 2022.



About GCM Mining Corp.

GCM Mining is a mid-tier gold producer with a proven track record of mine building and operating in Latin America. In Colombia, the Company is the leading high-grade underground gold and silver producer with several mines in operation at Segovia Operations. Segovia produced 206,000 ounces of gold in 2021. In Guyana, the Company is advancing its fully funded Toroparu Project, one of the largest undeveloped gold/copper projects in the Americas, which is expected to commence production of more than 200,000 ounces of gold annually in 2024. GCM Mining pays a monthly dividend to its shareholders and has equity interests in Aris Gold Corporation (44%; TSX: ARIS; Colombia  Marmato), Denarius Metals Corp. (28.6%; TSXV: DSLV; Spain  Lomero-Poyatos and Colombia  Guia Antigua, Zancudo) and Western Atlas Resources Inc. (26%; TSX-V: WA: Nunavut  Meadowbank).

Additional information on GCM Mining can be found on its website at www.gcm-mining.com and by reviewing its profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

Cautionary Statement on Forward-Looking Information:



This news release contains "forward-looking information", which may include, but is not limited to, statements with respect to production guidance, the Toroparu Project construction, mining license and technical studies, and other anticipated business plans or strategies. Often, but not always, forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as "plans", "expects", "is expected", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates", or "believes" or variations (including negative 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. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of GCM Mining to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements are described under the caption "Risk Factors" in the Company's Annual Information Form dated as of March 31, 2022 which is available for view on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Forward-looking statements contained herein are made as of the date of this press release and GCM Mining disclaims, other than as required by law, any obligation to update any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, results, future events, circumstances, or if management's estimates or opinions should change, or otherwise. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, the reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.

For Further Information, Contact:

Mike Davies

Chief Financial Officer

(416) 360-4653

investorrelations@gcm-mining.com
Investors can contact the law firm at no cost to learn more about recovering their losses



LOS ANGELES, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Portnoy Law Firm advises First High-School Education Group Co., Ltd. ("First High-School Education " or the "Company") (NYSE: FHS) investors that a class action filed on behalf of investors that purchased First High-School Education Group shares and lost money are encouraged to contact the firm to discuss their legal rights.

Investors are encouraged to contact attorney Lesley F. Portnoy, by phone 844-767-8529 or email: lesley@portnoylaw.com, to discuss their legal rights, or click here to join the case via www.portnoylaw.com. The Portnoy Law Firm can provide a complimentary case evaluation and discuss investors options for pursuing claims to recover their losses.

According to the lawsuit, the Companys IPO Registration Statement was materially false and misleading and omitted to state: (1) the new rules, regulations, and policies to be implemented by the Chinese government following the Two Sessions parliamentary meetings were far more severe than represented to investors and posed a material adverse threat to First High-School Education Group and its business; (2) contemplated Chinese regulations and rules regarding private education were leading to a slowdown of government approval to open new educational facilities which would have a negative effect on First High-School Education Group's enrollment and growth; and (3) as a result, the Registration Statement's representations regarding First High-School Education Group's historical financial and operational metrics and purported market opportunities did not accurately reflect the actual business, operations, and financial results and trajectory of First High-School Education Group at the time of the IPO, and were materially false and misleading and lacked a factual basis. When the true details entered the market, the lawsuit claims that investors suffered damages.

Please visit our website to review more information and submit your transaction information.

The Portnoy Law Firm represents investors in pursuing claims against caused by corporate wrongdoing. The Firms founding partner has recovered over $5.5 billion for aggrieved investors. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes.

Lesley F. Portnoy, Esq.

Admitted CA and NY Bar

lesley@portnoylaw.com

310-692-8883

www.portnoylaw.com

Attorney Advertising
For Fernando Alonso, 'El Plan' has not yet gone as he had hoped. The Spaniard is only on two points after five races, but is supported by Alpine CEO Laurent Rossi.

Expectations were high around Alpine after Alonso set the bar high with 'El Plan' on the back of his car at the end of 2021. It's all going to be very disappointing in 2022. Alpine is sixth among the constructors and saw star driver Alonso retire twice already. The Spaniard has only scored two points, even though the pace seems to be there.

Alonso has a lot of bad luck

''Of course we are as frustrated as he is. He only has two points, while if you were to ask Alonso or other people everyone says he's in the best four. He's always there this year, but he's just had a lot of bad luck,'' said the CEO of the French brand according to Marca.

Alonso crashed out in Saudi Arabia due to a problem with the car, crashed out in qualifying in Australia due to a problem with the car and crashed out in Imola due to damage sustained from a spin by Mick Schumacher. It's not exactly easy for the Spaniard and with an expiring contract and Oscar Piastri in the waiting room, it's not an ideal situation.

Read more After being humiliated by Verstappen, Albon seems equal to Russell
Mercedes seemed to have solved some problems during practice for the Miami Grand Prix. Nevertheless, the reigning constructor champion is still not in good shape. The upcoming Spanish Grand Prix will be very important for the development of the W13.

Mercedes more concerned with solutions than continued development

The biggest problem Mercedes faces is porpoising. Because the car has a fluctuating downforce level on the straights, the car bumps up and down violently. George Russell and Lewis Hamilton sometimes have to lift on the straights and get off the gas earlier before the corner to stabilize the car to steer properly. In Formula 1, you lose an awful lot of valuable time doing that.

On Friday in Miami, the team seemed to have the problems under control a lot better. In the F1 Nation-podcast, Mercedes chief James Vowles let it be known that Russell's fastest time in VT1 was not a distortion, but that they were genuinely fast. During the weekend they lost that speed; that is a big problem for which there is no explanation yet within the team. So at Mercedes, this season is even more about finding a solution than it is about further developing the car.

Vowles calls Barcelona an important step

The battle with Red Bull Racing and Ferrari seems to become increasingly difficult. Vowles: "The advantage is that when we solve this incredibly difficult puzzle we get a lot of satisfaction out of it. The downside is that we have to put so much effort into it that it takes over your life. We enjoy the puzzle, but also feel the pressure of the millions of people around the world."

Barcelona is going to be crucial in Mercedes' learning process, as the team started there with the W13 during winter testing. Vowles continued: "A small correction. We have not been to Barcelona with this car yet. We were in Barcelona with the old specification. That's the interesting learning point; we can draw a line in the sand and compare it with the aerodynamic solutions we had then."
Test and measurement company TOYO Corporation announced that a major US automotive manufacturer recently selected TOYOs vehicle-in-the-loop simulator (ViLS) for testing and validating its next generation of electric vehicles (EVs) and autonomous vehicles.

The ViLS allows automotive engineers to perform a wide variety of vehicle, environmental, and road testing under real-world conditions but in a more cost-effective and safer lab-controlled setting. In particular, the TOYO ViLS supports the CASE paradigm: Connected cars, Autonomous/Automated driving, Shared, and Electric.

The TOYO ViLS is designed from the ground up. Among the components are Rototest Energy chassis dynamometers, Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), and True Sim, a professional-grade driving simulator co-developed by TOYO and Iwane that features augmented reality functionality.





After a multi-month technical assessment of the ViLS with one of the automakers EVs, the OEM established that the ViLS met both their current and evolving needs. In particular, the automaker needed dynamometers capable of coping with the high-torque forces generated by EVs and observed that the Rototest system met this stringent requirement.

The company has ordered two complete ViLS systemsthe largest ever secured by TOYO for the ViLS with a valuation in the multi-millions of dollars. The customer worked closely with TOYOs US subsidiary TOYOTech through all phases of the procurement cycle. Delivery and deployment of the platforms are expected to occur before the end of the year.

Some advantages of the TOYO solution include:

Portable and short setup time (15 to 20 minutes per hub)

Supports high-torque force

4-wheel independent control dynamometer system requiring only a flat surface and power

Allows for steering control and feedback during a running test

Uses a low-inertia drive motor unit

Allows for a quick acceleration test by eliminating tires

Allows for a running resistance test, also simulating hill conditions

Available in different variations covering from single-axle (2WD) vehicles to dual-axle (4WD) vehicles

Available in application-specific models such as a low-noise model for the NVH test (45dBA or less at 62mph/100kmh) and an environment test model (covering down to -95 F/35C)

Allows for system customization with different options, such as a blower that generates headwinds according to the simulated running speed

Interface to link external control systems such as a driving simulator or hardware-in-the-loop simulator

A key to closing this transaction was the proof-of-concept (POC) evaluation that the automaker partook in with our technology partner, Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee (ORNL). As a multiprogram science and technology national laboratory sponsored by the US Department of Energy, ORNL maintains a TOYO-supplied ViLS in DOEs National Transportation Research Center at ORNL to support such endeavors. During the POC, the automaker validated requirements and witnessed first-hand the ViLS in operation with their electric vehicle.We are grateful to ORNL for supporting the POC and look forward to assisting with the deployment and commissioning of the ViLSs at the customer site. Bo Han, CEO of TOYOTech

The automakers key test requirements for the TOYO ViLS include support for:
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GREENWICH  A proposal by the the Boys & Girls Club of Greenwich to build a 10,000-square-foot addition and modernize the building on Horseneck Lane was viewed favorably by the Planning and Zoning Commission in its first public presentation.

The expansion plan calls for a new gym to be built over the existing outdoor parking lot. The proposal will also result in an upgraded teen center, additional instructional space, new locker rooms and an outdoor amphitheater. Better mechanical systems and energy-efficient enhancements are in store, as well as an upgraded security system.

Boys & Girls Club Chief Executive Officer Cristina Vittoria told the commission the facilities, which she called a cornerstone of the Greenwich community, were out of date.

The club was built back in the 1930s. It has not been significantly rehabilitated since a renovation almost 20 years ago, she said.

The goal is to modernize the operation and improve offerings to young people, Vittoria said.

The Boys & Girls Club has a long history of serving the community, and we intend to do so for the next 100 years and to serve thousands of youths each year, she concluded. Some 350 young people use the facility every day, Vittoria said, and it helped support working families in Greenwich.

The plan by the Boys & Girls Club is to carry out a roughly 15-month construction project from June 2023 to September 2024. Vittoria said the plan was for programs and activities to continue at other locations around town  such as town facilities and houses of worship.

Members of the planning commission said they were interested in how parking and traffic circulation could be improved at the facility, with Chairman Margarita Alban calling vehicular access off Horseneck into the facility weird.

The attorney for the project, Bruce Cohen, said, Hopefully, well make it less weird, and a traffic consultant was working on the issue.

No major objections were raised by the commission. Alban said the organization was viewed favorably in the community, and the commission was looking to expedite the proposal.

The application is still in the preliminary stages, and a full site plan is set to be filed later in the year.

Editors note: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Cristina Vittoria.
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP)  Connecticut lawmakers closed out the 2022 legislative session Wednesday night after passing juvenile crime reforms, limits on marijuana advertising and making Juneteenth a state holiday, while also expressing gratitude that things were getting back to normal after two years of pandemic restrictions.

The top Democratic and Republican leaders of the House of Representatives both expressed appreciation for the normalcy of the night, which included the traditional hurried passage of bills before the midnight deadline.

Its really really really special to look down and see everybody standing here because I'm not sure we all thought this was possible two months ago let alone two years ago," said House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, looking out over the House membership.

House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora, R-North Branford, said it was important for lawmakers to get back to normal. We did some great work, he said. While public hearings and committee votes were held mostly virtually, House and Senate sessions were held in person throughout the three-month session. Lawmakers did have the option of voting from their offices.

While hundreds of bills died on the vine at the stroke of midnight, per usual, many of the major bills of the three-month-long session have already cleared the Democratic-controlled General Assembly in recent days.

The list includes one of the first abortion-related bills to pass in years in Connecticut. It expands who can perform abortions to include advanced practice registered nurse, nurse-midwife or physician assistant. It also attempts to protect Connecticut providers from legal action stemming from out-of-state laws, as well as the patients who travel to Connecticut to terminate a pregnancy and those who help them.

Lawmakers voted along mostly party lines to revise the one-year, $24.2 billion state budget that contains roughly $600 million in tax cuts and increases state spending for a major mental health initiative and social service programs  all thanks the state's best fiscal figures in decades and subsequently lots of money to spend. Connecticut is projected to end the fiscal year on June 30 with a $4.8 billion surplus. Revisions to the second year of the two-year budget passed last year include about $1 billion in federal COVID-19 relief funds.

We've bemoaned our inability to meet these needs for the last 10 to 15 years since the onset of the Great Recession in 2008, said Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney, D-New Haven. Now we're making good on a promise that we regretted not being able to fulfill back then.

While Republicans supported many of the initiatives that passed this year, including the mental health bills inspired in part by psychological fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, they've accused the majority Democrats of squandering this unique financial opportunity to make systemic changes to Connecticuts tax system  as well as spending too much. It's an accusation that will likely to come up in this year's legislative and gubernatorial campaigns.

Connecticut Democrats have overtaxed our families and their immediate reaction is to overspend and grow an unaffordable government, not provide the level of relief Connecticut families are asking for now," said Senate Minority Leader Kevin Kelly, R-Stratford.

Lawmakers were facing a midnight adjournment deadline. While governors traditionally address a joint session of the General Assembly once the final gavel is struck, Lamont was forgoing an appearance this year. House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, said some legislators were concerned about so many people gathering in the hall of the House of Representatives as the state's COVID-19 infection numbers have been climbing. He said it's maybe a tradition that's time has come and gone.

Here are highlights of some key bills that passed on the final day of the session:

JUVENILE CRIME

Procedures for juvenile arrests are updated under a legislation that cleared the Senate. It's part of an effort to clamp down on juvenile crime in Connecticut. Among the changes, an arrested juvenile must be brought before a judge within five business days after the arrest, and courts are allowed to order electronic monitoring if the child has been charged with a second or more vehicle or property thefts. The bill also increases the maximum period, from six to eight hours, that a juvenile may be held in a lockup without a judge's order.

CANNABIS ADVERTISING

Tougher restrictions on marijuana advertising cleared the Senate, including barring ads from cross-border retail cannabis establishments such as the billboard ads that have popped up along the states border with Massachusetts. It prevents anyone without a Connecticut cannabis-related license from advertising the product and cannabis-services within the state. The same bill also bars Connecticut licensees from using images of the cannabis plant as well as from advertising on an illuminated billboard between 6 a.m. and 11 p.m. and from advertising within 1,500 yards of a school or church.

The same bill tightens rules for gifting marijuana. Some legislators have raised concerns about cannabis bazaars, where people barter for marijuana, essentially circumventing the states regulated marketplace.

JOB DISCRIMINATION

A bill that prevents job licensure boards from imposing blanket bans against groups of people based on their record of arrest or conviction cleared the Senate. Instead, the legislation allows such boards to review people's licensure applications individually. The boards would be allowed to deny someone a license because of an arrest or conviction only if it's related directly the person's job.
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WEISSENHAUS, Germany (AP)  Top diplomats from the Group of Seven wealthy nations gathered Thursday in northern Germany for a three-day meeting centered on Russia's war against Ukraine and the wider impact it is having around the world, particularly on food and energy prices.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, the meeting's host, said the conflict already had become a global crisis" because shipments of staple crops are stuck in Ukraine, a major agricultural exporter.

Twenty-five million tons (27.5 million U.S. tons) of grain are currently blocked in Ukrainian ports, particularly Odesa, Baerbock said. Grain that's food for millions of people around the world, and which is needed particularly urgently in African countries and the Middle East.

That's why we are discussing how the grain blockade exerted by Russia can be unblocked, how we can get the grain out to the world, she added.

Baerbock warned that the brewing global food emergency was being further fuelled by climate change  another topic the ministers plan to discuss during their meeting in Weissenhaus, a resort on Germany's Baltic Sea coast northeast of Hamburg.

About 3,500 police officers were deployed at the event site to provide security.

The foreign ministers of Ukraine and neighboring Moldova, which fears it could become the next target of Russia's aggression, have been invited to attend the meeting as guests. Indonesias foreign minister, whose country chairs the Group of 20 major economies this year, is expected to join remotely for part of the meeting Friday, when relations with China are on the agenda.

Speaking earlier Thursday in Berlin, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba welcomed the German government's recent decisions to step up military support for his country.

We see a positive, positive dynamic, Kuleba told reporters after a meeting with German lawmakers. We have to make sure that this positive dynamic is maintained.

Kuleba said he considered it a signal of strength that Chancellor Olaf Scholzs center-left Social Democratic Party had dropped its opposition to providing Ukraine with heavy weapons.

He also expressed hope that the European Union would soon approve Ukraine's application to start the process of joining the bloc. French President Emmanuel Macron has suggested it could be decades before Ukraine is ready to become a full EU member.

Baerbock, who recently became the first top representative of Germany to travel to Ukraine since the start of the war, offered support for Ukraines EU application. Asked about Ukraines request for fighter jets, Baerbock was less encouraging, citing the risk of NATO being drawn into a conflict with Russia.

When it comes to no-fly zones and aviation support weve already taken a clear position, she told reporters.

Britain's foreign secretary called for Ukrain to receive more sophisticated military support, saying Russian President Vladimir Putin should face a defeat in Ukraine that denies him any benefit and ultimately constrains further aggression.

To help Ukraine, we need to go further and faster, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss told the meeting, according to remarks released by her office.

The best long-term security for Ukraine will come from it being able to defend itself," Truss said. "That means providing Ukraine with a clear pathway to NATO-standard equipment."

Also attending the meeting in Weissenhaus were the foreign ministers of Canada, France, Italy and Japan. Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland is representing the United States; U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is recovering from COVID-19 but is scheduled to travel to Berlin for a weekend meeting of NATO foreign ministers.

The NATO gathering will also hear from the foreign ministers of Sweden and Finland as the two countries are poised to join the Western military alliance amid concerns over the military threat from Russia.

___

Follow the APs coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
GREENWICH  After an earlier proposal was rejected by town officials last year, the Greenwich Hospital administration is explaining the changes it made in a proposed new cancer unit it is seeking to build  all part of an effort to make it more appealing to its neighbors.

But there are still concerns about the latest plan among the members of the Planning & Zoning Commission, which held a preliminary and informal review of the proposal Tuesday.

The planned 56,000-square-foot structure would be similar in size to the earlier version, but hospital administrators say the latest version of the building would go deep underground to shrink the footprint of the structure and add more green space to the site.

A number of other modifications have been made to the proposed cancer-unit expansion that were geared to make it appealing to the neighborhood, the design team told the commission during an early review.

Greenwich Hospital President Diane Kelly, in her introduction, reiterated what she said is a strong demand for a top-notch cancer treatment facility in the community. The aim is to have specialists from the highly rated Yale Cancer Center and the Yale New Haven Health System, of which Greenwich is a part, work there, along with the most up-to-date equipment installed.

We are so passionate, and so persistent, about not letting this project go down, Kelly told the commission. It comes down to our serious obligation of ensuring that our town has access to state-of-the-art health care. Cancer rates in Greenwich are rising and would continue to rise into the foreseeable future, and a localized facility would be an invaluable resource for patients and families, she said.

The administration had looked at three other locations, she said, and spent months of study exploring alternate locations. But for a multitude of reasons, Kelly said, the hospital determined the best solution was to build at a site along Lake Avenue near the main hospital site on Perryridge Road in a strip of now vacant residences and medical offices.

Weve worked hard to make changes. I do believe this is a better facility and a better fit in the neighborhood, she said of the latest version.

The development team spelled out the improved design of the latest version of the planned Smilow Cancer Center, its green and sustainable energy systems. Christopher Granatini, a traffic engineer working for the hospital, said a new configuration for the vehicles accessing the site would offer improvements, and the construction would lead to a negligible impact to the roadway network.

Some commissioners expressed reservations about the plan for hospital expansion.

It seems distinctly at odds with the POCDs (Plan of Conservation and Development) first guiding principle, Commissioner Peter Lowe said, noting the long term goals of preservation of community character.

Its not clear the hospital has provided the rationale for this facility and this location, particularly in light of the potentially unwarranted impingement on the surrounding neighborhoods, Lowe said. I remain somewhat unconvinced  not about the need, not about the desirability  but to this particular site.

Commissioner Dennis Yeskey said, There is a conflict here. Were going to have to dig deeper into. We have this challenge.

Another commissioner, Arnold Welles, said he saw a major improvement from what we had before in the latest plan. He said there appeared to be a division between the very valid concerns from the nearby neighbors, versus the towns needs. He said the planned project was a balancing act.

The hospital administration has been making the case that the planned cancer unit has widespread support in the larger Greenwich community, with endorsements and letters in favor of the project.

But during the public hearing portion of the meeting, neighborhood residents raised concerns about traffic congestion, overdevelopment and blasting associated with the project.

Barry Cohen, who lives nearby, said a number of other planned developments in the area would overwhelm the area, in combination with the planned hospital expansion. These are little roads. ... You have to slalom around the parked cars, he said.

Sue McClenahan said she was worried about blasting and traffic.Youre going to have two to three years of disruption. And right now, cant down to Lafayette Place in the morning, it takes five lights to get to the Post Road.

Chairwoman Margarita Alban and other commissioners urged the hospital administration to reach out to the neighborhood for upcoming meetings and workshops on the project.

The hospital has a website set up at www.smilowcancerhospitalgreenwich.org, with an email function, for community members to find out about meetings or to offer input.

Alban said she encouraged that the hospital administration has continued to reach out to the neighborhood. Well see you soon. Youre going to see how it goes with the public and do more outreach, she told the hospital team. Youve heard all the concerns for now.

A formal application has not yet been filed.

rmarchant@greenwichtime.com
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GREENWICH  When building a new Central Middle School, the district could consider redistricting.

That was the idea school board member Laura Kostin pitched during a special meeting Tuesday evening, a process she has been through multiple times as a resident of an area shuffled between Central and Eastern middle schools.

Redistricting is touchy, but there are some families who would be destined for Eastern that may want to attend a brand-new school. Because as I saw when I was a Glenville family, if you do build it, they will come, she said.

Kostin wasnt the only one to quote If you build it, they will come.

Karen Hirsh first introduced those words when she suggested increasing the square footage of the project.

Our town has a very much if you build it, they will come mentality. Weve seen it with a lot of other schools, the school board member said, adding that Eastern is crowded.

Consultants revealed the framework for the new school, planned for an opening in January 2026, to the board on Tuesday. They showed the first draft of the educational specifications, or ed specs, a 35-page report that will guide the projects building committee and serve as a rubric for the projects architect.

Educational specifications are also key to receiving approval for state reimbursement and determining the rate at which the project will be reimbursed.

The district is eligible to receive a maximum 10 percent reimbursement for new construction  though projects built too large will receive a lesser rate, Construction Solutions Group chief operating officer Roger LaFleur told the board.

The district could receive a 20 percent reimbursement for renovation of an existing building, but LaFleur remarked that the decision for a new school is quite on the mark.

Central was deemed unsafe for occupation Feb. 4, two days after an engineering assessment by Diversified Technology Consultants that outlined significant structural concerns was made public. The towns building department confirmed the report and shuttered the building.

The district utilized scaffolding to address inspectors concerns and reopen doors after two weeks.

Even prior to Centrals condemnation, the plan was to start anew. The facilities master plan, finalized in September 2019, suggested replacing the aging building.

Construction Solutions Group, armed with insight from staff and the community, drew up a 103,970-square-foot building with 37 classrooms. A typical classroom will be 800 square feet, according to the specifications, which CMS principal Tom Healy said is much larger than teachers current spaces.

LaFleur said Greenwich was building Central a bit larger than the state standards. The auditorium, which is the designated meeting space for the Representative Town Meeting, is drafted to be larger than what the state will reimburse.

What has to happen because youre submitting a grant, we have to meet certain requirements of the state, and one of the requirements is that they suggest you build a school to a size that is part of the enrollment, the long-range enrollment, he said. Unfortunately, the enrollment projections for Greenwich and for the middle school have you peaking this year and next pretty much and then declining going forward.

He estimated that the highest projection the board could submit would be a student population of 511. Hirsh, though, had projections she had previously received that were slightly higher.

She suggested building the school larger in case more students move to the area or if the district would like to ease the burden of crowded schools.

While we know that enrollment is lower (at Central), and its not just lowered here, its lowered across all of Connecticut and much beyond. But for us to not consider the fact that we will probably go back up where they have been historically  would be very short sighted of us. I do not want to create a school where we are creating it to be overcrowded before we even put a shovel in the ground, she said.

The public will have an opportunity to comment when the second draft is presented during an upcoming school board meeting.

annelise.hanshaw@hearstmediact.com
WINDSOR LOCKS  Police intend to charge a 15-year-old in Georgia after hostage negotiators and a tactical team were called to a local home in what investigators believe was a false swatting incident.

The fake emergency call, and others like it in Georgia and Florida were related to insults traded during sessions of the video game Call of Duty, Windsor Locks police said.

The incident in Connecticut began around 4:05 a.m. March 19 when Windsor Locks police received a call from a person on South Elm Street who claimed to have killed his mother, and would kill his two sisters if police approached him.

Police said they became suspicious after the caller mispronounced the name of the resident at the home.

Based on the information provided by the caller and the potential threat to more innocent people, WLPD had to act, police said in a statement.

A regional emergency response team and hostage negotiators were brought in, and police monitored the home.

Although no movement was seen, the incident continued to unfold under the cover of darkness, police said.

Police said the phone number had been electronically manipulated to show it was coming from the residence, but the actual call had been placed from somewhere else.

Negotiators eventually reached a person inside the home.

After much dialog, it was determined that the residents were believed to be safe and the call a swatting incident, police said. The residents were able to safely leave the home, which was cleared by tactical police. Police said there was no sign of criminal activity, and authorities were cleared while detectives took over the investigation.

That investigation led police to trace the origin of the call to Cherokee County in Georgia, where a similar incident had occurred, police said.

Authorities said the suspect in the case, a 15-year-old boy, was recently arrested on criminal charges in Georgia.

Police did not identify the suspect, as is common in cases involving minors. Police said he is facing felony charges, but declined to list the offenses.
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GREENWICH  At this years annual fundraising benefit, which returns after a two-year hiatus because of COVID-19, Greenwich Hospital will honor three people for serving its community.

The honorees at the May 20 event will be Arthur C. Martinez, former chairman of its board of trustees; his wife, Elizabeth Martinez, a longtime volunteer; and Dr. James A. Brunetti, a longtime physician.

This years Benefit for Greenwich Hospital holds special meaning for our hospital community as we embrace our ability to celebrate together again, said Diane P. Kelly, president, Greenwich Hospital.

Over the past two years, while we focused on helping and healing the hundreds of patients who came to us during the pandemic, Greenwich Hospital remained forward facing  keeping pace with new innovations, technologies and treatments, all while growing key clinical areas and planning for the future health-care needs of our community, she said.

Former Today show co-host Kathie Lee Gifford, a longtime Riverside resident, will serve as master of ceremonies at the festivities, which will be held at the Greenwich Country Club.

It is an honor to host the Benefit for Greenwich Hospital, an organization that is always there in our time of need, and to recognize Dr. James Brunetti, a compassionate caregiver who exemplifies excellence and someone I feel blessed to call a dear, personal friend, Gifford said.

The proceeds of the event will benefit five key areas of growth for Greenwich Hospital: behavioral health, heart and vascular, oncology, childrens and neuroscience.

According to the hospital, Arthur C. Martinez is the retired chairman, president and chief executive officer of Sears, Roebuck and Co., leader of other corporations and director of boards of Fortune 500 companies. He played an active role on Greenwich Hospitals Board of Trustees for 19 years, beginning in 2002. Martinez, a trustee emeritus, led or co-led the board for three terms.

Nothing touches a community more than their health care and how health care is delivered. This is what drew me to the hospital, said Martinez. The campaign to build the new Watson Pavilion started in 2005. I transitioned to chairman while this was going on and was fortunate to have moved into a position when we had a new physical plant. It became a magnet for patients and physicians.

Martinezs leadership helped to guide the hospital through a strategic affiliation with Yale New Haven Health, which is at the core of its growth initiatives today, according to a statement from Greenwich Hospital. It is a cause that Elizabeth Martinez has supported as well ... (as) a dedicated volunteer on hospital fundraising event committees, the hospital said in a statement.

Brunettis career spans from chief resident, to partner in a private practice in town, to a compassionate concierge physician. After his medical training in New York, this second-generation Greenwich resident and former hospital volunteer said he was drawn to the care and personal touch of physician specialists and staff at Greenwich Hospital.

It was amazing how the hospital staff showed so much attention and care. The nurses were friendly, everyone knew the patient and they instilled a family atmosphere, he said. At the same time, Greenwich Hospital had new technology and equipment that rivaled the city hospitals.

Greenwich Hospitals values around patient care became a guiding principle in his private practice, Brunetti said.

Whether seen in the hospital, in their home, or in a nursing home, his patients trust and believe in him. They rely on this very hardworking doctor to help them get back to health, the hospital said in a statement.

Our honorees, Arthur, Liz and Jim have truly been partners over the years in the growth and success of Greenwich Hospital  we are delighted to have the opportunity to celebrate them and to celebrate our communitys unwavering commitment to our hospital, said Kelly.

For the safety of the community, Greenwich Hospital has a reduced number of tickets available for this years benefit. To purchase tickets, send an email to events@greenwichhospital.org or call 203-863-3865. To support the fundraising areas or to make a gift in recognition of an honoree, visit giving.greenhosp.org/benefit-2022.

Greenwich Hospital is 206-bed community hospital and a member of Yale New Haven Health. For information, visit www.greenwichhospital.org.
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MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP)  Somalia is set to hold its long-delayed presidential vote on Sunday, ending the convoluted electoral process that raised tensions in the country when the president's term expired last year without a successor in place.

Authorities have registered 39 presidential candidates, a list that includes incumbent Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, two former presidents, a former prime minister, several top officials and even a journalist. The field includes one woman, Fawzia Yusuf Haji Adam, a lawmaker who once served as Somalia's foreign minister.

The vote will take place amid heightened insecurity as the Islamic extremist group al-Shabab, which opposes the federal government, continues to stage lethal attacks in the capital and elsewhere in the Horn of Africa nation.

With mortar shells and gun assaults, al-Shabab in recent months has repeatedly tested the defenses of the Halane military camp, which is protected by African Union peacekeepers. A suicide bombing Wednesday killed at least four, including two government soldiers, at a checkpoint near the heavily fortified airport area where lawmakers will meet Sunday to choose a new president.

The vote is behind schedule by 15 months and Somali authorities faced a May 17 deadline to hold the vote or risk losing key funding from international donors.

Somali polls are unpredictable, and it appears Mohamed  who is also known as Farmaajo  faces a tough battle for reelection. Mohamed has been locked in a power struggle with his prime minister, Mohamed Hussein Roble, over control of the government. Roble is not running for president, but behind the scenes he and other former leaders could play a decisive role in the outcome of the vote.

A lot of issues are at stake. The most important thing is to oust the incumbent and unite all candidates against him, although he is aware his chances for re-election are minimal, unlike his predecessors," said Mohamed Mohamud, a Mogadishu-based political analyst.

There are disturbing phenomena that the incumbent cant secure the required votes for his re-election, but he is determined to twist results for his preferred opposition candidate and attempt to prevent specific candidates from winning even if they are ahead in the polls, he said.

Despite its persistent insecurity, Somalia has had peaceful changes of leadership every four years since 2000, and it has the distinction of having Africas first democratically elected president to peacefully step down, Aden Abdulle Osman in 1967.

Somalia began to fall apart in 1991, when warlords ousted dictator Siad Barre and then turned on each other. Years of conflict and al-Shabab attacks, along with famine, have shattered the country of some 12 million people.

The goal of a direct, one-person-one-vote election in Somalia remains elusive. It was meant to take place this time. Instead, the federal government and states agreed on another indirect election, with lawmakers elected by community leaders  delegates of powerful clans  in each member state.

All 329 lawmakers of both chambers of parliament are expected to vote by secret ballot on Sunday. To win in the first round, a candidate must secure two-thirds of the vote, or 219 ballots. Observers expect a second or even third round of voting for the four top candidates.

In addition to Mohamed, major contenders include former presidents Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, as well as Said Dani, the current president of the regional state of Puntland.

Somali elections are notoriously corrupt, and there have been widespread allegations of bribery beginning with the selection of lawmakers.

Mohamed's four-year term expired in February 2021, but he stayed in office after the lower house of parliament approved a two-year extension of his mandate and that of the federal government, drawing fury from Senate leaders and criticism from the international community.

The poll delay triggered an exchange of gunfire in April 2021 between soldiers loyal to the government and others angry over what they saw as the president's unlawful extension of his mandate.

Under pressure, Mohamed reversed the term extension and instructed the prime minister to engage with leaders of regional states to chart a fresh roadmap to the vote.

Whoever wins the election faces the urgent issue of insecurity, with al-Shabab fighters making territorial gains in recent months. The new president will also have to help ease tensions between regional states competing for limited resources, analysts say.

We are hoping that the next president will be someone who can put the nations interest before his interest and lead the country towards peace and prosperity, said Farhan Isak Yusuf, deputy executive director of Somali Public Agenda, a Mogadishu-based policy think tank and research group. The decision is in the hands of lawmakers who are entirely independent and not loyal to any certain groups (but) frequently manipulated by money.
Samsung launched the Galaxy Watch4 last August with Wear OS 3, but it didn't come with Google Assistant. Neither Samsung nor Google ever gave a definite time frame of when that would happen, but we now know that Google's digital assistant will be released for the Galaxy Watch4 this summer.

Word comes from Mr. Patrick Chomet, EVP and Head of Customer Experience Office at Mobile eXperience Business, Samsung Electronics, who also said that Google Assistant on Galaxy Watch4 will feature "faster and more natural voice interactions, enabling quick answers and on-the-go help."

Samsung Galaxy Watch4

Mr. Chomet also revealed that Samsung is bringing "enhanced functionality" to their third-party partners, which, for Spotify users, means changing songs with Google Assistant using only their voice.

The EVP further talked about optimizing Google's apps and services for Galaxy Watches later this year to deliver "the most comprehensive and seamless wearable device experience with Android smartphones."

What the Samsung executive didn't talk about, though, is when exactly in summer the rollout of Google Assistant for the Galaxy Watch4 will begin. However, it's still good to have a confirmed time frame for the release rather than having no word on it at all.

Source
Evelyn Flores, a University of Guam professor of Pacific Island literature and CHamoru studies, will be sharing her poetry and literary journey in a special presentation for an online dementia support group.

The session is designed to help caregivers learn to make meaningful connections with older adults and persons with dementia, according to a UOG press release.

They are part of ongoing online support groups for family caregivers of persons with dementia. The groups are coordinated by the Guam/Micronesia Geriatrics Workforce Enhancement Program at UOGs School of Health.

Poetry in Dementia Care with Evelyn Flores takes place 6-8 p.m. Wednesday.

Register for the session at zoom.us/j/92072878067.

Dementia care specialists

The program also is sponsoring training from world-renowned dementia care specialists affiliated with Positive Approach to Care. The training is for caregivers of persons with dementia.

Applied Gerontologist Dr. Beth Nolan will present on Brain Changes in Dementia on Saturday.

On May 21, occupational therapist Teepa Snow will present Navigating the Journey of Dementia from 8-10 a.m.

Register for either or both at zoom.us/j/91243370958.

Nolan and Snow will be available after their presentations to answer questions from the group participants.

Those who have participated in the programs CARES End-of-Life Dementia Care training can take exams to get certified this month.

Exams will take place:

6-8 p.m. May 25: Register at zoom.us/j/92072878067.

10 a.m.noon May 28:Register at zoom.us/j/91243370958.

Dementia supportThe dementia support group sessions are free for partners, family members, and other caregivers of persons with dementia who have ties to Guam and the Micronesian region.

For more information, contact Iain Twaddle or Nikolas Gutierrez at 671-735-2883 or gwep.tgss@triton.uog.edu or Rhoda Orallo at 671-735-3277 or nfcspmgr@teleguam.net.
Norm Analista is the founder of Analista & Co., a Guam-based brand specializing in stand-out bespoke apparel. For more fashion content, follow @analista_co on Instagram and TikTok and Analista & Co. on Facebook. For unpublished and behind the scenes content related to this columns topic, visit @tastemaker671 on Instagram.
Despite traveling throughout the globe for military moves, Leilani Tabor has retained her Guam roots, according to a U.S. Army online story.

Tabor originally joined the Army partly for her childrens sake. I needed my kids to have a better life than what I did, Tabor was quoted as saying in the story.

We didnt have everything growing up, so I wanted to make sure my kids got something I didnt have growing up.

At her first duty station in South Korea, she met other CHamorus and in island tradition, theyd get together on weekends to cook and hang out.

It was like one big family, Tabor said in the story.

There she also met her husband, Joffre Jay Tabor, who also was serving in the Army. She got out after three years, and the family traveled around the world during her husbands 24 1/2 years of service.

Their duty stations have included Fort Bliss, Texas; Yongsan, South Korea; Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Camp Zama, Japan; and Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii.

During their tour in Yongsan, Tabor started working as an Army civilian in a family readiness support role. Today, shes an administrative specialist for U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Commands G-3 office.

Although the family has settled in Huntsville, Guam is still home, Tabor said.

Its always home, she said.

The basic lifestyle that the Chamorro people lived is what molded me to be who I am today, Tabor said. The expensive lifestyle was not a part of our culture growing up. We lived off our land, ate the food we grew, hunted and fished. Our playground was the beach.

I was taught that I should be proud of what I had in life, nothing in life was handed out, and you had to go earn it. Ive learn to appreciate things more if I worked hard to get them.
Former governor of Guam and Guam Visitor Bureaus current president & CEO Carl Gutierrez touches upon the impact that the islands Air V&V program has had in encouraging Taiwan tourists to travel to Guam for COVID-19 vaccinations, as he addresses Rotary Club of Northern Guam members during their meeting at the Hilton Guam Resort & Spa Aug. 11, 2021, in Tumon.
The total number of deaths on island and the number of people pronounced dead on arrival at the islands hospitals have jumped during the past two years of the pandemic, data from the Department of Public Health and Social Services shows.

Territorial epidemiologist Dr. Ann Pobutsky during a Thursday media brief cautioned that calculating just how much more death COVID-19 caused on Guam isnt as simple as comparing the death rates in 2020 and 2021 to previous years. Excess mortality caused by COVID during those two years has to be compared to many deaths the island would have expected otherwise, Its not just something where you can just do an adding and subtracting. Its a little more complicated statistically, Pobutsky said.

But she granted that it wasnt a long shot to think the pandemic contributed to the increased deaths.

In the five years prior to 2020 and the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2, Guam was averaging 1,025 deaths annually, and an average of 315 people were pronounced dead on arrival at a local hospital each year, based on data from Public Health.

Increase in deaths

COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death in 2020, when total deaths went up to 1,193, a 16.6% increase compared to the prior five years. DOAs in 2020 shot to 405. Preliminary data from Public Health has COVID-19 as the third leading cause of death again in 2021, when total deaths went up to 1,278, up 25% from the 2015 to 2019 average. There were 403 DOAs reported in 2021.

Guam has higher rates of DOAs than the U.S. as a whole, Pobutsky said, with DOAs accounting for 30.7% of all deaths in the five-year lead up to the pandemic and peaking at 33.4% of all deaths in 2020.

In the U.S. people who die at home or who were dead on arrival, its less than 10% of their deaths  some of this depends on definitions, but were much higher because we just dont have a lot of long term care facilities or nursing homes. We wanted to have people living at home when they die, Pobutsy said.

About 32% of the 355 people who have died from COVID-19 on island so far were pronounced dead on arrival, data shows.

A lot of the dead on arrivals, most of them got tested the same day they died, so they didnt even know they were sick, Pobutsky said, which highlighted the need for the elderly to get tested and treated immediately when they got sick.

There were nine deaths in April, including several who were dead on arrival, she said. The long-term impact of COVID on mortality was uncertain, and depended on how the virus mutated, she said, however it seems to be coming, becoming less virulent. And thats good.

Guam is also officially out of the omicron surge that started around January, which accounted for upwards of 55% of all COVID-19 cases the island has seen so far.

New cases, hospitalizations

On Thursday, the Joint Information Center reported 38 new cases of COVID-19, including 11 from the Department of Defense.

There have been 48,469 officially reported cases of COVID-19, with 358 deaths, there are currently 226 active cases.

There were two people hospitalized with the virus, including one child. One person was in intensive care and on a ventilator.
Find out where and how you can get vaccines and testing for COVID-19 this week, based on information provided by Joint Information Center.
After years without a pay increase and going through the recent ups and downs of online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, Guam Department of Education teachers will be receiving a 20% pay increase effective May 23, as recommended by the Department of Administration.

Teachers, myself included, are pretty excited about it. Its gonna help, theres a lot of teacher burnout. Ive been teaching for over 20 years, a long time, said Sonny Chargualaf, John F. Kennedy High School art teacher. The uncertainty of things, changing so often with, should we wear masks in class, should we go online  those things over the past few years were very, very draining on teachers.

Guam Federation of Teachers Vice President Sanjay Sharma agreed with Chargualaf.

Were finally keeping up to date with what the national averages are. Im really thankful, Sharma said, noting that Guams public school teachers often leave island for better pay  or even quit teaching altogether for different occupations.

The education department is the largest single agency within the government of Guam, inclusive of employees who fall under the General Pay Plan in the Competitive Wage Act.

Current plan

The current Educator Pay Plan was established and implemented under the government of Guam Competitive Wage Act of 2014. The pay plan, implemented eight years ago, served as an updated pay schedule for school teachers and school administrators.

During the course of the pandemic, teachers and administrators have been amongst those on the frontlines, trying to keep to the education departments mission of educating students, said Guam DOE Superintendent Jon Fernandez in a news release.

Earlier this year, Fernandez announced that the education department was working on educator pay adjustments in response to teacher shortages as officials were strategizing ways to improve teacher retention rates.

I feel like teachers are a little more motivated to do well, to push hard, said Chargualaf. I think it helps with overall morale.

Comparison

Sharma, a chemistry teacher at JFK high, said that although he is happy that he and his fellow teachers are getting a pay increase, he noted that the pay scale still does not compare to with Department of Defense Education Activity schools.

Compared to those teachers, the islands public school teachers are paid much lower, even with the new increase.

With their cost of living average, thats included in their salaries, they get to earn upwards of $110,000 for their teachers going in with their Ph.D., Sharma said. The nice thing about their pay scale is that they see a 2% to 3% increase every year.

According to the first quarter staffing pattern for fiscal year 2022, Guam DOEs payroll has more than 3,400 employees.

There are approximately 1,925 employees who are considered educators performing various duties in the classroom, or as special program consultants, teacher mentors or school administrators throughout the islands 41 public schools.

Sharma said the pay increase may help to retain teachers currently employed, but emphasized that the teacher shortage is still ongoing, particularly in the math and science departments in secondary schools.

We have less than a handful of math majors and education majors graduating. The same thing with our sciences, we dont have enough coming into the profession, and replacing the ones that are retiring, Sharma said. In my department alone, we have two teachers that have reached their retirement age in science and theyre still looking and waiting for the replacements to come on board.

Principals and assistant principals also will see an increase in their paychecks. Principals will receive a 15% increase with additional administrator differential pay and assistant principals will see an additional 10% differential, according to a news release from the governors office, which also stated that pay increases for all other public school employees will be included in the next General Pay Plan Study.
The University of Guam Press won its third Independent Publisher Book Award for Julian Aguons The Properties of Perpetual Light, according to a news release from the university.

The Independent Publisher Book Awards, also known as the IPPY awards, was established in 1996 and has served as the longest and largest running book contest for independent presses.

Its an honor to have helped UOG Press win another IPPY award, said Aguon, an indigenous human rights lawyer and environmental activist. Im just happy that the Press is getting the acclaim it so richly deserves, and I look forward to reading all the other authors whose books are in the works.

The Properties of Perpetual Light received a gold medal in the category of Best Regional Non-Fiction for Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Rim  making this the first gold medal for UOG Press and the books second national book award. In 2021, the book also won Best Multicultural Nonfiction in American Book Fests Best Book Awards.

The book continues to receive national acclaim for its poetry and prose. The book provides searing political commentary on the realities of growing up in the Pacific Islands during the threat of the climate crisis and nuclear warfare.

Aguons essay To Hell With Drowning was recently selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. The essay was published in The Atlantic last November and shares the stories of Indigenous Pacific Island communities fighting against the destruction of climate change to achieve a more hopeful future.

The Properties of Perpetual Light will be republished for international distribution by Astra House in New York City under the new title, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies.

The book is expected for release on Sept. 13 and will include an introduction by Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy and a new afterword by Aguon.

UOG Press will continue to distribute The Properties of Perpetual Light on its website and in stores throughout Micronesia.
The Guam Department of Corrections in Mangilao April 20, 2022. The Department of Corrections is investigating an alleged assault on a prisoner at their Mangilao facility.
Michael Lujan Bevacqua is an author, artist, activist and the curator for The Guam Museum.
Our View: Cannabis use has been legal, now make it safe and profitable




Haiti - FLASH : Yonyon the ex-Leader of 400 Mawozo indicted by a federal grand jury





On Tuesday, May 10, 2022, ex-leader of the "400 Mawozo" gang Joly Germine (29), aka "Yonyon", was indicted by a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia on charges of conspiracy to commit a kidnapping and for his role in the armed abduction of 16 American citizens including 5 children, including an 8-month-old baby in Haiti on October 16, 2021 https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-35012-haiti-flash-at-least-fifteen-american-missionaries-kidnapped-in-port-au-prince.html The victims were Christian missionaries serving in Haiti and most of them were held captive for 61 days before being achieve "escape".



Lert's recall that the Haitian government authorized the transfer of Germine to the United States on May 3rd, 2022 https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-36576-haiti-flash-the-powerful-leader-of-the-400-wawozo-gang-extradited-to-the-usa.html . He was under International Warrant issued by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia for the following counts: Conspiracy and violation of the United States Export Control and Contraband Reform Act; Importation of weapons of war https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-36596-haiti-usa-3-haitians-and-an-american-charged-with-having-provided-weapons-and-ammunition-to-the-gang-400-mawozo.html ; Kidnapping followed by sequestration against ransom of Americains citizens.



The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Karen P. Seifert, with assistance from paralegal specialist Jorge Casillas and Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Hunter Deeley from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia.



According to the indictment, Germine, who was in a Haitian prison at the time of the kidnapping, directed and claimed control of the operations of the kidnapping by members of the "400 Mawozo" gang, including the negotiation of a ransom for the release of the hostages. One of the gang's stated purposes in holding the hostages was to obtain from the Haitian government the release of Germine from prison.



United States Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. Said "This case shows that the Justice Department will be relentless in our efforts to track down anyone who kidnaps a U.S. citizen abroad..."



FBI Director Christopher Wray commented, "Todays indictment demonstrates that the United States will not tolerate crime against our citizens, here or abroad," adding, "The FBI will continue to work aggressively with our international partners to keep our citizens safe and bring perpetrators to justice."



Note : Let's recall in the United States the charges in the indictment are only allegations, and each defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty without of any reasonable doubt by a court. If convicted of an offence, an accused's sentence will be determined by the court based on the sentencing advisory guidelines and other statutory factors.



Read also about the kidnapping of American missionaries :

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-35658-haiti-flash-a-ransom-was-paid-for-the-release-of-american-hostages.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-35529-haiti-flash-the-400-mawozo-gang-did-not-release-the-12-hostages-they-escaped.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-35497-haiti-flash-the-gang-400-mawozo-released-all-the-american-hostages.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-35513-haiti-flash-christian-aid-ministries-forgives-the-kidnappers-of-the-17-american-hostages.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-35417-haiti-flash-3-new-american-hostages-released.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-35299-haiti-flash-2-of-the-17-kidnapped-american-hostages-released.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-35204-haiti-news-zapping.html

https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-35112-icihaiti-insecurity-the-pnh-has-proof-that-the-16-american-hostages-are-alive.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-35094-haiti-flash-joe-biden-sends-a-large-number-of-specialists-to-release-the-american-hostages-in-haiti.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-35061-haiti-news-zapping.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-35053-haiti-news-zapping.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-35037-haiti-flash-the-gang-400-mawozo-demands-one-million-dollars-for-the-release-of-each-american-hostage.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-35028-haiti-news-zapping.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-35012-haiti-flash-at-least-fifteen-american-missionaries-kidnapped-in-port-au-prince.html



SL/ HaitiLibre


















By William Schwartz | Published on 2022/05/11

Director Joo Dong-min has had a long career in the South Korean television industry, putting out a wide variety of titles from "Your Heaven" in 2010 to "The Penthouse 3" last year. But the famed director tackles film for the first with "It's Alright" which is part of a short film series released via TVing. On May 12th, Joo Dong-min had a chance to talk about his work in a special interview that aired as part of a spectator event for the short film itself.

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Joo Dong-min expressed particular pride in how he was able to get a large number of stars from "The Penthouse" to appear in his short film. These include Shin Eun-kyung, Uhm Ki-joon, Lee Ji-ah, Kim So-yeon, and Bong Tae-gyu among others. In the chat, Kim So-yeon herself praised Joo Dong-min as a director who brings out the best in his actors, while Shin Eun-kyung said she was always ready to explore new dimensions of the imagination.

In regards to a question from the emcee Moon So-ri about how making film is different from making a drama, Joo Dong-min noted that he didn't have access to audience feedback, and was simply left to guess on his own which parts of the story worked and which didn't. The larger group also told many behind-the-scenes stories regarding production. "It's Alright" became available on TVing at four PM on May 12th.

Written by William Schwartz
Published on 2022/05/11 | Source

The funeral ceremony for movie star Kang Soo-yeon, who passed away on the 7th due to cerebral hemorrhage, will be held on the 11th amid the memorial service of her film colleagues.

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The late Kang Soo-yeon funeral committee is scheduled to observe the funeral ceremony of Kang Soo-yeon, who died suddenly at the age of 55 at the funeral hall of Samsung Medical Center in Gangnam-gu, Seoul at 10 AM that day.

At the funeral ceremony hosted by actor Yoo Ji-tae, former chairman of the Busan International Film Festival, directors Im Kwon-taek and Yeon Sang-ho, actors Moon So-ri and Sol Kyung-gu will deliver eulogy and video of fellow filmmakers will be screened.

For fans, the funeral of the deceased will also be broadcast live on the official YouTube channel of the Korea Film Council.

Earlier, Kang Soo-yeon died on the 7th while receiving hospital treatment in unconsciousness after collapsing due to cerebral hemorrhage on the afternoon of the 5th. The film industry has formed a funeral committee headed by former chairman Kim to honor Kang Soo-yeon, who left a great mark in Korean film history. Her remains will be cremated at Seoul Memorial Park and placed in Yongin Park.
In split votes, council OKs senior housing, upscale apartments

Proposals for 43 units of affordable senior housing on Sixth Avenue West and an upscale, gated apartment building behind the Fresh Market won approval from the Hendersonville City Council last week in a pair of 3-2 votes.

The council vote on the senior housing request across from Pardee UNC Health and the YMCA came after a long public hearing and presentation by the developer, Ohio-based Woda Cooper. The developer made numerous concessions in response to concerns raised by the Planning Board and neighboring homeowners. The Hawkins Pointe project would be three stories, which was reduced from four stories, itself a revision from the original request for a five-story building.

Nieghbors argued that the project would put too much traffic on narrow neighborhood streets, especially Florida Avenue directly behind the building, and said the plan for 47 parking spaces would be too few.

Clay Cooper, a vice president of Woda Cooper, said that a large office building permitted by right under the current zoning would add much more traffic and would be more imposing than the apartments.

Mayor Barbara Volk, Lyndsey Simpson and Jennifer Hensley voted in favor of the rezoning. Voting no were council members Jerry Smith and Debbie Roundtree.

Hawkins Pointe is one of three affordable housing developments seeking authority from the N.C. Housing Finance Agency to use tax credit financing to attract investors. Others are the proposed Apple Ridge work force housing development of apartments and single-family homes on Sugarloaf Road and White Pine Villas on Chimney Rock Road. It's expected that only one project in the county will win state approval of tax credit financing. The City Council previously approved rezoning for Apple Ridge. Later Thursday night, the council also authorized rezoning for White Pine Villas.

Also following a lengthy public hearing, the council granted a rezoning request from Southgate Shopping Center owner David W. Royster III to allow a 70-unit apartment building along Wash Creek between the Fresh Market and Israel Street. Although the developer is seeking to fill part of the floodplain, its engineer said that runoff would be contained on the property and would not result in worse downstream flooding.

Both the planning staff and council member Smith objected to the fact that the community would be gated. The developer declined to agree to forgo the gate, citing as factors the privacy and security of tenants and concerns about inviting cut-through traffic.

Royster and the development team, represented by attorney Craig Justus, also declined Smith's request to dedicate 10 parking spots on the property for use by Ecusta Trail visitors. The developer did agree to constructing a path linking the Southgate Shopping Center and the trail.

In his review of the rezoning request, the city's stormwater administrator noted that the development was likely to overburden an undersized culvert where Wash Creek and Mud Creek come together.

"That culvert is by far the smallest diameter culvert on the whole reach of Mud Creek from Laurel Park to the confluence," the report said. "Every other crossing is either a bridge, double or triple box culvert w/ 6x4 boxes, and the culvert at Fresh Market is a single 72 round pipe, 30 percent of which is filled w/ sediment. The current stream crossing on Wash Creek at the eastern entrance to the development is not designed to convey the 25-year storm event without overtopping."

"Based on past storm events this entrance is likely to be inundated at least twice a year, limiting the development to the single entrance onto Israel Street. ... While this development is not responsible for causing flooding in this area, it will contribute to the peak flow in Wash Creek upstream of the culvert, further increasing the possibility of the eastern entrance becoming inaccessible during severe rain events."

The applicant agreed to clean out the Wash Creek culvert, which is not its property, but not to replace it with a larger one. The city planning report also said the development addresses a much needed shortage of housing in the city and would be built at a priority in-fill development location near retail, offices and recreational amenities.
Judge sends crooked contractor to prison

BREVARD  A 36-year-old Transylvania County man was sentenced to up 32 months in prison on Monday after pleading guilty to fraud charges including exploitation of an elder adult through a business relationship and obtaining property by false pretense, both felonies, and misdemeanor contracting without a license.

During a two-week Transylvania County Superior Court session May 2-13, numerous defendants entered guilty pleas to a variety of charges, including elder exploitation and fraud charges, drug trafficking charges, and unlawful possession of a firearm by a convicted felon charges, District Attorney R. Andrew Murray announced.

According to court records and the sentencing hearing, the Transylvania County Sheriffs Office received a complaint that the defendant, Travis Galloway, had contracted with an elder adult for general contracting services without having a necessary contracting license. An investigation ensued and the Transylvania County Sheriffs Office charged Galloway with exploitation of an elder adult through a business relationship, obtaining property by false pretense, and misdemeanor contracting without a license. Galloway took $48,000 for contracting services from a 72-year-old victim and never completed the work, the sheriffs office said. Investigators discovered that this was a pattern of conduct by Galloway.

Superior Court Judge William Coward, who presided over the trial calendar, sentenced Galloway to 19 months minimum to 32 months in prison.

Numerous other felony cases were handled during this trial session, including several drug trafficking cases. Drug trafficking offenses included:

Lisa Morgan, 43, of Rosman, pleaded guilty to one count of trafficking in methamphetamine and two counts of possession with intent to sell methamphetamine. Morgan received an active prison sentence of 70 months to 93 months and a mandatory $50,000 fine.

Caryington Hunter, 22, of Pisgah Forest, pleaded guilty to numerous drug trafficking charges, including trafficking in cocaine and methamphetamine and other related drug offenses, including possession with intent to sell fentanyl. She also pleaded guilty to several possession of firearm by a convicted felon charges. Hunter received a consolidated prison sentence of a minimum of six years and eight months and up to 9 years in prison and a mandatory $50,000 fine.

Assistant District Attorney Jason Hayes (Transylvania County Assistant District Attorney Supervisor) and Assistant District Attorney Lily Ferry prosecuted the cases and handled the sentencing hearings.
US epidemic incompetence creates 200,000 COVID orphans with 75% of American children infected

(Global Times) 10:49, May 12, 2022

Editor's note:

One by one, Western countries have scrapped their COVID-19 restrictions and now purport to be ready to "return to normalcy." Yet as the coronavirus continues to mutate, from the deadly Delta variant to the more contagious Omicron variant, what can such a rush to re-open really bring to the West?

After analyzing data and talking to epidemiologists, the Global Times conducted a series of investigative reports and looked into the dire consequences of the countries' relaxed COVID-19 response on vulnerable groups, including the elderly, minorities, and children, and what impact such moves will wreak upon their medical system. This is the second installment and we delve into the shocking impact of the pandemic on adolescents and children in some countries, especially the US, after they chose to acquiesce rather than deal with the disease.

More than two years after the novel coronavirus disease outbreak, and behind the whopping COVID-19 death toll of more than a million in the US, there are far more shocking and heart-breaking numbers.

Whereas nearly 60 percent of Americans have been infected with COVID-19 at least once, more than 75 percent of children and adolescents in the country have been infected, according to the results of the national blood survey released by the US' Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on April 26.

Life expectancy in the country has declined for two consecutive years since the pandemic began, while about 200,000 children in the country have become "COVID-19 orphans."

All these figures once again prove that the US, which has never reflected upon nor held any official accountable for such catastrophe, has been seeking comfort in the notion of "coexistence with the coronavirus," which is the world's top "failed mandate."

Chinese health experts noted that as a vulnerable group, the protection, treatment, and rehabilitation of adolescents and children requires the joint efforts of parents and the society.

They stressed that the Omicron variant is not a "large flu" and those countries that either chose or were forced to acquiesce in dealing with the pandemic has never walked out of the dark side of the pandemic. Data, examples, and continued calls from their own countries' health experts demonstrate that China's dynamic zero-COVID anti-epidemic strategy helped solve some of the problems that the West has been struggling with, and China's insistence on sticking to dynamic zero-COVID is the current best solution to protect human lives.

Record numbers of hospitalized children

The number of children hospitalized with COVID-19 is soaring in the US, especially as the highly transmissible Omicron variant spreads across the country.

According to an NBC News analysis, at least nine states have reported record numbers of COVID-related pediatric hospitalizations. The spike in hospitalizations has frustrated pediatric infectious disease doctors on the front lines treating children sick with the coronavirus disease.

In Singapore, the Omicron strain is currently most prevalent among adolescents, whereas when the Delta strain was more virulent, it was mainly among the elderly and working adults. Currently, infection rates are highest among children aged between 5 and 11, followed by adolescents aged between 12 and 19.

According to a report from the Guardian in March, as many as 20 percent of all child deaths from COVID in the US have occurred during the Omicron surge of the pandemic.

Children seem to be facing increasing risks from COVID-19 even as mask mandates are abandoned across the country, and vaccination rates among children chart at an alarmingly low rate.

Since the beginning of 2022, 179 children have died from COVID-19 in the US, compared with 735 children in the preceding 20 months, according to the Guardian, citing data from the American Academy of Pediatrics. The figures mainly focus on children aged 0 to 17 and were gathered from around May 2020 to early March 2022.

The under-5 age group saw record-high numbers of hospitalization over the past few months. Omicron hospitalization rates for kids under the age of 5 soared five times higher during Omicron's peak compared with the Delta wave, according to recent CDC research and data analytics.

Chen Xi, an associated professor of public health at Yale University, told the Global Times on Wednesday that in the US, in addition to a significant threat to the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions, novel coronavirus disease infections are also quite high among children and adolescents.

Earlier this year, public schools in the US lifted mask requirements and it is now common to see students and teachers not wearing masks on school premises. A large proportion of public schools do not conduct routine COVID-19 testing. In this case, schools become hotbeds for the spread of the virus.

Vaccines are highly effective against severe illness, hospitalization, and death among children. But less than 30 percent of children between the ages of 5 and 11 are vaccinated in the US, and a little more than half of children between 12 and 17 are vaccinated.

According to Chen, although the US FDA has approved the vaccine for children above the age of 5, the willingness of parents to have their children vaccinated is still very low.

Research shows only about a quarter of parents in the US have had their children vaccinated against COVID-19. Almost every city in the US, except Philadelphia, requires parental consent to vaccinate children, further reducing vaccination rates among children and adolescents.

Sequelae of concerns

The cumulative number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in South Korea has exceeded 16.8 million, or about one-third of the population. According to South Korean media, the relaxation of COVID-19 control has not only led to infections in a large number of children, but has also triggered worries among many families about whether COVID-19 will have serious sequelae.

According to a survey released by the Health Insurance Review &Assessment Service in April, in South Korea, 19.1 percent of 21,615 confirmed patients had visited a hospital for treatment due to sequelae.

South Korean media also paid close attention to the consequences in adolescents. Their reports showed that after the Omicron variant has quickly spread, more and more parents sought online consultations about their children's continued symptoms after contracting and recovering from COVID-19.

Amid the panic, some media outlets called for parents to remain calm. A report published by Hankyoreh said further research is needed on whether COVID-19 is likely to cause long-term and permanent damage to children.

There have been no reports showing that the Delta and Omicron variants would likely cause different sequelae, but the former had caused more severe infections, the newspaper said, citing a professor of infectious diseases.

Wang Guangfa, a renowned respiratory expert who had contracted the coronavirus disease as a member of the National Health Commission's expert team in Wuhan, told the Global Times that sequelae should be treated scientifically. It is crucial to have a correct understanding of the sequelae of COVID-19.

"First of all, it should be clear that sequela is not the disease itself, but the aftereffect of the disease. Second, we have very little research on the aftereffects of COVID-19, and we know even less about the long-term aftereffects. Therefore, we should not blindly hype the issue of sequelae, but rationally and objectively study how serious the sequelae of COVID-19 are. More scientific research is needed to give the answer," Wang said.

Inability to reflect

In October 2021, China launched a nationwide COVID-19 vaccination campaign for minors aged 3 to 11, in a bid to increase mass vaccination and accelerate herd immunity.

Speaking at the 2021 Summr Child Health Care Event on August 9, Wang Huaqing, a chief expert with the immunization program of the Chinese CDC, pointed out that some children showed severe symptoms after being infected with the coronavirus disease, such as those with underlying medical conditions or those who are very young. The ultimate goal now for China is to establish an immunity barrier through vaccination and children are an important part of achieving the goal.

However, children and adolescents' lives lost in the pandemic are receiving less attention in the US as Washington turns greater attention to Wall Street numbers and geopolitical machinations. Driven by the rush to declare that COVID-19 is over, vulnerable groups trapped in the throes of the epidemic in the US appear to have been intentionally or unconsciously forgotten.

In January, UNICEF reported that more than 616 million students worldwide are still affected by COVID-related school closures, which experts worried could push the world's most vulnerable child populations into child labor.

"The COVID-19 orphan crisis has gotten relatively little attention; it's a pandemic hidden inside a pandemic," Rachel Kidman, a social epidemiologist focused on childhood adversity at the Stony Brook University, told National Geographic, noting that COVID-19 is perceived as a disease mainly affecting older people, so the toll on children left behind is overlooked.

Chen pointed out that the pandemic is also affecting the mental health of children and adolescents, which is already a serious problem in the US today. During the pandemic, several studies showed significant increases in suicide attempts and depressive symptoms among American children.

In a latest article published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases in April, Anthony Fauci, M.D., director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and other NIAID scientists wrote that "classical" herd immunity for COVID-19 "almost certainly is an unattainable goal."

Chinese observers said that instead of reflecting on and drawing lessons from the pandemic, Western countries have made poor achievements. They have surrendered without hesitation. Fundamentally speaking, they have not taken human life seriously and their actions scrapped the image of "human rights defenders" that they had been grooming for years.

Analysts noted that the failure of the US to fight the epidemic has cost one million lives, and the most fundamental problem is the government's disregard for the lives and basic interests of its people, and the vast majority of the dead are from the lower and middle class, ethnic minorities, and the underprivileged.

Lu Xiang, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the tragedy of the US is not just in its failed pandemic response, or the sheer number of deaths, but the country's inability to govern and reflect.

"The underlying cause of US incapacity for governance is the malpractice of its self-proclaimed two-party system. The system is fractious, inefficient, and slow to make decisions," Lu told the Global Times.

Right now, the BA.2 subvariant of the Omicron strain is accelerating its spread across the US.

The US has entered a new phase of a localized epidemic and the situation is likely to worsen again as autumn and winter begin. The diminishing effectiveness of the vaccine over time, increased indoor activity in the fall and winter, and the constant emergence of new variants, could lead to a resurgence in the US, Chen warned.

(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun)
On Thursday, May 12, 2022, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra hosted the first in-person meeting of the Presidents Advisory Commission on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C.

Last May, President Joe Biden authorized the creation of the Presidents Advisory Commission through Executive Order 14031 and appointed 25 leaders to serve as commissioners on December 20, 2021. The commissioners were sworn in by Vice President Kamala Harris in February 2022. The Commission, chaired by Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and United States Trade Representative Ambassador Katherine Tai, advises the President on ways the public, private and non-profit sectors can work together to advance equity, justice, and opportunity for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AA and NHPI) communities.

As Prepared for Delivery

Thank you, Krystal, for that warm introduction.

I want to start by wishing everyone a happy Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

I cant think of a better time to have our first in-person meeting than during this month where we celebrate the strength and resiliency of AA and NHPI communities.

Ambassador Tai, thank you for co-chairing this Commission with me. I couldnt ask for a better partner.

Commissioners, great to see your faces again since the swearing-in ceremony in February. Thank you for your tireless work.

And I want to recognize Krystal Kaai, for her leadership as Executive Director of this Commission.

But before we begin, I want to pay tribute to a trailblazer for AA and NHPI communities, Secretary Norm Mineta.

Secretary Mineta was the first Asian American ever appointed to a presidential Cabinet.

He was also the first Chair of the Presidents Advisory Commission under the Clinton Administration.

And he was the founder of several AA and NHPI institutions, including the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, which I was proud to join as a member of Congress and doubly blessed to serve alongside him.

Secretary Mineta opened doors for so many of us here today, and there is no better tribute to his legacy than our work on this commission.

Our mission can best be summed in three words: equity, justice, opportunity.

That is what AA and NHPI communities deserve from us.

That is the Presidents goal.

And that is what we are working here to accomplish.

AA and NHPI communities have faced an uphill fight the last couple of years in the face of COVID-19 and the blight of racism.

But today, the resiliency of these communities has never been clearer. Every day, these communities work and study hard, start small businesses, support their families, and continue to build their lives with dignity and perseverance.

And all of you play a vital role in ensuring that moving forward, AA and NHPI communities get a fair shake at reaching the American Dream.

As Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Im proud to say our Department stands with you in this critical work.

In the past two years, weve launched several campaigns to advance health equity during the COVID-19 pandemic for AA and NHPI communities.

We have launched an Equity Technical Assistance Center to provide training, tools, and technical assistance for HHS employees to make sure that our policies, programs, research, and analyses are more equitable.

We have worked to ensure an equitable pandemic response by investing in our 1400 community health centers that serve many AA and NHPI families.

And we have awarded grants to drive better health research and data and that support AA and NHPI survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault.

But were not done.

Over the past three months, this Commissions subcommittees have been hard at work  often meeting on a weekly basis  to develop recommendations to the President on everything from addressing anti-Asian hate, to promoting health and economic equity, to tackling systemic challenges like the need for greater data disaggregation, language access, and more.

The recommendations that you will be presenting and discussing today address some of the most pressing issues impacting AA and NHPI communities.

These recommendations will help us advance equity, justice, and opportunity, and they are only the beginning.

Today, as we celebrate AA and NHPI Heritage Month, you are helping to chart a new course for AA and NHPI communities and setting the stage to emerge stronger from the past two years.

Please continue this momentum. And please know that myself, Ambassador Tai, the President, and all of government stand with you in this endeavor.

Thank you. And now Id like to welcome my co-chair Ambassador Tai to say a few words.
Omni La Mansion del Rio and Mokara Hotel & Spa are pleased to announce the appointment of Chef Andres Farias as the hotel's new Executive Chef.

With nearly two decades of progressive experience, Chef Farias has worked in the hospitality industry at many highly acclaimed hotels and restaurants including Trump Hotels, Starwood Hotels, Marriott International, Intercontinental Hotels, and luxury restaurants in Caracas-Venezuela.

"We are looking forward to Chef Farias creating a fresh approach to our restaurant's menus that considers its guests and their dining experiences," said Rusty Wallace, Area Managing Director, General Manager at Omni La Mansion del Rio and Mokara Hotel & Spa. "Chef Farias will enhance our Four Diamond luxury hotels and restaurants by incorporating a contemporary flair on our classic dishes."

"It's a true honor to be part of the Omni family here at La Mansion del Rio and Mokara Hotel & Spa," said Executive Chef Farias. "Unlike any dining experience in the city, the opening of new dining concepts of modern Texas cuisine with some Latin influence will offer guests, locals, and travelers an exceptional culinary experience in an unrivaled setting on the famed Riverwalk. My goal is to create dishes that complement the current times - seasonally and aesthetically."

Chef Farias realized his own passion in the kitchen while spending his childhood watching his mother, who was an exceptional chef. In 2001, Chef Farias graduated from the High Training Educational Institute in Caracas, Venezuela, with the designation of International Chef. He also has completed specialized training in French and Asian cuisine, and bakery/pastry creations. In 2019, Chef Farias was one of the twenty-five celebrity chefs who participated in the Celebrity Chef Ball gala dinner at Morgan Manufacturing in Chicago, Illinois supporting "Meals on Wheels", where he contributed to the main VIP dinner. By capitalizing on the wealth of experience, Chef Farias is able to combine his culinary creativity with his savvy business acumen to create unique dining concepts and menu offerings that showcase the highest of quality of service and culinary standards.

With his extensive knowledge of the hospitality industry and global culinary experience of luxury hotels and restaurants, Chef Farias is an asset to Omni La Mansion del Rio and Mokara Hotel & Spa. He will provide guests with memorable food experiences at the hotel's restaurants: El Colegio,Ostra, La Mansion Pool Bar, Rooftop Cafe and Meetings, Weddings, and In-Room Dining with his team.
Myriam Younes is a director of business development at Expedia Group Media Solutions, where she is responsible for driving business development in EMEA and India. Along with her team, Myriam oversees client business and partnerships for travel brands and non-travel brands, and provides strategic guidance to help them reach audiences across the vast network of Expedia Group travel brands and global sites. Prior to joining Expedia Group Media Solutions in 2012, Myriam worked for JacTravel, where she was responsible for travel agency sales internationally. She has a wealth of international, tourism and hospitality career experience, and has worked with brands such as Atout France, Moroccan National Tourism Board, Egyptian Tourism Authority, Air France, Hilton and Accor. Myriam is a graduate of Toulouse Business School in France, with a Masters in Management, and currently is based in London.
Katanox, the travel accommodation distribution and fintech platform, has raised $ 5.7 million from a group of financial, hospitality, and tech entrepreneur family offices to overhaul and reconfigure B2B distribution in hospitality. The group of investors includes Rappi and Yuno co-founder Juan Pablo Ortega, co-founder of fintech Dimebox and current co-founder and CEO of Founda Jan Joost Kalff, and founder of hospitality tech iTesso Bas Blommaart.

In addition to its raise, Katanox brings industry veteran Rob Torres on as non-executive director. Rob brings over 20 years of experience and his vast travel industry network to the company. He will be working with the founding team to partner with global hotel brands.

I am very excited to grow my relationship with the team and apply best practices from the programmatic advertising industry for B2B distribution in hospitality. The Katanox team is building an intriguing set of solutions to bring transparency that's needed for the open distribution era, said Rob Torres, non-executive director at Katanox.

The Katanox team combines innovative technology along with decades of expertise in payments, travel and programmatic media technology, to advance the future of B2B distribution in hospitality. Katanox addresses the $150 billion corporate travel market by streamlining and improving the distribution of travel accommodations, which has historically been controlled by Online Travel Agencies (OTAs), Global Distribution Systems (GDS) and bedbanks.

Out of necessity, weve seen many advancements and improvements in the travel sector spurred on by technology and digitalization. However, when it comes to lodging, its the safe middle men who are controlling the market and stifling growth, said Mendel Senf, co-founder of Katanox. Were bringing much needed change to the market by putting power back in the hands of accommodation providers by empowering them to control their own destination via the Katanox platform.

Removing barriers

This round unlocks international expansion and finances further development of the platform and integrations with Central Reservation Systems (CRS), Property Management Systems (PMS) and Payment Service Providers (PSP).

Global hotel chains are under severe pressure as a result of the slow Covid recovery of corporate travel, and are actively seeking to replace the expensive GDS and wholesalers because connectivity and contracting between them and the business travel agencies are too expensive.

Katanox brings together travel accommodations so travel sellers like Travel Management Companies (TMC) can assemble an end-to-end experience for their corporate clients. Giving them data streaming access and availability to directly search, book, pay and modify their booking at any time. On top of that, Katanox will introduce financial services like price freeze, travel now pay later, cancel/change fees as new revenue opportunities to both partners in the platform. Platformization is a proven model from fintech and other industries to radically cut costs and boost innovation through direct partnerships.

A transformative era for travel distribution

The International Air Transport Association (IATA), the trade association for the worlds airlines has created an industry standard, known as New Distribution Capability (NDC) and Billing and Settlement Plan (BSP) which transforms the way airline products are retailed and paid for. Alternatively, the hotel and vacation rental industry lags behind in distribution and payment initiatives. The pandemic made it utterly clear that B2B distribution in hospitality is dictated by gatekeepers such as the GDS and OTA duopoly, held back by archaic software solutions and conditioned by monotonous pay-out providers like virtual credit cards.

The Katanox team, who has industry transforming experience in programmatic advertising and payments, sees parallels with advertising platforms who are connecting advertisers directly to publishers inventory or payment service providers which are connecting the fragmented world of payments and finance. Katanox is a global remote first company with a base in Amsterdam and has extensive hiring plans in engineering, business development and sales. Its team is spread over the globe from Amsterdam to London, Paris, Istanbul, Los Angeles and Mexico City.

About Katanox

Katanox is a travel accommodation distribution and fintech platform bringing together travel sellers and travel accommodation providers. Katanox facilitates distribution of travel accommodation inventory and payments. The platform aims to unlock the programmatic era for B2B distribution in hospitality. The team is led by Mendel Senf, Georgios Georgiadis, Imre Vogelezang and Paul Beukers, supported by a group of experienced industry professionals.

Mendel Senf

Co-Founder

+31642306050
As the travel industrys recovery starts to gather pace, many tourist boards are looking to differentiate themselves from rival destinations by focusing on their cuisine rather than traditional natural hot spots, cities, or coastal locations, observes GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

According to GlobalDatas Ads Database, Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) for Turkey, Malta, and Indonesia have focused on their national cuisine to entice new tourists. Marketing campaigns have included glossy images and short videos covering traditional cooking methods to boost cultural appeal. The development of these marketing campaigns appears to be in response to growing demand for international cuisine and culinary experiences, with DMOs using this to gain a competitive advantage over rival destinations.

Craig Bradley, Associate Travel & Tourism Analyst at GlobalData, comments: DMOs appear to be reacting to a change in traveler sentiment towards gastronomy. Development of this trend has been brought on by the pandemic, which has helped broaden the palates of many tourists despite the closure of many restaurants during 2020 and 2021."

Many restaurants needed to adapt to pandemic restrictions to survive, so they started selling meals via food delivery services such as Just Eat, Deliveroo and Uber Eats. These services have made international cuisines more accessible to consumers than ever before due to their low-touch service offering, intuitive smartphone apps, and efficient mobile payment systems. As a result, global awareness of alternative international cuisines has increased considerably enabling tourist boards to utilize this in attractive marketing campaigns to entice potential tourists.

This trend is unlikely to slow either, with the food delivery market set to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 7% between 2021 and 2025, according to a 2021 GlobalData Food Insights & Trends report. As a result, millions of individuals will continue to sample new cuisines and flavors from their local restaurants.

According to a GlobalData Q4 2021 Global Consumer Survey, 47% of respondents said that they find the broader availability of cuisines the most appealing reason to consume food and drink outside of the home, highlighting the global appetite for experiencing new flavors. It is reasonable to assume that the same sentiment applies to tourists within a destination. Many will be enthusiastic about encountering local culture and customs, including food and drink.

Source: GlobalData Plc

Bradley concludes: In response to this development in consumer tastes, tourist boards have recognized an opportunity to use regional cuisine to create original marketing campaigns that can convey local culture within the tourist experience. This will be particularly attractive to niche tourists and millennial tourists, who typically search for more unique experiences."

However, it is important to note that linking destination marketing with gastronomic experiences is nothing new. Still, this type of promotional strategy is likely to grow in importance for DMOs as shown by Malta, Indonesia and Turkey, due to consumers becoming more exposed to culinary experiences.

About GlobalData

4,000 of the world's largest companies, including over 70% of FTSE 100 and 60% of Fortune 100 companies, make more timely and better business decisions thanks to GlobalData's unique data, expert analysis and innovative solutions, all in one platform. GlobalData's mission is to help our clients decode the future to be more successful and innovative across a range of industries, including the healthcare, consumer, retail, financial, technology and professional services sectors.

GlobalData | LinkedIn | Twitter

GlobalData Press Office

+44 207 832 4399

GlobalData Plc
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After searching every Walmart, grocery and corner store in Katy, Synquise Winston realized she needed to cast a wider net if she was ever to find baby formula.

The 29-year-old mom has driven to Conroe, Huntsville, and as far as College Station in search of formula. Usually, she calls ahead and sometimes, if the stores still have some, theyll hold a can or two for her. Other times, though, she just has to hop in the car and hope she gets there before it runs out.

Its been a toss-up, said Winston, who gave birth to her baby boy in March. And even when they do have some there is a limit.

The shortage of baby formula, a supplement or substitute for breastfeeding, is the latest in the long line of shortages that have marked the two-plus years of pandemic. Its beginnings go back to February, when Abbott Laboratories one of the largest manufacturers of baby formula, recalled several defective brands and shut down its Sturgis, Mich. factory after at least four babies were hospitalized with bacterial infections and at least two died.

Karen Warren, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

Although other companies make baby formula, they likely dont have enough ingredients and supplies on hand to fill the void left by Abbott, said David Gantz, a Will Clayton Fellow in Trade and International Economics at Rice Universitys Baker Institute. Abbott, a leading medical products company, holds more than 40 percent of the baby formula market.

There are other manufacturers, said Gantz, but I suspect it's hard for them to ramp up supply quickly.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Is homemade baby formula safe? Pediatricians, nutritionists have concerns as shortage worsens

The effects of the recall have only been worsened by the same supply chain issues  labor shortages, material shortages, packaging shortages  that led to dwindling supplies of everything from toilet paper to computer chips to cars.

In normal times, a recall will be a temporary inconvenience, said Margaret Kidd, program director for University of Houstons supply chain & logistics technology program. But now even minor disturbances are amplified.

Karen Warren, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

In a statement issued Wednesday, Abbott said it could restart the Michigan site within two weeks pending FDA approval. From the time the manufacturer restarts the site, it will take six to eight weeks before baby formula appears on the shelf. The manufacturer said its working to increase supply at other FDA registered facilities and flying in formula from its plant in Cootehill, Ireland.

We understand the situation is urgent - getting Sturgis up and running will help alleviate this shortage, Abbott said in a statement.

I cant find formula. Now what?

Waiting  and scrambling  for another two months before shortages begin to ease probably isnt what mothers want to hear. Winston has about three cans in her pantry right now, which lasts her about three weeks, and shes trying to calculate when she should resume her search process again.

Im not trying to be a hoarder and take it from others that need it, Winston said, But honestly, by next week Ill be searching again so I can have some and dont have to stress about it.

Planning ahead and buying a couple weeks out, as Winston is doing, is the right move, said Dr. Melanie Mouzoon, fellow at the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine and Kelsey-Seybold doctor.

Dont worsen the shortage by over buying. Buy a couple weeks supply, don't go buy a five months supply, Mouzoon said. That will only make it worse for other people.

Karen Warren, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

She also suggested parents try smaller drug stores and shops if they cant find formula at big box retailers. Generic brand formula might also be easier to find, she added.

But Mouzoon cautioned against buying formula or breast milk from someone online like on Facebook marketplace, diluting formula with water or attempting to make your own. If mothers are able to, she recommends breast feeding.

Unfortunately, some mothers cant rely solely on breastfeeding.

Crystal James, 31, who lives near Texas Medical Center, is an under supplier meaning she cant produce enough breast milk to feed her child and needs to supplement it with formula. Shes now pumping every two hours while at work and storing it in case she cant find formula.

On HoustonChronicle.com: It won't be easy for women to reenter the workforce after the pandemic. Here's why.

The 31-year-old mother found herself in tears Tuesday after she drove around for hours going to 15 stores just to leave empty handed. She eventually got the last can of formula at a convenience store.

Karen Warren, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

Its very scary and it makes me very emotional, James said. Im already thinking, Where are we going to get the next one?

There are other alternatives to formula in addition to breastfeeding. Mothers Milk Bank at Austin, for example, is a nonprofit that supplies breast milk from approved donors.

The milk bank has received 30 more inquiries than usual this week, said executive director Kim Updegrove. The milk bank is working to help as many of families as it can, but first needs to provide milk to vulnerable infants who were born prematurely or with medical conditions.

Some of those families are reaching out because they just cannot find not only the formula their baby was eating, but they cant find any other type of formula, either she said. Those are the ones who just need something to feed their baby.

becca.carballo@chron.com

evan.macdonald@chron.com
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Brown Bag Deli, a popular Houston-based sandwich chain, is growing its Houston real estate footprint as its owners feel more confident about diners demand coming out of the pandemic.



Beloved for its high-quality ingredients, Brown Bag Deli has built a strong following over the past 20 years as a local alternative to big chain sandwich brands.



This week Brown Bag quietly opened its first location in the Texas Medical Center in a 900 square-foot shop, replacing SusieCakes, near Salata and Chipotle within the Westin at 1709 Dryden.



I always thought the Medical Center would be a great location because of the traffic there, said Forrest Andrews, owner of Brown Bag Deli, in an interview.

RELATED: 10 new restaurants coming to Houston soon



And just outside of The Heights, Brown Bag Deli is also planning to open a 1,650 square-foot location this October within a former Subway shop adjacent to an OReilly Auto Parts near 11th Street and North, he said. The Kroger-anchored shopping center is owned by Brixmor Property Group.



Andrews also is anticipating construction to wrap up on a remodeled 1,450 square-foot shop at its flagship location on Westheimer and Shephard. Brown Bag's former building there was recently demolished and will be replaced by a newer building with a similar size and layout, Andrews said. (Next door, T-Mobile is still operating within the complex owned by Yalla Group.) Depending on city permitting, Andrews is planning the new shop to open at 2036 Westheimer this fall, he said.

Prior to purchasing Brown Bag Deli back in 2019, Andrews was a long-time fan of the eatery and used to walk to the Westheimer location when he lived in the area more than a decade ago.



I had no idea I would one day be owning the building,then watching it get torn down and replaced, he said. Currently staff who did work at the Westheimer location were moved to help open the Medical Center shop, he said.

EARLIER: Whole Foods-anchored retail center sells in West U



Andrews had been intending to expand the brand before the pandemic hit, sending the restaurant industry into turmoil for much of 2020. Sales have see-sawed up and down with the various strains of coronavirus. Its existing downtown location underneath the tunnels still hasnt fully recovered the losses of the pandemic, Andrews said. Its downtown location at 919 Milam is temporarily closed as the landlord remodels the building, he said, and it will reopen in about eight months. Another location underground at 600 Travis remains open downtown.



Outside of those downtown shops, overall Brown Bag sales have rebounded across its other three locations, particularly at its Rice Village shop, he said.



Were getting out of COVID ....I feel pretty good about it, he said. Brown Bag Deli is not going through a rebranding. Were keeping the same food products; if anything were trying to increase the quality."



Jeanie Gibbs of Reed King is Brown Bag Deli real estate broker representing him in the new locations.
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Sara Silms vagabond spirit has taken her all over the world for work, travel and life, and at 50 shes settling into family life in the Bearn region of France.

Silm and her husband in 2015 bought an old chateau with land and a barn and set out to create a primary home for her children whod been in boarding school in the U.K. as the couple  both Australians  bounced around Europe and Central Asia for his work.

Their home dates back to the 1800s, so it needed a lot of expensive work. But it came full of treasures, too, from old oil paintings and antiques to armoires full of linens.

Silm calls the first year she lived in the house proper camping and the rest of her family moved in after it had electricity, plumbing, a sturdy roof and doors that could close.

Shed been working on the home for while when a friend told an editor at the Thames & Hudson publisher about her project, leading to a book contract. Now, the chateau is the home base for Silm, her husband who splits his time between London and Paris and their children, Hugo, 22, Annabelle, 19, and Toby, 16

Her book, How to French Country, chronicles her efforts to revitalize the aging home and make a guest house out of its barn. Readers learn about French antiques, colors and style along the way.

More Information French Country style tips Colors: French Country colors are all muted tones and vary with each area of rural France. Great paint options are: Benjamin Moore Putnam Ivory, Georgetown Pink Beige, Yellow Brick Road, Philipsburg Blue, Ashley Grey, Stonington Gray, Sherwood Green, Southfied Green and Jamestown Blue; and Farrow & Ball Setting Plaster, Hague Blue, Light Blue, Oval Room Blue, Vert de Terre and Skylight. For neutrals, consider Farrow & Ball Mole's Breath, Ammonite, Strong White, Purbeck Stone or Cornforth White. Furniture: If you're going to paint it, chalk-based paint is a great option. Masonry: You're going for a natural feel, even if you are putting a coat of something on brick or stone. Stick to lime wash paint for a more natural look. Mix with Swedish: Swedish antiques - usually called "Gustavian" - mix well with French Country style and often are in lighter, washed out colors. Source: Sara Silm and "How to French Country" See More Collapse

Written in four parts  her home, the barn, the basics of design and, finally, recipes for foods as theyd be eaten there, seasonally  the tome serves as a handbook for anyone wanting to work French country style into their home.

Silm recently spoke with the Chronicle about her book, her journey to France and more.

Q: Were you interested in French country decor before you moved to the Bearn?

A: To be perfectly honest, Im not a Francophile  Im a world-ophile. I love culture and I love people and digging deep into whichever part of the world Im in.

We were living in Kazakhstan and searching for a house to call a home because our children were in boarding school and needed a home to make memories in rather than a hotel room. I could have easily picked somewhere in Italy or Greece. We were in an Irish pub in Kazakhstan, eating curry, not the local cuisine, and this English friend of ours was talking about where to buy a house. He suggested the Bearn region of France because he had owned a house there for a decade.

Its in the middle of nowhere, and thats the exciting thing. Everyone knows Provence, but didnt before Peter Mayle wrote A Year in Provence. It was like the Bearn is now, a rural area. This is like getting let in on a secret. Its a part of France nobody knows about.

Q: In the book you talk about the color, pattern and objects that comprise French country style. Which is most important element to get right?

A: Start with color. It is transformative and will have a profound effect on the way you feel emotionally in your home. Dig deep into questions of color and what makes you feel good. No matter what color you love, theres a French country equivalent.

I went to all of the local villages and color matched patinaed paint on shutters and doors. When you visit France and fall in love with the colors, what youre actually falling in love with is a color that cant really be recreated. I made my own color palettes with an international paint system, NCS (National Colour System), that commercial interior designers use. You can take that NCS code to a paint company and have it mixed. I give readers a chance to take a little piece of France home with them.

I narrow it down to a failproof list. You can take those to anyone and put one or several in a home, and they are guaranteed, like a little chorus in perfect harmony.

Q: In your book, you even differentiate the different color palettes for each region. I had no idea there would be so much variation.

A: It was a big surprise to me, too, actually. Im in the Bearn region of France and the next village behind mine is in the Pays Basque, where house can only be one of four colors. The house is white, the roof is terracotta and the shutters are blue, red, green, or brown and thats it. They are sold in hardware stores and theres no variation of the blue. Its Basque Blue and thats it. You see blue more around the sea and in the countryside its green, brown or red, thats it.

Q: What about the furniture?

A: Just quickly going to Gustavian, King Gustav III of Sweden visited Versailles and took the color palette to Sweden and grayed it down. Those colors are French colors. In terms of furniture, what I enjoyed most in the book is being conscious of solutions to every budget. French country style is not chateau style, its laid back and practical. The more bashed up they are, the better, really.

I focused on buying old pieces, not necessarily fabulously valuable, but pieces from local brocantes (outdoor flea markets).

You dont want your interior to be too woody. Wood is lovely and I have pieces that are natural, but its lovely to bring in color via furniture. A lime-based paint has a lovely soft chalky finish and finish it with a wax coating for day-to-day wear and tear. Its a lovely way to weave more color into your furniture.

Q: What were the biggest challenges in your 200-year-old house?

A: The house is probably a young house by French standards. Its ancient to me; Australians dont have houses that old. Part of the roof had collapsed and everything was so old it had to be replaced, electricity, the boiler and the plumbing system. Theyre big-ticket items that have to be completed before you can get onto the pretty things. The first year, thats where our budget went and after that, we looked at furniture.

My greatest advice in furnishing a house is to not buy into the temptation of having a show home that after a month you have everything in place. Wait and find a perfect piece that has a story to tell, and then it becomes a part of your life.

Q: What are your favorite elements of the house?

A: I love the exposed stone walls. They have a beautiful color, white limestone with gray and fawny beige. Its very laid back, and I love it.

I also love the old beams, though I didnt love them in their original state. They were imposing and dark, so I painted them gray and painted in between in white so theyre nice and fresh. Even in a new build, you can have false beams that you create to instill the same sense of rustic charm.

diane.cowen@chron.com
The deadline to challenge property appraisals is quickly approaching in Fort Bend County, so you might be wondering if you should partake in the process. Here's what you should know to help you make that call.

The deadline to do so is May 16  this coming Monday  "or within 30 days after a notice of appraised value was mailed to you, whichever is later," per the Fort Bend Central Appraisal District's website. It could be later, though.

"Late protests are allowed for good cause if you miss the usual deadline," per the website. "The [Appraisal Review Board] decides whether you have good cause."

How do I protest my property appraisal?

Each year beginning in early April, the Fort Bend Central Appraisal District will send a notice of appraised value, and a notice of protest form or online filing instructions are included with that, according to Rex Wogan, the appraisal district's communications and outreach director. Property owners can file a protest in four ways, which are laid out on the district's website: doing an online appeal, e-filing, sending it through the mail or going in person.

You could do it on your own, or solicit help from a company to guide you through filing the protest and the rest of the process. Just make sure you have your protest in by the deadline.

Who should protest their property appraisal?

"Everyone," said Jenn Alcorta, the appeals manager for Rainbolt & Co., a Sugar Land-based tax consultant service. "I can't stress that enough."

Doing so provides "the opportunity to make sure that you are truly in line with market," Alcorta said.

And if you bought your property in the previous year, that's one of the "easiest scenarios," according to Wogan.

"A lot of times the appraisal review board and appraisers would agree that what you pay for your property is what the value of the property is," Wogan said. "And so bringing in a closing statement, HUD-1 statement, stuff like that, from your recent purchase is a very good piece of evidence to suggest where the value should be."

"Other things you can do is take photos of any damage around the property, if you have any estimates for needed repairs around the property, things like that, those go a long way to help you get a lower value and get sympathy from the appraisal review board," he added.

What are the benefits of challenging my property appraisal?

Wogan said the district has a mass appraisal system and close to 390,000 parcels, and they can't do an inspection on each of them every year. Property owners generally know more about their property than others, he said, and there's "always room for some error" or "something we may miss."

Another reason people might want to protest is if they want to see the sales information being used to value their property, Wogan said. Since Texas is a non-disclosure state, they can't provide it unless a protest is filed, according to Wogan.

"Once you do that  we can give you the sales that we're using in the formal hearing and the informal conference to support the value that we've developed," Wogan said. "So I would recommend that if you just even want to see what, what we're using. There's no penalty to file, there's no penalty for not showing up to a hearing, really, there's really no downside to doing that."

What are the downsides of challenging my property appraisal?

Wogan thought the only downside was that it gives the district added volume, so "it might take us a hair longer to get through them all." But they want owners to know how properties are being valued and "have as open a process as we legally are allowed to do," he said.

leah.brennan@chron.com
AP

CENTERVILLE, Texas (AP)  A Texas prisoner serving a life sentence for murder escaped from a transport bus Thursday after stabbing the driver, setting off a search in a rural county between Dallas and Houston, authorities said.

Multiple law enforcement agencies were searching an area off an interstate in Leon County for Gonzalo Lopez, 46, who was convicted in 2006 of killing another man along the Texas-Mexico border.
Police in Texas City found the body of a missing woman in the trunk of a car after neighbors complained of a smell, according to authorities.

Officers were dispatched to the 400 block of 4th Street North around 2:30 p.m. Wednesday and tracked the smell to the vehicle. Investigators opened the trunk and found the body of 24-year-old Angela Mitchell, Texas City police Sgt. Allen Bjerke said in a statement. She was reported missing to authorities in nearby Dickinson.
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A recent review of bail records found that most bondsmen complied with new regulations requiring defendants charged with violent felonies to pay 10 percent or more of their surety bond to get out of jail, officials said.

The Harris County Sheriffs Office reviewed records from April 23  when the mandated fee minimum kicked in  to the end of the month and found that 94 defendants whose charges qualified under the rule posted bond to secure their freedom, Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said Wednesday at the countys Bail Bond Board meeting. Authorities received affidavits for all but three of those defendants  and what records were turned in showed bail bondsmen accepted a 10 percent minimum from their clients.

EXPLAINER: What you need to know about Harris County's new bail bond rule and how it might impact violent crime

The vast majority were in compliance, Gonzalez said.

Those affidavits, which is how the sheriffs office will enforce the regulations, show what premium a bail bondsman collected ahead of the defendants release, how the premium was paid and who paid it.

Sgt. Sisto DeLeon, who collected and reviewed the documents, said the three missing affidavits stemmed from cases that a bail bondsman started on the eve of the new rule  but their documents did not go through until the following day.

Godofredo A. Vasquez, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

The Bail Bond Board approved the rule in April following hours of emotional testimony from politicians and families of homicide victims, predominantly slain children. Debate over bail fees stemmed from a Chronicle investigation that found bail bondsmen have for years offered defendants discounted rates. A review of court records for that investigation found that bondsmen have been increasingly accepting lower fees on more violent crimes amid diminishing profits.

Bail agents have more recently relied on payment plans.

The Bail Bond Board can revoke a bail bondsman's license for not following rules it sets.

Godofredo A. Vasquez, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

A lawsuit filed April 22 against the county attempted to stop the bail policy from taking effect with the argument that it would jeopardize a bail business and force bail bondsmen to participate in an illegal price-fixing scheme. Lawyers for both sides return to court June 13 to discuss a temporary injunction.

On HoustonChronicle.com: New bail dashboard offers look at trends in Harris County criminal courts

Defense attorney and board chairman Troy McKinney expressed worry at the time of the vote that the policy could lead to some defendants being unable to make bail and a more crowded jail. Gonzalez argued then that the jail was already packed with violent and repeat offenders .

More than 9,550 defendants were in the jail as of Tuesday  about 20 inmates more than when the bail policy took effect.

nicole.hensley@chron.com
A Texas judge who regularly presides over alcohol- and drug-related cases was arrested last weekend on suspicion of driving while intoxicated.

Travis County Judge John Lipscombe, 65, told deputies that he had a couple of drinks at his house but not even to get messy, when authorities spoke with him in a North Austin hotel lobby around midnight on Saturday, according to an arrest affidavit obtained by Fox 7 Austin.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Sugar Land man catches behemoth 300-pound alligator gar in Houston bayou.

The Travis County Sheriffs Office was called to the parking lot of the hotel after witnesses said that Lipscombe tried to back into a parking space that already had a car in it, the news station reported. If witnesses hadn't intervened, Lipscombe would have backed into the car, according to reports.

Travis County

Following a verbal argument, Lipscombe drove around the parking lot and parked in a handicapped spot near the entrance of the hotel, the television station reported. When deputies arrived, Lipscombe was reportedly sitting in the lobby and appeared to be disoriented.

Lipscombe refused a field sobriety test and reportedly told deputies that he had recently broken his right ankle, Fox 7 reported.

On HoustonChronicle.com: 10 new restaurants now open or coming soon to Houston

Records show Lipscombe was booked into the Travis County jail just before 9 a.m. Saturday on charges of DWI. He bonded out two hours later.

Linscombe was elected judge in January 2011, according to the countys website. In that position, Lipscombe oversees Class A and B misdemeanors, which include DWI cases. Visiting Judge David Crane took over Linscombe's court cases on Sunday.

On Tuesday, public records show that more than two dozen defendants who face charges of driving while intoxicated were on Lipscombes docket.

timothy.fanning@express-news.net
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IDEA Public Schools this week named as its lone finalist for superintendent a top Texas Education Agency official who oversaw an office that has been investigating the charter network over allegations former leaders had misused money and staff for personal gain.

The networks board on Tuesday named Jeff Cottrill, who has served as TEAs Deputy Commissioner for Governance and Accountability for the last three years, as the finalist, according a statement from IDEA. He is expected to begin serving as superintendent in June following a 21-day waiting period required by the state for superintendent appointments.

Jeff is an education leader with tremendous gifts, heart and focus, Collin Sewell, chair of the IDEA Board of Directors, said in the statement. He is a veteran school administrator with valuable and diverse experience leading, overseeing, and improving school districts and charter schools throughout Texas.

In response to an inquiry from the Houston Chronicle, the charter network on Thursday issued a statement saying Cottrill had recused himself from matters involving IDEA at the Texas Education Agency.

He has not been IDEAs point of contact at the agency since we posted the superintendent position. Its worth remembering that one year ago this month, it was the IDEA board of directors that investigated the misdeeds of former IDEA executives and referred the matter to TEA and other authorities. IDEA will continue to cooperate with TEA and is prepared for any consequences that may result from the agencys own investigation.

In a statement, TEA officials said that Cottrill immediately recused himself from all IDEA-related matters, including any involvement in the agencys ongoing investigation in late January when IDEA first recruited him. He also submitted a potential conflict of interest form.

The document, reviewed by the Chronicle, shows the charter networks general counsel contacted Cottrill Jan. 22 to gauge interest/encourage me to apply, Cottrill wrote.

As such, I feel it necessary to step back and remove myself from the (IDEA Public Schools) point of contact here at the TEA, remove myself from oversight/engagement regarding the TEA Special Investigations Unit's Special Investigation into IPS as well as refrain from engaging on all TEA/IPS matters going forward, he wrote.

Cottrill remained a TEA employee as of Thursday, according to TEA, and is expected to depart in June.

On HoustonChronicle.com: IDEA Public Schools fires CEO, chief operating officer after financial audit

At least two elected officials expressed concerns about the charter networks decision to hire Cottrill.

State Board of Education Rep. Georgina Cecilia Perez, whose district includes 40 counties in West Texas, said the move just stinks to high heaven.

She questioned why the agency had not announced Cottrills recusal from the probe. Perez also asked who currently is overseeing the IDEA investigation and whether the same investigators, who technically worked for Cottrill, would continue digging into a charter network that he now will lead.

My whole point to this is: why, as a taxpayer, do I even have to ask these questions? Perez said. Dont they feel the least bit obligated to be forthcoming and transparent with us?

The conflict of interest disclosures show Cottrill advised various individuals to take over specific roles.

State Rep. Terry Canales, D-Edinburg, in a tweet said, At the very least, this gives the appearance of possible impropriety at TEA.

The public is rightfully concerned when state employees serving as a regulator are hired to work for an entity that they previously regulated, Canales told the Chronicle in a follow-up statement. In this case, Dr. Cottrills hiring raises concerns about his previous work at TEA, and how he will use his connections at TEA in the future.

The education agency opened an investigation into the charter system in May 2021 after an audit found substantial evidence top leaders at the large charter network misused money and staff for personal gain.

The auditors findings resulted in the firings of IDEAs co-founder and CEO JoAnn Gama and Chief Operating Officer Irma Munoz.

IDEAs other co-founder, Tom Torkelson, resigned as CEO in 2020, following criticism over the charters spending, including $400,000 on luxury boxes and tickets for events at San Antonios AT&T Center and his plan to lease a jet for travel between the charter networks hubs.

During Torkelsons tenure, several relatives of IDEA executives and board members also engaged in business dealings with the charter, including a company co-owned by Munozs husband that billed more than $600,000 for uniforms, other clothing and gear.

TEAs Governance and Accountability office, for which Cottrill served as deputy commissioner, is tasked with improving governance and performance of the states school systems through various initiatives, including investigations, according to the agency.

IDEA has 75,000 students who attend 137 schools in Texas, Louisiana and Florida. Three of the schools are in the Houston area.

More IDEA news: IDEA Public Schools CEO Tom Torkelson resigns from Texas largest charter school network

IDEA students, the vast majority of whom are Hispanic and come from low-income families, routinely score well-above average on state standardized tests and enroll in college at high rates compared to their peers. Skeptics argue IDEAs success is inflated by high academic standards that deter families from enrolling students with more intensive academic and behavioral needs.

alejandro.serrano@chron.com
About 30 protesters gathered in front of the Philippine General Consulate in west Houston Wednesday night to protest against the election of Ferdinand Bongbong Marcos Jr., the son of the countrys former martial law dictator.

The protest  organized by Anakbayan Rice, Filipinx Artists of Houston and Malaya Movement Texas  featured poems, songs and chants against the president-elect and the martial law his father enacted in 1972 and lifted in 1981.

Other protests were scheduled around the state in nine other cities  including Dallas and Austin, according to Kate Murcia of Malaya Movement Texas. Each protest was broadcast online simultaneously.

Marcos along with his running mate Sara Duterte, the daughter of outgoing President Roberto Dutarte, became the countrys first majority elected pair since Ferdinand Marcos Sr. won in a boycotted election after lifting martial law in 1981.

With more than 97 percent of the vote counted as of Wednesday night, Marcos captured over 30 million votes which was double his nearest opponent, outgoing Vice President Leni Robredo who netted 14 million votes, according to the Commission on Elections of the Philippines (COMELEC).

For Aniway Duhaylungsod, 42, Marcos Jr.s election symbolizes a failure by her generation to continue the People Power movement  a grassroots movement in the Philippines which in 1986 ousted the elder Marcos Sr. from power.

I get emotional when I think about it, she said holding back tears. I believe we failed the youth in allowing the disinformation to come to our people.

Many of those in attendance echoed Duhaylungsods sentiment and questioned the legitimacy of the May 9 election while citing alleged Internet disinformation campaigns funded by Marcos.

What we have witnessed in the past 24 hours and in the past month is a clear failure of the commission on elections to ensure that Filipinos are able to exercise their right to vote, Rory of Malaya Movement Texas said. She did not wish to give her last name.

Going forward, all three organizations involved in the protest are hoping to continue to bring awareness of the issues in the Philippines, according to Murcia.

joel.umanzor@chron.com
Mercedes Herrera, a janitor who cleans corporate offices in the Galleria area, was verbally attacked recently by another Latina and it left her stunned, as if a bucket of cold water had been thrown on me, she said.

She had been at a rally supporting colleagues who were laid off by another company. She said the janitors were chanting in Spanish when, a Hispanic woman came right up to me and screamed in my face, pinches Latinos, pinches mugrosos, which translates roughly to damn Latinos, dam scum.

Herrera said she didnt just feel angry, she felt sad. The Latina woman was the only person who opted to berate the janitors among a group of several company officials facing opposite them who were white and Black, she said.

SURVEY: 12 percent of Hispanics identify as Afro-Latino, reporting more instances of discrimination

It was sad to see one of us treating us as if we were dirty people, said Herrera. They seem to forget that we are the essential workers who came to clean the mess after the (2021 winter storm), after Harvey, during the pandemic.

Herrera is among a large sector of Latinos who have been victim of discrimination from people of their same ethnicity. About a quarter of Latino adults in the United States face inter-ethnic discrimination, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center, a nonprofit think tank. Hate speech is likelier to be triggered among Latinos when one party has a different immigration status, a darker skin color or speaks Spanish.

Overall, the report says that 27 percent of Latinos surveyed had personally experienced discrimination or unfair treatment from other Latinos. Overall 31 percent said they had been targeted by people who are not Hispanic.

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Latinos were likeliest to be discriminated against based on their race or darker skin tone  41 percent reported incidents involving other Latinos. Roughly the same percentage of Hispanic respondents, 42 percent, had been victimized by non-Hispanics based on race.

The main takeaway of this survey is that the discrimination that Latinos experience not only comes from people who are not Latinos, but also from Latinos themselves, said Mark Hugo Lopez, director of race and ethnicity research at Pew Research.

More from Olivia P. Tallet: Afro-Latinos: a vision of Houston's mixed-race future

Lopez said Latinos are a very diverse and multiracial population, and that the discrimination based on race and colorism is not exclusive to this community.

This can happen in any community and theres research that shows, for example, among Black Americans ... there are similar experiences according to skin color, said Lopez.

Immigration status is also a leading target for discrimination, with 32 percent of Latinos born in other countries and in Puerto Rico reporting such incidences coming from Hispanics.

Discrimination between Hispanics born in the continental U.S. and those born abroad or on unincorporated U.S. territory is not a new phenomenon, said Jeronimo Cortina, a political science professor at the University of Houston who studies immigration.

He said since the 1930s and 1940s, Theres always existed this ambivalent relationship between foreign-born Latinos and native-born Latinos prompted by influxes of immigrants, said Cortina.

Cortina said the mainland U.S. Latinos perceive Puerto Ricans and foreign-born Latinos as potential competition.

Latinos had mixed reactions to the federal Bracero program in the 1940s and 1960s that brought in manual workers from Mexico to alleviate severe shortages of farm laborers and workers in other low-paid industries.

SPECIAL FEATURE: Extraordinarios! 10 Houston Latinos who are making a difference

Ambivalent inter-group relationships also occur in Black communities where there is tension between the African American community and migrants coming directly from Africa, Cortina said.

Dont be so brown

Educational levels and English fluency and pronunciation are other factors that incite discrimination among Latinos, which, together with skin color, can be perceived as markers of class, said Cortina.

This type of derision was familiar to Lupe Mendez, a Mexican American born in Galveston to low-income Spanish speaking parents who didnt go far in school.

Dont be so brown! Go to your rancho, I am Ms. Rodriguez, not Rrrodrrriguez, teachers would tell Mendez and other Latino students, mocking their accents when they used a drawn out pronunciation of the letter R.

Mendez said the curious thing is that those types of discriminatory comments came from school teachers who were also Latinos.

This kind of discrimination, looking down at you because of your background or for having a brown skin or your language or accent didnt stop there, said Mendez. With English as his first language and Spanish as the family tongue, he still faced mistreatment from two Hispanic professors when he moved to Houston for college at a private institution, he said.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Latino leaders plan lawsuit to change 'gross' underrepresentation in Houston City Council

Dont you even know how to spell your last name! he recalled his Spanish professor, a light-skinned Latino, saying, scolding him and taking points off his test score.

I was trying very hard to learn proper Spanish, Mendez said. But these two professors bit me at every corner.

Now an educator himself with more than 20 years of experience. who was honored as the 2022 Texas Poet Laureate, he said hes seen that discrimination by Latinos against Latinos still happens at schools.

And it happens out in the open. Herrera, the janitor who was insulted at the demonstration, said woman who called her names also tried to intimidate her by holding up her phone close to her face and saying she was going to record her.

I have children and grandchildren. I have always worked hard to support my family and am very proud of the work I do, said Herrera.

I have taught my children not to discriminate against anyone, she said. We are all equal and we are all brothers and sisters.

olivia.tallet@chron.com
The attorney for a man fatally shot by a Houston police officer during an April traffic stop on Wednesday called on the Houston Police Department to release body camera footage and said he man did not pose a threat to officers.

Jalen Randle was killed during a police pursuit on April 27 in the Pleasantville area. His family has hired civil rights attorney Ben Crump.

Witnesses affirm that Jalen was running away from police with no visible weapon when he was shot," Crumps office said in a statement on Wednesday.

According to Crump, an independent autopsy commissioned by the family showed Randle was shot in the back of the neck.

The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences determined Randle died of a gunshot wound to the neck.

After the police pursuit, officers confronted Randle on foot. According to police, one approaching officer fired their weapon, striking the 29-year old.

Following the fatal shooting, police said Randle was carrying a bag concealing a handgun.

The Houston Police Department identified the officer as Shane Privette of the narcotics division. Privette, who remained on administrative duties as of Wednesday, was charged in 2017 with aggravated assault for injuries he inflicted during a 2017 undercover drug operation. The charges were later dismissed.

Under the citys body camera policy for police shootings, the department has 30 days to release body camera footage  a policy HPD spokesperson John Cannon said it would adhere to.

The HPD spokesperson said all police shootings are probed by the departments special investigations unit and the Harris County District Attorneys office.

We do not discuss ongoing internal affairs investigations, Cannon said. The questions (the Randle family) raised, we cant answer to those.

At the time of his death, Randle was wanted on warrants for three felony charges: aggravated assault, evading arrest in a vehicle and felon in a possession of a weapon. The charges stemmed from a police report filed on March 19, when his girlfriend of three weeks told police that he beat her and pointed a gun at her, according to court records.

Police on that day pursued Randle while he fled the scene of the alleged assault, records show. He eventually abandoned the vehicle and fled on foot, records show.

Three weeks later, a tactical team spotted Randle getting into the passenger seat of an SUV. Officers tried to pull the vehicle over, but the driver did not stop, HPD Executive Chief Matt Slinkard said the day of the police shooting.

A brief pursuit continued to the 8700 block of Josie Street, where officers used an "intervention technique" to stop the vehicle, Slinkard said. When the SUV came to a stop on Josie Street, body camera footage showed the man exiting the passenger side with a "bag in his hand," Slinkard said.

Thats when Privette fired his weapon, he said, striking Randle.

nora.mishanec@chron.com
As Harris County continues to grapple with violent crime, local law enforcement agencies are creating a new, 16-member squad tasked with hunting down dangerous fugitives, authorities have announced.

The task force will be staffed with deputies from the Harris County Sheriffs Office and the countys eight constables, Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia said, in a news conference Tuesday shortly before commissioners voted to approve the measure.

The task force will be modeled after the U.S. Marshals Gulf Coast Violent Offenders and Fugitive Task Force, Garcia said, calling the effort a historic investment in the countys efforts to reduce the backlog of warrants of those charged with violent crimes.

The new unit will focus exclusively on tracking down the most violent offenders, he said, meaning those wanted for aggravated robberies and assaults, murders, assaults in which robbers used weapons, assaults against children or family members, and sexual assaults.

The task force will also focus on the newest warrants, officials said.

County Judge Lina Hidalgo said the effort was meant to send a message to criminals who might believe they can act with impunity.

When dangerous criminals arent apprehended quickly, it creates a sense that the government does not do its part in addressing serious crimes, making victims feel ignored and perpetrators empowered, she said. Thats why this specific initiative is so important.

Sheriff Ed Gonzalez noted that the county presently has 4,800 warrants for people wanted on aggravated felonies, with about 1,000 warrants for bond revocations.

Every community and every precinct in Harris County has violent offenders that have absconded, he said. We want them to know we are going to be out there looking for them.

Eight of the deputies, and a pair of supervisors, will come from the sheriffs office. Each of Harris Countys constables will also contribute a deputy, if they agree to join the effort, Garcia said. So far, six of the county constables have expressed interest in the task force or agreed to participate.

The departments will have 30 days after the task forces formation to agree to participate in it. If any of the constables decide not to, the position they would have taken will go to a sheriffs deputy, according to county records show.

The new initiative coincides with a countywide spike in crime  and the accompanying increase in arrest warrants filed every month with the sheriffs office. As of March, the sheriffs offices warrants division had 50,247 outstanding warrants, including nearly 5,000 for aggravated offenses and more than 700 for murder. That number has only accelerated over the past few years: Before 2019, the warrants division received between 3,000 and 4,000 warrants a month, according to county data. Over the past year, that number has climbed to about 6,000 new warrants per month.

County officials said they believe the unit will end up making about 1,300 arrests a year, clearing a total of about 1,800 felony warrants in that time. The program will end up costing the county just over $2.5 million, according to a program proposal.

Precinct 4 Constable Mark Herman said he was glad to hear of the initiative and looking forward to hearing more specifics about how it would work.

Like the sheriffs office, his department also fields a warrant team, he said. However, the new task force would be especially helpful because it would target some of the most dangerous people across the county, he said.

There are more suspected criminals on the streets of Harris County than ever before, Herman said, blaming that increase on recent criminal justice reforms. Its dangerous and volatile times for police officers, but I do think these programs are good ideas. The main thing is to keep violent offenders off the streets and hopefully stop the revolving door when they get arrested.

st.john.smith@houstonchronicle.com
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Three new facilities are under construction at the Houston Spaceport, a promising step toward the citys 2015 commitment to transform Ellington Airport into a hub for space activity.

Axiom Space, the local company that recently sent private astronauts to the International Space Station, held a ground-breaking ceremony Wednesday for Phase I of its 22-acre campus. This campus will be used to train future astronauts and develop a commercial space station.

In January, Houston-based Intuitive Machines broke ground on its 12.5-acre, 110,000-square-foot location. This is where it will build lunar landers, operate its mission control and make other space products, such as guidance, navigation and control technology.

And in June of 2021, Charlotte, N.C.-based Collins Aerospace broke ground on an 8-acre, 120,000-square-foot campus to develop and produce systems for NASAs human spaceflight programs.

Marie D. De Jesus, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer Marie D. De Jesus, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer Marie D. De Jesus, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer Marie D. De Jesus, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer Three new facilities are under construction at the Houston Spaceport, a promising step toward the citys 2015 commitment to transform Ellington Airport into a hub for space activity.

Its so fascinating to see the progress that Houston and the Houston Spaceport have made, said Arturo Machuca, the spaceports director.

SPACE CITY: TexSpace debuts to solidify Houston as Space City

June marks seven years since the Houston Spaceport became the nations 10th FAA-licensed commercial spaceport. Its location in the middle of a major city means it will not be home to vertical rocket launches, but early renderings showcased spaceplanes that take off or land horizontally.

That technology is still maturing, including a local company developing a spaceplane to fly passengers from Los Angeles to Tokyo in one hour, and Houston officials didnt want the spaceport to sit empty as the technology advanced. So they focused on attracting a cluster of aerospace companies that can invent, develop and manufacture space technologies.

The spaceport now has three anchor tenants and is in talks with three additional companies that might become tenants, Machuca said.

Marie D. De Jesus, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer Marie D. De Jesus, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer Marie D. De Jesus, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer Marie D. De Jesus, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer The groundbreaking ceremony for new Axiom Space headquarters at the Houston Spaceport, Wednesday, May 11, 2022, in Houston.

We realized that a spaceport was not about flights, said Mario Diaz, director of the Houston Airport System. It was not about rockets taking off or jets taking off. It was about what kind of economic development, what kind of manufacturing, what kind of companies could you bring to the forefront.

The spaceport experienced an early blow to this idea in 2017, when it lost a bid to attract a Blue Origin rocket engine manufacturing facility that promised a $200 million investment and 342 well-paying jobs.

So it spent roughly $20 million to build streets, utilities and other infrastructure that would make the spaceport more attractive.

And more recently, the Houston Airport System has appropriated up to $105.6 million to finance construction for Axiom Space, Intuitive Machines and Collins Aerospace. The companies will pay this money back to the Houston Airport System, plus interest. The Houston Airport System will own the buildings, and the companies will lease them.

Collins Aerospace, a subsidiary of Raytheon Technologies Corp., plans to move into its new facility in the third quarter of this year. The company will relocate some 120 Houston employees currently working from 18050 Saturn Lane.

Marie D. De Jesus, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

Its new building will also include 10,000 square feet for high-tech aerospace startups.

Intuitive Machines plans to open an advanced propulsion test facility in June. Its targeting May 2023 for opening the main facility.

The lunar lander company currently has offices at 3700 Bay Area Blvd., and it leases a smaller building at the Houston Spaceport (it was the first spaceport tenant). Intuitive Machines plans to grow from 150 employees to 200 by the end of this year, and most of those employees will be based at its new spaceport facility.

Axiom Space plans to complete the first phase of its construction (106,000 square feet and 11 acres) by April 2023. This includes a high bay where the company can receive the first module of its space station. The exterior of this module is being made in Italy, but Axiom will install and test its various electronics and life-support systems in Houston.

The first segment of its space station is slated to launch in late 2024.

Marie D. De Jesus, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

SPACE ENTREPRENEUR: Whats your passion? An entrepreneurs question leads to space enterprises

Axiom is currently headquartered at 1290 Hercules Ave. and has about 450 employees. It expects to have 800 people by the end of this year and 1,300 people by the end of next year.

To help develop local talent to fill these companies, the Houston Airport System has contracted with FS Group Architects to plan a campus where several colleges and universities could collaborate. Machuca said the airport system does not yet have funding beyond the planning and design phase, but the goal is to build upon the work of San Jacinto College EDGE Center that currently offers aerospace training at the spaceport.

Our workforce must be ready to seize on the opportunities that will spring from this extraordinary and crucial undertaking, said Diaz, director of the Houston Airport System.

andrea.leinfelder@chron.com

twitter.com/a_leinfelder
The chances of a Republican candidate winning in the 29th Congressional District are slim.

The majority-Latino district, which encompasses South Houston and Pasadena and snakes around the outer rim of northeast Harris County into Aldine, is represented by Democratic Rep. Sylvia Garcia, a two-term incumbent and former state lawmaker.

Garcia has a massive fundraising advantage, with $526,578 on hand. By contrast, the two Republican candidates vying in the runoff to challenge Garcia, Julio Garza and Robert Schafranek, appear to not even be trying to raise money. Garza has $593 on hand, while Schafranek has not reported any fundraising totals.

That massive gap in resources will make it tough for either of the GOP candidates to build the necessary cross-party appeal to pick off Democratic and independent voters to compete with Garcia.

We spoke with Garza and believe his staunch patriotism and compelling personal background as a second-generation immigrant success story will be appealing to many voters. But we cant recommend him. He told us that President Biden is not the legitimate president  a view that all by itself triggers questions about his judgment  and that the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was staged.

A candidate who truly believes these falsehoods has proven him or herself easily fooled. A candidate who sees through that dangerous myth but repeats it anyway for campaign advantage has shown he or she cant be trusted with this or any elected office.

Garza, 53, was born in San Antonio. Hes an entrepreneur and licensed health insurance agent. His family moved to Houston when he was young and he grew up in Second Ward, where he helped his family run multiple businesses, including a bakery, restaurant, bar, and night club.

He describes himself as a man of faith, steadfastly pro-life, and says he believes voters will appreciate his work ethic. If hes elected, hell make it a priority to fund the construction of border fencing.

Either by a border wall or some kind of additional protection, Garza told the editorial board. The way things are right now, everyone and their grandmother is walking across and we dont know who they are.

As for Schafranek, a perennial candidate who got nearly 40 percent of the vote in the March 1 primary, we cant recommend him, either. Hes raised no money, has no campaign website and has not returned our calls.

This is the second time Garza and Schafranek, 64, have faced off for the GOP nomination in the 29th District. Garza defeated Schafranek by 19 points in 2016 before losing to the incumbent Democrat Gene Green. Schafranek also ran for Congress in the 29th District unsuccessfully in 2018 and 2020.
Republicans looking for a strong candidate to challenge U.S. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, the Houston Democrat seeking her third term, have two good choices in the May 24 runoff.

Johnny Teague, 59, the Baptist preacher and rancher, earned 43 percent of the vote in the March 1 primary, the best showing among seven candidates. Hes an experienced candidate, a strong conservative, and has a welcome ability to talk about hotly debated policy preferences in a way that calms, rather than excites, passions. Teagues experience as senior pastor at Houstons Church at the Cross  come as you are is a tag line  includes working to aid refugee families and battling human trafficking.

Even so, we continue to believe his opponent, Tim Stroud, is the better choice for Republicans looking for the best chance at winning in November.

A former combat medic for the U.S. Army with tours of duty in Kosovo and Iraq, Stroud offered what weve called conservative but reasonable takes on pressing issues  from climate change to the future of the energy industry. Stroud strongly supports oil and gas, for instance, but also wants to see continued investments in renewable fuels. Rather than eliminate subsidies for clean energy, he wants to insist that help for the industry is fairly spread out among green and fossil fuels.

Stroud, 50, believes Houston  and Texas as a whole  can become a hub for innovative responses to climate change. The talent already employed in the oil and gas industry could be a rich source of human capital necessary to develop new solutions for a warming planet that will require ever more energy in years to come. There are brilliant minds all over the world working on the energy transition, he told us in February. We need to attract them to the United States and Texas. Lets use those minds right here.

Both candidates offer voters a reliably conservative approach to the nations challenges. We believe Stroud stands out, however, due to the level of thinking he has put into the solving them. Strouds commitment to both protect workers in Houstons primary industry and help the region chart a new course persuades us that he deserves a spot on the November ballot.

We urge those voting in the Republican primary runoff to back Stroud.
Regarding Pitts: Its hard to fight from a crouch, (May 8): In the Sunday column by Leonard Pitts, he expressed what I have been saying for years. The right wing has lost the battle of ideas but has won the battle of words. I virtually gag every time the media refers to the extreme members of the GOP as conservative. Somehow over the last 50 years conservative took on a positive connotation and liberal a negative one.

Todays right wing has totally abandoned traditional conservative values. Fiscal responsibility has been discarded and replaced with favoring anything that lowers taxes, particularly on the wealthy. Long forgotten is conservative icon Barry Goldwater who voted against a tax cut that was not offset with spending cuts.

Particularly absurd is the term social conservative. Traditional conservative values call for less government involvement in our private lives, not imposing our religious beliefs on others. Here, too, the right wing has won the war of words. The debate over abortion rights is framed as pro-life vs. pro-choice. The right wing position is better described as pro-birth than pro-life. The other side calls for doing more to ensure lifes necessities once someone is born. Also social conservatives have managed to describe their opposition as woke. Whatever that means, it must be bad if one sneers when she says it.

Most distressing is the right wing's abandonment of what have always been shared values between our political rivals. Liberals and conservative are not opposites. They are terms that describe positions on a continuum which define more or less government involvement in the life of the country. Somehow the extreme element of the right wing has decided that winning is more important than free and fair elections and, to some extent, that freedom of speech, of religion and of the press can be compromised.

If our politicians could focus more on issues and less on labels they would find there is much common ground with their opponents. They could then concentrate on solutions rather than name calling.

Marc Freedman, Houston

I sometimes read the weekly anti-Republican rants from Leonard Pitts just to keep track of how far out there the left can be. This column defines words used to describe left-leaning individuals but, of course, his definitions are structured to make them look good. Lets take a look at what he said with my edits to bring them into alignment with reality.

Woke means awake and aware. In reality woke means we see things a certain way and if you don't agree with us you must be racist, homophobic, xenophobic and just generally hateful  so you're canceled and no one will be allowed to hear what you have to say.

Liberal means generous and broad-minded. Rephrased, a more complete definition is generous with taxpayers money and broad-minded as long as you agree.

Progressive means characterized by progress. Progress toward which goal or goals? Based on observation of progressives behavior and advocacy the correct answer is progress toward communism or some other form of left-wing totalitarianism where the progressive government micromanages the lives of citizens under the belief that they alone know what's best.

Greg Groh, Houston

Leonard Pitts describes how the GOP has distorted words like woke which means awake and aware, and liberal which means generous and broad-minded, in an attempt to deflect attention away from their own minority party status. Pitts correctly notes that Democrats have not stood up to this assault on public discourse. But this is actually an old story.

In a moment of confusion and cynicism (Vietnam, Watergate, stagflation), Democrats let Ronald Reagan get away with a politically motivated attack on the American government when he said that government is not the solution to our problem (false), government is the problem (an insult to the American people who run government through their elected representatives). Democrats have paid the price for their negligence ever since as Republicans routinely scoff at any attempt to use government to provide necessities not adequately available from the private sector.

Michael Douglas Gilbert, Houston

I see another Leonard Pitts piece where he is laying the blame for most everything on conservatives and whites  even when its about why liberals are not doing things right. He seems to always put race into his columns whether it is really part of the narrative or not. The goals for society he has listed are also what many white conservatives want for our country. I have yet to see an objective piece, looking at valid points from both sides from him in all these years.

James Fix, Katy
WASHINGTON  Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner and Police Chief Troy Finner are set to meet with President Joe Biden on Friday as the White House touts efforts to use COVID stimulus money to crack down on violent crime.

Turner and Finner are expected to be among a group of elected officials and police chiefs visiting Biden to talk about how they have used American Rescue Plan funding to boost public safety programs. Biden is expected to call for state and local leaders to use the coronavirus stimulus money to invest in similar programs, a White House official said.

Houston recently rolled out a plan to use more than $50 million in federal funding to combat underlying issues leading to crime, with more than half of the funding going toward helping those facing mental health and domestic violence crises.

Turner said the program has shown early signs of success. In January, the month before it went into place, the citys homicide rate was more than 60 percent above the year before. In the time since the city instituted the plan, that had dropped to 10 percent. He said all other violent crimes are below where they were last year.

According to an update on the program the city released this month, from Feb. 7 to April 27, Houston police made 515 felony arrests and recovered 325 guns and 260 vehicles. As of April 8, police had made arrests for 18 murder charges, the report said.

The numbers are very, very positive, Turner said.

Background: Mayor Turner outlines $44 million plan to combat violent crime

The city, like many across the country, has weathered a spike in violent crime since the start of the pandemic. Houston recorded 479 homicides in 2021, a per capita rate of 20 per 100,000 people  one of the most violent years since 1990, according to a Chronicle analysis.

Still, city officials have said that violent crime overall has diminished since the worst of the pandemic increases, dropping by 4.5 percent by the end of 2021 from the year prior.

The citys plan, rolled out in February, calls for spending $10 million on violence reduction and crime prevention  including adding $5.7 million in overtime for Houston Police Department patrols  and about $34 million more for crisis intervention, response and recovery, the bulk of which will expand existing mental health programs.

The funding is expected to pay for 125 additional officers per day.

Turner said there is funding through the American Rescue Plan to cover the plan for three years.

We are not defunding, you know, law enforcement. In fact we are investing even more, he said.

ben.wermund@chron.com
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Democrat Beto ORourke said if he wins the governors race in November, he absolutely sees a role for actor Matthew McConaughey on his team.

During an interview on Late Night with Seth Meyers, ORourke said hes not sure if the Academy Award winner is a Democrat or a Republican, but heaped praise on the Uvalde native for his work to help Texans in time of crisis. ORourke said after the 2021 winter storms and after the 2019 mass shooting in El Paso, McConaughey dropped everything and was helping raise money and support Texans in need.

This guys a great Texan, ORourke said after Meyers asked him if hed try to bring McConaughey on in some capacity. Beyond being an extraordinary actor, when the chips are down in our state, this guy shows up.

ORourke later added, so whatever he wants to do and whoever he can help, we want to turn him loose.

Last year, McConaughey, a University of Texas alum, toyed with the idea of running for governor himself. At the time, he said he was exploring whether to become more involved in politics or find other ways to help people.

As a simple kid born in the little town of Uvalde, Texas, it never occurred to me that I would one day be considered for political leadership, he said in a social media post in November. Its a humbling and inspiring path to ponder. It is also a path that I am choosing not to take at this moment.

McConaughey, 52, already has made some inroads in Texas politics. In 2018, he appeared in public service announcements with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to bring more awareness to human trafficking in the state. And in 2020, he appeared in public service announcements as part of an anti-litter campaign with the Texas Department of Transportation.

Last year, McConaughey also weighed in on the Texas abortion legislation that bars women from getting an abortion after six weeks even if they are victims of rape or incest.

Ive got a problem with that, McConaughey said, though he never spelled out his position on abortion.

The Academy Award winner also has declined to publicly disclose whether he votes Republican or a Democrat  at one point describing his political views as aggressively centric.
The Texas primary runoffs are nearly here, with early voting set to begin Monday for all the Democratic and Republican contests in which no candidate received a majority of votes during the first round of voting.

Some of the premier November races have already been set, including the gubernatorial matchup between Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and Democrat Beto ORourke, who decisively won their primaries in March. But several other statewide contests have gone into overtime to determine at least one major party nominee, and a handful of San Antonio-area congressional and statehouse primaries remain unsettled.

Ahead of the May 24 runoff election, here are the most notable races that will appear on Democratic and Republican ballots in Bexar County and the surrounding area.

Statewide offices

Attorney general, Democratic and Republican primaries

Widely considered to be Texas marquee contest this spring, the Republican primary for attorney general has come down to a runoff between incumbent Ken Paxton and Land Commissioner George P. Bush.

Bush, who opted to forgo a third term in office to challenge Paxton, secured 23 percent of the vote in March, finishing 20 percentage points behind Paxton. But Paxtons two other high-profile challengers  former Texas Supreme Court justice Eva Guzman and U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert  won enough support to force the incumbent into a showdown with Bush.

Hoping to erode Paxtons advantage with staunchly conservative voters, Bush has adopted a hard-line stance on border security and framed himself as a fierce defender of law enforcement. But he faces a number of headwinds in the runoff, including Republican skepticism about his familys conservative credentials; Donald Trumps endorsement of Paxton; and polling that found that about one-third of primary voters would never choose Bush  roughly triple the number who said the same about Paxton.

KNOW THE CANDIDATES: Houston Chronicle 2022 Primary Voter Guide: May 24 runoff election / San Antonio Express-News 2022 Primary Voter guide: May 24 runoff election

On the Democratic side, former ACLU attorney Rochelle Garza easily claimed a first-place finish in the March primary, yet fell several percentage points shy of an outright win. In the runoff, she faces former Galveston mayor Joe Jaworski, who finished less than half a percentage point ahead of civil rights attorney Lee Merritt in the first round. Merritt has thrown his support behind Garza in the runoff.

Lieutenant governor, Democratic primary

With Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick easily securing the Republican nomination for a third term, the race to determine his Democratic opponent is between Mike Collier, an accountant who lost to Patrick by about 5 percentage points in 2018, and state Rep. Michelle Beckley, D-Carrollton.

Collier, a former Republican, argues he stands a better chance of appealing to moderate and rural voters than Beckley, who is considered one of the most liberal members of the Texas House.

Beckley, a small business owner who is serving her second term in Austin, argues she energizes Democratic voters in ways Collier does not, pointing to her win over a Republican incumbent in 2018.

After the runoff was set in March, Beckley wasted no time calling for Collier to drop out of the race  despite finishing 12 points behind him in the first round  because he doesnt inspire the base. Collier declined, and has since been endorsed by a number of Beckleys colleagues in the House.

Land commissioner, Democratic and Republican primaries

With Bush running for attorney general, a crowded field emerged in the two open primaries for his seat, both of which went into overtime.

On the GOP side, state Sen. Dawn Buckingham, a Lakeway Republican who was viewed as the strong favorite, placed first with 42 percent of the vote. She faces Tim Westley, a pastor, historian for the Texas Republican Party and two-time congressional candidate, on May 24. Westley is aiming to overcome Buckinghams massive fundraising advantage and her high-powered endorsements from Trump, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and a slew of other Republican lawmakers.

Meanwhile, mental health counselor Sandra Grace Martinez and conservationist Jay Kleberg are battling for the Democratic nomination. On paper, Kleberg has appeared to have the upper hand, recently winning the endorsement of ORourke and outraising Martinez in the first round more than 300-to-1. But it was Martinez who finished first, nearly six points ahead of Kleberg, despite spending only about $2,000 on her campaign.

Congressional

28th Congressional District, Democratic primary

The runoff between U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar and progressive immigration attorney Jessica Cisneros has seen a few dramatic twists in the homestretch of the campaign, including news that the Supreme Court may overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision guaranteeing access to abortion nationwide.

Cuellar, a Catholic who has long opposed abortion, was the only House Democrat to vote against a bill last year that would have codified the right to an abortion. He has said he opposes an outright ban on abortion and supports exceptions for rape, incest and danger to the life of the mother. The top three ranked Democrats in the House, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have stuck behind Cuellar despite facing pressure from abortion rights advocates to drop their support for the incumbent.

After narrowly surviving a challenge from Cisneros in 2020, Cuellar was forced into a runoff this year after falling several hundred votes shy of an outright win in March.

The district, newly drawn to include a larger share of San Antonio, runs all the way to the border, including Laredo, the hometown of both Cisneros and Cuellar.

28th Congressional District, Republican primary

Though Cuellar won re-election comfortably in 2020, national Republicans are targeting the moderate Democrats seat, sensing opportunity in a potential GOP wave year and the possibility Cuellar could lose the Democratic primary.

The seven-candidate GOP primary has come down to Cassy Garcia, a former staffer for U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who is backing Garcia in the primary; and Sandra Whitten, the 2020 GOP nominee for the district. Garcia finished first in the March primary, securing 23.5 percent of the vote, while Whitten drew 18 percent.

Texas Legislature

Texas Senate District 24, Republican primary

In his bid to return to the Texas Senate, Pleasanton Republican Pete Flores placed first in the March primary but failed to avoid a runoff against his main rival, former congressional candidate Raul Reyes. With Flores endorsed by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick  along with a host of other Republican politicians, including former president Donald Trump  Reyes has taken to calling his runoff foe a lapdog, suggesting he would be beholden to Patrick and Senate leadership. (Flores and Patrick say this is untrue.)

Flores lost re-election in a different district in 2020 and is running for the newly crafted version of Senate District 24, which sweeps around the west side of Bexar County, covering all of Medina County and parts of the Hill Country and Atascosa County.

Texas House District 122, Republican primary

State Rep. Lyle Larson, by some measures the most moderate Republican lawmaker in Austin, announced last year he would retire from the Legislature, then endorsed trucking industry executive Adam Blanchard to succeed him in the Republican primary. But Blanchard finished third in the initial round of voting, which produced a runoff between former San Antonio city councilwoman Elisa Chan and former Bexar County Republican Party chair Mark Dorazio.

Chan, who has led the candidates in spending after lending her campaign more than $750,000, won 37 percent of the vote in the March primary, topping the field of four candidates. Dorazio, who has posted more modest fundraising totals but is boosted by endorsements from U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, finished second with 27 percent.

The conservative-leaning House District 122 covers most of northwest Bexar County under boundaries that were newly configured during last years redistricting process.

County offices

Bexar County Judge, Democratic primary

For the first time in more than 20 years, the Democratic nominee for Bexar Countys top elected post will be someone other than Nelson Wolff, the longtime incumbent who decided not to seek re-election.

The three-candidate Democratic primary has been narrowed to a runoff between former district court judge Peter Sakai, who led with 41 percent in the March contest, and state Rep. Ina Minjarez, a former prosecutor in the Bexar County District Attorneys Office who received 31 percent of the vote in the first round.

The winner will face Republican nominee Trish DeBerry, a former public relations executive who resigned as Precinct 3 commissioner to run for county judge.

jasper.scherer@chron.com
WFO AMARILLO Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Wednesday, May 11, 2022

_____

SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING

The National Weather Service in Amarillo has issued a

* Severe Thunderstorm Warning for...

Southwestern Texas County in the Panhandle of Oklahoma...

Southeastern Cimarron County in the Panhandle of Oklahoma...

Northwestern Sherman County in the Panhandle of Texas...

Northeastern Dallam County in the Panhandle of Texas...

* Until 700 PM CDT.

* At 559 PM CDT, a severe thunderstorm was located 13 miles northwest

of Conlen, or 17 miles west of Stratford, moving north at 35 mph.

HAZARD...60 mph wind gusts and quarter size hail.

SOURCE...Radar indicated.

IMPACT...Minor damage to roofs, siding, and trees is possible.

Hail damage to vehicles is expected.

* Locations impacted include...

Griggs and Conlen.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...

For your protection move to an interior room on the lowest floor of a

building.

_____

Copyright 2022 AccuWeather
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Opulous adds MFTs (Music Fungible Tokens), an SEC compliant music investment vehicle on the blockchain

NFT platform Opulous has added a new type of token  the MFT (Music Fungible Token)  which combines the power of blockchain technology with an an investment framework tailored to the music industry.

More than just smart branding, Opulous created MFTs as a better way to split music copyright tokens into equal shares.

Opulous is the first company to split up music royalties and we have pioneered music NFTs since our inception said Opulous CEO Lee Parsons who also heads music indie platform Ditto. We love the term MFT and believe it positions Opulous at the forefront of the music industry at what will be a tremendous evolution for fans and artists.

Investors will receive rights to music royalties through a limited number of MFTs, each representing a music copyright security token compliant with SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) regulations.

Opulous will use this token as the basis for all MFT sales (previously S-NFT), as they are divisible and can be easily traded for another asset of like-kind. As such, MFTs allow Opulous to offer fractional investments while ensuring that each fraction is equivalent to the next.

New MFT launchpad

In the coming weeks Opulous will add a music NFT launchpad that will use traditional NFT structures to sell art, fan experiences, and focus on long term NFT utility for musicians.

The new Opulous NFT launchpad will help artists receive up-front funding through MFT fundraising campaigns and offer bespoke generative artwork NFTs.

Bruce Houghton is Founder and Editor of Hypebot and MusicThinkTank and serves as a Senior Advisor to Bandsintown which acquired both publications in 2019. He is the Founder and President of the Skyline Artists Agency and a professor for the Berklee College Of Music.

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Violin Concert in Stockbridge

STOCKBRIDGE, Mass.  The Board of Music of the First Congregational Church in Stockbridge, in partnership with artistic adviser Carl Shuster, will present Yevgeny Kutik and Benjamin Luxon in "The Reflected Voice: Music for Violin and Spoken Word" on Saturday, May 14.

The concert will feature two works by British composer Richard Pantcheff: the US premiere of To Autumn, featuring British poetry on the theme of autumn, and the world premiere of New England Elegy, with a text by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Kutik will also perform works of JS Bach for solo violin.

The texts will be narrated by baritone and Berkshire County resident Benjamin Luxon, who has performed title roles at the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, and the English National Opera. Luxon's retirement from singing has led to a career shift to narration and spoken word performances.

Violinist Yevgeny Kutik, raised in Berkshire County, made his orchestral debut in 2003 with the Boston Pops as the winner of the Boston Symphony Young Artists competition. Since then he has appeared as a soloist with orchestras across the US and Europe. His most recent CD, released in 2021, is entitled "The Death of Juliet and Other Tales," featuring the music of Prokofiev and settings of Russian folk music by contemporary composers.

Composer Richard Pantcheff is a specialist in music for the Church of England whose organ and choral works have been performed in sacred and secular venues in England and South Africa. His piece for solo cello "the field long-slept in pastoral green" had its world premiere at Tanglewood in the summer of 2021. Pantcheff will attend the concert to introduce his work.

The concert will take place Saturday May 14 at 4 pm at the First Congregational Church, 4 Main Street in Stockbridge. Admission is $35 at the door. Covid-19: currently the venue is mask-optional but protocols are subject to change based upon then current conditions. The venue does not currently require proof of vaccination but if conditions change, audience members should be prepared to show proof of vaccination at the door.
Berkshire County Under Normal Drought Conditions

BOSTON  During the past several months, the Commonwealth has experienced irregular rainfall events, contributing to less than average spring precipitation numbers; however, the southeastern of the state has been most impacted.

This has not substantially impacted the rest of the state and all other regions of the state (Connecticut River Valley, Central, Northeast, Western, Cape Cod regions) remain in Level 0-Normal conditions.

"With forecasts showing below normal rainfalls with elevated temperatures, it's important that we all administer water conservation practices early in the year to minimize stress on our water supply systems and natural habitats," said Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Beth Card. "As state officials continue to monitor and analyze ongoing conditions, we ask everyone, particularly those in the Southeast and Islands Regions, to be mindful of water usage as we advance further into the growing and outdoor recreational seasons."

Following sporadic rainfall totals during the last several months, which has resulted in below average precipitation numbers in eastern Massachusetts, Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Bethany Card today declared a Level 1-Mild Drought in the Southeast and Islands Regions of the Commonwealth. A Level 1-Mild Drought, as outlined in the Massachusetts Drought Management Plan, warrants detailed monitoring of drought conditions, close coordination among state and federal agencies, and technical outreach and assistance to the affected municipalities.

The Drought Management Task Force will meet again on Wednesday, June 8, 2022, at 1:00PM. State agencies will continue to closely monitor and assess conditions across the state, coordinate any needed dissemination of information to the public, and help state, federal and local agencies prepare additional responses that may be needed in the future.




iciHaiti - Turks and Caicos Islands : US Coast Guard intercepts 207 Haitian migrants





On Monday, May 9, a Coast Guard aircraft spotted an excessively overloaded passenger boat south of the Turks and Caicos Islands.



The Cutter Campbell of the United States Coast Guard intercepted a dangerous boat with 207 illegal Haitian migrants on board about 20 miles south of the Turks and Caicos Islands.



The crew deployed a small boat with life jackets to hand over to the migrants before their safe transfer to the Campbell.



"We urge families in the United States to ask their loved ones not to risk their lives on these dangerous voyages," said Captain Anne O'Connell, commanding officer of the Cutter Campbell adding, "These voyages are extremely dangerous and often involve rustic boats that are overloaded and lack food, water and basic safety equipment."



The 217 Haitians were repatriated to Haiti on Wednesday May 11, 2022.



S/ iciHaiti


















Name: Steve Dotson

Organisation: Acoustic

Job title: CISO

Date started current role: March 2020

Location: Atlanta

Steve Dotson is a security executive with over 20 years of experience in Information Security and Risk within public and private companies, government contractors, and startups. Dotson specialises in building security programs from scratch and has proven experience in enabling business growth in a secure manner through risk management and business alignment.

What was your first job? My first real job after graduating from the University of Central Florida with a bachelors degree in Marketing and Sales was selling cellular phones in Orlando. Fun fact: when Shaquille ONeal signed with the Orlando Magic, I sold him and his family a bunch of cell phones. I learned pretty quickly that I didnt like sales.

How did you get involved in cybersecurity? I moved to San Diego in the mid-90s, primarily for the surfing but also because it was a tech hub and I knew I wanted to get involved in technology of some kind. I was selling Mac computers to graphics shops and biotech companies, and the son of an SAIC executive was working with me and recommended me to his dad for a large government contract he was staffing up. It just happened to be a huge DoD PKI project, which started my path in security. They asked me to configure a large Sun server and early Netscape certificate and directory servers. It was a total sink or swim environment but I loved it.

What was your education? Do you hold any certifications? What are they? My first degree was a B.S. in Business Administration. In hindsight, I should have done Computer Science, but I didnt know what I didnt know. I see my kids struggle with major selection when they dont have much basis for the selection, and thats how I felt too. I went back to school at the University of California San Diego for Computer Science, but California didnt allow a double B.S.so I had to start the Masters track. I did my undergrad in Computer Science there but then moved to Denver for a telecom startup. I finished my Masters in Computer Science with a specialisation in Security 10 years later at Florida Tech when I was working at Harris Corporation in Melbourne, Florida. I had a Cisco CCNP and Microsoft MCSE when I was doing networking and administration on some of the early projects I was on, but I think I tested well and dont feel like I learned much going through that process. There were some other security certifications that I could have grandfathered in like the CISM but I didnt pursue them as I felt I was just chasing CPEs for the sake of a certification. The CISSP is still one I hold in high regard as it is broad; however, I let that one lapse as well due to CPEs.

Explain your career path. Did you take any detours? If so, discuss. I started out in sales then worked my way over to security technology. I wrote web code (yes Perl) for a year at a web startup in the late 90s, then did networking at a telecom startup. Otherwise, all my roles have been security-focused roles. I focused on international security standards for a few years (cable and cellular/3GPP/LTE), which was a bit of a detour. I felt standards/policy was a way to make a larger and lasting impact.

Was there anyone who has inspired or mentored you in your career? Terri Bush at SAIC and Ronda Henning at Harris had to spend a lot of time rounding out my sharp edges early in my career. Ronda sat with me in executive meetings with government higher ups so she could kick me when I went down technical rabbit holes. I thought everyone had the same passion as I did for the details! Mark Gibaldi and Phil Agcaoili were also strong mentors for me when I moved over to the executive side of security. There were many others that helped me get to where I am and I am thankful for everyones help and advice.

What do you feel is the most important aspect of your job? Protecting the value of the business.

What metrics or KPIs do you use to measure security effectiveness? I am usually creating security programs so I am a big fan of using capability maturity during the build phase. These are normally subjective based on my experience, which is a gap in the standard frameworks (in my opinion). Once capabilities are stood up (e.g., security monitoring, vendor risk management, vulnerability management, etc.), then more traditional KPIs become important at the control level.

Is the security skills shortage affecting your organisation? What roles or skills are you finding the most difficult to fill? Definitely. Strong application security and cloud security skills are challenging to find. Devops skills are also in high demand (e.g., AWS, CICD, Kubernetes, containers, etc.).

Cybersecurity is constantly changing  how do you keep learning? Thats why I do it, I tried programming and networking and while those are always changing, security has its own technologies but it is also an overlay on everyone elses technology so we must keep up with general technology as well, and I love learning. I am part of several CISO groups which offer high-value collaboration with peers on similar challenges. My network is probably now my biggest source of information, along with books and online content.

What conferences are on your must-attend list? I really enjoy BSides San Francisco; it reminds me of very early days at the RSA conference when it was small(ish), and the content was meaningful and actionable.

What is the best current trend in cybersecurity? Zero trust as a principle. The worst? Zero trust in practice

What's the best career advice you ever received? Talk less and listen more.

What advice would you give to aspiring security leaders? Understand the actual business you are protecting and become an expert on your products and services.

What has been your greatest career achievement? I have been lucky to find 4-5 opportunities to build out security programs from scratch, so I feel like Im leaving things better than they were.

Looking back with 20:20 hindsight, what would you have done differently? I probably would have done a different first degree, such as Computer Science.
Chinas foreign trade shows resilience despite many challenges

People's Daily Online) 11:27, May 12, 2022

Photo shows the Qianwan Container Terminal at Qingdao Port, east Chinas Shandong Province. (Photo/Peoples Daily)

An employee of a company is busy with production in Ganzhou city, east Chinas Jiangxi Province. (Photo/Liu Qing)

An international freight train that runs via the China-Laos Railway departs from a railway station in Shenyang, capital city of northeast Chinas Liaoning Province. (Photo/Peoples Daily)

Chinas foreign trade sustained resilience and growth momentum in the first three months of this year despite increasingly complex challenges and risks.

The countrys total imports and exports expanded 7.9 percent year-on-year to reach 12.58 trillion yuan (about $1.88 trillion) in the January-March period, according to official data.

The resilience of Chinas foreign trade can be attributed to the efforts of businesses and a slew of policies to help enterprises tide over ongoing difficulties.

Some enterprises engaging in foreign trade have promoted the better integration of the domestic and international markets and greater complementarity between domestic and global resources, improving their competitiveness in global industrial and supply chains.

Recently, TCL China Star Optoelectronics Technology Co., Ltd. (TCL CSOT), a world-leading panel supplier under Chinese consumer electronics company TCL Corp in Shenzhen, south Chinas Guangdong Province, exported its products to TCLs plant in Mexico.

In the past, TCL directly exported TV sets. Nowadays the company ships liquid crystal display panels and electronic parts and components to its production base in Mexico, where TV sets are assembled, in this way reducing costs. The approach has played a key role in improving the competitiveness of TCL products in North America.

Ten years ago, we were hindered by the short supply of screens. But we have mastered core technologies to produce major parts and components such as screens, said Zhao Jun, chief operating officer of TCL CSOT.

Its estimated that Chinas large-size liquid crystal display panels will reach or exceed 70 percent of the global market by 2023.

In the first two months of this year, TCLs exports reached $2.77 billion, up 2.2 percent year-on-year. In the first quarter of this year, TCL CSOT exported 12 million TV screens. TCLs plant in Mexico can produce and assemble modules and inner wiring.

TCLs revenue growth in overseas markets is facilitated by the building of complete industrial and supply chains across the globe, said Li Dongsheng, founder and president of TCL. Li added that building complete industrial and supply chains globally can effectively boost enterprises exports of core components, materials and equipment while significantly increasing their global competitiveness.

Meanwhile, new business forms and models of foreign trade such as cross-border e-commerce, overseas warehouses, and the market purchase trade are thriving in China, becoming new drivers for the high-quality development of the countrys foreign trade.

Hangzhou Santa Technology Co., Ltd., a company based in Hangzhou, capital city of east Chinas Zhejiang Province, saw its overseas sales of electric bicycles grow by 15 percent in a half year.

Overseas customers can try our bikes at sales outlets before buying, and after-sales services can be guaranteed, said Zhu Guoqiang, general manager of the company, attributing this to the establishment of an overseas warehouse.

To explore overseas markets, Santa Technology once rented warehouses outside China, but high rental costs and inconvenient communications made it difficult for the company to achieve its desired results.

Zhejiang Cathy International Freight Forwarding Co., Ltd., an international freight forwarder in the city, extended an olive branch to Zhu, inviting him to join its overseas warehouse in Los Angeles, the U.S., where products can be displayed at a 200-square meter operation and service center and professionals are able to provide after-sales services.

Zhu introduced that the overseas warehouse has helped his company save on costs adding up to more than $1 million every year.

The international freight forwarder has so far built 16 self-operated overseas warehouses with a combined area of more than 100,000 square meters.

Ma Shuzhong, director of the International Business Institute at Zhejiang University, said digital and intelligent overseas warehouses can solve the bottleneck problems in cross-border logistics and after-sales services to a greater extent, while helping cross-border enterprises operate at a lower cost, promoting high-quality operations, improving logistics efficiency and providing customers a better shopping experience, thus enhancing the resilience of Chinas foreign trade.

At present, Zhejiang has built 791 overseas warehouses covering a total area of 9.5 million square meters in over 40 countries and regions.

Besides, China has continued to deepen multilateral, bilateral, and regional cooperation and promote high-quality development through the Belt and Road Initiative, creating favorable conditions for exporters to explore emerging markets.

China has implemented the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreement, the worlds largest free trade agreement, bringing new opportunities for enterprises to explore new markets.

Data from the Guangdong branch of the General Administration of Customs of China (GACC) showed that the total trade volume of Guangdong with RCEP members reached 343.89 billion yuan, up 2.7 percent year-on-year, in the first two months of this year. The RCEP has improved customs clearance efficiency and cut tariffs, serving as a key fulcrum for stabilizing foreign trade.

China will continue to improve the business environment for foreign trade and make customs clearance for returning export goods more efficient, according to the State Council executive meeting held on April 13.

To help ease difficulties facing foreign trade firms and promote stable growth, all localities and government departments have rolled out a slew of measures to stabilize the overall performance of foreign trade and support exporters in optimizing their structure and building brands to further raise the added value of their products and improve their international competitiveness.

(Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun)
Afghan journalist Khaled Qaderi has been tried and sentenced to one year in prison by a Taliban military court for social media posts criticising the Taliban regime. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) condemns the arbitrary sentencing and urges the Taliban to cease its persecution of journalists for their independent reportage.

Taliban minister for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice Mohammad Khalid Hanafi announces dress code for Afghan women in Kabul on May 7, 2022. Credit: Ahmad Sahel Arman / AFP

Qaderi, a poet and reporter for independent broadcaster Radio Nawruz, has been in custody since his arrest on March 17 in Herat, and was tried in mid-April. He was notified of the military courts verdict 10 days from the date of the trial.

Istikhbarat, the Taliban Intelligence Service, accused the journalist of conducting espionage for foreign media and criticising the Taliban regime through propaganda posted to social media platform Facebook.

Qaderi told the court, I realised my errors and I deleted the posts from my Facebook page. He did not have a defence lawyer and was forced to agree not to appeal the verdict.

This is the first reported case of a journalist tried by the military court since the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in August 2021.

Qaderis prison sentence is the latest example of human rights violations concerning journalists and restrictions on media freedoms in Afghanistan. In April 2022, a presenter for 1 TV, Moheb Jalili, and a reporter for Rah-e-Farda, Reza Shahir, were arrested and tortured by the Taliban Intelligence Service.

In the lastet South Asia Press Freedom report, the IFJ documented 75 media rights violations, including 12 killings and 30 arrests, in Afghanistan from May 2021 to April 2022. An estimated 1,000 journalists have fled the country since the Taliban takeover, with threats, harsh restrictions, and economic collapse leading to mass closures of media outlets.

A survey conducted by the IFJs Afghan affiliate, Afghanistans National Journalists Union (ANJU), in February 2022, found that 318 media outlets across 33 provinces have closed since 15 August 2021. On May 7, Hibatullah Akhundzada, Afghanistan's supreme leader and Taliban chief, announced a strict new dress code for Afghan women, mandating use of the chadori or head-to-toe-burqa.

The IFJ said: Under Taliban rule, Afghan journalists have continued to face draconian restrictions, threats to freedom and arbitrary arrests. The IFJ condemns the arrest, trial and sentencing of Khaled Qaderi by the Talibans military court and calls for his immediate release from prison.
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Supply factors are likely to limit near-term growth opportunities for Indian renewable power generators stemming from the countrys current heat wave and high fossil-fuel prices, says Fitch Ratings. Nonetheless, their medium-term prospects remain strong and are supported by government policies to diversify Indias energy base away from fossil fuels.



Rising power demand as Indias economy recovers from the Covid-19 pandemic has been accentuated by high temperatures that have afflicted large regions since March. This has added to electricity shortages and prompted official efforts to increase power generation from coal- and gas-fired plants, including restarting older plants. However, domestic coal supplies have struggled to meet demand and high imported coal prices, further spurred by Russias invasion of Ukraine, pose additional challenges for coal-based power generators.



These dynamics imply potential upside in near-term demand growth for renewable power generators, and Fitch believes that strong electricity demand should reduce curtailment risk. However, generators cash profiles could suffer if state utilities face added financial pressure, due to an inability to promptly pass on elevated power purchase costs, and delay paying outstanding dues to renewable generators.

Moreover, we expect supply factors to constrain the renewable sectors capacity to boost output in the near term. High global commodity prices have increased the cost of materials and equipment, such as for solar modules and wind turbines. This situation has been aggravated by the Indian governments efforts to localise the renewable power equipment supply chain, particularly for solar energy. For example, tariffs of 40% on imported solar modules and 25% on imported solar cells came into effect in April 2022, although implementation of a new system of approved solar-module models and manufacturers, which could further restrict imports of certain equipment, has been pushed back from April to October 2022.



Indias large industrial companies are increasing their investments in domestic solar-equipment production. For instance, Reliance New Energy Solar Ltd acquired Norwegian solar photovoltaics manufacturer REC Group in October 2021, which should support its investments in this area. However, it will take at least two to three years to fully develop Indias solar supply chain, with the sector remaining reliant on imported equipment in the interim. Even with expanded domestic production of equipment, we expect some reliance on imported raw materials to persist.



Financing challenges could also hinder greater domestic renewable equipment production and installed generation capacity. ReNew Power Private Limited (BB-/Stable) and Greenko Energy Holdings (BB/Negative), through issuing entities, raised US dollar notes in January and March 2022, respectively. However, other planned offshore issuance has been disrupted by developments around the Ukraine conflict. We believe the disruption to issuance will be only temporary, even if the conflict continues, but issuance costs may rise during the period of delay and affect capital raising plans. Indias central bank raised its policy repo rate by 40bp to 4.4% on 4 May 2022, and we expect further rate hikes in coming months.



We believe medium-term growth prospects for Indian renewable power generators remain strong, despite the near-term constraints on increasing output. They will be underpinned by the governments goal of meeting half of the countrys energy requirements from renewables by 2030.
Actor Kangana Ranaut has come out in support of Telugu superstar Mahesh Babu. Mahesh Babu made headlines and drew mixed reactions for his 'Bollywood can't afford me' remark.

For the uninitiated, the Telugu stars comments made at a promotional event of his production Major in Hyderabad recently led to a controversy on social media.

Indiatimes

At the event, he had said, I may sound arrogant, but I did get a lot of offers in Hindi. But I think they cant afford me. I dont want to waste my time. The stardom and love I have here in Telugu cinema, I never thought of going to another industry.

The actor later clarified that he respects all languages but was happy in his space in Telugu cinema.

Instagram

When asked to comment on Babus statement at the trailer launch of her film Dhaakad here, Kangana said,

Instagram

He (Babu) was right that Bollywood cant afford him, this I agree (with). I know for a fact that many filmmakers have approached him. Ranaut said Babu was simply stating facts. His generation has singlehandedly made the Telugu industry the number one film industry in India. Now, Bollywood definitely cant afford him. I dont see why this should be made into a huge controversy,



Instagram

He (Babu) has only shown a lot of respect towards his industry, and we cant deny that Telugu films have grown in the last 10-15 years They didnt get anything on a platter. We only have lots to learn from them, she said.



The actor said she did not want to again speak about the language divide between the two industries as this country has many languages and they are all important. No language is bigger or smaller than the other.

When Kangana was asked whether her upcoming film 'Dhaakad' will be an answer to pan India hits from South cinema, she said,

I dont think I have come here to reply (on this). Calling herself the biggest cheerleader of South Indian cinema, the actor said,

Indiatimes

I was the first to start this topic that our regional cinema should do well. If there is something, we must do together, (its) save our screens from Hollywood.

It is Hollywood that the Indian film industry needs to be wary of, Kangana said,

Instagram

If we have to, we must safeguard ourselves from Hollywood. We dont have to fight amongst ourselves. Be it South, Malayalam, Kannada, or Punjabi cinema, we must promote them.

And about answering the South cinema, why should we answer our people? We arent scared of South films, and we should be scared of the American film industry, she said.



Also starring Arjun Rampal and Divya Dutta, Dhaakad is set to release on May 20.

(With inputs from PTI)

(To get the latest updates from Bollywood and Hollywood, keep reading Indiatimes Entertainment.)


The Delhi Police has arrested a sergeant of the Indian Air Force (IAF) on charges of espionage for allegedly leaking sensitive information about defence installations.

The arrested Sergeant has been identified as Devendra Kumar Sharma, a native of Kanpur was honey-trapped by a woman on social media.

Twitter

Sharma who was working as an Administrative Assistant (GD) at Air Force Record Office at Subroto Park, New Delhi was arrested by the Crime Branch on May 6.

"On May 6, a team of Crime Branch from Delhi police received inputs about suspicious activities of a Sergeant of the Indian Air Force. It was informed that the MN has been honey-trapped and has made available some classified information to his contact, suspected to belong to some other country," a senior police official said.

Pakistani had suspected

The police said that there is a suspicion of the hand of Pakistan's intelligence agency ISI in this whole work.

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Acting on this input, a team zeroed in on Sharma and he was arrested. "Further probe revealed that Sharma had leaked the sensitive information about defence installations and Air Force personnel through the electronic means to the agent of adversary country after deceitfully obtaining the said documents from the computers and other files. He had also received money, from the agent of the adversary country, for leaking the information," said the officer.

The police have also found some suspicious transactions in the bank account of the accused's wife.

Booked under the Official Secrets Act

Delhi police have now booked Sharma under the Official Secrets Act (OSA). During further investigation, incriminating evidences such as electronic gadgets and documents etc. were seized and the accused was arrested in the case.

"Investigation of the case is going on to unearth the whole conspiracy and to track the person who was in touch with Sharma. It has been found that the number that Sharma was getting calls from was of an Indian service provider. Hence, the details of the number have also been sought and further probe is underway," the officer added.

AFP

Honey trap, a tried and tested method

This is not the first time that a defence personnel has been honey-trapped by suspected ISI handlers.

Pakistani intelligence agencies have been using fake female profiles on social media to honey-trap young personnel, who then pass on sensitive information to the enemy, knowingly or unknowingly.

In the past, the Army, Navy and Air Force have repeatedly warned their personnel against befriending unfamiliar and suspicious-looking accounts on social media.

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The land on which the Taj Mahal was built originally belonged to Jaipurs ruler Jai Singh, and Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan acquired it, BJP MP Diya Kumari claimed on Wednesday.

To corroborate her claims, she asserted that records are available with the erstwhile Jaipur royal family.

Agencies

Supporting a petition in the Allahabad High Court seeking a fact-finding inquiry into the history of the Taj Mahal, she wants the opening of the doors of its 22 rooms to see the truth, whatever it is.



"It should be investigated what was there before the monument was built, and people have the right to know. There are records available with the Jaipur family, and it would provide these, if required, Kumari." a member of the erstwhile Jaipur royal family said.

Agencies

Compensation was given in lieu of the land, but how much was it, whether it was accepted or not? I cannot say this because I have not studied the records in our pothikhana. But the land belonged to our family, and Shah Jahan had acquired it, she told reporters.



My Nation

Since there was no judiciary, no appeal could have been made at that time. Things will be clear only after examining the records, the BJP leader said.

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Referring to the petition, she said it was a valid point that the rooms should be opened and an investigation should be done.

People should know why the rooms are locked there. There could have been anything before the Taj Mahal, maybe a temple. People have the right to know what was there originally before the maqbara, Kumari said.



She said that she had not studied the records and could reach a conclusion only after examining them.

Rajasthan | As per documents with us, property (Taj Mahal) on that land was a palace & Shah Jahan captured it as they ruled back then. The land belonged to Jaipur royal family (erstwhile) & we have got the documents that it belonged to us: BJP MP Diya Kumari on Taj Mahal row pic.twitter.com/Nv9kD7tyAs  ANI MP/CG/Rajasthan (@ANI_MP_CG_RJ) May 11, 2022

What I am saying is on behalf of what I have learned and heard. I have not studied the records. We can provide the records to the court if necessary. After examining the records, we can reach a conclusion, Kumari said.

The writ petition was filed on Saturday in the Lucknow bench of the high court registry by Rajneesh Singh, who is the media in charge of the BJPs Ayodhya unit. The petition would come up before the court for a hearing after the registry passes it.

Rajasthan | Documents say that since Shah Jahan liked it, he acquired it. I've heard that he gave some compensation in lieu of it. If the court directs we will provide the documents: BJP MP Diya Kumari on Taj Mahal row pic.twitter.com/yLNulgmgSe  ANI MP/CG/Rajasthan (@ANI_MP_CG_RJ) May 11, 2022

In the petition, I have demanded that the 22 doors of the monument's rooms should be opened to see the truth, whatever it is, Singh told PTI on Sunday.

(With PTI inputs)

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Vets and animal rescuers are having difficulty saving birds in India's western Gujarat state. According to a report in Reuters, rescuers have seen a 10% rise in dehydrated birds that are dropping every day after suffering heatstroke.

As the temperature continues to soar and dries out water sources in the state's biggest city, veterinary doctors and animal rescuers are picking up birds to provide them assistance.

Agencies

In recent years, large patches of land in South Asia are drying up during the hottest pre-summer months. The increase in temperature has also prompted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to warn of rising fire risks.

The report claims that doctors in an animal hospital managed by non-profit Jivdaya Charitable Trust in Ahmedabad have treated thousands of birds in the last few weeks.

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Amit Dave/Reuters

"This year has been one of the worst in recent times. We have seen a 10% increase in the number of birds that need rescuing," said Manoj Bhavsar, who works closely with the trust. He has been involved in rescuing birds for over a decade.



A few pictures show how vets at the trust-run hospital feed birds multi-vitamin tablets and inject water into their mouths using syringes.

Amit Dave/Reuters

Health officials in Gujarat have also issued advisories to hospitals to set up special wards for heat stroke and other heat-related diseases due to the rise in temperatures.



India recorded the hottest March in 122 years and its capital, Delhi, had its second-hottest April in 72 years, with an average maximum temperature of 40.2 degrees Celsius (104.4 F).

Amit Dave/Reuters

Neighbouring Pakistan also reported unusually high temperatures due to record heat waves.



In April, several birds in the national capital were reported to be in stressful conditions. Since march, an NGO said it has rescued around 140 birds suffering from exhaustion and dehydration.

Amit Dave/Reuters

Wildlife SOS, a conservation NGO established in 1995 to rescue and rehabilitate wildlife in distress, said its members saved nearly 120 birds, including 30 kites and more than 70 pigeons, in March and 20 black kites this month Delhi-NCR.

Rising temperature causes dehydration and heat exhaustion. Wildlife SOS has rescued numerous birds from such distress situations and provided necessary medical aid to the citys avian population, the NGO said.



(With inputs from PTI and Reuters)

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In 2008, Tata Motors made cars affordable for Indian households by launching Nano. Touted as one of the 'affordable' cars, Nano created a lot of buzz for being priced at 1 lakh.

Even though Nano became a sentimental car for many Indian families as it became their 'first purchased car,' it was discontinued a few years ago.

Reuters

Today, India's most compact and 'affordable' car is trending on social media, thanks to Ratan Tata, the Chairman Emeritus of Tata Sons.



Ratan Tata shared the 'real reason' that motivated him to launch Nano in a heartwarming post. Sharing the entire process of how Nano became a reality, he says it began with his desire to make road travel safer for Indian families.

reuters

In an Instagram post, Ratan Tata explained why he came up with the idea of producing a cheap and compact car.

What really motivated me, and sparked a desire to produce such a vehicle, was constantly seeing Indian families on scooters, maybe the child sandwiched between the mother and father, riding to wherever they were going, often on slippery roads, he wrote.

Reuters

Nano was born with the basic idea of making two-wheelers safer.

Eventually, after many brainstorming sessions, Ratan Tata decided to make a car that could prove a safer and 'affordable' mobile alternative for Indians.

shutterstock

One of the benefits of being in the School of Architecture, it had taught me to doodle when I was free, wrote Ratan Tata.

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He added, At first, we were trying to figure out how to make two-wheelers safer, and the doodles became four wheels, no windows, no doors, just a basic dune buggy. But I finally decided it should be a car. The Nano was always meant for all our people.

As soon as he shared the post, people flooded the comments section with messages.

Calling him a 'true legend' and a 'visionary,' here's how the internet rewarded Ratan Tata for being one of the most exemplary men in India, who always has his heart in the right place.

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In a 2020 interview with Humans of Bombay, Ratan Tata spoke about Nano and said he wanted to invent the affordable car for India after he witnessed a family of four on a two-wheeler during heavy rains.

bloomberg

He said he wanted to 'do more' for people who couldn't afford to buy a 'safer alternative' for their families.

Instagram

He was quoted in the post as saying, I remember seeing a family of 4 on a motorbike in the heavy Bombay rain  I knew I wanted to do more for these families who were risking their lives for lack of an alternative. Looking back, Im still proud of the car and the decision to go ahead with it.



Unfortunately, many reasons led to the 'slow' death of Nano, including marketing failure, safety concerns, and a decline in the demand for cheap cars in India.

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Billionaire Elon Musk recently bought Twitter and since then his presence on it is being followed by fans - now more than ever. The SpaceX founder has now shared his wish to meet his Chinese lookalike Yilong Ma.

Reuters

The Chinese doppelganger from the northeastern Chinese province of Hebei is apparently quite popular on social media platforms, especially Twitter, for his uncanny resemblance with the Tesla CEO.

Despite Musk wanting to meet this Chinese lookalike, he has his qualms. He wants to know if the guy actually exists or if he is a deep fake.

Musk responded to a tweet by a user who suggested that the "Chinese Elon Musk" could be a "decoy" for the real deal.

Responding to the Tweet asking, Should we deploy Chinese @elonmusk as a decoy?, Musk said that he would like to meet this guy (if he is real). Hard to tell with deepfakes these days, he added.



Id like to meet this guy (if he is real). Hard to tell with deepfakes these days.  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 9, 2022

Yu Li was first noticed when his photos showcasing the similarities between him and Musk were widely circulated on social media platforms. He usually shares his videos on Douyin, which is the Chinese version of TikTok and he is quite popular on it. At that time, Musk had commented in one of the posts and said, Maybe I am partly Chinese.



Maybe Im partly Chinese!  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 20, 2021

Musk's lookalike, Ma too got the message and replied back saying that he would love to meet him too. "I am here. I want very much to see you too! I love you, you are my hero," wrote Ma on Tuesday on China's Twitter-like Weibo.

Meanwhile, for all those who don't have a clue, deepfake is an advanced technology that lets anyone alter a video and put a public figures face placed over another person's. Several countries are ramping up their efforts to take on deepfake as the tech can be misused to spread fake news or create a nuisance.

Coming back to Musk, he recently tweeted a very cryptic post. He said, If I die under mysterious circumstances, its been nice knowin ya, he said to his 91 million followers. However, he took a step back after his mother took the tweet seriously.

If I die under mysterious circumstances, its been nice knowin ya  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 9, 2022

"That's not funny," she tweeted, prompting an apology from Musk. "Sorry! I will do my best to stay alive," he wrote back.

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More than 800 employees of WhiteHat Jr have reportedly put in their papers in the last two months after being asked to work from the office. According to an Inc42 report, WhiteHat Jr, a platform to learn to code acquired by BYJUS, had asked its employees to return to the office within a month.

The decision to end 'work from home' was announced in a company-wide email on March 18.

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The company asked all its remote employees to return to the office by April 18.

Inc42 report states that unwilling to return to the office, over 800 employees decided to resign. The resignations came from full-time employees of the sales, coding, and math teams.

Work From Home/Unsplash

The report hints that more employees will be quitting in the upcoming months. One of the resigned employees spoke to Inc42 and said, "Some have kids, some have aged and sick parents, while others have other responsibilities. It is not right to call back employees in such a short period of time."



The former employee said that the 'return to office' policy could be the company's cost-cutting measure as they were running in losses.

The employee was quoted in the report as saying, "The company was clearly running in losses. This was a cost-cutting exercise to reduce its expenses without ruining their name in the market," they said.

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Another ex-employee weighed in and said that their salaries could be another factor for mass resignation.

At the time of hiring, employees were told about their job location  WhiteHat Jr has offices in Gurugram, Mumbai, and Bengaluru. However, after working from home for two years, employees were under the impression that their salaries should be revised to match living costs in expensive cities.

"This was a well-planned and managed layoff that WhiteHat Jr did," another former employee added in the same report.

Work from home/Unsplash

In 2020, Whitehat Jr was sold to BYJU'S in a $300 million all-cash deal. An employee blamed BYJU'S culture and said,

"Subconsciously, we knew something like this would happen after BYJUS acquired WhiteHat Jr last year. We all know what sort of an employer BYJUS is."

In their statement given to Inc42, WhiteHat Jr said,

"As part of our back-to-work drive, most of our Sales and Support employees have been asked to report to Gurgaon and Mumbai offices from April 18. We have made exceptions for medical and personal exigencies and have offered relocation assistance as required. Our teachers will continue to work from home,"

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Who doesn't like free lunches? But things got pretty chaotic in a resort in Punjab's Ludhiana when government school teachers and principles were seen pushing and fighting each other to grab plates to have free lunch after meeting Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann.

The meeting was chaired by Mr Mann and he called the meeting of over 2,600 school heads and district education officers from all over the state to discuss the quality of education.

In the video, a person who is wearing a suit is probably a staff member of the resort. He quickly moved the plates to a corner and started distributing them one by one till the swarming teachers became overwhelming.

The video was shared by Gagandeep Singh on Twitter. The caption read, "Lunch Scenes of Principals & Teachers after meeting with CM & Education Minister in Ludhiana."

The internet couldn't get over this video and made several jokes about the entire scene. Many were even disappointed by the way these teachers acted. One user said, "If this is the way they behave how are they going to discipline children. I strongly feel the Punjab govt. should begin Happiness class, yoga, and meditation sessions for teachers first. This is a result of an unhealthy mind."

I am curious to understand what time was the lunch served because they appear to be too hungry, said another. A third slammed the organisers and wrote, What a humiliating way to treat the teachers. They are humans, teachers are God, and the way they distributed the plates was like giving pieces of food to animals. Was it not planned.





The department had arranged 57 air-conditioned buses for the educators to travel. Education Minister Gurmeet Singh Meet Hayer said the meeting was called to listen to the suggestions of teachers to improve the education system by framing a policy.



According to PTI, Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann launched an online portal to seek ideas and suggestions from teachers for bringing out of the box educational reforms.

He said teachers should send ideas online through this portal to help change the conventional system of education and make it paperless, and digitally empowered, the report further said.

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FANUC hits five millionth CNC milestone as European expansion gears up

Like all FANUC products, its CNC controllers come with a guarantee of lifetime maintenance and repair

The achievement comes as FANUC ramps up its presence in Europe. A 130m investment in 2022 will see the Japan-based company strengthen its technical support, training and service offering to European customers, while a new 20m technical centre in Germany is expected to go live in 2023.

Alongside robots, cobots and other factory automation solutions, CNCs are at the heart of FANUCs portfolio. The company has a production capacity of 36,500 CNCs per month and its latest FS 30i/31i/32iB Plus and FS0i-F Plus series offer state-of-the-art CNC and servo technologies, as well as numerous AI-based functions.

Artificial intelligence in CNC control helps to make technological processes more efficient, as well as improve machine running times and production quality, says Shinichi Tanzawa, President and CEO of FANUC Europe Corporation.

The focus is also on user-friendliness. A special PC software (CNC GUIDE) offers a development environment to allow the user to add the PMC ladder and machine signal simulation capabilities. When combined with other FANUC software, such as FANUC LADDER III, FANUC PICTURE, C- and MACRO EXECUTOR, CNC GUIDE provides a more efficient development environment for the machine tool builder. The software is also available as an academic version, meaning it can be used as CNC training software.

Robotics and automation specialist FANUC is celebrating after reaching the milestone achievement of producing its five millionth CNC

Like all FANUC products, its CNC controllers come with a guarantee of lifetime maintenance and repair. Of all the CNCs that we repair in Europe, around a third are over 20 years old, says Shinichi Tanzawa. We believe that our business policy contributes to the sustainability of our customers factories.

Alongside sustainability, training and development are crucial to FANUCs plans in Europe. In 2017, a European development centre was opened at the companys German subsidiary in Neuhausen, near Stuttgart. FANUC is now building a 20m, 6,000m2 technical centre at the site, scheduled to become operational in 2023, and is also investing heavily at other locations. In the twelve months to the end of March 2022, it spent around 130m to strengthen its technical support, training and service offering to its European customers, including a warehouse and distribution centre in Luxembourg to shorten delivery lead-time. Further investments are planned in the coming years.

The requirements of our European customers are playing an increasingly important role for us, says Shinichi Tanzawa. We are rapidly expanding our presence in almost all European countries to satisfy the needs of our current and future customers.

More information on FANUC may be found here.

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BMS, the London-based independent insurance and reinsurance broker, announced it has commenced operations in New Zealand, with the launch of BMS Risk Solutions Ltd. (BMSRS).

BMSRS is an independent, New Zealand owned and operated extension of BMS Group and has been established by highly experienced industry executives Storm McVay, Paul Meehan and David Gibbons.

BMSRS has chosen to partner with BMS Group due to its unyielding focus on client driven outcomes. The collaboration from our Australian and UK colleagues has been exceptional and lays a solid platform for future success. Since commencing operations we have been humbled by the support of clients, and Insurers who have backed our vision and desire to establish a viable alternative to the traditional market players, McVay commented.

BMSRS has a team of highly experienced local specialists and leaders from across the risk advisory industry, including Wayne Henderson (Aon), Brett Gerrard (Gallagher), Sue Hale (Black Peak Risk), Josh Thomson (WTW) and Dominic Sheehan (Marsh).

BMSRS said the team is set to expand significantly by the end of the year.

BMSRS has opened offices in Christchurch and Dunedin and anticipates expansion into Auckland in the new year.

BMS Group already provides wholesale broking services to a number of New Zealand corporate and institutional clients with requirements for tailored risk financing solutions including London market placements.

We are delighted to have partnered with such highly experienced and well-regarded industry leaders in Storm McVay, Paul Meehan and David Gibbons, commented Nick Cook, CEO of BMS Group. BMS has had a close working relationship with them and their clients for many years so this is a natural progression as we look to broaden our global footprint.

Launched in 1980, BMS offers comprehensive, customized solutions in the fields of wholesale, reinsurance and direct insurance, and capital advisory.
Howden Insurance Brokers (Singapore) Pte Ltd., the international insurance broker and subsidiary of Howden, announced it has acquired the business and assets of AEGIS Insurance Agencies Pte., a Singapore-based specialist insurance agency.

Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

Established in 2003, AEGIS offers tailor-made retail insurance solutions, specializing in professional indemnity, professional liability, pilot loss of license protection, and bonds and financial guarantee schemes. It enjoys strong relationships with many private education institutions in Singapore, providing them with fee protection and medical insurance cover.

AEGIS was the first intermediary to offer loss of license insurance for pilots working for major airline groups in Asia Pacific and is now the only intermediary offering this product in Singapore.

Our clients will benefit from Howdens scale, international depth and breadth, and access to top quality technology and digital solutions. Howden is a perfect fit for our team, and we look forward to continuing our growth and remaining committed to delivering for our clients as part of Howden, commented Richard Tay, co-founder of AEGIS.

Joining Howden enables our clients to benefit from the scale of Howdens international specialty offering. As an employee-owned company with a people first culture that shares our commitment to client centricity and innovation, our people will be empowered to deliver ever more advanced risk solutions to clients as part of Howden. Were looking forward to growing our business with Howden in the future, said Evan Chng, co-founder of AEGIS.

The acquisition of AEGIS reflects our broader strategy of empowering local teams to partner with culturally aligned companies with a shared entrepreneurial culture, and is a further step in our strategy to enhance our operational capabilities and client offering in Singapore, according to Goh Chye Huat, CEO of Howden Asia. Evan Chng and Richard Tay have built a highly respected business that is a market leader in its chosen segments, and its commercial portfolio will help us diversify our business, expands our breadth and depth of specialism in Asia, and makes us the leading broker in the private education insurance segment in Singapore.

About Howden

Headquartered in the UK and established in 1994, Howden provides re/insurance brokerage, risk consulting and employee benefits advice. It comprises owned businesses across Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, employing more than 9,000 people worldwide. Together with network partners aligned to its specialty-led proposition, Howden operates in more than 90 territories.

Source: Howden Broking

Topics Mergers & Acquisitions Agencies
Canopius CUO Duffy to Retire Next Year

Canopius Group, the London-based global specialty re/insurer, announced that, after nearly 17 years of service, Group Chief Underwriting Officer Mike Duffy will retire in 12 months time.

Duffy joined Canopius in January 2006 as head of direct and facultative (D&F) property, progressing during his tenure to serve as chief executive officer of Canopius Managing Agents, before he became group CUO.

During his more than 40-year insurance career, Duffy has held numerous roles in the London market and also worked abroad, most notably in New York.

Duffy will remain at Canopius for the next 12 months to oversee an orderly transition to his successor  to be announced in due course  and will leave in May 2023.

Mike has had a hugely significant impact on Canopius during his time, helping to shape the thriving company it is today. He has also mentored and supported the careers of many underwriters in our market, commented Neil Robertson, group chief executive officer, Canopius Group.

On behalf of our leadership team and all at Canopius, I would like to express our huge thanks for his many efforts and continuing contributions, and we shall reserve our fond farewells for next year.

About Canopius

Canopius has underwriting operations in Australia, Bermuda, China, Singapore, the UK and U.S. It underwrites through Lloyds Syndicate 4444 (managed by Canopius Managing Agents Ltd.), a U.S. surplus lines insurer, Canopius US Insurance Inc. and Canopius Reinsurance Ltd, a Bermuda based Class 4 Reinsurer.

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AXA XL Promotes Baker to Head of Construction, UK & Lloyds

AXA XL has promoted Al Baker to head of Construction, UK & Lloyds market, effective immediately.

In his new role  which he has been carrying out on an interim basis since September 2021  Baker will be responsible for leading AXA XLs construction business for the UK & Lloyds region and driving its strategic, profitable development.

Al is already a valued member of the senior construction team, and Im delighted that hell be taking on responsibility for leading our UK construction business. Al has been with AXA since 2010, so has built up a solid reputation within the business, in addition to a wealth of industry knowledge, commented Anish Jadav, CUO, Retail P&C, UK & Lloyds.

Baker is a seasoned insurance executive and chartered civil engineer, with extensive experience across distribution and construction. He joined Carillion PLC in 2002 as an engineer and undertook various engineering and construction roles while gaining Chartered status.

He joined AXA Matrix Risk Consultants as a construction risk consultant in 2010, before moving to Paris with AXA Corporate Solutions as global infrastructure practice leader in 2015. In 2019, he joined AXA XL, where he was promoted several times before assuming his current position.

Baker has a post graduate Diploma in Business Management (DIBM) from Aston Business School and a Bachelor of Engineering in Civil Engineering with Architecture from the University of Leeds. He has also acted as a mentor for three cohorts of Lloyds Lab insurtech startups.

Topics Excess Surplus Lloyd's AXA XL Construction
Two Black female police officers allege in separate lawsuits that they were subjected to discrimination, retaliation and a hostile work environment at the Kansas City Police Department.

Officer Rashawnda Williams said in her lawsuit that her male colleagues made misogynistic, racist and sexist comments in her presence. Officer Alexis Bush-Bailey alleges in her lawsuit that a white female supervisor treated her unfairly because of her race, sex and age, The Kansas City Star reported.

Both lawsuits name the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners as defendants. The women said the police board, which controls the department, was responsible for how they were treated.

Their attorney, Spencer Webster, said both officers worked in department programs that included outreach to Kansas City youth.

Police spokesman Sgt. Jacob Becchina said the department does not comment on pending litigation.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Lawsuits Law Enforcement Kansas
Marsh Launches Renewable Energy Facility

Insurance broker Marsh announced the launch of a renewable energy facility that provides streamlined, dedicated insurance capacity for mid-scale solar and battery energy storage system (BESS) risks in the U.S. and Canada.

According to the broker, renewable energy companies have been challenged to find enough capacity for smaller standalone solar and BESS projects in a quick enough timeframe to satisfy developers, consultants, and financiers operating in the rapidly growing and competitive distributed energy resource market.

The facility, which was developed by Marsh Specialtys Renewable Energy Practice, fills this void by providing expedited policy issuance and uniform terms and conditions through forms tailored for risks of mid-scale solar and BESS projects  those with capacity under 50 megawatts.

The facility is backed by a panel of A-rated carriers and offers pre-agreed coverage terms for construction all risk, operational all risk, general liability, and excess liability insurance, either as a package or individual coverages. Renewable energy clients can purchase replacement cost and business interruption coverage for any qualifying project and up to $25 million in liability through the facility.

Main Street America Rolls Out Farm and Ranch Coverage

Main Street America Insurance is launching a product that provides a full suite of coverages for farms and ranches. The product is being rolled out in phases throughout the year and into 2023, company officials announced.

Main Street Americas Farm and Ranch insurance coverages include rural homeowners, hobby farms, small to mid-sized farms, large farms, and more complex farming operations. The product provides coverage for most exposure types, including row crops (corn, wheat, and soybeans), cattle (including dairy operations), equine, hay, produce (fruits and vegetables), and more.

The product offers comprehensive coverages for dwellings, farm structures and personal/ commercial liability exposures. A full suite of optional property and liability coverages allows farmers and ranchers to customize coverages.

Munich Re Specialty Insurance Introduces Two Surety Solutions

Munich Re Specialty Insurance (MRSI) is now offering contract and commercial surety bonds. This marks Munich Res initial foray into these primary surety markets, as the company has been a longtime provider of U.S. Customs bonds and surety reinsurance.

Available in all 50 U.S. states and Puerto Rico  and sold through MRSIs retail broker partners  the bonds are backed by Munich Res financial strength, underscored by a U.S. Treasury Listing of USD 429 million. Single bonds will be issued up to USD 100 million and aggregate programs up to USD 250 million. Larger issuances may be available on a case-by-case basis.

The bonds are available for all contract markets  from small and emerging contractors to larger accounts, including bid bonds, performance bonds, payment bondssnd aaintenance bonds.

Specific surety bonds offered by MRSI to both small businesses/individuals and large commercial accounts include license & permit bonds, court/fiduciary bonds, public Official bonds, miscellaneous bonds and subdivision bonds.

Skyward Specialty Adds Crane & Rigging Captive Program

Skyward Specialty Insurance Group, Inc. has expanded its construction portfolio by adding a crane and rigging captive program, in partnership with eMaxx Assurance Group of Companies, a tech-enabled specialty provider of property/casualty captives.

The new captive program will target coverages including commercial auto, general liability and workers compensation. In addition, Skyward Specialty offers excess coverage outside of the captive program.

Draftrs Launches Digital Professional Liability Insurance Platform

Insurtech Draftrs announced a digital insurance platform that enables instant underwriting and policy management for small firm professionals and agents.

In conjunction with the platform launch, Draftrs is launching with a professional liability insurance product for architects and engineers that was developed in collaboration with Markel Insurtech Underwriters and plans to introduce additional professional liability product lines in the future.

The Draftrs platform digitizes the underwriting and distribution process for the companys insurance carrier and broker partners for the small commercial market. For brokers, Draftrs provides a custom-branded user interface that delivers the online experience customers in the small commercial segment require. Brokers can also use the platform to get quotes, send payment requests, issue policy documents and track client activity.

Topics Agribusiness Energy
Tesla Inc. cant escape a trial over claims the automaker is responsible for the death of a Florida teenager who crashed a Model S into a wall at 116 miles an hour in 2018.

A federal judges ruling paves the way for a trial in July, the first time Tesla will face a jury in litigation over a car crash. The electric car-maker faces a flurry of lawsuits over a spate of accidents that have also drawn increasing scrutiny from safety regulators.

Barrett Riley, 18, was at the wheel of his fathers Model S when he lost control and veered into a concrete wall of a house in Fort Lauderdale. The car was engulfed in flames. Riley and his friend in the passenger seat were both killed.

The father, James Riley, alleged in a lawsuit that Tesla was negligent for removing a speed-limiting device from the car after his wife had asked for it to be installed. The after-market device was designed to cap the cars speed at 85 mph.

The family also argued that Barrett could have survived the impact of the crash but lost his life because of the intense fire, which the suit attributes to a defective design in the battery.

We very much look forward to proceeding to trial in this important case against Tesla, said Curtis Miner, an attorney representing the Rileys. Teslas attorney, Wendy Lumish, didnt respond to requests for comment.

In its defense, the company said the speed limiter was removed on Barrett Rileys instructions when he came to the Tesla shop where the car was being serviced.

Tesla also argued that fires arent uncommon when cars crash and that the Rileys havent offered proof that a defect was to blame for their car catching fire.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Alicia Valle denied Teslas request to dismiss the case without sending it to a trial over claims the companys handling of the speed limiter was negligent and battery was defective.

Valle found that the Rileys had shown that the removal of the speed limiter without consent or notice may have had an impact on events in the case. The judge also ruled the Rileys can seek punitive damages on the negligence claim.

A jury will have to determine whether the vehicles battery was defective based a finding by an expert retained by the Rileys that the design lacked certain fire-retardant materials, the judge said. The Rileys dropped their request to seek punitive damages over the alleged defect.

The National Transportation Safety Board concluded in 2019 after investigating the crash that Barrett Riley and his front-seat passenger died as a result of the fire. A passenger in the rear, who wasnt wearing a seat belt, was ejected from the car and survived with multiple fractures.

The crash is one of several reviewed by the NTSB in which fires erupted in the highly flammable lithium-based batteries used in Teslas and other vehicles. The batteries are difficult for firefighters to extinguish and can reignite hours or days after a crash.

A suit that blames Teslas Autopilot driver-assistance feature for a fatal 2019 crash that killed a Florida man was initially scheduled to go to trial earlier this year in Palm Beach County. But that trial was pushed to September.

The case is Riley v. Tesla Inc., 20-cv-60517, U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida (Fort Lauderdale).

Photo: A Tesla Inc. badge is displayed on a Model X electric vehicle in San Ramon, California, U.S., on Saturday, Feb. 8, 2020. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.

Topics Tesla
A number of businesses within the U.S. insurance sector are trying to weaken or delay emerging climate-related insurance regulation at federal and state levels, according to climate think tank InfluenceMap.

Research from the group released on Thursday reportedly shows that despite many insurers publicly acknowledging the need to act on climate, their industry associations have been pushing the opposite message to policymakers.

Theres a striking disconnect between what major insurance companies are publicly saying about climate change risks and what their industry associations are telling policymakers, InfluenceMap Sustainable Finance Analyst Cleo Rank said in a statement.

The groups research focuses on four industry associations that have reportedly engaged with various climate-related insurance policies: the American Property Casualty Insurance Association (APCIA), the American Council of Life Insurers (ACLI), the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies (NAMIC), and the Reinsurance Association of America (RAA).

Media representatives for all four organizations were reached out to for comment. ACLI has seen the report but is still reviewing it.

APCIA issued a point-by-point response countering InfluenceMaps assertions in the report, which the group said mischaracterizes the insurance industrys approach to climate-related financial regulation.

APCIA and our members take climate change very seriously and continue to take steps to help reduce consumers potential for loss, David Snyder, vice president, policy, research, and international division for APCIA, said in the response.

NAMIC issued a response attributable to Erin Collins, senior vice president of state and policy affairs, that states the group understands the importance of all kinds of risks of all kinds, it has been concerned with extreme weather since it inception, and focuses its attention on disaster recovery, resiliency, and regulatory initiatives that assist consumers.

These initiatives make real impacts on lives and communities, the statement continues. InsuranceMaps press release suggesting that the industry is not responsive to climate is simply false. The insurance industry is tackling the mitigation of risk on behalf of their policyholders every day.

The RAA responded to the media request for comment with filings filled with climate change comments and actions it made with the Securities and Exchange Commission last year, and RAAs Guiding Principles to Address Climate Change. The RAA in its letter to the SEC stated it supports climate change disclosures that adequately inform investors about known material risks and uncertainties, and it supports disclosures that would provide greater consistency.

According to the InfluenceMaps research shows the pushback has been effective in delaying or watering down some proposals:

Lobbying by all four associations successfully delayed and weakened aspects of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) 2022 redesigned Climate Risk Disclosure Survey.

In 2022, APCIA lobbied against a bill in California that would require insurance companies to disclose investments in and underwriting of fossil fuel-related entities. The Insurance Committee declined to hold a hearing on the bill, effectively killing it for the legislative session.

There were instances where negative industry lobbying has been unsuccessful. For example, a bill in Connecticut requiring insurers to disclose fossil fuel investments and exposure to climate risk, and guidance in New York which directs insurers to incorporate climate risk considerations into governance and decision-making.

100 Big Companies

Representatives from more than 100 large companies and investors are meeting with U.S. lawmakers this week to press Congress to pass an ambitious package of federal clean energy, transportation, infrastructure, and advanced manufacturing investments.

Among the major U.S. employers spanning all sectors of the economy that are participating in what has been dubbed LEAD on Climate 2022 are: Best Buy, bp America, eBay, Gap, General Mills, HP, IKEA, Levi Strauss & Co., LinkedIn, Nestle, Marriott International, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, PayPal, PepsiCo, Salesforce, Siemens, Starbucks, Unilever and Wayfair.

Representatives from the organizations plan to meet with lawmakers and Congressional staff on in virtual forums. So far, 90 meetings have been scheduled over this two-day period, according Ceres, the sustainability nonprofit organizer of the meetings.

In April, nearly 50 major reporting at least $200 million in annual revenue urged lawmakers in a joint letter to pass an economic package with massive investments into clean energy projects.

The fourth annual business advocacy event gives companies and investors the opportunity to make an economic case for federal climate action, elevating calls for clean energy and environmental justice investments.

Specifically, companies and investors are calling for Congress to:

Meet the urgency and scale of the climate crisis with ambitious federal investments to accelerate the transition to affordable, secure, domestic clean energy.

Seize the economic opportunities to lead the world in clean energy manufacturing and deployment to create jobs, spur innovation, strengthen supply chains, and reduce costs and volatility for businesses and consumers.

Tackle inequity by targeting climate and clean energy investments in disadvantaged, rural, and frontline energy communities.

Climate and Ukraine

Decarbonization must be accelerated despite a focus on energy security in the wake of Russias invasion of Ukraine, leading climate envoys said on Wednesday.

Ahead of United Nations climate talks in Egypt in November, the war on Ukraine has led some countries to speed up their shift to renewables but others to call for a pause.

U.N. climate envoy Mark Carney urged delegates at a recent City of London Corporation conference to not allow the conflict to hold back the global effort to reduce carbon emissions, a Reuters article this week on Insurance Journal states.

We know the climate doesnt care why emissions happen, only how much occur, Carney stated. The more we emit now, the more radical action will be needed later. We need to speed up, not slow down.

Carney chairs the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, a group of financial institutions that have pledged to help meet a goal of net-zero emissions by 2050.

U.S. climate envoy John Kerry also called for the Ukraine war to drive a quicker shift to renewables, according to Reuters.

It is absolutely critical that we recognize that we cant allow energy to be weaponized in the way that President Putin has tried to weaponize it, Kerry stated.

Climate Change and Southwest

A ProPublica report to better understand how climate change is and will continue to affect the Southwest showcases three climate change experts talking about drought and falling water levels, wildfires, and more.

The report, for example, seeks a connection between climate change and wildfires are burning near Santa Fe, New Mexico, while the Boulder, Colorado, area is still feeling the effects of a fire that burned a developed area in the dead of winter.

We make the extremes worse, said David Gutzler, a professor at the University of New Mexicos Earth and Planetary Sciences department. Thats a bit different than saying a wildfire is caused by climate change. As temperatures rise, hot temperature-related extreme events are likely to become more frequent and more severe, and thats exactly what were seeing across the West right now.

Gregg Garfin, a climatologist at the University of Arizona, had a dour outlook about the Colorado Rivers historically low flow and how the regions river systems might be shaped in the future by climate change.

Were seeing less snow-covered area, less water content in the snowpack, early runoff in the late winter and early spring at elevations lower than around 7,000 feet, an increased fraction in the precipitation that we get coming as rain rather than snow and reduced soil moisture, he said. All of these things combine to reduce the efficiency of runoff.

Mikhail Chester, a professor in Arizona State Universitys engineering school and the director of the Metis Center for Infrastructure and Sustainable Engineering, said the way in which we build may be one of the biggest impacts on the Southwest from climate change:

The problem  from my perspective as an engineer who studies infrastructure  is the rigidity of everything weve built out.  For the past century weve gotten away with these design assumptions that things can be rigid, can be based on a future that is largely predictable. Here we are in the future saying that doesnt seem to be the case. We need a lot of flexibility.

Past columns:

Topics Carriers Legislation USA
BXS Insurance, Inc. (BXSI), a subsidiary of Cadence Bank acquired the assets of Wall 2 Wall Benefit Services (Wall 2 Wall) which is headquartered in Stafford, Texas, a city within the Houston metropolitan statistical area.

Wall 2 Wall, founded by Rand Wall, provides insurance and employee benefit services throughout Texas. Wall 2 Walls employees will become part of BXSIs Houston office.

Rand Wall stated that Wall 2 Walls employees are ready to leverage BXSIs vast array of resources to provide clients with expanded insurance and employee benefit solutions.

BXS Insurance is the second largest bank-owned insurance broker in the nation and is in the top 10 percent of brokers in the U.S based on total revenue.

Source: BXSI

Topics Mergers & Acquisitions Texas
If you were looking for the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee website and ended up here, try this





Got news tips, gossip, suggestions, complaints?E-mail us: progressivecharlestown@gmail.com We strive to avoid errors in our articles. Our correction policy can be found here
Three years ago, when a beaten and bloody Ronald Greene drew his final breath on a rural roadside, his death in Louisiana State Police custody seemed destined for obscurity.

Family members were told _ falsely _ that he died in a car crash after a high-speed chase. Body camera footage of white troopers stunning, punching and dragging the Black motorist remained so secret it was even withheld from his initial autopsy.

The story state police stubbornly pushed for months about Greenes death didnt hold up, unraveled by graphic footage, published last year by The Associated Press, that contradicted police reports and fueled claims of a cover-up.

Now, even as as Greenes May 10, 2019, death has engulfed Louisianas premier law enforcement agency in controversy, it remains an open wound for a grieving family still seeking justice. Despite long-running state and federal criminal investigations, no charges have been filed in the case.

How do you turn your back on a killing? Mona Hardin, Greenes mother, said in an emotional interview Tuesday. Its an ugly, lurking evil.

For months, particularly after AP published the body-camera video last spring, the question had not been whether the Justice Department would file charges but how many troopers would be indicted. The scope of the investigation expanded to include whether state police brass obstructed justice to protect the troopers.

But after months of interviews, grand jury testimony and a recommissioned autopsy, federal prosecutors are increasingly skeptical they can bring a successful civil rights case against any of the troopers caught on camera abusing Greene, according to people familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing case.

A key sticking point has been whether federal authorities can prove troopers acted willfully _ a key component of the federal civil rights charges authorities are considering. To do that, the sources said, investigators were trying to show that Greene was also pepper-sprayed after he was already in custody.

Even after the FBI enhanced the body-camera video, however, federal authorities have questioned whether the footage proves Greene was pepper-sprayed.

The delays have been compounded by the fact that federal prosecutors had asked the local district attorney, John Belton, to hold off on bringing state charges until the federal investigation runs its course.

But last month, federal prosecutors reversed course and said they would not object to a state prosecution. Belton has said a state grand jury is expected to begin hearing evidence soon.

Separately, a state legislative committee investigating a possible cover-up in the Greene case is squaring up for a showdown over a subpoena to the former head of the Louisiana State Police.

Wednesday, the bipartisan committee is set to hold an initial vote on holding former Col. Kevin Reeves in contempt for refusing to turn over the full three volumes of a diary he kept while leading the agency. Reeves lawyer delivered 11 hand-written pages to the committee last week but contends the remainder is not related to Greene and need not be turned over.

Reeves journal entries within days of Greenes death showed an awareness of the potential fallout. Realize there is a problem  must address immediately, Reeves wrote in one section that listed a series of possible steps, including suspending troopers or putting them on leave and opening up an internal probe into the case.

But 462 days would pass before state police began an internal investigation into the troopers involved, including one who was recorded boasting he beat the ever-living f out of Greene. Reeves, who described Greenes death as awful but lawful, stepped down in late 2020 amid criticism.

If the committee votes to proceed with a contempt case against Reeves, the matter would then move to another committee and then the full state House, where a vote for contempt would allow lawmakers to launch the legal process to force Reeves to comply with the subpoena.

The committee was formed in response to an AP report that found Reeves informed Gov. John Bel Edwards within hours that troopers arresting Greene had engaged in a violent, lengthy struggle. Yet the Democrat stayed mostly silent on the case for two years as state troopers continued to raise the car crash theory.

Lawmakers have said they intend to investigate what Edwards knew about the case and when he knew it, but no one on his staff has yet been called to testify.

Hardin and other family members planned to gather. May 10 for a vigil in the quiet community near Monroe where Greene died, praying that their long wait for justice will finally come to an end.

We just have to keep going, she said. Its all we can do.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Lawsuits
Families of the 98 victims of the 2021 condominium collapse near Miami Beach, along with injured survivors, could split hundreds of millions of dollars in payouts under a preliminary settlement agreement announced Wednesday.

The settlement will top $997 million, the plaintiffs lawyer said in Miami-Dade Circuit Court, according to reports in the Miami Herald and Sun Sentinel newspapers. How the money will be distributed among the families and injured victims, along with attorneys fees, has yet to be decided.

The judge in the case, who last year had charged the lawyers with reaching a speedy resolution, marveled at the results so far.

The result achieved and the speed is beyond extraordinary, Hanzman said, the Herald reported. When this case first came in this court I told everyone this wouldnt be business as usual. This was a tragedy of unspeakable proportions. If we didnt have the right people handling this case, it would be a 10-year slog with tens of millions in attorneys fees.

The judge must approve the settlement before it is finalized and he said he hopes to get it done before the one-year anniversary of the collapse on June 24.

The money will come from more than 10 sources, including insurers of the security company for the Champlain Towers South building in Surfside, on the northern edge of Miami Beach. The security firm was responsible for safety systems at the condo building and will pay the largest share, more than $450 million, according to news reports.

Other defendants include parties associated with the condominium association, engineers, architects, the town of Surfside, where the building was situated, and the developers and contractors at 87 Park, the condo next door to the collapsed tower.

Plaintiffs had argued that the construction of the adjacent condo in 2016 had contributed to the collapse by destabilizing the Champlain foundation and forcing runoff into the buildings underpinnings, according to news reports and lawsuit filings. The 87 Park owners and associated firms have not admitted fault in the case, and settled for an undisclosed amount. An engineering firm for 87 Park will pay about $8.5 million as part of the settlement.

Two other defendants have settled in recent weeks, including the powerhouse Florida condo law firm of Becker, which advised the Champlain Towers board. The firms professional liability insurer will pay an estimated $31 million in its part of a settlement.

The engineering firm hired to inspect the towers shortly before the collapse also has agreed to a $16 million settlement, paid by the engineering firms insurance company.

Repairs to the tower, which had been postponed by the Champlain condo association, were estimated to cost $15 million, and had just begun when part of the high-rise building crumbled, according to news reports. Investigations are continuing, but have raised questions about Champlain Towers construction techniques, modifications, water infiltration, unrepaired cracks in concrete and other deterioration since it was built more than 40 years ago.

The Champlain South condo associations insurer also has paid out $50 million, according to reports.

Part of the proceeds from the sale of the property, where the remaining part of the condo has been demolished and removed, will eventually be added to the total settlement. That will increase the total for the settlement to more than $1 billion, the Herald reported.

Separately, Judge Hanzman in March approved a $83 million settlement for lawsuits brought by individual owners of units in the Champlain Towers condo building who lost property and belongings. The settlement money would come from the condo associations property and liability insurers and from the sale of the property.

Top photo: A makeshift memorial wall honoring the victims of the nearby deadly building collapse. (AP photo/Lynne Sladky)

Topics Carriers Condominium
Florida restaurants have had little success in recent lawsuits against Lloyds of London over insurance coverage for shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic.

On Wednesday, Floridas 3rd District Court of Appeal, in the first COVID-coverage ruling by a Florida state appeals court, upheld a trial courts order that affirmed Lloyds denial of a claim from Commodore Inc. and its GreenStreet Cafe in Miami. The local court and the appellate court found that the policy required direct physical loss of or damage to property and some tangible alteration to the insureds property.

We therefore affirm the trial courts ruling that the economic losses GreenStreet suffered when it suspended its operations due to the COVID-19 pandemic does not give rise to coverage under the policy, the 3rd DCA panel of judges wrote. The trial court did not err in dismissing GreenStreets petition for declaratory relief and damages with prejudice.

The opinion came one week after a federal appeals court found in favor of Certain Underwriters of Lloyds and other insurers in a similar suit brought by three restaurants and a furniture company. The U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on May 5 mostly upheld the federal district court for the Southern District of Florida in its dismissal of the complaints.

SA Palm Beach, Emerald Coast Restaurants, Rococo Steak, and RTG Furniture Co., like GreenStreet, had argued that the pandemic shutdown orders had caused heavy financial losses that should be covered by their insurance policies. But the federal district court and the appeals court found that the all-risk commercial policies covered only physical losses or damages to the property.

All-risk policies do not provide coverage for every conceivable loss, the judges wrote, citing previous decisions from the Florida Supreme Court.

On Emerald Coasts complaint, involving spoilage of food, the court vacated part of the lower courts dismissal and remanded the case for further consideration. The district court had not fully addressed the spoilage claim, the appellate judges said.

Businesses around the country have fared poorly in thousands of claims against insurers over the loss of revenue during the pandemic, particularly in federal courts. The University of Pennsylvania Law Schools litigation tracker site shows that through mid-April, 67% of insurers motions to dismiss coverage suits have been upheld in state courts. Federal courts have upheld 86% of the motions.

Two states Supreme Courts also have ruled against insured businesses on COVID shutdown claims.

Its long past time for the plaintiffs bar to throw in the towel, University of South Carolina economist Robert Hartwig told the Claims Journal in April. Courts across the country have ruled on thousands of cases arising from businesses small and large in many different industries. The message the courts are sending are seldom this consistent or this clear. COVID did not result in physical loss or damage to covered property. Period. End of story.

Topics Lawsuits Florida COVID-19 Excess Surplus Lloyd's Restaurant
Global cannabis sales for 2022 will reach just over $35 billion, and will almost double that in the next few years  and with newly legal states coming online, continued growth in the big states, more products, and more marketing of those products, its not hard to believe.

A report from BDSA provides a deep look at where the industry is heading, but theres a lot more behind the numbers to know for cannabis businesses and firms that serve those businesses. The report outlines key takeaways, market forecasts and consumer insights.

Micha Tapman, BDSAs new chief, talked with us for our latest podcast about the report, and what it means for ancillary businesses like the insurance industry.

Following are takeaways from that conversation.

Tapman attributed the growth pushing global sales to the $35 billion figure to big markets and emerging ones.

So, the big drivers for growth are, of course, states like California, which continue to see increases year over year and represent the largest share of the market, but also the emergence of new markets, Tapman said. For example, Michigan has really emerged as a top-performing market, as they legalized recreational sales. We also anticipate seeing sales in New Jersey, which hopefully, will be starting relatively soon.

BDSA in its report expects some of those same dynamics  big states and states becoming legal for adult-use of medicinal-use sales  will push global sales past $61 billion in 2026, a compound annual growth rate of 16%.

A bigger, even more important, dynamic may be in play. Not just more consumers, but greater consumer interest.

So BDSA has been doing consumer research for about four years. And so we have this longitudinal trending analysis of why people are consuming and how many people as a percentage of the population are consuming, Tapman said. What weve seen is there is a great penetration within a market for new consumers. Meaning, lets say, Colorado, comes online initially about a third of the population of adults 21-plus are consuming cannabis products. Now were north of 50%. And so that is a really exciting dynamic to understand within the market.



Therein lies an important takeaway for ancillary businesses like insurance. Growth, even within more mature markets, continues accelerating. A trend that will naturally grow the need for more goods and services to be provided to emerging and growing cannabis operators, and one that will change the needs  and risk profiles  of these businesses rapidly.

I think if were looking at, for example, a financial support provider, like an insurer, one of the big things to be thinking about is that the market as a whole is growing, he said. So, even in states like Colorado, which is one of the longest-tenured statesthere is still quite a bit of growth happening. So as an insurer, one of the things to watch for is essentially an understanding of Is the person underinsured, right? Is the growth of their company and whats going on in, lets say their inventory management, is the insurance level correct? And thats likely to change very, very quickly, meaning within months, that theyre increasing.

Skeptics might see a bubble emerging from all of this rapid expansion. The bubble question wasnt tackled in the report, but it was put to Tapman.

Even based on stocks, which are not a good measure of the industrys growth potential  especially cannabis stocks, which are largely traded under complex regulatory framework in Canada  Tapman believes the industry is undervalued.

So, will we ever see a bubble in cannabis sales at some point on the horizon?

Its a pretty far horizon, he responded.

Related:

Topics Cannabis
Federal investigators blamed a deadly 2019 helicopter crash in Hawaii on the pilots decision to keep flying into worsening weather, and in a report this week they accused regulators of lax oversight of air tours that are popular among tourists to the islands.

The National Transportation Safety Board said that the Federal Aviation Administration had delayed installing aviation weather cameras that might have alerted the pilot to the fog-shrouded conditions in a mountainous region on the island of Kauai. The board also said the FAA failed to do enough to ensure that tour pilots in Hawaii are trained in handling bad weather.

Safety board Chair Jennifer Homendy said some will be quick to single out the pilot for causing the crash, which killed all seven people on board, but that she was troubled more by the FAAs role.

The fact is that this tragedy should never have occurred. It was 100% preventable, Homendy said. There was minimal FAA oversight of the safety of air tour operations in Hawaii. The FAA should be leading on safety, not ceding their responsibility to the industry that they are charged with regulating.

Kauai, with its steep sea-side cliffs and mountainous terrain, often experiences fast moving weather systems that can change conditions quickly, especially in winter months.

The tour helicopter operated by Safari Aviation was carrying the pilot and six passengers, three adults and three children, the youngest was 10, when it crashed in turbulent weather near the famed Na Pali Coast. Witnesses and other pilots reported fog, rain and low visibility around the time of the crash, and some pilots had turned around.

The pilot, 69-year-old Paul Matero, had his license revoked in 2010 after testing positive for marijuana, but his certificate was reinstated in 2012. A toxicology report after the crash found no drugs in Materos system. Matero was not licensed to fly solely by instruments.

The FAA said it has installed weather cameras at five locations in Hawaii including two on the island of Kauai, although none in the area of the crash, and it plans to install 21 more across six islands by the end of next year. The FAA has been operating weather cameras in Alaska for more than 20 years.

The NTSB said it found no mechanical problems with the helicopter, but it said Safari Aviations lack of a formal process to identify safety hazards contributed to the accident.

The FAA said it has started writing regulations to require tour and charter operators to adopt safety-management systems to identify and minimize risks _ a longtime NTSB recommendation.

Air tour operators today can apply to the FAAs voluntary Safety Management System program, and we have rule making underway to make these systems a requirement, the FAA said in an emailed statement.

The safety board voted 4-0 to adopt a staff-written outline of the probable cause of the crash, along with 10 safety recommendations, eight of them directed at the FAA.

The board also renewed nine other past recommendations to the FAA, including requiring tour helicopters to be retrofitted with so-called black boxes that would aid investigators after crashes.

Currently, FAA requires the devices on air ambulance helicopters, and manufacturers include them on some models. The agency said it encourages air tour operators to equip their aircraft with flight data recorders and is considering requiring the devices.

Koenig reported from Dallas.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
A top Senate Republican released an investigation that concluded Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti likely knew or should have known that a former top adviser was allegedly sexually harassing city employees, a finding that appears to contradict the mayors assertion that he was unaware of any inappropriate behavior.

A 23-page report released by U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa said his offices investigation found it was extremely unlikely that the Democratic mayor, who was nominated by President Joe Biden to serve as ambassador to India, would not have been aware of the misconduct allegations against his former aide, Rick Jacobs.

The White House issued a statement saying Biden had confidence in Garcetti and called on the Senate to confirm him.

This partisan report was a hit job from the beginning, and many of the claims have already been conclusively debunked by more serious independent reports, said the statement by spokesman Chris Meagher. It repackages allegations already addressed under oath and does not interview key participants.

The report marks the latest development in Garcettis effort to fill one of the nations most prominent diplomatic roles. The nomination has been languishing in the Senate since July, as the mayor faced questions about what he knew, and when, regarding the allegations against Jacobs.

At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in December, Garcetti told senators considering his nomination that he never witnessed Jacobs sexually harass one of his police bodyguards, allegations that are at the center of a lawsuit filed against his administration.

The lawsuit charges that Jacobs frequently sexually harassed the police bodyguard while Garcetti ignored it or laughed it off. The mayor has repeatedly denied the claims. Jacobs has called the allegations of misconduct fiction.

Grassley disclosed the investigation in March, saying he had received numerous credible allegations that Garcetti was aware of the sexual harassment but did nothing to stop it. At the time, he said he could not vote to confirm Garcetti, saying the nation deserved an ambassador who will represent the values of the United States.

Investigators interviewed 15 witnesses, read 26 depositions taken in the lawsuit and consulted other materials, including emails and text messages. The report said Garcetti and Jacobs declined to be interviewed.

Much of the evidence cited in the report has previously been made public. However, one apparently new account involves a whistleblower who allegedly saw Jacobs at the U.S.-China Climate Summit in 2015 sexually harass an employee who was working on a laptop, including pressing his groin area on the persons back. Senior staffers later laughed it off, the report said.

Investigators believe this allegation is credible because it fits the pattern of behavior described by several other senior staff members in Mayor Garcettis office, and because of its similarity to allegations in the lawsuit, the report found.

In a statement, Garcetti spokeswoman Dae Levine said, No new facts were uncovered in this report and Mayor Garcetti strongly reaffirms the simple truth that he never witnessed or was made aware of sexual harassment.

___

Associated Press reporter Will Weissert in Washington contributed.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Answers

Global TiC powder market trend 2023-2028 High Purity Titanium Carbide Nannoparticles Nano TiC Powder CAS 12070-08-5, 99% by Newsintegra927

The U.S. and its allies plan to impose sanctions on more Russian industries and supply chains.

The US government representatives recently visited Europe to consult with allies on strengthening and enforcing sanctions to punish Russia. They also plan to take action to disrupt their critical supply chains.

The US government claims that the sanctions imposed on Russia since the invasion began on February 24 have proved extremely effective, plunging Russia into a financial crisis. The sanctions include a freeze on the Russian central bank's foreign exchange assets, a ban on hard currency transactions by major Russian banks and wealthy individuals, and export restrictions on advanced semiconductors and other technologies. The sanctions have weakened the Russian economy and left the Kremlin with fewer resources.

The volatile international political situations will continue to affect the markets and prices of many commodities like the TiC powder.





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Editorials are longer opinion pieces that are written by a group of community members recruited across campus who address relevant issues on a local, national and international level. Editorials are research-based. The purpose of the Editorial Board is to promote discussion concerning relevant issues in the community while advising on possible solutions. Topics are chosen via relevancy and interests of the members, which are then discussed by the Editorial Board in order to reach a general consensus concerning the topic or issue.

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Columns are hyper-specific to opinion and are written by only columnists employed by the Iowa State Daily. Columnists are unique because they have a specific writing day and only publish on those writing days. Each column undergoes a thorough editing process ensuring the integrity of the writer, and their claim is maintained while remaining research-based and respectful. Columns may be submitted from community members. These are labelled as Guest Columns. These contain similar research-based content and need to be at least 400 words in length. The following requirements should be met: first and last name, email and relation or position to Iowa State. Emails must be tied to the submitted guest column or it will not be accepted or published. Pseudonyms are prohibited and the writer will be banned from submissions.

Read our full Opinion Policies here. Updated on 10/7/2020
Former solicitor Michael Lynn has told his multi-million euro theft trial that while in jail awaiting extradition from Brazil he saw a prisoner beheaded by other inmates.

Mr Lynn (53) continued giving evidence at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court on Thursday. He described what life was like in a Brazilian prison after his arrest in August 2013 in Recife, a coastal city in northeast Brazil.

He said the jail where he was held was beside a dump - "a very big dump with rats so big even the cats ran away from them," he told defence barrister Paul Comiskey-O'Keeffe, BL. Mr Lynn said that prisons in Brazil were essentially run by the inmates.

When I went in, the first three nights I was in a tiny cell shared with 30 other guys, he said. That was kind of a holdover prison. You are not given any bowls to eat [from] or utensils to eat.

Asked about prison security, he replied:

The security is as follows: there were 1,800 prisoners and 10 security guards. The prisons are run by prisoners.

In the jail where he was detained, he said he was moved to a part of the complex where they held people who had a degree, such as lawyers and accountants.

Certain prisoners run the prison, he said, and were given a gun and what he described as "large swords". "It's like something from Game of Thrones," he told Judge Martin Nolan, adding that violence was commonplace.

There were breakdowns, there were rebellions, he said. I saw people being killed. I saw once a decapitation of a young man whose only sin was that he was gay. I don't mean [being gay] was a sin but that's how it was seen over there. It's extremely macho and all that malarkey over there.

Mr Lynn (53) of Millbrook Court, Red Cross, Co. Wicklow, is on trial accused of the theft of around 27 million from seven financial institutions. He has pleaded not guilty to 21 counts of theft in Dublin between October 23, 2006, and April 20, 2007.

It is the prosecution case that Mr Lynn obtained multiple mortgages on the same properties in a situation where banks were unaware that other institutions were also providing finance.

Bankruptcy

On his fourth day being questioned by defence counsel, Mr Lynn said that he first went to London after he failed to appear at the High Court in Dublin in 2007.

Before that, he said he had meetings with bankers and with Grant Thornton to analyse his assets in Ireland and elsewhere to see if we could find a commercial solution to his financial problems. He said he was advised that if he went bankrupt in Ireland, he was facing bankruptcy for 12 years.

He said he talked to solicitors and to Michael Fingleton, then chief executive of the Irish Nationwide Building Society, and to Sean FitzPatrick of Anglo Irish Bank. "They were very concerned, and I was also very concerned in terms of myself having a future," said Mr Lynn.

He said he had a house rented in London and he could go bankrupt in the UK for a shorter period than in Ireland, so he went there. He said he hoped that it would allow things to settle and resolve themselves.

Brazil

The court heard that in February 2008, Mr Lynn moved to Portugal and continued living there with his wife Brid until June 2011. He told the court he had first gone to Brazil in 2005 because there was a natural business connection between Brazil and Portugal.

He said his accountant friend in Portugal introduced him to a good friend in Sao Paulo, where he lived with his wife for eight months. Hitherto, the couple had been unable to have children despite IVF treatment, the court heard. But in Sao Paulo, he said they were more fortunate and had a boy.

Mr Lynn said they did not like the size of the city, however, and so moved to Recife, a smaller coastal city where, with investors, he became involved in property in nearby Cabo de Santo Agostinho. He said he got a salary from this and also earned money from teaching English.

When he was arrested, his wife was expecting again and was seven months pregnant, he told the court. He resisted extradition initially, he said.

I needed to give time for Brid to give birth, he told Mr Comiskey-O'Keeffe. He said he hoped to get bail and spent time with his children but bail was denied. However, he said conjugal prison visits were allowed and they had two more children in Brazil.

Brazilian prisons are very difficult for everybody, he said. Conjugal visits exist to maintain peace in what is essentially a war zone.

The trial continues.
Welcome Guest! You Are Here:
Up to 140 Ukrainians forced to flee the war will be VIP guests at a sold-out benefit concert in Cork Opera House on Friday night.

Proceeds from the Night Out for Ukraine concert, featuring 150 musicians including Ruby Horse, The White Horse Guitar Club, Carrigtwohill and White Horse Gospel Choirs, Karen Underwood, and others, will be donated to the Red Cross.

Cork Opera House has provided the venue for free to maximise the fundraising potential.

Ruby Horse.

Ruby Horse lead singer, Dave Farrell, said the concert represents an opportunity for Cork to welcome Ukrainians who now call the city home in a spirit of of love, compassion, humanity and solidarity.

We live in a country that has either been forced to send its people overseas, or has people who went by choice, and who were by and large welcomed overseas," he said.

Having lived as an immigrant in another country for almost a decade, and being welcomed there, I felt it was important that we reciprocate now and say to these unfortunate people that our home is your home for as long as it takes.

There has been so much great work going on in communities all over the country to help people from Ukraine and I think this concert will be a really nice way to welcome them to their new home, and to let them know that we will comfort them and help as much as we can.

Band member, Gordon Ashe, is flying back from the US to perform with the group for the first time in over a decade and the Kyiv national choir has also recorded a very special performance that will be broadcast during the show.

Meanwhile, a new Ukrainian hub operated by the support group, Palyanytsya, which runs similar hubs in Dublin, Arklow, and Cavan, will open a branch in a unit in Merchants Quay shopping centre in Cork city on Sunday.

The group helps refugees who have just arrived in Ireland and who have yet to receive any financial state aid by arranging the basics like clothes, shoes, buggies and toiletries, for free. The hubs also serve as a networking hub.

Basketball Ireland has also announced that it will waive the players registration fee for Ukrainian refugees who join a basketball club here.
The ongoing invasion of Ukraine has led to one of the largest movements of people in the world today, with 5.3m refugees from Ukraine and 7.7m people internally displaced in just two months.

Women, children, and older people make up the vast majority of this population, something that is generally true of most refugee crises.

These are people arriving with all the stresses and vulnerabilities of a life suddenly uprooted and disrupted by violence and loss.

Children sit in a refugee centre in Nadarzyn, near Warsaw, Poland. Picture: AP Photo/Petr David Josek

However, there are additional risks for women and children who find themselves in temporary shared accommodation  the risk of violence and exploitation, and women as carers can be put under immense pressures, which can place their children at additional risk of violence.

In the midst of such population movements, these risks can be exacerbated by the urgency of informal response groups to provide for accommodation, services and other provisions.

Well-meaning efforts to meet needs as soon as possible can result in the use of untrained or inexperienced volunteers, who can be unaware of particular risks and inadvertently place women and children at further risk.

Human trafficking

An example of this can be the separation of mothers from their children while queuing, registering for shelter. Inadequate responses can also attract or create space for those with nefarious intentions to exploit, harass, or intentionally purchase or kidnap individuals for the purpose of human trafficking.

The UN has stated that multiple forms of gender-based violence are being reported among people displaced in Ukraine and refugees, with a particularly high risk for women and girls on the move, at border crossing points and transit/collective centres, and in bomb shelters.

A refugee woman from Ukraine sleeps in the middle of her luggage in the ticket hall of the railway station in Przemysl, eastern Poland. Picture: Wojtek Radwanski/AFP via Getty Images

There have been reports of intimate partner violence, sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual harassment, sexual violence (including conflict-related sexual violence), and economic abuse.

There is also a high risk of trafficking for sexual exploitation at borders where registration is piecemeal and where volunteers may offer accommodation and transportation without vetting.

Such risks of course are present in all humanitarian crises  those large in the public view and those less visible.

The World Health Organization was widely criticised for its efforts in preventing and tackling widespread sexual abuse during the ebola response in Congo from 2018 to 2020.

An investigation was launched when more than 50 local women reported to media that they had been lured into sex-for-work schemes by WHO staff. These safeguarding risks are also not new: in 2001-02, allegations of a sex-for-aid scandal in West Africa led to the first global humanitarian policies on addressing sexual exploitation and abuse.

Safeguarding vulnerable people

This is an unpleasant but very real element to humanitarian crises  the exploitation of deeply vulnerable people. Prevention, detection, reporting and response measures must be robust and effective to ensure exploitation cannot happen.

If humanitarian agencies really want to protect the communities they serve, they must place safeguarding front and centre of emergency response.

Through the support of the Irish public and corporate partners, Goal was able to deploy our emergency response team to assess the needs of displaced people within days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Goal has been working with displaced populations and refugees in conflict zones, in over 60 countries around the world, for 45 years.

In response to the Ukraine crisis, we first sought to understand the security and safety risks, and the nature and needs of the populations on the move  whether food, shelter, health and/or sanitation are the most urgent needs.

Culturally sensitive response

We also sought to quickly identify local partners with whom to work and support, to ensure a relevant and culturally sensitive response.

Our initial assessment identified that those disembarking buses in Poland needed hygiene and personal sanitation items. We engaged with a local partner to assist in supply and distribution, ensured partner staff complied with Goal safeguarding policies while stipulating the behaviours expected of all Goal staff and partners.

All hygiene kits were equipped with a complaints card and hotline number to ensure recipients knew where to communicate any concerns or complaints.

Luba (who did not want to provide her last name) rests at a relief centre in Rzeszow, Poland. Her husband and children were killed before she fled the Donetsk region where they lived. Picture: Joe Raedle/Getty Images We are now embarking on a larger programme with the support of Irish Aid, offering legal and personal rights advice to internally displaced people and refugees, to ensure they are aware of their entitlements, protections and where to access critical services.

Access to sexual and reproductive health services, as well as mental health and psychological support services, is critical in such settings.

Through our work with our local partner in Ukraine, Right to Protection, are also providing this vital link.

To ensure we deal effectively and swiftly with any safeguarding complaints Goal has a dedicated complaints response team in our headquarters with an investigation unit led by two former superintendent detectives from an Garda Siochana and a global safeguarding adviser.

Serious complaints are reported further to the relevant funders to ensure we remain accountable to them, and most importantly, the communities we serve.

Safeguarding mechanisms like these are the minimum protections vulnerable communities deserve; and are a critical step in supporting the journey to safety and stability for people displaced by this devastating conflict.

Mary Van Lieshout is complaints response director with Goal
THREE Pearse Flynn companies have moved into a new headquarters at Penrose Dock in Cork.

More than 100 people are currently employed by Green Rebel, EIH2 and ActionZero.

Mr Flynn, a Co Cork native, has invested more than 10 million in the green energy companies and plans to grow the workforce to 150 by the end of this year.

Green Rebel, which provides site investigation and data services to the offshore wind sector, recently announced a partnership with Energia to carry out surveys on its proposed wind farm off the coast of Co Waterford.

Meanwhile, EIH2 is Irelands first green hydrogen production company and ActionZero provides a decarbonisation solution for companies moving from fossil fuels to renewable electricity.

The companies moved into the new headquarters this week.

Moving into Penrose Dock was an easy decision for us, Mr Flynn.

By positioning ourselves at the heart of Corks new business district, we believe that we now have the scope needed to meet the growing demand for the services of each of our green energy companies.

We are looking to significantly invest in Irelands green economy, and we believe that Cork has a key strategic role to play in that growing sector.
Burma Buddhist Monks Urged to Boycott Myanmar Junta Rice Offerings

A junta hoarding in Mandalay urging residents to donate rice to Buddhist monks. / CJ

The Sangha Union in Mandalay has urged Buddhist monks in the city to boycott a junta-organized rice-offering on Saturday and all its other religious events.

The Mandalay authorities are planning to provide rice, cash and other offerings to 10,264 Buddhist monks on May 14, Kason full moon day in the lunar calendar.

U Raja Dhamma, a Sangha Union monk, said: We are urging monks not to take part. We urge them to boycott all junta events.

The regime has invited Mandalays monks and erected street notices, urging residents to donate.

Donations are meaningless after thousands of murders and torched villages, said U Raja Dhamma.

I urge monks who live off alms not to accept hollow donations from a regime which tortures and kills people, he said.

Mandalay residents say the regime is attempting to give an impression of peace and stability and portray itself as the protector of Buddhism.

A veteran journalist from Mandalay, who asked not to be named, said: Successive military dictators have used religion, saying only they can protect Buddhism and the Burmese. Now this regime cannot control the country as people dont accept it. But it wants to give an impression that stability has been restored and religious events can be organized.

The junta tried to organize rice donations to 4,000 Mandalay monks on April 17, Myanmars new years day. But monks boycotted the event.

U Aggawunsa, a monk leading anti-regime protests in Pyigyitagon Township, said: Monks cant accept donations offered by those who have brutally killed and tortured people, robbed and looted their possessions and are stealing public funds. They are trying to hide their sins under the cover of religion. They make donations not because they have faith in religion so it is against Buddhist principles.

Mandalay has Myanmars largest monk population with around 130,000 attending Lent annually before the 2021 coup. The number fell to some 70,000 after the coup.

When a previous regime banned residents rice offerings in 1990, Mandalay monks showed solidarity and refused to accept any junta donations.

The Sangha Union has participated in anti-regime protests in Mandalay, where street protests are still common. More than 100 monks were detained in Mandalay for protesting.

However, influential religious figures, like Sitagu Sayadaw, have been condemned for their close ties with regime leader Min Aung Hlaing.

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Burma Myanmar Refugees on Indian Border Face Danger of Disease and Shortage of Medicines

A notice at a refugee camp in Zokhawthar, Mizoram State warning inmates about malaria. / Supplied

Myanmar refugees in Indias border state of Mizoram face a shortage of medicines and access to healthcare, after being evicted from their homes in western Myanmar following brutal reprisals by the countrys military regime.

Almost 30,000 refugees are sheltering in Mizoram State, with the maximum numbers in the twin districts of Champhai and Saiha. They are mostly from neighboring Chin State but some hail from Sagaing Region.

Refugees started crossing the border to India after last years coup and village councils, church and civil society groups in Mizoram such as the Young Mizo Association (YMA) have swung into action to provide them with aid and shelter. Plots have been allocated for building homes and all essential ingredients provided to the refugees to settle down at different locations across the state. The government has also started issuing them with identity cards.

Despite the support, the refugees are still faced with the problems that confront displaced people compelled to settle in new locations.

Biaktinsanga, a member of the YMAs executive committee in the Mizoram border township of Zokhawthar, said: Diseases like malaria, flu and dysentery have been found to be common among the refugees. Medicines are not available in adequate quantity. Schools in this region also do not have the infrastructure to accommodate so many children.

Located in Champhai District, Zokhawthar has close on 5,000 Myanmar refugees among whom 250 families have been settled at a playground on the banks of Tiao river. The supply of drinking water was a problem, until it was decided to connect the settlement to a waterfall about two kilometres away in the hills via pipes.

A greater challenge was enrolling the children in the few government and private schools available in the district. The families had no money to equip them with the uniforms, books and bags that are mandatory in the schools. Eventually, the rules were relaxed to allow the children to attend the schools. Last February, a total of 29 boys and girls were allowed to take the Mizoram state board examinations for classes 10 and 12.

It was primarily with the goal of assisting the children that a delegation from the Chin community in the United States surveyed the refugee camps. The delegates also aim to raise awareness about the situation in Myanmar at a global level.

Our goal is to create a school system for the children, hire teachers and raise funds. And we would like the world to know about their suffering, said Justin Thang, who was part of the two-member delegation from the US.

The delegates represent an organisation called Hope For Tomorrow, whose mandate is to build bridges between the Burmese, Chin and American communities. Currently, it is focused on helping the refugees who were forced to flee Myanmar after the juntas coup.

The delegation visited several refugee camps in Mizoram, including the ones in Zokhawthar, and organised charity concerts in the Mizoram capital Aizawl to raise funds during their two week stay in the state.

We will return to the US, share our experiences and then firm up the next plan of action. The situation would have been worse if Mizoram had not opened its doors so warmly and offered assistance, said Justin Thang.

Civil society activists are worried that diseases like malaria, which is widespread in Indias northeastern states, could spread among the refugees with the onset of the rainy season that lasts till October. A major challenge is ensuring the availability of medicines at the remote locations where many refugee families have settled.

In Zokhawthar, the Champhai District administration has carried out a survey of an alternate spot with facilities for drinking water and toilets, which they plan to move the families currently sheltering by the Tiao River to in a few weeks.

An official said that the new location would be at a higher elevation to prevent the possibility of the settlement flooding.

Rajeev Bhattacharyya is a senior journalist in Assam, India

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Editorial ASEAN Under Pressure to Do More on Myanmar as Leaders Gather in Washington

Indonesian President Joko Widodo (center) delivers his speech at ASEANs Myannmar crisis talks in Jakarta in April 2021. / AFP

Myanmars brutal regime has not been invited to the two-day US-ASEAN Special Summit beginning in Washington on Thursday, but Burma will be a subject of intense deliberation in all of our meetings, said a senior US administration official, using another name for the country.

Foreign Minister Daw Zin Mar Aung of Myanmars shadow National Unity Government (NUG) is in Washington at the same time as the leaders of regional grouping the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). She will not be able to attend the summit but will hold informal meetings with some ASEAN and US officials.

A senior US State Department official said, We have had diplomatic engagement with the government in exile [the NUG]. We are in discussions about the best way to represent what has transpired in Burma and how to represent that in the meeting.

The official added, I think one of the discussions has been to have an empty chair to reflect our dissatisfaction with whats taken place and our hope for a better path forward.

Amid the Biden administrations promises to deepen its engagement with the Indo Pacific Region, including ASEAN, Myanmar is one of the issues currently posing a threat to the blocs unity and spirit.

Speaking at the US Institute of Peace, US National Security Council coordinator for the Indo-Pacific Kurt Campbell said the Biden administration would encourage greater diplomacy on Myanmar in meetings with the ASEAN leaders in Washington on Thursday and Friday. Campbell, the White Houses Asia Tsar, was US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs under President Barack Obama and a key architect of his pivot to Asia.

Campbell is no stranger to Myanmar, having made a historic visit to the country in 2009 to meet with the countrys top leaders led by strongman U Than Shwe. During his trip, he also met with then-opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who by that time had spent a total of 14 years under house arrest. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who in 2016 was elected the countrys de facto leader with the position of State Counselor, has been detained at an unknown location in Myanmar since the military ousted her government in a coup in February last year, and is facing secret trial by the regime.

Campbell said the 10-nation regional bloc had begun important initiatives on the crisis, including appointing an envoy to carry messages to the generals, but most of those have not borne fruit.

The United States is going to continue its active role working with other partners, but we do want ASEAN to play a more deeply engaged role in the critical diplomacy about the next steps in Burma, he said. We hope and expect ASEAN to take real initiatives in terms of how to engage both the current government and the opposition about the way forward.

Under Obama, the US stepped up its principled engagement with both the Myanmar regime and opposition, ostensibly balancing its values and interests in Myanmar. Obama made two historic visits to the country after the 2010 election of a quasi-civilian government, which the following year embarked on what at the time were hailed as far-reaching political and economic reforms.

During his first visit to Myanmar in November 2012the first by a sitting US presidentObama urged leaders in the country not to extinguish the flickers of progress that we have seen. Those flickers seem very distant today, with Myanmar back to square one.

Fifteen months on from the military takeover, the junta is still facing public protests as well as armed resistance and insurgencies. In its attempt to counter the growing resistance, the military regime has been brutal, arresting and imprisoning thousands of people and torching hundreds of villages in the center of the country. Many citizens who are able, including many members of the educated middle class, have fled Myanmar.

ASEANs diplomatic efforts have faltered in the face of a lack of cooperation from coup leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, who was excluded from the blocs summit in October for his recalcitrance.

The lack of progress in the implementation of ASEANs five-point consensus continues to draw sharp criticism. Current ASEAN chair Cambodias requests that the blocs special envoy be allowed to meet with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and President U Win Myint, who has also been detained, have been rejected by the military junta. The regime knows ASEAN is divided and is confident that the bloc, while it may have the occasional carrot to offer, lacks sticks.

So why has the US outsourced the issue to ASEAN, asking it to do more and engage more? Because it is politically convenient?

Human Rights Watch has called for the ditching of the five-point consensus and the adoption of a new approach. For a year, governments around the world have stalled taking action on Myanmar by standing behind ASEANs hollow wordsand have nothing to show for it, the groups acting Asia Director, Elaine Pearson, said in a statement. They need to adopt strong measures to deter further atrocities and hold the military accountable, not a flimsy consensus thats proven its futility.

Greg Poling, a Southeast Asia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said, The reason that the US and everybody else in the world basically keeps voicing support for the ASEAN five-point consensus is because it passes the buck to ASEAN, either because you dont have better ideas or because youre not willing to pursue things that would actually have an impact. Its a view thats hard to argue with.

More recently, some bolder proposals seem to have emerged from within ASEAN to informally engage all stakeholders in Myanmar in an effort to find a breakthrough. Malaysian Foreign Minister Datuk Seri Saifuddin Abdullah said ASEAN should informally engage the NUG, National Unity Consultative Council (NUCC) and Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH).

Increasingly, there is a strong desire for concrete action on Myanmar, rather than empty words.

Human Rights Watch has called on three of ASEANs leading nationsIndonesia, Malaysia and Singaporeto present Myanmars military leadership with a clear, time-bound approach and to press for reform by taking moves to restrict its currency reserves and arms imports. The group has also called on Biden to push the regional bloc to abandon the failed consensus approach at this weeks US-ASEAN Summit.

Some in ASEAN have called for Myanmar to be expelled from ASEAN. The regime leaders know full well that the special summit will likely produce a few lines over Myanmar and some condemnation, and no more. Meanwhile, the junta continues to keep the country and its citizens hostage, spotlighting the regional blocs pathetic failures. Myanmars suffering will continue, much to ASEANs shame.

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The government of Costa Rica has declared a state of emergency after a number of state agencies, including the finance ministry, were hit by the Windows ransomware strain known as Conti.

An announcement on Wednesday said the emergency was warranted due to cyber crimes that had affected the structure of information systems of different institutions.

The initial attack on 12 April breached the finance ministry. Other agencies like science, technology and telecommunications, and the national meteorological institute were also hit.

The attackers are claimed to have stolen more than 670GB of data and have been leaking the information since mid-April.

Conti can attack all versions of Microsoft Windows and has been around since 2020. On Friday, the US Governmenta reward of US$10 million (A$14.41 million) for information leading to the identification and location of any of the people behind the ransomware.

"The FBI estimates that as of January 2022, there had been over 1000 victims of attacks associated with Conti ransomware with victim payouts exceeding US$150,000,000, making the Conti ransomware variant the costliest strain of ransomware ever documented," the State Department said in the notice offering the reward.

Costa Rica has seemingly declared a national emergency as a result of the ransomware attack for which Conti has claimed responsibility. 1/3 https://t.co/BBepxBVJD7  Brett Callow (@BrettCallow) May 8, 2022

There has been a general dropoff in ransomware attacks following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but Conti has been an exception.

The CIA-backed tech news website The Record said Conti was responsible for about 50 attacks during April, the highest by far for any of the group that target Microsoft's operating system.

Ransomware threat researcher Brett Callow told iTWire that this attack could well be the most serious ransomware incident to date.

"I believe its the first time a cyber attack has resulted in a national state of emergency being declared," he added. "Seemingly, the attack has affected everything from impact and export processes to the governments ability to collect taxes."

Callow, who works with the New Zealand-headquartered security shop Emsisoft, said actions against ransomware gangs by US Cyber Command and law enforcement agencies in both the US and Europe had been increasingly successful.

"While thats good news for organisations in those countries, it may not be good news for organisations in other countries as the gangs may perceive them to be less risky targets," he noted.
Hyper-light laptops allow employees to embrace working from anywhere, and Dynabook's newest range offers incredible power and portability, driven by the latest Intel 12th gen Core processors.

The pandemic accelerated working from home initiatives in many companies and while workers worldwide saw the benefits of reduced commute times and greater lifestyle benefits, it was also clear workplace collaboration was not as seamless as in the office. Not even six months ago it looked like many workplaces were starting to encourage employees back to the office full-time, but its hybrid working that has won out.

With a continued need for mobility, and with hybrid working here to stay, this is the perfect time to upgrade business laptops.

Dynabook ANZ product marketing manager Matthew Tumminello spoke with iTWireTV about the current Dynabook laptop range, designed with hybrid workers in mind.

Matthew spoke about the great advantages of the Intel 12th gen Core processors, and other features of Dynabooks ultra-light laptop range such as the Eyesafe display to reduce blue light and protect eyes.

Matthew spoke about the AI-driven Dynabook Online Meeting Assist which provides virtual backgrounds and other effects at the hardware level - allowing you to set your background for all your conferencing apps in one go. In fact, this even gives you virtual backgrounds for apps like AWS Chime and Google Meet which natively offer fewer features here than Microsoft Teams or Zoom.

Matthew told iTWire about specific Dynabook laptop models such as the remarkable Dynabook X40L-K laptop - weighing only 1.05kg and measuring 15.9mm thick, and the 14 Dynabook Portege X40-K with its premium chassis, and the 14 Tecra A40-K and 15 Tecra A50-K models.

Despite being so powerful, Dynabook's engineers have achieved a remarkable feat in installing so much in such slim and light cases - while still providing military-spec durability.

Matthew also spoke about how Dynabook laptops cater for the hybrid worker in Australia, and how the Toshiba heritage continues to shine through Dynabooks modern range. In fact, Matthew spoke of the longevity of many of the Toshiba/Dynabook team which, in my view, speaks volumes about how the organisation treats its people and has created an enviable culture where people want to work and to stay.

Check out our talk here, and all of Matthew's great insights and anecdotes as he explains, with passion and gusto, why businesses of all sizes need to give Dynabook a serious look when purchasing its next set of laptops.
GUEST OPINION: The world of digital technology does not exist within a bubble. Developments in politics, finance, and climate change all influence IT. The IT industries are quick moving and, in recent weeks, are proving to be rather unpredictable. These developments also have wide-ranging impacts, for example, in Musks recent takeover of Twitter, which will be addressed in more detail below. Here is a roundup of the latest IT news.

Russians turn to VPNs

Until recently, internet access in the Russian Federation was relatively unrestrictive. This is no longer the case. Since Russia launched its special operation in the territory of Ukraine, the government in the worlds largest country has been scrambling to prevent ordinary Russians from accessing information that might contradict the official narrative. Part of their efforts have centred around the traditional media producers in the country: news media professionals can be sentenced to lengthy jail sentences for spreading fake news.

Another strand of repression is aimed squarely at the internet. The Russian government has geo-blocked access to popular social media networks, where information (and misinformation) from all political angles is regularly shared. In order to circumvent this repression of the free internet, some Russians are turning to Virtual Private Networks. A simple Surfshark download can enable a Russian citizen to bypass the geo-blocking efforts of the government and access news from abroad. VPN usage in the country is surging, but it is highly likely that new laws will come into force banning them before they can make too much of a dent in the national political will.

India demands data collection

The Indian Ministry For Electronics and IT has brought new regulations into place requiring VPN companies to store end-user data for five years. This is a huge blow to the overall utility of VPNs in the massive South Asian country.

It is expected that the new law will be enforced from around the 27th of July 2022. Large fines and prison sentences are a real possibility for VPN provider staff that do not alter their operations within India. In theory, this new regulation has been drafted with the intention of maintaining a healthy online ecosystem in India. Data is stored that will allow the government to track malware as it spreads, for instance. Some people are worried, however, that the new regulations could clamp down on free speech within the country.

Musk buys Twitter

Elon Musk, the worlds richest man, has bought social media giant Twitter for a reported 44 billion dollars. The eccentric  and frequently foolish  heir to a South African mining fortune stated that he wanted to purchase the platform in order to preserve the free speech of users. This is, to a degree, a noble cause. Activists are worried, however, that this will amount to a laissez-faire attitude toward racist attacks and other prejudice. Musk would also have very little to worry about if he decided to, say, sell the data of Twitter users. This is a worrying possibility. Twitter messages are not encrypted, meaning that they can be accessed by whoever owns the platform. Political activists and union members can probably already sense the danger approaching.
Low-code platform company Appian has been awarded US$2.036 billion in damages from software provider Pegasystems in the Circuit Court for Fairfax County, Virginia for trade secret misappropriation.

The jury also found Pegasystems misappropriation of Appians trade secrets to be willful and malicious. Appian brought the case to trial to ensure the protection of its proprietary intellectual property, including its trade secrets.

We are very grateful that the jury held Pegasystems accountable for its wrongful conduct, said Appian general counsel Christopher Winters, in a lengthy statement issued by Appian.

We put forward strong evidence that Appian trade secrets were misappropriated by Pegasystems. The award of substantial damages to Appian is entirely appropriate given the nature and extent of what Pegasystems did.

During the seven-week trial, Appian presented evidence that Pegasystems hired an employee of a government contractor (the Contractor), to provide Pegasystems with access to Appians software as a part of an effort to learn how to better compete against Appian. In hiring the Contractor, Pegasystems instructed its third-party contracting service to recruit someone who was not loyal to Appian. Appian provided evidence that the Contractor, who worked as a developer in the Appian software under a government contract, violated his employers code of conduct and his employers agreement with Appian by providing access to an Appian competitor.

Appian put forward evidence that the Contractor passed trade secret information to Pegasystems to enable its employees to build competitive features and train Pegasystems sales team to better compete against Appian.

During the proceedings, Alan Trefler, Pegasystems Founder and CEO, admitted that it was inappropriate'' for Pegasystems employees to have hired the Contractor, and that the Contractor apparently did things for which he was not entitled.

The Contractor, referred to as a spy internally at Pegasystems, helped Pegasystems generate dozens of video recordings of the Appian development environment for use by Pegasystems in compiling competitive materials and evaluating improvements to its platform.

Appian put forward evidence that Trefler attended and participated in a meeting with the Contractor and received Appians trade secrets supplied by the Contractor. The videos and documents created in connection with Contractors efforts were then used by Pegasystems to train its sales force to better compete against Appian. The effort was later labeled Project Crush within Pegasystems. At one point, a Pegasystems employee reviewing the materials exclaimed that we should never lose to Appian again!

Appian also submitted that Pegasystems product development team reviewed the materials provided by the Contractor and changed the course of Pegasystems product engineering to take advantage of the Appian technology they saw. Specifically, Appian put forward documents and testimony that Pegasystems made use of the trade secrets gleaned from the Contractor to make improvements with respect to, among other things, ease of use, and social and mobile capabilities in the Pegasystems platform.

In addition, Appian presented undisputed evidence that Pegasystems employees used false identities to obtain access to Appian information and trial versions of Appians software, which were then used for competitive purposes. Trefler himself admitted to using an alias, Albert Skii to obtain access to Appian information. One Pegasystems employee admitted to creating a fake persona and a company to fool Appian into providing him with access to Appians software platform. Other Pegasystems employees obtained access to Appians software through Pegasystems partners in India, using credentials provided to those partners under license. Trefler admitted that he did not think it was appropriate for people to access other companys systems through aliases and that the Pegasystems employees who gained access to Appian trial software shouldnt have done it.

Appian believes that the damages award by the jury is the largest award in Virginia state court history.

Appian CEO Matthew Calkins stated Appian will never hesitate to defend itself and its intellectual property from competitors where it believes they have acted illegally. I am proud of our legal team for their outstanding work on this case. It was a masterful performance and the jurys verdict is the result of their efforts.

Appian said the jurys verdict and the courts entry of judgment is subject to appeal by Pegasystems. Pegasystems is not required to pay Appian the amount awarded by the jury until all appeals are exhausted and the judgment is final.

Appian said it cannot predict the outcome of any appeals or the time it will take to resolve them.

Pegasystems issued a statement on its website in response to the Appian lawsuit:

In the lawsuit filed by Appian Corp on May 29, 2020 against Pegasystems in state court in Virginia, Pega strongly disagrees with the claims and the recent verdict, which are not supported by the facts of the case or the law and are the result of significant error. We have strong grounds to overturn this result, and we are actively pursuing all legal options. As a reminder, the appeals process could potentially take years to complete, and no judgement would be payable until this process has ended.

This verdict has no impact on our products or what we are able to sell and service. In the meantime, we will continue to focus on helping our clients address their most pressing digital transformation challenges so theyre ready for whats next.
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Xi sends congratulatory message to Philippine President-elect Marcos

Xinhua) 13:27, May 12, 2022

BEIJING, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday sent a congratulatory message to Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos on his election as president of the Republic of the Philippines.

China and the Philippines are neighbors facing each other across the sea and partners through thick and thin, Xi said.

In recent years, with the joint efforts of both sides, the bilateral relations have been consolidated and enhanced, bringing benefits to the people of both countries and contributing to regional peace and stability, Xi added.

Xi stressed that both China and the Philippines are at a critical stage of development and their relations face important opportunities and enjoy broad prospects.

Noting that he attaches great importance to the development of the bilateral ties, Xi said he is ready to establish a good working relationship with Marcos to uphold good-neighborliness and joint development, and further advance the bilateral comprehensive strategic cooperative relationship to benefit the two countries and their people.

On the same day, Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan also sent a message to Sara Zimmerman Duterte-Carpio to congratulate her on her election as vice president of the Philippines.

(Web editor: Liang Jun, Bianji)
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The Congress alleged on Wednesday that the Delhi government seems determined to ruin the people of the national capital, who are already battling price rise, unemployment and economic crisis.

Delhi Congress chief Anil Kumar alleged that the excise department's proposal to legalise home delivery of liquor and stop regulating discounts offered by vendors in the Delhi Excise Policy 2022-23, which is in the final stages of being drafted, will be disastrous for the youth.

He also alleged that Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has become a puppet at the hands of the liquor mafia due to his "greed for commission".

Kumar also said that it is shocking to know that besides alcohol, the liquor vends will also "sell cigars, chocolates laced with liquor, and have testing rooms for drinkers and turn the national capital into a 'nashe ki rajdhani'".

Anil Kumar said that at a time when people are struggling to manage household budgets due to a sharp rise in the prices of all essential commodities, including vegetables, pulses and cooking oil, liquor has become cheaper, affecting the lives of the youth who are without jobs, resulting in a sharp increase in criminal acts.
Protais Mpiranya, whose 2006 death was revealed by UN prosecutors on Thursday, was on the run for years, with investigators eager to bring him to justice for his alleged role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Charged with war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity, Mpiranya became the top priority for investigators in May 2020, following the arrest of alleged genocide financier Felicien Kabuga near Paris.

But unbeknownst to them, Mpiranya, who was living in Zimbabwes capital Harare under an alias, contracted tuberculosis in 2006 and died on October 5 that year.

His family went to great lengths to hide his whereabouts, concealing the fact of his death and even preparing a tombstone that misidentified him, to ensure that few would know his true fate.

They repeatedly provided false statements to investigators, and urged those who knew of his presence and death in Harare to make false statements in the event of a hearing, said the Mechanism of International Criminal Tribunals, which oversees prosecution of those responsible for the genocide.

Mpiranya, who was believed to be around 46 at the time of his death, was accused of commanding a presidential guard implicated in high-profile murders during the 1994 slaughter which left some 800,000 dead.

The presidential guard was a feared outfit accused of targeted assassinations during the 100-day massacre of Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

In particular, Mpiranya was allegedly among those who ordered the murder of then prime minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, 10 Belgian soldiers protecting her, and several other leading politicians and their families on April 7, 1994, in the early hours of the genocide.

 Wave of assassinations 

The evening before, a plane carrying Rwandas president Juvenal Habyarimana had been shot down on its approach to Kigali International Airport.

The president had just returned from a regional meeting in Tanzania, where he agreed to push ahead with the terms of the 1993 Arusha Accords which were meant to end a three-year war between the Hutu government in Kigali, and a Tutsi rebellion.

Following Habyarimanas assassination, an emergency meeting was called between top brass of the Rwandan Armed Forces, senior police officials, the UN military, and civilian leaders.

The latter made the case that Uwilingiyimana, a moderate Hutu and Rwandas first female prime minister, had legal authority to take control of the country and suggested she make a national address to that effect.

But Rwandas radical Hutu leadership had other ideas.

On the morning of April 7, Mpiranya and two other military officials ordered their subordinates to search for the prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, in order to kill her, according to the prosecutors indictment for the former International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).

Uwilingiyimana was sexually assaulted and murdered and left in the street, naked, in full view of passersby. The savage attack was overseen by a captain of the battalion of the presidential guard, the indictment said.

But her murder was only the first in a wave of assassinations targeting prominent figures and politicians who supported the Arusha Accords.

Among those killed were the president of the Constitutional Court, the minister of agriculture, the minister of information, and the vice-president of the Social Democratic Party, who was being considered for the post of president of the transitional National Assembly.

The killings aimed to create a political vacuum and derail the implementation of the Arusha Accords, read the indictment, which directly implicated the presidential guard in the attacks.

 Fear of being discovered 

Mpiranya hailed from the former province of Gisenyi, in northern Rwanda, also the homeland of Habyarimana and several other top-ranking hardline Hutu military officials.

After graduating from military college in Kigali in 1983, he was assigned to the national police force.

In 1991, as the army was fighting the rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), led by todays President Paul Kagame, Mpiranya was transferred to the presidential guard battalion and two years later was promoted to commander.

In July 1994, after the armys defeat at the hands of the rebels brought about the end of the genocide, Mpiranya began a long journey into exile that would take him to several African countries.

In 1998, he fought alongside Congolese forces in a campaign against rebels backed by Rwandan troops, has said the non-profit African Rights, which has studied the genocide.

He also travelled to Zimbabwe on behalf of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a militia partly composed of former Hutus implicated in the genocide, and accused of exploiting the mineral wealth of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

In September 2002, the ICTR issued an arrest warrant against Mpiranya, prompting him to seek refuge in Zimbabwe, where he spent the next four years, living under a false name in an affluent neighbourhood in Harare.

Despite access to a fake Ugandan passport, his status as an international fugitive severely limited his opportunities for travel, with his wife and daughters living in the UK.

His last years were marked by anguish and fear of being discovered and of being tried for his crimes, like many other former Rwandan officials indicted for their roles in the 1994 genocide, the UN prosecutors said.
Ukraine announced it will hold its first war crimes trial over the Russian invasion, as Moscow accused Kyiv of shelling a Russian city in the wars latest flashpoint.

The conflict has devastated cities and displaced millions, with fears also growing of its broader international impact as gas supplies to Europe were disrupted by a halt in Russian flows through Ukraine.

Kyiv has repeatedly accused Russian troops of committing atrocities since the invasion began on February 24, and Ukrainian authorities said Wednesday they would launch the first war crimes trial of the conflict.

The prosecutor generals office said Vadim Shishimarin, a 21-year-old Russian service member, is accused of killing an unarmed 62-year-old civilian as he fled with four other soldiers in a stolen car.

The man died on the spot just a few dozen metres from his home, said a statement from prosecutor Iryna Venediktovas office.

Shishimarin faces possible life imprisonment if found guilty.

Venediktovas office has said it has received reports of more than 10,000 alleged war crimes, with 622 suspects identified.

The Russian invasion has sparked an exodus of nearly six million civilians, many of whom bear accounts of torture, sexual violence and indiscriminate destruction.

The UN Human Rights Council is due to hold a special session on Ukraine on Thursday.

Moscow has focused on eastern and southern Ukraine since it failed to take Kyiv in the first weeks of its campaign.

Ukraines forces were boosted by what Kyiv described as the recapture of four villages around the northeastern city of Kharkiv, close to the border with Russia.

In the Russian city of Belgorod, around 70 kilometres (43 miles) from Kharkiv, authorities said one person was killed and six injured by Ukrainian shelling.

Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said it was the most difficult situation facing the border region since Russia sent its troops into Ukraine 11 weeks ago.

Authorities in Russian regions bordering Ukraine have repeatedly accused Ukrainian forces of launching attacks.

In April, Gladkov said Ukrainian helicopters carried out a strike on a fuel storage facility in Belgorod.

 They come in waves 

In southern Ukraine, the pro-Kremlin authorities in the city of Kherson urged Putin to annex the region.

Kherson was the first major Ukrainian city to fall in the current conflict. It lies north of Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014.

Kirill Stremousov, deputy head of Khersons Moscow-installed administration, said there would be a request to make Kherson region a full subject of the Russian Federation.

The Kremlin replied it was up to the residents of Kherson to determine their own fate.

Ukrainian presidential aide Mykhaylo Podolyak said Kherson would be liberated and the invaders may ask to join even Mars or Jupiter.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has framed his nations resistance to the Russian invasion as a war against tyranny, but the fierce fightback has carried a heavy cost.

In a rare release of battle casualty figures, Ukraines National Guard said Wednesday that 561 of its members have been killed and nearly 1,700 wounded since the invasion began.

Neither the defence ministry in Kyiv nor its counterpart in Moscow has provided official death counts, but in mid-April, Zelensky said between 2,500 and 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed.

Ukraines effort to hold the Russian-speaking Donbas region in the east has also become increasingly desperate.

They come in waves, volunteer fighter Mykola said of the repeated Russian attempts to push past a strategic river near a rural settlement called Bilogorivka.

 NATO decision by Finland, Sweden 

Much of the world has moved to isolate Putin as punishment for the invasion.

Russia is today the most direct threat to the world order with the barbaric war against Ukraine, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in Tokyo Thursday after meeting Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

Kishida, whose government joined the tough measures against Moscow, added: Russias invasion of Ukraine is not just a matter for Europe, but it shakes the core of the international order including Asia. This must not be tolerated.

Russia has been hit with a wave of punishing economic sanctions that have started to take a toll on its foreign exchange reserves.

Zelensky said Wednesday that he had spoken with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz about boosting penalties on Moscow.

Step by step we are doing everything to make the aggressor feel the biggest pain from the aggression, the Ukrainian leader said.

But ramping up the embargoes has not been straightforward, with concern among some nations in Europe that rely on Russian gas.

Kyiv said Wednesday that Russia had halted gas supplies through a key transit hub in the east.

The stoppage caused supplies to plunge by 25 percent in Germany, which is dependent on Russia for its energy and has rejected an immediate full embargo on Russian gas.

The invasion of Ukraine has also prompted Sweden and Finland to consider NATO membership.

Finland was due to reveal its position on joining the bloc on Thursday.

 A mother mourns 

A Ukrainian commander in Mariupol appealed directly to Elon Musk on Wednesday, asking the worlds richest man to intervene on behalf of those trapped by Russian forces in the southern port city.

The war has devastated Mariupol, where Ukrainians have sustained a pocket of resistance at a steel factory.

Iryna Yegorchenko, 43, learned Wednesday that her soldier son Artem had died protecting the Azovstal plant.

I suddenly felt relieved, she told AFP.

The 22-year-old was crushed during the collapse of a structure and quickly went to God, said Yegorchenko, who lives in Kyiv.

He decided to defend his homeland, his people I have nothing to be ashamed of as a mother.

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Finland took a step Thursday towards fast-track NATO membership, triggering a blunt warning from the Kremlin, as the war in Ukraine throttled supplies of Russian gas to Europe and the number of people who fled the country passed six million.

In Geneva, the UN Human Rights Council decided to probe alleged Russian atrocities in Ukraine, in a vote overwhelmingly approved by its members but snubbed by Russia.

And in graphic new evidence of potential war crimes by Moscows forces, CNN aired footage it said showed Russian troops shooting two unarmed civilians in the back. AFP has not independently verified the footage.

Finlands leaders declared their nation must apply to join NATO without delay  a seismic change in policy since Russia invaded its neighbour in February.

As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defence alliance, President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said in a joint statement.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned Russia would definitely see Finnish membership as a threat.

The Russian foreign ministry said Moscow would be forced to take reciprocal steps, military-technical and other, to address the resulting threats.

In launching the invasion of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin cited in part what he called the threat from NATO, which expanded eastwards after the Cold War.

Finland has been a declared neutral in East-West crises for decades, and as recently as January its leaders ruled out NATO membership.

But the February 24 invasion shocked the Nordic nation.

It shares a 1,300-kilometre (800-mile) border with Russia and its past is studded with conflict with its giant neighbour.

NATO has already declared it will warmly embrace Finland and Sweden, two countries with deep pockets and well-equipped armies.

Finlands entry will be smooth and swift, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg promised on Thursday.

Germany, France and the powerful US Senate Foreign Relations Committee also strongly voiced their support, and Britain has already pledged its assistance.

A special committee will announce Finlands formal decision on a membership bid on Sunday. Sweden, another neutral state, is widely expected to follow.

 Russian gas 

Russias flow of gas to Europe meanwhile fell, spurring fears for Germany and other heavily dependent economies.

Russian energy giant Gazprom announced it would stop supplying gas via the Polish part of the Yamal-Europe pipeline following retaliatory sanctions that Moscow imposed Wednesday on Western companies.

Gazprom also said gas transiting to Europe via Ukraine had dropped by a third  a fall it blamed on Ukraines pipeline operator, which the company denies, pointing the finger at Russia.

Ukraine and Poland are major supply routes for Russian gas to Europe and the two sides have kept flows going despite the conflict.

The European Unions heavy reliance on Russian energy has made it reluctant to add oil and gas imports to sanctions targeting Russias economy.

Mykhaylo Podolyak, a senior aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, urged the bloc to impose an immediate embargo.

If the leaders had acted decisively in 1938, Europe could have avoided WWII, he wrote on Twitter. History wont forgive us if we make the same mistake again.

With a global food crisis feared as Ukrainian exports tumble, host Germany said the G7 club of industrialised nations will tackle the issue for the worlds poorest nations at talks beginning Thursday.

 Shelling 

Fighting in Ukraine has been concentrated in the south and east since Russia abandoned attempts to seize Kyiv.

Ukraines presidency said shelling continued throughout Lugansk  part of the Donbas region where Ukrainian forces are fiercely opposing Russian armour and Kremlin-backed separatists.

Russian troops are trying to take complete control of Rubizhne, block a key highway between Lysychansk and Bakhmut and seize Severodonetsk, the office said.

Zelensky said Thursday in his daily address to the nation that Russian forces have destroyed 570 health care facilities in the country, including 101 hospitals. What for? Its nonsense. Its barbarity, he said.

In the northeastern region of Chernigiv three people were killed and 12 others wounded early Thursday in a strike on a school in Novgorod-Siversky, the emergency services said.

In the southern port city of Mariupol, besieged troops in the vast Azovstal steelworks have been holding out against weeks-long bombardment, refusing demands to surrender.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said difficult talks were underway over the evacuation of 38 seriously wounded troops.

Russias army said it struck Donetsk and Kharkiv on Thursday, killing more than 170 people and destroying Ukrainian drones and rockets.

 War crimes probe 

In Geneva, the UN Human Rights Council voted 33-2 to investigate alleged atrocities by Russian troops.

The resolution, brought by Ukraine, will focus on alleged crimes in the Kyiv, Chernigiv, Kharkiv and Sumy regions in late February and March.

These have been 10 weeks of sheer horror to the people of my country, Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Dzhaparova told the UN meeting from Kyiv, accusing Putins forces of pure evil.

The International Criminal Court in The Hague has already begun its own inquiry, sending investigators to the Kyiv suburb of Bucha.

The invasion has sparked an exodus of civilians, many of whom describe torture, sexual violence and indiscriminate destruction.

The UN refugee agency said on Thursday the number of those who have fled Ukraine had passed six million, more than half of them going to neighbouring Poland.

Ukrainian prosecutors say they have received reports of more than 10,000 alleged crimes, with 622 suspects identified.

On Wednesday, the office said it would launch the first trial for war crimes.

CNN and the BBC on Thursday released what they said was security camera footage showing two Ukrainian civilians being shot in the back by Russian soldiers near a car dealership outside of Kyiv on March 16.

One man died on the spot, the other shortly thereafter.

Ukrainian authorities and witnesses interviewed by AFP also accused Russian forces of killing several civilians in March after shelling a residential home in the east Ukrainian village of Stepanki from a tank.

They started going into the house to hide, said Olga Karpenko, 52, whose daughter was among those killed. The tank took aim and fired as they entered the house.

Four people died, two were injured. My daughter died from a shrapnel wound in the back of her head, Karpenko said.

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The Ministry of Public Housing, Environment, Spatial Planning, and Infrastructure (Ministry of VROMI), and the Ministry of Finance, will be hosting a Job Mixer on Thursday, May 12 from 1:00PM to 5:00PM at the Government Administration Building.





The event will focus on highlighting the Ministries current vacancies, objectives, collaborative opportunities, and showcase some of the projects that the Ministries have accomplished or are currently working on.





The underlying concept is to attract skilled and enthusiastic professionals and allow them an opportunity to apply for vacancies and learn from other informed experts.





The Minister of VROMI Hon. Egbert Doran and the Minister of Finance Hon. Ardwell Irion will be addressing those in attendance about new opportunities and career advancement options within the government organization.





The Job Mixer will take place in Room 1 at the Government Building. There will be signs directing you to the room.





Persons attending the Job Mixer should walk with their resume.





The Job Mixer is being supported by the Management teams and key personnel of both ministries as well as the Department of Personnel and Organization.
Kyiv condemned the sheer horror and pure evil of Russias war in Ukraine at an extraordinary meeting Thursday of the United Nations Human Rights Council about Moscows alleged violations.

Ukraines Deputy Foreign Minister Emine Dzhaparova said Russia was committing the most gruesome human rights violations on the European continent in decades, as countries slammed the conduct of President Vladimir Putins troops.

The UNs top rights body will vote on a draft resolution calling for an investigation into alleged violations since Russias February 24 invasion of Ukraine, with a view to holding those responsible to account.

More than 50 countries backed Kyivs request for a special session of the UNs top rights body to examine the deteriorating human rights situation in Ukraine stemming from the Russian aggression.

Russia snubbed the session.

These have been 10 weeks of sheer horror to the people of my country, Dzhaparova said, speaking from Kyiv.

Torture and enforced disappearances, sexual and gender-based violence; the list of Russias crimes is endless.

Only the world standing strong in solidarity with the Ukrainian people can defeat this pure evil.

 Russias chair empty 

Russia was among the 47 council members until the UN General Assembly in New York voted on April 7 to suspend it from the body and from sitting in judgement of other nations human rights records.

Russia then immediately withdrew from the council.

It was the first meeting of the body since then to address the situation in Ukraine.

Now an ordinary observer, Russia was offered the floor but its chair was left vacant.

Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Tuesday that Moscow will not legitimise with its presence this new political show.

UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet told the council that her office was verifying allegations of international human rights and humanitarian law violations, many of which may amount to war crimes.

The scale of unlawful killings, including indicia of summary executions in areas to the north of Kyiv, is shocking, she said.

While we have information about 300 such killings, the figures will continue to increase as new evidence becomes available. These killings of civilians often appeared to be intentional.

US ambassador Michele Taylor said that Russias frustrations at being unable to defeat Ukraine militarily had led to ever-more-egregious human rights abuses.

She said Putin had shown an utter disregard for human rights and human life and urged the councils scrutiny to expose Russias continued attempts to hide atrocities.

 Repeated rapes 

Dzhaparova held up a picture featuring black lines which she said had been drawn by an 11-year-old boy raped in front of his mother, now only able to communicate through drawing as psychologists try to help him recover.

Frances ambassador Jerome Bonnafont, speaking for the European Union, said the EU was shocked and appalled by the staggering scale of human rights violations committed by Russia.

The high numbers of brutal killings of civilians, the documented cases of repeated rapes, summary executions and enforced disappearances, as well as other incidents of unlawful violence and threats against civilians, and the large-scale targeting of civilian infrastructures show the true face of Russias brutal war.

The Human Rights Council holds three regular sessions a year, in March, June and September.

The support of 16 council members  more than a third of the membership  is required to convene a special session.

Thursdays session is the 34th extraordinary meeting of the UNs top rights body since its creation in 2006.
Matthew War Bonnet was just six years old when he was shipped off to a US government-funded boarding school in South Dakota for Native American children.

Beaten, starved, stripped of his Lakota language and culture, the next eight years were very painful and traumatic, War Bonnet told a House hearing on Thursday on a bill to create a Truth and Healing Commission on the boarding schools.

The 76-year-old War Bonnet was one of several Native American survivors of federally funded boarding schools to testify about their harrowing experiences at the institutions.

The hearing came a day after the Department of the Interior issued a report about the treatment of children in the Federal Indian boarding school system between 1819 and 1969.

War Bonnet and his nine other siblings attended the same school, the Saint Francis Boarding School in South Dakota.

It is hard to speak about it without making myself feel bad by bringing up these memories, he told the House subcommittee.

Corporal punishment was common. The priests would often get impatient and discipline us by hitting us with a leather strap or a willow stick, War Bonnet said.

Another way the priests disciplined us was to lock us out of the school during the cold weather, he said. One time I got in trouble and my punishment was for 10 days I was separated from the other kids and given only bread and water to eat.

War Bonnet said the children were forced to speak English and it became difficult to speak with my parents in our Lakota language.

The government and the churches need to be held accountable for what happened at these schools, he said.

 My entire life 

Jim Labelle, who was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, to a white father and an Inupiaq mother, also testified before the House subcommittee.

I have been waiting to tell this story for my entire life, the 75-year-old Labelle said.

We lost our ability to speak our language and do our traditional hunting, fishing, and gathering, he said. At the end of 10 years, I did not know who I was as a Native person.

I didnt know who I was because they never told us who we were, Labelle said. I learned American history, world history, math, science, and English, but never who I was as an Inupiaq person.

Labelle also recounted harsh punishment including being sprayed with icy water from a firehose.

There was also sexual abuse, he said. These schools were magnets for pedophiles.

According to the Interior Department report, more than 500 American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children died in the boarding schools.

The Department expects that continued investigation will reveal the approximate number of Indian children who died at Federal Indian boarding schools to be in the thousands or tens of thousands, the report said.

A statement released along with the report said the school system had the twin goals of cultural assimilation and territorial dispossession of Indigenous peoples through the forced removal and relocation of their children.

Canada is also grappling with the legacy of abuse and neglect at its schools for Indigenous children.

Thousands died at the schools, and many were subjected to physical and sexual abuse, according to an investigative commission that concluded the Canadian government engaged in cultural genocide.
Ji Chang Wook, Choi Sung Eun and Hwang In Yeop's "The Sound of Magic" dominated the global Hallyu scene instantaneously after its release.

The main cast of the drama shared their personal experiences and memories which pushed them to choose the work. Read to know more!

Ji Chang Wook, Choi Sung Eun Dish Reasons for Choosing 'The Sound of Magic'

The new musical fantasy drama "The Sound of Magic" graced the small screen on May 6 with beauty, romance, and magic.

Ji Chang Wook, Choi Sung Eun, and Hwang In Yeop led the drama, and told the story of young students who learn how to dream again with the help of a mysterious magician.

In their exclusive interview with W Korea, Ji Chang Wook and Choi Sung Eun shared what made them choose "The Sound of Magic."

For Ji Chang Wook, the drama is his story. He said, "With Yoon Ah Yi's (Choi Sung Eun) poverty and concerns and Na Il Deung's (Hwang In Yeop) worries about his grades, I was reminded of my teenage years."

According to the actor, he was also stressed a lot because of his grades. He also shared that there was a time where his life was difficult to handle due unsolved family problems.

Because of Ji Chang Wook's similarities with the two characters, he chose to do the project without hesitation.

As for Choi Sung Eun, she fell in love with the story and her character, Yoon Ah Yi, at the very first meeting.

"Through Lee Eul (Ji Chang Wook) and Yoon Ah Yi's personal struggles, I received a lot of comfort," Choi Sung Eun shared. "I want to show how beautiful and lyrical the story is, which I know will touch the people of this generation."

'The Sound of Magic' Themes, Message, More

Since the drama focuses on the beauty and magical aspects of it, Ji Chang Wook is reminded of a child's innocence.

"The Sound of Magic" will mean something different for each viewer, but it will surely give a sense of compassion, comfort, and healing.

The actor also shared how his grandfather's death impacted his life. He shared that during his college days, he would often go out and drink yet hide from problems and responsibilities.

Looking back, Ji Chang Wook finds the similarities of him and his character, Lee Eul, a magician who's afraid to grow up due to the pain he felt when he was younger.

Thanks to "The Sound of Magic," he realized that all the unhappy memories that helped him grow into a stronger adult. There will always be magic and beauty after the rain.

For Choi Sung Eun, Lee Eul's words truly struck her heart. It gave her a different kind of boost to take on a challenge that she's never done before.

In the drama, Lee Eul said, "I'm not telling you to live while only doing the things you want to do. I'm telling you to do the things you want to do, as much as you do the things you don't want to do."

Choi Sung Eun admits that she's grateful for the character, both as Yoon Ah Yi and the actress herself.

"He allowed me to realize so much more than that," Choi Sung Eun shared. "I hope the viewers never give up on their dreams despite the hardships and reality."

Catch "The Sound of Magic" on Netflix with English subtitles! Watch the teaser here:

KDramaStars owns this article.

Written by Elijah Mully.
John Gowland, holding a Rush LP in his vinyl-packed living room, is one of the organizers of the Kelowna Music Collectors Show, which will see thousands of records, CDs and stereos for sale from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday at the Ukrainian Catholic Church Hall, 1091 Coronation Ave.
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An Ontario Provincial Police logo is shown during a news conference in Barrie, Ont., on April 3, 2019. A British Columbia flight instructor alleges the pilot of a plane that crashed in northern Ontario with two wanted men on board had been advertising flight tours on a plane that wasn't registered for commercial use. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette
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On May 11th 2022, the Council of Ministers attended the Royal Caribbean Group and Government partnership signing ceremony at the Dr A.C Wathey Cruise & Port facility. At this ceremony, the MOU was signed by the Minister of public Health, Social Development and Labor Omar Ottley and Ms. Wendy McDonald who is the regional Vice president of government relations of RCG. The ceremony was hosted by the NESC and the Minister delivered the following speech:





Today is a historic moment for Sint Maarten.

As Minister of labor I can truly say this marks a milestone in our labor market. Since the Hurricanes Irma and Maria, unemployment has been steadily rising. However, just when we were seeing the light, we had to deal with the COVID-19.





This all started with a conversation in my office. In April 2021, I sat with Mrs. Dros- Richardson and said to her I need a six month plan for the ministry. We spoke of many things, including the online job portal, which RCG and the NESC will actually be using as a tool to source employment locally. At the end of that meeting, her eyes lit up and she said Boss we have an amazing opportunity for our people to work on the cruise ships in collaboration with RCG and create up to 1000 jobs.

Guess what? That is when my eyes began to light up as well. I said Mrs. Dros get it done, I do not care what it takes get it done and I leave the ball in your court. For those who know Mrs. Dros, oh lord that is all you need to tell her and she runs with it.





But guess what, we are standing here today at this ceremony. Because upon entering office it was not my way or the high way. I took time to discuss and see what my staff and team have in the pipelines.

The same can be said with MP Ludmila De Weever, she had so many ideas for our people and the cruise lines, it was amazing.

Today falls in line with the goals of the Ministry of VSA. Like the Rhianna song says work work work. Over the pass year, we have had job fairs at the hospital, the airport and now we invade the ports.

To the NESC team I say thank you,

To my colleagues in the Council of Ministers, I say thank you,

To the entire Royal Caribbean Group, I say thank you.

I will end by saying this, it is better to be prepared for opportunity that has not yet arrived, than for the opportunity to arrive and you are not prepared.

Sint Maarten this is your time to be prepared, because the opportunity is on its way and it is called Royal Caribbeans Cruise Line.

The NESC, under the Ministey VSA will head the recruitment drive so I encourage everyone interested to please register with us at www.nesc.sx.

Thank you
The Kenosha Sportfishing and Conservation Association will hold a Kids Fish N Fun event at Anderson Pond, adjacent to the Anderson Park Pool, from 9 a.m. to noon Saturday. The aim is to introduce families to the sport of fishing and educate children about the environment.

The event is for children ages 4 to 12 with an adult. Complimentary fishing rods and reels will be given away while supplies last. Kids can learn about lure selection, casting, bait selection, fly tying and more. There will also be free hot dogs, chips, water and swag bags with environmental educational materials.

No pre-registration is required.

John Meyer, a volunteer with KSFCA, said the event, which began 20 years ago, is a way to introduce kids and families to fishing and enjoying the outdoors.

We hope people can come and enjoy the outdoors, Meyer said. We want to introduce children to the wonders of nature and turn them into life-long learners.

Whoever catches the longest fish will win the Joseph Borden Longest Fish Award. Borden died earlier this year, and although he was not a member of KSFCA, he was an avid fisherman.

KSFCA President Lynn Davis said nearly 30 of Bordens friends and family members donated well over $1,500 to the organization. In honor of Borden and the generosity of his friends and family, the award bears his name.

Ive never seen donations like that, Davis said.

Great to be back

The event was unfortunately canceled twice during COVID according to Davis, but she said they are excited to be back.

This is an opportunity to teach Kenosha children how to fish and how much fun they can have, Davis said. It feels great to be back. We just hope the weather cooperates.

Meyer said teaching kids at a young age about the outdoors, nature and where their food comes from is important, and something that many dont learn enough about.

Were hoping this event turns people towards doing these kinds of things on their own, Meyer said. Anything that can get kids outside is good.

Two Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Wardens will be on hand to assist and give a presentation.

For more information on the event, go to kenoshasportfishing.com, or email fishnfun@kenoshasportfishing.com.

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KENOSHA  The Kemper Hall Alumnae Association, which is working to raise funds for a renovation project at the historic Kemper Center, is hosting an organ recital Saturday, May 21, in the Kemper Center Chapel, 6501 Third Ave.

The renovations are for the fourth floor, above Founders Hall, said Pat Mott, who is the alumnae groups treasurer, as well as chairwoman of the Kemper Center Board of Directors.

Brian Schoettler is performing the organ recital and is also performing for the Kemper Hall 150th anniversary celebration on June 25. (Kemper Hall was a girls school that operated for several decades at the site, nestled on the shore of Lake Michigan.)

Schoettler's program will feature "Prelude and Fugue in E-flat Major, BMV 552" by Johann Sebastian Bach; "Elevation" from "Mass for the Convents" by Francois Couperin; and "Scherzo" from Symphony No. 2, Op. 20, "Adagio" from Symphony No. 3, Op. 28 and "Final" from Symphony No. 2, Op. 14, all by Louis Vierne.

Schoettler is also performing his own coompsition, "Variations on Kemper."

Music was a major part of education at Kemper Hall, Mott said.

"Miss Wreden taught piano and was the choir director," Mott, a 1962 Kemper Hall graduate, recalled. "We had various choirs and a lot of attention to individual voice lessons, as well as the piano. Musical plays such as 'The Mikado' by Gilbert & Sullivan and 'Hansel and Gretel' by Lillian & Robert Masters were performed.

"Students had music appreciation class and this would include attending the Kenosha Symphony, attending concerts such as Arthur Rubenstein, performing individual and group recitals at Nash House or traveling."

In the school's early years, Mott added, "there was a band, too. So music was very much a part of our education and having Brian perform the classics on the organ will bring back wonderful memories."

Schoettler serves as Minister of Music and Organist at First United Methodist Church in Evanston, Ill., where he directs the chancel, handbell, gospel and childrens choir groups. He is also a member of the organ faculty at the Music Institute of Chicago.

He earned his doctor of musical arts degree in organ performance and literature at the Eastman School of Music. He also has a bachelor's degree in organ performances and instrumental music education from Carthage College and a master's degree in music in organ performance and composition from Westminster Choir College.

He has participated in summer composition programs at Yales Institute of Sacred Music and with the European American Musical Alliance at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, and his compositions have been performed throughout the United States.

The recital is 7 to 8 p.m. on May 21. Tickets are $20 per person and are available online at kempercenter.com or at the door. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. Note: Schoettler will stay in the chapel to talk with audience members and answer questions after the recital. For more information about Schoettler, go to brianschoettler.com.

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This is one first-person story I never thought I would write.

My last day with the Kenosha News will be Thursday, May 12, two months shy of 23 years with the paper and 30 years as a daily reporter covering southeastern Wisconsin (including seven years for the Journal Times in Racine).

It seems fitting, having come from a line of Kenosha County farmers, that my last story will be a feature about the family that will host the 2022 Dairy Breakfast. But, as it has become a tradition for longtime reporters to write an outgoing recap ... I first find myself reflecting on assignments gone by.

I cringe at the thought of first-person pieces. For me, this career is about sharing the stories of others, about recording history, and about informing the public.

Aside from an occasional first-hand account  such as trying my hand as a taxidermist for a dirty jobs series, jumping off a mail boat in Lake Geneva, or being forced to sample food at the Kenosha County Fair  I have mostly steered clear of the spotlight.

I take pride in the fact that after so many years there are still people who dont connect my face to my byline.

Speaking of bylines, I cannot fathom how many there have been. But, there is a reason my last name appears as Tatge-Rozell. I kept my maiden name attached to my byline because I would not have become a writer if it were not for my late brother Jay Tatge. Jay, who died in a car accident just months after graduating from Central High School in Paddock Lake, wrote for the Falcon Flyer. He also wrote poetry. After his passing, I wrote letters to him in heaven and also started to write poems. I was 7.

My first experience with the Kenosha News was actually as a staff writer during the summer of 1990 for feature editor Elaine Edwards. One day that August, as I sat at a microfiche machine looking for today in history blurbs, I came across the story about my brothers accident. It was a story I had never seen before. My parents, faithful subscribers, didnt keep a clip of it. I was 20.

Celebrate lives

It hit me like a freight train that I had lived longer than him. I vowed if I ever had to write a story about someones family member dying I would be sensitive to their loss. Unfortunately, there were many such stories of untimely and sometimes tragic deaths to be written. I feel Jay was there, helping me find the words to celebrate these lives.

My first day back at the Kenosha News was July 5, 1999, after graduating from DePaul University in Chicago and moving to Chicago columnist Mike Roykos beloved Bohners Lake community in the town of Burlington. Three days before starting the new work-from-home position, my home was destroyed by fire.

One of the few things able to be salvaged from the charred remains was a stack of newspapers with the stories I had written for the Journal Times about the Green Bay Packers making it to the Super Bowl in 1997. The pages, edged in soot, have since further yellowed.

Less than a week later I found myself, digital camera in hand (as the first reporter for the Kenosha News to use one), heading out to report on a house fire. The smell is something that stays with you and I immediately burst into tears, overcome by emotion. I vowed that every time I wrote about a fire I would also offer to help  most recently giving my sons winter boots away to someone who evacuated without shoes.

Sadly, the awards I have received over the years are tied to tragedy, such as stories on what became referred to as a plot to kill at Burlington High School shortly after the mass shooting at Columbine, as well as coverage of tornados that have torn through Kenosha County.

At times, I found myself in the thick of it. I interviewed the family of one of accused teens in Burlington when the landlord walked in to tell them they were being evicted. I ran through pouring rain and jumped over live wires in Wheatland, calling into peoples damaged homes after the tornado hit to see if they were in need of assistance. And, I was just inside the door of the Kenosha County Safety Building during the aftermath of the Jacob Blake shooting in August 2020 when an angry crowd broke the door  my camera in hand as the Kenosha County Sheriffs Department SWAT team rushed past me from behind.

While I will no longer report on the issues, I will still be able to help the residents of Kenosha County in my new role with Kenosha County Executive Samantha Kerkman.

I will miss the creative, thoughtful, brilliant people I work with  many of whom, like me, play a musical instrument or two.

I will also miss writing stories that can affect change. Take, for example, a story I wrote decades ago about a zoning battle in Waterford. Tom Kojis, who was born with cerebral palsy, opened a plant stand at his home on a corner of Main Street. All but his corner were zoned commercial. As a result, a neighbor complained he should not be able to operate a business there.

After weeks of meetings, petitions, letters  and multiple newspaper stories  Kojis was unanimously granted permission to sell his flowers.

Still in operation today, he now employs part-time seasonal help

If you get a chance, stop by 509 E. Main St. in Waterford, and see the beautiful fruits of his labor. And, dont forget to support local journalism. By doing so, you can help change the world, or at least one small corner of it.

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SOMERS  Take a quick look at the accomplishments of Kelly Burke over the past five years and you might think that she has either figured out a way to live without sleep or she is heavily invested in the Keurig and Nespresso companies.

Would you believe sleeping is one of my favorite things to do? Burke says. I do it quite often. Work, school, self-care, and sleep  that has been my life lately.

Burke graduates from the University of Wisconsin-Parkside on Saturday as the Chancellors Award recipient, emblematic of the top in her class.

Along the way she has earned four majors: accounting, management information systems (MIS), marketing, and business management with a finance concentration. Burke is also completing certificates in project management and sales.

Her academic record is exceptional. Burke was inducted into Beta Gamma Sigma, a business honor society, and completed a total of 128 credits at UW-Parkside with a near-perfect GPA of 3.989 (in other words, she only received one A-minus in all of her Parkside classes). Impressive? To say the least.

I dont watch much TV, nor have time to spend on social media, Burke says.

In 2017 she transferred from Milwaukee Area Technical College to UW-Parkside.

I also attended college when I was younger, Burke says. But when she couldnt decide exactly what she wanted to do, she put college on hold. I still have a hard time deciding what I want to be when I grow up, Burke says in fun, thats how I ended up with four bachelors degrees and two certificates.

As an older adult returning to higher education, Burkes motivation to demonstrate excellence is beyond words. She works more than a full-time job as a quality-control supervisor. She and her husband, Anthony, live in Caledonia, with a blended family of eight children.

I have a wonderful husband who is retired from the military, Burke says. He knows how to cook, clean, do laundry, and take care of things around the house. This was very much a joint effort.

Burke is not exactly sure of the moment her educational experience clicked. The change in attitude for me came naturally because I could see how passionate the instructors were about teaching their courses, she says. I started to thoroughly enjoy participating in class. The students were engaged and welcoming. My opinion is  if it isnt more than just class, thats because a person is making a deliberate attempt at not getting involved.

Involvement

On campus, Burke serves as vice president of Accountants in Action, the universitys Accounting Club. Burkes involvement in the club came by coincidence. The clubs president mistakenly thought Burke had applied for the position  she had not, be said she would be more than willing to help.

Burke served as an ambassador for Becker Accounting. She is a member of the Wisconsin Chapter of Women in Technology  an organization that promotes womens participation in STEM careers. Burke even met with the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) team as a student representative sharing her perspectives during the UW-Parkside business program mandatory reaccreditation.

Dr. Rizvana Zameeruddin, UW-Parkside associate professor of accounting, describes Burke as extremely conscientious and detail-oriented. Kelly is especially inclusive of her colleagues in group assignments and projects, and respects her colleagues and the faculty alike, Zameeruddin says.

Other faculty see Burkes accomplishments as an inspiration to others. In an age where we are seeking to increase womens participation in quantitative and technical fields, Kellys achievements serve as a guiding light to future female students everywhere, says Dr. Suresh Chalasani, interim associate dean for the UW-Parkside College of Business, Economics, and Computing. For working adults, her accomplishments show that a work-life-educational balance is not only achievable but one can achieve exceptional and high-quality outcomes.

Going back to class

When Burke decided to return to the classroom, her children were a big reason why. I was nervous, she says, but I knew my kids were watching me and I wanted to give them the guidance I never had so that they could have a solid foundation in adulthood.

She chose UW-Parkside because it was close and convenient. At first, I just wanted to get through it; I was busy with work, home life, and now homework, Burke says. Soon enough, I got to know fellow students and teachers. I was participating in community-based learning courses and decided to apply for a study abroad trip to Cuba. I made the Dean and Provosts lists every semester and was awarded the Falbo Scholarship and the Ruth Hall Scholarship.

Burke also earned the universitys prestigious Academic Achievement Award each year. The award recognizes student success in the classroom and in the community. Heres just a few other things Burke has been doing in her spare time:

Representing UW-Parkside at the BizTimes Media Future 50 Awards luncheon

Meeting with prospective students who are considering UW-Parkside

Building Microsoft Access databases for a Racine company as part of an internship

Participating in Rebuilding Kenosha, created after the Jacob Blake shooting

Rebuilding Kenosha was an experience that Burke says especially stands out. One of my former instructors invited me to be part of this initiative, she says. I was able to participate for a short while and it was amazing to see how people came together. We had open and honest conversations that really served to change the future of the community.

A new degree goal

Burkes children were a big reason she returned to school. Now shell have the opportunity to study at UW-Parkside right alongside her oldest son who earned his undergraduate degree in information technology last year. He told me he was applying for grad school  at UW-Parkside, Burke says. I couldnt be prouder and I know he chose Parkside because of me. He saw how it changed me  it gave me confidence. It helped me to dream again.

An M.B.A. might not have been on Burkes road map, but curiosity and her son changed all of that. I took an extra course in data analytics this semester because I was curious what would be taught, and if I would like it, she says. I ended up loving it  it is one of my favorite courses I have ever taken. When my son mentioned that the M.B.A. he found was offered though Parkside  that pretty much sealed the deal.

Now that an educational journey toward four majors is almost complete, Burke says she doesnt remember many times when it was unbearable. I have always had my husband, kids, and family as a strong support system. In hard times, I usually complain at my husband and he gives me encouraging words to keep me going, she says.

Burke also credits a strong sense of support from UW-Parkside faculty and staff, saying they care and are willing to go above and beyond to help their students succeed.

I would have never thought in a million years, when I made the decision to apply to UW-Parkside that my life could have been so enriched by the people that I metat and through the university, Burke says. My experience at UW-Parkside has been so fulfilling  I know I ended up at Parkside exactly when I was supposed to be there.

John Mielke wrote this feature for the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, and it is presented here as a special feature for the Kenosha News.

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The people do not want new faces or new leaders with hollow dreams, but a strong national initiative to get the country out of the mire. That is why we see the political alliance between President Gotabaya and Ranil as a good step.

Editorial

As we reported in our last edition Ranil Wickremesinghe will be sworn in as the new Prime Minister before President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. If he is able to get the appointment, this will be his sixth term as Prime Minister. Most certainly, this appointment will be the most challenging one he will ever receive. This is a decisive political decision that will write the most important chapter in his politics. Ranil is well acquainted with the criticisms levelled at him by his political opponents and social groups including religious leaders who are well versed not in religion but in politics. But the real challenge he faces is how to recover from the colossal crisis facing the state and its people. Ranils main opponent, Sajith Premadasa will lose his chance to become the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka once again.

Mr Ranil Wickremesinghe

We believe it is important to mention here a parable in folklore. A man who had great faith in God who always performed religious sacrifices once went to bathe and started drowning. Seeing the incident, a man swam up to him and tried to save his life. But the drowning man refused his help saying that God is coming to save him. Then another boat came to the rescue of the man. Refusing to seek his help too, he reaffirmed that God would come to his rescue. In a few moments, he drowned. The man who had a great devotion to God went to heaven after death. God saw him and asked why he was so angry and sad. He then said that he was angry and sad because God did not come to save his life when he drowned, even though he had made many sacrifices to God. Then God told him that God comes in disguise and that ordinary man needs to have the brain to understand that. This parable is equally useful in ordinary life as in politics. Likewise, opposition Leader, Sajith Premadasa's political opportunities are similar. Although Sajith Premadasa is theoretically brilliant, it is unfortunate that he does not have such a broad understanding of how to behave in politics in a country like Sri Lanka. Due to this, his first political enemy was able to take full advantage of it. This is the difference between theories and strategies. Sajith is yet to understand that if the will is great, the difficulties may not be great. Unfortunately, it is not surprising that in the next few days he will lose not only the post of Prime Minister but also the leadership of the Opposition. That is the nature of politics in Sri Lanka

A controversial figure in Sri Lankan politics Ranil Wickremesinghe is going to be the Prime Minister. Whether the President is late or not, this decision is vital to his political survival. Though we cannot be fully optimistic about this decision, it is certainly a positive approach. Mr Wickremasinghe's active participation is essential to overcome, to some extent, the massive political and economic crisis facing the country. It is good to take advantage of his political experiences at this moment. Undoubtedly, this appointment will be of some help in alleviating the plight of Mahinda Rajapaksa's family members.

Ranil knows politics. He knows how to read between the lines. He is a politician with a broad understanding of regional and international relations. He should be given the opportunity to prove in the coming weeks that he has a plan to overcome the massive economic crisis. It is also important that he use this opportunity to correct his old mistakes and to be wary of opportunists he has met in the past.

Political alliances are not a strange or new experience for Mr Wickremesinghe. Throughout his life, he has sought to gain power through various political alliances. However, unquestionably, the support of all is needed to manage the fragile political instability in Parliament and beyond. On the other hand, it is advantageous for President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to meet a person he can trust politically outside his family corporation. This will require both sides to move to short-term, medium-term and long-term programs and evaluate them accordingly. The success of this political alliance depends entirely on the unity of each other and the talented team members. Both sides will have to identify national priorities and understand the positivity of political cohabitation. The people do not want new faces or new leaders with hollow dreams, but a strong national initiative to get the country out of the mire. That is why we see the political alliance between President Gotabaya and Ranil as a good step.
A guest column by the American Society of Anesthesiologists, exclusive to KevinMD.

As leaders in patient safety, anesthesiologists are committed to improving patient care and positively impacting the experiences of expectant mothers to ensure the health and safety of mom and baby. Along with primary health care providers, anesthesiologists are available to help expectant mothers develop a plan to have the best possible labor and delivery experience.

Not only are we the physicians who lead the anesthesia team to ease labor pain during childbirth, but we take care of mom and baby to set them up for health success when they go home.

Anesthesiologists have their patients backs! Literally and figuratively.

Anesthesiologists play a key role in pregnant womens short- and long-term health. Not only do we ease their labor pain, but we help manage and minimize health effects of pregnancy, such as chronic pain after delivery, and opioid addiction following Cesarean delivery. Were also at the forefront of preventing maternal mortality and morbidity and addressing racial and ethnic disparities prevalent within maternal health care.

We help plan womens pain management after childbirth.

Acute pain after surgery or delivery has been associated with greater risks of chronic pain and postpartum depression, and we are continually working to improve provider and patient education and treatment choices. Anesthesiologists have standardized care plans to decrease and control pain after delivery, such as providing various types of medications at once (known as multimodal analgesia) and enhanced recovery after Cesarean. Even a severe positional headache or spinal headache, an uncommon complication resulting from an epidural or spinal anesthesia, can have long-term side effects if left untreated (see the American Society of Anesthesiologists [ASA] statement on post-dural puncture headache management).

Sadly, 1 in 300 women who have a Cesarean delivery still take opioids one year later. We encourage patients to take the time to learn how they can optimize their pregnancy health and review their options for pain relief during and after delivery. Together with their anesthesiologist and primary health care providers, they can discuss and decide what types of pain relief might be best, also known as shared decision making, and express their concerns or fears about postpartum depression. Decisions made with the patients health care team, in addition to standardized protocols involving routine acetaminophen and anti-inflammatories, has been shown to decrease opioid consumption after delivery and reduce long-term opioid use.

We help prevent maternal mortality and morbidity.

What patients may not see or even be aware of is that anesthesiologists actively plan and participate in ways to reduce serious maternal morbidity (e.g., blood transfusions or intensive care unit admission) and mortality. We examine adverse events to identify the systemic root causes of these serious issues and provide solutions to improve care at the hospital and state levels.

For example, a state perinatal quality collaborative reduced severe maternal morbidity from hemorrhage in California. Additionally, weve helped recognize and treat preeclampsia/high blood pressure during pregnancy and responded to the need for specialized labor and delivery equipment, such as rapid transfusers to combat hypothermia and blood loss, and video-laryngoscopes for assistance intubating, as pregnant women have a higher incidence of difficult intubations (placement of breathing tube).

We help address health care disparities.

Unfortunately, we continue to combat increasing maternal mortality across the nation, as well as racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities within maternal health care. A recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report shows the overall maternal death rate in the U.S. rose from 20.1 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2019 to 23.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2020, marking an 18% increase. For non-Hispanic Black women, that number jumped to 55.3 deaths per 100,000 live births.

Black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women and are at a higher risk of severe maternal morbidities. Additionally, Black and Hispanic women in the U.S. are less likely to receive epidural analgesia for labor pain than white women.

In October 2021, ASAs Committee on Obstetric Anesthesia issued recommendations for reducing racial and ethnic disparities in maternal anesthesia care, which can be summarized in five themes: 1) Measuring disparities; 2) Recognizing disparities at personal and systems-levels; 3) Increasing awareness of the magnitude of disparities; 4) Overcoming communication barriers; and 5) Addressing differences in the structure of care. The use of standardized protocols, like the Society of Obstetric Anesthesia and Perinatologys Consensus Statement and Recommendations for Enhanced Recovery after Cesarean, can help reduce health care disparities as well.

Mark Zakowski is an obstetric anesthesiologist.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
The 2022 Medscape poll on physician burnout confirms what has been painfully obvious to doctors on the frontlines of COVID-19: Their burnout is intensifying.

According to the survey of 13,000 doctors, the nations most burned-out physicians are those in emergency medicine (60%) and critical care (56%). Medscape, a leading health care publication, describes burnout as long-term, unresolvable job-related stress that leads to exhaustion, cynicism, and feelings of detachment.

These types of psychological issues are a predictable outcome for physicians whove been fighting a continuous and often-losing battle against the coronavirus.

But not all of Medscapes burnout statistics are as easy to explain. Look directly below the two most burned-out specialties, and youll find obstetrics and gynecology (53%) and, not far behind it, pediatrics (49%).

Among the 29 medical specialties surveyed, OB/GYN and pediatrics have reported some of the professions largest increases in burnout over the past two years. Compared to the 2020 Medscape poll (which included pre-pandemic data), the burnout rate for pediatric physicians is up 8% and, for OB/GYNs, 13%.

Looking closer at OB/GYN and pediatrics

Few in health care would have predicted these spikes. After all, OB/GYNs and pediatricians havent had to watch COVID-19 patients die day after day, wave after wave  not like their colleagues in the ERs and ICUs.

And their rapid rise in burnout makes even less sense when you look at the No. 1 cause of physician dissatisfaction overall, according to Medscape. In 2022, 60% of doctors attributed their burnout to administrative tasks, such as filling out insurance and billing forms.

Indeed, most doctors find it annoying and time-wasting to seek prior authorization and meet billing documentation requirements.

But its not as though any one specialty is tasked with doing significantly more paperwork than others. Rather, this oft-cited complaint generally affects all specialties the same (and no other potential cause garnered more than 40% of physician votes).

So, there must be another reason for the sudden spike in burnout among OB/GYNs and pediatricians.

Part of the answer lies in what distinguishes these two specialties. According to recent estimates, 85% of all OB/GYNs and 73% of pediatricians are women, the highest percentages of female physicians among all specialties.

To understand the spikes in burnout among these doctors, we need to ask: Whats been happening to women physicians?

Times are changing, but not fast enough

Women make up more than a third of all doctors and comprise a growing majority of medical students. These days, more women than ever are completing their residency training in surgical specialties, despite ongoing verbal discouragement from some of the men who still dominate these fields.

Medicine has seen progress toward gender equality in recent decades, but the fact remains: Women physicians consistently report higher burnout rates than men.

A lack of due recognition and fairness no doubt contribute. A 25% pay gap still stands between men and women in medicine. In academic periodicals, women are published far less often and account for only 1 in 5 editor-in-chief positions in top-ranked medical journals.

In fact, women are underrepresented in nearly all health care leadership positions, making up only 18% of hospital CEOs and 16% of deans and department chairs.

Among physician mothers, nearly 1 in 3 have experienced discrimination because of pregnancy or breastfeeding.

But even these long-standing gender inequities fail to explain the recent increases in burnout among women-led specialties. And they dont help us understand why the burnout gap has widened by several percentage points over the past two years. Among doctors today, 56% of women are burned out vs. 41% of men.

Putting the pieces together, the best explanation for the recent surge among OB/GYNs and pediatricians stems from events happening outside the medical profession.

For the past five months, this series (called Breaking The Rules Of Health Care) has focused on the unwritten rules of medicine, which dictate the right way for doctors to behave. This article, however, examines a different kind of rule: not one emanating from within health care but, rather, from American society. It best explains the uptick in burnout among women physicians.

The rule: Women are expected to work three jobs, men only one and a half

For women in medicine, the past two years have been a test of resilience. As one respondent wrote in the 2022 Medscape survey: Home is just as busy and chaotic as work. I can never relax.

That quote is consistent with the results of a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, which found that doctor moms spend 8.5 hours more on household work each week than doctor dads. And that data was collected in 2014, long before COVID-19.

During the pandemic, women have been working more in all phases of life.

Its what sociologists and psychologists call the third shift. Meaning, women work one shift at home, another at their job, and then a third, which involves taking on extra responsibilities at work and at home.

The pandemic added more duties than ever to the third shift at home.

When schools closed, women (disproportionately more than men) supervised their kids remote learning and attended more often to the emotional needs of the entire household.

Lareina Yee, a senior partner at McKinsey, wrote in an article for Fast Company that the third shift is comparable to housework in that its unpaid, underestimated, unglamorous  and essential. For women in medicine, this triple shift is causing heightened levels of frustration, fatigue, and unfulfillment, both in life and at work.

Stress at work, stress at home

Doctors are acutely aware of the impact professional burnout has had on their lives outside of work. In the Medscape poll, more than two-thirds of physicians say it is having a negative effect on their personal relationships. Those who are burned out at work report getting angry at home, having less interest in romance, and feeling guilty when stress gets in the way of spending time with the kids.

When physicians are asked about their burnout, they often talk about the negative impact the health care system and the workplace have on their personal life.

This interplay between work stress and home stress now dominates the agendas of health care conferences across the country. Entire event programs are dedicated to teaching doctors how to achieve work-life balance. There, physicians undergo resilience training, learn breathing techniques and attend lectures on how to psychologically detach from work.

Its a very unidirectional way of problem-solving. Ive yet to come across a medical conference or training session that acknowledges how much more responsibility women shoulder outside of the office and what kind of impact that might have on women inside the office.

This life-work imbalance, which has only worsened during the pandemic, best explains the growing burnout gap between female and male doctors.

If we want to alleviate the fatigue and frustration women physicians are experiencing, we can always start by solving two old problems: (1) All doctors need fewer bureaucratic tasks forced upon them, and (2) women physicians must be able to work in environments free of harassment and discrimination.

Theres yet another solution that must come from outside the workplace. The spouses and partners of women physicians must confront any gender inequalities that may exist within their relationship.

It would be impossible for anyone to work eight extra hours each week at home  on top of a busy work schedule  without experiencing greater exhaustion, cynicism, and feelings of detachment (a.k.a. burnout).

We know from the data that occupational burnout harms personal relationships. If not addressed, it will continue to add stress to doctors home lives. But physicians must also recognize that gender inequality at home strongly contributes to burnout in the workplace. It, too, must be addressed.

Robert Pearl is a plastic surgeon and author of Uncaring: How the Culture of Medicine Kills Doctors and Patients. He can be reached on Twitter @RobertPearlMD. This article originally appeared in Forbes.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
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A little-known fact about doctors that most patients would find horrifying is that physicians dont keep track of their results.

If I botch a knee surgery so badly that my patient requires five repairs by a different specialist, I might never find out. As a result, I will continue to use a flawed technique on patient after patient. The fact that I never hear from any of them again will be proof, to me, of my incredible success.

We know from studies that malpractice suits have more to do with a physicians bedside manner than actual negligence and that there may be an inverse relationship between a doctors online reviews and the quality of care that doctor delivers.

This means the average doctor has no way of knowing whether they are truly good at their job. Even scarier: they have no incentive to find out. If I repair a patients shoulder by only 70 percent, but Im charming, on time, and my office staff is friendly, that patient will likely recommend me to their friends and write glowing online reviews. They figure, anyone would have given them a 70 percent shoulder and consider me a genius.

Conversely, suppose a less charismatic surgeon with a more disorganized staff performs a surgery that restores a patients shoulder to 100 percent. In that case, that patient may figure anyone would have given them a perfect shoulder and shy away from referring their friends and family to such a jerk.

I come out as the better of the two doctors and am rewarded with more robust business when, in fact, I should be taking notes from my gruff colleague down the street.

How can we fix this broken system? By measuring what matters. Teachers are evaluated by their students educational achievements. CEOs of public companies are measured by profits. Doctors, in turn, should be held accountable for their outcomes.

Clinical trials currently use patient-reported outcomes (PROs) to track the effectiveness of the treatment, drug, or procedure they are studying. PROs are reported directly by the patient, without interpretation by a health care provider. They are derived from a validated set of questions to measure symptoms, health-related quality of life, and other markers of how well a patient is doing following a medical event or intervention.

What PROs are not derived from is a subjective review of how nice a doctor is or how great the parking was. By tracking PROs, innovative health systems and physicians can bring the kind of data found in clinical trials into everyday clinical practice. This allows objective data to drive meaningful, patient-centric, and profitable changes to health care delivery.

Doctors who are currently tracking and reporting outcomes can validate what works and quickly change what doesnt. Chris P. Dougherty, MD, team doctor for the Kansas City Royals and an orthopedic surgeon, said that by leveraging PROs in his practice, he has been able to actively monitor our patients progress and document this in our medical records. We can positively prove our outcomes to patients and insurers, which is critical to our practice profile.

PRO tracking and reporting are even more powerful when combined with confounding factor data and EMR data. This gives doctors a complete picture of a patients health, allowing them to select medications and treatments for like patients based on national or international data.

The only thing limiting the power of PROs to transform health care is their adoption. Some companies are encouraging physicians and health systems to bring more data into the practice of medicine. And its working.

The doctors who use our platform, for example, are alerted immediately if their patient reports a worsening in symptoms or has a new confounding factor affecting their health. This allows the physician to reach out to the patient quickly to help the patient correct course or avoid a complication, and it gives the doctor cumulative data insight to dial-in best practices. With these best practices insights collected from all their patients, the doctor truly knows what does and does not work in their hands. They are more likely to deliver the right treatment the first time, which is obviously preferable to the patient and reduces overall health care costs.

Right now, most doctors dont keep track of their outcomes. To improve the health of their patients and the health of their business, they should.

Justin D. Saliman is a Stanford sports medicine trained orthopaedic surgeon operating out of Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, and founder and CEO, OutcomeMD, a cloud-based software platform empowering health providers and patients with critical data to understand and prove what works.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
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Entries for this years Irish Food Awards, Blas na hEireann, will close on Friday May 20 and this year all roads lead to the pretty seaside town of Dingle as it gears up to host the first in-person Blas na hEireann awards event in two years.

Regarded by many as a key event in the Irish food industrys calendar, Blas na hEireann, like so many others, celebrated their finalists and winners online over the past two years leaving a significant gap in the food and drink calendar.

This year will see the welcome return of this important weekend of celebrations, with the great and good of the Irish food and drinks scene descending on Dingle once more for the weekend on Friday, September 30.

This year is the 15th year of Blas na hEireann with last year seeing a huge increase in entries and many new producers entering the food awards for the very first time.

Previous Kilkenny winner Bart Pawlukojc from Aran Kilkenny explains the sense of achievement fostered by the awards and the increased interest in the business afterwards.

""We were delighted to get our name on the national stage next to all these wonderful food providers around Ireland," he said.

"There was noticeable elevated interest in our products when the awards were initially announced, and we continue to attract our dedicated local customers from around Kilkenny, who we are most grateful for."

The blind-tasting judging system which was designed by The School of Food and Nutritional Science at U.C.C. under the supervision of Prof. Joe Kerry and the team at Blas is now recognised as an industry gold standard worldwide.

Winners are always the best Blas ambassadors. Something 15 years worth of small producers, farmers, growers, bakers and artisan food makers who have won Blas awards can attest to.

Research has shown that the Blas accreditation has the highest recognition among Irish consumers and having the coveted winners sticker and award logo on products really does encourage shoppers to buy  it is a recognised guarantee of a top-quality Irish product.

Entries for Blas na hEireann 2022 are open until 20th May. The entry fee is 80 per entry (ex VAT).

See 'www.irishfoodawards.com' for more.
MACE has once again teamed up with Ireland out-half Johnny Sexton to offer people in Kilkenny the opportunity to share in a prize-fund of 10,000 in a community initiative, whereby the public nominate their unsung hero.

MACE is asking the people of Kilkenny to nominate that special someone who goes the extra mile to make a difference, so they get the recognition they deserve. We want people to nominate their unsung hero, and to tell us which award they think their nominee should win and why.

The individual award categories are:

Charity Award

Child & Youth Award

Environment Award

Sports, Health & Well-being Award

MACE Store Team Award

The special overall MACE Community Award will single out someone from around Ireland who really goes over and above to give something back to their community. Do you know someone who gives themselves selflessly to benefit a charity organisation or their local community? If so, then we want to hear from you. Nominate that special person by logging onto www.mace.ie/unsung-heroes and tell us why they deserve to be recognised as an Unsung Hero.

Each category winner will receive 1,000 while the overall special MACE Community Unsung Hero will receive an overall prize of 5,000. This is the second time MACE have run this initiative. Last year, Limerick native Leona OCallaghan was selected as the overall outstanding hero for her tireless work in raising awareness of violence against women. Leona was an outstanding recipient of the special overall MACE Community Award.

MACE Ambassador Johnny Sexton is very excited to be part of this initiative again as it is a programme that sees the public nominate someone special to their community who embodies all that is good about their community, someone who truly is a local hero.

Im delighted to be a part of this exciting MACE initiative once again. This is a great way for communities to recognise that special person who always puts others ahead of themselves and Im really looking forward to seeing the wide range of thoughtful and generous acts by people in communities all around the country. I am genuinely proud to be working with MACE in promoting this positive community initiative throughout towns and villages in Ireland," he said.

MACE Sales Director, Peter Dwan, said: In communities all around Ireland, there is that one person who stands out above all others for consistently going out of their way to help, and this is your opportunity to acknowledge their kindness. MACE is very proud of this initiative, which is reflective of the spirit of our retailers, all of whom are determined to contribute positively to the communities in which they are embedded. We are proud to celebrate the Unsung Heroes of Ireland.

Closing date for entries is May 31 and entering couldnt be simpler. Log onto www.mace.ie/unsung-heroes and nominate that special someone you believe is a true Unsung Hero. There is no limit on the number of award categories you can enter.
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Local woman Mary Pierce has been presented with an award by Mayor Andrew McGuinness for her work with those who are homeless.

The presentation took place in City Hall where a crowd of Marys supporters, family and friends gathered for the special occasion.

Mary you are nothing short of inspirational. Your tireless work for the homeless, the vulnerable and the less well off in Kilkenny and beyond is exceptional, said Mayor Andrew McGuinness.

You have also shown great leadership in bringing so many volunteers together who help you to provide food and essential items for so many people that have fallen on difficult times.

In Kilkenny, if you are vulnerable and need some help, you think of Mary Pierce. If you have something that you want to donate to someone that needs it, you think of Mary Pierce.

If you are a business or a community group that wants to raise funds for a good cause, you think of Mary Pierce. Because Mary Pierce is truly an exceptional person who goes above and beyond for those who need it most.

As Mayor of Kilkenny I believe its hugely important to acknowledge people who give so much of themselves for the betterment of others so Im delighted and honoured to present Mary Pierce with a Mayors Award.

Mayor McGuinness also acknowledged Marys husband who has always been a driving force and a solid partner who has helped Mary to help others but has also done so much charity work himself, including a recent trip to the Polish border with essential supplies for people affected by the war in Ukraine.
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18-year-old exploring the depths of space with radio Interesting Engineering have published an article about 18-year-old radio amateur Dhruv Rebba KC9ZJX who hopes to develop a program that will enable youth to build and program microsatellites



When Rebba was nine, he received his ham radio technician license - becoming the youngest person of Indian origin, until then, to receive the same. That earned him a spot in the Limca Book of Records. The same year, he attained the General Class License.



A senior specializing in Computer Science at Normal Community High School in Bloomington, Rebba firmly believes that getting into amateur radio was a stepping stone to various other fields.



The space industry, for example.



In 2017, Rebba was part of the Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) project. It involves amateur radio operators across the world speaking directly to astronauts/cosmonauts through their handheld, mobile, or home radio stations.



"I found out about the program at the Hamvention and thought it would be interesting to get my school involved in the project. After three tries, we received the approval. As I have an amateur radio license, I was able to make the initial contact. Some 16 students were given the chance to ask 23 questions to astronaut Joseph M. Acaba on the International Space Station for Expedition 53/54," Rebba explains.



Two years later, in 2019, he was named Young Ham of the Year.



"Currently, I'm the lead of a statewide program called 4-H in Space Mission Command. I have been working with Illinois 4-H, LASSI (Laboratory for Advanced Space Systems at Illinois), and the University of Illinois Dept. of Aerospace to develop a program that will enable youth to build and program microsatellites that will be launched into orbit Q32022," he says.



Read the full article at

https://interestingengineering.com/18-year-old-explores-space-radio
Shenandoah, IA (51601)

Today

Scattered thunderstorms this evening becoming more widespread overnight. Gusty winds and small hail are possible. Low 57F. Winds NNE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms this evening becoming more widespread overnight. Gusty winds and small hail are possible. Low 57F. Winds NNE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%.
Over the past few years, French forces in Mali have earned a reputation for ruthless use of aerial power that has resulted in countless civilian casualties.

by Vijay Prashad

On May 2, 2022, a statement was made by Malis military spokesperson Colonel Abdoulaye Maiga on the countrys national television, where he said that Mali was ending the defense accords it had with France, effectively making the presence of French troops in Mali illegal. The statement was written by the military leadership of the country, which has been in power since May 2021.

Colonel Maiga said that there were three reasons why Malis military had taken this dramatic decision. The first was that they were reacting to Frances unilateral attitude, reflected in the way Frances military operated in Mali and in the June 2021 decision by French President Emmanuel Macron to withdraw French forces from the country without consulting Mali. Frances military forces moved to nearby Niger thereafter and continued to fly French military planes over Malian airspace. These violations of Malian airspace despite the establishment of a temporary no-fly zone by the Malian military authorities constituted the second reason for the new declaration, according to the statement. Thirdly, Malis military had asked the French in December 2021 to revise the France-Mali Defense Cooperation treaty. Apparently, Frances answer to relatively minor revisions from Mali on April 29 displeased the military, which then issued its statement a few days later.

Neither Peace, Nor Security, Nor Reconciliation

Over the past few years, French forces in Mali have earned a reputation for ruthless use of aerial power that has resulted in countless civilian casualties. A dramatic incident took place on January 3, 2021, in the village of Bounti in the central Mopti region of Mali, not far from Burkina Faso. A French drone strike killed 19 civilians who were part of a wedding party. Frances Defense Minister Florence Parly said, The French armed forces targeted a terrorist group, which had been formally identified as such. However, an investigation by the United Nations mission in Mali (the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali, or MINUSMA) found that the French drone fired at a marriage celebration attended by about 100 people (which might have included five armed persons).

Two months later, on March 5, 2021, in the village of Talataye, east of Bounti, a French airstrike killed three teenage children and injured two others, who were all out hunting birds. The father of the three deceased childrenAdamou Ag Hamadou, a shepherdsaid that the children had taken their cattle to drink water and then had gone off to hunt birds with their two hunting rifles. When I arrived at the scene of the airstrike, Ag Hamadou remembered, there were other people from this [hunting] camp. From 1 p.m. until 6 p.m., we were able to collect the pieces of their bodies that we buried.

These are some of the most dramatic incidents. Others litter the debate over the French military intervention in Mali, but few of these stories make it beyond the countrys borders. There are several reasons for the global indifference to these civilian deaths, one of them being that these atrocities perpetrated by Western states during their interventions in Africa do not elicit outrage from the international press, and another is that the French have consistently denied even well-proven incidents of what should be considered war crimes.

For example, on June 8, 2019, French soldiers fired at a car in Razelma, outside Timbuktu, killing three civilians (one of them a young child). The French military made a bizarre statement about the killing. On the one hand, the French said that the killing was unintentional. But then, on the other hand, the French authorities said that the car was suspicious because the car did not stop despite warning shots being fired at it. Eyewitnesses said that the driver of the car was helping a family move to Agaghayassane and that they were not linked to any terrorist group. Ahmad Ag Handoune, who is a relative of those killed in this attack and who drove up to the site after the incident, said that the French soldiers took gasoline and then poured it on the vehicle to set everything on fire so that nothing was identifiable.

Protests against the French military presence have been taking place for over a year, and it is plausible to say that the May 2021 military coup, which installed the present military leadership of the country to power, was partly due to both the failure of the French intervention in Mali to bring about stability and its excesses. Colonel Assimi Goita, who leads the military junta, said that the agreement with the French brought neither peace, nor security, nor reconciliation and that the population aspires to stop the flow of Malian blood.

No Way Forward

On the day that the Malians said that the presence of French troops on their soil was illegal with the ending of the defense accords, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres paid a visit to neighboring Niger. When Frances army withdrew from Mali, they relocated to Niger, whose president, Mohamed Bazoum, tweeted his welcome to these troops. Guterres, standing beside Bazoum, said that terrorism is not just a regional or African issue, but one that threatens the whole world.

No one denies the fact that the chaos in the Sahel region of Africa was deepened by the 2011 NATO war against Libya. Malis earlier challengesincluding a decades-long Tuareg insurgency and conflicts between Fulani herders and Dogon farmerswere now convulsed by the entry of arms and men from Libya and Algeria. Three jihadi groups appeared in the country as if from nowhereAl Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Movement for the Unification of Jihad in the African West, and Ansar Dine. They used the older tensions to seize northern Mali in 2012 and declared the state of Azawad. French military intervention followed in January 2013.

Iyad Ag Ghali, a Tuareg leader from Kidal, fought in Libya and Mali. In the early 2000s, Ag Ghali set up the Alliance for Democracy and Change, which advocated for Tuareg rights. Soft-spoken and reserved, said a 2007 U.S. Embassy cable about him. Ag Ghali showed nothing of the cold-blooded warrior persona created by the Malian press. After a brief stint as a diplomat to Saudi Arabia, Ag Ghali returned to Mali, befriended Amadou Koufa, the leader of the Macina Liberation Front, and drifted into the world of Sahelian jihad. In a famous 2017 audio message, Amadou Koufa said, The day that France started the war against us, no Fulani or anyone else was practicing jihad. That kind of warfare was a product of NATOs war on Libya and the arrival of Al Qaeda, and later ISIS, to seek local franchise with local grievances to nurture their ambitions.

Conflicts in Mali, as the former President Alpha Oumar Konare said over a decade ago, are inflamed due to the suffocation of the countrys economy. Neither did the country receive any debt relief nor infrastructure support from the West or international organizations. This landlocked state of more than 20 million people imports 70 percent of its food, the prices for which have skyrocketed in recent weeks, and could further worsen food insecurity in Mali. Part of the instability of the post-NATO war has been the military coups in Mali, Guinea and Burkina Faso. Mali faces harsh sanctions from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), sanctions that will only deepen the crisis and provoke greater conflict north of Malis capital, Bamako.

Anti-French sentiment is not the whole story in Mali. What France and other global leaders need to recognize is that there are many larger questions at the root of the issues Malians facequestions around their livelihood and their dignity, which need to be answered to secure a better future for the country.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.
China's Mars rover finds water evidence on the red planet: study

Xinhua) 15:53, May 12, 2022

BEIJING, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Chinese scientists have found new evidence that there was water on Mars in the past and there are hydrated minerals on the red planet, which can be potentially exploited during future crewed Mars missions.

The study published on Thursday in the journal Science Advances revealed that a large impact basin on Mars contained liquid water during the Amazonian epoch, the planet's most recent geologic epoch.

The findings contribute to a growing body of telltale signs that suggests liquid water activities may have persisted much longer on Mars than previously thought.

The study also indicated that in this particular site, there are currently considerable stores of water in the form of hydrated minerals and possibly ground ice.

The researchers led by those from the National Space Science Center under the Chinese Academy of Sciences used data gathered by China's Mars rover Zhurong on the sedimentary and mineral characteristics of southern Utopia Planitia, a vast plain in the northern hemisphere of Mars.

They interpreted the bright-toned rocks Zhurong's camera caught as a layer of "duricrust" that would have been sculpted by a substantial quantity of liquid water, perhaps rising groundwater or melting subsurface ice.

That solid sulfate mineral crust contrasts with thinner, weaker duricrusts observed by other Mars rovers, which may have formed through the actions of water vapor, according to the study.

Another Chinese study published in March in the journal Nature Geoscience also revealed that the site where Zhurong landed might have experienced wind and possibly water erosion.

(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun)
The suspension of collaborative projects between Russian and Western space agencies will enhance their traditional rivalries. But the new space race is also being driven by other countriesas well as private companies.

by John P. Ruehl

Shortly after Russia was sanctioned for invading Ukraine in late February, Russias state-run space agency, Roscosmos, announced that it was officially suspending the U.S. from an upcoming Venus exploration mission. Weeks later, on March 17, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced the suspension of a joint mission to Mars with Roscosmos, and further said that it would not be taking part in upcoming Roscosmos missions to the moon.

These decisions have naturally generated concern across the space industry and political landscape. For decades, Russian and Western countries have collaborated in space despite flare-ups in tensions on Earth. In 1975, the U.S. Apollo capsule linked up with the Soviet Soyuz spacecraft briefly as a symbol of cooperation amid the Cold War. In 1995, the U.S. space shuttle Atlantis docked with the Russian space station Mir.

And in 1998, the International Space Station (ISS) was launched, featuring a Russian Orbital Segment (ROS) and a United States Orbital Segment (USOS), the latter being operated by NASA, the ESA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

Sustained cooperation on the ISS has been a notable exception to the growing tensions between Russia and the Western states over the last decade. But in April, Dmitry Rogozin, head of Roscosmos, declared that Russia would end cooperation on the ISS, as well as other joint projects, if sanctions against Russia were not lifted. While such threats have been issued before, notably after Russias 2014 annexation of Crimea, the heightened confrontation between Russia and the West since the start of the Ukrainian invasion has reinforced this possibility.

NASA, meanwhile, chose to downplay Rogozins claims and stated that it will continue to operate the ISS until at least 2030. But Roscosmos has previously stated that it intends to develop its own space station by 2025, and has also revealed plans for a potential manned mission to the moon. Russias GLONASS satellite navigation system, which achieved global coverage in 2011, has also become a viable rival to the United States GPS system. These developments show the Kremlins growing commitment to pursuing its own interests in space without partnering with Western states.

In comparison, Roscosmos has increased its collaboration with the China National Space Administration (CNSA), particularly after the first wave of Western sanctions in 2014. In 2021, China and Russia announced plans to build a lunar research station, a direct rival to NASAs Gateway project, which will be coordinated with the space agencies from Europe, Japan, and Canada.

China has already created its own space station, the Tiangong Space Station, which was launched in 2021. While far smaller than the ISS, Chinas space agency has six more launches planned this year to complete the installation. China also sent a rover to the far side of the moon in 2019, as well as to Mars in 2021, and has announced plans for its own manned moon mission this decade.

While the space programs of some countries in the Global South, such as India, Brazil, Indonesia, and Iran, are certainly less impressive, their development demonstrates the growing accessibility to space, which has long been dominated by Russia, China, and Western states. More than 70 countries now have space agencies, while 14 are capable of orbital launch.

For these countries, success in space in recent years has often come from collaborating with existing space powers. In 2005, Irans first satellite was built and launched in Russia, while in 2008, China, Iran, and Thailand launched a joint research satellite on a Chinese rocket. Technology sharing, domestic innovation, and decreasing costs have also allowed more countries to compete in space. India made history in 2013 after it sent its own orbiter to Mars, notably on a smaller budget than the space movie Gravity, which came out the same year.

The growing number of countries active in Earths orbit and beyond have also revitalized fears of the possibility of the militarization of space. So far, only Russia, China, the U.S., and India have successfully demonstrated anti-satellite weapons. Other countries, however, including Iran and Israel, are believed to either be developing or already have similar capabilities.

Of course, Western countries remain far ahead technologically than any other state or group of states. NASAs Artemis 1 mission, for example, aims to place humans on the moon again by 2025, while three NASA rovers are currently active on Mars. NASAs unmanned X-37B programwhich began in 1999, was transferred to the U.S. military in 2004, and is now being run by the Air Forces Rapid Capabilities Officehas so far conducted four missions, while collaborative projects with the ESA have further underlined Western dominance in space.

But a growing phenomenon in space is the role of private companies. They have been involved in many of NASAs and the ESAs high-profile projects, including Boeings involvement in the X-37B project. Largely based in the U.S. and the UK, these companies have helped reduce costs and have increased opportunities for government space agencies, and they will be essential for exploiting the vast resources on the moon, asteroids, and other celestial bodies.

Though hundreds of space-related companies exist, a handful have stood out as pioneers of the modern space age. Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, owned by entrepreneurs Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson respectively, both made history in 2021 after conducting their own manned space flights. Blue Origin, defense contractor Lockheed Martin, and other corporations have also signed contracts to create private space stations in the future.

The most notable private company operating in space, however, is SpaceX, which is owned by entrepreneur Elon Musk. In recent years, the company has helped reduce the United States dependency on Russian Soyuz rockets to bring astronauts and deliveries to the ISS following the termination of the NASA program as a consequence of the Ukraine war.

SpaceX has launched more than 2,000 Starlink satellites into space, with plans to launch more than 12,000 by 2026. Most will form part of the Starlink project that aims to provide internet access to populations around the world.

Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov tweeted at Elon Musk in February to use the Starlink project to bring internet to Ukraine after some services were disrupted by the Russian invasion. Within days, Starlink was active across the country, and in early May, Ukrainian officials stated that 150,000 Ukrainians were using the service daily.

The use of Starlink satellites was no doubt seen in Moscow as a direct challenge to the Kremlin. While Russia is currently unlikely to attack the network, it has raised questions as to how future confrontations between private companies and countries in space might play out. The growing use of private military companies on Earth by both states and the private sector could inspire similar moves to protect government and private assets in space.

The growing profile of private space-related companies threatens to upend the rules of regulations regarding space, most of which were written decades ago. This includes the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which through Article VI established that countries have the legal authority to regulate space and not international bodies, with private companies not yet having started space exploration when the treaty was finalized. The Artemis Accords, a modern U.S.-sponsored agreement to regulate space created in 2020, has so far only been signed by 16 countries.

Nonetheless, the increasingly competitive space industry has already demonstrated that even smaller countries can play a large role in it. Overseeing the development of technologies and tempering the weaponization of space, by both countries and companies, should become a priority globally to help ensure that growing competition in space does not lead to avoidable and destructive consequences on Earth.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

John P. Ruehl is an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C. He is a contributing editor to Strategic Policy and a contributor to several other foreign affairs publications. He is currently finishing a book on Russia to be published in 2022.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland discussed on May 11 the findings of an investigation into the conditions that Native American children endured in boarding schools between 1819 and 1969.
This is the second in a "Letters to President Yoon" series The Korea Times has organized to convey policy recommendations in open letters from politicians, scholars and experts to President Yoon Suk-yeol following his May 10 inauguration.  ED.



By Gareth Evans





Dear Mr. President,



Congratulations on your taking office. The Korean Peninsula has for centuries been exposed to a great power rivalry and its geography will always make it more vulnerable than Australia's. Given this reality, it is clearly presumptuous for any Australian to offer any suggestions to any incoming ROK administration on how it should be addressing defense and foreign policy issues.



However, perhaps not too cheeky, given how much we have in common as vibrant middle powers allied geopolitically to the United States but very much economically dependent on China. So in that spirit, I respectfully offer five major suggestions as to how you might think about approaching the most obvious security challenges you will face during your presidency.



Maintain some distance from both the giants. In the present volatile global and regional environment, all of your instincts, and those of the governing party, will be to double down on the U.S. alliance. The U.S. is and must remain a crucial regional security counterweight to a potentially over-reaching China and I would not suggest for a moment  any more than I would for my own country  that you walk away from that alliance. But that does not mean buying the argument that our security depends on the U.S. remaining not just a balancing power but undisputed top dog in our region and everywhere else.



Nor does it mean following Washington down every trail it might want to lead us  too many of which have in the past been misguided, including not only misconceived military adventures but opting out of the CPTPP trans-Pacific trade deal. Being seen as "deputy sheriff," lacking any real capacity for independent judgment  as Australia has been under some of our governments  helps neither national pride, nor one's wider reputation, nor one's influence in Washington.



China's economic might  and the dependence on it of so many in our region  is here to stay, and its military capability is growing dramatically. But it is equally important that our countries not be sucked uncritically into Beijing's orbit. We should not hold back in making clear our own commitment to democratic and human rights values and continue to be prepared to push back strongly when China overreaches externally, as it has in the South China Sea.



The Quad  embracing the U.S., Japan, Australia and India  is not a formal military alliance but has become an important element in that push-back messaging, and there are clear attractions in the ROK making it a "Quint." The task for Seoul, as it is for Canberra, is to both get along with China  because we have to  but also stand up to its excesses. Not an easy balance to strike, but as a U.K. politician once famously put it, "If you can't ride two horses at once, you've no right to be in the circus!"



Don't be seduced by the lure of nuclear weapons. Despite the siren-song you will hear from many on your own side of politics and in the wider Korean community, please recognize that for the ROK to become a nuclear-armed state would be catastrophic for the global non-proliferation regime, and with it your country's international reputation, while doing little or nothing to actually enhance your security.



The taboo against the use of their nuclear arsenals by China, Russia, North Korea, or anyone else remains very strong  as it has for the last 77 years  and there is a much greater risk of use through human or system error or miscalculation than deliberate aggression. Potentially vulnerable countries still need effective deterrent capability, but conventional weaponry can supply that.



Both our countries benefit from U.S. military support and have a reasonable expectation of being able to rely on that support so long as our alliances exist. What matters here is extended deterrence, not extended nuclear deterrence. Should North Korea ever be stupid enough to launch a nuclear assault on the South, Washington, with ROK support, would not need nukes to turn it into a car park.



Don't abandon the effort to reconcile with North Korea. In that context, and despite, again, the likely instinctive distaste of some of your colleagues for anything looking like a "sunshine" policy, please do make an effort to get the normalization of North-South relations back on track. For all Kim Jong-un's chest-beating and provocations, it is still a reasonable analysis that his basic intentions are above all defensive rather than aggressive; that he is focused on regime survival, knows that to be homicidal is to be suicidal; and that he is not immune to negotiating a deal.



It is unrealistic in the short to medium term to hope for anything more than a freeze on fissile material production and the development and testing of both weapons and delivery systems. But that would be eminently worth having.



And  if accompanied by moves toward conclusion of the long-sought Korean War peace treaty, and normalization of diplomatic relations  this might actually build some of the trust that will be required for the ultimate goal of denuclearization to be achieved and the dream of peaceful and stable unification to be advanced.



Find strength in middle power cooperation. "Middle powers" are best described as those states which may not economically or militarily be big or strong enough to impose their policy preferences on anyone else, but which are nonetheless sufficiently capable, credible and motivated to be able, through their own efforts and above all effective coalition building, to make an impact on international relations.



That description certainly includes both the ROK and Australia, and  whatever the state of our relationships with the two giants  we should be making a concerted effort together to harness the collective middle-power energy and capacity of a number of regional states of real regional substance, including in particular not only India and Japan but Indonesia and Vietnam.



Recognize the importance of soft power and both being and being seen to be a good international citizen. With the extraordinary global success of its popular music, television series and films in recent years, South Korea certainly now understands what soft power can mean: the power that comes not with economic and military might, but an attractive example. But there is much more that you can do in this space, in the conduct of your foreign policy, to be and be seen to be a good international citizen.



It is a matter of being seen to genuinely care about poverty, conflicts, human rights atrocities, health epidemics, environmental catastrophes, weapons proliferation and other problems affecting people often in faraway places, and where supportive action produces little or no direct national security or economic return. To act in this way is not just a moral imperative, but generates measurable reputational returns.



Building and sustaining a country that is not only secure and prosperous but is one with a reputation that others respect, trust and want to emulate is perhaps the greatest of all contributions a national leader can make. May you have every success in meeting that challenge.



Sincerely,

Gareth Evans



The writer was Australian foreign minister from1988 to 96, president of the International Crisis Group from 2000-09, chancellor of the Australian National University 2010-19, and founding convener of the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (APLN). His most recent book is "Good International Citizenship: The Case for Decency" (Monash Publishing, 2022).


Unification Minister nominee Kwon Young-se speaks during a confirmation hearing in the National Assembly, Seoul, Thursday. Joint Press Corp



Unification minister nominee says South Korea ready to help North in fight against COVID-19



By Lee Hae-rin



Unification Minister nominee Kwon Young-se said on Thursday that if he takes the helm in the ministry, he will be willing to help North Korea in its fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.



"I think using the plight facing North Korea as an opportunity to initiate dialogue is ethically wrong. What I can say now is that South Korea is willing to help the North as it's currently in trouble," he said during a confirmation hearing held in the National Assembly, when asked how he thinks South Korea can help its northern neighbor, which allegedly reported its first official COVID-19 infections on Thursday.



Kwon vowed to prepare for the resumption of humanitarian assistance for the North as the Omicron outbreak will worsen its already poor humanitarian situation.



"Our position is that inter-Korean cooperation in the area of health and quarantine can be launched anytime, if North Korea is willing to accept it. If there's anything we can do in inter-Korean relations or international cooperation to resume cooperation on humanitarian assistance for the North, we are ready to review it," the nominee said.



He said that the Yoon government would pursue a "no-strings-attached policy" on humanitarian assistance to the North, stressing that medical and health assistance for North Korea's people would be provided anytime, if necessary.



Regarding the denuclearization of North Korea, the nominee said he would use both carrots and sticks.



"There are two very different options that we can use to encourage North Korea to achieve denuclearization: one is persuasion through economic assistance and the other is sanctions," he said during a confirmation hearing in the National Assembly on Thursday. "Considering that the North has made its nuclear and missile technologies sophisticated in a relatively short period of time, and employed provocations to get what it wants, I think now is the time for sanctions, rather than appeasement."



Nevertheless, the nominee said that he didn't believe sanctions are powerful enough to convince the North to go for denuclearization, noting that he would propose dialogue and discuss ways to offer a security guarantee and economic assistance to convince the North to give up its nuclear program.



He made the remarks when Rep. Park Hong-keun of the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) asked him about how he would engage with the North to achieve denuclearization.



Kwon defended President Yoon Suk-yeol's previous remarks about "a preemptive strike against the North," which he said during the presidential election campaign.



"When you compare the rhetoric of previous presidents before and after they were elected, you can see that there are clear differences between them," Kwon said.



"Regarding Yoon's remarks about a preemptive strike, it's an option that has so many conditions, all of which have to be met before one can choose it as a last resort. So the president didn't mean that he would go for it with his previous remarks."



When asked if President Yoon's vision for North Korea is identical to that of former President Lee Myung-bak, Kwon answered no, and that he didn't believe that Lee's North Korea policy had failed.



Noting that the Yoon government's policy toward the North is different from Lee's, he said Lee's tenure ended without having a proper opportunity to implement his North Korea vision because of the killing of a South Korean tourist on Mount Geumgang, which was followed by the sinking of the South Korean frigate Cheonan in the West Sea.



"Having said that, it's not fair to say that President Lee's North Korea policy failed," Kwon said.



Although the Yoon administration's posture on North Korea is very different from that of the previous Moon Jae-in administration, Kwon said the new government won't oppose the previous government's policies just for the sake of opposing them, noting that policy inconsistency won't help the nation at all.



"Overturning everything that the Moon government did  that's not going to be very good for our North Korea policy, and it could cause confusion for North Korea as well," he said.



Kwon brought up the example of Germany and explained that the continuity in West Germany's policies toward the East  despite the fierce criticism from both the governing and opposition parties and the system change  was the secret to the country's reunification.



However, the unification nominee went on to say that the Yoon government will not continue the parts of the Moon government's policies that were wrong.



During the hearing, Kwon was grilled over allegations of tax evasion and a conflict of interest regarding his family members' overseas business, which he has also invested in. But he denied all the allegations.



A prosecutor-turned-lawmaker, Kwon was nominated by President Yoon as the unification minister for his previous experience as South Korea's ambassador to China during the Park Geun-hye administration.




EU Ambassador to Korea Maria Castillo Fernandez, front in blue dress, makes a toast with Ukrainian Ambassador to Korea Dmytro Ponomarenko, second from right, wearing a blue mask, and other EU member state envoys in Korea during the opening ceremony of the 2022 Europe Day event in Seoul Plaza, downtown Seoul, Monday. Courtesy of the EU delegation to Korea



By Kwon Mee-yoo



European embassies in Korea celebrated Europe Day in Seoul Plaza, May 9, with the Embassy of Ukraine to Seoul as a way to show solidarity with the war-torn country. The embassies of 24 EU member states as well as the EU delegation and Embassy of Ukraine took part in this year's event, which brought some vitality to the city center after two years of the pandemic. Each country's booth offered a variety of items introducing the country, from iconic food to travel brochures.



"This is my first Europe Day event in Korea because we couldn't do anything last year because of COVID. So I am very happy that we can come out to the heart of Seoul in City Hall Plaza with all the European embassies in Korea," EU Ambassador to Korea Maria Castillo Fernandez said.



"What we wanted to celebrate today with Seoul citizens is mainly the principles we share with Korea and we are here in this plaza with Ukraine to stand with them," she continued.





The embassies of 24 EU member states as well as the EU delegation and Embassy of Ukraine take part in the 2022 Europe Day event in Seoul Plaza, downtown Seoul, Monday. Courtesy of the EU delegation to Korea



Europe Day commemorates the birth of the European Union (EU), dating back to 1950. As European countries tried to recover from the aftermath of World War II, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman suggested a supranational organization, which led to the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC).



"We celebrate the unity of the 27 European countries for peace and prosperity. Seventy years ago on this day, a statement of less than 10 minutes changed the destiny of a whole continent," Ambassador Castillo said.



"France, through the voice of Robert Schuman, reached out to Germany and other European countries with the historic Schuman Declaration that proposes a unique union based on shared values, principles and solidarity for peace and prosperity across Europe."



Ambassador Castillo also noted the crises the EU's solidarity faces, such as the ongoing pandemic, climate change and more recently, Russia's unjustified aggression against Ukraine.



"On this day, our hearts especially go out to the people of Ukraine who are still fighting for freedom, human rights, democracy and rule of law," she said. "These are fundamental values we stand for. It shows us that the objective of European solidarity and unity is more valid than ever."





Visitors take a look at Ukrainian foods and crafts at the country's booth during the 2022 Europe Day event in Seoul Plaza, downtown Seoul, Monday. Ukraine was invited to the event this year as the embassies of EU member states in Korea stand with the war-torn country. Courtesy of the EU delegation to Korea



Ukrainian Ambassador to Seoul Dmytro Ponomarenko greeted guests at his country's booth, which offered traditional Ukrainian food and crafts to represent the country's unique culture.



"We are so pleased to be here because we think of ourselves as part of the European family. Ukraine is fighting against Russia to keep the peace of Europe and definitely, we do this not only for Europe but for the whole world. And we are very proud and we hope the next step for us is to be a member of the European Union," he said.



Then he introduced Ukrainian dishes, such as "vareniki" (dumplings with potatoes and onions), "kartoplianyky" (mashed potato patties with meat fillings) and "uzvar" (a drink made by boiling dried fruits).



Other European delicacies, such as Austria's "salzstangerl" (salt bread roll) with "Liptauer" spread and Belgium's waffles with cream also built up long queues.



The Danish booth hosted a quiz on Denmark and a Lego guessing game with Lego sets as prizes, boasting the famous toy brick company started in Denmark. The Swedish booth's big Dala Horse sculpture became a popular photo spot for the visitors who flocked to Seoul Plaza. Ireland promoted its literary heavyweight, James Joyce.



The booths of Croatia and the Czech Republic were crowded with visitors as those are popular destinations among Korean tourists. The three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania promoted tourist sites in their countries to attract Korean visitors to lesser-known parts of Europe.





A visitor asks questions about Romania and other European countries at the Romanian booth of the 2022 Europe event in Seoul Plaza, downtown Seoul, Monday. Courtesy of the EU delegation to Korea




By Kim Jae-heun







Posco International CEO Joo Si-bo visited Uzbekistan from May 9 to 12 to check the company's global supply chain there, while meeting with Governor Bozorov Hayitbayevich of the region of Fergana to discuss their plans to establish a raw cotton cluster in the Central Asian country, the company said, Thursday.







The cotton cluster refers to the Uzbekistan government's project to invite companies to cultivate the crop and establish a stable supply chain.







Posco International erected a spinning plant in Uzbekistan, the world's sixth-largest cotton exporter in 1996, and has been operating a total of five manufacturing facilities producing thread and textiles in the regions of Fergana and Bukhara. The company posted a $37-million operating profit last year from its cotton business in Uzbekistan.







In March, the trading company also secure 5,210 hectares of raw cotton cultivation areas in the capital area of Fergana region, believing that they are necessary to increase the added value of the cotton business.







It has plans to open a cotton processing plant there by the end of this year to complete the value chain from harvesting cotton to manufacturing yarn and fabric.







In addition, the company acquired the Recycled Claimed Standard (RCS) and Global Recycled Standard (GRS) certifications from the Control Union, an eco-friendly certifying agency, to follow the green trend in the textile business, last November.







"Uzbekistan's cotton business has gained further momentum by creating a cotton cluster and obtaining eco-friendly certifications. As Uzbekistan's representative foreign investor company, we will seek mutual growth with the local community too," company CEO Joo said.




By Chris Baumann





May 1 is a good time to reflect on the Bee Gee's success; one of their early songs was named "First of May." Now is also a good time to visit the Bee Gees Way in Redcliffe, close to Brisbane, with Australia opening its borders post-COVID-19.



While the Bee Gees are originally British, their cradle of success was Australia. In 1958 they settled in Redcliffe (named after the red colored cliffs in the area), later moving to Sydney in the 1960s. "Spicks and Specks" was their first big success while still in Australia, with the most famous songs to follow when they returned to the U.K., and eventually moving to Florida in the U.S.



Their most streamed songs are "Stayin' Alive" and "How Deep Is Your Love." The big breakthrough was in 1977 with the "Saturday Night Fever" soundtrack. The film and its soundtrack put disco on dancefloors around the globe, and the Bee Gees became a global household name, making them rich and famous.



In fact, the Bee Gees joined the exclusive club of the best-selling artists with roughly a quarter of a billion records sold, winning them Grammy Awards and entry into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Estimates put the Bee Gees in one of the top positions in billboard charts history.



Redcliffe is proud of its famous sons and in 2013 opened the Bee Gees Way in honor of Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb. The Moreton Bay Council and the Queensland Government created a new tourist attraction that was opened by the last surviving Bee Gee, Barry Gibb.



He returned in 2015 to open the improved version, by now with a large screen, showing interviews and playing the most famous tunes, including their biggest masterpiece: "Too Much Heaven." On display is a copy of a contract from the very beginning of their music careers where they played at local pubs and at the Redcliffe Raceway.



In addition to the Bee Gees Way, the original house in Scarborough still exists, but can only be "visited" from the outside. Humpybong State School (Indigenous language in the region for "deserted shelters"), where they went to school, is also still there; just across the beach.



The school's motto, "a sea of learning for the future," must be inspirational for today's pupils, given that such talent once must have composed its early music on the school grounds.



Barry Gibb later commented that some inspiration for their creativity dates back to their time in the Redcliffe area with the Australian bushland, the beaches, and the pier that is no longer there; only a shorter version, the Redcliffe Jetty, is still in existence.



It would be impossible to pinpoint a single driving factor for their success. No doubt, in part it's nature; the brothers must have inherited genes from their parents that "gave" them voices that in combination together created their unique vocal harmony, not least with phenomenal falsetto registers.



Their parents were also interested in music and created a family culture where making and enjoying music was important from an early age.



The family was poor and arrived in Australia as "ten pound Poms"  Poms being Australian slang for the English  on the SS Fairsea, an Australian government program at the time where British people were encouraged to migrate through a subsidized 10-pound fare (roughly a tenth of the actual transportation costs) to travel to Australia.



Two of Australia's prime ministers also arrived on the assisted passage scheme as children. In interviews the Brothers Gibb later reflected that the voyage on the SS Fairsea was a great adventure and an eye-opener, also fueling their inspirations and aspirations.



Early on, they knew they wanted success more than money, specifically fame. Somehow, they must have known they could make it big if they really tried, against all odds. Their parents supported them, yet with little praise, which was possibly a driving factor to motivate them to do better and better.



The Bee Gees Way in Redcliffe is well worth a visit for any Bee Gees fan, and also worth a visit for only vaguely interested visitors. The 70-meter walkway attracts visitors and locals alike, and often there are short conversations where locals freely share their own history with the Bee Gees.



Communication seems to be a hallmark of Redcliffe, given that their famous sons are still featured every 30 seconds on a radio somewhere in the world. It must be a never-ending Night Fever Staying Alive.





Dr. Chris Baumann (chris.baumann@mq.edu.au) is an associate professor at Macquarie University, Sydney, a visiting professor at Seoul National University (SNU) in Korea, and a visiting associate professor at Osaka University in Japan. His visit to Redcliffe was unsponsored. He has previously published on the effect of in-store music in service settings.




Kendallville, IN (46755)

Today

Some sunshine with a thunderstorm or two possible this afternoon. High 81F. Winds WNW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%..

Tonight

Rain. Low 51F. Winds NW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%. Rainfall around a half an inch.
Kendallville, IN (46755)

Today

Partly cloudy skies during the morning giving way to a few showers late. High around 80F. Winds WNW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%..

Tonight

A steady rain this evening. Showers continuing overnight. Low 51F. Winds NW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%. Rainfall around a quarter of an inch.
Emergency personnel from Steuben County and Branch County, Michigan, attend to a fire at the Red Arrow Restaurant in the 6800 block of North Old U.S. 27, rural Fremont, on Thursday morning. While the Red Arrow was destroyed, Fremont Fire Chief Eric Hufnagle said, the neighboring businesses, State Line Tobacco and Bubbas Pizza, sustained only minimal damage. State Line reopened later Thursday and Bubbas will reopen on Wednesday.
Kendallville, IN (46755)

Today

Variable clouds with scattered thunderstorms. Gusty winds and small hail are possible. High 83F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 60%..

Tonight

Cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy after midnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low around 55F. Winds light and variable.
Auburn, IN (46706)

Today

Variable clouds with scattered thunderstorms. Gusty winds and small hail are possible. High 83F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 60%..

Tonight

Cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy after midnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 56F. Winds light and variable.
DGAP-Ad-hoc: Majorel Group Luxembourg S.A. / Key word(s): Dividend/Dividend

Majorel Group Luxembourg S.A. : Majorel announces proposed dividend of EUR 0.32 per share



12-May-2022 / 08:30 CET/CEST

Disclosure of an inside information acc. to Article 17 MAR of the Regulation (EU) No 596/2014, transmitted by DGAP - a service of EQS Group AG.

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.





THIS ANNOUNCEMENT RELATES TO THE DISCLOSURE OF INFORMATION THAT QUALIFIED OR MAY HAVE QUALIFIED AS INSIDE INFORMATION WITHIN THE MEANING OF ARTICLE 7(1) OF THE MARKET ABUSE REGULATION (EU) 596/2014.

News Release

Majorel announces proposed dividend of EUR 0.32 per share

Luxembourg, May 12, 2022: Majorel Group Luxembourg S.A. (Euronext Amsterdam: MAJ) (Majorel or the Company), a leading global provider of next-generation end-to-end customer experience (CX) solutions for digital-native and vertical leading brands, today announces its proposed dividend for 2021.

The Company proposes a dividend payment of EUR 0.32 per share, in line with Analyst expectations, subject to shareholder approval at its Annual General Meeting on June 20, 2022, that will be held virtually.

If the dividend proposal is accepted at the Annual General Meeting, the payment schedule will be as shown in the table below:

Ex-Dividend date June 22, 2022 Record date June 23, 2022 Payment date July 15, 2022

Dividends are paid in Euros. A Luxembourg withholding tax of 15% will be applied on the gross dividend amounts. In order to benefit from exemption of Luxembourg withholding tax at source, an Informative Memorandum describing the procedure is available here.

For Majorel shares held via Euroclear Nederland, ABN AMRO is offering a dividend reinvestment plan (DRIP). Shareholders have the opportunity to reinvest their net dividend in ordinary shares of Majorel. Shareholders should make the decision to participate in the DRIP via their own bank, broker, custodian or financial institution.



FINANCIAL CALENDAR (INDICATIVE)

Capital Markets Day, London June 9, 2022

Annual General Meeting (virtual) June 20, 2022

H1 2022 Results August 30, 2022

Q3/9M Trading Update November 3, 2022

ABOUT MAJOREL

We design, build and deliver next-generation end-to-end CX solutions for many of the worlds most respected digital-native and vertical leading brands. Our comprehensive east-to-west global footprint in 36 countries across five continents, with more than 73,000 team members[1] and 60 languages, allows us to deliver flexible solutions that leverage our expertise in cultural nuance, which we believe to be essential for true excellence in CX. We have deep domain expertise in tech-augmented front to-back-office CX. Additionally, we offer Digital Consumer Engagement, CX Consulting, and an innovative suite of Proprietary Digital Solutions for industry verticals. We are a global leader in Content Services, Trust & Safety. We believe the Majorel difference to be our culture of entrepreneurship.

CONTACT

Investor Relations

Insa Calsow

EVP, Investor Relations

ir@majorel.com

Investor Relations

Michele Negen

SVP, Investor Relations

ir@majorel.com



Media Relations

Andrew Slater

SVP, Global Marketing & Communications

media@majorel.com

DISCLAIMER

This announcement is released by Majorel Group Luxembourg S.A. (Company) and contains information that qualified or may have qualified as inside information for the purposes of Article 7 of the Market Abuse Regulation (EU) 596/2014 (MAR). This announcement is made for the purposes of MAR and pursuant to Article 2 of Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2016/1055.

[1] As of March 31, 2022.
In her latest live broadcast, Haewon reveals she used to listen to this Stray Kids song during her time of difficulty.

Keep on reading to know more.

NMIXX Haewon Used to Listen to Stray Kids During Difficult Times in Trainee Days

Back on April 30, rookie girl group members NMIXX's Haewon and Lily took to Naver V LIVE to hold a live broadcast called "Must-Have Idol Virtue Article 3, Chapter 4 Lecture," where they interacted with fans and listened to numerous old and recent K-Pop songs.

As Haewon and Lily were playing newer K-Pop songs, they listened to labelmate Stray Kids' 2020 release, "MIROH," which is part of the boy group's fourth mini album "Cle 1: MIROH."

While listening to "MIROH," Haewon recalled the time during her trainee days when she would put the song on repeat and listen to it whenever she was experiencing difficult times.

She said, "Back when I was still a trainee, I would catch the bus to get to the subway station, and on the way there, I usually listened to this song. I listened to this song during my most difficult time, and I would put the song on loop all the way from Incheon Station to the agency."

Haewon added that every time she listens to the song, she would imagine herself as the protagonist of a movie and would get renewed bravery.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: NMIXX Kyujin Reveals Which TWICE Member She Likes the Most and Why

"Every time that I listened to this song, I would imagine myself as a protagonist in a movie and got off the station with renewed bravery. Now that I think about it, it was embarrassing humming to the lyrics of 'MIROH' while on the subway in front of everyone," the NMIXX member said.

Meanwhile, through Haewon and Lily's V LIVE broadcast, they sang along to some of their favorite K-Pop songs, with fans joining in on reminscing about the older K-Pop songs from groups such as KARA, Girl's Day, EVERGLOW, and more.

Watch Haewon and Lily's full V LIVE broadcast here: *Topic starts at the 29 minute and 37 second mark

NMIXX Performs Cover of Stray Kids' 'Thunderous'

Recently on May 7, the "KCON 2022 Premiere" held its first day in Seoul, and marks the official return of "KCON" following the COVID-19 pandemic.

To kick off the event, NMIXX showed off their vocals and dancing skills by giving a cover of Stray Kids' high-energy track, "Thunderous."

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: NMIXX Draws Attention for Covering BLACKPINK's 'Kill This Love' Differently

Following their performance, NMIXX was showered with praise for their stellar stage, with many complimenting the members for being able to pull off the choreography given its intensity.

Check out their performance here:

For more K-Pop news and updates, always keep your tabs open here on KpopStarz.

KpopStarz owns this article.

Written by Robyn Joan
Statement by Sri Lanka

9 May 2022

Mr. Chair,

Since the first launching of a satellite in 1957, space exploration, interest and use of space have developed rapidly. Conflict in space could affect not only space faring nations but also those who do not have space power in view of the interconnectedness and the reliability of space based services. The Outer Space Treaty, the legal cornerstone of international law on space activities, recognizes in its preamble the common interest of all mankind in the progress of the exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes and establishes in its Article 3 the basic principle that, activities in the exploration and use of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be in accordance with international law, including the Charter of the United Nations. In addition, the Rescue Agreement of 1968, the Liability Convention of 1972, Registration Convention of 1974, the Moon Treaty of 1984 as well as UN declarations and principles which are non binding in nature provide important references to existing legal regime and principles on space behaviour.

From the point of disarmament and nonproliferation the Outer Space Treaty contains certain obvious legal gaps so that an arms race in outer space has never been restricted. Some of the legal gaps in the Outer Space Treaty include the limited prohibition of only nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, reference to place in orbit around the earth thereby permission of use of weapons that are not in orbit around the earth and the applicability of the rule on exclusive peaceful use only of moon and other celestial bodies but not of outer space as a whole. Verification provisions of the Outer Space Treaty such as those provided in Art. X and XII are considered insufficient and ineffective. At the time of adoption of this Treaty Sri Lanka delegation expressed its disappointment that military activities were not prohibited under the treaty. Given the rapid advancements of outer space technology it is well established that existing legal regime does not correspond to the current reality, the very reason why preventing an arms race in outer space (PAROS) has been on the disarmament agenda since SSOD-1 in 1978 which confirms for the need for further measures in the prevention of an arms race.

Furthermore it has been pointed out by many delegations including our own of the need to re-examine the Registration Convention. As elaborated in the Preamble of the Convention it seeks to establish a mandatory system of registering objects launched into the space not only for identification of purposes but also to contribute to the application and development of international law governing the exploration and use of outer of space. While the system of registration is expected to provide for greater transparency, predictability and accountability, the requirement to provide only the general function of the space object may not have contributed much in reality to meet such expectations on transparency. A further expansion of the Conventions objectives to guarantee the peaceful use of outer space would have better facilitated the intended purpose of the Convention.

In our view, while the existing legal regime on space activities require further strengthening in view of the current realities and developments in the domain of outer space, the importance of reaffirming fundamental principles enshrined in the existing treaty regimes is essential. These fundamental principles include inter alia, obligation of States to act in accordance with international law including the UN Charter, prohibition of territorial sovereignty or any other form of national appropriation of outer space and celestial bodies, recognition of the common interest of all mankind in the progress of the exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes, freedom for all states to explore outer space and other celestial bodies as well as state responsibility for damages caused by space objects including those of private entities.

In this stock taking exercise of international law and other normative frameworks with respect to outer space we would also like to highlight the importance of taking into account the increasing number of non-state entities actively engaged in space activities and rapid commercialization of space in view of the varied interests in space operations of commercial actors.

Mr. Chair, in concluding we reiterate that given the increasingly contested domain of space and the crucial importance of the preservation of its peaceful, safe and sustainable use for human development the urgency of the need for multilaterally negotiated binding rules to prevent the imminent possibility of an arms race in outer space. (ends)

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New Delhi [India], May 12 (ANI): In line with the National Hydrogen Mission targets, GAIL (India) Limited has awarded a contract to set up one of the country's largest Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) based green hydrogen projects, the Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas said on Thursday.

The project would be installed at GAIL's Vijaipur Complex, in Guna district of Madhya Pradesh, and would be based on renewable power.

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The project has been designed to produce around 4.3 Metric Tons (MT) of Hydrogen per day (approx. 10 MW capacity) with a purity of about 99.999 per cent.

The project is scheduled to be commissioned by November 2023. In line with the vision of Atmanirbhar Bharat, the project has been awarded to a vendor having a domestic value addition of more than 50 per cent, the ministry said.

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Earlier, in January this year, GAIL had commenced India's first-of-its-kind project of mixing Hydrogen into Natural Gas system. Hydrogen blended Natural Gas is being supplied to one of GAIL's Joint Venture (JV) companies with HPCL- Avantika Gas Limited (AGL), which is a City Gas Distribution (CGD) company operating in Indore, Madhya Pradesh.

Till date, GAIL has been successful in blending upto 2 per cent (v/v) hydrogen in natural gas in the CGD network. (ANI)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Jakarta [Indonesia], May 12 (ANI/PRNewswire): Entering 2022, Indonesian insurtech startup Qoala, has successfully raised Series B funding of US USD 65 million.

The company distributes retail insurance products to consumers for car, bike, home, and health through its omnichannel platform.

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Based in Indonesia, the platform has successfully expanded to Thailand and Malaysia in 2021, strengthening Qoala's commitment to make makes insurance accessible, easy to understand, and help consumers better with their claims.

Having grown 30 times since the Series A round in April 2020, Qoala is the fastest growing insurtech in SEA. Qoala has acquired over 50,000 insurance marketers and provides a platform supported by over 50 insurers for them to sell insurance from multiple insurers, while managing pre-sale and post-sale services. It also provides several innovative micro-insurance products through its partnerships with Traveloka, Redbus, DANA, JD.ID, Shopee, Kredivo and Investree among others.

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Qoala focuses on "retail insurance" which involves insurance for cars, bikes, homes, and health. "Qoala is the only insurtech with licenses in three markets in SEA and with this new round we are optimistic in sustaining our growth momentum. Our business in Thailand has also already grown by three times since we joined forces with FairDee in February 2021, which gives us confidence in our expansion capability," added Tommy Martin, Co-founder and COO of Qoala.

Tara Reeves of Eurazeo, a European investment firm who led this round and previously funded WeFox, the largest insurtech in the world added, "Qoala stands out amongst the insurtech companies due to its diverse team which has been able to deliver rapid growth with promising unit economics despite the pandemic. With regional presence and fast growth forecasted for the region, we are excited to lead this round and join Qoala in its journey."

Qoala sets itself apart through a superior tech stack. This enables them to offer industry-leading speed in policy issuance, instant pricing as well as an industry first - instant commissions to insurance marketers. These innovations not only solve very key issues for insurance marketers and consumers but also allow Qoala to acquire and service consumers at a lower cost, leading to superior unit economics.

Global insurers like Sompo, AXA, and Chubb have also joined Qoala's platform due to their focus on retail customers so they can fasten insurance adoption while maintaining healthy loss ratios.

The funding also demonstrates appreciation and trust from both Qoala's existing and new investors to continue its growth in the insurtech sector. "We will continue to invest towards scaling up Qoala's reach in our core markets and focus on enhancing our technology and product experience to greatly reduce the hurdles to accessing insurance that are today still very significant," said Harshet Lunani, Founder and CEO of Qoala.

Furthermore, Qoala aims to add over 250 employees this year focus on building out an engineering and product management hub in Gurugram, India. In parallel, Qoala also plans to grant employees with equity compensation and give them the right to acquire shares in the company to strengthen employee ownership in the company.

"Insurance penetration in Indonesia is currently only 2 per cent, far behind the global average of 6%, with most consumers just beginning to understand the value of insurance and hence there is plenty of room for growth. Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia are amongst the top 10 fastest growing global markets for insurance in the next decade," added Harshet.

Qoala is a startup in the field of insurance technology with a mission to socialize insurance through a combination of new product development supported by machine learning-based claim processes. Qoala operates in three countries; Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand offering various insurance protections, ranging from health, motor vehicle, property, personal accident, and other needs that can be accessed quickly, easily, and transparently through the Qoala application or website.

This story is provided by PRNewswire. ANI will not be responsible in any way for the content of this article. (ANI/PRNewswire)

(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, May 12 (PTI) The Chandigarh Police has arrested four Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) officers for allegedly conducting a fake raid on an IT firm there to extort money, officials said on Thursday.

These four accused officers had allegedly gone to Chandigarh on Wednesday to conduct a "search" even when they are not posted there and had no case or mandate for such an operation, they said.

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The employees of the firm smelled rat in the conduct of the officers, rounded them up and called police, the officials here said.

Senior CBI officials said as part of the agency's zero-tolerance towards corruption policy, strictest possible action will be initiated against the accused officials.

Also Read | GSEB HSC 12th Science Result 2022 Declared: Gujarat 12th Result Out; Check Scores on gseb.org.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Sitapur (Uttar Pradesh) [India], May 12 (ANI): Samajwadi Party leader Azam Khan, who is lodged in Sitapur jail for 38 months, was taken to Lucknow on Thursday to appear before the CBI court today.

However, due to the absence of a few documents on the part of the CBI, the hearing could not take place and the SP leader was set back to the Sitapur jail.

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The next date for the hearing will be given by this evening.

He was taken to the court in connection with a case concerning an alleged Jal Nigam recruitment scam which is being investigated by the Central agency.

Also Read | Sahara Chief Subroto Roy Likely To Appear Before Patna High Court To Explain How He Would Return the Money of Investors.

The investigation of the alleged scam, which was registered by the SIT in 2017, was handed over to the CBI.

A total of eight persons, including the then minister Azam Khan, Director Jal Nigam, and the Project Manager, involved in the alleged scam, were granted anticipatory bail in the case. However, Khan was sent back to Sitapur jail as charges could not be framed against him today due to the absence of papers on the part of the CBI in the case.

After Khan was produced in the court, his advocate, Kalim Rehman, said, "Today Azam Khan was produced before the court for the framing of charges against him. The court had sought some documents from the state government which were not provided today. Because of this reason, the hearing could not be conducted today. When the entire document would be presented, the court will frame the charges."

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Meanwhile, the Supreme Court on Wednesday said that it will hear Samajwadi Party leader Azam Khan's plea on Tuesday after it was apprised that he has been arrested in another case.

The Court said that this chain will continue and also asked why this coincidence happens whenever he gets bail in one case, he faces another charge.

The Uttar Pradesh counsel said there is not any frivolous case against Azam Khan and they will file a detailed affidavit. The counsel also defended the action against the SP leader and said that there is a substance in each of these cases.

The Supreme Court had earlier expressed displeasure with the prolonged delay in pronouncing the judgement by Allahabad High Court on Azam Khan's bail plea and called it a "travesty of justice".

The Allahabad High Court on Tuesday granted interim bail to the SP leader in a case related to wrongful possession of the land.

Khan has been lodged in Sitapur jail since February 2020. (ANI)

(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, May 12 (PTI) The Delhi government will plant 10 lakh saplings to improve the green cover of the capital with Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia approving Rs 140.74 crore for the project, an official statement said on Thursday.

The budget was approved during the meeting of the Expenditure Finance Committee (EFC) held recently.

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"The Kejriwal government is determined to provide clean air to the residents of Delhi and in this direction we are continuously working on increasing the green cover of Delhi.

"This is not just an allocation of funds but investment for the quality of health of Delhi residents. Over the years, the green cover has grown in the national capital and it will be further improved after plantation of 10 lakh saplings. This project will help us restore Delhi's green lungs," Sisodia said.

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The green cover of Delhi has increased from 299.77sqkm in 2015 to 342sqkm in 2021, said the statement.

The minister added that as a part of the project, the forest land in Asola Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuary, Dera Mandi, Ghittorni, Maidangarhi, Rangpuri, Tughlaqabad, Pul Pehladpur and Rajokri of the Southern Ridge area, which has large chunk of less vegetated forest areas will be eco-restored by suppression/removal of invasive species, wildlife habitat improvement and soil moisture conservation measures.

The forest department will plant more than six lakh saplings on 'mission mode' before this monsoon and another four lakh saplings during the next monsoon season, which is the best time for planting, it said.

Along with native species of Aravali, the saplings shortlisted for plantation include specially grown plant species in the upgraded nursery of the forest department, it added.

These plantations will be taken care of by the Eco Task Force appointed by the Delhi's forest department.

The Delhi government has now approved the tenure of the Eco Task Force for another five years, which will be responsible for maintaining the plantations, protecting the forest areas from threat of encroachment and supporting the forest department in minimizing the threat to thriving wildlife in the area, it said.

Ex-servicemen and officers from the territorial army will be engaged in the Eco Task Force for the creation of a plantation of 10 lakh saplings and its maintenance for five years, it added.

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New Delhi, May 12 (PTI) AAP leader Amanatullah Khan and five others were arrested on Thursday for rioting and obstructing public servants from discharging their duty, police said, hours after the MLA took part in the protest against an anti-encroachment drive in southeast Delhi.

The AAP leader and his supporters were arrested after being detained for several hours for taking part in the protest against the demolition drive at the Madanpur Khadar area, they said.

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The anti-encroachment drive sparked violent protests and pelting of stones in the Madanpur Khadar area where the locals claimed that legal structures were bulldozed.

Esha Pandey, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Southeast) said, "An FIR has been registered under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code and Amanatullah Khan along with five other supporters have been arrested for rioting and obstructing public servants in discharging of their duty."

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While the South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC) carried out the drive in Madanpur Khadar and Dhirsen Marg, the North Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) took action in Rohini and Karol Bagh.

Earlier in the day, Shafia, Khan's wife tweeted from the MLA's Twitter handle, "Delhi Police took away my husband Amanatullah Khan, MLA from Okhla. There is no news of him for the last 4-5 hours. I am afraid, no untoward incident should happen to him. His life is in danger."

Delhi's three municipal corporations -- South, East and North -- are ruled by the BJP.

SDMC officials said four illegally built buildings and other temporary structures were razed during the drive.

As bulldozers, surrounded by SDMC officials and the police, rolled into Kanchan Kunj in Madanpur Khadar to raze alleged illegal structures, locals, including women, gathered on the streets and atop buildings to oppose the action.

According to the police, people pelted stones at security personnel but were chased away. Security personnel were seen wearing helmets and carrying batons to disperse the crowd during the protest.

The locals alleged the civic authorities had "taken money" to allow construction there and termed the demolition action "politically motivated".

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New Delhi, May 12 (PTI) External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Thursday spoke to his Saudi counterpart Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud with a focus on bilateral strategic ties and the impact of the Ukraine conflict.

Jaishankar said the Ukraine conflict and its political, energy and economic fallout figured in the conversation.

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"A good discussion with FM @FaisalbinFarhan of Saudi Arabia. Reviewed our bilateral cooperation and the Strategic Partnership Council's progress.

"Also spoke about the Ukraine conflict and its political, energy and economic fallout," the external affairs minister tweeted.

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In reflection of their strategic ties, India and Saudi Arabia signed the Strategic Partnership Council Agreement in 2019 to coordinate on important issues and bilateral cooperation in diverse areas.

Jaishankar also spoke to the Foreign Minister of Iceland Thordis K Gylfadottir and discussed a range of issues including the situation in Ukraine.

"A warm conversation today with FM @thordiskolbrun of Iceland. Underlined the importance of 50 years of diplomatic relations. Followed up on the recent India-Nordic Summit. Exchanged views on Ukraine," he tweeted.

The conversation between Jaishankar and Gylfadottir came over a week after Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his counterparts from the five Nordic countries including Iceland held a summit in Copenhagen.

At the summit, India and the Nordic countries expressed serious concern over the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and called for an immediate cessation of hostilities.

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New Delhi [India], May 12 (ANI): India successfully test-fired the extended range version of BrahMos air-launched missile from Su-30 MKI fighter aircraft on Thursday.

According to the Ministry of Defence, the launch from the aircraft was as planned and the missile achieved a direct hit on the designated target in the Bay of Bengal region.

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It was the first launch of the extended range version of BrahMos missile from Su-30MKI aircraft. With this, the IAF has achieved the capability to carry out precision strikes from Su-30MKI aircraft against a land/sea target over very long ranges.

The Ministry said the dedicated and synergetic efforts of the Indian Air Force (IAF), Indian Navy, Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), Bengal Aerotropolis Projects (BAPL) and Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) have proven the capability of the nation to achieve this feat.

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The Ministry said extended range capability of the missile coupled with the high performance of the Su-30MKI aircraft gives the IAF a strategic reach and allows it to dominate the future battlefields. (ANI)

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Kolkata (West Bengal) [India], May 12 (ANI): West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday wrote a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, stating that the Central Government isn't releasing funds to Bengal for MGNREGA and PM Awas Yojana.

The CM requests Prime Minister Narendra Modi's immediate intervention and direction to the concerned Ministry to release the funds "without any further delay."

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In the letter, Banerjee wrote, "It was very astonishing that the Government of India is not releasing funds to West Bengal for MGNREGA and PM Awas Yojana. You are aware that MGNREGA forms an important part of livelihood of rural people."

She stated that the Act mandates that wages must be paid within 15 days.

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"In West Bengal, wage payment is pending for more than four months as Government of India is not releasing funds to the State to the tune of nearly Rs 6500 Crore-Rs 3000 Crore against wage liabilities and Rs 3500 Crore against non-wage liabilities", added the Bengal CM.

Writing about the Awas Yojna, Banerjee said, "West Bengal is No. 1 in the country and from 2016-17, more than 32 lakh houses have been constructed in the State. Despite this performance, fresh allocation of funds to west Bengal is pending.."

Earlier CM Mamata Banerjee has written to PM Narendra Modi on COVID vaccines and oxygen deficiency during COVID, NEET and PG exams. (ANI)

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New Delhi [India], May 12 (ANI): Congress leader Rahul Gandhi left for Udaipur from Delhi by train on Thursday to attend the party's three-day Nav Sankalp Chintan Shivir.

Rahul Gandhi reached Sarai Rohilla railway station on Thursday evening to catch his train for Udaipur. Congress workers thronged the railway station to see off Gandhi.

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Railway porters interacted with Rahul Gandhi on board the train. Congress leaders are heading to Udaipur for the party's Chintan Shivir which begins on Friday.

Around 400 senior Congress leaders from across the country are expected to take part in the brainstorming session. Congress is going to hold a 'Chintan Shivir' in Udaipur under the leadership of its interim President Sonia Gandhi to hold discussions on party organization, and to formulate a strategy to challenge the BJP in the upcoming 2024 general elections.

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The top leaders demanded that Rahul Gandhi should take over the post of Congress President in the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting held on March 14.

In the meeting, senior Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury told Wayanad MP that he should accept the post of President, according to sources.

Sources further informed, "Rahul is ready to consider the post. After this, a proposal came in the meeting to hold the election of the President of August-September. However, it was then decided that the ongoing process cannot be pre-poned."

After the defeat in 2019 LS polls, Rahul Gandhi resigned from the post of Congress president and Sonia Gandhi turned up to become the party's interim president.

Discussions and crucial decisions are likely to be taken regarding the post of the Congress president during the Chintan Shivir in Udaipur.

The Chintan Shivir is being held in the backdrop of the party's drubbing in the elections to five state assemblies earlier this year. The party has witnessed several electoral losses in the elections held in the past eight years. Congress has also seen the exit of some of its prominent faces.

The Chintan Shivir will commence on May 13 with Sonia Gandhi's address to the people and will conclude on May 14 with Rahul Gandhi's speech. (ANI)

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New Delhi, May 12 (PTI) Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Thursday boarded a train for Udaipur from Delhi's Sarai Rohilla railway station along with some other senior leaders of the party as he headed to the party's three-day 'Chintan Shivir'.

Gandhi was greeted with flowers and slogans by party workers as he reached the railway station in the evening.

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The former Congress chief was also welcomed by coolies at the Sarai Rohilla station and their delegation shared its concerns with him.

The Congress had booked two bogies of the train as many party leaders, including Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel and former Union minister Jairam Ramesh, were travelling along with Gandhi in the train to attend the session from May 13 to May 15.

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The three-day 'Nav Sankalp Chintan Shivir' is being held in the backdrop of a string of electoral defeats and dissent in the party for the past many years.

The Shivir will focus on time-bound party restructuring, finding ways to combat politics of polarisation and getting battle-ready for upcoming electoral challenges.

It will begin Friday afternoon following which over 400 delegates will discuss subject-specific issues across six groups.

These discussions will continue on the first and second day and the conclusions will be recorded in the form of a declaration, a draft of which will be discussed at the CWC meeting to be held there on the third and last day.

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New Delhi [India], May 12 (ANI): Defence Minister Rajnath Singh has approved revised Scales of Accommodation 2022 (SoA) for defence services on Thursday which will ensure contemporary specifications in future projects and better standards of living for the personnel of the armed forces.

According to a Press release from the Ministry of Defence, the implementation of Scales of Accommodation 2022, would be a tremendous improvement inbuilt facilities/ infrastructure and specifications commensurate to contemporary requirements.

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Optimisation of defence land usage by using multi-storeyed construction and austerity measures by combining common facilities have been emphasized.

These would ensure better working and living conditions for the defence personnel including defence civilians. Amenities in all public buildings for persons with disabilities have been introduced and gender commonality in all specifications has been ensured.

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The Scales of Accommodation (SoA) defines the authorization for construction facilities for operational, functional, training, administrative, living and recreation facilities for the defence services, the release read.

These Scales are applicable for all three Defence Services and the Indian Coast Guard.

The previous SoA was approved by the Government in Oct 2009. With the induction of new units, technological facilities and equipment profile, requirements of operational readiness, increased threat perception, the concept of sustainable development including contemporary industry standards and enhanced aspirations of users for improved living standards, there was an inescapable necessity for revision of the SoA 2009.

The revision of Scales of Accommodation will enhance infrastructure development, enable usage of modern technology, give more flexibility to the executives and cater for users' aspirations. The enhanced Scales will also be in line with the Government vision and programmes like Swatch Bharat, Sugamya Bharat, Digital India, Green Buildings, Sustainable Development, Renewable Energy, reduction of Carbon Footprint, etc, the Ministry said.

The Military Engineer Services (MES) is a premier construction agency and one of the pillars of the Corps of Engineers of the Indian Army which provides rear line engineering support to the Armed Forces and associated organisations of the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

MES carries out multifarious construction activities for the Military stations/cantonments such as residential and office buildings, hospitals, roads, runways and marine structures across the country including border areas. Besides conventional buildings, MES is also involved in the construction of complex laboratories, factories, workshops, hangars, ammunition storage facilities, dockyards, jetties/ wharves and other complex/ special structures.

On this momentous occasion, the Defence Minister congratulated all the defence services and urged MES to continue its contribution towards Nation Building by providing better infrastructure services to the armed forces. (ANI)

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New Delhi, May 12 (PTI) The Delhi government has sent an SOS to Haryana, the third time in two weeks, urging it to release additional water in the Yamuna river to prevent a water crisis in the national capital.

"Haryana is releasing less water in the river due to which the water level at the Wazirabad pond has dropped to a critical low of 671.80 feet, as against the normal level of 674.5 feet. Several areas in Delhi may face a water crisis," an official said.

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The India Meteorological Department has issued a 'yellow' alert, warning of a heatwave at most places in the capital on Friday and Saturday. An 'orange' alert has been issued to caution people about a severe heatwave on Sunday.

The mercury is predicted to leap to 46-47 degrees Celsius at isolated places in the coming days, weather experts said.

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"Even flow via CLC (Carrier-Lined Channel) and DSB (Delhi Sub-Branch) is fluctuating... The lifting of 120 cusec of water from the Wazirabad pond is affected due to low pond level. This will affect water production adversely. Due to peak summer, the water requirement is more," the SOS sent to the Haryana irrigation department read.

"It is requested to supply 150 cusec of raw water additionally through DD-8/river route, so as to ensure that 120 cusec of raw water reaches the Wazirabad pond in this time of crisis, till the arrival of monsoon," it said.

Officials said operations at Wazirabad, Chandrawal and Okhla water treatment plants have been affected. Starting Friday morning, the water supply will remain affected till the water level at the Wazirabad pond improves to normal.

The city government had earlier written to the Haryana irrigation department in this connection on May 3 and April 30.

Haryana supplies a total of 610 million gallons of water a day to Delhi through two canals -- Carrier-Lined Channel (CLC) and Delhi Sub-Branch (DSB) -- and the Yamuna.

The CLC and the DSB are supplied water from Hathni Kund via Munak canal and the Bhakra Beas Management Board.

Besides, Delhi receives 253 MGD from Uttar Pradesh through the Upper Ganga Canal, and 90 MGD is drawn from ranney wells and tube wells installed across the city.

The Chandrawal and Wazirabad WTPs have a capacity of 90 MGD and 135 MGD, respectively. The two plants lift raw water from the Wazirabad pond, treat it and supply to northeast Delhi, west Delhi, north Delhi, central Delhi, south Delhi, including Delhi Cantonment, and New Delhi Municipal Council areas.

Delhi requires around 1,200 MGD of water, while the DJB supplies around 950 MGD.

The government has now targeted increasing the water supply to 998 MGD to meet the growing demand this summer season and to 1,180 MGD by June 2023.

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New Delhi, May 12 (PTI) Hindustan Construction Company (HCC) on Thursday reported an 80.36 per cent decline in consolidated net profit at Rs 30.88 crore for the quarter ended March 31, 2022.

The company had clocked a profit of Rs 157.28 crore in the year-ago period, it said in a BSE filing.

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Total income during the quarter under review stood at Rs 2,946.16 crore, compared to Rs 2,398.38 crore in the year-ago period.

Total expenses increased to Rs 2,884.36 crore from Rs 2,618.48 crore earlier.

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For the full year 2021-22, the company recorded a consolidated net profit of Rs 419.7 crore. It had posted a loss of Rs 610.02 crore on a consolidated basis in 2020-21.

HCC Vice Chairman Arjun Dhawan said this year the company made strides in both balance sheet resolution and strengthening operations.

The company said it along with JV/consortium partners secured three contracts worth Rs 3,100 crore (HCC's share - Rs 1,558 crore), mainly in the transportation and water sectors.

The reorganising of HCC's debt via a lender resolution plan is in the final documentation phase with 100 per cent of lender board approvals in place, it added.

"HCC shareholders' approval was received at the EGM on March 23, 2022. The Plan is expected to achieve final closure shortly.

"Once completed, HCC's asset-liability mismatch will stand addressed, besides achieving a material de-leveraging, with the focus of the company shifting to securing new orders for growth," it said.

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New Delhi, May 12: Shares of Punjab National Bank (PNB) on Thursday tumbled over 11 per cent after the company reported a 66 per cent decline in standalone net profit for the quarter ended March 2022. The stock tanked 11.17 per cent to its 52-week low of Rs 29.40 on the BSE and NSE.

State-owned Punjab National Bank on Wednesday reported a 66 per cent decline in standalone net profit at Rs 202 crore for the quarter ended March 2022 due to a higher amount parked towards provisioning, even as the NPA levels declined. The bank had posted a net profit of Rs 586 crore in the same quarter a year ago. SEBI Asks PNB Housing to Halt Rs 4,000 Crore Preferential Issue of Shares.

Total standalone income during the January-March quarter stood at Rs 21,095 crore, down from Rs 21,386 crore in the same period of 2021-21, PNB said in a regulatory filing. For the full fiscal 2021-22, standalone net profit rose to Rs 3,456.96 crore against Rs 2,021.62 crore in FY21, the bank said.

The asset quality showed improvement, with the gross non-performing assets (GNPAs) falling to 11.78 per cent of the gross advances as of March 2022, from 14.12 per cent a year ago.

Net NPAs or bad loans too declined to 4.8 per cent from 5.73 per cent. However, the lender kept a higher provision for bad loans and contingencies for Q4 FY22 at Rs 4,851.47 crore against Rs 3,540.32 crore earlier.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Colombo [Sri Lanka], May 12 (ANI): India's commitment to the people of Sri Lanka will continue, said Indian High Commission in Colombo on Thursday shortly after Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa appointed leader of the United National Party Ranil Wickremesinghe as the prime minister on Thursday.

"High Commission of India hopes for political stability and looks forward to working with the Government of Sri Lanka formed in accordance with democratic processes pursuant to the swearing-in of Hon'ble @RW_UNP as the Prime Minister of SriLanka," the high commission said in a tweet.

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"India's commitment to the people of #SriLanka will continue," it added.

Wickremesinghe was sworn in as the prime minister by Gotabaya Rajapaksa in Colombo Thursday evening.Wickremesinghe had previously served as the prime minister.

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US Ambassador Julie Chung said she is looking forward to working with new Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.

"Look forward to working with Ranil Wickremesinghe. His appointment as PM, and the quick formation of an inclusive government, are first steps to addressing the crisis and promoting stability. We encourage meaningful progress at the IMF and long-term solutions that meet the needs of all Sri Lankans," the US ambassador tweeted.

Mahinda Rajapaksa stepped down as the prime minister on Monday, following violent incidents reported between pro-government groups and anti-government protesters.

Sri Lanka's Opposition leader Sajith Premadasa said that his party will "devise a strategy" if United National Party (UNP) leader Ranil Wickramasinghe is made the prime minister of the country.

In an exclusive interview with ANI, Sajith spoke about the letter he wrote to Sri Lankan President in which he expressed willingness to assume the post of prime minister if demands put forward by his party are met.

"I will not speak on the speculation but if it will happen, we will launch our strategy soon. We are the largest opposition party in the country and we know the political system in the country," he said answering a question related to Ranil Wickremesinghe. (ANI)

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Bangkok, May 12 (AP) Myanmar announced Thursday it will resume issuing visas for visitors in an effort to help its moribund tourism industry, devastated by the coronavirus pandemic and violent political unrest.

Starting on Sunday, tourist e-Visas will be provided online in a move also intended to harmonise tourism with neighboring countries, according to a government notice in the state-run Global New Light of Myanmar newspaper.

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Visitors need a certificate of vaccination, negative results from a COVID-19 RT-PCR test taken shortly before their flight and a travel insurance policy. They must also take an ATK rapid test after arrival.

Myanmar on April 1 had already resumed issuing business visas, and on April 17 dropped a ban on international commercial flights. It had stopped issuing visas and suspended flight arrivals in March 2020.

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Tourism is an important source of revenue for most Southeast Asian nations but they banned almost all foreign visitors after the coronavirus pandemic began in early 2020. In the past six months most have reopened and gradually dropped most or all testing requirements.

The pandemic and political instability have buffeted Myanmar's economy, which was put under more pressure by economic sanctions imposed by Western nations targeting commercial holdings controlled by the army, which seized power in February 2021 from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi.

Myanmar hosted 4.36 million visitor arrivals in 2019, before the pandemic, but the number fell to 903,000 in 2020, the latest year for which official statistics are available.

Peaceful opposition to the military takeover has turned into armed resistance, and the country is now in a state of civil war, according to some U.N. experts. The army is conducting large-scale offensives in the countryside while anti-government forces carry out scattered urban guerrilla attacks in the cities.

The U.S. State Department advisory for Myanmar, which it calls by its old name Burma, is at its maximum alert Level 4. It advises against travel there due to areas of civil unrest and armed conflict. It also says "reconsider travel to Burma due to COVID-19-related restrictions. (AP)

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Colombo, May 12 (PTI) Sri Lankan Parliament will debate a no-confidence motion against President Gotabaya Rajapaksa on May 17, the Speaker's Office confirmed on Thursday, amid the ongoing political turmoil triggered by the worst economic crisis plaguing the debt-ridden country.

The decision was taken during the party leaders' meeting on Thursday. The motion would be taken up for debate after obtaining special approval from Parliament, the Daily Mirror newspaper reported.

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Speaking at a press conference after the party leaders met at the Parliament complex, Speaker Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena said that the proposal submitted by the leaders will be prepared and handed over to the president

The proposals, including the formation of a stable government and the security of the members of parliament, will be handed over to President Rajapaksa.

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Parliamentarian MA Sumanthiran emphasised that a stable government was necessary for the country to move forward.

Sumanthiran noted that while a stipulated time duration has not been given for the resignation of the president, action must be taken soon with regard to the appointment of the prime minister, News First website reported.

Parliamentarian Mano Ganeshan added that no one should suddenly intervene and take up the position of the prime minister, and the president must respect the repeated calls for his resignation by the people, the report said.

Sri Lanka's main Opposition party SJB on Friday announced that it will move a no-confidence motion against the government of President Rajapaksa and is prepared to impeach the embattled leader if he fails to address the concerns of the public facing hardships due to the worst economic crisis.

As protests continued across the country, demanding the resignation of the President and the entire Rajapaksa family from the government, Opposition leader Sajith Premadasa also called for the Executive Presidency to be abolished, saying power should be divided between the Executive, Legislature and Judiciary.

The government must pay heed to the public demand for the Rajapaksas to quit, if not we will bring a no-confidence motion," the leader of the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) told Parliament.

Premadasa said that he cannot agree to an interim government with Rajapaksa remaining as the president. The SJB said that it was also prepared to impeach the president. He also submitted a set of proposals to Parliament on behalf of the SJB to address the economic crisis in Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka is facing its worst economic crisis since independence from Britain in 1948. Clashes broke out on Monday after government's supporters attacked peaceful anti-government protest sites in Colombo and elsewhere, killing at least 8 people and leaving over 200 others injured in the violence.

Sri Lanka's worst economic crisis has provoked widespread protests calling for political reform and the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. On April 1, President Rajapaksa imposed a state of emergency, lifting it five days later. The government reimposed a state of emergency on May 6 after police fired teargas and arrested students protesting near parliament, which was adjourned until May 17.

Although the protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful, the police fatally shot a protester on April 19, and on several occasions have used teargas and water cannons against protesters. The authorities have made numerous arrests and repeatedly imposed curfews.

The political crisis was triggered in late March when people hurt by long hours of power cuts and essential shortages took to the streets demanding the resignation of the government.

President Rajapaksa sacked his cabinet and appointed a younger cabinet as a response to the demand for resignation. A continuous protest opposite his secretariat has now gone on for well over a month.

Last Monday, his brother Mahinda Rajapaksa resigned as the prime minister to make way for the president to appoint an interim all political party government.

Sri Lankan authorities on Wednesday deployed troops and military vehicles in the streets to ensure public security in the Capital amidst nationwide protests over the government's failure to tackle the worst economic crisis.

The deployment came a day after the country's Ministry of Defence ordered the Army, the Air Force and the Navy personnel to open fire on anyone looting public property or causing harm to others amidst violent protests in the island nation over the unprecedented economic crisis.

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London, May 12 (PTI) Scotland Yard on Thursday said that it had issued over 100 fixed penalty notice fines for COVID-19 lockdown breaches at UK government offices as part of its ongoing investigation into the so-called partygate scandal.

The Metropolitan Police had previously confirmed 50 fines, including one each issued to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, his wife Carrie Johnson and Chancellor Rishi Sunak for attending a birthday party for the British prime minister at the Cabinet Room in 10 Downing Street in June 2020.

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The force's Operation Hillman inquiry into these illegal gatherings has been ongoing, which has now resulted in a further 50 fines.

Operation Hillman, the investigation into breaches of COVID-19 regulations in Whitehall and Downing Street, has made more than 100 referrals for fixed penalty notices (FPNs) to the ACRO Criminal Records Office, the Met Police said in a statement.

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These referrals have continued to be made throughout the period since our last update on Tuesday 12 April and the investigation remains live, it said.

Downing Street has confirmed that Boris Johnson is not included in the latest wave of fines, which start at around 100 pounds each and get halved to 50 pounds if paid up quickly, something Johnson and Sunak had done last month.

While the identities of those who receive fines are not revealed by the police as normal practice, Downing Street is committed to reveal if further fines are received by the UK PM or any senior Cabinet colleagues.

"We'll have plenty to say about that when the thing's finished," Boris Johnson told reporters, when asked about the issue as he arrived for a special Cabinet meeting taking place at Staffordshire in the West Midlands of England on Thursday.

Meanwhile, Opposition Labour Party Leader Sir Keir Starmer and his deputy, Angela Rayner, remain under investigation by Durham Police over whether an event with party activists in April last year broke COVID-19 rules.

The inquiry, dubbed beergate, was launched after footage emerged of him drinking a beer with colleagues in April 2021 when COVID restrictions were in place.

Starmer and Rayner have maintained no rules were broken at the work event and have pledged to resign from their posts if they are issued with fines by the police, in an attempt to distance themselves from any comparisons with partygate.

There are a string of gatherings under the police scanner to determine whether there was a breach of the law, which at the time imposed a strict ban on social gatherings with anyone outside your own household to control the spread of coronavirus.

Breaches result in fixed penalty notices, or a sanction for breaking the law, and mean a fine needs to be paid within 28 days unless contested. If someone chooses to contest the fine, the police will then review the case and decide whether to withdraw the fine or take the matter to court.

(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, May 12: The Crime Branch of Delhi Police has arrested an Indian Air Force jawan for allegedly leaking sensitive information to a woman, officials said on Thursday. The Jawan, identified as Devendra Sharma, was working as an Airman with the Indian Air Force in Delhi.

Crime Branch sources said the accused Sharma was first honey-trapped by a woman and later asked to share secret information of the IAF. "He was caught in a honey-trap through social media," sources said. Haryana Honey Trap Case: Woman Registers 'Fake' Rape Case Against Five Youths In Jind, Demands Rs 6 Lakh; Arrested.

They further said that accused Sharma was first detained on May 6 and the police have since then been probing the matter and have now unearthed the conspiracy. During the investigation, it was also revealed that some suspicious transactions were made in his wife's bank account.

Meanwhile, according to sources, the role of Pakistan's intelligence agency ISI is being currently probed in the whole matter. Notably, it is not the first time that a defence personnel has been honey-trapped by the ISI handlers. Pakistani intelligence agencies are always working to corner India and fetch sensitive information about India's security apparatus by honey-trapping young personnel.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on May 12, 2022 02:17 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).
The results of the Gujarat Common Entrance Test (GUJCET) 2022 have been declared. The results of GUJCET 2022 were declared at 10 am today, May 12. The Gujarat School Education Board (GSEB) announced the GUJCET Result 2022 on the official websites- gseb.org and gsebeservice.com. GSEB 12th Science Result Declared.

Students who appeared for the GUJCET 2022 Examinations can visit the official website of the Gujarat Education Board and download their Gujarat CET results. Candidates need to use their roll number or seat number mentioned on the admit card in order to access their GUJCET Result 2022.

Here's how to download the GUJCET Result 2022:

Visit the official site of GSEB on gseb.org and gsebeservice.com

Click on the GUJCET link available on the home page

Enter your roll number/seat number and then click on submit

Your GUJCET result will be displayed on the screen

Download the result and take a printout for reference

This year, the GUJCET 2022 entrance test was held on April 18. The exams were conducted in three languages - Hindi, English, and Gujarati and in two shifts; morning (10 am-12 pm) and afternoon (2 pm-4 pm) in offline mode.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on May 12, 2022 10:43 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).
Florida Surfside condo collapse victims have reached a proposed $997 million settlement in a court hearing on Wednesday.

Wall Street Journal originally reported that the reached settlement is much larger than legal experts were predicting.

The defendants were named as the insurers, developers, and an engineering firm that warned of the tower's structural issues.

The settlement is still pending final approval and comes six weeks before the first anniversary of the tragedy on June 24.

Judge Michael A. Hanzman of the Circuit Court in Miami-Dade County said in a New York Times report that he is shocked by the result, describing it as "fantastic."

Hanzman added that it is a recovery that is far in excess of what he had expected.

The judge had approved a smaller settlement of $83 million to be split among condo unit owners for their property losses before the nearly billion-dollar settlement that was announced on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, how the money will be split among the relatives of the victims will be determined in the coming weeks.

All but one of the defendants is part of the settlement, with GeoSonics being the lone remaining defendant.

The company is the vibration monitoring firm for nearby condominium complex Eighty-Seven Park.

As negotiations with the vibration monitoring firm go on, the settlement could reach over $1 billion.

READ NEXT: Miami-Dade County Condo Building Collapsed: Death Toll Rises to 3, 99 Still Missing

Champlain Towers South Collapse

On June 24, 2021, the 12-storey Champlain Towers South condo collapsed in the early morning hours, destroying dozens of individual condo units and burying its residents under rubble.

The death toll for the incident has reached 98 people, including four Canadians, according to a CBC News report.

A team of federal investigators released a video showing evidence of extensive corrosion and overcrowded concrete reinforcement in the building.

Several measures were passed to address the Florida Surfside condo collapse.

In February, the Florida House unanimously passed a bill that would require statewide recertification of any condo building above three stories high.

It would also require recertification after 30 years or 25 years if the building is within five kilometers of the coast.

Champlain Tower South's Settlement

The $83 million fund for the unit owners will come from Champlain Tower South's insurers and the sale of the land.

The condo owners were released from any liability for negligence in the building's maintenance as part of their earlier settlement.

Some of the victims' families earlier argued that the money recovered through the lawsuit should be allotted to them and none to the unit owners, which Hanzman disagreed on.

Hanzman argued that unit owners had to rebuild their lives from scratch after economic losses.

Lawyers then argued that settlement for victims' families could expand further to about $1 billion if they reach an agreement with a remaining company.

Hanzman said he would like to finalize the settlement before June 24 and compensate survivors and victims' families by fall.

READ MORE: Oceanside Condo Partially Collapses in Miami; At Least 1 Dead

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Written by: Mary Webber

WATCH: Nearly $1 billion settlement reach in condo collapse case | Rush Hour - from NewsNation






House Rep. Kevin McCarthy has said that U.S. President Joe Biden has created a new disinformation board, which the Democrats could access to control the information Americans are able to see.

The House leader raised the question if they do not trust Americans enough "that they want to control that much of our lives" during a press briefing on the new Homeland Security board.

Daily Mail reported that the Republican representative claimed Democrats are trying to "conceal information pushed by the right," which leftists seemed to label as likely conspiracies.

Republicans quickly denounced the new disinformation board officially known as Disinformation Governance Board.

It is currently headed by so-called Russian misinformation expert Nina Jankowicz.

McCarthy further said that the president's "Ministry of truth is an un-American abuse of power." The House leader was referring to George Orwell's novel 1984.

Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado also spoke at the press briefing at the Capitol, saying "free speech is under attack here in America."

READ NEXT: Pres. Joe Biden Administration Launches New Sponsorship Program for Ukrainian Refugees Fleeing Russia's War

U.S. President Joe Biden's Disinformation Board

Federal Communications Commission head Brendan Carr slammed the Homeland Security's new disinformation board, which aims to fight online disinformation.

Carr called the new board "Orwellian," "un-American," and "unconstitutional," according to a Fox Business News report.

Carr stressed that the disinformation board should be abolished, arguing that "there is a broader game afoot."

The FCC commissioner then mentioned White House press secretary Jen Psaki from the White House podium saying that they are coordinating with Big Tech to take down posts, flagging posts for them.

Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced the disinformation board late last month, saying that the goal was to address the threat.

He added that the department is focused on the spread of disinformation in minority communities before the 2022 midterm elections.

Republican-led states are threatening legal action against Homeland Security's new disinformation board.

Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares is leading GOP attorneys general in sending a letter to Mayorkas demanding the department halt the enforcement of the board.

The 20 attorneys general wrote in a letter that it is an "unacceptable and downright alarming encroachment on every citizen's right" in expressing their opinions.

Disinformation in the United States

Claire Wardle, the executive director of First Draft, noted in The Guardian report that America's current disinformation crisis is a collection of more than two decades of "pollution of the country's information ecosystem."

In addition, the left and right in the U.S. do not only have different sets of media outlets for their different audiences.

They also have created distinct models of information-sharing, according to Wardle.

Mainstream media outlets follow a traditional top-down broadcast model, wherein right-wing media has developed a strategy through talk radio.

Kate Starbird, a University of Washington professor who studies disinformation, said that former U.S. President Donald Trump has built on that, embracing "participatory disinformation."

Starbird wrote that the former president did not just prime his audience to be receptive to false narratives of vote fraud, but also "inspired them to create them."

READ MORE: Russia-Ukraine Crisis: WHO Advises Ukraine to Destroy Health Lab Pathogens to Curb Spread of Disease

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Written by: Mary Webber

WATCH: McCarthy Criticizes DHS Disinformation Board As 'Un-American Abuse Of Power' - from NBC News






One Florida plane passenger has called Florida's Treasure Coast airport saying that the plane's pilot "has gone incoherent," adding that he does not know how to fly the plane.

NPR reported the recordings of the air traffic control call of the man who made an emergency landing with the help of multiple air traffic controllers around West Palm Beach, Florida.

The Florida plane passenger has not been publicly identified. He said several times in the recordings of the call that he does not know how to operate the Cessna Caravan aircraft.

However, his conversations with controllers suggest that he had some familiarity with technical aviation terms.

Robert Morgan, the Palm Beach International air traffic controller, said that luckily the passenger who made an emergency landing has been around "aviation a little bit."

Morgan clarified that the passenger was not a pilot and did not really have any flying experience.

READ NEXT: Florida: Worst Flight Delays Happening Because of Space Launches, Severe Weather

Florida Plane Emergency Landing

The air traffic controller asked the passenger his position, wherein he responded that he does not have any idea and that he could only see the Florida coast ahead of him.

BBC News reported that the air traffic controller told the passenger to maintain wings level and to follow the coast, either north or southbound.

At one point, the passenger said that he cannot get his navigation screen to turn on, adding that he has no idea how to stop the plane.

Morgan then used a map of the aircraft's cockpit to give instructions to the passenger who flew the plane.

The longtime flight instructor said that he knew the plane was flying like any other plane and that he just knew he had to keep the flier calm, point to the runway, and tell him how to reduce the power so he could land.

Morgan and the passenger who flew the plane met on the runway and hugged. They also took a picture of them together.

However, Morgan never heard the man's name in his excitement.

The air traffic controller said that the flier told him that he just wanted to get home to his pregnant wife and it "felt even better."

Florida Plane

The Federal Aviation Administration noted that only three people were on board, with a pilot and two passengers, according to The New York Times report.

The pilot said that he was not feeling well about an hour into the flight. He then slumped against the controls, making the plane go into a nosedive and a sharp turn.

The owner of the Cessna 208 plane was reported to be a limited liability corporation registered in Delaware based on FAA's records.

Meanwhile, the corporation that owned the Cessna 208 plane could not be reached for comment.

One patient was transported to an area hospital after the emergency landing, according to Palm Beach County Fire Rescue.

The FAA said that the passengers were not injured in light of the incident.

Flight tracker FlightAware noted that the plane has taken off around an hour earlier from Marsh Harbor in the Bahamas.

READ MORE: Disney Stocks Falls by 33% After Governor Ron DeSantis Revokes Special Status

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Written by: Mary Webber

WATCH: Passenger safely lands plane at Florida airplane, pilot 'incoherent' - from USA TODAY






A sinkhole, appearing over a narco tunnel, has swallowed a young man sleeping on a couch early Tuesday morning in Mexico's Sinaloa state.

According to Borderland Beat, the sinkhole inside a house in the Juntas de Humaya neighborhood in Culiacan city opened up due to a narco tunnel that crosses several streets in the area that was discovered in 2011.

The outlet reported that the young man's relatives were awakened by a loud noise at around 4 a.m. When they turned on the light to see what happened, they saw the young man at the bottom of the sinkhole.

Authorities said the young man fell to a depth of between two and a half meters and three meters. He reportedly suffered injuries and bruises in different parts of his body.

The neighbors, who also heard the loud noise, believed that the sinkhole was caused by the collapse of one of the many "narco tunnels" in the area, Riodoce reported.

According to reports, criminals managed to escape in 2011 using a narco tunnel located about 50 meters from the accident site. At the time, the army conducted an operation to secure the area, where they seized several illegal items stored in black bags.

Tuesday's opening of the sinkhole resulted in a series of complaints from other neighbors, who said that their homes also have damages caused by this same problem.

They noted that a big mango tree was already "swallowed" by a sinkhole about two years ago. Another home can also be seen with cracks in the ground and walls.

Reports said authorities are expected to look into this case and will also conduct a thorough soil study to verify whether the houses are still suitable for continued habitation.

READ NEXT: El Chapo Narco Tunnel Found in Front of a National Guard Base in Mexico

Narco Tunnels Link to El Chapo and His Sinaloa Cartel

In May last year, Mexican authorities discovered a 650-foot tunnel created by Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Loera. The said narco tunnel was across the street from a National Guard base in Tijuana, Mexico.

Authorities believed that the narco tunnel was planned to connect Tijuana to the San Diego underpass discovered in 2019, which was a part of a tunnel network built by the now-jailed El Chapo.

Reports said there are at least 13,300 narco tunnels in Mexico. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), most of these tunnels were established in areas where the Sinaloa Cartel is doing its operations.

In March 2021, U.S. agents found $30 million worth of drugs in a 600 meters tunnel in San Diego. The tunnel's discovery came two months after the agents found a different tunnel in January.

The tunnel discovered in January was reportedly the longest narco tunnel ever found on the U.S.-Mexico border as it stretched more than three-quarters of a mile from an industrial building in Tijuana into San Diego.

Builder of El Chapo and Sinaloa Cartel Narco Tunnels Arrested

Jose Sanchez Villalobos, the builder of the narco tunnels linking Tijuana on the Mexican side and San Diego on the U.S. side, was sentenced to 10 years and one month in custody for a drug distribution conspiracy in a San Diego federal court in July 2021.

Villalobos, also one of the Sinaloa Cartel's high-level managers, pleaded guilty in December 2020 to planning, financing, and supervising the construction of several cross-border tunnels from 2010 to 2012.

He also pleaded guilty in overseeing the Sinaloa cartel's operation as smuggling conduits. He was reportedly responsible for transporting drugs in Baja, California, and Jalisco in Mexico and managing marijuana transport from southern Mexico to northern Mexico.

Villalobos was also reported to have overseen two tunnels found in the San Diego area built to transport Sinaloa Cartel drugs. He was also said to have been responsible for deciding who could use the said tunnels for a fee.

Villalobos was arrested in Mexico in 2012 and spent about eight years in custody there. He then spent another year and a half in San Diego after being extradited to the U.S to face charges. He seemed to have already served most of his prison term.

The narco tunnels became a huge part of El Chapo's operation for smuggling and escaping from prisons. El Chapo has earned the reputation of being the "Lord of the Tunnels" for his preference to use the underground.

He was compared to early Juarez Cartel boss Amado Carillo Fuentes, who was dubbed as "Lord of the Skies." Carillo Fuentes was known to transport drugs by using planes.

READ MORE: Gun Battle Between Rival Mexican Drug Cartels Left 8 People Dead

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Written by: Mary Webber

WATCH: How Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Escaped Prison - From Channel 4 News






The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is urging China to clamp down on the supply chain networks producing fentanyl, which is the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 45.

DEA administrator Anne Milgram told CBS News that they would like the Chinese government to do more as a majority of the chemicals in fentanyl are produced in China.

"For example, we need to be able to track every shipment of chemicals that's coming out of those Chinese chemical companies and coming to Mexico. Right now, we can't do that," Milgram noted.

According to Borderland Beat, the number one killer of Americans between 18 and 45 is now fentanyl overdoses. Between January 2021 and March 2022, Milgram said the DEA had seized 2,100 pounds of precursor chemicals.

She noted that it was enough to make one billion possibly lethal doses. However, Milgram said she knew her agency was not getting all of it.

READ NEXT: Mexican Drug Cartels Move Into Chinese Market for Illegal Wildlife Trade

DEA Says Fentanyl Arriving in the United States From China

According to Anne Milgram, chemical companies in China are currently the largest producer of precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl.

The DEA official said there was a relationship between the Chinese chemical companies and the Mexican drug cartels in Mexico, adding that once the drugs make it to the U.S. border, "it is too late."

"That's part of why we are so focused right now on stopping the chemicals coming out of the Chinese chemical companies. If we can go as far upstream as possible to China, we have a much better chance of stopping it ever being made in Mexico," Milgram noted.

Milgram also said that fentanyl's threat to teens is also a concern as the fentanyl-laced drugs can easily be bought online.

The DEA official warned parents that fake counterfeit prescription pills were widely available on social media, and drug dealers were also using TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook to sell the illegal drugs.

Milgram likened it to "Uber Eats," being able "to get a fake pill delivered to your doorstep." She said four of 10 pills seized last year contained a deadly dose of fentanyl, which is two milligrams or more.

The DEA official noted that "the amount that could be on the tip of a pencil is enough to kill someone."

Deaths From Fentanyl Overdose in the U.S.

According to preliminary new data published on Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), nearly 108,000 people died from drug overdoses from January to December 2021.

Farida Ahmad, a research scientist with the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, said that's about a 15 percent increase from the number of deaths in 2020, NPR reported that nearly 94,000 died in 2020.

According to The New York Times, deaths related to synthetic opioids, largely fentanyl, rose to 71,000 from 58,000. Those associated with stimulants like methamphetamine also increased to 33,000 from 25,000.

Deaths from both drugs have reportedly been rising in recent years.

READ MORE: El Chapo's Wife Emma Coronel Could Dismantle Sinaloa Cartel by Cutting Deal With U.S.: Report

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Written by: Mary Webber

WATCH: Fentanyl: An Epidemic of Addiction Made Worse by the COVID-19 Pandemic - From DW News






A sheriff's office in Utah has identified and named a suspect in the murder of a Moab couple that has been linked to Brian Laundrie.

Kylen Schulte and her wife, Crystal Turner, were both found dead with gunshot wounds at a campsite in the La Sal mountain range in Utah last August 13.

Crime Online reported that the Grand County Sheriff's Office named Adam Pinkusiewicz as the suspect in the couple's deaths. The sheriff's office noted that Pinkusiewicz worked at the Moab McDonald's, where Turner also worked.

Police said he was among the "persons of interest" previously under investigation. Investigators noted that Pinkusiewicz told another person that he had killed the Moab couple.

The suspect also reportedly provided details about the killing, known only to investigators. Police said that Pinkusiewicz left Utah shortly after the murders and later committed suicide.

But despite the suspect's death, the sheriff's office noted that the case is still open and under investigation. Police said they were still processing "critical and newly discovered evidence," which includes the recent finding and seizure of Pinkusiewicz's 2007 Yaris automobile.

READ NEXT: Colombia Police: Paraguay Anti-Mafia Prosecutor's Killing Likely 'Transnational' Hit

Brian Laundrie Linked to Murder of Moab Couple

It has been previously speculated that Kylen Schulte and Crystal Turner might have played pool with Gabby Petito and Brian Laundrie in Moab, Utah before they were found dead.

Sean-Paul Schulte, the father of Kylen Schulte, earlier said that his daughter and her wife were playing pool with a couple at a local bar called Woody's Tavern on August 12, the same day that Laundrie and Petito were stopped by Utah cops.

Sharing details on Understanding Crime's Facebook page, Schulte noted that her daughter had been playing with a "creepy man" peacefully. He wrote that he was hoping the tavern's staff would look to see if they knew who it was.

When someone asked Schulte if "Crystal was shooting pool with the creeper at Woody's? So he may have been following them?" he replied, "we don't know if it was him. It was a couple. A young couple. I want to know if it was Brian and Gabby!"

After their infamous stop with the bodycam footage, Laundrie and Petito were interviewed and separated by Utah cops. The police officers then concluded that the incident was a mental-health crisis and not a crime.

The cops ordered Laundrie and Petito to cool down for the night separately. Laundrie was put in a hotel room while Petito stayed in their van. Laundrie's room was reportedly just a seven-minute walk from Woody's.

Prior to their murder, the Moab couple had told their friends that they were transferring to another site since there was a "weirdo camping near them that was freaking them out." The couple reportedly stopped communicating with their family and friends shortly after.

Investigators speculated whether the deaths of Kylen and Crystal could be linked to the Laundrie-Petito case, given the closeness of time and location of the two incidents. However, officials later determined that there was no connection between the two cases.

Dog the Bounty Hunter Is in Utah to Investigate Murder of Moab Couple

Dog the Bounty Hunter, whose real name is Duane Chapman, is now in Utah to investigate the murder of Kylen Schulte and Crystal Turner.

Dog the Bounty Hunter said on Tuesday that he had helped track down thousands of criminals, but the killings of the Moab couple were one of the most horrendous cases he has seen, ABC 4 reported.

According to Chapman, he believes that the killer was a local person who knew the couple. He said: "Usually the only thing that drives someone to kill like that is love."

Schulte's father reached out to Dog the Bounty Hunter months ago in the hopes that he could help him find his daughter's killer.

Chapman earlier went to Florida to look for Brian Laundrie. He searched the Fort De Soto campground area after receiving tips that Gabby Petito's fiance could be there. However, he was not lucky enough to find Laundrie in the park.

READ MORE: California: 13 Homes Engulfed by Flames of Coastal Fire; Evacuations Issued

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Written by: Joshua Summers

WATCH: Victim's Father Reacts After Suspect Identified in Moab Murders - From KSL News
China-Belarus industrial park welcomes new resident company

Xinhua) 16:04, May 12, 2022

Representatives of the Great Stone China-Belarus Industrial Park and Chinese enterprise Transport Complex AF LLC sign an agreement online in Minsk, Belarus on May 11, 2022. The Great Stone China-Belarus Industrial Park, a landmark cooperation project within the Belt and Road framework, held a welcome ceremony on Wednesday for a new resident company. The Chinese enterprise Transport Complex AF LLC, the 90th resident company of the industrial park located in the eastern suburbs of Minsk, plans to build a monitoring center for cross-border transportation with the help of the Internet of Things technology. (The Great Stone China-Belarus Industrial Park/Handout via Xinhua)

MINSK, May 12 (Xinhua) -- The Great Stone China-Belarus Industrial Park, a landmark cooperation project within the Belt and Road framework, held a welcome ceremony on Wednesday for a new resident company.

The Chinese enterprise Transport Complex AF LLC, the 90th resident company of the industrial park located in the eastern suburbs of Minsk, plans to build a monitoring center for cross-border transportation with the help of the Internet of Things technology.

During the ceremony, head of the park's administration Alexander Yaroshenko voiced hope that the number of the Great Stone resident companies will reach 100 by the end of this year, and the administration stands ready to support them in all matters.

Among the 90 enterprises in the park, 46 are financed by China, 27 by Belarus and 17 by other countries. The total investment in businesses has amounted to 1.26 billion U.S. dollars.

The industrial park is the largest investment project of China in Belarus and an important example of the Belt and Road cooperation between the two countries.

(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun)
Laois is becoming more attractive to business thanks to local supports, the Minister of State for Business, Employment and Retail, has said on a visit to the county this week.

Minister Damien English, TD met Laois business support groups and local companies on a tour last Thursday afternoon, as part of nationwide face-to-face meetings since Covid restrictions eased.

He got a warm reception at the slick recently opened Laois Local Enterprise Office (Laois LEO) now off the foyer of county hall, reflecting a new policy to be on call in Laois County Council offices, ready to welcome and support local business people.

He praised Laois LEO and Laois County Council for making use of all Government supports possible to keep Laois businesses not just afloat, but expanding despite the pressures of Brexit, the pandemic and now the war on Ukraine.

"There was a concern in some businesses when local authorities stepped in to be involved with LEOs, but it has been an immense success. When I met you previously you said at the time about the amount of people commuting out of Laois. All your work indicates that you are making Laois a more attractive place. There are a lot of opportunities for county Laois. You're availing of the national supports. You have talent and skills in Laois, it's all about making this county a more attractive place.

Laois County Council CEO John Mulholland praised the will to grow in Laois businesses.

"How remarkable it is, after six years of turmoil. Imagine, Brexit, Covid shutdown, Ukraine and a lot of businesses are still in expansionist mode. You have to pinch yourself. One of the things that assures me is networking. Maybe years ago the same trust wasn't there in working groups. That people like Glanbia, is exporting cheese to Europe from Laois, with the cheddar market having gone, it's incredible. It's a terrific story so far. I am glad to see businesses expand. You would have thought after Brexit they would be cut off but most are expanding," he said.

Having heard that Laois has six remote working hubs, with a national event showcasing them in BloomHQ next week, Minister English said that "hubs are where the real potential is" for regional areas, with people now wanting to keep a working life near home.

The Minister was greeted at County Hall by John Mulholland CEO, Councillor Conor Bergin, Cathaoirleach, the LEO team, Alison Browne President of Laois Chamber, Caroline Hofman CEO of Laois Chamber and Sarah Morgan Midland Regional Enterprise Office, members of the Evaluation Committee and Cllr Thomasina Connell.

They thanked him for the new supports in recent years to get through Covid, and promote remote working.

"We have fabulous support from the council and in particularly LEO and the Business Support Unit have been fantastic. With the Town Team and Downtown Portlaoise it is a lifeline for retail and business and we look forward to more incentives," Ms Browne said.

The Minister made a presentation to Laois company Salutem Insights, this years Laois County Enterprise award winner. They work with pharmaceuticals to bring products to market, formed in 2017 with a new employee every year since, and six now employed.

Sandra Redmond MD told the Leinster Express that it meant a lot to be awarded.

"It is a recognition of the work that LEO put in to Salutem to allow us to expand and grow in confidence," she said.

At Portlaoise Enterprise Centre he visited LEO client company TSI Flowmeters Ltd. With over twenty years experience, TSI are the market leaders in providing innovative water management solutions to a wide range of customers including water utilities and fire services.

Minister English finished his Laois visit at another LEO client, Ballykilcavan Brewing Company. David Walsh-Kemmis set up the company in 2016 and started brewing beer in 2018. The beers are distributed all over Ireland and the company are now developing a visitor centre at the brewery.

A number of food producers from the Laois Taste Group also visited Ballykilcavan including The Merry Mill, Temptation Patisserie and Mueller and OConnell Bakery.

He praised the Laois Taste Group for their initiative.

Local communities are recognising the strengths and business opportunities that exist in their own area and seeking to make the most of them. It is evident here in Laois too with ventures such as the Laois Taste Group. Our new Regional Enterprise Plans were specifically developed to enable collaboration and to utilise local insight and resources so as to realise enterprise growth and job creation.
Rail services through Laois were delayed when a truck struck a bridge in Portlaoise on the Mountrath Road on Wednesday morning.

The incident led to rail and traffic delays and Irish Rail staff had to inspect the bridge before allowing services to resume. Irish Rail said the incident delayed the 10.25am Portlaoise to Dublin service.

Its not the first time the Mountrath Road railway bridge or the Moutmellick Road bridge have been hit by lorries.

Local resident Tony Connolly questioned why Irish Rail have signs on both bridges that dont work. He said the signs worked up to about two years ago but have ceased functioning despite appearing to have power.

Before it was put up surely it ought to have been tried and tested, said Mr Connolly. He said the two of them arent working and yet there is power going to them it seems.

He explained that there the signs are lit in patches but no longer display the warnings they were designed to display.

Mr Connolly alerted Laois County Council to the signage and they told him it was an issue for Irish Rail. He said I wrote a letter a couple of years ago to Irish Rail about those signs.
Transition Year students from Scoil Chriost Ri in Portlaoise will have their work featured in a new national exhibition.

The exhibition, which opens Sunday, May 12 at the National Museum of Ireland- Country Life in Turlough Park, Mayo, is part of the Irish Architecture Foundations Architects in Schools programme, which provides Transition Year students with first-hand experience of the design process under the guidance of architects and architectural graduates nationwide.

Students created a mix of 2D drawings, architectural drawings and 3D models, in response to three key themes: home, community and sustainability and were inspired by the Irish folklife collection at the National Museum of Ireland.

Students from Scoil Chriost Ri created a model for the exhibition with the help of their teacher, Ger Murphy and the collaborating architect, Patrick Dunne.

A record number of schools were involved this year with 1750 students participating from 70 schools across 19 counties nationwide. There were 41 architects involved in the programme.

A specially commissioned film will also feature in the exhibition  Architects in Schools: The Student Voice  which hears directly from the students about their responses to the exhibition themes, hands-on learning process, and how to build a more sustainable and inclusive future through architecture.

The exhibition is free to attend and will run from Sunday, 1st May until Thursday, 30th June. The Architects in Schools Exhibition is co-produced by the Irish Architecture Foundation and the National Museum of Ireland. The Architects in Schools programme is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, Department of Education and Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage.

Applications for the Architects in Schools programme 2022 / 23 will open during May, further information on how to apply will be on the Irish Architecture Foundation website here.

Devised and delivered by the Irish Architecture Foundation and running since 2013/14, Architects in Schools provides Transition Year students with first-hand experience of the design process under the guidance of architects and architectural graduates, through facilitated workshops. The youth voice is central to this programme, as we aim to empower young people to become thoughtful stewards of the built environment and to increase their understanding and appreciation of architecture. Now in its ninth year, this celebrated programme is currently reaching a record 70 secondary schools across Ireland, facilitated by a team of 41 architects, increasing opportunities for young people to connect with architectural professionals and the art form of architecture.
A child in Ireland has died and another has received a liver transplant after being admitted to hospital with an acute form of hepatitis that has been reported in children in several countries.

As of April, at least 169 cases of acute hepatitis of unknown origin in children have been reported in 11 countries, with 114 of these cases reported in the UK.

Since March, the HSE said that there have been six probable cases of children with hepatitis in Ireland, which it said is more than would usually be expected over this period of time.

All children were aged between one and 12 years of age, and all had been hospitalised.

The children affected have no links to the other children involved, and no single virus has yet been identified. The Irish cases have no links to the UK cases, the HSE said, and none had a recent travel history to the UK.

The common viruses that cause hepatitis: hepatitis viruses A, B, C, and E; have not been detected in any of the cases reported worldwide.

Authorities are investigating links between this form of hepatitis and an increase in infections caused by adenovirus, a common cause of childhood illness, as well as other infections including Covid-19.

Irish authorities are liaising closely with the ECDC (European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control), the World Health Organisation and authorities in the UK to identify the cause of the illness.

Parents are advised to go to their GP if their child develops symptoms of hepatitis, which include pale, grey-coloured stools, very dark urine, or a yellowing of the eyes and skin.
At an Amnesty International protest against anti-abortion laws, in San Salvador, April 2015. JOSE CABEZAS / REUTERS

Thirty years in prison for losing her fetus, that is the sentence Esme (which is not her real name) received on Monday May 9, after she went to the emergency room and miscarried. According to the Citizen's Collective for the Decriminalization of Abortion, far from receiving the necessary care, she was denounced to the police and accused of homicide. Esme's lawyer, Karla Vaquerano, announced that she would appeal the court's decision, saying that the prosecution's accusations were biased and tainted by gender stereotypes.

El Salvador is one of seven countries (along with Nicaragua, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Suriname and Malta) that completely prohibit abortion. A dozen women are currently behind bars because of obstetric emergencies. They are accused of having purposefully terminated their pregnancies. Their sentences sometimes reach forty years, as was the case for Maria Teresa Rivera, who was able to flee to Sweden and obtain asylum there.

For seven years, there had been no new convictions. Esme's is the first to take place under El Salvadors young President, Nayib Bukele, who was elected in 2019 and for whom feminists had high expectation. The president assured voters during his campaign that he was in favor of decriminalizing the termination of pregnancy when a womans life is at risk.

Nayib Bukele's broken promises

Mr. Bukele, though, broke his promise. In September 2021, he announced that he had decided to remove therapeutic abortion and same-sex marriage from proposed constitutional reform. Feminist and LGBT groups, however, had been consulted by the ad hoc team in charge of drafting the constitutional reform proposal. The country's vice-president, Felix Ulloa, who wrote the draft, attributed Mr. Bukele's actions to pressure from "very powerful conservative sectors, in particular the Catholic Church. Addressing the sentencing of women to long prison terms, he acknowledged that El Salvador was "a disgrace in this regard."

In December 2021, as a gesture of appeasement, Mr. Bukele ordered the release of three of the seventeen women sentenced to long terms for aggravated homicide related to obstetric emergencies. In January and February, two other women were released after each spending a decade in prison following miscarriages.

"Esme's conviction... is a blow in [the struggle] to end the criminalization of obstetric emergencies, which, as the IACHR [Inter-American Court of Human Rights] has pointed out, must be treated as problems of public health while guaranteeing the rights of women" said Morena Herrera, president of the Citizen's Collective.

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At the Imatra border crossing, 270 km East of Helsinki and 200 km West of St. Petersburg, time seems to have stopped. The few motorists who show up are redirected to Lappeenranta, the only crossing point in the region still open, located about 30 km to the South. Only trucks not registered in Russia or Belarus are allowed to enter Finland. As for rail transport, it has come to a standstill. On the tracks, near the road, hundreds of wood transport wagons form a long unmoving snake over several kilometers, a consequence of the embargo on Russian wood, imposed by the European Union, since April 8.

Anna Helminen, 46, is the chairwoman of the Imatra City Council. She is a member of the National Coalition Party and is in favor of Finland joining NATO. In Imatra, on May 06, 2022. ADRIEN VAUTIER/ LE PICTORIUM POUR  LE MONDE 

The naturally jovial Anna Helminen is chairwoman of the municipal council of Imatra, a small town of 26,000 inhabitants located three kilometers from the border crossing. She does not hide her pessimism regarding the iron curtain that came down between the two countries on February 24: "I don't see any light at the end of the tunnel," she said. In this context, the 46yearold member of the conservative National Coalition Party, who has long been undecided on whether Finland should join NATO, has joined the supporters of such a move. "I think it's a good solution to ensure security in the region and reassure investors, who might be worried about our proximity to Russia."

More on this topic Finnish leaders announce support for application to join NATO

Anna Helminen is not the only one to have changed her opinion: according to a poll published on May 9, 76% of Finns are now in favor of membership, compared to less than 30% before the war in Ukraine. It's a shift in public opinion, unthinkable just a few months ago, which should lead the country of 5.5 million inhabitants to announce its application for NATO membership by the end of the week.

Helicopter incursion

Moscow has already made it clear that the integration of Finland  which would double the length of the borders between Russia and the transatlantic alliance from 1,215 to 2,555 km  will not go unanswered. On May 4, while British Secretary of State for Defence Ben Wallace was attending the "Arrow" military exercise in southwestern Finland, a Russian military helicopter made an incursion 4.5 km into Finnish airspace, north of Imatra. The next day, Russian media published photos of armored vehicles, taken during the exercise, claiming that Finland was moving troops on the border with Russia.

Jarmo Ikavalko, the curator of the War Veterans' Museum, in Imatra, Finland, on May 6, 2022. ADRIEN VAUTIER/ LE PICTORIUM POUR  LE MONDE 

While these attempts at destabilization are being closely monitored by the authorities in Helsinki, Emil Stigman, the head of security in Imatra, said there is no reason to worry. According to the 32-year-old former border guard: "these events do not affect the daily life of our inhabitants." Jarmo Ikavalko, a soon-to-be-70 resident, is a bit resigned: "It doesn't matter what happens anyway. We live on the border and have nowhere to go."

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WAITING times for colposcopy procedures and test results at University Hospital Limerick have been raised in the Seanad.

Senator Roisin Garvey discussed the issue with Minister of State at the Department of Health Frank Feighan TD who was attending on behalf of Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly.

The Green Party representative said she had been contacted by a number of women who had experienced delays in receiving test results after their smear tests.

Senator Garvey acknowledged that while there had been improvements in the area of cervical checks thanks to the likes of Vicky Phelan, test results were still being delayed.

"Some women said they had waited five months for test results after being told that they had irregular cells.

"Irregular cells are not always cancer but as soon as you are told you have irregular cells, that is what you immediately think.

"295,000 women are screened every year with 12,000 of these told they have irregular cells, they then have to carry the stress with them until they get the results."

Ms Garvey outlined that there are set targets for when results from such tests should be received.

Smear test results should be available within four weeks, appointments for colposcopys should be eight weeks and then the results for this test should be four weeks.

Ms Garvey said that long waiting times cannot be justified for such a worrying diagnosis and in some cases results remain on consultant's desks for weeks if they are away.

Minister Feighan responded to Ms Garvey's concerns while acknowledging the dedication of staff working in the area.

"I am pleased to say that cervical check screening is back to pre-covid testing levels which is a testament to the staff as well as women across the country who attended their tests.

"The majority of people are receiving their results within the targets with 100% of urgent and high grade referrals seen well within the target time.

"In 2021, the government allocated 10 million to cancer services which represents the commitment to cancer services."

Mr Feighan said it was unacceptable that women have to wait that bit longer for results which causes huge stress and strain.

Ms Garvey finished by saying the Department of Health needs to build up people's confidence in cervical check services assure them that they will get their results promptly.
AVERAGE monthly rents in Limerick have risen as supply hits a new low, figures have confirmed.

According to the latest Daft Rental Price Report, which has just been published, the average monthly rent for a property in County Limerick is now 1129, up 96% from its lowest point.

In Limerick city, rents have risen by 15.5% in the last year and the average rent is now 1485 according to the latest report.

Rents in Munster rose 12.6% year-on-year, reflecting very low availability - just 131 homes were available to rent on May 1, down over two thirds year-on-year.

Nationwide rents in the first quarter of 2022 were an average of 11.7% higher than the same period a year earlier.

The price of renting a one bed apartment in Limerick city has risen 16.4% to 988 compared to the same quarter last year.

The rental cost of a two bedroom house has gone up by 14.2% to 1,153 and a three bed house has risen to 1,344 annually.

A four bedroom house will now cost renters 1,654 a month, an increase of 13.8% and a five bed in Limerick city has gone up by 33.4% to 2,095.

Meanwhile the cost of renting a one bed apartment in County Limerick has risen by 10.8% to 743 compared to the same time last year.

A two bed house now costs 855 to rent on a monthly basis, an increase of 10.3%, and the price of a three bed house has risen by 12.9% to 987.

The cost of a four bed house has risen by 10.9% to 1,126 and a five bed house will now cost 1,597 on a monthly basis, a rise of 40.6%.

The average market rent nationwide between January and March was 1,567 per month, up 2.8% on the last three months of 2021 and more than double the low of 765 per month seen in late 2011.

Nationwide, there were just 851 homes available to rent on May 1st, down from over 3,600 a year ago and another new all-time low in a series that extends back over fifteen years to 2006.

Commenting on the Daft report, its author Ronan Lyons, economist at Trinity College Dublin, said: "While strong demand for housing reflects underlying economic health, it becomes a challenge when there is inadequate supply to meet it. In Irelands case, the economy has suffered from an under-provision of new rental accommodation for over a decade.

"As a result, market rents have doubled and, as shown in this latest report, rental homes have become unbelievably scarce. New figures confirm that sitting tenants have experienced much smaller increases in rents  both during 2021 and over the last ten years."
A PRIVATE ambulance company has launched an investigation after one of its vehicles left the road while a patient was on board.

The road traffic collision caused a full closure of the M7 between Birdhill and Castletroy. The condition of the patient prior to the incident is unknown. However, a garda spokesperson said there were no injuries reported following the collision.

A spokesperson for Lifeline Ambulance Service confirmed to Limerick Live that one of their fleet was involved in an incident on Friday at Birdhill.

Lifeline is the biggest private ambulance service provider in Ireland and the service provider of choice by and to the HSE nationally.

A spokesperson for the company said an ambulance left the road and we are currently investigating this.

I can confirm there were two crew and a patient on board at the time and thankfully no one was injured. The normal procedures and plan were followed where another ambulance was dispatched to the scene and the appropriate emergency services contacted.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the services for their very prompt response and assistance, said the Lifeline spokesperson.

Gardai and a number of appliances from Limerick Fire and Rescue Service and from Newport fire station attended the scene.

The reason the ambulance left the road is unknown. However, one school of thought is it may be connected to oft-highlighted accidents on that stretch of motorway following rain or hail.

In a social media post, West Cork Rapid Response wrote above a photo of the ambulance: Thoughts with colleagues inLifeline. Hope everyone well following their accident.
A CLOSED nursing home in Castleconnell has welcomed over 30 Ukrainians fleeing their war-torn country.

The building was prepared in just 24 hours to receive predominantly women and children, including a baby as young as four-months-old.

The Castleconnell community has extended a warm welcome to the new arrivals.

Limerick Live revealed in February that Riverbrook Nursing and Respite Care faced potential closure.

A spokesperson said they, like many nursing home businesses, have been under considerable pressure in recent years, partly due to the Covid-19 pandemic and also due to trading and regulatory pressures.

In the subsequent weeks hopes were raised that its future could be secured.

A healthcare company had expressed an interest in purchasing Riverbrook and continuing to operate it as a going concern with plans for future development. However, due to financial constraints the deal failed to materialise. Families were understanding and appreciative of the efforts made by management to achieve a solution securing the future of the nursing home.

We were very disappointed that the nursing home hasnt continued on in its current guise to care for our elderly. It was a difficult day for management, staff and residents and, in particular, the longer term residents and staff who had made the operation tick for so long, said the spokesperson.

The last of the 22 residents left four weeks ago with the 31 full and part-time staff finding new jobs in hospitals and care facilities.

Management liaised with families and other nursing homes in the area to facilitate suitable accommodation. They have all been relocated to other nursing homes in other communities throughout the county, said the spokesperson.

Following the closure, management had no immediate plans for the extensive building.

On Thursday, April 28, a decision was made to support the Government's Ukrainian response regarding the provision of emergency accommodation. The building was prepared in 24 hours with the assistance of Limerick City and County Council, Limerick Civil Defence and some local volunteers, said the spokesperson.

Between 2am and 4am on the morning of Bank Holiday Monday, 34 Ukrainians arrived at Riverbrook.

The Castleconnell community has extended a warm welcome to the new arrivals, concluded the spokesperson.

In March, Limerick Live reported on serious concerns over fire safety at Riverbrook following a HIQA report. A query was sent to the local authority regarding this.

A council spokesperson said the HIQA report referred to followed an inspection of Riverbrook in October 2021 while it was in operation as a nursing home.

The inspection refers to the Health Act 2007 (Care and Welfare of Residents in Designated Centres for Older People) Regulations 2013, Health Act 2007 (Registration of Designated Centres for Older People) Regulations 2015 and the National Standards for Residential Care Settings for Older People in Ireland as the basis of assessment.

The facility ceased to operate as a nursing home recently and as a response to the call for accommodation for the Ukrainian people arriving into Ireland, Limerick City and Council arranged a site inspection with the owner of the property whereby a thorough inspection was carried out.

The property has a current fire certificate and the council is satisfied that the property is suitable for ground floor residential accommodation in a managed multi-occupancy setting, said the spokesperson.

This resulted in the council recommending this facility to the International Protection Accommodation Service (IPAS) of the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth who are responsible for the provision of accommodation to people in the International Protection process.

Shortly after making the recommendation, the facility was activated to accommodate Ukrainians over the May Bank Holiday weekend.
He lectured in Latin and Classical Studies at SU before studying on a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford University, where he obtained the degrees BA in Jurisprudence and Bachelor of Civil Law. Cameron graduated with an LLB degree from the University of South Africa (Unisa) in 1978. He practised at the Johannesburg Bar from 1983 to 1994. From 1986, he was also a human rights lawyer based at the University of the Witwatersrands Centre for Applied Legal Studies (Cals), where he was awarded a law professorship. His practice included labour and employment law, defence of members of the African National Congress charged with treason, conscientious and religious objectors, land tenure and forced removals, as well as gay and lesbian equality.

From 1988, he helped draft and negotiate the mining industrys first comprehensive Aids agreement with the Chamber of Mines, and, at the same time, assisted in drafting the Charter of Rights on Aids and HIV. He co-founded the Aids Consortium, a national affiliation of non-governmental organisations working in the field of Aids, which he chaired for the first three years. Cameron was also the founder and first director of the Aids Law Project. When the Constitution was being drafted in 1994, he oversaw the gay and lesbian movements submissions to the Kempton Park multiparty negotiating forum. This resulted in the inclusion of a clause on respect for all persons sexual orientation in the final Constitution  a world first.

In September 1994, the late president Nelson Mandela conferred on Cameron the status of senior consultus (senior counsel or silk), and he was appointed as an acting judge of the high court. He was asked by the late chief justice Arthur Chaskalson to act in the Constitutional Court from 1999 to 2000, was appointed to the Supreme Court of Appeal in 2001, and to the Constitutional Court in 2009. Described as a jurist of the highest order, he was considered a crucial member of the Constitutional Courts progressive wing.

As the first South African in a high-profile public office speaking openly about his HIV status and experience taking antiretroviral drugs (ARVs), Cameron has made a credible and crucial contribution to more accessible ARV treatment for all South Africans living with HIV.

His international impact as top jurist with nearly 200 published judgments against his name, acclaimed author and popular speaker is evident from the numerous awards and distinctions he has received, among them the Nelson Mandela award. Other accolades include recognition by the Bar of England and Wales for his contribution to international jurisprudence and the protection of human rights, and the prestigious Grand Prix du Conseil Quebecois des Gais et Lesbiennes award bestowed on him in Montreal.

His approach to handling difficult situations is premised on two principles that he holds dear: integrity and preparation. He has helped develop South African law so as to truly reflect the fundamental values of the Constitution, and is a key player in South African and international law.

He is the youngest of three children, with two older sisters, Laura and Jeanie. The eldest, Laura, was tragically killed by a delivery van in Pretoria as a child. Cameron credits Jeanie for helping make him the person he is today. He met his partner, Nhlanhla Mnisi, in 2015.
A LEADING global software company in Limerick is due to significantly increase its workforce following a new strategic acquisition.

Castletroy based Advanced Manufacturing Control Systems (AMC) has agreed to acquire German company Quentic, a leading software solution provider, for an undisclosed amount.

This will be the cloud-based software and vehicle technology suppliers fourth acquisition in the last 12 months and will see its workforce increase by 250 to a total of 1,000.

The transaction is subject to regulatory approval and is expected to close in the coming weeks.

Jimmy Martin, CEO of AMCS stressed that both companies are very aligned with the mission to drive an environmentally sustainable future.

A net zero carbon future depends on a very connected and circular approach across the supply chain, he stated.

With this acquisition, AMCS will be positioned to broaden its expertise in the environmental services industry globally and continue to expand its customer base.

With a combined 4,000 customers supported by now over 1,000 employees, AMCS is on a trajectory to achieve run rate revenues greater than 180m by the end of the year.

Today, Quentic provides a holistic and modular software as a service solution to manage all tasks and processes related to environmental, health, safety, and quality management (EHSQ) as well as corporate responsibility-related areas in environment, social and governance (ESG).

We have built Quentic on the values of making a meaningful contribution to people, society and the environment, Markus Becker, CEO of Quentic said.

Together with AMCS, the Quentic management team will continue to shape the future, he concluded.
From India to Indonesia, Elon Musk is scouting out sites to make more Teslas for global roads. With the world mired in supply chain chaos, access to materials matters most. Hes got it right. After lobbying against Indias tight policies around manufacturing and prohibitive import duties, Musk is headed to meet Indonesias President Joko Widodo and visit several areas across the country, which is also the top producer of nickel, a key metal for batteries. Thats an astute bet  for Tesla and Indonesia. And a missed opportunity for New Delhi.

To meet ambitious electric vehicle targets, Indonesia has drawn in several battery and car manufacturers in recent months with a variety of incentives. Government ministers say they hope to have investment across the supply chain.

With a friendly policy bolstering the countrys EV goals, manufacturers have started committing billions of dollars. LG Energy Solution, along with other companies, is investing about $9 billion to set up a supply chain  from mining to manufacturing  in the country. Together with Hyundai Motor Co., the firm is developing a battery plant, too. Meanwhile, the worlds largest powerpack maker Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. is investing almost $6 billion in a battery project with state-backed PT Aneka Tambang Tbk and PT Industri Baterai Indonesia. Further up the value chain, Chinas Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt Co. and PT Vale Indonesia Tbk announced last month they would work together on the formers fifth nickel project in the country.

The move by companies across the EV supply chain into the Southeast Asias largest economy shows how important it is to be close to the source of raw materials that feed into manufacturing. If theres one thing the past year of logistical screw-ups and delays has shown the industry, its that proximity is key. Even if global supply and demand is balanced on paper, moving industrial goods around has become expensive, slow and cumbersome.

Tesla knows this well. It has created large manufacturing hubs in China and now Germany  countries known for their prowess in industrial production and policies that will help sell its cars. After having trouble making EVs in the US, its market share has grown globally. Now the company is looking to secure materials and make its own batteries, while stopping short of buying mines and getting into a new business. Wherever Musk sees problems in the production process, he looks for a solution. Tesla is essentially creating discrete supply chains across the globe.

Automakers wouldnt have necessarily made their way to Indonesia. The country churns out around 1 million cars in a good year, and is dominated by Japanese producers smaller vehicles. The auto market pales in comparison to the likes of China and the US, and EVs make up a small portion. In addition, its geography doesnt make it an ideal place for electric vehicle charging stations and infrastructure connectivity, although the government aims to make the capital, Jakarta, and the tourist hub of Bali model centers for greener transport.

Potential sales generated in Indonesia wouldnt really move the needle for Tesla. Yet, the country is leveraging existing resources, an EV business-friendly policy and the right story to make it fertile ground for large-scale investment. The moment that happens, Indonesia will be able to boast about its battery manufacturing supply chain on the global scale  a much vaunted accolade these days that even the US is vying for. Private investment into manufacturing batteries will only draw more attention.

Meanwhile, India continues to hem and haw around whether it will lift duties. Government officials there have made big, bold statements about their ambitions, talking up their desire to draw in Tesla. Earlier this month, Road Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari went as far as to say that Tesla would benefit from manufacturing in India. Yet customers who placed orders are still waiting and its unclear how Musks firm would get a leg up. Now, there are questions around whether Tesla will make its way into India at all, given all the roadblocks.

That probably is a good bet, too. Setting up manufacturing now, especially as companies struggle to procure parts for their products and deal with logistical issues and high shipping costs, is the one thing firms dont want to face. Progress toward EVs has been scattered and commitment isnt clear. Toyota Motor Corp., one of the worlds biggest automakers but a laggard in EVs globally, has pledged to invest $624 million to making EV-related components through its existing units in India, however its unclear who they will buy them. Even Indias dominant automakers Maruti Suzuki India Ltd isnt planning on EVs until 2025. Add in policy hoops and punitive taxes, and India has all but ruled itself out by making the cost of investing in its market so high.

Indias vaccine king, Adar Poonawalla, also decided to weigh in earlier this month. He tweeted that putting capital into making cars in India would be the best investment" Musk would ever make." Thats perhaps too optimistic.

EV and battery manufacturers are in high demand across the globe and it will take far more than bold words and political ambition  that includes making existing resources available and coming up with a coherent policy that manufacturers can work with. Its bizzare, then, Prime Minister Narendra Modis government continues to hold back. Yes, there are a few domestic EV models however, the Indian auto market remains an aspirational one. That means wide-scale adoption will pick up pace where there are models that people want to buy  like Teslas Model 3  or enough charging facilities that make it easy, as the evolution of the two-wheeler market showed.

Much like China made Tesla a global company, Indonesia could do the same for its battery supply chain. All while making manufacturing more affordable and eventually, electric vehicles, too. Its a means to an end  and a smart one at that.

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.
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CBS has canceled the Chuck Lorre-produced sitcom United States of Al after two seasons, Variety has confirmed.

United States of Al centers on the relationship between Marine combat veteran Riley (Parker Young) and his Afghan interpreter Awalmir, or Al (Adhir Kalyan), who finally lands a visa allowing him passage into the United States. Riley, who has separated from his wife, makes room for Al in his Ohio home, and together they struggle to adjust to their post-combat lives.

Creators David Goetsch and Maria Ferrari, who worked for Lorre on The Big Bang Theory, began kicking around the idea for Al after seeing stories on the plight of 17,000 Afghan interpreters who have been promised asylum in the United States, but are still waiting to be granted entry. Many of the stories depicted the bond that often developed between veterans and their interpreters.

In Season 1, Goetsch and Ferrari put together a team of seven writers, three of whom were Afghan or Afghan American; one was a military veteran; and one was the fiancee of a combat veteran who served in Afghanistan. Five of them were new to the Writers Guild of America, having joined the union thanks to the show.

When United States of Al debuted its second season last fall, it told a story that followed its production staffs experience in scrambling to help those who had loved ones in Afghanistan during Taliban attacks.

We had shot one and a half episodes during the week of the fall of Kabul and quickly realized that we were going to have to think that we had guessed wrong [about] what was going to happen and that we were going to have to adjust our plans, executive producer Maria Ferrari said during a Television Critics Assn. press panel.

Lorre, Goetsch, Ferrari, Reza Aslan and Mahyad Tousi executive produced United States of Al for Warner Bros. TV. The show also starred Dean Norris stars as Art, Rileys father; Elizabeth Alderfer as Lizzie, Rileys sister; Kelli Goss as Vanessa, Rileys ex-wife and Farrah Mackenzie as Hazel, Riley and Vanessas daughter.

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Emily Blunt will star in Pain Hustlers, a criminal-conspiracy film directed by Fantastic Beasts helmer David Yates that will be introduced to buyers at Cannes.

From a script by The True American writer Wells Tower, the film is produced by Lawrence Grey through his Grey Matter Productions banner and Wychwood Pictures.

The movies official logline reads: Dreaming of a better life for her and her young daughter, Liza Drake (Blunt), a high-school dropout, lands a job with a failing pharmaceutical start-up in a yellowing strip mall in Central Florida. Lizas charm, guts and drive catapult the company and her into the high life, where she soon finds herself at the center of a criminal conspiracy with deadly consequences. In the vein of The Big Short, American Hustle and The Wolf of Wall Street, Pain Hustlers is a hilarious, dramatic and wild journey to the corrupt heart of the American dream.

Production on Pain Hustlers is set to begin on Aug. 22. The Veterans and CAA Media Finance are representing the film at the Cannes Film Market. Grey originally pitched the project to Yates and Wychwood Pictures, and from there sold it to Sony Pictures.

BAFTA-winning filmmaker Yates is fresh off the release of his third Fantastic Beasts film, The Secrets of Dumbledore. Golden Globe winner Blunt most recently starred in Jungle Cruise, and will next appear in Christopher Nolans World War II epic Oppenheimer.

Yates is repped by CAA, Casarotto Ramsay, and Eric Brooks at Goodman Schenkman & Brecheen, LLP. Blunt is represented by CAA, The Artists Partnership, and attorney David Weber at Sloane Offer Weber & Dern. Tower is repped by CAA and attorney Tara Kole at Gang, Tyre, Ramer, Brown & Passman Inc.

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NBCs comedy pilot Lopez vs. Lopez starring George Lopez and his daughter Mayan Lopez has been ordered to series.

The multi-cam is described as a working-class family comedy about dysfunction, reconnection and all the pain and joy in between. In April, Variety learned exclusively that Selenis Leyva, Brice Gonzalez and Matt Shively would also star, with Laci Mosley and Kiran Deol in recurring roles. Additionally, Kelly Park was announced as director.

Debby Wolfe serves as writer and executive producer of Lopez vs. Lopez on behalf of via Mi Vida Loba. Bruce Helford supervises and executive produces under his Mohawk Productions banner. George will executive produce via Travieso Productions, with Mayan producing. 3 Arts Katie Newman and Michael Rotenberg also executive produce. Universal Television is the studio.

Leyva stars as Rosie, Mayans mother and Georges ex-wife, described as a ball of energy whos barely overbearing and the self-proclaimed best insurance agent in town. Shively stars as Quinten, Mayans live-in boyfriend described as a kind-hearted beta male and the bane of Georges existence. Hes also the father of Chance (Gonzalez), Mayan and Quintens five-year-old son whose hobbies include meditating and bulking up on green juice. Chance is also Georges favorite grandchild, if only by default.

Mosley plays Mayans co-worker and best friend Brookie who always knows whats trending (and sometimes its her feet pics). Deol plays Dr. Pocha, the veterinarian who employs Mayan and Brookie and is better at saving pets than talking to people.

NBC picked up the Lopez vs. Lopez pilot in October 2021 after a put pilot order in June.

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Scrolling through Michael Stuhlbargs filmography on Wikipedia, youll notice that quite a few of his roles are written in blue font, with hyperlinks that lead to other Wikipedia pages. The real-life characters hes taken on include former New York Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal in The Post, Golden Age-actor Edward G. Robinson in Trumbo, and even disgraced pharmaceutical executive Richard Sackler on Dopesick.

But Stuhlbarg says his role as defense attorney David Rudolf on The Staircase, HBO Maxs adaptation of the true crime docuseries, was his hardest biographical challenge yet.

Ive played a lot of people whove actually lived, some of whom are still alive and some who are not, Stuhlbarg told Variety. I had played a criminal defense lawyer briefly on a Law and Order episode once before, but never with the amount of depth or time or as much information to sift through as I had under these circumstances.

The real Rudolf, now 72, had a daunting task ahead of him when he agreed to represent Michael Peterson (whos played by Colin Firth) after he was accused of murdering his wife, Kathleen (Toni Collette) at the bottom of their homes back staircase. As captured in the original docuseries, Peterson is a frustrating client  appearing to lie even when telling the truth, and not especially forthcoming about the troubling details of his past. From failing to disclose the details of his other wifes death to fudging a story during a failed mayoral campaign about receiving a Purple Heart in Vietnam, Peterson did not make Rudolfs job easy. (Peterson was sentenced to life in prison in 2003 before being released on house arrest in 2011. He was fully freed in 2017 after entering an Alford plea.)

Rudolf became known by viewers of the docuseries as a stalwart fixture of the North Carolina courtroom, remaining by Petersons side even as the case took unpredictable and shocking turns, with Rudolf committed to maintaining his composure in public, yet struggling behind the scenes. Playing a lawyer fiercely devoted to his job, Stuhlbarg said he was interested in learning why Rudolf thrives doing what he does.

It was really challenging, Stuhlbarg said of taking on the role. Some days, it was eerie, because I had his voice ringing in my head. Other days it felt very much like me going through those circumstances. And thats just part of the journey that we go on.

Variety spoke with Stuhlbarg about his experience meeting the real Rudolf, his own theories about the case and why he believes his character said yes to a French documentary crew capturing the case in real time.

When you first came to the project, what was your familiarity with The Staircase?

I had seen the documentary, and I had actually started watching it a second time before I even knew that I was going to be involved in this project. There was something about the story that kept my attention all the way through. So the idea of exploring it from David Rudolfs shoes was a thrilling idea for me, because I found him to be one of my favorite  if you could say this  characters in the documentary to watch because of his thought process, because of his sense of humor, because of the way he navigated his way through through the circumstances that he was given. Then I got to meet him and talk with him about what it was actually like to go through all those things, and ask him a million questions. He made himself available to all of us to answer any question that we could come up with. So it was a daunting prospect, but really, really fun in the doing of it.

I was going to ask you if you had spoken to him. What were those conversations like, and what questions did you have for him?

Oh, gosh. Well, we got to spend at least 12 or 13 hours together in his law offices. Then he brought me to his house to meet his family, we took a long walk in the park and we had lunch together. I asked as many questions as I could. It was fantastic. Its rare to get the opportunity to talk to the people that youre going to be playing. But he was an open book, and he was really sweet about the whole thing. I think primarily he was interested in making sure that how a criminal defense lawyer is portrayed may be done so in our project as above board as possible. He takes his work very seriously and hes really good at it. So I think it was important for him, for myself and for all of us to help show what criminal defense lawyers do in the best possible light.

What were your main inquiries for the real David, in terms of what you needed for your acting?

Thats an excellent question. I didnt know what I needed. Its just an opportunity to be with an individual who lived through something or made something happen. I wanted to know a lot about who he was before all this took place, and what brought him there. About his schooling, his family, his relationships  what it was that got him jazzed about being a lawyer in the first place. What kind of a human being he is or was, and why it is that he thrives doing what he does. Even now, I was particularly interested to learn about how his life changed during the course of this particular trial and how it really sent his life in a different direction. He and his wife go about trying to help people whove been wrongly accused, and Im glad to know that theyre spending their time doing that.

Something I was wondering from watching both the documentary and the new series is why David agreed to the documentary crews request to film. Im curious what your answer is for that, and whether you were able to speak with the real David about that.

I was, and he explained to me that it was neither here nor there with him, because he was still going to go about doing his job. But he said, Look, here are my rules that you need to follow. He didnt think they would agree to them, frankly, because most documentarians probably wouldnt have. They did agree to it, obviously, otherwise we wouldnt be here. In the end, I dont know how much it necessarily changed who he was or how he defended his client, but he probably would have done the same thing if he had the opportunity to do it again. He would probably do it under those circumstances as long as it didnt harm his client. He was fine with it all.

Throughout the trial in Episode 4, we really get to see David start to become more critical of Michael. Im curious how you approached Davids internal life as he was dealing with that.

Anything thats going to make Davids case more difficult in terms of information not being revealed by his client was something that I imagine just made him angry. You know, Look, Im trying to help you here. You have to give me everything you can so I can help you. Im not judging you about your life or anything. The more I know, the stronger our case is going to be because we wont be able to be surprised by the prosecution. So give me everything. There were certain frustrations when things kept being revealed and there was nothing David could do about it.

At the same time, you have to make do with what happens, and I imagine how frustrating that might be if youre trying to help somebody and theyre the one whos not giving you all the help that they could. It was interesting trying to navigate those things. All that someone trying to walk in his shoes can do is offer up as many different options to the filmmaker as possible in terms of how one might react under certain circumstances. Then its up to them to include whichever they think is the best version.

Did playing this role give you a different perspective on the real Michael? Because Id imagine that you have to look at it from a completely different angle when youre on his defense.

Maybe I paid attention to the coverage that I was privy to of Michael in a more focused manner than I did before, as opposed to just letting it wash over me. I dont know if it changed my opinion of him. In the end, its Colin and I engaging in whatever the moment happens to be. So Im taking in what Im given as opposed to something thats not in front of me. So Im reacting immediately to the circumstances, which is Colin. So its going to be different from how I would react if I met the real Michael Peterson.

What was that like working with Colin, and what was that dynamic like between the two of you, since you seem to have most of your scenes together?

Wonderful. Everything youd want it to be. Hes so smart and accomplished. I learned a lot about what it is we do and trying to tell a story in this medium. Hes got a great sense of humor, and I really enjoyed my time with him. It was really fun to watch him navigate what he had to go through emotionally and intellectually and to see all the different choices he made, and the way he went about trying to achieve those.

In this show, is there anything that was specifically a challenge for you?

I remember feeling a great sense of wanting to honor what it was I had seen in regards to the documentary, because I watched an awful lot and in some cases we were recreating those moments. So I felt a great sense of wanting to honor what I had seen as truly as I could, but not giving the exact same words because our writers didnt want to use the same words. It wasnt like we were trying to create the same thing. What would be the point of that? So we were showing it from a different point of view. I wanted to honor those things, and bring along with me the ramifications of what would happen if I wasnt able to do what it was I was being tasked to do. In other words, trying to get Michael off in the circumstances and then trying to bring with me what that feels like. What are the stakes under these circumstances? If I cant get Michael out of prison, or trying to feel what it must have felt like to expect a certain outcome and then have it flip on you like that. Trying to make those instances real for me. He had something that he really wanted to do. And I think the most difficult part was trying to take the information that I had learned and try to make it real for myself as much as possible.

At this point, having done the show, do you have any of your own theories?

Well, I havent come up with anything new, honestly. Ive taken all the information that Ive been privy to, and there are some that make more sense to me than others. Honestly, in terms of the logic, it just seems like certain things happened and the facts that were left with logically unfold in a particular way. You know, the whole owl theory circumstance and all that stuff, that gets explored, as well. Theres a lot of smart people whove applied themselves to this story, and its great that weve gotten to explore it a little bit in several, several different ways.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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Laredo police have confirmed that the baby who had multiple injuries on his body has died.

Authorities identified him as Justin Alejandro Tello, who was 9 months old. Police identified the parents as Carlos Alejandro Tello, 39, and Justina Eliza Martinez, 36. Each was served with arrest warrants on April 29 charging each with three counts of injury to a child.

Police responded to an injured child case at Laredo Medical Center on April 18. Tello stated that he and his wife, Martinez, had taken their child to the doctor in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico because the boy was constipated and had a very bloated stomach, states the arrest affidavit.

Medical staff in Nuevo Laredo prescribed suppositories for the boy to help with the constipation, according to Tello. He added that medical staff in Nuevo Laredo told him the child only had cramps, states the affidavit. Tello stated he did not know what could be wrong with the child.

Tello stated that the child became unresponsive when they arrived from Nuevo Laredo and would have trouble breathing. Tello and Martinez went to the fire station on Cielito Lindo Boulevard to seek help. An ambulance transported Justin to LMC.

Police then spoke to Martinez. She stated they took their child to the doctor in Nuevo Laredo at about 1 p.m. because the child had been very bloated, according to court documents.

She also stated that the child did not want to eat anything and that she tried feeding him Gerber but the child rejected it. Mrs. Martinez also advised that she tried giving the child rice water, states the affidavit.

Police learned that the child had a distended stomach, bruising on the right side of his torso toward his back, bruising on the right side of his forehead, an abrasion underneath his chin and trauma to his anus, according to the affidavit.

LMC medical staff could not determine what caused the injuries. CT scans of the childs body showed non-displaced posterior 10th and 11th rib fractures and a large volume of fluid in the childs abdomen that was causing the abdominal swelling.

Asked if Justin couldve gotten injured any other way, Tello added that Justin had fallen from the crib three or four days prior. Tello did not seek medical attention for the fall because he claimed the child was fine, states the affidavit.

Tello pointed out that the child did not cry and did not seem injured. Asked about the crib, Tello stated the crib was no longer at the residence. He claimed they threw it away because it was broken, states the affidavit.

Martinez corroborated Tellos statements. Martinez further stated that she was in a coma and suffered from COVID-19 last year around the same time of her boys birth. She further stated that she suffers from weakness and shortness of breath due to COVID-19, states the affidavit.

Asked about the childs two markings on his left thigh, Martinez stated the child fell about four or five months ago in her living room. She stated she had her son in her arms when she fell.

Asked about the fall from the crib, Martinez mentioned that Tello woke up in the middle of the night because they heard Justin crying and discovered that the child had fallen. Martinez claimed that the child was fine. No medical attention was sought for Justin.

Justin would die at LMC. Tello and Martinez denied physical abuse of Justin.

Preliminary findings of the autopsy revealed that Justin had displaced fracture femur. The femur had become callused and did not heal correctly. The child also had two possible rib fractures. Justin had a torn mesentary and jejunum, causing feces to leak into the babys body and causing peritonitis, states the affidavit.

Police also learned that Justins stomach distention was caused by trauma. During the investigation, authorities were made aware of a report filed on Nov. 24. Court documents allege that Tello was injuring Justin. Police learned that Tello did not want a baby and would hand off Justin to relatives to care for days.

Authorities also obtain a photo showing Justin with two small red scratches on his cheeks. Another photo obtained by police showed the baby with small and faint bruising on his face. Tello allegedly excused himself saying that Justins sibling would mistreat him. During the investigation, police learned that Tello grabbed Justin by the arm and punched on his stomach 10 times and threw him in the crib.

The case remains open.
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LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif. (AP)  Southern California Edison has told state utility regulators that unspecified electrical circuit activity happened at about the time that a wildfire erupted near the wealthy coastal city of Laguna Niguel and burned at least 20 homes, including mansions.

Plumes of smoke rose from the gutted ruins of the burned homes on Thursday but others nearby appeared untouched by Wednesday's fire.

Sassan Darian, 38, sat on a curb watching firefighters douse the remains of his father's five-bedroom home and recounted how he, his daughter and his father fled as winds blasted flames toward them and embers fell on them and around them.

The sky, everything was orange. It looked like an inferno, so we just jumped in the car, he said. My daughter said, Were on fire. There were sparks on her and we were patting ourselves down.

The Coastal Fire was reported Wednesday afternoon in a canyon between Laguna Niguel and the neighboring city of Laguna Beach, Orange County Fire Authority Assistant Chief T.J. McGovern told reporters. SoCal Edison made the report about the circuit activity Wednesday evening.

The fire burned uphill toward luxury homes lining ridges with sweeping views of the Pacific Ocean. The National Weather Service reported winds on the coast ranged from 34 mph to 38 mph (55-61 kph) between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. while the fire was raging.

The fire's cause was under investigation and damage inspections were still ongoing on Thursday, McGovern said.

Southern California Edison said the company made the notification to the California Public Utilities Commission out of an abundance of caution because the incident may meet reporting requirements.

Our information reflects circuit activity occurring close in time to the reported time of the fire. Our investigation is ongoing, the utility said.

Various utilities' electrical equipment has repeatedly been linked to the ignition of disastrous California wildfires, especially during windy weather.

The state Public Utilities Commission last year approved a settlement placing of more than half a billion dollars in fines and penalties for Southern California Edison for its role in five wildfires in 2017 and 2018.

The Coastal Fire was estimated to have burned 200 acres (81 hectares), McGovern said. There was no information immediately available about how much of the fire's perimeter had been contained.

About 900 homes remained under evacuation orders on Thursday, said sheriff's Capt. Virgil Asuncion, chief of police services for Laguna Niguel.

One firefighter was taken to a hospital for evaluation of an unspecified injury.

___

Antczak reported from Los Angeles.
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The Webb County Democratic Party will host a candidate forum in Laredo on May 16, according to a tweet from the organization. The forum will feature four statewide Democratic candidates running for multiple positions, with some of the candidates still vying for a spot on the November ballot and facing a runoff election on May 24.

The candidates participating in the forum are Mike Collier, Jay Kelberg, Susan Hays and Janet Dudding, the tweet said. Hays has secured her spot on the November ticket for Agriculture Commissioner, while Collier, Kleberg and Dudding are all running in the primary runoff election to gain the Democratic nomination for their respective races.

The meet and greet on Monday will be held at Dannys Restaurant located at 4320 McPherson Ave. Monday is also the first day of early voting for the primary runoff with the last day to vote early on May 20.

Here is more information on each of the candidates participating in the forum.

Mike Collier

Collier is running for Lieutenant Governor to unseat incumbent Republican Dan Patrick, who is seeking a third term. Patrick won his partys nomination in the March 1 primary, but Collier will first have to face State Rep. Michelle Beckley on May 24 before focusing on November.

Collier, a Houston-area accountant, gained 41.7% of the Democratic vote in March while Beckley received 30.1%, according to election results. Collier previously ran against Patrick in 2018, coming within five percentage points of unseating the Republican.

Jay Kleberg

Kleberg is running for Agriculture Commission, the position previously held by Republican George P. Bush, who is currently running against incumbent Republican Ken Paxton in the Attorney General race. Kleberg will also face a primary runoff after failing to gain 50% of the Democratic vote on March 1.

Kleberg will face Sandragrace Martinez, who gained 31.8% of the vote compared to his 26% on March 1, election results show. Kleberg was the associate director of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation from September 2013 to October 2019 and is co-founder and managing director of Explore Ranches.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto ORourke endorsed Kleberg for the role. The Democratic winner of the runoff will face off against the eventual Republican nominee. The Republican primary also went to a runoff, where Dawn Buckingham will face Tim Westley.

Susan Hays

Hays is the only candidate in the forum who already has their eyes set on November after winning 82.8% of the vote in the Democratic primary for Agriculture Commissioner. Hays, an attorney and a lobbyist, will face incumbent Republican Sid Miller, who is running for a third term.

While Miller won a lower percentage of his partys vote in the March primary (58.5%), the election results show he won more votes overall: 992,330 to Hays 814,283. Miller has been at the forefront of multiple ethics controversies, including two investigations by the Texas Rangers and using tax-payer funds to take out-of-state excursions.

Janet Dudding

A certified public accountant, Dudding will face a runoff election on May 24 against Angel Luis Vega for the Democratic nomination for Comptroller. In March, Dudding received 46.3% of the Democratic vote, while Vega won 34.5%, according to the election results. The winner will face incumbent Republican Glenn Hegar, who is seeking a third term.
MBABANE  Tertiary students in the country have accused their representative body, Swaziland National Union of Students (SNUS) of using them to push their own agenda.

It has reached this publication that some students have concerns that SNUS was no longer with them in their strife. Speaking to this publication, one of the students, who preferred to comment anonymously, said petitions delivered by SNUS were often not what they wanted as a student body. SNUS is hijacking our protests and delivering their own petitions, she alleged. The circulating claim is that, whenever the students resolved to protest, their leadership would appear to support their course, but hijack the exercise and deliver their own petitions. We want to raise our concerns the same way we agreed during our meetings, as opposed to them coming and shutting us down, said another student. The student claimed that SNUS members were obsessed with power and media attention.

Petition

She said sometimes, SNUS members would join the students and deliver a petition that was linked to the ongoing trial of the incarcerated Members of Parliaments (MPs) in Mduduzi Mabuza and Mthandeni Dube. They align our institutional affairs with the ongoing political unrest, she added. The student further mentioned that the SNUS members must now be called to order. This is because they claimed that some of them were aligned with the Peoples United Democratic Movement (PUDEMO). About a week ago, SNUS petitioned the University of Eswatini (UNESWA) administration, after the rape incident of three students, where they raised security concerns. SNUS also released a statement stating that they would be leading the students to the Manzini Regional Police Headquarters, which the other students claimed was not part of the agenda.

Disappeared

When the police closed in with their arms and shields, the SNUS members disappeared and cops dealt with the students, said the source. Another impeccable source said SNUS was supposed to attend protests only to support, not to change what the masses had resolved. He said if anyone changed the masses interests, then it would be wrong. The SNUS members went to UNESWA, Mbabane, where the students were on their way to the Ministry of Labour and Social Security to deliver their petition. However, SNUS members hijacked this exercise and delivered their petition as SNUS, said the source. When reached for comment, SNUS President Colani Maseko, was not immediately available. Meanwhile, SNUS National Executive Council Legal Officer Vuyiswa Maseko said SNUS was run by different students from different institutions in the country.

Solution

Maseko said SNUS had branches in almost all the institutions of higher learning in the country, and whenever there were issues in a certain institution, the SNUS branch in that institution engaged with the student representative council (SRC) leadership of those institutions and found a solution. He explained that it was only when the branches found it difficult to neutralise the identified issues, that they invite the SNUS National Executive Council (NEC) leadership to assist in handling the situation. He further said SNUS acted organisationally and the leadership did not just budge in without having been thoroughly updated on the issues and heard what the students demanded. I think it can only be a matter of misunderstanding that SNUS hijacks demonstrations and delivers its own petitions during demonstrations. SNUS has always worked hand-in-hand with its branches for informed action. SNUS has a good working relationship with all the institutions in the country, he said.
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Solomon Eduard from Cnoc Mhuire Granard pictured wearing the design he and Joshua Osabuehien created at the Junk Kouture 2022 Final at the Bord Gais Energy Theatre, Dublin.

Longfords young people have never failed to impress when it comes to creative projects and none have proven that more than Cnoc Mhuire Granard students Joshua Osabuehien and Solomon Eduard who are going forward to the international finals of Junk Kouture in Abu Dhabi in the coming months.

Back to the Future, modelled by Solomon, is a futuristic coat of armour against climate change, made from an old laundry basket, car wipers, and an old shower mat.

Who could have ever imagined that there would be a step beyond a National Final? a statement from Cnoc Mhuire posted on social media read.

Well see lots more from Solomon and Josh in the coming months as they prepare for the world final in Abu Dhabi!

Art teacher at the school, Ms Charmaine Hetherton told the Longford Leader: "Solomon opened the show on Thursday night in the Bord Gais with an amazing performance to Breathe by The Prodigy. He brought the house down with his moves and received a mention from celebrity judge Soule for his efforts.

"A second entry from the school Tech Republic created by Leah Simpson, Marilena Dommer and Aisling O Hara also performed brilliantly on the night. I am very proud of all the students.

"The whole school community is delighted for Solomon and Joshua. What a huge achievement and thanks to Junkkouture for the huge opportunity to travel to Abu Dhabi for the World Final. We can't wait!"
Bealtaine Festival 2022 in partnership with LIVESTOCK and Creative Ireland Longford are delighted to present the premiere of a new work, Land Workings: from the land and to return there, by renowned artist Nigel Rolfe.

Curated and produced by Francis Fay, the premier of this audio-visual work will be shown at Corlea Trackway Visitors Centre, Kenagh, Co. Longford on Saturday 14 May (20:00  21:30) in association with the OPW.

Inspired by the Corlea Trackway: a relic of prehistory; a togher  an Iron Age highway built in 148 BC, and possibly of ceremonial significance; Rolfe invites us to consider questions about resilience, vulnerability, and human purpose in the face of impermanence.

Rolfe worked on site at Corlea to create this work with the surrounding landscape and local people and now the resulting work returns to this site.

For booking and further information see: bealtaine.ie/bealtaine-event/livestock-land-workings/.

Speaking about the work Nigel Rolfe says A bedrock of my work has been the land itself, working with the landscape and the framing terms of history on geography but more so the socio-politics of how and why places are particular to themselves and why they are what they are.

Fault lines that coincide into that peculiar spirit of place and the toxicity that is special to locations. Often attempting to examine sites and places that excavate our continuing inability to resolve human differences.

As a traveller in the world, to walk the ground, to ponder the now and the then of what happened there.

Nigel Rolfe is recognised as a seminal figure in performance art nationally and internationally. His work spans live performance, photography, video and sound and has received international acclaim over five continents, including the former Eastern Bloc, North and South America and Asia.

Rolfe employs video not as a tool of documentation but to investigate and test his own physical and psychological limits, using his body as a site for challenging his limitations and revealing vulnerability.

Bealtaine Festival is Irelands national festival which celebrates the arts and creativity as we age. The festival is run by Age & Opportunity, the leading national development organisation working to enable the best possible quality of life for us all as we age and funded by the Arts Council and the HSE.

Age & Opportunity Arts provides opportunities for older people to be more creative more often, to create meaningful participation and representation for all older people in cultural and creative life and to demonstrate and celebrate how our creative potential can improve with age.

Livestock is an artist-led initiative set up to provide opportunities for performers to show new or evolving work. Livestock has collaborated with Dublin Live Art Festival (DLAF), MART, The Complex and Bealtine Festival. The platform is currently curated by Francis Fay and Katherine Nolan.

Other Bealtaine events include the Padraig Colum Gathering this weekend, launch of the BOI Community Art Project, a Granard Art Club Exhibition and an Over 65s Party.
The fact that the village of Newtownforbes has not yet been finished has brought up a range of safety issues, according to local man, Gerard McGowan, who has expressed his anger at the lack of proper parking bays in the village.

Mr McGowan, a former publican in the village of Newtownforbes, said that he has been receiving very little from Longford County Council by way of reassurance.

"A few weeks ago the County Council were in town to launch the squirrels in the village, he said.

"But this village has not been finished. In 2019 we were told thered be parking bays between our gate and the church. I suggested at the time to put parking bays in.

"What we got were flowerbeds. You still have to open your car door into traffic and for the elderly people, its a disgrace."

The area has become a danger, according to Mr McGowan, who explained that he himself had an incident recently where he struggled to get by a car that was parked in the "flower bed" near his home.

"This is a safety issue. Theres enough room to put in three or four parking bays between my house and the church," he said.

"When you think about health and safety in today's terms, there will be an accident and Longford County Council will be pursued.

"Newtownforbes village is not finished. The wires were due to be put underground and to be fair, on the other end of the village that has been done but up our end of the village, the wires are still up and not being put underground.

"The tarmac-ing is supposed to start next week and once the tarmac goes in, as far as Im concerned, the parking bays can't go in.

"There was concrete put around a pole that was supposed to be removed. You could call it Mr Nuts and the village not finished.

"All the council is telling me is next week, next week, next week. Next week is neverending. This is a safety issue and it feels like discrimination against this end of the town."

A spokesperson from Longford County Council, when contacted by the Longford Leader, commented:

"The roadworks contractor will carry out the remaining road resurfacing work on the nights of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday next week (16-18 May). Road markings will be placed as soon as resurfacing is complete. This will effectively complete the works in Newtownforbes.

"Prior to this scheme, there was no full-width parking bays on this section of the street in Newtownforbes. As part of this scheme, the footpath between McGowan's Pub and the entrance to St Pauls, Church of Ireland grounds has been narrowed. This has facilitated full-width parking spaces. This will be evident when the road markings are in place."

Longford County Council has since issued an alert via the MapAlerter app that nightly roadworks will take place in Newtownforbes from 16 to 19 May.

"Resurfacing works will take place in Newtownforbes, Co. Longford, beginning next Monday night, 16th May, 2022, from 7pm. Works are expected to take three nights to complete. Traffic Management will be in place."
A painting thought to be the earliest likeness of Gullivers Travels author Jonathan Swift is to be sold in an online auction.

Swift is believed to be only sixteen years old and a student at Dublin College in the painting, which is estimated to fetch between 30,000 and 50,000.

The painting, which is attributed to the Irish artist Thomas Pooley (16461723), will be sold live online from Edinburgh by fine art auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull on Wednesday May 18.

There are few images of the celebrated Anglo-Irish author (16671745), whose works include An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708) and A Modest Proposal (1729).

Thought to have been painted around 1682, it is coming to auction for the first time in 200 years.

Nick Curnow, head of fine art at Lyon & Turnbull, said: This is a remarkable painting of a literary giant of whom few likenesses exist.

Swift is a very self-assured sitter for a young man and the work has a presence and immediacy that so many 18th-century portraits lack.

The work was acquired by Thomas Percy, Bishop of Dromore, County Down, in 1801, who recorded it as a small portrait of Dean Swift.

First exhibited at South Kensington in 1867, it then drifted in and out of public view for the next hundred years.

In 1898 Sir Leslie Stephen, writing in the Dictionary of National Biography, declared the present whereabouts of this portrait is unknown.

It reappeared around 1967 in the collection of a descendant of Thomas Percy and at this time it came to the attention of Swift scholars and was attributed to Pooley.

The artist painted many high society figures in Ireland during the second half of the seventeenth century and at the start of eighteenth century, contributing to the theory that Swift was the illegitimate son of his benefactor, Sir John Temple (1600-1677).

It was shown in an exhibition at the National Library of Ireland in 1999.

Dominic Somerville-Brown, rare books specialist at Lyon & Turnbull, said: Swift has an enduring hold on readers imaginations and an indisputable place in the literary canon.

However, his legacy is not matched by a profusion of images, especially given the era in which he lived."

This portrait being auctioned is therefore very exciting and I will be on tenterhooks when bidding begins.

The portrait is being auctioned as part of Lyon & Turnbulls Five Centuries: Furniture, Paintings & Works of Art sale.
Local News, Health & Wellness

By Long Island Published: May 12 2022

Jofaz Transportation, Inc., 3rd Avenue Transit, Inc., and Y&M Transit Corp., Inc. Violated City and State Idling Limits Leading to Widespread Air Pollution in Communities of Color

New York Attorney General Letitia James today announced a lawsuit against three New York City bus companies for causing significant air pollution in communities of color by violating city and state bus idling laws. Buses owned and operated by Jofaz Transportation, Inc., 3rd Avenue Transit, Inc., and Y&M Transit Corp., Inc. repeatedly and unlawfully idled at schools, bus yards, and other locations predominantly in low-income and communities of color throughout the five boroughs, polluting the air and endangering the health of New Yorkers. Attorney General James suit seeks monetary relief and a court order to ensure the companies full compliance with city and state idling laws.

These school bus companies have a responsibility to follow the laws that help protect the health and the safety of our communities and the environment, said Attorney General James. Too often, we see companies emit these dangerous pollutants in low-income communities or communities of color without consequence. In this case, its our Black and brown children who are suffering the impacts and experiencing record-high levels of asthma as a result. We must confront and eliminate environmental injustice in all of its forms, and I will continue to hold companies accountable for taking advantage of vulnerable communities.

Jofaz Transportation, Inc., 3rd Avenue Transit, Inc., and Y&M Transit Corp., Inc. are three school bus companies that are owned and operated by Joseph Fazzia and his family, and collectively operate 614 buses and three Brooklyn bus yards. The lawsuit, filed in Kings County Supreme Court, alleges that from September 2019 to present day, the companies constantly violated New York state law, which prohibits idling for more than five minutes with certain exceptions, and New York City law, which prohibits idling for more than three minutes  and no more than one minute at schools  with certain exceptions.

The Office of the Attorney General (OAG) previously reached an agreement with Jofaz and 3rd Avenue Transit for violating city and state idling laws, requiring the companies to comply with the laws and train all staff on anti-idling policies. However, using data provided by Geotab, the fleet management system that the Department of Education (DOE) installed on the buses, OAG discovered that the companies continued their substantial, widespread, and persistent exceedances of idling limits at bus yards, near schools, public housing, and other locations across the city, as recently as April of this year.

For example, OAG found that between September 4, 2019 and December 31, 2019, a Jofaz school bus idled for at least 10 minutes at a bus yard in Red Hook, Brooklyn on 82 different occasions on 42 different days, indicating that the bus often idled multiple times a day at the yard. The bus yard is in close proximity to the Red Hook Houses, which is the largest public housing development in Brooklyn with more than 6,000 residents.

The OAG also found that during that same time period, 30 different Jofaz school buses idled near P.S. K140 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn for at least 10 minutes each, for a total of 285 different times over 65 days. More than 90 percent of the students at P.S. K140 are Black or Latino. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the neighborhood surrounding P.S. K140 is in the 92nd percentile in the country for levels of diesel particulate matter and has childhood asthma rates in the 70th to 80th percentile.

In her lawsuit, Attorney General James is seeking monetary penalties and a court order requiring the companies to ensure that their drivers are complying with the laws and educating and training employees on idling laws and the health and environmental impacts of diesel pollution.

Tailpipe emissions from cars, trucks, and buses are one of the leading sources of air pollution in New York state due to the release of smog-forming pollutants, soot, toxins, and greenhouse gases. Idling is a significant  and usually unnecessary  source of these emissions, with an estimated 130,000 tons of carbon dioxide emitted in New York City each year. New York City suffers roughly 1,400 premature deaths every year  the highest death toll in the Northeast  and pays billions in health costs due to significant pollution from hundreds of thousands of vehicles that operate in the city.

Pollutants found in tailpipe emissions have been linked to numerous serious health issues including asthma, cancer, heart disease, and other serious health impacts, particularly in vulnerable populations such as children, the elderly, and those with respiratory ailments. The vast majority of the health impacts of soot and air pollution exposure are felt in low-income communities and communities of color in New York City. These communities have the highest truck and traffic volume and have industrial facilities, such as bus yards, located in close proximity to residential areas. The children in the high poverty areas of Central Brooklyn, the South Bronx, and Northern Manhattan are three times more likely than children in other areas of the city to be diagnosed with asthma.

Todays lawsuit continues Attorney General James aggressive approach to taking on companies that unlawfully pollute the air, especially in communities of color. Recently, Attorney General James reached an agreement with Reliant Transportation, the now-defunct owner and operator of 838 school buses, following an investigation that revealed the company's unlawful idling practices. The agreement required Reliant to pay a $59,500 penalty. Reliant is no longer in operation, and if the company is ever reestablished in New York City, they must enact a strict compliance program that includes extensive driver training, the adoption of a strict company anti-idling policy, the installation of automatic shut-off technology on all buses operating in the city, and the monitoring of driver compliance with idling laws.

Environmental regulations are essential to keeping our city safe and healthy, particularly in environmental justice communities. We must create accountability and consequences for our city-contracted businesses to ensure that theyre positive contributors to our spaces, said Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. Thank you to Attorney General James for bringing to our attention the violations of these three bus companies and the pollution theyre encouraging in our communities of color.

Attorney General James action provides a voice to communities of color and other under-resourced communities in determining their neighborhoods' futures, said State Senator Roxanne J. Persaud. All too often, minority communities become dumping grounds for pollution and refuse from elsewhere. The attorney generals specific attention to school buses is quite timely. I sponsored legislation to give streets in my district and New York City back to the residents who have long dealt with school buses parked in front of their homes seven nights a week. I look forward to continuing the fight for the safety and dignity of our communities with Attorney General James.

I applaud New York Attorney General Letitia James for further committing our state towards environmental justice, said Assemblymember Marcela Mitaynes. As a district that is a majority community of color, we are on the frontlines of the environmental crisis and are already seeing its effects. Hurricane Sandy hit almost 10 years ago now, and the neighborhood of Red Hook, which is home to more than 6000 NYCHA tenants is still seeing its effects today  in the form of degraded infrastructure, gas leaks, and water main bursts. With a rise in last-mile facilities opening in working-class communities colors like ours, the Attorney General's action is the correct step forward.

Communities of color have long fought for environmental justice in the face of insufferable pollution and environmental dangers because of profit, carelessness, and neglect, said Assemblymember Stefani Zinerman. It is great to have our attorney general take charge of holding negligent companies accountable for their misconduct. New York holds the designation of a livable and age-friendly state because we invest in our transportation infrastructure and pass laws to ensure the safety of our passengers, especially our children, the aged, and individuals with disabilities. Companies must adhere to the law and act in ways that protect the health and well-being of our states residents and our planet.

These actions from the Attorney Generals Office are key steps in New Yorks fight against the twin scourges of environmental degradation and environmental racism, said New York City Council Member Chi Osse. Our city, and Bed-Stuy specifically, will see real, impactful health and wellbeing benefits. I applaud Attorney General James for holding bad actors accountable and establishing a system that will deter similar polluters in our neighborhoods moving forward.

Idling school buses can expose children, parents, teachers, and others to harmful toxic air contaminants, particularly diesel exhaust, said New York City Council Member Mercedes Narcisse. We applaud New York Attorney General Letitia James for her steadfast leadership in holding these companies accountable for their negligence. We know that there are a range of adverse effects from air contaminants, and that the environmental and health disparities disproportionately impact low-income and communities of color. We thank the attorney general for continuing to hold companies accountable, keep our air clean, and implement solutions that protects the environment from harmful emissions.

Illegal idling dumps harmful pollution into the air we breathe, and fuels asthma, emphysema, and other lung diseases in our communities, said Eddie Bautista, executive director, New York City Environmental Justice Alliance. Especially hard hit are the communities that continue to bear a legacy of environmental abuse and disproportionate impact: low-income communities and communities of color. We applaud Attorney General James for taking the fight to school bus companies that ignore the law and their responsibility to protect the health of our communities.

Too often, environmental justice is viewed and articulated as a theory rather than exercised as a praxis rooted in key principles associated with civil rights, self-determination, and the recognition of mutual humanity, said Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright, director of environmental justice, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest. Attorney General James, a proven and staunch environmental justice champion, clearly recognizes this discrepancy and is to be applauded for her efforts to ameliorate this challenge. A combination of protective measures including proactive interdiction as well as redress for environmental harms are requisite for an equitable New York where all residents have access to clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment as mandated by the states constitution. We commend Attorney General James for her leadership in helping to help deliver us to the destination of mutual and inexorable environmental justice for all.

The attorney general's action sends a strong message to all potential offenders: Poisoning our air by idling will no longer be tolerated, said Marco A. Carrion, executive director, El Puente. Our communities have suffered for too long from ailments caused by high levels of pollutants, along with unenforced and often ineffective laws. We are grateful that Attorney General James is holding these bad actors accountable and providing justice for our communities.

It is with much gratitude and appreciation that we thank Attorney General James for her leadership in curtailing excessive school bus emissions due to idling in our communities, especially considering how these tailpipe emissions can impact the long term health of our children and families, said Lisa Bloodgood, interim executive director, North Brooklyn Neighbors. Accountability is necessary to ensure this behavior doesnt continue.

This matter is being handled by Assistant Attorney General Austin Thompson, former Assistant Attorney General Marissa Lieberman-Klein, law intern Soleil Ball Van Zee, and Affirmative Litigation Section Chief Yueh-Ru Chu, all under the supervision of Environmental Protection Bureau Chief Lemuel M. Srolovic. Data Analyst Anushua Choudhury of the Research and Analytics Department assisted in the matter. The Research and Analytics Department is led by Deputy Director Megan Thorsfeldt and Director Jonathan Werberg. The Environmental Protection Bureau is a part of the Division for Social Justice, which is led by Chief Deputy Attorney General Meghan Faux and overseen by First Deputy Attorney General Jennifer Levy.
School & Education, Local News, Business & Finance

By Chris Boyle Published: May 12 2022

Governor previously ordered SUNY and CUNY to end this practice.

Governor Kathy Hochul has signed legislation S.5924-C/A.6938-B that prohibits colleges from withholding a student's transcript because of unpaid debts or charging individuals who owe debts a higher fee to obtain their transcript. This legislation ensures that students can access their transcript when necessary so that they may continue their education or find a job.

"Transcripts are critical for students to continue pursuing their educational and career goals," Governor Hochul said. "To hold transcripts hostage until outstanding debts are paid is an unfair, predatory practice that prevents our students from reaching their full potential. I was proud to make ending transcript withholding a top priority and took action to end this practice at SUNY and CUNY in January. Today, we put an end to this abhorrent policy for all higher education institutions to ensure a level playing field for New York's students."

The tactic of withholding student transcripts or overcharging for their release has been used by some colleges in the state to leverage collection of outstanding debts, however one is not related to the other. Withholding a student's transcript is a punitive measure that penalizes students with less resources, while ironically making it more difficult for them to advance in higher education or obtain employment that will allow them to make outstanding payments.

Governor Hochul made the proposal to end this practice in her 2022 State of the State Address. In January, the Governor announced that the SUNY board and CUNY board voted to end the practice.

State Senator Kevin Thomas said, "Transcripts are a record of a students' education -- they are not and were never meant to be tools for debt collection. Transcript withholding is a disruptive, counter-productive, and harmful practice that prevents students from being able to transfer credits, re-enroll in school to finish their degrees, or obtain jobs that could help them pay their balances. Each withheld transcript represents a student who was denied the opportunity to pursue a chosen career path, denied access to social and economic mobility through higher education, and ultimately denied access to the American Dream. I thank Governor Hochul for signing this important legislation to stop the practice of transcript withholding and empower students across New York State."

Assemblymember Harvey Epstein said, "Today's a great moment for students in New York. No longer will students be punished as they try to advance in their academic and professional careers. Removing the barrier of transcript withholding will help get students into the next step in their lives, while they work to meet their obligations to their schools. I'm proud to have worked with Senator Kevin Thomas, Chair of the Assembly Committee on Higher Education, Deborah Glick, and many higher education advocates to pass this legislation. I want to thank the Governor for standing up for students by signing our bill."
Local News, Health & Wellness

By Long Island Published: May 11 2022

AG James Advises Parents to Speak to Doctor if Short on Formula, Encourages New Yorkers to Donate Excess Formula to Local Food Pantries

With increased shortages of baby formula due to recalls and supply chain disruptions, New York Attorney General Letitia James today warned retailers that price gouging is illegal. The Office of the Attorney General (OAG) is aware of reports of baby formula being sold online for prices far exceeding its retail value. Attorney General James urges New Yorkers to be on alert for potential price gouging of baby formula and to report any dramatic price increases to her office. In addition, Attorney General James encourages parents having difficulty finding formula to speak with their childs doctor before attempting to water down formula or make their own, both of which can be potentially dangerous to a child. Attorney General James asks that anyone with extra unopened, unexpired formula consider donating it to their local food pantry.

The national baby formula shortage is terrifying for parents concerned about how to feed their children, said Attorney General James. The last thing any family needs is to be price gouged on critical nutrition for their little ones, which is why I am putting profiteers seeking to take advantage of this crisis on notice. If New Yorkers see exorbitant price increases for baby formula, I encourage them to report it to my office immediately. Anyone who seeks to take advantage of this crisis is on notice. I also urge any parent who is struggling to find formula to speak with their childs doctor before altering or using formula other than directed. If New Yorkers have excess unopened, unexpired formula, please consider donating it to your local food pantry to help families in need.

New York law prohibits merchants from taking unfair advantage of consumers by selling goods or services that are vital to their health, safety, or welfare for an unconscionably excessive price. Due to the nationwide shortage, OAG advises consumers to buy only as much formula as they need and not to unnecessarily stock up as such panic buying may intensify the shortage and could encourage sellers to engage in illegal price gouging. The OAG also reminds consumers that it is not price gouging for retailers to limit the amount of formula they sell to individual consumers.

When reporting price gouging to OAG, consumers should:

Report the specific increased prices, the dates, and places that they saw the increased prices, and the types of formula being sold; and,

Provide copies of their sales receipts and photos of the advertised prices, if available.

New Yorkers should report potential concerns about price gouging to OAG by filing a complaint online or call 800-771-7755.
MBABANE - The Methodist Church of Southern Africa Highveld in Eswatini says anyone deciding to leave the church should not use its hymns books, uniform among other things.

Responding to the talks in relation to the formation of Wesleyan Church of Eswatini by some members of the church, Bishop Sondlile Nkwanyana of the Highveld in Eswatini, said the newly-established church had no link to the old church. The news of the establishment of the Wesleyan Church in Eswatini was shared by Party Shongwe, who is an active member of the new church. This, Nkwanyana said, was because the Methodist Church of Southern Africa had not approved or blessed any formation of a branch in Eswatini. He said anyone establishing a church was doing so on his own accord. They should not use our hymn books, uniform or anything that has to do with our church because there is no link between the two churches, he said.

Concerned

Nkwanyana said as far as the church was concerned, there was no Methodists Church of South Africa serving as a main branch for a local Methodist Church of Eswatini. Nkwanyana said there were no branches in South Africa and Eswatini. However, he said the church, which had existed for almost 200 years had 15 districts in six of the Sothern African countries, namely; Eswatini, South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho and Mozambique. He said no money was taken to South Africa from Eswatini, as stated by members of the newly-established church, as one of the reasons for parting ways with the church. Instead, Nkwanyana said money was taken to one office and utilised accordingly. He said it was the same money that was used to pay salaries for priests.

Asked if the members of the now Wesleyan Church of Eswatini informed the Highveld of Eswatini about their decision to leave the Methodist Church of Southern Africa, Nkwanyana responded that a certain group wrote an email, where they listed some of their challenges. He said the church complained about the language barrier, as they used Sotho, Tswana and Zulu among other African languages. Nkwanyana stated that as far as the church was concerned, language was not an issue because there were interpreters in the church. He also mentioned that the group raised the issue of involvement of lesbians gays bisexual transgender Queen and intersex (LGBTQI) members in the church. I dont know how that is an issue because we have never officiated a marriage of people of the same sex in the church, he said.

Nkwanyana stated that many people had been asking what measures were to be taken against priests who breached their vows in the church. He said the presiding Bishop, Purity Malinga, made it clear in the statement that the formation of the Wesleyan Church of Eswatini had not been blessed or approved by the Methodist Church of Southern Africa. He said the church had just been established by people on their own accord. As a result, he stated that the Methodists Church of Southern Africa had requested a formal letter from the Mahamba Circuit, so that they could discipline the priests who breached the church vows.

He mentioned that the Methodists Church of Southern Africa had been reliably informed that members of the Wesleyan Church were luring members of their church into joining them.

Nkwanyana was speaking on national radio yesterday morning. He mentioned that he had been requested by members of the church to set the record straight after Shongwe made the startling allegations about the church. Members of the church sent me Shongwes recordings and asked that I respond, he said.

Developments

When informed about the latest developments, Shongwe stated that he heard Nkwanyana on national radio. However, he said there was no way they could not use the hymn books of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa. Shongwe said there were many churches that used the same hymn books as the Methodists Church of Southern Africa. Nkwanyana can say a lot in his defence, but it cannot help. I heard him accusing members of the Wesleyan Church of Eswatini of enticing members of the Methodists Church of Southern Africa to join their church. Unfortunately, we have a meeting with the church Board tomorrow. May we give a full response after the meeting, Shongwe said briefly. Shongwe had cited unfair distribution of offerings, stipends, tithes and neglect as the root cause of leaving the Methodists Church of Southern Africa.
(Alliance News) - Arc Minerals Ltd on Thursday said it signed an agreement with a subsidiary of FTSE 100-listed miner Anglo American PLC for the company's copper-cobalt project located in Zambia.

Arc Minerals shares were up 13% at 5.09 pence each on Thursday in London.

Through the joint venture, Anglo will have the right to retain a 70% ownership for an aggregate investment of up to USD88.5 million.

As part of this investment, Anglo will make cash payments to Arc Minerals of up to USD14.5 million.

Arc Minerals Chair Nick von Schirnding said: "This agreement represents a major turning point for Arc and follows many months of negotiations. I am delighted to be signing this agreement with Anglo American which will, upon execution and completion of the definitive agreements, result in the potential for significant investment by a reputable major mining company in the tenements in north west Zambia and a very exciting time ahead for us."

The two have agreed an exclusivity period of up to 90 days to allow for due diligence, and up to a further 90 days for the negotiation and execution of the joint venture agreement.

By Xindi Wei; xindiwei@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2022 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved
(Alliance News) - The following is a round-up of share dealings by London-listed company directors and managers announced on Thursday and not separately reported by Alliance News:

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Yourgene Health PLC - Manchester-based molecular diagnostics - Chief Executive Officer Lyn Rees buys 1.0 million shares at 7.1 pence each, worth GBP71,000, on Wednesday. Now has 2.0 million shares, a 0.3% stake.

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Big Technologies PLC - UK-based remote people monitoring technology - Chief Financial Officer Daren Morris buys 30,000 shares at average GBP2.43, worth GBP72,900, on Tuesday. Now has 360,000 shares, a 0.1% stake.

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GlaxoSmithKline PLC - Brentford, Middlesex-based pharmaceuticals and consumer healthcare products - Hal Barron, chief scientific officer & president of research & development, buys 1,193 notional American Depositary Shares, each worth two ordinary shares, at USD43.16, worth USD51,490, on Monday.

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Manchester & London Investment Trust PLC - technology-focused growth-stock investor - Mark Sheppard transfers 37,721 shares, worth GBP140,322, to Richard Morgan, on Wednesday. Both are investment managers of the trust.

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By Tom Waite; thomaslwaite@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2022 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
Silver Bullet Data Services Group PLC - London-based provider of digital transformation services and products - Enters into joint venture agreement with Making Science Group SA which will see the two companies combining their respective products and services to deliver solutions for the privacy-first, post-cookie era. Agreement will expand the services and products of both companies, from first party data strategy design and deployment, technical implementations and integration across AdTech and MarTech platforms, data and analytics, and post-cookie solutions, it explains.

Chief Executive Officer Ian James said: "The joint venture with Making Science could not be better timed. As Google has confirmed the deprecation of the third-party cookie, our clients are seeking new improved solutions for the privacy-first era. Making Science's deep relationship with Google, extensive talent base, and impressive client relationships blend perfectly with Silverbullet's proprietary 4D product, extensive first-party data skillset, and global client footprint. We believe this will create significant value for both our combined clients and shareholders."

Current stock price: 158.00 pence

12-month change: down 43%

By Arvind Bhunjun; arvindbhunjun@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2022 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
(Alliance News) - The following is a round-up of updates by London-listed companies, issued on Thursday and not separately reported by Alliance News:

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Syncona Ltd - investor in healthcare companies - portfolio company, Autolus Therapeutics PLC to present data at European Hematology Association's Congress on June 9-12. Data includes positive early safety and efficacy data from AUTO4 in T cell lymphoma, and promising early data in AUTO1/22 programme in paediatric acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, as well as AUTO1 early safety and efficacy for relapsed/refractory primary central nervous system lymphoma.

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Faron Pharmaceuticals Ltd - Turku, Finland-based clinical stage biopharmaceutical company - Will present data on the potential of bexmarilimab in combination with standard of care for blood cancers at the European Hematology Association's Congress. Bexmarilimab is its wholly-owned novel precision cancer immunotherapy. It targets the Clever-1 receptor, which is associated with tumour-associated macrophages. "High Clever-1 expression is associated with poor survival in certain blood cancer patients and bexmarilimab provides a novel treatment approach for these patients, downregulating Clever-1 expression and igniting an effective immune response. We look forward to the imminent start of our hematology cancer clinical trial program to further explore these promising findings," says Chief Medical Officer Marie-Louise Fjallskog.

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Verici Dx PLC - Tennessee-based developer of clinical diagnostics for organ transplants - Results blinded, international, multi-centre validation study for Tuteva blood test showed significantly higher Positive Predictive Value for Tuteva than currently available kidney transplant blood tests. "The results reflect the wide clinical applicability of the test for comprehensive commercial adoption in a real-world setting," Verici says.

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Water Intelligence PLC - London-based leak detection services - Reacquires franchise in central Texas held within American Leak Detection subsidiary for USD750,000 cash, building upon acquisition of Forth Worth, Texas franchise in January. "The group is executing this regional hub model across the United States with its more than 150 corporate and franchise locations," the company says.

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Graft Polymer (UK) PLC - Slovenia-based polymer modification and drug delivery systems -Is granted Hazard Analysis & Critical Control Point certificate for its R&D facility in Slovenia for GraftBio division. "The HACCP certificate will allow us to create a strong reputation in the B2C market as a manufacturer of quality and safe food supplements, selling direct to consumers over time - a more lucrative revenue stream," says Chief Executive Officer Victor Bolduev.

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React Group PLC - South Derbyshire, England-based cleaning, hygiene and decontamination firm - Completes acquisition of window, gutter and cladding business LaddersFree Ltd for up to GBP8.5 million. GBP4.7 million is paid in cash, with GBP1.0 million in 83.3 million new ordinary shares at 1.2 pence each. Deferred consideration of GBP1.5 million to be paid in instalments. The acquired company has a "consistent track record of organic revenue growth and profitability", React says, and will broaden its customer base, reducing dependence on reactive and ad hoc work.

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AEX Gold Inc - Greenland-focused gold miner - Acquires mineral exploration licences No. 2020-41 and 2021-11 covering areas in south Greenland from Orano Group for no upfront consideration but a royalty on future production. The acquisition means AEX will be the largest licence holder in region, and the third-largest in Greenland, after Anglo American PLC and Greenfield Exploration. "We are excited to be substantially increasing our exposure to strategic metals and rare earth elements across Greenland. Greenland has the potential to become a crucial supplier of these vital minerals to the Western world, and AEX intends to be a key player in this," says Chief Executive Officer Eldur Olafsson.

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Puma VCT 12 PLC - venture capital trust managed by Puma Investments - Announces Sunlight Education Nucleus Ltd has been acquired, in which it invested GBP2.4 million in 2017. Exit represents 3.2 times return on its equity investment.

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Avation PLC - Singapore-based passenger aircraft leasing company - Completes second sale of series of ex-Virgin Australia Airlines ATR72-600s to Aegean Airlines for unspecified amount. Executive Chair Jeff Chatfield says: "Avation continues to reduce its few remaining unutilised aircraft in the fleet. We anticipate zero unutilised aircraft by the end of the calendar year 2022. Sales of unutilised aircraft provide capital to rebuild in a post-pandemic recovery phase."

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Belluscura PLC -London-based medical device developer - Will raise GBP5 million in accelerated bookbuild via placing of new shares. Proceeds will be used to fund the purchase of raw material inventory and non-recurring costs of manufacturing and engineering, in relation to its manufacturing agreement with InnoMax Medical Technology Ltd. Dowgate Capital Ltd is acting as sole placing agent, bookrunner and broker, with SPARK Advisory Partners Ltd acting as nominated adviser.

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Circle Property PLC - London-based buyer, developer and manager of regional office assets in UK - Has exchanged contracts for the sale of 720 Aztec West in Bristol to Maybrook Properties Ltd. Sale price of GBP2.5 million is a 77% increase on the valuation of GBP1.4 million at the end of March last year.

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Clontarf Energy PLC - Dublin-headquartered oil & gas exploration and production company focused on South America and Africa - Updates on drilling for Sasanof-1 exploration well. Says Valaris MS-1 rig is anchored in Dampier outer harbour, scheduled to commence tow to Sasanof-1 location on Monday. The operator Western Gas' drilling operations dteam are deployed to field and with now onboard MS-1 rig and undertake pre-mobilisation checks. Support vessels started operations on time on Monday. Drilling operations are expected to start on May 24. Has 10% working interest in Sasanof.

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Molten Ventures PLC - London-based venture capital firm focused on technology companies - Says portfolio company Aiven, a Finnish software company, closes externally-led series D funding round, raising USD210 million. Valuation of Aiven now USD3 billion, a "significant uplift on earlier rounds". Molten holds interest through Earlybird Partnership. Says carrying value of its holding in Aiven will be finalised as part of its final results on June 13.

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Mercia Asset Management PLC - regionally focused specialist asset manager  Says Knowledge-Intensive and annual Enterprise Investment Scheme funds raise total of around GBP20 million in new capital over past year.

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Kefi Gold & Copper PLC - Cyprus-based gold and copper exploration and development company with projects in Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia - Says progress in Ethiopia remains on track over past month, and multi-party project financing is developing. Expects to sign umbrella financing agreement this quarter, with full construction to commence from October, at the end of the current wet season. "KEFI has been able to pivot onto a much more positive direction since December 2021 due to geopolitics, regulatory changes and exploration results. We now have three advanced projects in two countries that are now overtly pro-development - a more positive and less risky position than KEFI has confronted for many years," says Executive Chair Harry Anagnostaras-Adams.

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European Metals Holdings Ltd - mineral exploration and development company focused on Cinovec lithium-tin project in Czech Republic - Accepted to trade on US based OTCQX Best Market, under the codes "EMHXY", "ERPNF" and "EMHLF" from Thursday. "Trading on the OTCQX comes at a pivotal time for investors seeking to leverage the transition away from fossil fuels, with the European Union offering significant funding to accelerate change and adoption rates of electric vehicles in the region continuing to climb," says Executive Chair Keith Coughlan.

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Future Metals NL - Perth-based platinum exploration company - Reports wide PGM assay results from drillhole samples at 100%-owned Panton PGM Project in northern Western Australia. Highlights include 60.5 metres at 1.24 grams per tonne palladium equivalent from 0 metres. "All drill hole results returned to date have confirmed significant intercepts of mineralisation, demonstrating the strong continuity of the Panton orebody along its current 3.5km strike, and the lateral extent of mineralisation sitting outside of the chromite reefs," says Chief Executive Officer & Managing Director Jardee Kininmonth. Is targeting new mineral resource estimate release in the coming weeks.

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Destiny Pharma PLC - Brighton-based clinical phase biotechnology company - Says data previously reported for c. difficile infection model study is accepted for presentation at Anaerobe 2022 Conference in Seattle. Data is on the ability of non-toxigenic strain M3 to colonise the gut following antibiotics. "The relevance and impact of this study cannot be underestimated as it indicates that the clinical use of fidaxomicin to treat CDI is unlikely to affect the ability of Destiny's late-stage asset, NTCD-M3, to colonise the gut and prevent recurrence of CDI," explains Chief Scientific Officer Bill Love.

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Mattioli Woods PLC - Leicester, England-based asset manager - Says subsidiary Ludlow Wealth Management Group Ltd has acquired Ferguson Financial Management Ltd for an initial GBP600,000 and potential further consideration of up to GBP600,000 million dependent on the attainment of performance targets in the year after completion.

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Capital Metals PLC - developing eastern minerals project in Sri Lanka - Says study for project demonstrates "exceptional economics" resulting in a high margin operation, enabling a short payback period. Says the long-term price assumptions used are below current prices suggesting "even more attractive economics are feasible". Further, it says the study does not take into account any potential resource extensions, which would enable the expansion of mine life and throughput, providing even further upside.

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HeiQ PLC - Zurich-based materials developer - Will pay deferred considerations relating to acquisitions of RAS AG and Life Material Technologies Ltd. Will pay EUR2.6 million to RAS based on its annual performance through ordinary shares of 30 pence each in HeiQ capital. Will pay USD2.8 million to Life, settled half in cash and half in new ordinary shares. Total new shares allotted for the transactions are 3.5 million.

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By Elizabeth Winter; elizabethwinter@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2022 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
MANZINI - Public sector associations (PSAs) are up in arms, as government owes them about E1.5 million in respect of their members subscription fees.

However, this amount excludes other deductions, like pension and subscriptions for savings and credit cooperatives. According to the PSAs, for the past five months (since December 2021), government had been remitting subscriptions it deducted from their members salaries about three weeks later, something which they viewed as union bashing as it grounded the trade unions operations. On average, government is supposed to remit about E1.484 million.

Breakdown

A breakdown of the money shows that about E1 million should go to the Swaziland National Association of Teachers (SNAT), E230 000 to the National Public Service and Allied Workers Union (NAPSAWU), E230 000 to the Swaziland Democratic Nurses Union (SWADNU), and E24 000 to the Swaziland National Association of Government Accounting Personnel (SNAGAP). The PSAs secretariat said usually, government remitted the subscriptions to the unions on or about the 22nd of very calendar month. Later on, they said the employer delayed and it started remitting around the 16th of the following month, which was about three weeks later. In fact, the leaders of the PSAs said government started delaying to remit the subscriptions some years back, but it was a difference of days. However, of late, the delay has worsened.

They said this frustrated their operations and in terms of servicing stop orders, they found themselves paying more in the form of penalties, yet it was the employer who was at fault.

SNAT Secretary General (SG) Sikelela Dlamini said the delay in the remitting of their members subscriptions affected and inconvenienced them in many ways. In fact, he said they viewed it as a special form of union bashing by the employer. He said this was because as unions, they had failed to meet their financial obligations or pay suppliers on time. In terms of stop orders at the banks, he said due to the delay in remitting the subscriptions, they found themselves paying more, as every time they missed a stop order, an interest would be charged.

Obligations

On top of that, the unionist said they also had daily obligations which they had to meet as a union, but due to the delay in the remittance of the subscriptions, they failed to meet them. He said this did not affect the operations of the national executive committee (NEC) alone, but even the branches and their structures. What we suspect is that government is robbing Peter to pay Paul by taking our subscriptions and investing them elsewhere or using them to pay some of its debts, the teachers unions secretary general said. He said this issue was among the grievances which they wanted to table to government as PSAs when they delivered their petitions in October 2021. However, he said the petition delivery march was quashed by members of the State security organs.

On the same note, NAPSAWU First Deputy Secretary General Thabile Zwane said the delay by the employer in remitting the subscriptions was inconveniencing them so much that they were tired of being frustrated by the administration as unions. Why does the employer fail to remit the money it deducts from our members salaries on time? Our partners and suppliers are starting to lose faith in us because we always fail to pay debts on time, all because of the employer, Zwane said. She said they were made to believe that government was deliberately delaying remitting the funds and its aim was to frustrate their operations and programmes. In that regard, she said they were not taking the matter lightly because if it was a mistake, it should have been fixed a long time ago.

Deadlines

Furthermore, SWADNU Secretary General (SG) Mayibongwe Masangane, concurred with the other leaders of the unions, which are organised under the banner of PSAs. He said recently, they had been missing deadlines in terms of paying stop orders and suppliers, which was something that cost them more money and eroded the trust between them and their partners.

For example, as SWADNU, we are paying a property through the bank and once we miss the deadline, we have to pay interest, Masangane said. Moreover, SNAGAP President Dumile Dlamini said most of the operations and activities which fell on dates before the 16th when government would eventually remit the subscriptions, would be affected. In fact, all our plans would not be implemented until government remits the subscriptions, she said.

For instance, she said these days they had vusela exercises as PSAs, whereby they visited branches to get mandates on what they should do at the ongoing Joint Negotiations Forum (JNF). She said as unions, they needed to pay for the venues and transport costs, among other things. She added that some of them were renting the offices and also needed to pay salaries for the unions workers. It is worth noting that this is not the first time the PSAs faced this challenge, as it happened in 2019 such that in June, they delivered a petition to the Accountant Generals Office, where they demanded that government should remit the unions subscriptions on time. Their complaint was that the subscription fees for its members were not remitted on time, something which affected their operations.
Manchester, VT (05254)

Today

Partly cloudy skies during the evening will give way to cloudy skies and light rain after midnight. Low 62F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 80%..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies during the evening will give way to cloudy skies and light rain after midnight. Low 62F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 80%.
The state health commissioner said Tuesday that the Food and Drug Administration will be meeting with the makers of the vaccines  primarily Pfizer and Moderna  and monitoring testing of the vaccines for the youngest children in the coming months. It could lead to a vaccine for younger children this fall.
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.
The contribution that Bahrains banking sector has made to the kingdoms economic diversification efforts and its evolving role as a supporter of green financing were among the topical issues explored by a leading banker.

Jean-Christophe Durand, CEO, National Bank of Bahrain (NBB), in a wide-ranging interview he gave recently to Oxford Business Groups online broadcasting channel, Global Platform, highlighted Bahrains status as a longstanding regional financial hub, which he said would strengthen NBBs plans to further extend its reach into other GCC countries, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

He also emphasised the importance of ensuring that banks have the capabilities to service businesses operating across the economic sectors and of varying sizes, in line with Bahrains diversification drive.

Supporting large projects

Of course, we support the large projects of government corporations and their endeavours within the framework of Bahrain Economic Vision 2030, he told OBG. We need to be able to have the tools to address all these segments: retail, small companies, large companies and governments.

The impact of Covid-19 pandemic on the banking sector was another topic examined, with Durand noting that accelerated digitalisation and a broader product range were among the outcomes of the health crisis.

We had to be close to small companies to help them to overcome the situation, he explained. We have started our journey with a retail app. The pandemic enabled us to review our business model, how we address clients and how we support staff as a national bank.

Sharp focus on ESG

Durand added that the pandemic had also sharpened the focus on environmental, social and governance (ESG) principles for banks and raised awareness of the contribution lenders could make to broader targets by providing green financing.

We have a role to play to drive the agenda of ESG, he said. For example, we have started lending for solar panels, for electric cars. I think an area where we probably need to bring more attention is on the environmental side, for clean energy.

Marc-Andre de Blois, OBGs Director of PR and Video Content, said the interview with Durand highlighted both the opportunities for international investors to contribute to Bahrains economic development and the kingdoms standing as a forward-looking destination, well placed to provide environment-friendly financing for companies incorporating ESG principles into their strategies.

Banking sector backing

While ESG remains a relatively new concept in the region, recognition is growing that these criteria are increasingly shaping the global corporate agenda, he said. Bahrain has long offered the international community a welcoming environment. Im delighted that through our video, weve been able to highlight the commitment taking shape across the kingdoms banking sector to support sustainable financing and move the ESG agenda forward.-- TradeArabia News Service
Its not the best-known or the easiest to pronounce but anCnoc makes an extremely delicious Speyside single malt which you should get your tongue around. We talked to distillery manager Gordon Bruce to find out more.

Theres a received opinion in the wine world that certain French wines are popular because they are easy to pronounce for English-speaking people. Which is why people order Sancerre instead of Menetou-Salon or Chablis instead of PernandVergelesses.

You say potato

This is rather turned on its head by Scotch whisky which proliferates with Gaelic names like Craigellachie, Glen Garioch, and Bunnahabhain which non-Scots whisky fans have to learn to pronounce. In fact, its part of the initiation into whisky having your pronunciation gently corrected when visiting distilleries. Even the Scots sometimes get it wrong. I remember the visible wince from Dr Bill Lumsden when a brand ambassador pronounced Glenmorangie with the emphasis on the third syllable. Such a faux pas!

Despite years of whisky drinking and associating with Scottish people, theres one whisky whose pronunciation Ive never quite got my head around: anCnoc. In fact, I struggle to spell it most of the time. Distillery manager Gordon Bruce told me that some people might be embarrassed about ordering it because they dont know how to pronounce it. But alternatively, it does make it a talking point. Its the unexpected mixture of upper and lowercase letters that really throws me. The correct pronunciation is a knock, just ignore the c in the middle, Bruce advised me.

I cant go for that, no can do

anCnoc single malt comes from Knockdhu distillery in Speyside. It changed the name of its single malt in the 1990s to differentiate it from nearby Knockandhu (which I used to pronounce no can do like the Hall & Oates song but is actually pronounced knock AN doo.)

Knockdhu means black hill in Gaelic, its situated not far from Elgin in the north of the Speyside region and was founded in 1894 by John Morrison. It was mothballed from 1983 until 1989 when it was reopened by Inver House Distillers. Its one of those absolutely perfect looking malt whisky distilleries especially on the sunny day when we visited. When the sun shines, theres no more beautiful place on earth than Speyside. But because its out of the main cluster of distilleries around Dufftown and Aberlour, Knockdhu is not much visited.

Loads of fruit and wee bit of cereal

Which is a shame because its a real treat for whisky nerds. The production process at Knockdhu is unusual and worth looking at in detail. Its all geared up to producing a damn decent new make spirit with loads of fruit and a wee hint of cereal, according to Gordon Bruce. It starts in the mash tun where the team are obsessive about removing solids from the wort. They do a very slow mash, eight hours, and a coarse filter and hydrocyclones help to keep things clear.

Gordon Bruce has been with Knockdhu for 16 years and describes his job as distillery manager, tea boy, dog walker, and tour guide. Before that he spent 12 years at Balblair and before that in his hometown distillery of Pulteney for six years. Both are now in the Inver House group with Knockdhu but werent when he worked for them. The distillery runs seven days a week round the clock. Its fully manual and operated by a small permanent staff of six people.

A long ferment

The very clear wort is then fermented for around 44 hours in Oregon pine washbacks before being pumped into separate wooden vessels. The movement stirs up the yeast cells and gets things going for another 16 hours. This is aided by a yeast strain called Mauri MG3 which is able to work at high temperatures to produce a wash thats high in esters and alcohol, over 9% ABV.

There are two stills with boil balls in the neck to increase reflux. They have worm tub condensers but unusually both worms share the same tub. Its a nightmare in the summer, according to Gordon, as the heat means the spirit wont condense easily. To combat this, they have a shell and tube condenser on the wash still before it goes into the worm tub. Gordon thinks its the only distillery in Scotland with such a system. This produces more reflux but also, all hot water needed for mash houses comes from condensers, Gordon explained. Knockdhu was doing sustainability long before it became a buzzword.

Knock on wood

Most of that fruity new make goes into bourbon casks with some sherry casks and then it will disappear into blends including Inver Houses excellent Hankey Bannister  for my money about the best value Scotch on the market. About 20% is sold as single malts with Britain, China and especially Scandinavia being important markets. Sweden has paid to feed and educate my children. Thank you Sweden! joked Bruce. But on the whole, its a pretty under the radar brand. The lions share of the groups marketing budget goes into Old Pulteney, according to Bruce.

Most of the whisky matured at a massive site at Airdrie, home to some 600,000 casks, but there is a racked and small dunnage warehouse on site. There used to be two dunnage warehouses but they were both destroyed during a snowstorm on 8/9 January 2010, dates tattooed on my memory, Bruice said. The sheer weight of snow caused the roofs to fall in. Warehouse one was reopened in 2012 with a celebratory ceilidh.

anCnoc and a hard place

You can taste that delicious fruitiness of Knockdhu from the 12 year old right up to the 24 year old (some tasting notes below). But its not the only trick up the distillerys sleeve. In the past, when Knockdhu had its own maltings the barley would have been dried with a mixture of coal and peat. The maltings closed in 1969 but in 2005 the team reintroduced a peated anCnoc and its become an annual tradition.

They use Aberdeen peat, its not like island peat. Terroir in peat is so important, Bruce explained. It majors more on the woodsmoke rather than the seaweed/TCP type notes. The result is a beautifully harmonious melding of the classic Knockdhu sweet fruitiness with bonfires and meaty notes. Bruce said theres more to peat than Islay peat. Its perhaps my favourite of the range.

These great single malts from anCnoc are worth getting your tongue around. Altogether now say: a knock! Now that wasnt so hard was it?

Tastings notes for anCnoc

anCnoc 18 Year Old

16 years in American oak followed by 24 months in Spanish oak sherry casks, and bottled at 46% ABV.

Nose: Floral and fruit on the nose, peaches and pineapple, touch of toffee. Water brings out the floral notes.

Palate: Honey, vanilla and apricots.

Finish: Very nutty with walnuts and chestnuts.

anCnoc 24 Year Old

Aged in a mixture of sherry and ex-bourbon casks before bottling at 46% ABV.

Nose: Very rich, Christmas cake, malty notes with tinned peaches and orange blossom.

Palate: Sweet, almost a bit like bourbon, with dried fruit, marmalade and honeyed cereal notes.

Finish: Long and layered finish with leather and vanilla a hint of orange peel.

anCnoc Peat

Made with 40 ppm peat, this is matured in American oak casks before finishing in Spanish oak sherry butts and bottled at 46% ABV.

Nose: Bacon Frazzle crisps on the nose, with wood smoke and a smell like cold ashes from the morning after a fire.

Palate: Lovely sweet fruit and toffee bolstered by gentle notes of bonfires and cured meats.

Finish: Earthy peat and citrus peels.
How did a New Yorker get into the spirit of the Cotswolds and create some of the finest English whisky around? Heres the story of the Cotswolds Distillery.

There are some distilleries that have long, romantic histories, and others that started with passion after a what if? conversation in a bar between old friends. Something of a red flag when it comes to distillery origins is the tale of a person leaving behind the corporate world to create whisky, making an unimpassioned stop on the way to create white spirits to balance the books and cash in on a thriving industry. Particularly when they try and fluff it up with some nonsense about heritage because their great uncle bumped into Johnnie Walker at Kilmarnock station or something.

The Cotswolds Distillery was founded by Dan Szor, a native New Yorker who spent 25 years in Europe, eight in London as an investment banker, before moving to the Cotswolds in 2011. A single malt lover, he was inspired to leave it all behind and make whisky, thinking his new idyllic English countryside home was the perfect place for it. While the whisky matured, he created a range of gin, as well as numerous other spirits that dont have such commercially prohibitive ageing laws. Uh oh. The red flags are waving all over the place like its Chinese New Year. On paper, this doesnt sound like a distillery that would fill us whisky-lovers with confidence.

And yet, Szors creation, The Cotswolds Distillery, is without doubt one of the leading lights of the English whisky boom. Its beautiful site receives nearly 100,000 visitors a year, who are treated to a host of excellent spirits, including a clearly lovingly-made selection of gin, and a superb early core range of whisky. Success has been so relentless that Jeremy Parsons, a 30-year industry veteran formerly at Diageo, has recently come on board as CEO, and a significant expansion is taking place at its site near Shipston-on-Stour. Plans include a whole new distillery that will make the Cotswolds Distillery the largest producer of English whisky with an eventual 500,000-litres of pure alcohol per year.

Cotswolds from start to finish

The whisky made here begins life as local barley, farmed just a few miles from the distillery. Right now they grow the Odyssey strain, but a switch to Concerto is on the way as its an advised grain for rotation. The only part of the process that doesnt happen in the Cotswolds is that Warminster Maltings do the malting, but even then theyre only a short distance away in Wiltshire.

Patchett tells me they havent experimented much with grain here because consistency of flavour is the priority. As soon as you add anomalies you can compromise that. Experiments are great, but were all about establishing quality first. There is, however, a barrel of rye whisky maturing in the warehouse, which a local brewery assisted with the mash, and distilled in both pot and column (the advantage of having a gin set up on-site).

This is one of many distilleries to have sought Dr. Jim Swans advice, and thats seen in the creation of a clear wort when mashing. It accentuates the fruit element in your mash. You let it rest for half an hour at the end of the cycle and the grain sifts to the bottom, which obviously reduces the grainy element and lets the fruit shine. We have clear perspex element in our pipe to monitor it, Patchett explains. They use floor-malted barley which is fed with hot water recycled from the last run into a 0.5-tonne mash tun.

Fruit-forward

Fermentation runs for 90 hours in eight 2,500-litre, stainless steel washbacks, which are filled with two yeast strains: Anchor for efficiency and Fermentis to build esters. The first two days of fermentation are about yield, while the next two days are about letting those fatty acids and fruit compounds (where flavour lives), develop. This was one of Dr. Swans trademarks, loading the wash with esters to impart as much fruity complexity as possible early on in the process.

As Im admiring the incredible tropical fruit note emanating from them, Patchett points out a knob of butter sitting atop the liquid. We couldnt afford switchers, the blades which stop the foaming element of fermentation, when we started. Jim Swan advised against any chemical compound that could knacker the copper in the still and, this is the beauty of working with someone whose been in the whisky industry for 50 years, said a nob of butter will have the same effect. Anybody whose made jam before will know this is true. The new distillery will have switchers, but I love that this doesnt compromise the wash or distillation. Its an old trick to combat a classic old school problem.

Theres no temperature control here as the Cotswolds is very much a manual distillery. Everything is operated by hand through a network of valves, and the distillers here could now almost run the distillery blind. Walk past the washbacks and youre greeted by a 2500-litre copper pot wash still called Proud Mary (love the Creedence reference, because she keeps on burning) and a 1600-litre spirit still, Janis (thusly named because we take a little bit of her heart, Patchett says). Theyre made by Forsyths, who is also equipping the new distillery with its revolutionary pre-assembled kit. The cut points are very narrow here and the distillers will switch from foreshots to hearts (cut at a high 69%-76% ABV) after only a few minutes and similarly cut to feints quickly to preserve those fruity esters from fermentation and reduce the interaction of any heavier, rougher compounds.

Szor, Swan, and other spirit masters

The pre-maturation part of the process was one that Szor was determined to get right, according to Patchett, who describes him as a spirit fiend with a love of fruit spirits like Grappa. He really wanted to create a new make spirit that would stand up by itself. The first few runs we did, Jim Swan said was too feinty and that we should be inspired by the rolling fields and fruit orchards around us to create something light, bright fruity, and accessible style. Thats the Cotswolds distillery DNA, something you can see in its White Pheasant expression, which is new make bottled at the casking strength of 63.5% ABV. Its delightful, full of raspberry chocolate, grape pulp, pear drops, banana foam sweets, digestives, and a little wet grass. Id happily drink this neat (although I am a new make fiend myself), and its very encouraging that this is what is going into cask.

Speaking of which, thats all happening in the Cotswolds now. The barrels used to be in Liverpool, but everything is moving within ten minutes of the distillery. That gives them full control of the production process, a surprisingly impactful temperate climate (the angle share is more greedy here than in Scotland), and the confidence to truly call this Cotswolds whisky.

Dr Swan hasnt been the only spirit master to lend his expertise. Whether it Emmanuel Camut assisting in apple brandy creation, Michael Delevante, Jamaican rum expert and former distillery manager at Wray & Nephew, or Harry Coburn, a former general manager of Bowmore, we want to learn from people who have been in the industry for a long time, Patchett says. Dr Swan has been the most influential, however, and for maturation purposes, his little black book of cooperages saved the Cotswolds from going through the pain of sourcing casks from inconsistent sources.

Maturation marvels

Miguel Martin supplies the sherry casks. He owns sawmills in America and Spain, a cooperage in Spain, a sherry bodega, a winery, and a sherry vinegar manufacturing process. He can control everything from the forest until the end. You can go to him and ask for an American oak hogshead seasoned with Oloroso and PX to create a cream sherry style and hell go, ok, Patchett says excitedly. Jim also got us in touch with a broker in Kentucky who gets really good bourbon casks, as well as Alter Ego to do all the exotics, like all the fortified wines, Sauternes, rum, Tequila, vermouth, sake, Islay quarter casks

The three primary casks here, however, are ex-bourbon, ex-sherry, and STR (shaved, toasted, re-charred) casks, the latter sourced from J Dias in Portugal. These are Dr Swans most recognisable signature, but are often derided by some in whisky circles for being seen as quick-fix casks that mask negative attributes rather than mature them. Patchett is not having that. STR is best of all words. Youre taking American oak, which already has such a distinctive profile, youre adding red wine which is removing bad tannins, then youre taking out the red wine which has amino acid that can cause a sulphuric reaction, making it almost a virgin oak cask after youve shaved, that has five-to-six litres of red wine seasoning in the pores, he explains.

Youre then toasting to caramelise all the sugar from the American oak and the wine, then applying an alligator char to seal it all in, which also soaks out any remaining sulphur. When you think about all the elements: American oak, red wine, sugars, filtration, its a remarkable cask. And the colour can develop in about 18 months. Dan used to have a party trick of taking 4-year-old STR whisky and giving it to friends who would guess its 15-year-old Speyside whisky.

Creating the Cotswolds character

Look across the core range and youll see these casks well represented, while the rarer styles are saved for special releases. Of all of them, I think my favourite is the classic Single Malt, all though the Sherry Cask runs it close. Whats really striking though is that, regardless if youre tasting the Reserve Single Malt, the Peated Cask Single Malt, the Bourbon Cask Single Malt, or one of the Founders Choice expressions, you always know where you are. The Cotswolds distillery character runs through the range, typified not only by those new make notes I described earlier but by this beautiful oily, creamy texture that flavours and aromas like vanilla and chocolate glide across.

Its a joyful thing that people are giving more and more of a damn about distillery character. Wood may still take the lions share of headlines in whisky, but people are becoming increasingly interested in what happens before a whisky goes into cask. Its one of the reasons why unadulterated presentations (whiskies bottled with no chill-filtration or colouring, often at cask strength) are so prized. And its been a persistent plus for independent bottlings, which are often a window into distilleries whose whiskies usually end up in blends. A fine fate, but who are they? We cant tell unless we can get a chance to taste that distillery character.

For a new distillery, this profile is gradually revealed, and of course, the goal is to create something so individual and remarkable you attain the lofty heights of Springbank status. Theres a pressure to maintain it, one the Cotswolds distillery will be wary of when building its new site, because when you tamper with the formula your reward will be the ire of the loyalists who have become attached to that certain character. Because the more you sample a great spirit with a defined profile, the more you create a connection with the producer. You see which casks accentuate or muddle the profile you love, you witness how it progresses with age, and how subtle adaptations in fermentation or barley strain alter things. Its the kind of detailed, nerdy aspect that drives whisky geekery, a term we mean wholly positively here (because were big whisky geeks, obviously).

Its this above all else that makes The Cotswolds Distillery so compelling for me. As Patchett and I sat in a tasting room discussing the range, that texture and taste kept reintroducing itself. Then theres the frankly bargain prices, and the clear love and transparency the whisky is made with. At one point, Patchett tells me about a very nerdy conversation as I was having with our distiller Nick about thermal degradation versus acetate and acetone degradation of the spirit. There wasnt a question that went unanswered on my tour, a detail hidden, a press-release paraphrase in sight. Theres no doubt to me that Szors love of single malt was genuine, and what its led to is a spirit that dutifully represents his adopted home.
Denny Hsieh speaks candidly when he discusses his skills as a presenter prior to starting the capstone communication project in Northwestern Engineering's Master of Project Management (MPM) program.

I was pretty bad, Hsieh (MPM '08) said. Imagine an international student flying more than 7,000 miles to Chicago for his new journey. English was a second language, and I didn't have Google Translate or Apple Siri to help me.

The capstone project requires each student to write a 20-30 page report on a topic of personal interest and then make a 30-minute presentation about the content. For Hsieh, a native of Taiwan, the task was daunting, but like each of his experiences in MPM, once he went through the process, he could tell he'd grown. And like most of what he learned in the program, he continues to apply lessons he learned to his daily work as a senior technical program manager at Intel.

A lot of what I learned from class is still applicable for my daily job, said Hsieh, who's worked at Intel since 2011. Even for the capstone report, I'm leveraging the presentation skills in my daily job when presenting to senior management.

The MPM programs goal is to help turn technically skilled professionals into dynamic business leaders, which is what the program did for Hsieh. At Intel, he coordinates the lifecycle of some of Intels most advanced and emerging products.

Engineering is the closest thing to magic that exists in the world," he said, "and my role is to let people know when this magic will be realized and how much it costs."

To do that well, Hsieh routinely leans on his MPM education. He learned program scheduling concepts that provide the framework for how he schedules projects, and he was taught finance and accounting methodologies that are relevant when he reads financial reports.

Most importantly, it was in MPM where he learned to be a project manager.

When Hsieh first considered graduate programs, each one he explored was in a business school. MPM was the only program that caught his interest that was affiliated with an engineering school. That differentiation was appealing then, and he said it continues to remain appealing today.

In MPM, I could learn and experience both engineering knowledge and business management skills, he said.

That combination molded him into what he believes is a unique project manager. He also finds himself applying core tenets of project management into his day-to-day life outside of the office.

In most of my important life events, I use project management skills, he said. Because project management can apply to work and also to life, I highly recommend that prospective students join the MPM family.
Bahrain Car Parks Company (Amakin), a Bahraini company specialised in parking management, premium add-on services and property leasing, has reported a net profit of BD164,000 ($431,986) for the first quarter, down 18% over last year's figure of BD199,000 ($524,178).

Amakin is a Bahraini public shareholding company established in 1981; it is specialized in parking management, premium add-on services, and property leasing.

Announcing its financial results for the three months ended March 31, 2022, Amakin said the company posted a total comprehensive income of BD183,000, up 27% compared to BD144,000 reported for the same period in 2021, and an increase of 22% in operating income, BD535,000 compared to BD437,000 for the same period in 2021.

Basic and diluted earnings per share were at 1.50 fils, compared to 1.82 fils for the same period in 2021.

Total equity attributable to the shareholders of the company amounted to BD19.3 million compared to BD19.8 million for the year ended December 31, 2021, which represents a decrease of 2%. The company's assets were at BD20.7 million, 1% higher compared to BD 20.4 million for the year ended 31 December 2021.

On the financial results, Chairman Amin Alarrayed, said: "Amakins financial performance reflects notable success and growth with the company entering strategic partnerships. We will continue to build long-term partnerships, especially with the public sector to achieve efficiency in public parking operations."

"This is in-line with our companys core values collaboration for a better future. This year, we aim to achieve our strategic priorities while diversifying and leveraging our resources to achieve exceptional results for our communities and fulfill Amakins mission to create a seamless parking ecosystem," he added.

CEO Tariq Ali Aljowder said Amakin had made a successful start into 2022, as highlighted by its positive results with an increase in operating income.

"In the past year, we successfully executed most of our planned initiatives which are tied to transforming our spaces into mobility hubs. We are confident that we will do even better in 2022, as we move into our second year of strategy implementation," he noted.

"Upcoming plans for the year include a major upgrade to our portfolio of F&B tenants in The Terminal and Amakins building. In addition to that, we added 1,000 parking spaces to our portfolio from Autospace Building in Diplomatic Area, with more to come in the next quarter," he added.-TradeArabia News Service
RAK Ceramics, one of the world's largest ceramics brands based in Ras Al Khaimah, has reported a total revenue of AED783.1 million ($213 million, up 8.3% over the same period last year despite the ongoing economic challenges weighing in namely on input prices, energy costs and supply chain.

Announcing its financial results for the first three months ended March 31, 2022. RAK Ceramics said its reported net profit increased to AED69.7 million for Q1 2022 due to higher revenue and gross profit margins.

The Emirati group's total gross profit margin too surged by 37% with an increase of 200bps year on year driven by improved efficiencies, while its total ebitda rose 2.9% to AED129.7 million.

RAK Ceramics maintained a stable capital structure with a net debt of AED975.2 million as of March 2022, in spite of the payment of dividends, it added.

Commenting on the results, Group CEO Abdallah Massaad said: "RAK Ceramics achieved a strong set of results in Q1 despite the ongoing economic challenges weighing in namely on input prices, energy costs and supply chain.

"Our financial performance was supported by key initiatives realized in Q1 2022 aimed to drive further growth in the top-line by enhancing our brand positioning, strengthen our profitability by increasing production efficiencies and improve our liquidity position by tightening our collection policy," stated Massaad.

"Additionally, we were successful in adjusting our prices selectively to partly offset additional costs while still maintaining our market share across markets. We remain focused on positioning ourselves as a trusted lifestyle solution provider and work towards growing and optimizing our portfolio. This included, most recently, our 100% acquisition of KLUDI Group, a significant step towards our shared vision of delivering world class service and quality products for our customers whilst also creating strong shareholder value," he added.

"We continue working towards protecting our market share in our core markets by focusing on brand positioning, product differentiation, sustainable investments and digital transformation," he added.

Strategic Highlights

On March 14, RAK Ceramics announced a share purchase agreement for the 100% acquisition of the Germany-based Kludi Group (including 49% of Kludi RAK joint venture).

An established European faucet brand, Kludi has manufacturing footprint across Germany, Austria, Hungary, and UAE.

The strategic acquisition of Kludi Group represents an opportunity for RAK Ceramics to spearhead expansion and strengthen its core businesses across European markets in addition to strengthening its position internationally as a fully integrated lifestyle solution provider. Both teams are currently working closely to satisfy all closing conditions by the May 31, it added.

Operational Review

In the UAE, revenue remained stable year on year with slight increase of 0.7% during Q1 2022, supported by increased brand exposure through the launch of RAK Ceramics e-commerce platform, brand participation in international events and sponsoring high-profile architectural and interior design awards.

RAK Ceramics pointed out that its position in Saudi Arabia continues to grow quarter-on-quarter, despite the imposition of a 12% customs duty, driven by its focus on strengthening its presence and brand positioning through increased retail footprint and secured projects.

This resulted in increase of 19.8% quarter on quarter in tiles & sanitaryware revenue in Q1 2022, it added.

In Europe, RAK Ceramics witnessed a strong performance. Revenues increased by 8.8% year on year in Q1 2022 mainly driven by the increase in selling price to partially offset the increased logistics and input costs. Company continues to position the brand as a trusted ceramic solution provider, increasing customer base by adding further showrooms, expanding distribution network and tapping into E-commerce platform.

In the Middle East (excluding UAE and KSA), registered a record growth of 56.8% year on year due to increased brand exposure and expanding distribution network.

In India, revenue remained stable with increase of 3.4% year on year supported by expanding dealers network presence in additional 12 districts.

In Bangladesh revenue increased by 13.9% year on year supported by price adjustments following increase in input costs and import freight and better brand visibility.

Financial Highlights

RAK Ceramics delivered a strong set of results during Q1 2022 despite the continued geopolitical and economic challenges.

Total revenue for Q1 2022 increased by 8.3% compared to same period last year to AED 783.1 million, driven by a strong growth in sanitaryware and tableware segments.

Reported net profit increased to AED 69.7 million during Q1 2022 due to higher revenue & gross profit margins.

Total gross profit margin for Q1 2022 increased to 37% compared to 35% in Q1 2021 despite increase in input, logistics costs and 12% custom duty imposed by Saudi Arabia effective 1st July 2021.

Tiles revenue remained stable with slight decrease of 0.8% year on year to reach AED 516.1 million in Q1 2022, supported by growth in all markets except United Arab Emirates & Saudi Arabian markets.

Sanitaryware revenue grew by 13.1% in Q1 2022 at AED 155.0 million driven by growth in all markets except Saudi Arabian market.

Tableware revenue decreased by 15.8 % quarter on quarter to AED 75.7 million while still outperforming year on year levels by 84.3% as the markets situations across all our core markets is gradually improving.
Madam President,

At present, the tension side of the situation on the Korean peninsula tends to be prominent, and the prospect of a spiraling escalation is worrying. China calls on all parties to maintain calm and restraint. adhere to the right direction of dialogue and consultation, and avoid any action that may aggravate tensions or lead to miscalculation. We sincerely support the improvement of relations between the DPRK and the ROK, and the promotion of reconciliation and cooperation. We look forward to the situation on the Peninsula moving towards detente and positive development.

Madam President,

The issue of the Korean Peninsula should be looked at historically and comprehensively, so as to understand the causes and consequences of the matter at hand. After 2018, there had been a general de-escalation of the situation on the Peninsula. The DPRK took a series of measures to denuclearize and de-escalate the situation. The leaders of the DPRK and the US met face to face in Singapore, and reached an important consensus on establishing a new type of DPRK-US relations, building a peace mechanism on the Peninsula, and advancing the denuclearization process on the Peninsula. Regrettably, the US side later reneged on its position, and did not reciprocate the DPRKs positive initiatives in accordance with the action-for-action principle, leading to an intractable impasse in the DPRK-US dialogue, adding to the mutual distrust between the two countries, and stalling the denuclearization process on the Peninsula.

Dialogue and consultation is the only correct way to resolve the Peninsula issue. The US is a direct party to the Peninsula issue, and holds the key to breaking the deadlock. As such, it should take concrete actions to respond positively to the reasonable concerns of the DPRK side, and create conditions for an early resumption of dialogue. Although the US side verbally claims to be willing to engage in unconditional dialogue, when it comes to actions, it is continuing to tighten sanctions and exert pressure. This is clearly not constructive. The new draft resolution proposed by the US, evoking Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations, is centered on furthering sanctions, which is not an appropriate way to address the current situation on the Peninsula. The Security Council, over the years, has adopted numerous resolutions on the Peninsula issue, which, while authorizing sanctions, have also stressed the need for a peaceful, political, and diplomatic solution to the nuclear issue on the Peninsula. All these deserve our equal attention. Sanctions are but a means to an end, and should always serve the overall goal of political settlement. Equating sanctions to or replacing diplomatic efforts is completely putting the cart before the horse, and will not achieve the desired result. Despite the fact that sanctions have already had a negative humanitarian impact and collateral damages to other countries, the countries concerned are still in total denial, which is inconsistent with the conclusions of various international humanitarian agencies and the 1718 Committees panel of experts.

In fact, in response to the latest situation, China and a number of Council members have all put forward reasonable proposals to explore ways to take strong actions and promote the political solution to the Peninsula issue, in a way that best garners the consensus of Council members. The draft resolution tabled by China and Russia is also for this very purpose. Regrettably, the US has turned a blind eye to the reasonable proposals of China and other relevant Council members, and remains enamored superstitiously with the magic power of sanctions. We believe that if the United States changes its negative attitude, it is possible for Council members to reach a consensus. We hope that the Council members will give serious consideration to the joint China-Russia draft resolution.

Madam President,

As a close neighbor of the Peninsula, China is highly concerned about the situation on the Peninsula, and has always insisted on maintaining peace and stability on the Peninsula, denuclearizing the Peninsula, and resolving problems through dialogue and consultation. We advocate that all parties concerned should prioritize the overall peace and stability on the Peninsula, adhere to the direction of dialogue and consultation, meet each other halfway, resume meaningful dialogue at an early date, and explore effective ways to resolve each others legitimate concerns in a balanced manner. China is seriously concerned about some recent negative developments.

Some countries are calling for the denuclearization of the DPRK, while they themselves are promoting cooperation on nuclear submarines, which carries serious risks of nuclear proliferation. Some countries profess their concerns about the DPRKs military development, while at the same time developing with much fanfare their own offensive weapons system such as hyper-sonic weapons. A certain politician in a certain country concerned even went so far as to openly advocate discussing nuclear sharing under the pretext of addressing security threats. Chinas Global Security Initiative is an important guide to resolving the issue of the Peninsula. Security is indivisible. The security of one country cannot be based on the insecurity of another country. Such a concept works anywhere, anytime. China once again calls all parties concerned to jointly cherish and maintain peace and stability on the Peninsula, work together to promote the establishment of a peace mechanism and denuclearization process on the Peninsula, and play a constructive role to this end.

Thank you, Madam President.
Al Masaood Commercial Vehicles and Equipment (CV&E), a part of Abu Dhabis leading conglomerate Al Masaood Group, has formally announced that it has been appointed as the official distributor for Toyo Carriers Manufacturing (TCM) in the whole UAE market (Abu Dhabi, Al Ain, Western region, Dubai and the Northern Emirates).

TCM, a long-established global brand in the material handling industry, offers a quality portfolio of forklift products designed and engineered to meet client requirements including heavy and medium forklifts.

Supplied from production facilities in Japan, China, Thailand, and Europe, TCMs value-for-money product range includes internal combustion engine forklifts, electric counterbalanced forklifts, reach trucks and skid steer loaders.

The load capacity of small TCM forklifts ranges from 1.5 tonnes to 23 tonnes, with the brands large-size products able to support heavy tasks such as container handling operations in ports, it stated.

Mohamed El Zeftawi, the General Manager of Al Masaood CV&E, said: "As its authorised distributor, we are tying our customer-centric sales and aftersales support to TCMs robust product range through this partnership, thereby providing an end-to-end service to our customers."

"To offer holistic solutions, we also provide flexible financing schemes and attractive leasing options," he stated.

According to him, TCM is the latest in Al Masaoods growing network of partnerships with renowned global brands, best known for their quality and excellence.

"This partnership exemplifies our commitment to bringing to the UAE market top quality products to support the operations of relevant local sectors. TCMs line of forklifts is available at Al Masaood CV&E showrooms in Abu Dhabi, Al Ain, and Northern Emirates (Sharjah)," noted El Zeftawi.

Kosuke Matsuda, Acting Deputy Manager (Overseas Sales and Marketing Headquarters) Mitsubishi Logisnext, said: "We are proud of the enviable legacy of the TCM brand in the history of Japanese technology. The TCM brand had pioneered the manufacturer of the first Made in Japan internal combustion forklift truck in 1949. We are indeed grateful for the many years of trust from our customers in the UAE who appreciate the reliability of the TCM brand."

"Our increasing collaboration with Al Masaood CV&E, the exclusive TCM agent in the UAE, is intended to open up new frontiers to continue in the excellent delivery of our after-sales service and for be-spoke solutions in material handling," explained Matsuda.

He pointed out that the UAE was one of the most important global market for the Japanese forklifts group.

"As we aim to build a more robust market presence in the country and the region, we are confident that partnering with Al Masaood CV&E is the right strategy for us given its proven track record in sales and aftersales support, technical capability, and outstanding customer service," observed Matsuda.

"TCMs diverse product range has been designed to deliver affordable top quality that satisfies varying customer needs across multiple sectors. With the arrival of TCM forklifts in Abu Dhabi, we look forward to combining our expertise, resources and services to deliver the best customer experience and form a stronger local market presence for our brand," he added.

El Zeftawi said the TCM forklift range is now available at Al Masaood CV&Es showrooms in Abu Dhabi, Al Ain, and Northern Emirates (Sharjah).

Apart from TCM, we are also the sole distributor in Abu Dhabi for UD Trucks, Renault Trucks, and UniCarriers Forklift, and in the UAE for Oshkosh Fire Trucks, along with other well-known brands of heavy equipment and ancillary products, he added.-TradeArabia News Service
Abu Dhabi Airports said that the airport welcomed 2.56 million guests in the first quarter of 2022, more than triple the number seen during the same period last year on the back of resurgent demand and new frequencies, routes and services.



First quarter statistics confirm that 2,563,297 passengers were served compared to 807,310 in Q1 2021, an increase of 218% as Covid-19 related travel restrictions across the globe eased and markets re-opened, reported state news agency WAM.



The airport recorded 22,689 flights during the period compared to 16,351 in 2021, a sharp increase of 38.8%.



"The first quarter continued to build on the momentum we saw in Q4 2021 as travel restrictions eased further, markets re-opened and airlines deployed capacity to accommodate the resulting surge in demand," said Shareef Hashim Al Hashmi, CEO of Abu Dhabi Airports.



He added: "There is no doubt that developments such as the relaxation of travel restrictions to and from India, the re-opening of Australia and Singapore and the removal of mandatory PCR testing for passengers travelling to Abu Dhabi provided further lift."



As a result, Abu Dhabi International Airport welcomed the expansion of operations by home carriers Etihad Airways, Wizz Air Abu Dhabi and Air Arabia Abu Dhabi, the launch of 10 new routes as well as the introduction of new carriers Go First and Pegasus Airlines.



Load factors have also doubled with the average passenger load factor reaching 70% during the first three months of the year versus 35% during the same period in 2021. The airport now offers flights to 99 destinations across the globe on 26 airlines compared to 81 destinations on 18 carriers during Q1 2021.



The top five countries in terms of passenger volumes during the period were India (515,927), Pakistan (253,874), the UK (170,620), KSA (137,582) and Egypt (127,009). The busiest destinations being served by AUH during Q1 included London (123,055), Delhi (103,472), Islamabad (101,476), Kochi (90,022) and Dhaka (89,272).



Customers continued to rate service levels highly at Abu Dhabi International during the first three months of 2022 across a number of metrics including airport cleanliness (98.4%), feeling safe and secure (98.2%), happiness index (96.4%) and health safety (97.4%).



The overall satisfaction score as measured by Airports Council International (ACI) was 91.8%.



Abu Dhabi International also received ACIs Airport Health Accreditation for the second year running in recognition of continued efforts to enhance health and safety measures in accordance with international standards.



First quarter baggage service was similarly robust as a total of 1,737,290 bags were processed through the airports baggage system during the first three months of the year with a delivery success rate of 99.8%.



The airport also handled 144,114 tonnes of air freight during the first quarter, a decline of 15.7% compared to the 170,876 tonnes handled during the same period last year primarily due to the redeployment of cargo capacity to support passenger operations.



The airport processed 1,835 tonnes of mail during the period compared to 2,518 tonnes during Q1 2021, down 27.1% for the same reason.



Top cargo markets during the period included the Netherlands (12,835 tonnes) and India (12,720 tonnes).
Marriott Executive Apartments, part of Marriott Bonvoys portfolio of 30 extraordinary brands, has announced the opening of Marriott Executive Apartments Al Khobar in the Saudi Arabian city of Al Khobar.

Located within close proximity to the citys premier shopping malls and business district, the upscale residential apartments cater to the rapidly growing demand for longer stay accommodations that offer home comforts for both business and leisure travellers.



Commenting on behalf of the owning company of Marriott Executive Apartments Al Khobar, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Jumah, Chairman, Mansour bin Jumah Holding said: We are delighted to introduce these elevated serviced apartments which will cater to travellers who seek short and long stay accommodation in a central city location. Suitable for a business trip, city escape or family holiday, Marriott Executive Apartments Al Khobar will embrace new ways of living, offering travellers premium accommodation and comfort, combined with world-class service. We are also proud to contribute to the Kingdoms thriving tourism sector and support Vision 2030.



Ahmed Hozaien, Area Vice President  Saudi Arabia, Bahrain & Egypt at Marriott International said: We are delighted to enhance our footprint in Saudi Arabia with the opening of Marriott Executive Apartments in the vibrant city of Al Khobar. This opening offers the ideal fit for business and leisure guests who seek a sophisticated experience with amenities and services that mirror the comforts of home.



Marriott Executive Apartments Al Khobar features 268 modern residential apartments. The spacious one, two and three-bedroom apartments offer separate living, sleeping, and working areas so guests can enjoy a home from home experience during their stay. The property embodies the notion of sophisticated living combined with modern comforts, fulfilling its commitment to providing a full range of accommodations with the highest quality service standards.



Guests can experience a variety of culinary options at the all-day dining restaurant, which is a meeting point for personal and professional get-togethers, with a bright, modern and cosy ambience. The casual, urban venue offers a delicious range of breakfast, lunch and dinner menus. Guests also have the option to cook for themselves, with all apartments featuring a fully equipped kitchen, complete with a refrigerator, oven, microwave, dishwasher, coffee machine and cookware.



Marriott Executive Apartments Al Khobar features an array of wellness facilities for men and women. The dedicated space includes a state of-the-art gym, spa with six treatment rooms, each providing a variety of services to revitalise and rejuvenate the mind and soul, an indoor pool, and a female beauty salon.



Catering to the needs of business professionals, Marriott Executive Apartments Al Khobar also offers an executive lounge with access to business facilities as well as a dedicated conference centre with six meeting rooms.  TradeArabia News Service
MANISTEE  When Armory Youth Project executive director Amy Wojciechowski discovered the cable had snapped on the Armory's flag pole, help was not hard to find.

"I came into town on a Sunday and found that the flag's cable had broken. I took it inside and contacted Paul Bosschem, who had been instrumental in putting up the other one," Wojciechowski said. "He immediately got on it and got ahold of the necessary people. He brought the rope to me at church on Saturday night, and said that (Rolling Thunder board member) John Stocki had contacted the fire department and that they would be willing to help."
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TEHRAN, Iran (AP)  Qatars emir met with Iranian leaders on Thursday, offering support for efforts to revive the nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers, even as talks on the tattered accord remain deadlocked.

Despite its small size, the tiny Gulf Arab sheikdom plays a strategic role as a quiet mediator and negotiator in a region rife with sectarian and political conflict. Qatars ties with both Washington and Tehran allow Doha to relay viewpoints between the two.

We believe that negotiation is the solution of the problem, the official IRNA news agency quoted visiting Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani as saying after meeting President Ebrahim Raisi. The two also discussed a range of other issues, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and the war in Yemen.

Raisi seized the opportunity to slam Western nations, insisting that their presence is not providing security in the region" but harming the security. Iran sees the presence of U.S. forces in neighboring countries  on its doorstep  as a threat.

Raisi described Sheikh Tamim's one-day visit to Tehran as a turning point in relations between Iran and Qatar.

Later in the day, Irans Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who has final say on all state matters, said during his meeting with the emir that their two nations should significantly boost their economic and political ties. But Khamenei also urged the Arab world and particularly Qatar to offer more support for the Palestinian cause in its conflict with Israel, an archenemy of Iran.

The emir's visit came as the European Unions coordinator on nuclear talks, Enrique Mora, was still in Iran. The talks in Vienna have been stalled for months, apparently over an Iranian demand that Washington lift a terrorism designation on Irans powerful paramilitary Revolutionary Guard.

Mora met with the Iranian nuclear negotiator on Wednesday, just after Iranian intelligence services announced they had detained two European citizens. Talks continued on Thursday, Iranian media reported without giving details.

In Paris, Frances Foreign Ministry said Thursday that two French nationals have been arrested in Iran and French authorities have fully mobilized to secure their swift release. Workers Force trade union identified the two as Cecile Kohler, a teachers union official, and her partner. It said they were on a tourist trip to Iran as part of an Easter vacation. The union said it was made aware of the arrests Wednesday.

The French government condemned this groundless arrest and calls for immediate release of the two. France did not say what charges the two face.

Another French citizen, Benjamin Briere, was sentenced in January by Iran to over eight years in prison for espionage, for photographing prohibited areas with a drone in 2020 during what he said was a tourist visit in the north of the country.

The emir, who will visit Europe soon, hosted Raisi in February.
Senior Services believes that you can people can help another if they first take care of themselves. This month, the organization is offering an evidence-based program designed to provide caregivers with the powerful tools they need to successfully manage their loved ones care.

Family members who assist in the care of a loved one tend to spend themselves until there is little left. In this evidence-based program, taking place over the course of six weeks, caregivers develop a wealth of self-care tools to reduce personal stress, change negative self-talk, communicate their needs to other family members and healthcare providers, deal with difficult feelings and make tough caregiving decisions. Powerful Tools for Caregivers is a program caregivers can count on to make a positive difference in their lives.
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MIDDLETOWN  Police are attempting to make sure a mother and her infant son are OK after she voluntarily stopped communicating with family last week, according to the Middletown Police Department.

Brigette Wood, 32, and her 3-week-old son, Zion Gonzalez, were last seen on Eastern Drive in Middletown around 3 p.m. May 6. Police and family have been unable to reach her since.
The Army has launched a new probe into living conditions at privatized housing at Fort Gordon, Georgia, following a scathing Senate report that found one of the military's largest housing providers continues to ignore residents' concerns about mold, asbestos and other problems, a top service official said Thursday.

Speaking to the House Appropriations Committee subpanel in charge of military construction, Rachel Jacobson, assistant secretary of the Army for installations, energy and environment, said she found the Senate report about conditions at Balfour Beatty Communities "very disturbing."

"I take very seriously any report of substandard conditions that compromise the life, health and safety of soldiers and families," she said. "The day after the report was released, I wrote to Balfour Beatty indicating that I directed an immediate investigation at Fort Gordon to be overseen by the commanding general of the Army Materiel Command."

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In addition, Jacobson said the Army is auditing Balfour Beatty's property management records at Fort Gordon and suspending any requests for performance bonuses. She also asked the service's top lawyer to provide a "comprehensive legal opinion outlining all enforcement options available under the law," including "an assessment of when we can amend contracts with privatizing housing providers to give us additional leverage."

"And if we conclude from this assessment that we need additional legislative authorities to strengthen oversight and impose greater consequences, we will work with Congress toward that goal," she added.

Jacobson's comments come after the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations last month released a report, followed the next day by a hearing, that detailed residents' struggles to get Balfour Beatty to respond to their requests to remediate dangerous and unhealthy living conditions. The company provides housing to 150,000 military residents in 26 states, but the report focused largely on Fort Gordon in the home state of subcommittee Chairman Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga.

The issues detailed in the report came after Balfour Beatty pleaded guilty to fraud tied to conditions in military housing it managed over a prior six-year period.

In December, Balfour Beatty pleaded guilty to defrauding the Army, Air Force and Navy after having been found to have manipulated maintenance records from 2013 to 2019 to obtain performance bonuses as a housing management contractor. As part of the plea, the company agreed to pay $65 million in fines and restitution.

A spokesperson for Balfour Beatty did not immediately respond to Military.com's request for comment on the Army's newly announced investigation and audit. But at the hearing last month, company representatives rejected allegations of subpar living conditions and maintained that most of its residents are happy.

Since systemic issues with on-base military housing run by private companies -- including widespread mold, rodent infestations, dangerous wiring and shoddy repairs -- first came to light in a series of Reuters articles in 2018, the military has pledged to conduct more oversight of the companies. The Pentagon also issued a congressionally mandated 18-point tenant bill of rights aimed at providing military families with more negotiating power with the companies.

Lawmakers have said that they are unsatisfied with the military services' efforts to fix the issues, and the Army's latest assurances Thursday did not appear to assuage them.

Subcommittee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., highlighted how the $1.9 billion for family housing in the Army's fiscal 2023 budget request would be a 40% cut compared to this year. Meanwhile, the Army's so-called unfunded priorities list, a congressionally mandated report on what the service wants if Congress approves more funding than it requested, includes more than $320 million for housing.

"You can speak words here, but money talks," Wasserman Schultz said. "If they are a priority, then they would be in your budget request."

Editors Note: After publication a Balfour Beatty spokesman responded to Military.coms request for comment with the following statement: We are working diligently to respond to the issues raised in the Armys letter and will provide detailed answers to all of their questions.

-- Rebecca Kheel can be reached at Rebecca.Kheel@Military.com. Follow her on Twitter @reporterkheel.

Related: Military Housing Still Unsafe for Families Served by Company That Pleaded Guilty to Fraud, Congressional Investigation Alleges
The Senate voted unanimously late Wednesday to confirm Adm. Linda Fagan as the next commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, the first woman ever to lead a military service.

Fagan is slated to take the helm of the service June 1 in a ceremony at Coast Guard Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

"This is a historic moment for our country and for women in the armed services," said Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., during Fagan's confirmation hearing April 28. "It will be the first time that a woman will lead one of the six branches of the armed services. So I am hoping that your leadership also will lead to more progress on getting women recruited and retained in the Coast Guard."

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Fagan, a 1985 graduate of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, became the service's first female admiral last June when she assumed the duties of vice commandant, five years after the post became a four-star billet. She was the third woman to serve as vice commandant, following Vice Adms. Vivien Crea and Sally Brice-O'Hara.

During her confirmation hearing, the admiral said her highest priority is to change the way the Coast Guard "recruits, trains and retains our workforce," emphasizing the recruitment of people who reflect the diversity of the American public and then retaining them by providing for them and their families.

"My goal is the best talent we can recruit," said Fagan, the mother of two daughters, one of whom is a Coast Guard officer. "It's what makes us great as a service and an organization, and [I] will continue to focus on making sure that talent, to the best extent possible, reflects the diversity that we carry in society and [we are] committed again to the best talent to bring into the service.

In addition to recruitment and retention, Fagan said she plans to build on the improvements made by the Coast Guard in the past several years, to include modernizing its fleet of boats, ships and aircraft; building shore infrastructure hardened against the effects of climate change; and adopting new technologies to improve training and operations.

"I'm committed to fielding an operationally relevant and ready force and will continue to focus on readiness and our ability to execute operationally," she said.

While Fagan will be the first woman to become a service chief, she will not be the first to serve as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Coast Guard commandant, who heads the only branch of the armed forces housed outside the Department of Defense, is a de facto member of the panel and lacks full voting rights.

Last year, Reps. Charlie Crist, D-Fla., and Steven Palazzo, R-Miss., sponsored a bill that would give the Coast Guard commandant full voting rights on the Joint Chiefs, but the legislation has not made it through the House Armed Services Committee.

During her nearly 40-year career, Fagan, a marine safety officer, worked more than 15 years as a marine inspector and served aboard the heavy icebreaker Polar Star.

Her command assignments include overseeing Sector New York and serving as captain of the Port of New York; leading the service's First District; and heading Coast Guard Pacific Area from 2018 to 2021, where she was responsible for all operations from the Rocky Mountains to Asia.

-- Patricia Kime can be reached at Patricia.Kime@Military.com. Follow her on Twitter @patriciakime.

Related: Coast Guard's $13.8 Billion Budget Request Includes a Commercial Icebreaker
The murder of seven veterans at a West Virginia Department of Veterans Affairs hospital and thousands of missed diagnoses by a pathologist who was drunk on the job at a Fayetteville, Arkansas, facility are signs that the Veterans Health Administration, or VHA, has significant leadership and cultural problems, according to the VA's top watchdog.

VA Inspector General Michael Missal said Wednesday that such egregious events should not be treated as "one-offs" but should be used as painful lessons to transform the culture at the department's medical centers, with many working well but others staffed by employees who are "complacent and disengaged."

"Incidents in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Clarksburg, West Virginia, serve as devastating examples of the most catastrophic consequences of disengaged leadership and the dangerous culture that is fostered when leaders are not attentive to and invested in their staff and the veterans they serve," Missal told members of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee during a hearing on patient safety Wednesday.

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Reta Mays pleaded guilty in 2020 to murdering seven veteran patients at the Louis A. Johnson VA Medical Center in Clarksburg, West Virginia, injecting them with deadly doses of insulin between 2017 and 2018.

A subsequent investigation found that staff did not vet Mays before hiring her, which would have revealed previous marks on her employment history, and they failed to follow procedures for securing pharmaceuticals or notice that doses of insulin were missing. They also failed to conduct investigations following the series of unexpected deaths in patients who all had unusually high blood sugar levels.

In Fayetteville, two patients died and more than 3,000 discrepancies resulted from pathology interpretations by Dr. Robert Morris Levy, who worked at the VA from 2005 to 2018, a period during which he was suspected of being impaired at work.

A VA Office of Inspector General investigation said a conviction of drunk driving before he was hired should have triggered close supervision during his employment probation period, but he received very little oversight. Leadership also failed to manage Levy, despite concerns from subordinates, and placed him in a position of authority.

"The events leading to these failings are often nuanced and multifactorial. However, common contributing factors the OIG has identified are poor, inconsistent, or ineffective leadership that cultivate a complacent and disengaged medical facility culture in which the VHA goal of 'zero patient harm' is improbable, if not impossible," Missal said.

During the hearing, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin called out VA leaders for a lack of accountability and noted that he didn't learn much about the investigation until Missal briefed him.

"Individuals in places of leadership were able simply to resign with benefits, like retirement benefits. ... How do the people stay in the system? How are they able to stay until retirement?" the Democrat said.

Missal called for a top-down overhaul of hospital culture from "the highest levels of leadership at the Veterans Health Administration.

"VHA staff have repeatedly overcome extraordinary obstacles to meet the complex needs of veterans," Missal said. "The OIG continues to emphasize the need for a cultural transformation within VHA, guided by accountable and attentive leaders that prioritize the safety of each veteran they encounter."

The Veterans Health Administration has not had a permanent undersecretary in five years, since Dr. David Shulkin was promoted to VA secretary in 2017.

During his confirmation hearing on April 27, the nominee for the position, Dr. Shereef Elnahal, pledged to invest in the VHA leadership and staff, as he has in his current job heading University Hospital in Newark, New Jersey.

"In addition to leading the hospital through the pandemic before I arrived, the hospital was under the oversight of a state monitor for failures in care quality, patient safety, financial performance, and poor community trust. Together with my workforce, I turned that hospital around by investing in a culture of respect and accountability," Elnahal said.

During the Wednesday hearing on patient safety, Dr. Gregg Meyer, a professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, warned Congress not to extrapolate the issues seen at the Fayetteville and Clarksburg VA hospitals across the system, adding that numerous studies show that, by many measures, patient outcomes at the VA are better than in civilian health care.

"The American public should be both reassured yet unsatisfied with the quality of care provided to its veterans," Meyer said. "Reassured that the care provided by the VA's direct care system is comparable to and oftentimes better than that available in civilian facilities ... yet unsatisfied that we can do better by veterans by continuing to improve care, learning from failures and ensuring that they have high-quality care regardless of where they access the system."

-- Patricia Kime can be reached at Patricia.Kime@Military.com. Follow her on Twitter @patriciakime

Related: These 17 Medical Centers Would Close and More Than 30 Built or Replaced Under VA Plan
HELSINKI  Finland's president and prime minister said Thursday theyre in favor of rapidly applying for NATO membership without delay, paving the way for the alliance to expand amid Russias war in Ukraine.

The dramatic move by Finland was announced by President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin. It means that Finland is virtually certain to seek NATO membership, though a few steps remain before the application process can begin. Neighboring Sweden is expected to decide on joining NATO in coming days.

The Kremlin reacted to the development a few hours later, saying that Finlands move to join NATO wont help stability and security in Europe. Finland shares a 1,340-kilometer (830-mile) land border with Russia.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia's response to the move would depend on what specific steps NATO will take to bring its infrastructure close to Russian borders. He noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin already had ordered to work out steps to strengthen the countrys defenses in the west in response to NATOs expansion closer to Russian borders.

Previously, the Kremlin had warned of military and political repercussions if Sweden and Finland decide to join NATO. Should they apply, there will be an interim period lasting from when an application has been handed in until all 30 NATO members parliaments have ratified it.

NATO membership would strengthen Finlands security. As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defence alliance, Niinisto and Marin said in a joint statement. "Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay. We hope that the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days.

The statement on Thursday came a day after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited both Finland and Sweden to sign a military cooperation agreement.

The U.K. pledged on Wednesday to come to the aid of Sweden and Finland if the two Nordic nations came under attack.

During a joint news conference with Johnson and Niinisto in Helsinki, the Finnish head of state said Moscow could only blame itself should his nation of 5.5 million people become a NATO member.

You (Russia) caused this. Look at the mirror, Niinisto said pointedly Wednesday.

On Thursday, Niinisto tweeted that he spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about Finland's firm support for Ukraine and the country's intention to join NATO. Niinisto said that Zelenskyy expressed his full support for it."

In 2017, Sweden and Finland joined the British-led Joint Expeditionary Force, which is designed to be more flexible and respond more quickly than the larger NATO alliance. It uses NATO standards and doctrine, so it can operate in conjunction with NATO, the United Nations or other multinational coalitions. Fully operational since 2018, the force has held a number of exercises both independently and in cooperation with NATO.

Since Russias invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, Finland and Sweden have been pondering whether to abandon their historic, decades-old neutrality and join the 30-member NATO. After Moscow launched its attack on Ukraine, public support in the two countries started to quickly shift toward membership in NATO, first in Finland and a bit later in Sweden.

The latest opinion poll conducted by Finnish public broadcaster YLE showed earlier this week that 76% of Finns are in favor of joining NATO, a big change from earlier years when only 20-30% of respondents favored such military alignment.

Speaking to European Union lawmakers Thursday as Niinisto's and Marin's announcement was made, Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said that the war started by Russia jeopardizes the security and stability of the whole of Europe.

Haavisto said that Russias unpredictable behavior is a serious concern for Finland, notably Moscows readiness to wage high-risk operations that could lead to many casualties, including among Russians themselves.

Should Finland become a NATO member, it would mean the biggest change in the Nordic countrys defense and security policy since World War II when it fought two lost wars against the Soviet Union. Along with Sweden, Finland joined the European Union in 1995 and has the longest border with Russia out of all the bloc's 27 members.

Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde tweeted that Finlands announcement gave an important message and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said that there were strong messages" from Finland's president and prime minister.

During the Cold War, Finland stayed away from NATO to avoid provoking the Soviet Union, instead opting to remain a neutral buffer between the East and the West while maintaining good relations with Moscow and also with the United States.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said the military alliance would welcome Finland and Sweden  both of which have strong, modern militaries  with open arms and expects the accession process to be speedy and smooth.

NATO officials say the Nordic duo's accession process could be done in a couple of weeks. The most time consuming part of the procedure  ratification of the countrys protocol by the 30 NATO member countries  could even be completed in less time than the four months or so that it took West Germany, Turkey and Greece to join in the 1950s, when there were only 12 members to ratify their applications.

These are not normal times, one NATO official said this week, discussing the possible applications of Finland and Sweden. The official was briefing reporters about the accession process on condition that he not be named as no application has been made by the two countries.

___

Lorne Cook in Brussels, and Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, contributed to this report.
Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., introduced a bill Wednesday that would create a Space National Guard, even as military leaders float the idea of having full-time and part-time Space Force Guardians instead.

The Space National Guard Establishment Act would move Air National Guard members who conduct space missions under the Space Force's command structure. A companion bill by Reps. Jason Crow, D-Colo., and Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., has been introduced in the House.

Currently, there are 14 Air National Guard units with space-related missions and about 2,000 personnel located in California, Alaska, Arkansas, Hawaii, Florida, Colorado, Ohio, New York and Guam. Lawmakers in those locations want to see the units transferred to the Space Force.

Read Next: Watchdog Validates Decision to Move Space Command But Says Officials Didn't Keep Adequate Records

"Creating a Space National Guard would boost our military readiness and increase efficiency," Rubio said in a press release. "It would also ensure that the Space Force retains needed talent. I look forward to working with my colleagues to pass this common-sense bill."

But Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and the Space Force's Chief of Space Operations Gen. John Raymond have publicly backed a plan that would combine the Space Force's active-duty and reserve elements.

They argue that it is more cost-effective and would be a more efficient way to recruit skilled talent from the private sector.

Last month, Kendall approved a proposal to create the full-time and part-time structure; recently, Raymond said that seeing that approved by Congress is one of his top priorities.

"We have overhauled how we recruit, assess, train, develop, promote, employ and take care of our Guardians. ... This is one of the reasons we are seeking the integration of active-duty and reserve forces into a single hybrid component," Raymond told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 3. "This is our number one legislative proposal, and we look forward to working very closely with this committee to implement this bold and transformational approach."

Since the creation of the Space Force in late 2019, there have been several attempts by military leaders to establish a reserve or National Guard element for the newest and smallest military service branch.

Those efforts have ultimately been delayed, sidelined or stymied, as lawmakers grapple with the costs and logistics of creating another element of the National Guard. President Joe Biden's White House has also offered no support for the efforts.

The White House Office of Management and Budget issued a statement last year saying it was "strongly opposed" to any efforts to create a Space Guard component, estimating it would increase costs each year by up to $500 million.

That figure has angered National Guard officials, and some outside observers believe the cost could be much less.

The Adjutants General Association of the United States sent a letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee in late March saying that moving those 14 Air Force units under Space Force's command could cost as little as $250,000, with no need to create new facilities.

"Most importantly, there is no plan to advocate for additional space force structure for all states, territories, and the District of Columbia. The proposal we support is the transfer of existing space structure from the Air National Guard to the Space National Guard," the letter stated.

The National Guard Association, which lobbies on behalf of the component in Washington, praised the new bill.

Rubio and Feinstein's legislation is co-sponsored by Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Rick Scott of Florida, Mike Braun of Indiana, Rob Portman of Ohio, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and John Cornyn of Texas, along with Democratic Sens. Alex Padilla of California, Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper of Colorado, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

"It's heartening to see such a broad coalition of senators get behind creating a Space National Guard," retired Brig. Gen. J. Roy Robinson, the National Guard Association president, said in a press release. "A Space National Guard is the only efficient, inexpensive way to enhance our Space Force. It requires no new personnel, equipment or facilities -- just new uniforms and a few new signs."

Ultimately, Congress will decide which plan to support.

Justin Brockhoff, a spokesman for Kendall, told Military.com last month that the Department of the Air Force will continue to figure out "the appropriate future disposition of current Air National Guard space units in a manner that is efficient, effective, and appropriate for space missions" until then.

-- Thomas Novelly can be reached at thomas.novelly@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @TomNovelly.

Related: Air Force Secretary Wants Part-Time Space Force Guardians, Not Reserves
SEOUL, South Korea  North Korea fired three short-range ballistic missiles toward the sea on Thursday, its neighbors said, in the latest of a series of weapons demonstrations this year that came just hours after it confirmed its first case of the coronavirus since the pandemic began.

The launches could underscore North Koreas determination to press ahead with its efforts to expand its arsenal despite the virus outbreak to rally support behind the leader, Kim Jong Un, and keep up pressure on its rivals amid long-dormant nuclear diplomacy.

Thursdays launches were the Norths first weapons fired since the inauguration of new conservative South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Tuesday.

North Korea has a history of rattling new governments in Seoul and Washington in an apparent bid to boost its bargaining chips in future negotiations. The North Korean nuclear threat will likely top the agenda when Yoon meets visiting U.S. President Joe Biden in Seoul next week.

Both South Korea and Japan condemned the launches from the Norths capital region on Thursday afternoon.

The missiles plunged into the waters between North Koreas eastern coast and outside of Japans exclusive economic zone, Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi said. There was no report of damage to aircraft or vessels.

South Koreas military said it boosted its readiness and surveillance while maintaining close coordination with the United States. It called on the North to immediately halt its repeated missile firings.

South Korea and Japan released similar flight details, saying the weapons traveled about 350-360 kilometers (217-224 miles) at a maximum altitude of 90-100 kilometers (56-62 miles).

Earlier Thursday, North Korean state media confirmed the countrys first COVID-19 infections as Kim ordered nationwide lockdowns to slow the spread of the virus. Kim also ordered officials to bolster the countrys defense posture to avoid any security vacuum.

In recent months, North Korea has test-launched a spate of missiles in what experts call an attempt to modernize its weapons and pressure the United States and its allies into accepting it as a nuclear state and relax sanctions on the North. Some observers say that despite the elevated anti-virus steps, North Korea would likely continue to build its arsenal with weapons tests to boost public morale and strengthen loyalty for the Kim leadership.

North Koreas latest missile firings appear excessive to what would be needed to test and improve military capabilities, Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, said. These launches look like a show of strength after the Kim regime publicly admitted to a coronavirus outbreak.

A statement issued after a meeting chaired by Yoon's national security adviser Kim Sung-han said South Korea would seek practical and stern measures in cooperation with the international community to respond to the growing North Korean threat.

The North Korean weapons tested recently included a variety of nuclear-capable missiles that could potentially reach South Korea, Japan or the mainland U.S. In March, North Korea ended its self-imposed suspension on huge weapons tests since 2018 with a launch of its biggest missile capable of reaching the entirety of the American homeland.

The U.N. Security Council has typically imposed punishing sanctions on North Korea after it carried out nuclear and long-range missile tests. But that didn't happen in March because veto-wielding members are divided over Russia's war in Ukraine.

Last Saturday, South Korea detected a North Korea ballistic missile launch likely from a submarine, the first such test since last October. There are also signs that the North is preparing to conduct its first nuclear test in nearly five years at a remote testing ground in its northeast.
The Marine Corps announced Thursday the death of "Gunny" John L. Canley, a legendary warrior in Vietnam and Medal of Honor recipient who was held in awe by other Marine legends.

The 84-year-old Canley, who retired as a sergeant major in 1981, passed away Wednesday with his family at his bedside in Bend, Oregon, after a decade-long battle with cancer, the Marine Corps said in a press release.

He is survived by several siblings, three children, a stepson and two grandchildren. With his death, there are now 64 living recipients of the nation's highest award for valor, according to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society.

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"The most impressive combat Marine I ever knew," retired Maj. Gen. Ray Smith, a Marine legend himself who earned the Navy Cross, two Silver Stars, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts, said of Canley in a 2018 interview with Military.com.

As a lieutenant, Smith fought alongside Canley in the brutal 1968 Battle of Hue. Those who served with Canley "worshiped the ground the guy walked on," Smith said. "All through my career, whenever I had to make a decision that would affect Marines, I'd always think, 'What would Canley tell me to do?'"

Smith spoke after the announcement came down that then-President Donald Trump had signed a bill passed by Congress to waive the five-year limit on recommendations for the Medal of Honor and upgrade Canley's Navy Cross to the Medal of Honor 50 years after the Battle of Hue.

"This honor is for all of the Marines with whom I served," Canley said at the time in an interview with Military.com. "The only thing I was doing was taking care of troops best I could. Do that, and everything else takes care of itself. They are an inspiration to me to this day."

Trump awarded the Medal of Honor to Canley at a White House ceremony on Oct. 17, 2018, citing Canley's undaunted courage and calm under fire during one of Vietnam's bloodiest battles.

"John and his company of less than 150 Marines had pushed into the city held by at least 6,000 communist fighters," Trump said. "In the days that followed, John led his company through the fog and rain and in house-to-house, very vicious, very hard combat."

Canley was born on Dec. 20, 1937, in Caledonia, Arkansas, and enlisted in the Marines in 1953, despite being underage. "John used his brother's paperwork to enlist," Trump said at the White House ceremony.

On his second of three tours in Vietnam, Canley, then a gunnery sergeant, took over as company commander of Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, when Capt. Gordon Batcheller was wounded and evacuated during the fight to retake Hue from the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong during the Tet Offensive in late January and February 1968.

In the combat that followed, Canley repeatedly exposed himself to the enemy to draw their fire and reveal their positions to his troops. Twice, he leaped over a wall to pick up wounded Marines and carry them to safety under fire, according to his medal citation.

On taking command of the company, Canley "immediately reorganized his scattered Marines, moving from one group to another to advise and encourage his men. Although sustaining shrapnel wounds during this period, he nonetheless established a base of fire which subsequently allowed the company to break through the enemy strongpoint," the citation said.

Then on Feb. 4, 1968, "despite fierce enemy resistance," Canley managed to get into the top floor of a building held by the enemy. He "dropped a large satchel charge into the position, personally accounting for numerous enemy killed, and forcing the others to vacate the building," according to the citation.

The upgrade of Canley's Navy Cross to the Medal of Honor was the result of a long lobbying campaign by those who served with him, including former Marine Pfc. John Ligato, a retired FBI agent, along with the advocacy of Rep. Julia Brownley, D-Calif.

In an interview with Military.com and in an article for Leatherneck Magazine, Ligato said the lobbying effort grew out of a 2005 reunion of Alpha Company's members.

At the reunion, "there were six or seven eyewitnesses to the Gunny carrying wounded Marines to safety, the Gunny confronting enemy automatic weapon positions, and many testimonials of, 'You saved my ass, Gunny.'"

Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps Troy Black emphasized Canley's devotion to his troops in the service's press release. "[Canley's] first priority was and has always been his Marines -- a true example of Semper Fidelis. I'm saddened by the loss of such a great Marine, yet I'm grateful for the legacy he established for generations of warriors," he said.

That legacy will live on with the scheduled christening June 25 in San Diego of the 784-foot, 90,000-ton USS John L. Canley, a new expeditionary sea-based ship that will be deployed to the Western Pacific.

-- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.

Related: Navy's Newest Ship to Be Named for Marine Sgt. Maj. John Canley, Vietnam War Hero
Russian television tells us that Vladimir Putin would rather go nuclear than accept defeat in Ukraine. President Biden has admonished that idle comments about the use of nuclear weapons are irresponsible. Opinion polls on both sides show widespread concern about a nuclear exchange. But Putin only talks about nuclear war because he has nothing else to say.

The war in Ukraine has not gone the way Kremlin decision-makers expected. The Ukrainian people have resisted more determinedly than Moscow (or Washington) predicted, and the international community has responded aggressively in a way the Kremlin did not anticipate. This is not like the 2008 invasion of Georgia, which passed with no effective response from the West, or 2014 when Russia seized and illegally annexed Crimea. Moscow effectively got away with those acts of aggression. However, the current war, exceedingly brutal, unprovoked, and unnecessary, has prompted a determined response.

Operations in Ukraine have unmasked Russian conventional power as a paper tiger. While it was widely expected before the invasion that Ukrainian troops would quickly be overwhelmed, Putins forces proved to be inexperienced, unmotivated, ineptly led, and poorly supplied. Columns moving on Kyiv ground to a halt and withdrew; forces in the south and east have better managed to seize ground, but whether they can hold it is another matter.

Ukraines forces have benefitted from ample supplies from Western countries, which have helped them to blunt Russias attacks. The United States and NATO have ruled out direct military intervention, but imagine if there was a force-on-force conventional engagement. Russias air forces would quickly cease to exist. The Russian Baltic Fleet would join the Moskva on the sea floor. Russian ground forces would face the full weight of more motivated, better trained, equipped, and supplied NATO forces. It would be a rout.

To get an idea of how this confrontation might unfold, recall the February 7, 2018 firefight in Syria between U.S. special operations forces and hundreds of Russian mercenaries, along with some Syrian government troops. The Americans were outnumbered more than ten to one, but a combination of precision airstrikes, lethal indirect fire and determined assault tactics drove the attacking force off with heavy losses. There were no American casualties.

If the Russian Army ever had any deterrence value, the war in Ukraine put an end to it. So, the only thing Moscow has left is its nuclear arsenal. Russia has around 6,000 nuclear warheads, of which about a quarter are deployed and ready to use. True, this force is a fraction the size of the Soviet Unions nuclear stockpile at its peak, but as the bumper-sticker from those days said, even one nuclear weapon can ruin your whole day.

Bear in mind we have heard this all before. The Kremlin has never been shy about making nuclear threats. In 2008, during the Georgia crisis, Russia threatened Poland with a nuclear response to deploying a U.S. missile defense system. In 2014, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov made veiled reference to a nuclear attack over the Crimea issue. And in March 2018, Putin himself unveiled invincible new nuclear weapons with a video suggesting an attack on Florida, for some reason.

Of course, threatening to use nuclear weapons and actually using them are two different things. Putin promised consequences you have never seen for intervening in Ukraine, but consequences go both ways. The old parameters of nuclear war have not changed. The United States is also a nuclear power, with a force at least as lethal and survivable as Russias, and any strategic nuclear attack on the U.S. or its allies would mean an immediate, devastating counterattack. Destruction is still mutually assured.

Putin knows this. He may pretend to be unhinged when it is convenient, but he is not suicidal. Neither is Joe Biden, which is why NATO forces will not intervene directly and push the conflict into the red zone. The alternative would be a war of mutual annihilation between the two old rivals, with China left to pick up the radioactive pieces.

Dr. Robbins is a former special assistant in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and in 2007 was awarded the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joint Meritorious Civilian Service Award.

This article originally appeared on 19fortyfive.com.
You attended the transportation briefings, read the militarys moving instructions website, talked to friends, gleaned advice from Facebook groups, prepared for the movers and said goodbye to your favorite coffee shop. But did you ever stop to think about how understanding your personal psychology can help you create a successful military Permanent Change of Station (PCS)?

The Enneagram system helps individuals not just understand how they tend to approach and think about the world, but also how to not just move through challenges, but come out better on the other side. In this episode of PCS with Military.com, Kellie Artis, a certified Enneagram expert, explains how to not just understand your own type, but use it to make your PCS move awesome.

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The Essential Enneagram by Dr. David Daniels

The following is an edited transcript of this episode of PCS with Military.com.

Amy Bushatz: We all know how stressful military moves have been over the last several years. Lost stuff, COVID more lost stuff, tons and tons of breaks. All the problems. There are a few helpful and practical ways to get through this, like being an organizational ninja or knowing exactly what your rights are as a military family or a service member.

You can carefully plan ahead. You can do scouting trip to your new base, or you can hire someone to scout things for you. You can ask all of the Facebook groups for all of the advice. But there's another way to prepare for, deal with and recover from a PCS. And it has to do with who you are as a person, and yes, the psychology of a PCS. Sounds interesting right? Can we really make PCSing easier on ourselves by understanding how we individually think? That's exactly what Kellie Artis is going to talk to us about today. You might remember Kellie from 2021 season of PCS with Military.com, where she talked about dealing with your new duty station from a distance by using the Millie Scout program.

But she's also recently completed the narrative Enneagram core program. And by the time you hear this, she'll be well into an Enneagram professional training program to become a certified teacher. In short, she knows what she's talking about. Today, she's going to talk about how understanding your own personality and psychology can help make this PCS season go as smoothly as humanly possible.

She's also going to tell us what the heck an Enneagram is. Kellie, welcome back to PCS with Military.com.

Kellie Artis: Hey Amy. Thanks so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here.

Amy Bushatz: So we did talk about this last time, but it's something we ask all of our guests. So remind us, how many times have you personally moved with the military or otherwise?

Kellie Artis: Oh, shoot. Otherwise there's a whole new category. But seven actual PCSes.. Yeah. And, but then in college I got bored a lot, so I moved almost every semester. But that's like laundry basket move. That's not, a a whole move.

Amy Bushatz: It's safe to say you like new scenery and that the military life isn't so bad from a new scenery perspective.

Kellie Artis: It's really not. And this is a whole nother conversation, but I've often wondered have I made it this far into the military lifecycle. I mean, we've been married for over 15 years now. Have I done okay at it because I am well-suited for it personality wise? Or has my personality shifted to accomodate the lifestyle that we live?

Amy Bushatz: Well, I think that's related because we're talking about psychology and personality today. So last time we talked Millie and move scouting from a distance, but this time we're going to talk something entirely different, but also very practical, just in a very different way. And that is the psychology of moving and how your personality fits into it. How did you get into this topic?

Because you really are one of the, I don't know anyone who's more interested in this than you are. So passion point for you. And I will say, and we'll get into this in a minute that I also find this endlessly fascinating, but that has to do with who I am as a person as we'll discuss. So talk to us -- what is Enneagram? How did you get into it.

Kellie Artis: Stressful situations catapult all of us into I think a bit of self discovery, whether we notice that it's happening or not. So just even basically fight, flight or freeze responses. You probably know and can look back on stressful events in your life and picked up on what you've done there. Did you find it, did you fly to freeze? Right? I'm a flight person that defaults to that. So anyway we're facing a PCS and we're just going to go into a stressful season. And with his military career with me having lost job or changed jobs four, because of a previous PCS, we did three back-to-back, like in for years. So there's just a lot, so I felt like I was like unraveling, you know what I mean? Like I was just so stressful. I was like, why can't I handle this? You look around and you're like, everybody else seems to be doing this so much better. They're enjoying the adventure. They're doing all this awesome Pinterest worthy stuff with their PCS. And I am like barely keeping my crap together. What is the problem? I like happened to be listening to some self-help podcast episode, and the hosts were talking about Enneagram and what type they were. And one's like, I'm a five and I'm a seven and I'm a two. And I was like, wait a minute, which one's better? What one do I want to be whatever.

And it was something that I didn't know about. And I was like, oh, I need to know what that is. So I jumped in found like an online test is how most people enter the Enneagram world just to determine which type you are, right? Everybody thinks oh, it's like Myers-Briggs or it's what friends character are you, or which Hogwarts house are you? All of these sorts of things.

It's fun and games until you're like, wait a minute. What? That was way too close. You know what I mean? Like you get you find your type and you feel like offended. I was like obsessed from the moment I read about it. I was like, wait a minute. Not only is this like identifying all of the things that I'm feeling, I can't put my finger on, but it's helping me like detach from that and feel less wrong, like guilty or like inadequate because of it.

Cause I'm like, oh, that's just my personality type structure kicking in and trying to protect me from the stressful thing that's happening. So that was, gosh, probably six years ago at this point. And it's just been the ultimate rabbit hole for me ever since. And just to establish right up front, for those of you who are familiar with Enneagram, I am a type five.

So a lot of what I'm going to tell you is going to make sense. Also Mille, funny enough.

So I had started with had been working with Millie before I learned about the Enneagram and then finally kind of merged the two sort of concepts together. I, literally Amy, mentally researched like PCS and researched 85 different duty stations in 13 months and was thriving on that sort of like deep dive. I loved it. I was accumulating all of this information and knowledge. Okay. That's like a crux for a five. I was like, oh, snap, that like fit totally into it. And it made me like the perfect fit for that role because I was able to, I didn't have to actually move. But I was able to pretend like I was moving in each instance, and lean into the strengths of my type instead of using them like in an unhealthy way which would be unraveling in the face of the PCS. Yeah.

Amy Bushatz: Do we consider Enneagram to be a personality test or do we think of it as something else?

Kellie Artis: You can. So essentially what the, Enneagram is. And just so you guys know, I am going to be borrowing pretty heavily from this really handy textbook that I love. It was written by David Daniels and it's actually going to be my recommendation in lieu of an inner internet test.

It's called the essential Enneagram, short little book gives a lot of descriptions that are boiled down. Enneagram is a really deep system, right? Like it, again, I've been studying it for six years and only barely feel like I'm scratching the surface. But he describes this concept, this system as nine patterns of thinking, feeling and acting, and those are based on perceptual filters and driving emotional energy.

So it's less about your type, right? One key thing here is you have a type, you're not a type, right? There's more to it than that. So it's not oh which box do I fit in and keep me in it? No, the idea is to identify what you, what type structure you lead with? Unconsciously, right? And start identifying waking up to the things that you do on a habitual basis and have never really paid much attention to, you've just kind of done them because they work for you. You adapt to these patterns when you're very young, right? It's all part of your ego trying to protect you. And you kind of lose sight and lose a connection with this greater knowing that you're loved because you're you and not because of XYZ thing that you do right? Or you are, or you act. So that's the the basic explanation of it. The actual Enneagram itself is named after a symbol. It's a circle that you can see, Google it. I'm sure you've probably seen it before you and my friend I know have there are nine points, like dots around the circle and each dot corresponds with a number one through nine.

And they all intersect with all these different crossing lines that kind of shoot across the, the circle. And it all has meaning The key thing here to know too, especially if you're new to Enneagram is if those lines provide you access to other points on the Enneagram, so you can move around a little bit.

And you have all of these other resources at your disposal that once you get more fluent with this map the system this archetype. Then you can start to draw in some of the things that you have access to that might be more helpful in situations like a PCS or other stressful things.

Amy Bushatz: So it's less about pegging yourself to a personality box and saying, oh, I'm an X, Y, and Z type person. You know, I'm a, I'm an introvert. So I therefore must act this way and more about saying I tend to have these types of qualities. Those things are my strengths or my weaknesses or things that I can grow in. I can use this information to help me really understand what makes me feel good, but also understand how to design what I'm doing in a stressful situation or in a non-stressful situation to really make me feel my best.

Kellie Artis: Yes, Amy, write that down. That was great. I liked that a lot. If one other thing that I'll add here is that most of the other like personality type sort of systems are typically describing behaviors.

Introverted, extroverted, things like that, Enneagram goes a bit deep. A lot deeper than that, in that it points out your core desires, your core motivations, your core fears. And it sometimes gets a bad rap because people that land on their type of read a type description, like I said, can feel hurt by it. Right? Like that was way too close. You know what I mean? Like that's not me. That's rude. Or maybe it triggers something that you've been called before in your past. Or you feel self-conscious about. And it can sting a little, but the idea is to call attention to those things and learn that you may be exhibiting those behaviors when you're unraveling, when you're stressed, when you're acting out in your type and it can help you pull back in. So again, self discovery is painful sometimes. Like it's a whole, it's not just like cocktail party banter. I mean, if that's all you're looking for out of it, then, it's super fun. But if you're using it as a tool, it is so much more helpful than that than to just oh, I'm a five.

Amy Bushatz: Okay. So there are seasons, seasons in life. There's seasons for growth and seasons for surviving. There's PCS season and non PCS. Okay. So, I feel like when you're under a lot of stress is the time to use a tool like this, to understand how to power through it, and that other times can be when you use it for growth. So do you agree? Disagree?

Kellie Artis: I like that a lot. And I'm gonna say that it also makes things so much more identifiable, right? It's hard to read a list of qualities and good traits and say, oh yeah, that's a hundred percent me. That seems boastful. It's oh, we were talking earlier offline about imposter syndrome. We all have it on some level. So like, I can read this beautiful articulation of, you know, a certain type and think no, that's not me because I'm going to be self-deprecating and think on some basic level that I'm not that, I'm not that right? When you're stressed out and you're relying on these coping mechanisms and you're acting out, those things are a lot more apparent. I just feel like I know again, I'm going to keep using myself as an example here, but as a type five, one of my coping mechanisms is withdrawing. My passion, the thing that I struggle with is avarice, which is actually like a hoarding or a feeling that there's a scarcity of something, could be the information that could be people that could be food, right? Like any kind of thing like that. I can notice when I'm doing it.

It's hard for me to notice when I'm living my best life. You know what I mean? Because like, I dunno, it just, I don't know. It just makes it much more clear- it's the red flags offering like, wait a minute, I'm doing my thing where I shut down and I stop responding to texts and I, you know what I mean? Like now that I know that's one of my coping mechanisms, I can spot that and try to correct a little more consciously instead of just like letting that take its natural progression.

Amy Bushatz: And if you want to pick on another number during this feel free to pick on me the eight. Eightest in land.

Kellie Artis: The eightest there ever was , yeah, I married an eight too. So I know you guys well,

Amy Bushatz: So I'm comfortable, I'm comfortable bearing my eightness for the good of the order. So lay it out for us, okay. Because we've talked a lot about how this can help you in red flag moments. We've talked about how it can like add texture to understanding who you are and how you tend to operate. Why should thinking about this be part of preparing for or recovering from a PCS? What does personality broadly, and this type of understanding specifically have to do with PCSing? And why are we talking about this on PCS with Military.com?

Kellie Artis: Because I convinced I've made us to draw a line between two really obscure things um, no okay.

Amy Bushatz: And because I'm an eight, I was like, that is fascinating.

Kellie Artis: All right. All right. Here's where I landed on this. And if you guys will indulge me a metaphor that I'm actually pretty stinking proud of and a promise I'm going to circle back. I think in a short answer, like if you want to just a one line it gives you an avenue to pull out of stress, anxiety depression even, we've all seen the dark side of PCS. It's hard, y'all, it's just hard. Transitions are hard. So I think that even in my personal experience a certain level of self-awareness, self-knowing pausing, reflecting, really getting in tune with what's actually going on in reality, versus what this personality type structure has obscured from us.

So that's the whole thing is that we're walking around with this filter that we didn't intentionally put on. We can be appreciative for, because our brains did that. Our brains have done that for like, when we were little kids, it said, you know what? That's not safe to think that, so we've disconnected from this like greater knowing.

For me, it's actually, there's plenty, like instead of having an abundance mentality, I have this scarcity mentality. That's not reality. There's plenty out there for me. So anyway, okay.

So here's my metaphor. We are looking at as an illustration, like a hand drawn illustration of a little stick figure. And the little stick figure is on a boat, a little sail boat, with little sailboat on the water. The sailboat is on a calm sea. The sun is shining. The clouds are out and a little stick figure has made a choice to look up at the clouds and see the beautiful horizon, the sunshine feeling the warmth on their skin or their stick figure skin right?.

And they are just enjoying life up in this crow's nest of this little boat on the sea. Okay. Along comes some disturbance in the water. Can't really see what the disturbances, but it begins to rock the sea, rock, the boat stick figure starts to get a little more concerned about this glorious life and starts to really get scared, right?

So they're looking down, they're seeing huge waves start to threaten to capsize the boat. They're freaking out about what's in the water because when I, that boat capsizes, I'm going to be in the water and a sea monster is going to eat me. Life is not good for the stick-figure any longer. Okay.

Then we skip ahead to the next scene and the stick figure has made its way to the seabed. It's still fine. They can breathe underwater. So on the sea floor, if even though he can still look up and see the disturbance on the surface, right? It doesn't seem as bad. There's perspective. There's a different perspective.

Things are calm on the seabed. They're sweet little fish floating by there's some coral, like it's cool and calm and you can still, again, you can still have a perspective of the thing that's happening, the disturbance on the surface, but you don't necessarily feel as involved in it and as invested right in the outcomes.

Okay. So here's where I'm going with this, the guy on the top of the boat and the crow's nest is your head, right? Your head space. This is where you're thinking, okay. So you can make choices on a daily basis, no matter what's going on in your life to choose your positive outlook or to catastrophize, right?

That's a spectrum. Clearly, you know, there could be anywhere in between there, but as a thinking human person with a brain, with neural pathways, our brain prioritizes the information that we decide that we want to pay attention to. So we make those choices on a daily basis, what we're looking at your brain also has a bias. So if you are fearful to begin with, on that boat, you're going to be looking down in the water and creating all sorts of scenarios for doom or danger. And again, that has kept you safe on some level, right? Like those things are important for humans in our evolution, but on another level, they're not as helpful because it's not reality. You're not seeing reality.

So that's what's going on in all of our heads. When we sink down and start paying attention to what's going on in our hearts, our feelings, we're then experiencing the waves, right? It doesn't matter what is happening or what caused the waves. It could be a storm, it could be a hurricane.

It could be, and I'm saying this as health challenges or, catastrophic events, I'm saying stress like deployments, right? It could be things that you don't have control over and you think are inconsiderate, and rude and ill timed, like uncle Sam coming along, telling you to pack up for a PCS, which can be big crater you know, or a yacht, like an obnoxious yacht that comes by and causes your, your boat to rock and not be tranquil any longer. So there's external forces creating this wave. The wave is like your actual emotional sort of stasis, the thing that you struggle with. So there's a, they call them passions and the Enneagram language, we all have a type of passion.

It's actually translated as like a struggle. What is the thing that you emotionally struggle with? What is that driving emotional force that pushes you into action? And we each have our own distinct, one of those I'm skipping back to the head I missed talking about your mental fixation. So there's, there are nine types of mental fixations as well, that correspond with your type.

Once you are able to sink down to that space on the seabed, is your moment of self-awareness right. That's your resource. Okay. So if you can find a way to get to that point where you are okay, that can be a resource for you and a refuge. So what that looks like is ignoring and pushing away what's going on in your head, right? Forgetting the little guy on the boat, the waves, all of the worst case scenarios. It is, instead of fighting the waves of the emotional thing that's happening, learning to navigate through them. Let go a little bit, right? If you've ever swam against waves or surfed or anything, you can't fight the wave.

You got to work with it. You know, so learning to let go a little bit of our emotional reactivity to that disturbance also getting mad at the yatch is not going to help anybody, and he's still going. So we're going to waive that yacht and just, learn to work around it.

But thinking down into your body, checking in with yourself, making sure that you can still find a moment to realize I can still breathe. I can draw breath. Where do I feel that breath? Do I feel like warmth in my heart space? Do I like actual physical sensations? It sounds woo and crazy, but it really works, y'all. And it's hard to cultivate this. Like, I'm still not there yet. As a head person, like it's a long way away from me. But learning to connect and Amy, I know, you know this so well with get just giving where you live and what you do on your free time, you are out in nature for a reason, right? It probably brings you a lot of solace grounding yourself and recognizing like, my body is amazing, capable of doing all these awesome mighty things.

We get distracted by all of this other noise that's happening in our lives, particularly around big, stressful situations. That we forget that. So tuning back in, again, it doesn't solve any problems necessarily. Like it doesn't help you, push your claims or your damage claim forward. But it gives you a moment to like, relax to let go to just appreciate, you're yourself, your body, you're not broken. You're not doing this wrong. I always thought like, I'm not doing this, everybody else is doing this better. Nope. That's not true. That's my perception. So checking in like, you know what, I'm doing a great job for me. And I appreciate me and I appreciate my brain and its way of fixating on things, because that helped me figure out XYZ.

And I appreciate my emotions because the sadness that I feel over leaving my best friend at this duty station helped me appreciate the relationship. You can just, again, get a better perspective of what's going on, taking just a small moment. I would say, dare I say daily to just reflect and recognize and use that as a resource, then you can push through, spot your red flags when they start to flare up, back back down into that resource point, right into that moment of I need to not experience this anxiety right now. I need to try so hard to like claim to what's important and not all of the falsifications that are coming at me, that my own brain has developed.

Amy Bushatz: So now I think people who've listened to episodes of this podcast know that I think this is an overused word, but I'm going to use it anyway, because I think in the right context it's okay. Resilience.

Kellie Artis: Oh I knew you were going there.

Amy Bushatz: The reason I don't like that word is because I lived through the army in 2010 when it was all the rage and it was something new people were talking about. And I felt like it became very empty. Using this tools like this is a way to make that word have meaning and actually be something that you can develop for yourself.

Because if we're looking at PCSing from a holistic standpoint, and we're looking at our lives, both military, and once we are no longer in the military, because that is one thing that's for sure people eventually are no longer active duty families. They no longer move every year. That is an eventuality. Looking at your life from a whole life, whole trajectory perspective, when we talk about that resilience, what we're talking about is making it so that you can get through this life full of challenges and come to the other side to a place where you are a better version of yourself, where you feel good, very basic, right, but that's the thing where you are happy. And where you have taken the opportunities that have been presented as challenges like a PCS, across your life to not feel like you're drowning. Because that's the other option for Mr. Stick Guy, that you're in the water and your little stick parts are flailing around because you cannot keep your head above water.

And I think so much of what we talk about here on, on PCS with Military.com is about practicality, but this is an emotional thing. And I am going to be better at the practical stuff if I feel like I am not drowning all the time.

Kellie Artis: 100%. Yes. And that doesn't make the practical stuff less hard to get through, like logistically it's all, but also like understanding too, and here I'm going to keep going with this metaphor. The chart has been packed or paved before. Like you're not the first person to ever PCS and struggle. We all do this. I do this as a living, right? Like it's my industry. There are so many other resources, there's your inner resource, which we talked about, just keeping yourself balanced, but then there are all these external resources that you have at your disposal and depending on your type structure, Those might be harder to uncover or ask for or identify for all kinds of reasons.

But again, if you back up and get a little bit of perspective, then you can say oh, actually this is going to be really helpful for me. I will take all that I can get. So.

Amy Bushatz: Yeah. Absolutely. We've talked about what Enneagram is. You referenced a book. I want to say that if you want to buy a book, that's great.

There are internet quizzes with this that may not be the most thorough resource, however they totally exist. So you can do that. It can be free. You can dive in there. There are level and zillion Instagram accounts, where you can follow information about your type or information about your friends types or information about your husband's type. And just feel some comfort and, information in that. I love doing that. I may or may not pick gifts to get people based off of those accounts.

Kellie Artis: That's so smart though. Yeah. Can I throw some caveats? So go online tests are so great and they're so fine, especially if it's just an entry point, but just hold the results loosely. Okay. The whole thing here you guys is that we are not accustomed to living on the seabed and having that healthy perspective of what's going on in our lives and how we're reacting to it. So you could take a test and type yourself as the thing that you want to be perceived as versus the thing that you actually are.

So there takes a level of self-awareness to even honestly take the test. So start out there, but they're probably, most of them will spit back two or three different types that you kind of resemble, or maybe scored highly for, explore all of those. You can usually eliminate several just on surface level. Like, nope, that's not me.

Amy Bushatz: Like, I am not a four.

Kellie Artis: You're not, you're not. So yeah. Some people can spot their type just from reading the short descriptions. I feel like eights y'all can do that. Like, there some like really strong types that are like, they don't struggle finding their type, but there's several that really resemble other types.

So there's a bit of digging sometimes that you have to dig in there. So just don't be discouraged if you don't like resonate with the results right off the bat. It doesn't necessarily mean that the system is bogus. It just means maybe dig a little deeper and do a little more exploration.

So before we become super annoying, just throwing out numbers can you, we've talked about two 3 numbers now. Very specifically, five, eight and fours.

In passing. Yeah.

Amy Bushatz: Can you define what those three are?

Kellie Artis: Yeah. Do you want me to just I'll go around. How about I go around the circle?

Amy Bushatz: That's even better so we're not just like dragging people through a number line without any definitions.

Kellie Artis: I could just randomly select numbers. Yeah. Or we could have some system. I'm actually going to start with eight. And I'll tell you why. Yeah, you're welcome. Hey, it's it's you. Um, there know that there are nine numbers in, there are three centers of intelligence. So they're group sort of like head, heart, gut. Did the backwards gut body heart head. So we'll go through them in those orders.

So the eights, the nines and the ones are all in the body triad. So that means that you guys all take in information instinctually on a gut level. That's your, that's what you have prioritized as the way that you perceive things in the world and your environment. So eights are the challenger. Also known as protector. I mean, there's tons of little like, you know, there's nomenclature, you can find all kinds of different opinions about the different names.

So we'll just, we'll go with the top of mind ones. So challenger for the eight, the nine is the peacemaker and the one is the perfectionist. Okay. Moving into the heart triad, we have number two or type two, which is the giver or the helper. I want to say something here, because a lot of military spouses, specifically women feel like that's their type or they're supposed to be that type, or they have been cast in a role that resembles that type.

It doesn't necessarily make it your leading type structure. So just make sure that you're not just defaulting to the giver because you volunteer right. Type three is the achiever or the performer type four is your romantic or individualist. Type five is the observer or questioner or sometimes and type, oh, sorry, we just moved into the Headspace. So Headspace is five, six and seven. And that's me the observer. That's your sixes, who are the loyalist and your sevens, who are the enthusiast or the Epicure.

Amy Bushatz: So that is a rundown of the types. And you can figure out which one of those you may be. And it is possible to be one leaning into the other. It's called a wing, right?

Kellie Artis: So you can be, you have one core type, but then you have access to the behaviors of the types on either side of you, right? So you could be a five, which is myself, the observer. And I can have a wing that is a six wing meaning I am community driven. I am people oriented or I can have a four wing, which brings out some of the creativity, some of the melancholy the heart space. So I can use those as resources once I'm a bit more fluent. If I want to, I don't have to, you don't have to have a wing. You might not have a wing, but those are only the numbers on either side of you. So Amy, for you, it would be seven or nine. Do you know your wing?

Amy Bushatz: I have determined that I don't have a wing. Is that possible?

Kellie Artis: Absolutely possible. And it's possible that you could have a dominant wing earlier in your life, um, that receeds over time and spend some time developing your other wing. So there's all these opportunities, like I said to to explore and see kind of what's what's working for you.

Amy Bushatz: And the other thing I personally like is looking at the strengths of the other types, and thinking about ways that I can use my type to lean into those things that I run away from a little bit.

So how does this relate to PCSing? So I know that I follow my gut and I'm biased toward action. I could sure use to take a beat sometimes and say, let's give this a day and not act right now and see if there are other options. Maybe hit up somebody like you who have done your research. So instead of making sweeping bold decisions about where I'm going to live, I have learned the hard way. And we talked about this in season one, where I ragged on poor Oak Grove, Kentucky that maybe if I had, instead of just followed my gut and gotten things done, I've matured now. And I know that that doesn't as well for me as I'd like all the time. And so I need to take a beat and do and lean into a little bit more research or lean into asking other people for advice. And then I can make a decision and follow my gut and, be a person of action, but I need two days.

Kellie Artis: That's two days you've got, I love that, you've got a time limit on it. Yeah, that's yeah, that's absolutely a perfect practice for you. And I think some of it stems from like perceptions of vulnerability or weakness and also being controlled.

So that impulsivity rares up because you want to be able to reclaim ownership of something or a thing or a situation, and that's not often productive. So taking a moment and just stepping back and yeah. Finding some calm. Yeah.

Amy Bushatz: So I give that example because I know that about myself and that's a very practical way that I can use this understanding and the psychology to make my PCS better. What are some other practical ways that people can do this? Because of course the DOD is not going to change. That's not flexible, right? That's not moving. So how can our poor little stick figure guys use this system to maybe make certain pain points of individual PCS is better?

Kellie Artis: As a personal example of a five I know that I pull away from when it comes time to leave transition, move on. That's not cool, right? It's not good for me because I don't have closure on relationships or at least new definitions on relationships, but I need to know that like me moving, doesn't remove that person from my life entirely. Like, I feel like there'll be taking something of me with them if I do that. So I'm robbing them of the opportunity to fully connect with me. And I'm also robbing myself of that opportunity to have the relationships and the emotional attachments needed that my type thinks is scary and unsafe. So that's one that I've identified in myself. Speaking more broadly, so we could, I'll try to do this quick way. So going around like the one can challenge their own rigidity, right question like are maybe there two rights in this scenario, maybe there's two right ways to pack a box and I don't need to stand over the movers or the packers while they're packing the boxes and maybe it'll be okay. It probably won't y'all so just go ahead and accept it, but you know, just like loosening up a little bit there and just bring up some mental space for other things that are more important to worry about, right?

Number twos are the type twos realizing that you are still loved, whether you're doing for others or not. And I think during a PCS, we need a lot of. We individually need a lot of help, even just logistical stuff like babysitting the kids while the packers are in the house. We, and it's tough to ask for help for a lot of people, but it's really hard to ask for those type twos because they feel like their value is attached to them being able to help you, not vice versa. So letting go of that, I think would be super helpful.

Type three, struggle with the vanity, so maybe that's putting unnecessary pressure on getting your new house just so right, on, making sure that you do everything perfectly like the best and well and just letting go of this idea of winning at PCSing. Like they're messy, it's gonna be messy. So not attaching like the fact that you didn't look great doing it. And I'm saying look great, not in like a physical way, you know what I mean just like.

Type fours are going to be really tempted to disappear into melancholy and loneliness. Right? So it's already a lonely thing to experience, especially like in the, the liminal space, right? The train, the actual move, even just the road trip, pulling away that could probably potentially be of kind of dark space to just wallow. So using that as an opportunity to explore that and push against that, I think would be super helpful for fours. And knowing that like, people are gonna see you as uniquely amazing as you are at your new duty station too. It wasn't just here or where you're leaving.

We talked about type fives, so just staying open and knowing that you will risk reestablish yourself and you will find new resources and new, things in your house your safe space again, too. It's just going to be a minute.

Type sixes. Oh, they need to not project. And when we talk about projection, it's like an actual physical projector makes a small thing really big on the wall. So think of projection in that way, like this small little thing that went wrong or might go wrong or hasn't gone wrong yet, but you fear it could doesn't need to consume that much space. Wait until it actually goes wrong to start freaking out about it if you can.

Type sevens are going to be tempted to just like mentally bail on the whole thing. And just be like, just tell me what I need to show up. Uh, you know, tell me when the truck gets here right kind of thing. And they'll be tempted to plan all these trips and maybe that's great. Do that totally do something fun in between like, this is going to be a person that's like, let's go to Europe while they're moving our stuff right. That sort of thing, which is fine. But if you're doing it just to escape the situation and just hope that it'll turn out or that somebody else will do it for you could be stressful for you in the long run, but also can be stressful for your family. So imagine if your family feels like they need to be more hands-on and you just want to go to Disneyland, try to stay present in the actual moment.

You nailed type eight, right? Just taking a break, realizing that there's calm and you don't have to act immediately on every single thing. And that you don't have to be in control. You can let someone else manage it.

Amy Bushatz: That's a lie.

Kellie Artis: It's not a lie. It's real. And it type nines. I'm really going to be tempted to just get lost. They merge with others really easily. They kind of absorb the mood, the temperature of whatever scenario they're in. And they're also really hesitant to make decisions and fear of introducing conflict.

So I would almost say to rob some of that energy from the eight next door to be able to push them to action. So where you're needing to slow down and not impulsively act. We need to give nines a little bit of that juice to say, you know what, it's okay. And you're going to make bad decisions and that's okay too, as long as you feel like you're still moving forward you're going to be okay.

Amy Bushatz: Yeah. Well, hopefully you guys have heard, one of your types mentioned, or yourself mentioned a little bit in one of these types rather today. And that those things sort of resonated with you. You can of course, find out more about the Enneagram in the book Kellie mentioned, which is what again?

Kellie Artis: The Essential enneagram by Dr. David Daniels.

Amy Bushatz: Cool. And we'll link that in the show notes as well, if you want to follow a direct link there. And of course internet test is a good, a good entry point, but it's not all that in a bag of chips. So maybe start there, but, and then move forward if you find it interesting. But the goal here, of course, isn't to put yourself in a hole or a box it's to say, or be a floating man in the sea stick guy it's to be in control of your experience by understanding how you operate and who you are in a way that can improve your military life. Like I said earlier, DoD talk a lot about nuts, bolts tips, tricks, regulations, rules, how to talk to the movers, how to deal with the trucking people, how to deal with the DoD.

This is how to deal with you and how to deal with you pretty big part of your PCS. So I'm very hopeful that you guys have found this useful. Kellie, thank you so much for joining us on PCS with Military.com.

Kellie Artis: Thanks Amy.


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Die Casting China Research Report - Pintejin Group





1. Domestic precision parts experts, business covers casting machining

(1) Domestic leading precision parts experts

Founded in 1995, Pintejin group is mainly engaged in the research and development, design, production and sales of high-precision mechanical parts and precision cavity mold products, providing one-stop services from casting to finishing. The company's products include precision parts for compressors, construction machinery, energy equipment and food machinery manufacturing. Specifically, the company's compressor parts products include compressor rotor seats, motor seats, suction seats, exhaust seats, slide valves, oil grooves and volutes, rotor support components, diffuser plates, nozzle plates, etc. Components include box assembly, transmission cover, body assembly, transmission box assembly, clutch housing, gear cover, transmission accessories, etc., injection molding machine parts include static plate, moving plate, oil cylinder, frame, motor base, feeding pipe, Bottom cover, etc. Food machinery parts include frame, main body, crosshead, connecting rod assembly, power frame, front frame, gear cover, bearing cover, etc.

The company's customers are all industry leaders. At present, the company has established a solid strategic partnership with the world's top equipment manufacturers Feiyue Laser, Huawei, Stanford, Mairui, the world's largest construction machinery manufacturer Sanyi and other well-known global top 500 companies, the products continue to be highly recognized by major customers.

Since its establishment, the company has expanded its business and expanded its production capacity through acquisitions and the establishment of subsidiaries for many times. In June 2019, the company established a subsidiary, BE-CU china rapid prototypin g company, which is mainly engaged in the trading business related to customized machinery and parts. BE-CU.COM was established in September 2020, mainly engaged in the machining of high-precision mechanical parts, and it was wholly acquired in November 2016. Be-cu china die casting was established in April 2021, mainly engaged in the casting of high-precision mechanical parts, and then wholly acquired in February 2022. Be-cu is mainly responsible for the production of high-precision mechanical parts castings in Europe and the United States. After that, the company has successively set up a Japanese docking department. In January 2022, the company will integrate the powder coating supply chain, which will effectively expand the casting and machining capacity.

The company's shareholding structure is concentrated. The company is privately owned. The actual controller of the company is Zhou Hanping, and the shareholding structure is concentrated. The company has 5 wholly-owned subsidiaries: PTJ Hardware, Pintejin Laser Cutting Factory, Pintejin Casting, BE-CU prototype company, PTJ m etal f orging china company.

The parent and subsidiary companies perform their respective duties and cooperate well. The production of the company's precision parts is mainly through forging, machining volume and other links. The subsidiary Pintejin Casting is mainly responsible for the casting process. The parent company Pintejin group and the subsidiary BE-CU prototype company are mainly responsible for the machining process. The global layout of the company's business.

(2) Relatively stable income in recent years and excellent financial indicators

The company's revenue has grown steadily and the gross profit margin has been relatively high. The company's revenue and net profit are relatively stable. In 2021Q1-3, the company achieved revenue of 588 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 25.33%, and realized a net profit attributable to the parent of 128 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of 9.59%. The company's gross profit margin is relatively high, maintaining an average of more than 40%. In 2021Q1-3, the company's gross profit margin was 36.38% and net profit margin was 21.76%, down 5.55pct and 3.12pct year-on-year respectively, mainly due to the increase in raw material prices.

Compressor parts are the company's main source of income, and the proportion of construction machinery parts has increased in recent years. The company's products mainly include compressors, construction machinery, food machinery, and energy equipment parts. Among them, compressor parts account for the highest proportion of revenue. In 2021H1, the company's compressor parts revenue is 283 million yuan, accounting for 77.75% of operating income. Construction machinery The revenue of parts and components was 61 million yuan, accounting for 16.76% of the operating income, and this proportion increased by 2.01pct compared with 2020. In addition, the proportion of food machinery and energy equipment parts is relatively low. In 2021H1, the revenue of the two will be 0.09 billion and 0.05 billion yuan, accounting for 2.47% and 1.37% of the operating income, respectively. Among various products, food machinery parts have the highest gross profit margin. In 2021H1, the company's compressor parts, construction machinery parts, food machinery parts, and energy equipment parts have gross profit margins of 38.77%/30.07%/49.83%/43.22%, respectively.

Both domestic and foreign business are emphasized, and the domestic gross profit margin is higher than that of foreign countries. The company adheres to the development of domestic and foreign routes, and the proportion of domestic and foreign income is relatively stable. In 2020, the company's domestic and foreign revenue were 421/249 million yuan, accounting for 62.84%/37.16% of the current revenue, respectively. Compared with the domestic business, the company's foreign business has a lower gross profit margin. In 2020, the domestic and foreign business gross profit margins are 46.53% and 37.60% respectively. The difference in gross profit margin at home and abroad is mainly caused by factors such as product structure and scale effect. For example, the company's important base in the Americas, AMR, sells mainly construction machinery parts, and the proportion of sales in each period is basically more than 80%, while domestic sales of products are Compressor parts are the main components, and the sales in each period account for about 85%. Since AMR only started production in 2016, the amortization of initial fixed costs is relatively high. With the increase in revenue and the gradual realization of the scale effect, the gross profit margin is expected to increase steadily.

Under economies of scale, the period expense rate continued to decline. The industry in which the company operates has relatively significant economies of scale. In recent years, with the continuous increase of the company's scale, the company's period expense ratio has continued to improve. In 2021H1, the company's sales expense ratio, management expense ratio, and financial expense ratio were 1.04%, 6.42%, and -0.51%, respectively, down 3.72/5.97/1.32pct from the highest point in 2017. The company focuses on R&D investment, and the R&D expense ratio has increased this year. In 2021H1, the company's R&D expense ratio is 6.62%, an increase of 1.75pct compared to 2017.

2. High-end precision parts are the foundation of high-end manufacturing, fully benefiting from the development of downstream industries and the rise of China's manufacturing industry

(1) Manufacturing of high-end mechanical parts

The manufacturing of machinery and equipment parts is one of the most important basic links in the machinery manufacturing industry. The product categories of machinery and equipment parts are diverse and their functions are important. The quality and technical level of the equipment often determines the performance, quality and reliability of the equipment host products. Therefore, the machinery and equipment parts manufacturing industry, as the basic industry of the equipment manufacturing industry, is a large number of host products and high-end technology. The basic guarantee of equipment innovation and development plays an indispensable role in the development of the national economy, and has become one of the basic driving forces for improving the overall level of a country's equipment manufacturing industry. From the production process point of view, raw materials need to be formed through casting, forging, welding, stamping and other links to form blank parts, and then through processing, assembly and other links to form parts, and parts are assembled to form various types of complete machines.

Casting is one of the most common processes in the blank forming of mechanical parts, and production capacity is gradually shifting to my country, which is already the world's largest producer of castings. The casting process has low cost and high process flexibility, and can obtain complex shapes and large-scale castings. The product has good comprehensive performance and has certain comparative advantages over other forming processes such as forging, rolling, welding, and punching. It is the main process of metal forming at present. methods and means. In recent years, with the reconstruction of the global industrial chain, emerging economies have undertaken international industrial transfer, and the foundry industry in emerging economies such as China, India, Russia, and Brazil has developed rapidly. my country has now become the world's largest casting producer. According to Wind, china die casting output in 2020 will be 51.95 million tons, accounting for 49.24% of the world's total casting output.

Machining is a key link that affects the accuracy and reliability of parts and components. The blank of mechanical equipment parts needs to be further machined by machine tools and other equipment, so that the parts can meet the needs of host production in terms of performance and accuracy. The higher the technological level of machining, the higher the precision and quality stability of the parts produced, thereby effectively improving the safety, reliability and stability of mechanical equipment.

There are many downstream industries of machinery and equipment parts. There are many downstream fields of machinery and equipment parts, including compressors, construction machinery, tires, national defense and military industries, air conditioners, and automobiles. From the perspective of comparable companies in the same industry, the company's main downstream application fields are compressors, construction machinery, energy equipment, food machinery, etc., while Liancheng Precision's main application fields are passenger cars, commercial vehicles, diesel engines, construction machinery, commercial compressors , hydraulic machinery, environmental protection water treatment, etc. The main application fields of Himile Technology are tire manufacturing, large-scale castings for wind power and gas turbines, and the main application fields of Yingliu Co., Ltd. are aerospace, nuclear power, oil and gas, resources and special equipment such as defense agents. Huaxiang Co., Ltd. The main application areas are air conditioners, refrigerators, automobiles, etc.

Under the demand of high-end customization, there are higher requirements for the research and development and process design of enterprises. In response to high-end demand, leading enterprises in the industry have begun to implement innovative business models of specialized customization. Customers only need to provide product drawings, standard specifications and delivery time requirements, and the rest are highly professional process design, tooling production, manufacturing, The whole process of quality inspection is completed by the parts manufacturer, and the traceability records required by the standard specifications are provided; at the same time, the R&D personnel of the parts manufacturer also participate in the customer's product design and provide professional technology and expert opinions. In this mode, not only the technological level of the parts manufacturing enterprises is inspected, but also the R&D level of the enterprises has high requirements. However, at present, my country's mechanical equipment parts products are still mainly low-end basic products, high-end parts and components products account for a relatively low proportion, the phenomenon of homogeneity is relatively common, and the research and development cycle is long and the contribution rate of new products is low. At the middle and low end of the industrial chain and value chain, some key components for special and high-end products, such as bearings, electronic components, high-speed rail gearboxes, robot gearboxes, etc., also rely on imports. Excellent casting companies represented by Liuzhou Co., Ltd., Himile Technology, etc. have moved towards the high-end direction.

The customer structure is greatly affected by the downstream concentration, but in general, the proportion of large customers is relatively high. The client concentration of Pintejin Group is relatively high. Among them, the top five customers of BE-CU.com account for the lowest revenue, mainly because its downstream are tire manufacturing enterprises, wind power, gas turbine and other enterprises, and the industry is relatively fragmented with a large number of enterprises, and the market is fragmented. The main downstream of the company are compressors and construction machinery, and the industry concentration is relatively high. Affected by this, the revenue of the company's top five customers is higher than that of comparable companies in the same industry. In addition, the number of downstream application areas will also affect the customer concentration of industry companies. As mentioned above, Liancheng Precision, Yingliu and Huaxiang have many downstream fields, which also reducestheir customer concentration. The company's compressor parts revenue accounts for more than 70%, and the downstream areas are relatively concentrated, which also leads to a high degree of customer concentration of the company.

(3) Construction machinery: the recovery of overseas markets is accelerating, and export demand may grow further

The construction machinery market is highly concentrated. Construction machinery includes excavators, cranes, road rollers, concrete machinery, etc. The construction machinery industry has high investment and high market concentration. The main players include Caterpillar, Komatsu, XCMG, Sany, and Zoomlion. According to YellowTable, the total market share of the top ten companies in the construction machinery industry in 2021 will be 65.3%, and the market shares of Caterpillar, Komatsu, XCMG, Sany, and Zoomlion will be 13.0%, 10.4%, 7.9%, and 7.5% respectively. , 4.9%.

The global economy has entered a recovery channel, and the global sales growth of construction machinery has gradually recovered. According to the financial report of the global construction machinery leader Caterpillar, its Asia-Pacific business has resumed positive growth since Q3 in 2020. Since Q1 2021, as the global economy gradually recovers from the epidemic, its global business has begun to grow, especially in Europe and the United States and other regions. The recovery is relatively fast, and its global market sales in 2021Q4 increased by 27% year-on-year.

In the short term, export demand may become the main driving force for the growth of the construction machinery market. With the recovery of the global construction machinery market, my country's export demand for excavators will gradually expand. According to the China Construction Machinery Industry Association, from April 2020, the export volume of my country's excavators began to bottom out, and the export growth rate continued to accelerate. In 2021, my country will export a total of 68,427 excavators, an increase of 96.96% compared with 2020.

(4) Wind power castings: Benefit from the development of the global wind power market under the trend of carbon neutrality

With the rapid development of the global wind power industry, my country has become the largest wind power market. According to the Global Wind Energy Organization Association GWEC (the same below), the global installed capacity of onshore wind power will be 72.5GW in 2021, and the new installed capacity of offshore wind power will be 21.1GW, an increase of 82.16% and 2244.44% respectively compared with 2011, and the compound growth rate of 2011-2021 The rates were 6.18% and 37.09%, respectively. At the same time, my country has become the world's largest wind power market. In 2021, my country's newly installed capacity of onshore wind power and offshore wind power will be 30.7GW and 16.9GW respectively, accounting for 42.30% and 80.09% of the world's newly installed capacity, respectively.

The company vigorously entered the market of large-scale castings for wind power. In recent years, the global wind power industry has developed rapidly, but the company can only produce and sell a small amount of sealing parts for large-scale wind power equipment. According to the company's prospectus, the company initially planned to invest 229 million yuan in the construction of a "technical transformation project with an annual output of 65,000 sets of high-precision mechanical parts". After transportation expenses and other factors, the company decided to change the original project and invest 596 million yuan to build the "high-precision mechanical parts production and construction project". The revised new fundraising project will be built into a complete industrial chain base of "casting + cnc machining china ", and will meet the production of large-scale wind power supporting parts. The newly raised investment projects can not only meet the increased demand for the company's existing products, but also fully meet the needs of large-scale production of new products.

About The Company:

As a China cnc machining company, Pintejin Group is internationally known for its dedication to the development of quality prototypes at an affordable cost for businesses all across the world. This company began operations in 1995 and has since expanded to a second facility in China to handle the growing number of project orders. For precision machining services in China, they have built a solid reputation for themselves.

Contact Information:

web:cncmachiningptj.com

Tel: +86 (0)769-8288 6112

Fax: +86 (0)769-8288 6112

Email: info@pintejin.com

Factory Address: Sifangyuan Industrial Park, Xinshapu, Huaide Community, Humen town, Dongguan City, Guangdong Province.

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Global TiN Powder market trend 2022-2028 High Purity Titanium Nitride TiN Powder CAS 25583-20-4, 99.5% by Newsmis-asia

Gazprom recently said it had completely suspended gas supplies to Bulgarian Gas company and Polish Oil and Gas Company (PGNiG) because it was not being paid in rubles. Russia said it would resume gas supplies after it agreed to pay for them in rubles.

Bulgaria and Poland announced Monday that they have received a notice from Russia to suspend natural gas supplies from Monday.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on March 31 signed a presidential decree to settle gas trade with "unfriendly" countries and regions in rubles. When the new rules took effect on April 1, Presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov said Russia would not immediately "cut off gas" to Europe, as the cost of gas supplies starting April 1 should be settled in the second half of April or May.

Because of the ever-changing international situation, the supply and prices of international bulk TiN Powder are still very uncertain.

About Titanium Nitride TiN Powder:

Titanium Nitride (TiN) is a very hard ceramic material, usually used as a coating for titanium alloys, steel, carbides and aluminum components to improve the surface properties of the substrate. The Vickers hardness of TiN is 1800-2100, the elastic modulus is 251 GPa, the coefficient of thermal expansion is 9.3510-6 K-1, and the superconducting transition temperature is 5.6K.



TiN will oxidize at 800C at normal temperature. TiN is brown and appears golden when it is coated. According to laboratory tests, it is chemically stable at a temperature of 20C but will be slowly corroded by concentrated acid solutions at high temperatures. Depending on the material and surface finish of the substrate, the friction coefficient between TiN and another TiN is 0.4 to 0.9 TiN surface (unlubricated). The typical TiN formation has a NaCl-type crystal structure with a stoichiometric ratio of about 1:1. However, TiNx compounds with x in the range of 0.6 to 1.2 are thermodynamically stable.



TiN becomes superconducting at low temperatures, and for single crystals, the critical temperature is as high as 6.0K. The superconductivity in thin-film TiN has been extensively studied, and its superconductivity varies greatly depending on the sample preparation until the superconductivity in the superconductor-insulator transition is completely suppressed. Cooling the TiN film to an absolute value close to zero, converting it into the first known super insulator, suddenly increased the resistance by 100,000 times.



Titanium nitride is a hard ceramic material used as a coating on titanium alloys, steel, carbides and aluminum parts. Because of its golden surface, it can be used for jewelry and high-performance ceramic materials, as well as medical equipment such as scalpels and plastic bone, saw blades. In addition, it is also used as a conductive barrier in microelectronics and electrodes in bioelectronic applications. Feel free to send an inquiry to get the latest price if you would like to buy Titanium Nitride TiN Powder in bulk.



How is Titanium Nitride TiN Powder produced?

Titanium nitride can be made by directly reacting titanium and nitrogen at 1200C. The coating can be formed by a vapor deposition method using a mixed gas of titanium tetrachloride, nitrogen, and hydrogen. Titanium dinitride is obtained by heating metallic titanium in nitrogen or ammonia at 900-1000C. Titanium tetranitride is obtained by heating titanium tetrachloride in ammonia at 1000C.



Product Performance of Titanium Nitride TiN powder:

Our Titanium Nitride, TiN powder (CAS 25583-20-4) has high purity, narrow size distribution, high temperature strength, high fracture strength, good chemical resistance, good thermal shock resistance, low density and high hardness.



Technical Parameter of Titanium Nitride TiN powder:

Product Name MF Purity Particle Size Specific Surface Area

( m2/g ) Volume Density

( g/cm3 ) Crystal Form Color Titanium Nitride TiN 99% 1-3um, 5-10um 7.39 0.19 Spherical Gray-black



Chemical Composition of Titanium Nitride TiN powder:

TiN N O C Fe Al Ca Si Ni 99.5% 21.5% 0.6-1.2% 0.1% 0.015% 0.01% 0.01% 0.30% 0.3%



Application of Titanium Nitride TiN powder:

Titanium nitride is a hard ceramic material used as a coating on titanium alloys, steel, carbides and aluminum parts. Because of its golden surface, it can be used for jewelry and high-performance ceramic materials, as well as medical equipment such as scalpels and orthopedic bone saw blades. In addition, it is also used as a conductive barrier in microelectronics and electrodes in bioelectronic applications.

TiN is used as a thin coating to harden and protect cutting and sliding surfaces, for decorative purposes (due to its golden appearance), and as a non-toxic exterior for medical implants. In most applications, the applied coating thickness is less than 5 microns (0.00020 inches).

TiN is usually applied to steel, hardened steel and stainless steel materials that require high wear resistance and lubricity. TiN is an essential material for physical vapor deposition coatings and is very suitable for applications that use expensive tools (such as injection molding, sawing, tapping, and molding).

The coating is also used in many medical (implants, surgical instruments, etc.) and food processing applications. TiN can be easily peeled off and can be recoated. Can be stripped and recoated.

Make plastic packaging materials, such as PET bottles.

In the solar vacuum tube, the absorbed sunlight is very large.

The high-temperature furnace is used for energy consumption.

Making artificial limbs, biological materials.

Manufacturing optical equipment in harsh environments.

Used as alloy modifier in cemented carbide.



Packing & Shipping of Titanium Nitride TiN Powder :

We have many different kinds of packing which depends on the titanium nitride TiN powder quantity.

Titanium nitride TiN powder packing: vacuum packing, 100g, 500g or 1kg/bag, 25kg/barrel, or as your request.

Titanium nitride TiN powder shipping: could be shipped out by sea , by air, by express as soon as possible once payment receipt.





Luoyang Tongrun Nano Technology Co. Ltd. (TRUNNANO) is a trusted global chemical material supplier & manufacturer with over 12-year-experience in providing super high-quality chemicals and Nanomaterials, including boride powder, nitride powder, graphite powder, sulfide powder, 3D printing powder, etc.

If you are looking for high-quality TiN powder, please feel free to contact us and send an inquiry. ([email protected])



Titanium Nitride Properties Other Names Tinite, TiNite, TiN powder, nitridotitanium CAS No. 25583-20-4 Compound Formula TiN Molecular Weight 61.87 Appearance Brown Powder Melting Point N/A Boiling Point N/A Density 5.24 g/cm3 Solubility in H2O N/A Exact Mass 61.951 Titanium Nitride Health & Safety Information Signal Word N/A Hazard Statements N/A Hazard Codes N/A Risk Codes N/A Safety Statements N/A Transport Information N/A

Europe has been facing the gas shortage problem since the second half of 2021. The worsening situation in Russia and Ukraine has reduced Russian gas shipments to Europe, leading to a doubling of European gas prices. Energy shortages have sent electricity prices soaring. For these reasons, it is predicted that the price of the TiN Powder will continue to increase.



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Frontrunner Vaccine Will Affact the Price of Stellite12 Cobalt-base Alloy (Co-Cr-W-Fe)-Spherical Powder - Market Trend

CEO of Pfizer partner BioNTech says coming winter will be hard but by April, 300 million immunization units should be ready, which will have an impact on the global pandemic.

If coronavirus vaccinations are rolled out widely, life could return to normal by next winter, one of the scientists behind the front-running coronavirus vaccine told British television on Sunday.

Ugur Sahin, the Turkish co-founder of the German firm BioNTech, told the BBCs The Andrew Marr Show that this winter will be hard, without any major impact from vaccinations.

Together with US giant Pfizer, BioNTech is developing the leading candidate in the worldwide chase for a vaccine. Israel has ordered millions of units of the vaccine, hoping that the first deliveries will arrive in the country by January.

Affected by the new coronary pneumonia epidemic, the Stellite12 Cobalt-base Alloy (Co-Cr-W-Fe)-Spherical Powder market is changing rapidly. These changes are indicators of market growth. This year-on-year upward trend in the market indicates that the next November 2020-2026 will show an oval but steady growth.

The price of Stellite12 Cobalt-base Alloy (Co-Cr-W-Fe)-Spherical Powder continues to be affected by factors such as market growth momentum, various opportunities and challenges. However, during the forecast period from 2020 to 2026, the global Stellite12 Cobalt-base Alloy (Co-Cr-W-Fe)-Spherical Powder sales market is expected to continue to be above average. The growth rate will continue to increase. It is expected that from today to next week, the price of Stellite12 Cobalt-base Alloy (Co-Cr-W-Fe)-Spherical Powder will increase to a certain extent.

Due to changes in consumer demand, import and export conditions, and various investigations on the development of Stellite12 Cobalt-base Alloy (Co-Cr-W-Fe)-Spherical Powder, the cost of Stellite12 Cobalt-base Alloy (Co-Cr-W-Fe)-Spherical Powder is constantly changing. Taking into account the current market macroeconomic parameters, value chain analysis, channel partners, demand and supply, the cost of Stellite12 Cobalt-base Alloy (Co-Cr-W-Fe)-Spherical Powder will also be affected to a certain extent. It is estimated that the cost of Stellite12 Cobalt-base Alloy (Co-Cr-W-Fe)-Spherical Powder will increase slightly from today to next week.

The market trend of Stellite12 Cobalt-base Alloy (Co-Cr-W-Fe)-Spherical Powder?

The global Stellite12 Cobalt-base Alloy (Co-Cr-W-Fe)-Spherical Powdermarket is constantly changing. The latest Global Market Report provides clear and accurate statistics and market estimates of the global Stellite12 Cobalt-base Alloy (Co-Cr-W-Fe)-Spherical Powder target market. The report includes an analysis of the different factors driving the market growth. It includes market drivers, constraints, opportunities and trends. This report is written by experienced and knowledgeable market analysts and researchers. It is an amazing compilation of important research that explores the competitive landscape, segmentation, geographic expansion, and revenue, production and consumption growth of the global Stellite12 Cobalt-base Alloy (Co-Cr-W-Fe)-Spherical Powder target market. In addition, the report provides a series of different market segments and applications that can promote market development during the forecast period. In-depth information is based on historical milestones and current trends. In addition, the Stellite12 Cobalt-base Alloy (Co-Cr-W-Fe)-Spherical Powder market report also covers development policies and plans, manufacturing processes and cost structures, marketing strategies, and then analyzes top Stellite12 Cobalt-base Alloy (Co-Cr-W-Fe)-Spherical Powder producers, distributors, marketing channels of Stellite12 Cobalt-base Alloy (Co-Cr-W-Fe)-Spherical Powder, potential buyers and Stellite12 Cobalt-base Alloy (Co-Cr-W-Fe)-Spherical Powder History of development. The report also lists import and export, supply and consumption data as well as costs, prices, revenue and gross margins by region.

The market demand for Stellite12 Cobalt-base Alloy (Co-Cr-W-Fe)-Spherical Powder?

The world's leading Stellite12 Cobalt-base Alloy (Co-Cr-W-Fe)-Spherical Powder target market report contains research on competitive dynamics. It also has a specific awareness that can help you choose the right business execution and steps. Market reports systematically display information in the form of organizational charts, facts, charts, statistics and graphs, which represent the status of related transactions on global and regional platforms. In addition, the report also includes the entire business chain, through which the growth rate and decline rate of specific industries in the market can be analyzed. The report also describes the total cost of manufacturing the product and analyzing its assembly process. In addition, the report also includes major developments in the market. The report involves value chain analysis and represents the workflow in the market. In addition, the market is classified by category, process, end-use industry and region. The report divides the market based on geographic location.

TRUNNANO (aka. Luoyang Tongrun Nano Technology Co. Ltd.) is a trusted global chemical material supplier & manufacturer with over 12 years experience in providing super high-quality chemicals and Nanomaterials. As a leading nanotechnology development and Stellite12 Cobalt-base Alloy (Co-Cr-W-Fe)-Spherical Powder manufacturer, Luoyang Tongrun dominates the market. Our professional work team provides perfect solutions to help improve the efficiency of various industries, create value, and easily cope with various challenges. Please send an inquiry as needed.

Li3N is short for lithium nitride, which is a metal nitrogen compound that is a purple or red crystalline solid, showing a light green luster under reflected light and a ruby color in transmitted light. At room temperature, metallic lithium can partially generate lithium nitride when exposed to air, and lithium generates lithium nitride in a nitrogen stream 10 to 15 times faster than in air. At this time, all lithium is converted into lithium nitride. Learn more knowledge about Lithium nitride from nanotrun website.

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Global ZrSi2 Powder market trend 2022-2026 Introduction to Zirconium Silicide ZrSi2 Powder by Newsmis-asia

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen recently called on India and other countries to support sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine incident. At The Raisina Dialogue forum, von der Leyen said, "We earnestly appeal to all members of the international community to support our efforts to achieve lasting peace."

Von der Leyen says countries around the world that have been suffering from the virus for two years must now deal with higher food, energy, and fertilizer prices. What is happening in Ukraine will not only determine the future of Europe, but also have profound implications for the rest of the world.

Because of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the prices of many other commodities like the ZrSi2 Powder are expected to continue to rise in the future.

Introduction to Zirconium Silicide ZrSi2 Powder

Zirconium silicide or zirconium disilicide is an organic compound, the chemical formula ZrSi2, is one of the silicides of zirconium.

It can be made by the reaction of silicon and zirconium at 1100 C or by the reaction of silicon and zirconium dioxide:

ZrO2 + 4Si -- ZrSi2 + 2SiO

When heated in the air, it forms a protective film of zirconium silicate.



Physicochemical Properties of Zirconium Silicide ZrSi2 Powder

ZrSi2 is insoluble in water, inorganic acid, and aqua regia, but soluble in hydrofluoric acid.

As a zirconium-silicon intermetallic compound, ZrSi2 is a kind of ceramic material with high hardness, high melting point, high conductivity, high heat conductivity, and good thermal shock resistance to high temperature.



Zirconium Silicide ZrSi2 Powder Properties Other Names zirconium(IV) silicide, zirconium disilicide, ZrSi2 powder CAS No. 12039-90-6 Compound Formula ZrSi2 Molecular Weight 147.4 Appearance gray black powder Melting Point N/A Boiling Point N/A Density 4.88g/cm3 Solubility in H2O insoluble Exact Mass 145.858557

Zirconium Silicide ZrSi2 Powder CAS 12039-90-6





Applications of Zirconium Silicide ZrSi2 Powder

ZrSi2 can be used as fine ceramic raw material powder to make crucibles or semiconductor film.



Related Elements

Si Silicon

Silicon (atomic symbol Si, atomic number 14) is an element of unit P in group 14 of period 3, with an atomic mass of 28.085. The number of electrons in each shell of silbohr silicon is 2,8,4, and its electron configuration is [Ne] 3s2, 3p2. The radius of a silicon atom is 11 pm and the van der Waals radius is 210pm. By weight, silicon makes up 25.7 percent of the earth's crust and is the second most abundant element after oxygen. These metals rarely exist in pure crystal form and are usually made from an iron-silicon alloy called ferrosilicon. Element Silicon (or silicon dioxide), such as sand, is the main component of glass, which is one of the cheapest materials and has excellent mechanical, optical, thermal, and electrical properties. Ultra-pure silicon can be doped with boron, gallium, phosphorus, or arsenic to produce silicon, which is used in transistors, solar cells, rectifiers, and other solid-state devices widely used in the electronics industry.



Zr Zirconium

Zirconium (Zr, atomic symbol Zr, atomic number 40) is a group D element of period 5 with an atomic mass of 91.224. Each zirconium layer has an electron number of 2,8,18,10,2 and an electron configuration of [Kr]4d2 5s2. The zirconium atom has a radius of 160pm and a van der Waals radius of 186pm. In its elemental form, zirconium has a silvery-white appearance similar to that of titanium. The main mineral of zirconium is zircon (zirconium silicate). Zirconium is commercially produced as a by-product of titanium and tin mining and has many applications as an opaque and refractory. It is not a free element in nature.



Zirconium plays an important role in industrial, medical, and defense applications around the world. Zircon metals are used as key components in many alloys due to their high strength and corrosion resistance. Zirconium alloys with high compressive strength are used in important naval and aerospace industries as components of submarine casings and high-speed aircraft alloys. Zircon's low neutron absorption properties make it irreplaceable in the inner components of fusion engines. In addition, zirconium silicate and zirconium dioxide are minerals with high refractive index and wear resistance, so they can be used in high-temperature furnace lining, refractory ceramics, and nanotechnology industries.



Main Supplier of Zirconium Silicide ZrSi2 Powder

Luoyang Tongrun Nano Technology Co. Ltd. (TRUNNANO) is a trusted global chemical material supplier & manufacturer with over 12-year-experience in providing super high-quality chemicals and Nanomaterials, including silicon powder, nitride powder, graphite powder, zinc sulfide, calcium nitride, 3D printing powder, etc.

If you are looking for high-quality zirconium silicide ZrSi2 powder, please feel free to contact us and send an inquiry. ([email protected])





The current international situation is highly uncertain, and its economic impact has not been able to be assessed properly. In addition, rising energy and commodity prices and supply chain disruptions are expected to push the price of the ZrSi2 Powder higher.



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Ghanaian gospel sensation, Joe Mettle, has asserted that not winning the artiste of the year award at the Vodafone Ghana Music Awards this year was a flip.

Joe Mettle, in an interview on the Dryve of your Lyfe on YFM, 97.9MHz, Takoradi, saidIt was the same thing that happened five years ago. Its just that there was a flip this time.

Five years ago, there were quite a number of us in the category and I won. This year also, there were a number of people in the category and another person won and thats how it goes.

Joe Mettle believes that this is how award shows go, hence, one should not expect to be the winner every time as other industry players are also working hard and deserve to win at some point too.

He noted however, that once there is a nomination, it is equally important, and that is enough endorsement that the artiste is doing great works.

Joe Mettle, in 2017, set the record of becoming the first gospel musician to win the artiste of the year award at the prestigious Vodafone Ghana Music Awards.

---happyghana.com
Defending champion Rafael Nadal maintained his quest for a record-extending 11th Rome Masters title on Wednesday with a straight sets demolition of the big-serving American John Isner.

Nadal, 35, dispatched his fellow veteran 6-3, 6-1 in 76 minutes to set up a last-16 showdown with the 13th seed Denis Shapovalov.

In his last-16 match at the 2021 tournament with the Canadian, Nadal saved two match points before prevailing.

And the Spaniard needed the same grit in his second round match on centre court at the Foro Italico.

At 3-3 in the first set, 37-year-old Isner had two separate chances to claim Nadal's serve. But he fluffed both opportunities.

"He had two not so difficult balls so I was in his hands at that moment," said Nadal of the break points. "I was lucky that he missed those shots and then I was able to break."

"Then the match changed, of course. With the first set on the board, and having the break in the first game of the second set, everything changed.

Isner, increasingly powerless trying to combat Nadal's vicious top spin, was swept aside.

"I finished better than how I started, without a doubt," said Nadal.

Elsewhere, Second seed Alexander Zverev moved into the last-16 also in straight sets. The 24-year-old German dispatched the 2022 Estoril Open champion 7-6, 6-3 to advance to a showdown with Alex de Minaur from Australia.
Thirty five years after Malik Oussekine was beaten to death by police during a student demonstration, his story is finally being told in a four-part series beginning Wednesday on Disney+ and a feature film debuts at this month's Cannes Film Festival.

On the night of 6 December, 1986, two police officers beat 22-year-old Malik Oussekine to death on the sidelines of a student protest in Paris.

He hadn't been involved in the demonstration, but was nonetheless chased by voltigeurs  a special baton-wielding police unit on motorbikes.

The youngster's death sent shockwaves through the population  triggering weeks of unrest.

The French public prosecutor claimed Oussekine had died of a heart attack, not from the beatings.

Several prominent intellectuals took part in protests which led to the unprecedented conviction of the officers.

While they received only suspended sentences, it marked a turning point in both French race relations and attitudes towards police violence.

Making the story resonate

Oussekine's name has continued to reverberate among minorities and his tragic story inspired Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 crime drama "La Haine".

But Oussekine's story had never been the subject of a full length dramatisation until now.

Two versions are being released this month: a film "Nos Frangins" (Our Brothers), premieres at the Cannes Film Festival, and a Disney+ mini-series, "Oussekine", is released worldwide on Wednesday.

The four-part series, directed by Antoine Chevrollier, retraces the drama of Oussekine's death, how security services tried to cover it up and his siblings' courageous fight to establish the truth.

"The important thing is to make this name and this story resonate so that we never forget," Chevrollier told AFP.

France's George Floyd

"He was attacked because of the colour of his skin. He is France's Arab George Floyd," historian Pascal Blanchard told French news agency AFP, referring to the African-American whose death at the hands of police in 2020 sparked massive international protests.

He said much of French society had allowed Oussekine's story to be brushed under the carpet as with so much of its troubled history with immigrant populations.

"It's not a question of whether Malik Oussekine has been forgotten, but by who?" said Blanchard.

'French stories'

France is still wrestling with the trauma of its colonial period, particularly the bloody war of independence in Algeria from 1954 to 1962.

Among its darkest moments was the massacre of up to 200 Algerian protesters by police in Paris on October 17, 1961  many of them shot dead and their bodies thrown into the Seine.

The events of that day went officially unacknowledged for decades until President Emmanuel Macron finally described them as "inexcusable crimes" at the 60th anniversary last year  though he stopped short of apologising.

Oussekine's death was crucial in marking the end of total police impunity  the first time that officers were convicted for this type of crime, according to the family's lawyer, Georges Kiejman.

It has taken until now, as the grandchildren of the original wave of North African immigrants comes of age, for there to be enough distance and confidence to address the past.

"For our generation, it is important to say that these individual stories form part of the French national story. They are not separate. These are French stories," said Faiza Guene, 36 and born to Algerian parents, who helped write the screenplay for "Oussekine".

'Historical cancers'

Director Chevrollier, who grew up in a small village in the Loire Valley, says he only became fully aware of the power of Oussekine's name when he moved to Paris and began to hang out with people from different backgrounds.

He first heard the name in the rap song "L'Etat Assasin" by the band Assassin.

"I hope the series will help ease the tensions that are unsettling the country. It is time that we in France begin to treat these historical cancers."
11.05.2022 LISTEN

The West African mining industry is thriving. As one of the worlds largest gold-producing regions, it also supplies 22.6% of global titanium oxide, 11.5% bauxite (used to create aluminum) and 5.6% uranium. Each year, its countries export minerals worth around US$16.1bn.

At the mining helm is Ghana, a modern, democratic powerhouse that leads the continents mineral production and ranks as sixth largest producer of gold and magnesium globally. The mining industry accounts for over half of Ghanas foreign direct investment, and as the countrys primary tax-paying sector, the government says it has a critical role to play in leading the nations sustainable economic development.

One example of its potential in stimulating sustainable economic growth is AngloGold Ashantis recent US $500 million investment to reopen Ghanas Obuasi gold mine, which promises a revival of the Obuasi town, new local and national employment opportunities and an expansion of the countrys mining value chain.

It is in this vein that all roads lead to the Ghanaian capital, Accra, in June, for the 16th edition of the West African Mining and Power Exhibition (WAMPEX) under the theme of Advancing a legacy of sustainable and responsible mining through innovation and partnership, which will have as its Special Guest, the Ghanaian Vice President, H.E Alhaji DrMahamudu Bawumia.

Dr Bawumia says: Looking towards the future of mining in West Africa and across the continent, it is imperative that our mineral resources  which are the property of the African people - continue to be managed for our collective interest. In line with the principles laid out in Ghanas Minerals and Mining sector policy, our primary aim and responsibility is therefore to ensure that the West African mining industry continues to be managed on a sustainable economic, social and environmental basis, to ensure its contribution towards the economic empowerment of our people, generating opportunities for local entrepreneurship and creating sustainable employment opportunities.

Taking place from 1-3 June 2022 at the Accra International Conference Centre, this leading exhibition for the mining and power value chain and its associated conference WAMPOC, will bring together strategic private and public industry stakeholders to discuss and debate the drive for sustainable investment opportunities in West Africa. According to the CEO of the Ghana Chamber of Mines, Sulemanu Koney, WAMPEX/WAMPOC is the most prestigious mining and power event in West Africa. It is a must-attend event for all players in the sector.

In addition to increased government involvement, this year the event boasts the support of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) who will also be hosting the ECOWAS Federation of Chamber of Mines General Assembly during the event.

Over a series of interactive and innovative technical workshops and panel discussions led by senior industry experts, WAMPEX/ WAMPOC attendees will explore the latest insights into sustainability, as well as strategies to develop diversified economies, stimulate investment and benchmark operational excellence by shaping the future of West Africas mining industry, says Le-Ann Hare, Portfolio Director at dmg Events.

As well as the technical workshops and extended networking opportunities, WAMPEX/WAMPOC promises to offer the widest range of mining and power suppliers and technologies in the region, with over 80 exhibitors from 16 countries, as well as a new commercial and energy-intensive users zone.
GHA Announces Internal Review of Waiting Times

The GHA has announced that it will conduct a post-COVID internal review of waiting times for services at St Bernards Hospital.

The review seeks to assess and understand the impact of the pandemic on waiting times across GHA services with the aim of improving these as far as reasonably possible. The review is part of the wider Reset, Restart, Recover strategy for the GHAs post-pandemic reform.

Under the auspices of the Director General, the GHA administrative leadership will liaise closely with the clinical directors and clinical leads of each specialty to determine the impact of the pandemic on their waiting lists. In a statement, the GHA said that these can be expected to rise in the short term, as they are globally, whilst backlogs are cleared and more patients come forward.

In conjunction with clinical teams, the GHA will use this data to understand what needs to be done in the immediate, short and long term in order to reduce waiting times further. As part of this, the GHA is keen to develop and promote the use of digital technology across the GHA so that both clinicians and administrators have easy access and readily available information regarding waiting times across the service. The GHA states it is confident, following the direction established by the Director General, to work side-by-side with clinicians and patients, and that wait times can be reduced further to rival those of any health service worldwide. The GHA will publish the findings from the review and update waiting times as they become available on the GHA website.

'As always, the GHAs priority is to ensure that urgent and emergency cases are seen to as quickly as possible, and this philosophy was upheld throughout the pandemic. The GHA has, for example, sent an invitation to local dental services to quote for routine examination of children in order to help clear the backlog of those waiting for an appointment.'

The Director General welcomes the discussion of waiting times across the GHA during his routine community meetings in order to further inform the GHAs understanding of the complex and multi layered issues that affect, and are affected by, waiting times.

The Director General, Patrick Geoghegan, said: I am pleased to announce the internal review of waiting times for GHA services, the findings of which will be made public in due course. The GHA is at the beginning of how the new administration wants to work moving forward. There are, unfortunately, no quick fixes and this will be part of a longer-term review across all GHA services. However, I am confident that by working smarter, and in collaboration with clinical teams and with patients, we can overcome the challenges and bring waiting times at the GHA down to rival those of any other health service around the world.
France will no longer require passengers on trains, metros, busses and domestic flights to wear masks starting Monday, 16 May, lifting one of the last remaining Covid measure in the country. And the European air safety authority will no longer recommend masks be worn on flights within the EU.

While wearing masks remains recommended on public transportation, requiring them is "no longer appropriate" given the recent drop in Covid cases, Health Minister Olivier Veran said Wednesday.

Soon after the announcement, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) said it will no longer recommend medical masks be worn at airports and on planes starting on Monday.

The new guideline takes account of the latest developments in the pandemic, in particular the levels of vaccination and naturally acquired immunity, and the accompanying lifting of restrictions in a growing number of European countries, EASA and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said in a joint statement.

Calls to respect rules and others

Mask rules may still vary by airline on flights to or from destinations where the rules are different.

For example, Germany's Health Ministry said it will continue to require all passengers over the age of 6 to wear masks on flights to, from or within the country.

EASA Executive Director Patrick Ky urged passengers to behave responsibly and respect the choices of others around them and to strongly consider wearing a face mask if they are coughing and sneezing, to reassure those nearby.

Masks still required in French hospitals

France, which ditched most Covid mask rules in March, still requires them and a health pass proving Covid vaccination or inoculation, to enter hospitals and nursing homes.

People who test positive for Covid must still isolate for at least seven days.

On Tuesday, 56,449 new cases were reported over the previous 24 hours, mainly the Omicron variant, according to health ministry data. The numbers of patients in hospitals have also been steadily decreasing in recent weeks.

In March authorities began offering a fourth coronavirus vaccine dose to people aged 80 and over, and Veran said a new booster campaign for the general population could be necessary in the autumn if new variants emerge.

(with wires)
Former President John Dramani Mahama has condemned the murder of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.

According to Mr Mahama, for a journalist who has for many years covered and brought the world reports of events in Israel and the Middle East region, we all mourn her loss.

It is Mr Mahamas prayer that whoever pulled the trigger and any associates will be brought to justice through an independent and transparent process.

On May 11, 2022, Abu Akleh was shot and killed while reporting on an Israel Defense Forces raid on the West Bank city of Jenin. Al Jazeera and the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported that she was killed by the IDF, with an Agence France-Presse photojournalist also reporting Israeli forces had shot and killed her, eyewitness reports as well as statements by other countries and non-governmental organizations additionally characterized her killing as having been perpetrated by Israeli forces.

While Israel initially said she was killed as a result of an exchange of fire with Palestinian militants, an Israeli spokesperson subsequently said that it was not yet known who was responsible.

An autopsy was inconclusive as to who shot Abu Akleh.

Having condemned the murder of the Palestinian-American journalist, Mr Mahama also note that the murderers of Ghanaian journalist, Ahmed Suale, are still walking free.

He has, thus, called on the Akufo-Addo administration and the Police Service to take the investigation seriously and bring the murderers to justice.

Ahmed Hussein-Suale was an undercover investigative journalist and an associate of fellow Ghanaian investigative journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas.

He died on Wednesday, 16 January 2019 when unidentified men on motorbikes shot him three times, twice in the chest and once in his neck in his vehicle.

Source: Classfmonline.com
12.05.2022 LISTEN

Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia has described the death of Prof. Kwaku Ohene-Frempong as a great loss to Ghana.

Until his death, Prof Ohene-Frempong was the President of the Sickle Cell Foundation of Ghana.

In a Facebook post to mourn his friend, Dr Bawumia described the late Prof as a highly accomplished, globally renowned and very humble and caring person.

He was passionate and committed in his research and practice to helping people living with sickle cell disease. This is a great loss to Ghana, Dr Bawumia wrote.

He extended his condolences to Prof Ohene-Frempongs immediate family and the Sickle Cell Foundation of Ghana.

Prof died on May 7 2022.

In 2020, he was honoured by the US Department of Health and Human Services with the Assistant Secretary of Health Exceptional Service Medal for his contribution to the management of sickle cell disease around the globe.

Source: Classfmonline.com
Former President, John Dramani Mahama has admonished the President Akufo-Addo administration to go after the killers of late Ghanaian investigative journalist Ahmed Suale.

The Tiger Eye PI was murdered in January 2019 when unknown gunmen shot him several times in his car.

Reacting to the recent murder of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, John Dramani Mahama has condemned the act as he recounts the killing of Ahmed Suale.

Through a post on his Twitter page, the leading member of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) has called on the ruling government to bring the killers of the late Ghanaian investigative journalist to book.

The killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh is a most condemnable act. We all mourn her loss. It is our prayer that whoever pulled the trigger and any associates will be brought to justice through an Independent and transparent process.

We also note that the murderers of Ghanaian journalist, Ahmed Suale, are still walking free. We call on the Akufo-Addo administration and the Police Service to take this investigation seriously and bring the murderers to justice, ex-Ghana President John Dramani Mahama said in a series of posts on his Twitter.
Ghanas Vice President, H.E Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia has mocked the General Secretary of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Mr. Johnson Asiedu Nketia in his latest speech delivered at the University of Ghana Business School (UGBS).

In an appeal that attracted several laughter, the Vice President jokingly asked the Dean of UG Business School on Wednesday, May 11, 2022, to admit the NDC scribe into the school for remedial classes.

While the Vice President did not specifically give reasons why Asiedu Nketia needs the remedial classes at the UGBS, it appears it is just one of those trolling moments in politics.

...It was like a who is who in Ghana. Even Asiedu Nketia was part of it. But in his case, Dean, we may have to let him come back for remedial classes, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia shared.

In his address at the launch of the 60th Anniversary Celebration of the University of Ghana Business School, the Vice President lauded the school for its achievement in churning out great men and women.

He said the school should be proud for leading the way and staying relevant all these decades to make an impact.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is a great pleasure to be here today, representing the President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo at this major celebration. I am here as one of you, having been an academic myself, including teaching at a business school, in my previous life.

I share in your joy because sixty years of continuous operation that has produced prominent people in Ghana and the world of business is not a small feat. I think you should be very proud of yourselves for being trailblazers of this institution, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia stressed.

At the anniversary celebration, the Vice President presented 100 laptops to the school.

The gesture is in fulfillment of a pledge he made to the University in the past to support the Schools One Student, One Laptop initiative announced by the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana, to advance digitisation on campus.
The Ghana Meteorological Agency has announced a thunderstorm is approaching Ghana from Nigeria on Thursday, April 12.

The Agency says the thunderstorm is expected to hit Ghana between 6hours to 8hours from the time of filing this story [6:30am on Thursday].

The Chief Forecaster for the Ghana Meteorological Agency, Felicity Ahafianyo, told Sunrise on 3FM hosted by Alfred Ocansey that the thunderstorms coming from Nigeria expected to hit Ghana between 6 and 8hours.

It will hit Volta, Greater Accra, Ashanti, Central, Eastern and Western regions, she explained.

Madam Ahafianyo said towns and cities such as Afloa, Accra, Kumasi, Agona Swedru, Sefwi Wiawso, Koforidua, Akyem Oda among others, will be hit by the storm.

The storm is also moving on the sea so it is not advisable to be on the sea. We need to be extra careful on the sea because the coastal lines will also experience such storms, she warned.

---3news.com
The principal of Mampong Nursing and Midwifery Training College by either an act of incompetence or sheer wickedness, has not only inconvenienced about 168 students of the school but cost, or almost cost, them, their career to become of service to their people and nation.

The students of the school by their future career intend to become carers of sick people gone to hospital for treatment as either outpatients or inpatients. They may likely by their profession be able to attend to sick people wherever they happen to be; in homes, public places or hospitals. These are the types of useful people to society that the principal of the college has intentionally or otherwise, been killing their dream.

The principal acting diabolically or cluelessly, has made the lives of the students a complete hell on earth.

She could not stand up tall to defend the very decision of amnesty she granted all the alleged failed students who as a result of the deadly infectious Covid-19 pandemic, could not physically attend classes/lessons hence could not do better at their 1st and 2nd semesters examinations.

This decision taken locally in Mampong by her when principals could take their own decisions deemed to be in the best interests of the school, students and the nation, is no longer possible. This is because the government or the national management of the Nursing and Midwifery Training Colleges have centralised the nursing training colleges examinations and assessments in Accra.

Nevertheless, if she were a person that worth her salt, she could have written to inform the Central Management or whatever the board is called, of the decision she took locally, hence they should not use the students poor marks for their first and second semesters (Level 100) to add to that of their third and fourths (Level 200) to cumulatively determine their Grade Point Average (GPA) pass mark.

In some countries, as cited in my recent publications, the students did not sit for any exams at all, yet the final year students were awarded grades by their class or subject tutors on assessment of their class/lesson performance.

Universities did accept the grades so awarded to the students to admit them into their institutions. Therefore, it would not have been only the principal of the college that took such an unordinary decision.

Every unique problem or occurrence must have their unique solution. This is truly conspicuous when it comes to law where it is said, each case is judged on its own merits. The period of Covid-19 pandemic called for a different approach to promoting students to their next higher classes.

Anyway, for the attention of the affected students, their parents or guardians, I have been alerted to a favourable decision taken by the Health Minister in their behalf. It will bring smiles back on their face.

Should it go as I have been told by a reliable source, the Minister has directed that the principal allows all the students back to school.

The communique to that effect has been passed to the Board of Governors of the college, I have been told. When the principal was contacted about recalling the affected students from their current abodes, be they their homes or privately rented hostels, she is alleged to have said, the school is now on holiday. I shall see what I can do when school reopens

If the Minister has really directed as communicated to me from a reliable source, there shouldnt be any hurdles of ifs or buts to be littered on the path of their re-admission.

The students have not been treated fairly at all. They have been sabotaged. Why do I say this, one may ask? Apart from the numerous discrepancies in their GPA results, surely bordering on incompetence, if not malignity, by the principal, many an affected student that went to the Academic Officer of the college to be issued academic transcript could not get it.

The Academic Officer, Paul Antiarefe, has refused to issue it to them for the past two months. Without the issuance of the academic transcript, those students who had decided to seek admission in other nursing colleges elsewhere in Ghana, could not do it. What a similitude of the Akan proverbial sayings, Wa bo me abra me su or wa tua ma no atua me to, to wit, Youve beaten me but forbidden me to cry or Youve blocked my mouth and my anus. They mean, you have maliciously blocked all my chances.

I shall be the happiest person to see the affected students recalled to pursue their future nursing and midwifery career.

Again, I shall advise them to live exemplary lives worthy of emulation. They should not be like most of the bad nurses in the nations hospitals who have no respect for patients but treat them worse than used rags only good for chucking into the skip.

BE LIKE FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE!

By the way, who was Florence Nightingale? She is mostly known for making hospitals a cleaner and safer place to be. Florence Nightingale OM RRC DStJ was an English social reformer, statistician and the founder of modern nursing. Nightingale came to prominence while serving as a manager and trainer of nurses during the Crimean War, in which she organised care for wounded soldiers at Constantinople.

Rockson Adofo

Thursday, 12 May 2022
The northern DR Congo jungle now encroaches on a palace built by the late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled the vast country with an iron fist for three decades before being ousted 25 years ago.

The Gbadolite palace, once dubbed "the Versailles of the Jungle," was an island of extreme opulence in its heydey, where world leaders dined in halls lined with Italian marble.

There were three palaces apart from a string of wildly opulent guest houses to host the world's rich and famous, Chinese pagodas and fake villages stocked with imported cattle as well as an airstrip to land a Concorde that Mobutu frequently used.

The complex boasted its own hydroelectric plant, peacocks strutted on the sprawling grounds and a fleet of Mercedes Benzes transpoted the guests who had come to party.

All that remains is a shell of a complex, its walls faded or in ruins, rooms bare and roofs missing -- a consequence of the mayhem that followed Mobutu's downfall on May 17, 1997, in the central African country.

Pierre Mokwe, a local guide and farmer, said thieves from nearby villages over the years snatched ironwork, pieces of marble and other material for building amid chaos resulting from "political and social crises".

Mokwe, 53, waxed nostalgic for the Mobutu years when he recalled "we lived well, there was enough to eat and we travelled without difficulty."

Mobutu ruled with an iron fist. By Eric Feferberg AFPFile

The Democratic Republic of Congo, a nation of about 90 million people, is one of the poorest countries in the world.

It has been devastated by a brutal colonial regime, as well as the predatory Mobutu era and the destructive series of wars that followed it.

Mobutu seized power in a coup in 1965 and developed a personalist dictatorship, accused of crushing political opponents and embezzling vast sums of money.

Mobutu was eventually overthrown by rebels led by Laurent Kabila at the end of the First Congo War in 1997, and exiled to Morocco where he died of prostate cancer shortly afterwards. His downfall precipitated the 1998-2003 Second Congo War.

Despite his controversial legacy, residents of Gbadolite city, about 15 kilometres (9 miles) from the ruined palace, continue to hold Mobutu in esteem. Mobutu spent his formative years there.

Fond memories

"The dictatorship had its bad side but also its good side. We respected the state, we respected the authorities," said Oscar Oshobale, the interim governor of North Ubangi province.

Local Bishop Dominique Bulamatari also praised Mobutu as a "visionary leader" who was ahead of his time.

Many locals still remember him fondly. By JOHN WESSELS AFPFile

"If he became a dictator, it is perhaps also our fault, we were asking a bit too much of him," he said, adding that he thought the country had gone backwards since Mobutu's overthrow.

There is little that directly recalls Mobutu in Gbadolite city apart from a small bust of his likeness, which features his signature leopard-skin cap.

But Gbadolite benefitted from infrastructure investments made under Mobutu's rule.

A power plant on the banks of the Ubangi river, which separates the DR Congo from the Central African Republic, supplies the city with constant power. Most other regional cities in the DRC suffer from poor electricity access.

A 40-kilometre (24-mile) network of asphalt roads built under Mobutu is also still in use in Gbadolite.

"I don't know if we will ever have a great leader like him here again," said Honore Ngusambia, a 23-year-old waiter born after Mobutu's downfall who nonetheless shares his elders' admiration for him.

Desecrated tombs

Oscar Oshobale, the interim governor, told AFP that people began to loot Gbadolite palace during the First Congo War.

But it was unpaid rebel soldiers who destroyed the buildings during the second war, he said, breaking them up and selling off parts.

Other nearby structures suffered similar fates, despite the apparent local fondness for Mobutu.

In 1978, the then dictator built the so-called Chapel of Mercy in Gbadolite city.

A statue depicting Mobutu's first wife Marie-Antoinette. By JOHN WESSELS AFPFile

The building, decked in marble and gold, was the resting place of Mobutu's first wife Marie-Antoinette and three of his sons.

It has also been destroyed and its valuables stripped. Sacristan Jerome Yumbi said that the remains of Mobutu's relatives have also been reburied elsewhere.

"The tombs have been desecrated," he said.
A rapper in the Democratic Republic of Congo sentenced to two years in prison for criticising the president has been acquitted on appeal, his lawyer said on Thursday.

A military court in the east of country sentenced Nzanzu Muyisa Makasi in December on charges of insulting the president, for a song called "No President" which suggested the country is ungoverned.

Eastern DR Congo is prey to myriad armed groups, many of which are a legacy of regional wars that flared a quarter of a century ago.

Last year, President Felix Tshisekedi placed the eastern North Kivu and Ituri provinces under a "state of siege," putting soldiers and police officers in key administrative positions in a bid to quell the violence.

Massacres have continued and rights groups charge that further empowering the security forces has led to abuses against civilians.

On Thursday, Makasi's lawyer Patrick Mukomba told AFP that a military tribunal in the provincial capital of Goma had acquitted and released the rapper at an appeal hearing the previous day.

"The charges against our client were not established," he said, explaining that criticising events in the volatile east did not amount to insulting the president.

Makasi, 29, is from conflict-torn North Kivu. His father was killed in a 2015 attack in neighbouring Ituri province by the Allied Democratic Forces, a militia the Islamic State group describes as its local affiliate in the region.

In December, Makasi was sentenced alongside fellow rapper Idengo -- real name Delphin Katembo -- who received a 10-year sentence for criticising the army.

Idengo is still in detention. His appeal hearing is scheduled for May 27.
Journalists Blessed Mhlanga left and Chengeto Chidi right are seen at the Chitungwiza Magistrates Court in Zimbabwe on May 9, 2022, after being detained while filming police attempt to arrest an opposition politician. Photo: News Day

12.05.2022 LISTEN

Lusaka, May 11, 2022  Zimbabwean authorities should immediately drop all charges against journalists Blessed Mhlanga and Chengeto Chidi, as well as Moses Hakata, and let them work freely, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Wednesday.

On Saturday, May 7, police arrested both journalists after they photographed officers attempting to detain an opposition lawmaker in the town of Chitungwiza, south of Harare, the capital, according to news reports, a statement by the Zimbabwean chapter of the Media Institute of Southern Africa, a regional press freedom body, and both journalists, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

The journalists were in the area to cover water shortages where a local election was being held, according to those sources.

Police ordered Mhlanga to stop recording their arrest of opposition Member of Parliament Job Sikhala, and after he identified himself as a journalist, an officer proceeded to punch him several times in the head, smashed his cellphone, and arrested him, according to Mhlanga, who also shared video of the incident. Officers arrested Chidi after she went to the police van where Mhlanga was detained to ask him to give her the keys to his vehicle, she told CPJ.

Police also arrested Hakata, a bystander who attempted to dissuade the officer from assaulting Mhlanga, according to media reports and Tapiwa Muchineripi, a lawyer representing both journalists, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app.

Police held Mhlanga and Chidi, both reporters for the privately owned newspaper News Day, at the Harare Central Police Station until Monday, when they were formally charged at the Chitungwiza Magistrates Court and released on bail, according to those sources. They are next due in court on May 24, Muchineripi said.

Hakata also appeared at that hearing, where authorities charged him with incitement to commit assault and released him on bail, Muchineripi told CPJ.

It is outrageous that Zimbabwe police arrested journalists Blessed Mhlanga and Chengeto Chidi, beating Mhlanga in the process, and held them for the weekend simply for doing their jobs and covering authorities attempt to arrest a member of parliament, said Angela Quintal, CPJs Africa program coordinator, in New York. To add insult to injury, police have also filed trumped-up charges against the journalists and bystander Moses Hakata, who sought to help them. Prosecutors should immediately drop the case against all three defendants and stop wasting the courts time and resources.

At that court hearing, authorities charged the journalists under sections of the Electoral Regulations Statutory Instrument (SI) 21 of 2005 barring photography within polling stations while voting is in progress, according to news reports and another statement by the Media Institute of Southern Africa, which CPJ reviewed.

The journalists pleaded not guilty and were released after each paying bail of 20,000 Zimbabwean dollars (US$62), according to those sources.

If convicted, they could face up to one year in prison and a fine of up to 70,000 Zimbabwean dollars (US$193), according to Muchineripi and the Zimbabwean criminal code register of fines.

Authorities also filed alternative charges accusing the journalists of disorderly conduct in a polling station, which would be pursued if they are acquitted of the photography charges, according to Muchineripi and a tweet by Mhlanga. If convicted of disorderly conduct, the journalists would face a fine of up to 20,000 Zimbabwean dollars (US$62), according to the Electoral Act.

Authorities also charged the journalists under Section 147(f) of the Electoral Act, which relates to the use of bands, music, or other noise-emitting devices near a polling place, but dropped that charge during the court hearing, according to their lawyer and Mhlanga.

Mhlanga filed a complaint against the police officer who assaulted him and damaged his phone, Muchineripi said. Police returned his broken phone at the request of his lawyers, but kept one of Chidis phones and a News Day camera, saying they were evidence, according to Mhlanga and Muchineripi.

I thought about quitting my job as a journalist and told Blessed about it, but I now feel more resolved to go on doing the work I love, Chidi told CPJ.

When CPJ called police spokesperson Paul Nyathi, he declined to comment. CPJ called and sent text messages to Zimbabwe Electoral Commission spokesperson Jasper Mangwana for comment, but did not receive any replies.
Under the auspices of the WCO/JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency) Joint Project, the Second Working Group Activity (sub-regional workshop) of the Master Trainers Programme (MTP) on Customs Valuation (CV) and HS Classification (HS) was held at the WCO Regional Training Center in Suva, Fiji, in a hybrid format, from 25 to 29 April 2022. The Workshop, hosted by Fiji Revenue and Customs Service, gathered the same 20 participants from six (6) Customs administrations in the Pacific Islands. These participants had joined the MTP in its first virtual sub-regional activity from 27 September to 1 October for CV and 18 to 22 October for HS, 2021.

This activity is the second in a series of 5 working group activities, benefitting six (6) Customs administrations in the Pacific Islands, namely Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Timor-Leste, Tonga, and Vanuatu, with the objective to enhance their capacities related to CV/HS. The Master Trainer Programme is a joint endeavour under the WCO/JICA Joint Project to develop sustainable and self-contained training capacity within the Customs administrations by developing (1) a pool of well-experienced trainers and (2) regionally tailor-made training materials and program to be used by these trainers.

This second working group activity (WG2) provided the working group members with the opportunity to understand and apply the fundamentals of competency-based training and aimed at equipping them to play their role as competency builders in the area of CV/HS. Using the WCO Train the Trainers material according to the competency approach, the focus was laid on critical areas such as the competency-based training cycle and principles, the adult learning cycle, the development of training material, self-awareness and self-development as a trainer. In addition, experts from the WCO and Japan Customs shared their expertise on technical aspects of CV/HS via their presentations and case studies.

Working group members actively participated in the series of sessions throughout the week. Both the WCO and the JICA welcomed the positive can do attitude, the noteworthy sense of ownership by working group members and their efforts to ensure sustainable capacity development in the Customs administrations of the Pacific Islands. All the efforts and exchanges provided by the working group members seem very promising for the progression of the MTP and the future application of the capacities newly developed within the Pacific islands in the Asia/Pacific region.

For more information, please, contact capacity.building@wcoomd.org.
Ukraine has indicted a Russian soldier  one of over 600 suspects identified for alleged atrocities  in what will be its first war crimes trial over Russia's invasion.

Ukraine's top prosecutor has charged a Russian soldier in the killing of an unarmed Ukrainian civilian in the north-eastern village of Chupakhivka on 28 February, four days after the start of the war.

Writing on Facebook, prosecutor-general Iryna Venediktova identified the soldier as Vadin Shyshimarin, 21, a commander of the 4th Guards Tank Division.

According to the prosecutor's office, Shyshimarin and four other soldiers were fleeing an attack by Ukranian defense forces in a stolen car, and Shyshimarin was ordered to shoot at a 62-year-old man "so that he would not report them" to Ukranian troops.

Shyshimarin is accused of firing a Kalashnikov through the car window at the man, who was riding a bicycle on the sidewalk near his home while speaking on the phone. He died instantly.

Venediktova's office did not say when the trial would start, but that Shyshimarin, who is in custody, could get up to 15 years in prison if found guilty.

Volodymyr Yavorskyy, of the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, said the group will be closely following the trial to see if it is fair and follows proper court proceedings, even during wartime.

Thousands of alleged war crimes

Venediktova's office has said it has received reports over 10,000 alleged war crimes and has identified 622 suspects.

Many of the alleged crimes came to light last month after Russian forces stopped withdrew from around Kyiv, exposing mass graves and streets strewn with bodies, like in Bucha.

Civilians have reported killings, rape and torture, and Ukraine has repeatedly accused Russian troops of committing atrocities.

The International Criminal Court opened war crimes investigations in Ukraine in March, at the request of 39 countries, including all EU member states.

United Nations meetings on Ukraine

The UN Human Rights Council is due to hold a special session on Thursday on "the deterioration of the human rights situation in Ukraine", the same day as a new public meeting by the UN Security Council.

France and Mexico have requested briefings from the UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs and the United Nations Children's Fund during what will be the 16th Security Council meeting on the war in Ukraine.

(with wires)
Mr Kevin Brosnahan, Press Attache at the US Embassy in Ghana, has entreated journalists to remain focused, firm, and fearless of intimidation in course of their duties.

Professional journalists are on the side of truth, so don't give up, be careful, be cautious, double-check your sources and don't be in a hurry to publish, but be in a hurry to be right, he said.

Mr Brosnahan said this in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) when he represented the Deputy Chief of Mission of the Embassy, Madam Nicole Chulick, at the commemoration of the 2022 World Press Freedom in Accra.

He was speaking to the 2022 Global Press Freedom Index released by the Reporters Without Borders, where Ghana dropped from 30th position to 60th among 180 countries, with a 100 per cent decline.

The index was reached by reflecting press freedom complexities in the political context, legal framework, economic and socio-cultural context and security.

Mr Brosnahan, who expressed contentment with discussions generated on varied platforms on how journalists could better be protected, called on government and the public to play key roles in ensuring the safety of journalists who were crucial element in promoting democracy and national development.

I believe the Government of Ghana is interested in improving the situation. We have to look at intimidation of journalists, how they are treated and threatened with violence. Those were the issues of concern raised by the index, he added.

Mr Affail Monney, the President, GJA, said dropping in ranking had been anticipated due to a confluence of anti-media factors, however, he said the Association did not expect the drop to be so precipitous  fall from third to 10th in Africa, and 30th to 60th worldwide, a 100 per cent decline.

We watched with shudder and heard with shiver, merciless arrests and reckless attacks and animalistic disregard for the rights of a number of journalists in the line of duty.

The deterministic outcome has been as sharp deterioration of the safety of journalists. Death threats rained on investigative journalists also went uninvestigated, let alone punished, while law enforcement officers who were supposed to protect journalists rather brutalised them, he noted.

Mr Monney noted that three years on, the assassination of Ahmed Suale in the most heinous of circumstances had been a stain of Ghana's reputation as a land of freedom and justice, a citadel of media freedom and a beacon of democratic accomplishment in Africa.

Assurance upon assurance of arresting the perpetrators have remained a hollow rhetoric, he added.

The GJA President said nonetheless, the global index still recognised Ghana as a regional pillar of democratic stability.

The drive for resurgence of the media, he said, called for a clear, radical and resolute stance to deal surgically with the cancerous spread of impunity.

He explained that impunity ignited a self- propelling and re-energising cycle, which became hellishly difficult to defeat, if not tackled from the root through application of the law fairly and squarely, to all offenders, at all times, regardless of their partisan stripes, material wealth or social standing.

Mr Monney who bemoaned the long 'incubation' of the Broadcasting Bill designed to address the lingering challenges on the airwaves, said it was also crucial to orchestrate a conversation to take a hard look at the ownership structure of the media.

That was because ownership controlled the media to the extent of dictating content to the professionals they employed, he said, adding: We dare say that this issue poses the greatest threat to media freedom in modern memory.

Mr Monney said it was also time to consider the poor conditions of service of journalists.

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) bluntly puts it that there can be no press freedom if journalists exist in conditions of corruption, poverty or fear, he said.

In the face of the cost of living challenges, the time has come, more than ever before, to address the flip-flop poverty in the media, Mr Monney stated.

GNA
12.05.2022 LISTEN

The head pastor of Life Worship Centre, Rev Cristian Kwabena Andrews, has blamed his colleague pastors for the web of problems the country finds itself.

According to him, many of his colleague pastors have distanced themselves from the truth.

The leader and founder of the Ghana Union Movement (GUM), popularly known as Osofo Kyiriabosom, told Accra100.5FMs morning show Ghana Yensom hosted by Kwame Obeng Sarkodie on Thursday, 12 May 2022 that pastors preach the existence of heaven when they know there is nothing like heaven.

According to him, many of these pastors are quick to seek medical treatment abroad when they suffer minor illnesses like Malaria.

So, as a pastor who has been preaching about the existence of heaven and urging congregants to seek the path of heaven, why seek medical attention when you are sick? he queried.

If there is a place like heaven and sweeter than earth, why dont you die and go? he asked.

He maintained that many of the pastors are afraid to die yet they preach the existence of heaven to their followers thereby brainwashing them with their non-existent doctrines.

You can only go to heaven when you die, so, why refuse to die? he stressed.

He noted that while these pastors are building mansions and driving nice cars, they tell the congregation to leave their jobs and come to the house of God, thereby impoverishing them at the end of the day.

He said pastors and politicians are part of the problems confronting Ghanaians.

Source: Classfmonline.com
Dr Akinwumi Adesina, President of the African Development Bank (AfDB), has encouraged the Government of Ghana to empower more women economically, socially, politically and financially to achieve enormous progress.

Women run Africa and nobody can fly with one wing, so when Africa fully empowers all its women economically, politically, socially and financially, Africa will take off like a jet, he said.

The AfDB President said this when he led a team from the Bank to inspect the Pokuase Interchange project on Wednesday.

The Pokuase Interchange project was jointly funded by the AfDB with 84 million dollars and the Government of Ghana with about 11 million dollars and kicked off in July 2018, to promote sustainable economic growth, convenience and safe transportation for motorists.

It was opened to traffic in July 2021 by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

Dr Adesina, speaking on other components of the project like rehabilitation of the Pobiman Women's Group Centre to train women in pastry, bread baking, soap and bead making, and the rehabilitation of the Manchie Gari Factory for the processing of cassava into gari and starch, encouraged the Government to empower more women.

He said that could make the nation achieve her targets and a positive milestone in socio-economic development.

Mrs Selina Avevor, the Assembly Member for Kuntunse Electoral Area, Ga West Municipality, expressed gratitude to the Government for its interventions in promoting women's development in the project area.

Mrs Avevor, also the President of the Pobiman Women's Association, appealed to the Government to complete phase two of the Women's Group Centre project it had initiated to promote the training of more women in vocational skills.

She said the Association had currently trained more than 40 women in the Municipality and stated its readiness to train more with Government's support.

GNA
12.05.2022 LISTEN

The National Executive Committee (NEC) of the Peoples National Convention (PNC) has sacked its 2020 flag bearer David Apasera and the partys Chairman Moses Dani Baah, for breaching the party's constitution.

The decision was communicated by the party through a communique issued after a meeting held in Accra on Thursday, 12 May 2022.

The communique said: After a comprehensive discussion of the courts ruling on the matter brought against the party by Messrs David Apasera and Moses Dani Baah, NEC concluded that the duo have violated Article 14 (a) of the PNC Constitution which states: Any member of the party who is aggrieved by the partys action and inaction shall within twenty-one (21) days, first seek redress from the internal dispute resolution mechanism of the party and shall have a further right of appeal to congress.

The NEC, the party said, also took notice of a purported Standing Committee meeting which was unduly conveyed and presided over by Messrs Apasera and Dani Baah on May 7, 2022, adding: The said meeting was attended by some members of the party despite an official caution from the party leadership.

Consequently, the party said following their penchant for breaching the constitution of the PNC  a behaviour that has obviously disrupted the pursuit of our collective goals and derailed the progress of the party, the membership of Messrs David Apasera and Moses Dani Baah has been terminated.

This is in accordance with the provisions of the constitution of the PNC, which states in Article 14 (b) that: A member of the party, who is in breach of (a) above, shall be liable to dismissal under this constitution, except otherwise agreed by the National Delegates Congress upon an appeal by the said member of the Party.

Additionally, the PNC NEC has asked the party members who attended the unduly conveyed standing committee meeting to step aside from their respective positions pending a disciplinary hearing.

Read the full communique below:

COMMUNIQUE AT THE END OF THE PNC'S NATIONAL EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE (NEC) MEETING HELD IN ACCRA ON MAY 12, 2022

1. Having constituted a majority of a quorum and pursuant to Article 45 of the Constitution of the Peoples National Convention (PNC), the National Executive Committee (NEC) held a meeting in Accra to, among other things, deliberate and decide upon issues of concern to the party.

2. NEC successfully reviewed membership of the various Functional Committees namely, Legal and Constitutional, Research and Policy, International and Diasporas Relations, Finance and Fundraising, and Disciplinary committees. This is to promote inclusivity and ensure that members are chosen on the basis of their knowledge and experience.

3. After a comprehensive discussion of the courts ruling on the matter brought against the party by Messrs David Apasera and Moses Dani Baah, NEC concluded that the duo have violated Article 14 (a) of the PNC Constitution which states: Any member of the party who is aggrieved by the partys action and inaction shall within twenty-one (21) days, first seek redress from the internal dispute resolution mechanism of the party and shall have a further right of appeal to congress.

4. NEC also took notice of a purported Standing Committee meeting which was unduly conveyed and presided over by Messrs Apasera and Dani Baah on May 7, 2022. The said meeting was attended by some members of the party despite an official caution from the party leadership.

Consequently, NEC duly adopted the following, which are now in full force and effect:

(a) That, following their penchant for breaching the constitution of the PNC  a behaviour that has obviously disrupted the pursuit of our collective goals and derailed the progress of the party, the membership of Messrs David Apasera and Moses Dani Baah has been terminated. This is in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution of the PNC, which states in Article 14 (b) that: A member of the party, who is in breach of (a) above, shall be liable to dismissal under this constitution, except otherwise agreed by the National Delegates Congress upon an appeal by the said member of the Party.

(b) That the following members who attended the purported Standing Committee meeting step aside from their respective positions pending disciplinary hearing:

i. Hajia Hajara Ali  1st Vice-Chairperson

ii. Alhaji Omar Bekure  3rd Vice Chairperson

iii. Mr. Abass Nuhu  National Organiser

iv. Mr Sampson Asampana  Chairman, Bono Region

v. Mr. Richard Dzreke  Chairman, Oti Region

vi. Mr Abraham Kaba Hirohito  Chairman, Ashanti Region

vii. Mr. Siba Salifu Sakibu  Secretary, Greater Accra Region

viii. Mallam Yakubu Tahir  Chairman, Western Region

ix. Mr Arimeyao Ali  Organiser, Ashanti Region

x. Mr. Oliver Ganaku  Secretary, Volta Region

xi. Mr Abdul Samed Nurideen  Secretary, Bono Region

xii. Ms Hidaya S. Ibrahim  National Womens Organiser Signed Members of NEC  PNC
A thirteen-member committee has been instituted to come out with guidelines to help absorb Ghanaian students from Ukraine into Ghanaian Universities to continue their studies.

The committee, chaired by Dr Nsiah Asare, Special Advisor to the President on Health issues, has four weeks to submit its report to Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum, the Education Minister.

The committee has representation from the Students Representative Council (SRC), Ministry of Education, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, Ministry of Health, Ghana Tertiary Education Commission (GTEC), Medical and Dental Council, Ghana Scholarship Secretariat, Vice Chancellors of Medical Schools, the Rector of College of Physicians and Surgeons, among others.

Speaking at a stakeholder's consultative meeting to address displaced Ghanaian Medical students from Ukraine, in Accra, Dr Adutwum urged the team to work hard to ensure that the students were placed in schools where they would fit well to continue their education.

The meeting was to update and explain the essential problem at stake, and discuss plans for the immediate integration of the Ghanaian Medical students from Ukraine into the Ghana Medical Education System.

The Minister reminded the committee to be innovative in their findings and consider creating a pathway for some of the students who might have some weaknesses in some areas of their studies so they could cope with the Ghanaian education system.

The Education Minister urged the committee to work hard and make sure all the students were placed so they could continue to their education.

Dr Adutwum, who is the Member of Parliament for Bosomtwe in the Ashanti region, assured that everything possible was being done to ensure that the Government's dream of hitting the 40 per cent Gross Tertiary Enrolment Ratio (GTER) mark was attained by 2030.

Dr Nsiah Asare, on behalf of the committee, pledged to work hard to ensure that the students were placed in the institutions and report submitted on schedule.

A total of 132 Ghanaian students were rescued from Ukraine when the Russia/Ukraine war started with about 28 of them on government scholarship.

GNA
Some former toll booth attendants in Accra who were laid off have massed up at the Ministry of Roads and Highways on Thursday, May 12, 2022, to demand the payment of their five-month salaries and reassignment.

It followed governments directive that the collection of road and bridge tolls at all locations nationwide should be stopped.

Government assured to reassign the attendants and continue paying them their salaries during the waiting period, but the government has reneged on its promise.

This rendered many, including physically challenged persons, jobless.

The workers are thus reiterating calls for government to fulfil its promise by giving them jobs or else they will spend their nights at the premises of the Ministry of Roads.

I have been sitting at home for a while now with no money. I have not been able to pay my rent. So today, I am not leaving here if there is no good news. Some of my colleagues are persons with disabilities who have families. We are not leaving here with no jobs. We are here to sleep.

The government has said the tollbooth workers would be retrained and reassigned, and that none of them will lose their jobs, as they would continue to withdraw their salaries.

Our next line of action will be after we have heard from our leaders who have gone to meet the Ministers, another aggrieved worker said.

The Ministry of Roads and Highways directed the discontinuation of the collection of tolls on all public roads and bridges across the country from Thursday, November 18, 2021, at 12:00am.

The directive followed the announcement by the Finance Ministry of the scrapping of tolls on all public roads.

---citinewsroom
The suspects

12.05.2022 LISTEN

Alhaji Shani Mohammed, a New Patriotic Party (NPP) Chairmanship aspirant in the North East Region who was arrested in connection with illegal possession of firearms has been granted a GHS50,000 bail by the Tamale District Magistrate Court.

He has since been charged with conspiracy to commit crime and possession of firearms and ammunition without authority.

Alhaji Shani Mohammed is expected to reappear in court on May 20, 2022.

Alhaji Shani Mohammed, a New Patriotic Party (NPP) Chairmanship aspirant in the North East region was arrested by the Northern Regional Police Command in connection with illegal possession of firearms.

The North East NPP aspirant's arrest follows the arrest of some three persons with weapons at Kukuabila near Nasia in the West Mamprusi municipality of the North East region.

The suspects Amadu Alhassan, a native of Tamale, Atito Godstime, and Seidu Ado Bala, both Nigerians were arrested with a loaded AK 47 riffle, a foreign-made pistol and ammunition concealed in the vehicle that they were travelling with.

The Northern Regional Crime Officer, Supt. Bernard Baba Ananga, who confirmed the arrest of the suspects to DGN Online said one of the suspects mentioned the NPP chairmanship aspirant as the one they were transporting the weapons to in the North East region.

According to him, the NPP chairmanship aspirant is in the custody of the police and his statement has been taken and will be arraigned before court after investigations.

He indicated that the NPP aspirant admitted that he knew one of the suspects arrested with the AK 47 riffle.

Supt. Ananga disclosed that when the police interrogated the three suspects, they revealed that the NPP chairmanship aspirant asked them to bring the weapons to the North East Region.

The suspects are saying that is it Ahaji Shani who told them to bring the firearms to him so he has to answer further questions.

The Northern Regional Crime Officer, however denied claims that the case is linked to an assassination plot in the North East region.

We are not investigating an assassination attempt against any person as far as the command is concern, nobody has made any complaint about any assassination we are investigating a case of possession of firearms, he said.

---Citinewsroom
Captain Etoenyo Onassis Bankas, General Secretary, Ghana Merchant Navy Officers Association (GMNOA) noted that Ghanas economy was growing and the demand for maritime shipping was likely to increase steadily.

"This is hindering the unlocking of Ghanas Maritime economic potential, and thus the low level of employment of Ghanaians in the Maritime sector, Capt. Bankas stated this during a seminar at the African Unity Auditorium of the Regional Maritime University (RMU) at Nungua in the Greater Accra Region.

The seminar was organized by the GMNOA in collaboration with the Regional Maritime University Alumni Association (RMUAA) which was on the theme: Your Place in the Maritime Labour Market," as monitored by the Communication for Development and Advocacy Consult (CDA Consult) at Nungua.

He said the association seek to bring the maritime market to light to whet the investment appetite of public and private sector organizations to invest more into businesses in the maritime market.

Dr Kofi Mbiah former Chief Executive of Ghana Shippers Authority called for a comprehensive national maritime policy to guide the maritime industry beyond maritime territorial sovereignty and ownership rights.

Beyond cabotage, we have to have a national maritime policy to guide local content, employment generation, labour, legal issues, oil and gas, clean beaches; and for the life of the mariner or seafarer after retirement from active service. Dr Mbiah said, explaining Cabotage is right to operate sea, air, or other transport services within a particular territory.

Dr Mbiah, who is also currently Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Chamber of Shipping, in a lecture and a panel discussion, stressed that Ghana must develop and adopt a comprehensive national maritime policy that goes beyond cabotage, and new legislation and review of regulation.

Dr Mbiah who is also a Maritime Law and Management Expert called for

massive investment in the maritime industry and value chain activities in the blue economy as he explained that there was the need to take more advantage of the marine and water resources of the earth because water covered two-thirds of the earths surface, and land a third.

Among the area, he identified for more investment are research, hospitality and recreation, husbandry, defence and environmental development and protection, which he said should be guided by a national maritime policy.

Dr Mbiah however wondered why many people would not go into research despite the advent of the Internet and other modern research tools, systems and mechanisms.

He called for the development of technologies and skills for current and emerging opportunities in the maritime industry; Levels of efficiency must go up, Dr Mbiah stressed.

Dr Jethro Brook, the Acting Vice-Chancellor of the Regional Maritime University (RMU) also reiterated the need for collaboration between the institution and all necessary and potential industry actors to create opportunities in the maritime industry for national development.

According to him, this would unravel avenues toward ending the high level of unemployment drastically.

Dr Brook encouraged Ghanaian seafarers to embrace and support the GMNOA agenda and urged every alumnus of the University to be interested hence getting involved in the activities of RMUAA as the associations play crucial roles in the development and continued existence of the University.

Representatives from Ghana Ports and Harbour Authority, Ghana Shippers Authority, Ghana Export Promotion Authority, the Ghana Maritime Authority, and the Ministry of Labour.

Others from the private sector were: Kudu Logistics, COSCO Shipping, Bernard Schulte Marine Services, Tullow, Enterprise Life, Assure Trustee, Masser-Afrique, NUSPAW- TUC, Members of the RMUAA, Members of the GMNOA, students of RMU among others attended the seminar.
Mr. Emmanuel Wilson Junior, Chief Crusader of the Crusaders Against Corruption, Ghana has diagnosed the state of the nations fight against corruption and concluded that the problem Ghana has with the fight against corruption is that we have failed to relook at the 1992 Constitution which is the biggest hindrance to the fight against corruption.

The 1992 Constitution gives state institutions powers to fight against corruption with the left hand and uses the right hand to take away those powers.

Speaking on the topic: Is the fight against corruption: a Mirage or reality? At the Ghana News Agency-Tema Industrial News Hub Boardroom Dialogue platform, which was monitored by the Communication for Development and Advocacy Consult (CDA Consult) in Tema, Mr. Wilson said too much power is given to the executive through the President.

He, therefore, described the 1992 Constitution of Ghana as a bane to the fight against corruption as it has disarmed state institutions that were mandated to fight the canker, the constitution consolidates too much power in the President who is expected to appoint every head of state-owned institutions including the institutions mandated to fight corruption.

Mr. Wilson stressed, if a president or government has all the authority to appoint and disappoint then it was expected that the appointee, especially those to institutions mandated to fight against corruption are covertly disarmed.

He indicated that with this when one engaged in a corrupt act all you need was to align with a political party and that would guarantee your freedom.

Mr. Wilson Jnr questioned why both former President John Dramani Mahama and current President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo were yet to make any effort to see to the implementation of the Constitution Review Commissions Report after the demise of the late President Professor John Evans Atta Mills.

He deduced that politicians would not want an amendment to the constitution because of the power they enjoy when in government, stressing that till we decide that as a nation we will put pressure on them to let us have an amendment of the constitution, the fight against corruption will be a mirage.

The Chief Crusader said the fight against corruption was a fight for all and therefore called for a mass movement of citizens to call for a constitutional review to move it from a Political Constitution to that of the Development Constitution.

He described Ghanas 1992 Constitution as a Political Constitution explaining that it seeks to protect the politicians, thats why we have an indemnity clause in it, and it gives unreasonable power to the president, with this, every institution that is built from it, have the aim to protect the politician.

Mr. Francis Ameyibor, Tema Regional Manager of the Ghana News Agency, on his part said the issues of corruption affected everyone, explaining that one way a person could either be a giver, a taker, or a corruption victim.

Mr Ameyibor said even though the laws of Ghana have stated explicitly that both the giver and the taker were all guilty of the offense, the talk of corruption mostly bordered on the taker while the giver was left off the hook.

He called for concerted efforts to empower state bodies to undertake their job within a protected environment.
Protais Mpiranya, whose 2006 death was revealed by UN prosecutors on Thursday, was on the run for years, with investigators eager to bring him to justice for his alleged role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Charged with war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity, Mpiranya became the top priority for investigators in May 2020, following the arrest of alleged genocide financier Felicien Kabuga near Paris.

But unbeknownst to them, Mpiranya, who was living in Zimbabwe's capital Harare under an alias, contracted tuberculosis in 2006 and died on October 5 that year.

His family went to great lengths to hide his whereabouts, concealing the fact of his death and even preparing a tombstone that misidentified him, to ensure that few would know his true fate.

"They repeatedly provided false statements to investigators, and urged those who knew of his presence and death in Harare to make false statements in the event of a hearing," said the Mechanism of International Criminal Tribunals, which oversees prosecution of those responsible for the genocide.

Mpiranya, who was believed to be around 46 at the time of his death, was accused of commanding a presidential guard implicated in high-profile murders during the 1994 slaughter which left some 800,000 dead.

The presidential guard was a feared outfit accused of targeted assassinations during the 100-day massacre of Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

In particular, Mpiranya was allegedly among those who ordered the murder of then prime minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, 10 Belgian soldiers protecting her, and several other leading politicians and their families on April 7, 1994, in the early hours of the genocide.

Wave of assassinations

The evening before, a plane carrying Rwanda's president Juvenal Habyarimana had been shot down on its approach to Kigali International Airport.

The president had just returned from a regional meeting in Tanzania, where he agreed to push ahead with the terms of the 1993 Arusha Accords which were meant to end a three-year war between the Hutu government in Kigali, and a Tutsi rebellion.

Following Habyarimana's assassination, an emergency meeting was called between top brass of the Rwandan Armed Forces, senior police officials, the UN military, and civilian leaders.

The latter made the case that Uwilingiyimana, a moderate Hutu and Rwanda's first female prime minister, had legal authority to take control of the country and suggested she make a national address to that effect.

But Rwanda's radical Hutu leadership had other ideas.

On the morning of April 7, Mpiranya and two other military officials "ordered their subordinates... to search for the prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, in order to kill her", according to the prosecutor's indictment for the former International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).

Uwilingiyimana was sexually assaulted and murdered and left in the street, naked, in full view of passersby. The savage attack was overseen by a captain of the battalion of the presidential guard, the indictment said.

But her murder was only the first in a wave of assassinations targeting prominent figures and politicians who supported the Arusha Accords.

Among those killed were the president of the Constitutional Court, the minister of agriculture, the minister of information, and the vice-president of the Social Democratic Party, who was being considered for the post of president of the transitional National Assembly.

The killings aimed "to create a political vacuum and derail the implementation of the Arusha Accords", read the indictment, which directly implicated the presidential guard in the attacks.

'Fear of being discovered'

Mpiranya hailed from the former province of Gisenyi, in northern Rwanda, also the homeland of Habyarimana and several other top-ranking hardline Hutu military officials.

After graduating from military college in Kigali in 1983, he was assigned to the national police force.

In 1991, as the army was fighting the rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), led by today's President Paul Kagame, Mpiranya was transferred to the presidential guard battalion and two years later was promoted to commander.

In July 1994, after the army's defeat at the hands of the rebels brought about the end of the genocide, Mpiranya began a long journey into exile that would take him to several African countries.

In 1998, he fought alongside Congolese forces in a campaign against rebels backed by Rwandan troops, has said the non-profit African Rights, which has studied the genocide.

He also travelled to Zimbabwe on behalf of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a militia partly composed of former Hutus implicated in the genocide, and accused of exploiting the mineral wealth of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

In September 2002, the ICTR issued an arrest warrant against Mpiranya, prompting him to seek refuge in Zimbabwe, where he spent the next four years, living under a false name in an affluent neighbourhood in Harare.

Despite access to a fake Ugandan passport, his status as an international fugitive severely limited his opportunities for travel, with his wife and daughters living in the UK.

"His last years were marked by anguish and fear of being discovered and of being tried for his crimes, like many other former Rwandan officials indicted for their roles in the 1994 genocide," the UN prosecutors said.
The Abossey Okai Spare Parts Dealers Association has kicked against another group calling itself the Concerned Spare Parts Dealers who are protesting governments decision to relocate them to Afienya.

The association says the current place of business has outlived its usefulness, hence, the relocation to a safe and conducive environment is in order.

The Greater Accra Regional Coordinating Council as part of efforts to decongest the capital has announced plans to relocate the traders to Afienya in the Ningo Prampram District of the Greater Accra Region.

Addressing the media, the Chairman of the Abossey Okai Spare Parts Dealers Association, Clement Boateng, said the relocation is in the interest of all.

The security situation is bad, sanitation is not the best. Pilfering is rising., and customers can't even get a place to park their cars to patronize our business.

Mr. Boateng also criticized the spare parts dealers, who threatened to demonstrate if the government fails to rescind its decision to relocate them.

It is an indictment on them. We want the whole world to know that our members are solidly behind us and are in full support of the project.

We cannot let this project slip out of our hands because of the selfish and parochial interest of the minority to the detriment of the majority, Mr. Boateng said.

---citinewsroom
French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian has been summoned by a court in Bamako as part of an investigation into an alleged "attack on public property and other offences" dating back to 2015, concerning the manufacture of Malian biometric passports. This comes at a time of tense relations between France and Mali.

The Bamako court has summoned Le Drian to present himself on 20 June at 8am "for a matter concerning him".

Le Drian and his son Thomas are suspected of "attacking public property and other offences at the expense of the Malian state".

The summons was prompted by a complaint from Maliko - a civil society association close to the military junta - regarding a biometric passport concession dating from 2015.

Maliko accuses Le Drian, who was then France's defence minister, of having "taken advantage of his position to twist the arm of [former president] IBK [Ibrahim Boubacar Keita]", to accept that Oberthur, a Breton company now called Idemia, would win the contract to manufacture Malian biometric passports, replacing a Canadian company.

Maliko believes that "Malian rules and procedures have been blithely violated".

'Umpteenth provocation'

A French diplomatic source told RFI that the French embassy in Bamako has not been officially called upon, denouncing what it called the "umpteenth provocation intended to put a spanner in the works."

However, a Malian magistrate reportedly maintained that the summons of France's foreign minister has "no legal basis".

Relations between Bamako and Paris have deteriorated of late, due - in particular - to the arrival of the Russian mercenary group Wagner on Malian soil.

The authorities in Bamako - dominated by the military, which came to power in a coup d'etat in August 2020 - declared earlier this month, that they were breaking off their defence accords with France and other European partners.

The accords were put in place nearly a decade ago to help Mali's army in it's fight against jihadist movements across the Sahel.
12.05.2022 LISTEN

A fetish priest based in Enyan Abowinum in the Central Region, Kwesi Tando has shot and killed himself after murdering his wife Abena Ketsewa and nine-year-old son, Richmond Tando over some marital issues.

The bloody incident occurred on Wednesday, May 11, 2022, during late hours.

From the information gathered from some residents, the fetish priest in recent weeks has been having problems with his wife.

Close relatives say the problems started when the priest decided he was going to go in for another woman.

From there on, the couple who are now deceased never saw eye to eye which affected their marital home.

His eldest daughter narrates that before the sad incident, his father had threatened to shoot all the five children.

Fortunately, only one of the children was around during the time the fetish priest lost it and decided to commit the murders.

His body, together with that of his wife and the son have since been deposited at the Cape Coast Teaching Hospital Mortuary for autopsy and preservation.

The other children of the deceased have been assigned to a Counselor to help deal with any trauma they are experiencing after the incident.
12.05.2022 LISTEN

A former teaching assistant to the KNUST Senior Lecturer, Dr. Wilberforce Aggrey, has told the Kumasi High Court that the embattled lecturer attempted to influence him into changing certain portions of his statement to the police regarding the disappearance of his wife.

Dr. Wilberforce Aggrey, who was the head of the Petroleum Engineering Department at KNUST until his arrest, has since last year been standing trial over the disappearance of his wife.

A witness in the case, Isaac Offei Aduamah, who was the lecturers teaching assistant has contradicted the claims made by the lecturer with respect to where the lecturer was when the wife went missing.

Giving a blow-by-blow account of where the lecturer, the lecturers kids and the three teaching assistants were, Isaac Offei Aduamah stressed that the three teaching assistants slept with kids at their hostel on 30th August 2021, the same day the lecturers wife, Rhodaline Amoah-Darko is said to have disappeared.

This goes contrary to the statement the lecturer gave to the police that he slept in his house with the teaching assistants and the kids, but the wife did not sleep in the house that fateful day.

On the 30th day of August, 2021, the 1st accused brought his son to the hostel and left for a meeting he had that morning. The 1st accused after returning from his meeting took his son to hospital together with Ababio (of the teaching assistants). He dropped them back at the hostel from the hospital and informed me that he had some work to attend to and asked me to take care of his son. I later picked up his girls from school and took them to the hostel to join their brother. That evening, the 1st accused (Dr. Wilberforce Aggrey), asked me to get him food and also take out the kids for ice cream. After buying his food, I took it to his house and left. That night and after getting the ice cream for the kids, I slept at the boys hostel together with the kids, Ababio (a teaching assistant) and Michael (a teaching assistant), Isaac Offei Aduamah noted in his witness statement to the court.

The teaching assistant added that on the next day (31st August, 2021), they took the kids to their lecturers house to prepare them for school.

He says the lecturer then informed them that he had killed a snake which he showed to them in a polythene bag.

He says Dr. Wilberforce Aggrey and one of the teaching assistants went to buy anti-snake repellant which was applied around the house after they returned.

The 1st accused person left the house together with Ababio to buy anti-snake repellant and same was applied around the house after they returned. The 1st accused asked us to take the kids to the mall and that he would join us later at the mall. When we got to the mall, I received a call from the 1st accused person informing me that he would no longer be coming to the mall to join us as he had to go and see a friend. He also asked us to take the kids back to the hostel after the mall due to the smell of the anti-snake repellant.

Isaac Offei Aduamah in his witness statement added that, Dr. Wilberforce Aggrey after some days reported to the police that the wife is missing.

According to the police, the husband reported to them on 2nd September 2021 that his wife, a senior lands officer of the Lands Commission in Kumasi, Rhodaline Amoah-Darko was missing.

Isaac Offei Aduamah says after the lecturer wrote his statement, one of the teaching assistants also wrote his statement, but since he had travelled to Accra at the time, he wrote his later on.

He says the lecturer showed him a picture of the statement by the other teaching assistant and asked him to memorize it to ensure that there are no inconsistencies.

He adds that the first accused person also made him write a mock statement for him to vet before he gave his final statement to the police. According to him, the lecturer even tried to influence his statement, but he did not heed to the request.

The 1st accused person also made me write a mock statement for him to vet before I gave my final statement to the police. Although the 1st accused person tried to influence my statement to the police, I did not heed his request and wrote my statement truthfully and in accordance with how the events occurred.

Meanwhile, while being interrogated by lawyers for Dr. Wilberforce Aggrey, Isaac Offei Aduamah admitted that since he was overwhelmed based on the happenings, it is possible that he may have forgotten the sequence of events.

This teaching assistants claim that the lecturer did not sleep at home on the night of the supposed disappearance of his wife, has already been established by one of the teaching assistants.

---citinewsroom
12.05.2022 LISTEN

The Paramount Chief of Kpone Traditional Council has downgraded politicians on the integrity scorecard saying they cant be trusted.

Nii Tetteh Otu II, therefore, cautions Ghanaians, especially the youth to desist from entrusting their future to the hands of politicians, stressing politicians over the years have not been sincere with the masses.

The Kpone Paramount Chief in an interview monitored by the Communication for Development and Advocacy Consult (CDA Consult) at Kpone said that based on the political history of this country, most of the promises of politicians whilst in opposition becomes a mirage when they win political power.

Nii Out II added that the current economic situation in the country was evidence that politicians could not be trusted, saying the youth must take their destiny into their own hands, work hard, entrepreneurship, and seeking for opportunities in the global world system should be the focus of the youth.

The Kpone Paramount Chief, said no government in Ghana has performed better than the first president of the First Republic Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumahs government adding that the leaders after Dr. Nkrumah did not consider the needs of the masses as their priority.

Nii Otu II explained that Ghana has many natural resources which could be exploited to develop the country instead of the overreliance on foreign aid and grants which comes mostly with some unpleasant conditions.

He again blamed the current economic crises in the country on the denomination of the local currency in 2007 and the reliance on foreign goods and services.

He said more cedis would be needed now for one to be able to transact business against the other foreign currencies a situation he said has compelled the government to introduce higher denominations into the economy which have made the local currency valueless against the major foreign currencies.

Nii Otu II again hinted that the government should focus its attention on the local resources to alleviate the plight of the people to gain the support of the masses.
Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, has reiterated government's decision not to seek a bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), despite Ghanas current economic challenges.

He said the government is confident in its homegrown solutions in getting the economy to recover.

Speaking at the Minister's Press Briefing in Accra, he said government will keep introducing more measures to raise revenue domestically to sustain the economy.

He however said Ghana continues to enjoy the technical support and advice received from the IMF.

We are members of the fund [IMF] and there are two major points of intervention that we have from the Fund. One is the advice that we get and these programme interventions which bring us some resources. If you see from the budget that we constructed for 2022 and the subsequent announces weve done, clearly the issue of Ghana having the capacity to think through the consolidation exercises and also disciplining itself with regard to the 20% to 30% [expenditure] cut that we have shown clearly is a direction that I guess even in a sense, the fund may be hesitant to push any further, he said.

The minister further said the government is optimistic monies accrued from the implementation of the E-levy will help fix the current budget deficit.

I am confident that E-levy opens a new vista for a tax handle in a way which all Ghanaians will be paying something. I dont know of any program which has technology involved that will not have teething problems, but certainly, the cataclysmic pronouncements by the people from the other side are not happening, he added.

---citinewsroom
Petty offenders serving 24 months and below account for 63% out of more than 1,500 prisoners in the Kumasi Central Prison, an official of the Prison has revealed.

Superintendent of Prisons (SP) Francis Awako, Officer in charge of Reception and Criminal Records, said the issues that brought most of them to the prison in 2021 could have been resolved through Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR).

He was speaking to the media on the sidelines of a stakeholder's roundtable on the need to review the ADR Act and the Legal Aid Commission Act, to allow some petty/minor crimes to be resolved through ADR.

The event was put together by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, an implementing partner of the USAID Justice Sector Support Activity.

Funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the project seeks to eliminate injustices in Ghana's criminal justice system through several interventions.

Participants at the roundtable were from the Department of Social Welfare, Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice, Ghana Prisons Service, Legal Aid Commission, National Commission for Civic Education, the Attorney General's Department and private ADR practitioners.

SP Awako said effective implementation of ADR mechanisms at all levels in the justice delivery system would go a long way to decongest Ghana's prisons.

The huge number of petty offenders being incarcerated is worrying, especially when people are sentenced for crimes that can easily be resolved through ADR, he said.

When some of these people come and add up to the congestion in the prison, it is very worrying knowing for the fact that our resources in taking care of them are very limited.

He, therefore, advocated those petty crimes be resolved outside the courts to limit the number of inmates to ensure effective reformation of prisoners.

Even though ADR mechanisms were available, judges and other actors of the courts were not utilising them when it came to petty offences, he said, and recommended that judges should refer some of those cases to ADR.

GNA
International Girls in ICT Day is a day instituted by the United Nations International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

On 8th April 2011, ITU announced the establishment of an international "Girls in ICT Day", which will be held every year on the fourth Thursday in April.

Girls around the world gathered on 28th April 2011 to celebrate the first annual International Girls in ICT Day. The day celebrates girls' interests and strengths and encourages them to choose a career in information and communication technologies to bridge the gender gap in the ICT sector.

The theme for this years celebration is Access and Safety. For girls and young women to thrive in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) careers, they need safe and reliable access to the internet and digital tools. Girls in ICT Day is celebrated in over 150 countries around the world.

ITU estimates a skills shortfall of over two million jobs in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector within the next five years. Girls and young women who learn coding, apps development, and computer science will not only be well-placed for a successful career in the ICT sector, but ICT skills are rapidly becoming a strong advantage for students in just about any other field they might choose to pursue, the statement noted.

This year IIPGH celebrated this event with girls from the Muslim communities in Achievers Ghana Foundation. The female volunteers came to the venue with laptop computers, and 3D printers and used the occasion to introduce the girls to coding and 3D design.

This years celebration is on the theme: Access & Safety which aims at promoting the need for safe and reliable access to the internet and digital tools for girls and young women. Coding is the language of technology. Just like how most of us learned English, French, and others when we were kids for effective communication with people, coding is a universal language that enables instructions to be translated to computerized machines to act according to the intended commands. In other words, Coding or Computer Programming makes it possible for us to create computer software, apps, and websites. Our browser, Operating System, the apps on our phones, Facebook, and WhatsApp, among others, were developed through Coding.

To prepare the next generation for the 21st-century technological world, the Administrative Director of the Institute of ICT Professionals Ghana (IIPGH) Madam Gifty Mottey led a team of female volunteers from the Institute to mark this years International Girls in ICT Day with a coding workshop for girls at Achievers Ghana Foundation in Maamobi-Nima. The girls between the ages of 6 - 16 years from the Muslim community were very excited to be exposed to coding for the first time. She admonished the girls to embrace coding as it can be used as a tool to step up and become designers, creators, and leaders in this fast-evolving tech world. Its time we build a gender-equitable digital future that meets everybodys needs Madam Mottey emphasized.

She further provided short career guidance to the young ones, some of whom aspire to become fashion designers, doctors, and scientists among others. By learning to code, you can apply the skills to opportunities in some of these career domains as learning to code will not necessarily make you a computer scientist but will help you develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills in every field you find yourselves the Administrative Director of IIPGH disclosed.

IIPGH team of female volunteers in technology came for the workshop fully prepared with over fifty (50) laptops and 3D printers. The team set up their coding tools at the training centre of Achievers Ghana Foundation with the support of their PR Madam Ayisha Mohammed and her team of energic instructors.

The workshop commenced with videos of coding project presentations by other students who participated in similar programs organized by IIPGH. Videos of students online coding programs, and the coding caravan among others played to the participants served as enough motivation as other children their age were able to do similar activities. The testimonials in the videos boosted their morale in readiness for the days activities.

One of the key female volunteers of IIPGH, Madam Muniratu Musah, a female engineer from MTN Ghana who was very instrumental in organizing the workshop delivered the opening remarks. Being an engineer and female STEM advocate, she inspired the girls with her life story and how her determination led her journey to become an engineer in the telecommunication profession. I am the only female engineer in my department therefore be focused on the need to learn programming at a young age, to be able to solve problems, and the benefits for the future, to be creative and innovative, critical and logic thinkers she added.

Ms. Deborah Ofori-Dartey and Ms. Barbara Asiamah who are kids coding education specialists from the Institute of ICT Professionals Ghana helped the girls create exciting games and animations. The practical session was very exciting for the girls as they were taught how to use the scratch programming language to conceptualize and develop their cartons and games. Ms. Ofori-Dartey led a very interactive class and helped the children with the basic concept of programming with scratch software developed by MIT. At the end of the 2hour session, the kids created a ghost game which they played amidst screaming and excitement. They could not believe they just created a game all by themselves and could play it at the same time.

The second programming language, Tinkertoys, which is about designing objects in 3D was led by Ms. Barbara Asiamah, After the Tinkertoys practical session, the girls came in batches around the 3D printers where Ms. Asiamah demonstrated to them how the 3D printer functions. The girls were able to print some of the items designed during the Tinkertoys practical session after learning how to operate the 3G printer. Every child was happy to take home a toy. In total, 43 girls participated in the program and the girls were given gifts to take home.

Background of IIPGH Coding Initiative

Since March 2018, the Institute of ICT Professionals Ghana (IIPGH) with its partners embarked on a major initiative to get children, teenagers, graduates, and professionals to learn Computer Programming or what is being called Coding. The initiative was designed to provide structured training for students starting with kids. To create awareness about the importance of coding, especially for young people, workshops, radio, and television talk shows were organized.

Online Coding Lessons

In April 2020 during the first Coronavirus pandemic lockdown, the Institute of ICT Professionals Ghana in partnership with GoDi Africa moved the coding program online. The lessons which are now being delivered via Zoom have been embraced by both students and parents. For parents, it is convenient as they will not have to drive every weekend to the training centre for their wards coding lessons. The students are also happy with the online lessons because all lessons are recorded and shared with them. This makes it possible for students to playback the entire lesson for revision or to catch up with any session missed. Visit https://iipgh.org/iipgh-coding-project/ for more details.

Author: Gifty Mottey - Administrative Director, Institute of ICT Professionals Ghana (IIPGH)

For comments, contact: [email protected] or Mobile: +233244418192
Mr Samuel Pyne, the Kumasi Metro Chief Executive on Thursday morning, cut the sod for the redevelopment of the Santasi old market into a modern one.

Joined by Otumfuo Sasamohene and the Chief of Santasi as well as the contractor and staff of the Assembly including assemblymen in KMA, the mayor cut sod for work to begin on the 24month long project.

Addressing the chiefs and people including traders earlier during a durbar, Mr Pyne assured that the Assembly would continue to engage stakeholders of the project to ensure a smooth process and construction.

He noted that the development of Santasi Market was the collective responsibility of the government as well as residents, adding that the project would thrive with the support of those involved.

"No single individual or government can develop this country and in this case, Santasi but the support of Chiefs, the people and all stakeholders would ensure that this area in particular, as well as Ghana as a whole, is developed collectively," the Mayor posited.

DETAILS

The Mayor indicated the resolve of the KMA to develop other satellite markets in the city so as to ease congestion in the markets and generally the city.

Subsequently, the Mayor disclosed that markets such as Amakom, Krofrom, Patasi and Moshie Zongo would be redeveloped into modern markets as well as improve trading activities at the same time.

This program, the Mayor noted, was part of the project designed by the Assembly named Sustainable Urban Mobility Program (SUMP).

"I call on chiefs and the public, especially residents, to rally behind contractors who would be assigned to carry out the construction of government projects so that they do a good job and help to hasten the rate of development in the city and the country as a whole," Mr Pyne rallied.

CHIEFS

Otumfuo Sasamohene, Nana Sei Atta II commended the Mayor for his proactive attitude to resolving all the issues that had arisen due to the intent to carry out the redevelopment project.

He said he was hopeful the women who had issues regarding their resettlement after the project would support the same with good spirits since the Mayor has assured them of spaces and priority to own shops or stalls when the project is completed.

Nana Amoako Kese, Santasihene applauded the government for the project and noted that Santasi had benefited from the development initiatives of the Local Government Ministry.

He, however, appealed to the KMA Chief Executive to lobby for the reconstruction of the Santasi Basic and Junior High School, which he noted was in a deplorable state.

CONTRACTOR

Joseph Otoo, lead servant at the ABBA Construction Limited assured the traders of a good job and added that he would work to complete the project within 18 months to enable them commence business.

He disclosed that he would deliver a one storey shop and stall complex which would also have lockable sheds as well as a 20-seater toilet, fire service station, a creche, a pharmacy and others with a solar powered system as back-up to the national electricity grid that would be available at the redeveloped market.

On her part, Juliana Nsiah, Estate Manager at KMA promised to keep documentation and data of all traders at the market and ensure that none of them is denied the opportunity to own a shed or shop at the market after work is completed.
12.05.2022 LISTEN

The Ghana Scholarship Secretariat (SCHOLSEC) has been accused of defaulting in the payment of thesis grants and bursaries due to postgraduate students for the past three years.

Former President of the Graduate Students Association of Ghana (GRASAG), Mr. Raphael Apetorgbor said the SCHOLSEC is yet to complete payments of the bursary and thesis grants to graduate students from 2019/2020 to the 2020/2021 academic year.

He also expressed fret over the inability of the secretariat to fulfill its financial obligations to graduate students in the payment of bursary and thesis grant for the 2021/2022 academic year to aid their research work.

He said the delay by government has made it difficult for most students to complete their academic research as a result of lack of funding which is inadequate and has resulted in students unable to submit their thesis for graduation.

The Government of Ghana's conception of research bursaries to aid graduate research in the country demonstrates the fact that governments over the years appreciate the importance of postgraduate education and research to our national economy. However, the current response from government is really frustrating our research work, Mr. Apetorgbor said.

Mr. Apetorgbor appeals to the government to increase their bursaries and thesis grant at least 100% due to high cost of living standard.

He explained that the current amount between GH 450 and GH900 per graduate, is woefully inadequate for quality research.

The former president of GRASAG also expressed fear that their bursaries for the next academic year may delay due to the fact that previous bursaries and thesis grants have not been paid.

The annual bursary and thesis grants are among five (5) types of scholarships for local public universities and technical universities under the local tertiary scholarship awards of the Scholarships Secretariat of the Republic of Ghana. The Secretariat was established in January, 1960 as an extra-ministerial body under the Office of the President.

Its main role is to administer and exercise central control over scholarship awards for capacity building so as to ensure effective manpower support for the national development agenda.

The thesis grants are payments made to PhD, MPhil and MA/Postgraduate Diploma students working on their research for one academic year, while the bursary grants are paid uniformly across board annually to mitigate the course cost of postgraduate education.
Fraud Preventions Expert and Security Consultant Richard Kumadoe has alluded that curfews cannot put a stop to the long-standing ethnic conflicts in Bawku in the Upper West Region.

According to him, curfews are only short term solutions to such ethnic conflicts and have never improved the ongoing unrest in the Northern enclaves.

In an interview with Samuel Eshun on the Happy Morning Show, Mr Kumadoe opined that the curfew effected on the community was only a reactionary approach and hence was never well thought through.

He said, Curfews are short term measures and thats why every time when curfews are effected they never solve the issue. There were curfews with security officers yet there were gun shots last time, the attack by the Burkinabe guys and just this morning it has been reported that one person has been shot dead.

He however suggested that the appropriate authorities need to take bold steps and go beyond curfew implementation to resolve the longstanding conflict. The security expert cautioned that failure to address the issue will impound more burden on the security institutions.

Curfews are good but are short term measures. The relevant thing is after the short term measure we need to be bold enough to face the issue at hand heads in. This will help improve the situation other that, what the President about spending so much money for national security on Chieftaincy disputes will be proved right and will create lots of problems for the National Security, he added.

---happyghana.com
GTP, Ghanas timeless fabric producer, styling customers and clients over the past 56 years, has relaunched its heritage print- GTP Adepa.

GTP Adepa Premium is basked with the touch of intricate colourful designs, in its authentic original designs, with improved fabric quality and pure elegance.

Through Adepa Premium; GTPs most celebrated fabric offering- Tex Styles Ghana is to bring African premium fashion to the world, presenting customers and designers with colourful patterns and motifs, appealing to the traditional matured woman while attracting new generation of women with discerning taste for real African prints.

Speaking with customers during the trade launch in Accra, the Sales Director, Emmanuel Kissi indicated, We have invested in a technology, improving lead times for the Adepa Premium Collection to meet customers demands in designs and colours that all fashion designers and lovers of originality will yearn for.

We are transforming from merely a textile manufacturer to a lifestyle brand, designing fabrics with the final customer in mind- Adepa Premium is the first of many more refining collections to come, said Emmanuel.

GTP Adepa Premium is showcasing its intricate designs and patterns through an online campaign on all its digital platforms, expressing the varied creations to inspire designers to fashion out timeless, stylish pieces for all clients on all occasions.


Young Chinese students swear in during a ceremony for becoming new members of the Communist Youth League of China at a middle school in Guiyang, Guizhou province, on April 28, 2022. [Photo/Xinhua]

People from different sectors of society say they were inspired by Xi's speech

China's young people, united by the Communist Youth League of China, will continue to play a vanguard role in national rejuvenation in the new era, people from different sectors said after hearing President Xi Jinping's speech marking the 100th anniversary of the Youth League.

Speaking at a ceremony in Beijing on Tuesday, Xi, who is also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, hailed the contributions made by Youth League members over the past century.

Founded in 1922, the CYLC acts as a pioneer of China's youth movement, a faithful assistant of the Party and its reliable reserve. It has more than 73.7 million members nationwide aged 14 to 28, and about 43.8 million of its members are students, official data showed.

In his speech, Xi also put forward a new vision for the CYLC, calling on the youth movement to better unite, organize and serve young people, and encouraging the nation's youth to dedicate their wisdom and efforts to national rejuvenation.

Wu Qing, head of the Institute of Communist Youth League Work Theory, said he was impressed by the fact that the word "youth" was mentioned more than 30 times in Xi's speech.

Looking back at the century-old history of the Youth League, Wu said it has been following the Party by organizing and mobilizing young people to become the vanguard force in national rejuvenation.

In the new era, young people in China should continue to make achievements under the leadership of the Party and contribute their youthful strength under the mobilization of the Youth League, he said.

As a mass organization for the Party's youth work, the Youth League should better serve young people and act as a "bridge" and a "bond" connecting the Party with young people, Wu said, adding that it should also build itself into a strong youth political organization of the Party.

Jin Li, president of Fudan University in Shanghai, said that Xi's speech showed that the Party and the nation attach great importance to youth work, adding that he felt deeply inspired by it.

"The pursuit of progress is the most valuable trait of young people, which is also the ardent expectation of the Party and the people," he said, adding that the university will strive to cultivate young talent with patriotic ideals, humanistic feelings, a scientific spirit, professionalism and an international outlook.

Wei Qian, secretary of the CYLC Committee of the School of Chemistry at Beihang University in Beijing, said, "We should always keep young people in mind and become a 'bridge' linking the Party with them", and was impressed by the work the university's students had done in poverty alleviation, epidemic prevention and control, and volunteer services for the Beijing 2022 Winter Games.

Zeng Ziqing, an undergraduate student at Tsinghua University and the CYLC committee secretary of his class, said he felt very fortunate and excited to attend the ceremony on Tuesday at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing to hear Xi's speech.

As someone from a mountainous village in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, he said that the Youth League helped him quickly become accustomed to life at the university and it has also helped him constantly pursue self-development.

"In the future, I will continue to assist the development of my classmates, help anyone in need, and promote the development and progress of the Youth League through organizing various activities," he said.

Liu Lijia, a senior undergraduate student at Beijing Normal University, said that as a Youth League member and a probationary member of the CPC, she is always grateful to the Party and the Youth League for assisting her development.

As an expression of her determination to devote her future career to the Party and the nation, she said that she had signed up to become a volunteer teacher in the country's western regions.

"I want to use what I have learned at the university, go to places where I am needed the most, and devote myself to bridging the educational gap between different regions," Liu said.
Anti-abortion laws do not stop abortions from happening they decrease access to safe abortions. Does the pro-life agenda of 'saving lives' outrightly ignore preventable maternal deaths and morbidities? And does it saddle women with the brunt of a broken education and healthcare system?

The abortion debate has gone round and round in circles for centuries. Throughout history governments around the world have supported abortion and infanticide in contexts of population control, gender selection, mandated family planning, and punitive property rights. Somehow a concept that is now widely banned and strictly regulated is fine when it's for the 'greater good' or the 'development of society', but the rights of women or their quality of life and that of unwanted children don't seem to factor in the equation.

Over time many (often male-dominated governments) have taken a pro-life stance, arguing to preserve the 'personhood' of embryos and foetuses. Religious groups have also fuelled the 'abortion is murder' rhetoric that is influencing restrictive reproduction policies and laws.

No support, No say

While reproductive freedom should be at the centre of the debate let's consider for a moment what kind of support these governments are offering to ease forced parenthood:

No mandatory comprehensive sexual education, abstinence is not sexual education

No free contraception, prevention is essential in avoiding unwanted pregnancy

No universal healthcare for sexual and reproductive needs, contraception fails and this failure should be catered to

No access to universal or affordable childcare, safe, accessible daily care for minors in working households keeps parents gainfully employed

No unemployment stipends or benefits for women who lose their livelihoods due to child rearing

No policies that enforce paid family leave to account for inevitable child rearing responsibilities e.g., school visitations, sick children, etc.

No policies that restrict employers from firing women due to child rearing-absenteeism and erratic interruptions increase without proper childcare

No financial assistance programs that cater to single or struggling parents-in cases of lost income directly linked to child rearing, parents cannot count on government bailouts

Not to mention the intricacies of maternal leave, adoption, and alternative foster institutions such as orphanages or children's homes.

Simply put, if the government is not willing to invest or assist with childcare it has no business forcing women to bear children. Said differently, if women should not expect the government to aid in childcare, they should retain the right to decide when to have children.

In Kenya the estimated cost of raising a child to the legal age of 18 years is Kshs. 3 million or approximately USD 3,000. This amount is spent on feeding, basic education, clothing, housing, healthcare, and other necessities. It does not account for childcare, tertiary education, extracurricular activities, or life-building experiences, let alone any leisure activities. It is also an amount that is inaccessible to a large portion of the country's population.

Anti-abortion laws result in the butchering of women

Currently, 90 million women live in countries that still ban abortions for all reasons, 360 million live in countries that only allow abortions when the woman's life is at risk, and 240 million can only have abortions to preserve their health.

Meanwhile, studies show that abortions occur as frequently in the most-restrictive categories of countries (banned outright or allowed only to save the woman's life) as in the least-restrictive category. Women will seek out abortions regardless of the legal restrictions, and these unsafe abortions are a leading and preventable cause of maternal deaths and morbidities. The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported that they also lead to social and financial burdens for women, communities, and health systems.

What's interesting is lawmakers continue to leave the burden of reproduction at women's feet. While many countries have female-specific restrictions, absolutely no country has male-specific restrictions. Men are not required to be active in contraception and prevention, nor are they required to raise the children they sire- women are not making babies by themselves, self-propagation is limited to plants and some animals.

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In fact, there are very few male contraceptives, and men to date refuse to have vasectomies even though some are reversible, and the recovery time is negligible. The moment the responsibility of child making, and child-raising is equally shared, will be the moment the tide against female liberties changes.

The imbalanced responsibility and lack of support help clarify that criminalising abortions is not about 'saving lives' because then men and the government would have an equal stake and decreasing maternal deaths and morbidities would be of paramount importance. Criminalising abortions is about infringing on fundamental human rights, controlling women's bodies, and limiting their socioeconomic potential.
May 12, 2022

Matthew VanDyke - Some 3 Letter Agency Dude With An Obsessive Compulsion For Publicity

Matthew VanDyke: US citizen held in Libya emerges on Syria's frontline - Guardian, Nov 9 2012

An American who fought alongside Libyan rebels, and who was detained in Tripoli's Abu Salim prison for six months before returning home to Baltimore in late 2011, has turned up on the frontline of the uprising in Syria. Matthew VanDyke said that he was in Aleppo to film a documentary alongside the Syrian rebel army. But he claims he is also advising the rebels on weaponry based on his experience in Libya. "I go to sleep and wake up to the sound of artillery shells, and Assad's jets flying overhead and bombing the city," VanDyke, 33, wrote in the first of a series of emails with the Guardian. "Most of these booms signal the death of more civilians in Aleppo." VanDyke claims to be a journalist-turned-freedom-fighter-turned documentarian, but others accuse him of being a misguided thrillseeker who repeatedly puts himself at risk.

...

He said he was also offering advice on weaponry, including the anti-aircraft Dushka machine guns he used while fighting in Libya, though that claim has been questioned by people who know him and who have spent time on the ground in Syria.

Matthew VanDyke and Obsessive Compulsive Freedom Fighting, Wrath-Bearing Tree, Apr 12, 2015

Yet for all the exciting adventures VanDyke experiences, it is impossible to get out of ones head the idea of a reenactment, of middle-aged office workers walking through the woods in Civil War uniforms and young men playing paintball between mounds of dirt. It is all so clumsy, so sad and trivial. He travels to Afghanistan to place an American flag in Bin Ladens house. He makes the first real friends of his life in combat. Van Dykes whole life, his whole idea of freedom, consists in this idea of acting, repeating typically dangerous situations under the gaze of the camera; and while the adventures he finds himself in are ostensibly new, they feel old and worn out.

VanDyke very much wants to believe otherwise. He wants to believe his experiences are immediately made hallowed through the ever-present camera, which turns the ephemeral and pointless violence he witnesses, the aimless and meandering journey he travels, into something much more. But it doesnt quite come off. The camera instead dictates his adventures, hollowing out his experiences, transforming a war and peoples lives into an unfunny Jackass skit.

This Guy From Baltimore Is Raising a Christian Army to Fight ISISWhat Could Go Wrong? - Mother Jones, May 28 2015

In late February, a Baltimore-born, self-proclaimed freedom fighter named Matthew VanDyke beamed into Greta Van Susterens Fox News show from Erbil, the capital of Iraqs Kurdish region. A few days earlier, he had announced on Facebook that he was in Iraq to raise and train a Christian army to fight ISIS and that he had formed a company called Sons of Liberty International (SOLI) to provide free military consulting and training to local forces fighting terrorists and oppressive regimes. For months, the so-called Islamic State had terrorized Iraqs Assyrian Christians, forcing many to flee their homes and villages and seek safe haven among the Kurds. With ISIS on the march across Iraq and Syriaand making headlines for its brutal beheadings of journalists and aid workersthe story of an American taking an on-the-ground role in the fight sparked a media frenzy. VanDyke, who is 35 and holds a masters degree in security studies from Georgetown, was soon featured by media outlets across the country, including the New York Times, USA Today, the Baltimore Sun, and MSNBC. This wasnt the first time VanDyke had become a media sensation. A few years earlier VanDyke had made international headlines after he was captured in Libya, where he had been fighting alongside rebel forces to overturn the regime of Moammar Qaddafi. He eventually escaped, and he would later say that his Christian faith deepened during his six-month imprisonment. A film about VanDyke, who had traveled across the Arab world by motorcycle, won best documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2014.

In 2004, VanDyke graduated from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service with a master's degree in Security Studies with a Middle East concentration. Georgetown is known to be a major CIA recruiting ground. He has since been 'filming', 'fighting with' and 'training' U.S. aligned forces in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Iraq - all more or less in the Middle East. The Ukraine is thereby a curious geographic choice for new activities. Unless you probably work for some U.S. 3 letter agency.

Why American veterans are dropping everything to train Ukrainians - Christian Science Monitor, May 11 2022

The war in Ukraine has attracted U.S. military veterans and Western legionnaires like no foreign battlefield in recent memory. But what motivates midcareer professionals  often now married, with children, and with their former military lives receding into memory  to drop everything and step into the trenches of another nations fight?

...

In the past, we didnt get involved in Ukraine because, when it was just involving Donbas, there was no way to have an effect on the outcome of the conflict. Now there is, says Matthew VanDyke, who founded SOLI in 2015. The former documentary filmmaker was motivated at the time by his own experiences being held captive for five months in Libya while fighting with Libyan revolutionary forces in 2011. Its also just a very clear conflict, with a democracy being invaded by essentially an authoritarian state, and a land grab, says Mr. VanDyke, who wears a beard, hair combed back, and tactical military clothes. Its a no-brainer as far as right and wrong in this.

Well, if you say so ...

Related:

Fact Sheet on the National Endowment for Democracy - Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China, May 7 2022

The United States has long used democracy as a tool and a weapon to undermine democracy in the name of democracy, to incite division and confrontation, and to meddle in other countries internal affairs, causing catastrophic consequences. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), as one of the US governments main foot soldiers, white gloves and democracy crusaders, has subverted lawful governments and cultivated pro-US puppet forces around the world under the pretext of promoting democracy. Its disgraceful record has aroused strong discontent in the international community. In todays world, peace and development is the theme of the times, and the trend towards greater democracy in international relations is unstoppable. Any attempt to interfere in other countries internal affairs in the name of democracy is unpopular and is doomed to failure.

...

Posted by b on May 12, 2022 at 6:57 UTC | Permalink

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Popular Nollywood actress, Genevieve Nnaji has returned to social media amid rumours that she had suffered from a mental breakdown.

The actress who has 8.5 million followers on Instagram deleted all the pictures on her page.

This happened in March shortly after the actress received heavy backlash from people for stating that mental health issue is a 'spiritual problem'.

The filmmaker wrote, "Mental health is more spiritual than it is physical. Rededicate your life to the God that you serve. Get rebaptized."

However, in the early hours of Wednesday, the 43-year-old movie producer via her Instagram story posted a video where she was painting. She captioned the video, 'Mindfulness'.
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HELSINKI (AP)  Finlands leaders said Thursday theyre in favor of rapidly applying for NATO membership, paving the way for a historic expansion of the alliance that could deal a serious blow to Russia as its military struggles with its war in Ukraine.

The annoucement by President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin means that Finland is all but certain to join the Western military alliance, though a few steps remain before the application process can begin. Neighboring Sweden is expected to decide on seeking NATO membership in coming days.

NATO membership would strengthen Finlands security. As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defence alliance, Niinisto and Marin said in a joint statement.

Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay," they said. "We hope that the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days.

Russia reacted to the development with a warning. The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Finland joining NATO would inflict serious damage to Russian-Finnish relations as well as stability and security in Northern Europe."

Russia will be forced to take retaliatory steps of military-technical and other characteristics in order to counter the emerging threats to its national security," the ministry said.

History will determine why Finland needed to turn its territory into a bulwark of military face-off with Russia while losing independence in making its own decisions, it added.

Before the ministry issued its statement, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Finlands decision wouldnt help stability and security in Europe. Peskov said Russias response would depend on NATOs moves to expand its infrastructure closer to Russian borders.

Finland has the longest border with Russia out of all the European Unions 27 members.

Previously, the Kremlin had warned of military and political repercussions if Sweden and Finland decided to become a NATO member. Should they seek to join the alliance, there would be an interim period lasting from when the applications are submitted until ratification by lawmakers in all 30 existing member nations.

In NATO member Estonia, which also borders Russia, Prime Minister Kaja Kallas tweeted that history being made by our northern neighbors. She pledged to support a rapid accession process for Finland into NATO.

Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde tweeted that Finlands announcement gave an important message.

Finland's announcement came a day after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited both Finland and Sweden to sign a military cooperation agreement.

The U.K. pledged Wednesday to come to the aid of Sweden and Finland if the two Nordic nations came under attack.

During a joint news conference with Johnson in Helsinki this week, Niinisto said Moscow could only blame itself should his nation of 5.5 million people become a NATO member.

You (Russia) caused this. Look in the mirror, the Finnish head of state said Wednesday.

On Thursday, Niinisto tweeted that he spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about Finland's firm support for Ukraine and the country's intention to join NATO. Niinisto said Zelenskyy expressed his full support for it."

In 2017, Sweden and Finland joined the British-led Joint Expeditionary Force, which is designed to be more flexible and respond more quickly than the larger NATO alliance. The force uses NATO standards and doctrine so it can operate in conjunction with the alliance, the United Nations or other multinational coalitions.

Fully operational since 2018, the force has held a number of exercises both independently and in cooperation with NATO.

Russias aggression in Ukraine prompted Finland and Sweden to reconsider their traditions of military nonalignment and to contemplate joining NATO itself. Public opinion in the two countries quickly started to shift toward favoring membership, first in Finland and a bit later in Sweden, after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24.

The latest opinion poll conducted by Finnish public broadcaster YLE showed earlier this week that 76% of Finns are in favor of joining NATO, a big change from earlier years when only 20-30% of respondents favored such military alignment.

Speaking to European Union lawmakers Thursday as Niinisto and Marin made their announcement, Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said that Russias unpredictable behavior was a serious concern for Finland. He cited Moscows readiness to wage high-risk operations that could lead to many casualties, including among Russians.

Should Finland become a NATO member, it would represent the biggest change in the Nordic country's defense and security policy since World War II, when it fought against the Soviet Union.

During the Cold War, Finland stayed away from NATO to avoid provoking the Soviet Union, instead opting to remain a neutral buffer between the East and the West while maintaining good relations with Moscow and also with the United States.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said the military alliance would welcome Finland and Sweden  both of which have strong, modern militaries  with open arms and that he expects the accession process to be speedy and smooth.

NATO officials say the Nordic duo's accession process could be done in a couple of weeks. The most time consuming part of the procedure  ratification of the countrys protocol by the existing NATO members  could be completed in less time than the four or so months it took West Germany, Turkey and Greece to join in the 1950s, when there were only 12 members to ratify their applications.

These are not normal times, one NATO official said this week, discussing the possible applications of Finland and Sweden. The official was briefing reporters about the accession process on condition that he not be named as no application has been made by the two countries.

___

Lorne Cook in Brussels, and Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, contributed to this report.

___

Follow the APs coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
The submission of the APC expression of interest and nomination forms closes on May 11.

The Attorney General of the Federation, has submitted his governorship nomination form for Kebbi State governorship race.

Mr Malami submitted the N50 million nomination form at the International Conference Centre on Wednesday.

His submission came some hours after the Court of Appeal ruled on the controversial section 84(12) of the electoral act.

The section provides that "No political appointee at any level shall be a voting delegate or be voted for at the convention or congress of any political party for the purpose of the nomination of candidates for any election."

The Appeal Court, headed by Hamma Akawu Barka, had struck out the suit filed by Nduka Edede, a member of the Action Alliance (AA).

However, the court held that the provision is unconstitutional because it violates section 42 (1)(a) of the constitution and denied a class of Nigerian citizens their right to participate in elections.

Meanwhile, Popular cleric and Senior pastor of the Citadel Global Community Church, Lagos, Tunde Bakare, also submitted his nomination form.

Mr Bakare is one of the 27 presidential aspirants that have bought the presidential forms of the ruling party.

In addition, Umar Bago, a member of the House of Representatives from Niger State, also submitted his governorship nomination form.

Mr Bago, who represents Chanchaga Federal Constituency in Niger State, contested for the House Speaker in 2019 but lost to Femi Gbajabiamila.

He is seeking to succeed Governor Sani Bello.

Barring any last-minute adjustment, the submission of nomination forms closes today.
Mayor Payton's statement -- as provided by the city of Midland on Wednesday evening -- following the grand jury's decision to not indict Midland Christian administrators and staff members.

--

When this investigation began to unfold many weeks ago, there were numerous people who wanted me to interject myself into the process.

Emotions were very high, and opinions and viewpoints were all over the board. No doubt, this matter has been discussed within the community, and many were impacted by what was taking place. I understand all of that.

When I took phone calls and meetings with people about the situation, I told them all one thing, Let the process work itself out. I stand here today and tell you I would say the same thing again and again, let the process work itself out. We as a people here in Midland, Texas, cannot act like other places, and seek to intimidate or harass or influence the legal process. If you lose hope in the process, we're losing hope in liberty, and we cannot afford to lose that hope.

As I stand here in front of you this evening, I believe in the men and women in blue and our legal and justice system right here in Midland. That doesn't mean we won't continue evaluating and taking a good, hard look at why we did what we did, how we can improve and get better as we seek to serve and protect this community. We will continue to assume the best of those who serve us in law enforcement, but we will seek to be even better when we come out the other side of the process.

I have been deeply and personally burdened by what many have had to go through in the process. I gave my word to all those who originally wanted me to step into the process that if the process played out and the Grand Jury delivered the verdict we have seen today that I would do what I'm doing tonight. There have indeed been reputations damaged, teachers and students affected, and many in this community left with questions and concerns. But  the process played itself out, and we will once again choose to trust the legal process that is at the bedrock of our freedom, liberty and security.

Any great city -- and I believe we are such a city -- will have these challenges and we all know similar challenges are playing out even now.

But when we get to where we are tonight, we must be gracious as well as bold. We must be gracious enough to admit mistakes where we find them, and we must be steadfast in what is an often gut-wrenching journey of letting the process play itself out and trusting that as a community committed to one another from the thin blue line to the streets, schools and places we do live that we will do what's right and we'll learn from mistakes where we find them.

Let us choose tonight to love and to learn. There will come another day when journeys similar to this will play out again; but tonight, we affirm that our system is not broken, our city is healthy, and we will be better and better in the days ahead with one another and for one another.

God bless you, and God bless.
Tim Fischer/Midland Reporter-Telegram

Midland Christian School was grateful yesterday to learn that the Midland County Grand Jury declined to indict the five administrative members of our staff. We are pleased that the grand jury confirmed what we believed to be true after receiving results of our own external and independent investigation into the legal matter. Our independent external investigator concluded the five individuals acted reasonably and appropriately given the facts and circumstances, so we are not surprised the grand jury reached the same conclusion. We recognize that grand jury service is one of the most demanding forms of community service. We want to express our appreciation to those men and women whose courage and pursuit of truth led them to this conclusion.

We are proud of the five members of our Midland Christian School family and grateful these legal proceedings are behind them. They have each handled themselves gracefully in the face of these extremely difficult circumstances, all while holding firm to their faith.
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Midland has built wealth from resources underneath the surface. Now, its working to build wealth from the skies.

Technology is advancing the new space economy to develop and manufacture space vehicles, propulsion systems, satellites, communications systems, navigation and guidance equipment and associated parts, and Texas is making great strides in this new space race.

The Perryman Group estimates almost 350,000 direct jobs nationwide are supported by this new economy with a current annual impact on US business activity of $204 billion in annual gross product and 1.7 million jobs. Texas, the company notes, has been associated with space-related industries for more than 60 years, and Midland is taking its place in the states space-related economy.

As Economist Ray Perryman told the Reporter-Telegram by email, I would say Midland is on the ground floor of such initiatives, which should create additional opportunities.

Midland International Airport became the first airport in the nation to be issued a commercial spaceport license by the Federal Aviation Administration and is now known as the Midland International Air and Space Port. The adjacent Spaceport Business Park is home to two tenants  AST SpaceMobile and Kepler Aerospace.

AST SpaceMobile this month received an experimental license from the Federal Communications Commission to support testing of the BlueWalker 3 test satellite, which is being assembled in Midland. It will be shipped to Cape Canaveral, Florida, where it is expected to be launched aboard one of SpaceXs Falcon 9 rockets this summer.

The license covers space-to-ground testing of the satellite in the US using 3GPP low-band cellular frequencies and Q/V-band frequencies. The test satellite has an aperture of 693 square feet that is designed to communicate directly with cell phones via 3GPP standard frequencies.

The companys mission is to eliminate connectivity gaps faced by the 5 billion mobile subscribers moving in and out of coverage zones and to bring cellular broadband to approximately half the worlds population who remain unconnected.

We selected the Midland-Odessa area as our base of operations for a number of compelling reasons, including a business-friendly environment both at local and state levels, Scott Wisniewski, chief strategy officer of AST SpaceMobile, told the Reporter-Telegram by email. We also placed a high value on access to a strong, technically oriented workforce in the area.

Being located on-site at Midland International Air and Space Port also provides the company with good access to the airport and other transportation infrastructure, he added.

Coming to Midland gave the company the opportunity to move into a partially built facility that would accommodate its needs, including immediately starting development of BlueWalker 3 test satellite and the production of up to two commercial satellites per month there.

We plan to expand our anticipated total production capacity to up to six commercial satellites per month through a second site located down the road, which we recently purchased and are retrofitting to suit our needs, Wisniewski said.
Political Science Majors Take Leadership Roles in Local State Senate Campaign

Cydney Wilson 23 and Zaire Carter 22 are working for candidate Nick Miller in the leadup to the May 17 primary.

By: Meghan Kita Tuesday, May 10, 2022 08:49 AM

Zaire Carter 22, candidate Nick Miller and Cydney Wilson 23

Allentown School Board member Nick Miller is running in the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania State Senate in the redrawn District 14, which includes the city of Allentown. At 27, hes a young candidate, and hes found young talent at Muhlenberg to support his campaign: Cydney Wilson 23 is serving as Millers campaign manager and Zaire Carter 22 is serving as his political director.

Typically, college students involved with a campaign might be doing things like phone banking or canvassing, Carter says: Weve both done that work and we both will continue to do that work, as there are many times during a campaign where it's all hands on deck. But the ability to run a campaign, to have high-level discussions about strategy and then implement it, it's quite an honor to have at this young of an age.

Wilson, a political science and self-designed womens, gender & sexuality studies double major and Africana studies minor, joined the campaign first. She knew Michaela Boyer 20 from when they were both part of the College Democrats. Boyer, who worked on Allentown Mayor Matt Tuerks campaign, recommended Wilson for Millers campaign. Wilson started as a field director in mid-March and quickly moved into the campaign manager role.

Miller asked Wilson if she knew anyone interested in policy and endorsements work, and she immediately thought of Carter, a political science and theatre double major whos also student body president. He joined the campaign near the end of March.

Wilsons role involves collaborating with Carter and the campaigns communications director, overseeing interns (including Muhlenberg students Katie Conlon 24 and Marissa Scharf 24) and volunteers, planning events and helping brainstorm and execute campaign strategy. Carter cultivates language to share the candidates policy stances and secure endorsements.

The campaign will first focus its outreach on voters whove requested mail-in and absentee ballots in the leadup to the May 17 primary. That day, Wilson, Carter and the rest of the campaign staff and volunteers will be out at polling places, working to answer questions and raise awareness of their candidate. Whatever the result, the experience has been invaluable.

I think that I will walk away from this experience with an impossible to count number of things that Ive learned, Wilson says. I've learned so much about collaboration and working with others and the importance of working in a team as well  There's no way that one single person can win an election. I knew that, but to see it in action is incredibly valuable and it's something that I'll definitely take forward with me.
All members of President Buhari's cabinet vying for public office will have to resign on or before May 16, 2022," Mr Ogunlesi wrote.

President Muhammadu Buhari has directed all ministers seeking elective public office to resign before May 16.

This was disclosed by the information minister, Lai Mohammed, at the end of Wednesday's Federal Executive Council meeting presided over by Mr Buhari.

The Special Assistant to President Buhari on Digital and New Media, Tolu Ogunlesi, also stated this in Twitter post.

"Just in: All members of President Buhari's cabinet vying for public office will have to resign on or before May 16, 2022," Mr Ogunlesi wrote.

Some of President Buhari's ministers who have indicated an interest in elective positions are transportation minister Rotimi Amaechi who seeks to be president; Abubakar Malami, the attorney-general, who seeks to be Kebbi governor; Labour minister Chris Ngige who seeks to be president but has yet to purchase his form and minister of state for health Emeka Nwajiuba who also seeks to be the president.

Mr Buhari's directive was made known on the day the Court of Appeal conditionally validated a section of the electoral law that mandates political office holders like ministers to resign before they can contest for elections or vote in party primaries.

Read our previous story on the appeal court ruling below.

The Court of Appeal has voided a ruling of a high court that nullified the controversial Section 84 (12) of the Electoral Act 2022. Although the appellate court, essentially, validated the controversial law, it said it would have ruled otherwise if the main suit was properly brought before it.

The law bars political appointees like attorney-general Malami from seeking elective public office or voting as delegates in a party primary unless they resign their positions.

The Court of Appeal in Abuja, on Wednesday, voided the judgment of the Federal High Court in Umuahia, Abia State, which nullified the controversial section.

Delivering its judgment, on Wednesday, a three-member panel of the appellate court headed by Hamma Barka, held that the Federal High Court, Umuahia, lacked jurisdiction to have adjudicated the suit.

The appellate court further said the plaintiff, Nduka Edede, lacked the legal standing to have filed the case.

The panel also held that Mr Edede did not establish any cause of action that would have given the grounds to approach the court over the matter.

Consequently, the appellate court struck out the case marked: FHC/UM/CS/26/2022 which Mr Edede lodged before the federal court in Umuahia.

The judgment was on the appeal marked: CA/OW/87/2022 and filed by the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP.

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Law Unconstitutional

PREMIUM TIMES had reported that Mr Buhari while signing the amended bill into law in February, urged the parliament to expunge Clause 84(12) of the Act.

The clause reads: "No political appointee at any level shall be a voting delegate or be voted for at the convention or congress of any political party for the purpose of the nomination of candidates for any election."

The Court of Appeal said if it were to decide the case on its merit, the provision is unconstitutional because it is in conflict with Section 42 (1)(a) of the constitution.

The court said the controversial clause in the Electoral Act denies a class of Nigerians their right to participate in elections.

Details later...
Editor

Zaldy Dandan is the recipient of the Best Editorial Writer Award of the Society of Professional Journalists, and the CNMI Humanities Award for Outstanding Contributions to Journalism. His four books are available on amazon.com
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Imag

Illinois consumers and businesses will soon receive payments as part of a $43 million settlement with manufacturers of cathode ray tubes, specialized parts used in older televisions and computer monitors.

The payments are a part of a settlement reached with international electronics companies Hitachi, LG, Philips, Samsung, Toshiba and Panasonic to resolve a 2012 lawsuit that alleged a conspiracy to illegally fix the prices of CRTs in televisions and monitors. The price-fixing conspiracy increased the costs of products containing CRTs, the office of the attorney general wrote in a press release, causing Illinois consumers to pay significantly more than they would have if prices had been set through normal competition.
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WASHINGTON (AP)  President Joe Biden on Thursday kicked off the first-ever Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit to be held in Washington as his administration makes an extended effort to demonstrate that the United States has not lost focus on the Pacific even while dealing with Russias invasion of Ukraine.

As Biden welcomed leaders from eight ASEAN nations for a dinner to start the two-day special summit, the White House announced the United States would commit to more than $150 million in new projects to bolster Southeast Asia's climate, maritime and public health infrastructure.

A senior administration official, who previewed the announcement on the condition of anonymity, said the effort was meant to signal that the U.S. is looking to step up our game in Southeast Asia.

The gathering marked the group's first meeting at the White House in its 45-year history. Leaders will take part in more formal talks at the State Department on Friday.

The ASEAN nations include Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. The top leaders from ASEAN member Myanmar were barred from attending, while outgoing Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte dispatched Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. to represent his government.

The summit comes before Biden's trip next week to South Korea and Japan  his first visit to Asia as president  for talks with those two countries' leaders. He also will meet during that trip with leaders from the Indo-Pacific strategic alliance with the U.S. known as the Quad: Australia, India and Japan.

Biden has tried to put greater focus on that alliance and improving relations with Pacific nations in the early going of his presidency as he sees a rising China as the most threatening economic and national security adversary to the United States.

Biden, who pledged to make the Pacific a greater focal point of U.S. policy, has seen his attempt at an Asia pivot complicated by the most serious fighting in Europe since World War II.

A White House Asia policy adviser said the administration remains committed to stepping up relations with Southeast Asian nations to address climate, economic and education initiatives.

There has been a sense that in previous administrations that we had set off with a determined pace to focus on East Asia or in the Indo-Pacific and then find ourselves with other pressing challenges that perhaps draws (us) away a little bit, Kurt Campbell, coordinator for Indo-Pacific Affairs on the White House National Security Council, said Wednesday. I think there is a deep sense that that cant happen again.

The new U.S. investment in ASEAN nations includes $40 million for clean energy infrastructure, $60 million for a new regional maritime initiative and $6 million to accelerate digital development in the region.

The White House also announced that Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies will launch a privately funded institute for rising leaders from ASEAN nations that will bring mid-career public sector officials to the United States for leadership training.

Duterte, the Philippines president, is skipping the summit because his country is in a political transition. ASEAN has barred Myanmar  in crisis since the army ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021  from sending all but nongovernmental leaders for ASEAN meetings.

The Biden administration condemned the military coup that led to the ouster of Suu Kyi. She was convicted by a military court last month of corruption and sentenced to five years in prison in the first of several corruption cases against her. Suu Kyi has denied the charges.

Biden is also expected to address the situation in Myanmar with ASEAN leaders, as well as discuss China and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Campbell said the administration expects the private talks will be direct, polite, but maybe a little bit uncomfortable at times as the U.S. and ASEAN members are not on the same page on all issues. He said the administration wants to see the group play a more deeply engaged role in the critical diplomacy about next steps in Myanmar.

Biden has called for Russia to be disinvited from Novembers scheduled Group of 20 summit because of its invasion of Ukraine. ASEAN member Indonesia, which holds the presidency of the G-20 this year, has resisted the calls to pull Moscows invitation.

Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the presumptive winner of this weeks Philippines presidential election, could test U.S. sway in the region. The son and namesake of the countrys former dictator has said he wants to pursue closer ties with China.

He has received congratulatory calls from both Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping. His campaign said that Marcos Jr. also met on on Thursday with Chinese ambassador, Huang Xilian, who conveyed that Beijing wants to bring cooperation between the two country to new heights.

Campbell acknowledged that historical considerations could present challenges to the relationship with Marcos Jr., a seeming reference to long-standing litigation in the United States against the estate of his father, Ferdinand Marcos.

A U.S. appeals court in 1996 upheld damages of about $2 billion against the elder Marcos estate for the torture and killings of thousands of Filipinos. The court upheld a 1994 verdict of a jury in Hawaii, where he had fled after being forced from power in 1986. He died there in 1989.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Thursday said she was not aware if the litigation or China came up in Bidens call with Marcos Jr.
Genevieve is one of the most followed Nigerian actresses on Instagram with 8.5 million followers.

Fans of Genevieve Nnaji, the Nollywood screen goddess, on Tuesday, raised concerns over her safety.

This was after she deleted pictures and videos on her Instagram page and unfollowed everyone.

Genevieve is one of the most followed Nigerian actresses on Instagram with 8.5 million followers.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the extremely private actress on Monday, deleted all the videos and pictures on her Instagram page.

The move has left fans disturbed about her safety.

Genevieve was the first actor to win the Africa Movie Academy Award in a leading role in 2005.

Dr Penking, on his twitter handle @drpenking, said that it was unusual, adding that "someone should please check on her. No one is above mental breakdown."

Also, Mr Francis Awuche, a resident, called on the Actors Guild of Nigeria (AGN) to reach out to the actress to ascertain the situation of things with her.

He said that for her to take such a drastic action suggested that there was something amiss, which must be unravelled.

Reacting to the development, the President of the AGN, Emeka Rolland, told NAN that he was not aware of Genevieve's exit on Instagram.

"Maybe I will have to reach out to her since I am just getting this news from you now. I have not learnt of that.

"I will reach out to her to know whether she's safe or not after your call. I cannot just conclude with hearsay or rumor," he said.
TOLGA AKMEN/AFP via Getty Images

The Citizens Utility Board, a nonprofit utility watchdog in Illinois, is urging eligible Illinois residents to apply for Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program funding before the May 31 deadline ahead of an expensive summer ahead for utilities.

The CUB will also host joint online events this week with the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity to educate Illinois residents about LIHEAP, who is eligible and how to apply by the deadline.
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LOS ANGELES (AP)  A U.S. appeals court ruled Wednesday that Californias ban on the sale of semiautomatic weapons to adults under 21 is unconstitutional.

In a 2-1 ruling, a panel of the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Wednesday the law violates the Second Amendment right to bear arms and a San Diego judge should have blocked what it called an almost total ban on semiautomatic centerfire rifles for young adults. America would not exist without the heroism of the young adults who fought and died in our revolutionary army," Judge Ryan Nelson wrote. "Today we reaffirm that our Constitution still protects the right that enabled their sacrifice: the right of young adults to keep and bear arms.

The Firearms Policy Coalition, which brought the case, said the ruling makes it optimistic age-based gun bans will be overturned in other courts.

Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the decision is a clear sign of how courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court which has a major gun case before it, are expanding gun rights.

Federal judges can read the tea leaves, Winkler said. In the coming years, the courts seem certain to strike down numerous gun safety measures in the name of the 2nd Amendment. This 9th Circuit ruling is a harbinger of things to come.

The ruling, however, was not a total victory for gun rights advocates.

They also sought an injunction blocking the state from requiring a hunting license for adults under 21  who are not in the military or law enforcement  to purchase rifles or shotguns.

Handgun sales to those under 21 were already prohibited when the hunting license requirement was passed in 2018 after some of the nations worst mass shootings were committed by young adults using rifles, including the Valentines Day slayings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

The following year, the Legislature acted to address what they saw as a loophole after an April 2019 synagogue shooting in San Diego County.

A 19-year-old armed with a semiautomatic rifle he had just purchased with a hunting license killed a 60-year-old woman and injured three others, including the rabbi and an 8-year-old girl at Chabad of Poway.

The state passed the law banning sales of semiautomatic centerfire rifles to anyone under 21. There were exemptions for police or military troops but not for those with hunting licenses.

Matthew Jones, a 20-year-old at the time from Santee in San Diego County, originally sued saying he wanted a gun to defend himself and other lawful purposes but didn't want to obtain a hunting license.

His lawsuit, which had been filed before the under-age ban on semiautomatic weapons, was amended to also challenge that law.

The suit said the state had whittled down (the) already inapplicable and irrelevant hunting license exemption  the only exemption that is even possible for an ordinary, law abiding young adult who does not wish to enter into a highly dangerous career in law enforcement or the military  by prohibiting an entire class of firearms.

The 9th Circuit ruled the hunting license requirement was reasonable for increasing public safety through sensible firearm control.

But it said an outright ban on semiautomatic rifles for those under 21 went too far.

Its one thing to say that young adults must take a course and purchase a hunting license before obtaining certain firearms, Nelson wrote. "But to say that they must become police officers or join the military? ... It is a blanket ban for everyone except police officers and servicemembers."

Nelson and Judge Kenneth Lee, who ruled in the majority, were part of Republican President Donald Trump's wave of conservative-approved nominees that reshaped the famously liberal court.

Two years ago, Lee authored a 2-1 decision that threw out Californias ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines, saying the law violated the U.S. Constitutions protection of the right to bear firearms. That ruling was later overturned by the court's 7-4 review of the decision.

A dissent was written by U.S. District Court Judge Sidney Stein, who was assigned to the panel from the Southern District of New York. Stein was nominated to that court by Democratic President Bill Clinton.

Stein said he would have upheld the lower court's decision not to block either law.

Stein said the regulation did not place a severe burden on gun ownership rights on young adults and noted they could get semiautomatic rifles from family members or borrow them from others.

He also said the majority failed to consider the the disproportionate amount of violent crime committed by those under 21 who have relatively less mature cognitive development.

Democratic Sen. Anthony Portantino of La Canada Flintridge, who wrote both laws, said he was disappointed the semiautomatic ban was struck down but was pleased the hunting license requirement survived.

I remain committed to keeping deadly weapons out of the wrong hands, Portantino said. "Student safety on our campuses is something we should all rally behind and sensible gun control is part of that solution.

Attorney General Rob Bonta's office said it was reviewing the decision. In a statement, a spokesperson said it was committed to defending Californias commonsense gun laws.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Wednesday urged Congress to act  and activists to take to the streets  to ensure abortion remains widely accessible even if the Supreme Court rolls back its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion nationwide.

The Democratic governor spoke from a Planned Parenthood facility in the Illinois suburbs of St. Louis. He said the U.S. Senate must step up in defense of the personal health care decisions of women.

Women are under siege. Basic rights to privacy, to healthcare, to the rights of women to control their own bodies, are about to be stripped away, Pritzker said. The world is watching. Here in Illinois, we trust women. To the U.S. Senate, we say, Be like Illinois'.

He finished with an offhanded pitch for protests, recalling how in her work for womens rights, his mother taught him how important it is to turn protest into action. Later he emphasized they must be peaceful.

The debate over access to abortion  which has never fallen far from the top tier of political debate in the past half-century  has roiled the nation since Politico reported last week on a leaked preliminary opinion suggesting the Supreme Court will overturn Roe in a case over a Mississippi law prohibiting abortion after 15 weeks.

This decision doesnt ban abortions, Cahokia Democratic Sen. Christopher Belt said. It bans safe abortions.

Overwhelming Democratic majorities that control the Illinois General Assembly have been preparing for a Roe rollback for years, particularly because the state would be a virtual island in a sea of states eager to restrict abortions should the landmark 1973 ruling fall.

In 2017, they approved public funding of abortion and repealed a 1975 trigger law that committed the state to an abortion ban if Roe were overturned. Abortion became legal under state law after the Reproductive Health Act of 2019. Last fall, lawmakers dropped parental notification for minors seeking abortions, action that abortion-rights proponents considered the last roadblock to unfettered access in Illinois.

We have been preparing for the day Roe falls and we are ready ... said Yamelsie Rodriguez, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis region. We are a safe place not just for Illinoisans, but for anyone who needs abortion in a post-Roe world.

The Planned Parenthood Regional Logistics Center, which provides travel, lodging, financial assistance and other help to out-of-state patients seeking abortions in Illinois, has helped 1,000 people from seven states since it opened in January, Rodriguez said.

Additional legislative action includes a House-approved measure that would protect the Illinois licenses of medical professionals who face lawsuits or other sanctions from out-of-state interests if they perform abortions in Illinois.

State funding has supported Planned Parenthood for years. Pritzker said he wants that funding to increase and is studying whether state funds can go directly to patients who need help getting to Illinois.

When women come here to this state, you are welcomed in Illinois, Pritzker said. You are supported, you are safe. You wont need to suffer additional trauma. You will be treated with dignity and empathy and compassion."
In the run-up to the early morning April 9 adjournment of the spring legislative session, Illinois lawmakers passed a spate of public safety measures backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in the $46 billion fiscal year operating budget.

The package, pushed by Democrats in an election year in which rising crime has become a major campaign issue, ranged from minor statutory changes to a new legal definition of organized retail crime, an expansion of a state road camera program and the regulation of ghost guns.

The package was backed by a state budget that allocated new money for three Illinois State Police cadet classes, the purchase of body cameras and less lethal equipment, officer recruitment and retention grants, a car-jacking response council, witness protection programs, investments in youth-based violence prevention programs, and an off-hours child care program.

While most of the bills were uncontroversial and broadly supported, the floor debate prior to the passage of several of them mirrored the rhetoric of an ongoing campaign season in which every constitutional office and seat in the General Assembly will be up for a vote in November.

Republicans accused Democrats of being soft on crime. Rep. Justin Slaughter, a Chicago Democrat, accused Republicans of a bad stench of racism in their ongoing criticisms of the Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today Act, a controversial criminal justice reform that passed the General Assembly in January.

That measure, widely known as the SAFE-T Act, was an initiative of the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus that included police certification changes, body camera requirements, use-of-force reforms and other provisions including the elimination of cash bail in Illinois beginning in January. It has been amended twice to address law enforcement concerns in several areas.

The bottom line is that you don't deserve our respect, Slaughter, who sponsored the SAFE-T Act in the House, told the GOP on the House floor last month. Your dog-and-pony show is over, and we're going to make you turn the page to a new chapter. A new and different era.

The new era, Slaughter said, includes youth investments addressing the root causes of violence, while Democrats have also touted increased investments in law enforcement investigative tools.

Sen. Robert Martwick, a Chicago Democrat, said the approach includes counteracting years of state police and youth program disinvestment that culminated in a two-year budget impasse between former Gov. Bruce Rauner and Democrats in the General Assembly.

First and foremost, you have to give police officers the tools so that people feel safe, that we are addressing it and trying to reduce crime, Martwick said in a phone interview. But then we have to have a long game, which means investing into people and into opportunities for people so that they have quality, healthy and safe alternatives to entering the life of crime.

Republicans took less of an issue with what was contained in the public safety package than what was excluded.

If you're not going to put violent people behind bars and keep them there, you have accomplished nothing, no matter how much money you spend, Sen. Chapin Rose, R-Mahomet, said in a phone interview.

Rose had for months been backing a crime response package full of sentence enhancements and mandatory minimums, such as a mandatory 10-year sentence for an offenders first conviction for crimes such as violent gun offenses and carjacking, and life sentences for a second offense.

The GOP-backed measures, including a $100 million Fund the Police Act, failed to receive a committee vote in the Democrat-dominated legislature which has prioritized investment over incarceration.

Democratic action on the public safety package this year, Rose said, was spurred by polling numbers and a 2021 Virginia election which saw Republican Glenn Youngkin unseat Democratic incumbent Gov. Terry McAullife in a major swing to the right compared to the states performance in the 2020 presidential election.

The Virginia election, Rose said, showed the public was pushing back against a defund the police mentality demonstrated by Democrats nationwide. In Illinois, he said, thats manifested in the SAFE-T Act, which he credited for creating unfunded training and equipment mandates, which in turn create financial pressures on departments, especially in smaller communities.

The impending end of cash bail could also make it harder for states attorneys to hold accused dangerous criminals prior to trial, he said.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker has rejected the GOP rhetoric, pointing to prolonged disinvestment during the Rauner administration and touting spending increases in his administration.

So there's an awful lot here that supports both the addition of public safety resources as well as making the system a safer one, a better one for anyone that ends up caught up in it, Pritzker said at a news conference last month. A lot of progress has been made in that regard, even though I know that Republicans want to turn this into an election year issue. They're just wrong. The Democrats have been standing up for public safety all along.

No Republicans voted for the state operating budget, contained in House Bill 900, which passed 72-42 in the House and 34-19 in the Senate and included money for body camera grants and other law enforcement investments. That has led Democrats, including House Speaker Emanuel Chris Welch, D-Hillside, to turn a frequent Republican argument on its head.

What I like to point out is there's only one party in this state that's voting to defund the police, Welch said at an April 13 news conference celebrating the budget. There's only one party that's voting to defund youth investment programs. And that's not the Democratic Party.

While Rose countered that he was skeptical the funds would be distributed equitably across the state and said spending wont make a difference without the accountability measures, Democrats say their investments speak for themselves.

Illinois has never seen an effort this robust to fight and solve crime, Pritzker said the day the budget passed the General Assembly.

Below are summaries of the public safety-related measures and funding approved in the recently adjourned legislative session. The vote tallies apply to the individual measures, not the funding amounts, which were approved in the budget that has been signed into law.

Reimagine Act

Funding: $240 million

The Reimagine Public Safety Act became law last year, aiming to drive state resources to violence prevention programs in the states most dangerous neighborhoods. The act created the Office of Firearm Violence Prevention to coordinate violence prevention efforts and give grants to community organizations that know where intervention is needed.

Its receiving $240 million this year, $235 million of which is from the federal American Rescue Plan Act, while $5 million will come from state general revenue funds.

The Reimagine Public Safety Act signifies a different and new approach, one that is not necessarily soft or hard on crime, but rather smart on crime, Rep. Justin Slaughter, D-Chicago, said in December.

Including the Reimagine Public Safety Act funding and investments resulting from the states legalization of adult-use marijuana in 2019, the budget included about $1 billion total in youth investment, adult redeploy and diversion, and other intervention programing, according to the governors office.

ISP funding

Funding: $36 million GRF increase

The budget included $18.6 million for three new classes of Illinois State Police cadets, $8 million for an equipment replacement program at ISP and $5.4 million for increased staffing and equipment at a new forensic lab in Decatur.

The $328 million general revenue spending for state police marked a 12% or $36 million increase from the current year.

Sen. Chapin Rose, R-Mahomet, meanwhile, criticized the fact that downstate state police officers are being reassigned to Chicago to monitor expressways and other high-crime areas.

Gangs, co-responders



Funding: $30 million; $10 million; $1 million

House Bill 4736 renames the Gang Crime Witness Protection Act as the Violent Crime Witness Protection Act, expanding it to fund emergency relocation expenses, lost wage assistance, security deposits for rent and utilities and more. The budget included $30 million to implement the program.

The plan also creates a crime reduction task force to study violence prevention measures and report back to the governor and General Assembly by March 1.

Co-responder pilot program: The budget provides $10 million for a co-responder pilot program at the police departments in East St. Louis, Peoria, Springfield and Waukegan, with an expiration set for January 2029.

The program would send social workers along with law enforcement on certain calls with a primary focus on victim assistance, including connecting victims with social services, providing guidance for receiving orders of protection and filing police reports, working with police investigators within confidentiality laws, and providing guidance to families of juveniles who have been arrested.

Tip hotline: HB 4736 also creates a tip hotline grant program overseen by the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, that would fund organizations or units of local government to establish anonymous tip hotlines that provide cash rewards for tips that lead to an arrest.

Senate vote: 40-17 partisan roll; House vote: 109-2. Pritzker signed the measure on May 10.

Carjackings



Funding: $30 million

House Bill 3699 adds vehicular hijacking as a focus of an existing state council to drive funding to intergovernmental task forces that work to solve carjacking crimes, according to Sen. Robert Martwick, D-Chicago, the bills Senate sponsor.

The measure pertains to the existing Motor Vehicle Theft Prevention and Insurance Verification Trust Fund, and the budget allocates an extra $30 million to the fund on top of its $21 million balance.

Martwick said the goal is to drive that money to three task forces, one in the collar counties, one in the St. Louis Metro East area and one that has statewide jurisdiction but focuses on the Chicago area.

Martwick said carjackings generally fall into three categories, including stealing a vehicle to harvest and sell parts, using the vehicle in another crime, or joyriding. The first two can fall into a category of organized crime, he said. The tasks forces, made up of local law enforcement, states attorneys, state agencies and other elements, would lead investigative efforts regarding the organized aspect of carjackings, he said.

They're the investigative team that is pooling all of the resources in an attempt to try and identify the organized criminal elements behind this and then go after that and effectuate arrests, he said.

He cited a Civic Federation report which showed more than 95% of carjackings ended without an arrest in 2020 and 2021.

While that fund is also dedicated to implementing an electronic insurance policy verification program, Martwicks bill capped the amount of money in the fund that would go to that purpose to 10 percent, down from 50.

Senate: 52-0; House: 113-0. Awaits Gov. JB Pritzkers signature.

Highway cameras

Funding: $20 million

House Bill 4481 would expand a Cook County roadway camera pilot program to state highways and expressways in the counties of Boone, Bureau, Champaign, DeKalb, DuPage, Grundy, Henry, Kane, Kendall, Lake, LaSalle, Macon, Madison, McHenry, Morgan, Peoria, Rock Island, Sangamon, St. Clair, Will and Winnebago. The budget contains $20 million from the Road Fund for the expansion.

House Bill 260 would allow police to use camera footage to also investigate hijacking and forcible felonies such as murder, criminal sexual assault, robbery, burglary, arson, kidnapping and aggravated battery. Current law allows the footage to be used to investigate firearm offenses and to monitor roadway conditions.

It would also give the attorney generals office authority to prosecute forcible felony, gunrunning and firearms offenses on camera-monitored expressways.

HB 4481: Senate: 48-5; House: 95-10. Awaits signature.

HB 260: Senate: 44-12; House 97-10. Awaits signature.

Organized retail crime

Funding: $5 million

House Bill 1091 defines organized retail crime in state law with the intent of reducing offenders ability to avoid prosecution.

The bill differentiates ringleaders from individuals stealing from retailers and mandates that online selling marketplaces must store information on high-volume sellers and ban them from the platform if they are suspected of selling stolen merchandise.

The measure would allow prosecutors to consolidate charges against an offender in one county even if a ring of smash-and-grab thefts happen across multiple counties. A statewide grand jury will have the power to investigate, indict and prosecute violations. The budget allocated $5 million to address organized retail crime.

Senate: 42-10 House: 96-5. Awaits signature.

Body cameras, equipment

Funding: $30 million; $20 million

The SAFE-T Act requires police departments to employ body cameras by 2025 on a staggered schedule based on department size. The budget allocates $30 million to the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board for grants administered for camera adoption.

It also includes $20 million for Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority to provide grants to fund less-lethal devices and trainings on how to use them.

Recruitment and retention

Funding: $10 million

Lawmakers dedicated $10 million to Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board to focus on law enforcement recruitment and retention through House Bill 3863. Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board would award grants to local governments, public higher education institutions and qualified nonprofits for the purpose of hiring and retaining officers. Grants would be prioritized to underserved areas and for efforts to achieve demographic and geographic diversity of law officers.

Senate: 55-0; House: 113-0. Signed on May 10.

Mental health

Funding: $17 million

House Bill 1321 creates a First Responder Behavioral Health Grant Fund that would provide grants to local governments, law enforcement agencies, fire districts, school districts, hospitals or ambulance services, for expenses related to behavioral health care for first responders.

The budget included $17 million for first responder mental health, including $10 million to the Department of Human Services for first responder wellness in Chicago and $2 million for grants for first responder mental health programs. Another $5 million was reallocated from federal COVID-19 funding from the previous fiscal year for administrative costs associated with first responder mental health.

Senate: 54-0; House: 113-0. Awaits signature.

Off-hours child care

Appropriation: $2 million

House Bill 1571 directs the Department of Human Services to create an off-hours child care program aimed at assisting first responders and other overnight shift workers. The department is to implement the program by July 1, 2023, and the budget included $2 million for the program.

Senate: 56-0; House: 113-0. Awaits signature.

Officer retirement

Potential cost: $4 million annually

House Bill 1568 allows an officer who is retiring in good standing to buy their department-issued badge and gun. It also lowered the retirement age to 55 from 60 for law enforcement officers employed by the state, provided they have served at least 20 years. The estimated cost for the State Employee Retirement System could be as much as $4 million annually, which could create a total increase in pension liabilities of about $230 million by 2045.

That measure also instructs the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board to work with state higher education agencies to create credit transfer programs to public colleges for law enforcement and correctional intern courses.

Senate: 42-2; House: 99-7. Signed on May 6.

Other initiatives

Ghost guns: House Bill 4383 gives owners of unserialized ghost guns 180 days to take them to a federal firearm dealer to be given a serial number. After that span, possession of an unserialized, unfinished firearm would become a Class A misdemeanor for a first offense and a Class 3 felony for subsequent violations. The measure applies to 3D printed guns and unfinished frames, but it doesnt apply to antique, permanently inoperable guns or those manufactured before 1968.

Senate: 31-19; House: 66-36. Awaits signature.

Carjacking fees: House Bill 3772 states that a person who has had their car stolen is not liable for traffic fees, fines or impound costs on the stolen vehicle. It also provides that a carjacking victim could be reimbursed up to $1,000 from the Court of Claims for towing costs.

Senate: 55-0; House: 115-0. Awaits signature.

Eavesdropping extensions: House Bill 3893 makes no changes to existing law other than extending the expiration dates of two laws that are already on the books. One law allowing law enforcement to eavesdrop on conversations during an investigation of murder, drug and sex offenses, will be extended until Jan. 1, 2027. The Illinois Street Gang and Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Law is extended by one year to June 11, 2023.

Senate: 53-0; House: 109-2. Awaits signature.

Burglary tools: House Bill 601 allows police to charge someone with possession of burglary tools if they possess, with the intent to steal a vehicle, a key fob duplication device.

Senate: 45-9; House: 103-5. Awaits signature.

Catalytic convertors: House Bill 107 adds catalytic convertors to the definition of recyclable metals under Illinois law and prohibits recyclable metal dealers from purchasing a convertor valued at more than $100. It also requires metal dealers to keep more stringent records on people selling catalytic convertors.

Senate: 56-0; House: 104-0. Awaits signature.

Law enforcement officers: House Bill 4667 adds Department of Corrections officers and deputies and county correctional officers to those covered under the federal Law Enforcement Officers Safety Act of 2004, which allows them to carry a weapon while off-duty.

Senate: 58-0; House 103-6. Awaits signature.
Charles O'Rear/Getty Images

One of six people charged with taking part in a drug network that targeted Pike and Adams counties has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for his role.

Tommy V. Tran, 28, of Sacramento, California, was indicted in March 2019 and pleaded guilty in November.
Microgen/Getty Images

WHITE HALL  The state is warning against eating sport fish caught in White Hall City Lake after detecting elevated levels of methylmercury.

The Illinois Department of Public Health added the lake on Thursday to its list of consumption advisories. It said the lake and three other locations in the state were added based on sampling through the Illinois Fish Contaminant Monitoring Program. To date, seven sites are on the list.
Chamber Golf Outing: 11:30 a.m., Links Golf Course, 319 Holkenbrink Drive. $60 | Lunch and registration 11:30 a.m. Shotgun start at 12:30 p.m. Price includes greens fees, cart, lunch, prizes and two beverage tickets. For registration and more information, go to jacksonvilleareachamber.org or call 217-245-2174

Produce and Bakery Giveaway: 9 a.m.-noon, Jacksonville Food Center, 316 E. State St. Free | For Morgan County residents.

Free Noon Meal: 11:45 a.m.-12:30 p.m., The Salvation Army, 331 W. Douglas Ave. | Meals in to-go containers can be picked up at side door.

Walking for Wellness: 12:30-3 p.m., First Christian Church, 2106 S. Main St. Free | Indoor walking program offered year-round Monday-Thursday. For more information, call 217-243-6445.

Spirit of Faith Soup Kitchen: 3:30-4 p.m., Spirit of Faith Soup Kitchen, 105 E. Dunlap St. Free | Serving meals to go for anyone in need.

Keith Bradbury Roast: 5 p.m., Hamilton's, 110 N. East St. $35 a person, table of eight $250. | Jacksonville Promise roast hosted by attorney Ryan Byers. Cocktails begin at 5 p.m. Dinner at 6 p.m. Roasting begins at 7 p.m. For reservations, call Lynne Sheaff at 217-670-9371.

Author Event: 5:30 p.m., Carlinville Public Library, 510 N. Broad St. Free | Featured speaker is author and historical researcher Tom Emery. Program is based on his book, "The Civil War in Illinois." For more information, call 217-854-3505 or emai mail@carlinvillelibrary.org.

Women's Health Night: 6- 8 p.m., Cass County Health Department, 8590 St. Luke's Drive, Beardstown. | Local resources, manicures, massages, light meal. Reservations are required by contacting the health department at 217-452-3057, extension 1321, or emailing kcooper@casscohealth.org.

Exploring Foods: Asian Infusion: 6-7:30 p.m., Illinois State Museum Zoom event. Free with registration. | Foods of Asia with chef Michael Maddox. Advanced registration is required at bit.ly/ISMAsianFood. For more information, contact events@illinoisstatemuseum.org or 217-782-0061.

Friday

Bluffs Preschool Screening: 9 a.m. - 3 p.m., Bluffs School Library, 100 Rockwood St. Free | To make an appointment, call 217-754-3714.

Produce and Bakery Giveaway: 9 a.m.-noon, Jacksonville Food Center, 316 E. State St. Free | For Morgan County residents.

Free Noon Meal: 11:45 a.m.-12:30 p.m., The Salvation Army, 331 W. Douglas Ave. | Meals in to-go containers can be picked up at side door.

Produce and Bakery Giveaway: 12:30-1 p.m., The Salvation Army, 331 W. Douglas Ave. Free.

Art in the Park: 6-8 p.m., Art Zeeck Park, Beardstown. | Art in the park, followed by the movie "Encanto."

Scott and Karl: 6 p.m., The Loading Dock, 401 Front St., Grafton. | Live music.

Trey Kennedy: The Are You For Real? Tour: 7 p.m., UIS Performing Arts Center, 1 University Plaza, Springfield. $29 | For tickets or more information, go to uispac.com or call 217-206-6160.

Springfield Theatre Centre presents Miscast Cabaret: 8 p.m., Hoogland Center for the Arts, 420 S. Sixth St., Springfield. $20 | Some favorite musical theater songs with a gender swap twist. For tickets or more information, go to hcfta.org.

A Twin Bill of Plays about the Creative Process: 8 p.m., Hoogland Center for the Arts, 420 S. Sixth St., Springfield. $18-$20 | Two successful writers are faced with writers block. For tickets or more information, go to hcfta.org.

Dave Caputo: 8 p.m., The Bloody Bucket, 201 E. Main St., Grafton. | Live rock and roll music.
In his recent article in The Atlantic, Ed Yong posed a poignant question: What does society owe immunocompromised people?

During the massive surge in COVID-19 cases in the fall and winter of 2020, I remember seeing commercial after commercial proclaiming that we were all in this together. Images of nurses and doctors with haggard faces and weeks old personal protection equipment flashed on screen. In November 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, as part of the White House COVID task force, said, We can mitigate this virus and stop this spread together.

Most people understood that protecting one another with layered protection strategies like masking and social distancing was essential to doing your part to help the broader community.



But much has changed in the last two years. The release of vaccines to combat COVID-19 provided an extra layer of protection for most individuals. Mask mandates, or even mask recommendations, have been thrown out the window in many places, including on public and air transportation. Recent videos of airline passengers cheering and throwing away their masks were virally making their way across social media platforms after a federal judge in Florida struck down the Biden administrations airline mask mandate.

However, most highly trained, well-regarded public health policy analysts state that masking is still needed to help reduce surges and hospitalizations and protect the most vulnerable in our communities. Even Fauci said in 2020, We should not say that vaccines are a substitution for public health measures; (theyre) a complement to public health measures.



COVID-19 is a respiratory illness spread through aerosol transmission. While it has affected everyone in the United States in some way, it has disproportionately harmed individuals who are immunocompromised, seniors, people with certain comorbidities, and Black or Brown communities. Layered mitigation strategies, including wearing a mask, have shown to significantly decrease the risk of transmission. Even surgical masks and cloth masks can reduce transmission rates. Yet the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, called masks the scarlet letter of this pandemic.



The shift from community-based public health measures to individual-risk health evaluations has left those who have been most affected by the pandemic increasingly vulnerable. As certain public health experts, including the CDC, push personal risk assessment over holistic community public health policies, individuals at high risk for COVID complications are left to determine how to navigate the daily task of going to the grocery store and attending health appointments.

Also, the personal risk assessment doesnt take into account the disabling nature of COVID-19: According to the Government Accountability Office, 10% to 30% of COVID survivors experience symptoms for more than one month, and at least 10% have symptoms that have affected their ability to work. A new study also showed that of the 66,008 COVID survivors experienced, on average, brain damage comparable to 20 years of aging.



So, what do we owe those most at risk for COVID complications? What do we owe the nurses and doctors burnt out after multiple surges? The United States must make crystal clear the value of masks in protecting vulnerable people and communities to help reduce surges and protect the most at risk in our communities. Masks are not scarlet letters  they are one of the many tools at our disposal to reduce chances of death or disability from long COVID.

As Dr. Paul Farmer is often quoted, The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world. Its our moral and civic duty to serve and protect the most vulnerable in our communities. By doing this, we protect all in our communities.
"Currently in Nigeria, there are 18.5 million out of school children, 60 per cent of these out of school children are girls - that is over 10 million girls are out of school.

Nigeria has a record of 18.5 million out of school children out of which 10 million are girls, the chief of UNICEF Field Office, Kano, Rahama Farah, has said.

Mr Farah, who spoke during a media dialogue on girls' education in Kano Wednesday afternoon, said the statistics are alarming.

The dialogue is part of a three-day training for journalists from Katsina and Kano States.

He said: "Currently in Nigeria, there are 18.5 million out of school children, 60 per cent of these out of school children are girls - that is over 10 million girls are out of school.

"Most importantly you will need to know that the majority of these out of school children are actually from northern Nigeria.

"This situation heightens the gender inequity, where only 1 in 4 girls from poor, rural families complete Junior Secondary school education," he said.

The UNICEF field chief said bandits' attacks in the North-west states have also compounded the situation

Mr Farah said the attacks have led to parents not sending their children to school.

He said it has created an unfavourable learning environment which led to a decrease in the number of girls attending school.

He asked journalists to continue to advocate increased funding and allocation of resources for the development of education in the country.

Project success

Mr Farah, however, said the interventions by the Girls Education Project 3 (GEP3) funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office of the UK and implemented by UNICEF, over 1.4 million girls have returned to school.

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"This support has expanded access to education for girls, resulting in no fewer than 1.4 million girls having access to education in northern Nigeria.

"With more of similar support, and working together with government and development partners, parents, communities, traditional and religious leaders, we can achieve more by enrolling more girls in schools, and ensuring they complete their full education," he said.

He said the project has also led to the establishment of a multi-sectoral task team in the 34 local government areas of Katsina State "to provide quick networking among actors on school security, with additional focus on the safety of the girl child.

"Additionally, 60 Junior Secondary Schools have developed emergency plans and tested the plans in evacuation drills," he said.

He said that in Kano State 300 School-Based Management Committee members have been trained, while schools have developed School Emergency Preparedness and Response Plans to mitigate the impact of potential and actual threats on schools.
Joe Biden proclaimed, Wearing masks is not a political statement, it is a scientific imperative. He was wrong. There is little evidence supporting generalized use of masks.

A pre-COVID-19 systemic review of interventions to combat the spread of respiratory viral diseases by the highly regarded Cochrane Library found that medical/surgical mask wearing makes little or no difference to the outcome of influenza or influenza-like illnesses compared to not wearing a mask.

A recent review of the literature reported two randomized controlled clinical trials of the effectiveness of masking in COVID-19. One failed to demonstrate a statistically significant benefit. The second found small, marginally statistically significant reductions in viral transmission for surgical masks but not for cloth masks. Thirteen of 14 tests assessing mask-wearing in non-COVID respiratory infections failed to find a statistically significant benefit for masks.

Randomized controlled clinical trials are the gold standard in medical research because randomization minimizes the effect of unmeasured confounding variables and researcher bias that can occur in observational studies.

Early in the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, British health authorities, and the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control all refrained from recommending widespread mask use, often discouraging it. Dr. Anthony Fauci emailed in February 2020 that the typical mask is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material. In a March 8 interview on 60 Minutes he said that theres no reason to be walking around with a mask.

Nevertheless, the CDC in April 2020 began recommending mask wearing, including cloth masks. A CDC Science Brief relied on observational masking studies where the evidence suggested benefit, while highlighting the limitations rather than outcomes of studies that suggested the absence of benefit or even harm.

Endorsing cloth masks was disconcerting since an RCT of hospital workers showed far higher infection rates with cloth masks than medical masks.

The CDC repeatedly highlighted an observational study of two COVID-19 positive hair stylists in Missouri who were masked and provided services for several days after developing COVID-19 symptoms to 139 customers, who were mostly masked. Sixty-seven customers who were tested were negative and none of the remaining 72 reported symptoms.

Yet, no one knows if any of the 72, untested, asymptomatic customers were actually infected. Half of COVID-19 infected people are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms. In addition, viral shedding and infectiousness is highest in the two to three days before symptom onset, which is before these symptomatic hairdressers encountered the study customers. Finally, there was no control group to show how many customers would be infected by COVID-19 positive hairdressers who did not wear masks.

Similarly, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky has repeatedly cited an observational Arizona study claiming that school districts without mask mandates were 3.5 times more likely to have COVID-19 outbreaks than districts that required masks. The study is an outlier in the literature and, as David Zweig showed in the Atlantic, has multiple methodological problems rendering its conclusions worthless.

The CDCs about-face on masks for general use appeared to be a demonstration it is doing something. Following the recent court decision striking down the federal transportation mask mandate, the agency still insists masks are needed. But the CDCs failure to seek a stay pending appeal suggests the agency doesnt really believe masks are beneficial.

Generalized mask mandates had little benefit. A study of infection rates with mask mandates and rates of mask use in all 50 states during the first year of the pandemic concluded that mask mandates and use are not associated with slower state-level COVID-19 spread during COVID-19 growth surges. Ian Millers Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates shows that infection rates and deaths were no different in the 39 states that imposed mandates and the 11 states that did not. There was also little difference between countries that imposed mandates and those that did not.

While there is little evidence for generalized use, masks should be used in specific circumstances. People with an active infection should mask since the evidence for mask efficacy is strongest as a means of source control rather than as protection against infections.

People who are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 such as the elderly, the immunocompromised and those with multiple medical problems should consider masking indoors since whatever small, uncertain benefit masking provides will be especially valuable for them. Medical personnel with access to high-quality, properly fitted masks should also mask when in patient contact.

Generalized mask mandates should not be imposed without evidence. And that, despite the presidents assurance, does not exist.
analysis

The COVID pandemic has had a profoundly negative impact on Africa's sovereign debt situation. Currently, 22 countries are either in debt distress or at high risk of debt distress. This means that African governments are struggling to pay the debts that they incurred on behalf of their states. For example, Mozambique and Zimbabwe are already in debt distress. Others at high risk include Malawi, Zambia and Comoros.

This situation is likely to be exacerbated by the war between Russia and Ukraine. The conflict is causing commodity prices, particularly food and gasoline, to rise. It is also disrupting the supply chains of critical goods like fertilisers.

The ability of countries to manage their debt is complicated by the changing composition of the debt. They now owe more money to a broader range of creditors.

In 2020, sub-Saharan Africa had a total external debt stock of $702.4 billion, compared to $380.9 billion in 2012. The amount owed to official creditors, including multilateral lenders, governments and government agencies, increased from about $119 billion to $258 billion.

In the past, official creditors of African countries were primarily the rich Western states and multilateral institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This group has now expanded to include China, India, Turkey and multilateral institutions like the African Export-Import Bank and the New Development Bank.

In addition, the amount of bonds issued by African states on international markets has tripled in the last 10 years. These bonds are held by a broad range of investors such as insurance companies, pension funds, hedge funds, investment banks and individuals.

In our new book we address the challenges that these changes have created for sovereign debt management for the 16 countries in the Southern Africa Development Community.

We hope the book will stimulate debate among academics, activists, policymakers and practitioners on how Southern Africa Development Community should manage its debt. Five recommendations emerge from the contribution. These include the need for enhanced debt transparency and an approach to debt management that takes into account a host of factors beyond just finance.

The landscape

The book contains a series of essays initially presented in several virtual workshops held in 2020. The participants sought to understand the debt challenges facing countries in the Southern Africa Development Community. They also offered policy-oriented recommendations for dealing with them.

The book includes contributions from a multi-disciplinary group of international experts as well as African researchers. In their contributions they discuss the complexities of debt management and restructuring - generally and in the Southern Africa Development Community member states.

They pay attention to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the debt situation but also recognise that it is only one factor contributing to the difficult debt situation in the region. Thus, they also focus on the broader domestic and international factors that are shaping debt management in the region.

In an effort to chart a way forward, the contributing authors addressed the following four themes:

The impact of structural changes in the global economy on the Southern Africa Development Community debt landscape. An example is the increasing importance of finance in the global economy.

The challenges of sovereign debt management and restructuring in the region;

The implications of the lack of transparency on the accumulation and use of sovereign debt;

Options for incorporating human rights and social considerations into sovereign debt renegotiations and restructuring.

Contributors make five key recommendations:

The first concerns debt transparency. The recommendation is that countries in the region should adopt comprehensive debt data disclosure requirements and state borrowing procedures that are transparent and participatory. The aim would be to facilitate holding relevant decision makers accountable.

Debt transparency is the cornerstone of reforming debt management. Sovereign debtors should follow well publicised, predictable and binding legal procedures in incurring new financial obligations. In addition, they should disclose the amount and contractual terms of their loans. This should include any arrangements for enhancing the security of the loan. An example is resource-backed loans. In these loans repayment is either made in natural resources or is guaranteed by the revenues generated by the sale of the natural resource.

Sovereign debtors should disclose this information to their creditors, the multilateral financial institutions of which they are member states. They should also make the information publicly available through national platforms.

Good governance. This involves strengthening national debt management policies to deal with issues of governance.

Transparency on its own won't ensure responsible borrowing. Debt management frameworks and practices should conform to all the principles of good governance. The list includes transparency, participation, accountability, reasoned decision-making and effective institutional arrangements.

Legal predictability. This involves strengthening contractual provisions in debt contracts.

Debt is a contractual relationship. It is therefore important - for debtors and creditors - to enter into contracts that are as comprehensive as possible. This means contracts should fairly allocate risks between the parties. This would include, for example, accommodating who is better able and more willing to accept the risks. In addition, contracts should provide the parties with clear answers to issues that could arise between them.

This would require policymakers providing guidance to their debt managers on the terms and conditions they can accept in contractual negotiations.

Comparability of treatment during restructuring. This means that, when needed, all creditors should participate on comparable terms in any sovereign debt restructuring. Southern Africa Development Community sovereign debtors can improve creditor confidence by offering all creditors comparable treatment. This would give them comfort that any relief they provided would benefit the debtor rather than other creditors.

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This should facilitate the debtor's efforts to reach agreement with all its creditors.

A comprehensive approach. Sovereign debt is not just a financial issue. It has implications for the social, political, economic, cultural and environmental situation in the debtor country. It requires a comprehensive approach to debt restructuring that incorporates all relevant stakeholders. This includes citizens of the debtor states, multilateral creditors, bilateral creditors, and private creditors such as bondholders, institutional investors of various sorts and commercial banks.

It also requires that all necessary issues are addressed. These range from financial sustainability to the social, human rights and environmental impacts of the restructuring.

The sovereign debtor and its creditors must therefore seek to effectively engage with each of these actors and with all of these issues.

These recommendations show that there is a need for more innovative approaches to sovereign debt. One possible approach is the DOVE (Debts of Vulnerable Economies) Fund. It will use funds raised from all the stakeholders in sovereign debt to buy the bonds of African debtors in distress and commit to only agree to a debt restructuring that complies with a set of published principles based on international standards that support a comprehensive approach to the debt restructuring.

Danny Bradlow, SARCHI Professor of International Development Law and African Economic Relations, University of Pretoria and Magalie Masamba, Post-doctoral Fellow, Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria
N Korea fires 3 ballistic missiles amid 1st virus outbreak View Photo

SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  North Korea fired three short-range ballistic missiles toward the sea on Thursday, its neighbors said, the latest in a series of weapons demonstrations this year and one that came just hours after it confirmed its first case of the coronavirus since the pandemic began.

The launches could underscore North Koreas determination to press ahead with its efforts to expand its arsenal despite the virus outbreak to rally support behind the leader, Kim Jong Un, and keep up pressure on its rivals amid long-dormant nuclear diplomacy.

Thursdays launches were the Norths first weapons fired since the inauguration of new conservative South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Tuesday.

North Korea has a history of rattling new governments in Seoul and Washington in an apparent bid to boost its bargaining chips in future negotiations. The North Korean nuclear threat will likely top the agenda when Yoon meets visiting U.S. President Joe Biden in Seoul next week.

South Korea, Japan and the U.S. condemned the test of the weapons, which were launched from the Norths capital region on Thursday afternoon.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan condemned the launch when he spoke by phone with his South Korean counterpart, Kim Sung-han, according to a White House statement. The two also discussed President Joe Bidens visit to South Korea next week, Bidens first to an Asian country during his presidency. Biden is also scheduled to visit Japan during the whirlwind trip.

The missiles plunged into the waters between North Koreas eastern coast and outside of Japans exclusive economic zone, Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi said. There was no report of damage to aircraft or vessels.

South Koreas military said it boosted its readiness and surveillance while maintaining close coordination with the United States. It called on the North to immediately halt its repeated missile firings.

South Korea and Japan released similar flight details, saying the weapons traveled about 350-360 kilometers (217-224 miles) at a maximum altitude of 90-100 kilometers (56-62 miles).

Earlier Thursday, North Korean state media confirmed the countrys first COVID-19 infections as Kim ordered nationwide lockdowns to slow the spread of the virus. Kim also ordered officials to bolster the countrys defense posture to avoid any security vacuum.

In recent months, North Korea has test-launched a spate of missiles in what experts call an attempt to modernize its weapons and pressure the United States and its allies into accepting it as a nuclear state and relax sanctions on the North. Some observers say that despite the elevated anti-virus steps, North Korea would likely continue to build its arsenal with weapons tests to boost public morale and strengthen loyalty for the Kim leadership.

North Koreas latest missile firings appear excessive to what would be needed to test and improve military capabilities, Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, said. These launches look like a show of strength after the Kim regime publicly admitted to a coronavirus outbreak.

A statement issued after a meeting chaired by Yoons national security adviser Kim Sung-han said South Korea would seek practical and stern measures in cooperation with the international community to respond to the growing North Korean threat.

The North Korean weapons tested recently included a variety of nuclear-capable missiles that could potentially reach South Korea, Japan or the mainland U.S. In March, North Korea ended its self-imposed suspension on huge weapons tests since 2018 with a launch of its biggest missile capable of reaching the entirety of the American homeland.

The U.N. Security Council has typically imposed punishing sanctions on North Korea after it carried out nuclear and long-range missile tests. But that didnt happen in March because veto-wielding members are divided over Russias war in Ukraine.

Last Saturday, South Korea detected a North Korea ballistic missile launch likely from a submarine, the first such test since last October. There are also signs that the North is preparing to conduct its first nuclear test in nearly five years at a remote testing ground in its northeast.

___

Yamaguchi reported from Tokyo.

By HYUNG-JIN KIM, KIM TONG-HYUNG and MARI YAMAGUCHI

Associated Press
UNITED NATIONS (AP)  The top international official in Bosnia warned Wednesday that Bosnian Serbs are trying to secede and undermine the countrys sovereignty, and he urged the international community to safeguard the rights of all its people and uphold the peace agreement that ended Bosnias 1992-95 war.

High representative Christian Schmidt told the U.N. Security Council that 26 years after the Dayton peace agreement was signed Bosnia is at a crossroads, and what happens and how the international community reacts will resonate throughout the western Balkans.

He said the country remains traumatized by the war that left over 100,000 people dead, and every single person who lived through it is still in one way or another wounded.

The U.S.-brokered Dayton agreement established two separate entities in Bosnia  one run by Bosnias Serbs called Republika Srpska and another one dominated by the countrys Bosniaks, who are mostly Muslims, and Croats. The two entities are bound together by joint central institutions, and all important decisions must be backed by both.

Since last year, Schmidt said, citizens of the country and even international media have speculated about the possibility of another war.

He said he sees the desire to keep peace among Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks and others, but the younger generations born during or after the war, in the face of continued instability, unfortunately, are leaving the country in record numbers.

In his report to the Security Council circulated Tuesday, Schmidt warned that Bosnias potential to become a security crisis is very real.

He said he is grateful for the European Unions force, EUFOR-ALTHEA, which is implementing the military side of the Dayton agreement, as a confidence-building measure and a necessary tool to safeguard peace and stability in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Schmidt was delivering his first his first briefing to the Security Council despite protests from Russia and China that he is not the legitimate high representative because his appointment was not endorsed by its 15 members.

Russias U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia raised a point of order when Schmidt was invited to speak by the current council president, U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, saying his presence undermines the authority of the Security Council and the United Nations at large. At the same time, he said, the council does allow individuals to brief members in their personal capacity and that is how Russia would consider Schmidts presence on Wednesday.

Chinas deputy U.N. ambassador Dai Bing called the Security Councils role in appointing the high representation indispensable under the 1995 Dayton agreement. Since Schmidt hasnt been endorsed by the council, he said, it is inappropriate for him to brief members as high representative.

Last July, the council rejected a resolution put forward by Russia and China that would have immediately stripped the powers of the international high representative, who oversees implementation of the peace agreement, and eliminated the position entirely in one year.

Schmidt was formally appointed as the next high representative on May 27, 2021 by the 10-member Steering Board of the 55-member Peace Implementation Council, the international body guiding Bosnias peace process. Russia has suspended its participation on the board.

Thomas-Greenfield and many other council members, who insist that Schmidt was legally appointed, welcomed his participation.

Schmidt warned the council that leaders of the Bosnian Serb-dominated entity have systematically challenged provisions of the 1995 agreement and intensified their activities aimed at usurping powers granted to the federal government.

In December, Schmidt said, the Republika Srpska legislature instructed its government to withdraw from agreements including on defense, indirect taxation and the judiciary.

If followed through, this would mean, at a minimum, the withdrawal of the Republika Srpska from the unified armed forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina  which is the result of one of the most significant reforms of the Dayton era and one of the most positive developments seen in recent years  and potentially the formation of its own military, he said.

Schmidt said so far this attempt could be stopped by the international community.

But he said Republika Srpskas authorities are pursuing through these unilateral withdrawals a de facto secession of the Bosnian Serb entity by attempting to opt out of Bosnias constitutional framework and assume its responsibilities.

They have no right to secede, Schmidt said, and he told council members the duty of the international community under the peace agreement is to safeguard the rights of all three constituent peoples and others, so all citizens may express their identity with none dominating the other.

Thomas-Greenfield stressed that the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Bosnia and Herzegovina is paramount and unquestionable and she called steps taken by Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik and Republika Srpska to block the work of state institutions undemocratic, escalatory, and not in the spirit of the Dayton agreement.

By EDITH M. LEDERER

Associated Press
Russian threats push Finland toward joining NATO alliance View Photo

KYIV, Ukraine (AP)  Finlands leaders Thursday came out in favor of applying to join NATO, and Sweden could do the same within days, in a historic realignment on the continent 2 1/2 months after Russian President Vladimir Putins invasion of Ukraine sent a shiver of fear through Moscows neighbors.

The Kremlin reacted by warning it will be forced to take retaliatory military-technical steps.

On the ground, meanwhile, Russian forces pounded areas in central, northern and eastern Ukraine, including the last pocket of resistance in Mariupol, as part its offensive to take the industrial Donbas region, while Ukraine recaptured some towns and villages in the northeast.

The first war-crimes trial of a Russian soldier since the start of the conflict is set to open Friday in Kyiv. A 21-year-old captured member of a tank unit is accused of shooting to death a civilian on a bicycle during the opening week of the war.

Finlands president and prime minister announced that the Nordic country should apply right away for membership in NATO, the military defense pact founded in part to counter the Soviet Union.

You (Russia) caused this. Look in the mirror, Finnish President Sauli Niinisto said this week.

While the countrys Parliament still has to weigh in, the announcement means Finland is all but certain to apply  and gain admission  though the process could take months to complete. Sweden, likewise, is considering putting itself under NATOs protection.

That would represent a major change in Europes security landscape: Sweden has avoided military alliances for more than 200 years, while Finland adopted neutrality after its defeat by the Soviets in World War II.

Public opinion in both nations shifted dramatically in favor of NATO membership after the invasion, which stirred fears in countries along Russias flank that they could be next.

Such an expansion of the alliance would leave Russia surrounded by NATO countries in the Baltic Sea and the Arctic and would amount to a stinging setback for Putin, who had hoped to divide and roll back NATO in Europe but is instead seeing the opposite happen.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said the alliance would welcome Finland and Sweden with open arms.

Russias Foreign Ministry warned that Moscow will be forced to take retaliatory steps of military-technical and other characteristics in order to counter the emerging threats to its national security.

NATOs funneling of weapons and other military support to Ukraine already has been critical to Kyivs surprising success in stymieing the invasion, and the Kremlin warned anew in chilling terms Thursday that the aid could lead to direct conflict between NATO and Russia.

There is always a risk of such conflict turning into a full-scale nuclear war, a scenario that will be catastrophic for all, said Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Russias Security Council.

While Russias advance in the Donbas has been slow, its forces have gained some ground and taken some villages.

Four civilians were killed Thursday in three communities in the Donetsk region, which is part of the Donbas, the regional governor reported.

Britains Defense Ministry said Russias focus on the Donbas has left its remaining troops around the northeastern city of Kharkiv vulnerable to counterattack from Ukrainian forces, which recaptured several towns and villages around the city.

Russian strikes Thursday killed at least two civilians on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraines second-largest city, local authorities said.

The attacks also damaged a building housing a humanitarian aid unit, municipal offices and hospital facilities, Vyacheslav Zadorenko, the mayor of the suburban town of Derhachi, wrote in a Telegram post.

None of the sites had anything to do with military infrastructure, Zadorenko said.

Fighting across the east has driven many thousands of Ukrainians from their homes.

It is terrible there now. We were leaving under missiles, said Tatiana Kravstova, who left the town of Siversk with her 8-year-old son Artiom on a bus headed for the central city of Dnipro. I dont know where they were aiming, but they were pointing at civilians.

Ukraine also said Russian forces had fired artillery and grenade launchers at Ukrainian troops around Zaporizhzhia, which has been a refuge for civilians fleeing Mariupol, and attacked in the Chernihiv and Sumy regions to the north.

Overnight airstrikes near Chernihiv, in northern Ukraine, killed at least three people, Ukraines military said. It said that Russian troops fired rockets at a school and student dormitory in Novhorod-Siversky and that some other buildings, including private homes, were also damaged.

In his evening address to the nation, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the assaults.

Of course, the Russian state is in such a state that any education only gets in its way, he said. But what can be achieved by destroying Ukrainian schools? All Russian commanders who give such orders are simply sick and incurable.

Noting that Thursday is International Nurses Day, Zelenskyy said the Russian military had damaged 570 medical facilities since the invasion began on Feb. 24 and fully destroyed 101 hospitals.

Twelve Russian missiles struck an oil refinery and other infrastructure in the central Ukrainian industrial hub of Kremenchuk on Thursday, the regions acting governor, Dmytro Lunin, wrote in a Telegram post. In early April, he said, the refinery, which had been the last fully functional one in Ukraine at the time, was knocked offline by an attack.

In the southern port of Mariupol, which has largely been reduced to smoking rubble with little food, water or medicine, or what the mayor called a medieval ghetto, Ukrainian fighters continued to hold out at the Azovstal steel plant, the last stronghold of resistance in the city.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said negotiations were underway with Russia to win the release of 38 severely wounded Ukrainian defenders from the plant. She said Ukraine hoped to exchange them for 38 significant Russian prisoners of war.

___

Yesica Fisch in Bakhmut, David Keyton in Kyiv, Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Mstyslav Chernov in Kharkiv, Jari Tanner in Helsinki, and other AP staffers around the world contributed.

___

Follow APs coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

By OLEKSANDR STASHEVSKYI

Associated Press
Sonora, CA  District Three Tuolumne County Board of Supervisor Anaiah Kirk has authored a new myMotherLode.com blog providing his opinions on various county government-related topics.

Issues he discusses include the potential TUD acquisition of water rights, the degrading roads, a new audible alert system, federal fire policies, cannabis rules and many other items.

Kirk is serving as board chair throughout 2022. His District Three includes Tuolumne, Twain Harte, and many communities up the Highway 108 corridor.

You can find the blog by clicking here.

All of the supervisors, and other elected officials, are invited to author blogs as a way to communicate directly to constituents and explain recent government actions and decisions.
Rights group: Israel approves over 4,000 new settler homes View Photo

JERUSALEM (AP)  Israel advanced plans for the construction of more than 4,000 settler homes in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, a rights group said, a day after the military demolished homes in an area where hundreds of Palestinians face the threat of expulsion.

It was a jolting illustration of Israels policies in the territory it has occupied for nearly 55 years. Critics, including three major human rights groups, say those policies amount to apartheid, a charge Israel rejects as an attack on its very legitimacy.

Hagit Ofran, an expert at the anti-settlement watchdog group Peace Now, told The Associated Press that a military planning body approved 4,427 housing units at a meeting on Thursday that she attended. The state of Israel took another stumble toward the abyss and further deepened the occupation, she tweeted.

Spokespeople for the Israeli government and the military body in charge of civilian affairs in the West Bank did not respond to requests for comment.

Its the biggest advancement of settlement projects since the Biden administration took office. The White House opposes settlement construction and views it as an obstacle to any eventual peace agreement with the Palestinians.

There was no immediate comment from the administration on Thursdays decision. But last week, when the first reports emerged of the impending settlement approval, State Department spokeswoman Jalina Porter reiterated that the U.S. strongly opposes settlement expansion.

U.N. Mideast envoy Tor Wennesland condemned the announcement, calling the settlements a major obstacle to peace that undermines hopes for a two-state solution.

Continued settlement expansion further entrenches the occupation, encroaches upon Palestinian land and natural resources, and hampers the free movement of the Palestinian population, he said.

Most of the international community considers the settlements illegal and supports a two-state solution to the conflict. But neither the United States nor other world powers have given Israel  the stronger party  any incentive to accede to such an arrangement. Israel says Palestinian leaders have rejected proposals by previous governments that would have given them a state.

Israel views the West Bank as the biblical and historical heartland of the Jewish people. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who once led the main settler organization, is opposed to Palestinian statehood, but his government has taken steps to improve economic conditions for Palestinians.

Israel approved some 3,000 settler homes in October, brushing aside a rebuke from the U.S., its closest ally. Peace talks with the Palestinians broke down more than a decade ago, in part because of Israels continuing construction on lands the Palestinians want for a future state.

On Wednesday, Israeli troops demolished at least 18 buildings and structures in the West Bank following a Supreme Court decision that would force at least 1,000 Palestinians out of an area Israel designated as a firing zone in the early 1980s.

BTselem, another Israeli rights group, said 12 residential buildings were among the structures that were demolished, in villages in the arid hills south of the West Bank city of Hebron.

Residents of the Masafer Yatta say they have been living in the region, herding animals and practicing traditional desert agriculture for decades, long before Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 war. The Supreme Court sided with the military, which says there were no permanent structures in the area before it was designated a training zone.

Whats happening now is ethnic cleansing, Sami Huraini, an activist and a resident of the area, told the AP. They are trying to expel the people from this land, saying they never lived here permanently, which is a lie.

He said residents of the area where the demolitions were carried out are determined to remain there. The people are staying on their land and have already started to rebuild, he said.

The military declined to comment on the demolitions.

Neighboring Jordan, which made peace with Israel in 1994, condemned both the settlement expansion and the forced displacement of Palestinians, calling it a a flagrant violation of international law.

Israel has built more than 130 settlements across the West Bank that today are home to nearly 500,000 settlers, who have Israeli citizenship. Nearly 3 million Palestinians live in the territory under open-ended Israeli military rule. The Palestinian Authority exercises limited self-rule over parts of the West Bank and cooperates with Israel on security matters.

The Palestinians want the West Bank to form the main part of a future state, along with east Jerusalem and Gaza, all territories seized by Israel in the 1967 war. Israel annexed east Jerusalem in a move not recognized internationally, and Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade on Gaza after the Palestinian militant group Hamas seized power there in 2007.

The Palestinians view the expansion of settlements in the West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem as a major obstacle to any future peace deal because they reduce and divide up the land on which such a state would be established.

___

Associated Press writer Ilan Ben Zion in Jerusalem contributed.

By JOSEPH KRAUSS

Associated Press
Man denies killing mother at sea to inherit familys estate View Photo

RUTLAND, Vt. (AP)  A 28-year-old man who was rescued from a raft off the coast of New England in 2016 after his boat sank pleaded not guilty Wednesday to charges he killed his mother at sea to inherit the familys estate.

Nathan Carman was arraigned in federal court in Rutland on multiple fraud charges and a first-degree murder charge in the death of Linda Carman of Middletown, Connecticut. He shouted not guilty in the direction of reporters who had asked him on his way into the courthouse whether he killed his mother.

Authorities alleged in an indictment unsealed Tuesday that Nathan Carman also killed his grandfather, John Chakalos, at his home in Windsor, Connecticut, in 2013 as part of a scheme to obtain money and property from his grandfathers estate, but he was not charged with that killing.

As a central part of the scheme, Nathan Carman murdered John Chakalos and Linda Carman, the indictment reads.

Nathan Carman was found in an inflatable raft eight days after leaving a Rhode Island marina to go fishing with his mother, who was never found. Prosecutors allege he altered the boat to make it more likely to sink that day. He has denied doing anything to intentionally make the boat unseaworthy.

Carman, who was arrested Tuesday, faces life in prison if convicted of killing his mother. His attorney did not comment after the arraignment.

Federal prosecutors said in a court document filed Wednesday he should remain detained because he poses a flight risk and is a danger to the community. They wrote that Carman was treated for mental health issues from when he was a small child until he was 17 years old and has avoided any treatment since then.

He remains jailed at least until a hearing scheduled for Monday.

For an individual who would kill his own family members, nothing is off the table, prosecutors wrote.

Prosecutors allege the inheritance scheme spanned nearly a decade and began with Carman buying a rifle in New Hampshire that he used to shoot Chakalos on Dec. 20, 2013, while he slept. He then discarded his computer hard drive and the GPS unit that had been in his truck, prosecutors said.

Police have said Carman was the last person to see his grandfather alive and owned a semi-automatic rifle similar to the one used to kill Chakalos  but the firearm disappeared.

After Chakalos death, Carman received $550,000 from two bank accounts that his grandfather had set up and that he was the beneficiary of when Chakalos died. He moved from an apartment in Bloomfield, Connecticut, to Vernon, Vermont, in 2014. He was unemployed much of the time and by the fall of 2016, was low on funds, prosecutors said.

In September 2016, Carman arranged to go on a fishing trip with his mother on his boat named the Chicken Pox.

Nathan Carman planned to kill his mother on the trip, the indictment reads. He also planned how he would report the sinking of the Chicken Pox and his mothers disappearance at sea as accidents.

Before the trip, Carman altered the boat by removing two forward bulkheads and trim tabs from the transom of the hull, the indictment states.

After leaving the marina, Nathan Carman killed his mother, Linda Carman, and eventually sank the Chicken Pox, it states.

In 2019, a federal judge in Rhode Island decided that Carman contributed to the sinking of the boat. U.S. District Judge John McConnell issued a written decision in favor of an insurance company that had refused to pay an $85,000 claim to Carman for the loss of his 31-foot fishing boat.

Carmen denied the allegations, telling the Coast Guard that when the boat filled quickly with water, he swam to the life raft and called for his mother but never saw her again.

He was found floating in the raft off the coast of Marthas Vineyard, a Massachusetts island, by the crew of a freighter eight days after the boat was reported missing.

Chakalos, who was a real estate developer, left behind an estate that was worth nearly $29 million, which was to be divided among his four daughters. Carman is in line to get about $7 million of the estate, as his mothers only heir.

Chakalos three surviving daughters sued Carman in New Hampshire probate court, seeking to bar him from receiving any money from Chakalos estate. A judge dismissed the case in 2019, saying Chakalos was not a New Hampshire resident. The probate case was refiled in Connecticut, where it remains pending.

William Michael, an attorney for Carmans mothers sisters, said Tuesday the family had no immediate comment.

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AP reporters Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire, Lisa Rathke in Montpelier, Vermont, and Dave Collins in Hartford, Connecticut, contributed to this report.

By LISA RATHKE

Associated Press
Texas authorities: Prisoner stabs guard, escapes from bus View Photo

CENTERVILLE, Texas (AP)  A Texas prisoner serving a life sentence for murder escaped from a transport bus Thursday after stabbing the driver, setting off a search in a rural county between Dallas and Houston, authorities said.

Multiple law enforcement agencies were searching an area off an interstate in Leon County for Gonzalo Lopez, 46, who was convicted in 2006 of killing another man along the Texas-Mexico border.

There were 16 prisoners aboard the bus but no one else escaped, said Jason Clark, chief of staff for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. He said Lopez overpowered the driver, a correctional officer, but that it was unclear whether Lopez gained control of the bus or whether it just went off the road.

The injuries to the driver are not considered life-threatening, Clark said.

Leon County has roughly 16,000 residents and is about 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of the states prison headquarters.

Prison records show Lopez was most recently being held at a lockup in Gatesville, more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) from where authorities were searching.

Other prisoners in Texas have also escaped transport vehicles over the years. Among the most recent was in 2019 when an MMA fighter suspected of killing two people fled from a van and was missing for nine hours. Authorities said he was eventually found hiding in a trash can.
Conservative groups go against Trump, Oz in Pa. Senate race View Photo

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP)  Several prominent conservative groups are getting involved in Pennsylvanias race for U.S. Senate and backing candidate Kathy Barnette as an alternative to Mehmet Oz, the celebrity heart surgeon endorsed by former President Donald Trump.

The anti-tax Club for Growth endorsed Barnette on Wednesday and has begun airing TV ads on her behalf. That follows the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony Lists decision on Tuesday to back Barnette over Oz.

The endorsement by Susan B. Anthony List is timely, with abortion in the headlines, and its backing of Barnette highlighted the story she has told of being the outcome of a rape when her mother was 11.

Kathy is a courageous advocate for life who exposes the human cost of abortion, Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony List, said in a statement.

Its unclear whether the endorsements and advertising will be enough to carry Barnette to the top of the field in Pennsylvanias May 17 primary.

The Club for Growth, for instance, unleashed millions of dollars in advertising against Trump-backed JD Vance in Ohios GOP Senate primary earlier this month only for the Hillbilly Elegy author to go on and win the race by an eight-point margin.

But the growing focus on Barnette suggests anxiety among some conservative and pro-Trump circles that Oz doesnt sufficiently reflect their views on abortion, guns or the culture wars the GOP is waging against Democrats.

An Oz loss next week would mark another setback for Trump after his preferred candidate for governor was defeated in Nebraskas Republican primary on Tuesday.

Trump remains the most popular figure among Republican voters and his endorsement helped pull Vance to victory in the final weeks of the Ohio campaign. Both Trump-backed congressional candidates also won in West Virginias primary.

A Fox News poll released Monday, however, suggested a tight race in Pennsylvanias Senate election.

The poll found 22% of GOP primary voters supported Oz with former hedge fund CEO David McCormick and Barnette bunched together at 20% and 19%. About one-fifth of voters, or 18%, said they were undecided.

If elected, the 50-year-old would be the first Black woman Pennsylvanians sent to the U.S. Senate.

She came into the race with little name recognition or money, but gained support among some right-wing groups by campaigning with allies of Trumps baseless conspiracy theories that Democrats stole the 2020 election in Pennsylvania.

In recent years, she has become a speaker for anti-abortion causes, penned a memoir about being Black and conservative, ran unsuccessfully for a congressional seat in a Democratic-leaning district in suburban Philadelphia and gained a platform as a guest on conservative news shows.

Until recently, Pennsylvanias Senate race has been primarily an expensive duel between Oz and McCormick. Both candidates and the super PACs that support them have reported spending more than $50 million and have blanketed Pennsylvanias airwaves with TV ads.

McCormick, who has substantial establishment connections going back to his service in former President George W. Bushs administration, has received backing from various Trump administration figures and will close the campaign with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz stumping across Pennsylvania for him.

But McCormick suffered a damaging blow when Trump attacked him at a Friday rally for Oz, calling McCormick the candidate of special interests and globalists and the Washington establishment.

Trump did not mention Barnette. McCormick and Oz have largely stayed quiet in public about Barnette, who has raised and spent a fraction of their money.

But Barnette has criticized both as carpetbaggers and  globalists, slammed Oz as a liberal and taken aim at what she called the GOPs habit of electing the richest person.

She also has dismissed Trumps endorsement of Oz, saying Trumps Make America Great slogan, or MAGA, does not belong to President Trump. MAGA, although he coined the word, MAGA actually belongs to the people.

The other major race in Pennsylvania, for its open governors office, is also volatile for Republicans, with party leaders and movement conservatives fearing that a far-right candidate will win it.

That candidate, Doug Mastriano, and Barnette often campaign together, along with key figures in Trumps circle who have spread denialism about the 2020 election, including Trumps former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and lawyer Jenna Ellis.

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Follow AP for full coverage of the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections and on Twitter, https://twitter.com/ap_politics

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Follow Marc Levy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/timelywriter

By MARC LEVY

Associated Press
Jan. 6 panel subpoenas McCarthy, four other GOP lawmakers View Photo

WASHINGTON (AP)  A House panel issued subpoenas Thursday to House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and four other GOP lawmakers in its probe into the violent Jan. 6 insurrection, an extraordinary step that has little precedent and is certain to further inflame partisan tensions over the 2021 attack.

The panel is investigating McCarthys conversations with then-President Donald Trump the day of the attack and meetings the four other lawmakers had with the White House beforehand as Trump and his aides worked to overturn his 2020 election defeat. The former presidents supporters violently pushed past police that day, broke through windows and doors of the Capitol and interrupted the certification of President Joe Bidens victory.

The decision to issue subpoenas to McCarthy, R-Calif., and Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Andy Biggs of Arizona and Mo Brooks of Alabama is a dramatic show of force by the panel, which has already interviewed nearly 1,000 witnesses and collected more than 100,000 documents as it investigates the worst attack on the Capitol in two centuries.

The move is not without risk, as Republicans are favored to capture back the House majority in this falls midterm elections and have promised retribution for Democrats if they take control.

After the announcement, McCarthy, who aspires to be House speaker, told reporters I have not seen a subpoena and said his view on the Jan. 6 committee has not changed since the nine-lawmaker panel asked for his voluntary cooperation earlier this year.

Theyre not conducting a legitimate investigation, McCarthy said. Seems as though they just want to go after their political opponents.

Similarly, Perry told reporters the investigation is a charade and said the subpoena is all about headlines.

Neither man said whether he would comply.

The panel, made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans, had previously asked for voluntary cooperation from the five lawmakers, along with a handful of other GOP members, but all of them refused to speak with the panel, which debated for months whether to issue the subpoenas.

Before we hold our hearings next month, we wished to provide members the opportunity to discuss these matters with the committee voluntarily, said Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Democratic chairman of the panel. Regrettably, the individuals receiving subpoenas today have refused and were forced to take this step to help ensure the committee uncovers facts concerning January 6th.

Rep. Liz Cheney, the panels Republican vice chair, said the step wasnt taken lightly. The unwillingness of the lawmakers to provide relevant information about the attack, she said, is a very serious and grave situation.

Congressional subpoenas for sitting members of Congress, especially for a party leader, have little precedent in recent decades, and it is unclear what the consequences would be if any or all of the five men decline to comply. The House has voted to hold two other noncompliant witnesses, former Trump aides Steve Bannon and Mark Meadows, in contempt, referring their cases to the Justice Department.

In announcing the subpoenas, the Jan. 6 panel said there is historical precedent for the move and noted that the House Ethics Committee has issued a number of subpoenas to Members of Congress for testimony or documents, though such actions are generally done secretly.

We recognize this is fairly unprecedented, said Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, the other GOP member of the panel, after the committee announced the subpoenas. But the Jan. 6 attack was very unprecedented.

Kinzinger said it is important for us to get every piece of information we possibly can.

McCarthy has acknowledged he spoke with Trump on Jan. 6 as Trumps supporters were beating police outside the Capitol and forcing their way into the building. But he has not shared many details. The committee requested information about his conversations with Trump before, during and after the riot.

McCarthy took to the House floor after the rioters were cleared and said in a forceful speech that Trump bears responsibility for the attack and that it was the saddest day I have ever had in Congress  even as he went on to join 138 other House Republicans in voting to reject the election results.

Another member of the GOP caucus, Washington Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, said after the attack that McCarthy had recounted that he told Trump to publicly call off the riot and said the violent mob was made up of Trump supporters, not far-left antifa members, as Trump had claimed.

Thats when, according to McCarthy, the president said, Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are, Herrera Beutler said in a statement last year.

The GOP leader soon made up with Trump, though, visiting him in Florida and rallying House Republicans to vote against investigations of the attack.

The other four men were in touch with the White House for several weeks ahead of the insurrection, talking to Trump and his legal advisers about ways to stop the congressional electoral count on Jan. 6 to certify Joe Bidens victory.

These members include those who participated in meetings at the White House, those who had direct conversations with President Trump leading up to and during the attack on the Capitol, and those who were involved in the planning and coordination of certain activities on and before January 6th, the committee said in a release.

Brooks, who has since been critical of Trump, spoke alongside the former president at the massive rally in front of the White House the morning of Jan. 6, telling supporters to start taking down names and kicking ass before hundreds of them broke into the Capitol.

Perry spoke to the White House about replacing acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen with an official who was more sympathetic to Trumps false claims of voter fraud, and Biggs was involved in plans to bring protesters to Washington and pressuring state officials to overturn the legitimate election results, according to the panel. Jordan, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, spoke to Trump on Jan. 6 and was also involved in strategizing how to overturn the election.

Several of their efforts were detailed in texts released to the panel by Meadows, who was Trumps chief of staff at the time.

11 days to 1/6 and 25 days to inauguration, Perry texted Meadows on Dec. 26, 2020. We gotta get going!

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Associated Press writer Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pa., contributed to this report.

By MARY CLARE JALONICK, KEVIN FREKING and LISA MASCARO

Associated Press
North Texas rancher Rex Cauble, a former cutting-horse champion and convicted member of the Cowboy Mafia, has died of natural causes at an Oklahoma hospital.

Services for Cauble, 89, of Denton were scheduled Friday in Dallas. Cauble died on Monday in Durant, Okla.

Cauble always maintained his innocence in the international drug smuggling operation and lived out his days enjoying his horses and being a grandfather to his grandchildren, his widow Anna Cauble of Dallas said Tuesday.

"It's a sad loss," William Trantham, a Denton lawyer, told The Dallas Morning News in Wednesday's editions. "I don't care if he was guilty or not guilty, it's a sad loss. He was a sucker for a sad story.  These outlaws that used and abused him so heavily _ he was quite loyal to them."

Cauble in January 1982 was convicted on federal charges of embezzlement, conspiracy and racketeering. A month later, he was convicted of participating in the smuggling of 106 tons of marijuana into Texas from South America. Trial testimony showed that trucks were used to move the drug from fishing trawlers on the Texas coast to four of Cauble's ranches in North Texas.

After Cauble's convictions, the government seized an estimated $12 million of his assets under the federal Racketeering Influenced and Corruption Organizations Act.

Cauble was sentenced to five years in prison on each of 10 counts. He completed his prison term in September 1987 through a combination of time served and good-conduct credits.

After his release from prison, Cauble began trading cotton futures and rebuilding his life. He remarried nine years ago.

"If you have that much, and you are doing that much with your life and have that many employees, things happen," said his widow, adding that he completed an autobiography before his death. "Up until the day he died, I would swear he did not do it."

Cauble was born the son of a cotton farmer on Aug. 15, 1913. As an oilfield roughneck, Cauble struck oil when he was 31 and by 1964, was a world champion nonprofessional rider. He purchased a prize horse, Cutter Bill, for $2,000 and parlayed his investment into a million-dollar stud. Cauble in March attended Cutter Bill's induction into the American Quarter Horse Hall of Fame.

"He knew a broader spectrum of people than I ever met in any other human being in my life _ everybody from (former Gov.) John Connally and the wealthiest men in Texas to horse traders and ranchers," said Trantham.

The former chairman of the Texas Aeronautics Commission and an honorary Texas Ranger, the flamboyant businessman with a 5 1/4-carat diamond ring owned western wear stores and had interests in banking, petroleum, ranching, construction and real estate. He formerly owned 8,900 acres in Denton County alone.

Services were scheduled for 2 p.m. Friday at Sparkman-Hillcrest Funeral Home in Dallas, followed by a private burial.

In addition to his widow, Cauble is survived by her daughter, Sonya Hartley of Dallas, and two grandchildren.

Information from: The Dallas Morning News
An explosion suspected to be a bomb blast has rocked Jalingo, Taraba state capital, again.

The blast with loud sound occurred on Tuesday night close to the Army base located along Jolly Nyame Road in Jalingo.

Unconfirmed reports said the blast happened by the gate of the Army base while residents close to the base said it might be inside the base.

Findings this morning revealed that the road leading to the base was closed and motorists were diverted to other roads.

The loud sound of the blast was heard in many parts of Jalingo, but there was no report of any casualty.

This is the third time a bomb blast has occurred in the state, with two blasts recorded in Jalingo and one at Iware town in Ardo Kola local government area.

The Police Public Relations Officer in charge of Taraba command, DSP Usman Abdullahi, confirmed the incident and said no casualty was recorded.
JERUSALEM (AP)  Israel advanced plans for the construction of more than 4,000 settler homes in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, a rights group said, a day after the military demolished homes in an area where hundreds of Palestinians face the threat of expulsion.

It was a jolting illustration of Israel's policies in the territory it has occupied for nearly 55 years. Critics, including three major human rights groups, say those policies amount to apartheid, a charge Israel rejects as an attack on its very legitimacy.

Hagit Ofran, an expert at the anti-settlement watchdog group Peace Now, told The Associated Press that a military planning body approved 4,427 housing units at a meeting on Thursday that she attended. The state of Israel took another stumble toward the abyss and further deepened the occupation, she tweeted.

Spokespeople for the Israeli government and the military body in charge of civilian affairs in the West Bank did not respond to requests for comment.

It's the biggest advancement of settlement projects since the Biden administration took office. The White House opposes settlement construction and views it as an obstacle to any eventual peace agreement with the Palestinians.

There was no immediate comment from the administration on Thursday's decision. But last week, when the first reports emerged of the impending settlement approval, State Department spokeswoman Jalina Porter reiterated that the U.S. strongly opposes settlement expansion.

U.N. Mideast envoy Tor Wennesland condemned the announcement, calling the settlements a major obstacle to peace that undermines hopes for a two-state solution.

Continued settlement expansion further entrenches the occupation, encroaches upon Palestinian land and natural resources, and hampers the free movement of the Palestinian population, he said.

Most of the international community considers the settlements illegal and supports a two-state solution to the conflict. But neither the United States nor other world powers have given Israel  the stronger party  any incentive to accede to such an arrangement. Israel says Palestinian leaders have rejected proposals by previous governments that would have given them a state.

Israel views the West Bank as the biblical and historical heartland of the Jewish people. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who once led the main settler organization, is opposed to Palestinian statehood, but his government has taken steps to improve economic conditions for Palestinians.

Israel approved some 3,000 settler homes in October, brushing aside a rebuke from the U.S., its closest ally. Peace talks with the Palestinians broke down more than a decade ago, in part because of Israel's continuing construction on lands the Palestinians want for a future state.

On Wednesday, Israeli troops demolished at least 18 buildings and structures in the West Bank following a Supreme Court decision that would force at least 1,000 Palestinians out of an area Israel designated as a firing zone in the early 1980s.

BTselem, another Israeli rights group, said 12 residential buildings were among the structures that were demolished, in villages in the arid hills south of the West Bank city of Hebron.

Residents of the Masafer Yatta say they have been living in the region, herding animals and practicing traditional desert agriculture for decades, long before Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 war. The Supreme Court sided with the military, which says there were no permanent structures in the area before it was designated a training zone.

Whats happening now is ethnic cleansing," Sami Huraini, an activist and a resident of the area, told the AP. They are trying to expel the people from this land, saying they never lived here permanently, which is a lie.

He said residents of the area where the demolitions were carried out are determined to remain there. The people are staying on their land and have already started to rebuild," he said.

The military declined to comment on the demolitions.

Neighboring Jordan, which made peace with Israel in 1994, condemned both the settlement expansion and the forced displacement of Palestinians, calling it a a flagrant violation of international law.

Israel has built more than 130 settlements across the West Bank that today are home to nearly 500,000 settlers, who have Israeli citizenship. Nearly 3 million Palestinians live in the territory under open-ended Israeli military rule. The Palestinian Authority exercises limited self-rule over parts of the West Bank and cooperates with Israel on security matters.

The Palestinians want the West Bank to form the main part of a future state, along with east Jerusalem and Gaza, all territories seized by Israel in the 1967 war. Israel annexed east Jerusalem in a move not recognized internationally, and Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade on Gaza after the Palestinian militant group Hamas seized power there in 2007.

The Palestinians view the expansion of settlements in the West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem as a major obstacle to any future peace deal because they reduce and divide up the land on which such a state would be established.

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Associated Press writer Ilan Ben Zion in Jerusalem contributed.
RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP)  Thousands gathered to mourn a slain Al Jazeera journalist in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah on Thursday, as the head of the Palestinian Authority blamed Israel for her death and rejected Israeli calls for a joint investigation.

Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American reporter who covered the Mideast conflict for more than 25 years, was shot dead Wednesday during an Israeli military raid in the West Bank town of Jenin. Journalists who were with her, including one who was shot and wounded, said Israeli forces fired upon them even though they were clearly identifiable as reporters.

Israel says it is investigating the incident. It initially suggested she might have been shot by Palestinian militants, without providing evidence, but has since backtracked. Israel is calling for a joint investigation with the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the West Bank and cooperates with it on security.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas angrily rejected that proposal, saying we hold the Israeli occupation authorities fully responsible for killing her.

"They cannot hide the truth with this crime, Abbas said in an address as her body lay in state with a Palestinian flag draped over it in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where the Palestinian Authority is headquartered.

"They are the ones who committed the crime, and because we do not trust them, we will immediately go to the International Criminal Court, Abbas said.

The ICC launched an investigation into possible Israeli war crimes over a year ago. Israel has rejected that probe as being biased against it.

Hussein al-Sheikh, a senior aide to Abbas, said that the Palestinians would conduct their own independent probe and convey the results "with high transparency. He rejected an Israeli request to conduct its own ballistic analysis on the bullet.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett accused the Palestinians of denying Israel access to the basic findings required to get to the truth. He called on the Palestinian Authority to not take any steps to disrupt the investigation or to contaminate the investigation process.

Abu Akleh was killed while covering an Israeli military raid in Jenin, which has emerged as a militant bastion in recent weeks as Palestinians have carried out a series of deadly attacks and Israel has launched military raids across the occupied West Bank.

The Qatar-based Al Jazeera accused Israel of deliberately killing her and vowed to take legal action. Reporters who were with her said there were no Palestinian militants in the area.

Israeli officials initially suggested Abu Akleh was struck by militant fire and released a video showing gunmen firing at Israeli forces in a narrow alley inside the Jenin refugee camp. They later backtracked after an Israeli human rights group released its own video showing the site of the shooting was several hundred meters away from where Abu Akleh was killed.

Her death was met with an outpouring of grief across the Arab world. The 51-year-old was well-known as a veteran on-air correspondent for Al Jazeera's Arabic-language channel. Her reporting shed light on the harsh realities of Israeli military rule, which is well into its sixth decade with no end in sight. She was also a U.S. citizen.

Her body was to be brought to Jerusalem, where she was born, for burial on Friday.

The killing sparked international condemnation and widespread calls for accountability. U.N. Secretary General Antonio Gutteres called for an an independent and transparent investigation to ensure those responsible are held to account.

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz on Wednesday promised such an inquiry, saying he was in touch with U.S. and Palestinian officials and hoped for cooperation between Israel and the Palestinians.

We are trying to figure out exactly what happened, he said. I dont have final conclusions.

Asked about the investigation and Israels offer for the Palestinians to participate, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday that U.S. officials stand ready to assist either party in any way that we can.

Neither side has asked for our assistance at this time and such a request would be required in order for us to do so, she said.

Abu Aklehs death could draw new scrutiny of Israels military justice system, which is being examined as part of the ICC probe. It also threatened to further strain often rocky relations between the army and the international media.

Rights groups say Israel rarely follows through on investigations of deadly encounters with Palestinians, and that when it does, it often hands down lenient punishments.

Her death comes amid a wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence that has been fueled by tensions at a key Jerusalem holy site.

At least 18 people have been killed in Palestinian attacks in recent weeks, as well as more than 30 Palestinians, most of them involved in attacks or clashes with Israeli forces. Among the slain Palestinians were an unarmed woman and at least two apparent passersby, fueling criticism that Israel often uses excessive force.

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Krauss reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press writer Ilan Ben Zion in Jerusalem contributed.
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP)  Five-time former Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe was reappointed on Thursday in an effort to bring stability to the island nation, which is engulfed in a political and economic crisis.

Wickremesinghe, a contentious choice by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, took his oath in a ceremony at the presidents residence. Protesters have blocked the entrance to the president's office for more than a month.

The presidents brother, Mahinda Rajakapsa, resigned as prime minister on Monday following violent attacks by supporters on peaceful anti-government protesters. His resignation automatically dissolved the Cabinet, leaving an administrative vacuum.

The presidents selection of Wickremesinghe is an attempt to end the violence and restore international credibility as the government negotiates a bailout package with the International Monetary Fund.

Sri Lankans for months have been forced to stand in long lines to buy scarce essentials, with many returning empty-handed.

Wickremesinghe visited a Buddhist temple after taking his oath and told journalists he will work with the opposition and the governing party to find solutions to the hardships faced by the people.

Authorities on Wednesday deployed armored vehicles and troops in the streets of the capital after attacks on protesters triggered a wave of violence across the country. Nine people died and more than 200 were injured.

Security forces have been ordered to shoot people deemed to be participating in the violence as sporadic acts of arson and vandalism continued despite a strict nationwide curfew that began Monday evening.

A court on Thursday banned former prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, his former government minister son and 15 others from traveling overseas pending the results of investigations on Mondays attack against peaceful protestors who had demanded the resignation of the Rajapaksa brothers, which triggered the countrywide violence against Rajapaksa supporters. Mahinda Rajapaksa resigned amid the violence.

Protesters had demanded the resignations of the Rajapaksa brothers because of the debt crisis that has nearly bankrupted the country and caused severe shortages of fuel, food and other essentials.

Some opposition politicians and religious leaders objected to Wickremesinghe's appointment, saying citizens wanted sweeping reforms.

Opposition lawmaker Anura Dissananayake said the choice of Wickremesinghe was aimed more at protecting the president and his family from public anger over corruption allegationsand his role in the economic crisis than it was in solving the countrys problems.

When he was previously prime minister from 2015 to 2019, Wickremesinghe was accused of protecting the powerful Rajapaksa family from allegations of corruption and other wrongdoing.

Buddhist and Catholic clergy also objected to Wickremesinghes selection.

This decision has been taken totally disregarding the aspirations of the people who are protesting today. The protests can only get worse by this decision, said the Rev. Omalpe Sobitha, a senior Buddhist monk.

Catholic Archbishop of Colombo Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith said "a complete change of the system is needed for Sri Lanka to emerge from crisis.

Political analyst Ranga Jayasuriya said by appointing Wickremesinghe as prime minister, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa did not put out the fire, but added fuel on it.

People would be angrier with this snub of appointing a man who has no public support, Jayasuriya tweeted.

The U.S. Ambassador to Sri Lanka, Julie Chung, said she looks forward to working with Wickremesinghe and that his appointment and the quick formation of an inclusive government are first steps to addressing the crisis and promoting stability.

We encourage meaningful progress at the IMF and long-term solutions that meet the needs of all Sri Lankans, she said in a tweet.

Sri Lanka is nearly bankrupt and has suspended repayments of $7 billion in foreign loans due this year. The IMF has said any short or long-term assistance depends on the outcome of talks with creditors on loan restructuring. Sri Lanka must repay about $25 billion in foreign loans by 2026 out of a current total foreign debt of $51 billion.

The finance ministry said earlier this month that the countrys usable foreign reserves have plummeted to $25 million.

The foreign currency shortage has forced a sharp decline in imports, leading to severe shortages of essentials such as fuel, cooking gas, food and medicine.

Wickremesinghe will likely present a Cabinet list to the president for appointment, a power vested in him by the constitution.

If there are objections to the prime minister or the new Cabinet, lawmakers can submit a no-confidence motion to the house speaker when the body reconvenes on Tuesday. The motion would then be debated and voted on.

Wickremesinghe, 73, has been in Parliament for 45 years. His political party split in 2020 amid a leadership crisis and its most senior members left to form a new party, which is currently the countrys main opposition.

Wickremesinghes reputation was damaged during his previous term as prime minister, when he was in a difficult power- sharing arrangement with then-President Maithripala Sirisena.

Conflict and a communication breakdown between them were blamed for intelligence lapses that led to Easter Sunday suicide bomb attacks in 2019 that killed more than 260 people.

He was also accused of shielding a friend he had appointed as head of the Central Bank from allegations of insider trading.
TEHRAN, Iran (AP)  Qatars emir met with Iranian leaders on Thursday, offering support for efforts to revive the nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers, even as talks on the tattered accord remain deadlocked.

Despite its small size, the tiny Gulf Arab sheikdom plays a strategic role as a quiet mediator and negotiator in a region rife with sectarian and political conflict. Qatars ties with both Washington and Tehran allow Doha to relay viewpoints between the two.

We believe that negotiation is the solution of the problem, the official IRNA news agency quoted visiting Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani as saying after meeting President Ebrahim Raisi. The two also discussed a range of other issues, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and the war in Yemen.

Raisi seized the opportunity to slam Western nations, insisting that their presence is not providing security in the region" but harming the security. Iran sees the presence of U.S. forces in neighboring countries  on its doorstep  as a threat.

Raisi described Sheikh Tamim's one-day visit to Tehran as a turning point in relations between Iran and Qatar.

Later in the day, Irans Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who has final say on all state matters, said during his meeting with the emir that their two nations should significantly boost their economic and political ties. But Khamenei also urged the Arab world and particularly Qatar to offer more support for the Palestinian cause in its conflict with Israel, an archenemy of Iran.

The emir's visit came as the European Unions coordinator on nuclear talks, Enrique Mora, was still in Iran. The talks in Vienna have been stalled for months, apparently over an Iranian demand that Washington lift a terrorism designation on Irans powerful paramilitary Revolutionary Guard.

Mora met with the Iranian nuclear negotiator on Wednesday, just after Iranian intelligence services announced they had detained two European citizens. Talks continued on Thursday, Iranian media reported without giving details.

In Paris, Frances Foreign Ministry said Thursday that two French nationals have been arrested in Iran and French authorities have fully mobilized to secure their swift release. Workers Force trade union identified the two as Cecile Kohler, a teachers union official, and her partner. It said they were on a tourist trip to Iran as part of an Easter vacation. The union said it was made aware of the arrests Wednesday.

The French government condemned this groundless arrest and calls for immediate release of the two. France did not say what charges the two face.

Another French citizen, Benjamin Briere, was sentenced in January by Iran to over eight years in prison for espionage, for photographing prohibited areas with a drone in 2020 during what he said was a tourist visit in the north of the country.

The emir, who will visit Europe soon, hosted Raisi in February.
Yves here. It must be impossible to understand fully what it means to be an exile unless its happened to you. If you had a peripatetic history, being unable to return to a place you enjoyed might not be so painful, except perhaps the stigma, since you night not be terribly attached to anywhere.

Not to denigrate Helmers sense of loss, but I am acutely aware that you really can never go back. I havent revisited any of the many places I grew up because they were one thing back then and are something very different now, almost certainly diminished, and Im fine with my memories. Even going back to places I knew a bit as an adult, like the part of London in which I lived for four months in the 1980s, its superficially tonier and yet sterile. I like my old version better. Maybe Im just getting old in a bad way, or maybe I am accurately measuring the march of neoliberalism and widening wealth disparity.

But even so, I always have an option.which Helmer does not.

By John Helmer who has been the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to have directed his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. Helmer has also been a professor of political science, and advisor to government heads in Greece, the United States, and Asia. Originally published at Dances with Bears

The problem with living in exile is the meaning of the word. If youre in exile, you mean you are forever looking backwards, in geography as well as in time. Youre not only out of place; youre out of time  yesterdays man.

Ovid, the Roman poet who was sent into exile from Rome by Caesar Augustus, for offences neither Augustus nor Ovid revealed, never stopped looking back to Rome. His exile, as Ovid described it, was a barbarous coast, inured to rapine/stalked ever by bloodshed, murder, war. In such a place or state, he said, writing a poem you can read to no one is like dancing in the dark.

The word itself, exsilium in Roman law, was the sentence of loss of citizenship as an alternative to loss of life, capital punishment. It meant being compelled to live outside Rome at a location decided by the emperor. The penalty took several degrees of isolation and severity. In Ovids case, he was ordered by Augustus to be shipped to the northeastern limit of the Roman empire, the Black Sea town called Tomis; it is now Constanta, Romania. Ovids last books, Tristia (Sorrows) and Epistulae ex Ponto (Black Sea Letters), were written from this exile, which began when he was 50 years old, in 8 AD, and ended when he died in Tomis nine years year later, in 17 AD.

In my case Ive been driven into exile more than once. The current one is lasting the longest. This is the one from Moscow, which began with my expulsion by the Foreign Ministry on September 28, 2010. The official sentence is Article 27(1) of the law No. 114-FZ  necessary for the purposes of defence capability or security of the state, or public order, or protection of health of the population. The reason, a foreign ministry official told an immigration service official when they didnt know they were being overheard, was: Helmer writes bad things about Russia.

In Washington, DC, on November 5, 1980, when my second exile began, the sentence was less severe. It started on the morning after Ronald Reagan had defeated Jimmy Carter for the presidency by a vote landslide. I was going to my office in the New Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House, when I was obliged to run a gauntlet of jeering Reaganites who had gathered outside the revolving doors of the entrance. Looking at my long hair, beard, and unconventional blue-denim suit, one of the crowd shouted in my ear: People like you should get out! You wont be allowed here any longer. The sentence was clear; the offence against the law less so. But government in Washington was more law-abiding then than it is today: it took Reagans men six months before they were able to finalise the paperwork to rid themselves of me.

At the time, and still, Washington has been a place of exile for many public figures and officials on the run from the countries where they had done a good deal more to their local caesars than Ovid had done to Augustus. Berlin had been like that, too; that is West Berlin, before the Wall came down in 1989.

I had been invited by the German government in Bonn for an official visit to teach my counterparts in the German Chancellery how the US Office of Management and Budget did its business, and how American know-how ought to be translated into German. After briefings on the first day in Berlin, my government guide asked me what I should like to see in the evening. I said: Take me to a place where people look like me. He did. The place was a cabaret cafe called Exil. It was filled with people like me.

The restaurant Exil at Berlin-Kreuzberg's Paul-Lincke-Ufer 44a. There is still a restaurant but it is now named Horvath, the second most common name in Hungary.

Germany today isnt a shadow of what West Berlin was before the Wall came down.

Before then, for over several hundred years the French, British and Russians  over two millennia, if you count the Romans  have never broken the Germans by military occupation as thoroughly as the Americans have in seventy-seven years. So when the Wall came down and the unification proceeded, the US occupation of Germany became total. Just how unopposed is clear from the conduct of the new chancellor in Berlin, Olaf Scholz. On Washingtons demand, he has made state policy of race hatred and war towards the Russians for the first time in the history of the Social Democratic Party (since 1863); for the second time since the National Socialist Party (1920).

Though we continue to look the same  long hair, beard, denim suit  Ive taken voluntary exile from the Germans. This is after my German publisher and translator recently tried to insert German qualifiers into my plain English reporting on the war in the Ukraine. Then he decided he should equivocate between who were the Nazis in World War II, and who are the Nazis in the present war. Ein historischer Karneval (a carnival of history) he called this. When I objected, he said he didnt understand. If he was telling the truth about that, I said there was no point in my saying more. I ordered the removal and liquidation of every word in German he has been publishing by me for the past two years.

Rereading Ovids Tristia from his Black Sea exile two thousand years ago, the saddest part is the grovelling he felt obliged to show towards Augustus in the hope he would be pardoned and allowed to return to Rome. Little book , Ovid opened the Tristia on the first line, no I dont begrudge it to you  youre off to the City/without me, going where your only begetter is banned!/On your way, then  but penny-plain as befits an exiles/ sad offering , and my present life.

For remedy with the emperor, Ovid tried litigating: I never fostered armed opposition,/my exile was earned by mere naivety. He even tried buttering up Augustus, telling him about his wife, the scheming empress Livia: I pray that the Citys grateful/ love may ever embrace you as you deserve/; that Livia your consort/ may grow old with you (she deserved/no other husband; without her, a bachelor existence/ should have been yours; whom else/could you have married?).

Left, a marble bust of Ovid as a younger man in Rome; right, a facial reconstruction from marble portraits of Caesar Augustus by Alessandro Tomasi .

Ovid was not prepared to accept that Augustus had punished him to make an example to others of the risk of the offence or of lese-majeste  a product/ of my youth, Ovid wrote, not a good joke, but a joke. But through all of the Tristia and for several more years, he continued to hope that if he kept quiet what exactly had been his offence to the emperor and kept begging for forgiveness, Augustus might relent.

The longer this failed to materialise, the longer Ovids indictment continued of the Black Sea coast as a resort for civilized people. Until recently this had been improving; it stopped when the installation of US nuclear missiles at Deveselu, west of Constanta, has made the country the target for nuclear devastation for the first time in its history. In Ovids opinion, he wouldnt be sorry to see it go.

There have been very clear warnings from Moscow to Constanta about that. To illustrate, there is also the old Russian proverb   ,   , beat your own people so that strangers will be afraid of you. When Augustus meant that for Ovid, the poet didnt understand. In the villages and between the clans of old Russia, it meant demonstrations of prowess at force in order to postpone and deter having to use the real thing. In Constanta now they are obliged to watch the real thing less than 400 kilometres, as the rocket flies, from Odessa in the north and Sevastopol to the east.

Modern communications, especially internet systems like email, Skype and Zoom, mean that exile isnt the punishment it was once cracked up to be. Neither for the victims as examples nor for their audience. Imagine what the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyns exile from Russia  to Frankfurt in 1974, then Zurich, then Cavendish, Vermont, until he returned to Moscow in 1994  might have been like if he had podcasted every week to the motherland, and if his books and essays were transmitted by Kindle to every desk-top, tablet or smart phone in Russia. The new technology means that exile nowadays is only a personal punishment. It has lost its deterrence value.

Many Russians who dont write for a living but steal, take voluntary exile. The biggest of these thieves sail to exile on their own boats and airplanes. At least they did until the US Government began to seize some of these boats at their moorings. As far away from civilization as Fiji they havent been safe. But Russian robbers can moor their boats safely in Israel. The latest Russian arrivals to wash up in Tel Aviv  Anatoly Chubais, the robber of the state electricity conglomerate UES and then the state technology investment company Rusnano; and his protege Alexei Kudrin, the former deputy prime minister and current state auditor, arent known to have boats. Kudrin says he is meeting Chubais and others in Israel for medical reasons, and plans to return to Moscow.

Left, Anatoly Chubais; right, Alexei Kudrin.

For the time being their exile is voluntary. Chubais and Kudrin can return; I cannot. They are safe from Article 27(1) of the law No. 114-FZ  necessary for the purposes of defence capability or security of the state, or public order, or protection of health of the population.
Lambert and I, and many readers, agree that Ukraine has prompted the worst informational environment ever. We hope readers will collaborate in mitigating the fog of war  both real fog and stage fog  in comments. None of us need more cheerleading and link-free repetition of memes; there are platforms for that. Low-value, link-free pom pom-wavers will be summarily whacked.

And for those who are new here, this is not a mere polite request. We have written site Policies and those who comment have accepted those terms. To prevent having to resort to the nuclear option of shutting comments down entirely until more sanity prevails, as we did during the 2015 Greek bailout negotiations and shortly after the 2020 election, we are going to be ruthless about moderating and blacklisting offenders.

Yves

P.S. Also, before further stressing our already stressed moderators, read our site policies:

Please do not write us to ask why a comment has not appeared. We do not have the bandwidth to investigate and reply. Using the comments section to complain about moderation decisions/tripwires earns that commenter troll points. Please dont do it. Those comments will also be removed if we encounter them.

* * *

The Population of Vaquita Porpoises Has Dwindled to Ten, but a Rebound Isnt Out of the Question Smithsonian (DL).

Climate

#COVID19

Designing infectious disease resilience into school buildings through improvements to ventilation and air cleaning (PDF) The Lancet COVID-19 Commission

China?
Russia published its initial list of parties subject to its retaliatory special economic measures. Putin established the program by decree on May 3, designed to address the unlawful taking of property and property rights by unfriendly parties. The order tasked officials to come up with targets in ten days and develop additional criteria.

We speculated that Germanys seizure of Gazprom operations, which included storage facilities, would be a prime initial target. We were correct. Weve embedded a machine translation1 of the May 11 document describing the implementation measures at the end of the post. TASS gives an overview:

The list includes 31 companies from Germany, France and other European countries, as well as from the USA and Singapore. In particular, it includes former European subsidiaries of Gazprom, traders and operators of underground gas storage facilities. In particular, Russian authorities, legal entities and citizens will not be able to conclude transactions with the sanctioned entities and organizations under their control, fulfill obligations to them under completed transactions, and conduct financial transactions in their favor. This includes the concluded foreign trade contracts. These bans were earlier established by a decree of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The resolution sets additional criteria for transactions that are prohibited from being performed with companies from the sanctions list. These are transactions concluded in favor of the sanctioned persons, or providing for the making of payments, transactions with securities with the participation or in favor of such companies, or transactions involving the entry of ships owned or chartered by sanctioned persons, in their interest or on their behalf, into the Russian ports.

If you look at the list, 12 of the 31 entities bear the Gazprom name. TASS lists some of the others:

Gazprom Germania is an international group of companies that, through its subsidiary Gazprom Marketing & Trading, is engaged in natural gas trading in the UK spot markets, as well as the sale of liquefied natural gas in Southeast Asia. Through its subsidiary Gazprom Schweiz AG, it trades natural gas in countries Central Asia and the former Soviet Union, as well as in Austria, Italy and Serbia. Natural gas is traded in Germany mainly through Wingas and in the Czech Republic and Slovakia through Vemex Gazprom Germania. Gazprom Germania is also the operator of several large gas storage facilities in Germany and has several projects in Serbia, Austria and the Czech Republic. EuRoPol GAZ is a joint venture between Gazprom and Polands PGNiG, which owns the Polish section of the Yamal-Europe gas pipeline.

So even though the first paragraph in the extract above is ambiguous, one can assume that Wingas entities, along with Vemex (per Vemex Gazprom Germania) and EuRoPol, are Gazprom ventures. Adding all those names brings the list of Gazrpom-related businesses to 21.

One has to assume the other ten were stolen or stolen from. They include:

But others are a mystery, at least to web searches, like IMUK AG (Switzerland), ZGG Zarubezhneftgazehim Trading (Austria) and PremiumGas SpA (Italy)

Further digging shows that Gazprom had entered into a long term supply contract with WIEE (three more listed entities), which operated in the eastern EU. See this tidbit from Russian Energy Strategy in the European Union, the Former Soviet Union by Stylianos A. Sotiriou (if I ever have time, I may have to buy this books and read it rather than rely on serendipity via Google Books):

Now so far this is all very entertaining, but what does it mean? It appears Europeans in the gas and possibly also electricity business wont know for sure until Russia counterparties tell them their contracts are cancelled or they otherwise wont be doing business with them. Remember that the sanctions are sweeping in terms of subjecting all Russian individuals and legal persons to them. And their application goes beyond the entities listed to include organizations under their control.

Note that we arent the only people wondering what this means in practice. From a later story in TASS:

The Federal Network Agency of Germany took note of energy companies, including ex-subsidiary of Gazprom, Gazprom Germania, being included in the retaliatory sanctions list of Russia, but does not yet know the details, representative of the regulator told TASS. We still do not have information on the type of sanctions. The government and the Federal Network Agency, as the trustee of Gazprom Germania, are taking the necessary measures and are preparing for various scenarios, the statement said. We are analyzing these announcements. We dont have details yet, the German Economy Ministry said in a separate statement.

Not that Russia cares much about the tender feelings of Germany, but they got lucky by virtue of Ukraine cutting gas supplies to Germany first. From Al Jazeera yesterday:

Russian gas flows to Europe via Ukraine fell by a quarter after Kyiv halted use of a major transit route blaming interference by occupying Russian forces, the first time exports via Ukraine have been disrupted since the invasion. The transit point Ukraine shut usually handles about 8 percent of Russian gas flows to Europe, although European states said they were still receiving supplies. The Ukraine corridor mostly sends gas to Austria, Italy, Slovakia and other east European states. Kremlin-controlled Gazprom, which has a monopoly on Russian gas exports by pipeline, said it was still shipping gas to Europe via Ukraine, but volumes were seen at 72 million cubic metres (mcm) on Wednesday, down from 95.8 mcm on Tuesday. GTSOU, which operates Ukraines gas system, said on Tuesday it would suspend flows through the Sokhranovka transit point, which it said delivered almost a third of fuel piped from Russia to Europe via Ukraine.

Note that when Ukraine first said it was going to cut gas supplies on this section of the network because reasons (the reason being the Donbass militias and Russian forces are about to take all of Lugansk), Gazprom said they didnt see any problem and hadnt got a force majeure notice, which Ukraine then sent in.

The priceless or cheeky part, depending on your point of view, is that Ukraines excuse for shutting off the pipes is that Russian forces were allegedly stealing gas and sending it to the separatists in Donbass. First, Ukraine has been syphoning transiting gas forevah, so pilfering was never an obstacle to transit, as long as they were the ones pilfering. Second, as Al Jazeera pointed out, Ukraine provide no evidence of the theft.2

Given that Germany appears to have heisted Gazproms storage operations in Germany, and potentially in other countries, along with related trading businesses, Russia could take the view that any gas that could be delivered to the former Gazprom storage (and through any related pipelines) will not longer be supplied. Well see soon enough how sweeping a view Russian officials take.

In the mean time, this is bad news for Germany and potentially other countries who played along with gas operations heist. As of early May, Germanys vice chancellor Robert Habeck said Germany had reduced the Russian share of its gas to 35%. The wee problem is that Germany was well on its way to filling up all of its gas storage facilities, and estimated that that supply would last to the winter. But since then, Germany has been providing some of its stored gas to neighbors Poland and Bulgaria, who are refusing to pay for gas in roubles, which has led Gazprom to reduce its supply to Europe. That is interfering with Germanys stockpiling. So if Russia cuts supply on top of Ukraines reduction, Germany could face a gas crisis months ahead of schedule.

This is a long-winded way of asking our eagle-eyed readers to pipe up in comments when they learn who in Russia is doing what to whom with respect to these retaliatory sanctions. And for those of you who read Russian, it would be helpful to compare Western accounts to the Russian version.

_____

1 One oddity is the capitalized RESPONSIBLE special economic measures, when even the Kremlins English translation of the Presidents May 3 executive order repeatedly called them retaliatory special economic measures. The Russian is , which my Yandex translator says is response which I take in context to mean responsive. Heres the implementation paper in Russian, for those of you able to and interested in having a look.

2 Gazprom did say it would be technically possible to redirect the interrupted supply to the Sudzha route, as Gazprom had done in 2020 to allow for repairs. But it isnt clear how quickly that might happen.
Senate President Ahmad Lawan yesterday described the 2009 agreements the Federal Government reached with the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) as unrealistic.

He spoke at the National Assembly in Abuja during a meeting with the leadership of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS), facilitated by founder, Vision Africa and the Bishop, Methodist Diocese of Umuahia, Sunday Onuoha.

ASUU has been on strike since February 14 demanding, among other things, that the government implement the agreements reached with it.

Lawan asked the NANS to shelve its plan to disrupt political activities in Abuja, saying the National Assembly would intervene.

He said: "There's no way the government can handle that agreement. It's a contentious issue because some people only wanted ASUU to go back to the classes. The federal government must always remain truthful because I don't see how they'll get that money.

"We're going to intervene. We'll bring ASUU and the federal government back to the negotiating table. Stop the planned protest so that we can bring everybody to the table. Give us a chance to do that believing that we're going to find a solution. We'll start the negotiation again.

"Don't disrupt the activities of political parties. We don't need to do that. Let's avoid confrontation. When we emphasize consultation, it's much easier for us. We'll be together with you. We've taken the prayer, we've endorsed it and we'll work for it."

He also called on ASUU to suspend the strike, saying "There's no way they can negotiate when they are on strike. I want to promise you that we'll push from the legislative angle so that together, we'll resolve the issue."

NANS President, Asefon Sunday Adedayo, had threatened that students would disrupt political activities in the FCT unless the issue of ASUU strike was resolved.

He alleged that the government prioritised political activities at the detriment of students.
(Natural News) Chad Caton called on Americans to stand up and fight against evil during the May 5 episode of Im Fired Up with Chad Caton on Brighteon.TV.

We are in a fight. We are in a situation right now where you do not get to sit on your couch. You do not get to sit there and look at your kids and say somebody else will take care of this. This is a time in our history that will be remembered forever. This is a time where we have a chance to stand against the very evil that is in front of us, said the former Horry County firefighter in South Carolina.

You have to stand up. You have to stand there along with other patriots. Look at what is real and focus on whats in front of you.

Caton warned that Americans are at war against immorality, lamenting the fact that people are trying to fight under the idea of what is right and wrong with abortion. He stressed that this is the kind of war that people cannot ignore and everyone should take a stand.

The former firefighter added that people have to start being honest with their journalism and that leadership is needed.

Leadership, of course, is essential in times of war. And Caton talked about the importance of having amazing leaders who could guide you in life.

According to Caton, motivation is just as important. He said more voices are going to get involved in the fight and more people who are trying to do good are going to be out there to give their message.

FBI illegally abducted and kidnapped people from their homes

The Brighteon.TV host also talked with Treniss Evans, who was among those charged in the January 6 Capitol Hill riot.

We are going after the truth, honesty, oath and due process  everybody has the right to due process. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) illegally abducted and kidnapped people from their homes. Check your state constitution, check your United States Constitution. Look how they intermingle, said Evans, who called out the and the Department of Justice for illegally abducting him from his home.

Get somebody that knows what theyre talking about to clearly provide you the information, not some interpretation by a bar attorney that doesnt get it or chooses not to look at it. Find somebody with some courage and talk to them. And youll find out really fast that those are illegal abductions that were carried out.

According to Evans, the state should have been notified and that the arrest should have been carried out by the county sheriff.

Evans urged the attorneys general (AGs) to do their job and protect the people of their states. He said the federal government is overreaching and violating state laws by marching into territories that it does not have control of.

But even without the help of AGs, Evans vowed to continue fighting for the men and women that are still languishing in the D.C. gulag. He also asked for the support of people by visiting the CondemnedUSA.com website and donating through his GiveSendGo account. (Related: January 6 riot defendant acquitted by court on all charges; federal judge convinced defendant was let in freely by police.)

Follow Resist.news for more news about fighting for liberty and freedom.

Watch the full May 5 episode of the Im Fired Up with Chad Caton below. Im Fired Up with Chad Caton airs every Thursday at 10-10:30 a.m. on Brighteon.TV.

More related articles:

Captain Deplorable tells Ohio Brett: Americans need to stand their ground to fight for their rights  Brighteon.TV.

Jan. 6 Capitol incident: Security footage suggests strong possibility of an inside job.

Colorado governor signs bill stating unborn human babies have no rights.

Sources include:

Brighteon.com

ImFiredUpShow.com

CondemnedUSA.com
(Natural News) Lawmakers found that executives of a company contracted for manufacturing Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccines covered up quality control issues in one of its factories.

Two Congressional committees made this discovery via a report published on May 10, which scrutinized vaccine manufacturer Emergent BioSolutions. According to the document, inexperienced staff and high turnover rates contributed to the contamination of COVID-19 vaccines being produced at its Bayview factory in Baltimore in March 2021.

According to the report, Emergent employees removed quality assurance hold tags attached to batches of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine to avoid drawing attention. The removal was done immediately before inspectors from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) conducted an inspection of the Bayview plant in February 2021.

Aside from this, the report also cited new documents revealing that Emergent employees were concerned about the Department of Health and Human Services getting too involved in the companys operations at Bayview.

The quality control problems led to Emergent discarding tens of millions of COVID-19 vaccines due to a mix-up of ingredients. Two vaccines  AstraZenecas two-dose shot and J&Js one-dose shot  are manufactured in the Bayview facility. About 15 million J&J vaccine doses were thrown away after being contaminated by an ingredient meant for the two-dose vaccine. (Related: Johnson & Johnson threw out 15 MILLION DOSES of its coronavirus vaccine after sloppy worker mixed in the WRONG ingredient.)

The FDA subsequently ordered the closure of Emergents Bayview facility in April 2021, but permitted it to resume production in August of the same year.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), who heads the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, said: Despite major red flags at its vaccine manufacturing facility, Emergents executives swept these problems under the rug and continued to rake in taxpayer dollars. According to the report from her committee, Emergent received $330 million from the federal government before the latter terminated the contract in November 2021.

Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), chairman of the House Select Oversight Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, denounced Emergents executives for [prioritizing] profits over producing vaccines in a responsible manner that complied with FDA requirements. Clyburns committee also helped Maloney pen the report.

These doses were squandered despite repeated warnings from employees, outside consultants, pharmaceutical companies and FDA regulators that the companys manufacturing practices were unsafe and that it was unlikely to fulfill the contract recklessly awarded by the Trump administration.

Officials had been warning Emergent of its quality control issues for a long time

An Emergent spokesman said on May 10 that the report contained nothing new and reiterated that the company had already provided information to the media and the FDA. Emergent has been open and forthcoming with the FDA, Congress and our partners about the work at our Bayview site, he said in a statement.

Prior to this, Emergent CEO Robert G. Kramer apologized for the failure of our controls. But instead of committing to address quality control concerns, he pointed his finger at the complexity of scaling up production quickly on two different COVID-19 shots.

Back in April 2020, the FDA conducted an inspection of the Bayview facility and cited several issues. Marcelinus Dordunoo, the FDA lead investigator, cited Emergent for failing to train employees in the particular operations they perform as part of their function and in current good manufacturing practices.

He also cited the Bayview plants failure to ensure that electronically held data generated during analytical testing  was protected from deletion or manipulation.

The lead investigators findings during the April 2020 inspection supported earlier reports that criticized the factory conditions at Emergents different facilities. A December 2017 report said the company had not addressed the presence of continued low-level mold and yeast isolates in its Canton, Massachusetts plant.

Almost a year later, the FDA questioned why its Camden plant  also located in Baltimore  followed an unwritten policy of not conducting routine compliance audits. Emergents Camden plant sees anthrax vaccines filled into vials before distribution.

Vaccines.news has more stories about the quality control issues at Emergent BioSolutions and other vaccine makers.

Watch the clip below that shows the different contaminants inside a vial of the single-dose J&J COVID-19 vaccine.

This video is from the FalconsCAFE Sharing is caring channel on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

Company that helps Johnson & Johnson produce coronavirus vaccines has a string of citations for quality control problems.

FDA slams troubled COVID vaccine manufacturer over quality control issues as shareholders sue company.

J&J coronavirus vaccine shipments halted due to ingredient MIX-UP during production.

Sources include:

WTOP.com

Oversight.House.gov

WPSDLocal6.com

Brighteon.com
(Natural News) The European Commission has introduced to the public a draft law on mandatory chat control.

This chat control law is similar to Apples highly controversial SpyPhone plans, where the Commission will oblige all providers of email, chat and messaging services to automate the search for suspicious messages and forward them to the police supposedly to combat child pornography.

However, this will require these providers to monitor and scan the communications of citizens even if they are securely encrypted end-to-end. Thus, the new law would undermine the essence of end-to-end encryption and make the European Union (EU) a world leader in the generalized surveillance of whole populations. This could pose a problem when undemocratic regimes enact the same measures.

Dr. Patrick Breyer, a digital rights activist and jurist, commented that the spying attack on private messages and photos by error-prone algorithms is a giant step toward a Chinese-style surveillance state. Will the next step be for the post office to open and scan all letters? he asked. (Related: They want national Internet speech regulations so that they can legally censor you into oblivion.)

Breyer also pointed out that organized child porn rings dont use email or messenger services, but darknet forums. By breaking secure encryption, the European Commission is putting the overall security of private communications and public networks, trade secrets and state secrets at risk to please their short-term surveillance desires.

Opening the door to foreign intelligence services and hackers is completely irresponsible, Breyer said.

Thirty-five organizations worldwide, including the German Lawyers Association, Digitale Gesellschaft and the Committee to Protect Journalists warned against the EUs chat control law.

A former judge pointed out last year that the warrantless interception of private communications violates the case law of the European Court of Justice.

A poll also showed that 72 percent of citizens oppose the indiscriminate scanning of their private communications. The German government coalition agreement also rejected the measures.

On May 9, Breyer also filed an action for an injunction against the so-called chat control against Facebooks parent company, Meta Platforms Ireland Limited, at the Kiel District Court.

Chat control deemed by many as a threat to democracy

While it is important to fight the dissemination of child sexual abuse material, the European Commissions proposal is deemed by many dangerous. The automated search of content on mobile phones and computers can also target private and encrypted communications, such as those on messenger services.

Critics say this form of preemptive mass surveillance not only poses a threat to privacy, cyber security and the freedom of expression, but serves as a danger to democracy in general.

Olivier Onidi, deputy director-general for Home Affairs, said that the proposal is an attempt to include all means of communication in its scope. The actual value added by the proposal would be to cover all forms of communication, including private ones.

The proposal could find support among member states. Slovenia, as the current holder of the Council presidency, has made the fight against child abuse one of its main priorities. According to a Council paper published in September, for the presidency, it is essential to focus on the digital dimension.

In this case, the work of investigative authorities would be complicated by end-to-end encryption, so automated approaches to scan content should at least be open for discussion.

If the plans come into action, it will allow intrusion into privacy regardless of the technical implementation of chat control. Each and every message, regardless of suspicion, will be automatically searched, evaluated and in case of a supposed match, reported, not only to the providers but straight to the authorities. (Related: Governments and social media companies are collaborating to censor anyone who would dare to question mainstream media narratives.)

This will inevitably include countless normal, legitimate photos and videos that people send each other. If automatic detection, which is so far an unreliable technology, raises an alarm, the content would have to be checked by humans. Not only would this violate the right to privacy, but open another gateway in which data could possibly be misused.

Ultimately, it could have massive consequences for providers who will be forced to either connect to an existing infrastructure or develop their own solutions to comply, which would play into the hands of larger providers who have the resources to implement the requirements. Those that lack such resources or find the effort too great could withdraw from the EU.

Visit Surveillance.news for more news about governments spying on their citizens.

Watch this video showing a future without privacy.

This video is from the Gezond Verstand (Common Sense) channel on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

UK Science advisory committee REGRETS using fear to control people, admit they used unethical and totalitarian methods.

ODNI transparency report: FBI monitored data of 3.4 million Americans without a warrant.

Italy deploys new social credit system to control human behavior in the name of climate change.

Jeffrey Prather: Elon Musk buying Twitter is an important inflection point that upsets the Deep State  Brighteon.TV.

Sources include:

StrangeSounds.org

NezPolitik.org

Brighteon.com
(Natural News) Electric vehicle (EV) charging has caused several house fires and resulted in massive losses, with three such fires being recorded in the states of Virginia and Maryland.

A March 31 house fire in Damascus, Maryland caused by a charging EV resulted in $350,000 worth of damages. It also displaced four people and a few pets the individuals owned. One person in the house had to be rescued, but no injuries were reported.

Pete Piringer, spokesman for the Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service (MCFRS), said the fire started in the houses garage near the front end of a Chevrolet Volt that was charging. The hybrid vehicle runs primarily on an electric battery that needs charging. When the battery uses up energy to a certain point, its gasoline-powered engine operates an electric generator to extend its range.

On April 5, another fire broke out at an apartment located in the city of Bethesda in Maryland. The blaze caused by a charging scooter displaced three people and resulted in about $150,000 worth of damages. One resident suffered minor burns.

According to Piringer, MCFRS firefighters responded to the scene after they saw smoke coming out of a unit on the third floor. They managed to extinguish the blaze almost half an hour later. Piringer added that a lithium battery inside an electric scooter that overheated caused the conflagration. (Related: Latest lithium-ion battery uses water-salt solution, reducing risk of fire and explosion in household electronics.)

Almost two weeks later, a garage at a home in Ashburn, Virginia caught fire on April 18. Firefighters from the Loudoun County Fire and Rescue responded to a 911 call for smoke visible from the garage. The owner and other individuals in the house managed to escape the blaze that caused $15,400 in damages.

The countys fire marshal ruled the blaze accidental, adding that it originated from the electric vehicle charging in the garage. The vehicles charging system malfunctioned, which caused the garage fire.

EVs touted as the green transport solution despite their risks

Abby Liebing, an associate reporter for the Western Journal, wrote about the three home fires caused by the EVs being charged.

These are not terribly remarkable events. The damages are unfortunate, but not catastrophic, she noted. As EVs become more common, the risk of fires associated with [them] cannot be overlooked or underplayed.

A CNBC report that quoted a study by vehicle insurer AutoinsuranceEZ said hybrid EVs have a 3.4 percent chance of igniting. Conventional battery EVs only have a 0.03 chance of igniting, while internal combustion engines powered by fuel have a 1.5 percent chance of catching fire.

The same report added that EVs using lithium-ion batteries burn hotter and faster when they catch fire. Such fires require more water to extinguish, with Liebing citing an example of one such conflagration. A fire from a Tesla EV that crashed in Houston back in April 2022 took firefighters more than four hours and 30,000 gallons of water before they finally extinguished it.

Moreover, fires caused by lithium-ion batteries can reignite hours or even days after they were initially extinguished  putting salvage yards, car repair shops and other similar establishments at risk.

Eric Wachsman, the director of the Maryland Energy Innovation Institute, told CNBC that the qualities that make lithium-ion batteries powerful enough to move vehicles can also make them susceptible to catching fire  most especially if the battery cells inside them are damaged or defective.

According to Wachsman, the flammable liquid electrolyte, coupled with electrodes positioned closely together, increases the chance of a short circuit. This flammable liquid could get into whats called a thermal runaway situation where it just starts boiling, and that results in a fire, he explained.

Liebing concluded: Though many like to advertise EVs as flawless, the way of the future and the green energy solution, [they] still have problems just like any other vehicle. But somehow, since the political messaging around EVs has been all about how they are good for the environment and how they are the way for humans to move forward  there has been a real downplaying of the risks still involved. These facts of EVs have to be recognized [as] all vehicles have risks and can be deadly.

Power.news has more stories about the risk of EVs and the lithium-ion batteries that power them.

Watch InfoWars founder Alex Jones investigating an EV charging station in Austin, Texas.

This video is from the Winston Churchill ? Vitamin D channel on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

Op-ed: Increased lithium demand for electric vehicle batteries comes with a price.

Contrary to what people believe, electric vehicles are not cheaper than gas-fueled vehicles.

Bombshell science study shows that electric cars are DIRTIER for the planet than diesel vehicles.

The Democrats plan to force Americans to drive electric vehicles just got even more EXPENSIVE.

Sources include:

WesternJournal.com

WTOP.com 1

WTOP.com 2

WTOP.com 3

CNBC.com

Brighteon.com
(Natural News) You might remember that ancient time in history when American civics discussions involved the separation of powers. Apparently, those days are long gone in the rubble of what was once considered a constitutional republic. Forget Joe Biden targeting the President of Russia for assassination, what happened today is far more serious in context.

(Article by Sundance republished from TheConservativeTreehouse.com)

The most powerful political office in the executive branch of government, the office of The President, is now endorsing the political, potentially violent, targeting of the justices within the most powerful office of the judicial branch of power, the justices of The Supreme Court of the United States.

Pause for a moment and let that settle in.

The President is now endorsing the targeting of Supreme Court justices. The Executive Branch is now publicly targeting the Judicial Branch.

Separate but co-equal? Again, think about the ramifications here. WATCH:

Read more at: TheConservativeTreehouse.com
(Natural News) Dr. Peter Pry, executive director of the Task Force on National Homeland Security, slammed the Biden administration for trying to revive the nuclear deal with Iran known as Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

This is one of the worst deals in history, precisely because Iran already has nuclear weapons. The idea of giving billions of dollars to them again, and expecting them to honor the Iran nuclear deal was incredibly naive. Its obviously the illogical drive. Pry told Ann Vandersteel in the May 6 episode of Steel Truth on BrighteonTV.

Pry expressed concerns that the terrorist country may launch an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack toward the United States if something goes wrong with the deal.

The EMP expert is firm that the attack would be most likely against the U.S. first because Iran knows that the country has the military wherewithal to stop it from trying to attack Israel. (Related: EMP Commission Chairman confirms that a nuclear EMP attack could kill 90% of the U.S. population.)

According to Pry, Iran can also attack Israel and Egypt simultaneously with a single EMP weapon. It can be a single nuclear weapon with an enormous radius on the ground of up to 600 kilometers that could easily encompass both Egypt and Israel. They could even go for Saudi Arabia, the moderate Arab Gulf states, Italy and even the capital of Christianity  the Vatican, he added.

We are wide open and vulnerable. Everybody is, except perhaps Russia, China and Iran itself. The detonation has to be above 30 kilometers altitude. The higher the detonation, the bigger the field gets, warned Pry.

The EMP field will cover all 48 contiguous states, a big chunk of Canada and much of Mexico and put at risk all electronics, the electric grid, everything electric, electronics in airplanes, electronics in the car. If the electronics and airplane are damaged, the plane could fall out of the sky. Not only could you blackout electric grids, and destroy electronic civilization, but you could also blow with the super EMP weapon.

Air Force getting ready for EMP attack

Due to possible EMP launch, officials at the Joint Base San Antonio in Lackland requested authorities for an inspection of their facility, the Petroleum, Oil and Lubrication Complex.

LiveScience reported that the request is a response to a 2019 executive order that then-President Donald Trump issued to the federal government to strengthen its infrastructure against EMPs.

Pry said ensuing upgrades are a part of a broader initiative by the Air Force to ramp up its defenses against this type of threat. This inspection is intended to identify any equipment that may be vulnerable to an EMP attack.

Preparedness is the key to surviving an EMP attack.

One of the essential items to stock up on is water. Make sure to fill your tubs or rain barrels and have clean drinking water accessible. It is also really helpful to have water purifying tablets ready.

Next is food. All that is stored in your refrigerator will likely spoil days after an EMP attack. Start stocking up on dried and imperishable food, and start planting crops and raising livestock in your backyard. It is also wise to invest in a generator as having one will buy you more time to stock up on food and water.

Experts advise to get a faraday cage for your appliances and electronics. This is used as a protective shield against the electromagnetic radiation coming from the external environment.

You should also keep basic tools like a hammer, a set of screwdrivers, utility knives and duct tape in case you need to do carpentry or repair work. Flashlights, batteries, and solar-powered devices will also come in handy once the power goes out.

Visit EMP.news to know more about EMPs and how to protect yourself from them.

Watch the full May 5 episode of Steel Truth: Ann Vandersteel ft. Dr. Peter Pry and Jacob Joseph, below. Catch new episodes of the program every weeknight at 9:30 p.m. on Brighteon.TV.

More related stories:

A basic guide to surviving an EMP attack.

Surviving EMP threats: The preppers guide to modern EMP protection.

Surviving in a post-EMP world.

Sources include:

Brighteon.com

ArmsControl.org

LiveScience.com

TheSurvivalistBlog.net
(Natural News) Scaremongering Joe Scarborough started his Morning Joe spiel today by saying people can get hysterical when discussing social issues . . . and then proceeded to get hysterical himself, suggesting that Republicans might exploit the Alito opinion to outlaw interracial marriage.

(Article by Mark Finkelstein republished from NewsBusters.org)

These are the people lecturing us about misinformation.

Scarborough repeatedly argued that if the Alito opinion is adopted, it can be used to undo a variety of other Supreme Court rulings. In particular, in addition to rulings striking down restrictions on contraception, and upholding gay marriage, Scarborough thrice cited the case of Loving v. Virginia, in which the Court struck down Virginias law outlawing interracial marriage.

This despite the fact that Alitos opinion expressly provides:

Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.

In any case, consider how, in theory, Loving would have to be overturned. The Supreme Court does not issue rulings on its own initiative. A state would have to pass a law outlawing interracial marriage. Challenges to the law would then have to work their way up to the Supreme Court, which would then rule.

It is inconceivable that any state would pass such a law. And surely if one did, it would be struck down by lower federal courts. If it ever did reach the Supreme Court, it is overwhelmingly likely that the Court would affirm the opinion of the lower courts, particularly given the Alito language cited above.

But that didnt stop Scarborough from fear-mongering the issue. What better way to galvanize a key sector of the Democrat base than to raise the specter of the return of a particularly odious form of racial segregation?

MSNBCs Jonathan Lemire agreed with Scarborough, saying there is no reason for anyone to believe the Republicans when they say they would stop with abortion. Then he turned to Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson: This could be the thing that maybe changes the conversation heading into this, this November. Democrats facing an uphill climb.

Robinson cast the Alito decision as a bombshell that could tilt the midterms, noting that hed always been skeptical of all the predictions that Democrats are inevitably in for these huge losses in the fall. Duly noted, Mr. Robinson!

Note: the irony is its supposed progressives who promote racial segregation in everything from school graduations, to campus housing, to special events, evenat my Cornell alma materto rock-climbing walls!

Joe Scarborough scaremongering the Alito opinion to suggest that Republicans might use it to outlaw interracial marriage was sponsored in part by Kayak, Clear Choice, and DirecTV.

Heres the transcript.

MSNBC

Morning Joe

5/10/22

6:40 am ET JOE SCARBOROUGH: You know, Jonathan Lemire, there have been real concerns that this does go beyond abortion. And, often, whenever youre talking about issues, social issues, people can be hysterical on all sides. But anybody thats gone to law school, anybody thats studied constitutional law, does understand that Alitos distinction was a distinction without a difference when he said, whoa, whoa, hey, listen, were only talking about abortion. Were not talking about Griswold and contraceptive rights. Were not talking about Loving and inter  the right for interracial marriage. Were not talking about marriage equality. No, no, no: none of those have anything to do with abortion. So this is a precedent without precedent. Which, of course, makes absolutely no sense. The same logic, that same right to privacy, the same construct that used the 14th amendment to give Roe, to give Griswold, to give Loving these rights, they all come from the same constitutional framework. So the fact that Alito goes, oh, dont worry about this. Just trust us. Were only talking about abortion because this has to do with abortion. No. If you, if you pull on that thread on Roe, youre pulling on a thread of Griswold, of Loving, of marriage equality, of all of these rights to privacy that the Court has found over the past 50, 60, 70 years that was contained in the Constitution. JONATHAN LEMIRE: Yeah. I dont know why any American, or any voter, or any Democrat, should believe them. Why do they think this would stop here? Stop here with this particular decision. Why wouldnt they think itd be an infringement on other rights, a restriction, a removal of other rights? Why believe it would just stop at abortion? And Gene, briefly, just, this is such an animating issue, Democrats believe. This could be the thing that maybe changes the conversation heading into this, this November. Democrats facing an uphill climb. Whats your early read of the land if Roe v. Wade does, indeed, go away? Is this something that actually, could get Democrats out there and change what we have been led to believe the outcome will be this fall? EUGENE ROBINSON: Well, it certainly could, Jonathan. I mean, look, its very difficult to make predictions about American politics these days, which way things will go. I have always been skeptical of all the predictions that Democrats are inevitably in for these huge losses in the fall. Because, you know, if a week is an eternity in politicsthats what we used to say 20 years ago. Now, its, you know, a week is how many eternities? I mean, things change so rapidly. But I think this is, this is a bombshell. It really is.

Read more at: NewsBusters.org
(Natural News) InfoWars founder Alex Jones touched on the criticism lobbed at the Disinformation Governance Board (DGB), under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

In a recent episode of The Alex Jones Show, the host played footage of a May 4 Senate hearing where Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) rebuked DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The lawmaker argued that the DGB has no authority to serve as the arbiter of truth, given that people cant even agree [on] what disinformation is.

Heres the problem: We cant even agree [on] what disinformation is. How are we ever going to come to an agreement on what is disinformation so you can police it on social media? I think youve got no idea what disinformation is, and I dont think the government [is] capable of [policing] it.

Paul also accused the government of being the No. 1 purveyor of disinformation.

I dont trust government to figure out what the truth is, [because it] is largely disseminating disinformation. Do you know [who] the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world is? The U.S. government.

Mayorkas defended the DGB and its role, telling the Kentucky senator: Where we become involved is where there is a connectivity between disinformation and threats to the security of the homeland.

You say your new [DGB] is going to help the public with disinformation. You claim it is not going to be about domestic; it is going to be about foreigners  those evil Russians, said the Kentucky senator. You think we cant determine [if] speech by traffickers is disinformation? You think the American people are so stupid, they need you to tell them what the truth is?

Jones put in his two cents about the exchange. If you watch what the corporate establishment puts out, [these] disinformation boards [are] stuff right out of fictional dictatorships. Something only a few countries have: North Korea, communist China [and] Stalinist Russia, he said.

You think this is cartoonish, this is like textbook tyranny? Well, thats because thats what this is. They have taken us being asleep and us putting up with all this garbage as a green light  a big, giant, green light  to come after everybody.

Disinfo czar Jankowicz also subjected to rebuke

Aside from Mayorkas himself, DGB Executive Director Nina Jankowicz also became the target of the GOP during the hearing. Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) asked Mayorkas if he was aware of precocious videos Jankowicz posted on social media  to which the DHS secretary answered in the negative. (Related: Bidens new disinformation head caught in a lie on first day in role.)

The lawmaker from Louisiana alluded to a video where the DGB head referred to herself as the Mary Poppins of disinformation. In another clip, Jankowicz sang about her new role to the tune of the 1964 song Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, which was used in the film Mary Poppins.

I was not aware of that. We do not discuss the internal hiring process, said Mayorkas. It is my understanding that Ms. Jankowicz is a subject matter expert in the field in which she will be working on behalf of the department. Ultimately, as the secretary  Im responsible for the decisions of DHS.

The InfoWars founder pointed out that while Jankowicz has claimed liberals and minorities have been censored on social media, the studies actually show that conservatives  not liberals are the true victims of censorship.

Theres already this allegation that there is anti-conservative bias on the platforms, even though there has been study after study proving, in fact, that often its liberal voices that are being silenced  particularly minority voices in social media. So I think were [going to] see more allegations of that, the DGB head claimed in a video.

Theyre saying theres no censorship, even though theyre on record saying theyre [going to] censor and want more censorship. But when you say you dont want it, [they say] Oh it doesnt exist, except its happening to minorities. So thats something else theyre doing, said Jones.

Disinfo.news has more stories about the DGB and criticism against it.

Watch the full segment of The Alex Jones Show, featuring the exchange between Paul and Mayorkas.

This video is from the InfoWars channel on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

Robert Spencer tells Tom Renz: Biden administration focusing on DISINFO while ignoring real TERRORISTS  Brighteon.TV.

New DHS Disinformation unit is designed to spread the governments disinformation while criminalizing TRUTH.

Tulsi Gabbard slams Disinformation Governance Board as Bidens propaganda arm, ministry of truth.

DeSantis: Bidens Ministry of Truth set up to perpetuate hoaxes and silence critics.

Homeland securitys disinformation board is even more pernicious than it seems.

Sources include:

Brighteon.com

InfoWars.com
(Natural News) The Biden regimes new Ministry of Truth, officially known as the Disinformation Governance Board, is wholly unconstitutional, says Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Brendan Carr.

Appearing on Maria Bartiromo on her Mornings with Maria program, Carr called for Bidens Ministry of Truth to be immediately dismantled because it is entirely illegal.

Sometimes the threats to our liberty come dressed up in sheeps clothing, but this wolf comes as a wolf, Carr said, quoting the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

This is Orwellian; its un-American; its unconstitutional. The very best time to shut this down was before the DHS ever announced it, the second-best time is right now.

You can watch the segment with Bartiromo and Carr below:

In Carrs view, the very idea of a disinformation board that regulates free speech is antithetical to the United States Constitution, the First Amendment of which guarantees the right to speak ones mind freely without government imposition.

This type of board was always going to be a dumpster fire, uh, but the particular director that they chose to run it is just throwing more gas on it, he explained.

Biden Disinformation Board head calls herself the Mary Poppins of disinformation

What makes this all that much more ridiculous is the fact that the Biden regime is packed to the gills with mentally ill people like Rachel Levine, the current U.S. Secretary for Health, who believes that he is a woman even though he is biologically a man.

If the regime is serious about getting rid of disinformation, then perhaps it needs to sit Levine down and give him a lesson in basic biologically. If he was born with man parts, then he is a man. He cannot just dress up like a woman and declare himself to be the opposite gender.

The MRC (Newsbusters.org) published an expose on May 6 exposing the Disinformation Boards far-left bent. Co-leader Jennifer Daskal has at least three close ties to far-left billionaire and Democrat mega-donor George Soros.

The Disinformation Boards director, Nina Jankowicz, is also convinced that she is the Mary Poppins of disinformation. She was seen on TikTok singing a show tune ditty about the dangers of disinformation, which was widely mocked across social media.

This woman, Nina Jankowicz, was among those people saying that Trump colluded with Russia, that Hunter Bidens laptop was fake, explained Bartiromo on her show.

All of this is obvious that the disinformation is coming from that side.

Jankowicz did, in fact, spread fake news about Hunters laptop being a fairy tale. She also cited intelligence officials whom she claims confirmed that the story was Russian disinformation.

Since that time, even the far-left Washington Post confirmed that Hunters laptop is, in fact, real. What it contains is still being uncovered and released bit by bit.

Ironically enough, Jankowicz has repeatedly spread disinformation about these and other topics that cast Democrats in a negative light. Her goal is not to eliminate disinformation, but rather to silence the truth.

This is a person who claims that its really liberals that are being shadow-banned on the internet, not conservatives, Carr says.

These arent isolated pinpricks. This is a broader effort by this administration to drive dissent from the public square.

According to Carr, theres a broader game afoot that goes beyond just silencing the truth. He referenced a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) bulletin on terrorism in February, suggesting that people who say things the government disapproves of could soon be classified as domestic terrorist threats to the establishment.

More news about free speech issues can be found at FirstAmendment.news.

Sources include:

Newspunch.com

NaturalNews.com
Blog

From the old (smallpox) to the new (COVID-19), for centuries, vaccines have helped save and promote healthier lives for people of all ages. In the last 2 decades, major gains in the development and production of vaccines have helped prevent more than 20 life-threatening diseases.

Africa was declared wild poliovirus-free in 2020. Over 40 African countries have eliminated maternal and neonatal tetanus, and vaccines are making a huge impact on diseases like cervical cancer, hepatitis and Ebola. While this is notable progress, the reality remains that within health systems in Africa, access to affordable and sustainable vaccine access remains a challenge.

African Vaccination Week

African Vaccination Week (AVW) is an annual event that is celebrated during the last week of April in synchronisation with other World Health Organization (WHO) Regions and the World Immunisation Week (WIW). It is an initiative that has proven particularly effective in bridging the vaccine access gap by reaching populations with limited access to regular health services, as well as, providing an opportunity to integrate other interventions with immunisation services.

It is coordinated by the WHO Regional Office for Africa and implemented by countries. Their goal is to strengthen immunisation programmes in the African region by increasing awareness of the importance of every person's (particularly every child and woman) need and right to be protected from vaccine-preventable diseases.

This year, the West African Institute of Public Health (WAIPH), with the support of the Partnership for Advocacy in Child and Family Health at Scale (PACFaH@Scale/PAS); a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation health and social accountability reinvestment project, in collaboration with other partners, hosted a high-level symposium to mark this year's AVW. The theme was 'Equitable Vaccine Access, Resilient Communities'.

Equitable vaccine access

According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), health equity is achieved when every person has the opportunity to "attain his or her full health potential" and no one is "disadvantaged from achieving this potential because of social position or other socially determined circumstances." Ensuring equitable vaccine access is an important part of achieving the human right to health.

The COVID-19 pandemic served as a reminder to the world that vaccines are critical tools in the fight against diseases, however, studies have shown that even though immunisation positively impacts health (SDG3) and contributes to 14 out of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), such as ending poverty, reducing hunger, and reducing inequalities; sub-Saharan Africa still lags behind.

Therefore the endorsement of a new global vision and strategy by the World Health Assembly, called the Immunisation Agenda 2030 (IA2030) is crucial and timely. IA2030 envisions a world where everyone, everywhere, of every age, fully benefits from vaccines to improve health and well-being. It aims to maintain hard-won gains in immunisation, recover from the disruptions caused by COVID-19, and achieve even more -- by leaving no one behind, in any situation or at any stage of life.

During his presentation, Professor Oyewale Tomori, past President of the Nigerian Academy of Science and Former Vice-Chancellor at Redeemer's University stated that the reason people are left behind is inequity. To level the playing field, he recommended that Nigeria and other African countries need to bring value to the global table in terms of vaccine production. This involves strengthening the vaccine learning ecosystem, and governments taking responsibility for their failures in governance, and committing to correcting them. "If our resources are properly managed, no one will be left behind. More epidemics are coming; we need to be prepared," he added.

Africa relies heavily on vaccine imports as 99% of the vaccines used within the continent are imported. But this wasn't always the case. Professor Abdulsalami Nasidi, pioneer Director-General, Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and Vice President of Reach Care Foundation, recalled how Nigeria produced an effective yellow fever vaccine which was used to control the 1986/1987 outbreak. "We could do it, we did it, and we can do it again," he said. For this to happen, Prof. Tomori submitted that, "Self-interest needs to die, so that national interest can live."

According to Dr Wondi Alemu, former WHO Senior Advisor, Africa and former Nigeria WHO representative, the case for immunisation is very clear. "If IA2030 is implemented according to schedule, an estimated 20 million lives in Africa will be saved."

Dr Francis Ohanyido, Director- General, West African Institute of Public Health, stated that for advocacy to be more effective, it needs to go beyond the development space. "We need to stop preaching to the choir," he said. Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) and the media need a seat at the table, because they can help simplify and amplify the science of vaccines. This approach will deal with poor health literacy at the grassroots level and give citizens the information that they need to hold governments at all levels accountable.

A world where everyone, everywhere, benefits

To achieve the IA2030 vision, the World Health Organization has released a framework for action, which describes how four critical and operational elements will translate strategy into implementation. These are highlighted below:

Regional and national strategies that prioritise actions for operational planning.

Mechanisms to ensure appropriate ownership and accountability (O&A).

Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) frameworks to guide and monitor country implementation.

Communication and advocacy to create the necessary messaging and reinforce the required actions by all stakeholders throughout the decade.

As of April 2022, data sourced from the CDC dashboard showed that only six African countries have a fully vaccinated rate of above 50% for COVID-19 vaccines. In Nigeria, the figure is a dismal 6%. All countries must therefore scale-up COVID-19 vaccine campaign and ensure that access is made easier where possible, as well as communications discussing the importance of COVID-19 vaccines. Collective action is needed to keep track with existing routine immunisation campaigns to ensure that children that have missed vaccinations are not left behind, while also making rebuilding of essential services, a priority.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted vaccination and routine immunisation activities globally. Rebuilding immunisation and strengthening of health systems at primary healthcare level will ensure that the country does not lose out on the gains made prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nigeria's ten-year Strategy for Immunisation and PHC System strengthening [NSIPSS] promotes a unified approach to improve all elements of immunisation by boosting immunisation, not as a stand-alone programme, but as a key component of PHC at all levels in Nigeria. Effective childhood and adult immunisation programmes, including COVID-19, will help build resilient and sustainable primary health care systems that will be central to strengthening global health security.

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On the continental level, the African Vaccine Manufacturing Initiative (AVMI) has a vision for Africa to have the capacity to produce its own vaccines for both routine and emergency purposes. The AVMI is partnering with governments, regional bodies, the private sector, academic institutions, and key opinion leaders with the aim of creating an environment on the African continent which is conducive to the emergence, development and sustainability of vaccine and biological manufacturers that meet global quality standards. There is also the Partnerships for African Vaccine Manufacturing, an initiative launched by the African Union (AU) and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) with the aim of leveraging Pan-African and global partnerships to enable Africa to manufacture 60 percent of its vaccine needs locally by 2040.

In 2020, the Central Bank of Nigeria introduced the 'Healthcare Sector Research and Development Intervention Scheme' (HSRDIS) as part of its policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The scheme is intended to boost the domestic manufacturing of critical drugs and vaccines, ensure their sustainable domestic supply, and reduce the cost of manufacturing drugs, medical devices, and vaccines in Nigeria. As at March 2021, N253.54 million worth of grants have been awarded to five researchers.

Vaccine manufacturing is a multifaceted undertaking, but it is imperative that Nigeria, and Africa continue to commit to reducing dependence on other countries for life saving vaccines and drugs.

Strengthening our health systems is critical to building resilient communities.
(Natural News) When the Russian military crossed into Ukraine and Vladimir Putin stated his military objectives there, European leaders were quick to escalate the situation, imposing sweeping economic and banking sanctions against the Russian people. These sanctions caused a domino effect of unintended consequences throughout Europe and the West.

The United States, Canada and Europe put up a tough, united front against Russia, but as their trade war against Russia escalated, supply chains were threatened and prices for valuable commodities increased throughout the West. European leaders talked a big talk against Vladimir Putin from the start, making empty demands without having much leverage at all. Russia responded to the sanctions by demanding that hostile nations in the West pay for Russian energy supplies with gold or Russian rubles. Vladimir Putin called Europes bluff and exposed the vulnerabilities of the West.

European gas buyers are now paying for energy in Russian rubles, emboldening Russia

Now the head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, is confirming that European gas buyers are paying for energy in Russian rubles. Draghi now says that most gas importers have opened up Ruble accounts with Gazprom and have acquiesced to Russian demands. One after the other, European gas buyers are violating the EUs sanctions against Russia, as Western tough talk becomes nothing but a mere echo of weakness. The worlds reserve currency  the U.S. dollar  is taking a historic blow in the process, as Russia circumvents the petrodollar.

The West is quietly surrendering to Russia, as the Kremlin holds oil and fertilizer as leverage over the West. At the same time, the Biden regime is threatening to send more U.S. weapons and military equipment (up to $20 billion worth) to Azov, the Nazi brigades fighting in Ukraine. This is the same Nazi battalion that received rocket-propelled grenade launchers from a coordinated arms transfer at the U.S. embassy in Kiev, Ukraine. This is the same Azov battalion that received training from Western instructors over the past eight years. Not only have U.S. sanctions backfired, but their desperate military alliance with the Azov Nazi battalion have only put innocent Ukrainian people further in harms way.

Italian Prime Minister reveals that the West is capitulating to Russia, as the Wests economic warfare backfires

As the Prime Minister of Italy, Draghi tried to claim that Italy would be able to pay for gas without breaching the EU sanctions against Russia. However, when questioned on how confident he was that Italy would be able to keep gas flowing without violating EU sanctions, Draghi tried to weasel his way out. Im actually quite confident, but for a silly reason. There is no official pronouncement of what it means to breach sanctions. Nobody ever said anything about whether rubles payments breach sanctions or not, how these payments are organized. So, its such a gray zone here.

The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen made it clear on April 27 that European gas companies should not bend to Russias energy demands. Companies with such contracts should not accede to the Russian demands, von der Leyen said. This would be a breach of the sanctions so a high risk for the companies.

Draghi finally confessed that most of Europe couldnt defend its sanctions and was already kowtowing to Putins energy demands. As a matter of fact, most gas importers have already opened an account in rubles with Gazprom, Draghi said, revealing that Europe continues to pay billions per day to Russia and on Russias terms! There is not a united front against Russia. Its all empty talk.

Russia will continue to destroy any military equipment that is brought into Ukraine by NATO countries, and they will get rich while doing so, as the Wests economic and banking warfare schemes backfire, as supply chains shake worldwide, and as innocents continue to suffer.

Sources include:

Zerohedge.com

NaturalNews.com

NaturalNews.com

Sovren.media
(Natural News) The Biden regime continues to demonstrate to Americans that they care more about the borders of other countries than they do our own border.

No sooner than Russia invaded Ukraine, the regime  along with the rest of the West  picked a side, condemning Moscow and Russian President Vladimir Putin while ignoring years worth of reporting on Ukrainian Nazism and corruption. And shortly after the U.S.-led NATO picked Kyiv over Moscow, weapons began flowing to Ukrainian soldiers.

Bidens handlers ordered the Pentagon to join the effort, including shipments of more than 5,000 Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine, which have been extremely effective against Russian armor.

But the problem is this: The Pentagons Javelin stocks are running low and thanks to decades worth of off-shoring U.S. industrial production, combined with the current manufactured supply chain crisis, the U.S. military cannot quickly replace them, according to a leading Republican lawmaker.

In an interview with Fox News, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), said that the regime is dangerously depleting Javelin stocks at a time when more conflicts involving American troops could break out around the world (such as a Chinese invasion of Taiwan).

Whats bad is the president himself seems at times to constantly want to remind everybody what we wont do and putting arbitrary limits on our assistance, I think, undermines our effort. But, the real ugly is that we are running low in terms of our stockpiles, he said.

We just burned through seven years of Javelins and thats not only important as we continue to try and help the Ukrainians win in Ukraine, thats important as we try to simultaneously defend Taiwan from aggression from the Chinese Communist Party, he continued.

They are going to need access to some of these same weapons systems, and we simply dont have the stockpiles at present in order to backfill what weve spent in Ukraine, he noted further.

Last week, our dementia patient president, Joe Biden, visited the Lockheed Martin plant in Troy, Ala., where the defense company builds Javelins. Lockheed officials said that the company is attempting to increase its workforce in order to crank out more of the missiles, but it is doing so at a time when the labor market is the tightest it has been in decades.

That said, the company is still expected to ramp up production in the near term.

On Sunday, Jim Taiclet, the president and chief executive officer of Lockheed Martin Corporation, told Face the Nation that production of the weapon would double from 2,100 missiles per year to 4,000 per year, adding that production will take a number of months, maybe even a couple of years to get there because we have to get our supply chain to also crank up.

But we may not have a couple of years is the problem, which is what Gallagher was getting at. And yet, the regime is purposely depleting stocks of a weapon that would be critical in another major power conflict which literally could flare up at any time.

For how long is Lockheed Martin preparing to ramp up production of javelins and other weapons? Their president and CEO says they are planning for the long run. pic.twitter.com/lnNQ98q8Yx  Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) May 8, 2022

That said, the missiles are not magic and cannot be deployed in all types of terrain, especially congested urban centers.

We couldnt even launch one. I think its completely useless in an urban environment, as something always gets in the way, said Col. Vladimir Baranyuk, the commander of Ukraines 36th Naval Infantry Brigade, as quoted by the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph.

In addition to Javelins, the Raytheon-produced Stinger anti-aircraft missile stocks are also being depleted, and that companys CEO has also said ramping up production amid a tight labor market and supply chain nightmare isnt going to happen quickly.

The Biden regime is purposefully harming our national security. The question Americans ought to be asking is why.

Sources include:

ZeroHedge.com

DailyTelegraph.co.nz
(Natural News) A German member of the European parliament warned that European Union (EU) citizens will no longer have any political influence over who they entrust with the administration of their fundamental rights as the World Health Organization (WHO) amended a treaty with member states.

In a video released last month, MEP Christine Anderson said the WHO was attempting to illegitimately seize de-facto governmental power through the creation of an intergovernmental negotiating body (INB), which is made up of non-democratically elected members. (Related: RFK Jr.: CIA-led military response to pandemic was meant to drive democracy from the world and usher in global totalitarianism.)

This means that the WHO will have power over its member states in the event of a pandemic and will not need the involvement or consultation with national governments or national parliaments to do so.

In a new video posted May 8 on her YouTube channel, Anderson explained that she asked the European Commission to what extent it would ensure that the principles of the peoples rule be respected and that citizens would not be subjected to the arbitrariness of an unelected entity.

The answer I received to my question a few hours ago is clear and brief: not at all, she said.

The WHO announced in a press release on December 21, 2021, that the World Health Assembly agreed to kickstart a global process to establish an intergovernmental negotiating body to draft and negotiate a WHO convention, agreement or other international instruments regarding pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.

This was also announced on the official EU council website, which stated that the body will hold its next meeting on August 1 and will deliver a progress report on the 76th World Health Assembly in 2023, with the aim to adopt the instrument by 2024.

The video posted on the EU Council website also stated that the world must be prepared for next time.

Super-rich people will decide fate of the world in future pandemics

This very idea of a future pandemic was the main argument behind the creation of the INB. According to Anderson, such empowerment could constitute a direct attack on the rule of the people by the people, which is the most elementary principle of any democracy.

This plan, she argued, is easy for anyone to see through. Anderson emphasized that a democratically non-legitimized body, into which the richest of the super-rich buy their way through donations, is to decide in the future whether a pandemic situation exists, in order to then directly take over governmental power.

Anderson explained that the composition of the WHO is not based on democratic elections and that the decision-makers sitting there can issue instructions, but they are not accountable to anyone and cannot be held politically responsible. (Related: WHO Pandemic Treaty: A power-grabbing act to control health responses of UN member countries.)

You, as a citizen, will therefore no longer have any political influence over whom you entrust with the administration of your fundamental rights, she said.

Anderson posted the link to both her question to the European Commission and the answer she received, noting that not a single time did the response mention words like citizen, democracy, rule of the people or political responsibility.

If the European Commission mentioned those words, it could have fostered the trust of citizens and exposed as fake news and conspiracy theories all the Telegram messages that talk about a new world order or a world government under the guise of WHO by simply stating that it will ensure that democratic decision-making processes are maintained, she argued.

The MEP also said the Commission could have simply stated that it is very important not to bypass citizens and not to patronize them, but it didnt. Anderson went on to describe the answer to her question as a blah, blah about the WHO that also contained a promise that the European Commission will consult with relevant stakeholders throughout the process of creating the new instrument.

Visit Pandemic.news for more news and updates about the WHOs Pandemic Treaty.

Watch the video below to know more about the proposed Pandemic Treaty and how it can potentially eradicate national sovereignty.

This story is from the Free4eva Media channel on Brighteon.com.

More related stories:

MEP Christine Anderson warns: WHO trying to seize governmental power through PANDEMIC TREATY.

Be warned: The World Health Organizations Pandemic Treaty will destroy all remaining freedoms and unleash a global MEDICAL DICTATORSHIP.

Sign this petition to stop the WHO from destroying U.S. sovereignty in times of health emergencies.

WHO calls for new global public health world order to take advantage of future plandemics.

As the war in Ukraine rages, the WHO is quietly scheming to strip US and 193 other countries of their national sovereignty.

Sources include:

LifeSiteNews.com

TheParadise.ng

Brighteon.com
Thunderstorms have caused widespread damage in some portions of the United States since the onset of the spring season on March 20, especially over the Central US and Southern US.

This week, severe thunderstorm warnings have been issued by weather authorities for the states of Wisconsin and Texas.

In addition to the severe weather, the continuance of fire weather and wildfires is still looming in the Southwest US and the southern High Plains.

Since April, multiple agricultural areas in the region have been engulfed in flames in addition to the dry conditions, strong winds, and above-normal temperatures.

Thunderstorm Warning

In its latest US weather forecast, the Weather Prediction Center (WPC) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) - National Weather Service (NWS), on Tuesday, May 10, has issued severe thunderstorm warnings for some portions of Wisconsin and western Texas.

The thunderstorms are likely to be associated with heavy rain, damaging winds, large hail, and the formation of tornadoes.

These conditions have also been forecasted from the Midwest to the Southern High Plains prior to a strengthening storm system.

The warning will be valid from Wednesday to Friday, May 11 to May 13. However, previous weather advisories of the US weather agency have been subjected to updates.

Thus, additional weather-related information may be consolidated in the coming days.

Also Read: Severe Thunderstorms Forecasted for Southern Plains and Mississippi River Valley

Midwest and Southern High Plains

The NOAA - NWS placed a warning for "Slight Risk," the second out of a four-tier scale, of excessive rainfall for parts of the Upper Missouri and Mississippi Valleys on Wednesday.

This is due to the deep moisture and warm front being carried northward across the region, leading to torrential rain.

Due to the heavy downpour, flash floods or widespread flooding are possible in low-lying areas and communities near lakes or rivers in the said region.

Since the rainfall is correlated with adverse weather, the Storm Prediction Center (SPC) has also issued a Slight Risk for Severe Thunderstorms, the second out of a five-tier scale, for the said two regions.

In addition, the US storm agency gave an "Enhanced Risk," the third on the scale, for a robust thunderstorm across a vast area of the Northern Plains and Upper Midwest on Thursday, May 12.

This is due to the deepening of a reported surface low moving into the region.

Summer Heat

In another weather advisory, the WPC, in its short-range forecast of a "summer-like heat" expanding in a northward pattern across the Midwest and Northeast.

It also mentioned critical fire dangers are still persisting from the Southwest US to the High Plains.

In particular, the extreme heat over the Heartland region will spread to the Midwest and Interior Northeast on Wednesday and Thursday.

Meanwhile, a lingering surface low over the Atlantic Ocean will continue to bring cool temperatures along the East Coast.

Wildfires

For the southwestern and southern states, fire weather conditions continue to pose a risk of wildfire formations and growth.

According to a video report of ABC News, over a dozen wildfires are burning across the Southwest, including the new '"Cerro Pelado Fire" in New Mexico.

The emergence of the novel fire came as the state is still dealing with the Calf Canyon Fire since April 6, resulting in the destruction of at least 276 structures and evacuation of almost 13,000 residences but with no reported deaths, according to The Washington Post.

Related Article: NOAA Warns of Heavy Rain in the Mid-Atlantic, Prolonged Fire Weather in the Southwest US
A scorched hillside from last year's Glass fire is seen near Angwin, California, August 30, 2021. - Water tanks, fire trucks and helicopters: California's Napa Valley winemakers are buying their own kit to protect their property and their pricey vintages from wildfires. A historic drought driven by man-made global warming has left large tracts of the western United States parched and highly vulnerable to fires. (Photo : Photo by NICK OTTO/AFP via Getty Images)

According to an innovative prediction, the year in which the globe clearly violates the 1.5C climate change restriction established by international authorities is rapidly nearing.

Earth Nearing the 1.5C Global Heating Limit

Researchers initiated by the UK Met Office remarked that the likelihood from one of the succeeding half a decade exceeding the limit has become 50%, although there was no possibility of this occurring in the next five years as lately as 2015.

However, this increased to 20% in 2020 and 40% in 2021. In 2021, the annual mean temperature was 1.1 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial thresholds.

It is also very guaranteed that 93% by the year 2026, which is the year believed to be the warmest yet measured, surpassing 2016, when heat was boosted by a natural El Nio climatic phenomenon.

As the environmental catastrophe worsens, the mean weather over next couple of years would almost certainly be greater than during the preceding years.

In his statement sent to The Guardian, Prof Petteri Taalas, president of the World Meteorological Organization, which released the latest research explained that the 1.5C number is not a haphazard estimate.

It's mostly a signal of when weather events may be progressively hazardous for individuals and the broader world.

Weather conditions will keep increasing as long as humans are going to generate gas emissions.

By that time, the bodies of water would then trap the heat and acidify, ice sheet and permafrost will dissolve, water threshold will emergence, and the climate would be extreme severe.

IPPC also claimed that weather patterns periods can cause planet to heat up or fall.

However, the Paris Agreement necessitates world powers to keep the fundamental upsurge, caused by sentient activity, far below 2 C, while also advancing attempts to maintain the upsurge below 1.5 C.

In 2018, experts advised that 1.5C of rising temperatures would have serious consequences for millions and millions of individuals.

Likewise, Dr Leon Hermanson of the Met Office stated that a solitary season of exceeding 1.5C does not indicate we have violated the landmark Paris Agreement barrier, nevertheless it does demonstrate that we are getting increasingly nearer to a condition wherein 1.5 C might be surpassed for a longer timeframe, according to United Nations website.

"The prospect of exceeding the 1.5C barrier, for even a season, is concerning," said Dr Andrew King of the University of Melbourne.

The planets GHGS are near-record peaks, and we will expect to witness climate change unless we cut pollution to nearly negative, thus, quick economic decreases in pollutants are considered necessary.

Also read: Mysterious Phenomenon: Thousands of Starfish Washed Ashore in South Carolina

Experts Warm on Hazardous Effect of Global Heat Limit

The yearly projections use the finest prognostication technologies from climatological centers all over the globe to generate useful feedback for judgment.

It discovered that cloud cover will be more likely in northern Europe, the Sahel, north-east Brazil, as well as Australia in 2022 than in the past two or three decades, whilst also circumstances in south-western Europe even in south-western North America will be extremely dry than customary.

Prof Taalas furthermore alerted of particularly warming trend at the north pole: "Polar regions heating is extraordinarily high, and what occurs in the Arctic directly impacts everyone."

The melting of ice sheets has been interconnected to rising temperatures in Europe, North America, and Asia, such as severe weather, river flooding, and even winter storms.

According to the estimate, the spike in Arctic readings would be triple that of the worldwide mean during the following couple of years.

Related article: Record-breaking Heat Wave Strains 'Limits of Human Survivability' in India and Pakistan
A massive fresh crater with a woodland at its bottom has been found by Chinese geologists. As per the Xinhua news agency, the depression is 630 feet below the surface, big enough to engulf St. Louis' Gateway Arch.

New Giant Sinkhole Discovered

On Friday (May 6), a crew of speleologists as well as cave divers jumped down into the crater, uncovering three subterranean entries as well as old trees 131 feet in height, arching their trees and shrubs forward towards the sunshine that seeps through the subsurface opening, English News website.

Wherein George Veni, executive chairman of the National Cave and Karst Research Institute in the United States and a renowned cave specialist also expressed his feelings and remarked how exciting it is to hear of the news.

According to Veni, 25% of the United States is limestone or pseudokarst, which includes caverns created by processes apart from complete destruction, including such igneous and metamorphic rocks or air currents.

Moreover, Veni informed Live Science that the finding was not surprising considering southern China has karst geology, which is characterized by stunning depressions and strange caverns.

Depressions and caverns are there to provide a safe haven for existence, but often additionally serve as a route to reservoirs, or profound subterranean reservoirs of freshwater.

Tropical plants thrive profusely in one West Texas hole, and their seeds were likely delivered there by bats migrating to Tropical and Subtropical Regions. It must also be noted how experts and researchers alike believes that karst caverns and fissures could offer a haven for species.

Guangxi is famous for its spectacular karst structures, which would include crater, limestone columns, as well as geological arches and have gained the province UNESCO World Heritage Site status. The one and only sorts of water sources that may be polluted with waste material are karst reservoirs.

Zhang Yuanhai, a veteran industrial designer with the Institute of Karst Geology, expressed confidence that with this, in China, individuals have always had this extremely aesthetically amazing karst with big depressions and bottomless chasm openings and the like. The sinkhole's inside is 1,004 feet length and 492 feet broad.

Veni claims that karst groundwater could provide single or major water supply for 700 million people globally.

Also read: ESA's Mars Express Orbiter Captures Giant 'Claw Marks' on Mars' Surface

Divers Discover Forest Inside Giant Sinkhole

According to China Daily, the very original research scientists earlier uncovered hundreds of depressions in Northwest China's Shaanxi region and a network of fully linked depressions in Guangxi.

Due to changes occurring in geography, climatic condition, as well as many variables, the manner karst looks on the sea floor can vary considerably.

According to Xinhua, the recently discovered raises the maximum count of depressions in Leye District to 30. Experts were said to be not shocked if creatures discovered in these caverns have never been documented or characterized by scientific knowledge.

If a dungeon compartment increases in size quite so, the roof can progressively crumble, revealing massive holes.

The Mandarin phrase for such massive sinkholes is "tiankeng," which translates as "heavenly pit," and the bottom of the crater does certainly appear to be some other universe. Veni explained that karst environments are generated mostly by the breakdown of limestone.

Related article: Mysterious Phenomenon: Thousands of Starfish Washed Ashore in South Carolina
According to wildlife authorities, a big alligator over 10 feet long was observed in Claremore Lake, Oklahoma.

The Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation (DWC) stated that it got reports from members of the general public approximately a week ago of a huge alligator in the lake in the state's northeast.

Department personnel later returned to the area of the lake where the alligator had been spotted and discovered.

According to a DWC representative, the animal had to be killed for public safety concerns.

Giant alligator found

According to the National Wildlife Federation, American alligators may be found in coastal marshes across the southern United States, with their range extending as far north as North Carolina and as far west as eastern Texas, as per Newsweek.

Male American alligators may grow to be more than 12 feet long and weigh up to 1,000 pounds, while females are somewhat smaller on average.

According to the DWC, alligators are exclusively found in the southeast of the state, including the Red and Little River systems that go through Choctaw, Bryan, McCurtain, and Love counties.

Don Brown, a communications consultant with the DWC, told KFOR in a story published last year that alligators are not regular sights anyplace in Oklahoma save the very point of the state's southeast corner, down even south of Broken Bow.

Typically, people have to go hunting for one in order to find one. He said that they are usually found in marshy places, down by the river in difficult locations.

If we can keep a safe distance from them and leave them alone, they will typically keep a safe distance from you.

According to Brown, the majority of alligators discovered in Oklahoma outside of the southeast are former pets that were released by their owners.

Also Read: 'Evil' Wild Pigs, Alligators Roamed Area Where Brian Laundrie's Skeletal Remains Were Found

What should we know about alligators?

Humans are not their preferred food. Alligators like eating a wide range of amphibians, birds, fish, reptiles, and small mammals such as raccoons and rabbits.

If they notice something splashing in the water, they will bite first and ask questions afterward.

Alligators are highly effective predators.

To attack their victim, alligators conceal themselves by remaining submerged with only their eyes visible above the surface.

They usually wait for anything to swim or walk by before lunging for it. The predators are extremely swift on land and much quicker on water.

Alligators are often timid, yet they are still predators.

The American alligator is only found in freshwater, but the American crocodile may live in both freshwater and saltwater environments.

Donnelly, an amphibian and reptile specialist, advised against allowing children or pets to play, swim, or exercise in bodies of water where these reptiles may live.

Heithaus, an apex predator specialist, advised staying watchful near shorelines, especially between dark and dawn, when they are most active.

Allow them their space and never feed them to make them less fearful of people.

Alligators perform a vital function in balancing the ecology. Alligators are apex predators at the top of the food chain, helping to keep other animal populations in check.

They generate a habitat for fish and marine invertebrates by excavating holes and leaving trails throughout wetlands.

Alligators also aid in the protection of birds.

Although alligators prefer to linger around under rookeries to eat nestlings that fall out of their nests, they also enjoy eating raccoons, which feed on birds in their nests.

Ectothermic animals include alligators and crocodiles. This implies they do not control their body temperature inside.

Instead, they rely on external sources of heat to control their body temperature, such as lying out in the sun or moving to warmer or colder places.

Related article: American Alligators: New Study Reveals Mechanisms Behind Sex Determination
La Nina may possibly impact the incoming hurricane season in the east basin of the Pacific Ocean.

A long-range forecast by meteorologists indicated that the atmospheric and oceanic phenomenon may affect the frequency and intensity of hurricanes across the region, including portions of the southwestern United States.

La Nina Weather Pattern

The approaching Pacific hurricane season in the East Pacific basin on Sunday, May 15, is likely to be dominated by the La Nina weather pattern for the third season in the region, according to AccuWeather.

The phenomenon will also affect the Central Pacific basin, where its hurricane season will start on Wednesday, June 1.

In particular, AccuWeather's long-range forecast revealed that a high-pressure area will continue to dominate the southwestern US and northwestern Mexico as far as November.

This will also likely determine the landfall of storms along the Pacific coast of both North America and Central America.

Also Read: La Nina: This Climate Phenomenon May Bring Untimely Snowfall in Parts of US

East Pacific Hurricane Season

The US-based weather forecasting company implies the following data for the East Pacific hurricane season for 2022, where it said: approximately 15 to 19 named storms, six to eight hurricanes, and two to four major hurricanes may impact the region.

Out of all these figures, AccuWeather emphasized two to four storms and hurricanes can make landfall in Mexico.

Although this is the case, such climatic and weather hazards can still impact the US and other countries in the Caribbean region.

In the past, arriving storms along the Pacific coast tend to move either in a northeastern, eastern, or southeastern pattern.

In the Western US, a hurricane landfall such as in the state of California is unlikely. However, it is still possible.

In October 1858, a hurricane made landfall in San Diego, California, after forming in September that year, according to the University of Rhode Island.

Atlantic Hurricane Season

The rarity of hurricanes in the Western US is opposite along the East Coast, where storms commonly form over the Atlantic Ocean, especially with the start of the Atlantic hurricane season, which annually spans from June 1 to November 30.

While it is still unclear whether the La Nina in the East Pacific basin will have far-reaching effects on Atlantic hurricanes, the Continental US is still imminently subjected to being hit by these storms, which impact's can range from moderate to severe.

US Hurricane Threats

In relation to the weather forecast, the Climate Prediction Center (CPC) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) - National Weather Service (NWS), on April 14, stated there is a 59% chance La Nina will continue in the Northern Hemisphere during the summer season (June to August), with a 50% to 55% chance of making landfall.

In spite of the provided data, US meteorologists have claimed there is only a possibility that this year's potential hurricanes will mirror previous storms over recent years, which have been marked by widespread casualties and damage.

In August 2021, Hurricane Ida, a deadly Category 4 Atlantic hurricane, made landfall in the state of Louisiana, killing multiple people and causing widespread power outages, affecting more than a million residences and businesses, as reported by USA Today.

In August 2005, Category 5 Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on the US Gulf Coast, devastating the city of New Orleans and its surrounding areas, and causing more than 1,800 reported deaths.

Out of a five-tier scale, the category levels of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Ida are some of the strongest recorded storms in US history.

Related Article: La Nina is Back and Could Possibly Prompt More Western US Wildfires, Droughts
Fruit flies have been found to exhaust their physical energy to mating instead of surviving on their own when infected by deadly pathogens such as bacteria, according to a new study.

The recent research acknowledged the fact that it has been long thought that a bacterial infection drains the affected organism's energy.

Mating over Survival

Various anecdotal evidence and research suggest that survival is a fundamental instinct when faced with danger or any life-threatening risks.

Evolutionary biology has taught us that the continuation and diversification of life are manifested by survival, a key factor when it comes to the proliferation of all living organisms.

This rationale is shown in a new study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B on Tuesday, May 10, wherein researchers from the University of Birmingham (UOB) in England found that both male and female fruit flies infected with bacterial pathogens show normal energy levels on courtship and mating.

The researchers were interested in further understanding how animals make it a priority and balance their energy levels in immune defense and reproduction.

This is due to the idea that animals have only limited energy resources, which are required to be distributed for various activities, such as fighting an infection or mating, according to Dr. Carolina Rezaval, the research team leader at UOB, as cited by Phys.org.

The study confirmed the fact some animals invest in reproduction to pass on their genes to the next generation of the evolutionary hierarchy.

The UOB team also collaborated with the Imperial College in London and the research institute IFIBYNE in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Also Read: How Fruit Fly's Fascinating Ability To Adapt To Climate Change Can Help Us Survive

Drosophila Fruit Fly

Widely known as the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster belongs to the family Drosophilidae and phylum Arthropoda.

They have been designated with such name due to their tendency to feast on fruit, which is in a state of rotting or excessive ripening, as mentioned by the University of Kentucky (UKY) in Lexington, United States.

Members of this fruit fly family are also reportedly called small fruit flies, pomace flies, or vinegar flies.

The insects are also attracted to rotting bananas, onions, potatoes, and other unrefrigerated products from the grocery store, UKY adds.

In the UK-based study, the UOB researchers used the Drosophila melanogaster as a sample species and surprisingly discovered it does not matter if the infected is a male or female fruit fly.

Regardless, the infected winged insects still exhibited courtship and mating behaviors similar to uninfected flies.

Evolution Theory

In Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, organisms, in general, produce more offspring than they are able to survive in their environment, as explained by the National Geographic.

In the underlying theoretical principle of "survival of the fittest," the theory suggested that reproduction by itself is also a "form of survival" rather than a single organism surviving only.

With this, the UK researchers imply that this is the case for the fruit flies.

What made the study unique is the fact that their behavior towards reproduction is enduring amidst a lethal bacterial infection.

Related Article: Study Shows How Fruit Flies Adapted in a Rapidly Changing World
By Ding Gang

Western democracy. Illustration: Chen Xia/GT

Thirty-six years after his father was deposed, Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr., the son of former Philippine leader Ferdinand Marcos, is set to be the next president of the Philippines.

Before the presidential election even began, the Western media rushed to label it a decision of the democratic future. The New York Times called it the most important election in the Philippines in decades, and one that will "shape the direction of the country's fragile democracy."

The election of Marcos Jr. was even seen by some ideologically dazed Westerners as a sign of returning to dictatorship and autocracy. This easily reminds us of the ongoing war in the heart of Europe between Russia and Ukraine, which is also described by the West as a war for the defense of democracy.

Most of the media is focusing on who is going to be the winner. The ideological battle behind the war may be a more important factor for the future of the world.

A recent article published in the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel points out that the West has adopted sanctions against Moscow, and that economic and trade relations are beginning to draw lines based on ideology, which is an unprecedented situation.

Globalization is not a fair game, and it has created conditions for the West to spread its ideology. But as so many "color revolutions" in various countries have proved, such ideological criteria can be a strong temptation for many post-development countries, but they can also lead to long-term unrest. Because every political system grows up in the soil of its own culture, it is very difficult or even impossible to take root outside of its own cultural traditions.

Many developing countries with cultures, traditions and values different from those of the West are constrained by their dependence on the West in the pursuit of economic development. Due to the constant political influence exerted by the West in the process of globalization, the developing countries are also forced to compromise on the influence and impact of the Western ideology because they are incapable of participating in the formulation of the rules of globalization.

However, if these countries fail to protect the values on which their nations and cultures depend in the process of their own development, and at the same time take a critical stance against Western influence, especially Western centrism, they may risk being caught in continuous social unrest.

The Russia-Ukraine war has intensified the ideological conflicts and fragmented the entire world according to American and Western standards.

It is not only a fragmentation of ideas, but it will also inevitably carry over to many levels such as technology, trade and finance. But the ideological conflict is the one which should be more concerned.

On the one hand, these standards will create enormous political and social pressure on latecomer countries, especially small- and medium-sized ones, triggering a strong sense of fear of the West. On the other hand, it is very difficult to accept Western values entirely, which will inevitably lead to a fierce conflict between Westernization and localization and an alert to national and state consciousness.

In recent years, the emergence of measures to guard one's own culture and values in Southeast Asian countries is one of the reactive responses.

ASEAN has embarked on measures to protect Southeast Asian indigenous cultures. At the 13th ASEAN Summit in Singapore in November 2007, leaders of member countries agreed on the development of the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community, with the main goal of creating a people-centered community with a high degree of social and moral responsibility.

It will be a long-term challenge to preserve its cultural traditions and find a path to modernity in the face of Westernization.

The author is a senior editor with People's Daily, and currently a senior fellow with the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China. dinggang@globaltimes.com.cn.
The United Nations Children Fund's (UNICEF) Chief of Field Office, Kano, Rahama Farah, has expressed worries over the prevailing statistics of out-of-school children in Nigeria, saying the country has 18.5 million out-of-school children.

He explained that out of the 18.5 million out-of-school children in the country, over 10 million are girls which represents 60 per cent.

Farah spoke Wednesday during a media dialogue on girls' education under the Girls' Education Project 3 (GEP3) funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office of the UK and implemented by UNICEF.

He lamented that the statistics had heightened the gender inequity, where only one in four girls from poor, rural families complete junior secondary school education in the country.

Farah noted that the attacks on schools and other educational challenges afflicting Nigeria were negatively affecting children's quest for education across the nation, noting that more girls were likely to be affected than boys.

He, however, said with the interventions of UNICEF, government and other development partners, 1.4 million girls now have access to education in northern Nigeria.

According to him, "Currently in Nigeria, there are 18.5 million out-of-school children, 60 per cent of these out-of-school children are girls - that is over 10 million girls are out of school

"Most importantly, you will need to know that the majority of these out-of-school children are actually from northern Nigeria. This situation heightens the gender inequity, where only one in four girls from poor, rural families complete Junior Secondary School education."

He admonished journalists to advocate increased funding, timely release and allocation of adequate resources to the education sector for effective and efficient learning.

"The media must also be at the forefront of advocating for the action directed at removing these barriers that hinder girls' education such as child marriage," Farah added.
Now more than ever, mental health risk has become a pressing issue to be addressed, one that was heightened due to the COVID-19 crisis. In order to deepen Malaysia's mental health revolution and, more importantly, to educate attendees on the socio-political factors of mental health, Newcastle University Medicine Malaysia (NUMed) is collaborating with Yayasan Health On World (YHOW) to host a mental health conference titled "Redefining Mental Wellness for a Brighter Future."

The two-day virtual mental health conference will provide attendees with the opportunity to learn about model programmes, methodologies, and strategies for tackling mental health concerns. The programme is an initiative to help people understand the policy environment that encourages high-quality mental health care, as well as the role it plays in resolving care disparities.

As an active mental health advocate, Ms Premila Nair, the co-organising chairperson and Chief Operating Officer of NUMed, stated that the virtual conference, in addition to being a profound learning experience for members of the public relating to mental issues, would also be beneficial to be aware of current mental health progression taking place in the country.

The most efficient way to deal with mental health issues is via facts and a comprehensive grasp of mental health problems. From spotting the causes, pinpointing solutions, and ultimately recognising that we are really dealing with medical issues, Ms Nair added.

She also highlighted that the conference will be a great educational experience for the general public, as it will bring together some of the most well-known mental health experts who will outline the strategy, financing, and operations of various aspects of the mental healthcare system as part of a revolutionary move to redefine our understanding of mental health.

Attendees of the virtual conference can expect a series of plenary talks, panel discussions, and rapid-fire sessions from professors, counsellors, consultant psychiatrists, and mental health advocates from various mental health associations and communities to discuss accessibility to mental healthcare resources, men and women's mental health, and existing mental health disorders in the twenty-first century, giving participants the opportunities to acquire different perspectives.

The conference will begin with keynote speeches from Deputy Director General of Health (Public Health) of the Ministry of Health Malaysia Datuk Dr. Chong Chee Kheong and Member of the Mental Health Advisory Council of the Ministry of Health Malaysia Tan Sri Lee Lam Thye. The former will be addressing Strategies for Enhancing Mental Healthcare Services in Malaysia while the latter will highlight The Underlying State of Mental Health in Malaysia: What Should Be Done?.

Thereafter, Prof. Dato Dr. Andrew Mohanraj, President of the Malaysian Mental Health Association (MMHA) will share on "Mental Healthcare Beyond the Pandemic". With her plenary talk on "Mental Health as An Essential Insurance Coverage", Prof. Dr. Sharifa Ezat Wan Puteh, Professor of Hospital Management and Health Economics at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, will shed light on the importance of expanding insurance coverage to include mental healthcare.

Meanwhile, Assoc. Prof. Dr Muhammad Muhsin Ahmad Zahari, Senior Consultant Psychiatrist at University of Malaya will be providing his insights on Spotlighting Mens Mental Health and Managing Director of Andolfi Family Therapy Centre Darrell Lourdes will present his take on How Much Do Parents Contribute to the Mental Welfare of their Children?.

Dr. Navinder Kaur will be sharing her insights and perspectives as a Medical Doctor at Managedcare on The Impact of Mental Health on Caregivers  Family + Domestic Helpers. Prof. Emeritus Tan Sri Dato Sri Ir. Dr. Sahol Hamid bin Abu Bakar, Vice Chancellor of UNITAR International University, will deliver a plenary session on "The Role of Educators in Addressing Mental Health Issues," which will be one of the highlights of the NUMed-YHOW mental health conference.

Participants of NUMed-YHOW Mental Health Conference will receive recordings of the conference and digital certificate.

The conference is sure to be eye-opening and productive. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to widen your horizons in terms of mental wellness.

Visit https://mentalhealthconference.com.my/ to reserve your slot.

ADDITIONAL INFO:

Speakers and panellists participating in the conference according to the theme of discussions are as follows:

Strategies For Enhancing Mental Healthcare Services

Datuk Dr. Chong Chee Kheong, Deputy Director General of Health (Public Health), Ministry of Health Malaysia

The Underlying State of Mental Health in Malaysia: What Should Be Done?

Tan Sri Lee Lam Thye

Member of Mental Health Advisory Council, Ministry of Health Malaysia

Championing Womens Mental Health

Moderator: Dr. Sangeeta Kaur, Co-Founder of Yayasan Health on World (YHOW)

Panellist: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Madihah Rushaidi, Dean of Biomedical Sciences at Newcastle University Medicine Malaysia; Assoc. Prof. Dr Salmi Razali Department Head of Psychology and Behavioural at Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM); Sarimah Ibrahim, Malaysian Celebrity and Mental Health Advocate, Stanley Clement, Chief Executive Officer of Mediabrands Content Studio (MBCS).

Perceived Sense of Grandiose Narcissism

By Dr. Praveena Rajendra, Exco Member of Alliance of Safe Community & Certified Mental Health Practitioner.

Mental Health First Aid (MHFA): Helping People with Mental Health Problems

By Dr Tracie Gan, Medical Director of Doctor Anywhere Malaysia.

The Relationship between Equity and Mental Health

Moderator: Marc Kevin Natusch

Panellist: Victor Tan Hock Kim, Deputy Chair of Befrienders KL; Dr Mohamed Maliki b Mohamed Rapiee, Director of International Youth Centre; Sainursalwa Sani, HR Practitioner.

Bridging the Gap of Mental Health @ Work  Impact and Good Practices

Moderator: Dr. Vimi Ramasamy

Panellist: Azwan Baharuddin, Country Managing Director at Accenture Malaysia; YM Raja Azura binti Raja Mahayuddin, Co-Founder of AKRAB Resources, Daniel Goh Cheng Hock, Consulting Manager of PERSOLKELLY Malaysia.

Mental Wellness for a Better Future

By Patrick Wee Kok Han, Founder of RUI Clinic
"To tell you how serious this is, many of us have failed to meet the salary obligation to our workers."

Hoteliers in Calabar, Cross River State, are lamenting the increasing costs of doing business because of the power outage that has affected the capital city for 49 days.

In separate interviews with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Wednesday, the hoteliers said their operational costs had more than doubled since the outage.

They lamented that the rising cost of diesel, the major source of energy used in powering their generating sets, had also not helped matters.

They further said the high taxation by the state government had also impacted negatively on their business.

An operator of Dreams Hotel, who simply gave her name as Mrs Effiom, noted that while some had increased their rates as a result of the biting cost of operation, several others refused to do so for some reasons.

She said that even juggling between using diesel and petrol had not in any way reduced the cost of operation for her.

"To tell you how serious this is, many of us have failed to meet the salary obligation to our workers.

"Using 30 litres of diesel every day at N650 per litre is not a joking matter. Before the outage, I used the same 30 liters for three days.

"In addition to the power supply and high cost of diesel, we are also confronted by high taxation imposed on us by the state government.

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"All these have not in any way been friendly to our operation.

On why some of them have not increased their rates due to the challenges, Thaddeus Ebimaye, manager in one of the hotels, said "it is a function of demand and supply.

"It is only one way into Calabar, unlike other cities; it's either you are coming to Calabar or not; the increasing rate at this difficult time will be counter-productive when we are already struggling for patronage before the power outage.

"The system some of us have adopted, which still does not make much difference, is to schedule hours or rationalise hours of power supply".

Similarly, Bassey Efiong, who said some of the operators had been crippled with the power outage, expressed sadness over the situation.

He said many would likely leave the business if the situation was not remedied.

It is exactly 49 days since the power supply to the city was cut off following the vandalism of the transmission line to Calabar from Itu Power Station.

Meanwhile, Collins Igwe, the regional manager of Port Harcourt Electricity Distribution Company, has called for calm.

He said the power distribution company was making efforts to restore power to the city.

A team of engineers was working hard to repair the vandalised line, he said.
Nokia has announced two new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings, aimed at helping communication service providers (CSPs) and enterprise customers reduce energy consumption across their networks and automate device management control for smart home devices.

The first, dubbed Nokia Analytics Virtualization and Automation (AVA) for Energy SaaS, uses artificial intelligence to monitor network traffic and help reduce the amount of connectivity resources used during periods of low demand. It also looks to spot network anomalies and benchmark the energy efficiency of passive infrastructure, such as batteries and power supplies. Nokia says AVA for Energy SaaS can help CSPs achieve up to five-fold energy savings.

The second, Nokia Home Device Management SaaS, is a device management platform for smart home devices. The vendor-agnostic tool allows CSP and enterprise customers to remotely monitor and manage fleets of smart home devices, including routers, Wi-Fi extenders, mesh nodes, video set top boxes, voice over IP access devices, and 4G/5G fixed wireless access devices.

Nokia has also announced the commercial availability of Anomaly Detection SaaS, a machine learning-powered network anomaly detection tool which was first announced in November 2021.

Rohit Mehra, group vice president for network and telecommunications at IDC, said that the announcements from Nokia are interesting enhancements that will help its customers improve their network operations.

Capabilities like energy efficiency monitoring are top of mind these days for operators and enterprises alike, as are issues pertaining to home device monitoring and management, he told Network World.

Mehra added that while it makes sense to be somewhat skeptical of the claims related to artificial intelligence or machine learning-powered platform enhancements, most service providers have now started to embrace a pragmatic approach to leveraging these types of capabilities to improve their security posture and network operations.
Foreign minister AK Abdul Momen presents a gift to Republic of Korea ambassador in Dhaka Lee Jang-keun during a seminar styled as 50 years of Korea-Bangladesh Relationship: Presentation of the Dhaka University Study in the capital on Thursday.  New Age photo

Foreign minister AK Abdul Momen on Thursday sought support from South Korea in sending back Rohingya people sheltered in Bangladesh.

He called upon the Republic of Korea to use the leverage it had in Myanmar.

You are a good friend of Myanmar. We need your little help to send Rohingya people back home for their better future, Momen told a seminar on the 50 years of Korea-Bangladesh Relationship: Presentation of the Dhaka University Study held at the Foreign Service Academy.

He said Bangladesh had given shelter to around 1.1 million forcibly displaced Myanmar nationals, who fled their country amid persecution.

Ambassador of the Republic of Korea in Dhaka Lee Jang-keun, among others, also addressed the seminar organised by the Foreign Service Academy jointly with the Embassy of the Republic of Korea and Dhaka University.

The minister said that Myanmar is a neighbouring country, not an enemy of Bangladesh.

But they had a long history of persecuting these people in their Rakhine state, he added.

Lee Jang-keun said South Korea and Bangladesh had many success stories of collaboration, especially in the readymade garment sector.

The two countries would celebrate the golden jubilee of their diplomatic relations in December, he mentioned.

He said that Bangladesh was becoming an attractive partner for them amid increasing geopolitical challenges in the region and beyond.

I believe that the current geopolitical situation to some extent is creating more opportunities than challenges for Bangladesh and Korea for closer collaboration, the diplomat observed.

Momen said that Bangladesh would learn from Korea how to implement a project on time to avoid delays and cost adjustments.

We are looking forward to a comprehensive partnership with them, he added.

Dhaka University international relations professor Delwar Hossain moderated the business session of the seminar.

Not a single Rohingya returned to Myanmar through a formal channel since the signing of instruments between Bangladesh and Myanmar in late 2018 for repatriation of Rohingya after their latest influx in 2017.

Two attempts to start the repatriation of Rohingya people from Bangladesh to Myanmar failed as the Rohingyas refused to return home without a guarantee of their citizenship and security.
Visa, the world leader in digital payments, has selected digital payments start-up TallyKhata from Bangladesh for the 2022 cohort of its Visa Accelerator Programme in the Asia Pacific, said a press release.

Joining a select group of five elite start-ups from across the region, TallyKhata is a leading digital payments platform with wallet and credit capabilities for small and micro-businesses in Bangladesh.

It will support financial inclusion by developing new ways for small businesses to access credit lines and working capital.

Over the next six months, the start-ups will work closely with Visa on creating defined commercial opportunities they can bring to Visas extensive network of bank, merchant, government and venture partners.

Through the programme, TallyKhata aims to partner with leading banks in Bangladesh to issue a Visa virtual card for small business working capital to micro merchants.

The Visa virtual card serves as a line of credit (short-term working capital loan) to be used by the MSME for direct payment to a list of approved suppliers/ FMCG companies.

We are super excited about the opportunity to be part of the Visa Accelerator Programme 2022. We are developing innovative credit products for small businesses in collaboration with Visa and the local banks. Leveraging Visa rails and TallyKhata transaction data and credit scoring, we will enable quick and easy access of digital credit for the 11 million small businesses in Bangladesh, Shahadat Khan, founder and CEO, TallyKhata.

The dynamic business landscape of Bangladesh calls for exciting and innovative solutions like TallyKhata. We are excited to collaborate with them and extend Visas experience in the payments industry to help them design solutions that meet the needs of businesses in Bangladesh. Together, we aim to help scale the economy and accelerate the digitization of the value chain. said Soumya Basu, country manager - Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan, Visa.

Through the Accelerator Programme, Visa supports the start-up community by giving them a leg up in one of their key challenges, which is expanding their footprint beyond their home market and into the region. Globally, nearly 30 per cent more fintechs issued Visa credentials in the last year, and they nearly doubled their payments volume. By combining Visas capabilities and the reach of our global network with the ingenuity of the start-ups, together we can create new innovative experiences at scale and bring more individuals and businesses into the digital economy.

With the Covid-19 pandemic accelerating the worlds migration towards a digital-first future, the 2022 cohort will tackle some of the most pressing financial and technological issues that came to prominence in recent years.

The four other companies located across the Asia Pacific region that will join TallyKhata in the programme include:

Moneytree, a financial data aggregation platform based in Japan and Perfios, an India-based fintech that specialises in data aggregation and analytics, will leverage the growing open data environment in Asia Pacific to drive enhanced decision making in areas such as risk and credit

Cymonz, an international payments and currency exchange platform, with a vision to simplify and expand money movement for banks, money service businesses and fintechs.

TripleA, a Singaporean start-up that offers white-label crypto currency solutions, will work on new payment innovations involving the use of digital currencies and blockchain technology

Visa introduced the Accelerator Programme in Asia Pacific in December 2020. Designed for start-ups that have launched successful solutions in their home markets and are looking towards their next stage of growth, the programme is ideal for growth-stage fintechs that are Series A and above, have a long-term commitment to Asia Pacific growth and existing operations in the region.

The Accelerator Programme is part of Visas broader set of platforms and activities for the startup community in Asia Pacific.

For more information, visit https://www.visa.com.sg/apaccelerator
The United States and China took opposing stances at the UN Security Council Wednesday on how to reduce tensions with North Korea, with Washington arguing for more sanctions against Pyongyang while Beijing called for their easing.

The emergency meeting of the body charged with global peace and security came amid fears that North Korea will resume nuclear testing in the coming weeks.

It is time to stop providing tacit permission and start taking action, US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield said. We need to turn quickly to strengthening the... sanctions regime, not considering sanctions relief.

Thomas-Greenfield rejected a draft resolution from China and Russia, like the US both veto-wielding members of the council, which aims to ease sanctions imposed in 2017.

Instead, she said they were near the end of negotiations on a separate US text updating the sanctions.

We cannot wait until (North Korea) conducts additional provocative, illegal, dangerous acts like a nuclear test. We need to speak up now, she said.

Chinese ambassador to the UN Zhang Jun called the possibility of escalation worrying and called for restraint, adding that tightening sanctions in an atmosphere of mistrust was not constructive.

What China wants to avoid is a new nuclear test, he said after the meeting.

So thats why we do not want to have additional sanctions that might force one of the parties to take more proactive action.

Talking is better than coercive measures. We have seen so much coercive measures in the world, in Syria, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Have you seen any good results? What we have seen is only the humanitarian suffering.

Russias deputy ambassador Anna Yevstigneeva also advocated the resolution proposed with China and called for the resumption of dialogue.

Pyongyang has dramatically ramped up its sanctions-busting missile launches, conducting more than a dozen weapons tests since January including firing an intercontinental ballistic missile at full range for the first time since 2017.

Wednesdays Security Council meeting came one day after the swearing in of South Koreas hawkish new president Yoon Suk-yeol, who has vowed to get tough on Pyongyang.

Satellite imagery meanwhile indicates North Korea may also be preparing to resume nuclear testing, with the US State Department last week warning a test could come as early as this month.
The Bangladesh Bank on Thursday barred directors of any non-bank financial institution having at least one year or above of directorship from becoming its contractual or regular employee.

If any director of any NBFI was appointed as its contractual or regular employee, the individual will have to vacate his or her position by July 31, 2022.

Many individuals are working in different financial institutions as contractual and regular employees after being in the respective financial institutions board, bankers said.

The central bank issued the embargo on the day after the imposition of the same ban on bank directors a day before.

Thursdays BB circular on the NBFI directors said that the central bank issued the circular to ensure better governance and discipline in the NBFI management.

BB officials said that controlling shareholders or directors of banks and NBFIs usually tried to ensure their control in their respective entity as well as in their associated companies management in different forms and the central banks latest initiative was about to curb the scope.

Besides, the central bank also barred any member of any NBFIs executive committee, audit committee and risk management committee, comprising of its chairman or members of board of directors, from working as chairman or director or members of the NBFIs any other subsidiary company or any company or foundation-formed and operated with its finance.

If anyone is holding such position, the central bank asked the individual to resign from the post by June 30, 2022 and thereby inform the central bank in seven working days after the deadline.

As per Financial Institutions Act, 1993, directors of NBFIs are barred from becoming director of more than one NBFI or bank or insurance company simultaneously.

The Bank Company Act also bars any director of a bank from becoming director of any other bank or insurance company or non-bank financial institution simultaneously.
The BNP holds a rally in front of the National Press Club in Dhaka on Thursday in protest at the attacks on BNP leaders and activists across the country.  New Age photo

The main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party on Thursday said parties that would contest in the next parliamentary elections under the Awami League government would be treated as national traitors.

Those who will join the election under the current regime will be considered as national traitors, BNP standing committee member Mirza Abbas said at a rally in Dhaka.

BNPs Dhaka north and south city units organised the protest rally in front of the National Press Club protesting attacks on opposition leaders and activists by the ruling Awami League in different parts of the country.

Speaking at the rally, Abbas also said their party would come up with a befitting reply if BNP leaders and activists were attacked by the ruling party suporters.

He recalled that prime minister Sheikh Hasina as an opposition leader in 1986 said in Chattograms Laldighi Maidan that those who would participate in the election under the then military ruler Hussain Muhammad Ershad would be the national traitors.

But Sheikh Hasina herself joined that polls after her warning others, Abbas said.

Referring to media reports about some opposition parties planning to join the polls and sharing seats with the ruling party, Abbas said they would not allow holding any such election.

No election of seat-sharing will be held and no stage-managed election will be allowed in Bangladesh. Keep it in mind, he warned.

The BNP leader strongly condemned and protested the recent attacks on the house of their partys senior leader Khandaker Mosharraf Hossain and some other party leaders and Bangladesh Liberal Democratic Party leader Redwan Ahmed.

We would like to clearly say that if we are again subjected to any kind of attack or repression, we will put resistance together. No one will be spared, Abbas said, adding that the ruling party leaders and activists were beaten by people as they attacked Mosharrafs house and Redwans vehicle in Cumilla.

Stating that holding rallies, meetings, and processions are the fundamental rights of political parties, Abbas said their party had long been deprived of that right in the name of a permission.
Taliban authorities have banned men and women from dining out together and visiting parks at the same time in the western Afghan city of Herat, an official said on Thursday.

The Taliban shutdown of girls education shows the hardline Islamists are not listening to the Afghan people and poses a major hurdle to international recognition of the new regime, a top European Union official said on Thursday.

In March, Taliban authorities ordered all secondary girls schools to shut, just hours after reopening them for the first time since seizing power in August last year.

The decision, which came from the countrys supreme leader and the movements chief Hibatullah Akhundzada, has triggered widespread outrage in the international community.

Western nations have made aid pledges to tackle Afghanistans spiralling humanitarian crisis conditional on the Talibans respect for human rights, particularly the rights of women to work and education.

But the EUs special envoy to Afghanistan Tomas Niklasson said the Taliban veto on girls schools has put some doubts in our heads regarding how reliable their promises are, how reliable they may be as a partner.

It seems to be a government that isnt really listening to its people, he said, adding that what women really wanted is the right to work, education, access to health facilities and not instructions on how to dress.

The Taliban had repeatedly assured that they would reopen secondary schools for girls, but on March 23 they ordered them shut after tens of thousands of teenage girls flocked to attend classes.

Afghanistan is a deeply conservative and patriarchal nation but it is common to see men and women eating together at restaurants  particularly in Herat, a city long-considered liberal by Afghan standards.

Since their return to power in August the Taliban have increasingly imposed restrictions segregating men and women in line with their austere vision of Islam.

Riazullah Seerat, a Taliban official at the ministry for promotion of virtue and prevention of vice in Herat, said authorities have instructed that men and women be segregated in restaurants.

He said that owners had been verbally warned that the rule applies even if they are husband and wife.

One Afghan woman who did not wish to be identified said the manager told her and her husband to sit separately at a Herat restaurant on Wednesday.

Seerat also said his office has issued a decree that Herats public parks should be segregated by gender, with men and women permitted to visit only on different days.

We have told women to visit parks on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, he said. The other days are kept for men who can visit for leisure and for exercise.

Women wanting to exercise on those days should find a safe place or do it in their homes, he added.

The Taliban previously promised a softer rule than their first stint in power from 1996 to 2001, which was marked by human rights abuses.

But they have increasingly restricted the rights of Afghans, particularly girls and women, who have been prevented from returning to secondary schools and many government jobs.

In Herat authorities have ordered driving instructors to stop issuing licences to female motorists.

Women across the country have been banned from travelling alone, and last week the authorities ordered them to cover fully in public, ideally with a burqa.
The policy gives politicians strict rules on where to file political and election-related cases, among other provisions, ahead of the 2023 general elections.

The National Judicial Council (NJC) has issued a new policy direction on the handling of political and election-related cases as such suits begin to flood Nigerian courts ahead of the 2023 general elections.

The new policy, issued at the NJC's meeting held on Wednesday, gives strict rules to politicians on where they should file their political and election-related cases.

Announced by NJC's information director, Soji Oye, in a statement after Wednesday's meeting, the new policy also contains rules on how heads of courts and judges must handle such suits that have been ruled upon by a court of coordinate jurisdiction.

The statement said the NJC issued the new policy at the meeting presided over by the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Tanko Muhammad, who doubles as the chair of the council, to prevent another wave of conflicting decisions from courts of coordinate jurisdiction.

In December last year, the NJC had to sanction three High Court judges after issuing conflicting court decisions on political cases with the same subject matter.

The council also warned various heads of courts to put a stop to such embarrassing conduct of their judges in their various jurisdictions.

Cases the policy applies to

The new policy, which according to the NJC, takes immediate effect, applies to suits in which the parties include the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), any political party or its officers, or any other person, natural or legal.

In addition, the policy is applicable when such parties are "suing or sued for a declaration in relation to any action taken or to compel or restrain any action or omission with respect to the affairs of a political party or any election into a public office."

Highlights

One of its major highlights is a directive that such suits whose outcome will likely have "an effect or compel persons or actions beyond the territorial jurisdiction of any one state" must be filed at the High Court of the Federal Territory (FCT), Abuja.

Where such suits are within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Federal High Court, the policy says, "they shall be filed or received at Abuja and assigned by the Chief Judge of the Court".

These provisions of the policy reveal a conscious effort by the NJC to ensure that most such suits are filed in Abuja - either the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) or the Federal High Court - for better coordination.

But it states further, "All such suits wherein the cause of action arose in a State and the relief seeks a declaration or to compel or restrain person (s), natural or legal, within that State's territory, with no consequence outside the State, shall be filed, received, or heard only in that State."

It also directs the heads of courts to "assign cases or constitute panels with a view to forestalling the incidences of conflicting judgements and rulings."

It prohibits courts or panels of coordinate jurisdiction from entertaining or being assigned suits of the same subject matter once the facts or issues have been ruled upon.

In such a situation, the policy says parties who are dissatisfied with the first furling "shall comply or proceed on appeal to the appropriate higher court".

Appointment

Mr Oye also said the NJC has recommended 49 successful candidates for appointment as heads of courts and other judicial officers.

He added that the council also received six notifications of retirement and one notification of death from the federal and state High Courts.

Read NJC's full statement below:

PRESS RELEASE: 11TH MAY, 2022 - NJC ISSUES POLICY DIRECTIONS ON POLITICAL AND ELECTION RELATED CASES TO HEAD OF COURTS NATION-WIDE. TO TAKE IMMEDIATE EFFECT, ALSO RECOMMENDS APPOINTMENT OF FORTY-NINE (49) JUDICIAL OFFICERS.

Concerned by the multiplicity of litigations of political suits at different Courts of coordinate jurisdiction across the nation, resulting in conflicting orders on the same issues and facts, the National Judicial Council at its 98th Meeting of 10 and 11 May, 2022 under the Chairmanship of The Chief Justice of Nigeria, Honourable Dr. Justice I. T. Muhammad, CFR, issued Policy Directions in order to remedy the situation.

The Directions to all Federal and State Courts reads as follows:

"Pursuant to the powers vested in the National Judicial Council by the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Schedule III, Part I, 21 (i).

These Policy Directions shall apply to all Suits filed in any Court in Nigeria wherein the Parties include Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), any political party or its officers, any other person, natural or legal, suing or sued for a declaration in relation to any action taken or to compel or restrain any action or omission with respect to the affairs of a political party or any election into a public office.

1. OBJECTIVES AND GUIDING PRINCIPLES

These Directions seek to:

a. Prevent the multiplicity of litigations at different Courts of coordinate jurisdiction across the nation, resulting in conflicting orders on the same issues and facts;

b. Recognise that Courts need to embrace prudential limitations on their powers with a view to curtailing the incidences of unscrupulous forum shopping disrupting the administration of justice and the democratic process; and

c. Acknowledge that the circumstances necessitate further administrative measures and procedures to complement and support the judicial process.

2. DIRECTIONS:

Without prejudice to the powers of Election Petitions Tribunals constituted pursuant to the provisions of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

Pending the Constitution of a Cross Jurisdiction Litigation Panel (CJLP) to give directions on appropriate litigation for a for cross jurisdiction litigations:

a. All suits to which these Policy Directions apply shall be filed, received, or entertained only at the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory in so far as the relief sought, or potential consequential order (s) or declaration (s) may restrain or compel persons or actions beyond the territorial jurisdiction of any one State;

b. Where such suits are within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Federal High Court, they shall be filed or received at Abuja and assigned by the Chief Judge of the Court;

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c. All such Suits wherein the cause of action arose in a State and the relief seeks a declaration or to compel or restrain person (s), natural or legal, within that State's territory, with no consequence outside the State, shall be filed, received, or heard only in that State;

d. All Heads of Court shall assign cases or constitute panels with a view to forestalling the incidences of conflicting judgements and rulings;

e. Once facts or issues have been ruled upon, no other Court or Panel of Coordinate Jurisdiction shall be assigned or entertain Suits on the same subject matter and parties shall comply or proceed on appeal to the appropriate higher Court;

f. Rules of Court shall require sufficient notice and publicity of actions that potentially impact other cases;

g. Rules of Court shall stipulate solemn disclosure duties on litigants filing actions that may impact other actions.

Heads of Court shall exercise their rule making and administrative powers to give effect to these Policy Directions.

These directions shall take effect from the 11 May 2022".

APPOINTMENT OF JUDICIAL OFFICERS

Council also considered the list of candidates presented by its Interview Committee and recommended forty-nine (49) successful candidates for appointment as Heads of Courts and other Judicial Officers in Nigeria.

Council also received Six (6) notifications of retirements and One (1) notification of death from the Federal and State High Courts.

Soji Oye, Esq

Director, Information
A Lalmonirhat senior judicial magistrate court has remanded in judicial custody 38 people, accused of lynching a man for allegedly desecrating the Quran last year.

Lalmonirhat senior judicial magistrate court-3 judge Joynal Abedin sent the accused to judicial custody, turning down their bail pleas, when they surrendered before the court on Wednesday.

Lalmonirhat court inspector Md Musa said that the 38 people, accused of lynching the man, attacking cops and vandalising the Burimari union parishad building in Patgram upazila.

On October 29 last year, a mob lynched Sahidunnabi Jewel, 50, a former librarian of Rangpur Cantonment Public School and College, and burnt his body in the upazila accusing him of disrespecting the Quran.

Police have so far arrested 50 people in connection with the crime. Besides, 12 more accused have voluntarily surrendered before the court. Some of the accused are also out on bail.

Jewel came to Burimari in the afternoon on October 29 last year with Sultan Zubair Abdar. After offering Asr prayer at the central mosque, he went to get a Quran from a shelf, said Sumonta Kumar Mohonto, officer-in-charge of the Patgram police station.

As he was trying to take one out, a number of Quranic and Hadith books fell at his feet, leading to an argument between him and the Muezzin. Locals took Jewel and Sultan to the union parishad office adjacent to the mosque as the argument escalated.

A rumour was spread in the market and nearby village that the two men were arrested for disrespecting the Quran by the time, according to police and locals.

At one stage, a group of people swooped on the union parishad office. They broke open the door and beat Jewel to death on the spot.

The mob did not stop there. It dragged the body to the Patgram-Burimari Highway and set it afire. The people also demonstrated in the area.

Later, police, Border Guard Bangladesh and firefighters rushed to the spot but failed to control the situation.

Police also fired 17 shots in the air to disperse the mob. Ten policemen, including the OC, were injured as the mob kept hurling brick chips.
The governor said appointees willing to contest for political offices have up to Monday to resign.

The Governor of Jigawa State, Muhammad Badaru, on Wednesday, directed all political appointees aspiring for political offices in the forthcoming 2023 general elections to resign on or before Monday, May 16, 2022.

In a statement signed by the Secretary to the State Government, Adamu Fanini, the governor said the decision is in compliance with the provision of section 84 (12) of the Electoral Act 2022, signed by President Muhammadu Buhari.

The section, which the Court of Appeal earlier on Wednesday ruled as unconstitutional, provides that political appointees aspiring to contest elections shall resign their positions before the conduct of political party primaries.

The statement asked the affected officials to tender their resignation letters to the office of the Secretary to the Government of Jigawa State.

The directive from Jigawa governor followed that of President Muhammadu Buhari who on Wednesday directed all ministers seeking elective public offices to resign before May 16.
Champaign, IL (61820)

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A few clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 61F. ENE winds shifting to SW at 10 to 15 mph..

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A few clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 61F. ENE winds shifting to SW at 10 to 15 mph.
The new development is coming less than 72 hours after the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) announced the extension of its ongoing strike by another three months.

The Nigerian polytechnic lecturers under the umbrella of the Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics (ASUP) have declared a two-week warning strike with effect from Monday, May 16.

This position was contained in a statement signed by the union's president, Anderson Ezeibe, and dated May 11, 2022.

The statement noted that the decision was taken at its 102nd emergency national executive council meeting held in Abuja on Wednesday.

The union said the decision became imperative following the failure of the government to implement the Memorandum of Action (MoA) signed in June, 2021, which informed the suspension of its two-month strike at the time.

ASUP said it also gave a one-month ultimatum in April to address its needs but said the government ignored its threat, and went on with political activities as if everything was normal.

The new development is coming less than 72 hours after the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) announced the extension of its ongoing strike by another three months.

Other labour unions in the universities- Non-Academic Staff Union of Educational and Associated Institutions (NASU), Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU), and the National Association of Academic Technologists (NAAT) are also currently on strike.

ASUP's demands

The union in its statement, which was titled; "Status Update of the ASUP/Federal Government of Nigeria Engagement and Resolutions of the Emergency National Executive Council (NEC) Meeting of ASUP held on the 11th of May, 2022," listed nine issues at the centre of its disagreement with the government.

ASUP said these issues include the alleged failure to release the approved revitalisation fund of N15 billion for the sector 11 months after it was approved by President Muhammadu Buahri; failure to release arrears of its members' new minimum wage.

The union said the unpaid arrears already accumulated to 10 months, and that the approximately N19 billion "composite amount" reportedly sits with the office of the accountant-general of the federation with an "Authority to Incur Expenditure (AIE)" not issued, among seven other issues.

The copy of the statement by the union is reproduced below:

ACADEMIC STAFF UNION OF POLYTECHNICS (ASUP)

11th May, 2022

STATUS UPDATE OF THE ASUP/ FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OF NIGERIA ENGAGEMENT; AND RESOLUTIONS OF THE EMERGENCY NATIONAL EXECUTIVE COUNCIL (NEC) MEETING OF ASUP HELD ON THE 11th OF MAY, 2022

Esteemed members of the press,

Our Union suspended its industrial action declared on the 6th of April 2021 on the 10th of June, 2021 following the signing of a Memorandum of Action (MoA) with the government. The signed MoA contained a clear path to sustainable resolution of the issues in dispute with timelines attached to each of the items in dispute.

The suspension of the industrial action was for a period of 3 months and to enable the government conclude processes already initiated in the direction of fulfilment of the items in the MoA which are process led.

Nine months after the suspension of the industrial action and six months after the expiration of the three-month period of suspension, our Union's NEC met in its 102nd meeting in Federal Polytechnic Mubi and after reviewing the report of the implementation of the MoA, resolved to issue a 1 month ultimatum to the government effective 4th April, 2022 to address the outstanding items in the MoA and other emergent issues or face the reality of another trade dispute with our Union.

Our Union's ultimatum expired on the 4th of May, 2022 and as is the norm, the Union's NEC reconvened today, 11th of May, 2022 to review the response of the government to the ultimatum, particularly as it affects relevant agencies/functionaries of government.

Within the period of the ultimatum, the Union met with the National Board for Technical Education to review the grievances with a view to resolution. Another meeting fixed at the instance of the Honorable Minister of Education (after the expiration of the ultimatum) failed to meet basic requirements for collective bargaining. Our Union stayed away from the meeting as it was not structured to address the issues in dispute. The Federal Ministry of Labour and Employment only acknowledged receipt of the union's ultimatum and made no attempts at conciliation.

Spirited efforts were also made by the Chairman of Chairmen of Governing Councils of Polytechnics in Nigeria and some members of the National Assembly in the direction of a resolution.

The status of the items in dispute as at today is captured below:

1. Non release of the approved revitalization fund for the sector: Approved N15bn yet to be released 11 months after approval by the President.

2. Non release of arrears of the new minimum wage: The owed 10 months arrears for the Polytechnics is yet to be released. The composite amount covering all Federal Tertiary Institutions to the approximate figure of N19Bn currently exists as an AIE in the Accountant General's Office.

3. Non release of the reviewed normative instruments for institution/management and programs accreditation: The document is currently awaiting approval of the Management of NBTE. This document is expected to provide a framework to address non payment of salaries in state owned institutions, non compliance with approved retirement age, non deployment of approved salary structures, poor governance structure as well as other issues affecting standards particularly in state owned Polytechnics. As a consequence, our members in Abia, Ogun, Edo, Benue, Bayelsa, Bauchi, Plateau and Osun states are owed salaries while they also continue to suffer from different levels of deprivation including non release of promotions and non deployment of appropriate retirement age. Such deprivations are also evident in Adamawa, Niger, Sokoto and Delta States where the government has resolved to disrupt the hitherto timely payment of salaries with a subvention styled funding regime.

4. Sustained infractions in implementation of the provisions of the Federal Polytechnics Act as amended in 2019: This issue is currently typified by the arbitrary removal of deputy rectors in Auchi Polytechnic, and existence of multiple templates for appointment of principal officers with provisions at variance with the provisions of the Act.

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5. Delay in the appointment of rectors: The appointment process in Kaduna Polytechnic, Federal Polytechnic Mubi, Federal Polytechnic Offa, and Federal Polytechnic Ekowe continues to linger.

6. Non Release of Arrears of CONTISS 15 Migration for the Lower Cadre: This issue remains at the committee level and even in chapters like NILEST, Zaria implementation is yet to commence.

7. Non release of the scheme of service for Polytechnics: Since 2017, the sector has been struggling with a review process for the scheme of service and conditions of service in use in the sector.

8. Continued Victimisation of Union Officers: Our officials in IMT Enugu and Rufus Giwa Polytechnic Owo still remain out of job.

9. Continued Arm twisting of Members in Colleges of Agriculture By the ARCN: This has continued as our members in these institutions continue to experience intimidation.

Following exhaustive deliberations, on the update as outlined above, the emergency meeting of the Union's National Executive Council has resolved that members should withdraw their services in a 2 weeks industrial action with effect from Monday, 16th of May 2022.

We are deploying this medium to equally appeal to members of the public to prevail on the government to do the needful within the 2 weeks period so as to avoid an indefinite shut down of the sector.

Thank you.

Anderson U. Ezeibe

(President)
Champaign, IL (61820)

Today

Partly cloudy early followed by scattered thunderstorms this afternoon. A few storms may be severe. High 86F. Winds NNW at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 60%..

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Thunderstorms during the evening will give way to mainly clear skies after midnight. Low 53F. Winds NNW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 70%.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa (in black face mask) and other leaders visit Aspen Pharmacare manufacturing facility in Gqeberha on March 29, 2021.

A year ago, South Africa celebrated the opening of the continent's first COVID-19 vaccine production line. Now it's at risk of being shut down due to low demand.

Trisha shakes her head when asked if she's vaccinated. The Cape Town student heard stories that people died afterwards. "So I was scared. I don't want to risk my life." Only half of her family members are vaccinated, the 19-year-old says. That's slightly more than the national average.

About 40% of adult South Africans are fully vaccinated. On the whole continent, just 15%. The World Health Organization has set a target of 70% coverage for all countries by June 2022. So far, only Mauritius and Seychelles reached that number in Africa. Most countries will likely miss it.

From 'historic agreement' to historic failure?

"We have to fight complacency," says Stavros Nicolaou, a Senior Executive at Aspen Pharmacare Group. About one year ago the company started manufacturing COVID-19 vaccines in the city of Gqeberha.

The production line received a 600 million ($634 million) long-term financing package from development agencies, also from Germany. South Africa's president Cyril Ramaphosa called it a "historic agreement." Aspen said it could manufacture more than 200 million doses per year for Johnson & Johnson. That number was never reached.

Later, Aspen went into a licensing arrangement with Johnson & Johnson and acquired rights to manufacture their own vaccine Aspenovax.

So far they haven't received a single order -- and are now at risk to shut down the production lines. "Everybody has supported building local capacities on the continent," Nicolaou told DW. "But that policy decision has not been practically expressed in orders."

Aspen has counted on orders by multinational procurement agencies - but never received any. About 60% of COVID-19 vaccines used in Africa went through the UN-backed COVAX (COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access) facility. In the past, several industrialized countries donated their surplus doses to COVAX and poorer nations. Often with approaching expiry dates.

'A massive setback for Africa's plans'

In the absence of orders or commitments, Aspen is considering the repurposing of two COVID-19 production lines for the manufacture of other products. "The continent would lose its only existing COVID vaccine manufacturing capacity," Nicolaou says. "It would be a massive setback for Africa's plans to localize and reduce its dependency on imported vaccines."

About one percent of vaccines used in Africa are currently manufactured on the continent. At the beginning of the pandemic, several African leaders said they want 60% of all vaccines produced locally by 2040. Africa's major public health body, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), urged all buyers of COVID-19 vaccines for the continent to place orders with Aspen.

Wolfgang Preiser, a virologist at Stellenbosch University, says the risk of production closure is alarming news. He is worried that in future pandemics, pharmaceutical companies might be more reluctant to ramp up investments under pressure. However, he says it is not unexpected: As global production capacity was stepped up globally, it was clear that at some stage vaccine supply would exceed demand.

Repurposed for other types of vaccines

While Aspen runs the only commercial COVID-19 vaccine production plant on the continent, at least six African countries are currently setting mRNA vaccine production capacity. Preiser believes they could be repurposed to produce other types of vaccines. "This field has really accelerated enormously during the pandemic. Many people expect that in the future we will have mRNA vaccines against a number of other diseases, possibly also cancer."

The reputation of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine could be another reason for the lacking orders, Preiser says. "It had a bit of a rough start," according to the virologist. Last week regulators in the United States announced strict limits on who can receive the Johnson & Johnson vaccine amid ongoing concerns about a rare but serious side effect that could cause life-threatening blood clots in patients who receive the shot.

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Despite previous challenges, Africa CDC has been recommending the Johnson & Johnson vaccine on the continent. Unlike mRNA vaccines it is easier to store and distribute, especially in rural areas.

Preiser emphasizes that all approved vaccines are safe and effective. Numbers of new COVID-19 infections in South Africa are currently increasing, driven by omicron sub-lineages BA.4 and BA.5.

Preiser says he is sometimes tired of arguing with those refusing the vaccine. "It reminds me of 25 years ago, when we had similar scenarios for HIV."

"But we need to improve our way to communicate with the public to convince people to get vaccinated," the virologist says. The excess death rate during the COVID-19 pandemic suggests 300,000 related deaths in South Africa.

Edited by: Benita van Eyssen
Many doctors caution their pregnant patients to avoid cat feces; even the family pet's litter box is off-limits. Now, a group of researchers from Clemson University have discovered a promising therapy for those who suffer from toxoplasmosis, a disease caused by the microscopic protozoa Toxoplasma gondii.

T. gondii is the reason pregnant women are warned not to come in contact with cat feces. The Clemson team has enlisted an unlikely ally -; the herbicide oxadiazon -; in the fight against the single-celled parasite. The team hit on oxadiazon because of the herbicide's ability to short-circuit the production of an enzyme that T. gondii needs to thrive.

Associate Professors Daniel Whitehead and Zhicheng Dou and former graduate student Kerrick Rees conducted the study. The journal ACS Infectious Disease, an American Chemical Society publication, published their findings in a paper titled, "Oxadiazon Derivatives Elicit Potent Intracellular Growth Inhibition against Toxoplasma gondii by Disrupting Heme Biosynthesis."

T. gondii infects nearly all warm-blooded animals, including about one-third of all humans, making it one of the most widespread parasitic organisms known to humans, the researchers said. Humans can contract T. gondii in a number of ways, including eating certain undercooked, contaminated meats, especially pork, lamb and venison; contact with cat feces; and in the womb, if the mother is infected.

"Infections during pregnancy can be quite dangerous for women and their unborn babies, particularly in the first trimester," said Whitehead, an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry.

When transmitted during pregnancy, the disease can cause birth defects and even fetal death. Toxoplasma infections can cause severe, even fatal complications in immunocompromised patients, such as people living with HIV and those undergoing chemotherapy.

While T. gondii is generally asymptomatic in infected people whose immune systems are not compromised, the parasites can penetrate the host's blood-brain barrier to hibernate within the brain and transition to chronic infections, which can occasionally be reactivated to acute infections when the host's immunity is compromised.

Current therapies for toxoplasmosis have critical shortcomings.

At this moment, the treatment for toxoplasmosis in patients is very limited. For example, there is a pyrimethamine and sulfadiazine combination treatment, but this treatment is not tolerated very well for certain populations of people because of the very strong side effects." Zhicheng Dou, associate professor, Department of Biological Sciences

In addition, Dou said, there is no current treatment available for T. gondii once it has migrated to the brain.

"We observed a very urgent need for developing new and novel therapy against toxoplasma infections," he said.

The Clemson team focused on the enzyme protoporphyrinogen oxidase (PPO), which is present in plants, animals and T. gondii. In animals and T. gondii, this enzyme is used to produce heme. In plants, PPO is essential to the production of chlorophyll in addition to heme. Critically, in T. gondii, PPO has the useful attribute of being more closely related to plants than humans, Dou said, which suggested it was possible to develop PPO-targeting herbicides that specifically kill T. gondii without causing damage to human tissue. Oxadiazon is a known inhibitor of the production of heme in plants. That made oxadiazon an appealing therapeutic strategy, the researchers stated.

The benefit of using oxadiazon to treat toxoplasmosis is that it does not harm infected human tissue in lab experiments. Oxadiazon was not particularly effective against T. gondii, however, so Rees was tasked with creating a library of 20 oxadiazon derivatives for experimentation.

"I had been working quite a bit with a certain type of reaction, known as a click reaction, which is really amenable to adding different molecular complexities very efficiently and simply to these molecules," Rees said.

The click reaction made it easier to change the physical makeup of the molecules by adding or removing parts of the molecules' structures, Rees added.

According to Dou, one of the synthesized derivatives actually exceeded the efficacy of the parent oxadiazon molecule "100-fold," which he described as an "exciting" result.

The team used an interdisciplinary approach in its research, Whitehead said.

"My lab is a synthetic organic chemistry lab, so our expertise is building complicated molecules. That was really Kerrick's expertise that he brought to the project, so he was able to take the known herbicide and synthesize a large number of derivatives in the laboratory," he said. "That's sort of complementary expertise to the parasite biology and molecular biology in Zhicheng's laboratory."

Rees is now a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University.

Dou said that next steps include synthesizing more oxadiazon derivatives to find the most effective derivatives for treatment in humans.

The team's research was funded through an National Institutes of Health grant. Dou and Whitehead plan to apply for additional grants to continue the research.
The world over, coffee is one of the most popular and highly consumed beverages. As a result of coffee's high consumption worldwide, even a minor health issue caused by coffee intake could have a major impact on global public health. Due to this, it is imperative to research all aspects of coffee so as to avoid any negative consequences.

Study: Association between espresso coffee and serum total cholesterol: the Troms Study 20152016. Image Credit: rawf8 / Shutterstock

Coffee: How Safe is It?

Previous studies have established a positive correlation between coffee consumption and increased serum total cholesterol (S-TC). These studies revealed that traditional boiled coffee significantly increases S-TC. However, interestingly, filter coffee did not show such a result. Later, scientists reported that two of the constituents of coffee beans, namely, kahweol and cafestol, elevate S-TC. One of the important factors that control the diterpene content of the coffee is its brewing method. Several studies have indicated that unfiltered brewing could enhance the diterpene contents of the finished coffee.

Even though boiled coffee elevates serum low-density lipoprotein (S-LDL) and S-TC, several epidemiological studies have revealed J-shaped and U-shaped relationships between a regular coffee consumer and cardiovascular disease (CVD) incidence. Previous studies have shown that individuals with moderate coffee consumption, i.e., 1-5 cups of coffee daily, are at low risk of developing CVD.

Scientists observed a lower mortality rate linked to those who consume filtered coffee compared to those who drink unfiltered or no coffee. Espresso coffee is a type of non-filtered coffee that contains LDL cholesterol. Previous studies have shown that consumption of nine or more cups of espresso coffee enhances diterpenes cafestol and kahweol substantially and increases the risk of CVD mortality by 25%.

A New Study

Recently, scientists developed a comprehensive guide containing all relevant information about the relationship between espresso coffee consumption and serum cholesterol. In this study, the main objective was to determine if there was an association between espresso coffee consumption and S-TC in both sexes. This study has been published in the journal Open Heart.

Coffee consumption in Norway is regarded as the second-highest in the world. The Tromso Study is one of the most comprehensive population studies that has been conducted for the last forty-eight years in Norway. This study has been repeated every 6th-7th year between the timeline 19742016.

The current study used data from the 7th survey of the Tromso Study, which was conducted between 20152016. This study included 11,074 women and 10,009 men, who were above forty years of age.

Coffee Types

The current study confirms the association between espresso coffee consumption and enhanced S-TC levels. Researchers observed that this association was considerably higher in males compared to females. Scientists analyzed S-TC levels against only espresso intake as well as combinational intake, i.e., espresso with other coffee brews. They found that combinational coffee intake causes a greater increase in S-TC levels. However, this study presented strong evidence that espresso by itself can raise S-TC levels.

Researchers reported that different types of espresso, made with mocha pots, coffee machines, and capsules, contain different concentrations of cafestol. This is because of the differential concentration of diterpene in different types of espresso. In comparison with boiled and filtered coffee, espresso coffee contributed the least to the consumption of kahweol and cafestol.

Unsurprisingly, the size of coffee cups also plays an important role in S-TC levels. As standardization of coffee cups was not conducted in the Tromso study, researchers assumed a typical large-sized cup that is popularly used in Norway for consumption of espresso as well. According to research, one cup of Norwegian espresso is the equivalent of four cups of Italian espresso. Consequently, Norwegians consume a greater amount of diterpene in their coffee.

Coffee harvesting: Image Credit: em faies / Shutterstock

Previous studies have also shown high variability in the levels of cafestol and kahweol in commercially available roasted and ground coffee. These coffees are predominantly blended with two species of coffee, namely, Coffea canephora and Coffea arabica. An inverse association between the degree of roasting and cafestol level in coffees that are prepared without a paper filter has been reported. Interestingly, scientists revealed that the pore size of the filter paper also determines the diterpene contents of coffee.

After adjusting the potential confounders, researchers reported that both S-TC and S-LDL cholesterol were higher in males compared to females. In order to explain why men's cholesterol metabolism reacts to diterpene intake more strongly than women's, more research is needed.

Key Strengths and Limitations

The inclusion of all participants who were over forty years of age was a key strength of the study. Researchers were able to adjust all-important confounding factors by using a variety of health variables. Additionally, the study examined the diverse coffee habits of Tromso residents.

A limitation of the study is that it relied on self-reported data, which could lead to bias. In addition, in spite of their best efforts, the authors failed to take into account some confounding factors, such as adding milk or sugar to the coffee.
Increased funding for nursing in care homes will support tens of thousands of care home residents with nursing needs, including those with learning and physical disabilities, with an 11.5% increase in 2022-23 and an estimated 87 million backdated for 2021-22.

The standard weekly rate per person, provided for NHS-funded nursing care, has increased by 11.5% from 187.60 to 209.19 for 2022-23 and will be backdated to 1 April.

In recognition of the additional time and work provided by nurses in care homes during the pandemic, a retrospective uplift on the 2021-22 rate has also been applied providing an estimated additional 87 million to the sector.

The funding is paid by the NHS directly to care homes who employ registered nurses. This allows care home residents with specific healthcare needs to benefit from direct nursing care and services.

Registered nurses provide support to people with a variety of needs, including people with learning disabilities, those living with enduring physical or mental health needs and various conditions associated with old age. This type of nursing requires a range of skills and training, with the extra funding supporting this important role.

The additional funds will help cover the costs of nursing care and support the staff that provide it ensuring the vital service can continue to support the needs of residents and all those who rely on it.

Providing nursing care within care homes also helps reduce the pressure on hospitals where the government's record funding can be used to help clear the Covid backlog.

Minister for Care Gillian Keegan said:

Our brilliant adult social care nurses work tirelessly to support people living with a variety of health needs. Increasing the weekly rate and the retrospective uplift reflects the cost of this vital work which is carried by our valued and skilled workforce to help those who need it. It is right we continue to review the cost of this care to ensure nurses can continue providing excellent care and support the needs of their residents.'

The rates are based on new research conducted by the Department of Health and Social Care in 2021 through a cost collection survey which was sent to nursing home providers.

Chief Nurse for Adult Social Care Deborah Sturdy said:

Nurses across social care play an essential role in delivering high-quality, complex care to those who require the skills and expertise of registered nurses. This funding is vital to supporting their role in planning and providing care."

The retrospective Covid uplift provides additional payments of 21.93 per resident per week for 2021-22.

Before 2007, there were three rates for NHS-funded nursing care based on need. After 2007, a single rate was introduced with the higher rate remaining for those who were already on this rate before 2007.

For those on the higher band the retrospective increase for 2021-22 will mean an extra 30.17 per resident per week. The higher band rate for 2022-23, with the increase, will be 287.78 per week.

This is another example of a period of unprecedented investment and improvements across adult social care. The 5.4 billion from the Health and Social Care Levy over the next three years includes 1.4 billion to ensure local authorities pay a fairer rate for care and 500 million to develop the wider care workforce.

From October 2023 people who draw on care and support will no longer face unpredictable care costs thanks to the government's charging reform with five trailblazing local authorities turning charging reform on early so we can learn lessons and ensure a smooth national transition to the new system.

Together with the white papers on reform and integration the government is fulfilling its promise to do what is necessary to develop world leading care.
The MRC/UVRI and LSHTM Uganda Research Unit has unveiled a new state-of-the-art clinical research facility in Entebbe to further boost its contributions to science, policy and practice in Uganda.

The facility commissioning ceremony was presided over by the Hon. Dr. Jane Ruth Aceng, the Minister of Health, and attended by Her Excellency Kate Airey OBE, the British High Commissioner to Uganda, and Professor Liam Smeeth, the Director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

Funded by Wellcome and the UKRI United Kingdom Research and Innovation/Medical Research Council, the solar-powered facility will be used to conduct clinical research in infectious and non-communicable diseases.

It will also support the sharing of expertise and experiences among researchers in Africa and facilitate the development of best practices in the management and conduct of clinical trials.

The MRC/UVRI and LSHTM Uganda Research Unit has over 30 years' experience in conducting clinical research and trials that involve interactions with patients, research participants and surrounding communities to further understanding of a range of different areas, including disease mechanisms and natural history, translational research, diagnosis, prevention and therapeutic intervention trials and health services research.

Professor Pontiano Kaleebu, Director of the Uganda Virus Research Institute and Director of the MRC/UVRI and LSHTM Uganda Research Unit, said: "We are very excited about this new facility which will provide opportunities to strengthen and expand our clinical research and training in order to contribute to improving the health of our people."

The Unit has strong clinical research expertise and infrastructure across its research sites and programmes. This includes experienced and clinical research staff in Good Participatory Practice Guidelines, Human Subjects Protection, Good Clinical Research Practice, Good Clinical and Laboratory Practice, and Advanced Life Support certification.

The new research clinics will house equipment to evaluate research participants, pharmacies to manage clinical trial investigational medicinal products, and clinical and diagnostic laboratory facilities. There will be continued engagement with the communities through Participant Advisory Groups and Community Advisory Boards to ensure strong linkages between the research teams, local communities, and other stakeholders.

Professor Liam Smeeth, Director of LSHTM, said: "This is an outstanding facility which cements the Unit's position as one of the leading research institutes in Africa. Combined with the Unit's talented and dedicated staff, the new facility will be the catalyst for more vital research that will improve the lives of Ugandans and health of the continent."

This new facility is another sign of the commitment of the Government of the United Kingdom to partner with the Government of Uganda and scientists to find solutions through research that will lead to better health." Her Excellency Kate Airey OBE, the British High Commissioner to Uganda

Hon. Dr. Jane Ruth Aceng, the Minister of Health, said: "On behalf of the Ministry of Health, I wish to thank the Wellcome Trust and the UK MRC for funding this facility. This contribution builds on the long term support and partnership with the UK Government and the outstanding research the MRC Unit and UVRI have generated over the years. We pledge to play our part, together building a healthier nation."
Evident, a new wholly owned subsidiary of Olympus comprised of its former Life Science and Industrial divisions, unveiled the winners of its third Global Image of the Year Life Science Light Microscopy Award, an annual competition that recognizes the best in life science imaging. The winners were selected from nearly 800 images submitted from 49 countries around the world. The Global Winner | Jan Martinek Global Winner Jan Martinek from the Czech Republic was selected as the global winner for a glowing image of an Arabidopsis thaliana flower with pollen tubes growing through the pistil. The flower tissues were chemically cleared to reveal the pollen tubes stained with aniline blue (yellow fluorescence). Martinek chose to image this flower to highlight the beauty of science in plant cell research. Plants are fascinating and beautiful on all levels of magnification, from the level of ecosystems to the level of individual cells, Martinek explained. As a plant cell biologist, I spend hours looking at plants under the microscope. I see a lot of beautiful images, like this flower of Arabidopsis thaliana with pollen tubes growing through the pistil to fertilize the ovules. However, I capture hundreds of pictures like this just to measure the lengths of the pollen tubes, and readers of my research articles will see only some boxplots comparing the pollination efficiency of different mutants. I share these pictures on my social media for fellow scientists and the general public to enjoy the beauty of science, which sometimes stays hidden behind the statistically significant results. I am happy that thanks to the IOTY Award, my and others' pictures of this fascinating microcosm get worldwide attention. Related Stories Olympus and Cytosurge collaborate to deliver a complete single-cell and CRISPR genetic manipulation solution in the Americas

Olympus scanR high-content screening station v. 3.2 brings improved image quality with award-winning X Line objectives

The art of science: Olympus launches second global image of the year award Martinek will receive the grand prize, an Olympus SZX7 stereo microscope with a DP28 digital camera. Regional Winners Three regional prizes were awarded to Vasilis Kokkoris (the Netherlands) for EMEA, Ivan Radin (USA) for the Americas and Daniel Han (Australia) for Asia. Each regional winner will receive an Olympus CX23 upright microscope. Honorable Mentions Honorable mentions include Di Lu (China), Yujun Chen (USA), Mingyue Jia (China), David Maitland (UK), Layra Cintron-Rivera (USA), Igor Siwanowicz (USA) and Yayun Wang (China). The contest launched on Oct. 19, 2021, with a call for users to submit their best life science microscopy images through Jan. 31, 2022. All entries were evaluated on artistic and visual aspects, scientific impact and microscope proficiency. From flowers to fungus and ferns, the Evident Life Science team was impressed by the fascinating specimens masterfully captured under the microscope. I continue to be amazed by the creative images we see each year that turn life under the microscope into unique art pieces, said Satoshi Nakamura, Vice President of Scientific Solutions Global Marketing at Evident. We are honored to receive so many stunning captures from around the world that visually blend artistic creativity and science. The winning images create a beautiful image gallery showcasing an incredible level of talent and technique at the microscope.
The Department of Medicine's Division of General Internal Medicine and Geriatrics have been officially separated into two divisions, the Division of Geriatrics and the Division of General Internal Medicine, effective March 1, 2022.

We have recognized the need to have distinct nationally recognized programs to provide the highest quality and most comprehensive patient-centered care. The Geriatrics program in Northwestern Medicine has a very strong national reputation, and has enjoyed that for many years. With the growth of the program in the critical domains of clinical activity, research and training, it is clear that Geriatrics deserves full Divisional status." Douglas Vaughan, MD, chair and the Irving S. Cutter Professor of Medicine and director of the Potocsnak Longevity Institute

Lee Lindquist, '00 MD, '05 MPH, MBA, '03 GME, the George M. Eisenberg Research Professor of Geriatric Medicine, will lead the Feinberg's new Division of Geriatric Medicine.

Lee Lindquist, '00 MD, '05 MPH, MBA, '03 GME, the George M. Eisenberg Research Professor of Geriatric Medicine and current section chief of Geriatric Medicine in the Department of Medicine, will lead as chief of the Division of Geriatrics.

Lindquist's patient-centered research focuses on helping older adults age-in-place when they develop Alzheimer's disease through home and community-based resources and supporting caregivers. She also provides clinical care for older adults in her geriatrics clinic is also the medical director of the Clare at Watertower in Chicago, a continuing care retirement community that encompasses independent living, assisted living, skilled nursing, memory care and long-term care.

"With the recent creation of both the NIH-funded Northwestern Pepper Center and the Potocsnak Longevity Institute, innovative geriatrics research and training has a solid home at Northwestern. I am extremely proud of our strong all-female faculty team of geriatricians, they are truly an amazing group of physicians," Lindquist said.

Jeffrey A. Linder,'97 MD, MPH, the Michael A. Gertz Professor of Medicine, who previously served as chief of General Internal Medicine and Geriatrics in the Department of Medicine, will continue his leadership as chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine.

Jeffrey A. Linder,'97 MD, MPH, the Michael A. Gertz Professor of Medicine, who has served as chief of General Internal Medicine and Geriatrics in the Department of Medicine, will continue his leadership as chief of the Division of General Internal Medicine.

A general internist and primary care clinician-investigator, Linder has expertise in electronic health records and clinical decision support, using behavioral science and social psychology to understand and change behavior, and appropriate care of ambulatory respiratory infections. Linder's overarching goal is to improve primary care in the U.S., especially for older adults. He also co-leads Northwestern's Claude D. Pepper Older Americans' Independence Center along with Lindquist and Michael Wolf, PhD, '02 MPH, the James R. Webster, Jr., Professor of Medicine and Associate Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Medicine.

"Even before I came back to Northwestern five years ago, Dr. Lindquist and I discussed an independent Division of Geriatrics as a goal. Geriatrics has grown under Dr. Lindquist's leadership, and it is time! I look forward to continuing to work with Dr. Lindquist and all our Geriatrics colleagues to strengthen care for older adults at Northwestern and beyond," Linder said.
In a recent study published in the Journal of American College of Cardiology, researchers evaluated the associations between hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HDP) and long-term cardiovascular disease (CVD).

Study: Cardiovascular Risk Factors Mediate the Long-Term Maternal Risk Associated With Hypertensive Disorders of Pregnancy. Image Credit: SUKJAI PHOTO / Shutterstock

HDP such as preeclampsia and gestational hypertension occurs in about 15% of parous women and is associated with a two-fold higher risk of CVD and premature CVD-linked mortality relative to those with a normotensive pregnancy. In addition, women with HDP are at an increased risk for chronic hypertension, type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), and hypercholesterolemia. Moreover, the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association (AHA) support preeclampsia as a factor enhancing the risk of hypercholesterolemia.

Nevertheless, the degree to which CVD risk factors mediate the associations between HDP and CVD events remains poorly understood. Whereas prior studies evaluated the contribution of individual risk factors, none have reported the joint role of T2DM, changes in the body-mass index (BMI), hypercholesterolemia, and chronic hypertension on the relationship between CVD and HDP.

About the study

In the current study, researchers analyzed the relationship between CVD and HDP by controlling for pre-pregnancy confounders. They evaluated the mediation of T2DM, BMI changes, hypercholesterolemia, and chronic hypertension to the HDP-CVD relationship in the Nurses health study II (NHSII).

The NHSII is an ongoing cohort of about 116,429 female nurses in the United States aged between 25 and 42 years at enrolment in 1989. Study participants were surveyed biennially regarding medication use, health-related behaviors and incident diseases. In the 2009 questionnaire, information on the complete history of pregnancy was captured, including the gestation length and adverse outcomes.

HDP was self-reported by the subjects as pregnancy-associated high blood pressure (gestational hypertension) or toxemia/preeclampsia. The primary focus was on HDP in first pregnancies, and the secondary analysis assessed HDP exposure across all pregnancies in the lifetime. The study population reported a history of angina, myocardial infarction (MI), transient ischemic attack, or stroke on the 1989 baseline questionary. Subsequent questionaries captured information on the incident CVD events.

Hypercholesterolemia was self-reported or otherwise inferred by the use of medication to lower cholesterol levels. Diabetes-related information like diagnostic tests, symptoms, and treatment was collected through supplemental questionnaires. The midpoint of each date range for hypercholesterolemia or chronic hypertension was used as the year of diagnosis, and the diagnosis year for T2DM was captured from the supplemental questionnaire. Only participants who completed the 2009 biennial questionary were included in the analysis. Cox proportional hazards models computed hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs).

Results

About 60,379 participants free of CVDs before first pregnancy were included in the primary analysis, 57,974 subjects in the mediation analysis, and 57,137 in the secondary analysis. Nearly 10% of the subjects experienced HDP during first pregnancy with first births between 1964 and 2008. The median follow-up period since the first birth was 34 years. Individuals with HDP during first pregnancy had similar health-related behaviors and demographics to those who had normotensive first pregnancies. However, participants with HDP were at least thrice as likely to have a pre-pregnancy BMI above 30kg/m2 and at greater odds of having a parent with a premature CVD event.

By the end of the follow-up, 1.8% of participants experienced their first CVD events: 560 MIs, six fatal coronary artery disease (CAD), and 515 strokes. The adjusted models revealed a whopping 63% increased rate of CVD in women with HDP during first pregnancy relative to those with normotensive first pregnancies. When preeclampsia and gestation hypertension were separately evaluated with CAD and strokes, they found significant associations between CAD and preeclampsia and stroke and gestational hypertension.

Women with HDP in first pregnancies developed CVDs at a younger age and sooner post-first birth than others with normotensive first pregnancies. Moreover, the cumulative incidence of CVD was higher in women with HDP, with CVDs appearing nearly 30 years after first birth in those with gestational hypertension and 10 years later for those with preeclampsia.

Overall, 12% of the subjects had at least one pregnancy with HDP, and 2.2% experienced recurrent HDP. Ever-experiencing HDP was associated with a 63% increased risk of CVD than those without HDP. Women with one HDP pregnancy had 48% higher chances of CVD, and those with two or more HDP pregnancies had a 2.3-fold higher rate of CVD than women with normotensive pregnancies. When HDP and CVD models were compared with and without developing CVD risk factors post-pregnancy, 63.8% of the association between first pregnancy HDP and CVD was jointly mediated by the subsequent development of T2DM, hypercholesterolemia, BMI changes, or chronic hypertension.

Although all CVD risk factors contributed to mediation, the most significant individual proportion was mediated by chronic hypertension, followed by BMI changes, hypercholesterolemia, and T2DM. Chronic hypertension alone accounted for 81% association of gestational hypertension with CVD and 48% for preeclampsia with CVD. About 95% of those with gestational hypertension and 89% of women with preeclampsia developed chronic hypertension between their first pregnancy and CVD event.

Conclusions

The authors reported that women who experienced HDP during first pregnancy had a 63% higher rate of CVD events in the future than those women who had normotensive first pregnancies even when shared risk factors (pre-pregnancy BMI, smoking, parental CVD history) were accounted for. This increased risk was explained by the subsequent development of risk factors like BMI changes, hypercholesterolemia, chronic hypertension, and T2DM in the successive years of hypertensive first pregnancy.

Women with preeclampsia in first pregnancy exhibited an increased rate of CAD but not a stroke, and conversely, those with gestational hypertension had a higher rate of stroke but not CAD. More than 80% of the increased CVD risk in women with gestational hypertension was associated with the subsequent development of chronic hypertension post-pregnancy. Altogether, the findings suggested that post-pregnancy screening for and treatment of chronic hypertension, T2DM, hypercholesterolemia, and changes in the BMI might delay or preclude CVD in women with HDP history.
For three decades, scientists have debated the underlying cause of Gulf War illness (GWI), a collection of unexplained and chronic symptoms affecting veterans of the Persian Gulf War. Now researchers led by Robert Haley, M.D., Professor of Internal Medicine and Director of the Division of Epidemiology at UT Southwestern, have solved the mystery, showing through a detailed genetic study that the nerve gas sarin was largely responsible for the syndrome. The findings were published in Environmental Health Perspectives, a peer-reviewed journal supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, with an accompanying editorial on the paper by leading environmental epidemiologists.

Dr. Haley's research group not only discovered that veterans with exposure to sarin were more likely to develop GWI, but also found that the risk was modulated by a gene that normally allows some people's bodies to better break down the nerve gas. Gulf War veterans with a weak variant of the gene who were exposed to sarin were more likely to develop symptoms of GWI than other exposed veterans who had the strong form of the gene.

"Quite simply, our findings prove that Gulf War illness was caused by sarin, which was released when we bombed Iraqi chemical weapons storage and production facilities," said Dr. Haley, a medical epidemiologist who has been investigating GWI for 28 years. "There are still more than 100,000 Gulf War veterans who are not getting help for this illness and our hope is that these findings will accelerate the search for better treatment."

In the years immediately following the Gulf War, more than a quarter of the U.S. and coalition veterans who served in the war began reporting a range of chronic symptoms, including fatigue, fever, night sweats, memory and concentration problems, difficulty finding words, diarrhea, sexual dysfunction, and chronic body pain. Since then, both academic researchers and those within the military and Department of Veterans Affairs have studied a list of possible causes of GWI, ranging from stress, vaccinations, and burning oil wells to exposure to pesticides, nerve gas, anti-nerve gas medication, and depleted uranium.

Over the years, these studies have identified statistical associations with several of these, but no cause has been widely accepted. Most recently, Dr. Haley and a colleague reported a large study testing veterans' urine for depleted uranium that would still be present if it had caused GWI and found none.

"As far back as 1995, when we first defined Gulf War illness, the evidence was pointing toward nerve agent exposure, but it has taken many years to build an irrefutable case," said Dr. Haley, who holds the U.S. Armed Forces Veterans Distinguished Chair for Medical Research, Honoring Robert Haley, M.D., and America's Gulf War Veterans.

Sarin is a toxic man-made nerve agent, first developed as a pesticide, that has been used in chemical warfare; its production was banned in 1997. When people are exposed to either the liquid or gas form, sarin enters the body through the skin or breathing and attacks the nervous system. High-level sarin often results in death, but studies on survivors have revealed that lower-level sarin exposure can lead to long-term impairment of brain function. The U.S. military has confirmed that chemical agents, including sarin, were detected in Iraq during the Gulf War. In particular, satellite imagery documented a large debris cloud rising from an Iraqi chemical weapons storage site bombed by U.S. and coalition aircraft and transiting over U.S. ground troop positions where it set off thousands of nerve gas alarms and was confirmed to contain sarin.

Previous studies have found an association between Gulf War veterans who self-reported exposure to sarin and GWI symptoms. However, critics have raised questions of recall bias, including whether veterans with GWI are simply more likely to remember and report exposure due to their assumption that it may be linked to their illness. "What makes this new study a game-changer is that it links GWI with a very strong gene-environment interaction that cannot be explained away by errors in recalling the environmental exposure or other biases in the data," Dr. Haley said.

In the new paper, Dr. Haley and his colleagues studied 508 deployed veterans with GWI and 508 deployed veterans who did not develop any GWI symptoms, all randomly selected from more than 8,000 representative Gulf War-era veterans who completed the U.S. Military Health Survey. They not only gauged sarin exposure  by asking whether the veterans had heard chemical nerve gas alarms sound during their deployment  but also collected blood and DNA samples from each veteran.

The researchers tested the samples for variants of a gene called PON1. There are two versions of PON1: the Q variant generates a blood enzyme that efficiently breaks down sarin while the R variant helps the body break down other chemicals but is not efficient at destroying sarin. Everyone carries two copies of PON1, giving them either a QQ, RR or QR genotype.

For Gulf War veterans with the QQ genotype, hearing nerve agent alarms  a proxy for chemical exposure  raised their chance of developing GWI by 3.75 times. For those with the QR genotype, the alarms raised their chance of GWI by 4.43 times. And for those with two copies of the R gene, inefficient at breaking down sarin, the chance of GWI increased by 8.91 times. Those soldiers with both the RR genotype and low-level sarin exposure were over seven times more likely to get GWI due to the interaction per se, over and above the increase in risk from both risk factors acting alone. For genetic epidemiologists, this number leads to a high degree of confidence that sarin is a causative agent of GWI.

Your risk is going up step by step depending on your genotype, because those genes are mediating how well your body inactivates sarin. It doesn't mean you can't get Gulf War illness if you have the QQ genotype, because even the highest-level genetic protection can be overwhelmed by higher intensity exposure." Robert Haley, M.D., Professor of Internal Medicine and Director of the Division of Epidemiology, UT Southwestern

This kind of strong gene-environment interaction is considered a gold standard for showing that an illness like GWI was caused by a particular environmental toxic exposure, he added. The research doesn't rule out that other chemical exposures could be responsible for a small number of cases of Gulf War illness. However, Dr. Haley and his team carried out additional genetic analyses on the new data, testing other factors that could be related, and found no other contributing causes.

"There's no other risk factor coming anywhere close to having this level of causal evidence for Gulf War illness," said Dr. Haley.

The team is continuing research on how GWI impacts the body, particularly the immune system, whether any of its effects are reversible, and whether there are biomarkers to detect prior sarin exposure or GWI.
In health care, perhaps no word sends a more chilling message than "cancer." Brain tumors, for example, prove especially resistant to current treatments. Only 5% of patients with that condition survive more than three years and the median survival time is 10 to 14 months.

But an innovative research project by University of NebraskaLincoln scientists offers the potential for a breakthrough. In a federally funded project, Janos Zempleni, a professor with the Department of Nutrition and Health Sciences, and Husker colleagues are pursuing a surprising way to use milk as the vehicle delivering cancer-fighting therapeutics to the brain.

The concept isn't as fanciful as it might sound -; it's building on recent science. Preliminary findings in recent years show that it's possible to manipulate the body's genetic function to reduce the growth of tissues, including cancerous tumors. Scientists achieve that result by directing a type of gene regulator known as siRNAs to the targeted tissue. Genetic signaling carried by the siRNAs shuts down genetic function that enables new tissue growth.

But converting that preliminary finding into effective medical treatment has run into obstacles. So far, scientists have not been able to find an efficient way to deliver the genes consistently to the targeted area and in sufficient quantity.

Milk, it turns out, offers a good chance to solve the problem. Humans absorb siRNAs through food, recent research shows. And milk, Zempleni has found, stands out for its robust ability, once ingested, to help the genes accumulate naturally in the brain.

In their project, the Husker researchers will hone milk-focused techniques for effective gene delivery. Specifically, the project will use milk-transported siRNA genes to shut down the growth function of a gene known as IDH1, whose mutations result in brain tumors. The research also offers hope in addressing rare brain-centered genetic abnormalities affecting young children, said Zempleni, Willa Cather Professor of molecular nutrition and director of the Nebraska Center for the Prevention of Obesity Diseases.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has provided a $630,000 grant to support the project. Zempleni will lead the research, in collaboration with Forrest Kievit, assistant professor of biological systems engineering, and Jiantao Guo, associate professor of chemistry. USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture awarded the grant.

The long-term potential of this science is "enormous. It has not been realized yet at all," said Zempleni, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences and winner of the Institute of Agricultural and Natural Resources' 2015 Omtvedt Innovation Award.

Zempleni and his colleagues will use genetic science and chemistry to load exosomes, a natural nanoparticle in milk, with therapeutic material including siRNAs. Loading the material on cow's milk exosomes would first require genetically modifying the cow, an enormously tricky task. So, the researchers instead will culture MAC-T cells (similar in genetic composition to cow's milk cells) in the laboratory to produce exosomes, then direct them to brain tumors in mice.

The researchers aim to develop techniques that achieve two goals: Have the siRNAs effectively and consistently reach the tumors and have the siRNAs accumulate in sufficient quantity to reduce the tumor growth.

If this technology proves viable, large-scale production of exosomes will be needed to meet real-world patient demand. Laboratory cultures can supply only a small volume of exosomes. A cow, in contrast, can provide an ample number through its milk.

So, the Husker researchers aim, long term, to take a big step if their current research reaches its gene-delivery goals: They will seek to develop a genetically modified cow.

Such a cow, Zempleni wrote, would secrete "milk exosomes conducive to maximal delivery of RNA therapeutics to brain tumors in human cancer patients."

The pharmaceutical industry is already using this general concept. It's known as biopharming, meaning the use of animals in producing medical treatments. The drug Atryn, used to prevent blood clots in patients with a rare disease, is derived from the milk of genetically engineered goats.

With our technology, you could actually use these milk exosomes, attach the appropriate feature and deliver a therapeutic to folks suffering from these rare diseases. I think this could be a huge game changer if we get a funding agency to take the risk of developing these animals. That is a difficult task. With the MAC-T cells, it's relatively easy, but taking this to livestock, a goat or a cow, it's way, way complicated." Janos Zempleni, Professor, Department of Nutrition and Health Sciences

Husker research has been pioneering in identifying the importance of milk as a potential gene delivery mechanism. In 2014, Scott Baier -; a doctoral candidate in Zempleni's lab -; proposed an initial research project on the subject, culminating in a Journal of Nutrition paper that he, Zempleni and other Husker colleagues co-authored. The article since has been cited academically almost 300 times. Baier received his doctoral degree in nutrition science from Nebraska in 2015 and now is senior director of medical strategy at Vaniam Group, a company focusing on transformative cancer therapies in Dallas.

Zempleni's path to the scientific exploration of genetics and food science began in his teenage years in his home country of Germany.

"I loved biology but at that age, I loved to go fishing -; I was very much into all these native species of fish from Germany," he said.

In succeeding years, his interests broadened, gradually shifting "from fish to biology to science."

"I was torn between biochemistry or nutrition science," he said. "I think in hindsight I made the right choice going with nutrition science. It's a very comprehensive approach, and it allowed me to delve deeply into biochemistry and molecular biology. So, I think I've got the best of both worlds."
In a recent article posted to the medRxiv* preprint server, researchers illustrated coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)-linked caregiver death and orphanhood in children.

Background

According to emerging worldwide modeling evidence on severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)-related excess fatalities, the pandemic death burden is more than double the number of COVID-19-associated deaths documented. The latest World Health Organization (WHO) estimations for COVID-19 excess mortality enable the creation of more accurate and up-to-date models of COVID-19-related caregiver loss and orphanhood in children.

Caregiver or parent death is permanent and their impacts on children could be enduring and devastating, including abuse, institutionalization, mental health problems, traumatic grief, poor educational outcomes, chronic/infectious diseases, and adolescent pregnancy.

Inconsistencies in SARS-CoV-2 testing and insufficient mortality reporting priorly impeded worldwide totals and national comparisons on COVID-19-linked caregiver loss and orphanhood across children.

About the study

In the present study, the investigators derived new COVID-19-related orphanhood estimates using SARS-CoV-2-linked excess death data. The researchers thoroughly assessed the long-lasting influence of SARS-CoV-2-connected caregiver loss and orphanhood among children. They integrated age-specific excess mortality and fertility estimates from January 2020 to May 2022 using methodologies developed in previous studies. This allowed the team to update their caregiver or parent loss estimates to current estimates derived from excess death for each reporting nation, utilizing The Economist, the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), and the WHO data.

They substituted COVID-19-linked fatalities in earlier logistic models with the maximum excess deaths and SARS-CoV-2-associated mortalities for two timeframes, 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2021 and 1 January 2020 to 1 May 2022. Further, the researchers employed bootstrapping to determine the uncertainty in their estimations based on mortality and fertility data.

Results

The study results illustrated that through 1 May 2022, 10.4 million children lost caregivers or parents as a result of COVID-19-related excess deaths, and 7.5 million children suffered pandemic-related orphanhood, based on WHO excess mortality estimates. SARS-CoV-2-associated orphanhood and caregiver loss impacted more children in the WHO areas of South-East Asia and Africa than in the Americas, Eastern Mediterranean, European, and Western Pacific.

Similarly, estimates differ at the national level, with India, Indonesia, Egypt, Nigeria, and Pakistan being the most impacted through 1 May 2022. Of the WHO regions significantly affected, nations displaying the highest proportions of bereaved children in South-East Asia included Indonesia, India, Myanmar, Nepal, and Bangladesh; and in Africa consisted of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, South Africa, Ethiopia, and Mozambique.

Discussions and conclusions

According to the study findings, an estimated 10.4 million children have lost their parents or caregivers due to the worldwide pandemic of COVID-19-related caregiver mortality and orphanhood. These new findings on the effects of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic on children were congruent with Saving Lives Now, a main priority of the forthcoming Presidential Global COVID-19 Summit.

The authors noted that although a tremendous amount of money was invested in minimizing SARS-CoV-2-related deaths, nothing was done to look after the children left behind. On the other hand, examples of billions of dollars spent on children orphaned because of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) depicted successful solutions that could be replicated.

Only Peru and the United States (US) have established evidence-informed national plans to combat COVID-19-associated orphanhood. Desperately required SARS-CoV-2 pandemic responses include equitable COVID-19 vaccination combining life-changing initiatives for grieving children. Considering the life-long implications and magnitude of orphanhood, incorporating prompt care for these children into every national pandemic response strategy would help lessen the long-term impacts.

The investigators noted that caregiver loss could lead to sexual exploitation, poverty, mental health hardship, and school dropout without supportive interventions in children. The present findings highlight the need for three crucial elements: 1) accelerate COVID-19 vaccinations, treatment, and containment, thereby preventing the mortality of caregivers; 2) educate families to offer caring and safe alternative care; and 3) safeguard orphaned children via parenting support, violence prevention, ensuring school access, and economic assistance.

Overall, the present research illustrated that an efficient, caring action to safeguard children from long-term and immediate harm caused by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic was both a public health necessity and an investment in the future.

*Important notice

medRxiv publishes preliminary scientific reports that are not peer-reviewed and, therefore, should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health-related behavior, or treated as established information.
analysis

Endemic poverty makes Malawi easy pickings for traffickers. The pandemic and fallout from Russia's war on Ukraine has exacerbated the situation despite government efforts to curb human trafficking.

"I was 16 years old then when a certain gentleman came to our village to hire me as a domestic worker," said Zione, a Malawian trafficking survivor, who asked DW to use only her first name.

"He said his wife had just given birth and they had two little kids, which was why they needed help."

The job proved to be very different from what she was promised.

When she arrived in the capital Lilongwe from where she lived in Ntcheu district in central Malawi, the teenager was instead taken to a shabeen.

There she was expected to serve alcohol and have sex with customers.

"My boss would collect the money that I would make from the sexual encounters with different men," she said.

"I thought I had hit the jackpot going to town to work, but alas! My bubble got busted."

Zione only managed to escape when she told her story to a woman who gave her some money and connected her to a local NGO that helped her.

This is just one of the many stories of human trafficking in Malawi.

Others include that of a young Malawian boy forced by his parents to accompany a stranger to Mozambique, where he ends up herding cattle from dawn to dusk, without shoes and with little food.

Or there's the story of a woman is recruited through a Malawian employment agency to work in a private home in Kuwait as a domestic. Upon arrival, she's doesn't see a cent of the promised salary, is never given a day off and isn't allowed to leave the compound.

Malawi's poverty drives trafficking

Malawi has long been a trafficking hot spot in southern Africa.

One major driver for this is endemic poverty and extensive rural unemployment.

Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world, ranking 174 out of 189 countries on the United Nations' Human Development Index. Half of the population lives below the national poverty line and a quarter lives in extreme poverty.

"Harmful cultural practices" also make Malawians more susceptible to trafficking, says Maxwell Matewere, National Project Officer for Malawi with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and an expert on human trafficking in the country.

When boys and girls hit puberty, he explains, they go through initiation ceremonies after which they are seen as adults and are expected to bring income into the family rather than stay in school.

This combination of factors makes Malawi is an "easy source country" for traffickers looking to recruit workers, he told DW.

COVID made trafficking worse

Experts say trafficking in Malawi has worsened since the start of the pandemic.

Before COVID-19, People Serving Girls at Risk, an NGO which helps trafficking survivors in Malawi's second biggest city of Blantyre, saw two to three cases a week at their drop-in center.

During the pandemic, that number spiraled.

"Sometimes we would get seven cases a week, even up to 10 or 15 cases in a week," said Caleb Ng'ombo, the organization's executive director.

And the numbers of trafficking victims has remained high in the pandemic's aftermath, he said, as families struggle to break out of chronic poverty.

"The economic shocks created by COVID-19 are still unfolding and have worsened, especially in the communities whose economies are already fragile," Ng'ombo told DW.

Russia-Ukraine war increases risk

Malawians are also now reeling under surging prices for fertilizers, fuel, cooking oil and bread, partly because of the global fallout from Russia's war in Ukraine.

The UN's Maxwell Matewere expects this to increase the "number of families who are unable to provide adequate care to their children" putting children at "greater risk of human trafficking."

Most victims trafficked within Malawi

Many trafficking victims end up staying within Malawi's borders.

Traffickers often target boys who are lured from the south of the country to the central or northern regions, according to the US State Department's 2021 Trafficking Report in Malawi.

There, they often end up in forced labor on farms, especially in the tobacco industry, working as goat and cattle herders or making bricks.

Traffickers also target girls and young women in rural areas who are forced into the sex industry in Malawi's cities.

A smaller number of victims end up abroad. Of these, some end up in places like South Africa and the Gulf States, but more often they are transported across the border to Malawi's neighbors.

"People from Zambia and Mozambique will come to Malawi to recruit young people to work in their farms, and Tanzanians will come to recruit young ones to work in the fishing industry," Matewere explained.

Malawi government trying to tackle trafficking

Malawi has strict laws against trafficking, including the 2015 Trafficking in Persons Act.

This legislation prescribes punishments of up to 14 years' imprisonment for offenses involving an adult victim and up to 21 years' imprisonment for those involving a child victim.

It also launched a national plan of action in 2017, and created a fund for survivors of trafficking.

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The government has made more of effort to crack down, the US State department's 2021 report finds.

But police and other authorities are still under-resourced when it comes to catching and prosecuting traffickers.

Malawi's police arrested 48 suspects on trafficking-related charges and convicted only 29 traffickers in 2020, according to the report.

Trafficking 'thriving because of corruption'

Poverty doesn't just make people susceptible to trafficking, it also makes officials susceptible to corruption.

"We still have high levels of corruption, and so most of the trafficking cases are thriving because of corruption," said Caleb Ng'ombo from People Serving Girls at Risk.

"The people entrusted to do their job cannot do it because someone is paying them under the table."

And as for Zione who escaped from forced prostitution, she is now undertaking counseling offered by an organization helping trafficking survivors.

Her advice to others: "Don't get carried away with strangers who promises heaven on earth. Continue with your education so that you can find a legitimate job in the future... There are clean jobs out there but only when you have an education."

Mirriam Kaliza in Lilongwe, Malawi, contributed to this article.

Edited by: Benita van Eyssen
The International Vaccine Institute (IVI) and SK bioscience announced today that SK bioscience obtained an export license from the Korean Ministry of Food and Drug Safety for SK's typhoid vaccine 'SKYTyphoid' which they jointly developed.

SK bioscience and IVI started the development of the typhoid vaccine in 2013 by applying conjugate vaccine production technology. The vaccine received funding support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation from the initial R&D stage, as SK bioscience led research and development and IVI was responsible for the conduct of global clinical studies.

SKYTyphoid is a polysaccharide-protein conjugate vaccine developed by conjugating the polysaccharide of typhoid bacteria, which acts as the antigen, to the diphtheria toxin protein (diphtheria toxoid), which acts as a carrier. Carrier proteins are known to play a role in inducing T-cell immune responses that affect long-term immunity. As a result, SKYTyphoid shows excellent immunogenicity even with a single dose inoculation and is expected to provide longer-term protection than the existing live oral or polysaccharide vaccines. Adopting conjugation technology, the new vaccine can be used in infants aged 6 months to up to 2 years as well as older populations.

IVI and SK bioscience confirmed the excellent immunogenicity and safety of SKYTyphoid in a phase III clinical trial conducted on 2,160 healthy individuals aged 6 months to under 45 years old in Nepal. In a comparative clinical trial with the existing typhoid conjugate vaccine that had obtained WHO PQ (Prequalification) certification, SKYTyphoid demonstrated equivalent immunogenicity and safety as the novel vaccine has not caused any notable side effects after administration in all age groups. Part of the research results were published in 'The Lancet Infectious Diseases,' a sister journal of The Lancet in December last year.

According to the results of the Phase II clinical trial of SKYTyphoid booster shot published in the international scientific journal 'npj (Nature Partner Journal) Vaccine' in January this year, two doses of SKYTyphoid in infants 6 to 23 months of age induced a strong immune response, with antibody titer in the body increasing 64 folds compared to before inoculation.

Based on these clinical results and licensure of the vaccine in Korea, SK bioscience will start the process to achieve WHO PQ for the vaccine. In collaboration with IVI, SK bioscience will seek to obtain WHO PQ certification for SKYTyphoid and start supplying the vaccine globally as early as next year. SK bioscience's vaccine plant, L House in Andong, Korea, will be solely responsible for both production and supply of the vaccine.

The Typhoid Program is one of the flagship programs at IVI since 1999 and the development of the conjugate vaccine was the cornerstone of this program. With the generous support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Government of Korea, we have conducted 4 clinical trials since 2015 in the Philippines and Nepal, and SKYTyphoid has shown good safety and immunogenicity profile. SKYTyphoid will play a major role in providing vaccine access in the endemic countries with support from Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance after its prequalification by the WHO." Dr. Sushant Sahastrabuddhe, Head of IVI's Typhoid Program

"I am thrilled that our research conducted for over 10 years through global cooperation has resulted in an innovative vaccine," Ahn Jae-yong, CEO of SK bioscience, said. "We will seek to acquire WHO PQ for the vaccine speedily in order to contribute to making children in low- and middle-income countries free of suffering from typhoid."

"IVI is very pleased that SK bioscience's TCV has been licensed by the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety," IVI Director General Dr. Jerome Kim said. "This is the culmination of an exemplary global public-private partnership that has brought yet another vaccine against one of the world's neglected diseases. IVI is committed to collaborating with SK bioscience and other vaccine developers around the world to accelerate the discovery, development, and delivery of vaccines for global public health."

Typhoid is an acute febrile disease caused by salmonella typhi infection and is characterized by high fever and headache that emerges after an incubation period of 10 to 14 days. According to the WHO, an estimated 11 to 20 million typhoid cases occur every year around the world, mainly in developing countries, with 126,000 to 161,000 deaths every year.
A study on adult women and infants in British Columbia, Canada, demonstrated that the humoral immunity against the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) has significantly reduced. Overall, the study highlights that relatively short-lived anti-RSV immunity may be responsible for the repeated seasonal resurgence of RSV infections in British Columbia. The study has recently been published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases.

Background

British Columbia, Canada, has experienced a near disappearance of RSV cases during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The control measures implemented to mitigate the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) could also be responsible for mitigating RSV.

During the three prior pre-pandemic seasons (2017  2020), an average of 1500 RSV cases were detected in British Columbia. In contrast, only five cases were detected during the first pandemic season (2020  2021). This prolonged lack of RSV exposure might influence protective immune responses at the population level.

In the current study, the scientists have estimated anti-RSV binding and neutralizing antibody levels in women of childbearing age and infants before and during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Study design

Healthy women of childbearing age (18  51 years) and infants residing in British Columbia were enrolled in the study. The serum samples were collected from the participants after the typical peak season of RSV infection in each studied year. The samples were used to measure the levels of anti-RSV IgG and neutralizing antibodies. In addition, RSV-specific T cell response was measured using peripheral blood mononuclear cells.

Humoral (antibody) immune responses to respiratory syncytial virus

The analysis of serum samples revealed that the levels of anti-RSV IgG antibodies in women reduced significantly in 2021 compared to that observed in 2020. However, when compared to the antibody levels of age-matched women in 2018 and 2019, no significant difference was observed.

The analysis of serum samples collected from infants revealed a 15-fold reduced anti-RSV IgG antibody levels in 2021 compared to that observed in 2020. An inverse correlation was observed between antibody levels in infants and post-natal age (afterbirth age). However, no such correlation was observed with gestational age (length of pregnancy).

Neutralizing antibody responses to respiratory syncytial virus

The findings of the live virus plaque assay revealed that the levels of anti-RSV neutralizing antibodies in women were 12-fold lower in 2021 compared to that observed in 2020. A similar reduction was observed compared with the antibody levels in 2018 and 2019. In infants, a 3.4-fold lower level of neutralizing antibodies against RSV was observed in 2021 compared to that observed in 2020.

Considering all samples collected from women and infants, a strong correlation was observed between anti-RSV IgG antibody levels and neutralizing antibody levels.

Regarding cellular immune responses, a comparable level of RSV-specific CD4+ T cell response was observed in women between 2020 and 2021.

Study significance

The study reveals a significant reduction in anti-RSV binding and neutralizing antibody levels in both women and infants after one year of the COVID-19 pandemic. In women, the reduction could be due to a prolonged lack of exposure to RSV.

Since infants are immunologically naive to RSV, they mostly depend on maternal antibodies to avoid severe RSV infection in the initial years after birth. Thus, the reduced humoral immunity observed in infants could be due to the combined impact of waning maternal immunity and a lack of exposure.

Unlike antibody response, the T cell responses in women remain mostly unaffected during the pandemic. This indicates the presence of a long-lived memory T cell response that can protect adults against severe infections, despite a lack of humoral immunity.

However, infants who do not have memory immune responses are primarily dependent on maternally-transferred antibodies. Thus, a waning humoral immunity could make infants more susceptible to severe RSV infection.

Overall, the study indicates that anti-RSV antibody responses decline rapidly with time and that continuous exposure to RSV is necessary for a durable protective immunity.
(Newser)  Update: A court made a mistake in upholding the conviction of a Texas woman who was given a five-year prison sentence for casting a ballot when she wasn't eligible to vote, and it needs to take another look at the case, a higher court ruled Wednesday. The court should have required proof that Crystal Mason knew she was committing a crime, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals said, per the Guardian. The most recent ruling had said whether Mason knew it or not wasn't relevant. Mason issued a statement saying she'll defend herself "against these cruel charges." Our story from March 31 follows:

The highest criminal appeals court in Texas will review the high-profile case of a woman sentenced to five years in prison for voting while ineligible. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rarely reviews non-death penalty convictions. But it announced Wednesday that it would review legal briefs, but not oral arguments, in the case of Crystal Mason, reports the Texas Tribune. The Fort Worth woman, now 45, was on supervised releaseakin to probationfor felony tax fraud when her mother encouraged her to vote in the 2016 election. She was not on the voter registration roll at her Tarrant County polling place but filled out a provisional ballot with help from a poll worker, unaware she's wasn't eligible. The back of the ballot, which Mason didn't read, included an affidavit stating convicted felons in Texas are barred from voting until they complete their full sentence, including any term of supervision.

Though her ballot was one of more than 11,000 of 12,668 provisional ballots cast in Tarrant County between 2014 and 2019 to be rejected for ineligibility, the Guardian reports the Black woman appears to be the only one who ended up prosecuted. An appeals court later upheld her sentence, finding "the fact that she did not know she was legally ineligible to vote was irrelevant." But Mason's legal team, including the American Civil Liberties Union, hopes the highest criminal appeals court will find Mason didn't intentionally vote illegally and didn't really commit the crime since her vote wasn't counted, per NBC News. "I'm hopeful that the judges will understand that any Texan, like me, who at most unknowingly makes an innocent mistake, should not be punished for it," says Mason, who is out of prison on an appeal bond. (Read more voting stories.)
Germany is set to draw down its EU deployment in Mali and increase its UN deployment. France is withdrawing from Mali amid friction with the military junta there.

Germany on Wednesday said it had agreed to raise its contingent in the UN's MINUSMA peacekeeping mission in Mali to a maximum of 1,400 troops from around 1,100.

The German government has also decided to reduce its training mission as part of the EU's deployment EUTM, halving its upper limit from 600 to 300. Most of the redeployed forces will be moved to neighboring Niger.

The changes, like all foreign military deployments, still need to be approved by parliament.

What did Germany say about the change in deployment?

"The upper limit was increased by 300. This is intended to compensate for capacities previously undertaken by French forces," said government spokeswoman Christiane Hoffmann.

Hoffmann added that the Mali mandate had been extended to May 31, 2023.

The announcement comes as France is pulling its forces out of Mali after relations with the country's ruling junta broke down.

French forces in Mali were not part of MINUSMA, but played an important part supporting UN troops in the country, especially with air power.

Hoffmann said that training and support previously provided to Mali would be offered to Niger's military in the future, citing a "changed situation" in the Sahel.

According to Hoffmann, Germany is also concerned that Malian forces receiving EU training could cooperate with Russian mercenaries operating in the country. German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht warned last week that Malian forces could "commit cruel violations of human rights" alongside Russian mercenaries.

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What is the goal of the deployments?

Mali has been fighting an Islamist insurgency over the past decade.

France dispatched troops in 2013 to help Mali put down the insurgency. The insurgency then spread to nearby Niger and Burkina Faso.

France is withdrawing its deployment from Mali after relations between the two countries soured following the ouster of then-President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita in August 2020. The transition back towards civilian government, or lack thereof, was a particular bone of contention. France has also criticized the presence of what it calls Russian mercenaries in Mali, which Mali's junta says are military instructors.

The UN Security Council is set to determine whether to renew the mandate of MINUSMA next month. Last week, UN chief Antonio Guterres said that MINUSMA could be replaced by an African Union force.

(AP, AFP)
(Newser)  Dolphins are turning up dead in the Black Sea, which experts say could be a consequence of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Since war began in February, Turkey has recorded a rise in dolphin deaths across its Black Sea coast. More than 100 dolphins had been found dead before the end of March, per the Daily Sabah, which reports 24 were found near Istanbul, directly across from the Ukrainian coast, in a single day. Some drowned in fishing nets, others were stranded, per the Guardian. That lines up with what Bulgarian conservation group Green Balkans has found. In tracking the bycatch of cetaceans in turbot fishing over four years, it found numbers were lowest during spring and highest in summer.

But this spring, 50 cetaceans, including harbor porpoise dolphins, became entangled in about 45 miles of nets, which is close to the peak from summer 2019, per the Guardian. The Turkish Marine Research Foundation (Tudav) initially warned of "an extraordinary increase" in deaths, adding "it is not yet clear why they are concentrated in the region at this time of the year compared to previous years, and why incidental net catches have increased so much." However, Chair Dr. Bayram Ozturk now says "acoustic trauma" in the northern Black Sea, where Russian navy vessels are active, may be driving cetaceanswhich rely on sound to navigate, communicate, and hunttoward shores in Turkey and Bulgaria.

Dr. Pavel Gol'din of Ukraine's National Academy of Sciences agrees underwater noise could seriously disturb the animals and "might be the cause of mass migration of fish and cetacean stocks to the south." However, "we don't have proof on what low frequency sonar may cause in the Black Sea because we have never seen this many ships, and this much noise for such an extended time," says Ozturk. Tudav has advised "that a surveillance program to detect the effects of the war on the marine life should be started immediately" as "the security of marine life, environment, and nourishment in the Black Sea is under threat," per Hurriyet Daily News. (Russia is reportedly using dolphins in its war effort.)
(Newser)  For the first time, the federal government has assessed and acknowledged the harm done to Native American children at boarding schools it backed or ran throughout most of the 19th and 20th centuries. A report released Wednesday by the Interior Department said the children were subjected to sexual abuse, whippings, manual labor, and severe malnourishment, Axios reports. The report listed 408 such schools and said about 50 burial sites have been found so far. At least 500 Native American, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children died at the schools, per NBC News, and the Interior Department said the toll could climb into the thousands as its investigation progresses.

The mistreatment took place between 1819 and 1969 during the government's effort to force assimilation as it removed tribes from their lands. Children were taken from their families and forbidden to speak their native languages, per the AP. They were given English names. Some did not return. "Many of those children were buried in unmarked or poorly maintained burial sites far from their Indian Tribes, Alaska Native Villages, the Native Hawaiian Community, and families, often hundreds, or even thousands, of miles away," the report said. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced the project last June, prompted by the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at sites of former boarding schools for Indigenous children in Canada.

Many of those schools were run by the Catholic Church, and many of the US boarding schools were operated by churches of various denominations. A Native American coalition has welcomed the government's reckoning but cautioned that the federal agency has limited authority. The department's goals include repatriating the children's remains and providing resources to Indigenous communities to help them deal with the lasting impact of the schools' abuses. "Recognizing the impacts of the federal Indian boarding school system cannot just be a historical reckoning," Haaland said Wednesday. Her ancestors were among the abused. (Read more Native Americans stories.)
(Newser)  Lucy Shtein has experience in hiding her identity in Moscow. "I have worn different disguises before to dodge the police," the Pussy Riot activist said, per the Guardian. "Sometimes I would wear long coats, I even dressed as a construction worker once." When President Vladimir Putin announced a hunt for "national traitors" after the invasion of Ukraine, Shteinwho already was under house arrestsaid she realized, "I could no longer stay in Russia." She began planning her escape, figuring "it wasn't going to be easy." She decided to take advantage of a feature of modern life in Moscow.

Shtein ordered a bright green suit from a food delivery company online and stepped into the street outside her flat, which police regularly patrol. She blended in. "We have become so used to delivery couriers roaming Moscow, so it was a foolproof way to escape," Shtein said. After several car trips she'd mapped out, she crossed into Lithuania. Her girlfriend, Masha Alyokhina, also a Pussy Riot activist, later sneaked out of Russia the same way, per the New York Times, wearing a food delivery suit Shtein had left for her. Along with other Pussy Riot members who got out, they're going to perform in Europe to raise money for Ukrainian refugees.

"I want to be useful in one way or another," Shtein said. She'll now be able to do it without the ankle monitor, and Alyokhina will avoid the criminal charges she was facing in Russia. In response to Putin's threatening rhetoric, pro-government activists had put pictures on the door of her flat calling her a traitor who had sold out the country," she said. "For a long time I aspired to change things from within the country, but the war simply made that impossible," Shtein said. "If I wouldnt be able to continue any of my work in Russia, it didnt make any sense for me to stay, just sitting around doing nothing." (Read more Pussy Riot stories.)
(Newser)  Andy Dick, known in some circles as a comedian, was arrested and charged with felony sexual battery Wednesday for allegedly assaulting another man at an RV park in Orange County, California, per the New York Daily News. The arrest was captured on video by "a fellow RV enthusiast" and livestreamed via YouTube on "Captain Contents RV" channel; it shows Orange County Sheriffs deputies talking to Dick before cuffing him and hauling him away. The videowhich continues for over five hours after the arrest footage and includes graphic, rambling commentarydoes not offer much more in the way of substantive or reliable information. TMZ reports that deputies searched Dicks trailer after he was in custody, and they "also asked to collect the male victims pants as evidence."

Dicks career gained momentum with stints on various sitcoms and talk shows in the 1990s. He is perhaps most recognized for his role on NBCs NewsRadio. His run-ins with law enforcement also date to the late 90s, when he entered rehab after crashing into a utility pole in Hollywood and pleading guilty to possession of cocaine and marijuana. Arrests for indecent exposure, groping, and more drugs soon followed, and he was bagged on felony sexual abuse charges in West Virginia in 2010. The streak continued, with more groping and sexual battery charges involving both men and women in the past decade. TMZ reported last November that Dick was arrested in LA and charged with felony domestic battery after hitting his partner "upside the head with a liquor bottle." (Read more Andy Dick stories.)
(Newser)  In a pre-trial ruling, a federal judge in California has determined that Elon Musk was "inaccurate and reckless" whenout of the blue one summer morning in 2018he tweeted, "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured. Musk had indeed talked to Saudi investors about the idea, but US District Judge Edward Chen said there was "nothing concrete" on which to base such a statement. The Guardian reports that Chens decision "represented a major victory for investors in a lawsuit accusing the worlds richest person of inflating stock prices by making false and misleading statements."

The judge rendered his decision back on April 1, but it was only made public this week. An attorney for disgruntled shareholders said it was a "hugely significant" and rare decision, coming before the jury trial even starts. Per the Guardian, although Chen "granted the shareholders summary judgment on the issue of whether Musk knowingly made false statements," he did not rule on whether or to what extent Musks statements impacted Tesla shares. Musks attorneys are appealing, but as things stand, jurors will only need to decide what damages Musk caused.

Tesla was in a different situation back then, under pressure from negative publicity and short sellers. Musk insisted he was only doing what was best for the company, but the initial tweet caused wild price fluctuations for days, per CleanTechnica reporting at the time; many investors lost billions in the shuffle. While some analysts found Musks tweet bizarre and gave a wink to the 420 reference, othersincluding the SECsaw a blatant attempt at stock manipulation. Musk was investigated for fraud and settled on a $20 million fine and agreed to step down as Tesla chairman, per the Hill, which reported last month on a separate judgment by Chen, saying Musk neednt be bound by a gag order forbidding him to discuss the case publicly before it goes to trial next year. (Read more Elon Musk stories.)
(Newser)  Authorities say they finally have a suspect in the murders of Kylen Schulte and Crystal Turner, who were found dead on Aug. 18 near their Utah campsiteand there's a thin connection between him and the women. The Salt Lake Tribune reports the Grand County Sheriffs Office named the suspect as Adam Pinkusiewicz and said he once worked at the Moab McDonald's where Turner was employed. He had previously been a person of interest in the case, but left the state and died by suicide the month after the bodies were found, reports KUTV. Authorities say he discussed killing two women in Utah with an unnamed person in advance of his death and provided "specific details" of the case that hadn't been made public.

"Critical and newly discovered" evidence, including Pinkusiewicz's 2007 Toyota Yaris, is being analyzed. As for whether he was known to the women, Grand County Sheriff Steven White says, "They both worked at McDonalds. The indications we have is we dont know if they worked shifts together. It doesnt seem like it." The AP adds police are looking into whether Pinkusiewicz was the "creepy" man Schulte told friends they spotted near the campsite shortly before their deaths. Anyone with relevant information should call 435-259-8115. Schulte and Turner wed in April 2021 and lived in Moab-area campgrounds while working in town. They failed to report for work on Aug. 16 and were later found shot to death near their campsite in the La Sal Mountains. (Read more murder stories.)
(Newser)  A nearly $1 billion tentative settlement has been reached in a class-action lawsuit brought by families of victims and survivors of last June's condominium collapse in Surfside, Florida, an attorney said Wednesday. Harley Tropin announced the $997 million settlement during a hearing before Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Michael Hanzman. Still pending final approval, the settlement involves insurance companies, developers of an adjacent building, and other defendants, the AP reports. "I'm shocked by this resultI think it's fantastic," Hanzman said. "This is a recovery that is far in excess of what I had anticipated."

Earlier this year, Hanzman had approved an $83 million settlement to compensate people who suffered economic losses such as condominium units and personal property. A key question from the beginning has been how to allocate money from the property's sale, insurance proceeds, and damages from lawsuits among wrongful death cases and property claims. The 12-story Champlain Towers South condominium collapsed suddenly in the early-morning hours of June 24, almost instantly destroying dozens of individual condo units and burying victims under tons of rubble. Rescuers spent weeks carefully digging through mountains of concrete, first to find survivors and later to recover the remains of those who died. A total of 98 people were killed.

The main lawsuit, filed on behalf of Champlain Towers South victims and family members, contends that work on the adjacent Eighty Seven Park tower damaged and destabilized the Champlain Towers building, which was in dire need of structural repair. Champlain Towers was in the midst of its 40-year structural review when it partially crumbled. The collapse triggered lawsuits from victims, families and condo owners, and prompted state and federal investigations. In December, a Florida grand jury issued a lengthy list of recommendations aimed at preventing another condominium collapse, including earlier and more frequent inspections and better waterproofing.

(Read more Florida condo collapse stories.)
(Newser)  New York City Mayor Eric Adams is afraid of ghosts. Questioned Tuesday about why he doesn't live in the mayor's official residencethe 223-year-old Gracie MansionAdams denied that the place was too cool for him. "I don't care what anyone says, there are ghosts in there, man," he told broadcaster Michael Kay on YES Network after throwing out the first pitch at Tuesday's Yankees game, per the New York Daily News. Kay asked if Adams sees "stuff moving there," to which the mayor replied, "All the time." He was then asked if he hears footsteps. "Listen, they're creeping around," the mayor said.

The discussion follows criticism of Adams' living situation. He was accused of actually living in New Jersey, rather than his Brooklyn apartment, during the mayoral campaign, per the New York Post. He has also faced scrutiny for his travels outside of the city, including to Washington, DC; Los Angeles; Miami; and New Orleans during his four months in office, per Gothamist. "Adams should be at City Hall and Gracie Mansion implementing plans that should have been implemented months ago," former Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani told the Post in a recent interview. But Adams, a Democrat, is not the first person to raise such concerns about the home on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

Chirlane McCray, wife of former Mayor Bill de Blasio, said she heard that the ghost of Elizabeth Walcott-Graciea daughter of original owner Archibald Gracieinhabits the place. "I've never seen her but there are times when doors open and close by themselves, and the floorboards creak as though someone is walking through the rooms," she told Metro in a 2017 interview. Walcott-Gracie died from apoplexy at the residence in 1819, 20 years after it was built, per the Post. Robert Gonyo, co-founder of the Haunted Manhattan tour company, tells the outlet that he'd gladly check out the place on Adams' behalf. (Read more Eric Adams stories.)
(Newser)  After staying neutral during the Cold War and remaining nonaligned for decades afterward, Finland is on the brink of joining NATO. In a joint statement Thursday, Prime Minister Sanna Marin and President Sauli Niinisto said the country needs to apply to join the alliance "without delay," the Guardian reports. "NATO membership would strengthen Finlands security," they said. "As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defense alliance." They said they hope the remaining steps toward applying for membership will be "taken rapidly within the next few days."

Finland shares an 830-mile border with Russia, and Moscow has repeatedly warned Finland and its neighbor Sweden against joining NATO. The New York Times reports that when Niinisto was asked Wednesday whether the move would provoke Russia, he said Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine is to blame. "My response would be that you caused thislook at the mirror," the president said. A Gallup poll this week found that 73% of Finns support joining NATO, up from 20% to 30% in previous years.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday that Finland's steps toward joining NATO were "definitely" a threat to Russia and Moscow's response will depend on "the extent to which military infrastructure moves closer to our borders," Reuters reports. "NATO expansion does not make our continent more stable and secure," Peskov said. Sweden is expected to make its decision on joining the alliance within days. NATO officials say the accession procedure for both countries, which would involve ratification by the legislatures of all 30 member states, could be completed in a matter of weeks, the AP reports. (Read more Finland stories.)
(Newser)  Coinbase, America's largest cryptocurrency exchange, holds around $256 billion in cryptocurrencies and traditional currenciesand it alarmed some users this week when it warned that those holdings could be lost if the company files for bankruptcy. The company said "the crypto assets we hold in custody on behalf of our customers could be subject to bankruptcy proceedings and such customers could be treated as our general unsecured creditors," Business Insider reports. CEO Brian Armstrong later said there was "no risk of bankruptcy," but new SEC rules required Coinbase to disclose the risk to customers, reports Bloomberg.

"We should have updated our retail terms sooner, and we didnt communicate proactively when this risk disclosure was added," Armstrong said. "My deepest apologies." Coinbase has lost more than half its value this week amid a slump in cryptocurrencies, the AP reports. The company's stock fell 43% in the four days leading up to an earnings report Tuesday, and another 26% Wednesday after it disclosed a $430 million net loss in the first quarter of this year. The company's stock, which hit $429 a share after its IPO 13 months ago, closed at $53.72 Wednesday.

Cryptocurrencies have been hit hard this week by investors' retreat from riskier assets and by issues with TerraUSD, a "stablecoin" formerly pegged to the US dollar, Wall Street Journal reports. TerraUSD, formerly the third largest stablecoin, was de-pegged and sank as low as 26 cents after a series of large withdrawals, and Luna, a "sister token" intended to stabilize TerraUSD, plunged by more than 99% Wednesday, per the Journal. Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency, briefly dropped below $26,000 early Thursday, its lowest level since 2020. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told the Senate Banking Committee Tuesday that it's time for a "consistent federal framework" to regulate stablecoins. (Read more cryptocurrency stories.)
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Religious leaders from across Africa have called on world governments to "act with compassion" and ensure that the world's most vulnerable people have access to Covid-19 vaccines, tests, and treatments, as US President Biden convenes world leaders at the Global COVID-19 Summit today (Thursday 12 May).

In a joint People's Vaccine Alliance statement, more than 45 African faith leaders urge politicians to remember that "we are one global family, where our problems are tightly interconnected". They call for "immediate action to address the massive l inequities in the global pandemic response.

Some of the most prominent religious leaders in Africa have added their names to the statement, including the Archbishops of five major African cities; Cape Town in South Africa, Niamey in Niger, Gaborone in Botswana, Freetown in Sierra Leone, and Kumasi in Ghana. They join senior Sheikhs, Mawlanas, Imams, Gambia's first Gambian Bishop, and the Auxiliary Bishop of Khartoum. Leading anti-apartheid figures and Muslim scholars Farid Esack and Shaykh Sa'dullah Khan have also signed the statement

Signatory Thabo Makgoba, the Archbishop of Cape Town, will speak at the summit in a side event with the United States' international religion ambassador Rashad Hussain

The leaders of major faith organizations have joined the call, including the Council of Religions, the Muslim Judicial Council, the All Africa Conference of Churches the Council of Anglican Provinces of Africa, Reconcile International, the Council of Churches in Zambia, CARITAS AFRICA, Ghana Conference of Religions for Peace, The Institute of Islamic Studies, and the Zimbabwe Inter Religious Council.

Signatories highlight that just one in five Africans have received their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine while wealthy countries roll out their third and fourth doses. They urge world leaders "not to see this as just a number, but as a reminder that each statistic represents a human being  who deserves dignity and the ability to thrive in a post-pandemic world."

"As we reflect, we are gladdened by the scientific achievements that enabled the creation of vaccines and therapeutics at a rapid scale", they say. But these tools "must be viewed as a gift for the common good and not be controlled by powerful countries and corporations, much to the detriment of people in lower-income countries."

They call on world leaders to "renew their approach" to COVID-19 vaccines, tests, and treatments, by treating them "not as commodities but as public goods, which all people have the right to access". "We encourage world leaders to unite and stand in solidarity with people living in low-income countries by supporting a People's Vaccine", they say.

That requires "properly financing the global response, sharing the technology and know-how needed to produce [vaccines, tests and treatments], and removing barriers to production like intellectual property rules", they say.

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Bashir Nuckchady Secretary of the Council of Religions, said: "At this time of year, we share with our community and those in need. We live in hope that world leaders might finally begin to take that same approach to the global struggle against COVID-19. To approach COVID-19 with a sense of kinship, not narrow self-interest. To support their friends and neighbors in the Global South in becoming vaccine self-sufficient and having the capacity to protect ourselves from deadly viruses, instead of having depend on charity."

Four times as many people are likely to have died from COVID-19 in lower-income countries compared to wealthy nations. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies have made $1,000 every minute, creating nine new billionaires during the pandemic.
(Newser)  Dr. Jane Goodall has accomplished a lot in her life. But for the first time, at age 88, she's now fronting an underwear campaign. The renowned primatologist appears front and center in a new ad for Australian sustainable clothing brand Boody. Though her clothes remain on in the rainforest setting, she's seen surrounded by half-naked models wearing Boody underwearwhich, like all of Boody's products, are made from Forest Stewardship Council-certified bamboo, per the Guardian. "It's a big job making our world a better place, but getting started? Well, that's as easy as changing your underwear," Goodall says in the ad.

"We couldn't believe it" when Goodall accepted the company's request to appear in the 30-second spot, Boody's co-managing director Elliot Midalia tells the Guardian. "We didn't want to just get any influencer or celebrity" and "Jane was the top of our list." Once she agreed in exchange for an undisclosed fee paid directly to the Jane Goodall Institute, Midalia says the brand quickly "expedited" plans to make a turtleneck, "her signature." Goodall was filmed in the black Boody turtleneck and light-colored sweater against a green screen in London, while the other models posed in Australia.

"She had a laugh about it, made a few jokes about how funny it was that she'd be out there with underwear models around her," says Roy Leibowitz, a creative director on the campaign. In the ad, Goodall refers to Boody as the "official underwear of the entire planet." "Small actions can make a big difference," says James Forbes, CEO of Jane Goodall Institute Australia, per Mumbrella. "Bamboo is an amazing fiber, organically grown, and while it has many benefits, it's not just about the material in your underwear. It's thinking about what other small steps you as an individual can make." (Read more Jane Goodall stories.)
Fairbanks, AK (99707)

Today

Partly cloudy skies this morning will become overcast during the afternoon. High around 50F. Winds NE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Showers this evening becoming less numerous overnight. Low 34F. Winds NE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%.
Fairbanks, AK (99707)

Today

A mix of clouds and sun during the morning will give way to cloudy skies this afternoon. High 51F. Winds NE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Cloudy with a few showers. Low 34F. Winds ENE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%.
Nairobi  The High Court in Eldoret has declined to give bond to Ibrahim Rotich, the chief suspect in the gruesome murder of celebrated Kenyan athlete Agnes Tirop on October 13 last year.

The suspect who was arrested after a dramatic chase that led detectives to Changamwe, Mombasa, had requested bail, but presiding judge Justice Reuben Nyakundi declined, saying his conduct had given the court doubts over his cooperation in the case.

"Bearing in mind that the matter before us is associated with gender-based violence and your conduct as the accused person has made this court to doubt if released on bond you will be available during the proceedings. Even personal circumstances and steps you took after the incident have made this court ask so many questions about your availability if released on bond," Justiced Nyakundi ruled, as queted by Daily Nation.

He further added; "The manner in which you behaved from the beginning makes this court deny you a bond. However, you have a right to request the court to revisit the ruling at a later stage."

The judge further added that the prosection had presented 'overwhelming evidence' linking Rotich to the murder of Tirop, who was until then, his lover.

The case will now be mentioned on June 22.

Tirop's murder at her house in Iten last year elicited huge reaction from all Kenyans and the entire world, with President Uhuru Kenyatta personally directing that the perpetrators of the heinous act should be dealt with accordingly.

The former World Cross Country champion was murdered just a few days after arriving back home from a race, and her mutilated body was found in the bedroom of her house.

It is alleged that she had been in strained relations with Rotich, who was arrested a few days after the murder.
TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

Staff Reporter

Retailers, restaurant owners and small-scale business owners are worried over the rise in Covid-19 numbers during the past two days as they fear a new round of restrictions in the coming days.

The Covid numbers saw a rise last Thursday when the reported new cases stood at 658 against 376 last Wednesday.

Last Friday recorded 680 Covid cases while Saturdays data showed 641 new cases. Yesterday, the number rose to 728.

Speaking to The Daily Tribune, a retail shop owner said that there are worries about an impending fourth wave among the trading community in general.

But the Kingdoms success on the vaccination front is what gives the trading community the hope to move forward confidently. We hope there wont be any lockdowns in the future, at least for one year.

A restaurateur said his business has been gradually improving since last February and hoped there wouldnt be lockdowns or other forms of restrictions in the future.

Our lives will come to a standstill if any restrictions or lockdowns happen in the future. The food industry was the most affected during the pandemic period and it is now on the path of recovery.

The Kingdom has been number one in terms of administering vaccines and precautionary measures. Lets hope the fourth wave doesnt touch the country, he added.

The Daily Tribune earlier reported that five individuals infected with the virus died last month as the number of new cases stabilised since the beginning of April, 2022.

Steep decline

Highlighting the Kingdoms success in the battle against the virus, the number is a steep decline when compared to last February, which saw 46 Covid-19 deaths, the highest monthly death number during the third wave of infection.

Having approved eight vaccines to be administered to the public in its battle against Covid-19 vaccine, the Kingdom now stands fourth along with Botswana, Cambodia, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Paraguay and Vietnam in the matter of giving nod to different anti-Covid vaccines.

India and Mexico, which have approved 10 anti-Covid vaccines top the list. The two countries are followed by Argentina, Nepal, Moldova, Hungary and Ecuador with each of them approving nine different vaccines.

Bahrain became the first country in the world last month to authorise, receive and administer Valnevas Covid-19 vaccine manufactured by the French biotech major.

The Kingdom was one of the first countries to provide access to all FDA approved vacations, with other effective vaccines, such as Sinopharm, also being made available. Elsewhere, most entry restrictions for those arriving in Bahrain have been removed and Bahrain International Airport is in the process of introducing a dedicated medical protocol for COVID-19 cases.

A robust multi-lingual media strategy underpins Bahrains public awareness campaign, which delivers regular pandemic developments, reiterates the necessity of following restrictions, and promotes getting vaccinated.

Efforts praised

Earlier, the Director General of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, praised the efforts of the Kingdom in supporting the organisations role in facing Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

He lauded the Kingdoms remarkable role in curbing the spread of the virus by taking effective preventive measures.

He also praised Bahrains solidarity with the other member states of the organisation in taking comprehensive measures and unifying efforts to quickly find the necessary treatment.

Billionaire Bill Gates, now considered a major public health expert, last week warned that Covid pandemic is far from over, with the worst remaining yet to unfold. Stressing on the need for increasing global surveillance, the Microsoft founder and philanthropist warned of the likelihood of an even more fatal and transmissive variant of Covid, the Financial Times reported.

Gates stated that even though he does not want to sound gloomy, yet the risk of a more virulent variant is more than five per cent.

Risk of pandemic

Were still at risk of this pandemic generating a variant that would be even more transmissive and even more fatal, he was quoted as saying.

Its not likely, I dont want to be a voice of doom and gloom, but its way above a 5 per cent risk that this pandemic, we havent even seen the worst of it, he added. This is not the first time that Gates warned of a potential global threat posed by viruses.

In 2015, he first cautioned publicly that the world was not ready for the inevitable next pandemic and that viruses, not war, pose the greatest risk of global catastrophe. Gates also called for renewed efforts with greater investments into global surveillance of viruses, which has been paused by a number of countries in the wake of decline in Covid cases.

Gates has also written a book on How to Prevent the Next Pandemic. He has urged for the creation of a team of international experts ranging from epidemiologists to computer modellers to quickly spot global health threats and improve coordination between the countries.

According to him, this would cost around $1 billion, which would be managed by WHO. The Kingdoms Health Ministry officials could not be reached for a comment.
TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

Staff Reporter

Bahrain will join other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states with electronic visa waiver status, the Home Office has announced. The move will maintain security and effective border processes ensuring necessary security checks are carried out ahead of travel whilst enabling smooth transit through the UK border for visitors.

An electronic visa waiver allows the holder to travel to the UK without obtaining a visa provided they complete an online waiver for each visit. A small fee will be applied, and it is quicker than applying for a visa as there is no need to provide biometric information (photo and fingerprints), attend a visa application centre or hand in your passport in advance of travel.

In a statement issued to the media, Home Secretary Priti Patel said: This visa waiver for Bahrain and Saudi Arabia will better connect the people of our countries and boost economic prosperity. The electronic visa waiver is a quick, digital alternative to the regular visit visa and ensures all the necessary security checks are carried out in advance of travel.

The visa improvements announced today will provide greater security for our citizens while making it easier and cheaper for visitors from the Gulf to travel here for leisure and business. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said: This visa waiver will strengthen our relationships with Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, making it easier for visitors from the Gulf to come to the UK.

Our friendships with both countries are of great importance, built on shared priorities such as trade, investment and security. Tourism in the UK contributes immensely to the economy, there was a total expenditure of British Pound 22.9 billion (2019 figures) and 37.9 million tourists.

The average spend per visit is British Pound 604 with an average length stay of seven nights. Although the UK is a small country, it still accounts for 3.8 percent of global tourism receipts and is the fifth top tourism earner in 2019.

According to experts, the UK travel industry must improve its image in order to lure back a new wave of tourists as well as travel industry staff following Brexit. Advantage Travel Partnership chief executive Julia Lo Bue Said called on the government to help the industry address its current staffing crisis through investment in graduate programmes and apprenticeships in the sector.

She admitted the industry had an image issue but stressed: We have an opportunity to get the best talent. We have got great careers. We need to grow that profile and attract that talent. This is a long-term issue. She called on the government to help the industry address its current staffing crisis through investment in graduate programmes and apprenticeships in the sector.
Bahrain condemns killing of Palestinian-American journalist while on duty

Bahrain condemns killing of Palestinian-American journalist while on duty

TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

Bahrain strongly condemned the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, which took place near the Jenin refugee camp in the Palestinian territories while she was on duty.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it is a violation of the rules and principles of the international humanitarian law.

A second journalist, Ali Al Samudi, was also shot and is in a stable condition.
TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

The Gulf Hotel and Vatel Bahrain awarded 47 of its students who participated in the Formula 1 Gulf Air Bahrain Grand Prix 2022 as part of their practical application learning.

The students were exposed to a global event that allows them to conduct hospitality-related tasks and get trained on how to cater to international guests.

Shaikh Khaled bin Khalifa Al Khalifa, General Director of Vatel Bahrain thanked the organizers for trusting and providing this opportunity to their students, noting that the opportunity had a positive impact on both themselves as well as for Vatel.

We are delighted to have this unique opportunity for our students. Their active participation in important events such as this showcases the competencies of Vatel students at a global level, as Formula 1 is organized by the worlds largest international companies, he said.

"At Vatel Bahrain, we aim to make Bahrain a centre for training in the field of hospitality and tourism in the Middle East, and turn it into one of the most important Vatel campuses for hospitality around the world."

The driving force behind the decision to involve Vatel students in this important event was based on our trust in the students and Vatel Bahrains capabilities and skills to handle this international event, Charbel Hanna, Deputy General Manager at the Gulf Hotel said.

This was a great opportunity to hone their skills for their international management careers. With the assistance of Vatels students, the 2022 Bahrain Grand Prix was the most successful in history, and I would like to thank them all.
TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

Bahrain is implementing initiatives related to the labour market within the Economic Recovery Plan. This was emphasised by Labour and Social Development Minister Jameel bin Mohammed Ali Humaidan, who is also Labour Market Regulatory Authority (LMRA) Board of Directors Chairman.

He held a meeting yesterday with a delegation from the advisory mission of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), led by Assistant Director of the Middle East and Central Asia Department at IMF, Asmaa El-Ganainy. The minister highlighted the governments efforts to maintain the stability of the labour market and mitigate the impacts of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

He also highlighted the kingdoms efforts to bridge the skill gap between the outputs of education and training and the needs of the labour market, in addition to the positive social effects of the insurance against unemployment system and the initiatives implemented by the government to raise the level of womens participation in the labour market.

Humaidan also shed light on the initiatives of the LMRA, especially those related to preserving workers rights, the freedom of movement of the workforce, the Wages Protection System and combatting trafficking in persons, in order to highlight the advanced civilised image of the Kingdom during the prosperous era of His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa.
Agencies | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

The Transportation and Telecommunication Ministry said that Bahrain has a strong digital infrastructure that supports the growth of the digital economy within the governments priorities and vision, which was translated in the Fifth National Telecommunications Plan.



The ministry noted that the Kingdom is one of the first countries to achieve comprehensive coverage of 5G services with high download speeds exceeding 2 Gbit/s, to ensure that the majority of consumers in Bahrain benefit from access to 5G networks across the country.



Minister Kamal bin Ahmed Mohammed highlighted that there are already many necessary factors to achieve the government's vision regarding fifth generation services.



The Kingdom has succeeded in attracting investments in the telecommunications and information technology sector and witnessed the entry of major content companies and technology service providers.



The volume of investments in the telecommunications sector amounted to BD72.8 million during 2020, and the total investments amounted to BD787 million in the period between 2010 to 2020, and 313 million Bahraini dinars in the period between 2016 to 2020, Kamal said.
A Facebook post claims that experts believe a man who travelled to Japan using a fake passport was from a parallel universe.

This is not true. While there are records of a man attempting to enter Japan using a passport from a non-existent country, he did not vanish from a secure room, as the post claims. There is no reason to think he came from a parallel universe, and we can find no experts saying he did.

The story of the man from Taured has also previously been debunked by the US fact checker Snopes.

The Facebook post, which was shared by an account called Alien UFO Sightings, claims that in 1954 a man arrived at Tokyo airport with a passport from a country called Taured, which does not exist.

This story appears to be based on a real case involving a man named John Allen K. Zegrus, who was arrested after entering Japan using a fake passport.

The case in question was mentioned in the House of Commons as part of a debate on border control measures in 1960. During the debate, Robert Mathew MP claimed that Mr Zegrus was facing prosecution in Japan after attempting to enter the country using a passport in a language unknown, which was stated to have been issued in Tamanrosset the capital of the independent sovereign State of Tuarid.

Despite neither Tamanrosset nor Tuarid being real places, Mr. Zegrus had successfully used his passport to travel the world without hindrance, before eventually being arrested by Japanese authorities, according to Mr Mathew .

Two weeks after Mr Mathew mentioned Mr Zegrus, an article in Canadian newspaper The Province also reported on the story with further details, writing: John claimed to be a naturalized Ethiopian and an intelligence agent for Colonel Nasser. The passport was stamped as issued at Tamanrasset, the capital of Tuared south of the Sahara. Any places so romantically named ought to exist, but they dont. John Allen Kuchar Zegrus invented them. ...continue reading
The Japanese government is considering exempting certain inbound travelers from the COVID-19 test now required at ports of entry, starting as early as June, Nikkei has learned.

The plans under consideration include exempting those who have received a third dose of a coronavirus vaccine or tested negative in pre-departure testing. The infection rate in the country of origin will also be taken into account. Currently, all travelers arriving in Japan must undergo COVID-19 tests.

"As for measures at borders from June, we're reassessing our testing rules and quarantine requests," Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno told a press conference Wednesday. "We'll make appropriate decisions based on the situation at home and abroad and control measures taken by other countries," he said.

The government will make a final decision based on Japan's infection trends following the Golden Week holiday, which ended Sunday.
Hong Kong. File photo

The Group of Seven (G7) has repeatedly issued statements on Hong Kong-related affairs, each time with absurd lines and deliberately trampling on the basic norms of international law and international relations. As had been anticipated, the G7 foreign ministers and EU high representative on Monday issued a statement on the election of the sixth-term chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), held the day before, where they attacked and smeared Hong Kong with such rhetoric as if they were "legally illiterate." This sanctimonious attitude means nothing more than confusing black and white and perplexing people.

When it comes to democracy, the G7's rhetoric cannot hold water. The comprehensive implementation of Hong Kong's new electoral system and the continuous optimization and improvement of Hong Kong's democratic development is more than sufficient to discourage the hostile forces behind the G7. Through their agents in Hong Kong, they are determined to engage in attacks of "pan-politicization" and advocate fake democracy with rampant violence, in a bid to achieve the vicious purpose of "disrupting Hong Kong and deterring China." However, the reality is that genuine democracy, which conforms to Hong Kong's reality and implements the principle of "patriots governing Hong Kong," is widely welcomed by all sectors of Hong Kong society. All Chinese people, including Hong Kong compatriots, have long seen through the hypocrisy of the double standards those hostile forces adopt on democracy.

It should be noted that the hostile forces against China behind the G7 not only hold a deep-rooted prejudice on the Hong Kong-related affairs, but also attempt to undermine China's development and stability. The rampant riots and violence in Hong Kong in 2019 used to lift up these forces. They took the side of the mob, sinisterly anticipating in more and larger-scale chaos. They did not care that the general public in Hong Kong was suffering from the turmoil. Just like the violent rioters, these forces are also losers. With the implementation of the National Security Law for Hong Kong and the adoption of the new electoral reform, it is even more inevitable that they will lose.

The election of Hong Kong chief executive is the last of the three important elections after the improvement of the SAR electoral system. It marked that the new electoral system has taken root in the city and the power of "patriots governing Hong Kong" has grown in strength. To free Hong Kong from pointless political disputes, social internal frictions, chaos and violence is what the people want.

Today's Hong Kong is witnessing a good social atmosphere of unity and progress. It indicates that the general public wholeheartedly supports "patriots governing Hong Kong" and expects the steady implementation of "one country, two systems." A stable political environment is, of course, the fundamental guarantee of the legitimate rights and long-term interests of the various business entities from G7 countries operating in Hong Kong. Regrettably, some G7 politicians have tried to curb Hong Kong's development space in disregard of the facts. The current situation in Hong Kong is exactly the scene that the politicians of the G7 do not want to see but are unable to prevent. Now, they can do nothing but hopelessly whimper with their statements.
Nairobi  Nairobi Gubernatorial aspirant Johnson Sakaja says he will roll out a school-feeding program in Nairobi county if elected Governor.

Sakaja said the implementation of the school feeding program is part of his manifesto.

He has pledged to roll out the programme in over 200 public primary schools, so as to ensure that no child missed school due to lack of food.

Deputy President William Ruto has endorsed the proposal by the Nairobi Senator saying it will help boost enrollments.

Ruto said that if the Kenya Kwanza team takes over power in the August election, his government will fully support the project implementation.

"It is doable for all our children not to have to go out looking for lunch or even go without food by implementing this programme across Kenya," DP Ruto said.

Ruto was speaking at Mukarara Primary school in Waithaka area, Nairobi where a school feeding programme is being implemented by a non-governmental organization Food4Education.
The commissioner said the decision followed an audit of buildings in the area.

The Lagos State Government has ordered the immediate stoppage of approval for structures above three floors in Ebute-Metta East and West.

The Commissioner for Physical Planning and Urban Development, Idris Salako, said this in a statement on Wednesday in Lagos.

Mr Salako said the decision followed an audit of buildings in the area.

He said the low-lying nature of Ebute-Metta and its negative impact on some of the buildings most of which showed serious defects made it mandatory for the government to apply special measures to save lives and property.

"The soil and topography, the low water level and effects, as well as the inability of structures in this area to bear loads above three floors, were considered in arriving at this decision," Mr Salako said.

"The Lagos State Physical Planning Permit Authority ( LASPPPA) has been directed to henceforth stop taking applications for approval above three floors in the area.

"To guarantee the safety of lives and property by ensuring that we put a halt to lives being cut short by incidents of building collapse, the government has been compelled to invoke the relevant sections of the Lagos State Urban and Regional Planning and Development Law 2019, as amended, to address the crisis," Mr Salako said.

He called for the understanding of stakeholders, stressing the decision is in the best interest of the state.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the state has recorded three incidents of building collapse across the Yaba, Ebute-Metta, and Okota areas this year, with 15 lives lost.

(NAN)
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HONG KONG (AP)  Cardinal Joseph Zen, the 90-year-old Catholic cleric arrested by Hong Kong police on national security charges, has long been a fiery critic of Beijing's control of religion and political monopoly, along with efforts by the Vatican to reach a working arrangement with the ruling Communist Party.

Zen left a police station on bail Wednesday night following his arrest alongside other former trustees of the 612 Humanitarian Support Fund, which provides assistance to people arrested during 2019 anti-government protests. The former Hong Kong archbishop has not yet commented on his arrest.

A police statement said the former trustees were suspected of endangering national security by making requests of foreign countries or overseas agencies and calling for sanctions against Hong Kong.

Widely condemned abroad, the arrests further a campaign to quash all forms of dissent in the city under a sweeping national security law passed in 2020, a year after authorities subdued pro-democracy protests that challenged China's rule over Hong Kong.

The crackdown is increasingly penetrating into the citys long-respected economic, religious and educational institutions, along with non-governmental organizations, many of which have closed down their Hong Kong operations. The city was promised that it could keep freedoms of speech, assembly and judicial independence when it was handed over from Britain to China in 1997, but critics say Beijing has reneged on its guarantees.

China's Foreign Ministry fired back at the criticism, with spokesperson Zhao Lijian saying, We are firmly opposed to any act that denigrates the rule of law in Hong Kong and interferes in Hong Kong affairs."

Hong Kong is a law-based society, where no organization or individual is above the law, and all illegal acts will be punished by law," Zhao told reporters at a daily briefing.

Separately, the ministry's office in Hong Kong issued a statement saying that "safeguarding national security is justified, foreign interference is purely in vain."

Zen had once sought to build bridges with China's Communist Party-controlled Catholic church by visiting Beijing-approved seminaries in mainland China. But he also said those experiences showed him the lack of religious freedom in China and fed a deep distrust of the officially atheist ruling party.

China broke off relations with the Holy See in 1951 after the party took power and established its own church. Foreign priests were expelled and many of their Chinese colleagues spent decades in prison or labor camps.

In recent years, the Vatican, particularly under Pope Francis, has been eager to reach a deal with the Chinese government and unite the churches.

Zen was especially scathing of attempts by some in the Vatican to reach an arrangement with the party on the appointment of bishops on the mainland, a power traditionally wielded by the Holy See which Beijing claims for itself.

In 2018, he warned that a deal between the Vatican and China that cedes too much authority to Beijing would place the countrys Catholic followers in a big birdcage.

The Communist government just wants the church to surrender, because they want complete control, not only of the Catholic Church but all the religions, Zen said at the time.

A tacit agreement was reportedly reached in 2018 whereby China submitted names to the Vatican for approval, but that has had little perceptible impact on relations between the sides. Zen accused the Holy See of selling out underground Catholics who have remained loyal to the Vatican.

Zen, a frequent blogger, posted about making a desperate journey to Rome in a personal effort to prevent an underground bishop from being replaced by an excommunicated one favored by Beijing.

The Vatican spokesman, Matteo Bruni, said Wednesday the Holy See learned with concern the news of the arrest of Cardinal Zen and is following the evolution of the situation with extreme attention.

The Hong Kong Catholic Diocese also issued a statement Thursday saying it was extremely concerned" about Zen's condition and safety.

We have always upheld the rule of law. We trust that in the future we will continue enjoying religious freedom in Hong Kong under the Basic Law," it said, referring to the city's mini-constitution.

Zen has outsized political clout in a city where Christians are a minority but many hold elite positions, particularly in government and education.

Born into a Catholic family in Shanghai in 1932, Zen left for Hong Kong, then a British colony, in 1948, a year before the Communist takeover of the mainland.

In 1989, when Zen and others in Hong Kong watched student-led pro-democracy protests unfold in China before a brutal military crackdown in Beijings Tiananmen Square left many dead.

He adopted an activist role after he was appointed Hong Kongs junior bishop in 1996, the year before Britain handed control of the city to Beijing. He frequently drew the wrath of Chinas Communist leaders, who called him a Vatican agent.

Zen backed the citys pro-democracy movement and was an outspoken critic of proposed anti-subversion legislation that officials were forced to shelve. He went on a three-day hunger strike to protest a government plan to curtail the influence of churches in publicly funded schools.

The junior bishop took over the Hong Kong diocese in 2002 and Pope Benedict XVI named him a cardinal in 2006, which he said signaled the popes focus on China. Zen retired from the Hong Kong post in 2009.

Also arrested Wednesday was singer-actress Denise Ho, who has become outspoken on a range of issues from the pro-democracy movement to LGBTQ rights.

Ho, a Canadian citizen, had earlier been banned in mainland China and lost her commercial endorsements after publicly supporting a 2014 push for expanded democratic rights known as the Umbrella Movement.

Ho was earlier arrested in December after police raided an independent online news site whose board she had formerly sat on, and charged her with conspiracy to publish a seditious publication.

___

Associated Press writer Kelvin Chan in London contributed to this report.
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NEW YORK (AP)  When his cellphone and computer accessories business was hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, Alvaro started thinking about leaving Colombia for the U.S.

The 55-year-old, who said he also faced discrimination in Colombia for his sexual orientation, learned this year that Mexico doesn't require visas for Colombians. That meant he could easily fly to the U.S. border.

I started hearing that one could ask for political asylum at the border, said Alvaro, who insisted that his last name not be published due to his legal status.

Alvaro joined tens of thousands of Colombians fleeing one of Latin Americas most populous countries on a migration route that has rarely been used  until now.

Colombians were stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border more than 15,000 times in March, up nearly 60% from February and nearly 100-fold over last year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures. Many fly to Mexico City or Cancun and take a bus or another plane to border towns before crossing into the U.S.

Years ago, Colombians came to the U.S. on visas and later asked for asylum, said Andres Daza, an attorney who works with the Colombian consulate in Miami.

But the Biden administration is pressing Mexico to get stricter. In April, Mexico imposed online registration for Colombians, demanding travel itineraries, hotel reservations in Mexico and departure tickets.

Alvaro found a way around the rules. A smuggler reserved him a hotel room and he flew to Mexico City. From there, he flew to Mexicali, across the border from Calexico, California. He climbed a border wall using a shaky ladder and surrendered to border agents. After being detained a few days, he eventually went to Miami, where he has nephews.

Over the last year, Mexico introduced travel restrictions for three other South American countries from which large numbers of immigrants were coming to the U.S., with immediate results. U.S. authorities stopped Brazilians 65% fewer times in January, the month after Mexico started requiring visas. Ecuadorians were stopped 95% fewer times in October, a month after visa requirements. Venezuelans were stopped 88% fewer times in February, after visa requirements began Jan. 21.

A similar dynamic may be playing out with Colombians.

If you look at the high numbers of Venezuelans that reached Mexico in December, before the visa restrictions went in January, it could suggest that people were told  its a role that smuggling organizations and others play  Now its your chance, come now, said Maureen Meyer, vice president of programs at The Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group.

Colombians have little reason to worry. Along with Peru and Chile, Colombia and Mexico form the Pacific Alliance economic bloc. All four countries agree to not require visas of each other.

Colombians have largely avoided expulsions the U.S. has carried out under pandemic-related powers to deny migrants a chance to seek asylum. The U.S. has expelled immigrants more than 1.8 million times using Title 42 authority, which was named for a public health law and is due to expire May 23.

Title 42 has been applied unevenly across nationalities, due to costs, diplomatic relations and other considerations. In March, only 303, or 2% of stops, resulted in expulsion for Colombians, according to CBP. The agency said in a statement that its ability to expel migrants under Title 42 may be limited for several reasons, including Mexicos ability and capacity to receive those individuals."

Mexico has agreed to take migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Cuba and Nicaragua.

Several hundred Colombians have been expelled under Title 42 authority since the U.S. ramped up flights there in March, officials said. Witness at the Border, an advocacy group that tracks removal flights, tallied 28 to Colombia in March and April, up from 12 in the previous 10 months.

Seated on a metal folding chair in a crowded waiting room at the Colombian consulate in New York, Darwin Hincapie said he left Colombia and flew to Cancun after being extorted by gangs. Hincapie listened to music on his headphones while hoping to get a Colombian passport. U.S. border agents took his after he crossed the border in November with a smuggler.

There is quality of life here I dont have that in Colombia, said the 27-year-old, who now lives in Queens.

The pandemic left many businesses in Colombia bankrupt. The country saw massive protests last year over proposed income tax hikes.

In rural areas, community leaders face threats from rebel groups and drug cartels fighting over territory abandoned after the country's largest rebel movement, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, also known as FARC, made peace with the government in 2016.

Carmen Salavarrieta, whose nonprofit group helps immigrants obtain local IDs and provides English classes in New Jersey, said Angels for Action is seeing a record number of Colombians seeking help.

Many are professionals, but they come through the border, by foot. Can you believe it? she said, adding that some come to her organization for food and clothes.

Jaime Rojas and his wife, Nataly Chaparro, are among professionals who crossed on foot. They left Bogota with their two kids after Rojas lost his job as an information systems technician and Chaparro lost hers as an English teacher. They also faced retaliation from gangs because of their volunteer work trying to steer young people away from drugs.

The family now lives in New Jersey. The husband and wife work 10 to 12 hours a day sorting legumes and packaging salads at a wholesale food manufacturer.

This has been hard work," Chaparro, 36, said, "but we are better off here."

_____

Salomon reported from Miami. Associated Press reporter Manuel Rueda contributed to this report from Bogota.
DENVER (AP)  Colorados Democratic-led Legislature capped its 2022 session Wednesday by passing a bill designed to confront the fentanyl crisis by giving prosecutors more room to pursue felony convictions while providing substantial support and treatment services.

With fentanyl overdose deaths skyrocketing nationwide, lawmakers struggled for weeks to fashion a bill lowering the fentanyl possession threshold for felony charges while bolstering treatment options for witting and unwitting users. Negotiations focused on whether prosecutors must prove that defendants knowingly possessed fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid that's frequently mixed with other drugs without users' knowledge, to pursue felony charges.

In the end, lawmakers adopted language allowing some defendants a way to present evidence at trial that they didn't know they possessed a substance containing fentanyl in hopes of reducing felony charges to misdemeanors. Opponents said that language will frustrate prosecutors' pursuit of felony convictions.

The bill strengthens criminal penalties for fentanyl dealers and creates a prevention campaign, among other initiatives aimed at attacking the crisis outside the criminal justice system. Gov. Jared Polis immediately applauded passage of the bill.

Polis and fellow Democrats had pledged at the start of the four-month session to tackle rising crime and soaring inflation  key issues highlighted by minority Republicans heading into this years midterm elections.

A number of crime-related measures and bills to lower fees on services for residents and businesses passed the Statehouse earlier in the session. Lawmakers also prioritized bills to spend nearly $2.6 billion in federal pandemic aid for Colorado at the risk of losing it.

The session was marked by landmark passage of a law enshrining the right to abortion in state statute, another expanding pre-school education and another expediting constitutionally mandated tax refunds to residents this year instead of next. But the fentanyl effort and other legislation had been delayed by minority Republicans frustrated with Democrats' plans to speed through dozens of late-session bills, The Colorado Sun reports.

The impasse was resolved following a 20-hour session that ended Tuesday in which Democrats offered key concessions, including modifying the scope of a bill to grant collective bargaining rights to thousands of county public employees. The Colorado Municipal League strongly opposed the bill, citing its potential cost to localities.

Lawmakers passed a bill to enhance security for Colorado's top elections official and other statewide office-holders in the wake of increasing threats against public servants. Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a debunker of fraudulent claims that the 2020 election was stolen from then-President Donald Trump, has received thousands of threats since that election.

Legislators also passed an elections security bill, backed by the state county clerks association, to tighten procedures and training for county employees with access to voting equipment. It was inspired by allegations that Mesa County's Republican Clerk Tina Peters played a role in stealing election data from that county's voting machines.

Peters, a candidate this year for secretary of state, denies the allegations. The bill was fiercely opposed by Republicans, who successfully deleted a provision, on free-speech grounds, that would have banned elections officials from spreading disinformation about elections.

Lawmakers passed a bill Tuesday to pay $600 million of Colorado's $1 billion debt to the federal government after its unemployment trust fund was exhausted during the coronavirus pandemic. Republicans unsuccessfully sought to pay the entire amount, mindful of the increased cost to employers who pay into the fund and, as with other Democratic spending, warning that Colorado's record $36.4 billion budget for the coming fiscal year is a one-time bonanza fed by federal pandemic aid.

Following December's Boulder County wildfire that destroyed more than 1,000 homes and businesses, lawmakers passed several bills boosting the states firefighting resources and mitigation planning for fires that, owing to climate change and the Wests megadrought, have become a year-round threat in Colorado.

Senate Democrats on Wednesday abandoned a last-minute proposal, backed by Polis, to pursue tougher statewide building codes for urban areas abutting wildland to deal with that threat. Republicans, long defenders of local control by municipalities, objected to the surprise proposal being added to fire mitigation legislation.

___

This story has been updated to correct that lawmakers passed a bill tightening security surrounding elections equipment. Another bill to bolster security for Colorado's top elections official also passed.
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WASHINGTON (AP)  The Supreme Courts nine justices met in private Thursday for the first time since the leak of a draft opinion that would overrule Roe v. Wade and sharply curtail abortion rights in roughly half the states.

The court offered no word on what was discussed in the gathering in the justices' private, wood-paneled conference room, other than to indicate at least one decision will be announced Monday.

By custom, no one aside from the justices attended and the most junior among them, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, was responsible for taking notes.

The abortion case is among 37 unresolved cases that were argued in the fall, winter and spring. The justices typically issue all their decisions by early summer.

Thursdays conference came at an especially fraught moment, with the future of abortion rights at stake and an investigation underway to try to find the source of the leak.

Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the draft opinion, dodged a question about the court's mood during a virtual question-and-answer session Thursday night with students at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University.

The court right now, we had our conference this morning, were doing our work," Alito said, according to The Washington Post. "Were taking new cases, were headed toward the end of the term, which is always a frenetic time as we get our opinions out.

Chief Justice John Roberts last week confirmed the authenticity of the opinion, revealed by Politico, in ordering the court's marshal to undertake an investigation.

Roberts stressed that the draft, written and circulated in February, may not be the court's final word. Supreme Court decisions are not final until they are formally issued and the outcomes in some cases changed between the justices initial votes shortly after arguments and the official announcement of the decisions.

That's true of a major abortion ruling from 1992 that now is threatened, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, when Justice Anthony Kennedy initially indicated he would be part of a majority to reverse Roe but later was among five justices who affirmed the basic right of a woman to choose abortion that the court first laid out in roe in 1973.

Kennedy met privately with Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and David Souter to craft a joint opinion, with no hint to the public or even to other justices about what was going on.

I think its tradition and decorum that everyone corresponds in writing about things that are in circulation, said Megan Wold, a former law clerk to Alito. But at the same time, theres nothing to prevent a justice from picking up the phone to call, from visiting someone else in chambers.

A major shift in the current abortion case seems less likely, at least partly because of the leak, abortion law experts and people on both sides of the issue said.

I think the broad contours are very unlikely to change. To the extent the leak matters, it will make broad changes unlikely, said Mary Ziegler, a scholar of the history of abortion at the Florida State University law school.

Sherif Gergis, a University of Notre Dame law professor who once was a law clerk for Alito, agreed. Ill be surprised if it changes very much, Gergis said.

It's not clear who leaked the opinion, or for what purpose. But Alito's writing means that there were at least five votes in December to overrule Roe and Casey, just after the court heard arguments over a Mississippi law that would ban abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Based on their questions at arguments, Justice Clarence Thomas and former President Donald Trump's three appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Barrett, seemed most likely to join Alito.

Roberts appeared the most inclined among the conservatives to avoid reaching a decision to overrule the landmark abortion rulings, but his questions suggested that he would at the very least vote to uphold the Mississippi law. Even that outcome would dramatically undermine abortion rights and invite states to adopt increasingly stricter limits.

If Roberts, who often prefers incremental steps in an effort to preserve the court's legitimacy, wanted to prevent the court from overruling Roe and Casey, he'd need to pick up the vote of just one other colleague. That would be enough to deprive Alito of a majority.

The liberal justices, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, are expected to dissent from either outcome. But no dissent, separate opinion from Roberts, or even a revised draft majority opinion has been circulated among the justices, Politico reported.

Majority opinions often change in response to friendly suggestions and barbed criticisms. The justices consider the internal back-and-forth a crucial part of their work.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remarked that pointed criticism from her friend and ideological opposite, Justice Antonin Scalia, made her opinions better. Scalia died in 2016; Ginsburg, four years later.

The lack of any other opinions surprised some former law clerks to the justices, though Wold said it's also true that bigger, harder cases traditionally take more time.

While there was no word whether the leak was discussed Thursday, several former clerks said they thought it would be.

I would be shocked if it doesnt come up, Wold said ahead of the meeting, adding that, given what has happened, the court would probably take additional precautions with drafts circulating in the future, including limiting who has access to them.

Kent Greenfield, a Boston College law professor who spent a year as a clerk to Souter, also speculated in advance that the leak would be on the table Thursday. Roberts is in a complete bind. He has to address it, but it doesn't strike me that he has many options, Greenfield said.

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This story has been corrected to show that Kent Greenfield is a professor at Boston College, not Boston University.
BOSTON (AP)  Bill Cosby was released from prison when his conviction that he drugged and assaulted a woman was overturned. Quarterback Deshaun Watson landed a record-setting $230 million contract, despite an investigation into allegations he assaulted 22 women. Celebrity chef Mario Batali was acquitted this week on just the second day of his sexual assault trial in Boston.

Nearly five years into the #MeToo era, former prosecutors, legal experts and victims advocates say prosecuting sexual misconduct cases has proven to be no easier than before the reckoning that ignited a firestorm of accusations against powerful, seemingly untouchable men.

Cases such as Batali's, if nothing else, reinforce how the criminal justice system remains an extremely imperfect tool for addressing the needs of survivors, said Emily Martin, a vice president at the National Womens Law Center, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group.

Failure to get a criminal conviction doesnt mean that abuse didnt happen or that it was okay, she said. It will often be extremely hard to prove sexual misconduct beyond a reasonable doubt, especially given the gender stereotypes that lead many people to be especially distrusting when women share their experiences of sexual assault.

Suffolk County Assistant District Attorney Ian Polumbaum, who helped prosecute Batali, declined to comment specifically about the case Wednesday but said sexual assault cases are among the most challenging to prosecute.

Sexual assault survivors are still trusted less than any other kind of crime victim, he said. Thats the perception were always fighting. Part of it is public attitudes, part of it is the private nature of the crime in most cases.

Accusing a person of wealth or stature only adds to the challenge because of the heightened public attention and the increased scrutiny of the victims alleged motives, Polumbaum said.

Were not afraid to bring the tough cases if theyre supported by evidence, he added. And we hope that survivors are not deterred from coming forward, either.

Batali's case also reinforces how crucial the credibility of the accuser is in a misconduct case, especially when theres scant additional evidence or witnesses to support the claims, says Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor in California who is now a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

The former Food Network personality Batali, 61, was accused of aggressively kissing and groping a woman while taking a selfie at a bar in 2017. Boston prosecutors largely relied on photos taken at the bar that night and the testimony of the now 32-year-old software company worker who accused him of the misconduct.

But Batalis lawyers honed in on the womans pending civil suit against Batali, which seeks more than $50,000 in damages, as well as her recent admission that shed tried to get out of jury duty in another criminal case by claiming to be clairvoyant and, in a separate incident, faked lease documents just to get out of paying a $200 gym fee.

These cases are never going to be easy, Levenson said. But even in the #MeToo era, you need credible victims.

Levenson hopes the Batali verdict serves as a cautionary reminder to abuse survivors that they will always be held to a higher standard, especially in high profile cases.

Theres more temptation in these cases to go off course, and by doing so, you undercut the credibility of your own case, Levenson said. The whole celebrity nature of it leads victims to do things like offer to sell their story, make demands for money or somehow sensationalize what occurred."

But Stewart Ryan, a former assistant district attorney in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, who helped prosecute Cosby, argued a sexual abuse survivor also seeking damages in a civil lawsuit should be viewed no differently than someone who was hit by a drunk driver suing the defendant while they face criminal charges.

He also stressed the rate of false reports of sexual assault are minute compared to the far greater percentage of survivors who never report an attack at all.

One reason, unfortunately, is the sort of tactics employed here, questioning the motives of a survivor with questions wholly unrelated to whether or not a sexual assault in fact occurred, Ryan said of the Batali defense strategy.

The Batali acquittal parallels another high-profile #MeToo case in Massachusetts that fell apart over issues involving the accuser.

In 2019, prosecutors were forced to drop indecent assault and battery charges against actor Kevin Spacey after his teen accuser refused to testify to being groped by the House of Cards star while working as a busboy at a Nantucket bar.

Meanwhile, actor Cuba Gooding Jr. is poised to avoid jail time after pleading guilty last month to forcibly kissing a worker at a New York City nightclub in 2018.

Even disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinsteins watershed #MeToo conviction in 2020 could be in doubt, with a New York court expected to rule soon on his appeal.

Sometimes people think since the Weinstein trial and conviction that we are in a different time, said Michelle Simpson Tuegel, a Dallas-based attorney who has represented gymnasts abused by former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar and other victims.

People are definitely more aware and survivors are more supported," she said. "But by no means are we seeing the level of accountability, especially for people who are super wealthy, very powerful, and who are known to the public.

___

Associated Press reporters Maryclaire Dale in Philadelphia, Michael Sisak in New York and Alanna Durkin Richer in Boston contributed to this story.
BETHEL  A worker was flown to Yale New Haven Hospital in serious condition Wednesday afternoon after a trench collapse left him buried up to his chin in dirt, officials said.

Bethels Stony Hill Fire Department said in a statement first responders from throughout the area helped to free the man, including digging him out by hand at one point.
REDDING  A Redding man accused of murdering his wife just over two years ago is scheduled to appear in a Danbury court next month.

Updated court records show Richard Commaille, 73, is scheduled to appear in a remote hearing scheduled for 10 a.m. on June 27 at Superior Court in Danbury.

Commaille, a retired physician, turned himself in on June 6, 2020 after being charged with murder. In June 2021 he pled not-guilty to charges of murder.

The arrest came just over two months after he called 911 to report that his wife, Nanci Commaille, had shot herself.

Responding officers and investigators would find inconsistencies in the retired physician assistant's account of what had transpired at the couples Top Ledge home on April 6, 2020. In May, the states Office of the Chief Medical examiner listed, the cause and manner of the death of the victim as homicide, shot by another.

According to the warrant, officers from the Redding Police Department arrived to find the victim sitting at her desk in the couples bedroom dead from a gunshot wound. Between 10 and 15 minutes after the initial 911 call, a responding officer on the scene reported feeling, that the victims skin was cold to the touch, with a pistol found lying on the floor several feet away to the victims left.

With help from the Connecticut State Police Western District Major Crime unit, the arrest warrant describes how investigators found the bullets entrance wound on the right side of the victims head, but could not identify any blood like substance on the victims left or right hand.

In the weeks that followed, DNA tests performed on a jacket recovered from the home and belonging to Commaille found a blood like substance on its sleeve to be the victims blood. Further testing allegedly revealed, gunshot residue particles present on both hands of the accused.

Commaille allegedly told police his wife had been drinking excessively for the past 10 years and that she would talk about fatally shooting herself when she was inebriated, according to the arrest warrant, but his wifes primary care physician subsequently told police she had been drinking excessively but said he did not believe she had suicidal thoughts.

Commailles attorney declined to comment on the case. The remote hearing scheduled for next month had been set for Thursday, but a continuance was granted to allow state prosecutors and the defense more time to prepare for the case.
"Those who fought from the Biafran side have been paid. Why were they paid and they left us unpaid?"

Some members of the First Intake Able Voluntary Retired or Discharged 10 or More Years in Military Service on Wednesday in Ibadan, protested their 44 years of unpaid pensions.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the group led by their National Coordinator, Babawande Philips, took to the streets of Ibadan, the Oyo state capital, with placards bearing various inscriptions.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that among some of the inscriptions on their placards were '44 years of unpaid pensions to the Nigeria Civil War Veterans' and 'We are dying in silence.'

Mr Philips, a retired corporal, wondered why their members have continued to suffer in the last 44 years when those who rebelled against the country had been paid.

"We have been so much deprived of our pensions for the past 44 years. They have denied us our pensions. We laid our lives for the unity of this nation.

"I wonder why they are treating us like this. We want the whole nation to know that we are being cheated.

"Those who fought from the Biafran side have been paid. Why were they paid and they left us unpaid? We that laid our lives for the unity of this nation," he said.

He faulted the recent claim that they were not qualified because their service was less than 15 years, saying they wanted to use Decree 102 against them.

The coordinator said that such a Decree could not be used against them because it was not used against Biafrans that fought the country.

"They are claiming that anyone that doesn't serve up to 15 years is not qualified to receive pensions. They have forgotten that there was a circular that came out in 1977.

"The circular stated that any soldier that clocks 10 years or more, but less than 15 years is qualified to receive pensions.

"And they would be entitled to 40 per cent of their terminal salaries. I don't know whether they are not aware of this circular or not," he said.

Mr Philips said at least 780 of them are yet to be paid, appealing to the Federal Government to heed their clarion call.

"We appeal to the Federal Government to yield to our clarion call. If a person used a day on the war front, you can't equate it with somebody who used a year outside the war.

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"The Biafran soldiers were paid in batches and they have all been paid to the last kobo. The last batch was paid last year, about 112 of them," he said.

He narrated how they settled ongoing litigation with the government out of court in 2015 and a new biometric verification was conducted on all of them.

"We have all these documents with us. We have the verification papers, biometrically captured in 2007 and 2015. We all have it with us.

"So, we don't know the reason why they should continue to punish us. A lot of my people are in abject poverty, many have died," he said.

Joseph Popoola, the Secretary of the group, appealed to the Federal Government and Nigerians to help them address their problem.

"It has been hard. We are suffering in silence. We appeal to all Nigerians and Federal Government to see to our problems," said Mr Popoola, a retired lance corporal.

"We have been on this since 2002. We were in court till 2014 when the retired Chief Justice Inang Okoro said we should go to the National Industrial Court.

"President Muhammadu Buhari was elected in 2015. Then, we were asked to come for pension board verification, which we did. But still, we didn't hear from them," he said.

(NAN)
NEW YORK (AP)  The lease to the Washington, D.C., hotel run by Donald Trump's family company while he was president, a symbol of his power to GOP politicians who gathered there and of corruption to his critics, has been sold by his family company to a Miami-based investor fund.

The Trump Organization said Wednesday that it had completed the sale of a long-term lease of the Trump International Hotel to CGI Merchant Group of Miami for what it described as a record price per room for the city. Sources close to the deal demanding anonymity to discuss the private transaction have said that the price was $375 million, handing the Trump family business perhaps as much as $100 million in profit.
LONDON (AP)  The British government refused Thursday to reveal whether intelligence agencies expressed concerns about the decision to award a noble title and a seat in Parliament to a newspaper owner whose father was a KGB agent.

Lawmakers voted earlier this year to order the government to release documents related to the appointment of Russia-born newspaper owner Evgeny Lebedev to the House of Lords.

Opposition politicians have demanded to know about Prime Minister Boris Johnson's involvement in the awarding of a place in Parliaments unelected upper chamber to Lebedev, whose oligarch father Alexander Lebedev is a former KGB officer.

British media have reported that Johnson overruled British intelligence agencies concerns about the 2020 ennobling of Lebedev, who owns the Independent and Evening Standard newspapers. The government insists that all Lords appointments are vetted by a commission.

Two weeks after the deadline to comply with lawmakers' request, Johnson's Conservative government on Thursday published partial documents: the blank form Lebedev was required to fill in for the House of Lords Appointments Commission, the public citation announcing his appointment as Lord Lebedev of Siberia, a list of the other peerages awarded at the same time and a letter congratulating him on the news.

The government said it was withholding other information to protect national security.

Lord Lebedev is a man of good standing, Cabinet Office Minister Michael Ellis said. No complaint has been made about his personal conduct. He has been vocal in his criticism of the Putin regime.

Ellis said that when considering requests for information from Parliament, the government has a responsibility to consider whether it is in the public interest to place information into the public domain.

He said the government plans to send information relating to any national security matters arising to Parliaments Intelligence and Security Committee, whose meetings and findings are normally kept private.

Angela Rayner, deputy leader of the opposition Labour Party, accused the government of failing to comply with a direct instruction from Parliament."

This looks like a cover up and smells like a cover up because it is a cover up, she said.

Johnsons government has announced moves to clamp down on corruption and money laundering alongside sanctions against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.

Opposition politicians and anti-corruption campaigners say Johnsons Conservatives have allowed ill-gotten money to slosh into U.K. properties, banks and businesses for years, turning London into a laundromat for dirty cash.
By purchasing their favourite food and beverage items in-restaurant, at the Drive-Thru, through the McDonald's app, and through McDelivery via Uber Eats, Skip the Dishes and DoorDash, to buying nostalgic swag from the McDonald's Canada x Peace Collective collection, Canadians stepped up to help raise more than $5.7 million to support families with sick children across Canada.

"The results from McHappy Day are amazing, and we're pleased to make a difference in the lives of wonderful families across our communities," said Alyssa Buetikofer, Chief Marketing Officer, McDonald's Restaurants of Canada Limited. "Thank you to our incredible guests, franchisees, restaurant teams, crew and supplier partners for participating in McHappy Day, and helping to make a truly meaningful impact for so many."

Across the country, one in four Canadians has either stayed at a Ronald McDonald House or knows someone who has, with the organization supporting up to 527 families every night. The money raised from McHappy Day, along with the continuous funds raised throughout the year, will help families with sick children across Canada stay together during treatment, so they can focus on what truly matters  their child's health.

"My family and I are incredibly thankful for RMHC Alberta for supporting us for over 200 nights while our baby, Ezra, received urgent care at the Alberta Children's Hospital," said the Marfo Family from Lac La Biche, Alberta. "During this difficult time, RMHC allowed us to focus on our child's health while they took care of everything else. Thank you to everyone across Canada who participated in McHappy Day to help families like ours and so many others."

While in an average year, RMHC is able to support more than 26,000 families from over 3,400 Canadian communities, the need is still greater than ever. Yearly, up to 45,000 families in Canada are left without the comfort and support of the RMHC House Program. The funds raised on McHappy Day will help expand the services provided by RMHC, including building new houses for families in need, like in Winnipeg where a new house is set to open its doors to more than double its support for families across Manitoba and Northern Ontario this summer, increasing the number of beds from 14 to 40.

People across the country can continue supporting the good RMHC does all year-round in the following ways:

Extended by popular demand, Canadians can purchase a piece from the limited-edition McDonald's Canada x Peace Collective collection of tees, sweatshirts and more, featuring iconic McDonaldland characters. A portion of the proceeds from every sale supports RMHC and families with sick children across Canada . Visit Peace-Collective.com.

x Peace Collective collection of tees, sweatshirts and more, featuring iconic McDonaldland characters. A portion of the proceeds from every sale supports RMHC and families with sick children across . Visit Peace-Collective.com. Purchasing Happy Meals and RMHC Cookies, as well as donating through coin box and kiosk donations.

Guests can 'Round up for RMHC' on any order at participating restaurants to support RMHC all year long.

Donating to a local Ronald McDonald House or setting up a monthly donation any time at https://www.rmhccanada.ca/donate.

Facts:

McHappy Day is McDonald's Canada's largest charity-driven program. Since its inception in 1977, McHappy Day has helped RMHC support more than 436,000 families across Canada .

largest charity-driven program. Since its inception in 1977, McHappy Day has helped RMHC support more than 436,000 families across . The 16 Ronald McDonald Houses and 17 Ronald McDonald Family Rooms in Canada give families a place to stay together when they have to travel for their sick child's treatment.

give families a place to stay together when they have to travel for their sick child's treatment. Every day, McDonald's Restaurants of Canada Limited, our independent franchisees, and guests, support Ronald McDonald House families by purchasing Happy Meals and RMHC Cookies, as well as through coin box and kiosk donations.

families by purchasing Happy Meals and RMHC Cookies, as well as through coin box and kiosk donations. To learn more about the services provided by RMHC, visit rmhccanada.ca.

About McDonald's Canada

In 1967, Canadians welcomed the first McDonald's restaurant to Richmond, British Columbia. Today, McDonald's Restaurants of Canada Limited has become part of the Canadian fabric, serving close to three million guests every day. In both franchised and corporate-owned restaurants, nearly 100,000 people are employed from coast-to-coast, and more than 90 per cent of McDonald's 1,400 Canadian restaurants are locally owned and operated by independent franchisees. Of the almost $1 billion spent on food, more than 85 per cent is purchased from suppliers in Canada. For more information on McDonald's Canada, visit mcdonalds.ca.

About Ronald McDonald House Charities Canada (RMHC CANADA )

In Canada, 65 per cent of families live outside a city with a children's hospital and must travel for treatment if their child is seriously ill. In an average year, the RMHC network of programs in Canada helps to keep more than 26,000 families close to their sick child and the care they need. The 16 Ronald McDonald Houses provide out-of-town families with a home to stay at while their child is being treated at a nearby hospital, while the 17 Ronald McDonald Family Rooms provide a comfortable place for families to rest and recharge, right inside hospitals. For more information, please visit rmhccanada.ca.

 Estimated need using Canadian Institute for Health Information Discharge Abstract Database (DAD) and NACRS data. 2018.

SOURCE McDonald's Canada

For further information: Corporate Relations, McDonald's Canada, [email protected]
OTTAWA, ON, May 12, 2022 /CNW/ - The Government of Canada values the experiences and expertise of coastal Canadians to help inform the sustainable management and development of our ocean resources. Collaboration is key to ensuring our decisions are based on the best available information.

Today, the Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, the Honourable Joyce Murray, announced that Fisheries and Oceans Canada will host a Seal Summit this fall in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, which responds to one of the nine recommendations made by the Atlantic Seal Science Task Team. The Summit will broaden engagement on Atlantic seals and invite collaboration and discussions between scientists, the commercial fishing industry, Indigenous groups, provincial and territorial representatives, academia, stakeholders and environmental non-governmental organizations on science, market development and management approaches.

The Summit is an important step to address recommendations made in a report submitted to Fisheries and Oceans Canada by the Atlantic Seal Science Task Team. The report offers eight other recommendations to the Department regarding its Atlantic seal science priorities, opportunities to increase fishing industry involvement in seal science projects, and ways to better communicate science findings to the fishing industry. This includes adding a section on seal impacts in Fish Stock Rebuilding Plans and Integrated Fisheries Management Plans, where appropriate.

If a harvester is interested in acquiring a licence to harvest seal for commercial purposes, they can get a licence from Fisheries and Oceans Canada and obtain training for a small fee. The Department will explore opportunities with stakeholders and partners, including other government departments and agencies, to further develop the market for Canadian seal products, and will continue to advance its scientific research on seals, guided by recommendations from the Task Team.

Quote

"We know seals eat fish, which is why our government established the Atlantic Seal Science Task Team. To build on the Task Team's important work, we are taking immediate action on some of their recommendations, hosting a seal summit and investigating how to include seal impacts in fisheries management decisions. We will be closely reviewing the remainder of the report. Canada's fish and seafood sector supports thousands of jobs and is vital to our economy; it has the full support of the federal government behind it."

The Honourable Joyce Murray, Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard

"I commend my colleague the Honourable Joyce Murray on her recognition there is an issue with seals in Atlantic Canada. Established by the then Minister of Fisheries and Oceans in 2019, the Honourable Jonathan Wilkinson, the Atlantic Seal Science Task Team's report makes it clear we must do more to understand the impacts of seal predation. I am glad to support a whole-of-government approach to address the challenges of seal predation and the opportunities of studying the marketability of seal products."

The Honourable Gudie Hutchings, Minister of Rural Economic Development

Related Documents

Backgrounder  Seal Management on Canada's East Coast

Associated Links

Stay Connected

Follow the Fisheries and Oceans Canada on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

Follow the Canadian Coast Guard on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

SOURCE Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) Canada

For further information: Claire Teichman, Press Secretary, Office of the Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, 604-679-5462, [email protected]; Media Relations, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, 613-990-7537, [email protected]
MOOSE JAW, SK, May 12, 2022 /CNW/ - Newcomers to Canada play a crucial role in our country's future and our economic recovery from the pandemic. They enrich our communities, and they work every day to create jobs, care for our loved ones and support local businesses.

To help newcomers settling in small and rural communities across the Prairies access essential services during their first year in Canada, Marie-France Lalonde, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, today announced an investment of more than $14 million. These funds will help expand critical resettlement capacity and settlement services in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

Settlement services help newcomers, including refugees, with language training, finding employment and connecting to their communities, so that they can successfully integrate into and contribute to Canadian society. Following the Resettlement Assistance Program and case management services call for proposals in August 2021, 14 projects were selected to provide additional services to help refugees and vulnerable newcomers settle and adapt to life across the Prairies.

These investments include $10,113,176 to extend case management services in 11 communities in both English and French, which will help more vulnerable newcomers with support and referrals to successfully settle into their new communities. In addition, $4,244,506 will be provided to add 3 new Resettlement Assistance Program service providers in Fort McMurray and Grand Prairie, Alberta, and Winkler, Manitoba. These organizations are key to enhancing access to support services for refugees in smaller and rural communities, and to providing newcomers with the tools needed for their long-term success in the years ahead.

Quote

"Newcomers and refugees have long been a driving force behind Canada's society and economy, and our country has a proud tradition of being an international leader in resettlement and integration. This success could not be achieved without vital settlement service organizations that help newcomers learn Canada's official languages, find jobs and build successful lives in their new communities."

- Marie-France Lalonde, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship

Quick facts

The Resettlement Assistance Program is a funding program that operates in all provinces outside Quebec and supports government-assisted refugees and other eligible clients upon arrival in Canada . The program provides newcomers with direct financial support and funds service provider organizations to deliver immediate and essential services.

and supports government-assisted refugees and other eligible clients upon arrival in . The program provides newcomers with direct financial support and funds service provider organizations to deliver immediate and essential services. Financial support includes a one-time start-up allowance and monthly income support typically provided for up to 1 year or until clients can support themselves, whichever comes first. Resettlement Assistance Program service provider organizations deliver immediate and essential services to clients generally within 4 to 6 weeks of arrival in Canada .

. These new investments will expand the Resettlement Assistance Program service provider organization footprint in communities across Canada , which will enhance the support our refugees need for their successful resettlement journey.

, which will enhance the support our refugees need for their successful resettlement journey. Case management refers to a comprehensive approach to supporting the settlement of government-assisted refugees and other high-needs and vulnerable newcomers facing multiple and complex barriers to integration during their first 12 to 18 months in Canada .

. Case management services involve a comprehensive needs and assets assessment, resulting in a settlement plan that includes referrals, regular monitoring of progress and check-ins at set intervals, as well as personalized and intensive supports based on client needs.

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SOURCE Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada

For further information: Contacts for media only: Aidan Strickland, Press Secretary, Minister's Office, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, [email protected]; Media Relations: Communications Branch, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, 613-952-1650, [email protected]
Award-Winning Canadian Retailer Opens 27 Stores in 12 States this Summer

TORONTO, May 11, 2022 /CNW/ - Showcase, recognized as "Home of the Hottest Trends", and just named one of Canada's Best Managed Companies for the second consecutive year, today announced major expansion plans in the United States. By the end of Summer 2022, the Canadian specialty retailer will have grown its brick and mortar store count to 146 - opening a record 27 trend stores in 12 states, the largest and fastest single expansion in the company's 28-year history. The privately held company operates 109 Canadian trend stores in top tier malls from coast to coast and established a retail footprint in the US Northeast in 2019 opening 10 locations.

Currently, 27* strategically located trend stores are under construction in top malls in the US Northeast: Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, US Southeast: Maryland and Virginia, and the Midwest: Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio, all supported by a brand new 147,000 sq. ft New York distribution centre. Additional trend store openings in 2022 will be announced in the upcoming months.

Founded in Edmonton, AB in 1994, Showcase is an award-winning retailer, product developer and marketer, specializing in new and hard-to-find consumer trends in health, beauty, home, toys, novelty candy and food. Showcase trend stores are designed to be fun, interactive, and demo-friendly environments. Customers are encouraged to "try it before you buy it" with the majority of products open and on display.

As a data-driven, rapid retail company, Showcase's proprietary trendspotting technology uses sophisticated techniques, powered by algorithms and AI, to understand and identify trending products. The company's agility allows them to be first and fastest to market: on average, each trend goes from concept to shelf in 53 days, with some of the top 10 items launching in as little as 16 days. Examples of hot viral products Showcase has introduced quickly include Dalgona Cookies inspired by Netflix's hit Squid Game, and Hot Chocolate Bombs which dominated holiday season sales in 2020.

Current top trends at Showcase include Squishmallows, TikTok-inspired candy and beverages, trading cards, Funko pops, food-themed novelty candles, and vegan beauty products. Showcase will continue to focus on its extensive private label offerings, with exclusive in-house brands representing 70 per cent of sales.

"Now that Showcase has saturated the Canadian market, occupying space in 93 per cent of the country's malls, we believe there is tremendous growth potential for our unique business model in an untapped US market," said Samir Kulkarni, CEO, Showcase. "Millions of American consumers are in for an amazing surprise when they are introduced to the Showcase brand, and discover our stores are filled with the hottest and trendiest items they won't find anywhere else," he added.

Showcase has invested heavily in a robust omnichannel strategy that will continue to deliver a seamless experience for customers to make shopping instant, relevant, and accessible. The company has introduced live online shopping events every 48 hours; same-day delivery service with DoorDash; mobile-first video advertising; and targeted personalized email campaigns to its two million+ loyalty Insider members.

Showcase carries all the latest TikTok-inspired trends that can't be found elsewhere. The hashtag #ShowcaseMadeMeBuyIt currently has over 64 million views on TikTok, and Showcase is one of the most popular Canadian retailers on TikTok with 205,000 followers and growing. Other signature elements of the Showcase shopping experience include knowledgeable staff, time-sensitive promotions, flash discounts and product demos.

"We have a long record of success, creativity and innovation in Canada, and we intend to build on this foundation in the US, integrating our physical and digital channels, growing our market share, and increasing member loyalty to solidify our position," said Mr. Kulkarni.

Showcase was a winner of Canada's Best Managed Companies Program in 2021 and requalified in 2022 to maintain their status as a Best Managed company. Showcase was recognized for overall business performance and sustained growth with the prestigious Canada's Best Managed Companies designation. The 2022 Best Managed winners are amongst the best-in-class of Canadian owned and managed companies with revenues over $50 million demonstrating leadership in the areas of strategy, capabilities and innovation, culture and commitment, and financials to achieve sustainable growth.

To stay up to date on the latest Showcase news and trends visit ShopAtShowcase.com or follow @ShopAtShowcase through any of our social channels on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram.

Visual assets available upon request.

ABOUT SHOWCASE

Showcase is the Home of the Hottest Trends, and the world's largest retailer of its kind. With 119 trend stores in North America's best shopping centres, Showcase offers the most fun, interactive, new, and unique products ever - all in a retail environment where you can "try it before you buy it." We call it retail-tainment! Founded in 1994 in Edmonton, AB by Amin Jivraj, Showcase is a proudly Canadian-owned and operated company. Showcase continues to expand across North America in 2022, cementing the company's position as a global leader in interactive retail and lifestyle trends. To learn more, visit www.ShopAtShowcase.com.

*SHOWCASE US STORE LOCATIONS: OPENING SUMMER 2022

Westfarms, Hartford, CT

Woodfield Mall, Chicago, IL

Burlington Mall, Burlington, MA

Holyoke Mall, Holyoke, MA

Natick Mall, Natick, MA

Northshore Mall, Peabody, MA

South Shore Place, Braintree, MA

Arundel Mills, Hanover, MD

Mall in Columbia, Columbia, MD

Towson Town Center, Towson, MD

Great Lakes Crossing, Auburn Hills, MI

Twelve Oaks, Novi, MI

Mall of New Hampshire, Manchester, NH

Mall at Rockingham Park, Salem, NH

Pheasant Lane Mall, Nashua, NH

Paramus Park, Paramus, NJ

Rockaway Townsquare Mall, Rockaway, NJ

Willowbrook Mall, Wayne, NJ

Eastview Mall, Rochester, NY

Palisades Center, West Nyack, NY

Smith Haven Mall, Lake Grove, NY

Walt Whitman, Huntington Station, NY

Beachwood Place, Beachwood, OH

Park City Center, Lancaster, PA

South Hills Village, Pittsburgh, PA

Providence Place, Providence, RI

Fair Oaks, Fairfax, VA

SOURCE Showcase

For further information: Beth Merrick, ZAZOU Communications, (416) 473-9881, [email protected]
SAINTE-MARIE, QC, May 12, 2022 /CNW/ - The Honourable Pablo Rodriguez, Minister of Canadian Heritage and Quebec Lieutenant, on behalf of the Honourable Dominic LeBlanc, Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, Infrastructure and Communities, and Luc Provencal, Member of the National Assembly for Beauce-Nord, are pleased to announce financial assistance of $2,473,100 for the construction of a new building to house the Sainte-Marie municipal library.

The new 1,458 m2 facility will be built in the heart of Cite Sainte-Marie, safe from flooding. It will have an access ramp and several parking spaces. The library will be better protected from the weather and more easily accessible to users. It will also provide more space for educational activities.

For this project, the Government of Canada is investing over $1,236,550 through the Community, Culture and Recreation Infrastructure stream (CCRIS) of the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program (ICIP). The Government of Quebec is also investing over $1,236,550 from the programme Aide au developpement des infrastructures culturelles (PADIC). Sainte-Marie is contributing $6,760,273 to the project.

Quotes

"Investing in our infrastructure is not just about putting money into brick and mortar. It's about investing in the daily lives of our residents. It's also about giving even more people in our communities places to gather, express themselves, move around and enjoy enriching experiences or simply be able to count on safe infrastructure. We continue to deliver for Quebecers through investments that will make a real difference in their daily lives!"

The Honourable Pablo Rodriguez, Minister of Canadian Heritage and Quebec Lieutenant, on behalf of the Honourable Dominic LeBlanc, Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, Infrastructure and Communities

"The vibrant city of Sainte-Marie deserves a fine and modern library in line with 2020 standards. All the more so given that the 2019 historic flood has made it necessary to relocate the building away from the risk zone. I commend the work done by Mayor Gaeton Vachon, and thank our two levels of government for supporting this important project."

Luc Provencal, Member of the National Assembly for Beauce-Nord

"These new investments will allow Quebecers to use a library adapted to their needs and today's realities. This project perfectly embodies our government's vision, which is working to make culture more accessible and to bring it closer to everyone all across Quebec."

Nathalie Roy, Quebec Minister of Culture and Communications

"This investment from the Government of Quebec and the Government of Canada is excellent news for the municipality. After the 2019 flood, we realized how essential it is to relocate our municipal buildings outside the flood zone. The infrastructure of the new library, which is planned to be paired with our town hall project (pending funding), will optimize our service offer to citizens. Once the construction work is finished, our families, our students and our seniors will certainly benefit from an enhanced experience and I'm looking forward to it."

Gaetan Vachon, Mayor of Sainte-Marie

Quick facts

Under the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program (ICIP), the federal government plans to invest over $7.5 billion in Quebec between 2018 and 2028 for projects focused on community, cultural and recreational infrastructure; green infrastructure; public transit; and infrastructure in rural and northern communities.

Infrastructure Program (ICIP), the federal government plans to invest over in between 2018 and 2028 for projects focused on community, cultural and recreational infrastructure; green infrastructure; public transit; and infrastructure in rural and northern communities. The Government of Quebec's programme Aide au developpement des infrastructures culturelles du gouvernement du Quebec (PADIC) comes under the ICIP and the Integrated Bilateral Agreement.

programme Aide au developpement des infrastructures culturelles du gouvernement du Quebec (PADIC) comes under the ICIP and the Integrated Bilateral Agreement. Quebec's Ministere de la Culture et Communications is implementing the cultural infrastructure sub-stream of the ICIP, which has an envelope of $100 million ( $50 million from the Government of Canada and $50 million from Quebec ) for improving the quality and accessibility of the province's cultural infrastructure.

Associated links

Investing in Canada Plan Map

Federal investments in Quebec infrastructure projects

Investing in Canada: Canada's Long-Term Infrastructure Plan

Cultural Infrastructure Development Assistance Program (PADIC)

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Website: Infrastructure Canada

SOURCE Infrastructure Canada

For further information: Media contacts: Jean-Sebastien Comeau, Press Secretary and Communications Advisor, Office of the Honourable Dominic LeBlanc, Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, Infrastructure and Communities, 343-574-8116, [email protected]; Maxime Roy, Director of Communications, Office of the Quebec Minister of Culture and Communications, 581-989-6037; Media Relations: Infrastructure Canada, 613-960-9251; Toll free: 1-877-250-7154, Email address: [email protected]; Media Relations: Ministere de la Culture et Communications du Quebec, [email protected], 418-380-2388
Rajneesh Singh, a BJP youth media in-charge, submitted the petition before the Lucknow bench, requesting that the ASI investigate the 22 locked doors at the Taj Mahal for the presence of Hindu deity idols.

A plea to open 22 shuttered rooms of the Taj Mahal was denied by the Allahabad High Courts Lucknow bench on Thursday. Tomorrow you will come and ask us to go to chambers of honourable judges? a panel of Justices DK Upadhyay and Subhash Vidyarthi reprimanded the petitioner. Please dont make fun of the PIL system.

Rajneesh Singh, a BJP youth media in-charge, submitted the petition before the Lucknow bench, requesting that the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) investigate the 22 locked doors in the Taj Mahal for the presence of Hindu deity idols.

The plea requested the formation of a fact-finding committee and the ASIs production of a report. Some historians and Hindu organisations have claimed that the monument is an antique Shiv Temple, according to the petition.

The bench informed the petitioner during the hearing that such disputes were welcome in casual settings but not in a court of law, according to reports.

The judge stated, I welcome you to debate the topic with us in the drawing room, not in a court of law.

The petitioner stated that there was a truth about the Taj Mahal that the countrys inhabitants needed to know. Ive also submitted numerous RTIs. I learned of several rooms that had been locked, and the authorities claimed that they were locked for security reasons.

The court expressed its disgust with the plea, saying, Is it possible to argue these points in a court of law? Do we have such training and equipment as judges?

In response to the petitioners contention, Right to information, the bench said, Go do some research. Do M.A. Do PhD. Then decide on a topic and see if any institutes will let you to research it. Come to us, then. Please enrol in an MA programme, then apply for NET or JRF, and if any university refuses to let you research on such a topic, come to us.

The petitioner had previously stated that he had been attempting to obtain the details through the Right to Information Act since 2020. In response to an RTI request, the Union Ministry of Culture advised the Central Information Commission (in Delhi) that these rooms were shut for security reasons, Singh explained. He also said that no information concerning these rooms was provided.
Kicukiro Primary Court has postponed the bail hearing of Dieudonne Ishimwe, commonly known as 'Prince Kid', who is pinned on three charges which are rape, soliciting or offering sexual favours, and harassment.

The CEO of Rwanda Inspirational Backup, the company that organized the Miss Rwanda beauty pageant, was clothed in a sky blue shirt, a dark blue suit, and black safari boots.

The hearing started at about 09:10 AM, after which the presiding judge was notified that the Ishimwe's lawyer had not yet arrived in the courtroom, prompting the judge to put it on hold.

Around 09:58 AM, the hearing resumed after the defence lawyer, Emeline Nyembo, walked into the courtroom.

However, she immediately requested a postponement of the hearing arguing that she has not yet accessed indictment from the electronic case management system.

The prosecution also agreed to the postponement, to give the lawyer time to go through the case and prepare her client's defence.

The presiding judge resolved to adjourn the trial to May 13, and also ordered prosecution to immediately avail 1the indictment.

Ishimwe was arrested on April 26 over charges related to sexual abuse towards contestants of the beauty pageant on various occasions.

Meanwhile, on Monday, May 9, RIB confirmed the arrest of Elsa Iradukunda, Miss Rwanda 2017, in connection with Prince Kid's case.

Iradukunda and Prince Kid were reportedly dating and The New Times understands that the beauty queen has been lobbying former Miss Rwanda contestants to sign affidavits absolving the suspect.

Prince Kid started organizing Miss Rwanda in 2014 through his company, which has seen the annual event become one of the most popular in the country.

However, the Minister of Youth and Culture Rosemary Mbabazi has announced the official halt of Rwanda Inspiration Backup from organizing the annual beauty pageant, following several allegations of misconduct and abuse towards contestants.
The order is expected to be significant in light of opposition against videography within the mosque.

On Thursday, a court in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, is set to issue an order concerning the Gyanvapi Mosque. Last Monday, a plea was filed demanding the dismissal of Ajay Kumar Mishra, the court-appointed lawyer commissioner in charge of conducting a study of the Maa Shringar Gauri Sthal within the mosque complex. The order is noteworthy in light of disputes over whether a poll can be done within the mosque. Inside the compound, there have been some complaints to videography.

The advocate commissioner was instructed to videotape the Maa Shringar Gauri Sthal by the court of civil judge (senior division) Ravi Kumar Diwakar and provide a thorough report on May 10.

The survey was done in response to a request by women petitioners Rakhi Singh, Laxmi Devi, Sita Sahu, and others for permission to undertake daily worship of deities Shringar Gauri, Lord Ganesha, Lord Hanuman, and Nandi, whose idols are alleged to be atop the Gyanvapi mosques outer wall.

The poll, however, could not be finished due to opposition, and the official requested extra time.

Apart from the official request, the court is also hearing a case concerning the filming of the two basements located inside the Gyanvapi premises barricading.

Maa Shringar Gauri Sthal and Gyanvapi mosque are separate, Abhay Nath Yadav, who represents the Gyanvapi mosque management committee (Anjuman Intezamiya Masajid Committee) in court, contended.

The court has deferred its decision until 12 a.m. tomorrow (Thursday). On Wednesday, lawyer Shivam Gaur, representing the Hindu side, informed reporters that the court would give a judgement on whether the commissioner will be removed or not tomorrow.
The Election Commission of India announced on Wednesday that India has been unanimously elected as the new Chair of the Association of Asian Election Authorities (AAEA) for the period 2022-2024

The Election Commission of India announced on Wednesday that India has been unanimously elected as the new Chair of the Association of Asian Election Authorities (AAEA) for the period 2022-2024.

The decision was made at a recent meeting of the Executive Board and General Assembly in Manila, Philippines, according to ECI. AAEA is now chaired by the Commission on Elections in Manila. Russia, Uzbekistan, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Taiwan, and the Philippines have joined the Executive Board as new members.

ECIs three-member delegation to the Executive Board meeting in Manila included Deputy Election Commissioner Nitesh Vyas, Manipur Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Rajesh Agrawal, and CEO Rajasthan Praveen Gupta, who presented the work plan for 2022-23 as well as futuristic activities for 2023-24 to the Executive Board.

According to the ECI, a presentation on Gender Issues in Elections was given, which highlighted Indias many deliberate and targeted efforts to break socio-political barriers in electoral and political processes for inclusive and participatory elections.

The Association of Asian Election Authorities mission is to provide a non-partisan forum in the Asian region for election authorities to share experiences and best practices in order to discuss and act on ways to promote open and transparent elections with the goal of supporting good governance and democracy.

Officials from various AAEA member nations have been attending India International Institute for Democracy and Election Management (IIIDEM) International Training Programs on a regular basis.

More than 250 officials from AAEA member nations have participated in these programmes since 2019. IIIDEM also offers specialized capacity-building training programmes for AAEA member countries. During the years 2021-22, 50 Bangladesh Election Commission officers were trained.

Delegates from the AAEA have also been attending the Election Commission of Indias International Election Visitors Program on a regular basis. The 3rd International Virtual Election Visitors Programme (IEVP), conducted by ECI during the Assembly Elections in 2022, drew 62 officials from 12 AAEA members. AAEA is also a member of the Association of World Election Bodies, which has 118 members (A-WEB).

The Association of Asian Election Authorities (AAEA) was founded in 1998 as a result of a resolution passed by participants at the Symposium on Asian Elections in the Twenty-First Century, held in Manila, Philippines from January 26 to 29, 1997. AAEA now has 20 Asian EMBs as members. ECI is a founding member of the AAEAs EMB and served on the AAEAs Executive Board as Vice-Chair from 2011 to 2013 and Chair from 2014 to 2016.
Pakistan and the United States finished security discussions in Washington on Wednesday

Pakistan and the United States finished security discussions in Washington on Wednesday, ahead of Pakistani Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardaris visit later this month.

Lt-Gen Nadeem Anjum, the Director-General of Inter-Services Intelligence (DG ISI), spent three days in Washington this week with senior security officials, including US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and CIA Director William J. Burns.

The talks are thought to have focused on bilateral security concerns and the situation in Afghanistan since the US believes Pakistan can help stabilize the war-torn country.

Earlier the two countries held security talks in July 2021, during which then-National Security Advisor Moeed Yusuf met with Mr Sullivan at the White House.

Meanwhile, Bilawal will travel to the United States at the invitation of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken later this month.

Blinken just had a phone call with Bilawal.

This comes at a critical time for Pakistan, as former Prime Minister Imran Khan has accused the US of plotting to remove him from power. However, US State Department has denied all of the charges, claiming that they are false.
Following the United States Senate of Connecticut, the City Councils of Norwich and Holyoke have expressed their support for pro-Khalistan groups.

In a major development, US lawmakers were seen openly supporting and promoting pro-Khalistan organisations. The Connecticut Senate, Norwich City Council, and Holyoke City Council have all expressed support for this separatist group and have recognised the Sikh Independence Declaration.

Pro-Khalistan activists are backed by US politicians.

The US state of Connecticut has already declared April 29 to be the Anniversary of Sikh Independence. The Indian World Forum later expressed worry about the provocation of pro-Khalistani groups by the US State of Connecticut, claiming that the resolution influenced and promoted Khalistan, thus challenging Indias sovereignty. The controversial statement was made in the aftermath of violent violence in Patiala on April 29 between Shiv Sena and pro-Khalistan factions.

Concerns raised by the Indian World Forum

In an exclusive interview with Republic Media Network, Puneet Singh Chandhok, President of the Indian World Forum, highlighted his concern over the United States support for separatist groups, despite pushing for global peace.

The first Senate of Connecticut is followed by the city of Norwich, where the council passes the resolution, the mayor endorses and recognises the Sikh Independence referendum, and finally the Holyoke City Council. Back-to-back activities are shaping an insurgency movement. This is inexcusable coming from a great power like the United States, which promotes global peace , stated the President of the Indian World Forum.
Sri Lanka, which is already dealing with a severe economic crisis, was thrown into upheaval on Monday when Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa resigned, thus nullifying the elected administration.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has named experienced political leader Ranil Wickremesinghe to succeed him as Prime Minister of the crisis-hit island nation. The President, who announced in a speech to the country yesterday that a Prime Minister and his cabinet would be installed this week, administered the oath of office to the 73-year-old.

Mr Wickremesinghe, the countrys largest opposition party, appeared to be the only alternative after the countrys main opposition party refused to join a government led by a member of the Rajapaksa clan.

The United National Party is led by Wickremesinghe. The partys breakaway SJB section currently serves as the main opposition force.
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HARTFORD  A newlywed couple sitting in the balcony at the Infinity Music Hall gave special meaning to the talk they came to hear Tuesday night, by Lech Walesa, the union electrician who formed the Solidarity movement in Poland and won the Nobel Peace Prize for his human rights struggle against the Soviet Union.

Now, a generation after Walesas name became a synonym for freedom, the young couple  refugees from the Ukraine War who arrived in Connecticut last month  heard the 78-year-old statesman call for more help from the United States in defeating the Russian invasion.

And Walesa took his call far, far beyond that.

Its not enough for Ukraine to defeat Russia militarily, Walesa said at a conversation sponsored by the World Affairs Council of Connecticut. Unless we really put the right order in Russia, Russia will rise up within five to 10 years and will constitute a threat to democracy again.

Even the complete reformation of Russia is not enough progress for Walesa, president of Poland from 1990 to 1995. No, the visionary of revolution, acknowledging that role without false modesty, declared the world is on the cusp of a new era  driven by technology, unfettered by national interests, based on neither communism nor capitalism, but built on free markets.

The era of divisions has collapsed. The new era of information, intellect and globalization has appeared. And we have been left behind in between the two, Walesa declared, speaking to a crowd of about 200, through an interpreter, with moderator Megan Clark Torrey, CEO of the World Affairs Council chapter.

The new thing has not appeared yet.

What does that new era look like? Thats the task of 21st century civilization, to figure it out or perish. First, we have to really reach a consensus on the values and principles, he said, like the Ten Commandments.

Laughter amid tragedy

If he werent an elder world statesman running the Lech Walesa Institute, this mischievous guy with a broad, white mustache could try his hand at stand-up comedy. Speaking of all the broken systems in the world, he quipped, There is only one structure that can continue being effective in the world. That is traffic regulations.

On a U.S. tour to raise money for refugee relief and raise resolve against Russia, he takes shots at the left and especially the right, and about political culture itself, gallows humor at a grave moment. Whenever two Polish people meet they will always establish at least three political parties.

Walesa railed against the populist, demagogue right-wing government in Poland, which he said has violated the constitutional separation of powers and illegally impeded news outlets. Thats why he was wearing a t-shirt with bold letters spelling out Constitution in Polish.

Walesa wore the same T-shirt under a blazer Monday night at an event at the New England Air Museum in Windsor Locks, which has an exhibit of the Kosciuszko Squadron of Polish aviators. There he met Gov. Ned Lamont and was greeted in Polish by Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz.

Its an honor to have Lech Walesa in Connecticut because we have the third highest number of Polish Americans of any state in the country, said Bysiewicz, who speaks just a few words of the language; her grandparents immigrated from the central European nation.

Bysiewicz, in an interview Tuesday, said its notable that Walesa wore that t-shirt for two reasons. We are the Constitution state and here we are a a time when constitutional issues are under attack.

The final blow to Russia

As Walesa spoke, the U.S. House of Representatives was approving a $40 billion aid package for Ukraine, with outside opposition led by Donald Trump Jr. Walesa didnt mention U.S. politics in his talk, but he did in an interview with me, without prodding.

My message with this T-shirt is, do not underestimate elections, he said, Polish people ... allowed demagogues and populists to win power, where in this country you allowed Trump to win power, which was a misfortune.

On stage, vowing to wear the T-shirt until the administration in Poland halts its violations, he paused for another laugh line  I brought 10 T-shirts, so dont worry  but never strayed from his main point about the latest crisis being a chance for world leaders, Germany in Europe and the United States globally, to push dramatic reforms toward eradicating evil.

So here is my appeal to you. United States, take advantage of the opportunity that has been given to us, he implored.

The immediate crisis, of course, is the war itself, which has sent 3 million refugees over the Ukraine border to Poland, with many more to come  and Poland is doing all it can, he said, as the world responds.

So help us give the final blow to Russia, Walesa said. The question to me now is whether we will stay united strongly enough for this new concept of the world to prevail.

He paid homage to his close friend, the late David Chase, a Holocaust survivor who became a multimillionaire global investor in Hartford and was a major supporter, setting up a Solidarity bank in reformist Poland. Walesas biggest worry, in answer to Torreys question: Letting this opportunity slip away. That happened when he was president of Poland, he said, looking for more U.S. aid.

I would be begging, please, give us your generals, he said. I mean General Motors, General ElectricThats why I lost my election, because I wasnt successful economically.

Is the dream realistic?

How about that new world era? I asked the young refugee couple, Simon Bobrovskii, who exited Russia for Kyiv, Ukraine, where he was working as a hearing aid technician when the war broke out, and Daria Sakhniuk, a dental clinic manager from Kyiv.

They married in a refugee camp in Mexico before they were brought to Connecticut by Dana Bucin, a Hartford immigration lawyer from Romania working with Ukraine refugees  who is looking for more hosts.

Walesas vision of a new world era is realistic, Bobrovskii said, based on the will of the people to live in peace together...its not a distant dream.

No, his new wife said, Its utopia. Its not real for this time, for now.

Attorney Peter G. Kelly, chairman of the World Affairs Council and retired from Updike, Kelly & Spellacy, helped write the post-Soviet Polish constitution during Walesas presidency and helped former Russian president Boris Yeltsin reform the judiciary, only to see Vladimir Putin undo the reforms.

Kelly said Walesas message about two superpowers facing off is poignant. What hes saying is that what we have now doesnt work.

And so Lech Walesa, introduced Tuesday night by Connecticut businessman Anthony Viscogliosi as an inspiration of our youth, keeps pushing 40 years later.

Our civilization is maybe reaching the point at which it can be destroyed, Walesa said. Will we be able to move beyond this point, avoiding this? If we fail to do that then there will be a millennium with no light on this globe.

Amazingly, at that moment he delivered another quip. I couldnt hear it or make it out on my recording amid the laughs of Polish speakers in the audience as the interpreter said the line in English. No matter; it was the laughter of human resilience.

dhaar@hearstmediact.com
Viktoria Sundqvist / Hearst Connecticut Media

HARTFORD  A Hartford man was sentenced Wednesday to more than five years in prison for trafficking cocaine, according to federal prosecutors.

Kendall Hooks, 50, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute and to possess with intent to distribute 500 grams or more of cocaine in August 2021, according to Leonard Boyle, the United States attorney for the District of Connecticut.
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After three hours of interviews and an hour of private deliberations, the Criminal Justice Commission on Thursday chose Patrick Griffin as Connecticuts next chief states attorney following months of turmoil over accusations the former top prosecutor tried to influence raises for himself and his staff.

Griffin, who has served as the New Haven States Attorney, will start in his new role Friday, according to Commission Chair State Supreme Court Justice Andrew McDonald.

The commission also interviewed Hartford States Attorney Sharmese Walcott and was slated to interview former Litchfield States Attorney Dawn Gallo, but she bowed out after being chosen as a finalist. It was not immediately clear Thursday why Gallo dropped out.

Griffin and Walcott were each interviewed by the commission for about 90 minutes before the body went into executive session to make their choice. Griffin will fill the remainder of the four-year term of former Chief States Attorney Richard J. Colangelo Jr., who retired on March 31 before he faced a probe by the commission for potential improprieties.

Griffin, whose term expires in 2026, was supported by community leaders who appreciated his outreach as the New Haven States Attorney since 2016.

Hes not someone Ive had to seek out, said Leonard Jahad, executive director of the Connecticut Violence Intervention Program in New Haven. Hes in the Zoom meetings, hes in the community and hes had the courage to speak out.

Griffin told the commission he faced challenges in his job as New Haven States Attorney, including the investigation into Hamden police officer Devin Eaton who shot an unarmed woman in 2019. The officer pleaded no contest to first-degree assault in January. Eaton agreed never to work as a police officer in the United States as part of a plea agreement reached with Griffin. He is scheduled to be sentenced on May 27 when he could receive 18 months in prison.

Griffin and Walcott acknowledged repeatedly there were disparities across the states 13 judicial districts for people of color. Theres no question that there are disparities in sentencing recommendations and in bail recommendations, Griffin said.

But he said he was confident there was an appetite for change within the Division of Criminal Justice, including addressing disparities, diversity and transparency.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut, which relied on data from the states 2019 prosecutorial transparency law, Black individuals are convicted more often than whites in every geographical area court in the state and people convicted of drug offenses are 2.4 times more likely to get prison sentences in some parts of the state than others.

Griffin and Walcott also agreed the agency needed to cast a wider net to have a more diverse set of prosecutors.

The process to find a new chief states attorney started in March after Colangelo retired amid accusations he hired the daughter of a high-ranking state Office of Policy and Management official in exchange for raises for himself and others.

When asked Thursday about morale within the Division of Criminal Justice by the commission, Griffin noted that negative news stories and the issues the division has confronted in the past few months has been a drag on morale.

Griffin has been a state prosecutor for 27 years. He was appointed in 2016 as New Haven States Attorney and previously headed the chief states attorneys Cold Case and Shooting Task Force. In 2014, Griffin received the Oliver Ellsworth Prosecutor of the Year award. He is an adjunct professor at the University of New Havens School of Public Safety and an adjunct lecturer with the New Haven and Waterbury police academies.

Walcott has been a state prosecutor since 2007. She was appointed as the Hartford States Attorney in 2020 after Gail Hardy was transferred following an investigation of allegations that deadly police use-of-force shooting investigations were taking years, and in some cases, a decade to complete.

The next chief states attorney will have a lot to prove, advocates from the CT ACLU said in a statement this week. They will have to show, by their actions and not just words, whether they are committed to creating accountability for states attorneys to prevent the kinds of corruption and politicization that have shown up in that system for decades.
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WASHINGTON (AP)  The Biden administration is canceling three oil and gas lease sales scheduled in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Alaska, removing millions of acres from possible drilling as U.S. gas prices reach record highs.

The Interior Department announced the decision Wednesday night, citing a lack of industry interest in drilling off the Alaska coast and conflicting court rulings that have complicated drilling efforts in the Gulf of Mexico, where the bulk of U.S. offshore drilling takes place,

The decision likely means the Biden administration will not hold a lease sale for offshore drilling this year and comes as Interior appears set to let a mandatory five-year plan for offshore drilling expire next month.

Unfortunately, this is becoming a pattern  the administration talks about the need for more supply and acts to restrict it,'' said Frank Macchiarola, senior vice president of the American Petroleum Institute, the top lobbying group for the oil and gas industry.

"As geopolitical volatility and global energy prices continue to rise, we again urge the administration to end the uncertainty and immediately act on a new five-year program for federal offshore leasing,'' he said.

The lease cancellations come as gas prices have surged to a record $4.40 a gallon amid the war in Ukraine and other disruptions that have pushed prices $1.40 a gallon higher than a year ago. Consumer prices jumped 8.3% last month from a year ago, the government said Wednesday.

A federal appeals court in New Orleans, meanwhile, is considering a challenge to a moratorium on new federal leasing that Biden imposed soon after taking office in January 2021. Biden said the administration needed to consider the effect of new drilling on climate change and conduct proper environmental reviews.

Louisiana and 12 other states challenged Bidens order, saying laws passed in response to the 1970s oil crisis require lease sales on federal lands and waters.

The Biden administration failed to grapple with prior analyses of the planned sales to give a valid reason for postponing or canceling them, Louisiana Deputy Solicitor General Joseph Scott St. John told a 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel this week.

The three-judge panel did not indicate when they will rule.

Environmental groups hailed the latest lease cancellation, saying the administration needs to do more to curb greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels that are driving climate change.

To save imperiled marine life and protect coastal communities and our climate from pollution, we need to end new leasing and phase out existing drilling, said Kristen Monsell, oceans legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group.

Republicans denounced the decision as harmful to consumers and U.S. national security.

The Interior Department's decision approaches levels of irresponsibility and reckless stupidity never seen before,'' said Rep. Garret Graves, R-La. We are paying record prices for gasoline and to heat and cool our homes. Rather than using American energy sources to help solve the problem and lower prices, the Biden administration continues to carry out policies that benefit'' Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and other countries, Graves said.

New leasing will not lower current gas prices,'' countered Dustin Renaud, a spokesman for the environmental coalition Healthy Gulf. It takes several years for new leases to begin producing oil, he noted, adding that the industry "is already sitting on over 8 million acres of unused offshore leases.''

The state challenge to Bidens leasing order has not yet gone to trial, but a federal judge blocked the order in a preliminary injunction last year, writing that since federal law does not state the president can suspend oil lease sales, only Congress can do so.

After U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty ruled for the states, the Interior Department held an offshore lease sale last fall, which a federal judge in Washington, D.C. later blocked.

The administration has appealed Doughty's ruling, but has scheduled onshore lease sales next month in eight mostly Western states. However, the administration scaled back the amount of land offered for drilling and raised royalty rates by 50%.

Biden has come under pressure to increase U.S. crude production as fuel prices spike because of the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine. The United States and other nations have banned imports of Russian oil, driving up prices worldwide.

Biden also faces pressure from Democrats and environmental groups urging him to do more to combat climate change, even as his legislative proposals on climate and clean energy remain stalled in a sharply divided Congress.

Interior cannot conduct new offshore oil and gas lease sales until it has completed a required five-year plan. The current plan expires June 30, and administration officials have not said when or if a replacement will be released.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said last month that the oil and gas industry is set with the amount of drilling permits at its disposal. She defended Biden administration actions to scale down federal leasing, saying that industry has about 9,000 permits that have been approved but are not being used.

"The industry is free to use these permits in a way they see fit. They just havent acted on those, Haaland told a House committee last week.

Oil companies say they have increased production as the economy recovers from the coronavirus pandemic, but they have been reluctant to ramp up production further, citing a shortage of workers and restraints from investors wary that todays high prices wont last. Decisions by the OPEC+ oil cartel, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, to only modestly increase supplies to the world market have also kept prices high.

Major oil companies reported surging profits in the first quarter and are sending tens of billions of dollars in dividends to shareholders, along with stock buybacks that have sharply increased the value of investor holdings.

Democrats accuse the industry of price gouging and have vowed to bring legislation cracking down on price manipulation to votes in the House and Senate. A bid to impose a windfall profits tax on oil producers has generated little support in Congress.

___

Associated Press writer Janet McConnaughey in New Orleans contributed to this report.
SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (AP)  After a month of crippling ransomware attacks, Costa Rica has declared a state of emergency. In theory, the measure usually reserved to deal with natural disasters or the COVID-19 pandemic would free up the government to react more nimbly to the crisis.

President Rodrigo Chaves, who was sworn in Sunday, made the emergency declaration one of his first acts. It was published Wednesday, but Chaves has not named the members of the National Emergency Commission.

The declaration refers to the attack Costa Rica is suffering at the hands of cybercriminals and cyberterrorists.

The Russian-speaking Conti gang had claimed responsibility for the attack. Last week the U.S. State Department offered a $10 million reward for information leading to the identification or location of Conti leaders.

The attack began in April when the Finance Ministry was the first to report that a number of its systems were affected including tax collection and customs. Attacks also targeted the social security agencys human resources system and Labor Ministry.

The Costa Rican government has not reported an expansion of the attack, but some systems, especially at the Finance Ministry, still are not functioning normally. The government has also not made an estimate of the losses caused by the attack.

Carlos Alvarado was still president when the attacks began and he said Costa Rica would not pay the gang any ransom.

In the U.S. State Department statement last week, it said the Conti group had been responsible for hundreds of ransomware incidents during the past two years. The FBI estimates that as of January 2022, there had been over 1,000 victims of attacks associated with Conti ransomware with victim payouts exceeding $150,000,000, making the Conti Ransomware variant the costliest strain of ransomware ever documented, the statement said.

In addition to the ransomware state of emergency, Chaves also eliminated pandemic-related obligatory use of masks in public spaces and issued a decree that urged public institutions to not sanction officials who have not been vaccinated against COVID-19, reversing his predecessors policy.
The Senate, on Wednesday, received the nomination of Senator Danjuma La'ah, representing Kaduna South, as the new Deputy Minority Whip of the Senate from the opposition People's Democratic Party (PDP).

La'ah's nomination was contained in a letter addressed to the Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, and read at the start of plenary.

The letter was signed by the National Secretary of the PDP, Senator Samuel Anyawu.

Anyawu explained in the letter that the nomination of Senator La'ah was against the backdrop of the recent defection of the former Minority Whip, Senator Ibrahim Abdullahi Danbaba (Sokoto South), to the majority All Progressives Congress (APC).

The letter reads, "We wish to affirm the nomination of Senator Danjuma La'ah (Kaduna South) by the People's Democratic Party (PDP) Senate Caucus, to fill the vacant seat of the Senate Minority Whip.

"The nomination of Senator Danjuma La'ah follows after the defection of Senator Ibrhaim Danbaba (Sokoto South), the former PDP Deputy Whip to APC.

"Please, kindly accord Senator Danjuma La'ah all necessary cooperation and do also accept the assurance of my esteemed regards."

But, Senator George Thompson Sekibo (PDP, Rivers East), while coming under Order 1(b), lamented the defection of PDP Senators who previously occupied the Deputy Minority Whip position.

Two Senators - Senators Emmnuel Bwacha (Taraba South) and Ibrahim Danbaba (Sokoto South) - previously both of the opposition party and La'ah's predecessors, resigned their membership of the PDP and defected to the APC weeks ago.

Ruling on Sekibo's point of order, the Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, ruled the Rivers lawmaker out of order, saying that his observation was not in line with the provisions of Order 1(b) of the Senate Standing Orders, 2022 as amended.

He, however, urged the new Deputy Minority Whip to perform his functions to bring about stability and productivity to the Senate.
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Following Nathan Carmans federal indictment in the killing of his mother in an alleged effort to get his hands on the family fortune, Windsor police said state officials are investigating the former Connecticut residents involvement in his grandfathers 2013 homicide.

In a nine-page indictment released Tuesday, federal authorities contend that Carman killed his grandfather, John Chakalos, who was found shot to death in his Windsor home in December 2013. But the indictment does not charge Carman with the murder.

Windsor Police Chief Donald Melanson said Thursday the Chakalos homicide is being handled by the Cold Case Unit with the chief states attorneys office.

The Windsor Police Department continues to work with state authorities to bring the investigation to a successful conclusion, Melanson said.

A spokesperson for the Office of the Chief States Attorney said Thursday she is waiting to speak with the Cold Case Unit before commenting on the investigation into Chakalos death. There is no information about the homicide among the cases posted on the Chief States Attorneys Cold Case Unit website and no reward offered by the state.

Federal authorities in Vermont who indicted Carman declined to answer questions about the Chakalos homicide.

Carman pleaded not guilty Wednesday to the charges in connection with his mothers homicide. He remains held pending a bond hearing scheduled for Monday.

According to the federal indictment, Carman used his New Hampshire drivers license to purchase a Sig Sauer rifle in that state in November 2013. The document further stated that on Dec. 20, 2013, Nathan Carman murdered his grandfather, John Chakalos, shooting him twice with the Sig Sauer while Chakalos slept in his Windsor, Connecticut home.

After the homicide, Carman covered up his involvement in the crime by discarding his computer hard drive and GPS unit that was in his truck the night of the killing, the indictment said. Federal authorities also said Carman gave investigators false information about the homicide and falsely denied involvement in the crime. He also denied purchasing the Sig Sauer rifle in November 2013, federal authorities said.

Carman received $550,000 from Chakalos death from a trust set for the family and he was hoping to gain access to his grandfathers fortune of $42 million by also killing his mother, Linda Carman, the indictment stated.

Carman purchased a boat called the Chicken Pox that he used to fish with his mother, the indictment said. Federal authorities alleged in the indictment that Carman planned on killing his mother during a fishing trip in September 2016 by altering the boat so it could sink at sea. Her body has never been found.

The boat never returned from its scheduled trip near Block Island in Rhode Island, authorities said. Federal investigators contend that Carman killed his mother and sank the boat, setting off alone in a life raft that was found eight days later by a commercial ship.

Although probate documents filed in New Hampshire related to Chakalos estate mention at various points that Carman is believed to have killed his grandfather, there are no documents that outline the crime.

Chakalos estate was originally filed in probate court in New Hampshire where the family had a home. But the probate case was moved to Connecticut after a New Hampshire judge ruled that Chakalos primary residence was in Windsor.

Probate documents indicated the estate is worth $42 million, of which Linda Carman and her three sisters would receive an equal share. A trustee has been appointed to represent Linda Carman in the proceedings. Federal authorities alleged that Nathan Carman killed his grandfather and mother to get his hands on her share of the estate.
Connecticut State Police / Contributed Photo

TOLLAND  When called to help a driver with a flat tire on Interstate 84 Wednesday afternoon, a Connecticut state trooper discovered the driver was the former president of Poland and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Lech Walesa.

You never know who you will meet as a state trooper, state police said in a Facebook post Wednesday.
HARTFORD  A Naugatuck man was sentenced to two years and nine months in prison Wednesday for distributing heroin, according to federal prosecutors.

Adam Mines, 38, pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge in December 2021. He was one of 17 charged in a federal indictment in March 2021 stemming from an investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administrations New Haven Task Force and the Waterbury Police Department, according to Leonard Boyle, the United States attorney for the District of Connecticut.

Those law enforcement agencies started the investigation in May 2020. They were looking into a drug trafficking organization, believed to have been led by Zachary Lee Foster, that was distributing large amounts of heroin, cocaine and crack cocaine in the Waterbury area, the U.S. Attorneys Office said.

In the investigation, detectives used court-authorized wire taps on several phones used by members of the organization, as well as physical surveillance, controlled purchases of narcotics and motor vehicle stops that allowed law enforcement to seize drugs, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office.

Detectives learned that Foster worked closely with Jason Metz, of Naugatuck, to distribute narcotics. Mine was heard multiple times through a wiretap ordering distribution quantities of heroin from Metz between November 2020 and January 2021. Metz then sold the drugs to his own customers, the U.S. Attorneys Office said.

Mines, Foster, Metz and 14 others were charged in an indictment from a federal grand jury in New Haven on March 1, 2021.

Mines was arrested on March 3, 2021. On that date, law enforcement executed seven search warrants and seized about 40,000 bags of suspected, heroin, 350 grams of cocaine, 50 grams of crack cocaine and nine firearms, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office.

Mines has been detained since his arrest and pleaded guilty to the charge on Dec. 10, 2021. A federal judge in Hartford ordered him to serve 33 months in prison, or two years and nine months, followed by three years of supervised release on Wednesday. .

Mets and Foster have both pleaded guilty and await sentencing.
BERLIN (AP)  A 16-year-old student was detained in Germany for allegedly plotting an attack on a local secondary school in the western city of Essen after police seized weapons and bomb-making materials from his apartment, authorities said Thursday.

An overnight search of the suspect's apartment yielded bomb-making materials and large amounts of right-wing extremist, antisemitic and anti-Muslim writings in the teens possession, state interior minister Herbert Reul told a press conference. Essen police said they also found spears and other sharp weapons.

The student is suspected of plotting an attack on the Don-Bosco-Gymnasium, the school he currently attends, or another local school he previously attended, the Realschule am Schloss Borbeck, police said.

Police told the broadcaster ZDF that they had evidence of a crime in which weapons played a role," but didn't offer more specifics.

Reul said the police search provided indications that the suspect had massive mental problems and suicidal thoughts, including recordings that could be seen as an urgent call for help from a desperate young man.

As of Thursday, the suspect was in police custody.

Both schools were closed Thursday because of the police operations. A statement on the Don-Bosco-Gymnasium's website Thursday morning said they had received indications that a crime was being planned at the school."

Reul said Thursday afternoon that thus far, no bombs or bomb-related materials had been found at the schools.

Thomas Kutschaty, the state parliamentary leader of the center-left SPD, tweeted Thursday that reports of the alleged plot shocked me deeply. He praised the high level of civil courage and the courageous intervention of the police that kept students and teachers safe.
LONDON (AP)  The number of fines issued over breaches of coronavirus regulations at British government offices, including Prime Minister Boris Johnsons official residence, has expanded to more than 100, Londons Metropolitan Police force said Thursday.

Johnson admitted last month that he was among dozens of people who paid a police fine for attending lockdown-breaching parties and gatherings, making him the first British leader to be sanctioned for breaking the law while in office.

Revelations that Johnson and other senior officials gathered illegally in government buildings in 2020 and 2021 - when millions in the country were told to restrict their lives to slow the spread of COVID-19 - has angered voters and triggered calls for Johnson to resign.

Johnson has apologized for attending his own surprise birthday party at 10 Downing St. in June 2020, but insisted that it did not occur to him that the gathering, which he said lasted less than 10 minutes, was a party.

Johnsons wife, Carrie, and Treasury chief Rishi Sunak also said they were fined for attending the same event.

The police force's update doubled the number of fixed-penalty notices issued so far over the scandal that has been dubbed partygate. Last month, the force said it had given about 50 such fines as a result of its investigation.

The Metropolitan Police said investigations were continuing into a dozen gatherings, which reportedly included bring your own booze office parties and wine time Fridays organized by Johnsons staff.

Police do not identify the recipients of the fines. Johnson's spokesperson said Thursday the prime minister was not among the individuals cited in the latest round of penalty notices.

A senior civil servant, Sue Gray, is conducting a separate investigation of the government parties. In a partial report on gatherings that are not the subject of criminal investigations by police, Gray said failures of leadership and judgment in Johnsons government allowed events to occur that should not have happened.

More than 176,000 people have died in Britain after testing positive for the coronavirus, the highest toll in Europe after Russia.
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BANGKOK (AP)  Myanmar announced Thursday it will resume issuing visas for visitors in an effort to help its moribund tourism industry, devastated by the coronavirus pandemic and violent political unrest.

Starting on Sunday, tourist e-Visas will be provided online in a move also intended to harmonize tourism with neighboring countries, according to a government notice in the state-run Global New Light of Myanmar newspaper.

Visitors need a certificate of vaccination, negative results from a COVID-19 RT-PCR test taken shortly before their flight and a travel insurance policy. They must also take an ATK rapid test after arrival.

Myanmar on April 1 had already resumed issuing business visas, and on April 17 dropped a ban on international commercial flights. It had stopped issuing visas and suspended flight arrivals in March 2020.

Tourism is an important source of revenue for most Southeast Asian nations but they banned almost all foreign visitors after the coronavirus pandemic began in early 2020. In the past six months most have reopened and gradually dropped most or all testing requirements.

The pandemic and political instability have buffeted Myanmar's economy, which was put under more pressure by economic sanctions imposed by Western nations targeting commercial holdings controlled by the army, which seized power in February 2021 from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi.

Myanmar hosted 4.36 million visitor arrivals in 2019, before the pandemic, but the number fell to 903,000 in 2020, the latest year for which official statistics are available.

Peaceful opposition to the military takeover has turned into armed resistance, and the country is now in a state of civil war, according to some U.N. experts. The army is conducting large-scale offensives in the countryside while anti-government forces carry out scattered urban guerrilla attacks in the cities.

The U.S. State Department advisory for Myanmar, which it calls by its old name Burma, is at its maximum alert Level 4. It advises against travel there due to areas of civil unrest and armed conflict. It also says "reconsider travel to Burma due to COVID-19-related restrictions.
NEW FAIRFIELD  The Board of Finance has scheduled a special meeting Monday to discuss remarks made by David Coleman that residents found insensitive and demeaning.

Residents are not only demanding the Republican finance board alternate publicly apologize for comments he made about the special needs community during the Board of Finances April 20 meeting, but calling for him to either be censured or resign.

Coleman  who was elected to the Board of Finance as an alternate back in November  has not been able to be reached for comment.

While talking about rising special education costs, Coleman said he felt sorry for any family who winds up in a situation with a child like that  referring to families of special education students who go to residential facilities. He also made a remark that seemed to insinuate that special education students arent likely to graduate.

Several residents spoke out against Colemans comments during and after the April 20 meeting  including parent and school board chair Dominic Cipollone, who called the remarks abhorrent and troubling.

Since the April 20 meeting, Board of Finance Chair Wes Marsh told Hearst Connecticut Media that the board has received at least one or two requests from residents asking for Coleman to make a public apology, and that he either be censured or resign.

Although Marsh said the finance board would discuss the remarks during the boards next regular meeting later on this month, a May 9 special meeting has been scheduled to discuss the comments Coleman made, as well as actions to take, according to the agenda.
Brian Zahn / Hearst Connecticut Media file photo

NEW HAVEN  Roughly a year after a student-led effort to remove uniformed police officers from school buildings fell short when the Board of Education voted to increase school psychologists instead of reducing police officers, students walked out of school Thursday in protest.

In an Instagram post, The Citywide Youth Coalition outlined the reason why more than 100 students marched throughout downtown New Haven. According to the statement, students are struggling in New Haven schools because of a lack of mental health supports. The schools are both militarized and Black and brown students are criminalized, it said, and such a culture is upheld by the presence of school resource officers  uniformed officers who work at schools through an agreement between the school district and Police Department.
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP)  A North Carolina man who ran a daycare from his home has been convicted of six felony drug and firearm offenses after authorities said he also directed an armed drug trafficking operation from the same location.

Michael Easley, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, said in a news release that Reshod Jamar Everett, 36, of Cumberland County, was found guilty by a federal jury on Tuesday. Agents seized drugs, more than $65,000 and eight loaded firearms, including high-powered rifles from the home, the news release said.
The Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics (ASUP) has said it will commence a two-week warning strike from May 16, 2022.

ASUP, in a statement released on Wednesday, said it took the decision after an emergency National Executive Council (NEC) meeting.

The statement was signed by its national president, Anderson Ezeibe, and titled, 'Status Update of the ASUP/Federal Government of Nigeria Engagement; and Resolutions of the Emergency National Executive Council Meeting of ASUP.'

The Union stated that it suspended its industrial action declared on the April 6, 2021 on June 10, 2021, following the signing of a Memorandum of Action (MoA) with the government for a period of three months to enable the government conclude processes already initiated in the direction of fulfilment of the items in the MoA which are process-led.

However, it alleged that after nine months of suspending its strike, it met to evaluate the government's response to the MoA, where it gave the Federal Government a one-month ultimatum, but government did not honour its agreement with the union.

"Nine months after the suspension of the industrial action and six months after the expiration of the three-month period of suspension, our Union's NEC met in its meeting in Federal Polytechnic Mubi and after reviewing the report of the implementation of the MoA, resolved to issue a 1 month ultimatum to the government effective 4th April, 2022 to address the outstanding items in the MoA and other emergent issues or face the reality of another trade dispute with our Union.

"Our Union's ultimatum expired on the 4th of May, 2022 and as is the norm, the Union's NEC reconvened today, 11th of May, 2022 to review the response of the government to the ultimatum, particularly as it affects relevant agencies/functionaries of government," the statement partly reads.

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The union also said that the government did not make attempts at conciliation despite the ultimatum given.

It also stated that it stayed away from a May 9 meeting called by the Minister of Education, noting that the meeting failed to meet basic requirements for collective bargaining.

"Within the period of the ultimatum, the Union met with the National Board for Technical Education to review the grievances with a view to resolution. Another meeting fixed at the instance of the Honourable Minister of Education (after the 2 expiration of the ultimatum) failed to meet basic requirements for collective bargaining.

"Our Union stayed away from the meeting as it was not structured to address the issues in dispute. The Federal Ministry of Labour and Employment only acknowledged receipt of the union's ultimatum and made no attempts at conciliation," the statement read in part," it added.
WEST HAVEN  Police arrested a New Haven man Wednesday in a fatal shooting from December.

Paul Burruss Sr. 52, was charged with felony murder, home invasion, first-degree robbery and conspiracy to commit first-degree robbery, according to West Haven Police Sgt. Patrick Buturla.

Buturla said police applied for Burress arrest warrant on April 27 after a lengthy investigation.

Police found Burruss in Seymour Wednesday where he was taken into custody with the help of the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles Police, state police and the Seymour Police Department. Burruss was then taken to West Haven where he is being held on $1 million bond.

The deadly shooting took place around 3 a.m. Dec. 16, 2021. Police were called to a home on Platt Avenue and found Carlos Gore Jr. shot in the residence.

Gore was taken to the hospital and succumbed to his injuries, police said.

The West Haven Police Department would like to thank the Milford States Attorneys Office, the FBI, New Haven Field Office and the public for their cooperation and assistance in this investigation, Buturla said in a statement Wednesday. We would also like to offer our deepest condolences to the family and friends of Carlos Gore Jr.
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LONDON (AP)  Britain's foreign secretary warned the European Union on Thursday that the U.K. will have no choice but to act" to revoke parts of a Brexit agreement on Northern Ireland if the EU does not show flexibility.

Post-Brexit arrangements for border and customs checks in Northern Ireland have become the greatest obstacle to forming a new government in Belfast, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said during a call with European Commission Vice President Maros Sefcovic.

Border issues between Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom, and EU member Ireland have long posed the thorniest problems in the U.K.s divorce from the EU.

They resurfaced after the Democratic Unionist Party refused this week to help form a power-sharing government with Irish nationalist party Sinn Fein unless the post-Brexit arrangements were substantially changed or scrapped.

An open Irish border is a key part of the peace process that ended decades of violence in Northern Ireland, which is the only part of the U.K. to share a land border with an EU country. The EU and the U.K. agreed to keep the Irish border free of customs posts and other checks after Brexit, which became final at the end of 2020.

Instead, there are checks on some goods, such as meat and eggs, entering Northern Ireland from elsewhere in the U.K. The Democratic Unionist Party is strongly opposed to the rules, saying the checks have created a barrier that undermines the British identity of its members.

Truss' office said Sefcovic reiterated to her Thursday that there was no room to expand the EU negotiating mandate or introduce new proposals to reduce the overall level of trade friction.

The foreign secretary noted this with regret and said the situation in Northern Ireland is a matter of internal peace and security for the United Kingdom, the Foreign Office said in a statement.

If the EU would not show the requisite flexibility to help solve those issues, then as a responsible government we would have no choice but to act," the statement said.

Tensions over the trade rules, known as the Northern Ireland Protocol, were ramping up even before Northern Ireland held its assembly elections last weekend.

Northern Ireland has been without a functioning government since February, when the DUPs leader at the time, Paul Givan, quit as first minister in protest over the trade rules.

U.K. officials have repeatedly warned they might unilaterally suspend the arrangements if the EU did not agree to major changes.

British media reported that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson could announce next week that his government would legislate to override parts of the Northern Ireland deal.

The Times newspaper reported Thursday that Britain's Attorney General, Suella Braverman, issued advice saying that such a move would be legal because the EU was undermining Northern Ireland's Good Friday peace agreement by creating a trade barrier in the Irish Sea.

Any move by Britain to unilaterally rewrite the rules would bring legal action from the EU that could escalate into a trade war.

I am convinced that only joint solutions will work. Unilateral action, effectively disapplying an international agreement such as the protocol, is simply not acceptable, Sefcovic, the EUs chief negotiator, said after Thursdays call.

The DUPs leader, Jeffrey Donaldson, said his party would decide whether to nominate a Speaker for the Northern Ireland Assembly on Friday, when the legislature is due to have its first session since last weeks elections.

Donaldson has said that the party will not nominate ministers to Northern Irelands devolved government until the U.K. government acts over the Brexit deal.

According to rules agreed under Northern Irelands 1998 peace agreement, no functioning government could form unless the largest British unionist party and largest Irish nationalist one come together to share power.
President Muhammadu Buhari has appealed to the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, to end the lingering strike. Buhari urged ASU...





President Muhammadu Buhari has appealed to the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, to end the lingering strike.

Buhari urged ASUU to consider the plight of the students and called off the industrial action.

The President made the appeal at the 19th National Productivity Day Celebration and Conferment of National Productivity Order of Merit Award, held at the State House Conference Centre, Abuja.

He also urged the National Association of Nigerian Students, NANS, to exercise patience as the government tries to resolve the crisis.

Buhari recalled his February 1 directive to His Chief of Staff, Ibrahim Gambari, the Ministers of Education and Labour and Employment, Adamu Adamu and Chris Ngige, respectively, to address the concerns of the striking aggrieved workers unions.

On Monday, ASUU has been on strike since February 20222.

But ASUU on Monday extended its ongoing roll-over strike by another three months.

The body is demanding funding for the revitalisation of public universities, the Earned Academic Allowances, the University Transparency Accountability Solution (UTAS) and promotion arrears.

Others include the renegotiation and implementation of the 2009 ASUU-FG Agreement and the inconsistency in the Integrated Personnel Payroll Information System.
Former militant leader, Asari Dokubo has cautioned ex-President Goodluck Jonathan against joining the All Progressives Congress, APC. ...

Former militant leader, Asari Dokubo has cautioned ex-President Goodluck Jonathan against joining the All Progressives Congress, APC.

Dokubo urged Jonathan to join other political parties and not APC if he wanted to run for the Presidency again.

In a Facebook live yesterday, the former militant leader said wooing Jonathan to APC was an attempt to ridicule him.

Dokubo said he is not in support of the former President joining the ruling party ahead of 2023.

I do not support Goodluck coming to contest election under the APC. 100%, Im not in support. Because many of his followers fought the APC government and had gone hungry throughout this period without any aid from him. And without consultation, he will just come out.

If Goodluck wants to stage a comeback, let him go to other political parties: YPP, SDP, etc. Why should he want somebody to anoint him before he contests the election? Dokubo said.

On Monday, a northern group purchased the APC Presidential nomination forms for Jonathan.

The former President, who spoke through his spokesman, Ikechukwu Eze, distanced himself from the group.

However, there are fillers that Jonathan was working on picking APCs membership card in Otuoke, Bayelsa State.
Bukola Saraki, senate president, formally declared his intention to run for president in 2023 on Thursday. He said he is running for...

Bukola Saraki, senate president, formally declared his intention to run for president in 2023 on Thursday.

He said he is running for president to build a greater Nigeria for even the generations yet unborn.

Below is his speech in full.

Eminent citizens, highly respected leaders and operators of the Fourth Estate of the realm, my friends and colleagues, dear compatriots, let me start by thanking all of you for finding time to be with us this morning.

1. It is no longer news that I am in the race for the PDPs ticket to contest for the Office of the President. But I have decided to convene this session to let you know why I am in the race.

2. For all that we have experienced in the last couple of years, the 2023 Presidential election looms large as another watershed moment in our political history. We must all acknowledge that some things have happened in this country in the last couple of years that no one could have imagined possible only less than a decade ago. 2023 therefore presents us with a great moment of decision: the moment to choose hope over hopelessness; the moment to choose peace and security over fear and terror; the moment to choose unity and inclusion over division and exclusion; the moment that we draw a bold line in the sands of history and say, no more, and then move ahead as one people, as one nation, towards our God-assigned destiny as the greatest black nation on the face of the earth.

3. We all have reasons to be worried about the future of this country. But this is not the time to surrender and wallow in despair. Rather, this is the moment, when all patriots and citizens of goodwill must show courage, rise above those lines of divisions that have kept us apart over the years and ask this very important question: where do we go from here?

4. I do not have a grass to grace story to tell. Some may even consider me privileged. But I never take my privileges for granted. I learnt as a young boy growing up under the watchful guidance of a father who loved this country so dearly that to whom much is given, much is expected. Therefore, I can say that even the privileges of my childhood were easily matched by a dominant culture of giving, created by a father whose politics was defined by a deep commitment to helping and uplifting others. I learnt from him that life is truly worth living only when it is lived in the service of something that is bigger than yourself.

5. I decided to become a doctor because of this ingrained desire to help and to serve others. And when in 1999, I joined government as Special Assistant to President Olusegun Obasanjo, I became even more acutely aware of the limitless possibilities for service through government; and of how political power in the hands of a committed, competent and courageous leadership can solve real problems and uplift the destiny of a nation and her people. It was this same realization that motivated me to contest and win election as the Governor of Kwara State in 2003.

6. Even back then, many did not give me a chance to succeed. They thought I was too young and too much of a political neophyte to make an impact. He is private sector and privileged, they said. So how would he understand what the poor people in the state want or what they are going through?. But I believe I proved them wrong in the end. Armed with a deep passion to serve, and to make a difference, I did my best to impact lives and to leave a lasting legacy.

7. I did not solve all the problems, but in eight years I left Kwara State better than I met it. We were able to confront old problems with new and innovative solutions. We implemented bold education reforms that brought children back to school, and improved the quality of teaching across the state. We established a State University and the International Aviation College to create jobs and expand access to higher eduction.

8. We rolled back malaria, we defeated polio, and we introduced the first community health insurance IN THE COUNTRY ON that brought thousands of rural poor under insurance coverage. We opened our state to commercial aviation, built road and housing infrastructure. We ensured value-for-money IN GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURE and became the first sub-national government in Nigeria to submit itself to a Fitch Rating, which returned with a national long-term rating of AA-.

9. As a Senator, I was able to rise above ruinous partisanship and challenged the massive scam perpetrated under the cover of fuel subsidy. As Senate President, I defended the integrity of the National Assembly, sometimes, at great personal cost. And even in the face of daunting challenges and conspiracies, we passed important legislations to make legitimate business easier in our country, and to support enterprise. We developed a 21-point Economic Agenda and designed a new security architecture that if fully implemented would have left us in a different place in our fight against terror. We promoted youth participation in politics and passed the law to lower the entry barrier for young people. We did so much more.

10. In all the positions that I have had the good fortune to occupy, I have been driven by the deep conviction to serve, to help, to proffer solutions and to leave behind a legacy of courage, of hard work and of unyielding commitment to making a difference.

11. Perhaps more importantly, I have gone into each of these positions with clearly thought-out plans, decided well in advance. Working with some of the best brains around, I took my time to study situations, decide on what to do, and agree on the best implementation strategies. I never muddled through. On every occasion, I have had to break through the walls of doubts and cynicism from those who thought that it could not be done; those who thought that the odds were too stacked against us and we wouldnt stand a chance. But each time, we were able to prove them wrong because we had the courage of conviction and we had God on our side.

12. The stake has never been higher for our country. This is the moment that we must put in everything we have to save this nation, because what we have today is not our country. This certainly, is not the Nigeria of the dreams of our founding fathers and those who came after them.

13. In our lifetime, we have seen a Nigeria where everyone, rich or poor, was guaranteed education just by merely attending a school.

14. In our lifetime, we have witnessed a Nigeria where children could wander far away from home, for as long as they wanted, and were sure to return in the evening.

15. In our lifetime, we have witnessed a Nigeria where one could drive from Lagos in the night and arrive Maiduguri in the morning, without fear or misfortune.

16. In our lifetime, we have witnessed a Nigeria, where a Fulani man, would arrive Enugu as a cattle trader and ended up as elected mayor of the city.

17. In our lifetime, we have witnessed a Nigeria where everyone was guaranteed a minimum standard of living, where the middle class thrived, where jobs were available and predictable, where crimes were punished, where the civil service was efficient, where public utilities worked, and where Nigeria was the pride of every black man anywhere in the world.

18. Where has this our Nigeria gone? How can we rediscover it and make it even greater for our children and for generations yet unborn? This is the reason I am running. I want to be President because I believe that this Nigeria is still possible in our lifetime.

19. I am aware that even now, many are asking, what am I going to do differently; what I am I going to say which has not been promised in the past? I know that even for those of you listening to me in this room, you are probably telling yourself right now, Havent we heard all these before?

20. Yes, you have the right to be skeptical. Yes, you have heard all these before. But here is what will make the difference. I will do what I have always done: I will arrive in the office with a well-thought-out plan of my own; I will implement my plans with courage and conviction; and I will work every single day as if it would be my last.

21. We never lacked ideas in this country. We all seem to know what needs to be done. What we have missed is leadership; the ability to rally everyone and everything around agreed priorities, to set measurable targets, to be uncompromising in achieving results, and to accept no excuse or justification for failure. This critical vacuum is what I intend to fill. This leadership with a purpose is what I bring to the table, and this is what would make the difference.

22. You may also ask; how long would it take to solve all these problems? I agree, the problems that we face are so many and so daunting that we may not solve them all in the lifetime of a presidency or even in our lifetime. But that is not the point. The point is not whether we would be able to solve all the problems; or whether I possess a magic wand that will turn our country into a paradise overnight.

23. The point is that we can be the generation that starts it all. We can be the turning point generation; in whose time everything began to change. The generation that despite our differences, we are able to unite against poverty and hunger, because poverty and hunger spare no tribe or religion.

24. We can be the generation that is ashamed to be labelled as the poverty capital of the world; and therefore, commit itself to do whatever it takes to remove this badge of dishonour on our country.

25. We can be the generation that is collectively embarrassed to admit that we have more children out of school than any other country in the world and therefore resolve to ensuring that every Nigerian child, regardless of the circumstance of her parents, is guaranteed quality basic education.

26. We can be the generation that commits to building a country on the principle of equal opportunity for all; a generation that gives equal chance to everyone; that is deliberate about policies that promote the inclusion of women and youth, as well as people living with disabilities; believing that we are only as strong as the weakest among us.

27. We can be the generation that is determined to make ours the last generation in whose time people aspiring for public office would be judged based on the content of their character and their capacity not on which part of the country they come from, what language they speak or how they worship God. Let us be the last generation that would ask, Where do you come from, rather than What can you do?

28. Indeed, we can be the generation that says, ENOUGH TALK, ENOUGH LAMENTATION, ENOUGH BLAMING EACH OTHER  THIS IS TIME FOR ACTION. This is the time for real work, this is the time to fix our Nigeria, and to make Nigeria work for all Nigerians.

29. I acknowledge the great efforts of all our past leaders over the years. I pay my great respect to them all and I thank them for their service to our nation.

30. However, as long as there is a child in Nigeria that cannot read or write, then the job is not done. And it is for this one child that I want to run for President, because I will ensure that the law on compulsory basic education is enforced and quality of teaching improves in all public schools.

31. As long as there is an old woman in this country who cannot afford her prescription drugs for diabetes or malaria because she has no insurance coverage, the job is not done. And it is for this woman that I want to run for President, because I will ensure that people like her are covered; and that we are able to push our compulsory health insurance coverage from the current 7 per cent to 50 per cent in the first two years.

32. As long as a single village or forest in this country is controlled by terrorists, or bandits or any other criminal groups; as long as any of our citizen lives in fear; as long as our soldiers and other security agents do not get the right training, the right equipment and the right incentives, the job is not done. And it is for these citizens that I want to be President, because I will do everything to protect the lives and properties of every Nigerian and everyone that live within our borders. I will ensure that all our men and women in uniform are well-trained, are well-paid and are well-equipped.

33. As long as crude oil revenue remains the mainstay of our economy, and we remain so vulnerable to the volatility of international oil market, then the job is not done. And this is why I want to be President, because I will raise the revenue from the non-oil sectors to the same level as we currently earn from oil.

34. As long as there are still people in this country who believe that they can break the laws of Nigeria with impunity; who think that crime has no consequences, then the job is not done. And this is why I want to be President, because I will ensure strict compliance with the rule of law and guarantee consequences for crime.

35. As long as we still import tilers, plumbers and electricians from neighboring countries, then the job is not done. And this is why I want to be President, because I will collaborate with the industries, and train one million of our youths in technical and vocational skills each year.

36. As long as 65 million of our citizens still live in slum conditions in our cities and urban centers, then the job is not done. And this is why I want to be President, because I will deliver half a million affordable housing units every year to our low-income earners and eliminate urban slums.

37. As long as Nigeria is not the tech hub for Africa, despite our incredible talents in this area, then our job is not done. And this is why I want to be President, because I will invest massively in skills in cloud computing, data analytics, programming and other such in-demand skills to drive innovation and competitiveness among our youths.

38. As long as our huge army of talented youths do not think that the Nigerian government can support their dreams, whether in entertainment, fashion or other creative business, the job is not done. And it is for these talented Nigerians that I want to be President, because I will create the Nigeria Creative Industry Initiatives to protect our leadership position on the African continent and position us to be global leader in the cultural productions economy.

39. As long as our university lecturers still have reasons to embark on strike actions; as long our universities still rank outside the top 1000 in the world, then our job is not done. And this is why I want to be President, because I will ensure that our universities and higher education institutions are competitive and well-funded, adopting models and approaches that have served the most successful higher education systems in the world.

40. As long as some of our best and brightest brains still relocate to other countries to find fulfillment, then our job is not done. And this is why I want to be President, because I will develop targeted incentives to reverse the brain drain and keep our professionals in the country.

41. I CAN DO IT! My portfolio of experience at the executive level, and at the highest legislative institution of our country, makes me a unique asset in democratic leadership at a time that calls for consensus building, for cooperation and for compromise.

42. I KNOW how business works. I KNOW how government functions. And I KNOW how the legislature operates. This diverse experience stands me out. And I will bring the experience to bear in getting the most critical constituencies behind the tough decisions that we must take if Nigeria must survive.

43. I will be President for all because I represent a Nigerian identity that is truly diverse, truly inclusive and truly Nigerian. I WILL BE THE BRIDGE BETWEEN THE YOUNG AND THE OLD. I WILL BE THE BRIDGE BETWEEN THE PRIVATE SECTOR AND THE PUBLIC SECTOR. I WILL BE THE BRIDGE BETWEEN MUSLIMS AND CHRISTIANS. I WILL BE THE BRIDGE BETWEEN NORTH AND THE SOUTH. BECAUSE I AM THE NIGERIAN FOR ALL NIGERIANS!

44. Join hands with me, lets go fix Nigeria. God bless the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
The Senate, on Wednesday, mourned the recent killing of over 40 persons, including soldiers by terrorists in the southern part of Taraba State.

This followed a point of order raised by Senator Emmanuel Bwacha (APC, Taraba South).

Coming under Order 42 of the Senate Standing Orders 2022 as amended, Bwacha drew the attention of the chamber to the incidents of banditry and terrorism that occurred in Southern Taraba during the Sallah break.

He noted that the attackers came on motorbikes and killed over 40 people, including soldiers who were mobilized to protect the community.

The lawmaker consoled with Military authorities over the loss of its men and officers in the line of duty.

He appealed to the Federal Government to direct the relevant agencies to provide relief materials to the victims of the attack.

The Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, called on Nigerians to support the military by providing the needed motivation and information to enable them tackle the problem of insecurity.

Lawan said, "Let me also say that the military and our armed forces are doing their best, we have no alternative but to support them in whatever way possible.

"Here in the Senate and National Assembly, we have been appropriating funds for our armed forces, and I believe that this administration has provided more resources to them to fight the various forms and ramifications of insecurity in the country than any previous one.

"So, we will continue to give that kind of support. And I also want to urge all Nigerians to continue to support our armed forces because they are doing so much even though we don't have enough for them.

"But I believe that the support of citizens for the armed forces will galvanize and keep them motivated."

The Senate, thereafter, observed a minute silence in honour of all those killed by terrorists in Southern Taraba.
Watertown, NY (13601)

Today

Sun and clouds mixed. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High around 75F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

Some clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 56F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph.
As the clock winds down on President Buhari's tenure, one of the underlying questions and expectations is what will happen to the 12 million guaranteed votes that the president has consistently garnered in all his election outings from 2011 up to 2019.

To put it in proper perspective President Muhammadu Buhari's ability to secure that considerable number of votes even when he was in opposition has been the most significant factor responsible for his political standing in the country today. It was this factor that made him such a formidable opposition figure against whom the various administrations of the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP) from Presidents Obasanjo to Goodluck Jonathan lived in constant dread.

It was the bankability of the 12 million (some call it Buhari's safe deposit) that formed the raison d'etre for some of the grandees of Nigerian politics to push through a merger of political parties which eventually led to the formation of the now ruling All Progressive Party (APC). I daresay if there was no Muhammadu Buhari and his 12 million votes the impetus for a grand merger of political parties in 2014 by political personalities in the country with the overriding desire to oust the then ruling PDP of Goodluck Jonathan in 2015 would not have been there. And in the 2019 elections yet again the 12-million man, Buhari, kicked in and affirmed his political standing by winning the elections against Atiku Abubakar of the PDP.

The subject of how President Buhari came to have such a solid, formidable and consistent political following over the years is a matter for another day. But the trending issue now is that as President Buhari is set to leave next year, what will happen to these votes that he packs; will he transfer them to a favoured candidate amongst aspirants now hotly jostling to get the APC's presidential ticket? Are the votes even transferable? In other words are the votes only for Buhari alone or can he hope to ask his 12 million voters to transfer their support to his chosen candidate and get their compliance in the 2023 elections?

Most if not all of the presidential aspirants in the APC in one way or the other entertain the hope and in some cases expect that President Buhari will mobilise the apparatus of government as well as his votes behind them to get the nomination and win the 2023 elections.

But while it is a genuine expectation of APC presidential aspirants of President Buhari, realistically the aspirants must, however, brace themselves up for the unexpected.

Yes, President Buhari, even with his not too sterling performances, can still count on the massive support he had enjoyed up till now. But in the waning months of his presidency, that massive support has noticeably been eroding. And that is down to the fact that many of the supporters, having been disappointed by his failure to live up to their expectation of him, have somewhat drawn by him. Secondly the support he has been consistently enjoying is largely due to the unique character and personality traits they perceived in him and him alone and not anyone else.

In this regard, any APC presidential aspirant who expects that President Buhari will instruct his 12 million voters and have such complied with in the 2023 election race should think again. The truth is that objectively President Buhari by character, disposition and circumstances may not be inclined to do so and in the unlikely event of his doing that, it may likely not be complied with by most of the 12 millions.

Most of President Buhari's supporters will feel that having supported him on their own assessment and volition, they should equally be allowed to form their own views and exercise their own choice in supporting any of the aspirants they so wished. Apart from his disinclination to support any political aspirant based on his past negative experience with such moves, President Buhari discerns that overtly showing support to any of the aspirants in an election that is not restricted to his party alone may not strike the right note with his supporters and may even result in an avoidably embarrassing blow-back to his political standing.

It is also important to note that the circumstances that first led to President Buhari getting and enjoying the support he basks in has drastically changed. In the run up to the 2011 elections, when he first emerged, he was the rallying political figure of the northern masses disillusioned and chafing at the perceived anti-northern policies of President Obasanjo. In 2015 he was still the candidate of the northern masses but in addition and more significantly he was the candidate of a formidable coalition of political grandees who wanted him to lead the charge for a new political direction in the country.

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Presently of course the Nigerian political firmament is beset by new conditions which have drastically changed the circumstances that threw up the massive support Buhari has come to garner. The core base of President Buhari's 12 million voters in the north is now in a state of bewildered disillusionment following the state of insecurity and debilitating poverty they least expected to experience under him. So while they may still have some love and support for him as a person, President Buhari's 12 million voters will not, however, solidly transfer their support to whoever he may eventually endorse and present to the party and Nigerians as his successor.
Sewage bubbles up in Laszlo Fulops backyard because the 108-year-old pipe under his property stopped flowing. Its an unpleasant situation. Fulop said he had part of the antique terra cotta pipe dug up and replaced with a modern plastic one, which set him back $9,000, but that didnt fix the problem.

Fulop has a friend who lets him shower and otherwise use the bathroom at her place every morning to minimize the amount of his backyard discharge. But the arrangement doesnt address the underlying issue.

Age-old architecture and neighborliness lend New Orleans some of its charm. But up on Cambronne Street, the charm is wearing a little thin. Fulop, an immigrant from Transvylania, said he was enjoying a modest version of the American Dream in his white frame, cottage-style house. But that dream has been rocked by deteriorating underground infrastructure, a disagreement with a neighbor involving lawyers, Sewerage & Water Board regulation  and staggering plumbing bills.

Trench warfare

Let's back up.

The trouble began in April, when a wet patch appeared in Fulops backyard, indicating that something was leaking underground. "I thought, hmmm, that's not good," he said. Eventually, a big lake formed under his house.

Fulop's plumbing issues date all the way back to 1914, the year World War I erupted in Europe. In that long-ago era, his sewer line was laid in such a way that it now travels under a neighbor's house.

Fulop said he pleaded with the neighbor for permission to tunnel on her land to try to solve his sewerage problem. But she refused.

Things got testy. Fulop threatened to sue his neighbor, whose tidy house is a mere 6 feet away, for the right of way to fix his plugged pipe. Asked to comment on the stalemate, attorney Wayne Jablonowski, who represents the neighbor, accused Fulop of attempting to bully her into allowing him to disrupt her property, merely to save money.

Mr. Fulop thinks that he has the legal rights to enter (the neighbor's) property and dig a four-foot-deep trench undermining her structural foundation and to place a permanent sewer line under her property, Jablonowski wrote in an email. This would place an unacceptable permanent encroachment of his sewer line under her property.

A change of direction

Jablonowski said it is possible for Fulop to go another route. I am told he can run his sewer line to Cambronne Street, the lawyer wrote.

Fulop denies that he attempted to bully his neighbor, but he said it is true that he has another option besides following the existing sewer line under the nearby property. All he has to do, he said, is pay someone to dig a 75-foot trench from his stinky backyard to the street and pay someone else to connect his line to the main sewerage drain under the street.

Fulops insurance was no help. They just told me this issue doesnt qualify, he said. So, altogether, Fulop estimates hell spend more than $30,000 on that project, including what hes already shelled out. Everybody tells him to take out a loan, he said, but they dont tell him how hes supposed to make the loan payments.

A crazy city

Fulop, 56, was born in the part of Romania called Transylvania, home of the fictional Count Dracula. He said he grew up under communism in the notoriously repressive Nicolae Ceausescu era. His family lived in a five-story housing block with 100 other families. It was one of the small ones, he said.

Fulop studied Hungarian literature in college. He said he would have rather studied creative writing, but there was no such thing as creative writing at the time.

As the Iron Curtain began to part, Fulop was able to apply for a job as a waiter with an international cruise ship company. His travels took him to New York, where he and two buddies set out on a road trip across America in a rattling Olds Cutlass. Like so many road trips, the path took the trio to New Orleans. It was the week before Mardi Gras 1994. With barely enough money to buy vodka at Schwegmanns, the buddies slept in the Cutlass parked on Decatur Street in the Marigny.

I thought, 'this is a crazy city,' Fulop said.

Absorbing the cost

New Orleans was made for low-budget adventurers, and Fulop, who was 27 at the time, fit right in. He said he became a bartender, then a waiter at Arnauds. He eventually went back to school, married, divorced, wrote plays, made post-Katrina video documentaries and became a University of New Orleans film professor. Five years ago, he bought a fixer upper on a street named after one of Napoleons generals. From Cutlass to Cambronne Street! It was a triumph.

It was also a time bomb. When the byproducts of the bathroom began turning up in the back yard, Fulop said he contacted the Sewerage & Water Board for assistance. Fulop said a S&WB crew attempted to wash out the drain, from the street side, but it had no affect.

That was all the agency was able to do, Fulop was told. In an email, S&WB Interim General Superintendent Ron Spooner explained that the agency was not responsible for maintaining Fulops aged lines and that hed have to pay for a replacement himself.

Unfortunately, Spooner wrote, we commonly run into these types of issues where one homeowner's sewer connection flows through their neighbor's connection located on private property. The homeowner will have to absorb the entire cost to install a new sewer connection to the existing sewer main in the street.

Losing balance

Based on some 1914 documents provided by the S&WB, Fulop said, its clear they built or gave permission to build a sewage line in a crazy way across property lines.

So why, he wants to know, is it up to him to lay a new pipe in a different direction and to have it attached to the city sewerage system in a whole new location?

If someone doesnt have the money to pay for a new tap/connection, what should they do? Fulop asks. Go bankrupt? Sell the house? Live a fulfilling, happy life with sewage in the backyard for years to come?

Fulop said the stress of the situation has produced anxiety, distraction and sleepless nights. He said he wears boots when he steps outside and worries the Health Department might come calling someday. The horror story hit me in the head, he said. "I lost my balance."

But hes trying to move forward.

Fulop said hes dropped any plans to sue his neighbor and arranged with a city-certified contractor to install a tie-in to the main sewer system in front of his house. He was told it could take up to three months before a crew was available, but to his surprise, workers arrived in two weeks to begin jackhammering the street. He hasnt settled on a plumber to run the 75-ft. line from his backyard to the street.

Winning the lottery

Fulop joked that his strategy to pay for the plumbing is simple: I will win the lottery. Or maybe hell become a famous standup comic, with a routine based on his plumbing experience.

In the meantime, he has established a GoFundMe campaign that has, so far, raised about a tenth of what he needs.

Coincidentally, on May 11, the Louisiana Legislature considered House Bill No. 652 that, to some extent, changes the S&WBs responsibility for providing hookups to the citys sewer system for properties that existed before 1954. But, if that bill became law, its unclear if it would affect Fulops situation.

According to S&WB spokesperson, at present, While we empathize with customers who run into these issues, the Sewerage & Water Board is prohibited from using public funds to address problems on private property.
The restaurant Golden Gate Bistro was a formed as a partnership between two Colombian women who made New Orleans their home, one a chef, the other founder of a construction firm. Its opening in 2020 was a hopeful note in the throes of the pandemic.

But the restaurant has now closed for good, confirmed Angelica Riviera, who developed the restaurant with Bleidys Lobelo.

She said the financial burden of the pandemic and staffing shortages forced the decision.

Riviera runs Colmex Construction, a local building contractor, and the restaurant was housed in the ground floor of the company's office at 4334 Earhart Blvd.

The name was a reference to the Colombian port city of Barranquilla, the chefs hometown. She got her start a New Orleans through private catering. One of those jobs was at the business incubator Riviera runs through Colemex, which is where the two connected.

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In a stylishly-designed dining room filled with traditional and contemporary Colombian art, Golden Gate Bistro served dishes from the various regions of the sprawling South American country, with arepas, grilled meats and fried plantain patacons stacked with meats and sauces among the specialties. It added a outdoor patio last year.

Lobelo is now working in private catering again.

Rivera said the former restaurant space will be used for private events.

+8 Vietnamese restaurant Tan Dinh reopens with some changes on the table after long hiatus Every few minutes a bell rang in the kitchen at Tan Dinh, signaling another order up, and I wasn't the only one in the dining room who perked 

+7 Casa Borrega, part of one-time restaurant revival in Central City, closes after 9 years Another restaurant and local music venue has closed for good. Casa Borrega, the Mexican restaurant, bar and music spot at 1719 Oretha Castle H
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The bodies of two people killed in a boat crash in the Industrial Canal in New Orleans have been recovered, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries said Wednesday.

Investigators said they think Kennie Joseph, 58, and Norman Wright, 39, were killed Saturday when Wright's 15-foot fiberglass boat collided with a barge moored parallel to the shoreline. Joseph's body was found Saturday, Wright's on Wednesday, and sent to the Orleans Parish coroner's office.

The Department of Wildlife and Fisheries did not release more information.
A longtime Jefferson Parish contractor says he won't give up his suit against the parish government, even after a judge rejected some of his claims that the parish unfairly took the contract he has held since 2005 and gave it to another vendor.

Ramsey Skipper, owner of Go-Graphics LLC, sued last month in a state District Court in Gretna after a rival firm won a contract to erect and maintain about 250 bus benches in return for keeping most of the revenue generated by advertising sold on the benches. Skipper asked the judge to block the parish from signing a contract with Vector Media, the New York-based firm the parish council selected April 6.

State District Court Judge Stephen D. Enright on Tuesday rejected Skipper's plea, saying he had refused to show that the process should be halted.

Skipper said Thursday he won't drop the suit.

"Absolutely, we continue the suit," he said.

Previous lawsuit

Skipper has tangled with parish officials before. In 2019, he sued the parish's Inspector General after the inspector took aim at the parish's contract with Go-Graphics, accusing the firm of not complying with some aspects of the contract and saying the parish was missing out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue because the contract was poorly written.

Skipper prevailed in court, and the parish amended its ordinance to ensure that private entities would be allowed to respond to Inspector General reports before they are officially issued.

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This time, Skipper's suit alleges that parish officials undermined his proposal in favor of pitches made by other firms, and that changes made to the requirements after proposals were submitted were significant enough to invalidate the entire process.

'Fell short'

Specifically, Skipper claims that Jefferson Parish Transit Director Ninette Barrios told a parish committee evaluating the proposals that Go-Graphics "fell short" in some areas.

Additionally, he alleged that the removal of a requirement that the vendors provide bus benches and pads compatible with the Americans with Disabilities Act, a move which happened after the initial proposals were submitted, constituted a "material and substantial change" that should trigger the process to restart.

Those claims were forcefully rebutted in filings from both Jefferson Parish government and Vector Media. Enright agreed with their assessment.

The changes made to the Request for Proposals "did not make material or substantive changes to the scope of service," he wrote in a brief explanation of his decision.

Skipper noted that under the terms of his contract, he still owns the concrete pads on which the bus benches sit. If the contract is ratified with another firm, he would be forced to remove those pads rather than risk a liability claim while they are under the control of another vendor, he said. If he removes them, he said, rebuilding them would take months and inconvenience bus riders.

"There has been no plan on how to transition to another vendor," he said.
Last month, monogastric (single-compartmented stomach) livestock farmers and stakeholders, at a conference in Abuja, raised concerns over the state of local chicken breeds.

They were worried that the effort of many poultry researchers and genetic resources in the country will be lost if urgent actions are not taken by the federal government.

To resolve the issue of inadequate production of indigenous breeds of poultry, they opined that there should be an innovative platform that was focused on encouraging the increased production of indigenous breeds like the Fulani breed, as well as the improved indigenous ones such as Shika Brown, Noiler and FUNAAB-Alpha.

"There is a huge market for these birds, so concerted effort should be made to enhance their production on a smallholder commercial basis at community level," the group, in their submission, told the federal government.

They advised the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (FMARD) to collaborate with relevant bodies to form an innovative platform that would focus on market linkage for poultry products.

Nigeria is blessed with unique breeds of birds, some of which were developed by the country's scientists, but federal government support has not been massive in terms of upscaling their production - something the stakeholders say is not correct and needs to be addressed.

Shika Brown

The Shika Brown of is one of the major achievements of researchers at the National Animal Production Research Institute (NAPRI), Zaria, in Kaduna State. It was developed after about 30 years of research work.

Shika Brown is resistant to all known diseases, including the ravaging power of avian influenza (bird Flu) that affects most of poultry farms across the country.

But this breed of chicken is facing many problems today as production has significantly dwindled due to obsolete equipment at the institute, especially incubators, and funding for its promotion and adoption by farmers.

Experts are worried that in the coming years Shika Brown may well be a historical relic.

FUNAAB-Alpha

The FUNAAB-Alpha was developed by a professor of animal breeding and genetics, Olufunmilayo Adebambo, at the College of Animal Science and Livestock Production (COLANIM) of the Federal University of Agriculture Abeokuta (FUNAAB) in Ogun State.

Professor Adebambo and her poultry-breeding team came up with the new breed and named it "FUNAAB-Alpha" after over 20 years of continuous research.

According to her, the results generated by African Chicken Genetic Gains (ACGG), which is an Africa-wide collaboration led by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), indicates that FUNAAB-Alpha is almost much better than the Fulani and the Shika Brown.

"The cocks, at 20 weeks, have body weight of 1.3kg for Fulani breed; FUNAAB-Alpha 2.6kg; Shika Brown 1.9kg; while for the hens, the body weight is 1.0kg, 1.9kg and 1.6kg 2 respectively.

"The data also indicated that the age at first lay for Fulani chicken is 18 weeks; FUNAAB-Alpha 17 weeks; Shika Brown 17 weeks, while the average egg weight per gram was 42, 51, 54 respectively.

"The fertility percentage data also indicates 82 per cent for Fulani chicken, 68 per cent for FUNAAB-Alpha, 89 per cent for Shika Brown, while the hatchability per cent was distributed as 60, 55, 74 respectively.

"Mortality of the FUNAAB-Alpha recorded on our station was less than three per cent at the brooding phase, two per cent at the growing phase and 3.5 per cent at the laying phase," she stated on FUNAAB's website.

Despite the success, the breed is yet to become a household name in the industry, and like its senior, the Shika Brown, it may end up in FUNAAB's shelf.

Noiler

One of the locally developed breeds that has so far recorded significant success is the Noiler, which was developed in Nigeria by Amo Farm Sieberer Hatchery Ltd, commonly called Amo Hatchery. It is a dual-purpose breed: meat and egg.

According to Mr Akinbobola Ade, an animal scientist, "The genetic work started in 2003 and five years after, Noiler pure-line breeding programme began. Amo Sieberer Hatchery started the commercial sales of Noiler chicks in 2014, and it is being raised in nine West African countries, including Nigeria."

The breed is a cross between the broiler and the native chicken, which could be used either for meat or egg.

Stakeholders say the success recorded is attributable to the development of the breed by a private farm which has more focus in the industry.

"It would have become history if it was developed by any government-funded institution," a poultry farmer, Akinola Adewuye, said.

Fulani chicken

One of the best preserved and well-known local chickens, particularly in Northern Nigeria, is the Fulani chicken, because of the cultural lifestyle of the Fulani, its keepers.

However, a research on "characterisation of the Fulani-ecotype chicken for thermoregulatory feather gene" by T. R. Fayeye and A. B. Oketoyin in 2006 indicated that the adaptive feather genes are at the brink of extinction in the Fulani-ecotype chicken.

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The researchers advised that, "There is the need for both researchers and field extension workers to take adequate measures to preserve these rare varieties of dominant gene carriers for future livestock development programmes."

With insufficient feed becoming a major challenge in poultry production, it was recommended at the conference that government should work out ways to develop feed formula using alternative feed resources to improve the quality of poultry products and reduce high cost of feeds.

It was also agreed by the stakeholders that cottage processing and storage facility for poultry should be established across the country in areas with comparative advantage in the production and processing of poultry products.

Farmers also asked government to improve on existing extension services by increasing the number of extension agents and improving capacity building in effective and efficient extension services, as well as encourage private sector participation along the value chain.

It was also recommended that more animal health care service providers should be deployed to rural and livestock farming communities for better animal health care services. It was recommended that attention be given to local birds in terms of animal health care.

Farmers also want aggressive capacity building on bio-security in poultry production.
Barely 48 hours after dissociating himself from moves by some groups to draft him into the 2023 presidential race, former President Goodluck Jonathan has finally made up his mind to vie for the top post.

Nigeria is set to go to the polls next year in a crowded contest parading many contestants in both the ruling APC and several opposition parties, including the main opposition PDP.

On May 9, Jonathan had rejected presidential expression of interest and nomination forms bought for him by people, described as nomadic Fulani pastoralists and Almajiri communities.

He was quoted as saying that it was an insult for people to buy the form for him without his consent but the former president has now made U-turn on the issue.

A dependable source in Jonathan's camp, who pleaded anonymity, said that the former president had indeed, joined the APC formally, having registered at his Otuoke Ward in Bayelsa.

The source disclosed that Jonathan was expected to submit his APC expression of interest and nomination forms bought for him earlier in the week, on Thursday.

According to the source, the former president has secured the support of the required number of APC delegates from across the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory.

"Several bigwigs of the party have also been calling Jonathan to pledge their loyalty and support to the former president," the source revealed.

The source told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) political correspondent late on Wednesday that some influential African leaders had called Jonathan earlier on Monday to advise him "to contest the election in the interest of Nigeria.

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"At least three top African leaders called the former president on the matter. They all urged him to run. One of them specifically told him that it didn't make sense travelling all over Africa settling disputes only to shy away from leadership responsibility in his home country."

"Another reminded him of the implication of failing to put the experiences he garnered as a former Nigerian president and as a continental statesman to good use," the source added but did not mention the names of the African leaders.

The source cited some of the African leaders as telling Jonathan that Nigeria was passing through challenging times and "needed a unifier like Jonathan at this time".

Jonathan, who lost power to incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari, was born in 1957 in the Ogbia district in Bayelsa State.

He was previously of the PDP party on whose platform he ruled Nigeria until he lost the presidential election to Buhari in 2015. (NAN)
The Future of Distributed Wind in the United States: Considerations for Unlocking Terawatt-Level Potential

NRELs Distributed Wind Energy Futures Study Finds the Most Promising Locations, Sectors for Distributed Wind To Play a Meaningful Role in the U.S. Energy Future

Distributed wind could play a meaningful role in the U.S. energy future. Photo from David Nevala Photography for CROPP Cooperative

The U.S. federal government has set a goal of 100% clean electricity in 2035 and a net-zero carbon economy in 2050. To achieve these ambitious targets, all forms of renewable power will be importantincluding distributed wind.

Distributed wind energy refers to wind technologies deployed as distributed energy resources. These technologies are place-based solutions that support individuals, communities, and businesses transitioning to carbon-free electricity.

Distributed wind can be placed in behind-the-meter applications, where the system directly offsets a specific end user's consumption of retail electricity supply, or in front-of-the-meter applications where the system is interconnected to the distribution network and provides community-scale energy supply while bolstering the robustness, reliability, and resiliency of the local distribution network. Distributed wind installations can range from a less-than-1-kilowatt off-grid wind turbine that powers telecommunications equipment to a 10-megawatt community-scale energy facility.

From 2003 through 2020, over 87,000 wind turbines were deployed in distributed applications across all 50 states, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Guam, totaling 1,055 megawatts in cumulative capacity. Iowa, Minnesota, Massachusetts, California, and Texas lead the country with the most distributed wind capacity currently installed. As more communities come to understand the role that distributed energy resources could play in their own energy transitions and seek their environmental, economic, and social benefits, distributed wind could play a unique role in the future U.S. grid.

To explore opportunities for widespread deployment of distributed wind in 2035, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) completed the Distributed Wind Energy Futures Study funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Wind Energy Technologies Office. The highly detailed, comprehensive analysis reveals distributed wind has the potential to profitably provide nearly 1,400 gigawatts of capacitytoday. That is enough energy to supply more than half of current U.S. annual electricity consumption.

But the right conditions must exist to realize the opportunities for distributed wind.

Modeling Innovations Provide Granular Insights

The Distributed Wind Energy Futures Study builds on NREL's 2016 first-ever exploratory analysis of future opportunities for behind-the-meter distributed wind systems.

For both the 2016 and 2022 studies, NREL used its Distributed Wind (dWind) modela module within the Distributed Generation Market Demand (dGen) model suite. This year, NREL added new, higher-resolution data and modeling capabilities to dWind to expand on the 2016 study. Notably, dWind now includes real-world dimensions from a data set of 150 million parcels of property in the United States to size turbines for those locations. NREL also improved dWind to consider front-of-the-meter wind systems. The model will be open sourced as part of dGen later this year.

"The potential of distributed wind projects can vary widely with local conditions, so it's important to study it at the most detailed level," said Kevin McCabe, NREL analyst and dGen developer. "Our study is one of the first demonstrations of parcel-level distributed energy resources analysis and advances wind economic and technical potential assessments with unprecedented resolution. With this new level of detail, we can identify trends by land-use type, end-use sector, and geography."

With these new modeling capabilities, dWind can now explore more community-scale distributed wind applications that could participate in the wholesale electricity market and a broader array of payment schemes. NREL modeled future scenarios with a variety of distributed wind system sizes in behind-the-meter and front-of-the-meter applications for specific land-use types, focusing on agricultural, commercial, and industrial areas.

A megawatt-class turbine in a behind-the-meter distributed wind application. Photo by Hank Doster, One Energy Enterprises LLC

Results: Economic Potential of Distributed Wind

Consistent with the 2016 study, NREL finds U.S. distributed wind has abundant economic potential, or the potential that would have a positive return on investment. Entire regions of the country could profitably provide hundreds of gigawatts today if deployed. In 2035, terawatts of capacity could be possible.

NREL examined three primary factors that could help unlock distributed wind's potential:

Improved financing and performance to reduce the cost of wind energy Relaxed siting restrictions to open up more available land for wind developmenta previous NREL study revealed a 7X difference in total U.S. wind technical potential in 2050 between the least and most restrictive siting restrictions An investment tax credit renewal and net metering. Currently, customers can receive a 26% tax credit for qualifying wind turbines below 100 kilowatts and solar panels installed between 2020 and 2022. The tax credit will expire in 2024 unless Congress renews it. Net metering is a metering and billing arrangement where distributed energy generation system owners are compensated for any generation that is not used and exported to the utility grid.

Under the most optimistic conditionsincluding aggressive cost declines, more relaxed siting constraints than today, and strategic extension and expansion of current tax credits and policiesNREL finds front-of-the-meter wind could provide over 4,000 gigawatts of capacity and behind-the-meter wind could provide over 1,700 gigawatts of capacity in 2035. In the least optimistic conditions, front-of-the-meter wind capacity decreases to 42 gigawatts and behind-the-meter wind capacity to 440 gigawatts in 2035.

"Our analysis suggests that technology cost reduction, performance improvements, and more relaxed siting restrictions are critical steps needed to realize the deployment potential of distributed wind," said Eric Lantz, principal investigator of the study. "At the same time, incentives like the investment tax credit, financing, and compensation mechanisms like net metering are also important to enhance system economicsand drive industry-wide growth that would fundamentally alter the outlook for distributed wind technologies."

Front-of-the-meter wind Baseline 2022 Scenario Behind-the-meter wind Baseline 2022 Scenario

Results: Regions, Sectors With the Lowest-Hanging Fruit

NREL finds the regions with the highest potential for distributed wind tend to have a combination of high-quality wind, relatively high electricity rates for behind-the-meter applications, higher wholesale power rates for front-of-the-meter applications, and siting availability.

The Midwest and Heartland regions overall have the highest potential for distributed wind, and the Pacific and Northeast regions have significant potential for expansion of behind-the-meter distributed wind deployments.

As modeled, agricultural land has the highest distributed wind potential, but residential, commercial, and industrial land also have gigawatt-scale potential, particularly for behind-the-meter applications.

NREL finds states with the most near-term potential for behind-the-meter applications include Texas, Minnesota, Montana, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Indiana. States with the most near-term potential for front-of-the-meter applications include Oklahoma, Nebraska, Illinois, Kansas, Iowa, and South Dakota.

States across much of the Northeast as well as California have lower quantities of profitable distributed wind potential, but there are select locations with significant wind resources, which when combined with generally higher retail electricity rates in these regions means there are compelling opportunities in there too.

Results: Distributed Wind Potential in Disadvantaged Communities

Some communities have long endured the negative aspects of energy and climate change and face more barriers to accessing clean energy. On-site energy generation, like distributed wind, could help reduce this inequity by extending the benefits of clean energy to more communities.

NREL modeled the technical and economic potential of distributed wind in parcels of property in communities with high risk to environmental hazards and/or high proportions of low-income households.

As modeled, disadvantaged communities represent 43% of all suitable U.S. parcels for front-of-the-meter wind, and 47% for behind-the-meter wind. There are significant opportunities to expand distributed wind in disadvantaged communities in the next decade, particularly for behind-the-meter deployments in Texas, Montana, Michigan, and California.

"With continued efforts to reduce cost, improve performance, and think more broadly about solutions to deployment, distributed wind could empower communities across the United States to transition to clean energy," Lantz said. "Taking steps to help realize the potential of distributed wind will be especially important in future scenarios with a lot of wind energy, as envisioned under economy-wide decarbonization. In those scenarios, distributed wind's ability to fit specific niches and provide local electricity supply could advance the nation's ability to use wind energy."

Read the full Distributed Wind Energy Futures Study report. Learn more about NREL's Distributed Wind Research and Energy Analysis, as well as the Distributed Wind Research Program at the U.S. Department of Energy's Wind Technology's Office.

Learn More About the Distributed Wind Energy Futures Study at May 24 Webinar

To learn more about findings from the Distributed Wind Futures Study, join a free webinar from 12 to 1 p.m. MT on Tuesday, May 24. Please register to attend.
South Africa: Cabinet commends solidarity shown to flood victims

This story has been published on: 2022-05-12. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.

Minister in the Presidency, Mondli Gungubele, has commended the unity shown by South Africans from all walks of life in reaching out to communities ravaged by the recent floods. Gungubele was addressing a post Cabinet briefing on Thursday. The Minister said Cabinet, which met on Wednesday, has expressed condolences to all those who hav... See more
By Chen Youjun

Fumio Kishida. Photo: CFP

Since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Japan's Fumio Kishida administration has been following closely with the US and Europe in piling increasing pressure and sanctions against Russia, while trying to take the opportunity to seek diplomatic breakthroughs at bilateral and multilateral levels, which reflects Japan's real strategic intentions.

The first is promoting United Nation's reform to realize Japan's dream of becoming a major political power in the post-war period. After becoming the second largest economy in the world in the late 1960s, Japan basically achieved its goal of economic rise in the post-war period. After that, Japan's overall national strategy began to shift toward becoming a political power, and it has continued to devote resources to this end.

Successive Japanese governments have since incorporated the promotion of UN reform into their foreign policies, and have relied on active economic diplomacy to gain the support of some small and medium-sized countries, part of which has been put into political documents or joint declarations between Japan and relevant countries.

Since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the Japanese government, some Japanese media outlets and right-wing forces have been emphasizing Russia's "special status" as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, arguing that the veto power unique to permanent members is the best protection for Russia's participation in the UN system. They claim that this is also the fundamental reason why the international community is unable to impose effective sanctions and constraints on Russia. Against this background, some politicians and right-wing opinion leaders, including Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, have spared no effort to promote the necessity and importance of UN reform on various occasions, seeking political leverage for Japan's permanent membership.

Japan's second strategic intention is enhancing its military strength, especially its military attack capability. After the Ukraine crisis, Japan has been exaggerating the unstable situation of the international situation, and has taken the opportunity to highlight the so-called serious threat to Japan's national security which faces "great uncertainty."

On one hand, Japan seeks to justify its military development, which is restricted by the current pacifist constitution. Fearing opposition from the Japanese public, Japan's domestic conservative forces dare not to be too aggressive in this sensitive issue and play "word games."

Encouraged by the domestic conservative forces, Japanese politicians launched a discussion on "the capability to attack enemy bases" in an attempt to enhance the long-range military strike capability and comprehensive military power of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. But the efforts have been opposed in Japan. Hence, the conservative forces, while emphasizing the basic policy of "exclusively defense-oriented policy," have cleverly replaced the term "counterattack capabilities" with "the capability to hit back at enemy bases."

On the other hand, Japan seeks strong financial support for military expansion. Japan's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) recently proposed to revise the National Security Strategy, the National Defense Program Guidelines, and the Mid-term Defense Program. It called for increasing Japan's defense expenditure to 2 percent of GDP, the standard for NATO members, in the next five years. The proposal is certainly not only the idea of the LDP, but a consensus of Japan's far-right forces, which has a social basis and therefore a high possibility of being transformed into specific government policies in the future.

Although Japan stands as a "third party" in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, it is actively bonding itself to the conflict, the intention behind needs to be paid special attention by neighboring countries and even the international community.

The author is a senior research fellow with Shanghai Institutes for International Studies. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn
The party said its decision was based on the recommendation of the 37-member committee set up to work out a zoning formula for the various electoral offices ahead of the 2023 polls.

Ahead of its primaries, Nigeria's main opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), has decided to throw open its 2023 presidential ticket to all sections of the country.

The party's National Publicity Secretary, Debo Ologunagba, disclosed this at the end of the PDP's National Executive Council meeting on Wednesday.

The decision to throw open the ticket he said, was in line with the recommendation made by the party's zoning committee.

"After a very extensive deliberation NEC aligned with the recommendation of the PDP National Zoning Committee that the Presidential Election should now be left open. The party should also work towards consensus candidate where possible.

"NEC noted the recommendation of the Zoning Committee that in the interest of justice and fair play, thepParty should take decision on Zoning timeously so as to prevent complications to the process," he said.

Mr Ologunagba further said the party will conduct of the Presidential Primary (Special National Convention) to elect the party's presidential candidate on Saturday May 28 and Sunday May 29, 2022 in Abuja.

The National Convention Organising Committee will be headed by former Senate President, David Mark, with Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi as Deputy Chairman and Ibrahim Shema as Secretary.

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This announcement comes weeks after the zoning committee submitted its see recommendations to the PDP NEC.

The 37-member committee headed by Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue State, was set up by the party in March and asked to make recommendations on a zoning formula for the various electoral offices ahead of next year's polls.

Although some members of the panel hinted that it asked the party to throw open the presidential ticket, citing the exigency of time as its reason for doing so, Mr Ortom, however, dismissed the media reports.

The party's decision on zoning comes amid calls and expectations that it would zone the presidential ticket to the south - ahead of the 2023 general elections.

Already, the party's presidential screening committee headed by Mr Mark has screened 17 presidential aspirants who have purchased the nomination forms.

The discord in the party - in the past weeks - over zoning has been between two groups - the pro-zoning group 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 party's last candidate.

And there is the anti-zoning group, mostly northern leaders, who want the ticket thrown open because they believe they stand a chance of winning the primaries and eventually the election, and 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 party's primary or adopt a consensus candidate.
LAPORTE  A manufacturer providing a finished wood grain look on cabinets and wall panels has begun operating in LaPorte.

A ribbon cutting was held Tuesday at Gravure Ink, which is occupying 60,000 square feet inside a privately constructed building at the Thomas Rose Industrial Park.

The company is owned by Patrick Industries, a maker and distributor of components and building products for the recreational vehicle, marine and manufactured housing industries.

Patrick Industries employs about 12,000 people at more than 170 sites in the United States, Canada and China.

The Gravure Ink plant in LaPorte has 31 employees working strictly the day shift.

Operations Manager Hugo Gonzalez said the hope is increasing demand for their products rises enough to operate two or three shifts per day.

Were excited about continuing to grow the business here, he said.

Gravure Ink produces a laminate on thin paper containing various designs, primarily resembling the grain on trees such as maple, hickory, cherry and oak. The finished products are shipped in rolls to plants operated by Patrick Industries to be glued on plywood and particle board panels.

He said the cabinetry and wall panels are used in making RVs, manufactured homes and boats.

Whats left is sold by retailers such as Home Depot and Lowes for home remodeling projects.

The laminate is the coating that goes into the panel. We give it color. Usually, its going to be a wood grain. Well make those designs, he said.

Gonzalez said laminates on thin sheets of vinyl are made at another Patrick Industries facility in Bensenville, Illinois.

The other half of the spec building recently constructed by Qualls Development Group is used for storage by American Renolit Corp., which has a production facility in LaPorte. The company makes films used in various products like Fathead life-sized cutouts of star athletes that stick to bedroom walls, and letters sticking to storefront windows to advertise sales or discounts.

The spec building started going up before tenants were found for the space.

Bert Cook, executive director of the LaPorte Economic Advancement Partnership, said the odds of finding tenants seemed very good, though, based on market studies on interest from manufacturers in such a facility.

He said gains in expanding the manufacturing base in LaPorte also helped lower the risk.

I think it was a fairly safe investment because they realized how robust our market was growing, he said.

The building is on 23 acres in an expanded area of the park equipped with roads and other infrastructure in 2016.

Cook said other investors plan to put up two spec buildings for similar uses along Boyd Boulevard on the citys east side. He said construction should begin sometime next year.

If youre a private developer and youve seen someone else do this and have great success with it, it would only make you more inclined to make those investments, he said.

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Valparaiso Care & Rehabilitation is celebrating 50 years of business serving seniors and their families.

The American Senior Communities retirement home at 606 Wall St. in Valparaiso will have an open house celebration from 4 to 6 p.m. Thursday. It's being honored by the Valparaiso Chamber of Commerce for a half-century of service to the community.

Valparaiso Care & Rehabilitation Center, a partner of the Continuing Care Network for St. Francis Hospital, offers a variety of long-term and short-term care for seniors, such as rehabilitation, advanced respiratory therapy, memory care, skilled nursing, respite and hospice care.

It also had advanced pulmonary and ventilator care. The facility serves Porter County and greater Northwest Indiana.

It's run by American Senior Communities, which operates retirement homes and health care facilities across Kentucky and Indiana, including Lowell Healthcare and Hickory Creek at Winamac.

People will be able to tour Valparaiso Care & Rehabilitation during the open house and meet staffers. Refreshments and hors doeuvres will be provided.

For more information, visit (219) 464-4976, visit asccare.com or find the business on Facebook.

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GARY  Three individuals injured by gunfire walked into a Region hospital Wednesday evening, police said.

Around 5 p.m., the three gunshot wound victims arrived on their own accord at Methodist Hospitals Northlake campus, said Gary Police Department Cmdr. Jack Hamady.

Police investigations found the shooting had occurred in the area of Third Avenue and McKinley Street in Gary.

Hamady said the investigation is ongoing by Gary police. The conditions of those injured are unknown at this time.

Individuals with information on crimes can leave an anonymous tip by calling 866-CRIME-GP.

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CROWN POINT  A judge denied a motion Wednesday to exclude testimony from a doctor at a Chicago pediatric hospital during an upcoming trial for a woman charged with causing the death of an infant she was babysitting in 2016.

Trisha Woodworth, 31, of Calumet Township, has pleaded not guilty to multiple felony charges filed in connection with the death of 8-month-old Maci Moor in April 2016.

Woodworth's attorneys, Harold Hagberg and Andreas Kyres, filed a motion seeking to exclude the testimony of Dr. Jill Glick, who works for University of Chicago Comer Children's Hospital in Chicago and concluded Maci's injuries were consistent with shaken baby syndrome.

Hagberg told Lake Criminal Court Judge Samuel Cappas Glick's testimony during a hearing earlier this year was based on prejudice and bias, not reliable scientific principles.

Lake County Supervisory Deputy Prosecutor Eric Randall said Glick has more than 30 years of experience as a pediatrician and has written peer-reviewed scholarly articles.

Glick painted the defense's three experts at outliers with regard to their opinions on abusive head trauma, he said.

"This was always 'a battle of the experts' case," Randall said. "We'll put our experts on. They'll put their experts on."

It's the jury's duty to decide which experts are more credible, he said.

Cappas said Glick was qualified to testify as an expert witness.

One of the defense's experts testified there is a 50/50 split among experts in the field about the science upon which Glick based her opinion, the judge said.

"It's for the jury to decide whom they will believe and whom they will not," Cappas said.

Hagberg said the defense's position is that Maci died as a result of an injury she suffered four days before Woodworth called an ambulance for her.

According to court records, Maci's parents told police a bruise on her forehead appeared after she accidentally fell and hit her head on a wood floor April 11, 2016, while playing with a "jump-a-roo."

Police and prosecutors allege Woodworth caused the baby's injuries, because she was the only person with Maci in the hours before she called an ambulance April 15, 2016.

Maci was taken to a local hospital and flown to Comer Children's Hospital, where she was declared brain dead April 17, 2016.

Woodworth's jury trial is scheduled for the week of July 11.

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CROWN POINT  A judge granted a request Tuesday from defense attorneys for a man charged in a triple homicide in 1998 in Hammond to review a co-defendant's medical records for any evidence relevant to the case.

James H. Higgason III, 52, of Whiting, has pleaded not guilty to several counts of murder in the bludgeoning deaths of Jerod "Buddy" Hodge, 18, of Chicago; Elva Tamez, 36; and Timothy W. "Midnight" Ross, 16, of Calumet City, on Jan. 18, 1998, inside a home in the 4600 block of Torrence Avenue in Hammond.

Higgason's co-defendant, David L. Copley Jr., 47, of Franklin, Indiana, pleaded guilty in October to one count of murder and agreed to a 45-year prison sentence.

Higgason and Copley each were charged in January 2021 after additional DNA evidence submitted to an Indiana State Police lab in 2020 linked them to the triple homicide, according to court records.

Copley, who first spoke to police about the homicides in February 1998, agreed to testify against Higgason at trial.

Higgason's attorneys, Mark Gruenhagen and Matthew Fech, filed a motion seeking Copley's medical, psychiatric and jail records.

Fech told Lake Criminal Court Judge Salvador Vasquez he could order the records be released if he deemed the request appropriate.

Fech suggested Vasquez conduct an "in-camera" review of Copley's records to determine Copley's ability to recall important events going back to 1998.

Copley's attorney, Cipriano Rodriguez, said Copley gave four or five statements to law enforcement over the years and his current mental status wasn't relevant.

Vasquez disagreed.

The records might contain information that indicates "his memory is not quite what it would appear," the judge said.

He ordered the Lake County Jail to release Copley's records by Friday.

The judge also set a hearing for Friday on Higgason's motion to dismiss his charges.

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VALPARAISO  A jury continued to deliberate in the case of a former Porter County police officer Wednesday on allegations of battering his infant son nearly six years ago, leaving the boy disabled and with a much shorter life expectancy.

Curtis Jones, 52, left the county department in 2005 and now lives in Florida. As of late Wednesday, the jury was still deliberating on whether Jones will be found guilty or innocent for one felony count of battery resulting in serious bodily injury to a person less than 14 years of age and two felony counts of neglect of a dependent resulting in serious injury.

The jury began to deliberate late Wednesday afternoon, and no verdict had been reached as of 9 p.m. as the trial reached its third week with presiding Porter Superior Court Judge Mike Fish.

Each of the felony counts carries a potential sentence of three to 16 years behind bars.

Jones stood accused of shaking or otherwise injuring his son July 24, 2016, while his former wife and the boy's mother was at her overnight nursing job.

The paramedic who responded to the distress call for 6-month-old Braxson Jones on the morning in question testified last week that he did not notice any injuries on the child and did not suspect child abuse.

The testimony conflicted with reports from doctors and other medical officials, who treated the child at the local St. Mary Medical Center and at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago.

A social worker told jurors earlier this week that the Illinois medical team working on Braxson found an injury on the child, causing the boy's mother, Susan Jones, to stop crying and question Curtis about its origin.

"You need to tell me right now what happened," Susan reportedly said to Curtis, who then shrugged and said he did nothing.

The medical team at St. Mary's found swelling and bruising on Braxson's forehead on the morning in question and reported the child struggling to breathe and bleeding under his skull, jurors were told last week.

A doctor at Lurie hospital said the child suffered "the worst brain injury I have ever seen," according to court documents.

A surgeon at Lurie's reportedly removed part of the child's skull to relieve pressure from the swelling brain.

Braxson, who is now 6, survived, but he needs constant care, a prosecutor has said.

He is blind, needs diaper changing, is fed through a tube, must be moved by others and no longer communicates on his own, she said.

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Many of the participants who attended the meeting of the APC South-west leaders have their own battles that are yet to be resolved.

All is not well with the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the South-west due to grudges among prominent leaders of the party in the zone.

Despite the public show of conviviality at their meeting on Friday in Lagos, animosity among the leaders remains obvious to close observers. Three out of the four presidential aspirants at the meeting are at war with each other for different reasons. Seven men from the region are bidding for the APC ticket.

Present at the meeting were Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, former Lagos governor, Bola Tinubu; former interim national chairman of the APC, Bisi Akande; former governor of Ogun, Segun Osoba; Ekiti governor, Kayode Fayemi; and APC national secretary, Iyiola Omisore.

Also at the meeting were Speaker of the House of Representatives Femi Gbajabiamila; Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola; Minister of Interior, Rauf Aregbesola; as well as governors Rotimi Akeredolu of Ondo, Dapo Abiodun of Ogun, Babajide Sanwo-Olu of Lagos, and Gboyega Oyetola of Osun.

How Tinubu, Aregbesola, Oyetola fell out

The relationship between Messrs Tinubu and Aregbesola began to crack in 2010 after the latter was sworn in as the governor of Osun State, following over three years of a legal challenge of the declaration of Olagunsoye Oyinlola of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) as the winner of the 2007 governorship election.

The seed of discord was planted when Mr Tinubu allegedly 'imposed' Mr Oyetola on Mr Aregbesola as his chief of staff. The new governor subsequently appointed a deputy and two assistants to share the responsibilities of the chief of staff. But Mr Oyetola endured in the office and went on to succeed his boss as governor.

Their relationship quickly broke down after the transition. The former governor accused his successor of destroying his legacy in the state while his supporters felt alienated by the government.

During the celebration of the 10th anniversary of APC rule in the state and the second anniversary of Mr Oyetola's administration, tension was palpable between the supporters of the governor and of his predecessor.

However, the crisis blew open over Mr Oyetola's reelection ambition when Mr Aregbesola and his supporters opposed the governor's bid.

At a meeting with his supporters just before the party's governorship primary, Mr Aregbesola poured invectives on Mr Tinubu, describing his former boss in Lagos as an enemy of Osun people. Both have not reconciled, despite the efforts of prominent Yoruba traditional rulers to bring them back together.

Tinubu, Osinbajo combat

For eight years Mr Osinbajo worked as commissioner of justice and attorney-general of Lagos while Mr Tinubu was governor. Both men were so close that it is believed Mr Tinubu nominated Mr Osinbajo as vice president to Muhammadu Buhari after the ex-Lagos governor was told he could not occupy the position to avoid a Muslim-Muslim ticket.

Mr Tinubu, who bears the unofficial title of the national leader of the APC, and Mr Osinbajo, who as vice president is the highest public office holder from the zone, were brought into conflict by their presidential ambitions. Shortly after Mr Osinbajo declared his intention to run for the office, a reporter asked Mr Tinubu, who had declared three months earlier, to respond to the news "of his son's declaration." The former Lagos governor replied curtly: "I have no son old enough to make such declaration."

Their supporters have since taken the cue and locked themselves in vicious combat of name-calling on social media.

Akande, Omisore dispute

Former Osun State Governor, Mr Akande (1999-2003) and Mr Omisore have not seen eye to eye since the events that led to the impeachment of Mr Omisore as the former's deputy. The former governor said their differences were 'ideological,' arising from Mr Omisore's alleged lust for public funds.

"Our sense of responsibility towards financing was not in the same direction: he was a spend-free person, I was being careful with the public money and I could not have approved all vouchers. I could not approve all requests and that was not going well with him," Mr Akande said in an interview.

However, the dispute turned to bitter enmity after the yet unresolved assassination of the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Bola Ige in December 2000. Many linked the assassination to the political crisis in Osun at the time. Mr Omisore was arraigned with other suspects in the murder but all of them were discharged and acquitted by the courts.

Thus when Mr Omisore, who until 2018 had kept a separate lane from Mr Akande and his political associates, emerged as the national scribe of the APC in March, Mr Akande accused Governor Oyetola of betrayal for brokering the deal.

Mr Aregbesola has also refused to associate with Mr Omisore over that history, even after the latter helped the APC in the supplementary election that put Mr Oyetola in office as governor. Mr Omisore has remained close to Mr Oyetola and both have joined hands in fighting off the challenge of Mr Aregbesola to the governor's re-nomination for the off-season election coming up in July.

Drama at Lagos meeting

Arriving at the Lagos meeting, Mr Aregbesola refused to take his seat beside Mr Omisore. He said he did not want to be associated with his party's national scribe, a source at the meeting told PREMIUM TIMES.

But at the end of the meeting, Mr Akande told journalists that the meeting was part of the efforts of party leaders in the zone to put up a common front at the APC presidential primary scheduled to hold between May 30 and June 1.

Daniel, Amosun and Abiodun: Three friends made and separated by power

Gbenga Daniel became Ogun governor in 2003 on the platform of the PDP, defeating Mr Osoba who was seeking a second term. Mr Amosun supported Mr Daniel in the PDP and he too was elected the senator of Ogun central district.

PREMIUM TIMES gathered that both had an agreement to switch offices at the expiration of the first term of the governor but the agreement was breached and both became sworn enemies.

The duo maintained a toxic relationship as their supporters clashed across Ogun State. In 2007, Mr Amosun left the PDP and ran for governor on the ticket of the defunct ANPP but lost after a long legal battle.

Mr Amosun, however, won the governorship seat on the second attempt in 2011, succeeding Mr Daniel and ruling for eight years. During his tenure, his predecessor was prosecuted for corruption by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. Mr Daniel believed that his old friend masterminded his ordeal with the anti-graft agency.

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In 2019, Mr Daniel repaid Mr Amosun by supporting Dapo Abiodun to defeat Mr Amosun's anointed candidate at the governorship election.

Ironically, despite his support, Mr Daniel does not have the backing of Mr Abiodun for his own senatorial ambition, opening up another channel of animosity.

Amosun, Osinbajo in three years dispute

At the expiration of Mr Amosun's second term in office, he anointed Adekunle Akinlade as his successor. But that plan was believed to have been thwarted by the vice president, Mr Osinbajo, who backed his kinsman, Dapo Abiodun, for the office. Mr Amosun claimed he visited Abuja 28 times to appeal to the Adams Oshiomole-led national working committee of the party but he did not have his way. In frustration, Mr Akinlade moved to the Allied Peoples Movement to run in the election but was defeated by Mr Abiodun.

During the campaign, Mr Osinbajo was in the state to campaign for Mr Abiodun, leaving Mr Amosun feeling betrayed by the vice president whose nomination as Muhammadu Buhari's running mate he had supported in 2015.

This birthed the dispute between the two men who are now running against each other for the APC presidential nomination.

When Mr Osinbajo visited Ogun for consultation over his presidential ambition, Governor Abiodun acknowledged his backing for his election.

He said: "We are not ingrates, we recognise his support for us during the 2019 governorship election. His support was significant and we shall reciprocate this time."
CROWN POINT  A Calumet City man pleaded guilty Thursday to helping one of his two co-defendants flee the scene of a double homicide in Hammond and getting rid of both of their guns.

Javier Galvan, 28, pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of assisting a criminal, a level 5 felony.

In exchange for Galvan's plea, Lake County prosecutors agreed to dismiss two counts of murder linked to the shooting deaths of two men Oct. 7 in the 700 block of Locust Street in Hammond.

Danniel Gamez, 26, of East Chicago, was found in the passenger side of a Honda Civic with a gunshot wound to his head, according to Lake Criminal Court records.

Diandre Easter, 27, of Calumet City, was found dead on the ground with gunshot wounds to his stomach and chest and money in his right hand.

If Lake Criminal Court Judge Gina Jones accepts Galvan's plea agreement, he would face a sentence of one to six years in jail or prison.

Galvan's attorney, Michael A. Campbell, and Deputy Prosecutor Maureen Koonce would argue the length of the sentence. Galvan agreed he won't be sentenced until the cases against his co-defendants are resolved.

Galvan admitted in his plea agreement he drove co-defendants Jorge A. Garza Jr., 25, and Gerardo Gudino to the Anchor Inn bar, 6712 Calumet Ave., in his white Chrysler 300.

Galvan told police Gamez agreed to sell Garza pills in exchange for money while they were inside the bar. The two briefly left the Anchor Inn before returning to the bar parking lot, court records state.

When Gamez walked north through an alley, Galvan admitted he, Garza and Gudino followed him to a dark sedan parked on Locust Street.

Galvan told police Gamez snatched cash out of Garza's hand and put him in a headlock, and Garza pushed Gamez away and immediately shot Gamez multiple times.

Gamez fell to the ground, and Garza shot at Easter and an unidentified third person in the backseat of the dark sedan, court records state.

Gudino then shot multiple times at the dark car while standing in front of it, documents allege.

Galvan admitted Garza and Gudino acted in concert with each other, and that he never saw Gamez or Easter display any weapons or threaten anyone.

Galvan, Garza and Gudino ran back to Galvan's Chrysler, where Garza ordered Gudino to drive away, court records state.

Galvan rode back to his residence in Calumet City with Gudino and hid Garza's and Gudino's firearms, documents allege. Galvan admitted he later gave the guns to Gudino's relative, knowing the relative would dispose of them.

Garza pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder.

Gudino was arrested in January in Posen, Illinois, but has not yet been extradited to Lake County to face two counts of murder, according to the U.S. Marshals Service and court records.

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CROWN POINT  A Dolton man agreed to serve two years on probation and complete 100 hours of community service in connection with a fiery crash in 2015 that resulted in the death of his passenger, court records show.

Kwame N. Mitchell, 27, pleaded guilty last week to criminal recklessness, a level 6 felony.

Mitchell admitted in his plea agreement he was speeding Aug. 14, 2015, in a red Jeep when he failed to stop at the T-intersection of May Street and Columbia Avenue in Hammond.

The Jeep jumped a curb, struck several trees and caught fire, Lake Criminal Court records state.

According to charging documents, a resident who was outside helped Mitchell to safety but wasn't able to get to the passenger in the Jeep.

Aaron Ligon, 22, of Hazel Crest, Illinois, suffered life-threatening burns and died at the scene, officials said.

Before officers arrived, witnesses saw a man carry the driver away from the scene. Officers eventually tracked Mitchell to Ingalls Memorial Hospital in Illinois, where he gave officials a different name and told them he was injured in a crash in Harvey, charging documents state.

If Judge Samuel Cappas accepts Mitchell's plea agreement, Mitchell would be sentenced to two years in jail, suspended in favor of probation. He also would be required to perform community service.

In exchange for Mitchell's plea, Lake County prosecutors agreed to dismiss charges of leaving the scene of an accident causing death and reckless homicide, both level 5 felonies.

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MICHIGAN CITY  A 3-year-old girl with autism died after she was found Thursday afternoon along a shoreline of a small lake in Long Beach, police said.

In efforts to save her life, medical professionals worked for hours to revive her, however the attempts were not successful, said Michigan City Police Department Sgt. Steve Forker. The name of the child has not been released yet.

Forker said the girl, who is nonverbal, was found about 1:30 p.m. along the north shoreline of Clare Lake in Long Beach, in an area just off Fairway Drive.

She had been reported missing at 11:30 a.m. from the 400 block of Long Beach Lane and was last seen in the area of Karwick Road and Long Beach Lane, wearing a T-shirt and diaper.

Following the 911 call, Michigan City officers searched the area and spoke with witnesses, and police from surrounding agencies arrived on the scene to assist.

Once she was located along the shoreline in the water, first responders pulled her onto dry land and immediately rendered medical aid to her. LaPorte County EMS took the child to Franciscan Health Michigan City.

Police are continuing to investigate the incident and speak with witnesses and are seeking video surveillance from the area.

Those who assisted Michigan City police include the LaPorte County Sheriff's Department, Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Porter County Search and Rescue, Michigan City Fire Department, Trail Creek Police Department, Long Beach Police Department, LaPorte County EMS and area residents.

Anyone with information can contact the Michigan City Police Department through Facebook Messenger or the crime tip line at 219-873-1488.

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CHESTERTON  Law enforcement say a potentially large group of reproduction rights protesters will be given access with limitations Thursday evening to the Indiana Dune State Park during a fundraiser for Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind.

"An area has been selected in the vicinity of the pavilion where guests will be able to safely exercise their First Amendment rights," said James Brindle, director of the division of communications at the Indiana Department of Natural Resources.

"We ask that all parties respectfully share the park with their fellow visitors," he said.

Anyone entering the lakefront park is required to pay the standard entry fee of $7 per Indiana licensed vehicle and $12 for out-of-state plates, or show an annual state park pass, Brindle said.

Thursday's 5 p.m. protest is organized by Northwest Indiana National Organization for Women and the associated CommUNITY for Repro Justice, according to local and state President Julie Storbeck.

"His voting record reveals a clear contempt for gender equality and the right to body autonomy, equal protections, and privacy for those who are not cis-gender, straight, white men and/or who conform to his harsh and narrow world view," she said of Young.

"These laws that hinder or deny access to reproductive health care, including birth control and abortions, disproportionately harm black, indigenous and other people of color, those with low incomes, immigrants, young people, people with disabilities, and the LGBTQIA+ community, who already face barriers to accessing health care," Storbeck said.

"Nowhere else can a person's body be used for some purpose against their will or without their consent," she said. "A person's organs cannot be harvested after their death. They cannot be forced to donate blood, have sex, enter into a contractual agreement, or labor against their will. But they can be forced to supply a 'domestic supply of infants' for adoption. That is horrifying. That is why we protest."

The fundraiser, which boasts a host fee of $5,800 and co-host at $2,900, is being sponsored by Valparaiso Mayor Matt Murphy, former Valparaiso Mayor Jon Costas, Porter County Republican Party Chairman Mike Simpson and Indiana GOP Treasurer and Valparaiso resident Chuck Williams, who was involved in the recent disputed restoration and operation of the pavilion.

A spokesperson for Young did not immediately respond Thursday morning to a request for comment, but a press release from earlier this week quotes the senator's opposition to legislation that he described as proposing to block states from "protecting the unborn and enshrine late-term abortion into federal law."

"Despite what these advances in modern science tell us, the current abortion policy in the United States is more in line with China and North Korea," he reportedly said. "We are one of only seven countries around the world that allow abortion to take place past the point at which a baby can feel pain in the womb."

Democrat Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr., who is seeking this year to unseat Young, said Thursday morning the planned protest shows how fed up the public is with the senator.

"Todd Young is more concerned about enlarging his campaign war chest than he is about Hoosiers civil liberties and rights," McDermott said.

He continued that, "3.3 million Hoosier women are going to lose their right to make a choice about their health and bodies when Roe v Wade is overturned and Todd Young will continue to ignore them."

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GARY  Two men were killed in separate shootings Tuesday night, police said.

Devante Brown, 29, of Gary, was found lying wounded outside after Gary police responded about 5:50 p.m. to the 1700 block of West Fifth Avenue for reports of shots fired, according to the Lake County coroner's office and Gary police.

Brown was taken to Methodist Hospitals Northlake Campus in Gary, Lt. Dawn Westerfield said.

Brown was pronounced dead about 9:50 p.m., a coroner's release said.

At about 6:40 p.m., police were dispatched to the 4400 block of Washington Street in the city's Glen Park section for a report of a gunshot victim, police records show.

Kurtis Tolliver, 27, of Gary, was taken to Methodist Northlake, where he was pronounced dead about 7:20 p.m. from gunshot wounds. The death was ruled a homicide, the coroner's office said.

Anyone with information about either homicide is asked to call detectives at the Lake County/Gary Metro Homicide Unit at 219-755-3855. To remain anonymous, call 866-CRIME-GP.

Come back to nwi.com for updates as they become available.

Times staff writer Robert Kasarda contributed to this report.

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Sarah Reese Lake County Courts and Social Justice Reporter Sarah covers crime, courts and public safety. She began her career at The Times in 2004. Contact her at sarah.reese@nwi.com or 219-933-3351. Follow Sarah Reese 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
KENTLAND  A Gary man escaped in Newton County, hid in an apartment and fired shots at officers before he was struck by gunfire, police said.

Around noon, the Newton County Sheriff's Office urged residents in Kentland to lock their doors due to an escaped man from prisoner transport and to call 911 if they know of his whereabouts.

The escaped man was identified as Jayme Lopez, 36, of Gary, Indiana State Police said. According to online court records, Lopez faces charges of child molesting and rape compelled by force or imminent threat, both felonies, in Newton Superior Court.

The incident happened as Newton County Jail deputies were transporting Lopez from Iroquois County Jail in Illinois to Newton County Jail due to his being extradited on an active Newton County warrant.

When he arrived at Newton County Jail shortly after 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, Lopez escaped from a transport vehicle, causing police to respond to the area and set up a search perimeter.

Indiana State Police troopers found Lopez just after 1 p.m. at 707 E. Lincoln Street in Kentland.

Police evacuated the apartment building and set up a perimeter around it. It was then determined that Lopez had obtained a firearm at some point following his escape, and he went inside an apartment to hide.

Jasper County Sheriffs Tactical Squad worked to negotiate with Lopez; however Lopez fired multiple shots at officers from inside the apartment, police said.

A member of the tactical squad returned fire, and Lopez was struck by gunfire, Indiana State Police said. Lopez then surrendered to officers, who immediately rendered medical aid, and a helicopter was called to airlift him to a South Bend area hospital. His current condition is unknown.

Indiana State Police Lowell Post detectives are conducting an active investigation into the officer-involved shooting and the escape of Lopez.

ISP officials stated that once the investigation is complete, information will be given to the Newton County prosecutor for potential criminal charges. The identity of the officer involved has not been released.

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VALPARAISO  A jury continued their deliberations from Wednesday into Thursday night on the fate of a former Porter County police officer accused of battering his infant son nearly six years ago, leaving the boy disabled and with a much shorter life expectancy.

Porter Superior Court Judge Mike Fish sent the jury home late Wednesday night after several hours of deliberations failed to produce a verdict in the criminal case against Curtis Jones, according to the court.

The group then resumed work Thursday morning.

Jones, 52, who left the county police department in 2005 and now lives in Florida, faces one felony count of battery resulting in serious bodily injury to a person less than 14 years of age and two felony counts of neglect of a dependent resulting in serious injury.

Each of the felony counts carries a potential sentence of three to 16 years behind bars.

The case went to the jury during its third week of trial, which has faced multiple delays over the years and failed attempts to dismiss charges and move the case out of Porter County.

The latest defense team in the case  attorneys John Vouga and Nicholas Barnes  took over in January 2021 from one attorney who died in 2019 and another who was disbarred a year prior.

Jones is accused of shaking or otherwise injuring his infant son July 24, 2016, while his former wife and the boy's mother was at her overnight nursing job.

The paramedic who responded to the distress call for 6-month-old Braxson Jones on the morning in question testified last week that he did not notice any injuries on the child and did not suspect child abuse.

The testimony conflicted with reports from doctors and other medical officials, who treated the child at the local St. Mary Medical Center and at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago.

A social worker told jurors earlier this week that the Illinois medical team working on Braxson found an injury on the child, causing the boy's mother, Susan Jones, to stop crying and question Curtis about its origin.

"You need to tell me right now what happened," Susan reportedly said to Curtis, who then shrugged and said he did nothing.

The medical team at St. Mary's found swelling and bruising on Braxson's forehead on the morning in question and reported the child struggling to breathe and bleeding under his skull, jurors were told last week.

A doctor at Lurie hospital said the child suffered "the worst brain injury I have ever seen," according to court documents.

A surgeon at Lurie's reportedly removed part of the child's skull to relieve pressure from the swelling brain.

Braxson, who is now 6, survived, but he needs constant care, a prosecutor has said.

He is blind, needs diaper changing, is fed through a tube, must be moved by others and no longer communicates on his own, she said.

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NIPSCO recognized shining stars across Northwest Indiana and beyond at its 2022 Luminary Awards.

The Merrillville-based utility has been giving out the awards for a decade to recognize local leaders and groups that work to strengthen and improve the community. Since 2012, it's conferred honors for community leadership, economic development, education, environmental stewardship, public safety and local government excellence in its service area across Northern Indiana, where it provides natural gas to 820,000 customers and electricity to 470,000 households and businesses.

This year's winners are Lakeshore Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Dave Ryan for community leadership, NWI Forum Executive Director Heather Ennis for economic development, the Ivy Tech Community College Kokomo campus for education, The Watershed Foundation for environmental stewardship, the American Red Cross for public safety and the city of LaPorte for local government excellence.

The utility also bestowed a lifetime achievement award on Don Babcock, NIPSCOs retired director of economic development. It's the first time the utility has conferred a Luminary Award for lifetime achievement.

Known for his bellowing "Good morning Northwest Indiana" greeting at chamber meetings and other business functions, Babcock has long promoted the economic development and growth of Northwest Indiana, touting the area's assets and helping to lure new businesses, jobs and investment. He now serves as Director of Economic Development and Community Relations at Purdue University Northwest.

The utility service NIPSCO provides critically impacts the lives of so many in our communities, said Rick Calinski, NIPSCO director of public affairs and economic development. Our communities are enriched by the work so many do to ensure continued growth, vitality and success across northern Indiana. Were so pleased to have this opportunity to recognize the efforts of organizations and leaders who make the communities we serve a better place to live and work.

NIPSCO donated $1,000 to each award winner's chosen charity on their behalf.

For more information, visit visit NIPSCO.com/GivingBack.

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VALPARAISO  Up until recently, an elementary school out of Zory, Poland, was using cat litter boxes filled with beans to help Ukrainian refugees regain their balance.

Thanks to the Nasty Women of Porter County, the school now has five foam sensory mats that help children harmed by the war. The Nasty Women fundraiser all started when Joanna Bloom, who immigrated from Poland in 1990, and her daughter decided to donate a couple hundred dollars.

We are not changing the world, we are not ending the war, but we are making a world of change for this particular group of kids and refugees, Bloom explained.

When Bloom reached out to Nasty Women, the donations started pouring in and now the group has raised over $5,000. Bloom contacted some of her friends and family who still live in Poland and got connected with a local school and Merino, a Polish company that makes blankets, baby clothes and pillows.

So far, the group has sent the school six orders from Merino, eight orders of school supplies from Amazon and four orders of books from a Polish bookstore.

Zory has been hosting a lot of refugees because of all the dorm-style buildings and factories in the city. Bloom said each wave of Ukrainian children is more traumatized and injured than those that came before.

When she first heard about the Russian invasion, her instinct was to "hop on a plane" and use her Polish language skills as a volunteer. However, she realized her presence may take up valuable resources such as food and housing and that the some $2,000 she would have spent on a plane ticket should go directly to those who need it most.

"The women [Nasty Women of Porter County] were eager to help, and I think they had the same idea that I had which was that I wanted to make a direct impact," Bloom said. "I did not want to make a donation to an organization where most of the money would go to the overhead."

The Nasty Women of Porter County have witnessed the immediate impact of their efforts, exchanging photos with the school. Bloom also regularly wakes up at 3 a.m. to call school staff and hear how the students are doing.

When a new delivery arrives, students run to the library shouting "we have a package from Nasty Women!" Bloom said. Filled with art supplies and books written in Ukrainian, Bloom said the items offer students a form of escapism.

The library has become a place of refuge, Bloom said. To me that is the first step of easing some of the trauma and bringing some normalcy to their lives.

The paint sets and notebooks also give the children an artistic way to document their experiences. Bloom said one girl created a portrait of her mother that was half in color and half black-and-white, "symbolizing that their world is beginning to fill with color again."

Through photos Bloom said she has seen the children slowly start to come out of their shells, "the smiles are not quite there, but they are almost there."

Some of the supplies sent by Nasty Women are helping with another kind of progress  physical rehabilitation.

Many children arrive in Zory with concussions, busted eardrums and other injuries. Bloom said the school therapy team was overwhelmed, but one member of Nasty Women got connected with an organization that installs sensory pads and mats that help children regain balance. The group was able to send over mats as well as hammocks and rubber spikey balls.

The therapy items allow children who have experienced violence to feel protected and regain sensory abilities without having to be physically touched. Right now Nasty Women is readying an order of heart-shaped wool pillows and more school supplies for the Ukrainian children who will be taking summer courses to make up for disrupted learning.

Being an "armchair warrior" has not only eased the workload for volunteers in Poland, Bloom said she and the other Nasty Women members now have a connection with a group of women and children halfway across the world.

Those interested in donating to the fundraiser can email Kathy Dewitt at kathleen.l.dewitt@gmail.com.

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The decision will not halt civil forfeitures, said Wesley P. Hottot, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice, which represented the Land Rovers owner.

People are still going to lose their property without being convicted of a crime, theyre still going to have their property seized, Mr. Hottot said. The new thing is that they can now say at the end of it all, whether Im guilty or not, I can argue that it was excessive.

Law enforcement agencies have resisted efforts to curtail civil forfeiture, saying they rely on the proceeds for sorely needed equipment. It is difficult, if not impossible, to calculate the total value of civil forfeitures by local police departments and prosecutors, but a significant portion comes from joint operations with federal law enforcement and is tracked by the Justice Department.

In fiscal year 2018, state and local agencies received $400 million through this arrangement, known as equitable sharing. The amount varied widely by agency  the Surprise Police Department in Arizona received $570,000, while the Buffalo Police Department in upstate New York got $130,000. The New York Police Department took in $7.8 million.

In Philadelphia, forfeiture proceeds once accounted for 20 percent of prosecutors budget, while agencies in New York and California tended to take in the highest sums, according to the Institute for Justice.

Investigations across the country have uncovered many examples where the property seized was disproportionate to the crime, taken from innocent citizens or targeted in accordance with law enforcement wish lists. As its name suggests, a civil forfeiture does not require a criminal conviction or even criminal charges but only proof that the property at issue was used in connection with a crime. Owners who wish to reclaim their property must demonstrate that it was not, or that it was used without their knowledge.

A recent series of articles by the Greenville News examined every civil forfeiture case in South Carolina from 2014 to 2016, finding examples like that of Ella Bromell, a 72-year-old woman who had to fight off the forfeiture of her home after drug dealers conducted transactions on her property, despite Ms. Bromells multiple attempts to stop them.
President Muhammadu Buhari had, earlier, on Wednesday, directed his appointees with plans to contest in the 2023 elections, to resign.

Two members of the Federal Executive Council (FEC) have resigned to focus on their presidential ambitions.

The Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, Godswill Akpabio, and the Minister of Science and Technology, Ogbonnaya Onu, resigned a few hours after a directive by President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday.

Jackson Udom, the spokesperson to the Mr Akpabio, confirmed the resignation of his principal to PREMIUM TIMES over the phone on Wednesday.

This newspaper also learnt that Mr Onu has equally forwarded his resignation letter to the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Boss Mustapha.

Messrs Akpabio and Onu, both former governors of Akwa Ibom and Old Abia State, respectively, are presidential aspirants on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC).

Mr Buhari had directed that all FEC members (Excluding the Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo) who are seeking nomination as flag bearers of their party should resign on or before May 16.

The president's directive followed the decision of the Court of Appeal to strike out the suit challenging section 84(12) of the electoral act.

The Court of Appeal had set aside the verdict of the Federal High Court in Umuahia, which ruled that the section was unconstitutional. Although, the Court of Appeal agreed the section was unconstitutional, it held that the Federal High Court, Umuahia, lacked jurisdiction to adjudicate on the suit.

The appellate court further said the plaintiff, Nduka Edede, lacked the locus standi to have filed the case.

Earlier, the Minister of State for Education, Emeke Nwajiuba, who is also running for president, also tendered his resignation.

It is expected that other appointees of the president will resign following his directive.

They are the Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi; the Attorney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami; the Minister of Labour and Employment, Chris Ngige; the Minister of Women Affairs, Paullen Tallen; the Minister of Petroleum Resources (State), Timipriye Sylva; and the Minister of Mines and Steel Development (State), Uche Ogar.
Bloomberg Media has decided to aggressively court a British audience, the first prong in a retooled global strategy for the business news giant.

On Wednesday night, executives introduced a venture that they hope could generate $100 million in annual revenue: Bloomberg UK, a brand meant to compete directly with The Financial Times and The Sunday Times, staples of British business journalism.

Bloomberg UK will include a website, a weekly Bloomberg Quicktake video series profiling British newsmakers, a podcast about the City of London and a summit this year on the future of British business.

Bloomberg has been in the British market for three decades, but the new venture is a targeted approach to an untapped audience of at least seven million in the professional, affluent space, said M. Scott Havens, the chief executive of Bloomberg Media.
Hundreds of thousands of British soldiers died fighting in World War II. Operation Mincemeat, directed by John Madden, tells the real-life story of one man drafted into the war effort after death  or rather, it tells the story of the men who conscripted him. In this bizarrely celebratory tale, the titular mincemeat is a troubling figure, weighing heavy on the conscience as the men whove enlisted him engage in petty infighting.

Colin Firth plays Ewen Montagu, a former barrister who teams up with Charles Cholmondeley, played by Matthew Macfadyen, after hearing his plan to deceive Hitler by using forged papers attached to a corpse. Theyre aided by two girls Friday: Hester, Montagus steadfast spinster secretary played by Penelope Wilton, and Jean, a younger typist played by Kelly Macdonald.
In Louisiana, lawmakers are considering a proposal to classify ending a pregnancy at any point from the moment of fertilization as homicide. And the Idaho State Legislature may hold hearings on outlawing emergency contraceptives, a reminder that when were talking about states rights, we should think about trusting your fate to a roomful of state legislators.

All this is basically about punishing women who want to have sex for pleasure. Its a concept with a long tradition in American history. Back in 1873, Congress began to pass a series of laws prohibiting dissemination through the mail of birth control literature, drugs or devices. Later, when a journalist asked Anthony Comstock, founder of the New York Commission on the Suppression of Vice, whether it would be all right for a woman to use contraceptives if pregnancy would endanger her life, Comstock snapped: Can they not use self-control? Or must they sink to the level of beasts?

OK, the current debate is probably not going to get quite that far. But its important to note that the policies were talking about here are basically a matter of legislating the religious beliefs of just one segment of the public.

The goal of the Democratic Senate bill was mainly to get the public focused on the reproductive rights issue before the fall elections. And that certainly couldnt hurt. There have to be voters out there who arent all that geared up about going to the polls but who might be moved if they got to hear the speech by Republican Steve Daines of Montana that praised anti-abortion laws as being similar to ones that protect the eggs of a sea turtle or the eggs of eagles.

Those sea turtles have been coming up a lot in this debate. Republican James Lankford of Oklahoma, in a long, emotional speech, recounted a confrontation with abortion rights demonstrators who pointed out there was a difference between laws protecting a womans right to choose and laws protecting endangered species.

And Im called the extremist, Lankford declared. He added, If people call me a radical for believing children are valuable  so be it.

Actually, people call Lankford a radical for believing that the reproductive experiences of female water-dwelling reptiles are comparable to the experiences of human beings whose offspring will need and deserve many years of constant care and concern in order to prosper.
An appeals court panel ruled on Wednesday that Californias ban on the sale of semiautomatic weapons to adults under the age of 21 violated the right to bear arms found in the Second Amendment of the Constitution.

Judge Ryan Nelson, writing for a two-to-one majority in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, struck down a ruling by a federal judge in San Diego that upheld what Judge Nelson called an almost total ban on semiautomatic rifles for young adults.

America would not exist without the heroism of the young adults who fought and died in our revolutionary army, Judge Nelson wrote. Today we reaffirm that our Constitution still protects the right that enabled their sacrifice: the right of young adults to keep and bear arms.

Judge Nelson rejected an argument, made by a lower court judge, that young adults were considered minors or infants for most of our countrys history without the rights afforded adults and were therefore unfit for responsible firearm possession and use.
A Texas woman whose five-year prison sentence for illegally casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 election prompted outrage among voting-rights activists will have her case reconsidered by an appeals court, the states highest criminal court ruled on Wednesday.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals found that a lower appeals court had incorrectly upheld parts of the conviction of the woman, Crystal Mason, who had voted in the general election in 2016, when she was a felon on probation, and filled out a provisional ballot that was never officially counted or tallied. Ms. Mason has insisted that at the time, she did not know she was ineligible to vote and had been advised by a poll worker to submit her provisional ballot.

The Second Court of Appeals in Tarrant County had said in 2020 that Ms. Masons unawareness was irrelevant to her prosecution. But the Court of Criminal Appeals disagreed, opening a channel for the conviction to be overturned.

This is great news for Ms. Mason, but the fight is not over, Tommy Buser-Clancy, a senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas who is representing Ms. Mason, said by phone on Wednesday.
LOS ANGELES  For nearly a year, the mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, has been between two worlds, as he put it in an interview, waiting to be confirmed as the Biden administrations ambassador to India while the high-stakes race to succeed him plays out in the nations second-largest city.

That sense of limbo became even stronger after a Senate report released this week suggested that Mr. Garcetti had ignored a pattern of sexual harassment by one of his top aides. The claim, which the mayor denies, threatens to derail an already drawn-out appointment, casts a shadow over his final months leading a Democratic stronghold and throws his political future into question.

The delay has also left the United States without a permanent envoy in one of the most populous countries at a critical time: India has remained steadfastly neutral on Russias war in Ukraine and has continued to buy Russian oil, undermining bans in the United States and Europe.

The 23-page report details the findings of an investigation led by Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, who in March asked to delay Mr. Garcettis confirmation, citing numerous credible allegations from multiple whistle-blowers of misconduct by Rick Jacobs, a close adviser to Mr. Garcetti and his former deputy chief of staff.
WASHINGTON  Even by the standards of other ideas promoted by the conservative lawyer John Eastman to keep President Donald J. Trump in the White House after his election loss in 2020, a newly revealed strategy he proposed to take votes from Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Pennsylvania stands out as especially brazen.

Mr. Eastman pressed a Pennsylvania state lawmaker in December 2020 to carry out a plan to strip Mr. Biden of his win in that state by applying a mathematical equation to accepting the validity of mail ballots, which were most heavily used by Democrats during the pandemic, according to emails from Mr. Eastman released under a public records request by the University of Colorado Boulder, which employed him at the time.

The emails were the latest evidence of just how far Mr. Trump and his allies were willing to go in the weeks after Election Day to keep him in power  complete with anti-democratic plans to install fake pro-Trump electors and reject the votes of Biden supporters. Mr. Eastman would go on to champion the idea that Vice President Mike Pence could unilaterally block congressional certification of Mr. Bidens Electoral College victory, an idea Mr. Pence rejected even as Mr. Trump was promoting the protests that turned into the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.

On Dec. 4, 2020, using his university email account, Mr. Eastman wrote to State Representative Russell H. Diamond, Republican of Pennsylvania, with plans for the legislature to appoint pro-Trump electors.
ERIE, Pa.  Republican voters in Pennsylvania, one of the nations most hotly contested political battlegrounds, appear to be rallying behind two hard-right candidates for governor and the Senate who are capturing grass-roots anger, railing against the partys old guard and amplifying Donald Trumps stolen-election myth.

With less than a week until the states primary election on Tuesday, polls show that State Senator Doug Mastriano  one of the states central figures in the former presidents efforts to overturn the 2020 election  has emerged as the clear front-runner in the G.O.P. race for governor. The candidate for Senate, Kathy Barnette, an underfunded conservative commentator who has never held public office, has made a surprise late surge in the contest that had been dominated by two big-spending rivals, Dr. Mehmet Oz and David McCormick.

Mr. Mastriano has made claims of election fraud a central plank of his bid to lead a state that could be decisive in the 2024 presidential race. Ms. Barnette has a history of incendiary remarks, including repeatedly calling former President Barack Obama an adherent of Islam, which she said should be banned, and derisively writing about the homosexual agenda. Both candidates have endorsed each other, forging an important alliance.

Now, Republicans are concerned about losing both races in November if primary voters embrace such out-of-the-mainstream candidates.
The news agency did not reveal if officials knew how the virus had entered the country.

After closing its borders from the rest of the world for two years, North Korea again began allowing cargo trains to bring in badly needed imports from China early this year. The North also held a huge nighttime military parade late last month in which the soldiers, members of the elite and tens of thousands of people who mobilized to watch the spectacle did not appear to wear masks.

Signs of possible trouble began leaking out soon afterward.

South Korean intelligence officials said last week that the North Korean authorities were ordering people on the streets to return home and stay there. Also last week, Park Jie-won, director of South Koreas National Intelligence Service, said that the North had again banned cargo trains from China from entering his country.

On Thursday, the North Korean news agency said, Mr. Kim called for national unity during the state emergency, telling his people that unscientific fear, lack of faith and weak will were a more dangerous enemy than the malicious virus.

He urged his country to continue to push forward with the bold five-year economic development plan he unfurled during a Workers Party congress in January last year. Under that plan, North Koreans have been building residential districts in the capital and greenhouse complexes in provinces.

For Pyongyang to publicly admit to having Covid-19 cases, the public health situation had to have been serious, said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor of international relations at Ewha Womans University in Seoul.

The worsening coronavirus situation is a serious challenge for Kim Jong-un, not only in terms of limiting infections, deaths and food disruptions, Mr. Easley said. Kim has credited strict social controls and self-imposed international isolation with keeping North Korea safe from Covid. If those signature measures fail, it could be a blow to regime legitimacy.

The epidemic control measures that North Korea enforced on Thursday could further restrict the traffic of people and goods between towns and factories, and disrupt supplies and production, said Cheong Seong-chang, director of the Center for North Korean Studies at the Sejong Institute in South Korea.
When David Geffen Hall reopens on the Lincoln Center campus this fall, two new artworks  by Nina Chanel Abney and by Jacolby Satterwhite  will be splayed across the 65th Street facade and a 50-foot media wall in the renovated lobby.

These highly visible pieces, commissioned by the performing arts center in partnership with the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Public Art Fund, are positioned to help reintroduce the longtime home of the New York Philharmonic to the city and will inaugurate a rotating program of visual artists invited to put their stamp on Lincoln Center.

One of the overriding goals of the new David Geffen Hall has been to find ways to connect more meaningfully with outside  not just to open up but to reach out, said Henry Timms, president and chief executive of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Weve been very intentional about thinking about different voices, different audiences, more people seeing themselves at Lincoln Center. The Studio Museum was the perfect partner for that.

For the museum, which has been organizing temporary installations of public art since 2016 in Harlem while its 125th Street building is under construction, this collaboration was a great opportunity to extend our engagement in site-specific commissioned artwork, said Thelma Golden, the Studio Museums director and chief curator. It also allows the museum to complement the work at Lincoln Center to broaden and deepen and expand their program and the ways in which they engage audiences. Golden pulled in the Public Art Fund for the organizations resources and expertise in implementing large-scale public projects.
HARTFORD, Conn.  There has always been a certain fluidity in our appreciation of the American modernist maverick Milton Avery (1885-1965). And this is not just because of the light, airy, daringly simplified, almost abstract paintings of sand, sea and sky that characterized his last decade. Avery was artistically unaffiliated, never part of a particular group or movement, which means that general awareness of his work has fluctuated a great deal. Its always surprising to realize the range of his styles and subjects, and the chance to do so has been too rare.

Now, one of those rare moments has arrived, with quite a bit of Averys work on view in shows in New York City and Hartford, Conn. The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford is presenting Milton Avery, a lavish survey of nearly 70 paintings (organized by the Royal Academy of Arts, London in collaboration with the Wadsworth and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth). It is the largest since the artists retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1982. In New York, Yares Art is celebrating 50 years of representing the Avery estate with an exhibition of 50 Averys; mostly paintings, with some watercolors.

And as a sidebar to these shows, D. Wigmore Fine Art has mounted its third show of the work of Sally Michel (1902-2003), the painter from Brooklyn who married Avery in 1926. She worked full time as a freelance illustrator for more than 30 years so that he could paint full time. Her painting style has been seen as a knockoff of her husbands, but her contribution to its formation has yet to be fully recognized, especially his tendency to distill forms to their essence.
After that days rehearsal, Davis said, its so funny because I like science fiction, and I wrote a science fiction opera  Under the Double Moon, from 1989  but I never thought of X like that.

In its opening scenes, X introduces a Black community in Michigan as it processes the news of the killing of the Rev. Earl Little  Malcolms father, and a preacher in the Marcus Garvey mold. During an aria for Louise, Malcolms newly widowed mother, she recalls local Ku Klux Klan terrorism on the eve of her sons birth. Rings of fire engulf the surface of the spaceship.

A new staging like this, Davis said, can represent how people in the future will see it, see Malcolm and see the whole story. And it also offers a new way to hear the music. Its not about this completely realistic portrayal, Davis said, before comparing the work to magic realism.

But to OHara, the spaceship means even more than that. It is a symbolic critique of the opera world, which rarely takes stock of Black composers and only earnestly came around on programming their music after the murder of George Floyd and a new wave of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. The Met, the largest performing arts institution in the United States, didnt program its first work by a Black composer, Terence Blanchards Fire Shut Up in My Bones, until this season.

We are actually saying this space cannot hold the opera; we have to crash and take over the space, OHara said. It costs us something to tell the story in which at the end a Black man is killed. And it should cost you something to witness it.

Many people are likely to witness it. After the new stagings premiere in Detroit, it will travel Opera Omaha (the city where Malcolm X was born) and the Met, as well as Seattle Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago  all of them partners in what has become a coast-to-coast coproduction.
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous nights highlights that lets you sleep  and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.

Stuck in the Past

On Wednesday, the Senate voted against legislation that would have guaranteed abortion rights nationwide.

Jimmy Kimmel referred to the blocking of the bill as a stupefying day in the history of this country.
AMSTERDAM  Kate Myklukha pushed herself up onto the tip of her left foot, then stretched her arms out in front of her as if hugging a tree.

As a pianist at the Dutch National Ballet here played a jaunty tune, several of Myklukhas classmates wobbled from side to side, struggling to hold the delicate pose. But Myklukha held her balance, then spun around and dipped into a knee bend, before gracefully waving an arm skyward.

During that short sequence last month, Myklukha, 17, looked as if she had been a member of the ballets junior company for years. Yet, she had arrived in Amsterdam only two and a half weeks before, having escaped the war in Ukraine.

In an interview before the class, Myklukha said she was struggling not to think about what was happening in Ukraine. Whenever she heard a loud noise  from a passing train or a tram rushing through Amsterdams cobbled streets  she got scared, she said, reminded of bombs and sirens back home. Her grandparents were still in Kyiv, and she was worried about them.
Its entirely a coincidence, I swear, that Rax Kings Tacky  an essay collection celebrating the lowbrow and garish products of American pop culture  appears on our recommended books list in the same week as Liarmouth, a debut novel by the acclaimed film director John Waters, who for decades has made a whole aesthetic out of his love for the lowbrow and garish. Sometimes, the planets just align. Im glad they do in this case, though, since it gives me an excuse to quote a commenter who made this same connection after reading Dwight Garners review of the King book: Like John Waters, she tackles bad taste from a place of amusement, but not judgment or irony. There is plenty in this world to take seriously right now, so why not find joy where you can? Why not, indeed.

Other books on this weeks list that feature art or artists or the creative impulse include Liana Fincks graphic novel Let There Be Light (a retelling of Genesis that casts God as a female artist) and Celia Pauls Letters to Gwen John, an imagined dialogue between the author and a fellow painter she never had the chance to know. Farther afield, we also like Simon Heffers High Minds, a cultural history of 19th-century Britain, and Cathy ONeils The Shame Machine, a cultural history thats very much of the 21st century, along with a couple of memoirs: Delia Ephrons Left on Tenth, about loss and late-life romance, and Erika Krouses Tell Me Everything, about her job as a private investigator. In fiction, we recommend new novels by Hernan Diaz, Susan Straight and Kelsey Ronan. Happy reading.

Gregory Cowles

Senior Editor, Books

Image

TACKY: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer, by Rax King. (Vintage, paper, $15.95.) Kings ebullient book is a well-calibrated celebration of bad taste: Creed, frosted lip gloss, The Jersey Shore, the Cheesecake Factory, the Josie and the Pussycats movie and Warm Vanilla Sugar fragrance mist. She tucks pieces of memoir inside her cultural criticism. Shes opposed to distance and irony; you end up taking her seriously because shes so opposed to the project of being taken seriously. Our critic Dwight Garner writes: So winsome is the writing in Tacky that, most of the time, theres no other word for it but classy.
Who fired a fatal bullet?

The bullet that killed the Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh has become the central point of contention between competing efforts by Israelis and Palestinians to investigate who shot her.

Palestinian officials said that Israel could not be trusted to investigate the killing, and would not let Israeli officials examine the bullet. As Palestinian investigators combed the area where Abu Akleh was killed, a top official rejected Israeli calls for a joint inquiry, and accused Israeli soldiers of killing her.

Israeli officials maintain that she may have been hit by Palestinian fire, and they said that they would need to examine the bullet to see if it could be matched to an Israeli rifle. They argued that Palestinians were refusing to provide the bullet in order to obscure its origin. Here are live updates.

Explanation: The bullet could reveal the gun that fired it, and its condition may contain signs about the direction and distance it was fired from. Israel said both sides fired M16s, which could complicate the investigation.
But Mr. Denning, a former Amazon warehouse employee who tells workers that they are the ones who must lead a union campaign, said that many didnt realize how much effort unionizing required, and that some became discouraged once he conferred with them.

We get people saying how do we get an A.L.U. situation here? How do we do that like they did? Mr. Denning said, adding: I dont want to scare them away. But I cant lie to workers. This is what it is. Its not for everyone.

At Starbucks, employees work together in a relatively small space, sometimes without a manager present to supervise them directly for hours at a time. This allows them to openly discuss concerns about pay and working conditions and the merits of a union.

At Amazon, the warehouses are cavernous, and workers are often more isolated and more closely supervised, especially during an organizing campaign.

What they would do is strategically separate me from everyone in my department, said Derrick Palmer, an Amazon employee on Staten Island who is one of the unions vice presidents. If they see me interacting with that person, they would move them to a different station.

Asked about the allegation, Amazon said it assigned employees to work stations and tasks based on operational needs.

Both companies have accused the unions of their own unfair tactics, including intimidating workers and inciting hostile confrontations.
Hundreds of investors in a troubled luxury student apartment building near the University of Texas at Austin are close to recouping much of the $75 million they committed to the project, with most of the bill footed by a management firm that has drawn complaints from tenants across the country.

Nelson Partners Student Housing will pay $50 million to the investor group that includes doctors, lawyers, teachers and engineers under a preliminary settlement approved by a Texas state judge. The deal or liquidation plan could require Nelson Partners to sell many of its nearly 20 properties to raise the money. The investors also could get several million dollars from a New York hedge fund that provided financing for the deal, following a verdict Wednesday from a jury in a related lawsuit.

The proposed settlement would resolve a bitter legal fight in which the investors in the Skyloft student housing complex claimed they were defrauded by the firms chief executive, Patrick Nelson, who aggressively bought up properties in the past four years.

But Mr. Nelson and his firm have encountered financial troubles and bankruptcies at several properties while student residents at different complexes complained about poor living conditions including broken elevators, darkened hallways, uncollected trash, insect infestation and algae-covered swimming pools.
The German electronics giant Siemens is exiting Russia after about 170 years of business there, the latest in a long list of companies to pull out of the country since its invasion of Ukraine in February.

The company, which has 3,000 employees in Russia, said on Thursday that it was winding down all its industrial operations and business. In an accompanying financial statement, Siemens said that in its second quarter it took a hit of 0.6 billion euros, or about $625 million, after Russian sanctions.

Siemens had announced in March that it was pausing its business in Russia while the company analyzed the full implication of all sanctions that had been placed on the country by Western governments. But at the time it said it would continue local service and maintenance for that business.

The conglomerate is among the Western companies with longtime business ties to Russia: Both Siemens and Deutsche Bank have been operating there since the late 19th century.
Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.

Whenever I think about the various reporting trips that I have taken abroad, I am grateful to the sources who spoke with me  but I also feel powerfully indebted to the translators who served as crucial allies when I was far from home. In Albania, my translator, an older woman, nursed me through a bad flu I picked up in a refugee camp. I felt remarkably close, very quickly, to a translator I worked with in Afghanistan, a young woman longing for higher education, as we collaborated on a New York Times Magazine article about girls and school in Kabul. And since I left Poland in late March, Ive remained in close touch with Oleksandra Lanko, a Ukrainian who worked as my translator for a recently published article I reported on surrogate mothers from Ukraine.

I knew in early March that I wanted to go to Poland to report that feature, which would ultimately follow the plight of several Ukrainian women who were working as surrogate mothers. I also knew I couldnt book a flight until I found a translator. (Most reporters seem to prefer the word translator to the slightly fussier, if more accurate, term for the spoken word, interpreter.)

A colleague, Jeffrey Gettleman, generously came through with a suggestion: He knew of Oleksandra, a young English teacher who had just left Ukraine. As soon as Oleksandra and I spoke by phone, I knew we would hit it off. She was witty and her English was fluent, perfected, she told me, after watching hours and hours of Friends.

Clearly, something about the dynamic between reporter and translator fosters closeness. During interviews, the translator is standing in for the reporter, trying to channel not just the reporters words but approach  the pauses, emphases, and corny tension-breaking jokes, whatever emotion might be felt with a sensitive question.
The term caveat emptor has appeared in eight articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on March 26 in Rising Fares, Low-Cost Airlines: Navigating the New Reality in the Sky by Elaine Glusac:

American carriers arent the only ones vying for your business. A growing number of low-cost carriers  including foreign entries  are offering new routes, new competition and bargain fares. Most analysts think the economics of trans-Atlantic travel preclude budget carriers from succeeding on the routes, pointing to Norwegian Air Shuttle, which stopped flying trans-Atlantic routes during the pandemic, and Icelands Wow Air, which went bankrupt in 2019. Caveat emptor.

Daily Word Challenge

Can you correctly use the term caveat emptor in a sentence?

Based on the definition and example provided, write a sentence using todays Word of the Day and share it as a comment on this article. It is most important that your sentence makes sense and demonstrates that you understand the terms definition, but we also encourage you to be creative and have fun.

Then, read some of the other sentences students have submitted and use the Recommend button to vote for two original sentences that stand out to you.

If you want a better idea of how caveat emptor can be used in a sentence, read these usage examples on Vocabulary.com.
In the first shot of Il Buco  the title, accurate and perhaps overly modest, is the Italian word for hole  the camera, positioned underground, gazes upward at a patch of sky fringed with grass. Cows poke their heads into the frame, setting a tone of quiet rural rumination that the director, Michelangelo Frammartino, will sustain for the next hour and a half.

The opening also establishes a perspective that is at once straightforward and philosophically complex. Il Buco is a historical film, carefully reconstructing the 1961 exploration of a previously unmapped cave in Calabria. Its also a landscape film, mesmerized by the sublimity of this verdant, rocky stretch of countryside.

Like Frammartinos previous feature, Le Quattro Volte (also shot in the Calabrian countryside), this one adopts a rigorously objective, pointedly nonhuman point of view. Whether you are looking up from mouth of the cave, down into its murky, winding depths or across the cloud-swept valley whose floor it scars, you are seeing the world as it might look through the disembodied eyes of nature or time itself. That effect is established through slow, static, long-distance shots and a sound design that treats human speech as no more significant than bird song, dripping water or rustling leaves. Frammartino connects the physical with the metaphysical. The world as he renders it is an anthology of concrete objects and unrepeatable moments that are somehow infused with abstract, even spiritual meanings.
As has been demonstrated in films as wide-ranging as Monterey Pop, Woodstock, and Summer of Soul, music festivals cant help but get part of their vibe from their settings. As musicians from all over the world testify in the documentary Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story, directed by Frank Marshall and Ryan Suffern, the Louisiana citys annual jazz festival has an irreproducible flavor because it happens in the cradle of American music.

The movies opening montage, featuring familiar famous faces ranging from Tom Jones to Pitbull, is  happily  a bit of a fake out. These big names and others get some play (and in what some might consider an unfortunate feature, Jimmy Buffett gets a lot of play) but the movie is conscientiously attentive to the festivals homegrown eclecticism.
Like every Hollywood hopeful, the heroine of Pleasure dreams big: She wants to be a star. Its going to be tough, even if she looks the part with blond hair and blue eyes that flicker between calculation and just enough vacancy to please male power. She already has it  it being the cameras love  but plenty of pretty people do as well, and they too burn with desire. Theyll do anything to make it, though maybe not exactly everything she does.

Reader, she wants to be a porn star.

That story and her desire arent for everyone, no doubt. But if youre curious what a feminist take on this world looks like, Pleasure might surprise you as much as it did me. Its a smart, gutsy, wholly unexpected movie that, at center, is an old-fashioned story about an ambitious striver overcoming the odds to become another American success story. Its also among the most explicit movies to have had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival (in 2021) and, having been snagged by Neon (the company that released Parasite), will play in art houses across the country, from Boston to Oklahoma City.

What makes Pleasure most provocative, though  worthy of serious consideration and discussion, not the usual outrage or blase shrugs  is that its a complex, even-tempered look at the mainstream porn industry. As a business, pornography exults in leaving nothing to the imagination other than its behind-the-scenes operations, its ugliness and especially its money  an annual haul in the billions in the United States alone. And while the Swedish director Ninja Thyberg doesnt crunch the numbers in Pleasure, she does shine a rightly harsh light on the political economy of mainstream smut, including its mode of production.

The story centers on Bella Cherry (psst, its not her real name), whos more than ready for her close-up. Recently arrived from Sweden, Bella  played by the astonishing Sofia Kappel  hasnt entirely charted her path to success. Shes just getting started, but shes entrepreneurial and already feeds her Instagram account with a stream of selfies. She has vague plans, a car, an agent and a co-living setup conveniently near work, a.k.a. the San Fernando Valley, the industrys epicenter. What she needs now is experience and maybe a signature specialty that will set her apart, burnish her reputation, make her name.
Mayor Eric Adams announced Thursday the details of a plan to turn around a literacy crisis in New York City and, in particular, to serve thousands of children in public schools who may have dyslexia, an issue deeply personal to the mayor, who has said his own undiagnosed dyslexia hurt his academic career.

School officials plan to screen nearly all students for dyslexia, while 80 elementary schools and 80 middle schools will receive additional support for addressing the needs of children with dyslexia. The city will also open two new dyslexia programs  one at P.S. 125 Ralph Bunche in Harlem and the other at P.S. 161 Juan Ponce de Leon in the South Bronx  with a goal of opening similar programs in each borough by 2023.

Officials also plan to train all teachers, and will create a new dyslexia task force. School leaders are requiring school principals to pivot to a phonics-based literacy curriculum, which literacy experts say is the most effective way to teach reading to most children.

Dyslexia holds back too many of our children in school but most importantly in life, Mr. Adams said during a press briefing Thursday morning, adding that it haunts you forever until you can get the proper treatment that you deserve.
Poughkeepsies historic preservation commission has adamantly opposed this plan, declining to issue a certificate of appropriateness. This has prevented the developers from obtaining the necessary permits to proceed, and they have appealed the decision. City legislators upheld it, and the developers have sued. The case is continuing.

Despite the lawsuit, the city recently closed on the sale of the property and is working with the developers to hammer out a settlement. We have a housing challenge  it has been called a crisis  and this site is a perfect location for market-rate homes, said Poughkeepsies mayor, Robert Rolison. The current deal would preserve Pelton Manor, a historic building that has been vacant for nearly a decade, for public use. Originally it was slated to be converted to apartments; now it is to house an arts organization.

That isnt enough for opponents. This is an unvarnished sweetheart deal quite typical of the good ole boys way of business around here, said Ken Stier, a freelance reporter who moved to the neighborhood from Brooklyn four years ago and is a vocal opponent of the plan. The mansion, and its small but precious river-view setting, is the crown jewel in a much-diminished historic district, he said. The area, he continued, will be completely privatized and packed with upscale housing.

Poughkeepsies preservation commission, in the meantime, is in a precarious spot. Of its seven seats, the terms of three have expired, and two more will expire this summer. With five of the seven seats up for grabs, it would be easy for the mayor to replace them with commissioners more sympathetic to the plan. So far, that hasnt happened.

I didnt replace them because of their involvement in this proposal, because it wouldnt have been the right thing to do, Mr. Rolison, the mayor, said. But the future remains in question. I havent done it for the time being, he said, but I am not going to lock myself into something.

The repercussions of a local government that does dismiss its historic preservation commission leaders have so far been minimal. In the case of Durham, the town could lose its status as a certified local government. The designation comes from a federal program, administered by the state, which gives towns and cities some financial assistance and training in return for upholding preservation standards. New York has 75 such certified local governments, including New York City.

The situation in Durham is incredibly frustrating, said Daniel McEneny, the division director at the New York State Historic Preservation Office, which oversees the program. Mr. McEnenys office has written two letters to Mr. Marriott, Durhams town supervisor. Both letters explain that Durhams preservation commission currently lacks a quorum to operate. So far, the town hasnt responded. If we dont hear back, we will commence with an audit, which is the first step in removing Durham from the federal program, Mr. McEneny said.

Mr. Ciccone recently wrote an email to Mr. McEneny asserting that his dismissal sets a dangerous precedent. This is metastasizing from an esoteric local issue, he wrote, to a major threat against local historic preservation commissions everywhere.
In the past year, the left-wing effort to boycott Israel over its treatment of Palestinians has won over The Harvard Crimson and the Irish novelist Sally Rooney. Its even affected ice cream: Ben & Jerrys has refused to sell its confections in the occupied territories.

It has also made inroads in New York, home to the worlds second-largest Jewish community, where the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement has gotten support from the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, the influential far-left political group.

But now a new group, backed by a billionaire hedge fund manager, is seeking to counter that movement by creating a political action network to support candidates in state legislative and local races who embrace Israel, and oppose candidates who do not.

The group, the New York Solidarity Network, will act something like a local American Israel Public Affairs Committee, commonly known as Aipac, according to several individuals who have spoken with its organizers. Like Aipac, the New York network is set up as a membership organization whose leaders will encourage donors to give to candidates they regard as being pro-Israel. It has not ruled out the idea of creating its own political action committee.
When the builders started digging the foundation of a house in 2017 in Basbuk, a village in Turkey about 70 miles from the Syrian border, they came across a curious opening in the limestone bedrock. Soon, they unearthed a staircase that descended more than 20 feet. It led to a cool, damp chamber nearly 28 feet wide with a 16-foot ceiling.

Etched into one wall was a 13-foot-long procession of almond-eyed deities, led by Hadad, a storm god who was identified by his three-pronged lightning rod and headdress with a five-point star. The goddess Atargatis, a fertility deity with a double-horned cylindrical crown inset with a star, followed. Six more beings trailed, in various stages of completion.

The discovery, described Wednesday in the journal Antiquity, captures a moment some 2,800 years ago when the Neo-Assyrian Empire was the dominant power in the region and its cultural influence was being integrated by subjects distant from its center. But the find also highlighted the fragility of archaeological treasures, which are vulnerable to looting and trafficking before the knowledge they preserve can be studied.

After discovering the chamber, the occupants tried to gain economic advantage, said Selim Adali, a historian and epigrapher at the Social Sciences University of Ankara and a co-author of the study.
There will be no Triple Crown champion this year after the owner of the Kentucky Derby winner Rich Strike announced Thursday that his colt would skip the Preakness Stakes and run instead in the Belmont Stakes.

The owner, Rick Dawson, said Rich Strike came out of the Derby in fine shape on Saturday. But he said that he and the trainer, Eric Reed, had decided not to push the colt into the second leg of the Triple Crown in Baltimore on May 21 after only two weeks of rest, especially after winning Americas most famous horse race (and a legion of fans) as an 80-1 shot.

The colt did not even draw into the Derby field until the day before the race, when Ethereal Road was scratched.

Our original plan for Rich Strike was contingent on the Kentucky Derby. Should we not run in the Derby we would point toward the Preakness, Dawson said in a statement. Should we run in the Derby, subject to the race outcome and the condition of our horse, we would give him more recovery time.
As far back as the third grade, I used to dream of looks I would be wearing to school the next day, he said. I would wake up and be like Mom, wheres that satin disco glitter jacket, and she was like, What are you talking about? You dont have that in your closet.

His two brothers introduced him to the musical and stylistic inventiveness of David Bowie and Debbie Harry. Little bro, youre like them, he remembers being told. I was 10 at the time, but they recognized the artistry in me.

By his teens, he was sneaking out of the house with friends to One Step Beyond, a local club. We were all doing makeup in the bathroom, he said, then going out dressed up in lipstick, hot pants and roller skates. At 17, he ventured with friends to San Francisco, where Julie Jewels, a founding member of the Club Kids, discovered him and encouraged him to join her scene in New York.

In Manhattan he discovered a home and showcase for his extravagant preening, befriending the Club Kids founders Michael Alig, James St. James and others. The Club Kids influence peaked in mid late 90s, dissolving when Mr. Alig and his roommate Robert Riggs pleaded guilty in 1997 to manslaughter in the killing and dismemberment of their fellow club habitue Andre Angel Melendez  a sordid denouement in which Mr. Rich had no part.

Part artist, part provocateur, Mr. Rich went on to work with Susanne Bartsch, a producer of outre nightlife events, before teaming with Traver Rains to design T-shirts and leather wear out of Mr. Rains apartment. He drew the notice of Patricia Field, the stylist and costume designer, and before long was whipping up pieces for Gwen Stefani, Sarah Jessica Parker and Foxy Brown.
I am a senior at a private high school in New York City. My younger sister is in the ninth grade there. We are among very few Black students at school, and were both enrolled on scholarships. I heard recently, then saw for myself, that my sister is being bullied by a group of girls in her class. When I talked to her about it, she was really upset, but she made me promise not to tell our mom. (The bullies were teasing her about her coat and her hair.) I was also bullied when I started at the school, but it stopped after a while. Im not sure whether to get involved or to let my sister work it out for herself. What do you think?

BIG SISTER

You may not like my advice: Tell your mother (or another adult family member) about the bullying right away. I get that you promised your sister you wouldnt, but the stakes are too high here. You can be extra supportive of her, but I dont think you can assess the seriousness of this problem on your own. Bullying can leave lasting scars and even lead to tragic results in some cases.

This may sound like an overreaction to you. You handled your bullies on your own, after all. But your sister is not you. We dont know how distraught she is or whether she can resolve this issue herself. She needs an adult who can help. (Some of what you describe sounds like racial taunting and should be addressed by a school administrator.) If shes angry with you for breaking your promise, apologize and explain that her safety is the most important thing.
A surprisingly chilly spring in the Northeast means that sweaters have stayed in rotation even as warm-weather garments have come into play. Its an aesthetic designers are embracing with an eye to sustainability. Seasonless style to have and to hold on to is the tagline for the London-based brand Sleau, which was launched last year by the designer Vanessa Jones and utilizes zero-waste practices for its billowy, plisse blouses and swingy iridescent trousers. The New York-based stylist Bryn Taylor debuted her line Ouisa last year, too, in response to the pieces clients were always asking for: They request items that offer ease, longevity and versatility, says Taylor, whose biannual presentations of six foundational garments, like a crisp button-down and classic T-shirt, can be worn any time of year. Also providing streamlined capsule collections is the Malibu, California-based brand Bleusalt; its founder, Lyndie Benson, makes blazers, unisex wraps and the rest of her evergreen line predominantly in Tencel, a fabric derived from sustainably sourced raw wood materials. Then theres Caes, the Amsterdam brand formed by the designer Helen de Kluiver in 2019 in response to her concerns about fast fashions environmental impact. Her fundamental garments  ankle-length dresses, an A-line black skirt, a traditional trench  have subtle but special touches, like seam detailing and gathered pleating, and are rendered in organic cottons, recycled polyesters and vegan leather. I created Caes from the belief that less is more, says de Kluiver, but that the pieces we do invest in should reflect our ideals.
On Taksim Square, now cut through with tunnels and underpasses, Eyup pointed out the scene of a violent confrontation in 2013 between Erdogans regime and its critics, many of whom were university students. Every inch of this city had been fought over. In Gezi Park, protests against its development were put down with brute force and, three years later, in 2016, when sections of Turkeys military, traditionally the protector of its secular state culture, attempted a coup against the regime and failed, Erdogan was handed the perfect opportunity to purge every aspect of public life, from the army to academia, of his political opponents.

Even as we spoke of politics, Eyup and I were circling around changes nearer to home. At a coffee shop on Istiklal, a major pedestrian thoroughfare, which had lost its wonderful air of political foment and beer-drinking students in side alleys  it now possessed a McDonalds, a Starbucks and a Sunglass Hut  Eyup said, Personal things have changed a lot, too. You never stay as you are when youre 23.

Here was an opening to confront the elephant that had accompanied us on our walk through Istanbul. In 2005, I had a girlfriend. Today, as Eyup knew from my Instagram, I was married to a tall white man from Tennessee. I felt I needed to catch Eyup up on that tiny cataclysm in my personal life, but I had a built-in reluctance to speak of my sexuality outside the safety of cities like New York. I was habitually discreet about it when traveling, but my hesitations around Eyup had more to do with what a mess I had been, sexually speaking, at the age of 25. Sex with men, even then, had always been part of my life, forming an unbroken arc from preadolescence into adulthood. But at that age, I lacked the means to connect desire with love, and I had never been with anyone who identified as gay.

In Istanbul, when I had last encountered Eyup, I had found a gay life that was much closer to what I had grown up with in India. Though still deeply closeted, on that visit I was a regular at the Firuzaga hammam, set among the winding cobblestone streets of the Cukurcuma neighborhood. It was nice to come in from the cold, stash ones clothes in a locker and wander through the squalid warren of marble-floored rooms, the domes pierced with tiny oculi, which allowed in a frosted, ethereal light. In the main room, scalloped with marble basins, there was a semblance of decorum, but in the side rooms, the men were young and frisky. We touched each other freely under our peshtemal, the small Turkish towels we were given. If things got too hot, we peeled off in twos and threes to more private alcoves. I remember a lot of laughter and playfulness, and then I remember walking back to Taksim Square, through the dark, winding streets, afraid of disease, afraid the wet hair around my ears would give me away to my girlfriend. I was at once deeply gratified and wretched with guilt.
Before theyd even arrived, all three of the features writers for Ts Travel issue immersed themselves in the place to which they were going with a number of books, television shows, songs and films. After all, the assignment  to return to somewhere they had once visited as a different person and examine the way the it reflected both their old and new selves  was a true test of memory. The assignment revealed that strange way our minds work: how much music or literature can transport us to a different place and time as much as the destination itself. Who among us can listen to a song that we first heard, say, while visiting Rio de Janeiro years ago, and suddenly smell the salty air of the ocean or see the cramped and enormous city glittering against the jungle? Below, a comprehensive but by no means exhaustive list of what Aatish Taseer, Maaza Mengiste and Thomas Page McBee read, watched and listened to in preparation for their travels.  Thessaly La Force

Video Ts Summer Travel Issue Three writers retake trips they made when they were different people  and experience a place other than the one they thought they knew. - Switzerland: Maaza Mengiste revisits Mount Pilatus after a life-changing first trip there. - The Grand Canyon: Thomas Page McBee returns to the landmark with his mothers ashes and reflects on what hes forgotten  and remembers. - Istanbul: In trying to understand the complexities of the city, Aatish Taseer examines both his past and present selves.

Aatish Taseers Istanbul Recommendations

De Profundis (1905) by Oscar Wilde

Wildes letter to his lover Bosie (Lord Alfred Douglas) from jail meant the world to me when I was a closeted young man in love with someone who was also living a secret life. It gave me my earliest intimation of the price both of hiding and disclosure.
But conservatives have said that the platforms remove too much  rather than too little  content. Many of them cheered Elon Musks recent purchase of Twitter because he has promised lighter restrictions on speech. When the site banned President Donald J. Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Republicans in statehouses proposed legislation to regulate how the companies enforce their policies.

My office just secured another BIG WIN against BIG TECH, Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general and a Republican, said in a tweet after the law was reinstated. A spokesman for Mr. Paxton did not provide details of how the attorney general planned to enforce the law.

Florida passed a bill last year that fined companies if they took down the accounts of some political candidates, but a federal judge stopped it from taking effect after tech industry groups sued. Texas bill takes a slightly different approach, saying that a platform may not censor a user, a users expression, or a users ability to receive the expression of another person based on the viewpoint of the user or another person.

The law does not stop platforms from taking down content when they are notified about it by organizations that track online sexual exploitation of children, or when it consists of specific threats of violence against someone based on the persons race or other protected qualities. The law also includes provisions that require online platforms to be transparent about their moderation policies.

When Texas governor signed the states bill into law in September, the tech industry sued to block it. It argued that the prohibition it placed on platforms violated their own free speech right to remove anything they deem objectionable.
Looking into a crystal ball two weeks ago, the board made a great decision, said Brian Quinn, an associate professor at Boston College Law School focusing on corporate mergers, referring to Twitters board. The idea the board could reasonably get to a $54 price on their own by their own making was debatable before they took the offer  but clearly now, its not going to happen anytime near term.

Mr. Musk, who also runs the electric carmaker Tesla and the rocket company SpaceX, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. He has said he will take Twitter private and wants to improve the product. He has also criticized some of Twitters top executives publicly, especially for the way that they have moderated speech on the service. The billionaire, who is still lining up some financing for the purchase, is expected to close the deal for Twitter in the next few months.

Image Mr. Beykpour, Twitters general manager, is leaving and will be replaced by Jay Sullivan. Credit... Jason Henry for The New York Times

Mr. Musk could walk away from the deal, but would have to pay a $1 billion breakup fee. And as long as his debt financing for the acquisition remains intact, Twitter could bring Mr. Musk to court to force him to pay for the deal.

Mr. Agrawal, who was appointed Twitters chief executive last November, has made a series of changes at the company and terminated some longtime executives. That same month, for instance, the companys head of communications departed and its head of people said she would leave by the end of the year. In December, Twitters head of engineering and head of design and research left.

While Mr. Agrawal attempts to overhaul the company, Twitter has been in an uproar over Mr. Musks takeover. At a company meeting on the day the deal was announced, Mr. Agrawal answered questions about how the deal came to be, what would happen to employees compensation and jobs, and how Mr. Musk might change Twitter.
Bruce MacVittie, one of New York Citys quintessential character actors, who made his Broadway debut in David Mamets American Buffalo opposite Al Pacino in 1983 and was a mainstay on Off Broadway stages for over 40 years, as well as a familiar face on television and in film, died on May 7 in Manhattan. He was 65.

His wife, Carol Ochs, confirmed the death, in a hospital, but said the cause had not been determined.

Mr. MacVittie excelled at playing tough guys with tormented souls, revealing a tenderness at the heart of his characterizations. His casting type was low-life and street-smart, but he himself ran in rarefied acting circles. In the mid-1980s, he helped found Naked Angels, a troupe of young film and theater hipsters (including Matthew Broderick and Marisa Tomei) who immediately dazzled New York with the celebrity wattage and social conscience of their theatrical endeavors.
BRUSSELS  As the biggest performing arts festival in Brussels got underway last weekend, there were few traditional stages in sight. Instead, spectators assembled in colonial-era monuments, a disused railway museum and even the debating chamber of Belgiums Senate.

There are practical reasons for the flurry of site-specific shows in the monthlong event, called Kunstenfestivaldesarts, said Daniel Blanga Gubbay, one of its directors, during a break between performances. After two years of pandemic upheaval, a lot of playhouses in Brussels were booked with rescheduled shows this year.

The constraints led to a creative lineup, highlighting areas of the city that even frequent visitors dont necessarily know. In order to see The Weeping Woods and the Okapi Resistance, a family-friendly puppet show created by Daniela Ortiz, audience members had to wander into a side alley of the large Cinquantenaire park  and stop in front of the Monument to the Belgian Pioneers in Congo.

Unveiled in 1921, this sculpted tribute to the colonization of Congo is deeply uncomfortable to look at today. It features racist imagery and inscriptions that portray Belgians as the saviors of the local Black population. Since Belgium has recently begun to publicly reckon with its brutal history and to remove statues associated with it, The Weeping Woods and the Okapi Resistance could hardly be more timely.
In his new book A Sacred Oath, released earlier this week, Mark T. Esper, the former defense secretary, revealed that President Donald J. Trump in 2020 had floated the idea of launching missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs and asked why the military could not just shoot racial justice protesters in Washington in the legs.

Mr. Esper also described his concerns that Mr. Trump might misuse the military during the 2020 election, for example by asking soldiers to seize ballot boxes.

On Monday, when a Fox News host asked if he thought President Trump was a threat to democracy, Mr. Esper was blunt.

I think that given the events of Jan. 6, given how he has undermined the election results, he incited people to come to D.C., stirred them up that morning and failed to call them off, to me that threatens our democracy, he said.
The Federal Aviation Administration has revoked the licenses of two pilots who attempted to swap planes in midair over the Arizona desert last month, calling their actions in the stunt, in which one plane crashed, reckless and egregious.

In addition to the revocation order, dated Tuesday, the F.A.A. also fined Luke Aikins, whom the agency called the lead pilot, $4,932 for abandoning his pilot seat and operating his plane in a careless and reckless manner, after an investigation announced shortly after the April 24 stunt.

Mr. Aikins and Andy Farrington, a fellow sky diver and pilot, planned to send their single-engine Cessna 182 planes into synchronized nosedives at 14,000 feet and then jump out to swap cockpits midair.

But when they attempted the switch as they flew over the desert in Eloy, Ariz., Mr. Farrington couldnt enter the plane Mr. Aikins had jumped from, according to an F.A.A. emergency revocation order. The plane spun out of control and crashed nearby, midway between Phoenix and Tucson. No spectators were present and no one was injured in the stunt, which was livestreamed by Hulu.
My view on the committee has not changed, he said. Theyre not conducting a legitimate investigation. It seems as though they just want to go after their political opponents.

Mr. Perry called the investigation a charade and a political witch hunt by Democrats that is about fabricating headlines and distracting the Americans from their abysmal record of running America into the ground.

The subpoenas come as the committee is preparing for a series of public hearings next month to reveal its findings. The eight hearings are scheduled to take place over several weeks beginning on June 9, some during prime time in an effort to attract a large television audience.

The select committee has learned that several of our colleagues have information relevant to our investigation into the attack on Jan. 6 and the events leading up to it, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, said in a statement. Before we hold our hearings next month, we wished to provide members the opportunity to discuss these matters with the committee voluntarily. Regrettably, the individuals receiving subpoenas today have refused, and were forced to take this step to help ensure the committee uncovers facts concerning Jan. 6.

The committees leaders had been reluctant to issue subpoenas to their fellow lawmakers. It is a rare step for a congressional panel, other than the House Ethics Committee, which is responsible for investigating allegations of misconduct by members.

For weeks, members and investigators on the special House panel have privately agonized over how aggressively to pursue sitting members of Congress, weighing their desire for information about lawmakers direct interactions with Mr. Trump against the potential legal difficulty and political consequences of doing so.

Behind closed doors, committee and staff members researched the law, parliamentary rules and past precedents before deciding to proceed, people familiar with the inquiry said.
Massachusetts said on Thursday that it had agreed to pay $56 million to resolve claims that the leaders of a state-run nursing home for military veterans showed deliberate indifference during a coronavirus outbreak that was linked to the deaths of 84 residents early in the pandemic.

An independent investigation had painted a picture of chaos at the Holyoke Soldiers Home when the virus began sweeping through it in March 2020, and had sharply criticized the leaders for combining veterans from two locked dementia units into one unit, crowding those who were infected or showing symptoms with those who did not have symptoms.

A social worker said it felt like it was moving the concentration camp, we were moving these unknowing veterans off to die. A nurse described it as total pandemonium.

Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, accepting the findings of the investigation in June 2020, called them nothing short of gut-wrenching.
But critics say the protesters should not be there at all. Some Republicans have pointed to a 1950 federal statute that says anyone with the intent of influencing any judge who pickets or parades in or near a building housing a court of the United States, or in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, would be breaking the law. The Justice Department declined to comment when asked about potential prosecutions.

You must vigorously investigate and prosecute the crimes committed in recent days, Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, wrote in a letter to the Justice Department. The rule of law demands no less.

The protests have not been limited to Washington. Over the weekend, Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, called the police on demonstrators who used chalk on the sidewalk outside her Bangor home to write a message asking her to support abortion rights legislation. Two churches in Colorado were vandalized last week with spray-painted messages of my body, my choice.

Rebecca Overmyer-Velazquez, a Whittier College professor focusing on global social movements, said history has shown that protests  even ones that make people uncomfortable  are at times necessary to create change. She pointed to the civil rights movement, when college students like John Lewis, who went on to become a congressman from Georgia, were arrested dozens of times for sitting at whites-only lunch counters and in other protests against Jim Crow-era laws in the South.

Im not convinced that the line is whether its legal or illegal, Ms. Overmyer-Velazquez said. I think the question is: Is this decision really going to impact our lives very, very seriously? And it is, no doubt.

She said the question was not whether protests were legal, but whether they were moral.

Mr. Biden has faced this kind of question before.

After demonstrations and riots erupted in the summer of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer, the Biden campaign repeatedly condemned violence and looting. And last year, advocates targeted two Democratic senators holding up Mr. Bidens domestic agenda  taking kayaks to protest near a yacht belonging to Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and following Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona into a university restroom.
WASHINGTON  President Biden on Thursday began hosting the leaders of Southeast Asian nations at the White House for a two-day visit, delivering a message of solidarity  and aiming to provide a bulwark against Chinese influence in the region  even as much of his administration remains focused on Russias invasion of Ukraine.

The summit, which concludes on Friday, is intended to cover an array of topics, including trade, human rights and climate change. But it is also part of an effort by Mr. Bidens foreign policy team to highlight one of the presidents primary goals: assembling a united front against China as it increasingly demonstrates its economic and military might around the world.

As a candidate, Mr. Biden promised to make China a central focus of his foreign policy. Instead, a senior administration official acknowledged to reporters this week that the war in Europe had created daily demands that had consumed the time and energy of the president and his team.

But the official, who requested anonymity to discuss preparations for the summit, said Mr. Biden remained concerned about, and focused on, the need to prevent China from dominating the Indo-Pacific. The gathering of Mr. Biden and the other world leaders in Washington is an opportunity to demonstrate that commitment, the official said.
WASHINGTON  President Biden and other leaders issued an urgent call on Thursday for the world to step up its fight against Covid-19, and countries including Germany, Canada and Japan pledged large sums to finance tests, therapeutics and vaccines  a commitment Mr. Biden could not make because Congress has refused to authorize new pandemic aid.

As the United States approached a harrowing milestone  one million American lives lost to the virus  fear of another deadly variant loomed large over the presidents second global Covid-19 summit, a virtual gathering co-hosted by Belize, Germany, Indonesia and Senegal. But some countries were notably absent. China, in the thick of its own Covid crisis, did not attend. Russia, waging war against Ukraine, was not invited.

Senior Biden administration officials said the summit produced more than $3 billion in commitments toward the global response and toward efforts to prevent future pandemics. That is far short of the $15 billion that the World Health Organization says is needed. But the summit did lay the groundwork for a new global preparedness fund.

The gathering on Thursday unfolded in a very different climate compared with that of the first Covid summit in September. The war in Ukraine is sapping energy and money from donor nations. The global vaccination campaign has stalled. Testing has plummeted around the globe. Covid antiviral pills, available in the United States, are scarce in many low- and middle-income nations. Many attendees said Covid fatigue had become as big a danger as Covid itself.
Representative Conor Lamb was supposed to be a Democratic rising star  a Marine veteran, former prosecutor and Pennsylvania moderate who had won in Trump territory and swing suburbs alike. Scores of Democratic officials endorsed him in his run for Senate, eager to pick up a Republican-held open seat and have him roll into Washington next year to bridge the partisan chasm.

It hasnt quite worked out that way.

Mr. Lamb now heads into the states Democratic primary on Tuesday on a much less competitive footing than he or his supporters had hoped. He trails by double digits in polling behind John Fetterman, the shorts-wearing lieutenant governor whose outsider image has resonated with the Democratic base.

Two distinct forces appear to have worked against Mr. Lamb: his campaigns strategic missteps and his misfortune to be running at a time when Democrats, much like Republicans, are rejecting their partys centrists.

The seeming meltdown for Mr. Lamb  whose initial victories in Western Pennsylvania had been a model for President Bidens 2020 race  reflects a frustration among Democrats nationally with politicians who promise bipartisan accord, including Mr. Biden, and who have yielded meager results in Washington. It comes as the left sees a rising Republican extremism on voting rights and abortion. Some Democrats appear more eager to elect fighters than candidates who might be tempted, like party moderates, to block their priorities.
Jake Corman, the top Republican in the Pennsylvania State Senate, ended his campaign for governor on Thursday and threw his support behind Lou Barletta, the former mayor and a former member of Congress currently running second in most polling.

The endorsement by Mr. Corman represents the starkest step yet for Republicans in the state who are trying to coalesce support behind one candidate in an effort to halt the current front-runner, Doug Mastriano, a freshmen state senator, before the states primary on Tuesday.

Mr. Mastriano, who burnished his image with the right-wing base by aggressively pursuing and promoting false claims about the 2020 election, has comfortably led in most polls in the state, but has rarely crested 30 percent within the large Republican primary field. He has made false election claims central to his platform, and has staked out far-right policy positions such as banning transgender bathrooms.

Yet Republican operatives in the state are concerned about Mr. Mastrianos prospects in a potential general election matchup against Josh Shapiro, the current attorney general and the likely Democratic nominee. They view Mr. Mastrianos closeness to the effort to overturn the 2020 election results as a likely drag on his candidacy and the party as a whole. In recent days, several of Mr. Mastrianos Republican rivals have been gathering on private conference calls in a last-minute attempt to stop him.
Since the articles publication, F.B.I. officials have acknowledged that they considered deploying Pegasus but have emphasized that the bureau bought the spying tool mainly to test and evaluate it  partly to assess how adversaries might use it. They said the bureau never used the spyware in any operation.

During a congressional hearing in March, the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, said the bureau had bought a limited license for testing and evaluation as part of our routine responsibilities to evaluate technologies that are out there, not just from a perspective of could they be used someday legally, but also, more important, what are the security concerns raised by those products.

So, very different from using it to investigate anyone, he said.

The Times revealed that the F.B.I. had also received a demonstration by NSO of a different hacking tool, Phantom, that can do what Pegasus cannot  target and infiltrate U.S. cellphone numbers. After the demonstration, government lawyers spent years debating whether to purchase and deploy Phantom. It was not until last summer that the F.B.I. and the Justice Department decided not to deploy NSO hacking tools in operations.

The F.B.I. has paid approximately $5 million to NSO since the bureau first purchased Pegasus.

The Times has sued the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act for bureau documents related to the purchase, testing and possible deployment of NSO spyware tools. During a court hearing last month, a federal judge set a deadline of Aug. 31 for the F.B.I. to produce all relevant documents or be held in contempt. Government lawyers said the bureau thus far had identified more than 400 pages of documents that were responsive to the request.

The F.B.I. letter to NSO, dated Dec. 4, 2018, stated that the United States government will not sell, deliver or otherwise transfer to any other party under any condition without prior approval of the government of Israel.
Now, Ms. Harris has a chance to become the voice of the administration on a subject which is complicated for her boss.

Mr. Biden, a lifelong Catholic, was opposed to Roe in the early days of his career and has only later come to embrace abortion rights. But he remains an unlikely champion of the issue. He issued a forceful statement after the draft opinion was revealed by Politico last week. But up to that point he had never said the word abortion aloud as president.

By contrast, Ms. Harris has taken several opportunities to be outspoken about the prospect that the court would overturn Roe. Aides to the vice president say she intends to lean into the topic even more aggressively over the next several weeks, as the court gets closer to issuing a final ruling on the case, expected in late June.

Some womens rights organizations said the potentially historic moment could either make or break her legacy as vice president.

This is the type of moment that creates leaders, so in my mind I think the question every leader should be asking themselves is where did they want to be? Where were they when this happened? said Fatima Goss Graves, president of the National Womens Law Center. I would hope that everyone in the White House is raising their hand to be engaged.

For others, the fact that Ms. Harris has stepped into a leadership void is an uncomfortable reminder that she doesnt have much authority to set in motion any policy proposals. As vice president, she, too, has avoided saying the word abortion and has mostly toed the line of the White House and other Democratic leaders, putting the onus of action on voters, noted Renee Bracey Sherman, founder and executive director of the reproductive-justice group We Testify.

I wonder how much space she is actually being given to be the best abortion-access champion she could be, Ms. Bracey Sherman added. Black women are asking you to do something. To then have a Black woman be the face of the lack of leadership  that feels really frustrating.
WASHINGTON  Last November, officials in Lowndes County, Ala., began fielding inquiries from an unexpected inquisitor  the Justice Department, which had opened an investigation into the link between environmental racism and the chronic water, flooding and sanitation woes in the area.

The Biden administrations choice of Lowndes as the site of its first big environmental justice inquiry was based on the magnitude of the countys problems. But it also sent a message. The county was a voting rights battleground and a focal point of Martin Luther King Jr.s march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, making it a logical choice to open a new front on civil rights.

Last week, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland announced a series of policies intended to elevate the departments environmental justice efforts from the symbolic to the substantive  as President Bidens allies questioned the pace of other White House efforts to help Black and Hispanic communities hit hard by pollution, neglect and climate change.

Mr. Garlands most important step, by far, was the creation of an office inside the department responsible for addressing the harm caused by environmental crime, pollution and climate change in communities of color and in low-income cities, towns and counties.
WASHINGTON  The countrys largest meatpackers successfully lobbied the Trump administration in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic to keep processing plants open despite knowing the health risks to their workers, according to a congressional report released on Thursday.

The report, prepared by a select House committee, describes the extent of the meat industrys influence on the administrations response to the pandemic: Companies stoked baseless fears of an imminent meat shortage in an effort to prevent plant closures. The legal department of Tyson Foods drafted the initial version of an executive order President Donald J. Trump issued in April 2020 declaring processing plants as critical infrastructure. And industry concerns prompted the government to adjust its federal recommendations on worker safety at a meatpacking plant.

Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina and the chairman of the committee, said the findings underlined the companies interest in prioritizing production over the health of their workers.

The shameful conduct of corporate executives pursuing profit at any cost during a crisis and government officials eager to do their bidding regardless of resulting harm to the public must never be repeated, he said in a statement.
Every female governors seat is up for election this year. All nine of them.

The three Republicans are likely to sail to re-election. Its a different story on the Democratic side, where most of the women rode in on the 2018 wave, flipping Republican seats.

That year, Laura Kelly of Kansas campaigned on education, and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan pledged to fix the damn roads. Janet Mills of Maine, Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico and Kate Brown of Oregon benefited, in an especially favorable climate, from running in states that lean toward Democrats.

In 2022, however, everything has changed for Democrats  and one big issue has become a five-alarm fire for the party.

As the Supreme Court stands poised to overturn Roe v. Wade and throw regulations on abortion to the states, governors are set to be on the front lines of the political clashes that would follow.
JOHANNESBURG  The first factory in Africa licensed to produce Covid-19 vaccines for the African market has not received a single order and may shut down that production line within weeks if the situation doesnt change, according to executives of the company, Aspen Pharmacare.

The factory, in the coastal South African city of Gqeberha, formerly known as Port Elizabeth, was celebrated as a solution to the continents unequal access to vaccines when it announced a deal to start manufacturing Covid vaccines in November of 2021.

But no purchasers have appeared, as the slow distribution of vaccines in Africa has left health agencies with a backlog of supplies. Commercial production never started, in what officials say is an ominous sign for other African countries that had considered manufacturing Covid-19 vaccines.

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, many African countries have lagged far behind much of the world in getting their people vaccinated  and some countries have had difficulty distributing what doses they did get.
It makes us a little bit blind in knowing what exactly is the situation, he said during W.H.O. Africas weekly briefing, adding that African countries should put in place a system that will help with earlier detection and better response for Covid-19.

Although testing levels have dropped in South Africa, public health officials have been able to detect an increased burden of the virus by testing wastewater, said Dr. Kerrigan McCarthy, a specialist pathologist at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa.

Meanwhile, vaccine distribution and use in Africa has also been slow. The first factory in Africa licensed to produce Covid-19 vaccines for the African market has not received a single order and may shut down that production line within weeks if the situation doesnt change, according to executives of the company, Aspen Pharmacare.

The primary driver of the latest wave is the Omicron variant and the highly transmissible subvariants BA.2, BA.4 and BA.5, W.H.O. officials said. People in South Africa are still required to wear masks indoors, including in schools, and the government is still limiting the size of public gatherings. But as winter approaches in the Southern Hemisphere, the countrys most onerous social distancing and other public health restrictions have been eliminated.

The pandemic measures were loosened primarily for economic reasons, and not necessarily for medical or public health reasons, Dr. McCarthy said.
The women outside the prison learn a lot from the employees at the two meal providers, who are often among the first to know when inmates are transferred out of their holding cells and into another prison. Family members get much less out of the prison itself, which staffs a small window to respond to questions but offers few answers.

We dont know anything, said Ms. de Sandoval. She held up a Burger King badge with a picture of her baby-faced son, Jonathan. He doesnt belong to any gang, she insisted. Before his arrest, the 21-year-old worked at a different restaurant in the capital, his mother said, as a janitor.

Mr. Gonzalezs girlfriend, sitting next to Ms. de Sandoval, is now caring for their toddler without the help of his income. What is she going to do? Ms. de Sandoval asked. We are poor. Who is going to help us?

It has been difficult to determine how the Salvadoran police have identified their targets, because the detentions have been so rapid and widespread. The government would not grant an interview with the head of the national police, but relatives of those arrested during the state of emergency said in interviews that many were targeted if they had past run-ins with the police.
When a popular podcast host in Indonesia invited two men onto his show who were married to each other, they had a polite on-air conversation about gay life and identity.

But in a Muslim-majority nation where gay rights are under threat, the show provoked an intense backlash from conservative fans and religious authorities. So the host, Deddy Corbuzier, deleted the interview from his social media pages and uploaded a fresh interview with an Islamic cleric in which he apologized for causing a ruckus.

Mr. Corbuziers 180-degree turn this week highlights a tension in the country that has the worlds largest Muslim population. Even as more gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in Indonesia assert themselves and gain acceptance from their families and communities, a conservative movement is trying  with help from social media  to portray such sexual identities as a threat to national harmony.

There is hostility on online platforms, and it amplifies negative public discourse surrounding homosexuality, said Hendri Yulius Wijaya, the author of Intimate Assemblages: The Politics of Queer Identities and Sexualities in Indonesia.
Thailand has said it plans to give away a million cannabis plants to households across the nation, in an effort to generate enthusiasm for a law taking effect next month that will allow residents to grow weed for their personal medicinal use or as a small-scale commercial enterprise.

The project, announced by the countrys health minister this week, is the latest move in Thailands effort to position itself as a leader in Asias nascent cannabis industry, coming as the United States and other major economies are liberalizing laws on marijuana amid growing evidence of its medical benefits.

Industry analysts say the moves could help lure more international visitors to Thailand and strengthen medical tourism, in a country where a sprawling tourism sector accounted for as much as a fifth of the pre-Covid economy.

But dont expect California-style cannabis retailers on your next trip to Bangkok or any of Thailands postcard-perfect tropical islands. Under current Thai law, the recreational use of highly potent marijuana is still forbidden, and tourists convicted of possessing the drug can face up to 15 years in prison.
LONDON  Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain sidestepped questions on Thursday about documents linking a major political donation to a Russian bank account. His Conservative Party gave no indication that it planned to return the money.

The donation, of $630,225, was made in February 2018 in the name of Ehud Sheleg, a wealthy London art dealer who was most recently the Conservative Partys treasurer. He is one of the partys biggest donors.

The New York Times reported early Thursday that, according to documents filed with Britains national law enforcement agency, the donation originated in the Russian account of Mr. Shelegs father-in-law, Sergei Kopytov, a Ukrainian national. The bank flagged the transaction as both suspected money laundering and a potentially illegal campaign donation because Mr. Kopytov is a foreign citizen.
LONDON  The police investigating lockdown breaking parties in Downing Street said Thursday they had issued 50 more fines, increasing pressure on Britains prime minister, Boris Johnson, who had earlier been penalized for one breach.

Mr. Johnson was not among those affected by the latest announcement, his office said, though neither it, nor the police, named those who were or provided more details.

Londons Metropolitan Police have now identified more than 100 cases of lawbreaking in government offices including Downing Street  where Mr. Johnson lives and works  underscoring the scale of rule breaking in the place where Britains strict coronavirus laws were written.

The new fines, known as fixed penalty notices, are thought to relate in part for a pre-Christmas party in Downing Street in December 2020 at which the prime minister was not present, the BBC said. It was, however, the event about which an aide to Mr. Johnson, Allegra Stratton, was filmed joking about, leading to her resignation and the crisis that has become known as partygate.
BRUSSELS  Finlands prime minister and president announced their support on Thursday for the nation to apply to join NATO.

President Sauli Niinisto, who is mostly responsible for Finlands foreign policy, has helped orchestrate Finlands move away from a long history of military nonalignment, prompted by the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24.

Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay, they said. We hope that the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days.
As the mourners followed her coffin out of the courtyard, many chanted her name as others shared their memories of Ms. Abu Akleh  even if from afar.

When we saw that Shireen had been assassinated, we all felt it, in every Palestinian home, said Thuraya Elayan, a 66-year-old Ramallah resident. The bullet didnt just kill Shireen  the bullet killed a piece of all of us. She was a symbol, and she lived inside all of our homes.

The bullet has become the focus of two competing narratives about the circumstances of her death. Witnesses said Ms. Abu Akleh was shot by Israeli soldiers in an area of Jenin where there were no Palestinian gunmen. But Israeli military officials said she was shot during a shootout between Israelis and Palestinians, and that she had been in the vicinity of a Palestinian armed with an assault rifle.

Video from the scene did not show the moment when the bullet hit Ms. Abu Akleh, or who fired it.

Both Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants involved in the Jenin clashes were carrying M16 assault rifles, guns that use the same 5.56-millimeter bullets, Israeli officials said.

While that fact could complicate efforts to determine who fired the fatal shot, a bullet can still be matched to the gun that fired it.

Each bullet bears microscopic marks specific to the weapon that discharged it, like a signature, said Lior Nadivi, an Israeli forensic ballistics expert.
PRYVILLIA, Ukraine  Through binoculars, the Ukrainian soldiers can see the Russian position far in the distance. But the single artillery weapon they operate at a small, ragtag outpost on the southern steppe has insufficient range to strike it.

These circumstances have imposed a numbingly grim routine on the Ukrainians, who are pounded daily by Russian artillery salvos while having no means to fight back. Every few hours, they dive into trenches to escape shells that streak out of the sky.

They have our position fixed, they know where we are, said Sgt. Anatoly Vykhovanets. Its like we are in the palm of their hand.

As President Volodymyr Zelensky makes almost daily pleas to the West for heavier artillery, it is positions like the one here on the west bank of the Dnipro River that most illustrate how critical that weaponry is for Ukraine. Military analysts say the battle now is riding not so much on the skill or bravery of Ukrainian soldiers, but on the accuracy, quantity and striking power of long-range weapons.
And there are more than 2,000 of them in the United States.

But crisis pregnancy centers are frontline outposts in the war against abortion.

You might not notice them if you drove by.

By Carly Thomsen, Carrie N. Baker and Zach Levitt Carly Thomsen is an assistant professor at Middlebury College. Carrie N. Baker is a chaired professor at Smith College. Zach Levitt is a graphics editor for Opinion.

With the Supreme Court likely to overturn Roe v. Wade this year, the American anti-abortion movement is preparing for a near future in which abortion is more restricted, in more parts of the country, than at any time in the past 50 years.

Anti-abortion activists have spent decades fighting Roe while waiting for this moment, in part by establishing a national network of about 2,600 so-called crisis pregnancy centers, through which they try to deter women from getting abortions, often with deceptive practices  and, in some cases, using taxpayer dollars.

As the number of C.P.C.s has increased in the United States, the number of abortion facilities has dropped, from more than 2,700 in 1978 to about 785 today. As a result, C.P.C.s now outnumber abortion facilities three to one.

If the Supreme Court overturns Roe, at least 26 states are likely to ban abortion, reducing the number of abortion facilities nationwide to fewer than 600. In that scenario, C.P.C.s would outnumber abortion facilities more than four to one.

More than half of American women of reproductive age would live closer to a C.P.C. than to an abortion facility, according to our analysis.

Where C.P.C.s are closer than abortion facilities Where C.P.C.s are closer than abortion facilities Wash. Me. Mont. N.D. Vt. Minn. Ore. N.H. N.Y. Wis. Mass. Idaho S.D. Mich. R.I. Conn. Wyo. Pa. Iowa N.J. Neb. Ohio Nev. Md. Del. Ind. Utah Ill. W.Va. Calif. Colo. Va. Kan. Mo. Ky. N.C. Tenn. Okla. ARK. Ariz. N.M. S.C. Ga. ALA. MISS. TEXAS LA. Alaska FLA. Hawaii Where C.P.C.s are closer than abortion facilities Wash. Mont. Me. N.D. Vt. Minn. Ore. N.H. N.Y. Idaho S.D. Wis. Mass. Mich. R.I. Conn. Wyo. Iowa Pa. Ohio N.J. Neb. Ind. Nev. Md. Calif. Utah W.Va. Del. Ill. Colo. Mo. Va. Kan. Ky. N.C. Tenn. Ariz. ARK. S.C. Okla. N.M. MISS. Ga. ALA. TEXAS LA. Alaska FLA. Hawaii Where C.P.C.s are closer than abortion facilities Wash. Mont. Me. N.D. Vt. Minn. Ore. N.H. N.Y. Idaho S.D. Wis. Mass. Mich. R.I. Conn. Wyo. Iowa Pa. Ohio N.J. Neb. Ind. Nev. Md. Calif. Utah W.Va. Del. Ill. Colo. Mo. Va. Kan. Ky. N.C. Tenn. Ariz. ARK. S.C. Okla. N.M. MISS. Ga. ALA. TEXAS LA. Alaska FLA. Hawaii Where C.P.C.s are closer than abortion facilities Wash. Mont. Me. N.D. Vt. Minn. Ore. N.H. N.Y. Mass. Wis. Idaho S.D. Conn. R.I. Mich. Wyo. Iowa Pa. N.J. Neb. Ohio Nev. Md. Ill. Ind. Utah Del. W.Va. Calif. Colo. Mo. Va. Kan. Ky. N.C. Tenn. Okla. ARK. Ariz. N.M. S.C. Ga. ALA. MISS. TEXAS LA. Alaska FLA. Hawaii Where C.P.C.s are closer than abortion facilities Where C.P.C.s are closer than abortion facilities Fargo Billings Boise Sioux Falls Detroit Salt Lake City Indianapolis Omaha Nashville Phoenix Atlanta Dallas Charleston Jackson Houston Miami Where C.P.C.s are closer than abortion facilities Fargo Billings Boise Sioux Falls Milwaukee Detroit Omaha Salt Lake City Des Moines Columbus Indianapolis Charleston Louisville Nashville Oklahoma City Atlanta Little Rock Birmingham Phoenix Charleston Dallas Jackson Tallahassee Houston Orlando New Orleans San Antonio Miami Where C.P.C.s are closer than abortion facilities Wash. Mont. Me. N.D. Fargo Billings Vt. Minn. Ore. Boise N.H. N.Y. Idaho S.D. Wis. Mass. Mich. Sioux Falls R.I. Milwaukee Conn. Detroit Wyo. Iowa Pa. Ohio Omaha N.J. Neb. Salt Lake City Des Moines Ind. Columbus Nev. Md. Calif. Utah W.Va. Del. Indianapolis Charleston Ill. Colo. Mo. Va. Kan. Louisville Ky. N.C. Nashville Tenn. Oklahoma City Ariz. ARK. S.C. Okla. Atlanta N.M. Little Rock Birmingham Phoenix MISS. Charleston Ga. Dallas Jackson ALA. TEXAS Tallahassee LA. Houston Orlando New Orleans Alaska San Antonio FLA. Miami Hawaii Where C.P.C.s are closer than abortion facilities Fargo Billings Boise Sioux Falls Milwaukee Detroit Cleveland Salt Lake City Indianapolis Omaha Louisville Oklahoma City Nashville Atlanta Phoenix Charleston Dallas Jackson Tallahassee Houston New Orleans San Antonio Miami

Over 16 million women of reproductive age in the United States currently live closer to a C.P.C. than to an abortion facility. In a post-Roe America, that number would increase by 18 million, to 34 million.

In 1967 a Christian carpenter in Hawaii named Robert Pearson opened his home as one of the first C.P.C.s in the country, as part of the backlash to expanding abortion access around the United States. By 1973, the year Roe v. Wade was decided, he reported that more than 120 women had visited his center. He later published a 93-page manual on how to start such a center. It was circulated widely among anti-abortion activists across the country.

The manual recommends that activists locate C.P.C.s near abortion facilities, choose neutral-sounding names and show women a slide show that includes misinformation about the health risks of abortion. It includes example scripts to help employees and volunteers deceive women about whether the C.P.C. performs abortions:

QUESTION: Do you do the abortions there? ANSWER: Anything you need, we do here. QUESTION: Can my friend be with me? ANSWER: Your friend can stay with you the whole time you're here. QUESTION: I want an abortion. Will you help me? ANSWER: We have many ways to help a woman and will gladly help you. Have you had a test? We will be glad to do one for you.

Many of the strategies that Pearson recommended are still used by C.P.C.s.

Once inside a C.P.C., women can be greeted by volunteers or staff members wearing lab coats or hospital scrubs who, despite their appearance, are usually not medical professionals. These representatives might try to frighten women by falsely claiming that abortions lead to breast cancer, mental health issues or infertility. They are also likely to suggest that abortion is much more dangerous than it is  in reality, women are almost 15 times as likely to die because of childbirth as from an abortion.

Today, C.P.C. volunteers increasingly use ultrasound machines in order to further appear as if they provide medical care. Women whove visited C.P.C.s have reported that volunteers underestimated how far along their pregnancies were. Other women say C.P.C. volunteers overstated natural miscarriage rates  so they might delay seeking an abortion and miss the window in which they are legally allowed to have one.

A 2014 study concluded that 80 percent of C.P.C.s included at least one false or misleading piece of medical information on their websites. Also, it appears that some C.P.C.s could share womens private health information with national anti-abortion networks, something that could be especially concerning in states that criminalize abortion post-Roe.

Not all C.P.C.s engage in every tactic mentioned above, especially as the centers have come under greater scrutiny in recent years. And some C.P.C.s provide material resources to women, like diapers and baby clothes. These resources often are limited  not enough to care for a baby in the long term  and come with strings attached, like required attendance at parenting or Bible classes. A large share of women who visit C.P.C.s are not pregnant or undecided but are parents who in many cases have been failed by a society that does little to help poor mothers. The anti-abortion movement takes advantage of their economic vulnerability.

Many C.P.C.s in the United States are affiliated with one of four Christian organizations: Care Net, Heartbeat International, Birthright International and the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates.

For Camilla Allison, who was raised in an ultraconservative Protestant community in New Mexico, C.P.C.s were viewed as agents of the church. After she became pregnant at 22, she visited a Care Net center in Albuquerque to get an ultrasound. There a staff member took her to a back room and lectured her.

It was almost like a Sunday school lesson, all of the fundamentalist dogma I grew up with. It brought up a lot of old shame in me, Ms. Allison said. It was all wrapped up in Jesus died for your sins. Youve already sinned, and if you kill your child, youll have lifelong trauma.

Cherisse Scott was given misinformation when she visited a Chicago C.P.C. in 2002 after seeing what appeared to be an advertisement for abortion in the Yellow Pages. She said that she was sent to another site for an ultrasound, where she was told that an abortion would perforate her uterus, leaving her infertile. In reality, major complications occur in less than one in 400 legal abortions.

Ms. Scott didnt learn that she had been manipulated until years later. Today she runs SisterReach, a group that helps young people and women of color find accurate health care and sexual health education.

SisterReach is based in Tennessee, where we estimate that more than 99 percent of women will live closer to a C.P.C. than to an abortion facility if Roe v. Wade is overturned. (Tennessee has already passed a ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy; it would immediately go into effect post-Roe.) Ms. Scott said her work has taken on new urgency. As a result of not having access to birth control, emergency contraception or abortion care, young people will not only become pregnant but might often have to make some decisions out of desperation, she said.

For many women, these decisions will be shaped by the presence of C.P.C.s across the United States. The share of Black women and Latinas who live closer to a C.P.C. than to an abortion facility would nearly triple if Roe is overturned, according to our analysis.

Share of women of reproductive age living closer to a C.P.C than to an abortion facility Shares of racial and ethnic groups closer to a C.P.C. than to an abortion facility today and if Roe is overturned If Roe is overturned Currently 19% 58% Black 46 16 Hispanic/Latina 34 60 White 40 63 Native American 8 29 Asian 0 25 50 75% Currently If Roe is overturned 19% 58% Black 16 46 Hispanic/Latina 34 60 White 40 63 Native American 8 29 Asian 0 25 50 75%

Black women are already 2.5 times as likely to die during childbirth as white women. If more Black women end up at C.P.C.s, they may experience more delays in obtaining professional prenatal care and encounter untrained volunteers who give them nondiagnostic ultrasounds that miss serious medical issues.

In at least a dozen states, C.P.C.s are funded in part by taxpayer money. This fiscal year, according to an Associated Press tally, a dozen states paid a total of at least $89 million to C.P.C.s, up from around $17 million a decade ago in about eight states. An analysis by Equity Forward found that some of this funding is diverted from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which helps low-income families pay for rent and food.

Unlike most programs that compete for government contracts, C.P.C.s are subject to almost no oversight, according to Amal Bass, an attorney at the Womens Law Project. Investigations have alleged that C.P.C.s repeatedly misused and possibly skimmed public money and that some did not provide sufficient health services to warrant funding.

Despite the centers receiving taxpayer dollars, lawmakers have struggled to regulate C.P.C.s. Because the centers do not charge for their services, in recent years the Better Business Bureau and state attorneys general have mostly declined to go after C.P.C.s that misled women. And most C.P.C.s are not licensed medical facilities, so they are usually exempt from state and federal rules governing patient privacy and medical ethics.

Groups around the country are already working to limit the harms that C.P.C.s can have on their communities. In Connecticut, lawmakers recently banned deceptive advertising by C.P.C.s. As with previous attempts to regulate C.P.C.s, the law is being challenged in court.

Individuals who are concerned about C.P.C.s can take action, too, by asking their representatives or church leaders to stop funding C.P.C.s or by calling their school board to make sure that a C.P.C. is not teaching the sex education in their middle or high school. And of course, change can come by simply raising awareness in ones community, including by talking to family and friends.
Gina Kolb got off to an early start in real estate, buying a small house in Columbia, Conn., near her hometown, Hartford, when she was 27. I didnt want to pay rent, she said. Rent is a waste of money.

Over the years, she and her husband, Peter Kolb, bought and sold a few more properties, in Connecticut and South Florida. Mrs. Kolb, filled with entrepreneurial zeal, always enjoyed renovating and decorating, and made money by renting or selling.

Gina is very good at finding the diamond in the rough, said Mr. Kolb, an accountant who grew up in Naugatuck, Conn. (The two met when she was referred to him after her accountant retired.) His approach was: This place is a dump. Why would we buy it? Hers was: We will fix it up, rent it and sell it later, he said.

[Did you recently buy or rent a home in the New York metro area? We want to hear from you. Email: thehunt@nytimes.com]

The Kolbs, now in their mid-50s, settled in Old Saybrook, on Connecticuts shoreline, where they spent three years renovating a house they bought as a teardown. The best deals are properties that need updating, Mrs. Kolb said. We try to find the best price at the right time.

The family, with four children now in their teens and 20s, vacationed in the Hamptons  an easy trip on the Cross Sound Ferry between New London and Orient Point. The Hamptons rental market was strong, with insurance costs and property taxes far lower than in Florida. So the Kolbs sold their Florida properties.

When we heard what people pay to rent in the Hamptons, we thought, This is something you see on TV, Mrs. Kolb said. The return on our investment as a rental is something we hadnt heard of before.

Their first Hamptons purchase was a three-bedroom duplex in a 1984 condo complex in Sag Harbor. It was outdated and reeked of cigarette smoke  but that was just another challenge for Mrs. Kolb, said her real estate agent, John F. Wines, a licensed associate broker with Saunders & Associates: Its interesting to her  she has fun doing it.

The Kolbs bought the condo for $900,000, redesigned it and sold it three years later for $1.5 million. A year ago, they bought a four-bedroom, two-bathroom ranch house with a pool, also in Sag Harbor, for $1.175 million. Mrs. Kolb happily renovated it, but wasnt keen on the location across from a firehouse. So the couple listed the house  it is currently for sale for $2.395 million  and went on the hunt for something different.

If it makes business sense, we resell it, Mrs. Kolb said. But she always kept an eye out for a permanent home.

Their budget was around $2 million, depending on what turned up. But they did have a few criteria. For one, they wanted to avoid having to drive to shops and restaurants. In season, there are way more cars than parking spots, Mr. Kolb said. When restaurants start opening for dinner, there are floods of people.

Among their options:
John Aylward

JCPenney brings on John Aylward as chief marketing officer, effective June 6. Aylward has been CMO at the global nonprofit CARE for the past five years. Before that, he was chief marketing officer at HSN, and has also held executive marketing posts at DSW, Starbucks and Gap. In his new post, Aylward will work to advance JCPenneys omnichannel strategy with the goal of delivering a seamless experience across stores and digital. He will also lead the marketing strategy, creative, visual merchandising and store design, and customer engagement teams. John will help fulfill our potential at this pivotal moment when JCPenney stands alone as a one-stop retailer, said JCPenney CEO Marc Rosen. Additionally, Johns passion for purpose-driven work will be an important asset as we continue to provide offerings that promote inclusivity and celebrate the diversity of our customers.

Marija Zivanovic-Smith

IEX Group hires Marija Zivanovic-Smith as its first chief marketing and communications officer at the financial tech company. Zivanovic-Smith comes to IEX from NCR, where she was most recently chief marketing officer. She has also served as a White House appointee to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Business Advisory Council. At IEX, Zivanovic-Smith will be part of the companys executive leadership team, working to strengthen its strategic marketing, brand and communications function. Marija is a seasoned executive who has succeeded at every point in her career due to her drive, creative vision, and ability to execute. Her track record speaks for itself, said IEX co-founder and CEO Brad Katsuyama.

Mauricio Gutierrez

JeffreyGroup promotes Mauricio Gutierrez to chief strategy officer. Gutierrez joined JeffreyGroup Mexico as group director in May 2013 and was appointed managing director of the Mexico operation in February 2016. Before coming to the agency, he was director, reputation & corporate affairs at LLYC. In his new position, Gutierrez will be responsible for identifying market needs, developing product offerings and management models, leading strategic partnerships, and deepening customer relationships. Mauricio will contribute his strategic vision and clear understanding of the keys to scaling our management models for the firms continual evolution, said JeffreyGroup CEO Brian Burlingame. JeffreyGroup has also promoted Elisenda Casellas to chief operating officer in Mexico.

Cindy Gustafson

Bark, a platform focused on dog owners, names Cindy Gustafson chief marketing officer. Gustafson comes to the company from WW International (formerly Weight Watchers), where also served as CMO. She was previously chief strategy officer at Mindshare. Gustafson will lead Barks marketing organization and is responsible for developing and executing strategies to enhance the brand and drive growth. Cindy is a recognized thought leader and accomplished practitioner in marketing, advertising, and media, with significant experience growing subscription-based businesses and building lasting connections with consumers, said Bark co-founder, executive chairman and CEO Matt Meeker.
One of my pet peeves about PR firms is when they attempt to distance themselves from objectionable client behavior by saying they had nothing to do with that activity.

Take the current controversy regarding SKDK and its now former longtime client Starbucks.

SKDK is noted for being the White House farm system for communications talent.

In fact, a veritable revolving door connects SKDK with the Joe Biden administration.

President Biden announced May 5 that Anita Dunn, partner and founding member of SKDK, is rejoining his team to plot strategy and guide messaging leading up to the midterm elections.

She was senior advisor to Biden and Kamala Harris during the presidential campaign and then joined Team Biden to work on the transition. Dunn returned to SKDK earlier this year.

Working for the coffee chain, which is trying to stave off union organizing drives at its shops across the US, was just bad optics for SKDK, as Biden takes pride in his role as the most pro labor president in years.

The president and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh had a meeting at the White House earlier this month with labor leaders including a rep from Starbucks Workers United.

Though SKDK says it had absolutely nothing to do with Starbucks on union matters, it cut ties with the company in April.

Starbucks begs to differ, maintaining that it wasnt SKDK that killed the relationship.

The SKDK/Starbucks flap comes on the heels of another Democratic firm, Global Strategy Group, taking heat for repping Amazon as it attempted to defeat an organizing drive at its JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island.

Like SKDK, GSG said it had nothing to do with Amazons union-busting work.

But it said that being involved with Amazon in any way was a mistake. We are deeply sorry, and we have resigned that work, said GSG. It deserves credit for that.

In contrast, the Starbucks farewell statement from SKDK, which is part of Mark Penns Stagwell, said it has great admiration for the company.

I dont think Joe and Marty share that admiration. Solidarity Forever.

China sinks to a new PR low. Hong Kong security forces arrested 90-year-old Cardinal Joseph Zen, a longtime champion of freedom of expression and religion, on May 11 under its draconian security laws that went into effect in 2020.

He was charged with collusion with foreign forces for his role as a trustee of the 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund, which aids jailed pro-democracy Hong Kongers. He was released on bail.

Arresting a 90-year-old cardinal for his peaceful activities has to be a shocking new low for Hong Kong, illustrating the citys free fall in human rights in the past two years, Maya Wang, researcher of China for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

The Kairos Co., a Glendale-based California PR firm, has publicized the arrests of Zen and three other activists.

It released a May 12 statement from Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, who called the arrests "a gross violation of human rights that must serve as a wake-up call to societies and governments everywhere.

Rev. Johnnie Moore, former senior VP-communications at Jerry Falwells Liberty University, founded Kairos Co.

The boss is watching you. The media abound with stories about companies offering goodies to employees in desperate bids to keep them from jumping ship.

Since there are apparently two jobs available to anyone who wants a new gig, companies roll out red carpets to lure new workers.

Theres also a dark side to the death of corporate loyalty: companies simply dont trust the people that are working for them.

The Economist ran a story May 10 about the era of the hyper-surveilled office.

It reported that 60 percent of the more than 1,000 US companies surveyed used spyware to snoop on workers. Another 17 percent are considering it.

Companies use spyware to track the whereabouts of workers and the hours worked. There is software to determine if a worker is a potential data leaker or intellectual property thief.

New York State offers some relief for paranoid workers who are ready to search for corporate bugs.

As of May 7, big companies in The Empire State are required to inform employees if their phone, email and Internet activity is being monitored.

But what about that camera in the corner flowerpot?
Marks and Spencer has had to withdraw about 600 lines of goods from its stores in the Republic of Ireland since Brexit, peers have been told.

Sacha Berendji, the retailers Ireland and Northern Ireland director, also said that it had faced increased costs and wastage due to new rules and administration.

He was giving evidence to the House of Lords Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland sub committee yesterday (Wednesday May 11).

He told peers that the impact on their operations in Northern Ireland, where a number of grace periods to rules within the Northern Ireland Protocol apply, had been significantly less than in the Republic.

He said: Pre-Brexit, our food supply chain worked in exactly the same way for all our stores in the United Kingdom and Ireland, once Brexit came in, and in preparation for it, we had to significantly adjust our supply chain.

While our business is significant in Ireland, it isnt big enough to stand up its own supply chain in Ireland so the vast majority of our goods continue to to be shipped from GB over to Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

In order to facilitate this we had to create a new export centre in Motherwell. All of our product for export to Northern Ireland and the Republic is now shipped into Motherwell; previously it was in our regular depots.

At Motherwell, those vehicles are separated and despatched to Northern Ireland and the Republic.

In Northern Ireland it is much simpler but, in both countries, the impact has been that we have needed to move from what we call day one to day two.

Previously goods would have come into our depot on the evening before and be shipped out ready for sail the following morning.

The process now requires an extra 24 hours in our export centre which means that we have taken one nights life out of all the product we ship which clearly has had an impact on shelf life for our customers.

Mr Berendji added: We have also seen an availability impact, less so in Northern Ireland but still there. But in our Republic of Ireland stores there are about 600 lines out of around 7,000 that we are not able to export, which we need to find a different solution for.

Therefore, the net impact for our customer has been that we have seen worse availability in both countries, although markedly worse in the Republic of Ireland, and higher waste levels for us.

On top of that, the cost of setting up the operation has cost us around 30 million of additional costs for the island of Ireland.

He continued: It takes up to 20 people an hour to despatch every vehicle to with the correct documentation to Northern Ireland. That number is eight hours for the Republic of Ireland.

Every single item on our load to Republic of Ireland needs to be certificated every single day.

We have looked at other options and we have built and recruited a local sourcing team for the island of Ireland and there are around 450 products we are now sourcing locally, including short shelf-life products like sandwiches.

Baroness Goudie asked about the practical impact that changes had had on customers.

Mr Berendji said: We are in a steady situation in Northern Ireland where broadly speaking we are able to deliver most of what we would like to for our customers, albeit with the shelf-life impact.

There are some key areas we are not able to do. Our Christmas food to order, which we werent able to do for either Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland last year because of the complexity of shipping product.

The risk of getting a vehicle turned around and not giving people Christmas dinner was just too great.
On International Nurses Day, today Thursday May 11, the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) has called on the Government to invest more in the nursing profession and focus on introducing measures to retain nurses in the profession.

INMO General Secretary Phil Ni Sheaghdha said:

Today is a day to celebrate nurses. We have been deeply humbled by the strong public support for our profession. Irish nurses and midwives are working in extremely challenging environments, dealing with a return to overcrowding while also dealing with the COVID pandemic, which is still a very real feature in Irish hospitals.

We must ensure that nurses are given the support and resources they need to do their job. To provide safe care, we need to build up our staffing levels but also take every measure possible to retain those who are working within our health service.

On International Nurses Day we recognise the impact of COVID-19 on our workforce, and this week, for #IND2022 and #IDM2022, student nurses and midwives are calling for investment in their professions to ensure the future of our health service. pic.twitter.com/PmPh9pK5iQ  Irish Nurses & Midwives Organisation (@INMO_IRL) May 12, 2022

There is a world-wide nursing shortage which is a huge threat to our health service. Our nursing graduates are in high demand right across the world.

We need to do everything we can to make it an attractive option for newly qualified nurses to remain here in Ireland but also to attract recent graduates who may have travelled to work in Australia or in the NHS home.

Nurses last week called on Minister Donnelly to establish a meaningful Bring Them Home campaign to bring young Irish nurses back into the Irish health system.

If we are to meet the healthcare challenges of the future, then we can no longer continue to undervalue and underinvest in nursing.
Three companies own about two-thirds of southern wood pellet mills exporting to Europe
House of Hegemony Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

Charles Richard, the head of US Strategic Command, which oversees the nuclear arsenal, warned Congress Wednesday that Washington faces a "heightened nuclear deterrence risk when it comes to Russia and China," claiming that China is "watching the war in Ukraine closely and will likely use nuclear coercion to their advantage in the future." He also warned the lawmakers that the US is facing "a crisis deterrence dynamic right now that we have only seen a few times in our nation's history."

Sensationalizing China's "nuclear threat" to justify actual US nuclear expansion has become a familiar trick of Washington. Last month, Richard told lawmakers at a closed-door hearing that China's "breathtaking expansion" of its strategic and nuclear arsenal is a quickly escalating risk for the US. In March, he said he is "very concerned" about potential "cooperative aggression" from China and Russia. If the efforts are to expand the budget for the department he's in charge, Richard made it - according to the Biden administration's recently submitted fiscal year 2023 defense budget, total spending on nuclear weapons and systems research and procurement grew to $34.4 billion from $27.7 billion for fiscal year 2022.

Of course, this is part of Washington's series ways to justify its arbitrary "nuclear freedom" and "nuclear hegemony" by pretending to worry that "deterrence is no longer sufficient." That is why politicians and media in Washington either hype disinformation like "China is building missile silos in its northwest part," or promote ridiculous fantasies, such as "China might use nuclear weapons in the Taiwan Straits," based completely on hypothetical assumptions. In the Russia-Ukraine conflict, it was the US and Western media and politicians who hyped the risk of nuclear war and wanted to "bind" China to Russia, even though China had nothing to do with the war.

These public opinion campaigns were "complemented" by a substantial step-by-step erosion of nuclear weapons limitations from the US. The Biden administration on one hand continues the nuclear weapons modernization efforts it inherited from the Trump administration. It increases investment to accelerate upgrading nuclear weapons and their delivery system, and maintain a low threshold for the use of nuclear weapons. On the other, the Biden administration has not corrected its predecessor's behavior of withdrawing from Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which has undermined the international arms control system. The US has also further extended its nuclear forces beyond its territory. Under the leadership of Washington, NATO has expanded the scope of its "nuclear sharing" arrangements and actively promoted the forward deployment of nuclear weapons. And there have been voices in countries like Japan calling for "nuclear sharing" with the US.

Everyone knows that the US is already the "nuclear giant" on earth. According to the estimation of foreign think tank on arms control, the number of nuclear warheads in the US and NATO member countries is about 20 times that of China's. The amount of China's nuclear weaponry and that of the US and its NATO allies is not on the same level. The US sits on the world's largest nuclear arsenal, splashes huge sums of money to modernize its nuclear weapons and constantly relaxes the restrictions of using nuclear weapons. The risk of strategic misjudgment caused by all those will be incalculable.

China's nuclear policy is open and transparent. Of all five nuclear weapon states in the world, China is the only one that pledges no-first-use of nuclear weapons. China has made it clear it will not engage in any nuclear arms race with any other country and will keep its nuclear capabilities at the minimum level required for national security.

This means that the development of China's nuclear force has its own established pace and China will not dance to the tune of US hype. In contrast, Washington has deliberately upheld strategic ambiguity on the use of nuclear weapons, trying to leave room for self-interpretation for the use of nuclear weapons in the future. People seem to see that Washington is pointing at other people's noses with one hand, while its other hand is quietly unscrewing the bottle and letting the devil out.

A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. At the beginning of this year, leaders of five nuclear weapon countries, China, Russia, the US, the UK and France, issued the Joint Statement on Preventing Nuclear War and Avoiding Arms Races, which stressed it again. It also expressed the common willingness to avoid military confrontation and prevent arms race. Washington should honor its commitment, rather than make petty moves of an arms race while shouting "deterrence crisis." On the nuclear issue, the "absolute advantage" and "absolute security" it pursues doesn't exist at all. Its strange logic will make all countries, including the US, feel unsafe. Washington should not be stubborn and should wake up in time.
SANTA ROSA, Calif. (AP)  The parents of a 15-month-old toddler were arrested for her death after the child was found unresponsive in their Northern California home where police found drug paraphernalia and fentanyl, authorities said.



Evan Frostick, 26, and Madison Bernard, 23, were arrested at their Santa Rosa apartment and booked for alleged cruelty to a child likely to produce great bodily injury or death, Santa Rosa Police Sgt. Christian Mahurin said Wednesday.



Authorities may file manslaughter charges based on the results of an autopsy and toxicology test on the toddler expected in the next few weeks, he said.



Mahurin said he didn't know if the child's parents have retained attorneys to speak on their behalf. They are scheduled to be arraigned later Wednesday and could be assigned a public defender if they can't afford an attorney, he said.



Santa Rosa police officers, fire officials and emergency crews responded to the family's apartment Monday after Bernard called 911 to report her child was unresponsive, Mahurin said.



The main concern was that the toddler was in a bed and in a bedroom that had both paraphernalia for fentanyl and fentanyl in the room and sprinkled on the bed, he said.



After serving a search warrant, detectives found 2 to 3 grams of suspected fentanyl and paraphernalia in a bedroom, including on the bed the child shared with her parents, and on the floor where the child often played, Mahurin said.



Anything from 2 milligrams or more can be considered a lethal dose so, having that much just lying around can be incredibly dangerous, he said.



Mahurin said there is a growing concern about children being exposed to fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid used for pain relief that has been blamed for a spike in San Francisco Bay Area overdoses.



We...
Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta has condemned Russia for cyberattacks on Ukraine, and the Five Eyes powers have warned the spiteful cyber activity could intensify."President Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine and sponsorship of...
Russia has warned Finland and Sweden against joining the NATO, saying there would be consequences. Finland's President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin announced their support for joining NATO. The Nordic country should apply to join the defense alliance "without delay," the leaders said in a joint statement Thursday. Addressing the European Parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs
Authorities said soldiers were deployed after angry crowds blocked a busy street in Colombo and held up traffic for hours because..

IndiaTimes 22 Mar 2022
Laxman Pai, Opalesque Asia:

Singapore-based private market exchange ADDX has partnered with Temasek subsidiary Fullerton Fund Management to list Fullerton's private equity fund of funds (FOF) on its digital platform.

The Fullerton Optimized Alpha Fund is a closed-end fund targeting 8% to 12% in returns per annum over its seven-year fund life, said a press release from Fullerton Fund Management Company, a subsidiary of Temasek, which is a Singaporean state holding company.

The fund will be invested in a portfolio of six to eight private equity and private credit funds.

From a field of over 20,000 funds, Fullerton arrives at the final list of funds following a rigorous and proprietary method of fund selection that focuses on blue-chip managers with a proven track record of consistent investment strategy and performance across market cycles, said the release.

According to the company, the underlying assets of the fund will be diversified by geography, across North America, Europe, and Asia, and by strategy, across buyout, growth, secondaries, and private or distressed credit. The fund will focus on thematic sectors, such as defensive, tech-enabled, new economy, post-COVID-19 dislocation, and recovery as well as ESG-aligned sectors.

As a result of efficiencies from tokenization, accredited individual investors on ADDX were able to access the Fullerton fund at a minimum size of US$10,000, instead of the US$250,000 required through traditional, non-tokenized chann......................

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Opalesque Industry Update - April was a difficult month in the investment/financial markets, and the global hedge fund business was no exception, with the aggregate industry return at -1.68% for the month, dragging year to date (YTD) returns further into the red at -2.59%, according to the just-released April 2022 eVestment hedge fund performance data. But on the bright side, the hedge fund business still performed better than many other industry benchmarks (see chart below) and among those funds that did perform well, some performed exceptionally well. The average return of -1.68% is a result of just 36% of the funds eVestment tracks producing positive results in April and the difference between average gain (+3.7%) and average loss (-4.7%) was the largest in 17 months. "In spite of overall disappointing numbers for the hedge fund business this year, there are bright spots among the major fund types and strategies eVestment tracks and within those categories as well," said eVestment Global Head of Research Peter Laurelli. "Times like these highlight the importance of hedge funds in a balanced portfolio and the role of solid due diligence when considering which type of funds and which individual funds in which to invest." Managed Futures funds followed one of their best monthly returns on record in March with another strategy-leading return of +3.73% in April. The universe's average 2022 YTD return of +13.55% is now more than two times the next best performing strategy (Macro, +6.60%). The largest products in the space have continued to outperform as well. The 10 largest reporting managed futures strategies had an aggregate return of +4.97% in April and are now at +16.10% YTD. As noted, Macro funds are also performing well so far this year, with April aggregate returns for these funds standing at +2.08% and YTD returns at +6.60%. The 10 largest Macro funds however are lagging the full strategy segment, with these largest funds seeing aggregate returns in April of +1.20% and YTD returns at +2.56%. The only other primary strategy in the green for both April and YTD, behind Managed Futures and Macro funds, were Distressed funds. These funds managed to eke out a +0.13% aggregate return in April and have returns of +0.56% YTD. Among primary hedge fund markets eVestment tracks, Equity-focused funds were the big performance losers in April, with aggregate returns of -3.99% in April and YTD returns at -7.79%. This is a sharp turnaround from a streak of double-digit positive returns Equity funds enjoyed from 2019 to 2020. The challenges in Equity markets filtered down to Equity-focused strategies as well. With aggregate returns of -4.87% in April and -5.87% YTD, Event Drive-Activist funds are among the worst performing primary hedge fund strategies eVestment tracks. Long/Short Equity funds are also performing poorly, at -4.31% in April and -7.42% YTD. Funds focused on Equity sub-sectors Financials, Energy, Healthcare and Technology were also in the red to one degree or another in April and YTD.
Opalesque Industry Update - Jersey Finance has welcomed a further series of amendments to Jersey's Limited Partnership Law, which were approved recently (27 April) and aim to provide fund managers with greater flexibility in their international fund structuring. The amendments, which are subject to Privy Council approval and are expected to come into force in the third quarter of this year, are designed to modernise the jurisdiction's regulatory framework, recognising trends and developments in the international funds environment. In particular, they include introducing wider protections for the limited liability of limited partners, by expanding "safe harbour" provisions where participation in the management of a limited partnership is concerned. Further amendments include:  The introduction of greater flexibility through a number of measures, including allowing third parties to have enforceable rights under the partnership agreement while not being a partner of the Limited Partnership  New reporting obligations to ensure the Register is kept up-to-date, including a new annual confirmation requirement  a clearer termination process  the introduction of wider amendment powers by way of secondary legislation to facilitate quicker and more efficient legislative change in the future The Limited Partnership vehicle is used extensively in cross-border fund structuring, particularly within the private equity and venture capital asset classes, and is popular for a range of reasons including the tax neutrality and limited liability the structure offers. The last set of amendments to Jersey's Limited Partnership law were made in 2020, when a statutory basis for limited partnerships to be migrated from other jurisdictions was introduced. The move provided greater legal certainty for managers and investors and resulted in a significant uptick in Limited Partnership fund structures moving to Jersey. Elliot Refson, Head of Funds, Jersey Finance, said: "We continue to see strong growth in our funds sector with the latest figures showing that private equity and venture capital business, asset classes where Limited Partnerships are widely used, grew by 27% over 2021. "We have a strong track record when it comes to evolving and enhancing our ecosystem for alternative funds. These latest amendments will be welcomed by the industry as a further demonstration of our innovative approach and our ambition and capability to support high quality private equity and wider alternative fund structuring."
Can't pour from an empty cup Everyday life can be busy: we're a global economy, we may work long and unsociable hours, the line between work and play has blurred, customer expectations may be higher, the demands are ever-increasing. Did you know:  42% of UK women currently feel, or have been, fatigued or 'burned out' by life  72% of UK women feel conflicted balancing their home life with work  20% of employed UK women take 
Best Advocate Firms And Services in India "Advocate means taking steps to help people say what they want, protect their rights, represent their interests, and get the services they need. Advocates and advocacy programs work in partnership with the people who support them and take their side." An advocate, on the other hand, is a qualified person representing a client in a court of law requesting compensation or release from him 
JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, Alaska (AP)  The U.S. Army is poised to revamp its forces in Alaska to better prepare for future cold-weather conflicts, and it is expected to replace the larger, heavily equipped Stryker Brigade in the state with a more mobile infantry unit better suited for the frigid fight, Army leaders say.

Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said she expects to make a final decision soon about the Alaska troop change, saying she will likely convert the Stryker unit, which uses heavy, eight-wheeled vehicles, to an infantry brigade.

I think right now the purpose of Army forces in Alaska is much more about creating an extreme cold weather capable formation" that could be used in Europe or the Indo-Pacific, Wormuth told The Associated Press on a recent trip to Alaska to meet with senior commanders and troops. Were trying to get to a place where we have Arctic capable forces  forces that can survive and operate in that environment.

The U.S. has long viewed the Arctic as a growing area of competition with Russia and China, particularly as climate change brings warmer temperatures and opens the sea lanes for longer periods of time. But officials have acknowledged that the U.S. lags behind those nations. Russia has taken steps to increase its military presence there, and China views the region as economically valuable for shipping and natural resources.

The changes in the Army were under consideration well before U.S. tensions with Russia soared following its invasion of Ukraine.

Under the new Army plan, the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, now based in Alaska, would be converted to a light infantry brigade. Combined with the division's 4th Infantry Brigade Combat team, the two units will become the 11th Airborne Division, based in Alaska. And the large Stryker vehicles, which are somewhat old, would be replaced by other vehicles that are more suitable for the icy and snowy terrain, Wormuth said.

The greater focus on cold-weather war includes a move to conduct major training exercises for the Alaska-based troops in their home state, under the weather conditions they would face in an Arctic fight. The troops had been scheduled to go to the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana, in March, but Army leaders decided to keep them in Alaska so they could train under the frigid temperatures and frozen terrain that they would encounter in any cold-weather battle.

I think it really makes sense to have forces trained in the Arctic environments that they would be used for, Wormuth said after spending two days at the still snowy base. If were going to have ground forces in Alaska, thats what we need them to be able to do. They cant get that experience going to the Mojave Desert or to Fort Polk.

Last year, in an initial trial event, Pacific-based forces stayed in Hawaii for their scheduled exercises at the National Training Center in Californias Mohave Desert. Commanders said they have learned from these first two moves, as they try to recreate conditions and relocate personnel and equipment from well-established training centers to more remote locations.

During her visit to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Wormuth met with commanders who called the training shift a success. Maj. Gen. Brian Eifler, commander of U.S. Army Alaska, said the benefits outweighed any shortfalls created by the need to build the infrastructure for the training exercise in the remote north.

You're getting the best of both worlds, without losing too much, Eifler said. We did get a lot more out of it than we thought we would.

Eifler said that while they didn't have as many training observers or civilian role players as they would have at one of the training centers, the trainers that did come were able to learn more about Arctic weather operations.

In addition, Eifler said, the change avoided the costly and time-consuming shipment of vehicles, weapons and other equipment to Louisiana and back. The lengthy packing and shipping process before and after a training exercise in Louisiana or California often forces troops to be without their weapons systems and other equipment for weeks.

During briefings at the Alaska base, commanders said the training included large-scale combat operations under extreme weather conditions in what they called the most challenging environment on earth. They said that 10,000 troops  including Canadian Army and Air forces  were involved in the exercise.

But they said the exercise also underscored the need for better cold-weather vehicles, including those capable of carrying Arctic infantry forces.

Gen. Joseph Martin, the vice chief of the Army who was in Alaska this year, said the service has been studying what would be the best type of vehicle for the troops. Is the Stryker the right vehicle for an Arctic warrior? In the winter, you need vehicles that can move across snow, he said.

In addition, he said, the vehicle also needs to be able to operate in the spring or summer thaw, when the ground turns to mud.

As Wormuth wrapped up her visit, she suggested that the decision on the Stryker Brigade is moving forward soon. Any final decision would need approval from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

If youre going to do big movements of equipment and things like that, the summer is a pretty important window because its a lot easier to move vehicles around than doing it in the dead of winter, she said.

And in conversations with congressional lawmakers, including during a hearing this week, she made clear that the change would not reduce the number of soldiers in Alaska. Instead, she said that while the infantry brigade will be smaller, the Army would offset that loss by increasing the size and capabilities of the headquarters.

More broadly, she talked with commanders in Alaska about the potential need for more changes as the U.S. military's Arctic strategy evolves.

The U.S., Wormuth said, has resisted moves to militarize the Arctic, even as Russia has expanded its military presence and basing there. But, she said, will that mindset continue given what the Russians are doing in Ukraine? Or will that get revisited? Will that create a window to think about things differently?"

Commanders said there are questions about whether one of the Pentagon's combatant commands  such as European Command or Northern Command, based in Colorado  should take full ownership of the Arctic and the U.S. military role there. Wormuth said the issue needs further discussion, and any decision may be years away.
The following list includes recent reports from the Midland County Sheriffs Office and the Midland Police Department. Compiled by reporter Tereasa Nims.

Wednesday, May 11

11:35 p.m. - A 48-year-old man was arrested for a conditional bond violation after deputies were dispatched to a Larkin Township home regarding a verbal argument. The man was transported and lodged in the Midland County Jail without incident.

8:32 p.m. - A deputy responded to MyMichigan Medical ER regarding a 2-year-old male who was bitten by the family dog. The child's father and dog owner, a 42-year-old Warren Township man, was issued an isolation notice. A report was sent to Department of Human Services/Child Protective Services for follow-up.

7:17 p.m.  Police were called to the 3400 block of James Savage Road for general assistance.

4:33 p.m. - A deputy assisted Habitat for Humanity. They had posted an eviction notice and the residents refused to leave. A deputy contacted the male resident, who advised he would be out by noon the next day after the deputy talked with him.

2:57 p.m.  Police were called to the 900 block of Joe Mann Blvd. for general assistance.

2:50 p.m.  Police were dispatched to the 5200 block of Hedgewood Drive for a civil complaint.

12:57 p.m. - A deputy assisted a Michigan State Police trooper with a shooting complaint in Homer Township.

10:53 a.m. - A deputy assisted Coleman Schools staff with a social media issue.

8:53 a.m.  Police were called to West Buttles and Jerome for a property damage accident.

8:44 a.m. - A deputy was dispatched to an Edenville Township residence for a death investigation. A 74-year-old Edenville Township woman was found to have died from natural causes.

4:11 a.m. - Deputies were dispatched to Lee Township regarding a complaint of shots fired in a wooded area. Deputies checked the area but no shots were heard. No suspicious activity was observed. The complainant refused contact with deputies.

3:56 a.m.  Police were called to the 700 block of Rodd Street for a domestic violence complaint.

1:21 a.m. - Deputies were dispatched to a Hope Township residence for a trespassing complaint/verbal dispute between a 24-year-old man and his 60-year-old male neighbor. The 60-year-old man stated that the 24-year-old man trespassed onto his property, but the 24-year-old denied the incident. A report was completed and forwarded to the prosecutor for review.

1:19 a.m. - Deputies were dispatched to a Mount Haley Township residence to check on the well-being of a 60-year-old man. Deputies spoke with the man outside of the residence and he was in good health. The man was subsequently arrested for an outstanding warrant out of Midland County's 75th District Court.
Greenleaf Trust, an independent Michigan-chartered, trust-only bank and wealth management firm, announced the opening of its newest office serving the Great Lakes Bay Region, located in Midland. The firm also announced the hire of Jennifer West to serve as the managing director of Greenleaf Trusts Great Lakes Bay Region.

Located at 117 E. Main St. in the heart of Midland, the new office will house a client centric team that will provide holistic wealth management, trust administration, and retirement plan administration solutions. Theyll also collaborate with Greenleaf Trusts independent and robust in-house research team, which is a key element of the firms ability to provide services driven exclusively by each clients unique needs and goals.

With assets under advisement of more than $17 billion, Greenleaf Trust continues to achieve tremendous growth across our home state of Michigan, the U.S. and internationally. We are thrilled to welcome Jennifer to our team as we expand our presence in Central Michigan, said Michael F. Odar, CFA, Greenleaf Trust president and CEO. With deep wealth management and leadership experience, and a strong commitment to our client centric approach, shes the perfect choice to lead our growth in this region.

West comes to Greenleaf Trust after spending nearly 20 years in the banking industry, most recently as a vice president with TCF Wealth Management. She served in a similar capacity within Chemical Banks wealth management and retirement planning division from 2016 until the companys acquisition by TCF. Prior to that, West worked at PNC Bank. Active in the community, she serves as Chair of Emerald Evening, on the Board of Trustees of Hidden Harvest, as a member of the Midland Noon Rotary and Midland 100 Clubs, and more. West is also a graduate of Leadership Midland and the Great Lakes Bay Regional Alliance Institute for Leaders. She holds a Bachelor of Science in business administration and management from Central Michigan University.

I was immediately drawn to Greenleaf Trusts company culture, ingrained ethos of honor and honesty, and unparalleled client focus, said West. The extensive level of financial planning we provide our clients was not only a significant draw for me personally but also supports our 99% client retention rate. I look forward to making the Midland office an integral part of the community, both as a trusted partner to our future clients and as a dedicated corporate citizen, supporting organizations like Catchafire, Midland Center for the Arts and the Dow Great Lakes Bay Invitational.

Greenleaf Trust partnered with local design firm Pinnacle Design Commercial Interiors on the new Midland office space, which is owned by Shaheen Development.

For further information on Greenleaf Trust, visit www.greenleaftrust.com.
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KYIV, Ukraine Ukrainian officials say their forces took out another Russian ship in the Black Sea.

Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, said late Thursday the Vsevolod Bobrov logistics ship was struck as it was trying to deliver an anti-aircraft system to Snake Island. He said the ship was badly damaged but was not believed to have sunk.

A spokesman for the Odesa regional military administration said the vessel caught fire after the strike. There was no confirmation from Russia and no reports of casualties.

The British Ministry of Defense said this week that Ukraine has been targeting Russian air defenses and supply vessels on Snake Island in an effort to disrupt Moscows efforts to expand its control over the Black Sea coastline.

The Ukrainian military last month sank the Moskva cruiser, the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet. In March, the military destroyed the landing ship Saratov.

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KEY DEVELOPMENTS IN THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR:

 Finlands leaders in favor of applying for NATO membership

 ' This tears my soul apart : A Ukrainian boy and a killing

 Protesters vent fury at French company for staying in Russia

 Ukrainian circus comes to town, and stays in Italy, amid war

Follow all AP stories on Russias war on Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

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OTHER DEVELOPMENTS:

MUNICH  German industrial giant Siemens AG says it is exiting Russia, where it has operated for almost 170 years.

We condemn the war in Ukraine and have decided to carry out an orderly process to wind down our industrial business activities in Russia, Roland Busch, the Munich-based companys CEO, said Thursday.

Siemens had been one of the first companies to put all new business in Russia, along with international deliveries to the country, on hold following Russias invasion of Ukraine in February.

The company said it had been evaluating the situation with the eye of ensuring the safety of its 3,000 employees in Russia.

The maker of trains and industrial equipment said the Russia sanctions shaved off about 600,000 euros ($623,000) from its fiscal second-quarter results, which were reported Thursday.



KYIV, Ukraine -- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian forces on Thursday night struck the Chernihiv region and hit schools.

Of course, the Russian state is in such a state that any education only gets in its way. But what can be achieved by destroying Ukrainian schools? All Russian commanders who give such orders are simply sick, and incurable.

He condemned what he suggested were senseless attacks on the refinery in the central Ukrainian industrial hub of Kremenchuk, on the Zaporizhzhia region and the Donbas.

They are cowards, and they try to hide the truth behind missiles, airstrikes and artillery shelling, he said in his nightly video address to the nation. Therefore our task is to fight until we achieve our goals in this war: to free our land, our people and secure our security.

Noting that Thursday is International Nurses Day, Zelenskyy thanked Ukraines nurses and other medical workers for their part in the fight and urged all Ukrainians to do the same. He said since the invasion began on Feb. 24, the Russian military had damaged 570 medical facilities, fully destroying 101 hospitals.

What is that? Its stupidity. Its barbarity. Its the self-destruction of Russia as a state that anyone in the world could see as a cultured nation.

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KYIV, Ukraine  Rocket attacks on Ukraines central Poltava region on Thursday were perhaps the most intense for the duration of the war, the regional governor said that same day.

Todays shelling of the Poltava region is perhaps the largest during the course of this full-scale war, Dmitry Lunin wrote in a Telegram post. 12 Russian missiles hit the infrastructure in (the city of) Kremenchuk; most of them hit an oil refinery that was not operational anyway.

Rescuers are putting out a fire at the refinery. Luckily, no one was hurt, Lunin added.

Kremenchuk is on the Dnieper River, south of Kyiv and north of Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia. The river, flowing north to south, divides Ukraine in half. In the south, it flows through Kherson before emptying into the Black See.

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KYIV, Ukraine  At least two civilians died Thursday as a result of a shelling attack on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraines second-largest city, local authorities said that same day.

As a result of the shelling, two people were killed, four more were injured, two of whom are doctors. All these people are civilians, Vyacheslav Zadorenko, the mayor of the suburban town of Derhachi, wrote in a Telegram post.

He added that the attack also damaged a building housing a humanitarian aid unit, municipal offices, and hospital facilities.

None of the sites that came under shelling, not to mention private houses that are destroyed daily, had anything to do with military infrastructure, Zadorenko said.

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KYIV, Ukraine  Ukraines foreign minister said Thursday that everyone involved in the transportation and sales of grain seized by Russia in occupied areas of the country will face legal consequences.

Russia is a criminal three times over: it bombed Syria to ruins, occupied part of Ukraine, and is now selling stolen Ukrainian grain to Syria, the ministrys press service cited Dmytro Kuleba as saying.

I want to remind the participants in this deal: what is stolen has never brought happiness to anyone. Everyone involved in the sale, transportation or purchase of stolen grain is an accomplice to the crime, Kuleba said.

Your actions will have adequate international legal consequences. We will do everything to make your life as difficult as possible, he continued, commenting on media reports that on Wednesday, a Russian ship carrying Ukrainian grain moored off the Syrian coast.

Kuleba also claimed that thanks to the efforts of Ukrainian diplomats, Egypt and Lebanon had previously refused to buy the looted grain shipment.

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MOSCOW  A student of a local construction college died as a result of a shelling attack on the Russian village of Solokhi near the Ukrainian border, a teacher at the college told the Interfax news agency Thursday.

Russian Nifodyov died as a result of the shelling of the peaceful village of Solokhi by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Nikolai Ignatenko was cited as saying.

Earlier on Thursday, the governor of Russias Belgorod region, where Solokhi is located, said that at least one civilian had been killed in the shelling, while six more were injured. While governor Vyacheslav Gladkov likewise blamed the attack on Kyivs forces, it was not immediately clear whether the slain civilian he referred to was Nifodyov.

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KYIV, Ukraine  Four civilians were reported dead and five more were injured in Ukraines eastern Donetsk region on Thursday, the regional governor said that same day.

On May 12, the Russians killed four more civilians of the Donbas: two in Novoselivka, one in Avdiivka and one in Lyman. Five more people were injured, Pavlo Kyrylenko wrote in a Telegram post, referring to a village and two cities in the Donetsk region, one of two which make up the Donbas.

His claims could not be immediately verified.

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ROME  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says that hes ready to talk with Russian President Vladimir Putin and that we must find an agreement, but with no ultimatum as a condition.

Zelenskyy also told Italian RAI state TV in an interview scheduled to be broadcast on Thursday night that Ukraine will never recognize Crimea as part of Russia, which annexed that part of southern Ukraine in 2014.

Crimea has always had its autonomy, it has its parliament, but on the inside of Ukraine, Zelenskyy said, in excerpts of the interview that RAI released earlier on Thursday.

The interviewer asked the Ukrainian leader about a comment by French President Emmanuel Macron cautioning against any humiliation of Putin.

We want the Russian army to leave our land, we arent on Russian soil, Zelenskyy replied. We wont save Putins face by paying with our territory. That would be unjust.

In another comment, Zelenskyy sounded a forward-looking note. We have to think of the future of Russia. I, as president of Ukraine, say these are our neighbors. There will be other presidents, other presidents and other generations of Russia, Zelenskyy said.

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KYIV, Ukraine  Ukrainian ministry officials said Thursday that Russian troops were trying to block Kyivs forces from advancing as far as the Ukrainian-Russian border in the northeastern Kharkiv region.

In the direction of Kharkiv, Russian army units are regrouping and trying to prevent the further advance of our troops in the direction of the state border of Ukraine, defense ministry spokesman Oleksandr Motuzyanyk said in his regular media briefing.

To this end, the occupiers launch unceasing artillery attacks on our troop units in order to inflict human losses, as well as to damage weapons and military equipment, Motuzyanyk added.

He did not clarify how close Ukrainian forces were to the border.

According to the defense ministry briefing, Moscows troops were opening fire along the entire line of confrontation in Ukraines east, and attempting to penetrate Ukrainian defenses.

Also on Thursday, the Ukrainian militarys General Staff said in its daily operational statement that Russian forces continued their attempts to storm several cities in Ukraines industrial heartland of Donbas that day, but had no success.

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A senior Russian U.N. envoy said Thursday that Finland and Swedens decision to join NATO would instantly turn them from neutral into hostile countries and potential targets for Russia.

Dmitry Polansky, First Deputy Representative of Russia to the U.N., said in an interview with the British conservative magazine UnHerd, that Helsinki and Stockholm know that the moment they become members of NATO it will imply certain mirror moves on the Russian side.

If there are NATO detachments in those territories, these territories would become a target - or possible target - for a strike, Polansky added. NATO is a very unfriendly bloc to us  it is an enemy and NATO itself admitted that Russia is the enemy. It means that Finland and Sweden all of a sudden, instead of neutral countries, become part of the enemy and they bear all the risks.

Elsewhere in the interview, Polansky downplayed the impact of the possible NATO enlargement on Europes security landscape, saying that Russia is ready to face NATO threats and has made the necessary precautions for this.



BERLIN  The U.N.s top human rights body has overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling on its investigators to specifically look into possible rights abuses and violations in northern Ukraine shortly after Russias invasion.

In a 33-2 vote, with 12 abstentions, the Human Rights Council concluded a special session Thursday on Russias invasion of Ukraine also by calling on Russia to grant international human rights groups unhindered, timely, immediate, unrestricted and safe access to people who have been transferred from Ukraine to Russia or areas controlled by Russian forces or affiliates.

Only China and Eritrea voted against the measure, which also urged the U.N. human rights office to report on events in Mariupol, a besieged southeastern port city where thousands of civilians are believed to have been killed. Access to the city has been virtually nonexistent for international human rights during recent fighting there.

The council called on a team of investigators known as a Commission of Inquiry to look specifically into the events in the Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Sumy regions of Ukraine in late February and early March after Russias invasion with a view to holding those responsible to account. The commission was already created to investigate rights abuses and violations generally in Ukraine.

Many atrocities in the war came to light last month after Moscows forces aborted their bid to capture Kyiv and withdrew from around the capital.

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KYIV, Ukraine  Between 8 and 12 Russian missiles hit the oil refinery and other infrastructure in the Ukrainian industrial hub of Kremenchuk Thursday, the acting governor of the central Poltava region said that same day.

In a Telegram post, Dmytro Lunin urged residents to remain in underground shelters, citing the persistent threat of airstrikes.

In early April, Lunin had said that the Kremenchuk refinery - Ukraines only remaining fully functional facility of its kind at the time  was no longer operational following a Russian attack. Moscow claimed to have targeted the refinery again at the end of the month, and to have destroyed further fuel production and storage facilities.

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BERLIN  The U.N. refugee agency is reporting that more than 6 million people have now fled Ukraine in the wake of Russias invasion.

Geneva-based UNHCR also said Thursday that the number of refugees who have returned back to Ukraine, either partially or fully, has reached more than 1.6 million. It says that number reflects cross-border movements, and doesnt necessarily indicate sustainable returns. The agency says its too early to draw conclusions about definitive trends on returns.

Matthew Saltmarsh, an agency spokesman, also said Thursday that a total of 2.4 million people who have left Ukraine have moved beyond Ukraines immediate border countries which have taken in the lions share of refugees from the country. Poland alone has registered more than 3.2 million people who fled Ukraine. It and other European Union member countries have open borders, making tracking where people go a complex endeavor.

On Tuesday, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, tweeted that the number of refugees from Ukraine had reached the same 5.7 million figure as the tally from Syrias 11-year war, which previously was the source of the worlds biggest refugee crisis.

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UNITED NATIONS -- The U.N. childrens agency says the war in Ukraine is a child rights crisis where education is under attack and nearly 100 youngsters have been killed in just the last month.

UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Omar Abdi told the U.N. Security Council Thursday that more children have been injured, millions have been displaced and schools continue to be attacked and used for military purposes.

The school year came to a standstill after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, and as of last week at least 15 of 89 UNICEF-supported schools in the countrys east have been damaged or destroyed in the fighting, he said.

In mid-March, over 15,000 schools resumed education in Ukraine mostly through remote learning or in-person hybrid options, he said.

It is estimated that 3.7 million children in Ukraine and abroad are using online and distance learning options, Abdi said.

But he stressed that there are still enormous obstacles to education including availability for learning, resources, language barriers and movements of children and their families.

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KYIV, Ukraine  Talks are underway between Kyiv and Moscow on the possible evacuation of 38 severely wounded Ukrainian troops from the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, Ukraines deputy PM said Thursday afternoon.

The steel mill is the only remaining stronghold of Ukrainian resistance in the ruined port city, and is now surrounded by Russian forces.

We are working step by step, Iryna Vereshchuk wrote in a public post on the Telegram messenger app.

She said that Kyiv hoped to exchange the soldiers for 38 significant Russian prisoners of war, before moving on to the next stage of the negotiations. She did not specify what this next stage would concern, but said that there were no negotiations on the exchange of 500 or 600 people.

Earlier on Thursday, an official at the Ukrainian Presidents Office said that Kyiv hoped to extract half a thousand wounded Ukrainian fighters from Azovstal.

Members of the Azov Regiment holed up inside the plant have repeatedly refused to surrender, citing fears of being killed or tortured. On Tuesday, Ukrainian officials said that more than a thousand Ukrainian troops, many of them injured, remained at Azovstal.

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VIENNA  German Chancellor Olaf Scholz spoke with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto Thursday, the same day Finlands leaders announced the country plans to apply for NATO membership, the German chancellery said Thursday afternoon.

Chancellor Scholz welcomed todays statements by the President and Prime Minister of Finland Sanna Marin, in which both advocate their countrys immediate accession to NATO, and assured Finland of the Federal Governments full support on this path, Scholzs office said in a statement.

Finlands announcement paves the way for a historic expansion of the alliance that could deal a serious blow to Russia as its military struggles with its war in Ukraine.

Finland shares a 1,340-kilometer (830-mile) land border with Russia.

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KYIV, Ukraine  About 3,000 Mariupol civilians are being detained in prisons controlled by pro-Russian separatists in Ukraines industrial east, the countrys human rights chief says.

Lyudmyla Denysova claimed on social media Thursday that Kyiv is aware of at least two prisons set up in the eastern Donetsk region, one in the regional capital of Donetsk and another in Olenivka, a suburb 20 kilometers southwest of the city center.

She claimed that authorities in Kyiv had received reports of people being tortured, interrogated, threatened with execution and forced to cooperate, and others disappearing after interrogations.

She also alleged that detainees were being kept in inhuman conditions, with inadequate access to bathrooms and no space to lie down.

She claimed that some captives had been released after 36 days, after signing unspecified documents, but did not provide more details. Ukrainian authorities are calling on the U.N. to intervene.

More than 100,000 civilians remain in the ruined port city of Mariupol, which had a pre-war population of about half a million. Ukrainian authorities have previously claimed that thousands of Ukrainians had been forcibly taken to Russia.

Troops from Ukraines Azov Regiment continue to hold out at the Azovstal steelworks, the last bulwark of Ukrainian resistance in the city.

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MOSCOW  Russia has warned that it will have to take unspecified military-technical steps in response to Finlands decision to join NATO.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said Thursday that Finlands accession to NATO will inflict serious damage on Russian-Finnish relations, as well as stability and security in Northern Europe.

It said in a statement that Russia will be forced to take retaliatory steps of military-technical and other characteristics in order to counter the emerging threats to its national security.

The statement noted that while its up to Finland to decide on ways to ensure its security, Helsinki must be aware of its responsibility and the consequences of such a move. The ministry charged that Finlands move also violated past agreements with Russia.

History will determine why Finland needed to turn its territory into a bulwark of military face-off with Russia while losing independence in making its own decisions, it added.
The Michigan Education Association recently announced the recipients of the 2022 MEA Scholarships, honoring exemplary public school students from across the state who will be attending a Michigan university next fall.

Among the 426 applications submitted for scholarship awards this year, the MEA Scholarship Fund Trustees chose 22 new award recipients who will each receive $1,600. In addition, 27 repeat winners who are already enrolled in college will receive $800 each.
Midland City Council postpone a vote on sidewalk projects due to an error with the related proposals language.

On Monday, council met in a regular meeting to vote on requested and proposed city sidewalk projects for 2022. Council also recognized students for their work with the Make Midland Beautiful Art Celebration.

City Engineer Matt Lemon said the 2022 Sidewalk Improvement Program has five projects to consider, which were requested by city residents. The proposed projects are listed below:

West side of Dublin Avenue from Saginaw Road to south of Amberwood Court.

North side of E. Ashman St. at 3545 E. Ashman St. (residence).

West side of West Main St. at 4525 W. Main St. (residence).

West side of Dublin Avenue at 6003 Dublin Ave. (residence).

East side of Waldo Avenue from East Patrick Road to south of Eastlawn Drive.

The city would pay part of the project costs and assess the rest to homeowners along the project areas. Council member Steve Arnosky said projects like the one along Waldo Avenue would address safety issues.

However, the addresses and costs for the two projects on Dublin Avenue were accidently switched in the resolutions. City Manager Brad Kaye said city staff is reviewing the public notices to determine if the city needs to hold another public hearing and when council can vote on the projects.

Council also voted to recognize nine elementary and middle school children for outstanding work in creating posters for the 2022 "Make Midland Beautiful Art Celebration." This celebration encourages creativity among children in the second and sixth grades by inviting them to create a poster on "what makes Midland beautiful."

Over 800 students participated in the 10th annual celebration, said Marcie Post of the parks and recreation department.

The students recognized for 2022 were:

Katie Cai (sixth grader at Jefferson Middle School).

Henry Kosick (sixth grader at Northeast Middle School).

Raelynn Graham (second grader at Plymouth Elementary).

Maddy Hale (second grader at Siebert Elementary).

Owen Lewis (second grader at St. Johns Lutheran).

Emily Schroeder (second grader at Central Park Elementary).

Brexley Sheets (second grader at Woodcrest Elementary).

Camila Villarreal (second grader at Chestnut Hill Elementary).

Sarah Wendt (second grader at Adams Elementary).

Their art can be viewed on the citys website.

Other council business:
NEW YORK (AP)  New York City will hold its first-ever Asian American and Pacific Islander Cultural and Heritage Parade in Manhattan this weekend, Mayor Eric Adams and event organizers announced Wednesday.

The parade is set for Sunday at 10:45 a.m. on Sixth Avenue from West 44th Street to West 55th Street.

It comes a day after another first for the city: a Japan Day parade to celebrate Japanese Americans and their heritage, scheduled for Saturday at 1 p.m. on Manhattans Central Park West.

The two parades are being held during Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, and amid activism following a wave of anti-Asian attacks during the coronavirus pandemic.

As we work to combat a spike in hate crimes, it is important to support and uplift our AAPI brothers and sisters," Adams said in a statement. "We are proud to announce the New York Citys first annual Asian American and Pacific Islander Cultural and Heritage Parade and pay tribute to the generations of New Yorkers from the Asian and Pacific diaspora.

Wellington Chen, executive director of the Chinatown Business Improvement District, said the new event is important for unity.

In these pandemic times and with Anti-Asian intolerance, division, and hatred on the rise, it is so important for all of us to come together to celebrate our collective humanity  in a rare historic parade  as it is about time that we march together with each other to show our solidarity, Chen said in a statement.
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COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP)  Five-time former Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe was reappointed on Thursday in an effort to bring stability to the island nation, which is engulfed in a political and economic crisis.

Wickremesinghe, a contentious choice by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, took his oath in a ceremony at the presidents residence. Protesters have blocked the entrance to the president's office for more than a month.

The presidents brother, Mahinda Rajakapsa, resigned as prime minister on Monday following violent attacks by supporters on peaceful anti-government protesters. His resignation automatically dissolved the Cabinet, leaving an administrative vacuum.

The presidents selection of Wickremesinghe is an attempt to end the violence and restore international credibility as the government negotiates a bailout package with the International Monetary Fund.

Sri Lankans for months have been forced to stand in long lines to buy scarce essentials, with many returning empty-handed.

Wickremesinghe visited a Buddhist temple after taking his oath and told journalists he will work with the opposition and the governing party to find solutions to the hardships faced by the people.

Authorities on Wednesday deployed armored vehicles and troops in the streets of the capital after attacks on protesters triggered a wave of violence across the country. Nine people died and more than 200 were injured.

Security forces have been ordered to shoot people deemed to be participating in the violence as sporadic acts of arson and vandalism continued despite a strict nationwide curfew that began Monday evening.

A court on Thursday banned former prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, his former government minister son and 15 others from traveling overseas pending the results of investigations on Mondays attack against peaceful protestors who had demanded the resignation of the Rajapaksa brothers, which triggered the countrywide violence against Rajapaksa supporters. Mahinda Rajapaksa resigned amid the violence.

Protesters had demanded the resignations of the Rajapaksa brothers because of the debt crisis that has nearly bankrupted the country and caused severe shortages of fuel, food and other essentials.

Some opposition politicians and religious leaders objected to Wickremesinghe's appointment, saying citizens wanted sweeping reforms.

Opposition lawmaker Anura Dissananayake said the choice of Wickremesinghe was aimed more at protecting the president and his family from public anger over corruption allegationsand his role in the economic crisis than it was in solving the countrys problems.

When he was previously prime minister from 2015 to 2019, Wickremesinghe was accused of protecting the powerful Rajapaksa family from allegations of corruption and other wrongdoing.

Buddhist and Catholic clergy also objected to Wickremesinghes selection.

This decision has been taken totally disregarding the aspirations of the people who are protesting today. The protests can only get worse by this decision, said the Rev. Omalpe Sobitha, a senior Buddhist monk.

Catholic Archbishop of Colombo Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith said "a complete change of the system is needed for Sri Lanka to emerge from crisis.

Political analyst Ranga Jayasuriya said by appointing Wickremesinghe as prime minister, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa did not put out the fire, but added fuel on it.

People would be angrier with this snub of appointing a man who has no public support, Jayasuriya tweeted.

The U.S. Ambassador to Sri Lanka, Julie Chung, said she looks forward to working with Wickremesinghe and that his appointment and the quick formation of an inclusive government are first steps to addressing the crisis and promoting stability.

We encourage meaningful progress at the IMF and long-term solutions that meet the needs of all Sri Lankans, she said in a tweet.

Sri Lanka is nearly bankrupt and has suspended repayments of $7 billion in foreign loans due this year. The IMF has said any short or long-term assistance depends on the outcome of talks with creditors on loan restructuring. Sri Lanka must repay about $25 billion in foreign loans by 2026 out of a current total foreign debt of $51 billion.

The finance ministry said earlier this month that the countrys usable foreign reserves have plummeted to $25 million.

The foreign currency shortage has forced a sharp decline in imports, leading to severe shortages of essentials such as fuel, cooking gas, food and medicine.

Wickremesinghe will likely present a Cabinet list to the president for appointment, a power vested in him by the constitution.

If there are objections to the prime minister or the new Cabinet, lawmakers can submit a no-confidence motion to the house speaker when the body reconvenes on Tuesday. The motion would then be debated and voted on.

Wickremesinghe, 73, has been in Parliament for 45 years. His political party split in 2020 amid a leadership crisis and its most senior members left to form a new party, which is currently the countrys main opposition.

Wickremesinghes reputation was damaged during his previous term as prime minister, when he was in a difficult power- sharing arrangement with then-President Maithripala Sirisena.

Conflict and a communication breakdown between them were blamed for intelligence lapses that led to Easter Sunday suicide bomb attacks in 2019 that killed more than 260 people.

He was also accused of shielding a friend he had appointed as head of the Central Bank from allegations of insider trading.
Tripoli, Libya (PANA) - The Libyan Navy says 146 illegal migrants of various African nationalities were rescued in two separate operations by Libyan guards while trying to reach European shores on board boats
Tripoli, Libya (PANA) - The Libyan ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of the government of national unity has described Amnesty International's report on human rights violations by Libyan security officials as "lacking credibility and professionalism and damaging"
Tripoli, Libya (PANA) - The Libyan Minister of Economy and Trade of the Government of National Unity (GNU), Mohamed al-Haweij, has called for a team to prepare a short and long-term food security strategy for the country
Tripoli, Libya (PANA) - The Libyan prime minister of the national unity government, Abdelhamid Al-Dbaiba, affirmed here Thursday that holding the meeting of the National Council for Economic and Social Development in Libya, 14 years after its establishment was a positive and effective step
Conakry, Guinea (PANA) - Former Guinean president Alpha Conde and 26 of his collaborators who have been accused of "blood crimes", have been banned from leaving the country until further notice, a judicial source said
Conakry, Guinea (PANA) - Members of the National Council of Transition (CNT) in Guinea on Wednesday approved 36 months as the transition period to elections against 39 months, previously proposed by the National Committee of Rally for Development (CNRD) junta
Khartoum, Sudan (PANA) - A much awaited process to end the Sudanese political stalemate finally kicked off in Khartoum on Thursday, following eight months of malfunctioning government
Photo: (Photo : Matthew Eisman/Getty Images for Beatycon)

When Annis Waugh started Braid Maidens in 2021, she didn't expect her most eager students to be dads with daughters. Her popular two-hour classes, where fathers learn how to braid their daughter's hair, are always sold out, and there's currently a waitlist for the following schedule of classes.

Waugh, based in England, decided to create the braiding class initially as a fundraiser for a local school. When she set up a specific session meant just for dads with daughters, which she dubbed "Beers and Braids," she was surprised that it had more participants than the classes reserved for moms.

Speaking with The Washington Post, Waugh said that she thought dads shouldn't be intimated by learning to braid their daughter's hair. As most women also know that it takes practice to master a perfect braid thus, she figured fathers could learn this special skill.

Read Also: TikTok Dad Shares Lessons from Mother's 'Husband in Training' Program to Teach Sons to be Gentlemen

What Happens in a Braid Maidens Class?

Waugh's classes have an average of eight students who practice braiding on plastic heads. She starts by teaching the fathers how to properly brush their hair with its different textures. After teaching how to do a ponytail, the mom then transitions to traditional braid, French braid, side braid, and fish style braid. She ends the session by teaching the fathers how to do the princess-style braid to impress their daughters.

Waugh said that the dads are "super-engaged" and really into learning during the sessions. Some of the fathers are quite perfectionists and take their classes seriously.

One dad said that Braid Maidens had been a helpful solution because he's now taking care of the kids while his wife has returned to her in-person duties at work. He has four girls between the ages of four to 10 years old, and they all have long hair, per the Philly Tribune.

The dad said that he likes the fact that he can share the load with his wife by braiding his daughters' hair when they go to school. He believes that their braiding sessions create a good rapport with his girls. Aside from learning how to braid, the fathers have also formed a friendship beyond the class.

Hair Braiding Class in Cleveland, U.S.

Across the pond, in Cleveland in the U.S., hairstylist Tieya Riggins has also conducted hair braiding lessons for dads with daughters since 2019. As with Waugh, the hair expert also observed that fathers are engaged with what they are doing, which makes her very happy, per News 5 Cleveland.

Riggins, however, paused her classes during the pandemic, but she is slowly returning to private workshops with single fathers who have custody of their daughters. She will soon return to hosting classes at schools and libraries. Her classes also allow the daughters to attend with their dad, making her more enthusiastic about teaching.

Both hairstylists agree that this "braiding legacy" will be the special bond between these dads and their daughters that they will remember as adults.

Related Article: Fathers in Las Vegas Form' Dads in School' to Prevent Fighting and Violence
Photo: (Photo : Rich Fury/Getty Images)

Michelle Williams is going to be a mom again. The Oscar nominee revealed to Variety on Tuesday, May 10, that she is pregnant, with the 41-year-old star expecting her third baby this coming fall.

This will be the Hollywood actress' second child with her husband, Thomas Kail. The couple welcomed son Hart back in 2020. Williams also shares 16-year-old daughter Matilda with late actor Heath Ledger, who tragically died in January 2008.

"The Greatest Showman" actress was emotional when relaying the news during the interview, saying that the pregnancy news was joyous. Williams said that as the years go by, you sort of wonder what they might hold for you or not hold for you. She added that it is exciting to discover that something you want again and again is available one more time and that good fortune is not lost on her or her family.

Williams plans to take a break from Hollywood during her pregnancy

She also gave her thoughts about becoming a mom again during the COVID pandemic, saying that it was a reminder that life goes on. Williams said that the world they brought a baby into is not the world they thought they were bringing a baby into, but the baby is ignorant of that. Williams said her son Hart experiences the unmitigated joy of discovery and the happiness of a loving home.

Williams added that there is nothing that makes you committed to a better world than raising a great kid. She called it the ultimate creative act, saying that the most ecstatic moments of life and art are the transcendent ones. Williams explained that having children is like combining your DNA with someone else to create a new life.

Williams also shared her plans to take a break from acting during her pregnancy, saying she wondered if she could work while pregnant, but she is too tired. According to People magazine, Williams and her 44-year-old husband Kail previously worked together on the critically acclaimed series Fosse/Verdon, for which she won numerous accolades, including a 2020 SAG Award.

Read Also: Connerjack Oswalt, California Teen With Autism, Found Alive in Utah After Missing for Three Years

Williams found love again after Ledger's death

The then-expectant mother gave a sweet shoutout to the director during her acceptance speech, saying that, like everything else in their life, she shares the award with him. Williams also paid tribute to her eldest child Matilda, saying it is one thing to be completely honest as an actor; it is another thing to be completely honest as a human being. Williams said that is just who her daughter is and how she lives.

Williams has been candid in the past about finding love after Ledger's death, telling Vanity Fair in an interview back in 2018 that she never gave up on love. Williams always told Matilda that Heath loved her before anybody thought she was talented or pretty or had nice clothes.

Related Article: Drew Scott and Linda Phan, Who Battled Fertility Issues, Share Baby Shower Photos
Photo: (Photo : PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)

Evan Frostick and Madison Bernard are suspected of child abuse in connection with the death of their 15-month-old child on Monday, May 9, after authorities said they found what they suspected to be fentanyl in their Santa Rosa home.

According to the Santa Rosa Police Department, the couple was arrested and booked for alleged cruelty to a child likely to produce great bodily injury or death.

As per the San Francisco Chronicle, Santa Rosa police officers, fire officials, and emergency crews responded to a report on Monday morning of an unresponsive toddler at a home on the 800 block of Sonoma Avenue.

Emergency crews found fentanyl near the dead toddler

When authorities arrived, they "noticed suspected fentanyl near the toddler." Emergency personnel immediately began performing life-saving measures on the toddler, who was not breathing. The young girl was transported to a local hospital, where she was later pronounced dead.

Authorities said that investigators from the Santa Rosa Police Department's narcotic, violence, sexual assault, and violent crimes teams began investigating the toddler's death and executing a search warrant "based on the circumstances."

Santa Rosa police told KTVU that authorities allegedly discovered packaged and unpacked suspected fentanyl and fentanyl paraphernalia "in numerous parts of the primary bedroom, including in the bed the toddler shared with her parents."

Santa Rosa police officers said they might file additional charges against the couple based on the results of the child's autopsy, including a toxicology test that was scheduled to be done later this week.

The toddler's unfortunate death was similar to a separate incident in 2019 when a Santa Rosa man and his 13-month-old son died of an accidental fentanyl overdose. Federal authorities sentenced two people in 2021 for supplying the deadly dose of the drug to the father.

Read Also: Japanese Mom and Daughter Make History; Enroll at Japan Police Academy at the Same Time

DEA declares fentanyl as the single deadliest drug threat the U.S. has ever faced

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) marked May 10 as "National Fentanyl Awareness Day" to bring more people's attention to overdose deaths across the United States. DEA Administrator Anne Milgram issued a statement about the dangerous drug, saying, "fentanyl is the single deadliest drug threat our nation has ever encountered."

Milgram added that fentanyl is everywhere, from large metropolitan areas to rural America, and no community is safe from this poison. Milgram said they must take every opportunity to spread the word to prevent fentanyl-related overdoses claiming scores of American lives every day.

According to Fox News, fentanyl is a synthetic opioid 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. Authorities said that drug traffickers are increasingly mixing fentanyl with other illicit drugs to drive addiction and create repeat customers.

Related Article: Most Popular Baby Names For Boys and Girls in the US: Liam and Olivia Top the Lists Again For 2021
Photo: (Photo : Getty images )

A mother-of-two has gone viral on social media after writing about her unusual love story of leaving her husband of 14 years for a stranger that she claimed was her "soulmate," but who ultimately rejected her.

She eventually wrote a book about it entitled "When a Soulmate Says No," prompting readers to comment on her unusual love life.

A fateful night with her "soulmate"

Amanda Trenfield, a mom from Sydney, had a career in financial services for 20 years and was married to her husband for 14 years. They have two kids.

According to DailyMail, Amanda said she hoped to reconnect with her husband during a three-day conference in Margaret River. Still, she met another man, Jason, and felt the "strong and raw" electricity between them. She said it traveled to her core, and the connection was so intense that she had to break eye contact.

Trenfield said she loved talking to him, and she felt warm, relaxed, and safe in his presence. She claimed she could be herself when with him, a feeling that she admitted was not familiar. She realized that she had not experienced that feeling in a "long time, or perhaps ever."

She remembered whispering to Jason that she wanted to see him again. The days after the meeting were a blur because meeting her soulmate made everything else in her life seem unimportant.

In the book, she wrote that she, who was always so careful, planned, organized, and clear about the path her life would take, just made the most dramatic decision, which affected the dearest thing to her, her family.

Convinced that she and Jason were soulmates despite nothing physically happening, she broke up with her husband less than a month later. She had no communication with Jason since she met him.

Jason ultimately rejected her, leaving her single, as per her book.

Read Also: 5 Little Milestones of Toddlers And What They Mean

Savage reactions

The unusual love story sparked a viral discussion on Twitter. Commenters were shocked by the way she "blew up" her life. A commenter said, "never in my life have I encountered someone romanticizing a one-night-stand that did not even happen," The Sun wrote.

Another said that Trenfield was convinced they had a connection, but there was no evidence they did. The woman must have projected onto a "random dude" because she was unhappy. The commenter added that we have all been there, but we "do not uproot our lives for it."

Another theorized that the soul mate would say no because she ghosted her husband after a night together. The commenter noted that he would be afraid of dating someone with no object permanence.

As per New York Post, someone said that she should not have published such a shameless account as her kids will one day read the book and know that she blew up the family.

A few also supported her, saying that ruining her life was not in vain. Her marriage, a commenter said, likely needed to end; otherwise, she would not be swayed by a stranger.

Related Article: Disney's "Out of Mind" Movie to Center on Children with Cerebral Palsy, Other Disabilities
Photo: (Photo : ED JONES/AFP via Getty Images)

Vermont native Nathan Carman is accused of killing his grandfather to obtain money from a trust fund and later killing his mother while they were at sea for a purported fishing trip to access millions of dollars in inheritance, according to a federal indictment unsealed on Tuesday, May 10.

NBC News reported that the 28-year-old had been charged with federal murder and fraud counts. According to federal prosecutors, Carman's mother, Linda, disappeared during a fishing trip on her son's boat, Chicken Pox, back in 2016. Carman purposefully sank the boat off Rhode Island to kill his mom.

Prosecutors alleged that Carman rigged the boat so it would take on water during its voyage. He then lied to the Coast Guard and other law enforcement officials about his mother's disappearance.

Money, the reason behind the killings

Prosecutors said that Carman killed his grandfather John Chakalos three years earlier by shooting him twice while he slept in his home in Windsor, Connecticut. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Vermont issued a statement on Tuesday, saying, "Both killings were part of a scheme to obtain money and property from the estate of John Chakalos and related family trusts."

The federal public defender's office in Vermont, which was representing Carman, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Carman has been consistent with his denials, saying he had nothing to do with his grandfather's death or his mother's disappearance.

According to WBZ News Radio, Chakalos bequeathed a $42 million estate to his four adult daughters, including Linda Carman. Prosecutors said that Chakalos managed to amass tens of millions of dollars by building and renting nursing homes.

According to the indictment, Nathan Carman spent "significant time" with his grandfather in 2012 and 2013. Prosecutors said that Chakalos, who was 87 years old at that time, put $550,000 into the bank accounts of his grandson.

The indictment alleges that Carman persuaded his mother to designate him as a beneficiary of her inheritance during the same period. Prosecutors said that the so-called dynasty trust inheritance arrangement for Chakalos' adult children was valued at $42 million.

Read Also: Michelle Williams is Going to be a Mom Again: Star Reveals She is Pregnant With Third Child

Carman purchased the rifle used to kill his grandfather

The indictment states that Nathan Carman, who was living in a New Hampshire home built by Chakalos, purchased the rifle used in the murder on November 11, 2013.

According to the indictment, Nathan Carman discarded his computer hard drive and the GPS unit that had been in his truck the night of the murder after he killed his grandfather John Chakalos as part of his plan to cover up his involvement in that crime.

The NPR reported that Carman planned to kill his mother on a fishing trip years later, with the indictment stating that he altered the boat by removing two forward bulkheads and trim tabs from the transom of the hull before the trip, leading to its sinking.

Related Article: New York Mom Prepares to Bring Home Miracle Baby After 12 Years of Heartbreak With 6 Miscarriages
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Google has become synonymous with powerful search, incredible hardware, and quirky, fun technology. Unfortunately, that includes stretching the limits of privacy and a reputation for giving up on its product lines too soon. But these negatives notwithstanding, Google is at it again at its Google I/O event near its company headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., enticing developers and consumers alike with a number of new hardware products, software and services.

Yes, Google just revealed new Pixel phones, including the Pixel 6A and the Pixel 7. But those werent the coolest technologies Google showed off on Wednesday. The stuff below is even cooler.

(And for more coverage, check out our stories on Googles new privacy controls, the new Pixel Watch, and the new Maps Immersive Mode.)

Immersive View in Google Maps

Google Maps began life as a two-dimensional representation of streets and highways. Over time, Google Maps has added traffic (as reported by Google Phones), Google Earth (as recorded by satellites and low-flying planes), and Google Street View (imagery from cars and cameras). Now, Google has started putting it all together with Immersive View for Maps. Immersive View layers actual imagery on top of simulated buildings it creates itself.

Will Immersive View for Google Maps look as good as this when its released? Google

Immersive View is the next generation of the 3D perspective thats already in your Android phonetry zooming in on a major city, then tapping the Layers icon in the upper-right-hand corner, then the 3D control and youll see its pretty awful. Its a sea of ghostly images superimposed on your phones screen at only a certain zoom level. But Immersive View looks like it will bring color and life back to the 3D world of Google Maps.

Ironically, theres a decent version of Immersive View already available. Try opening the Maps application on your Windows 10/11 PC, zoom in on a city, then select the small angled grid.

Google Search via Scene Exploration

Scene Exploration is the next iteration of Google Search, mimicking how you yourself visually search. Imagine walking through a grocery store, with your eyes scanning the shelves. On some level you know what those objects are, and possibly their relative worth and what their quality is.

Thats how Scene Exploration will work: Youll pan your smartphone camera over a scene, and Google will scan the various items and ping the Web for further information. The idea is that youll approach the scene with a filter in mind: scanning a shelf full of wine, for example, to find a well-rated vintage or a chardonnay that was made by a Black-owned winery.

Scene Exploration is like having a supercharged CTRL-F for the world around you. Google Search via Scene Exploration

Unfortunately, Google didnt announce a timeframe on when Scene Exploration will become a reality.

Google Docs TL:DR Mode

Some of us have learned how to read and process information very quickly. Others not so much. And others simply dont have the time to scrub through a story, let alone a couple hours of a YouTube video.

Googles automated summarization or TL:DR Mode for Google Docs. Google

Using machine learning, automated summarization (or TL:DR Mode) will automatically pull out the key points of a document, providing a short summary of whats being discussed. What Google showed off at Google I/O has incredible potential, though you might be a bit leery of running your companys latest sales strategy document threw Googles AI. And while summarization is going to come to other products within Google Workspace, it will only be available for chat capabilities at first, providing a helpful digest of chat conversations. Expect TL:DR mode to coordinate with Googles automated transcription and translation services, which are being added to Google Meet.

Will TL:DR Mode ever be better than a curated executive summary? And will it work on PDF files? Were excited and intrigued, but still a bit wary. And theres no word yet on when this feature will roll out.

Is Google Glass back?

When Google killed Google Glass seven years ago, PCWorld wrote that it was down, not out. Apparently we were more prescient than we knew.

Google showed off an unnamed augmented-reality prototype at Google I/O with either extremely limited capabilities or an extremely focused perspectivehow you see it is up to you. Either way, the new prototype (marked with PROTO-15 on the side of one demonstration model) is strictly focused on communication. Google Glass, with its focus on photos, video, and facial recognition, flopped hard. But the new Glass 2.0 simply listens for the voice of the person youre speaking with and projects a transcript of the conversation on the inside of the glass screens.

Simple and to the point: this new version of Google Glass could work. Google

Google positioned this new Glass with examples of an immigrant mother and daughter who spoke different languages, and of a man who spoke Spanish but no English. Its hard to say what, or, if, these glasses will be, or if theyll come to market. But even a limited version of Google Glass 2.0 will have utility. (A photo of what the new Glass might look like is at the very top of this article.)

Pixel Watch

When Google bought Fitbit last year, you could be forgiven for thinking the eventual fate of the popular activity tracker might be a repeat of Intels botched Basis buy. But Google appears to be serious about its acquisition, announcing and showing off the Pixel Watch after months of leaks and speculation. Fitbit technology will be baked right in.

Google

The Pixel Watch will debut later this year, when Google will announce features like its price, battery life, and so on. On Wednesday, Google showed off features such as sleep tracking and continuous heart monitoringtable stakes for activity trackers that debuted years ago. To be fair, the company has yet to announce the full breadth of the Pixel Watchs capabilities. We know, too, that Google intends that its smartwatch be more than just an exercise monitor, with payment and even home-control functions built in.

Samsung and Apple are the dominant players in smartwatches, with Fitbit and others providing more fitness-oriented bands. Can Google manage to pull off a unified device? Well have to wait until the Pixel Watch formally launches.
Accra Brewery PLC (ABL), a subsidiary of ABInBev and a leading manufacturer and distributor of beer and non-alcoholic malt beverages in Ghana has launched a new thematic campaign dubbed TASTE NO Y3 DEEP



This is to establish the superiority of quality and offerings of its flagship brand CLUB Premium Lager.



First brewed in 1931, CLUB has become a truly national icon through the consistent use of adinkra symbols, national flag, timeless tagline, Beer de noaa ne CLUB and adoption of Charlie which cements its continuing presence throughout different occasions and generations, making it a brand that brings friends and family members together.



Launching the campaign, Mrs Nancy Bediako, Assistant Brands Manager - CLUB Premium Lager said "We asked our consumers to describe the amazing taste of CLUB, the most loved beer in Ghana and they were unable to put the refreshing feeling after taking CLUB into words, so they settled on the phrase Taste No Y3 Deep.



She said they adopted this phrase as our campaign theme: Taste no y3 deep; so deep, its indescribable.



The only way to truly understand just how deep it is is to grab a bottle or glass of CLUB Beer for just GHC 7 "she said.



Continuing, she said, "CLUB Beer is a true national icon and continues to be part of the Ghanaian heritage, bringing Chales together throughout different occasions and generations."



She called on Ghanaians to purchase club beer during their festive occasions because it has a low alcoholic percentage which represents only 6%.



It is undoubtedly Ghanas quintessential beer, brewed with the same dedication to quality since 1931 and is currently Ghanas number one selling beer."



Subsequent to the launch, ABL in the coming days will be engaging their cherished Chales and CLUB lovers on radio, TV and all social media platforms using the hashtag #TasteNoY3Deep to express in their own words the amazing indescribable taste of CLUB Beer.



ABLs product portfolio includes a range of popular beverages such as Ghanas best-selling beer, Club Premium Lager, Club Shandy, Eagle Lager, Stella Artois, Budweiser and Beta malt.

Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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A group of European Union parliamentarians has asked the European Commission to open negotiations with Ivory Coast and Ghana to address low cocoa prices, it said in a letter.



The two West African countries, which together produce more than 60% of the world's cocoa, called on the EU earlier this year to join them in creating an economic pact which would ensure cocoa farmers earn a living wage.



Most cocoa farmers in these countries live in extreme poverty, earning well under $1 a day, said a letter signed by members of the Responsible Business Conduct Working Group of the European Parliament.



Low prices paid for cocoa are a key driver of deforestation and child labour in the sector, which are of concern to the EU as it seeks to prevent imports of commodities linked to environmental and human rights abuses.



"We urge the Commission to rapidly engage in formal negotiations with the governments of Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana with the aim of reaching an Economic Pact for Sustainable Cocoa," said the letter seen by Reuters, dated April 27.



The pact would entail an agreement between all parties on what to do to resolve the low price of cocoa and manage cocoa supply to prevent market shocks, it said.



An EU Commission spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.



The EU is the leading destination for Ivorian cocoa, accounting for about 67% of the country's exports.



But a newly proposed EU law could force cocoa traders to drop some suppliers because they use unethical practices.



"In view of the environmental and social provisions implemented by the EU and many other countries in term of regulations, an 'Economic Pact' is now necessary... in order to satisfy the first condition of sustainability," said Alex Assanvo, head of the Ivory Coast-Ghana Cocoa Initiative, set up by both governments.



Both countries in 2019 imposed a "living income" premium on all cocoa purchases in order to raise farmers' wages, but they said last year that traders were not paying it.

Source: REUTERS









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 African Development Bank Group (AfDB) is set to host its 57th Annual General Meetings in Accra to deliberate on a continental-wide approach to set in motion Africas recovery from the twin crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict.



The meetings which will be held from May 23rd to 27th, 2022 is the first in-person meetings in two years since the COVID-19 pandemic hit Africa.



Minister for Finance, Ken Ofori-Atta who made the announcement during a press conference in Accra on Thursday, May 12, 2022, said the meetings provide Africa with a platform where it can hold deliberations and advance African solutions to African problems particularly as the continent seeks to recover from the blowbacks of the crises.



This is the first time Ghana will be hosting this event (in-person) in our history after we signed on as a founding member state on 14th August 1963, in Khartoum, Sudan and attended the Bank's inaugural Board Meeting in November 1964 in Lagos, Nigeria. Indeed, we had a Ghanaian, Dr. Kwame Donkoh Fordjour Kantinka, as the President of this Bank between May 1976 and July 1979.



These facts, together with our championing role in setting up what has become Africa's premier Bank, suggest that hosting this event now seems long overdue. As is often said, however, it is better late than never, especially now that the Continent is charting a new path towards building forward better. We have the opportunity to host the Annual Meetings of the two main entities that make up the AfDB (that is, the ADB and ADF).



The Annual Meetings, under the theme; "Achieving Climate Resilience and a Just Energy Transition for Africa" provide Ghana with the opportunity to advance discussions on building resilience, addressing financing gaps, and narrowing its physical and digital infrastructural deficits in tandem with that of other African countries.



It will be attended by Ministers for Finance, Governors of Central Banks, Leaders of local and international Finance and Development Organizations, captains of industry, and Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) from the 81 Member States of the AfDB; made up of 54 Regional and 27 non-regional member countries.



Schedule for AfDB Annual Meetings



i. Formal Opening, where H.E President Nana Akufo-Addo will deliver the Key Note Address and Closing Ceremonies (which will be web-streamed and Televised);



ii. Presidential Dialogue on "Africa: Development Challenges and Opportunities" (to be web-streamed and Televised);



iii. Four (4) statutory sitting of the Board of Governors (closed sessions); and



iv. Four (4) Knowledge events (open sessions) on:

a. Launch of the African Economic Outlook Report, 2022;



b. Building Resilient Digital Economies for Africa;



c. Africa Day Event (coinciding with the 50th Anniversary of the passing of Dr Kwame Nkrumah);



d. Climate Resilience and Africa's food systems;



e. Green Jobs for Youth and Women in Post-COVID Africa;



f. A Seminar on Special Drawing Rights (SDRs); and



g. A visit by the Spouses of the participating Governors to the Osu Children's Home.



According to the Minister, the meetings also provide Ghana with the opportunity to strengthen its partnership with the AfDB. The country has benefitted from numerous project partnerships with the bank, including: the construction of the Pokuase Interchange, the construction of the Terminal 3 of the Kotoka International Airport (KIA), construction of the Awoshie-Pokuase road, Fufulso-Sawla road and the Northern Corridor roads amongst hosts of projects in education, skill training, sanitation, and agriculture.



This Minister Ofori-Atta was confident that the high-level event in Accra will help convey the countrys collective appreciation to the AfDB as a long-standing strategic partner and lead to deliberations over potential new projects that will benefit the Ghanaian people.

Source: King Edward Ambrose Washman Addo/peacefmonline.com/ghana









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Former President John Dramani Mahama, has arrived in Lafia, Nasarawa State, Nigeria, at the invitation of the Executive Governor and his Economic Advisory Council to deliver a keynote speech at the Nasarawa Investment Summit.



A statement issued by the office of the former President said his participation would include a panel discussion on Nasarawa Means Business: The urgency of delivering sustained Economic Growth.



It said Mr Mahama would share with the Summit the main and critical opportunities for transforming a resource-rich, but low productivity economy into a development miracle that creates sustained wealth and transforms communities.



The Nasarawa Investment Summit 2022 on the theme Diamond in the Rough, The Making of a New Investment Frontier, would serve as a platform to present credible and bankable investment opportunities that are market-ready for investor engagement.



It will also foster closer collaboration and partnership between the private sector and the government in building a stronger business environment.

Source: GNA









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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If, up to now, youve ever been stumped by something written in Krio or Ewe or Tigrinya then, unlike for more than 100 other languages, Google Translate was not going to help you out.



But thats just changed as Google has announced the addition of 24 languages - including 10 spoken in Africa - to this function.



The new African languages are:



-Bambara - spoken in Mali



-Ewe - spoken in Ghana and Togo



-Krio - spoken in Sierra Leone



-Lingala - spoken in large parts of central Africa including the Democratic Republic of Congo



-Luganda - spoken in Uganda and Rwanda



-Oromo - spoken in Ethiopia



-Sepedi - spoken in South Africa



-Tigrinya - spoken in Eritrea and Ethiopia



-Tsonga - spoken in South Africa



-Twi - spoken in Ghana



Several other African languages were already available, including Amharic, Hausa and Somali.



In the past, the software used to translate as well as learn how to improve the interpretation relied on being fed material that had already been translated.



There is a large and growing amount of text in the more widely spoken and used languages - but this is not the case for many others.



Google has said that these new additions rely on novel software which does not require reference to previous examples.



Google Translates research scientist Isaac Caswell told the BBC that this work was part of expanding coverage to many communities who were very much overlooked not just by Google but other technologies in general.



But will the translations be accurate? Many polyglots have up to now noted problems with the languages already available.



For many supported languages, even the largest languages in Africa that we have supported - say like Yoruba, Igbo, the translation is not great. It will definitely get the idea across but often it will loss much of the subtlety of the language, Mr Caswell admitted.



With the new languages, he said, it would be no different. But the people who helped in the research said it was a good place to start.



Some of the Krio [speakers] said, Dont let the perfect be the enemy of the good.



In the end, we have to make the call. And my impression from other people I have talked to was that it was a very positive thing for them.

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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An attempt by state prosecutors to have a former boss of the Microfinance and Small Loans Centre (MASLOC), Sedina Tamakloe Attionu, tried in absentia is in limbo.



State prosecutors had filed an application for Mrs Attionu to be tried in absentia following her failure to attend the trial since October last year.



However, at last Mondays hearing, the Accra High Court said it would not hear the application for trial in absentia until it determined another application seeking to hold the sureties who guaranteed Mrs Attionus bail responsible for her absence.



I will not determine the application for trial in absentia until the application for forfeiture has been determined, the presiding judge, Justice Afia Serwaa Asare-Botwe, said.



Mrs Attionu, who is on trial for allegedly causing financial loss of GH90 million to the state during her tenure as the Chief Executive Officer of MASLOC between 2013 and January 2017, has failed to show up for the trial after being granted permission by the court to travel to the USA for medical treatment.



She was expected to return to Ghana for the continuation of her trial on October 6 last year but is yet to show up.



In November last year, Justice Asare-Botwe expressed her displeasure about the situation and issued a bench warrant for the arrest of Ms Attionu to force her to attend the trial.



Afterwards, the prosecution filed an application for trial in absentia.



It then followed up with an application for forfeiture of recognisance, which is directed at the two sureties who executed Mrs Attionus GH5 million bail bond to show any justification why they should not be made to pay the bail sum due to her absence from the trial.



The two sureties for Mrs Attionu are Alex Mould and Gavivina Tamakloe.



The prosecution withdrew the first application for forfeiture and filed a fresh one.



Application for forfeiture



At last Mondays hearing, the prosecutor, Stella Ohena Appiah, a Principal State Attorney, told the court that the two sureties had been informed about the fresh application of forfeiture.



She, therefore, asked the court for a two-week adjournment to enable the prosecution to serve the sureties with the application.



The prosecutor also reminded the court about the application for Mrs Attionus trial in absentia.



Justice Asare-Botwe, however, told the prosecutor that the court would not hear the application for the trial in absentia until the application for forfeiture had been determined.



The hearing continues on May 24, 2022.



Not guilty



Mrs Attionu is on trial with Daniel Axim, a former Operations Manager of MASLOC, on 78 counts of wilfully causing financial loss to the state, stealing, and contravention of the public procurement act, among other charges.



The two have denied any wrongdoing and have pleaded not guilty to all the charges.



Prosecutions case



The prosecution has accused Mrs Attionu of engaging in some illegalities leading to the alleged stealing and financial loss.



For instance, it has accused Mrs Attionu of embezzling GH500,000 that was paid by a company which benefitted from MASLOC support in 2014.



It is also the case of the prosecution that in 2013 following a fire disaster at the Kantamanto Market, then-President John Mahama directed MASLOC to provide assistance of GH1.46 million to victims of the disaster but Mrs Attionu embezzled part of the money.

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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President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has hinted that a single airport will be constructed at a strategic location to serve both the Central and Western regions.



He said although the committee assigned to assess the siting of the airport for the two regions had not officially submitted its work, he had been informed that it would be situated strategically in the middle of the two regions.



President Akufo-Addo gave the hint when the chiefs and elders of the Oguaa Traditional Council paid a courtesy call on him at the Jubilee House in Accra on May 11, 2022.



He gave the assurance that the famous Philip Quaque Boys School in Cape Coast, the first primary school in the country, would be renovated for the learners and teachers to benefit more from the two-century-old school.



Chief



The Omanhen of Oguaa, Osabarimba Kwesi Atta II, expressed the gratitude of the chiefs and people of the traditional area to the government for the developmental projects and the celebration of national ceremonies such as the Independence Day and Farmers Day in the area.





We cant sit at home without coming here to express our gratitude to your government for the honour done us, and with this, we are asking for more of such honours, he added.



He reiterated the request of the people for the construction of an airport for the region and the rehabilitation of the Philip Quaque Boys School.



Osabarimba Kwesi Atta also used the opportunity to invite the President to this years Fetu Afahye which will be celebrated on Saturday, September 3, 2022.



Regional Minister



The Central Regional Minister, Justina Marigold Assan, speaking on behalf of the Oguaamanhen, said they were very appreciative of the numerous developmental projects and social interventions that had benefited the people of the region.



She mentioned the extension of electricity and water to many communities in the region and the resumption of rehabilitation works on the Komenda Sugar Factory as important government interventions that would impact the social and economic lives of the people of the region.













Source: graphiconline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The Vice-Chancellor of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Prof. Rita Akosua Dickson, has appealed to industries to partner with the university to commercialise some of its research works.



She said the university had, over the years, come out with innovations to solve problems facing society and brought relief to people.



However, she said industries were making good use of those researches and pleaded for more collaboration from the private sector to help bring those innovations out to the public.



Exhibition



Prof. Dickson made the appeal during the opening ceremony of a four-day science exhibition mounted by the university as part of activities marking the 70th-anniversary celebration of the KNUST.



The 70th-anniversary celebration is on the theme: KNUST: 70 years of global impact; a new age for a renewed focus.



As a science and technology university, she said the objective was to make an impact in society and of 70 years of our existence, that is what we have stood for.



What keeps us awake till now is that we tell our story on a consistent basis that the problems of society are our problems and we go through research to proffer solutions to the problems of humanity, she explained.



It is in this vein that she said there was the need for the industry to partner with the university such that, if we carry out these researches, we must ensure that the research or the outcome of these researches are impacting the people for whom the researches are carried out.



Appreciation



She expressed appreciation to the industries that offered their platforms to the students of the university to undertake their industrial attachment, saying, they help us to bring the practicality of the training of our students to bear on what we do and we want to say we are grateful to them and we welcome them to even help us to commercialise all these research outcomes.



They should come and take it up so that it will be very beneficial to society. In that sense, then, we will be satisfied and know that, indeed, our core mandate of impacting the lives of humanities, we are taking that course, she pleaded.



Planning committee chairman



The chairman of the 70th-anniversary planning committee of the university, Prof. William O. Ellis, said the exhibition was a platform for KNUST to showcase some of its works, innovations and creativity to its stakeholders and the rest of the Ghanaian community.





He said it would also open the university and its facility to the general public, allowing for a better appreciation of the strength of growth and what the university stands for.



According to him, KNUST is Ghana and Ghana is KNUST. This means that one cannot extricate the development of our dear country from or without KNUST.





Prof. Ellis said the science and technology exhibition is just a small aspect of what we do here as a university.



The exhibition was mounted by the colleges of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Health Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences, Art and Built Environment, Science and the Institute of Distance Learning.

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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Trading activities in the New Juaben Traditional Area have been banned from Friday May 13 to Monday May 16 as part of preparations towards the burial of the Omanhene, Daasebre Professor (Emeritus) Oti Boateng, and the Queenmother, Nana Yaa Daani II.



The ban affects all stores, stalls and markets except drug stores and pharmacies, food vendors and clinics, which have been classified as very essential.



Drinking bars will operate but will not be allowed to make noise on their premises in line with the ban on drumming and noise making which has been in force since April 18, this year to end on May 18, this year.



The two royals will be laid to rest on Monday.



The Gyaasehene of New Juaben Traditional Area, Nana Twumasi Dankwa, who is the Chairman of the Funeral Planning Committee, disclosed this to the Daily Graphic, yesterday.



He warned that security detail from the Yiadom-Hwedie Palace, traditionally referred to as abrafoo to wit executioners would be going round to enforce the bans.



The Gyaasehene said items and goods of defaulters would be confiscated and therefore urged the people of the New Juaben Traditional Area, which is essentially the Eastern Regional capital, Koforidua, and its environs, to cooperate with Juabenman to give the two illustrious traditional rulers a fitting funeral.



Nana Dankwa said the period between Saturday and Monday had been declared as Doteyie in line with Asante custom, to be used to observe all the burial and funeral rites.



Preparations



Huge portraits of the late Omanhene and the queenmother on giant billboards have been erected at vantage points of Koforidua, the traditional seat of New Juaben.



The back of the Yiadom-Hwedie Palace has been prepared as the venue for the burial and funeral service.



The venue and the forecourt of the palace have been cleaned and asphalted to accommodate the large number of people who will throng Koforidua for the burial and funeral rites.



The venue is a bigger place to accommodate the large number of mourners as the forecourt of the palace where the one-week rites were observed was too small to accommodate hundreds of mourners expected at the funeral.



A visit to the venue by the Daily Graphic indicated that canopies and seats had started arriving to be fixed and arranged for the funeral.

Trees and poles in Koforidua and its environs have been partly draped in black and red cloth.



Expected mourners



Nana Dankwa said numerous mourners from all parts of the country, especially Juaben, near Ejisu in the Ashanti Region, where the people of New Juaben migrated from, would be in Koforidua in their numbers to pay their last respects to the two royals.



The President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, will lead a government delegation to attend the funeral, which will have other politicians, as well as diplomats and other dignitaries, in attendance on Saturday.



Also expected, Nana Dankwa stated, would be Asantes and other indigenes from the diaspora.



On Sunday, religious bodies, the Eastern Region House of Chiefs, chiefs, Commonwealth Hall Old Students (Old Vandals), Freemasons and the general public will be expected to pay their last respects.



Asantehene to attend



The Funeral Planning Committee chairman added that the Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, and other chiefs from the Ashanti Region would be spearheading the burial of the two royals on Monday.



The Juabenhene and Chairman of the Council of State, Nana Otuo Siriboe, who is a younger brother of Daasebre Oti Boateng, has been presiding over the funeral arrangements.

With regard to the final funeral rites for the departed traditional rulers, the Gyasehene indicated that it could only be performed by a new Omanhene who would be enstooled.



Views



Some residents of Koforidua who shared their expectations with the Daily Graphic said they expected a fitting funeral for the two traditional rulers.



A trader, Akosua Larbi, and a dressmaker, Fuseini Zakari, were anxious of witnessing the funeral rites.



They described the late Omanhene and the queenmother as great leaders who did a lot for the people of New Juaben, particularly in the area of development.



Daasebre Oti Boateng passed away on August 10, last year, while Nana Yaa Daani died a couple of months ago.









Source: graphiconline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The Ghana National Petroleum Corporation, through its Foundation, on Monday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Michigan based Non-Profit Organization, Youth Development Corporation (YDC) USA in Saginaw Michigan.



The agreement, witnessed by the Mayor of Saginaw City Brenda Moore, YDC Board Chair, Gary L. Loster, and other dignitaries is aimed at collaborating to provide employable skills training, exchange programs to Ghanaian youths as well as sourcing for funding to support the various economic empowerment programmes designed and implemented by the GNPC Foundation.



In a brief remark, the Executive Director of the GNPC Foundation, Dr. Dominic Eduah, said the Foundation and the YDC share a similar vision to improve the livelihoods of young people by equipping them with requisite skilled training and expressed his delight in the opportunity to leverage on the expertise of YDC to support the youth of Ghana.



He reiterated GNPCs commitment to seeing through the terms of the agreement to ensure it yields its desired impact.



On his part, the Chief Executive and Founder of YDC-USA, Eric Eggleston, said his outfit s mission is to empower and assist underserved young people with the essential social, vocational, academic, and life skills necessary to navigate a positive pathway to self-sufficiency and community responsibility. This, according to him, is reflective of GNPCs work in building the capacity of the youth through technical and vocational training and thus, the appropriateness of the partnership.



YDC-USA is also partnering with 2 other Ghanaian State-Owned Agencies, the Ghana Digital Centers Limited and the National Service Scheme, which are involved in the development and implementation of various youth-centered programmes in Ghana.



This partnership is also expected to enhance YDCs quest to expand its operations in Africa with Ghana offering a stable, conducive environment for any developing economy.









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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Director of Communications at the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), William Boateng, says the state company is lacking funds for its day-to-day activities.



He was emphatic on NEAT FMs morning show 'Ghana Montie' that ECG is broke  after calling on state institutions owing the company to pay.



I have said this before," he reiterated after host Kwesi Aboagye seek a reconfirmation if indeed the Electricity Company of Ghana is out of funds.



Mr William Boateng was discussing a proposed 148% increment in tariff by the ECG.



The tariff proposal from the power distributor submitted to the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) is seeking an adjustment to cover the period from 2019.



ECG also proposed an average increase of 7.6% in tariff over the next four years to cover Distribution Service Charges (DSC).



However, the PURC has held a meeting with some stakeholders including the Mines and Energy Committee in Parliament, the Civil Society Organisations, the World Bank and USAID, the media and the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI) to put finality to the matter.

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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Member of Parliament(MP) for Bortianor-Ngleshie Amanfro, Sylvester Tetteh, has condemned the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) and Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) for demanding increments in tariffs.



The Electricity Company of Ghana is requesting 148% increase in utility prices while Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) also asks for 334% increase in water tariffs.



According to ECG, this demand is necessary due to cost of investments projects they are undertaking in order to be more efficient and render quality service, and on the part of Ghana Water Company, the cost of water production has gone high, hence the need for the over 300% increment.



Responding to the utility providers during a panel discussion programme 'Kokrokoo' on Peace FM, Sylvester Tetteh was exceptionally alarmed by their proposals.



The Parliamentarian noted that ECG and GWCL's demands on grounds that the consumers pay more for quality service has over the years turned out to be a mirage.



He stated that, "since the days of former President JJ Rawlings, any time they want to increase utility, they come under the guise of 'give us more money to give you quality service'. That has been the problem . . . what I've seen . . . even though if data backs it, they will start demanding high percentage".



To him, the focus of the companies should be on stopping the excess waste in order to save cost but not overcharging Ghanaians on utilities.



"We all know that, in energy production, there is a percentage of wastage that is acceptable. We have never come close to that acceptable percentage of wastage in our country but nobody is held responsible for that wastage - excess wastage - in our system but Ghanaians are made to pay for it," he said.



Sylvester Tetteh found the increments very absurd.



"Today, they tell us they want 148 percent. Ghana Water Company also says they want 300 percent. Over 300 percent; it's absurd!", he exclaimed.



He called on the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) not to entertain such demands, emphasizing "we cannot continue to pay for their inefficiencies. So, they should come clean and I hope it is not one of their tricks to get the people of Ghana coerced to pay".





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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Dr. Benjamin Otchere-Ankrah, a Central University Lecturer, has rained praises on the taxi driver who went viral on Wednesday for returning missing money to its owner.



The taxi driver, Kwesi Ackoh, had found the money lying in his car and quickly located a trader who boarded the taxi to give back her money.



The sum of GHc 8,400 was safely delivered into the hands of the trader who couldn't help but to tearfully bless the driver as the missing money had caused her to lose sleep the eve of the taxi driver's kind gesture.



Following a viral video that showed the driver's selfless act, he has been splashed with gifts and money from the public.



Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia donated an amount of GHc 20,000 to him while Chief Executive Officer of Salt Media, Charles Ohene Frimpong and musician Kidi also gifted the driver GHc 7,800 and GHc 5,000 respectively.



More gifts have been trickling in for the taxi driver over his godly act.



Touching on this incident, Dr. Otchere-Ankrah stressed the driver well deserves the public magnanimity towards him noting his act has proven that indeed "good people still exist".



He urged all Ghanaians to learn lessons from him.



One lesson learned, as Dr. Otchere-Ankrah commended the driver on Peace FM's "Kokrokoo" programme, is that people should be kind and also not to take things that don't belong to them.



"There are still good people in the world...I'm much encouraged that we shouldn't be discouraged; good people still exist," he emphasized.





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 Abossey Okai Spare Parts Dealers Association has reiterated that majority of its members are in support of the plan by the Greater Accra Regional Coordinating Council to relocate them to Afienya.



This is contrary to the position by a group describing itself as the National Concerned Spare Parts Dealers Association who say they will resist any attempt by the government to relocate them to Afienya.



At a press briefing in Accra Thursday [May 12, 2022], the Co-chairman of the Abossey Okai Spare Parts Association, Clement Boateng, said they will continue to pursue the project to its logical conclusion and want the public to know that the executives are not seeking their selfish interest as speculated by the group but to seek the interest and welfare of its members.



We the Abossey Okai Spare Parts Dealers Association would like to set the records straight by responding to the press conference held last Tuesday 10th May, 2022 by the so-called "National Concerned Spare Parts Dealers Association" and let the public know the true state of affairs regarding the relocation of our business to a more convenient location, he noted.



He explained that the issue of relocation has been on the drawing board for over 30 years now as their predecessors had all appealed to successive governments to relocate them.



He said the current Executives decided to continue putting the request to all the aspiring presidential candidates during the tour in the run up to the 2020

general elections.



He noted that on assumption of office as the Regional Minister, Henry Quartey, had a meeting with them and Kokompe people and pledged the governments support by putting up an ultra-modern West Africa automotive hub which will include shops, workshops, vehicle sales centres, financial institutions, one bedroom

facility, hospital, police station, supermarkets, a railway line to transport goods from Tema to the site, stadium, schools, restaurants and custom bonded

warehouse.



The proposed areas have been Afienya, Dawenya, Pokuase and beyond. But the Regional Minister made us understand that the available land now is at Afienya.



The message was conveyed to our members at one of the general meetings to solicit their views on the project. There was an overwhelming

support from our members. However, soon after the meetings, the shop owners started to express their

displeasure about the project. We have had several meetings with them and have assured them that nobody is going to be forcefully ejected from here. But they seem not to be satisfied and have decided to kick against the project, he said.









Source: graphiconline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The Director-General of the National Development Policy Commission (NDPC), Dr. Kodjo Esseim Mensah-Abrampa has said Ghana is making much better progress in attaining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations.



According to him, the country can boast of making huge strides in areas including health, access to water, access to electricity, and sanitation.



He said, "in terms of the strides, Ghana is doing very well and even without congratulating us, other countries are appreciating us in many ways"



He made this known at the Ghanas 2022 Voluntary National Review consultation with the youth groups in Accra with the view of accelerating the implementation of the 2030 Agenda.



Ghana is among 45 countries that will present their National experiences on the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the High-level Political Forum (HLPF) under the auspices of the United Nations Economic and Social Council in July this year.



A draft report has been prepared after a series of consultations and meetings with various stakeholders.



This is a consultative meeting by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Implementation Coordination Committee (ICC) and the National Development Planning Commission with its Development Partners to review the draft report and build consensus on innovative actions for the attainment of the SDGs.



The SDG National Coordinator at the National Development Planning Commission, NDPC, Dr. Richard Osei Bofah, said Ghana is doing well, but there is more room for improvement.





Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The Nigerian military has launched a search and rescue operation for a battalion commander. He went missing after a security convoy he was leading was ambushed by gunmen in the state of Taraba.



The authorities say at least six soldiers, one anti-riot police officer and six gunmen were killed during clashes that followed the ambush on Tuesday.



The convoy came under gunfire as they travelled to the Takum area to contain a communal conflict between farmers and nomadic herders, according to the authorities.



The military commander leading the security forces then went missing during the clashes.



There are fears he might have been captured by the gunmen.



In a statement, a spokesperson for the Nigerian military says a search for the missing officer has begun.



Its not yet clear who carried out the attack. But armed gangs kidnapping people for ransom operate in the region.



The extremist group Islamic State West Africa Province had said it carried out a deadly bomb attack last month in Taraba - a state the militants had previously spared in their years of armed insurgency in northern Nigeria.







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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A Development Economist, Nicholas Issaka Gbana, has highlighted the need for the government to expand the economy as a matter of urgency.



That, he said, would help absorb and keep pace with the increasing number of graduates being produced by tertiary institutions.



Mr Gbana was delivering a lecture on the topic: The unemployment crisis: Dimensions and solutions," at the second governance dialogue series of the Eagles Forum, a think tank in Accra last Tuesday.



Mr Gbana also suggested the need for the government to pursue what he described as a strong, inclusive and sustainable economic growth agenda.



That, he said, would enable the government to address the low and inconsistent economic growth recorded over the years.



Issues such as low innovations, low structural economic change and a stagnated manufacturing sector must also be paid attention to.



Another way out of the unemployment predicament, the economist said, was for the government to help stimulate demand for made-in-Ghana products".



He further called for partnership between the government and civil society organisations to ensure effective implementation and delivery of programmes for better outcomes.



Mr Gbana, however, advised against the politicisation of development interventions aimed at addressing youth unemployment.



Statistics



The economist also advocated that the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) be provided with the necessary resources to enable it to gather quality data to publish monthly reports on the state of the country's unemployment rate.



On unemployment matters, we need data. We don't have to wait for population census every 10 years or on Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS) every four or five years to know what is happening on the labour front, he said.



According to Mr Gbana, the Eagles Forum Election 2020 survey, the Centre for Democratic Development (CDD) Ghana post-election survey, and the GLSS 7 of 2017, all pointed to the fact that unemployment was the topmost issue on the minds of citizens.



The GSS 2021 Population Housing Census showed that 33 per cent of the youth between the ages of 15 and 24 and older were unemployed, he said.



The report also showed that 54 per cent of the unemployed were female while 46 per cent were male.



The development economist has 30 years of experience in his field of work.





Mr Gbana is currently the Global Lead for Supportive Business Ecosystems at Solidaridad, an international development organisation.



He has also led the design and implementation of economic growth programmes in West Africa that created jobs, increased productivity and incomes, and enhanced decent work.



Mr Gbana is also an executive member of the Eagles Forum. The forum is a movement that galvanises progressive Ghanaian professionals worldwide to share in their social democratic ideologies.



Low confidence of women



The Chief Executive Officer of DeZigner Foods and Spices, an agro-processing company, Grace Twumasi, said one of the major reasons for the high female unemployment rate was low confidence.



She said most job-seeking women did not like applying for jobs they wanted because they felt they did not meet all the criteria.



Men apply for jobs even if they only have 50 per cent of what is required while women always want to have a 100 per cent requirement before seeking for the jobs they want, Ms Twumasi observed.



The Country Lead for FootPrince Bridge International, an entrepreneurial development NGO, Baba Adongo, also stressed the need for proper targeting in the implementation of policies.









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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President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has stated that he is encouraged by the offer of partnership by the Mobile Money Agents Association of Ghana (MAAG) to ensure that the electronic transactions levy (E-Levy) is successfully administered.



He said it was appropriate that direct stakeholders such as the association voiced their concerns as they did initially and those concerns were taken into account by the government so that when the law was finally shaped, it was meaningful for the state and the private sector.



President Akufo-Addo stated this when the National Executive of the 300,000-member MAAG paid a courtesy call on him at the Jubilee House in Accra.



I welcome very much this offer of partnership, the idea of an alliance to work together to see how best the new tax can be implemented and developed, President Akufo-Addo noted.



Regarding the request by the association for some of its members to be on the boards of other state institutions and bodies, the President said although most of such boards were regulatory in nature and thus could not have the very people they regulated as board members, the government would see how best it could meet them half way.



The more cooperation we have in the running of the economy, between the government and the private sector, the better it is for the economy and for the people of this country, he assured.



Security



President Akufo-Addo said the government would find effective ways of responding rigorously to the criminal syndicates that were attacking the mobile money operators because if they were allowed to go ahead it would be a major defeat for the government and Ghanaians in general.



He described as unacceptable the attacks on mobile money operators by criminal elements, describing the situation as detrimental to the growth of such legitimate market.



I want to assure you whatever can be done as a state to create an atmosphere of peace and stability for you to be able to do your work, he said.



President Akufo-Addo assured the executive of the association that contacts would be made with them, especially the security agencies, so that together they would work out effective ways of dealing with criminal interferences.



Association



The President of the association, Dela Abotsi, expressed worry that since the introduction of mobile money transfer over a decade a ago, their rate had remained the same and never increased and asked the President to intervene, especially in instances when the vendors were attacked even to death, the telcos did not offer any assistance.



He gave instances where some of their members who were breadwinners for their families had been attacked and killed by armed robbers and there had been no assistance from any quarters.



The Secretary of the Association, Evans Otumfuo, commended the government for the digitisation drive that had culminated in the introduction of the Mobile Money Interoperability which had impacted positively on users of MoMo and earned Ghana the first African country to achieve such a feat.



He also mentioned the introduction of a QR-CODE payment system, the electronic renewal of the NHIS, among others which were all heavily dependent on mobile money and had boosted their businesses.



He also mentioned the recent national roaming system, the SIM card registration which would eliminate identity theft and fraud and added that As business people, we have a soft spot for your policies that directly or indirectly affect our operations spheres.



Despite our earlier resistance to E-Levy, we also understand that government will have to take drastic measures in drastic times, Mr Otumfuo said, and added that the E-Levy had now been passed into law and all citizens must obey, so we are here as allies and not opposing forces.



He commended the government for taking bold steps to reduce the electronic transactions levy from the initial 1.75 per cent to 1.5 per cent and the tall list of exemptions provided by the E-Levy.



Mr Otumfuo indicated that the existence of this union meant that all the over 300,000 Mobile Money agents across the country were under one umbrella to properly position themselves with policymakers, regulators, telecommunication networks and the government.



The association has a database of all our members and as such, each member has a unique 7-digit number serving as a membership ID, he added.









Source: graphiconline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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NIGERIA: A female student of the Shehu Shagari College of Education (SSCOE) Sokoto simply identified as Deborah was allegedly beaten and burnt to death on allegations of blasphemy today Thursday, May 12.



Deborah, who is said to be residing with her parents in Old Airport Road area of Sokoto metropolis, was accused of insulting Prophet Muhammad (SAW), during a hot argument with her colleagues in school.



''She was having an argument with some of her schoolmates over their ongoing examination and when she was asked how she managed to pass her exams, she said it was Jesus. She was asked to withdraw the statement and apologise which she refused.



The school security intervened, and took her to their post but they were overpowered by students after which she was killed in the process. After killing her, her body was burnt on the school premises''a source said.



Addressing newsmen at Government House in Sokoto, the Commissioner of Information, Isah Bajini Galadanchi, said the state government has ordered security agencies to investigate the incident to ascertain its remote causes. It also ordered the immediate closure of the college.



It has come to the notice of Sokoto State Government, the unfortunate incident that took place at the Shehu Shagari College of Education (SSCOE) Sokoto in which a Student of the College, lost her life.



The Government has ordered the immediate closure of the College.



Already, the State Governor, Rt Hon. Aminu Waziri Tambuwal has directed the Ministry of Higher Education, and relevant Security agencies in the State to commence investigations into the remote and immediate causes of the incident and report back to the Government.



Meanwhile, Governor Ammu Waziri Tambuwal has called on the people of the State to remain calm and maintain peace, as the Government would take appropriate actions on the findings of the investigations by the relevant authority Galadanchi said.<blockquote class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-captioned data-instgrm-permalink="https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cdea2CfIzlT/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading" data-instgrm-version="14" style=" background:#FFF; border:0; border-radius:3px; box-shadow:0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width:540px; min-width:326px; padding:0; width:99.375%; width:-webkit-calc(100% - 2px); width:calc(100% - 2px);"><div style="padding:16px;"> <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cdea2CfIzlT/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading" style=" background:#FFFFFF; line-height:0; padding:0 0; text-align:center; text-decoration:none; width:100%;" target="_blank"> <div style=" display: flex; flex-direction: row; align-items: center;"> <div style="background-color: #F4F4F4; border-radius: 50%; flex-grow: 0; height: 40px; margin-right: 14px; width: 40px;"></div> <div style="display: flex; flex-direction: column; flex-grow: 1; justify-content: center;"> <div style=" background-color: #F4F4F4; border-radius: 4px; flex-grow: 0; height: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px; width: 100px;"></div> <div style=" background-color: #F4F4F4; border-radius: 4px; flex-grow: 0; height: 14px; width: 60px;"></div></div></div><div style="padding: 19% 0;"></div> <div style="display:block; height:50px; margin:0 auto 12px; width:50px;"><svg width="50px" height="50px" viewBox="0 0 60 60" version="1.1" xmlns="https://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><g stroke="none" stroke-width="1" fill="none" fill-rule="evenodd"><g transform="translate(-511.000000, -20.000000)" fill="#000000"><g><path d="M556.869,30.41 C554.814,30.41 553.148,32.076 553.148,34.131 C553.148,36.186 554.814,37.852 556.869,37.852 C558.924,37.852 560.59,36.186 560.59,34.131 C560.59,32.076 558.924,30.41 556.869,30.41 M541,60.657 C535.114,60.657 530.342,55.887 530.342,50 C530.342,44.114 535.114,39.342 541,39.342 C546.887,39.342 551.658,44.114 551.658,50 C551.658,55.887 546.887,60.657 541,60.657 M541,33.886 C532.1,33.886 524.886,41.1 524.886,50 C524.886,58.899 532.1,66.113 541,66.113 C549.9,66.113 557.115,58.899 557.115,50 C557.115,41.1 549.9,33.886 541,33.886 M565.378,62.101 C565.244,65.022 564.756,66.606 564.346,67.663 C563.803,69.06 563.154,70.057 562.106,71.106 C561.058,72.155 560.06,72.803 558.662,73.347 C557.607,73.757 556.021,74.244 553.102,74.378 C549.944,74.521 548.997,74.552 541,74.552 C533.003,74.552 532.056,74.521 528.898,74.378 C525.979,74.244 524.393,73.757 523.338,73.347 C521.94,72.803 520.942,72.155 519.894,71.106 C518.846,70.057 518.197,69.06 517.654,67.663 C517.244,66.606 516.755,65.022 516.623,62.101 C516.479,58.943 516.448,57.996 516.448,50 C516.448,42.003 516.479,41.056 516.623,37.899 C516.755,34.978 517.244,33.391 517.654,32.338 C518.197,30.938 518.846,29.942 519.894,28.894 C520.942,27.846 521.94,27.196 523.338,26.654 C524.393,26.244 525.979,25.756 528.898,25.623 C532.057,25.479 533.004,25.448 541,25.448 C548.997,25.448 549.943,25.479 553.102,25.623 C556.021,25.756 557.607,26.244 558.662,26.654 C560.06,27.196 561.058,27.846 562.106,28.894 C563.154,29.942 563.803,30.938 564.346,32.338 C564.756,33.391 565.244,34.978 565.378,37.899 C565.522,41.056 565.552,42.003 565.552,50 C565.552,57.996 565.522,58.943 565.378,62.101 M570.82,37.631 C570.674,34.438 570.167,32.258 569.425,30.349 C568.659,28.377 567.633,26.702 565.965,25.035 C564.297,23.368 562.623,22.342 560.652,21.575 C558.743,20.834 556.562,20.326 553.369,20.18 C550.169,20.033 549.148,20 541,20 C532.853,20 531.831,20.033 528.631,20.18 C525.438,20.326 523.257,20.834 521.349,21.575 C519.376,22.342 517.703,23.368 516.035,25.035 C514.368,26.702 513.342,28.377 512.574,30.349 C511.834,32.258 511.326,34.438 511.181,37.631 C511.035,40.831 511,41.851 511,50 C511,58.147 511.035,59.17 511.181,62.369 C511.326,65.562 511.834,67.743 512.574,69.651 C513.342,71.625 514.368,73.296 516.035,74.965 C517.703,76.634 519.376,77.658 521.349,78.425 C523.257,79.167 525.438,79.673 528.631,79.82 C531.831,79.965 532.853,80.001 541,80.001 C549.148,80.001 550.169,79.965 553.369,79.82 C556.562,79.673 558.743,79.167 560.652,78.425 C562.623,77.658 564.297,76.634 565.965,74.965 C567.633,73.296 568.659,71.625 569.425,69.651 C570.167,67.743 570.674,65.562 570.82,62.369 C570.966,59.17 571,58.147 571,50 C571,41.851 570.966,40.831 570.82,37.631"></path></g></g></g></svg></div><div style="padding-top: 8px;"> <div style=" color:#3897f0; 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overflow:hidden; padding:8px 0 7px; text-align:center; text-overflow:ellipsis; white-space:nowrap;"><a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cdea2CfIzlT/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading" style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px; text-decoration:none;" target="_blank">A post shared by GossipMillNaija (@gossipmilltv)</a></p></div></blockquote> <script async src="//www.instagram.com/embed.js"></script>









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Alphabet (GOOGL.O) unit Google has signed deals to pay more than 300 publishers in Germany, France and four other EU countries for their news and will roll out a tool to make it easier for others to sign up too, the company told Reuters.



The move to be announced publicly later on Wednesday followed the adoption of landmark EU copyright rules three years ago that require Google and other online platforms to pay musicians, performers, authors, news publishers and journalists for using their work.



News publishers, among Google's fiercest critics, have long urged governments to ensure online platforms pay fair remuneration for their content. Australia last year made such payments mandatory while Canada introduced similar legislation last month. read more



"So far, we have agreements which cover more than 300 national, local and specialist news publications in Germany, Hungary, France, Austria, the Netherlands and Ireland, with many more discussions ongoing," Sulina Connal, director for news and publishing partnerships, said in blogpost seen by Reuters and expected to be published later on Wednesday. The blog did not say how much publishers were being paid.



Two-thirds of this group are German publishers including Der Spiegel, Die Zeit and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.



"We are now announcing the launch of a new tool to make offers to thousands more news publishers, starting in Germany and Hungary, and rolling out to other EU countries over the coming months," Connal said in the blogpost.



The tool offers publishers an extended news preview agreement that allows Google to show snippets and thumbnails for a licensing fee.

Source: REUTERS









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Vice President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, has made fun of the General Secretary of the opposition National Democracy Congress (NDC), Johnson Asiedu Nketia.



According to the Vice President, the NDCs chief scribe must return to the University of Ghana Business School, for remedials.



Dr Bawumia made this comment, while delivering an address at the launch of the 60th Anniversary Celebration of the University of Ghana Business School on Wednesday, May 11.



Ladies and gentlemen, it is a great pleasure to be here today, representing the President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo at this major celebration. I am here as one of you, having been an academic myself, including teaching at a business school, in my previous life.



I share in your joy, because sixty years of continuous operation that has produced prominent people in Ghana and the world of business is not a small feat. I think you should be very proud of yourselves for being trailblazers of this institution.



It was like a who is who in Ghana. Even Asiedu Nketiah was part of it. But in his case, Dean, we may have to let him come back for remedial classes, he said.



The Vice President also used the occasion to congratulate the School for its strides over the years, despite the difficulties that confront it, due to the resource inadequacy, coupled with the high expectations of stakeholders.



He added that, the educational terrain is also fast becoming turbulent, and I believe there is the need for the premier business school in Ghana, to show leadership in this endeavour of providing management education.



I genuinely believe that the University of Ghana Business School has the wherewithal to develop the necessary flair for setting the pace.

Source: myjoyonline.com









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General Secretary of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Johnson Asiedu, has disclosed that former Presiding Bishop of the Obuasi Diocese of the Methodist Church Ghana, Rev. Bosomtwe Ayensu had a 'mental illness' making him not qualified to become the Chaplain General of the Ghana Police Service some years back.



"First of all those he was competing with for the post were ahead of him in terms of ranking, secondly he had medical records of a slight mental illness . . . I have evidence to that, and you know hospitals keep medical records for about 10 years and scrap it otherwise you could have crosschecked at the Police Hospital . . . that is why they didn't give him that position. So he wanted Prof Mills to use political power to help him and the late Mills didn't do it . . ." he told Kwame Nkrumah, adding that due to this he angrily resigned from the Police Service.



According to him, the NDC know the history of Bishop Bosomtwe Ayensu.



". . the NDC and the Methodist Church do not have any problem, but rather we have a problem with Bishop Ayensu as a human being, we will not allow him to let us have issues with the church . . . henceforth we all know that he is an NPP member and doing the work of the party . . " he explained.



Speaking on Okay FM's Ade Akye Abia programme, he explained that Rev. Bosomtwe Ayensu has a longstanding hatred for the National Democratic Congress ever since he was denied that position.



Commending the Methodist Church Ghana for distancing itself from the conduct of one of its own, Asiedu Nketia explained that despite the litany of vitriolic attacks launched by him against the party and some of its leading functionaries, it is a fact that several leaders of the NDC have been and are still devout members of the Methodist Church.



Notably, President John Evans Atta Mills and Vice President Kwesi Amissah-Arthur, both of blessed memory were members of the Methodist Church in good standing until their passing.



Similarly, Prof. Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang, the immediate-past Running Mate to the Flagbearer of the NDC in the 2020 General Election is also a member of the Methodist Church, he revealed.



Background



Rev Bosomtwe Ayensu, launched an unprovoked attack on former President John Dramani Mahama, over his recent pledge to ensure the immediate repeal of the E-levy law when the NDC assumes the reins of government.



Watch video below





Source: Isaac Kwame Owusu/Peacefmonline/[email protected]









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Sylvester Tetteh, Member of Parliament(MP) for Bortianor-Ngleshie Amanfro, has taken a swipe at Ex-President John Dramani Mahama and the National Democratic Congress on the party members' attacks on Methodist Bishop, Rt. Rev. Bosomtwe Ayensu.



The Methodist Bishop has incurred the wrath of the opposition after shooting a reply to the Ex-President John Mahama's promise to repeal the E-Levy implemented by government.



Background



Delivering a public lecture on the theme "Ghana at a Crossroads" on Monday, May 2, Mr. Mahama said "a new National Democratic Congress government, God willing and with the votes of the sovereign people of Ghana  in 2025  will repeal the E-Levy Act".



He argued that "even as this government remains fixated with taxing their way out of economic mismanagement, the Akufo-Addo government has been wasteful. They have failed to demonstrate prudence in public financial management. The people of Ghana cannot be called upon to pay more taxes only for the accruing money belonging to the people of Ghana, to be dubiously and wastefully shared among family and friends through various fraudulent procurement practices".



But Rt. Rev. Ayensu dissented to the views of the former President saying "a leading opposition party says this government has been borrowing to fund projects. But it [the government] has been strategic this time to introduce this homegrown policy to build our nation. So if someone says he will repeal this law when he wins power then such a person will not even win power to abort it".



If the E-levy is a good policy why will you abolish it? Such people cant even do it because history keeps guiding us. Such comments usually end up as a political talk and deceit, he stated.



NDC Rebukes Methodist Bishop



The NDC has described the Bishop as "NPP propagandist" and a "vile" human being.



"He is a vile, unintelligent NPP propagandist parading in cassock...no rational man of God will do this...The NDC as a responsible opposition has every right to state our position if we feel certain policies of the government will unnecessarily burden Ghanaians and also provide alternative solution to that. If you think or feel otherwise, you can equally comment without attacking or making disparaging comments about the person of the former president HE John Dramani Mahama," the National Communications Officer of the NDC, Sammy Gyamfi, snapped.



Methodist Bishop Is Right



Addressing the issue on Peace FM's "Kokrokoo", Hon. Sylvester Tetteh vehemently condemned the verbal attacks on the Bishop stating what he said is truth.



He wondered why the Bishop would attract an outrage because, to him, he was right in his comments.



Defending the Bishop, the MP noted that the former President's track record proves he isn't trustworthy.



He alluded to some promises Mr. Mahama made while in government but failed to accomplish them and concluded that "a baby even doesn't believe him (Mahama)...credibility, he lacks it. So, the Methodist Bishop is right to say that indeed he won't win power to repeal it".



He advised Ghanaians against trusting Mr. Mahama stressing "you trust him at your own risk".





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 race for the New Patriotic Party (NPP) National Executive positions is getting steamer and steamer as indicated by data and statistics surfacing.



In a recent survey titled; Breaking the 8: An Analysis of NPPs Intra Party Democracy, Politics and Possible Impact on Winning Ghanas 2024 General Election.



Akwasi Osei Agyei has been revealed fore runner in the NPP National Chairmanship Race.



Results from the research indicate a possible replacement of the current crop of leadership with new faces who can propel the party into electoral victory, starting with the National Chairman.



Thirty Seven percent (37%) of respondents settled on Akwasi Osei Agyei, naming him their preferred candidate to fill the shoes of the incumbent NPP chairman, Freddie Blay.



About 21% of respondents settled on Stephen Ayensu Ntim; 17% mentioned Prof. Christopher Ameyaw Ekumfi; 15% settled on Asamoah Boateng; 7% went for Ayikoi Otoo whiles about 3% of respondents mentioned they are yet to choose any of the candidates above after the data was analyzed.



May 10, 2022 Explaining their choice of Akwasi Osei Agyei as the next Chair of the party, respondents alluded to emerald of factors including accessibility of Akwasi Osei Agyei, and the fact that he has gone through the mill as a former Member of Parliament, former Foreign Affairs Minister amongst his numerous portfolios.



Respondents contend that Akwasi Osei Agyei is unaligned and would stand the best of positions to be a fair adjudicator of matters that are brought before the National Executives and unite the NPP if voted for. Some also argue that his maturity and background as a diplomat with international clout will help build the partys image.



As a founding member of the party, respondents believe he has the good of the party at heart and will go the extra  mile to engender respect and cooperation from party grassroots and executives at the national, regional, constituency and polling station levels. The full report details the reasons why respondents settled on the other respective contenders.



For the position of General Secretary, respondents demanded John Boadu be replaced by Frederick Opare Ansah.

Persons who have declared their intent, either officially or unofficially, to contest for the position include John Boadu, who is the substantive General Secretary of the party; Musah Superior  former Mayor for Tamale and currently a deputy CEO of the Forestry Commission, Justin Kodua  CEO of Youth Employment Agency, and Frederick Opare Ansah  a former MP for Suhum Constituency in the Eastern Region.



Most respondents shared that the current General Secretary of the party is not accessible and has a tainted reputation because of allegations of being involved in illegal small scale mining which is dealing a huge blow to the fortunes of the party.



May 10, 2022 Some of the respondents aver the incumbent general secretary will not be able to deliver victory for the party in the 2024 elections given his 2020 electoral record of hanging parliament  among others.



Frederick Opare Ansah, respondents suggest, has an advantage by virtue of being a former Member of Parliament. Respondents believe that he can leverage on his expertise and experience to better project the party in a good light. His maturity was also a factor for their selection of him.



38% shared that it is time for the new face of Opare Ansah to take the mantle of party General Secretary whilst 29% of respondents settled for Justin Frimpong Kodua.



John Boadu came in third with about 17% of respondent saying he will be a candidate of their choice; close by was Musah Superior with about 10% of respondents saying he will be a candidate of their choice. About 6% of respondents indicated they were still thinking about voting for any of the prospective candidates listed.



For the National Organizer position, however, respondents were starkly split between Nana Boakye, popularly known as Nana B, who is already a national officer serving as a National Youth Organizer of the party, Nii Kwartei Titus Glover, a former Member of Parliament for Tema East Constituency in the Greater Accra Region. About 41% of respondents believe that Nana Boakye has the qualities to be the National Organizer of the party and could help deliver the much needed victory for the party given his background as a Youth Organizer. They contend his responsibilities, if voted for as the National Organizer, will not be dissimilar to the ones he currently executes. They say he is a trusted pair of hands.



Contrary to this opinion, about 40% of respondents also believe, Nii Kwartei Titus Glover, will bring a fresh feel to organizing members and nonmembers alike to deliver victory for the party leveraging on his maturity and experience as a former MP.



Meanwhile, 15% of respondents, consider Owusu Fordjour, a former regional youth organizer of the party, as s viable candidate who can equally perform creditably well.



About 4% of respondents are yet to decide on who should lead the party as national organizer.



These findings are indicative but are not predictive of likely changes in the leadership front of the party in the upcoming national elections.



The New Patriotic Party is keen on breaking the jinx of the two term governance system. Although the mantra of breaking the eight has gained notoriety, some members of the party still think winning the 2024 elections will come not just sloganeering but rather an intricate mix of leveraging on the achievements of the current government, giving new faces the opportunity to serve with their expertise and above all ensuring there is unity, which clearly will be the main duty or responsibility of elected national executives.



Some members of the party contend the current crop of leadership has outlived its purpose and thus must be replaced with new ones that can propel the party into electoral victory. From this preliminary study, it could be deduced that supporters want a unifier who can build the party from ground up. Per the analysis of this study, members are clamoring for a leader who is a unifier and unaligned to the high powers within the party to lead the party into the 2024 elections.



The consolidation of intra-party democracy is key to sustaining the momentum of political parties in holding on to power and/or wrestling power from political opponents. It also holds true that political party leadership plays an integral role in sustaining internal democratic structures and extending them to interparty democracy and governance.



In due course, research findings of the other Executive positions will be released. Berkeley Kwadwo Obotuo (Lead Researcher) Richmond Owusu Danquah (Assistant Researcher) Joel Acheampong (Analyst)













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 world is going digital and those who master the digital way of doing things are surely ahead. Mark Zuckerberg is one of the richest people in the world due to his brainchild, Facebook, and he is only 33 years old.



Some people are also building on the already established social media platforms to bring about the change they wish to see. Kwame Motion is a digital Marketer and blogger with huge following on social media platforms.



His website, Sarkcessfulvision.net is currently ranked among the most visited websites in Ghana which added him up to the list of top 50 Bloggers In Ghana by Avance Media.





Neldrick Kwame Sackey comes from Yamoransa in the Central Region of Ghana. He was born to Mr. Kwame Sackey and Gifty Biney. He grew up in a family of three (3) children. He has two sisters and he happens to be the last born. He had his basic education at St. Augustines School at Obuasi and later left to Cambridge International School and went on to Our Lady Of Grace Senior High School a catholic private school located at Mamponteng Ashanti. He is currently perusing his first degree in Computer Management at the University Of Professional Studies, Accra.





Kwame Motion is currently not married but is engaged to be married. He is a celebrity and lifestyle blogger, owner and publisher of www.kwamemotion.com & Sarkcessfulvision.net



Growing up, Kwame Motion had a lot in mind with respect to what he wanted to become in future.



I wanted to be many things at different stages in my life; I went through the phase of wanting to be a musician or comedian to the phase of wanting to be a doctor. I went to OLAG SHS to Persue GENRAL ART WITH ELECTIVE IT which changed my interest when I got to the University to IT MANAGEMENT, which is ultimately what I feel like doing all the time , he revealed.





He went on to explain to us why he couldnt Offer General Science at SHS



I think I didnt become a doctor because I lost interest in It, whiles my passion for Computing increases and also because of the nature of those subjects. So when I had the chance to attend OLAG SHS I decided to offer ELECTIVE IT becuase they had the facilities which facilitated the a conducive teaching and learning.





Currently, through his website and social media pages, Kwame Motion believes he is doing more than enough as he provides fun, entertaining and informative content to make people happy.



A lot of people may see that as trivial but informing people, putting a smile on someones face etc means a hell lot to me. It comes with joy and satisfaction, he said.





Many blogs are started everyday across the globe but few are able to remain active after its first year. It takes an unending dedication to maintain a blog and keep it active but it all starts from the beginning. The question, Why tends to explain the reason some have quit and others are still sticking on.

I think I started doing it by chance and when it started and I was getting good feedback, it motivated me to do more, he revealed.





In 2021 Kwame Motion became the Youngest Blogger to be Ranked among the Top 50 bloggers in Ghana, he adjourned as Number 16 for the first time a new add up made it to the top 20.





Advice for other young bloggers



The young blogger had some advice for other young people who want to follow in his footsteps. My advice is that they should look for their passion and work it at. If they want to be bloggers, they should cover subjects that they are passionate about. Whether it is environment, business, healthcare or community development. A good blogger is one who is passionate about what he writes about and not the money or status that can come with it.

Source: 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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Diners enjoy lunch on the patio of The Cellar Wine Bar and Kitchen in downtown Penticton. The property is half-owned by the citys mayor, who has taken legal action against the other owners
Dr. Kieran Moore, Ontario's Chief Medical Officer of Health speaks at a press conference, at Queens Park in Toronto on Monday, April 11, 2022. COVID-19 indicators are heading in the right direction ahead of what looks to be a "calm summer," though he is concerned about BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette
Ontario Liberal Leader Steven Del Duca speaks to journalists following an announcement in Etobicoke, Ont., on Wednesday, May 11, 2022. Ontario's main party leaders are making stops across southern Ontario today as they campaign for votes.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young
A Jackson man was arrested Wednesday in connection to a kidnapping incident and attempted arson on Goodman Road.

Stephen Christopher Wright, 51, is charged with kidnapping, arson, assault and battery of a high and aggravated nature, reckless driving, careless or negligent driving, two counts of driving under suspension, two counts of uninsured motor vehicle fee violation, possession of marijuana, two counts of failure to register a vehicle and operating a vehicle in an unsafe mechanical condition.

Around 11:30 p.m. Wednesday night, 21 deputies with the Aiken County Sheriff's Office responded to the 300 block of Goodman Road in Jackson in reference to an assault.

When deputies arrived, the victim was "distraught and covered in gasoline," according to an incident report obtained from the sheriff's office.

The victim told police the suspect was in her home when she arrived and a verbal argument ensued. The suspect left the home and returned with a gas can and poured it on her and inside the living room, according to the report.

The suspect "threaten[ed] to kill her and burn the house down" before assaulting the victim multiple times, according to police.

A witness who was doing yard work entered the house to help the victim and the suspect fled the scene, according to the report.

The Aiken County Sheriff's Office Bloodhound Tracking Team was called in and the suspect was later arrested and booked into the Aiken County detention center.

Prior criminal record

Wright has a criminal record, according to South Carolina Law Enforcement Division records.

In 1988, Wright was charged with simple assault and battery and disturbing schools.

In December 2021, Wright was charged with failure to stop for a blue light, driving under suspension, an uninsured motor vehicle fee violation, reckless driving, operating a vehicle that is not registered, possession of marijuana and vehicular tire violation.

He was issued a $5,000 surety bond for those charges on Dec. 7, 2021.

In January 2022, Wright was charged with operating an unregistered vehicle, driving under suspension and violation of a city ordinance.
A man running for a South Carolina House of Representatives seat representing part of Aiken County has been decertified from the June 14 primary ballot.

Trav Robertson, chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party, sent a letter to the South Carolina Election Commission on May 10 informing the commission that the party would be decertifying House District 82 candidate Brian "Ryan B" Doyle.

Robertson said Thursday afternoon that Doyle may still appear on the primary ballots but will not be eligible to receive any votes or the party's nomination for the seat.

Doyle did not answer a phone call Thursday or reply to an email seeking comment on his decertification by the Aiken Standard's deadline.

Due to Doyle's decertification, S.C. Rep. Bill Clyburn, D-Aiken, would not face an opponent in either the primary or general election.

Robertson says in the letter that it has become apparent that Doyle does not meet the requirements to run as outlined in the South Carolina Constitution.

The Constitution requires that people who have been convicted of felonies wait 15 years after the completion of their sentence before running for a seat in the South Carolina House or Senate.

Doyle was convicted in February 2003 on four counts of conspiracy to file false claims to Medicare and one count of making false statements or representations to Medicare.

On May 1, 2003, District Judge Beverly Martin sentenced Doyle to 30 months in prison, three years of supervised release, restitution to Medicare in the amount of $503,762.89 and an immediate payment of $500.

Doyle told the Aiken Standard that he had been released from prison in March 2004 and in September 2004.

However, on Sept. 20, 2004, he filed a habeas corpus petition to be released from prison and placed on home confinement or in a community correctional center by January 2005. Federal Bureau of Prison records say that Doyle's release date was July 1, 2005.

Doyle said in an April interview that he had three years of supervised release (federal probation) after he was released from prison, meaning his supervised release would have ended on July 1, 2008. And he would not be eligible because it has been less than 15 years since his sentence ended.

There is also a possibility that Doyle still owes restitution and this could also make him ineligible to run for the House District 82 seat.

Doyle said he felt like he had completed paying the restitution he owed. He added he had paid it for quite a while and that two other people had been paying it.

The judgment in a criminal case form says Doyle must pay $250 per month to Medicare to pay back the $503,762.89 he and one other defendant owe Medicare.

The Aiken Standard reviewed the court records and did not locate any court order lowering or raising the amount Doyle owes in total or per month.

Assuming the other defendant who owes the money was required to pay the same amount each month and that both have been paying since they were convicted in late February 2003, Doyle and the other defendant would still be required to pay $250 per month each for the next 64 years.

Robertson adds that he asked Doyle to provide the party with documentation demonstrating his eligibility. "To date, he has not," Robertson wrote.

He adds the decertification gives the party "no pleasure" and that the party must uphold the state constitution.
By Wu Minwen

Japan has fully cooperated with the US to promote the Indo-Pacific strategy since the Fumio Kishida took office. Since the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Japan has actively followed the pace of the US and continuously escalated sanctions against Russia. Does Japan really want to act as a US pawn in the Indo-Pacific strategy?

Fumio Kishida took office as the new Prime Minister of Japan in October 2021. In an interview, he advocated taking resolute measures against China and claimed not to give in one step to China. The Indo-Pacific strategy led by the US aims to contain the rise of China, and Japan's response to this strategy is mainly rooted in internal and external considerations.

The internal reason is Japan's fear of China's rise. Japan is an island country with extremely scarce resources, and its national economy and overseas trade are highly dependent on maritime routes in the areas such as the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. Therefore, Japan regards Taiwan as its lifeline, which is also the reason that some Japanese politicians advocate that "a Taiwan emergency is a Japanese emergency".

The external reason is mainly the inducement and pressure from the US. China's resolution on the Taiwan question will disintegrate the US "island chain strategy" to contain China, thereby weakening its influence in the Western Pacific. The Diaoyu Islands issue has become the most important link between the interests of Japan and the US. Therefore, the US has taken the Diaoyu Islands issue as bait to lure Japan into its strategy.

However, whether the US induces Japan or Japan relies on the US, Japan faces insoluble problems.

First, Japan cannot simultaneously reconcile the territorial disputes from the north to the south. As we all know, Japan not only provokes the issue of the Diaoyu Islands with China in the south, but also has a dispute with Russia over the Southern Kuril Islands in the north. In addition, it has a Dokdo Islands dispute with South Korea. These have almost become deadlocks in Japan's relationship with its neighbors.

Second, the US is only taking advantage of Japan. Allies are only pawns on the chessboard of the US global hegemony. As the pawn in the Indo-Pacific strategy, Japan uses human and material resources to serve the regional strategy of the US. In the end, its loss outweighs the gain.

Third, Japan faces opposition from its own people. The US uses Japan to intervene in the Taiwan question, in which Japan's southwestern islands play important supporting roles. There are nearly 200 islands in the southwest of Japan. Among them, 40 ones can supply fresh water as military strongholds, but most of them are inhabited.

Japan has stationed troops on these islands and joined the plot to intervene in the situation across the Taiwan Strait, making these islands and their inhabitants the targets of counterattacks in military operations. In this regard, the Japanese Self-Defense Force (JSDF) declared that it has no enough energy to evacuate the residents and can only let the local government do it instead. The residents of Okinawa are very concerned about being involved in the war, and they hope that the Japanese government will earnestly de-escalate the regional tension and reduce the risk of war.

The US Indo-Pacific strategy stems from the Cold War mentality, which is inherently ridiculous and out of date. Gathering allies to promote the Indo-Pacific strategy will inevitably lead to more uncertainties in the regional situation, and even lead to the danger of unpredictable serious conflicts. At the forefront of a possible conflict, Japan should think carefully about its role and situation.

(The author is from College of Information and Communication, PLA National University of Defense Technology)

Editor's note: This article is originally published on zqb.cyol.com, 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.
An apartment developer's $20 million deal to buy the dockworkers' former union hall in Charleston has fallen apart.

LMC, the multifamily arm of homebuilder Lennar, had a contract to purchase the International Longshoremen's Association property at 1142 Morrison Drive, but it walked away from the purchase in April after not being able to strike a new agreement with the local union, according to Jeff Harris, the company's division president.

"We have fallen out of contract but hope to revisit the plan in the future," he said.

LMC's contract to buy the 4.5-acre property ended March 31, shortly after the city's Board of Architectural Review unanimously rejected design plans as "boring" for the proposed seven-story multifamily building. LMC considered reworking the project based on the BAR's recommendations.

Dockworkers union president Charles Brave said he gave LMC until April 13, when the ILA board and its membership was set to meet, to renew the developer's contract to buy the building.

Brave said LMC wanted the union to grant it a four-month extension to rework the proposed design without including the $465,000 in earnest money to continue the contract terms.

"We weren't getting anything in return for the extra four months," Brave said. "The membership was disheartened the way it was done."

On April 13, the union's members voted 55-33 to walk away from the deal. Brave said LMC called the ILA on April 18 to say the deal was off.

Harris, with LMC, said he's hopeful a new arrangement can be made.

"For now, everything is on hold," he said.

Brave called new negotiations with LMC a possibility, but only under new parameters.

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"We would not have the same contract," he said. "They had our property tied up for eight months, and we dont have a dime."

Brave said the future of the property rests with the waterfront union's 875 members, but for now the group plans to "catch its breath" and weigh its options.

Alternatives include selling or leasing the idle property or eventually deciding to sell the Morrison Drive site as well as the recently purchased property on Corporate Road off Leeds Avenue in North Charleston and constructing a new facility elsewhere.

"We still want to market the property," Brave said. "We are in a better position now."

He's already had several offers since the deal fell through.

"I don't know how they found out about it so fast," Brave said.

For now, it's off the market.

Brave said the ILA instructed the listing agent on May 11 to remove the "For Sale" sign from the property. It was still listed May 12 on the website for commercial real estate firm Shoreline International as "Under Contract" with a list price of $20.19 million.

LMC had planned to tear down the 32,000-square-foot structure after the city determined it was not old enough to save from demolition. In its place, the company wanted to build 424 apartment units in front of a 620-space parking garage.

Retail, fitness and co-working space were planned along the streetfront. A courtyard, two outdoor plazas and a pool also were part of the plans.

The union hall site is almost adjacent to another apartment development that LMC is constructing just to the north.

The multifamily builder paid $10.5 million in 2018 for about 3 acres at 1310 Meeting Street Road, next to Santis Restaurante Mexicano. LMC is developing 303 units in a new project called Cormac that is slated to open in December.

Its LMCs first apartment community in South Carolina.
On May 12, 1949, the Soviet Union lifted its blockade on Berlin, ending the humanitarian crisis known as the Berlin Airlift. For over a year, planes from across the world dropped tons of food, medicine and other necessities to the people stranded in West Berlin.

In honor of this exceptional feat, this weeks trivia will be about the airlift.
WEST COLUMBIA  The superintendent of a Columbia-area school district is resigning after less than a year in the job.

The Lexington Two school board voted 4-3 during a specially called meeting May 11 to accept the resignation of Superintendent Nicholas Wade. His official last day is June 30, though his interim replacement  a former superintendent for the district  takes over immediately.

Neither Wade nor board members publicly discussed why he's leaving. He did not attend the meeting. Board members declined to answer questions afterward.

"I am very grateful for not just the experience Lexington Two has given me, but to be able to work alongside such talented teachers and administrators," Wade said in a statement. "I am looking forward to pursuing new professional opportunities to continue my philosophy and practice of serving all students, supporting all schools and helping all communities."

Wade took the helm of the 8,800-student district, which serves West Columbia and Cayce, in August 2021, following the retirement of Superintendent Dr. William James Jr.

Hired in July 2020, the former English teacher and school principal came to Lexington Two from a Chicago suburb. He had been superintendent in Elmwood Park, Illinois, since 2017.

Wade's resignation comes less than a month after the resignation of Lexington One school district Superintendent Greg Little, who took a vice presidential post with the S.C. Technical College system.

"We just want to thank Dr. Wade for his leadership and guidance," said Lexington Two board Chairwoman Christina Rucker. "We wish him the best."

Board members Elizabeth Branham, Elizabeth Castles, Cynthia Kessler and Linda Alford-Wooten voted "yes" to accept Wade's resignation. Dissenting votes came from chairwoman Rucker, James "Bud" Summers and Abbott "Tre" Bray.

A district spokeswoman said the board will start searching for a permanent superintendent in June.

In the interim, the school board named Barry Bolen as acting superintendent, starting May 12.

Bolen was Lexington Two's superintendent from 2000 to 2008, when he retired. His 36 years in public K-12 education included being a middle and high school principal in Lexington Two. Since retiring, he's been an educational consultant with an architectural firm.

Bolen was on the state Board of Education from 2012-2016, the last two as its chairman.
Grocery stores across the state have been carding patrons for a beverage that contains 0.5 percent alcohol by volume or less.

That's because, until recently, kombucha fell in a legal gray area that left it undetermined whether it should receive the same treatment as alcoholic beverages, from taxation to licensing requirements.

Zach Smith, the owner of Charleston-based kombucha producer Dalai Sofia, said confusion surrounding regulation of the fermented beverage arose a little more than a month ago when his distribution company received a visit from the S.C. Department of Revenue that resulted in a decision to categorize the drink as alcohol.

That had not been the case until that visit, said Smith, and he felt unduly targeted.

"It came out of nowhere," said Smith. "Most of my accounts are esoteric, small, privately owned places  no grocery stores or anyone on a corporate level  so I lost a solid 30 percent of them for a moment."

Smith said the small coffee shops and other retailers he had partnered with would have been required to obtain an alcohol license to sell his drink. On top of that, he was told he would be charged an alcohol tax, which equated to nearly $2 a 24-pack case.

In addition, the drinks would not be legally available for curbside pickup or home delivery.

After the S.C. Retailers Association and Kombucha Brewers International showed concern over these guidelines, the Revenue Department released a clarifying statement on April 29 declaring that it would not be regulating the drink.

"Standard kombucha is not subject to regulation under Title 61 Chapter 4 since it is a bacterially fermented tea and not a beer, ale, porter, or 'similar malt or fermented beverage,' " the department released in a statement. "It is a type of tea with a specific process for fermentation that is different from that of beer and does not feature barley, hops, or malt."

Indeed kombucha is non-intoxicating, fermented with a bacteria and yeast colony that produces acetic acid and a low alcoholic content, similar to the composition of vinegar.

The state agency said kombucha made for wholesale distribution instead falls under the regulation by the S.C. Department of Agriculture.

The Agriculture Department features a food safety team that makes sure wholesale food and beverage producers in the state are following good manufacturing processes. Kombucha falls in that category.

"We do an initial alcohol test when a kombucha manufacturer applies for an RVC (registration verification certificate) to make sure theyre not over the 0.5 percent limit," said agency Communications Director Eva Moore. "Then we do our regular inspections and reviews."

If a drink is more than 0.5 percent ABV, there are federal health labeling laws for alcohol.

"State law aside, it's not really in producers' interest to go above that 0.5 percent," Moore said.

That's unfortunate, according to another local kombucha producer, Nick Ferraro of Booch Lab, who claims that the ultimate benefits from the fermented beverage are granted when the drink hits around 1.25 percent ABV.

"Authentic kombucha is in a higher range if you really want to feel the health benefits," Ferraro said. "If it's not authentic, what's the point?"

Ferraro's business, which mostly distributes kombucha at local farmers markets and private events, slowed down during the pandemic and as the company searched for a larger kitchen space.

Ferraro is still searching. But he's been discouraged by what he called a "confusing regulation process since the beginning," with limited information granted to producers.

Smith of Dalai Sofia agreed there have been some hurdles.

"I've had to walk people through a lot of it," he shared. "It's an age-old process, but people still don't understand how you can't use chemicals to preserve everything."

Smith did say Dalai Sofia plans to release a hard kombucha, with around a 5 percent ABV level in the coming weeks. He understands different rules and regulations will apply.

But as for standard kombucha, he counts the Revenue Department's statement as a win.
GEORGETOWN  Georgetown County Councilman John Thomas is resigning his seat on May 23, citing a desire to pursue other opportunities.

Thomas, a North Litchfield resident who represents District 1, took his seat on the council in 2015 and served as chairman from 2019 to 2021. He had already decided to not seek reelection this year.

In his resignation letter to incumbent chairman Louis Morant, Thomas wrote that "now is the time to take advantage of opportunities elsewhere."

"I am very grateful to the citizens of District 1 for allowing me to have served as their Councilman for more than the last seven years," Thomas wrote. "During that time, I would like to think that I have had a part in making Georgetown County a better place to live, work, and play."

In a letter accepting the resignation, Morant thanked Thomas for his service and wished him the best in the future.

"During your tenure, Georgetown County has seen a tremendous level of positive change and growth in numerous areas, despite unprecedented challenges faced by the county in recent years," Morant wrote.

The timing of Thomas' resignation means the District 1 chair will be empty when the council next meets on May 24. Since Thomas' resignation took place within 180 days of the November general election, no special election will be held to determine his replacement.

Murrells Inlet environmental scientist Clint Elliott is the only candidate who filed to run for the District 1 seat that covers Murrells Inlet in November.

Elliott said Thomas did a "wonderful job" in his tenure and wished him the best.
ANDREWS  Police Chief William Zurcher has been placed on administrative leave until further notice, Andrews Mayor Frank McClary confirmed to Georgetown Times.

McClary said Maj. James Barr is at the helm of the Andrews Police Department while Zurcher is on leave.

Zurcher is currently being investigated by the State Law Enforcement Division on sexual assault allegations, the agency said earlier this week. The Georgetown County Sheriff's Office forwarded SLED a report taken by a deputy on May 5.

The incident involving Zurcher was labeled as possible forcible rape taking place in November near County Line and Reds Landing roads north of downtown Andrews, according to the report provided by the Georgetown County Sheriffs Office.

McClary said there will be no further comments at this time.

The town of 2,575 straddling the Williamsburg-Georgetown county line has been mum about Zurcher on its Facebook page, with its last posts being recordings of a May 7 emergency meeting about a personnel matter in the town police department. The meeting took place almost entirely in executive session.

No additional information is available as the investigation into Zurcher continues, SLED spokeswoman Renee Wunderlich said May 9.
GREENVILLE  In late 2020, Greenville County Council rezoned 12 acres of wooded property along Augusta Road at the Interstate 85 interchange. The developer said the company planned an apartment complex on the land with 100 percent affordable housing.

Two years later, County Council took a rare and controversial step to rescind the rezoning decision. It did so without notice to the landowners whose property was involved, and without any sort of public hearing as is typical when a property is rezoned.

The move left the landowners flummoxed at the legality of the decision. Theyd entered into a contract to sell the property as zoned for multifamily. Now theyre left to either take the county to court or go back to square one in trying to sell the land under its new residential zoning classification.

The councils unanimous and sudden decision came after Councilman Ennis Fant, who represents the district where the property is located, said developers had pulled a bait-and-switch on the council by saying they would put affordable housing in a community where it is sorely needed. Once the council agreed to rezone the site for multifamily, another company stepped in and decided to put in market rate townhouses instead.

Members of council have grown increasingly frustrated in recent months by what they see as members of the development community getting a rezoning passed based on a set of expectations, then changing the project to something else that also fits in the zoning classification.

Some council members said they want more control over how projects develop once a rezoning is approved. Under one scenario, if a developer doesnt build the intended project in a certain time period, the sites zoning would revert back to its previous zoning.

After neighbors found out about the Augusta Road switch, they contacted Fant with concerns that Greenville's gentrification would spread to their neighborhood south of the city. Poorer residents have consistently been pushed farther from the city as rising property values have made it unaffordable to remain in their homes.

But Margaret Lee, one of three sisters whose family has owned the Augusta Road land for seven decades, said the council used false information to form its decision and never reached out to any of the family members to inform them of the plan.

Weve just been railroaded, Lee said. I cant believe the family wasnt even notified.

The initial prospective buyers did plan to build an affordable housing project with all apartments rented to people with incomes at 60 percent or less of the areas median income. But once they performed due diligence on the site, they determined the cost to bring sanitary sewer lines to the property would make the affordable aspect of the apartments unfeasible, Lee said.

The company backed out. A second company from North Carolina also failed in an attempt to make an affordable housing complex work. The familys real estate broker then reached out to an Atlanta-based company, which agreed to buy the site for a townhouse project, Lee said.

But Fant said that after speaking with the company, they planned to offer all the units for market rate. So he made a motion May 3 to rescind the countys November 2020 rezoning of the land and allow it to revert back to R-12 residential zoning.

County Attorney Mark Tollison said the county had rescinded zoning on a property at least once before, but it was just a couple months after it had been rezoned. This was uncharted waters, he said, the longest stretch of time that had elapsed between rezoning a site and taking it back.

Lee said she understood the county wanted a certain type of housing built on the site and wasnt happy that wasnt going to happen. She said the council had its opportunity to have a say when it rezoned the site for multifamily, but it didnt put limits on the type of development.

Thats because the county by state law cant make rezoning decisions based solely on a propertys value and expected value, said Councilman Butch Kirven. It cant legally restrict a propertys use to a certain price-point of housing, though it can dictate the types of building materials and sizes of units under some zoning classifications that translate to costs, he said.

The state has given county councils authority to zone and rezone property at its discretion, and Kirven said that while unusual, he believes this zoning being rescinded fits within the councils purview.

Councilman Lynn Ballard said he also felt like the council did the right thing by listening to the councilman who represents the area. He said any issues with the process of how it was done would be Fants to answer.

Fant said his first responsibility is to protect his constituents from gentrification. He said he goes to community meetings and hears from residents whove been pushed into his district from the city of Greenville or other districts.

My role and my responsibility is uniquely different than anybody else on County Council, said Fant, whose district has the highest minority population in Greenville County. Its failed leadership on my part if I just turn a blind eye and let it go.

Fant said he is in discussion with the property owners about the sites future. He said the land sits at one of the gateways to Greenville along Augusta Road where the county is beginning a corridor improvement plan. The council is treating this case as a one-off and other property owners shouldnt be concerned that the council is going to change their zoning without following the normal process.

Fant said hes spoken with county planning staff about creating a specific zoning designation for affordable housing. Otherwise, he said the county would continue to get bait-and-switch projects from developers because everybodys going to vote for affordable housing and they do what they need to do to get you to vote for it, and then they go do whatever they want with it.

A new zoning designation could become part of the countys discussion around creating a unified development ordinance, a document county planners and consultants have been piecing together for more than a year but isnt yet in its final form.

Beyond that, the council may just ask for more requests to be brought as flexible review district zoning, a classification that requires developers to stick to a preapproved plan for a property. Developers shy away from it in some cases because it requires more up-front costs to develop site plans, but council may seek more FRD zoning classifications, especially on infill developments surrounding the city of Greenville, Ballard said.

Fant said the county wouldnt have needed to rescind zoning on the Augusta Road property if the developers had done due diligence on the project before bringing the rezoning request.

Now the land sits vacant and wooded. An available sign sits at the corner. And the landowner said it may just end up in court.
Red, white and blue bunting patriotically and ceremoniously stretched taut, like a giant rubber band, 900 yards around the 513-foot-long and 66-foot-wide destroyer.

Flagmaker Wallace St. John, out of Boston, has been decorating Navy ships since 2008 and, like always, was on site a couple of days early putting the finishing touches on his banners before the vessel's big day.

"We try to get it flat," said St. John, who has decorated 60 ships. "It wasnt made to wear a tutu. Its a fighting ship. Its a destroyer."

The USS Frank E. Petersen Jr., named after the Marine Corps' first Black aviator and built in Pascagoula, Miss., is headed to Pearl Harbor in Oahu, Hawaii, after its commissioning at 10 a.m. May 14 at the Columbus Street Terminal in Charleston. Tickets for the ceremony are distributed and no longer available.

From Hawaii, the guided-missile destroyer will be assigned to a strike group, likely in the Pacific.

With 96 missiles, six torpedoes and a gun that can shoot up to 12 miles away, it's equipped for combat. And with a top speed exceeding about 35 mph and the ability to stop on a dime (in 1,000 feet), it's a top-notch destroyer  one that Executive Officer Chad Stewart deems "the Navy's newest, most capable warship."

Stewart, who actually first started his Navy career in Goose Creek at the Naval Nuclear Power Training Command, is one of more than 300 crew members on the Petersen now in Charleston.

The Holy City was chosen by the U.S. Navy League as its commissioning point, a decision that alternates between coastal cities and takes into account the proximity of the family of the ship's namesake.

It was between Wilmington, N.C., and Charleston, but in the end the Lowcountry won out.

Petersen's family members will be on hand.

From Topeka, Kan., Frank E. Petersen III was just arriving in town on the afternoon of May 12 for the momentous occasion celebrating the life and legacy of his father, whose catchphrase is painted on a commemorative mural in the mess hall.

"When the time comes, hell, stick out your can," Petersen is quoted on the ship's wall. "Let's go. Let's see what the old tiger's got. Let's jump right into his big, old jaw."

"Into the Tiger's Jaw" is also the name of Petersen's autobiography, which recounts his life from his start as a Navy seaman in 1950 up through his retirement as Marine lieutenant general in 1988.

He died in August 2015 at age 83.

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"Petersen was a man of high character," said Commanding Officer Daniel Hancock. "Not only was he a trailblazer  he did amazing things, he overcame injustice and overcame obstacles and things nobody should have to deal with  but that wasn't the end of his story."

He was a warfighter. He flew combat missions in Korea, and he led a fighter squadron in Vietnam called the Black Knights (also the name of the ship's mess hall diner). He wanted to be known as a great pilot and a great Marine, Hancock said.

The crew members on his namesake ship are following in his footsteps.

"We want men and women of the highest character, like the general, but we have to be ready to fight, like the general," Hancock said. "I know his spirit will be with us."

The crew is a diverse one from across the U.S. and beyond. One deck seaman from Hungary, Lilla Safar, just received her American citizenship. She's in charge of dropping and reeling in the anchor, which weighs more than 7 tons.

Overseeing administration as the ship secretary, Anita Lopez from San Diego, is who Hancock deems the "gatekeeper." She's following in the footsteps of her two grandfathers who served in the Navy during the Vietnam and Korean wars.

Shakerah Frye, 29 and from Philadelphia, is one of the youngest petty officers to lead a team of engineers as the engineering officer of the watch.

Hancock has 20 years of Navy experience and has traveled "almost everywhere in the world." He stuck with the Navy because he loved the people, and this crew is no different.

"I like to drive fast and shoot guns, sure, but it's really that I love the people," Hancock said. "And if you take care of the people, the mission tends to take care of itself."

In the early afternoon, under cloudy skies with one hopeful sunbeam peaking out above the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge in the distance, Hancock's voice announced over the loudspeakers exciting news in addition to the commissioning: two chiefs on board, Cameron Hansen and Thorn Brown, had been promoted to senior chiefs.

Cheers rang out from fellow crew members, along with a congratulatory chime from the ship's bell.

The bell will be christened along with the ship this weekend when Executive Officer Stewart's baby daughter, Harper Grace, gets baptized on Sunday. In Navy tradition, her name will be the first to be etched on the bottom of the bell.

Two new beginnings.
Kenna Coe is the editor for the Moultrie News. Send her an email at editor@moultrienews.com
When COVID-19 started taking its toll on restaurants and small businesses, the city of Charleston moved to relax rules regarding the use of sandwich boards and pedestal signs on sidewalks.

That nearly two-year grace period will end May 16, when the city will start enforcing the ordinance prohibiting the use of this signage on public right-of-way sidewalks.

Citizen complaints to Charleston's Americans with Disabilities Act coordinator led to the reinstatement, Charleston Director of Livability and Tourism Dan Riccio said, adding that the decision is "100 percent" related to the safety of pedestrians, especially those with disabilities.

While the move will impact all neighborhoods within city limits, most concerns have been related to signs blocking the flow of pedestrian traffic on downtown Charleston's narrow walkways.

Over the past six months, the city has been going through an educational period with restaurants and small businesses ahead of the reinstatement. During that time, Riccio said, a study found 17 signs that impeded pedestrians were regularly set out on King and Market streets.

Starting May 16, sandwich boards and pedestal signs like those will result in citations.

Exceptions will be made for items like planters and benches if a business applies for an encroachment permit.

"We want to be as accommodating as we can; however, the impetus of all this happening recently was generated by citizen complaints," Riccio said. "It's more of a problem downtown because of the infrastructure."

Councilman Jason Sakran said he believes there could be a way to make streets ADA-compliant and safe, while also continuing to give small businesses the right to increase visibility by using the signs. Had City Council been given the opportunity to weigh in, Sakran would have suggested size limitations or a style guide as opposed to an outright ban, he said, adding that he fears these small decisions could pile up and make Charleston less attractive for small businesses.

"I just think there's room for a common-sense compromise, and I don't think the current ordinance allows for flexibility," said Sakran, who co-owns Bon Banh Mi on Spring Street in downtown Charleston. "Not that (small businesses) should be running the city, but there's no back and forth."

The city has rolled back other pandemic-era exceptions for restaurants and retail stores, including the use of parklets on streets  in January, Babas on Cannon and Cutty's were forced to remove temporary structures with seating on Cannon and St. Philip streets, respectively. While signs are now prohibited, there won't be any upcoming changes to the Sidewalk Cafe Program that allows restaurants with permits to serve customers on city sidewalks, Riccio said.

The citys sidewalk dining rules require at least 8 feet from the property line to the curb, and operators must make room for a 5-foot walkway for pedestrians.
NORTH CHARLESTON  A yearslong initiative finally came to fruition May 11 when the Police Department welcomed three new officers from Puerto Rico as part of its effort to build a better relationship with the citys Hispanic population.

Jesus Rivera Vergara, Emmanuel Cruz Rivera and Jesus Veluz-Pena accepted offers earlier that day to become North Charleston officers. They are the first batch of bilingual officers recruited through a partnership with the University of Puerto Rico to hire and train at least 10 people.

The men are an invaluable addition to the city's police force, charged with protecting nearly 114,000 residents. Around 13,000 people, or 11.4 percent of the population, identify as Hispanic or Latino. The new officers will help establish trust within that particular community, as its members have historically hesitated from contacting law enforcement, Sgt. Maria Perez said.

There are over 300 officers in the department, yet only about 20 speak Spanish. It can take around an hour for someone who speaks only Spanish to file a police report, as they often have to wait for a translator to be called for help. Many decide it's just not worth it, she said.

A couple dozen community members gathered at the Midland Park Community Center to meet the new officers and introduce them to North Charleston. Local resident Yanniel Fontanez played his guitar and sang, passing out panderos  an instrument similar to the tambourine  to the guests of honor.

Veluz-Pena, Vergara and Rivera arrived in the mainland U.S. several days prior to have their final interviews for the position, Perez said. All three men signed their offer letters that day and would return to Puerto Rico for about a week before officially moving to North Charleston at the end of this month.

I've told our recruits that someone has to make the choice to leave the island. And it's a hard choice," Perez said. "Because if you're a Puerto Rican, you know el coqui, la bomba, all of that stuff  youre like, Wow, I had to leave that for a job.

But working in the mainland U.S. has its benefits, including a large pay increase and promise of a retirement plan. The pension system in Puerto Rico has completely collapsed, Perez said, leaving many career cops with concerns about financial stability.

Because the island is a U.S. territory, its residents are citizens of the United States, making bureaucratic red tape less of an issue. The candidates must already be certified cops at home and speak proficient English. Instead of participating in South Carolina's mandated training for new cops, the recruits will be able to complete any training requirements in-house, Perez said.

Perez and several other police officials traveled to Puerto Rico earlier this year to recruit officers. They met potential candidates at a career fair and during scheduled interviews, but they also went into communities and spoke directly with the people.

When we met with these gentlemen, and we talked to them, I think what they felt was our love and our sincerity in wanting them to be part of our North Charleston family, Perez said.

One of the new cops had already accepted a job with another police department, but changed his mind after meeting the North Charleston officers, she added.

The department had several employees who were instrumental in the recruitment process, including Master Patrol Officer Rodrik Rodriguez, a 14-year veteran who joined the force after moving from Puerto Rico.

Rodriguez grew emotional on Wednesday night as he spoke about the tough transition from the island, but also about the community he found in South Carolina.

I told (the new officers), You guys are my family, just like the North Charleston police is, and the Hispanic community and the North Charleston community became my family, he said.

The new recruits will have plenty of professional support from the Police Department, but theyll need cultural and emotional support as well, said resident Paula Tejeda, who left the island 18 years ago.

You will love it here because its very similar to Puerto Rico, in the way that we behave, she told the three officers. But still, there is a different culture. And when you feel lonely, call us. Were here for you.

Fontanez played one more song for the crowd before everyone mingled while enjoying traditional foods from the island. Having fellow Puerto Ricans working in his community is a "huge honor," he said.
Red, white and blue bunting patriotically and ceremoniously stretched taut, like a giant rubber band, 900 yards around the 513-foot-long and 66-foot-wide destroyer.

Flagmaker Wallace St. John, out of Boston, has been decorating Navy ships since 2008 and, like always, was on site a couple of days early putting the finishing touches on his banners before the vessel's big day.

"We try to get it flat," said St. John, who has decorated 60 ships. "It wasnt made to wear a tutu. Its a fighting ship. Its a destroyer."

The USS Frank E. Petersen Jr., named after the Marine Corps' first Black aviator and built in Pascagoula, Miss., is headed to Pearl Harbor in Oahu, Hawaii, after its commissioning at 10 a.m. May 14 at the Columbus Street Terminal in Charleston. Tickets for the ceremony are distributed and no longer available.

From Hawaii, the guided-missile destroyer will be assigned to a strike group, likely in the Pacific.

With 96 missiles, six torpedoes and a gun that can shoot up to 12 miles away, it's equipped for combat. And with a top speed exceeding about 35 mph and the ability to stop on a dime (in 1,000 feet), it's a top-notch destroyer  one that Executive Officer Chad Stewart deems "the Navy's newest, most capable warship."

Stewart, who actually first started his Navy career in Goose Creek at the Naval Nuclear Power Training Command, is one of more than 300 crew members on the Petersen now in Charleston.

The Holy City was chosen by the U.S. Navy League as its commissioning point, a decision that alternates between coastal cities and takes into account the proximity of the family of the ship's namesake.

It was between Wilmington, N.C., and Charleston, but in the end the Lowcountry won out.

Petersen's family members will be on hand.

From Topeka, Kan., Frank E. Petersen III was just arriving in town on the afternoon of May 12 for the momentous occasion celebrating the life and legacy of his father, whose catchphrase is painted on a commemorative mural in the mess hall.

"When the time comes, hell, stick out your can," Petersen is quoted on the ship's wall. "Let's go. Let's see what the old tiger's got. Let's jump right into his big, old jaw."

"Into the Tiger's Jaw" is also the name of Petersen's autobiography, which recounts his life from his start as a Navy seaman in 1950 up through his retirement as Marine lieutenant general in 1988.

He died in August 2015 at age 83.

"Petersen was a man of high character," said Commanding Officer Daniel Hancock. "Not only was he a trailblazer  he did amazing things, he overcame injustice and overcame obstacles and things nobody should have to deal with  but that wasn't the end of his story."

He was a warfighter. He flew combat missions in Korea, and he led a fighter squadron in Vietnam called the Black Knights (also the name of the ship's mess hall diner). He wanted to be known as a great pilot and a great Marine, Hancock said.

The crew members on his namesake ship are following in his footsteps.

"We want men and women of the highest character, like the general, but we have to be ready to fight, like the general," Hancock said. "I know his spirit will be with us."

The crew is a diverse one from across the U.S. and beyond. One deck seaman from Hungary, Lilla Safar, just received her American citizenship. She's in charge of dropping and reeling in the anchor, which weighs more than 7 tons.

Overseeing administration as the ship secretary, Anita Lopez from San Diego, is who Hancock deems the "gatekeeper." She's following in the footsteps of her two grandfathers who served in the Navy during the Vietnam and Korean wars.

Shakerah Frye, 29 and from Philadelphia, is one of the youngest petty officers to lead a team of engineers as the engineering officer of the watch.

Hancock has 20 years of Navy experience and has traveled "almost everywhere in the world." He stuck with the Navy because he loved the people, and this crew is no different.

"I like to drive fast and shoot guns, sure, but it's really that I love the people," Hancock said. "And if you take care of the people, the mission tends to take care of itself."

In the early afternoon, under cloudy skies with one hopeful sunbeam peaking out above the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge in the distance, Hancock's voice announced over the loudspeakers exciting news in addition to the commissioning: two chiefs on board, Cameron Hansen and Thorn Brown, had been promoted to senior chiefs.

Cheers rang out from fellow crew members, along with a congratulatory chime from the ship's bell.

The bell will be christened along with the ship this weekend when Executive Officer Stewart's baby daughter, Harper Grace, gets baptized on Sunday. In Navy tradition, her name will be the first to be etched on the bottom of the bell.

Two new beginnings.
The yellow contraption on the windshield is a new "barnacle" device that Charleston is experimenting with as a way to prompt motorists to pay their old parking tickets. City of Charleston/Provided
 So Democrats couldnt even get to 50 votes in the Senate for their complete abortion-on-demand at any point for any reason bill, which was clearly written with the express political purpose of making it impossible for pro-choice Republican senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins to vote for it. The bill exposed the Democrats hostility toward religion with a clause that would have required Catholic (and other denominational) hospitals to perform abortionsso much for rights of conscience.

The text of the bill also dropped the term woman or mother in favor of gender-neutral terms like patient, person, or individual. Apparently bowing to the demands of Pennsylvanias fraudulent pro-life Senator Bob Casey, the bill changed language in its findings section referring to abortion restrictions as a tool of white supremacy to a tool of gender suppression.

The time has clearly come to paraphrase Justice Anthony Kennedy: At the heart of politics is the right of Democrats to define ones own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

P.S. Lets not forget Ruth Bader Ginsburgs 2009 observation on Roe:

 Another day, another podcast on my M. Stanton Evans biography, this time with Anchoring Truths, which is a product of Hadley Arkess James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding. Early in the conversation Michael Uhlmanns name came up as someone who bore many similarities to Stan, and it wasnt until after that I recalled that Mike and Stan were acquainted, and once debated together against Ernest van den Haag and Danny Boggs at a 1975 Philadelphia Society meeting on the resolution, This house would immanentize the eschaton! (Those were the days.)

Anyway, those of you who just cant get enough, the podcast can be found here.

 Bill Maher nails it on student loan forgiveness, but the best part is Paul Begala, a rather loathsome human being, admitting that Democrats have a lab in Berkeley and another in Brooklyn that are skilled at coming up with new ideas to drive away the working class. Money quote: In my lifetime the Democratic Party has gone from being the party of the factory floor to the party of the faculty lounge.

Student loan forgiveness is a loser issue for the party that wants to win back the working class. pic.twitter.com/QbvO4TRgx5  Bill Maher (@billmaher) May 11, 2022

 While were in the Twitterverse, here is the best evidence yet that western Europe is finished:

meanwhile, in the european parliament: confused meps watch an elaborate interpretative dance at the end of a conference on the future of europe pic.twitter.com/5InPwQTFfK  ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) May 10, 2022

From the comments: Why does all interpretive dance look the same?

 Finally, speaking of Stan Evans and his great quip about always wanting to hear from Bono about every political issue before he can make up his mind, behold the Washington Post today:
Its such a fine line between clever and stupid, David St. Hubbins informs us in This Is Spinal Tap, and to adapt his profound insight, given that contemporary liberalism operates mostly in cliches, how do you discern the fine line between plagiarism and stupid liberal cliches?

Consider the case of this years Duke University undergraduate commencement speaker, Priya Parkash, who is being accused of plagiarizing a Harvard student commencement speaker from 2014. Parkash has copped a no contest plea, admitting that she inadvertently appropriated some of the language of the Harvard student. (Though in a typical detail common among people who attack privilege, Parkash issued the statement through the crisis public relations firm Red Banyan. Theres no privilege like leftist privilege these days.)

An indignant Harvard Crimson is all over the story, offering several side-by-side comparisons:

Theres more, but this is enough. Forget the parallel wording, and note the deeper common bedrock of leftist perception about American society and its institutions. There are only so many ways to express this fashionable disdain and hatred. And if were going to bust students for copying one another, what should be said about the rote recitations of every declaration about diversity, equity, and inclusion that come from the mouths of every college administrator without variation? The Harvard Crimson might want to do some side-by-side comparisons of administrator statements, but dont hold your breath, because the embarrassment would be too obvious.

Summary observations:

Liberals today are unoriginal people, so it is to be expected that they would copy each other. As I say, how can you tell what is plagiarism, or fealty to the lexicon of liberal cliches that are so richly rewarded in liberal-run institutions? Is it any surprise that they all sound alike? Liberal Duke graduates are entitled to a refund, since Duke has plainly failed to provide an education that enables individuals to think for themselves and generate original thoughts. The real scandal here ought to be not the similarity in phrasing, but the banality of thought expressed by Dukes leading students after four years in Dukes classrooms. Memo to employers: Do I really need to finish this sentence?

Lets get out with David St. Hubbins:
Two stories about the National Institutes of Health hit the news today. The first arose from testimony by acting NIH director Lawrence Tabak before a House Appropriations subcommittee. Tabak admitted that NIH hid genetic information about the covid-19 virus that could have shed light on its origin, at the behest of the Chinese Communists:

National Institutes of Health acting director Lawrence Tabak confirmed to lawmakers Wednesday that US health officials concealed early genomic sequences of COVID-19 at the request of Chinese scientists  but insisted the data remains on file. Tabak told a House Appropriations subcommittee that the NIH eliminated from public view the data from the pandemic epicenter in Wuhan, China, before adding that researchers can still access it via an archaic tape drive.

I do not understand why a federal agency would be more loyal to the Chinese government than to the American people. But that is what we have come to in todays administrative state.

Vanity Fair recently reported that the information was hidden in response to a request from Chinese scientists, despite potentially resolving whether the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology or passed naturally from animals to humans. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.) asked Tabek to explain why US officials would comply with such a request. Theres no question that the communication that we had about the sequence archive  Sequence Read Archive  could have been improved. I freely admit that, Tabek said. If I may, the archive never deleted the sequence, it just did not make it available for interrogation.

So the information exists, you just cant see it. There is more at the link about bureaucrats hostility toward data that suggested the virus came from a Wuhan laboratory leak.

The second scandal is financial. The Epoch Times reports:

The Epoch Times received no responses from multiple requests to Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) for comment on a report by a non-profit government watchdog estimating that Fauci, former NIH director Francis Collins, and hundreds of NIH scientists got as much as $350 million in undisclosed royalty payments from pharmaceutical and other private firms between 2010 and 2020.

Why are they undisclosed?

The revelations from Open the Books, which were first reported on May 9 by The Epoch Times, are based on thousands of pages of documents the group obtained from NIH in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in federal court. The suit was filed by Judicial Watch on behalf of Open the Books.

***

A spokesman for NIH also did not respond to multiple requests from The Epoch Times for comment.

It seems rather obvious that millions of dollars from pharmaceutical companies represent a conflict of interest.

Because NIH hands out $32 billion in research grants to medical institutions and researchers annually the undisclosed royalty payments, which are usually for work on a new drug, may indicate the presence of massive and widespread conflicts of interest or the appearance of such conflicts, both of which violate federal ethics laws and regulations.

Based on what we have seen over the last few years, I will hazard a wild guess that Anthony Fauci was at the front of the line with his hand out. And then he went on to demand that all of us get vaccinatedrepeatedly!to the great benefit of the drug companies. Coincidence.

I have always opposed the administrative state on philosophical grounds, while assuming that it was more or less honest. That assumption has turned out to be false. We are crazy to repose so much power in institutionspeoplewho so little have our interests at heart. Taxpayers are the ultimate chumps.
Two years ago it was toilet paper, now it is baby formulaa much more serious shortage. I am tuned in to it in part because one of my daughters is the mother of eight-month-old twins and has had a hard time finding formula. What is going on here? My colleague John Phelan looks at the issue and concludes that the culprits are shutdowns and the FDA:

What is going on? The Wall Street Journal explains: There are two reasons for the shortage. Supply chain issues caused by the Covid-19 pandemic have made baby formula harder to find for months. The shortage worsened after Abbott Laboratories, a major formula manufacturer, voluntarily recalled some products and closed a plant where the products were made in Sturgis, Mich.

The Abbott Labs plant is now re-opening, not apparently being the source of the contamination that the FDA investigated.

John Phelan comments:

More links and commentary at InstaPundit. You know the situation is serious when Mitt Romney gets involved:

On Tuesday, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah sent a letter to the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture, asserting that federal officials have been too slow to respond.

I never used to be a cynic. I always had faith in our institutions. But one wonders whether this mother has a point:
The State Security Service (SSS) has removed a journalist, Lanre Arogundade, from a watchlist in which his name featured for 38 years, the Director-General of the Service, Yusuf Bichi, has said.

Mr Bichi spoke on Wednesday when a delegation from the Nigerian chapter of the International Press Institute (IPI Nigeria) visited him in Abuja, as part of the organisations ongoing high-level engagements on the safety of journalists and press freedom in Nigeria

Mr Arogundade, director of the Lagos-based International Press Centre (IPC), was on February 10 intercepted and detained by officers of the SSS upon his arrival at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos, from Banjul, The Gambia, where he went to train journalists on conflict reporting.

Speaking on the circumstances leading to the interception of the journalist on his arrival in Lagos, Mr Bichi said the service acted based on a decades-long watchlist, which demanded that Mr Arogundade should be quizzed whenever he returned from a foreign country.

He said the journalist was put on the list during his days as the President of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS).

Mr Arogundade was NANS president between 1984 and 1985 while he was a student at the Obafemi Awolowo University. President Muhammadu Buhari was Nigerias head of state at the time.

The SSS DG said after Mr Arogundadename was initially removed from the watchlist, there arose another case of mistaken identity triggered by a request by the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP).

According to Mr Bichi, We dont intercept people willfully at airports. We do so based on requests from other government agencies who may have issues with the persons affected.

The SSS DG spoke on Mr Arogundades case after the IPI Nigeria delegation condemned the journalists treatment by the secret service while also raising other cases of harassment of media professionals by the agency.

Responding to the other issues about violation of the rights of journalists, which were raised by the IPI Nigeria delegation, the SSS boss emphasised the need for close collaboration between the media and the Service.

He said this was necessary to address many of the misconceptions, because our mission is peace, and that though a security outfit, the SSS is too friendly to be antagonistic toward the media.

Earlier in his remarks, the President of IPI Nigeria, Musikilu Mojeed, lamented the rising incidents of violation of the rights of journalists while performing their constitutional duties of upholding the peoples right to know and holding governments, individuals and corporations accountable.

Citing the 2021 World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders, Mr Mojeed lamented the ranking of Nigeria as one of West Africas most dangerous and difficult countries for journalists, who he said are often spied on, attacked, arbitrarily arrested or even killed.

He reiterated the commitment of IPI Nigeria to ensuring credible and independent journalism, media freedom, freedom of speech and the free flow of news and information, saying, We will always stand firm and resist any measure or action that threatens these matters and principles for which we stand.

He said all oppressive and repressive policies and actions directed at the media must be resisted so as not to allow authoritarianism, poor governance and corruption to thrive in Nigeria.

As we all know, Section 22 of the Nigerian Constitution is clear in compelling the press, radio, television and other agencies of the mass media to, at all time, be free to uphold the responsibility and accountability of the government to the people, he said.

He appealed to the SSS DG to educate and prevail on officers and men of the service all over the country to desist from harassment of journalists, and that they should also not allow themselves to be used by politicians, public office holders and other individuals who happen to be on the wrong side of media reporting.

Such (aggrieved) individuals should be advised to seek redress in court instead of coming to the SSS (to complain), Mr Mojeed added.

The president informed his host that IPI Nigeria would henceforth demand accountability in any case of harassment of journalists in the country.

For a start, we are opening a black book to document all security personnel and other individuals involved in the harassment of journalists in Nigeria, he said. The records so gathered will be shared periodically with embassies, and all relevant international and human rights groups across the world. We will use the records for intense advocacy with a view to getting perpetrators to be held accountable one way or another.

Those in the IPI Nigeria delegation to the SSS headquarters included its Secretary, Ahmed I. Shekarau; the Director, Digital Media, Voice of Nigeria (VON), Hajia Sani; the General Manager/CEO of Trust TV, Ibrahim Shehu; a director with Ambience Blue Communication, Tunde Ipinmisho; Deputy Editor, 21st Century Chronicle, Catherine Agbo; and Ag. Editor, Peoples Daily, Sunday Ode.

Ahmed I. Shekarau,

Secretary.

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All is not well with the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the South-west due to grudges among prominent leaders of the party in the zone.

Despite the public show of conviviality at their meeting on Friday in Lagos, animosity among the leaders remains obvious to close observers. Three out of the four presidential aspirants at the meeting are at war with each other for different reasons. Seven men from the region are bidding for the APC ticket.

Present at the meeting were Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, former Lagos governor, Bola Tinubu; former interim national chairman of the APC, Bisi Akande; former governor of Ogun, Segun Osoba; Ekiti governor, Kayode Fayemi; and APC national secretary, Iyiola Omisore.

Also at the meeting were Speaker of the House of Representatives Femi Gbajabiamila; Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola; Minister of Interior, Rauf Aregbesola; as well as governors Rotimi Akeredolu of Ondo, Dapo Abiodun of Ogun, Babajide Sanwo-Olu of Lagos, and Gboyega Oyetola of Osun.

How Tinubu, Aregbesola, Oyetola fell out

The relationship between Messrs Tinubu and Aregbesola began to crack in 2010 after the latter was sworn in as the governor of Osun State, following over three years of a legal challenge of the declaration of Olagunsoye Oyinlola of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) as the winner of the 2007 governorship election.

The seed of discord was planted when Mr Tinubu allegedly imposed Mr Oyetola on Mr Aregbesola as his chief of staff. The new governor subsequently appointed a deputy and two assistants to share the responsibilities of the chief of staff. But Mr Oyetola endured in the office and went on to succeed his boss as governor.

Their relationship quickly broke down after the transition. The former governor accused his successor of destroying his legacy in the state while his supporters felt alienated by the government.

During the celebration of the 10th anniversary of APC rule in the state and the second anniversary of Mr Oyetolas administration, tension was palpable between the supporters of the governor and of his predecessor.

However, the crisis blew open over Mr Oyetolas reelection ambition when Mr Aregbesola and his supporters opposed the governors bid.

At a meeting with his supporters just before the partys governorship primary, Mr Aregbesola poured invectives on Mr Tinubu, describing his former boss in Lagos as an enemy of Osun people. Both have not reconciled, despite the efforts of prominent Yoruba traditional rulers to bring them back together.

Tinubu, Osinbajo combat

For eight years Mr Osinbajo worked as commissioner of justice and attorney-general of Lagos while Mr Tinubu was governor. Both men were so close that it is believed Mr Tinubu nominated Mr Osinbajo as vice president to Muhammadu Buhari after the ex-Lagos governor was told he could not occupy the position to avoid a Muslim-Muslim ticket.

Mr Tinubu, who bears the unofficial title of the national leader of the APC, and Mr Osinbajo, who as vice president is the highest public office holder from the zone, were brought into conflict by their presidential ambitions. Shortly after Mr Osinbajo declared his intention to run for the office, a reporter asked Mr Tinubu, who had declared three months earlier, to respond to the news of his sons declaration. The former Lagos governor replied curtly: I have no son old enough to make such declaration.

Their supporters have since taken the cue and locked themselves in vicious combat of name-calling on social media.

Akande, Omisore dispute

Former Osun State Governor, Mr Akande (1999-2003) and Mr Omisore have not seen eye to eye since the events that led to the impeachment of Mr Omisore as the formers deputy. The former governor said their differences were ideological, arising from Mr Omisores alleged lust for public funds.

Our sense of responsibility towards financing was not in the same direction: he was a spend-free person, I was being careful with the public money and I could not have approved all vouchers. I could not approve all requests and that was not going well with him, Mr Akande said in an interview.

However, the dispute turned to bitter enmity after the yet unresolved assassination of the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Bola Ige in December 2000. Many linked the assassination to the political crisis in Osun at the time. Mr Omisore was arraigned with other suspects in the murder but all of them were discharged and acquitted by the courts.

Thus when Mr Omisore, who until 2018 had kept a separate lane from Mr Akande and his political associates, emerged as the national scribe of the APC in March, Mr Akande accused Governor Oyetola of betrayal for brokering the deal.

Mr Aregbesola has also refused to associate with Mr Omisore over that history, even after the latter helped the APC in the supplementary election that put Mr Oyetola in office as governor. Mr Omisore has remained close to Mr Oyetola and both have joined hands in fighting off the challenge of Mr Aregbesola to the governors re-nomination for the off-season election coming up in July.

Drama at Lagos meeting

Arriving at the Lagos meeting, Mr Aregbesola refused to take his seat beside Mr Omisore. He said he did not want to be associated with his partys national scribe, a source at the meeting told PREMIUM TIMES.

But at the end of the meeting, Mr Akande told journalists that the meeting was part of the efforts of party leaders in the zone to put up a common front at the APC presidential primary scheduled to hold between May 30 and June 1.

Daniel, Amosun and Abiodun: Three friends made and separated by power

Gbenga Daniel became Ogun governor in 2003 on the platform of the PDP, defeating Mr Osoba who was seeking a second term. Mr Amosun supported Mr Daniel in the PDP and he too was elected the senator of Ogun central district.

PREMIUM TIMES gathered that both had an agreement to switch offices at the expiration of the first term of the governor but the agreement was breached and both became sworn enemies.

The duo maintained a toxic relationship as their supporters clashed across Ogun State. In 2007, Mr Amosun left the PDP and ran for governor on the ticket of the defunct ANPP but lost after a long legal battle.

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Mr Amosun, however, won the governorship seat on the second attempt in 2011, succeeding Mr Daniel and ruling for eight years. During his tenure, his predecessor was prosecuted for corruption by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. Mr Daniel believed that his old friend masterminded his ordeal with the anti-graft agency.

In 2019, Mr Daniel repaid Mr Amosun by supporting Dapo Abiodun to defeat Mr Amosuns anointed candidate at the governorship election.

Ironically, despite his support, Mr Daniel does not have the backing of Mr Abiodun for his own senatorial ambition, opening up another channel of animosity.

Amosun, Osinbajo in three years dispute

At the expiration of Mr Amosuns second term in office, he anointed Adekunle Akinlade as his successor. But that plan was believed to have been thwarted by the vice president, Mr Osinbajo, who backed his kinsman, Dapo Abiodun, for the office. Mr Amosun claimed he visited Abuja 28 times to appeal to the Adams Oshiomole-led national working committee of the party but he did not have his way. In frustration, Mr Akinlade moved to the Allied Peoples Movement to run in the election but was defeated by Mr Abiodun.

During the campaign, Mr Osinbajo was in the state to campaign for Mr Abiodun, leaving Mr Amosun feeling betrayed by the vice president whose nomination as Muhammadu Buharis running mate he had supported in 2015.

This birthed the dispute between the two men who are now running against each other for the APC presidential nomination.

When Mr Osinbajo visited Ogun for consultation over his presidential ambition, Governor Abiodun acknowledged his backing for his election.

He said: We are not ingrates, we recognise his support for us during the 2019 governorship election. His support was significant and we shall reciprocate this time.
This intervention seeks to discuss and determine two interrelated issues. The first issue is whether the Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), is permitted by law, during his term of office, to engage in partisan politics, become a registered member, an unregistered member or sympathizer of a political party, and/or participate in the primary election of a political party with a view to contesting for an elective political office or securing an appointment into a non-elective political office.

The second issue is whether the incumbent Governor of the CBN who, personally, and through proxies, support groups and allies, is currently running a political campaign to participate in the upcoming presidential primary election of the All Progressive Congress (APC), in order to possibly clinch the ticket of the APC, and for whom an APC Expression of Interest and Nomination Form for the Office of President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, in the sum of One Hundred Million Naira, has been bought (allegedly by millionaire farmers), and who has been confirmed to be a registered member of APC as far back as February 2021, is not guilty of an act of serious misconduct, and not in blatant breach of the provisions of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, the CBN Act and the Code of Conduct for Public Officers, on the grounds of which the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria ought immediately to commence proceedings for his removal from office, and for the President to exercise the power to remove him from office forthwith.

In discussing and resolving the formulated twin issues for determination, we must inevitably turn to the provisions of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999, as amended, the Central Bank of Nigeria Act, No 7 of 2007, Cap C4, Vol I, Revised Laws of the Federation of Nigeria (LFN) 2004, Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal Act, Cap. C 15, Vol. II, Revised LFN, 2004, and Public Service Rules, 2008 Edition.Law.

The CBN Act.

Section 1 of the CBN Act establishes the CBN. Section 1 (3) provides that in order to facilitate the achievement of its mandate under this Act and the Banks and Other Financial Institutions Act, and in line with the objective of promoting stability and continuity in economic management, the Bank shall be an independent body in the discharge of its functions

Section 7 (1) of the CBN Act provides for the management of the Bank and it states that the Governor or in his absence, one of the Deputy Governors nominated by him, shall be in charge of the day-to-day management of the Bank and shall be answerable to the Board for his acts and decisions.

Section 8 (1) of the CBN Act provides that the Governor and Deputy Governors shall be persons of recognized financial experience and shall be appointed by the President subject to confirmation by the Senate on such terms and conditions as may be set out in their respective letters of appointments.

Section 9 of the CBN Act provides that the Governor and the Deputy Governors shall devote the whole of their time to the service of the Bank and while holding office shall not engage in any full or part-time employment or vocation whether remunerated or not, except such personal or charitable causes as may be determined by the Board and which do not conflict with or detract from their full-time duties.

Section 11 (1) of the CBN Act provides that a person shall not remain a Governor, Deputy Governor or Director of the Bank if he is  (a) a member of any Federal or Legislative House; or (b) a director, officer or employee of any Bank licensed under the Banks and Other Financial Institutions Act.

Section 11 (2) of the CBN Act provides that:

the Governor, Deputy Governor or Director shall cease to hold office in the bank if he-

(a) becomes of unsound mind or, owing to ill-health, is incapable of carrying out his duties;

(b) is convicted of any criminal offence by a court of competent jurisdiction except for traffic offences or contempt proceedings arising in connection with the execution or intended execution of any power or duty conferred under this Act or the Banks and other Financial Institutions Act.

(c) is guilty of serious misconduct in relation to his duties under this Act

(d) is disqualified or suspended from practicing his profession in Nigeria by order of a competent authority made in respect of him personally;

(e) becomes bankrupt;

(f) is removed by the President:

provided that the removal of the Governor shall be supported by two-thirds majority of the Senate praying that he be so removed.

Section 11 (3) provides that the Governor or any Deputy Governor may resign his office by giving at least three months notice in writing to the President of his intention to do so and any director may similarly resign by giving at least one months notice in writing to the president of his intention to do so.

The Code of Conduct for Public Officers in the Fifth Schedule to the Constitution; and the Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal Act.

Section 2 of Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal Act, Cap C 15 Vol. II, Revised LFN 2004 provides that the aims and objectives of the Bureau shall be to establish and maintain a high standard of morality in the conduct of government business and to ensure that the actions and behaviors of public officers conform to the highest standards of public morality and accountability.

Section 5 of the CCB&T Act provides that a public officer shall not put himself in a position where his personal interest conflicts with his public duties and responsibilities.

Section 14 of the CCB&T Act provides that a public officer shall not be a member of, or belong to, or take part in any society, a membership of which is incompatible with the functions or dignity of his office (See also identical provisions in Paragraphs 1 and 10 respectively, of the Code of Conduct for Public Officers in Part 1 of the Fifth Schedule to the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999).

Section 26 of CCB&T Act is the Interpretation Section of the Act. The Section provides that public officer means a person holding any of the offices specified in the Second Schedule of this Act. The said Second Schedule lists public officers for the purposes of the Code of Conduct. Listed in Paragraph 14 are chairmen and members of the Boards or other governing bodies and staff of the statutory corporations and of companies in which the Federal or any State Government has controlling interests. (See also Paragraph 14 in the list of public officers for the purposes of the Code of Conduct, in Part II of the Fifth Schedule to the Constitution).

Section 318 of the Constitution is the Interpretation Section of same. It provides, inter alia, that  Public Service of the Federation means the service of the Federation in any capacity in respect of the Government of the Federation, and includes service as- ( c) member of staff of any commission or authority established for the Federation by this Constitution or by an Act of the National Assembly; ( e) staff of any statutory corporation established by an Act of the National Assembly; or ( g) staff of any company or enterprise in which the Government of the Federation or its agency owns controlling shares or interest

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By virtue of Section 1 of the CBN Act, the CBN is wholly owned by the Federal Government of Nigeria. The CBN is established for Nigeria. It is a government body which has an appointed Board of Directors under Section 6 of the CBN Act, a section which provides that the Board shall consist of, amongst other members, a Governor who shall be the Chairman. See Section 6 (2) (a) of the CBN Act. Under Section 8(2) of the CBN Act, the CBN Governor has a renewable term of five years, not exceeding ten years in two terms. The CBN Governor is an appointed public officer in the public service of the Federation of Nigeria.

Without any doubt, therefore, the CBN Governor is a public officer within the contemplation of, and definition thereto ascribed under Paragraph 14 of the Second Schedule to the CCB&T Act. The CBN Governor, is by law, required and obligated to observe the provisions of the Code of Conduct.

Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999

Section 40 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria made under Chapter 4 of same which provides for the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution, states that every person shall be entitled to assemble freely or may form or belong to any political party, trade union or any other association for the protection of his interest.

Section 45 (1) of the Constitution provides that nothing in Section 37, 38, 39, 40 and 41 of this Constitution shall invalidate any law that is reasonably justifiable in a democratic society (a) in the interest of defence, public safety, public order, public morality; or (b) for the purpose of protecting the right and freedom of other persons.

Section 137 (1)(g) of the Constitution provides that a person shall not be qualified for election to the office of the President if being a person employed in the civil or public service of the Federation of any State he has not resigned, withdrawn or retired from the employment at least thirty days before the date of the election.

Section 172 of the Constitution provides that a person in the public service of the Federation shall observe and conform to the Code of Conduct.

Section 222 (b) of the Constitution provides that no association of whatever name called shall function as a political party unless-the membership of the association is open to every citizen of Nigeria, irrespective of the place of origin, circumstance of birth, sex, religion or ethnic grouping.

Federal Government Public Service Rules, (2008 Edition), Published in the Federal Republic of Nigeria Official Gazette, , No. 57. Vol 96, issued in Abuja on 25th August, 2009 as Government Notice No. 278 2009

Chapter 1, Rule 010101 says that it shall be the duty of every officer to acquaint himself/herself with the Public Service Rules, other regulations and extant circulars. These Public Service Rules apply to all officers except where they conflict with specific terms approved by the Federal Government and written into the contract of employment or letters of appointment. In so far as the holders of the..and any other similar organs that derive their appointments from the Constitution of the FRN are concerned, the Rules apply only to the extent that they are not inconsistent with the provisions of the Constitution of the FRN in so far as their conditions of service and any other law applicable to these other officers are concerned.

It is our submission that the provisions of the Public Service Rules (PSR) are applicable to the position of the CBN Governor. Elsewhere, we had strenuously argued that the Public Service Rules did not apply to that office and position. But having looked at the CBN Act, again, and realizing that there is no provision therein, excluding the applicability of the Public Service Rules, and since there are no conflicts between the provisions of the PSR and provisions of the CBN Act, and the conditions of service of the CBN Governor, we are persuaded very strongly to submit that the Public Service Rules do apply to the office of the CBN Governor.

Chapter 3 of the Federal Government Public Service Rules makes provisions for Discipline. In particular Section 4 thereof provides for serious misconduct.

Rule 030401 thereunder states that: Serious misconduct is defined as a specific act of very serious wrong doing and improper behavior which is inimical to the image of the service and which can be investigated and if proven may lead to dismissal.

Rule 030402 provides that serious act of misconduct includes, amongst other listed incidents, (g) engaging in partisan political activities, (o) action prejudicial to the security of the State, (r) nepotism or any other form of preferential treatment, (s) divided loyalty and (w) any other act unbecoming of a public officer.

Under Rules 030403, 030404, 030405 & 030406, disciplinary procedure may be instituted against any public officer in accordance with Rules 030302-030306 and interdiction and suspension may follow. Under Rule 030407, it is provided that the ultimate penalty for serious misconduct is dismissal. An officer who is dismissed forfeits all claims to retiring benefits, leave of transport grants, etc, subject to the provisions of Pension Reforms Act 2004.

Rule 030422 provides that no officer shall, without express permission of the government, whether on duty or leave of absence: (a) hold any office, paid or unpaid, permanent or temporary in any political organization (b) offer himself/herself or nominate anyone else as a candidate for any elective public office, including membership of a local government council, state or national assembly (c ) indicate publicly his support of, or opposition to any party or candidate or policy (d) engage in canvassing in support for political candidate; and (e) nothing in this rule shall be deemed to prevent an officer from voting at an election.

Rule 030423 provides that resignation is necessary before seeking elective public office. Howbeit, any officer wishing to engage in partisan political activities or seek elective public office shall resign his/her appointment forthwith.

Submissions

Based on the above cited provisions of the Constitution, Acts of the National Assembly, and the provisions of the Federal Government Public Service Rules, we are strengthened in making the following submissions, and fortified in calling for the immediate removal of Godwin Emefiele, the CBN Governor, from office.

Firstly, it is our considered view that on a calm and dispassionate reading and construction of the provisions of the CBN Act, it is not the intendment of the Legislature that a CBN Governor should be a registered or a closet, unregistered member of a political party while holding the office of the CBN Governor. Section 1 of the CBN Act declares that the CBN shall be an independent body in the discharge of its functions. This safeguarded independence, certainly, is lost when a CBN Governor becomes a member (registered or unregistered) of a political party, especially the party in power and in control of the Federal Government of Nigeria. This independence is surrendered when the CBN Governor enters into partisan politics and becomes yoked umbilically with the ruling political party.

The CBN Act does not contemplate, let alone tolerate or accommodate, a CBN Governor, who is obligated by law to devote all his time while in office to the pursuit of the mandate of the CBN, being a registered member of any political party in Nigeria, and certainly does not accept a CBN Governor running for a legislative or executive political office during his term of office as CBN Governor.

Section 9 of the CBN Act states that the Governor and the Deputy Governors shall devote the whole of their time to the service of the Bank and while holding office shall not engage in any full or part-time employment or vocation whether remunerated or not, except such personal or charitable causes as may be determined by the Board and which do not conflict with or detract from their full-time duties. It is our contention that by reportedly registering clandestinely as a member of APC-a political party-, since February 2021 and participating in its activities, the CBN Governor has blatantly engaged in a vocation that conflicts with or detract from his full-time duties. Obviously, thus politically distracted, the CBN Governor, we must presume, has not been in charge of the day-to-day activities of the CBN, contrary to the provisions of Section 7 of the CBN Act. The CBN Governor, therefore, has breached the duty imposed on him by Sections 1, 7, and 9 of the CBN Act: a duty not to subvert, undermine, mortgage or destroy the independence of the Bank, and a duty to devote his full time to the work of the Bank without engaging in any other vocation, which has not been approved by the Board, and which is not in conflict with or detract from his full-time duties. Certainly, the Bord of the CBN did not pass a resolution authorizing the CBN Governor to register as a member of the APC, and contest the presidency on its platform. The CBN Governors membership of APC is in conflict with and detract from his full-time duties.

Secondly, it is our position that the CBN Governor has breached the provisions of the Code of Conduct for Public Officers, by registering as a member of the APC, campaigning, by proxies and support groups, to be elected as a candidate in the 2023 Presidential Elections, in order to possibly get elected as President of Nigeria, while in office as CBN Governor.

Section 2 of Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal Act, Cap C 15 Vol II, Revised LFN 2004 provides that the aims and objectives of the Bureau shall be to establish and maintain a high standard of morality in the conduct of government business and to ensure that the actions and behaviors of public officers conform to the highest standards of public morality and accountability. Clearly, the abhorrent acts of the CBN Governor do not conform to the highest standards of public morality and accountability in a public office as high as, and as central to the Nigerian economy as the office of the CBN Governor. For those who argue that law is no morality, what is written into the Code of Conduct as a binding law is the codification of public morality. The CBN Governor, clandestinely became a member of the APC in violation of the provisions of the CBN Act, without disclosures. There was no transparency and accountability. His action is immoral and is a breach of the provisions of the Code of Conduct.

Section 172 of the Constitution provides that a person in the public service of the Federation shall observe and conform to the Code of Conduct. The CBN Governor, a public servant, under the Code of Conduct provisions in the Constitution, has not observed nor conformed to the Code of Conduct.

Section 5 of the CCB&T Act provides that a public officer shall not put himself in a position where his personal interest conflicts with his public duties and responsibilities.

Section 14 of the CCB&T Act provides that a public officer shall not be a member of, or belong to, or take part in any society, a membership of which is incompatible with the functions or dignity of his office (See also identical provisions in Paragraphs 1 and 10 respectively, of the Code of Conduct for Public Officers in Part 1 of the Fifth Schedule to the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999). Clearly, the CBN Governor breached these provisions of the Code of Conduct. It must be assumed that the functions of the CBN, particularly in monetary policy issues, have been subordinated to the interests of the APC, the CBN Governors political party. The CBN as an entirety will in the coming days be used to promote the interests of the CBN Governor and his party, if he is allowed to stay in office, whether he rests his offensive partisan politics pursuit or not. 2023 Election is coming and the CBN, apart from disbursing appropriated elections funds to INEC, warehouses sensitive election materials for INEC. There is clearly a real and potential conflict of interests. The CBN Governor has become a full-fledged politician in public service, pursuing a personal interest in obvious conflict with his public duties. Possible Sabotage of the public interest looms.

Thirdly, we submit that the right to peaceful assembly and association under Section 40 of the Constitution which guarantees that every person shall be entitled to assemble freely or may form or belong to any political party, trade union or any other association for the protection of his interest. is not absolute and unfettered.

Section 45 (1) of the Constitution provides that nothing in Section 37, 38, 39, 40 and 41 of this Constitution shall invalidate any law that is reasonably justifiable in a democratic society (a) in the interest of defence public safety, public order, public morality; or (b) for the purpose of protecting the right and freedom of other persons.

As stated under Section 2 of Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal Act, Cap C 15 Vol. II, Revised LFN 2004 the aims and objectives of the Bureau shall be to establish and maintain a high standard of morality in the conduct of government business and to ensure that the actions and behaviors of public officers conform to the highest standards of public morality and accountability. We submit that the provisions of the CCB&T Act, CBN Act, and the Public Service Rules, which restrict the right of pubic officers (and in particular, the CBN Governor) to engage in partisan political activities while in employment of Government, are not inconsistent with the provision od Section 40 of the Constitution, and thus cannot be voided under Section 1(3) of the Constitution.

We, therefore, contend that by virtue of Section 45 (1) of the Constitution- the restriction and derogation provision, provisions in Acts and Laws which restrict the right of public officers to fully enjoy the right to freedom of assembly and association, including joining political parties of their choice, are Acts and Laws validly made which cannot be invalidated or annulled on account of any alleged inconsistency with the provision of Section 1 (3) of the Constitution, the supremacy clause, which provides that  if any other law is inconsistent to the provision of this Constitution, this Constitution shall prevail, and that other law shall to the extent of the inconsistency be void Members of the Police Force and those of the Armed Forces or Services, for example, are not permitted by law to join political parties, join partisan politics or contests for political offices while in service. Understandably. And it cannot be seriously suggested or argued that their right as Nigerians to freely assemble and to form or belong to any political party or trade union or any other association for the protection of their interest, is being breached.

We also submit that Section 137 (1)(g) of the Constitution which provides that a person shall not be qualified for election to the office of the President if being a person employed in the civil or public service of the Federation or of any State he has not resigned, withdrawn or retired from the employment at least thirty days before the date of the election cannot be interpreted or construed to permit a public officer, forbidden by the applicable statutory or constitutional provisions to hold office and contemporaneously join a political party and run for an elective office, to hold office and contemporaneously join a political party and run for an elective office. This Section relates only to the eligibility and qualification of public officers to run for political offices in a general election; not to any alleged right of the CBN Governor, a public officer, to be a member of a political party regardless of whether or not he seeks to contest for an elected office while holding his public office.

While Section 137 ( 1) (g) references at least thirty days before the date of an election for resignation, withdrawal or retirement from office, of a public officer who may want to contest in a ( general ) election, Section 11 (3) of the CBN Act provides that the Governor or any Deputy Governor may resign his office by giving at least three months notice in writing to the President of his intention to do so and any director may similarly resign by giving at least one months notice in writing to the president of his intention to do so.. Placing the two provisions side by side, it becomes very clear that these provisions cannot be relied upon to permit a CBN Governor to engage in partisan politics until thirty days to an election or three months to an election. Whether he eventually contests in an election or not is beside the point. Once he becomes a member of a political party and starts participating in partisan politics, whether the time he is doing so is four years to an election or one year to an election in which he may participate, is of no consequence. He can no longer keep the office.

The law is that the provisions of the Constitution must be read and construed as a whole, and not in isolation of one another, to such a degree that a selective and isolated interpretation of a section will lead to the interpretative violation of another section or other sections, thereby occasioning absurdity. When the constitutional provisions of the Code of Conduct are read together with Section 137(1) ( g) of the Constitution, and the relevant provisions of the CBN Act, it becomes clear that no incumbent CBN Governor can lawfully dabble in partisan politics, become a registered member of a political party and contest for the office of President of Nigeria at any point during his term, whether the country is close to election or not. It is unlawful and unconstitutional.

Similarly, as argued above, Section 222 (b) of the Constitution which provides that no association of whatever name called shall function as a political party unless-the membership of the association is open to every citizen of Nigeria, irrespective of the place of origin, circumstance of birth, sex, religion or ethnic grouping cannot be interpreted to accommodate public officers who are prohibited from participating in partisan politics. The literal or textual interpretation of the provision does not yield such accommodation.

Fourthly, it is our firm view that the CBN Governor has, by engaging in partisan politics, and actively seeking to contest for the office of President of Nigeria committed serious acts of misconduct under Rule 030402 which provides that serious act of misconduct includes, amongst other listed incidents,  (g) engaging in partisan political activities, (o) action prejudicial to the security of the State, (r) nepotism or any other form of preferential treatment, (s) divided loyalty and (w) any other act unbecoming of a public officer.

The CBN Governor has also violated Rule 030422 which provides that no officer shall, without express permission of the government, whether on duty or leave of absence: (a) hold any office, paid or unpaid, permanent or temporary in any political organization (b) offer himself/herself or nominate anyone else as a candidate for any elective public office including membership of a local government council, state or national assembly (c ) indicate publicly his support of or opposition to any party or candidate or policy (d) engage in canvassing in support for political candidate; and (e) nothing in this rule shall be deemed to prevent an officer from voting at an election.

Urgent Action

Based on the unlawful acts of the CBN Governor, the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria is urged to immediately commence the removal from office proceedings against the CBN Governor, for committing acts of serious misconduct. Be it noted that Section 11 (2) of the CBN Act provides that: the Governor, Deputy Governor or Director shall cease to hold office in the bank if he-(c) is guilty of serious misconduct in relation to his duties under this Act. Rules 030401 and 030402 also define the offence of serious misconduct.

Rule 030423 provides that resignation is necessary before seeking elective public office. Howbeit, any officer wishing to engage in partisan political activities or seek elective public office shall resign his/her appointment forthwith.

The provision of Rule 030423 is beautiful. But we are not calling on the CBN Governor to resign. He may not. Rule 030401 of the Public Service Rules defines serious misconduct. It is defined as a specific act of very serious wrong-doing and improper behavior which is inimical to the image of the service and which can be investigated and if proven may lead to dismissal. What is required is a removal proceeding in the Senate, the end of which will be tantamount to a dismissal from office.

Section 8(1) of the CBN Act provides that the Governor and the Deputy Governors shall be persons of recognized financial experience and shall be appointed by the President, subject to confirmation by the Senate on such terms and conditions as may be set out in their respective letters of appointments

Section 11(2) ( c & f) of the CBN Act stipulates that: the Governor, Deputy Governor or director shall cease to hold office in the Bank if [c] he is guilty of a serious misconduct in relation to his duties under this Act [f] is removed by the President; PROVIDED that the removal of the Governor shall be supported by two-thirds majority of the Senate praying that he be so removed

The CBN Governor came to office by the confirmation of the Senate; and he is removable by a two-thirds concurring vote of the Senate. Practically, the Senate is empowered, through a removal hearing, and by a two-thirds resolution to authorize the President to remove the CBN Governor from office. The President must comply with such a resolution.

The CBN, by its enabling law, is not a body that is accountable or responsible to no one. S.8(4) of the Act provides that the Governor (of the CBN) shall appear before the National Assembly ( NA) at semi-annual hearings as specified in subsection 5 regarding-: (a) effort, activities, objectives and plans of the Board with monetary policy, and (b) economic development and prospects for the future described in the report required in subsection 5(b) of this Section.

S. 8(5) of the Act provides that the Governor (of the CBN) shall from time to time (a) keep the President, informed of the affairs of the Bank, including a report on its budget and, (b) makes a formal report and presentation on the activities of the Bank and the performance of the economy to the relevant committees of the NA. And S. 50 (1-2) of the Act provides that the Bank shall, within two months after the close of each financial year transmit to the NA and the President a copy of its annual accounts certified by the auditor; and a report required to be submitted to the NA and the President shall be copied by the Bank in such manner as the Governor may direct

The CBN Act has ample provisions to make the CBN Governor accountable, and if he abuses his office or powers or is adjudged guilty of misconduct in a removal hearing conducted by the Senate, the due process of law must be followed in sanctioning him.

The CBN Governor must go.

Jiti Ogunye, public interest attorney, legal essayist, and author is Legal Adviser to Premium Times and Principal Counsel, Jiti Ogunye Chambers, Lagos Nigeria.
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) is investigating the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for suspected money laundering through their accounts in two banks in Abuja, PREMIUM TIMES can authoritatively report.

It is not clear whether the investigation is connected to the ongoing nomination exercises of the parties that have seen high volumes of money moving into the accounts of the parties.

As parties prepare for their primaries for the selection of candidates for the 2023 general election, hundreds of aspirants in the two parties have bought their expression of interest and nomination forms for various offices.

The exercises have generated several billions of naira for the nations two major parties with about 28 presidential aspirants paying N100 million each for the APC forms as of Wednesday, while 17 of their counterparts in the PDP obtained the forms for N40 million each.

On Monday, the Head of Operations at the headquarters of the EFCC, Michael Wetkas, wrote a letter, exclusively obtained by PREMIUM TIMES, informing the managing directors of Access Bank and Polaris Bank in Abuja that the commission was investigating 14 accounts of the two parties, and another organisation believed to be connected to PDP.

According to the letters, the investigation involves three accounts in Access Bank belonging to the APC, (0692988080, 0035644896 and 0044183689), one owned by the National Secretariat of the PDP (0054586830), and three by Umbrella Trust Ltd (0076600091, 0066988655 and 0068595990).

In Polaris Bank, one of the accounts belongs to the APC (1771444115), two owned by the PDP (1140060876 and 1770319690) and four by the PDP Fund Raising Dinner (1771643176,177647521, 177164514 and 1771647507).

In the letter, Mr Wetkas said: In the letter, Mr Wetkas said:

The Commission is investigating a case in which the above-mentioned account names and numbers featured.

In view of the above, you are kindly requested to forward the certified true copies of the following:

a. Account opening packages/mandate cards.

b. Statement of account from January 2021 to date (hard and soft copies). The soft copy should be copied to excel format and forwarded to cagomuo@effc.gov.ng.

c. Certificate of identification pursuant to Section 84(4) of the Evidence Act. 2011 (The certifying officer should include his full name, designation, signature and date on each page).

d. Any other relevant information that could assist the investigation.

The request is made pursuant to Section 38(1) 8(2) of Economic and Financial Crimes Commission Act 2021 and Section of the Money Laundering (Prohibition) Act 2021 as amended.

The spokesperson for the commission, Wilson Uwujaren declined to comment on the development, saying he had not been briefed.
Some students of Shehu Shagari College of Education, Sokoto, on Thursday, lynched a female student, identified simply as Deborah, over an allegation of blasphemy against Muhammed, a prophet of Islam.

The deceased was violently stoned to death and later set ablaze by the angry mob, who are mostly students of the college.

The college authorities immediately announced the closure of the school and ordered students to vacate the campus.

Alleged offence

The deceased, whose details were still sketchy as of the time of filing this report, was seen in a video that has gone viral on social media being violently attacked until she collapsed and was set ablaze.

She was said to have made derogatory comments against the prophet on a WhatsApp platform.

How it happened

A student of the college identified only by her first name, Jamila, narrated to PREMIUM TIMES how the incident started on Wednesday.

She said it all started when someone sent a broadcast message to a WhatsApp group of the students, to which Deborah, the murdered student, belonged.

It was that kind of message that will ask you to share with other groups if you dont want evil to befall you, said Jamila.

But the now deceased Deborah complained that such messages should not be sent to a WhatsApp group created for the sharing of important information about tests and assignments.

Send us important information. This group was not created for you to send useless information. It was created for you to send past questions if there is a test or an assignment. It is not for you to send useless information. Which prophet?, the late Deborah was quoted to have stated this in a voice note she shared to the WhatsApp group.

Jamila said although she later deleted the voice note, other members of the group had shared it among their friends in the school. It eventually sparked tension among the students on the campus.

PREMIUM TIMES learnt that when the students tried to mob Deborah, the schools security men came to her rescue. They informed the police when the situation started to get out of hand.

But a resident of Bado, the host community of the college, Ibrahim, said the police couldnt rescue Deborah as the mob kept hurling stones and objects at the police and the shelter where she was kept.

The shelter, which was originally a cell where the school security locked up thieves caught on the campus, has also been burnt down by the mob.

Details later
Public primary schools in Enugu state South-east Nigeria have been shut down since Monday following the indefinite strike embarked on by teachers over the non-payment of N30,000 minimum wage by the state government.

The State Wing Executive Council (SWEC) of the Nigeria Union of Teachers, (NUT) Enugu State chapter had announced the strike after its meeting on April 6.

SWEC Enugu directed that primary school teachers in the state should not resume for the 3rd term, of the 2021/22 academic session with effect from May 9 until the N30,000 National Minimum Wage is paid to their members.

Some pupils, who were not informed of the development to schools, went to schools, but returned home when they noticed the absence of teachers in their various schools.

The teachers had gone on a three- day warning strike in January to force the state government to pay them the new minimum wage.

The Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC), in solidarity with the teachers, had joined the warning strike.

Rather than negotiate with the workers, the government instead sued the leadership of the union at the National Industrial Court (NIC) sitting in Enugu.

The Enugu State Government, had, in an originating summons with number NICN/EN/01/2022, against the NUT in the state, led by Theophilus Odo, asked the court to bar the teachers from embarking on any strike on the ground that they were essential workers.

The government, however, lost the suit, as the NIC ruled that the teachers could go on strike as they were not essential duty workers, as alleged by the government.

Dismissing the suit, the NIC accused the state government of discriminating against primary school teachers.

The NIC, presided over by Oluwakayode Arowosegbe, had in an interlocutory injunction, restrained the teachers from embarking on any form of industrial action pending the determination of the substantive suit and ordered an accelerated hearing.

Mr Arowosegbe ordered the state government to go back and negotiate with the teachers, describing it as discriminatory for the claimant to pay some workers in the state the minimum wage, from February 2020, while refusing to pay the teachers same.

The judge noted that the state could not stop the teachers from ventilating their grievances through industrial action.

The court, in its judgement delivered on Tuesday, March 8, 2022, held that the Primary School teachers in Enugu State do not fall within the categories of workers who provide essential services, hence they can embark on strike and other lawful means to press home their demands.
Governor Hope Uzodinma of Imo State has set up a security committee ahead of a planned security conference in the state.

The Commissioner for Information in the state, Declan Emelumba, disclosed this on Wednesday during a news conference on the outcome of the states Executive Council meeting in Owerri.

Mr Emelumba said the committee would be headed by the Commissioner for Homeland Security and Vigilante Affairs, Ugorji Ugorji.

He said the governor also set up another committee, headed by the Commissioner for Livestock Development, Obiageri Ajoku, to work out modalities for the inspection and construction of modern abattoirs in the state.

The committee is to visit the Somachi Abattoir to examine the sanitary conditions and determine whether it was fit as a place where animals are slaughtered for public consumption, he said.

According to him, the committee is expected to work out the needs of meat dealers and consumers, in consideration of the construction of modern abattoirs.

Mr Emelumba expressed the delight of the executive council over the performance of the states para athletes at the recently concluded first-ever National Para-Sports Games in Abuja.

The executive council was delighted to note that the Imo contingent for this years para games came sixth overall in the country and first in the South East, winning a total of 59 medals.

Out of this, 16 gold, 25 silver and 18 bronze were won, he said.

He disclosed the governor would host the athletes to appreciate them and encourage future athletes to do better.

It is a thing of joy that they made the state and the people proud by coming tops at the competition.

Fraudulent acquisition of government land, property

Mr Emelumba said Governor Uzodinma has donated some trailer loads of textbooks to primary, secondary and tertiary schools to help facilitate quality education in the state.

He said the Executive Council frowned at residents conniving with government agencies to fraudulently acquire government land and property in the state.

Government warns that those doing so are doing so at their own risk, because the process of automation of these lands is ongoing.

Once completed, all the lands taken through forgery of Certificate of Occupancy will be recovered and those involved punished accordingly, he said.

The state government road construction campaign in the state had recorded much progress, despite the rainy season, the commissioner said.

He assured residents that the campaign across the state would be sustained despite rains, especially on MCC and Egbu roads.

(NAN)
Vice President Yemi Osinbajo continued his ongoing consultations and engagements with stakeholders and delegates of the All Progressives Congress (APC) on Wednesday in Nasarawa State, with the State Governor and Emir of Lafia commending his leadership qualities, describing him as the best among the aspirants to become Nigerias next president in 2023.

Also, in Nasarawa State yesterday, the vice president delivered the keynote at the inaugural Nasarawa Investment Summit, with the theme Diamond in the Rough: The Making of a New Investment Frontier.

Mr Osinbajo was warmly received in Nasarawa State by Governor Abdullahi Sule; the APC National Chairman, Abdullahi Adamu and other senior state government officials, with much dancing and singing from supporters and residents in the state.

In their remarks, both Governor Abdullahi Sule and the monarch, Justice Sidi Muhammad I, praised Mr Osinbajo, with the emir recalling that the VP is the Madugun Jihar Nasarawa (The Captain/Leader of Nasarawa State).

According to the Emir of Lafia, the best should be put in positions of leadership, adding that Mr Vice President, you are the best.

I wish you all the best. For us here, the little we can do is to put you in our prayers and the best should come out of you.

Also, Governor Sule noted that the Vice President was the best person to lead Nigeria as its next president in 2023.

Noting that even though there are several aspirants who have now declared their intention to run for president in 2023, the Nasarawa State Governor stated that in reality, there is no better candidate or aspirant than Mr Osinbajo.

Your Excellency, we believe in you, we strongly believe in you. For that reason, we pray for you. We pray that good things will be done for you, Governor Sule added.

During his interactions with the APC delegates in the state, Mr Osinbajo restated that his decision to run for president was because he wanted to give the best of his service to Nigeria.

The VP addressed various issues raised by the delegates, including restoring the confidence of ordinary Nigerians in the judiciary, and the representation of women in government.

I think that any country that wants to take itself seriously cannot afford to ignore half of its population; about half of our population are women. God helping us, if I am president of this country, there is no question in my mind that women will play very active roles, Mr Osinbajo stated.

He also highlighted the efforts of the Buhari administration in tackling issues in security, education and the power sector, among others.

Earlier at the inaugural Nasarawa Investment Summit, the vice president noted in his remarks that states must explore concrete ways of collaboration with the Federal Government and private sector so as to further boost and harness their investment potential.

The VP pointed out the strong public-private partnership models being promoted by Nasarawa Investment and Development Agency (NASIDA), so the private sector is able to bring resources, expertise and motivation to the table, to fill in capacity and resource gaps on the part of the government.

In boosting the investment drive, the VP added, I think it is also quite clear that Public sector reform, especially capacity enhancement, is crucial to the delivery of public goods. especially health, education, potable water, sanitation and housing and the success of the other giant strides being taken by Governor Abdullahi Sule and his team.

Reform of the civil service is one of the reform areas indicated in the Nasarawa Economic Development Strategy (NEDS) document. Current successes include the rationalization of ministries to 13 and the introduction of compulsory computer literacy training. Ongoing reforms must be institutionalised to ensure a lasting legacy.

The vice president also commended the foresight of the state governor in developing the NEDS, which has seen the states Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) boosted by 66 per cent from N12.48 billion in 2020 to N20.8 billion in 2021 despite the severe economic impact of COVID-19 pandemic.

He also referenced the states Ease of Doing Business Reforms, and, especially the establishment of NASIDA, a one-stop-shop for the initiation, promotion and facilitation of investments in the state.

Focusing on the theme of the summit, which he described as pragmatic and forward-looking, the VP stated that just like there are many facets to a diamond, there are many sides to the potential for investment in Nasarawa State.

He pointed out the states potential in solid minerals and agriculture, among other areas to attract investments.

Noting the states slogan as the Home of Solid Minerals, the VP stated that there is great scope for building a successful mining industry in Nasarawa State.

Mr Osinbajo observed that the national success recorded in the cement industry was based on the plentiful availability of limestone deposits which is positive proof of the potential of value-adding activities in the mining sector in Nasarawa State.

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The VP also pointed out the potential in increasing the States Internally Generated Revenue, noting that Nasarawa State shares borders with six states and the FCT. I expect that this and future investment summits will showcase the potential of the state as a logistics hub for the movement of people and goods between its neighbours.

The Vice President commended Governor Sule and his team for their great vision, hard work and efforts in transforming Nasarawa State in the last three years.

In his remarks, Governor Sule stated that the summit is aimed at positioning Nasarawa State as the investment destination amongst the top three most competitive States in Nigeria, in terms of accelerated growth, increased economic opportunities, social inclusion and improved quality of life of the citizenry.

He further stated that in line with the NEDS documents, we have also attracted additional investments from Dangote Industries Ltd, Azman Rice Ltd, Flour Mills of Nigeria Plc, as well as utilisation of our various assets, including markets, fertilizer blending plants, packaging company, as well as exportation.

As a state government, we are looking forward to the resolution of this summit for implementation and we shall closely monitor implementation.

Dignitaries who spoke at the summit include former Ghanaian President, John Mahama; the Edo State Governor, Godwin Obaseki; the APC National Chairman, Abdullahi Adamu, and former Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi II.

Others are the Special Adviser to the President on Ease of Doing Business, Jumoke Oduwole; President, Dangote Group of Companies, Aliko Dangote; Director-General, Nigeria Governors Forum, A. B. Okauru; and Koyinsola Ajayi, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria.

Laolu Akande

Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media & Publicity
The Senate, on Wednesday, mourned the killing of soldiers and civilians by armed persons in the southern part of Taraba State.

The mourning followed a point of order by Emmanuel Bwacha, a senator representing Taraba South.

PREMIUM TIMES reported how the gunmen, locally called bandits, killed six soldiers responding to an attack at Tati, a village in Takum Local Government Area in the State.

The Nigerian Military said in an internal communication obtained by this newspaper from 93 Battalion in Takum, that the commanding officer of the battalion, E.S Okore, a lieutenant colonel, is yet to be accounted for.

The signal said the incident happened around 10 a.m. on May 10. It stated that the bandits in the clash outnumbered the troops.

Ezrel Tabiowo, media aide to the president of the Senate, in a statement, said under Order 42 of the Senate Standing Orders 2022 as amended, Mr Bwacha drew the attention of the chamber to the incidents of banditry and terrorism that occurred in Southern Taraba during the Sallah break.

The lawmaker said the attackers came on motorbikes and killed over 40 people, including soldiers who were mobilised to protect the community.

Mr Bwacha consoled military authorities over the loss of its officials in the line of duty, the statement said.

He appealed to the Federal Government to direct the relevant agencies to provide relief materials to the victims of the attack.

Mr Tabiowo said Senate President Ahmad Lawan urged Nigerians to support the military by providing the needed motivation and information to enable them to tackle the problem of insecurity.

Mr Lawan said, Let me also say that the military and our armed forces are doing their best, we have no alternative but to support them in whatever way possible.

Here in the Senate and National Assembly, we have been appropriating funds for our armed forces, and I believe that this administration has provided more resources to them to fight the various forms and ramifications of insecurity in the country than any previous one.

So, we will continue to give that kind of support. And I also want to urge all Nigerians to continue to support our armed forces because they are doing so much even though we dont have enough for them.

But I believe that the support of citizens for the armed forces will galvanize and keep them motivated, Mr Tabiowo quoted his principal saying in the statement.

The Senate, thereafter, observed a minute of silence for all those killed by the terrorists, the statement added.

Taraba in the Northeast region is witnessing an upsurge in criminality with kidnap-for-ransom, bomb explosions on the rise in the state capital, Jalingo, and attacks by bandits are becoming rampant in other parts of the state.

PREMIUM TIMES reported how the Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP) has claimed responsibility for some of the explosions in the state.
A Catholic Priest, Alphonsus Eboh, abducted by gunmen in Akwa Ibom State on Sunday has been freed after spending four days in captivity.

Mr Eboh was abducted around 7 p.m. on May 8 at his residence, inside the parish house  St Pius X parish  Ikot Abasi Akpan, Mkpat Enin Local Government Area of Akwa Ibom State.

Cletus Okodi, the chairman of the parish council, who confirmed the release of the priest, said money was paid to his abductors.

The gunmen had demanded N100 million ransom.

Mr Okodi told PREMIUM TIMES the parish paid money to the kidnappers, but he did not, however, mention the specific amount.

They (kidnappers) cannot release him without money. We paid what we have but not up to N100 million, Mr Okodi told our reporters Thursday morning.

The church said the gunmen abducted the priest shortly after he returned from visiting a parishioner who was ill.

The Catholic authorities in Uyo Diocese had urged the public to pray for his safe release.

His abduction came a few days after a popular Pentecostal preacher in the state, John Okoriko, was abducted and later released, apparently after ransom payment.

The priests abduction took place less than 10 kilometers away from where Mr Okoriko was abducted.

It is unclear for now if the same group was responsible for the two abductions.

The police spokesperson in Akwa Ibom, Odiko Macdon, did not respond to the request for comment for this report.

Meanwhile, a Catholic priest abducted some weeks ago in Kaduna, Nigerias North-west, has reportedly died in captivity.

The priest, Joseph Bako, died between April 18 and 20, according to the Catholic authorities in Kaduna.

He was 48 years old.

Abduction for ransom is now one of the dominant crimes across various Nigerian cities.

Politicians, entrepreneurs, just anyone with good financial worth, including school children, are easy targets.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has rejected the rescheduled ward congress of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Imo State.

The state chapter of PDP had, in a letter, dated May 9, 2022, notified the commission that it had rescheduled its congress to hold on Tuesday, May 10, 2022.

But INEC, in a letter addressed to the party and signed by the commissions secretary, Rose Oriaran-Anthony, on Wednesday, said the partys notice contravened the commissions regulations for political party operations.

The commission notes that the notice was received on May 9, 2022 and the congress was rescheduled for May 10, 2022 contrary to the provision (of) Article 1.2 of the commissions Regulations Guidelines for political party operations which requires at least a seven-day notice for rescheduled congresses, the letter read in part.

INEC also said it would not accept the result from the congress due to an existing court order restraining the commission from recognising any result from the three-man ad-hoc delegates election in the state.

Background

INEC had voided the three-man ad hoc delegates congress of the PDP in the state, which was held on April 30.

The commission explained that its decision was based on their observations that the exercise did not comply with the relevant laws and guidelines on the conduct of the congress.

It said while some party officials claimed to have reached a consensus to elect the delegates; the process adopted by the party violated the Electoral Act.

When parties have agreed to adopt a consensus method, proper congress should be held to affirm the chosen candidates or delegates in a free, fair and credible process, Francis Ezeonu, the state resident electoral commissioner, said, in a report on the Imo PDP three-man ward congress delegate.

Mr Ezeonu, in the eight-page report, also listed the observations of the commission in each of the 27 local council areas of the state during the botched exercise.

In almost all the instances, the monitors claimed that no original result was brought to the venues. The absence of the materials, including the sensitive ones (result sheets), as reported by all the electoral officers in all the ward venues where the congress was to hold, cast a lot of doubts on the exercise, he added.

The INEC official insisted that, given the instances of various violations, the state party congress will not be said to have substantially complied with the relevant laws and guidelines on the conduct of ward congresses for the election of delegates.
Airtel Africas net profit for the year ended March 31 soared by more than four-fifths on the back of increased revenue, according to the wireless operators financial report for the period.

Turnover leapt by 23.3 per cent to $4.7 billion from a year earlier, with receiving a boost from earnings from data as well as mobile money.

The telco highlighted marked improvement in constant currency underlying revenue in all the regions of its operation (Nigeria, East Africa and Francophone Africa) as a key factor aiding the growth.

London-listed Airtel Africa, which entered the FTSE 100 Index in January, won the Central Bank of Nigerias full approval in April to operate a payments service bank in Nigeria.

Profit before tax stood at $1.2 billion, rising 75.6 per cent over what was posted a year ago, while after-tax profit scaled up to $755 million. That compares with the $415 million reported for financial year 2020, implying an 82 per cent increase.

We have successfully executed on a number of strategic initiatives in the year, with tower sales completed in four countries, $550m of minority investments secured for our mobile money business and a successful buyout of minorities in our Nigerian operation, said CEO Segun Ogunsanya.

While the fundamentals of our six-pillar growth strategy remain unchanged, we are looking to accelerate our performance through a greater focus on digitalisation and we have underpinned our strategic pillars with our sustainability ambition.

Airtel Africas mobile money drive attracted investment from a number of private equity investors last year including Mastercard, TPG, Chimera Investment LLC and Qatar Investment Authority. The companys mobile money business is currently valued at $2.65 billion on a cash and debt free basis.

For the review period, profit margin, which measures how much of revenue has turned to profit, was 16 per cent. It was 10.6 per cent a year earlier.

Nigeria is the mobile telephone groups largest market.
The chancellor of the Kaduna Catholic Archdiocese, Christian Emmanuel, has said a Reverend Father, Joseph Bako, has died in the kidnappers hideout, the Daily trust newspaper is reporting.

Mr Bako was abducted by gunmen in St John Catholic Church, Kudenda in the Chikun Local Government Area of Kaduna State in March.

Mr Emmanuel said the 48-year-old priest died after battling sickness while in the kidnappers den.

Daily Trust reported that Mr Bako was denied access to his drugs by the bandits which led to his death.

His own brother was killed there in his presence and after his brother was killed, his condition worsened and he died. We have not recovered his corpse but we have confirmed his death. People who were kidnapped together with him saw him die, Mr Emmanuel said.

Kaduna, like in other areas in Nigerias North-west region, is convulsing under the attacks by gunmen locally called bandits who attack mostly rural communities and travellers.

READ ALSO: Catholic Church calls for prayer for its priest abducted in Akwa Ibom

These bandits have been blamed for killing thousands of people. They have also abducted many more in what is shaping to become one of the worst kidnap-for-ransom syndicates in the history of the country.

In the face of the failure of the government to protect residents of the area, many communities have set up vigilante groups to protect residents from attacks by bandits but this has worsened the security challenges in the area as it has given rise to an explosion of tit-for-tat killings between the bandits (who are mostly of Fulani extraction) and the vigilante groups set up by the majority Hausa communities in the area.
A Supreme Court judge, Mary Peter-Odili, retired after attaining the retirement age of 70 on Thursday.

Speaking at the valedictory court session held in her honour, Mrs Peter-Odili lamented the spate of violent crimes in Nigeria, which she attributed to youth unemployment.

At the event which held at the Supreme Court in Abuja, the retiring apex court justice, who is the wife of Peter Odili, a former Rivers State governor, warned that the urgency of what we are all faced with right now calls for necessity in tackling them.

The massive unemployment of tertiary institution graduates is a tip of the icebergs.

The millions of idle youth is not unrelated to the insecurity on the ground, she said.

She said the current strike action by public universities lecturers, which has lasted over three months, has compounded youth restiveness.

The situation is not helped by the perennial strikes which leave students idling away.

In tackling the problem, Mrs Peter-Odili suggested that the Head of State should take on the garb of Minister of Youth, Employment and Social Welfare.

Drawing from her experience as a former First Lady in Rivers State, Mrs Peter-Odili said with the president assuming the role of employment minister, he would direct the implementation of what is put in place without middlemen hijacking the process.

She advised state governors to adopt same strategies in dealing with youth unemployment.

Furthermore, Mrs Peter-Odili in her valedictory speech advocated the urgent restructuring of Nigeria.

My humble view is that the issue (of restructuring) should be given an immediate attention.

Recalling her over four-decade judicial career, she thanked her husband, Mr Odili, and colleagues for their support.

Eulogies

The Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Tanko Muhammad, poured encomium on Mrs Peter-Odili for her irrepressible voice in the temple of justice.

Mr Muhammad described the retiring jurist as the epitome of jurisprudential finesse.

We are honouring an amiable lady of alluring qualities and excellence that transcend the legal profession, he said.

The CJN noted that Mrs Peter-Odili offered the best of her intellect to the advancement of the legal profession through her several years of inimitable adjudications at different levels of courts in Nigeria.

She is a specimen of hard work, industry, discipline and high moral rectitude, Mr Muhammad said.

Similarly, Wole Olanipekun, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria(SAN), praised the retiring justice for her contribution to Nigerias judicial system.

But, Mr Olanipekun who spoke on behalf of the Body of Senior Advocates of Nigeria, said the legal profession today faces a lot of problems.

Political cases are responsible for the tagging of judiciary as supermarket.'

He pointed out that the Supreme Court cannot be insular.

Where the Supreme Court gives a judgement in error, it should reverse itself,  adding that forum-shopping where lawyers shop for favourable court decisions has to be addressed.

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Mr Olanipekun urged the executive arm of government to stop harassing the judiciary. The judiciary can never be inferior to any other arm of government.

On his part, the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF) Abubakar Malami, represented by Beatrice Jedy-Agba, Ministry of Justices permanent secretary, noted that Mrs Peter-Odili followed the path of honour during her time as justice on the bench of the Supreme Court.

He, however, called on the judiciary to embrace technological innovation to ensure a more effective and efficient justice delivery system.

Profile

Mrs Peter-Odili bowed out of service after attaining the 70 years mandatory retirement age.

She was born on May 12, 1952, to the royal family of Bernard Nzenwa in a highly commercially inclined community of Amudi Obizi, Ezinihitte-Mbaise Local Government Area of Imo State.

She made headlines in October last year after 15 suspected invaders, including a suspected police officer, invaded her house to purportedly execute a search warrant.

The suspects are currently standing trial at the Federal High Court in Abuja.
Some students of Shehu Shagari College of Education, Sokoto, on Thursday, lynched a 200 level female student of the Department of Early Childhood Education, Deborah Emmanuel, over an allegation of blasphemy against Muhammed, a prophet of Islam.

The deceased was violently stoned to death and later set ablaze by the angry mob, who are mostly students of the college.

The college authorities immediately announced the closure of the school and ordered students to vacate the campus.

The Sokoto State Government has also promised to investigate the matter and vowed that the perpetrators would be brought to book.

The government said it ordered the immediate closure of the institution.

Alleged offence

The deceased, whose details were still sketchy as of the time of filing this report, was seen in a video that has gone viral on social media being violently attacked until she collapsed and was set ablaze.

She was said to have made derogatory comments against the prophet on a WhatsApp platform.

How it happened

A student of the college identified only by her first name, Jamila, narrated to PREMIUM TIMES how the incident started on Wednesday.

She said it all started when someone sent a broadcast message to a WhatsApp group of the students, to which Deborah, the murdered student, belonged.

It was that kind of message that will ask you to share with other groups if you dont want evil to befall you, said Jamila.

But the now deceased Deborah complained that such messages should not be sent to a WhatsApp group created for the sharing of important information about tests and assignments.

Send us important information. This group was not created for you to send useless information. It was created for you to send past questions if there is a test or an assignment. It is not for you to send useless information. Which prophet?, the late Deborah was quoted to have stated this in a voice note she shared to the WhatsApp group.

Jamila said although she later deleted the voice note, other members of the group had shared it among their friends in the school. It eventually sparked tension among the students on the campus.

PREMIUM TIMES learnt that when the students tried to mob Deborah, the schools security men came to her rescue. They informed the police when the situation started to get out of hand.

But a resident of Bado, the host community of the college, Ibrahim, said the police couldnt rescue Deborah as the mob kept hurling stones and objects at the police and the shelter where she was kept.

The shelter, which was originally a cell where the school security locked up thieves caught on the campus, has also been burnt down by the mob.

Government reacts

Speaking on Thursday on the matter, the information commissioner, Isa Galadanchi, described the incident as unfortunate.

He said the state governor, Aminu Tambuwal, has directed the ministry of higher education and other relevant authorities to commence investigations into the remote and immediate causes of the incident and report back to the government.

Meanwhile, Governor Aminu Waziri Tambuwal has called on the people of the state to remain calm and maintain peace as the government would take appropriate actions on the findings of the investigations by the relevant authority.

Kukah, Kadaria react

Meanwhile, the Bishop of Sokoto Diocese, Matthew Kukah condemned the killing and called on authorities to investigate the tragedy and ensure that the culprits are brought to the book.

This as many Nigerians have also taken to social media to condemn the development, describing it as barbaric and gory.

A renowned journalist and owner of Radio Now in Lagos, Kadaria Ahmed, took to her Twitter handle to vent her anger at the perpetrators of the act.

Mr Kukah, in a statement issued on the matter on Thursday, noted the peaceful coexistence of Muslims and Christians in Sokoto over the years. He said the conduct of the mob was an act of criminality and that it must be treated as one.

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The clerics statement read in part: The only obligation that is owed to her immediate family, her fellow students and the school authorities is the assurance that those who are guilty of this inhuman act, no matter their motivation, are punished according to the extant laws of our land.

This has nothing to do with religion. Christians have lived peacefully with their Muslim neighbours here in Sokoto over the years. This matter must be treated as a criminal act and the law must take its cause.

He also called on Christians in Sokoto and Nigeria to remain calm and pray for the repose of the soul of Ms Deborah; it is the first obligation we owe her.

Were becoming a Godless people

Mrs Ahmed in her tweet on Thursday said it is not enough for the school authorities to simply shut down the school. She demanded further details and justice.

She wrote: Just saw a harrowing video of a mob killing a girl at a college of education in Sokoto.The notice below shutting down the school doesnt give details. We have totally lost our way (and) are in fact fast becoming a Godless people despite pretence to the contrary. I am angry.

Qosim Suleiman is a reporter at Premium Times in partnership with Report for the World, which matches local newsrooms with talented emerging journalists to report on under-covered issues around the globe.
The State Security Service (SSS) has distanced itself from media reports that it called for the elongation of the tenure of President Muhammadu Buhari.

The Service made its stance known in a statement on Thursday by its spokesperson, Peter Afunanya.

An online newspaper, Sahara Reporters, had reported that the SSS was backing the continued stay of the president, whose tenure ends on May 29, 2023.

It comes a few days after a senior lawyer, Robert Clarke, in an interview with Arise TV, suggested that the president remains in office for six extra months to address the lingering security challenges.

The Presidency, however, on Tuesday, responded by saying the transfer of power from President Muhammadu Buhari to another democratically elected leader on May 29, 2023, remained sacrosanct.

The Presidencys position was contained in a statement by the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, titled May 29 handover is sacrosanct.

The SSS said the publication,which claimed it was testing the water for tenure elongation for Buhari was aimed at maligning the agency and misleading the public.

Consequently, the DSS disassociates itself from the publication and categorically states that the information is false and obviously fabricated to malign it and mislead the populace, the statement partly read.

Read full statement:

PRESS RELEASE

NO CALL FOR TENURE ELONGATION BY DSS

The attention of the Department of State Services (DSS) has been drawn to a misleading and mischievous publication by SaharaReporters titled Nigerias Secret Police, DSS Tests the Water on Tenure Elongation for Buhari, Tells Journalists, CSOs 2023 Elections May Not Hold. In the said report, the Service was accused of informing participants at its April 6th brainstorming session with CSOs/NGOs that the 2023 general elections might not hold due to insecurity. The report further stated that the session was a ruse to sell tenure elongation to the public.

Consequently, the DSS disassociates itself from the publication and categorically states that the information is false and obviously fabricated to malign it and mislead the populace.

It is curious that the session which was applauded and described as innovative by participants including credible Civil Society groups would be misrepresented by SaharaReporters that was neither invited to nor participated in the exercise. The Online paper, in its characteristic gutter journalism, had initially claimed that participants at the session were harassed. When the fake news did not garner the expected attention, it resorted to another gimmick aimed at dragging the Service into an unnecessary term elongation debate.

However, the statement by the Presidency reiterating its definite stance to hand over power to a new president on 29th May 2023, has vindicated the Service and countered the deliberate effort by SaharaReporters to create confusion. While the Service, in the circumstance, aligns with the Presidency, it urges the public to disregard the lies of SaharaReporters and its promoter whose activities are usually antithetical to a decorous environment.

It is common knowledge that SaharaReporters is mischievously desperate and takes delight in promoting negative narratives against Government and its officials. The paper has not only remained biased and sensational in its reportage, it has sustained seditious attacks against security institutions and particularly the Service which may not hesitate to seek legal redress in the face of continued misrepresentation

Meanwhile, politicians and highly placed personalities are advised to desist from making unguarded statements capable of derailing efforts to deepen the countrys democracy as well as mobilise citizens for national unity and stability.

Peter Afunanya, Ph.D, fsi

Public Relations Officer

Department of State Services

National Headquarters

Abuja.

12th May, 2022
The Federal High Court in Abuja, on Thursday, joined the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and two lawyers, as interest parties in the suit by the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Godwin Emefiele, to secure his right to run for the presidency in 2023.

The judge, Ahmed Mohammed, dismissed the objection of the Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF), one of the two defendants originally sued by Mr Emefiele, to grant permission to PDP to be joined as a party to the case.

Mr Emefiele had filed his suit praying for an order restraining the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and the AGF from disqualifying him from contesting for the presidential ticket of any political party of his choice ahead of the 2023 general elections.

The PDP and two lawyers, John Aikpokpo-Martins and Olakunle Ebun, had subsequently applied to be joined as interested parties in the suit. Mr Aikpokpo-Martins and Edun applied to be joined in the suit on behalf of a non-governmental organisation  Save Nigeria Our Fatherland.

The applications were opposed by the AGF. But the plaintiff, Mr Emefiele, and INEC were neutral.

Ruling on the applications, however, the judge dismissed the AGFs objection and granted the PDPs application. He ruled that the AGF lacked the right to oppose the requests.

The plaintiff who should have opposed the joinder has conceded it. The joinder applications are hereby granted, Mr Mohammed said.

Subsequently, the judge ordered Mr Emefieles lawyer, Mike Ozekhome, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), to file and serve amended court documents on the defendants to reflect the new parties to the suit.

Messrs Dipo Okpeseyi and Sabastin Hon represented the AGF and the PDP, respectively.

Why we are joining suit

One of the newly joined respondents, Mr Aikpokpo-Martins, who is the 1st Vice president of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), told PREMIUM TIMES that he was joining the suit in the interest of Nigerians.

Citing the case of Nduka Edede versus the AGF concerning the controversial Section 84 (12) of the Electoral Act 2022 which was determined by the Federal High Court in Umuahia, Abia State, Mr Aikpokpo-Martins said the interest of Nigerians was not properly defended in the suit by the AGF who was the sole respondent.

To forestall what transpired in the recent AGF suit at the Federal High Court in Umuahia, we have joined this case to ensure that it is not compromised, Mr Aikpokpo-Martins explained.

Mr Malami after receiving news of the outcome of the decision by the judge, Evelyn Anyadike in Umuahia, vowed to immediately enforce the verdict.

Section 84 (12) bars political appointees from voting as delegates in party conventions or congresses of any political party to vie for elective positions.

Background

This newspaper reported that Mr Emefiele, who filed the main suit on May 5, argued that no law exempts him from contesting the primary election of any political party as a sitting CBN governor.

The plaintiff is legally competent to contest the primaries of any political parties while still serving as the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, in so far as he gives 30 days notice of his resignation, withdrawal from the services of the CBN as its governor in accordance with the provisions of section 167 and 318 of the constitution, the plaintiffs lawyer said.

The CBN governor has been under pressure to relinquish his office since the information about his presidential ambition leaked to the public earlier this year.

In February, a PREMIUM TIMES editorial called on Mr Emefiele to resign and pursue his political ambition, if he had any, or publicly distance himself from groups clamouring for him to contest the forthcoming presidential election scheduled to hold on February 25.

Mr Emefiele spoke, on Saturday, for the first time about his reported plan to run for the presidency in the 2023 election.

He spoke after reports that a group had purchased the N100 million worth of presidential nomination and expression of interest forms of the All Progressives Congress (APC) for him.

He said although he had yet to decide to contest the presidential election, should he heed the call to run for the presidency, he would use his own hard-earned savings from over 35 years of banking leadership to buy my own Nomination Forms.

In his suit confirming his political ambition, Mr Emefiele sued the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and the Attorney-General of the Federation asking the court to restrain them from compelling him to resign as the CBN governor to run for office in 2023.

His lawyer, Mr Ozekhome, expressed fears that the INEC and the AGF are making frantic efforts to disqualify Mr Emefiele from participating in the presidential primaries scheduled for June 3, 2022, for not resigning from his office before the parties primaries.

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A former Senate President and presidential aspirant, Bukola Saraki, says he will ensure strict compliance with the rule of law if elected into office, come 2023.

He also said he would guarantee consequences for crimes and ensure that security personnel are well-trained, well-paid and well-equipped.

These are some of the promises he made when he officially declared to run for president in the 2023 election, in Abuja, on Thursday.

Mr Saraki is one of the 17 aspirants vying for the nations highest political office on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

He was screened and cleared by the partys presidential screening committee last month.

He had contested for the same position in 2019 but lost out in the primaries.

In his speech, the former lawmaker said his decision to run for the various offices he has occupied in the past is based solely on his passion to serve the people.

It is no longer news that I am in the race for the @OfficialPDPNig ticket to contest for the Office of the President. This morning at 10 am, go to https://t.co/y8nBJPC3Vw to find out why. You can also watch the session live on AIT and Arise Television.#ABS2023#FixNigeria pic.twitter.com/Qz96fIsR3F  Dr. Abubakar Bukola Saraki (@bukolasaraki) May 12, 2022

He said his experiences as governor, special assistant to a former president, Olusegun Obasanjo and a senate president, make him the best candidate for president.

He recalled the successes he recorded during his time as the governor of Kwara including education reforms, job creation, healthcare, commercial aviation and infrastructure.

He explained that Nigeria has never lacked ideas but only missed it in leadership  a critical vacuum he intends to fill.

Promises

Some of Mr Sarakis promises include ensuring that the law on compulsory basic education is enforced and the quality of teaching improves in all public schools.

He also promised to make health insurance available to all Nigerians, protect the lives and properties of citizens as well as train and pay security personnel.

I will raise the revenue from the non-oil sectors to the same level as we currently earn from oil.

I will ensure strict compliance with the rule of law and guarantee consequences for crime. I will collaborate with the industries, and train one million of our youths in technical and vocational skills each year.

Earlier today, in the presence of my lovely wife, Toyin, our friends and supporters, and 1500 delegates from the Peoples Democratic Party, I officially rolled out my social contract with Nigerians by telling them why I want to be their next President.#TheSarakiDeclaration pic.twitter.com/VwFrQAIZi0  Dr. Abubakar Bukola Saraki (@bukolasaraki) May 12, 2022

Mr Saraki has also promised to deliver half a million affordable housing units every year to our low-income earners and eliminate urban slums and invest massively in skills in cloud computing, data analytics, programming and other such in-demand skills to drive innovation and competitiveness among the youths.

He said he will ensure universities and higher education institutions are competitive and well-funded, adopting models and approaches that have served the most successful higher education systems in the world. And also develop targeted incentives to reverse the brain drain and keep our professionals in the country.

While he agreed that the challenges may take longer to solve, the former lawmaker assured that his portfolio of experience at the executive level, and the highest legislative institution in the country, makes him a unique asset in democratic leadership at a time that calls for consensus building, for cooperation and compromise.

He will battle for the partys presidential ticket alongside 16 other aspirants at the partys primary election scheduled for May 28 and 29.
For now, those who dont like what theyre seeing or what theyre hearing can comfort themselves with the thought that after nearly eight years of waiting, the ruling party may have finally paved the way to change by leveraging the scandalous ingenuity of a politician from the PDP, the same party that APC once despised.

After emerging as the consensus chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Abdullahi Adamu, was faced with a major crisis. Healing the deep divisions in the party was urgent but it was not even the most serious concern of the 75-year-old senator, former governor and former member of the opposition party. Nor was the dilapidated, rudderless state of the party organs the most pressing task.

His problem was more severe. In vehicular metaphor, he had just inherited a car without an engine. And this happened ahead of a major race in which his party is not only hoping to do well, but also to win. He needs money to fix the engine and oil the party machine, but the party is broke, if not bankrupt.

His new executive toyed with the idea of probing its predecessors but quickly dropped it. It would be a needless distraction and there was hardly any time for that. Insiders said at this point, members of the newly constituted national executive committee met and decided that the only way to repair the partys finances and fund the forthcoming elections was to raise the cost of the nomination forms by 122 per cent, that is, from N45 million in the last election cycle in 2019 to N100 million.

Why anyone would buy a form for N100 million to prequalify to tackle a raft of problems ranging from a serious debt crisis to banditry and from insurgency to rampant corruption and a distressed national currency, is baffling. But Adamus executive obviously thought there was no other way, except those that had been tried with severe negative consequences.

Its in the nature of party politics in Nigeria that party chairmen serve two masters. They are appointed and removed by the strongest faction (usually the president in the case of the ruling party) to whom they must bow. And also, they hold their positions at the pleasure of governors who fund the parties.

In the last over two decades, at least, the fall of chairmen across party lines is traceable to political transactions with governors, especially at election time, for the organised bazaar of party positions. This transaction allows chairmen to make some money, offers governors a bargain, while the change, if there is any, is used to run the party.

It was a temptation that Adamu wanted to resist by building, if you like, an independent war chest outside the contaminated trough. And yet, he overcame this temptation by yielding to its worst outcomes. His predecessor, Adams Oshiomhole, had tried, for the first time, to raise money from the sale of party forms to fund candidates in 2019, with limited success.

Yet, even at this scandalous rate, the partys stock is oversubscribed. It is apparently so seduced by its own scandalous ingenuity that it has twice extended the sale of forms. However hard Adamu may try  and he has bullyishly made the point that the party needs tons of money to fund its campaign  it is difficult for him and his party to escape accusations of robbery by pretence.

Unlike what obtains in other countries where the party rank and file chip in their bits and special interest groups with shared ideology also come through for the party, the contribution here is zero. Since party registers are at best dubious and party accounts are not audited, funds come from anywhere from private pockets to bullion vans. No one is exactly sure what it costs political parties to run, say, a presidential election campaign, for example.

A report in The Africa Report of March 22 said staging a presidential campaign alone could cost up to $2 billion. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) set the bar for 2023 at N1 billion ($2.4 million), now adjusted to N5 billion ($12 million), but has no way of knowing, monitoring or enforcing this threshold.

Former presidential spokesperson, Doyin Okupe, himself a presidential wannabe, told the magazine that, No Nigerian president in the last 20 years has spent less than $100 million to be president. Its now upwards of $300 million. I know this because Im an insiderNo Nigerian president has through his sheer wealth alone put himself in office, whether Olusegun Obasanjo, Umaru YarAdua or Goodluck Jonathan. He might have added Muhammadu Buhari as well.

Its one of the paradoxes of this republic that a system that should guarantee reasonable opportunities  an egalitarian system, if you like  still manages to produce political oligarchs. The system appears designed to be forbiddingly expensive and there is no one who has witnessed Nigerias elections in the last nearly two-and-a-half decades that would not be alarmed at the outrageous monetisation of the process under a party that campaigned for change. Politicians dispense bribes in sacks or stuff them in between bread loaves, depending on who is at the receiving end, where and when.

Caught between the devil of depending on governors to fund its election and the rock of an empty party treasury, Adamu obtained Buharis approval to raise the cost of forms to an amount almost double the four-year annual salary of the president, who officially earns roughly N14.1 million yearly.

Yet, even at this scandalous rate, the partys stock is oversubscribed. It is apparently so seduced by its own scandalous ingenuity that it has twice extended the sale of forms. However hard Adamu may try  and he has bullyishly made the point that the party needs tons of money to fund its campaign  it is difficult for him and his party to escape accusations of robbery by pretence.

Out of the 28 APC aspirants who have so far bought forms to contest the presidency, seven  Godswill Akpabio, Chris Ngige, Emeka Nwajiuba, Ogbonnaya Onu, Rotimi Amaechi, Timipre Silva, and Godwin Emefiele  are political appointees serving in Buharis government. The salaries of six of them in the last seven years is estimated at N504 million, that is, a yearly average of N72 million. This, of course, is minus Emefiele, whose salary is on a different scale.

Those who contested the position for chairmanship against Adamu and lost, for example, are still lining up outside the party secretariat waiting to get their N20 million refunds or whatever crumbs remain. But it doesnt matter. With the extraordinary infusion of cash from the new sale of forms, the tent can always be expanded to create room for every scoundrel.

If they claim  as they all do  that the money is not theirs, then were compelled to ask what special lotion or charm they have been using to attract such extraordinary goodwill in a country that has gotten poorer in the last seven years than at any other time in its recent history. As of the last rough tally, APC had amassed about N3 billion, VAT-free income from the sale of presidential forms alone.

In the end, only one candidate will emerge. Like the true stock brokerage firm that it has become, however, the party will advise the losers to convert their form fees into investment in ministerial positions or the right to make significant appointments. There is no place for refunds.

Those who contested the position for chairmanship against Adamu and lost, for example, are still lining up outside the party secretariat waiting to get their N20 million refunds or whatever crumbs remain. But it doesnt matter. With the extraordinary infusion of cash from the new sale of forms, the tent can always be expanded to create room for every scoundrel.

A friend suggested that the huge funds flowing into the APCs account could be an avenue to launder money. But which government agency has the courage to question a group of peasants, herders or an old boys network for shelling out N100 million only to buy a lottery ticket from the ruling party for a messiah in its fold? That will be the day.

For now, those who dont like what theyre seeing or what theyre hearing can comfort themselves with the thought that after nearly eight years of waiting, the ruling party may have finally paved the way to change by leveraging the scandalous ingenuity of a politician from the PDP, the same party that APC once despised.

Adamu is a gift that the PDP would regret losing. In two months of taking the helm, he has shown that he can both think  and work  outside the box. Whoever knew that the road to the presidency was this prosperous!

Azu Ishiekwene is Editor-in-Chief of LEADERSHIP.
Over four advocacy groups have accused an associate professor at the Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies of sexually abusing his two daughters.

The groups told journalists in Lagos Thursday that Adebisi Arewa, the associate professor, alleged that his daughters school teachers and a driver of sexually abusing his children.

His accusation led to the detention of one of the teachers, Adewale Bakare, by a magistrate court in Lagos and a life sentence of one Abiodun Martins, the driver, in February.

The groups include Advocate for Children and Vulnerable Persons Network (ACVPN) Concerned Parents and Educators (CPE), Radical Agenda Movement in the Nigerian Bar Association, and Stop the Abuse Against Children and Women Foundation (SAACWF) amongst others.

Toyin Taiwo-Ojo, a lawyer, who spoke on behalf of the groups, said Mr Arewa exploited the lacuna in the states justice system and went on an accusation spree that innocent persons have defiled his daughters.

According to Mrs Taiwo-Ojo, the professor had accused at least six teachers  five males and a female  of raping his daughters, who are minors, since 2019.

One question that stands out among so many others is why are these girls being repeatedly abused, even in different schools? Is this another case of child abuse and parental negligence? Mrs Taiwo-Ojo asked.

As we speak, we have a teacher who is in Kirikiri for having defiled one of the daughters whom we shall call Miss O.

And even though Miss O has confessed on three different occasions on video that she was lying against her teacher, one Mr Bakare.

She has also confessed to her classmate and even her principal that the allegations against her teacher were all lies and she only said that because that was what her father wanted her to say.

Mrs Taiwo-Ojo said the commissioner of police in the state on April 4 ordered a forensic interview on one of the minors as part of the investigation into the matter.

But a day before the scheduled date for the forensic interview, they charged the matter to court.

One question which begs for an answer is why the tardiness and hurry to prosecute a poorly investigated matter? Why is Mr Arewa afraid of the forensic interview? Is he afraid that the real truth of who is abusing the minor will be discovered?

We are also aware that an almost similar scenario had earlier been enacted in 2019, when a sister NGO, Cece Yara Foundation, during an advocacy visit noticed that the child, Miss O, had been physically abused by the father and according to the report, wrote a letter to the Ministry of Youth and Social Development that the said child should be taken into protective custody.

And in what will be best described as drawing away attention from the real issue of the physical abuse of Miss O, five days later, a driver in the school, one Abiodun Matthew, who never had any contact with the minor was arrested and accused of having defiled the girl. He has since been committed to life imprisonment by the court.

The lawyer said they scheduled another date, May 12, for the forensic interview, but the minors father refused to present the child.

The groups described Mr Arewas allegations as an abuse of the legal process.

We also find the Lagos State government culpable for the continual abuse of the children, said Mrs Taiwo-Ojo.

It is to our knowledge that the Ministry of Youth and Social Development obtained an order in 2019 to rescue the girls but failed to execute the order because they discovered that Mr Arewa had abruptly moved out of his rented abode when he got wind of their plan.

Outright lies

Contacted for reaction, Mr Arewa described the allegations as funny and outright lies.

He said the investigation team had done a forensic interview with his daughter but still went to his daughters school to conduct another forensic interview without his knowledge.

He said the investigation team promised her many things, messed up her head and made her accuse him of the sexual abuse.

When asked to respond to claims that he refused to present the minor for evaluation, he replied, How many forensic interviews?

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Mr Arewa said the investigation had closed before some groups went to mount pressure on the commissioner of police who eventually reopened the matter.

I wrote a petition and followed up with the commissioner up to about nine pages. He ordered that the man be taken to court at the Ilori Complex in Ikeja.

Mr Arewa also described as false, allegations that he bathed with his children, adding that they should get good lawyers to represent Mr Bakare.

Protest

The groups, chanting a protest song, marched to the Lagos State police command and demanded to speak with the commissioner of police, Abiodun Alabi.

They were obliged.

The commissioner later escorted them out, insisting that the matter was in court.
Armin Schnettler and Thorsten Herdan to lead eFuels expansion in the EMEA region

BERLIN and HOUSTON and SANTIAGO, Chile, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- HIF Global, the world's leading eFuels company, continues its global expansion with the launch of HIF Europe, Middle East and Africa ("HIF EMEA") headquartered in Berlin, Germany, with Armin Schnettler named as President and Thorsten Herdan as CEO of HIF EMEA.

HIF EMEA will anchor eFuels from HIF Global's production facilities worldwide to the EMEA region beginning with the operations of the Haru Oni facility in late 2022 in Magallanes, Chile. Furthermore, HIF EMEA will develop eFuel projects in the region for the region.

Cesar Norton, President and CEO of HIF Global said, "We are building a global presence and elite team to fight climate change and accelerate decarbonization. HIF EMEA, under the leadership of Armin Schnettler and Thorsten Herdan, will focus on providing carbon-neutral electricity-based fuels, also known as eFuels, to the EMEA region to speed up decarbonization and improve the security of energy supply."

Armin Schnettler, President of HIF EMEA, explained, "We need many solutions to support the growing demand for energy worldwide in ways that reduce carbon emissions. When utilizing eFuels, which are produced from renewable electricity, hydrogen, and recycled CO 2 , we can further decarbonize the transport sector and significantly accelerate the hydrogen economy today in a way that is sustainable, competitive, and secure."

"Innovative energy solutions and diversification are the heartbeat of the global economy and society. At HIF EMEA, we are preparing for deliveries of eFuels to Europe later in 2022, following the inauguration of the Haru Oni facility under construction today in Magallanes, Chile. The expansion of eFuels into European, Middle Eastern and African markets will bring renewable energy to millions of existing vehicles, ships and airplanes, without any modification to required infrastructure," said Thorsten Herdan, CEO HIF EMEA.

About HIF EMEA team

Armin Schnettler has more than 30 years of experience in electrical power, energy transition and the hydrogen economy. He has broad industrial experience, including senior management positions at ABB, Siemens, and Siemens Energy. Armin also spent more than 18 years as a research director at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. Armin holds a Dr.-Ing. degree and a professorship in Electrical Engineering.

Thorsten Herdan has a broad experience in industry as well as government business, including senior management positions at industry associations, research associations and renewable foundations. As former Director General Energy in the German Ministry of Economy and Energy and current Chairman of the supervisory board of the first German state-owned fund, Thorsten combines financial experience from an industry, government, and asset management perspective. He holds a Dipl.Ing. Degree Mechanical Engineering from the RWTH University of Aachen.

About HIF Global

HIF Global is the world leading eFuels company, developing projects to convert hydrogen made using low-cost renewable power into carbon neutral liquid eFuels that can be transported and utilized in existing infrastructure. The name HIF represents the mission of the company: to provide Highly Innovative Fuels to make decarbonization of the planet possible. HIF Chile, HIF USA, HIF Australia, and HIF EMEA are wholly owned subsidiaries of HIF Global. HIF Chile is currently constructing the Haru Oni Demonstration Plant in Magallanes, Chile. For more information, visit www.hifglobal.com.

CAUTIONARY INFORMATION ABOUT FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

Information in this press release includes various statements that are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. federal securities laws. All statements other than statements of historical fact are, or may be deemed to be, forward-looking statements. Words such as "can," "expect," potential," "to be," "will," and similar expressions are used to identify forward-looking statements and convey the uncertainty of future events or outcomes. Forward-looking statements in this press release relate to, among other things, our expectations of our plans, strategies, and objectives, including with respect to the timing and other aspects of the HIF Haru Oni Demonstration Plant. Such statements are based on management's current expectations and assumptions and are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from expectations expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements include (without limitation): our ability to timely obtain or maintain necessary permits to construct and develop the HIF Haru Oni Demonstration Plant; our ability to execute operational objectives on a timely and successful basis; legislative, policy, fiscal and regulatory developments; the outcome of commercial negotiations; our ability to raise financing; consumer preferences or demand; and various economic, business, and competitive factors affecting our business. All forward-looking statements contained in this press release are expressly qualified in their entirety by the cautionary statements contained or referred to in this paragraph. HIF Global urges you to carefully review and consider the cautionary statements made in this press release and cautions you not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this press release. HIF Global undertakes no obligation (and expressly disclaims any such obligation) to update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

SOURCE HIF Global
A satellite event to the long-standing Asia Pacific Rail 2022, the Summit was themed Driving Digitalization in Future Rail to Create New Value Together . Asia Pacific Rail is a long-standing event in the region, which has brought together over 25,000 industry leaders over the past 23 years. Huawei also hosted a booth at the event, showcasing some of the company's cutting-edge portfolio of rail industry solutions.

"As a leading global ICT solution provider, Huawei proposes smart railway and urban rail solutions with a full-service architecture based on diversified connectivity and unified digital platform, enabling rail digitalization and business intelligence." said Aaron Wang, Huawei's Senior Vice President for the Asia Pacific Enterprise Business Group.

"We are seeing a rapid increase in the digitalization of rail transport. Both railways and urban rails are shifting away from station-specific systems to using rail cloud infrastructure to interconnect services. There is also a push toward smarter, more integrated systems. We foresee these being rolled out on a large scale in the near future, which is why Huawei is already designing and launching intelligent, comprehensive solutions for the industry," said Xiang Xi, Vice President of the Huawei Global Transportation Business Unit.

The Huawei Global Rail Summit 2022 followed a packed agenda on innovation, digitalization, and future-proof rail transport.

Li Zhonghao, Director of the China Association of Metros, shared China's experience in the digital transformation of metro systems. The State Railway of Thailand and CRSC International looked at strategies to reshape connectivity, deploy innovative ICTs, and build robust communication infrastructure for railways.

The Huawei Global Rail Summit also saw the launch of the Future Railway Mobile Communications System (FRMCS) White Paper. Fresh off the press, the paper discusses the latest trends and innovative practices in mobile communications systems for railways and metro systems. Aimed at decision-makers and industry leaders, it sums up some of the most prominent technologies in the field today as well as sharing best practices on deploying top-of-the-line communications solutions.

In addition, Huawei also shared several best practices and showcased its solutions at a booth at the Asia Pacific Rail 2022. One of the highlights was the Urban Rail Wi-Fi 6 Vehicle-to-Ground Communication Network Solution. The solution enables near-real-time data transmission for rail transport. This vehicle-to-ground communication network is a whole new way for trains to share data, ensure safety, and promote efficiency. Trains can communicate with stations and command centers even when traveling at high-speeds, nearly eliminating information transmission delays.

The Summit demonstrated the industry's consensus on the need to go digital, and to do so quickly. Huawei looks forward to continued cooperation with industry customers and ecosystem partners. Huawei delivers innovative digital infrastructure to help the rail transport industries in the Asia Pacific region and around the world go digital. The company's low-carbon, smart rail solutions offer improved safety, efficiency, and experience, boosting urban development and creating new value for the industry to create digital city together.

For Huawei FRMCS white paper downloadhttps://e.huawei.com/en/material/wireless/ab9bbc5ad15144bca82e16c6059d823d

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1816685/image_986294_34652236.jpg

SOURCE Huawei
ABU DHABI, SINGAPORE and RIO DE JANEIRO, May 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- AirCarbon Exchange (ACX) successfully hosted the world's first micromobility carbon credits auction, in collaboration with Bolsa Verde Rio, Tembici, BlockC and ZCO2.

"The ACX Brazil auction is yet another milestone in our quest to bring transparency and efficiency to the carbon markets," said William Pazos, Managing Director & Co-Founder of ACX. "The unique Tembici carbon credits reached an international audience covering 30 countries through ACX's network. We are pleased to bring these international players to the Bolsa Verde."

The auction, which ran for 24 hours from April 27th to April 28th, offered credits generated from Rio de Janeiro's shared bike scheme run by Tembici, one of Latin America's leading micromobility technology companies. This was the first time micromobility carbon credits had been publicly available with the event attracting interest from a wide range of companies with StoneX Financial Inc. and ClimateSeed ultimately winning with bids of $8.45-$8.50.

"We're at the point where we urgently need to rethink the impact we're having on the environment so it is gratifying to see companies like StoneX and Climate Seed helping to construct a more sustainable world," said BlockC CEO Carlos Martins. The credits have been issued using the AMS-III.BM.: Lightweight two and three wheeled personal transportation calculation methodology developed by the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). The credits generated by Tembici were calculated by ZCO2, which is part of the BlockC group of companies dedicated to the decarbonization journey.

"We are pleased with every element of this pioneering auction. Our success in working alongside our strategic partners points to the start of a very promising business opportunity," said Leandro Fariello, Tembici's CFO. "The credits that were auctioned have a key point of difference to other carbon credits in that they are generated within an urban setting. This theme will become increasingly important so we will reinvest the revenue generated back into the business on new technologies and bicycles."

About AirCarbon Exchange

AirCarbon Exchange ("ACX") is a global exchange revolutionizing the voluntary carbon market. The Exchange's client base comprises corporate entities, financial traders, carbon project developers and other industry stakeholders. ACX provides its clients with an efficient and transparent trading platform which is easy to use, frictionless and with the lowest commission fees available on the market. Its underlying technology will allow the carbon market to scale efficiently to meet global ambitions of Net Zero.

As of May 2021, ACX is the world's first carbon negative exchange, having offset its carbon emissions 12 months into the future (to May 2022) through the Onil Stoves Guatemala Uspantan project. ACX is committed to continuing to offset all of its emissions 12 months forward. In 2022, ACX was named as the 'Best Solution in Energy Trading' by Wired UK and Publicis Sapient at their Global EnergyTech Awards, which spotlighted the companies that are 'Winning the Race to Reinvent Energy'.

For more information or to trade carbon, please reach out to [email protected] or visit www.aircarbon.co

About Tembici

Tembici is the leading micromobility company in Latin America, responsible for more than 60 million trips by bicycle in the main Brazilian cities, including Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Salvador, Recife, Porto Alegre and Brasilia as well as in Santiago, Chile, and Buenos Aires, Argentina. It was named as one of the most promising and innovative startups in the country, in the list of the 100 Startups to Watch 2020 and 2021 and featured in the Mobility category in the "Best of ESG 2021", by Exame. Over the last few years, the company has boosted growth of the micromobility sector.

Press information: [email protected] / [email protected]

About BlockC

BlockC is a Brazilian company that has developed a blockchain-based platform offering a reliable, transparent and effective solution for organizations that want to make their transition to a low carbon economy. A solution that provides reliability, transparency and effectiveness to the decarbonization journey of companies through the use of disruptive technologies. A member of a group of companies with more than 20 years of experience in greenhouse gases and environmental assets, BlockC is a partner of AirCarbon Exchange and the City of Rio de Janeiro in the Brazilian operation of ACX.

For more information, visit: www.blockc.com.br

About ZCO2

ZCO2 is an innovative coalition for environmentally-conscious individuals and companies engaged. It promotes responsible consumption and seeks to fight the causes of climate change, through tokens backed by carbon credits, transacted into digital wallets and inserted on a relationship platform.

For more information, please visit: www.zco2.com.br

SOURCE AirCarbon Exchange
DETROIT, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The National Entrepreneurs Association will host the 2022 Entrepreneurs Forum: Reemergence, Friday, May 20th at 12p.m. ET on Zoom. With the theme "Reemergence," the goal of the event is to get entrepreneurs and small business owners information that will help businesses emerge from the last 2 years stronger than before. The conference will feature keynote speakers, a panel discussion, networking activities and a virtual expo.

2022 Entrepreneurs Forum

Entrepreneur Jay Johnson will deliver the keynote address. Johnson, who is the CEO of Coeus Group, has delivered keynotes and lectures in countries across 4 continents to help people and organizations better understand themselves and their relationships with others. As a TEDx Speaker he shared his message on Behavioral Intelligence with 3 million viewers. He is a Forbes Business Council Member who has worked with Fortune 100 companies such as Ford Motor Company, State Farm, Consumers Energy, JCI, KFC, University of Michigan Health Systems, and Crain Communications. He will provide strategies to help entrepreneurs overcome challenges and turn them into opportunities.

The event will also include a panel discussion, "I Survived the Pandemic and Now My Business is Thriving" which will consist of experienced entrepreneurs discussing how they were able to grow despite the challenges of the past two years. Panelists will include, Christine Allyson of Christal Clear Consulting, Alicia Mckay of No Fear Cafe, Bria Simmons Creator of the brand Choose the Mood and Ray Moulden Founder of The Moulden Allstate Agency. Geoff Marek, a Manager at Dell Technologies with more than a decade of experience in tech, will deliver a presentation on "The Future of Work is Hybrid."

"The past two years have been brutal for a lot of entrepreneurs so inspiration, support and tools to empower entrepreneurs are needed now more than ever. This Entrepreneurs Forum: Reemergence, will provide the hope and information entrepreneurs need from people who have traveled the same challenging path and came out on the other side," said National Entrepreneurs Association President, ZaLonya Allen, PhD.

Sponsors of the event include X Trade Corporation, Dell Technologies and Comerica Bank. The event is open to the public. Registration is $47. For more or to register visit www.nationalentrepreneurs.org or call 248-416-7278.

The National Entrepreneurs Association is a 501c3 non- profit created to empower entrepreneurs to grow and sustain successful businesses through quality networking events and training programs.

National Entrepreneurs Association

18444 W 10 Mile Road Suite 103

Southfield, MI 48075

Contact: ZaLonya Allen, PhD

(248) 416-7278 or [email protected]

SOURCE National Entrepreneurs Association
Researchers monitor mercury levels in artificial lakes to identify the sources of mercury as well as the factors that affect its concentration

GWANGJU, South Korea, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Anthropogenic activities have led to increased amounts of mercury being discharged into aquatic systems, where it accumulates in fish as methylmercury, an organic form of mercury that is neurotoxic. Eventually, the mercury makes its way up the food chain and enters the human body. In light of the dangers of methylmercury accumulation, researchers from Korea monitored five artificial lakes to identify the sources and accumulation patterns of methylmercury in sediment and fish.

A Study by the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology Investigates Mercury Contamination in Freshwater Lakes in Korea

During the 1950s and 1960s, Minamata Bay in Japan was the site of widespread mercury poisoning caused by the consumption of fish containing methylmercurya toxic form of mercury that is synthesized when bacteria react with mercury released in water. Mercury poisoning caused deaths and widespread neurological disorders, as well as intergenerational harm as many of the survivors had children with birth defects. As methylmercury was stored in fish, it continued to remain in the food chain long after the discharge of mercury into the environment has ceased.

The dangers posed by methylmercury to unborn children have concerned Eunji Jung, a Ph.D. student who works in the Trace Metal Biogeochemistry Laboratory at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST). "As the health of infants and children is an important issue for all women, I felt great responsibility as a female scientist while conducting this research," explains Jung.

As part of a program to assess the methylmercury levels in aquatic systems in Korea, Jung and her colleagues under the guidance of GIST Professor Seunghee Han monitored mercury levels in five artificial reservoirs between 2016 and 2020. "We analyzed total mercury and methylmercury concentrations in water and sediment, and total mercury concentrations in common fish species. Data from the national water quality monitoring network were used to comprehensively understand the temporal and spatial variations in reservoir conditions; this was necessary to analyze the transport and fate of mercury," explains Prof. Han.

Their findings were made available online on 5 January 2022 and were subsequently published in Volume 293 of the journal Chemosphere in April 2022.

They found that most of the mercury in the reservoirs originated from soil in the catchment areas. In reservoirs with shorter water residence time, i.e., from which water was frequently discharged, the major source of methylmercury was surface runoff. In reservoirs with longer water residence time, where water was stored longer, the source of the toxin was accumulated methylmercury in the sediment. Methylmercury in sediments was also the source of mercury in fish, and higher mercury concentration were found in fish from reservoirs with longer residence times.

The researchers explain that it is possible to reduce mercury contamination in reservoir fish by preventing accumulation of methylmercury in the reservoir's sediment. They suggest increasing the rate of water discharge from reservoirs to accomplish this. "Reducing the synthesis rate of methylmercury by controlling the water residence time should ultimately exert a positive effect on human health," observes Jung.

Continuous monitoring of reservoir water quality might help detect human activity-induced changes in mercury levels and lower methylmercury poisoning due to fish consumption.

Reference

Title of original paper: Importance of hydraulic residence time for methylmercury accumulation in sediment and fish from artificial reservoirs

Journal: Chemosphere

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemosphere.2022.133545

About the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST)

please visit: http://www.gist.ac.kr/.

Contact:

Seulhye Kim

82 62 715 6253

[email protected]

SOURCE Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST)
AbbVie will present 46 abstracts for six investigational and approved medicines across eight cancer types

A five-year update from the CLL14 Phase 3 VENCLYXTO  /VENCLEXTA  (venetoclax) and obinutuzumab in previously untreated patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) will be presented at EHA

Nine abstracts showing results from ongoing trials studying investigational epcoritamab will be presented at both meetings

NORTH CHICAGO, Ill., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- AbbVie (NYSE: ABBV) will present 46 abstracts across eight types of cancer during the upcoming American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting (June 3-7) and the European Hematology Association (EHA) Congress (June 9-17).

"AbbVie continues working to transform the standards of care for cancer treatments as a result of our commitment to patients, innovation and partnerships," said Mohamed Zaki, M.D., Ph.D., vice president and global head of oncology development, AbbVie. "The data being presented at ASCO and EHA will provide a look at our continued research advancements in cancer across our expanding oncology portfolio and pipeline."

During both meetings, AbbVie will present nine abstracts evaluating epcoritamab (DuoBody-CD3xCD20), an investigational subcutaneous bispecific antibody, including data from multiple arms of the ongoing phase 1b/2 EPCORE NHL-2 clinical trial, evaluating the safety and preliminary efficacy of epcoritamab in combination with standard-of-care therapies for the treatment of various types of B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). Additionally, data will be presented from the Phase 2 REFINE study of investigational compound navitoclax + ruxolitinib in JAK inhibitor-treatment-naive patients with myelofibrosis.

At this year's ASCO annual meeting AbbVie will be presenting on its solid tumor research with data from telisotuzumab vedotin (Teliso-V) in non-small cell lung cancer.

During the EHA Congress, the five-year update from the CLL14 trial of a combined regimen of venetoclax + obinutuzumab versus obinutuzumab + chlorambucil comparing the efficacy and safety in participants with untreated chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) will be presented.

Details about presentations are as follows:

ASCO 2022 Abstracts Abstract Presentation Details All Times in CT Ibrutinib Primary Results From the Double-Blind,

Placebo-Controlled, Phase III SHINE Study of

Ibrutinib in Combination With Bendamustine-

Rituximab (BR) and R Maintenance as a

First-Line Treatment for Older Patients (Pts)

with Mantle Cell Lymphoma (MCL) Session: Hematologic Malignancies

Lymphoma and Chronic Lymphocytic

Leukemia Friday, June 3, 2022 1:00  4:00 p.m. CT Oral Fixed-Duration (FD) Ibrutinib (I) Plus

Venetoclax (V) for First-Line (1L) Treatment

(tx) of Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia

(CLL)/Small Lymphocytic Lymphoma (SLL)

3-year Follow-up From the FD Cohort of the

Phase 2 CAPTIVATE Study Session: Hematologic Malignancies

Lymphoma and Chronic Lymphocytic

Leukemia Saturday, June 4, 2022 8:00  11:00 a.m. CT Poster Phase 1/2 Study of Zilovertamab and Ibrutinib

in Mantle Cell Lymphoma (MCL) or Chronic

Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL) Session: Hematologic Malignancies

Lymphoma and Chronic Lymphocytic

Leukemia Saturday, June 4, 2022 3:00  4:30 p.m. CT Poster Prognostic Testing and Treatment Patterns in

Black Patients (Pts) With Chronic

Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL) From the

Inform CLL Prospective

Observational Registry Abstract Publication Only Upper Gastrointestinal (GI) Morbidity, Peptic

Ulcer Risk, and Proton Pump Inhibitor

(PPI)/H2 Blocker (H2B) Use in Patients (Pts)

Treated With Bruton's Tyrosine Kinase

Inhibitors (BTKis) During Routine Care Abstract Publication Only Characteristics and Clinical Outcomes

Among Patients Receiving Either Ibrutinib or

Anti-CD20 Monotherapy as First-Line (1L)

Treatment for Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia

(CLL) / Small Lymphocytic Lymphoma (SLL)

A Retrospective Analysis in Community

Oncology Practice Abstract Publication Only Real-World Clinical Outcomes in Patients

Receiving Either Ibrutinib or Chemo-

Immunotherapy (CIT) as First-Line (1L)

Treatment for Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia

(CLL) / Small Lymphocytic Lymphoma (SLL)

A Retrospective Analysis Abstract Publication Only Venetoclax Efficacy and Safety of Venetoclax

in Combination With Azacitidine or Decitabine in

an Outpatient Setting in Patients with

Untreated Acute Myeloid Leukemia Session: Hematologic Malignancies

Leukemia, Myelodysplastic Syndromes, and

Allotransplant Saturday, June 4, 2022 8:00  11:00 a.m. CT Poster Epcoritamab* First-Line Treatment (Tx) With Subcutaneous

(SC) Epcoritamab (Epco) + R-CHOP in

Patients (Pts) With High-Risk Diffuse Large

B-Cell Lymphoma (DLBCL): Phase 1/2 Data

Update Session: Hematologic Malignancies

Lymphoma and Chronic Lymphocytic

Leukemia Saturday, June 4, 2022 8:00  11:00 a.m. CT Poster Subcutaneous Epcoritamab With Rituximab +

Lenalidomide (R2) in Patients (Pts) with

Relapsed or Refractory (R/R) Follicular

Lymphoma (FL): Update from Phase 1/2 Trial Session: Hematologic Malignancies

Lymphoma and Chronic Lymphocytic

Leukemia Saturday, June 4, 2022 8:00  11:00 a.m. CT Poster Subcutaneous Epcoritamab + R-DHAX/C in

Patients (Pts) With Relapsed or Refractory

(R/R) Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma

(DLBCL) Who Are Eligible for Autologous

Stem Cell Transplant (ASCT): Preliminary

Phase 1/2 Results Session: Hematologic Malignancies

Lymphoma and Chronic Lymphocytic

Leukemia Saturday, June 4, 2022 8:00  11:00 a.m. CT Poster Epcoritamab (Epco) with Gemcitabine +

Oxaliplatin (GemOx) in Patients (Pts) With

Relapsed or Refractory (R/R) Diffuse Large

BCell Lymphoma (DLBCL) Ineligible for

Autologous Stem Cell Transplant (ASCT)

Induces High Response Rate Even in Pts

Failing CAR T Therapy Session: Hematologic Malignancies

Lymphoma and Chronic Lymphocytic

Leukemia Saturday, June 4, 2022 8:00  11:00 a.m. CT Poster Navitoclax Navitoclax Plus Ruxolitinib in JAK inhibitor-

Naive Patients (Pts) With Myelofibrosis:

Preliminary Safety and Efficacy in a

Multicenter, Open-Label Phase 2 Study Session: Hematologic Malignancies 

Leukemia, Myelodysplastic Syndromes, and

Allotransplant 8:00  11:00 a.m. CT Poster Saturday, June 4, 2022 1:15  2:45 p.m. CT Poster Discussion Lemzoparlimab Lemzoparlimab (Lemzo) with Venetoclax

(Ven) and/or Azacitidine (Aza) in Patients

(Pts) With Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) or

Myelodysplastic Syndromes (MDS)

A Phase 1b Dose Escalation Study Session: Hematologic Malignancies

Leukemia, Myelodysplastic Syndromes, and

Allotransplant Saturday, June 4, 2022 8:00  11:00 a.m. CT Poster Teliso-V Phase 1/1B study of Telisotuzumab Vedotin

(Teliso-V) + Osimertinib (Osi), After Failure

on Prior Osi, in Patients (Pts) With Advanced,

c-Met Overexpressing, EGFR-Mutated Non-

Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC). Session: Lung Cancer  Non-Small Cell

Metastatic Monday, June 6, 2022 8:00  11:00 a.m. CT Poster 1:15  2:45 p.m. CT Poster Discussion Telisotuzumab Vedotin (Teliso-V)

Monotherapy in Patients (Pts) With

Previously Treated c-Met-Overexpressing

(OE) Advanced Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer

(NSCLC) Session: Lung Cancer  Non-Small Cell

Metastatic Monday, June 6, 2022 8:00  11:00 a.m. CT Poster 1:15  2:45 p.m. CT Poster Discussion

The ASCO 2022 Annual Meeting abstracts are available here.

EHA 2022 Abstracts Abstract Presentation Details All Times in CT Ibrutinib Immune Restoration and Synergistic Activity

with First-Line (1L) Ibrutinib (IBR) Plus

Venetoclax (VEN): Translational Analyses of

CAPTIVATE Trial Patients with CLL Session: CLL: Translational Research Saturday, June 11, 2022 9:30  10:45 a.m. CT Oral Primary Results From the Phase 3 Shine Study

of Ibrutinub in Combination With

Bendamustine-Rituximab (BR) and R

Maintenance as a First-Line Treatment for

Older Patients With Mantle-Cell Lymphoma Session: Indolent and Mantle Cell Lymphoma Saturday, June 11, 2022 4:30 - 5:45 a.m. CT Oral Absence of BTK, BCL2, and PLCG2 Mutations

in Relapsing Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia

(CLL) After First-Line Treatment with Fixed-

Duration Ibrutinib (I) Plus Venetoclax (V) Session: Chronic lymphocytic leukemia and

related disorders - Clinical

Friday, June 10, 2022 9:30-10:45 a.m. CT Poster Fixed-Duration (FD) Ibrutinib + Venetoclax for

First-Line Treatment of Chronic Lymphocytic

Leukemia (CLL)/Small Lymophocytic

Lymphoma (SLL): 3-Year Follow-up From the

Phase 2 CAPTIVATE Study FD Cohort Friday, June 10, 2022 9:30  10:45 a.m. CT Poster Cross-Trial Analysis of Fixed-Duration Ibrutinib

(I) Plus Venetoclax (V) Vs Fludarabine (F),

Cyclophosphamide (C), And Rituximab (R) As

First-Line Treatment for Chronic Lymphocytic

Leukemia (CLL) Session: Chronic lymphocytic leukemia and

related disorders - Clinical

Abstract Publication Only Venetoclax*** Venetoclax-Obinutuzumab for Previously

Untreated Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia: 5-

Year Results of the Randomized CLL14 Study Session: CLL: Clinical Sunday, June 12, 2022 4:30 - 5:45 a.m. CT Oral VIALE-M: A Randomized, Double-Blind, 2-Arm,

Multicenter, Phase 3 Study of Venetoclax and

Oral Azacitidine Versus Oral Azacitidine as

Maintenance Therapy for Patients With Acute

Myeloid Leukemia in First Remission After

Intensive Chemotherapy Session: Acute myeloid leukemia - Clinical

Friday, June 10, 2022 9:30  10:45 a.m. CT Poster VIALE-T: A Randomized, Open-Label, Phase 3

Study of Venetoclax in Combination With

Azacitidine After Allogeneic Stem Cell

Transplantation in Patients With Acute Myeloid

Leukemia Session: Acute myeloid leukemia - Clinical

Friday, June 10, 2022 9:30  10:45 a.m. CT Poster The Impact of Post-Remission Granulocyte

Colony-Stimulating Factor Use in the Phase 3

Studies of Venetoclax Combination Treatments

in Patients With Newly Diagnosed Acute

Myeloid Leukemia Session: Acute myeloid leukemia - Clinical

Friday, June 10, 2022 9:30  10:45 a.m. CT Poster Transfusion Independence Among Newly

Diagnosed Acute Myeloid Leukemia Patients

Receiving Venetoclax-Based Combinations Vs

Other Therapies: Results from the AML Real

World Evidence (ARC) Initiative Session: Acute myeloid leukemia - Clinical

Friday, June 10, 2022 9:30  10:45 a.m. CT Poster Clinical Outcomes in Patients With

Higher-Risk Myelodysplastic Syndromes

Receiving Hypomethylating Agents:

a Large Population-Based Analysis Session: Myelodysplastic syndromes - Clinical

Friday, June 10, 2022 9:30  10:45 a.m. CT Poster Venetoclax in Patients With Chronic

Lymphocytic Leukemia With 17p Deletion: 6-

Year Follow-Up and Genomic Analyses in a

Pivotal Phase 2 Trial Session: CLL: Clinical Friday, June 12, 2022 4:30 - 5:45 a.m. CT Oral Treatment Sequences and Outcomes of

Patients (Pts) with CLL Treated With Targeted

Agents in Real-World Settings Session: Chronic lymphocytic leukemia and

related disorders - Clinical

Friday, June 10, 2022 9:30  10:45 a.m. CT Poster Healthcare Resource Utilization and Costs Of

Therapy With Fixed-Duration Venetoclax

Among CLL Patients (Pts) Abstract Publication Only Transcriptomic Characterization of MRD

Response and Non-Response in Patients (Pts) Treated With Fixed-Duration Venetoclax-

Obinutuzumab Session: CLL: Translational Saturday, June 11, 2022 9:30  10:45 a.m. CT Oral Fixed-Duration (FD) Ibrutinib (I) Plus

Venetoclax (V) for First-Line (1L) Treatment

(Tx) of Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL) /

Small Lymphocytic Lymphoma (SLL): 3-Year

Follow-Up From the FD Cohort of the Phase 2

CAPTIVATE Study Friday, June 10, 2022 9:30  10:45 a.m. CT Poster PedAL/EuPAL International Collaboration to

Improve the Outcome of Children With

Relapsed or Refractory Acute Myeloid

Leukemia (AML) Session: Acute myeloid leukemia - Clinical

Friday, June 10, 2022 9:30  10:45 a.m. CT Poster Cross-Trial Analysis of Fixed-Duration Ibrutinib

(I) Plus Venetoclax (V) Versus Fludarabine (F),

Cyclophosphamide (C), and Rituximab (R) as

First-Line Treatment for Chromic Lymphoma

Leukemia (CLL) Session: Chronic lymphocytic leukemia and

related disorders - Clinical

Abstract Publication Only Safety and Effectiveness of Venetoclax

Monotherapy in Relapsed/Refractory CLL

Patients (Pts) With or Without Risk-Associated

Genetic Markers  Data from the Observational

VeRVe Study Session: Chronic lymphocytic leukemia and

related disorders - Clinical

Friday, June 10, 2022 9:30  10:45 a.m. CT Poster Effectiveness and Safety of Venetoclax in

Combination with Rituximab (VenR) in

Relapsed/Refractory CLL Patients With or

Without Risk-Associated Genetic Markers 

Data from the Observational VeRVe Study Session: Chronic lymphocytic leukemia and

related disorders - Clinical

Friday, June 10, 2022 9:30  10:45 a.m. CT Poster Real-Life Efficacy and Safety of Venetoclax

Monotherapy in Relapsed/Refractory Chronic

Lymphocytic Leukemia  Interim Analysis of

Multicentric Study VERONE Session: Chronic lymphocytic leukemia and

related disorders - Clinical

Friday, June 10, 2022 9:30  10:45 a.m. CT Poster Venetoclax in Combination With Obinutuzumab

in First Line Chromic Leukemia in Argentina: A

Cost-Effectiveness Analysis Session: Quality of life, palliative care, ethics

and health economics

Friday, June 10, 2022 9:30  10:45 a.m. CT Poster Lemzoparlimab** Lemzoparlimab (Lemzo) With Venetoclax (Ven)

And/Or Azacitidine (Aza) in Patients (Pts) With

Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) or

Myelodysplastic Syndromes (MDS): A Phase

1b Dose Escalation Study Session: Acute myeloid leukemia - Clinical

Friday, June 10, 2022 9:30  10:45 a.m. CT Poster Epcoritamab* Assessing Safety, Tolerability, and Efficacy of

Subcutaneous Epcoritamab in Novel

Combinations With Anti-Neoplastic Agents in

Patients (Pts) With Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma in

an Open-Label Phase 1B/2 Study Session: Aggressive Non-Hodgkin lymphoma

- Clinical

Abstract Publication Only Subcutaneous (SC) Epcoritamab + R-CHOP in

Previously Untreated Patients (Pts) With High-

Risk Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma (DLBCL):

Phase 1/2 Data Update Friday, June 10, 2022 9:30 - 10:45 a.m. CT Poster Subcutaneous (SC) Epcoritamab With

Rituximab + Lenalidomide (R2) in Patients

(Pts) With Relapsed or Refractory (R/R)

Follicular Lymphoma (FL): Update From Phase

1/2 Trial Friday, June 10, 2022 4:30  5:45 p.m. CT Poster Subcutaneous (SC) Epcoritamab + R-DHAX/C

in Patients (Pts) With Relapsed or Refractory

(R/R) Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma (DLBCL)

Who Are Eligible For Autologous Stem Cell

Transplant (ASCT): Preliminary Phase 1/2 Data Friday, June 10, 2022 9:30  10:45 a.m. CT Poster Epcoritamab With Gemcitabine + Oxaliplatin

(GemOx) in Patients (Pts) With Relapsed or

Refractory (R/R) Diffuse Large B Cell

Lymphoma (DLBCL) Who Are Ineligible for

Autologous Stem Cell Transplant (ASCT):

Phase 1/2 Data

Friday, June 10, 2022 9:30  10:45 a.m. CT Poster Navitoclax Navitoclax Monotherapy in Patients (Pts) With

MF Previously Treated With JAK-2 Inhibitors:

Safety and Tolerability Session: Myeloproliferative neoplasms - Clinical

Friday, June 10, 2022 9:30  10:45 a.m. CT Poster Navitoclax plus ruxolitinib in JAK Inhibitor-naive

Patients with Myelofibrosis: Preliminary Safety

and Efficacy in a Multicenter, Open-label Phase

2 Study Session: Treatments and complications in MPN

Friday, June 11, 2022 4:30  5:45 a.m. CT Oral

The EHA 2022 Congress abstracts are available here.

*Epcoritamab is being co-developed by AbbVie and Genmab as part of the companies' broad oncology collaboration.

**Lemzoparlimab is investigational and being developed through a comprehensive clinical development plan for hematologic malignancies and solid tumor in collaboration with AbbVie and I-Mab.

***Use of venetoclax in myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) is not approved and its safety and efficacy have not been evaluated by regulatory authorities.

About Ibrutinib (IMBRUVICA)

IMBRUVICA (ibrutinib) is a once-daily oral medication that is jointly developed and commercialized by Pharmacyclics LLC, an AbbVie Company and Janssen Biotech, Inc. IMBRUVICA blocks the Bruton's tyrosine kinase (BTK) protein, which is needed by normal and abnormal B cells, to multiply and spread.1,2 By blocking BTK, IMBRUVICA may help move abnormal B cells out of their nourishing environments in the lymph nodes, bone marrow, and other organs.3

IMBRUVICA is approved in more than 100 countries and has been used to treat more than 250,000 patients worldwide. There are more than 50 company-sponsored clinical trials, including 18 ongoing or completed Phase 3 studies, over 11 years evaluating the efficacy and safety of IMBRUVICA.

IMBRUVICA was first approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in November 2013, and today is indicated for adult patients in six disease areas, including five hematologic cancers. These include adults with CLL/small lymphocytic lymphoma (SLL) with or without 17p deletion (del17p) and adults with Waldenstrom's macroglobulinemia (WM), as well as adult patients with previously treated mantle cell lymphoma (MCL)*, adult patients with previously treated marginal zone lymphoma (MZL) who require systemic therapy and have received at least one prior anti-CD20-based therapy*, as well as adult patients with previously treated chronic graft-versus-host disease (cGVHD) after failure of one or more lines of systemic therapy.4

*Accelerated approval was granted for MCL and MZL based on overall response rate. Continued approval for MCL and MZL may be contingent upon verification and description of clinical benefit in confirmatory trials.

Since 2019, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN), recommends ibrutinib (IMBRUVICA) as a preferred regimen for first-line treatment of CLL/SLL, with Category 1 status for previously untreated patients without del17p. Additionally, IMBRUVICA is a preferred treatment regimen for previously untreated patients with del17p. Since January 2020, the NCCN Guidelines recommend IMBRUVICA as a category 2A preferred regimen for the treatment of relapsed/refractory MCL. Since September 2020, the NCCN Guidelines recommend IMBRUVICA with or without rituximab as a Category 1 preferred regimen for both untreated and previously treated WM patients.

For more information, visit www.IMBRUVICA.com.

*Accelerated approval was granted for the MCL and MZL indications based on overall response rate. Continued approval for MCL and MZL may be contingent upon verification and description of clinical benefit in confirmatory trials.

Important Side Effect Information5

Before taking IMBRUVICA, tell your healthcare provider about all of your medical conditions, including if you:

have had recent surgery or plan to have surgery. Your healthcare provider may stop IMBRUVICA  for any planned medical, surgical, or dental procedure.

for any planned medical, surgical, or dental procedure. have bleeding problems.

have or had heart rhythm problems, smoke, or have a medical condition that increases your risk of heart disease, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or diabetes.

have an infection.

have liver problems.

are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. IMBRUVICA  can harm your unborn baby. If you are able to become pregnant, your healthcare provider will do a pregnancy test before starting treatment with IMBRUVICA  . Tell your healthcare provider if you are pregnant or think you may be pregnant during treatment with IMBRUVICA  .

can harm your unborn baby. If you are able to become pregnant, your healthcare provider will do a pregnancy test before starting treatment with IMBRUVICA . Tell your healthcare provider if you are pregnant or think you may be pregnant during treatment with IMBRUVICA . Females who are able to become pregnant should use effective birth control (contraception) during treatment with IMBRUVICA  and for 1 month after the last dose.

who are able to become pregnant should use effective birth control (contraception) during treatment with IMBRUVICA and for 1 month after the last dose.

Males with female partners who are able to become pregnant should use effective birth control, such as condoms, during treatment with IMBRUVICA  and for 1 month after the last dose.

with female partners who are able to become pregnant should use effective birth control, such as condoms, during treatment with IMBRUVICA and for 1 month after the last dose. are breastfeeding or plan to breastfeed. Do not breastfeed during treatment with IMBRUVICA and for 1 week after the last dose.

Tell your healthcare provider about all the medicines you take, including prescription and over-the-counter medicines, vitamins, and herbal supplements. Taking IMBRUVICA with certain other medicines may affect how IMBRUVICA works and can cause side effects.

How should I take IMBRUVICA?

Take IMBRUVICA  exactly as your healthcare provider tells you to take it.

exactly as your healthcare provider tells you to take it. Take IMBRUVICA  1 time a day.

1 time a day. Swallow IMBRUVICA  capsules or tablets whole with a glass of water.

capsules or tablets whole with a glass of water. Do not open, break or chew IMBRUVICA  capsules.

capsules. Do not cut, crush or chew IMBRUVICA  tablets.

tablets. Take IMBRUVICA  at about the same time each day.

at about the same time each day. If you miss a dose of IMBRUVICA  take it as soon as you remember on the same day. Take your next dose of IMBRUVICA  at your regular time on the next day. Do not take extra doses of IMBRUVICA  to make up for a missed dose.

take it as soon as you remember on the same day. Take your next dose of IMBRUVICA at your regular time on the next day. Do not take extra doses of IMBRUVICA to make up for a missed dose. If you take too much IMBRUVICA call your healthcare provider or go to the nearest hospital emergency room right away.

What should I avoid while taking IMBRUVICA?

You should not drink grapefruit juice, eat grapefruit, or eat Seville oranges (often used in marmalades) during treatment with IMBRUVICA. These products may increase the amount of IMBRUVICA in your blood.

What are the possible side effects of IMBRUVICA?

IMBRUVICA may cause serious side effects, including:

Bleeding problems (hemorrhage) are common during treatment with IMBRUVICA  , and can also be serious and may lead to death. Your risk of bleeding may increase if you are also taking a blood thinner medicine. Tell your healthcare provider if you have any signs of bleeding, including: blood in your stools or black stools (looks like tar), pink or brown urine, unexpected bleeding, or bleeding that is severe or that you cannot control, vomit blood or vomit looks like coffee grounds, cough up blood or blood clots, increased bruising, dizziness, weakness, confusion, change in your speech, or a headache that lasts a long time or severe headache.

during treatment with IMBRUVICA , and can also be serious and may lead to death. Your risk of bleeding may increase if you are also taking a blood thinner medicine. Tell your healthcare provider if you have any signs of bleeding, including: blood in your stools or black stools (looks like tar), pink or brown urine, unexpected bleeding, or bleeding that is severe or that you cannot control, vomit blood or vomit looks like coffee grounds, cough up blood or blood clots, increased bruising, dizziness, weakness, confusion, change in your speech, or a headache that lasts a long time or severe headache. Infections can happen during treatment with IMBRUVICA  . These infections can be serious and may lead to death. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you have fever, chills, weakness, confusion, or other signs or symptoms of an infection during treatment with IMBRUVICA  .

can happen during treatment with IMBRUVICA . These infections can be serious and may lead to death. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you have fever, chills, weakness, confusion, or other signs or symptoms of an infection during treatment with IMBRUVICA . Decrease in blood cell counts. Decreased blood counts (white blood cells, platelets, and red blood cells) are common with IMBRUVICA  , but can also be severe. Your healthcare provider should do monthly blood tests to check your blood counts.

Decreased blood counts (white blood cells, platelets, and red blood cells) are common with IMBRUVICA , but can also be severe. Your healthcare provider should do monthly blood tests to check your blood counts. Heart problems. Serious heart rhythm problems (ventricular arrhythmias, atrial fibrillation, and atrial flutter), heart failure, and death have happened in people treated with IMBRUVICA  , especially in people who have an increased risk for heart disease, have an infection, or who have had heart rhythm problems in the past. Tell your healthcare provider if you get any symptoms of heart problems, such as feeling as if your heart is beating fast and irregular, lightheadedness, dizziness, shortness of breath, swelling of the feet, ankles, or legs, chest discomfort, or you faint. If you develop any of these symptoms, your healthcare provider may do a test to check your heart (ECG) and may change your IMBRUVICA  dose.

Serious heart rhythm problems (ventricular arrhythmias, atrial fibrillation, and atrial flutter), heart failure, and death have happened in people treated with IMBRUVICA , especially in people who have an increased risk for heart disease, have an infection, or who have had heart rhythm problems in the past. Tell your healthcare provider if you get any symptoms of heart problems, such as feeling as if your heart is beating fast and irregular, lightheadedness, dizziness, shortness of breath, swelling of the feet, ankles, or legs, chest discomfort, or you faint. If you develop any of these symptoms, your healthcare provider may do a test to check your heart (ECG) and may change your IMBRUVICA dose. High blood pressure (hypertension). New or worsening high blood pressure has happened in people treated with IMBRUVICA  . Your healthcare provider may start you on blood pressure medicine or change current medicines to treat your blood pressure.

New or worsening high blood pressure has happened in people treated with IMBRUVICA . Your healthcare provider may start you on blood pressure medicine or change current medicines to treat your blood pressure. Second primary cancers. New cancers have happened during treatment with IMBRUVICA  , including cancers of the skin or other organs.

New cancers have happened during treatment with IMBRUVICA , including cancers of the skin or other organs. Tumor lysis syndrome (TLS). TLS is caused by the fast breakdown of cancer cells. TLS can cause kidney failure and the need for dialysis treatment, abnormal heart rhythm, seizure, and sometimes death. Your healthcare provider may do blood tests to check you for TLS.

The most common side effects of IMBRUVICA in adults with B-cell malignancies (MCL, CLL/SLL, WM and MZL) include:

diarrhea

tiredness

muscle and bone pain

rash

bruising

The most common side effects of IMBRUVICA in adults with cGVHD include:

tiredness

bruising

diarrhea

mouth sores (stomatitis)

muscle spasms

nausea

pneumonia

Diarrhea is a common side effect in people who take IMBRUVICA. Drink plenty of fluids during treatment with IMBRUVICA to help reduce your risk of losing too much fluid (dehydration) due to diarrhea. Tell your healthcare provider if you have diarrhea that does not go away.

These are not all the possible side effects of IMBRUVICA. Call your doctor for medical advice about side effects. You may report side effects to FDA at 1-800-FDA-1088.

General information about the safe and effective use of IMBRUVICA

Medicines are sometimes prescribed for purposes other than those listed in a Patient Information leaflet. Do not use IMBRUVICA for a condition for which it was not prescribed. Do not give IMBRUVICA to other people, even if they have the same symptoms that you have. It may harm them. You can ask your pharmacist or healthcare provider for information about IMBRUVICA that is written for health professionals.

Please click here for full Prescribing Information.5

About VENCLEXTA/VENCLYXTO (venetoclax)6

VENCLEXTA/VENCLYXTO (venetoclax) is a first-in-class medicine that selectively binds and inhibits the B-cell lymphoma-2 (BCL-2) protein. In some blood cancers, BCL-2 prevents cancer cells from undergoing their natural death or self-destruction process, called apoptosis. VENCLXEXTA/VENCLYXTO targets the BCL-2 protein and works to help restore the process of apoptosis.

VENCLEXTA/VENCLYXTO is being developed by AbbVie and Roche. It is jointly commercialized by AbbVie and Genentech, a member of the Roche Group, in the U.S. and by AbbVie outside of the U.S. Together, the companies are committed to BCL-2 research and to studying venetoclax in clinical trials across several blood cancers. Venetoclax is approved in more than 80 countries, including the U.S.

Important Safety Information7

What is the most important information I should know about VENCLEXTA?

VENCLEXTA can cause serious side effects, including:

Tumor lysis syndrome (TLS). TLS is caused by the fast breakdown of cancer cells. TLS can cause kidney failure, the need for dialysis treatment, and may lead to death. Your healthcare provider will do tests to check your risk of getting TLS before you start taking VENCLEXTA. You will receive other medicines before starting and during treatment with VENCLEXTA to help reduce your risk of TLS. You may also need to receive intravenous (IV) fluids into your vein. Your healthcare provider will do blood tests to check for TLS when you first start treatment and during treatment with VENCLEXTA. It is important to keep your appointments for blood tests. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you have any symptoms of TLS during treatment with VENCLEXTA, including fever, chills, nausea, vomiting, confusion, shortness of breath, seizures, irregular heartbeat, dark or cloudy urine, unusual tiredness, or muscle or joint pain.

Drink plenty of water during treatment with VENCLEXTA to help reduce your risk of getting TLS.

Drink 6 to 8 glasses (about 56 ounces total) of water each day, starting 2 days before your first dose, on the day of your first dose of VENCLEXTA, and each time your dose is increased. Your healthcare provider may delay, decrease your dose, or stop treatment with VENCLEXTA if you have side effects. When restarting VENCLEXTA after stopping for 1 week or longer, your healthcare provider may again check for your risk of TLS and change your dose.

Who should not take VENCLEXTA?

Certain medicines must not be taken when you first start taking VENCLEXTA and while your dose is being slowly increased because of the risk of increased TLS.

Tell your healthcare provider about all the medicines you take , including prescription and over-the counter medicines, vitamins, and herbal supplements. VENCLEXTA and other medicines may affect each other causing serious side effects.

, including prescription and over-the counter medicines, vitamins, and herbal supplements. VENCLEXTA and other medicines may affect each other causing serious side effects. Do not start new medicines during treatment with VENCLEXTA without first talking with your healthcare provider.

Before taking VENCLEXTA, tell your healthcare provider about all of your medical conditions,

including if you:

have kidney or liver problems.

have problems with your body salts or electrolytes, such as potassium, phosphorus, or calcium.

have a history of high uric acid levels in your blood or gout.

are scheduled to receive a vaccine. You should not receive a "live vaccine" before, during, or after treatment with VENCLEXTA, until your healthcare provider tells you it is okay. If you are not sure about the type of immunization or vaccine, ask your healthcare provider. These vaccines may not be safe or may not work as well during treatment with VENCLEXTA.

are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. VENCLEXTA may harm your unborn baby. If you are able to become pregnant, your healthcare provider should do a pregnancy test before you start treatment with VENCLEXTA, and you should use effective birth control during treatment and for at least 30 days after the last dose of VENCLEXTA. If you become pregnant or think you are pregnant, tell your healthcare provider right away.

are breastfeeding or plan to breastfeed. It is not known if VENCLEXTA passes into your breast milk. Do not breastfeed during treatment with VENCLEXTA and for 1 week after the last dose.

What should I avoid while taking VENCLEXTA?

You should not drink grapefruit juice or eat grapefruit, Seville oranges (often used in marmalades), or starfruit while you are taking VENCLEXTA. These products may increase the amount of VENCLEXTA in your blood.

What are the possible side effects of VENCLEXTA?

VENCLEXTA can cause serious side effects, including:

Low white blood cell counts (neutropenia). Low white blood cell counts are common with VENCLEXTA, but can also be severe. Your healthcare provider will do blood tests to check your blood counts during treatment with VENCLEXTA and may pause dosing.

Low white blood cell counts are common with VENCLEXTA, but can also be severe. Your healthcare provider will do blood tests to check your blood counts during treatment with VENCLEXTA and may pause dosing. Infections. Death and serious infections such as pneumonia and blood infection (sepsis) have happened during treatment with VENCLEXTA. Your healthcare provider will closely monitor and treat you right away if you have a fever or any signs of infection during treatment with VENCLEXTA.

Tell your healthcare provider right away if you have a fever or any signs of an infection during treatment with VENCLEXTA.

The most common side effects of VENCLEXTA when used in combination with obinutuzumab or rituximab or alone in people with CLL or SLL include low white blood cell counts; low platelet counts; low red blood cell counts; diarrhea; nausea; upper respiratory tract infection; cough; muscle and joint pain; tiredness; and swelling of your arms, legs, hands, and feet.

The most common side effects of VENCLEXTA in combination with azacitidine or decitabine or low-dose cytarabine in people with AML include nausea; diarrhea; low platelet count; constipation; low white blood cell count; fever with low white blood cell count; tiredness; vomiting; swelling of arms, legs, hands, or feet; fever; infection in lungs; shortness of breath; bleeding; low red blood cell count; rash; stomach (abdominal) pain; infection in your blood; muscle and joint pain; dizziness; cough; sore throat; and low blood pressure.

VENCLEXTA may cause fertility problems in males. This may affect your ability to father a child. Talk to your healthcare provider if you have concerns about fertility.

These are not all the possible side effects of VENCLEXTA. Call your doctor for medical advice about side effects.

You are encouraged to report side effects of prescription drug to the FDA. Visit www.fda.gov/medwatch or call 1-800-FDA-1088.

If you cannot afford your medication, contact genentech-access.com/patient/brands/venclexta for assistance.

The full U.S. prescribing information, including Medication Guide, for VENCLEXTA can be found here .

Indications and Important Venclyxto (venetoclax) EU Safety Information8

Indications

VENCLYXTO in combination with obinutuzumab is indicated for the treatment of adult patients with previously untreated chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL).

VENCLYXTO in combination with rituximab is indicated for the treatment of adult patients with CLL who have received at least one prior therapy.

VENCLYXTO monotherapy is indicated for the treatment of CLL:

In the presence of 17p deletion or TP53 mutation in adult patients who are unsuitable for or have failed a B-cell receptor pathway inhibitor, or

mutation in adult patients who are unsuitable for or have failed a B-cell receptor pathway inhibitor, or In the absence of 17p deletion or TP53 mutation in adult patients who have failed both chemoimmunotherapy and a B-cell receptor pathway inhibitor

Venclyxto in combination with a hypomethylating agent is indicated for the treatment of adult patients with newly diagnosed acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) who are ineligible for intensive chemotherapy.

Contraindications

Hypersensitivity to the active substance or to any of the excipients is contraindicated. Concomitant use of strong CYP3A inhibitors at initiation and during the dose-titration phase due to increased risk for tumour lysis syndrome (TLS). Concomitant use of preparations containing St. John's wort as Venclyxto efficacy may be reduced.

Special Warnings & Precautions for Use

Tumour Lysis syndrome, including fatal events, has occurred in patients when treated with Venclyxto. For CLL and AML, please refer to the indication-specific recommendations for prevention of TLS in the Venclyxto summary of product characteristic (SmPC).

Patients should be assessed for risk and should receive appropriate prophylaxis, monitoring, and management for TLS. The risk of TLS is a continuum based on multiple factors, including comorbidities. Venclyxto poses a risk for TLS at initiation and during the dose-titration phase. Changes in electrolytes consistent with TLS that require prompt management can occur as early as 6 to 8 hours following the first dose of Venclyxto and at each dose increase. During postmarketing surveillance, TLS, including fatal events, has been reported after a single 20 mg dose of venetoclax.

Neutropenia (grade 3 or 4) has been reported. Complete blood counts should be monitored throughout the treatment period.

In patients with AML, neutropenia (grade 3 or 4) is common before starting treatment. The neutrophil counts can worsen with Venetoclax in combination with a hypomethylating agent. Neutropenia can recur with subsequent cycles of therapy. Dose modification and interruptions for cytopenias are dependent on remission status.

For CLL and AML, please refer to the indication-specific recommendations for dose modifications for toxicities in the Venclyxto SmPC.

Serious infections including sepsis with fatal outcome have been reported. Monitoring of any signs and symptoms of infection is required. Suspected infections should receive prompt treatment, including antimicrobials and dose interruption or reduction as appropriate.

Live vaccines should not be administered during treatment or thereafter until B-cell recovery.

Drug Interactions

In CLL and AML CYP3A inhibitors may increase Venclyxto plasma concentrations.

In CLL, at initiation and dose-titration phase, Strong CYP3A inhibitors are contraindicated due to increased risk for TLS and moderate CYP3A inhibitors should be avoided. If moderate CYP3A inhibitors must be used, please refer to the recommendations for dose modifications in the Venclyxto SmPC.

In AML, please refer to the AML-specific recommendation for dose modifications for potential interactions with CYP3A inhibitors, in the VENCLYXTO SmPC.

Avoid concomitant use of P-gp and BCRP inhibitors at initiation and during the dose titration phase.

CYP3A4 inducers may decrease Venclyxto plasma concentrations. Avoid coadministration with strong or moderate CYP3A inducers. These agents may decrease venetoclax plasma concentrations.

Co-administration of bile acid sequestrants with VENCLYXTO is not recommended as this may reduce the absorption of VENCLYXTO.

Adverse Reactions

CLL

The most commonly occurring adverse reactions (20%) of any grade in patients receiving venetoclax in the combination studies with obinutuzumab or rituximab were neutropenia, diarrhoea, and upper respiratory tract infection. In the monotherapy studies, the most common adverse reactions were neutropenia/neutrophil count decreased, diarrhoea, nausea, anaemia, fatigue, and upper respiratory tract infection.

The most frequently occurring serious adverse reactions (2%) in patients receiving venetoclax in combination with obinutuzumab or rituximab were pneumonia, sepsis, febrile neutropenia, and TLS. In the monotherapy studies, the most frequently reported serious adverse reactions (2%) were pneumonia and febrile neutropenia.

Discontinuations due to adverse reactions occurred in 16% of patients in both combination studies (CLL14 and MURANO). In the monotherapy studies with venetoclax, 11% of patients discontinued due to adverse reactions.

Dosage reductions due to adverse reactions occurred in 21% of patients treated with the combination of venetoclax and obinutuzumab in the CLL14 study, in 15% of patients treated with the combination of venetoclax and rituximab in the Murano study, and in 14% of patients treated with venetoclax in the monotherapy studies. The most common adverse reaction that led to dose interruptions was neutropenia.

AML

The most commonly occurring adverse reactions (>=20%) of any grade in patients receiving venetoclax in combination with azacitidine or decitabine in the VIALE-A and M14-358, respectively, were thrombocytopenia, neutropenia, febrile neutropenia, nausea, diarrhoea, vomiting, anaemia, fatigue, pneumonia, hypokalaemia, and decreased appetite, haemorrhage, dizziness/syncope, hypotension, headache, abdominal pain, and anaemia.

The most frequently reported serious adverse reactions (5%) in patients receiving venetoclax in combination with azacitidine were febrile neutropenia, pneumonia, sepsis and haemorrhage. In M14-358, the most frequently reported serious adverse reactions (5%) were febrile neutropenia, pneumonia, bacteraemia and sepsis.

Discontinuations due to adverse reactions occurred in 24 % of patients treated with venetoclax in combination with azacitidine in the VIALE-A study, and 26% of patients treated with venetoclax in combination with decitabine in the M14-358 study, respectively.

Dosage reductions due to adverse reactions occurred in 2% of patients in VIALE-A, and in 6% of patients in M14-358. Venetoclax dose interruptions due to adverse reactions occurred in 72% and 65 % of patients, respectively. The most common adverse reaction that led to dose interruption (>10%) of Venetoclax in VIALE-A, were febrile neutropenia, neutropenia, pneumonia, and thrombocytopenia. The most common adverse reactions that led to dose interruption (5%) of venetoclax in M14-358 were febrile neutropenia, neutropenia/neutrophil count decreased, pneumonia, platelet count decreased, and white blood cell count decreased.

Special Populations

Patients with reduced renal function (CrCl <80 mL/min) may require more intensive prophylaxis and monitoring to reduce the risk of TLS at initiation and during the dose-titration phase. Safety in patients with severe renal impairment (CrCl <30 mL/min) or on dialysis has not been established, and a recommended dose for these patients has not been determined.

For patients with severe (Child-Pugh C) hepatic impairment, a dose reduction of at least 50% throughout treatment is recommended.

Venclyxto may cause embryo-fetal harm when administered to a pregnant woman. Advise nursing women to discontinue breastfeeding during treatment.

This is not a complete summary of all safety information. See Venclyxto (venetoclax) SmPC at www.ema.europa.eu. Globally, prescribing information varies; refer to the individual country product label for complete information.



About Epcoritamab

Epcoritamab is an investigational IgG1-bispecific antibody created using Genmab's proprietary DuoBody technology. Genmab's DuoBody-CD3 technology is designed to direct cytotoxic T cells selectively to elicit an immune response towards target cell types. Epcoritamab is designed to simultaneously bind to CD3 on T cells and CD20 on B-cells and induces T cell mediated killing of CD20+ cells.9 Epcoritamab was developed with selective, silencing mutations that may limit, systemic non-specific activity.10 CD20 is expressed on B-cells and a clinically validated therapeutic target in many B-cell malignancies, including diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, follicular lymphoma, mantle cell lymphoma and chronic lymphocytic leukemia.11,12 Epcoritamab is being co-developed by AbbVie and Genmab as part of the companies' broad oncology collaboration.

About Lemzoparlimab

Lemzoparlimab is investigational and being developed through a comprehensive clinical development plan for hematologic malignancies and solid tumor in collaboration with AbbVie and I-Mab.

About Navitoclax

Navitoclax is an investigational, oral BCL-XL/BCL-2 inhibitor. The BCL-2 family of proteins are known regulators of the apoptosis pathway.13 Navitoclax is not approved by any regulatory authority. Its safety and efficacy are under evaluation as part of ongoing Phase 2 and registrational Phase 3 studies.

AbbVie is currently recruiting for two Phase 3 trials of navitoclax (TRANSFORM-1 and TRANSFORM-2) in combination with ruxolitinib for the treatment of myelofibrosis that will enroll more than 500 patients. The company anticipates pivotal trial readouts and regulatory submission for navitoclax in 2023.

About Telisotuzumab Vedotin

Teliso-V is an investigational antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) targeting c-Met, a receptor tyrosine kinase that is overexpressed in tumors including NSCLC. Teliso-V is not approved by any regulatory authority and its safety and efficacy are under evaluation.

About AbbVie in Oncology

At AbbVie, we are committed to transforming standards of care for multiple blood cancers while advancing a dynamic pipeline of investigational therapies across a range of cancer types. Our dedicated and experienced team joins forces with innovative partners to accelerate the delivery of potentially breakthrough medicines. We are evaluating more than 20 investigational medicines in over 300 clinical trials across some of the world's most widespread and debilitating cancers. As we work to have a remarkable impact on people's lives, we are committed to exploring solutions to help patients obtain access to our cancer medicines. For more information, please visit http://www.abbvie.com/oncology.

About AbbVie

AbbVie's mission is to discover and deliver innovative medicines that solve serious health issues today and address the medical challenges of tomorrow. We strive to have a remarkable impact on people's lives across several key therapeutic areas: immunology, oncology, neuroscience, eye care, virology, women's health and gastroenterology, in addition to products and services across its Allergan Aesthetics portfolio. For more information about AbbVie, please visit us at www.abbvie.com. Follow @abbvie on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Forward-Looking Statements

Some statements in this news release are, or may be considered, forward-looking statements for purposes of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The words "believe," "expect," "anticipate," "project" and similar expressions, among others, generally identify forward-looking statements. AbbVie cautions that these forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements. Such risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, failure to realize the expected benefits from AbbVie's acquisition of Allergan plc ("Allergan"), failure to promptly and effectively integrate Allergan's businesses, competition from other products, challenges to intellectual property, difficulties inherent in the research and development process, adverse litigation or government action, changes to laws and regulations applicable to our industry and the impact of public health outbreaks, epidemics or pandemics, such as COVID-19. Additional information about the economic, competitive, governmental, technological and other factors that may affect AbbVie's operations is set forth in Item 1A, "Risk Factors," of AbbVie's 2021 Annual Report on Form 10-K, which has been filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as updated by its subsequent Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q. AbbVie undertakes no obligation to release publicly any revisions to forward-looking statements as a result of subsequent events or developments, except as required by law.

1 Genetics Home Reference. Isolated growth hormone deficiency. http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/isolated-growth-hormone-deficiency. Accessed November 2020.

2 Turetsky, et al. Single cell imaging of Bruton's Tyrosine Kinase using an irreversible inhibitor. Scientific Reports. volume 4, Article number: 4782 (2014)

3 de Rooij MF, Kuil A, Geest CR, et al. The clinically active BTK inhibitor PCI-32765 targets B-cell receptor- and chemokine-controlled adhesion and migration in chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Blood. 2012;119(11):2590-2594.

4 IMBRUVICA U.S. Prescribing Information, April 2020.

5 IMBRUVICA U.S. Prescribing Information, April 2020.

6 Summary of Product Characteristics for VENCLYXTO (venetoclax). Ludwigshafen, Germany: AbbVie Deutschland GmbH & Co. KG.

7 ISI verified against ISI listed on venclexta.com 24Oct2021

8 Summary of Product Characteristics for VENCLYXTO (venetoclax). Ludwigshafen, Germany: AbbVie Deutschland GmbH & Co. KG.

9 "Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma." Lymphoma Research Foundation, https://www.lymphoma.org/aboutlymphoma/nhl/dlbcl/; date accessed: 11 February 2022.

10 van der Horst, H.J., de Jonge, A.V., Hiemstra, I.H. et al. Epcoritamab induces potent anti-tumor activity against malignant B-cells from patients with DLBCL, FL and MCL, irrespective of prior CD20 monoclonal antibody treatment. Blood Cancer J. 11, 38 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41408-021-00430-6

11 Rafiq, Sarwish, et al. "Comparative Assessment of Clinically Utilized CD20-Directed Antibodies in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia Cells Reveals Divergent NK Cell, Monocyte, and Macrophage Properties." J. Immunol. (Baltimore, Md. 1950), U.S. National Library of Medicine, 15 Mar. 2013, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3631574/.

12 Singh, Vijay, et al. "Development of Novel Anti-Cd20 Monoclonal Antibodies and Modulation in Cd20 Levels on Cell Surface: Looking to Improve Immunotherapy Response." J Cancer Sci Ther., U.S. National Library of Medicine, Nov. 2015, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4939752/.

13 Tsujimoto Y. (1998). Role of Bcl-2 family proteins in apoptosis: apoptosomes or mitochondria?. Genes to cells: devoted to molecular & cellular mechanisms, 3(11), 697707. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1365-2443.1998.00223.x

SOURCE AbbVie
JOHANNESBURG, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The COVID-19 pandemic's immense impact on businesses can no longer be ignored. It has become a tremendous stimulant for transformation projects in African enterprises across nearly all markets, with organisations investing resources, time and considerable effort in upgrading their digital services in hopes of taking advantage of the rapid digital revolution that is taking Africa by storm.

As reported by the World Economic Forum Africa, the digital economy could contribute close to $180 billion to the region's growth by the mid-decade. Time, however, is of the essence.

Organisations that seek to compete in today's super-dynamic marketplace are quickly realising the importance of a comprehensive Digital Transformation business model that incorporates diverse technologies across various spectrums.

With this in mind, IT News Africa and industry experts are set to come together to tackle ideas on how to navigate the future-of-work, future-of-integration, connected digital experience, data management, and digital innovation strategies at this year's Digital Transformation Forum 2022 .

A hybrid conference, taking place on 31 May 2022 at The Maslow Hotel Sandton, Johannesburg, #DTF2022 is the premier Africa event focused on Digital Transformation that seeks to convey noteworthy information on how technologies (Blockchain, Cloud & Edge Computing, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), IoT, Analytics, and Gamification), can shape resilient business models going into the future.

Confirmed speakers include:

- Jeanette Uddoh - Head, Innovation & New Products at Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement Systems (NIBSS)

- Nakampe Molewa - Regional General Manager at Uber Eats Sub-Saharan Africa

- Andrew McDonald - Chief Talent Officer (CHRO) at Voys Telecom South Africa

- Khensani Khoza - CIO at Agriseta

- Mbali Ndandani - IT Consumer Experience & Digital Transformation Manager at Unilever

- Faheem Ali - Chief Risk Officer at Musoni

- Michael Njenga Gitau - Regional Head of IT Services at KPMG East Africa

- Freddy Jonker - Regional Sales Manager at Nintex

- Julie Snell - Chair at Scotland 5G Centre

- Ofentse Hlulani Mokwena - Strategic Projects Lead at Uber SSA

Don't miss out, sign up for the #DTF2022 and learn how to successfully transform your business today! To join as an attendee, exhibitor or speaker:

Call: +27 12 012 5801 | Email us: [email protected] | Visit our website now: https://itnewsafrica.com/events/event/digital-transformation-congress-webinar/

Events Manager

IT News Africa

+27 11 026 0982

[email protected]

SOURCE IT News Africa
4-Soft specializes in data encryption management and hosting

AMSTERDAM, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Amsterdam-based 4-Soft , which specializes in data encryption management and hosting, is opening a new investment round after signing a 1.300.000 contract with a Saudi Arabian company.

The new round of 3.500.000 will support the continuous development of 4-Soft's cutting-edge data centralization Phantera System. The system enables data to be encrypted, stored and shared in a wholly enhanced and decentralized environment, ensuring data security and identity, and it unlocks the full potential of Web 3.0.

After Signing Contract Worth More Than 1 Million Euros, 4-Soft is Opening a New Investment Round

The Phantera System is built in a way that allows the integration of an already existing system, as well as the implementation of new software that is under development. As a result, 4-Soft has two business models: integration of systems into a current system or selling APIs to developers.

4-Soft's ultimate goal is to replace the current server providers with its systems, which provide increased security and core changes to systems used since the 1980s. The all-in-one solution 4-Soft provides has been tested since 2019, during which safety and the speed deficit of the system was improved.

By directly encrypting any kind of data using its own Y-GEN protocol, Phantera ensures any data sent through its APIs are secured from the get-go. 4-Soft's APIs are optimized with speed, security and flexibility in mind. This helps businesses save time in scaling their software while keeping it secure and future-ready.

4-Soft developed the Phantera APIs to enable data decentralization needed by companies and enterprises to adapt to Web 3.0. They're currently targeting software developers and software companies and will further develop APIs until every sector that uses the internet is covered  from banking to refrigerators.

Nejc Paradiz, 4-Soft's CEO, said, "I'm delighted with the progress we made over the past years, not only from the development side of things but also from the revenue side. For us, it was important to open the investment round after we got traction and the Saudi Arabia investment opened a whole new level of opportunities for us. I think that with a contract worth more than a million Euros yearly before we have even developed the final version of our system, we overachieved on that front. The next big milestone for us will be closing the round and focusing solely on the development and revenue side of the business. The future looks bright and we are working at full capacity to enter the highly competitive market with a product that outdoes the rest."

For more information and to invest now, visit 4-soft.com .

About 4-Soft

4-Soft is a Web 3.0 company aiming to make the internet a safer place for new and exciting adventures. It develops data encryption, management and storage solutions that achieve unprecedented safety levels by using a unique formula.

About Comms Factory

Comms Factory is a corporate communications resource for entrepreneurs of all kinds. We are a team of experienced corporate communications professionals that offers a range of public relations and content marketing services. Our goal is to enable our clients to promote themselves in multiple media as economically as possible.

SOURCE 4-Soft
WASHINGTON, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, the American Conservative Values ETF (ticker: ACVF) welcomed Woke, Inc. author Vivek Ramaswamy to the politically conservative investing community. "We're happy to have a respected voice with a megaphone join us in challenging the epidemic of corporate wokeness sweeping through boardrooms" said Bill Flaig ACVF founder and CEO. [Web Site]

"We launched ACVF almost two years ago, based on the conviction that companies engaging in advancing liberal social policies will fail to maximize shareholder value while insulting conservative values. Simply put, we seek to avoid as many companies hostile to conservative values as possible, without sacrificing performance." added Flaig [Factsheet]

The recent Disney debacle is an excellent example showing how a failed social agenda can harm investors proving the thesis of ACVF. "I'm pleased that our investors were not harmed because ACVF didn't have any exposure to Disney's stock," said Tom Carter, ACVF president and portfolio manager

Unfortunately, conservatives have unwittingly or begrudgingly supported the liberal agenda with investments because of a lack of alternative investing options. "We designed ACVF to address that problem by giving the conservative investor an opportunity to replace their current large-cap investments with an alternative conservatives will be proud to own" added Carter

"We are thrilled Ramaswamy is joining the effort to challenge the woke bandwagon. We are confident ACVF can help change corporate behavior and give politically conservative investors an investment option that reflects conservative values," said Flaig.

The America Conservative Values ETF (ACVF) is an actively managed diversified large-cap core ETF seeking to boycott as many companies hostile to conservative values as possible, while remaining confident that it can provide large-cap performance and risk.

Investconservative.com

SOURCE American Conservative Values ETF
App Science wins the Reed award for Innovation in Analytics

Reed awards are a major event in the Political Campaign Industry Conference

Political spending for 2022 is expected to be strongest ever for midterm elections

TORONTO, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Sabio Holdings Inc. (TSXV: SBIO) (the "Company" or "Sabio"), a leading provider of Connected TV ("CTV") software solutions, validated by performance, is pleased to announce that its wholly owned App Science ("App Science") business has won a 2022 Reed award in the CTV/OTT category of "Best Use of Media Buying" for our unique solution of enhancing voter lists with granular consumer data which allows clients to target audiences with a level of accuracy previously unseen in the space. Reed Award winners represent the very best in political campaigning, campaign management, political consulting and design, and grassroots & advocacy have to offer.

"We are extremely proud of this accomplishment as it validates our multi-year commitment and investments into providing the most innovative and comprehensive analytics platform to help our customers: brands, agencies, and publishers to gain critical visibility and capability to measure and maximize the performance of their campaigns, and for publishers to maximize revenues. This award is presented to the most exceptional new solutions in the political market and is known in the industry as "the most exacting award in political campaigning." This recognition showcases the unique value App Science brings to the growing market of political CTV and validates the claim of how advanced data analytics can be used to drive notable wins within campaigns and elections nationwide. With the upcoming 2022 midterm election campaign spending, this win puts us in a strong position with campaign managers and agencies," said Aziz Rahimtoola, CEO of Sabio Holdings.

Jon Stimmel, Chief Growth Officer at Sabio, stated "as a former executive with a major agency, I fully understand the challenges facing agencies and brands in the highly fragmented media space. One of the primary reasons that I joined Sabio is App Science, as I believe it has the potential to become a major part of the solutions that will help address these challenges. The Reed Award is a crucial indicator of this potential in the political campaign industry."

According to the Kantar Group, Political ad spending for the 2022 midterms is expected to reach US$7.8 billion, up from the US$4.2 billion spent during the 2018 mid-terms. It is also the first time Kantar is reporting the expected spend for CTV/OTT separately as a major category. Kantar expects spending on CTV/OTT to reach US$1.2B. This highlights the strong growth and increasing importance of this emerging media channel.

Sajid Premji, Chief Financial Officer, stated "CTV/OTT has become the primary growth driver for the business. Our CTV revenues increased by 10x in 2021 over 2020 to reach US$10.2 million. In Q4/2021, CTV revenues of US$5.2 million accounted for close to 50% of the total revenues for the quarter. We expect the strong growth momentum to continue in 2022."

The Reed Awards are named after Campaigns & Elections magazine founder Stanley Foster Reed. The awards recognize excellence in political campaigning, campaign management, political consulting, and political design. Chosen from the largest and smallest organizations in the industry, the winners represent the best in the industry from across more than 100 categories for television, radio, direct mail, phones, field, political technology, and online advertising.

About Sabio

Sabio Holdings Inc. is a technology provider in the high-growth advertising areas of connected TV ("CTV") and over-the-top ("OTT") streaming, where viewership in 2022 is expected to rise to over 221 million users in the United States CTV market alone. Sabio's full CTV/OTT technology stack and services enables global distribution, monetizes, and provides analytics for content creator CTV/OTT apps and the brands and agencies that want to partner with them. Sabio's wholly owned subsidiaries include Vidillion Corp. ("Vidillion"), a CTV/OTT technology pioneer (whose business was acquired subsequent to year-end) that creates and distributes ad-supported CTV/OTT apps on platforms such as Roku, Vizio, Amazon Fire, Disney + and others. In addition, the Company's wholly owned Sabio, Inc. subsidiary works with major brands and agencies, through its propriety Demand Side Platform (DSP) and ad server, to provide targeted campaign solutions to top agencies and the brands they represent by filling the ad slots in Vidillion and other non-Vidillion CTV/OTT apps. Lastly, its wholly owned AppScience, Inc. ("App Science") subsidiary, powered by its App Science Data Management Platform ("DMP"), has pioneered a privacy compliant, non-cookie cross screen household graph of 55 million validated homes that connects insights between mobile apps, CTV/OTT apps, podcast data, along with other data points to better understand consumer behaviors at scale.

For more information, visit: sabioholding.com and/or appscience.inc

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release may contain certain forward-looking information and statements ("forward-looking information") within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation, including but not limited to potential political-related revenue opportunities or anticipated CTV/OTT growth, that are not based on historical fact. Forward-looking information includes, without limitation statements containing the words "believes", "anticipates", "plans", "intends", "will", "should", "expects", "continue", "estimate", "forecasts" and other similar expressions. Readers are cautioned to not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. Actual results and developments may differ materially from those contemplated by these statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to comment on analyses, expectations or statements made by third-parties in respect of the Company, its securities, or financial or operating results (as applicable). Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in forward-looking information in this press release are reasonable, such forward-looking information has been based on expectations, factors and assumptions concerning future events that may prove to be inaccurate and are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, certain of which are beyond the Company's control, including the risk factors disclosed in the Filing Statement which is publicly available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. The forward-looking information contained in this press release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement and is made as of the date hereof. The Company disclaims any intention and has no obligation or responsibility, except as required by law, to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

This news release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities in any jurisdiction.

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: Sabio Holdings Inc.

SOURCE Sabio Holdings Inc.
Home discount retailer to offer additional savings to customers who donate

COLUMBUS, Ohio, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Big Lots, Inc . (NYSE: BIG), a leading home discount retailer, is collecting donations to benefit the Columbus, Ohio-based National Veterans Memorial and Museum (NVMM) now through Tuesday, May 31, in honor of Memorial Day. Customers who make a donation of any size when they check out at a Big Lots store nationwide will receive a coupon for $5 off any future purchase of $15 or more.

Big Lots associate Ethan Prak places American flags at the National Veterans Memorial and Museum.

"Honoring our nation's veterans and their families has always been important to Big Lots and me personally," said Bruce Thorn, president and CEO of Big Lots and NVMM board member. "The National Veterans Memorial and Museum is a place every American should experience, and we feel fortunate that it's located near our headquarters here in Columbus. We are proud to continue to support the work they're doing to ensure the stories and legacies of our nation's service members are shared and remembered for generations to come."

The Big Lots Foundation serves as a corporate sponsor of the NVMM, having donated nearly $3.5 million since 2019. Donations to the NVMM support its goals of unfettered access for all U.S. military veterans and Gold Star Families who have lost an immediate family member while serving, world-class exhibits and story preservation, K-12 education programs, fellowships, public programming, and capital enhancements of the museum. The museum has gained international recognition and was considered one of Architectural Digest's most anticipated buildings of 2018.

"Thank you to Bruce Thorn and his team at Big Lots for another incredible partnership opportunity and to the amazing Big Lots customers who continue to show their love and support of our military veterans by giving to the National Veterans Memorial and Museum," said retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Ferriter, NVMM president and CEO. "The donations made through this program will directly support our mission to honor and positively impact the lives of veterans, their families and our communities by sharing the veteran experience."

Big Lots CEO Bruce Thorn served in the U.S. Army during the Gulf War. He completed the Army's Ranger School and attained the rank of captain before being honorably discharged in 1994.

A year-round military discount of 10% is available to active-duty military and veterans who shop at Big Lots. For more information about the NVMM, visit nationalvmm.org . To find the Big Lots store nearest you, visit biglots.com .

About Big Lots

Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, Big Lots, Inc. (NYSE: BIG) is a leading home discount retailer and a Fortune 500 company, operating 1,432 stores in 47 states, as well as a best-in-class ecommerce platform with expanded capabilities via BOPIS, curbside pickup, Instacart and same day delivery across thousands of items. The company's product assortment is focused on home essentials: Furniture, Seasonal, Soft Home, Food, Consumables and Hard Home. Ranked one of the fastest-growing eCommerce businesses by Digital Commerce 360 and the recipient of Home Textiles Today's 2021 Retail Titan Award, Big Lots' mission is to help people Live BIG and Save Lots. The company strives to be the BIG difference for a better life by delivering exceptional value to customers through the ultimate treasure hunt shopping experience, building a "best places to grow" culture, rewarding shareholders with consistent growth and top-tier returns and doing good in local communities. For more information about the company, visit biglots.com .

About the National Veterans Memorial and Museum

The museum takes visitors on a narrative journey in-person and online telling individual stories and sharing experiences of Veterans from all military branches throughout history, in war and peace. History is presented in a dynamic, participatory experience with photos, letters and personal effects, multimedia presentations, interactive exhibits, online events and digital content. Together, these elements link our national story to the larger context of our world. The NVMM is more than a museum, providing digital story-telling and programming, Resilience and Wellness (Jiu Jitsu, yoga, runs and more) and more that reach across the country. The museum is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and does not receive any state or federal funding. For more information, please visit nationalvmm.org.

Media Contact:

Taylor Castillejo

Tombras

[email protected]

(865) 257-0026

SOURCE Big Lots, Inc.
SINGAPORE, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Binance , the world's leading crypto and blockchain infrastructure provider, has strengthened its team with the recruitment of Jarek Jakubcek as the Head of Intelligence and Investigations for Asia-Pacific. Jarek is a leading global expert in cybercrime and former cryptocurrency specialist in Europol Cybercrime Centre's (EC3) Dark Web team.

At Binance, Jarek will lead efforts to coordinate the takedown of malicious actors in the crypto ecosystem in conjunction with law enforcement agencies in the APAC region.

During his seven years at EC3, Jarek provided operational and strategic support for major cryptocurrency investigations. He also led the world's largest cryptocurrency experts' platform with representatives from hundreds of law enforcement agencies internationally. Being a specialist and educator in the field, Jarek's expertise is widely respected in the law enforcement community. Jarek will be an essential link between law enforcement and the crypto industry in assisting large-scale investigations.

"With its growing role in the industry comes growing responsibility, which Binance is taking the lead on. This is evidenced by Binance's ongoing support of law enforcement investigations and recent strategic moves, including hiring an impressive team of key personnel in both its investigations and compliance teams," commented Jarek Jakubcek.

Jarek added: "I am proud to join Binance and work alongside the most experienced and talented team within the blockchain industry, including former law enforcement colleagues. It will be our duty to ensure efficient cooperation with law enforcement agencies and prosecutors in the detection and prevention of criminal activities. Together, we will be stamping out illicit activities from the blockchain ecosystem and ensure that Binance remains the safest exchange in the world."

Tigran Gambaryan, Global Head of Intelligence and Investigations at Binance, said: "Jarek is a hugely impressive cybercrime expert with connections to law enforcement agencies all over the world. His role will be pivotal in ensuring that Binance works effectively with police and prosecutors to keep the Binance ecosystem and wider crypto industry secure. As the world's leading exchange, Binance is totally committed to take the lead on crypto security."

Jarek joined EC3 in 2014, shortly after EC3 had opened its doors for business, and had been a driving force for Europol's pioneering activities in the area of cryptocurrency investigations since the very beginning. Prior to Europol, Jarek spent over five years at An Garda Siochana, Ireland's National Police and Security Service, where he won international awards for creative use of OSINT technologies. He has lived in five countries and earned two MSc degrees.

Jarek has played a key role in a number of high-profile investigations across a variety of criminal activities, including ransomware, dark web, corporate hacks, phishing incidents, investment fraud, kidnappings and money laundering. He has also de-anonymised mixing services, published practical law enforcement guides, organised specialised conferences, developed relations with the cryptocurrency industry and trained investigators worldwide.

Jarek joins Binance's industry-leading security and investigations team which includes Tigran Gambaryan , Matthew Price , Nils Andersen-Roed , and Aron Akbiyikian .

SOURCE Binance
NEW YORK, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Xintong "Tony" Zhang, an experienced litigation attorney from mainland China, joins the New York office of Seiden Law Group LLP as a litigation associate working on complex cross border litigation. Tony was admitted to the New York and New Jersey State Bars after graduating from St. John's law school and practicing law in a boutique law firm in New York. Tony joins a driven team of lawyers at Seiden Law Group and primarily focuses on the China Practice Group where he assists US and Chinese clients who have been the victims of fraud, or are embroiled in business disputes. Tony also assists clients with negotiating business deals.

Tony brings a practical, sure-footed approach and business sense to resolving disputes and uses his fluency in both Chinese and English language and culture to efficiently and aggressively assist clients. Tony holds a joint LL.M./J.D. degree from St. John's University School of Law. Tony previously worked at the United Nations and law firms in Xian, China and New York. Tony is currently working on matters for one of China's most successful entrepreneurs as well as several major financial institutions in China. Tony was recently named one of Super Lawyer's 2021-22 Rising Stars.

Seiden Law Group is a boutique law firm based in Manhattan with a vast array of global clients that trust the Seiden team when they want sound advice, creative solutions, and bare-knuckled, smart-as-a-whip street fighters in the negotiating or court room to get them successful results.

Click here to read further about Seiden Law Group LLP.

SOURCE Seiden Law Group LLP
The CMA CGM Group is committed to assisting in the overall effort to improve supply chain velocity in the United States .

The Group's new early return incentive program will deliver 300 USD per container to help customers offset costs.

The CMA CGM Group continues to implement solutions designed to support U.S. exporters and expedite the flow of goods.

NORFOLK, Va., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The CMA CGM Group, a global leader in sea, land, air and logistics solutions, announced today that it will implement the shipping industry's first Early Container Return Incentive Program at the FMS terminal in Los Angeles and all CMA CGM return locations in Chicago, IL; Dallas, TX; Kansas City, KS; and Memphis, TN. The program will begin on May 16, 2022, and continue until July 15, 2022, with the goal of accelerating the return of empty containers and ensuring U.S. exporters have even greater access to equipment.

A Group committed to assisting in the overall effort to improve supply chain conditions

The shipping industry has experienced an unprecedented spike in demand, leading to severe congestion throughout North America's supply chain. Exporters have been impacted particularly hard by the challenges, with the lack of equipment making it more difficult to get their goods to market in a timely manner.

Throughout the crisis, CMA CGM has leveraged its extensive capabilities that include sea, land, air and logistics services to provide an array of flexible transport and logistics solutions to assist customers. The company has also significantly invested in industrial assets (vessels, containers, chassis, aircraft, terminals and warehouses) and implemented several industry-leading programs designed to decrease congestion and help both partners and customers navigate the complex environment.

Not only was CMA CGM the first to freeze spot rates, the company also implemented a program to encourage the early pickup of containers, which resulted in a 73% decrease in dwell of CMA CGM containers over 9 days in Southern California. And in March, the Group dedicated vessel capacity to small and medium enterprises in both Europe and North America at rates typically only provided to high-volume shippers.

The Group is also collaborating with industry associations like the International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) to develop customized, market-based solutions to ensure greater reliability and predictability for U.S. exporters.

A groundbreaking incentive to assist U.S. exporters and expedite the flow of goods

CMA CGM's new 60-day incentive program is projected to result in approximately 43,000 dry containers being put back into circulation within 4 days of pickup on or after Monday, May 16, 2022. Details include:

A 300 USD credit per dry container returned to eligible locations during calendar days 14.

credit per dry container returned to eligible locations during calendar days 14. Calculation of incentive credits on a weekly basis with a credit memo issued every 14 days to each applicable importer of record (consignee listed on the Bill of Lading).

Utilization of EDI transaction data to assess credit, thus no additional documentation required from customers.

This new initiative is the second incentive program implemented by CMA CGM in the USA, following the Early Container Pickup Incentive Program the Group initiated at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach at the end of 2021.

Ed Aldridge, President of CMA CGM and APL North America, said, "CMA CGM is committed to doing everything we can to increase the fluidity and velocity of America's supply chain. Our new program will result in an incentive credit for our importers, improve equipment availability for our exporters and expedite the flow of goods into and out of America's heartland. It's truly a win-win for everyone."

Gene Seroka, Executive Director of the Port of Los Angeles, said, "With this incentive program, the CMA CGM Group is facilitating a more robust flow of goods through the Port of Los Angeles and helping U.S. exporters get their product to destinations around the globe more quickly. CMA CGM has been a reliable partner to the Port of Los Angeles and a driving force for change throughout the spike in demand."

About CMA CGM

Led by Rodolphe Saade, the CMA CGM Group, a global leader in sea, land, air and logistics solutions, serves more than 420 ports around the world on five continents. Backed by a fleet of 566 vessels, in 2021 the Group transported 22 million TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units) containers. With its subsidiary CEVA Logistics, a world leader in logistics, which transports 474,000 tons of air freight and more than 21 million tons of land freight each year, and its air freight division CMA CGM AIR CARGO, the CMA CGM Group is continually innovating to offer its customers a complete and increasingly efficient range of new shipping, land, air and logistics solutions.

Committed to the energy transition in shipping, and a pioneer in the use of alternative fuels, the CMA CGM Group has set a target to become Net Zero Carbon by 2050.

Through the CMA CGM Foundation, every year the Group helps thousands of children through its actions to promote education for all and equal opportunity. The CMA CGM Foundation also acts in humanitarian crises that require an emergency response by mobilizing the Group's shipping and logistics expertise to bring humanitarian supplies around the world.

Present in 160 countries through its network of more than 400 offices and 750 warehouses, the Group employs more than 130,000 people worldwide, including 2,900 in Marseilles where its head office is located. In the United States, the CMA CGM Group, which is headquartered in Norfolk, Va., employs more than 12,000 people. Its subsidiary, American President Lines (APL), operates a fleet of U.S.-flagged vessels and supports U.S. territories and American military stationed around the world. Learn more at cmacgm-group.com

SOURCE CMA CGM
"We are extremely proud of our vessel's early performance, which is a testament to the expertise, ingenuity and skill of our design and newbuild teams who conceived Nukumi, and of our seafarers who are now operating this highly sophisticated ship."

Purpose-designed to service Windsor Salt's deicing salt shipping and handling needs in Eastern Canada, the vessel's state-of-the-art technology and innovative features were put to the test for the first time during loading at the Mines Seleines salt mine in the Magdalene Islands last week, and during the discharge in Montreal yesterday.

On her first trip to the Mines Seleine salt mine, the ship's modern hull design and twin-fin diesel-electric propulsion system demonstrated the vessel's ability to transit through narrow channels more quickly, at lower tide and with exceptional maneuverability.

The ship's fully automated single point of loading and state-of-the-art cargo handling systems performed as designed and eliminated the need for vessel shifting during loading, making for a safer and more efficient operation.

During discharge in Montreal, the vessel's shuttle discharge boom arrangement significantly reduced shifting, while sensor technology installed on the boom and programmed to auto-pile mode contributed to saving time and crew effort.

Several innovations built into the design of MV Nukumi are also reducing the ship's overall environmental footprint and are expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants by 25% and 80% respectively, compared with previous ships servicing the same routes. These include diesel-electric tier 3 engines, a ballast water treatment system, a waste heat recovery system, and overall quieter machinery.

"Canadians count on the critical deicing salts that Nukumi will deliver to stockpiles throughout Eastern Canada to help keep roadways safe during the winter," said Luc B. Savoie, Vice-President and Chief Commercial Officer, Windsor Salt Ltd. "Reducing the environmental impact of shipping our deicing salt and ensuring everyone's safety are important objectives at Windsor Salt, and we are delighted that this new, advanced ship will help us achieve both."

CSL is grateful to the Ministere des Transports du Quebec for its financial contribution as part of the Ministry's program to improve the efficiency of marine, air and rail transportation.

"With Avantage Saint-Laurent, our government has given Quebec a clear vision for the marine industry: aligning economic development and protecting ecosystems. CSL's Nukumi is a perfect example as to what we want to do on the St. Lawrence. I am very proud to support this project, which uses innovative marine transportation practices that respect the environment, and has concrete benefits for communities," said Chantal Rouleau, Quebec's Minister for Transport.

For more information visit mvnukumi.com.

About Canada Steamship Lines

Canada Steamship Lines is a division of The CSL Group, the largest owner and operator of self-unloading ships in the world. Headquartered in Montreal with regional operations in the Americas, Australia, Europe and Asia, CSL delivers millions of tons of cargo annually for customers in the construction, steel, energy and agri-food sectors. For more information, please visit cslships.com.

About Windsor Salt

Windsor Salt Ltd. is headquartered in Pointe-Claire (Quebec) and employs approximately 775 people across Canada. The company's highly recognizable Windsor brand has been a part of Canadian life since 1893. Today, the Windsor portfolio includes a full range of premium products for consumers, business and industry, from culinary salts and water softening salts to deicing products and pool salts. For more information, please visit WindsorSalt.com.

Windsor Salt's Mines Seleine mine has been in operation since 1982.

SOURCE The CSL Group Inc.
ALEXANDRIA, Va. , May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- DCS Corporation has been awarded positions in two Pools under the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD) Webster Outlying Field (WOLF) Rapid Acquisition Prototyping Integration and Development (RAPID) Multiple Award Contract (MAC). DCS will provide technical expertise under RAPID MAC Pool 5: Embarkable Systems and Pool 6: Airborne Mission Systems. The multiple-award, Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (ID/IQ) RAPID MAC has a combined ceiling of a $249M to be shared by awardees over a 5-year period of performance.

NAVAIR Public Release 2022-256. Distribution Statement A  Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.

"DCS looks forward to expanding our support at WOLF under the RAPID MAC," said Jim Benbow, DCS CEO. "We are excited for the opportunity to play a part in meeting the new and emerging requirements and growth across the NAWCAD WOLF."

Under RAPID MAC, DCS will compete for task orders in the areas of requirements analysis, evaluation, studies and analysis, cyber hardening, engineering design, configuration management, prototyping, integration, production, test and evaluation, logistical support, training, documentation, and fielding of Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Combat Systems, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C5ISR) technologies, airworthiness, flight operations, and fielding of Airborne Mission Systems to the Warfighter.

About DCS

An employee-owned company, DCS offers advanced technology, engineering, and management solutions to Government agencies in the national security sector. The transformative ideas, commitment to quality, and entrepreneurial spirit that characterize our employee-owners allow us to ensure the success of each customer's mission and actively contribute to the well-being of the Nation.

For more information, please visit: https://www.dcscorp.com.

NAVAIR Public Release 2022-256. Distribution Statement A  "Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited."

Media Contact:

DCS Corporation

[email protected]

571-227-6000

SOURCE DCS Corporation
New Solar Contracts Come as Digital Realty is Recognized by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy for Green Energy Leadership

AUSTIN, Texas, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Digital Realty (NYSE: DLR), the largest global provider of cloud- and carrier-neutral data center, colocation and interconnection solutions, today announced that it is contracting for 158 megawatts (MW) of new solar power in California and Georgia.

The move advances Digital Realty's progress toward 100% renewable electricity and its 1.5 degree C-aligned Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi)  a global standard for reduction greenhouse gas emissions.

"These efforts are part of our strategy to reduce our carbon footprint," said Digital Realty CEO A. William Stein. "We are demonstrating that the data center industry is a key part of the transition to a digital economy that is powered by clean energy."

The contracts include a 12-year agreement to support the development of a new 130 MW utility-scale solar project in Kern County, California. The project, developed by Terra-Gen as part of its Edwards Sanborn Solar Storage energy project, is one of the largest solar-plus-storage projects in the world and is expected to be completed in late-2022.

Additionally, Digital Realty is subscribing to Georgia Power's Customer Renewable Supply Procurement program. The company will receive 28 MW of new solar supply to support its Atlanta data center portfolio. The energy will be generated by new solar facilities located in Georgia. The program is expected to begin delivering power and renewable energy certificates to Digital Realty in 2024.

In 2020, Digital Realty set aggressive science-based carbon emissions targets with the SBTi, becoming the first global data center organization of its size and scale to do so. Digital Realty has committed to reducing its Scope 1 and 2 emissions (direct and indirect emissions) by 68 percent and Scope 3 emissions (indirect emissions in its value chain) by 24 percent by 2030.

The contract announcements come on the heels of a pair of honors for Digital Realty from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Energy (DOE).

For the third consecutive year, Digital Realty received the EPA ENERGY STAR Partner of the Year Award this month, earning Sustained Excellence recognition. The award comes as part of Digital Realty's continued commitment to measuring and improving the energy efficiency of its data centers and pursuing ENERGY STAR certifications for eligible sites.

Digital Realty certified 34 data centers under the 2021 ENERGY STAR Certification Program, totaling 9 million square feet and 765 MW of IT capacity. This covers 65% of Digital Realty's U.S. owned and managed portfolio and represents a 15% increase in MW-IT capacity certified from the prior year. Compared to industry-average data centers, Digital Realty's ENERGY STAR-certified facilities reduce emissions by 408,000 metric tons of CO2 per year and save 943,000 MW of energy, enough to power approximately 79,000 average U.S. homes.

Digital Realty was also recently ranked No. 9 on the EPA's list of green power users on its Top 30 Tech & Telecom List and No. 21 among companies overall on the National Top 100 List as part of the Green Power Partnership.

Digital Realty uses nearly 1.1 billion kilowatt-hours of green power annually in the U.S. alone, under the EPA's Green Power Partnership criteria. This is equivalent to the annual electricity use of more than 99,000 average American homes.

Additional Resources

About Digital Realty

Digital Realty supports the world's leading enterprises and service providers by delivering the full spectrum of data center, colocation, and interconnection solutions. PlatformDIGITAL, the company's global data center platform, provides customers a trusted foundation and proven Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx) solution methodology for scaling digital business and efficiently managing Data Gravity challenges. Digital Realty's global data center footprint gives customers access to the connected communities that matter to them with 290+ facilities in 50 metros across 26 countries on six continents. For more information, please visit digitalrealty.com or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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 nearly 40% of the Fortune 500partner with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to deliver cost-saving energy efficiency solutions that protect the climate while improving air quality and protecting public health. Since 1992, ENERGY STAR and its partners have helped American families and businesses save 5 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity, avoid more than $500 billion in energy costs, and achieve 4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas reductions. Over the lifetime of the program, every dollar EPA has spent on ENERGY STAR resulted in nearly $350 in energy cost savings for American business and households. In 2020 alone, ENERGY STAR and its partners helped Americans save more than 520 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and avoid $42 billion in energy costs. More background information about ENERGY STAR can be found at energystar.gov.

About Environmental Protection Agency's Green Power Partnership

The Green Power Partnership is a voluntary program that helps increase green power use among U.S. organizations to advance the American market for green power and development of those sources to reduce air pollution and other environmental impacts associated with electricity use. In 2020, the Partnership had more than 700 Partners voluntarily using nearly 70 billion kilowatt-hours of green power annually. Partners include a wide variety of leading organizations such as Fortune 500 companies; small and medium sized businesses; local, state, and federal governments; and colleges and universities. For additional information, please visit www.epa.gov/greenpower.

For Additional Information

Media Contacts

Helen Bleasdale

Digital Realty

+1 (737) 267-6822

[email protected]

Investor Relations

Jordan Sadler/ Jim Huseby

Digital Realty

+1 415 848 9311

[email protected]

Forward-Looking Statement/ Safe Harbour Statement

This press release contains forward-looking statements which are based on current expectations, forecasts and assumptions that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual outcomes and results to differ materially, including statements related to our sustainability goals, certifications and strategy and potential impact from sustainability initiatives and our sustainability program and achievements. For a list and description of such risks and uncertainties, see the reports and filings by the company with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

SOURCE Digital Realty
Product Suite from Workforce Solutions Simplifies Forms Management to Improve Employee Experience

ATLANTA, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Equifax  (NYSE: EFX) announced enhancements to its employee-driven product suite with the expansion of its State Forms solution. The enhanced solution delivers simplified forms management to help U.S. employers meet state employee form requirements, including required annual notices. Bundling State Forms with services including I-9 Management, state and federal withholding forms and Work Opportunity Tax Credits (WOTC) helps employers more seamlessly create their own custom forms and packets to improve the employee experience.

More than 1 in 10 Americans moved during the pandemic according to a recent survey from Zillow Group, with respondents citing the opportunity to work remotely as a primary reason they decided to move. For employers that hire across multiple states, keeping up with the numerous state laws that govern new hire forms and annual notices can be a complex and daunting task.

The State Forms solution from Equifax can help automate this process for employers  from monitoring state requirements and tracking updates, to helping employers better manage the delivery of forms to a remote, in-office or hybrid workforce. Equifax maintains a growing and customizable array of forms, which can be accessed by HR professionals and employees via secure, single sign-on (SSO) technology. In addition, the solution can integrate seamlessly with most human capital management (HCM) systems through an application programming interface (API) connection or other integration technology.

"The pandemic caused a dramatic shift in companies' willingness to consider remote work, opening up a nationwide talent pool. However, the cross-state workforce also brings new challenges and risks for employers," commented Kate Devine-Elkins, Director, Product Management, Compliance Solutions at Equifax Workforce Solutions. "At a time when employee expectations are rising and it's more important than ever to retain talent, new enhancements to our State Forms service delivers on our commitment to helping take more of the administrative burden off of HR, while also helping employers better mitigate their risk and setting the stage for a more positive employee experience during onboarding and beyond."

State Forms is an integral pillar in the Equifax Workforce Solutions Compliance Center suite of solutions, along with I-9 Management (including our award-winning I-9 Anywhere solution for simpler remote onboarding) and WOTC Management, which supports faster onboarding and easier form management along the employee lifecycle, all within a customizable platform that connects seamlessly with most HCM systems. State Forms is available now to employer customers. More information on State Forms solutions from Equifax Workforce Solutions is available here .

ABOUT EQUIFAX

At Equifax (NYSE: EFX), we believe knowledge drives progress. As a global data, analytics, and technology company, we play an essential role in the global economy by helping financial institutions, companies, employers, and government agencies make critical decisions with greater confidence. Our unique blend of differentiated data, analytics, and cloud technology drives insights to power decisions to move people forward. Headquartered in Atlanta and supported by more than 13,000 employees worldwide, Equifax operates or has investments in 25 countries in North America, Central and South America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region. For more information, visit Equifax.com .

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Daniel Jenkins for Equifax Workforce Solutions

[email protected]

SOURCE Equifax Inc.
LUXEMBOURG, May 12th, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Globant (NYSE: GLOB), a digitally native technology services company, today announced it will release results for the first quarter ended March 31st, 2022 on Thursday May 19th, 2022 after the close of regular market hours.

Following the release, Martin Migoya, Globant's CEO & co-founder, and Juan Urthiague, Globant's CFO, will discuss the results in a video conference call beginning at 4:30pm ET.

Video conference call access information is:

https://more.globant.com/F1Q22EarningsCall

About Globant (NYSE:GLOB)

We are a digitally native company that helps organizations reinvent themselves to create a way forward and unleash their potential. We are the place where innovation, design and engineering meet scale.

We have more than 23,500 employees and we are present in 18 countries working for companies like Google, Rockwell Automation, Electronic Arts and Santander, among others.

We were named a Worldwide Leader in CX Improvement Services by IDC MarketScape report. We were also featured as a business case study at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. We are a member of the Cybersecurity Tech Accord.

For more information, please visit www.globant.com

Investor Relations Contact:

[email protected]

+1 (877) 215-5230

Media Contact:

Wanda Weigert, Globant

[email protected]

+1 (877) 215-5230

SOURCE Globant
Revenue Reaches a Record of HK$2,233.6 Million

CYBEX and Evenflo Brands Achieve Strong Revenue Growth

HONG KONG, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Goodbaby International Holdings Limited ("Goodbaby International" or the "Company", HKEX stock code: 1086, together with its subsidiaries, the "Group"), a leading global parenting products company, has today announced its unaudited revenue performance for the three months ended 31 March 2022 (the "Period"). The Group generated revenue of approximately HK$2,233.6 million, representing a record for the first quarter with a growth rate of 7.1% year-on-year ("YoY") (8.1% increase on a constant currency basis[1]).

During the Period, CYBEX brand continued its strong revenue growth at a rate of 15.6% (22.1% increase on a constant currency basis) YoY to reach a record first quarter revenue. Its strong brand position and product portfolio (in both car seats and particularly wheeled goods), fortified global operations, the continuous launch of new products and categories and ongoing expansion of global omni-channel distribution of CYBEX contributed to the strong positive revenue momentum across all key global markets, where the respective market shares also expanded.

The revenue performance of Evenflo brand reached a record first quarter total and growth rate of 31.0% YoY (29.9% increase on a constant currency basis) during the Period, primarily driven by continued strong consumer reaction to innovative new products in North America. Despite ongoing supply chain challenges in North America and an unfavorable foreign exchange rate, Evenflo continued to outperform the competition.

Revenue of gb brand amounted to approximately HK$422.9 million. In its key China market, the revenue performance was negatively impacted by the COVID-19 related restrictions causing retail store closures, logistics delivery disruption and the suspension of wholesale activities. gb continues to proactively right-size the commercial operations to adapt to the new situation and declining birth rate in China.

The Blue Chip business revenue amounted to approximately HK$287.0 million, representing a growth rate of 8.1% (6.1% increase on a constant currency basis) YoY, mainly due to the continued increasing orders from its customers.

Goodbaby International's CEO Mr. Martin Pos concluded, "The Group is facing continued disruption of its supply chain due to COVID-19 lockdowns in China and regional instability in Europe. We are actively working to mitigate these challenges and as a result it is not prudent at this time to provide a forward looking view of how these challenges will impact the Group's 2022 financial performance."

For more details, please refer to the announcement:

https://www1.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/sehk/2022/0512/2022051200258.pdf

About Goodbaby International Holdings Limited

Goodbaby International Holdings Ltd. (Stock code: 1086) is a world-leading parenting products company. The Group serves millions of families around the world through design, research and development, manufacture, marketing and sales of children's car safety seats, strollers, apparel and home textile products, feeding, nursing and personal care products, cribs, bicycles and tricycles and other children's products.

Note: [1] The constant currency basis is the weighted growth rate on each original currency revenue.

SOURCE Goodbaby International
Talent shortages driven by external environmental changes, tightening labor markets, and rising candidate expectations have made sourcing talent increasingly challenging. According to McLean & Company, combating these obstacles requires rethinking traditional sourcing activities.

"Redefining what makes a 'quality' candidate is crucial to finding stronger, more diverse talent pools," says Laura Ribadeneira, Director, HR Research & Advisory Services at McLean & Company. "It's important to prioritize the transferrable skills and experiences candidates bring, rather than relying on historic job requirements. This means talent acquisition specialists must have the skills, tools, and organizational support to influence a shift in hiring practices and decisions."

The latest research from McLean & Company shows that recruiting has remained the number one priority for organizations since 2020, though HR departments' effectiveness at enabling recruiting has decreased by 8% despite HR spending 25% more of their time on talent acquisition compared to 2021. Sourcing talent for onsite roles is proving particularly challenging, with organizations unable to provide remote or hybrid work options being 1.5 times more likely to experience candidate ghosting and 1.3 times more likely to experience decreased job applications.

Relying on methods that worked in the past is no longer enough as the world of work continues to change. In order to attract and retain top talent, McLean & Company recommends HR leaders challenge historical perceptions of qualified candidates to ensure inclusivity and remove barriers for potential applicants to expand candidate pipelines further.

To assist HR teams in diversifying their talent pools, McLean & Company's newly released blueprint outlines four steps to improve sourcing activities and channels:

Assess the current state of sourcing  Collect stakeholder feedback on sourcing effectiveness, complete a sourcing analysis and uncover pain points, identify challenges requiring solutions beyond sourcing, and then set goals and metrics.



Optimize key sourcing activities  Consider specific sourcing activities to improve and elevate some or all of the following sourcing activities:



Holding intake meetings

Creating success profiles

Designing sourcing plans

Developing job ads

Nurturing talent pipelines

Identify specific sourcing channels to improve  Determine which channels meet current and future needs, explore other sourcing channels to integrate, and decide whether to elevate, maintain, remove, or build key sourcing channels, such as:

Internal talent mobility

High-potential program

Employee referral program

Campus recruitment

Organizational alumni program

Social media

Implement changes to sourcing activities and channels  Create a roadmap of planned changes to sourcing activities and channels and communicate planned changes to stakeholders. Partner with other functions to leverage existing knowledge and build skills, and then evaluate success and continually monitor effectiveness.

To support HR leaders in their efforts to elevate talent sourcing and expand candidate pipelines, McLean & Company provides various levels of support and practical resources in addition to comprehensive research such as Elevate Talent Sourcing. From DIY toolkits to guided implementations, workshops, and consulting, McLean & Company offers tools that are best suited to the unique needs of organizations, allowing leaders to shape a workplace where everyone thrives.

To learn more about McLean & Company or 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 program provides unrestricted, on-demand access to HR, IT, and software industry content, as well as subject matter experts from a group of over 200 research analysts. To apply 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
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Hive Learning  the peer learning platform specialising in delivering culture change at scale has released their yearly Most Influential DEI Leaders in North America List.

Every year, the DEI experts and practitioners at Hive Learning search the DEI space to see who is doing the most influential work. This is the 3rd annual release of the list which includes 80 leaders across all types of industries.

The list is Hive Learning's collection of leaders who are doing influential work or have helped make progress in the diversity, inclusion and equity space. Peer learning is a cornerstone of Hive Learning's program, so the Influential Leaders list serves as a one-stop compilation of the innovators' work in the DEI space and a reference of learning material for people who are interested in scaling culture change within their organization.

The full list can be found at https://www.hivelearning.com/site/resource/news/dei-influential-leaders-2022-north-america/ .

About Hive Learning

Hive Learning is the world's #1 peer learning platform. Their award-winning approach uses nudge theory and network science to help enterprise companies create and sustain culture change at scale by changing one behaviour at a time.

Hive Learning combines a consumer grade platform with peer learning programmes that accelerate skill adoption specialising in areas like inclusion, mental health, and leadership; expert services offer customers deep insights into their culture and deliver an engagement playbook designed over 20,000 deployments.

In the past three years, Hive Learning has generated over 22 million peer learning interactions in 196 countries and helped +80% of learners take action on what they learnt. Visit www.hivelearning.com to learn more.

SOURCE Hive Learning
The first and only fully automated U.S. Copyright Registration Service Enables Creators to Submit Registrations of Visual Works in less than 3 Minutes

BOSTON, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- ImageRights International, Inc., the world's leading copyright enforcement service for visual works, today announced that it has registered 1,000,000 images on behalf of its photographer, visual artist, photo agency and media company clients.

ImageRights International, Inc.

ImageRights has offered registration services for visual works with the United States Copyright Office (USCO) since 2010, eliminating many of the administrative and financial barriers that have historically deterred rightsholders from registering their work. Under U.S. law, registration is required for copyright owners to be eligible to receive statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work, and possible recovery of attorney's fees, without which it is very difficult for attorneys to litigate an infringement case. Photographers lose out on millions of dollars every year for the simple reason that they fail to register their photos with the U.S. Copyright Office.

In addition to making registration fast and easy, ImageRights' automated error checking and expert human review of the applications the service automatically completes on the copyright.gov website have resulted in over 99% of all registrations being issued without the need for any follow up correspondence with the USCO registration specialists. As a result, we often have the USCO certificates of registration in hand within only 2-3 weeks of submission.

ImageRights also adheres to the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard to automatically store the USCO registration information in the image files. For photographers using the ImageRights Adobe Lightroom plug-in to register their photos with the USCO from directly within the Lightroom environment, the metadata is automatically synced back to the files in their catalog when they subsequently connect to their ImageRights accounts. This ensures that all the copyright information is accurately contained within their image files when they distribute their photos to their clients or photo agencies or when they post their photos online.

Lickerish (lickerishltd.com), a high-quality photographic syndication company that provides images of celebrities and models taken by more than 400 internationally renowned photographers, has been using the ImageRights USCO registration service for more than a decade. It was only fitting that their registration of Dimitry Loiseau's photos shot for the Fall 2021 issue of Regard Magazine (VA 2-283-389) covered the 1,000,000th image registered through the ImageRights service. Lickerish director Emma Carlsen stated that, "not only does the ImageRights USCO registration service enable us to efficiently manage registrations for our contributors, but the service also serves as a recruiting tool for us to sign new high-end celebrity, fashion and fine art photographers."

The registration service is also available to copyright attorneys who are looking for more efficient ways of registering their clients' visual works and managing their copyright infringement claims. ImageRights founder and CEO Joe Naylor noted that "the integration of ImageRights automated USCO registration service with its proprietary online image search and claims management platform makes a powerful tool for law firms focused on growing and more efficiently managing their IP clientele."

About ImageRights

Boston-based ImageRights International, Inc., provides AI-driven intelligent Internet search and copyright enforcement services to photo agencies, image archives, professional photographers, and media companies worldwide, enabling them to maximize control and monetization of their intellectual property.

For more information on ImageRights USCO registration and copyright enforcement services, visit https://www.imagerights.com/.

For more information on the ImageRights Adobe Lightroom plug-in, visit https://www.imagerights.com/plugins.

Media Contact:

Ted VanCleave

323-377-4879

[email protected]

SOURCE ImageRights International, Inc.
"I am very excited to join Radiance Technologies. Radiance has a great culture, balancing mission focus and vision with a strong emphasis on the professional and personal growth of our employees. I'm excited to provide our customers with a diverse and innovative approach to delivering capabilities and supporting our nation in strategic competition," said Stratton.

Mr. Stratton is a highly decorated officer with numerous awards from multiple agencies for achievements both military and civilian. He is a veteran of Operations Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Joint Endeavor, Deny Flight, Deliberate Force, Allied Force, Southern Watch, Iraqi Freedom, Enduring Freedom, and Noble Eagle. He was the senior representative from Naval Intelligence in the creation and design of the Certified Defense All-Source Analyst (CDASA) Program along with serving as Senior Representative in numerous hearings and briefings to Congress on a variety of topics. Most recently, he was the first Director of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force (UAPTF). The UAPTF delivered an interagency "whole of government" approach to standardize collection and reporting of sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena.

"Jay's extensive experience in the Intelligence Community will be valuable in identifying and cultivating new strategic teaming opportunities within both industry and government," said Radiance President Tim Tinsley. "His wealth of knowledge will ensure Radiance's Scientific and Technical Intelligence efforts will continue to grow."

About Radiance Technologies:

Radiance Technologies is an employee-owned small business prime contractor founded in 1999. Radiance has over 950 employee-owners across the United States serving the Department of Defense, national intelligence community and other government agencies. From concepts to capabilities, Radiance leads the way in developing customer-focused solutions in the areas of cyber security, systems engineering, prototyping and integration as well as operational and strategic intelligence including scientific and technical intelligence.

Contact:

Julia Parrish

(256) 929-7969

[email protected]

SOURCE Radiance Technologies
With the inaugural cohort of fellows scheduled to graduate this July, Kabbalah Experience is opening applications for new students to apply for the ten-month intensive

DENVER, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Following the successful 2021 inauguration of the Rosenbaum Fellowship in Transformative Kabbalah, Kabbalah Experience (KE) is excited to announce that applications are now open for the second cohort of teachers in Fall 2022. Teaching fellows are mentored in the core curriculum by KE Founder and Spiritual Director, Dr. David Sanders. Tuition is significantly subsidized through a generous legacy donation by Jane E. Rosenbaum in honor of her late husband, Stanton Rosenbaum, both long term students of KE. Completed applications for the second cohort of Fellows are currently available and must be submitted by June 8, 2022.

KE's Fellowship is designed for those passionate about guiding people to live more aware lives through the study and practice of Transformative Kabbalah. The program provides participants with the tools needed to successfully launch KE classes in their respective communities. Through this model, KE is able to maximize its reach and impact the lives of individuals interested in Transformative Kabbalah internationally. The program's virtual format removes location as a barrier for applicants to participate. Dr. David Sanders facilitates the 10-month program and is available for supervision following the certification.

"The Rosenbaums' generous gift has provided us with the resources to share our unique teachings of Kabbalah with a larger audience than we previously had access to. Through the fellowship, a select group of teachers have exclusive access to learn directly from Dr. Sanders, and share these teachings with their communities across the globe," said KE's Executive Director, Melanie Gruenwald.

The international KE Rosenbaum Fellows will meet weekly as they are mentored in content and pedagogy. Following certification, each of the participants is prepared to launch Transformative Kabbalah classes in their home communities. The success of the KE Rosenbaum Fellowship provides more communities with a safe, inclusive, and welcoming space to engage in person or via ZOOM with a pragmatic, awareness enhancing spiritual curriculum.

For more information on the fellowship and to apply, please visit https://kabbalahexperience.com/teacher-training/ .

About Kabbalah Experience

Kabbalah Experience is a nonprofit center for adult spiritual education, and has served

the community of Denver, Colo., for 16 years. Kabbalah Experience provides an open,

inclusive and diverse learning community, offering independent and small group study

for students across the world. The Transformative Kabbalah curriculum encourages

participants to expand their awareness of the parallels between physical and spiritual

reality to envision new personal and communal human stories.

MEDIA CONTACT: Jasmine Martin

PHONE: 631-575-6783

EMAIL: [email protected]

SOURCE Kabbalah Experience
PASADENA, Calif., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine recently announced that David G. Nichols, MD, MBA has joined the school's Board of Directors. Dr. Nichols will work alongside fellow board members, who are leaders and innovators across medical education, technology, business, and healthcare to further the school's mission to provide a world-class medical education that ignites a passion for learning, a desire to serve, and an unwavering commitment to improve the health and well-being of diverse patients and communities.

"We are incredibly honored for Dr. Nichols to join the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine community and Board of Directors," said Mark Schuster, MD, PhD, Founding Dean and Chief Executive Officer. "Dr. Nichols has been a dedicated patient advocate and an inspiring leader in his commitment to equity, inclusion, and diversity in child and adolescent health. And his over three decades of medical education leadership experience will be a rich resource for our school."

Dr. Nichols served as the President and CEO of the American Board of Pediatrics for nearly a decade retiring in December 2021. In his role, he oversaw certification of approximately 80,000 pediatricians and pediatric subspecialists. Prior to his tenure with The American Board of Pediatrics, Dr. Nichols was a member of the faculty for more than thirty years at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where he served as the Director of the Pediatric ICU, Division Director, and Professor of Pediatric Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine, and was named the Mary Wallace Stanton Professor and Vice Dean for Education. In addition to leading student-focused programs for professional and personal development, he was responsible for establishing the design of that school's medical education building and simulation center. Dr. Nichols earned his bachelor's degree from Yale University, his MD degree from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and his MBA from The John Hopkins University Carey School of Business.

"After spending many years of my career in medical education as well as advocating for children's health and health equity, I am thrilled for the opportunity to join the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine board alongside brilliant minds who are dedicated to furthering the school's forward-thinking approach to medical education and inspiring future patient advocates," said Dr. David Nichols. " I am honored to be part of this esteemed group and look forward to sharing my expertise with an institution that prioritizes a future of better health outcomes for all."

"Dr. Nichols has made a positive difference for physicians' and patients' lives, and we are thrilled to welcome him to the board. His deep experience will help us advance our mission to develop compassionate healers, lifelong learners and courageous leaders," said Holly Humphrey, MD, MACP, Chair of the KPSOM Board of Directors.

Dr. Nichols has authored several textbooks on pediatric health and has trained nearly 60 pediatric critical care fellows. His lectures and teachings have spanned the globe. The American Pediatric Society and the National Medical Association have named annual national awards in his honor, including the new David G. Nichols Health Equity Award and the David G. Nichols Educational Symposium grant.

About the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine

The Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine is devoted first and foremost to offering an outstanding, forward-thinking medical education. Its curriculum is built on the three pillars of Biomedical Science, Clinical Science, and Health Systems Science. Students think broadly about the ways care can be more effective for everyone and learn how to advocate for better health in homes, school, workplaces, neighborhoods, and society. The school incorporates many of the most innovative and effective educational practices available today and gives students the opportunity to learn from the physicians and care teams in Kaiser Permanente's integrated healthcare system. The school's future physicians learn the knowledge and skills essential to the highest quality patient care and to the transformation of nation's healthcare so that all people thrive. Learn more at http://medschool.kp.org/.

Contact

Ashannti Hill Mims

[email protected]

(818) 724-7638

SOURCE Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine
KeyBank Beach Point Direct Lending Program will combine complimentary sourcing, underwriting and structuring capabilities for middle market borrowers

CLEVELAND and SANTA MONICA, Calif., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- KeyBank and Beach Point Capital Management ("Beach Point"), a credit focused investment manager, announced that they have established a new joint venture middle market direct lending program with $1.5 billion in lending capacity for U.S. middle market clients.

The KeyBank Beach Point Direct Lending Program offers loans with flexibility in structure to middle market borrowers. This approach expedites closing and certainty of execution, and KeyBank Beach Point Direct Lending borrowers will benefit from a single lending entity. The direct lending program will span industries where KeyBank and Beach Point have deep expertise and relationships, including the industrial, healthcare, consumer, and technology sectors.

"This product will provide a competitive financing solution with a seamless, streamlined execution for our middle market clients," said KeyBank Beach Point Direct Lending Program Fund Manager Bob Scelza. "We are excited to partner with Beach Point to add a middle market direct lending program to our platform."

"We have long respected the industry lending teams at KeyBank and are thrilled to work with them to bring a differentiated and compelling direct lending solution to the middle market," said Co-Head of Private Credit at Beach Point Capital Management Michael Haynes.

Brian Himot, Co-Head of Private Credit at Beach Point Management, added: "The joint venture compliments Beach Point's larger private credit platform and is a natural extension of our success across credit markets. We are confident this initiative will deliver attractive returns for our clients and value for middle market borrowers and other stakeholders."

By offering a competitive direct lending solution, the KeyBank Beach Point Direct Lending Program will be able to deploy capital efficiently for KeyBank's middle market clients and private equity sponsors while providing attractive potential risk adjusted returns to Beach Point's investors.

About KeyCorp (NYSE: KEY)

KeyCorp's roots trace back nearly 200 years to Albany, New York. Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, Key is one of the nation's largest bank-based financial services companies, with assets of approximately $186.3 billion at December 31, 2021. Key provides deposit, lending, cash management, and investment services to individuals and businesses in 15 states under the name KeyBank National Association through a network of approximately 1,100 branches and more than 1,400 ATMs. Key also provides a broad range of sophisticated corporate and investment banking products, such as merger and acquisition advice, public and private debt and equity, syndications, and derivatives to middle market companies in selected industries throughout the United States under the KeyBanc Capital Markets trade name. For more information, visit https://www.key.com/. KeyBank is Member FDIC.

About Beach Point Capital Management

Beach Point Capital Management is a Santa Monica, California based investment manager specializing in credit-related investments. The firm employs a flexible, value-oriented, and risk-controlled approach and focuses on complex and less followed opportunities. As of December 31, 2021, Beach Point manages $17 billion in AUM on behalf of sophisticated global institutional investors and has offices in California, New York, London, and Dublin.

Media Contacts

KeyBank

Laura Mimura

216.471.2883 / [email protected]

Beach Point Capital Management

Prosek Partners

Josh Clarkson

203.273.7935 / [email protected]

SOURCE Beach Point Capital Management
"Jerry is a leading strategist and one of the top legal minds working to develop the frameworks that are needed for bridging the gap between compliant digital asset opportunities and the current banking systems in the United States," said Gene A. Grant II. "As a former senior regulator who moved into private practice to chair best practices in banking law, nobody has a better understanding of how to develop new, compliant financial products that blend the traditional financial system with new financial products that feature digital assets. As both a board member and a consultant on these issues, Jerry will be integral to purposefully shaping LevelField into a regulation-forward financial services leader that will disrupt how we view and benefit from digital assets."

"LevelField is a game changing company in the financial services market, and being presented with an opportunity to sit on the board of directors and help provide strategic guidance on the future of banking, is an opportunity I'm thrilled to accept," said Mr. Comizio. "With over forty years of experience as a senior regulator and a law firm partner representing clients on the spectrum of financial services law regulatory and compliance issues, before major financial regulatory agencies, I have a deep appreciation for both the myriad opportunities presented by digital assets markets, as well as the necessity and challenge of ensuring a compliant approach to financial services and the need to provide consumers of new digital financial services products with an adequate level of information to make informed financial decisions. Maintaining the trust and security of banking, while balancing the need for fast paced digital asset markets to follow regulation, is an incredibly challenging task. I look forward to helping guide the company and its leadership to meet the challenge and maximize this unique opportunity."

The Associate Director of the Business Law Program at American University's Washington College of Law, Mr. Comizio currently teaches financial services law, including one of the first courses taught in the United States on virtual currency law.

For many years Mr. Comizio practiced at major law firms where he chaired their banking practices. Prior to entering private practice, he was the deputy general counsel of the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Thrift Supervision, and senior attorney at the SEC. A multi-published author, Mr. Comizio wrote International Banking Law, West Academic (2016), and Virtual Currency Law: The Emerging Legal and Regulatory Framework, Wolters Kluwer (2022).

Mr. Comizio received his master's degree in global policy from Johns Hopkins University, LLM from the Georgetown University Law Center, JD from the Pace University School of Law, and BA from Fordham University.

Comizio joins current members of LevelField's board including Clay Allen, Managing Member of The Arbroath Companies in Houston, Texas; Carmine Urciuoli, currently Head of Sales and Trading at AmeriVet Securities; and Stephen Hollingshead, founder and CEO of RegTech company ChangeInEx.

To learn more about LevelField, please visit www.LevelField.us/.

About LevelField:

LevelField is uniting digital assets and traditional banking services in one trusted platform. Founded by banking and financial services veterans, LevelField aims to be a well-regulated,  safe, simple, and secure  partner to trade, borrow and earn using digital and traditional assets. LevelField aims to acquire a U.S. chartered bank. For more information visit www.levelfield.us/ .

SOURCE LevelField Financial
Latest DDoS report reminds businesses that anyone can be target; vigilant defenses are key

DENVER, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Lumen Technologies (NYSE: LUMN) continues to track Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks around the world, and today the company released a report that details the DDoS statistics and trends for the first quarter 2022.

Key Findings:

After a relatively quiet fourth quarter, the number of DDoS attacks that Lumen scrubbed in Q1 increased by 66%. Tweet this Our first-quarter data shows just how important it is for businesses to maintain solid cyber defense strategies. Anyone can be the target of a large attack at any time." - Beth Kohler, senior director of Security Product Management for Lumen.

The number of DDoS attacks that Lumen scrubbed in Q1 2022 increased by 66% compared to Q4 2021, and by 32% compared to Q1 2021.

Of the 500 largest attacks in Q1, 97% targeted the Telecommunications, Gaming, Software and Technology, Hosting, and Government verticals.

Lumen protected one organization from more than 1,300 DDoS attacks  more than 20% of the total number of attacks scrubbed during the entire quarter.

The same organization accounted for the largest bandwidth attack that has ever passed through Lumen's scrubbing centers at 775 Gbps.

"Our first-quarter data shows just how important it is for businesses to maintain solid cyber defense strategies," said Beth Kohler, senior director of Security Product Management for Lumen. "Anyone can be the target of a large attack at any time. Even a few minutes of downtime can cause serious damage to a company's operations, revenue and reputation. Because the highly targeted customer uses Lumen's Always-On DDoS Mitigation Service with Rapid Threat Defense, many attacks are blocked before they can do any damage. We can only imagine the harm these criminals could have caused to our customer (and their customers) had these attacks succeeded."

Read the full report here: https://tinyurl.com/Q1DDoSReport

Other Findings:

The largest packet rate-based attack scrubbed in Q1 was 127 Mpps, which was more than double what Lumen mitigated in Q4.

The longest DDoS attack period Lumen mitigated for an individual customer in Q1 2022 lasted five days.

Thirty two percent of all DDoS mitigations were single-vector, TCP SYN flooding attacks. This indicates that many actors are still relying on simple, tried-and-true attack methods.

Multi-vector attacks seem to be the tactic of choice for the gaming and telecommunications sectors represented 38% of all DDoS mitigations.

Additional Resources:

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 450,000 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
Lawsuit: December blast at ExxonMobil refinery caused hearing loss, respiratory injuries

HOUSTON, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- More than 275 Baytown residents who suffered injuries during a December 23, 2021, refinery explosion near their homes have joined a lawsuit against the facility's owner, ExxonMobil Corporation.

The amended lawsuit, filed today in Harris County, alleges that residents in nearby neighborhoods suffered hearing loss, respiratory problems and related balance issues from the concussive force of the blast and fire at the gasoline-producing refinery unit. The lawsuit also raises concerns that harmful chemicals were released into the air and spread across the surrounding area.

"Safely handling volatile materials requires an extra level of responsibility and commitment, and ExxonMobil tragically failed to meet even minimal standards," says Derek Potts of the Potts Law Firm in Houston. "Our clients include children and elderly individuals who are particularly vulnerable to the health effects caused by the explosion, and who are going to require long-term care and monitoring. ExxonMobil needs to acknowledge the negligence and lack of oversight that caused these injuries and provide for the resulting medical needs of these people."

The court earlier granted a temporary restraining order to preserve all company documents, video and other materials related to the early morning blast.

The case is Credit et al v. ExxonMobil Corporation, No. 2021-83158 filed in the 125th District Court in Harris County.

Media Contact:

Barry Pound

800-559-4534

[email protected]

SOURCE Potts Law Firm
Nari Ward: Home of the Brave includes a selection of works and installations by the Jamaican-born artist. The exhibition provokes an examination of the values espoused in iconic American symbols, including the American flag and the Statue of Liberty. The individual works invite viewers to question how the concepts of democracy, liberty, and belonging are experienced by immigrants, Black people, and other underrepresented communities whose experiences put them outside the dominant white narrative.

Ward was born in Jamaica and immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of 12; the family settled in Brooklyn, New York. Ward has lived in the New York City area ever since, earning his BA at Hunter College and his MFA at Brooklyn College. He became a U.S. citizen in 2011. Ward received the Vilcek Prize in Fine Arts in 2017 for his body of found-object assemblage artwork that invites both public discourse and intimate dialogue on topics including race, poverty, and Black and Caribbean diasporic identities.

"As a curator," Kinsel says, "it is especially exciting to be able to provide a platform for Ward's work. Ward challenges viewers to consider the conflicting attitudes towards immigration in the United States. In the past several decades we have seen a rise in anti-immigration sentiment across our country. National symbols like the American flag and the Declaration of Independence hold multiple meanings for historically under-represented groups, and Ward's work conveys the dualities within. The American flag can both be seen as the triumphant banner that waves "O'er the land of the free/And the home of the brave" in our national anthem, and the banner that was carried by extremists that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021."

Symbols are powerful both as they were intended, and as they are appropriated. The power of Ward's work lies in part in his appropriation of everyday objects. Using shoelaces, discarded tires, and washing machine drums, he constructs works that are monumental for the concepts they address. Each of these works invites viewers to examine their own relationship to race, economics, power, and belonging in the United States.

Art historian and curator Erica Moiah James contributed the exhibition essay for Nari Ward: Home of the Brave. An assistant professor of African, Black, and Caribbean art at the University of Miami, James previously wrote on Ward's work for Nari Ward: Sun Splashed; in that volume, she contextualized Ward's work within the Caribbean diaspora, noting "complex relations and subject reformation at the heart of Caribbean modernities are mechanisms that are fundamental to the artist's thinking, formal vocabulary, and aesthetic production."

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Vilcek Foundation produced a video with Ward highlighting the installation of Lazarus (2019) at the foundation. In the one-and-a-half-minute video, Ward discusses the intent of the work, which uses thousands of shoelaces inserted into the gallery's walls to frame selected words from Emma Lazarus' poem, The New Colossus. In the video, Ward discusses how the process of installation is a vital part of how this meaning is conveyed and experienced: "When I was working with the laces, it was really important that they be in the wall; that it was part of the architecture. [Y]our relationship to the work within the space has something to do with how legible the work itself is."

Nari Ward: Home of the Brave is open to the public in the Vilcek Foundation's headquarters at 21 East 70th Street by appointment. Appointments may be made by emailing the Vilcek Foundation's art department at [email protected] . Learn more and plan your visit via the Vilcek Foundation website, at the following link: Nari Ward: Home of the Brave .

Following the exhibition at the Vilcek Foundation, Nari Ward: Home of the Brave will be available for loan and display at other institutions.

Says Vilcek Foundation Curator Emily Schuchardt Navratil, "With this capsule exhibition, we hope to be able to share Ward's work and the mission and vision of the Vilcek Foundation with a wider audience." She says, "The initiative to develop exhibitions available for loan has grown out of our mission to foster appreciation for the arts, and our commitment to making the works included in the Vilcek Collection accessible to the public."

Learn more and plan your visit today: Nari Ward: Home of the Brave at the Vilcek Foundation

The Vilcek Foundation

The Vilcek Foundation raises awareness of immigrant contributions in the United States and fosters appreciation for the arts and sciences. The foundation was established in 2000 by Jan and Marica Vilcek, immigrants from the former Czechoslovakia. The mission of the foundation was inspired by the couple's respective careers in biomedical science and art history. Since 2000, the foundation has awarded over $6.4 million in prizes to foreign-born individuals and has supported organizations with over $5.5 million in grants.

The Vilcek Foundation is a private operating foundation, a federally tax-exempt nonprofit organization under IRS Section 501(c)(3). To learn more, please visit vilcek.org .

Contact

Elizabeth Boylan

The Vilcek Foundation

212-472-2500

[email protected]

SOURCE The Vilcek Foundation
Congressional Medal of Honor Society award for excellence in journalism to be presented at Medal of Honor Celebration in Knoxville in September

KNOXVILLE, Tenn., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Medal of Honor Celebration Committee is pleased to announce that NBC News Correspondent Courtney Kube will accept the "Tex" McCrary Award for Excellence in Journalism in person at the upcoming Medal of Honor Celebration in Knoxville in September. Kube covers the Pentagon and the Department of Defense and regularly breaks exclusive reporting on military operations and foreign policy, appearing across all NBC News and MSNBC programs. She will join fellow Medal of Honor award recipients, Ambassador Nikki Haley, Dr. Timothy Miller and Dennis Quaid, at the Patriot Gala on Sept. 10.

I am absolutely humbled that a group as distinguished as the Congressional Medal of Honor Society is recognizing my work and coverage of the U.S. military, said Courtney Kube, NBC news correspondent. And I am thrilled to be able to accept the award later this year in the Volunteer State!

"I am absolutely humbled that a group as distinguished as the Congressional Medal of Honor Society is recognizing my work and coverage of the U.S. military," said Kube. "And I am thrilled to be able to accept the award later this year in the Volunteer State!"

The "Tex" McCrary Award is reserved for people who, through their life's work, have distinguished themselves by service to or unbiased coverage of the United States Military through journalism in peace and war. Previous recipients include Jake Tapper, Tom Brokaw, Paul Harvey and Peggy Noonan.

Kube joined NBC News in 2000, working in the Washington, D.C. bureau as a researcher, production assistant and associate producer. She holds degrees in political science and psychology from the University of Michigan.

Before becoming the Pentagon Correspondent, Kube was NBC News' Pentagon producer for more than a decade, covering wars in the Middle East, including in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, and reporting from U.S. military bases around the world. She has been embedded with troops from across all military branches and has traveled alongside secretaries of defense, secretaries of state, vice presidents and other senior U.S. military officials.

The Medal of Honor Celebration is an annual gathering for recipients of the United States' highest military award for valor. September will mark the second time the event has been held in Knoxville. Knoxville last welcomed recipients in 2014. Actor and director Gary Sinise, who played the character of "Lt. Dan" in the 1994 film "Forrest Gump," will once again serve as master of ceremonies for the Patriot Award Gala in Knoxville. For more information about the Celebration visit mohknoxville2022.org .

About The Congressional Medal of Honor Society

The Congressional Medal of Honor Society was chartered by Congress in 1958 to create a brotherhood among the living Medal of Honor recipients; to protect and uphold the dignity and honor of the Medal; to promote patriotism and love of country; and to inspire our youth to become worthy and dedicated citizens of our nation. Its membership consists exclusively of those individuals who have received the Medal of Honor. Today, there are 65 living recipients of the Medal of Honor. The Society is unique in that its membership hopes that there will be no need to welcome new inductees. For more information, visit cmhos.org .

Laura Mansfield, APR

Tombras

[email protected]

865.599.9968

SOURCE Medal of Honor Celebration Committee
OXFORD, United Kingdom, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Mirico's technology is now helping to develop an exciting new method of mapping greenhouse gas balances in the agricultural sector.

In joint research, the University of Eastern Finland and Natural Resources Institute Finland are using a multi-gas Mirico Orion as part of research to monitor the greenhouse gas exchange in fields and then visualise it in a three-dimensional model.

Professor Aku Seppanen with the Mirico Orion CH4 and CO2 dual gas instrument

The agricultural sector is a significant contributor of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. The IPCC estimates that agriculture is directly responsible for 8.5% of all greenhouse emissions, with 75% of nitrous oxide emissions coming from the sector. To help understand exactly where and how these greenhouse gases are emitted during agricultural processes, reliable measurement methods are needed.

Mirico's products will allow researchers to continuously monitor and map tens of hectares of fields over long periods of time, providing spatially varying greenhouse gas balance maps. This will help identify when a field is a source of, or sink for, greenhouse gas emissions during different phases of crop production which can then be linked back to different farming practices.

The initial stage of the project will focus on the two main greenhouse gasses, CO 2 and methane, which will be monitored using a single Orion instrument. The next stage of the project will then look at nitrous oxide emissions using a sperate Orion.

Mirico's Orion instruments provide a unique, robust and accurate solution to continuous emissions monitoring. Greenhouse gas emissions can be accurately quantified across entire sites through reliable, continuous, wide-area monitoring with data collected and analyzed in real-time. This enables operators to detect, locate, quantify, and visualize emissions swiftly and accurately through all weather conditions.

Aku Seppanen, Professor at University of Eastern Finland said "Bringing cross sectional imaging alongside the Mirico Orion's emissions monitoring data will really help us to further our understanding of how emissions change across the different phases of crop production. We're excited to be developing this technique and looking forward to the results."

Lee Billingham, Head of Business Development at Mirico said "The agricultural sector is a big source of emissions and this is being matched by real ambition to find solutions to reducing them. It is exciting for us as our technology is unique and will provide the insights the sector needs to make changes, reduce emissions and validate the results."

To find out more about how Mirico could help you monitor emissions, visit https://mirico.co.uk/ or contact Mirico at [email protected]

Website: https://www.mirico.co.uk

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mirico-ltd-

Twitter: https://twitter.com/miricompany

About Mirico: Mirico monitors greenhouse gas emissions across a range of industries and applications. By providing reliable continuous monitoring, Mirico detects, localises and quantifies emissions to support organisations achieve their net zero goals.

Contact:

Rob Gibbs, Digital Marketing Manager, Mirico, Phone: +44 (0)1235 612 404

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE MIRICO
Economic losses mounting as U.S. maintains outdated requirement

WASHINGTON, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- A new survey conducted by Morning Consult for U.S. Travel Association reveals the inbound pre-departure testing requirement imposed by the federal government is having a devastating impact on travelers' likelihood of visiting the United States this summer and remains a major barrier to economic recovery.

A survey of vaccinated international travelers in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Japan and India found that pre-departure testing requirements are a deterrent to travel and are making it significantly less likely that people will choose to visit the U.S.

Nearly half of respondents (47%) who are unlikely to travel abroad in the next 12 months cited pre-departure testing requirements as a reason.

More than half of international travelers (54%) said the added uncertainty of potentially having to cancel a trip due to U.S. pre-departure testing requirements would have a big impact on their likelihood to visit the U.S.

A large majority of adults surveyed (71%) agree they prioritize traveling to destinations without cumbersome entry requirements, including 29% who strongly agree.

An opportunity to save the summer travel season

Despite the bleak projections for inbound travel, there is still time for the Biden administration to save the summer travel season and accelerate recovery for travel businesses. Forty-six percent of international travelers would be more likely to visit the United States if pre-departure testing requirements for vaccinated adults were lifted. If the removal of the pre-departure testing requirement would bring an increase of just 20% more visitors this summer than we are otherwise expecting, it would mean an additional half a million visitors each month and $2 billion in valuable U.S. travel exports. Over the course of the summer, that spending could directly support approximately 40,000 U.S. jobs.

This is particularly urgent as international arrivals to the U.S. are still far below pre-pandemic levels and are not projected to recover to 2019 levels until 2024.

"Before the pandemic, travel was the second-largest U.S. industry export and generated a positive trade balance of $53 billion," said U.S. Travel Association President and CEO Roger Dow. "Inbound travel is critical to reducing the overall trade deficit, but the pre-departure testing requirement remains an unnecessary hurdle to regaining visitors and competing for global tourism dollars.

"While other countries with similar case, vaccination and hospital rates have removed their testing requirements and have begun rebuilding their travel economies, the U.S. is at a competitive disadvantage and risks a prolonged period of recovery."

With abundant health and safety tools in place, practically all other sectors of the U.S. economyincluding domestic air travelare operating without a federal requirement for testing; international inbound air travel remains a key exception. The Morning Consult survey follows a May 5 letter in which more than 260 travel and business organizations urgently called on White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha to repeal of the pre-departure testing requirement for vaccinated international air travelers.

U.S. Travel Association urges the Biden administration to repeal the pre-departure testing requirement for vaccinated international air travelers quickly and accelerate recovery for this critical segment of the U.S. economy.

Click here to see the full survey results from Morning Consult.

U.S. Travel Association Contact

SOURCE U.S. Travel Association
Enhanced Features Allow Organizations to Visualize Relationships and Dependencies Across ETL Tools in Legacy Data Warehouses and Data Lakes

TORONTO, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - Next Pathway Inc., the Automated Cloud Migration company, announced it has extended the capabilities of its cloud migration planning tool, Crawler360. In this latest release, Next Pathway has improved and expanded the visualization capabilities of this tool, giving clients better insights into the dependencies across data pipelines in legacy data warehouses and data lakes. The new version also enables users to dynamically create multiple cloud migration wave plans, immediately trigger code translation and automatically generate test scrips based on their wave plan.

Every customer that wants to move legacy data warehouses and data lakes to the cloud struggles with the extensive network of extract, transform and load (ETL) pipelines essential for downstream reporting applications. In many cases, these ETL pipelines are decades old and built from a multitude of tools, such as Informatica Power Center, IBM DataStage, Microsoft SSIS and Talend Data Fabric.

Crawler360 is the only tool that provides an organic and thorough understanding of the critical interdependencies within each legacy data warehouse and data lake. It automatically scans each object and depicts every ETL pipeline across the multiple data warehouses, allowing users to sort the pipelines by complexity and view control flows, data flows, steps, sources and sinks. Crawler360 gives users a deep dive into all the objects, data lineage and dependencies within the entire code base. Armed with this information, customers can efficiently select and determine the order of data warehouses to migrate and which data warehouses to decommission safely.

Understanding these interdependencies before beginning a cloud migration is essential.

"Our customers are under increasing pressure to move to the cloud to stay competitive and enable digital transformation," said Chetan Mathur, CEO of Next Pathway. "This transition takes careful planning and execution. At Next Pathway, our focus is on building the best tools to accelerate the end-to-end migration to the cloud, which begins with planning. We are so pleased with this latest version of Crawler360, as it includes substantial enhancements that give clients a holistic view of their legacy systems, making it easy to plan and de-risk a cloud migration."

The wave planner is one of Crawler360's most innovative new features, providing users with the capability to:

Build scenario-based wave plans: Create cloud migration wave plans by tables, data warehouse or jobs dependent on specific applications.

Profile each ETL by tool type. Specify each job, control flow, data flow steps, sources and sinks for each ETL tool.

Trigger SHIFT for code translation. Once satisfied with the wave plan, trigger SHIFT to automatically translate code and ETLs to the cloud target.

for code translation. Once satisfied with the wave plan, trigger to automatically translate code and ETLs to the cloud target. Trigger TESTER for test script generation. The user's customized wave plan will also automatically trigger the creation of test scripts to verify their cloud migration.

for test script generation. The user's customized wave plan will also automatically trigger the creation of test scripts to verify their cloud migration. Download for off-line use. Download the output from Crawler360 for further analysis or pull the metadata into other data tools.

Solving the challenge of cloud migration planning

Crawler360 solves many of the stubborn challenges organizations face when planning a cloud migration by allowing users to see the interdependencies between workloads and determine the best path forward. According to Next Pathway's recent survey, 44% of respondents said that workload and data migration planning was the most challenging aspect of a cloud warehouse migration.

The trepidation that an ineffective plan will hinder the migration runs deep. Top concerns cited by survey respondents included not knowing which workloads to move to the cloud and which to retire (48%) and not having the internal skill set to plan and execute the migration (43%). In addition, more than two out of five respondents (44%) wished they had spent more time planning the migration of workloads.

"Next Pathway automates the end-to-end challenges our customers face when migrating to the cloud," said Mathur. "The latest release of Crawler360 signifies our commitment to furthering the innovation behind our tools and to continuously improve and simplify the migration process and get customers to cut over to the cloud faster."

About Next Pathway

Next Pathway is the Automated Cloud Migration company. Powered by Crawler360, the Migration Planner and the SHIFT Migration Suite, Next Pathway automates the end-to-end challenges companies experience when migrating applications to the cloud. For more information, please visit nextpathway.com .

Connect with Next Pathway

Blog | LinkedIn | Twitter

SOURCE Next Pathway
Bringing more than 20 years of media industry experience, the addition of Howard will bolster OpenWeb's executive team, bringing an insider's perspective to the company's solutions for media companies, brands, and content creators on the web.

NEW YORK, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- OpenWeb, the premium audience relationship platform , today announced the appointment of Mark Howard as its Chief Business Officer. Howard brings a wealth of experience in the media business, most recently serving as Chief Advertising & Partnerships Officer at Penske Media Corporation, and previously a 17-year tenure at Forbes [Media?] where he rose to Chief Revenue Officer, a role he served in for six years.

Howard's more than two decades of experience will serve as an invaluable asset to the OpenWeb executive team as they bring to life their vision for a more sustainable, healthier internet. In this role, Howard will guide the trajectory of OpenWeb's business development and continued partnership with media companies and brands, helping them build loyal communities and leverage their zero and first party data. He will serve as a key member of the executive team, reporting to co-founder and CEO Nadav Shoval and overseeing a team across the United States, Canada, and EMEA.

"Mark is an incredible strategic leader in our industry. A highly experienced executive with deep knowledge of the media businessI couldn't be more excited to welcome Mark to the team at this crucial point in our growth," said Shoval. "Mark joining the team will accelerate OpenWeb's growth and our mission to create a healthier, more sustainable web that benefits all stakeholders."

In addition to his vast experience at media companies, Howard served on the IAB Board of Directors for eight years. In that role, he collaborated with other influential members of the media and advertising world, setting standards for best practices across the digital advertising landscape.

"Since the beginning of my career, I've been passionate about helping companies grow and thrive in the changing and increasingly competitive media landscape," said Mark Howard, Chief Business Officer at OpenWeb. "Creating models for growth and sustainability is an essential task for the survival of media and journalism, and for the future of a healthy, open internet. Applying my experience and knowledge to the incredible scale of OpenWeb's platformone with still so much room to growis a truly exciting opportunity."

In this role he will be responsible for overseeing OpenWeb's Supply and Demand sales teams, with the goal of onboarding new publisher partners and advertisers into OpenWeb's network.

In the first four months of 2022, OpenWeb made the strategic acquisition of Hive Media Group for $60M in January, followed closely by its $100M deal to acquire ADYOULIKE , announced in April.

To learn more, visit OpenWeb's blog .

About OpenWeb

OpenWeb's mission is to improve online conversation. As a product company, OpenWeb partners with publishers and brands to build strong, direct relationships with their audiences. OpenWeb's technology empowers its partners to build vibrant communities rooted in healthy conversations and robust social experiences. OpenWeb works with more than 1,000 top-tier publishers, hosting more than 100 million active users each month.

Founded in 2012, OpenWeb has over 295 employees in New York City, Tel Aviv, Kiev, San Diego, Canada, London and Paris and is backed by world-class investors including Insight Partners, Georgian, Entree Capital, The New York Times Company, Samsung Next, Dentsu, and ScaleUp. To date, the company has raised $223 million in funding and is currently valued at over $1 billion. To learn more about OpenWeb's platform visit OpenWeb.com, or follow @OpenWebHQ on LinkedIn and Twitter.

SOURCE OpenWeb
"We are honoured to be selected by the European Investment Bank as the first Israeli medtech company to be supported by the Infectious Disease Financing Facility. The investment will allow POCARED to significantly accelerate development of our diagnostic system and complete the preparations for its clinical trials. POCARED's system will provide real-time results to clinicians, enabling them to optimize treatment of infections and save unnecessary patient suffering while reducing total healthcare costs. For the first time, clinicians will have all the information required to prescribe the most effective antibiotic treatment. This will be a key cornerstone of antibiotic stewardship serving as the main tool for fighting Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR)," says Jonathan Gurfinkel, President and CEO of the company.

"The European Investment Bank is committed to accelerating development of research that strengthens the fight against infectious diseases and reducing the threat of AMR to patients with underlying medical conditions. We are pleased to provide EUR 22 million of new venture debt financing to enhance POCARED's development of rapid microbiology diagnostics solution. Israel is home to world class research and development, and we are pleased to provide the first EIB financing for an Israeli medtech company and build on our strong engagement supporting biotech investment in this country," said Gelsomina Vigliotti, Vice President of the European Investment Bank.

Rapid testing is key for improving patient treatment and fighting Antimicrobial Resistance

The new POCARED test will enable, for the first time, an optimal, evidence based, patient treatment and transform the fight against Antimicrobial Resistance.

Building on EIB track record supporting innovation

The venture debt program of the EIB was established to fill the persistent market gap and increase support for growth stage companies promoting disruptive innovation.

Since 2015, the EIB has deployed more than EUR 3.0bn in venture debt and quasi-equity operations, supporting more than 150 highly innovative companies.

Background information

The European Investment Bank (EIB) is the long-term lending institution of the European Union owned by its Member States. It makes long-term finance available for sound investment in order to contribute towards EU policy goals.

POCARED Diagnostics Ltd, is an in-vitro diagnostic and pre-analytics company utilizing cutting edge technologies to deliver next generation platforms. POCARED's CULTURE-FREE Microbiology technology is revolutionizing infectious disease diagnosis and practice with real-time automated results. This saves several critical days in reporting compared to current practices.

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1816720/POCARED_Diagnostics_Logo.jpg

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1816721/European_Investment_Bank_Logo.jpg

Press contact:

POCARED Diagnostics Ltd:

Arie Rand

[email protected]

+972 54-433-0108

https://www.pocared.com

SOURCE POCARED Diagnostics; European Investment Bank
Continual Focus on Process Expertise Strengthens Impact on Steel Industry

CONSHOHOCKEN, Pa., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- In the steel manufacturing industry, companies face complex issues ranging from technology adaptation, regulatory pressures, and cost efficiencies, to maintaining consistent quality. Quaker Houghton (NYSE: KWR), the global leader in industrial process fluids and long term partner to the steel industry, recognizes these challenges and works to develop customized solutions based on their innovative R&D approach and comprehensive range of products and services. This will be highlighted at the 2022 AISTech Conference and Exposition (https://home.quakerhoughton.com/aistech) at Booth 1007.

Quaker Houghton experts will also present technical papers during the cold rolling and lubrication and hydraulics sessions featuring:

"Aspects of Boundary Lubrication in Advanced High-Strength Steel Rolling" by Bas Smeulders , PhD, Research Scientist, on Monday, May 16 th at 4:30 pm

by , PhD, Research Scientist, on at "Improvement of Work Safety and Reduction of Environmental Issues with Fire-Resistant Lubricants in Steel Plants" by Ronald Knecht , Global Strategic Product Line Manager  Hydraulics & Lubricants, on Tuesday, May 17 th at 3:00 pm

Quaker Houghton will exhibit some of its portfolio of differentiated offerings for the steel industry including:

Long Steel Manufacturing : A selection of hydraulic fluids, lubricants, greases, gear oils, coolants, and cleaners to help run processes under demanding conditions

: A selection of hydraulic fluids, lubricants, greases, gear oils, coolants, and cleaners to help run processes under demanding conditions Industrial Greases: A wide range of lubricants for mill applications aimed to provide greater efficiency, improved working conditions, and reduced total cost of ownership

A wide range of lubricants for mill applications aimed to provide greater efficiency, improved working conditions, and reduced total cost of ownership QH FLUID INTELLIGENCE: Our ultimate, value-based engineered solution combining our comprehensive process fluid portfolio, QH Equipment and sensor technology, QH FLUIDTREND software, and expert engineering services

In addition, the company has a full line of steel fluid solutions that include cleaners, rolling oils, corrosion preventives, temper fluids, pickle oils, surface treatment, industrial lubricants, equipment, and services. These will be featured at AISTech 2022 from May 16-18 at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. will be

For Quaker Houghton's full product line, visit: https://home.quakerhoughton.com/product-lines/

For steel operations: https://home.quakerhoughton.com/steel

For fire-resistant hydraulic fluids: https://fireresistantfluids.com/

For QH FLUID INTELLIGENCE & QH FLUIDTREND: https://home.quakerhoughton.com/qhfluid-intelligence/

About Quaker Houghton:

Quaker Houghton is the global leader in industrial process fluids. With a presence around the world, including operations in over 25 countries, our customers include thousands of the world's most advanced and specialized steel, aluminum, automotive, aerospace, offshore, can, mining, and metalworking companies. Our high-performing, innovative and sustainable solutions are backed by best-in-class technology, deep process knowledge and customized services. With approximately 4,700 employees, including chemists, engineers and industry experts, we partner with our customers to improve their operations so they can run even more efficiently, even more effectively, whatever comes next. Quaker Houghton is headquartered in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, located near Philadelphia in the United States. Visit quakerhoughton.com to learn more.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/quakerhoughton

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/sifcoasc

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/EPMARCorp

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/quakerhoughton/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sifco-applied-surface-concepts/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/epmar-corporation/

SOURCE Quaker Houghton
NEW YORK, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- A survey by The Conference Board released earlier this year found that fully two-thirds of companies found the environment for corporate political activity to be challenging to extremely challenging. And nearly all (87 percent) believed 2022 would be at least as challenging. That is proving true, as the combination of the mid-term election year, contentious primaries against incumbents, redistricting, increased federal and state regulation, scrutiny by multiple stakeholders and the media, and pressure on companies to take a stand on a raft of hot-button issues at the federal and state levels are making 2022 especially difficult.

A new report by The Conference Board ESG Center provides several key recommendations to help companies navigate this environment:

Conduct a comprehensive inventory and risk assessment of the company's political activity.

Engage their boards in an annual discussion of the costs and benefits of each of these activities , with an eye toward simplifying corporate political activity and eliminating those areas that create the greatest risk.

, with an eye toward simplifying corporate political activity and eliminating those areas that create the greatest risk. Conduct a broad-based effort to educate externalnot just internalstakeholders about corporate political activity.

Make the affirmative case for how political activity advances the company's business and broader societal purpose.

Do not overpromise: steer clear of unrealistic statements that the actions of those they support will always be consistent with the company's values.

steer clear of unrealistic statements that the actions of those they support will always be consistent with the company's values. Be ready for, but do not always respond to, provocative statements by politicians and actions by legislatures.

The report's insights are based, in part, on a roundtable convened under the Chatham House Rule with corporate executives, directors, and experts. The report also includes insights fromand is a follow-up toa survey released in January, which gauged US corporations about developments in corporate political activity and their expectations and plans for 2022.

"The case that companies make for their political activity needs to go beyond the legal argument that corporate lobbying and contributions are constitutionally protected activities," said Paul Washington, co-author of the report and Executive Director of The Conference Board ESG Center. "If companies engage in political activity, they need to stop playing defense, and instead emphasize how their political actions not only advance the firm's business interests, but also serve a social and/or environmental purpose that is tied to the core business."

The Conference Board report was developed with support from Altria, Prudential Financial, Sempra, and Steptoe & Johnson. The report offers the following findings and insights:

Risk Awareness: Develop Comprehensive and Up-to-Date Assessments of Corporate Political Risks

Today's landscape for corporate political activity is fraught with risk:

A midterm election year: In this midterm election year, 87 percent of companies say the 2022 environment will be at least as challenging as 2021with 42 percent believing it will be even more so.

In this midterm election year, 87 percent of companies say the 2022 environment will be at least as challenging as 2021with 42 percent believing it will be even more so.

High-stakes regulatory activity: The Federal Elections Commission is considering multiple complaints about corporate in-kind contributions to campaigns. In addition, the US Department of Justice has stepped up enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registrations Act, and several states are restricting lobbying or political activity.

The Federal Elections Commission is considering multiple complaints about corporate in-kind contributions to campaigns. In addition, the US Department of Justice has stepped up enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registrations Act, and several states are restricting lobbying or political activity.

Growing scrutiny from multiple stakeholders, especially employees: Given the increasing pressure they are putting on companies, employees are the most-cited group that companies plan to focus on educating this year about their corporate political activity.

Given the increasing pressure they are putting on companies, employees are the most-cited group that companies plan to focus on educating this year about their corporate political activity.

Donations to third-party organizations: Donations to super-PACs and 501(c)4 organizations are particular sources of risk, given these groups may unexpectedly take controversial stands.

Donations to super-PACs and 501(c)4 organizations are particular sources of risk, given these groups may unexpectedly take controversial stands. Companies need a full picture of their political activity, including routine updates from third-party orgs:

Companies need to maintain a full inventory of their corporate political activity and up-to-date information on the risks associated with each.



Companies should not just conduct due diligence at the outset of the relationship with a third-party organization. They should request regular reports from the organization about its activities. An organization that refuses to do so is a red flag.

Strike a Balance: Regularly Evaluate the Costs and Benefits of Corporate Political Activity

Companies have significant discretion regarding the level of their political activity:

Most large companies, those in regulated industries, or whose business could be significantly affected by government action will likely want to lobby. But they have a choice as to how much advocacy they want to conduct directly versus through third parties.



Corporate PAC and direct corporate contributions come with tradeoffs: They can give the company and employees greater access to political leaders. They also, however, increase reputational risk whennot ifrecipients take positions at odds with corporate values.

Routine analyses can help companies make a more compelling case for their political activity:

Companies should conduct annual, or at least regularly scheduled, cost-benefit analyses of their corporate political activity and share them with their boards.



Doing so will better position companies to articulate to all stakeholders how their political activity serves a business and societal purpose.

Education for All: Conduct a Broad-Based Campaign to Educate Stakeholders

On the upside, most companies plan to educate internal stakeholders:

72 percent of companies entered 2022 planning to increase efforts to educate stakeholders about their corporate political activity.



Most efforts are focused on internal constituencies: employees, senior management, and the board.

But few companies plan to educate key external stakeholdersa risky omission:

Less than a third entered 2022 planning to focus on investors, policymakers, and the media.



Companies should not leave investors in the dark regarding corporate political activity. Shareholder proposals on the topic are more likely than any other broad category of environmental or social proposals to go to a vote, and receive relatively high levels of support, at annual shareholder meetings.



There's also a strong case to be made for educating policymakers, given that they have not always reacted favorably to adjustments in PAC giving, the stances that companies have taken on social and environmental issues, or corporate giving in general.



Educating the media is also a necessary endeavor, given that traditional and social media help inform the views of employees, customers, and investors.

Be Ready for Provocation, But Resist the Temptation to Always Respond

Expect continued scrutiny and surprises, during election years and in the off season:

Companies do not need to respond to every statement by a politician or action by a legislature. But they should be prepared for provocative actions by policymakers, and scrutiny by stakeholders, to continueand in some cases, intensify.

A playbook should anchor a company's strategy for responding:

Companies should ensure that their playbook includes standard procedures for deciding whether, when, and how to respond to the latest incident where stakeholders are pressuring them to take a position.

"While developments at the national level often dominate the headlines and airwaves, activity at the state level can have a profound impact on a company's political activity and reputation," said Bill Black, co-author of the report and Program Director of the Government Relations Executives Council at The Conference Board. "Significant regulatory activity is underway in many states, relating to lobbying reform, campaign finance reform, and election registration and voting rules. Moreover, it is at the state level that hot-button issues often arise. To reduce the risk of being caught off guard, companies should be sure to devote attention and resources in states where they have substantial business operations, workforces, or customers."

Manage Expectations: Don't Overpromise

Candid conversations can help set more realistic expectations:

Companies need to be candid with stakeholdersespecially PAC donors and other employeesthat the company and PAC may support candidates whose values do not comprehensively and consistently match those of the company.



It is challenging enough to ensure that a company's own actions align with its stated values. It is virtually impossible to be confident that the actions by a candidate or third-party organization will always be consistent with a company's values.

Communicate the processes in place for managing risks:

In their communications with stakeholders, PACs and companies should avoid statements that the actions of candidates, campaigns, and organizations they support will consistently reflect company values.



They should explain the role that the organization's values have in governing the firm's own actions, and the controls in place to manage risks associated with those individuals and organizations that receive their support.

Lobbying: Focus on the Long-Term

The mid-term elections, plus high-stakes redistricting, pose challenges to lobbying in the short-term:

Lobbying is traditionally difficult in a mid-term election year. The committee chair this year could be the ranking minority member next year. Additionally, incumbents are facing primary threats from challengers who often take more extreme positions.



Another hurdle is the redistricting process underway, with the stakes high both for individual members of Congress and the composition of the House of Representatives.

Focus on building bipartisan consensus, and strengthen your case with data and CEO involvement:

Despite the challenges, companies should not retreat from the legislative scene.



They should instead focus on building bipartisan consensus on issues, which can take considerable time. Getting the CEO involved and leveraging data can help strengthen companies' advocacy efforts.

Corporate PACs: Prepare for More Challenges; the Dust Has Not Settled

With most corporate PACs having already made changes, few plan to make more changes in 2022:

Most corporate PACs used the 2020-2021 period to update their policies and have now resumed contributions. While just 15 percent entered 2022 planning on making further changes, the other 85 percent should nonetheless be prepared to do so.

Corporate PACs should be prepared to adjust their donation criteria, and to expect more FEC scrutiny:

Moving forward, corporate PACs may still need to revise their criteria for donating funds in light of the company's evolving positions on social and environmental issues.



Many will also want to focus on procedures for soliciting funds and the associated programs they conduct. Ensuring those who contribute are comfortable with the PAC's approach will be critical.



They can also expect further regulatory efforts, including scrutiny from the FEC, about the process used to solicit PAC contributions.

About The Conference Board ESG Center

The Conference Board ESG Center serves as a resource, platform, and partner to help Member companies address their priorities in corporate governance, sustainability, and citizenship. www.conference-board.org/ESG

About The Conference Board

The Conference Board is the member-driven think tank that delivers trusted insights for what's ahead. Founded in 1916, we are a non-partisan, not-for-profit entity holding 501 (c) (3) tax-exempt status in the United States. www.conference-board.org

SOURCE The Conference Board
In her new role, Malone will continue to steward the $8.5 billion Bronzeville Lakefront megadevelopment, on the former Michael Reese Hospital site, while also contributing to Farpoint's social impact, strategic partnerships and operations at large.

"Morgan is an economic development maven, with a deep understanding of social impact and how to skillfully navigate complex systems and processes," said Regina Stilp, a founding principal of Farpoint Development, one of the six firms that comprise GRIT, the joint venture behind Bronzeville Lakefront. "At 100 acres and worth billions of dollars, Bronzeville Lakefront is massive, and the stakes are high. As developers, we are responsible for building a community that honors and elevates the experience of current and future residents. This project is a behemoth, and in a sense, Morgan is the glue that holds it all together."

The chance to help grow opportunities and build generational wealth in the Bronzeville neighborhood specificallyand on Chicago's South Side broadlydrives Malone's work. Bronzeville Lakefront is expected to create 75,000 jobs and $8.2 billion in direct and indirect economic impact.

"I am committed to equitable and inclusive development and holistic thinking," Malone said. "That's what drew me to Farpoint and Bronzeville Lakefrontthe opportunity to build impact ecosystems and infrastructure at scale. Some people distrust developers, but I see development as a pathway to build with purpose and create deep, transformational and generational change that positively affects those most impacted."

A Lifetime of Civic Engagement Drives Success

Civic duty and mission-driven work are a part of Malone's DNA. Her parents are both career Marines. She began working on political campaigns as early as age 12, and frequently engaged in community service. After college, Malone's journey took her from organizing work with labor unions to managing the Englewood Quality of Life Plan, which involved hundreds of residents, five task forces and intricate public-private partnerships.

Professional accolades came early and often. In 2020, Malone was named one of Crain's Chicago Business's "20 in Their 20s" for her work with the Chicago Department of Aviation, where she led administrative operations for the $8.5 billion terminal expansion at O'Hare International Airport.

Since 2015, Malone has been a member of the Cook County Commission on Social Innovation, which focuses on job creation, community revitalization and entrepreneurship, among other aims. She is also on the board of the Greater Englewood Chamber of Commerce Foundation and the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. Additionally, she serves on the advisory board for Chicago Cityscape, which makes property, neighborhood and construction development data accessible to all.

"It's never too early to make an impact. You don't have to wait your turn. You can be a doer, add value and have agency while unapologetically adhering to the principles you are passionate about," Malone said. "I have always been people-centered, service-oriented and civic-minded. For years, I worked inside the community advocating for equity and economic development. Now, I'm in private industry, but my objective is and always will be the same: positive social impact. I'm here to strengthen communities, to advocate for and voice the concerns of people who are typically underrepresented."

Building a Pipeline for Black Women

It's no secret that the commercial real estate industry has a long way to go when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion. A 2021 global real estate survey found that nearly 85 percent of senior-level real estate executives in North America are white. Malone's commitment to equity translates to a desire to open doors for more people of color.

Every quarter, Malone co-hosts a happy hour for Black women in architecture, engineering, construction, design and development. Her goal is to foster connection and promote pipeline development for marginalized people in commercial real estate and related industries. The other co-host is Michelle McClendon, a senior project executive at Gilbane Building Company, a construction firm.

"We launched these happy hours last year and they have been immensely popular," Malone said. "There aren't many Black women in the industry, which is precisely why we need spaces like thisto help establish and strengthen pipelines and accelerate diversity. I always say we're eliminating a culture of 'can't' and amplifying a culture of 'do.' If you want to change the landscape, you must take steps to spark a shift."

About GRIT

GRIT is a joint venture comprising Farpoint Development, Bronzeville Community Development Partnership, Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives, Draper & Kramer, Loop Capital and McLaurin Development to redevelop the former Michael Reese Hospital site in Chicago's Bronzeville community. The 100-acre, multibillion-dollar development is master planned as a vibrant, mixed-use, walkable, live-work-learn-play community with more than nine acres of sustainability-oriented green space. It will be anchored by the Bronzeville Innovation Center, which will encompass innovative life sciences, medical and bioscience offices, wet lab space and university partnership sites and be powered by the Chicago ARC, a life sciences accelerator developed in partnership with Israel's Sheba Medical Center and Kaleidoscope Health Ventures. Bronzeville Lakefront's offerings will include affordable, senior and workforce homes, retail options, restaurants and office space that will be home to major companies and organizations.

Media Contact:

Beshanda Owusu

[email protected]

773-398-9194

SOURCE GRIT
GENEVA, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Rivada Space Networks GmbH, a disruptive new company launching a constellation of 600 low-earth-orbit communications satellites, today announced a pledge of $112 million toward creating an Open Access Platform for the ITU Partner2Connect Digital Coalition to help bridge the digital divide.

Today, around 2.9 billion people  37 per cent of the world's population  have never used the Internet despite a global surge in connectivity in the past two years. An estimated 96 per cent of them live in developing countries.

Rivada Networks CEO Declan Ganley speaks at the ITU in Geneva, Switzerland on May 11, 2022 - Image Credit: ITU

In response to the continuing challenge of the digital divide, the ITU has launched the Partner2Connect Digital Coalition, a multi-stakeholder alliance to help mobilize resources to transform societies, promote sustainable digital technology uptake, and ensure meaningful connectivity for everyone.

Rivada Space Networks is proud to join pledges from global technology and communications firms such as Microsoft and Vodafone with its own $112 million pledge toward creating an equitable marketplace for satellite capacity through the creation of an Open Access Platform for the ITU Partner2Connect Digital Coalition.

Rivada's approach will positively affect low-income communities, as through this auction mechanism, the market-clearing price of otherwise unsold satellite data capacity will naturally adapt to the local market situation. As a result, unserved or underserved communities that could otherwise not afford a "traditional" satellite connection can be connected at an equitable price. As Rivada's business model is business-to-business wholesale, local entrepreneurs are incentivized, through the availability of equitably priced wholesale capacity, to bring connectivity to their communities.

Rivada Space Networks Founder Declan Ganley commenting on the Partner2Connect initiative, said: "We believe that creating affordable connectivity through local entrepreneurship is the key to sustainable development. With the pledge we are announcing today, we aim to leverage the unique strengths of our satellite communication system combined with our dynamic pricing and open access technology to enable efficient use of spectrum and bring meaningful connectivity to remote and underserved communities."

Doreen Bogdan-Martin, Director of the ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau, said: "I welcome this pledge by Rivada. The international community needs to find new ways to move the needle on connecting the unconnected, to overcome chronic connectivity barriers, to dramatically level-up affordable access to technology, to empower people with digital skills, and to foster thriving local digital ecosystems. The Partner2Connect Coalition will re-energize global and regional connectivity efforts through broader commitments and a holistic approach to advance universal and meaningful connectivity, so that everyone, everywhere, has access to life-changing, enabling, digital platforms and services."

Maria Francesca Spatolisano, Assistant Secretary General of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs and Acting Envoy on Technology at the Office of the UN's Secretary-General Technology Envoy, reiterated that "global connectivity is the foundation of the Secretary-General's vision of an open, free and secure digital future for all" and "that the action-oriented approach taken by Partner2Connect will be critical in pushing this forward."

"Digital inclusion is a pivotal concern as more and more aspects of life require connectivity," said Maikel Wilms, Partner & Director of BCG. The Partner2Connect Digital Coalition and its Platform provide a clear pathway for private players, civil society, and governments to come together in partnership to connect all people around the world."

About Rivada Space Networks

Rivada Space Networks GmbH is a disruptive new company set to establish and operate the first truly global low latency point-to-point connectivity network of LEO satellites. By connecting its satellites with lasers, Rivada Space Networks will provide resellers and B2B customers with the ability to securely connect any two points on the globe with low latency and high bandwidth. The constellation of 600 low-earth-orbit communications satellites will represent a fundamental change in the availability of secure, global, end-to-end enterprise-grade connectivity for Telecom, Enterprise, Maritime, Energy and Government Services markets.

About Rivada Networks, Inc.

Rivada Networks, Inc. is a U.S.-based private wireless technology company that transforms telecom networks into open access marketplaces. Founded by Declan Ganley, Rivada Networks, Inc. is active across North and South America as well as Europe. Rivada holds a multitude of patents relating to spectrum sharing, digital spectrum arbitrage, prioritized messaging, open access services and other wireless communications technologies. For more information: www.rivada.com

Follow us on:

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/rivada-networks/

Twitter: @rivadaspace

Media Contacts:

Brian Carney

Head of Corporate Communications

Rivada Networks

Tel: +1 (207) 256-0386

Email: [email protected]

Melanie Dickie

Director

MPD Communications

Tel: +31 6 14 22 97 62

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Rivada Space Networks
Combination strengthens ScionHealth's position as a leading healthcare delivery network committed to investing in community healthcare

LOUISVILLE, Ky. and DALLAS, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- ScionHealth and Cornerstone Healthcare Group ("Cornerstone") today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement for ScionHealth to acquire Cornerstone. The combination of the two patient-focused and quality-driven organizations will strengthen ScionHealth's position as a leading healthcare delivery network, expanding services, resources, and expertise to grow and invest in the health and well-being of patients and employees in communities nationwide.

The addition of Cornerstone's locations will enhance ScionHealth's ability to advance access to high-quality care and implement innovative solutions to improve the patient experience. The transaction expands ScionHealth's national network of long-term acute care hospitals, community-based hospitals and physician practices to deliver life-saving care solutions for the nation's most medically complex patients.

ScionHealth was established in late 2021 with a focus on investment in community healthcare and grounded in commitments to outstanding patient care and quality outcomes. The acquisition of Cornerstone is the first step in executing ScionHealth's strategic plan for growth and innovation.

"When we launched ScionHealth, we knew our portfolio would serve as a strong platform for growth," said Rob Jay, chief executive officer of ScionHealth. "Adding Cornerstone to ScionHealth is a significant first milestone and reflects our commitment to deliver high-quality healthcare solutions in the communities we serve. We are excited to welcome Cornerstone's talented group of employees and providers into the ScionHealth family. Cornerstone shares our values, as well as a similar focus on advancing clinical and quality excellence to benefit patients, pursue innovative solutions, and make healthcare more accessible. Additionally, today's announcement reinforces ScionHealth's commitment to being an active member of the Louisville business community, as well as a strong employer in Louisville and the other communities where our team members live and work across the U.S."

"This combination with ScionHealth confirms Cornerstone's commitment to quality care," said Steve Jakubcanin, chief executive officer and president. "We are proud to join an organization that puts people first and shares our vision to deliver best-in-class healthcare innovation and clinical expertise. We look forward to the benefits this combination will have for our team members and those we serve."

Upon the completion of regulatory approvals and satisfaction of customary closing conditions, the acquisition of Cornerstone is expected to be completed in the second half of 2022. Cornerstone Specialty Hospitals Clear Lake and Cornerstone Specialty Hospitals Houston Medical Center are excluded from the acquisition.

About ScionHealth

ScionHealth strives to provide high-quality, patient-centered acute and post-acute hospital solutions. The health system is focused on driving innovation, serving its communities, and investing in people and technology to deliver compassionate patient care and excellent health outcomes. Based in Louisville, ScionHealth operates 79 hospital campuses in 25 states  61 long-term acute care hospitals and 18 community hospital campuses and associated health systems. For more information, please visit www.scionhealth.com.

Media Contact:

Scott Shepherd

Vice President, Communications and Marketing

ScionHealth

[email protected]

About Cornerstone Healthcare Group

Cornerstone Healthcare Group Holding, Inc. is a diversified healthcare company based in Dallas, Texas. Cornerstone's mission is to make a difference by providing exceptional care and delivering the best experience to all who they serve. For more information, visit www.chghospitals.com.

Media Contact:

Nicolette Perrone

Sr. Brand and Social Media Manager

Cornerstone Healthcare Group

[email protected]

Forward-Looking Statements

This communication contains certain information, including statements as to the expected timing, completion and effects of the proposed transaction involving ScionHealth and Cornerstone Healthcare Group, which may constitute forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially. Such forward looking statements include, among others, statements about the benefits of the proposed transaction, including future financial and operating results, plans, objectives, expectations for ScionHealth and other statements that are not historical facts. Such statements are based on the current beliefs and expectations of management and are subject to significant risks and uncertainties outside of its control. These risks and uncertainties include, among others: the possibility that the anticipated benefits from the proposed transaction will not be realized, or will not be realized within the expected time periods; the occurrence of any event, change or other circumstances that could give rise to termination of the proposed transaction agreement or cause the proposed transaction not to close within the anticipated timeline or at all; risks associated with the disruption of management's attention from ongoing business operations due to the proposed transaction; risks associated with the retention of key employees; and the inability to obtain necessary regulatory approvals of the proposed transaction or the receipt of such approvals being subject to conditions that are not anticipated. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof. Except as otherwise required by law, neither ScionHealth nor Cornerstone Healthcare Group undertakes any obligation, and expressly disclaims any obligation, to update, alter or otherwise revise any forward-looking statements, whether written or oral, that may be made from time to time, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

SOURCE ScionHealth
SAN FRANCISCO, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Scleroderma Research Foundation (SRF) will host its inaugural Virtual Patient Forum, Collaborating for a Cure, on Wednesday, June 1, 2022, to kick-off Scleroderma Awareness Month. Designed for those living with scleroderma and the people who care about them, the half-day patient forum will bring together leaders from the scientific and medical community so that participants can learn more about scleroderma and the latest research efforts to address this complex disease. The forum will feature educational sessions on symptom management, new developments in research, and information about the vital role patients play in finding a cure for this rare autoimmune disease. Participants will engage in live Q&A sessions with presenters, interactive activities to win prizes, and more. Collaborating for a Cure is free to attend and registration is required at https://srfcure.org/forum.

"Since our founding in 1987, patients have been essential to supporting the Scleroderma Research Foundation and contribute to the advancement of our research programs through direct engagement as study participants, serving as advocates to raise awareness about the disease, and helping to raise funds to support research investments," says Joanne Gold, Executive Director of the Scleroderma Research Foundation. "As we head into Scleroderma Awareness Month, the virtual patient forum is a way for people living with scleroderma to learn more from leading researchers in the field, connect with a community of advocates, and further the opportunity for discovery to end this disease."

"As someone living with scleroderma, I know how challenging it can feel when searching for answers," adds Scleroderma Research Foundation Board Chairman Dr. Luke Evnin. "The SRF's commitment to our patients includes a deep commitment to providing needed information. The new patient forum represents an evolution of our efforts and will be a key component of our broader work to communicate the research and medical advancements, including those driven by the SRF's own funding."

Following the patient forum and throughout Scleroderma Awareness Month, SRF will also hold its second annual #SayScleroderma campaign, which raises awareness about the complex disease by encouraging people to speak out. Lack of awareness causes delays in treatment and diagnosis, and #SayScleroderma will help more people learn what scleroderma is and does. The SRF will feature stories from community members on social media throughout June, along with various ways those affected by scleroderma can make a difference by using their voice and influence.

About Scleroderma Research Foundation (SRF)

The Scleroderma Research Foundation is the single largest investor in scleroderma research in the U.S., focused on bringing the best minds in science together to find a cure for scleroderma. The SRF was established in 1987 by patient-turned-activist Sharon Monsky, when research on this potentially life-threatening illness was nearly nonexistent. Sharon lost her battle to the disease in 2002, but her vision lives on today, as the SRF remains committed to funding the most promising research aimed at improved therapies and finding a cure. Through the generosity of donors, the SRF has invested more than $39 million dollars to date in scleroderma research, funding and facilitating research at top universities such as Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Stanford University, and University of California, San Francisco, so thatone dayno one will suffer from scleroderma. Stay engaged with SRF at http://srfcure.org and via social media: Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Media Contact: Julie Richter | [email protected] | 480.818.8022

SOURCE Scleroderma Research Foundation
NEW YORK, May 11, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Pomerantz LLP announces that a class action lawsuit has been filed against Credit Suisse Group AG ("Credit Suisse" or the "Company") (NYSE: CS) and certain of its officers. The class action, filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, and docketed under 22-cv-02477, is on behalf of a class consisting of all persons and entities other than Defendants that purchased or otherwise acquired Credit Suisse securities between March 19, 2021 and March 25, 2022, both dates inclusive (the "Class Period"), seeking to recover damages caused by Defendants' violations of the federal securities laws and to pursue remedies under Sections 10(b) and 20(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (the "Exchange Act") and Rule 10b-5 promulgated thereunder, against the Company and certain of its top officials.

If you are a shareholder who purchased or otherwise acquired Credit Suisse securities during the Class Period, you have until June 28, 2022 to ask the Court to appoint you as Lead Plaintiff for the class. A copy of the Complaint can be obtained at www.pomerantzlaw.com. To discuss this action, contact Robert S. Willoughby at [email protected] or 888.476.6529 (or 888.4-POMLAW), toll-free, Ext. 7980. Those who inquire by e-mail are encouraged to include their mailing address, telephone number, and the number of shares purchased.

[Click here for information about joining the class action]

Credit Suisse, together with its subsidiaries, provides various financial services in Switzerland, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Americas, and Asia Pacific. The Company offers private banking and wealth management solutions, including advisory, investment, financial planning, succession planning, and trust services, and financing and lending, and multi-shore platform solutions.

Credit Suisse has a history of business dealings with Russian oligarchs, or ultra-high net worth business leaders possessing significant political influence. For example, an article published by Financial Times on February 7, 2022, entitled "Credit Suisse securitizes yacht loans to oligarchs and tycoons", cited a recent investor presentation for a synthetic securitization deal, in which Credit Suisse sold off $80 million worth of risk related to a $2 billion portfolio of loans backed by assets owned by certain of the bank's ultra-high net worth clients (the "Securitization Deal"), which disclosed that, in 2017 and 2018, Credit Suisse experienced 12 defaults on yacht and aircraft loans, a third of which were related to U.S. sanctions against Russian oligarchs. Press reports at the time indicated that Russian billionaires Oleg Deripaska, Arkady Rotenberg, and Boris Rotenberg had to terminate private jet leases with Credit Suisse in those years.

Beginning in or around October 2021, Russia commenced a major military build-up near the Russo-Ukrainian border, in apparent preparation for an invasion of Ukraine. Although the Russian government repeatedly denied it had plans to invade or attack Ukraine, the U.S. later released intelligence of Russian invasion plans, including satellite photographs showing Russian troops and equipment near the Russo-Ukrainian border.

In November 2021, as Russia's military buildup on the Russo-Ukrainian border continued, the Company entered the Securitization Deal.

Just months later, on February 24, 2022, Russian military forces invaded Ukraine. In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, Western governments including, among others, the U.S., Canada, and the European Union, imposed significant sanctions on Russia. The sanctions included, inter alia, measures targeting Russia's ultrawealthy oligarchs by denying them access to the global financial system and by, in some cases, authorizing the seizure of certain of their high-value assets located outside of Russia.

Barely a week after the commencement of the Russian invasion and the retaliatory sanctions imposed by Western nations, news outlets reported that Credit Suisse had requested non-participating investors who received information about the Company's loan portfolio to destroy and permanently erase any confidential information that Credit Suisse provided to them regarding the Securitization Deal.

The complaint alleges that, throughout the Class Period, Defendants made materially false and misleading statements regarding the Company's business, operations, and compliance policies. Specifically, Defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (i) Credit Suisse had deficient disclosure controls and procedures and internal control over financial reporting; (ii) Credit Suisse's practice of lending money to Russian oligarchs subject to U.S. and international sanctions created a significant risk of violating rules pertaining to those sanctions and future sanctions; (iii) the foregoing conduct subjected the Company to an increased risk of heightened regulatory scrutiny and/or enforcement actions; (iv) the Securitization Deal concerned loans that Credit Suisse made to Russian oligarchs previously sanctioned by the U.S.; (v) the purpose of the Securitization Deal was to offload the risks associated with these loans and mitigate the impact on Credit Suisse of sanctions likely to be implemented by Western nations in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine; (vi) Credit Suisse's request that non-participating investors destroy documents related to the Securitization Deal was intended to conceal the Company's noncompliance with U.S. and international sanctions in its lending practices; (vii) the foregoing, once revealed, was likely to subject the Company to enhanced regulatory scrutiny and significant reputational harm; and (viii) as a result, the Company's public statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times.

On March 28, 2022, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform sent Credit Suisse a letter asking the Company to turn over information and documents about a portfolio of loans backed by yachts and private jets owned by clients, potentially including sanctioned Russian individuals. In the letter, House Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney and Rep. Stephen Lynch, chair of the Subcommittee on National Security, questioned Credit Suisse's request that hedge funds and other non-participating investors "destroy documents" related to yachts and private jets owned by the bank's clients. "Given the timing of this request and its subject matter," the House Democrats wrote, "Credit Suisse's action raises significant concerns that it may be concealing information" about whether participants in the deal may be "evading sanctions" imposed by the West after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

On this news, Credit Suisse's stock price fell $0.21 per share, or 2.58%, to close at $7.94 per share on March 28, 2022.

Pomerantz LLP, with offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Paris, and Tel Aviv, is acknowledged as one of the premier firms in the areas of corporate, securities, and antitrust class litigation. Founded by the late Abraham L. Pomerantz, known as the dean of the class action bar, Pomerantz pioneered the field of securities class actions. Today, more than 85 years later, Pomerantz continues in the tradition he established, fighting for the rights of the victims of securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty, and corporate misconduct. The Firm has recovered numerous multimillion-dollar damages awards on behalf of class members. See www.pomlaw.com

CONTACT:

Robert S. Willoughby

Pomerantz LLP

[email protected]

888-476-6529 ext. 7980

SOURCE Pomerantz LLP
NEW YORK , May 11, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Pomerantz LLP is investigating claims on behalf of investors of Youdao, Inc. ("Yaoudao" or the "Company") (NYSE: DAO). Such investors are advised to contact Robert S. Willoughby at [email protected] or 888-476-6529, ext. 7980.

The investigation concerns whether Youdao and certain of its officers and/or directors have engaged in securities fraud or other unlawful business practices.

[Click here for information about joining the class action]

On May 5, 2022, Youdao issued a press release "provid[ing] an update on its status under the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act (the 'HFCAA')." The press release stated, in relevant part, that "[o]n May 4, 2022, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the 'SEC') provisionally named the Company as a Commission-Identified Issuer after the Company filed its annual report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2021 with the SEC on April 28, 2022, which included an audit report issued by a public accounting firm that the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (the 'PCAOB') has determined that it is unable to inspect or investigate completely." The press release advised investors that "[i]n accordance with the HFCAA, if the SEC determines that a company has filed audit reports issued by a registered public accounting firm that cannot be inspected or investigated completely by the PCAOB for three consecutive years beginning in 2021, the SEC shall prohibit its shares or American depositary shares (the 'ADSs') from being traded on a national securities exchange or in the over-the-counter trading market in the United States."

On this news, Youdao's ADS price fell $0.67 per share, or 9.24%, to close at $6.58 per share on May 5, 2022.

The Pomerantz Firm, with offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Paris is acknowledged as one of the premier firms in the areas of corporate, securities, and antitrust class litigation. Founded by the late Abraham L. Pomerantz, known as the dean of the class action bar, the Pomerantz Firm pioneered the field of securities class actions. Today, more than 80 years later, the Pomerantz Firm continues in the tradition he established, fighting for the rights of the victims of securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty, and corporate misconduct. The Firm has recovered numerous multimillion-dollar damages awards on behalf of class members. See www.pomerantzlaw.com

CONTACT:

Robert S. Willoughby

Pomerantz LLP

[email protected]

888-476-6529 ext. 7980

SOURCE Pomerantz LLP
Company to develop 430-unit apartment tower at 505 East Tyler Street in Downtown Tampa

NEW YORK, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Silverstein Properties, a leading global full-service real estate development, investment, and management firm announces the acquisition of a 34,000-square-foot site in Tampa, Florida. The Property was acquired by Silverstein and Cantor Fitzgerald, L.P. through their Cantor Silverstein Opportunity Zone Trust, Inc. (CSOZ Trust), a Qualified Opportunity Fund. The seller is affiliates of 1754 Properties, LLC, an institutional owner, operator and lender of hotels and other real estate based in Weston, Florida and its partner at Triangle Capital Group.

Located at 505 East Tyler Street in Downtown Tampa, the three-quarter-acre site is intended to be developed into a residential tower with approximately 770,000 square feet, including 430 residential rental apartments, approximately 15,000 square feet of retail and a 600-space parking garage. Silverstein will serve as the lead developer for the project. "With this latest acquisition and planned development, we are continuing to extend our acquisitions and development reach around the country and geographically diversify our portfolio," said Marty Burger, CEO of Silverstein Properties.

The project site is in Northern Downtown Tampa, home to over 3,700 businesses and access to nearby restaurants, area nightlife, the Riverwalk pedestrian trail, Amalie Arena, the University of Tampa, and Tampa General Hospital. This transaction reinforces the emergence of the NoDo (North Downtown) submarket as the epicenter of upscale residential living, culture and nightlife and a new walkable neighborhood in downtown Tampa.

"This project is a great addition to our portfolio of high-quality, development properties in growing markets," said Chris Milner, Head of Cantor Fitzgerald Investment Management, "We're attracted to Tampa's continued job and population growth, creating a demand for housing near the thriving central business district."

"Tampa is one of the country's fastest growing residential markets," said David Marks, Head of Acquisitions for Silverstein. "With this acquisition, we are delighted to bring our expertise into more cities across the U.S. The opportunity allows us to leverage Silverstein's national high-rise development capabilities and existing residential portfolio knowhow."

"We look forward to the accelerated development of the NoDo neighborhood and believe it will be anchored by the high-quality hotel, restaurant and bar offerings at the Floridan Palace Hotel which will be renovated at a cost of more than $20 million," said Joe Smith, CEO of 1754 Properties.

"We expect these transactions are among the first but certainly not the last in the robust and rapidly growing NoDo submarket," said Michael Dornbusch, of Triangle Capital.

CSOZ Trust has four additional development projects underway and other projects with executed non-binding term sheets together totaling approximately $1.8 billion in total estimated project cost.

Cantor Fitzgerald and Silverstein were among the first groups to launch a Qualified Opportunity Fund focused on multiple development projects in a single fund utilizing the real estate investment trust structure. CSOZ Trust closed in January of 2022 and together with its affiliated co-investment vehicles raised approximately $600 million of equity.

About Silverstein Properties

Silverstein Properties is a privately held, full-service real estate development, investment and management firm based in New York founded by Larry Silverstein. Silverstein Properties has developed, owned and managed more than 40 million square feet of commercial, residential, retail and hotel space. Recent projects include 7 World Trade Center, the first LEED-certified office tower in New York City (2006), 4 World Trade Center (2013), Four Seasons Resort Orlando (2014), Four Seasons Hotel and Private Residences, New York, Downtown (2016), One West End (2017) and 3 World Trade Center (2018). For more information on Silverstein Properties, please visit: www.silversteinproperties.com or http://www.wtc.com.

About Cantor Fitzgerald, L.P.

Cantor Fitzgerald, with over 12,000 employees, is a leading global financial services group at the forefront of financial and technological innovation and has been a proven and resilient leader for over 77 years. Cantor Fitzgerald & Co. is a preeminent investment bank serving more than 5,000 institutional clients around the world, recognized for its strengths in fixed income and equity capital markets, investment banking, SPAC underwriting and PIPE placements, prime brokerage, and commercial real estate, and for its global distribution platform. Cantor Fitzgerald & Co. is one of the 24 primary dealers authorized to transact business with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Cantor Fitzgerald is a leading SPAC sponsor, having completed multiple initial public offerings and announced multiple business combinations through its CF Acquisition platform. For more information, please visit www.cantor.com.

About 1754 Properties LLC

With offices in Mexico City and Weston, Florida, 1754 Properties LLC is an institutional owner, operator and lender of hotel and multifamily properties in Mexico and the United States. The company focuses primarily of larger full-service hotel properties where it can implement its value-add operational, branding and renovation strategies. The principals have owned hotels for more than 20 years and have had a wide range of investors, including international private equity funds, corporate pension plans of Fortune 500 companies, public pension plans, endowments, and family offices of some of the wealthiest high-net-worth investors in the world. 1754Properties.com

About Triangle Capital Group

Founded in 2009, New York-based Triangle Capital Group is a private real estate investment firm that focuses on special situations in both equity and debt. Since inception, Triangle has completed more than $2 billion of acquisitions and actively manages over 3.8 million square feet in multiple asset classes and over 5,000 multifamily and hotel units across 17 states. Trianglecap.com.

Media Contacts:

Silverstein Properties

Dara McQuilan

212.551.7352

[email protected]

Cantor Fitzgerald

Karen Laureano-Rikardsen

212-829-4975

[email protected]

Hayworth Public Relations

Kelly Grass Prieto, APR

386-677-7000 x2

[email protected]

SOURCE Silverstein Properties
DALLAS and CALDWELL, Texas, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Skylark Private Equity Partners, an entrepreneur-centric lower middle market private equity firm, announced today, in partnership with management, the formation of USA Automotive Partners, LLC ("USAAP") and its acquisition Caldwell Automotive Partners ("CAP" or the "Company"), a leading upfitter and dealer of law enforcement and other vehicles for local, state, and federal government entities. Skylark's investment will accelerate CAP's growth through investments in facilities, talent, and product extensions.

CAP Fleet Upfitters

Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Caldwell, TX, CAP is a leading vehicle upfitter and the number one dealer in the United States for government vehicles. Led by its CEO, Zach Hester, and CFO Craig Oliver, CAP is one of the only law enforcement upfitters in the country that has the ability to complete 2,000+ upfits per year. CAP is poised to continue record growth with a new 128,000 square foot production facility opening in Caldwell, TX later this year, which will more than double its current upfit footprint. In conjunction with the transaction, USAAP acquired Cameron Country. This acquisition expanded the company's product line to include Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram products, including the Dodge Charger Pursuit, the market leading sedan for law enforcement agencies across the country.

"CAP has consistently delivered high quality service to the specific and customized needs of our law enforcement customers. We have already begun to execute our plans to scale our capabilities and operations so that we can continue to meet the needs of the law enforcement agencies and government customers that serve all of us every day," stated Mr. Hester. "Skylark brings significant operational resources and knowledge of how to dramatically scale companies like CAP which will allow us to continue to grow and provide the highest quality vehicle upfitting to our federal, state, and local customers."

"CAP has proven itself to be an industry leader and we are excited about the growth opportunities as CAP expands its production capacity and customer base both in and outside of Texas" said Skylark Partner Marshall Viney. "Zach, Craig, and the entire CAP team have built tremendous relationships with law enforcement agencies and other government entities by providing exceptional customer service and leading upfit capabilities for their customers. We look forward to working alongside the CAP team to build upon this firm foundation."

Skylark's Managing Partner Hunter Peterson, Principal Chase Eckert, and Associate Danny McNamara worked alongside Mr. Viney on the transaction. Foley & Lardner, LLP and Mayer Brown LLP advised Skylark on the transaction and BMO Harris provided debt financing.

About USA Automotive Partners

USA Automotive Partners is a leading vehicle upfitter and dealer servicing government-related entities at the federal, state, and local level. USAAP conducts business under its brands CAP Fleet Upfitters, Caldwell Chevrolet, Rockdale Ford, and Cameron Dodge. For more information, please visit www.capfleet.com.

About Skylark Private Equity Partners

Skylark Private Equity Partners is an entrepreneur-centric private equity firm that partners with founders and management teams of lower middle market companies to scale their business into market leading companies that can address the growing demand for their products and services. Skylark seeks to learn from our partner companies and then in partnership draw upon the operational and investment experience of our professionals to help drive long-term transformative change. Skylark makes control and minority investments in growth-oriented lower middle market manufacturing and business, healthcare, industrial, and consumer service companies. For more information, please visit www.skylarkpe.com .

Media Contact

Marshall Viney

Skylark Private Equity Partners, LP

[email protected]

214-817-4282

Logan Melton

Caldwell Automotive Partners

[email protected]

979-567-1500

SOURCE Skylark Private Equity Partners
"We're thrilled to name these two exceptional individuals to positions of greater responsibility as Specialdocs continues to grow," says CEO Terry Bauer. "Our policy of promoting from within whenever possible allows us to recognize the benefits of their experience and ensure continuity while providing a fresh perspective in these pivotal roles. Andrew and Matt have both demonstrated a powerful commitment to serving our network of remarkable physicians and thoughtfully expanding Specialdocs' capabilities."

"We're thrilled to name these exceptional individuals to positions of greater responsibility at Specialdocs."

As Specialdocs' Vice President of Business Development, Andrew Bonner is committed to building partnerships with physicians interested in transitioning to the Specialdocs concierge practice model. "I'm excited to play a larger role in providing a path for physicians to deliver patient care in a much simpler and extremely meaningful way," he says. "In my years with the company, I've seen firsthand how physicians who make the change are able to fully realize their professional potential and enjoy a happier, healthier and more rewarding career."

Bonner joined Specialdocs in 2018 as Director of Marketing, bringing 15 years of experience in business development and marketing for two mid-sized physician groups. At Specialdocs, he focused on attracting prospective new clients and supporting continued growth for the company's national network of independent concierge physicians. His highly successful lead generation initiatives, including email marketing, digital advertising and client referral programs, significantly enhanced Specialdocs' leadership profile in the industry.

Bonner earned a bachelor's degree from Ball State University's College of Communication, Information and Media, and subsequently worked as a content producer/editor for an award-winning broadcast news website.

As Specialdocs marketing manager since 2020, Matt Minton specialized in driving growth for individual client practices with a strategic mix of traditional and digital communications. He will take on Bonner's former role as Director of Marketing.

"I look forward to taking this next step at Specialdocs," says Minton, "with the opportunity to build on the achievements of our current best marketing practices and continually innovate to fuel the future of our business."

At Specialdocs, Minton focused on data and insight-driven digital communications marketing, drawing on previous experience as a senior level freelance consultant to a wide range of national healthcare and consumer brand leaders. He also served as Director of Global Public Affairs at Abbott Nutrition, and worked for almost a decade as a producer on CNN's primetime news show, Anderson Cooper 360. Minton earned a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism degree from the University of Arizona.

In 2022, Specialdocs celebrates its 20th anniversary of transforming physicians' professional and personal lives with the industry's most customized and viable concierge medicine model based on: autonomy and professional satisfaction for physicians; personalized and preventive care for patients; and the healing power of the physician-patient relationship.

For more information, contact: Mindy Kolof  [email protected], 847-432-4502; visit the company website www.specialdocs.com

SOURCE Specialdocs Consultants
The campaign's goal is to prove that Big Sugar money is a liability, not an asset  members of Congress and candidates are better positioned to win elections without being on the take. The vehicle for advancing this goal is an open letter and pledge to reject political contributions, direct and indirect, from Big Sugar. Candidates and public officials can take the pledge; meanwhile, advocacy groups, businesses, and the general public can sign the open letter to show support for the effort.

"The energy behind this campaign is unlike anything we've seen," said Gil Smart, VoteWater's executive director. "Change is in the air. Floridians across the political spectrum have had enough of this industry's toxic impact. So we charge ahead, knowing the industry will fight to keep the system rigged, but also knowing real reform is possible."

Social and Political Changes Set the Table for Bipartisan Reform

In the past, free-market advocates, opposed to the industry's federal handout, led the reform fight with support from sugar-using American companies. (Current federal policy requires American companies to pay far more sugar than their international counterparts.)

But American politics has changed in ways that open new paths to sugar policy reform. With the emergence of movements for social justice (Black Lives Matter), national concern about damage to our natural resources (Florida's toxic algae blooms), and bipartisan anger over political corruption, there is an opportunity to build a diverse, bipartisan reform coalition unlike any we've seen before.

Tectonic Political Shift in Florida

Florida lawmakers have long served as Big Sugar's most useful line of defense. But times are changing, including in Florida's 20th Congressional District. For the first time in decades, the home district of US Sugar elected a member of Congress  Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick  who did not take money from Big Sugar during the campaign and called the industry out for its political corruption and environmental abuse. In 2020, she said "all industries that take part in practices that jeopardize human health through pollution must be regulated and fined. This includes Big Sugar, who has silenced legislators by donating large amounts to their campaigns." Just as important, seven other candidates on both sides of the aisle took a VoteWater "no Big Sugar money" pledge.

The district has gone from the industry's greatest booster to someone concerned about the industry's impact on the district's people. That's a tectonic shift.

Building a Strange Bedfellows Coalition

Piggybacking on the FL-20 special election, this campaign launches with support from a diverse set of Florida groups, including Muck City Black Lives Matter, Florida Clinicians for Climate Action, Florida Council of Churches, Florida Keys Outfitters and the Florida Chapter of the Sierra Club. At a national level, Patagonia is supporting the cause. A full list of supporters is at https://nobigsugar.com/current-signers .

The campaign's roots in Florida are a critical difference from previous sugar reform efforts. In the past, government efforts to hold big sugar accountable failed in part because pro-reform politicians outside Florida never had support within Florida. This time, a bipartisan groundswell in Florida is calling for change.

"The sugar industry does not have the right to demand Florida's environment kneel to their wishes," said Republican US Representative Brian Mast. "As representative of the Treasure Coast and the Palm Beaches, I will not let them make backroom deals that poison our waterways or starve Florida's Everglades."

"I've dedicated my career in public service to fighting polluters who hurt Floridians and our environment," said Democratic Florida Representative Anna V. Eskamani. "Change is possible when more elected officials stand up to one the most powerful industries in the state and say no to their practices of polluting our air and water. This campaign is fighting to protect our environment and our people, and I'm proud to be a part of it."

"In my community, toxic chemical ash from burning cane falls on baby showers, on weddings, on funerals - and on our children's faces every day. That's our tragic reality in 2022, and it's been that way for generations," said Robert Mitchell, a founder of Black Lives Matter Muck City. "'Her soil is her fortune' is our city's tagline. The truth is her soil and her people are her fortune. This campaign is the best shot we have at proving that point."

"This campaign will limit big sugar's money and influence in politics, protect the planet, and make lives better for people," said J.J. Huggins, spokesman for Patagonia.

Contact: Gil Smart, [email protected], 772-212-2939

SOURCE VoteWater
UK's leading jewellery broker will benefit from Novidea's 'one platform' solution for both retail and wholesale customers, including a new, cutting-edge online portal

LONDON and BOSTON, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Novidea today announces that it has partnered with the UK's leading jewellery insurance broker, TH March, to implement its born-in-the-cloud, data-driven insurance platform. The platform will manage their complete end-to-end customer journeys for both high volume personal lines and large complex commercial risks placed into the London Market, all on one platform, with an integrated customer self-service portal.

Further, around two thirds of TH March's growing personal jewellery insurance products are currently arranged by its call centre and a third via online enquiries. The new Novidea online portal will invert this to two thirds portal and one third call centre, so that TH March's professional team can focus their efforts on High Net Worth and more complex accounts, with enhanced customer experience and operational efficiencies for both existing personal and business customers.

Andrew Alcock, Chief Operating Officer, TH March said: "We selected Novidea as we were keen to work with tomorrow's technology. Looking ahead, Novidea's cloud-based customer service portal will give us the edge to ensure we retain our market-leading position, by giving both our personal lines and business customers a much-enhanced customer experience and more efficient service, which is so important in today's on-demand world.

"Although we were established in 1887, we have always been an innovative business. Novidea's platform will be transformational, with all our six UK offices moving away from siloed legacy systems to one shared, data- driven platform, with integrated customer and business data and Management Information."

Ben Potts, MD, UK, Novidea said: "Historically, the insurance market has been encumbered by legacy systems that are difficult and expensive to update, with limited access to real-time Management Information. Today, forward- looking businesses, like TH March, are increasingly moving to cloud-based platforms that enable them to automate processes, reduce costs, add agility, and boost customer service standards."

The portal will ultimately enable TH March customers buying their March Plus product to manage all aspects of their insurances securely online, including policy information, mid-term adjustments, claims, renewals, contact details, and more. The portal will seamlessly integrate with Novidea's end-to-end insurance platform, so that TH March's team has access to live customer data from first enquiry to quote and bind, and claims.

Further, Novidea has partnered with Polaris, whose imarket product and digital trading standards are used market-wide by insurers, brokers, and software houses. This will enable TH March to offer major customers a one-stop shop for all their insurance needs, complimenting complex jewellers block risks placed via Lloyd's and the London Market with e-traded cyber business insurance products.

About Novidea

Novidea is a leading provider of the only born-on-the-cloud, data-driven insurance platform that enables brokers, agents, and MGAs to manage the customer insurance journey, end-to-end, and drive growth across the entire insurance distribution lifecycle.

The Novidea platform, built to leverage the power of Salesforce's Big Technology, provides a complete ecosystem spanning every aspect of an insurance business, including a 360-degree view of the customer and all stakeholders, an integrated front-, middle-, and back-office, as well as seamless automated workflows that streamline every phase of the insurance journey.

Brokers, agencies, and MGAs have instant access to all customer and policy data, with actionable intelligence, from any device, anywhere. Novidea turns data into insight at the point of need, enabling better-informed decisions and delivering greater customer value through products and services tailored to individual needs.

Novidea supports more than 100 customers, including agents, brokers, MGAs, and the London Market, managing more than 22 million policies across 20 countries, worldwide.

For more information, please go to: www.novideasoft.com

About TH March

TH March is the largest firm of specialist jewellery insurance brokers in the UK and they have been looking after jewellers and their customers since 1887. They are experts in insuring jewellery and valuables for both HNW individuals and jewellers. As the jewellery insurance experts, they understand the trade and have the know how regarding claims. TH March is an Insurance Age "UK Top 100 Independent Insurance Broker."

The company has satisfied rigorous criteria relating to professionalism, capability, and ethics and as such have been awarded the prestigious status of Chartered Insurance Broker, the industry's gold standard award.

While TH March is the jewellery industry's leading insurance broker, the firm also arranges a range of bespoke insurance products for businesses and individuals. These range from specialist commercial insurance to cover for high value items and home and life insurance.

With a head office in London, TH March also has offices in Plymouth, Birmingham, Manchester, Sevenoaks, and Glasgow, and employs more than 120 staff.

www.thmarch.co.uk

For further information contact

Simon Hayes, M.D.

NextGen Communications

[email protected]

M: +44 (0)7771 516544

Michelle Barry

Chameleon Collective

[email protected]

T: +1 (603) 809-2748

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1723159/Novidea_Logo.jpg

SOURCE Novidea
ASHLAND, Va., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- An insanely comfortable and incredibly adorable summer sandal is finally a reality. The Emma Slide by Stegmann launched on May 12, 2022, making it the second sandal design released by the 130-year-old footwear brand known for its comfortable clogs.

With padded arch support, a cushioned soft suede footbed and hidden elastic goring in the strap, Emma gives women the comfort they've always longed for in a sandal. The sleek and feminine design avoids the bulk of a Birkenstock, but has the same high quality comfort features.

Stegmann's new Emma Slide Sandal comes in four colors: Poppy Rose, Black, Tan, and Violet. The elegant Emma Slide from Stegmann packs orthopedic-inspired support in a graceful, feminine silhouette. With an understated leather and nubuck cross-over strap, Emma pairs effortlessly with dresses, skirts, jeans, slacks or beachwear.

"When we launched our first sandal in 2021, we rapidly sold out," says Stegmann USA President Andy Jacob about the Louisa Slingback . "We knew right away that our customers would want another sandal from us."

One customer wrote: "As someone with heel spurs and plantar fasciitis, finding comfortable footwear that does not scream 'orthotic shoes' can be difficult, but the Louisa sandal hit a home run for me."

Jacobs and his team got to work right away using the feedback and reviews from excited Louisa Slingback customers to design another sandal. This time, they wanted to create an option that slipped on and off as easily as a pair of Stegmann's signature wool clogs .

Stegmann's new Emma Slide ($115) is officially available for sale May 12, 2022. The slide comes in four colors: Poppy Rose, Black, Tan, and Violet. The Emma is available in US full sizes and is a medium width sandal. A few features of the new slide:

Cushioned soft suede footbed with arch support and anatomical contouring

Vegetable tanned leather & nubuck cross-over style strap

Smooth leather lined interior

Elastic goring on strap for flexible, no-pinch comfort and freedom of movement

Sustainable cork & latex midsole

The elegant slide packs orthopedic-inspired support in a graceful, feminine silhouette. With an understated leather and nubuck cross-over strap, Emma pairs effortlessly with dresses, skirts, jeans, slacks or beachwear. With sustainability as a major focus of the brand's sourcing and production, customers will note the cork footbed is a sustainable material.

About Stegmann

Born and based in Austria, the Stegmann brand has been handcrafting wool felt and leather footwear since 1888. Famous for their iconic styling, seamless wool uppers, and contoured comfort soles, the brand also emphasizes sustainability and quality throughout its production. Stegmann continues to reimagine the everyday shoe by releasing fresh shapes and sophisticated styles for new admirers and loyal fans alike. For more information about Stegmann, visit stegmannusa.com .

Preferred Photos:

Design breakdown:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6b6lpcolq3jc6vt/Photo%2004-05-22%2C%202%2017%2027%20PM.webp?dl=0

All Four Colors:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/hy9drqruhit7mym/Poppy%20Circle_full.jpg?dl=0

Poppy Close Up:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nwfekfqvnlbd1tm/Poppy%20close%20up%20small%202.jpg?dl=0

Violet Close Up:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/pyehhink2u94iq9/Violet.jpg?dl=0

Media Contact:

Megan Wilson

540-894-6245

[email protected]

SOURCE Stegmann Clogs
In the U.S., an unprecedented mental health crisis is affecting people of all ages, according to a statement on the "national mental health crisis," issued by The White House on the occasion of President Biden's first inaugural address. Two out of five adults report symptoms of anxiety or depression. And, Black and Brown communities are disproportionately undertreated  even as their burden of mental illness has continued to rise. Even before the pandemic, rates of depression and anxiety were inching higher . But to the grief, trauma, and physical isolation of the last two years have driven Americans to a breaking point .

"While many people associate trauma with PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] and veterans returning from active combat, it exists in many forms and can be the result of natural disasters, health crises, bullying, abuse, cumulative micro-aggressions and even grief," says George Livengood, LMFT, Vice President, Discovery Mood & Anxiety Program, and the panel's moderator. "Reactions can include exhaustion, confusion, dissociation, anxiety, flashbacks, depression, risky behavior, alcohol and drug use, eating disorders and an overwhelming loss of hope."

The webinar will explore the most common types of trauma, how trauma can be "invisible" with many people experiencing it without realizing it, and coping strategies for people of all ages.

Joining Livengood on the panel will be Maia Evrigenis, author of "Neon Jane," her autobiographical account of surviving a cancer diagnosis in childhood and the impact it had on her and her family, and Elizabeth Ayiku, Director of the feature film "Me Little Me," which made its world premiere earlier this year at SXSW Film Festival, about a young Black woman who is fiercely pursuing a promotion at work while attending an intensive out-patient treatment program for eating disorder recovery.

Evrigenis says that while being treated for cancer as teenager about to begin high school, she resisted the idea that she was experiencing trauma. Later, she learned to appreciate the complexity of the condition. "It wasn't until college that I was able to unpack all these feelings and realize that I was experiencing the aftermath of childhood trauma. So much about my cancer experience felt very beautiful to me and inspiring, due to the way my family and community supported me. I think that's why it was so difficult for me to finally label my cancer experience as trauma." she says.

Filmmaker Ayiku explains how trauma in minority communities inspired and informed her making of "Me Little Me." "In a lot of Black communities disordered eating and eating disorder behaviors are used to manage generational and daily traumas. That's why I wanted to make the most authentic film I could about a Black woman in recovery from an eating disorder while showing the role that trauma plays," she says.

Also joining the panel are Jan Wagman, PhD., a mental health professional with 23 years of experience as a licensed marriage and family therapist and with additional experience in working with victims of natural disasters, and Alex Santana, ACSW, a clinical social worker for Casa Palmera treatment center in Southern California with extensive experience working with PTSD, TBI (traumatic brain injury) and Substance Use Disorders. (As a United States Marine Corps veteran with combat exposure, Santana uses personal experience to form bonds used for healing the wounds of trauma.)

Following the initial discussion, the attending public will be allowed to submit questions to the panel. For more information about the webinar, the panelists and Discovery Behavioral Health, visit: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/trauma-the-invisible-epidemic-tickets-333858518817 ].

About Discovery Behavioral Health

Everyone deserves a happy, rewarding life. That's why Discovery Behavioral Health has strived to make evidence-based, outcome driven healthcare accessible and affordable since inception. With a full continuum of care  detoxification, medical residences, residential treatment centers, partial hospitalization, intensive outpatient, outpatient, psychiatric and addiction medicine, TMS, virtual and telehealth services, we work to offer the right care at the right time for adults or teens struggling with mental health, substance use or eating disorders. We are a contracted provider with 100 payers and other managed care organizations. Our portfolio of more than 130 treatment centers includes service lines in successful operation since 1985. When treatment is complete, our patients become part of Discovery's growing family of Alumni, connected through free aftercare programs, support groups, activities, and a caring community. Because when quality behavioral healthcare is within reach, so is happiness.

Press Contact:

Greg Ptacek

Communications

Discovery Behavioral Health, Inc.

323-841-8002 mobile

[email protected]

SOURCE Discovery Behavioral Health


Participants carry out a search and rescue exercise in the ruins at the site in Ganzhou District, Zhangye City of Gansu Province. (Photo by Chen Bin)

ZHANGYE, May 12  Chinas State Councils Earthquake Relief Headquarters Office, the Ministry of Emergency Management (MEM), and the Gansu Provincial Government held the "Emergency Mission-2022" earthquake relief exercise targeting plateau and alpine regions on the morning of May 11, 2022. The main site for the exercise was set in Zhangye City, southwest Chinas Gansu Province, with four sub-sites in Jiayuguan, Jinchang, Jiuquan, and Wuwei. A total of more than 5,000 military and civilian personnel participated in the exercise.

The exercise scenario included the collapse of houses and casualties caused by the earthquake, the interruption of roads, electricity, water supply, gas, and communications in the disaster area, and the occurrence of landslides and collapses in mountainous areas. It aimed to comprehensively test the rapid response and earthquake relief capabilities of the emergency rescue system.

After the exercise began, the Earthquake Relief Headquarters Office launched the Level I emergency response, while the Joint Command Center of Chinas Central Military Commission (CMC) and the Joint Command Center of the PLA Western Theater Command launched emergency response according to the plan. The PLA Western Theater Command established the Earthquake Relief Headquarters, and the Gansu Provincial Military Command worked with local civilian departments to ensure that the rescue forces assigned to the army and air force of the Western Theater Command, the Xining Joint Logistic Support Center (JLSF), and the First Mobile Corps of the People's Armed Police Force (PAP) arrive at the disaster area timely. The National Earthquake Disaster Emergency Rescue Team and the China International Search and Rescue Team also provided cross-regional support to the disaster area.

The exercise made extensive use of new rescue and disaster relief equipment such as dangerous goods disposal robots, human exoskeletons, map modeling drones, and 5G remote diagnosis and treatment equipment, which has reduced the damage to rescuers from secondary disasters and made the rescue more efficient.

It is reported that 17 emergency professional teams of eight categories from the PLA and the PAP participated in the operation under the command of the PLA Western Theater Command. More than 800 people and 200 sets of various types of equipment and local rescue forces carried out drills on over 10 subjects including personnel evacuation and transfer, highway and bridge repair. Through the exercise, they comprehensively improved the efficient rescue capability in major disasters.



Participants carry out a drone fire exercise at the training site in Zhangye City, Gansu Province. (Photo by Chen Bin)
The Leading Retirement Planning Firm, with Offices in Ridgewood and Nutley, New Jersey, will Offer Members Affordable Access to a Certified Financial Planner Professional

RIDGEWOOD, N.J. , May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The independent advisory firm Vision Retirement, headquartered in Ridgewood, New Jersey, announces a partnership with TEG Federal Credit Union, with eight locations spread throughout New York's Hudson Valley. The new partnership will provide the credit union's 40,000-plus members with ease of access to financial advice, investment, and retirement planning needs.

TEG Federal Credit Union

Regardless of whether they're just starting out or have significant assets saved, TEG's members can take advantage of a variety of engagement options offered by Vision Retirement. For example, a monthly subscription plan is available that provides them with ongoing advice from a CFP professional to help ensure they are consistently making the right financial and investment decisions. Tax preparation and hourly consulting services are also available.

"Partnering with such a well-respected institution as TEG Federal Credit Union allows us to expand and help so many more individuals simplify their journey to retirement, which can often seem complicated and overwhelming at first," said Paul Muller, AEP, CFP, Founder and CCO of Vision Retirement. "We want to take the guesswork out and be that trusted source for them whether they need us for the long-term or on an as-needed basis."

"We believe this alliance with Vision Retirement will only further enhance our members' experience with a multitude of added resources now right at their fingertips," said Ronald Flaherty, President and CEO of TEG Federal Credit Union. "Planning for the future is critical to financial health and the team at Vision Retirement are the experts in this field and can offer the advice and tools members need to feel secure in their decision-making."

TEG Federal Credit Union members will not be required to meet a certain net worth or minimum investment to meet with a Vision Retirement CFP professional. Plans are in the works to offer complimentary educational content, including webinars and digital content, on various retirement-related topics.

About Vision Retirement

Vision Retirement is an independent registered investment advisor (RIA) headquartered in Ridgewood, NJ. Launched in 2006 to better help people simplify their retirement journey, Vision Retirement's mission is to provide clients with clarity and guidance so they can enjoy a comfortable and stress-free retirement. For more information, call 201.447.2212 or visit www.visionretirement.com.

About TEG Federal Credit Union

Founded in 1969, TEG FCU is a full-service financial cooperative for individuals and businesses who live, work, worship, or attend school in the New York counties of Dutchess, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, Sullivan, Ulster, and Westchester. As a member-owned and not-for-profit organization, TEG always puts the financial needs of its members first. TEG offers a wide range of financial services, including deposit accounts, loans, mortgages, and investment/retirement planning. Insured by the NCUA. Equal Housing Lender. For more information, visit tegfcu.com.

Media Contact

Paul Muller, Founder & CCO

201-447-2212

[email protected]

SOURCE Vision Retirement
Retail industry's premier FitTech solution appoints Patrik Brakenhielm as CFO, leveraging Series A fundraise to grow commercial team and expand presence in China

STOCKHOLM, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Volumental, a computer vision company that helps the world's top retailers and brands solve fit, improve customer experiences, and transform data into fuel for profitable growth, today announced a number of growth initiatives to support the company's global expansion. Following its Series A fundraise in December, Volumental has bolstered its C-suite with a Chief Financial Officer and established a new commercial team focused on growth efforts in China.

Partnerships with leading brands who already have a presence in China - including Under Armour, Canada Goose, Yonex and New Balance, as well as domestic retailers and brands - will all play a part in paving the way for Volumental's expansion. Volumental has tried and tested its FitTech solutions globally since 2016, providing immense value in shop floor sales, e-commerce sales and sales data to leverage in product design, digital marketing and inventory management and with this experience Volumental is confident it will be able to re-create this same success in China.

Playing a key role in the company's growth initiatives is newly appointed Chief Financial Officer, Patrik Brakenhielm. He joins Volumental from SkinCity, where as CFO and interim CEO he was part of transforming a Swedish-based small skincare business into a highly successful international e-commerce organization. "We're really excited to invest in our team and deploy our strategic growth plan following our fundraise," said Alper Aydemir, co-founder and CEO at Volumental. "We're thrilled to have Patrik and his global retail and e-commerce expertise join our team at this pivotal phase in our growth plan."

Adoption of Volumental's FitTech solutions continues to be unrivaled, with over 100 global brands and retailers leveraging its 3D scanning technology and data tools in 3,000+ stores across 46 countries. "In addition to helping us build out a strong finance team to help us scale across multiple initiatives, Patrik will help us with the financial engineering to fuel growth in new markets like China, the world's largest producer and consumer of footwear," said Aydemir.

"Coming from an investment company with a focus on next generation retail, and most recently from an innovation-driven e-commerce business, I've followed Volumental from the sidelines for a number of years as I watched this company solve the biggest challenge in retail for the world's largest brands," added Brakenhielm. "I'm honored to join the brilliant minds on the leadership team to execute the strategic growth plan in place, ensuring Volumental's technology and team are second to none to build the perfect fit."

In addition to the 28 million and counting 3D foot scans Volumental's collected with its partners, the largest names in retail continue to partner with Volumental to leverage its FitTech solutions, including recent initiatives with Lululemon - who analyzed aggregated data from millions of Volumental's 3D foot scans to design shoes specifically for the shape of a woman's foot, and Red Wing Shoes - where Volumental's 3D foot scanner serves as the key piece in Red Wing's AI-driven Ultimate Fit Experience, featured in their fleet of more than 500 retail stores.

Contact

Rebecca Nelson

Phone: +46733309069

Email: [email protected]

About Volumental

Volumental helps brands and retailers leverage data to create better in-store and online shopping experiences. Through its integrated FitTech platform, Volumental matches 3D foot scans to retail purchase data and uses its AI-powered Fit Engine to deliver perfect size and style recommendations. Volumental also utilizes its massive database and digital marketing capabilities to turn a shopper's unique foot data into targeted campaigns with hyper-personalized product recommendations. Volumental is the only recommendation engine that truly empowers retailers and brands to build a holistic omnichannel footwear shopping journey based on fit.

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

https://news.cision.com/volumental-ab/r/volumental-makes-key-c-suite-hire-and-forms-new-team-to-fuel-global-expansion,c3565380

The following files are available for download:

https://mb.cision.com/Main/21600/3565380/1578390.pdf Press release (PDF)

SOURCE Volumental AB
SHIJIAZHUANG, China, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Yiling Pharmaceutical disclosed Wednesday that it had received the medicine approval document for Lianhua Qingwen Capsules from the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), Nigeria. The Product Category is Herbal and Nutraceuticals.

Lianhua Qingwen is one of Yiling's leading products. As a drug included in China's national essential medicines list and the catalog of medicines covered by China's national medical insurance system, Lianhua Qingwen has been selected for the Diagnosis and Treatment Protocols for COVID-19 Patients (4th-9th Editions) issued by China's National Health Commission, and widely used in the designated hospitals for Covid-19 patients.

As of now, Lianhua Qingwen has been granted market access in nearly 30 countries and regions. It has been approved COVID-19 indications in Kuwait; in July 2021, it has been adopted as a treatment in the COVID-19 patients' self-care protocol at home by the Cambodian Ministry of Health.

As the largest economic entity (GDP of USD 432.3 Billion in 2020) and most populous country (206 million people) in Africa, Nigeria is the headquarters of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and becomes the 8th African country that has approved Lianhua Qingwen.

SOURCE Yiling Pharmaceutical
ERIE, Pa., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Bad habits can be hard to shake. This is especially true when it comes to driving. Depending on how many years you've spent behind the wheel, certain habits may be deeply ingrained by now. And many of them can be bad for your car.

Wondering if there are any bad driving behaviors you've picked up over the years? Check out Erie Insurance's list of 10 habits that aren't good for your car.

Bad habits. We all have them. And sometimes, they can be hard to shake. But some habits can do serious damage to your car. Find out if you are guilty of these 10 bad habits.

Driving on empty. Critical components, like your vehicle's fuel pump, aren't designed to operate without gas. The fuel pump is submerged in the gas tank, where it uses fuel to cool and lubricate the mechanisms in the pump. Most fuel pumps can last for the life of your vehicle. But when you run your car on empty, the pump can overheat, which could lead to a costly failure. And because the gas tank typically needs to be drained and removed to replace the pump, this labor-intensive job could cost upward of $1,000 to repair. Revving a cold engine. It's no fun getting into a freezing cold car. But there are no shortcuts to warming up a cold vehicle. So never rev up the engine in an effort to get the heat flowing faster. Doing this will only cause excess wear and tear on your engine because the cold engine oil isn't at the right temperature to properly lubricate all its internal components. Delaying maintenance. Every vehicle manufacturer recommends following a routine maintenance schedule to keep your car running in tip-top shape. In the short term, it may seem like there's no harm in skipping an oil change, air filter replacement or tire rotation. But the truth is, taking care of these preventative maintenance tasks now can save you from needing major repairs later. Ignoring warning lights. Modern cars feature a host of warning lights, and each is there to notify you of a particular problem with your vehicle. Ignoring these warning lights could leave you with a major repair down the road. Depending on the problem, it could even jeopardize the safety of you and your passengers. The next time that "check engine" light starts flashing, consult your car's manual and if need be, take your car to a qualified mechanic to get it checked out. Driving through deep water. If you approach any kind of flooding, including large puddles of groundwater, you may be tempted to drive right through. But your bestand safestcourse of action is always to turn around and find another route. Driving through deep water can damage or destroy your vehicle's engine, transmission and other critical components. It can also cause irreversible damage to your car's complex electrical system. Because of this long-lasting damage, a flooded vehicle is often considered a total loss by insurance providers. Not checking your tire pressure. One of the easiest car maintenance tasks to ignore is checking your tire pressure. Not running your tires at the manufacturer's recommended air pressure can cause a host of problems ranging from premature or uneven tire wear to bad handling and poor fuel economy. Experts recommend that you make a habit of checking your tire pressure once a month Riding the brakes. Your car's brakes represent one of its most important safety systems. But hitting the brake pedal too hard, or using the brakes too often, can leave this system severely compromised. Overuse of your brakes can have long-term consequences, too. More braking means you'll wear through pads and rotors faster, which translates to more frequent service intervals. You can also expect to pay more at the pump, thanks to lower fuel economy caused by frequent braking. Shifting without coming to a complete stop. If you drive a car with an automatic transmission, you may have fallen into the bad habit of shifting from "reverse" to "drive" while the car is still moving. Even if you're moving backward at a slow speed, switching gears without coming to a complete stop puts extra stress on your car's drivetrainparticularly the transmission. And chances are, the few seconds you save in the process aren't worth the cost of a premature transmission service, which can cost $2,000 or more. Driving too fast over speed bumps. If you drive over a speed bump at a slow speed, your car will be unharmed. But hit a speed bump faster than about 10 miles per hour and you can do serious damage to your car. The sudden impact of a speed bump could cause your suspension to bottom out, damaging your shocks and struts. It could also bend other important suspension components or knock your car out of alignment. Ignoring a windshield chip. Leaving a windshield chip will increase the likelihood that the damage will get worse. Weather changes or simply driving over a pothole, speed bump or uneven terrain puts additional pressure on the edges of a chip, which can quickly turn into a crack. Repairing a chip is always less expensive than doing a full windshield replacement. It typically takes less than 30 minutes. Learn more about what to expect when filing a glass claim.

At ERIE, we believe reliability isn't just important for cars. You should be able to count on your insurance company, too. When you purchase auto insurance from ERIE, we commit to being there when you need usand we'll get you back on your way, right away. To learn more, talk to a local ERIE agent in your neighborhood.

About Erie Insurance

According to A.M. Best Company, Erie Insurance Group, based in Erie, Pennsylvania, is the 12th largest homeowners insurer, 13th largest automobile insurer and 13th largest commercial lines insurer in the United States based on direct premiums written. Founded in 1925, Erie Insurance is a Fortune 500 company and the 16th largest property/casualty insurer in the United States based on total lines net premium written. Rated A+ (Superior) by A.M. Best, ERIE has more than 6 million policies in force and operates in 12 states and the District of Columbia. Erie Family Life Insurance Company is rated A (Excellent) by A.M. Best Company. Life insurance policies not written in New York state. Erie Insurance Group is a FORTUNE 500 company.

News releases and more information are available on ERIE's website at www.erieinsurance.com.

SOURCE Erie Insurance Group
The 2022 Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid claimed multiple victories at the Texas Automotive Writers Association (TAWA) Auto Roundup, held April 25-26 at Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth, earning prestigious Family Vehicle of Texas honors for the sixth consecutive year, as well winning the Green Vehicle of Texas award.

Pacifica is the most awarded minivan over the last six years, and has compiled more than 170 honors since its introduction as a minivan, including a TOP SAFETY PICK+ rating from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) for the 2022 Chrysler Pacifica.

"We are proud to celebrate an amazing sixth consecutive award as Family Vehicle of Texas for the Chrysler Pacifica, as well as honors for the Pacifica Hybrid as the Green Vehicle of Texas," said Chris Feuell, Chrysler brand CEO - Stellantis. "The Texas Automotive Writers Association is one of the most respected automotive press organizations, which makes the group's recognition of the Pacifica at the recent TAWA Auto Roundup especially significant."

"Congratulations to Chrysler brand for earning multiple honors at the 2022 TAWA Auto Roundup," said Teia Collier, president of TAWA. "Competition was fierce in the minivan segment, with Chrysler Pacifica maintaining its win streak as overall Family Vehicle of Texas, as well collecting awards in a variety of categories, including Best Minivan."

In addition to the Family Vehicle of Texas honor, the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid was recognized as the Green Vehicle of Texas. The Pacifica Hybrid, the first and still the only plug-in hybrid in the segment, offers an all-electric range of more than 30 miles, more than 80 miles per gallon equivalent (MPGe) and a total range of more than 500 miles. The Pacifica Hybrid also qualifies for an eligible $7,500 federal tax credit, as well as any available state and local tax credits.

The 2022 Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid also corralled Best Minivan, Best Interior and Best Feature awards. The Pacifica Hybrid Pinnacle model offers the most luxurious interior in its class and is loaded with premium appointments and features, including Caramel Nappa leather seats with quilted seat side bolsters and perforated seat inserts/seat backs on all three rows, second-row captain's chairs with a unique set of two movable lumbar comfort pillows and a large console area with dual-level storage.

New Pacifica interior features for 2022 include Amazon Fire TV, which allows passengers to stream videos, play games, listen to music, get information and watch downloaded programs on the Uconnect Theater system, as well as a new rear seat reminder feature that recognizes when rear doors are opened and closed prior to ignition start, and alerts the driver with a chime and cluster message after trip completion to check the rear seats.

TAWA

TAWA is one of the most reputable automotive press organizations in the industry, with a mission to promote quality and accuracy in automotive journalism and disseminate information about the industry through news-related print, online and broadcast media. TAWA produces two driving events each year  the Texas Auto Roundup in the spring and the Texas Truck Rodeo in the fall. Media members enjoy driving and evaluating new vehicles competing for the coveted Family Vehicle of Texas and Truck of Texas.

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
ACTOR, DESIGNER, SKATER, EVAN MOCK, STEPS INTO WEB3; LAUNCHES SOCIAL TOKEN WITH P00LS Tweet this

In conjunction with this first-of-its-kind social token strategy, Mock has also announced his new clothing collection, entitled "Wahine," in collaboration with stylist Donte McGuine, launching later this month. While the limited edition items will be available to all for purchase, holders of the $MAHCOIN token will have early access to purchase all the items of the collection and to an exclusive Wahine t-shirt giveaway, as well as discounts on the collection.

Evan Mock has partnered with social token platform, P00LS, for the launch of $MAHCOIN. As part of the P00LS protocol, Mock's day-one fans and famous friends alike have the opportunity to secure their place in his community by earning his tokens for free on the P00LS launchpad. Through completing various actionsi.e., streaming his videos, learning about Mock's vision and creative projects, as well as sharing his work and interacting with Mock directlycommunity members earn tokens without ever having to pay for them. In this way, Mock has pioneered a new, highly innovative Web3 creative strategy that brings his community closer to his projects, drawing them into his larger creative world. $MAHCOIN is an ERC-20 token and will be listed on the P00LS decentralized exchange later this year, where it can be earned and traded on Ethereum.

Mock is the latest creator to launch with P00LS, the premier tool for accessing creator and community value. Founded in 2021 by French crypto entrepreneur, Hugo Renaudin, P00LS is the leading community-first Web3 protocol for creator cryptocurrencies. P00LS partners with talent and brands to launch their own social token, distribute it to their communities and list it on the P00LS decentralized exchange, where it can be earned and traded on Ethereum.

About Evan Mock: A pink-haired multihyphenate hailing from Hawaii, Mock has created a brand that extends to almost every corner of culture, from fashion weeks to skate parks to surf beaches around the globe. As an in-demand model, Mock has starred in numerous campaigns and most notably walked the runway in Paris for Virgil Abloh's Louis Vuitton Men's Spring-Summer 2020 Show. Evan Mock is a creative force, renowned actor, fashion designer and serial collaborator with culture-defining brands such as RVCA, Pandora, Mattel and many more in addition to the launch of his own streetwear brand Sorry in Advance.

About P00LS : P00LS is the leading community-first, decentralized protocol for creator cryptocurrencies. We enable creators and brands to launch their proprietary token, distribute it to their communities, and list it on the P00LS decentralized exchange, where it can be earned and traded on Ethereum. Partnering with P00LS means incentivizing audiences and fanbases to consume creator and brand content, while empowering them to promote, share, and scale it. With P00LSthe premier tool for accessing creator valuemoney is no longer the only currency.

Press Contact:

Harrison Vail

[email protected]

+1 203-858-9609

LINK TO PRESS-APPROVED IMAGES HERE

SOURCE P00LS
BERKELEY, Calif., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Actym Therapeutics, a privately held biotechnology company developing STACT, a novel therapeutic platform that delivers immunomodulatory payloads to solid tumors after IV dosing, announced today the significant expansion of its senior leadership team. Dr. Julie Cherrington joins as BOD Chair, James Stutz joins as Chief Business Officer, and Dr. Omkar Joshi joins as Vice President, Technical Operations. The appointments strengthen the Company's strategic, finance, operations, and technical functions.

"On behalf of the Executive Leadership Team and the Board of Directors, we are thrilled to welcome this accomplished group of leaders to Actym." said Christopher Thanos, President and CEO of Actym. "Each individual brings a proven track record of success in the biotechnology industry. These appointments significantly expand our ability to advance our pipeline, with the ultimate goal of bringing therapeutic benefit to cancer patients with limited treatment options."

Julie Cherrington PhD, Chair, Board of Directors

Julie is an accomplished life science executive with extensive insight in bringing drugs into the clinic and through to commercialization. She has been a key contributor to the successful development of multiple FDA-approved products, including SUTENT, PALLADIA, VISTIDE, VIREAD, and HEPSERA. Julie has served as President and Chief Executive Officer at several biotechnology companies, including QUE Oncology, Arch Oncology, Revitope Oncology, Zenith Epigenetics, and Pathway Therapeutics. In addition, she served as President and Executive Vice President, R&D at Phenomix Corporation. Earlier in her career, Julie was Vice President of Preclinical and Clinical Research at SUGEN, a Pharmacia/Pfizer company. Julie began her career at Gilead Sciences, where she held a range of positions of increasing responsibility. Currently, Julie serves on the Boards of Syncona Ltd, Sardona Therapeutics, KisoJi Biotechnology, MycRx, Vaxart, and Mirati Therapeutics. Julie received her PhD training in Immunology & Microbiology from the University of Minnesota and Stanford University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF.

James Stutz, Chief Business Officer

James is an experienced life sciences executive with 20 years in the biopharma industry. He was previously Vice President and Head of Business Development at Instil Bio. Before joining Instil, James was the Chief Financial Officer at Tolerion, and Chief Business Officer at Tioma Therapeutics. James has also held roles of increasing responsibility at InterMune, CoMentis, and Alios BioPharma, which was acquired by Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson, in November 2014. While at Alios BioPharma, James served as the Vice President of Strategy & Business Development, where he supported the company's CBO and was responsible for business development, financial and strategic planning. In addition to operating roles, James was a Principal with Essex Woodlands Health Ventures where he focused on investments in the biopharma and life sciences tools space including ProteinSimple (acquired by BioTechne), Revance Therapeutics, and Symphogen (acquired by Servier). Prior to his career in life sciences, James was a commissioned officer in the United States Air Force. James graduated with honors, from UC Santa Barbara with a B.A. in Business Economics. He also earned an M.B.A from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. From 2012 through 2017 James held an appointment as Lecturer at Stanford University in the Department of Medicine, Division of Clinical Pharmacology in the School of Medicine.

As Chief Business Officer, James will serve as a member of the Actym Executive Leadership Team and be responsible for leading business development, finance, and operations activities for the company.

Omkar Joshi PhD, Vice President, Technical Operations

Omkar was previously Senior Director, MSAT (Manufacturing Sciences and Technology) at Bayer. In his 16-year career at Bayer, he held roles of increasing responsibility, spanning Drug Substance and Drug Product Process Development, Analytical Development and Preclinical Research. He has extensive experience working across various modalities including recombinant proteins, monoclonal antibodies, ADCs, cell therapies and gene therapies. Omkar earned a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the Oregon State University.

As Vice President, Technical Operations, Omkar will serve as a member of the Actym Executive Leadership Team and will be responsible for all aspects of technical development, manufacturing, analytical development, and quality at Actym.

About Actym

Actym Therapeutics, based in Berkeley, CA, is a privately-held biotechnology company focused on discovery and development of novel immuno-oncology therapies to treat cancer. The company has developed a patent-protected, attenuated, microbial-based, immunotherapeutic technology platform called STACT (S. Typhimurium-Attenuated Cancer Therapy). In preclinical studies, STACT specifically enriches in many types of solid tumors and not in healthy tissue. Once there, STACT delivers multiplexed immuno-modulatory payloads directly to tumor-resident immune cells. Many of these payload targets are of significant interest to the biopharmaceutical community but are intractable using conventional approaches due to systemic toxicities after intravenous dosing. Furthermore, STACT has been engineered to deliver payload combinations, which facilitates engagement of multiple biological pathways from a single therapy. In April of 2020, Actym raised $34 million in a Series A financing, co-led by Boehringer-Ingelheim Venture Fund and Panacea Venture, with participation from Illumina Ventures, Korea Investment Partners, and JLo Ventures.

Media Contact:

Valerie Enes

Seismic Media Relations

[email protected]

Corporate Contact:

Sheriese Rush, MBA

Head of Operations, Actym Therapeutics, Inc.

[email protected]

SOURCE Actym Therapeutics Inc.
NEW YORK, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- AES El Salvador Trust II bis, a trust formed under the laws of the State of New York (the " Issuer ") today announced that it has launched an offer to purchase for cash (the " Tender Offer ") any and all of its 6.750% Senior Guaranteed Notes due 2023 listed in the table below (the " Notes "), guaranteed by each of (i) Compania de Alumbrado Electrico de San Salvador, S.A. de C.V. ("CAESS"), (ii) AES CLESA y Compania, S. en C. de C.V. ("CLESA"), (iii) Empresa Electrica de Oriente, S.A. de C.V. ("EEO") and (iv) Distribuidora Electrica de Usulutan, S.A. de C.V. ("DEUSEM" and, jointly with CAESS, CLESA and EEO, the "Guarantors" and the Guarantors, together with the Issuer, referred to herein as "we," or "us"). Concurrently with the Tender Offer, the Issuer is soliciting (the " Solicitation ") from the holders of the Notes a consent (the " Consent " or in the plural " Consents ") to certain proposed amendments (the " Proposed Amendments ") to the indenture governing the Notes (the " Indenture "), shortening the minimum notice period for any redemption of the Notes by the Issuer to three days. This redemption includes optional, withholding tax event, substantial repurchase event, rating methodology event or tax deductibility event redemptions, all as described in the Indenture. The Proposed Amendments require the Consent of holders of a majority in aggregate principal amount (the " Requisite Consents ") of the outstanding Notes. No tenders submitted after the expiration date will be valid. The Tender Offer and Solicitation will take place upon the terms and conditions described in the Issuer's Offer to Purchase and Consent Solicitation Statement, dated May 12, 2022 (the " Statement ").

The following table sets forth certain terms of the Tender Offer:







Dollars per U.S. $1,000 Principal Amount of Notes Title of Notes CUSIP and ISIN Numbers Aggregate Principal

Amount Outstanding Tender Offer

Consideration(1) Early Tender

Premium Total

Consideration

(1)(2) 6.750% Senior Guaranteed Notes

due 2023 CUSIP: 00105N AA1 / P06076 AA4 ISIN: US00105NAA19 / USP06076AA49 U.S. $310,000,000 U.S.$970.00 U.S. $ 30.00 U.S. $1,000.00













(1) Does not include Accrued Interest, which will also be payable as provided herein. (2) Includes the Early Tender Premium.

The Tender Offer and concurrent Solicitation will expire at 11:59 p.m., New York City time, on June 9, 2022, unless amended, extended or terminated by the Issuer (the " Expiration Date "). The Tender Offer and the Solicitation may be amended, extended or terminated by us at any time.

Subject to the terms and conditions of the Tender Offer and concurrent Solicitation, the consideration for each U.S. $1,000 principal amount of the Notes validly tendered and accepted for purchase pursuant to the Tender Offer and concurrent Solicitation will be the applicable Tender Offer Consideration set forth in the above table. Holders of Notes that are validly tendered together with concurrent Consents prior to 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on May 25, 2022 (subject to extension, the " Early Tender and Consent Time ") and accepted for purchase pursuant to the Tender Offer will receive the Total Consideration set forth in the above table, which includes the Tender Offer Consideration plus the applicable Early Tender Premium. Holders of Notes tendering their Notes together with concurrent Consents after the Early Tender and Consent Time will not be eligible to receive the Early Tender Premium. All Notes validly tendered and accepted for purchase pursuant to the Tender Offer and concurrent Solicitation will also receive accrued and unpaid interest on such Notes from the last interest payment date with respect to those Notes to, but not including, the applicable settlement date. Holders may not tender their Notes without delivering their Consents pursuant to the Solicitation and may not deliver Consents without tendering their Notes pursuant to the Tender Offer.

Tendered Notes and Consents may be withdrawn from the Tender Offer and concurrent Solicitation prior to 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on May 25, 2022, unless extended by the Issuer (the " Withdrawal Deadline "). Holders of Notes, who tender their Notes and deliver Consents after the Withdrawal Deadline, but prior to the Expiration Date, may not withdraw their tendered Notes or Consents.

The Early Settlement Date will be determined at the Issuer's option and is currently expected to occur promptly following the Early Tender and Consent Time, subject to all conditions to the Tender Offer and concurrent Solicitation, including the financing condition (as defined in the Statement) in respect of the Tender Offer, having been either satisfied or waived by the Issuer as of the Early Settlement Date. The Issuer expects to purchase any Notes that have been validly tendered and accepted in the Tender Offer prior to the Expiration Date promptly following the Expiration Date. If the Issuer does not elect to have an Early Settlement Date, payment for Notes validly tendered prior to the Early Tender Date and accepted for purchase will be made on the Final Settlement Date.

The Tender Offer and concurrent Solicitation are not conditioned upon the tender of any minimum principal amount of Notes. However, the Tender Offer and concurrent Solicitation is subject to, and conditioned upon the satisfaction or waiver of certain conditions described in the Statement, including the Financing Condition (as defined therein) in respect of the Tender Offer.

The Issuer, together with the Guarantors, intend to fund the repurchase of Notes validly tendered in the Tender Offer, including accrued and unpaid interest and fees and expenses payable in connection with the Tender Offer, with the net proceeds of a senior secured term loan facility in an aggregate principal amount of up U.S. $370,000,000 that each of CAESS, CLESA, EEO and DEUSEM, as borrowers, expect to enter into with Bancolombia S.A. Establecimiento Bancario and Banco Agricola S.A., as lead arrangers and bookrunners, each lender from time to time party hereto, and Scotia Panama Trust Company, S.A., as administrative agent (the " Bank Financing "). Neither the Issuer nor the Guarantors make any assurance, however, that the Bank Financing will be consummated.

If the Requisite Consents are obtained and all other conditions of the Tender Offer and concurrent Solicitation are satisfied or waived by us, we intend to enter into a supplemental indenture to the Indenture to give effect to the Proposed Amendments. However, the Proposed Amendments shall not become effective until the payment of the corresponding consideration to tendering/consenting holders of Notes on the applicable settlement date.

J.P. Morgan Securities LLC (" J.P. Morgan ") is the Dealer Manager and Solicitation Agent in the Tender Offer and concurrent Solicitation. Global Bondholder Services Corporation has been retained to serve as the Tender, Solicitation and Information Agent for the Tender Offer and concurrent Solicitation. Persons with questions regarding the Tender Offer and concurrent Solicitation should contact J.P. Morgan at (toll free) (866) 846-2874. To contact Global Bondholder Services Corporation, banks and brokers may call (212) 430-3774, and others may call U.S. toll-free: (855) 654-2015 or email [email protected].

None of the Issuer, any of the Guarantors, their respective board of directors, officers, the dealer manager and solicitation agent, the information agent or the trustees with respect to the Notes, or any of their respective affiliates, makes any recommendation that holders tender or refrain from tendering all or any portion of the principal amount of their Notes and consent to the Proposed Amendments to the Indenture, and no one has been authorized by any of them to make such a recommendation. Holders must make their own decision as to whether to tender their Notes and provide their consent and, if so, the principal amount of Notes to tender in the Tender Offer and concurrent Solicitation.

This press release is not an offer to purchase or a solicitation of an offer to purchase with respect to any Notes or any other securities. The Tender Offer and concurrent Solicitation is being made solely pursuant to the terms of the Statement. The Tender Offer and concurrent Solicitation is not being made to holders of Notes in any jurisdiction in which the making or acceptance thereof would not be in compliance with the securities, blue sky or other laws of such jurisdiction. The Statement does not constitute a public offer to purchase in El Salvador or a public offer to purchase to any resident of El Salvador.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act and Section 21E of the U.S. Securities Exchange Act of 1934 that are not based on historical facts and are not assurances of future results. These forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and estimates about future events and financial trends, which affect or may affect the Issuer's businesses and results of operations. The words "believe," "may," "will," "estimate," "continue," "anticipate," "intend," "expect" and similar words are intended to identify estimates and forward-looking statements. These statements include but are not limited to forward-looking statements about the planned Tender Offer and concurrent Solicitation. Although the Issuer believes that these forward-looking statements are based upon reasonable assumptions, these statements are subject to several risks and uncertainties and are made in light of information currently available to the Issuer. Estimates and forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties and are not guarantees of future performance. Any changes in such assumptions or factors could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations and the Issuer's future results may differ materially from those expressed in these estimates and forward- looking statements.

All forward-looking statements are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement, and you should not place reliance on any forward-looking statement contained in this press release. The Issuer undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information or future events or for any other reason.

SOURCE AES El Salvador Trust II bis
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- A historic gathering of faith leaders from across religious traditions took place this week in Saudi Arabia, and included 12 rabbis, among them Rabbi David Rosen, American Jewish Committee's Director of International Interreligious Relations.

The event, hosted by the Muslim World League in Riyadh, marks the first time Saudi Arabia has held a multifaith gathering, which included leadership from the Catholic Church, Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate, Evangelical Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as religious leaders from other countries across the Muslim world.

"We are witnessing a transformation of Muslim-Jewish relations across the globe," said Rosen, who has decades of experience forging interfaith relations and was the only rabbi in attendance from Israel. "It is encouraging and exciting to see the Muslim World League and Saudi Arabia exercise leadership to promote cooperation among the faith communities of the world. The work of forging a multifaith alliance against extremism and hatred of all kinds, including antisemitism, must include traditional religious voices along with more liberal expressions. Every country and faith community has a role to play."

The event addressed the theme "Promoting Common Values Among the Followers of Religions," and was dedicated to charting tangible ways to promote interreligious cooperation and solidarity as a response to conflict and tensions between faith communities.

In recent years, AJC has developed a formal partnership with the Muslim World League and its Secretary General, Sheikh Dr. Mohammed Al-Issa. In 2019, AJC CEO David Harris and Dr. Al-Issa signed a Memorandum of Understanding to promote Muslim-Jewish relations and take on ventures to combat racism, hatred, and extremism in all its expressions. The MOU was followed by a historic joint mission to Auschwitz and Warsaw in January 2020, attended by Muslim and Jewish leaders from 28 countries to commemorate Holocaust victims.

The mission, held just days before the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp, also honored the endurance of Jewish life. In June 2020, Dr. Al-Issa spoke at AJC's Global Forum about the need for Muslims and Jews to work together to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia.

For decades, AJC has been a global leader in developing Muslim-Jewish relations, including through regular programs with leaders across the Middle East and North Africa. AJC earlier this year opened the Sidney Lerner Center for Arab-Jewish Understanding in Abu Dhabi to build closer ties between Arabs and Jews, enrich Jewish life across the Middle East, and increase understanding of Israel in the Arab world.

AJC has also built an online community of nearly 800,000 Arabic speakers through @AJCArabic platforms. Its Arabic language video series on Jews and Judaism, 'An Al-Yahud,' has garnered over 25 million views.

SOURCE American Jewish Committee
CHICAGO, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Angeles Investors , the investment community on a mission to find, fund, and grow the most promising startup ventures  is pleased to announce the top 100 startups in the U.S. with Hispanic or Latinx DNA. Awardees will be recognized today during the Angeles Q2 Pitch Night Event & Awards in Silicon Valley, sponsored by SVB - Silicon Valley Bank.

The Angeles 100 celebrates a collection of inspiring venture-backed startups driving innovation. These startups have built, or are building, great companies of the exact kind Angeles supports and invests in. This year's honorees exemplify how startup founders are driving business forward and setting their organizations up for success.

The 2022 awadess were nominated and selected based on their having secured funding (seed through Series E), the founder, co-founder, and/or board member being of Hispanic descent, being incorporated in the United States and their ability to show year-over-year growth.

"We're excited to be back in-person at the Computer History Museum for the event today to celebrate great business achievements, exceptional leadership, reconnect with old peers, forge new partnerships, and obtain new perspectives into this fast-paced industry from the world's leading investors and entrepreneurs", said Adela Cepeda, Angeles Investors Board Chair and Director at BMO Financial Corporation.

Angeles Investors will celebrate the top 100 startup ventures with Hispanic DNA, called the Angeles 100, during the Angeles Q2 Pitch Night Event & Awards this evening at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

Join the celebration virtually or in person. Tickets to this event may be purchased online. Media are invited to attend.

We are now accepting nominations for our 2023 Angeles 100 award. Click here to apply. For sponsorship and membership opportunities or questions about this release, please contact Dahlia Mijarez .

SOURCE Angeles Investors
Lauren Snelling , artistic director of YoungArts, said, "The 2022 U.S. Presidential Scholars in the Arts demonstrate both a dedication to academic achievement and a commitment to creativity in mediums spanning the visual, literary and performing arts. YoungArts is incredibly proud to celebrate these young artists today and to amplify their innovative perspectives as they grow to become the arbiters of our nation's cultural compass tomorrow."

"Our 2022 Presidential Scholars represent the best of America, and remind us that when empowered by education, there are no limits to what our young people can achieve," said U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. "Today, I join President Biden to celebrate a class of scholars whose pursuit of knowledge, generosity of spirit, and exceptional talents bring our nation tremendous pride. Throughout one of the most trying periods in our nation's history and amid our recovery from the pandemic, our students have once again demonstrated their strength and that they have so much to contribute to our country. Thanks to them, I know America's future is bright."

The 2022 U.S. Presidential Scholars in the Arts are:

*Interviews can be facilitated, and images are available upon request.

Name Hometown City, State School YoungArts Winner Year and Discipline Ayana Askew Norfolk, VA Booker T. Washington Senior High School Writing, 2022 Caroline Berthin Miami, FL Design and Architecture Senior High School Visual Arts, 2022 Joshua Brown Interlochen, MI Interlochen Arts Academy Theater, 2022 Quoc Bui Fargo, ND Interlochen Arts Academy Visual Arts, 2021 Madeleine Case Woodland Hills, CA Viewpoint School Writing, 2022 Zoe Goldemberg Miami Beach, FL Design and Architecture Senior High School Design Arts, 2022 Grace Gramins Bronxville, NY Bronxville High School Voice, 2022 Isabella Gueck Grand Prairie, TX Grand Prairie Fine Arts Academy Voice, 2022 Anya Jimenez Brooklyn, NY Professional Performing Arts School Writing, 2022 Maya Koenig Arlington, VA Washington-Liberty High School Film, 2022 Stella Lei Paoli, PA Conestoga High School Writing, 2022 Jordin MacKenzie Leawood, KS Blue Valley North High School Voice, 2022 Tomek Marczewski Dallas, TX The St. Mark's School of Texas Design Arts, 2022 Ella Reaugh Lucas, TX Lovejoy High School Visual Arts, 2022 Eason Rytter New York, NY Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts Theater, 2022 Malavika Singh Salt Lake City, UT West High School Dance, 2022 Reva Srivastava Fremont, CA Mission San Jose High School Dance, 2022 Miye Sugino La Canada Flintridge, CA La Canada High School Visual Arts, 2022 Kailey Worontsoff Wellington, FL Alexander W. Dreyfoos School of the Arts Dance, 2020 Sean Yu Rye, NY Rye High School Classical Music, 2022

BECOMING A U.S. PRESIDENTIAL SCHOLAR IN THE ARTS The first step to becoming a U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts is to apply to YoungArts, which is the nominating agency for this honor. To be eligible for the YoungArts program, applicants must be 1518 years old or in high school grades 1012. To be further considered for a nomination as a U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts, applicants must be high school seniors and meet all of the U.S. Presidential Scholars requirements.

YoungArts award winners demonstrating excellence in the performing, visual or literary arts are selected annually through a blind adjudication process. This year, 720 YoungArts award winners were selected. In January, 157 Finalists from across the nation were invited to National YoungArts Week+, where they participated in a week of intensive virtual classes and workshops with internationally renowned artists.

During National YoungArts Week+, eligible participants are further evaluated, award levels are determined, and nominations are made for that year's U.S. Presidential Scholars in the Arts candidates. After a rigorous selection process, YoungArts nominates 60 candidates for an invitation to apply to the U.S. Presidential Scholars Program. Finally, the Commission on Presidential Scholars selects 20 U.S. Presidential Scholars in the Arts each year.

For more information, visit youngarts.org, YouTube , Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

Media Contacts:

Heike Dempster, YoungArts

[email protected] / 305.377.1140

Sara Ory, Polskin Arts

[email protected]/ 212.593.5815

SOURCE YoungArts
HYDERABAD, India, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ --

Market Overview

According to ReAnIn, the global anti-drone market was valued at USD 1,198.12 million in the year 2021 and is projected to reach USD 4,764.66 million by the year 2028, registering a CAGR of 21.8% during the forecast period. Increasing use of the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for a variety of purposes including delivery, surveillance, etc., higher spending on anti-UAV systems from military organizations, and increasing research and development activities in this field are a few leading drivers of this market. As a majority of the UAVs cannot be detected by traditional air defense systems due to their size, construction material, and flight altitude, anti-UAV systems have become a vital instrument in managing or neutralizing UAV-based threats. However, high equipment costs and a lack of specific guidelines for drones may restrain the growth of this market.

Download free sample: Global Anti-Drone Market Growth, Share, Size, Trends and Forecast (2022 - 2028)

Low-cost hand-held devices are expected to revolutionize the anti-drone industry

Since the majority of the drones employed across industries are small drones, armed forces are specifically looking for systems to counter smaller drones. For instance, in April 2021, the US air force released a request for proposals for contracts worth up to US$ 490 million for technologies to counter the threat of small, commercially made drones. Furthermore, the Department of Defense (DOD) is collaborating with research institutes to develop state-of-the-art technology and a highly-trained workforce for counter-UAS capabilities.

In the Middle East region, Israel is expected to gain maximum from this ever-increasing demand for the drone as well as anti-drone systems. Due to its experience in anti-drone development, the country has developed various high-end systems. For example, Israel became the first country to have been able to use laser technology on an aircraft to intercept drones in an operational simulation and destroy them. In recent years, an Israel-based company has sold counter-drone systems to India, Morocco, the US, and other countries. The ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russia is expected to further propel the growth of counter-drone systems as drones are increasingly being used in any war or conflict.

Key Highlights of the Report:

Electronic-based anti-drone system is expected to hold the majority of the market share in 2021 in the global anti-drone market owing to huge investment from leading players to launch an electronic counter-drone system. For instance, In November 2021 , Fortem Technologies unveiled its SkyDome System 3.7 which can destroy bigger and larger drones.

, Fortem Technologies unveiled its SkyDome System 3.7 which can destroy bigger and larger drones. Currently, the military & defense segment holds a majority of the market share, while the commercial segment is expected to witness the highest CAGR during the forecast period.

North America accounted for the highest market share in 2021 owing to higher spending on defense and increasing security threats from various terrorist organizations. For instance, in FY2022, the Department of Defense (DOD) plans to spend at least US$ 636 million on counter- unmanned aircraft systems (C-UAS) research and development and at least US$ 75 million on C-UAS procurement.

accounted for the highest market share in 2021 owing to higher spending on defense and increasing security threats from various terrorist organizations. For instance, in FY2022, the Department of Defense (DOD) plans to spend at least on counter- unmanned aircraft systems (C-UAS) research and development and at least on C-UAS procurement. Demand for technologically advanced systems such as AI-based Counter-Drone systems is expected to increase significantly in the near future. In April 2021 , Citadel Defense received a multi-million dollar contract from the Pentagon for its AI-based Counter-Drone system.

Access the report description on: Global Anti-Drone Market

Market Segmentation:

ReAnIn has segmented the global anti-drone market by:

Technology

Laser-based



Kinetic-based



Electronic-based

Application

Detection



Detection & Disruption

Platform Type

Ground-based



Handheld



UAV-based

Vertical

Military & Defense



Commercial



Others

Region

North America



Latin America



Europe



Asia Pacific



Middle East & Africa

Competitive Landscape

Leading players operating in the global anti-drone technology market are Blighter Surveillance Systems Ltd, Drone Defence, Dedrone, DeTect Inc., DroneShield Ltd, Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd., Lockheed Martin Corp., Leonardo S.p.A, Liteye Systems, Inc, Northrop Grumman Corp, QinetiQ Group PLC, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd, Raytheon Technologies Corp, SRC, Inc., Thales Group, and Zen Technologies Limited.

Know more about this report: Global Anti-Drone Market

About ReAnIn

ReAnIn provides end-to-end market research services which span across different support areas such as syndicated market research reports, custom market research reports, consulting, long-term engagement, and flash delivery. We are proud to have more than 100 Fortune 500 companies in our clientele. We are a client-first organization and we are known not just for meeting our client expectations but for exceeding them.

Media Contact:

Name: Deepak Kumar

Email: [email protected]

Phone: +1 469-730-0260

SOURCE Reanin Research & Consulting Private Limited
MARINA DEL REY, Calif, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Armata Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NYSE American: ARMP) ("Armata" or the "Company"), a biotechnology company focused on pathogen-specific bacteriophage therapeutics for antibiotic-resistant and difficult-to-treat bacterial infections, today announced financial results for its first quarter 2022 and provided a corporate update.

First Quarter 2022 and Recent Developments:

SWARM- P.a. study advancing through multiple ascending dose (MAD) dosing with optimized AP-PA02

study advancing through multiple ascending dose (MAD) dosing with optimized AP-PA02 diSArm Phase 1b /2 S. Staphylococcus aureus bacteremia study initiated

/2 bacteremia study initiated IND approved for AP-PA02 non-cystic fibrosis bronchiectasis (NCFB) Phase 2 study

Strengthened balance sheet through $45 million equity financing.

"Armata continues to advance our clinical strategy of evaluating bacteriophage product candidates against P. aeruginosa and S. aureus in multiple indications," stated Dr. Brian Varnum, Chief Executive Officer of Armata. "We are pleased with our progress in the SWARM-P.a. study and are excited to launch the diSArm and NCFB studies. We also continue to make significant progress toward initiating a clinical trial of AP-SA02 in prosthetic joint infections and advance toward an IND for AP-PA03. These programs are powered by our continued investment in developing bacteriophage-specific manufacturing methods. In parallel, we continue advance the build out of our new state-of-the-art cGMP manufacturing facility, which will allow us to increase production scale and capacity, meeting the needs of our expanding pipeline."

First Quarter 2022 Financial Results

Grant Revenue. The Company recognized grant revenue of approximately $1.2 million for the three months ended March 31, 2022, which represents Medical Technology Enterprise Consortium ("MTEC")'s share of the costs incurred for the Company's AP-SA02 program for the treatment of Staphylococcus aureus bacteremia. The Company expects to receive $15.0 million in grant funding from MTEC administered by the U.S. Department of Defense and the Defense Health Agency and Joint Warfighter Medical Research Program. The Company recognized approximately $1.1 million of revenue in the comparable period in 2021.

Research and Development. Research and development expenses for the three months ended March 31, 2022, were approximately $8.0 million as compared to approximately $4.4 million for the comparable period in 2021. The company continues to invest in clinical trial and personnel related expenses associated with its primary development programs.

General and Administrative. General and administrative expenses for the three months ended March 31, 2022, were approximately $2.0 million as compared to approximately $2.2 million for the comparable period in 2021.

Loss from Operations. Loss from operations for the three months ended March 31, 2022, was $(9.0) million as compared to a loss from operations of approximately $(5.5) million for the comparable period in 2021.

Cash and Equivalents. As of March 31, 2022, Armata held approximately $46.4 million of unrestricted cash and cash equivalents, as compared to $10.3 million as of December 31, 2021. During the first quarter, the company entered into a securities purchase agreement with a subsidiary of Innoviva, Inc. with raised total gross proceeds of $45 million, before deducting transaction expenses.

As of May 12, 2022, there were approximately 36.1 million shares of common stock outstanding.

About Armata Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Armata is a clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on the development of pathogen-specific bacteriophage therapeutics for the treatment of antibiotic-resistant and difficult-to-treat bacterial infections using its proprietary bacteriophage-based technology. Armata is developing and advancing a broad pipeline of natural and synthetic phage candidates, including clinical candidates for Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureus, and other pathogens. In addition, in collaboration with Merck, known as MSD outside of the United States and Canada, Armata is developing proprietary synthetic phage candidates to target an undisclosed infectious disease agent. Armata is committed to advancing phage with drug development expertise that spans bench to clinic including in-house phage specific GMP manufacturing.

Forward Looking Statements

This communication contains "forward-looking" statements, including, without limitation, statements related to Armata's bacteriophage development programs, Armata's ability to set up or operate R&D and manufacturing facilities, Armata's ability to meet expected milestones, Armata's ability to be a leader in the development of phage-based therapeutics, and statements related to the timing and results of clinical trials, including the anticipated results of clinical trials of AP-PA02 and AP-SA02, and Armata's ability to develop new products based on bacteriophages and synthetic phages. Any statements contained in this communication that are not statements of historical fact may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based upon Armata's current expectations. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties. Armata's actual results and the timing of events could differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking statements as a result of these risks and uncertainties, which include, without limitation, risks related to the ability of Armata's lead clinical candidates, AP-PA02 and AP-SA02, to be more effective than previous candidates; Armata's ability to expedite development of AP-PA02; Armata's ability to advance its preclinical and clinical programs and the uncertain and time-consuming regulatory approval process; Armata's ability to develop products based on bacteriophages and synthetic phages to kill bacterial pathogens; the Company's expected market opportunity for its products; Armata's ability to sufficiently fund its operations as expected, including obtaining additional funding as needed; and any delays or adverse events within, or outside of, Armata's control, caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Additional risks and uncertainties relating to Armata and its business can be found under the caption "Risk Factors" and elsewhere in Armata's filings and reports with the SEC, including in Armata's Annual Report on Form 10-K, filed with the SEC on March 17, 2022, and in its subsequent filings with the SEC.

Armata expressly disclaims any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements contained herein to reflect any change in Armata's expectations with regard thereto or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statements are based.

Media Contacts:

At Armata:

Pierre Kyme

Armata Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

[email protected]

310-665-2928

Investor Relations:

Joyce Allaire

LifeSci Advisors, LLC

[email protected]

212-915-2569

Armata Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheets

















March 31, 2022

December 31, 2021











Assets











Cash and cash equivalents

$ 46,408,000

$ 10,288,000 Awards receivable



1,236,000



2,989,000 Prepaids and other current assets



1,055,000



1,718,000 Total current assets



48,699,000



14,995,000 Property and equipment, net



37,665,000



38,072,000 Other long term assets



7,655,000



2,955,000 Intangible assets, net



13,746,000



13,746,000













Total assets

$ 107,765,000

$ 69,768,000













Liabilities and stockholders' equity











Total current liabilities

$ 6,226,000

$ 4,814,000 Long term liabilities



36,923,000



36,480,000 Deferred tax liability



3,077,000



3,077,000 Total liabilities



46,226,000



44,371,000 Stockholders' equity



61,539,000



25,397,000













Total liabilities and stockholders' equity

$ 107,765,000

$ 69,768,000

Armata Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations

















Three Months Ended Mar 31,



2022

2021



(Unaudited)

(Unaudited)













Grant Revenue

$ 1,236,000

$ 1,066,000 Operating expenses:











Research and development



8,028,000



4,350,000 General and administrative



1,983,000



2,151,000 Total operating expenses



10,011,000



6,501,000 Loss from operations



(8,775,000)



(5,435,000) Other income (expense), net



1,000



(60,000) Loss before income taxes and Net Loss

$ (8,774,000)

$ (5,495,000) Net loss per share, basic and diluted

$ (0.30)

$ (0.27) Weighted average shares outstanding, basic

and diluted



28,996,499



20,458,355

Armata Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Condensed Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows





















Three Months Ended March 31,





2022

2021













Operating activities:













Net loss

$ (8,774,000)

$ (5,495,000)

Adjustments required to reconcile net loss to net cash

used in operating activities:













Stock-based compensation



493,000



842,000

Depreciation



226,000



281,000

Payment of accreted interest for deferred consideration

for asset acquisition



-



(586,000)

Non-cash interest expense



-



62,000

Changes in operating assets and liabilities, net



4,540,000



(579,000)

Net cash used in operating activities



(3,515,000)



(5,475,000)

Investing activities:













Purchases of property and equipment, net



(236,000)



(298,000)

Net cash used in investing activities



(236,000)



(298,000)

Financing activities:













Payment of deferred consideration for asset acquisition



-



(1,414,000)

Proceeds from sale of common stock, net of offering costs



44,631,000



19,548,000

Proceeds from exercise of warrants and stock options



-



445,000

Net cash provided by (used in) financing activities



44,631,000



18,579,000

Net increase (decrease) in cash and cash equivalents



40,880,000



12,806,000

Cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash, beginning of

period



11,488,000



10,849,000

Cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash, end of period

$ 52,368,000

$ 23,655,000

















































Reconciliation of Cash and cash equivalents:



Three Months Ended March 31,





2022

2021 Cash and cash equivalents

$ 46,408,000

$ 22,455,000

Restricted cash



5,960,000



1,200,000

Cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash

$ 52,368,000

$ 23,655,000



















SOURCE Armata Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
--ARU-1801 reduced vaso-occlusive events and days in the hospital for patients with severe sickle cell disease--

MILLBURN, N.J. and BASEL, Switzerland, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Aruvant Sciences ("Aruvant"), a private company focused on developing gene therapies for rare diseases, announced that data demonstrating the clinical benefit of the company's lead product candidate ARU-1801 for severe sickle cell disease (SCD) will be presented today in an oral presentation at the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy (ASGCT) 25th annual meeting. Punam Malik, M.D., Director of the Cincinnati Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center and Program Leader of the Hematology and Gene Therapy Program at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, will deliver the oral presentation this afternoon at 1:30 PM EDT.

"The data demonstrate that the ARU-1801 gene therapy may not only be able to reduce severe vaso-occlusive events (VOEs) but also reduce days in the hospital for SCD patients which could provide a clinically meaningful benefit for patients and help reduce health care costs," said Dr. Malik. "ARU-1801 is the only gene therapy in development that has been shown to achieve durable responses in patients with severe SCD using only reduced intensity conditioninga key differentiator from other investigational gene therapy and gene editing regimens."

Dr. Malik will be presenting data from the ongoing MOMENTUM Phase 1/2 clinical trial that is examining ARU-1801, an autologous lentiviral cell therapy with a modified, highly potent gamma globin payload, in individuals with severe SCD. ARU-1801 is designed to address the limitations of current curative allogeneic transplant options, such as low donor availability, the risk of graft-versus-host disease and toxicity from myeloablative chemotherapy. Unlike investigational gene therapies that require fully myeloablative conditioning, ARU-1801 is given with reduced intensity conditioning (RIC), which is a lower dose chemotherapy associated with less chemotherapy side effects including shorter time in the hospital and less short- and long-term toxicity than myeloablative approaches.

The data being presented demonstrates:

All five study participants who had sufficient follow-up have had significant reductions in severe VOEs, demonstrating clinically meaningful reductions in disease burden;

Participants have experienced durable engraftment and improvement in SCD burden without the use of myeloablative chemotherapy; and

Four of the five patients treated have experienced complete resolution of severe VOEs since they received the treatment.

The ASGCT annual meeting is taking place in Washington, D.C. and virtually starting today, May 16, and will go through to May 19, 2022. For more information about the conference, please visit https://annualmeeting.asgct.org/.

About Aruvant Sciences

Aruvant Sciences, part of the Roivant family of companies, is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing and commercializing gene therapies for the treatment of rare diseases. The company has a talented team with extensive experience in the development, manufacturing and commercialization of gene therapy products. Aruvant has an active research program with a lead product candidate, ARU-1801, in development for individuals suffering from SCD. ARU-1801, an investigational lentiviral gene therapy, is being studied in a Phase 1/2 clinical trial, the MOMENTUM study, as a one-time potentially curative treatment for SCD. Preliminary clinical data demonstrate engraftment of ARU-1801 and amelioration of SCD is possible with one dose of reduced intensity chemotherapy. The company's second product candidate, ARU-2801, is in development to cure hypophosphatasia, a devastating, ultra-orphan disorder that affects multiple organ systems and leads to high morbidity and mortality when not treated. Data from pre-clinical studies with ARU-2801 shows durable improvement in disease biomarkers and increased survival. For more information on the ongoing ARU-1801 clinical study, please visit https://sicklecellstudies.com/, and for more on the company, please visit www.aruvant.com. Follow Aruvant on Facebook, Twitter @AruvantSciences, Instagram @Aruvant_Sciences or LinkedIn @AruvantSciences.

SOURCE Aruvant Sciences
NEW YORK, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- To help businesses before, during and after actual or suspected cyber breaches, AXA XL continues to build out its cyber incident response team in North America with the addition of Jeanelle Dawes-Ghee, Yelizaveta (Liz) Veys and Bridget Mead as claims specialists, reporting to North America Cyber Incident Response Manager Gwenn Cujdik.

According to Ms. Cujdik, "We've created quite a team! Jeanelle, Liz and Bridget's collective knowledge and experience managing crisis events and complex cyber incidents will certainly be invaluable to our clients before, during, and after a cyber event. To help avoid future cyber incidents, our clients will see tremendous benefit in partnering with this team to discuss pre-incident plans, services, and strategies to achieve better cyber and data security. If a company does have a cyber incident, our cyber clients will be in very skilled hands, working together with the Cyber Incident Response team to achieve an optimal outcome."

Access to the Cyber Incident Response team is part of AXA XL's cyber insurance offering. Working with AXA XL's breach response panel, including best-in-class law firms and vendors, the team is dedicated to assisting clients prepare for and navigate cyber incidents, including consultation regarding a suspected event. to helping businesses through a strategic and fast paced response to a catastrophic ransomware event.

Jeanelle Dawes-Ghee joins AXA XL from AIG where she served as a Cyber, Technology and Media Claims Analyst, handling a variety of complex cyber incident response and Professional Liability matters from inception through conclusion. Jeanelle joins the team with a strong background in cyber incident response having assisted in the incident response of hundreds of events large and small, in both the public and private sectors. Based in New York, Ms. Dawes-Ghee received her J.D. from St. John's University School of Law and is admitted to the New York State Bar.

Yelizaveta (Liz) Veys joins AXA XL from a prior career in law enforcement working at the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office where she was involved in all aspects of a criminal prosecution in a wide variety of major felony criminal matters. She joins the team with exceptional skills in crisis management, investigation and litigation in high profile and high stakes events. Ms. Veys received her J.D. from Temple University's James E. Beasley School of Law and is admitted to the Pennsylvania State Bar. She is based in AXA XL's Exton, Pennsylvania office.

Also based in AXA XL's Exton office, Bridget Mead brings considerable cybersecurity and data privacy legal expertise to her new role at AXA XL. Ms. Mead worked as an attorney in the Cybersecurity and Data Privacy practice group of an international law firm, where she handled a variety of complex cyber incident response and data privacy matters. Her expertise in cyber also includes co-authoring a textbook, Data Privacy and Cybersecurity Law: Risks and Mitigation. She received her J.D. from Drexel University's Kline School of Law, is a Certified Information Privacy Professional through the IAPP and is admitted to the Pennsylvania State Bar.

Follow AXA XL on Twitter and on LinkedIn.

ABOUT AXA XL AXA XL, the property & casualty and specialty risk division of AXA, provides insurance and risk management products and services for mid-sized companies through to large multinationals, and reinsurance solutions to insurance companies globally. We partner with those who move the world forward. To learn more, visit www.axaxl.com ABOUT AXA XL INSURANCE AXA XL Insurance offers property, casualty, professional, financial lines and specialty insurance solutions to mid-sized companies through to large multinationals globally. We partner with those who move the world forward. To learn more, visit www.axaxl.com

SOURCE AXA XL
ICCA's decision reflects the association meeting industry's confidence in Bangkok and the interest among ICCA members to get reacquainted with Thailand after a two-year break. Supported by Thailand Convention and Exhibition Bureau (TCEB), the 2023 congress also promises to be an especially memorable one as it will take place at a time when Bangkok will be showcasing its achievements from the first half of its 20-year Strategic Development Plan (20132032) to transform itself into the "Metropolitan City of Asia".

By hosting the ICCA Congress, TCEB hopes to impress upon association meeting executives not only Bangkok's exceptional credentials but also the many MICE destinations to be found throughout Thailand. Having developed their business events infrastructure over the years with input from TCEB, Thailand's other MICE Cities  Chiang Mai, Phuket, Pattaya, Khon Kaen, Nakhon Ratchasima, Songkhla, Phitsanulok, Udon Thani and Surat Thani  are now more ready than ever to host international meetings.

TCEB President, Mr. Chiruit Isarangkun Na Ayuthaya, said: "We thank ICCA for this great opportunity to host the 62nd ICCA Congress in Bangkok. Thailand has been a member of ICCA since 1974 and we are absolutely confident that it will continue to play an exemplary leadership role in promoting international association meetings. We look forward to welcoming ICCA delegates to the city of Bangkok as we celebrate an important milestone in the city's transformation to become the "Metropolitan City of Asia"  a safe, green, and economically and culturally vibrant city  under its 20-year Strategic Development Plan (2013-2032).

"Hosting the ICCA Congress 2023 will generate substantial economic returns and uncover countless new business opportunities for our MICE community. With more than 1,000 overseas and 200 Thai delegates expected, we estimate the congress itself will generate 3 million USD in revenue and other positive impacts, such as job creation, tax revenue and added values to the economy."

Mr. Chiruit pointed out that one segment of the congress programme is particularly important for Thailand's MICE professionals. The ICCA Business Exchange  the session where ICCA members share commercially important information on the bidding process, selection criteria and budgets of their recent events  can provide essential guidance for Thai MICE players in crafting winning bids. With more than 30 executives of international associations participating in the session, this is also a golden opportunity for local associations and regional stakeholders to form network and drive business development.

The ICCA Congress 2023 will also be a tremendous learning opportunity for Thailand's MICE Cities and local associations. TCEB has invited the governors of all Thailand's MICE Cities to participate in dialogue sessions alongside experts on international academic conventions. Their exchange of ideas and experiences will help each city further refine its MICE strategy. TCEB will also invite at least 20 local associations to attend ICCA's Incredible Impacts Programme meeting where the spotlight will be on how international conventions have helped bring positive change to societies around the world, while leaving behind inspiring legacy for local communities and the next generations. TCEB hopes that the local attendees will be inspired to create similarly impactful programmes following their interaction with at least 30 of their overseas counterparts.

"2023 will be the year of economic revival for Thailand. Our country will open to the world again and we will join hands with the world and ICCA to reimagine a new future for business events," said Mr. Chiruit.

Mr. Senthil Gopinath, CEO of the International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA) said, "I thank TCEB and Thailand for the ambition to host the ICCA Congress 2023. TCEB clearly demonstrated structured planning, support from crucial partners in the region, and offering a beautiful setting for guests to come together. There is no doubt that the ICCA Congress in Bangkok will showcase how business events can contribute to socio-economic development, enhance the intellectuality of the meetings industry, and be prepared for the future. I am sure ICCA delegates will be able to experience memorable Thai hospitality and professionalism at ICCA Congress 2023."

Thailand: Redefine Your Business Events

Experience the Extraordinary

About TCEB

A LEADING AGENCY AT THE FOREFRONT OF THAILAND'S MICE INDUSTRY

Established in 2004, Thailand Convention & Exhibition Bureau (Public Organization) or TCEB  the government agency under the supervision of the Prime Minister  has been assigned a role to promote, support and develop business events industry  corporate meetings, incentive trips, conventions, exhibitions, mega events and world festivals. Serving as a strategic partner, TCEB helps deliver creative ideas and solutions to bring success and fulfill the requirements of business events. The overarching goal is to drive Thailand to become a global MICE and mega events destination that can drive the country's strategic industries and national economy.

SOURCE Thailand Convention and Exhibition Bureau (TCEB)
"Welcoming someone of Emma's caliber and potential to our Wealth Advisors team is exciting," stated Leslie Crabill, Senior Vice President, Director of Wealth and Investments. "She epitomizes the BCT spirit, as a leader at Shepherd University, which includes being President of the Financial Planning club, as well as her outstanding performance at BCT while working her way through college. Emma will be a champion for our clients."

While working part time as a Teller with Bank of Charles Town, Ms. Espinosa attended Shepherd University from which she recently graduated Summa Cum Laude. While at Shepherd she was selected a McMurran Scholar, the highest academic honor of the university. Additionally, she earned entrance into the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society and was elected Senator for the Student Government Association. As noted earlier, Ms. Espinosa also served as President of the university's Financial Planning Club.

Ms. Espinosa is a native of Jefferson County, West Virginia. She is an active member of St. James Catholic Church and enjoys traveling, exercising, attending sporting events, and most especially spending time with friends and family.

BCT Wealth Advisors serve clients in D.C., Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia.

Securities and advisory services are offered through LPL Financial (LPL), a registered investment advisor and broker-dealer (member FINRA/SIPC). Insurance products are offered through LPL or its licensed affiliates. BCT-Bank of Charles Town and BCT Wealth Advisors are not registered as a broker-dealer or investment advisor. Registered representatives of LPL offer products and services using BCT Wealth Advisors, and may also be employees of BCT-Bank of Charles Town. These products and services are being offered through LPL or its affiliates, which are separate entities from, and not affiliates of, BCT-Bank of Charles Town or BCT Wealth Advisors.

Securities and insurance offered through LPL or its affiliates are:

Not Insured by FDIC or Any Other Government Agency, Not Bank Guaranteed, Not Bank Deposits or Obligations, May Lose Value

SOURCE BCT - Bank of Charles Town
NEW YORK, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Due to the increasing elderly population, growing demand for medicines, rising investment in healthcare, and the constant introduction of new products, the global biologics CDMO market was valued at $13,173.7 million in 2021. This is expected to reach $31,839.7 million by 2030, at a CAGR of 10.3% from 2021 to 2030, according to P&S Intelligence. With the rise in the cases of infections among people, pharma companies are engaging in partnerships with CDMOs for meeting the demand for antibiotics.

A share of 50% in the biologics CDMO market was held by drug substances in 2021, and this trend is expected to continue in the years to come. This will be because of the rising number of biologics approvals, predominantly by the FDA, along with the strong clinical pipelines and dipping rates of biologic drug development failures. The highest subcontracting revenue from drug substance production attributes to the monoclonal antibody (mAb).

Get the sample pages of this report at: https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/biologics-cdmo-market/report-sample

Key Findings of Biologics CDMO Market Report

Mammalian cell culture is likely to contribute revenue of $17,983.2 million in 2030, progressing with a CAGR of over 10% in the coming years, due to the growing production of bi- and tri-specific antibodies and antibodydrug conjugates.

in 2030, progressing with a CAGR of over 10% in the coming years, due to the growing production of bi- and tri-specific antibodies and antibodydrug conjugates. During COVID-19, the increasing requirement for vaccines and therapeutic antibodies has had a positive effect on the biologics CDMO market. Additionally, the pandemic exposed the flaws in the supply chain and the world's dependence on developing markets for APIs and generics.

The demand for clinical services is on the rise because of the outsourcing by the biopharmaceutical industry. To lessen the risks associated with this phase of drug development, biologics CDMOs' low drug costs and extensive experience are being leveraged by biopharma firms.

APAC is the largest and fastest-growing region in the market, with a CAGR of 10% during 20212030. This is attributable to an immense and quickly growing population demanding better access to medical drugs.

Furthermore, a surge in the GDP, government healthcare programs, and an increase in the rate of urbanization have extended the access to medical professionals and pharmacies for a large number of people.

As per the EFPIA, the pharmaceutical industry invested $46,144 million in 2020 in Europe for research, development, and introduction of new medicines.

Browse detailed report on Global Biologics CDMO Market Size and Demand Forecast Through 2030

India is a good prospect for the CDMO market as it has the FDA approval for a large number of medicines and is home to a highly competent workforce. With the improvement of healthcare ecosystem in emerging economies and growth of generic drug manufacturers, there will be a mammoth surge in the business of local CDMOs, as India has the potential to handle a vast number of products more lucratively.

The key players in the biologics CDMO market include Sandoz International GmbH (Novartis AG), JRS Pharma LP, BINEX Co. Ltd., Parexel International Corporation, Toyobo Co. Ltd., FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies U.S.A. Inc., Lonza Group Ltd., Samsung Biologics, WuXi Biologics (Cayman) Inc., and Boehringer Ingelheim. Many of them are involved in mergers and acquisitions to better their standing in the market.

Biologics CDMO Market Segmentation Analysis

By Product Type

Drug Product

Drug Substance

By Cell Line Type

Microbial

Mammalian

Viral Vector & Other Modalities

By Service Type

Clinical

Commercial

Regional Analysis

North America

U.S.



Canada

Europe

Germany



France



U.K.



Italy



Spain

Asia-Pacific

China



India



Japan



Australia



South Korea

Latin America

Brazil



Mexico

Middle East and Africa

and Saudi Arabia



South Africa

Browse Other Related Reports

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Global Dermatology Drugs Market Size and Growth Forecast Report

Global Complementary and Alternative Medicines Market Size and Growth Forecast Report

Global Regenerative Medicine Market Size and Growth Forecast Report

About P&S Intelligence

P&S Intelligence provides market research and consulting services to a vast array of industries across the world. As an enterprising research and consulting company, P&S believes in providing thorough insights on the ever-changing market scenario, to empower companies to make informed decisions and base their business strategies with astuteness. P&S keeps the interest of its clients at heart, which is why the insights we provide are both honest and accurate. Our long list of satisfied clients includes entry-level firms as well as multi-million-dollar businesses and government agencies.

Contact:

Prajneesh Kumar

P&S Intelligence

Phone: +1-347-960-6455

Email: [email protected]

Web: https://www.psmarketresearch.com

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SOURCE P&S Intelligence
DENVER, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- John Edward Lawson, the African American author, educator, and publisher behind Raw Dog Screaming Press, never expected to be distinguished as a guest of honor at this year's StokerCon. The annual Horror Writers Association conference, held at Denver's Cutis Hotel this Thursday through Sunday, is named after Bram Stoker, author of Dracula. Lawson's pioneering work as a publisher has previously been recognized with awards, but even after 25 years in the business industry acceptance is a new experience.

StokerCon guest of honor John Edward Lawson

"It's no surprise the success of movies like Jordan Peele's Get Out and shows like Lovecraft Country has made the industry sit up and take notice," Lawson says of Black creators in the horror space. He adds, "Experts are calling this a new golden age of genre publishing in general, and horror in specific, and the African diaspora influence on that can't be ignored."

One catalyst for the surge in Black-led horror projects is the work of the scholars and documentarians behind the acclaimed film, and its resultant series, Horror Noir. Of the Black academics in the horror field, Sheree Renee Thomas will also be a guest of honor at StokerCon alongside Lawson, as will one of the subjects of Horror Noir, filmmaker Ernest Dickerson. Half of this year's guests of honor are Black contributors to the genre.

Deepening the Academic Connection

As business owner and longtime supporter of horror conferences Lawson, with business partner Jennifer Barnes, decided to sponsor the Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference, or AnnRadCon, which functions as StokerCon's academic track. Pre-recorded presentations by scholars will be available throughout the convention virtually, with live presentations exclusive to the in-person event on Friday, May 13.

Nicholas Diak, co-chair of the conference, says of orchestrating this year's event, "A delight is finding out that Raw Dog Screaming Press will be sponsoring AnnRadCon this year! This is amazing because I love RDSP. We are sincerely grateful to Jennifer and John for all that they do for the writing community."

The Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference is available to all StokerCon attendees as part of registration for this hybrid event.

Scary Innovation

John Lawson is thankful for the community building efforts of HWA leadership and convention chairs alike. "Folks like John Palisano and James Chambers, not to mention Linda Addison and Brian Matthews, they all really rolled up their sleeves, got involved and made room for the rest of us to contribute."

Among his 20+ hours of programming Lawson will be leading a class titled Afro-Surrealism in Horror, participating in discussions of censorship, pushing boundaries with poetry, and other issues of business and craft, and will be onstage as a presenter during Saturday evening's Bram Stoker Awards Ceremony.

Ann Radcliffe Conference highlights include:

I Am My Sister's Keeper: The Dynamics of Black Sisters in Candyman (2021), Lovecraft Country , and Eve's Bayou by Rhonda Jackson Joseph

(2021), , and by Beauty in the Grotesque: Bernie Wrightson's Lifelong Obsession with Frankenstein's Monster by Michele Brittany

Lifelong Obsession with Frankenstein's Monster by Michele Brittany Bathing Bad: Feminine Vengeance and Masculine Vulnerability in the Showers of Horror by Karley Pardue

Distortions in the Looking Glass: The Hidden Horrors of Uncle Tom's Cabin and its Effects on Contemporary Black Horror by Anita Siraki

and its Effects on Contemporary Black Horror by Gaia Screaming by Brenda S. Tolian

Full information and tickets can be found at https://rawdogscreaming.com/rdsp-proudly-sponsors-annradcon-at-stokercon/.

About Raw Dog Screaming Press

Founded in 2003 by John Lawson and Jennifer Barnes, Raw Dog Screaming Press gives authors an outlet for weird, dark, unconventional books.

About the Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference

The Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference is part of the Horror Writers Association's Outreach Program. Created in 2016 by Michele Brittany and Nicholas Diak, the Ann Radcliffe Academic Conference has been a venue for horror scholars to present their work.

Media contact:

John Lawson

Co-Founder, Raw Dog Screaming Press

1 (301) 832-85321

[email protected]

SOURCE Raw Dog Screaming Press
CAMBRIDGE, England, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Darktrace, a global leader in cyber security AI, today announced that multi-award-winning Indonesian transport giant, Bluebird Group, has selected Darktrace AI to autonomously interrupt cyber-attacks.

Bluebird Group, which was established in 1972 and is listed on the Indonesian Stock Exchange, is the largest taxi operator in Indonesia. The company has over 2,000 employees and serves millions of passengers every month throughout Indonesia's major cities and tourism spots, as well as providing containers, charter buses and logistics services. As its services have become increasingly digitized through apps and online payment services, Bluebird sought a technology which could protect its digital estate in the face of a rising level of attacks against the sector.

Darktrace Antigena stood out to Bluebird when compared to other solutions because of its ability to autonomously stop in-progress attacks whilst allowing normal business operations. The artificial intelligence learns 'normal operations' for Bluebird, and from this not only detects anomalous activity but intelligently makes micro-decisions based on the unusual activity. The algorithms are outcome-driven and optimized to enforce normal business operations; interrupting emerging cyber-threats whilst allowing the business to function as normal even whilst under attack.

The technology uplifts the security team, defending against intellectual property theft and disruptive attacks like ransomware and supply chain attacks, allowing the team to focus on strategic business decisions.

Darktrace saw a 33% increase in attacks across its customer base in APAC in 2021. 12% of incidents detected by Darktrace across the region in 2021 were in Singapore alone. The transport sector was among those most targeted across Darktrace's customer base in APAC, as were financial services, manufacturing and the information and communications industries.

"Bluebird is committed to putting safety and security at the heart of our business, from the consumer experience through to our IT ecosystem," commented Sigit Djokosoetono, CEO at PT Blue Bird Tbk, part of Bluebird Group. "By adopting Darktrace's AI, we have bolstered the ability of our security team to keep pace with the evolving threat landscape and are protecting our customers and employees from cyber-threats with cutting-edge technology."

"We are proud to protect Bluebird Group, which provides vital transportation services to people across Indonesia," said Tony Jarvis, Director of Enterprise Security, Asia Pacific and Japan, Darktrace. "The transport sector is part of any nation's critical infrastructure and disruption to the public's ability to move around not only has knock-on effects for the economy but could threaten individuals' safety. Bluebird is a shining example for the transport sector globally, prioritizing defensive technology that is designed to minimise cyber disruption whilst keeping the lights on."

About Darktrace

Darktrace (DARK:L), a global leader in cyber security AI, delivers world-class technology that protects over 6,800 customers worldwide from advanced threats, including ransomware and cloud and SaaS attacks. Darktrace's fundamentally different approach applies Self-Learning AI to enable machines to understand the business in order to autonomously defend it. Headquartered in Cambridge, UK, the Group has more than 2,000 employees worldwide. Darktrace was named one of TIME magazine's 'Most Influential Companies' for 2021.

Media Contacts

Tom Bermingham

Brands2Life (UK)

+44 (0) 7983 857952

[email protected]

Tamana Mulchand / Royston Wah

Speyside Group (APAC)

+65 9654 4390

[email protected]

Jessica Cheney

CommStrat (US)

+1 419 350 4614

[email protected]







SOURCE Darktrace
"Ambitious founders, CEOs, and CMOs need a new basis for brand growth and agency value," said Trevor Hubbard, CEO of Butchershop Global. "Success-based strategies get derailed by foreseeable problems, and the fail-faster ethos of startups relegates branding and marketing to trial and error. Meanwhile, the traditional services orientation of agencies leaves them open to constant devaluation and resource drain. We're solving both problems with a system of concrete value, while providing a pedigree of expertise and creativity that yields transformative results for our client partners."

Beat Failure was recently used to reposition healthcare communication giant W2O as Real Chemistry, a leader in global health innovation that fuses technology, data and creativity. After acquiring more than a dozen companies during the pandemic, the new positioning helped Real Chemistry win recognition as 2022's SABRE Awards Healthcare Agency of The Year. For Nike, Beat Failure helped shape a consumerized global hiring experience, underscoring the need for a new digital platform, employer brand, and custom content to bring to life what working in the storied halls of one of the world's most iconic brands felt like. Today, clients like Dataiku, BFA Industries and Ironman are shaping the next chapter of their business using Butchershop's Beat Failure methodology and connected model of products.

Because Butchershop has broken products into granular detail, new business scoping takes an hour to identify clients' real needs based on what could cause the initiative to fail, map out product solutions and price, and deliver a plan of execution addressing all the failure points articulated with client partners. Butchershop has also launched a web-based app called Priio  that puts the Beat Failure methodology in the hands of organizations, teams, entrepreneurs and VCs.

"We're building a world-class creativity and technology practice, yes out of ambition, but also necessity for what our clients need," said Ben McNutt, Butchershop Chief Creative Officer and Associate Partner. "Customers and consumers want more honesty and consistency. Right now, the zeitgeist is saying, 'Clarity is a brand's greatest currency.' Our entire model is designed to deliver that for clients."

Over the last two years of using Beat Failure, Butchershop has increased revenue by 60% YOY as well as strategically acquired best-of-breed Web3 design and development agency Maniak in Guadalajara to build out greater capabilities for digital commerce and experiences. The agency also opened a "pod" space in Austria, and nearly tripled its employee headcount to 150 employees in three countries and 12 cities. As a completely decentralized workforce, Butchershop plans to open "pod" spaces for collaborative occasions in Los Angeles and New York, with a first US location to open in San Francisco Summer 2022. Further expansion into EMEA, LATAM and APAC markets is being executed through the agency's M+A strategy.

For more information, visit the new website created by Butchershop Global at Butchershop.co

About Butchershop

Founded in 2009, Butchershop Global is a growth and transformation company born and raised in Silicon Valley with teams in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Guadalajara, Mexico City and Vienna. The company connects consulting, creativity and technology to help brands break into emerging sectors or break out to lead them. Butchershop has turned an unwavering emphasis on clarity into the Beat Failure methodology, helping companies steer through the challenges of inflection points  whether they be at a moment of growth, scale, evolution, transformation or launch. Success is measured by the ability to change perception and increase awareness, retention, impressions, conversions, and revenue.

CONTACT:

Dania Jimenez

Communications Director

Butchershop Global

[email protected]

SOURCE Butchershop Global
PHOENIX, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Ten schools and organizations across the Cable One family of brands (Sparklight, Fidelity, ValuNet, Hargray) footprint were recently awarded $3,000 each to fund science, technology, engineering or math projects that will further enable student learning in these crucial areas.

Over the past three years, Cable One has awarded more than $80,000 to fund STEM initiatives through its Dream Bigger social media campaign.

K-12 schools and organizations in communities throughout the 24 states Cable One serves are invited to submit written entries each year, outlining how the award will be used to fund their STEM project and how the project benefits students. Winners are determined by public voting. 2022 Dream Bigger winners included:

Denison ISD B. McDaniel Intermediate School  Denison, Texas

The school's LEGO League builds and programs robots and competes in the LEGO League Challenge categories of robot design, robot game, innovation, and core values. The funds will be used to expand their program to more students.

 The school's LEGO League builds and programs robots and competes in the LEGO League Challenge categories of robot design, robot game, innovation, and core values. The funds will be used to expand their program to more students. Edinburgh Middle School Science Olympiad Team  Edinburgh, Ind.

In its inaugural season, the team competed in 26 different events at a regional competition and qualified for state finals. The team will use the award to pay for supplies and fund field trips to enhance skills in areas such as the solar system and meteorology.

 In its inaugural season, the team competed in 26 different events at a regional competition and qualified for state finals. The team will use the award to pay for supplies and fund field trips to enhance skills in areas such as the solar system and meteorology. Emporia Christian School  Emporia, Kans.

Dream bigger funds will be used to increase the device-to-student ratio, enhancing the use of technology in instruction.

 Dream bigger funds will be used to increase the device-to-student ratio, enhancing the use of technology in instruction. FIRST Robotics Team 5461 - the Victorian Engineered Robotic Nation (V.E.R.N.)  Meridian, Idaho

V.E.R.N. is an Explorer Post in the Mountain West BSA Council focused on STEM education and workforce skills. The team does demonstrations at local elementary schools, libraries and community events. Funds will be used to expand programs to more youth.

 V.E.R.N. is an Explorer Post in the Mountain West BSA Council focused on STEM education and workforce skills. The team does demonstrations at local elementary schools, libraries and community events. Funds will be used to expand programs to more youth. Mallory Elementary  Buffalo, Mo.

The winning funds will be used to purchase Ozobots to allow for the incorporation of robotics into the classroom and ensure all students gain access and experience with coding and robotics.

The winning funds will be used to purchase Ozobots to allow for the incorporation of robotics into the classroom and ensure all students gain access and experience with coding and robotics. Ocean Springs Upper Elementary Computer Science/Coding Club  Ocean Springs, Miss.

Dream Bigger funds will be used to purchase the Code and Go Robot Mouse, which will be used beginning in the 2022-23 school year to foster cross-curricular coding lessons.

 Dream Bigger funds will be used to purchase the Code and Go Robot Mouse, which will be used beginning in the 2022-23 school year to foster cross-curricular coding lessons. Pass Christian Public School District  Pass Christian, Miss.

The district is creating and hosting X-STREAM Learning Camps to ensure students have the ability to learn collaboration, communication, creativity, and critical thinking skills. The Dream Bigger grant will allow for the purchase of equipment such as 3-D printers, cameras, robotics kits, drones and more for summer camps, as well as two micro-intersessions built into the 2022-2023 academic calendar.

 The district is creating and hosting X-STREAM Learning Camps to ensure students have the ability to learn collaboration, communication, creativity, and critical thinking skills. The Dream Bigger grant will allow for the purchase of equipment such as 3-D printers, cameras, robotics kits, drones and more for summer camps, as well as two micro-intersessions built into the 2022-2023 academic calendar. Pell City High School  Pell City, Ala.

Dream Bigger funds will be used to provide students the opportunity to explore photography, videography, editing, and school news production by purchasing equipment that will allow students to edit highlight reels, game videos, speeches and more.

 Dream Bigger funds will be used to provide students the opportunity to explore photography, videography, editing, and school news production by purchasing equipment that will allow students to edit highlight reels, game videos, speeches and more. Rolla Robotics  Rolla, Mo.

A self-funded student club, Rolla Robotics competes in events and competitions throughout the state of Missouri . Dream Bigger funds will be used to help pay for parts, travel and registration fees.

 A self-funded student club, Rolla Robotics competes in events and competitions throughout the state of . Dream Bigger funds will be used to help pay for parts, travel and registration fees. Veterans High School AFJROTC  Kathleen, Ga.

In August, the school will be opening up a STEM track as a part of its curriculum, including rocketry, drones, e-sports, model aircraft design, and robotics. The Dream Bigger award will be essential in purchasing equipment, including trainer drones, Nintendo Switch e-sports consoles, ESTES model rocket kits and VEX robotics supply inventory.

"We continue to be impressed by the variety of applicants we receive each year and all that these students are able to accomplish," said Trish Niemann, Cable One Vice President, Communications Strategy. "Cable One is honored to help these students dream bigger and we are excited to see how they will continue to utilize technology both inside and outside the classroom as they grow into the future leaders of the communities we serve."

About Cable One

Cable One, Inc. (NYSE: CABO) is a leading broadband communications provider committed to connecting customers and communities to what matters most. Through Sparklight and the associated Cable One family of brands, the Company serves more than 1.1 million residential and business customers in 24 states. Over its fiber-optic infrastructure, the Cable One family of brands provide residential customers with a wide array of connectivity and entertainment services, including Gigabit speeds, advanced WiFi and video. For businesses ranging from small and mid-market up to enterprise, wholesale and carrier, the Company offers scalable, cost-effective solutions that enable businesses of all sizes to grow, compete and succeed.

SOURCE Cable One
Carnival Cruise Line President Christine Duffy; Bahamas Prime Minister The Honourable Philip Davis; Bahamas Deputy Prime Minister The Honourable I. Chester Cooper; Minister for Grand Bahama The Honourable Ginger Moxey; and The Grand Bahama Port Authority Acting Chairman Sarah St. George; along with Carnival Corporation CEO Arnold Donald and representatives from Carnival Corporation and the local community used ceremonial shovels to officially mark the beginning of construction.

"With the start of this Carnival project, Grand Bahama is now on the better side of reaching its true economic potential," said The Honourable Philip Davis, Prime Minister of The Bahamas. "This investment will provide much needed jobs but will also signal new hope for the island's recovery."

The new Carnival Grand Bahama cruise port destination, expected to open in late 2024, is being developed on the south side of the island and will continue to serve as a gateway to Grand Bahama while also offering guests a uniquely Bahamian experience with many exciting features and amenities, along with business opportunities for the residents of Grand Bahama.

"As we celebrate our 50-year partnership with The Bahamas, today's groundbreaking on our incredible new Grand Bahama destination represents an opportunity to collaborate with the government and people of Grand Bahama  to contribute to the local economy through job and business opportunities, meaningfully engage with local communities, and further expand our experience offerings for our guests who will have a breathtaking new port of call to enjoy," said Carnival Cruise Line President Christine Duffy. "Our sincere thanks to the government of The Bahamas and The Grand Bahama Port Authority for their continued support as we begin construction. Our guests already love The Bahamas, and we are certain this new project will give them even more reason to want to visit."

The Grand Bahama Port Authority Acting Chairman Sarah St. George commented: "The new Carnival cruise port destination will have a monumental impact on our island's economy, including a panoply of new business opportunities, a huge surge in tourist visitors, as well as increased activities for established businesses. It is transformational in the true sense of the word. We are immensely grateful to Carnival for choosing Freeport and Grand Bahama for this flagship project. Today, we mark this incredible achievement made possible by the efforts of Carnival with The Grand Bahama Port Authority, Port Group Limited, the Grand Bahama Development Company and Freeport Harbour Company, and the Government of The Bahamas. A project of this magnitude is only possible through genuine collaboration. Grand Bahamians have withstood life-changing challenges, particularly in recent years. Despite these, Carnival never wavered in their commitment to building their next cruise port in Freeport. We are very proud to have played our part to the best of our ability towards making this a reality."

The cruise port development includes a pier able to accommodate up to two Excel-class ships simultaneously welcoming guests to a stunning white-sand beach The Bahamas are known for. Guests will be able to explore and enjoy Grand Bahama by way of sea, via a dedicated shore excursion dock, or by land, via the dedicated ground transportation hub. The cruise port itself will also feature an area designated as a nature reserve and an interior pool feature, along with many Bahamian-operated retail, food and beverage options for guests to enjoy.

"The Carnival groundbreaking is very significant to the residents of Grand Bahama. This development signals opportunities for creatives, vendors, and small and medium sized businesses, and represents our commitment to collaboration with local and international partners for the betterment of our island," said The Honourable Ginger M. Moxey, Minister for Grand Bahama.

The cruise pier will allow Grand Bahama to welcome guests from Carnival's larger ships, such as the 5,282-passenger Mardi Gras, which debuted in 2021 as the line's largest and most innovative ship and North America's first cruise ship powered by Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), and Carnival Celebration, sister ship to Mardi Gras, which will begin sailing from Miami later this year.

Added Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Tourism, Investment and Aviation The Honourable I. Chester Cooper: "The cruise port is an integral part of our plan to restore Grand Bahama to economic viability. Carnival will play a critical role in stimulating our economy and shining a light on Grand Bahama as a rejuvenated and premier destination in our country and the region. We believe the excitement of what is happening on Grand Bahama will be contagious."

Today's event was an important next step as construction gets underway. Additional details on the design, features and the name of the cruise port destination will be revealed over the coming months as Carnival finalizes its plans to maximize the fun for their guests and the opportunities to partner with local businesses and other stakeholders.

For additional information on Carnival Cruise Line and to book a cruise vacation, call 1-800-CARNIVAL, visit www.carnival.com, or contact your favorite travel advisor or online travel site.

ABOUT CARNIVAL CRUISE LINE

Carnival Cruise Line, part of Carnival Corporation & plc (NYSE/LSE: CCL;NYSE: CUK), is proud to be known as America's Cruise Line with a total of 23 ships, sailing from 14 U.S. homeports and employing more than 40,000 team members from 120 nationalities. Carnival's newest ship, Mardi Gras, featuring the first roller coaster at sea and the first in the Americas powered by eco-friendly Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), sailed from Port Canaveral, Fla., July 31, 2021. As part of its 50th Birthday festivities, Carnival Celebration, sister ship to Mardi Gras, is scheduled to debut in late 2022 from PortMiami, as well as Carnival Jubilee from Galveston in 2023.

SOURCE Carnival Cruise Line
CCI has grown rapidly in Kenya since entering the market in 2016, specialising in the operation of outbound, inbound and web chat multi-channel contact centres, serving leading international brands, primarily in the mobile, technology, telecommunications and financial industry sectors.

CCI's expansion comes amid unprecedented demand for the company's young, highly skilled workforce in Kenya, which has swelled to over 2,000 agents in the last 12 months. The facility at Tatu City, scheduled for completion in Q4 2023, will double the firm's capacity to more than 4,000 seats in a single location.

"CCI's business in Kenya, which serves well-known American, British, Australian and other international brands, continues to accelerate, thanks to our dynamic workforce, quality assurance and operational excellence," said Mark Chana, CCI's Chief Operating Officer. "We are excited to build CCI's home at Tatu City, in a business-friendly environment that focuses on the welfare of our employees."

CCI's contact centre will provide business process outsourcing, or BPO, that supports the whole customer lifecycle in both traditional voice interactions as well as digital.

The Grade A office building with five floors and two levels of underground parking will anchor Tatu Central, the business district of Tatu City.

"The building is custom-designed for CCI, with large floor plates for flexible call centre operations, rapid lifts for seamless shift changes, ample natural light and employee welfare at its core," said Greg Pearson, co-founder and CEO of GREA. "We are pleased to develop this spectacular building for a world-class client like CCI in Africa."

As part of the development, Tatu City, which is owned and developed by Rendeavour, Africa's largest new city builder, will construct a transport hub to accommodate CCI's thousands of employees.

"The Tatu City ecosystem  with homes, businesses, schools, parks and other amenities  is the ideal location for CCI's operations and employees," said Stephen Jennings, Founder and CEO of Rendeavour. "A first mover in all aspects, CCI embodies the global shift of businesses from congested urban areas to decentralised environments like Tatu City that provide live-work-play solutions for employees and investors alike."

The CCI office at Tatu City is the latest in a strategic partnership between GREA and Rendeavour, which spans commercial, warehousing and logistics developments at Rendeavour's new cities in East and West Africa.

About CCI Global (www.cciglobal.com)

CCI Global is Africa's largest provider of customer management services to the international market. The CCI group of companies provides Business Process Outsourcing services, including consumer sales, service, and digital customer management strategies to some of the leading brands in the UK, Australia, and Africa in the mobile technology, telecommunications, financial services, retail, and leisure sectors.

About Gateway Real Estate Africa ( https://greafrica.group/ )

Gateway Real Estate Africa is a private real estate development company specialising in the turnkey construction of accommodation for multinational corporates and retailers wishing to expand their operations on the African continent. For qualifying investors, Gateway Real Estate Africa provides direct real estate exposure to high-yielding US-dollar denominated rental income streams and robust growth potential.

About Tatu City (www.tatucity.com)

Tatu City is a 5,000-acre new city on Nairobi's doorstep with homes, schools, businesses, a shopping district, medical clinic, nature areas and recreation for more than 250,000 residents and tens of thousands of day visitors. Tatu City's schools educate thousands of students daily, a range of homes suits all incomes and more than 60 businesses thrive in the country's first operational Special Economic Zone. Located 30 minutes from Westlands, Tatu City represents a new way of living and thinking for all Kenyans in a live, work and play environment that is free from traffic congestion and long-distance commuting.

SOURCE Tatu City / Rendeavour
Viruses constantly change through mutation and these mutations can give rise to new variants with unique characteristics. Multiple variants of the virus that cause COVID-19 have been documented globally during the pandemic. Cepheid is proactively addressing this increasing genetic diversity by enhancing gene coverage. The new plus version of the test incorporates a 3rd conserved genetic target for SARS-CoV-2 detection to meet the challenge of future viral mutations and optimizes nucleocapsid gene probes to enable consistent virus detection.

Xpert Xpress CoV-2 plus joins Xpert Xpress CoV-2/Flu/RSV plus and others in Cepheid's growing portfolio of PCRplus respiratory tests that deliver rapid, accurate, and actionable respiratory results. Xpert Xpress CoV-2/Flu/RSV plus continues to be the most appropriate product for when multiple viruses that cause influenza-like illnesses are circulating. Xpert Xpress CoV2 plus is authorized to be used on any individuals, including for screening those without symptoms or reasons to suspect COVID-19.1

Xpert Xpress CoV-2 plus is designed for use on any of Cepheid's over 40,000 GeneXpert systems placed worldwide. The test can provide rapid on-demand detection of SARS-CoV-2 in as soon as 20 minutes for positive results.2

"From the beginning of the pandemic, we have been keenly focused on staying ahead of SARS-CoV-2 genetic drift and have designed our tests in anticipation of current and potential future variants." said David Persing, M.D., Ph.D., EVP, and Chief Scientific Officer. "The high sensitivity of this test is now especially important for recently announced Test-to-Treat initiatives, for which early detection is important for achieving the best clinical outcomes of antiviral therapies."

Xpert Xpress CoV-2 plus is expected to begin shipping to US customers in May.

Visit www.cepheid.com/coronavirus for more information, videos and package inserts.

1. PPA and NPA for asymptomatic specimens were calculated using anterior nasal swab specimens

2. With early assay termination for positives only; reporting of negatives in approximately 30 minutes

About Cepheid

Based in Sunnyvale, Calif., Cepheid is a leading molecular diagnostics company. Cepheid is dedicated to improving healthcare by developing, manufacturing, and marketing accurate yet easy-to-use molecular systems and tests. By automating highly complex and time-consuming manual procedures, the company's solutions deliver a better way for institutions of any size to perform sophisticated molecular diagnostic testing for organisms and genetic-based diseases. Through its strong molecular biology capabilities, the company is focusing on those applications where accurate, rapid, and actionable test results are needed most, such as managing infectious diseases and cancer. For more information, visit http://www.cepheid.com.

About Emergency Use Authorization Status

This product has not been FDA cleared or approved, but has been authorized by FDA under an EUA for use by authorized laboratories. This product has been authorized only for the detection of nucleic acid from SARS-CoV-2, not for any other viruses or pathogens. The emergency use of this product is only authorized for the duration of the declaration that circumstances exist justifying the authorization of emergency use of in vitro diagnostics for detection and/or diagnosis of COVID-19 under Section 564(b)(1) of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, 21 U.S.C.  360bbb-3(b)(1), unless the declaration is terminated or authorization is revoked sooner.

For Cepheid Media Inquiries:

Darwa Peterson

[email protected]

SOURCE Cepheid
For the second year in a row, Chicago cultural institutions and dignitaries will celebrate Africa Day, an occasion celebrated globally for 59 years, which honors the unity and cultural diversity of African nations through arts, commerce, and diplomacy.

CHICAGO, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- On May 25th, cultural institutions, consulates, businesses, and communities across Chicago will celebrate Africa Day. This holiday, which has been celebrated by African communities and nations for nearly 60 years internationally, honors the diplomatic, economic, and cultural legacy of the African Uniona collective of 55 representative states who negotiate trade and commerce on the continent.

Last year, Governor Pritzker issued a proclamation naming May 25th Africa Day in the state of Illinois, and Chicago celebrated with a reception on the city's North side attended by various dignitaries, including representatives from Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller.

This year, in honor of Africa Day, several events are scheduled, including a flag raising ceremony of the African Union flag on Wednesday, May 25 from 12-1 P.M. at the Daley Plaza. In addition to this several co-sponsoring Chicago cultural organizations, including the Muslim American Leadership Alliance, will host special community events. The festivities will be attended by Chicago community leaders and various members of the Chicago Consular Corps, including representatives from Morocco, Egypt, Ethiopia, Cape Verde, Comoros, and the Republic of Congo.

Africa Day honors the contributions of African nations and peoples to Chicago's shared cultural heritage; All are invited to join in this celebration and the important cultural moment it represents.

For press inquiries, please contact:

Zainab Khan | President, Muslim American Leadership Alliance | [email protected]

Charif Hachim | Honorary Consul General, Comoros | [email protected]

SOURCE Muslim American Leadership Alliance
The partnership will bring the first open and carrier-neutral Cable Landing Station (CLS) to India to provide new routes and address the ever-growing demand for capacity

to provide new routes and address the ever-growing demand for capacity TEAS will provide the lowest latency and high resiliency required between Asia and Europe by the cloud and content providers

and by the cloud and content providers Lightstorm's plans to build a chain of open CLS to set the foundation for robust digital infrastructure designed to elevate the country's digital economy

HAMILTON, Bermuda, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Cinturion Corp Ltd., a global provider of scalable, subsea and terrestrial capacity-based network solutions, announced that it has reached an agreement with Lightstorm as its landing partner in India.

As part of the agreement, Cinturion's TEAS  Trans Europe Asia System, an `open-access' submarine and terrestrial network, will be hosted by Lightstorm to strengthen connectivity between India, the Middle East and Europe. Lightstorm will use its carrier-neutral and open CLS to herald a new era in the landing of submarine cable systems in India.

TEAS will seamlessly link two new connections across the Arabian and Mediterranean Seas and continue with two paths interlinking the Middle East, with multiple routes across the Arabian Peninsula and a route through the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea. TEAS low latency and diverse routing will change the global traffic patterns by delivering cutting-edge solutions strengthening connectivity between India, the Middle East and Europe.

In India, cable landing stations are captive in nature, which means the landing party service provider holds a monopoly over access to the fiber. As a result, the market is controlled by a limited number of service providers, leading to high bandwidth prices in India. It is this challenge that Lightstorm seeks to tackle by launching a chain of truly open-access cable landing stations in the country.

Lightstorm offers an unprecedented advantage to its customers by integrating its open CLS with a first-of-its-kind utility-grade fiber network, SmartNet, which connects seven key economic hubs with over 12,000 km of fiber, connecting 45+ multi-tenant data centers currently and aiming to connect 100+ MTDCs in the near future. This provides an end-to-end low latency route for customers to access digital hubs between India and Europe, through SmartNet.

Bill Marra, Chief Commercial Officer of Cinturion, says, "We are extremely excited to partner with Lightstorm and deliver a network that will ensure secure, resilient, and redundant communications with our Open-Access Carrier-Neutral Solutions to further establish India as a hub for international connectivity."

Ranjan Banerjee, Chief Strategy Officer at Lightstorm, says, "The growing data consumption and the digital aspirations of India demand best-in-class digital infrastructure. Collaboration with Cinturion will not only contribute to this growth but will also bring diversity to the existing cable systems in the country. We look forward to a longstanding and fulfilling partnership with Cinturion."

About Cinturion Corp Ltd.

With its key management having a long history of involvement in the development and implementation of submarine telecommunications cable systems worldwide, is focused on the development of new fiber-optic networks utilizing the latest submarine cable systems coupled with the latest terrestrial technology for greenfield or underserved markets. The strength of Cinturion comes from its diverse and experienced members' profiles that includes senior management, technical, financial, project management, systems engineering and sales, representing all the core elements required for successfully implementing major international systems.

About Lightstorm

Lightstorm is building infrastructure for hyperscale networking in South Asia and Southeast Asia to accelerate the region's growth and spur innovation in the digital economy. We are a pioneer in building a first-of-its-kind utility-grade resilient fiber network, SmartNet, in several countries in the region. A trusted partner of several Fortune 500 companies, Lightstorm is creating a robust foundation of digital infrastructure to create new sources of value and differentiation for businesses. Connect with us on LinkedIn.

For Further Information Visit:

www.cinturiongroup.com

www.lightstormtelecom.com

For Media Inquiries Contact:

Lisa Cruise, VP - Marketing, Cinturion: [email protected]

Harnoor Kanwar, Lead Marketing, Lightstorm: [email protected]

SOURCE Lightstorm
WASHINGTON, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Students from Boulder, Colorado, will have an opportunity next week to hear from American and European astronauts aboard the International Space Station. The space-to-Earth call will air live at 12:05 p.m. EDT Monday, May 16, on NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency's website.

NASA astronaut and Fairview High School graduate Jessica Watkins and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti will answer prerecorded video questions. Participation in the downlink is part of an ongoing schoolwide event focusing on leadership and supports the goal of inspiring students to reach their full potentials and learn about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics opportunities.

While the downlink with Fairview High School students will be conducted virtually, students and staff will gather to watch the event in person at school. Media interested in covering the event should contact Fairview's Randy Barber at: 720-561-5823 or [email protected].

Linking students directly to astronauts aboard the space station provides unique, authentic experiences designed to enhance student learning, performance, and interest in STEM. Astronauts living in space on the orbiting laboratory communicate with NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston 24 hours a day through the Near Space Network Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS).

For more than 21 years, astronauts have continuously lived and worked aboard the space station, testing technologies, performing science, and developing the skills needed to explore farther from Earth. Through NASA's Artemis program, the agency will send astronauts to the Moon, with eventual human exploration of Mars. Inspiring the next generation of explorers  the Artemis Generation  ensures America will continue to lead in space exploration and discovery.

See videos and lesson plans highlighting research on the International Space Station at:

https://www.nasa.gov/stemonstation

SOURCE NASA
The symposium, "Digging DeeperUncovering Expanded Patient Insights through Linked Data," will take place on May 16 and offer innovative methodologies to link applicable claims data with patient registry data as well as explore the benefits of leveraging multiple linked data sources. Panelists will describe the attributes of both data sources and offer specific examples of how novel insights have been derived from the unique combination of claims and patient registry data.

"We are linking best in class real-world data sets so biopharmaceutical organizations can better understand patients and physicians can optimize care of their patients," shared Heather von Allmen, Senior Director at CorEvitas and symposium panelist. "Combining claims data with patient registry data presents the patient's lived experience, from medication adherence and hospital visits to pharmacy refills and socioeconomic factors."

Claims data are widely used in health economics and outcomes research to better understand topics such as medication adherence and healthcare resource utilization. However, these data are limited, typically only including patient demographics, diagnoses, procedures, and pharmacy script data. CorEvitas' patient registry data capture clinical measures from both physicians and patients, including patient reported outcomes. By linking administrative claims data with clinical registry data, additional dimension is gained on both the patient journey and treatment experience.

"Stakeholders across the healthcare ecosystem, including biopharmaceutical organizations, payers, and physicians are looking for a consolidated view of clinical measures, patient adherence, laboratory values, and economic outcomes to better understand the patient journey," said Scott Robinson, VP of Health Economics and Outcomes Research, a member of the Inovalon Insights team, and symposium panelist. "At ISPOR, we are excited to share use cases that demonstrate the benefits of combining applicable data sets and offer attendees practical strategies for gleaning new patient insights."

About CorEvitas

CorEvitas is the built-for-purpose, gold-standard provider of real-world evidence. Through syndicated registry data and analytic services, CorEvitas supports biopharmaceutical companies to demonstrate the value of their products to clinicians, patients, payers, and regulators. CorEvitas operates eight major autoimmune and inflammatory registries across the U.S., Canada, and Japan, collecting data from almost 500 participating investigator sites. In addition to supporting hundreds of manuscripts and abstracts, CorEvitas has supported post-approval safety commitments for multiple newly approved treatments in autoimmune diseases for both U.S. and European regulators. CorEvitas has built on its syndicated registry business with additional complementary capabilities over time. The Precision Medicine business advances the molecular understanding of disease and prognostic tools by pairing registry data with select biospecimens and 'omics data. The Patient Experience business complements and strengthens the company's strong presence in disease registries by providing market-leading expertise in supporting innovative, evidence-based patient engagement initiatives across the product lifecycle. This includes the HealthUnlocked technology platform, which hosts over 1.5 million patients in hundreds of condition-specific communities and significantly expands the scope of patient experiential data. The Specialty EMR Data business has deep relationships with the NHS and leading UK academic institutions and gives CorEvitas access to a broad range of UK and international data sets across primary and secondary care, including access to a leading retinal data set. CorEvitas is Headquartered in Waltham, MA and is a portfolio company of Audax Private Equity.

About Inovalon

Inovalon is a leading provider of cloud-based platforms empowering data-driven healthcare. Through the Inovalon ONE Platform, Inovalon brings to the marketplace a national-scale capability to interconnect with the healthcare ecosystem, aggregate and analyze data in real time, and empower the application of resulting insights to drive meaningful impact at the point of care. Leveraging its Platform, unparalleled proprietary datasets, and industry-leading subject matter expertise, Inovalon enables better care, efficiency, and financial performance across the healthcare ecosystem. From health plans and provider organizations, to pharmaceutical, medical device, and diagnostics companies, Inovalon's unique achievement of value is delivered through the effective progression of "Turning Data into Insight, and Insight into Action." Supporting thousands of customers, including all 25 of the top 25 U.S. health plans, all 25 of the top 25 global pharma companies, 24 of the top 25 U.S. healthcare provider systems, and many of the leading pharmacy organizations, device manufacturers, and other healthcare industry constituents, Inovalon's technology platforms and analytics are informed by data pertaining to more than one million physicians, 594,000 clinical facilities, 348 million Americans, and 68 billion medical events. For more information, visit Inovalon's website.

CONTACT INFORMATION:

CorEvitas, LLC

Erem Latif

(508) 408-5529

[email protected]

Inovalon

Whitney Swistock

(612) 277-3953

[email protected]

SOURCE CorEvitas, LLC
NEW YORK , May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- DailyPay, the country's most trusted * earned wage access provider, has been recognized at the 2022 ADP Marketplace Partner Summit for "Best Marketing and PR" for their thought leadership efforts including blogs, bylines, case studies, videos, industry event activation, and social media engagement surrounding earned wage access.

Partnering with America's largest employers, DailyPay's proprietary technology provides millions of American workers the opportunity to access their earned income as they earn it. With the power of choice and control over their earned pay, employees are able to pay bills, spend, save, or invest on their own schedule without waiting for an arbitrary payday.

Named a Platinum Partner and listed as a Bestseller on ADP Marketplace , the DailyPay earned wage access solution integrates with most ADP platforms, resulting in turnkey implementation for ADP clients. Research shows that employees are able to better manage their financial lives with DailyPay benefits. By providing benefits to employees, organizations can leverage themselves amongst others in a challenging labor market. Using DailyPay benefits can help:

Attract top talent and reduce turnover in competitive labor markets

Improve productivity by alleviating financial stress, which can be a distraction at work

Maintain payroll integrity with no additional withholding, paper statements, funding or money movement required

DailyPay, powered by its industry-leading technology platform, is on a mission to build a new financial system. Partnering with some of America's best-in-class employers, including Dollar Tree and Adecco, DailyPay is the recognized gold-standard in on-demand pay. Through its massive data network, proprietary funding model and connections into over 6,000 endpoints in the banking system, DailyPay works to ensure that money is always in the right place at the right time for employers, merchants and financial institutions. DailyPay is building technology and the mindset to reimagine the way money moves, from the moment work starts. DailyPay is headquartered in New York City, with operations based in Minneapolis. For more information, visit www.dailypay.com/press .

*Global Brands Magazine 2021 "Most Trusted EWA Provider"

Media Contacts

David Schwarz, DailyPay

Email: [email protected]

Gabriella Lourie, DailyPay

Email: [email protected]

Jason Ledder, ADP

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE DailyPay
WASHINGTON, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- DCI Consulting Group, Inc. (DCI) is pleased to announce that Evan Szarenski has joined DCI's Audit Strategy & Regulatory Affairs team as a Senior Consultant. The addition of Mr. Szarenski is a strategic hire for DCI, enhancing their commitment of providing the best OFCCP audit support and consulting services for their clients.

Prior to joining DCI, Mr. Szarenski spent 11 years at the U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP). Most recently, he served as the Director of Regional Operations. In this role, he was responsible for setting the framework for compliance reviews, investigations, and enforcement priorities for execution under Executive Order 11246, Title VII, Section 503, the Vietnam Era Veterans' Readjustment and Assistance Act, and more.

In his new role at DCI, Mr. Szarenski will assist clients in meeting regulatory obligations and lead the full lifecycle of strategic OFCCP audit support for his clients, representing them from audit submission through audit closure.

David Cohen, President of DCI, stated that "Evan Szarenski brings incredible insight to DCI with his experience at OFCCP ensuring contractor compliance with regulations, policies, and procedures. Our clients will benefit from his breadth of knowledge."

About DCI

DCI is a human resources risk management consulting firm. Members of DCI's staff are recognized experts in a variety of spaces, including diversity, equity & inclusion metrics, pay equity, systemic compensation discrimination analyses, affirmative action plan development, employee selection and test validation, and OFCCP audit and litigation support.

About the Audit Strategy & Regulatory Affairs Team

DCI offers audit support through the Audit Strategy & Regulatory Affairs team. The team partners with clients to negotiate with OFCCP and navigate the audit process. They work with clients to assess next steps, provide additional analyses, back pay calculations, and guidance. Their holistic support has included defending their work at a high stakes national level.

Contact: Amanda Beety, [email protected]

SOURCE DCI Consulting Group, Inc.
NAARDEN, The Netherlands, and ZUG, Switzerland, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Digital Trust Solutions (DTS), a software development, management and consultancy firm specializing in customer compliance, and Concordium a Web 3 company providing a Layer-1, proof-of-stake blockchain with built in ID layer to ease regulatory compliance, announce today a new partnership, where DTS will act as global ID verification provider on the Concordium blockchain. Concordium's ID layer, Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) technology, and partnership with ID providers, such as DTS, ensures user privacy while enhancing accountability and trust in the digital ecosphere.

"With DTS' Identity Services, users of CCD wallets are authenticated based on locally available digital identities, NFC chip reader or by means of a Passport/Driving License or National ID card with a selfie check," said Arjan van Diemen, CEO of Digital Trust Solutions and further explains, "All transactions will be stored in an identification file with independent evidence, off-chain. If required by regulators, user identities and their transactions may be revoked by a set of independent identity revokers. In this way we bridge the gap between the virtual and real world and meet regulatory requirements".

Headquartered in Switzerland, Concordium is a Layer-1, proof-of-stake, sustainable blockchain with ID layer which makes it compliance ready from day one. This innovative identity layer, at the protocol level, offers transactional privacy while supporting accountability towards relevant regulators and, as such, lays the basis for compliance readiness from day one. Concordium's methodology ensures instant finalization and high throughput, at low and predictable transaction fees.

In addition to running identity verification services on Concordium, Digital Trust Solutions will actively participate in the ecosystem development and collaborate with Concordium on use case development and enterprise blockchain adoption.

"With the Concordium ecosystem, the decentralized blockchain space is maturing and we are looking forward to working as a part of this ecosystem which provides so many interesting new business model options for the ever increasing number of participants," said Arjan van Diemen, CEO of Digital Trust Solutions.

"It's a great pleasure to work with the DTS team who has shown great interest in the decentralized blockchain space and we look forward to collaborating with DTS on driving innovative solutions to the Concordium ecosystem," said Mikael Breinholst, Head of Partner Integration at Concordium.

CONTACT:

Media Contact

Sigal Biran-Nagar

VP Marketing

[email protected]

+972 54 9222 634

Media Contact:

Marinus Kreuze

COO

[email protected]

+31 - (0)6 - 5332 7216

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

https://news.cision.com/concordium/r/digital-trust-solutions-to-act-as-global-id-verification-provider-for-concordium-blockchain,c3565221

SOURCE Concordium
GUATEMALA CITY, May 11, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Without giving an exact date for security reasons, in recent days, Dionisio Gutierrez was part of a group of experts on reconstruction and development issues that traveled to various cities of Ukraine for 3 days.

Gutierrez described the trip as dramatic and sad, but at the same time hopeful after seeing the determination of the Ukrainians to defend their country.

The group flew from Madrid to Warsaw and then they were taken in several helicopters to Chelm. After getting to the border with Ukraine, a military convoy took them to Kyiv. Along the way they witnessed death, drama and destruction.

They visited Bucha and the cemeteries with mass graves. Gutierrez affirms that there is evidence of war crimes committed by the Russians troops.

They spent two nights in an abandoned school in Irpin, in the northwest of Kyiv, which they used as a base to move around the region.

Gutierrez and the group met with civil society leaders and specialists from various think tanks to discuss the reconstruction and development plan;, and to design the formulation of public policies so that Ukraine will soon become a modern European nation, with checks and balances system, rule of law and freedom. Fundacion Libertad y Desarrollo will participate in this effort.

The participants of the mission signed confidentiality agreements on the visit to Ukraine to ensure their safety and that of the organizers.

At the end of the visit, Dr. Gutierrez said that it will take a few weeks to assimilate the experiences and emotions felt on this trip to the land invaded by the Russian tyrant; and affirmed that the respect and admiration he feels for the Ukrainian people, for its army and for its president, will accompany him until the last of his days.

Dionisio Gutierrez is a businessman, activist and communicator with a PhD in Sociology and Political Science. President of the Latin American think-tank Fundacion Libertad y Desarrollo (Freedom and Development Foundation) and host of the weekly television program Razon de Estado. He is a member of the Latin American Council of Georgetown University and of the Council of the Harvard Kennedy School. In 2021, he became the only Latin American on the Freedom House Council.

For more information, visit https://fundacionlibertad.com/

SOURCE Fundacion Libertad y Desarrollo
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Dr. Miguel A. Delgado has been recognized as one of three top plastic surgeons by threebestrated.com, a website which determines top local businesses, professionals, restaurants, healthcare providers and more. This distinction is determined based on prior awards history, online ratings and other relevant criteria according to a 50-point inspection. Three Best Rated does not accept paid listings and independently determines their top three choices for various industries and professionals in key cities.

Miguel Delgado, M.D., is a Board Certified Plastic Surgeon and certified by the America Board of Plastic Surgery. Dr. Delgado has received multiple top award for being an outstanding cosmetic surgeon in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has offices in San Francisco, Union Square, and Novato in Marin County. Before and After photos of a patient of Miguel Delgado, M.D. who had a complete facelift procedure which includes an eyebrow lift, upper and lower eyelid lift, lower face and neck lift and a TCA chemical peel.

Dr. Delgado graduated with honors from San Francisco University of California Medical School before pursuing an internship and residency at Johns Hopkins University Hospital School in Baltimore, Maryland. He is board-certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery and a member of the American Society of Plastic Surgery. In addition to treating patients through a range of plastic surgery procedures including abdominoplasty, body lifts, breast augmentation and facelifts. Dr. Delgado is known worldwide as one of the top gynecomastia specialists and operates gynecomastia.org, the world's largest gynecomastia forum.

Previously, Dr. Delgado was named a Top Doctor by San Francisco Magazine in 2010, 2016 and 2017, a Top Doctor by Castle Connolly in 2015 and a Top Plastic Surgeon by Sonoma County Magazine in 2016 and 2017.

Those interested may learn more about Dr. Delgado by visiting dr-delgado.com, calling (415) 898-4161 or reading reviews at his Novato or San Francisco locations.

Contact:

Dr. Delgado

(415) 898-4161

SOURCE Dr. Miguel Delgado
SEOUL, South Korea, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- On May 12th, 2022, SKY Technology Co., LTD announced that SKY Play took its first step towards becoming an official blockchain platform by listing its cryptocurrency, SKY Play Token(SKP) on MEXC Globalone of the world's leading digital-asset trading platforms.

SKP, the key currency in the SKY Play platform, uses the Polygon(MATIC) network, which offers low transaction fees, speed, and scalability as one of the top Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain.

Following its cryptocurrency listing on MEXC Global, SKY Technology will release a variety of new lifestyle content via SKY Playan easy NFT business platformand will accelerate its listings on other global cryptocurrency exchanges. Under the leadership of the Singapore corporation, starting with eP2E gamesthe company will collaborate with industry-leading partners to expand its content services in various fields, such as movies, music, sports, and art.

Coin Grid, a eP2E(easy play-to-earn) game, is the first hitter that will be serviced on SKY Play, in conjunction with SKP. During an alpha test last month, Coin Grid received positive feedback from game users, as an easy NFT game that everyone can enjoy. Coin Grid will be released for global service in the first half of this year.

Sang-ok Chang, the CEO of SKY Technology said, "We will deliver more eP2E games and easy NFT services in industries other than IT and gaming, in addition to Coin Grid. The SKP's ecosystem will be enlarged, and the SKY Play platform's reliability and accessibility will be continuously improved".

SKY Play

Starting with easy P2E games, SKY Play will offer a rich variety of lifestyle content including games, sports, education, and artall of which will be provided through an easy NFT business platform optimized for mobile UI/UX. SKY Play will offer a bigger and better space than a simple portal, encouraging users and service providers to grow and thrive within an easy-to-use, reliable, and trustworthy ecosystem.

MEXC Global

Established in April 2018, MEXC Global is a digital asset trading platform with more than 7 million users, which offers users one-stop services, including spot, margin, leveraged ETFs, derivatives trading and staking services. The core members of the team come from international enterprises and financial companies and have experience in blockchain and financial industries.

SOURCE SKY Technology
Community's 10th release comes at project's fifth anniversary and adds new features related to metrics collection, security, and configurability

SAN FRANCISCO, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- EdgeX Foundry , a highly-scalable and flexible open source framework that facilitates interoperability between devices and applications at the IoT edge, and a Linux Foundation project under the LF Edge umbrella, today announced the release of version 2.2 of EdgeX, codenamed 'Kamakura.' It is the project's tenth release and coincides with the celebration of EdgeX Foundry's fifth anniversary.

"Many new startup businesses don't last 5 years, and for EdgeX to reach its fifth birthday while consistently releasing twice a year since its inception is quite the achievement," said Jim White, chairman of the EdgeX Foundry Technical Steering Committee and CTO of IoTSystems. "The project continues to see global adoption growth, especially in places like China, and its success is a testament to both the need for an open edge/IoT platform, as well as the dedication and support of a fantastic development community."

"Having set itself apart as the de facto open source IoT framework for edge computing in just five years is no small feat," said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge, and IoT at the Linux Foundation. "The continued growth and success of EdgeX Foundry is a testament to its strong community and ability to innovate in real time. Congratulations to the entire ecosystem on this milestone, as well as the release of Kamakura."

While a 'dot' release, EdgeX Kamakura still contains a number of new features while still maintaining backward compatibility with all 2.x releases.

With the Kamakura release, EdgeX has added:

micro service metrics/telemetry collection capability (beta) - making it easier for adopters to monitor the health and status of the EdgeX services





delayed start services - allowing services to be added and started anytime and still receive security tokens without the need for a restart of the platform





new camera device services - allowing improved capabilities to command, control and interface with ONVIF and USB cameras





dynamic device profiles  allowing device profiles to be modified over time without needing to remove and re-add devices/sensors





V2 of the CLI  an update of the command line interface making it compatible with EdgeX 2.x releases while also adding 100% coverage of the REST APIs

Learn more about the Kamakura release on the EdgeX Foundry Wiki site or on the blog post .

EdgeX Foundry Tech Talks

The EdgeX community will be presenting a new series of "EdgeX Foundry Tech Talks," designed to help people get started with EdgeX. The series begins May 24 and will run weekly through June. Developers and adopters can register for the series at the following links:

May 24: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_c6c-4LAfRD6AJP1BQM6QeQ

June 7-28: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_hyrYdafeR5mSM5oLcM75hA

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world's leading home for collaboration on open-source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation's projects are critical to the world's infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more. The Linux Foundation's methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contact

Jill Lovato

The Linux Foundation

[email protected]

SOURCE LF Edge
Firm Continues Mission to Invest in Overlooked B2B Software Startups and Builds Leadership Team With Key Promotions

AUSTIN, Texas, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Elsewhere Partners today announced the closing of its second fund, Elsewhere Partners II, L.P., with $175 million in new capital. It also announced the promotion of Sloane Child and Nick Stoffregen to Principal, both of whom previously served as Vice Presidents for the firm.

Elsewhere Partners Founder and Partner Chris Pacitti

Since its launch in 2016, Elsewhere Partners has remained committed to providing operational expertise and thoughtful capital to scale B2B software companies located outside of traditional venture capital hubs. These companies often bootstrap their way to gaining product traction and see an opportunity to embrace accelerated, yet pragmatic, growth.

"Not every B2B software founder subscribes to the hyper-growth mentality that tends to run rampant in traditional investment circles. Investing, both our capital and our network, in companies that don't always get the attention they deserve from the startup funding ecosystem at large, we've been able to make deeper connections and partner with founders on the path toward a meaningful exit," noted Chris Pacitti, Founder and Partner at Elsewhere Partners. "I'm thrilled our limited partners agree that supporting companies ready to evolve their product strategy and scale their go-to-market organizations is critical. Our team works with each founder to tailor access to the operational and market-specific expertise they need to succeed, and with Sloane and Nick moving into their new roles as Principals, we're ready to deliver."

Partnering with capital-efficient software startups that have achieved customer traction and are already generating substantial revenue, Elsewhere will continue to focus on innovative businesses across IT infrastructure, developer tools, workforce management, cybersecurity and other sectors. The firm has already made several new growth investments from the fund, including: BackBox , a security automation provider; Portnox , a network access control platform; Sellers Shield , a residential real estate risk management platform; and greymatter.io , an enterprise microservices platform.

In their new roles, Child and Stoffregen will work with Elsewhere's team of seasoned software investors to lead new investments for its growing portfolio and extensive network of 100+ operating advisors .

About Elsewhere Partners

Elsewhere Partners is a growth-stage venture capital firm that invests in Elsewhere Outliers  business software companies that are located outside of traditional venture capital hubs and have achieved substantial customer traction and revenue growth without significant outside funding. Elsewhere Partners combines transitional capital with transformational expertise to help companies achieve exit readiness on their own terms. www.elsewhere.partners .

Contact:

Erica Camilo

610-639-5644

[email protected]

SOURCE Elsewhere Partners
SAN DIEGO, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- ESET, a global leader in digital security, today announced the winners of the seventh annual ESET Women in Cybersecurity Scholarships. The scholarships are designed to increase diversity in the cybersecurity workforce, which has been struggling to fill jobs as global cyber threats continue to increase. The three $5,000 scholarships (totaling $15,000) were made available to women enrolled as graduate/undergraduate students studying digital security and cyber awareness within the field of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).

The ESET Women in Cybersecurity Scholarships winners for this year are:

Tiffany Dinh of Huntsville, Ala. A computer engineering major at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and a first-generation Vietnamese American, Dinh became hooked on computers when she took a programming class in high school. Since then, she has earned a variety of awards and honors in the field, including the Generation Google Scholar, SANS CyberFastTrack Institute Scholar and (ISC2) Women in Cybersecurity Scholar. Currently, she works at the UAH Center for Cybersecurity Research and Education (CCRE) during the academic year, gaining experience in cryptology. She is also a member of the Society of Women Engineers, Women in Cybersecurity and Tau Beta Pi, and serves as a volunteer for CyberPatriot and the Girl Scouts.

"As technology becomes more embedded into society, cybersecurity is emerging as an essential field of work and research," said Dinh. "Without it, the infrastructure behind the world's technologies would be vulnerable to attack. I want to work in cybersecurity so that I can defend this country and give back to America what she's given me and my family. The ESET Women in Cybersecurity Scholarship is a direct investment into these future pursuits. Any income I have is being funneled into my education. With this scholarship, I will not have to take out loans or find additional employment. I can focus on my aspirations in cybersecurity."

Arisa Chue of Alexandria, Va. Chue, who is majoring in computer science at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Ca., became interested in natural language processing (NLP)  which connects humans, machines, and languages through computational methods  after she learned American Sign Language (ASL) in high school. She first stepped into the world of NLP as a Machine Learning research intern at George Mason University, where she created an ASL recognition device with graduate student mentors. She has been a student at Google's Computer Science Summer Institute and participated in the Jane Street Women in STEM Education program. She is also a member of the Stanford Society of Women Engineers and was the president of her high school's Women Interested in Science and Engineering club.

"My interests lie in using machine learning to better detect cybersecurity attacks. Instead of detecting intrusion after it has happened, or at the point of intrusion, I hope to improve computer intelligence so that we can one day predict risky behaviors before the attack even takes place," said Chue. "I am thrilled and honored to be a recipient of ESET's Women in Cybersecurity Scholarship, which will help me get closer to meeting these goals."

Gwendolyn Vongkasemsiri of Nashville, Tenn. Vongkasemsiri starts her freshman year at Dakota State University in Madison, S.D., in the fall of 2022. Her interest in technology started with a Khan Academy computer programming course, which led to forming and leading the largest and longest-running team of computer programmers ever created on Khan Academy, and a position on the Khan Academy Computer Programming Challenge Council. She fell "hopelessly in love" with cybersecurity when she entered the JROTC/CAP CyberStart competition and took second place. Vongkasemsiri also competed in the US Cyber Open and scored so high that she was invited to the US Cyber Combine as a trainee, where she was awarded the Combine Rising Star Award. She is also a competitive volleyball player and a Civil Air Patrol Cadet.

"Only two short years have passed since I first discovered cybersecurity and it became my passion," said Vongkasemsiri. "Interacting with successful female cybersecurity professionals played a role in inspiring and motivating me to succeed in my dreams. I want to give back in a similar way to young women behind me, who need nothing but an introduction and an opportunity to kindle the fire and talents already within them for future success in the cyber realm. ESET's Women in Cybersecurity Scholarship will help me achieve my goal of being a manifest force for good in the world of cybersecurity and its role in securing our nation for future generations."

ESET has long championed increasing diversity in the workplace and in cybersecurity through the Women in Cybersecurity Scholarship and mentorships geared to boosting female representation in the technology sector. ESET also supports a number of philanthropic organizations including Girls Inc., Promises2Kids, Feeding San Diego, #LatinaGeeks, WITI (Women in Technology International) and WiCys (Women in Cybersecurity).

"ESET is passionate about empowering women and encouraging diversity at every level. It is a core aspect of everything we do," said Celeste Blodgett, vice president of human resources, ESET. "Filling the cybersecurity jobs gap  which becomes more urgent as attacks become more sophisticated  requires bringing more people from diverse backgrounds into the fold. ESET is pleased to be able to help do this through our Women in Cybersecurity Scholarships, which empowers women to build on their tech and cyber skills and become excellent leaders who will keep us all safe and secure online."

About the ESET Women in Cybersecurity Scholarship

The ESET Women in Cybersecurity Scholarship was launched in 2016 to help support and encourage women who aspire to have a career in information security. A recent (ISC)2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study found that the actual percentage of women in the cybersecurity workplace has remained close to constant over the last three years, with women making up approximately 25% of the security workforce. To address this issue, a majority of survey respondents said that they believe the best way to increase women's representation in the field was to encourage women to pursue STEM degrees in college.

Applicants must be a woman enrolled in or accepted to an accredited undergraduate or graduate program in the United States with a minimum cumulative 3.0 GPA. More information about the application process can be found here.

About ESET

For more than 30 years, ESET has been developing industry-leading IT security software and services to protect businesses, critical infrastructure and consumers worldwide from increasingly sophisticated digital threats. From endpoint and mobile security to endpoint detection and response, as well as encryption and multifactor authentication, ESET's high-performing, easy-to-use solutions unobtrusively protect and monitor 24/7, updating defenses in real time to keep users safe and businesses running without interruption. Evolving threats require an evolving IT security company that enables the safe use of technology. This is backed by ESET's R&D centers worldwide, working in support of our shared future. For more information, visit www.eset.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

SOURCE ESET
Presented by The Healthcare Technology Report, the award underscores eVisit's leadership in telehealth and care delivery.

PHOENIX, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Bret Larsen, co-founder and CEO of eVisit, the leading enterprise care delivery platform built for modern health systems and hospitals, has been named to Healthcare Technology Report's prestigious Top 50 Healthcare Technology CEO list for 2022. Larsen shares this honor with chief executives from companies such as Medtronic, NextGen Healthcare, Edwards Lifesciences, ResMed and Vocera Communications, among others.

"In an industry as innovative and competitive as healthcare technology, I am humbled to be recognized as a top leader in this field in 2022," Larsen said. "This honor is truly a reflection of our team's dedication to our mission to simplify healthcare delivery to everyone, everywhere. Together, we are committed to making a positive impact in the way healthcare is delivered, enabling virtual care while enhancing the provider-patient relationship with ease and scalability across various specialties. Our work is transformational, and I could not be prouder of leading the eVisit team."

Larsen co-founded eVisit in 2015 after observing a disconnect between telehealth and traditional healthcare providers. He realized most telehealth vendors function as independent provider networks, offering services that compete with existing healthcare systems and disrupting the continuity of care for patients. eVisit is uniquely positioned as the only non-competing, end-to-end telehealth platform purpose-built for hospitals and health systems, enabling them to deliver virtual care services using their own providers. This approach allows patients to continue to interact virtually with the providers they know and trustimproving patient engagement and bolstering outcomes, while protecting revenue for health systems.

Under Larsen's leadership as CEO, eVisit was recognized as the sole Leader for Virtual Care Platforms for Digital Health by Forrester Research, as well as a Representative Vendor in the Gartner 2020 Guide for Virtual Care Solutions. Inc. Magazine also recognized eVisit as one of America's fastest-growing companies in 2021, ranking 2,300 on the prestigious Inc. 5000 list.

"Bret's recognition as one of the Top 50 Healthcare Technology CEOs is well-deserved," the editorial team at The Healthcare Technology Report said. "He has been influential at changing the traditional mindset surrounding telehealth, overcoming significant provider opposition to the technology. He's done so by positioning telehealth as an integrated solution, enabling healthcare's digital front door and augmenting in-person, hands-on care. Bret's vision, tenacity, and leadership make him a highly effective CEO."

The Top 50 Healthcare Technology CEOs is an annual award program that recognizes the most accomplished executives in healthcare technology. The program is administered by The Healthcare Technology Reporta firm that provides market research, insights, business news, investment activity updates, and important corporate developments related to the healthcare technology sector.

About eVisit

eVisit is the only end-to-end, fully integrated, enterprise care delivery platform built for health systems and hospitals. It delivers innovative consumer experiences in care navigation, care delivery, and care engagement, improving margins at scale without sacrificing quality. eVisit works seamlessly across enterprise service lines and departments to improve outcomes, reduce costs, and boost revenue. Based in Phoenix, Ariz., eVisit helps healthcare organizations, including the largest systems in the U.S., innovate and succeed in today's changing healthcare market. eVisit is the only Leader in the Forrester Wave: Virtual Care Platforms in Digital Health, Q1 2021, and is a Representative Vendor in the Gartner 2020 Market Guide for Virtual Care. Get your complimentary copy of the Forrester Report here and the Gartner Report here. For more information, visit evisit.com.

Media contact: [email protected]

SOURCE eVisit
"Achieving Breakthrough Device status for our endorphin stimulator is a major step, one that recognizes its potential for treating fibromyalgia patients' pain. We look forward to working closely with the FDA to bring our solution to patients in the United States as fast as possible." David Crouzier, co-founder and CEO, Remedee Labs

The endorphin stimulation technology developed by Remedee Labs is a new non-pharmaceutical approach to pain treatment for fibromyalgia patients, offering relief from major symptoms including pain, sleep disorders, fatigue, and stiffness. The initial results observed in "Remedee Well" solution users who reported having fibromyalgia showed a clinically significant improvement in their quality of life (FIQ) and an improvement in their sleep quality (PSQI).

More than 10 million people in the United States are living with fibromyalgia, a severely debilitating condition that has no satisfactory solution and is extremely expensive for both patients and society. Its direct and indirect costs are estimated at $180 billion per year in the United States, a loss of close to 1% of national productivity.[1]

Study of 170 fibromyalgia patients in France

In November 2021, Remedee Labs started a multicenter study of 170 patients in France to assess its solution's benefits as a treatment for fibromyalgia. Remedee Labs is announcing the end of recruitment for its fibromyalgia study today. The results will be available in early 2023.

1. Epidemiology, costs, and the economic burden of fibromyalgia Published online 2009 Jun 30. doi: 10.1186/ar2715.

About Remedee Labs

1.5 billion people worldwide suffer from chronic pain and over half of them are not satisfied with their care. Remedee Labs aims to give these patients a new life.

Remedee Labs has created the first personal endorphin stimulator, based on 10 years of preclinical and clinical research. It has also drawn on its clinical partners' experience to develop the first dedicated digital services platform for chronic pain care. Built around Remedee Labs' unique technology, the platform enables patient-centric care for a long-term improvement in quality of life. Clinical trials for conditions including arthritis, migraines, and fibromyalgia are already under way.

Remedee Labs was founded in 2016 and announced in 2019 that it had raised 12 million dollars from investors including HCVC, Habert Dassault Finance, Partech, Supernova Invest, and C4 Venture.

For more information, go to https://remedeelabs.com.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1816005/Remedee_Labs_endorphin_stimulation_solution.jpg

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1512681/Remedee_Labs_Logo.jpg

Press contact:

Remedee Labs

Quentin Richard

[email protected]

SOURCE Remedee Labs
EXTON, Pa., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- First Resource Bank (OTCQX: FRSB) announced the completion of its reorganization as a wholly-owned subsidiary of First Resource Bancorp, Inc., effective May 11, 2022. The reorganization was approved by the Bank's shareholders on April 27, 2022, at their Annual Shareholder Meeting. First Resource Bancorp, Inc. common stock continues to trade on the OTCQX marketplace under the symbol FRSB and stockholders have the same rights and ownership percentage in the new holding company as they currently have in the Bank.

CEO Glenn B. Marshall stated, "This reorganization provides enhanced capital options to finance future growth of First Resource Bank, most notably, the ability to issue debt at the holding company level which can then be invested in the Bank as common equity. This option will be a cost-effective way to support growth across the enterprise and is in the best interest of our customers and shareholders."

The Bank's current operations will remain unaffected by the formation of the holding company and there will be no changes to the company's headquarters or management. Customers can still expect to receive the same level of exceptional service and product offerings that First Resource Bank has always provided.

Pursuant to the reorganization, each existing shareholder of First Resource Bank will receive an equal number of shares of First Resource Bancorp, Inc. common stock in exchange for their Bank stock. Bank shareholders holding paper stock certificates will receive correspondence from the Bank's transfer agent, Broadridge Corporate Issuer Solutions, with specific instructions on how to exchange their certificates. Shares held in book entry form only will be automatically converted with no action needed by shareholders.

About First Resource Bank

First Resource Bank, a subsidiary of bank holding company, First Resource Bancorp Inc., is a locally owned and operated Pennsylvania state-chartered bank, serving the banking needs of businesses, professionals and individuals in the Delaware Valley. The Bank offers a full range of deposit and credit services with a high level of personalized service. First Resource Bank also offers a broad range of traditional financial services and products, competitively priced and delivered in a responsive manner to small businesses, professionals and residents in the local market. For additional information visit our website at www.firstresourcebank.com. Member FDIC.

This press release contains statements that are not of historical facts and may pertain to future operating results or events or management's expectations regarding those results or events. These are "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934. These forward-looking statements may include, but are not limited to, statements about our plans, objectives, expectations and intentions and other statements contained in this press release that are not historical facts. When used in this press release, the words "expects", "anticipates", "intends", "plans", "believes", "seeks", "estimates", or words of similar meaning, or future or conditional verbs, such as "will", "would", "should", "could", or "may" are generally intended to identify forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are inherently subject to significant business, economic and competitive uncertainties and contingencies, many of which are either beyond our control or not reasonably capable of predicting at this time. In addition, these forward-looking statements are subject to assumptions with respect to future business strategies and decisions that are subject to change. Actual results may differ materially from the results discussed in these forward-looking statements. Readers of this press release are accordingly cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. First Resource Bank disclaims any intent or obligation to update publicly any of the forward-looking statements herein, whether in response to new information, future events or otherwise.

SOURCE First Resource Bank
WASHINGTON, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Flat Rock Opportunity Fund, ticker FROPX - (the "Fund"), an SEC-registered closed-end management investment company operating as an interval fund investing in Collateralized Loan Obligations ("CLOs"), hereby announces that its Board of Trustees has declared a special distribution of $0.35 per share, which will be payable on May 18, 2022 to shareholders of record at the close of business on May 16, 2022. The closing price of the Fund as of March 31, 2022 was $22.07 per share. The Fund's current regular monthly distribution rate is $0.221 per share, and the Fund has steadily increased its distribution rate since inception, most recently in August 2021 from $0.183 to $0.221 per share.

As stated by Robert Grunewald, Founder and CEO of Flat Rock Global: "Flat Rock Opportunity Fund had a strong first quarter, and we continue to see exciting investment opportunities while remaining highly selective in our approach. We are pleased that the Fund's performance allows us to provide a $0.35 special dividend."

About Flat Rock Opportunity Fund (FROPX):

Flat Rock Opportunity Fund invests primarily in equity and in junior debt tranches of CLOs. CLOs provide exposure to senior secured loans on a leveraged basis. The Fund's investment objective is to generate current income and as of March 31, 2022 the current distribution rate was 12.01%. Flat Rock Opportunity Fund is structured as an SEC-registered closed-end management investment company operating as an interval fund, and shares of the Fund can be purchased using the ticker FROPX.

About Flat Rock Global, LLC:

Founded in July, 2017, Flat Rock Global, LLC is an alternative credit manager investing in areas of the fixed income markets we believe are less efficient with the dual objective of preservation of capital and generation of income. Flat Rock funds are available exclusively to clients of RIAs, Family Offices, and Institutional Investors. To learn more about the firm and our funds, please visit www.flatrockglobal.com.

Consider the investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses of the Fund carefully before investing. Other information about the Fund may be obtained at www.flatrockglobal.com/opportunity-fund.html. This material must be preceded or accompanied by a prospectus. ALPS Distributors, Inc. serves as our principal underwriter, within the meaning of the Investment Company Act of 1940, as amended, and will act as the distributor of our shares on a best efforts' basis, subject to various conditions.

SOURCE Flat Rock Global, LLC
Food on the Fly is a winner for airports and existing food and beverage outlets alike. Tweet this

Passengers who would otherwise be constrained by their connection time or departure gate will now be empowered to place an order in real time or in advance from any of the airport's variety of premium restaurant and bar offeringswith guaranteed, on-time delivery.

Chad D. Cummings, founder and principal, explains: "The existing solutions and platforms were all brought to market pre-Covid. Those models, platforms, and ideas all need to be re-worked for the post-Covid world. That's what we've done with this new iteration of Food on the Flythe first post-Covid platform operating in this space."

He continues: "My team has given a tremendous amount of thought as to how the airport experience will evolve post-Covid and the qualities that travelers will expect and demand in their new outlook. Premium is the new standard."

Food on the Fly is a winner for airports and existing food and beverage outlets alike. Ongoing schedule shake-ups are pushing tight connections even tighter, driving down revenue for restaurants in terminals and rents collected by airport operating authorities.

While delivering meals to weary passengers, Food on the Fly will also deliver revenue to these stakeholders by monetizing what would otherwise be a missed opportunity to connect travelers with premium, locally-sourced, and nationally-recognized food and beverage offerings.

Food on the Fly is launching later this summer.

SOURCE Food on the Fly
CPN-301 was a randomized, double-masked trial in the United States of APP13007 versus matching placebo (1:1 ratio) in 378 subjects following cataract surgery. The primary endpoints are complete and sustained resolution of ocular inflammation and pain after cataract surgery. Treatment with an APP13007 eyedrop twice daily for 14 days met the two primary endpoints by producing rapid and sustained clearance of ocular inflammation and cure of ocular pain which were statistically and clinically superior to placebo.

There were 26.5% of subjects who showed sustained anterior chamber cell (ACC) count = 0 (inflammation free) from post-operative day 8 (POD8) through POD15 in the APP13007 arm as compared to 5.1% in the placebo arm (p<0.001). A total of 58.6% of subjects had ACC count = 0 on POD15 following APP13007 treatment as compared to 15.7% following placebo treatment (p<0.001).

Sixty-eight percent (68.0%) of subjects showed sustained ocular pain grade = 0 (pain free) as early as POD4 through to POD15 in the APP13007 arm as compared to 23% in the placebo arm (p<0.001). A total of 77.3% of subjects on APP13007 were ocular pain free at POD4 as compared to 43.7% on placebo (p<0.001).

APP13007 treatment was well tolerated with a safety profile similar to that of placebo. There were no serious adverse events, and the treatment-emergent adverse events were mainly ocular events commonly seen after cataract surgery. Both the APP13007 and placebo treatments had comparable profiles of change in intraocular pressure (IOP) from baseline.

"The data from Study CPN-301 demonstrate the clear benefits of treating patients after cataract surgery with APP13007 accompanied by a reassuring placebo-like safety profile," said AimMax Therapeutics' Chief Medical Officer, Derek Nunez, M.D. "We are extremely pleased to have successfully completed Study CPN-301 over a challenging pandemic period and to have achieved superiority for APP13007 in both primary efficacy endpoints, paving the way for an NDA submission pending the second Phase 3 trial results," said AimMax Therapeutics' Chief Executive Officer, Laurene Wang, Ph.D.

"We are extremely encouraged to observe the clinical outcome of this novel formulation of clobetasol propionate and are appreciative of the painstaking efforts of our clinical team at AimMax Therapeutics and the clinical investigators for achieving this latest milestone of APP13007," said Erick Co, Ph.D., Formosa Pharmaceuticals' Chief Executive Officer.

About Formosa Pharmaceuticals, Inc.:

Formosa Pharmaceuticals is a clinical phase biotech company focused primarily in the areas of ophthalmology and oncology. The company's proprietary nanoparticle formulation technology (APNT), through which APP13007 was developed, improves the dissolution and bioavailability of APIs for topical, oral, and inhaler administration.

Formosa Pharmaceuticals' advanced programs are:

APP13007: 505(b)(2) corticosteroid eyedrop for the treatment of inflammation and pain after ocular surgery manufactured using the APNT formulation technology. Enrollment for both Phase 3 trials completed in the United States .

505(b)(2) corticosteroid eyedrop for the treatment of inflammation and pain after ocular surgery manufactured using the APNT formulation technology. Enrollment for both Phase 3 trials completed in . TSY-0110: ado-trastuzumab emtansine biosimilar (Kadcyla). The Phase 1 trials are expected to commence in 2023.

For more information about Formosa Pharmaceuticals, please visit https://www.formosapharma.com/.

About AimMax Therapeutics, Inc.:

AimMax Therapeutics, Inc., located in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, United States, engages in the research and development of biopharmaceuticals at various stages of development through its own research/discovery or by co-development with strategic partners, primarily in the anti-inflammatory and anti-infective therapeutic areas. The company's R&D strengths derive from extensive and synergistic experience in basic and nonclincal research, translational medicine, clinical trial design, and regulatory and commercial strategy.

For more information about AimMax Therapeutics, please visit www.aimmaxrx.com.

SOURCE Formosa Pharmaceuticals Inc.,
FLINT, Mich., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Forum Health, LLC, the first national network of integrative and functional medicine practitioners, adds a functional medicine practice in Las Colinas, Texas welcoming Dr. Leigh Ann Scott to its growing team of physicians.

"We're excited to grow the Forum Health network in Texas with the addition of this new practice," said Adam Puttkammer, president of Forum Health. "Dr. Scott is an expert in functional medicine and hormone therapies with an incredible team that we're fortunate to have joined our network."

Dr. Scott has over 30 years of experience specializing in gynecology and personalized functional medicine care to men and women. Her team focuses on prevention and encourages patients to be proactive about achieving optimal health.

"Joining Forum Health is an exciting opportunity to have the support of a national leader in functional medicine," said Dr. Scott. "The leadership and resources available to us as part of the Forum Health network will allow my team to focus on what we do best  serving our patients."

Dr. Scott is trained in bioidentical hormone therapy and develops individual protocols for patients including hormone balancing, nutrition, supplement support, weight management, and advanced testing.

"We welcome Dr. Scott and her team to Forum Health," said Phil Hagerman, chief executive officer at Forum Health. "This practice is thriving and setting a great example of the quality of functional and integrative medicine practices we strive to partner with."

Dr. Scott is board certified in obstetrics and gynecology by the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology and is a Fellow of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. She graduated Summa Cum Laude from Texas A&M University, received her M.D from the University of Texas, then continued to St. Paul University Hospital in Dallas, TX for her residency in obstetrics and gynecology where she served as chief resident until 1988.

For more on Forum Health, including how to join one of our practices, visit www.forumhealth.com.

About Forum Health, LLC

Forum Health, LLC is a nationwide provider of personalized healthcare. Steeped in the powerful principles of functional and integrative medicine, Forum Health providers take a root-cause approach to care exploring lifestyle, environment, and genetics to help each patient achieve their health goals. Members have access to advanced medical treatments and technology, with care plans informed by data analytics and collaborative relationships.

SOURCE Forum Health, LLC
RE/MAX HQ Honors DFW Agent for Extraordinary Sales Performance

FRISCO, Texas, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- RE/MAX DFW Associates realtor Terry Hendricks announced today his selection for the national RE/MAX Platinum Club Award, an exclusive honor awarded to the real estate professionals with the highest sales volume in the country. The RE/MAX Platinum Club recognizes high-achieving real estate professionals for their service to buyers and sellers over the past year.

Frisco - Realtor - Terry- Hendricks

"Achieving RE/MAX Platinum Club status is an honor, and it shows just how strong the services I provide to home buyers and sellers really are," said Terry Hendricks, RE/MAX DFW Associates realtor. "By connecting buyers to properties before they hit the market and delivering industry-leading digital marketing and sales services through the 72SOLD program, I continue to succeed in driving huge demand and getting sellers more money than traditional realtors for their homes."

Henricks is one of the state's only 72SOLD-certified agents, offering a compressed residential property showing schedule that is more convenient for sellers and reduces the sales process for home buyers from months to days. The innovative 72SOLD process uses front-loaded sales and marketing efforts designed to create the highest competitive bidding environment and secure above-asking prices within just three days.

In addition, Henricks offers home buyers in the complex Dallas-Ft. Worth market the free "Dream Home Buyers" program, which identifies off-market homes, providing buyers more property options at lower prices. In a market where homes sell in hours rather than days, some before being announced to the public, the Dream Home Buyers Program provides access to properties not found on consumer real estate apps and websites. Sources for off market deals include pre-foreclosures, non-owner-occupied properties, and neighborhood geo-targeting.

For More information Contact:

Terry Hendricks, RE/MAX DFW Associates - Frisco

(972) 299-3032 | [email protected] | www.TerryHendricks.com

SOURCE Terry Hendricks
Since the establishment of GenScript Biotech Corporation and GenScript ProBio, they have been actively exploring in the field of bioprocessing and manufacturing, facilitating bio manufacturing excellence at enhanced speed, reduced cost, and superior quality to support the innovation plans of customers in South Korea, Asia Pacific and around the world, and GenScript ProBio has cooperated with several customers from Korea. With outstanding technical strength and high-quality CDMO services, GenScript Biotech Corporation received the "Best Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization Award" at the Asia Pacific Bioprocessing Excellence Awards 2022. This marks the third consecutive year of GenScript bagging the same award in the Asia Pacific region. The award also followed GenScript's recognition at the Korea Bioprocessing Excellence Awards in 2021 for the 'Best Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization Award'.

"We are very pleased to announce the establishment of a legal entity called 'Genscript Probio Biotech Korea Ltd.' at the BIO KOREA conference", said Dr. Brian Min, CEO of GenScript ProBio. "South Korea is one of the most dynamic innovation centers of the biotech industry in the Asia-Pacific region. We are looking forward to working with scientists and partners in South Korea, utilizing GenScript ProBio's one-stop CDMO service platform from drug discovery to commercialization in cell and gene therapy, vaccine, biologics discovery and antibody protein drug, and are committed to improving human life and health."

About BIO KOREA International Convention

BIO KOREA International Convention has been held every year since 2006 and serves as a business platform for international bio health companies. Sponsored by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, BIO KOREA is a place of practical business correspondence as well as international information and technology exchange, invigorating the bio health industry. In its 17th year of bringing together various international academics, professionals, and CEOs of global bio health companies to obtain, exchange, and discuss diverse affairs, through exhibition, business forum, and conference. BIO KOREA has been providing abundant opportunities to assure competitive edges within the convergence industry centered around biotechnology.

www.biokorea.org

About GenScript ProBio

GenScript ProBio is the subsidiary of GenScript Biotech Corporation, proactively providing end-to-end CDMO service from drug discovery to commercialization with proactive strategies, professional solutions and efficient processes in cell and gene therapy, vaccine, biologics discovery and antibody protein drug to accelerate drug development for customers.

GenScript ProBio's total cell and gene therapy solution covers CMC of plasmid and virus for IND filing as well as clinical manufacturing and commercial manufacturing. GenScript ProBio's innovative solutions for biologics discovery and development include therapeutic antibody discovery, antibody engineering and antibody characterization. GMP capacity which meets FDA, EMA and NMPA regulatory requirements.

Toward the mission of "Innovation through Collaboration", GenScript ProBio is committed to helping customers shorten the timeline for the development of biological drugs from discovery to commercialization, significantly lowering R&D costs and building a healthier future.

https://www.genscriptprobio.com

SOURCE GenScript ProBio
Giantleap Capital invests alongside Cerberus Capital Management, L.P., GIC, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund and Fortress Investment Group, in Series D funding for Federated Wireless

sovereign wealth fund and Fortress Investment Group, in Series D funding for Federated Wireless The investment is part of Giantleap's strategy of thematic investing within data connectivity technologies at the physical-digital convergence of critical industries





NEW YORK, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Giantleap Capital, a fundamental research-driven investment firm, focused on partnering with companies at the convergence of physical and digital infrastructure, today announced that it has invested in a Series D funding of Federated Wireless, the leader in shared spectrum and CBRS technology.

Private wireless is a disruptive technology that is disrupting how businesses build their enterprise network. It harnesses a ubiquitous resource called shared spectrum, also known as CBRS - an innovative technology that delivers the best attributes of traditional wireless and Wi-Fi, with lower fixed cost, higher quality, and greater efficiency and scale.

"With digital transformation, businesses have to embrace enterprise agility and mobility  the ability to share data and information across multiple devices at speed and scale. This ability is critical not only to keep up with customers' needs, boost efficiency, but also to help businesses benefit from the full potential of the connected economy," said Himanshu Sekhar, Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Giantleap.

As the first to market with a Spectrum Access System ("SAS"), Federated Wireless is the nationwide leader in enabling, commercializing, and driving adoption of shared spectrum. With more than 350 customers and over 85,000 connected devices across the United States and territories, the company serves a customer base spanning defense, government, manufacturing, telecommunications, utilities, real estate, and education, with a wide range of use cases ranging from network densification and mobile offload to private wireless and industrial IoT.

"Giantleap Capital is an ideal partner for our next chapter of growth. We look forward to continuing to support our customers and investing in our products to deliver the private wireless and shared spectrum solutions needed to power impactful transformation at the enterprise edge," said CEO Iyad Tarazi. "Giantleap brings significant resources and experience in building market-leading businesses, as well as a commitment to support Federated's growth initiatives."

"Iyad and the Federated Wireless team have built an exceptional business that provides an unrivaled value proposition to critical industries including government and defense," said Samir Parikh, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Giantleap. "We look forward to partnering with the Federated team as they continue to expand their platform to deliver a differentiated solution focused on the unique needs of their customer base."

About GiantLeap Capital

Giantleap Capital is a fundamental research-driven investment firm focused on investing in technologies that are transforming critical industries at the convergence of physical and digital infrastructure. The firm takes a long-term thematic approach to invest in idiosyncratic investment opportunities across private, public, and special situations.

For more information, please visit https://www.giantleapcapital.com/

About Federated Wireless

Founded in 2012, Federated Wireless is the leading innovator of private wireless and shared spectrum services. The company's partner ecosystem includes more than 50 solution and edge partners, all of which are dedicated to collaboration in advancing the development and deployment of shared spectrum services. Federated Wireless' customer base includes companies spanning the telecommunications, logistics, manufacturing, energy, hospitality, education, retail, office space, municipal and other verticals, with use cases ranging from Private Wireless and Industrial IoT to network densification and mobile offload.

For more information, please visit https://www.federatedwireless.com/

SOURCE Giantleap Capital
DUBLIN, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Antenna in Package Patent Landscape 2021" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

Antenna integration becomes more and more advantageous at higher frequencies

Since 2017, the publisher has been following the intellectual property (IP) trends related to RF front-end devices and their packaging. Recently, the publisher witnessed increasing patenting activity related to PAMiD modules, RF front-end modules, RF filters and switch integration, and antennas for 5G and their packaging.

Packaging of 5G systems requires the integration of RF, analog and digital functions along with passives and other system components in a single module. These systems exemplify the heterogeneous integration trend which becomes more important for 5G. Proximity of the transceiver and front-end module is also important, to reduce size and loss. This is achieved by integrating antennas with the RF module as well as simultaneous modeling of a heat dissipation solution to keep active components in acceptable thermal conditions.

In the mm-wave antenna-in-package solutions, interconnections between transceiver ICs and antennas should result in low insertion loss and acceptable return loss over the frequency range of interest. The other key requirement is the form factor, and to meet it the industry is progressively moving from conventional interconnect techniques such as wire-bonding and flip-chip interconnections to emerging techniques referred to as Fan-Out packaging or IC-embedding.

Flip-chip and Fan-out interconnections were originally developed for high-performance computing or mobile processor applications, but their fine pitch and low electrical parasitic have pushed RF players to use them in their RF/mm-wave modules. Today, these approaches are getting more and more critical for the RF industry and are used in antenna-integrated modules.

In this report, the publisher analyzes the patent landscape related to antenna integrated in package (AiP, AoP). The AiP patent landscape is led by major semiconductor foundries and OSATs, SJ Semiconductor (SJSemi) being the main patent assignee, and it includes any links in the supply chain. Foundries/OSATs (SJSemi/SMIC, TSMC, SEMCO, ASE, SPIL) as well as IDMs/fabless (MediaTek, Qualcomm, Murata, TI, Skyworks) and OEMs (Huawei, Vivo mobile, Oppo mobile) have filed AiP-related patents to protect their structures/designs or manufacturing methods.

Understanding of the current IP players' activities

The publisher has identified more than 140 different entities that have filed patent applications related to AiP. The report provides a clear overview of the most active assignees as well as a presentation of IP newcomers. Furthermore, a patent segmentation reveals the technical position, e.g. WLP, Fan-Out, Flip Chip or antenna type, of each of the main players.

SJSemi, Intel and TSMC have the most significant enforceable portfolio; together they own one third of all granted patents. Over the last few years, SJSemi, TSMC, Samsung, MediaTek, Huawei, AAC Technologies and NCAP have been increasing their patenting activity.

The IP newcomers of the last 2 years are mainly Chinese companies that focus on a wafer-level packaging approach for integrated antenna: Vivo Mobile, OPPO Mobile, Shanghai Xianfang Semiconductor (subsidiary of NCAP), Powertech Technology, Microsilicon Technology, T-Ray Technology, Sky Semiconductor Technology, Xinhua Microelectronics and Unisoc.

Focus on the main IP players' IP portfolios

The report provides a detailed analysis of the main IP players: SJSemi/SMIC, TSMC, Samsung Electro-Mechanics, Huawei, MediaTek, IBM, ASE, SPIL, NCAP, Qualcomm, and Murata. For each player, we highlight their strengths and weaknesses and provide information about their technology developments. Finally, a description and analysis of their key patents is provided.

The IP white-spaces are shrinking

The patents describe a variety of solutions to design or manufacture antenna systems in package, and not many patents are focused on critical technological bricks. The AiP patent landscape attests to well-mastered packaging solutions that are already available on the market and where the IP "white-spaces" will be quickly limited. Each player has developed and protected its own AiP structures/designs, each providing a solution to answer the different requirements of next-generation handset RF packages.

The patents mainly claim specific AiP structures/designs or processes/methods for making them. Asserting owned patents against infringing products is easier with patents claiming an AiP structure/design, and patent litigation on such aspects will thus be inevitable in a growing 5G market.

Report's Main Assets

Understanding the key players' patented technologies and current IP strategies and strengths: More than 140 patent applicants are involved in the antenna in package patent landscape. This report reveals the IP position of key players through a detailed analysis of their patent portfolios. We also provide an understanding of these players' patented technologies, their IP strategy, and their capability to limit other firms' activity.

Analyzing IP players' developed technologies: This report provides an understanding of the IP players' recent technical developments. The main AiP approaches are sorted, and IP players and key patents are presented for each segment.

Identifying and understanding IP players' key patents related to AiP: This report highlights the main IP players' key patents related to AiP with a selection of the most influential/blocking patents.

Useful Excel Patent Database

This report also includes an Excel database with the 1,500+ patents and patent applications analyzed in this study. This useful patent database allows for multi-criteria searches and includes patent publication numbers, hyperlinks to the original documents, priority date, title, abstract, patent assignees, patent's current legal status, and technological segments.

Report's Key Features

PDF with > 80 slides.

Excel file with > 660 patent families + hyperlink to updated online database (legal status, documents etc.)

IP trends, including time-evolution of published patents, countries of patent filings, etc.

Ranking of main patent assignees.

Newcomers in the AiP IP landscape.

Main technologies IP analysis:

Flip Chip



Fan Out



Wafer Level Packaging



Air cavity antenna



Stacked antenna

Focus on AiP patent portfolios of key players: SJSemi/SMIC, TSMC, Samsung Electro-Mechanics, Huawei, MediaTek, IBM, ASE, SPIL, NCAP, Qualcomm, Murata.

Key players' IP position and relative strength of their patent portfolios.

Companies Mentioned in this Report (non-exhaustive list):

A*STAR

AAC Technologies

ASE

AT&S

Boeing

Bosch

Broadcom

CETC

Chengdu Ruishi Intelligent Technology

Chengdu T Ray Technology

Chunghwa Precision Test Technology

Core

Dongwoo Fine-Chem

Dupont Electronics

Ericsson

Forehope Electronic Ningbo

Fraunhofer

Fujikura

GlobalFoundries

Guangdong Fozhixin Microelectronics Technology Research

Guangdong Xinhua Microelectronic Technology

Hanyang University

Huawei

IBM

Imec

Innolux

Institute of Microelectronics - Chinese Academy of Sciences

Intel

JCAP

JCET

Kyocera

LG Electronics

LS Mtron

Mediatek

Micron Technology

Microsilicon Technology

Murata

NCAP

Nanjing Qinheng Microelectronics

National Chung Shan Institute of Science & Technology

Nepes

New Kojinpeng Private

Novaco Microelectronics Technologies

Oppo Mobile

Powertech Technology

Qingdao Geer Intelligent Sensor

Qualcomm

Raytheon

SJ Semiconductor

SMIC

SPIL

STATS ChipPAC

Saint Gobain

Samsung Electro Mechanics

Samsung Electronics

Shanghai Amphenol Airwave Communication Electronics

Shanghai Xianfang Semiconductor

Skyworks

Sony

Spreadtrum Communication

TDK Epcos

TSMC

Texas Instruments

Tsinghua University

Vega Grieshaber

Vivo Mobile

Xiamen Yun Tian Semiconductor Technology

Key Topics Covered:

Introduction

Context and challenges

Market data

AiP technical approaches

Scope of the Report & Methodology

Scope of the report

Key features of the report

Why study the patent landscape

Main patent assignees cited in this report

Objectives of the report

Methodology for patent search and selection

Terminology

Executive Summary

IP Landscape Overview

Time evolution of patent publications

Main patent assignees

IP position and IP activity of main players

Geographic coverage of main players' AiP patent portfolio

Time evolution of patent publications for main players

Newcomers in the AiP patent landscape

IP leadership of main players

Patent segmentation per AiP technical approach: WLP, Fan-Out WLP, 3D stacking, Other

Main patent assignees per AiP approach



Fan-Out packaging: IP players vs. Market players



Time evolution of patent publications per AiP approach

Patent segmentation per package-integrated antenna structures: Patch antenna, Dipole antenna, Monopole antenna, Microstrip antenna, Yagi antenna, Vivaldi antenna, Slot antenna

Main patent assignees per package-integrated antenna structures

Air cavity related patents

Stacked antenna related patents

Main IP collaborations (co-owned patents and IP transfers)

IP Profile of Key Players (Patent portfolio overview, key patents, and recent patenting activity)

SMIC / SJSemi

TSMC

Samsung Electro-Mechanics

Huawei

MediaTek

IBM

ASE

SPIL

NCAP

Qualcomm

Murata

Conclusion

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/316g60

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
DUBLIN, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Digital Dose Inhaler Market: Global Industry Trends, Share, Size, Growth, Opportunity and Forecast 2022-2027" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global digital dose inhaler market reached a value of US$ 2.49 Billion in 2021. Looking forward, the publisher expects the market to reach US$ 5.85 Billion by 2027, exhibiting a CAGR of 15.1% 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.



Digital dose inhalers are utilized to provide a simple, accurate, and reliable dose counter, which enables asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients to track adherence to their therapy.

These inhalers comprise sensors that record the time of medication administration and provide a low-dose warning indicator. They also offer a large display for easy accessibility and comprehension by varied patient populations.

Nowadays, digital dose inhalers are integrated with Bluetooth technology that assists in pairing with a tablet, smartphone, or computer wirelessly to enable the automatic transfer of data.



Digital Dose Inhaler Market Trends:

A considerable rise in the number of individuals diagnosed with chronic respiratory diseases (CRDs), such as bronchial asthma, lung disorders, pulmonary hypertension (PH) and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), represents one of the key factors driving the demand for digital dose inhalers worldwide.

Additionally, the risk of developing CRDs is increasing around the world on account of the growing number of tobacco smokers, rising levels of air pollution, and occupational dust exposure in the agriculture, forestry, and mining settings. This, in turn, is bolstering the market growth.

Apart from this, governing agencies of numerous countries, along with non-governmental organizations (NGOs), are introducing several programs to spread awareness about CRDs and the available treatments. Moreover, dry powder inhaler (DPI) systems are gaining traction as they target the delivery of fine drug particles to the deeper airways in the lungs. As a result, several manufacturers are offering capsule-based and disposable DPI devices with improved reliability, consistency, and cost-effectiveness, which is driving the market.

Furthermore, favorable reimbursement policies available to the patients via government-sponsored plans and individual insurance and employee policies are boosting the treatment rates of respiratory disorders. This, in turn, is projected to stimulate the growth of the market.

Key Questions Answered in this Report:

How has the global digital dose inhaler market performed so far and how will it perform in the coming years?

What has been the impact of COVID-19 on the global digital dose inhaler market?

What are the key regional markets?

What is the breakup of the market based on the type?

What is the breakup of the market based on the product?

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 digital dose inhaler market and who are the key players?

What is the degree of competition in the industry?

Competitive Landscape:

The competitive landscape of the industry has also been examined along with the profiles of the key players being

3M Company

Company AstraZeneca plc

GlaxoSmithKline plc

Glenmark Pharmaceuticals Limited

H&T Presspart Manufacturing Ltd.

Koninklijke Philips N.V.

Lupin Limited

Novartis AG

OPKO Health Inc.

Propeller Health (ResMed)

Sensirion AG Switzerland

Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd.

Key Market Segmentation



Breakup by Type:

Branded Medication

Generics Medication

Breakup by Product:

Metered Dose Inhaler

Dry Powder Inhaler

Breakup by Region:

North America

United States

Canada

Asia-Pacific

China

Japan

India

South Korea

Australia

Indonesia

Others

Europe

Germany

France

United Kingdom

Italy

Spain

Russia

Others

Latin America

Brazil

Mexico

Others

Middle East and Africa

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/u0u4e3

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
Download our free sample report today to get a detailed understanding of the major forces driving this market across geographies.

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Key Industrial Starch Sourcing and Procurement Report Highlights:

1. Market growth 2022-2026: USD 30.25 Billion

2. Growth momentum & CAGR: Accelerate at a CAGR of 5.54%

3. Top Pricing Models: Volume based pricing, and Market based pricing

4. Key consumer countries: North America, Europe, and APAC

5. Supplier Selection Criteria: Technical specifications, Operational requirements, Acceptance criteria, and Evaluation criteria

6. Top Suppliers: Archer Daniels Midland Co., Tate & Lyle Plc, and Ingredion Inc

Know More About This Market: Request for a Free Sample Report Now!

Insights into buyer strategies and tactical negotiation levers:

Several strategic and tactical negotiation levers are explained in the report to help buyers achieve the best prices for the Industrial Starch market. The report also aids buyers with relevant Industrial Starch pricing levels, pros, and cons of prevalent pricing models such as Unit-based pricing, and Bundled pricing, category management strategies and best practices to fulfil their category objectives.

For more insights on buyer strategies and tactical negotiation levers, www.spendedge.com/report/industrial-starch--sourcing-and-procurement-intelligence-report

Key Drivers and Trends Fueling Market Growth:

The pressure from substitutes and a moderate level of threat from new entrants has resulted in the low bargaining power of suppliers.

Price forecasts are beneficial in purchase planning, especially when supplemented by the constant monitoring of price influencing factors.

Identify favorable opportunities in Industrial Starch TCO (total cost of ownership).

Expected changes in price forecast and factors driving the current and future price changes.

Identify pricing models that offer the most rewarding opportunities.

To know more about various other market drivers, trends and challenges.

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Table of Content

Executive Summary

Market Insights

Category Pricing Insights

Cost-saving Opportunities

Best Practices

Category Ecosystem

Category Management Strategy

Category Management Enablers

Suppliers Selection

Suppliers under Coverage

US Market Insights

Category scope

Appendix

About SpendEdge:

SpendEdge shares your passion for driving sourcing and procurement excellence. We are the preferred procurement market intelligence partner for 120+ Fortune 500 firms and other leading companies across numerous industries. Our strength lies in delivering, real-time procurement market intelligence reports and solutions.

Contacts

SpendEdge

Anirban Choudhury

Marketing Manager

Ph No: +1 (872) 206-9340

https://www.spendedge.com/contact-us

SOURCE SpendEdge
"Ukraine is one of the largest exporters of agri-foods and this is a critical planting season. Many of Ukraine's farmers have become soldiers. If we don't end this war now, farmers will not be able to plant and export the necessary resources the world needs to survive. We will inevitably enter into a global food shortage," said Bob Unanue at a press conference held at the Shrine of Divine Mercy in Krakow-agiewniki, Poland on Thursday, May 12, 2022, which coincides with the anniversary of the apparition of the Blessed Mother in the village of Hrushiv, Ukraine on May 12, 1914.

With the guidance of the Knights of Columbus, who assisted the Archdiocese of Czestochowa to create a home for 100 orphans, Goya's second humanitarian turned spiritual mission to Poland and Ukraine answers the recent call for prayer by Pope Francis. "Knights of Columbus live out the founding mission of Blessed Father Michael McGivney to help the vulnerable, especially the widows and orphans," said Szymon Czyszek, the Knights' Director of International Growth for Europe. "We see that today the vulnerable are the Ukrainian families, women and children, and we as Knights cannot be indifferent to their suffering."

Through Goya Cares, this mission continues Goya's commitment to caring for women and children and extends to funding organizations including the Aerial Recovery Group, the Knights of Columbus and the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy, who through their original apostolate of running "Mercy Houses" provide a safe haven for women and girls in danger of or in situations of exploitation.

"God created humanity and humanity has created every way to destroy itself. We need to relinquish the destructive weapons of hate and war, and fully embrace the power of God and prayer. I have hope that humanity will embrace love and protection and block hate and destruction," continued Bob Unanue.

More than half of Ukraine's 7.5 million children have been displaced by the war. 219 children have died and 398 have been wounded. 121,000 children have been taken to Russia. While many children have fled with their mothers, others have been separated from their families or sent away on their own in the hope they will reach safety. The Aerial Group has rescued over 700 orphans and over 1,000 Ukrainian refugees.

"As long as Putin's war rages on in Ukraine and wherever evil manifests we will be there to protect God's most innocent. What I have learned in my 5 deployments as a U.S. Army Green Beret is that war steals innocence. We must protect the most innocent. These children deserve safety and to feel the love of the Lord," said Jeremy Locke, Chief of Operations of Aerial Recovery Group.

While this war comes with high demand for food and supplies, Goya also returns with 1,000 rosaries blessed by Pope Francis and over 60,000 rosaries donated by Americans, a donation that started with the offer of one rosary from Shannon Hasse of San Antonio, Texas and has miraculously turned into tens of thousands of rosaries more and still counting.

As part of Goya's mission, Goya donated one million pounds of food to Global Empowerment Mission (GEM). "Goya is GEM's main food partner. We have been working together on a multitude of global and US disasters. Goya products are also inside each one of our GEM Bstrong Family Necessities Kits. This is one of our most precious and important partnerships. They care and they are always ready to support the causes that arise," said Michael Capponi, President Global Empowerment Mission.

Goya Cares is a global initiative dedicated to combating child trafficking and nourishing the soul by supporting organizations that protect the lives of women and children. Through Goya Gives, Goya has donated over seven million pounds of food over the past few years in response to the pandemic, natural disasters, and humanitarian crises.

To learn more about Goya, please visit: www.goya.com

About Goya Foods: Founded in 1936, Goya Foods, Inc. is America's largest Hispanic-owned food company, and has established itself as the leader in Latin American food and condiments. Goya manufactures, packages, and distributes over 2,500 high-quality food products from Spain, the Caribbean, Mexico, Central, and South America. Goya products have their roots in the culinary traditions of Hispanic communities around the world. The combination of authentic ingredients, robust seasonings, and convenient preparation makes Goya products ideal for every taste and every table. For more information on Goya Foods, please visit www.goya.com

For more information, contact:

Natalie J. Maniscalco

845.659.6506 / [email protected]

SOURCE Goya Foods, Inc.
CINCINNATI, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- In celebration of International Nurses Day and the Year of the Nurse Educator, Health Carousel, LLC, the 17th largest healthcare staffing agency in the US, today announced a three-year commitment of $200,000 to fund a variety of nurse training and education programs in the US and abroad. This substantial, multi-year investment represents a small portion of the work underway through the company's Light the Way initiative, which focuses on ethical recruitment and the sustainability of the nursing profession.

Health Carousel's Light the Way initiative takes its namesake from Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing and known as the "The Lady With the Lamp" for the nightly rounds she made caring for wounded soldiers, guided only by a dim oil lamp. Since their inception in 2004, Health Carousel has maintained its Light the Way program, through which all of their programs and activities promoting ethical recruitment practices and global nursing sustainability have been funneled. Light the Way is proud on this International Nurses Day 2022, to announce additional efforts in the US and abroad.

Providing Support in the US and Abroad

In the United States, funding is earmarked to establish Light the Way Scholarships. These awards will primarily be given to nurses wishing to pursue a graduate or post-graduate nursing degree. Discussions are currently underway with several professional and nationality-specific US-based nursing organizations to administer the awards. Additionally, Chamberlain University was named a preferred nursing education partner for Health Carousel earlier this week.

Around the globe, Light the Way funds are earmarked for a variety of nursing sustainability endeavors. In the Philippines, funds will be used for Ph.D. nurse educator scholarships to improve both the student capacity of nursing schools and the quality of education they provide. In Uganda, funds are being used to establish a nurse training lab in coordination with the Uganda Nurse and Midwives Union. Additional programs are under development.

A Focus on Nurse Education and Educators

Health Carousel's decision that the funds are to be used to build nurse educational capacity is entirely purposeful, as it can lessen the US and global nursing shortage. According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing , in 2019, US nursing schools turned away more than 80,000 qualified nursing applicants because of an insufficient number of faculty to teach them. In the Philippines, the majority of nursing faculty lack advanced education and training and this reflects in the low pass rates of their students taking the country's nurse licensure exam. Similar difficulties persist worldwide.

"We're making a substantial financial and administrative commitment, but it's much needed to support the nursing profession and its many challenges that grew during the pandemic," said Bill DeVille, Founder and Board Chair of Health Carousel. "Investing in nursing's future is a tradition at Health Carousel that we have quietly celebrated. Most don't realize that we have helped hundreds of nurses earn their Master's of Nursing degrees since our founding in 2004. Today, many recipients of these awards serve as nursing leaders and educators in the US and internationally."

Earl Dalton, Health Carousel Chief Nursing Officer explains that these investments have a direct impact on patient care.

"Health Carousel's investment battles against industry trends that threaten patient care," said Dalton. "Namely, the experienced nurses in the US are rapidly leaving the nursing workforce and our patient population is becoming older, with much more complex care needs. The result is a widening experience-complexity gap. Put simply, there aren't enough veteran nurses to mentor younger ones. Health Carousel's investment in nursing training and advanced degrees is an effective way to address this situation."

About Health Carousel

Health Carousel is a total talent management company with a leading portfolio of workforce solutions and healthcare staffing solutions including travel nursing, locum tenens, and international healthcare providers.

Health Carousel is listed as the 17th largest healthcare staffing company in the US by Staffing Industry Analysts. Health Carousel aims to deliver the finest healthcare talent and workforce management solutions, so every patient has access to a qualified healthcare professional when and where they need them. Health Carousel has a steadfast dedication to the highest industry standards, which are without equal in the industry. This is evident by the codes of professional practice that they follow and in the Light the Way program, through which our ethical and sustainable recruitment initiatives are delivered.

CONTACT:

[email protected]

SOURCE Health Carousel
"We are thrilled to be recognized as one of the top businesses in the Denver area," said Levi Torres, co-owner of High 5 Plumbing. "For us, this is a community award. Without the support from the community, there would be no High 5 Plumbing. We truly appreciate all of our customers for allowing us to serve them and for being a part of our day-to-day lives."

High 5 Plumbing offers a variety of plumbing services to residents in the Denver area, including repair and installation, drain cleaning, pump plumbing, piping, garbage disposal services, sewer line repair, gas plumbing, water heater installation and much more. In addition, the company offers 24/7 emergency services.

High 5 Plumbing also dedicates itself to giving back to the community through the High 5 Cares program. Started in 2018, the mission of High 5 Cares is to provide financial support to reputable trusted charity organizations in the community. The company spotlights a different nonprofit each month and donates a set amount of $500. In addition, the nonprofit receives $10 for every High 5 Club Membership that's sold during the month and receives 100% of the proceeds from the company's High 5 clothing line.

"Giving back to the community is a big part of what we do as a company," said Cassi Torres, co-owner of High 5 Plumbing. "We believe our job is to give back to the people that have played such a pivotal role in who we are as a company. They are part of the reason why we love coming to work every day."

For more information on High 5 Plumbing, visit https://www.high5plumbing.com/.

About High 5 Plumbing

Founded in 2012, High 5 Plumbing is a local, family-owned company serving residents in the greater Denver metropolitan area. With a professional team that has extensive experience and a commitment to service, High 5 Plumbing offers comprehensive plumbing, sewer and drain services. The company was built on the values of solving plumbing problems and serving every customer with professionalism and respect. For more information about High 5 Plumbing, visit https://www.high5plumbing.com/.

MEDIA CONTACT:

Heather Ripley

Ripley PR

(865) 977-1973

[email protected]

SOURCE High 5 Plumbing
WASHINGTON , May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- A group of American Hindu organizations representing a myriad of Dharmic religions and philosophies held an exhibition titled "Darshana  A Glimpse into the Hindu Civilization" on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. on May 10 and 11. Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh USA (HSS), in conjunction with numerous Hindu organizations, initiated this educational project as part of a year-long Hindu Dharma Awareness Campaign.

Hindu Civilization Exhibition at Capitol Hill Senator Mike Brown R-IN at Hindu Civilization Exhibition at Capitol Hill

Representatives from thirty-two Congressional offices visited the Exhibition to learn more about the Hindu traditions and culture. The Exhibition offered a platform to explore a wide range of topics such as Yoga, Ayurveda, Dharma, Mathematics, Architecture, Arts, Sciences, and the present-day global presence of Hinduism.

Two U.S. Senators and seven Members of the House of Representatives attended and explored the Exhibition. Sen. Mike Braun (R-Indiana) and Sen. Mark Kelley (D-Arizona) toured the Exhibition and actively engaged with the organizers to learn more about the Hindu community and its traditions, culture, and philosophy.

In his comments after viewing the Exhibition, Senator Braun said, "I appreciate it (Hindu Culture) because it's an enterprising culture. So much of what we do in this world has its roots there, and the more I see, the more I learn about it; it's probably part of how we solve today's problems, from climate change to food security. In general, it's an industrious, enterprising, and faithful community. Glad I've had time to learn more about it."

This Exhibition is part of the Hindu Dharma Awareness Campaign and is successfully being displayed and welcomed across the country. In the months of April and May, over 200 events have been organized across the country to educate political, civic, educational, and interfaith leaders about Hindu Dharma, another term for Hinduism. Open to all, it provides glimpses into the Hindu way of life.

"This was a collective effort of several Hindu organizations. This event created a great opportunity for elected representatives and their staff to better understand their Hindu constituents. We are glad that so many lawmakers and their staff took the time out of their busy day to view the Exhibition and learn more about Hindu Traditions and Culture," said Darshan Soni (National Joint Executive Director, HSS USA), one of the organizers of "Darshana  A Glimpse into the Hindu Civilization" at the Capitol Hill event.

This press release is issued by HSS-USA. For more information, visit www.hssus.org . For exhibition-related information, visit www.hindudarshana.com

Contact:

HSS Media Contact

Vikas Deshpande

973-500-8477

[email protected]

SOURCE Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh USA
To commemorate the occasion, Holland America Line held a ribbon-cutting ceremony in the terminal to open embarkation, attended by the ship's captain and senior officers, with flag-waving fanfare from team members lined up to greet guests as they boarded the ship.

"With Zaandam's reentry into service, we are thrilled to not only have nearly our full fleet back, but also to return Canada and New England after two years away from this beautiful cruising destination," said Gus Antorcha, president of Holland America Line. "Zaandam has some special cruises coming up, and we're glad to have her back in service with an amazing team ready to give our guests an exceptional cruise experience."

Following the repositioning cruise along the east coast of North America, Zaandam will spend the summer and early fall offering Canada and New England cruises between Boston, Massachusetts, and Montreal.

On July 9, Zaandam sets sail on the popular 35-day Voyage of the Vikings itinerary roundtrip from Boston that retraces the routes of past explorers with ports in Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, Norway and the Netherlands. Following fall foliage cruises between Boston and Montreal, Zaandam embarks guests Oct. 10 for the 71-day Grand Africa Voyage that sails roundtrip from Fort Lauderdale and includes 25 ports of call, four overnights and countless safari opportunities to throughout the African continent.

After the Grand Africa Voyage, Zaandam will spend the holidays in the Caribbean and then offer a series of Panama Canal transits between San Diego, California, and Fort Lauderdale, with two Mexico options roundtrip from San Diego in March. The ship will return to Canada/New England next spring.

Since Holland America Line restarted cruising in July 2021, Eurodam, Koningsdam, Nieuw Amsterdam, Nieuw Statendam, Noordam, Oosterdam, Rotterdam and Zuiderdam have returned to service with cruises in Alaska, the Caribbean, Europe, Mexico, California Coast and South Pacific. Volendam currently is under charter by the government of the Netherlands, positioned alongside in Rotterdam accommodating Ukrainian families.

Holland America Line will complete the restart of the fleet June 12 with Westerdam in Seattle, Washington.

For more information about Holland America Line, consult a travel advisor, call 1-877-SAIL HAL (877-724-5425) or visit hollandamerica.com.

Editors note: Photos are available at https://www.cruiseimagelibrary.com/c/riccqtic.

Find Holland America Line on Twitter, Facebook and the Holland America Blog. Access all social media outlets via the home page at hollandamerica.com.

About Holland America Line [a division of Carnival Corporation and plc (NYSE: CCL and CUK)]

Holland America Line has been exploring the world since 1873 and was the first cruise line to offer adventures to Alaska and the Yukon nearly 75 years ago. Its fleet of premium ships visits nearly 400 ports in 114 countries around the world, offering an ideal mid-sized ship experience. A third Pinnacle-class ship, Rotterdam, joined the fleet in July 2021.

The leader in premium cruising, Holland America Line's ships feature innovative initiatives and a diverse range of enriching experiences focused on destination exploration and personalized travel. The best live music at sea fills each evening at Music Walk, and dining venues feature exclusive selections from Holland America Line's esteemed Culinary Council of world-famous chefs.

CONTACT: Bill Zucker, Erik Elvejord PHONE: 800-637-5029, 206-626-9890 EMAIL: [email protected]

SOURCE Holland America Line
Led by Animoca Brands and Gaw Capital, the fresh capital will support Gusto Collective's growth in Web3, Metaverse and product development

HONG KONG, May 11, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Gusto Collective, Asia's first BrandTech holding company, has raised US$ 11 million in its Seed Plus funding round led by Animoca Brands and Gaw Capital. The oversubscribed round also received participation from BlackPine, YCI Limited, and several existing shareholders including ClearVue Partners. With the completion of this round, the company has raised US$ 23 million in cumulative external funding since launching in 2020.

Gusto Collective was founded in 2020 by Chairman and CEO Aaron Lau, with the ambition of combining best-in-class storytelling and immersive technology. Gusto Collective has around 200 full-time "Gustodians" and the group consists of four specialisms in Web3 marketing services, an augmented reality experience platform, a metahuman platform and luxury marketing services. The company has partnered with Hong Kong's largest wireless operator, CSL, to create 5G AR experiences through an AR application it created; partnered with Phillips Auctioneers on the world's first real-time generative data art, based on auction data; and created AR experiences for Pixar Fest in the Harbour City mall in 2021.

The funding will support Gusto Collective's growth in 1) geographic expansion into other parts of Asia; 2) Web3 services and products, and 3) recurring-revenue product development.

"Gusto Collective was founded with the simple idea of helping brands connect with their franchise in the fast-growing world of Asia, whether in the physical world of bricks and mortar, or the emerging world of the metaverse. Since 2020, the company has been focused on creating content and experiences using the latest AR, VR and XR technologies. In the last 18 months, we have added metaverse services onto our tech stack to help brands build relationships with their franchises in this new medium. With the new funding, we intend to move more aggressively into Web3 tech services and expand geographically to bring our BrandTech capabilities to other fast-growth geographies within Asia," said Aaron Lau, Gusto Collective Founder and CEO.

Yat Siu, the executive chairman and co-founder of Animoca Brands, commented: "Major brands continue to increase their Web3 involvement and capabilities in order to engage with customers in the open metaverse. Gusto Collective has already proven to be adept at partnering with customers for Web3 and augmented reality services. With Aaron leading a growing and world-class team, Gusto Collective has the opportunity to establish strong recurring-revenue products and client services."

"Gusto Collective's team has decades of experience connecting brands with consumers via online, offline and hybrid mediums. Just like how Web2 revolutionized online marketing, Web3 is the next dimension for brands to further interact and deepen their relationships with consumers. Having witnessed Gusto Collective's marketing and branding prowess first-hand, we are excited to support the company to bring their marketing and creative expertise into the dynamic and fast-growing Web3 universe. " said Kenny Gaw, Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Gaw Capital Partners.

Gusto Collective also recently announced the appointment of Jeff Zielinski, Chief Financial Controller, Gusto Collective, based in Hong Kong.

About Gusto Collective

Gusto Collective is Asia's first BrandTech holding company  bringing the best businesses in technology and branding together to drive value and growth for brands through immersive and engaging customer experiences. Gusto Collective is a leading player in determining the future of immersive customer experiences that are increasingly operating within the spheres of AR, the metaverse and NFTs. The Collective was founded in January 2020 by Aaron Lau, an advertising, and branding veteran. The Collective has around 200 full-time employees. Gusto Luxe is focused on the Luxury and Premium sectors, Gusto Labs develops products in AR, VR, and more.

www.thisisgusto.com

SOURCE Gusto Collective
Houston business lawyer Andrew Weisblatt discusses how businesses can recover outstanding payments from debtors without experiencing difficulties.

HOUSTON , May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- In business, encountering clients that refuse to pay for goods delivered or services rendered happens from time to time. Without knowledge about their proper legal rights to utilize and recover debts, most business owners exhaust resources to get debtors to pay the outstanding payments. This method of approach can often lead to frustration for the business owner, who may still not recover their debt in the end.

Whether the debtors are consumers or other businesses, recovering debt can be tricky and requires several approaches to be successful. While companies can take quick action and regularly keep track of debtors, there are more helpful steps to collect unpaid debt.

Prominent Lawyer Andrew Weisblatt Advises Business Owners on Initial Steps Towards Debt Recovery

Andrew Weisblatt, a Houston business lawyer at Weisblatt Law Firm, says that debt collection cases can initially be tackled with negotiation to resolve the issue amicably and preserve the business relationship between the parties.

"The process of collecting pending payments can vary depending on the type of customer. In most cases, such issues with customers that respond to your queries in a good sense are easier to resolve," Weisblatt says.

"Although most business owners believe that an attorney only provides support for litigation cases, a business lawyer dexterously negotiates with debtors to avoid litigation if possible."

Debt Collection Can Be Easier with Help from a Business Lawyer

While most customers can be responsive, which leads to an effective resolution plan for paying off their debt, some customers would go to any length to avoid paying off their debt. For such customers, legal intervention can be the solution.

"Trying to collect debts from unresponsive customers who have failed to pay for your goods or services can be difficult and negatively impact your operations. After methods like negotiation fail to yield results, taking the case to court is not farfetched," Weisblatt says. He continues, "With the assistance of a business lawyer, you can file a lawsuit against your debtors and utilize your rights for debt collection, including placing liens on property or garnishing assets."

For over 25 years, lead attorney Andrew Weisblatt has skillfully represented businesses in the greater Houston area, ranging from multimillion-dollar corporations to single-owner start-ups, in several legal issues. He has a wealth of experience and a stellar record to back it up as a legal counsel for businesses in cases requiring business representation, contract disputes and litigation.

This press release was issued through 24-7PressRelease.com. For further information, visit http://www.24-7pressrelease.com.

SOURCE Weisblatt Law Firm
MOU with the AUTOSAR software platform expert Vector expected to boost software platform competitiveness.

The partnership is a preemptive move for forecasted increase in demand from global clients for software-installed auto components related to autonomous driving and infotainment.

SEOUL, South Korea, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Hyundai Mobis and Vector have agreed to the joint development of automotive software platforms. Vector, a German premium partner of AUTOSAR, which endorses global standards for automotive software, is a leading provider of development tools and software platforms to global automakers and suppliers.

As software platforms have become a critical component in defining competitiveness in vehicle manufacturing, automakers are now requiring their suppliers to adopt AUTOSAR-based software platforms with proven quality and versatility.

Through this MOU, the two companies are anticipating increased competitiveness of their automotive software in the global automotive industry.

The two companies will first install the co-developed software in core components related to parking systems, autonomous driving sensors, infotainment systems, and electrified parts. It is also expected that this list of core components installed with the platform will grow further.

According to Senior Vice President Jae-ho Jang at Hyundai Mobis, "This strategic partnership will not only enhance our software competitiveness and quality reliability in the global automotive industry but will also guide us towards becoming a leader in the mobility software industry."

Ji-Hwan Chang, President of Vector Korea adds, "Vector is extremely excited to join Hyundai Mobis in the development of mission-critical automotive software platforms. Contributing with our industry-leading AUTOSAR expertise and products, we look forward to helping Hyundai Mobis' software oriented mobility transformation."

For Hyundai Mobis, this partnership is only the beginning of more long-term partnerships to come with major software companies that have elemental technologies for automated driving. The first of these partnerships will most likely be concluded in the areas of automotive communication solutions and autonomous driving sensors. (END)

About Hyundai MOBIS

Hyundai Mobis is the global no.7 global automotive supplier, headquartered in Seoul, Korea. Hyundai Mobis has outstanding expertise in sensors, sensor fusion in ECUs and software development for safety control. The company's products also include various components for electrification, brakes, chassis and suspension, steering, airbags, lighting and automotive electronics. Hyundai Mobis operates R&D headquarter in Korea, with 4 technology centers in Germany, China, India and the United States.

For more information, please visit the website at http://www.mobis.co.kr/.

Media Contact

Jihyun Han: [email protected]

Choon Kee Hwang: [email protected]

SOURCE Hyundai Mobis
How a national network of doctors is tapping AI to combat rare diseases Tweet this

Inflect's rich knowledge of healthcare economics across diverse patient populations ensures that GEn1E can identify key areas of high unmet medical need. The team at GEn1E then uses computational models, biological experiments, and 'omics data, among other proprietary information, to drive its decision-making. This enables them to discover and develop promising drugs much faster than traditional solutions. By following this process, GEn1E has radically accelerated small molecule drug development to advance novel compounds for rare and inflammatory diseases starting with ARDS (Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome)a devastating lung disease with a ~40% mortality rate, a $125,000+ cost of care per patient contributing to a $20B cost to society in the US, and no therapeutic treatment.

"Our mission at Inflect has always been to put patients first, that means patients whose needs are not being met due to the lack of effective treatments. We have a strong network of thousands of expert physicians that gives us a unique insight into the unmet needs of millions of patients," said Dr. Rick Newell, CEO of Inflect Health. "With 90% of rare diseases having no therapeutic treatment at all, GEn1E's mission is critical, and we are delighted to embark on this expanded partnership."

The power of GEn1E's platform is evident in the progress they have made in the ~2 years since graduating from Y Combinator in late 2019 using only seed funding. With over 21+ novel immunomodulators in their pipeline, clinical success exhibited by their lead, and plans to file two more INDs (investigational new drug), GEn1E has demonstrated an unprecedented fast pace and efficiency in drug developmenta stark contrast to the 7+ years and $100M+ spend that is typical within the industry.

"Our partnership with Inflect is tremendously helpful to supercharge our drug development process. Their expertise on the needs of hospital systems and payers, current standard of care, along with key healthcare metrics such as length of stay and readmission rates, are invaluable to the development of new and much-needed therapies faster, better, and more cost-effectively," said Dr. Ritu Lal, CEO of GEn1E Lifesciences.

ABOUT INFLECT HEALTH:

Inflect Health is a catalyst for better care. Headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area with offices across America, Inflect Health provides guidance and financial support to early-stage healthcare and healthtech companies building promising solutions that offer to meet the needs of today's evolving healthcare landscape.

As the innovation hub of Vituity, a physician-owned multi-specialty partnership, Inflect Health has robust access to 5,000 doctors, clinicians, health systems, and other key industry players.

By connecting innovators to capital, physicians, and patients in real-time, Inflect Health is a catalyst for consistent care improvement and innovative health technologies.

For more information on Inflect Health, including its portfolio, partners, services, and networking opportunities, visit www.InflectHealth.com or find Inflect Health on LinkedIn or Twitter @InflectHealth .

ABOUT GEN1E LIFESCIENCES:

GEn1E Lifesciences is a multitarget platform for novel, next generation immunomodulators for rare and inflammatory diseases. By applying machine learning to its "platform in a mechanism" model, GEn1E has developed a pipeline of 21+ novel compounds. Their lead compound is a purpose-built therapy for acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), a serious respiratory condition with no approved therapeutic treatments and high mortality rate.

GEn1E is based in Palo Alto, CA, with a laboratory in Mountain View, CA. For more information on GEn1E Lifesciences, visit www.gen1e.com and follow GEn1E on LinkedIn.

SOURCE GEn1E Lifesciences Inc.
Ryan joined the Company in 1988 and was elected Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary in 2011. She previously served in a variety of legal roles, including as Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer. She has been honored for her many contributions in the community, most recently for establishing the IP Signature Pro Bono Initiative, which advocates for equal justice for people who lack access and resources.

Joseph R. Saab has been elected Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary effective July 1, 2022. After working several years as an environmental lawyer, Saab joined the Company in 2001 as legal counsel for Environment, Health and Safety. Since then, he has served in a number of roles in the legal department, including chief counsel, Global Governance and Compliance, and general counsel, Papers the Americas. In 2014, he was named Associate General Counsel for Industrial Packaging and Latin America and his responsibilities were expanded to include EMEA and Russia in 2018. In 2019, he was appointed Vice President, Deputy General Counsel and Assistant Corporate Secretary and his recent responsibilities have included Enterprise Corporate Law and Operational Excellence, as well as overseeing support for and advising the Board of Directors.

"Throughout his time with IP, Joe has proven himself to be an effective and capable leader," stated Sutton. "I have every confidence that he will provide the legal expertise and leadership we need as he takes on this new role and joins our senior lead team."

About International Paper

International Paper (NYSE: IP) is a leading global supplier of renewable fiber-based products. We produce corrugated packaging products that protect and promote goods, and enable worldwide commerce, and pulp for diapers, tissue and other personal care products that promote health and wellness. Headquartered in Memphis, Tenn., we employ approximately 38,000 colleagues globally. We serve customers worldwide, with manufacturing operations in North America, Latin America, North Africa and Europe. Net sales for 2021 were $19.4 billion. Additional information can be found by visiting InternationalPaper.com.

SOURCE International Paper
VANCOUVER, BC, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - International Tower Hill Mines Ltd. (the "Company") - (TSX: ITH) (NYSE American: THM) today announced that it has filed its unaudited first quarter Financial Statements and associated Management Discussion and Analysis and Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the three-month period ended March 31, 2022.

As of March 31, 2022, the Company had working capital of US$7.1 million.

Shareholders can obtain copies of the Company's unaudited first quarter Financial Statements and associated Management Discussion and Analysis and Form 10-Q on SEDAR at: www.sedar.com, EDGAR at www.sec.gov and on the Company's website at: www.ithmines.com. The Company will also provide hard copies of these documents, free of charge, to shareholders who request a copy directly from the Company.

About International Tower Hill Mines Ltd.

International Tower Hill Mines Ltd. has a 100% interest in its Livengood Gold Project located along the paved Elliott Highway, 70 miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska.

On behalf of

International Tower Hill Mines Ltd.

(signed) Karl L. Hanneman

Chief Executive Officer

This news release is not, and is not to be construed in any way as, an offer to buy or sell securities in the United States.

SOURCE International Tower Hill Mines Ltd.
21Shares Launches First DeFi ETP in Europe and Layer 1 Index ETP

With the 21Shares DeFi 10 Infrastructure ETP, 21Shares is the first provider in Europe to launch an ETP based on a DeFi index.

to launch an ETP based on a DeFi index. The 21Shares Layer 1 ETP invests exclusively in Layer 1 blockchains, which represent the technical basis of the DeFi universe and the entire crypto industry.

ZURICH, Switzerland, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- 21Shares AG ("21Shares"), a Swiss-based issuer of crypto Exchange Traded Products (ETPs), today announces the launch of the new 21Shares Layer 1 and 21Shares DeFi 10 Infrastructure ETPs on SIX Swiss and BX Swiss Exchange respectively. Both of these new products allow investors to invest in the services and technical fundamentals of the DeFi industry.

21Shares Layer 1 ETP offers thematic exposure to blockchain foundations

The 21Shares Layer 1 ETP (symbol: LAY1) is listed on SIX Swiss Exchange as of today, May 12, 2022, and offers investors targeted exposure to the blockchains that form the technical foundation of the DeFi universe. To this end, LAY1 tracks an index which was custom-tailored by index provider Vinter and invests in an index that includes the fiv largest Layer 1 blockchains - with a maximum weighting of 30 percent per blockchain. Rebalancing is conducted on a quarterly basis.

21Shares DeFi 10 Infrastructure ETP: dApps for the future of finance

The 21Shares DeFi 10 Infrastructure ETP (symbol: DEFII) is planned to be listed on BX Swiss Exchange on May 18, 2022. It is designed to provide investors targeted exposure to the emerging decentralized financial services (DeFi) industry rooted in blockchain technology, and tracks the results of a customized index also created by Vinter. This index tracks a combination of the price performance of decentralized DeFi applications ("dApps") and Layer 1 blockchains, which form the technological basis of DeFi. Each comprises 50 percent of the overall index. The assets in both categories are ranked by market capitalization and reweighted quarterly.

Ophelia Snyder, Co-founder and President of 21Shares, comments:

"Our financial system is at the beginning of a paradigm shift. A plethora of new blockchain-based applications around DeFi and Web3 are already under development and making enormous progress. They are the components of a completely new, democratic and inclusive financial system. With our new thematic crypto ETPs, we're providing investors with two broadly diversified investment vehicles at the ideal time to participate in this revolution."

About 21Shares:

21Shares takes innovation to the next level with the largest suite of cryptocurrency exchange-traded products (ETPs) in the world. In 2018 it pioneered the world's first cryptocurrency index listing on the SIX Swiss Exchange, and it continues powering its cryptocurrency franchise with cutting-edge research and groundbreaking approaches to product strategy. 21Shares aims to provide all investors with an easy, secure and regulated way to buy, sell and short cryptocurrency through existing bank and brokerage accounts. 21Shares is a Swiss company registered in Zug, Switzerland with offices in Zurich and New York City. For more information, please visit www.21shares.com .

Press Contact

Arielle Sobel, Head of Global Communications

[email protected]

Disclaimer:

This document is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy or subscribe for securities of 21Shares AG. Neither this document nor anything contained herein shall form the basis of, or be relied upon in connection with, any offer or commitment whatsoever in any jurisdiction. This document constitutes advertisement within the meaning of the Swiss Financial Services Act and not a prospectus. This document and the information contained herein are not for distribution in or into (directly or indirectly) the United States, Canada, Australia or Japan or any other jurisdiction in which the distribution or release would be unlawful. This document does not constitute an offer of securities to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase in or into the United States, Canada, Australia, or Japan. The securities of 21Shares AG to which these materials relate have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act"), and may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration or an applicable exemption from, or in a transaction not subject to, the registration requirements of the Securities Act. There will not be a public offering of securities in the United States. This document is only being distributed to and is only directed at: (i) to investment professionals falling within Article 19(5) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005 (the "Order"); or (ii) high net worth entities, and other persons to whom it may lawfully be communicated, falling within Article 49(2)(a) to (d) of the Order (all such persons together being referred to as "relevant persons"); or (iii) persons who fall within Article 43(2) of the Order, including existing members and creditors of the Company or (iv) any other persons to whom this document can be lawfully distributed in circumstances where section 21(1) of the FSMA does not apply. The Securities are only available to, and any invitation, offer or agreement to subscribe, purchase or otherwise acquire such securities will be engaged in only with, relevant persons. Any person who is not a relevant person should not act or rely on this document or any of its contents. In any EEA Member State (other than the France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain ) that has implemented the Prospectus Regulation (EU) 2017/1129, together with any applicable implementing measures in any Member State, the "Prospectus Regulation") this communication is only addressed to and is only directed at qualified investors in that Member State within the meaning of the Prospectus Regulation. Exclusively for potential investors in France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain the 2021 Base Prospectus (EU) is made available on the Issuer's website under www.21Shares.com. The approval of the 2021 Base Prospectus (EU) should not be understood as an endorsement by the SFSA of the securities offered or admitted to trading on a regulated market. Eligible potential investors should read the 2021 Base Prospectus (EU) and the relevant Final Terms before making an investment decision in order to understand the potential risks associated with the decision to invest in the securities.

SOURCE 21Shares
The campaign continues the visual narrative of capturing and celebrating the different sides to the self-portrait woman. The full Autumn/Winter Pre-Collection campaign, showing an evolution of Irina's character, will be revealed later this month.

Han Chong said:

"I wanted to shift our campaign into something that felt really strong, powerful and clean to represent the joy and confidence associated with our brand and to celebrate the spirit at the heart of this new collection. Irina is the perfect woman for us - she has so much character and personality, and is able to show the different sides of the self-portrait woman so effortlessly. I'm so pleased to work with her and that our creative relationship continues to evolve."

Irina Shayk said:

"I loved working with self-portrait - a brand that celebrates women and loves to make them feel their best. Working with them really feels like family."

The self-portrait Autumn/Winter 2022 Pre-Collection introduces a refined approach to dressing in the springtime. Clean silhouettes are the focus with voluminous lace detailing and figure-hugging knitwear styles offered in a palette of pastels, vivid hues and more muted tones.

The launch of the campaign coincides with the arrival of the brand's Autumn/Winter 2022 Pre-Collection online and in stores. The collection is available to purchase immediately at self-portrait.com, in self-portrait stores around the world, including the brand's flagship store in London, and across its global network of partner retailers.

Established in London in 2013 by Han Chong, self-portrait has become synonymous with empowering the modern woman through functional dressing for day and night. The brand is also strongly committed to supporting creative British talent through a number of initiatives including a scholarship program with Central Saint Martins.

NOTES TO EDITORS

ABOUT THE CAMPAIGN

Creative Director: Han Chong

Photographer: Carlijn Jacobs

Stylist: Katie Burnett

Makeup: Sam Visser

Hair: Mustafa Yanaz

Art Director: Lina Kutsovskaya for Be Good Studios

CELEBRATING THE AUTUMN/WINTER 2022 PRE-COLLECTION

Fabrics: Boucle, grid cotton broderie, mixed cotton broderie, organic cotton poplin, cotton denim, guipure lace, lily cotton guipure lace, cotton lace, recycled polyester chiffon, bonded crepe, stretch crepe, thin jersey, thick jersey, light, viscose knit, ribbed viscose knit, power mesh, taffeta, viscose

Colours: lime, bright green, light green, mint, sea green, green, dark green, teal, navy, blue, bright Blue, light Blue, orange, pink, light pink, lilac, slate, silver, taupe, ivory, white, black

HAN CHONG ON THE AUTUMN/WINTER 2022 PRE-COLLECTION

"When I was designing this collection, I was thinking a lot about the joys of springtime when I knew the pieces would be delivering in stores. I wanted to create a happy, grown up collection that focused on clean silhouettes and strong bold colours. Our key shapes are contemporised with a feminine lens, and new shapes are introduced including eveningwear in full length knitwear and mini dresses in a vibrant happy-making palette."

ABOUT HAN CHONG

Born in Penang, Malaysia , Han studied Fashion Design at Central Saint Martins in London

, Han studied Fashion Design at Central Saint Martins in Fuelled by his own training at Central Saint Martins, Han is committed to supporting the next generation of creative talent and in 2018, established a five-year scholarship program with Central Saint Martins offering financial backing for five students to complete their MA degree as well as offering mentorship on navigating the realities of operating a fashion business

ABOUT SELF-PORTRAIT

Established in the UK in 2013 by Han Chong , self-portrait is a modern fashion house based in London which has become synonymous with modern occasionwear for day and night and prides itself on its deep understanding of structure and materials

, self-portrait is a modern fashion house based in which has become synonymous with modern occasionwear for day and night and prides itself on its deep understanding of structure and materials self-portrait is dedicated to reducing its environmental impact by using responsibly sourced fibres and in 2019 started to introduce organic cotton and recycled chiffon and polyester across its collections. In 2020, the brand introduced recycled viscose

self-portrait is available online at self-portrait-studio.com and in stores globally including its flagships in London , Bangkok , Beijing , Shanghai , Chengdu , Shenzhen and Taipei . self-portrait is also sold through a network of select retailers around the world

ABOUT SP COLLECTION

In December 2021 , Han Chong announced the foundation of SP Collection

, announced the foundation of SP Collection The new holding company established by Han acquired the luxury brand Roland Mouret , which joins self-portrait in the newly established group that has been set up to discover, nurture, and develop best in class creativity and design

Photo 1: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1816551/Self_Portrait_Irina_Shayk__1.jpg

Photo 2: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1816552/Self_Portrait_Irina_Shayk__2.jpg

Photo 3: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1816553/Self_Portrait_Irina_Shayk__3.jpg

SOURCE self-portrait
JAMESTOWN, Pa., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Jamestown Coating Technologies, a Pennsylvania-based manufacturer of industrial paints and coatings, and The Yenkin-Majestic Paint Corporation, an Ohio-based manufacturer of coatings and coatings resins, have entered into a definitive agreement under which Jamestown Coating Technologies will acquire Yenkin-Majestic's industrial paint business, producing coatings for the OEM market under the YM-Industrial brand.

"The acquisition of the YM-Industrial portfolio of products is an excellent strategic fit for Jamestown," said Michael Walton, CEO of Jamestown Coatings. "We're excited to collaborate with Yenkin-Majestic's customers, and we will continue to provide the excellent service and quality that has been Yenkin-Majestic's hallmark.This product portfolio will also benefit Jamestown's existing customers by leveraging Yenkin-Majestic's long history of developing high performance, environmentally friendly paints and coatings. Both companies' customers will benefit from Jamestown's continued investment in Research & Development, improving manufacturing efficiency, and supply chain resiliency."

The sale of Yenkin-Majestic's industrial coatings business continues the company's shift to focus investment on its OPC Polymers unit, which supplies the coatings industry with alkyd, copolymer, and specialty resins."Our primary objective in working with Jamestown has been to ensure the high-quality and service-oriented continuation of supply to our industrial coatings customers, particularly under these difficult supply-chain conditions. Our customers are in great hands with Jamestown," said Andrew O. Smith, the CEO of Yenkin-Majestic. "Over the coming months, we will work together closely to make sure the transition is seamless."

J.D. Walton, President of Jamestown Coatings said, "This acquisition is the fourth in our company's 137-year history. It demonstrates our desire to grow our industrial coatings business in parallel with our consumer packaging coatings business. In addition to facilities investments, we're adding personnel in R&D, manufacturing, and sales. We continue to find excellent opportunities in the market, and this acquisition positions us to succeed well into the future."

About Jamestown Coating Technologies

Jamestown Coating Technologies, based in Jamestown, PA, is a 6th generation, family-owned manufacturer of consumer packaging coatings and industrial paints and coatings. Serving Original Equipment Manufacturers and Packaging Converters across the globe, Jamestown custom formulates its products to help improve its customers' profitability. Jamestown produces coatings that minimize waste, improve throughput, offer superior corrosion protection, and reduce energy consumption. Learn more at www.jamestowncoatings.com.

About Yenkin-Majestic

Yenkin-Majestic Paint Corporation, based in Columbus, OH, is the owner of OPC Polymers, one of North America's leading suppliers of coatings resins. OPC Polymers serves the paint industry through continuous innovation in its broad portfolio of alkyd, copolymer, and specialty resins. This family-owned business began in 1920. Learn more at www.opcpolymers.com.

Media Contact:

Michael Walton

[email protected]

SOURCE Jamestown Coating Technologies
"We are very pleased to be launching our OpenBlue Innovation Center in Cork. This center will be focused on working with our customers to identify solutions for them to hit decarbonization and renewable energy goals while optimizing building performance," said Tomas Brannemo, vice president and president, Building Solutions EMEALA at Johnson Controls. "This center will serve as our regional center of excellence to bring clients to see Johnson Controls' latest cutting-edge innovations on how to solve for net zero".

Fitted with the most advanced Johnson Controls building technology solutions, the OpenBlue Innovation Center will be a showcase of the latest and most innovative solutions from the company in a live environment. The research and development grant Johnson Controls received from the Irish government will support engineering activities at the center, including developing a professional services hub for the Europe, Middle East, Africa and Latin America region over a two-year period. Johnson Controls' research and development presence has grown substantially in recent years and it is expected that 18 new research and development roles will be created as a result of the OpenBlue Innovation Center, in addition to 40 roles already in place working on the next generation solutions for Johnson Controls and its customers.

Research and development at the OpenBlue Innovation Center will focus on the global priority to reduce carbon emissions in the building sector. The building sector accounts for nearly 40 percent of global annual CO2 emissions, making it a key focus area in the pursuit of a net zero world.

"Our partnership with the Irish government through IDA Ireland shows how governments and industry can drive real change. The financial support will allow us to increase our headcount, which will contribute not only to the local economy, but also to the development of our OpenBlue net zero solutions globally to have a positive impact on climate change," said Eamonn Hughes, vice president and general manager, Digital Solutions EMEALA at Johnson Controls.

Welcoming the investment, IDA Ireland's Head of Engineering and Green Economy, Eileen Sharpe added: "IDA Ireland is committed to supporting the work of world class companies such as Johnson Controls to utilize the latest developments in AI, Data Analytics and Cloud Architecture to build new technologies to enable a more sustainable world. This is a most welcome investment for Cork and for Ireland and is in line with our strategy aim to develop Ireland as a leading location for Sustainability Engineering solutions."

OpenBlue, Johnson Controls' suite of connected solutions, is a key enabler changing the face of sustainability for customers today, through smart buildings technologies designed for operational energy efficiency, occupant comfort and sustainability. Cutting-edge solutions such as OpenBlue Net Zero Buildings can help drive significant improvements in energy efficiency and corresponding carbon emissions.

The OpenBlue Innovation Center in Cork will launch on May 12, 2022.

About Johnson Controls:

At Johnson Controls (NYSE:JCI), we transform the environments where people live, work, learn and play. As the global leader in smart, healthy and sustainable buildings, our mission is to reimagine the performance of buildings to serve people, places and the planet.

Building on a proud history of more than 135 years of innovation, we deliver the blueprint of the future for industries such as healthcare, schools, data centers, airports, stadiums, manufacturing and beyond through OpenBlue, our comprehensive digital offering. Today, with a global team of 100,000 experts in more than 150 countries, Johnson Controls offers the world's largest portfolio of building technology and software as well as service solutions from some of the most trusted names in the industry. Visit www.johnsoncontrols.com for more information and follow @Johnson Controls on social platforms.

About Johnson Controls OpenBlue Innovation Centers



Johnson Controls was founded on innovation. It is in our DNA. Today, our OpenBlue Innovation Centers write the next chapters of this proud history, emphasizing seamless collaboration between expert teams to find new ways of providing smart, healthy and sustainable spaces. Powering the blueprint of the future.

www.johnsoncontrols.com/openblue/openblue-innovation-centers

SOURCE Johnson Controls International plc
GLEN ALLEN, Va., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Association for Accounting Marketing (AAM) unveiled the winners of the Marketing Achievement Awards on May 2, 2022, at the AAM Summit Conference in Louisville, Kentucky with over 200 in attendance. Keiter was recognized in this nationwide industry competition for website development with a budget of under $35,000.

"The award reflects the innovative thinking and ingenuity of the Keiter marketing team to build an insight driven website that focuses on user experience (UX)," said Brian Swanson, Chief SEO Strategist. "FlashPoint Digital is pleased to have been a part of the design, development, and initial optimization of the Keiter site."

"This award is a reflection of Keiter's strategic growth initiative focused on finding ideal clients that our team of opportunity advisors can best serve," explained Gary Wallace, Keiter's Managing Partner. "This award would not be possible without the wonderfully creative, strategic, and brand-minded individuals on our Marketing Team."

AAM's Marketing Achievement Awards features awards across multiple categories including advertising, branding, business development initiative, collateral and content marketing, events, marketing and PR campaigns, video and multimedia, website, corporate social responsibility, and diversity, equity and inclusion. Access the list of 2022 AAM/MAA winners.

Flashpoint Digital consulted on the development of the award winning Keiter website. They provide search engine optimization and website development services to professionals service organizations including Certified Public Accountants, Chartered Accountants, law firms, and others in the United States, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. For more information on the firm visit www.flashpointmarketing.biz.

Keiter was founded in 1978 and provides a full range of financial services to businesses and their owners. The Keiter team is always focused on providing fresh insights and creating new opportunities to help businesses grow. The Firm has over 160 employees in its Richmond office and is the third largest accounting firm in Richmond with over 80 CPAs. Keiter has developed specialized expertise in serving the real estate, construction, manufacturing, and financial services industries, as well as nonprofit entities. For more information on the Firm, please visit www.keitercpa.com.

CONTACT: Mike Gray, [email protected]

SOURCE Keiter
With Kickfin and Visa Direct, employers distribute real-time, cashless tip payouts directly to their employees' bank accounts Tweet this

Historically part of the full-service restaurant and hotel culture, tip programs are increasingly leveraged by quick-service restaurants as a means to increase employees' take-home earnings. However, the rise of credit card and digital transactions has made it difficult to pay out tips in cash at the end of every shift.

By digitizing tip payouts and distributing them in real time, directly to their employees' bank accounts, employers can reduce bank runs, reduce theft and human error, and streamline reporting  while increasing employee satisfaction. Kickfin's technology also ensures organizations remain compliant with complicated, ever-changing tip pooling regulations, and it integrates with existing POS and payroll systems.

"The hospitality workforce consists of frontline, essential employees. They need, deserve and quite frankly expect immediate access to their earnings," said Justin Roberts, co-CEO of Kickfin. "When employers offer real-time, cashless tip payouts, the message is clear: they care about the financial well-being of their employees. Kickfin provides a long-term, sustainable solution for the operational, recruiting and compliance needs of the modern hospitality employer, and we're excited to see how our collaboration with Visa will continue to transform the industry for the better."

"We live in a world with expectations of immediacy and convenience, necessitating the need for a global money movement network that is nonstop," said Yanilsa Gonzalez-Ore, SVP, North America Head of Visa Direct. "With Visa Direct, we're helping transform the next generation of global money movement and are excited to help bring fast, digitized tip disbursements to Kickfin's clients in the U.S."

ABOUT KICKFIN

Kickfin is the leading gratuity management software. Restaurant and hospitality brands across the country use Kickfin to tip out employees in real-time, directly to their bank accounts  no cash required. Solve for cash shortages, reduce the risk of theft and human error, and recruit more workers by giving your team immediate access to their tips. Visit kickfin.com/visa-payouts to schedule a free demo today.

1 Actual fund availability depends on receiving financial institution and region

2 Visa Direct capability enabled through Kickfin's financial institution partner

SOURCE Kickfin
-- Current Drug Market Shortage Exists for Fludarabine Phosphate, An Injectable Chemotherapeutic Medication; Marketing Anticipated to Commence Later This Calendar Year --

PHILADELPHIA, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Lannett Company, Inc. (NYSE: LCI) today announced that it has entered into an agreement with Areva Pharmaceuticals to be the exclusive U.S. distributor of Fludarabine Phosphate for injection, USP, 50 mg/2mL, single dose vials.

"Fludarabine Phosphate for injection represents a continuation of our push to new dosage forms with attractive market opportunities," said Tim Crew, chief executive officer of Lannett. "Moreover, a drug market shortage has recently existed for Fludarabine Phosphate for injection, so our goal, subject to FDA clearance, is to commence marketing as soon as possible, targeting later this calendar year, to help patients gain access to this important oncology medicine. We are pleased to establish a new strategic relationship with Areva Pharmaceuticals and look forward to launching this product."

While total U.S. sales for the 12 months ended March 2022 of Fludarabine Phosphate for injection, USP, 50 mg/2mL were approximately $4.9 million, according to IQVIA, the current market value is believed to be higher due to the recent market disruptions.

Under the agreement, Lannett will provide sales, marketing and distribution support for Fludarabine Phosphate, for which it will receive a share of the profits. Other financial terms were not disclosed. Fludarabine Phosphate for injection USP is the generic equivalent of Fludara of Bayer AG.

Fludara is a registered trademark of Bayer AG.

About Areva Pharmaceuticals

Areva Pharmaceuticals Inc., a US-based healthcare company, specializes in innovative processes to make difficult-to-manufacture specialty and multi-source pharmaceutical drugs that are easier to use, less labor intensive, and more streamlined in practice. Areva ensures that its high-quality FDA-approved drugs fulfill a critical unmet medical need and delivers dependable life-saving treatment options when and where they are needed most.

About Lannett Company, Inc.:

Lannett Company, founded in 1942, develops, manufactures, packages, markets and distributes generic pharmaceutical products for a wide range of medical indications. For more information, visit the company's website at www.lannett.com.

This news release contains certain statements of a forward-looking nature relating to future events or future business performance. Any such statement, including, but not limited to, the company successfully commercializing Fludarabine Phosphate for injection, USP, 50 mg/2mL, and the potential material impact of COVID-19 on future financial results, whether expressed or implied, is subject to market and other conditions, and subject to risks and uncertainties which can cause actual results to differ materially from those currently anticipated due to a number of factors which include, but are not limited to, the risk factors discussed in the Company's Form 10-K and other documents filed with the SEC from time to time, including the prospectus supplement related to the proposed offering to be filed with the SEC. These forward-looking statements represent the Company's judgment as of the date of this news release. The Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update these forward-looking statements.

Contact:

Robert Jaffe

Robert Jaffe Co., LLC

(424) 288-4098

SOURCE Lannett Company, Inc.
Technology Learning Center and event designed to foster growth, optimize efficiency

CHICAGO, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- LaSalle St., a family of wealth management firms encompassing independent broker-dealer and registered investment adviser (RIA) platforms, today introduced its Technology Learning Center. The firm's comprehensive set of learning resources, consisting of live webinars, recorded videos, written documentation and a LaSalle St. podcast, is designed to help its affiliated representatives and advisors evaluate and optimize their practices' technology platforms.

The Technology Learning Center will be formally introduced during the LaSalle St. Annual Growth Summit which focuses on bringing real-life practice management, business growth, peer-to-peer engagement and product idea brainstorming to a one-day event. More than 120 of LaSalle St.'s reps, advisors, home office staff and strategic sponsors will attend the summit at the Westin Yorktown Centre in Lombard, Illinois. The firm suspended its 2020 and 2021 Annual Growth Summits due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mark Contey, Senior Vice President of Business Development at LaSalle St. said, "We understand how daunting and time-consuming it can be for advisors to identify, integrate and learn how to use the right technology solutions for their businesses. And that does not include keeping up with changes custodians roll out on platforms that are mission-critical to their businesses. The Technology Learning Center will help our advisors explore what is available to them from LaSalle St. and others, stay up to speed on advancing technologies and determine how it can help grow their business."

The 2022 Annual Growth Summit will feature sessions on networking, capital markets investment themes, book-buying strategies and other growth strategies. Speakers include:

John Cianciulli , President, Team Edge Consulting

, President, Team Edge Consulting Taylor Hankins , CFA, Fidelity Investments

, CFA, Fidelity Investments Amy Osborne , Senior Learning Consultant, Franklin Templeton

, Senior Learning Consultant, Jim and Kim Steinbrenner , Steinbrenner Financial Group

, Steinbrenner Financial Group Lewin Williams , First Trust

, First Trust David Zoller , CFP, co-owner, Streamline Financial Services

, CFP, co-owner, Streamline Financial Services Michael Graham , Peter Lewis and Todd Fennick , LaSalle St.

"We believe that offering more resources and customized integration and implementation assistance to our advisors will drive meaningful growth to their business and ours, enabling LaSalle St. reps and advisors to continue to deliver superior service and results to their clients," Mr. Contey said.

About LaSalle St.

LaSalle St. is a family of firms comprising LaSalle St. Securities, an independent broker-dealer; LaSalle St. Investment Advisors, a SEC-registered investment adviser; and LaSalle St. Insurance Services, a provider of annuity and insurance products. It has a singular mission of supporting the growth and success of independent financial advisors across the country. Founded in 1974 and based in Chicago, Illinois, LaSalle St. supports more than 300 financial advisors, has over $12 billion in total client assets and is registered in all 50 states. The LaSalle St. companies offer a wide range of services, including brokerage, advisory, investment and insurance. The firm clears primarily through National Financial Services, with custodial services through NFS parent Fidelity Investments. For more information, visit https://www.lasallest.com/.

Media Contact

Haven Tower Group

Donald C. Cutler/ Lorene Yue

[email protected]/ [email protected]

424 317 4864 / 424 317 4854

SOURCE LaSalle St.
NEW YORK, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Historically, the venture capital industry has not set a good example for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Angelica Fuentes Tellez, businesswoman and capital investor, points out that ensuring equality of opportunity for entrepreneurs, regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender, is one of the main challenges in the industry.

For Latin Women entrepreneurs, for example, one of their main barriers in the United States is getting the access to raise capital for their venture.

According to data from Crunchbase, in 2021, startups founded by women, or led exclusively by female teams, raised only 2.3% of that year's venture capital, with no exact figure on how many of those were Latin women.

By comparison, startups with mixed-gender co-founders raised 11.7% of the funds. However, it stands out that 86% of the venture capital went to male startups.

Although the panorama indicates that more and more women entrepreneurs are accessing mega-rounds of financing at the macro level, Angelica Fuentes Tellez, a defender of gender equality in the business field, highlights that the financing figures are disproportionate, leaving Latina entrepreneurs behind.

"The financing barriers that currently limit women's business development are entirely due to gender and racial biases. In conversations I've had with women entrepreneurs, the questions that investors ask them have little or nothing to do with developing their companies and their vision for the future," explains Angelica Fuentes.

The businesswoman and impact investor points out that while male founders are questioned about potential profits, women are challenged on the potential losses that their venture may generate.

For Angelica Fuentes, one of the solutions to this problem lies in the support networks that women build and their capacity to empower more women.

"We cannot wait for investors to trust us to launch our ventures. For this reason, there are more and more networks and organizations that recruit female venture capitalists, because they understand the importance of the gender perspective in the entrepreneurial ecosystem," she says.

The All Raise organization points out that 65% of venture capital companies do not have any female investors in their ranks, so naturally, financing is allocated in a smaller proportion to female founders.

To reduce this gap, the organization has the key objective of increasing the number of women VCs, so that they foster venture capital for women to start their businesses.

"While in 2018 we saw that only 9% of venture capitalists were women, the effort that organizations such as All Raise or Melinda French Gates' Female Founders Funds have done increased female investors in 14%," says Angelica Fuentes.

The importance that Angelica Fuentes gives to gender equality in the private sector has earned her recognition as one of the 15 women who have changed the world by the World Economic Forum.

SOURCE Angelica Fuentes Tellez
Lawsuit brought by The Button Law Firm alleges doctor and hospital employees neglected patient safety protocols

DALLAS, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- A North Texas man believes a laparotomy sponge left inside his abdomen during small bowel resection surgery last summer resulted in a serious infection caused by E. coli bacteria. Justin Martin is suing Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Rockwall (THR Rockwall), Dr. Katherine Makohon, Lakeside Surgery, and other employees who participated in the medical procedure, alleging patient safety protocols that prevent these kinds of incidents were not followed.

The suit states Martin was in the care of Dr. Makohon shortly after he sought help for abdominal pain at THR Rockwall's emergency room on June 21, 2021. He was admitted to the hospital for further evaluation and management of ileitis, inflammation of the intestines, including a surgical procedure and possible colectomy.

Dr. Makohon, an employee of Lakeside Surgery and consulting physician for THR Rockwall, and the hospital employees who staffed Martin's small bowel resection surgery were expected to follow patient safety protocols, which included participating in sponge, needle, and instrument counts at multiple junctures during the procedure. According to the lawsuit, the hospital staff conducted four counts during the operation, but Dr. Makohon failed to participate in and was not provided notice of conducting the count procedure at least once before she proceeded with closing Martin's abdomen. In addition, the suit claims the missing sponge was not charted.

Two weeks after the surgery, Martin experienced a gush of pinkish fluid rushing out of the incision and returned to THR Rockwall by ambulance, where doctors found "foul smelling drainage," according to the lawsuit. Martin's blood work revealed signs of infection and inflammation with an intra-abdominal abscess that measured approximately 12 cm near his incision area. The suit states a CT scan found Martin had a "narrow rectangular object in the abdomen that was suspicious to [Dr. Makohon] as a foreign body." The suit cites that the finding landed Martin back in surgery to remove the sponge left inside his body, which was now infecteda wound culture even revealed the presence of E. coli bacteria. Martin continued to experience intense pain, even with morphine, and his severe injuries will have lifelong consequences, according to the suit.

"What happened to Mr. Martin is a prime example of why patient safety protocols were created," says Russell Button of The Button Law Firm, one of the attorneys representing Martin in this case. "A simple instrument count before completing his first operation would have protected him while in the care of Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Rockwall, Dr. Makohon, and the hospital staff."

The lawsuit is Justin Martin vs. Katherine Rose Makohon, M.D.; Lakeside Surgery, P.A.; Rockwall Regional Hospital, LLC d/b/a Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Rockwall; Amanda E. Jones, R.N.; Mary J. Hamel, R.N.; Joel T. Catanzano; and Pamela J. Riley, C.S.T.;

Cause No. CC-22-02340-E in Dallas County, Texas.

About the Button Law Firm

The Button Law Firm (https://www.buttonlawfirm.com) is a Texas-based personal injury law firm that represents individuals in meaningful litigation to make local communities safer, including medical malpractice, daycare injuries, catastrophic injuries, and automotive accidents. The firm has offices in Dallas, Houston, and Midland.

SOURCE The Button Law Firm
May 14th Food Drive Will Help Feed Needy Families in All 50 States

WASHINGTON, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) will conduct its annual national food drive this Saturday, May 14. NALC's food drive, first held in 1993, helps feed millions of Americans.

The Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive, the country's largest one-day food drive, provides residents with an easy way to donate food to those in need.

Customers simply leave their donation of non-perishable food items next to their mailbox on Saturday, May 14. Letter carriers will collect these food donations on that day as they deliver mail along their postal routes, and distribute them to local food banks, pantries, shelters and churches.

"Letter carriers are a part of every neighborhood in the nation," NALC President Fredric Rolando said, "and we see the growing need for food assistance in our communities. On Saturday, May 14, NALC invites everyone to participate in the annual Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive. Together, we can help stamp out hunger in America."

The timing is important, with food banks, pantries and shelters running low on donations from the winter holidays and with summer approaching, when most school meal programs are suspended.

On May 14, as they deliver mail, the nation's 200,000 letter carriers will collect the donations that residents have left near their mailboxes. People are encouraged to leave a sturdy bag (or bags) containing non-perishable foods, such as canned soup, canned vegetables, canned meats and fish, pasta, rice or cereal before the regular mail delivery on Saturday. The food donations stay in each community, going to help local residents.

National partners assisting NALC in the food drive are: the U.S. Postal Service, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, the National Rural Letter Carriers' Association, Vericast, United Way Worldwide, the AFL-CIO, Valpak, the Kellogg Co. and CVS Health.

People who have questions about the drive in their area should ask their letter carrier, contact their local post office, or go to nalc.org/food-drive, facebook.com/StampOutHunger or twitter.com/StampOutHunger .

********

The 294,000-member National Association of Letter Carriers represents letter carriers across the country employed by the U.S. Postal Service, along with retired letter carriers. Founded by Civil War veterans in 1889, the NALC is among the country's oldest labor unions.

SOURCE National Association of Letter Carriers
"When we designed our cannabis degree programs, we wanted to provide our students access to the highest achievers from various parts of the cannabis business. With these cannabis all-stars joining our faculty, we are delivering on that promise," said Michael Zaytsev, Academic Director of The Business of Cannabis at LIM College and author of The Cannabis Business Book.

Continued Zaytsev, "By learning directly from industry leading pioneers, our graduates will have a competitive advantage when pursuing the hundreds of thousands of jobs the legal cannabis industry will create."

Dasheeda Dawson, who will be teaching The Retailing of Cannabis, is a global cannabis advocate, award-winning Fortune 100 business strategist, and bestselling author of How to Succeed in the Cannabis Industry.

Dawson is the City of Portland Cannabis Program Manager, responsible for overseeing all regulatory licensing, compliance, and equity initiatives for the city's cannabis industry. Her office oversees the Social Equity & Educational Development (SEED) Initiatives, which includes the country's first community reinvestment fund tied to cannabis tax revenue.

Dawson also serves as Board Chair of the national Cannabis Regulators of Color Coalition and participates on the Oregon Cannabis Commission Governance Frameworking subcommittee. Additionally, she is co-founder and Chief Strategist for the Cannabis Health Equity Movement and co-founder of the Community Education Advocacy Symposium & Expo.

Jesce Horton is Chief Executive Officer at LOWD, an award-winning cannabis craft cultivation company. Jesce will be bringing his expertise to LIM students by teaching the course The Business of Cannabis Cultivation and Manufacturing.

An engineer, horticulturist, and energy management expert, Horton is a co-founder of the Minority Cannabis Business Association, the first and largest non-profit organization developed to create equal access and economic empowerment for cannabis businesses and the communities most affected by the war on drugs.

In 2016, Horton was appointed by Oregon Governor Kate Brown to the Task Force for Cannabis Environmental Best Practice and continues this work today as a member of the Board of Directors of the Resource Innovation Institute, an organization focused on creating energy efficiency solutions and standards for the global cannabis industry. He is also on the Board of Directors of the Oregon Cannabis Association.

Along with his wife, Jeannette Ward Horton, Horton founded the non-profit organization NuProject, which delivers grant loans, educational resources, job matching assistance and entrepreneurial services to cannabis business owners and career hopefuls.

Kristin Jordan, Esq. is the founder and CEO of Park Jordan, a commercial real estate brokerage and advisory services firm serving the cannabis industry. She is also an attorney, drug policy activist, and thought leader.

Until recently, Jordan served as the Director of Real Estate at Acreage Holdings. She led Acreage's efforts in selecting real estate sites for the company's national footprint of cultivation, processing, and dispensary facilities. Prior to her work in the cannabis sector, Jordan practiced real estate law at several boutique firms and managed real estate portfolios for Kaplan, Inc., Morgan Stanley, and SoulCycle. She is a frequent speaker on real estate, cannabis regulations, and social equity and economic justice issues and in 2019 was distinguished by Forbes as one of "Fifteen Powerful and Innovative Women in Cannabis Right Now."

Jordan is the founder and CEO of Mannada, a NYC-based cannabis professional event production company, which launched The Maze, a weekly cannabis event listing newsletter, as well as the Cannabis Summit Series including the Cannabis Media Summit, Cannabis Real Estate Summit, and Cannabis Law Summit.

Jordan is also a co-founder of the Cannabis Cultural Association, a non-profit organization, and the founder of the Asian Cannabis Roundtable, a professional networking organization. Additionally, Kristin is a member of the New York State Bar Association Committee on Cannabis and the Minority Cannabis Business Association Policy Committee.

David Paleschuck, founder of Branding Bud Consulting Group, will be teaching Cannabis Marketing. His book, Branding Bud: The Commercialization of Cannabis  the first book on cannabis branding  was a #1 best-seller on Amazon.

With over 20 years of brand-building and consumer marketing experience with American Express, MasterCard, PepsiCo, and Microsoft, Paleschuck has played a role in developing and marketing many of today's best-known brands.

Since entering the cannabis industry in 2012, Paleschuck has created profitable partnerships while working as the Vice President, Licensing & Brand Partnerships at DOPE Magazine and crafted award-winning cannabis-infused products as the Chief Brand Officer at Evergreen Herbal.

Paleschuck's writing and thought leadership on cannabis branding and marketing has been widely featured in leading outlets, including Forbes, Kiplinger's, The Brookings Institution, High Times and many more.

These four join a team of innovative professionals that also includes Penelope Nam-Stephen, Chief Commercial Officer of Community Growth Partners, formerly of Burberry and Juicy Couture; Marianne Cursetjee, CEO and co-founder of Alibi Cannabis; Melanie Nash, Chief Operating Officer of Purple City Genetics, formerly of REI and Tumi; Beryl Solomon, founder of Poplar, formerly of Kate Spade, Theory, and IBM; Wei Hu, CEO of MRTA Law, formerly of the NYC Human Resources Administration; and David Abecassis, co-founder of the Green Growers Alliance.

LIM College's degree programs in The Business of Cannabis focus on specialized cannabis industry knowledge, as well as business skills such as marketing, retail management, branding, merchandising and supply chain management. The master's degree program, designed for career-changers as well as those who are interested in advancing their current cannabis careers, will be delivered fully online and can be completed in one calendar year. The bachelor's degree program is available on LIM's midtown Manhattan campus or online.

For more information visit: https://www.limcollege.edu/academics/business-cannabis

About LIM College

Founded in 1939, LIM College educates students for success in the global businesses of fashion and cannabis, as well as the many industries adjacent to each. As a pioneer in experiential education, LIM fosters a unique connection between real-world experience and academic study in business principles, offering master's, bachelor's, and associate degree programs. LIM College is located in Manhattan  the nation's fashion and business capital  giving students vast opportunities for resume-building experience and professional development.

Media Contact:

Stu Zakim, Bridge Strategic Communications

[email protected] 732-754-9051

Meredith Finnin, LIM College

[email protected] 646-218-2156

SOURCE LIM COLLEGE
The collaboration with Lootex and OneOffs is a step in the right direction for the first metaverse NFT fashion show in Taiwan. The co-curation of "Fashion in The Metaverse,'' has collected artists from The Sandbox Foundation: An An, TongYangChicken, Nest, Beryll Chen, Carina Chen, and game art designer Nora C. These talented artists were invited to design: a futuristic sci-fi fashion catwalk with the avatars created in The Sandbox's VoxEdit . Each avatar is casted into a limited-edition NFT and put on the Lootex website for sale . The exclusivity of each avatar will only enhance the collector's experience in the ever-growing metaverse. It is still to be given a date but buyers of these avatars can expect some cool perks that will allow them to show off not just the art in the real world but also flex their stylistic choices in the metaverse.

Recap of Lootex Metaverse Fashion Event: View Here

The latest collaboration extends the existing partnership between Lootex and The Sandbox, which started in 2018. This is part of a broader partnership between Lootex and The Sandbox that also adds The Sandbox Co-Founder Sebastien Borget as an advisor and investor of Lootex . The CEO and Co-Founder of Lootex, Justine Lu, is the organizer of the Global Blockchain Game Alliance, also co-hosted the VoxEdit NFT creation event and Game Jam game design competitions for The Sandbox. Lootex is proud to be a long-term partner with The Sandbox, and expects to see more game developers and creators utilizing The Sandbox to make the next generation of metaverse assets and games," Lu said. The support from such a huge contributor to the future of the metaverse and its assets makes it clear that Lootex is on the path to not just being pioneers in their field but a major player in NFT marketplaces.

Beyond The Sandbox, Lootex's player-centric, cross-chain NFT trading platform is constantly updated to reflect the latest developments in blockchain games. The creativity interwoven with both physical and virtual worlds is the reason Lootex is on its way to being the one-stop-shop that can't be denied. Providing their 80,000 active users with a decentralized multi-chain NFT marketplace, Lootex will surely open the path to more impressive projects. Coupled with the appreciation for the artists that are showcasing their amazing works, we would not be surprised to see more collaborations of this caliber.

About Lootex

Lootex is a player-centric, cross-chain NFT trading platform that shares the latest blockchain game info. It is devoted to building a gamer-centric game asset marketplace where anyone can easily browse and trade game assets across multiple blockchains.

For the latest updates and announcements, follow Lootex on these channels:

Website: www.lootex.io

Twitter: www.twitter.com/LootexIO

Telegram (EN): www.t.me/lootexIO

Telegram (CN): www.t.me/lootex

Medium: www.medium.com/lootex

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/lootexio

Facebook: www.facebook.com/lootex.io

Media contact: [email protected]

SOURCE Lootex
LOS ANGELES, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The National Alliance on Mental Illness Greater L.A. County (NAMI GLAC) is pleased to announce the L.A. Downtown Medical Center as the presenting sponsor of the 19th annual NAMIWalks L.A. County, to be held on May 21, 2022, in Grand Park.

This annual mental health awareness event taking place during Mental Health Awareness Month brings NAMI's message of hope and community to everyone impacted by mental illness. The theme this year is Together for Mental Health. Contributions to the event provide funding for NAMI's signature mental health classes, resources, educational programs which are available free of charge to all residents of L.A. County. Typically, nearly 4000 walkers attend the walk event held in Downtown Los Angeles.

"We are thrilled to be partnering with LA Downtown Medical Center this year, as we move closer to our goal of Mental Health for All," said Davi Weber, manager of the NAMIWalks event. "LADMC's commitment to improving the lives of residents of L.A. County makes them a natural fit as we bring together thousands of Angelenos to end the stigma around mental health and celebrate recovery."

NAMI is the nation's largest grassroots mental health organization dedicated to improving the lives of individuals and families affected by mental illness. NAMI works to end stigma by bringing awareness to mental health, providing support, educating the public and advocating for equal care.

To register for the walk event, please click here.

About LA Downtown Medical Center (LADMC)

L.A. Downtown Medical Center provides safe, compassionate, and supportive care for a culturally diverse population at two campuses in Los Angeles County. The LADMC Foundation was established to improve the lives of residents in Los Angeles County through financial assistance for temporary housing, public health education, health fairs, professional growth programs, and nurse leadership training. To learn more about the Foundation, visit ladmcfoundation.org.

About The National Alliance on Mental Illness Greater Los Angeles County (NAMI GLAC)

NAMI GLAC is the leading countywide organization composed of grassroots-based chapters that promote wellness, recovery, equality, and dignity for individuals and families affected by mental illness and the community at large. They work to provide leadership in advocacy, education, support, and public awareness throughout Los Angeles County. Mental illness can be treated, and people living with mental illness can recover to live fulfilling lives. To learn more about how NAMI can help, visit namiglac.org.

NAMI Greater Los Angeles County Facebook  NAMI Greater Los Angeles County Instagram

www.namiglac.org

SOURCE National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Greater Los Angeles County
The studio will enable global organizations to accelerate their digital transformation journeys with RISE with SAP and SAP Business Technology Platform

MUMBAI, India, May 11, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Larsen & Toubro Infotech Ltd. (BSE: 540005) (NSE: LTI), a global technology consulting and digital solutions company, launched its LTI Innovation Studio for SAP Business Technology Platform at the 2022 SAP Sapphire conference. The LTI Innovation Studio for SAP Business Technology Platform helps global organizations accelerate their transformation journeys with the RISE with SAP solution and SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). The studio helps businesses realize the vision of an intelligent enterprise and enables them to amplify value from their digital core investments.

LTI Innovation Studio for SAP Business Technology Platform powers digital transformation with ready-to-deploy industry leading digital apps, microservices and a migration cockpit. It is a set of services and tools that can improve operations by automating business processes, making them smarter, easier to use, and more efficient by utilizing key components of SAP BTP like SAP HANA, the SAP Analytics Cloud solution, AI, machine learning, enterprise integration APIs and the UX extensibility tools. As organizations advance toward their digital native operating model, it becomes paramount to have rapid digital innovations, connected to the digital core in a clean, composable architecture. LTI Innovation Studio for SAP Business Technology Platform enables such innovation with a curated collection of design-thinking methods, engineering tools and prebuilt industry reference models.

Vineet Moroney, Executive Vice President & Global Head of SAP Practice at LTI, said, "The post-pandemic world has made it critical for every business to operate like a digital native business. Many enterprises have made significant investments in SAP solutions and are now looking to accelerate their digital transformation journeys on top of such investments. LTI has an extraordinary record of innovating with SAP solutions. LTI Innovation Studio for SAP Business Technology Platform is our latest investment that allows businesses to accelerate their digital native transformation."

Marc Rolfe, Senior Vice President, and Head of Strategic Partners at SAP said, "LTI is a global strategic SAP partner that brings a rich heritage of SAP software-enabled and industry-centric innovations. LTI Innovation Studio for SAP Business Technology Platform in combination with LTI's portfolio of service offerings for the RISE with SAP solution will help accelerate an organization's journey to becoming an intelligent enterprise while driving business value with digital innovations built on SAP BTP."

LTI solutions built on SAP BTP are already helping many global organizations harness their unique competitive advantage. For example, LTI has partnered with a multi-national industrial conglomerate to reimagine its business across 63 entities by deploying seven digital innovations built on SAP BTP. By combining its deep industry expertise and advanced digital engineering, LTI used SAP BTP to create several SAP-certified, award-winning industry cloud solutions that are now available to organizations worldwide through the SAP Store. These solutions span multiple industries, such as engineering and construction, manufacturing, life sciences and others. For example, Paychain is an application developed for the construction industry that can streamline the vendor, contractor and subcontractor payment process which has traditionally been a manual, error-prone administrative process. Additionally, LTI also recently achieved certification for T-cell therapy and Controlled Drug Compliance solutions for the life sciences industry.

About LTI:

LTI (NSE: LTI) is a global technology consulting and digital solutions Company helping more than 485 clients succeed in a converging world. With operations in 33 countries, we go the extra mile for our clients and accelerate their digital transformation journeys. Founded in 1997 as a subsidiary of Larsen & Toubro Limited, our unique heritage gives us unrivalled real-world expertise to solve the most complex challenges of enterprises across all industries. Each day, our team of more than 45,000 LTItes enable our clients to improve the effectiveness of their business and technology operations and deliver value to their customers, employees, and shareholders. Find more at http://www.Lntinfotech.com or follow us at @LTI_Global.

SAP and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE in Germany and other countries. Please see https://www.sap.com/copyright for additional trademark information and notices.

Connect with LTI :

Read our News and Blogs

and Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn

and Like us on Facebook

Read More:

- LTI Wins 2020 SAP Pinnacle Award as the Industry Innovation Partner of the Year

- LTI to Launch Accelerated Migration Program for SAP-Based Enterprises with Amazon Web Services

SOURCE LTI
GIBRALTAR, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Mavryk is a decentralized, non-custodial, community-governed financial platform that gives users independent control of their finances.

They will be launching a suite of decentralized financial products on the Tezos blockchain, designed to bring financial freedom to all of its users and to bridge the gap between the real world and on-chain finance.

Mavryk enables its users to free the equity trapped in their assets as a loan without requiring the involvement of third parties such as banks. Users also earn by participating as members in Mavryk's digital co-op.

Mavryk enables its members to take a passive or active role in the operations of the DAO platform by either delegating their tokens voting rights or operating a "Satellite" node. Satellite nodes act as representative curators for the platform, and also form an array of nodes for Mavryk's decentralized oracle system. Stakeholder participation is incentivized via rewards for governance & signing oracle price feeds, in order to bring stability, security, prosperity to the platform and its users.

The community with live updates can be found on the Mavryk discord. Mavryk is also backed by a host of heavyweight industry players such as Tezos Israel, Draper Goren Holm, Ghaf Capital, Metavest Capital, Big Brain Holdings, and numerous Tezos Bakeries (validator nodes).

SOURCE Mavryk Finance
New dealership's expansion plan will create jobs for the local community

WILMINGTON, Mass., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The McGovern Auto Group, a regional auto powerhouse that operates more than 19 dealerships across Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York, today announced the opening of McGovern Route 93 Hyundai. The new dealership, which replaces Bill Dube Hyundai, has 25 staff members across its sales, leasing, and maintenance teams, with plans to add approximately 15 more in the coming months.

The opening of the new dealership follows McGovern Auto Group's acquisition of Bill Dube Hyundai, located on Main St. in the heart of Wilmington, MA. Under the McGovern brand, the new dealership will feature a lot with over 175 new and used cars, including the latest Ioniq, Santa Fe, Tucson, and Palisade models.

Founded in 2016, McGovern Auto Group is a full-service dealer group, with 4 collision centers and a commercial and municipal division. Recognized as the region's leading dealer of luxury car brands such as Ferrari and Porsche, the McGovern Auto Group also has extensive expertise working with Chevrolet, GMC, Ford, Hyundai, Honda, and Toyota vehicles.

Customers of Route 93 Hyundai will benefit from the McGovern's innovative sales platform, which uses cutting-edge technology to intelligently price vehicles according to their true market value. The streamlined and efficient system guarantees complete transparency throughout the purchasing process, ensuring every shopper receives a fair deal as soon as they walk onto the lot.

"The Dube family has provided exemplary service to car buyers and owners in Wilmington, Danvers, Middleton, and Reading for decades  we're proud to continue that legacy of excellence," said Patrick Coffey, General Manager at McGovern Route 93 Hyundai. "We're also excited to build on the dealership's commitment to the local economy, with plans to employ more than a dozen new staff from the surrounding area."

"The new dealership will deliver McGovern's extensive inventory and intelligent, tech-enabled pricing strategy to customers in and around Wilmington," said Zac Casey, McGovern Auto Group's VP of Operations, who will oversee the store. "This is a new part of Massachusetts for us, and we can't wait to offer our great prices, superb customer service, and amazing aftermarket support to the local community."

Visit McGovern Route 93 Hyundai at 271 Main St., right off I-93 near Woburn and Burlington. Alternatively, speak to the sales and leasing department.

SOURCE McGovern Auto Group
TORONTO, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - MediPharm Labs Corp. (TSX: LABS) (OTCQX: MEDIF) (FSE: MLZ) ("MediPharm" or the "Company") a pharmaceutical company specialized in precision-based cannabinoids, is pleased to announce it will release fourth quarter financial results for the three month period ended March 31, 2022 before markets open on Monday, May 16, 2022.

MediPharm's executive management team will also host a conference call and audio webcast on Monday, May 16, 2022, at 8:30 a.m. eastern time to discuss the Company's financial results and outlook.

Audio Conference Call Dial in Details:

Toll-free number: +1 (888) 330-2379 / International number: +1 (240) 789-2714 / Conference ID: 4921762

Participants are asked to dial in approximately 15 minutes before the start of the call.

Audio Webcast:

An audio webcast will be available in the Events section of the MediPharm website https://www.medipharmlabs.com/investors or by visiting the following link here .

For those who are unable to participate on the live conference call or webcast, a replay will be available approximately one hour after completion of the call.

About MediPharm Labs Corp.

Founded in 2015, MediPharm specializes in the development and manufacture of purified, pharmaceutical-quality cannabis concentrates, API and advanced derivative products utilizing a Good Manufacturing Practices certified facility with ISO standard-built clean rooms. MediPharm has invested in an expert, research driven team, state-of-the-art technology, downstream purification methodologies and purpose-built facilities with five primary extraction lines for delivery of pure, trusted and precision-dosed cannabis products for its customers. Through its wholesale and white label platforms, MediPharm formulates, develops (including through sensory testing), processes, packages and distributes cannabis extracts and advanced cannabinoid-based products to domestic and international markets.

In 2021, MediPharm received a Drug Establishment Licence from Health Canada, becoming the only company in North America to hold a domestic Good Manufacturing Practices licence for the extraction of natural cannabinoids. The Company carries out its operations in compliance with all applicable laws in the countries in which it operates.

CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION:

This news release contains "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" (collectively, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of the applicable Canadian securities legislation. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements and are based on expectations, estimates and projections as at the date of this news release. Any statement that involves discussions with respect to predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions, future events or performance (often but not always using phrases such as "expects", or "does not expect", "is expected", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", "plans", "budget", "scheduled", "forecasts", "estimates", "believes" or "intends" or variations of such words and phrases or stating that certain actions, events or results "may" or "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken to occur or be achieved) are not statements of historical fact and may be forward-looking statements. 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; the inability of MediPharm to obtain adequate financing; the delay or failure to receive regulatory approvals; and other factors discussed in MediPharm's filings, available on the SEDAR website at www.sedar.com. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements and information contained in this news release. Except as required by law, MediPharm assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements of beliefs, opinions, projections, or other factors, should they change.

SOURCE MediPharm Labs Corp.
The purpose of Path SpermQT is to raise the standard of care for male fertility testing by providing critical information about underlying epigenetic factors that may impact a sperm's ability to achieve a successful pregnancy. While typical semen analyses quantify sperm count, concentration, motility and morphology, Path SpermQT gives a score of Excellent, Average, or Poor sperm quality based on epigenetic biomarkers. Path Fertility's studies have shown that men with Poor sperm quality have an almost 3x lower chance of pregnancy when undergoing IUI, when compared to men with Excellent sperm quality. However, IVF can overcome the epigenetic sperm quality issues. Knowing this information ahead of time means providers and couples can save time and improve pregnancy rates by moving on to treatments more likely to succeed.

"Path SpermQT raises the bar for male reproductive health, is unique in its class and should be available to all. At Meenta, we believe in changing how diagnoses are made by giving every patient access to the best tests available from one easy-to-use marketplace. You shouldn't have to be at an Ivy league institution or even leave your couch to get this level of care."- Meenta CEO, Gabor Bethlendy.

Path SpermQT also allows men to take ownership of their role in the shared fertility journey. In further studies, 4 out of 5 men with a Poor SpermQT result presented with normal sperm concentration and normal total motile count, finding a previously unidentified subfertile group of men. Without this key additional information, couples may not understand why they are facing fertility issues.

"Male infertility is a very common issue yet innovation in the space has been lacking, and gaining access to state of the art testing for men has been challenging. We're committed to providing cutting edge technology that makes a difference for couples in their path to pregnancy. The Meenta marketplace makes it convenient and efficient for patients to order Path SpermQT and make more informed decisions about fertility treatment options." - Path Fertility CEO, Andy Olson

To continue learning and to order Path SpermQT, please click here.

Interested in speaking with the Meenta Team? Book a meeting today.

Meenta Marketplace

Any Test. Any Time. One Marketplace.



About Path Fertility:

We believe the path to pregnancy is a shared journey that deserves the best that science has to offer. Couples who understand the unique biology of both the egg and the sperm can make more informed plans for their future family. Path Fertility is on a mission to raise the standard of care for male reproductive health.

About Meenta:

Meenta was born out of the idea that life science and diagnostics could greatly benefit from the technological revolution that has forever changed the way we shop, dine, vacation, and catch a ride. Grounded in technology and sitting at the intersection of supply and demand, the Meenta marketplace brings together the widest array of testing products and laboratory services combined with world-class scientific expertise and clinical oversight all in one place. Meenta exists to completely revolutionize the way the world accesses diagnostic testing and laboratory capabilities. Our vision is to make all of the world's scientific equipment and clinical tests accessible to everyone.

SOURCE Meenta
Brought to you in partnership with astro-aficionado, Lisa Stardust

CHICAGO, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- This week marks the start of Mercury in Retrograde, and that means the vibe is off. Be it missed connections, email blunders, or frazzled travel plans, Vizzy Hard Seltzer is restoring the good vibes and warding off the bad. Today, the brand is introducing limited time only Vizzy Mercury Retrograde Edition Cans.* Eligible winners will receive a Vizzy 'Good Vibes' Kit, which include vibe-protecting charms like a neo-mystical candle, sage, incense, and either a $15 Prepaid Mastercard or Vizzy Mercury Retrograde Edition cans**.

Vizzy Mimosa Hard Seltzer Mercury Retrograde Limited Edition Cans

"Nobody has time for a bad vibe which is why Vizzy is stepping in to bring some much-needed good energy to Mercury in Retrograde," said brand manager, Vi Tran. "Whether you're a hard seltzer fan or astrology aficionado, we're excited to team up with Lisa Stardust and make the next few weeks a total vibe, no matter what the planets are doing."

The Vizzy Mercury Retrograde Edition Cans adorned with exclusive, celestial-inspired holographic designs  and 'Good Vibes' Kits are available to those who enter, are selected, and deemed confirmed winners. The Promotion starts at 8:00 AM Central Standard Time ("CST") on May 12 and goes through the end of Mercury Retrograde on June 2 at 11:59 pm CST. Vizzy fans can air their retrograde woes at www.vizzymercuryretrograde.com for a chance to win* the limited time only cans** and kit. Click here for full rules and more information around how to enter.

"My clients are always asking for tips and tricks on how to survive the foibles of Mercury retrograde," said Lisa Stardust, astrologer, energy healer and bestselling author of Saturn Return Survival Guide: Navigating This Cosmic Rite of Passage , The Astrology Deck: Your Guide to the Meanings and Myths of the Cosmos and the upcoming book The Love Deck to be released on August 2, 2022 . "Now it's easier to embrace a higher vibration with Vizzy and my 'Good Vibes' Kit that will help you navigate this turbulent planetary movement  and it's important to remain flexible, patient, and understanding during this time."

Cheers to upping your vibrations, onward and skyward, this retrograde season. Also, if you're 21 or older, you should probably follow us on Instagram and Facebook @vizzyhardseltzer and on Twitter @vizzyseltzer and sign up to be a Vizzy Gang VIP here.

*NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Sweepstakes begins at or about 8:00 AM CST on 5/12/22 and ends at 11:59:59 PM CST on 6/2/22. Sweepstakes includes 3 entry periods. Open only to legal residents 50 U.S/DC, who are 21 years or older. Click Here for Official Rules, including how to enter, odds, prize details, and restrictions. Void where prohibited. Msg&data rates may apply.

**You will only receive the Vizzy Mercury Retrograde Edition Cans if you are selected and deemed an eligible winner of the Prize and reside in of one (1) of the following states: Colorado, District of Columbia, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, or South Dakota. Winners outside of these states will receive a $15 Prepaid Mastercard in lieu of the Vizzy Mercury Retrograde Edition Cans.

About Molson Coors Beverage Company

For over two centuries Molson Coors has been brewing beverages that unite people for all of life's moments. From Coors Light, Miller Lite, Molson Canadian, Carling, and Staropramen to Coors Banquet, Blue Moon Belgian White Belgian-Style Wheat Ale, Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy, Creemore Springs and more, Molson Coors produces some of the most beloved and iconic beer brands ever made. While the company's history is rooted in beer, Molson Coors offers a modern portfolio that expands beyond the beer aisle with sparkling cocktails, canned wine, kombucha, cider and more.

Molson Coors Beverage Company is a publicly traded company that operates through Molson Coors North America and Molson Coors Europe, and is traded on the New York and Canadian Stock Exchange (TAP). The company's commitment to raising industry standards and leaving a positive imprint on our employees, consumers, communities and the environment is reflected in Our Beer Print and our 2025 sustainability targets. To learn more about Molson Coors Beverage Company, visit molsoncoors.com.

SOURCE Vizzy Hard Seltzer
For the third year in a row, Morningstar will work with Mesmerise to create a virtual reality experience that will include interactive games, networking, and live discussions with speakers

LONDON, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Mesmerise , a company that helps global enterprises make the best use of virtual reality, announced today it is working with Morningstar Inc. , a leading provider of independent investment research, to deliver a cutting-edge virtual reality (VR) experience as part of the annual Morningstar Investment Conference in 2022.

The conference will take place on Monday, May 16 through Wednesday, May 18 at McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago, along with a simultaneous digital and virtual reality experience. For the third year in a row, the VR component will be hosted by Mesmerise's platform, Gatherings , accessible with an Oculus Quest 2 device.

Mesmerise's programming will allow attendees to participate from anywhere in the world, with conference VR experiences mirroring the in-person event. Virtual participants can network, attend live-streamed presentations, join "Meet the Analyst" sessions with panelists, and more, all within the Morningstar virtual ecosystem.

The conference's most anticipated discussions and presentations, including those from Mike McFaul, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, and Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson, will be live streamed within the virtual ecosystem. Select speakers, including Karla Paxton, SVP of Business Development at Morningstar, and Yubin Kim, Quantitative Behavioral Analyst at Morningstar, will also hold exclusive virtual sessions after their in-person discussions, allowing virtual attendees to join in live Q&As.

In-person attendees can also access on-site headsets to try out Gatherings and to play two VR games, Sustainable City and Bee Game. These games, developed by Mesmerise, teach players about sustainability and climate change. The Bee Game allows players to earn points which Morningstar will then convert into monetary donations from the company to conservation causes.

"We're grateful to continue our work with a tech-forward industry leader like Morningstar," said Andrew Hawken, Co-Founder and CEO of Mesmerise. "What we're achieving with the 2022 Morningstar Investment Conference is a blending of the physical and virtual worlds, which we believe is the immediate future of conference and work environments."

"In 2022, it's more important than ever to educate the financial community about the metaverse and its expected impact on our industry," said Leslie Marshall, Head of Experiential Marketing at Morningstar. "By working with Mesmerise to create a seamless hybrid event, we can open up our event to attendees from all over the world to experience our conference both in-person and from home."

The conference programming will also feature two panels that discuss the impact of the metaverse on investing and the future of work. These include Reality May Evolve Into the Metaverse, but Should Investors Care? and Software Has Eaten the World. What's Next? The full agenda can be found here .

About Mesmerise

Mesmerise helps leading enterprises, including Morningstar, Well Fargo, and Allianz, host immersive meetings, conferences, training sessions, and events in virtual reality. Through Mesmerise's proprietary Gatherings platform, global companies can bring their teams together to host bespoke virtual experiences for any occasion. Mesmerise was founded in 2016 by Andrew Hawken and Daglar Cizmeci.

Media Contact:

[email protected]

SOURCE Mesmerise
A landscape analysis of 2,200 organizations in Greater Boston and the visualization of service gaps inform strategy

EDMONDS, Wash., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- X4Impact , the leading Insights-as-a-Service company in the Nonprofit and Tech for Good sector honored by Fast Company as a World Changing Idea, is providing a new perspective for Next Level Social Impact on a mission to address persistent inequities in Greater Boston through impact-driven philanthropy.

Next Level Social Impact Selects X4Impact as Data Provider

Nine of every ten philanthropic dollars in Massachusetts goes to the largest one percent of nonprofits. This leaves many Commonwealth nonprofits doing exceptional work without access to needed resources. Next Level plays a vital role in addressing this gap by providing highly customized, easily accessible strategic guidance and financial support to a carefully selected portfolio of high-impact nonprofits.

Next Level Social Impact used a regional landscape analysis from X4Impact to understand the growth trajectory and sizing of 82,000 nonprofit organizations in Massachusetts. X4Impact detailed segmentation by the size of the nonprofit, tenure, geography, UN SDG, and focus area helped narrow down the target list to 2,200 organizations with a total of $2B in annual revenue, staffed by 15,900 employees and over 346,000 volunteers.

To further inform their strategy, an X4Impact Service Desert Map showcased the zip codes in Greater Boston with a scarcity of Human Services nonprofits and a large number of households in need of social assistance, so-called "Service Deserts."

"There are over 30,000 grantmaking organiztions in the US working hard to make decisions about place-based philanthropy with limited resources," said Luis Salazar, co-founder X4Impact. "We are proud to partner with Next Level Social Impact to answer important questions about nonprofits in the Greater Boston area as a blueprint for other communities to follow."

Next Level Social Impact provides flexible, multi-year funding for Massachusetts nonprofit organizations, strategic guidance, customized resources, and social capital. Thanks to the landscape report from X4Impact, they saved months of data gathering work, combing through online forms and fragmented data sources to understand the landscape of opportunity. The organization's leadership team was able to validate their hypotheses related to nonprofit size and tenure as key characteristics to inform their giving strategy.

"We have spent a lot of time trying to find the right data to best inform our work supporting the local nonprofit sector," said Ranjini Govender, Chief Partnerships Officer, Next Level Social Impact. "We are fortunate to have found X4Impact! Their Landscape Analysis provided actionable data insights in a streamlined, easily digestible format."

The Next Level Social Impact team will use the X4Impact insights to partner with local funders in addressing the identified areas of need. A funder collaborative convening is in the works to bring shared understanding around the power of X4Impact insights to inform local impact-driven philanthropic strategies.

About X4Impact

X4Impact, Inc. is the leading Insights as a Service Platform for the US $2.9 Trillion per year Nonprofit Sector. Our technology processes billions of social impact data points to help foundations, tech companies, nonprofits, social innovators, academia, and investors build tomorrow's social impact organizations and initiatives. X4Impact was honored in Fast Company's World Changing Ideas 2022 Awards in two categories. Visit x4i.org and follow us at www.linkedin.com/company/x4impact .

Media Contact:

Shelly Kurtz, Co-Founder & CMO

X4Impact

206-999-9030

[email protected]

SOURCE X4Impact
WASHINGTON , May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The voice of more than 45,000 current and former National Guard officers applauds bipartisan Senate legislation that would ensure some of America's most talented and experienced space professionals can keep serving the nation.

Introduced yesterday by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Sen. Marco Rubio, R- Fla., the Space National Guard Establishment Act would create a Space Guard under the Space Force.

This parallels House legislation passed last year. It was introduced by Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo.

The Senate legislation is co-sponsored by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., Michael Bennet, D-Colo., Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio., Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.

"It's heartening to see such a broad coalition of senators get behind creating a Space National Guard," said retired Brig. Gen. J. Roy Robison, the NGAUS president.

"A Space National Guard is the only efficient, inexpensive way to enhance our Space Force," he added. "It requires no new personnel, equipment or facilities  just new uniforms and a few new signs."

Approximately 1,000 space professionals are in 16 Air National Guard units across eight states and territories. They provide 60% of the military's space electronic warfare capability, the only mobile, survivable missile-warning capability and 100% of the surge capacity.

Gen. John W. "Jay" Raymond, the Space Force's chief, has said numerous times the nation cannot accomplish military space missions without Guard space units.

"And nearly half of the Guard's part-time space professionals work full time in civilian aerospace or other high-tech industries," Robinson added. "These are talented, coveted people."

But now they're "orphaned" in the Air Force, a service no longer conducting space missions, he said. All other Air Force space units have migrated to the Space Force, he said.

"This complicates acquiring needed resources and professional development," Robinson said.

The legislation doesn't expand the force, but corrects this misalignment, the bill's authors say.

"Without a National Guard component for Space Force, we risk losing many talented individuals who want to keep serving their country and their states after they leave active duty, and that is simply unacceptable," Feinstein said.

"Creating a Space Force National Guard would also save money and ensure a smoother process in the event we need to activate personnel," she said. "Not establishing a Space National Guard was a mistake when Space Force was created, and this bill will remedy that."

Said Rubio: "Creating a Space National Guard would boost our military readiness and increase efficiency. It would also ensure that the Space Force retains needed talent. I look forward to working with my colleagues to pass this commonsense bill."

Guard space units are in Alaska, California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, New York, Ohio and Guam.

The cost to create a Space National Guard is $250,000, the National Guard Bureau says.

"The cost to the nation to lose the Guard's space capabilities would be immeasurable," Robinson said.

Reporters, Editors & Producers: Retired Brig. Gen. J. Roy Robinson is available for interviews or to appear as a subject matter expert on issues related to the National Guard. Contact John Goheen at 202-408-5882 to schedule an interview or appearance.

About NGAUS: The association includes more than 45,000 current or former Guard officers. It was created in 1878 to provide unified National Guard representation in Washington. In their first productive meeting after Reconstruction, militia officers from the North and South formed the association with the goal of obtaining better equipment and training by educating Congress on Guard requirements. Today, 144 years later, NGAUS has the same mission.

SOURCE National Guard Association of the U.S.
Becky Humphries to Retire in 2023; NWTF Board of Directors Names Kurt Dyroff and Jason Burckhalter to Serve as Co-CEOs

EDGEFIELD, S.C., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The National Wild Turkey Federation today announced that Becky Humphries, its CEO since 2017, will retire in February 2023 as the organization celebrates its 50th anniversary. To succeed her, the NWTF Board of Directors has appointed Jason Burckhalter and Kurt Dyroff, two of the organization's top staff executives, as co-CEOs, effective immediately. Humphries will serve with them until she steps down.

"Building on Becky's accomplishments and to prepare the NWTF for the future, the Board decided, after careful consideration, to tap the unique experiences and energy of not just one but two of the organization's top executives," said Bryan Perry, president of the NWTF Board of Directors. "Kurt and Jason have established proven track records as effective, forward-thinking senior executives and strong collaborators in managing the organization's key operations. We believe Jason and Kurt will make an effective team to lead the NWTF."

Under the NWTF's co-CEO model, Dyroff will lead the organization's mission-related activities, including conservation, finance and accounting, and general business support (legal, human resources and land holdings). Burckhalter will oversee membership and fundraising-related duties, including field operations and development, marketing and communications, membership, information technology, and facility management. Humphries will continue as part of the NWTF leadership team, overseeing government affairs until her retirement when those duties will transition to Dyroff.

Burckhalter has been the NWTF's chief information officer for the past three years and before that served as its vice president of finance and controller. Prior to joining the NWTF in 2013, he held various executive roles with for-profit entities, including as CIO/COO of a national multi-site operation. Burckhalter is a graduate of Lander University where he earned a bachelor's degree in finance/economics. He received an MBA from Augusta University and an accounting degree from Auburn University.

Dyroff has been the NWTF's chief business and finance officer for the past three years, and previously held positions as director of business development, acting chief of conservation, and as western director of conservation operations. Before joining the NWTF in 2014, he served in various conservation-focused executive capacities at Ducks Unlimited for nine years. Dyroff is a graduate of The Pennsylvania State University where he earned a bachelor's degree in civil engineering with a minor in environmental engineering.

In a joint statement, Burckhalter and Dyroff outlined their priorities for the organization:

"We look forward to building upon the NWTF's nearly 50 years of success. The future is bright and reminds us how the NWTF achieved it: our mission and people. The NWTF will increase focus on our membership and member experience and bolster research and habitat delivery in areas experiencing wild turkey population decline. Our mission, as ever, is to ensure robust wild turkey populations, while benefiting healthy forests, waterways, and communities, and championing the soul of the American hunting lifestyle. This requires a nimble organization, built on a solid financial foundation, capable of retaining and attracting the best and brightest minds."

About the National Wild Turkey Federation

Based in Edgefield, South Carolina, the NWTF is dedicated to the conservation of the wild turkey and preservation of our hunting heritage. In the early 1900s, there were as few as 200,000 wild turkeys across the nation due to commercial harvest and loss of habitat. Though restoration efforts predate the beginning of the NWTF, turkey populations still only numbered around 1.3 million in 1973, the year the NWTF began. Thanks to the efforts of the NWTF and its state and federal partners, the turkey populations today is at more than 6.25 million, and the restoration of the wild turkey is widely considered one of the greatest conservation stories in the history of the country.

Media Contact:

Pete Muller

[email protected]

Office: 803.637.7698

SOURCE National Wild Turkey Federation
Unified platform enables customers to share connectivity packages from industry peers and further reduce custom code

COPENHAGEN, Denmark, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Omada A/S ("Omada"), a global leader of Identity Governance and Administration (IGA), announced today that it has introduced the Omada Connectivity Community, a platform for like-minded customers to share connectivity packages used to integrate business applications with Omada deployments. This platform furthers Omada's approach for universal connectivity and enables customers to connect to the broadest set of business applications and systems without the need for custom code.

The average organization has added 65 business critical applications to its enterprise in the past 24 months, research shows. With each application comes new connectivity requirements for onboarding, assigning and provisioning access. Omada makes this easier for organizations through a configurable connectivity approach that's faster and more reliable than using code development. The Connectivity Community takes this a step further by providing a platform where users can submit their own connectivity packages and benefit from packages other users have submitted as yet another method for integrating business applications.

Within the Connectivity Community, customers can:

Seamlessly download connectivity packages: The Connectivity Community makes it easy for Omada customers to group, search, and find relevant connectivity packages. Community members can then install with a simple click of the mouse.

The Connectivity Community makes it easy for Omada customers to group, search, and find relevant connectivity packages. Community members can then install with a simple click of the mouse. Easily submit connectivity packages: Users fill in a simple form to submit connectivity packages directly from the Omada user interface. All packages are part of an existing Omada deployment, and this initiative creates a space for customers from different industries, sizes, and teams to share best practices with each other.

The Omada Connectivity Community is open to all customers, whether they deploy Omada in the cloud or on-premises. This initiative enables customers to be self-sufficient in how they integrate applications into their environments in a way that is secure, efficient and effective. The Omada approach supports common protocols like REST, OData, SCIM 2.0, SOAP and LDAP, as well as an SDK for applications without a common communication protocol.

Lars Bell, chief customer officer, Omada, said: "Providing our customers with the best possible experience includes giving them a variety of options to integrate their business applications. The Connectivity Community presents an exciting step forward to provide our customers with the ability to support one another and foster a community of identity governance and administration experts working with each other to help keep businesses efficient, secure and compliant."

About Omada

Omada, a global market leader in Identity Governance and Administration (IGA), offers a full-featured, enterprise-grade, cloud native IGA solution that enables organizations to maximize efficiency, reduce risk, and meet compliance. requirements. Founded in 2000, Omada delivers innovative identity management to complex hybrid environments based on our leading technology, proven best practice process framework, and best-in-breed deployment approach.

For more information, go to omadaidentity.com

SOURCE Omada
App is designed to protect against toxic culture and build a more positive community with higher values, purpose and mission

NEW YORK, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- We Ascend Now, Inc. recently launched a decentralized social community called ASCEND, built on the values of truth, transparency and collaboration. The network is based on personal development and community value in which people's knowledge, skills and talents are the community's currency. Using data and artificial intelligence to inspire people to learn about themselves, ASCEND curates content to help people be their best selves and live their best lives.

ASCEND empowers anyone with a specialized expertise, talent, product or service to find their niche and make a living. Tweet this Announcing a new way to play. Create and discover meaningful content curated to help you grow and expand. Content is scored by helpfulness and moderated by the community, built on authenticity and transparency. Launched 2022. https://www.weascendnow.com/

"Social media 1.0 launched a new generation of connective tools and technologies with positive intentions but over the last decade these platforms have created a more myopic, extremist, objectified, manipulated world," said David Richeson, co-founder and CEO of ASCEND. "Nearly everyone seems to want a new alternative but even platforms that claim to be the solution are still rooted in designs and ideology of the old paradigms that brought us into the situation we want to escape."

In the same way that current social media platforms are having a negative impact on the world in the form of divisiveness, manipulation, addiction, negativity, depression, and self-harm among other effects, ASCEND is designed to heal the planet and the humans that live on it.

"We need a new strategy altogether," said Sydney Campos, co-founder and CSO. "Imagine a community in which everyone is a creator. Everyone has something to teach and share and everyone is gathered with the shared intention of learning and growing together. What if there is no agenda within our social community other than adding real value, sharing authentically, and expressing creativity all for the sake of positive growth and evolution?"

Ascend was founded with a built-in solution that prevents hate speech and disinformation without centralized censorship with its unique feature called community self-moderation. Each new piece of content goes through a scaled review with a random assortment of Ascend users who rate the content based on its relevance and helpfulness. The rating scale is from (-1 to 5) wherein (5) denotes the most helpful content approved for circulation. Any content with an average review score below (2) flags and returns the content to the original creator for revision.

ASCEND is designed to showcase the most helpful and entertaining content to the people who desire to see it, while inspiring personal growth and expansion. There is no centralized censorship: all content and comments are reviewed and scored within community tiers to deter low value content, misinformation and hateful commentary. No longer is credibility measured by followers or following. Instead, category expert scores create a new paradigm in influencer marketing, driven by expertise and quality, not popularity that's often artificial. With ASCEND, the colors, symbols, language, rating systems, and scoring based on the value contributed to the community and prioritization of the highest scoring content are all designed to establish and perpetuate this more positive and purpose-driven community.

The platform will enable anyone with a specialized expertise, talent, product or service to find their niche and make a living. App users don't have to learn "marketing", pay to amplify their content or buy followers like they do on other platforms. The best feature on ASCEND is that all users are invited to become creators and easily monetize their content in a multitude of ways from earning credits for views on posts, to hosting paid groups and even receiving patronage via tips from their beloved fans and collaborators.

Since the app launched in February 2022, it has gained 500+ users, with the vision video amassing over 25K views.

User Testimonials:

"I joined ASCEND because I have been in search of an open, honest and transparent platform that is centered around the value of one's content for co-creating with community, instead of being performance driven, filtered content that is based on latest trends or gamifying a structured hierarchy based on number of followers or status quo. I love that ASCEND's value system is based on the contribution of content rather than having to follow an algorithm in order to get your content "seen." We are each artists in our own way, and what we find valuable in sharing with others deserves to be seen, in an equal playing field where resonance is the currency. What I love most is that ASCEND feels very organic. I come on the app to search for what topic I am looking to learn about without advertisements or pushy infomercials being sold to me. On ASCEND people want to share to help others, instead of feeding insecurities like other platforms that are driven by more of a service to self mindset." ~ Jade C.

"I love the aesthetic! It's a place where I can envision hanging out online. I have read the research and understand how more people will move to platforms dedicated to their likes and needs. We want to find places that resonate with us, far from the mainstream media and the noise. Somewhere where we find like-minded individuals etc." ~Tamara L.

About We Ascend Now, Inc.

ASCEND is a new social network based on personal development and community value in which people's knowledge, skills and talents are the community's currency. Using data and artificial intelligence to inspire you to learn about yourself, ASCEND curates content to help you live a better, more fulfilling life. Content is designed to inspire personal growth and expansion. To learn more, visit www.weascendnow.com.

Contact information:

Sydney Campos

Co-Founder/CSO: ASCEND

[email protected]

(415) 678-9840

SOURCE We Ascend Now Inc.
With ISO 9001:2015 certification, Technavio is proudly partnering with more than 100 Fortune 500 companies for over 16 years. Download Our Sample Report to get more insights on the Online Furniture Market

Regional Forecast & Analysis:

37% of the market's growth will originate from APAC during the forecast period. China and Japan are the key markets for the online furniture market in APAC. Market growth in this region will be faster than the growth of the market in other regions. A rise in the real estate sector for both residential and commercial properties will facilitate the online furniture market growth in APAC over the forecast period.

Segmentation Forecast & Analysis:

The online furniture market share growth by the online-residential furniture segment will be significant during the forecast period. Sales of living room furniture are expected to increase during the forecast period. For instance, Wayfair, a US-based online furniture retailer, offers living room furniture in a wide range of styles and price options and competitive prices, which reduce the need for visiting brick-and-mortar stores. Moreover, innovative styles and designs that occupy very little space and offer comfort are in high demand and will drive the online furniture market growth during the forecast period

Download Our Sample Report to gain further insights on the market contribution & share of various regions & segments

Key Market Dynamics:

Market Driver

The increasing online spending and smartphone penetration is one of the key drivers supporting the online furniture market growth. The high penetration of internet services, improved economy, and upgradation of purchase and delivery options with the emergence of m-commerce has increased online shopping through smart devices. Meanwhile, consumers have now become way more comfortable about purchasing products on the go. Moreover, factors such as security features for online payments, free delivery, improved online customer services, and customer-friendly designs of shopping websites are also contributing to the growth of the market. Such flexible features associated with online shopping will drive the online furniture market growth during the forecast period.

Market Challenge

The longer replacement cycle of products is one of the challenges impeding the online furniture market growth. Most residential indoor and outdoor furnishings, especially furniture, are meant for long-term use and generally do not require frequent replacement. However, certain types of home furniture can be expensive and are one-time expenditures. Moreover, most branded home furniture and furnishing products are durable and of superior quality. Consumers only need to incur maintenance costs for these over the years, which are usually minimal. This reduces the need for the frequent purchase of furniture and furnishings, which acts as a major growth barrier for the market. Such challenges will limit the online furniture market growth during the forecast period.

Download our Sample Report right now! to learn about additional key drivers, trends, and challenges available with Technavio

Some Companies Mentioned with their Offerings

Ashcomm LLC- The company offers online furniture such as sofas and recliners. Through the furniture segment, the company offers living room furniture, bedroom furniture, kitchen and dining room furniture, home office furniture, bathroom furniture, and other furniture products.

The company offers online furniture such as sofas and recliners. Through the furniture segment, the company offers living room furniture, bedroom furniture, kitchen and dining room furniture, home office furniture, bathroom furniture, and other furniture products.

Bobs Discount Furniture LLC



Brilloca Ltd.



Herman Miller Inc.



Inter IKEA Holding BV



Kimball International Inc.



LaZBoy Inc.



Otto GmbH and Co. KG



Pepperfry Pvt. Ltd.



Raymour and Flanigan Furniture and Mattresses



Reliance Retail Ltd.



Steelcase Inc.



Wayfair Inc.



World Market



Ballard Designs Inc.



Bassett Furniture Industries



Haverty Furniture Companies Inc.



HNI Corp.



Pier 1 Imports Inc.



Williams Sonoma Inc.

Download Our Sample Report to gain access to more vendor profiles with their key offerings available with Technavio

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RTA Furniture Market in the US by Product and Distribution Channel - Forecast and Analysis 2022-2026: The RTA furniture market share in the US is expected to increase by USD 2.56 billion from 2021 to 2026, and the market's growth momentum will accelerate at a CAGR of 2.69%. To get more exclusive research insights: Download Our Sample Report

Online Furniture Market Scope Report Coverage Details Page number 120 Base year 2021 Forecast period 2022-2026 Growth momentum & CAGR Accelerate at a CAGR of 16.79% Market growth 2022-2026 $ 112.67 billion Market structure Fragmented YoY growth (%) 8.0 Regional analysis APAC, North America, Europe, Middle East and Africa, and South America Performing market contribution APAC at 37% Key consumer countries US, Canada, China, Japan, and UK Competitive landscape Leading companies, competitive strategies, consumer engagement scope Companies profiled Ashcomm LLC, Bobs Discount Furniture LLC, Brilloca Ltd., Herman Miller Inc., Inter IKEA Holding BV, Kimball International Inc., LaZBoy Inc., Otto GmbH and Co. KG, Pepperfry Pvt. Ltd., Raymour and Flanigan Furniture and Mattresses, Reliance Retail Ltd., Steelcase Inc., Wayfair Inc., World Market, Ballard Designs Inc., Bassett Furniture Industries, Haverty Furniture Companies Inc., HNI Corp., Pier 1 Imports Inc., and Williams Sonoma Inc. Market Dynamics Parent market analysis, Market growth inducers and obstacles, Fast-growing and slow-growing segment analysis, COVID 19 impact and future consumer dynamics, market condition analysis for forecast period. Customization preview If our report has not included the data that you are looking for, you can reach out to our analysts and get segments customized.

Key Topics Covered:

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 Application



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 ($ billion)



Exhibit 14: Data Table on Global - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)



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 between2021 and 2026

4.2 Bargaining power of buyers

Exhibit 18: Chart on Bargaining power of buyers  Impact of key factors 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 Application

5.1 Market segments

Exhibit 24: Chart on Application - Market share 2021-2026 (%)



Exhibit 25: Data Table on Application - Market share 2021-2026 (%)

5.2 Comparison by Application

Exhibit 26: Chart on Comparison by Application



Exhibit 27: Data Table on Comparison by Application

5.3 Online residential furniture - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

Exhibit 28: Chart on Online residential furniture - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)



Exhibit 29: Data Table on Online residential furniture - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)



Exhibit 30: Chart on Online residential furniture - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)



Exhibit 31: Data Table on Online residential furniture - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

5.4 Online commercial furniture - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

Exhibit 32: Chart on Online commercial furniture - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)



Exhibit 33: Data Table on Online commercial furniture - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)



Exhibit 34: Chart on Online commercial furniture - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)



Exhibit 35: Data Table on Online commercial furniture - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

5.5 Market opportunity by Application

Exhibit 36: Market opportunity by Application ($ billion)

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 APAC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

Exhibit 42: Chart on APAC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)



Exhibit 43: Data Table on APAC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)



Exhibit 44: Chart on APAC - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)



Exhibit 45: Data Table on APAC - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

7.4 North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 46: Chart on North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

Exhibit 47: Data Table on North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

Exhibit 48: Chart on North America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

Exhibit 49: Data Table on North America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

7.5 Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 50: Chart on Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

Exhibit 51: Data Table on Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

Exhibit 52: Chart on Europe - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

Exhibit 53: Data Table on Europe - 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 ($ billion)

and - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

Exhibit 55: Data Table on Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

and - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

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 ($ billion)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

Exhibit 59: Data Table on South America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

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 ($ billion)



Exhibit 63: Data Table on US - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)



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 China - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 66: Chart on China - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

Exhibit 67: Data Table on China - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

Exhibit 68: Chart on China - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

Exhibit 69: Data Table on China - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

7.10 Japan - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 70: Chart on Japan - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

Exhibit 71: Data Table on Japan - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

Exhibit 72: Chart on Japan - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

Exhibit 73: Data Table on Japan - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

7.11 UK - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

Exhibit 74: Chart on UK - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)



Exhibit 75: Data Table on UK - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)



Exhibit 76: Chart on UK - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)



Exhibit 77: Data Table on UK - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

7.12 Canada - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 78: Chart on Canada - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

Exhibit 79: Data Table on Canada - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ billion)

Exhibit 80: Chart on Canada - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

Exhibit 81: Data Table on Canada - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

7.13 Market opportunity by geography

Exhibit 82: Market opportunity by geography ($ billion)

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 Ashcomm LLC

Exhibit 89: Ashcomm LLC - Overview



Exhibit 90: Ashcomm LLC - Product / Service



Exhibit 91: Ashcomm LLC - Key offerings

10.4 Herman Miller Inc.

Exhibit 92: Herman Miller Inc. - Overview



Exhibit 93: Herman Miller Inc. - Business segments



Exhibit 94: Herman Miller Inc. - Key offerings



Exhibit 95: Herman Miller Inc. - Segment focus

10.5 HNI Corp.

Exhibit 96: HNI Corp. - Overview



Exhibit 97: HNI Corp. - Business segments



Exhibit 98: HNI Corp. - Key news



Exhibit 99: HNI Corp. - Key offerings



Exhibit 100: HNI Corp. - Segment focus

10.6 Inter IKEA Holding BV

Exhibit 101: Inter IKEA Holding BV - Overview



Exhibit 102: Inter IKEA Holding BV - Product / Service



Exhibit 103: Inter IKEA Holding BV - Key news



Exhibit 104: Inter IKEA Holding BV - Key offerings

10.7 Kimball International Inc.

Exhibit 105: Kimball International Inc. - Overview



Exhibit 106: Kimball International Inc. - Business segments



Exhibit 107: Kimball International Inc. - Key offerings



Exhibit 108: Kimball International Inc. - Segment focus

10.8 Otto GmbH and Co. KG

Exhibit 109: Otto GmbH and Co. KG - Overview



Exhibit 110: Otto GmbH and Co. KG - Business segments



Exhibit 111: Otto GmbH and Co. KG - Key news



Exhibit 112: Otto GmbH and Co. KG - Key offerings



Exhibit 113: Otto GmbH and Co. KG - Segment focus

10.9 Pepperfry Pvt. Ltd.

Exhibit 114: Pepperfry Pvt. Ltd. - Overview



Exhibit 115: Pepperfry Pvt. Ltd. - Product / Service



Exhibit 116: Pepperfry Pvt. Ltd. - Key offerings

10.10 Reliance Retail Ltd.

Exhibit 117: Reliance Retail Ltd. - Overview



Exhibit 118: Reliance Retail Ltd. - Product / Service



Exhibit 119: Reliance Retail Ltd. - Key offerings

10.11 Steelcase Inc.

Exhibit 120: Steelcase Inc. - Overview



Exhibit 121: Steelcase Inc. - Business segments



Exhibit 122: Steelcase Inc. - Key offerings



Exhibit 123: Steelcase Inc. - Segment focus

10.12 Williams Sonoma Inc.

Exhibit 124: Williams Sonoma Inc. - Overview



Exhibit 125: Williams Sonoma Inc. - Business segments



Exhibit 126: Williams Sonoma Inc. - Key news



Exhibit 127: Williams Sonoma Inc. - Key offerings



Exhibit 128: Williams Sonoma Inc. - Segment focus

11 Appendix

11.1 Scope of the report

11.2 Inclusions and exclusions checklist

Exhibit 129: Inclusions checklist



Exhibit 130: Exclusions checklist

11.3 Currency conversion rates for US$

Exhibit 131: Currency conversion rates for US$

11.4 Research methodology

Exhibit 132: Research methodology



Exhibit 133: Validation techniques employed for market sizing



Exhibit 134: Information sources

11.5 List of abbreviations

Exhibit 135: List of abbreviations

About Us

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focuses on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions. With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios.

Contact

Technavio Research

Jesse Maida

Media & Marketing Executive

US: +1 844 364 1100

UK: +44 203 893 3200

Email:[email protected]

Website: www.technavio.com/

SOURCE Technavio
Passenger traffic increased by 4% in March compared with the same month in 2019.

"Demand for air travel through Ontario International remained strong in April as passengers took to the airways for spring break vacations and to visit friends and family for religious holidays. Ontario International was rapidly growing before the COVID-19 pandemic, so it is not a surprise that we're among the quickest to recover," said Alan D. Wapner, president of the Ontario International Airport Authority (OIAA) Board of Commissioners.

From January through April, total passenger volume was more than 1.62 million, within a percentage point of the total from the first four months of 2019. The number of domestic passengers was 1.57 million, an increase of 1.6%.

Passenger Totals April 2022 April 2019 Change YTD 2022 YTD 2019 Change Domestic 461,300 420,699 9.65% 1,571,080 1,545,621 1.6% International 14,441 24,249 -40.45% 56,300 95,660 -41.1% Total 475,741 444,948 6.92% 1,627,380 1,641,281 -0.8%

Passenger Totals April 2022 April 2021 Change YTD 2022 YTD 2021 Change Domestic 461,300 295,186 56.27% 1,571,080 847,680 85.3% International 14,441 3,598 301.36% 56,300 14,748 281.7% Total 475,741 298,784 59.23% 1,627,380 862,428 88.7%

Air cargo shipments also remained strong in April at 67,000 tons, 8.6% greater than April in 2019. On a year-to-date basis, shipments of freight and mail combined were 15.5% higher than the January through April period in 2019, at nearly 270,000 tons.

Air cargo (tonnage) April 2022 April 2019 Change YTD 2022 YTD 2019 Change Freight 62,291 59,359 4.94% 250,623 224,346 11.7% Mail 4,860 2,454 98.05% 19,068 9,192 107.4% Total 67,152 61,813 8.64% 269,692 233,539 15.5%

Air cargo (tonnage) April 2022 April 2021 Change YTD 2022 YTD 2021 Change Freight 62,291 70,422 -11.55% 250,623 278,143 -9.9% Mail 4,860 4,085 18.98% 19,068 14,383 32.6% Total 67,152 74,508 -9.87 269,692 292,526 -7.8%

"Ontario International remains a point of pride as an increasingly popular passenger gateway in Southern California and attractive hub for e-commerce," said Atif Elkadi, chief executive officer of the OIAA. "With our growing customer base in the Inland Empire, support of our community neighbors and strong political will of our city and county leaders, I am confident Ontario International will continue to attract new and increased flights from passenger and cargo air carriers."

About Ontario International Airport

Ontario International Airport (ONT) is the fastest growing airport in the United States, according to Global Traveler, a leading publication for frequent fliers. Located in the Inland Empire, ONT is approximately 35 miles east of downtown Los Angeles in the center of Southern California. It is a full-service airport which offers nonstop commercial jet service to 33 major airports in the U.S., Mexico, Central America and Taiwan. More information is available at www.flyOntario.com. Follow @flyONT on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram

About the Ontario International Airport Authority (OIAA)

The OIAA was formed in August 2012 by a Joint Powers Agreement between the City of Ontario and the County of San Bernardino to provide overall direction for the management, operations, development and marketing of ONT for the benefit of the Southern California economy and the residents of the airport's four-county catchment area. OIAA Commissioners are Ontario Mayor Pro Tem Alan D. Wapner (President), Retired Riverside Mayor Ronald O. Loveridge (Vice President), Ontario City Council Member Jim W. Bowman (Secretary), San Bernardino County Supervisor Curt Hagman (Commissioner) and retired business executive Julia Gouw (Commissioner).

OIAA Media Contact:

Steve Lambert (909) 841-7527 [email protected]

SOURCE Ontario International Airport
BOSTON and DALLAS, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Overjet , a leader in dental artificial intelligence solutions for some of the largest dental groups, today announced a partnership with Jefferson Dental & Orthodontics , one of the fastest-growing dental service organizations in the country. By incorporating Overjet's AI platform, Jefferson is taking proactive steps to streamline the diagnostic workflow, create better doctor-patient communication, and improve patient outcomes.

"We chose to partner with Overjet because they share our commitment to best-in-class patient care," said Adam Arnette, Chief Marketing Officer of Jefferson Dental & Orthodontics. "Overjet has an unmatched reputation in pioneering dental innovations that advance patient care, and we are thrilled to partner with Overjet to bring yet another cutting-edge technology to JDO."

Driven by their commitment to provide high-quality, comprehensive oral healthcare to over 600,000 families every year, Jefferson Dental & Orthodontics invests in the industry's most advanced technology to build trusting relationships with their patients.

"Our partnership with Overjet allows us to deliver the finest treatment plans in the world, removing doubt about what each patient needs to reach optimal oral health," said Mick McCormick, CEO of Jefferson Dental & Orthodontics. "When patients can see and understand what their providers see, we bridge the gap between provider and patient  this is key to building lifelong relationships based on trust and transparency."

Industry-leading technology and a synergetic approach  integrating general dentistry, hygiene, and orthodontics  allows their patients to make informed decisions about their oral health while receiving unmatched multidisciplinary care.

"Our goal is to deliver the insight needed for business growth and improved efficiency while enhancing the quality of care," said Wardah Inam, co-founder and CEO of Overjet. "We're proud to partner with a leading, innovative DSO like Jefferson. Together, through our AI solutions and their best-in-class approach to dentistry, we will enable clinicians to provide the best care to their patients."

Every day, Overjet's dental AI products are in use by some of the largest dental groups to enable better clinical decision-making. To learn more about the partnership and how dental support organizations are using Overjet to improve overall practice performance and improve patient outcomes, visit http://www.overjet.com/jdo

About Overjet

Overjet is the global leader in dental artificial intelligence, helping both payors and providers improve patient care. By combining deep expertise in dentistry and advanced engineering, Overjet develops accurate and quantified ways to detect pathologies, and integrates actionable insights into systems and workflows to operationalize a feedback loop between payors, providers, and patients. The company was founded by experts from the MIT and Harvard School of Dental Medicine and has assembled the largest and most seasoned team of technologists and domain experts with deep AI, dental, and insurance experience. Every day, some of the largest DSOs and insurance companies rely on accurate information provided by Overjet to deliver care and service to patients. Learn more at www.overjet.com.

About Jefferson Dental & Orthodontics

Since the opening of their first office in 1967, Jefferson Dental & Orthodontics (JDO) has been a trusted oral healthcare provider for thousands of families with 70+ offices throughout Texas and Oklahoma. Jefferson takes a comprehensive oral healthcare approach, integrating general dentistry, hygiene, and orthodontics, which helps their patients and team live better lives. With the latest technology and talented, caring team members, they strive to earn their patients' trust and build lifelong partnerships. Learn more about Jefferson Dental & Orthodontics at jeffersondental.com.

SOURCE Overjet
DALLAS, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- PEAK ELEVATOR PARTS, a leader in serving and supporting the elevator industry, proudly announces the grand opening of its new Dallas distribution center:

TEXAS

May 13

10990 Petal St., Suite 700

Dallas, TX 75238

The recent acquisition of a huge inventory of components positions PEAK ELEVATOR PARTS to become the first elevator parts distribution company in Texas.

Our conveniently located distribution center offers same-day shipping and delivery as well as pick-up options. Our same-day delivery minimizes elevator downtime caused by out-of-service elevators.

With parts readily in stock, service companies nationwide can grow their businesses with convenient access to parts when they need them most. PEAK ELEVATOR PARTS also carries a large assortment of obsolete components.

PEAK ELEVATOR PARTS is a division of PEAK Elevator, a privately owned company that has specialized in all sectors of the vertical transportation industry since 1980. With our forefront focus on customer service, PEAK ELEVATOR PARTS strives to set new standards and launch innovative parts procurement options to the elevator industry.

Please join PEAK ELEVATOR PARTS in celebrating our grand opening on May 13 in Dallas, Texas. Lunch served from 11 a.m.  1 p.m. For more information or other inquiries, contact Brandon McGinnis or Natalie Twigg-Baetke at (800) 458-3726.

SOURCE Peak Elevator Parts
ARVADA, Colo., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- PEAK ELEVATOR PARTS, a leader in serving and supporting the elevator industry, proudly announces the grand opening of its new Colorado distribution facility:

COLORADO

May 20

5405 W. 56th Ave., Unit F

Arvada, CO 80002

The company's new elevator parts distribution center is the culmination of an endeavor to broaden the scope of its service to customers in Colorado and across the country.

Our strategic location offers same-day shipping and delivery as well as pick-up options. Our same-day delivery service enables PEAK ELEVATOR PARTS to significantly minimize elevator downtime caused by out-of-service elevators.

PEAK ELEVATOR PARTS also provides faster access to a vast array of obsolete components for customer repairs and upgrades. With parts readily in stock, service companies nationwide can grow their businesses with convenient access to parts when they need them most.

PEAK ELEVATOR PARTS is a division of PEAK Elevator, a privately owned company that has specialized in all sectors of the vertical transportation industry since 1980. With our forefront focus on customer service, PEAK ELEVATOR PARTS strives to set new standards and launch innovative parts procurement options to the elevator industry.

Please join PEAK ELEVATOR PARTS in celebrating our grand opening on May 20 in Arvada, Colorado. Lunch served from 11 a.m.  1 p.m. For more information or other inquiries, contact Brandon McGinnis or Natalie Twigg-Baetke at (800) 458-3726.

SOURCE Peak Elevator Parts
DUBLIN, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Philippines Social Commerce Market Intelligence and Future Growth Dynamics Databook - 50+ KPIs on Social Commerce Trends by End-Use Sectors, Operational KPIs, Retail Product Dynamics, and Consumer Demographics - Q1 2022 Update" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

Social commerce industry in Philippines is expected to grow by 30.4% on annual basis to reach US$681.6 million in 2022.



The social commerce industry is expected to grow steadily over the forecast period, recording a CAGR of 26.7% during 2022-2028. The social commerce GMV in the country will increase from US$681.6 million in 2022 to reach US$2,744.5 million by 2028.



In the midst of the growing number of consumers flocking to social media platforms to discover and purchase products from social networking sites, the social commerce industry is gaining increasing ground on traditional e-commerce channels and physical retail outlets in the Philippines. The sheer amount of time spent by consumers, especially younger generations, on social networking platforms is making social commerce one of the fastest-growing trends in the Philippines.



The rise of the social commerce industry in the Philippines is parallel to the growth of the market in Southeast Asia. Being one of the youngest communities globally, Southeast Asia is expected to remain one of the largest markets for social commerce over the next four to eight quarters. According to the analysis, social commerce accounted for more than 45% of the Southeast Asian e-commerce market in 2021 alone and is expected to have increased further in 2022.



The publisher expects the growth in the Philippine social commerce sector to continue over the next four to eight quarters as several local and regional startups continue to compete for market share in the country. Notably, the growing investment from large social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, is also expected to support the growth of the social commerce sector in the Philippines.



Moreover, as the social shopping method continues to become more mainstream in the country, the publisher expects a further rise in investment from private equity and venture capital firms in the Filipino social commerce industry. The growing competition in the space is also expected to lead to more mergers and acquisition deals over the next four to eight quarters in the Philippines. Overall, the publisher expects the social commerce industry in the Philippines to record strong growth from the short to medium-term perspective.



Brands are increasingly using social platforms to tap into the growing social commerce trend in the Philippines



In the midst of the growing number of consumers flocking to social media platforms such as TikTok to discover and purchase products in the country, a number of different brands are using social commerce platforms to boost their sales.

In the Philippines , firms such as Belo Medical Group and Shopee Philippines are already using TikTok to tap into the platforms' potential for commerce. Apart from these two firms, Samsung Philippines is also using the platform to drive engagement and purchasing intent among consumers in the country.

, firms such as Belo Medical Group and Shopee Philippines are already using TikTok to tap into the platforms' potential for commerce. Apart from these two firms, Samsung Philippines is also using the platform to drive engagement and purchasing intent among consumers in the country. Notably, Samsung Philippines reported improved brand awareness and engagement after employing a gamified hashtag challenge on the social media platform for launching its smartphone models. The 2021 campaign by Samsung Philippines resulted in a 7.35% increase in ad recall, an 11.25% increase in purchasing intent, and a 9.5% increase in brand preference among consumers in the Philippines .

With several of the brands reporting a positive impact on the consumers when interacting through social commerce platforms, the publisher expects more firms to leverage TikTok and other social media platforms to drive consumer purchase intent in the country from the short to medium-term perspective.



Social commerce startups are adopting different business expansion strategies to expand their market in the Philippines



Social commerce firm Pinduoduo has achieved substantial success in China over the last four to eight quarters. Notably, startups around the globe are looking to recreate the success of Pinduoduo in their own region. Similar trends are visible in the Philippines, wherein the social commerce startups are seeking to recreate the success of Pinduoduo in Southeast Asia.

Resellee, a social commerce startup in the Philippines , partners with individual sellers and manufacturers, and farmers in the country. The platform connects resellers with manufacturers and farmers, thereby allowing resellers to choose the product they want to add to their stores and market them to potential buyers through the use of different social media platforms.

, partners with individual sellers and manufacturers, and farmers in the country. The platform connects resellers with manufacturers and farmers, thereby allowing resellers to choose the product they want to add to their stores and market them to potential buyers through the use of different social media platforms. Notably, the social commerce platforms offer products across different categories, including fashion and electronics. However, its major focus is on groceries. During the global pandemic outbreak, the firm partnered with the government and farmers to meet the growing demand. In November 2020 , the firm also raised US$1 million in its seed funding round from Hofan Capital and Mintech Enterprises.

Scope

Philippines Ecommerce Industry Market Size and Future Growth Dynamics by Key Performance Indicators, 2019-2028

Philippines Social Commerce Industry Market Size and Future Growth Dynamics by Key Performance Indicators, 2019-2028

Philippines Social Commerce Industry Market Size and Forecast by Retail Product Categories, 2019-2028

Clothing & Footwear

Beauty and Personal Care

Food & Grocery

Appliances and Electronics

Home Improvement

Others

Philippines Social Commerce Industry Market Size and Forecast by End Use Segment, 2019-2028

B2B

B2C

C2C

Philippines Social Commerce Industry Market Size and Forecast by End Use Device, 2019-2028

Mobile

Desktop

Philippines Social Commerce Industry Market Size and Forecast by Location, 2019-2028

Domestic

Cross Border

Philippines Social Commerce Industry Market Size and Forecast by Location, 2019-2028

Tier-1 Cities

Tier-2 Cities

Tier-3 Cities

Philippines Social Commerce Industry Market Size and Forecast by Payment Method, 2019-2028

Credit Card

Debit Card

Bank Transfer

Prepaid Card

Digital & Mobile Wallet

Other Digital Payment

Cash

Philippines Social Commerce Industry Market Size and Forecast by Consumer Demographics & Behaviour, 2021

By Age

By Income Level

By Gender

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/oy77cp

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- Neumifil is a novel broad-spectrum anti-viral product that was shown to be well-tolerated with no safety signals at all doses tested

- Pneumagen plans to conduct a Phase 2 Influenza challenge study in the second half of 2022 to demonstrate clinical proof of efficacy of Neumifil

ST ANDREWS, Scotland, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Pneumagen, a clinical stage biotech company developing Neumifil, a broad-spectrum antiviral, intranasal drug for the prophylaxis and treatment of viral respiratory tract infections (RTIs), today reports positive topline data from a Phase 1 study with Neumifil designed to evaluate safety and tolerability in healthy volunteers.

The Phase 1, single centre, two-part randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled dose escalation study enrolled a total of 60 healthy volunteers who were evaluated for safety and tolerability of single and multiple doses of Neumifil.

Top line data from the trial show that Neumifil is well tolerated with no dose limiting toxicities and a safety profile that strongly supports further development. No serious adverse events were reported at any of the doses evaluated in the study.

Dr. Geoff Kitson, Pneumagen's Chief Medical Officer commented, "The availability of an effective intranasal broad-spectrum anti-viral therapeutic for patients who experience viral induced exacerbations of underlying pulmonary pathology would be transformational and would provide an early treatment option with significantly improved quality of life. This successful Phase 1 safety study is the first important step in our development path that could make Neumifil available to vulnerable and at-risk patients, offering them protection against a range of respiratory viruses."

Neumifil is a unique multivalent carbohydrate binding molecule (mCBM) generated using Pneumagen's proprietary GlycoTarge technology platform, that acts by binding to epithelial cell surface sialic acid receptors in the respiratory tract, thereby stopping viral entry at the site of infection by reducing their ability to enter host cells. Neumifil has shown potent anti-viral activity against a broad range of infections caused by influenza viruses, Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), SARS-CoV-2 and rhinovirus in pre-clinical studies, and its differentiated mechanism of action means it is less susceptible to direct viral resistance.

Douglas Thomson, CEO of Pneumagen commented, "We are encouraged by these first clinical data, which confirm that Neumifil is well tolerated and safe. These data represent the first clinical evidence supporting the development of this new intranasal therapeutic for patients who experience viral induced exacerbations of chronic lung disease, including those with COPD and asthma. Neumifil has the potential to deliver a significant impact on decreasing the risk of hospitalization, complications and death for the many susceptible patients around the world."

A Phase 2, proof of concept, controlled human influenza challenge study of Neumifil to be conducted by hVIVO is planned to commence in the second half of 2022. Following this trial, which is designed to demonstrate clinical proof of concept, Pneumagen plans to initiate full development studies in 2023, in patients who experience viral induced exacerbations of underlying pulmonary pathology.

For further information, please contact:

Pneumagen

Douglas Thomson, CEO

Email: [email protected]

MEDiSTRAVA Consulting (Financial PR)

Frazer Hall, David Dible, Sandi Greenwood, Evelyn McCormack

Email: [email protected]

About Pneumagen

Pneumagen is a clinical- stage biotech company developing Neumifil, its lead product, as an intranasal drug for the prophylaxis and treatment of a broad range of viral respiratory tract infections (RTIs).

Neumifil is a novel, engineered multivalent Carbohydrate Binding Molecule (mCBM), which is being developed for the pan-antiviral prevention of Influenza Virus (IFV), RSV, coronavirus infections including COVID-19 and human rhinovirus. Neumifil acts by directly binding and preventing the entry of the viral pathogens into the lungs with reduced susceptibility to direct viral resistance. Neumifil was generated using Pneumagen's proprietary GlycoTarge technology that acts by stopping viruses at the site of infection, reducing their ability to enter cells.

In addition to Neumifil, Pneumagen is harnessing its GlycoTarge platform to enable the development of a pipeline of intranasal therapies targeting other infectious lung diseases.

Pneumagen was established in 2016 as a spin-out from the University of St Andrews in Scotland giving Pneumagen access to world-class scientific expertise and capabilities in viral RTI's specifically related to glycobiology.

SOURCE Pneumagen
CHICAGO, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- According to the new market research report "Power Distribution Unit Market by Type (Basic, Metered, Switched, Monitored, ATS, Hot Swap, Dual Circuit), Phase (Single & Three), Power Rating (Up to 120 V, 120240 V, 240400 V, above 400 V), End User and Region - Global Forecast to 2027", published by MarketsandMarkets, the Power Distribution Unit Market size is estimated to be USD 3.9 billion by 2022 and is projected to reach USD 5.7 billion by 2027, at a CAGR of 7.9%. This is designed to provide standard electrical outlets for use within a variety of settings that dont require monitoring or remote access capabilities. Power distribution units can either be basic or intelligent, depending on the features they have. These products can monitor, track, and manage every aspect of data center activity and provide efficient solutions for critical power devices, along with data center security and server management.

Download PDF Brochure: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownloadNew.asp?id=129924226

Single phase PDUs is expected to result in the segment occupying majority of the Power Distribution Unit Market share

The single-phase power distribution units are different from the three-phase power distribution units. Single-phase wires are usually grounded at the switchboard. These systems are mostly used in residential settings that have small workloads. They are rarely used in data centers today, as most cabinets are too dense and require more electricity than single-phase systems can provide. The demand from residential sectors and small end users drives the market for single-phase power distribution units. For instance, in February 2021, Eaton acquired Tripp Lite for USD 1.6 billion, which added the new single-phase uninterruptible power supply systems, rack power distribution units, surge protectors, and enclosures to Eaton's existing data center portfolio.

Browse in-depth TOC on "Power Distribution Unit Market"

124  Tables

48  Figures

197  Pages

View Detailed Table of Content Here: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/power-distribution-unit-market-129924226.html

Telecom & IT end user is estimated to be the largest and fastest growing market

Based on the end user segment of power distribution unit systems, the telecom & IT sector is estimated to be the fastest and largest growing market from 2020 to 2027. The telecom & IT sector is a major consumer of PDU across all regions, which has contributed significantly to the growth of the market. It is also an industry continually redefining its parameters, providing communications service providers (CSPs) with tremendous opportunities for growth. Subsequently, CSPs are working toward expanding their partner ecosystem to deliver innovative new services and implement new business models. According to the GSM Association, a trade body that represents the interests of mobile network operators worldwide, by 2025, 71% of the world's population will be connected to smartphone networks and will be enjoying internet services.

North America likely to emerge as the largest Power Distribution Unit Market

North America accounted for a 42.3% share of the Power Distribution Unit Market in 2022. North America is experiencing evident growth for colocation data centers and is providing opportunities for the players operating in the Power Distribution Unit Market. For instance, In March 2022, nVent officially announced the opening of its first North American power distribution unit (PDU) manufacturing facility in Tucson, Ariz. The new facility will be the third to manufacture intelligent PDUs for nVent's CIS business. The growing demand for PDUs for data centers, along with rising investments in the telecom & IT and healthcare sectors are expected to drive the demand for the Power Distribution Unit Market in North America.

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Legrand (France), Schneider Electric (France), Cisco System (US), ABB (Switzerland), and Eaton (Ireland), are the key players in the global Power Distribution Unit Market.

Browse Adjacent Markets: Energy and Power Market Research Reports & Consulting

Browse Related Reports:

Modular Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) Market by Component (Solutions (50kVA & below, 51-100 kVA, 101-250 kVA, 251-500 kVA) and Services (Consulting, Integration & Implementation)), Enterprise Size, Vertical, and Region - Global Forecast to 2025

Data Center Power Market by Solution (Power Monitoring, Power Distribution, Power Backup, and Cabling Infrastructure), Service (System Integration, Training & Consulting, and Support & Maintenance), End-User Type, Vertical, and Region - Global Forecast to 2025

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President Guillermo Lasso said he hopes to develop further relations with the Israeli innovation ecosystem and offer additional opportunities for Israeli companies operating in Ecuador

The President is accompanied by Minister of Foreign Affairs Juan Carlos Holguin, Minister of Production, Foreign Trade & Investment Julio Jose Prado, and National Secretary for Public-Private Alliance & Development, Roberto Salas Guzman

TEL AVIV, Israel, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- President of Ecuador Guillermo Lasso made his first official visit to Israel this week in an effort to deepen bilateral relations with an emphasis on developing closer business, commercial, and innovation ties between the two countries. Leading a delegation of Ecuadorian entrepreneurs, President Lasso arrived today at Tel Aviv based Start-Up Nation Central, an organization that promotes Israeli innovation around the world, accompanied by Minister of Foreign Affairs Juan Carlos Holguin, Minister of Production, Foreign Trade & Investment Julio Jose Prado, and National Secretary for Public-Private Alliance & Development Roberto Salas Guzman. The delegation met with Start-Up Nation Central's CEO Avi Hasson and other senior executives and heard from them about what it takes to develop an advanced innovation ecosystem such as Israel's.

President of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso and CEO of Start-Up Nation Central, Avi Hasson (Photo Credit: Liron Cohen Aviv)

During the official visit, President Lasso presented for the first time in Israel the government's new "Ecuador Open for Business" strategy, which aims to attract investments and strengthen public-private partnerships. This is an open call to the Israeli tech ecosystem to better understand the market in Ecuador, which is ripe for investments and is a desirable destination for expanding technological activities through strategic partnerships.

Following the presentation, the Ecuadorian officials took part in a panel in which they heard from Avi Hasson; Boaz Albaranes, a partner at Mindset Ventures, and other high-level representatives of the Israeli tech ecosystem about ways in which Ecuador and Israel can find synergies and collaborate through innovation.

Start-Up Nation Central CEO Avi Hasson: "I would like to thank President Lasso and the senior Ecuadorian delegation for meeting with us. Our mission is to promote Israeli innovation to the world in order to help international entities solve global challenges and we are honored to be connecting Ecuador to the Israeli innovation ecosystem and its problem-solving capabilities. Israel's innovation and capabilities especially in the agrifood-tech sector can bring value to the Ecuadorian economy and we are sure this visit will help boost ties between the two countries".

Start-Up Nation Central is a non-profit organization that connects Israeli innovation to the world in order to help international entities solve global challenges. Immersed in the Israeli technology ecosystem, we provide a platform that nurtures business growth and generates partnerships with corporations, governments, investors, and NGOs to strengthen Israel's economy and society.

SOURCE Start-Up Nation Central (SNC)
Having grown 30 times since the Series A round in April 2020, Qoala is the fastest growing insurtech in SEA. Qoala has acquired over 50,000 insurance marketers and provides a platform supported by over 50 insurers for them to sell insurance from multiple insurers, while managing pre-sale and post-sale services. It also provides several innovative micro-insurance products through its partnerships with Traveloka, Redbus, DANA, JD.ID, Shopee, Kredivo and Investree among others.

Qoala focuses on "retail insurance" which involves insurance for cars, bikes, homes, and health. "Qoala is the only insurtech with licenses in three markets in SEA and with this new round we are optimistic in sustaining our growth momentum. Our business in Thailand has also already grown by three times since we joined forces with FairDee in February 2021, which gives us confidence in our expansion capability," added Tommy Martin, Co-founder and COO of Qoala.

"Qoala's business model of expanding the use of insurance among underserved consumers in Southeast Asia resonates with our thesis of backing innovation to improve financial health of households," said Smita Aggarwal, Global Investments Advisor at Flourish Ventures. "We are excited about the momentum that Qoala has generated since we last invested in Series A. We at Flourish Ventures are pleased to continue our commitment to Qoala."

Tara Reeves of Eurazeo, a European investment firm who led this round and previously funded WeFox, the largest insurtech in the world also added, "Qoala stands out amongst the insurtech companies due to its diverse team which has been able to deliver rapid growth with promising unit economics despite the pandemic. With regional presence and fast growth forecasted for the region, we are excited to lead this round and join Qoala in its journey."

Qoala sets itself apart through a superior tech stack. This enables them to offer industry-leading speed in policy issuance, instant pricing as well as an industry first - instant commissions to insurance marketers. These innovations not only solve very key issues for insurance marketers and consumers but also allow Qoala to acquire and service consumers at a lower cost, leading to superior unit economics. Global insurers like Sompo, AXA, and Chubb have also joined Qoala's platform due to their focus on retail customers so they can fasten insurance adoption while maintaining healthy loss ratios.

The funding also demonstrates appreciation and trust from both Qoala's existing and new investors to continue its growth in the insurtech sector. "We will continue to invest towards scaling up Qoala's reach in our core markets and focus on enhancing our technology and product experience to greatly reduce the hurdles to accessing insurance that are today still very significant," said Harshet Lunani, Founder and CEO of Qoala.

Furthermore, Qoala aims to add over 250 employees this year focus on building out an engineering and product management hub in Gurugram, India. In parallel, Qoala also plans to grant employees with equity compensation and give them the right to acquire shares in the company to strengthen employee ownership in the company.

"Insurance penetration in Indonesia is currently only 2%, far behind the global average of 6%, with most consumers just beginning to understand the value of insurance and hence there is plenty of room for growth. Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia are amongst the top 10 fastest growing global markets for insurance in the next decade," added Harshet.

About Qoala

Qoala is a startup in the field of insurance technology with a mission to socialize insurance through a combination of new product development supported by machine learning-based claim processes. Qoala operates in three countries; Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand offering various insurance protections, ranging from health, motor vehicle, property, personal accident, and other needs that can be accessed quickly, easily, and transparently through the Qoala application or website.

SOURCE Qoala
Kim Stevenson joins Pamela Steer and Rusty Lewis as board members appointed in 2022

TORONTO, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - Quarterhill Inc. ("Quarterhill") (TSX: QTRH) (OTCQX: QTRHF) announces that Kim Stevenson has been appointed to its board of directors.

Ms. Stevenson brings to the Quarterhill board more than three decades of experience as an IT, finance and operations executive with a broad range of senior management and board of director roles at both private and public companies in the tech industry. She has led some of the largest technology brands in the world, including serving as CIO for Intel and COO of Intel's Internet of Things unit, which was focused on automotive technologies. Her most recent roles were as Senior Vice President and General Manager at NetApp and Lenovo, while she held other senior leadership roles at IBM, EDS, and HP (Hewlett-Packard). Ms. Stevenson has served on several public and private Boards of Directors including Cloudera, Riverbed Technology, Boston Private Financial Holdings, Inc., Skyworks Solutions, Inc. and National Center for Women in IT. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for Ambiq Micro and Mitek Systems Inc. and on the advisory board of TruU. Ms. Stevenson is a vocal advocate for women in leadership and has a deep commitment for developing leaders. She holds a Master of Business Administration degree from Cornell University and a Bachelor of Science degree from Northeastern University.

I am very pleased to welcome Kim to the Quarterhill board," said John Gillberry, Chair of Quarterhill. "Kim has a long and distinguished career as a leader in the tech industry with deep experience in business, strategy and technology innovation. We look forward to her contributions as Quarterhill pursues organic and acquisitive growth opportunities in the ITS industry where technology is increasingly transforming how people view the potential and utility of their infrastructure projects."

Ms. Stevenson joins Pamela Steer and Rusty Lewis as new Quarterhill board members in 2022.

Ms. Steer has more than 20 years of experience in accounting and finance from a variety of public and private corporations and professional services providers, and in 2019 was awarded the title of Canada's CFO of the Year. She is currently the CEO of the Chartered Professional Accountants of Canada, one of the largest national accounting organizations in the world, and a member of the Board of Directors of the City of Toronto Investment Board. Ms. Steer is also a founding member of the Advisory Board of the Institute for Sustainable Finance and a member of the Board of Directors of Michael Garron Hospital in Toronto. From June 2019 to January 2021, she served, initially, as Chief Financial Officer and, subsequently, as Chief Financial and Corporate Strategy Officer for Payments Canada, the organization that owns and operates Canada's payment clearing and settlement infrastructure. From May 2012 to May 2019, Ms. Steer was, initially, Vice-President, Finance and, subsequently, Chief Financial Officer and Head, Finance and Employer Services for Ontario's Workplace Safety and Insurance Board.

Ms. Steer holds a Master of Accounting degree from the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, holds a CPA Fellow (FCPA, FCA) designation from the Chartered Professional Accountants of Canada. She holds the Chartered Financial Analyst designation from the CFA Institute and the Chartered Business Valuator designation from The Canadian Institute of Chartered Business Valuators.

Mr. Lewis, a pioneer in the ITS industry, was previously profiled in Quarterhill's March 3, 2022, press release announcing his appointment to the board.

About Quarterhill

Quarterhill is a leading provider of tolling and enforcement solutions in the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) industry, as well as, through its Wi-LAN Inc. subsidiary, a leader in Intellectual Property licensing. Our goal is global leadership in ITS, via organic growth of the Electronic Transaction Consultants, LLC (ETC) and International Road Dynamics, Inc. (IRD) platforms, and by continuing an acquisition-oriented investment strategy that capitalizes on attractive growth opportunities within ITS and its adjacent markets. Quarterhill is listed on the TSX under the symbol QTRH and on the OTCQX Best Market under the symbol QTRHF. For more information, visit www.quarterhill.com

SOURCE Quarterhill Inc.
TORONTO, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - Quarterhill Inc. ("Quarterhill") (TSX: QTRH) (OTCQX: QTRHF) announces that Andrew Parolin has been appointed CEO of Wi-LAN Inc. ("WiLAN"), its wholly owned patent licensing business.

Mr. Parolin has been with WiLAN for 15 years and a key member of the executive team during that time. Most recently he was Senior Vice-President, Licensing, responsible for the licensing of the company's portfolio of wireless, wireline, digital television and other technologies.

"Andrew is an exceptional talent in the patent licensing industry and reflects the deep bench strength we have at WiLAN," said Bret Kidd, CEO of Quarterill. "During his time at WiLAN, his business unit has negotiated license agreements with more than 100 companies including global technology leaders such as LG, Cisco, Nokia, Ericsson, Panasonic and Sony. He provides great continuity with the team at WiLAN and with the executive and board at Quarterhill and I look forward to working more closely with him."

Before joining WiLAN, Mr. Parolin worked at SiGe Semiconductor, a fabless semiconductor company specializing in next-generation integrated circuit designs, where he served as Director of Wireless Data Products. Mr. Parolin has a MBA from the University of Ottawa, a Master of Applied Science from Queen's University, and a Bachelor of Engineering from the Technical University of Nova Scotia.

About Quarterhill

Quarterhill is a leading provider of tolling and enforcement solutions in the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) industry, as well as, through its Wi-LAN Inc. subsidiary, a leader in Intellectual Property licensing. Our goal is global leadership in ITS, via organic growth of the Electronic Transaction Consultants, LLC (ETC) and International Road Dynamics, Inc. (IRD) platforms, and by continuing an acquisition-oriented investment strategy that capitalizes on attractive growth opportunities within ITS and its adjacent markets. Quarterhill is listed on the TSX under the symbol QTRH and on the OTCQX Best Market under the symbol QTRHF. For more information, visit www.quarterhill.com

SOURCE Quarterhill Inc.
UNITED NATIONS, May 11 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese envoy on Wednesday warned against attempts to impose more sanctions on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).

Dialogue and consultation is the only correct way to resolve the Korean Peninsula issue. The United States is a direct party to the issue and holds the key to breaking the deadlock. As such, it should take concrete actions to respond positively to the reasonable concerns of the DPRK and create conditions for an early resumption of dialogue, said Zhang Jun, China's permanent representative to the United Nations.

Although the U.S. side claims to be willing to engage in unconditional dialogue, when it comes to actions, it is continuing to tighten sanctions and exert pressure. This is clearly not constructive, he told the Security Council. "The new draft resolution proposed by the United States, evoking Chapter VII of the UN Charter, is centered on furthering sanctions, which is not an appropriate way to address the current situation on the peninsula."

The Security Council, over the years, has adopted numerous resolutions on the issue, which, while authorizing sanctions, have also stressed the need for a peaceful, political, and diplomatic solution to the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula. All these deserve equal attention, said Zhang.

"Sanctions are but a means to an end, and should always serve the overall goal of political settlement. Equating sanctions to or replacing diplomatic efforts is completely putting the cart before the horse, and will not achieve the desired result," he said. "Despite the fact that sanctions have already had a negative humanitarian impact and collateral damage to other countries, the countries concerned are still in total denial, which is inconsistent with the conclusions of various international humanitarian agencies and the 1718 (DPRK Sanctions) Committee's panel of experts."

In response to the latest situation, China and a number of Security Council members have all put forward reasonable proposals to explore ways to take strong actions and promote the political solution to the Korean Peninsula issue, in a way that best garners the consensus of council members. The draft resolution tabled by China and Russia is for this very purpose. Regrettably, the United States, which is the penholder of the DPRK non-proliferation issue, has turned a blind eye to the reasonable proposals of China and other relevant council members, and remains enamored superstitiously with the magic power of sanctions, said Zhang.

"We believe that if the United States changes its negative attitude, it is possible for council members to reach a consensus. We hope that the council members will give serious consideration to the joint China-Russia draft resolution," he said.

The issue of the Korean Peninsula should be looked at historically and comprehensively so as to understand the causes and consequences of the matter at hand. After 2018, there had been a general de-escalation of the situation. The DPRK took a series of measures to denuclearize and de-escalate the situation. The leaders of the DPRK and the United States met in Singapore and reached agreement on establishing a new type of DPRK-U.S. relations, building a peace mechanism on the peninsula, and advancing the denuclearization process. Regrettably, the U.S. side later reneged on its position, and did not reciprocate the DPRK's positive initiatives in accordance with the action-for-action principle, leading to an intractable impasse in the DPRK-U.S. dialogue, adding to the mutual distrust between the two countries, and stalling the denuclearization process, said Zhang.

As a close neighbor, China is highly concerned about the situation on the Korean Peninsula, and has always insisted on maintaining peace and stability on the peninsula, denuclearizing the peninsula, and resolving problems through dialogue and consultation, he said. "We advocate that all parties concerned should prioritize the overall peace and stability on the peninsula, adhere to the direction of dialogue and consultation, meet each other halfway, resume meaningful dialogue at an early date, and explore effective ways to resolve each other's legitimate concerns in a balanced manner."

China is seriously concerned about some recent negative developments, he said.

Some countries are calling for the denuclearization of the DPRK, while they themselves are promoting cooperation on nuclear submarines, which carries serious risks of nuclear proliferation. Some countries profess their concerns about the DPRK's military development, while at the same time developing with much fanfare their own offensive weapons system such as hypersonic weapons. A certain politician in a certain country concerned even went so far as to openly advocate discussing nuclear sharing under the pretext of addressing security threats, he noted.

China's Global Security Initiative is an important guide to resolving the issue of the Korean Peninsula. Security is indivisible. The security of one country cannot be based on the insecurity of another country. Such a concept works anywhere, anytime, he said.

China once again calls on all parties concerned to jointly cherish and maintain peace and stability on the peninsula, work together to promote the establishment of a peace mechanism and denuclearization process on the peninsula, and play a constructive role to this end, Zhang said. 
DIEPENBEEK, Belgium, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Rejuvenate Biomed NV ("Rejuvenate"), a biomedical company developing novel combination drugs for age-related diseases, appoints Dr. Ajit Shetty as Chair of the Board of Directors. As a veteran of the life sciences industry, Dr. Shetty will strengthen the business strategy of this ambitious company through both mentorship and connections. Along with the other members of the Board, he will support Rejuvenate's international growth and collaborations.

Dr. Shetty brings his extensive experience of over four decades in the life sciences industry. Before his retirement in 2017, he was Chair of Janssen Pharmaceutica and Member of the Operating Committee of Johnson & Johnson. Prior to these prominent positions, Dr. Shetty spent almost a decade as Managing Director of Janssen Pharmaceutica in Belgium, during which time he drove the enlargement of the Janssen Group of Companies from USD 1 billion to USD 8 billion in global sales through geographical expansion and new product introduction. In his former capacity as President of The Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson in the US, he was responsible for launching Durogesic to become the fourth largest J&J product in 2008 with sales reaching USD 2 billion.

Dr. Shetty continues to be extremely active in helping shape the life sciences industry in Belgium and the US. He chairs the Board of the Flemish Institute of Biotechnology (VIB), and is actively involved with high level management at Carnegie Mellon University in the US and the Institute for Tropical Medicine in Antwerp. He also lends his experience and advice to a number of companies (including Agile Therapeutics, Actinium Pharmaceuticals, and reMYND), as well as VC fund Newton Biocapital.

In recognition of his unique services as a leader in the life sciences industry, Dr. Shetty was awarded the Right Honourable Sir and Title of Baron by King Albert II of Belgium in 2008. He was granted the Lifetime Achievement Award in India, his country of birth, in 2010. Dr. Shetty was also elected "Manager of the Year 2004" by Belgian economic magazine Trends.

Dr. Ajit Shetty, Chair of the Board of Rejuvenate: "Aging is something which is going to affect each and every one of us, making Rejuvenate a very exciting company to be involved with. It is my dream to help create a disease-free world, where we can live well from start to end, and our time spent on this planet is a healthy span that we can enjoy. Anything we can do to push the scientific boundaries and help minimize suffering is a worthwhile endeavor, which is why I'm so pleased to be associated with a company doing just that."

Dr. Ann Belien, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Rejuvenate: "This appointment means a lot to me, both personally and professionally: I've looked up to Dr. Shetty ever since I first got to know him when I was working at Janssen. That he is now willing to join the company I've founded as Chair of our Board is a huge honor, and also a validation that we are doing good work at Rejuvenate. Dr. Shetty is extremely well connected in the life sciences industry and will help open doors for us both in Belgium and abroad, helping to foster our international ambitions. His advice and mentorship have already been invaluable  this is a dream come true."

About Rejuvenate Biomed

Rejuvenate Biomed is an independent Belgian biomedical company established in October 2017 by Ann Belien, PhD, after nearly two decades of experience with Janssen Pharmaceutical companies of Johnson & Johnson. The company is developing safe, proprietary, combination drugs that delay or prevent the onset of multiple age-related diseases, with a focus on the intersection between fundamental aging mechanisms and chronic conditions.

Rejuvenate Biomed is a resident company of Johnson & Johnson Innovation, JLABS, a premier life sciences incubator program. JLABS is a global network of open innovation ecosystems, enabling and empowering innovators to create and accelerate the delivery of life-enhancing health and wellness solutions to patients around the world. As a leader in innovation, JLABS helps entrepreneurs in pharmaceutical, medical device, consumer, and health tech bring healthcare solutions to patients and consumers.

For more information, please visit: www.rejuvenatebiomed.com

SOURCE Rejuvenate Biomed
Key NorthStar Executives to Obtain Leadership Positions Within Revere

MIAMI, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- NorthStar Investment Banking, a globally active boutique investment bank, announced today that the Company has been acquired by Revere Securities, a premier Wall Street investment banking firm. The new deal will allow NorthStar to offer its clients access to a larger organization, under the umbrella of Revere, which can handle bigger transactions at a global scale, all with the same exceptional client service and boutique approach they've grown accustomed to.

This marks the third company Managing Director Julien Meyer has successfully exited and he will be joining the Revere team as an Executive Director of Investment Banking. Other key NorthStar executives joining Revere include James Sackey, who will join as Vice President of Investment Banking and Matthew Davis, as a Senior Analyst.

"Since our inception nearly five years ago, we've been steadfast on developing something scalable while working with the best-in-class investment banking, advisory and law firms to provide high caliber due diligence and transaction services to our clients made up of entrepreneurs and mid-level business," said Meyer. "By partnering with Revere, we look forward to taking the NorthStar services to the next level while also having the opportunity to grow alongside such a powerhouse team and operation. We couldn't be happier to join Revere at such an exciting time for both our firms."

"As Revere expects to continue our rapid expansion, we have been actively looking to bolster our execution team and NorthStar fits the bill. Our team has had a close relationship with the team and have tracked them closely over the past three years as they've closed nearly a half billion dollars in transaction value. We welcome Julien and his team and are thrilled to bring them on as assets to our banking group here at Revere," said Arthur DeFilippo Banking Principle.

Throughout his career, Meyer has launched a top-ranked podcast "Startup Financial News" that yielded more than 20,000 subscribers at its peak, wrote and published the book "First Money In", and has been featured in numerous nationally recognized media outlets including Yahoo! Finance, MarketWatch, Ascent, Orlando Business Journal, Bloomberg, CNBC, and more.

For more information about Revere Securities LLC, visit https://www.reveresecurities.com/. For more information on NorthStar Investment Banking, visit https://northstarib.com/.

About NorthStar Investment Banking

NorthStar is a globally active boutique investment bank specializing in mergers and acquisitions, access to capital, and managing company sales and valuations. The company is on a mission to offer transparent pricing, upfront disclosures, easy-to-understand engagements, and the fact that M&A has the power to positively change organizations and lives. NorthStar specializes in business formation, capital raises, growth through acquisitions, and M&A services for companies across the globe.

About Revere Securities LLC

Revere Securities is a global broker-dealer firm providing strategic and financial support to institutional investors, hedge funds, and individual investors. The firm's professionals are involved in all components of the sales and trading process and include extensive compliance and operational personnel. In addition, Revere Securities LLC provides differentiated corporate access, helping institutional clients gain access to management as a component of their investment process. The firm has industry focused sales specialists who possess "buy-side" experience; therefore, providing a sound, alternate perspective, to the investment process.

Media Contacts:

Julien Meyer

845-548-7279

[email protected]

SOURCE Revere Securities LLC
CHICAGO, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- According to the report "Rodenticides Market by Type (Anticoagulants, Non-Coagulants), Mode of Application (Pellets, Spray, and Powder), End Use (Agriculture, Warehouses, and Urban Centers), Rodent Types (Rats, Mice, Chipmunks, Hamsters) & Region - Global Forecast to 2027", published by MarketsandMarkets, the global Rodenticides Market is estimated to be valued at USD 5.3 billion in 2022. It is projected to reach USD 7.1 billion by 2027, recording a CAGR of 5.8% during the forecast period. The rodenticides market is driven by rapid urbanization across regions. The increase in awareness on public hygiene, the prevention of vector-borne diseases, and the rise in purchasing power parity (PPP) among the middle-class population are factors that have encouraged the demand for pest control services, globally. In addition, government initiatives for maintaining environmental hygiene are projected to drive the demand for rodenticides. For instance, the "clean-up" movement in India has proven to be a major driver for the insect pest control industry.

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The major factor restraining the growth of the rodent control market is the absence of uniform guidelines for testing across regions. The absence of systematic rules and protocols for the approval of rodent control (due to varying regulations across different countries) and the overlapping of these regulations with those of crop protection pesticides often result in delayed product approvals; this hampers the growth of the market. The lengthy approval procedures for the registration of an active ingredient and the growing resistance against chemical insecticides among insects also pose challenges to the market growth.

Rapid Urbanization across the region

Urban areas are more susceptible to pests. In addition, a rapid increase in urbanization and industrialization is one of the major factors encouraging the demand for pest control. The shift in residences of people and their migration from rural to urban areas would contribute to the increase in the urban population. According to FAOSTAT 2018, an increase was observed in the urban population by 8% during the study period from 2015 to 2018. According to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2018, a significant portion of the population in North America (82%), followed by Latin America and the Caribbean regions (81%), Europe (74%), Oceania (68%), Asia (50%), and Africa (43%) is living in urban areas.

The shift of the rural population for more growth opportunities in cities has increased the burden on urban cities. These megacities have now become incubators for new epidemics and zoonotic diseases that could spread more rapidly and become a worldwide threat. Poor housing facilities arising due to increased urbanization can lead to the proliferation of insect and rodent vector diseases and geohelminthiases. This is due to inadequate water supplies as well as sanitation and waste management. These factors contribute to a favorable environment for both different rodents and insects, which carry pathogens and soil-transmitted helminth infections. For example, in Chinese cities, the incidence of Seoul hantavirus hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome has been linked to urban growth, an increase in the rat population, and the rise in rat-human contact.

Rapid urbanization is impacting commercial, residential, and agricultural areas significantly. The increase in urbanization has led to changes in consumer lifestyles. With the increase in workload, busy lifestyles, and the rise in the number of working women, the time to keep the working space pest-free is reduced. This has led to a surge in demand for products that offer proper pest management solutions. Rodents, such as rats. are most commonly found in kitchens due to the presence of food and food-related garbage. The increase in health and hygienic concerns of the people and the affordability of pest control practices encourage them to adopt such practices for a rodent-free environment.

Browse in-depth TOC on "Rodenticides Market"

364  Tables

71  Figures

334  Pages

Increase in the global trade of rodenticides

Germany is one of the global leaders engaged in the export of rodenticides. It is followed by India, the US, the UK, Belgium, and Italy. Germany has a presence of major chemical companies, such as Bayer AG and BASF SE, which have a wide portfolio of insect pest control products. The country is a major exporter of rodenticides to countries, such as the Netherlands, the UK, and France. These countries import rodenticides due to their high-quality standards, fewer transportation costs, and easy accessibility. India is emerging as a potential export hub for high-quality rodenticides due to low-cost manufacturing and the security of patented new active ingredients. India majorly exports rodenticides to countries, such as Brazil, the US, and the Netherlands. China is a dominant exporter of rodenticides to Southeast Asian countries, such as Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia. This increase in demand for rodenticides across the globe is attributed to factors, such as government initiatives for health awareness programs, an increase in crop losses, and a rise in health concerns due to rodent attacks.

The import of rodenticides is observed mainly in countries, such as India, the US, and France. Due to the increase in the population and high density, India has also been importing a large number of rodenticides. Hence, it is positioned as a leading rodenticides importer in the world. The rodenticides market in the US, France, and other countries has grown exponentially due to the rising awareness, concerns regarding health issues, ease of use, and availability of rodenticides. India is emerging as a major importer of insecticides due to the increase in demand from farmers and government health authorities for the eradication of pests.

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Asia Pacific is expected to be the fastest-growing region with a CAGR of 6.5% during the forecast period.

The Asia Pacific market is completely driven by the country markets of China, India, Japan, Australia, Thailand, Indonesia and a few other Asian countries. As the world's largest and most populous region, Asia Pacific is one of the key markets for rodenticides. Rodents are common pests present in agricultural fields. Annually, extensive volumes of agricultural produce are destroyed and contaminated by rodents. To meet the increase in demand for food products and to reduce the crop damages caused by rodents, the use of rodenticides has increased significantly in the region. The food retail, food manufacturing, pharmaceutical, hospitality, and residential sectors are expected to be major growth verticals in this market.Asia Pacific is expected to be the fastest-growing region during the forecast period due to several reasons. One of the major drivers of the market is the fact that agriculture is one of the most significant revenue-generating sectors in China and India. The growing population within the region is urging the farmers to provide a maximum yield to fulfill the demand of the increasing population. In such cases, the increasing crop damage and decreasing food production due to rodents are expected to leverage this market positively.

Key Players:

The major players in this market are BASF SE (Germany), Syngenta (Switzerland), Bayer AG (Germany), UPL (India), and Rentokil Initial PLC (UK).

Related Reports:

Pest Control Market by Pest Type (Insects, Rodents, Termites), Control Method (Chemical, Mechanical, Biological), Mode of Application (Sprays, Traps, Baits), Application (Residential, Commercial, Industrial), and Region  Global Forecast to 2026

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/pest-control-market-144665518.html

Agricultural Fumigants Market by Product Type (Methyl Bromide, Phosphine, Chloropicrin), Crop Type (Cereals, Oilseeds, Fruits), Application (Soil, Warehouse), Pest Control Method (Tarpaulin, Non-Tarp, Vacuum), and Region - Global Forecast to 2026

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/agricultural-fumigant-market-87798928.html

Browse Adjacent Reports: Agriculture Industry Market Research Reports & Consulting

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SOURCE MarketsandMarkets
BEIJING, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- RYB Education, Inc. (the "Company") (NYSE: RYB), a leading early childhood education service provider in China, today announced it has filed its annual report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2021 with the Securities and Exchange Commission on May 11, 2022. The annual report is available on the Company's investor relations website at http://ir.rybbaby.com.

The Company will provide a hard copy of its annual report containing the audited consolidated financial statements, free of charge, to its shareholders and ADS holders upon request. Requests should be submitted to [email protected].

About RYB Education, Inc.

Founded on the core values of "Care" and "Responsibility," "Inspire" and "Innovate," RYB Education, Inc. is a leading early childhood education service provider in China. Since opening its first play-and-learn center in 1998, the Company has grown and flourished with the mission to provide high-quality, individualized and age-appropriate care and education to nurture and inspire each child for his or her betterment in life. During its two decades of operating history, the Company has built "RYB" into a well-recognized education brand and helped bring about many new educational practices in China's early childhood education industry. RYB's comprehensive early childhood education solutions meet the needs of children from infancy to 6 years old through structured courses at kindergartens and play-and-learn centers, as well as at-home educational products and services.

For more information, please visit http://ir.rybbaby.com.

Contacts

In China:

RYB Education, Inc.

Investor Relations

E-mail: [email protected]

The Piacente Group, Inc.

Yang Song

Tel: +86 (10) 6508-0677

E-mail: [email protected]

In the United States:

The Piacente Group, Inc.

Brandi Piacente

Tel: +1-212-481-2050

E-mail: [email protected]

SOURCE RYB Education, Inc.
SODERTALJE, Sweden, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ --

 Scania responds to increasing customer interest for its gas-powered trucks by expanding its assortment of tanks and specifications

 Ranges of up to 1 400 km now possible for LBG tractor combinations

 Expanding infrastructure and increased access to biomethane are main drivers for rising interest in gas trucks

 New tank options mean improved fuel-carrying capacity, longer distances and new opportunities for rigids with advanced body builds

 Biomethane offers vital contribution for decarbonising transports, reducing CO2 by up to 90% in a well-to-wheel perspective.

Scania is a major player in heavy trucks with gas engines. The current backdrop of expanding infrastructure and growing supplies of biomethane gas has generated higher demand, especially for long-haul tractors with the kind of range figures you normally only expect from diesel trucks. Scania is now adding several new CBG and LBG tank options to its offer that mean substantial improvements to the range potential. Trucks showcasing the new solutions are unveiled at the Italian fair "Transpotec" in mid-May.

"Scania has been relentless in offering and informing customers about the potential of biogas solutions," says Stefan Dorski, Senior Vice President and Head of Scania Trucks. "With these additions we increase not only the range but also the potential customer base, since biomethane trucks are essential for meeting the short and midterm demand for fossil-free transports."

The infrastructure of filling stations for liquefied biomethane and other types of fuels for gas vehicles has definitely reached a critical mass, and not only in Europe. By adding various tank solutions to its existing offering, Scania is demonstrating its strong support for renewable fuels as an important part of driving the shift towards a sustainable transport system.

Gas vehicles are becoming increasingly popular all over Europe, but markets such as Spain, Italy, France, Germany and Eastern and Central Europe are at the forefront. Customers have noted all the benefits they can get from Scania's gas-powered vehicles, such as lower operating costs and reduced CO2 emissions when using biomethane (LBG or CBG).

Gas-powered trucks are also an important cornerstone in Scania's adherence to its Science-Based Targets, the company's commitment to reducing the CO2 emissions from its products by 20% overall between 2015 and 2025.

"Increasing the potential tank capacity for different applications takes out what used to be an Achilles heel in the eyes of some prospective customers," says Dorski. "Our expanded offer, increased flexibility of the chassis layout and the many new gas filling stations spells a bright future for gas-minded customers. And their range anxieties can now finally be put to rest."

Scania's latest additions to its gas solutions portfolio:

 LBG tanks for ranges up to 1 400 km (Sodertalje to Calais)

 CBG tanks for ranges up to 750 km (Sodertalje to Lubeck)

 80-litre CBG tanks that can be combined, freeing up one frame side

 CBG tanks in a rack behind the cab: offers increased range in combination with tanks in regular positions. Ranges up to 1 000 km on tractors with axle distances  3 900 mm (Sodertalje to Berlin)

 LBG tanks that offer extra, free space in front of the tanks, beneficial for bodybuilders, and allowing for specialised solutions like Hendrickson support axles in A6x2/2 pusher configurations in the UK.



All these new performance steps will be introduced during 2022.

"Scania believes that the transformation towards e-mobility will happen gradually during this decade and the next," says Dorski. "But combustion engines running on biomethane or other fossil-free fuels will contribute their fair share in reducing noise, emissions and CO2, while at the same time offering great total operating economy and excellent customer value."

In March, the European Commission announced a decision to double its objective for home-grown biomethane production, with the target set at 35 billion cubic metres by 2030.

For further information, please contact:

Orjan Aslund, Head of Product Affairs, Scania Trucks

Phone: +46 70 289 83 78, email: [email protected]

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

https://news.cision.com/scania/r/scania-meets-growing-biogas-interest-with-expanded-offer,c3565768

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https://mb.cision.com/Main/209/3565768/1578758.pdf Scania meets growing biogas interest with expanded offer https://news.cision.com/scania/i/22074-037-16-7,c3048895 22074-037 16-7 https://news.cision.com/scania/i/21273-005,c3048902 21273-005 https://news.cision.com/scania/i/21273-008,c3048905 21273-008 https://news.cision.com/scania/i/21273-016,c3048906 21273-016 https://news.cision.com/scania/i/21273-015,c3048918 21273-015

SOURCE Scania
HAMILTON, Bermuda, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Reference is made to the stock exchange announcement published by Seadrill Limited ("Seadrill" or "the Company") (XOAS ticker: SDRL) on 27 April 2022 regarding the approval and publication of a prospectus prepared in connection with the listing of the Company's shares on Euronext Expand and the contemplated subsequent transfer to, and listing on, the Oslo Stock Exchange's main list (the "Prospectus"), as well as the stock exchange announcement published on 29 April 2022 regarding the filing of the 2021 annual report on Form 20-F.

The Financial Supervisory Authority of Norway (Nw.: Finanstilsynet) has today approved a prospectus supplement dated 12 May 2022 (the "Prospectus Supplement") to the Prospectus. The Prospectus Supplement has been prepared due to the Company's publication of its audited consolidated financial statements as of and for the fiscal year ended 31 December 2021 on 29 April 2022. The information contained in the Prospectus Supplement shall be considered an integral part of, and is to be read together with, the Prospectus. The Prospectus is available, and the Prospectus Supplement will be made available, on the Company's website https://www.seadrill.com/investors/.

About Seadrill

Seadrill is a leading offshore drilling contractor utilizing advanced technology to unlock oil and gas resources for clients across harsh and benign locations around the globe. Seadrill's high-quality, technologically-advanced fleet spans all asset classes allowing its experienced crews to conduct operations from shallow to ultra-deep-water environments. The Company owns and/or operates 30 rigs, which includes drillships, semi-submersibles, and jack-ups.

FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS

This news release includes forward-looking statements. Such statements are generally not historical in nature, and specifically include statements about the Company's plans, strategies, business prospects, changes and trends in its business and the markets in which it operates. These statements are made based upon management's current plans, expectations, assumptions and beliefs concerning future events impacting the Company and therefore involve a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this news release. Consequently, no forward-looking statement can be guaranteed. When considering these forward-looking statements, you should keep in mind the risks described from time to time in the Company's regulatory filings and periodical reporting. The Company undertakes no obligation to update any forward looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date on which such statement is made or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. New factors emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for the Company to predict all of these factors. Further, the Company cannot assess the impact of each such factor on its business or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to be materially different from those contained in any forward looking statement.

This information is subject to the disclosure requirements pursuant to section 5-12 of the Norwegian Securities Trading Act.

CONTACT:

[email protected]

+44 (0) 203 7454960

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

SOURCE Seadrill Limited
NEW YORK, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Pomerantz LLP is investigating claims on behalf of investors of First High-School Education Group Co., Ltd. (""or the "Company") (NYSE: FHS). Such investors are advised to contact Robert S. Willoughby at [email protected] or 888-476-6529, ext. 7980.

The investigation concerns whether FHS and certain of its officers and/or directors have engaged in securities fraud or other unlawful business practices.

[Click here for information about joining the class action]

On or around March 11, 2021, FHS conducted its initial public offering ("IPO") of 7.5 million American Depositary Shares ("ADSs") priced at $10.00 per share. Soon after the IPO, media reports stated that Chinese policymakers had proposed stricter regulations to rein in the for-profit education industry, such as regulations aimed at enhancing teacher quality, limiting fee scams, reducing market abuse, and reducing the stress that for-profit educational companies had placed on students in the Chinese educational system.

On May 12, 2021, news reports revealed that the impending government crackdown on for-profit educational companies in China would be much more drastic and far reaching than previously publicly known. Sources stated that anticipated rules would include measures such as banning on-campus tutoring classes, prohibiting tutoring services during weekend hours, and the imposition of industry-wide fee limitations.

On May 14, 2021, China's state council announced that it would further tighten regulations on compulsory education and training institutions with new rules set to take effect on September 1, 2021.

On July 23, 2021, China unveiled a sweeping overhaul of its education sector, banning companies that teach the school curriculum from making profits, raising capital or going public. These drastic measures effectively ended any potential growth in the for-profit tutoring sector in China.

On July 26, 2021, FHS issued a press release announcing that the Company "will follow the spirit of the Opinion and comply with all relevant rules and regulations in providing high school education services."

In a series of disclosures beginning on September 28, 2021, FHS reported, among other things, disappointing financial and operating results due to the impact of the regulatory crackdown on China's for-profit education sector; the resignation of the Company's Chief Financial Officer; the dismissal of the Company's auditor, KPMG Huazhen LLP; the receipt of a letter from the New York Stock Exchange ("NYSE") stating that the Company was in non-compliance with the NYSE's listing requirements because its total market capitalization and stockholders' equity had fallen below compliance standards; and that the Company would be unable to timely filed its annual report with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

By May 10, 2022, FHS ADSs closed below $1.00 per share, representing a decline of more than 90% from the offering price.

Pomerantz LLP, with offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Paris, and Tel Aviv, is acknowledged as one of the premier firms in the areas of corporate, securities, and antitrust class litigation. Founded by the late Abraham L. Pomerantz, known as the dean of the class action bar, Pomerantz pioneered the field of securities class actions. Today, more than 85 years later, Pomerantz continues in the tradition he established, fighting for the rights of the victims of securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty, and corporate misconduct. The Firm has recovered numerous multimillion-dollar damages awards on behalf of class members. See www.pomlaw.com.

CONTACT:

Robert S. Willoughby

Pomerantz LLP

[email protected]

888-476-6529 ext. 7980

SOURCE Pomerantz LLP
The Specialty & Custom Chemicals Show to be held at JW Marriott

ARLINGTON, Va., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Society of Chemical Manufacturers & Affiliates (SOCMA) is pleased to announce that the 2023 Specialty & Custom Chemicals Show will be held March 1-3, at the JW Marriott in Nashville, TN.

"SOCMA's Show sets the stage for the specialty chemical value chain to leverage connections, source leads and find solutions to drive business growth," said Jennifer Abril, SOCMA President & CEO. "As the 2023 host city of the SOCMA Show, Nashville is accessible, accommodating and centrally located  a perfect backdrop for the collaboration of business and networking for our industry," said Abril.

"As Chair of SOCMA's Trade Show Committee, I am honored to help champion and grow this industry-leading event for the specialty chemical sector," said David Fortune, Vice President, La Petite Roche Technologies. "We are excited to host the show in Nashville next year, while continuing the mission of delivering a centralized place for the specialty chemical value chain to meet new project partners, check in with customers and discuss key challenges and share intelligence with colleagues."

With nearly 50% of exhibitor spaces already reserved, 2023 spots are filling up quickly. Secure your booth today at www.socma.org/tradeshow.

About SOCMA

Solely dedicated to the specialty and fine chemical industry, SOCMA focuses on building commercial connections, supporting manufacturing and operations, and advocating for regulatory and legislative policies. www.socma.org

SOURCE Society of Chemical Manufacturers & Affiliates
Substantial demand from automotive and electronics industries for the manufacture of several industrial equipment, such as traction motors, AC/DC converters, and pumps, underscores growth of the soft magnetic composites market

An array of favorable physical and chemical properties of some soft magnetic composite segments make them promising substitutes to conventional materials for use in electromagnetic applications

ALBANY, N.Y., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Analysts at TMR project the soft magnetic composites market to expand at a CAGR of 7.2% between 2021 and 2031. The increasing demand for high performance industrial motors in economically valuable end-use industries such as automotive and manufacturing is driving the soft magnetic composites market.

The consistent rise in demand for soft magnetic composites in the manufacture of mechanical and electromagnetic equipment for industrial and commercial use such as traction motors, pumps, air conditioning compressors, high output industrial motors, and DC/DC converters, among others, fuels the growth of the soft magnetic composites market.

The Asia Pacific soft magnetic composites market is expected to expand at a CAGR of more than 7.6% over the forecast period from 2021 to 2031. Significant demand for soft magnetic composites for various applications such as high performance industrial motors that are intrinsic to industrial units fuels the growth of the soft magnetic composites market in the region.

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Soft Magnetic Composites Market  Key Findings of Report

Distinct advantage of efficient output of end products composed of soft magnetic composites compared to other magnetic materials continues to generate demand in the soft magnetic composites market. In addition, low eddy current loss, superior thermal properties, and reduced total care loss at medium and high frequencies stimulate the demand for soft magnetic composites.

Superior chemical properties of soft magnetic composites account for substantial demand from automotive and electronic industries. Nonetheless, gap in knowledge between the unique combinations of soft magnetic composites puts forth need for qualified electric motor suppliers for mission-critical applications such as in the automotive industry.

Concerted efforts of stakeholders in the soft magnetic composites market to diversify for the increasing availability of qualified suppliers for cross-functional collaborations between stakeholders in the value chain attracts investment. Complete knowledge from concept to production is essential for innovations of robust electric motor designs that influences growth of soft magnetic composites market.

Iron-based soft magnetic composites feature superior magnetic properties and productivity to substitute laminate steel in electromagnetic applications

The electrical steel material segment is likely to witness attractive growth during the forecast period. Innovations in electric mobility and improvement in efficiency of industrial equipment & home appliances leading to the need for higher output motors to stimulate demand for the electrical steel material segment.

Array of physical attributes of soft magnetic composites that enable flexible machine design, 3D isotropic ferromagnetic behavior, and improved thermal in motor design, and production favors demand over classic laminated steel cores for motor designing and production processes

Increase in purchase of electric and hybrid vehicles that is stimulating design innovations and engineering advancements is creating lucrative opportunities in the soft magnetic composites market

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Soft Magnetic Composites Market  Growth Drivers

Extensive use of soft magnetic composites in the manufacture of high performance, compact, and cost-efficient electromagnetic composites for automotive components fuels the growth of the soft magnetic composites market

Proliferation of the Fourth Industrial Revolution leading to continuous demand for essential equipment such as air conditioning compressors, traction motors, and pumps propels the soft magnetic composites market

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Soft Magnetic Composites Market  Key Players

Some of the prominent players in the soft magnetic composites market are;

GKN Powder Metallurgy

Hitachi Metals Ltd

Sumitomo Metal Mining Co. Ltd.

Hoganas AB

Rio Tinto

Mitsubishi Materials Corporation

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The soft magnetic composites market is segmented as follows;

Soft Magnetic Composites Market, by Material

Soft Ferrite

Electrical Steel

Iron

Others (including Supermalloys, Permalloys, and Silicon Ferrite)

Soft Magnetic Composites Market, by Application

Traction Motors

Air Conditioning Compressors

Pumps (including Cooling and Oil)

DC/DC Converters

On-vehicle Chargers

Ventilation Fans

Solar Power

Industrial Motor Drives

Off-board Battery Charging

High Performance Industrial Motors

Electrical Engines & Generators

Others (including Sensors)

Soft Magnetic Composites Market, by End-use

Automotive

Industrial Machinery & Equipment

Consumer Goods

Energy

Others (including Electronics)

Soft Magnetic Composites Market, by Region

North America

U.S.



Canada

Europe

Germany



France



U.K.



Italy



Russia & CIS

& CIS

Rest of Europe

Asia Pacific

China



India



Japan



ASEAN



Rest of Asia Pacific

Latin America

Brazil



Mexico



Rest of Latin America

Middle East & Africa

& GCC Countries



South Africa



Rest of Middle East & Africa

Chemicals & Materials Industry battles Tangible Impact of Economic and Cultural changes, Explore Transparency Market Research's award-winning coverage of the global Chemicals & Materials:

Hydropower Lubricants Market - https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/hydropower-lubricants-market.html

Below-grade Waterproofing Market - https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/belowgrade-waterproofing-market.html

About Transparency Market Research

Transparency Market Research is a global market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. Our experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyse information.

Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.

For More Research Insights on Leading Industries, Visit our YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8e-z-g23-TdDMuODiL8BKQ

Contact :

Rohit Bhisey

Transparency Market Research

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Suite 700,

Albany NY - 12207

United States

USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453

Email: [email protected]

Website: http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com

Press Release Source: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/pressrelease/soft-magnetic-composite-market.htm

SOURCE Transparency Market Research
Dr. Corneil (Neil) Montgomery founded the not-for-profit building upon his experience as a creative social impact executive in Fortune 50 companies, global not-for-profits, and consulting. He has secured partnerships with Wells Fargo and Lexus and gained early support from fashion influencers and thought leaders, including sustainable fashion blogger Aditi Mayer , James Higa CEO of Philanthropic Ventures Foundation, Edwina Kulego vice president of international and business development at Informa Markets Fashion and founder of Essentials By Edwina. Sovereignty's goal is to realize a diverse, inclusive, equitable, prosperous, and circular fashion society for BIPOC communities. The non-diluted accelerator will help fashion designers and entrepreneurs of color design and launch sustainable fashion business models and brands.

"Designers of color helped shape fashion history and evolution but are still underrepresented and lack the resources and connections to build and grow their careers," says Neil Montgomery, founder and chief executive officer of Sovereignty Fashion CEOs Accelerator. "Our goal is to advance fashion entrepreneurs' careers by giving them the tools to build sustainability into their brands and define their reputations as change makers, leaders, and influencers in high-end fashion, which they so deserve."

The Fashion CEOs Accelerator provides resources to fashion designers and fashion entrepreneurs to design and launch sustainable and circular business models. Sovereignty will focus investments in Environmental Social Governance (ESG) impact-driven, startups, early growth fashion brands and tech companies that are building the future of circular and sustainable fashion with a particular interest in funding BIPOC and underrepresented founders with pre-seed or seed capital. All designers in the program will receive a $50,000 non-diluted cash grant, eight months of immersive education and training, peer support, hands-on mentorship, and connections to a network of sustainability and circular fashion experts to help them launch or grow their brands.

Charles Harbison, a sought-after creative director for global modern luxury lifestyle and consumer products is partnering with Sovereignty to serve as the chief fashion director for SO.TY, the sustainable fashion arm of the enterprise. Harbison has dressed notable celebrities like Beyonce, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Ava Duvernay, and designed and directed sustainable lines for Ungaro in London, Cult Gaia & Nicholas in LA, and Banana Republic. Four percent of the profit from SO.TY will be directed to Sovereignty's Fashion CEOs Accelerator.

"Fashion makes up a huge part of the waste in our landfills, which impacts the environment in detrimental ways," said Charles Harbison, chief fashion director for SO.TY. "We have tools to create sustainable models through slow and neo luxe fashion movements that uphold high-end fashion aesthetics. Sovereignty and SO.TY are working to be at the forefront of democratizing access to the next wave in sustainable design."

SO.TY and Sovereignty Company aligns with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, and 13, the Paris Agreement on climate change, and the Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action, sponsored by the United Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The Vision 33 Impact Fund will launch in November as a funding arm to invest and further support sustainable and circular fashion brands and tech companies growing under the Fashion CEOs Accelerator Program.

During the first year, Sovereignty announced the Fashion CEOs Accelerator and hosted the first SO.TY fashion show in Los Angeles. The next moves for the company include producing multicultural content for climate change, launching the first Fashion CEOs Accelerator cohort, opening the Center for Sustainable Circular Fashion Innovation in Los Angeles, announcing the Change Coalition and members at Climate Week in New York City, and launching the impact fund with seed investors. Sovereignty will raise $21 million in year one to further fund the accelerators program, scale our impact investments in #netzero fashion solutions and empower underrepresented communities.

CONTACT

Neil Montgomery

Press and Media Inquiries

213-442-5756

[email protected]



Related Links: https://sov-er-eign-ty.com/

SOURCE Sovereignty Company
Scott originally joined Spartech in 2011 as Senior Financial Analyst for the Color and Specialty Compounds Division. After PolyOne acquired Spartech in 2012, he served as Senior Finance Manager before joining PARIC Corporation, a general contractor headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, as Director of Financial Planning & Analysis. He took on increasing responsibilities at PARIC over the past five years and most recently served as Chief Financial Officer, overseeing all accounting, financial, and compliance functions.

Scott holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Robert Morris University. He will be based out of Spartech's corporate headquarters in St. Louis, MO.

About Spartech

Headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri with a unique innovation center and 16 manufacturing facilities located throughout the United States, Spartech is a leading plastics manufacturer of engineered thermoplastic materials and specialty packaging products. Meeting exact standards for everything from food packaging to aerospace and automotive applications, Spartech continues to make a world of difference with sustainable, diverse, reliable, and innovative products including UltraTuf, Royalite, Korad, PreservaPak, and Polycast. https://spartech.com

Media Contact:

For Spartech

Sheldon Ripson

[email protected]

636-751-5733

SOURCE Spartech
With the launch of VMOD, SwatchOn makes the leap into digital fashion, connecting IRL to URL

SEOUL, South Korea, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Today marks the launch of VMOD, an open marketplace for digital fashion that bridges the gap between real-life physical garments (IRL) and digital fashion ownership (URL). Founded as a sister company to global sourcing pioneer and the world's leading wholesale fashion fabric aggregator SwatchOn, the fashion industry will take on a new shape as VMOD creates the ability to purchase interconnected digital and physical goods from both emerging and well-known fashion brands.

With a mission to empower fashion brands across the globe to create without limits, VMOD aims to dismantle the barrier of conventional fashion and bring brands to life in new and exciting ways. To meet young consumers where they are, the platform will enrich the experience of purchasing and owning garments across several verticals including AR wearables, physical twin, virtual looks, metaverse wearables, and more. Over time, SwatchOn and VMOD will work together to build an IRL to URL vertical for fashion production  from sourcing materials to producing and distributing garments.

"We're thrilled to make VMOD a reality and to be launching with such stand-out emerging designers like Annaiss Yucra and San Kim", said Will Lee, co-founder, and CEO of SwatchOn and VMOD. "This platform is proof that fashion extends beyond IRL designs and can be applied across many different novel and groundbreaking applications. This is just the beginning of what we plan to accomplish."

The founders of VMOD are focused on championing fashion and culture through storytelling and by serving a global community of diverse creators and collectors from a wide range of backgrounds. For the launch, VMOD features Annaiss Yucra, a 3rd generation artisan and indigenous Peruvian designer who highlights local traditions, textiles, and artisans; and San Kim, a University of Westminster MA Menswear graduate, whose avant garde designs are a fantastical interpretation of society around him.

Annaiss looks at her work as "Artivism"  activism through art. For many of her collections, including her drop on VMOD, she sheds light on different social issues in Peru and across Latin America, specifically in regard to women's rights.

"To me, the fashion industry and the catwalk can be a space where people really want to listen. And we can start a deeper conversation about what's really happening in the world, happening all around us" said Yucra. "Every time that I start a collection, I want to see a representation of this  I think about the social issues going on in my society; I think about the things that have affected my family; I think about my own legacy and how to communicate that in my work. As a founding designer on VMOD, that conversation and my designs can reach new heights, and new audiences."

As for San Kim, he considers himself a quiet observer. Inspired by everyday subjects, he creates his own unique visual language to reflect a collective experience. For his current work that is included in VMOD's drop, he took inspiration from how people were responding to the unprecedented pandemic. Kim watched how people were forced to be creative in fighting the virus, seeing images online of people using supermarket plastic bags over their heads instead of masks. Selecting plastic bags as his materials, he went to work designing his "inflatables."

"Fashion for me is a visual language, interpreting the world around me in order to communicate a message that resonates with everyday people. Connecting my real-life designs with digital versions through VMOD only helps to reverberate the intended message even further  it becomes additive."

Both Annaiss and San launched their new collections on VMOD this week. To learn more about VMOD, the designers, or to purchase their collections, visit VMOD.com.

About VMOD

VMOD is a digital fashion platform where fashion can be owned and experienced across various IRL and URL contexts. VMOD's mission is to enable fashion brands to create without limits and to encourage imagination, originality, and brilliant ideas through every story we tell and the fashion experiences we build. VMOD enriches the experience of owning and wearing fashion across digital and physical worlds while dismantling the barrier of conventional fashion with: Your fashion, virtually no bounds.

VMOD is a sister service to SwatchOn, which connects the South Korean textile industry to brands around the globe. SwatchOn has streamlined the fabric supply chain, allowing designers to quickly search and access over 200,000 textiles from 750 different suppliers. With VMOD, SwatchOn is making the leap into digital fashion, connecting from IRL to URL.

VMOD Contact

Sheldon Strategy & Consulting

[email protected]

SOURCE VMOD
"The safety of first responders in hazardous environments is our top priority." Tweet this

Taber Innovation Group was assisted by Colorado intellectual property law firm Martensen IP Law in obtaining the Canadian Patent. The firm previously helped the company secure U.S. Patent 11054529, which validated its unique approach to locating first responders in challenging conditions. Taber Innovation Group also has an exclusive license of U.S. Patent 9699621 with ResponderX, Inc.

About Taber Innovation Group

Since 2015, Taber Innovation Group LLC (TIG), a Service-Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business (SDVOSB), has been at the industry forefront of researching and developing the next generation of firefighting and first responder accountability hardware, Over-Watch Locator (OWL), stemming from its internationally patented Location-Enhanced Accountability of Personnel (LEAP) technology stack.

About Martensen IP Law

Based in Colorado Springs, CO, and operating at the intersection of business, law and technology, Martensen IP Law provides legal solutions to companies and investors worldwide that are facing complicated intellectual property (IP) issues. The firm possesses a unique combination of legal, business, technology and military contracting experience that enables it to assess an organization's IP and develop a strategy for protecting and capitalizing on those assets. Learn more at martensenip.com .

Contact:

Phil Taber

866-861-5327

[email protected]

SOURCE Taber Innovation Group
BOCA RATON, Fla., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The Marriott Family of Marriott Hotels has built an incredible business. The Pulte Family, known in homebuilding and for Bill Pulte's experience inside of PulteGroup, congratulates David Marriott, the grandson of Marriott Hotels founder J. Willard Marriott, on his recent promotion to Chairman of the Board of Marriott International.

"Like the Marriott's, our name has been adorned on buildings across America. Our late grandfather also took his name to the public but made sure that the family had a footprint inside of the public companies to ensure quality and hospitality. To see The Marriott Family continuing its untarnished legacy of customer delight, quality, and hospitality warms our heart," said a Pulte Family spokesperson.

The Pulte Family

William J. "Bill" Pulte founded Pulte Homes, today PulteGroup Inc, in 1950 at age 18. Over the decades, Bill Pulte built Pulte Homes into The #1 USA Homebuilder. In 2016, after retiring the first time, Bill Pulte (1932-2018) and Bill Pulte (b. 1988), his grandson, turned the company around after Bad Management took it in the wrong direction. Mr. Pulte (b. 1988) was PulteGroup Director from 2016-2020. Bill Pulte's Twitter Philanthropy became a giant success starting in June 2019, helping thousands of people and inspiring millions of people worldwide. Even after the passing of Bill Pulte (1932-2018), their work together continues through a collection of Pulte founded organizations, including The Bill Pulte Foundation.

SOURCE The Pulte Family
FirmTech's mission is to provide revolutionary aids to help in the evaluation and treatment options for ED and to improve sexual performance for all men. With the Tech Ring, Dr. Justin's team of urologists and bio-engineers bring a never-before-seen level of informative quantification to male sexual function  creating a tool that can enhance pleasure and generate real-time tracking of erectile fitness and function with sensor technology. This will help men to engage in their sexual health by better understanding its relationship to their overall health, assess the impact of medications, drugs and alcohol upon their erectile fitness. The TechRing includes an insert that contains pressure and strain gauges, Bluetooth capability, and 8 hours of battery life, per charge.

In addition, FirmTech's erection ring feature a patented hook and loop design and a proprietary softness, making the device easy and discreet to put on and take off, decreasing the embarrassment and shame that often accompany the use of aids for ED and for performance. One user noted, "It's a paradigm shift in terms of comfort" for erection rings.

Since FirmTech's products can facilitate firmer erections, Dr. Justin wants men to see erection rings as sexual wellness aid, rather than a crutch. According to Amy Pearlman, MD, and Director of the Men's Health Program at the University of Iowa, "Sex toys and tools can be game-changers in the bedroomit's time we normalize the use of these products to optimize performance and pleasure for men and women. Sexual health IS health."

The 1st of it's kind TechRing signals a fresh and important focus for wearable technology. It is designed to be used in a way similar to Fitbit or Apple Watch; delivering real-time metrics for erectile fitness. This data is sent by Bluetooth to FirmTech's easy to use phone app. As FirmTech builds a robust database, users of the TechRing will be able to compare their data to that of other men of similar age and medical conditions.

With groundbreaking technology inside a device that is easy and comfortable to wear, Dr. Justin is excited about how FirmTech will change men's sexual health for the better. "In this age of wearables, this is the world's first under-wearable. "I am confident that this is going to change the treatment of men who have erectile issues and help the majority of men who want to enjoy a long lifetime of lovemaking.

First came tech, then smart techand now FirmTech. Dr. Justin and his team of clinicians founded FirmTech to pioneer products for performance enhancement, ED, and sexual wellness.

To learn more about FirmTech, please visit www.myfirmtech.com .

SOURCE FirmTech
Substantially advancing SaaS security adoption globally was the primary accelerator of growth. Enterprise subscription-based ARR increased by 34% year-over-year, along with a 13% year-over-year increase in subscription-based customers, now totaling more than 393,000. Continued SaaS success amidst a tumultuous global market reinforces Trend Micro's customer-first approach as an innovative and trusted cybersecurity partner for individuals, businesses and governments around the world.

"While I am proud and humbled by our continued success and growth, I am not surprised by it, because we have not slowed innovation throughout the constant change and uncertainty in our world," said Eva Chen, co-founder and chief executive officer for Trend Micro. "Our drive is fueled by the honor to protect our customers, meeting them where they need us most and ultimately making the digital world a safer place."

For this quarter, Trend Micro posted consolidated net sales of 50,427 million Yen (or US $433 million, 116.35 JPY = 1USD). The company posted operating income of 11,115 million Yen (or US $95 million) and net income attributable to owners of the parent of 8,531 million Yen (or US $73 million) for the quarter.

The company will not revise expected consolidated results for the full fiscal year ending December 31, 2022 (released on February 17, 2022). Based on information currently available to the company, consolidated net sales for the year ending December 31, 2022 is expected to be 208,900 million Yen (or US $1,899 million, based on an exchange rate of 110 JPY = 1 USD). Operating income and net income are expected to be 42,000 million Yen (or US $381 million) and 30,300 million Yen (or US $275 million), respectively.

Key business updates in Q1 2022:

Innovative:

Trend Micro nurtures a culture of innovation to drive advancements across its cybersecurity platform.

Trend Micro's cybersecurity platform blocked more than 94 billion cyber threats targeting consumer, government and business customers in 2021.

Trend Micro Research discovered cloud computing resources are caught in an ongoing battle among cryptocurrency mining groups.

The future vehicle market will require built-in cybersecurity to protect consumers globally. Trend Micro's solution is poised to meet this need.

Trusted:

Trend Micro is a trusted partner to the customers and communities that we serve.

Trend Micro's commitment to securing US federal organizations was advanced through a partnership with Coalfire.

A vulnerability disclosed during the company's Pwn2Own competition helped protect Samba users before real-world exploits could occur.

Trend Micro's program to educate kids and families had a record-breaking year in 2021, reaching more than 3 million people globally.

Global:

Trend Micro has the most geographically dispersed customers in the industry; those millions of sensors inform products and customer support.

A global survey found that over 90% of IT and business decision makers were concerned about ransomware attacks, requiring a strong partner with global intelligence to best mitigate their risk.

Trend Micro's global threat intelligence engines and researchers observed multiple attacks and threats stemming from Russia's invasion of Ukraine . This intelligence was shared to help protect businesses and consumers who may be impacted by these threats.

invasion of . This intelligence was shared to help protect businesses and consumers who may be impacted by these threats. The company added an integration with Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR to simplify investigations and response times for joint customers.

New Patents Filed:

Trend Micro was awarded the following patents in Q1 2022:

Patent No. Issue Date Title 11258601 02/22/2022 Systems and methods for distributed digital rights

management with decentralized key management 11258825 02/22/2022 Computer Network Monitoring with Event Prediction 11263500 03/01/2022 Image detection methods and apparatus 11270000 03/08/2022 Generation of file digests for detecting malicious

executable files 11288594 03/29/2022 Domain Classification

Notice Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements that are made in this release are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on management's current assumptions and beliefs in light of the information currently available, but involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Many important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in forward-looking statements. These factors include:

Difficulties in addressing new threats and other computer security problems

Timing of new product introductions and lack of market acceptance for new products

The level of continuing demand for, and timing of sales of, existing products

Rapid technological change within the security software industry

Changes in customer needs for security software

Existing products and new product introductions by competitors and pricing of those products

Declining prices for products and services

The effect of future acquisitions on our financial condition and results of operations

The effect of adverse economic trends on principal markets

The effect of foreign exchange fluctuations on our results of operations

An increase in the incidence of product returns

The potential lack of attractive investment targets and difficulties in successfully executing our investment strategy

New and potentially unforeseen risks and liabilities associated with the internet of things, the use of artificial intelligence in our products and services, and other emerging technologies

About Trend Micro

Trend Micro, a global cybersecurity leader, helps make the world safe for exchanging digital information. Fueled by decades of security expertise, global threat research, and continuous innovation, Trend Micro's cybersecurity platform protects hundreds of thousands of organizations and millions of individuals across clouds, networks, devices, and endpoints. As a leader in cloud and enterprise cybersecurity, the platform delivers a powerful range of advanced threat defense techniques optimized for environments like AWS, Microsoft, and Google, and central visibility for better, faster detection and response. With 7,000 employees across 65 countries, Trend Micro enables organizations to simplify and secure their connected world. www.trendmicro.com.

SOURCE Trend Micro Incorporated
DUBLIN, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The "U.S. Remote Patient Monitoring Market - Industry Outlook & Forecast 2022-2027" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The US remote patient monitoring market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.63%.



This report considers the present scenario of the U.S. remote patient monitoring market and its market dynamics for 2022-2027. It covers a detailed overview of several market growth enablers, restraints, and trends. The study covers both the demand and supply sides of the market. It also profiles and analyses leading companies and several other prominent companies operating in the market.



U.S. REMOTE PATIENT MONITORING MARKET SEGMENTATION

The Devices and Software segment accounts for the largest share than that of the Services segment in the U.S. remote patient monitoring market. The increasing adoption of wearable medical devices, technological advancements in IoT, the rise in the adoption of home healthcare systems are expected to boost the adoption of device & software segment in the remote patient monitoring market.



The hospitals and specialty clinics accounted for the largest share in the U.S. remote patient monitoring market and the Homecare setting is anticipated to be the fastest-growing end-user. With the increased demand for hospital beds and the challenge of delivering care with staff shortages, some health care centers prefer remote patient monitoring solutions.

Moreover, technological advancements have made it viable to monitor patients remotely while at home or in skilled nursing facilities.

COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE

Manufacturers and providers are rapidly approaching the RPM technology to limit costs, improve patient outcomes, and cut down on using more expensive services for a share of this growing market.



The major competitors in the industry are focusing their efforts on reducing the size of remote patient monitoring devices. These companies are also attempting to increase their market share by launching new goods and forming collaborations with other industry participants. As a result, these factors are expected to increase the remote patient monitoring market size.

MARKET GROWTH ENABLERS

Increasing Innovations in Wearable Medical Devices

Growing Use of Mobile Technologies & Smart Devices for Remote Patient Monitoring

Aging Population Vulnerable to Chronic Diseases

Key Vendors

Medtronic

Philips Healthcare

ResMed

Other Prominent Vendors

100-Plus

A&D Company

Abbott

AltumView Syste

BIOTRONIK

Boston Scientific

Bardy Diagnostics

Cardiomo Care

Cardiologs

Dragerwerk

Hoffmann-La Roche

GE Healthcare

GrandCare Systems

Honeywell International

iHealthUnifiedcare

Qardio

MedM

Masimo Corporation

Medopad

Nihon Kohden

Omron Healthcare

OSPLabs

Resideo Technologies

Smiths Medical

Spacelabs Healthcare

Senseonics

TeleMedCare

VitalConnect

Vitls

Modivcare

Hill-Rom

Vivify Health

ACL Digital

Dexcom

iRhythm Technologies

Vivalink

Biobeat

CareValidate

Biofourmis

CAREMINDr

Datos Health

Key Topics Covered:



1 Research Methodology



2 Research Objectives



3 Research Process



4 Scope & Coverage

4.1 Market Definition

4.2 Base Year

4.3 Scope of the Study



5 Report Assumptions & Caveats

5.1 Key Caveats

5.2 Currency Conversion

5.3 Market Derivation



6 Market at a Glance



7 Introduction

7.1 Overview



8 Market Opportunities & Trends

8.1 Technological Advancements, Improved Connectivity, & Remote Monitoring

8.2 Telemedicine Ushering New Opportunities for Remote Monitoring

8.3 Increasing Role of Internet of Things (IoT) in Remote Monitoring & Healthcare



9 Market Growth Enablers

9.1 Increasing Innovations in Wearable Medical Devices

9.2 Growing Use of Mobile Technologies & Smart Devices for Remote Patient Monitoring

9.3 Aging Population Vulnerable to Chronic Diseases

9.4 Growing Use of Rpm to Monitor & Improve Patient Engagement



10 Market Growth Restraints

10.1 Regulatory Variations Across Country

10.2 Lack of Data Accuracy



11 Market Landscape

11.1 Market Overview

11.2 Market Size & Forecast

11.2.1 Market Share by Component

11.2.2 Market Share by Devices & Software

11.2.3 Market Share by Application

11.2.4 Market Share by End-User

11.3 Five Forces Analysis



12 Component

12.1 Market Snapshot & Growth Engine



13 Devices & Software

13.1 Market Snapshot & Growth Engine

13.2 Market Overview

13.2.1 Market Size & Forecast

13.3 Cardiac Monitoring Devices

13.3.1 Market Overview

13.3.2 Market Size & Forecast

13.3.3 Electrocardiographs (Ecgs): Market Overview

13.3.4 Market Size & Forecast

13.3.5 Cardiac Monitors: Market Overview

13.3.6 Market Size & Forecast

13.3.7 Blood Pressure Monitors: Market Overview

13.3.8 Market Size & Forecast

13.3.9 Others: Market Overview

13.3.10 Market Size & Forecast

13.4 Respiratory Monitoring Devices

13.4.1 Market Overview

13.4.2 Market Size & Forecast

13.4.3 Apnea Monitors: Market Overview

13.4.4 Market Size & Forecast

13.4.5 Pulse Oximeters: Market Overview

13.4.6 Market Size & Forecast

13.4.7 Other Respiratory Monitoring Devices: Market Overview

13.4.8 Market Size & Forecast

13.5 Blood Glucose Monitors

13.6 Fetal & Neonatal Monitoring Devices

13.7 Other Rpm Devices



14 Services

14.1 Market Overview

14.2 Market Size & Forecast



15 Application

15.1 Market Snapshot & Growth Engine

15.2 Market Overview

15.3 Cardiology

15.3.1 Market Overview

15.3.2 Market Size & Forecast

15.4 Pulmonology

15.5 Endocrinology



16 End-User

16.1 Market Snapshot & Growth Engine

16.2 Market Overview

16.3 Hospitals & Specialty Clinics

16.3.1 Market Overview

16.3.2 Market Size & Forecast

16.4 Homecare Settings

16.5 Ambulatory Surgical Centers

16.6 Long-Term & Acute Care Centers



17 Competitive Landscape

17.1 Competition Overview by Devices & Software

17.1.1 Medtronic

17.1.2 Philips Healthcare

17.1.3 Resmed

17.2 Competition Overview by Services

17.2.1 Medm

17.2.2 Ihealthunifiedcare

17.2.3 Qardio



18 Key Vendors

18.1 Medtronic

18.1.1 Business Overview

18.1.2 Product Offering

18.2 Philips Healthcare

18.2.1 Business Overview

18.2.2 Product Offering

18.3 Resmed

18.3.1 Business Overview

18.3.2 Product Offering

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/lupbjj

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SOURCE Research and Markets
Meckey, a veteran healthcare leader in leading global institutions, will join the company in July

DELRAY BEACH, Fla., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- UpHealth, Inc. (NYSE: UPH)  Samuel J. Meckey will join UpHealth, Inc. as Chief Executive Officer in July. The appointment was announced today by Dr. Avi Katz, Co-Chairman of the company's Board of Directors.

"Sam has considerable healthcare experience in publicly traded companies and a consistent track record of delivering exceptional results," said Dr. Katz. "The Board and I are confident that his experience and expertise will accelerate UpHealth's transformation and growth. Sam excels at building winning teams, creating a client-first culture, driving innovation that meets market needs and delivering against operational excellence goals."

Meckey was most recently Executive Vice President and Head of Healthcare at EXLService Holdings, Inc., a leading data analytics, digital operations, technology and solutions company. During his tenure, he integrated five separate businesses into one cohesive operating unit and developed the strategic plan to double the business's size, grew revenues and net income, increased gross margin and significantly improved return on invested capital.

Prior to joining EXL, he was President of Optum Global Solutions, overseeing the company's global operations and technology services organization. There, Mr. Meckey was responsible for more than 35,000 employees in India, the Philippines, Brazil and the United States. Under his leadership, revenue and earnings significantly increased.

Before beginning his career in healthcare, Mr. Meckey was an officer and pilot in the United States Navy. He completed his undergraduate work in economics at the United States Naval Academy and earned a master's degree from Harvard Business School.

"It is an honor to join UpHealth almost one year into its journey as a publicly traded company," said Mr. Meckey. "The company's potential to affect positive change in healthcare globally is enormous, as is its potential for growth in every aspect of its businesses. I look forward to collaborating with the accomplished leadership team at the company to deliver exceptional results for our clients and shareholders."

Mr. Meckey replaces Dr. Ramesh Balakrishnan, whom the company announced would be moving to another role last month. Dr. Balakrishnan will become the company's Chief Strategy Officer when Mr. Meckey joins. Until that time, he will serve as Chief Executive Officer and will be instrumental in Mr. Meckey's transition into the company.

"Sam and I have had the opportunity to get acquainted, and I see him as a dynamic, ambitious and high integrity leader who will guide us toward our mission to power the world's most trusted health institutions to achieve their access, quality and affordability goals. His strong client orientation, disciplined approach to operations and passion for innovation will materially accelerate our progress as an institution. I'm eager to partner with him in my new role and am confident the company will see much success under this leadership," said Dr. Balakrishnan.

Dr. Katz said, "When the Board and I announced last month that we were seeking a new Chief Executive Officer, we said that our ideal candidate would be a proven leader with deep expertise in healthcare, services and technology institutions and with demonstrated operational excellence experience. Sam fits all these criteriaand more. We are looking forward to collaborating with Sam as he shapes our journey toward becoming a leading institution in healthcare."

About UpHealth

UpHealth is a global digital health company that delivers digital-first technology, infrastructure, and services to dramatically improve how healthcare is delivered and managed. UpHealth's solutions holistically enable clients to deliver on their affordability , access , quality , outcomes , and patient experience goals. UpHealth's technology platform helps its clients improve access, coordinate care teams, and achieve better patient outcomes at lower cost, with care management solutions, analytics, and telehealth tools that serve patients wherever they are, in their native language. Additionally, UpHealth's technology-enabled virtual care infrastructure and services improves access to quality primary and acute care, behavioral health, and pharmacy services. UpHealth's clients include health plans, global governments, healthcare providers and community-based organizations.

For more information, please visit https://uphealthinc.com and follow us at @UpHealthInc on Twitter and UpHealth Inc on LinkedIn.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of U.S. federal securities laws. Such forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, the hiring and the start date of UpHealth's new CEO, and the expectations, hopes, beliefs, intentions, plans, prospects or strategies regarding the future revenue, growth and business plans of UpHealth's management team. Any statements contained herein that are not statements of historical fact may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. In addition, any statements that refer to projections, forecasts, or other characterizations of future events or circumstances, including any underlying assumptions, are forward-looking statements. The words "anticipate," "believe," "continue," "could," "estimate," "expect," "intends," "may," "might," "plan," "possible,"" "potential,"" "predict," "project," "should," "would" and similar expressions may identify forward-looking statements, but the absence of these words does not mean that a statement is not forward-looking. The forward-looking statements contained in this press release are based on certain assumptions and analyses made by the management of UpHealth in light of their respective experience and perception of historical trends, current conditions, and expected future developments and their potential effects on UpHealth as well as other factors they believe are appropriate in the circumstances. There can be no assurance that future developments affecting UpHealth will be those anticipated. These forward-looking statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties (some of which are beyond the control of the parties), or other assumptions that may cause actual results or performance to be materially different from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements, including the mix of services utilized by UpHealth's customers and such customers' needs for these services, market acceptance of new service offerings, the ability of UpHealth to expand what it does for existing customers as well as to add new customers, the ability of the new CEO to begin work when anticipated, that UpHealth will have sufficient capital to operate as anticipated, and the impact that the novel coronavirus and the illness, COVID-19, that it causes, as well as government responses to deal with the spread of this illness and the reopening of economies that have been closed as part of these responses, may have on UpHealth's operations, the demand for UpHealth's products, global supply chains and economic activity in general. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize or should any of the assumptions being made prove incorrect, actual results may vary in material respects from those projected in these forward-looking statements. We undertake no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as may be required under applicable securities laws.

SOURCE UpHealth, Inc.
The report analyzes the market's competitive landscape and offers information on several market vendors, including:

Continental AG- The company offers access systems such as Start Stop Button, Immobilizer, that reliably protect machines against unauthorized access with features from immobilizers to central locks. Through the tires segment, the company offers digital tire monitoring and management systems.

The company offers access systems such as Start Stop Button, Immobilizer, that reliably protect machines against unauthorized access with features from immobilizers to central locks. Through the tires segment, the company offers digital tire monitoring and management systems. Axis Communications AB-

BIODIT AD

DENSO Corp.

FEIG ELECTRONIC GmbH

Fingerprint Cards AB

HELLA GmbH and Co. KG

Johnson Electric Holdings Ltd.

Lear Corp.

MinebeaMitsumi Inc.

Mitsubishi Electric Corp.

Nortech Access Control Ltd.

Nuance Communications Inc.

NXP Semiconductors NV

Robert Bosch GmbH

STid

Synaptics Inc.

Tokai Rika Co. Ltd.

Valeo SA

VOXX International Corp.

The vehicle access control market is fragmented and the vendors are deploying organic and inorganic growth strategies to compete in the market.

Download Report to know about the market's vendor landscape highlights with a comprehensive list of vendors and their offerings

Latest Drivers & Trends of the Global Vehicle Access Control Market

Market Driver:

Rising vehicle theft:

According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program, there was an estimated 721,885 thefts of motor vehicles in the US in 2019. For instance, in the UK, the rate of motor vehicle thefts from 71 vehicles per 1,000 cars in 2015 increased to 115 cars per 1000 cars in 2019. Moreover, technological advancements have resulted in the creation of modern vehicle access control systems to give an excellent driving platform which is also driving consumers to choose a vehicle with the most up-to-date access control system. Thus, growing car theft incidences in developed countries such as the US and the UK are expected to drive the growth of the market during the forecast period.

Market Trend:

Development of the standard ecosystem for keyless vehicles access:

The digital key architecture uses standardized interfaces to ensure interoperability between implementations by mobile device manufacturers and vehicle manufacturers, and it uses standard-based public key infrastructure to establish end-to-end security. Mobile devices create and store digital keys insecure elements that provide the highest level of protection from hardware or software-based attacks. The architecture is also designed to allow vehicle owners to access their vehicles without internet connectivity while also allowing vehicle manufacturers to add features that require internet connectivity for specialized features. Hence, such factors are expected to drive the global vehicle access control market during the forecast period.

Download sample report to find additional information about various other market drivers & trends

Our Vehicle Access Control Market Report Covers the Following Areas:

Key Market Segmentation

By Technology:

RFID:

The vehicle access control market share growth by the RFID segment will be significant during the forecast period. The RFID segment captured the largest market share in the global vehicle access control market in 2021. This is attributed to its low cost, easy installation on vehicles, and quick access authorization for vehicle owners compared to other segments. Furthermore, the RFID application is comprised of residential buildings, commercial buildings, tollways, and others. The access control system uses RFID technology for entry or exit at tollways and highways. These systems help to mitigate traffic congestion problems at tollways. Thus, the continuous expansion of road infrastructure in the region will lead to the installation of more new toll gates, which will drive market growth during the forecast period.

NFC



Bluetooth



Others

Download Sample of this report for more highlights into the market segments

Regional Market Outlook

The vehicle access control market is segmented geography (North America, Europe, APAC, South America, and Middle East and Africa). 35% of the market's growth will originate from Europe during the forecast period. Germany and the UK are the key markets for the vehicle access control market in Europe. Market growth in this region will be faster than the growth of the market in other regions. The rising sales of automobiles will facilitate the vehicle access control market growth in Europe over the forecast period.

Download our sample report for more key highlights on the regional market share of most of the above-mentioned countries

Need More? Are You Looking for Information Not Covered in This Report?

Want to understand more about the various research methodology?

Evaluate a specific segment or region in detail

Identify key suppliers, customers, or other market players

Analyze market regulations

Speak to Our Analyst Now ! to take full advantage of every opportunity using competitive analysis created just for you

Vehicle Access Control Market 2022-2026: Key Highlights

CAGR of the market during the forecast period 2022-2026

Detailed information on factors that will assist Vehicle Access Control Market growth during the next five years

Estimation of the Vehicle Access Control Market size and its contribution to the parent market

Predictions on upcoming trends and changes in consumer behavior

The growth of the Vehicle Access Control Market

Analysis of the market's competitive landscape and detailed information on vendors

Comprehensive details of factors that will challenge the growth of Vehicle Access Control Market vendors

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On-Board Diagnostics Telematics Market by Type and Geography - Forecast and Analysis: The on-board diagnostics telematics market size has the potential to grow by USD 1.74 billion and the market's growth momentum will accelerate during the forecast period. To get more exclusive research insights: Download Our Sample Report

Vehicle Access Control Market Scope Report Coverage Details Page number 120 Base year 2021 Forecast period 2022-2026 Growth momentum & CAGR Accelerate at a CAGR of 8.71% Market growth 2022-2026 $ 4.59 billion Market structure Fragmented YoY growth (%) 7.89 Regional analysis North America, Europe, APAC, South America, and Middle East and Africa Performing market contribution Europe at 35% Key consumer countries US, China, Japan, Germany, and UK Competitive landscape Leading companies, competitive strategies, consumer engagement scope Companies profiled Axis Communications AB, BIODIT AD, Continental AG, DENSO Corp., FEIG ELECTRONIC GmbH, Fingerprint Cards AB, HELLA GmbH and Co. KG, Johnson Electric Holdings Ltd., Lear Corp., MinebeaMitsumi Inc., Mitsubishi Electric Corp., Nortech Access Control Ltd., Nuance Communications Inc., NXP Semiconductors NV, Robert Bosch GmbH, STid, Synaptics Inc., Tokai Rika Co. Ltd., Valeo SA, and VOXX International Corp. Market Dynamics Parent market analysis, Market growth inducers and obstacles, Fast-growing and slow-growing segment analysis, COVID 19 impact and future consumer dynamics, market condition analysis for forecast period, Customization preview 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 Technology



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 Technology

5.1 Market segments

Exhibit 24: Chart on Technology - Market share 2021-2026 (%)



Exhibit 25: Data Table on Technology - Market share 2021-2026 (%)

5.2 Comparison by Technology

Exhibit 26: Chart on Comparison by Technology



Exhibit 27: Data Table on Comparison by Technology

5.3 RFID - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

Exhibit 28: Chart on RFID - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 29: Data Table on RFID - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 30: Chart on RFID - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)



Exhibit 31: Data Table on RFID - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

5.4 NFC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

Exhibit 32: Chart on NFC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 33: Data Table on NFC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 34: Chart on NFC - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)



Exhibit 35: Data Table on NFC - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

5.5 Bluetooth - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

Exhibit 36: Chart on Bluetooth - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 37: Data Table on Bluetooth - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 38: Chart on Bluetooth - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)



Exhibit 39: Data Table on Bluetooth - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

5.6 Others - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

Exhibit 40: Chart on Others - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 41: Data Table on Others - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 42: Chart on Others - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)



Exhibit 43: Data Table on Others - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

5.7 Market opportunity by Technology

Exhibit 44: Market opportunity by Technology ($ million)

6 Customer Landscape

6.1 Customer landscape overview

Exhibit 45: Analysis of price sensitivity, lifecycle, customer purchase basket, adoption rates, and purchase criteria

7 Geographic Landscape

7.1 Geographic segmentation

Exhibit 46: Chart on Market share by geography 2021-2026 (%)



Exhibit 47: Data Table on Market share by geography 2021-2026 (%)

7.2 Geographic comparison

Exhibit 48: Chart on Geographic comparison



Exhibit 49: Data Table on Geographic comparison

7.3 North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 50: Chart on North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 51: Data Table on North America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 52: Chart on North America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

Exhibit 53: 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 54: Chart on Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 55: Data Table on Europe - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 56: Chart on Europe - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

Exhibit 57: Data Table on Europe - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

7.5 APAC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

Exhibit 58: Chart on APAC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 59: Data Table on APAC - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 60: Chart on APAC - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)



Exhibit 61: Data Table on APAC - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

7.6 South America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 62: Chart on South America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 63: Data Table on South America - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 64: Chart on South America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

Exhibit 65: Data Table on South America - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

7.7 Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

and - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 66: Chart on Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

and - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 67: Data Table on Middle East and Africa - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

and - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 68: Chart on Middle East and Africa - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

and - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

Exhibit 69: Data Table on Middle East and Africa - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

7.8 US - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

Exhibit 70: Chart on US - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 71: Data Table on US - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 72: Chart on US - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)



Exhibit 73: Data Table on US - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

7.9 Germany - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 74: Chart on Germany - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 75: Data Table on Germany - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 76: Chart on Germany - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

Exhibit 77: Data Table on Germany - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

7.10 China - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 78: Chart on China - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 79: Data Table on China - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 80: Chart on China - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

Exhibit 81: Data Table on China - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

7.11 Japan - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 Exhibit 82: Chart on Japan - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 83: Data Table on Japan - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

- Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)

Exhibit 84: Chart on Japan - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

- Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

Exhibit 85: Data Table on Japan - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

7.12 UK - Market size and forecast 2021-2026

Exhibit 86: Chart on UK - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 87: Data Table on UK - Market size and forecast 2021-2026 ($ million)



Exhibit 88: Chart on UK - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)



Exhibit 89: Data Table on UK - Year-over-year growth 2021-2026 (%)

7.13 Market opportunity by geography

Exhibit 90: 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 91: Impact of drivers and challenges in 2021 and 2026

8.4 Market trends

9 Vendor Landscape

9.1 Overview

9.2 Vendor landscape

Exhibit 92: Overview on Criticality of inputs and Factors of differentiation

9.3 Landscape disruption

Exhibit 93: Overview on factors of disruption

9.4 Industry risks

Exhibit 94: Impact of key risks on business

10 Vendor Analysis

10.1 Vendors covered

Exhibit 95: Vendors covered

10.2 Market positioning of vendors

Exhibit 96: Matrix on vendor position and classification

10.3 Continental AG

Exhibit 97: Continental AG - Overview



Exhibit 98: Continental AG - Business segments



Exhibit 99: Continental AG - Key news



Exhibit 100: Continental AG - Key offerings



Exhibit 101: Continental AG - Segment focus

10.4 DENSO Corp.

Exhibit 102: DENSO Corp. - Overview



Exhibit 103: DENSO Corp. - Business segments



Exhibit 104: DENSO Corp. - Key news



Exhibit 105: DENSO Corp. - Key offerings



Exhibit 106: DENSO Corp. - Segment focus

10.5 Fingerprint Cards AB

Exhibit 107: Fingerprint Cards AB - Overview



Exhibit 108: Fingerprint Cards AB - Business segments



Exhibit 109: Fingerprint Cards AB - Key offerings



Exhibit 110: Fingerprint Cards AB - Segment focus

10.6 HELLA GmbH and Co. KG

Exhibit 111: HELLA GmbH and Co. KG - Overview



Exhibit 112: HELLA GmbH and Co. KG - Business segments



Exhibit 113: HELLA GmbH and Co. KG - Key offerings



Exhibit 114: HELLA GmbH and Co. KG - Segment focus

10.7 Lear Corp.

Exhibit 115: Lear Corp. - Overview



Exhibit 116: Lear Corp. - Business segments



Exhibit 117: Lear Corp. - Key news



Exhibit 118: Lear Corp. - Key offerings



Exhibit 119: Lear Corp. - Segment focus

10.8 Nuance Communications Inc.

Exhibit 120: Nuance Communications Inc. - Overview



Exhibit 121: Nuance Communications Inc. - Business segments



Exhibit 122: Nuance Communications Inc. - Key offerings



Exhibit 123: Nuance Communications Inc. - Segment focus

10.9 Robert Bosch GmbH

Exhibit 124: Robert Bosch GmbH - Overview



Exhibit 125: Robert Bosch GmbH - Business segments



Exhibit 126: Robert Bosch GmbH - Key news



Exhibit 127: Robert Bosch GmbH - Key offerings



Exhibit 128: Robert Bosch GmbH - Segment focus

10.10 Synaptics Inc.

Exhibit 129: Synaptics Inc. - Overview



Exhibit 130: Synaptics Inc. - Business segments



Exhibit 131: Synaptics Inc. - Key offerings



Exhibit 132: Synaptics Inc. - Segment focus

10.11 Valeo SA

Exhibit 133: Valeo SA - Overview



Exhibit 134: Valeo SA - Business segments



Exhibit 135: Valeo SA - Key news



Exhibit 136: Valeo SA - Key offerings



Exhibit 137: Valeo SA - Segment focus

10.12 VOXX International Corp.

Exhibit 138: VOXX International Corp. - Overview



Exhibit 139: VOXX International Corp. - Business segments



Exhibit 140: VOXX International Corp. - Key offerings



Exhibit 141: VOXX International Corp. - Segment focus

11 Appendix

11.1 Scope of the report

11.2 Inclusions and exclusions checklist

Exhibit 142: Inclusions checklist



Exhibit 143: Exclusions checklist

11.3 Currency conversion rates for US$

Exhibit 144: Currency conversion rates for US$

11.4 Research methodology

Exhibit 145: Research methodology



Exhibit 146: Validation techniques employed for market sizing



Exhibit 147: Information sources

11.5 List of abbreviations

Exhibit 148: List of abbreviations

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SOURCE Technavio
MIAMI, May 11, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- On December 24, 2021, after months of investigation, Mark Cassidy, through The Moskowitz Law Firm PLLC and Grossman Roth Yaffa Cohen, P.A., filed a class action Complaint before Chief Judge Cecilia M. Altonaga in the Southern District of Florida, captioned Mark Cassidy v. Voyager Digital Ltd., et al., Case No. 21-24441-CIV-ALTONAGA/Torres (S.D. Fla.).

Voyager was sued for a wide range of alleged deceptive claims, including false "no commission" promises and the sale of unregistered securities, the Voyager Earn Program Account ("EPA"). "We have been talking to many Voyager customers from across the country about their problems and their desire to join our lawsuit", said Adam Moskowitz, Managing Partner of The Moskowitz Law Firm, who indicated that they may be further expanding the lawsuit.

On April 28, 2022, plaintiff filed his Amended Complaint with additional expert support to, among other things, include allegations Voyager engaged in the unlawful offer and sale of unregistered securities in violation of Sections 5(a) and 5(c) of the Securities Act of 1933 by selling EPAs to persons or entities in the United States on or after December 24, 2020. Any member of this putative class may move within 60 days of this publication to seek to serve as a lead plaintiff.

Voyager has raised numerous defenses, including arguing the Court lacks personal jurisdiction over its Canadian parent company and that plaintiff manifested his agreement to Voyager's User Agreement (containing an Arbitration Provision, which Voyager argues includes a delegation clause requiring claimants to submit threshold issues to the arbitrator) through clicking a box affirming his agreement at registration. Voyager was required to file one consolidated motion to dismiss by next week, where they state they will raise numerous other defenses to these alleged claims.

"Our main goal is simply to allow every common investor a fighting chance," said Adam Moskowitz. Moskowitz further explains "the sale of unregistered securities may allow investors full repayment and this app, we allege, was set up like a carnival game, where every consumer was going to lose."

If you wish to discuss this action and potentially join it as a plaintiff and/or class representative, Joseph Kaye of The Moskowitz Law Firm PLLC may be contacted at (786) 309-9585 or [email protected].

SOURCE The Moskowitz Law Firm
Kiev, May 12 : The gas transmission system operator of Ukraine (GSTOU) has accused Russia of interrupting Russian gas transit through Ukraine to the consumers in Ukraine and Europe.

Sergiy Makogon, head of the GSTOU, said on Wednesday that Gazprom has stopped transportation of gas from Russia to the gas measuring station Sokhranivka, thus suspending supplies to Ukraine's eastern Donetsk and Lugansk regions, Xinhua news agency reported.

The GSTOU said that it was forced to suspend the Russian gas transit to Europe via the territories in eastern Ukraine controlled by Russian forces due to "force majeure".

The gas transit via the Sokhranivka and the border compressor station Novopskov were halted over unauthorized interference in technical processes and withdrawals of gas, the GSTOU said.

"The actions of the occupiers led to the interruption of gas transit," it said.

Novopskov is the gas compressor station in the conflict-affected Lugansk region, which pumps up to 32.6 million cubic meters of gas per day via Sokhranivka or a third of Russia's gas transit to Europe.

The GSTOU said it is ready to reroute the gas flows from Sokhranivka to the Sudzha physical interconnection point located in the territory controlled by Ukraine.

A similar transfer of capacity from Sokhranivka to Sudzha took place from Oct. 12 to 25, 2020 due to scheduled repairs, the GSTOU said.

According to it, Sudzha has a capacity of pumping 72 million cubic meters of gas per day.

On March 31, the GSTOU said that 44 gas-distributing stations in Ukraine suspended their operations due to the damage caused by shelling in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

On March 10, Makogon said that the daily transit of Russian gas via Ukraine almost doubled since the start of the conflict to a contracted maximum of 109 million cubic meters per day.

On April 12, local media reported that Russia's gas transit through Ukraine fell to about 68 percent of the contracted maximum.

In 2021, Ukraine transited some 41.6 billion cubic meters of Russian gas to consumers in Europe, down 25 percent from 2020.

Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Kiev, May 12 : Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has tweeted that he had a conversation with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to discuss defensive aid for Ukraine.

"We appreciate the high level of dialogue with Germany and support in our struggle," Zelensky was quoted as saying by Xinhua news agency In their talks, the parties touched upon the sanctions against Russia over its conflict with Ukraine and the cooperation between Ukraine and Germany in the energy sector.

According to a statement issued Wednesday by the German government, the two leaders exchanged views on specific and practical options for further supporting Ukraine during the phone conversation.

Scholz also expressed his condolences to Zelensky over the passing of Leonid Kravchuk, the first president of independent Ukraine.

On Tuesday, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said the government of Germany was working with the country's enterprises to provide modern weapons to Ukraine.

Baerbock said that in the coming days Germany would begin training Ukrainian soldiers on using mobile howitzers.

Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Lucknow, May 12 : Uttar Pradesh plans to link at least 7.5 crore people with yoga to mark the 75th anniversary of India's independence.

The period from May 21 to June 21 will be celebrated as 'Amrut Yoga' month.

According to Uttar Pradesh Chief Secretary, Durga Shankar Mishra, the International Yoga Day will be celebrated on a grand scale.

Mishra has directed all District Magistrates to prepare a micro plan to achieve the target of linking 7.5 crore people and make it available to the Ayush department.

Efforts should be made to set a world record on June 21.

However, plans are afoot to hold yoga programmes at the Ganga ghats on the occasion of World Yoga Day on June 21.

Cities along the Ganga river will hold such programmes on the river banks.

Kanpur District Magistrate, Neha Sharma has already directed all the departments and their heads to ensure compliance of directives issued for the Yoga Day to be held on June 21 and submit their work plan.

All heads of the government departments would also perform yoga exercises with the people on June 21. A pledge will be taken on the occasion to keep the Ganga river clean, she said.

The Yogi Adityanath government in its second term wants to give a major boost to the health sector with focus on natural ways of healing.

Yoga forms the cornerstone of natural healing and the government wants to take it to the next level this time.
Chandigarh, May 12 : Scenes of government school principals and teachers jostling just to grab a plate for a free lunch after attending a meeting chaired by Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in a plush resort in Ludhiana to improve the quality of education has gone viral.

The education department had called the meeting of over 2,600 school heads and district education officers from all over the state. For their transportation, the department had arranged 57 air conditioned buses.

Education Minister Gurmeet Singh Meet Hayer said the meeting was called to listen to the suggestions of teachers to improve the education system by framing a policy.

After the meeting, in which the Chief Minister launched an online portal to seek suggestions for bringing "out-of-the-box" educational reforms, the teachers were caught on camera creating ruckus to grab a plate for lunch.

"These people are going abroad for training, ultimately these people will spoil the name of BHARAT," says a viral tweet.

Taking a jibe at the Chief Minister for announcing to send school principals teachers abroad for sharpening their skills, another tweet said, "Instead of sending them to abroad for teaching training, the government first give them classes of personality skills. Shameless lunch break of teachers yesterday after meeting CM Bhagwant Mann." "Looks like they have been starving for many days or probably did not want to miss a free lunch!" added another tweet.
May 12 : Alia Bhatt today celebrated four years of Raazi. The highly successful film was released on May 11, 2018. Directed by Meghna Gulzar and produced by Vineet Jain, Karan Johar, Hiroo Yash Johar and Apoorva Mehta, the spy thriller starred Vicky Kaushal, Alia Bhatt, Jaideep Ahlawat, Rajit Kapur, Shishir Sharma, among others.

Taking to her Instagram stories, Alia shared glimpses of her journey on the sets of Raazi as she shared a bunch of behind the scene pictures. The film is an adaptation of Harinder Sikka's 2008 novel Calling Sehmat, based on a true story of an Indian Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) agent who, upon her father's request, was married into a family of military officials in Pakistan to send information to India, before the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971. In the film, Alia played the role of the undercover spy Sehmat.

Raazi was considered one of Alias best performances. The film was also a critical success, with Meghna's direction and Alias performance receiving high praises. Raazi marked Alias first collaboration with Vicky Kaushal. Made on a budget of 350 million, Raazi grossed 1.96 billion worldwide. Raazi won five Filmfare awards, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actress for Alia Bhatt.

Back in 2018, Alia said in an interview, I didnt expect this kind of response. Since the beginning, we thought that we were making a small film, so we didnt feel we would get so much attention and love from the audience.

We were proud of the film but the kind of unanimous reaction we are getting for the film is amazing. We all are pleasantly shocked. I am really happy, especially for Meghna Gulzar because I think she hasnt slept for God knows how many months.

She was so nervous before the release of the film but the audience has given so much love that we are so grateful. Some people were crying after watching the film and I feel really happy when I make people cry through my films. Then I feel we have done our job.
Doha, May 12 : Swift and widespread condemnation has given way to shock and fear after the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in Ramallah in West Bank.

The veteran reporter was hit by a live bullet on Wednesday as she was covering an Israeli military raid in the city of Jenin, Al Jazeera said. The Doha-based network has been full of stories linked to the killing of the woman television journalist by troops who shot her while she was reporting in full press gear, including an anti-flak jacket marked 'press'.

However, Israel blamed the Palestinian militants for the death of the reporter.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said it was "likely" that Palestinian gunfire killed the Al Jazeera reporter.

"According to the information we've gathered, it appears likely that armed Palestinians -- who were indiscriminately firing at the time -- were responsible for the unfortunate death of the journalist," Bennett said in a statement.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was vocal in blaming Israeli forces for the death of the journalist, calling it a "blatant cold-blooded murder by the Israeli Army".

Al Jazeera quoted the executive director of the International Press Institute, Barbara Trionfi, as saying that the killing comes at a time of increased attacks against journalists in the West Bank and Gaza.

There was obvious indignation in the Palestinian Territories after the incident. An outraged Palestinian told IANS that Akleh was a brave journalist who always fought for the truth. "She was a true icon and inspiration for all of us. She was brutally killed by a settler colonial regime though she sported her full press gear. The killing was deliberate, we are all outraged and hurt by this ongoing perpetual injustice," said the woman requesting anonymity. We've had enough of 'neutral' and fake media coverage that does not speak the truth and perpetuates the settler's tales, she added.

Amid global calls for an independent probe into the killing, Palestine's UN ambassador Riyad Mansoursaid his country will "not accept" an investigation by the "Israeli occupying authority" and has held the Israeli army responsible for the "assassination" of Abu Akleh, Al Jazeera reported.

Addressing media persons at the UN headquarters in New York, Mansour said: "The story of the Israeli side does not hold water, it is fictitious and it is not in line with reality and we do not accept to have an investigation on this issue with those who are the criminals in conducting this event itself."

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
London, May 12 : Pakistan Muslim League's London huddle has decided that there will be no early elections and the main focus of the current government should be on providing economic relief to the masses and also taking tough but long-term economic decisions, according to insiders of the meeting, The News reported.

The meeting between Pak Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, former PM Nawaz Sharif and senior PMLN leaders, including Khwaja Asif, Miftah Ismail, Marriyum Aurangzeb, Atta Tarar, Rana Sanaullah, Ishaq Dar, Ayaz Sadiq and others continued for over six hours at an undisclosed location in London.

Nawaz Sharif sought suggestions on various issues, including early elections from all the party leaders and everyone agreed that the PMLN should implement the economic agenda for the remaining term and then announce the next elections in consultation with the coalition partners, The News reported.

Answering questions of this correspondent after the meeting, Information Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb said that the PMLN leaders and PM Shehbaz Sharif presented a full report on Pakistan's social, economic and political situation to Nawaz Sharif and briefed him on the agenda of the government and its planning.

She said the PMLN and its coalition partners had inherited the worst kind of economic situation from the PTI government and the meeting considered that the huge suffering of people was a result of the policies of previous government. She said the meeting reviewed the IMF conditions and how the people of Pakistan were affected by it.

When asked as to why these issues could not be discussed virtually and why the whole government was visiting London, Marriyum said there was nothing surprising in the London meeting. "Nawaz Sharif is our Quaid. Meeting between Nawaz Sharif and Shehbaz Sharif was long overdue. We have inherited todays Pakistan in a written-off situation and we needed to review the whole situation to formulate a plan. This was a private delegation." When asked about the early elections, she said that the current government's "mandate is till next year and we are here to give relief to the people of Pakistan. It's the history of Nawaz Sharif to take Pakistan out of the economic crisis and if there is one person who can deliver, that's Shehbaz Sharif. Only the PMLN has the right strategy," The News reported.
Los Angeles, May 12 : Filmmaker Richard Linklater is set to tell the true story of an undercover hitman, played by 'Top Gun: Maverick' star Glen Powell.

According to 'Variety', the Oscar-nominated 'Boyhood' helmer will direct and co-write action comedy 'Hitman', which is based on a Texas Monthly magazine article by journalist Skip Hollandsworth.

Powell, who plays Hangman in Paramount's 'Top Gun: Maverick', will co-write and star in the project as a Houston cop who's been working undercover as the most in-demand hitman in Houston, until one day he breaks protocol in order to help a desperate woman (Adria Arjona) trying to escape an abusive boyfriend.

The project is based on a 2001 article in Texas Monthly that tells the fascinating story of hit man Gary Johnson, a staff investigator at the Harris Country district attorney's office, who plays the role of hit man for police requiring the help of an undercover officer to catch individuals ordering a hit, reports 'Variety'.

'Hitman' will be produced by Linklater, Michael Blizzard for Detour Pictures, Michael Costigan and Jason Bateman for Aggregate Films, and Powell with his production outfit BarnStorm Productions.

Linklater, an Oscar nominee for 'Boyhood', 'Before Midnight' and 'Before Sunset', recently helmed animated movie 'Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Adventure', which premiered at SXSW in March.

The director's last movie prior to that was the Cate Blanchett-led 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette'.

Linklater is also in the works on two different biopics, about con artist John Brinkley, and comedian Bill Hicks.

Powell previously worked with Linklater on 'Apollo 10 A' as well as 'Everybody Wants Some!!'. He also starred in 'Set It Up' and 'The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society'.

AGC International's other big title at Cannes is the Anna Kendrick-led 'The Dating Game', which tells the chilling true story of serial killer Rodney Alcala, who appeared on popular US dating programme 'The Dating Game' and was selected to go on a date with contestant Cheryl Bradshaw before his grisly crimes were ultimately exposed.
Amman, May 12 : Jordan has urged for a just, transparent and immediate investigation into the killing of Al-Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh to hold perpetrators accountable.

Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi on Wednesday described the killing as a "heinous crime and a flagrant attack on press freedom" during a phone call with his Palestinian counterpart Riyad al-Maliki, according to a statement by Jordanian Foreign Ministry.

The Foreign Ministry Spokesman, Haitham Abu Al-Foul condemned the targeting of journalists in the occupied Palestinian territories, saying the crime violated international humanitarian law and international conventions and norms, Xinhua news agency reported.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said Abu Akleh was shot by the Israeli troops in the northern occupied West Bank on Wednesday morning while covering an Israeli military raid and died shortly after.

Israeli Army said it has launched an investigation into the incident.
Chennai, May 12 : The PMK and VCK have urged the Centre not to give political asylum to former Prime Minister of Sri Lanka Mahinda Rajapakse.

In a statement on Thursday, the youth wing leader of the PMK and former Union Minister Dr. Anbumani Ramadoss said that the Indian government must not consider giving political asylum to Mahinda Rajapakse, who has resigned as the Sri Lankan Prime Minister and is said to be hiding in Trincomalee.

Ramadoss said that Mahinda Rajapakse was facing serious charges of genocide against the Tamil population of the island nation during the civil war in that country in 2009.

He said that there were reports that the former Sri Lankan Prime Minister is likely to come to India along with his family through sea route and called upon the Centre not to give him any consideration. He said that the United Nations Human Rights Commission was taking evidence against Mahinda Rajapakse on the crimes committed by him during the last stages of the Civil war that rocked Lanka.

The PMK leader said that the former Prime Minister of the island nation must be tried for international war crimes with the help of India and other countries.

The VCK has also appealed to the Centre not to consider any asylum to Mahinda Rajapakse as there was a case of genocide against him.

Thol Thirumavalavan, VCK MP said in a statement on Thursday that the Centre must never consider granting asylum to Mahinda Rajapakse, and said that the UNHRC is taking evidence against him for the crimes committed during the civil war against the Tamil population.
Bhopal, May 12 : Section 144 has been re-imposed in the riot-hit Khargone district of Madhya Pradesh as a preventive measure.

A notification issued jointly by the district administration and the police on Wednesday stated that no rallies, processions, Jagarans and shobha yatras or political rallies will be allowed in the district till July 10.

It came a week after the administration had lifted curfew from the riot-hit area claiming that the situation had returned to normal in the district. Last time section 144 was imposed was on April 11, a day after communal violence broke out in the district during the Navratri festival.

Restrictions were re-imposed a day after a group Muslim women took out a rally in accusing the police of harassing women and arresting the people without proper verification. A delegation of Muslim women on Tuesday staged a protest at SP office alleging that police have arrested children and senior citizens.

"Police are barging into houses of Muslims and arresting men and children. They are harassing women as well. We are living in a fearful situation," a Muslim woman told reporters.

While Muslim women alleged harassment by police in the name of arrests-searching, ASP-Khargone, Neeraj Chaurasia assured of befitting action. Chauaria further informed that the administration is currently engaged in efforts for peace in Khargone, which recently witnessed communal riots.

Notably, as many as 182 people have so far been arrested in 72 cases registered in connection with the violence. Among the injured was SP Siddharth Choudhary, who was hit by a bullet in his leg. Police arrested a man, identified as Mohsin aka Waseem, for the firing incident.

Communal clashes broke out in Khargone on the occasion of Ram Navami on April 10, leading to violence, with incidents of Arson and stone-pelting. A curfew was imposed immediately.
Patna, May 12 : Sahara chief Subroto Roy is expected to appear before the Patna High Court on Thursday to explain how he would return the money of investors.

A single bench of justice Sandeep Kumar, during the last hearing on April 27, had directed him to physically appear before the high court on May 11 and inform how he could return the money of investors. As he was unable to come to Patna on May 11, the case was adjourned for May 12.

According to sources, Subroto Roy has reached Patna and would appear before the court any time from now on.

During the hearing on April 27, the Patna High Court had asked the lawyer of Sahara India named Umesh Prasad Singh to submit a detailed report on how Sahara India will return the money of investors of Bihar.

In reposnse, Singh had given some alternate methods to return the amount of investors but Justice Sandeep Kumar was not interested in it. He firmly told the lawyer that the court will not tolerate further excuses of Subroto Roy.

Currently, more than 2000 cases pertaining to alleged fraudulency of Sahara India are filed in Patna High Court. Though, the actual numbers of duped persons are in lakhs. Many of them have already died.
Islamabad, May 12 : With a change in the Pakistan federal government, the Pak Ministry of Commerce (MoC) has ruled out the possibility of a resumption of stalled bilateral trade with India, Dawn reported.

The response came from the commerce ministry over the widespread speculation on social media that the new government led by Pak Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif is considering a proposal to resume trade with its arch rival India.

"There is no change in Pakistan's policy on trade with India," an official announcement from the commerce ministry said.

An official source in the Pakistan Prime Minister's Secretariat told Dawn that the appointment of a trade officer in New Delhi is one of the routine postings, adding that the post of trade officer in the Pakistan embassy in New Delhi has been vacant for years.

The prime minister has approved a senior officer of the Commerce and Trade Group, Qamar Zaman, for posting in New Delhi. He is one of the 15 officers appointed for posting in various countries. "The selection process for the appointment of all these trade officers was started by the previous government," the official in the Prime Minister's Secretariat said.

"We have not changed anything in the summary of the previous government," the source said, adding the selection process was found on merit, Dawn reported.

According to a source in the commerce ministry, the appointment of a new trade officer in New Delhi, like the previous two before him, will not get a visa and his time will end. Therefore, it is unlikely that India will grant a visa to the new officer appointed by Islamabad for posting in New Delhi if India follows its previous policy.

The source added that earlier, the government appointed two trade officers for posting in New Delhi but they were denied visas.

According to the announcement, the MoC manages 57 trade missions in 46 countries, which includes the post of Minister (Trade and Investment) in New Delhi, India.

The post of Minister (Trade and Investment) in New Delhi has existed for more than two decades and has no connection with the operationalisation of trade with India or otherwise in the current context, Dawn reported.

The appointment of the Minister (Trade and Investment) in New Delhi, therefore, may not be seen in the context of any relaxation of trade restrictions with India, added the statement, Dawn reported.

On August 19, 2019, Pakistan formally downgraded its trade relations with India to the level of Israel, with which Islamabad has no trade ties at all.
Los Angeles, May 12 : A Los Angeles judge has ruled that five additional witnesses will be allowed to testify against former Hollywood film producer and convicted sex offender Harvey Weinstein at his upcoming rape trial, but excluded testimony from actresses Rose McGowan and Daryl Hannah.

Prosecutors wanted to call 15 witnesses to testify about the producer's "prior bad acts," but the judge excluded 10 of them, reports 'Variety'.

The judge will also allow jurors to be told of Weinstein's New York conviction involving the sexual assault of Miriam Haley, though Haley will not be called to testify in LA.

Weinstein is facing 11 counts of rape and sexual assault pertaining to five alleged victims.

The prosecution wants to call the additional witnesses to show that Weinstein had a propensity to commit sex crimes.

His defence lawyer Mark Werksman argued on Wednesday that the witnesses would confuse the jury and serve merely to blacken his reputation.

"The jury will be tempted to want to punish him for all the things they heard, whether they're charged or not," Werksman argued.

Paul Thompson, the lead prosecutor, argued that it was not the DA's fault that so many women were lining up to testify against Weinstein, reports 'Variety'.

"There is one person in this courtroom who is responsible for that," he said. "That is Mr Weinstein's responsibility. Mr Weinstein is the one who committed all of these offenses against so many women over so many years." The DA's motion and the defense's opposition remain under seal. The witnesses were identified in court only by first names, though some were readily identifiable.

Werksman said the prosecution was seeking to call "Daryl".

"The prosecution intends to introduce her testimony with the inflammatory purpose of trying to suggest that this man is so despicable, he would attempt to rape America's sweetheart - the mermaid from 'Splash'," Werksman said.

Hannah has told her story to Ronan Farrow of the New Yorker, alleging that Weinstein twice pounded on her hotel room door, and that once she was forced to escape out the back.

Werksman argued that Weinstein wasn't even accused of a crime in that incident, making it irrelevant to the case.

"She's window-dressing so the jury will hate Mr Weinstein a little more than they already hate him," he said.

Werksman also referenced "Rose" saying the prosecution wanted her to testify that Weinstein had forcibly performed oral sex on her in a hotel hot tub. Thompson said the incident occurred in 1997.

McGowan was famously among Weinstein's first public accusers, alleging that Weinstein assaulted her at the Sundance Film Festival in 1997.

The judge ruled that any testimony pertaining to conduct prior to 2000 would not be allowed, thus excluding McGowan's testimony.

The issue of "prior bad acts" witnesses has been one of the most important factors in Weinstein's first trial, in New York, and in Bill Cosby's two trials in Pennsylvania. In the first Weinstein trial, three women were allowed to testify to uncharged sexual assaults.

Weinstein is now appealing his conviction - which sent him to prison for 23 years - partly on grounds that the additional testimony prejudiced the jury. An appeals court held a hearing on the matter in December, and a few of the justices appeared sympathetic to the defence argument.

Werksman referenced the New York appeal in his argument, warning that allowing too many "prior bad acts witnesses would make any conviction in LA ripe for appeal.

"This is a kamikaze run by the People," he said. "Maybe they'll blame the (DA's) appellate unit when the appeals court reverses the conviction." Thompson countered that the legislature has allowed such witnesses for a good reason, and that courts have repeatedly upheld their use in California trials.

"It's constitutional," he said. "It's permissible." The judge sought to pare down the list, allowing prosecutors to call women identified in court only as Natassia, Miss I. and Kelly S. Prosecutors will also be allowed to call two additional women, though the judge gave the DA's office the opportunity to choose those witnesses from a list of seven.

Werksman was visibly frustrated by the ruling, arguing that the prosecutors had sought a high number as a "feint," in order to make the judge's eventual ruling appear like a reasonable compromise.

"This is going to become a circus," he said. "I would beg the court to reconsider." The judge said the parties are anticipating beginning the trial in September. The next hearing was set for June 10.
New Delhi, May 12 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday appreciated the nurses for their vital role in keeping our planet healthy.

Taking to twitter on the occasion of International Nurses Day, the Prime Minister posted, "Nurses play a vital role in keeping our planet healthy. Their dedication and compassion is exemplary.

"International Nurses Day is a day to reiterate our appreciation to all nursing staff for their exceptional work even in the most challenging of situations." Union Law Minister Kiren Rijiju tweeted, "On #InternationalNursesDay, I express my deep gratitude to all the Nurses for their inspiring services and spirited fight against COVID-19."
Ulan Bator, May 12 : A total of nearly five million animals have been vaccinated against the deadly foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) across Mongolia, local media reported on Thursday, citing the country's General Authority for Veterinary Services (GAVS).

FMD is a viral infectious disease that spreads among cloven-hoofed animals such as cattle, sheep and pigs, Xinhua news agency reported.

"Almost five million cloven-hoofed animals such as cattle, pigs and reindeers have been vaccinated against FMD since Mongolia launched a month-long nationwide immunisation campaign against the infectious disease on April 18," the GAVS said in a statement.

Since the beginning of this year, over 356,800 cases of FMD have been registered in 20 of the country's 21 provinces, according to the GAVS.

Mongolia has developed a 2022-2028 strategy to fight FMD and keep livestock healthy, the GAVS said, adding that under the strategy, efforts will be intensified to support the immunity of animals susceptible to FMD. In particular, high-risk animals are expected to be vaccinated against the disease every six months.

The livestock sector is a main pillar of the Mongolian economy with nearly 70 million heads of livestock in the country as compared with its 3.4 million people.

The landlocked country is striving to develop its livestock sector by raising meat exports in a bid to diversify its mining-dependent economy.

However, frequent outbreaks of livestock animal diseases such as FMD and mad cow disease are impeding the process.
Kochi, May 12 : Congress-led UDF's star campaigner Ramesh Chennithala on Thursday exuded confidence in the party's victory in Kerala bypoll saying there is only captain in Thrikkakara - Late P.T Thomas - and not Pinarayi Vijayan.

"In Thrikkakara, there is only one captain and it's P.T.Thomas. In this 'game' here Vijayan is going to lose. Vijayan is not the captain, it's Thomas here," said Chennithala, who has been staying put at the constituency overseeing the poll campaign.

"I challenge Vijayan and wish to ask him, why has he stopped laying the marking stones of K-Rail (the now controversial pet project of Vijayan). If he is so confident, then he should have continued with the laying of the marking stones. We will be discussing the needless and destructive project K-Rail, which will sound the death knell of the state," he asserted.

His remarks come against the backdrop of several videos doing rounds in the social media with hash tag, "Captain Pinarayi".

Chennithala, the veteran Congress legislator and former Leader of Opposition, said that there is no doubt that Uma Thomas, the widow of Congress legislator P.T.Thomas, will win hands down.

gKochi, May 12 (IANS) With the election campaiging for the May 31 Kerala bypoll heating up, the Congress-led UDF, which was the first to hit the campaign trail at Thrikkakara, has once again exuded confidence in the party's victory.

If completed, the K-Rail project will see a 529.45 km corridor connecting Thiruvananthapuram to Kasaragod with semi-high speed trains covering the distance in around four hours.

Both the Congress and the BJP are up in arms against the project saying it is not needed given the massive cost which they say will be in excess of Rs 1.50 lakh crore. Besides, it would be an environmental and economic disaster and a huge burden for the next generation.

Vijayan is determined to go ahead with this project despite massive protests wherever the K-Rail officials went to lay the marking stones.

Asked about the announcement made by estranged Congress veteran K.V.Thomas that he will be campaigning for the Left candidate, Chennithala said, he only feels sympathatic for Thomas.

"I pity his present plight and position and at Thrikkakara, the impact of he campaigning for the CPI-M candidate is not going to make any impact at all," added Chennithala.

Vijayan, who has returned from the US after his medical treatment two days back, is reaching Thrikkakara on Thursday evening to give the much needed impetus for the campaign of their candidate, an interventional cardiologist Joe Joseph.

The social media being managed by the CPI-M cyber wing has come out with videos of Vijayan with the hash tag, 'Captain Pinarayi'.
Kathmandu, May 12 : A Nepali female climber scaled the world's tallest Mt. Qomolangma for the 10th time on Thursday, a record for a female mountaineer.

Lhakpa Sherpa, 48, reached the top of the 8848.86-metre-high Mt. Qomolangma from the Nepali side at 6:30 a.m, Khim Lal Gautam, a Nepali government liaison officer, told Xinhua news agency.

It is her second summit of the peak that straddles Nepal and China from the Nepali side. She completed the other feats from the Chinese side, according to Mingma Gelu Sherpa, Chief of the Seven Summit Club, which organised the expedition, Xinhua news agency reported.

"It's a pleasure to see a Nepali woman making history," he told Xinhua.

"It has conveyed the message of women's empowerment." Taking advantage of the good weather, nearly 150 climbers scaled Mt. Qomolangma on Thursday morning, according to Gautam.
Bhopal, May 12 : Three people, including a police officer, were injured when two groups clashed over a land in Madhya Pradesh's Rajgarh district, police said on Thursday.

An angry mob went on a vandalism spree, torching shops and houses. The violence occurred on Wednesday evening, it said.

District Superintendent of Police Pradeep Sharma said an angry mob damaged public and private properties. A van and two motorbikes were also set ablaze. When police reached the spot, miscreants pelted stones and shattered the glass of a police vehicle and the Khilchipur SDM's car.

Police had to fire tear gas shells to disperse the mob and called for back-up. In the wake of the violence, heavy police deployment was seen in Karedi on Thursday. The situation is tense but under control, District Collector Harsh Vikas told media.

DSP Pradeep Sharma said the entire incident was triggered when a man attacked another from a different community with an iron rod after the two had a verbal spat over a land dispute. The injured were rushed to Rajgarh District Hospital, where they are currently undergoing treatment.

"Fire tenders put out the blaze and police brought the situation under control. There was no loss of life. At least three people -- two brothers and one policeman - were injured in the stone pelting," police said.

An FIR has been lodged against both the groups. Four people -- the accused, his two sons and daughter-in-law -- have been named, while the rest are unidentified.
Washington, May 12 : A bill intended to codify abortion rights in the United States failed to advance in the Senate.

The bill was tabled in US Senate on Wednesday.

The Women's Health Protection Act, which had passed the House of Representatives, was voted down 49-51 in the upper chamber, Xinhua news agency reported.

All 50 Senate Republicans, along with one Democrat, opposed the Democratic-led effort, which requires at least 60 votes to move forward.

"This failure to act comes at a time when women's constitutional rights are under unprecedented attack," US President Joe Biden said in a statement.

Republicans have criticised the bill, saying that it went further than most Americans would want to go on abortion rights.

The vote came more than a week after a draft majority opinion leaked from the US Supreme Court suggested that it is poised to strike down Roe v. Wade.

"Roe was egregiously wrong from the start," Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the draft majority opinion, a copy of which was obtained and published by POLITICO.

"We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled," the Conservative argued.

"It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people's elected representatives." The landmark Supreme Court decision in 1973 established a constitutional right to abortion in the United States. A subsequent 1992 decision -- Planned Parenthood v. Casey -- largely maintained that right.

The Supreme Court acknowledged the authenticity of the draft, though it said the document did not represent its final position.

The high court is considering Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organisation, an appeal case that involves a Mississippi law banning all abortions over 15 weeks gestational age except in certain circumstances. A ruling is expected by the end of the court's term in late June or early July.

Several recent polls have shown that a majority of American voters support Roe v. Wade being upheld.

Democrats are trying to make abortion rights a big issue in this year's midterm elections, as Republicans are believed to have been favoured this cycle.

An abortion rights demonstration is planned for Saturday on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., according to the National Park Service.

Participants are expected to meet on the grounds of the Washington Monument at noon for a rally and then march to the Supreme Court.

Fencing has surrounded the Supreme Court since last week. Abortion rights advocates have also protested outside some justices' homes, drawing criticism from Republicans.

White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki tweeted on Monday that protests "should never include violence, threats or vandalism".

"Judges perform an incredibly important function in our society, and they must be able to do their jobs without concern for their personal safety," she said.

The US Department of Justice said on Wednesday that Attorney General Merrick Garland "continues to be briefed on security matters related to the Supreme Court and Supreme Court Justices".

"The Attorney General directed the US Marshals Service to help ensure the Justices' safety by providing additional support to the Marshal of the Supreme Court and Supreme Court Police," a statement said.
Mumbai, May 12 : TV actor Sanjay Gagnani, known for his role of Prithvi Malhotra in 'Kundali Bhagya' gives insights about his fitness regime amidst busy shooting schedule.

Sanjay says: "I love dancing and so I make sure to inculcate a dance workout in my daily routine. Since time is of the essence in careers like ours, dancing does two things at once, helps in fitness as well as relaxation." "Sometimes adding to the mix things like running, jogging, and cardio as well. Managing a busy schedule along with workouts requires inner strength and willpower to be fresh, clean, and healthy. It also depends on how you want to look and if you wish to look a certain way you will automatically work on it," he adds.

In response to how he maintains his fitness regime in the heat of the Mumbai summers, Sanjay shares: "In this extremely hot climate, I increase my water intake, I have lots of fresh fruit juices and fruits and anything that helps me stay hydrated. The best mantra for staying in shape is to eat healthy, stay away from toxic people and foods." Known for his work in many shows like 'Bairi Piya', 'Hamari Devrani', 'Encounter', 'Veera', 'Savdhaan India' and 'Halla Bol', Sanjay has also acted in two films 'Rakhtbeej' and 'Heroine'.
Lucknow, May 12 : In a surprise development, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) president Mayawati has come out in support of senior Samajwadi Party leader Mohd Azam Khan, once considered her bete noire.

Mayawati, in a series of tweets on Thursday, said his continued incarceration is being regarded as a 'strangulation of justice' by the common man.

Mayawati also hit out at the Bharatiya Janata Party government for allegedly targeting the poor, Dalits, tribals and Muslims and also harassing its political opponents.

She said, "In Uttar Pradesh and other BJP-ruled states, Muslims are being harassed by making them victims of atrocities ..." She further said, "In this sequence, the matter of continuous hateful and terror (like) action by the UP government on its opponents and keeping senior MLA Mohammad Azam Khan in jail for about two-and-a-half years is in the news which, in the eyes of the people, if not strangulating justice, then what is it?"

Mohd Azam Khan, a senior SP leader and MLA from Rampur, is currently in jail on several charges, including corruption. Khan has been lodged in the Sitapur jail for over two years.

He has got bail in 88 out of 89 cases. However, he will be released from jail only after the bail is granted in the last case.
Los Angeles, May 12 : Filmmaker Danny Boyle has revealed his James Bond movie would have been set in Russia.

Due to helm 'No Time to Die' but he dropped out of the 25th film in the iconic franchise due to "creative differences", the 'Slumdog Millionaire' director has now told how it would have seen Bond go back to his roots, reports aceshowbiz.com.

"I remember thinking, 'Should I really get involved in franchises?' Because they don't really want something different," he said.

"They want you to freshen it up a bit, but not really challenge it, and we wanted to do something different with it. Weirdly, it would have been very topical now, it was all set in Russia, which is of course where Bond came from, out of the Cold War." The 65-year-old filmmaker felt it was a "shame" he didn't get to make a Bond movie, claiming there was a loss of "confidence" over his plot idea. Speaking to Esquire UK magazine, he added: "It was set in present-day Russia and went back to his origins, and they just lost, what's the word... they just lost confidence in it. It was a shame really." This comes after Russia invaded Ukraine in February resulting in more than 3,000 civilian deaths, according to The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

In August 2018, it was confirmed Boyle had dropped out of directing Daniel Craig's last outing as 007.

Cary Fukunaga later took Boyle's place and directed Craig in 2021's 'No Time to Die'.
Lucknow, May 12 : The Yogi Adityanath government, in an attempt to boost religious tourism, is all set to revamp and renovate Naimisharanya in Sitapur and bring back its ancient glory.

Naimisharanya is a prominent centre of pilgrimage for Hindus with multiple mythological connections.

Lok Bharti, a civil society organisation, on Thursday started the fourth round of efforts for the revamp of Naimisharanya. The organisation will seek assistance from government organisations as it has been doing since 2011.

Eleven teams of volunteers have been formed to work on the plan.

The district administration of Sitapur and Hardoi and forest department have aligned with Lok Bharti in the effort to plant trees and restore ponds.

"We will take up 20 villages that lie on the 84-kosi distance and work for the revival of ponds and ancient sources of groundwater there," said Brijendra Pal Singh from Lok Bharti.

"The organisations will dig ponds and seek assistance from the government under the Centre's Amrit Sarovar scheme. The other initiative will be to revive the Chitwa river which has dried up," said Singh, adding that it covers a distance of 29 km and flows through 20 villages.

It has a slope of 21 metres which will be rectified to conserve rainwater. Farmers in the villages will be encouraged for cow-based organic farming, which will lead to water conservation.

Naimisharanya has sage's blessings. Legend has it that after Sage Dadhichi gave away all his bones, he invoked the pilgrimage sites and that's how Naimisharanya got them. The place has 10 teerths (pilgrimages).
Panaji, May 12 : The Goa Police will seek criminal record of a person, who is an accused in the rape of a 12-year-old Russian girl at a resort in Arambol, from their Karnataka counterpart.

The accused, Ravi Lamani (28), was working as a room attendant in the resort, where the incident took place on May 6.

Vikram Naik, Police Inspector of Pernem police station, told IANS that the accused Ravi Lamani was arrested by a team of Pernem police on May 10 in Karnataka's Gadag.

Responding to a query whether the accused has a criminal record, Naik said that it is the first case registered against him at Pernem Police station, however they will seek a report from the Karnataka Police. "We will definitely contact the police from Gadag-Karnataka to check if the accused has any criminal record in the past," he said.

Lamani had fled to his native place after the incident.

He informed that the mother of the victim had lodged a complaint that her minor daughter was sexually assaulted in the swimming pool of the resort and later inside the hotel room by the accused, on the same day they had checked into the resort.

The Goa Police informed that the victim's mother had gone to market, leaving her daughter alone in the resort, before the incident took place.

The Pernem police has registered a case against Lamani under section 376 (rape) IPC, section 8 of the Goa Children's Act and section of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.
Bhopal, May 12 : The ongoing physical test for police recruitment has been postponed till June 2 in view of scorching heat in Madhya Pradesh. An announcement was made by the state Home Minister Narottam Mishra on Thursday.

This decision came a day after an aspirant appearing in the physical efficiency test for the post of constables (GD and radio) died in Jabalpur. An official spokesperson in Madhya Pradesh Police Headquarters told IANS that the physical efficiency test for affected aspirants will be rescheduled from June 6.

"Physical efficiency test scheduled between June 3 and June 5 will continue, whereas the candidates, whose physical test will be affected due to postponement, will be rescheduled from June 6. Candidates will be informed about their turn for the physical test in advance," said Ashish Sharma, a spokesperson in the MP Police.

On Wednesday, a candidate -- Narendra Kumar Goutam, resident of Seoni district, died after finishing the 800-metre race during a physical test in Jabalpur. According to the officials, Goutama fell down soon after finishing the race. The onlookers noticed that he was facing difficulty in breathing. He was taken to the Ranjhi hospital and later was shifted to Victoria hospital and then to Jabalpur hospital. Later in the evening, he died in the hospital.

Indar Kumar, another aspirant faced a similar situation on Tuesday. After completing the 800-metre race, he sat on a chair and fell unconscious. As per the official information, Kumar started bleeding from nose and mouth.

"He was rushed to the hospital and sensing the urgency a green corridor was created and he was transported to Jabalpur hospital. He is still recovering in the hospital," official said.

Online examination was conducted by Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board Bhopal from January 8 to February 17 for the recruitment of 6,000 posts of constable (GD) and constable (radio).

The results were declared on the website www.peb.mp.gov.in on March 24.
Seoul, May 12 : Outgoing South Korean Prime Minister, Kim Boo-kyum on Thursday appealed for dialogue and compromise to address challenges, including political divisions and economic inequalities, as he formally left office.

Kim formally stepped down two days after President Yoon Suk-yeol took office, amid uncertainties over whether Yoon's nominee for Prime Minister, Han Duck-soo, would be approved in the opposition-controlled National Assembly.

Finance Minister Choo Kyung-ho, who doubles as Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs, is expected to serve as acting Prime Minister, Yonhap news agency reported.

"Dialogue, compromise, coexistence and co-prosperity are the fundamental values of a democratic republic and the spirit that the community of the Republic of Korea needs most," Kim said in a retirement ceremony.

Kim called for the nation to "become a warm community where we live together." Yoon has formally asked the National Assembly to approve Han, but the ruling People Power Party (PPP) and the main opposition Democratic Party (DP) on Wednesday failed to agree on a date to hold a plenary session for Han's confirmation.

In South Korea, the Prime Minister is the only Cabinet post that requires parliamentary approval.

A parliamentary confirmation hearing committee of the DP has declared Han as "unqualified," citing his post-retirement career at a law firm and other suspicions of irregularities.
New Delhi, May 12 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi will virtually launch the 'Madhya Pradesh Startup Policy' on Friday, May 13.

He will address the startup community during the Madhya Pradesh Startup Conclave being held in Indore on Friday.

The Prime Minister will also launch the Madhya Pradesh Startup portal, which will facilitate and help promote the startup ecosystem.

In a statement, the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) said that the conclave will witness participation of various pillars of the startup ecosystem including policy makers from government and private sector, innovators, entrepreneurs, academicians, investors, mentors and other stakeholders.

The conclave will witness a variety of sessions, including speed mentoring session, where startups will have dialogue with leaders of educational institutions and startup space; how to start startup session, where startups will be guided by policymakers; funding session, where entrepreneurs will learn about various funding methods; pitching session, where startups will get opportunity to collaborate with investors and put forth their ideas for funding; and ecosystem support session, where participants will learn about brand value and about promoting startup ecosystem in the state.

A Startup Expo displaying new trends and innovations will also be displayed at the venue.
Chennai, May 12 : A leopard's carcass was found at Valparai in Anamalai Tiger Reserve (ATR), Tamil Nadu on Thursday morning.

Usman, a tea shop owner at Valparai, found the carcass in the morning when he went to check his henhouse and informed the forest officials.

Forest officials told IANS that the animal would have died of shock after its forearm got stuck in the mesh of the henhouse.

Deputy Director of Anamalai Tiger Reserve (ATR), D. Ganesh told IANS that there were no external injuries on the body. He said: "There are no external injuries on the body of the leopard. Its teeth and claw are intact." He said that the actual cause of its death would be ascertained only after a post-mortem which will be conducted as per the protocol of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA).

On Wednesday, the carcass of a wild tusker was found at the Coimbatore forest division while a special forest team was on patrol.
New Delhi, May 12 : Chaos ruled Madanpur Khadar area of the national capital on Thursday as the Municipal Corporation carried out the demolition drive.

As per latest reports, the people have resorted to stone pelting on the police personnel and para-military forces. To contain the situation, the police also used mild force.

Earlier, Aam Aadmi Party MLA Amanatullah Khan reached the spot where people were protesting against the Municipal Corporation officials.

While speaking to the media, Khan accused the civic agency of demolishing the houses of poor people.

"You said that you will remove encroachments. I am with you in this. But you are demolishing poor people's houses. There is not a single encroachment in this area," the AAP MLA said.

The situation is extremely volatile in the area. There is heavy deployment of police and paramilitary.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Seoul, May 12 : President Yoon Suk-yeol appointed Foreign Minister Park Jin and Interior Minister Lee Sang-min on Thursday, a presidential official said, amid a delay in their parliamentary confirmation process.

The appointments will help meet the quorum for Yoon's first Cabinet meeting set for later in the day, Yonhap news agency reported.

Park is a lawmaker of the ruling People Power Party, and Lee is a former Vice Chief of the Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission.
Navi Mumbai, May 12 : Delhi Capitals' left-arm pacer Chetan Sakariya said taking the wicket of Rajasthan Royals' opener Jos Buttler in Wednesday's match at the DY Patil Stadium was a big thing for him.

Sakariya had been drafted into the playing eleven as fellow left-arm seamer Khaleel Ahmed had a hamstring injury.

Pushed into batting first, Buttler was kept quiet by Sakariya's left-arm pace. Eventually, Sakariya got him out when the Englishman hit one coming in straight to mid-on off a thick inner edge.

Sakariya was the standout pacer for Delhi, picking 2/23 alongside Mitchell Marsh (2/25) and Anrich Nortje (2/38) in restricting Rajasthan to 160/6, giving away just 53 runs in the last six overs while picking four wickets.

"It felt really good to contribute to the team's victory. I enjoyed dismissing Jos Buttler as he has been in terrific form and taking his wicket was a big thing for me. I executed my plans well and I am happy with my overall performance," said Sakariya in an official release by the franchise on Thursday.

In reply, Delhi chased down 161 with 11 balls to spare, thanks to a 144-run stand between Mitchell Marsh (89 off 62 balls) and David Warner (52 not out off 41 balls). Nortje thinks the much-needed win over Rajasthan will propel Delhi to win their remaining matches in the league stage to seal a playoffs spot.

"We needed a win at this stage of the tournament and hopefully, we can carry forward this momentum into our next two games. Warner and Marsh batted really well. They absorbed the pressure in the beginning and then took that momentum into the latter part of the innings." Delhi's next match is against Punjab Kings at the DY Patil Stadium on Monday. Sakariya stressed upon light thinking and relaxation as ways to keep themselves calm ahead of the match against the Mayank Agarwal-led side.

"We will try to stay as relaxed as possible as we go into the next game. It's not good to think too much. We will look to enjoy a few light moments for now and get focused on our upcoming game as we get closer to it." Nortje feels that the players will focus on executing their skills well without worrying about the end result as the race to playoffs heats up. "You get used to these kinds of situations and you just focus on what you have to do. We have to think about what we have to execute and just go out and do it without worrying about the outcome."
Chennai, May 12 : The insurance regulations in India are set for a major overhaul with the two industry bodies likely to hire a consultancy firm to recommend regulatory changes, said senior industry officials.

The two industry bodies are - Life Insurance Council and General Insurance Council.

Industry officials told IANS preferring anonymity that the new Chairman of the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) Debasish Panda at his meeting with the sectoral officials had said the two Councils should turn vibrant.

It is learnt Panda had told them that the Insurance Information Bureau (IIB) should ideally be part of the Councils as it collects the data from the industry to come out with research reports.

Similarly, the Institute of Insurance and Risk Management (IIRM) should also be part of the industry and not that of the regulator.

A media statement from IRDAI had said: "It was proposed to revamp the role and functioning of the Life Insurance and General Insurance Councils, to make them more vibrant bodies. Role of Insurance Information Bureau of India (IIB) in supporting data and tech-driven insurance solutions was also discussed." "To take these ideas forward and also come out with recommendations for overhaul of the regulations, the two Councils may have to hire a consultancy firm," officials told IANS.

The consultancy fee would be shared by both the Councils.

"How the fee would be shared by the members of the Councils-insurers- has to be seen. Whether it would be shared in the ratio of their gross premium or equally will have to be decided," a senior industry official told IANS.

Already several groups have been formed in the life/non-life/reinsurance to study the existing regulations and come out with recommendations on them.

IRDAI Chairman Panda had told the insurers that every Indian should have a life insurance policy; every family a health insurance family and every bread winner should have an accident insurance policy.

At its meeting with the industry officials, IRDAI said it had displayed firm commitment to carry out reforms which will lead to the objective of "Insurance for all" by 2047.

"These reforms, among others, include promoting ease of doing business by encouraging new insurance players, allowing niche players in insurance, relaxing renewal norms for intermediaries," product certification by insurers, time-bound approvals, administrative flexibility, fast-track approvals for investment proposals, facilitating InsurTech and distribution agility," IRDAI had said.

The IRDAI also has plans to make the regulations lighter and reduce the compliance burden on the insurers.

"Additionally, the need for risk based capital and solvency, convergence to Ind-AS, rationalising expenses of management, developing talent pool, updating investment norms and sustainable growth of industry were also deliberated," IRDAI said after its meeting with industry officials.

The two councils may soon come out with a request for proposal for interested consultancy firms to bid for the project.

(Venkatachari Jagannathan can be reached at v.jagannathan@ians.in)
Kolkata, May 12 : West Bengal government is heading for bifurcation of several existing districts in the state, hinted Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee here on Thursday.

The state at present has 23 districts.

"Look at our neighbouring state of Bihar, which has 38 districts. In West Bengal, we have so many big districts which need bifurcation to expedite administrative efficiency. So, in future, the current number of 23 districts might be increased to 46," the chief minister said. She was addressing the annual general meeting of the West Bengal Civil Service (Executive) Officers' Association at the newly inaugurated Kolkata's iconic town hall here.

According to her, the bifurcation and increase in the number of districts is extremely necessary to improve the promotion avenues of the West Bengal Civil Service (WBCS) officers, which in her words are the "state's own officers".

"The WBCS officers are the state's own officers. So, it is the duty of the state government to give priority to them. If more districts are created, we can give important postings to WBCS officers and their avenues for promotion to the ranks of additional district magistrates, district magistrates, deputy secretaries and additional secretaries should increase,' the chief minister said.

Speaking on the occasion, the chief minister also targeted the Union government for not allocating enough Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers to the state. "In 2011, when we came to power, the total number of IAS officers in the state was just 314. The situation has improved now with the number rising to 378. Still there is a huge shortfall which is often a hurdle for running the administration more smoothly," the chief minister said.

She once again attacked the Centre for releasing the dues of the state government on account of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). "Because of these dues, often payments of wages under MGNREGA are getting stuck or delayed. As it is, the people are suffering due to massive increase in the prices of essential commodities. Lives of people become further miserable if they do not get payment for the work done," the chief minister said.
Panaji, May 12 : Goa Leader of Opposition Michael Lobo on Thursday accused state Town and Country Planning Minister Vishwajit Rane of "personally targetting" him over alleged tree cutting and land filling for a land development project in North Goa.

Days after a first information report was filed at the Mapusa police station by officials of the Town and Country Planning department against Lobo for illegally developing a tract of land, Lobo has said that he was developing the area for farming purposes.

"He is personally targetting me, which is not right in politics. I am a businessman before I could become an MLA. Now he has already filed a case, where I have shown that the land is being used for farm purposes," Lobo told reporters.

The FIR was filed against Lobo and his wife Delilah, also a Congress MLA, last week.

"It is nothing but vindictive politics. I have explained to the CM. He is quiet about it. Opposition MLAs are being targetted," Lobo also said.

Incidentally, Lobo was a BJP MLA and a Minister for Ports in the last BJP-led coalition government. But he quit the party ahead of the 2022 state Assembly polls, before joining the Congress on election eve.
New Delhi, May 12 : The involvement of the local Kashmiri youths in various terror outfits has been a major concern for the security forces in Jammu and Kashmir, however a substantial decrease in the numbers was recorded this year as only 28 youths joined the terrorist camps till May 8.

According to sources in the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), as many as 142 local youths joined these outfits in 2021 while the figure was 181 in 2020.

The CRPF also said that 187 local Kashmiris were hired by the militant organisations in 2018 which declined to 121 in 2019. However, when Article 370 was abrogated, the number again shot up to 181 in 2020.

Sources also said that the number of foreign terrorists active in J&K has substantially declined in the past two years while the number of local terrorists has increased in the last two years.

They also admitted that earlier the foreign terrorists used to constitute 60 to 70 per cent of the total number of ultras active in Jammu and Kashmir, but in the past two years the situation has changed.

The CRPF sources also said that nearly 163 terrorists are believed to be currently active on the ground, 85 are foreign terrorists and 78 are local Kashmiri recruits who have joined these outfits recently.

Considering it as an achievement, the officials in the force said that earlier the number of active ultras used to be 350 to 360. The number has decreased because of the sustained and coordinated anti-terror operations by the security forces in the J&K.

They also informed that as many as 71 terrorists have been neutralised so far and out of these 19 were foreign terrorists and 52 were the local terror recruits.
Colombo, May 12 : A Sri Lankan court on Thursday banned former Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa and 15 others, including his son, MPs and senior police officers from leaving the country, for instigating Monday's violence that killed nine people and injured over 300.

Colombo's Magistrate court issued the travel ban on Mahinda Rajapaksa, his son MP Namal, and 14 others who participated in Monday's meeting with his supporters who later carried out violent attacks on peaceful protesters in front of his house and his President's office.

The Attorney General Sanjaya Rajarantam, who has directed the Inspector General of Police (IGP) to investigate the violent attacks on peaceful protesters, had informed the courts to impose a ban on the former PM and others.

Mahinda Rajapaksa, his son and others, who were present at the meeting, need to be present in Sri Lanka for the ongoing investigations on the attacks as they were suspected to have conspired and planned the attacks.

The pro-Rajapaksa supporters, who protested against Rajapaska leaving his post were later armed with clubs, poles and iron bars, had attacked the protesters.

The protesters had been camping for more than a month demanding the Rajapaksas to leave amid a severe economic crisis.

Among others against whom the travel ban has been imposed were former ministers -- Pavithra Wanniarachchi, Kanchana Jayaratne, Rohitha Abeygunawardena, Sanath Nishantha, other MPs and senior DIG Deshabandu Thennakoon.

Latest updates on Srilankan Crisis

-- Except for the title, this story has not been edited by Prokerala team and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed
Lahore, May 12 : A Pakistani Anti-Terrorism Court (ATC) has sentenced atleast 22 accused to five years of imprisonment each for allegedly attacking a Hindu temple in Punjab province in 2021.

In July 2021, miscreants allegedly attacked the Ganesh temple at Bhong city of Rahim Yar Khan district in Punjab province with sticks, bamboos and weapons.

The angry mob allegedly assaulted the security guard, damaged idols, walls, doors and electric fittings and set part of the temple ablaze, desecrating the holy Hindu temple.

The mob attack was triggered in response to desecration of a Muslim seminary by an eight-year-old Hindu boy.

At least 84 suspected persons, who attacked the Hindu temple were taken into custody during September 2021, and a case was registered in the ATC in Bahawalpur of Punjab province.

As per details, Bahawalpur ATC judge, Nazir Hussain, announced the judgment in the case.

"The judge handed down imprisonment of five years each to at least 22 suspects while acquitting the remaining 62 people on benefit of doubt," confirmed a court official.

"The court handed out the punishment to 22 accused persons after the prosecution presented the relevant evidence in the form of footages and witnesses who testified against them," the official added.

The matter was also taken up by the Pakistan government, which had already announced a compensation of Rs one million from the alleged suspects. This was done as per orders of the same court.

The government had also announced immediate restoration of the Ganesh temple, which was complied to, and the temple was restored at the expense of the government.

The former Pakistan Chief Justice, Gulzar Ahmed had taken notice of the incident and regretted that vandalism of Ganesh temple had brought shame to the country.

He also expressed disappointment over the local police, who he said, did nothing to stop the violent mob from attacking the Hindu temple.

"Imagine what mental agony the desecration incident had brought to the members of the Hindu community," Ahmed said.

The incident was also condemned as a resolution was unanimously adopted against it.
Kathmandu, May 12 : Indian climber Baljeet Kaul has climbed her second 8000m mountain Kanchenjunga, the world's third highest peak on Thursday morning just within two weeks, according to a media report.

Baljeet Kaur, from Himachal Pradesh summited Mt. Kanchenjunga at 04.20 a.m. with her guide Mingma Sherpa, said Pasang Sherpa of Peak Promotion Pvt Ltd, according to Himalayan Times Daily.

"She has arrived at Camp III and is now descending as she is expected to arrive at the base camp today evening," Sherpa said.

She has also climbed Mt. Annapurna I on April 28, 2022. This is her second 8000m+ mountain this season, according to Sherpa. "This season, she is attempting Everest and Lhotse as well," he added.

Meanwhile, a climbing guide, who was suffering from severe high altitude sickness, died while undergoing treatment in Kathmandu on Thursday morning.

Dipak Mahat from, who fell ill at Camp II on Mt Everest on Monday, was evacuated to Kathmandu for treatment on Tuesday morning, according to the local hospital authorities in Kathmandu.

Doctors attending Mahat at the Kathmandu-based HAMS hospital pronounced him dead on Thursday morning, according to the expedition organizer.

This season, three climbers, including a foreigner, have already died in the Everest region. A woman climber scaled the world's highest peak, becoming the first Nepali female doctor to successfully scale Mt Everest this season.
New Delhi, May 12 : India on Thursday relaxed the waiting period for Covid-19 vaccine precaution dose for those travelling abroad, allowing them to get the jab before the stipulated nine months, as per the rules of their destination country.

"Indian citizens & students travelling overseas can now take the precaution dose as required by the guidelines of the destination country," said Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya in a tweet on Thursday. He also said that the new facility will be available soon on the CoWIN portal.

The decision to relax the guidelines for the Covid precaution dose for overseas travellers was taken on the recommendations made by the National Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (NTAGI).

The NTAGI, in its recent meeting, had recommended the precaution doses of Covid vaccines be administered before 9 months for those who are travelling abroad as per the receiving country's needs. At present, there is a nine month gap for the administration of precaution doses after the second dose.

India began administering precaution doses of vaccines to healthcare and frontline workers and 60 plus population from January 10 this year. All those above 18 years of age were allowed to get the precaution doses after the completion of 9 months of their second doses from April 10 onwards.

Meanwhile, as of Thursday morning, India's Covid-19 vaccination coverage exceeded 190.83 crore which has been achieved via 2,38,04,573 sessions. Over 3.10 crore adolescents have also been administered with a first dose of Covid-19 jab since the beginning of vaccination drive for this age bracket.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- Except for the title, this story has not been edited by Prokerala team and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed
Hyderabad, May 12 : In a horrific incident, a man raped a tribal woman even after she died while resisting his sexual assault.

A construction worker committed the heinous crime at Choutuppal near Hyderabad on Monday night but was arrested by police on Wednesday.

According to police, E. Harish Goud raped and brutally killed the 28-year-old tribal woman working in a brick kiln warehouse at Choutuppal in Yadadri Bhuvanagiri district, about 40 km from Hyderabad.

Finding the victim alone in the warehouse, the accused sought sexual favours. When she refused and threatened to reveal this to her husband, he tried to sexually assault her. As she resisted, he hit her on the face with a log, resulting in bleeding injury.

Police investigations revealed that though the victim succumbed to the assault, he still raped her. After committing the act, he robbed the silver articles she was wearing and escaped.

When the victim's husband reached the warehouse, he found her in a pool of blood. He informed the police, which registered a case and took up investigation.

According to Assistant Commissioner of Police, N. Uday Reddy, the couple, belonging to Nagarkurnool district, had migrated to Choutuppal for livelihood and were working as guards at the warehouse for the past two months.

The accused, hailing from Sangareddy district, was working at a dairy beside it. As the victim's husband was working at a college nearby, she used to be alone in the warehouse. Taking advantage of this, Goud tried to sexually rape her. When she resisted, he battered her face with a log, resulting in her death. The accused confessed to the crime when police picked up and questioned him.

The 25-year-old has been booked for rape, robbery and murder. Chouttuppal police registered a case under various sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.

The accused was produced before a court, which sent him to judicial custody.
New Delhi, May 12 : A day after being arrested in a PMLA case, Jharkhand mining secretary Pooja Singhal was suspended from the Indian Administrative Services (IAS).

The action against her was taken by the Department of Personnel and Training.

Singhal is presently in five-day ED's custody in connection with alleged embezzlement of MGNREGA funds in Jharkhand.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) is scanning her last three years' transactions to check the suspicious money trail if any. The agency is also scanning all her properties.

Earlier four cars belonging to her Chartered Accountant Suman Kumar was seized. The source said that someone else had made the payments for the luxury cars, which was suspicious. Kumar was arrested by the agency on Saturday.

Cash of around Rs 19 crore was recovered during the raids by the ED. It is said that it was Singhal's money. The ED will try to know from where this cash came from.

Chartered Accountant Kumar, who worked for Singhal and her husband, was placed under arrest on Saturday following several raids. Kumar was then sent to five days ED's custody.

The ED had last week recovered Rs 19.31 crore and a few incriminating documents from the premises of Kumar.

Kumar, a CA of IAS official and mining secretary of Jharkhand Pooja Singhal, came on the radar during the course of investigation. Kumar also handled the accounts of Singhal's husband.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) had on last week conducted raids at more than 18 places -- Ranchi, Chandigarh, Noida, Mumbai, Kollata, Muzaffarpur, Saharsa, and in several parts of NCR, including Faridabad and Gurugram.
Lucknow, May 12 : The Allahabad High Court's Lucknow bench on Thursday dismissed the petition seeking opening of 22 rooms in the Taj Mahal premises.

The two-judge bench ripped into the petitioner who sought opening of the 22 locked rooms, stating that the truth about the iconic monument needs to come out, and that he has filed multiple PILs for the same.

"Tomorrow you will ask for permission to see our chambers. Please, don't make mockery of the PIL system," the bench said during the hearing.

The writ petition, seeking to "find the truth" behind the 22 locked rooms in the Taj Mahal, was filed last week before the Lucknow bench by Rajneesh Singh, who is the media in-charge of the BJP's Ayodhya unit.

The petition cited the claims of some historians and Hindu groups about the mausoleum actually being an old Shiva temple. The petition has sought the Archaeological Survey of India form a special committee to examine the locked rooms and release the report to the public.

Singh said that the demand is not to make the Taj Mahal a temple but to bring out the truth of the matter for the sake of social harmony. He said that the only way to end such controversy is by examining closed rooms.

Justices D.K. Upadhyay and Subhash Vidyarthi questioned the petitioner on what his plea is. Pointing out that the petitioner wants the court to issue a writ of mandamus, they stated it can only be issued in case of infringement of rights.

"What judgment do you want us to pronounce? Who built the Taj Mahal? Don't go into historical facts... Mandamus can only be issued when rights have been infringed. What rights of yours have been infringed?" the bench asked.

The petitioner said he is asking for a fact-finding committee to be constituted to get to the bottom of the issue and reiterated his demand to be allowed access to the 22 rooms as the "truth" needs to emerge about the Taj Mahal. Citizens need to know why multiple rooms in the monument are said to be locked due to "security reasons", he said.

The bench responded sharply, saying: "Who are you asking the information from? If you are not satisfied that the rooms have been closed for security reasons, use your remedies in law to challenge that. Do some research first -- do MA, Ph.D, enroll yourself somewhere. Don't make a mockery of this." Several right-wing organisations claim Taj Mahal to be Tejo Mahalaya, a Hindu temple.
Shivamogga, : May 12 (IANS) Karnataka police on Thursday arrested two men on Thursday for allegedly stripping and attempting to rape a Dalit woman in Araga village near Thirthahalli town in Shivamogga district.

The incident, which came to light recently. has shocked the state, since it had taken place in the native village of Karnataka Home Minister Araga Jnanendra.

Thirthahalli police arrested Adarsh and Sampath, who were hiding in Shirasi town of Uttara Kannada district and launched a hunt for the other two accused who are at large.

As per a complaint, the incident took place when the victim had gone to Thirthahalli to visit a hospital with her husband late on Monday night. While returning, the four accused rammed the bike on them and unleashed brutality.

The woman has stated that after being hit by the bike, her husband lost consciousness as he suffered a head injury. The accused, who were inebriated, then stripped the woman. On hearing her cries for help, locals rushed to the spot and rescued the couple.

Shivamogga SP Lakshmiprasad has stated that on the basis of the complaint, an FIR had been lodged against four persons. The police have clamped IPC Section 341 (wrongful restraint), 323 (voluntarily causing hurt), 353 (assault to deter public servant from discharging duty), 354a (assault or criminal force to woman with intent to outrage her modesty), 354b (assault or use of criminal force to woman with intent to disrobe), 506 (criminal intimidation) and the Atrocity Act. He maintained that the police department has formed a special team and the accused would be arrested soon.

However, sources said that the preliminary investigation suggested that the incident had taken place when the victim had gone to a wine shop with her husband. The youths who objected to bringing the woman to the liquor shop assaulted her husband and allegedly stripped her.

Both the victim and her husband were treated in a hospital in Thirthahalli town. The police are verifying the charges of attempt to rape and stripping the woman.

Further investigation is on.
Chennai, May 12 : Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin has urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Justice of India N.V. Ramana to ensure that the judiciary also reflect the spirit of Co-operative Federalism enshrined in our Constitution.

Stalin in a letter to Modi and Ramana said certain important aspects relating to the higher judiciary - like setting up of regional benches of the apex court, having judicial diversity and proportional representation of the states in judicial bench and the use of Tamil as the official language of the Madras High Court - needs to be addressed early.

Referring to the appointments of judges of High Court and Supreme Court, Stalin said it should reflect the diverse and pluralistic society of India.

"For the past few years, we have been witnessing declining representation from all the sections of the society in the higher judiciary, leading to a 'diversity deficit'," Stalin said.

"A broad based, heterogeneous group of Judges representing various sections of the society as a whole alone can reflect the views and values of society as a whole, particularly on issues involving historical, traditional, linguistic and cultural matters," he said.

According to Stalin, all the States must find proportional representation on the Bench of the Supreme Court.

The Chief Minister said establishment of Permanent Regional Benches of the Supreme Court is another issue that would reflect the federal character of India.

"Considering the fact that the Supreme Court is located at New Delhi (which is not equidistant to all parts of the country) and is far away from many States, particularly the Southern, South Western & Eastern States, the citizens in these States are deprived of their fundamental right to approach the Court," Stalin said.

"While there are 25 High Courts across the nation, it is seen from data that the number of appeals being filed in the Supreme Court is more from States around the NCR region than States located further away from Delhi," Stalin added.

He said the Constituent Assembly Debates show that even the framers of the Constitution, as early as 1950, recognised that the Supreme Court would need to have branches in other parts of the country as the nation grows. That is why in Article 130, the Constitution permits the Court to sit in other places in the country.

"Therefore, I request you to take appropriate steps to establish Permanent Regional Benches of the Supreme Court in New Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai, apart from the Constitution Bench in New Delhi, so that the citizens in other parts of this vast country have equal access to the Supreme Court," Stalin said.

Recalling Ramana's words "judicial proceedings cannot be like chanting of mantras in a wedding that nobody understands" at a function held here, Stalin said making law and justice comprehensible to the common man in its proceedings is essential in the justice delivery system.

"In four High Courts - Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, Hindi has been authorised as the official language in addition to English. One therefore wonders, what is the impediment to make the official language of other States the official language of the High Court, in addition to English?" Stalin said.

He requested the Prime Minister and the CJI to take appropriate steps to declare Tamil, the official language of the Government of Tamil Nadu, as the official language of the High Court of Judicature at Madras and its Bench at Madurai, in addition to English.
New Delhi, May 12 : The Enforcement Directorate has carried out search operations at various offices and residential premises of former Odisha MLA Jitendra Nath Patnaik and related entities at Bhubaneswar and Keonjhar district in connection with a Prevention of Money Laundering case.

Patnaik, a former MLA of Champua constituency, allegedly derived undue pecuniary advantage by way of illegal mining without necessary approvals.

The ED has seized Rs 70 lakh cash and 124 fixed deposits amounting to Rs 133.17 crore during the search operations. Few incriminating documents and digital evidences were also recovered by the agency in the course of operation.

The agency initiated this investigation on the basis of FIR and charge sheet filed by the state vigilance cell of Odisha against Patnaik and others. As per the charge sheet, the accused indulged in illegal mining for a long time causing a huge loss to the government exchequer which exceeds Rs 130 crore. Thus, the ED has been able to recover almost the entire proceeds of crime.
MOGADISHU, Sept. 18, 2016(Xinhua) -- Somali security force members investigate a suicide attack scene in Mogadishu, Somalia, Sept. 18, 2016. A senior Somali military commander and seven of his bodyguards were killed on Sunday in a suicide car bomb at Image Source: IANS News

Mogadishu, May 12 : Somali security forces killed 17 al-Shabab terrorists and wounded several others during security operations in the southern region, officials said on Thursday.

The Somalia National Army (SNA) told Radio Mogadishu that the security operation which was carried out by its special forces, Danab, also saw nine of al-Shabab hideouts destroyed in southern and southwestern states on Wednesday.

"Seventeen al-Shabab terrorists were killed and nine of their hideouts destroyed in special security operations carried out by SNA commanders in Somalia's Jubaland and southwest states in the past 24 hours," the radio reported.

The government forces have stepped up operation against al-Shabab blamed for staging sporadic attacks targeting African Union and government key bases, including public places in Mogadishu and elsewhere across the country, Xinhua news agency reported.

The intensified operation also comes ahead of the long-delayed presidential elections to be held in the capital Mogadishu on Sunday.

Al-Shabab militants, who have opposed the ongoing electoral process have staged a series of attacks, targeting delegates in bid to disrupt the electoral process.
Tumakur : , May 12 (IANS) The Tumakuru district administration in Karnataka is worried over villagers choosing to sacrifice ox instead of buffalo to appease deities.

The new law in effect regarding animal sacrifice was passed in December last year. It bans the slaughter of cows, calves of a cow and bull, bullock of all ages, and buffalo under the age of 13 years.

The move has caused concern as the ban on animal sacrifice is intended to create awareness about cruelty against any creature. However, the villagers who have been sacrificing animals to deities for hundreds of years are adamant on continuing with the practice.

The villagers of Bellibatlu village in Tumakuru district have sacrificed oxen instead of buffaloes. According to the Tehsildar of Pavagada, Varadaraju, the authorities will gather information regarding the sacrifices in the village and submit a report to the District Commissioner for further action.

Meanwhile, villagers expressed anger over the controversy surrounding sacrifice of oxen to deities. They claimed that throughout the Pavagada taluk, animals are ritualistically sacrificed for the worship of Shakti deities.

They added that since sacrificing ox has been prevelent throughout the taluk for a month, there is no need to highlight the issue, underlining that this has been a tradition since ages.

In Bellibatlu village, oxen were sacrificed for the Chowdeshwari deity as the ancient temple was being renovated. As per tradition, goats, rams, and buffaloes are sacrificed ritualistically.

In 2007, the practice of sacrificing buffalos was objected and a complaint was lodged with the district administration.

The villagers said that the District Commissioner had then banned buffalo sacrifice and suggested they sacrifice any other animal. The elders started sacrificing ox since then.

However, some villagers raised a complaint in this regard again on May 9 with the District Commissioner and Superintendent of Police, appealing for prevention of ox sacrifice.
Seoul, May 12 : North Korea fired an unspecified ballistic missile toward the East Sea on Thursday, the South Korean military said, in its latest saber-rattling just two days after the inauguration of South Korean President, Yoon Suk-yeol.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff announced the launch, the North's 16th show of force this year. Other details were not immediately available, Yonhap news agency reported.

The latest launch came after North Korea fired an apparent submarine-launched ballistic missile on Saturday and what was thought to be an intercontinental ballistic missile on May 4.
Srinagar, May 12 : A Kashmiri Pandit government employee was shot and injured by militants on Thursday in Jammu and Kashmir's Budgam district.

"An employee of the revenue department identified as Rahul Bhat was shot and injured by militants at the Tehsil office in Budgam district," a police officer said.

He sustained grievous injuries and has been shifted to a hospital in Srinagar.

"The area has been surrounded for searches," sources said.
Gandhinagar, May 12 : OBC leader and former MLA Alpesh Thakor's recent statements can't be ignored. If read between the lines, it seems that Thakor is unhappy in the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Recently while attending a mass-marriage function organised by the Gujarat Thakor Sena, Alpesh Thakor said, "I am going to contest the Radhanpur Assembly seat (Patan district). If any one tries to oust me, I will ensure that those leaders too don't get chance to contest the elections." His remarks were directed at former MLA and BJP leader Lavingji Thakor, who is a contender for the seat in the run-up to the Assembly elections scheduled at the end of this year.

Alpesh Thakor also said, "The state government has failed to strictly implement prohibition." Playing down the controversy, Alpesh Thakor told IANS that some party leaders are playing dirty politics and instead of uniting the Koli Thakor community, they are dividing it.

His statements were message to such leaders, and he has no intention of quitting the party, Alpesh Thakor said.

Alpesh Thakor had won from Radhanpur in 2017 on Congress ticket. In 2019, he quit the Congress and joined the BJP. He had contested bypolls from Radhanpur in October 2019, but lost to Congress' Raghubhai Desai.

Refuting Alpesh Thakor, Lavingji Thakor claimed that if there was any substance in what the former said, people would not have elected him as an Independent MLA from Radhanpur in 1995. He also claimed that he is a local leader, whereas Alpesh Takor is a native of Ahmedabad district.

After 1995, Lavingji Thakor contested from Radhanpur thrice, once each on the ticket of All India Rashtriya Janata Party, Congress and BJP, but lost on all three occasions.

In fact, Radhanpur is a curious constituency. Barring Congress' Khodidan Zula (1975, 1980 and 1985) and Shankar Chaudhary of the BJP (1998, 2002, 2007), no other leader has ever got re-elected from this seat.

Even veteran leader and former Chief Minister Shankarsinh Vaghela, who won the bypolls here in 1997, never contested from Radhanpur again.

For the last few months, there were rumours that the Gujarat Kshatriya Thakor Sena is searching for a safe seat for Alpesh Thakor, who though claims that the outfit launched by him has presence in 176 talukas.

"Gujarat Thakor Sena has around 9,200 committees, and at least 50 families in each village with whom I have direct contact. So the question does not arise of looking for a safe seat," he said.

The OBC leader has also claimed that he is not just leader of Thakors or the OBC community, but members of other communities as well.

"Under my leadership, Patidars have formed the Patidar Sena in 76 villages of Karamsad Taluka, while Patels from Saurashtra also attend my public meetings in large numbers," he claimed.

There is no doubt that Alpesh Thakor can influence voters from his community and change the results where Thakors are in dominance, feels Suresh Vanol, senior journalist from Mehsana district.

Vanol said the party did not call Alpesh Thakor to campaign for one seat in Satlasana Taluka panchayat elections which it lost. Even in Gandhinagar municipal elections, the BJP had asked Alpesh Thakor to campaign at last moment.

According to Vanol's assessment, Alpesh Thakor may change constituency and contest either from Becharaji or Kheralu in Mehsana district.
Islamabad, May 12 : Pakistan Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari claimed on Thursday that a Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) minister had threatened him with the imposition of martial law a night before the no-confidence motion against ex-Prime Minister Imran Khan was passed, media reports said.

In his address to the National Assembly, Zardari said that the PTI minister had asked him to either accept early elections or martial law would be imposed in the country, Geo News reported.

The Foreign Minister said that despite PTI's repeated attempts to defeat the no-confidence motion against the former premier, their bids were foiled and the no-trust vote was successful in ousting Imran Khan.

Zardari also demanded an investigation into the events leading up to and post the no-confidence motion voting.

Ex-Deputy Speaker Qasim Suri had termed the no-trust motion against Khan "unconstitutional" and dismissed it on April 3, and following this, Khan advised President Arif Alvi to dissolve the assemblies and the latter followed suit.

But the then Opposition filed a plea in the Supreme Court seeking the nullification of the government's move. The top court on April 7 declared the government's decision to dissolve the assemblies and Suri's ruling against the Constitution, Geo News reported.

The SC had asked to hold the voting on the no-confidence motion on April 9, but Khan had the Speaker prolong the session. But near midnight, the Speaker resigned from office.

Being the senior member of the panel of chairs, PML-N MNA Ayaz Sadiq chaired a session on early April 10 and held the voting on the no-confidence motion, which ultimately led to Khan's ouster.
New Delhi, May 12 : The Supreme Court on Thursday said it can pass an order to Kolkata Police to provide all assistance to the ED officials in Kolkata in questioning ruling Trinamool Congress leader Abhishek Banerjee, after the agency's counsel expressed apprehension regarding treatment of central agencies in Kolkata.

A bench headed by Justice U.U. Lalit queried Additional Solicitor General S.V. Raju, representing the ED, why the agency cannot question Banerjee in Kolkata instead of Delhi, as the politician till now seems to be just a witness and not a potential accused.

To this, Raju submitted that Banerjee is an influential politician. "My lords know how central agencies were treated in Kolkata...CBI officers were gheraoed....I should not be saying this," he said.

The bench, also comprising Justices Ravindra Bhat and Sudhanshu Dhulia, said it can pass an order to the Kolkata Police to provide all assistance and will hold the West Bengal government accountable.

It orally observed: "We will say the moment you make a requisition 72 hours in advance, the Kolkata Police will co-operate." "We'll hold the State of West Bengal accountable." Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, representing the petitioners, contended that as per Section 160 of the CrPC, the police should question witnesses at their place of residence. "I am not saying no to investigation. I am saying come to Kolkata... they want me to come to Delhi", said Sibal.

The ED's counsel argued that Section 160 CrPC was only applicable to police investigation and not to ED investigation, which is governed by Section 50 of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

As the bench also pointed out that the ED is not saying if the summonses were issued to Banerjee and his wife as an accused, the ASG said he will get information on this aspect and sought adjournment.

The bench scheduled the matter for further hearing on Tuesday and orally said that no coercive action be taken against the petitioners in the meantime.

The top court was hearing the special leave petition filed by Banerjees challenging Delhi High Court's order, which dismissed their challenge to the ED's summons issued in connection with a money laundering case linked to the alleged West Bengal coal scam.

Banerjee and his wife's plea, filed through advocate Sunil Fernandes, said: "The party to which the Petitioner No.1 (Abhishek) belonged, comprehensively trounced the political party at power in the Centre, thereby giving justifiable cause to 'target' and 'fix' the Petitioner No.1, by misusing the Central Investigation Agencies".

"The petitioners' contention of political victimisation is further fortified by the inscrutable and inexplicable insistence of the ED to interrogate the petitioners at their New Delhi office instead of their full-fledged office in Kolkata. The ED seems more interested in causing prejudice to the petitioners herein rather than sincerely and expeditiously investigate the alleged offence."
Srinagar, May 12 : A Kashmiri Pandit government employee in Jammu and Kashmir's Budgam district was shot dead by militants on Thursday, police said.

"An employee of the Revenue Department identified as Rahul Bhat was shot and injured by militants at the Tehsil office in Budgam," a police officer said.

He sustained grievous injuries and was shifted to a hospital in Srinagar, where he succumbed to his injuries.

"The area has been surrounded for searches," sources said.
Chennai, May 12 : Diversified engineering company Greaves Cotton Ltd closed the last quarter of FY22 with a consolidated revenue of Rs 621 crore, said a top company official.

"We closed the Q4 of last fiscal with a consolidated operational revenue of about Rs 621 crore, up from about Rs.520 crore earned during the previous year corresponding period. The new business started four years back contributed bulk of the revenue," MD and Group CEO Nagesh Basavanhalli told IANS.

The company reported a profit before tax of about Rs 27 crore and a net profit of about Rs 17.56 crore during Q4.

For the full year, Greaves Cotton reported consolidated total income of Rs 1,732.05 crore and a total loss of about Rs 33 crore for FY22.

According to Basavanhalli, the demand for auto engines is picking up.

The group's electric vehicle sales stood at about 62,000 units last fiscal up from 27,000 units sold in FY21.

Basavanhalli said 90 per cent of the vehicles sold are powered by lithium-ion battery.

Queried about the impact on sales of electric two wheelers as some vehicles made by couple of Greaves Cotton competitors went up in flames, he said: "We haven't seen any sales impact. But customers are asking questions and they are being answered."
Bengaluru, May 12 : Goa Police have taken a 23-year-old Karnataka youth into custody on charges of raping a Russian minor girl at a Goa resort, police sources said on Thursday.

The accused, identified as Ravi Lamani, was arrested from Gadag in Karnataka. According to police, the incident had taken place on May 6.

The special police team from Pernam had come to the state, tracked down the accused and took him into custody, the police said.

Ravi used to work as room assistant at a resort located in Arambol of north Goa. The mother of the 12-year-old girl had lodged a complaint against him, alleging that he had raped her daughter near the swimming pool and the hotel room, according to police.

The complaint was lodged on May 9. The complainant had stated that the incident had taken place when she had left her daughter alone near the swimming pool and had gone out, the police said.

The accused after committing the crime had disappeared and took shelter in Gadag district of Karnataka.

The police have lodged a case under IPC Sections 376 (rape), Goa Children Protection Act Section 8 and Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.
New Delhi, May 12 : The Alliance of Digital India Foundation (ADIF) on Thursday urged the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to stop the spread of online scams due to fraudulent ads on Google Search.

In a letter addressed to IT Secretary Alkesh Kumar Sharma, the foundation urged adequate regulation of false advertisements to ensure the safety of Indians online.

The industry body pointed to a recent incident of fraudsters advertising numbers disguised as customer support numbers of Mobikwik on Google.

The topmost result of a Mobikwik helpline number on the search engine is, in fact, a fraudulent link - through which scamsters ask for UPI transfers or send UPI pull requests - meant to swindle help seekers.

"A major concern is the lack of adequate regulation of false advertisements and there's an urgent need to protect the safety of Indians on the internet," said Sijo Kuruvilla George, Executive Director of ADIF.

The foundation claimed that tech firms, such as Google, charge hefty fees to host these ads and make profits from them.

The letter said that these fraudulent ads contribute a significant part of the revenue of these tech firms all the while exposing users to high risks.

"The misuse of their platform by big tech firms is going unchecked and Indian citizens are paying a price for it," said George.

ADIF has requested a meeting with MeitY to help develop a robust mechanism for making the internet safe for the people.
Shimla, May 12 : A high-level South Korean trade delegation, comprising heads of its apex trade and industry organisations, including the embassy, visited the Himachal Pradesh capital on Thursday to explore possibilities of investment and collaborations in upcoming sectors.

The delegation met Industries Department Director Rakesh Kumar Prajapati and other key officials.

Both sides discussed economic and bilateral cooperation between Korea and the Himachal Pradesh government. The Korean delegation expressed interest in electronics, semiconductor manufacturing, EV components, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices in the state which has a huge potential for Korean companies.

They also agreed that several sectors such as renewable energy, power, agro and food processing and tourism might be opportunities for collaboration between companies from Korea and Himachal Pradesh.

Led by Kwang Seok Yang, Commercial Attach, Embassy of the Republic of Korea, the delegation comprised heads of Korea Plus, Invest India, KOTRA (Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency), Korea International Trade Association (KITA), Korea SMEs and Startups Agency (KOSME), Korea Trade Insurance Corporation (K-Sure) and Chungcheongnam-Do Economic Promotion Agency (CEPA).

According to the delegation, KOTRA will share the features of Himachal Pradesh with Korean companies based in India as well as in Korea to attract them to this promising and investment-friendly state.

"I hope, post this visit multiple opportunities open up in Himachal Pradesh," said Kwang Seok Yang, the Commercial Attache, Korean Embassy, New Delhi.

A state-owned agency, KOTRA is the apex foreign trade promotion agency of the Korean government with offices across the globe.
New Delhi, May 12: Will Kazakhstan be the one to spearhead deep rooted change in the Central Asian region? While ensuring continuity, the country it seems, is ushering in long-term change in some innovative ways. In a region rife with the deification of rulers who have been at the helm for decades, Kazakhstan is seeking to put an end to it. But unlike fellow Central Asian country Kyrgyzstan, which has seen numerous presidents seated and overthrown creating chaos and cacophony, Kazakhstan seems to be getting its act together more adroitly.

On June 5, this year citizens of Central Asia's largest country will be participating in a referendum for the adoption of some constitutional amendments. According to current President Kassym Jomart Tokayev, the constitutional reform is aimed at a comprehensive transformation of the entire state model.

The amendments are intended to ensure the final transition from a "super-presidential" form of government to a presidential republic with a powerful parliament and an accountable government. The full-majoritarian system of elections of deputies to regional and city masukhats opens up the opportunity for citizens to influence on life in the regions more effectively.

While there is nothing unusual about making amendments to a constitution, one change that has been proposed by Kazakhstan's law maker is curious. And that is -- doing away with the mention and explication of the 'historical role' of Kazakhstan's first president Nursultan Nazarbayev.

Nursultan Abishovich Nazarbayev, 78, grew up in the Soviet Union, was a former steel worker and a high-profile member of the Communist Party.

He held the reins of power and ruled Kazakhstan and its almost 18 million people with an iron fist.

Under him, energy rich Kazakhstan, which is also Central Asia's largest republic, has recorded higher standards of living, a brand-new capital Astana, sustained increase in oil output, connectivity with the outside world, and foreign investments. In fact, Nazarbayev endeavoured to follow a 'multi-vectoral' foreign policy, trying to do a balancing act between Russia and the West.

In 2012, Nazarbayev announced his new national strategy -- Kazakhstan-2050 -- the main objective of which was to bring Kazakhstan amongst the top 50 developed countries in the world.

Kazakh Nut in March 2019, in a surprise move, Nazarbayev announced that he was stepping down from the post of president. He had been holding this post for 28 years, since 1991, when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was dissolved and Kazakhstan emerged a sovereign republic.

The current constitution includes this on the former president: "The independence of the state, unitarity and territorial integrity of the republic, the form of its government, established by the Constitution, as well as the fundamental principles of the republic's activities, laid down by the founder of independent Kazakhstan, the First President of the Republic of Kazakhstan (Elbasy), and his status are unchanged." Members of the working group are reported to have proposed that the status of the first president and reference to him be eliminated from the constitution altogether as Nazarbayev's role as the first president of the republic is "well known". The Constitutional Committee is said to have accepted the amendment.

In a region rife with hagiographies of its leaders, often elevated to the position of demi-gods, Kazakhstan may be hewing a new path.

Earlier this year when spontaneous and unprecedented riots engulfed the country, President Tokayev, in spite of the show and massive use of force, which included inviting forces from the Russia led Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), had to also yield to some of the popular demands.

This included removing Nazarbayev as the head of the Kazakh Security Council, Karim Masimov, head of the National Security Committee as well as a number of other heads of government, including the Defence Minister, many of whom were close to Nazarbayev. The riots in part were fuelled by dissatisfaction both with the Tokayev administration, as well as with the Nazarbayevs.

The removal of the reference to Nazarbayev in the constitution, read in conjunction with Tokayev's announcement that the amendments are meant to ensure 'the final transition from a "super-presidential" form of government to a presidential republic with a powerful parliament and an accountable government' make it clear that much of the president's powers, that had been put in place by Nazarbayev, will be curtailed. It may also mean that in later years the glorious place in Kazakh history that Nazarbayev had so far claimed as "Elbasi" -- the Leader, may not be imputed to him. While the Constitutional Council has reportedly accepted the changes, it remains to be seen how the Kazakh people will respond to them. Whether or not Nazarbayev's legacy comes undone, changes in the manner of governance and in the polity towards further democratization of the country will take place in a peaceful and stable manner. This will be a major achievement for the Kazakh people.

(Aditi Bhaduri is a columnist specialising in Eurasian geopolitics. Views expressed are personal and exclusive to India Narrative) (The content is being carried under an arrangement with indianarrative.com) --indianarrative
Moscow, May 12 : Military support for Ukraine risks sparking nuclear war with Russia, Putin ally and ex-President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, warned, media reports said.

In a fiery post to nearly one million Telegram users on Thursday, Medvedev wrote: "NATO countries pumping weapons into Ukraine, training troops to use western equipment, sending in mercenaries and the exercises of alliance countries near our borders increase the likelihood of a direct and open conflict between NATO and Russia. Such a conflict always has the risk of turning into a full-fledged nuclear war," Daily Mail reported.

Now serving as deputy chairman of the influential Kremlin Security Council, Medvedev was President of Russia from 2008 to 2012 while Putin was term-limited, Daily Mail reported.

Medvedev had appointed Putin as the Prime Minister during that period. When Putin was allowed to become President once again, Medvedev stepped aside.

He took the premiership until 2020, at which point Putin nullified term limits and moved Medvedev to his current role.

Medvedev accused NATO countries of "sending in mercenaries" to fight for Ukraine and intentionally playing up the prospect of nuclear war.

His post continued: "The endless talk by foreign analysts about a war between NATO and Russia continues unabated. The cynicism of Western 'talking heads' is becoming more and more blatant.

"The thesis that Russia frightens the world with a nuclear conflict is being pushed to the top of the agenda. Even [Donald] Trump recently came out with this, though, understandably, just to spite [President] Biden. And of course the Europeans are squeaking their little voices," Daily Mail reported.

Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War
Karachi, May 12 : The Pakistani rupee on Thursday broke all previous records against the US dollar and dropped to an all-time low of Rs191.77 in the interbank market, media reports said.

The local currency lost Rs 1.7 (or 0.91 per cent) during the day to close at Rs 191.77, surpassing Wednesday's record low of Rs 188.66, The News reported.

Dried-up foreign currency inflows, coupled with a delay in the revival of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout and a lack of financial support from friendly countries, are adding to the pressure on the local currency.

The decline was in line with the predictions of the analysts who fear more losses down the road as the country remains mired in political and economic instability, The News reported.

A day earlier, the rupee surpassed the critical threshold of 190 amid a persistent decline in the foreign exchange reserves due to hefty current account and trade deficits, and higher debt payments.

Since the beginning of this fiscal year (July 1, 2021) to date, the rupee has collectively dropped by a massive 21.72 per cent (or Rs 34.23) compared to the previous fiscal year's close at Rs 157.54.

The rupee has maintained a downward trend for the last 13 months. It has lost 25.94 per cent (or Rs 39.5) to date, compared to the record high of Rs 152.27 recorded in May 2021.

Moreover, political unrest owing to PTI's protest campaign against the government is eclipsing the new economic team's focus on economic firefighting. Former Prime Minister Imran Khan has announced to march with millions of his supporters towards Islamabad after May 20 to demand new elections to add to the troubles of the economically-challenged PML-N led regime, The News reported.
New Delhi, May 12: Sri Lanka's economic crisis triggered by a debt default and acute shortage of food and fuel leading to violence has hit headlines but several other countries -- Pakistan, Nepal, South Africa, Argentina, Ethiopia, Ghana, Peru among others with similar distress are also on the watchlist. These countries are in the grip of ballooning debts, trade deficits and falling foreign exchange reserves.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict have pushed debt levels for many countries to alarming levels.

Take the case of Nepal. The Himalayan nation has been hit by a yawning trade deficit due to growing imports. Nepal's trade deficit in the first eight months of its financial year beginning on July 16 touched $9.5 billion, which is close to the entire budgetary amount of the Nepalese government.

But what has added to the problem is drying remittances and depleting foreign exchange reserves. The picture in Pakistan is similar. Islamabad has already initiated talks with the International Monetary Fund for a bailout package.

Karachi based newspaper Dawn in an editorial noted that any further delay in the IMF agreement would not only cause irreversible damage to the economy and also affect negotiations with Saudi Arabia and China for financial support. "This situation is unsustainable," it said.

"Most emerging and developing countries are not just grappling with the economic fallout of the war, but also the scarring effects of the pandemic crisis. This includes job losses and learning losses -- costs borne mostly by women and young people," Kristalina Georgieva, IMF's Managing Director said last month.

Lessons from the current crisis: Global food and commodity prices are soaring following the Russia-Ukraine war. Import bills for countries which rely on imports of fuel will surge at a time when the global economy was just starting to recuperate from the severe impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. Analysts said that India, India--the third largest oil consumer in the world after the US and China importing more than 80 per cent of its crude, must remain "vigilant and cautious" in relation to government spendings.

"One of the key things for us is to refrain from carving out populist measures especially when commodity prices are surging.. Populist measures in neighbouring Sri Lanka and Pakistan have caused their economic downfall," an insider told India Narrative.

"India must refrain from any such measures, especially now since the world economy is in the middle of an extremely volatile period," he said.

Georgieva said that even with assistance, many policymakers face the difficult task of addressing rising debt. "This is why spending must be carefully prioritised -- on safety nets, health, and education -- and targeted to the most vulnerable," Georgieva said.

(The content is being carried under an arrangement with indianarrative.com) --indianarrative

Latest updates on Srilankan Crisis

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-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Patna May 12 : Walking on the railway tracks, while wearing earphones to hear music, turned fatal for a teenager in Bihar's Saran district, as he was run over by a train, his family said on Thursday.

The fatal incident occurred near Tero railway station under Madaura block of Saran on Wednesday evening.

The victim, identified as Rahul Kumar, 15, was returning to his native village, Sonali under Mashrakh block, from his maternal grandmother's house in Tero village.

"Rahul went to Tero to attend a marriage function on Monday. He was returning home by train. While walking on the railway track near Tero railway station, he came under the Gorakhpur-Patliputra express train and died on the spot," his uncle, Santosh Parihar, said.

"Rahul was wearing earphones and listening to music while walking on the track. The train driver sounded the horn to warn him but he did not hear it," he added.

"We have recovered the dead body from the track. Pieces of earphones were also recovered from the spot," said a GRP official of Chapra railway station.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
New Delhi, May 12 : The Supreme Court on Thursday said that future visa applications of persons, blacklisted during the 2020 Tablighi Jamaat congregation, held at the capital's Nizamuddin Markaz, should be considered uninfluenced by the blacklisting order.

A bench, headed by Justice A.M. Khanwilkar disposed of the petitions filed by foreigners belonging to 35 countries, who were blacklisted by the Ministry of Home Affairs, on the allegations of having indulged in Tablighi activities in 2020.

The bench, also comprising Justices Abhay S. Oka and J.B. Pardiwala, said without going into the questions of law raised by both sides, there is no blacklisting order served on any of the foreigner petitioner nor any such blacklisting order was placed on record by the Centre.

The top court directed the authorities concerned to examine the future applications for grant of visa -- made by the petitioners or similarly placed persons -- on a case-to-case basis. Nearly 3,500 persons were blacklisted in connection with the Tablighi Jamaat congregation.

The bench added that future visa applications of the foreign nationals should be considered as per law and uninfluenced by the stand of the Centre, which blacklisted the foreigners for 10 years.

The petitioners were represented by senior advocate C.U. Singh and the petitions were filed by advocate-on-record Fuzail Ahmad Ayyubi. The petitioner had argued that no blacklisting order was served on them or any other similarly placed person.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, representing the Centre, submitted that there is a provision that the affected can make a representation for revocation of the blacklisting, but after a decision is taken, they cannot challenge it.

He contended that if the same thing is done by the government of a sovereign nation with its citizen, it would be completely unacceptable, but the yardstick would be different while dealing with a foreigner trying to enter your territory.

The bench pointed out that future entry is the prerogative of the government, and even if blacklisting is set aside, the person's entry remains on office record, and if one makes a representation, perhaps the government will rethink.

The top court said the petitioners have already left India, consequent to cancellation of visas and the only issue remains is about blacklisting orders passed by the authorities concerned.

It added that while considering visa applications, it will be open to the authorities to take into account all aspects of the matter as may be permissible in law.
Kolkata, May 12 : West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has sent a strongly-worded letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi asking the Central government to immediately release the state's dues for the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) and PM Awas Yojana.

"I am writing to bring an urgent matter to your kind attention. It is very astonishing that the Government of India is not releasing funds to West Bengal for MGNREGA and PM Awas Yojana," read the opening lines of the letter, a copy of which is available with IANS.

In the letter, she said that wage payment under MGNREGS in West Bengal is pending for more than four months as the Union government has held back around Rs 6,500 crore, out of which Rs 3,000 core was on account of wage liabilities and around Rs 3,500 crore was on account of non-wage liabilities.

She also pointed out that in PM Awas Yojana, West Bengal ranks first in the country and over 32 lakh houses have been constructed in the state under this scheme.

According to the Chief Minister, in spite of this performance, fresh allocations of funds to West Bengal are pending with the Union Ministry of Rural Development and hence, a long list of beneficiaries is awaiting sanction in the state.

"Considering the significance of the projects and the hardships being faced by the common people, I would request you for your immediate intervention and direction to the concerned ministry to release the funds without any further delay," the letter said.

On Thursday morning too, Banerjee, while addressing the Annual General Meeting of West Bengal Civil Service (Executive) Officers' Association at the newly-renovated iconic Town Hall in Kolkata, attacked the Union government for not releasing funds for the state government under MGNREGS.

"Because of these dues, often payments of wages under MGNREGA are getting stuck or delayed. As it is, the people are suffering due to massive increase in the prices of essential commodities. Lives of people become further miserable if they do not get payment for the work done," she said.

However, senior BJP leader, Rahul Sinha claimed that the Chief Minister is not giving correct figures. He also alleged that the state government often spends the money allotted for one head on other heads, which results in the paucity of funds under the head it was allotted.
New Delhi, May 12: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's visit to Algeria and Oman comes at a time when Europe is looking at North Africa to break free from its dependence on Russian gas and the Arab world at the same time displaying willingness to mediate between Moscow and Kyiv to end the ongoing conflict.

Lavrov landed in Algiers on Tuesday - a visit which was labelled as "unannounced" by many - to share with the Algerian leadership the Russian assessments and considerations in connection with the development of the situation in Ukraine.

As he forwarded to Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune an invitation from his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to pay a visit to Moscow to mark the 60th anniversary of diplomatic ties between the two nations, Lavrov appreciated the "balanced and objective" position taken by Algeria on the Ukrainian issue.

"Algeria is a member of the Contact Group of the League of Arab States (LAS), which recently visited the Russian Federation and then met with the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine. Our Arab friends were guided by the decisions taken within the Arab League at the ministerial level, which we consider objective and useful," said the Russian Foreign Minister.

A regional power in North Africa, Algeria is also expected to play a major role after the European Commission proposed an outline of a plan to make Europe independent from Russian fossil fuels well before 2030, starting with gas, in light of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Covering an area of around 2,382 square kilometres, Algeria is territorially the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries or the OPEC's largest member country and the largest country in Africa. OPEC lists the oil and gas sector as the backbone of the Algerian economy, accounting for about 20 per cent of the gross domestic product, and 85 per cent of total exports.

With the European Union needing energy that is imported from third countries, over three quarters of its imports of natural gas comes from Russia (43%), Norway (21%) and Algeria (8%).

Looking for alternative gas solutions after Russia began its 'special military operation' in Ukraine on February 24 this year, many European nations, including Greece, Spain and Italy, have already struck new deals with Algeria recently.

When asked about how Russia assesses the position of Algeria regarding gas supplies, Lavrov cited observance of the fundamental norms that have been followed in the past.

"On gas supplies to the world market. We and Algeria, other participants of the Forum of Gas Exporting Countries adhere to the agreements reached. I am sure it will continue to be so," he said.

Russia also remains the biggest supplier of arms to Algeria, one of the largest arms importers in the region.

"We talked about the further development of military-technical cooperation, which has strong roots and good prospects. The Russian Federation appreciates the confidence placed in us by our Algerian friends in strengthening the defence capability of Algeria," said Lavrov.

He added that the new strategic document will "reflect the new quality of bilateral partnership" between the two countries.

Travelling to Muscat on Wednesday, Lavrov "synchronized watches" on topical international issues with his Omani counterpart Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi and Deputy Prime Minister for the Council of Ministers of Oman Fahd bin Mahmoud Al Said.

The Russian foreign ministry said that considerable attention was paid to the situation in Ukraine and around it with Lavrov informing the leadership of Oman in detail about the goals and objectives of the 'special military operation' undertaken by Russia in Ukraine as well as about the Russian-Ukrainian negotiations.

The Russian Foreign Minister stated that, when considering the current situation in the Middle East region, the fundamental approaches of Moscow and Muscat coincide in favour of resolving the crisis that persists in the strategically important region by political and diplomatic means.

"As for Oman's position on the Ukrainian crisis, we consider it balanced and based on the rational interests of its people. This is precisely the approach shared by all other countries in the region and which has been enshrined in the decisions taken within the framework of the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf and within the framework of the League of Arab States," said Lavrov.

(The content is being carried under an arrangement with indianarrative.com) --indianarrative

Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War
Gurugram, May 12 : The Gurugram Police have arrested a labour contractor for allegedly plotting a fake robbery on the Delhi-Jaipur Expressway on Thursday morning.

The contractor has been identified as Kamal Singh, a resident of Rajendra Park in Gurugram.

According to the police, at 11.50 am on Thursday, Singh made a PCR call and said that after withdrawing Rs 4.40 lakh from his account in a bank in Sector 5, he was going to Noida in his car. When he reached the Jharsa flyover on the Delhi-Jaipur Expressway, three bike-borne assailants alleged robbed the cash at gunpoint.

During preliminary investigation, the police scanned around 80 to 100 CCTV footages, which were found suspicious.

"During questioning, Singh disclosed that he had to make payments to labourers in Noida but he was in debt. So he thought that with this fake plan, he would not have to make payments to the labourers. Singh had withdrawn the cash but handed it over to the wife of his brother Jitender. The police have recovered the cash from his brother's house in Rajendra Park," Pankaj Kumar, SHO at Civil Lines police station, told IANS.
ZAGREB, May 12 (Xinhua) -- As this year marks the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Croatia and China, former Croatian President Ivo Josipovic told Xinhua in a recent interview that this would inject new impetus into the development of bilateral relations and open up new possibilities for cooperation.

In May 1992, China, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, recognized and established diplomatic relations with Croatia, which was of great significance because Croatia was still fighting for statehood and international recognition at that time, Josipovic said, adding that bilateral relations have developed well since the establishment of diplomatic ties, and practical cooperation has been continuously deepened.

"Today, I think we have very good relations. We do not have any open issues, probably we should be more intensively engaged in establishing more cultural and economical cooperation," he said.

Josipovic noted that bilateral contacts should be strengthened, not only between the two governments but also between businesses and cultural institutions, and that more projects should be launched for both sides.

According to the former president, Croatia has always valued cooperation with China, the world's second largest economy, with the Chinese-built Peljesac Bridge serving as an example of bilateral cooperation.

Josipovic also supports closer high-level political and economic ties and cooperation between China and the European Union, noting that global peace and stability, in which China has played a positive role, require cooperation among all countries.

"Croatia is always in favor of it, and I am sure that our government will support the idea of better cooperation between the European Union and China," he said.

China and Croatia established diplomatic relations on May 13, 1992. In 2005, the two countries established a comprehensive cooperative partnership, marking a new stage in the development of bilateral ties. 
Washington, May 12 : US President Joe Biden called upon Americans to continue to remain vigilant against the Covid-19 pandemic as the nation is poised to cross a grim milestone of 1 million deaths.

"Today, we mark a tragic milestone: one million American lives lost to Covid-19," the American President said in a statement Thursday, as he co-hosted a virtual global summit on combating the pandemic, with Germany, Indonesia, Senegal and Belize.

The United States has not crossed that mark yet. The toll stands at 995,747, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the top US government health agency that keeps an official track of Covid-19 numbers in the US.

Globally 6.2 million people have died due to Covid-19, according to WHO.

"One million empty chairs around the dinner table. Each an irreplaceable loss. Each leaving behind a family, a community, and a nation forever changed because of this pandemic," Biden went on to say, adding: "To heal, we must remember. We must remain vigilant against this pandemic and do everything we can to save as many lives as possible, as we have with more testing, vaccines, and treatments than ever before." Biden has ordered flags lowered to half-staff.

The US President called for a renewed commitment by all nations to combat the pandemic.

"This summit is an opportunity to renew our efforts to keep our foot on the gas when it comes to getting this pandemic under control and preventing future health crises," he said.
New Delhi, May 12 : Chief of Army Staff, General Manoj Pande, is on a three-day visit to Ladakh to review force deployment along the borders with China.

He arrived at Leh on Thursday on his maiden visit to Ladakh region after assuming charge as Army chief.

General Pande was briefed on the security situation along the borders with special focus on Eastern Ladakh. The high-level of operational readiness being maintained by the forces while maintaining a high tempo of capability development was highlighted.

Image Source: IANS News

Later, General Pande, accompanied by Lieutenant General Upendra Dwivedi, General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Northern Command, and Lieutenant General A. Sengupta, General Officer Commanding, Fire and Fury Corps, called on R.K. Mathur, the Lieutenant Governer of the Union Territory of Ladakh.

This was followed by a detailed discussion on issues related to civil-military cooperation and the role of Indian Army in developmental activities in the UT of Ladakh.

During his visit to Ladakh, General Pande will also visit the forward areas in Eastern Ladakh and interact with the troops deployed along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in one of the most difficult and inhospitable terrains in the world.

-- Syndicated from IANS
New Delhi, May 12 : With an aim to share experiences and learnings from recently-held five Assembly elections, the Election Commission on Thursday launched a conference of all Chief Electoral Officers of the states and Union Territories.

During the two-day symposium, there will be thematic discussions on election planning, expenditure monitoring, electoral rolls, IT applications, data management, EVMs/VVPATs, timely resolution of grievances, SVEEP strategy and voter outreach, and media and communication.

Addressing the gathering, CEC Sushil Chandra said that such conferences are an excellent platform for sharing experiences and learning from each other. While complimenting the Chief Electoral Officers, he further said that these five states' elections conducted amidst the pandemic were exemplary and had no previous examples or references.

The extraordinary circumstances demanded extraordinary solutions from banning physical rallies, promoting digital campaigning and weekly reviewing the situation with critical stakeholders, he said.

The CEC stressed on the need to continuously upgrade the services for voters through the entire election process, right from registration to voting.

Noting that the CEOs are the face of the Commission in the states, he exhorted them to ensure that they are accessible and visible to all stakeholders.

He also urged CEOs to strengthen their outreach and communication to showcase their best practices and innovations in election management to the world.

Sushil Chandra also praised Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar, who has been appointed as new Chief Election Commissioner, and hoped that the poll panel, attains greater heights under his leadership.

In his remarks, Rajiv Kumar said that with the mandate provided by the Constitution, the EC has developed extremely robust internal mechanisms and practices to ensure that elections are conducted in a free, fair, accessible and participative manner for each and every voter.

Narrating his experiences of conducting elections for the first time amidst the pandemic in Bihar till the recent Assembly elections in five states, he said that the journey has been full of challenges and learnings in a most unprecedented situation demanded dynamic decision making and pre-empting the misinformed narratives.

He also said that the technology has been leveraged in a big way to enhance the accessibility and transparency of the election system. The EC has streamlined the entire IT infrastructure with focus on three critical stakeholders, namely voters, political parties and election management functionaries, he said, and urged CEOs to strengthen their IT systems including training of the IT personnel for adapting to the latest advancements.

Election Commissioner Anup Chandra Pandey highlighted the agenda for CEOs for next few months including arranging logistics in states for upcoming elections for the office of President.

He said that CEOs should utilise this lean period to strengthen and upgrade the fundamental features of the election system including updating the electoral rolls, infrastructure upgradation at polling stations, EVM-VVPAT storage and maintenance and training and capacity building of officials. He also asked CEOs to implement innovative SVEEP strategies to better connect with the voter.

The CEOs of the five states, where polls were held, gave a brief presentation about their experiences, learnings and innovative practices they adopted during these elections.
Mumbai, May 12 : Oscar-winning music composer A.R. Rahman, who was in the news for his spirited responses to Union Home Minister Amit Shah's stand that Hindi should replace English as the link language between different linguistic groups, emphasised the importance of English at an event here on Thursday.

English, he said, is a global language and helps break barriers. He was speaking at the unveiling of the second season of Nexa Music, which identifies emerging talent in English music.

When asked if he would like to come up with a similar talent sourcing and identification series like Nexa Music in India's regional languages, the composer gave a categorical response. "The movie industry is doing great with music in Indian languages," said the man who has been hailed as the 'Mozart of Madras'. "This initiative is focused on making our artistes global so that they can compete for Grammys and be on international platforms." The world of music is "out of ideas," the maestro said. "The rest of the world is waiting for India in terms of music," he added.

On an altogether different but heartfelt note, Rahman said that sometimes pressure extracts the best out of people. As he put it: "It's good to put people on the edge, it gives amazing results." Earlier, during the language controversy, the composer had shared a post about 'Beloved Tamil' along with an illustration of 'Thamizhanangu' of 'Goddess Tamil', which is a word from the Tamil anthem penned by Manonmaniam Sundaram Pillai.

The anthem includes a line penned by Bharathidasan, a Tamil poet of the 20th century, in 'Thamilyakkam', an anthology of Tamil poetry. The line reads: "Beloved Tamil is the root of our existence."
Kolkata, May 12 : The West Bengal government has decided to form an expert committee to review the situation after cracks were spotted in certain buildings at Durga Pituri Lane in the congested Bowbazar area in central Kolkata because of the underground tunnel-boring work of the East-West Metro Rail project.

In August 2019, around 40 houses in the same lane had developed cracks and at that time, over 250 residents were evacuated by the Kolkata Metro Railway Corporation (KMRCL) authorities, who arranged for the accommodation of the evacuated residents in different city hotels for about three months. Later, the residents returned to their respective homes after the cracks were repaired.

Kolkata Mayor and Transport Minister Firhad Hakim visited the spot on Thursday and inspected the buildings where cracks have developed.

"Most of these buildings are highly vulnerable. The Kolkata Municipal Corporation had served notices to many of these buildings over two months back. I also had dialogues with the KMRCL authorities. After KMRCL submits a report to Chief Secretary, a joint expert committee will be formed which will review the situation and take appropriate measures," Hakim told the media.

Meanwhile, KMRCL has already arranged for accommodation for the dwellers of several buildings at different hotels in the city. The KMRCL engineers were on the spot since Wednesday night trying to ascertain the reason behind the development of cracks.

The underground tunnel that reportedly caused the cracks in around 10 houses at Durga Pituri Lane is supposed to connect Esplanade with Sealdah. The area is extremely congested with several old and dilapidated residential houses, many gold and silver jewellery manufacturing shops. One of the oldest red-light areas of Kolkata is also located in the area at Premchand Boral Street.

The underground tunnel is a part of the project to connect the Howrah station with the IT hub in Salt Lake on the northern outskirts of the city.
New Delhi, May 12 : The Supreme Court on Thursday said an aggrieved woman -- who is not in a domestic relationship with the in-laws, but has shared the household and was subjected to domestic violence - is entitled to file an application under Domestic Violence Act.

A bench of Justices M.R. Shah and B.V. Nagarathna said: "It is held that there should be a subsisting domestic relationship between the aggrieved person and the person against whom the relief is claimed vis-a-vis allegation of domestic violence. However, it is not necessary that at the time of filing of an application by an aggrieved person, the domestic relationship should be subsisting." It added that in other words, "even if an aggrieved person is not in a domestic relationship with the respondent in a shared household at the time of filing of an application under Section 12 of the DV Act, but has at any point of time lived so or had the right to live and has been subjected to domestic violence or is later subjected to domestic violence on account of the domestic relationship, is entitled to file an application under Section 12 of the DV Act".

The bench said that it is not mandatory for the aggrieved person, when she is related by consanguinity, marriage or through a relationship in the nature of marriage, adoption or are family members living together as a joint family, to actually reside with those persons against whom the allegations have been levelled at the time of commission of domestic violence.

"If a woman has the right to reside in the shared household under Section 17 of the DV Act and such a woman becomes an aggrieved person or victim of domestic violence, she can seek reliefs under the provisions of DV Act including enforcement of her right to live in a shared household," it added in 79-page judgment.

The top court held that Section 12 does not make it mandatory for a magistrate to consider a domestic incident report filed by a protection officer or service provider before passing any order under the DV Act. It clarified that even in the absence of a domestic incident report, a magistrate is empowered to pass both ex-parte or interim as well as a final order under the provisions of the DV Act.

The bench noted that appellant had a right to reside in the shared household as she was in a domestic relationship with her husband till he died in a road accident and had lived together with him, therefore she also had a right to reside in the shared household despite the death of her husband.

"The aggrieved person continued to have a subsisting domestic relationship owing to her marriage and she, being the daughter-in-law, had the right to reside in the shared household," it added.

The woman, after the death of her husband, moved a magistrate's court seeking protection orders, residence orders, and compensation orders to be passed under various provisions of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005. The court directed the in-laws not to obstruct the aggrieved woman and her daughter from enjoying the property of her husband.

The mother-in-law challenged this order before a sessions court, which set aside the trial court order. The aggrieved woman moved the Uttarakhand High Court challenging this order, but her criminal revision petition was dismissed in 2019. She moved the top court challenging the high court and the sessions court order.

The top court allowed the woman's appeal and set aside the high court order and sessions court order, and affirmed the trial court order.
Hyderabad, May 12 : Telangana's Cabinet Minister K.T. Rama Rao has warned state BJP president and MP Bandi Sanjay Kumar of legal action for making baseless allegations.

"BS Kumar, if you don't stop this ludicrous, baseless & irresponsible allegations, I'll be constrained to take legal action," tweeted Rama Rao responding to Sanjay's allegation that due to the minister's negligence, 27 students of intermediate committed suicide.

KTR, as Rama Rao is popularly known, demanded the BJP leader to either prove his allegation or publicly apologise.

"If you have an iota of evidence to prove what you allege, please put it in public domain or else apologise publicly for this BS rhetoric," wrote KTR.

KTR is minister for industries, information technology, municipal administration and urban development in the cabinet headed by his father and Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao.

During his ongoing 'Praja sangrama yatra', Sanjay had made the allegation while referring to the suicides of intermediate students in 2019 allegedly due to the bungling in evaluation of answer sheets and publication of results.

However, after re-verification of the answer sheets of these students, Telangana State Board of Intermediate Education (TSBIE) denied that the suicides were related any technical errors in processing of the results.

Meanwhile, KTR once again slammed Prime Minister Narendra Modi for alleged discrimination against Telangana.

"Modi Ji, You are the PM of India not just Gujarat. What about the lakhs of young boys & girls of Telangana whom you've denied the opportunity to become doctors by NOT sanctioning even one medical college in last 8 years? Why this discrimination against a performing state?" asked the minister in his reaction to the report that got him emotional while talking to one of the beneficiaries of government schemes in Gujarat.

When the beneficiary told Modi about his daughter's dream of becoming a doctor, he turned emotional and offered help in fulfilling her dream.
Colombo, May 12 : Setting several world records, Sri Lanka's veteran politician Ranil Wickremesinghe was sworn in as the 26th Prime Minister of Indian Ocean island nation, which has been crippled with its worst-ever economic crisis.

Holding the office for a record-breaking 6th occasion, Wickremesinghe was sworn in as PM by his rival party leader and President Gotabaya Rajapaska. He also becomes the world's first premier to run a government with just one seat in the Parliament.

Amidst the ongoing crisis, President Rajapaksa invited the opposition parties to join to form an all-party government.

The main opposition United People's Power, led by Sajith Premadasa and the Marxist party, National People's Power, led by Anura Kumara Disannayake, refused to form a government until President Rajapaksa resigned.

The President's elder brother and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa controversially resigned on Monday after violence erupted across the country when a group of his supporters carried out violent attacks on peaceful protesters demanding the government step down amidst the severe financial crisis.

"(British PM Winston) Churchill had only four members backing him in 1939. How he became the Prime Minister because of the crisis, I have done the same," the newly-appointed PM Wickremesinghe reporters who questioned his moral right to become the PM without a majority in the parliament.

"I will make a government with the participation of all the parties," Wickremesinghe assured as as he was leaving a Buddhist temple in Colombo after participating at religious ceremonies.

"Do you want to suffer without fuel and gas while engaging in petty politics or find solutions to the current crisis?" he questioned the journalist and said that he would work to overcome the current crisis.

Ex-PM Mahinda Rajapaksa was one of the firsts to wish Wickremesighe.

In a Twitter message, Rajapaksa said: "Congratulations to the newly appointed Prime Minister. I wish you all the best as you navigate these troubled times".

Wishing the newly-appointed PM, the Indian High Commission in Colombo stated that it "hopes for political stability and looks forward to working with the Government of Sri Lanka formed in accordance with democratic processes pursuant to the swearing in of Hon'ble @RW_UNP as the Prime Minister of #SriLanka. India's commitment to the people of #SriLanka will continue." US Ambassador Julie Chung, in a tweet, said: "Look forward to working w/ @RW_UNP.

His appointment as PM, and the quick formation of an inclusive government, are first steps to addressing the crisis & promoting stability. We encourage meaningful progress at the IMF & long-term solutions that meet the needs of all Sri Lankans".

Entering politics in 1970 and becoming the then youngest member of the Parliament in 1977, Wickremesinghe became the PM for the first time in 1993 under the then President D.B. Wijetunga, then he was elected the PM in 2001 under Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunge.

Again in 2015 when Maithripala Sirisena formed a 100-day government, Wickremesinghe was appointed the PM. At the subsequent 2015 general election, his party won the election and he was elected the PM. But his alliance with President Sirisena came to an end when Sirisena replaced him with Mahinda Rajapaska for 52 days. But Wickremsinghe sworn in as the PM again after the Supreme Court removed Rajapaksa.

However, Wickremesinghe had not ruled for a complete five year term in any of his previous tenures as PM.

In the 2020 general election, his party divided over leadership dispute and deputy leader Premadasa broke away with a majority of the MPs. Wickermesinghe could not win a single seat at the election but he entered the parliament using the national list seat received based on the total votes his party scored.

Latest updates on Srilankan Crisis

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
New Delhi, May 12 : The Municipal Corporation of Delhi's hardline approach vis-a-vis demolishing illegal encroachments in the national capital left the 'encroachers' outraged on Wednesday in the southeast part of the city.

The civic authorities had planned to demolish illegally constructed structures in various parts of the city, but when they reached the Madanpur Khadar area, people started protesting against the demolition drive.

Amid agitation and sloganeering, the civic agency continued its action against illegal encroachments. Two five-storey under construction buildings were demolished in the process.

Aam Aadmi Party MLA Amanatullah Khan soon reached the spot where people were protesting against the corporation officials.

While speaking to the media, Khan accused the civic body of demolishing the houses of poor people.

"You said that you will remove encroachments. I am with you on this. But you are demolishing poor people's houses. There is not a single encroachment in this area," the AAP MLA claimed.

An hour after he reached the spot, the protest suddenly turned violent as people in large numbers resorted to stone pelting. The police had to use force to disperse the crowd. Amid the pandemonium, several people were detained.

The situation in the area remained tense for a few hours and then gradually turned normal. The demolition drive was carried out by the South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC) in Madanpur Khadar and Dhirsen Marg.

The North Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) carried out similar drives in Rohini and Karol Bagh in the northern part of the city.

Meanwhile, the hapless destitutes residing alongside the K.N. Katju road were left agonised as their illegally constructed huts were demolished by the civic agency.

The shanties that were razed to the ground were constructed on the pavement of the main road, i.e., on government land.

As the officials of the civic body arrived there, the people, rather than resisting the drive, were seen removing the temporarily structures themselves.

"We have been residing here for the past 25 years and there was no problem. We are not Bangladeshis or Rohingyas. We came from Rajasthan decades ago," Ram Lal Solanki, whose dwelling was demolished, told IANS.

When asked where they will go now, Solanki said they have no place to go and will reside on the same pavement, sans a roof over their head.

A woman named Bimla expressed similar sentiments while speaking to IANS.

"I have four sons and as many daughter-in-laws. My grandchildren are studying in school. We won't go anywhere and stay here only," she said.

After removing over 300 shanties, the demolition process culminated for Thursday and the bulldozers were last seen removing the debris on the footpath.
New Delhi, May 12 : As Rahul Gandhi and other Congress leaders boarded a train to Rajasthan's Udaipur to participate in three-day brainstorming session, beginning from Friday, there is no clarity that the G-23 dissidents group's strategy and if they will propose the changes which has been mooted by them to party chief Sonia Gandhi.

Even the G-23 leaders - many of whom have been accomodated in various committees in the run up for the 'Chintan Shivir'. Sources within the group say that they will think over the matter during the event before any comment.

Meanwhile, the Congress on Thursday said that Udaipur will be new milestone of hope, aspiration and change as India is "enduring a painful and vicious assault on its democracy, economy and societal harmony".

Addressing a press conference, General Secretary Randeep Surjewala said: "Congress was born out of a determined struggle to liberate India and its people from the shackles of oppression, discrimination, bigotry and the policy of divide and rule. In these trying times, when 'Divide and Rule' has become the state policy, we resolve to re-dedicate ourselves to 'nav sankalp', that is, to once again propel India onto the path of progress, prosperity and societal harmony." "The road map shall provide a way forward not only to the Congress to meet up with the current set of reverses and challenges, but will also pave the way for a resilient, strong and inclusive nation," he added.

It is also likely that a clamour for former party President Rahul Gandhi's return will be raised by some quarters in the party, sources said.
Patna, May 12 : The Patna High Court on Thursday took a tough stand against Sahara India chief Subroto Roy after he did not appear before the court.

The single bench of Justice Sandeep Kumar has now asked the Sahara chief to physically be present before the court at 10.30 am on Friday.

The lawyer of Subroto Roy cited illness as the reason for his client's non-appearance. The lawyer also presented medical certificates and diagnosis papers before Justice Kumar, but he was not satisfied with them.

Kumar directed Umesh Prasad Singh, the lawyer, to present Subroto Roy before the court.

"He should physically appear before the court at 10.30 am on Friday (tomorrow) and present the blueprint of how he would return the money of investors," the bench said.

The lawyer also mentioned that there is life threat to Subroto Roy in Bihar. On this, Kumar reportedly said that "why would he do such an act when his life is under threat".

Kumar also said that the security of Subroto Roy is the responsibility of the district administration of Patna. He then directed Patna SSP Manavjeet Singh Dhillon to make arrangements for his security.

Subroto Roy's lawyers also went to the Supreme Court to get a stay on his physical appearance before Patna High Court.

During the hearing on April 27, the Patna High Court had directed Subroto Roy to physically appear before the court on May 11. As Subroto Roy did not appear, Justice Kumar gave him another chance to appear before the court on May 12. As he again did not appear before the court on Thursday, Kumar has given a final order to Subroto Roy to appear before the court at 10.30 am on Friday.

At present, more than 2,000 cases pertaining to alleged fraudulency by Sahara India have been filed in the Patna High Court.
New Delhi, May 12 : To create unrest in India after failed attempt to create chaos in Kashmir post abrogation of Article 370, Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) has started activating the sleepers cells of Khalistani terror group in Punjab and began roping in youngsters to fulfil its nefarious act.

These sleepers cells are circulating literature of Khalistani group and funds are being managed through hawala channel. Pakistan has also activated the Khalistani members who are settled in Canada, the US and UK to fund Punjab-based youngsters aimed at creating mayhem in Punjab, said a top intelligence officer looking after the movements of Khalistani members.

Sources said that they are also pumping in narcotics in Punjab to fund the Khalistani movement. He explained that as security grid has tightened in Jammu and Kashmir and ISI fails to push terrorists in the Valley, they have started focusing back in Punjab and pumping in drugs and arms through International boundary.

"The pro-Khalistani elements in Punjab were not in hibernation but active on a low key affair and trying to revive militancy in the border state with anti-India activities such as peddling drugs and arms through its sleeper cells," the sources in the Intelligence grid said.

They also said that the recent spurt in the violence incidents like attack on the Punjab Police's intelligence headquarter, blast at a Ludhiana court on December 23 last year were two major incidents which have been executed by the Khalistani militants suggest that these anti-India elements have been trying to revive militancy in the border state.

A senior official in the security grid said that reviving terrorism in both Kashmir and Punjab is most essential part of the ISI's K2 Plan (Kashmir and Khalistan) but following the sustained and coordinated counter terror operations in Kashmir valley by the security forces, the ISI has concentrated now in Punjab.

The sources further said that the incidents have been on rise after the drones being used by the Khalistani militants hiding in Pakistan. It is learnt that the ISI got a huge number of drones from China and Turkey and some of them are given to Khalistani leaders operating from Pakistan to transport arms and drugs.

Reacting to the situation, the former Director General of Police of Uttar Pradesh and Border Security Force Prakash Singh said that the Central government should take a serious notice in these developments as the Khalistani militant wants to recreate the terrorism in Punjab.

"As of now, both the central and state governments are appearing to be on different pages and ultimately the people of the Punjab will have to pay a heavy price for this." However, the former Special Director of Intelligence Bureau Yashovardhan Azad said that perpetrators sitting across the border have been trying to revive the issue Khalistan time to time but the recent attack on the Punjab police's intelligence headquarter must be carefully seen because the terrorist have used Rocket Propelled Grenade.

"The sleeper cells of Khalistan has been activated in Punjab by the ISI, the leaders of Khalistan wants to imbue some misguided Sikh youths in Punjab but these stray incidents executed by the these elements will not pose any major challenge to our internal security as in one way, the Khalistan movement is dead now, yes some stray incidents do occur in Punjab as the they (Khalistani terrorists hiding in Pakistan) want to prove their utility before ISI," Azad said.
Thiruvananthapuram, May 12 : Kerala Governor Arif Mohammed Khan on Thursday slammed those who reportedly insulted a Class 10 girl student after a senior leader of Samastha Kerala Jem-iyyathul Ulama, M.T. Abdulla Musaliyar, blasted the organisers of an event for inviting her to receive an award.

The incident took place after the opening ceremony of a madrasa building at Malappuram when students were being felicitated by the SKJU members.

"A case should have been registered against those who have done this and I am surprised if it has not been done. I am all the more surprised that the political leadership is silent on what has happened. This is totally not acceptable, especially in Kerala," said Khan.

"Do you know how that young girl would have felt? This is enough for her to stop her studies. Action should be taken against such people who are spreading Islamphobia in the country. This is a conspiracy against Muslim women to push them back," added Khan.

This incident occurred a few days back during the inaugural ceremony of a new building of Darul Ulum madrasa in Malappuram.

During the ceremony, Abdulla Musliyar publicly scolded the organisers for inviting the girl to the dais. He conveyed the message to the organisers that girls should not be invited to the dais.

"Who invited her to the dais? You will face the consequences if you repeat this mistake. Don't you know the rules of Samastha? Instead, invite her guardian," Musliyar was heard telling the organisers.

Former state minister and legislator K.T. Jaleel said he wants to know what the Indian Union Muslim League leaders have to say on this.

The IUML is the second biggest ally of the Congress-led UDF, presently the opposition in the 140-member Kerala Legislative Assembly.

"Muslim girls and women are doing very well in the education sector and it should be appreciated," Higher Education Minister R. Bindhu said on Thursday.

Health Minister Veena George condemned what has happened, as the winner has to come and collect her award, and not someone else.

Leader of Opposition and Congress veteran V.D. Satheesan said that the Congress and the UDF are totally against anything that pulls down women.
Ballari, : , May 12 (IANS) A corporator in Karnataka's Ballari on Thursday lodged a complaint against a Congress leader for allegedly cheating him of Rs 3.5 crore after promising the Mayor's post.

Congress corporator of ward 30, Asif Basha lodged a complaint with the Kaul Bazar police station against Congress leader T.G.A Erriswamy.

This comes as allegations of heavy money transactions had swirled around the recently concluded elections for Mayor and Deputy Mayor in the Ballari City Corporation.

Basha, in his complaint, alleged that the promise was not kept but Erriswamy refused to repay the money and threatened him whenever he had asked for it.

The corporator said that he had given money to the accused in two installments, Rs 2.5 crore in 2021 and Rs 1 crore in 2022. Kaul Bazar police are investigating the case.

Sources say that Erriswamy is a relative of MLA Nagendra and he looked after his work in the region. The police has issued notices to both Erriswamy and Basha over the issue.

Erriswamy was unavailable for comment, but the local Congress unit came out in his defence, saying that he has not indulged in any such activity and will come out clean.
Hyderabad, May 12 : A world-wide study, which included Indian scientists, of diverse populations has shed new light on how genes contribute to Type 2 diabetes.

The study, named DIAMANTE (DIAbetes Meta-ANalysis of Trans-Ethnic association studies), co-led by Prof Andrew Morris of the University of Manchester, has been published in Nature Genetics.

The global prevalence of Type 2 diabetes, a familial disease with severe morbidity, has increased 4-fold over the last 3 decades. Asia, especially India and China, are major hubs of this spurt.

It is thought that Indians are especially at risk of Type 2 diabetes because they are centrally obese, or fat around the abdomen - indicative of fat around their visceral organs, and are more insulin resistant right from birth. This is in contrast to the Europeans who are overall fat in a generalised manner.

Despite this fact, the largest studies to understand the genetic basis of Type 2 diabetes have mostly been conducted on populations of European ancestry.

Dr. Giriraj R Chandak, Chief Scientist at CSIR - Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CSIR - CCMB) and one of the lead investigators from India, highlighted this study as a landmark event where scientists from different parts of the world put together their minds to understand similarities and differences in genetic susceptibility to Type 2 diabetes in different populations.

His group had earlier provided evidence of greater genetic heterogeneity in Indians compared to Europeans, which compromises the ability to predict Type 2 diabetes risk in the Indian populations using European data.

This recent study compared genomic DNA of 1.8 lakh people with Type 2 diabetes against 11.6 lakh normal subjects from five ancestries - Europeans, East Asians, South Asians, Africans, and Hispanics, and identified large number of genetic differences (Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms or SNPs) between patients and the normal subjects.

"The study found population-specific differences in genetic susceptibility to Type 2 diabetes. These results pave the way towards development of ancestry-specific genetic risk score for risk prediction in different populations and has immense implications for Indians, where every sixth individual is a potential diabetic," said Dr. Chandak.

"This study sets up the stage for further investigating the South Asian population for genetic susceptibility to Type 2 Diabetes and extends the journey on the path of precision medicine," CCMB Director, Dr Vinay Nandicoori, said.
Bhubaneswar, May 12 : The Odisha government has agreed to the proposal of Mahanadi Coalfields Limited (MCL) for the management of Mahanadi Institute of Medical Sciences and Research (MIMSAR) in Talcher.

Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Thursday gave in-principle approval to run the medical college, which was constructed by MCL at the coal town Talcher in Angul district.

The Health and Family Welfare Department of Odisha will run the medical college and hospital, while MCL will provide the necessary funds for this purpose, officials said.

This will be a major step towards providing quality healthcare facility to the people of Angul and adjacent districts. The medical college will further strengthen the efforts of the state government to improve the capacity of medical education institutions in the state, they said.

The PSU will provide the funding towards the running of the medical college and hospital.

MCL has constructed the institution on 20 acres of land provided by the state government. The institute has 100 seats per year while the hospital is a 500-bed facility.

Initially, MCL tried to operate the college and hospital through PPP mode. However, later the MCL sent a proposal for the state government to take over the responsibility of operating the facility.
Srinagar, May 12 : Kashmiri Pandits working in the Valley, majority of them under the Prime Minister's rehabilitation package, on Thursday staged protests at different places against the killing of their colleague, Rahul Bhat, by militants in Budgam district.

The protesting Kashmiri Pandit government employees blocked the Srinagar-Jammu highway outside Vessu migrant colony in Anantnag district. They lit candles to register their protest.

Visibly disturbed by the broad daylight killing of Rahul Bhat in a government office during working hours, one of the protesters said: "If rehabilitation costs life, we will prefer to resign and leave Kashmir forever.

"We are being made soft targets by militants. They (militants) should also clarify their policy. If they are out to kill all of us, they should tell us clearly. But the fact remains that the government has failed to protect us despite making tall claims".

During the protests on the Srinagar-Jammu highway, hundreds of vehicles remained stranded for hours.

Protests were also held at Sheikhpora, Budgam outside the migrant KP colony where women and male members of the Pandit community sat in the middle of the road in protest.

Vijay Kumar, IGP (Kashmir) visited Sheikhpora Budgam to express sympathy with the fellow colleagues of the slain employee. However, the protesters insisted that he should bring Divisional Commissioner Kashmir to the spot.

Many protesters alleged that the killing of Rahul Bhat at Tehsil office Chadoora was a major security lapse.

Another protest was held along the Pulwama-Shopian highway outside KP migrant colony. Protesters shouted: "Fail Hai, Fail Hai, administration fail Hai." Protests were also held in Baramulla district where the Pandit members assembled at Pandit Colony Veerwan demanding justice and protection to Kashmiri Pandits working in the Valley.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
New Delhi, May 12 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday stressed the requirement of a coordinated global response to combat future health emergencies.

In his remarks at the opening session of the Second Global Covid virtual summit he was attending on the invitation of US President Joe Biden, he said that the Covid pandemic continues to disrupt lives, supply chains, and tests the resilience of open societies and called for building "a resilient global supply chain and enable equitable access to vaccines and medicines".

He also said that India adopted a people-centric strategy against the pandemic and his government made the highest-ever allocation to its annual healthcare budget.

"Our vaccination programm is the largest in the world. We have fully vaccinated almost 90 per cent of the adult population, and more than 50 million children. India manufactures four WHO approved vaccines and has the capacity to produce five billion doses this year," Modi said.

He also said that India supplied over 200 million doses to 98 countries, bilaterally and through COVAX, while also developing low-cost Covid mitigation technologies for testing, treating and data management.

"We have offered these capabilities to other countries." Referring to Genomics Consortium in India, Modi said that it has contributed significantly to the global database on the virus.

"I am happy to share that we will extend this network to countries in our neighborhood," he added.

"In India, we extensively used our traditional medicines to supplement our fight against Covid and to boost immunity, saving countless lives," the PM asserted.

He also informed that last month, the Indian government laid the foundation of WHO Centre for Traditional Medicine in India, with an aim to make this age-old knowledge available to the World.

The Indian Prime Minister also called for WTO rules, particularly Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), to be more flexible.

"WHO must be reformed and strengthened to build a more resilient global health security architecture.

"We also call for streamlining WHO's approval process for vaccines and therapeutics to keep supply chains stable and predictable. As a responsible member of the global community, India is ready to play a key role in these efforts," he said.

Other participants at the event were co-hosts of the event - Heads of State/Government of Belize in its capacity as Chair of CARICOM, Senegal as Chair of African Union, Indonesia as President of G20, and Germany as President of G7.

The Secretary General of the United Nations, and Director General of World Health Organization and other dignitaries also participated.

Modi had also participated in the first Global Covid virtual Summit hosted by President Biden on September 22, 2021.
New Delhi, May 12 : Union Minister of State for Health, Bharati Pawar on Thursday said a strong nursing sector is an essential building block of a strong healthcare sector, and nurses are the foundation of hospitals, and the heart and the soul of caring.

Pawar said this while addressing an event to mark the International Nurses day, organised by the Indian Nursing Council in collaboration with the Ministry of Health.

Congratulating the nursing fraternity for dedicated service to the nation, Pawar said: "Nurses play a vital role in the healthcare industry and are the most important link between a doctor and the patient. Nurses are the heroes who attend to the needs of their patients, be it day or night without a frown on their face. They are the backbone of the healthcare industry, who tirelessly take care of all the requirements of the patients.

"Nursing is currently the largest occupational group in the health sector, accounting for approximately 59 per cent of the health professionals, and serves as the first point of contact and this makes their role all the more important in the healthcare delivery system," said Pawar.

She further said "investing in nursing will help in achieving our objectives of Universal Health Coverage through improved health services and disease prevention".
New Delhi, May 12 : The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Thursday said it has filed a charge sheet against four accused in connection with the Jamaat-e-Islami, Jammu and Kashmir, terror funding case.

It said that it has filed the charge sheet in special NIA court of Patiala House here against four arrested accused persons -- Javaid Ahmad Lone, Aadil Ahmad Lone, Manzoor Ahmad Dar, and Rameez Ahmad Kondu.

The accused were charged under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and the Arms Act.

The case was registered against members and cadres of Jamaat-e-Islami, J&K, for their involvement in separatist and secessionist activities in Jammu and Kashmir even after its declaration as an unlawful association on February 28, 2019.

According to NIA, the accused had been collecting funds domestically as well as from abroad through donations, particularly in the form of Zakat, Mowda and Bait-ul-Mal, purportedly to further charity and other welfare activities but had instead used it to encourage violent and secessionist activities.

The NIA registered the case suo-moto on February 5 last year.

The agency said that their investigation in the case has revealed that accused Javaid Ahmad Lone has been soliciting funds and organising meetings in the name of JeI, J&K. In these meetings, he has been giving hateful anti-India speeches and exhorting people to donate according to their status. Further, both accused Javaid Ahmad Lone and Aadil Ahmad Lone had acquired firearms and ammunition, with ulterior motives from the co-accused persons.

Further investigation in the case continues, the NIA said in a statement.
New Delhi, May 12 : The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Thursday arrested a person named Namit Singh, a resident of West Bengal, in connection with the recovery of crude bombs and a firearm frpm a house in Jagaddal in Bhatpara municipality of North 24 Parganas district.

An NIA team also conducted search operations at the premises of others involved in the case.

The police had recovered 44 crude bombs and a firearm from a house in Bhatpara in March this year. The house was located close to the residence of BJP MP Arjun Singh, who had sought an NIA probe into the incident.

The case was initially registered with the Jagaddal police station on March 12. Later the NIA took over the investigation on April 8.

During investigation it was revealed that the arrested person was part of a criminal conspiracy for illegal collection and possession of bombs to create terror in the minds of the general public.

During the search, the NIA recovered a number of incriminating documents and material objects.
Raipur, May 12 : Both the pilots were killed when a Chhattisgarh government helicopter crashed at the Raipur airport on Thursday evening, officials said.

According to information received, the helicopter was landing when the crash occurred, but it was not clear what led to the accident.

Chhattisgarh Chief Bhupesh Baghel has expressed his deep sorrow at the death of the pilots -- identified as Captain Gopal Krishna Panda and Captain A.P. Srivastava -- and extended his condolences to their families.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
United Nations, May 13 : India is exploring ways to help its students whose education in Ukraine has been interrupted by the war, according to India's Deputy Permanent Representative R. Ravindra.

"We are exploring options to minimise the impact on our students' education," he said on Thursday during a debate in the Security Council on the humanitarian situation in Ukraine centred on education and children.

"We appreciate the relaxations made by the Ukrainian government for this academic year in respect of medical students," he added.

According to the Ukrainian Education Ministry, there had been 18,095 Indian students studying there before the Russian invasion.

They were among the 22,500 Indian citizens who, Ravindra said, were safely brought back to India.

The Ukrainian Education Ministry has said that the final year MBBS students at universities there would get their degrees without having to take the final licensing exams, according to media reports.

Ravindra said that more than 900 educational institutions have been reported damaged or destroyed in Ukraine and called for "unequivocal" international support for the Kyiv government to protect them and continue educating children.

In keeping with India's neutral stance, which also takes into account Ukraine's travails, he did not criticise Russia or even mention it while speaking about the destruction of educational institutions by Moscow's invasion.

Ravindra said: "Since the beginning of the Ukrainian conflict, India has stood for peace, dialogue and diplomacy. We believe that no solution can be arrived at by shedding blood and at the cost of innocent lives, especially those of women and children." "It is in our collective interest to work constructively, both within the United Nations and outside, towards seeking an early resolution to the conflict," he added.

US Deputy Permanent Representative Richard Mills said: "Many on this Council have just now called for diplomacy to resolve this crisis." "We agree that diplomacy and dialogue are essential to resolve this crisis, and Russia should show its commitment to pursuing a peaceful resolution by silencing the guns and withdrawing its forces from Ukraine." Ravindra drew attention to the food crisis developing from the war and said that it "requires us to respond by going beyond constraints that bind us presently" -- a reference to World Trade Organisation (WTO) restrcitions.

While India has a stockpile of wheat estimated at about 100 million tonnes, it faces problems in exporting from it because of the WTO restrictions on selling them because they have been acquired by the government from farmers -- which India does to support the price levels.

Russia and Ukraine together account for about 30 per cent of the global wheat exports, which has been affected by the war.

Ravindra also called for international cooperation to ensure energy security, which has been affected by disruption in supplies from Russia that have sent oil and gas prices soaring.

Latest updates on Russia-Ukraine War

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Kabul, May 13 : Pakistan has handed over two top commanders of the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) to the Afghan Taliban, which has been mediating peace talks between the two sides, as part of efforts to revive negotiations with the militant group, RFE/RL reported.

Muslim Khan and Mehmood Khan were recently transferred from a military detention facility to the custody of the Afghan Taliban in Pakistan's northwestern tribal belt, said sources with knowledge of the matter.

The move came as a delegation of senior Pakistani military officials arrived in Kabul on May 9 for talks with the TTP leadership, said sources with knowledge of the negotiations.

As a confidence-building measure, the TTP agreed a temporary cease-fire from May 10 to 15, according to a decree issued by the TTP leadership and seen by RFE/RL. The militant group had announced a unilateral truce from April 29 to May 9 to mark the end of the holy month of Ramadan and the start of the Eid holiday.

The talks between the Pakistani delegation and the TTP are being mediated by the Afghan Taliban, which has close ideological and organizational ties with the TTP. The Afghan militant group is also a longtime ally of Islamabad, its main foreign sponsor.

The negotiations came as the TTP, also known as the Pakistani Taliban, has intensified its attacks in Pakistan since a monthlong cease-fire expired and peace talks collapsed in December, RFE/RL reported.

Since then, Islamabad has sent secret delegations to Afghanistan to hold talks with the TTP on reviving the expired truce and resuming talks over a negotiated end to the TTP's 14-year insurgency in Pakistan, where thousands of people have been killed in militant attacks and clashes between the TTP and the military.

The TTP has demanded the release of 102 commanders and fighters in Pakistani prisons. Pakistan had released most of the TTP prisoners but had been reluctant to free Muslim Khan and Mehmood Khan.

The TTP has also demanded the implementation of Islamic Shar'ia law in Pakistan's tribal belt, a demand that observers said the government would likely reject.

The two commanders will be released from the custody of the Afghan Taliban once the TTP agrees a permanent cease-fire with Islamabad, said a source with knowledge of the negotiations, RFE/RL reported.
Patna, May 13 : One person were killed and two others injured in an explosion in an ice cream factory in Bihar's Muzaffarpur district on Thursday evening, officials said.

SDO, Muzaffarpur, West, Brajesh Kumar said that the incident occurred in Motipur area.

"We have rescued the injured persons and taken them to a private hospital. Their condition is stable. The victims were employees of the ice cream factory. The explosion took place in a compressor," he said.

Legal action is being taken against the owner of the ice cream factory, he added.
Islamabad, May 13 : The Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), the media wing of Pakistan's armed forces, has reacted to "imprudent" comments made by politicians about Lieutenant General Faiz Hameed, the former DG-ISI who currently commands the XI Corps of the Pakistan Army also known as Peshawar Crops, Samaa TV reported.

The ISPR on Thursday issued a statement deploring the remarks by politicians without naming anyone.

The ISPR said that "the Peshawar Corps is an illustrious formation of Pakistan Army spearheading national war against terrorism for over two decades".

"One of the most competent and professional officers is entrusted with the responsibility to lead this prestigious formation," it said.

The military's media wing said that "imprudent comments made by important senior politicians recently about Corps Commander Peshawar are very inappropriate".

"Such statements undermine the honour and morale of institution and its leadership. It is expected that the senior political leadership of country refrains from passing objectionable remarks against the institution whose brave officers and men are constantly putting their lives on the line to guard the integrity and sovereignty of Pakistan," it said.

At least three Pakistani politicians have made remarks about Gen Faiz Hameed in the past few days.

Former President and PPP leader Asif Ali Zardari at the end of his press conference in Karachi on Wednesday had said that Hameed had been "cornered" (khudday line laga dia) after being posted to lead the Peshawar Corps.

The PPP leader immediately realised his gaffe and clarified that it was an off-the-cuff remark.

On Thursday, Maryam Nawaz Sharif was asked to comment on Khawaja Asif's statement to which she had said that "a competent person, someone who has no blot on him, should become the chief of army staff".
Bengaluru, 13 May : Global humanitarian and spiritual leader, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, founder of The Art of Living addressed both US's Delaware State Senate and the House of Representatives, becoming the first Indian spiritual leader to be invited to both the houses, an official statement has said.

His address to the Delaware General Assembly was focused on dealing with mental health challenges and establishing peace.

He highlighted the importance of using one's own breath to achieve inner peace and mental wellbeing.

Interestingly, Delaware is the first state to ratify the Constitution of the US and is the electoral constituency of US President Joe Biden.

During the meeting, each chamber presented a tribute acknowledging "the extensive work of The Art of Living globally towards peace, trauma relief, conflict resolution, women empowerment and community development". The tributes also recognised Ravi Shankar's long standing role in mediation and conflict resolution in countries like Iraq, Sri Lanka, Columbia, Cameroom, Bihar, among others.

In his address, Ravi Shankar emphasised on the importance of building communities where human values are cherished and nurtured. He also encouraged all the stakeholders to join forces and be a part of the "I Stand for Peace" campaign, a movement to bring the focus back to "peaceful progress, unity and harmony".

"We are proud to honour and thank Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar's humanitarianism, spiritual leadership and commitment to peace here in the United States and across the world," mentioned John Carney, Governor and Bethany Hall-Long, Lieutenant Governor in their joint tribute to the spritual leader, recognising Art of Living's work.

As part of his first tour of US this year, Ravi Shankar has initiated a critical conversation on the importance of mental health and well being in the post pandemic times, "when the incidences of mental health illnesses including depression, fatigue and anxiety are on the rise across the globe". His 2022 US tour began in Miami where he addressed a conference of physicians on the role of meditation for mental health and overall well-being.

He continued to Boston, where he shared his thoughts about destigmatising mental health at Harvard University.
Kupiano Airport, Kupiano, Papua New Guinea [ KUP / ]

If you are planning to travel to Kupiano or any other city in Papua New Guinea, this airport locator will be a very useful tool. This page gives complete information about the Kupiano Airport along with the airport location map, Time Zone, lattitude and longitude, Current time and date, hotels near the airport etc... Kupiano Airport Map showing the location of this airport in Papua New Guinea. Kupiano Airport IATA Code, ICAO Code, exchange rate etc... is also provided.

Kupiano Airport Info:

Kupiano Airport IATA Code: KUP Kupiano Airport ICAO Code: Latitude : -10.0667 Longitude : 148.217 City : Kupiano Country : Papua New Guinea World Area Code : 804 Airport Type : Small Kupiano Airport Address / Contact Details :

Kupiano (KUP), Papua New Guinea Timezone : Pacific/Port_Moresby Kupiano Airport Timezone : GMT +10:00 hours Current time and date at Kupiano Airport is 02:53:25 AM (+10) on Monday, May 16, 2022

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Kupiano Airport Map - Location of Kupiano Airport Load Map Papua New Guinea - General Information Country Formal Name Independent State of Papua New Guinea Country Code PG Capital Port Moresby Currency Kina (PGK)

 1 PGK = 0.284 USD

 1 USD = 3.515 PGK

 1 PGK = 0.273 EUR

 1 EUR = 3.66 PGK

 More PGK convertion rates Tel Code +675 Top Level Domain .pg

This page provides all the information you need to know about Kupiano Airport, Papua New Guinea. This page is created with the aim of helping travelers and tourists visiting Papua New Guinea or traveling to Kupiano Airport. Details about Kupiano Airport given here include Kupiano Airport Code - IATA Code (3 letter airport codes) and ICAO Code (4 letter airport codes)

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KUP - Kupiano Airport IATA Code
Advanced Management Strategies Group, Inc. (AMSG) announced April 24, 2022, that they are proud to support the General Federation of Womens Clubs of Virginia (GFWC Virginia) in reaching their goal of raising $35,000 for the Armed Services YMCA to purchase a bus to transport children of military families to daily childcare.

GFWC Virginia partnered with the Nations oldest military service organization to raise funds for critical early education and childcare transportation at the Armed Services YMCA Hampton Roads Branch. AMSG understands how important Childcare is to a service member:

Childcare is ESSENTIAL to the mission readiness of the service member, the employment of the military spouse, financial stability, and food security, and to the ongoing development of the military child. This is why the Greater Federation of Women's Clubs Virginia is helping the Armed Services YMCA of Hampton Roads raise funds to purchase a bus for their various transportation needs for their early education and school-age programs.

As the Nation's oldest military service organization, the Armed Services YMCA provides programs and services that are focused on strengthening military families through youth enrichment initiatives, family support systems, providing a hand up during challenge and honoring the impact of service.

AMSG is donating over $6,700 to get the GFWC Virginia to completion of their goal.

Jim OFarrell, AMSGs President & CEO said the following AMSG is thrilled to support GFWC Virginia and the Armed Services YMCA as they initiate a new service providing transportation to military families allowing the parents to seek job opportunities in the Hampton Roads area. At AMSG we understand that military families need safe, affordable, transportation options to childcare so that they can focus on the mission, whether the mission is a military member on deployment, or a military spouse seeking employment to earn an income and support their families, and/or advancing their careers and dreams. In a nutshell, we can draw a direct line from the purchase of a bus to the strengthening of our nation.

About GFWC Virginia: The General Federation of Womens Clubs of Virginia (GFWC Virginia) is a member of the General Federation of Womens Clubs, one of the oldest and largest organizations of women volunteers in the world.

With nearly 3,700 members in 138 clubs across the Commonwealth we are dedicated to community improvement by enhancing the lives of others through volunteer service. While diverse in age, interests, and experiences, all clubwomen are united by a desire to create positive change in our communities and across the world.

About Armed Service YMCA: The Armed Services YMCA (ASYMCA) is the constant in a military familys life: on the home front and during deployment, when transitioning between bases, and in times of conflict and peace.

The ASYMCA is an Association of the YMCA of the USA, specifically dedicated to serving active-duty junior enlisted military service members and their families of all six armed services: Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Space Force and Coast Guard.

The oldest military support organization in the U.S., the ASYMCA has been Strengthening Our Military Family since 1861 through its 12 branches and 24 affiliate partners, serving 87 military installations and facilities nationwide. Our nationally and locally tailored programs and services for our nations troops and their families are offered at no or low cost and require no dues or membership fees.

About AMSG: AMSG is a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) verified Service-Disabled, Veteran-Owned, Small Business with substantial relevant Program/Project Management, Knowledge Management, Acquisition Management, Capability Development, Business Process Improvement, and administrative support experience. Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Dumfries, Virginia, with numerous satellite work locations across the country, AMSG supports a variety of Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, Defense Health Agency, Department of the Treasury, and Federal Trade Commission program and performance management services. Our core capabilities are provided by AMSG employees, who have deep subject matter expertise, proven experience, and a desire to bring innovative and unique solutions to complex problems. In supporting federal government agencies, we develop business processes and facilitate mission requirements, helping to guide, organize and develop technology and infrastructure support and enhance business relationships.

Advanced Management Strategies Group, Inc. (AMSG)

Dumfries, VA

571.931.0435

amessenger@amsgcorp.net
Fluxergy partners with the Wyss Institute Fluxergy plans to collaborate with distinguished clinicians, researchers, engineers, funding agencies, philanthropists, government agencies, and industry partners.

Fluxergy has joined as an inaugural member of the Wyss Diagnostics Accelerators (Wyss DxA) Industrial Participant Program (IPP). The Wyss DxA is Harvards Wyss Institutes initiative to create and deliver disruptive diagnostic technologies to address unmet clinical needs in the screening, diagnosis, prognosis, and management of diseases. Through its participation in the IPP, Fluxergy plans to collaborate with distinguished clinicians, researchers, engineers, funding agencies, philanthropists, government agencies, and industry partners.

The measure of success for the Wyss Diagnostics Accelerator is lives saved by delivering accurate and accessible diagnostics and that is the challenge that we are facing said Rushdy Ahmad, Ph.D., Head of the Wyss DxA.

The Wyss DxA is co-led by Ahmad and David Walt, Ph.D. Walt is a Core Faculty member at the Wyss Institute, Professor of Pathology at the Brigham and Womens Hospital, and scientific co-founder of several life science companies. By participating in the program, Fluxergy will work within the IPP framework to facilitate discovery, development, and delivery of diagnostic solutions in areas of unmet needs.

After an initial meeting with the inaugural partners, Im ecstatic. We have a room full of scientific and commercial heavy weights that can enact change especially for matching unmet needs with ideal technologies. Its very unique to be in a consortium of seasoned and passionate people with such diverse backgrounds: applications in human health, veterinary medicine, and food safety, presence in each of the global markets, and platform technologies that cover telehealth, diagnostics, drug discovery, and digital health, said Tej Patel, CEO and co-founder of Fluxergy.

Fluxergys goal is to leverage its multimodal diagnostic platform as an OEM partner to manufacture multi-omic testing panels that integrate combinations of protein, transcript, and metabolite data into unique signatures that better inform on patient outcomes. Example applications in human health can be seen within infectious disease, chronic blood disorders, cancer, sepsis, and chronic kidney disease. Currently, point-of-care devices can be limited to detecting only one type of parameter (i.e., immunoassay, chemistry, or PCR). Fluxergys flexible system is designed to conduct PCR, immunoassays, chemistry, and cell counting all on one, user-friendly platform. In human health, Fluxergy seeks to help drive syndromic and situational testing panels and make it actionable for small clinics, doctors offices, nursing homes, and consumers to run more complex tests from a general metabolic panel to a sepsis screening test. It is an extension of central laboratory infrastructure that will drive faster and higher volumes of clinical decision making from laboratory information.

Dr. Ahmad closed one of the year- end meetings saying, There is an unparalleled unique vision for this group at the Wyss Diagnostics Accelerator - expand diagnostics to all.

Fluxergy is aligned with this vision.

About Fluxergy

Fluxergy is a medical device manufacturing company specializing in point-of-use detection technologies with the goals of making affordable diagnostics accessible in all settings. The Fluxergy system uses patented microfluidics and a highly integrated sensor system to produce a more flexible and cost-effective multimodal testing platform. Fluxergy is ISO 13485 and MDSAP certified for IVD manufacturing. Fluxergys manufacturing and R&D campus spans 90,000 sq.ft. in Irvine, CA. Fluxergy Europe GMBH is based in Aschaffenburg, Germany. Fluxergy, Inc. launched in 2013 with funding support from principal investor and Kingston Technology co-founder John Tu.

The Fluxergy Diagnostic Testing System consists of The Fluxergy Card, a single-use lab-on-chip consumable test cartridge; the Fluxergy Analyzer, which conducts the testing process, and Fluxergy Works software is used to review and interpret the test data. The Fluxergy Cards are multi-modal (meaning different types of diagnostic tests can be run simultaneously i.e., PCR, immunochemistry, chemistry, etc.) and designed to be very cost-effective and scalable, using proprietary printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing and microfluidics technologies. Fluxergy Works enables organizations to cloud link as many devices as a network can support.

The Fluxergy POC PCR Test Kit COVID-19 is only available for purchase in the European Union market and any other markets that accept the CE-marking as valid regulatory approval.

Fluxergy is also in process of developing a CLIA waivable respiratory panel, an inflammation panel, and commercializing several products for the equine veterinary and food safety markets.
When Amelia landed here, no one had ever seen a woman driving a car, let alone flying an airplane or wearing trousers, said Nicole McElhinney of Derry's Amelia Earhart Legacy Association With our partners across the Atlantic, were committed to sharing Amelias story of tenacity and courage to inspire future generations  in Kansas, in Derry and around the globe," said Karen Seaberg, founder and president of the Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum.

Leaders of the Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum in Earharts Atchison, Kansas, hometown will be special guests of the Amelia Earhart Legacy Association in Derry, Northern Ireland, for their 90th anniversary celebration of Earharts historic landing in Derry, where Earhart became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean  and one of the most admired women in history.

We are honored to return to Derry for this extraordinary 90th anniversary celebration hosted by our transatlantic partners at the Amelia Earhart Legacy Association in Derry. We share a commitment to preserve Earharts legacy to defy the odds and pursue her dreams that changed aviation forever, said Karen Seaberg, founder and president of the Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum in Atchison, Kan.  where Earharts dream of flight began. The new state-of-the-art STEM and history museum, opening in 2023, will immerse visitors in Earharts pioneering life. Highly interactive exhibits will feature an opportunity to pilot a virtual reality recreation of Earharts 1932 transatlantic flight with challenges mirroring obstacles Earhart overcame to land in Derry.

On May 20, 1932, Earhart set off in her red Lockheed Vega from Harbour Grace in Newfoundland, Canada, intending to fly to Paris. With weather and technical problems altering her course, Earhart landed on May 21, 1932, in Robert Gallaghers farm in Ballyarnett in Derry.

When Amelia landed here, no one had ever seen a woman driving a car, let alone flying an airplane or wearing trousers, said Nicole McElhinney, co-founder of the Amelia Earhart Legacy Association. Her fearless spirit was revolutionary, particularly for women, and continues to be an inspiration around the world.

AMELIA EARHART STEM CHALLENGE

As part of the 90th festivities in Derry, students from across Northern Ireland will compete in The Amelia Earhart STEM Challenge hosted by the Royal Academy of Engineering in the Great Hall at Ulster University Magee in Derry, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Friday, May 20. Student teams will build model planes with judging criteria to include the longest flying distance. Seaberg, along with Jacque Pregont, Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum board member and coordinator of the annual Atchison Amelia Earhart Festival, will serve on the judging panel.

The Amelia Earhart STEM Challenge is organized by Clare Doherty, the great-great granddaughter of Robert Gallagher who owned the farm where Amelia landed on May 21, 1932. The Gallagher family opened their home to Amelia, providing food and a place to sleep. Doherty is the Head of Technology for St. Marys College and the Royal Academy of Engineering Connecting STEM Teachers Coordinator.

The winning team will take a helicopter ride over Derry and along the flight path of Earharts landing on Gallaghers farm in Ballyarnett, along with a trophy from the Amelia Earhart Legacy Association.

Other 90th anniversary events throughout Derry include:



Amelia Earhart 90th Commemorative World Radio Call from Ballyarnett, May 20-21  The North West Amateur Radio club in Northern, Ireland, will transmit from the field where Earhart landed, connecting with the Amelia Earhart Memorial Airport in her hometown in Atchison, Kansas, in the U.S. and Harbour Grace in Canada  along with thousands of radio operators around the world. For more, visit https://www.qrz.com/db/GB0AEL.

Amelia Earhart Mural Launch, 2 p.m., May 20, Galliagh Coop building  The new 48-foot mural by Derry artist Joe Campbell tells the story of Earhart's historic landing in Derry. The mural will feature Earhart's flight path, a portrait and one of her inspirational quotes: But What Do Dreams Know of Boundaries? For more, visit https://www.studio2derry.com/earhart-mural

Amelias Speakeasy, Walled City Brewery, 6 p.m, May 20  This reservation-only event will feature Earhart Gin made from hand-picked botanicals from the field where Amelia landed.

Amelia Earhart Walking Tour, 12:30 pm, Sat., May 21, Visit Derry Information Centre Tour traces the footsteps of Earharts unscheduled visit to Derry.

Amelia Earhart Vintage Fashion Show, 1:30 pm, May 21, GuildHall  The event will showcase pieces from the Amelia Earhart collection by Christopher Reid, the Derry-native fashion designer known for his TopherLily collection and work with Alexander McQueen.

ATCHISON-DERRY PROCLAMATION

McElhinney, along with AELA co-founder Brona Sharkey, visited Atchison as special guest speakers during the 2019 Atchison Amelia Earhart Festival. It was a dream come true to come to the U.S. and walk the same streets in Atchison where Amelia grew up, McElhinney said. All of us in Derry look forward to returning for the grand opening of the Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum in 2023.

This month, Atchison Mayor Abby Bartlett issued a proclamation recognizing Atchison, Kansas, in the U.S. and Derry in Northern Ireland as bonded by their ties to Amelia Earharts beginnings and monumental accomplishments. It acknowledges their mutual dedication to honor and recognize the contributions made by Amelia Earhart in aeronautics and to educate and share with others the history and courageous exploits of Amelia Earhart.

Amelia faced many obstacles, but she persevered and believed in her dream of flight, Seaberg added. With our partners across the Atlantic, were committed to sharing Amelias story of tenacity and courage to inspire future generations  in Kansas, in Derry and around the globe.

ABOUT THE AMELIA EARHART HANGAR MUSEUM The Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum  opening in 2023  will honor Earharts aviation legacy and inspire all generations in the pursuit of flight. Surrounded by immersive STEM and history storytelling exhibits will be Muriel  the worlds last remaining Lockheed Electra 10-E  identical to the plane Earhart flew on her final flight. Located at the Amelia Earhart Memorial Airport in Atchison, Kan. (K59)  birthplace of the world-renowned aviator  the Museum will take visitors on a journey through Earharts inspiring life, from growing up in Atchison to the height of her worldwide fame. The Museum is partnering with Kansas-based Dimensional Innovations for exhibit design and fabrication. When completed, the Museum will apply to become an Affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution. For more, visit http://www.ameliaearharthangarmuseum.org. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

ABOUT THE AMELIA EARHART LEGACY ASSOCIATION

The Amelia Earhart Legacy Association is a volunteer group in Derry, Northern Ireland. Established in 2015, AELA is dedicated to promoting the pioneering spirit of Amelia Earhart who landed in Derry on May 21, 1932. AELA is focused on sharing Earharts inspiring story to encourage young people to realize their dreams. For more, visit http://www.ameliaearhartlegacyassociation.co.uk or follow on Facebook.com/Amelia-Derry-Earhart and Twitter @AmeliaDerry.

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The PatientIQ platform is a best-in-class product that will inspire the collaboration and innovation needed to advance clinical practice.

PatientIQ, a leading healthcare technology company deriving actionable insights from patient outcomes data at scale, announced today it has secured $20 million in Series B funding. The funding round was led by Health Enterprise Partners (HEP), a growth equity firm whose investors include some of the largest health systems and health plans in the United States. August Capital, an early financier of PatientIQ, also participated in this funding round.

PatientIQ partnered with HEP because of its deep industry expertise and long-standing record of scaling healthcare technology businesses. HEPs investment will help advance PatientIQs mission of driving medicine forward through the systemic collection and analysis of patient outcomes data. Specifically, the company will leverage the investment to further enhance its industry-leading patient outcomes platform and accelerate its expansion in the provider and real-world evidence markets. Following the recent hiring of John Gerhardt as Chief Technology Officer, the company also plans to double in size by the end of 2022 to meet increasing demand for patient outcomes collection and analysis.

As healthcare continues down the path toward value-based care delivery, the ability to measure and quantitatively define quality is imperative, said Matthew Gitelis, CEO, PatientIQ. Other industries with far less at stake leverage big data to measure value and improve performance, and HEPs investment will help ensure that healthcare organizations across the country are expertly equipped to optimize clinical outcomes.

HEP invests in companies that demonstrate an unmatched commitment to achieving clinical and operational excellence, said Dave Tamburri, Managing Partner, HEP. The PatientIQ platform is a best-in-class product that will inspire the collaboration and innovation needed to advance clinical practice. We are thrilled to partner with Matthew Gitelis, Michael Casey, and the entire PatientIQ team to accelerate the companys growth. Tamburri will serve on the PatientIQ Board of Directors.

The $20 million Series B raise follows a tremendous period of growth for PatientIQ. In just two years, the company has matured its customer base from 29 healthcare organizations to more than 200, collecting outcomes data from more than 1.4 million patients. The volume of outcomes collected has also grown substantially to almost 6 million, which provides clinicians and researchers with a robust database they can leverage to benchmark performance, predict patient outcomes, and collaborate to enable better care.

About PatientIQ

PatientIQ is the healthcare technology partner for deriving actionable insights from patient outcomes data. The PatientIQ platform is a cloud-based solution that empowers hospitals, health systems, private practices, and industry partners to systemically collect, measure and analyze patient-reported outcomes data to improve clinical and operational performance. With the single, EHR-integrated platform, leveraging a proprietary analytics engine, healthcare organizations are empowered to continuously capture patient progress and derive intelligent insights that enable better care - without increased administrative burden. In addition to outcomes analysis, the platform facilitates collaboration, bringing together data-driven clinicians from across the country to accelerate research, participate in registries, and push medicine forward. PatientIQ has demonstrated years of experience and a superior ability to transform patient outcomes into actionable intelligence. For more, visit http://www.patientiq.io.

About Health Enterprise Partners

Health Enterprise Partners invests in innovative healthcare services and technology companies that deploy solutions that matter. Central to HEP's strategy is its unique and extensive hospital system and health plan network, 36 members of which are investors in HEP's funds. HEP seeks to invest in companies that improve the quality of the patient experience, expand access, and reduce the cost of healthcare. https://hepfund.com/

About August Capital

August Capital is an early-stage venture capital fund located in the San Francisco Bay Area, with multiple fund vintages since our founding in 1995. We currently manage approximately $2 Billion in aggregate capital commitments. Over the last 25+ years, we have invested in breakthrough startups across the technology sector such as Atheros, Seagate, Ebates, Splunk, Zulily, Fastly, Bill.com, and GitLab. We have a team of investment professionals that are open-minded, creative, flexible, experienced, and well-networked. We believe in serving as a resource to support and guide entrepreneurial teams as they pursue their company vision
Juliette founder and CEO Rechelle Balanzat with former owner of Chinese Laundry Inc, Yan Xia He "Tammy". At Juliette, we will be able to preserve the Chinese laundry tradition and technique for doing things by hand. As an Asian, and as an immigrant myself - I'm proud to be able to bridge the gap between the old world and the new world.... to usher in this lost art and bring it to the 21st century.

Juliette, the innovative laundry and dry-cleaning company that sits at the intersection of fashion, lifestyle, and technology, continues to thrive in spite of the challenges faced over the past two years: While the industry lost approximately 80 percent of revenue during Covid, Juliette founder and CEO Rechelle Balanzat is making up for lost time surpassing its 2019 revenue numbers last October. The city is bustling with activity again and with it returns a demand for reliable pick up and drop off laundry services. Coming off the financial growth of 2021, Juliette is delighted to announce its expansion, having recently acquired the established Manhattan company, Chinese Laundry Inc. and with it, a forgotten art of laundry. The timing of this announcement coincides with AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) heritage month, further igniting Rechelles desire to share the history of laundry services in America.

The art of Chinese Laundry has foundations steeped in tradition: Its very name makes reference to the meticulous practice of hand washed/pressed laundry, and is one of the few remaining establishments in the city that offers the technique. The name itself has carried a negative connotation and an unjustified stereotype assigned to the Asian community that Balanzat plans to change. As the new owner, Balanzat is eager to bring the Juliette brand and technology to the existing business. She also quickly discovered a whole new side of the industry that she wants to preserve. Balanzat plans on reimagining the traditional art of hand finished garments and introducing it as a new luxury service to New Yorkers.

"At Juliette, we will be able to preserve the Chinese laundry tradition and technique for doing things by hand. As a non-Chinese, non-family member - I'm really honored and touched that the previous owner trusts me with preserving not only her family legacy - but the legacy of all the Chinese immigrants who came before. As an Asian, and as an immigrant myself - I'm proud to be able to bridge the gap between the old world and the new world.... to usher in this lost art and bring it to the 21st century."

Chinese Laundry has a rich history in NYC that starts in the early twentieth century, as many Chinese immigrating to America were overlooked for jobs because of the language barrier and told to stick to laundry and dry cleaning, a task Western culture felt to be above. Despite being a family owned business for over 100 years, Chinese Laundry Inc. chose to sell because they believe that through Juliette, the art and tradition of Chinese Laundry will be revitalized for a 21st century clientele, a goal the family was not capable of achieving.

Using innovative solutions that leverage data analytics and AI, Juliette is conquering the industry by bringing together the best of technology and beauty for a laundry experience like no other. Currently offering pickup and drop off throughout Manhattan, the Juliette blueprint will be expanding to surrounding boroughs this year.

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About Juliette and Rechelle Balanzat:

Juliette breathes new life and luxury into the laundry & dry cleaning industry. With a singular focus on becoming the category leader, Juliette is redefining how the industry operates. Relentlessly pursuing what clients truly desire - trust, a touch of excitement, and the arousal of inner confidence.

A thrice time entrepreneur, founder and CEO Rechelle Balanzat immigrated from the Philippines with her parents as a teenager. She graduated from Fordham and has a background in tech. She successfully completed the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Program; she is a 2019 Tory Burch Fellow, as well as a graduate of the International Drycleaning & Laundry Institute. She has also been honored by the Philippine Embassy as a Distinguished Filipino Woman.

For more information about Juliette, please visit http://www.juliettecleaners.com

For PR inquiries, please reach out to Sara Spiegel at sara@withsarapr.com
Locusview, a digital construction management company for energy infrastructure organizations, is expanding its long-term partnership with Operations Technology Development (OTD)--a not-for-profit corporation led by 28 members who serve over 70 million natural gas consumers, mainly in North America. This member-controlled collaborative of gas distribution companies are enabling a safe, resilient, and sustainable energy infrastructure and dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

"Billions of dollars are invested each year into new gas infrastructure construction and replacement programs for aging infrastructures, creating a clear need for solutions that will enable utility companies to scale up their construction projects, said Shahar Levi, Co-Founder, and CEO of Locusview. Our long-term relationship with OTD has already created great solutions for our customers, and will create even greater new opportunities to help lead the digital transformation efforts of natural gas utilities, he said.

Locusview pioneered the development and deployment of technologies to automate high-quality data collection and streamline project close-out to support large-scale replacement programs. Our approach of utilizing construction crews to capture digital as-built data is made possible because of the extensive work we did together with OTD to thoroughly evaluate the technology in several pilot projects, said Alicia Farag, Co-Founder, and President at Locusview.

We recently developed a digital data model for Material Test Reports (MTR) for steel pipe that was published through API as a Recommended Practice 5MT. The publication of this Recommended Practice will pave the way for future work together, added Alicia.

Were very pleased with the progress Locusview is making and to see that they are addressing challenges and providing solutions that not only have a positive impact on our members but on the overall industry as well. We are excited to continue working with Locusview, combining our efforts to expand industry standards and best practices for material tracking and traceability, noted Mike Adamo, Vice President of Operations at OTD.

Founded in 2014, Locusview was a spin-out of GTI Energy (formerly the Chicago-based Gas Technology Institute). Weve been fortunate to work with over 25 of the nations leading gas utilities to bring advanced digital technologies to help the industry scale construction operations. We are committed to investing the resources and collaborating with key stakeholders to support the needs of our natural gas utility customers as their construction plans continue to grow, said Shahar.

About Locusview

Locusview is a Digital Construction Management (DCM) platform that manages the entire infrastructure process for utilities, from planning to revenue. Founded in 2014, Locusview enables all stakeholders to streamline data flow and manage the three crucial phases of infrastructure construction projects: planning, construction, and close-out. Guided by a mission to be the world leader in digital construction technology that supports large-scale infrastructure projects from design to completion, it is committed to creating the future of smart utility construction technologies.

About Operational Technology Development

OTD was established in 2003 as an Illinois not-for-profit company to facilitate voluntarily funded, collaborative research. OTDs mission is to identify, select, fund, and oversee research projects resulting in innovative solutions and the improved safety, reliability, operational efficiency, and sustainability of gas systems. http://www.otd.org
A woman-owned business, Clean Beauty & Wellness, offers a line of super-efficient, natural CBD beauty and wellness products. Created by a fitness trainer and team of scientists, CBD is incorporated to enhance skincare and general well-being. Made of one hundred percent raw ingredients, including organically-grown full-spectrum hemp in the USA, Clean Beauty & Wellness has been credited for benefits from skincare to mood. Their products are third party lab tested to ensure safety and potency.

After focusing on health and wellness for more than a decade as a personal trainer, I was introduced to the benefits of CBD and I was fascinated, says Susan McMenamin, Founder of Clean Beauty & Wellness. In doing research, I was not able to find companies that provided detailed product information, particularly regarding ingredients and amount of CBD in their products. Shortly after that, I was introduced to a team of scientist that primarily focused on CBD and we began to work together to curate a line of beauty and wellness products and make them available at a reasonable price point. We are thrilled to be working with Shark Discoveries and expand our audience so more people can harness the benefits of CBD.

"Clean Beauty & Wellness products are the real deal," says Doug Scott, Executive Producer at Shark Discoveries. "They build all of their tinctures and cosmetics from the ground up."

As part of its BRTV campaign with Shark Discoveries, Clean Beauty & Wellness will be appearing in 30 second spots set to air nationwide and feature the original Shark himself, Kevin Harrington. Shark Discoveries is comprised of an award-winning team of producers, writers, videographers, and editors as well as industry veterans dedicated to finding the latest, most innovative products and ideas, and putting them on the BRTV map.

About Shark Discoveries

Headquartered in South Florida, Shark Discoveries is a full-service production, branding, and marketing company that specializes in brand response television, including Celebrity Influencer Videos, and brand building. Based out of a 25,000+ sq ft, state-of-the-art studio, the companys creative team handles every aspect of production from script to screen to airing.

About Kevin Harrington

As the inventor of the infomercial, founder of As Seen on TV, and one of the original Sharks on Shark Tank, Kevin Harrington has worked with some of the worlds biggest celebrities and launched some of the best-selling DRTV campaigns in history. Since producing his first 30-minute infomercial in 1984, Harrington has been involved in over 500 product launches that have resulted in over $5 billion in sales. Now, in his latest venture with Shark Discoveries, Harrington is on the hunt for the best new products and ideas, bringing them to homes everywhere through personalized BRTV campaigns featuring the Shark.

For more information on Clean Beauty & Wellness, please visit http://www.CleanBeautyandWellness.com.
The Samuel Lawrence Foundation this month awarded a $10,000 grant to an Encinitas company advancing new technology to gather data from the ocean and atmosphere.

The company, HyperKelp, Inc., designs solar-powered buoys that can be equipped with sensors that gather all manner of data from the ocean, the air, lagoons, harbors or any other body of water.

The Foundations grant focuses on improving the tracking of sea surface heights  the elevation of the ocean once noise from the tides, waves, and atmospheric pressure is removed. Capturing real-time, in situ data from surface-level buoys tracks sea level rise far more reliably than modeling extrapolated from satellite readings or failure-prone underwater hardware, said Dr. Graeme Rae, HyperKelps chief executive officer.

Our systems are more efficient, reliable and can gather more accurate data, Rae said.

A HyperKelp buoy can be outfitted with super-sensitive, GPS-based sensors that capture readings from the oceans surface.

"Our approach uses next-generation signal processing to capture the slow, hidden rise of the ocean, said Costas Soler, chief technology officer.

The sensors also can detect sudden fluctuations in sea surface heights brought by tsunamis.

Sea level rise, coastal flooding, and tsunamis are of particular concern to the Samuel Lawrence Foundation, a Del Mar-based advocacy group challenging the storage of nuclear waste 100 feet from the ocean at San Onofre.

HyperKelp is applying science where its needed most, said Dr. Bart Ziegler, president of The Samuel Lawrence Foundation. At Southern California Edisons nuclear waste dump, where the utility and government regulators are sitting on their hands, accurate ocean monitoring and predictions could be the driver of long-overdue action.

One of HyperKelps Kelp Smart Buoys is deployed in Los Penasquitos Lagoon to gather environmental data for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Others work at an aquaculture facility on Agua Hedionda Lagoon in Carlsbad and the Ocean Institute in Dana Point Harbor. Still, others are being deployed in Georgia for Georgia Tech Research Institute and the US Navy.

The buoys are designed for ridesharing, Rae says. That means different researchers can outfit a buoy with various sensors to capture the specific data they need. An open-ocean wind farmer can identify the best locations to place turbines; a fish farmer can find plankton in the sea or trout in a lake; surf forecasters can improve their predictions; water district managers can read reservoir depths.

Sensors aboard a HyperKelp buoy can even measure meltwater from glaciers in Greenland with great accuracy.

A HyperKelp buoy in Dana Point is loaded with a dozen different kinds of sensors, Rae said.

Sensors can take basic weather readings such as temperature, salinity, turbidity, and conductivity. A recent NOAA grant had HyperKelp measuring levels of airborne dust. Up to 150 specialized sensors can function aboard a HyperKelp buoy. Adding new ones takes about 20 lines of code and two hours work.

By 2025, HyperKelp hopes to deploy thousands of buoys in the worlds oceans. Rae, who holds a Ph.D. in Ocean Engineering from Florida Atlantic University, founded HyperKelp in 2021.

The potential for us goes so far beyond tracking weather, Rae said. The ocean covers 70% of the earths surface, but nobodys taking readings in the middle of the ocean.
Each individual youth in foster care is alone. Our families may have abused us, been unable to take care of us, or abandoned us, but we still matter. Im alone, but I still want to be a part of this world, so please take us into account and give us an actual fighting chance. Foster Youth

iFoster, a national 501c3 non-profit organization whose mission is to ensure that every child growing up outside of their biological home has the resources and opportunities they need to become successful, has released The Voice of the Foster Care Community Report at http://www.VoiceofFosterCare.org. The Report is the largest-ever opinion survey of people inside the foster care system.

Congress established May as National Foster Care Month in 2021 as an opportunity to raise awareness about the challenges of children in the foster care system, and for advocates to encourage Congress to implement policies to improve the lives of these children.

Each individual youth in foster care is alone. We have to worry about paperwork, we have to worry about food, we have to worry about school expenses, we have to worry about our future. I just want to go to college and get an education.  Id like to tell the Biden administration that I and many other foster youth need support. Our families may have abused us, been unable to take care of us, or abandoned us, but we still matter. We want the ability to have hopeful futures, so please support us in our dreams. I want to have to stop worrying about court and paperwork. I want to feel secure, even if I dont have a family. Im alone, but I still want to be a part of this world, so please take us into account and give us an actual fighting chance.  Currently in Foster Care Youth, California, From the Voice of the Foster Care Community Report.

The report, sponsored by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, will be published annually. The May 2022 Report includes responses from 2,411 people in the iFoster network, including 1,049 transition-age foster youth (ages 16 to 24), 1,134 caregivers, and 228 workers in 49 states and the District of Columbia. The Report marks the first time that the voice of youth in foster care, their caregivers, both families and institutions, and people working within the system, have spoken in such detail to policymakers. The survey for the May 2023 Report is now live at http://www.VoiceofFosterCare.org.

Angela LoBue, Senior Program Officer at the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, said: "We are proud to support iFoster's work lifting up voices within the foster care community. As the largest national online community in foster care, iFoster is uniquely positioned to tap into the lived experiences of the entire foster care community to provide real-time insights into the issues that need to be addressed to help young people in the foster care system achieve their full potential.

iFoster is using the report as the basis for crosswalk analysis, comparing legislative agendas and proposed budgets to the clear mandates for change articulated by the foster care community. Starting in May with the release of the report, the foster care community will engage with taxpayers in every state to reach out to their elected officials via http://www.voiceoffostercare.org to ensure the voices of those most impacted by the foster care system are heard.

Key Findings from the report:

The System Fails to Prioritize Child Well-Being.

FACT: Children in foster care experience lifelong challenges not only from the trauma of maltreatment but also from their time in the child welfare system.

FINDINGS: Mental and physical health problems, food and housing insecurity, education, and substance use are often highlighted as priority needs. The system is focused on paperwork, policies, and procedures and does not prioritize the well-being of children and youth.

Structural Inequities Drive Child Welfare Involvement.

FACT: Minority and vulnerable communities are overrepresented within the foster care system.

FINDINGS: Children of color and LGBTQ+ youth face racism and discrimination, which affects their entrance to and exit from the child welfare system. Poverty intersects with discrimination based on race, ethnicity, and sexual identity, making poor youth of color and sexual or gender minority youth particularly vulnerable to child welfare involvement.

Providing a Stable, Permanent Family Needs to be a Priority.

FACT: The longer children are in the child welfare system, the worse their short- and long-term outcomes are compared to children not involved in the system.

FINDINGS: Greater efforts are needed to support biological parents prior to the removal of children and to help them regain their children as soon as possible. Though once children are removed, caregivers and workers and advocates identify the need to prioritize the well-being of the child versus the needs of the parents as the source for delayed termination of parental rights permanency.

Resource Scarcity and Inequity is Rampant throughout the System.

FACT: The child welfare system is under resourced and underfunded and this has dire consequences for children.

FINDINGS: Youth need more equitable access to the resources that do exist and more services as they age out of care without a family, services, like rental assistance, employment, and money for daily expenses, and broad support for achieving individual goals like a high school diploma and a college degree. There is consensus that youth deserve more time to achieve their goals. An important oversight is the unique needs of caregivers, as well as workers and advocates are often dismissed.

Teaching Youth Self-Sufficiency Must be a Priority.

FACT: Youth who age out of foster care are more likely to experience homelessness, as well as significant health disparities.

FINDINGS: Overall, transition-age foster youth fear for their futures because they feel ill prepared and under resourced to face emancipation in an evolving world. And caregivers worry they wont have the stamina and financial stability to continue to care. The foster care community would like to see the child welfare system held accountable for, and adequately funded and supported to ensure all transition-age youth are prepared for independence.

Those Who Live and Work in the Child Welfare System Should have a say in its Functioning.

FACT: Current and former foster care youth are not part of the decisions-making process that impacts their lives.

FINDINGS: The community feels strongly they should have input into the decisions and policies that impact their ability to raise foster children. Both current and former foster care youth identified free or low-cost housing (98%), issues of homelessness (96%), and job training and employment opportunities (93%) as the main priorities for the Biden administration. Caregivers identified it was essential to ensure that children and youth get the services they are eligible for. They called for improvements in mental health and substance use treatment supports and increasing foster care and kinship care stipends. Workers and advocates identified issues of eligibility, improved mental health and substance abuse treatment, and increased child maltreatment prevention. In addition to these services, there was overwhelming consensus that Trauma-informed training should be mandatory for all foster parents and professionals working with foster youth.

About iFoster

iFoster is a 501c3 national nonprofit with the largest and most inclusive online community of young people, caregivers, and organizations in foster care, with over 70,000 members in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and Guam. iFosters mission is to ensure that every child growing up outside of their biological home has the resources and opportunities they need to become successful.
Zipps Liquor is proud to contribute to an organization as worthy as Hope For The Warriors and we look forward to this number growing.

Zipps Liquor, a chain of popular liquor stores in Texas, proudly donates a portion of sales proceeds for its allocated bottles of liquor to Hope For The Warriors. The liquor company just completed its second donation to the Hope For The Warriors organization.

Zipps Liquor has 33 stores located throughout Texas and provides locals and visitors with access to a wide variety of quality wine, liquor, and beer products. The liquor store also partners with Drizly, DoorDash, and Uber Eats to fulfill delivery orders by local customers.

To help give back to the community, Zipps Liquor donates a portion of its sales proceeds from its allocated bottles to an organization called Hope For The Warriors. The Hope For The Warriors organization was founded by military families and is grounded in family values. The organization offers programs and services designed to assist wounded veterans and the family members of wounded and fallen veterans.

Hope For The Warriors focuses on providing peer engagement, health and wellness services, transition services, and community connections to veterans and their loved ones. The program also encourages physical activity through its Run For The Warriors event, 30x30 Virtual Challenges, and other outdoor adventures. The primary goal of Hope For The Warriors is to help those touched by military service succeed at home and in their professional lives. The program also connects veterans and their family members to physical and emotional wellness services as needed.

Anuj Mittal, the Chief Operation Officer at Zipps Liquor, stated, Zipps Liquor is proud to contribute to an organization as worthy as Hope For The Warriors, and we look forward to this number growing. The liquor company just completed a donation of $11,586. In total, Zipps Liquor has donated nearly $22,0000 to the Hope For The Warriors organization. The donated money represents a portion of the proceeds from allocated bottle sales.

Zipps Liquor offers limited edition allocated bottles a few times throughout the year. These bottles are collectible and also help support charitable causes. When customers purchase allocated bottles, they are helping to support the Hope For The Warriors charity, since a portion of allocated bottle sales goes to the charity.

Individuals and organizations that would like to purchase some of the highest-quality liquor Zipps Liquor has to offer while also supporting veterans and their families are invited to purchase limited-edition bottles online and pick them up at select Zipps Liquor locations. Currently, allocated bottles are available at the Bellville, Conroe, Dayton, and Livingston Zipps Liquor locations. Inventory may vary by location.

Individuals who are interested in learning more about the Hope For The Warriors Project and how to donate time or money can learn more by visiting (https://www.hopeforthewarriors.org/).

About Zipps Liquor

Zipps Liquor is a chain of liquor stores offering lower prices, excellent service, and all the best brands. We have one of the largest selections of Beer, Spirits, and Wine. Whether youre looking for your go-to bottle or looking for something off the beaten path, we carry it!
West Coast Equity Partners (WCEP) has invested over $100M into 30+ technology companies in Silicon Valley and other U.S. regions in the last 12 months. The firm added Robinhood stock brokerage, Coursera e-learning platform, Upgrade and One Zero Digital Bank neobanks, DataRobot enterprise AI platform, OpenWeb social engagement platform, and dozens of other highly sought-after tech companies.

Launched in 2020, WCEP invests on a deal-by-deal basis offering its investors the flexibility and freedom of constantly investing in selected opportunities, exiting and receiving payouts, and reinvesting again.

In addition, in the second half of 2021, WCEP launched Scale-Up Unicorn Fund I, which allowed its investors to acquire a diversified portfolio of U.S.-based tech unicorns. In just a few months, WCEP has funded 17 companies through Scale-Up Unicorn Fund I, including Upgrade neobank, Dataminr AI platform for risk detection, Scopely game developer, Psi Quantum quantum computer developer, Pipe Technologies financial services platform, Outschool e-learning platform, Side real estate brokerage and others.

WCEP joined funding rounds alongside global investment leaders such as Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, BlackRock, DST Global, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, Lightspeed Venture Partners, NEA, Sequoia Capital, SoftBank Vision Fund, Tiger Global, Spark Capital, and many others.



Investment focus and selection principles

WCEP focuses on significant fast-growing technology segments: artificial intelligence and machine learning, fintech, aerospace, e-learning, and cybersecurity. In addition to funding private companies valued at over $1 billion, the firm also invests in top-tier venture capital firms to strengthen relationships and access the best deals.

We invest in the most promising companies that will keep growing even during recession time, doubling and tripling their valuation from round to round, says Alex Lazovsky, managing partner and co-founder at WCEP, who turned venture capitalist after dozens of years of experience as an American-Israeli tech entrepreneur.

Scale-Up Unicorn Fund I aims to generate for its LPs at least three times ROI within four years. In order to achieve this goal, WCEP uses an investment strategy based on a research model that has been validated over the past five years. The fund invests at least 85% of its capital in companies valued between $2B to $5B. WCEP uses a number of selection criteria, including strong revenue growth, positive unit economics, scalable business model, and leading global venture capital firms among the existing investors.



Deep roots in tech and venture markets

In addition to years of investment experience in the U.S., Europe, and Israel, WCEPs team is distinguished by a unique combination of professional expertise. WCEPs managing partners are entrepreneurs and operational leaders - turned investors. They have previously created and run successful technology companies, and have years of expertise in corporate finance and investments. An impeccable reputation and solid experience allow the firm to access the most attractive deals.

Reputation among tech founders and top-tier venture capital firms is a key for investing in highly-demanded Silicon Valley-based companies. When investors compete for the right to join the round of a successful startup, it is the reputation that determines who gets access to the deal. Long-term partnerships, as well as serving on the boards of directors of portfolio companies, allow us to set ambitious goals and achieve them, says Alex Lazovsky.

Recognized in the global venture market, WCEP considers its mission to contribute to the development of the venture capital industry and support both independent investors and portfolio companies.

When a successful Silicon Valley startup raises a new round, its founders are after the smart money  capital that goes hand in hand with professional contacts and expertise. And that's what sets us apart from many other VCs. Our portfolio companies use our business network to find clients and attract top managers, connect with other players in the market for partnerships or M&A transactions. For companies that want to give employees some liquidity, we offer secondary opportunities, so-called tender offers. And if a company is considering an IPO, we help consolidate and simplify the cap table, adds Alex Lazovsky.

In the coming months, WCEP plans to fund about 10 more unicorn companies in space technology, PropTech, FinTech, HR Tech, MarTech, gaming, and others.
Remote Raven Remote Raven has really streamlined my staffing process and taken a lot of stress out of the search for quality candidates, says Kyla Bonnstetter with Top Talent Consulting. Im continuously impressed with the skilled recruiters and the people they recommend for my business.

Two years ago the sudden onset of the pandemic forced over 70% of American workers to transition to remote work. However, with a regained sense of normalcy, employers are finding it not so simple to return to the office with rising business costs at the forefront of the battle. As we head into the post-pandemic future, Scottsdale-based company, Remote Raven, recently announced the launch of their affordable and flexible staffing services to fill remote positions.

Companies are discovering that its much more efficient to maintain a remote or hybrid work environment and that truly benefits everyone involved. Theres an increase in retention with workers reporting higher work satisfaction and employers are making better use of their budgets as well, says Randall Averitte, CEO of Remote Raven. For example, Remote Raven can reduce the cost of paid positions by 50 to 70 percent on average.

Remote Raven connects clients with well-trained and thoroughly vetted virtual assistants, allowing them more time to focus on their business. Offering rigorous professional development and soft skills training, the company ensures that clients receive high-quality remote workers to fill their specific staffing needs.

The organization prioritizes a simplified hiring process for companies to find their ideal professionals. Their team includes local recruiting specialists that are involved in every stage of the process including identifying candidates,assessing behavioral competency, emotional intelligence, interviewing and selecting potential remote workers to fill a position. A wide range of services are offered, including IT website management, accounting, marketing, administrative and customer service.

Remote Ravens virtual assistants are skilled in job functions such as executive assistants, medical schedulers, medical coders, Certified Public Accountants, data entry clerks, bookkeepers, cold callers, appointment setters, social media managers, recruitment specialists, content writers and more.

Remote Raven has really streamlined my staffing process and taken a lot of stress out of the search for quality candidates, says Kyla Bonnstetter with Top Talent Consulting. Im continuously impressed with the skilled recruiters and the people they recommend for my business.

Businesses across America that continue to embrace hybrid and remote work are experiencing increased productivity, access to a wider talent pool and reduced business costs. As time is a valuable commodity, Remote Raven handles all staffing needs to ensure that the process of hiring a remote worker is as easy as possible.

About Remote Raven

Based in Scottsdale, Arizona, Remote Raven connects businesses with highly qualified virtual assistants to quickly fill positions, freeing up time to focus on other important tasks. Remote Raven provides professional, college-educated, and well-trained remote workers to meet specific hiring needs. With no start-up fees, Remote Raven provides an affordable and flexible choice for finding ideal virtual assistants. For more information, visit https://hireremoteraven.com/.
Middle School Science Teachers Participate in National STEM Scholar Program Supporting teachers who inspire and motivate middle school students at this critical decision-making age will directly impact how many choose to pursue the STEM skills essential for living wage jobs.

Ten middle school teachers in eight states have been selected to participate in the prestigious National STEM Scholar Program, a unique professional development program providing advanced STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) training, national network building and project support for middle school science teachers nationwide.

Created in partnership between the National Stem Cell Foundation and The Gatton Academy of Mathematics and Science at Western Kentucky University (WKU), the National STEM Scholar Program selects ten teachers each year from a national pool of applicants based solely on the description of a big idea Challenge Project the applicant would implement if funds were available. Selected projects are chosen for maximum impact in middle school classrooms where research shows lifelong STEM career decisions are being made. STEM Scholars convene on WKUs campus for a week of advanced STEM training and finalize their projects with input from their STEM Scholar class colleagues.

The 2022 National STEM Scholar class will hosted by The Gatton Academy from May 29th to June 4th on the campus of WKU in Bowling Green, KY:



Susan Hall, Norfolk, MA  King Philip Middle School

Carey Hancey-Shier, Manassas, VA  Grace E. Metz Middle School

Kathleen Holliday, Tybee Island, GA  Tybee Island Maritime Academy

Tasha Jordan, Ferguson, MO  Johnson-Wabash Sixth Grade Center

Brandi Norman, Worden, MT  Huntley Projects Junior High

Jennifer Polacek, Woonsocket, RI  Hamlet Middle School

Tonya Prentice, Bass Harbor, ME  Tremont Consolidated School

Lori Schoenwiesner, Mechanicsville, VA  Oak Knoll Middle School

Marie Schuh, Spotsylvania, VA  Thornburg Middle School

Ashley Ventrella, Delray Beach, FL  American Heritage School Palm Beach

The National STEM Scholar Program brings a thought leader in STEM education to Kentucky each year for a day of interaction with the Scholar class. This years speaker will be Michelle Lucas, CEO of Higher Orbits. Michelle spent ten years working at NASA in International Space Station (ISS) Flight Control Operations Planning and as an Astronaut Instructor in the Daily Operations Group before founding Higher Orbits to inspire student passion for STEM through spaceflight.

Studies show that middle school students who become excited about science are the ones who will pursue STEM courses in high school and major in them at the technical and college level. At a pivotal time in decision-making that will open or close the door to opportunity, however, nearly 50% of 8th graders in America lose interest in pursuing the STEM related subjects increasingly required for 21st Century jobs.

Dr. Paula Grisanti, CEO of the National Stem Cell Foundation, said, We added education to our mission and partnered with The Gatton Academy in 2015 to support the development of a new generation of scientists in academic research, advanced technology and infrastructure engineering. Supporting teachers who inspire and motivate middle school students at this critical decision-making age will directly impact how many choose to pursue the STEM skills essential for living wage jobs. By investing in the influential middle school STEM teacher now, we reach thousands of students in classrooms today and far into the future.

Dr. Julia Link Roberts, Executive Director of The Gatton Academy, added, This partnership will accrue benefits for the National STEM Scholars, middle school students in their classrooms, and the middle school science teachers with whom they collaborate. The National STEM Scholar Program is an excellent way for teachers to learn new strategies and new ways to engage students to help them become and stay interested in science and math.

Now in its 7th year, there are 70 National STEM Scholars representing middle schools in 32 states. 90% teach in public schools, 40% teach in mid- to high-poverty schools and 36% teach in communities with a population under 15,000. A unique requirement of the program is the responsibility for STEM Scholars to share lessons learned with colleagues in their home schools, districts or states, magnifying impact over multiple classrooms and years. By June 2023, National STEM Scholars will have directly and indirectly impacted more than 83,000 middle school students in the U.S.

About the National Stem Cell Foundation

The National Stem Cell Foundation is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that funds adult stem cell and regenerative medicine research, underwrites the National STEM Scholar Program for middle school science teachers inspiring the next generation of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) pioneers nationwide, and covers copays and deductibles for children of limited means participating in clinical trials for rare diseases. For more information, visit http://www.nationalstemcellfoundation.org.

About The Gatton Academy

Established in 2007, The Gatton Academy is Kentuckys first residential two-year program for gifted and talented juniors and seniors. The Gatton Academys students enroll as juniors and are full-time WKU students pursuing their interests in advanced science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The Gatton Academy has been named to Jay Mathews list of top-performing schools with elite students for eleven consecutive appearances and received the National Consortium for Secondary STEM Schools Innovation Partnership Award.
ISC-CX - The Digital Customer Experience Company Our Mobile App bestows a myriad of benefit to global brands. It is a tool for facilitating quicker customer experience measurement and analysis at the highest quality levels in both brick-and-mortar stores and digital channels. Adino Baumann, Global Operations Director at ISC-CX

Market research company ISC-CX, the leading provider of Customer Experience programs worldwide for over 20 years, is pleased to report its Evaluators spent over 700,000 minutes actively collecting Customer Experience measurement data in April 2022. ISC-CX Evaluators collect this data for ISC-CX clients at their points of sale and customer support around the world, both brick-and-mortar and digital channels. Data is analyzed and used in the clients Customer Experience improvement programs. Aprils Customer Service data capture included measurements for a significant number of new clients, which were acquired in 2022. ISC-CX clients cover a wide spectrum of top global brands including watches/jewelry, luxury automobiles, supermarkets, restaurant chains, home goods, apparel and electronics. To name only a few, ISC-CX measures the customer experience at Vodafone, Shell, McDonalds, Lavazza, Lindt, RE/MAX, and many more.

ISC-CX Evaluators utilize the upgraded ISC-CX Mobile App to guarantee high-quality and high-efficiency data capture. Available on the App Store and Google Play, the ISC-CX Mobile App is available to the companys 1.2 million Customer Experience Evaluators and Brand Auditors around the world for the CX programs of top global brands. It is infused with the most advanced security and artificial intelligence in its data analytics that is available today.

ISC-CXs clients accrue the benefits of the upgraded App, for both Mystery Shopping and Brand Audit programs. The App offers:



Full Capture of the Customer Journey  The App is the optimal tool to capture the complex processes of the customer journey for retail brands. From their initial interaction with the brand to the purchase to the post-purchase experience, the customer experience at all steps in the journey is captured and analyzed. The amount of data points that the App can collect during the journey is unlimited.

Omni-Channel Analysis of all Customer Touchpoints  The App is used for CX data collection in brick-and-mortar stores as well as customer interactions by phone, emails, chat and websites.

Highest Image Quality - High-resolution photos are recorded directly in the App, which ensures the highest quality images for clients.

The App also offers many advantages to ISC-CXs Evaluators. At a store, the Evaluator can access instructions on how to conduct the Service Check/Mystery Shop/Audit straight from the App, and input data immediately with ease. Data collection can include prices, conversations with associates, general service impressions, photographs (e.g. the storefront, products, price tags, compliance factors, etc.) and many other data types. The data gets transmitted in real-time to the Clients reporting dashboard customized to their requirements.

"We are very pleased about the feedback we have received from our clients and Customer Experience Evaluators around the world," explains Adino Baumann, global operations director at ISC-CX. Our Mobile App bestows a myriad of benefit to global brands that work with ISC-CX now and in the future. It is a tool for facilitating quicker customer experience measurement and analysis at the highest quality levels in both brick-and-mortar stores and digital channels.

For information about the full features and functionality of the upgraded ISC-CX Mobile App, go to ISC-CX Mobile App Upgrade

About ISC-CX: ISC-CX is the leading provider of in-store and omni-channel customer experience measurement and analytics programs for global retailers based around the world. The companys multi-lingual, local teams on the ground in over 120 countries collect and analyze many millions of data sets per year. You can find client references and CX solutions at ISC-CX.com.
Power Home Remodeling (Power), the nations largest, full-service exterior home remodeling company, hosted their fifth annual Cultural Diversity & Inclusion Summit in Atlanta, Georgia spearheaded by the companys Cultural Diversity & Inclusion (CD&I) Initiative. Power welcomed more than 350 employees from 18 different territories across the country to educate one another, build stronger bonds, and set goals for the year ahead to continue driving their diversity and inclusion efforts forward.

With a desire to create more understanding of ourselves and others while dismantling preconceived notions we hold, this years Summit theme focused on both individual and collective identity. The three-day event included a surprise guest speaker, interactive installations focused on self-reflection and identity, and smaller group breakout sessions for relationship-building among employees. This years CD&I Summit was the largest to date and first one held outside of Powers Chester, PA Headquarters.

Since 2017, Powers CD&I Initiative has hosted their Summit  a three-day event dedicated to providing shared knowledge and experiences amongst employees to ultimately create more inclusivity and equity within the business. During the event, conversations are facilitated surrounding topics like race, sexual orientation, intersectionality, immigration, leadership development amongst the underrepresented population, allyship, and smaller, more intimate gatherings and sessions are held in an effort to cultivate more authentic connections with coworkers.

As an organization thats truly committed to diversity and inclusion, we cant just talk the talk. Real progress and change only occur when action is taken, said Olumide Cole, Powers Director of Cultural Diversity & Inclusion. But action starts with education and awareness. Our annual CD&I Summit is just one way in which were instilling more awareness amongst our people, which is especially important in a world thats so polarized. Its a ripple effect. With awareness comes empathy, and with empathy comes real change and more meaningful connections  both inside and outside of Powers walls.

Since its inception in 2017, Powers CD&I Initiative has increased representation of underrepresented groups to 26%, spurred policy change, launched unconscious bias and micro-aggression trainings, created employee resource groups, and kickstarted programming like Woke-ish  a national platform dedicated to facilitating tough conversations in the workplace and help employees become more aware and inclusive. But most importantly, the initiative has fostered a culture of respect for all, building champions for employees in a safe, honest, loving, accepting and inclusive environment yielding impactful progress.

Recognized as one of Fortunes 100 Best Companies To Work For in 2021, Power Home Remodeling offers engaging, fulfilling career opportunities where employees thrive. To learn more about Power and view career opportunities available in its 17 territories nationwide, visit apply.workatpower.com/jobs.

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About Power Home Remodeling

Power Home Remodeling is a dream realization company  believing its purpose is to create positive change in everything the company touches  from customers homes to employees lives to the communities they live and work in. Power realizes this purpose by being people-first. Its employees and customers come before profit and their well-being factors into every business decision. Established in 1992, Power is the nations largest, full-service, exterior home remodeler with more than 2,600 employees, over one million customers and $825 million in annual revenue. Headquartered in the Philadelphia region, Powers primary product line includes windows, siding, roofing, doors, solar roofing panels, and attic insulation, providing energy-saving solutions to residents across its operating territories, including: Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington D.C. and Wisconsin.
Industrial Intelligence Inc. We are the first known company in North America that is solving the dust accumulation monitoring problem with modern technology said George Armbruster, Founder and CEO of Industrial Intelligence.

The US Patent Office has issued US Patent no. 11,300,493 to Industrial Intelligence Inc. for its Continuous Dust Accumulation Monitor. Combustible dust accumulation can now be monitored 24/7 with alerts when predetermined dust depths have been reached. The monitor will communicate with a facilitys data acquisition system or sent to a cloud- based data acquisition system. The device is designed to be certified for use in hazardous locations (HazLoc).

While there are monitors on the market which measure the dust in the air, there are no devices measuring dust accumulation. Unchecked dust accumulation increases the conditions of an explosion or deflagration (chain reaction) to occur. Monitoring how much dust has accumulated on surfaces is a proactive way to prevent fires and explosions because it gives personnel time to correct the situation.

Currently, combustible dust accumulation is monitored by manual methods which are time consuming and not sufficiently reliable. We are the first known company in North America that is solving the dust accumulation monitoring problem with modern technology, said George Armbruster, Founder and CEO of Industrial Intelligence. The majority of dust created in manufacturing and processing facilities is combustible, and these companies are concerned about fires and explosions. Combustible dust igniting in facilities injures workers, costs lives and causes millions of dollars in asset lost each year.

Recently, there has been an effort by Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to address combustible dust. It is Industrial Intelligences goal to give companies the data they need to help prevent combustible dust fires and explosions in order to save lives and capital.

If you would like more information about this monitor, its launch into the market, or investment opportunities, please contact George Armbruster at garmbruster@industintel.com or visit http://www.industintel.com.
Lucas is a NEVE STEM Scholarship recipient studying biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University Gerson Nascimento, NEVEs founder and chairman, said that our goal with NEVE is to support and empower underprivileged or disadvantaged youth, and provide them with access to education, skills development and personal empowerment in order to achieve their full potential in life and society.

NEVE (Nascimento Education, Vision & Empowerment), the philanthropic arm of Brazilian entrepreneur Gerson Nascimentos enterprises, has announced the availability of scholarships to be awarded to undergraduate students who are enrolled or already accepted into a full-time post-secondary educational institution and pursuing Bachelor of Science or Engineering degree in one of the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics).

Currently, NEVE offers two one-year $10,000 undergraduate STEM scholarships available annually with applications for the 2023 academic year accepted between May, 1st 2022 and July 15th, 2022. Awards to be announced August 1st, 2022. Apply online at https://neveproject.org/scholarships/

Gerson Nascimento, NEVEs founder and chairman, said that our goal with NEVE is to support and empower underprivileged or disadvantaged youth, and provide them with access to education, skills development and personal empowerment in order to achieve their full potential in life and society.

According to NEVEs first STEM recipient, Lucas Nadolskis, the scholarship provided crucial support towards his BA in computer science from the University of Minnesota. Blind since an early age, Lucas is now enrolled in a master degree program in Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He is grateful to NEVE for helping put me on this pathway to becoming the first blind student in the Biomedical Engineering program at this top-tier university and able to take advantage of endless potential for research and networking.

Lucass journey is inspiring, a first-generation college STEM student working on groundbreaking research to benefit people in need and make a positive impact in this world, he is truly a stellar example of a NEVE success story, said Alec J. Rosen, president & CEO of NEVE Project., Inc. NEVE is driven by a commitment for a sustainable future for all people, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity or gender, added Rosen.

To that end, Lucas is applying to Ph.D. programs starting in 2023 with the goal centered on understanding the visual areas from a computational neuroscience perspective. The more we understand the visual cortex from different perspectives, the more we will be able to bring closer to reality projects that can assist blind and low-vision people.

Check out NEVE on Facebook and LinkedIn and follow on Twitter

Scholarship Criteria

Eligible applicants must have a minimum cumulative college Grade Point Average of 3.0 on a scale where 4.0 is the highest; and/or class ranking in the top 30%. Additional criteria include three letters of recommendation from an instructor or faculty advisor, a current or past employer, and at least one character reference. Multiple employer or academic references are permitted. Applicants should present strong evidence of excellence of character and leadership ability, and a demonstrated record of volunteerism and service to community & others. Financial need is also considered.
"If I could give dealers one piece of advice, the payoff is massive. Get rid of the radios  you need Lot Metrix," said Casey Gerard, Service Manager at Gull Boats and RV

Motility Software, a leader in end-to-end dealer management solutions, today announced that Bretz RV & Marine has selected Motility Software to help transform inventory while saving time and money for Gull Boats & RV location.

Were ecstatic to see Gull Boats & RV leading their service transformation with Lot Metrix, said Brad Rogers, CEO at Motility Software. The Bretz team was our earliest adopters and have shown us the immense value this can bring to any dealership.

Founded in 1967, Bretz is a premier specialty dealer in Montana and Idaho with locations in Missoula, Nampa, Boise, and Billings. The main location in Missoula has nearly 38+ acres and 600-700 customer storage units. They are also the largest RV and Marine dealer in Montana, Idaho, eastern Washington, Wyoming, and the Dakotas.

Bretz has seen significant growth in recent years and the primary location has multiple service bays, a large showroom, and an outdoor space for inventory. With the addition of Gull Boats & RV, Lot Metrix will be utilized in all locations to create and assign unit moves to drivers so they can claim tasks directly from the app.

Lot Metrix is my best friend and the single best tool we have, said Casey Garard, Service Manager at Gull Boats & RV. I have been with Bretz for 26 years and I dont know how we ever lived without it. When youre trying to get the most of the service resources you have, keeping things moving with full bays is critical.

Prior to Lot Metrix, Bretz had a cumbersome and time-consuming process. If a unit needed to be moved on the lot, they would use a 2-way radio to communicate with their drivers and share the new location a unit needed to be moved. The driver would aimlessly search for the unit and complete the assignment. As time went on, they acquired better quality radios, but it still proved challenging to communicate  signals were being blocked in the metal buildings, noisy forklifts, drivers were frustrated due to communication breakdown, techs were frustrated due to losing money, and leadership didnt have proper oversight that it needed. They spent nearly $8,000 on radio setups that still werent an efficient way to communicate.

I could never imagine going back to that kind of setup, said Garard. On a large lot, imagine a forklift driver searching for units aimlessly and getting frustrated that they couldnt find what they were tasked to locate. We tried to organize the lot by model or types of units, but in all actuality, the unit could be in 4 or 5 different locations. The wear and tear on our forklifts, the fuel we were using, the wait times  it all stacked up.

Lot Metrix is helping Bretz increase sales and service production while minimizing dealership liability. Assignments are on a tablet, drivers see the assignment, pick it up, and bring it exactly where its needed. The seamless breakdown of all vehicle movements from A to Z has minimized their liability of unnecessary repair costs. An added bonus is the robust reporting  employee performance, unit moves, and more.

When Garard was promoted to a Service Manager at Gull Boats & Marine, he was tasked with transforming their inventory management. Prior to Lot Metrix, the Gull technicians were paid to move units. They would clock into a flag, go on a forklift, get their unit, and move it. In March, he calculated the time it took his team to move units and dropped it from the retail rate. He was able to identify roughly $23,000 in lost production time that could have been spent on higher priority tasks or helping customers who have been waiting to get their boats and RVs worked on. Garard estimates the savings is likely closer to the $30,000 a month mark for Gull and was likely millions at the primary Missoula location prior to utilizing Lot Metrix.

The efficiency savings are staggering  get more work done, improve lead time and wait time, and streamlined the backlog.

Garard goes on to say, As someone who is paid off production, we need to be cutting edge to ensure we are hitting the mark. Here at Gull, we deal with a 6+ acre footprint but doing it the caveman way just doesnt make sense. If I could give dealers one piece of advice, the payoff is massive. Get rid of the radios  you need Lot Metrix!

Motility is working hard on enhancements to Lot Metrix 2.0 and expects those to be released later this quarter. To learn more about Lot Metrix, Motility offers a 2-week free trial for you to see the value first-hand.

About Motility Software Solutions

For over 36 years, Motility remains committed to providing best-in-class dealer management software (DMS) to over 7,000 users and 800 rooftops. Motilitys comprehensive software delivers an end-to-end solution to increase the efficiency for every critical function in a dealership, including inventory management, CRM, quoting, accounting, payroll and service scheduling, and more. Visit motilitysoftware.com to learn more.
COA Wethersfield "I am very excited to bring Children of America to Wethersfield, so working families will now have exceptional childcare services they might not normally have." says Director, Lauren Eldridge.

Florida based Children of America (COA) is expanding their unique, early education concept to Wethersfield, CT. Children of America will hold a Grand Opening Event, to the public, on Saturday, May 14th from 10:00 am to 2:00 pm at 1199 Silas Deane Hwy., Wethersfield, CT 06109. Doors open for business Monday May 16th, 2022.

Children of America is the industry leader in early childhood education, offering the highest level of educational opportunities for children ages six weeks to twelve years of age. The premier programs include Infant and Toddler Programs, nationally renowned Preschool and Pre-Kindergarten Programs, Before-and-After School, and Summer Camp Programs. Children of America is currently operating and developing in 14 states, and has long-term plans to expand nationally.

Children of America brings to Wethersfield, its one-of-a-kind educational philosophy, COA Mind & Body Matters. Mind & Body Matters approaches early learning through COAs four proprietary programs: COA Just Read, Presidential Fitness, COA Nutrition, STAR Curriculum (Success through Academic Readiness), and many enrichment programs that have proven to dramatically impact the lives of young children. Children of America's educational curriculum is a product of years of research and development in early childcare.



The COA approach to Social/Emotional Growth Allows children to engage in social experiences through play, group activities and partnering with other children as they pretend, discover and investigate their learning environment.

Intellectual Growth at COA offers experiences that encourage problem solving, decision making and challenges through activities that promote emerging literacy.

We promote Physical Growth through a variety of activities; strengthening and refining of the body through eye/hand coordination, eye tracking, coordination of movements spatial relationships and crossing the midline, which leads to emerging reading and writing skills.

Children of America's already robust health and safety procedures have been enhanced to ensure a clean, welcoming school environment. "The well-being of every child is our top priority now and always", says CEO Ted Hockenberry. "With COA, every child will discover the joy of learning and parents enjoy peace of mind. It starts with a healthy, safe environment, informed by CDC guidance, where learning can flourish. It has been our honor to step in and offer stability and reliability to essential workers and critical workers, and we are happy to bring this to Wethersfield."

At the helm of this new school is, Mrs. Lauren Eldridge, Director. With a B.A. in Educational Studies (ECE) and Connecticut Director's Credential (CDC) she is not daunted by the challenging times and brings with her a passion and determination that will help to set this preschool apart. Mrs. Eldridge has over 11 years in the industry and has displayed a remarkable talent for leading and motivating her team to be not only inspirational teachers but extended family members to the families we serve. Born and raised in Newington, she knows the area well and considers old Wethersfield her favorite neighborhood. "I am very excited to bring Children of America to Wethersfield, so working families will now have exceptional childcare services they might not normally have." says Director, Lauren Eldridge.

Our curriculum and staff training are second to none  we are invested in developing the best possible staff, many have been training with us for months leading up to our opening event. CEO Ted Hockenberry continues. These set us apart from any other program in the country. Children of America is raising the bar for child care throughout the USA.

The COA Wethersfield location is the first school the company has built in Connecticut with potential designs to expand further. Hockenberry adds, "The company continues to invest heavily in both its unique facilities and amazing team. It is our goal to provide the very best environment for our children and staff to learn and grow."

For more information about COA, please visit childrenofamerica.com.

About Children of America

Children of America operates facilities throughout Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. The company expansion plans include several locations in the SC and TX areas over the next two (2) years. COA offers the highest level of childcare for children ages six weeks to twelve years of age. The premier programs include infant care, toddler care, nationally renowned preschool and pre-kindergarten programs, before-and-after school care, and summer camp. An industry pioneer, Children of America is a subsidiary of World Wide Child Care Corp. Visit childrenofamerica.com for more information or interact with COA on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook.
Modern People logo Blockchain technology and digital ownership are redefining the internet economy and culture as we know it, and opens up a wide world of opportunities for artists and marketers. Those opportunities will stem from strong strategic ideas, community building, storytelling and craft.

Founding partners Sylvain Tron, Tolga Yildiz, Can Misirlioglu, and advisor, Thomas Rush of ConsenSys Mesh, have combined their decades of experience in design, craft, brand strategy and blockchain technology to launch Modern People, a first of its kind multidisciplinary creative studio that specializes in creating and launching NFT projects and providing guidance to brands, IP holders, content creators and artists in the next generation of the internet, Web3.

The new companys goal is to help marketers strategically and efficiently navigate the continuing evolution of Web3 and blockchain technology  bridging the gap between their work and its admirers, insuring they are validated by their creations as they build a more fair, decentralized and transparent internet that doesnt rely on existing platforms.

Discovering NFTs at the end of 2020 was life changing and I quickly realized that the possibilities would expand far beyond illustrated animal pictures, Tron said. Blockchain technology and digital ownership are redefining the internet economy and culture as we know it, and opens up a wide world of opportunities for artists and marketers. Those opportunities will stem from strong strategic ideas, community building, storytelling and craft. In launching Modern People, weve combined our expertise launching projects in the space with our hands-on ability to develop and execute projects from beginning to end.

Web3 represents a distinct new opportunity for creative storytelling, Misirlioglu said. From sophisticated brand building for established companies to engaging communities for independent artists, the range of creative possibilities driven by meaningful audience participation, and enabled by digital ownership, is unprecedented. The forming of Modern People is driven by our fundamentals of strategy, creativity and craft, now augmented by a deep understanding of the web3 culture and technology. It takes a completely new combination of competencies to thrive in this fast-moving space, and I am energized every day to be a part of this dynamic team.

Rush commented, My experience over the years at ConsenSys and now at Mesh has allowed me to play a small role in the development of the technology that will transform societys operating systems. The infrastructure and tooling built in the past 5 years will always be critical, but looking ahead, web3 is on the cusp of unlocking massive value for communities of creators and builders instead of corporations  which is precisely why Im excited about the work that Modern People is undertaking.

The highly adaptable team of partners has a finely tuned collective background stemming from senior, client-facing roles at creative agencies, content studios and early stage web3 ventures, making them uniquely suited to provide creative counsel while understanding every distinct facet of their clients needs.

We are at a turning point in terms of the relationship between creativity and ownership. Blockchain technology enables a transparent medium for groundbreaking ways of generating value between artists, IP holders, brands and their collectors, audiences and communities, Yildiz said. Its an increasingly diverse, rich yet complicated landscape. Modern People is very exciting to me because the teams passion and expertise in the areas of strategy, creativity, craft and technology create the perfect Venns diagram. Each member has enough overlap in each others area and that creates a propulsive dialog, from the start of an idea to the end of a project. And the center of it, where it all comes together, well, thats fireworks!

The Modern People team consists of:

 Sylvain Tron - Trons career began as founder of film production and international sales company, Visit Films. After selling the company, he served as Senior Producer for marketing agency, R/GA, where he managed content creation for major brands. He then joined Havas Media Agency in New York, overseeing production and leading the companys content agency Studio 6 as Head of Content, North America. In 2017, Sylvain founded the Operam Creative Group, serving as president. He sourced, managed, and executed Operam's acquisition by McKinney in 2019, and also began his position as Managing Director at the new McKinney LA office overseeing operations, culture, and business growth. Sylvain has been honored for his groundbreaking creations receiving 3 Cannes Lions, four Clios and One Show Pencil.

 Tolga Yildiz - Yildizs professional career began at Trollback and Company, where he contributed to major network rebranding projects and provided creative input for national television commercials. Here, he also created title design work for renowned festivals and feature films. At R/GA Digital Studio, he led a team of designers-animators and character animators and supervised platform re-designs, product launches and digital campaigns for major brands. In 2012, Tolga co-founded Kozmonot Animation Studio, contributing ideas for various commercial and non-commercial projects. Co-directed with his partner in Kozmonot, Little Matryoshka has been an official selection in major film and animation festivals including a Coup de Coeur in Cannes Film Festival. Tolga and his work are the recipients of the Art Directors Young Guns Award, BDA Rocket Award as well as various Promax/BDA Gold, Silver and Bronze medals. His work has been exhibited in the Cooper Hewitt National Design Triennial and showcased by industry standard publications. It has also been selected for AIGA 365, Type Directors Club and Art Directors Club Annuals.

 Can Misirlioglu - A creative director, Can has led in-house content studios for some of the most respected agencies. He spent 10 years working at R/GA where his design-driven content work became the foundation for the current iteration of R/GA Studios. He then served as Group Creative Director for Studio 6 at Havas Agency. Can later formed the Design + Craft group at Decoded, where he led rebrandings, launch campaigns, and brand and content design. Can is also the co-founder of United Labor, a creative collective known for its eclectic creative output around art, music, and food culture.

 Thomas Rush (Advisor) - A partner at ConsenSys Mesh where he focuses on digital assets, DAOs, and the Mesh investment portfolio of 200+ positions, Rush is also an angel investor, board director, and advisor for various early-stage technology companies. Previously he led Client Services at Live Grey, which focuses on transforming workplaces for Fortune 500 companies. Prior to that he served on the innovation and global business development teams at IPG Mediabrands, and in 2010, he co-founded Propeller, an impact-driven coworking space and business incubator in New Orleans. He is an alumnus of the World Economic Forum Global Shapers, holds a BS in Applied Economics, and in his spare time he designs impractical three-dimensional art.

About Modern People

Modern People is a web3 consultancy and a multidisciplinary creative studio focused on creating and launching NFT projects. The company is comprised of a group of friendly (forward-)thinkers and makers whose collective experience brings together design, craft, brand strategy and blockchain technology. Creativity drives Modern People in web3 and beyond. The promise of web3 is unleashed by good ideas, strong IP and flawless creative execution. Great art and storytelling will be lasting forces in this evolving new medium. Modern People applies this philosophy to their process -- whether developing IP, partnering with brands, content creators or other artists.

Media contacts:

EJ Grant

ejgrant@zohnypr.com

813-210-2726

Josephine Zohny

Josie@zohnypr.com

917-742-3777
Migrating to Microsoft 365 can prove challenging. Taking the time to identify the scope of the project and involve key stakeholders up front will save time and headaches in the end.

Messaging Architects, an eMazzanti Technologies Company and Microsoft 365 migration expert, encourages careful Microsoft 365 migration planning in a new article. The informative article first asserts that asking the right questions from the beginning helps to ensure a migration process that runs smoothly.

The author then argues for involving the right people, including representatives from key areas, in the planning process. He then relates the importance of planning for security and regulatory compliance. He concludes by stating the importance of planning the migration with a focus on the end user.

Migrating to Microsoft 365 can prove challenging, stated Greg Smith, Vice President of Services Delivery at Messaging Architects. Taking the time to identify the scope of the project and involve key stakeholders up front will save time and headaches in the end.

Below are a few excerpts from the article, Careful Microsoft 365 Migration Planning Delivers Recipe for Success.

Begin with the Right Questions

What data needs to be migrated? Migration presents the perfect opportunity to destroy redundant, outdated, or trivial data. This may also be the time to remove unused mailboxes and inactive databases belonging to long-retired teams. Streamlining the data to migrate saves both time and money.

Involve the Right People

Asking the right questions necessarily means involving the right people. IT staff need to be heavily involved in any migration process. However, to correctly determine what data needs to be migrated and what factors require consideration, other stakeholders also need a seat at the planning table.

Plan for Security and Regulatory Compliance

Industry regulations and state privacy laws govern how organizations treat critical data, including email and document storage. Consequently, organizations need to ensure that migration happens in accordance with those regulations, as lack of compliance can prove costly.

Focus on the End User

In the end, the success of any technology deployment depends on how the end users respond to the technology and to the migration process itself. For instance, if users cannot quickly find necessary data or easily use new features, they will resist implementing the technology. Likewise, if the migration process significantly interrupts workflows, users will complain.

Migrate with Confidence

With careful planning and the right tools, Microsoft 365 migration can proceed with minimal work disruption. Using proven tools and processes, the migration experts at Messaging Architects have helped hundreds of customers migrate successfully. Business leaders should contact them today to start the planning process.

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About Messaging Architects

Messaging Architects specializes in effectively managing and securing an organizations most precious asset, its information. With over 20 years of information management and technology consulting experience, the Messaging Architects team has provided corporations, educational intuitions, health care facilities and nonprofits with methodologies, procedures, and technology to keep their data organized, compliant and secure.

About eMazzanti Technologies

eMazzantis team of trained, certified IT experts rapidly deliver increased revenue growth, data security and productivity for clients ranging from law firms to high-end global retailers, expertly providing advanced retail and payment technology, digital marketing services, cloud and mobile solutions, multi-site implementations, 247 outsourced network management, remote monitoring, and support.

eMazzanti has made the Inc. 5000 list 9X, is a 4X Microsoft Partner of the Year, the #1 ranked NYC area MSP, NJ Business of the Year and 5X WatchGuard Partner of the Year! Contact: 1-866-362-9926, info@emazzanti.net or http://www.emazzanti.net Twitter: @emazzanti Facebook: Facebook.com/emazzantitechnologies.


The Technology for the Next Decade, Today Awards categories recognize leadership, customer experience, and redefining the workplace. The Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Award placements from among the following HCL Finalists will be determined over the next week by a specially-convened jury of IT professionals, and the results will be revealed at the 20th ABA awards banquet in New York on Monday, June 13.

HCL Technologies (HCL), a leading global IT services company, sponsored the Technology for the Next Decade, Today categories in The 2022 American Business Awards, the premier business awards program in the USA.

The Technology for the Next Decade, Today Awards categories recognize leadership, customer experience, and redefining the workplace. This is the 20th year that The American Business Awards have recognized achievements of organizations operating in the USA, and the fifth year that HCL Technologies has sponsored awards in the competition.

The Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Award placements from among the following Finalists will be determined over the next week by a specially-convened jury of IT professionals, and the results will be revealed at the 20th ABA awards banquet in New York on Monday, June 13. The Finalists are:

Excellence in Transforming Business

Finalists

Chevron Corporation, San Ramon, CA: Raymond R. Smelly, Head of IT Foundation Platform

Haemonetics, Boston, MA: Kim Weatherbee, CIO

Laundris Corporation, Manor, TX: Don Ward, CEO

The Mosaic Company, Tampa, FL: Jeff Wysocki, CIO

Wells Fargo, San Francisco, CA: Nadeem Kayani, Executive VP & CIO

Leading Through Uncertainty

Finalists

Performance Food Group, Richmond, VA: Don Bulmer, Senior VP & CIO

Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO: Kyle Collins, VP & CIO

Stanley Black & Decker, New Britain, CT: Robert Castello, CIO, Global IT Solution Delivery & Employee Experience

Warner Music Group, New York, NY: Ralph Munsen, CIO & Executive VP

Leadership in Nextgen Technology

Finalists

The Boeing Company, Chicago, IL: Balaji Rangaswamy, VP, IT&DA Supply Chain

Cox Communications, Atlanta, GA: John Civiletto, VP Technology

Johnson Controls, Glendale, WI: Michael Ellis, Executive VP & Chief Customer and Digital Officer

Light & Wonder, Las Vegas, NV: Rob Bone, Senior VP, Global Systems and Services

New-Normal Digital Transformer

Finalists

Cummins, Inc., Columbus, IN: Prasad Poludasu, Head of CBS IT Services

Dollar General, Goodlettsville, TN: Julie Elmore, CTO

Unum, Chattanooga, TN: Gautam Roy, Senior VP & CTO

All organizations operating in the U.S.A.  large and small, public and private, for-profit and non-profit - are eligible to submit nominations to the ABAs in a wide range of categories, honoring achievement in every aspect of work life, from customer service and management to public relations and product development. More than 3,700 nominations, a record number, were reviewed in the judging process this year by more than 240 professionals worldwide, whose average scores determined the winners.

2022 Stevie winners will be celebrated during an awards ceremony on Monday, June 13 at 7 pm ET. Details of the event are available on the website.

About the Stevie Awards

Stevie Awards are conferred in eight programs: the Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, the German Stevie Awards, the Middle East & North Africa Stevie Awards, The American Business Awards, The International Business Awards, the Stevie Awards for Women in Business, the Stevie Awards for Great Employers, and the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. Stevie Awards competitions receive more than 12,000 entries each year from organizations in more than 70 nations. Honoring organizations of all types and sizes and the people behind them, the Stevies recognize outstanding performances in the workplace worldwide. Learn more about the Stevie Awards at http://www.StevieAwards.com.

About HCL Technologies (HCL)

HCL Technologies (HCL) empowers global enterprises with technology for the next decade, today. HCLs Mode 1-2-3 strategy, based on its deep-domain industry expertise, customer-centricity and entrepreneurial culture of Ideapreneurship, enables businesses to transform into next-gen enterprises.

HCL offers its services and products through three business units: IT and Business Services (ITBS), Engineering and R&D Services (ERS) and Products & Platforms (P&P). ITBS enables global enterprises to transform their businesses through offerings in the areas of applications, infrastructure, digital process operations and next generational digital transformation solutions. ERS offers engineering services and solutions in all aspects of product development and platform engineering. P&P provides modernized software products to global clients for their technology and industry specific requirements. Through its cutting-edge co-innovation labs, global delivery capabilities and broad global network, HCL delivers holistic services in various industry verticals, categorized as Financial Services, Manufacturing, Technology & Services, Telecom & Media, Retail & CPG, Life Sciences & Healthcare and Public Services.

As a leading global technology company, HCL takes pride in its diversity, social responsibility, sustainability and education initiatives. For the 12 months ended March 31, 2022, HCL had consolidated revenue of US$11.48 billion. Its nearly 209,000 ideapreneurs operate out of 52 countries.

For more information, visit http://www.hcltech.com
An opportunity could be a divine ladderdont miss or waste it. An association could be your divine ladderdont distance yourself or dissociate from it. A secular or religious organization may be the ladder you need to climb updont despise or reject it

Author Michael O. Olaniyan trains believers to take advantage of divine encounters with Recognizing Divine Ladders: Divine Setup ($13.49, paperback, 9781662849411; $5.99, e-book, 9781662849428).

Inspired by Jacobs ladder described in the book of Genesis, Olaniyan encourages readers to keep their eyes open for the ladders God places along their paths to move them toward their lifes purpose.

An opportunity could be a divine ladderdont miss or waste it. An association could be your divine ladderdont distance yourself or dissociate from it. A secular or religious organization may be the ladder you need to climb updont despise or reject it, said Olaniyan.

Michael Olaniyan is the President, lead Pastor, and Board Chairman of King's Court Parish, the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), Cincinnati, Ohio. Olaniyan has an Associate degree in Biology/Chemistry, a B.Sc. (Ed) Chemistry, and a Master's in Organizational Leadership, M.Sc. (Ed) from North Central University, Arizona. He also studied Computer Networking, and attended the RCCG School of Disciple and Redeemer Leadership Institutes, USA. He is married to Pastor Bunmi Olaniyan, and they are blessed with three royal children: Faith, Joshua, and Caleb.

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Xulon Press, a division of Salem Media Group, is the worlds largest Christian self-publisher, with more than 15,000 titles published to date. Recognizing Divine Ladders is available online through xulonpress.com/bookstore, amazon.com, and barnesandnoble.com.
A veteran franchise professional, Carolyn Tedesco has ten years of franchising experience in the fitness industry. Carolyn's breadth of knowledge in the fitness industry is immense, and her experience working in some of the most notable fitness franchise concepts to date. will be a great addition to the GYMGUYZ team. -Chris Davenport, VP of Franchise Development for GYMGUYZ.

GYMGUYZ, the world's largest in-home, onsite, and virtual personal training company, is announcing today that Carolyn Tedesco has been named Executive Director of Franchise Development.

A veteran franchise professional, Tedesco has ten years of franchising experience in the fitness industry including over four years of sales experience with Anytime Fitness, and nearly six years of new territory and resales experience at Snap Fitness. Prior to GYMGUYZ, Tedesco worked with another mobile franchise brand enabling her to bring that specialized expertise to the GYMGUYZ business model.

We are tremendously excited to welcome Carolyn to the team, said Chris Davenport, VP of Franchise Development for GYMGUYZ. Her breadth of knowledge in the fitness industry is immense, and her experience working in some of the most notable fitness franchise concepts to date. will be a great addition to the GYMGUYZ team.

On the heels of launching its enhanced franchise offering last month to better meet the needs of savvy entrepreneurs looking for a low investment, semi-absentee business opportunity, GYMGUYZ has hired Tedesco to be a key component of the launch and to drive their overall three-year growth plan. With her knowledge of the fitness industry, and experience in mobile franchise development, Tedesco will be responsible for all new franchise sales.

I love the health and wellness space and believe that fitness is evolving in a way that GYMGUYZ fits perfectly into, commented Carolyn Tedesco, Executive Director of Franchise Development. Im excited to be a part of this growing franchise and look forward to a successful 2022.

In addition to her role as Executive Director of Franchise Development, Tedesco is a mother of five and currently resides in Chanhassen, Minnesota. She holds a bachelors degree in Business Administration and a certificate in Entrepreneurship.

GYMGUYZ is #1 in home personal training and provides convenient, customized and creative workouts to clients at the location of their choice. Founded in 2008 by fitness specialist Josh York, the mobile brand utilizes a fleet of branded vehicles that bring more than 365 pieces of state-of-the-art fitness equipment and expert personal trainers to their customers doors. With over 150 locations in the US, Canada and the UK, GYMGUYZ is one of the fastest-growing fitness concepts in the world.

To train with GYMGUYZ, visit https://www.gymguyz.com/. To learn more about franchising with GYMGUYZ, visit https://www.gymguyz.com/franchise-opportunities/.

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ABOUT GYMGUYZ:

GYMGUYZ is # 1 in home personal training and provides convenient, customized and creative workouts at the location of your choice. Headquartered in Plainview, N.Y., and founded in 2008 by fitness specialist Josh York, the mobile brand utilizes a fleet of branded vehicles that bring more than 365 pieces of state-of-the-art fitness equipment and expert personal trainers to their customers doors. In 2019, the brand was recognized as No. 5 on Inc. Mag's 10 Hottest Franchise Businesses in America, which highlighted their growth of more than 801% over the last three years. GYMGUYZ also scored the second-place spot on Franchise Gators annual list of the Top 100 Fastest-Growing Franchises and received recognition as a top franchise in Entrepreneur's Highly Competitive 41st Annual Franchise 500. Now with over 150 locations internationally, including the United States, United Kingdom and Canada, GYMGUYZ is the fastest-growing fitness concept in the U.S. with plans to open another 100+ locations globally in the coming year. For more information on GYMGUYZ and franchising opportunities, visit http://www.gymguyz.com/.

Media Contact:

Natalie Mikolich

natalie@elementmagency.com
We are excited to partner with an established leader in the localization, content strategy and digital experience arena. Acolads expertise in structured content and global team of experts will nicely supplement our CCMS technology. IXIASOFT CEO, Eric Bergeron

IXIASOFT, a leading DITA CCMS software company based in Montreal, Canada, announces today that it has signed a partnership agreement with Acolad Digital known for its specialization in designing, implementing, and running integrated experiences across multiple channels, touchpoints and regions.

Acolad Digital, formerly Amplexor, is part of Acolad Group, a France-based global content leader providing a complete range of content and language solutions including consulting services and related technologies.

IXIASOFT and Acolad Digital both serve large enterprise-class customers, embracing the DITA open-standard, within the technical documentation industry. Leveraging each others complementary products and services, Acolad Digital and IXIASOFT will provide the market with end-to-end solutions from global content strategy and consultancy to managing, authoring and publishing structured content through a centralized CCMS.

We are excited to partner with an established leader in the localization, content strategy and digital experience arena, says Eric Bergeron, President and CEO at IXIASOFT. Acolads expertise in structured content and global team of experts will supplement our CCMS technology and allow us to further expand our reach in a variety of industries.

IXIASOFT CCMS is a best-in-class CCMS solution that will help us provide turnkey solutions to our customers, says Benoit Laxenaire, Head of Acolad Digital. IXIASOFT is a proven market leader in the CCMS industry and naturally complements our product portfolio, allowing us to offer an enhanced digital experience to our customers.

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About IXIASOFT:

Founded in 1998, IXIASOFT is a trusted global leader in the XML content management software industry. Its signature product, IXIASOFT CCMS, is an award-winning, end-to-end component content management solution (CCMS) used to produce and manage DITA structured technical documentation. IXIASOFT CCMS has been deployed by industry leaders like Abbott, ARM, DocuSign, Komatsu, Mastercard, SAP and Toyota.

For more information visit https://www.ixiasoft.com.

About Acolad:

Ranked as one of the worlds largest LSPs by industry research organizations CSA Research, Nimdzi, and Slator, Acolad is a dynamic leader in the global content space providing a full suite of content and language solutions, services and technology. For decades, Acolad has been committed to helping customers across key industries engage with their markets, increase revenue, and drive process efficiencies through cutting-edge content solutions and technology. To guarantee an exceptional and seamless service, the Acolad group has a presence in 25 countries across Europe, North America and Asia, maintaining a strong partnership with over 20,000 professional language, learning and authoring professionals.

For more information visit https://www.acolad.com.


Ryan Swearingen, Founder of Keel Real Estate By getting to know our clients on a personal level, we can accurately manifest their dreams

Keel Real Estate today announced its partnership with Side, the only real estate technology company that exclusively partners with high-performing agents, teams, and independent brokerages to transform them into market-leading boutique brands and businesses. The collaboration will ensure that Keel Real Estate, a company that continuously strives to deliver top-quality service, is powered by the industrys most advanced platform.

Keel was founded by Ryan Swearingen, who has facilitated $35 million in sales since beginning his career in 2016. Swearingen takes an interpersonal approach to real estate, informed by a decade as a psychologist in private practice in New York City. Keel Real Estate is a service-focused lifestyle brand serving Southwest Florida. The Keel team balances hard work with innovative play to connect clients to their greatest ambitions with expert finesse.

I know how to get my clients every advantage in this competitive market, Swearingen said. At Keel Real Estate, well take that same strategy to listen and lead our clients to success. By getting to know our clients on a personal level, we can accurately manifest their dreams.

Partnering with Side will ensure Keel Real Estate remains on the cutting edge of the evolving real estate market while continuing to deliver premium services to its clients. Side works behind the scenes, supporting Keel Real Estate with a one-of-a-kind brokerage platform that includes proprietary technology, transaction management, branding and marketing services, public relations, legal support, lead generation, vendor management, infrastructure solutions, and more. Additionally, Keel Real Estate will join an exclusive group of Side partners, tapping into an expansive network from coast to coast.

Ive partnered with Side because I expect Keels services to be nothing short of perfect, Swearingen continued. Side offers the Keel Real Estate team next-level marketing, tech, administrative, and legal support so we can commit 100% of our time to our clients without sacrificing the other ends of the business.

About Keel Real Estate

Keel Real Estate is not your average real estate company. Its a lifestyle brand dedicated to helping clients live their lives to the fullest. As students of real estate, Keel agents are informed by the latest industry happenings and continuously strive to deliver top-quality service. Clients get a dynamic combination of expert market analysis and friendlike reliability that creates a smooth, steady journey. Keel Real Estate is headquartered in Naples, Florida. For more information, visit http://www.keelrealestate.com.

About Side

Side is a behind-the-scenes brokerage platform that exclusively partners with top-performing agents, teams, and independent brokerages to create and grow their own boutique brands without the cost, time, or risk of operating a brokerage. Sides proprietary technology platform and premier support solutions empower its agent partners to be more productive, grow their business, and focus on serving their clients. Side is headquartered in San Francisco. For more information, visit http://www.sideinc.com.
Mercy College will celebrate 2,670 graduates from the Class of 2022 at commencement ceremonies to be held on the Dobbs Ferry Campus, May 17, 18 and 19. The return of commencement to the Dobbs Ferry Campus marks the first time in 35 years that graduation ceremonies will be held on-campus. In addition to the in-person ceremonies, all commencement addresses and awarding of diplomas will be live-streamed for families, friends and guests of the graduating students.

The individual ceremonies of each of Mercys five schools will celebrate keynote remarks from speakers who have demonstrated a commitment to giving back to their communities and exceptional leadership in the fields of health, media, business, education and social sciences. School graduation celebrations will also include addresses given by selected student speakers, and the conferring of degrees by Mercy College President Tim Hall.

Celebrating our students at graduation and conferring their degrees is something I look forward to all year, said Mercy College President Tim Hall. Mercy graduates have overcome many obstacles, including a pandemic, to earn their degrees and I am delighted that we can celebrate in person after two long years and once again host the ceremonies on the Dobbs Ferry Campus for the first time in 35 years.

Honorary degrees will be bestowed on the five commencement speakers for their lifetime achievements and outstanding contributions to society. The Mercy College 2022 honorary degree recipients include:

School of Social and Behavioral Sciences: Ian Kerner, Ph.D., LMFT, M.S., is a licensed psychotherapist and nationally recognized sexuality counselor who specializes in sex therapy, couples therapy and working with individuals. He is regularly quoted as an expert in various media, most recently in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Economist, NPR and is a contributor to CNN Health. Kerner lectures on a wide range of relationship topics, most recently for the Psychotherapy Networker Symposium, Ackerman Institute, Tony Robbins, Goop, and TED 2021. He is a New York Times best-selling author, a Clinical Fellow of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists and holds membership in the Society for Sex Therapy and Research and The American Family Therapy Academy. He is certified by the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists and has sat on their Board of Directors. Kerner received his Master of Science in Marriage and Family Therapy from Mercy College. Kerner will be awarded a Doctor of Humane Letters by Mercy College.

School of Education: Paul Broadie II, Ph.D. took office as president of Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Florida., in February 2020. Within his first few months, he engaged key leaders in discussions of potential partnerships, took steps to bridge the digital divide by providing students in rural areas greater access to technology, and challenged college leaders to change the mentality, where it exists, that college is not for everyone. For nearly three decades, Broadie has expanded academic programs, student services, innovative technology, community partnerships and campus facilities, always with a focus on the student. Prior to his tenure at Santa Fe College, he simultaneously headed Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Gateway Community College in New Haven, Connecticut. Broadie was named among Connecticuts 100 most influential by the NAACP and among the regions 50 most influential by New Haven Biz magazine. He holds a doctorate from Colorado State University, a Master of Business Administration from Long Island University and a bachelors degree in business administration from Mercy College. Broadie will be awarded a Doctor of Humane Letters.

School of Business: Umran Beba, M.B.A., is a partner at August Leadership, an executive search firm based in New York City where she serves as a search, leadership, and diversity consultant. As an experienced senior business executive, she spent 25 years working with PepsiCo in Istanbul, Hong Kong, Dubai, and New York, and served as the Asia Pacific President of PepsiCo after performing in leadership roles in Southeast Europe, East Mediterranean/Middle East, and Turkey. She co-founded the Beba Innovation and Entrepreneurship Foundation and serves on boards of Bakkavor Group plc, International Youth Foundation and Purchase College Foundation. Beba is a member of the Advisory Board of Mercys School of Business as well as the Board of Overseers for Columbia University School of Professional Studies. She co-authored the book  Leaders with Purpose in Turkish (Deger Yaratan Liderler), published this year. She has a Master of Business Administration, and a bachelor of science degree in industrial engineering from Bogazici University in Istanbul. Beba will be awarded a Doctor of Commercial Science.

School of Liberal Arts: Sharon Epperson, CNBCs senior personal finance correspondent, is a journalist, author and sought-after speaker on a wide range of personal finance topics. She has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, USA Weekend, Self, Essence, Ebony and TIME. She is a lead contributor to a multi-platform financial wellness and education initiative at CNBC and contributes to NBCs TODAY and NBC Nightly News. Since sustaining a ruptured brain aneurysm in 2016, Epperson has worked to raise awareness and research funding via The Sharon Epperson Chair of Research, which she and her family established through the Brain Aneurysm Foundation. Among her many industry and civic awards are a Special Achievement Award from the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors (NAPFA) and honors from both the National and New York chapters of the Association of Black Journalists. Epperson has a bachelors degree in sociology and government from Harvard University and a masters degree in international affairs from Columbia University, where she has taught in the School of International and Public Affairs and the Graduate School of Journalism. Epperson will be awarded a Doctor of Letters.

School of Health and Natural Sciences: Susan Fox, RN, M.B.A., president and chief executive officer of White Plains Hospital (WPH), has been at the forefront of the health care industry transformation for the last decade. She joined WPH in 2010 as senior vice president of administration, taking the helm as chief executive officer in 2015. In prior positions, Fox was a senior vice president at North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System and a senior manager of health care consulting at Ernst & Young. She currently chairs the Westchester County Association and is former chair of the American Hospital Association (AHA) Regional Policy Board 2 and past member of AHAs Board of Trustees. She serves on the Columbia University School of Nursing Board of Visitors and the Board of the Healthcare Association of New York State. Fox has been repeatedly named among the Westchester Power 100, honored with the 914 Inc. Women in Business Award, and repeatedly recognized as a leader in business by Westchester Magazine and Westfair. A Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, she has a bachelors degree in nursing from Columbia University and an Master of Business Administration from Baruch College, Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Fox will be awarded a Doctor of Humane Letters.

For complete details about each of Mercy Colleges five Commencement ceremonies, including date, time and location, please visit https://www.mercy.edu/campus-life/commencement.

About Mercy College

Founded in 1950 by the Sisters of Mercy, Mercy College is an independent, coeducational college that offers more than 100 undergraduate and graduate degree and certificate programs within five schools: Business, Education, Health and Natural Sciences, Liberal Arts and Social and Behavioral Sciences. The vibrancy of the College culture is sustained by a diverse student body from around the region. The College has campuses in Dobbs Ferry, Bronx and Manhattan as well as online offerings.


Drivers can now order genuine Ford OEM parts and accessories at Bickford Motors in Snohomish, Washington.

Individuals looking to get parts and accessories for their Ford vehicles can now order genuine original equipment manufacturer (OEM) parts from the comfort of their homes at Bickford Motors, an automotive dealership in Snohomish, Washington. To place an order, drivers must give their vehicles information along with the parts and accessories they are looking for by filling out an online form.

Once the customers submit the form, the dealerships team will contact them via their preferred mode of communication to provide an estimate regarding the cost of the parts and the accessories. Moreover, drivers who are not handy with installing the parts themselves can get those parts installed by the dealerships team of experts. In addition to OEM parts and accessories, the dealership also offers a range of services and maintenance for all makes and models. Drivers can take their vehicles to the dealership for the following services:

-Coolant flush

-Brake inspection

-Vehicle inspection

-Transmission flush

-Front end alignment

-Oil, lube and filter change

-And much more!

Individuals interested in taking advantage of the services offered by Bickford Motors can schedule a service appointment right away. Customers can also contact the dealerships team by dialing 844-309-3673 to schedule an appointment. Drivers who want to learn more about the expertise of the dealerships service staff can visit them at 3100 Bickford Avenue in Snohomish, Washington.
The U.S. Rx-to-OTC market the market for product with ingredients switched to allow over-the-counter usage, has grown into a $13.8 billion market. This is according to a new report from Kalorama Information. This has mainly been due to factors such as patent expirations, increasing competitiveness with the pharmaceutical environment, the FDA willingness to work with industry, brand re-invention, consumer demand, and cost containment strategies. The firm's report includes in its market figure a wide variety of products that have been determined safe and effective as over-the-counter products, once available only by prescription.

Kalorama estimates that more than 700 products have made the switch from Rx to OTC over the past several decades. Aging populations, many of which are taking greater interest in their health, have created a growing Rx-to-OTC industry in America. It is anticipated that Rx-to-OTC switch products will continue to grow as interest from both consumers and developers continue to expand.

Kalroama notes the market increased by 14.5% from 2019 to 2020 as a result of effects from the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, the increase in COVID-19 cases, continued incidence of allergy, gastrointestinal and pain symptoms and a reduction the available in-person health visits increased the demand for OTC treatments during this time-period. This continued, at a slightly lower level, during 2021.

Many of the new products that are on the market may be potential candidates after standing the test of time as a prescription product. Also, the demand for OTC products is not likely to diminish, giving rise to more possibilities in the switched categories. Over one third of American consumers use an OTC medication at least every other day and the numbers are increasing on a regular basis as more products appear on the OTC market.

The report says all areas contribute to the growth and development of the OTC market; however, new product development and additional regulatory review and approval of new OTC drug classifications, specifically in areas such as gastrointestinal drugs, analgesics, allergy treatments, hair growth products, cholesterol-reducing drugs, urinary disorder treatments, contraceptives and sexual dysfunction treatments will be major forces in the future market.

Kalorama says some of these segments will experience growth due to new introductions during the forecast period, while other segments may not achieve market approvals until after the forecast period.

Kalorama's report, Rx to OTC Switches, Can Be Found At: https://kaloramainformation.com/product/the-market-for-rx-to-otc-switches-8th-edition/

About Kalorama Information

Kalorama Information is the leading publisher of market research in healthcare areas, including in vitro diagnostics (IVD), biotechnology, medical devices, and pharmaceuticals. Science and Medicine Group supports companies seeking to commercialize the rapidly changing marketplace at the intersection of science, medicine, and technology. Comprised of industry-leading brands, Science and Medicine Group serves analytical instrument, life science, imaging, and clinical diagnostic companies by helping them create strategies and products to win markets and provide platforms to digitally engage their markets through a variety of innovative solutions. Kalorama Information produces 30 reports a year. The firm offers a Knowledge Center, which provides access to all published reports.
This new OOH measurement platform is the latest innovation coming out of Reveal Mobile and Mira having joined forces to democratize attribution.Jon Frangakis, chief commercial officer at Reveal Mobile

Reveal Mobile, the location intelligence and geofencing marketing software company, announced today the launch of a new self-service platform for out of home (OOH) campaign measurement.

The new platform, called the Mira Console, is the first of its kind to deliver measurement reports for traditional, digital, place-based, programmatic, and moving OOH ad campaigns.

The launch of the Mira Console ushers in a new era for out of home advertisers, combining industry-leading measurement methodology with the flexibility and convenience of self-service software. Buy-side and sell-side OOH companies use the platform to get campaign reports that measure in-store, mobile app, and online actions that consumers take after being exposed to OOH ads.

This new OOH measurement platform is the latest innovation coming out of Reveal Mobile and Mira having joined forces to democratize attribution, said Jon Frangakis, chief commercial officer at Reveal Mobile. The Mira Console cements Reveal Mobiles position as the only SaaS provider for measuring all types of OOH ad exposure and all conversion environments.

The Mira Console was developed in partnership with Lyft, Inc. (LYFT), who became a Reveal Mobile customer in October and served as a design partner.

One of the first customers to adopt the new platform is Adomni, the programmatic out of home specialist that makes more than 500,000 screens purchasable to advertisers across the United States.

"Our customers run a large volume of campaigns across several verticals, geos, and formats, so we're managing a high degree of complexity while delivering results every day," said Adrien Sossa, VP of Partnerships - Audience Data and Measurement at Adomni. "The Mira console removes a lot of the challenges of reporting by streamlining how we prove performance and the true value of our work. Using the console has been a win on the efficiency side, while also helping strengthen trust among our customers."

Key features of the Mira Console:



Quickly set up clients to house and organize individual advertisers and campaigns.

See all campaigns associated with an advertiser to get a quick view of what has completed, whats in progress, and what has been delivered.

Each campaign can have multiple measurement reports associated with it. Users can choose from multiple types of reports across exposure and conversion environments.

Easily share results with clients by downloading PDF versions of fully annotated reports.

Reveal Mobile is offering live demonstrations of the new Mira Console at the OOH Media Conference and Expo from May 16-18 in Marco Island, FL. Live demos are also available by contacting Reveal Mobile.

About Reveal Mobile

Reveal Mobile provides location intelligence, geofencing marketing and attribution solutions to ad agencies, retailers, media, restaurants and out of home companies. Creator of VISIT Local, the companys award-winning platform allows companies of any size to leverage location data to understand, reach and measure the right audiences. Mira, acquired by Reveal Mobile in 2021, is the leading location intelligence solution used in the out of home industry. Reveal Mobile is CCPA and GDPR compliant and adheres to the Network Advertising Initiative code of conduct. The company is based in Raleigh, NC and New York, NY.

For more information, visit https://revealmobile.com. For insights on the marketing, advertising and ad tech industries, follow us on LinkedIn and visit our blog.

For a demo of the Mira Console or VISIT Local, contact us.
After a three-year pause because of the pandemic, students, faculty, staff, and alumni from Rochester Institute of Technologys (RIT) College of Art and Design will descend on Manhattan this week for NYCxDesignNew York Citys annual celebration of design that attracts hundreds of thousands from around the globewhich is marking its 10th year.

RITs Vignelli Center for Design Studies, under the directorship of Josh Owen, the Vignelli Distinguished Professor of Design, will kick-off the School of Designs presence at Design Week from 5:30 to 8 p.m. Saturday, May 14, with RIT Success by Design at Partners + Napiers New York City office, 412 West 15th St., 7th floor. The event will be hosted by RIT Trustee Sharon D. Napier 04 MS (service leadership and innovation), the firms executive chair and founder.

Registration is required to attend the event, which will fully comply with state and local COVID-19 guidelines, along with any health and safety protocols required by the venue. Proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test within three days is required to enter the event.

RIT Success by Design will celebrate the past, present, and future of design at RIT by highlighting its impact on the global design community through our remarkable alumni, current student successes, local and global assets, and future ambitions for growth, Owen said. Its great for RIT to be back at Design Week, and it is significant for the university to have such a formidable presence at one of the worlds leading showcases for design.

RIT is among only a select few universities and design schools to be invited to Design Week in New York City.

This Saturday night programs highlights will include:



Unveiling of Metaproject 11, with industry partner Staach.

Celebration of the Vignelli Center for Design Studies 12 years of impact.

Presentation of R. Roger Remingtons retirement tribute book, Onward, published by RIT Press.

Premiere showing of Bookends, a documentary highlighting a collaborative design project between Wendell Castle and Owen.

Castle and Owen collaborated on a philanthropic project titled Support for Knowledge, sales of which go toward further growing RITs industrial design program. The limited-edition bronze bookends created from the extraordinary design pairing are a partnership with RITs Shop One, Borough Furnace, and Autodesk. The documentary film was created by alumnus Alex Freeman 14 (industrial design).

Since 2010, RITs Metaproject has regularly demonstrated that education partnered with industry is a successful vehicle for fostering innovative thinking and thoughtful product design. The collaboration pairing RIT student designers with a client partner has become a seminal project for the universitys nationally ranked industrial design program and also aims to help play a role in bringing about a better world.

For Metaproject 11, senior industrial design students spent last year designing products for Staach, which focuses on functional sustainable design. Founded by Seth Eshelman 06 (industrial design/graphic design), the company designs and domestically manufactures sustainable products including furniture, interiors, and built structures that can be found around the world. The event at Partners + Napier on Saturday night will highlight a number of the projects from the Metaproject 11 collaboration with Staach.

At the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF), which will be held inside New York Citys Jacob Javits Center May 15 to 17, RITs installation within the WantedDesign Schools Showcase will highlight this years Metaproject 12 with Modkat, the award-winning maker of cat litter boxes where modern cats do their business, the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based company proclaims on its website.

Co-founded by Brett Teper 94 (industrial design) and Rich Williams, Modkat is widely hailed for creating an entirely new category of litter boxes inspired by innovative design. The companys original Modkat Litter Box made its debut at the 2009 ICFF, where it earned The Editors Choice Award for Best Accessory. Shortly thereafter, it received the prestigious Red Dot Design Award.

The Metaproject initiative, true to RITs mission of providing experiential, innovative learning opportunities at a university noted for innovative leadership in technology, the arts, and design, has seen industrial design students work in collaboration with photography, glass, interior design, graphic design, new media design, and other industry partners.

Started by Owen when he arrived at RIT in 2010, the course offers students a taste of real-world experience, connections with leading design industry professionals, and the possibility of having their project put into production.

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Rochester Institute of Technology is home to leading creators, entrepreneurs, innovators and researchers. Founded in 1829, RIT enrolls 19,700 students in more than 200 career-oriented and professional programs, making it among the largest private universities in the U.S.

The university is internationally recognized and ranked for academic leadership in business, computing, engineering, imaging science, liberal arts, sustainability, and fine and applied arts. RIT also offers unparalleled support services for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. The cooperative education program is one of the oldest and largest in the nation. Global partnerships include campuses in China, Croatia, Dubai and Kosovo.

For news, photos and videos, go to http://www.rit.edu/news.

To follow RIT on social media, go to http://www.rit.edu/socialmedia.
In the coming weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court will hand down a series of decisions that may transform American society. One of those decisions is in a case called Carson v. Makin, the latest in a series of cases brought to expand the use of private school vouchers. This decision in Carson may be particularly radical and transformative, explains University of Colorado Boulder professor and NEPC director Kevin Welner.

In a policy memo titled, The Outsourcing of Discrimination: Another SCOTUS Earthquake?, Welner, an education law and policy scholar, contends that the majority of Supreme Court justices, in deciding Carson v. Makin, will likely adopt a rule that requires public funding in Maine to be used to subsidize religious teaching and proselytizing. But the Court may also take the nation far beyond that determination.

Specifically, the Court may require that whenever a state decides to provide a service through a non-state employee (e.g., through a contracting mechanism), the state will face the highest level of judicial scrutiny if it discriminates against churches and church-affiliated service providers that infuse their beliefs into the provided services. Moreover, the Court may impose that same heightened scrutiny to limit any state anti-discrimination enforcement if providers religious beliefs direct them to engage in that discrimination against people because of, for example, their gender identity or sexual orientation.

Welner explains that such a judicial ruling would amount to a license to outsource discrimination. While a conventional public school cannot violate a states anti-discrimination laws, a school run privately by a religious organization might be allowed to do so. He points in particular to charter school laws as creating this possibility, and he describes how Supreme Court cases in recent years have laid the groundwork for courts to require authorizers to grant charters to religious organizations.

The Supreme Court is just a few small steps away from transforming every charter school law in the U.S. into a private-school voucher policy, says Welner. In addition, he argues, charters run by religious organizations would likely gain a constitutionally protected right to discriminate against, for example, members of the LGBTQ+ community.

If this happens, states that abhor such discrimination may find themselves forced to pull back on private contracting to provide public services, ending policies that allow private operators of everything from social services like foster care, health care, prisons, and charter schools.

Find The Outsourcing of Discrimination: Another SCOTUS Earthquake?, by Kevin Welner, at: https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/carson-makin

The National Education Policy Center (NEPC), a university research center housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education, produces and disseminates high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. Visit us at: https://nepc.colorado.edu
transcosmos Korea Genesys Partnership transcosmos Korea will offer Genesys' cutting-edge cloud solutions and services to clients at a reasonable investment expense to minimize the hurdle for cloud implementation and ultimately help them build competitive strengths that differentiate themselves from others.

transcosmos inc. is pleased to announce that transcosmos Korea, Inc. (Headquarter: Seoul, Republic of Korea; President and COO: Kwon Sang-chuel; transcosmos Korea), its subsidiary and a business process outsourcing provider in the Republic of Korea (South Korea), has signed a partnership agreement with Genesys (Chairman and CEO: Tony Bates), a global leader in the cloud contact center market. Now, transcosmos Korea has become both a Genesys Cloud reseller and an AppFoundry partner.

Genesys Cloud reseller: A partner who resells Genesys solutions to end users.

AppFoundry: A marketplace of solutions that offers a selection of customer service applications, integrations and services.

With the partnership agreement in place, transcosmos Korea has become an official reseller of Genesys Cloud solutions, and will provide system integration services that include pre-implementation consulting, cloud platform development, and post-implementation customer support.

At the same time, as a partner of Genesys's marketplace AppFoundry, transcosmos Korea will develop, sell and deliver programs (APP) that are integrated to Genesys cloud solutions. Going forward, transcosmos Korea will develop and offer Genesys Cloud for PowerFront, integrating Genesys Cloud and PowerFront, the company's custom customer relations management solution (an integrated CRM solution).

Genesys is the leading global contact center solutions company, providing telecommunication software solutions built on cloud, digital and AI technologies to more than 10,000 clients in 100+ countries.

To be a Genesys partner, companies must have basic knowledge about Genesys solutions, and a Digital Badge, which means businesses must maintain a set number of technically certified individuals. With the aim of providing the right services to each individual client, transcosmos Korea will make its members in IT, Consulting and Sales departments obtain Genesys technology certification.

"The unpredictable pandemic has altered the very foundation of our business, and the contact center market is rapidly shifting to cloud from physical locations," Kwon Sang-chuel, President and COO at transcosmos Korea said. "Just recently, we, at transcosmos Korea, have decided to build an AI-powered contact center in Gwangju. And we are actively investing in R&D, as well as in AI talent development so that we can adapt to the changing environment. transcosmos Korea will offer Genesys' cutting-edge cloud solutions and services to clients at a reasonable investment expense to minimize the hurdle for cloud implementation, and ultimately help them build competitive strengths that differentiate themselves from others."

*transcosmos is a trademark or registered trademark of transcosmos inc. in Japan and other countries.

*Other company names and product or service names used here are trademarks or registered trademarks of respective companies.

About transcosmos inc.

transcosmos launched its operations in 1966. Since then, we have combined superior "people" with up-to-date "technology" to enhance the competitive strength of our clients by providing them with superior and valuable services. transcosmos currently offers services that support clients' business processes focusing on both sales expansion and cost optimization through our 169 bases across 28 countries/regions with a focus on Asia, while continuously pursuing Operational Excellence. Furthermore, following the expansion of e-commerce market on the global scale, transcosmos provides a comprehensive One-Stop Global E-Commerce Services to deliver our clients' excellent products and services to consumers in 46 countries/regions around the globe. transcosmos aims to be the "Global Digital Transformation Partner" of our clients, supporting the clients' transformation by leveraging digital technology, responding to the ever-changing business environment. Visit us here https://www.trans-cosmos.co.jp/english/
Hon. John W. Demling (Ret.) receives DCBA Ralph A. Gabric Award

Mirabella, Kincaid, Frederick & Mirabella, LLC is proud to announce that Hon. John W. Demling (Ret.) has received the DuPage County Bar Associations Ralph A. Gabric Award for Professionalism. Judge Demling served 21 years as an Associate Judge for the Eighteenth Judicial Circuit Court, DuPage County, and today, he serves as Of Counsel for the Wheaton law firm, MKFM Law.

The DCBAs Ralph A. Gabric Award is a prestigious award presented to an individual who, through their leadership, respectability, and character, has directly impacted the organization in a positive manner.

Judge Demlings experience in the field of law allows MKFM Law to better assist clients, and he provides an enhanced level of skill when evaluating and developing cases. For more than 40 years as a judge and attorney, Judge Demling has greatly developed his problem-solving and litigation capabilities, and he skillfully guides families and individuals through issues related to family law and divorce. As a judge, he spent more than 18 years serving in the Domestic Relations Division of the circuit court, and he utilizes that experience to compassionately and strategically handle cases involving domestic violence and other sensitive matters.

Throughout his career, Judge Demling has prioritized continuing his legal education and sharing his knowledge and experience with other legal professionals. He has presented numerous programs to judges and attorneys alike, and he has presented programs to organizations including the Illinois Institute for Continuing Legal Education and the Illinois State Bar Association. Judge Demling is also an active member with the DuPage County Bar Association, the Illinois State Bar Association, and the Illinois Judges Association.

Judge Demling has held a multitude of leadership positions throughout his career, including his current positions as Chairman of the DuPage County Ethics Commission and as Director of the DuPage Legal Assistance Foundation.

About Mirabella, Kincaid, Frederick & Mirabella, LLC

With locations in Wheaton and St. Charles, Illinois, MKFM Law represents clients in several practice areas. The firms legal team comprises experienced and skilled attorneys who pride themselves in educating each of their clients and tailoring their strategy for each individual case.

MKFM Law represents clients throughout DuPage County and surrounding areas who are facing legal matters including divorce, family law, sexual harassment, employment discrimination, civil litigation, and criminal defense.

To learn more about MKFM or to schedule a free consultation, visit https://www.mkfmlaw.com/ or call 630-665-7300.
HR NOLA Logo "As HR professionals we know that when employees feel supported and heard, that they are able to focus their best efforts on their job." - Amy Bakay, SHRM-SCP, CEO of HR NOLA.

HR NOLA has been named to Inc. magazines annual Best Workplaces list. Featured in the May/June 2022 issue, hitting newsstands on May 17, 2022, and prominently featured on Inc.com, the list is the result of a comprehensive measurement of American companies that have excelled in creating exceptional workplaces and company culture, whether operating in a physical or virtual facility.

HR NOLA was started in 2017 by founder, Amy Bakay, SHRM-SCP, after a 20-year career in a diverse range of HR leadership roles. Bakay identified a necessity in the small-business market for tailored Human Resources solutions, as well as retained HR outsourced services, and founded HR NOLA to suit the needs of these businesses. Over the last five years, HR NOLA has helped many companies to select and support their employees, train their management, assure their compliance, and ultimately grow their businesses. HR NOLA takes a different approach to HR, both internally and for their clients. They are passionate about the value that HR brings to an organization, and they are always learning and exploring new solutions to better support any businesses most important asset: their employees.

After collecting data from thousands of submissions, Inc. selected 475 honorees this year. Each company that was nominated took part in an employee survey, conducted by Quantum Workplace, which included topics such as management effectiveness, perks, fostering employee growth, and overall company culture. The organizations benefits were also audited to determine overall score and ranking.

At HR NOLA, we strive to create an environment, both in person and remotely, that supports every employee. As HR professionals we know that when employees feel supported and heard, that they are able to focus their best efforts on their job. This in turn helps our clients to get the best results from their strategic HR partnership. Ive learned so much since starting HR NOLA five years ago! Without my team we wouldn't have been able to grow to support over 300 businesses nationwide. says Amy Bakay, SHRM-SCP, CEO of HR NOLA.

Not long ago, the term best workplace would have conjured up images of open-office designs with stocked snack fridges, says Inc. editor-in-chief Scott Omelianuk. Yet given the widespread adoption of remote work, the concept of the workplace has shifted. This year, Inc. has recognized the organizations dedicated to redefining and enriching the workplace in the face of the pandemic.

About HR NOLA

HR NOLAs team is composed of SHRM certified consultants with strong backgrounds in human resources and business management. Their team not only focuses on traditional HR best practices and efficiencies, but on progressive HR by creating a respectful, positive, and productive work environment that benefits employees regardless of if they work in-person or remotely. HR NOLA is always working on preventing the non-compliance and toxicity that can cost a company millions. With offices in New Orleans, Louisiana, and San Antonio, Texas, HR NOLA is able to serve clients throughout the United States. In 2021, HR NOLA served over 5000 employees as an HR partner, and saved their clients hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential legal liabilities. To learn more about HR NOLA, see their website: https://www.hrnola.com/, which features informative blog and video posts, including How to be a Workplace Bully, a tongue-in-cheek presentation about the big mistakes people make at work, and how to avoid them.

About Inc. Media

The worlds most trusted business-media brand, Inc. offers entrepreneurs the knowledge, tools, connections, and community to build great companies. Its award-winning multiplatform content reaches more than 50 million people each month across a variety of channels including websites, newsletters, social media, podcasts, and print. Its prestigious Inc. 5000 list, produced every year since 1982, analyzes company data to recognize the fastest-growing privately held businesses in the United States. The global recognition that comes with inclusion in the 5000 gives the founders of the best businesses an opportunity to engage with an exclusive community of their peers, and the credibility that helps them drive sales and recruit talent. The associated Inc. 5000 Conference is part of a highly acclaimed portfolio of bespoke events produced by Inc. For more information, visit http://www.inc.com.

About Quantum Workplace

Quantum Workplace, based in Omaha, Nebraska, is an HR technology company that serves organizations through employee-engagement surveys, action-planning tools, exit surveys, peer-to-peer recognition, performance evaluations, goal tracking, and leadership assessment. For more information, visit QuantumWorkplace.com.

Media Contact:

Allison Schmidt, Marketing Manager, Get Online NOLA http://www.getonlinenola.com

Allison@getonlinenola.com
We need this information to combat the effects of natural disasters that come with climate change and to protect the quality and availability of our water supply as the Earth evolves.

The U.S. Geological Survey selected Woolpert to process and delineate elevation-derived hydrography (EDH) from lidar data collected in Oregon and IfSAR data collected in Alaska. The high-resolution EDH data developed under these two task orders will be used to update the National Hydrography Dataset, which represents the surface water network of the United States.

In Alaska, Woolpert was tasked with acquiring, processing and delineating EDH for nearly 3,000 square miles to support the USGS 3D Hydrography Program (3DHP). The Oregon task order focuses on the delineation and conflation of EDH for two areas of interest: The Applegate River watershed within the Klamath National Forest in southwestern Oregon, and the Canyon Creek watershed within the Malheur National Forest in the central part of Oregon.

These data will provide researchers, scientists, engineers and natural resource managers with the accuracy and attributes needed to map, model and analyze all surface water and flow patterns within these areas of interest for use in flood-risk management, coastal resilience, resource management, conservation planning, engineering design, stormwater management, geologic hazard mitigation, etc. EDH enables initiatives and agencies nationwide, from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the U.S. Forest Service, to make informed decisions on critical issues.

Woolpert Vice President John Gerhard said EDH is the next logical layer to update in the National Map. The EDH data will be used to accurately define and model lakes, rivers, tributaries, floodplains, coastlines, etc.many of which were originally traced from USGS hardcopy topological maps and have not been updated for decades. He said because EDH is derived from the consistent, high-resolution elevation data of the 3DEP program and is 3D-enabled, this nationwide hydrography data will fit the terrain data more accurately.

By combining lidar and IfSAR elevation data with GIS and cloud-computing technologies, we can understand how our waterways function, connect and interact, while modeling change over time, Gerhard said. We need this information to combat the effects of natural disasters that come with climate change and to protect the quality and availability of our water supply as the Earth evolves. The technology, science and collaboration inherent to these USGS initiatives hold the key to our nations prosperity and longevity.

About Woolpert

Woolpert is the premier architecture, engineering, geospatial (AEG) and strategic consulting firm, with a vision to become one of the best companies in the world. We innovate within and across markets to effectively serve public, private and government clients worldwide. Woolpert is an ENR Top 150 Global Design Firm, has earned six straight Great Place to Work certifications and actively nurtures a culture of growth, inclusion, diversity and respect. Founded in 1911 in Dayton, Ohio, Woolpert has been Americas fastest-growing AEG firm since 2015. The firm has 1,900 employees and more than 60 offices on four continents. For more, visit woolpert.com.
Its a total Minneapolis story, said Lerner Publishing Group CEO Adam Lerner about the events leading up to the fall release of the YA edition of Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. It might be more specifically called an only in Minneapolis publishing story. The book is based on Braiding Sweetgrass, originally published in 2013 by Milkweed Editionsits offices are about a mile down Washington Avenue from LPGs offices. Lerner and Milkweeds CEO, Daniel Slager, whove known each other for about 25 years, began negotiating the rights to the YA edition with a picture book option last year while sitting in front of a firepit in Lerners backyard and sipping bourbon.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and professor of plant ecology at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, mixes science, botany, Indigenous teachings, and Potawatomi legends with personal memoir to explore the role of plants in Indigenous and Western traditions and to advocate for a more mindful relationship between humans and the natural world.

Its a very timely book, Lerner said. Young people are really concerned about the planet and this book addresses that in an original wayat least original for non-Native people.

Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults, written by Kimmerer, adapted by Monique Gray Smith, and illustrated by Nicole Neidhardt, will be released on November 1 under LPGs Zest Books imprint, with a 50,000-copy initial print run. The cover for this edition of Braiding Sweetgrass is being revealed here for the first time.

Adaptations Are Trending

Lerner credits Shaina Olmanson, Zests editorial director for young adult nonfiction, with identifying the growing trend of larger houses adapting adult bestsellers published by one imprint and re-packaging it under one of their childrens imprints.

There are more and more of these crossover books, like [Michelle] Obamas memoir [Becoming], Lerner said. And then there was Stamped [adapted from Ibram X. Kendis book by Jason Reynolds]thats a big one. The New York City houses have both childrens and adult divisions so its easier for them. We dont have an adult division, so Shaina suggested one of our adult publishers in Minneapolis that doesnt have a childrens list. She identified Braiding Sweetgrass as a great title to consider for this: its a natural fit. Its really about identifying the right titles: they typically have to be bestsellers to break out [as adaptations].

With more than 1.1 million copies sold in all formats, Braiding Sweetgrass is Milkweeds bestselling title in its history. Originally published in trade paper, Milkweed released a special edition in hardcover in November 2020 to celebrate the presss 40th anniversary that contains a new foreword by Kimmerer. The paper edition is in its 26th printing, and the hardcover in its fourth. The book first landed on the New York Times bestsellers list in February 2020 and has remained there for 107 weeks.

Not only does Braiding Sweetgrass complement other trade nonfiction releases on Zests list but, Lerner pointed out, like Milkweed employees, LPG personnel live and work in a geographic region with a large Indigenous population.

Native culture is part of Minnesotas culture, Lerner said. Natives are often friends or neighbors here. Were closer to the environment and spend time in the natural world. We have an appreciation for this book.

Creativity and Collaboration

Once Kimmerer agreed to the project, Lerner said, LPG moved quickly. Smith and Neidhardt agreed to collaborate on the project as writer and illustrator, respectively. Smith, a Canadian author of two YA novels, three picture books, and two nonfiction books for adults that all spotlight Indigenous issues and themes, is of Cree and Lakota ancestry. Neidhardt, who lives in Santa Fe, is of Navajo descent and has illustrated three picture books with Indigenous themes, including When We Are Kind, written by Smith.

Smith said that her first order of business in adapting the book for a YA audience was to reach out to Kimmerer, as she wanted to make sure our relationship was one where she felt trusting to hand over this piece of work for me to do. Kimmerer, Smith said, had final say on everything: what to keep in, what to remove, what to add, and what to weave into the text. As the project progressed into its final edits, collaboration between the two included some tender discussions over Zoom that couldnt happen over email; they needed to happen face-to-face.

Smith said that, for her, the most difficult part of the project was deciding which chapters to cut from the original edition, as she regards Braiding Sweetgrass as a sacred text. There were some chapters that were removed, she noted, some chapters that for young adults may not be where theyre at yet.

At 300 pages, whittled down from the Milkweed editions of more than 400 pages, the Zest edition still has a high page count for a YA nonfiction book, Smith said. Describing the package as very interactive and very engaging, with a combination of illustrations, pull-outs, and reflection questions, Smith is confident that, despite the length, it will inspire young readers to be responsible in their ways of contributing to climate wellness.

The final product is a mixture of Kimmerers original writing and Smiths rewriting, much of it woven in to tighten up the material and set it within a more contemporary context, as well as to provide a social-emotional learning element.

As she wrestles with final edits, Smith describes her first experience adapting an adult novel into a YA read as overall the most joyous project Ive worked on yet, reawakening in her a love for the land, taking care of the land, and the waterthat is part of the joy.

The Illustrators Artistic Vision

Smith credited Neidhardts 28 black-and-white interior illustrations, which expand on the original editions photographs and simple drawings, as really helping bring the book alive in a whole new way. The two collaborated closely, as well as with LPG, to conceptualize a visual to accompany each of the 23 chapters, as well as the introduction.

The introduction includes five different illustrations; Neidhardt explained that she drew four panels on one page to tell the story of Sky Woman falling and the creation of Turtle Island. We wanted to bring the story that Kimmerer starts off her book with into this [edition] in a graphic novel type of fashion. There are a couple of things in the text at the beginning that really set the tone for the illustrations in the book.

Smith and Neidhart discussed every chapter, she noted, and the images that really resonated with us, and the ways in which we could use the artwork to complement and really add to the text. In contrast to illustrations that she previously created for childrens books, consisting of the bare bones of what was happening in the text, most of the illustrations in Braiding Sweetgrass are more theoretical, symbolic; the ideas and concepts in each chapter are translated into an image, with plants serving as the focal point in each illustration.

The jacket art features a young adults hands braiding sweetgrass on the front cover. The braid wraps around the spine onto the back cover, where a childs hands hold the other end of the braid. It was the only time during the process, Neidhardt said, when she consciously linked the YA edition of Braiding Sweetgrass to the previous Milkweed editions.

Designing the cover for this book, she said, I looked at the past covers and the art inside of those previous editions. I felt like [the cover] was part of that legacy, and could reference that. The art, I would say, stands on its own [otherwise] for this edition. As for the luscious purple below the braid that surrounds Kimmerer, Smith, and Neidhardts names, the color pays homage to Kimmerers revelation in the text of Braiding Sweetgrass that she takes notes in purple ink. I thought purple was an important color, Neidhardt said, disclosing that as the illustrations are being finalized, she has been consulting with Kimmerer to make sure that the art reflects her vision as much as Smiths adaptation does.

After a year of Zooms, phone calls, and emails, Kimmerer, Smith, and Neidhart will at long last all three meet in person in Minneapolis on May 17. After a full day of meetings with LPG personnel for Smith and Neidhardt, the two will be in the audience as Kimmerer sits down for a conversation with another Milkweed author, the novelist Diane Wilson, who is of Dakota ancestry; it is billed as a discussion of reciprocity, storytelling, and the interconnectedness between all beings. Lerner and Slager will also be in attendance at this event, which will take place at the Northrop Auditorium on the University of Minnesota campus.
In Alison Espachs powerful sophomore novel, Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, a young woman addresses her older sister, who died when they were teens. Sally Holt, now 28, continues to find her life shaped by her older sister Kathys absence. Despite the sisters contrasting temperaments, they are each others closest confidantes as they grow up in 1990s small-town Connecticut. Of particular interest to them both is high school senior Billy Barnes. After Billy saves 13-year-old Sally from drowning, he begins dating Kathy, to Sallys fascination and envy. A car accident involving all three teenagers permanently shifts the Holt family dynamic.

If you were anything like me growing up, you were convinced that your life was ruined because you didnt have a sister. After reading Little Women for the first time, I was certain I would never be happy. How could I be, without a family of zany, quirky sisters?

Turns out, I was being a bit dramatic. And my brothers were pretty great. But the longing for a sister was real, which is probably why I wrote my second novel, Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, about a young girl, Sally, who loves her older sister more than anything else in the worldand then loses her. Sally takes notes for her sister as she continues to grow up and become a woman, documenting the changes in her family, the weirdness of adult life, and the unexpected joys of falling in love.

But I didnt only write about sisters to copeI devoured books about them all throughout my life. Reading about sisters was another way to live out the fantasy (or horror, in the case of certain books). I have created a list of what I think are the best books about sisters that will help you live (or re-live) the fantasy and the horror, too. These books are all very different from each other, but the one thing they have in common is that the sisters are the hearts of each story.

1. My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite I read this book in a day. Its a riveting, suspenseful, darkly comic story about a woman named Korede who loves her sister as much as she resents herand how could you not resent a serial killer who always asks you to clean up her messes? Yet Braithwaite is such a skillful storyteller and the story is never that simple. Youll spend most of the book wondering which sister is right and which sister is wrong, and that, I imagine, is the question sisters are always asking each other.

2. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Ausen This is my favorite Austen novel. Its about the three Dashwood sisters whose lives are uprooted when they have to leave their family home and set up life at Barton Cottage. What I love most about this novel is how Austen captures the actual friendship of these sisters. While there are squabbles and lingering tensions between them, its mostly just great fun to be with the Dashwoods as they share jokes, secrets, and witty commentary.

3. Atonement by Ian McEwan Two sisters with crushes on the same boysay no more. Yet, I will, because the story is so much bigger than that. Its a story about WWII and its profound effect on England. But even more so, its a story about the stories we tell ourselves, the great power that narrative has to condemn and to heal. What happens when a young girl tells a damning lie about the boy her sister loves? Youll have to read and find out.

4. Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman A fun, magical story about two sisters who grow up to be very different women with conflicting views on magic. You dont even have to like fantasy to enjoy this book. Just replace the word magic with anything else that can divide and bond two sisters, because the relationship Hoffman creates is utterly real. A fascinating examination of why sisters turn away and turn toward each other.

5. Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen This book is a two-for-onea story about familial and chosen sisterhood. The young Mariette joins a cloistered order of nuns in upstate New York in 1906 that is governed by her actual, biological sister. When Mariette begins to have mystical visions and maybe (or maybe not) receives the stigmata, she becomes famous as a living saint in her town and an object of fascination, affection, and jealousy among her sisters in the conventand then an investigation into the mystery of her experience unfolds. A lyrical novel ranging from the passions of faith to the petty concerns of everyday life, Mariette in Ecstasy explores how these women relate to one another as sisters (in both senses) and what happens when one of them is chosen to become a "star."

6. The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides This is a story about looking at sisters more than it is about being sisters. Perhaps thats why I connected to it so muchthe boys in this Grosse Pointe, Mich., neighborhood are the narrators of this novel, and they are endlessly fascinated with the Lisbon sisters. Their brief but intense encounters with the sisters give rise to the questions that haunt them for the rest of their lives: what was going on inside the Lisbon house that made each sister, one by one, take her life? A very dark story, yet the boys youthful perspective makes the narrative surprisingly fun.

7. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott You probably dont need me to tell you that this is one of the best books about sistersyet I couldnt leave it off the list since it is the book that started it all for me. Reading about the March sisters is like getting to join someone elses wonderful family for a few weeks, which is why you will want to read this book again and again, usually when youre not feeling so crazy about your own.

8. In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez Historical fiction about the four Mirabel sisters, who each tell their own story about why they ended up plotting against Rafael Trujillos dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, and how three of them were murdered. This novel is so huge and intimate at the same timewhile telling the story of a country, Alvarez keeps us grounded in the particular realities of each girl, showing the reader what its like to be alive, to grow up, and to be this sister at this precise historical moment.

9. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley A retelling of King Lear that explores the darker side of sisterhood. What happens when, at the end of a fathers life, he cuts one of his three daughters out of the will? A lot, it turns outmuch between the Cook sisters gets revealed, heightened, and examined in the wake of the disinheritance. The hidden tensions and the secrets of the sisters are set against the absolute beauty of Smileys prose.
It took a federal court just 12 pages to deny a preliminary injunction against Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren in a First Amendment suit filed last year by authors Joseph Mercola, Ronnie Cummins, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and their publisher Chelsea Green.

In their suit, lawyers for Chelsea Green and the authors argue that a letter Warren sent to Amazon voicing concerns about controversial Covid-19 claims in their book runs afoul of a 60-year-old Supreme Court precedent in Bantam Books v. Sullivan, which holds that state officials violated the First Amendment by sending letters to booksellers warning that the sale of certain named books was potentially unlawful. The suit seeks an order declaring Warrens conduct to be unlawful, as well as damages, and a public retraction.

But in her ruling this week, Federal judge Barbara Rothstein eviscerated the plaintiffs' claims that the letter Warren sent to Amazon expressing concern over the e-tailers role in spreading Covid-19 misinformation constituted a government attack on the plaintiffs' First Amendment rights, and held that the plaintiffs are unlikely to succeed in establishing Warrens letter constitutes a prior restraint on speech.

Here, it is difficult to maintain that Defendant Warrens writing a letter to Amazon is effectively wielding state regulatory power, in part because there is no such power to wield," the decision states. "In Bantam Books, the commission was given an express mandate by the legislature and its threats were backed up by a statute criminalizing obscenity. In contrast, Defendant Warren does not have any unilateral investigative authority, and there is no immediate statutory basis for her statement that Amazons practices are potentially unlawful. Put another way, the threat of legal sanctions can act as an unlawful restriction on speech, but a threat will only be perceived as such if there is a realistic chance the threatened action can be carried out. Plaintiffs are unlikely to successfully demonstrate that the booksellers reasonably perceived Defendant Warrens letter as a threat.

The suit revolves around controversial claims repeated in the book The Truth About COVID-19: Exposing the Great Reset, Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports, and the New Normal, by Mercola and Cummins, with a foreword by Robert F. Kennedy Jr..

 Plaintiffs are unlikely to successfully demonstrate that the booksellers reasonably perceived Defendant Warrens letter as a threat 

In a September 7 letter to Amazon, Warren complained that the book perpetuates dangerous conspiracies about COVID-19 and false and misleading information about vaccines. And yet, Warren observed, the book was among the top products consistently featured on Amazon when her staff searched for Covid-19 and "vaccine." Warren asked Amazon to explore and report back how the companys algorithm was preferencing the book in search results, and said the companys role in allowing the spread of falsehoods or the sale of inappropriate products was unethical, unacceptable, and potentially unlawful.

In filing their complaint, lawyers for Mercola, Cummins, Kennedy, and Chelsea Green argued that the Supreme Court ruling in Bantam established that state officials violated the First Amendment by sending letters to booksellers warning that selling certain books was potentially illegal. Senator Warrens letter makes plain that it is calling on Amazon to de-platform the books she deems objectionable by lauding other Big Tech behemoths that, in response to similar governmental pressure, now block, remove, and demote all so-called Covid misinformation, the complaint states. The complaint goes on to argue that, even if Warrens claims of misinformation were correct (which the authors dispute), it would not alter the books constitutional protection.

The court, however, dispatched with that argument, and found that the plaintiffs did not satisfy any of the four factors needed to justify a preliminary injunction. Not only were the plaintiffs unlikely to win on their core claim of prior restraint, Rothstein held, they also failed to show that Warrens letter caused irreparable harm, that the balance of equities tipped in their favor, or that an injunction was in the public interest.

Ordering Defendant Warren to retract her letter would effectively be a permanent injunction, because it cannot be undone," Rothstein wrote. "This injunction would not relieve Plaintiffs of irreparable harm, but rather impose it on Defendant Warren.
The opportunity to speak freely and openly  especially on controversial topics  is a cornerstone of civic education. But events that unfolded after the Politics, Policy, and Panic: Governing in Times of Crisis conference at Saint Vincent College demonstrate that freedom of speech at Americas institutions of higher education continues to stand on shaky footing.

Organized and hosted by Bradley C. S. Watson, director of the Center for Political and Economic Thought, the conference featured nine speakers, including former Trump White House science advisor Scott Atlas, political scientist Wilfred Reilly, and Johnny Burtka, president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Over the span of two days, participants discussed a broad range of issues relating to the breakdown of public institutions and politics in the United States.

In a presentation provocatively titled Black Privilege and Racial Hysteria in America, Hillsdale College assistant professor David Azerrad argued against treating Americans differently due to their race. I denounced all forms of preferential treatment for black Americans, Azerrad said later about his talk, and defended the core American principles of meritocracy and the rule of law  that is, the idea that desirable positions in the private sector should be awarded on the basis of competence and not skin color, and that all Americans should be equal before the law.

Students vigorously debated Azerrads opinions, and he responded in turn. Conference participant Jacob Howland wrote of Azerrads presentation: His frankness, precision, and patience in dealing with strongly worded objections and emotionally charged audience questions modeled a combination of intelligence, courage, and commitment to teaching and learning rarely found in academia.

Since then, however, St. Vincent College has taken a series of actions that Watson calls very disturbing.

Letters by Gary Quinlivan, CPETs co-director, and Saint Vincent president Father Paul R. Taylor denounced the conference and apologized to students. Quinlivan contended that Azerrads talk may be interpreted as a form of invidious discrimination which inherently degrades the sanctity of human life. The college initially prohibited the publication of all presentations, though a complete playlist was published on YouTube a few days later.

The center is being stripped of its independence, Watson says, purportedly in response to a single speaker at that conference who gave an anti-affirmative action talk.

CPET has now been placed under the authority of Jeffrey Mallory, Saint Vincents executive vice president and chief operating officer, who, Watson notes, has a background in diversity, equity, and inclusion. And going forward, President Taylor and his cabinet must approve all speakers in advance, which Watson argues will have the effect of turning away the kind of independent-minded speakers we seek to attract.

Whats inexcusable is that the adults running the university would cower in fear before a handful of students, defame me, and impose an unprecedented policy to preapprove all speakers from here onward, Azerrad states.

These are stark changes for CPET, which Watson calls one of the oldest and most renowned collegiate centers of its kind in the nation. It promotes the foundations of the American constitutional order, including the political thought and history behind it  and the institutions generated by that thought and history.

CPET offers lectures, annual conferences, scholarships, and the George Washington Fellowship, which gives accomplished undergraduates a chance to work with faculty on independent projects related to the theme of citizenship, broadly conceived, Watson says.

Civics is a particular focus of CPET, Watson notes. The center has hosted many speakers who have addressed how to reverse the decline of American civic education.

Its fair to say the center has been home to heterodox arguments  ones not commonly heard in academic institutions, due to the stranglehold of progressive orthodoxy, Watson states. The center has developed a national profile and has long ensured that  in the world of ideas  we fight well above our weight class. Of course, this also means that our woke colleagues dont particularly like what we do.

Watson says he has already seen a chilling effect from the administrations actions.

Major donors have already told us theyre withholding funds pending us sorting out center governance, Watson reports. He also argues that Bibiana Boerio, a member of the colleges board of trustees, licensed rage as a valid response to speech. Boerio recently told of her fury over Azerrads presentation and the conferences extreme perspective.

Watson himself received what could be interpreted as a death threat from a Saint Vincent alumnus, which he forwarded to the colleges president, counsel, and executive vice president, asking if they would be as quick to condemn such obvious hatred as they were to condemn an invited speaker. So far, he hasnt gotten a response.

The university is not supposed to be a safe space for ideas, Azerrad argues. If students are to be educated, rather than be indoctrinated; if they are to learn how to think, rather than have their prejudices confirmed, then they must be exposed to a broad range of ideas.

It is particularly important to make room for voices that defend the American creed of equality for all and special privileges for none.
Netflix is giving a glimpse of the new series Resident Evil.

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The streaming service shared a teaser trailer for the live-action horror series Thursday.

The preview opens in 2022 and shows Albert Wesker (Lance Reddick) arrive with his daughters, Jade Wesker (Ella Balinska) and Billie Wesker (Siena Nicole Agudong), in New Raccoon City to work for the mysterious Umbrella Corporation.

The scene then changes to London in 2036, where Jade is seen searching for her long-lost sister while facing a zombie apocalypse.

Resident Evil is based on the Capcom video game franchise of the same name. The video games were previously adapted as a film series starring Milla Jovovich and the Netflix movie Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City with Kaya Scodelario.

Andrew Dabb (Supernatural) serves as writer, showrunner and executive producer on the Netflix series.

Netflix released posters for the show in March.

Resident Evil premieres July 14 on Netflix.
Members of the Brattleboro Rotary Club get an education in the game of Cornhole as members of Youth Services held a demonstration on Thursday, May 12, 2022. The Youth Services members were raising awareness for their fundraiser CORNSTOCK: Cornhole for a Cause! which will be held on Saturda
Brattleboro, VT (05301)

Today

Generally cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 79F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms early, then cloudy skies after midnight. Low 59F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%.
ISTANBUL, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Turkish police detained 25 members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) suspected of planning terror attacks across the country, the Istanbul Governor's Office said Thursday.

The suspects were captured in parallel operations launched for 24 sites in eight provinces by Istanbul's provincial Gendarmerie Command units, including the western provinces of Istanbul and Izmir, the governor's office said in a statement.

At least two guns, organizational documents, digital materials and banners were seized in the operations.

One suspect is found to be looking for material to make homemade explosives, while others are found recruiting through social media and providing covert training for new PKK members, according to security officials.

In April, the Turkish military launched a cross-border operation against the PKK bases in northern Iraq after Turkey's defense ministry claimed that the PKK was planning a large-scale attack in the country.

The PKK, listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States, and the European Union, has been rebelling against the Turkish government for more than 30 years. 
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Sarah Wright is an undergraduate student at the University of Vermont. The opinions expressed by columnists do not necessarily reflect the views of Vermont News & Media.
Five Points Arts Center / Contributed photo

TORRINGTON  The opening reception of the artist Don Gummers sculptures at Five Points Arts Center is set for 6-8 p.m. May 21. The center is located at 855 University Drive, Torrington.

Gummer is an American sculptor known for his large abstract contemporary outdoor sculptures made of aluminum, stainless steel, and stained glass that often appear to defy gravity. Gummer has seven individual sculptures placed throughout the Five Points sculpture fields, each with its own interesting story.
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NEW ORLEANS (AP)  The sponsor of a bill that would have subjected Louisiana women to murder charges for having abortions abruptly pulled the proposal from debate Thursday night after House members voted 65-26 to totally revamp the legislation, eliminating the criminal penalties.

The controversial bill would have ventured farther against abortion than lawmakers efforts in any other state. It would have made women who end their pregnancies subject to criminal homicide prosecutions.

This is a thorny political question, but we all know that it is actually very simple. Abortion is murder, Rep. Danny McCormick, a Republican from Oil City, proclaimed as he opened debate. He noted that a majority of Louisiana lawmakers in the heavily Republican Legislature say they are anti-abortion, and briefly chided those abortion opponents who also oppose his bill. Were faltering and trying to explain it away.

But McCormick's measure had drawn increasingly strong opposition from many anti-abortion stalwarts. Gov. John Bel Edwards, an anti-abortion Democrat, said he would veto it. Louisiana Right to Life, the Louisiana Conference of Catholic Bishops, and the National Right to Life Committee were among the prominent anti-abortion opponents of the measure.

Edwards, a devout Catholic, declared prosecuting women for abortion absurd.

McCormick had just as strongly disagreed, saying a woman who has an abortion should be in the same legal position as a woman who takes the life of a child after birth. When I give equal protection to the unborn, that's the possibility, he said in a Wednesday evening phone interview.

Supporters of the bill were adamant. Scores of them gathered at the Capitol to pray and show support. As the group watched from the House balcony as the bill was pulled, one shouted Shame.

The House had not yet started debating the controversial legislation when the building was temporarily evacuated Thursday after the speaker interrupted proceedings and said an unknown, unclaimed package had been found in the capitols Memorial Hall  a gathering area between House and Senate Chambers.

It came on a day when legislation was already moving slowly as lawmakers tried to find a compromise on McCormicks bill. The House recessed for more than an hour while lawmakers broke into groups behind closed doors to discuss the legislation.

Pending at the time was the amendment by Rep. Alan Seabaugh. The Shreveport Republican is an anti-abortion stalwart. But his amendment overhauled McCormicks bill, declaring that women would not face criminal penalties for abortion. It also allowed abortion to save the life of a pregnant woman. And it eliminated language in McCormick's original bill that appeared to make contraceptive drugs and at least some aspects of in vitro fertilization illegal.

The amendment also stripped language from McCormick's bill widely regarded as blatantly unconstitutional  a declaration that any federal law, regulation or court ruling that allows abortion is void and that any judge who blocks enforcement of the bills provisions could be impeached.

We can't grant ourselves the power to order a court to rule future acts unconstitutional, Seabaugh argued.

The amendment mirrors a pending Senate bill aimed at tightening up Louisiana abortion laws that would go into effect if Roe v. Wade is overturned. McCormick, as the sponsor, is unlikely to advance it in the House but the Senate version can still advance.

McCormick's bill, introduced in March, had drawn intense scrutiny in light of last weeks leak of a draft of a U.S. Supreme Court opinion indicating the high court is preparing to overturn decisions upholding a constitutional right to abortion.

There was no indication yet that lawmakers in other states are taking up similar legislation. In Idaho, Republican state Rep. Heather Scott has proposed prosecuting women who get abortions, but a committee chairman said Friday he would not allow it. There are still reasonable people in the Legislature who are going to ensure that extreme bills like that are not going to get a hearing, Rep. Brent Crane said.

Louisiana already has laws on the books criminalizing abortion, including a trigger law ensuring that it will be a crime if the Supreme Court reverses the Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 ruling establishing abortion rights. The statutes appear to exempt women from prosecution, although some abortion rights advocates have suggested they need tightening.

McCormick has said the existing laws are inadequate to give fetuses equal protection under law.

___

Associated Press writer Holly Ramer contributed to this report from Concord, New Hampshire.
TORRINGTON  Family and friends of Delia Dee Donne, a former five-term city mayor, remember her as a dedicated and often outspoken community servant. Donne, 91, died Tuesday.

According to her obituary from the Phalen Funeral Home, she was the wife of 61 years of the late Louis G. Donne Sr. Born July 11, 1930, she was the daughter of the late Archangela and Louis Paniati of Torrington, and was predeceased by her sister, Flora (Paniati) Nebiolo.

While raising her family in Torrington, Donne managed Torringtons S&H Green Stamps store and worked at Reibmans and the Gazebo clothing stores. She started her own restaurant, Dees Delicatessen, which she ran with her daughter, Joanne and turned it into the popular Dees and Joannes Restaurant and catering, according to her family.

Donne became involved in local government in the late 1970s, serving on the citys Civil Service Commission, and then the City Council. From 1985 to 1995 she served five two-year terms as the towns first woman mayor.

The term public service accurately describes her tenure as the citys mayor; she notably restored faith in city governance, her family said in her obituary. During her decade as mayor, she reformed the police department, modeled integrity, modernized government, rebuilt infrastructure, enhanced support networks, grew the economy and made every citizen  as well as Barbara Bush, Nancy Johnson, and Ella Grasso  feel welcomed in her office. Her spirit of openness, and capacity to get things done extended to the daily Meet the Mayor open-mike radio program she initiated and hosted on the local radio station. The show, and her tenure as civil servant, were a testament to her character.

JoAnn Ryan, executive director of the Northwest CT Chamber of Commerce and a former City Council member, ran for mayor against Donne in 1989 and 1991. She lost both races, but the challenges drew the two women togther, Ryan said. She will remember Donne as a person who wasnt afraid to speak out.

She was a pistol, no question about it, Ryan said. She did what she believed in, from her heart.

I ran against her twice for mayor, and the races were very close  and of course, I was disappointed when I lost, Ryan said. But things happen for a reason, and my years with the chamber have been wonderful. Things worked out better for all of us, I think.

In spite of being on opposite sides of the political fence  Donne was a Democrat, Ryan a Republican  they were friends.

I put aside the tough moments we had, and thought about the positive, she said. We were friends. She really cared about people. She always asked about my family.

Ryan was planning to run against Donne again in 1993. The day after she was nominated for the mayors race, she was promoted by her employer at the time, Kelly Services.

I took that promotion, and it was the best thing I ever did, she said. That left the town without a candidate, and thats when (Republican) Mary Jane Gryniuk stepped in and ended up beating Dee. At the time, Dee said she felt shed been in office long enough.

After leaving office, her family said, Donne stayed close to her roots, spending time with her grandchildren, as a hospice volunteer, a member of the support staff at Phalens Funeral Home, and working at Wisdom House in Litchfield, where she also was host of a television show called ''Cooking with Wisdom. She was a parishioner of St. Peters Church in Torrington, and for years celebrated the Eucharist through the Catholic Archdiocese of Hartfords daily television mass.

Her family includes her two children, Joanne Donne and her partner Walter Nowakowski, and Louis Donne Jr. and wife Deborah; three grandchildren, Tara Donne, Matthew Donne, and Mark Donne and his partner Bharathi Sundaresh; nieces Karen Kozlak and her husband Tom Kozlak, and Karla Nebiolo and her husband Paul Hamlin; and grandniece Rhiannon Carile and her husband Steve Carile, and their children Mia and Marley; and grandnephews Raymond Michna and his wife Jenna, and their child Ryleigh; Dr. Scott Kozlak and his wife Dr. Kaitlin Peretto; and Bryan Kozlak and his wife Courtney Kozlak; and many Paniati cousins.

Calling hours will be on Thursday, May 19, from 9-10:30 a.m. at Phalen Funeral Home in Torrington; a Mass of Christian burial will follow at 11 a.m. at St. Peters Church in Torrington, with burial at St Peters Cemetery in Torrington. www.phalenfuneral.com

In lieu of flowers, the family is requesting a memorial donation to the Friendly Hands Food Bank of Torrington, FISH Pantry of Torrington, Visiting Nurse and Hospice of Litchfield County, or the charity of your choice.
ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP)  The Minnesota Senate Democratic minority tried unsuccessfully to force consideration Thursday of nine abortion and health-related bills that the Republican majority has kept bottled up in committee, saying it was critical to take a stand even though they lacked the votes to prevail.

The leak of a draft U.S. Supreme Court opinion that would overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision and sharply curtail abortion rights in roughly half the states has energized both sides of the abortion debate in Minnesota. While it's unlikely that any abortion measures will pass the divided Legislature before the May 23 adjournment deadline, the issue is certain to take on new importance in the November elections.

Senate Minority Leader Melisa Lopez Franzen, of Edina, said her fellow Democrats wanted to send a message to Minnesota residents that they will fight to protect their privacy and reproductive rights, including the right to abortion, while Republicans won't.

Sen. Jennifer McEwen led off the debate by trying to bring up a bill to codify that every individual has a fundamental right to make their own reproductive health decisions, including having an abortion.

The people of Minnesota are looking to us now  now  to protect their rights, to enshrine them in statute, to make sure that politicians and their government, is not going to reach into their homes, reach into their bedrooms, reach into their private decision making," the Duluth Democrat said. "This is urgent.

It would have taken 41 votes to pull the bills out of committee under Senate rules, but Democrats hold only 31 seats, compared with 34 for Republicans plus two independents. None of the nine efforts fared better than a 33-33 tie.

Some bills didn't deal directly with abortion, but did cover other aspects of reproductive health care, such as access to contraception. One would have created a paid family and medical leave system.

No Republicans spoke against any of the bills, though Senate President David Osmek, a Republican from Mound, frequently warned Democrats that they were getting improperly deep into discussions of the merits of the bills instead of sticking to basic descriptions of what they would do.

At a news conference afterward, Democrats criticized their Republican colleagues for remaining silent during the debate.

Unfortunately, they refused to participate, Sen. Mary Kunsesh, of New Brighton, said. We did not have one GOP member engage, ask questions, debate the issues that we brought forward. It was as if we were not even there.

The votes in Minnesota came one day after the U.S. Senate fell short in an effort to enshrine into federal law the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion nationwide.

The debate was the latest largely symbolic skirmish over abortion at the Minnesota Legislature in recent days. Senate Democrats lost a vote to tack an amendment similar to McEwen's bill onto a larger health and human services measure on a 29-36 vote late last month.

But the House Democratic majority beat back GOP attempts to add two less sweeping anti-abortion measures to a different health and human services bill last week. One would have required licensing of clinics that perform 10 or more abortions per month. The other would have prevented organizations receiving state family planning grants from subsidizing abortion services. Both failed on narrow procedural votes.

Whatever happens at the U.S. Supreme Court, abortion will remain legal in Minnesota, at least for now, under a 1995 Minnesota Supreme Court ruling known as Doe v. Gomez. It effectively established a right to abortion under the state constitution. The state has several restrictions in place, including a 24-hour waiting period and a requirement that minors notify both parents before getting an abortion. A lawsuit pending in state court seeks to throw out those limits.
Pottsville, PA (17901)

Today

Foggy during the morning hours followed by scattered showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. High 78F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 50%..

Tonight

Partly to mostly cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 59F. Winds light and variable.
A Cambodian-American retiree flung a shoe at the strongman as he greeted a crowd mustered to welcome him.

Scene of an incident in which former Cambodian soldier Ouk Touch threw a shoe at visiting Prime Minister Hun Sen in Washington, D.C., May 11, 2022.

Cambodias Prime Minister Hun Sen, making his first visit to Washington, got a taste of the dissent he has completely crushed back home in his 36 years of rule when an emigre from the Southeast Asian nation threw a shoe at him as he greeted supporters in front of his hotel.

As the 69-year-old strongman prepared to meet supporters on the eve of a summit of U.S.-Southeast Asian leaders, a retired Cambodian soldier flung a shoe that whizzed by his head and missed him. The incident at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel on Wednesday was caught on video and went viral on social media.

I feel so relieved and slept well, sleep better after I threw my shoe at Hun Sens head. I have intended to do this for a long time because I want him to be humiliated, nothing more than that, Ouk Touch told RFAs Khmer Service on Thursday at another protest.

He said Hun Sens bodyguards jumped toward him and attempted to beat him, but U.S. security officials intervened and urged him to leave the scene.

My action, it was just throwing a shoe at Hun Sen, but Hun Sen threw grenades at Cambodian people, peaceful protesters. Hun Sen is a dictator, and he has killed many people, including my relatives, said Touch, 72, a former soldier in the Cambodian army in the early 1970s.

The retiree and California resident was referring to an armed attack against Hun Sens elected coalition partners in 1997, one of two such violent attacks that helped him remain in power after failing to win elections. The 1997 attack killed 16 people and wounded 150, but the perpetrators have not been brought to justice.

Responding on Facebook to the shoe incident, Hun Sens son Hun called it absolutely unacceptable, adding: Those extremists must not be tolerated.

In February Cambodian opposition activist Sam Sokha was released after serving a four-year prison term for throwing her shoe at a poster of Hun Sen and sharing it on social media. She is among scores of activist jailed in a wide-ranging crackdown against opponents of Hun Sen, the media and civic society groups that begin in 2017.

Touch said he managed to talk his way into the gathering with a group of Hun Sen supporters that largely consisted of Cambodian officials and their relatives, businessmen with government projects and several people who told RFA their travel expenses to Washington was paid for, without elaborating on the source of funding.

Im so delighted that Cambodia has a hero, who liberated us from the genocide and we have peace for 30-40 years and people are living prosperously, said one supporter, who said he was part of a group of 23 Cambodians who flew to Washington from Vancouver, Canada on Tuesday.

Hun Sens trip to Washington, his first such visit to the U.S. capital, is as chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a ten-country bloc whose leaders are holding a summit with U.S. President Joe Biden. The Cambodian leader will attend a dinner at the White House Thursday.

Aside from a handful of visits since 1999 to the United Nations in New York for annual meetings, Hun Sen has made very few trips to the U.S. He attended the West Point graduation ceremony of his son and designated heir Hun Manet in May 1999 and took part in the first U.S.-ASEAN summit hosted by former President Barack Obama in California in February 2016.

As rotating chair of ASEAN this year, Hun Sens suitability to lead outside efforts to resolve a political crisis in Myanmar since a military coup in in February 2021 is questioned by many observers in light of his record of violence and his systematic destruction of Cambodia's opposition since 2017.

In a briefing ahead of the U.S.-ASEAN gathering, a White House spokesperson had to address Hun Sens problematic rights record and noted that he was attending in his role of ASEAN chair.

When you think about Cambodia, thats the question that we tend to get, said Principal Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.

The president and our administration (have) been clear about human rights concerns and promoting human rights in Cambodia, she added.

Biden will, of course, not hold back from expressing his views and his priorities to promote human rights in that region, she added.

Hun Sen resents being held at arms length by successive U.S. administrations, which have generally viewed Cambodia as a strategically marginal country, said Sebastian Strangio, Southeast Asia Editor at The Diplomat and author of books on Cambodia and Southeast Asia.

Hun Sens steady accumulation of power and generally authoritarian behavior is the primary reason why he has never been invited to the White House. But its also true that many leaders with similar (or worse) records have received the red carpet treatment, he told RFA in emailed comments.

Indeed, for Hun Sen, the fact that he has been overlooked, while leaders such as Thailands Prime Minister Prayut, who seized power in a coup, and Nguyen Phu Trong, the head of the Vietnamese Communist Party, have been feted in Washington, continues to be a source of abiding resentment, added Strangio.

From his perspective, it is just one more example of how Western nations have treated Cambodia differently from partners and allies, he wrote.

Translated by Som Sok-Ry. Written by Paul Eckert.
The protesters called for Democracy not Autocracy in the region as the US-ASEAN summit got under way.

More than 100 protesters gathered at the Washington Monument in the U.S. capital on Thursday to call on the United States to encourage democracy and the rule of law in the largely authoritarian nations of Southeast Asia, as leaders from the region met with President Joe Biden on the first day of a high-level summit.

Waving the flags of many of the ten nations that make up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) or in some cases, the flags of now-defunct governments, the protesters called for Democracy, not autocracy in the countries that make up the regional bloc.

The protesters, who mostly came from Cambodian, Lao, Burmese and Vietnamese communities across in the United States, said they were in Washington to draw attention to the lack of democratic freedoms in Southeast Asia.

Signs accused Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, who is the rotating ASEAN chair for 2022, of being a dictator and killer of Cambodian Democracy.

Protesters from U.S.-based Southeast Asian diasporic communities rally in Washington, May 12, 2022 Photo:RFA

Were here today to work with other Asian countries to ask the president to convey our message that we do not like the authoritarians in this land of the free, Rithy Uong of Massachusetts, a member of the banned opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) and one of the leaders of Thursdays rally, told RFAs English Service.

We Asians, we like to have democracy, not autocracy in our countries, he said. We want to have free and fair elections in Cambodia, monitored by the international community.

Opponents of the ruling Cambodian Peoples Party (CPP) have been targeted in a five-year crackdown that has sent CNRP leaders into exile and landed scores of its supporters in prison. Cambodias Supreme Court dissolved the CNRP in November 2017 in a move that allowed the Hun Sens CPP to win all 125 seats in Parliament in a July 2018 election.

Flanked by a fellow Vietnamese-American waving the flag of the former South Vietnam, Duyen Bui, who traveled from Hawaii for Thursdays protest, told RFA that she wanted to call attention to how the governments of Vietnam and other ASEAN countries are not directly elected by the people. South Vietnam was absorbed by communist North Vietnam in 1975.

So were calling on U.S. President Biden to really listen to the voices of the people as he meets with these leaders to put human rights forward within his policy and strategic planning with these different leaders, she said.

Much of the crowd was made up of members of the Burmese diaspora who held signs denouncing the military junta that ousted Myanmars democratically elected government more than one year ago.

Right now, theres a new military coup, and we need the United States to help our country thats being repressed by the military regime, Burmese-American Stephanie Shwe, who lives in Maryland, told RFA. Myanmars elected government was overthrown by its army in February 2021, plunging the country of 54 million into political and economic turmoil and armed conflict.

And that is why we are out here trying to raise awareness and ask President Biden to give us the support that we need so that our people can be free from injustice and oppression, she said.

Lynn Lwin Naing, a member of the U.S. Advocacy Coalition for Myanmar, told RFA that all of the rally attendees are like-minded in support of U.S. efforts to promote democracy across the entire region.

The communities of ASEAN  Cambodia, Vietnam, Burma and others  were here to use this opportunity for the ASEAN summit to speak directly to Chairman Hun Sen and also encourage President Biden to help the ASEAN members move forward with issues in ASEAN, especially the crisis in Myanmar and returning democratic government to Myanmar, he said.

Protesters from U.S.-based Southeast Asian diasporic communities rally in Washington, May 12, 2022 Photo:RFA

ASEAN governments include several electoral democracies, traditional one-party Communist states Laos and Vietnam, strongman rule in Cambodia and Thailand, a military junta in Myanmar and a monarchy in oil-rich Brunei.

Protesters interviewed by RFA raised issues such as the absence of media and internet freedom in Vietnam to the lack of fair elections in Cambodia and an overall deterioration of human rights across Southeast Asia.

Some expressed their support for Ukraine as it fights off a Russian invasion. Several of the ASEAN member states have strong ties with Russia, and the conflict is an area that Biden is expected to focus on in his meetings with the ASEAN leaders.

Following their rally at the Washington Monument, the protesters marched to the U.S. State Department to hold another demonstration at the site of Fridays summit.
China on Thursday announced it would place strict curbs on "non-essential" travel overseas by its nationals, amid a surge in immigration inquiries after weeks of grueling mass testing, lockdowns and forcible mass transportation to quarantine camps.



"On the afternoon of , the National Immigration Administration [ruling Chinese Communist] Party committee held a meeting on strengthening disease control and prevention," the administration said via its Weibo account on .



"According to the requirements of the meeting ... it will be necessary to strictly implement entry and exit policies, strictly restrict non-essential departures of Chinese citizens, and strictly approve and issue exit and entry documents," it said.



Comments under the Weibo post were terse and sarcastic, yet with a hint of panic.



"Sure enough, disease control and prevention is a panacea," @Fangtou commented from Shanghai, while @HeyLucas123 added from Beijing: "They're afraid everyone will seek a happier life overseas."



User @Cucumber mixed with coriander 39466 added from Shanghai: "The front door is welded shut, don't even think about trying to run, just stay in China and have fun."



And @Libra zodiac sign added: "I feel more and more lately that the pandemic is just an excuse."



"We can't run away now! First they lock down the city, then the country. We're the last generation, and we get to watch everyone die!"



The news comes after police in the central province of Hunan ordered local residents to hand over their passports to police, promising to return them "when the pandemic is over."



A notice from the Baisha police department in the central province of Hunan posted to social media ordered employers to hand over the passports of all employees and family members to police, "to be returned after the pandemic."



People buy food at a grocery store in Beijing, May 12, 2022. Credit: AFP Clipping passports at border

An officer who answered the phone at the Baisha police department confirmed the report to RFA, and said the measure is being rolled out nationwide.



Meanwhile, people leaving China for foreign study are having their passports clipped as they arrive or try to leave the country, according to passport-holders, overseas study agencies and social media reports.



China's zero-COVID policy of mass compulsory testing, stringent lockdowns and digital health codes has sparked an emigration wave fueled by "shocked" middle-classes fed up with food shortages, confinement at home, and amid broader safety concerns.



The number of keyword searches on social media platform WeChat and search engine Baidu for "criteria for emigrating to Canada" has skyrocketed by nearly 3,000 percent in the past month, with most queries clustered in cities and provinces under tough, zero-COVID restrictions, including Shanghai, Jiangsu, Guangdong, and Beijing.



Immigration consultancies have seen a huge spike in emigration inquiries in recent weeks, with clients looking to apply for overseas passports or green cards, while holding onto their Chinese passports, they said in April.



The immigration announcement also comes days after the CCP warned government officials in a communique that they should keep implementing CCP leader Xi Jinping's zero-COVID policy, which has prompted mass lockdowns involving tens of millions of people, stringent controls on movement, mass compulsory PCR testing and the forcible transportation and mass incarceration of people across China in makeshift quarantine facilities.



Meanwhile Shanghai residents said they were continuing to resist mass testing and forcible quarantine as best they could, despite multiple videos showing officials in full PPE beating and dragging people who were unwilling to test or to go to a quarantine facility.



Residents have complained via social media video clips of being forced into quarantine even if their PCR test was negative, while officials have been shown apparently raiding people's food stores during forcible "disinfection" of their homes.



But video clips also showed municipal workers mowing grass and planting flowers on the streets, prompting speculation that a high-ranking official would soon arrive in the city to announce victory over the virus.



Officials being challenged

A Shanghai resident surnamed Xue said infection figures have plummeted in the past two days.



"Infection numbers have plummeted in the past couple of days due to political factors, after military orders were issued to every district," Xue said. "When the data matches the target, they can lift the lockdown."



"They said residents would be allowed to go outside for exercise , but it's still not allowed," he said.



He said residents were starting to argue with officials who came to their door ordering them to do PCR tests.



"When the police come to their door, they are insisting that they tell them which laws and which part of that law they have violated," Xue said. "There are fewer and fewer people submitting to PCR testing in our residential community."



"They keep shouting at us through the loudspeakers about it, but nobody believes what they're saying; they don't listen to what the government says any more."



One social media video clip showed Wei Qin, a woman living in Jing'an district, arguing with police officers and demanding to see the correct legal documents.



"You have already broken the law, and you're still arguing about it," Wei tells the officer. "I'm not breaking the law."



Another Shanghai resident surnamed Xu said the city authorities had stepped up restrictions in the wake of the directive from Beijing, banning any incoming deliveries and leaving some people without access to food.



"I'm eating the food that I bought before [the new restrictions]," Xu told RFA. "I was getting it through group buying."



Meanwhile, People's Daily journalist Li Hongbing hit out at video of officials forcibly entering people's homes for "disinfection" purposes.



"Home is a very private place, and I can understand this feeling [of resistance," Li told a Shanghai broadcaster. "I noticed that some residents are very concerned about this household disinfection process."



Li cited epidemiologists as saying that the risk of COVID-19 being transmitted via surfaces was "relatively small," meaning the disinfection of people's homes was unnecessary.



Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
Britain on Thursday hit out at the arrest by Hong Kong's national security police of five pro-democracy figures including 90-year-old retired bishop Cardinal Joseph Zen, amid calls for Magnitsky-style sanctions on officials responsible for the ongoing crackdown on public dissent.



"The Hong Kong authorities decision to target leading pro-democracy figures, including Cardinal Zen, Margaret Ng, Hui Po-keung and Denise Ho, under the national security law is unacceptable," minister for Europe and North America told the House of Commons on Thursday.



"We continue to make clear to mainland China and to Hong Kong authorities our strong opposition to the national security law, which is being used to curtail freedom, punish dissent and shrink the space for opposition, free press and civil society," he said.



Former ruling Conservative Party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith called on the government to sanction Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam, chief executive-elect and former security chief John Lee, as well as Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official in charge of implementing a draconian national security law in Hong Kong Luo Huining and former police chief Chris Tang, among others.



"Not one of those people has been sanctioned by the U.K. government," Duncan Smith said. "It is time to step up and make our position very clear."



Cleverly said the government was willing to listen to calls for "not just words but actions."



Meanwhile, the Catholic Diocese of Hong Kong said it was "extremely concerned" over Zen's arrest.



"The Catholic Diocese of Hong Kong is extremely concerned about the condition and safety of Cardinal Joseph Zen and we are offering our special prayers for him," it said in a statement on its website. "We urge the Hong Kong Police and the judicial authorities to handle Cardinal Zens case in accordance with justice."



In Washington, State Department spokesman Ned Price said the recent arrests of Cardinal Zen, former pro-democracy lawmaker and barrister Margaret Ng, scholar Hui Po-keung and Cantopop star Denise Ho showed that the Hong Kong authorities "will pursue all means necessary to stifle dissent and undercut protected rights and freedoms."



Zen, Ng, Hui and Ho served as trustees of the 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund, which helped thousands of arrested Hong Kong democracy protesters access funds for medical aid, legal advice, psychological counseling, and emergency financial relief, he said.



"We call for the immediate release of those who remain in custody and continue to stand with people in Hong Kong," Price said in a May 11 statement.



In addition to the above four, jailed former pro-democracy lawmaker Cyd Ho, another trustee currently on remand awaiting trial on a separate charge, was also arrested on the same charge of "conspiracy to collude with foreign powers" on Thursday.



Canadian foreign minister Melanie Joly has called the arrests "deeply troubling." Denise Ho holds a Canadian passport.



EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said he was following the arrests with "great concern," while Human Rights Watch called it a "shocking new low for Hong Kong."



The Vatican has said it is following the case closely.



National Security 'offenses'



China hit back at the international outcry over the arrests on Thursday, saying that international criticism was "slandering and smearing legitimate law enforcement action by the Hong Kong police against the 612 Humanitarian Relief Fund."



"Rights and freedoms cannot be used as a shield for illegal activities in Hong Kong," the foreign ministry's Hong Kong office said in a statement.



"We urge external forces trying to intervene to cease this clumsy political performance immediately," it said, adding that the arrestees are suspected of offenses under the national security law "of a serious nature."



Zen and the other arrestees were released on bail late on Wednesday.



More than 180 Hongkongers have been arrested to date under the law, including dozens of former opposition politicians and democracy activists, and several senior media figures including Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai.



Cardinal Zen, 90, has long been an outspoken supporter of Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement and a critic of the CCP's suppression of religious freedom.



U.S.-based democracy campaigner Samuel Chu said the fact that Zen was arrested shortly after the selection of one-horse candidate and former security chief John Lee showed that Beijing is celebrating its new-found control over every aspect of life in Hong Kong.



Chu described the national security law -- which applies to actions and speech anywhere in the world -- as an "evil law" that is now the paramount political principle in Hong Kong.



"It doesn't matter who is the chief executive or who is in charge of the different government departments," Chu said. "As long as there is a national security law, they will arrest whoever they want, and no one in the world is safe."



Taiwan human rights activist Shih Yi-hsiang said the law is in violation of international human rights covenants.



"All of our brothers and sisters in Hong Kong who have been arrested ... are innocent," Shih told RFA. "Who is to blame? The CCP regime ... and the puppet chief executive John Lee."



Rwei-ren Wu, an associate researcher at the Institute of Taiwan History of the Academia Sinica, called on President Tsai Ing-wen to expedite a clear path to political asylum for Hongkongers fleeing political oppression in their home city.



Chiu Chui-cheng, spokesman for Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council, condemned "any evil action that suppresses human rights and freedoms in the name of national security."



Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
Sources say the managers exaggerate their workers poor living conditions to take advantage of the business owners.

In this file photo, workers at a seafood processing plant where North Korean workers are distinguished from the Chinese workers by blue overalls, wash up after work in the city of Hunchun, in northeastern China's Jilin province.

North Korean job placement officials in China are demanding more money and perks like free cell phones from Chinese companies for the use of North Korean workers, a consequence of the tight labor market that has grown out of the COVID-19 pandemic, sources in China told RFA.

Pyongyang dispatches legions of workers to both Russia and China to work in factories and on construction sites to earn foreign cash for the state. The workers give the lions share of their salaries to their North Korean handlers, who forward it to the central government.

But demand for workers is rising as Chinas economy struggles under a new wave of lockdowns, giving officials at the North Korean human resources companies new negotiating leverage with their Chinese business partners. While the North Koreans say the extra cash will improve the lives of the foreign workers they supervise, Chinese business owners suspect the placement officials are using the money for other purposes.

A common tactic is to request more money to improve the workers squalid living conditions, a Chinese citizen of Korean descent, from Yanji, in the northeastern province of Jilin, told RFAs Korean Service on condition of anonymity to speak freely.

On the outskirts of Yanji, about 300 North Korean workers  are employed by a clothing processing company. According to the original contract, the monthly salary per worker is 2,000 yuan (U.S. $297), but the North Korean handler is asking for more money in addition to that, the source said.

The North Korean handlers demand things like electronic devices like cell phones and laptops, which they will use. Even if the company president buys them the devices, they will still ask for more money under the pretext of feeding the workers meat and providing them with snacks, he said.

Since the border with North Korea remains closed, the labor managers hold all the cards and the company owners have very little leverage, according to the source.

It is impossible to dispatch more manpower from North Korea because of the coronavirus crisis. Its like the North Korean manpower managers are strangling the Chinese company owner, who is in a hurry to get the factory operating, he said.

Even with the Chinese companys proposal to give an average of an additional 30 yuan ($4.46) per worker per day to account for the additional working hours, the North Korean officials argue that it is not enough, the source said.

In some disputes, the North Korean consulate has had to step in to mediate between the labor managers and business owners, another Chinese citizen of Korean descent in the border city of Dandong, which lies across the Yalu River from North Koreas Sinuiju, told RFA on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

The consulate sent a warning to a North Korean human resource company in a contract with a poultry processing company, urging them to abide by the law and order of the host county, but to no avail, the second source said.

The Chinese company offered an additional 15 yuan [$2.23] per hour per person for night work, but the North Korean official said that was not enough and they got into a huge argument, he said.

The Chinese business owner argued that he would be unable to offer more than the agreed 2,000 yuan per worker per month as stipulated in the contract unless there was additional night work, the second source said.

However, the North Korean officials are raising the issue, saying that fresh vegetables that were brought in daily before the coronavirus crisis have decreased to once a week during the pandemic, and the workers are suffering, he said.

The officials say that the reason they are arguing over wages is to feed the workers better, but in reality, it is because they dont have enough funds after they pay off the state, the second source said, adding that most of the human resource companies operate a cafeteria exclusively for their workers, and they are usually adequately fed.

It is true however that after paying off the government and the consulate, as well as their food and living expenses, they dont have enough to pay the workers their cut, as well as their food and living expenses, he said.

The U.N. Security Council reported that 50,000 out of 100,000 North Korean overseas workers were dispatched to China. The Chinese government claims to have repatriated more than half of the workers, but did not disclose specific figures.

According to RFA sources, about 30,000 North Korean workers are believed to be in the Dandong area.

North Korean labor exports were supposed to have stopped when United Nations nuclear sanctions froze the issuance of work visas and mandated the repatriation of North Korean nationals working abroad by the end of 2019.

But Pyongyang sometimes dispatches workers to China and Russia on short-term student or visitor visas to get around sanctions.

Translated by Leejin J. Chung. Written in English by Eugene Whong.
While the PDF is stronger, an analyst says hundreds of armed groups mean Myanmar is more insecure than ever.

PDF fighters mark the one-year anniversary of the establishment of the paramilitary group, May 6, 2022.

One year after Myanmars shadow National Unity Government (NUG) established the prodemocracy Peoples Defense Force (PDF), hundreds of anti-junta groups are active throughout the country and violent conflict is escalating with no end in sight, an analyst said Wednesday.

May 6 marked the anniversary of the PDF, a paramilitary group formed to protect Myanmars civilians after junta security forces violently repressed peaceful protests of the militarys Feb. 1, 2021, coup. Comprised of members from all walks of life, the PDF counts deposed members of parliament, artists, celebrities, students, farmers, and defected soldiers among its ranks.

In a statement detailing the growth of the group over the past year, the NUG Ministry of Defense said the PDF has since expanded to 257 units based in 250 townships across Myanmar and maintains links to more than 400 local guerrilla groups. Around U.S. $30 million was spent on arms training and military equipment for the PDF since its formation, the NUG said, adding that it plans to increase related expenditures to ensure the group is amply supplied going forward.

But while the PDF has developed into a formidable fighting force, Min Zaw Oo, executive director of the Myanmar Institute for Peace and Security (MIPS), told RFAs Myanmar Service that the country is less stable than it was in the aftermath of the coup.

The security situation in the country has deteriorated significantly, he said.

Theres a lot of insecurity among the people and armed conflict is on the rise.

Min Zaw Oo said that the military is increasingly spread thin, fighting insurgents on a multitude of fronts, including in areas technically under its control.

The junta had to stretch its forces when armed insurgencies erupted in areas where there were none in the past, he noted.

These areas are currently controlled by the junta, but there are also rebel forces there. Such rebel pockets exist in nearly every city.

He warned that, with more armed groups operating in Myanmar than ever before in the countrys 70 years of independence, violent conflict is likely to become worse before it gets better.

In the more than 15 months since the military coup, security forces have killed at least 1,835 civilians and arrested more than 10,600 others, mostly during anti-junta protests, according to Thailand-based NGO Assistance Association for Political Prisoners. The junta has sought to justify its putsch with unsubstantiated claims that the deposed National League for Democracy (NLD) won the countrys most recent election through voter fraud.

In addition to suppressing the opposition in urban areas, the junta has launched offensives against PDF forces located in the Myanmars remote border regions, where armed ethnic groups administer wide swathes of territory. ISP-Myanmar and Data for Myanmar  two groups monitoring conflict in the country  say at least 615 civilians have been killed in clashes between the military and the PDF, while as many as 811,000 have been displaced and more than 11,400 homes have been destroyed in fires started during the fighting.

PDF members mark the one-year anniversary of the paramilitary group, May 6, 2022. Credit: NUG Ministry of Defense Growing insecurity

NUG Defense Minister Ye Mon said during his address marking the anniversary of the PDF that the group had grown substantially stronger over the past year and suggested that it would soon remove the junta from power.

Our comrades have gained a decent amount of experience and military skills within the year, and I believe that they have become more skillful in guerrilla warfare and can attack the enemy more effectively, he said.

It has become obvious that the morale of the enemy is down. At such a moment, we need to intensify our attacks and bring the enemy to its knees in front of the people.

Ye Mon said that with the help of armed ethnic groups, the PDF is now in control of nearly half of Myanmar and predicted further gains soon.

But junta Deputy Information Minister Zaw Min Tun dismissed the claims as inaccurate in a recent interview with RFA.

He also blamed the countrys growing insecurity on the NUG and the PDF, which the junta has labeled terrorist organizations.

We were first on the path to a negotiated solution but they, the current armed insurgents, have chosen to resort to this path of violence, Zaw Min Tun said.

He said PDF units that pursue armed violence will be cracked down on until the country is stable.

Despite calls at home and abroad for inclusive talks to end conflict in Myanmar, the junta has said it will not negotiate with the NUG or the PDF.

Meanwhile, civilians caught in the middle of the fighting say they want to be left out of the conflict.

Nadi Aung, a woman from war-torn Sagaing regions Myaung township, called on both the military and the PDF to prevent further casualties among unarmed villagers amid the escalating fighting.

As a citizen, I want to ask both sides to fight bravely and with honor, she said.

There are armed groups and unarmed groups operating everywhere. We want an end to the taking hostage of unarmed civilians. We want an end to the looting, killings and burnings.

Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.
Saifuddin Abdullah plans to have his first in-person meeting with shadow foreign minister Zin Mar Aung on Saturday.

Malaysian Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah listens to a question during an interview with BenarNews at his hotel room in Washington, May 11, 2022.

ASEANs special envoy to Myanmar has welcomed the idea of engaging informally with Myanmars Myanmars National Unity Consultative Council (NUCC), a body of opposition stakeholders, and its parallel civilian government, as the junta has reneged on a promise to put the country back on a democratic path, Malaysias foreign minister said in an interview Wednesday.

Meetings with opposition stakeholders could be held via video conference calls and other means if the junta prohibits such meetings in-person, Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah told BenarNews after an informal gathering here with other top diplomats from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations ahead of a leader-level summit here with the United States.

I thought the ASEAN special envoy, in his concluding remarks  though I cannot speak on his behalf  ... in some ways welcomed the idea of engaging the NUG and the NUCC and the other stakeholders, Saifuddin said.

Two other ministers spoke along the same lines, but not necessarily mentioning the NUG and the NUCC.

He was referring to the National Unity Government, Myanmars parallel, civilian-led government. The NUCC is a more representative body, which includes members of the NUG, civil society groups, ethnic armed organizations, and civil disobedience groups.

Saifuddins proposals at Wednesdays meeting in Washington included strengthening the role of the blocs envoy to Myanmar and ensuring that the United Nations special envoy to the country, Noeleen Heyzer, is invited to relevant ASEAN meetings.

Heyzer could not attend an ASEAN meeting last week to coordinate humanitarian aid to Myanmar because the Burmese junta does not recognize her.

I mentioned that the U.N. secretary generals special envoy needs to be invited to all of the relevant meetings, regardless what the junta is saying. You cannot allow the junta to dictate who is to be invited, Saifuddin noted having told meeting with the ASEAN ministers.

If it is an ASEAN meeting, then it is ASEAN that should decide who is to attend. And in this context we should invite Dr. Noeleen Heyzer.

Two weeks ago, the Myanmar junta reacted furiously when Saifuddin said he planned to propose that the ASEAN envoy must engage informally with NUG. In its response, the junta branded the NUG terrorist groups.

Judging from that response, the Burmese generals wont be happy to learn that Saifuddin said he was planning to have his first in-person meeting with the NUGs foreign minister, Zin Mar Aung, in Washington on Saturday. He said he planned to solicit her opinion on how the people of Myanmar can move on.

The foreign ministers of the ASEAN member-states are in Washington with their countries leaders to participate in the U.S.-ASEAN summit.

Saifuddin said the ministers had planned the informal meeting here to mainly discuss the crisis in post-coup Myanmar and the non-implementation of a five-point agreement that the junta agreed to with ASEAN to return the country to peace and democracy.

The juntas reneging on the agreement notwithstanding, ASEAN members plan to stick with the five-point consensus, Saifuddin said.

We are very much still on board with the five-point consensus, but I think many of us are quite frustrated , Saifuddin acknowledged.

I think we need to be more creative and that is why, for example, we [need to] start naming the stakeholders the NUG, the NUCC, all of them.

The points of the consensus call for a constructive dialogue among all parties; the mediation of such talks by a special envoy of the ASEAN chair; and a visit to Myanmar by an ASEAN delegation, headed by the special envoy, to meet with all parties.

BenarNews asked Saifuddin if he believed the NUG should attend the U.S.-ASEAN summit, because the junta is being kept out of ASEAN meetings and Washington is following the regional blocs lead on that. The NUG foreign minister was in Washington, as of Wednesday.

Well, we have not come to that point. My suggestion to the ASEAN meeting this morning was to engage informally. We, as you know, many of us are democrats at heart and our countries are democracies, the Malaysian minister said.

But at the same time, we do not want to, you know, to do something that is probably beyond what we can handle. So I thought the best way forward for now is to engage with the NUG informally.

Meanwhile, when a senior Biden administration official was asked Wednesday about who would represent ASEAN member-state Myanmar at the summit, he replied well have more to say on this tomorrow.

We have had diplomatic engagement with the government in exile. We are in discussions about the best way to represent what has transpired in Burma and how to represent that in the meeting, the senior administration official told Radio Free Asia, the parent company of BenarNews, in a briefing to media.

I think one of the discussions has been to have an empty chair to reflect our dissatisfaction with whats taken place and our hope for a better path forward.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news service.
They also issue notices for locals not to take phone calls from international numbers.

The Chinese government has issued a new directive that forbids Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region from discussing the network of internment camps or accepting calls from international phone numbers ahead of an expected visit by the United Nations human rights chief, a police office in the region told RFA.

The officer, who works in Kashgar (in Chinese, Kashi) and declined to give his name, told RFA that police received special government notices on how to prepare for the visit this month by Michelle Bachelet, the U.N.s high commissioner for human rights.

The policeman said he was a Chinese Communist Party member and was playing a leading role in disseminating the notices during political study sessions and enforcing their mandates.

The political study sessions are being held on Wednesdays, and prefectural and autonomous regional notices are being studied as they arrive, he said.

The dates of Bachelets visit to China and Xinjiang have yet to be announced. Uyghur rights groups have pressed her to visit the region and release an overdue report on well-documented allegations of torture, forced labor and other severe rights abuses against the local population.

An advance delegation from Bachelets office arrived in late April in Guangzhou in southern Chinas Guangdong Province, where they are still being held in quarantine as required by COVID-19 protocols before heading to Xinjiang, Chinas Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Wednesday.

Officials issued a notice prohibiting Uyghurs from speaking about re-education or internment camps, but added that if the topic arose, they should only mention positive aspects of re-education, namely that it is a pathway to living a good and normal life, the Kashgar officer said.

Uyghurs have been told not to speak spontaneously when the U.N. team arrives and asks questions, he said.

We were told not to speak about re-education and the current situation, and that we should speak positively about life here, the police officer said.

The policeman made the comments when RFA contacted him last week about reports that residential committees had paid Uyghurs to perform a dance in front of the Kashgar Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar on the Eid al-Fitr holiday marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.

In the past, officials in Xinjiang have issued notices warning citizens there not to disclose so-called state secrets, including one directive requiring Uyghurs to not disclose any information about the camps.

In a previous RFA report, authorities in Xinjiang said Chinese officials had warned Uyghurs not to divulge state secrets during Bachelets visit, not to accept calls from unknown phone numbers, and not to answer questions from the U.N. human rights team without approval from the government.

Another government notice on the U.N. rights chiefs visit to Xinjiang that appeared recently on the Chinese video-focused social networking service Douyin, known in English as TikTok, was about setting up mobiles phones to not accept international calls. One video provided step-by-step instructions on how users could adjust their cell phone settings to reject calls from abroad.

Slanderous lies

Zumrat Dawut, a former Uyghur internment camp detainee who has said she was forcibly sterilized by government officials, said Chinese authorities are concerned about possible cooperation between the Uyghurs inside Xinjiang and those living abroad in revealing evidence about the internment camps during Bachelets visit.

Before the U.N. team goes, they are worried that the people will tell the real information about the situation on the ground, she said. Thats why they are emphasizing these restrictions.

Authorities are believed to have held up to 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities accused of harboring strong religious and politically incorrect views in a vast network of internment camps in Xinjiang since 2017 and have jailed or detained hundreds of Uyghur academics and other influential members of the ethnic group in recent years.

The U.S. and the parliaments of several Western governments have declared that Chinas mistreatment of the Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang constitutes genocide and crimes against humanity.

China rejects the accusations as slanderous lies and asserts that the re-education centers are part of efforts to combat terrorism and extremism by providing vocational training.

On Tuesday, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) government hosted a teleconference on religious freedom that was livestreamed to more than 60 countries and international organizations, China News Service reported.

Today, the situation of religious belief and freedom in Xinjiang is incomparable to any historical period, Abdureqip Tumulniyaz, president of the state-controlled Islamic Association of the XUAR and of the Xinjiang Islamic Institute, said at the conference, which was attended by XUAR officials, religious leaders and Muslim residents.

A report by state-run Global Times on Tuesday said: Happily dancing crowds to celebrate the festival of Eid al-Fitr, clean and solemn mosques with Muslims waiting for prayer time, students in the Xinjiang Islamic Institute reading doctrine out loud  these were the scenarios displayed during an online meeting held by the government of Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region on Tuesday to show the situation of religious freedom in the region.

China in 2019 organized two visits to internment camps in the XUAR  one for a small group of foreign journalists, and another for diplomats from non-Western countries, including Russia, Indonesia, Kazakhstan and Thailand.

A U.S. diplomat dismissed those trips as Potemkin tours and an Albanian scholar who was taken on one of the tours later said he agreed with reports about the camps.

This official narrative was very shocking to us, and we could see it put into practice when we visited the mass detention centers  that our Chinese friends call vocational training institutes, but which we saw to be a kind of hell, Olsi Jazexhi, a university lecturer with a doctoral degree in nationalism studies, told RFA after visiting the region in August 2019.

Translated by RFAs Uyghur Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
Vietnam has previously released high-profile political prisoners ahead of of diplomatic meetings with the U.S.

Vietnamese journalist Ho Duc Hoa was released from prison and put on a plane to the United States ahead of a regional summit this week after more than a decade behind bars for treason in what rights activists said was proof that international pressure works on the one-party Communist regime in Hanoi.

Hoa was released Wednesday from the Nam Ha Detention Center in Nghe An province after serving 11 years of a 13-year jail termjust as Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Minh Chinh traveled to Washington to attend a two-day summit between U.S. officials and leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Also put on a plane across the Pacific was Tran Thi Thuy, a lands rights activist who was sentenced to eight years in prison on the same charges and had completed her jail term in 2018, the pro-democracy group Viet Tan told RFA

Ms. Tran Thi Thuy and Mr. Ho Duc Hoa are on their way to the U.S. on schedule, Viet Tan Director Ly Thai Hung told RFAs Vietnamese Service.

"We did not accept the sentences and fought for their freedom and of course with the support and advocacy of the U.S. government as well as political parties and organizations," he added.

Like all political prisoners, both Ho Duc Hoa and Tran Thi Thuy should never have been arrested in the first place. Their release shows that sustained international pressure does work. International advocacy is particularly important for the courageous activists who are in need of medical care, the group said in a statement.

In 2013, the Nghe An Provincial Peoples Court sentenced Hoa and several others to prison for carrying out activities to overthrow the Peoples Government. Authorities had accused the reporter of maintaining ties to the U.S.-based Viet Tan in a case that drew condemnation from Washington and international rights groups at the time.

Vietnamese state media, which had extensively covered Hoas trial, made no mention of his release on Wednesday.

While in prison, Thuy garnered international attention over repeated charges of abuse by authorities. Her brother told Amnesty International at the time that she was unable to recognize him during one prison visit, and said her health had seriously deteriorated.

Vietnam is currently detaining 253 prisoners of conscience, according to the rights group Defend the Defenders, though the organization said it believes that the actual number is higher. Prisoners charged with sabotaging the national solidarity policy and religious prisoners comprise the largest number of detainees, while about 100 belong to ethnic minority groups, the organizations leader said.

Vietnam has previously released high-profile political prisoners ahead of diplomatic meetings with the U.S. When Vice President Kamala Harris visited Vietnam in August 2021, Hanoi released detained Vietnamese-Americans Angel Phan and James Han Nguyen.

Reported by Anna Vu and written in English by Nawar Nemeh.
Ukraine's military has launched a counteroffensive near the Russian-held eastern town of Izyum as Kyiv said Kremlin forces were withdrawing from areas near Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, in what appears to be the latest setback for Moscow's military offensive.

Ukraines General Staff said on May 14 that Russian forces appeared to be focusing on guarding supply routes and were launching mortar, artillery, and air strikes in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region in an effort to deplete Ukrainian forces and destroy fortifications.



Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said Ukraine was entering a new -- long-term -- phase of the war.

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.

Meanwhile, U.S. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell led a delegation of Republican senators on a surprise visit to Kyiv in a show of support for Ukraine in its fight against the unprovoked Russian invasion.



The McConnell-led trip, which followed one by Democratic House of Representative leaders on May 1, comes as the Senate attempts to finalize a $40 billion military aid package for Ukraine.



Outside of Ukraine, the Group of Seven (G7) leading industrial nations reaffirmed their support for Ukraine, saying they were prepared to provide Kyiv with aid for as long as it was needed in the fight against Russian forces.



We underscore Ukraines sovereignty, territorial integrity, independence, and right for self-defense under the UN Charter. This war of aggression has reaffirmed our determination to reject outright attempts to redraw borders by force in violation of sovereignty and territorial integrity, said the G7, which consists of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, and Japan.

Kharkiv had been under heavy bombardment by Russian forces since Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, but it never fell. The U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War said in its latest assessment of the conflict on May 13 that Ukraine appears to have won the battle of Kharkiv," noting that Ukrainian forces had prevented Russian troops from encircling, "let alone seizing," the city.

Speaking during his nightly nationwide address on May 13, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that his country's forces are making progress in their efforts to counter the Russian offensive and had retaken six towns and villages over the previous day.

However, neither side appears to be making major breakthroughs, and while Zelenskiy said that his military is doing everything it can to drive Russian forces from Ukrainian territory, "no one today can predict how long this war will last."

Zelenskiy said the outcome will depend not only on the Ukrainian people, but on "our partners, on European countries, on the entire free world."

Ukraine's top military intelligence official, Major General Kyrlyo Budanov, gave a more optimistic assessment. Budanov told Sky News on May 14 that the "breaking point will be in the second part of August" and that "most of the active combat actions will have finished by the end of this year."

"As a result, we will renew Ukrainian power in all our territories that we have lost, including Donbas and Crimea," he said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also said it was impossible to determine how long the conflict would last, claiming that the West was planning to conduct a "total hybrid war" against Russia.



He added that attempts by Western countries to isolate Russia through a slew wide-ranging sanctions were destined to fail.

Russian forces have suffered high casualties since their invasion of Ukraine in late February, and their ongoing offensive in the east of the country has made minimal territorial gains and is widely seen to be behind schedule.

But while Russia failed both in its attempts to quickly take all of Ukraine and then to encircle Ukrainian troops in besieged areas, Kyiv now sees the war entering a "third phase" in which Russian forces will seek to defend the territory they have captured.

"This shows that they plan to make it a long war," Ukrainian Interior Ministry adviser Viktor Andrusiv said in televised remarks on May 13. "Moscow appears to think that by dragging out the war in this way they can force the West to the negotiating table and get Ukraine to give in."

Zelenskiy said that "very difficult negotiations" with Moscow continue in an effort to evacuate Ukrainian forces from the southeastern port city of Mariupol, which has been devastated by Russia's military as it tries open a land corridor to the seized territory of Crimea.

Dozens of seriously wounded Ukrainian personnel remain trapped inside the city's Azovstal metals plant, the last Ukrainian holdout in the city that has been the target of a seven-week siege by Russian forces.

On May 14, the British Defense Ministry said that the civilian administration placed in charge of Ukraine's southern Kherson region by the Russian military will ask Moscow to include it into the Russian Federation.

In the event the occupied region does carry out a referendum, the British Defense Ministry said on Twitter, the vote would almost certainly be manipulated to show a clear majority of the region's population wants to leave Ukraine.

On May 11, the Zaporizhzhya Regional Military Administration in southeastern Ukraine said that Russia was not changing its war plans, which it said entail occupying Ukrainian territories and creating pseudo-republics in the southern regions.

With reporting by AP, Reuters, and dpa
Finland has announced its desire to join NATO "without delay," prompting a sharp warning from the Kremlin as Moscow's ongoing war in Ukraine, which President Vladimir Putin has said he launched to prevent the alliance's expansion, reshapes Europe's security architecture.

Russia also appeared to lose ground on the battlefield on May 12, with Ukraine's military claiming it had pushed back Russian forces in a counterattack in the east that could mark the beginning of a shift in the momentum of the war.

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.

"NATO membership would strengthen Finland's security. As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defense alliance. Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay," Finnish President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said in a joint statement.



Finland, which shares a 1,340-kilometer border and a turbulent relationship with Russia, has stepped up its cooperation with NATO since Russia seized Crimea in 2014.

Putin cited in part what he called the threat from NATO, which expanded eastwards after the Cold War, as a reason for launching his invasion of Ukraine.



The announcement in Helsinki prompted Russia to warn that it would have to take "military-technical" steps in response.



"The expansion of NATO and the approach of the alliance to our borders does not make the world and our continent more stable and secure," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.



Asked whether Finland's membership would be a threat, Peskov answered: "definitely."



"Everything will depend on how this process takes place, how far the military infrastructure will move towards our borders," he said.



In Helsinki, Niisto and Marin said in their statement that a special committee will announce a formal Finnish decision on a membership bid on May 15 as another Nordic country, the traditionally neutral Sweden, is also expected to announce its intention to join NATO in the coming days.



NATO officials have indicated that the accession protocols for Finland and Sweden could be signed when the alliance holds a summit in Madrid on June 28-29 if the formal applications landed on NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenbergs desk by the end of this month.



Finland fought two wars with the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1944, repelling an attempted invasion but losing 10 percent of its territory in the subsequent peace agreement.



Finland maintained its neutrality in the postwar period, acting at times as an intermediary between Moscow and the West.

The diplomatic moves made abroad came as Ukraine's General Staff said its forces had recaptured Pytomnyk, a village on the main highway north of Kharkiv, a city located just 40 kilometers from the border.



In its daily intelligence bulletin, Britain's Ministry of Defense noted that the withdrawal of Russian forces from the Kharkiv area was "a tacit recognition of Russia's inability to capture key Ukrainian cities where they expected limited resistance from the population."



Russian forces continue to pound a steel plant in the southern port city of Mariupol that is the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance, its defenders said.



Ukraine offered to release Russian prisoners of war in exchange for the safe evacuation of badly wounded fighters trapped inside the Azovstal steel plant.



Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said that negotiations were under way to release the wounded. She said there were different options, but none of them is ideal.



Russia hasn't confirmed any talks on the subject.



Officials said in recent weeks that about 100,000 residents could still be trapped in Mariupol, which had a prewar population of over 400,000.



Russian and Ukrainian authorities have agreed to cease-fires to evacuate residents, but those efforts have subsequently failed most of the time.



Russia, meanwhile, said on May 12 that its forces hit two ammunition depots in the Chernihiv region of Ukraine. The Defense Ministry said Russia had destroyed a Ukrainian S-300 air defense missile system in the Kharkiv region and a radar station near Odesa.

Earlier on May 12, leaders of the European Union warned that Russia posed the "most direct threat" to world order and called Moscow's invasion of Ukraine "barbaric" as heavy fighting in the east and south of the country continued.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who is in Japan together with European Council President Charles Michel, held talks on May 12 with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida that have touched on Moscow's invasion.



Russia "is today the most direct threat to the world order with the barbaric war against Ukraine, and its worrying pact with China," von der Leyen said after meeting Kishida.

As fighting raged in southern and eastern Ukraine, Kyiv said it will not reopen the suspended Sokhranovka gas transit route from Russia to European customers until it obtains control over its gas transit system.



On May 11, Russian gas flows to Europe via Ukraine fell by a quarter after Kyiv announced it would stop Russian shipments through a hub in the east, blaming interference by Russian forces in the region.



It was the first time exports have been disrupted since Moscow launched its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, but the immediate effect is likely to be limited because Russia can divert the gas to another pipeline and because Europe relies on a variety of suppliers.

With reporting by AP, Reuters, AFP, and dpa
France's Foreign Ministry has condemned the "baseless arrests" of two French citizens and called for their immediate release after being detained in Iran.

The ministry said in a statement on May 12 that French authorities are "fully mobilized" to address the situation after Iran's Intelligence Ministry announced a day earlier that two "Europeans" had been arrested on accusations of seeking to "destabilize the country."



Details of the charges have not been revealed.



"As soon as this information became known, our ambassador in Tehran took steps with the Iranian authorities to obtain consular access to our two compatriots and the charge d'affaires of the Iranian Embassy in Paris was summoned to the Ministry for Europe. and Foreign Affairs by the Director General of Political and Security Affairs," the statement said.



"The French government condemns this baseless arrest. It demands the immediate release of these two French nationals and will remain fully mobilized for this purpose," it added.



The arrests came as a European Union envoy visited Tehran for talks on stalled negotiations to renew a nuclear pact with world powers.

With reporting by AFP
As a court verdict looms in Sweden in a case that has implicated high-ranking members of Iran's clerical regime in war crimes, Tehran appears to be targeting Swedish citizens in Iran as payback.



Iran has expressed outrage over the ongoing trial of Hamid Nouri, an alleged former deputy prosecutor and member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) who is seen as henchman during the bloody purge of political prisoners and regime opponents at the end of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War.



Tehran has heightened tensions with Sweden by announcing the pending execution of Swedish-Iranian researcher Ahmadreza Jalali.



The same day that arguments concluded in Nouri's trial, Iran announced on May 4 that Jalali would be put to death within two weeks. Just days later, the Swedish Foreign Ministry announced the arrest of a Swedish tourist who was traveling in Iran.



The pending execution of the 50-year-old Jalali has been condemned by Sweden. It has also led to accusations that Iran is holding an innocent civilian hostage to influence the outcome of Nouri's trial and prompted a fellow inmate to launch a hunger strike in his defense.



"This is a dirty game through which they [the Iranian authorities] are torturing Ahmadreza and his family," Jalali's wife, Vida Mehran Nia, told RFE/RL's Radio Farda on May 6, describing her husband as a "hostage" of the situation.



"It is such a shame to see that the Iranian government has made a pawn out of its own citizen in this political game," she added.



While Iran has claimed that its actions against Jalali have nothing to do with Nouri's case, the timing and rhetoric from officials indicates an act of retribution.



Jalali, who was arrested in April 2016 while visiting Iran for an academic conference, has said he is innocent of the charges of espionage and "corruption on earth" that led to his death sentence in 2017. His verdict, according to Amnesty International, stated that Jalali worked with the Israeli government, which allegedly helped him obtain a Swedish residency permit. Iran does not recognize dual citizenships of Iranian nationals.



The decision to carry out Jalali's death sentence came as prosecutors argued in the Stockholm District Court that Nouri should be sentenced to life in prison for war crimes. The court is set to issue its verdict on July 14.

On May 1, the Iranian Foreign Ministry summoned the Swedish ambassador to lodge an "extreme protest" over Nouri's trial, which Tehran has described as "completely illegal" and a "political show." The Foreign Ministry decried the prosecution's indictments of Nouri during the trial in the Swedish court and accused it of leveling false accusations against Iran.



Nouri has denied the charges that he is responsible for international war crimes due to the murder of more than 100 people while allegedly working as a deputy to a prison prosecutor carrying out orders by former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to eliminate prisoners found guilty of mohareb, or waging war against God.



Nouri, who was arrested in Sweden in 2019 after arriving for a vacation, has been on trial since August.



'Disturbing Reports'



In a May 4 tweet, Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde called reports that Iran would enforce Jalali's death sentence "extremely worrying" and demanded his release.



A follow-up tweet said that she had spoken to Iran's foreign minister about the "disturbing reports."



Just days after Sweden advised its citizens to avoid traveling to Iran, citing a deteriorating security situation, it announced that it had learned that an unidentified 30-year-old Swedish male had been arrested in Iran. Swedens Foreign Ministry said it had launched an investigation.



The Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet quoted an informed Swedish source as saying that the development was a "warning" about the possible abduction of Swedes in retaliation for Nouri's trial.



Mahmud Amiri Moghadam of the Norway-based Iran Human Rights Organization told Radio Farda on May 9 that Jalali's sentencing was clear evidence that "the Islamic republic is using Jalali as a hostage" to exert pressure on Sweden over the outcome of the Nouri trial.



"We demand the international community and specifically European countries to clarify the ramifications of such an execution," he said, describing the "hostage-taking" of Jalali as an international crime that could be punished by cutting off diplomatic and economic ties with Iran and bringing charges against those who ordered it.



Farhad Meisami, a civil rights activist who is serving a six-year prison sentence in Iran for protesting the murders of political activists there in the late 1990s,is putting his own life on the line to save Jalali's.

Meisami announced on May 6 that he was launching a hunger strike to protest the injustice of Jalali's death sentence.



"I met Dr. Jalali for the first time more than three years ago in the library of ward No. 4 of Evin Prison,"Meisami wrote in a message posted by supporters on Telegram, adding that Jalali's own hunger strikes in protest at his death sentence had left him "very frail and thin."



Recalling his experiences of seeing another inmate suffer before his death sentence was carried out, Meisami asked: "Is there any torture worse than this?"



Meisami's lawyer, Mohammad Moghimi, told Radio Farda on May 10 that his client had concluded through his meetings with Jalali that the researcher was innocent and felt a responsibility to help save him.



"I hope the authorities, for once, let go of their foolishness," Moghimi said, "and halt this very unfair verdict against Ahmadreza Jalali."

RFE/RL Radio Farda correspondents Mohammad Zarghami and Hannah Kaviani report.
Five-year-old Anastasia Konchakovska wants to be held by her mother.

Lying in a hospital bed in Belarus recovering from surgery to remove a bullet fragment from her skull last month, Konchakovska spoke one word repeatedly: "Mama."

When she was told that her mother, Tetyana, was at work, the child said that couldn't be true because "she came and laid down with me."

Konchakovska must have been dreaming. That remembered interaction with her mother was no more true than the tall tale that she was at work.

Tetyana Konchakovska had been killed along with her husband and son on February 28, when their van was ambushed by invading Russian troops outside the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, according to Anastasia Mizetskaya, a relative who lives in the United States.

Anastasia Konchakovska survived the attack, as did her grandmother, Vasylyna Moshchenko. But the 5-year-old faces a tough physical and emotional recovery and may have permanent damage to her right eye.

Moshchenko has yet to tell her that her parents and half-brother are dead.

Konchakovska is one of thousands of Ukrainian children who are suffering from incalculable trauma as a result of Russian President Vladimir Putin's decision to invade Ukraine and the Russian military's treatment of civilians.

Thousands of civilians have been killed since Russia launched the large-scale offensive on February 24. Accurate casualty figures are elusive and the number of children who have lost one or both parents is unknown.

Fateful Decision

Mizetskaya, in the United States, had been in touch with the family frequently after the invasion began, exchanging text messages with Tetyana Konchakovska until the day before her death. Mizetskaya also recorded her phone conversation with Moshchenko about the details of the attack.

Like many other families, Anastasia's fled Kyiv for the suburbs the day Russia invaded, believing it would be safer than staying in the capital, Mizetskaya said.

It made sense: Russia appeared to be seeking to take Kyiv in an attempt to impose a puppet government loyal to Moscow, striking the city with rockets.

Anastasia's father, Oleh Konchakovskiy, a driver for a food-delivery company, put his family into the white van he used for work and drove them to the home of Tetyana's brother, Pavlo, about 40 kilometers northwest of Kyiv.

However, Russian soldiers sweeping down into Ukraine from Belarus made their way toward Kyiv through those very suburbs in the northwest, bringing the fighting to Pavlo's area.

Tetyana Konchakovska told Mizetskaya on February 26 that there was "shooting, periodically" in the area. The next day she wrote Mizetskaya to say that there was "a lot of bombing near us."

Pavlo's suburb is 20 kilometers from Bucha, one of the towns around Kyiv where surviving residents have given horrifying accounts of alleged abuse and rights groups have accused Russian forces of committing war crimes, including executing civilians, during their monthlong occupation.

Frightened and living in her brother's home, which was now without electricity and running water, Tetyana Konchakovska and her husband decided to return to Kyiv with their children, against the wishes of their relatives. A hesitant Moshchenko chose to join them.

It was a fateful decision.

On the way back to Kyiv, shortly before noon on February 28, Russian troops, apparently hiding in the forest along the road, sprayed the front of the car with bullets, Moshchenko recalled to Mizetskaya.

Tetyana, Oleh, and 18-year-old Mykyta Bobrov -- Anastasia's half-brother -- were killed instantly, she said.

As they surveyed the human toll, the Russian troops told Moshchenko they feared the minivan contained members of Ukraine's Territorial Defense Forces, the largely volunteer units created across the country as Russia was massing tens of thousands of troops at the border in the months before the invasion.

"'You, Ukrainians, drive in your cars with automatic weapons. [You are] like regular people, [but] you shoot at us,'" Moshchenko quoted one of the Russian soldiers as saying in her recorded call with Mizetskaya.

'They Stole Everything From Her'

Other cars were ambushed on the same road as well, resulting in the deaths of several civilians in addition to Oleh, Tetyana, and Nykyta.

Oleh Konchakovskiy's bullet-ridden van was pointed downward on a slope off the side of the road, with two bodies slumped over inside, when it was filmed by journalist Dmytro Komarov on April 5, days after Russian troops were pushed out of the Kyiv region by Ukrainian forces.

Mizetskaya said the bodies belonged to Tetyana and Mykyta. Oleh's body had been removed and its location is unknown. His family is continuing to search.

Shortly after the ambush, a Russian officer took Moshchenko and the wounded Anastasia to the air base at Hostomel, which was then held by Russian forces, and they were flown by helicopter to Belarus for surgery, Moschenko said.

Belarusian doctors removed the bullet from the girl's skull two days later. With the help of the Ukrainian Embassy in Belarus, she was transferred to Germany, where a second operation was performed to remove fragments from her eye.

Anastasia is recovering in Germany, riding her bike, watching cartoons, and playing games, still unaware what happened that day in February.

Mizetskaya said that Moshchenko would like to return to Kyiv with her granddaughter at some point, but feared she would be haunted there by her loss.

"They stole everything from her," Mizetskaya said.

Written by Todd Prince based on reporting by Current Time contributor Meir Itkin
Often shunned by infantrymen who engage their foes in close combat, indirect-fire infantry -- known as mortarmen -- are a lethal addition to any military. Their main job is to shower down shrapnel, destroying equipment and enemy positions from afar.



For a Ukrainian unit serving in the Kharkiv region, days are spent moving heavy equipment, sending out reconnaissance units to locate Russian targets, and firing a 120-mm mortar. They try to operate undetected by an enemy who can return fire with their own mortars. Ukraine says its military has made some progress in pushing Russian forces away from the city of Kharkiv as fighting in the Donbas continues.
Heidi Audet, owner of Sweatshop Fitness and a member of Project Hand Up's board; Coreen St. Jean, founder and president of Project Hand Up; and Mindy Horan, vice president of the nonprofit, are pictured from left holding up a flier for a fundraising event taking place on Sunday. A spring craft and vendor fair at Sweatshop Fitness, located at 81 Sandy Bottom Road, Coventry, will raise money to help Project Hand Up purchase the building at 15 Factory St., West Warwick.
United States Attorney Michael Easley today announced a new multi-agency initiative to combat violent crime in the Rocky Mount area that includes a task force of local, state, and federal law enforcement.

The new Violent Crime Action Plan initiative was launched in collaboration with Rocky Mount Police Chief Robert Hassell earlier this week, in advance of the summer months when shootings typically increase.

Rocky Mount is a place of great promise, brimming with growth and opportunity. But that opportunity will not be fully realized until we unite as a community to stop the violence, said Easley. Since April 30, Rocky Mount has seen four homicides and three other shootings, including one earlier this week that wounded an innocent 9-year-old boy. Our state, local, and federal partners are committed to doing all we can, in conjunction with community stakeholders, to stop this wave of gun violence. First and foremost, that means getting illegal guns off the streets and bringing those responsible for the violence to swift justice  for the victims and for the community at large.

Chief Hassell stated, We believe this Violent Crime Action Plan will protect our community at a time when our citizens are understandably concerned. We appreciate the support and assistance from our federal partners and Edgecombe County Sheriff Cleveland Atkinson and Nash County Sheriff Keith Stone. By working together, we can reduce violent crime and make sure that our community is safe.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Assistant Special Agent in Charge Anthony Spotswood said, The ATF stands with the Rocky Mount community in its push against gun violence. We are bringing our resources and expertise for a systematic and coordinated effort to target the most violent offenders on the streets.

The Nash County Sheriffs Office and Edgecombe County Sheriffs Office have agreed to devote officers to the VCAP effort.

These resources will supplement the work of the Rocky Mount Police Department and other partners in the investigation and prosecution of gun violence in Rocky Mount.

Nash County Sheriff Keith Stone commented, The Nash County Sheriffs Office is working collaboratively with the Edgecombe County Sheriffs Office, the U.S. Attorneys Office, the Rocky Mount Police Department and federal agencies to reduce the violence in Rocky Mount. The Nash County Sheriffs Office is dedicated to safer communities by enforcement of gang, gun and drug violations.

Atkinson said, Edgecombe County is grateful for the assistance and partnership of the U.S. Attorneys Office, the Nash County Sheriffs Office, the Rocky Mount Police Department and other local municipal police departments, the District Attorneys Office and state and federal partners. As law enforcement officers, we are here to make a positive difference in the lives of our citizens, and ensuring their safety is paramount. We look forward to continuing proactive efforts to counteract criminal behavior and ensure safe communities.

Said Easley: The coordinated effort these agencies bring to this initiative will make Rocky Mount a safer place to live, work, and do business.

VCAP is a three-pronged approach drawing on close partnerships among federal, state, and local law enforcement, as well as the community, to combat violence.

Focused and Strategic Enforcement

Designating lead prosecutors from the U.S. Attorneys Office and District Attorneys Office to prioritize the review of all gun crime cases with local and federal law enforcement for accelerated action.

Sustained, proactive, and coordinated efforts to identify and prosecute the most significantly violent repeat offenders and dangerous criminal organizations in the Rocky Mount area.

Focusing on the sources of crime guns, including the prosecution of gun traffickers, straw purchasers, suppliers of guns to juveniles, and those using non-serialized ghost guns in crimes.

Inter-Agency Coordination and Intelligence-led Policing

Analyzing crime data to identify trends, patterns, and hot spots to deploy resources where they are needed most.

Leveraging federal Task Force Officers to bring federal technology and resources to address local gun violence.

Increasing the use of Crime Gun Intelligence through the ATFs National Integrated Ballistic Information Network to identify and prosecute the serial trigger-pullers driving gun violence in local communities.

Community Engagement

Raising awareness through youth education. EDNC is working with the Rocky Mount Police Department to introduce programs, such as Educating Kids about Gangs and Guns, into Nash and Edgecombe County Schools in hopes of engaging students, law enforcement, and educators in life-saving conversations.

Engaging with local offender reentry programs, such as the Nash Edgecombe Wilson Re-entry Council, in their ongoing work to help returning citizens successfully reintegrate into society following incarceration through employment, transportation, and housing-related support.

Meaningful community engagement by law enforcement, hearing from the communities most affected by violence to better partner in stopping it through supporting prevention, intervention, and reentry services.

The new task force ensures that Rocky Mount will have the full range of enforcement tools available to stop the violence. Participants will include representation from the Rocky Mount Police Department, Nash County Sheriffs Office, Edgecombe County Sheriff's Office, as well as the ATF, FBI, the DEA, Homeland Security Investigations, and the United States Marshals Service.

Prosecutors from the Seventh Judicial District Attorneys Office and the U.S. Attorneys Office are also engaged in the effort.
Since then, this is the first time the market has experienced a steep fall. Stocks plummeted drastically in April, even continuing to fall for many days, and wiping out profits previously earned. Along with disappointment and fear, several investors have raised their voices on forums, asking for solutions to remedy the situation.

Unpredictable outcome

Regardless of age, the experience on the stock market has its own characteristics of having to work to understand it. It is a feeling that goes from glorious victory and standing at the top, to feeling regret and even panic. According to statistics from the Depository Centre, the booming wave of the stock market since the beginning of April 2020 has attracted more than 2.5 million new accounts by March 2022. There will be old investors coming back to the market, but most of these accounts are certainly owned by new investors. Therefore, experiencing the first shock in just around two years is actually very good, because everything must be experienced eventually, and the sooner the better.

If based solely on the VNSmallcap index representing small-cap stocks on the HoSE, the growth from the bottom in March 2020 to the top in early January 2022 is more than 4.1 times or 412%. This is a growth rate that can help many amateur investors become billionaires. Just a month ago, this index dropped about 30% of its value, but the bitter thing for many new investors is that the decline in stock is much larger. In April, HoSE had 208 stocks that lost more than 30% of the value, and the HNX had about 173 shares that fell as well. This statistic is only partially revealed, because depending on the size of the portfolio and depending on the stock code, investors can lose many times more than this. For example, with FLC stock, the loss from the peak is a negative 76.1%, ROS is negative 79.5%, NBB is negative 73.2%, VRC is negative 70.8%, FTM is negative 70.8%, and LCM is negative 70.3%.

Lack of experience in portfolio management can also make investors lose all profits earned during the 2020 to 2021 growth cycle in a few speculative stocks. The 30% drop in the VND 100 million start-up investment capital is much less bitter than the feeling of loss of 30% of the VND 400 million profit. The winning that lasts too long can instigate investors to pledge to get more capital or borrow double margin to hit big. Then the 30% loss could be with VND 800 million or VND 1 billion, or even more.

No support from market

The get-rich-quick aim by investing in stocks can be felt in many places, from friends to co-workers in the office, or even at an iced tea shop. There was a time when taxi drivers and market sellers also opened price lists on their phones to discuss stocks and showed off profits. A clear difference between novice investors and professional investors is that they always find ways to blame their failure on something else or ask for support from a management agency. The last few days on the securities forums were circulating with calls for help to save the market. The shareholders' meetings were full of tension when investors asked business leaders why they let the stocks drop in price, even to the extent that a chairman even advised speculators to divest from the company, to save for long-distance investors. Another president called stock speculators parasitic and unwelcome.

The only time Vietnam's stock market was rescued was in 2009, when the State Capital Investment Corporation SCIC bought shares to curb the decline due to the impact of the world financial crisis. However, at present, Vietnam's stock market has become much more mature, reaching the scale of an emerging market, with foreign investment capital inflow of hundreds of billions of dollars, and no national fund that can rescue it and there is no need to expend resources for that purpose. A sufficiently developed market needs no rescue, as market forces balance themselves out. A drop of 30% to 70% like the new statistics above may be a loss for one person but will be an opportunity for someone else.

In recent days, the market has seen cheap buying cash flow, from both domestic and foreign investors. The simple reason is that the business is still profitable, the economy is still growing, the society is stable, and there is no point in rejecting a stock that has fallen tens of percent in a few months simply out of fear of a disoriented group of investors. The total resources in the market are still the same because the amount of money lost from the pockets of losing investors will flow into the pockets of better investors. Those same coins will come back to salvage the market.

If one considers entering the stock market like a start-up, one needs to know that over 90% of start-ups fail or go bankrupt in the first two years. Therefore, losses in the stock market are completely normal. The difference here is that you must accept that it is inevitable for anyone to fail, and the fault is yours alone. On the other hand, if failure is considered a tutor, then the lesson must be worth it and never be repeated.

Hoang Nguyen
The founders of the nonprofit Ride Above Disability Therapeutic Riding Center in Poway each remember the moment they knew where life was taking them.

For Program Director Allie Sarnataro it was while she was volunteering 15 years ago at another equestrian therapy center. The very first child who came in was in a wheelchair and could barely pull herself up.

We put her on the horse and she was sitting up tall, steering, laughing, Sarnataro said. It blew my mind. I knew this is what I needed to do with my life.

For Katie Cram, the centers equine specialist, it was years ago, after watching a boy at a riding center being passed from one instructor to another because they couldnt stand his attitude.

He was super smart but had zero filter and came off as .. rude and a know-it-all she said. He hated coming to the lessons at first. Cram said she continued working with the boy and, over time, a huge change occurred  he bonded with a horse and his lessons became the favorite part of his week.

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Realizing I could take a kid and make it entertaining for him and teach him to have a connection with horses like I had growing up  I thought, yes, this is what I want to do, she said.

For Wayne Jackson, Ride Aboves executive director, it came about five years ago while he was finishing up a 20-year career with the U.S. Marine Corps. After several tours in Iraq  where he became involved in a charity that helped child refugees  he began volunteering at a North County horse center where he met Cram and Sarnataro.

He was typically there every Thursday, but had to miss a few months because of work. When he returned, he had what seemed like a typical session with one of his regular students.

That evening my phone started to blow up, Jackson said. The childs mother had posted on Facebook a description of her normally emotionless son, who on the drive home from the riding center was smiling from ear to ear. He told his mother today was the best day because Wayne was back.

For him to be able to feel an emotion, process it, show the emotion on his face, explain what he was feeling and why he had it  it was a huge thing, Jackson said. That was it, the hook was set for me. This was what I was going to do.

The trio formed Ride Above in 2014 as a 501(c)3 nonprofit, with the goal of helping a wide variety of special-need students at the lowest price possible, and showing that lessons are about so much more than just riding a horse. Theyre now hoping to expand the organization to serve more students.

The center  in Poways Sycamore Canyon, on property donated by the Rolling Hills Boarding Stable  has 37 students who take four or five lessons monthly. When another therapeutic riding center in the area recently shut down, Ride Aboves waiting list mushroomed. Jackson and his colleagues are trying to raise money so they accommodate the growing need.

Every time a butt hits a saddle it costs us a little bit over $90  and we only charge $47, Jackson said. The rest of it we make up with direct public support, fundraising and I beg shamelessly.

The center has a policy that everyone whose doctor says it will not hurt them physically to ride will be accepted regardless of behavior, weight or age. They help students with severe and not so severe mental and physical disabilities. Their youngest client is three and their oldest is 70, though their website says they serve students from 2 to 102.

Holly Baltera said her 8-year-old daughter Lauren, who is autistic and non-verbal, began coming to the center in November and has loved it from her first lesson.

Things she never thought she would do shes dong, Baltera said. She just loves it. Her face is grinning from side to side. She cant get enough of it. Its amazing.

So amazing that the family has doubled Laurens monthly lessons to eight.

She has a bond with the horse and the people and the place, Baltera said. They are extremely cautious here. You know they are going to take care of the most important things. Its a great group of people here.

Mara Penick brings her 27-year-old daughter, Kimberly, to the center once a week. Kimberly is deaf, weighs just 58 pounds, and suffers from various ailments that affect her balance.

Like many of the students, it takes a team of instructors and volunteers to accompany her on a ride  one leading the horse, two on each side, a sign-language interpreter and others.

When she comes she feels really special, Penick said. This is one of the best nonprofits youll ever find. Almost all are volunteers and they do it because they have such big hearts.

Ride Above is hoping for corporate sponsorship and encourages private donations. Jackson said more money will help them teach more students and perhaps to even lower the prices more.

To learn more about Ride Above visit radtrc.org or call 858-349-1692 | Email: Katie@radtrc.org

jharry.jones@sduniontribune.com; 760/529-4931; Twitter: @jharryjones
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San Jose is considering reversing a decades-old ban on car cruising that officials say is discriminatory against Latinos and the lowrider culture  but law enforcement officials say they are worried revoking the ban could lead to more traffic-related crimes.

San Jose prohibited cruising on specific downtown streets in 1992 in response to crime and traffic-related incidents, often unrelated to the cruising itself, according to city officials.

While lowriders continued cruising the streets despite the ordinance, San Jose police have not enforced the law or issued citations related to it in decades, said Councilmember Raul Peralez, who wrote the proposal to lift the ban.

Theres more than enough good reason as to why we should get rid of this (law), said Peralez. Theres still more than enough protections for all of the other things that are illegal that we would want to continue to enforce that arent discriminatory in nature.

On Wednesday, a city committee voted unanimously to direct the city manager to take a number of steps to eliminate the car cruising ban as part of the citys budget process, including eliminating the fines, fees and signage on city streets related to the ban. The councils vote also directs the city manager to look into how San Jose can further address incidents and behaviors that may arise from large gatherings at cruising events.

A final City Council vote on the legislation is scheduled sometime in June when the City Council plans to vote on its 2022-2023 budget, city officials said.

Wednesdays vote comes as lowrider communities across California are asking cities to lift decades-old bans on cruising. Lowriding began in the 1940s among Mexican American youth and endures as a celebration and expression of their culture.

In Sacramento, members of a local lowrider commission met with city and law enforcement officials in March to urge them to lift the ban. A similar 30-year ban was temporarily lifted in National City (San Diego County) where the city is allowing a local lowrider group to police themselves during cruising events, according to the San Diego Union Tribune. Their first legal cruise was held last Friday.

Unlike National City, Peralez said he doesnt think San Jose needs to do a short-term pilot to test whether they should lift the ban. Instead, he said, city officials should work with San Jose police on preventing incidents that are causing injuries and deaths on city streets, such as speeding and sideshows. The city passed a law last year making it illegal to encourage or promote sideshow events.

Its not cruising that were actually trying to enforce, said Peralez, who grew up cruising with his parents in San Jose. Its these other things that are happening that happen to also be illegal.

Lowriding began in the 1940s among Mexican American youth in zoot suits, known as pachucos, in the U.S. Southwest, specifically in Los Angeles, would buy cheap vehicles and fix them, said John Ulloa, a professor of history and cultural anthropology at Skyline College and a lowrider.

As people began to use hydraulics to adjust the height of the vehicles, some used the equipment to avoid citations and harassment from police officers for having the car too low to the ground, said Ulloua, whose research focuses on lowrider culture.

Over the years, lowriders have been criminalized due to a small minority of people, who are not involved in lowriding, causing trouble and the stereotypical representation of lowriders on films and media, he said.

The banning of cruising is a form of institutionalized racism, he said.

San Jose police Lt. Steve Donohue asked the city committee to not take away this tool  that we use to ensure the safety of the public.

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When the ordinance was created, Donohue said, it wasnt only the cruising that caused problems but the fights and other incidents that broke out because of it.

This is something that while right now is not a tool thats been used very often, it is something that we do not want to lose out of our toolbox, said Donohue.

This is long overdue, said Veronica Amador, who called in during Wednesdays meeting to support the proposal. She said it was frustrating having to explain to her children why cruising isnt allowed.

Were being criminalized for wanting to show our culture, she said.

David Polanco, the president of the United Lowrider Council of San Jose, said Wednesdays vote was a good step forward.

He said he hopes the Lowrider Council of San Jose can follow the foot steps of the San Francisco Lowrider Council in cultivating a stronger relationship with the city to continue the tradition.

Thats the goal, he said, so that we can we can continue the culture and highlight it in San Jose.

Jessica Flores (she/her) is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jessica.flores@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jesssmflores
In his first 14 years playing the beautiful music on KABL-AM, Bill Moen was not allowed to mention his own name on the air.

The station format dictated that soothing instrumental standards would be interrupted only by the news and a recording of a ringing cable car bell. On-air talent was restricted to utterances of KABL music between songs, but Moen was able to inject enough personality in those two words to launch an improbable 33-year career as the morning drive host at KABL. His signature was the 15- to 30-second city-centric vignette that came to be known as Bill Moen Moods.

When, finally, he was allowed to say his name and talk a bit, he revealed what a real San Franciscan he was, dropping bon mots about the local scenes, about restaurants and shows, like a Herb Caen with an announcers voice, said radio historian and writer Ben Fong-Torres. He came across as a gentleman  with a sense of fun.

Moens show on KABL ran from 1960 to 1993, outlasting Don Sherwood and Don Rose, among his morning drive-time competitors. Moens ratings were consistently high and his listeners loyal to the point that when he ran a promotion for a travel agency booking a tour of Europe, enough people signed up and paid their own way to command two tour buses of 35 passengers each, hitting 14 cities in 21 days.

He was the play-by-play announcer for the cable car bell ringing competition and a leader in the campaign to save the cable cars. When he was finally eased out of KABL after a format shift, he took his morning show to KXBX in Lakeport (Lake County), where he spent 20 more years on the air.

Thats 50 years on morning radio. Nobody lasts for 50 years, said Clark Reid, a fellow host at KABL.

Moen died from complications of an infection he developed while living in Lake County. He died Easter Sunday at a hospital in Napa, said his daughter, Heather Moen. He was 93.

Moen wasnt a screamer or a jokester on air, and his voice wasnt tricked up or exaggerated. He had a straightforward Midwestern delivery, speaking slowly and with precision.

He just had the ability to put something memorable into a little statement on the radio, Reid said. He didnt go on and on. There arent many disc jockeys who can competently quote Shakespeare on the air and keep listeners, but Bill could.

Moen wrote most of his own material or told stories spontaneously, always playing up the sentimentality of the San Franciscans who chose KABL over its competitors, KSFO and KGO.

Youre truly clearly an old-timer if you caught the dinner show in the nightspot in the city, the Venetian Room in the Fairmont Hotel. Wow, he said in one of his vignettes.

The Mills Brothers, Peggy Lee, Nat Cole. Remember John Gary? Ill bet that you dont remember Sergio Franchi. The biggest names and the names that you dont quite remember but all part of the excitement of San Francisco and all remembered by KABL music.

William Iver Moen was born Feb. 11, 1929, in Minnesota, where he grew up. His first career path was as a bank teller in Duluth, where he chatted up one of his customers, Vivienne McCormack. They married, and Moen made the unlikely transition from banker to disc jockey, first in Fargo, N.D., then in Duluth.

His big move was to a Top 40 station in Houston. He was instructed to use the handle Bill Scott so he was used to keeping his own name off the air when he got the job at KABL.

While playing what would come to be known as elevator music, Moen could make it sound like he was at the height of Nob Hill sophistication.

Moen punched his way through that tapioca-pudding format and became a personality,  Moens rival, Jim Dunbar of KGO, said when Moen made the Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame in 2006.

According to former KABL station manager Bill Clark, the process of elevating Moen from morning shift announcer into a full-blown personality and standard-bearer for the station was gradual. The idea was not to compete with Sherwood, who was untouchable, or KNBRs Frank Dill and his partner, Mike Cleary, who produced morning comedy and talk shows with music sprinkled in.

The only thing we were trying to do was to take advantage of Bills inherent talent, Clark said. His personality would not overpower the music but would contribute to the appeal of the station.

The talent on the AM dial was tremendous during Moens tenure. In addition to Sherwood, there was Jim Lange, Frank and Mike, Carter B. Smith, Ronn Owens, Gene Nelson. Moen topped them all when Evening Magazine on KPIX gave Moen the Bay Areas Most Popular Radio Personality Award after a vote by its viewers, in 1983.

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Those vying for the honor of cable car bell ringer of the year are still dead serious in their efforts, he announced in one of his more recent Moods. The lunchtime crowds back then were huge and enthusiastic, and the winner got worldwide attention. Well, somebody else (sponsors the bell-ringing competition), but the bells still ring in the temple of our memory at KABL music.

But Moen did not ride the cable cars or live in the city or even work there. He got up at 3:30 every morning to commute in the dark to a studio near the Bay Bridge toll plaza in Oakland from Novato, where he and Vivienne raised two kids, Tim and Heather. Vivienne Moen died in 2018.

Heather Moen recalled that whenever she would go to a friends house, she would be greeted by a parent with, I wake up to your dad every morning, she said. Even the cashiers at Safeway would comment when theyd see his name on a check.

In 1990, Moen was assigned a co-host, a South Bay shock jock named Trish Bell, to handle weather and traffic. The format switched from easy listening and standards to soft adult contemporary and was simulcast on FM, at 98.1. Soft and easy KABL was the slogan. In 1993, Moen was let go. The AM station evolved into KNEW business talk, and the FM station became KISQ, the Breeze.

By then Moen had bought a second home in Lake County, and he and Vivienne moved there. But he could not shake the habit of getting up while it was still dark out. So he figured he may as well get in a car and drive to work, which he did at KXBX for another 20 years.

Even in retirement, the Bill Moen Moods lived on, when David Jackson of the Bay Area Radio Museum asked Moen to join a Classic KABL Music station online in 2009. Moen contributed some 50 taped vignettes to air sporadically mixed in with the old music on KABLradio.com. They will be airing in concentration along with testimony from his radio contemporaries on the Bill Moen Tribute Show, from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Friday, May 20, and repeating from noon to 2 p.m. Sunday, May 22.

I knew I had landed the gig of a lifetime watching Bill and bantering with him on the KABL morning show, said Bell, who hosts a Sunday morning show on the Internet KABL. His sarcasm and wit was better than any talent Ive ever known or worked with. He is sorely missed.

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SamWhitingSF
WASHINGTON  The founder and executive chairman of the company that will put on this weekends iconic Bay to Breakers footrace in San Francisco has donated money to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who has spread false, bigoted and dangerous information about topics ranging from mass shootings to COVID vaccines to the 2020 election.

Known as much for tutus and chicken costumes as competitive running, the 12-kilometer Bay to Breakers was acquired three years ago by Capstone Event Group, which puts on running races mostly in the Carolinas. The race is taking place on Sunday. Capstones board chair is John Kane, a former North Carolina college football player who founded the company after becoming an endurance athlete, according to a profile in Midtown Magazine.

On Wednesday, a Twitter account that describes itself as revealing corporate political donors to ultra-conservative politicians tweeted that Kane had given thousands of dollars to Republicans including Taylor Greene, former President Donald Trump and Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida.

Federal Election Commission data reviewed by The Chronicle shows that a North Carolina-based John Kane of Capstone Event Group has donated $1,000 or more to several prominent Republicans since 2020, and gave the maximum donation of $2,800 to Trumps campaign. In 2021, Kane gave $1,000 to Greene, North Carolina Senate candidate Mark Walker and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, and $500 to a group supporting Gaetz. The FEC lists no donations for Kane since May of last year. Political donations are public record.

Neither Kane nor representatives for the company immediately responded to questions.

Gaetz and Greene have downplayed the events of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and have spread conspiracy theories about President Bidens win in the 2020 election. The Justice Department earlier opened an investigation into whether Gaetz violated sex trafficking laws, the New York Times reported last year.

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Greene has spread conspiracy theories including that Hillary Clinton murdered people, that the 2018 Parkland school shooting was staged and that a California wildfire was sparked by a space laser. She has promoted the QAnon mass delusion and has complained of vaccine Nazis. She has signaled support for violence against prominent Democrats, according a to a CNN review of her Facebook activity. And in recordings revealed by Politico in 2020, Greene said that the 2018 midterm election was part of an Islamic invasion of our government.

The Bay to Breakers footrace is one of the most beloved traditions in a progressive city. It dates back to 1912, one in a string of events intended to help reinvigorate the citys spirit after the 1906 earthquake.

While the event has always been apolitical, it describes itself as celebrating the personality of San Francisco. The Bay Area is an overwhelmingly Democratic region that symbolizes values including LGBTQ rights opposed by Republicans. San Franciscans voted for Biden over Trump 86% to 13% in 2020.

Tal Kopan (she/her) is The San Francisco Chronicles Washington correspondent. Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tal.kopan@sfchronicle.com, rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @talkopan, @rachelswan
A federal magistrate says immigrant parents and children who were separated at the U.S.-Mexico border by the Trump administration can sue the government for the harm they suffered.

The separations began in April 2018 under the zero-tolerance policy announced by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who said all adults crossing the border without authorization would be charged criminally. Because the government then prohibited placing migrant children in custody with their parents, the policy resulted in the removal of thousands of youngsters to far-away government shelters and other facilities. The stated purpose of the policy was to deter illegal immigration.

Two months later, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw of San Diego ordered the government to reunite the families, but many still remain separated. As of last November, according to the Biden administration, out of more than 3,900 children who had been taken from their parents, more than 1,700 had not yet been reunited.

President Biden ordered an end to family separations after taking office, but his Justice Department sought dismissal of a suit filed in San Francisco last June by three parents from Central America and their children, aged 6, 11 and 13, who were separated for weeks after crossing the border in 2018. The families, who now live in the Bay Area and have applied for political asylum, are seeking damages for emotional distress.

Late Tuesday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Kandis Westmore ruled that the suit could proceed.

These separations were by executive policy, not statute or regulation, Westmore wrote. She rejected Justice Department arguments that the prior administration had been authorized by law, or had believed it was authorized, to transfer immigrant children whose parents were no longer available to care for them.

The fact that the government is now attempting to evade liability for a policy that is still being unwound, as some children are still waiting to be reunited with their families, is not legally defensible, Westmore said. Unnecessarily separating asylum-seeking children from their parents is cruel and malicious.

She said the lawsuit does not challenge the governments authority to enforce immigration law or hold suspected lawbreakers in custody, only its forcible separation of families without explanation, and its refusal to inform parents about their childrens location or well-being.

Westmore also rejected the Justice Departments contention that immigration officials had made discretionary decisions about which families to separate and where to place them. While the government can be shielded from liability for some discretionary acts by its employees, she said, this was a policy prescribed by the Trump administration  and employees who carried it out had no choice.

Similar suits are pending in other federal courts. The Biden administration had been discussing a possible nationwide monetary settlement with the families, but ended those negotiations in December.

The court confirmed that the U.S. government must be held accountable for the intentional harm and abuse it inflicted on families separated at the border, said attorney Bree Bernwanger of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, which represents the families. The Biden administration needs to stop trying to defend Trumps cruel and unlawful family separation policy in court.

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The lawyers also provided a statement by Erindra C.M., a Guatemalan woman who had been separated from her 6-year-old daughter.

I will continue to fight to ensure that no family suffers the way my daughter and I have suffered, she said.

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko
California Gov. Gavin Newsom previewed a plan to lure businesses to California from states that ban abortion on Wednesday, as well as new proposed spending on abortions.

Newsom said his plan aims to solidify Californias leadership on abortion rights.

California will not stand idly by as extremists roll back our basic constitutional rights, he wrote in a statement. Were going to fight like hell, making sure that all women  not just those in California  know that this state continues to recognize and protect their fundamental rights.

The governors office said Newsom wants to update Californias business incentive programs to give special consideration to companies leaving states with anti-abortion or anti-LGBT laws. California currently offers hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks for businesses, including $180 million for a program called California Competes, which aims to attract and retain businesses in the Golden State.

Newsoms office wouldnt say which incentive programs would be affected. Spokesman Alex Stack said Newsom would give more details on Friday, when he unveils his full revised budget plan.

Newsom is also proposing to add $40 million to cover abortions for people who dont have insurance coverage for the procedure and $15 million for reproductive health organizations.

Newsoms initial plan for the 2022-23 budget, which he announced in January, already proposed $68 million in new spending to expand reproductive care. The issue has taken on new urgency since Politico published a leaked draft opinion that revealed the Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide.

California, where Democrats control both houses of the Legislature, will continue to allow abortions even if the Court overturns Roe. But many other states will ban the procedure, meaning California will see an influx of women seeking abortions.

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State lawmakers are already considering bills that aim to help people who travel to California for abortions and shield them from prosecution in their home states.

Newsoms new spending proposal also comes as the state continues to see higher-than-expected tax revenue, meaning Newsom and lawmakers have more money to spend on their top priorities. In January, Newsoms Department of Finance predicted a nearly $46 billion surplus, including $16 million in funds that must go to education and $21 billion that Newsom and lawmakers can spend as they choose. Senate Democrats said earlier this month that the total surplus will be much higher than Newsoms initial estimate.

The Legislature must agree to Newsoms plan for it to become law. Top lawmakers have already said they support spending more on abortion access.

Newsom and lawmakers must agree on a budget bill for the 2022-23 fiscal year by mid-June, but likely will continue to hash out details throughout the summer.

Sophia Bollag is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sophia.bollag@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SophiaBollag
Californias ban on selling semiautomatic rifles to anyone under 21 violates the constitutional right to bear arms for self-defense, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday, saying the arming of young adults is a tradition dating to the nation's founding.

Lawmakers enacted the ban after 19-year-old John Timothy Earnest used a semiautomatic rifle to kill a woman and wound three people at a synagogue in the San Diego suburb of Poway in April 2019. Earnest pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. The previous state law had allowed people ages 18 through 20 to purchase the weapons if they had a hunting license.

Gun advocates challenged the law and were rejected by U.S. District Judge M. James Lorenz of San Diego, who said the law was a valid public safety measure and did not prohibit 18-year-olds from possessing semiautomatic rifles, if they obtained the weapons from a close family member or served in law enforcement or the military.

On Wednesday, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco endorsed a portion of Lorenzs ruling that upheld a California law allowing 18-year-olds to purchase long guns  rifles that are not semiautomatic  only if they have hunting licenses. The three-judge panel said the law did not hamper the right of self-defense.

But a majority of the panel said U.S. history shows the authors of the Second Amendment meant to protect the right of young people to obtain and own firearms such as semiautomatic rifles.

America would not exist without the heroism of the young adults who fought and died in our revolutionary army, Judge Ryan Nelson said in the 2-1 ruling. Today we reaffirm that our Constitution still protects the right that enabled their sacrifice: the right of young adults to keep and bear arms.

From the outset, Nelson said, every state required all white males 18 or older to own guns and serve in the militia, a tradition from centuries of English law. And today, he said, a ban on purchasing the weapons imposes a severe burden on the core Second Amendment right of self-defense in the home.

California prohibits possession of handguns by anyone under 21. Although the ban on purchasing semiautomatic rifles does not apply to shotguns, Nelson said, those weapons are not as effective for self-defense as semiautomatics, which can be fired repeatedly without reloading, have a longer range and are easier to use. And transfers from family members are not available to young adults whose parents and grandparents lack such weapons, are unwilling to transfer them or have passed away.

The state also cited evidence that 18- to 20-year-olds made up less than 5% of Californias population but more than 15% of those arrested on suspicion of murder or manslaughter.

But Nelson said the figures did not justify the law because the arrestees amounted to only 0.25% of young adults. He was joined by Judge Kenneth Lee, who said in a separate opinion that Californias rationale, if upheld, could be used to prohibit men from owning firearms, since they are more likely than women to commit violent crimes.

Both Nelson and Lee were appointed by then-President Donald Trump. In dissent, Sidney Stein, a federal judge from New York temporarily assigned to the appeals court and an appointee of President Bill Clinton, said the California law was a valid measure aimed at promoting public safety and reducing gun violence.

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There is ample evidence that 18- to 20-year-olds are quicker to anger than older adults and more vulnerable to intense mood swings, Stein said.

The appeals court, which has 16 Democratic appointees among its 29 judges, has upheld other California gun laws, including a ban on gun magazines carrying more than 10 cartridges and restrictions on carrying concealed weapons in public. The Supreme Court, however, indicated in a November hearing that it was likely to strike down similar open-carry limits in New York state.

Attorney General Rob Bonta could ask the full appeals court to order a new hearing before a larger panel in the semiautomatic rifles case. Bontas office said it was reviewing Wednesdays ruling.

California will continue to take all necessary steps to prevent and reduce gun violence, the office said in a statement. We remain committed to defending Californias commonsense gun laws, which save lives and make our communities safer.

Attorney Esther Sanchez-Gomez of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which filed arguments supporting the state, called the ruling a dangerous misinterpretation of the Second Amendments protections and said it would worsen an already deadly problem.

Haley Proctor, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said, We are delighted that the Ninth Circuit has vindicated the rights of 18- to 20-year-old adults to keep and bear arms.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko
A global team led by San Francisco researchers unveiled Thursday the first draft of a human cell atlas  a groundbreaking endeavor to identify and map every cell type in the body, and thus provide a reference tool that could transform scientists grasp of molecular biology, including how they think about and treat disease.

The draft atlas incorporates nearly 500,000 cells from 24 tissues and organs, including the heart, lung, eye and uterus. Scientists identified more than 400 cell types, including some that were newly discovered, and described in unprecedented detail their molecular makeup and genetic function.

The Tabula Sapiens Consortium  a team of more than 160 scientists from UCSF, UC Berkeley, Stanford and other institutions around the world, and led by experts from San Franciscos Chan Zuckerberg Biohub  published a paper Thursday describing its work in the journal Science. The work was part of the global Human Cell Atlas effort founded in 2016 to classify the 37 trillion cells that make up the human body.

The atlas carries on the work done by the Human Genome Project, which compiled the first genetic blueprint of the human body more than 20 years ago, and which is still being expanded and refined. But the human genome, scientists involved in the atlas work said, wasnt a blueprint so much as a parts list  a catalog of human DNA, exact copies of which are carried in nearly every cell of the body.

Its how cells use that parts list that defines them. Gene expression  when and what types of genes are turned off and on  determines what role each cell plays in human development: whether it becomes a smooth muscle cell of the large intestine, an immune B cell from the lymph nodes, or an epithelial cell lining the airways in the lungs.

This is really a companion to the genome, that explains how the parts are used in all the different cells of the body, said Stephen Quake, senior author of the paper who is an applied physics professor at Stanford and president of the CZ Biohub Network.

And were not done, he said. No one yet knows exactly how many cell types there are in the human body  before the atlas, guesses ranged from 200 to perhaps 1,000. The Tabula Sapiens team identified 475 distinct types. Its atlas does not include cells from the brain and some other parts of the body.

The draft atlas was made available to scientists around the world several months ago, and already some are using it to improve their understanding of conditions from obesity to cancer. A Stanford scientist who studies a deadly type of brain tumor said hed referenced the atlas to help determine whether a cell type he hopes to target with drug therapy is found in other places in the body, which could lead to toxic side effects.

Bart Deplancke, a bioengineer at the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology, said he is eager to use the atlas to inform his work studying adipose tissue. Studying the diversity of cells found in the fatty tissue could help explain how obesity develops, and why some people with obesity dont experience related diseases like diabetes, while others do.

This work is truly groundbreaking. I consider this parallel to the human genome, which we thought was truly revolutionary, Deplancke said.

Weve been so successful in fighting disease, but for many tissues and organs, we still dont have a good understanding of which cell types make up these organs, he added. You wonder, how can we even treat disease if we dont know what the parts are that make up the organs we want to treat? This is what these reference atlases are intending to do, allow us to know which parts of our body are there.

Single-cell biology  studying the individual cells that form every part of the human body  has been enormously complicated, in large part because of how difficult it is to separate the cells from one another; Deplancke compared it to trying to identify the individual fruit particles that make up a smoothie. Its especially challenging to isolate rare cell types found in organs that are dominated by more common cells.

Until fairly recently, even once the cells were isolated scientists lacked the tools to efficiently sequence the genetic material in them. That technology was developed about a decade ago.

Scientists need live cells to sequence all of the genetic material. The Tabula Sapiens team collected tissues and organs from 18 recently deceased individuals, including 17 samples from one donor and 14 from another. The process of collecting the donor tissues was itself a monumental effort, requiring close coordination with Donor Network West, a nonprofit organ procurement organization for Northern California and Northern Nevada.

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For each donor, surgeons would first harvest organs that would be used for transplantation. Once that process was done, surgeons would remove tissues for the atlas work  in some cases, that meant lining up multiple surgeons, often in the middle of the night, with very specific expertise in removing the thymus gland, for example. Couriers would then rush the samples to laboratories around the Bay Area to begin the processes of separating cells and sequencing.

I would stand in the parking lot at Stanford, waiting for the cars to come in the middle of the night, said Bob Jones, a senior research engineer at Stanford who coordinated the various teams. Wed be busy from the first call until the middle of the next day. Many of us worked 36 hours straight to make sure all of this flowed.

Analyzing the data collected from all of the sequencing was another enormous challenge, starting with developing a standardized system for labeling each cell. Experts in computational data analysis spent hours with scientists who specialize in various tissues working out how to annotate the cells, said Angela Pisco, associate director of data science at the Biohub.

And the real work starts now, because we have the more complex components, but we are still only wanting to understand the puzzle of how the cells work together, Pisco said. What cells are next to each other? How do cells talk to each other? Why are some organs more packed with cells than others?

Three other papers were published Thursday as part of the Human Cell Atlas project. One paper describes a new tool for sequencing frozen cells, and two focus on immune cells.

What we hope is by using maps like these we can better understand how disease arises in the body, and where precisely disease arises, said Aviv Regev, head of Genentech research and early development at Roche, who is co-leader of the Human Cell Atlas project.

Erin Allday is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: eallday@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @erinallday
OTTAWA, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Canada will deploy a Canadian Armed Forces general officer and six staff officers to NATO's Multinational Division North Headquarters based in Adazi of Latvia, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Thursday.

According to a news release posted on the prime minister's website, Trudeau made the announcement after meeting with Latvia's Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins during the latter's visit to Canada from May 10 to 12.

The prime ministers stressed the importance of coordination among members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and discussed ways to further strengthen NATO's deterrence and defence measures in Eastern Europe, particularly in the Baltic region.

The prime ministers also expressed their shared support for Finland joining the NATO Alliance, the release said.

Canada currently has approximately 700 Canadian Armed Forces personnel leading NATO's enhanced Forward Presence Battle Group in Latvia as part of Operation REASSURANCE.

Created in March 2019, NATO's Multinational Division North Headquarters performs several vital roles, including support for the defence planning of Baltic nations, and the coordination of regional military activities, such as the activities of enhanced Forward Presence forces, according the release. 
Jana Asenbrennerova/Special to The Chronicle 2021

The state Supreme Court rejected a challenge by apartment owners Wednesday to a San Francisco law that bars them from sidestepping the citys limits on evictions by imposing huge rent increases in order to force tenants to leave.

The ordinance, passed in January 2019, prohibits property owners from increasing rents in amounts so large that they were clearly not intended to recoup the owners costs but were instead meant to displace the tenant, either voluntarily or by a suit for nonpayment of rent. In deciding whether the rent was being raised in bad faith, city officials are to consider whether the amounts were substantially above market rates and whether the increase was imposed within six months of an attempt to evict the tenant.
A loud crash shook Lena Ohta awake just after 11 p.m. on a rainy Thursday night in April. Startled out of bed, she peered through a window of her bungalow in Oaklands Maxwell Park neighborhood, and saw that a giant sport utility vehicle had rammed through her fence.

Police later said a driver had stolen white Yukon XL vehicle and careened down Ohtas street in a leafy enclave near Mills College, below Interstate 580. Barreling toward the side of Ohtas house, the motorist sideswiped her car, slammed through a chain-link fence and toppled the posts of a wooden fence she had installed six months earlier.

The wreck was just one in a steady and unexceptional stream of crises in Oakland that night: harrowing, but low on the priority list for the citys police officers.

When Ohta called 911, a dispatcher informed her she was number 70 in a swelling queue, Ohta said. Elsewhere in Oakland, a gunshot wound victim walked into a local hospital that evening, and within hours, officers would respond to a call about a baby that abruptly stopped breathing, according to police notifications reviewed by The Chronicle.

Even on a relatively quiet weekday, enough people dialed 911 to overload the citys fragile emergency-response system, creating backlogs for police and forcing residents to sit and wait. Ohtas ordeal seemed to illustrate a larger, ongoing predicament: To conserve resources, the citys dispatch center frequently stops sending officers to all but the most urgent calls for service.

They werent going to send someone unless there was an immediate need, she said. I thought, OK, I hope nobody is bleeding out.

Another six hours passed before two officers rolled up to Ohtas house, determined the Yukon was stolen, and told her the driver was long gone, so I shouldnt worry about it, Ohta said. They handed Ohta a slip of paper with a report number and left.

The cops are always showing up at your house at 3 a.m. when you called hours ago, said Paige Thomas, who lives in the San Antonio district and who described 911 in Oakland as a quagmire: long holds, overwhelmed dispatchers, police responses so slow that people eventually give up.

City officials acknowledge that Oaklands 911 system has long been inadequate, though its reached a critical point in recent years. An Alameda County civil grand jury investigation published in 2020 found that Oaklands underfunded and understaffed 911 communications center can not manage the volume of emergency and non-emergency calls it receives, putting the publics safety at risk.

Among the grand jurys findings were unsettling wait times to reach a 911 operator: In 2019, nearly 40% of callers could not reach an operator within the state standard time of 15 seconds, and more than 18,000 callers had to wait more than two minutes  a lag that likely prompted 13,800 callers to hang up, the report said.

Records obtained by The Chronicle show that from Jan. 1 through Nov. 23 last year, there were 115 instances in which Oaklands communications center got so overburdened with 911 calls that dispatchers had to triage, sending officers only to emergencies that presented an imminent danger.

This practice appears to be routine: At 8 p.m. on a recent Friday night, signs in the departments communications division in East Oakland instructed No 950 citywide  a police radio code signifying that officers should respond only to the most critical calls for crimes in progress.

Inside the center, 13 dispatchers sat at consoles, sifting through a backlog of 230 calls, many held over from the night before when police were tied up with a massive sideshow.

Communications manager Eugenia Oliver stood before a set of screens resembling the frenetic monitors in a stock exchange: one showed all the backed-up calls, another the 41 priority calls for serious incidents, such as a death at 40th Avenue and International Boulevard that drew five officers and a lieutenant to the scene, or the carjacking in West Oakland, or the alleged kidnapping in Fruitvale.

Another screen showed activations of Oaklands ShotSpotter gunfire detectors: At 8:16 p.m., someone shot 15 rounds from a high-capacity firearm on Coolidge Avenue. In East Oakland, residents began calling to report gunfire nine minutes later.

All this, and theres probably nobody to break, Oliver said, shaking her head, fearing that at the moment she had no officers available to help the carjacking victim. The center is painfully understaffed, with 59 positions filled out of 77 budgeted, while the Police Department also grapples with what some officials have deemed a dire staffing shortage: As of May 4, the department had 669 officers, or 15 for every 10,000 people  commensurate with Richmond but significantly less than the 26 officers per capita in San Francisco.

Oliver said shes trying to hire and train people as quickly as possible, but many people who apply quickly discover they cannot bear the grueling work and emotional intensity of the job, and some leave for cities with fewer emergencies.

This year, the center fielded 86,718 calls by the end of April  up from 68,471 over the same period last year. Oliver expected to surpass a million 911 calls at the end of the year.

Santiago Mejia/The Chronicle

Its clear that were responding to more shootings and more homicides, more serious calls, more violent calls, more calls where people are injured, Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong said in an interview. He noted that each homicide might require as many as nine officers to manage the scene and the investigation for several hours  essentially dedicating a third of the citywide patrols to one incident. Since onset of the pandemic, homicides have ticked up: by 20% at the end of 2020, and another 20% at the end of 2021.

As a result, Armstrong said, police scramble to manage other emergency calls. You can see how calls could begin to stack, Armstrong said.

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This department should be somewhere around 1,100 officers in order to meet the demand of calls for service, as well as violence in the community, Armstrong said, suggesting he wants to nearly double the police force.

While the chief rallies for additional resources, Ohta said she wonders whether the department could use its budget more effectively. Others put the onus on elected officials. Heather Hawke, a former Redwood Heights resident, said that in December 2020 she tried to report a flurry of gunshots in her neighborhood, and waited on hold for nine minutes between two 911 calls before giving up. She criticized the citys political leaders for not explaining why this is happening.

Anna Wong, another San Antonio resident, said she became disenchanted with Oaklands police services after an incident in April 2020, in which a man drove up in a van while she was sitting at a bus stop, and shouted for Wong to get in. She recognized the van, which had been circling the blocks around her home for two months.

When Wong got on the bus and called the police, an officer told her she had to file a report in person. So she went to the downtown police station on her lunch break that day, only to be directed to a phone in the lobby, and told to call the non-emergency line. After waiting on hold for 45 minutes, Wong gave up.

There were a bunch of people in line behind me waiting for the phone, Wong said, adding that she returned to the station the next day to repeat the experience. Once she got home she called the non-emergency line again and requested that an officer take her report. Hours later, at 3 a.m., an officer knocked on her door.

As police continue to struggle, Oakland officials began testing an alternative to 911: a team of medical technicians run by the Fire Department, to handle non-emergency calls related to homelessness, disturbances or erratic behavior that may be symptomatic of a mental health crisis.

Launched last month, the team spent its first month getting oriented in the field, and hasnt yet released a phone number to call for service. At this point, it is still unclear how many calls the team will divert from the Police Department.

Miya Muraki, who lives near Ohta, realized after a petrifying experience in March that law enforcement wont always come when people need them. It took police roughly 40 minutes to respond to Murakis 911 call about an intruder at her back gate, who eventually hopped the fence in to the yard.

Although police ultimately confronted the man, and Muraki said she was impressed with the officers calm demeanor when they detained him, she still shudders at what could have happened while she waited for them to arrive.

I call it the terrifying fire drill, Muraki said. I learned that there is no button to make help come right away.

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan
The Oakland school board voted late Wednesday to select a replacement to fill a vacant members seat rather than hold a special election in the coming months.

Currently, the board has just six members following the sudden resignation earlier this month of Shanthi Gonzales, the outspoken board president who slammed the teachers union and some fellow board members in a departure note.

In their first regular meeting since the resignation, the remaining members decided to start interviewing candidates and select one by the end of June.

The vacancy comes amid a turbulent time for the East Bay school district, including a recent one-day teacher strike over school closures. In addition, the board continues to grapple with years of consistent overspending, which has resulted in state and county intervention. The district remains at risk of not being able to pay its bills in the coming years.

Gonzales, who served just over seven years on the board, moved to Humboldt County days after her resignation. She had eight months remaining on her four-year term. She was not expected to run for re-election in November.

Gonzales was among the majority on the board approving 11 school closures and mergers in the next two years. She and other board members faced a significant backlash, including protests at their homes and places of worship, vandalism and threats.

I need to be in a place where people treat each other better, she told The Chronicle in an exclusive interview the day of her resignation on May 2. Frankly, it is traumatic to be an elected official in Oakland, and I need time to recover from that.

Gonzales blasted dysfunctional board meetings in her resignation letter to the community.

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The resignation could have long-term implications for the political leanings on the board, with the current majority supporting action to prevent financial collapse, including closing schools. Other board members, currently in the minority, say that they dont believe Oakland Unified has a budget problem despite state and county assertions, and that there is no need to close schools or take other drastic actions.

Two board members were absent at Wednesdays meeting. The vote was 4-0 to appoint a replacement.

District staff estimated the cost of a special election could exceed $400,000, which the district would have to pay for, while appointing someone would carry little to no cost.

The replacement will represent District Six, which is in East Oakland, finishing out Gonzales term, which ends in January. The seat will be up for a vote in the regular election in November.

Jill Tucker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jtucker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jilltucker
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More than a year after a bust of Breonna Taylor was vandalized and went missing from downtown Oakland, a new and larger sculpture will make its debut this month.

Artist Leo Carson spent the past 17 months creating a larger and more durable sculpture with bronze and steel after his original ceramic bust was smashed and subsequently disappeared in December 2020 from the corner of Broadway and Telegraph Avenue.

The vandalism made national headlines and was described by Carson at the time as an act of racist intimidation and an attack on the Black Lives Matter movement and Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician who was fatally shot by Louisville, Ky., police when officers entered her apartment during a botched raid. The killings in 2020 of Taylor, George Floyd and other Black Americans by police sparked outrage, worldwide protests and renewed calls to end police violence against Black people.

The vandalism also underscored the recurring defacement of public art in the Bay Area in 2020.

As the two-year anniversary of Floyds May 25 killing and what would have been Taylors 29th birthday on June 5 approach, Carson plans to install a new sculpture.

The 3-foot bust, which incorporates pieces of the original ceramic artwork and its pedestal, will be installed May 22 in Latham Square, the same location where the first bust was erected, after Carson crowdfunded for nearly two years. An official ceremony to follow the installation is in the works, said Carson, an art teacher at Skyline High School in the Oakland hills.

Now Playing: A video shows a new and larger bust of Breonna Taylor by Oakland artist Leo Carson. More than a year after the original sculpture was vandalized and went missing from downtown Oakland, Carson plans to install the new version on May 22 in Latham Square, the same location where the first bust was erected. Video: Provided by Leo Carson

The remaining money from the GoFundMe campaign  which Carson estimated to be about $6,000 of the nearly $28,000 he received  will be donated to Taylors family, he said.

I really needed to make this good, Carson told The Chronicle. Because its for Breonna Taylor, its for the (Black Lives Matter) movement and everyone who has donated.

The statue is dedicated to the victims of police violence and all those who are fighting to end oppression, he said.

Carson said he recognizes that the new sculpture could be vandalized again, but he is very prepared and confident that it will withstand major damage as it is made of more durable material and is twice as tall as the original piece.

The words Say her name remain on the new artwork with more words underneath Taylors name commemorating her and the statutes history.

When the original bust was vandalized in 2020, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf tweeted it was a vicious attack against the light + justice sought in Breonna Taylors name.

Oakland will not tolerate acts of hatred, she tweeted.

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A police report was filed at the time, and Oakland police began an investigation.

Officer Kevin Godchaux told The Chronicle on Thursday that investigators reviewed surveillance footage near Latham Square and spoke with witnesses, but police werent able to find suspects.

With the new sculpture, Carson said he hopes to continue shining light on police violence.

He said some changes have happened since the killing of Taylor, such as legislation in Louisville that bans or restricts no-knock search warrants, known as Breonnas Law. Still, he said, its not enough.

A lot of promises were made about defunding the police that never happened, he said. If we keep allowing promises instead of action, then I think were going to be stuck.

Jessica Flores (she/her) is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jessica.flores@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jesssmflores
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Golden State Cider, the hard cider whose blue-white-and-orange cans are a ubiqutious presence throughout the Bay Area, has been acquired by Chris and Ariel Jackson, owners of the craft brewery Seismic. A purchase price was not disclosed.

The move unites two fast-growing Sonoma County alcohol brands, both of which operate tasting rooms in Sebastopols Barlow complex. Chris Jackson is the son of Barbara Banke and the late Jess Jackson, who founded Jackson Family Wines, one of the most powerful wine companies in the U.S..

Just as his family built brands like Kendall-Jackson Chardonnay and La Crema Chardonnay into nationally available, household-name wines, Jackson said he wants to bring Golden State Cider  currently sold only in California, Oregon, Washington and parts of Nevada  into every state.

Golden State Cider is the top-selling hard cider in Northern California, according to Nielsen data, selling 600,000 cases last year. It produces several versions, including the flagship Mighty Dry, plus flavors like Radical Paradise, made with pineapple juice. Apples are sourced from California and the Pacific Northwest, and the ciders are fermented with Champagne yeast.

Provided by Golden State Cider

Though Golden State Cider and Seismic Brewing will continue to operate as separate brands, maintaining their separate tasting rooms in the Barlow, there will be some collaborations, said Jackson and Golden State Cider CEO and partner Chris Lacey. Experimentation with hopped ciders is a priority, for example.

We really see an opportunity to talk about both cider and beer from a terroir perspective, and a Sonoma County perspective, said Lacey.

Jolie Devoto and Hunter Wade co-founded Golden State Cider as an outgrowth of their familys Devoto Orchards, a longtime Gravenstein apple grower in Sebastopol. The family previously had a cider label called Devoto, consisting of ciders in traditional 750ml bottles. They started canning some cider under the Golden State name in 2016. The Golden State cans took off, and they soon retired the Devoto brand entirely.

Now that theyve sold the business, the founders will move on, but Lacey will remain on board under the new ownership. Jackson has made Lacey a partner in Sonoma Craft, the holding company that encompasses both the beer and cider businesses.

John Storey/Special to the Chronicle 2016

We were one of the first to do cans, said Lacey. Now everyones moving into cans. The rise of the gluten-free movement helped drive the ciders growth too, positioning cider as a naturally gluten-free alternative to beer.

Seismic Brewing opened in 2016. It was notable not only because of its owner  a scion of one of the most famous local wine families, branching out into beer  but also because of its investment in sustainability. Jackson installed high-tech equipment at the Santa Rosa brewery to make its water and energy use more efficient.

The brewery, which makes about 150,000 cases of beer annually, has won acclaim in the years since, recently earning gold medals at both the World Beer Cup and the Great American Beer Festival for its Tremor lager.

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Local agriculture plays a role in the conceptions of both, Jackson said of Seismic and Golden State Cider. Just as the cider supports the historically significant apple orchards of west Sonoma County, he said, Seismic has tried to use hyper-local ingredients whenever possible, including barley and hops grown within 10 miles of the brewery.

Provided by Golden State Cider

Jackson has also gotten Seismic in the news lately for another reason: He filed an antitrust lawsuit against the largest U.S. beer distributor, Reyes Holdings, claiming that the distributors contracts are excessively onerous for beer producers and prevent them from switching to competing distributors.

The consolidation of beer distributors has been a large concern in recent years for craft breweries. Jackson said he was glad to be able to use his financial resources to draw attention to some of the fundamental issues in the consolidation of distribution in California and nationally as well.

Esther Mobley is The San Francisco Chronicles senior wine critic. Email: emobley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Esther_mobley
When I first got wind that Chuck Wagner and family, of Napa's Caymus winery, were building a massive new tasting compound in Suisun Valley, which I wrote about this week, I was surprised.

Suisun Valley, if you haven't heard of it (few wine lovers have!) is a small area adjacent to Napa Valley, in neighboring Solano County. It's been an American Viticultural Area for 40 years, but has just six wineries  well, seven now. None has widespread recognition. The arrival of a globally famous brand like Caymus in such a low-profile wine region might initially seem confusing. Why go to Suisun when you've already got a home in Rutherford?

But we shouldn't be surprised by these sorts of moves anymore. The Caymus-Suisun story is merely one example of an increasingly common migration pattern in California. As Napa, the center of American wine, grows more crowded and more expensive, vintners are pushing out to the perimeters. And that creates opportunities, as well as challenges, for the perimeters themselves.

In fact, I think it's safe to say that the satellite-wine-region story has become a veritable sub-genre of California wine writing.

It's the story of Livermore, a region rich in wine history that's struggling to be taken seriously. Of Lodi, where top winemakers priced out of Napa are buying vineyards. Of Lake County, where a Napa grape mogul is trying to create a market for luxury Cabernet.

Sometimes the forces pushing vintners to lesser-known wine regions are economic. Vineyard land in Napa Valley, after all, can cost more than $300,000 an acre, experts have told us. Who can afford that? Other times, the motivation is environmental, which usually means moving closer and closer to the Pacific Ocean, whether that's in San Luis Obispo, Point Reyes or Bodega Bay.

Climate change does not seem to have factored into the Caymus-Suisun formulation as much as bureaucracy did. Napa Valley isn't merely expensive  it's also strictly regulated, requiring winery and vineyard owners to jump through a lot more hoops in order to do business. Wagner has never been shy about expressing his belief that Napa's rules for wineries are excessive, and he told me he was drawn to Solano County in part because of its more business-friendly atmosphere.

Yet when I spoke with him, he also seemed drawn to the openness of Suisun Valley in a more elemental way, as if he's settling the unspoiled wilderness. Last week, as Wagner drove me up a steep hill at Caymus-Suisun in an ATV so that I could get a good view of the valley, he addressed this explicitly. "California is still an open menu," he said. "It hasn't been fully exploited. So many areas with coastal conditions and good soils are still unknown."

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He's exploited some parts of it already, notably Monterey County's Santa Lucia Highlands, where he established Mer Soleil winery in 1988. (Not that he was the first to get there; a winemaking renaissance had begun in the Santa Lucia Highlands in the previous decade.)

As Wagner waxed, several times, about how much Suisun reminded him of "how Napa used to be," it wasn't hard to sense his deep nostalgia for the Napa of his childhood. His family farmed prunes. His dad made homemade wine. Times were simpler. Napa was still an open menu.

Now, Napa is very much a fixed menu: The soils are mapped, the microclimates known, the ideal grape varieties chosen, and the prices set. And as long as it remains so, wine writers like me will have plenty of material for keeping alive the satellite-wine-region subgenre.
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The superintendent of Hayward schools has emerged as the top pick for San Franciscos new superintendent, ending a months-long national search for a leader to take over the struggling district as it seeks to end more than two years of controversy and upheaval.

The school board announced Matt Wayne as the sole finalist at a news conference Thursday morning after a lengthy process, but the board would still need to finalize the contract.

Board President Jenny Lam said the seven members all agreed on selecting Wayne and that the decision comes at a critical moment for the district.

The last two years have tested the city. These years have taken a deep toll on everyone, she said. But today is a day to look forward.

Wayne said he recognizes that San Francisco schools have been through a great deal of struggle in the past two years and he is coming into the job with open eyes.

Im coming in knowing the challenges, he said before the announcement. Its the challenge Im seeking.

Wayne, who has led the East Bay district for five years, spent 20 years in Bay Area schools, as a principal in San Pablo and lecturer at UC Berkeley, before joining SFUSD in 2010 as executive director of instructional support for two years.

He moved on to Hayward, which has about 18,000 students, as assistant superintendent 10 years ago and then into the top job there in 2016.

April Oquenda, president of the Hayward school board, described Wayne as a collaborative leader, frequently visiting school sites, talking to teachers and staff, and attending community events.

Wayne became Haywards superintendent at a tumultuous time for the district. The school board had fired its previous superintendent for purported misuse of public funds and an explosive temper. When Wayne entered the role, initially on an interim basis, he provided a lot of stability right away for our district in a time of great upheaval, Oquenda said.

She said he provided stability and set everything back on the right course, getting us onto a path of rebuilding trust.

Lam said that it was immediately clear that Wayne is focused on learning and whats best for students.

When you sit down with Matt and learn what drives him, his commitment to children comes out clearly, she said.

Mayor London Breed congratulated Wayne.

San Francisco should be a national leader when it comes to educating our kids, she said. As a graduate of our citys public schools, I know how much work still needs to be done to get us where we need to be. I look forward to working with Dr. Wayne as we work to get our school district back on track.

Wayne replaces outgoing Superintendent Vincent Matthews, who will retire at the end of June.

The selection is not a flashy pick by the citys school board, which represents one of the largest districts in the state, but one that taps a Bay Area school leader with experience and knowledge about navigating state policy and politics. More than 60 people applied and 18 candidates were identified as potential matches, according to the district.

Wayne, 48, lives in Berkeley with his wife and son, who attends El Cerrito High School. His daughter is a junior in college.

He will be the first white superintendent in San Francisco since 1985, when Robert Alioto left the districts top job. The district is diverse, with 34% Asian American, 30% Hispanic, 14% white and 7% two or more races, 6% African American, with Filipino, Pacific Islander, American Indian and unknown accounting for the remainder of students.

The city overall, however, is 40% white, 36% Asian American, 15% Hispanic and nearly 6% Black, according to U.S. census data.

After a contract is finalized, the new superintendent will step into a district of 49,000 students and 10,000 employees that faces several significant challenges, including declining enrollment. Wayne will continue to navigate a budget crisis, with an initial $125 million shortfall projected for the upcoming school year and a $140 million deficit the year after.

Wayne will take over in the midst of a significant reorganization, which will include filling several positions after the resignations or retirement of several top-level administrators, as well as nearly a dozen principal spots. He will also navigate a shift on the school board, which includes three mayoral appointees who filled vacancies after a successful recall in February. Hell also preside over the rollout of a new school assignment system for elementary schools and the likely reopening of the debate over admission to the academically prestigious Lowell High School.

Wayne has faced some similar issues in Hayward, including declining enrollment. His current district has lost about 3,000 students since 2015, bringing with it fiscal concerns related to a potential decrease in state funding. The East Bay districts school board voted in November to close two elementary schools at the end of this academic year to address the loss of students and fiscal issues.

At the time, Wayne cited a $15 million shortfall and $900 million in needed facilities repairs.

School closures could also be a divisive issue in San Francisco in the coming years, but Wayne said hes not coming into San Francisco with any set agenda and will be in listening mode and focused on helping the system recover from the pandemic and the divisive politics.

One main priority, he said, was recognizing what weve been through and creating some space for healing and bringing the community together.

At times, the boards relationship with Matthews has been tense, leaving many wondering who would want to step into the job after such upheaval, yet the new hire offers the district and its leadership something of a fresh start.

District officials in Hayward cited their support of the overall climate of the district during Waynes time as assistant superintendent and interim superintendent when selecting him to take the role permanently in 2018.

He was named a regional 2021 Superintendent of the Year by the Association of California School Administrators.

Matt is a no-nonsense educator, said Phil Halperin, an education advocate who has chaired previous parcel tax and bond campaigns. Thats what we need.

The immediate response to Wayne from parents and community groups was positive.

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Im very excited, said Cassondra Curiel, president of the United Educators of San Francisco. So far everything seems really, really promising.

Wayne earned an undergraduate degree in rhetoric and a doctorate in educational leadership from UC Berkeley.

He has the right background for San Francisco in this moment and the benefit of full board support, said district parent Patrick Wolff, who is also the executive director of Families for San Francisco.

I think (a new superintendent) does give a fresh start, he said. Theres a lot of work to do, but it feels like everyone is focused on what matters, which is a great education for kids.

Matthews oversaw the district for the past five years, returning to the city where he grew up, earned his doctorate and began his career as a teacher.

Matthews took over the leadership as the district navigated a new teachers contract and the affordability crisis for educators and families who were increasingly fleeing San Franciscos high cost of living.

The districts troubles only increased over his tenure, with the unprecedented upheaval of a global pandemic, a failed school renaming effort, a board recall, declining enrollment, a budget crisis resulting in the appointment of a state fiscal expert, and a payroll debacle that has left educators and other staff with error-riddled paychecks.

Frustrated by a school board that micromanaged staff and failed to heed his recommendations, Matthews initially announced his retirement in 2021, but agreed to remain if the board stayed out of administrative decisions, focused on the budget shortfall and school reopenings while treating everyone with civility and respect, conditions codified in an amendment to his contract.

Yet, controversy continued, with a successful school board recall of Alison Collins, Gabriela Lopez and Faauuga Moliga upending the district, resulting in the mayoral appointment of three new members, all of whom are SFUSD parents.

At the announcement, Wayne acknowledged how rocky the last few years have been.

I think we need to be real, he said. Its been hard and people are tired.

Wayne said he is ready to help the community come together and hes eager to focus on the classroom and figure out how to do whats right for the kids and how to help them on their educational journey.

Im excited, he said. I know how special a place this is.

San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Ricardo Cano contributed to this report.

Jill Tucker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jtucker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jilltucker
San Francisco police may soon be prohibited from stopping drivers for tinted windows, expired license plate tags and other low-level violations as part of a proposed policy overhaul intended to curb racially biased policing.

The draft policy, which was expected to be presented at Wednesdays Police Commission meeting, comes as the department continues to post striking racial disparities in the rates of people stopped and searched, despite substantial reform measures enacted over the last several years.

The proposal is intended to ban whats known as pretextual stops  when an officer pulls over a driver for a minor traffic violation as an excuse to search them for items like drugs or guns. While police say pretextual stops have helped officers confiscate dangerous contraband, the tactic has been criticized by criminal justice reform advocates as a driver of disproportionate arrests for Black people.

Police Commissioner Max Carter-Oberstone, who is hammering out the new guidelines alongside Police Chief Bill Scott, said racial disparities were most pronounced in stops for ticky-tack offenses that dont have any real public safety implication. These infractions include things like having a broken taillight or fuzzy dice hanging from a rearview mirror.

Officers rely almost entirely on their own discretion in enforcing such equipment violations, Carter-Oberstone said, which is different than responding to calls for service or crimes in action.

One solution, Carter-Oberstone said, could be to limit that discretion, which can lead to police bias.

Step one is to say, Here are a list of low-level traffic offenses. ... These are offenses that pose no threat to public safety, Carter-Oberstone explained. Were just going to say, From here on out, police officers cannot make a stop to enforce these offenses.

In a statement, Scott said the Police Department was committed to reviewing existing policies, like the one on traffic stops, and propose revisions that address disparities and bias policing.

Addressing traffic enforcement and limiting (pretextual) stops with a balance of carrying out public safety duties is critical to breaking any potential patterns of bias policing and impacts to communities of color, Scott said.

The amended policy would still allow police to enforce vehicle offenses  just not by stopping motorists in the moment. Police could still send a ticket to someone in the mail or leave one on a parked car.

Exceptions would also be made if the person in the car matches the description of a violent suspect or is wanted for a crime.

This is not about stopping enforcement, Carter-Oberstone said. Its about limiting unnecessary interaction between law enforcement and citizens.

Tracy McCray, acting president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, said the citys officers focus on behavior when making traffic stops to enforce the vehicle code, not anything else.

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The reality is routine traffic stops can lead to removing illegal guns off of our streets and given the level of gun violence our city is experiencing; these traffic stops literally save lives, McCray said in a statement. If the new policy prohibits our officers from enforcing traffic laws, more guns will be in the hands of criminals and there will be more pedestrian and bicycle riders injured.

Criminal justice reform advocates in San Francisco and around the country in recent years have enacted policies that limit polices use of pretextual stops. Los Angeles and Philadelphia have severely limited the practice, and San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin prohibits prosecutors from charging cases where contraband is discovered through a pretextual stop.

Berkeley police have also eliminated many low-level police stops as part of a broader effort to reduce the type of police interactions that have been deadly for people of color.

The draft policy would additionally limit how police can search or question people, and ban stops for people for certain crosswalk or bicycle infractions.

After Wednesdays meeting, commissioners are planning to hold public listening groups, weigh input from the department and the Department of Police Accountability, and potentially take a vote on the proposal by fall.

Megan Cassidy is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: megan.cassidy@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @meganrcassidy
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On January 4, 1996, Christopher Hervey was stabbed multiple times and killed in his Santa Ana apartment. His girlfriend, Jade Benning, told the police that a Black man had forced entry into the apartment on the 2200 block of N. Broadway Street and stabbed the victim.

Now, Benning is behind bars as a suspect in the Hervey's killing after an anonymous letter tipped off police, according to a news release from the Santa Ana Police Department.
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A terrifying scene unfolded Wednesday night as a wind-whipped wildfire tore through a high-end subdivision near Laguna Beach, Calif., destroying at least 20 homes. Firefighters continued to battle the 200-acre blaze Thursday morning and as of 7:30 a.m. there was no containment.

The Orange County Fire Authority will be giving an update on the fire at 8:30 a.m. and a live feed will be available on Facebook.
Its easy to get lost wandering through Prestons Candy & Ice Cream, where a series of chocolate-covered almond clusters, crunchy peanut brittle and other sweets are perfectly stored within a glass display. Behind the counter is owner Irene Preston, a spry and petite 77-year-old, who knows the ins and outs of every piece of candy the store makes in-house.

Prestons Candy, a 75-year-old neighborhood gem, is as old-school as they come with its selection of handmade confections prepared in copper kettles, its checkered floor tiles and a large neon sign welcoming customers at the entrance. Lately, a new product called Irenes Rescue Box has been at the stores forefront, and it's one Preston hopes will keep Prestons Candy moving steadily for decades to come.

The boxes that we're doing right now are called rescue boxes, Preston said, as she fastens red ribbons around a dozen cartons. It's about a pound of candy. We had to figure out what we could do to get the word out that we need help ... so that's why it's called a rescue box. Our goal is that we can be able to sell enough that we can keep afloat.

Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE

Ben Lambright, who is a writer and runs an educational nonprofit, helped spearhead the rescue boxes, as first reported by Palo Alto Online, that went on sale March 30. Not long after moving from New York to Burlingame, Lambright and his fiancee discovered Prestons Candy after being struck by its old-fashioned charm. Lambright felt as if he was stepping back in time and quickly noticed Prestons admirable independent streak. During one visit last December, Lambright overheard Preston share that her business was in dire straits, and it motivated him to conjure up ways that he could get Prestons Candy back on track.

I realized [Preston] was in pretty deep with rent and electricity bills ... so I told her we'd set her up [with a] website and we'd sell her products, Lambright said. She wasn't doing online business and was entirely dependent on people coming into the store. Then, we started the rescue boxes to sort of germ up some support. Nothing is better than getting a surprise collection of treats mailed to your door.

Like many restaurants and businesses in the food industry, sales at Prestons Candy plummeted when the store temporarily closed at the height of the pandemic. Prestons Candy eventually reopened only to find fewer customers making in-store purchases.

Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE A selection of handmade candies at Preston's Candy in Burlingame. (Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE) A selection of handmade candies at Preston's Candy in Burlingame. (Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE)

The ones that did return found many top-selling treats at Prestons Candy unavailable due to a full-time candy maker leaving or because of supply chain mishaps. For months, Preston couldnt make her chocolate-dipped orange peels when the special rind, shipped from France, was stuck in a cargo ship. The peanut brittle was likewise affected when Preston started making fewer batches because the puncture-proof bags needed to store the salty-sweet confections were unavailable, even though she ordered them six months ago. To date, Preston has yet to see a single bag.

[Its] little things like that, but it impacts everything that we do ... and I don't think people recognize how it impacts what they want, Preston said. I have a lot of people coming in and saying, You've always made this, you've always had that. Why don't you have this anymore? I have list-candies that I haven't been able to make for two years because of ingredients or because I don't have the right staff to make it.

Of all Prestons hardships, Lambright believes that the rescue boxes are the first step in clearing up pending bills. Since their launch, along with the website, Lambright said that Prestons Candy has sold about 200 boxes, priced at $36.40, so far. Initially, he believed that the boxes would only yield about $500 worth of revenue, but he was astonished when the initiative took off and customers, both local and distant fans, caught wind and began showing their support.

Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE

We sold out of the entire contents of the first one, which was peanut brittle, truffles, caramels and a couple of our candy bars, Lambright said. People want to buy the rescue boxes, so I'm trying to get Irene as much cash as she can out of that. But the next phase for me is to run a program I'm calling Prestons Forever, which is a subscription service so that we can stabilize her income and allow her to predict inventory.

Lambright said that safeguarding the longevity of Prestons Candy is crucial, especially given its long history in the Bay Area. In 1946, Art Preston, of no relation to Irene Preston, opened his namesake store with a GI loan worth $5,000 when he returned from World War II, according to his obituary. Art Preston knew he would become a candy maker during his teen years and managed to take an apprenticeship with San Francisco chocolatier, Douglas Shaw, just before the war. Upon his return, his store debuted at 1170 Broadway in Burlingame and he was gifted a couple of copper kettles and a gas stove by his mentor, Shaw.

Irene Preston said that she was introduced to Prestons Candy about 20 years before she and her former husband purchased it. During her first visit in the late 1970s, Irene Preston said she noticed the true craftsmanship of Art Prestons creations, which made her feel as if she were tasting chocolate for the first time. Art Preston continued to operate his business until 1997, when he decided to retire and sold his business to Irene Preston that same year. Irene Preston, who lacked a conventional candy-making background, said she trained with Art Preston for three years before she mastered the trade and eventually began to train her own staff years later.

Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE

I know all the recipes, Preston shared. I have a black book with the recipes he developed for over 50 years. I call it the bible.

Since Preston became owner, shes upheld the same technical methods of old-time confectioners, even if that means some candies take longer to produce. And thats something her longtime customers have come to treasure about Prestons Candy.

There's something so great about what Irene does, Lambright added. I couldn't tell you how many times someone has come in and told Irene to mechanize. We'll just show you how to make a production line. She only wants to make things by hand, and I really respect that. She's just in here at 77 years old and will [work] seven days a week. It's kind of quintessential America here.

Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE Chocolatier Javier Santiago, upper left, shows off some of the candy he makes, and Georgia Piotter, lower right, helps out behind the chocolate counter at Preston's Candy & Ice Cream in Burlingame, Calif. on May 10, 2022. (Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE) Chocolatier Javier Santiago, upper left, shows off some of the candy he makes, and Georgia Piotter, lower right, helps out behind the chocolate counter at Preston's Candy & Ice Cream in Burlingame, Calif. on May 10, 2022. (Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE)

Back at the store, Irene makes her way through a towering case of rescue boxes when she pauses to guide her cashier, a local high school student, through a recent transaction. She shared that many students have taken up their first gig at Prestons Candy over the years. It brings her joy when she thinks about the different ways her business has touched the lives of locals through the decades. As she reflects on the past month, Preston said she feels grateful for the rescue box sales, which helped her pay rent in April. She also hopes that the next batch of rescue boxes will continue the momentum.

We have all these customers that go back for so long that if they could help us out a little bit, it might be able to keep us going, Preston said. We're really an old-time confectioner and there are few left in California.

Prestons Candy & Ice Cream, at 1170 Broadway Ave., Burlingame is open daily, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Customers can purchase rescue boxes in-store or order online.
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BRUSSELS (AP)  The European Commission proposed helping Ukraine export its wheat and other grains by rail, road and river to get around a Russian blockade of Black Sea ports, which is preventing those critical supplies from reaching parts of the world at risk of food insecurity.

The European Unions executive arm said the plan aims to establish alternative routes and ease congestion between borders that also should facilitate getting humanitarian aid and other goods into the war-torn country.

Russias invasion of Ukraine has provoked disruptions of global food supplies, with both countries two of the worlds biggest exporters of wheat, barley and sunflower oil. The blockade of Ukrainian ports has been particularly harmful, having accounted for 90% of grain and oilseed exports before the war, the commission said.

Twenty million tons of grains have to leave Ukraine in less than three months using the EU infrastructure, said Adina Valean, EU commissioner for transport. This is a gigantesque challenge, so it is essential to coordinate and optimize the logistic chains, put in place new routes, and avoid, as much as possible, the bottlenecks.

The potential loss of affordable grain supplies that Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia rely on has raised the risk of global food shortages and political instability in countries where many people already were not getting enough to eat. The disruptions from the war have further raised food prices, with the high cost of fertilizers  of which Russia is a top exporter  and cooking oils further squeezing the global food chain.

The head of the European Investment Bank said this week that Ukraine is sitting on 8 billion euros worth of wheat it cant export.

In addition to the port blockade, Ukraines Foreign Ministry has accused Russia of stealing grain and trying to sell some on global markets. It cited official estimates indicating that Russia already may have stolen 400,000 to 500,000 metric tons of grain that cost over $100 million. It asserted that practically all ships leaving Sevastopol with a load of grain are carrying the grain stolen from Ukraine, referring to a major port on the Black Sea.

To get Ukraine's food supplies to the world, Europe is looking to increase shipments by railroads and trucks. Trains have started carrying loads of grain to Austria and Germany via other EU countries but amount to only a fraction of the Black Sea port capacity.

A key challenge is the diverging rail gauge widths between Ukraine and EU countries. Since Ukrainian railroad cars dont fit with most of the EU network, goods need to be transferred to trucks or other rail cars adapted to the system.

The EU says the average wait time for the thousands of rail cars at Ukraines border with the 27-nation bloc is 16 days, reaching up to 30 days in some places.

To address this congestion, the commission said the most urgent priority is to ensure additional transport vehicles are available to get the grain to EU ports. It said grain-hopper trailers, cargo containers, and barges and vessels are urgently needed.

With nonmilitary flights grounded in Ukraine, the commission said the new supply routes should be organized mainly via land and river transport, using for instance Ukraine's ports on the Danube River.

The commission urged member nations to accelerate procedures at border crossing points and increase capacity on EU soil for the temporary storage of Ukrainian exports.

In the medium to long term, the commission will also work on increasing the infrastructure capacity of new export corridors and on establishing new infrastructure connections," it said.

The commissions proposals are nonbinding and mostly intend to facilitate coordination between EU countries, transport operators and equipment suppliers.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP)  Two Rhode Island men who pleaded guilty in connection with the 2019 shooting death of a 17-year-old girl have been sent to prison for life, prosecutors said.

Quinton St. Pierre, 20, and Craig Robinson, 20, both pleaded guilty recently to second-degree murder and other charges in the December 2019 death of Nyasia Williams-Thomas as she sat in a vehicle near a Woonsocket apartment complex, according to a statement Wednesday from the office of state Attorney General Peter Neronha.
PITTSFIELD, Mass. (AP)  Two men who participated in an elaborate phone scam that cheated people from across the nation have agreed to repay their victims but avoided time behind bars, Massachusetts prosecutors said.

Ajaykumar Chaudhari, 26, of Pownal, Vermont, and Jitendra Chaudhari, 29, of Williamstown, Massachusetts, pleaded guilty in Berkshire Superior Court to larceny and attempt to commit larceny, according to a statement Wednesday from the office of Berkshire District Attorney Andrea Harrington. They were arrested in June 2020.

The guilty pleas were filed by the court, meaning the defendants won't be sent to jail as long as they stay out of additional legal trouble.

They, together with a third defendant, have agreed to pay more than $200,000 in restitution. That third defendant, Parth Chaudhari, pleaded guilty to the same charges in December and was sentenced to time served. The restitution money has already been secured, prosecutors said.

All three men are members of the same family, the district attorney's office said.

The victims in this case overwhelmingly supported a resolution that would return the most money in the most timely manner while sparing them, many of whom are aging and live out of state, from having to travel to Massachusetts to testify, Harrington said in a statement.

The three men, sometimes posing as government employees, targeted about 20 victims, some of whom sent packages of cash, often to an address in Adams, Massachusetts, prosecutors said.

In one case, they told the victim their Social Security number had been compromised and they needed to send money to fix the problem, according to the DA's office. Victims came from multiple states including California, Missouri, Ohio and Virginia, prosecutors said.

Adams police started investigating in March 2020 after getting tips from out-of-state law enforcement agencies.

During the investigation, victims and law enforcement intercepted packages of cash together worth more than $100,000.
BARRON, Wis. (AP)  Two young children and their father died in a house fire in Barron County early Thursday, according to sheriffs officials.

Dispatchers received a 911 call about 3:30 a.m. The caller said three people were still inside the burning house in Barron.
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MANILA, Philippines (AP)  U.S. President Joe Biden called Ferdinand Marcos Jr. on Thursday to congratulate him on his apparent landslide victory in the Philippine presidential election, Manilas ambassador to Washington said.

Biden is among the first world leaders to recognize the electoral triumph of the namesake son of the ousted dictator, whose candidacy has alarmed human rights activists and pro-democracy groups.

President Biden told him Washington is looking forward to working with him and cited the shared history of the longtime treaty allies, Philippine Ambassador Jose Manuel Romualdez told The Associated Press, adding the two spoke for more than 10 minutes.

Biden also aims to expand cooperation on a wide range of issues, including the fight against COVID-19 outbreaks, the climate crisis, fostering economic growth and respect for human rights, according to a White House statement.

Marcos Jr. had more than 31 million votes in the unofficial count from Mondays elections in whats projected to be one of the strongest mandates for a Philippine president in decades. His vice presidential running mate, Sara Duterte, appeared to have also won by a landslide.

Marcos Jr. cited the robust relations between Manila and Washington and said his administration would work to continue building them. He invited Biden to attend his inauguration on June 30, but the U.S. leader said he was dealing with urgent concerns that may prompt him to stay in the U.S. and would instead send a high-level delegation, Romualdez said.

Marcos Jr.s declared victory Wednesday, saying it was a boost to democracy and promised to seek common ground across the political divide, his spokesman, Vic Rodriguez, said.

To the world: Judge me not by my ancestors, but by my actions, Rodriguez quoted him as saying.

The election outcome was an astonishing reversal of the army-backed but largely peaceful People Power uprising that ousted Marcoss father in 1986  a democratic triumph in Southeast Asia where authoritarian regimes flourish.

Marcos Jr., 64, campaigned on a vague national unity theme while avoiding volatile issues in an effort hard-line leftist groups and survivors of the elder Marcoss dictatorship likened to whitewashing of his fathers crimes. On Tuesday, he appeared overcome with emotions while visiting his fathers grave, which was moved to the national heroes cemetery under current President Rodrigo Duterte.

Several of Marcos Jr.s key election rivals have conceded defeat, though the closest, Vice President Leni Robredo, a human rights lawyer who ran on a promise of badly needed reforms, has only acknowledged his massive lead. The U.S. State Department said the elections and subsequent vote count followed international standards without any major incident.

The tabulated results still must be confirmed by Congress. Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte would then start their single, six-year term leading a Southeast Asian nation battered by the COVID-19 pandemic, wealth inequality, Muslim and communist insurgencies, and political divisions, which were only inflamed by the turbulent presidencies of their fathers.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Vice President Wang Qishan had sent congratulatory messages to Marcos and Sara Duterte on Wednesday, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said in Beijing.

At present, the China-Philippines relations are in a critical stage of development, facing important opportunities and broad prospects," Zhao told reporters Thursday at a daily briefing. "We attach great importance to the relations with the Philippine side, and we stand ready to work with the Philippines to adhere to good neighborliness and common development and further deepen our comprehensive strategic cooperative relations so as to benefit two countries and the two peoples.

Marcos Jr. has said he wants to pursue closer ties with China, though Beijing during the outgoing Dutertes presidency showed no willingness to compromise on their conflicting territorial claims in the South China Sea. It prompted Manila to lodge an unusually large number of diplomatic protests against Beijing over Chinas increasingly aggressive actions in the busy waterway.
KARACHI, Pakistan (AP)  A roadside bombing targeted a van carrying Pakistani security forces in the southern port city of Karachi on Thursday, killing a passerby and wounding 13 people, police said.

According to Sajjad Khan, a local police chief, the attack took place in the citys Saddar neighborhood. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the bombing but Karachi has witnessed several militant attacks in recent years.
SALEM, Ore. (AP)  Foreign drug cartels that established illegal outdoor marijuana farms in Oregon last year are adapting as pressure on them begins to mount, law enforcement officials said Thursday.

New challenges are emerging as a task force created by the Legislature met for the first time to figure out how to combat cannabis-related problems, some of which threaten Oregon's legal, regulated recreational marijuana industry.

The Task Force on Cannabis-Derived Intoxicants and Illegal Cannabis Production is also responsible for recommending funding and command structure to enable law enforcement to combat illegal cannabis production, changes to state laws to address labor trafficking and water theft by the cartel-financed pot farms and regulations on genetic engineering of cannabis, among other issues.

It started with a simple ask of help and its turned into, Oh, my goodness, theres so much to deal with. And so I think we just have to kind of take one at a time, said state Rep. Lily Morgan, a Republican from the southern town of Grants Pass, as the task force met via video link.

One of the biggest problems is the recent proliferation of illegal, industrial-sized marijuana farms.

In early 2021, hundreds of greenhouses began cropping up in southern Oregon's Josephine and Jackson counties  some within city limits, others brazenly established along highways or tucked into remote valleys.

They were not licensed by the Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission and are financed by foreign criminal cartels, from Latin America, Europe and Asia, authorities have said. There were more pot farms than overwhelmed law enforcement officials could take down. Indoor illegal growing operations have long existed indoors, but now criminal gangs are pushing more in that direction, enabling them to grow year-round, a task force member said.

Were starting to hear about Josephine County, a lot of operations moving indoors, said Oregon State Police Sgt. Tyler Bechtel. "It makes it all that much harder to see it from the street, see it from the air, just smell it. And its not a seasonal problem when you move indoors. Its a year-round problem.

Josephine County Sheriff Dave Daniel, though, said he hasn't heard of cartels operating in his county moving to indoor grows and are instead lowering their profile by establishing more numerous smaller grow operations.

They seem to be diversifying and spreading out operations to many small grows to avoid the attention, Daniel said in an email to The Associated Press. We anticipated this change as we have primarily been focusing on the large grows and now smaller ones. It is a good business move for them and will slow us down.

The state police have identified dozens of ethnic-based drug trafficking organizations, each operating between five and 30 marijuana grow sites, Bechtel said.

Giving an idea of the scope of the problem, the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission says 551,000 marijuana plants were seized in Jackson County, Josephine County and central Oregon's Deschutes County from July 1, 2020, to June 30, 2021. And that was a tiny fraction of the illegal crop. Authorities also seized almost $3.4 million in cash in the raids.

Despite legal avenues for purchases and sales of marijuana within Oregon, an illegal marijuana market continues to cause public safety concerns, including diversion of marijuana to other states, sales of marijuana to underage buyers, illegal cultivation of marijuana on private, state, and federal property, and enrichment of organized criminal operations, the commission said in a report.

The report examined results after an outlay of millions of dollars in grants to the three counties to address increasing unlawful marijuana cultivation and distribution operations in Oregon. The commission said it could not judge the effectiveness of the grant program because the illegal marijuana market is an especially nebulous sector to evaluate.

The Task Force must provide its findings to an interim committee of the Legislature by Dec. 31, 2022.
CANBERRA, Australia (AP)  A Chinese ambassador says Chinas engagement with South Pacific island countries poses no threat to Australia, responding to fears that Beijing will establish a military foothold in the Solomon Islands.

Chinas envoy to Australia, Xiao Qian, attempted to reassure his host nation in a newspaper opinion piece published Thursday as reports emerged of a planned trip by a high-level Chinese delegation to the Solomons following the completion of a bilateral security pact.

The cooperation between China and the South Pacific island countries is conducive to peoples well-being on both sides, and regional prosperity and stability, and will by no means threaten Australias security, Xiao wrote in The Australian Financial Review.

Chinas rise should not be seen as a threat to Australia, Xiao wrote. He made no specific mention of the Solomon Islands or the security pact.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, whose conservative government is seeking a fourth three-year term in elections next week, said he disagreed with the ambassador that Chinese government interference in the Pacific is of no consequence.

I think its of great consequence, Morrison told reporters.

I support the Australian national interests, not the Chinese governments view of what national interests are, whether they be in Australia or across the Pacific, and thats why Ive always taken a very strong stance upon this, Morrison added.

Australia and its allies including the United States fear the China-Solomons pact will result in a Chinese naval base being established less than 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) off the northeast Australian coast.

Solomons Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare has maintained that there will be no Chinese military base in his country and China has denied seeking a military foothold in the islands.

Asked if Chinas rise should be seen as a threat to Australia, opposition leader Anthony Albanese told reporters: China has changed its posture. They are more aggressive in the region.

We need to, in the words of the (President Joe) Biden administration, have competition without catastrophe, Albanese said.

Solomons opposition lawmaker and chair of the parliamentary foreign relations committee, Peter Kenilorea, told The Associated Press he had heard Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi would visit the capital, Honiara, on the weekend that Australians vote on Saturday, May 21.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry said it had no information to release about the trip, and Sogavares office did not immediately respond on Thursday to a request for comment on Wangs visit.

Some senior Australian government lawmakers have suggested Beijing had timed the announcement of the Solomons pact during an election campaign to undermine the ruling coalitions chances of retaining power in the poll.

Its obviously provocative, particularly during the course of an election campaign, that China has made that decision and I think we again need to be eyes wide open about what is happening in our region, Defense Minister Peter Dutton said Wednesday.

The center-left Labor Party opposition has described the China-Solomons pact as Australias worst foreign policy blunder in the Pacific since World War II.

Government lawmakers argue Beijing wants a change of government because Labor lawmakers would be less likely to stand up to Chinese coercion.

In a speech on Wednesday, Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce accused China of following the same strategic course as Japan had done when it began building an airfield on the Solomons during World War II.

The airfield would have enabled Japanese bombers to threaten shipping between the Unites States and Australia. The airfield was the target of the Battle of Guadalcanal, the first major U.S. land offensive against Japanese forces.

It is quite obvious through their desire to have military bases that they are starting a process of encircling Australia and that there is a wish, at the very least, to intimidate, or worse, to supplicate Australia, Joyce said.

Australia has a security pact with the Solomon Islands and sent a peacekeeping police force to Honiara in November after civil unrest.
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LITTLETON, Colo. (AP)  A handful of curious voters mingled on a suburban Denver brewpubs patio one recent evening as Pam Anderson told them she could restore professionalism to the office of Colorado secretary of state.

Anderson rattled off her resume  former county clerk, head of the state clerks association and ardent defender of Colorados mail voting system  making clear that she fit the profile of the sort of technocrat whom Republicans used to back for the top election post in Colorado.

I'm the only person in this election, including the primary, who has a real record in election integrity, Anderson said.

Anderson was taking a swipe at her better-known primary rival, Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who has become the prime example of the GOP's new approach to running elections.

A grand jury earlier this year indicted Peters for her role in breaking into her own county's election system during a hunt for evidence of conspiracy theories fanned by former President Donald Trump. A judge already barred Peters from running last year's local elections due to the controversy and this week blocked Peters from administering this year's, too. Still, she's become a heroine to those who disbelieve the actual results of the 2020 elections.

Ive taken their best shot. They made me sleep on the concrete jail floor for 30 hours because I protected your election data, Peters told a crowd of 3,000 GOP activists and officials at the state party's convention last month. They know who to be afraid of. Sixty percent of attendees voted to place her atop the ballot for secretary of state in their June 28 primary.

For nearly a century, U.S. elections have relied on a sort of partisan truce. They are run by thousands of local officials, often elected in partisan races, and usually overseen by secretaries of state who run statewide along with candidates for hotly contested offices like attorney general and governor. But, typically, election administration itself has been done in a nonpartisan manner, and those who run for positions overseeing it are more technocrats than crusaders.

That is changing after Trump's 2020 loss. The former president is recruiting a class of partisan secretary of state candidates who parrot his lies about losing the election due to fraud and argue he should have remained president. The contest between Peters  she joined Trump at his Florida headquarters of Mar-a-Lago last week  and Anderson is perhaps the starkest battle in the GOP between those traditions.

The two candidates faced off Thursday night in a debate held by a Republican group in suburban Denver. They were joined by the third GOP contender in the race, businessman Mike O'Donnell, but most of the energy came from the clash between Anderson and Peters. The room was split between supporters of the two candidates who would sometimes grumble when the other spoke.

There's no question that the election deniers are winning the fight within the Republican Party. In Michigan last month, Kristina Karamo, a community college professor endorsed by Trump, won the GOP nomination to run for secretary of state after fanning suspicion of the 2020 election results. Candidates with similar stances are running in GOP primaries in every swing state, including for secretary of state in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada.

An Associated Press-NORC poll last year found that two-thirds of Republicans doubt Biden was legitimately elected president. Trump continues to fan the myth that massive voter fraud swung the election. He and his supporters have lost more than 60 court cases trying to demonstrate such fraud. His own Justice Department, along with numerous other investigations and audits, found no significant fraud.

Though Trump's election denial has caught on among the party's rank and file, many GOP strategists fear it could backfire on them in November. In Colorado, some Republicans dread the idea of Peters on the general election ballot.

The Democrats are going to love it and do everything they can to make every Republican candidate look like they came from the same DNA as Tina Peters, said Scott McInnis, a former GOP congressman who is now on the Mesa County Commission.

McInnis and other Republican Mesa County commissioners have long clashed with Peters. The local district attorney, a Republican, is overseeing her prosecution. McInnis predicts that Anderson will win the primary.

I don't think Republican voters are going to vote for someone who has nine felony charges, McInnis said of Peters.

Still, the enthusiasm for Peters in some parts of the GOP is considerable. She raised $158,000 in the eight weeks since she announced her campaign, compared to $50,000 by Anderson, who reported only having $5,000 left on hand at the end of April. At the state GOP convention, one of a bevy of aspirants for governor won enough votes from the crowd to secure a spot on the primary ballot simply by promising to pardon Peters if elected.

I agree with what she did. I don't think she did anything illegal, said Pam Utterback, 67, an ordained minister who banged on a drum appreciatively as Peters spoke at a pre-convention rally in Denver.

Peters flew to the rally with MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, at whose election conspiracy seminar she spoke last year after the data breach in Mesa County election machines. That data soon appeared on election conspiracy websites and Lindell insists it proves massive, internationally run fraud that put President Joe Biden in office. He told reporters he's paid $800,000 to Peters' legal defense fund.

Peters' legal jeopardy extends beyond the charges of identity theft, attempting to influence a public official and criminal impersonation filed by the grand jury. She was also arrested after kicking at a police officer trying to serve a search warrant for her iPad, to see if Peters had illegally recorded a court hearing of a deputy accused of burglary and cybercrimes.

Peters' supporters are convinced she's a martyr for the cause. Even if they can't explain precisely what it is Peters claims to have uncovered, they're convinced something went wrong in 2020.

I think the reason everyone is attacking her is she's for election integrity, said Adrianna Cuva, 45, a volunteer for a Peters-affiliated candidate who has met Peters. I think the election was rigged. That's why we're seeing all these problems in our economy."

It's a stark contrast with the sentiment at the brewpub in the Denver suburb of Littleton, where the small group of Anderson supporters stressed the importance of competent, nonpartisan election administration.

That's what you want, someone who's played it straight, said Paul Schauer, a former Republican state legislator.

Anderson grew up in Southern California. Her father was a highway patrolman, part of a long line of law enforcement in a family that's instilled in Anderson a reverence for law enforcement. She was elected clerk of the suburban city of Wheat Ridge in 2003 and then of the suburban swing county around it the following year.

She's been witheringly critical of Trump's election lies since they began in 2020 and sits on the board of a nonprofit that distributed $350 million in donations from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife to help fund the 2020 elections, an act that fueled conservative suspicions.

We need to restore sanity, Anderson said in an interview.

But she also got into the race because of frustration with the Democratic secretary of state, Jena Griswold, who she contends has politicized the office for Democrats.

And Anderson has been frustrated at how Griswold and other Democrats attack Republicans as a party for election misinformation. She cites some Republicans who have stood up for truth and nonpartisanship in election administration. One is Stephen Richer, the clerk in Arizonas Maricopa County, who pushed back strongly against a conspiratorial, Trump-supported pseudo-audit of the election.

There are Republicans across the country fighting the good fight on elections, Anderson said.

___

This story has been corrected to show the spelling of the Mesa commissioners surname is McInnis, not McGinnis.
GREENWOOD, Miss. (AP)  Mississippi prosecutors have dropped a second set of charges against a former Franciscan friar who was convicted last month of sexually abusing a student during the 1990s at a Catholic school.

Paul West, 62, received a 45-year sentence on April 13 and is in the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility.

He had been scheduled to go on trial Tuesday on charges of sexually abusing another student during the 1990s at St. Francis of Assisi School in Greenwood.

The Mississippi attorney general's office submitted an order dropping the second set of charges because he had been convicted on the first set, the Greenwood Commonwealth reported. Circuit Judge Ashley Hines approved the order.

As first reported by The Associated Press in 2019, La Jarvis Love, now 39, and his cousin, Joshua Love, now 38, had accused West of numerous instances of sexual abuse while they were students at the school where West was a physical education teacher before becoming principal.

During a two-day trial last month, a Leflore County jury deliberated less than an hour before convicting West of one count of sexual battery and one count of gratification of lust against La Jarvis Love.

Both Loves testified of repeated abuse by West beginning when they were in the fourth grade. They testified the abuse occurred both at the school and on trips to New York and to Wisconsin, where the Franciscan Friars of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary are based. West was a member of the religious order.

A third man, Joshua Loves younger brother, Raphael Love, also alleged that West sexually abused him. He reported the abuse to church authorities in 1998, after which West returned to Wisconsin and left the order. West has not been charged with abusing Raphael Love.

Gaunt and relying on a walker, West made no comment after he was convicted last month.

West had been held in Mississippi's Leflore County Jail since September 2020, when he was extradited from his home state of Wisconsin to face charges. Shortly after being returned to Mississippi, he pleaded not guilty to all charges, including one count of sexual battery and one count of gratification of lust against Joshua Love  the charges that were dropped this month.
CLARENDON HILLS, Ill. (AP)  A woman who died when a commuter train collided with a semitrailer at a crossing in suburban Chicago was thrown through a train window by the force of the crash, the vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday.

A tremendous amount of force propelled" the woman through the window, the NTSB'S Bruce Landsberg said at a news briefing.
FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP)  A central Kentucky coroner resigned from office hours before he pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiring to defraud the federal government.

John Goble, 68, entered the plea Wednesday morning in federal court before Judge Gregory Van Tatenhove, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported.
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP)  Veteran prosecutor Patrick Griffin was named Connecticut's new chief state's attorney Thursday and vowed to repair the office's reputation after an investigation questioned his predecessor's integrity.

Griffin, a state prosecutor for 27 years including the past six as the top state's attorney for the New Haven area, was appointed by a unanimous vote of the Criminal Justice Commission. The panel interviewed Griffin and Hartford State's Attorney Sharmese Walcott for the post earlier Thursday.

I dont think that theres any question that the reputation of the Division of Criminal Justice has been tarnished, Griffin told the commission. I think thats affected the morale of the entire division. ... Weve got to begin to think about new ways to engage the community. We have to think outside the box. But I do think that the only way to begin to mend and improve our reputations is through community engagement.

The chief state's attorney is Connecticut's top state prosecutor and leads the Division of Criminal Justice, which oversees the state's attorney's offices for the state's 13 judicial districts.

Former Chief State's Attorney Richard Colangelo Jr. decided to retire March 31 after two years on the job as the Criminal Justice Commission considered whether to hold termination hearings.

An independent investigation ordered by Gov. Ned Lamont questioned Colangelo's hiring of a state budget official's daughter to a $99,000-per-year executive assistant's job in his office, while pressing the official for pay raises for high-ranking state's attorneys. Colangelo denied wrongdoing and questioned many of the investigation's findings.

The probe, led by former U.S. Attorney Stanley Twardy Jr., said Colangelo, budget official Konstantinos Diamantis, and Diamantis' daughter, Anastasia Diamantis, gave conflicting statements to investigators that cast doubt on the integrity of the circumstances surrounding the hiring of Anastasia Diamantis.

Colangelo and Konstantinos Diamantis denied discussing a job for Diamantis daughter before she was hired, but emails appeared to show otherwise, the investigation report said. She also was the only person interviewed for the post, the report said.

Konstantinos Diamantis also denied wrongdoing. He said that while he was in office, Colangelo never got the pay raises he sought.

Konstantinos Diamantis, who was deputy secretary of the Office of Policy and Management, retired in October after being placed on leave as Lamont ordered the investigation into his daughter's hiring. He also is at the center of an ongoing federal investigation into the bidding and awarding of school construction and other projects. State officials have received a grand jury subpoena for communications involving Konstantinos Diamantis, who denies doing anything wrong in that case.

Griffin began his career in 1995 in the chief state's attorney's office and served in the Waterbury Judicial District from 1996 to 2011, including the last eight years trying murder and other serious cases. He later led a new state cold case and shooting task force in the chief state's attorney's office before being named New Haven state's attorney in 2016.

As states attorney, I have always sought to project a steady, professional demeaner, to demand rigorous adherence to the highest standards of ethical and professional conduct, to lead by example, set clearly defined goals and objectives, work as hard as anyone I supervise, to be fair and impartial and above all else to listen to the ideas and concerns of those around me, Griffin told the commission.

A third finalist for the chief state's attorney's job, retired Litchfield State's Attorney Dawn Gallo, withdrew her candidacy before Thursday's commission meeting.
JUNEAU, Alaska (AP)  A Democrat has filed to run for U.S. Senate in Alaska, three weeks before the filing deadline.

Pat Chesbro filed candidacy paperwork with the state Division of Elections on Wednesday, her campaign said. She would join a crowded field that includes the incumbent, Republican Lisa Murkowski, and Kelly Tshibaka, a Republican endorsed by former President Donald Trump.
HOUSTON (AP)  A sheriff's deputy died in a crash Wednesday after his vehicle clipped the back of a semitrailer parked on the shoulder of a Houston-area highway, authorities said.

Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said Robert Adam Howard, a 27-year-old Harris County sheriff's deputy, was a member of the gang unit and was getting ready to begin an operation when he hit the semitrailer.
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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP)  Vida Mehrannia is trying to save her husbands life. Iran is scheduled to put him to death within nine days  by May 21.

To Iran, the 50-year-old Ahmad Reza Jalali is a spy for Israel. To his colleagues, he is a respected physician specialized in disaster medicine, a most demanding field. To Mehrannia, he is a beloved husband.

Its a nightmare, she told The Associated Press from Stockholm, where she lives with her 10-year-old son and 19-year-old daughter who have not seen their father in the six years since his arrest. They want to sacrifice my husband.

Mehrannia pins her fading hopes on Jalalis Swedish citizenship and Stockholms attempts to push for his release. The extent of those efforts is unclear, though the Swedish foreign minister called her Iranian counterpart last week and, along with the European Union, expressed categorial opposition to the death penalty and demanded Jalali be released.

But it appears that Jalalis very ties to Sweden are what landed him in an Iranian prison.

In Iran, some foreigners are pawns, both in Tehran's internal political rivalries and in tensions between Tehran and Western capitals, analysts say. A pattern of Westerners being picked up has grown increasingly visible since the collapse of Iran's nuclear deal with world powers.

On Wednesday, Iran said it detained two unidentified Europeans just hours after the European Union envoy touched down in the capital in a last-ditch effort to save the tattered atomic accord.

Iran has imprisoned at least a dozen dual nationals in recent years. Most of them are held on widely disputed spying charges.

Here's a look at the forces at play in Jalali's case.

HOW DID IT START?

Jalali was born in Irans northwestern town of Tabriz. He built a successful career in Italy and Sweden, publishing over 40 articles in medical journals and teaching across the continent. When an Iranian university invited him to a workshop in April 2016, he didn't think twice about attending.

He never saw his family again.

Security services scooped him up, accused him of leaking details about Iranian nuclear scientists believed to have been killed by the Mossad and whisked him to Iran's notorious Evin Prison where he was sentenced to death.

Meanwhile, a landmark quest in Sweden to hold accountable a former Iranian official accused of committing atrocities has kindled outrage back in Tehran.

The two cases have coincided uneasily. Hamid Nouri is standing trial in Stockholm for war crimes and murder committed during the Iran-Iraq war  a conflict that ended more than a quarter century ago and haunts Tehran to this day.

WHAT IS HAPPENING BETWEEN IRAN AND SWEDEN?

For the first time, several Iranians who survived mass executions at the end of the Iran-Iraq war have taken the stand in a Swedish court.

Iran denies any link between the contentious trial and Jalalis death sentence  declared to be imminent last week as the Swedish court proceedings grabbed international headlines. Iran's judiciary spokesman on Tuesday declared Jalalis verdict final. His family believes the cases are linked.

The allegations in Sweden date back to 1988, after Irans then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini accepted a U.N.-brokered cease-fire. Members of the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, heavily armed by Saddam Hussein, stormed across the Iranian border from Iraq in a surprise attack. Iran blunted their assault.

The sham trials of political prisoners began around that time, with defendants asked to identify themselves. Those who responded mujahedeen were sent to their deaths, according to a 1990 Amnesty International report. International rights groups estimate that as many as 5,000 people were executed.

Iran has sought to bury this dark chapter of history. But now the sensitive memories are being dragged to light. Former prisoners have told the Swedish court that Nouri, a former Iranian judiciary official, handed down death sentences, guided convicts to chambers where they were executed and helped prosecutors gather the names of those sympathetic to the mujahedeen. Nouri denies involvement.

The verdict is expected in July and, if found guilty, the 61-year-old Nouri could face a life sentence. The case reverberates in Tehran, where the hard-line former judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi served on the commissions that issued execution orders.

Iran is outraged, condemning the proceedings as an unjust and illegal show trial."

Iranian authorities have since detained another Swedish citizen, a tourist traveling in the country, Sweden's Foreign Ministry confirmed last week.

WHY DOES IRAN DETAIN FOREIGNERS?

Four decades ago, young Iranian revolutionaries stormed the U.S. Embassy and took 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. They were released in 1981, but Iran's policy of hostage-taking never ended, analysts say.

It ebbs and flows, but this has been a notorious page in the Islamic Republic's playbook since 1979, said Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. Iran usually detains foreign nationals as a means of getting leverage or something else from that other country.

The tactic has burst into public view as prisoner swaps gain traction. When Tehran's nuclear accord with world powers took effect in 2016, four American captives flew home from Iran. That same day, the Obama administration airlifted Iran $400 million in cash.

More recently this spring, two British citizens who had been jailed in Iran for more than five years were returned home after the U.K. settled a decades-old debt to Iran.

Today there are at least four Americans, two Germans, two Austrians and two French citizens known to be detained in Iran.

A United Nations panel describes their incarceration as part of an emerging pattern involving the arbitrary deprivation of liberty of dual nationals.

WHAT IS IRANS HISTORY OF EXECUTING PRISONERS?

Iran is one of the world's leading executioners. In March, the U.N. special rapporteur for Iran told the Human Rights Council that Iran's execution count had surged to 280 last year, including at least three minors.

The execution of foreigners, however, remains extremely rare. Iran is not publicly known to have executed a foreigner in the last two decades.

Dual nationals facing the death penalty in recent years, such as Iranian-Canadian Hamid Ghasemi or Iranian-American Amir Hekmati, have had their sentences commuted.

Last year, U.N. rights experts warned that Jalali faced harsh conditions and was nearing death as his health rapidly deteriorated in solitary confinement. His conviction, the U.N. says, stems from a confession extracted under torture after an unfair trial.

Deprived of sleep under bright lights, he waits for the day he will be taken away to be killed.

It's a terror his family says they share, even 3,000 miles away.

It's torture. ... It has completely taken over our lives, Mehrannia said. For the politics of other countries, we are suffering.
EDMONTON, Alberta (AP)  All 4,000 people in the Northwest Territories town of Hay River were ordered to evacuate as floodwaters reached the communitys downtown area.

Chief April Martel of the Katodeeche First Nation on Wednesday ordered her entire community to leave and head south toward the town of Enterprise as parts of western Canada struggle with some of the worst flooding in decades.

The city of Yellowknife opened an evacuation center for people leaving Hay River in search of safety, and in Fort Providence the Big River gas station assisted evacuees through the night. Other people seemed to be heading for northern Alberta.

Some had very little warning and had to react quickly to stay safe, while leaving their home, their possessions and, for some, their business to endure the water and ice, Northwest Territories Premier Caroline Cochrane and Municipal Affairs Minister Shane Thompson said in a statement Thursday.

The local Department of Infrastructure closed as impassable the only road to Hay River's Vale Island, where the local airport is located.

Earlier Wednesday, a section of ice broke away, sending a fresh surge of water toward the town and the downtown was covered in a foot or more of water within minutes. Some residents reported being rescued from their homes by boat.

The town is at the mouth of the Hay River where it flows into the Great Slave Lake and it's essentially a miniature delta through which multiple river channels run.

Ice jamming those channels had blocked water and a weekend of rain and snow in the rivers basin added more more and more water into that system.

There was a large volume of ice, a large volume of snow in the basin over winter, and then this storm hit  initially as rain, which then flowed directly into streams and creeks, bumping up the water level immediately  and it parked over the entire basin, territorial hydrologist Shawne Kokelj said this week.

Now what were seeing is theres still high water coming from farther upstream because a lot of rain fell there, too, and now some of the snow is melting and so keeps feeding a lot of these smaller streams.

Justin Gaudet of the Paddle Prairie Mtis Settlement, where about 800 people live, said a local emergency alert was issued Sunday after rain and snowmelt raised water levels on six nearby rivers to heights that elders in the community last saw more than 50 years ago.

Some of these homes dont have running water right now, Gaudet said late Wednesday. The members are very tired, very stressed, very anxious, he said.

Gaudet said the water level had lowered, but moisture and contaminated water posed the threat of mold damage, and he said some bridges were damaged.

Without the bridges, people cant leave their homes, he said.

The Dene Tha First Nation at Chateh, about 845 kilometers northwest (525 miles) of Edmonton, and the Little Red River Cree have been under local emergency alerts due to flooding since the weekend.

The mayor of High Level said this week that some evacuees living in the towns arena and hotels were running out of food.

Its a huge influx of people for our small community, said Crystal McAteer.

In the province of Manitoba there are 28 municipalities and four First Nation communities that have declared states of emergency, with 2,500 people out of their homes.
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COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP)  Time ran out for South Carolina senators as they tried to pass a bill that would restructure the University of South Carolina's board on Thursday, the frenetic final day of the 2022 General Assembly session.

Gov. Henry McMaster's desk filled quickly on the final day as lawmakers also agreed to a bill that would overhaul South Carolina's sex offender registry to eliminate a requirement to register for life without a hearing and a ban on paying disabled workers less than the minimum wage.

A bill requiring minimum standards for police officers for use of force and vehicle pursuits and setting up two weeks of early voting also are heading to the governor.

Other bills such as one creating a program allowing parents of poorer students to use taxpayer money for private school tuition and allowing counties to continue charging user fees to pay for roads and other projects stayed alive by heading to conference committee where six lawmakers will work out differences between the House and Senate versions.

In the House, Speaker Jay Lucas swung down his gavel for the final time during his eight years leading the chamber right at the 5 p.m. end of session required by law. When the gavel thumped, Rep. Murrell Smith took over and the 124th General Assembly regular session was over.

The end of the two-year session means the end of bills that didn't pass both the House and the Senate. Bills that died include proposals to create a medical marijuana program and make South Carolina the 49th state with a hate crimes law.

Lawmakers aren't done with Columbia. They will be back June 15 to deal with finalizing the state budget and perhaps conference reports. There is a second special session at the end of June to address the governor's vetoes.

The end-of-session agreement also allows the House Speaker and Senate President to call legislators back to deal with abortion depending on what the U.S. Supreme Court decision says in a case that could overturn Roe v. Wade.

Thursday was a typically busy and sometimes hard-to-follow final day of a fairly unusual session. The COVID-19 pandemic overshadowed the chamber for much of the past two years, but by May, mask-use was ebbing, crowds filled the galleries and Statehouse tours were back.

The House was less stressful. Members took selfies together as the clock ticked toward 5 p.m. A steady stream of lawmakers made their way to shake Lucas' hand or give him a hug.

Rep. Jonathon Hill, admonished for throwing his papers in the air when a Lucas ruling didn't go his way last year, ended his goodbye speech by playfully tossing his speech in the air.

Things were more tense in the Senate, where opponents of an effort to restructure the University of South Carolina Board of Trustees ran out the clock.

A number of lawmakers were angry at trustees, feeling they were arrogant and power hungry, responsible for hiring a president who crudely criticized the school and left in less than two years after interfering in daily school affairs.

A small screening group of powerful lawmakers refused to put five incumbent trustees back up for reelection and some legislators wanted to fire the board and start over  or at least cut the number of trustees.

The university will continue to be mismanaged. Money will be wasted. Good people will be driven off, Democratic state Sen Dick Harpootlian of Columbia said as it became obvious the stall tactic would work.

Harpootlian suggested fellow Democratic Sen. Brad Hutto was holding up the bill because his law partner in Orangeburg is a trustee. Hutto said he hadn't even talked with his partner about the bill.

I understand your frustration. It's 20 minutes til five. Its not going to happen," Hutto said. It's good discussion about where we can go next year.

Now House members return to their district for the June 14 primaries and for November's elections for new two-year terms. State senators are not up for reelection for four-year terms until 2024.

___

Follow Jeffrey Collins on Twitter at https://twitter.com/JSCollinsAP.
HONOLULU (AP)  Public school students in Hawaii will be required to wear masks while indoors for summer classes and related activities.

State officials said at a news conference Wednesday that the measure is meant to keep students and families safe. Hawaii is the only state in the nation that still has a universal indoor mask requirement for public school students.

Hawaiis State Epidemiologist Sarah Kemble said officials are still discussing whether to keep the rule in place for the fall term.

We will continue to review the numbers and the data in the coming weeks as we move through the early months of summer," Kemble said. "We will be issuing further guidance about the fall, but we dont have that at this time.

Hawaii has seen a steady rise in new COVID-19 infections over the last seven weeks. State health officials are warning people to be on guard as residents plan graduation ceremonies. The state has been handing out free at-home tests for people to use prior to attending school events.

Hawaii was the last state in the nation to drop its statewide mask mandate at the end of March. The federal mask rule for domestic flights was also recently struck down, leaving tourists and other travelers unmasked on crowded flights.

New data released by the state shows the average case count for the most recent seven day reporting period was 722 per day, up from 485 cases per day last week. All Hawaii counties are in the yellow or medium risk range under Centers for Disease Control and Prevention community masking guidelines.

Hospitalizations continue to rise and ICU admissions are now also increasing, so I think this is a really important juncture," Kemble said. Case counts alone dont tell the whole story, but we are now seeing the repercussions for severe disease and accumulating cases in our hospitals.
BOISE, Idaho (AP)  An Idaho hospital that went on lockdown in March after far-right activists protested outside is suing Ammon Bundy, Diego Rodriguez and their various political organizations for defamation and sustained online attacks."

St. Luke's Health System filed the lawsuit Wednesday against Bundy, his gubernatorial campaign, and his People's Rights Network organization. The hospital system is also suing Diego Rodriguez  the grandfather of the child involved in the protection case  as well as Rodriguez's website Freedom Man Press and the Freedom Man political action committee. Rodriguez is an associate of Bundy's who has been active in Bundy's political campaign.

The child protection case involved a 10-month-old baby who was temporarily removed from family custody in March after officials determined the infant was suffering from severe malnourishment and at risk of injury or death, the Meridian Police Department said at the time. The babys parents had refused to let officers check on the childs welfare after the family canceled a medical appointment, the police statement said.

Bundy, who is well-known for participating in armed standoffs with law enforcement, was arrested the following day on a misdemeanor trespassing charge after he protested at a different hospital where he believed the baby was being treated. He also asked his followers to protest at the hospital and the homes of child protection service workers, law enforcement officers and others involved in the child protection case. Rodriguez, meanwhile, wrote on his website that the baby was kidnapped, and suggested that the state and people involved in the case were engaged in child trafficking for profit.

The men also told followers to protest at the Boise hospital on March 15. The facility went on lockdown for more than an hour, diverting emergency patients to other area hospitals, after hospital officials determined the protests presented a safety risk.

In the lawsuit, St. Luke's Health System contends that the two men worked together to manufacture a false narrative of a state-sponsored child kidnapping and trafficking ring that included the hospital, the Department of Health and Welfare, law enforcement officials and others.

They realized the facts surrounding DHW's intervention could be mischaracterized as a governmental conspiracy to kidnap, traffic and kill children," the hospital system's attorney wrote in the lawsuit. "Then, in turn, Defendants realized they could establish themselves as crusaders against their falsely manufactured governmental conspiracy.

The defendants wanted to generate interest in Bundy's political campaign for governor, raise their public profiles and create financial gain in the form of donations from followers, the hospital system contends.

Neither Bundy nor Rodriguez immediately responded to emails requesting comment.

St. Luke's is asking for more than $50,000 in damages plus legal fees in an amount to be proven in trial. The hospital system also wants the defendants to be barred from making defamatory statements.

In a statement, St. Lukes said it would donate any award of monetary damages to a program for at-risk children called Children At Risk Evaluation Service.
WAUKEGAN, Ill. (AP)  A northern Illinois man convicted of murder in the 2021 shooting death of a teen he spotted in his car a few days after he reported it stolen has been sentenced to 21 years in prison, prosecutors announced on Thursday.

In a news release, the Lake County State's Attorney's office said that Lynell Glover, 36, of Round Lake Beach, was sentenced late Wednesday. He was convicted by a jury in March of one count of second-degree murder and one count of aggravated battery with a firearm.
FORT WORTH, Texas (AP)  Jurors in a civil lawsuit decided Wednesday that American Airlines did not bear responsibility for an alleged sexual assault against a flight attendant by a celebrity chef who was hired by the airline as an independent contractor.

The jury in state court in Fort Worth deliberated for parts of three days before concluding that a sexual assault occurred during a company trip to Germany in 2018, but that American was not involved.

The chef, Mark Sargeant, has never been charged with a crime. He reached a confidential settlement with the flight attendant, Kimberly Goesling, according to Robert Miller, one of her lawyers.

The Associated Press does not typically name victims of sexual assault but is doing so in this case because Goesling has spoken openly to the news media about her case and issues of sexual harassment at American.

Goesling, who later retired after 30 years with Fort Worth, Texas-based American, sought $25.6 million in damages from the airline during the trial, which lasted more than two weeks.

American Airlines spokeswoman Lindsey Martin said, The jurys decision confirms that American does not tolerate inappropriate sexual conduct of any kind.

Miller said he will appeal the verdict. He said the judge excluded evidence about unwanted advances by Sargeant toward other female American Airlines employees before the alleged assault against Goesling.

Sargeant did not appear at the trial, although jurors saw a video deposition. Last year he told a news organization in the United Kingdom that while intoxicated he went to Goesling's hotel room in the mistaken belief that she was interested in him, but he denied sexually assaulting her.
NEW YORK (AP)  A Manhattan federal court jury returned a mixed verdict Wednesday in the trial of a New Jersey software developer who authorities say researched and photographed U.S. landmarks for possible attacks.

The jury was unable to reach a verdict on one terrorism charge  providing material support for a terrorist group  but found Alexei Saab, 44, had received military-type training from Hezbollahs Islamic Jihad Organization, which is based in Lebanon.

Saab was also found guilty of conspiring to commit marriage fraud and making false statements. The Morristown, New Jersey, resident was exonerated on three other charges after a two-week trial.

Saabs lawyer, Marlon Kirton, said much of the evidence came from what Saab himself told FBI investigators that was un-credible, crazy, unsubstantiated information, and which cant be considered reliable.

Saab spoke with the FBI in 11 sessions over several weeks prior to his 2019 arrest, but was never read his rights, Kirton said in an email after the verdict.

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams highlighted the jurys unanimous verdict that Saab was trained by a terrorist organization.

The evidence at trial showed that Saab surveilled some of New Yorks most iconic and highly trafficked locations, Williams said in a statement, in order to provide critical intelligence on how they could be most effectively attacked.

Judge Paul G. Gardephe questioned whether the terrorism count conviction will stand based on rules about how the statute of limitations pertains to terrorism charges. He asked lawyers on both sides to submit written arguments within weeks about the charge, which has a potential maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.

Gardephe said he wanted to know if it was the intent of Congress that there would be no limit to how long the government could wait to bring charges against someone who received military-type training from a terrorist organization.

Prosecutors were also given a week to decide whether to seek a retrial on the material support charge, which carries a potential penalty of up to 20 years in prison.

The other two convictions for conspiring to commit marriage fraud and making false statements each carry a potential penalty of up to five years in prison.

Prosecutors say that, according to Saab, he joined Hezbollah in 1996 and once tried to kill a man he later understood to be a suspected Israeli spy by pointing a weapon at the individual at close range, but the firearm jammed. They said he surveilled potential targets for terrorism attacks from 2000 to 2005 while working by day as a technology software engineer.
LENOX TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP)  Authorities said they'll search a landfill for the body of a Detroit-area teenager who was killed earlier this year and likely placed in a Dumpster.

Its our responsibility as law enforcement to this mother to find the answers to two questions, Macomb County Executive Mark Hackel said. Where is she? And how did this happen?
ST. LOUIS (AP)  Lindenwood University in St. Charles will pay $1.65 million to nearly 6,000 students who were moved to online classes in the spring of 2020 during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The money goes to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by students who argued that they overpaid for tuition because virtual instruction is less expensive than in-person classes, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
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WINNSBORO, La. (AP)  State prosecutors have charged three Louisiana State Police troopers accused of beating a Black motorist, hoisting him to his feet by his hair braids and bragging in text messages that the whoopin' would give him nightmares for a long time.

The misdemeanor simple battery charges in the 2020 arrest of Antonio Harris come amid mounting scrutiny of the states premier law enforcement agency over allegations of excessive force  particularly against Black people  and an institutional instinct to cover it up.

Jacob Brown, Dakota DeMoss and George Kam Harper, who are white, were seen on body-camera video piling onto Harris following a high-speed chase that ended next to a cornfield in rural Franklin Parish, kneeing, slapping and punching him even though he had surrendered face down with his arms and legs splayed.

The troopers' attorneys declined to comment Thursday. State police spokesperson Lt. Melissa Matey said the troopers' actions "are inexcusable and have no place in professional public safety services.

State police had arrested the troopers in February 2021 on felony charges of malfeasance in office, but local prosecutors elected not to bring that count last week when filing a bill of information in Franklin Parish. Misdemeanor simple battery in Louisiana carries up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine.

Obviously we would have liked stronger charges but were still hopeful the Department of Justice will bring a case, said Harris attorney, Michael Sterling.

A federal grand jury in Lafayette has been hearing testimony in the case following a months-long investigation into whether the troopers used excessive force. But it remains unclear whether the U.S. Justice Department intends to move forward with a civil rights case.

A similar uncertainty hangs over the federal investigation into the deadly 2019 arrest of Ronald Greene, another Black motorist beaten by state police. A federal grand jury also has been hearing testimony in that case, in which troopers stunned, punched and dragged Greene before he died on a rural roadside in Union Parish, outside Monroe. The Associated Press reported this week that the Justice Department is increasingly skeptical it can bring a successful case against the troopers.

State lawmakers, meanwhile, are probing allegations of a cover-up in Greene's death and voted Wednesday to hold the former head of the state police in contempt for defying a subpoena and refusing to turn over the handwritten journals he kept while leading the agency. Former Col. Kevin Reeves was separately held in contempt Thursday for not complying with a subpoena from the commission that oversees discipline of state troopers. Reeves attorney, Lewis Unglesby, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In the Harris beating, an internal investigation found the troopers filed wholly untrue reports claiming the man kept trying to flee, refused to obey commands and fought with troopers before they began to pummel him with what Brown called tactical strikes.

They kept saying Stop resisting but I was never resisting, Harris told investigators. As soon as they got to me, one of them kneed me in my face. One of them was squeezing my eyes.

The troopers also later exchanged 14 text messages peppered with lol and haha responses in which they boasted about the beating and mocked Harris, who spit up blood and suffered from sore ribs and stomach pain for days after the arrest.

He gonna be sore tomorrow for sure, Brown wrote in one of the texts. Warms my heart knowing we could educate that young man.

Brown, Harper and DeMoss, who were part of a notoriously violent division of troopers patrolling the northeastern part of the state, were arrested in the case last year. DeMoss and Harper were fired and Brown, who in October pleaded not guilty in a separate federal case accusing him of pummeling another Black motorist 18 times with a flashlight, resigned.

DeMoss has also come under investigation for his role in Greene's death, which authorities initially blamed on a car crash at the end of a chase before the AP last year published troopers' long-withheld body-camera video showing a violent arrest.

Greene and Harris arrests were among at least 12 cases over the past decade in which an AP investigation found troopers or their bosses ignored or concealed evidence of beatings, deflected blame and impeded efforts to root out misconduct. Dozens of current and former troopers told the AP the beatings were countenanced by a culture of impunity, nepotism and, in some cases, outright racism.

Harris case began after Brown pulled him over for a minor traffic violation on Interstate 20. The trooper conducted a criminal history check and discovered Harris had a suspended drivers license and outstanding warrants.

Harris sped away from the traffic stop in a Hyundai Sonata, leading troopers on a 29-mile (47- kilometer) chase that reached speeds of 150 miles (241 kph) before it was finally stopped with the help of a tire-puncturing spike strip.

Even though Harris had already surrendered, DeMoss, the first arriving trooper, delivered a knee strike and slapped him in the face with an open palm before powering off his body-worn camera, court records show.

Harper, meanwhile, punched Harris in the head several times with a fist reinforced by a flashlight and threatened to punish Harris, while Brown pulled the mans hair, an internal investigation concluded. DeMoss can later be seen on the footage lifting Harris to his feet by his braids.

Investigators determined Brown never informed state prosecutors that any body-worn camera video of the arrest existed.
KENTLAND, Ind. (AP)  A 36-year-old man has been shot and wounded by officers after escaping from a jail transport van in western Indiana and later firing shots from an apartment he ran into, state police said.

Jayme Lopez of Gary fled about 10:30 a.m. Wednesday after arriving at the Newton County Jail in Kentland from a jail in Iroquois County, Illinois, police said.
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP)  Multnomah County health officials in Portland, Oregon, are asking people to wear masks indoors until new COVID-19 counts and hospitalizations start to decline.

Health Officer Dr. Jennifer Vines said it is not a mandate but a request for everyone to put their masks back on for a few weeks as they go to school, work and other indoor events, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported. Officials strongly recommend people wear masks in schools.
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SPOKANE, Wash. (AP)  Randy Weaver, patriarch of a family that was involved in an 11-day Idaho standoff with federal agents 30 years ago that left three people dead and helped spark the growth of anti-government extremists, has died at the age of 74.

His death was announced Thursday in a Facebook post by daughter Sara Weaver, who lives near Kalispell, Montana.

Love you always Dad was written on Sara Weaver's Facebook page, posted with a picture of an older Randy and a smiling Sara, along with the dates Jan. 3, 1948, and May 11, 2022.

Sara Weaver did not immediately return Facebook messages and email requests for information. Details of Randy Weaver's death were not immediately available.

The standoff in the mountains near Ruby Ridge in the Idaho Panhandle transfixed the nation in August of 1992.

Randy Weaver moved his family to northern Idaho in the 1980s to escape what he saw as a corrupt world. Over time, federal agents began investigating the Army veteran for possible ties to white supremacist and anti-government groups. Weaver was eventually suspected of selling a government informant two illegal sawed-off shotguns.

To avoid arrest, Weaver holed up on his land near Naples, Idaho.

On Aug. 21, 1992, a team of U.S. marshals scouting the forest to find suitable places to ambush and arrest Weaver came across his friend, Kevin Harris, and Weavers 14-year-old son Samuel in the woods. A gunfight broke out. Samuel Weaver and Deputy U.S. Marshal William Degan were killed.

The next day, an FBI sniper shot Randy Weaver. As Weaver, Harris and Sara ran back toward the house, the sniper fired a second bullet, which passed through Vicki Weavers head as she held an infant and wounded Harris in the chest.

During the siege, Sara Weaver crawled around her mothers blanket-covered body to get food and water for the survivors until the family surrendered on Aug. 31, 1992.

Harris and Randy Weaver were arrested, and Weavers three daughters went to live with their mothers family in Iowa. Randy Weaver was acquitted of the most serious charges and Harris was acquitted of all charges.

The surviving members of the Weaver family filed a wrongful death lawsuit. The federal government awarded Randy Weaver a $100,000 settlement and his three daughters $1 million each in 1995.

Ruby Ridge was the opening shot of a new era of anti-government hatred not seen since the Civil War, said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center in a 2012 interview on the 20th anniversary of the siege.

After Ruby Ridge, federal agents laid siege to the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. It ended violently after 51 days on April 19, 1993, when a fire destroyed the compound after an assault was launched, killing 76 people.

Timothy McVeigh cited both Ruby Ridge and Waco as motivators when he bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Ruby Ridge has been cited often by militia and patriot groups since.

In the 30 years since the standoff, Ruby Ridge remained a rallying cry for anti-government extremists. The Spokesman-Review reported Weaver remained popular among white supremacists and extremists in the years following the standoff, and was often seen selling his book, The Federal Siege at Ruby Ridge, at gun shows and survivalist expos.

Sara Weaver lives near Kalispell, Montana, a city in the northwestern part of the state that is the gateway to Glacier National Park and more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) east of Ruby Ridge.

Sara Weaver said she is devastated each time someone commits a violent act in the name of Ruby Ridge. It killed me inside, she told The Associated Press in 2012, regarding the Oklahoma City bombing. I knew what it was like to lose a family member in violence. I wouldnt wish that on anyone.

After graduating from high school in Iowa, Sara Weaver moved to the Kalispell area in 1996. Her sisters and father followed shortly after.

She has been back to Ruby Ridge, to the land her family still owns. All that remains of the familys modest home is the foundation, she said.
NEW YORK (AP)  A 25-year-old Rhode Island man who federal prosecutors say defrauded more than 170 people who poured millions of dollars into his cryptocurrency investment business was sentenced in New York City on Wednesday to more than three years in prison and ordered to pay more than $2.8 million in restitution.

Jeremy Spence, of Bristol, Rhode Island, solicited more than $5 million in investments through false representations, including bogus statements showing his cryptocurrency trading was very profitable when in fact it consistently lost money, Damian Williams, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.
As Russias grinding war pulverizes eastern Ukraine and eats away at the global economy, it is also creating unintended consequences for President Vladimir Putin, whose aggression is bringing more European nations closer to NATO's fold and strengthening Western ties, the very thing the Russian leader had hoped to weaken.

Finlands leaders announced Thursday that their country should apply for NATO membership without delay, while Swedish leaders were expected to do the same within days. It is a remarkable shift by two nations on Russias doorstep that had long remained nonaligned militarily  but where public opinion has lurched strongly toward joining the alliance in the 11 weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine.

The Kremlin said that Finlands membership in NATO was definitely a threat, and that it was prepared to "balance the situation" to ensure Russias security.

NATO's secretary-general promised Finland a "smooth and swift" accession process if it applied, but that could take a year or longer, leaving it and Sweden vulnerable to Russian retaliation while not covered under the alliances collective defense pact. Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain sought Wednesday to fill that gap, committing Britain, one of Europes strongest militaries, to defending Finland and Sweden if attacked  even if they ended up not joining NATO.

But the hardening of Western resolve has not persuaded Russia to ease its assault, which has occupied large chunks of southern and eastern Ukraine. It could also help Putin  who has described NATOs eastward expansion as one of the reasons he was compelled to send troops into Ukraine  reinforce his argument to Russians that it is the West, not Russia, that is driving the conflict.

In other developments:

 Ukrainian and Western officials say Russia is reportedly withdrawing forces from around Kharkiv, Ukraines second-largest city, where it has been losing territory. They say it may redirect troops to the southeast, where Russian troops are making greater progress.

 The U.S. Congress is likely to approve $40 billion in military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine, the latest package of support intended to help Ukrainian forces bring the fight to the invading Russians.

 The U.N. human rights chief said that the bodies of more than 1,000 civilians had been recovered in Kyiv suburbs that were occupied by Russian forces, and that the figures will continue to increase.

 New York Times journalists visited a volunteer unit of Ukrainian fighters on the front line in the east, where they are fighting to hold back Russian forces pushing down from their stronghold in the occupied city of Izyum.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Ivan Sekretarev/AP

The highest ranking Russian official to go to prison in nearly two decades was released Thursday after serving more than half of an eight-year sentence for a bribery conviction.

Former Economic Development Minister Alexei Ulyukayev filed a petition for early release after serving more than five years. A court in the Tver region, some 140 kilometers northwest of Moscow, granted him parole last month.
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WASHINGTON (AP)  Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul defied leaders of both parties Thursday and single-handedly delayed until next week Senate approval of an additional $40 billion to help Ukraine and its allies withstand Russia's three-month old invasion.

With the Senate poised to debate and vote on the package of military and economic aid, Paul denied leaders the unanimous agreement they needed to proceed. The bipartisan measure, backed by President Joe Biden, underscores U.S. determination to reinforce its support for Ukraines outnumbered forces.

The legislation has been approved overwhelmingly by the House and has strong bipartisan support in the Senate. Final passage is not in doubt.

Even so, Pauls objection was an audacious departure from an overwhelming sentiment in Congress that quickly helping Ukraine was urgent, both for that nations prospects of withstanding Vladimir Putins brutal attack and for discouraging the Russian president from escalating or widening the war.

It was also a brazen rebellion against his fellow Kentucky Republican, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. McConnell began Thursdays session by saying senators from both sides  meaning Republicans and Democrats  needed to help us pass this urgent funding bill today, gesturing emphatically as he said today.

Paul, a libertarian who often opposes U.S. intervention abroad, said he wanted language inserted into the bill, without a vote, that would have an inspector general scrutinize the new spending. He has a long history of demanding last-minute changes by holding up or threatening to delay bills on the brink of passage, including measures dealing with lynching, sanctioning Russia,preventing a federal shutdown,the defense budget, government surveillance and providing health care to the Sept. 11 attack first responders.

Democrats and McConnell opposed Paul's push and offered to have a vote on his language. Paul was likely to lose that vote and rejected the offer.

Paul, who unsuccessfully sought his party's 2016 presidential nomination, argued that the added spending was more than the U.S. spends on many domestic programs, was comparable to Russia's entire defense budget and would deepen federal deficits and worsen inflation. Last year's budget deficit was almost $2.8 trillion but is likely headed downward, and the bill's spending is less than two-tenths of 1% the size of the U.S. economy, suggesting its impact on inflation would be negligible.

No matter how sympathetic the cause, my oath of office is to the national security of the United States of America," Paul said. "We cannot save Ukraine by dooming the U.S. economy.

Democrats said they were objecting to Pauls plan because it would expand the powers of an existing inspector general whose current purview is limited to Afghanistan. That would deny Biden the chance past presidents have had to appoint the person to the post, they said.

It's clear from the junior senator from Kentucky's remarks, he doesn't want to aid Ukraine, said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., All he will accomplish with his actions here today is to delay that aid, not to stop it.

Underscoring their joint desire to approve the bill immediately, Schumer and McConnell stood nearly side-by-side as they tried pushing the legislation forward.

Theyre only asking for the resources they need to defend themselves against this deranged invasion, McConnell said of the Ukrainians. And they need this help right now."

The House voted 368-57 on Tuesday to approve the measure. All Democrats and most Republicans backed it, though every no vote came from the GOP.

The bipartisan backing for Ukraine has been partly driven by accounts of Russian atrocities against Ukrainian civilians that have been impossible to ignore. It also reflects strategic concerns about letting Putin seize European territory unanswered as his assault on his neighbor to the west grinds into its 12th week.

Helping Ukraine is not an instance of mere philanthropy," McConnell said. "It bears directly on Americas national security and vital interests that Russias naked aggression not succeed and carries significant costs.

Biden administration officials have said they expect the latest aid measure to suffice through September. But with Ukraine taking heavy military and civilian losses and no sign of when the fighting might end, Congress will ultimately face decisions about how much more aid to provide at a time of huge U.S. budget deficits and a risk of recession that could demand added spending at home.

The latest bill, when added to the $13.6 billion Congress approved in March, would push American aid to the region well above $50 billion. For perspective, that would total $6 billion more than the U.S. spent on military and economic aid around the world in 2019, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

The push toward passage came as Russia continued blasting Ukrainian forces and cities in southern and eastern portions of the country. Reflecting international concerns prompted by the assault, Finland's leaders announced their support for joining NATO and Sweden seemed not far behind.

Biden asked Congress for $33 billion two weeks ago. It didn't take lawmakers long to add $3.4 billion to his requests for both military and humanitarian programs.

The measure includes $6 billion for Ukraine for intelligence, equipment and training for its forces, plus $4 billion in financing to help Kyiv and NATO allies build up their militaries.

There's $8.7 billion for the Pentagon to rebuild stocks of weapons it has shipped to Ukraine and $3.9 billion for U.S. troops in the region.

The measure also includes $8.8 billion to keep the Kyiv government functioning, more than $5 billion to provide food to countries around the world that rely on Ukrainian crops devastated by the fighting and $900 million to teach English and provide other services to Ukrainian refugees who have moved to the United States.

The biggest hurdle to rapid approval of the assistance was cleared this week when Biden and Democrats dropped their demand to include billions more in the measure to bolster U.S. efforts to counter the coronavirus pandemic.

Republicans want separate COVID-19 legislation to be a battleground for an election-season fight over immigration that divides Democrats.
WASHINGTON - Throughout history, Congress has established expert agencies to oversee important parts of the American economy - from agriculture to drugs to railroads. Now amid growing concerns about the power of Silicon Valley, a Democratic senator suggests reforming current institutions isn't enough: A new federal watchdog is needed to regulate the country's most influential tech companies.

Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., on Thursday introduced the Digital Platform Commission Act, legislation to establish a new five-person commission responsible for protecting consumers in the age of Big Tech. According to proposed text viewed exclusively by The Washington Post, the agency would have the power to interrogate the algorithms powering major tech platforms, and to set new rules to ensure the biggest companies are transparent about how they handle thorny decisions around content moderation on their platforms.

"We need an agency with expertise to have a thoughtful approach here," he said.

Regulators' current focus on competition problems in tech does not address many of the industry's most pressing problems, according to Bennet, such as foreign disinformation, children's safety and the potentially radicalizing effect of platform and product designs.

The bill represents a growing awareness that the federal government is consistently outmatched in resources and tech skills when examining massive Silicon Valley companies. The Federal Trade Commission, which currently does much of the oversight of the tech industry, and the Justice Department, which has brought a major antitrust case against Google, have traditionally taken a more reactive approach to abuses in the tech industry - sometimes at a far slower pace than the industry moves. FTC Chair Lina Khan has said that the agency's staff and resources are strained under a crush of merger filings and has asked Congress for more funding.

Consumer advocates have called for such a body for years, after tech companies were embroiled in scandals over data privacy, election interference and child safety. Recently, industry heavyweights including Microsoft President Brad Smith have chimed in with support for such an idea.

U.S. lawmakers have previously proposed creating a new privacy regulator within the FTC, and other countries boast data protection agencies and competition agencies with many technologists on staff. But Bennet's proposed commission would have a broader purview, addressing issues from the impact of social media platforms on local news to the effect of tech platforms on mental health.

The commission would be tasked with creating rules to ensure large tech companies are transparent about their content moderation rules, as well as requirements for regular public risk assessments about the violent or hateful content circulating on their services. It would establish a "Code Council" made up of technologists and public interest experts to create technical standards and policies for the commission to consider, as well as a Research Office that would conduct internal research and coordinate with outside academics to study the companies.

Bennet said he was motivated by his personal experience with harms stemming from technology: disinformation he's viewed in his work on the Senate Intelligence Committee and witnessing the effects that social media has had on his own children.

The proposal is a long shot in a Senate where Democrats have a fragile 50-50 majority - and Republicans have historically been wary of bills that would create new regulatory bodies. Though the legislation aims to address a wide range of harms, any government effort to force greater transparency of companies' content moderation practices and algorithms could raise free speech concerns under the First Amendment.

Recently, the Department of Homeland Security's launch of a "disinformation governance board" triggered a wave of criticism, largely from conservatives, arguing that it was a potential vehicle for government censorship. DHS clarified the entity will focus on foreign targets, including countering disinformation from Russia ahead of the midterm elections and human smugglers targeting migrants. And a group representing tech companies challenged President Donald Trump's 2020 social media executive order, arguing it could "curtail and chill constitutionally protected speech."

Harold Feld, the senior vice president of the consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge, proposed a new tech-focused commission in his 2019 book "The Case for the Digital Platform Act." Such an agency could bring more independence to oversight of the tech companies, he told The Post, because it would include commissioners from both parties, much like the FTC or Federal Communications Commission.

"We don't want regulation to be written based on just how p----d off the executive branch is," he said. "We want some independence here that is able to look beyond any particular controversy and make sure the decision is in the public interest."

Feld's proposal has increasingly gained steam in tech policy circles. Former FCC chair Tom Wheeler, a Democrat, told The Post last month that Elon Musk's bid to buy Twitter underscored the need for such an agency, to ensure "an acceptable behavioral code" across the tech industry. Feld said that there are safeguards in the bill around administrative processes that would provide additional checks, as well as court challenges that could be brought under the First Amendment.

The new agency would have limited resources compared with the companies, some of which have valuations of over a trillion dollars. Its initial budget would be $100 million in its first year, and then ramp up to $500 million over the course of five years.

Some critics have warned that such a body may be more susceptible to influence from powerful tech giants, which are among the largest lobbying spenders in Washington. Microsoft's Smith said at an April privacy conference that such a commission would represent "a better future than asking a Congress or a legislature or a parliament to go on a piecemeal basis and change each and every law separately." Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., at a March 2021 congressional hearing that such a new agency "could be very effective and positive for helping out."

Welch has also been working on a similar proposal, and he circulated a memo to members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in March 2021 proposing the creation of a separate agency overseeing tech.

"I'm drafting legislation that would finally create an agency to provide fair and comprehensive regulatory oversight of social media companies, so we can create online communities that are safer and better for our society," he said in a statement.
SPRING HILL, Fla. (AP)  A Florida woman is accused of shooting her dogs multiple times with a BB gun to keep them from escaping her yard, sheriff's officials said.

The 37-year-old woman was arrested Tuesday on charges of aggravated animal cruelty, Hernando County Sheriff's officials said in a Facebook post.

An animal enforcement deputy went to the woman's house in April to investigate a call about someone shooting a dog at a home in Spring Hill, officials said. A witness told the deputy he had heard a BB gun firing about 15 times. She denied having a BB gun when deputies spoke with her, and also said she didn't have any vaccination records for the dogs.

The deputies noticed three of her dogs were limping and had various injuries including scars on their paws and feet, the report said.

The woman said the dogs had been fighting with each other and that she had to force them to stop, the report said.

She was given a warning and instructed to have the dogs vaccinated within 10 days.

A deputy returned to the property the next day and found dogs with fresh wounds, officials said. As they continued checking in on her, the woman told investigators she didn't have the money to take the dogs to a veterinarian.

She inquired about the county's surrender policy and two days later she gave two of the dogs to Hernando County Animal Services. An exam there found 173 projectiles in their legs and paws the report said.

Investigators found she had used a gas-powered BB gun to shoot the dogs when they tried digging under a fence to get out of the yard, the report said. Three cats, a ferret and a bird were also taken from the woman; the report didn't list their condition.
ATLANTA (AP)  South Korean automaker Hyundai Motor Group is expected to announce next week its building a massive electric vehicle plant near Savannah, Georgia, according to a U.S. official familiar with the anticipated announcement.

Hyundai is finalizing its plans for the new plant as President Joe Biden is set to travel to South Korea next week as part of his first visit to Asia during his administration.

The White House and Hyundai have been in discussions about the plant thats expected to bring thousands new jobs to Georgia, and the formal announcement is likely to come during Bidens May 20-21 visit to Seoul, according to the official who was not authorized to comment and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The official stressed though that details of the formal announcement are still being worked out.

The plant could grow to include 8,500 employees and would be built on a 2,200-acre (890-hectare) site that state and local governments own near the hamlet of Ellabell, Georgia, said two people familiar with Georgias talks with Hyundai.

Thats about 25 miles (40 kilometers) inland from Savannah. The second person said Hyundai would invest more than $7 billion and could also build some cars powered by gasoline engines at the site, with an announcement in Georgia set for May 20. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the confidential talks.

It would be the second massive electric vehicle plant announced in Georgia in less than a year. Rivian Automotive in December announced it would build a $5 billion, 7,500-job electric truck plant about 45 miles (70 kilometers) east of Atlanta.

___

Madhani reported from Washington. Associated Press auto writer Tom Krisher contributed from Detroit and writer Russ Bynum contributed from Savannah, Georgia.
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ATLANTA (AP)  South Korean automaker Hyundai Motor Group is expected to announce next week that its building a massive electric vehicle plant near Savannah, Georgia, according to a U.S. official familiar with the anticipated announcement.

Hyundai is finalizing those plans as President Joe Biden is set to travel to South Korea next week as part of his first visit to Asia during his presidency.

The White House and Hyundai have been in discussions about the project, which is expected to bring thousands of new jobs to Georgia, and the formal announcement is likely during Bidens scheduled May 20-21 visit to Seoul, according to the official who was not authorized to comment and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The official stressed though that details of the formal announcement are still being worked out.

The plant could grow to include 8,500 employees and would be built on a 2,200-acre (890-hectare) site that state and local governments own near the hamlet of Ellabell, Georgia, said two people familiar with Georgias talks with Hyundai. The location's about 25 miles (40 kilometers) inland from Savannah. The second person said Hyundai would invest more than $7 billion and could also build some cars powered by gasoline engines at the site, with an announcement in Georgia set for May 20. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the confidential talks.

It would be the second huge electric vehicle plant announced in Georgia in less than a year. Rivian Automotive in December announced it would build a $5 billion, 7,500-job electric truck plant about 45 miles (70 kilometers) east of Atlanta.

Hyundai Motor Group is committed to accelerating electrification in the U.S., said spokesperson Michelle Tinson. We will announce the location of our new US EV plant soon.

Biden is heading to South Korea and Japan for talks with those two countries leaders. He also will meet during that trip with leaders from the Indo-Pacific strategic alliance with the U.S. known as the Quad: Australia, India and Japan.

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, who took office earlier this week, pledged during his campaign to strengthen U.S.-South Korea ties.

U.S. Sen Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat, met with Kia officials Tuesday. I tell business leaders regularly: Georgia is open for business, Warnock said, not mentioning the possibility of the plant.

Hyundai's interest in Georgia was first reported by Reuters, while The Atlanta Journal-Constitution initially reported the announcement plan. The company sells cars under the Hyundai and Kia brands.

The announcement would come in the closing days before Georgia's May 24 primary elections and could be a last-minute boost to Gov. Brian Kemp. The Republican incumbent leads in polls in his effort to hold off a challenge from former U.S. Sen. David Perdue and others in the GOP primary. Perdue has repeatedly attacked the Rivian deal, in which Georgia and local governments have pledged $1.5 billion of incentives and tax breaks, saying the state is transferring money to liberal financiers and should have consulted with local residents who oppose the plant because it threatens their rural quality of life.

The South Korean automaker would add a third American assembly plant to the Hyundai factory in Montgomery, Alabama, and a Kia factory in West Point, Georgia. It's unclear what models would be assembled at the new Georgia plant. Hyundai announced plans to invest $7.4 billion in the United States by 2025 to produce electric vehicles, upgrade plants and develop technology. The company plans to start building hybrid and electric vehicles at its Montgomery plant by this fall, investing $300 million.

Kemp has cultivated ties to the Korean automaker, part of a push to deliver jobs to parts of Georgia outside Atlanta and to build Georgia's position in the electric vehicle industry. South Korean conglomerate SK Group is building a $2.6 billion complex to make batteries for electric vehicles in Commerce, northeast of Atlanta.

There was a reason I made my first economic development trip to South Korea and visited with great companies like Kia and Hyundai and a lot of others. We've got a great partnership with them and a lot of other South Korean companies, and we have for a long time, Kemp said Monday.

The deal would solidify Georgia's efforts to capture a big piece of the electric vehicle industry. Pat Wilson, Georgia's economic development commissioner, said in December after Georgia landed Rivian that the industry transition is a seed field of opportunity for Georgia.

Looking forward, I just see a huge amount of opportunity for us, Wilson said,

Georgia bought the site, which includes more than 2,200 acres (890) hectares) for $61 million last July, with Bryan and Chatham counties each kicking in $9 million.

-

Madhani reported from Washington. Associated Press auto writer Tom Krisher contributed from Detroit and writer Russ Bynum contributed from Savannah, Georgia.
LOME, Togo (AP)  At least eight soldiers have been killed and 13 other security forces members wounded in an ambush by extremists in northern Togo near the border with Burkina Faso, the government said.

The incident was a worrying sign that jihadis who are staging increasing attacks in neighboring countries are expanding their activity into Togo.
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BUCHA, Ukraine (AP)  As he listened to his father die, the boy lay still on the asphalt. His elbow burned where a bullet had pierced him. His thumb stung from being grazed.

Another killing was in progress on a lonely street in Bucha, the community on the outskirts of Ukraines capital, Kyiv, where bodies of civilians are still being discovered weeks after Russian soldiers withdrew. Many have been shot in the head.

The 14--year-old Yura Nechyporenko was about to become one of them.

Survivors have described soldiers firing guns near their feet or threatening them with grenades, only to be drawn away by a cooler-headed colleague. But there was no one around to restrain the Russian soldier that day in March when Yura and his father, 47-year-old Ruslan, were biking down a tree-lined street.

They were on their way to visit vulnerable neighbors sheltering in basements and homes without electricity or running water. Their bikes were tied with white fabric, in a sign they traveled in peace.

When the solider stepped from a dirt path to challenge them, Yura and his father immediately stopped and raised their hands.

What are you doing? the soldier asked. He didnt give Yuras father time to answer.

The boy heard two gunshots. His father fell, mouth open, already bleeding.

A shot hit Yuras hand, and he fell, too. Another shot struck his elbow. He closed his eyes.

A final shot was fired.

Yuras extraordinary account of an attempted killing by Russian soldiers stands out as international justice experts descend on Bucha as a center of the horrors and possible war crimes in Ukraine. In Bucha alone, 31 children under the age of 18 were killed and 19 wounded, according to local authorities.

All children were killed or injured deliberately, since the Russian soldiers deliberately shot at evacuating cars that had the signs CHILDREN and white fabric tied to them, and they deliberately shot at the homes of civilians, the chief prosecutor of the Bucha region, Ruslan Kravchenko, told The Associated Press.

The U.N. human rights office says at least 202 children across Ukraine have been killed in Russias invasion, and believes the real number to be considerably higher. The Ukrainian governments count is 217 children killed and over 390 wounded.

The AP and Frontline, drawing from a variety of sources, have independently documented 18 attacks where children were killed that likely meet the definition of a war crime. The number of child victims in the attacks is unknown, and the accounting represents just a fraction of potential war crimes.

Yura is a teenager growing into himself, spindly and spotted, with dark circles pressed under his eyes. As he lies on the floor of his familys home to demonstrate what happened, he shows the healing holes in his elbow.

His mother, Alla, takes deep breaths to calm herself. Yura, sitting up, wraps an arm around her, then puts his head on her shoulder.

On that awful day, Yura survived the attempted killing by the awkward grace of that teenage constant, his gray hoodie. It was shot instead of him, and he felt it move.

Yura lay on the street for minutes afterward, waiting for the soldier to walk away.

Then Yura ran.

When he finally arrived home, his family called the police. The police told the family that officers didnt know what to do with the case, according to the boys uncle, Andriy. A prosecutors report describes the killing and attempted killing in a few bare sentences. Kravchenko told the AP that they continue to work on Yuras case.

In March, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court announced that investigations into crimes against children in particular will benefit from a new trust fund. Children account for half or more of those affected by conflict, but are often labeled as too vulnerable to testify or as having inaccurate memories, according to Veronique Aubert, the special adviser on crimes involving children to the ICC prosecutor.

Yuras case is unusual.

Prosecutors may want to take up this case because the victim is still alive and can potentially testify, said Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University and former special counsel for the Department of Defense. It may be difficult if not impossible for a defendant to claim they were somehow justified in trying to kill a child.

Yuras family retrieved his fathers body the next day. Yuras grandmother pleaded with Russian soldiers to let her approach.

With their guns cocked, they let her walk ahead of them. Another soldier in the distance shouted, Dont come here or well kill you. But he didnt fire.

They brought Yuras father home in a wheelbarrow and buried him in the yard, in one of many makeshift graves hurriedly dug during the monthlong Russian occupation.

Yura and his family left Bucha the next day along a rare evacuation corridor. They had to pass the scene of the shooting. Yura wore a white sling around his arm, and Russian soldiers asked what had happened.

I was shot by a Russian soldier, the boy replied.

At that, his mother was terrified. I felt everything collapse inside me, she recalled. I thought they would shoot us all.

But the soldiers let them pass. The family left town that day.

The gray hoodie, bloodied at the elbow and with the top seam sliced, is now the centerpiece of the familys search for justice. After the Russians left, they returned to Bucha and reburied Yura's father.

Yura's mother is thinking of sending the boy overseas for the sake of his mental health. She needs some distance, too.

Im never alone physically, but its possible to be alone mentally, she said, near tears. I try to avoid this.

She hopes the courts will work, and believes no one should go through what her son did. Yura fears they already have.

Its not only me who wants justice, he said. People in Ukraine are still possibly being tortured and killed even now.

Yura turned 15 on April 12. It was a quiet birthday. His father, a good cook, usually grilled to celebrate it.

On April 25, the family again gathered at the grave to mark 40 days after Ruslans death, by local custom. Yura quietly lit a candle and placed it on the grave. Then he pulled a hoodie, a black one, over his head to block the chill.

The boys uncle, Andriy, fears the trauma of surviving death will catch up with Yura.

This tears my soul apart, said Andriy, in tears. What we see is suffering after suffering."

___

Frontline producer Tom Jennings contributed to this story.
UNITED NATIONS (AP)  The top international official in Bosnia warned Wednesday that Bosnian Serbs are trying to secede and undermine the countrys sovereignty, and he urged the international community to safeguard the rights of all its people and uphold the peace agreement that ended Bosnias 1992-95 war.

High representative Christian Schmidt told the U.N. Security Council that 26 years after the Dayton peace agreement was signed Bosnia is at a crossroads, and what happens and how the international community reacts will resonate throughout the western Balkans.

He said the country remains traumatized by the war that left over 100,000 people dead, and every single person who lived through it is still in one way or another wounded.

The U.S.-brokered Dayton agreement established two separate entities in Bosnia  one run by Bosnias Serbs called Republika Srpska and another one dominated by the countrys Bosniaks, who are mostly Muslims, and Croats. The two entities are bound together by joint central institutions, and all important decisions must be backed by both.

Since last year, Schmidt said, citizens of the country and even international media have speculated about the possibility of another war.

He said he sees the desire to keep peace among Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks and others, but the younger generations born during or after the war, in the face of continued instability, unfortunately, are leaving the country in record numbers.

In his report to the Security Council circulated Tuesday, Schmidt warned that Bosnias potential to become a security crisis is very real.

He said he is grateful for the European Unions force, EUFOR-ALTHEA, which is implementing the military side of the Dayton agreement, as a confidence-building measure and a necessary tool to safeguard peace and stability in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Schmidt was delivering his first his first briefing to the Security Council despite protests from Russia and China that he is not the legitimate high representative because his appointment was not endorsed by its 15 members.

Russias U.N. Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia raised a point of order when Schmidt was invited to speak by the current council president, U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, saying his presence undermines the authority of the Security Council and the United Nations at large. At the same time, he said, the council does allow individuals to brief members in their personal capacity and that is how Russia would consider Schmidts presence on Wednesday.

Chinas deputy U.N. ambassador Dai Bing called the Security Councils role in appointing the high representation indispensable under the 1995 Dayton agreement. Since Schmidt hasnt been endorsed by the council, he said, it is inappropriate for him to brief members as high representative.

Last July, the council rejected a resolution put forward by Russia and China that would have immediately stripped the powers of the international high representative, who oversees implementation of the peace agreement, and eliminated the position entirely in one year.

Schmidt was formally appointed as the next high representative on May 27, 2021 by the 10-member Steering Board of the 55-member Peace Implementation Council, the international body guiding Bosnias peace process. Russia has suspended its participation on the board.

Thomas-Greenfield and many other council members, who insist that Schmidt was legally appointed, welcomed his participation.

Schmidt warned the council that leaders of the Bosnian Serb-dominated entity have systematically challenged provisions of the 1995 agreement and intensified their activities aimed at usurping powers granted to the federal government.

In December, Schmidt said, the Republika Srpska legislature instructed its government to withdraw from agreements including on defense, indirect taxation and the judiciary.

If followed through, this would mean, at a minimum, the withdrawal of the Republika Srpska from the unified armed forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina -- which is the result of one of the most significant reforms of the Dayton era and one of the most positive developments seen in recent years -- and potentially the formation of its own military, he said.

Schmidt said so far this attempt could be stopped by the international community.

But he said Republika Srpskas authorities are pursuing through these unilateral withdrawals a de facto secession of the Bosnian Serb entity by attempting to opt out of Bosnias constitutional framework and assume its responsibilities.

They have no right to secede, Schmidt said, and he told council members the duty of the international community under the peace agreement is to safeguard the rights of all three constituent peoples and others, so all citizens may express their identity with none dominating the other.

Thomas-Greenfield stressed that the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Bosnia and Herzegovina is paramount and unquestionable and she called steps taken by Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik and Republika Srpska to block the work of state institutions undemocratic, escalatory, and not in the spirit of the Dayton agreement.
The United Nations Human Rights Council voted Thursday to deepen an investigation into alleged rights abuses by Russian forces near Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, and other regions of the country.

The council in March established an international commission of inquiry to probe all human rights violations during Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The vote on Thursday at a special session of the council passed a resolution urging the commission's investigators to focus their efforts on incidents near Kyiv, as well as the regions of Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Sumy, all of which were occupied by Russian forces in late February and March.

The measure passed with 33 votes in favor and only two countries - China and Eritrea - voting against. Russia was suspended from the council last month and has denied that its troops targeted civilians for abuse.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet told member states Thursday that her team had collected evidence of hundreds of killings of Ukrainian civilians by Russian soldiers and continues to verify allegations that "may amount to war crimes."

"The scale of unlawful killings, including indicia of summary executions in areas to the north of Kyiv, is shocking," Bachelet said in a video message to the council ahead of the vote. "These killings of civilians often appeared to be intentional, carried out by snipers and soldiers."

More than 1,000 civilian bodies have been recovered in the Kyiv region alone, she said. In early April, Russian troops retreated from areas around the Ukrainian capital they had captured at the start of the war, leaving bodies in the streets and traumatized residents behind.

Bachelet said civilians had been killed while seeking food or water or fleeing in their vehicles, and some unarmed local men had been tortured before being killed. A monitoring mission from the U.N. office visited 14 towns and villages in the areas around Kyiv and the northern city of Chernihiv last week.

"This was the second OHCHR visit to these regions, and it pains me to imagine how many visits will be needed to document only a fraction of the egregious human rights violations that have occurred there," Bachelet said.

The city of Mariupol, where Russian forces are closing in on the last Ukrainian holdout after an 11-week siege, remains inaccessible to international monitors and investigators. Bachelet said she was "shocked at the scale of the destruction" and the breaches of international law by Russian forces in the southern port city, where the U.N. estimates thousands of civilians have died.

Bachelet also said her office has verified a dozen cases of sexual violence across the country and is looking into more allegations. Most of the victims cited are women and girls, she said, though accounts of men and boys experiencing sexual violence have begun to emerge.

According to the U.N. Children's Fund, or UNICEF, at least 100 children have been confirmed killed in the fighting in Ukraine in the past month, although it believes the actual figure is much higher.

"More children have been injured and faced grave violations of their rights, millions more have been displaced. Schools continue to be attacked and used for military purposes and water and sanitation infrastructure impacted," UNICEF's deputy executive director, Omar Abdi, told the U.N. Security Council Thursday.

In a video address to the human rights council, Ukraine's deputy foreign minister, Emine Dzhaparova, decried the "sheer horror" and "pure evil" of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Dzhaparova said Russia was committing "the most gruesome human rights violations on the European continent in decades."

Russia's war "could have utterly devastating long-term implications for human rights, a rules-based international order and peace and security if we do not continue to stand together as an international community," Bathsheba Nell Crocker, U.S. representative to the U.N. in Geneva, said Thursday.

China said that it voted against the measure because it was "neither balanced nor objective" and would only serve to escalate tensions. Russia's ambassador in Geneva also accused Western nations of "organizing ... to demonize Russia," in a statement to Reuters.
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (AP)  The flagship school of North Carolina's university system is renaming a residence hall and a student affairs office long named for people tied to white supremacy.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will dedicate the Hortense McClinton Residence Hall and the Henry Owl Building in a ceremony on Friday, the school said in a news release.
UNITED NATIONS (AP)  The United States clashed with China and Russia on Wednesday over their strong opposition to the U.S. push for new U.N. sanctions on North Korea over its missile and nuclear programs.

The debate at a U.N. Security Council meeting put a spotlight on the enormous gap between the two sides and the near impossible task the Biden administration faces in trying to get the council to adopt a new sanctions resolution. China and Russia both have veto power and say they want to see new talks and not more punishment for the North.

U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, this months council president who called the meeting, said the Security Council cant wait until North Korea conducts additional provocative, illegal, dangerous acts -- like a nuclear test.

She said the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea -- the countrys official name -- has conducted 17 ballistic missile launches so far this year. Assistant U.N. Secretary-General Khaled Khiari told the council that North Korea has launched more missiles in the past five months than in the prior two years combined.

The council imposed sanctions after the Norths first nuclear test explosion in 2006 and tightened them over the years seeking to rein in its nuclear and ballistic missile programs and cut off funding.

But Thomas-Greenfield said that for the last four years, two members -- a clear reference to China and Russia -- have blocked every attempt to enforce the sanctions and update the list of individuals, companies and other entities subject to asset freezes and travel bans.

In the sanctions resolution adopted in December 2017, the Security Council committed to further restricting petroleum exports to North Korea if it conducted a ballistic missile launch capable of reaching intercontinental ranges, Thomas-Greenfield said. This year, North Korea has launched at least three ICBMs, and the council has remained silent, she said.

A proposed U.S. draft resolution would halve oil exports, among other sanctions.

The U.S. ambassador said the council needs to speak with a strong and unified voice to condemn North Korea's behavior.

Thomas-Greenfield told reporters last week the U.S. would like the council to vote on the resolution in May, and she urged members on Wednesday to support the measure and show that the council will respond to threats to international peace and security and to blatant violations of its resolutions.

Chinese Ambassador Zhang Jun expressed regret that the United States remains enamored superstitiously of the magic power of sanctions.

He said that the direct talks between the U.S. and North Korea in 2018 produced positive results and a de-escalation of the situation on the Korean peninsula, but that the United States created the current impasse by not reciprocating to what he said were Pyongyangs positive initiatives.

Zhang said the U.S. holds the key to breaking the deadlock and should take concrete actions to respond positively to North Koreas concerns and create conditions for an early resumption of dialogue.

The U.S. draft resolution is centered on furthering sanctions, which is not an appropriate way to address the current situation, he said.

Asked by reporters later how China will vote on the U.S. draft resolution, Zhang replied: We have proposed other options, and we have told them that we will not support the current U.S. draft resolution.

Last fall China and Russia circulated a draft resolution urging the Security Council to end a host of sanctions on North Korea, and Zhang expressed hope Wednesday that council members will give serious consideration to it.

Russias deputy U.N. ambassador, Anna Evstigneeva, echoed Zhangs opposition to new sanctions.

Unfortunately, so far the council has only tightened restrictions ignoring the positive signals from North Korea, she said.

She expressed regret that over the last four years the council didnt react to North Koreas dismantling of its nuclear test site and compliance with the moratorium on nuclear testing. She said there is a need for political and diplomatic solutions to peacefully resolve the issues on the Korean peninsula.

Khiari, the U.N. assistant secretary-general, told the council that there are indications of resumed construction activities at the Punggye-ri nuclear test site, which was declared shut down in 2018.

Zhang said Beijing wants to avoid a new nuclear test explosion, so thats why we do not want to have additional sanctions that might force one of the parties to take more proactive measures.
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PORTLAND, Maine (AP)  America's commercial fishing industry fell 10% in catch volume and 15% in value during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, federal regulators said Thursday.

The 2020 haul of fish was 8.4 billion pounds, while the value of that catch was $4.8 billion, officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. The early months of the pandemic posed numerous challenges for the U.S. fishing industry, which has remained economically viable despite the difficult year, NOAA officials said.

It was fishery closures, boats not going out due to COVID, border closings due to COVID, lots of disruption in the flow of goods and services, said Michael Liddel, NOAA's commercial fishery statistics branch chief.

NOAA made the announcement as it unveiled its Status of the Stocks report, which provides details about the health of the nation's commercial fishing industry.

The report said there were 51 fish stocks on the federal government's overfished list in 2021. That list includes stocks that have been depleted by excessive fishing and the number was an increase of two from the previous year.

Bering Sea snow crabs were among the stocks added to the overfished list. The snow crab fishery, based in Alaska, is one of the most valuable in the country, and was worth more than $100 million at the docks in 2020. Climate factors appear to be playing a role in the decline of Bering Sea snow crabs.

The stock could be falling victim to disease, predation and movement in search of colder waters, said Kelly Denit, director of NOAA Fisheries' Office of Sustainable Fisheries.

That abundance has dropped by more than 50% in the last two years, and that stock is now overfished, Denit said.

NOAA also removed a few fish stocks from its overfishing and overfished lists. They included the south Atlantic Coast tilefish and the eastern Pacific Ocean yellowfin tuna.

Some of the largest value seafood species were once again New England staples, such as lobster, a fishery anchored in Maine, and sea scallops, many of which come to the docks in Massachusetts. Other high value seafoods included species of crab, salmon and shrimp.

NOAA said 8% of stocks with known statuses are subject to overfishing. That means nearly 300 fish stocks are not.

The high number of sustainable fish stocks illustrates that regulators and industry were able to "answer the challenge of COVID-19 while ensuring the sustainability and economic stability of our nations fisheries, said NOAAs acting assistant secretary for oceans and atmosphere, Janet Coit.
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP)  Deb Haaland is pushing the U.S. government to reckon with its role in Native American boarding schools like no other Cabinet secretary could  backed by personal experience, a struggle with losing her own Native language and a broader community that has felt the devastating impacts.

The agency she oversees  the Interior Department  released a first-of-its-kind report this week that named the 408 schools the federal government supported to strip Native Americans of their cultures and identities. At least 500 children died at some of the schools, but that number is expected to reach into the thousands or tens of thousands as more research is done.

We are uniquely positioned to assist in the effort to undercover the dark history of these institutions that have haunted our families for too long, she said Wednesday during a news conference. As a pueblo woman, it is my responsibility and, frankly, its my legacy.

The U.S. government hasn't been open to investigating itself to uncover the truth about boarding schools that operated from the late 18th century to the late 1960s. It's possible now because people who know first-hand the persistent trauma caused by the boarding school system are positioned in the U.S. government.

Still, the work to uncover the truth and create a path for healing will rely on having financial resources in Indian Country, which the federal government has chronically underfunded.

Tribes will have to navigate federal laws on repatriation to take Native children who died and are buried at former boarding school sites home, if desired, and might have no recourse to access burial sites on private land. The causes of death included disease, accidental injuries and abuse.

Boarding school survivors also might be hesitant to recount the painful past and trust a government whose policies were to eradicate tribes and, later, assimilate them under the veil of education. Some have welcomed the opportunity to share their stories for the first time.

Haaland, the first and only Native American Cabinet secretary, has the support of President Joe Biden to investigate further. Congress has provided the Interior Department with $7 million for its work on the next phase of the report, which will focus on burial sites, and identifying Native children and their ages. Haaland also said a year-long tour would seek to gather stories of boarding school survivors for an oral history collection.

A bill that's previously been introduced in Congress to create a truth and healing commission on boarding schools got its first hearing Thursday. It's sponsored by two Native American U.S. representatives  Democrat Sharice Davids of Kansas, who is Ho-Chunk, and Republican Tom Cole of Oklahoma, who is Chickasaw.

Working with the Interior, knowing that there are representatives in the federal government who understand these experiences not just on a historical record but deep within their selves, their own personal stories, really makes a difference, said Deborah Parker, chief executive of the National Native American Boarding Schools Healing Coalition and a member of the Tulalip Tribes.

More than two decades ago, Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Kevin Gover issued an apology for the emotional, psychological, physical and spiritual violence committed against children at the off-reservation schools. Then in 2009, President Barack Obama quietly signed off on an apology of sorts for violence, maltreatment and neglect inflicted on Native Peoples by citizens of the United States. The language was buried deep in a multibillion-dollar defense spending bill.

The proposed commission would have a broader scope than the Interior's investigation to seek records with subpoena power. It would make recommendations to the federal government within five years of its passage, possible in the U.S. House but more difficult in the U.S. Senate.

Starting with the Indian Civilization Act of 1819, the U.S. enacted laws and policies to establish and support Native American Boarding Schools. The goal was to civilize Native Americans, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians. Religious and private institutions often received federal funding and were willing partners.

Capt. Richard Henry Pratt described the essence of the federal boarding schools in a speech he gave in 1892 where he said, Kill the Indian and save the man.

Minnesota resident Mitch Walking Elk ran away multiple times from boarding schools he attended in the late 1950s and early '60s because my spirit knew it wasnt a good place for me, he said.

Boarding schools aren't the only thing that has led him to distrust the federal government, even as it seems willing to uncover the past. In 1864, Walking Elks ancestors from the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes were attacked in the Sand Creek Massacre. At least 200 people were killed, and victims bodies were mutilated.

I have reservations about what's going on right now because I don't trust them, said Walking Elk. If Deb Haaland makes too many waves, the far right, the extremists will manufacture something to put the brakes on this.

Boarding school survivor Ramona Klein testified before Congress on Thursday, describing seeing her mother cry as her children got on a big, green bus for boarding school, being scrubbed with a stiff brush once there, and sleeping under a scratchy wool Army blanket. She put on a large rubber hand when she spoke of being touched at the school at night like no childs body should be touched.

Being in that boarding school was the loneliest time of my life, said Klein, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa in North Dakota. It has made it difficult for me to trust other people, including the people on this committee, with my emotions, my thoughts, my dreams and my physical being. And how could that not be the result?

Republican Rep. Jay Obernolte of California said Congress would need to consider the financial investment in the proposed commission and whether those who serve would do so as a public service or be compensated.

Im not opposed to investing substantial taxpayer resources in this commission, but I think we need to be explicit about what those resources are, he said Thursday.
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP)  Amendments to a lucrative contract between the state and a barbecue restaurateur to build and operate restaurants at six state parks ballooned the cost of the project by $12.4 million, the head of a state watchdog agency told House lawmakers on Thursday.

Mike Jackson, the director of the Legislative Office of Fiscal Transparency, said his office quickly noticed irregularities in the contract between the Oklahoma Tourism and Recreation Department and Swadley's Foggy Bottom Kitchen.

It looked like it was very favorable to the vendor," Jackson said. LOFT was unable to find another contract structured this way."

Jackson said two amendments to the contract, both of which ratified expenditures that had already been made, ended up costing state taxpayers $12.4 million more than expected.

Under the deal, the state agreed to subsidize the restaurant's financial losses, which ultimately cost the state $2.1 million, and pay the restaurant management fees of $1.34 million, Jackson testified. In addition, the restaurant company served as the general contractor overseeing the construction and charged the state management and consulting fees on virtually every invoice that ranged from 5% to as much as 35%, he said.

The entire project cost the state an estimated $16.7 million, Jackson said.

The agency canceled the contract last month, and Gov. Kevin Stitt's hand-picked former director of the agency, Jerry Winchester, resigned days later. The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation has launched a probe into the deal, and Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater has asked for a forensic audit of allegations of potential criminal conduct."

Jackson said his agency began looking into the tourism agency's finances after the Legislature authorized $48.6 million in bonds in 2020 for capital improvements to state parks. One of the first thing evaluators noticed was that the annual cost for food and beverage service at state parks, which typically averaged $50,000 annually, jumped to nearly $6 million in 2021, Jackson said.

We started asking questions pretty quickly," Jackson said.

A message left Thursday with Swadley's corporate office wasn't immediately returned, but the company has said it's proud of the work it accomplished to help beautify state parks.

Despite the logistical complexities presented by the location of these restaurant sites, Swadley's completed its work on the six restaurants in less than two years," the company said. From the beginning, Swadleys acknowledged and accepted that this project would be a difficult undertaking, but the extent of the decay and neglect at the various restaurants made it more difficult than either party initially anticipated."
LONGVIEW, Wash. (AP)  Timber company Weyerhaeuser will pay $600,000 after reaching a settlement with conservation group Columbia Riverkeeper, despite denying allegations it had broken Washington state water quality laws.

The Daily News in Longview reported Riverkeeper in March sued Weyerhaeuser NR Companys Longview mill.

Under the settlement reached this week, the timber company will pay $600,000 to Seeding Justice for its Columbia River Restoration Fund. Each violation after the agreement goes into effect will cost Weyerhaeuser $5,000.

While we acknowledge the stormwater exceedances stemming from one or more of the facilities at the site, we did not break the law and continue to deny any wrongdoing related to this issue, Weyerhaeuser Public Affairs Manager Mary Catherine McAleer said in a statement. We do, however, accept our shared responsibility in the community and the need to take positive, proactive measures to help protect and invest in the river.

Weyerhaeuser also was ordered to pay about $119,000 to cover Riverkeepers legal costs.

Weyerhaeuser by Dec. 31 must also reroute one of its stormwater pipes so it no longer flows into the Columbia River and instead goes to a waste treatment plant, according to court documents.

The court also ordered the company to install aerators, one or more flow meters with monitoring probes, particulate streams and biochar sock filters at its facility.

The U.S. Department of Justice has 45 days to review the settlement and after that a federal district court judge must approve the agreement.

People rely on the Columbia for clean water and strong salmon runs, Riverkeeper staff attorney Simone Anter said in a news release. No corporation, including Weyerhaeuser, has the right to flout the law and pollute this irreplaceable river. The requirements of this agreement will see significant steps to reduce pollution at this massive facility.

Riverkeeper sued Weyerhaeuser on grounds it had violated the Clean Water Act.

We have been working cooperatively with the Department of Ecology to address these concerns and are involved in an ongoing process to set appropriate permit conditions and standards for all facilities, McAleer wrote in the statement.

In February, the Washington Department of Ecology fined the companys Longview mill $40,000 for water quality and monitoring violations.
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GENEVA (AP)  The number of new coronavirus cases reported worldwide has continued to fall except in the Americas and Africa, the World Health Organization said in its latest assessment of the pandemic.

The decline comes as Europe marked a COVID-19 death milestone: 2 million on the continent.

In its weekly pandemic report released late Tuesday, the U.N. health agency said about 3.5 million new cases and more than 25,000 deaths were reported globally, which respectively represent decreases of 12% and 25%.

The downward trend in reported infections began in March, although many countries have dismantled their widespread testing and surveillance programs, making an accurate count of cases extremely difficult.

WHO said there were only two regions where reported COVID-19 infections increased: the Americas, by 14%, and Africa, by 12%. Cases remained stable in the Western Pacific and fell everywhere else, the agency said.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned during a press briefing this week that the rising cases in more than 50 countries highlights the volatility of this virus.

Tedros said COVID-19 variants, including mutated versions of the highly infectious omicron, are driving a resurgence of COVID-19 in several countries, including South Africa, which was the first to identify omicron in November.

He said relatively high rates of population immunity are preventing a spike in hospitalizations and deaths but cautioned that this is not guaranteed for places where vaccination levels are low. Only about 16% of people in poorer countries have been immunized against COVID-19.

WHO's report noted that some of the biggest jumps in COVID-19 cases were seen in China, which saw a 145% rise in the last week.

Earlier this week, Chinese authorities doubled down on pandemic restrictions in Shanghai after a brief period of loosening up. The move frustrated residents who were hoping a more than monthlong lockdown was finally easing after complaints of food shortages and quarantines where some people were forced to surrender their house keys.

WHO's Tedros said Tuesday he didn't think China's zero-COVID strategy was sustainable, considering the behaviour of the virus now and what we anticipate in the future.

On Thursday, North Korea announced its first coronavirus outbreak and imposed a nationwide lockdown. The size of the outbreak wasnt immediately known, but it could have serious consequences because the country has a poor health care system and its 26 million people are believed to be mostly unvaccinated.

___

Follow APs coverage of the pandemic at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic
MADISON, Wis. (AP)  All four of the leading Republican candidates for Wisconsin governor want to either abolish or dramatically overhaul the GOP-created bipartisan commission that oversees elections in the state, moves that Democratic Gov. Tony Evers opposes.

Tim Michels, a construction company co-owner and the most recent Republican to get into the race, released his proposed overhaul of the Wisconsin Elections Commission on Thursday. The three other top Republicans  former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefish, businessman Kevin Nicholson and state Rep. Timothy Ramthun  all favor abolishing the commission.

The winner of the Aug. 9 primary will face Evers.

The commission has been in the crosshairs for many Republicans ever since President Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in 2020 by nearly 21,000 votes. Critics have faulted how the commission administered the election, while multiple lawsuits, reviews and recounts have upheld Biden's win and not found evidence of widespread fraud.

Michael Gableman, the former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice hired by Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to review the 2020 election, also recommended eliminating the commission. Vos does not support that recommendation.

The Republican-controlled Legislature created the commission in 2016. It replaced the nonpartisan Government Accountability Board, which was comprised of retired judges.

Michels' plan calls for terminating the three Republican and three Democratic members of the commission, repealing all of its guidance issued to local election clerks, terminating all senior staff and banning the use of unstaffed absentee ballot boxes.

Michels is also calling for a twice-annual purge of dead and inactive voters from the voting rolls. That is less than what the commission does now. It currently performs a daily check to deactivate voters who are dead or have become ineligible and checks four times a year for people who have moved.

My plan is a fresh start, and allows us to bring in or bring back people who are ready to get to work to fix our elections, not make the problem worse, Michels said in a statement.

Ann Jacobs, the Democratic chair of the elections commission, tweeted that Michels plan was craziness.

It demonstrates a total lack of understanding how elections work, Jacobs said. There would be no guidance for elections at all? And no staff? Just an empty office? Who will administer registrations?

Kleefisch, who polls have shown is the frontrunner, said Michels' plan doesn't go far enough.

Anyone who has been paying attention knows that the Wisconsin Elections Commission cannot be reformed, Kleefisch said. It must be abolished.

Both Nicholson and Ramthun support eliminating the commission and moving election duties to the secretary of state's office.

Evers voiced his opposition to Michels' plan in a tweet Thursday.

All eligible voters should be able to vote, Evers tweeted. I will continue to veto any radical legislation that makes it harder to access the ballot box.
SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)

BART and Caltrain will provide additional trains early Sunday morning to accommodate participants in the Bay to Breakers run in San Francisco.

The 12 kilometer race was first run in 1912 and begins near the Embarcadero and goes west through the city and Golden Gate Park to the Great Highway.

BART plans to provide four additional trains that will arrive at the Embarcadero station at 7 a.m. with limited service:

- One train will leave Millbrae at 6:31 a.m. and will stop at Daly City at 6:44 a.m., 16th Street Mission at 6:54 a.m. and then Embarcadero at 7 a.m. No other stops will be made along the line.

- A second train will leave Pleasant Hill at 6:25 a.m. and will stop at MacArthur at 6:45 a.m., West Oakland at 6:53 a.m. and then Embarcadero at 7 a.m. No other stops will be made along the line.

- A third train will leave Dublin at 6:20 a.m. and will stop at Bay Fair at 6:37 a.m., West Oakland at 6:56 a.m. and then Embarcadero at 7:03 a.m. No other stops will be made along the line.

- A fourth train will leave El Cerrito del Norte at 6:37 a.m. and will stop at MacArthur at 6:51 a.m., West Oakland at 6:59 a.m. and then Embarcadero at 7:06 a.m. No other stops will be made along the line.

Caltrain will run two northbound special event trains with limited stops Sunday to get runners to the start line in time for the 8 a.m. start.

Two trains will depart from San Jose Diridon Station at 5:50 a.m. and 6:02 a.m. and will arrive at the San Francisco Caltrain Station at 7:17 a.m. and 7:30 a.m., respectively.

Trains will be single-tracking at the Burlingame, Broadway, San Mateo, Hayward Park, Hillsdale, Palo Alto and California Avenue stations, so riders should pay attention to signs and announcements to be sure they are on the correct platform.

the starting line is about 1.4 miles from the San Francisco Caltrain Station, so participants can walk to the starting line or take Muni's T-Third light-rail service.

Masks are required on BART and recommended on board for both Caltrain and Muni.

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IN SUMMARY

Gaps in COVID vaccination rates among the state's Medi-Cal population persist. Five Medi-Cal plans still have vaccination rates under 50 percent.

By Ana B. Ibarra

CalMatters

To boost COVID-19 vaccination rates among California's low-income residents, last year the state launched a $350 million incentive program. But since then, the gap between those Medi-Cal members and the general population has actually grown wider.

While 84 percent of all Californians 5 years and older have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, only about 57 percent of those in Medi-Cal, the health insurance program for low-income residents, have done so as of April, according to the latest vaccination update from the California Department of Health Care Services.

That's a gap of 27 percentage points, and it's slightly bigger than the gap recorded last summer.

In September, the state rolled out a six-month incentive program for Medi-Cal health plans to boost Covid vaccination rates among their 14 million members. CalMatters compared those health plans' most recently published vaccination rates to what they looked like in August of 2021, before the start of the incentive program, to see how much each plan's vaccination rates had grown in that time. This comparison looks at the 12 and over age group because vaccines for younger children were not available last summer.

Between last August and this April, the most improved Medi-Cal plan, CalViva in Fresno, Kings and Madera counties, went from 42 percent to 54 percent vaccinated members ages 12 and over. The plan with the lowest gains, United Healthcare Community Plan in San Diego County, went from 46 percent to 48 percent. Five Medi-Cal plans still have Covid vaccination rates under 50 percent -- although that's an improvement from last summer, when 11 plans were under the half mark.

The fact that rates are trending up is a good thing, but the growing gap between Medi-Cal members and the general population is concerning, said Kiran Savage-Sangwan, executive director at the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network. "They're not making the type of progress that one would hope for," she said. "I think it's possible that health plans may need to reevaluate their strategies."

Data has persistently shown that people living in the poorest zip codes and enrolled in the Medi-Cal program are vaccinated at lower rates, leaving them more susceptible to serious disease from an infection. People who are not vaccinated are 8.6 times more likely to be hospitalized than those who have been vaccinated and boosted, according to the state's public health department.

Through the incentive program, the state paid Medi-Cal plans some money upfront to roll out efforts to get more of their members vaccinated. The plans would then get additional dollars if they met certain targets, such as increasing vaccination among their homebound members and among Latino and African American members, who have been vaccinated at lower rates than other racial and ethnic groups.

The incentive program has now ended, and the state's Department of Health Care Services is still analyzing data provided by the health plans to determine whether targets were met. "Final performance and financial data for the current program will be evaluated before considering whether a follow-up future program would be helpful," Carol Sloan, a department spokesperson, said in an email.

In general, a health plan's vaccination rate reflects that of the region it serves. For example, plans serving the Bay Area -- where vaccination has typically been more popular-- report higher Covid vaccination rates than those serving the San Joaquin Valley or the Inland Empire. But because vaccination rates in the valley were lower to begin with, Medi-Cal plans there saw the most growth in the six months of the state's incentive program.

Officials at health plans interviewed for this story said that while they were already doing their own outreach to members prior to the incentive program, state dollars allowed them to ramp up those efforts and get creative.

Some plans increased the number of vaccination events -- one even hired an event planner to redesign its pop-up clinics, bringing in balloon artists and bubblegum machines in hopes of attracting more people. Plans have offered Medi-Cal members gift cards and free days at a local museum in exchange for a vaccine. They've teamed up with celebrities on social media campaigns and partnered with local organizations like churches to set up clinics in zip codes with the lowest Covid vaccination rates. Plans also used the money to boost their efforts in combating vaccine misinformation via mailers and phone calls.

Dr. Takashi Wada, chief medical officer at Inland Empire Health Plan, which serves 1.5 million people in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, said a key component of its vaccination strategy was to pass on incentive dollars to the health providers they contract with. "Because we really wanted our providers to be talking to their patients about the importance of the vaccine...and administer the vaccine themselves," he said.

The percentage of the plan's providers administering the vaccines in their offices, rather than referring out, went from 40 percent to 60 percent during the six months of the incentive program, Wada said.

Still, despite the ongoing efforts and an improvement of about 8 percentage points since August, less than half of Inland Empire Health's members 12 and older have received a shot.

"There are still absolutely opportunities (to grow), and that's why we've been working so hard to come up with ways to try to make the vaccine more accessible and to gain trust," Wada said.

Early in the vaccine distribution process, access was often cited as the primary challenge -- supply was scarce, especially in the state's rural or more remote areas. Now health plans hear a lot more about hesitancy due to mistrust, misinformation and political ideology, Wada said.

Jake Hall, deputy director of provider contracts at Kern Health Systems, which covers about 330,000 people in Kern County, said a common reason members give for turning down the vaccine is that they've already had a COVID-19 infection. Pregnancy is also another common reason, Hall said. Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend vaccination for people who are pregnant and for those who've had a previous infection.

Officials at health plans with higher Covid vaccination rates said one of their focus points now is to increase vaccination among young children. As of mid-April, 28 percent of California children 5 to 11 enrolled in Medi-Cal had received at least one dose, according to the Medi-Cal data. By comparison, 40 percent of all children statewide in this age group had received a shot.

"I think in our community there has been a lot of support for getting kids vaccinated, but it's short of a mandate. It makes it tricky," said Christine Tomcala, chief executive officer at Santa Clara Health Plan.

Last month state legislators pulled back a bill that would have required vaccination for kids to attend school. That same day, the Newsom administration also postponed its proposed vaccine mandate for school children until at least July 2023.

In the coming months, health insurance plans will also face a change in their membership numbers as California expands Medi-Cal to undocumented people 50 and over -- adding new people who might not yet be vaccinated.

Also, during the declared federal COVID-19 public health emergency, the state suspended efforts to verify Medi-Cal eligibility. Assuming the emergency declaration ends as expected this summer, about 2 million people are estimated to lose their Medi-Cal coverage if they no longer qualify for the program either because their income has increased or they've gained access to other types of health coverage in the last two years.

"We're adding people who may not be vaccinated, but we could also be losing people who are, so it might look like we're going backwards," Tomcala said.

CalMatters COVID and health care coverage is supported by grants from the Blue Shield of California Foundation, the California Health Care Foundation and the California Wellness Foundation.

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SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)

Help may be on its way soon for San Francisco businesses tagged with graffiti.

Supervisor Myrna Melgar introduced legislation that will allow property owners on business corridors to opt-in and allow the Department of Public Works to address graffiti for no charge.

Co-sponsored by Supervisor Catherine Stefani, the ordinance would create a two-year pilot program to shift the responsibility from participating business owners to the city's Department of Public Works, which would proactively monitor routes on a regular schedule and paint over graffiti as it is spotted.

Currently, business owners are responsible for painting over or removing graffiti within 30 days or they face fines from the city.

"This pilot program is meant to offer back some support and appreciation while businesses regain financial health," Melgar said in news release from her office.

The announcement did not indicate when the board would take up the issue at one of its meetings.

The program received support in the news release from Sharkey Laguana, President of the Small Business Commission.

"This proposal takes a much-needed, proactive approach to dealing with graffiti in our commercial corridors," Laguana said. "I'm thrilled that San Francisco can join other major cities like Boston, New York, and Los Angeles in supporting small businesses who are victims of graffiti."

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ABERDEEN, S.D. (AP)  Some Aberdeen School District employees have made their case before the 8th District appeals court that a lawsuit by parents of five special education student should not proceed to trial.

The appeals court heard the case Wednesday. The parents allege a teacher subjected their children to physical restraint, seclusion as punishment and unnecessary use of force, among other offenses. The plaintiffs say the teacher's supervisors ignored their complaints.

The students are all non-verbal, some with autism, some have physical disabilities.

Allegations include that the childrens teacher confined the students in a small windowless room, that she grabbed students by the arms and jerked them around, that she pushed one boy into a YMCA pool, that she forcibly stripped another boy to get him ready for swimming, South Dakota Public Broadcasting reported.

Zachary Peterson, an attorney for the defendants, told the three-judge appeals panel that there's no evidence the children were physically or psychologically harmed.

But the attorney for the parents and students said otherwise.

Margaret OSullivan Kane told the judges that the children were not able to speak for themselves, and the abuse they suffered would not be tolerated by students who could speak up. She said school administrators had the opportunity to put a stop to the abuse but chose to look the other way.

The federal circuit judge presiding over the case issued an order last October and held that the case could continue to a jury. The employees appealed.
Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a plan Wednesday that would both expand abortion access in California and lure businesses away from states that are expected to ban the procedure in the coming weeks.

The plan is a response to a recently leaked Supreme Court draft opinion that revealed the body planned to overturn Roe v. Wade. If that happens, political analysts expect abortions to be illegal or difficult to obtain in roughly half of the U.S.

California will not stand idly by as extremists roll back our basic constitutional rights, Newsom said in a statement. Were going to fight like hell, making sure that all women  not just those in California  know that this state continues to recognize and protect their fundamental rights."

Its not uncommon for Newsom to capitalize on what he sees as bad political moves being made by other state leaders, namely those in Florida and Texas.

When lawmakers in Florida passed a controversial bill  which has come to be known colloquially as the Dont Say Gay bill  earlier this year, Newsom called on Disney to abandon its plan to reallocate 2,000 employees from California to Florida.

"Disney, the door is open to bring those jobs back to California  the state that actually represents the values of your workers," Newsom tweeted.

After mounting pressure, Disney publicly voiced its opposition to the Florida bill and said it would cease political donations to Florida lawmakers in response. That led to the Florida Legislature stripping Disney of its ability to operate as an independent government in the area around its Orlando theme park.

Newsom again took to Twitter April 19 to blast Florida's move and contrast the two states.

"THIS is what 'business friendly' means?" he said. "We protect free speech in California. We help our businesses grow, thrive, and invent the future. Punishing businesses for speaking out against hatred is the move of an authoritarian regime."

In February, Newsom introduced a bill that would allow private citizens to sue gun makers to stop them from selling assault weapons. It was modeled after a Texas law that lets its residents sue abortion providers, effectively banning abortion in the state.

During a fiery press conference last week, Newsom called that bill a counteroffensive to moves being made by GOP-controlled legislatures and said businesses should consider the political leanings of local lawmakers before relocating to a new state.

"All those businesses, ideally you're moving your companies to states, and then you have to pay for your employees to travel back to the states that you made them move [from], he said. Maybe they should start reconsidering some of those decisions as well.

Newsoms new plan is an expansion of his so-called California Blueprint, a $68 million reproductive rights package he unveiled in January.

An additional $57 million will now  among other things  go toward awarding grants to abortion clinics that provide services to low-income individuals and those without health insurance, and to community organizations that will use the money to conduct public outreach and education on reproductive health issues.

Newsom also said he plans to create new business incentives for companies leaving states that have enacted anti-LGBTQ+ laws and restrictions on abortion. Newsoms statement did not specify what those new incentives would be, but a spokesperson told the San Francisco Chronicle that the governor would offer more details when he unveils his revised state budget plan on Friday (SFGATE and the San Francisco Chronicle are both owned by Hearst but operate independently of one another).
In the fall of 2018, California residents were faced with our first federal elections since Donald Trump was elected president and I remember how motivated people were. I had a chance to cast votes that I believed could be the start of fixing some of the issues that had arisen under the Trump administration by giving Democrats control of the House of Representatives.

The problem was, as it always is at election time, that I was voting for something like 60 vacant offices. With the amount of time I gave myself, I could only get decent information on maybe a third of candidates. The Los Angeles County sheriff, much like many of the judges, is at the end of the ballot and stuffed with folks that few civilians have ever heard of. When it was time to research which of these candidates to vote for, I was at the mercy of endorsements. This is not to say that there wasnt huge interest in the sheriff's race, because there was. In fact, I had never recorded a vote for a sheriff, before so I learned then that its an elected position that runs the correctional facilities, has to police around the same amount of people as the Los Angeles Police Department, and tends to oversee an understaffed department as a result.

I sat down and did my research to get all the info I could, but the candidates had very few public statements, especially, Alex Villanueva. Sure, I remember him talking about increasing transparency and changes to interactions with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but the details were light. My vote was for sheriff based on the Los Angeles County Democratic Partys endorsement, which went to Villanueva, a relatively unknown challenger in the sheriffs race. I figured, after the year we had just had, that the party would have vetted Villanueva thoroughly. So that man got my vote. Im willing to bet that many of my peers also checked that box, thinking the same thing.

Since that moment, the man has been a nightmare. One of the main things he promised was that the department would be more transparent. Well, that has been as far from reality as possible. Over the past few weeks, hes been in the news for announcing an investigation into a reporter for reporting on allegations of a deputy using excessive force against an inmate by kneeling on the inmates neck for three minutes. Essentially, hes attempting to make the entire department above reproach.

This isnt his first transgression. The one that got my blood boiling when it went down was when deputies shot and killed Andres Guardado by shooting him in the back five times then allegedly destroyed cameras from the auto shop Guardado was killed in. Villanuevas chief of staff John Burcher later made wild comments about the killing on social media, saying Guardado "CHOSE his fate." While the police department, under pressure from Democratic Mayor Eric Garcetti, has seen some reforms in recent years, the sheriff's department is able to avoid such reform because Villanueva can shield them from it. They answer to him and him alone. That said, Im not here to list every single thing Villanueva has done wrong or lied about. Im actually here to thank him.

See, Ill never forget the first Saturday after George Floyd died. I had gotten very used to the cycle of a Black man getting murdered, me turning up to a small protest, it blowing over, and then boom, repeat. But when I arrived on that Saturday in May 2020, I was absolutely shocked to see how many people were there. Shocked maybe isnt a strong enough word. I actually got weak. No way all those people actually cared about me. My mind wouldnt let me give in to the moment.

As we started to actually march, which was also unexpected, and people had their signs and their chants, I began to lose it just a little. The usual tear or two began to develop. Still standard practice, just larger scale. Then as we turned onto 3rd Street and walked past the farmers market at The Grove, there were so many of us that we stopped traffic. In that stoppage was a USPS truck, alone, unable to move a foot forward or backwards. As I got close to it, I saw a Black woman inside, wearing the USPS uniform, sobbing. I stopped dead in my tracks and I fully broke down and entered into the hardest cry of my life.

But that energy has since faded. Admittedly, even from me. Not that I dont care, its just hard to keep that energy for years. At some point, living my life needed to happen and it did. The protests that called for police reform that used to take place in front of LA City Hall went from being packed daily, to attended weekly, to nonexistent. As someone who was there, it became clear as fewer and fewer people showed up, the general public needed to get back to their lives. The protests did lead to some police reforms for sure, but people began to settle back into their routines again. This fatigue is why polling from 2021 showed Villanueva was seen favorably by around 30% of residents and unfavorably by 20-30% of residents. The plurality, about 50% of residents, said the were unaware or didn't care. People stopped worrying, especially about someone who wasnt on the 2020 ballot.

But now, this guy Villanueva has opened his mouth to the point where hes getting national attention for not only being horrible and defiant, but also for being a Democrat and seemingly duping voters. His efforts have been a point of pride nationally for tough-on-crime conservatives who have championed him and helped him raise over $1.8 million, six times the amount of his closest challenger. Villanueva could have flown under the radar of the left had he not been so confrontational. But because he cant help himself, I can feel that post-George Floyd energy returning in this local race, even if at the state and national level, tough-on-crime sentiment seems to be dominating.

Frankly put, Ive never been more ready to vote a local official out of office. I believe more and more people will become aware of what hes been doing and who its affected. I think people will also become more aware of just what the sheriff does and what his department is in charge of. Its something that even I, someone born and raised in Southern California, had no idea of until recently.

But who do we replace him with and how do we learn about that person? Well, I have to thank him for helping with this also. By bringing national attention to himself and, by proxy, the Los Angeles County Democratic Party that endorsed him, the local Democrats will be forced to at least consider new criteria. The party, in dealing with him, has been forced to improve, and I believe they will because too many of us will be distrusting of their next candidate. Theyll be forced to explain why the new candidate is worth our vote, what went wrong last time, and why this time will be different. Itll be a tough task because there aren't any sheriffs who will want to be the guy who holds longtime deputies accountable, especially when they feel understaffed and fear losing more deputies, but someone will have to find the courage to do so if they want the endorsement and eventually my vote.

So thank you, Alex Villanueva, for being the worst and being defiant at a time when we all needed a recharge in energy, especially amid a national backlash to criminal justice reform. And I hope whoever takes your place makes your job one that you hate: one that requires empathy, process, transparency, and not killing unarmed people who dont look like you.

When I was out on that last Saturday in May 2020, I felt something that never left. I cried harder in that moment than I did when two second graders I had never met punched me in the stomach and called me a nigger when I was in first grade. I cried harder than when a group of kids kicked me out of a party in high school and said niggers werent welcome. This cry was one of both solidarity and release. It was realizing the moment, the support, and the pent up feelings that after years and years, was all coming to a head. It was surreal, beautiful and difficult, even if it was a joyful cry. I truly felt that I may have some say in how police in America would treat us going forward.

I imagine thats your nightmare, Alex Villanueva. Not the racism, so much, but the awakening of those directly affected by your policies. You cant outrun the pain of those who desperately want more for themselves and their future children. So thank you for opening your mouth so we know where you are, how to find you, and how to get you out of the office for good.
The body of a Texas National Guard soldier who went missing Friday in Eagle Pass was recovered Monday, according to the Texas Military Department.

Specialist (SPC) Bishop E. Evans, who was assigned to Operation Lone Star, was reported missing Friday along the Rio Grande River during a mission-related incident. The 22-year-old went missing after allegedly trying to rescue two migrants who appeared to be drowning while crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico into the U.S., according to the TMD. Evans's family was notified Friday evening, the agency said.

"We are devastated by the loss of a member of our Guard family, said Maj Gen Tom Suelzer, Adjutant General for Texas. We recognize the selflessness of this heroic Soldier who put his life above others in service to our state and national security. The Texas Military Department sends our deepest condolences to the family. Our thoughts and prayers are with them during this difficult time

Gov. Greg Abbott issued a statement saying he is "heartbroken" over Evans's death. "Our National Guard soldiers risk their lives every day to serve and protect others and we are eternally grateful for the way SPC Evans heroically served his state and country," Abbott wrote. "I thank the members of the Texas National Guard, the Texas Department of Public Safety, Texas Parks and Wildlife, Border Patrol, and local law enforcement for working around the clock to locate this soldier."

The Republican leader shared a photo of Evans in a statement posted on Twitter Sunday.

Abbott says the Texas Military Department will continue to provide more updates to the public as they become available. "I ask that Texans join Cecilia and me in praying for the family and friends of SPC Evans as they grieve this heartbreaking loss," Abbott wrote.

On Friday, Texas DPS Lt. Christopher Olivarez told the Washington Post that Evans was carried away by a swift current while attempting to rescue a migrant in the water. Powerful river currents have resulted in at least 10 drownings this week alone, Olivarez added.

Evans, a field artilleryman from Arlington, was assigned to A Battery, 4-133 Field Artillery Regiment in New Braunfels and joined the Texas Army National Guard in May 2019. He joined Operation Spartan Shield in Kuwait in the fall of 2020, according to the TMD.

"During this mobilization, his dedication, talents, and tactical prowess led his leadership to regularly assign him to operations in Iraq in support of Special Operations Forces for short periods of time, while then rotating back into Kuwait," the TMD said in a statement.
We present you a tongue twister. A rare Richardsonian Romanesque recently landed on the market in Lexington, KY, for $875,000.

Named after architect Henry Hobson Richardson, this European-inspired home design was established in the late 1800s.

Houses built in this style feature a gable roof, semiround arches, and stonework to give them a "sense of permanence." Richardsons most famous structure is Trinity Church in Boston, which is designated a National Historic Landmark.

Lovely in Lexington

Built in 1892, this four-bedroom, 3,868-square-foot home has an equally prestigious spot on the National Register of Historic Places. It sits at the end of one of just two cul-de-sacs in downtown Lexington.

Intricate woodwork Realtor.com

Third floor Realtor.com

The homeowners are Mark Minix and the listing broker, Blake Liles of Keller Williams Bluegrass: This is actually our personal house. It's located on one of the oldest streets [Elsmere Park] in Lexington."

The home has been through a lot over the decades and hasn't always looked as appealing as it does now, explains Liles, whose partner Minix acquired it three years ago. "It was a duplex in the '60s, then became a single-family residence in the '70s. It fell into disrepair after that, but it has been entirely restored.

"We have installed a new HVAC, a new kitchen and bathrooms, and the antique slatestyle roof is also new," says Liles. "The kitchen and baths are all modernized with new backsplashes and tile floors."

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Watch: Love It or Hate It? A-Frame Home in Akron, OH, Isn't for Everyone

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Historic preservation

Minix kept the original woodwork and other historic features of the home. He finished the third floor, adding HVAC and a bathroom and converting the space into a family room.

The space could also serve as an office or additional bedroom, he says. "You could definitely make it into a master suite as well. It has 20-foot ceilings, which are incredible

The home now features an intriguing blend of modern amenities and vintage style.

The grand staircase in the main entry is a showpiece, Liles says. Its the original staircase in front, and there is also one in the back that has the original woodworking.

There are original pocket doors and brick accents throughout," he continues. "Every bedroom has its own fireplace as well. There are a total of seven fireplaces.

Kitchen Realtor.com

The exterior features a beautifully restored three-story turret and copper box gutters. It has been freshly tuckpointed and painted.

The oversized chef's kitchen comes with custom cabinetry, granite countertops, and a gas range. The large backyard is ideal for families.

The next owner will definitely be someone who has a love for the Victorian style and downtown living, says Liles.

Liles has nine dogs and is looking to move an hour out of the city to a home with lots of land.

We love this home, but we are crazy dog people, and they need more land to play, he says.

The post Kentucky Queen: Rare Richardsonian Romanesque Home Now Available for $875K appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com.
WFO MIDLAND/ODESSA Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Wednesday, May 11, 2022

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SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING

The National Weather Service in Midland has issued a

* Severe Thunderstorm Warning for...

Southeastern Brewster County in southwestern Texas...

* Until 745 PM CDT.

* At 721 PM CDT, a severe thunderstorm was located 17 miles north of

Boquillas Canyon, or 19 miles northeast of Panther Junction, moving

east at 45 mph.

HAZARD...70 mph wind gusts and quarter size hail.

SOURCE...Radar indicated.

IMPACT...Hail damage to vehicles is expected. Expect considerable

tree damage. Wind damage is also likely to mobile homes,

roofs, and outbuildings.

* This severe thunderstorm will remain over mainly rural areas of

southeastern Brewster County.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...

For your protection move to an interior room on the lowest floor of a

building.

To report severe weather, contact your nearest law enforcement

agency. They will send your report to the National Weather Service

office in Midland.

Torrential rainfall is occurring with this storm, and may lead to

flash flooding. Do not drive your vehicle through flooded roadways.

_____

Copyright 2022 AccuWeather
WFO MIDLAND/ODESSA Warnings, Watches and Advisories for Thursday, May 12, 2022

_____

SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING

The National Weather Service in Midland has issued a

* Severe Thunderstorm Warning for...

Central Pecos County in southwestern Texas...

North central Terrell County in southwestern Texas...

* Until 615 PM CDT.

* At 516 PM CDT, a severe thunderstorm was located 26 miles southeast

of Fort Stockton, moving east at 25 mph.

HAZARD...60 mph wind gusts and quarter size hail.

SOURCE...Radar indicated.

IMPACT...Hail damage to vehicles is expected. Expect wind damage

to roofs, siding, and trees.

* This severe thunderstorm will remain over mainly rural areas of

central Pecos and north central Terrell Counties.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...

For your protection move to an interior room on the lowest floor of a

building.

To report severe weather, contact your nearest law enforcement

agency. They will send your report to the National Weather Service

office in Midland.

Torrential rainfall is occurring with this storm, and may lead to

flash flooding. Do not drive your vehicle through flooded roadways.

_____

Copyright 2022 AccuWeather
This information was released at the Vietnam Online Business Forum (VOBF 2022) which has just been held in Ho Chi Minh City with the participation of hundreds of domestic and foreign e-commerce communities.



As internet access and adoption are rapidly increasing nationwide, the number of digital buyers keeps climbing. According to the speakers at the forum, the coronavirus pandemic continued to have a significant influence on e-commerce and online consumer behavior, and people's choice of health care products tends to increase. Notably, the trend of digital multi-channel shopping has experienced remarkable growth, especially amongst consumers recovering from the epidemic. During the pandemic, e-commerce is the bridge to accelerate the speed of digital transformation, connecting the disruption of the market.

Up to 85 percent of Vietnamese consumers have preferred online shopping since the outbreaks of the coronavirus pandemic. A survey on online shopping behavior conducted by e-commerce firm Lazada in cooperation with market research partner Milieu Insight recently revealed that 81 percent of Vietnamese people said that they consider online shopping an integral part of every day. The survey has also shown the percentage of online shoppers at least once a week.

In particular, consumers in Vietnam are giving a lot of preference to domestic brands when 52 percent of Vietnamese respondents said that they prefer to choose Vietnamese brands. According to the e-commerce business overview report in the first half of 2022, extracted from Metric.vn's data platform, in the context of Vietnam's e-commerce in the post-Covid-19 era is developing rapidly, Vietnam has become the second largest e-commerce market in Southeast Asia, just after Indonesia.

VOBF 2022 is an opportunity for agencies, organizations, businesses, and individuals to discuss the opportunities and challenges of e-commerce in the coming time. In addition, the forum gave specific solutions to help businesses recover quickly after the big crisis and apply digital transformation in the most effective way.

By Lac Phong - Translated by Anh Quan
The Government intends to develop high-level scientific-technological human resources in Vietnam



The strategy signals that science, technology, and innovation all play important roles in developing key industries in Vietnam, with a focus on processing and manufacturing industries (to reach the proportion of at least 45 percent), in order to restructure the national economy to be more modern in 2030; in the active participation of Vietnam in Industry 4.0.

To achieve the goals in the strategy, it is necessary to boost scientific-technological and innovative activities, nationwide, to establish a national innovative ecosystem that can closely linked to its counterparts in the region and the world.

Therefore, the Government has planned to build a system of national, regional, and sectoral innovative centers, startup support centers that connect to hi-tech zones, residential areas, financial centers, venture capital funds, universities, and research institutes in order to form innovative clusters.

Another key mission in the strategy is to develop capable scientific human resources with a high level of innovation; enhance their computer and foreign language skills. This should be achieved at an early schooling stage via the participation in practical projects at school, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics) training. Proper career guidance and counseling on science pursuance at school and university should also be taken care of.

In addition, the Government emphasizes on building highly qualified scientific human resources, including leading scientists that can match the level of their counterparts in developed nations.

This is fulfilled via further training of the scientific human resources of prioritized fields in countries of advanced scientific level; the introduction of policies and mechanisms to financially support and facilitate immigration as well as labor permit procedures for overseas Vietnamese or foreigners who participate in domestic scientific activities; and the development of a network to connect talented overseas Vietnamese scientists.

Simultaneously, there must be a policy to send Vietnamese laborers to multi-national corporations, foreign startups for experience gaining before returning to work in the country. Outdated policies must be amended to create favorable conditions for lectures and researchers to regularly join in scientific-technological and innovative activities in businesses.

By Phan Thao  Translated by Vien Hong
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We offer one free story view per month. If you register for an account, you will get two additional story views. After those three total views, we ask that you support us with a subscription.

A subscription to our digital content is so much more than just access to our valuable content. It means youre helping to support a local community institution that has, from its very start, supported the betterment of our society. Thank you very much!
Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size In this wrap of the latest reviews of performances around Sydney, the ACO dazzles with a familiar Mozart work, Son of Byblos continues playwright James Elazzis exploration of the jagged interface between Lebanese and Australian culture and Meyne Wyatt delivers a searing performance in City of Gold. CITY OF GOLD

Wharf 1 Theatre, May 12

Until June 11

Reviewed by John Shand

 It comes like a punch in the guts, knocking the stuffing out of you, and as you sit there winded, Meyne Wyatt delivers the rest of his five-page monologue on the day-to-day realities of racism. Like Wyatt, his character, Breythe is an actor. I just want to be seen for my talent, not my skin colour, he tells us. I hate being a token, a box to tick. With Wyatt the actor delivering Wyatt the playwrights speech, its almost as if he steps outside the play; shrugs Breythe aside and addresses us directly, so were caught in the headlights of his ferocious anger and crucifying satire. Meyne Wyatts monologue comes like a punch to the guts. Credit:Joseph Mayers He recounts the saga of AFL great Adam Goodes, who called out the racism he copped on the field and suffered accordingly. From his own arsenal of experiences Wyatt tells us of cabs slowing, seeing him, driving on. The chips are already stacked against me, he says. And thats why theres one on my shoulder. Then comes the line by which all artists should live: I dont wanna be what you want me to be. Never trade authenticity for approval. Not only does the speech keep detonating like a series of bomb-blasts, but the delivery is just as potent, Wyatt having a rare presence. The monologue begins Act Two, and director Shari Sebbens (for Sydney Theatre Company and Black Swan) has him on the roof of the house comprising Tyler Hills set, so its as if hes haranguing us from atop a monstrous soapbox, his voice richly musical as it rides the bucking melodies and harmonies of anger, pride, despair and hope. No play can sustain such a pitch of intensity, but Act Two of City of Gold gives it a good shake, and the actors rise to it like so many boats on a swell. Most notably, Mathew Coopers performance as Breythes brother Mateo grew, Cooper shedding the awkwardness that had plagued him in Act One.

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I didnt see the plays first Sydney season at the Stables, so cant compare. Wyatt and Cooper reprise their roles from that production, while Sebbens has moved from acting in it to directing this heavily autobiographical piece about a family gathering after the death of their father (an imposing Trevor Ryan). Simone Detourbet is effective as the brothers put-upon, no-nonsense sister, Carina, and Ian Michael rips us the role of Cliffhanger, the siblings deaf cousin. Completing the cast are St John Cowcher and Myles Pollard. They are all miked up, presumably to facilitate some sound effects added in the dream and memory sequences, but the volume could come down elsewhere. Ultimately, the production is not as assured as the play, from which Wyatts main points thrust like so many spear-tips. Among them is that, like being pregnant, you cant be a little bit racist. More brutal is the point that Australias racism doesnt change. The tone might, but not the fact, and thats not enough to prove were on our way out of the tunnel. Indigenous people  oxygen thieves to some whites, Mateo tells us  continue to die in custody or on the streets, and the perpetrators continue to walk free, as if theyve swatted so many flies. Were in the midst of an election, and not a word is spoken on the issue. No votes; just the downside of aggravating the racists and their frightening cheer squad. Theres a legend that when they burned Joan of Arc, her heart didnt burn. This play is like that. MUSIC

Australian Chamber Orchestra 

City Recital Hall, touring until May 23 As the applause dies down from a whizzbang performance of Mozarts D major Divertimento, artistic director Richard Tognetti turns to the audience with a sheepish grin and says, The last time we played that we were only 12. Its a throwaway comment, but it makes the point that Mozart, in general, and this Divertimento, in particular, is repertoire on which all string players cut their teeth. And, by extension, that it is music this band have grown up with, have lived with, have lived on. Music they can own. Principal violist Stefanie Farrands brings a gruff poetry to the Sinfonia Concertante. Credit:Nic Walker

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They can give the allegro a dazzling shine, float through the andante with an ease that belies the skill involved, and play the presto ad libitum, switching between pizzicato and spiccato, plucked, bowed, fast and even faster, rattling out notes as payback for youthful diligence. When it comes to the Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola (with principal violist Stefanie Farrands), Tognettis sense of ownership is more heavy-handed. While Farrands brings a gruff poetry to this highlight of the viola repertoire, Tognetti indulges in louche portamento and loud, blunt phrasing. Its almost like hes playing the yokel as a foil to Ferrands elegance. The result makes for an engaging, if sometimes distracting, dialogue. Benjamin Brittens Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge is a work that could have been written for the ACO. (It was, in fact, written for the Boyd Neel Orchestra in 1937.) It is a perfect showcase for the expressive range and virtuosity of this superband, from the exuberance of the Aria Italiana to the yearning crunch of the Funeral March to the gripping precision of the closing fugue. The concert opens with the Australian premiere of Brittens Elegy for Strings, written when the composer was 15. Its hard to hear much more than imaginings of the voice that Britten would eventually develop, but it is already charged with a precocious grasp of complexity and a magpie mind for exciting sounds. - Harriet Cunningham THEATRE

Sons of Byblos 

Belvoir Downstairs Theatre, until May 21 Silent action can be worth a thousand words. The most complete piece of theatre in this new play comes when Claire, a lesbian intent on marrying a stray man, removes her street clothes and, helped by Carol, her aunt, dons a stunning ivory bridal gown. Both women are moved in different ways and for different reasons, but their emotions converge in a simple infatuation with the beauty of the dress. Not a word is exchanged.

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Theres a lesson there because playwright James Elazzi is prone to putting lines into his characters mouths that could have been left unsaid, whether to maximise the truth of the dialogue or to intensify the storytelling by making the audience work a little harder. From left: Simon Elrahi, Kate Bookallil, Deborah Galanos, Violette Ayad and Mansoor Noor Simon on the set of Son of Byblos. Credit:David Hooley This tendency to overwrite is exacerbated by the actors being much too loud when their characters are angry  which is often  in Belvoirs tiny Downstairs Theatre. Acting, after all, is much like playing a musical instrument, and the performances must be geared to the size and acoustics of the venue. Director Anna Jahjah (for Brave New Word Theatre Company) staged the wedding-dress scene perfectly, but she should have coaxed her actors into finding comparable (or greater) intensity without resorting to such ferocious volume. Its like the difference between making music in a stadium and a bar. Son of Byblos continues Elazzis exploration of the jagged interface between Lebanese and Australian culture that he began with Lady Tabouli and continued with Queen Fatima. As with the former, this story centres on the difficulties of coming out as gay in a conservative Australian-Lebanese household. But, unlike the earlier plays, Elazzi is less concerned with making us laugh than with making us feel. Hes devised a storyline and characters to draw us in, and Jahjah has assembled a cast capable of completing the job. Whats missing is a consistent understanding that greater restraint might actually make the audience feel more. Mansoor Noor as Adam and Deborah Galanos as his mother. Credit:David Hooley Mansoor Noor plays Adam, the soured apple of his fathers eye and the darling of his mothers heart  except they dont know his main hobby is having casual sex in public toilets. Nor do they understand why he wants to design websites rather than install wardrobes or work in an office. Adams father (Simon Elrahi) has a simple philosophy that a man must be able to survive in life; be self-sufficient. He helps his son obtain better jobs than stacking fruit, and cant begin to understand why these efforts arent appreciated. Elrahi is especially convincing as the character riding the steepest learning curve. Loading

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Throughout the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, a particularly niche genre of films became bizarrely popular: movies about kids who had a parent that was the president of the United States. Whether it was First Kid, starring the criminally underrated Sinbad or First Daughter starring the equally underrated Katie Holmes, for a generation of moviegoers (including me), these films were a kind of political Disneyland.

Imagine living in the White House! Having Secret Service officers as best friends? And they all have guns!

Eventually, our collective cynicism kicked in, and we no longer wanted to roam the corridors of power, choosing instead to take a more traditional teenage path: drinking in the park.

Cassandra Helmot as Cat in The PMs Daughter. Credit:J. Pratley

Fast-forward to today, and teens are much more intelligent and far more politically engaged. So it makes sense that the presidential-kid genre received a 2022 refurbish, which brings us to The PMs Daughter, the ABC tween series which premiered earlier this year.
Australias financial watchdog is considering launching a sweeping inquiry into the federal carve-up of infrastructure funding, after Victoria complained it has been short-changed by the Morrison government.

State Treasurer Tim Pallas has written to federal Auditor-General Grant Hehir asking for an audit to examine how Canberra hands out infrastructure cash in the budget.

Victorian Treasurer Tim Pallas Credit:Luis Ascui

Victoria has long argued it is getting a disproportionately small portion of federal infrastructure cash, well below the states one-quarter share of the national population.

But in an escalating row, federal Infrastructure Minister Paul Fletcher accused the Victorian government of throwing the toys out of the pram because the federal government had followed clear departmental advice by refusing to fund Labors Suburban Rail Loop, which Fletcher branded Dan Andrews vanity project.

In the most-recent federal budget, Victoria was allocated just 5.9 per cent of new infrastructure cash over the four-year budget period.

The state government was also furious it was left out of the federal governments Energy Security and Regional Development Plan, a $7.1 billion fund overseen by Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce to turbocharge regional areas.

In the May 10 letter, Pallas said he could not accept that a fair and transparent process had been followed.

In the most-recent federal budget, Victoria was allocated just 5.9 per cent of new infrastructure cash over the four-year budget period.

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The state government was also furious it was left out of the federal governments Energy Security and Regional Development Plan, a $7.1 billion fund overseen by Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce to turbocharge regional areas.

In the May 10 letter, Pallas said he could not accept that a fair and transparent process had been followed.

Read the full article here.
The lawyer for a Comancheros heavyweight targeted in a gangland shooting that killed his brother says Tarek Zahed first learnt of a bounty on his head in a newspaper article, with police now probing a long line of suspects.

Tarek, 41, and Omar Zahed, 39, were walking through the foyer of Auburns Bodyfit gym on Tuesday night when at least two gunmen sprayed the duo with dozens of bullets. Omar died at the scene, while Tarek, a married father of one, survived despite being shot in the head, body and legs.

Comanchero member Tarek Zahed (centre) and his brother Omar were shot at an Auburn gym on Tuesday night. Credit:Kate Geraghy

He underwent surgery on Wednesday and remains intubated in hospital in a stable condition. His long-term prognosis is unknown.

A week before he was shot, The Daily Telegraph reported Tarek was the latest underworld figure to attract a $1 million bounty. In October last year, it was reported that a similar $1 million bounty was on offer for the killer of underworld figure Mahmoud Brownie Ahmad. Last month, Ahmad was gunned down in a hail of bullets outside a Greenacre home by two gunmen lying in wait.
Smith also savaged what he described as abysmal anti-organised crime laws in NSW, the state with the highest number of nationally networked organised crime and bikie gang bosses. He warned that crime groups were carrying out assassinations in NSW and in Europe and that vast resources were required to effectively monitor them as they not only trafficked in drugs but rorted federal and state government schemes such as the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). In a statement, Perrottet said on Thursday that the NSW government was working closely with police on a range of options to deal with the problem. NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet. Credit:Nick Moir Money laundering and organised crime are completely unacceptable in any form, he said.

In December last year I welcomed the decision of the NSW Crime Commission to commence an inquiry into money laundering at licensed premises in NSW. The inquiry is being conducted in collaboration with the Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission. Perrottet said the commission had extensive powers and had the full support of the NSW government. We will consider the findings of the inquiry when they are made available. Comanchero member Tarek Zahed (centre) and his brother Omar were shot at an Auburn gym on Tuesday night. Credit:Kate Geraghy On Tuesday, Comanchero national sergeant-at-arms Tarek Zahed, 41, was injured in a Sydney shooting attack that claimed the life of his brother Omar Zahed, 39. There have been more than 40 incidents of organised crime-linked violence in the past two years in NSW, including 12 murders.

In his briefings, Smith also singled out poker machine venues, including clubs, pubs and casinos, as having been exploited by money launderers, as well as the crypto market and Australias property market. An overview of Smiths briefings  sighted by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age  also reveal Dominello warned the assistant commissioner that lobbyists from the gaming industry would use their political contacts to fight efforts to combat money laundering in pubs, clubs and casinos. Loading The gambling lobby is very, very powerful and they have very, very deep roots inside the cabinet and opposition, Dominello told the senior officer. There was also deep frustration among others briefed by Smith at the governments failure to fully engage with efforts to more aggressively counter organised crime and crack down on the exploitation of poker machines by money launderers.

NSWs chief gaming regulator, Philip Crawford, told officials at the briefing that it was scary how gaming officials had very few regulatory levers to pull on this industry. Crawford chairs the NSW Independent Liquor & Gaming Authority and unsuccessfully pushed Perrottet in December for a public inquiry into money laundering and problem gambling at poker machine venues. The industry doesnt want us anywhere near it, he said. Unprecedented briefing Smith said in his briefings that his frustration at the failure to get political backing to bolster the fight against organised crime had led him to seek and gain backing from state and federal agencies to privately brief politicians and public servants on the severity of the problem. Smith said the then police minister David Elliott had been left out on the ledge trying to get legislation through to solve the problem.

Loading Since 2018, assistant commissioner Smith has helped lead major joint state and federal organised crime operations and committees, overseeing major transnational drug importation inquiries. He was the NSW State Crime Commander until April, when he was reassigned by new NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb. He most recently led the NSW Police response to Operation Ironside, a federal police sting investigation that gave state and federal agencies unprecedented insights into Australian organised crime. The Herald and The Age have confirmed the authenticity of detailed records of the briefings Smith delivered last December to senior politicians and public servants from the offices of the premier, then police minister David Elliott and then minister responsible for gaming, Victor Dominello, who both lost their portfolios during recent reshuffles. Descriptions of the briefings reveal Elliotts chief of staff, Tanya Raffoul, revealed she had tried repeatedly to alert Perrottet about the polices organised crime concerns but been rebuffed by the premiers office. Ive tried three times to get it through  and the answer has been no, Raffoul said, describing efforts to get backing for reform as a war of attrition.

The premier wouldnt be able to stand up and say that weve got the toughest money laundering laws in the country. They are significantly weak, Raffoul said. Loading Dominello was moved out of the gaming portfolio by Perrottet after pushing for inquiries and reforms to combat money laundering and problem gambling at The Star Sydney, Crown Resorts and at pokies venues. The casino inquiries exposed major organised crime infiltration and abysmal governance within the gaming sector, while the NSW Crime Commission is probing criminal infiltration of pubs and clubs. Smiths briefings build on comments from the federal polices top organised crime official, Assistant Commissioner Nigel Ryan, who last October warned the majority of organised crime was operating with impunity. The head of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, Mike Phelan, has also warned organised crime had become a multibillion-dollar behemoth that was corrupting Australian public officials and penetrating border security via corrupt insiders. Into everything

In his briefing, Smith warned that organised crime in Australia was earning almost $40 billion via its main source of income  drug trafficking  and by rorting state and federal government programs, including the NDIS. Micro grants, they [organised crime] love those things. Childcare schemes, theyre into that. The NDIA [National Disability Insurance Agency], they steal from that. Loading He said classified national threat matrix intelligence had escalated organised crime to number five on the hit list of things destroying prosperity in Australia. Smith described recent record seizures of drug money, including $39 million found in trucks moving between Australias east and west coast, as a tip in the ocean compared to the actual amount of dirty money in circulation and the scale of money laundering.

It is absolutely nothing, he said of the cash seizures. He warned of drug-laden ships circulating Australia whose cargo was put out to auction. The highest bidder won the right to have the drug shipment delivered via an entrenched corrupt transport network. Smith described NSW as the epicentre of organised crime and as the host of the largest numbers of outlaw bikie club members, nominating other states as key drug markets and the Gold Coast as Australias new version of the infamous 1980s Kings Cross vice strip. Newcastles port and transport industry was a weak point, said Smith, given it was deeply infiltrated by serious organised crime. Smith named fugitive Comanchero bikie leader Mark Buddle as one of several crime bosses damaging Australian interests from offshore. Buddle has been instrumental in creating The Commission, a crime cartel that charges drug traffickers a fee to allow them to import drugs into Australia and promises to regulate the drug market using its muscle. Failing laws, pokies exploited

Smith also repeatedly highlighted the role of clever lawyers and clever accountants in helping crime bosses and corrupt officials hide their money. The veteran crime fighters comments highlight the 15-year failure of successive federal governments to introduce financial crime reforms targeting lawyers, accountants and real estate agents. Mostafa Baluch. Credit:Brook Mitchell Smith identified alleged organised crime boss Mostafa Baluch as an example of those who police suspect had employed accountants and lawyers to defeat law enforcement efforts to identify the proceeds of crimes. His comments will increase pressure on the major parties to commit to introducing stalled anti-money laundering laws  known as Tranche 2 reforms  that place far greater obligations on lawyers, accountants and real estate agents to report suspected money laundering. The changes have been backed by almost every policing agency in the country.

Smith also savaged the state of NSWs proceeds of crime and money laundering laws, describing them as wonky, old and easily defeated by organised crime. Smith said other jurisdictions, including Western Australia, had far more effective laws that shifted the onus onto suspects to explain the origins of unexplained wealth. Loading I think weve let it get out of balance in terms of dealing with money laundering and civil forfeiture, he said, while also pressing for new laws to help police deal with the use of encrypted phone services such as An0m and Cipher and which are designed solely for use by criminals. We just need to put the balance back in the [legislative] weaponry, so that these drugs pay for the damage they do to our state. Smith also repeatedly described how policing agencies had identified poker machines and venues as having been used to launder drug money.
Australias financial watchdog is considering launching a sweeping inquiry into the federal carve-up of infrastructure funding, after Victoria complained it has been short-changed by the Morrison government.

State Treasurer Tim Pallas has written to federal Auditor-General Grant Hehir asking for an audit to examine how Canberra hands out infrastructure cash in the budget.

Victorian Treasurer Tim Pallas handed down the state budget last week. Credit:Joe Aramao

Victoria has long argued it is getting a disproportionately small portion of federal infrastructure cash, well below the states one-quarter share of the national population.

But in an escalating row, federal Infrastructure Minister Paul Fletcher accused the Victorian government of throwing the toys out of the pram because the federal government had followed clear departmental advice by refusing to fund Labors Suburban Rail Loop, which Fletcher branded Dan Andrews vanity project.
BAMAKO, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Four Malian soldiers were killed in the explosion of a homemade bomb, the army said Wednesday.

According to an announcement of the Malian Armed Forces (FAMa) on their official website, the tragedy occurred Wednesday morning when a security patrol of the FAMa jumped on the homemade bomb in Djenne, causing four dead and one injured.

On Monday, two children were killed and four other people were injured by shellfire by the Armed Terrorist Groups (GAT) in Diondiori, also in central Mali.

Mali has been facing security, political and economic crises since 2012, with insurgencies, jihadist incursions and inter-community violence killing thousands and displacing hundreds of thousands of others in the West African country. 
The Greens will promise to abolish Australian Border Force and hand over its responsibilities to a re-established customs agency, police and the military, as it looks to ramp up pressure on Labor over its policies on asylum seekers in a minority government.

Releasing the partys full suite of immigration policies on Thursday, Greens leader Adam Bandt and immigration spokesman Nick McKim will vow to push Labor into ending offshore detention and boat turnbacks if they hold the balance of power in parliament after the election.

The Greens will pledge to abolish Australian Border Force. Credit:Wolter Peeters

The comments open the door for a potentially tricky set of negotiations for Labor if there is a hung parliament. Labor has pledged to get rid of temporary protection visas, but supports boat turnbacks and offshore detention.

The Greens will also announce a policy to drastically increase Australias annual refugee intake to 50,000, up from 13,750, with special refugee places for people fleeing Afghanistan and Ukraine, and to hold a royal commission into Australias offshore detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island.
A former high commissioner to the Solomon Islands has questioned whether Australia is still a free country after being manhandled by Scott Morrisons security when he tried to talk to the prime minister about mishandling the relationship with the Pacific Island nation.

Trevor Sofield, the high commissioner to the Solomons from 1982 to 1985, was at a cheese shop and cafe with his wife in northern Tasmania on Thursday afternoon when he approached Morrison, who was also at the venue on the campaign trail.

Trevor Sofield (left), former high commissioner to the Solomon Islands, tried to talk to the prime minister at a cafe but was pushed aside by security. Credit:James Brickwood

Footage shows members of Morrisons security detail stopping Sofield from getting to the prime minister multiple times.

Speaking to The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age hours after the incident, the 78-year-old said he wanted to tell Morrison he had lost his vote for failing to stop the controversial security pact between China and the Solomons.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has distanced himself from Scott Morrisons handling of controversial Liberal candidate Katherine Deves after the prime minister doubled down on his defence of Deves views on transgender children.

The prime ministers office has denied assertions it is orchestrating the Warringah candidates election campaign after Morrison maintained his support for Deves earlier this week when she retreated from her apology for likening gender reassignment surgery to mutilation.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has once again distanced himself from the prime minister. Credit:Wayne Taylor

Asked whether he would have backed Deves if he were prime minister, Frydenberg told ABC Radio National on Thursday morning: I would use different language to what the prime minister has used, and Ive been pretty outspoken and strong in my criticism of the way Katherine Deves has approached this issue.

It is the second time in a fortnight he has put himself at arms length from the prime minister after Frydenberg said he would use different words to describe the NSW anti-corruption commission, which Morrison has repeatedly described as a kangaroo court.
The Liberal candidate for a seat taking in Melbournes LGBTQ heartland argued Australian rugby player Israel Folau had nothing to apologise for over his comment that hell awaits gay people, and when asked about reducing gender-based violence, said there was bad behaviour by both genders.

Liberal candidate for Macnamara Colleen Harkin.

Colleen Harkin, the Liberal candidate for Macnamara, an inner-city seat that takes in progressive areas such as St Kilda, also described lockdowns in Victoria during the pandemic as martial law.

Labor holds the electorate with a 6.25 per cent margin, but the Liberals came close to winning it in 2016.

In a candidate forum this week, the Liberal hopeful was asked about her policies to reduce gender-based violence and gender inequity. While research suggested one in four women had been sexually assaulted, she said the Jenkins review into Australian Parliaments workplace culture found that about 60 per cent of bullying was by women.
One depressing aspect of the federal election campaign is that policies on climate change have barely rated a mention.

During the 80-minute final television debate on Wednesday night, between Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese, there was just half a question even vaguely related to the topic. Both leaders were asked if they would ever introduce a carbon tax or a mining tax and they both said they would not.

Yet opinion polls regularly show that climate change is a vital issue for many voters. The most recent Herald Resolve Political Monitor found that 50 per cent of voters want action on climate even if it involves some personal cost to them. A Lowy Institute poll last year found 60 per cent of voters said it was a serious and pressing problem.

Moreover, evidence of the costs of inaction keep piling up. Flooding is again devastating Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority released a report on Tuesday, which the federal government seems to have tried to delay until after the election, which showed that climate change is already hurting Australias greatest natural treasure.

The annual aerial survey showed that 91 per cent of the systems reefs showed signs of bleaching, caused largely by high water temperatures over summer. Repeated bleaching can eventually kill coral. It has happened five times in the past two decades but this year was significant because it is the first time bleaching has occurred during a La Nina weather event, when water temperatures are supposed to be lower.
Chinese Australians are being shown misinformation and unauthorised political advertising on dominant social network WeChat, during a federal election campaign where major parties are courting their votes in key marginal seats.

WeChat has an estimated 690,000 daily users in Australia. The platform, owned by Chinese internet behemoth Tencent, claims it does not allow political advertising, but even a brief search reveals the widespread existence of what appear to be political ads and misinformation.

Images circulating on WeChat, the very popular app among the Chinese Australian community, during the 2022 election.

Much of the discussion on the platform is similar to that on Western sites such as Facebook, with different sections of the Chinese community making the case for their preferred candidates.

However, in some private chat groups, which can count hundreds of members, images are circulating with false claims about candidates and political parties. Misinformation experts believe the posts may have been shared by the proxies of candidates in seats where votes from Chinese Australians may determine the result.
Colombo: President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has appointed a long-time opponent to run the government days after his brother resigned as prime minister in a bid to quell growing tensions over a months-long crisis over shortages of food and fuel.

Ranil Wickremesinghe, a veteran politician and former prime minister, will become prime minister for the sixth time, the presidents media unit confirmed late on Thursday. No other details were immediately available.

The announcement may bring a modicum of stability to the country, which is on the verge of bankruptcy and needs a government to oversee bailout talks with the International Monetary Fund. Sri Lankas central bank chief has threatened to resign if political order isnt restored urgently.

The new appointment is the only option for Sri Lanka, said Ravi Karunanayake, a member of Wickremesinghes party and a former finance minister. I think his appointment will calm down the protest although internally not everyone will be happy and there will be some who will have belly aches.

The new prime ministers first priority will be to restore supply of gas and fuel and then getting the economy back on track, he added.
The decision by the two Nordic countries to abandon the neutrality they maintained throughout the Cold War would be one of the biggest shifts in European security in decades.

Sweden is expected to follow Finland in joining NATO as Russias invasion of Ukraine looked set to bring about the very expansion of the Western military alliance that Russian President Vladimir Putin aimed to prevent.

Helsinki/Kharkhiv: Moscow has threatened to take retaliatory steps, both of a military-technical and other nature after Finland announced it would apply to join NATO without delay.

Asked whether Finlands announcement that it would like to join NATO as soon as possible posed a direct threat to Russia, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: Definitely. NATO expansion does not make our continent more stable and secure.

This cannot fail to arouse our regret, and is a reason for corresponding symmetrical responses on our side, Peskov added.

Finlands announcement came even as Russias war in Ukraine was suffering another big setback, with Ukrainian forces driving Russian troops out of the region around the second largest city Kharkiv, the fastest Ukrainian advance since forcing Russia to withdraw from the capital and north-east more than a month ago.

Finlands 1300 kilometre border will more than double the length of the frontier between the US-led alliance and Russia, putting NATO guards a few hours drive from the northern outskirts of St Petersburg.

Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay, President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said in a joint statement, hoping steps to take the decision would be taken rapidly within the next few days.
Zaporizhzhia: Ukraine will hold its first war crimes trial of a captured Russian soldier later this year, as the Kremlin entertained the possibility of annexing a corner of the country it seized early in the invasion.

Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said her office charged Sergeant Vadin Shyshimarin, 21, in the killing of an unarmed 62-year-old civilian who was gunned down while riding a bicycle in February, four days into the war.

Ukrainian Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova looks at exhumed bodies of civilians killed during the Russian occupation in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv. Credit:AP

Shyshimarin, who served with a tank unit, was accused of firing through a car window on the man in the northeastern village of Chupakhivka. Venediktova said the soldier could get up to 15 years in prison. She did not say when the trial would start.

Venediktovas office has said it has been investigating over 10,700 alleged war crimes committed by Russian forces and has identified over 600 suspects.
Washington: The US will ramp up its maritime presence in the Indo-Pacific to check Chinas rise, sending its national coast guard across the ocean to battle the ever-growing challenge of illegal fishing.

In the midst of the war in Ukraine, US President Joe Biden is hosting the first-ever Washington summit of leaders from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to assert his administrations commitment to the region.

Chinas Xi Jinping and the USs then vice president Joe Biden in 2013. Credit:Getty

This reflects, I think, recognition on the part of the administration that we need to step up our game in South-East Asia, said an administration official, speaking anonymously to provide frank details of the presidents plans.

As part of that, we need to work more closely with ASEAN.
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia:--- Local Environmental conservationist Tadzio Bervoets recently returned from a scientific expedition to the Red Sea. Bervoets, upon invitation from Marine Conservation NGO Beneath the Waves, global ocean exploration initiative OceanX, and the Saudi Arabian King Abdullah University for Science and Technology (KAUST), conducted deep-sea research (300 to 2000 meters deep) into different deep-sea habitats and species in the Red Sea.

Bervoets, and Dr. Oliver Shippley from Beneath the Waves, were specifically looking at deep-sea shark species in the Red Sea while also testing equipment that will also be launched in the Dutch Caribbean; we know so very little about our deep-sea resources and the links between deep areas of the ocean and the coastal zones we are more familiar with. This while that likely the deep-sea will play a critical role for small island developing states to be able to help mitigate the impacts of climate change and in terms of maintaining the goods and services provided to coastal communities. Thats why the work being done in the Red Sea is so exciting; we are making the link between deep-sea habitat, coastal habitat, and the importance for holistic management of natural ocean resources as a buffer against the impacts of climate change, commented Bervoets.

OceanX is an ocean exploration initiative with a mission to explore the ocean and bring it back to the world. OceanX combines science, technology, and media to explore and raise awareness for the oceans and create a community engaged with protecting them.

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) is a private research university located in Saudi Arabia and is among the 500 fastest growing research and citation records in the world.

Founded in 2013 as a non-profit organization, Beneath The Waves is dedicated to promoting ocean health and using science and technology to catalyze ocean policy. Bervoets is on the Science and Policy Advisory Board for Beneath the Waves in addition to being the Director of the Dutch Caribbean Nature Alliance.
SABA:--- Joined by their colleagues from St. Eustatius, healthcare workers on Saba celebrated International Healthcare Workers Day on Thursday, May 12. The program started with an ecumenical service at the Roman Catholic Church in The Bottom.

This was the first time that International Healthcare Workers Day was celebrated under this new name. Before, it was called International Nurses Day. To make this event extra special, a group of healthcare workers came over from St. Eustatius to celebrate the day with their colleagues on Saba. The group of 25 Statia healthcare workers was headed by nurse Carol Jack-Roosberg. The group arrived by ferry in the morning and stayed for the day.

Everyone working in the local healthcare sector was invited to attend the program. Not only the employees of Saba Cares but also personnel of the Care and Youth Caribbean Netherlands ZJCN, the Testing Center, the Public Health Department, the Vector Control/Hygiene Department, Medwork, and Saba Wellness Pharmacy.

Father Zbigniew Zibi Orlikowski and Pastor Vernon Liburd hosted the well-attended ecumenical church service. You are there when people need it most. Your job involves so much more than just providing care. Thank you for being there, for caring, and for lifting people up, said Father Zibi in his welcoming words.

Highly valuable

You are highly valuable to your community. Thank God for having you. It is a noble profession that you carry out. You work under strenuous situations. You are devoted to caring for others and you care for us from cradle to death. I applaud your dedication, your commitment, and your tenacity, said Pastor Liburd who did the blessing preceded by a moment of silence for those who have lost the battle.

Because she could not personally be present, Saba Cares Director Judith Meijer shared her message via a short video. She thanked everyone for their contribution to the healthcare system. She said the profession not only involved the physical aspect of peoples health, but also mental health, making people feel comfortable and addressing loneliness for which social support is vital. Meijer called on the healthcare workers to not only support their community, but also each other.

Tirelessly work

Commissioner of Public Health Rolando Wilson welcomed the Statia delegation to Saba. On Saba Day, I said that it is important to reach out to our brothers and sisters on neighboring Statia, and here you are. He said that it was an honor to acknowledge healthcare workers as pillars who work tirelessly to safeguard peoples health.

You are the frontline workers who risk your life on a daily basis to help others in need. The community at large has to treat all healthcare workers with dignity and respect. Let us not forget other healthcare workers around the world and remember those who lost their lives during the COVID-19 pandemic while caring for others, said Wilson. Acting Island Governor Amelia Nicholson was also present at the church service on behalf of the Public Entity Saba.

Betterment

Nurse Felicia Dookhan read a poem by caregiver Yvonne Ugarte about kindness, something that is inextricably associated with a nurses job. Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Saba Cares Sydney Sorton thanked all healthcare workers for their hard work, dedication, contribution to the community, and for the betterment of healthcare.

Carol Jack-Roosberg said it was important for healthcare workers not to forget about themselves. If you dont care for yourself, you cannot care for others. She said the uniform did not make a person a nurse, but rather everything that the person does impact the job. She called on nurses to get together, work together and empower each other for the benefit of the island communities.

After a closing word by Father Zibi, the healthcare workers gathered for a group photo in front of the church and then went for brunch and festivities at Saba Cares next door.
Victoria Gold Reports 2022 First Quarter Results

Victoria Gold Corp. (TSX-VGCX) (aVictoriaa or the aCompanya  https://www.commodity-tv.com/ondemand/companies/profil/victoria-gold-corp/ ) is pleased to announce its first quarter 2022 summary financial and operating results.

The Company uses certain non-IFRS performance measures throughout this news release. Please refer to the aNon-IFRS Performance Measuresa section of this news release for more information. All currency figures are Canadian $ unless stated otherwise.

This release should be read in conjunction with the Companya?s Financial Statements and Managementa?s Discussion and Analysis (aMD&Aa) for the three months ended March 31, 2022 and 2021, available on the Companya?s website or on SEDAR.

Mr. John McConnell, President and CEO commented, aSimilar to previous years, the Eagle Minea?s gold production profile during 2022 will continue to be seasonal in nature. As summer approaches in the Yukon and the days get longer, we expect increased ore stacking and gold production to result in greater earnings and cashflows.a

Operational Highlights a First Quarter 2022

Mine production was 1.3 million tonnes of ore in the quarter.

Ore stacked on the heap leach pad in the quarter was 0.9 million tonnes at an average grade of 0.72 grams per tonne (g/t).

Gold production was 24,358 ounces in the quarter.

Financial Highlights a First Quarter 2022

Gold sold in the quarter was 25,518 ounces, at an average realized price1 of $2,328 (US$1,838) per ounce.

Recognized revenue was $59.5 million based on sales of 25,518 ounces of gold in the quarter.

Operating earnings were $23.5 million in the quarter.

Net income was $16.0 million, or $0.25 per share outstanding in the quarter.

Cash costs1 were $783 (US$618) per ounce and all-in sustaining costs (aAISCa)[1] were $1,904 (US$1,504) per ounce of gold sold in the quarter.

EBITDA1 were $38.3 million in the quarter.

Free cash flow1 deficiency was $40.0 million, or a deficiency of $0.63 per share1 in the quarter.

Cash and cash equivalents were $40.7 million at March 31, 2022 after net draw of $20.4 million against the Companya?s debt facilities.

[1] Refer to aNon-IFRS Performance Measuresa section.

Gold production and sales

During the three months ended March 31, 2022, the Eagle Gold Mine produced 24,358 ounces of gold, compared to 26,759 ounces of gold production in Q1 2021. The 9% decrease in gold production is attributed to the decrease in ore mined and stacked during the current quarter as well as Q4 2021.

During the three months ended March 31, 2022, the Company sold 25,518 ounces of gold, compared with 27,538 gold ounces sold in Q1 2021. The 7% decrease in gold sold is primarily attributed to the decrease in gold produced.

Mining

During the three months ended March 31, 2022, a total of 1.3 million tonnes of ore were mined, at a strip ratio of 1.7:1 with a total of 3.6 million tonnes of material mined. In comparison, a total of 1.6 million tonnes of ore were mined, at a strip ratio of 3:1 with a total of 6.2 million tonnes of material mined for the prior comparable period in 2021.

Total tonnes mined were 42% lower during the three months ended March 31, 2022 as a result of sufficient stockpiles of ore and low stripping requirements for the current period.

Processing

During the three months ended March 31, 2022, a total of 881,000 tonnes of ore was stacked on the heap leach pad at a throughput rate of 9,800 tonnes per day. A total of 951,000 tonnes of ore was stacked on the heap leach pad at a throughput rate of 10,600 tonnes per day for the prior comparable period in 2021.

Ore stacked on the pad decreased by 7% for the three months ended March 31, 2022 as a result of higher frequency of cold weather operational delays and supply chain challenges which increased unplanned maintenance.

As expected, ore for the quarter had an average grade of 0.72 g/t Au, compared to 0.87 g/t Au in the prior comparable period in 2021 due to mine sequencing.

As at March 31, 2022, the Company estimates there are 102,467 recoverable ounces within mineral inventory.

Capital

The Company incurred a total of $28.0 million in capital expenditures during the three months ended March 31, 2022 including:

1. sustaining capital of $18.4 million, including:

scheduled capital component rebuilds on mobile mining fleet,

expansion to the heap leach pad,

final construction on the truck shop, and

construction of the water treatment facility;

2. capitalized stripping activities of $9.2 million;

3. $3.3 million growth capital expenditures (growth exploration and mine expansion), and;

4. $2.9 million adjustment to the Companya?s asset retirement obligation during the quarter.

Revenue

For the three months ended March 31, 2022, the Company recognized revenue of $59.5 million compared to $62.7 million for the previous yeara?s comparable period. The decrease in revenue is attributed to a lower number of gold ounces sold, partially offset by a higher average realized price. Revenue is net of treatment and refining charges, which were $0.1 million for the three months ended March 31, 2022. The Company sold 25,518 ounces of gold at an average realized price of $2,328 (US$1,838) (see aNon-IFRS Performance Measuresa section), compared to 27,538 ounces at an average realized price of $2,274 (US$1,795) (see aNon-IFRS Performance Measuresa section), in the first quarter of 2021.

Cost of goods sold

Cost of goods sold was $20.1 million for the three months ended March 31, 2022 compared to $25.3 million for the previous yeara?s comparable period. The decrease in cost of goods sold is primarily attributed to the change in inventory.

Depreciation and depletion

Depreciation and depletion was $13.1 million for the three months ended March 31, 2022 compared to $12.6 million for the previous yeara?s comparable period. Assets are depreciated on a straight-line basis over their useful life, or depleted on a units-of-production basis over the reserves to which they relate.A

Liquidity and Capital Resources

At March 31, 2022, the Company had cash and cash equivalents of $40.7 million (December 31, 2021  $31.3 million) and a working capital surplus of $118.2 million (December 31, 2021 a $62.8 million surplus). The increase in cash and cash equivalents of $9.4 million over the year ended December 31, 2021, was due to financing activities ($47.8 million increase in cash) from shares issued for cash and draws made on credit facilities and long term debt. This is partially offset by operating activities and changes in working capital including foreign exchange losses on cash balances ($6.7 million decrease in cash) and investing activities ($31.5 million decrease in cash) primarily from capital expenditures incurred at the Eagle Gold Mine.

2022 Outlook

Outlook includes forward-looking statements which are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from expected results. See the end of this news release aCautionary Language and Forward-Looking Statementsa.

Victoriaa?s operational outlook assumes that operations will continue without any significant COVID-19 related interruptions. The Company has taken precautions to mitigate the risk of COVID-19 on operations. However, the COVID-19 pandemic and any future emergence and spread of similar pathogens could have a material adverse impact on our business, operations and operating results, financial condition, liquidity and market for our securities. Refer to the aRisk and Uncertaintiesa section of this MD&A.

2022 production and cost guidance is unchanged from when it was originally estimated and released in March 2022.

Production at the Eagle Gold Mine for 2022 is estimated to be between 165,000 and 190,000 ounces.

Mining, crushing, irrigation of ore on the heap leach pad and gold production are all expected to operate at full capacity during 2022. Stacking of ore on the heap leach pad was paused for six weeks in the first quarter of 2022 (late January through early March 2022) for regularly scheduled maintenance activities. Gold production, which lags stacking activities in heap leach operations, will have a seasonal bias due to the winter scheduled maintenance program which will result in lower gold production in the first half of 2022 and higher production in the last half of 2022, similar to 2021.

AISC1 for 2022 are expected to be between US$1,225 and US$1,425 per ounce of gold sold.

Qualified Person

The technical content of this news release has been reviewed and approved by Paul D. Gray, P.Geo, as the aQualified Persona as defined in National Instrument 43-101  Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects.

About the Dublin Gulch Property

Victoria Gold\-s 100%-owned Dublin Gulch gold property (the aPropertya) is situated in central Yukon Territory, Canada, approximately 375 kilometers north of the capital city of Whitehorse, and approximately 85 kilometers from the town of Mayo. The Property is accessible by road year round, and is located within Yukon Energy\-s electrical grid.

The Property covers an area of approximately 555 square kilometers, and is the site of the Company\-s Eagle and Olive Gold Deposits. The Eagle Gold Mine is Yukon\-s newest operating gold mine. The Eagle and Olive deposits include Proven and Probable Reserves of 3.3 million ounces of gold from 155 million tonnes of ore with a grade of 0.65 grams of gold per tonne, as outlined in a National Instrument 43-101 Technical Report for the Eagle Gold Mine dated December 3, 2019. The Mineral Resource under National Instrument 43-101 a Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects (aNI 43-101a) for the Eagle and Olive deposits has been estimated to host 227 million tonnes averaging 0.67 grams of gold per tonne, containing 4.7 million ounces of gold in the \Measured and Indicated\ category, inclusive of Proven and Probable Reserves, and a further 28 million tonnes averaging 0.65 grams of gold per tonne, containing 0.6 million ounces of gold in the \Inferred\ category.

Non-IFRS Performance Measures

The Company has included certain non-IFRS measures in this new release. Refer to the Companya?s MD&A for an explanation, discussion and reconciliation of non-IFRS measures. The Company believes that these measures, in addition to measures prepared in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards (aIFRSa), provide readers with an improved ability to evaluate the underlying performance of the Company and to compare it to information reported by other companies. The non-IFRS measures are 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. These measures do not have any standardized meaning prescribed under IFRS, and therefore may not be comparable to similar measures presented by other issuers.

Cautionary Language and Forward-Looking Statements

This press release includes certain statements that may be deemed \forward-looking statements\. Except for statements of historical fact relating to Victoria, information contained herein constitutes forward-looking information, including any information related to Victoria\-s strategy, plans or future financial or operating performance. Forward-looking information is characterized by words such as aplana, aexpecta, abudgeta, atargeta, aprojecta, aintenda, abelievea, aanticipatea, aestimatea and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions amaya, awilla, acoulda or ashoulda occur, and includes any guidance and forecasts set out herein (including, but not limited to, production and operational guidance of the Corporation). In order to give such forward-looking information, the Corporation has made certain assumptions about the its business, operations, the economy and the mineral exploration industry in general, in particular in light of the impact of the novel coronavirus and the COVID-19 disease (aCOVID-19a) on each of the foregoing. In this respect, the Corporation has assumed that production levels will remain consistent with managementa?s expectations, contracted parties provide goods and services on agreed timeframes, equipment works as anticipated, required regulatory approvals are received, no unusual geological or technical problems occur, no material adverse change in the price of gold occurs and no significant events occur outside of the Corporation\-s normal course of business. Forward-looking information is based on the opinions, assumptions and estimates of management considered reasonable at the date the statements are made, and are inherently subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other known and unknown factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those described in, or implied by, the forward-looking information. These factors include the impact of general business and economic conditions, risks related to COVID-19 on the Company, global liquidity and credit availability on the timing of cash flows and the values of assets and liabilities based on projected future conditions, anticipated metal production, fluctuating metal prices, currency exchange rates, estimated ore grades, possible variations in ore grade or recovery rates, changes in accounting policies, changes in Victoria\-s corporate resources, changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined, changes in development and production time frames, the possibility of cost overruns or unanticipated costs and expenses, uncertainty of mineral reserve and mineral resource estimates, higher prices for fuel, steel, power, labour and other consumables contributing to higher costs and general risks of the mining industry, failure of plant, equipment or processes to operate as anticipated, final pricing for metal sales, unanticipated results of future studies, seasonality and unanticipated weather changes, costs and timing of the development of new deposits, success of exploration activities, requirements for additional capital, permitting time lines, government regulation of mining operations, environmental risks, unanticipated reclamation expenses, title disputes or claims, limitations on insurance coverage and timing and possible outcomes of pending litigation and labour disputes, risks related to remote operations and the availability of adequate infrastructure, fluctuations in price and availability of energy and other inputs necessary for mining operations. Although Victoria has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in, or implied by, the forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results not to be anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that forward-looking information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information. The forward-looking information contained herein is presented for the purpose of assisting investors in understanding Victoria\-s expected financial and operational performance and Victoria\-s plans and objectives and may not be appropriate for other purposes. All forward-looking information contained herein is given as of the date hereof, as the case may be, and is based upon the opinions and estimates of management and information available to management of the Corporation as at the date hereof. The Corporation undertakes no obligation to update or revise the forward-looking information contained herein and the documents incorporated by reference herein, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable laws.

For Further Information Contact:

John McConnell

President & CEO

Victoria Gold Corp.

Tel: 604-696-6605

ceo@vgcx.com

In Europe:

Swiss Resource Capital AG

Jochen Staiger

info@resource-capital.ch

www.resource-capital.ch

1 Refer to aNon-IFRS Performance Measuresa section.
Schenck Process Reports Strong Q1 Results despite Challenging Market Environment

Posted by Publisher Internet

.

Q1 2022 Highlights:

Continued strong order intake at 224ma

Double-digit sales growth at 187ma, up 21%1

Continued strong order book of 598ma, up 40%1

Adjusted EBITDA of 20ma, up 1.7 ma1

Schenck Process delivered a strong Q1 performance continuing the growth momentum of recent quarters with Original Equipment and Aftermarket order intake amounting to 224ma with particular strength in APAC (up 8%1).

Sales grew by 21%1A to 187ma led by an outstanding performance in the Americas as a result of significant order wins in pet food during 2021. A strong recovery across the APAC region and first synergy effects from the acquisition of SHAPE (Thailand) further contributed to the Group\-s positive sales development, while EMEA sales were negatively impacted by supply chain constraints.A

Aftermarket sales continue with a positive trend with sales up 4%1A supported by an expanding digitalization offering and growing demand for digital add-ons and remote services.A

The order book remained at a high level of 598ma (+40%1) ensuring continued business momentum for 2022.

Earlier this month Schenck Process announced an agreement for the sale of the Mining business to Swedish engineering group Sandvik AB. The transaction is expected to complete in the second half of 2022, subject to regulatory approvals.

Keith Cochrane, CEO, commented:

aWe continued to demonstrate the resilience of our business by delivering another strong performance in Q1 2022. The disposal of our mining business will enable us to advance a more focused strategy for our other core businesses and strengthen our positions as a global solutions provider for the food, chemical and performance materials as well as the infrastructure & energy markets. Despite a difficult global environment, we are looking forward to a period of further growth building on our recent successes.aA

Schenck Process is a leading global provider of sustainable products, integrated solutions, and services in mission-critical applications for bulk materials. Headquartered in Darmstadt, Germany, the Group has more than 3,000 employees with a presence in over 21 countries across six continents focused on the food and mining market segments, alongside chemicals and performance materials, and infrastructure and energy.

The product offering includes solutions for industrial weighing, feeding, conveying, pulverizing and classification, screening, mixing and blending, and associated digital applications.

For further company news and information, please visit www.schenckprocess.com

1)  vs PY (FX adjusted)
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LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP)  Bolivia's President Luis Arce says he may not go to the Summit of the Americas if some countries from the region are not invited, joining Mexico's leader in objecting to suggestions that Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua might be excluded from the June meeting in Los Angeles.

Arce made the statement in a tweet late Tuesday following a similar warning earlier in the day from Mexico's Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Two Caribbean leaders have also protested against calls to exclude the three leftist governments that are under U.S. sanctions.
Connecticuts COVID positivity rate hit 13 percent Wednesday, according to state data.

COVID has been steadily rising in the state, with Hartford HealthCares chief epidemiologist Ulysses Shawdee Wu describing the spike earlier this week as a Jersey shore wave as opposed to a Hawaiian Pacific coast wave.

The numbers haven't been spiking but they certainly have been rising, Wu said.

On Wednesday, the state reported 9,311 new cases over the previous seven days out of 71,569 reported tests, a positivity rate of 13.01 percent.

The state also said Wednesday that 55 more patients had been in Connecticut hospitals with a COVID infection, a total of 300 statewide.
A story published Thursday about Sema4 and its COVID-19 testing contract with the state of Connecticut contained a number of errors.

Sema4 was one of several contractors that responded to a request for proposals for COVID-19 testing that the state issued in June 2021. The master contract stated that testing could be needed through June 30, 2022.

But the state Department of Public Healths agreements for COVID-19 testing with Sema4  as defined in statements of work, or SOWs, that were separate from the master contract  were set to expire at the end of December 2021, not in June 2022, as the CT Mirror incorrectly reported.

Sema4 notified the state via email on Dec. 15 that it was ceasing its COVID-19 testing work, continued to work through December and agreed to continue testing through January 2022. It did not breach its contract, according to state officials who clarified the agreements to the CT Mirror on Thursday.

Accordingly, the state of Connecticut would have had no reason to claim a breach or end its payments to the company for work it performed. The CT Mirror incorrectly reported otherwise in Wednesdays story.

The CT Mirror sought comment from DPH in recent days, asking why the state didnt withhold payments to Sema4 if the company had breached its contract with the state.

The DPHs response was: DPH accepted the email from SEMA-4 as the written notice pursuant to the contract and negotiated that SEMA-4 stay on until Jan. 31, 2022.

On Thursday, the state Department of Public Health issued an additional statement to The Mirror.

The SOW between DPH and SEMA4 to conduct state supported testing at 12 sites was effective August 31 to December 31, 2021 (initial SOW). The initial SOWs with all the vendors providing state supported testing ended on December 31, 2021. On or around late November 2021, with demand for community testing on the rise, DPH began working with the various vendors providing state supporting testing to negotiate amendments to their SOWs to extend the service period to June 30, 2022. On or around the third week of December, SEMA4 confirmed via email to and in discussions with DPH that it would be ending its state supported testing work on December 31, 2021, the end date for the initial SOW, and would not be interested in an amendment extending their services through June 30, 2022. Since the state was coincidentally experiencing a significant surge in COVID (Omicron surge) at the time of SEMA4s announcement, DPH negotiated with SEMA4 to continue its services for an additional month through January 31, 2022, so that DPH could arrange coverage by other vendors and amend their respective SOWs accordingly. DPH and SEMA4 executed an amendment to the initial SOW (Amended SOW) which extended SEMA4s services to the state through January 31, 2022. DPH successfully secured alternate vendors for all SEMA4 state supporting testing sites on or before the end of January 2022, the statement reads, in part.

SEMA4s initial SOW with DPH contractually ended on December 31, 2022. SEMA4 was not in breach of the initial SOW, so DPH has processed payments for work SEMA4 completed under that SOW. The Amended SOW with SEMA4 ran through January 31, 2022, and SEMA4 continued to perform appropriately under the Amended SOW, and DPH continues to process payments for this work as well, it continues.

The Department of Administrative Services (DAS) which issued the Master Contract has confirmed that as Sema4 completed the work required under the SOW as amended, there was no breach of the Master Contract, it continues.

On Thursday, Sema4 issued a statement to the CT Mirror:

Soon after the onset of the pandemic, Sema4 invested significant resources to answer the call to help the people of Connecticut. Quickly, we developed an end-to-end COVID-19 testing solution that addressed the States acute need for greater capacity for accurate and accessible testing with suitable turnaround times. We firmly believe this was the right thing to do and were glad to support the Connecticut communities in which we work and live.

We partnered closely with the State of Connecticut over these last couple of years and our departure from COVID-19 testing this past January was compliant with all contractual obligations. Administering hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 tests from 2020 until the end of January 2022 at the request of the Department of Public Health, we carefully and collaboratively wound down our offerings without disrupting the States ability to administer testing, prior to rededicating our resources to Sema4s original core business. Any subsequent payments Sema4 received, or that we have yet to receive from the State, are for tests already performed for Connecticut residents several months ago and pursuant to invoices that we have provided to the State.

The CT Mirror regrets the errors.
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RICHMOND, Va. (AP)  A settlement has been reached in a lawsuit twelve women brought last summer against Liberty University, accusing the Christian institution of fostering an unsafe environment on its Virginia campus and mishandling cases of sexual assault and harassment.

A notice of dismissal filed Wednesday by the plaintiffs' attorney, Jack Larkin, said the case had been settled but provided no details about the terms.

In a statement Thursday, Liberty said a settlement had been reached with all the plaintiffs and all but two additional women Larkin represented. The university did not disclose the terms of the agreement but outlined a number of other changes it has undertaken in recent months to improve campus security and review how it responds to incidents of sexual harassment or violence.

Liberty University president Jerry Prevo made it clear when the Jane Does filed their lawsuit that, despite certain claims being potentially outside of the statute of limitations, the university was committed to doing what it could to make things right with the plaintiffs, the statement said.

Larkin did not respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press. But he told TV station WDBJ the settlement terms were confidential.

The development comes as the prominent evangelical school in Lynchburg faces continued scrutiny over its handling of sex assault cases. It is facing other lawsuits that raise similar allegations and recently acknowledged to news outlets that the U.S. Department of Education is reviewing its compliance with the federal Clery Act, which requires colleges and universities to maintain and disclose crime statistics and security information.

In a statement, the department acknowledged the oversight work was ongoing but said no further comment would be provided until the outcome officially has been communicated to the institution.

The recently settled lawsuit was filed in federal court in New York and made various claims under Title IX, the federal law that protects against sex discrimination in education.

It alleged that Libertys strict honor code makes it difficult or impossible for students to report sexual violence. It said the university had a tacit policy of weighting investigations in favor of accused male students, and it said the university retaliated against women who did make such reports.

The women, former students and employees, all filed suit anonymously and were identified as Jane Doe 1-12. Their allegations spanned more than two decades.

Some plaintiffs in the lawsuit described being raped or sexually harassed and having their cases mishandled or effectively ignored. One woman alleged pregnancy discrimination.

A status report filed in the case in February said that if it was not resolved amicably an amended complaint would be filed adding new plaintiffs, including a current student.

In its statement, Liberty said it has spent over $8.5 million on campus security upgrades, including the installation of security cameras, blue light emergency call boxes and enhanced lighting, along with a new cellphone app for emergency reporting.

Liberty said it has made donations to community sexual assault response programs and is reviewing its counseling services to ensure there are more services available from licensed mental health providers, "including in rapid response scenarios resulting from sexual assault.

The university is also revising its amnesty policy to better communicate" that it will not discipline parties who engage in behaviors, in connection with a case of sexual harassment or assault "that would have otherwise violated its student honor code."

Liberty has also been in the spotlight recently for its acrimonious split with former president and chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. in 2020. Litigation between Falwell and the school is ongoing.
ATLANTA (AP)  A Georgia representative is proposing that Congress condemn attempts to criminally prosecute people who perform abortions, have abortions or experience miscarriages.

Rep. Nikema Willams, an Atlanta Democrat who formerly lobbied for Planned Parenthood in the Southeast, is introducing her resolution Thursday, and has already collected 115 co-sponsors, all Democrats, her spokesman said.

The resolution also supports keeping contraceptives and abortion pills available, and using puberty blockers, hormones and other procedures when medically necessary to treat transgender people.

Someone you know, someone in your family, or someone you love currently relies on or will need these services, the congresswoman said in a statement.

The move comes after a Democratic effort in the U.S. Senate to enshrine abortion access into federal law fell far short of breaking a filibuster on Wednesday. Williams' effort and the Senate debate follow a leaked draft U.S. Supreme Court opinion suggesting that justices will overturn the 50-year-old Roe v. Wade decision that created a nationwide right to abortion, leaving states to decide such questions.

The resolution would not have the force of law, but would help Democrats highlight what they see as Republican overreach. Some women have already been prosecuted for fetal harm due to alcohol and drug use during pregnancy. Louisiana lawmakers, despite opposition from anti-abortion groups who say it goes too far, are debating a bill that would make women who get abortions subject to prosecution for murder. And several states recently banned certain medical treatments for transgender youth.

I worked on the frontlines of reproductive health care and saw the sacrifices people still make to legally get the care they need. Criminalizing people who need or who provide this care wont save lives," Williams' statement said.

Democrats believe voters who favor legal abortion will rally to their side, possibly swinging the 2022 elections to their advantage in narrowly divided states such as Georgia.

But abortion opponents are confident that after decades of struggle, this is their moment. In an anti-abortion rally at the state capitol on Friday, Cole Muzio, president of conservative Christian group Frontline Policy Action, said he would triple dog dare any Democrats, including gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, to run a campaign of abortion on demand.

For any who want to talk about the politics of this moment, I say this: Bring it on. We will stand for this," Muzio said.

Ed Hula, a spokesperson for Williams, said the resolution also is endorsed by more than 140 outside groups including Planned Parenthood, the National Organization for Women, NARAL Pro-Choice America and the Human Rights Campaign.

Dr. Jamila Perritt, who leads Physicians for Reproductive Health, said passing the resolution would send an unequivocal message that no matter someones health care needs or the pregnancy outcomes they experience, no one should be criminalized for getting the care they need.



An earlier version of this story misspelled Dr. Jamila Perrit's first name.

___

Follow Jeff Amy on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jeffamy.
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PLAINFIELD  A Massachusetts man was charged with burglary and other offenses after police said he stole liquor and cash from a local store.

Police received a call around 4:20 a.m. Thursday reporting two men walking near Norwich Road and Bennett Street. In the area, an officer saw a man wearing a ski mask and a hooded sweatshirt, according to the Plainfield Police Department.
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Gathered at a ceremony Thursday to honor the 98 people who died in a Florida condominium collapse last summer, some of the victims' family members said they are too deep in mourning to contemplate the nearly $1 billion settlement their attorneys negotiated on their behalf.

Families and local officials gathered at the chain-link fence surrounding the vacant lot where Champlain Towers South once stood for the unveiling of temporary banners adorned with the victims' names and ages under the heading "Fathers, Mothers, Sons, Daughters, Brothers, Sisters.

The ceremony took place a day after the surprise announcement that a $997 million settlement had been reached in the families' lawsuit against local officials, the developers of an adjacent building and others whom they hold responsible for the collapse of the 40-year-old, 12-story beachside building during the early hours of June 24.

For Ronit Felszer Naibryf, whose 21-year-old son Ilan Naibryf was killed in the collapse, it feels like she lost a limb with his death, so it is impossible to fathom the settlement.

I am still processing that loss," Naibryf said. Everything else is a little bit of noise.

Pablo Rodriguez, who lost his mother and grandmother in the collapse, said the settlement was the best result the families could hope for legally.

The speed with which this was resolved was pleasantly surprising, he said. My biggest concern is that there isnt any accountability and the legislature hasnt done anything to remediate the situation.

Most of the Champlain Towers South collapsed suddenly about 1:20 a.m. June 24 as most of its residents slept. Only three people survived the initial collapse. No other survivors were found despite the around-the-clock efforts of rescuers who dug through a 40-foot (12-meter) pile of rubble for two weeks. Another three dozen people were in the portion of the building that remained standing.

The condominium's residents and visitors formed a melting pot: Orthodox Jews, Latin Americans, Israelis, Europeans and snowbirds from the Northeast.

Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, who visited the site daily during the search, said Thursday's ceremony and the banners were to assure we forever remember and honor the lives lost.

Newly elected Surfside Mayor Shlomo Danzinger said the idea for the signs came to him when he was driving past the site with his teenage daughter, who had been in the area during the collapse and got stuck in a dust cloud. Danzinger said she confided that driving by the area always makes her sad.

We wanted to make sure that people driving by or walking by will see those names and will remember what happened, he said. A permanent memorial is planned.

The speed and size of the proposed $997 million settlement stunned even Circuit Court Judge Michael Hanzman, who is presiding over the lawsuit, when it was announced at a hearing Wednesday.

Its fantastic, Hanzman said during the hearing. This is a recovery that is far in excess of what I had anticipated.

In comparison, the families of the 3,000 victims of 9/11 split $7 billion. The settlement still requires final approval and will grow after the building's lot is sold at auction later this month. An opening bid of $120 million has already been filed.

Harley S. Tropin, who represents the Champlain Towers families, credited the judge for setting the conditions that led to the lawsuit's speedy conclusion. Rather than let the suit take four or five years, as is typical in such cases, Hanzman made it clear this case would go to trial quickly if the sides couldn't settle.

That put enormous pressure on everyone  the plaintiffs and defendants, Tropin said Thursday. This tragedy was unique and I think the defendants along with everyone in the courtroom wanted to see if there was a reasonable way to provide some closure."

Specifics of the settlement or how it will be distributed have not been released. Defendants include developers, builders and others involved in the Eighty Seven Park Condo, the luxury building erected five years ago just south of Champlain South; the company that provided alarms and safety systems for Champlain South, which allegedly failed to alert the residents; and the town of Surfside.

Residents of Champlain South and victims' families have blamed vibrations caused by the construction of Eighty Seven Park Condo for weakening the structural wall that supported their building's pool deck. The deck's collapse on June 24 started the cascade of structural failures that ended with the building's partial collapse seven minutes later.

The developers of Eighty Seven Park insist their building was constructed safely and played no part in the collapse. Their attorney, Michael Thomas, said in a statement that their participation in the settlement is not an admission of culpability.

Our clients insurers made a business decision to contribute to the overall settlement of this litigation in order to resolve claims against them and avoid the time, expense, and inconvenience of litigation, Thomas wrote. The design, development, and construction of Eighty Seven Park in no way caused or contributed to the collapse of Champlain Towers South.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is investigating the cause of the collapse, a process that is expected to take years. Shoddy construction techniques used in the early 1980s when Champlain Towers South was built and a possible lack of proper maintenance by its condo association over the years are two other areas being explored.

Pablo Langesfeld, who lost his 26-year-old daughter, Nicole, said he will not even begin to experience emotional closure until that investigation is complete.

Even then, closure might not happen, but it "is going to be closer when we know whos at fault, he said.

__

Spencer reported from Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
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NEW YORK (AP)  Viewers tuning in to Thursday's episode of Candy, starring Jessica Biel, may recognize a familiar face: Biels husband Justin Timberlake.

The musician and actor portrays a deputy who investigates the murder the show is centered around.

Biel, a co-executive producer on the project, says Timberlake first approached her producing partner, Michelle Purple, about wanting to be involved.

They sort of had this whole plan. I didnt even know about at first. And then I thought he was kidding. And then he said, No, for real, I want to do this. And then it was off to the races. He was getting a wig fitting, it was so fun and was such a good surprise.

Biel admits to being worried at first about whether their dynamic would translate at work" but that quickly went away.

I actually felt total peace when he was around. Like, I knew he was going to hold that sort of safe space for me to work in the way I needed to and be non-judgmental and open and free. And he gave me the freedom to improvise, which hes so good at and Im less comfortable with."

In Candy, Biel plays Candy Montgomery, a young, outgoing, church-going wife and mother in Texas who voraciously reads romance novels. She seems to have it all  but is bored  so she begins an affair with a man from her town (played by Pablo Schreiber) and ends up killing his wife, Betty, with an ax. Montgomery pleaded not guilty to the crime and a jury sided with her, some even saying they never liked Betty.

The story is based on a real case from 1980 and is of interest in Hollywood at the moment. Elizabeth Olsen recently wrapped filming her own limited series version called Love and Death," in which she plays Candy.

Melanie Lynskey, who plays Betty, hopes the story will lead to compassion for the victim, and that people will see how the trial was a popularity contest.

As somebody who has had a hard time fitting in for a lot of my life since I was a little girl, I really, really responded to that and just how deeply unfair it was," she said.

Timberlake isnt the only surprise casting in the show: Lynskey's husband, Jason Ritter, plays Timberlake's partner. A memorable moment is when the two recreate the crime as part of their investigation.

Biel credits Candy co-creator and showrunner Robin Veith for the idea to have Jason as well and have these two be partners in crime. It tickled us, said Biel.

Biel wears a wig with short, curly brown hair in the series which gotten a lot of attention. She jokes that its a similar hairstyle to one her husband had in the late 90s with his boy band NSYNC.

He definitely had that hairstyle," said Biel. I always ask, "Please grow those beautiful curls back out. I love that curly hair. I know. Its so weird. We were laughing about that.

___

AP Writer Mike Cidoni Lennox in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
PLAINS TWP.  Dallas High School senior Hailey Russ said having autism makes it difficult for her to get a job but she found plenty of employment opportunities at a job fair that the Luzerne Intermediate Unit 18 hosted Wednesday at the Holiday Inn.

Russ, 18, stopped at booths for several businesses and talked to career navigator Mia McJunkins about services and training that Pennsylvania CareerLink offers for job seekers at its Wilkes-Barre office.

Im more than happy to get any job they offer me because at least Im getting money, Russ said. I just feel I really should have a job whether I have this disorder or not.

Russ was one of hundreds of high school juniors and seniors from Luzerne, Lackawanna and Monroe counties who came out to the job fair amid a labor shortage.

LIU transition specialist Cara Serino, who organized the job fair with Diane Orloski and Ed Clarke of the LIU, said they recognized a need for employers to hire amid a labor shortage and they wanted to help prepare students to enter the workforce. Some students did on-the-spot interviews and were hired immediately, she said.

Convenience store chain Sheetz was one of 35 businesses that participated in the job fair.

Sheetz field recruiter Chad Carey was looking to hire students for stores throughout Luzerne County and for its newest location that is being constructed in Larksville that is expected to open in June.

Sheetz pays a starting wage of $14 an hour in Luzerne County and offers training and perks like tuition reimbursement of $5,250 per year if students maintain a 3.0 grade point average, Carey said.

Even if they arent going to make a career out of Sheetz, we want to help them get where they want to be, Carey said. Its a great first job and it teaches you a lot of different life skills.

Several students stopped at the booth for Sheetz, including Hazleton Area High School senior Christie Tineo, 19, who said she plans to study nursing at Kings College but she is interested in jobs that would give her experience working with people.

Holly Check of the Lion Brewery in Wilkes-Barre talked to students about 50 to 100 job opportunities that could be available to them after they graduate.

Lion Brewery is expanding its manufacturing capabilities to a new 250,000-square-foot facility in the Grimes Industrial Park in Pittston Twp. that will feature two new canning lines.

Thats going to grow our business quite a bit, Check said. A lot of high school students dont know what they want to do after graduation so they have the opportunity to look at what its like to start right off the bat in a job.

Barb Eyet, human resources manager at Golden Technologies in Old Forge that manufactures wheelchairs, lift chairs and scooters, said the business is looking to fill about 30 positions. She said she thought holding a job fair for high school students was an excellent idea.

Schools are there to prepare kids for their future and part of that future is working, Eyet said. Having people from the businesses here to talk to kids about what kinds of jobs they offer is an excellent opportunity to link school to work. This is a fantastic program and I hope they continue programs like this.
Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca said on Thursday that the confidence shown by German investors in the Romanian business environment could encourage other foreign investors, a statement made during a working visit to the "Star Assembly" Production Unit in Sebes (Alba County), an important component of the production network for the drivetrains of vehicles produced by the German concern Mercedes-Benz and an investment objective with many benefits locally and nationally, shows a Government press release.

"It is an encouraging signal for the Romanian economy and for the Sebes community that this production unit in Romania is taken into account by the German investor in its retooling program for the transition to the production of components for electric vehicles. Through this increase in the production performance level and adaptation to the objectives of sustainable development, we are sure that the people in the area will continue to have jobs. The development of production investment in Sebes will continue to have a multiplier effect socially, through newly created jobs, and it will bring added value to the local and national economy at the same time, through the high standards of the specific production," Prime minister Nicolae Ciuca said.In context, the Prime Minister stressed the importance of German investments in Romania."The head of the Executive expressed appreciation that the confidence shown by German investors in the Romanian business environment can encourage other foreign investors, to whom he conveyed that the measures agreed by the government program and those included in the National Recovery and Resilience Plan take into account both the investment component, as well as the reform component to ensure the transparent, correct and efficient functioning of the institutional mechanisms in relation to the citizens and the business environment," the release further mentions.The Prime Minister also thanked the representatives of Mercedes-Benz investors from Sebes for the company's involvement in various social responsibility projects, including training and retraining opportunities, the dual education system, scholarships and qualification programs they make available for the training of staff locally.According to the release, the company's representatives mentioned that they intend to develop projects for the transition to the production of components for electric vehicles, through major investments in the next period."They also appreciated the support amounting to 35 million euros received in the form of state aid, funds used by the company benefited for the purchase of equipment. As a result of the investments of over 320 million euros made, the social contributions paid were of over 64 million euros," the cited source states.Production in the Sebes unit began with the assembly of eight-speed dual-clutch automatic gearboxes and nine-speed transmissions for Mercedes-Benz, and starting with 2020 the hybrid vehicle variant is also being assembled, an important step towards the production of environmentally friendly, carbon-free vehicles.The assembly and production unit SC Star Assembly SRL from Sebes is, together with the unit SC Star Transmission from Cugir, an important component of the production network for the drivetrains of vehicles produced by the German concern Mercedes-Benz.The Romanian Prime Minister is accompanied in his visit to Alba County by the head of the Chancellery of the Prime Minister, Mircea Abrudean.
Public government officials and IT&C specialists will meet today for a conference on cybercrime during the digitalisation of the economy and in time of war.

The event will be attended by Sabin Popescu, director of the Directorate General for Institutional Partnerships of the National Cyber-Security Directorate (DNSC); Toma Cimpeanu, executive director, National Information Systems Security Association (ANSSI); Ioan-Cosmin Mihai, deputy chair of the Romanian Association for Information Security Assurance (ARASEC); police officer Vasile Belciu, Cyber-Crime Fighting Service, Organised Crime Fighting Directorate, General Inspectorate of the Romanian Police, Agerpres reports.
Romania is carefully monitoring the situation in the Black Sea and the possible development of the military conflict of the Russian Federation towards Odessa and remains concerned regarding the fact that the Black Sea is not, practically, open for international circulation, said the Minister of National Defence, Vasile Dincu, on the occasion of the meeting of the Chiefs of European Navies, organized, Wednesday and Thursday, in Bucharest, by the Romanian Naval Forces.

According to a release of the Ministry of National Defence (MApN), Minister Vasile Dincu was present at the official opening of the reunion, where he hailed the presence, in Romania, of the 25 chiefs of naval forces from European countries which are NATO or EU members and the representatives of the leaderships of NATO's Allied Maritime Command and the US Sixth Fleet deployed to Europe, the latter having the status of observers.

"We are all living extremely hard times here, in the Black Sea region, following the military aggression of the Russian Federation on a sovereign and independent state, Ukraine," said the Minister in his speech on the occasion, according to the quoted source.

Vasile Dincu mentioned that the presence in Bucharest of the heads of naval forces in Europe is "all the more relevant in the context of fighting in the Black Sea, the Russian forces being, close to the mouths of the Danube, on Snake Island."

"Romania is monitoring carefully this situation, the possible development of the conflict towards Odessa, and remains concerned that the Black Sea is not, practically, open to international circulation," said the Romanian Minister of Defence.

He reiterated that the operationalization of the NATO Battle Group in Romania is growing closer and that, together with those in Bulgaria, Slovakia and Hungary, will lead to the consolidation of this flank of the Alliance.

Ministe Dincu showed his appreciation for the role of military navies in this complicated geopolitical context and said that he is convinced that "participating in NATO and European Union naval missions and operations have contributed to obtaining interoperability, so necessary at this time," the quoted source also shows.

Vasile Dincu stated his opinion that the war between Russia and Ukraine reveals a new series of challenges towards global security, with short-, medium- and long-term implications.

"Ahead of this, we must remain united, cooperate closely, as we have especially since the start of this inhuman war, continue to train together, executing missions in responsibility and interest areas and, essentially, evolve together," said Dincu.

"In the context of the current security challenges in the European maritime space, CHENS contributes to the consolidation of a unitary vision among the representatives of European naval forces regarding cooperation in the domain and facilitates discussing defining concepts (...) of the command and control mechanism , as well as the development of military dialogue at the high level and European military cooperation in the naval domain," the release mentions.

Romania holds the Presidency of this European Forum since last year, and the head of the Naval Forces General Staff, Rear Admiral Mihai Panait, turned over, on Thursday, the leadership of the structure to his Irish counterpart, Commodore Micheal Malone.

The meeting of the Chiefs of European Navies is an informal and independent forum, composed of the head of military navies in EU or NATO member-states that have naval forces. The purpose of CHENS is to promote, continuously, cooperation between the military navies of member-states, to analyze joint interest problems and to improve situational awareness in the maritime domain in member-states. AGERPRES
The latest French films will be screened in indoor cinema halls and open-air cinemas in Bucharest and ten other Romanian cities in the 26th edition of the French Film Festival in Romania, June 1-12.

"Nos yeux grand ouverts"/"Our eyes wide open" is the theme for this year's edition.The Young Talent - Feature Film Competition brings to the fore, as every year, new voices of French filmmaking in five remarkable debut feature films that will compete for the Audience Award: a 1,000-euro scholarship offered by the French Institute to the winning filmmaker, as well as financial support provided by TV5 Monde to the Romanian distributor who will choose to bring the film on the screens in local cinemas, Agerpres reports.Among the national premieres confirmed in this section are two films selected for Semaine de la Critique: "Bruno Reidal" (Bruno Reidal, Confessions of a Murderer) by Vincent Le Port, and "Les Amours d'Anais" (Anais in Love) by Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet.For the second year in a row, the Young Talent Competition - Short Film has picked five productions with a special festival performance. A jury of three young film critics - Dora Leu, Calin Boto and Andreea Chiper - will pick the winner of this section. The prize consists of a stay at the Residence de Poche / Pocket Residence of the French Institute in Romania in Bucharest: an ideal setting for the winning director to develop a feature film project.Screened for the first time in Romania in the Panorama of the films of the year, the classic section that brings together the recent successes of French cinema, will be the absurdist comedy "Viens je t'emmene" (Nobody's Hero) by Alain Guiraudie, and "L'evenement" (Happening) by Audrey Diwan, winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival 2021.This year's edition brings an important European cinematographic component marking the French presidency of the Council of the European Union. The section Regard vers l'Europe/Looking at Europe will celebrate filmmaking co-operation in Europe and the key role of France in that, offering significant Franco-European co-productions for each decade since the 1960s.Among the selected films are "La Grande Bouffe" (The Big Feast) by Marco Ferreri, a film from the golden era of Franco-Italian co-productions, and "Possession" (Possession) by Andrzej Zulawski. Special guest of the section is French-Tunisian producer Said Ben Said, who will come to Bucharest to introduce the film "Elle" (Elle) by Paul Verhoeven, winner of the 2017 Cesar Award for Best Film.The French Film Festival is organised by the French Institute of Romania in the cities of Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Iasi, and Timisoara.
The Prime Minister of Moldova, Natalia Gavrilita, sent to the representatives of the European Union, on Thursday, the second part of the filled questionnaire for the European Commission regarding accession to the European Union, during an inauguration ceremony for the new headquarters of the EU Delegation in the Republic of Moldova, according to the Deschide.md portal.

"The Republic of Moldova belongs to the European space, historically, culturally, as well as a value system. The people of Moldova are looking with hope and trust towards a European future for the Republic of Moldova and I believe in the beneficial results for the necessary reforms to the European integration. The Republic of Moldova was late in this undertaking, but the Government that I am leading is set on recovering the delays and to accelerate the processes in order to put our country where it belongs, in the family of free countries, in the family of European countries," Gavrilita declared during the ceremony.

The head of the EU Delegation in Chisinau, Janis Mazeiks, declared that he was pleasantly surprised by how quickly the answers were offered.

"This shows the determination of the people in the Republic of Moldova to advance in their relation with the European Union," he declared, specifying that the presented information will be examined by the European Commission, after which the next steps will be announced.

On April 22, PM Natalia Gavrilita sent the ambassador of the European Union in Chisinau, Janis Mazeiks, the first part of the filled questionnaire for accession to the EU. Gavrilita pointed out then then that a lot of work was put into filling out the questionnaire in order to offer good news to the citizens before the Holy Easter Holidays.
The Cugir Plant is part of the entire defence industry, which needs new investments and technology, said, on Thursday, Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca, who added that at the level of the Defence Ministry there is a ten-year plan running, but, unfortunately, until now, change has not happened with regard to retooling.

"We've discussed this subject, I was two years ago and saw the conditions in Cugir. I saw the way production is carried out at Cugir. It's true, everything's based on old technology. Cugir saw no investments. In order for Cugir to produce equipment, competitive arms it must invest in technology. Moreover, I was telling them today, because I saw them at the presentation stand, that, if they want to remain operational, they must invest in technology and use the creativeness of the youths that were there and seemed very willing to conduct their activity in said domain, but not on the current technology," said Ciuca.

He recalled that, a few years ago, the Cugir Plant couldn't honor a contract to manufacture 1,000 pistols for the Romanian Army.

"We came prepared to be able to sign a contract with the Cugir Plant. Unfortunately, the plant was unable to sign that contract. We convened together with the management of the plant to return, as soon as possible, with the offer to be able to acquire arms produced in Romania for the Romanian Army. They came, we made a contract for 1,000 pistols. Unfortunately, they couldn't be delivered to this day. As such, the Cugir Plant is part of the entire defence industry, which needs new investments and technology," Ciuca mentioned.

The Prime Minister mentioned that there are arms plants where a "certain evolution" regarding the technology used could be noted, and the products have a different quality.

"Still, at the level of the Ministry of National Defence, there is that 10 year plan. There were meetings, we actually had discussions, both with the Ministry of Economy, as well as with the Defence Ministry. Meetings took place at the level of ministry leadership, there were meetings between specialists, between planners. There is still that plan and it is running. Unfortunately, change did not happen with regard to retooling the defence industry in Romania. There are plants, not everywhere though, where a certain evolution regarding new technology happened and, of course, the quality of the equipment is different," Ciuca also stated. AGERPRES
Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca declared on Thursday in Alba Iulia that a tentative new bank forbearance decision "is being analyzed" and that he also discussed the subject with the governor of the National Bank of Romania.

"We will look at the situation and announce the decision together with the other members of the coalition," Ciuca told a press conference today while on a visit to Alba County. AGERPRES
Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca declared on Thursday, in Alba Iulia, that the Ministry of Economy is analyzing the situation at Cupru Min Abrud, where the extracted raw material is exported, as there is no copper concentrate processing facility in Romania.

"Our country has significant mineral resources. Unfortunately, at the moment, the resources are being exported and we are losing what we all know and we are aware that it is the biggest benefit, namely the added value," the head of the Executive told a news conference, when asked what are the long-term plans for Cupru Min Abrud, a company that exploits the Rosia Poieni deposit.

Nicolae Ciuca spoke about the "inability" to be able to process these resources in our country. "It does not bring us practically the benefit that could be much more substantial through the existence or investments in terms of the processing of mineral resources," the Prime Minister said.

According to the head of Government, Cupru Min is one of the topics discussed at the level of the Executive. "It is an issue under analysis at the level of the Ministry of Economy and when the analysis is completed we will discuss what is to be achieved in practice," said Nicolae Ciuca.

A month ago, the Minister of Economy, Florin Spataru, was saying, also in Alba Iulia, that solutions must be found so that the copper concentrate from Rosia Poieni can be processed in Romania or, possibly, in another country of the European Union.

Asked by journalists if such a plant could be built in Apuseni Mountains, the minister replied that "there is no concrete project".

"It does not seem normal to me that this raw material, this copper concentrate that we extract from Romania, be processed elsewhere, taking into account the fact that, at European level, we need this copper. And then we have to find solutions at European level so that the processing can take place in Romania or somewhere in the European Union. That is why we started these discussions with the European Commission to see what the financing solutions are for ensuring such a facility," said Spataru.

This is not the first time that the possibility that what is extracted from the Rosia Poieni deposit, where 60% of Romania's copper reserves are located, be processed in the country and no longer be sold, especially in China in recent years, only in the form of dry copper concentrate.

In 2017, the then Minister of Economy, Mihai Fifor, said during a visit to Abrud that the authorities wanted to stop selling "just the ore" but to "develop it in the area", naming as a possible place for the establishment of a metallurgical plant in the town of Zlatna, in the Apuseni Mountains.

Cupru Min, a company subordinated to the Ministry of Economy, has as main object of activity the exploitation and delivery in specific forms of resources/reserves of copper ore from the Rosia Poieni mining perimeter. The concentrate extracted by Cupru Min is from a porphyry-type deposit, which, in addition to copper, also contains other metals. AGERPRES
Chairman of the Ukraine Friendship Parliamentary Group in the Romanian Parliament MP Ioan Balan of the National Liberal Party (PNL) on Tuesday told a visiting Ukrainian parliamentary delegation led by Marchenko Liudmyla about the support of all Romanian institutions to the Ukrainian people affected by Russia's "barbaric aggression."

According to a press statement released by the Chamber of Deputies on Thursday, the parliamentary friendship group with Ukraine had a meeting with the Ukrainian delegation on Tuesday."In my conversations with the Ukrainian delegation, I strongly condemned, along with my colleagues in the friendship group, the barbaric and unprovoked war unleashed by Russia and reaffirmed the support of all Romanian state institutions to Ukrainian citizens. I strongly believe that the strengthening of the relationships between Romania and Ukraine began with the unconditional and emotional support that Romanians have given to Ukrainian refugees since the first day of the war. Since the first day of the war, the Romanians have demonstrated that through their veins flows hospitality, humanity, kindness and the desire to help those in need unconditionally. That is testified by the fact that to thousands of refugees, to thousands of Ukrainian children, Romania is at home," Balan is quoted as saying in the statement.He added that "thousands of Ukrainians have been received and integrated with Romanian families like brothers.""I also conveyed to the neighbouring people all the admiration of the Romanians for the heroism of the soldiers who defend their country and their families at the cost of their lives," Balan added.The Ukrainian MPs extended an invitation to the friendship group to pay a visit to Kyiv and thanked them for their help.The PNL MP also mentioned that the friendship between the two countries is getting stronger and stronger."As an MP who has taken many steps in recent years to improve diplomatic ties with Ukraine and to protect the interests of Romanians in Ukraine, I can only rejoice that today the friendship between the two countries is getting stronger, more solid, to the benefit of both sides," Balan said.
President Klaus Iohannis said on Thursday that the issue of revising the Constitution is "very sensitive", noting that there are issues that needed to be clarified in the fundamental law, such as the "early election scenario."

"It is a very important, very sensitive topic, but at the same time extremely attractive for all kinds of scenarios and all kinds of interpretations. Until we have something written, a draft - we are working in Parliament for a special committee - it is difficult to comment, but if you ask me directly: yes, there are issues that I think we need to clarify in the Constitution. Please recall the scenario of early elections was put forth, but the notion doesn't even exist in the Constitution. So, we must clarify how, when and who dissolves Parliament, what early elections mean," Iohannis said.The head of state said that there are some technical matters provided for in the Constitution, which in practice don't function anymore."I'll give an example. An interim minister can stay for 45 days. But if the crisis lasts 145 days, what do we do? We remain without a Government, we remain without ministers? It's absurd. Such things have happened and we have drawn the conclusions which should lead to improvements in the Constitution's text. Even the position of the President. The discussion exists since we escaped communism and the discussion is: we want a President elected by the people, with vast powers, or do we want a President elected by Parliament, that has a position which is more for protocol. There are arguments for and against both. For the moment the situation is the one we're in: the President is elected directly, has the attributes he has," Klaus Iohannis added.He mentioned that this subject "will not be finalized through the media or through TV or even social networks," but "through deep political discussions between the formations that represent Romanians in Parliament.""The discussion, I'll tell you right now, is a very complicated one, it's one that will lead to a lot of discord in the public space, if it is not approached with maximum responsibility. So, in principle, yes, I believe that the Constitution needs some changes and yes, it's necessary to have careful discussions with finality, targeted towards making the state function better," said the head of state.President Klaus Iohannis paid a visit to the Colentina Clinical Hospital on the occasion of International Nurses' Day.
As many as 602 new cases of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 were recorded in the last 24 hours in Romania, down 103 from the previous day, with over 18,000 RT-PCR and rapid antigenic tests performed, the Health Ministry informed on Thursday.

Of the new cases, 62 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 - 126, and in the counties of Cluj - 70, and Iasi - 36.As of Thursday, 2,901,682 cases of people infected with the novel coronavirus were confirmed in Romania.- Hospitalisations -As many as 888 people with COVID-19, down 25 from the previous reporting, including 66 children, are hospitalised in Romania at specialist care facilities.Out of the total number of hospitalised patients, 151 patients, up seven, are in intensive care.Of the 151 patients admitted to ICU, 140 are unvaccinated against COVID-19.- Deaths -According to the ministry, another six Romanians infected with SARS-CoV-2, two men and four women, are reported dead in the last 24 hours.Of the six deceased patients, four were unvaccinated and two were vaccinated. One of the vaccinated patients who died was 50-59 years old and the other one was 70-79 years old. Both had commorbidities.Since the beginning of the pandemic, 65,595 people diagnosed with the SARS-CoV-2 infection have died in Romania.
Romania's representative at Eurovision, wrs, will perform on Thursday in the second semifinal of the European song contest, organized at the Sala Pala Olimpico in Turin, Agerpres reports.

The artist will enter the thirteenth in the competition, with the song "Llamame". Representatives from Australia, Georgia, Cyprus, Serbia, Finland, Azerbaijan, San Marino, Israel, Malta, Montenegro, the Czech Republic, Poland, Belgium, Northern Macedonia, Sweden, Estonia and Ireland also take the stage in the second semifinal.Fans from the semifinalist countries (except those living in Romania) plus those from Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy can vote for the song "Llamame" via SMS or through the application on the official website of the contest.All those who want to support Romania have to do is that, in the allotted period, which will open immediately after the end of the presentation of the 18 songs, to vote 13 - the number allocated to Romania.Eurovision presenters will announce when the lines are open for voting. A jury made up of music industry professionals will vote in turn, and the jury's choice will represent 50% of the final result.The holders of the first 10 positions will qualify for the final of the Eurovision 2022 competition, which will take place on Saturday evening.On Tuesday, after the first semifinal, the representatives of the following countries qualified for the final: Switzerland, Armenia, Iceland, Lithuania, Portugal, Norway, Greece, Ukraine, the Republic of Moldova and the Netherlands.The five countries that make up the so-called "Big Five" group - the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Spain - are automatically qualified for the grand final, as they make the largest financial contributions to the competition organizer, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU).The Eurovision 2022 final will take place on Saturday, May 14, and Romanian viewers will be able to watch it live on TVR 1 and TVR International, also starting at 22.00.The Eurovision Song Contest 2022 takes place under the slogan "The sound of beauty."The Eurovision Song Contest is the most important international music competition organized by the EBU - the largest public television association in Europe. The European Song Contest (ESC) has been held every year since 1956. The show is one of the longest-running and most watched television programs in the world, being broadcast in Europe as well as in Australia, Asia and the United States.Romania's best performances in this competition were twice the third place (Luminita Anghel & Sistem - Kyiv, 2005; Paula Seling and Ovi - Oslo, 2010) and once the fourth place (Mihai Traistariu - Athens, 2006).
LITTLETON, Colo. (AP)  A handful of curious voters mingled on a suburban Denver brewpubs patio one recent evening as Pam Anderson told them she could restore professionalism to the office of Colorado secretary of state.

Anderson rattled off her resume  former county clerk, head of the state clerks association and ardent defender of Colorados mail voting system  making clear that she fit the profile of the sort of technocrat whom Republicans used to back for the top election post in Colorado.

I'm the only person in this election, including the primary, who has a real record in election integrity, Anderson said.

Anderson was taking a swipe at her better-known primary rival, Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who has become the prime example of the GOP's new approach to running elections.

A grand jury earlier this year indicted Peters for her role in breaking into her own county's election system during a hunt for evidence of conspiracy theories fanned by former President Donald Trump. A judge already barred Peters from running last year's local elections due to the controversy and this week blocked Peters from administering this year's, too. Still, she's become a heroine to those who disbelieve the actual results of the 2020 elections.

Ive taken their best shot. They made me sleep on the concrete jail floor for 30 hours because I protected your election data, Peters told a crowd of 3,000 GOP activists and officials at the state party's convention last month. They know who to be afraid of. Sixty percent of attendees voted to place her atop the ballot for secretary of state in their June 28 primary.

For nearly a century, U.S. elections have relied on a sort of partisan truce. They are run by thousands of local officials, often elected in partisan races, and usually overseen by secretaries of state who run statewide along with candidates for hotly contested offices like attorney general and governor. But, typically, election administration itself has been done in a nonpartisan manner, and those who run for positions overseeing it are more technocrats than crusaders.

That is changing after Trump's 2020 loss. The former president is recruiting a class of partisan secretary of state candidates who parrot his lies about losing the election due to fraud and argue he should have remained president. The contest between Peters  she joined Trump at his Florida headquarters of Mar-a-Lago last week  and Anderson is perhaps the starkest battle in the GOP between those traditions.

The two candidates faced off Thursday night in a debate held by a Republican group in suburban Denver. They were joined by the third GOP contender in the race, businessman Mike O'Donnell, but most of the energy came from the clash between Anderson and Peters. The room was split between supporters of the two candidates who would sometimes grumble when the other spoke.

There's no question that the election deniers are winning the fight within the Republican Party. In Michigan last month, Kristina Karamo, a community college professor endorsed by Trump, won the GOP nomination to run for secretary of state after fanning suspicion of the 2020 election results. Candidates with similar stances are running in GOP primaries in every swing state, including for secretary of state in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada.

An Associated Press-NORC poll last year found that two-thirds of Republicans doubt Biden was legitimately elected president. Trump continues to fan the myth that massive voter fraud swung the election. He and his supporters have lost more than 60 court cases trying to demonstrate such fraud. His own Justice Department, along with numerous other investigations and audits, found no significant fraud.

Though Trump's election denial has caught on among the party's rank and file, many GOP strategists fear it could backfire on them in November. In Colorado, some Republicans dread the idea of Peters on the general election ballot.

The Democrats are going to love it and do everything they can to make every Republican candidate look like they came from the same DNA as Tina Peters, said Scott McInnis, a former GOP congressman who is now on the Mesa County Commission.

McInnis and other Republican Mesa County commissioners have long clashed with Peters. The local district attorney, a Republican, is overseeing her prosecution. McInnis predicts that Anderson will win the primary.

I don't think Republican voters are going to vote for someone who has nine felony charges, McInnis said of Peters.

Still, the enthusiasm for Peters in some parts of the GOP is considerable. She raised $158,000 in the eight weeks since she announced her campaign, compared to $50,000 by Anderson, who reported only having $5,000 left on hand at the end of April. At the state GOP convention, one of a bevy of aspirants for governor won enough votes from the crowd to secure a spot on the primary ballot simply by promising to pardon Peters if elected.

I agree with what she did. I don't think she did anything illegal, said Pam Utterback, 67, an ordained minister who banged on a drum appreciatively as Peters spoke at a pre-convention rally in Denver.

Peters flew to the rally with MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, at whose election conspiracy seminar she spoke last year after the data breach in Mesa County election machines. That data soon appeared on election conspiracy websites and Lindell insists it proves massive, internationally run fraud that put President Joe Biden in office. He told reporters he's paid $800,000 to Peters' legal defense fund.

Peters' legal jeopardy extends beyond the charges of identity theft, attempting to influence a public official and criminal impersonation filed by the grand jury. She was also arrested after kicking at a police officer trying to serve a search warrant for her iPad, to see if Peters had illegally recorded a court hearing of a deputy accused of burglary and cybercrimes.

Peters' supporters are convinced she's a martyr for the cause. Even if they can't explain precisely what it is Peters claims to have uncovered, they're convinced something went wrong in 2020.

I think the reason everyone is attacking her is she's for election integrity, said Adrianna Cuva, 45, a volunteer for a Peters-affiliated candidate who has met Peters. I think the election was rigged. That's why we're seeing all these problems in our economy."

It's a stark contrast with the sentiment at the brewpub in the Denver suburb of Littleton, where the small group of Anderson supporters stressed the importance of competent, nonpartisan election administration.

That's what you want, someone who's played it straight, said Paul Schauer, a former Republican state legislator.

Anderson grew up in Southern California. Her father was a highway patrolman, part of a long line of law enforcement in a family that's instilled in Anderson a reverence for law enforcement. She was elected clerk of the suburban city of Wheat Ridge in 2003 and then of the suburban swing county around it the following year.

She's been witheringly critical of Trump's election lies since they began in 2020 and sits on the board of a nonprofit that distributed $350 million in donations from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife to help fund the 2020 elections, an act that fueled conservative suspicions.

We need to restore sanity, Anderson said in an interview.

But she also got into the race because of frustration with the Democratic secretary of state, Jena Griswold, who she contends has politicized the office for Democrats.

And Anderson has been frustrated at how Griswold and other Democrats attack Republicans as a party for election misinformation. She cites some Republicans who have stood up for truth and nonpartisanship in election administration. One is Stephen Richer, the clerk in Arizonas Maricopa County, who pushed back strongly against a conspiratorial, Trump-supported pseudo-audit of the election.

There are Republicans across the country fighting the good fight on elections, Anderson said.

This story has been corrected to show the spelling of the Mesa commissioners surname is McInnis, not McGinnis.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
MANILA, Philippines (AP)  U.S. President Joe Biden called Ferdinand Marcos Jr. on Thursday to congratulate him over his apparent landslide victory in the Philippine presidential election, Manilas ambassador to Washington said.

Biden is among the first world leaders to recognize the electoral triumph of Marcos Jr., the namesake son of the ousted dictator whose candidacy alarmed human rights activists and pro-democracy groups.

President Biden told him Washington is looking forward to working with him and cited the shared history of the longtime treaty allies, Philippine Ambassador Jose Manuel Romualdez told The Associated Press, adding the two spoke for more than 10 minutes.

Marcos Jr. had more than 31 million votes in the unofficial count from Mondays elections in whats projected to be one of the strongest mandates for a Philippine president in decades. His vice presidential running mate, Sara Duterte, appeared to have also won by a landslide.

Marcos Jr. cited the long robust relations between Manila and Washington and said his administration would work to continue building on that. He invited Biden to attend his inauguration on June 30 but the U.S. leader said he was dealing with urgent concerns that may prompt him to stay in the U.S. but would send a high-level American delegation, Romualdez said by telephone.

Marcos Jr.s declared victory Wednesday, saying his electoral triumph is a boost to democracy and promised to seek common ground across the political divide, his spokesman, Vic Rodriguez, said.

To the world: Judge me not by my ancestors, but by my actions, Rodriguez quoted Marcos Jr. as saying.

The election outcome was an astonishing reversal of the army-backed but largely peaceful People Power uprising that ousted Marcoss father in 1986  a democratic triumph in Southeast Asia where authoritarian regimes flourish.

Marcos Jr., 64, campaigned on a vague national unity theme while avoiding volatile issues in an effort hard-line leftist groups and survivors of the elder Marcos's dictatorship likened to whitewashing of his father's crimes. On Tuesday, he appeared overcome with emotions while visiting his fathers grave  which was moved to the national heroes cemetery under current President Rodrigo Duterte.

Several of Marcos Jr.s key election rivals have conceded defeat, though the closest challenger, Vice President Leni Robredo, a human rights lawyer who ran on a promise of badly needed reforms, has only acknowledged his massive lead. The U.S. State Department said the elections and subsequent vote count followed international standards without any major incident.

The tabulated results still must be confirmed by Congress. Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte would then start their single, six-year term leading a Southeast Asian nation battered by the COVID-19 pandemic, wealth inequality, Muslim and communist insurgencies, and political divisions, which were only inflamed by the turbulent presidencies of their fathers.

Earlier, China congratulated the leading candidates and the Philippines for the smooth conduct of the elections and said it would work with Manila to stay committed to good neighborliness and friendship for the benefit of both nations' people.

Marcos Jr. has said he wants to pursue closer ties with China, though Beijing during the outgoing Duterte's presidency showed no willingness to compromise on their conflicting territorial claims in the South China Sea and military, fishing and other operations in those waters.

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ST. LOUIS  The region is in an outdoor retail renaissance.

Over the past year, three local shops have opened within 8 miles of one another, stocking camping gear, climbing holds and canoes for adventurous St. Louisans. A new chain outlet has arrived. And now two existing franchises are adding second locations.

The St. Louis area is coming into its own as a hub for outdoor recreation, said Brad Kovach, editor of St. Louis-based Terrain Magazine. And theres still room to grow.

Competition will breed more interest, Kovach said. Instead of splitting a pie into smaller pieces, theyre going to make a bigger pie.

The rush of openings reflects a local industry scrambling to catch up with surging interest and increased opportunities. Over the past few years, trails have been extended and bike parks built. Niche activities have gone mainstream. At the same time, the pandemic began to push cabin-fevered homebodies off their couches and into kayaks, hiking boots or snowboards.

And retailers figured that enthusiasts  both folks picking up hobbies for the first time and those revisiting lapsed ones  needed equipment. In November, Arkansas-based Gearhead Outfitters landed in Plaza Frontenac. REI is arriving in Town and Country by summer, and Sunset Hills will be home to a Bass Pro Shop before the end of the year.

But the trio of independent operations, which welcomed customers within weeks of each other in October, have claimed space here even among the major players. They are banking on experienced staff, curated shelves and an approachable atmosphere to give them a toehold in the burgeoning market.

Outdoor space can be off-putting and standoffish, said Ian VanDam, the owner of Field Theory on Big Bend Boulevard in Webster Groves. We really keep it accessible.

He had already developed a customer base through the lifestyle store he co-owns with his mother, Civil Alchemy. When a place became available across the street, VanDam decided to expand  with a purpose.

Field Theory lets him indulge his penchant for no-fuss utilitarian gear thats also a little bit funkier. The shop sells everything from geodesic tents and organic toothpaste to Ansel Adams photography books. VanDams Bernese mountain dog, Rafa, serves as the official greeter.

Anna Sweeley of St. Louis County brought her 3-year-old son, Alfie, to Field Theory on a recent Thursday. After making Rafas acquaintance, they checked out rucksacks and ballcaps.

Sweeley acquired a taste for hard-core hiking while living in Colorado but thinks Missouri has more to offer than many natives realize.

We do a lot of Castlewood. Its in our backyard, said Sweeley, who has two other boys. We just have to be outdoors.

Missouris 92 state parks saw record attendance last year. Castlewood, in Ballwin, is known for its mountain-bike-friendly trails.

Elephant Rocks, in Iron County, offers nearby bouldering opportunities, said Hannah Chancellor, marketing director of rock climbing company So iLL.

Chancellors husband, Dan, and his brother, Dave, started the company in 2006 out of their barn in southern Illinois and a few years later designed their first of two climbing gyms.

Since then, the sports profile has been elevated: In 2020, climbing made its debut at the Tokyo Olympics. More climbing gyms were built in the United States in 2021 than in any previous year, according to Climbing Business Journal, an industry publication.

For months, So iLLs 13 employees worked to convert their office space on Marconi Avenue on the Hill into a climbing showroom, a little So iLL museum, Chancellor said, with harnesses and carabiners, chalk bags and crash pads. A spectrum of climbing holds bubbles out from the white pegboard walls.

When you are doing something like climbing, its important to be able to touch it and feel it and ask somebody a couple questions, she said.

Shoe-fitting is almost a workout in itself. It can take up to an hour to experiment with the toe-curling footwear, checking for tension, stiffness and grip.

Its kind of a process, said Chancellor. We can guide people.

Being able to try gear out and talk through options eases what can be a daunting experience for customers who are new to a sport.

Joe Diekemper of St. Louis had wanted his own canoe ever since he dipped his toes in the water on an excursion with Big Muddy Adventures. When he got an unexpected bonus at work this winter, he decided it was time to buy.

Diekemper examined the streamlined selection at Big Muddys Guide Shop on Washington Boulevard in the Central West End and spotted a canary yellow 16-footer. He ran his hand from bow to stern, gripped the hull and determined he could lift it atop his car by himself, a nonnegotiable attribute.

He took it home that day.

Its incredibly light, said Diekemper. It handles beautifully.

Big Muddy has hosted river expeditions, like full-moon floats and overnight campouts, since 2016. But the converted auto-repair shop, with a bar inside and a firepit out back, allows the company to connect with its customers on dry land.

Weve always wanted to have some sort of outpost, said owner Roo Yawitz. Were trying to be an urban center for an outdoor lifestyle.

Customers can book trips at the store, as well as shop for life jackets, cast-iron cookware or books on birding. Big Muddy carries a line of locally made graphic T-shirts, Ope Outdoors, that celebrate day-trip destinations like Johnsons Shut-Ins and Hawn State Park.

Were not selling skis, said Yawitz. Were very Midwest-focused. People are doing really cool stuff here.

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ST. LOUIS  Missouri health officials say they are investigating about 10 cases of a mysterious form of hepatitis that has sickened hundreds of healthy, young children across the U.S., the United Kingdom and several other countries.

Officials with the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services are working with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the investigation and will not yet say where the cases were reported in Missouri or how severe they were, said Lisa Cox, DHSS spokeswoman.

We are in the process of collecting information, so what we do have is very limited, preliminary and likely to change, Cox said.

The CDC began to zero in on the cases last month and on Friday said it was investigating a total 109 cases of hepatitis  inflammation of the liver  in children in 24 states and Puerto Rico where the hepatitis is of unknown cause.

The cases have been reported in the past seven months, and the children are under the age of 10 and otherwise healthy.

While most of the children have fully recovered, more than 90% were hospitalized, five have died and 14% required liver transplants, federal officials said.

What has experts stumped is the cause. The most common causes of viral hepatitis are hepatitis A, hepatitis B and hepatitis C viruses. But in these cases, those causes were ruled out.

In more than half of the cases, the children were found to be infected with a common adenovirus type 41, which typically causes diarrhea, vomiting and fever. Adenoviruses spread through contact with respiratory secretions when someone coughs or sneezes.

While its not unusual for the cause of hepatitis cases to be unknown, it is unusual for adenovirus to cause hepatitis in healthy children, experts say. And its unusual for healthy children to suffer with severe outcomes such as a transplant or death.

Given the small number of children who have died or needed transplants, federal and local officials are not saying where those cases occurred.

Washington University pediatric gastroenterologist Dr. Janis Stoll, who cares for patients at St. Louis Childrens Hospital, said hospital staff have seen an unusual uptick of acute hepatitis in children over the past few months where the cause was either adenovirus or unknown.

There seemed to be more coming to us an outpatient or even coming into the hospital, Stoll said.

The severity of the cases also caught doctors attention.

If you are not immunocompromised  usually adenovirus is a run-of-the-mill virus that we see in kids frequently that may, in some cases cause liver enzyme elevation, but not to this degree in normal healthy kids, Stoll said.

Stoll said parents can be on the lookout for signs of liver inflammation which include belly pain, vomiting and jaundice (yellowing of the skin and eyes). To prevent spread, wash hands frequently, stay home if sick and cover coughs and sneezes.

Officials with the World Health Organization in a press briefing on Tuesday said 348 potential hepatitis cases of unknown cause in children have been reported in 20 counties around the globe.

The United Kingdom is investigating 163 cases, 11 of which required liver transplants. The U.K. says of the cases that were tested, 91 had adenovirus infections.

Experts say they are casting a wide net in trying to determine the cause. They are looking at environmental factors such as an infection from a family pet or some other interaction makes adenovirus or the bodys immune response more dangerous to kids.

Despite speculation, experts say the COVID-19 vaccines are not responsible for the illnesses. Most of the cases involve children under the age of 5 who are not yet even eligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.

COVID-19 vaccination is not the cause of these illnesses, and we hope that this information helps clarify some of the speculation circulating online, said Dr. Jay Butler, the CDCs deputy director for infectious diseases, during Fridays briefing.

Most of the children have not had a known COVID-19 infection, but experts say they are not ruling out the possibility that the coronavirus played a role in the illnesses.

CDC officials say they first became aware of the cases in November, when a large childrens hospital in Alabama reported seeing five pediatric patients with significant liver damage and who all tested positive for adenovirus. None had ever reported having COVID-19.

Hospital officials continued to study cases and found four more pediatric patients with hepatitis and adenovirus infections admitted between October of last year and this February, for a total of nine patients.

The children ranged in age from 1 to 6. None of the children had significant underlying medical conditions. They came from different parts of the state, and no known contact or common exposure were found among the children.

In early April, the United Kingdom began reporting similar cases, which prompted the CDC on April 21 to issue a health advisory to health providers across the country notifying them of the cases.

The advisory asked providers to report to the CDC any serious cases of hepatitis in children under the age of 10 seen since Oct. 1 where the cause is unknown. The alert has since led to identification of more cases to investigate.

Stoll said its important for the CDC to study commonalities among the cases, and she does not want to be alarmist.

Most kids do fine with these typical viruses and recover without needing any sort of a significant medical intervention, she said. We are keeping our eye on all these things that are going on so that we can make the best clinical judgment for these patients and help the best we can.

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ST. LOUIS  Agencies caring for some of the most vulnerable families in the St. Louis area say they are struggling to help desperate moms find food for their babies amid a national formula shortage and educate families about dangerous shortcuts such as homemade recipes or diluting products.

Melinda Monroe, executive director of Nurses for Newborns, said the home visitation agency has seen a large uptick in calls for help over the past couple weeks. And many are dire.

Its rough. Moms are saying, Im out of formula, I dont have any to give my baby tonight, Monroe said. We dont typically see this.

The nonprofit agency mainly depends on donations of formula for the approximately 650 families they serve, Monroe said. Their shelves, however, are bare.

We have three cans where would normally l have several hundred at this point in time, she said.

Months of spot shortages at stores have been exacerbated by a massive safety recall by Abbott Nutrition that swept many leading brands off store shelves. Abbott was forced to shutter its largest U.S. formula manufacturing plant in February due to contamination concerns, and the facility is still not operating.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is working with U.S. manufacturers to increase their output and is streamlining paperwork to allow more imports. President Joe Biden also met Thursday with baby formula manufacturers to see how his administration can help. And stores are limiting the amounts parents can buy to prevent hoarding.

Meanwhile, moms like Taneasha Condra, 33, of Florissant, are spending hours going from store to store. On Thursday, she had no formula left for her 9-month-old twins. She had no luck during her search in the morning, and was heading back in the afternoon to try and catch shipments hitting shelves.

Its so hard. Its upsetting. Its past frustrating, Condra said. Shes also very fearful to buy the Similac brand as a substitute because certain lots of Similac were involved in the recall.

Shyneia Graham, 32, of Manchester, is driving store-to-store with her 3-month-old in tow in search of a specialty formula for premature babies. Her baby was born seven weeks early. She also has family and friends on the lookout.

Its scary, said Graham, who recently had to drive to four different stores and ended up more than 12 miles away in Brentwood. I havent really thought about what would happen if I cant find her formula. I just hope that every month I continue to find it no matter how far I have to drive.

Like a mama bear

Dr. Heather Joyce, a Mercy Kids pediatrician with an office in OFallon, Missouri, said worried calls from her patients have ramped up over the past two weeks and continue to increase. On Thursday, her office was getting about three calls every 20 minutes.

They need help finding an appropriate substitute for their usual formula, or they are seeking free samples. They are complaining about their babies spitting up, having gas or crying from switching brands or types such as powders or liquid concentrates.

Joyce also hears from patients driving hours to find formula, buying from questionable sources online and having out-of-town family members ship any amounts they may find.

In most cases, nurses can help parents come up with alternatives that are easier to find, but the recall has scared a lot of patients toward other brands.

Theres just a lot of mistrust and fear, Joyce said. I hope that most of our families can put trust in our opinion.

Agencies working with families struggling with poverty say they are especially hard-hit by the shortage.

Many moms depend on the state-administered Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children to purchase their formula. The program, known as WIC, supports low-income pregnant women, new moms and children younger than 5.

Missouri had contracted with Abbott for its WIC program, said Kristen Gore, director of the WIC program at Affinia Healthcare clinics in St. Louis and St. Louis County. The recall wiped out nearly 85% of what was on shelves, making it harder to replenish supplies.

The WIC program has since allowed a long list of other types and brands, but not all stores accept WIC vouchers, so families choices are limited. Walgreens, CVS and Target stores do not accept the vouchers in Missouri.

Gore said families are instead using their own funds to buy whatever they can find, even driving to Illinois where Missouri vouchers arent accepted.

Formula containers can cost anywhere from $25 to $40 each and last from a few days to a week. High gas prices are also hitting pocketbooks.

One person told me they drove to Columbia, Missouri, to get formula, Gore said, so besides them having a hard time finding formula and maybe even having to pay out-of-pocket, they are having to drive far distances, which is also costing them money as well.

Gore said staff across Affinias clinics are calling stores for clients and trying to help direct them to spots with what they need in stock, especially for those who dont have transportation and cant try multiple places or Internet access to connect to support through social media.

Some moms even want to learn how to begin breastfeeding again, which is possible, but the process takes time and is not an immediate fix, Gore said.

For the most part, parents are scared and angry, she said, and WIC staff is experiencing a lot of backlash even though there is nothing they can do.

Its understandable. They are like a mama bear, Gore said. They are upset and dont have anything to feed their babies.

Risk of child abuse

Molly Brown is the senior clinical director for St. Louis Crisis Nursery, which operates five nurseries that serve as short-term safe havens for 5,000 children a year whose families in crisis because of illness, homelessness, domestic violence or overwhelming stress.

On Thursday, six infants were in the agencys care, Brown said. The nurseries not only must have numerous types of formula on hand for whoever arrives at their door, they also distribute formula to anyone who asks through its nurseries or 10 outreach centers in St. Louis and Jefferson, St. Charles and St. Louis counties.

The agencys goal is to prevent child abuse and neglect.

Not being able to provide for your family increases stress levels dramatically, Brown said, And we know that when stress levels increase, the risk for child abuse also increases.

Brown said the agency is extremely fortunate. Immediately after the formula recall, leaders decided to host an online formula donation drive through Amazon.com. Purchases poured in, even some from out of state.

Brown said they are luckily able to help those in need. Families can call 314-768-3201 to arrange a pickup. St. Charles families can call 636-947-0600.

The agency has seen an increase in calls over the past two weeks, she said. While we know we have enough right now for babies in our care and to support families that are calling, we do worry as the crisis continues, how long our supplies will last.

Gore and Monroe at Nurses for Newborns said their nursing staffs are busy reminding families to not try to stretch the amount of formula they have by adding water to it, which can be toxic for babies and fail to provide what they need to grow and develop.

Babies should also not be given cows milk before they turn 1. And despite the recipes that may be circulating online, do not give homemade concoctions to babies.

So, what is the magic answer right now? Monroe said. There isnt any except that families need to educate themselves ASAP on what the equivalents are on the formulas that they use.

She urged families to call their pediatrician or community clinic to discuss their options. Some older babies may be able to transition to cows milk or toddler formulas. Ask neighbors if they have samples. Ask friends to keep an eye out when they shop.

The issues here is how long is this going to last, Monroe said. These tips and tricks are very short term, and what we are hearing is that manufacturing is ramping up as much as they can, but there are thousands of babies born every day.

They are used to helping families plan ahead, she said, and that planning-ahead piece is falling apart.

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The call came into the Metro East abortion clinic on a recent weekday: A young woman from Missouri was on the line, frantic because she no longer had the money to pay for her $470 procedure, which was scheduled for the next day.

The caller panicked because she assumed shed have to cancel and reschedule later, whenever she could come up with the money. The prospect of delaying such a time-sensitive procedure was terrifying.

But a calm voice on the line asked a few questions about the patient and how much she could afford at that moment.

The woman said she had just started a new job and would be getting her first check soon but was in the middle of a pay period. She also mentioned that she has a child and an unexpected bill came up, swallowing the money she had set aside to pay to terminate the pregnancy.

I dont want you to commit something you dont have, said the woman who took the call, Kawanna Shannon, director of patient access at the new Regional Logistics Center, which is housed in the Planned Parenthood Health Center in Fairview Heights.

Shannon spent a few minutes successfully searching various abortion funds to help cover the cost of the procedure. Then she went over a few instructions for the callers appointment, which would continue as scheduled the next day.

Thank you, maam, the patient repeated several times, her panicked tone melting into relief.

Calls of this sort from women throughout the Midwest and South were pouring into the clinic all day  and theyre expected to become even more abundant soon.

With the U.S. Supreme Court poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, Illinois is preparing for a massive rise in out-of-state patients traveling here to terminate a pregnancy. If Roe were to crumble, providers have predicted an additional 14,000 patients each year will cross state lines to terminate pregnancies in southern Illinois.

Facing this imminent influx, the two abortion providers in the region partnered to open the Regional Logistics Center in January. The center is operated jointly by Reproductive Health Services of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Hope Clinic for Women, an abortion clinic in Granite City.

Dedicated case managers there assist traveling patients with overcoming various common barriers to abortion access: finding lodging, booking transportation and securing child care, as well as navigating various funding sources to help pay for abortions.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker visited the Planned Parenthood in Fairview Heights on Wednesday to champion reproductive rights, calling the agencys work lifesaving and life-changing. He noted that more than 75% of the clinics patients already come from other states.

Lets be crystal clear about one point: Abortion is health care, he said. By the time many of these out-of-state patients make it to Fairview Heights, Illinois, they have traveled further than anyone should have to, physically and emotionally. People should not have to endure trauma after trauma to be in control of their own bodies. But thats exactly the burden this right-wing Supreme Court and anti-choice governors and state legislators increasingly put on the backs of millions of women.

For almost half a century, the landmark Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade has affirmed the right to terminate a pregnancy nationwide. But a stunning draft opinion leaked earlier this month indicated that a majority of justices intend to strike down the 1973 decision, leaving the matter of abortion rights to individual states.

The official ruling in the case, Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, is expected to come over the summer.

In the absence of Roe, experts anticipate roughly half of all states would prohibit abortion, including Missouri and almost all of the Midwest. And states with strong reproductive rights protections like Illinois are preparing to take on the burden of patients from all the states where abortion would be outlawed.

Brian Westbrook, executive director of the organization Coalition Life, which is based in St. Louis, said he and other abortion opponents have been confident for a while that Roe v. Wade would eventually fall.

Its not a matter of if it will be overturned, he said. Its a matter of when. The pro-life movement will only do more as a result. This is not necessarily a victory  its a shifting of work from the federal level down to the state level.

Not going back

The after-hours phone line rang at around 3 a.m. on a winter morning, just a few weeks after the Regional Logistics Center was established.

The caller was a woman from Louisiana who was desperate to book a ride to the airport that instant, to get to her appointment the next day, said Shannon, who took the call.

I didnt tell people this, but Im in a very abusive relationship and he just left, Shannon recalled the woman saying. I dont know if hes gone for a minute or what, but I just want to leave right now.

The Louisiana woman said her partner did not know she was pregnant. Shannon recalled scrambling to book the Uber in the middle of the night and then staying on the phone with the caller until the ride came, fearful her partner would return before the Ubers arrival.

Im literally packing now, Shannon remembered the woman saying.

The woman from Louisiana flew in and had a surgical abortion. Afterward, Shannon asked the patient if she needed a return ride to the airport.

No, she recalled the patient saying. Im not going back.

Where are you going? Shannon said she replied, surprised. What are you doing?

She said the patient told her she wanted to leave her partner and start a new life. Shannon contacted as many services and nonprofits as she could find and passed on the pamphlets and phone numbers. Before leaving, the woman from Louisiana said she was going to a shelter, Shannon recalled.

She was like, Ms. Kawanna, Im good. Im going to be fine, Shannon said. That sticks with me. Sometimes I wish shed call, so I know shes good. I really wholeheartedly believe shes never going back

In 2020, nearly 10,000 patients crossed state lines to have an abortion in Illinois, according to the latest data from the Illinois Department of Public Health. The number has increased every year since 2014.

The rise in out-of-state abortions comes as many nearby states increasingly restrict the procedure by legislating gestational limits, mandating waiting periods before having an abortion and implementing stringent regulations on clinics and providers.

Illinois, on the other hand, has eliminated every major restriction on the procedure. In 2019, Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed the Reproductive Health Act, which declared terminating a pregnancy a fundamental right in Illinois.

Planned Parenthood in late 2019 opened the 18,000-square-foot Fairview Heights site where the Regional Logistics Center operates; the location on the cusp of Missouri was chosen strategically to serve patients traveling from that neighboring state and beyond.

The facility includes a family room designed for children, equipped with beanbag chairs, books and toys, as well as extra diapers and wipes. So many patients had child care constraints and were bringing their kids into the regular waiting room, so staff decided to set aside a more comfortable space for families, said Bonyen Lee-Gilmore, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region.

One patient from Missouri recently couldnt find anyone to watch her three children, so Shannon said she took the kids to the family room and, for about two and a half hours, she watched the baby, toddler and 6-year-old during the procedure.

The oldest, a little boy, watched TikTok videos on a laptop and performed some of the dances featured in them.

I even did a couple with him  at least, I was trying to, Shannon said, laughing a little.

She added that sometimes patients stay with their children in the family room and receive services and information sessions there, until its time to go into a procedure room.

The room is not a day care, she stressed.

But if you happen to come with your child, you have a safe place to go with your child, she said.

Obstacle course

One day in February, an 18-wheeler semitruck pulled into the Planned Parenthood parking lot, quite conspicuous alongside all the regular cars and SUVs that typically park there, Gilmore said.

A patient, who drove the truck for a living, traveled more than a thousand miles from Arizona to southern Illinois to pick up abortion pills, an appointment that typically takes about 90 minutes, according to staff.

While medication abortion has been available in the United States since 2000, 19 states have restrictions mandating the provider be present when the pill is taken, barring access via telemedicine; 32 states have laws requiring physicians administer the medication, as opposed to other types of clinicians like advanced practice nurses and physician assistants, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.

Illinois has none of these restrictions.

We get a lot of people who will drive hundreds of miles for a medication abortion, Gilmore said. This scheme that politicians have set up is literally a game they put people on. It is an obstacle course.

Westbrook, of Coalition Life, called the Regional Logistics Center a media ploy.

Quite frankly, its nothing more or less than what theyve always done, which is provide abortions and take the life of unborn children, he said.

Missouri is one of about a dozen states with a so-called trigger law that would ban abortion in all or most cases if Roe were to be overturned.

The state has one remaining abortion clinic, a Planned Parenthood in St. Louis, largely due to stringent regulations on clinics and providers. In contrast, Westbrook said there are 75 anti-abortion pregnancy resource centers statewide.

With all of that help and assistance for pregnant women, they dont feel like they have to get an abortion, he said.

Crunchtime

Last month, one young woman traveled about 800 miles round trip from rural Mississippi to southern Illinois.

The hardest part of coordinating her trip was scrambling to find a ride from her home to the closest Greyhound station, about 45 minutes away in Memphis, said Kenicia Page, Regional Logistics Center manager.

It was just very difficult trying to find transportation in the area, she said, noting that theres often a dearth of taxis, Ubers and public transit in rural communities. It was really crunchtime. I think it was 24 to 48 hours to her appointment.

Eventually, the patient found a ride through a nonprofit organization that offers transportation for those in need in the Mississippi Delta region.

The young woman was in her second trimester and had a two-day surgical procedure. The patient was unemployed and needed food and sanitary items during her travels, Page recalled. So the Regional Logistics Center sent her an electronic gift card and booked her an Uber to take to a Dollar General store, so she could pick up a few items before heading back to her hotel.

It was just making her feel comfortable while she was here and keeping her uplifted, because she was just so discouraged from having to go through all the hoops, Page said. But she was able to get everything done and then return home safely afterward.

The Regional Logistics Center has seen an increase in callers each month, from serving 183 patients in January to 329 patients in April, Shannon said.

In May, it will be more, she said. Its constant. People, they need the help.

Each Regional Logistics Center case costs on average $900 to $1,500, depending on how many services the patient requires, Gilmore said. With reproductive rights in jeopardy, shes concerned about how the center will handle the rising need and make sure funding lasts long term.

The thing that I worry about is when the headlines die down, she said. When theres breaking news like this we see an outpouring of support. And we have seen that outpouring. But I worry about what happens six months after, a year later.  Is it sustainable over time?

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ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP)  Gov. Larry Hogan signed measures to strengthen cybersecurity in state and local governments in Maryland on Thursday, after lawmakers approved legislation and big investments earlier this year to protect vital systems against cyberattacks.

One of the measures aims to help local governments, school systems and health departments work with more resources and assistance from the Maryland Emergency Management Agency to improve cybersecurity. The agency will support local governments in developing vulnerability assessments and response plans.

Today we are signing into law bipartisan legislation to continue solidifying our standing as the cyber capital of America, and further strengthen our infrastructure to protect Marylanders against cyberattacks, the Republican governor said in reference to the number of cybersecurity companies in the state, as well as cyber-related federal agencies and military installations.

In a year with a huge budget surplus, Maryland lawmakers approved roughly $570 million for cybersecurity and information technology upgrades in the legislative session that ended last month. That includes about $200 million for cybersecurity and nearly $334 million for information technology development projects.

State Sen. Katie Fry Hester, a Democrat who was the lead Senate sponsor of cybersecurity legislation, said its vital to protect the states basic public infrastructure.

Now, everything is electronic: our drinking water, our transportation, our public safety, our education, our financial systems  this is the governments responsibility to maintain, she said. We have to make sure that our Marylanders day-to-day routines are not disrupted, and I think these three bills in combination with the $570 million in the 2023 budget will get us a long ways toward achieving those goals.

Hogan also signed a bill to create reporting requirements for state agencies and local governments, including reporting of cybersecurity incidents. Agencies will be required to complete a cybersecurity assessment and to remediate findings. Local government entities will have to consult with the local emergency manager to create or update a cybersecurity preparedness and response plan.

Another measure expands cybersecurity requirements for state agencies and water and sewer systems. It requires public or private water or sewer systems that serve 10,000 or more users and receive financial assistance from the state to assess their vulnerability to a cyber attack.

Last year, a hacker gained entry to the system controlling the water treatment plant of a Florida city of 15,000 and tried to taint the water supply with a caustic chemical. Cybersecurity experts said the incident exposed a danger that has grown as systems become both more computerized and accessible via the internet.

A provision in the bill also requires that at least 20% of the amount spent on information technology in fiscal year 2023 to be spent in the following fiscal year.

State and local governments are ripe targets for hackers, even as President Joe Bidens administration has announced additional steps to safeguard federal government systems from hacking. Cities also have come under cyberattack.

Baltimore County was one of about 50 school systems across the nation attacked with ransomware in 2020, costing the county millions of dollars. In December, Marylands health department was hit by a ransomware attack that impeded information about health metrics relating to COVID-19.

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Tony Messenger Tony Messenger is the metro columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Follow Tony Messenger 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

St. Charles Mayor Dan Borgmeyer had a bone to pick.

Marshall is just muddying the waters, he told me.

Borgmeyer was responding to my recent column about the attempts to find a new home for the Steamboat Arabia, which has outgrown its resting place in a Kansas City museum, in part because the man who created it, David Hawley, wants to add the buried Steamboat Malta to his collection, once he finds the money to unearth that buried bit of 19th century Missouri history.

The column Borgmeyer called me about was focused on former Missourinet reporter Bob Priddys proposal to get the states casinos to help cover the cost of expanding the museum and keeping it in Missouri. The casino folks, and the port-city mayors like Borgmeyer who benefit from their taxes, didnt take kindly to Priddys suggestion that the casino industry had long gotten away with broken promises to better fund public education in the state. They sent him packing at a meeting a few years back when Priddy pitched the idea.

But Borgmeyer and Priddy agreed on something: The Arabia  and the Malta  are worth saving for future generations to connect to the Missouri River and its rich history.

For a while, there were several cities interested in attracting the steamboat museum, with or without the help of the casinos. Branson, Jefferson City, St. Charles and Marshall all expressed an interest. The folks in and around Marshall, along Interstate 70 in the middle of Missouri, have a website suggesting their city will be the new home of the National Steamboat Museum.

Borgmeyer begs to differ. For the past few weeks, the city has been in negotiation with Hawley to sign a letter of intent to locate the future museum in St. Charles, if the various partners can find the funding. If the Is are dotted and the Ts crossed, Borgmeyer will have a leg up on the competition, with a six-month exclusive head start to line up financing.

We feel like we really have a lot of connections, to the story of the Arabia, Borgmeyer says.

Indeed, after the ship was built in Pennsylvania and took its initial trips on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, Capt. John Shaw of St. Charles bought it for $20,000 and brought the steamboat to the Missouri River, moving goods between St. Louis and St. Joseph. Shaw was the son-in-law of the citys first mayor, Col. Ludwell Powell.

Shaws historic home still stands in St. Charles, and hes buried in a cemetery in the city. Borgmeyers hope is to locate the museum on land adjacent to the existing Lewis and Clark Boat House and Museum, which sits near where the old Goldenrod Showboat used to be moored.

That river cruiser had its own interesting history. The Goldenrod was built in 1909 and spent nearly 100 years entertaining diners and revelers on multiple rivers in the Midwest. St. Charles bought it in 1990, and it lasted there a decade, but after years of ending up in various states of disrepair, some of it caused by floods and passing driftwood, the showboat shut down in 2001. It was destroyed in a fire in 2017.

The river giveth, and the river taketh away.

Thats the story for both the Arabia and the Malta. Those steamboats sunk in the Missouri River in the 1800s, back before the river was constrained by dams and dikes, when flooding would cause it to move now and then, leaving port cities separated from the flowing water by newly created rich bottomland. Buried in the mud, the ships and their cargo were preserved, to the point where if they are properly excavated, visitors from more than a century later can see what life was like in the days where steamships ruled the river.

On Monday, St. Charles economic development director Mike Klinghammer showed me the land where the city hopes the future National Steamboat Museum will reside. Its about 15 acres of wooded property between the cross-state Katy Trail and the Missouri River. Theres already a parking lot, a remnant of past river development dreams. Some of the land will have to be raised out of the flood plain, the constant trade-off when it comes to trying to turn the riverfront into an economic development nirvana.

St. Charles was really the jump-off point for a lot of people who were traveling west, Klinghammer says. He hopes that bit of history will turn into an opportunity for the city to bring hundreds of thousands of tourists to town every year and keep a bit of Missouri history alive for the next generation.

Until the money is lined up and the contracts signed, it is but a dream. But its one worth holding onto, if only the Big Muddy doesnt get in the way.

From City Hall to the Capitol, metro columnist Tony Messenger shines light on what public officials are doing, tells stories of the disaffected, and brings voice to the issues that matter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy.
CLAYTON  St. Louis County prosecutors on Thursday dropped murder charges against two St. Louis men in a deadly 2020 home invasion in University City.

Jimmy Johnson Jr. and Ramon Rockett's cases were set for trial May 23 on charges that they broke into a home two years ago this month in the 6800 block of Corbitt Avenue and fatally shot Joshua Laster, 31, of St. John and his girlfriend, Veronda Hollins, 34, of St. Louis.

Laster was shot three times and Hollins once, charges said.

"We lost confidence in the credibility of an essential witness, so no longer have the evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt," Chris King, a spokesman for St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell, said in a text message.

A dismissal memo filed Thursday in the cases said "continued investigation has revealed a lack of credible evidence."

Johnson, 30, and Rockett, 27, had been charged with multiple counts including first-degree murder, first-degree robbery, kidnapping, armed criminal action and unlawful use of a weapon.

Johnson's lawyer, Scott Rosenblum, said he was grateful to Bell's office for taking "a hard review of the evidence."

He said, "This was a case that should not go forward on the evidence, which is the right decision. I 100% believe that these gentlemen were completely innocent."

Rockett's lawyer Robert Taaffe said the decision to dismiss the case should have come sooner because he believes it was a weak case.

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ST. LOUIS  Representatives of a real estate development company said Wednesday they were shocked to find out that an inspection firm contracted by the federal government gave a troubled northwest St. Louis apartment complex a 93/100 rating.

Its surprising to me that they would get that score, Justin Unger, development manager for Denver-based Steele Properties, told the Post-Dispatch in the parking lot at Hillvale Apartments, adding that everything, basically, needs to be fixed.

Steele is in the process of buying the 146-unit complex at 5830 Selber Court from New Jersey-based Treetop Companies.

The $34 million deal, which is supposed to close in September, is on track to include millions of dollars in incentives, including $15.7 million in low-income housing tax credits, a tax-exempt bond up to $15.5 million and other assistance. The citys Industrial Development Authority cancelled a Thursday meeting expected to consider final approval of the bond.

Unger said Wednesday he is seeking additional incentives from tax abatements.

A recent in-depth report in the Post-Dispatch showed that Hillvale, built in 1967, has been covered by a Project Based Section 8 Housing Assistance Payments Contract that guaranteed millions of dollars in rent to owners for years. Yet reporting revealed deplorable living conditions and the inspection report from an unnamed firm contracted through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that gave Hillvale a 93/100 rating, or essentially an A. If broader challenges arent addressed in the neighborhood near Natural Bridge and Goodfellow, some questioned the long-term sustainability of the redevelopment.

Lisa Trujillo, vice president of the Monroe Group, the firm expected to manage Hillvale under new ownership, and others, said on site Wednesday that she was surprised the inspection didnt fail or come close to failing. Still, she said, Monroe Group has improved places like Hillvale in other parts of the country.

Our success is because of the partnerships that we engage in with cities and all their resources, Trujillo said. We have to build trust together. Lets do it. Lets turn it around.

Unger said Monroe Group is affiliated with Steele Properties. He said they work together with the management firm at multiple properties because we dont like giving up that control.

He said there would be maintenance workers on site of the redevelopment and that, in addition to state and federal inspections, a regional maintenance team would inspect Hillvale quarterly. According to records submitted to the city, Steele has completed more than $1 billion in acquisitions, sales and developments in 24 states, including more than 65 tax-credit projects.

Asked what the city could do to help at Hillvale, Unger said: The biggest thing is taking care of the trash.

Anna Richardson, the longtime on-site manager of Hillvale, said security is at the top of her list. As is, if management sees somebody in the parking lot wearing a ski mask and displaying a large firearm, they call police and leave for their own safety. She said she understands that police also have families to go home to.

Hopefully they come, she said.

Since 2019, there have been more than 1,400 emergency calls for service logged with police from the area. Treetop, the current owners, invested in a surveillance system, but they havent been providing security officers. Richardson said the complex recently received an offer to staff off-duty police officers there.

There are broader forces beyond the complex boundary that are obstacles for families to succeed in the area  regional disinvestment, struggling schools, shootings, sex trafficking and trash. A neighboring large lot recently had a mountain of alley debris and other detritus dumped there by the city, a source of concern for Hillvale residents fighting an infestation of mice.

Earlier this week, a spokesman for Mayor Tishaura O. Jones said the city-owned lot recently was cleared after Betherny Williams, director of Streets, Traffic & Refuse, read about the situation in the newspaper.

In prepared remarks, Williams said Wednesday that the lot is used for the temporary storage of green waste and debris collected on the weekends when the Waste Management transfer station on the north riverfront is not open. She said city refuse crews typically collect trash and debris left on that site on Mondays to deliver to Waste Management for sorting before taken to the landfill.

The long-term plan for this lot is to keep it clean and maintained for future uses, Williams said.

While the mountain has been cleared, the city continues to dump in the northwest corner of the lot, across from an hourly motel on Hamilton Avenue.

Tommy Howard, 27, was there Wednesday, climbing the pile, looking for things to salvage, he said, so he could eat and do what I want to do.

His friend Christina Dixon, 40, walked the nearby alley, catching the attention of passing motorists. She described a life of challenges, including getting pregnant at 13.

It all boils down to drugs, she said, and how all of us growed up with parents who was into drugs. Ive seen mothers prostitute just to get money for their kids. Pay a bill. All sorts of stuff. Ive done it.

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KANSAS CITY, Mo.  Police shootings increased in Missouri after the state loosened restrictions on carrying concealed firearms, researchers at Johns Hopkins University found in a new study.

Ten states including Missouri saw a 12.9% increase in police shootings from 2014 to 2020 after passing legislation allowing individuals to carry concealed firearms without a permit, according to the study from the universitys Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Researchers examined the impact of removing the permit requirement on police shootings by comparing the 10 states that changed their laws with 26 states that still required permits.

The trend of more states allowing civilians to carry concealed guns without a permit may be influencing the perceived threat of danger faced by law enforcement, said Mitchell Doucette, assistant scientist in the Bloomberg Schools Department of Health Policy and Management and the studys lead author.

This could contribute to higher rates of fatal and nonfatal officer-involved shootings.

Four of the 10 states in the study  Missouri, Idaho, Mississippi and West Virginia  had significantly higher average rates of police shootings after dropping permit-to-carry laws. Missouri, which did away with the permit requirement in 2016, had the highest number of additional victims at 12.7 every six months.

Meanwhile, the police shooting rate in the six other states did not significantly change, researchers found.

One limitation the authors acknowledged is that police shootings are undercounted in the U.S. because data on those incidents isnt systematically collected.

For this study, researchers used data from the Gun Violence Archive, a database that collects daily information on shootings from news reports, law enforcement and government agencies.

2022 The Kansas City Star. Visit kansascity.com.

The study is available here at the Journal of Urban Health website.
CHICAGO  A predominantly Black college in central Illinois named after Abraham Lincoln and founded the year the former president was assassinated will close this week, months after a cyberattack that compounded enrollment struggles due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Lincoln College, which saw record enrollment numbers in 2019, said in a news release that it scrambled to stay afloat with fundraising campaigns, a consolidation of employee positions, and exploring leasing alternatives.

Unfortunately, these efforts did not create long-term viability for Lincoln College in the face of the pandemic, the school, which opened in 1865 in Lincoln, about 170 miles southwest of Chicago, said in the release.

Then, as COVID cases fell and students returned to schools across the country, the college was victimized by a December cyberattack. It left all the systems needed to recruit students, retain them and raise money inoperable for three months.

Lincolns president, David Gerlach, told the Chicago Tribune that the school paid a ransom of less than $100,000 after an attack that he said originated in Iran. But when the systems were fully restored, the school that had just over 1,000 students during the 2018-19 academic year discovered significant enrollment shortfalls that would require a massive donation or partnership to stay open beyond the current semester.

A GoFundMe campaign called Save Lincoln College was launched with a goal of raising $20 million but as of this week, only $2,352 had been raised. And Gerlach told the Tribune that the school needed $50 million to remain open.

The loss of history, careers, and a community of students and alumni is immense, Gerlach said in a statement. The school did not immediately return a call Tuesday from The Associated Press.

The school also announced that the Higher Learning Commission had approved what are called Teach Out/Transfer Agreements with 21 colleges. The school held a college fair last month to give students a chance to learn where they might want to transfer.

Editors note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said Lincoln College was a historically Black college.
JEFFERSON CITY  Following a three-year legislative push, charter school advocates won a key victory Thursday as state lawmakers finally approved a measure to increase the schools funding.

The Republican-led House voted 116-29 to pass the bill, which calls for at least $62 million more for those schools per year.

The original version of the proposal, sponsored by Rep. Doug Richey, R-Excelsior Springs, would have diverted an estimated $18 million away from St. Louis Public Schools to fund public charter schools, according to a nonpartisan fiscal analysis, provoking outrage among public school proponents.

But the version approved Thursday, amended in the Senate in response to the pushback, designates more state aid for the charters. Under the changes, money would no longer be diverted from St. Louis Public Schools to fund the increase to charters.

What has been adjusted is that the state will pick up what is needed to finish out equitable funding for our public charter schools, Richey said.

We really have to make sure that we are doing whats best for all students in our state, and I commend you on this, said Rep. Maggie Nurrenbern, D-Kansas City. I really appreciate you listening to the concerns.

The long-running issues over funding are rooted in the way the two different types of schools receive support.

Charters receive most of their funding from the state, while St. Louis Public Schools receives most of its funding from local sources, said Matt Davis, member of the St. Louis Public Schools Board of Education.

But while local revenues to SLPS have increased over the years, state funding to charter schools has remained flat, he said.

The bill also specifies that only Missouri residents may serve on the boards of these charter schools and only nonprofit entities may operate the schools.

The measure contains a separate provision altering how students access virtual learning programs.

School administrators currently make the final call over whether a student is eligible for virtual learning. The measure transfers the decision on virtual schooling options to the childs parents.

The bill now moves to Gov. Mike Parson for his consideration.

The legislation is House Bill 1552.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Posted at 3 p.m. Thursday, May 12.

Grace Zokovitch gzokovitch@post-dispatch.com
JEFFERSON CITY  A southwest Missouri lawmaker facing federal fraud charges is taking her case to trial after rejecting plea offers from the government, her attorney told the Post-Dispatch.

Dr. (Patricia) Derges has repudiated four separate plea offers from the Government, attorney Al Watkins said in an email Tuesday. She fully intends to defend herself at trial in June.

Derges appeared in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri in Springfield on Wednesday, where the federal government and Derges told Chief Magistrate Judge David P. Rush that they would proceed with a trial.

Court documents say the trial is estimated to last eight days. Watkins said the trial is set to begin June 13.

Dr. Derges has no intention to resign her seat in the Missouri House of Representatives, Watkins said Tuesday. Her commitment to her constituents and district are unwavering.

The Missouri Republican Party, however, moved in February to block Derges from running for reelection as a member of the GOP. Her name does not appear on a list of candidates running in the Aug. 2 primaries.

Derges, an assistant physician, was stripped of her committee assignments in the House and given an office in a broom closet in the Capitol after the federal charges were lodged against her in 2021.

A federal judge in January turned down Derges bid to dismiss her case.

A federal grand jury indicted Derges in early 2021 on charges of promoting a fake stem cell treatment and of illegally distributing prescription drugs to patients. The 20-count indictment includes eight counts of wire fraud, 10 counts of violating the federal Controlled Substances Act and two counts of making false statements to federal agents.

A second indictment in March 2021 accused Derges of fraudulently submitting claims for $900,000 in federal COVID-19 funds.

Kurt Erickson of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.

Editors note: Clarifies the charges spelled out in the first indictment.

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ST. LOUIS  The St. Louis area is facing an early dose of extreme heat this week, with high temperatures and humidity setting records and resembling conditions often not seen until the peak of summer.

It feels more like the middle of July than early May, the local forecast office of the National Weather Service wrote in a recent tweet.

Tuesdays high of 90 just missed toppling that dates 91-degree record. But daily records were tumbling by lunchtime on Wednesday, eventually hitting 94 degrees at St. Louis Lambert International Airport, 3 degrees higher than the previous peak, in 2011.

And the high Thursday reached 93 degrees  enough to supplant the daily record of 92, set in 1956, the NWS said.

I wouldnt mind a couple degrees cooler, if I were honest, said Ben Washburn, an Environmental Protection Agency spokesman, before a meeting in the Metro East on Wednesday with local mayors on federal funding opportunities for infrastructure projects.

The mid-70s are more typical for this time of year, according to historical NWS averages.

But as any Midwesterner knows, the humidity often matters just as much. And this week the heat index  which measures what the weather feels like, given the combination of heat and humidity  has soared toward record levels for this time of year.

The heat index hit 98 degrees on Tuesday and reached 102 on Wednesday, according to the local NWS office. The agency said such a high reading at this point of the spring is extremely unusual  the region hasnt seen a heat index of 100 this early since at least 1945. Since then, the earliest the region has hit 100 was on May 26, 1953.

Thursdays heat index topped out at 97.

Nowadays, episodes of extreme heat are made more likely and more frequent as greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere.

Still, the region has hit high temperatures earlier in the year. Melissa Mainhart, a local NWS meteorologist, said the area has occasionally experienced 90-degree days in April and even twice in March, roughly a century ago.

The region has seen, on average, its first 90-degree day around May 20, she said, based on about 150 years of data.

But that doesnt always coincide with an extended, multiday run, like the one now gripping the area.

For those sweating through the current heat, some incremental relief is on the horizon.

Temperatures will slacken on Friday, Mainhart said, and drop closer to normal over the weekend, when highs are expected to be in the lower 80s.

It looks like were backing down from 90, but its still going to be warm, Mainhart said. Its still going to feel summerlike.

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FLORENCE, Ariz. (AP)  An Arizona man convicted of killing a college student in 1978 was put to death Wednesday after a nearly eight-year hiatus in the states use of the death penalty brought on by a nearly two-hour execution that critics say was botched.

Clarence Dixon, 66, died by lethal injection at the state prison in Florence for his murder conviction in the killing of 21-year-old Arizona State University student Deana Bowdoin, making him the sixth person to be executed in the U.S. in 2022. Dixons death was announced late Wednesday morning by Frank Strada, a deputy director with Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry.

The execution appeared to track the states protocol, though the medical team had some difficulty finding a vein to administer the lethal drugs. They first tried Dixon's arms and then made an incision in his groin area. That process took about 25 minutes.

After the drugs were injected, Dixon's mouth stayed open and his body did not move. The execution was declared completed about 10 minutes after he was injected.

In the final weeks of Dixon's life, his lawyers tried to postpone the execution, but judges rejected the argument that he was not mentally fit to be executed and did not have a rational understanding of why the state wanted to execute him. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a last-minute delay of Dixons execution less than an hour before the execution began.

Dixon earlier declined the option of being killed in Arizona's gas chamber that was refurbished in 2020  a method that hasnt been used in the U.S. in more than two decades.

Shortly before he was executed with pentobarbital, Strada said Dixon declared: The Arizona Supreme Court should follow the laws. They denied my appeals and petitions to change the outcome of this trial. I do and will always proclaim innocence. Now, lets do this (expletive)."

And as prison medical staff put an IV line in Dixon's thigh in preparation for the injection, he chided them, saying: This is really funny  trying to be as thorough as possible while you are trying to kill me.

Leslie James, Bowdoins older sister and a witness to the execution, told reporters after it was conducted that Deana Bowdoin had been poised to graduate from ASU and was planning a career in international marketing. James described her sister as a hard worker who loved to travel, spoke multiple languages and wrote poetry.

She characterized the execution as a relief but criticized how long it took to happen: This process was way, way, way too long, James said. He had been on death row since his 2008 conviction.

The last time Arizona executed a prisoner was in July 2014, when Joseph Wood was given 15 doses of a two-drug combination over two hours in an execution that his lawyers said was botched. Wood snorted repeatedly and gasped more than 600 times before he died, and an execution that normally would take 10 minutes to complete lasted nearly two hours. The process dragged on for so long that the Arizona Supreme Court convened an emergency hearing during the execution to decide whether to halt the procedure.

States including Arizona have struggled to buy execution drugs in recent years after U.S. and European pharmaceutical companies began blocking the use of their products in lethal injections.

Authorities have said Bowdoin, who was found dead in her apartment in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe, had been raped, stabbed and strangled with a belt.

Dixon, who lived across the street from Bowdoin, had been charged with raping Bowdoin, but the rape charge was later dropped on statute-of-limitation grounds. He was convicted of murder in her killing.

In arguing that Dixon was mentally unfit, his lawyers said he erroneously believed he would be executed because police at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff wrongfully arrested him in another case  a 1985 attack on a 21-year-old student. His attorneys conceded he was lawfully arrested by Flagstaff police.

Dixon was sentenced to life in prison in that case for sexual assault and other convictions. DNA samples taken while he was in prison later linked him to Bowdoins killing, which had been unsolved.

Prosecutors said there was nothing about Dixons beliefs that prevented him from understanding the reason for the execution and pointed to court filings that Dixon himself made over the years.

Defense lawyers said Dixon was repeatedly diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, regularly experienced hallucinations over the past 30 years and was found not guilty by reason of insanity in a 1977 assault case in which the verdict was delivered by then-Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sandra Day OConnor, nearly four years before her appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Bowdoin was killed two days after that verdict, according to court records.

Another Arizona death-row prisoner, Frank Atwood, is scheduled to be executed on June 8 in the killing of 8-year-old Vicki Lynne Hoskinson in 1984. Authorities have said Atwood kidnapped the girl.

The childs remains was discovered in the desert northwest of Tucson nearly seven months after her disappearance. Experts could not determine the cause of death from the bones that were found, according to court records.

Arizona now has 112 prisoners left on the state's death row.

Billeaud reported from Phoenix. Associated Press writer Bob Christie in Phoenix contributed to this report.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
KYIV, Ukraine Ukrainian officials say their forces took out another Russian ship in the Black Sea.

Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, said late Thursday the Vsevolod Bobrov logistics ship was struck as it was trying to deliver an anti-aircraft system to Snake Island. He said the ship was badly damaged but was not believed to have sunk.

A spokesman for the Odesa regional military administration said the vessel caught fire after the strike. There was no confirmation from Russia and no reports of casualties.

The British Ministry of Defense said this week that Ukraine has been targeting Russian air defenses and supply vessels on Snake Island in an effort to disrupt Moscows efforts to expand its control over the Black Sea coastline.

The Ukrainian military last month sank the Moskva cruiser, the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet. In March, the military destroyed the landing ship Saratov.

KEY DEVELOPMENTS IN THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR:

 Finlands leaders in favor of applying for NATO membership

 ' This tears my soul apart : A Ukrainian boy and a killing

 Protesters vent fury at French company for staying in Russia

 Ukrainian circus comes to town, and stays in Italy, amid war

Follow all AP stories on Russias war on Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

OTHER DEVELOPMENTS:

MUNICH  German industrial giant Siemens AG says it is exiting Russia, where it has operated for almost 170 years.

We condemn the war in Ukraine and have decided to carry out an orderly process to wind down our industrial business activities in Russia, Roland Busch, the Munich-based companys CEO, said Thursday.

Siemens had been one of the first companies to put all new business in Russia, along with international deliveries to the country, on hold following Russias invasion of Ukraine in February.

The company said it had been evaluating the situation with the eye of ensuring the safety of its 3,000 employees in Russia.

The maker of trains and industrial equipment said the Russia sanctions shaved off about 600,000 euros ($623,000) from its fiscal second-quarter results, which were reported Thursday.



KYIV, Ukraine -- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian forces on Thursday night struck the Chernihiv region and hit schools.

Of course, the Russian state is in such a state that any education only gets in its way. But what can be achieved by destroying Ukrainian schools? All Russian commanders who give such orders are simply sick, and incurable.

He condemned what he suggested were senseless attacks on the refinery in the central Ukrainian industrial hub of Kremenchuk, on the Zaporizhzhia region and the Donbas.

They are cowards, and they try to hide the truth behind missiles, airstrikes and artillery shelling, he said in his nightly video address to the nation. Therefore our task is to fight until we achieve our goals in this war: to free our land, our people and secure our security.

Noting that Thursday is International Nurses Day, Zelenskyy thanked Ukraines nurses and other medical workers for their part in the fight and urged all Ukrainians to do the same. He said since the invasion began on Feb. 24, the Russian military had damaged 570 medical facilities, fully destroying 101 hospitals.

What is that? Its stupidity. Its barbarity. Its the self-destruction of Russia as a state that anyone in the world could see as a cultured nation.

KYIV, Ukraine  Rocket attacks on Ukraines central Poltava region on Thursday were perhaps the most intense for the duration of the war, the regional governor said that same day.

Todays shelling of the Poltava region is perhaps the largest during the course of this full-scale war, Dmitry Lunin wrote in a Telegram post. 12 Russian missiles hit the infrastructure in (the city of) Kremenchuk; most of them hit an oil refinery that was not operational anyway.

Rescuers are putting out a fire at the refinery. Luckily, no one was hurt, Lunin added.

Kremenchuk is on the Dnieper River, south of Kyiv and north of Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia. The river, flowing north to south, divides Ukraine in half. In the south, it flows through Kherson before emptying into the Black See.

KYIV, Ukraine  At least two civilians died Thursday as a result of a shelling attack on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraines second-largest city, local authorities said that same day.

As a result of the shelling, two people were killed, four more were injured, two of whom are doctors. All these people are civilians, Vyacheslav Zadorenko, the mayor of the suburban town of Derhachi, wrote in a Telegram post.

He added that the attack also damaged a building housing a humanitarian aid unit, municipal offices, and hospital facilities.

None of the sites that came under shelling, not to mention private houses that are destroyed daily, had anything to do with military infrastructure, Zadorenko said.

KYIV, Ukraine  Ukraines foreign minister said Thursday that everyone involved in the transportation and sales of grain seized by Russia in occupied areas of the country will face legal consequences.

Russia is a criminal three times over: it bombed Syria to ruins, occupied part of Ukraine, and is now selling stolen Ukrainian grain to Syria, the ministrys press service cited Dmytro Kuleba as saying.

I want to remind the participants in this deal: what is stolen has never brought happiness to anyone. Everyone involved in the sale, transportation or purchase of stolen grain is an accomplice to the crime, Kuleba said.

Your actions will have adequate international legal consequences. We will do everything to make your life as difficult as possible, he continued, commenting on media reports that on Wednesday, a Russian ship carrying Ukrainian grain moored off the Syrian coast.

Kuleba also claimed that thanks to the efforts of Ukrainian diplomats, Egypt and Lebanon had previously refused to buy the looted grain shipment.

MOSCOW  A student of a local construction college died as a result of a shelling attack on the Russian village of Solokhi near the Ukrainian border, a teacher at the college told the Interfax news agency Thursday.

Russian Nifodyov died as a result of the shelling of the peaceful village of Solokhi by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Nikolai Ignatenko was cited as saying.

Earlier on Thursday, the governor of Russias Belgorod region, where Solokhi is located, said that at least one civilian had been killed in the shelling, while six more were injured. While governor Vyacheslav Gladkov likewise blamed the attack on Kyivs forces, it was not immediately clear whether the slain civilian he referred to was Nifodyov.

KYIV, Ukraine  Four civilians were reported dead and five more were injured in Ukraines eastern Donetsk region on Thursday, the regional governor said that same day.

On May 12, the Russians killed four more civilians of the Donbas: two in Novoselivka, one in Avdiivka and one in Lyman. Five more people were injured, Pavlo Kyrylenko wrote in a Telegram post, referring to a village and two cities in the Donetsk region, one of two which make up the Donbas.

His claims could not be immediately verified.

ROME  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says that hes ready to talk with Russian President Vladimir Putin and that we must find an agreement, but with no ultimatum as a condition.

Zelenskyy also told Italian RAI state TV in an interview scheduled to be broadcast on Thursday night that Ukraine will never recognize Crimea as part of Russia, which annexed that part of southern Ukraine in 2014.

Crimea has always had its autonomy, it has its parliament, but on the inside of Ukraine, Zelenskyy said, in excerpts of the interview that RAI released earlier on Thursday.

The interviewer asked the Ukrainian leader about a comment by French President Emmanuel Macron cautioning against any humiliation of Putin.

We want the Russian army to leave our land, we arent on Russian soil, Zelenskyy replied. We wont save Putins face by paying with our territory. That would be unjust.

In another comment, Zelenskyy sounded a forward-looking note. We have to think of the future of Russia. I, as president of Ukraine, say these are our neighbors. There will be other presidents, other presidents and other generations of Russia, Zelenskyy said.

KYIV, Ukraine  Ukrainian ministry officials said Thursday that Russian troops were trying to block Kyivs forces from advancing as far as the Ukrainian-Russian border in the northeastern Kharkiv region.

In the direction of Kharkiv, Russian army units are regrouping and trying to prevent the further advance of our troops in the direction of the state border of Ukraine, defense ministry spokesman Oleksandr Motuzyanyk said in his regular media briefing.

To this end, the occupiers launch unceasing artillery attacks on our troop units in order to inflict human losses, as well as to damage weapons and military equipment, Motuzyanyk added.

He did not clarify how close Ukrainian forces were to the border.

According to the defense ministry briefing, Moscows troops were opening fire along the entire line of confrontation in Ukraines east, and attempting to penetrate Ukrainian defenses.

Also on Thursday, the Ukrainian militarys General Staff said in its daily operational statement that Russian forces continued their attempts to storm several cities in Ukraines industrial heartland of Donbas that day, but had no success.

A senior Russian U.N. envoy said Thursday that Finland and Swedens decision to join NATO would instantly turn them from neutral into hostile countries and potential targets for Russia.

Dmitry Polansky, First Deputy Representative of Russia to the U.N., said in an interview with the British conservative magazine UnHerd, that Helsinki and Stockholm know that the moment they become members of NATO it will imply certain mirror moves on the Russian side.

If there are NATO detachments in those territories, these territories would become a target - or possible target - for a strike, Polansky added. NATO is a very unfriendly bloc to us  it is an enemy and NATO itself admitted that Russia is the enemy. It means that Finland and Sweden all of a sudden, instead of neutral countries, become part of the enemy and they bear all the risks.

Elsewhere in the interview, Polansky downplayed the impact of the possible NATO enlargement on Europes security landscape, saying that Russia is ready to face NATO threats and has made the necessary precautions for this.



BERLIN  The U.N.s top human rights body has overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling on its investigators to specifically look into possible rights abuses and violations in northern Ukraine shortly after Russias invasion.

In a 33-2 vote, with 12 abstentions, the Human Rights Council concluded a special session Thursday on Russias invasion of Ukraine also by calling on Russia to grant international human rights groups unhindered, timely, immediate, unrestricted and safe access to people who have been transferred from Ukraine to Russia or areas controlled by Russian forces or affiliates.

Only China and Eritrea voted against the measure, which also urged the U.N. human rights office to report on events in Mariupol, a besieged southeastern port city where thousands of civilians are believed to have been killed. Access to the city has been virtually nonexistent for international human rights during recent fighting there.

The council called on a team of investigators known as a Commission of Inquiry to look specifically into the events in the Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Sumy regions of Ukraine in late February and early March after Russias invasion with a view to holding those responsible to account. The commission was already created to investigate rights abuses and violations generally in Ukraine.

Many atrocities in the war came to light last month after Moscows forces aborted their bid to capture Kyiv and withdrew from around the capital.

KYIV, Ukraine  Between 8 and 12 Russian missiles hit the oil refinery and other infrastructure in the Ukrainian industrial hub of Kremenchuk Thursday, the acting governor of the central Poltava region said that same day.

In a Telegram post, Dmytro Lunin urged residents to remain in underground shelters, citing the persistent threat of airstrikes.

In early April, Lunin had said that the Kremenchuk refinery - Ukraines only remaining fully functional facility of its kind at the time  was no longer operational following a Russian attack. Moscow claimed to have targeted the refinery again at the end of the month, and to have destroyed further fuel production and storage facilities.

BERLIN  The U.N. refugee agency is reporting that more than 6 million people have now fled Ukraine in the wake of Russias invasion.

Geneva-based UNHCR also said Thursday that the number of refugees who have returned back to Ukraine, either partially or fully, has reached more than 1.6 million. It says that number reflects cross-border movements, and doesnt necessarily indicate sustainable returns. The agency says its too early to draw conclusions about definitive trends on returns.

Matthew Saltmarsh, an agency spokesman, also said Thursday that a total of 2.4 million people who have left Ukraine have moved beyond Ukraines immediate border countries which have taken in the lions share of refugees from the country. Poland alone has registered more than 3.2 million people who fled Ukraine. It and other European Union member countries have open borders, making tracking where people go a complex endeavor.

On Tuesday, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, tweeted that the number of refugees from Ukraine had reached the same 5.7 million figure as the tally from Syrias 11-year war, which previously was the source of the worlds biggest refugee crisis.

UNITED NATIONS -- The U.N. childrens agency says the war in Ukraine is a child rights crisis where education is under attack and nearly 100 youngsters have been killed in just the last month.

UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Omar Abdi told the U.N. Security Council Thursday that more children have been injured, millions have been displaced and schools continue to be attacked and used for military purposes.

The school year came to a standstill after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, and as of last week at least 15 of 89 UNICEF-supported schools in the countrys east have been damaged or destroyed in the fighting, he said.

In mid-March, over 15,000 schools resumed education in Ukraine mostly through remote learning or in-person hybrid options, he said.

It is estimated that 3.7 million children in Ukraine and abroad are using online and distance learning options, Abdi said.

But he stressed that there are still enormous obstacles to education including availability for learning, resources, language barriers and movements of children and their families.

KYIV, Ukraine  Talks are underway between Kyiv and Moscow on the possible evacuation of 38 severely wounded Ukrainian troops from the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, Ukraines deputy PM said Thursday afternoon.

The steel mill is the only remaining stronghold of Ukrainian resistance in the ruined port city, and is now surrounded by Russian forces.

We are working step by step, Iryna Vereshchuk wrote in a public post on the Telegram messenger app.

She said that Kyiv hoped to exchange the soldiers for 38 significant Russian prisoners of war, before moving on to the next stage of the negotiations. She did not specify what this next stage would concern, but said that there were no negotiations on the exchange of 500 or 600 people.

Earlier on Thursday, an official at the Ukrainian Presidents Office said that Kyiv hoped to extract half a thousand wounded Ukrainian fighters from Azovstal.

Members of the Azov Regiment holed up inside the plant have repeatedly refused to surrender, citing fears of being killed or tortured. On Tuesday, Ukrainian officials said that more than a thousand Ukrainian troops, many of them injured, remained at Azovstal.

VIENNA  German Chancellor Olaf Scholz spoke with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto Thursday, the same day Finlands leaders announced the country plans to apply for NATO membership, the German chancellery said Thursday afternoon.

Chancellor Scholz welcomed todays statements by the President and Prime Minister of Finland Sanna Marin, in which both advocate their countrys immediate accession to NATO, and assured Finland of the Federal Governments full support on this path, Scholzs office said in a statement.

Finlands announcement paves the way for a historic expansion of the alliance that could deal a serious blow to Russia as its military struggles with its war in Ukraine.

Finland shares a 1,340-kilometer (830-mile) land border with Russia.

KYIV, Ukraine  About 3,000 Mariupol civilians are being detained in prisons controlled by pro-Russian separatists in Ukraines industrial east, the countrys human rights chief says.

Lyudmyla Denysova claimed on social media Thursday that Kyiv is aware of at least two prisons set up in the eastern Donetsk region, one in the regional capital of Donetsk and another in Olenivka, a suburb 20 kilometers southwest of the city center.

She claimed that authorities in Kyiv had received reports of people being tortured, interrogated, threatened with execution and forced to cooperate, and others disappearing after interrogations.

She also alleged that detainees were being kept in inhuman conditions, with inadequate access to bathrooms and no space to lie down.

She claimed that some captives had been released after 36 days, after signing unspecified documents, but did not provide more details. Ukrainian authorities are calling on the U.N. to intervene.

More than 100,000 civilians remain in the ruined port city of Mariupol, which had a pre-war population of about half a million. Ukrainian authorities have previously claimed that thousands of Ukrainians had been forcibly taken to Russia.

Troops from Ukraines Azov Regiment continue to hold out at the Azovstal steelworks, the last bulwark of Ukrainian resistance in the city.

MOSCOW  Russia has warned that it will have to take unspecified military-technical steps in response to Finlands decision to join NATO.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said Thursday that Finlands accession to NATO will inflict serious damage on Russian-Finnish relations, as well as stability and security in Northern Europe.

It said in a statement that Russia will be forced to take retaliatory steps of military-technical and other characteristics in order to counter the emerging threats to its national security.

The statement noted that while its up to Finland to decide on ways to ensure its security, Helsinki must be aware of its responsibility and the consequences of such a move. The ministry charged that Finlands move also violated past agreements with Russia.

History will determine why Finland needed to turn its territory into a bulwark of military face-off with Russia while losing independence in making its own decisions, it added.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
YAOUNDE, May 11 (Xinhua) -- Cameroonian Minister of Transport Jean Ernest Ngalle Bibehe on late Wednesday reported the loss of radio contact with an aircraft with 11 people on board.

Bibehe said in a statement the aircraft was located finally in the forests near Nanga Eboko, a locality in the Centre region.

"Rescue workers are currently on the way to the site where the plane is located to provide assistance to its occupants," Bibehe said.

The aircraft left the capital Yaounde and was heading to Belabo, a town in the East region of the country.

Local media reported that passengers on board were workers of an oil company. 
I didnt want to weigh in with an opinion on the probability of Roe v. Wades reversal just yet, only because it was too disheartening to feel as if 49 years of my life were being erased, and because I knew there would be a glut of other writers with similar opinions following the leak of the Supreme Courts dummy opinion. Then I happened to catch a quote from Jane Fonda on The View last week that compelled me to add my voice. To paraphrase, she said that the same protesters who seek to take away womens reproductive rights are the people who were screaming that the government couldnt mandate vaccines  their bodies were sacred.

Its infuriating.

I know that for many baby boomers like me, Jane Fonda is a polarizing figure because of her visit to, and photograph with, the enemy during the Vietnam War. For the last 50 years, Fonda has apologized and admitted ad nauseam that she was wrong to go to North Vietnam. In the 30 years since, however, she has been advocating for the rights of every marginalized group and fighting to save our warming planet. Shes right to point out the hypocrisy that exists when discussing the sanctity of the human body as it relates to refusing a shot while denying any woman sovereignty over her own body.

Unlike many (if not most) of those gleefully anticipating the end of Roe, I was old enough to experience life before it was implemented. I knew girls who had illegal abortions and girls who chose or were forced (because of lack of access or fear) to have their babies as well. Contraception was not taught at every school, and certainly not early enough for hormonal kids in many instances. Even many educated parents often failed to discuss sex in the home.

When I was 14, and she was 16, one of my friends had an illegal abortion unbeknownst to her parents. After she returned home, she told her older sister and me that shed thought she was sterile because shed been dating boys for several years without getting pregnant. We were both astonished at her naivete  more so because their father was a physician.

As soon as they started to show, girls who got pregnant in St. Louis City high schools were shipped off to the special high school that they shared with other incorrigibles whod also been suspended from their schools. Once their babies were born, girls were not allowed to return to their former high schools. They had to start all over in another school or get a graduate equivalency degree. The fathers of these babies, just like now, experienced no consequences. They were allowed to continue at their original schools without any punishment, many moving on to impregnate other girls as evidence of their virility.

Would any of these girls have gotten abortions if they had been legal then? Who can say? What we can say, however, is that the education and future dreams for many of these girls stopped once they became mothers. Their priorities shifted to babies needs with minimal help from the state. The Aid To Dependent Childrens grant for one child in 1971 was $80 a month. Potentially a girl could get food stamps, but eligibility required separate purchase, storage, and preparation of food if a girl shared a home. As for caregiving, not everyone had a family who could babysit while the mother returned to school or got a job. Having that baby trapped them both in the cycle of poverty that a better education for the mother could have provided.

Yes, theres a future baby involved. But until it can survive outside the mothers body, its an embryo. Abolish womens rights? Then lets legislate that the sperm donor who contributed to that embryo be sterilized. And, if incest or rape is involved, legislate surgical castration.

The very folks screaming that they want to save babies are the ones who will be screaming later that there are too many freeloaders on the dole. Perhaps the anti-abortion crew should also be legislated to support the babies who result from overturning Roe. In perpetuity.

Janet Y. Jackson is a Post-Dispatch columnist and Editorial Board Member.
The apparently pending Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade is an affront to womens rights to biological self-determination and to all Americans rights to privacy. This is why wide majorities of the country oppose the coming reversal of Roe. But if that support is to remain strong and eventually translate into abortion-protection legislation, pro-choice forces must quit sabotaging themselves by engaging in threatening protests at justices homes  and the Biden administration must enforce federal law prohibiting such actions.

To be sure, the leaked draft of Justice Samuel Alitos opinion, joined by four other conservatives on the court, is infuriating. In language berating and dismissive of a right that has been a cherished and transformative one to more than half the U.S. population for almost half a century, Alito effectively struck down the entire premise of a right to privacy implicit in the Constitution. Were he right (hes not), other rights like access to conception, same-sex marriage and even interracial marriage could also be on the chopping block.

Progressive fury is understandable  but for protesters to direct it at the justices personally, outside their homes, is indefensible.

Activists lately have staged protests outside the homes of Alito and other conservative justices. In response, Governors Glenn Youngkin of Virginia and Larry Hogan of Maryland sent a letter this week to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding that he enforce a federal law making it a crime to picket judges residences with the intent of influencing their decisions.

The protesters argue that law doesnt apply in this case because their intent is to express their fury, not to influence the upcoming decision. Even if thats true, they miss a broader point. The potential loss of Roe is a huge issue that should be debated as an issue, not as a personal attack on individuals. What theyre doing is comparable to anti-choice demonstrators intimidating women as they enter abortion clinics.

The key to keeping some legislative or other form of abortion rights in place is to convince the broad middle. Polls indicate moderates strongly favor keeping some level of abortion rights in force. If pro-choice activists want to keep that tentative majority alliance in place, the last thing they should do is present themselves as radicals who shout slogans at judges families in their homes in response to rulings they dont like.

Yes, as one protester told The Washington Post, there is something galling about the premise that the Supreme Court wants to have domain over womens uteruses and yet the sidewalk in front of their homes is somehow sacred ground. It may not be sacred ground, but it is outside the legitimate parameters of debate and protest. For the sake of both political propriety and strategic effectiveness, those activists should keep to the Supreme Court steps.
Who really needs clean towels and sheets every day on vacation? Ditto for super-long showers.

The amount of energy and water that travelers use negatively impacts locals far more than they realize, said Max Shak, founder of SurvivalGearShack.com. Check with your hotel about how they conserve water and what you can do to minimize your impact.

Better yet, consider hotels that are actively working to operate more sustainably like the Loews Regency New York (water reduction and temperature adjustments when guests are out of their rooms). The LEED-Certified Kimpton Hotel Palomar in Philadelphia and the Radisson Blu Mall of America in Minnesota are among those partnering with Clean the World. Their unused portions of bar soaps are recycled for kits sent to impoverished communities.

The YMCA of the Rockies in Colorado boasts a solar farm, new electrical vehicle chargers, and has begun to put a Wrap on Plastic Wrap, purchasing reusable options for towels and linens.

Cruise lines, including Holland America, are eliminating single-use plastic bottles and seeking more sustainable fuel options. Hurtigruten has debuted its second battery hybrid cruise ship while Royal Caribbean has announced a Destination Net Zero strategy to achieve net-zero emissions

A large number of hotels are actually committing themselves to being more sustainable through efforts like reducing or eliminating plastic waste. Even with these efforts in place, their price typically doesnt go up, making them a viable option for most travelers. By intentionally choosing to stay at these kinds of hotels, you are supporting sustainable efforts, being more sustainable yourself, and not going out of budget, suggests Nick Mueller, director of Operations for Hawaiianislands.com.

That seems especially true in Hawaii. Alohilani Resort Waikiki Beach on Oahu announced last month that it is on track to become the first carbon neutral hotel in the state of Hawaii. The resort is now powered by 100 percent renewable electricity, has pledged to plant 100,000 indigenous trees with the Hawaii Legacy Reforestation Initiative and has introduced a sustainable food and cocktail happy hour series centered on locally sourced products.

The newly renovated Turtle Bay Resort on Oahus North Shore has a 469-acre on-site Kulima Farm that provides local produce not only to the resort but surrounding communities. Guests are invited to visit and even pick their own ingredients.

On Kauai, Hanalei Colony Resort, where the suites have kitchens, is gifting guests new reusable shopping bags with a guide to the island's farmer's markets, farms and roadside stands. This is to encourage guests to buy local and make conscious commerce the part of their visit to Kauai. Hanaleis new Travel Well initiative includes a recycled tote and guide to local markets as well as a $100 groceries credit for those spending four nights. (Use code GCREDIT.)

Certainly, shopping and eating locally, using public transportation  or traveling by bike or on foot can all support sustainability efforts and local economies.

Locally-owned businesses tend to source their labor and supplies more locally compared to massive chain stores. Not only that, but the vast majority of the money you spend with these businesses stays in the local community through local tax dollars, explains Tim White, founder of MilePro.com.

Consider a water bottle with a water purifier filter so you can drink water safely wherever you go. One Water-to-Go water purifier bottle filter replaces 400 single use plastic bottles. ($35.99). For every LifeStraw product purchased, a child in need receives safe water for an entire year. (Squeeze bottles with a filter start at $32.95.)

Air travel comes with a big carbon footprint. Consider purchasing carbon offsets from Terrapass. The purchase funds projects to reduce carbon emissions and provide more green jobs.

The Coral Reef Alliance created a sustainable travel guide with some simple steps you can take to reduce your carbon footprint. Obviously, reuse towels and sheets to conserve energy and water, shut off lights, heat and AC when not needed. Take shorter showers and avoid single-use plastics. Use reef-safe sunscreens that dont contain oxybenzone, octinoxate or octoctrylene that harm coral reefs. Look for marine safe logo.

Aqua-Aston Hospitality in Hawaii helped pass the worlds first sunscreen law banning chemicals commonly used in sunscreen. The resort companys #ForOurReef campaign aims to educate guests and has now partnered with Little Hands Hawaii, a mom-owned reef-safe sunscreen company.

Perhaps the pandemic was the tipping point for travelers wanting to travel more sustainably, suggests research from Booking.com, 83 percent of global travelers surveyed think sustainable travel is vital, with 61 percent saying the pandemic has made them want to travel more sustainably in the future.

More than half (55 percent) of global travelers are planning to take slower modes of transport to reduce their environmental impact in 2022. Additionally, three quarters (76 percent) of global travelers will choose a place to stay if it has good sustainability accreditation.

To that end, Booking.com has introduced a new Travel Sustainable badge, helping to connect properties that have implemented a combination of independently verified sustainable practices. It is a first of its kind and it is designed to help travelers find more sustainable options.

The platform lists six of the worlds best cities for more sustainable travel, including New York, (easy to walk or take the subway!) and Copenhagen (bike everywhere).

The city of San Luis Obispo (SLO), California, has launched Keys for Trees, an initiative that aims to plant 10,000 trees by 2035  the same year this California Central Coast town will become carbon neutral. Every time a hotel room is booked, the funds to plant new trees continue to blossom

Costa Rica and Belize have long championed eco-tourism and resorts that have pioneered sustainability initiatives. Like Chaa Creek, which we recently visited and was the first Green Globe Certified resort in the country.

Belize is phasing out all single-use plastics, has banned offshore drilling and after a decade of effort, the Belize Barrier Reef, the largest in the northern hemisphere, is being removed from the danger list. Nice work!

Happy (sustainable) travel!

(For more Taking the Kids, visit www.takingthekids.com and also follow TakingTheKids on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram where Eileen Ogintz welcomes your questions and comments. The Kids Guide to Philadelphia and The Kids Guide to Camping are the latest in a series of 14 books for kid travelers published by Eileen.)
In Russia, the 2022 annual May 9th Victory Day Parade was about a third smaller than the 2021 event. This is a result of the war in Ukraine. The 2022 parade was expected to feature an important speech by leader Vladimir Putin about the future of the war in Ukraine. Many Russians were concerned about that. Despite new laws making data on deaths in the military a state secret, Russian families are starting to receive the coffins of soldiers, sailors and airmen killed in Ukraine. Earlier it was believed that the coffins, or news that their soldier was missing and presumed dead, would be delayed until after May 9th. That didnt happen and the coffins and death notices are being delivered.

Despite the censorship of casualty news, families all over Russia realized that contact had been lost with a very large number of Russian soldiers since February 24th, the day the Ukraine Operation began. Calling it a war or invasion was a criminal offense. Speculation was that the 2022 parade speech would include a declaration that a state of war now existed against NATO because of Ukraine. That meant a national mobilization could commence, with a call up of military personnel who had recently left the service or retired. This was seen as a gamble because morale and discipline in the military plummeted after the invasion began.

The Ukrainians were able to tap into Russian military communications as well as authorized or unauthorized cell phone use by soldiers and officers inside Ukraine. Many of these recordings were made public, as were the interviews of captured soldiers and officers. Most of the prisoners of war were eager to talk about their experience in Ukraine, which did not reflect well on Russian planning for the invasion and management of it once it began to fail. Officers still in command complained to wives that discipline had collapsed and troops often refused to fight. There were growing incidents of desertion or mutiny. Back in Russia, the recent semi-annual call up of conscripts featured even more young men refusing to show up or bribing officials to declare them unfit for service.

Since the start of the fighting at least one general a week has been killed in action, along with many brigade and battalion commanders or staff officers of the same rank. At the end of March nearly all forces had been withdrawn from northern Ukraine and those still combat capable were sent to eastern Ukraine for another offensive that failed to advance because of Ukrainian resistance, heavy Russian casualties and timid behavior by troops and junior officers. Ukrainian counter-attacks pushed back Russian forces and more outbreaks of partisan (armed) resistance started in areas controlled by Russian forces.

At the end of April Valery Gerasimov, the senior general and commander of all Russian military forces, went to Ukraine to see for himself what was going on. On May 1st there were reports that Gerasimov was wounded by enemy artillery fire and recalled to Moscow. Gerasimov could have been killed because he had been at a meeting with dozens of senior officers that Ukrainian intelligence found out about. The Ukrainians immediately launched a missile and artillery strike on the site of the meeting. Over a hundred Russians were killed and many more in the area wounded, including Gerasimov. Russia would not confirm that. Gerasimov was selected by Putin a decade ago to be chief of staff and ensure that many important military programs were completed successfully. Putin trusts Gerasimov, but Gerasimov is at fault for not realizing the poor combat readiness of Russian forces and the decisive effectiveness of the Ukrainian defense. Putins remarks at the 2022 parade were supposed to clarify the many questions about the war and where it was going.

There were also questions of how effective Putins efforts were to restore Russian military power and pride in the achievements of the communist leadership during wartime. With the collapse and dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, there were fewer events like the Victory Day Parades. The big Moscow parade was not held from 1991 to 1994 because there was no money for it. The parades were resumed in 1995, in part because it had become customary to hold larger parades involving up to 15,000 troops and hundreds of vehicles every five years. The 2020 parade was to be special because it was the 75th anniversary of the victory.

In 2015 Russia commemorated the 70th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 in a spectacular and expensive fashion. The annual Victory Day parade was held in Moscow and it was the largest ever for this event. The trend towards larger and larger Victory Day parades began in 2011 which was (up until then) the largest ever parade, featuring 20,000 troops and a growing array of new weapons. World War II (the Great Patriotic War in Russia) is still a very big deal. The conflict killed nearly 30 million Russians, a figure that was a state secret until the Cold War (and the Soviet Union) ended in 1991. Before that, the Soviet government downplayed their wartime losses, which were about twice what the Soviets would admit to. The war was a catastrophe for Russia, destroying much of the economy, in addition to causing widespread hunger and privation. It took decades to repair most of the damage, and the annual victory celebration was a reminder of all that. But things change. By the 1970s, older Russians were beginning to complain that memories were starting to fade. Younger Russians were put off by the forced celebrations and constant propaganda extolling the efforts of the Communist Party in defeating the German invaders. When the Cold War ended, the annual parades continued, but without the forced attendance. The government is trying to maintain Victory Day as something important for most people. This justifies the big parades since 2011, where the event cost a record $43 million. It's become less a celebration of how great the Communist Party was, and more about how the Russian people came together to defeat a common enemy.

The 2010 victory day parade in Moscow was also different. Not only was it bigger than it has been since the Cold War, it featured many weapons, including armored vehicles, missiles, and warplanes overhead. Over 10,000 troops marched in Moscow (with over 100,000 nationwide in over 70 major parades). The Moscow parade included, for the first time, contingents from World War II allies America, Britain and France.

After the Russian attack on Ukraine in 2014 there was no more Western participation in the May 9 parades as Putin pushed his belief that NATO was actively at war with Russia and something must be done to deal with that.
by Austin Bay May 11, 2022

In November 2018, at the direction of then-President Donald Trump, the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI and other federal security and economic agencies launched the China Initiative to halt the massive transfer of American information and technology to China and counter Chinese spying in American businesses, research institutions and universities.

In late February of this year the Biden administration terminated the project, alleging the initiative was racially biased and ineffective.

Perhaps. There is evidence the FBI mishandled several cases.

However, the strategic problems posed by China's aggressive spying operations and influence operations within the U.S. have not disappeared.

Why didn't the Biden administration address the China Initiative's problems instead of eliminating the effort?

That's not just a fair question, it's a fundamental national security question that deserves better answers than the administration has provided.

In early January I wrote a column sketching four strategic challenges the U.S. faces.

Challenge No. 4 is relevant to this column: No. 4 -- The pervasive corruption of influential but venal individuals and venal institutions in democratic nations. The corruption is so internally corrosive to these nations that timely and effective political and military response to Challenges Nos. 1 through 3 is systemically delayed, undermined or immobilized.

The other challenges were No. 1: Imperialist powers bent on recovering lost empires; No. 2: Failed states seeding regional anarchy; No. 3: Militant extremists attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

They still plague us, and Challenge No. 4 exacerbates all of them.

The Pentagon, State Department and FBI take the national security threat of corruption very seriously. They refer to the corruption strategies, tactics and techniques employed by enemies targeting leaders and institutions as "weaponized corruption."

China is unquestionably the most pervasive employer of weaponized corruption in the world.

Consider its activities in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in Congo's notorious "China Deal." Congo President Felix Tshisekedi ordered the review of the multibillion-dollar China Deal; investigators discovered some $55 million in kickbacks (perhaps more). The bribe plot used shell companies to make the operation look legit.

China has outright cheated Congo. It promised to invest several billion in infrastructure projects, but by the end of 2021 had invested less than half of what the contract stipulated.

Congo is far more vulnerable than the U.S., but it provides an example of China employing economic and financial corruption techniques. State-owned Chinese companies are in thrall to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). That means they are tools of CCP policy. The companies can be coerced financially and their employees physically intimidated -- to do things like spy in the U.S.

All of America's enemies prey upon corruptible American leaders and institutions. China, however, has mastered the dark art of targeting corruptible U.S. leaders and influencers using investment ploys, outright bribes, kickback schemes and blackmail. It certainly appears Beijing set a sex blackmail "honey trap" for Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif. -- check out his romance with suspected Chinese spy Christine Fang aka Fang Fang.

China also employs physical threat. Media have reported that FBI agents investigating suspected Chinese spy and influence operations said ethnic Chinese nationals living in the U.S. claimed Chinese intelligence officers told them their families in China faced reprisals if they refused to spy or provide data Beijing sought. That is physical threat.

Ultimately, China uses individual and institutional corruption as a strategic weapon to weaken U.S. defenses, damage the U.S. economy, sap American morale and advance Chinese science and technology.

America needs a focused effort to combat China's threat, and that includes punishing corrupt politicians, businesspeople and academics.

But the Biden administration terminated rather than improved the China Initiative.

Last year the Washington Free Beacon reported that China gave the University of Pennsylvania $72 million after Penn opened the Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement (Biden Center). Is it a cleverly disguised quid pro quo? Then there is Hunter Biden's notorious laptop, which contains details about his multimillion-dollar deal with the CEFC China Energy company.

The sources of our corruption and the individually corrupt must be publicly identified and judicially confronted.
Oral presentation of pivotal Phase 2 clinical trial of Cami in relapsed or refractory Hodgkin lymphoma

ZYNLONTA diffuse large B-cell lymphoma data highlighted in several abstracts

LAUSANNE, Switzerland--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- ADC Therapeutics SA (NYSE: ADCT), announced today that results from the pivotal Phase 2 clinical trial of camidanlumab tesirine (Cami) in patients with relapsed or refractory Hodgkin lymphoma have been accepted for an oral presentation at the European Hematology Association 2022 Hybrid Congress (EHA2022), which will be held virtually and in Vienna, Austria from June 9-12, 2022.

We continue to be encouraged by the data from our ongoing pivotal Phase 2 trial demonstrating the efficacy and safety of Cami as a single agent for patients with relapsed or refractory Hodgkin lymphoma, said Joseph Camardo, MD, Chief Medical Officer of ADC Therapeutics. As we advance Cami toward a potential BLA submission, we look forward to sharing these data with the hematology community at EHA2022.

Details of ADC Therapeutics oral presentation are as follows:

Camidanlumab Tesirine: Updated Efficacy And Safety In An Open-Label, Multicenter, Phase 2 Study Of Patients With Relapsed Or Refractory Classical Hodgkin Lymphoma (R/R CHL)

Presentation Date and Time: Friday, June 10, 2022, 11:45 am  12:00 pm CEST // 5:45 am  6 am EDT

Session Title: Hodgkin lymphoma  Clinical

Session Room: Hall A8

Abstract Code: S201

Presenter: Carmelo Carlo-Stella, MD, Department of Biomedical Sciences, Humanitas University, and Department of Oncology and Hematology, IRCCS Humanitas Research Hospital, Milan, Italy

Details of ADC Therapeutics poster presentations are as follows:

Health-Related Quality Of Life And Tolerability Of Loncastuximab Tesirine In High-Risk Patients With Relapsed/Refractory Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma Treated In A Phase 2 Clinical Trial (LOTIS 2)

Session Date and Time: Friday, June 10, 2022, 16:30  17:45 CEST // 10:30 am  11:45 am EDT

Location: Hall D

Abstract Code: P1717

Real-World Characteristics And Clinical Outcomes In Relapse/Refractory Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma Patients Who Received Car-T Therapy

Session Date and Time: Friday, June 10, 2022, 16:30  17:45 CEST // 10:30 am  11:45 am EDT

Location: Hall D

Abstract Code: 1182

Real-World Characteristics And Clinical Outcomes In Relapse/Refractory Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma Post Car-T Failure

Session Date and Time: Friday, June 10, 2022, 16:30  17:45 CEST // 10:30 am  11:45 am EDT

Location: Hall D

Abstract Code: 1181

Titles of ADC Therapeutics abstracts accepted for publication only are as follows:

A Phase 2, Open-Label Study Of Loncastuximab Tesirine In Combination With Rituximab (LONCA-R) In Previously Untreated Unfit/Frail Patients With Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma (DLBCL) (LOTIS-9) [Trials in progress]

Longterm survival projections of loncastuximab tesirinetreated patients in relapsed or refractory (R/R) diffuse large Bcell lymphoma (DLBCL)

Phase 3 Randomized Study of Loncastuximab Tesirine in Combination With Rituximab (LoncaR) Versus Immunochemotherapy in Patients With R/R DLBCL (LOTIS5) [Trials in progress]

Please note: times and locations are tentative and subject to change.

About Camidanlumab Tesirine (Cami)

Camidanlumab tesirine (Cami) is an antibody drug conjugate (ADC) comprised of a monoclonal antibody that binds to CD25 (HuMax-TAC, licensed from Genmab A/S), conjugated to the pyrrolobenzodiazepine (PBD) dimer payload, tesirine. Once bound to a CD25-expressing cell, Cami is internalized into the cell where enzymes release the PBD-based payload, killing the cell. This applies to CD25-expressing tumor cells and also to CD25-expressing Tregs. The intra-tumoral release of its PBD payload may also cause bystander killing of neighboring tumor cells, and PBDs have also been shown to induce immunogenic cell death. All of these properties of Cami may enhance immune-mediated anti-tumor activity.

Cami is being evaluated in a pivotal Phase 2 clinical trial in patients with relapsed or refractory Hodgkin lymphoma and a Phase 1b clinical trial as monotherapy and in combination with pembrolizumab in solid tumors.

About ZYNLONTA (loncastuximab tesirine-lpyl)

ZYNLONTA is a CD19-directed antibody drug conjugate (ADC). Once bound to a CD19-expressing cell, ZYNLONTA is internalized by the cell, where enzymes release a pyrrolobenzodiazepine (PBD) payload. The potent payload binds to DNA minor groove with little distortion, remaining less visible to DNA repair mechanisms. This ultimately results in cell cycle arrest and tumor cell death.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved ZYNLONTA (loncastuximab tesirine-lpyl) for the treatment of adult patients with relapsed or refractory (r/r) large B-cell lymphoma after two or more lines of systemic therapy, including DLBCL not otherwise specified, DLBCL arising from low-grade lymphoma and also high-grade B-cell lymphoma. The trial included a broad spectrum of heavily pre-treated patients (median three prior lines of therapy) with difficult-to-treat disease, including patients who did not respond to first-line therapy, patients refractory to all prior lines of therapy, patients with double/triple hit genetics and patients who had stem cell transplant and CAR-T therapy prior to their treatment with ZYNLONTA. This indication is approved by the FDA under accelerated approval based on overall response rate and continued approval for this indication may be contingent upon verification and description of clinical benefit in a confirmatory trial.

ZYNLONTA is also being evaluated as a therapeutic option in combination studies in other B-cell malignancies and earlier lines of therapy.

About ADC Therapeutics

ADC Therapeutics (NYSE: ADCT) is a commercial-stage biotechnology company improving the lives of those affected by cancer with its next-generation, targeted antibody drug conjugates (ADCs). The Company is advancing its proprietary PBD-based ADC technology to transform the treatment paradigm for patients with hematologic malignancies and solid tumors.

ADC Therapeutics CD19-directed ADC ZYNLONTA (loncastuximab tesirine-lpyl) is approved by the FDA for the treatment of relapsed or refractory diffuse large b-cell lymphoma after two or more lines of systemic therapy. ZYNLONTA is also in development in combination with other agents. Cami (camidanlumab tesirine) is being evaluated in a pivotal Phase 2 trial for relapsed or refractory Hodgkin lymphoma and in a Phase 1b clinical trial for various advanced solid tumors. In addition to ZYNLONTA and Cami, ADC Therapeutics has multiple ADCs in ongoing clinical and preclinical development.

ADC Therapeutics is based in Lausanne (Biopole), Switzerland and has operations in London, the San Francisco Bay Area and New Jersey. For more information, please visit https://adctherapeutics.com/ and follow the Company on Twitter and LinkedIn.

ZYNLONTA is a registered trademark of ADC Therapeutics SA.

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Investors



Eugenia Litz

ADC Therapeutics

[email protected]

+44 7879 627205

Amanda Hamilton

ADC Therapeutics

[email protected]

+1 917-288-7023

EU Media

Alexandre Muller

Dynamics Group

[email protected]

+41 (0) 43 268 3231

USA Media

Mary Ann Ondish

ADC Therapeutics

[email protected]

+1 914-552-4625

Source: ADC Therapeutics SA
FORT WORTH, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- ADM Endeavors, Inc. announces today that Bruce Boyce has been promoted to Sales Manager. He will lead our team of 10 sales reps.

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Bruce Boyce (Photo: Business Wire)

Marc Johnson, CEO of ADM Endeavors, said, Bruce has done such a great job at securing new government contracts and servicing his existing account; it was time to reward that service and promote Bruce to Sales Manager. Bruce will be able to mold his team into a cohesive group modeled after his personal style and processes that have yielded the company such tremendous sales growth. Bruce has truly earned this promotion.

About ADMQ: Since 2010, our wholly owned subsidiary, Just Right Products, Inc., has been consistently increasing sales, with sales topping $6.44 million for the last reported 12 months. The Company sells Anything With A Logo on its website, www.JustRightProducts.com, developing products ranging from unique business cards to coffee cups, T-shirts to boots, with tens of thousands of other unique products from which to select. Just Right Products, Inc. operates a diverse vertical integrated business in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, consisting of a retail sales division, screen print production, embroidery production, digital production, import wholesale sourcing, and uniforms.

Forward Looking Statement:

This press release may contain forward-looking information within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended. Any statements that are not historical facts contained in this press release are "forward-looking statements" that involve a number of risks and uncertainties and are made pursuant to the Safe Harbor Provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as strategy, expects, continues, plans, anticipates, believes, would, will, estimates, intends, projects, goals, targets and other words of similar meaning are intended to identify forward-looking statements but are not the exclusive means of identifying these statements. Such forward-looking statements are based on current expectations, involve known and unknown risks, a reliance on third parties for information, transactions that may be cancelled, and other factors that may cause our actual results, performance or achievements, or developments in our industry, to differ materially from the anticipated results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from anticipated results include risks and uncertainties related to the fluctuation of global economic conditions or economic conditions with respect to the retail industry, the COVID-19 pandemic, the performance of management, actions of government regulators, vendors, and suppliers, our cash flows and ability to obtain financing, competition, general economic conditions and other factors that are detailed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We intend that all forward-looking statements be subject to the safe-harbor provisions. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

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ADM Endeavors, Inc. | [email protected] | 817.840.6271

Investor Relations:

Andrew Barwicki | [email protected] | 516.662.9461

Source: ADM Endeavors, Inc.
Fastest-growing open source data integration platform fills finance, business development, and data policy leadership positions

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Airbyte, creator of the fastest-growing open source data integration platform, has more than doubled the number of employees this year, adding 42 people to bring the total to 72  with plans to grow to 200 by year end. In this challenging time for companies to find qualified candidates with the unemployment rate for tech occupations at 1.7% in January, the company has added executives to lead finance, business development, and data policy.

With its growth trajectory and more than $181 million funding raised in 2021, Airbyte announced the company's first hiring sprint in March. With Airbytes growth and success, the company has brought on new hires Otto Yeung as head of finance, Chris Tatarowicz as head of business development, and Patsy Bailin as head of data policy.

These additions to our leadership team are strategically important representing key areas in helping us grow our business, focus on our relationships with developers, and ensure we have strong governance and policies that protect our users data, said Michel Tricot, co-founder and CEO, Airbyte. With the tough competition for talent, we are so lucky to have not only doubled our workforce this year alone, but to have a strong team in place that is focused on users to help us reach our goals this year.

With its growing community of 7,000 data practitioners and 300 contributors, Airbyte is redefining the standard of moving and consolidating data from different sources to data warehouses, data lakes, or databases in a process referred to as extract, load, and, when desired, transform (ELT). Over the past year and a half, more than 20,000 companies have used Airbyte to sync data from sources such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, Facebook Ads, Salesforce, Stripe, and connect to destinations that include Redshift, Snowflake, Databricks and BigQuery.

Airbytes open-source data integration solves two problems: First, companies always have to build and maintain data connectors on their own because most less popular long tail'' data connectors are not supported by closed-source ELT technologies. Second, data teams often have to do custom work around pre-built connectors to make them work within their unique data infrastructure.

About Airbyte

Airbyte is the open-source data integration alternative running in the safety of your cloud and syncing data from applications, APIs, and databases to data warehouses, lakes, and other destinations. Airbyte was co-founded by Michel Tricot (former director of engineering and head of integrations at Liveramp and RideOS) and John Lafleur (serial entrepreneur of dev tools and B2B). The company is headquartered in San Francisco with remote employees around the world. To learn more, visit airbyte.com.

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Joe Eckert for Airbyte

Eckert Communications

[email protected]

Source: Airbyte
Data Management Innovator Expands Global Presence to Support Growing Customer Base

MUNICH & MELBOURNE, Australia--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Arcitecta, a creative and innovative data management software company, today announced that it has opened its new EMEA headquarters in Munich, Germany, to support the companys current and growing business across Europe. Arcitecta also announced the appointment of Frank Radefeldt as senior vice president of customer success worldwide and managing director for Europe.

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Frank Radefeldt, SVP of Customer Success Worldwide and Managing Director for Europe, Arcitecta (Photo: Business Wire)

Arcitecta is experiencing strong demand and traction in Europe, driven by exponential data growth, the challenge of managing massive data volumes and the increasingly geo-distributed nature of todays workforces and workflows, said Jason Lohrey, Arcitectas CEO and founder. The new EMEA headquarters office underscores our commitment to supporting our customers with a regional presence and resources. We are also delighted to welcome Frank, an executive with a proven track record of devotion to customer success, to lead our operations in Europe and help organizations of all sizes solve their toughest data management challenges.

Radefeldt is a seasoned international technology leader who has served in various management and professional services roles for technology companies such as SGI, Splunk and McAfee over the past 15 years. During this time, he developed a reputation for building customer-focused sales and technical teams that drive customer success and desired outcomes.

I first experienced the magic of Arcitectas Mediaflux data management fabric while at SGI many years ago. It is a powerful platform that has become increasingly relevant as it solves key challenges that organizations are grappling with today - but may not be aware that a solution exists, said Radefeldt. l am excited to join such an innovative, customer-focused company. And I look forward to supporting organizations throughout Europe with leveraging metadata and increasing automation and ease of data management  including moving massive data and metadata volumes quickly and securely across all networks to support their distributed workflows and requirements. Mediaflux helps significantly with making big data manageable again.

Arcitecta provides customers with innovative end-to-end data management solutions that radically simplify global data management. Its proven Mediaflux solution delivers highly scalable data management capabilities that allow for easy collaboration, data access and sharing and significant workflow efficiencies using a single system to manage and move the data optimally. Arcitectas Mediaflux Livewire solution can transfer billions of files securely, reliably and globally at ultra-fast speeds and was recently awarded the "Most Complete Solution" and "Best Software Architecture" by the International Data Mover Challenge at Supercomputing Asia 2022.

Tweet this: Arcitecta opens European office in Munich and expands global presence to support current and growing customer base with powerful Mediaflux #datamanagement capabilities - https://bit.ly/3Ft0p7y #metadata #datamover #ISC2022 #ISC

Upcoming ISC High Performance 2022 - Interactive Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) Session

Arcitectas CEO, Jason Lohrey, will join Matt Starr, Spectra Logics CTO, Allan Williams, associate director at National Computational Infrastructure, and Nick Whalen, architect data engineering at Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, for an interactive discussion on the topic of Does HPC Really Need Data Management? The session will be held on Tuesday, May 31 from 1:00  2:00 pm CEST in Hall D at ISC 2022 in Hamburg, Germany. Register here for ISC 2022.

About Arcitecta

Arcitecta is a creative and innovative data management software company. Founded in 1998, Arcitecta builds the worlds best data management platforms, enabling thousands of users worldwide in some of the most demanding data-driven environments. Long before "Big Data" became a buzzword, Arcitecta recognized that data would underpin every human endeavor and create a significant explosion in all forms of data during the coming decades. Arcitectas flagship Mediaflux platform began with the vision to provide organizations with extraordinary technology for handling all forms of data, from small to very large and complex. Today, it forms the foundation for managing the simplest and the most complex data for all sizes of organizations and global enterprises, empowering them to simplify data-intensive workflows and accelerate time to insight from their data to improve business outcomes and people's quality of life.

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Media Contact Information



[email protected]



US/EMEA Media Inquiries:

Denise Nelson, IGNITE Consulting

+1 925-858-5198



Australia/APAC Media Inquiries:

Emily King | Arcitecta Marketing and Communications

+61 434 255 022

Source: Arcitecta
BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Cabot Corporation (NYSE: CBT) announced today that Raffiq Nathoo has been elected to its Board of Directors, effective May 12, 2022. He was also appointed a member of the Audit Committee of the Board of Directors, effective May 12, 2022. Since August 2019, Mr. Nathoo has served as a Managing Partner of TX3 Sage Rock, a private investment management firm. Mr. Nathoo has 30 years of experience which spans the investment banking, private equity, and public equity businesses, including over 22 years at Blackstone where he was a Senior Managing Director for 14 years and led the firms advisory practice globally in the energy, power and utilities sectors, with New Mountain Capital where he served as an Executive-in-Residence, and with Salomon Brothers Inc. where he started his career. Mr. Nathoo received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Government from Dartmouth College, and a Master of Business Administration degree from Harvard University.

Sue H. Rataj, Non-Executive Chair of Cabots Board of Directors, said, We are very pleased to welcome Raffiq to our Board. His significant leadership experience, international financial and capital markets expertise, both as an investor and as an M&A advisor, and his broad strategic perspective will further enhance the Boards depth and capabilities that are necessary to oversee the Companys Creating for Tomorrow strategy.

I am delighted and honored to join the Cabot Board of Directors. Cabot is a company with exceptional products and technologies and has many exciting opportunities for growth in the years ahead. I look forward to drawing on my experience to help Cabot achieve its growth objectives and further advance the Companys strategy, said Mr. Nathoo.

About Cabot Corporation

Cabot Corporation (NYSE: CBT) is a global specialty chemicals and performance materials company headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. The company is a leading provider of carbon black, specialty carbons, engineered elastomer composites, inkjet colorants, masterbatches and conductive compounds, fumed silica and aerogel. For more information on Cabot, please visit the companys website at cabotcorp.com. The Company encourages investors and potential investors to consult the Cabot website regularly.

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Investor Contact:

Steve Delahunt

(617) 342-6255

Source: Cabot Corporation
LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Citi released a new Global Perspectives & Solutions (Citi GPS) report titled Space: The Dawn of a New Age. Access full report here. The report focuses on the commercial space market, where we expect the greatest potential advances over the next few decades.

Today's launch costs of $1,500 per kilogram ($1,500/kg) are about 30x less than the launch cost of NASA's Space Shuttle in 1981. Reusable rockets and launch vehicles, new materials and fuels, more cost-efficient production methods, and advancements in robotics and electronics systems are combining to drive these costs even lower.

Launch costs could fall to $100/kg by 2040, and in a bullish scenario, to as low as $33/kg, says Pavan Daswani, Citi Researchs Europe Technology Analyst. With lower launch costs, we expect the space economy to generate over $1 trillion in annual sales by 2040, up from around $370 billion in 2020, he adds. The satellite market, which currently makes up over 70% of the current space industry, will continue to dominate but is expected to undergo a paradigm shift in demand.

Traditional applications such as video broadcasting will cede to newer applications such as consumer broadband and space-as-a-service. We forecast this will result in an expansion of the Earth Observation market to being more data-driven, resulting in a compound annual growth rate of ~10% from 2020 to 2040, to be worth ~$17 billion in annual sales by 2040. Satellite imagery and better analysis tools for large amounts of data could be crucial in helping nations and companies address many of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, particularly monitoring greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation and biodiversity, says Anita McBain, Citi Researchs Head of EMEA ESG.

We expect the fastest growth to come from new space applications and industries, such as space-based solar power, space logistics, and Moon/asteroid mining, among others. These areas could generate ~$100 billion in annual sales by 2040. Investment is also supportive as flows shift from being dominated by government agencies and the wealthiest nations, towards more private funding, particularly from venture capital.

About Citi Global Perspectives & Solutions (Citi GPS)

As our premier thought-leadership product, Citi Global Perspectives & Solutions (Citi GPS) is designed to help our clients navigate the global economy's most demanding challenges, identify future themes and trends, and help our clients profit in a fast-changing and interconnected world. Citi GPS accesses the best elements of our global conversation and harvests the thought leadership of our research analysts and a wide range of senior professionals across our firm.

About Citi

Citi, the leading global bank, has approximately 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 160 countries and jurisdictions. Citi provides consumers, corporations, governments and institutions with a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage, transaction services, and wealth management. Additional information may be found at www.citigroup.com | Twitter: @Citi | www.youtube.com/citi | Blog: http://blog.citigroup.com | Facebook: www.facebook.com/citi | LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/citi.

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Media contacts

Franecsco Meucci

Citi Research & Global Insights

[email protected]

Susannah Gullette

Citi Research

[email protected]

Source: Citi
Future of Energy Scholarship Fund launched this year to remove financial barriers, boost diversity and inclusion in STEM and energy careers

CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- ComEd today announced it will award $279,500 in scholarships to 56 local students pursuing college coursework in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and related fields this fall. The new Future of Energy Scholarships are part of ComEds growing efforts to build a more diverse future energy workforce by removing obstacles for women and minority students pursuing STEM careers.

The 56 students selected to receive scholarships reflect the diversity of the communities that ComEd serves, with scholars hailing from 28 different community areas across northern Illinois. More than 50 percent of the scholarship recipients are minorities and nearly two-thirds are women. One fifth of the scholars are committed to attend an Historically Black College or University (HBCU) in the fall. A full list of the spring 2022 scholarship recipients can be found here.

ComEd requires skilled talent as we work to confront climate change and prepare for our clean energy future, said Gil C. Quiniones, CEO of ComEd. The Future of Energy Scholarship is a key component of the work we are doing to create a local, diverse pipeline of talent to meet new demands of the industry and ensure equitable opportunity for our communities across the region so they can benefit from the growth of well-paying clean energy jobs in the years ahead.

The Future of Energy Scholarship provides college bound high school seniors and current college students with awards ranging from $1,000 to $10,000, which may be used to cover tuition and related expenses, in addition to the chance to pursue a ComEd internship where students gain direct career experience in the energy industry.

"I am appreciative to ComEd for this scholarship award as I prepare to attend Howard University to pursue my goal to become an engineer, said Chase Easley, student from Schaumburg who will be majoring in engineering at Howard University this fall. Through my involvement in STEAM courses in high school, I have learned the importance of renewable energy for our environment, and I look forward to building the skills that will help me create a more sustainable future for my community.

To be eligible for an award, students were required to demonstrate acceptance to a STEM, business or relevant degree program, and a minimum 2.8 GPA. Priority consideration was made for minorities and women, students with a demonstrated financial need, and students headed to an HBCU program. Since announcing the program in February, ComEd expanded funding to provide additional support for qualifying students who met needs-based criteria.

Pursuing a degree in engineering has always been a dream for me, and with the ComEd Future of Energy scholarship, I look forward to pursuing my passion for computer science this fall, said Kelly Lin, student from Chicago who will attend the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I am honored to have received this award and an internship with ComEd, and I have never been more motivated to make myself and my family proud with these opportunities.

To recruit scholars for this opportunity, ComEd worked with a program administrator, National Energy Education Development (NEED) Project, to promote the program across various channels including job and community resource fairs, within local school systems, youth providers, workforce agencies, and more.

We are honored to partner with ComEd for the Future of Energy Scholarships. The exceptional students who are receiving these scholarships reflect the diversity of a growing energy industry and STEM as a whole, said Mary Spruill, Executive Director of The NEED Project. The ingenuity, talent, and curiosity exhibited by each of these students will shape the future of the energy as we consider the opportunities and challenges ahead.

Advancements in clean energy technology are expected to fuel new jobs for the future, with green jobs estimated to jump from 9 million to 24 million by 2030. To ensure diverse local residents can benefit from these opportunities, ComEd is taking steps to address the current inequities in STEM, which includes as few as 9 percent of STEM jobs occupied by Black Americans, 7 percent by Latinos, and only 27 percent by women, despite their being more than half of the eligible workforce.

As a computer science major, concerned about the future of our planet, I am interested in working with smart grids to integrate renewable energy sources like solar, said Vanessa Medrano, student from Streamwood who will be majoring in computer science and programming at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I am thankful for the scholarship to support my education and for the opportunity to intern at ComEd. This internship will give me a first-hand look at working with smart grid technology and learn from experts in the field I am pursuing.

The Future of Energy Scholarship program builds on the array of STEM education and college preparatory programs offered by ComEd and its parent company, Exelon, including: the DePaul Scholarship program, STEM scholarships for Illinois Tech and University of Illinois programs, the Exelon HBCU Scholarship Fund, and various high school training and mentorship programs geared toward promoting women and minorities in the STEM fields. To inspire more young women to enter STEM fields, ComEd will also host its first-ever EV Rally this summer, a competition that challenges teens to build electric-powered racecars.

To expand future pathways to college, ComEd expects to issue another $250,000 in scholarship opportunities later this year for 2023 college students. For updates on these and other career assistance opportunities, please visit www.comed.com/workforce

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ComEd Media Relations

312-394-3500

Source: ComEd
Robotic-assisted PCI will be prominently featured at the world-leading course in interventional cardiovascular medicine

NEWTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Corindus, A Siemens Healthineers Company and a leading developer of precision vascular robotics, announced today that it will showcase the CorPath GRX System, the first and only FDA-cleared and CE marked medical device for robotic-assisted coronary interventions, at EuroPCR 2022 through live cases, scientific presentations, and multiple Siemens Healthineers-sponsored symposia. One of the sessions, featuring Professor Dariusz Dudek from the Institute of Cardiology at Jagiellonian University Medical College, will include new clinical data from the NAVIGATE study, a novel, post-market study which evaluated CorPath GRX technIQ automated movements in PCI. EuroPCR is returning to in-person attendance in Paris, France, from May 17-22, 2022.

The course is scheduled to open with a live broadcast of a robotic-assisted PCI case performed at Clinique Pasteur in Toulouse, France, during which the clinical team will utilize a CorPath GRX System. The same day, Siemens Healthineers will host an educational symposium on imaging and robotics, Personalized coronary intervention with CT-guided robotic-assisted PCI. The session will help attendees understand how coronary CT angiography can bring additional value in the diagnosis of coronary artery disease, pre-procedural planning, and procedural guidance of coronary interventions. It will also include a case demonstration featuring CT angiography and robotic-assisted PCI.

EuroPCR is a world-leading course in interventional cardiology, and we are pleased to see the growing enthusiasm for robotic technology, as evidenced by the program, said Wayne Markowitz, Worldwide Executive Vice President and Business Head of Corindus. Were especially excited that Professor Dudek will share new clinical data from the NAVIGATE study. Sharing these initial results with the clinical community marks another step toward continuing our research on procedural automation.

Professor Dudek will present the data as part of the Innovations in simulation-based training, procedural planning, monitoring and robotic PCI session. Siemens Healthineers will also host a second educational symposium, Robotic-assisted intervention: latest clinical insights and applications for complex PCI, featuring interventional cardiologists Dariusz Dudek, Jean Fajadet, Eric Wyffels, and Constantin von zur Muhlen. It will provide an overview of CorPath GRX and technIQ Smart Procedural Automation, as well as robotic training program best practices, novel training techniques using 3D heart flow models, and additional insights on the clinical data from the NAVIGATE study.

I am pleased to share my findings from the NAVIGATE Study, which indicates promising results for procedural automation in robotic-assisted PCI, Professor Dudek said. Coronary artery disease is one of the leading causes of death globally, and incorporating new technological advancements, like robotics and automation, can advance precision and safety for both patients and practitioners. I look forward to sharing my experience with CorPath GRX and the benefits the system has to offer at this years EuroPCR course.

A list of the highlighted sessions and the times they will be taking place is as follows:

Tuesday, May 17th  8:45-10:00 a.m. CET : Robotic PCI: LIVE case from Clinique Pasteur - Toulouse, France

: Robotic PCI: LIVE case from Clinique Pasteur - Toulouse, France Tuesday, May 17th  3:30-5:00 p.m. CET : NAVIGATE Study data as part of Innovations in simulation-based training, procedural planning, monitoring and robotic PCI

: NAVIGATE Study data as part of Innovations in simulation-based training, procedural planning, monitoring and robotic PCI Tuesday, May 17th  5:15-6:00 p.m. CET : Personalized coronary intervention with CT-guided robotic-assisted PCI

: Personalized coronary intervention with CT-guided robotic-assisted PCI Wednesday, May 18th  12:15-1:15 p.m. CET: Robotic-assisted intervention: latest clinical insights and applications for complex PCI

The CorPath GRX System with technIQ Smart Procedural Automation will be on display and available for hands-on demonstrations at the Siemens Healthineers booth M49. To learn more, please visit https://www.siemens-healthineers.com/news-and-events/conferences-events-new/euro-pcr.

ABOUT CORINDUS

Corindus, A Siemens Healthineers Company, is a global technology leader in robotic-assisted vascular interventions. The Companys CorPath platform is a medical device to bring robotic precision to percutaneous coronary and vascular procedures. CorPath GRX is the second-generation robotic-assisted technology offering enhancements to the platform by adding important key upgrades that increase precision, improve workflow, and extend the capabilities and range of procedures that can be performed robotically. We are focused on developing innovative robotic solutions to revolutionize treatment of emergent conditions by providing specialized and timely medical care to patients around the world. For additional information, visit www.corindus.com, and follow @CorindusInc.

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Media:

Matter Health for Corindus

Jill Gross

978-518-4258

[email protected]

Kathrin Palder

Press Officer, Siemens Healthineers

+49 (173) 3645319

[email protected]

Source: Corindus
SEOUL, South Korea--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- The aesthetic and medical device company DEXLEVO attended the 20th AMWC (Aesthetic & Anti-aging Medicine World Congress) held in Monaco and explained its products to the visitors.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220502005974/en/

The aesthetic and medical device company DEXLEVO attended the 20th AMWC (Aesthetic & Anti-aging Medicine World Congress) held in Monaco and explained its products to the visitors. (Photo: Business Wire)

The world's first fully liquid PCL (polycaprolactone) injectable, GOURI developed by DEXLEVO, an aesthetic and medical device company, was the first in Asia to be chosen as Best Injectable in the category at the 20th AMWC (Aesthetic & Anti-aging Medicine World Congress) held in Monaco from March 31 to April 2, 2022.

AMWC is one of the world's most prestigious aesthetic and anti-aging congresses. More than 20,000 visitors from more than 200 countries worldwide, including dermatologists, attend the event every year to share the latest trends in aesthetic and anti-aging products and industry trends.

DEXLEVO launched GOURI, the world's first fully liquid PCL injectable, at the AMWC in 2021. Attending AMWC for the second year, it won the Best Injectable award for the first time as an Asian company at the AMWC Awards, having its unique technology and products recognized on the world stage. For the AMWC Awards, the AMWC Committee reviews and chooses the candidate products, judged by votes from dermatologists and industry workers around the world. At this year's review, DEXLEVO was nominated alongside prominent global beauty companies such as Allergan, Merz, Fillmed, and Aptos, proving its competence in the global market.

More than 150 doctors and companies visited DEXLEVO's booth and showed great interest in GOURI, which provides a fundamental solution to anti-aging.

Under the theme of "1st Liquid PCL-What, When, Why?", Mexican dermatologist Dr. Arturo Vela said, "The beauty market now wants naturalness. DEXLEVO's GOURI is the world's first fully liquid PCL injectable and the safest anti-aging product that meets consumer needs." Croatian dermatologist Dr. Dinko Kaliterna gave a treatment lecture at the congress under the theme "Skin Rejuvenation with Liquid PCL," saying, "GOURI is safer than competing products and its treatment is very convenient. Also, patients satisfaction with the procedure is high due to the natural collagen regeneration effect."

An official from DEXLEVO said, "As the trend in the beauty market changes, more companies are showing interest compared to last year's AMWC. Since the global market is showing increasing interest in GOURI, we plan to support marketing to become a leader in anti-aging products."

DEXLEVO's GOURI is the world's first fully liquid type PCL injectable of polycaprolactone (PCL), a biodegradable polymer material, that spreads naturally throughout the face and around the eyes when injected into the skin, forming a three-dimensional matrix and causing collagen production.

With the launch of AMWC in September 2021, DEXLEVO is selling and contracting GOURI in more than 40 countries and will participate as a platinum sponsor in IMCAS 2022, to be held in Paris in June this year, to accelerate marketing activities and expand the global market.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220502005974/en/

DEXLEVO

Marketing Department

Chris Jeong

[email protected]

Source: DEXLEVO
With the publication of Shaping Place and a new website.

DURHAM, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Duda|Paine Architects, a premier international design firm, celebrates twenty-five years since its founding in 1997.

Turan Duda, FAIA, and Jeffrey Paine, FAIA, chose the Durham warehouse district as the site to grow their single studio practice. Today the culture and working dynamic founded by Duda and Paine have grown to include the leadership of Principals Russ Holcomb, AIA; Sanjeev Patel, AIA; Scott Shell, AIA; and Jay Smith, AIA. The work created by this collaborative group of thinkers and designers can be seen across the southeast and beyond. The firms staff includes U.S. and international employees from Brazil, Germany, Japan, India, China, Russia, Nigeria and South Africa.

The firms portfolio of commercial office towers has reframed the growing skylines of Raleigh/Durham, Charlotte, Austin, Dallas, Washington, Atlanta and El Paso in the U.S. and in Monterrey, Mexico. Signature designs for Pioneer Natural Resources, BlueCross BlueShield, Cox Companies, Time Warner Cable and NCR have redefined the way people work now and in the future. They have helped reimagine the iconic Research Triangle Park into a mixed-use, life science, office and retail/restaurant destination.

Its an honor to design multiple buildings within expanding urban centers, said Turan Duda, Founding Principal. We recently celebrated the opening of transformative projects in Austin, Atlanta and Raleigh.

The firms work for academic clients includes building design and master planning for Duke University, Emory University, N.C. State University, N.C. Central University, Appalachian State University, UNC Asheville, UNC Pembroke and the University of Central Florida. Duda|Paines student life centers are fostering new models of care, student services and campus resources for growing and diverse university populations.

Duda|Paine is also at the forefront of redefining the design of health, wellness and fitness facilities for communities and campuses. Their portfolio of wellness design promotes new models of holistic care and prevention across the southeast.

Shaping Place

Released in 2021, Shaping Place presents readers with the thematic origins of the firms collected designs for academic life, wellness, the new workplace and 21st century cities. The volume highlights the firms evolving work and practices since the 2013 publication of Individual to Collective.

We now have a history of what has resonated with our clients and what has brought us the most satisfaction as a team of people who came together to create better places, said Duda of the publication.

New Website

Duda|Paines new website features the latest insight into the firms approach and work as well as the latest noteworthy news and social media. The firm continues to be recognized with design and industry awards for its projects and practices, including the 2020 AIA Healthcare Design Award and AIA Triangle Merit Award for the Duke Student Wellness Center, a NAIOP Northern Virginia Office Award of Excellence for 1950 & 2000 Opportunity Way at Reston Gateway, and the Triangle Business Journal SPACE Award for 301 Hillsborough at Raleigh Crossing.

Entering our 25th year in business, said Jeff Paine, Founding Principal, we have established Duda|Paine as a leading international architectural design practice. The new website highlights our culture and our growing portfolio of award-winning work.

About Duda|Paine Architects

Duda|Paine Architects provides a full complement of design, interior design, architectural, planning and master planning services to a diverse array of international and national corporate, academic, wellness and cultural arts clients. The firms enduring success results from an idea-based design process that engages participants and fosters inspiration to achieve visionary built work. For additional information, please visit http://www.dudapaine.com.

About Shaping Place

In Shaping Place, founding principals Turan Duda, FAIA and Jeffrey Paine, FAIA, are joined by the firms four studio leaders to discuss the evolution of their work and thematic underpinnings since publication of their previous volume, Individual to Collective, in 2013. Steve Dumez, FAIA, of Eskew Dumez Ripple, provides perspective on the firms work within the larger lens of architectural practice. Shaping Place is available for purchase at Oro Editions.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220512005930/en/

Haley Meyer, [email protected]

Source: Duda|Paine Architects
WATERTOWN, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Markforged Holding Corporation (NYSE: MKFG) (the Company), creator of the integrated metal and carbon fiber additive manufacturing platform, The Digital Forge, today announced its results from the first quarter ended March 31, 2022.

Financial Highlights

Revenue increased by 8.6%, to $21.9 million, in the first quarter of 2022 from $20.1 million in the first quarter of 2021.

Gross margin was 53.1% in the first quarter of 2022 compared to 60.5% in the first quarter of 2021.

Non-GAAP gross margin was 53.6% in the first quarter of 2022 compared to 60.7% in the first quarter of 2021.

Net profit (loss) was a profit of $4.2 million in the first quarter of 2022, compared to a net loss of $10.0 million in the first quarter of 2021.

Non-GAAP profit (loss) was a loss of $15.5 million in the first quarter of 2022, compared to a loss of $7.8 million in the first quarter of 2021.

GAAP earnings per share was a profit of $0.02 for the first quarter of 2022, compared to a loss of $0.25 in the first quarter of 2021.

Non-GAAP earnings per share was a loss of $0.08 for the first quarter of 2022, compared to a loss of $0.20 in the first quarter of 2021.

Cash and cash equivalents were $269.1 million as of March 31, 2022.

Reconciliations of the non-GAAP financial measures provided in this press release to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in the financial tables included at the end of this press release. An explanation of these measures and how they are calculated is also included under the heading Non-GAAP Financial Measures.

Markforged is a differentiated player in additive manufacturing. We bring a strong balance sheet and a track record of execution to our industry. Our focus on high-value, end-use manufacturing applications, printed at the point of need, solves for todays extreme supply chain challenges, resulting in a growing install base and leading gross margins. We are accelerating organic product innovation as planned and increasing our addressable market. Im so proud of our team for their execution against our plan, said Shai Terem, President and CEO of Markforged. We also applaud the Biden administrations Additive Manufacturing Forward initiative, announced earlier this month, which we believe will help accelerate adoption of additive technologies and create more agile and resilient supply chains. Markforged is excited to be part of this important initiative to help strengthen American manufacturing.

Business Highlights

Production and delivery of Markforgeds newest printer, the FX20, continued as planned this quarter. The majority of shipments will occur in the second half of the year, but the printers already in the field are generating great feedback and increased interest. The FX20 will be showcased in North America for the first time next week at the Rapid + TCT 2022 trade show in Detroit.

The company launched Precise PLA in the first quarter as part of our strategy to expand our addressable market. This cost-effective, specialized version of polylactic acid enables our customers to use the Markforged solution for the full product lifecycle, from design through tooling and into production.

Subsequent to the quarter-end Markforged completed its acquisition of cloud-native software provider Teton Simulation Software. Tetons SmartSlice technology will be integrated into Markforgeds Eiger software as a subscription add-on, enabling customers to optimize and validate advanced composite parts for the most demanding production applications.

As part of Markforgeds long-term growth strategy, the Company made continued, yet measured, investments to accelerate innovation efforts in R&D and grow its go-to-market organization. The Markforged organization grew to over 400 team members this quarter.

2022 Guidance

Markforged reaffirms its full-year 2022 guidance. Revenue is expected to be within the range of $114-123 million, and non-GAAP gross margins are expected to be within the range of 55%-57%. Non-GAAP earnings per share results for the full year are expected to be a loss in the range of $0.28 - $0.31 per share, based on an outstanding share count of approximately 187 million shares.

Conference Call and Webcast Information

The Company will host a webcast and conference call at 5:00 p.m. ET today, Thursday, May 12, to discuss the results and other matters.

Participants may access the audio webcast by visiting the investors section of the Company's website at https://investors.markforged.com/.

To participate in the call, please dial 1-877-300-8521, or 1-412-317-6026 for international participants, ten minutes before the scheduled start.

For those unable to listen to the live conference call, a replay will be available on the Company's website and telephonically through May 26, 2022, by dialing 1-844-512-2921 (U.S. domestic) or 1-412-317-6671 (International), passcode 10165836.

About Markforged

Markforged (NYSE: MKFG) is reimagining how humans build everything by leading a technology-driven transformation of manufacturing with solutions for enterprises and societies throughout the world. The Markforged Digital Forge brings the power and speed of agile software development to industrial manufacturing, combining hardware, software, and materials to solve supply chain problems right at the point of need. Engineers, designers, and manufacturing professionals all over the world rely on Markforged metal and composite printers for tooling, fixtures, functional prototyping, and high-value end-use production. Markforged is headquartered in Watertown, Mass., where it designs its products with over 400 employees worldwide. To learn more, visit www.markforged.com.

Non-GAAP Financial Measures

In addition to our financial results determined in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), we believe that non-GAAP profit (loss), a non-GAAP financial measure, is useful in evaluating the performance of our business.

This non-GAAP measure has limitations as an analytical tool. We do not, nor do we suggest that investors should, consider such non-GAAP financial measures in isolation from, or as a substitute for, financial information prepared in accordance with GAAP. Investors should also note that the non-GAAP financial measures we use may not be the same non-GAAP financial measures, and may not be calculated in the same manner, as that of other companies, including other companies in our industry.

We recommend that you review the reconciliation of this non-GAAP measure to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure provided in the financial statement tables included below in this press release, and that you not rely on any single financial measure to evaluate our business.

Non-GAAP profit (loss)

We define non-GAAP profit (loss) as net profit (loss) and comprehensive income (loss) less stock-based compensation expense, net change in fair value of warrant liabilities and contingent earnout liabilities, and non-recurring transaction costs. We monitor non-GAAP profit (loss) as a measure of our overall business performance, which enables us to analyze our past and future performance without the effects of certain non-cash items and/or one-time charges. While we believe that non-GAAP profit (loss) is useful in evaluating our business, non-GAAP profit (loss) is a non-GAAP financial measure that has limitations as an analytical tool. Non-GAAP profit (loss) can be useful in evaluating our performance by eliminating the effect of certain non-cash expenses, such as stock-based compensation, however, we may incur such expenses in the future which could impact future results.

Special Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements that are based on beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available. 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 or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology, although not all forward-looking statements contain these words. 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 Markforged believes that it has a reasonable basis for each forward-looking statement contained in this press release, Markforged cautions you that these statements are based on a combination of facts and factors currently known by it and its projections of the future, about which it cannot be certain. Forward-looking statements in this press release include, but are not limited to, future growth rate, revenue and gross profit margin guidance; expected growth, the size of and opportunity to increase our addressable market; the anticipated benefits of the acquisition of Teton Simulation Software, the rate and extent of adoption of our products, including, but not limited to, our most recently introduced products; the effects of the global supply chain disruptions; the contributions of individual executive team members; and the benefits to consumers, functionality and applications of Markforgeds products. Markforged cannot assure you that the forward-looking statements in this press release will prove to be accurate. These forward looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including, among others, general economic, political and business conditions; the ability of Markforged to maintain its listing on the New York Stock Exchange; the effect of COVID-19 on Markforgeds business and financial results; the outcome of any legal proceedings against Markforged; and those factors discussed under the header Risk Factors in Markforgeds most recent periodic and other filings with the SEC. Furthermore, if the forward-looking statements prove to be inaccurate, the inaccuracy may be material. In light of the significant uncertainties in these forward-looking statements, you should not regard these statements as a representation or warranty by us or any other person that Markforged will achieve its objectives and plans in any specified time frame, or at all. The forward-looking statements in this press release represent Markforgeds views as of the date of this press release. Markforged anticipates that subsequent events and developments will cause its views to change. However, while Markforged may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, Markforged has no current intention of doing so except to the extent required by applicable law. You should, therefore, not rely on these forward-looking statements as representing Markforgeds views as of any date subsequent to the date of this press release.

MARKFORGED HOLDING CORPORATION CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEETS As of March 31, 2022 and December 31, 2021 (In thousands, except share data and par value amounts) (Unaudited) March 31,

2022 December 31,

2021 Assets Current assets Cash and cash equivalents $ 269,138 $ 288,603 Accounts receivable, net 22,806 26,777 Inventory 12,801 10,377 Prepaid expenses 3,636 3,921 Other current assets 1,887 511 Total current assets 310,268 330,189 Property and equipment, net 6,680 6,349 Right-of-use assets 11,702  Other assets 1,012 776 Total assets $ 329,662 $ 337,314 Liabilities and Stockholders Equity Current liabilities Accounts payable $ 6,653 $ 11,403 Accrued expenses 8,009 7,411 Deferred revenue 6,367 6,288 Operating lease liabilities 2,962  Other current liabilities 53 310 Total current liabilities 24,044 25,412 Long-term deferred revenue 3,808 3,742 Deferred rent  1,623 Contingent earnout liability 34,826 59,722 Long-term operating lease liabilities 10,621  Other liabilities 1,953 2,646 Total liabilities 75,252 93,145 Commitments and contingencies Stockholders equity Common stock, $0.0001 par value; 1,000,000,000 shares authorized at March 31, 2022 and December 31, 2021; 187,117,960 and 185,993,058 shares issued at March 31, 2022 and December 31, 2021, respectively 19 19 Additional paid-in capital 325,861 319,859 Accumulated deficit (71,470 ) (75,709 ) Total stockholders equity 254,410 244,169 Total liabilities and stockholders equity $ 329,662 $ 337,314

MARKFORGED HOLDING CORPORATION CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENTS OF OPERATIONS AND COMPREHENSIVE INCOME (LOSS) For the three months ended March 31, 2022 and 2021 (In thousands, except share data and per share data) (Unaudited) Three Months Ended March 31, 2022 2021 Revenue $ 21,859 $ 20,120 Cost of revenue 10,253 7,939 Gross profit 11,606 12,181 Operating expenses Sales and marketing 10,448 7,057 Research and development 10,567 5,259 General and administrative 11,743 8,863 Total operating expenses 32,758 21,179 Loss from operations (21,152 ) (8,998 ) Change in fair value of warrant liabilities 693 (1,010 ) Change in fair value of contingent earnout liability 24,896  Other expense (219 ) (13 ) Interest expense  (4 ) Interest income 20 2 Profit (loss) before income taxes 4,238 (10,023 ) Income tax benefit (1 ) (4 ) Net profit (loss) and comprehensive income (loss) $ 4,239 $ (10,019 ) Weighted average shares outstanding - basic 186,383,312 39,440,986 Weighted average shares outstanding - diluted 191,100,683 39,440,986 Net profit (loss) per share - basic $ 0.02 $ (0.25 ) Net profit (loss) per share - diluted 0.02 (0.25 )

MARKFORGED HOLDING CORPORATION RECONCILIATION OF GAAP TO NON-GAAP MEASURES For the three months and years ended March 31, 2022 and 2021 (In thousands) (Unaudited)  Three Months Ended

March 31,  2022 2021 Net profit (loss) and comprehensive income (loss)  $ 4,239 $ (10,019 ) Stock compensation expense  5,422 1,194 Change in fair value of warrant liabilities (693 ) 1,010 Change in fair value of contingent earnout liability (24,896 )  Transaction costs expensed  400  Non-GAAP loss 1  $ (15,528 ) $ (7,815 ) 1Stock-based compensation expense and transaction costs were included in the following GAAP consolidated statement of operations categories:

Three Months Ended March 31, 2022 2021 Cost of revenue $ 115 $ 27 Sales and marketing 848 84 Research and development 1,419 331 General and administrative 3,440 752 Total operating expense 5,707 1,167 Total adjustments $ 5,822 $ 1,194

MARKFORGED HOLDING CORPORATION DISAGGREGATED REVENUE BY NATURE OF PRODUCTS AND SERVICES (In thousands) (Unaudited) Three Months Ended March 31, (in thousands) 2022 2021 Hardware $ 14,517 $ 14,239 Consumables 5,456 4,617 Services 1,886 1,264 Total Revenue $ 21,859 $ 20,120

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Media

Paulina Bucko, Head of Communications

[email protected]

Austin Bohlig, Director of Investor Relations

[email protected]

Source: Markforged Holding Corporation
TAMPA, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Overseas Shipholding Group, Inc. (NYSE: OSG) (the Company or OSG) announces that its Annual Meeting of Stockholders will be held virtually on Wednesday, June 1, 2022 at 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time (ET). Any stockholder wishing to participate in the Annual Meeting may do so by means of remote communication. The Company determined to continue to hold its meeting virtually.

To participate in the Annual Meeting of Stockholders remotely, dial (844) 200-6205 for US/Canada callers and (929) 526-1599 for international callers and enter Access Code 885895. Please dial in ten minutes prior to the start of the call. Stockholders and other interested parties can listen to a live webcast of the Meeting from the Investor Relations section of the Companys website at www.osg.com. Stockholders can ask questions by using the call in option. The call is hosted by Q4 with a moderator who will provide instructions on how to ask a question when the Q&A section of the meeting is set to begin. If you are having technical difficulties in joining the meeting, you should email [email protected] and someone will be available to assist.

As noted in our Proxy Statement for the Meeting, it is possible to vote by telephone or over the Internet, and we urge you to vote as soon as possible by either of these methods. A stockholder who wishes to vote on the date of the Annual Meeting or who wishes to change his or her vote may do so by sending an email to [email protected] and attaching either your proxy card or your voting instruction form and the legal proxy provided by your bank, broker or other nominee. This information is necessary in order for your vote to be validated and counted. Your email must be submitted by 9:35 a.m. ET on Wednesday, June 1, 2022.

An audio replay of the Annual Meeting of Stockholders will be available starting at 11:00 a.m. ET on Wednesday, June 1, 2022 until June 8, 2022 by dialing (866) 813-9403 for US/Canada callers and (929) 458-6194 for international callers and entering Access Code 849003.

About Overseas Shipholding Group, Inc.

Overseas Shipholding Group, Inc. (NYSE: OSG) is a publicly traded company providing energy transportation services for crude oil and petroleum products in the U.S. Flag markets. OSG is a major operator of tankers and ATBs in the Jones Act industry. OSGs 22 vessel US Flag active fleet consists of three crude oil tankers doing business in Alaska, two conventional ATB, two lightering ATBs, three shuttle tankers, ten MR tankers, and two non-Jones Act MR tankers that participate in the U.S. Maritime Security Program. OSG also currently owns and operates one Marshall Islands flagged MR tanker which trades internationally.

OSG is committed to setting high standards of excellence for its quality, safety and environmental programs. OSG is recognized as one of the worlds most customer-focused marine transportation companies and is headquartered in Tampa, FL. More information is available at www.osg.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220512006097/en/

Investor Relations & Media Contact:

Susan Allan, Overseas Shipholding Group, Inc.

(813) 209-0620

[email protected]

Source: Overseas Shipholding Group, Inc.
SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- The Paper Excellence Group, a global diversified manufacturer of pulp and specialty, printing, writing, and packaging papers, today announced its subsidiary, Domtar Inc., has entered into an agreement with an affiliate of Kruger Specialty Papers Holding L.P. to sell its Kamloops pulp mill for an undisclosed amount.

When the Paper Excellence Group acquired Domtar on November 30, 2021 and entered into a Consent Agreement with the Commissioner of Competition (Canada), it agreed to sell Domtars pulp mill in Kamloops, British Columbia in order to resolve the Commissioners concerns about the Mergers implications on the purchase of wood fibre from the Thompson/Okanagan region in British Columbia. Once approved by the Commissioner, this transaction satisfies the requirements of the Consent Agreement.

The transaction is expected to close by the end of Q2.

Advisors

BMO Capital Markets served as exclusive financial advisor to Domtar, McMillan LLP served as legal advisors to the Paper Excellence Group, and KPMG served as tax advisors to Domtar.

ScotiaBank served as exclusive financial advisor to Kruger, and McCarthy Tetrault LLP served as legal advisors.

About Paper Excellence Group

The Paper Excellence Group, headquartered in Southern California, is a privately-held diversified manufacturer of pulp and specialty, printing and writing, and packaging papers, producing over 7 million tons annually with a workforce of over 10,000 in its nearly 40 locations across the Americas and Europe. Through its individual business units, the Group leverages its operational excellence and sustainable high-quality, cost-effective products to deliver high quality pulp and paper to its customers around the world. For more information on Paper Excellence, please visit www.paperexcellence.com. To learn more about Domtar, visit www.domtar.com.

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Domtar Investors & Media

David Struhs

Vice-President

Corporate Services & Sustainability

Tel.: 803-802-8031

Source: Paper Excellence Group
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Regulatory News:

Philip Morris International Inc. (PMI) (NYSE: PM) will host a live video webcast of the companys remarks and question-and-answer session by Emmanuel Babeau, Chief Financial Officer, at the 2022 Goldman Sachs Global Staples Forum at www.pmi.com/2022goldmansachs on Tuesday, May 17, 2022, at approximately 9:35 a.m. ET.

The webcast will provide a live video of the entire PMI session.

The webcast can also be accessed on iOS or Android devices by downloading PMIs free Investor Relations Mobile Application at www.pmi.com/irapp .

An archived copy of the webcast will be available at www.pmi.com/2022goldmansachs until 5:00 p.m. ET on Wednesday, June 15, 2022.

Presentation slides will be available on the same site.

Philip Morris International: Delivering a Smoke-Free Future

Philip Morris International (PMI) is a leading international tobacco company working to deliver a smoke-free future and evolving its portfolio for the long term to include products outside of the tobacco and nicotine sector. The companys current product portfolio primarily consists of cigarettes and smoke-free products, including heat-not-burn, vapor and oral nicotine products, which are sold in markets outside the U.S. Since 2008, PMI has invested more than USD 9 billion to develop, scientifically substantiate and commercialize innovative smoke-free products for adults who would otherwise continue to smoke, with the goal of completely ending the sale of cigarettes. This includes the building of world-class scientific assessment capabilities, notably in the areas of pre-clinical systems toxicology, clinical and behavioral research, as well as post-market studies. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized the marketing of versions of PMIs IQOS Platform 1 devices and consumables as Modified Risk Tobacco Products (MRTPs), finding that exposure modification orders for these products are appropriate to promote the public health. As of March 31, 2022, PMI's smoke-free products are available for sale in 71 markets, and PMI estimates that approximately 12.7 million adults around the world excluding Russia and Ukraine, have already switched to IQOS and stopped smoking. With a strong foundation and significant expertise in life sciences, in February 2021 PMI announced its ambition to expand into wellness and healthcare areas and deliver innovative products and solutions that aim to address unmet consumer and patient needs. For more information, please visit www.pmi.com and www.pmiscience.com.

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Philip Morris International

Investor Relations:

New York: +1 (917) 663 2233

Lausanne: +41 (0)58 242 4666

Email: [email protected]



Media: David Fraser

Lausanne: +41 (0)58 242 4500

Email: [email protected]

Source: Philip Morris International
Geisler Named APS President; Cooper Appointed CFO

PHOENIX--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Pinnacle West Capital Corporation today announced that Ted Geisler has been promoted to president of Arizona Public Service Co. (APS), the companys principal subsidiary, effective May 16.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220512005370/en/

Ted Geisler has been promoted to president of Arizona Public Service Co. (APS), the principal subsidiary of Pinnacle West Capital Corporation, effective May 16. Geisler, who currently serves as senior vice president and chief financial officer for both Pinnacle West and APS, will be succeeded in those roles by Andrew Cooper, current vice president and treasurer. Geisler began his career at APS in 2001 in generation and has served in a variety of roles throughout the company. He was elevated from vice president and chief information officer to his current position as senior vice president and chief financial officer in January 2020. His other leadership roles include general manager of transmission and distribution operations, as well as director responsibilities for investor relations, corporate strategy and transmission operations. He also has experience in renewable energy and energy trading. (Photo: Business Wire)

Geisler, who currently serves as senior vice president and chief financial officer for both Pinnacle West and APS, will be succeeded in those roles by Andrew Cooper, current vice president and treasurer. Both individuals will report directly to Jeff Guldner, PNW chairman, president and chief executive officer and APS chairman and CEO.

Returning to separate CEO and president roles within APS allows us to consolidate our core utility functions, specifically non-nuclear operations, public policy, technology, customer experience and strategy, said Guldner. In turn, this move will enable greater internal and external stakeholder collaboration that ensures we execute our mission to serve more than 1.3 million customers.

Teds well-rounded utility experience is valued by me and the board. Our company and industry face complex and exciting challenges, and this new structure sets us up to address those challenges with customer-centric solutions and to fulfill our promise to do whats right for the people and prosperity of our state.

Geisler began his career at APS in 2001 in generation and has served in a variety of roles throughout the company. He was elevated from vice president and chief information officer to his current position as senior vice president and chief financial officer in January 2020. His other leadership roles include general manager of transmission and distribution operations, as well as director responsibilities for investor relations, corporate strategy and transmission operations. He also has experience in renewable energy and energy trading.

Geisler earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Colorado State University and an MBA with an emphasis on strategy from Arizona State University. A Phoenix native, he is engaged in the community, currently serving on the board of Chicanos Por La Causa and volunteering with Hunkapi Programs, which provides equine therapy to children.

APS is a terrific company with a long history of service, said Geisler. I am grateful to Jeff for his confidence and support, and humbled to continue serving our employees, our customers and communities to create a sustainable energy future for Arizona.

Newly promoted CFO Cooper joined Pinnacle West and APS in 2020 as vice president and treasurer after serving as director of corporate finance at Consolidated Edison Company of New York. He began his career as an investment banker, including more than a decade at Barclays serving clients in the power and utilities industry. A New York native, Cooper earned a bachelors degree in government with citation in Spanish from Harvard College. He went on to earn his law degree from Harvard Law School. Cooper serves on the board of directors for Valle del Sol.

Pinnacle West Capital Corp., an energy holding company based in Phoenix, has consolidated assets of approximately $22 billion, about 6,300 megawatts of generating capacity and nearly 5,900 employees in Arizona and New Mexico. Through its principal subsidiary, Arizona Public Service, the company provides retail electricity service to more than 1.3 million Arizona homes and businesses. For more information about Pinnacle West, visit the companys website at pinnaclewest.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220512005370/en/

Media Contact:

Alan Bunnell (602) 250-3376

Analyst Contact:

Amanda Ho (602) 250-3334

Website:

pinnaclewest.com

Source: Pinnacle West Capital Corporation
International Paper (NYSE: IP) announced today that Sharon R. Ryan, Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, will retire effective June 30, 2022.

"Sharon has been an exceptional business partner and mentor throughout her 34 years of service," said International Paper Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Mark S. Sutton. "I appreciate all her accomplishments and contributions and wish her health and happiness in the years ahead."

Ryan joined the Company in 1988 and was elected Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary in 2011. She previously served in a variety of legal roles, including as Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer. She has been honored for her many contributions in the community, most recently for establishing the IP Signature Pro Bono Initiative, which advocates for equal justice for people who lack access and resources.

Joseph R. Saab has been elected Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary effective July 1, 2022. After working several years as an environmental lawyer, Saab joined the Company in 2001 as legal counsel for Environment, Health and Safety. Since then, he has served in a number of roles in the legal department, including chief counsel, Global Governance and Compliance, and general counsel, Papers the Americas. In 2014, he was named Associate General Counsel for Industrial Packaging and Latin America and his responsibilities were expanded to include EMEA and Russia in 2018. In 2019, he was appointed Vice President, Deputy General Counsel and Assistant Corporate Secretary and his recent responsibilities have included Enterprise Corporate Law and Operational Excellence, as well as overseeing support for and advising the Board of Directors.

"Throughout his time with IP, Joe has proven himself to be an effective and capable leader," stated Sutton. "I have every confidence that he will provide the legal expertise and leadership we need as he takes on this new role and joins our senior lead team."
Washington, DC, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Global Down Syndrome Foundation's (GLOBAL) annual AcceptAbility Gala will take place on May 24, 2022 at the Marriott Marquis Washington, DC, beginning at 6:00pm EST. The event will raise critical funds and awareness for life-changing research and medical care for people with Down syndrome.

Senator Steve Daines (R-MT) and Senator John Hickenlooper (D-CO) will receive GLOBALs highest honor  the Quincy Jones Exceptional Advocacy Award  in recognition of their dedication, support and advocacy efforts. Jonah Berger will be recognized as GLOBALs 2022 Ambassador.

Kyra Phillips, an award-winning ABC journalist, and John Roberts, co-anchor of America Reports on Fox News, will emcee the event. The gala will also feature live performances from the popular rock band, American Authors, the inclusive dance troupe, RhythmXpress, and Robert Wallop, a professional dancer with Down syndrome. Celebrities such as Olympic Champion Elana Meyers Taylor will also join the inspirational event.

GLOBAL is the leading Down syndrome research and medical care non-profit in the United States. The AcceptAbility Gala honors GLOBALs champions and celebrates the contributions of people with Down syndrome.

###

About Global Down Syndrome Foundation

The Global Down Syndrome Foundation (GLOBAL) is the largest non-profit in the U.S. working to save lives and dramatically improve health outcomes for people with Down syndrome. GLOBAL has donated more than $32 million to establish the first Down syndrome research institute supporting over 400 scientists and over 2,000 patients with Down syndrome from 33 states and 10 countries. Working closely with Congress and the National Institutes of Health, GLOBAL is the lead advocacy organization in the U.S. for Down syndrome research and care. GLOBAL has a membership of over 120 Down syndrome organizations worldwide, and is part of a network of Affiliates  the Crnic Institute for Down Syndrome, the Sie Center for Down Syndrome, and the University of Colorado Alzheimers and Cognition Center  all on the Anschutz Medical Campus.

GLOBALs widely circulated medical publications include Global Medical Care Guidelines for Adults with Down Syndrome, Prenatal Testing and Information about Down Syndrome, and the award-winning magazine Down Syndrome WorldTM. GLOBAL also organizes the Be Beautiful Be Yourself Fashion Show, the largest Down syndrome fundraiser in the world. Visit globaldownsyndrome.org and follow us on social media (Facebook & Twitter: @GDSFoundation, Instagram: @globaldownsyndrome).

Attachment

Anca Call Global Down Syndrome Foundation (720) 320-3832 [email protected] Cora Mandy Plus Communications (203) 980-1940 [email protected]

Source: Global Down Syndrome Foundation
NASHVILLE, Tenn., May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Archer Datacenters, LLC and its affiliates (Archer) announced the launch of a joint venture with Evoque, a portfolio company of Brookfield Infrastructure Partners. Evoque will provide ongoing development and management services for Archers Nashville Hyperscale campus (Archer Nashville).

Archers Nashville campus presents a unique opportunity in the broader Nashville metropolitan area and Central Southeast region that to date has been underserved by digital infrastructure, despite robust population and economic growth over the past decade.

With highly favorable demographic tailwinds, an attractive business climate, and a diverse base of local, national and global enterprises, the Nashville metropolitan area has become one of the fastest growing economic engines in the country. According to the 2020 U.S. Census, the Nashville metropolitan area population grew by 19.1% between 2010 and 2020, compared to the national average rate of 6.7%. A highly educated workforce and an attractive cost of doing business relative to other large metropolitan areas has led to billions of dollars of investments in relocations and expansions by companies across the technology, financial services, and healthcare industries. These include institutions such as Amazon, Oracle, Meta, Google, Alliance Bernstein, Ernst & Young, Vanderbilt University, HCA Healthcare, Dollar General, Asurion, Nissan North America, Bridgestone Americas, and General Motors.

As part of its focus on strategic, emerging markets, Archer identified Nashville as an attractive data center market opportunity in 2018 and purchased a 28.5-acre land parcel approximately 35 miles from downtown Nashville in Gallatin, Tennessee. With an electrical substation adjacent to the parcel and access to scaled power and diverse connectivity routes, the location is ideal for a data center campus designed to serve the regions growing colocation and hyperscale demand. Over the past few years, Archers market vision has been validated through the launch of a $600 million hyperscale data center campus by Google and a $1 billion+ data center campus by Meta, the latter of which is located adjacent to the Archer Nashville campus in Gallatin.

The strategic partnership with Evoque aligns Archer with a world-class data center developer and operator to accelerate the expansion of its Nashville campus. Given the existing 82,000 square foot data center shell, the partnership believes it can now offer the fastest time to market of any scaled capacity option in the broader region. In addition to the initial facility, the campus provides flexibility for multiple additional buildings to support both single tenant as well as multi-tenant colocation facilities. The project is scalable both on the existing site as well as an adjacent 32.5-acre parcel that is expected to be purchased imminently. The substation is run by Gallatin Department of Electricity (GDE) with current access to 40MW of utility power. Long-term expandability of 100+MW is also possible in concert with the continuously updated transmission capacity of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the largest public utility in the nation.

TVAs commitment to modernizing its renewable energy portfolio, bringing substantial generation resources to the region for data centers, is a large part of what initially attracted Archer to the region. Archer has worked with the TVA to structure renewable energy solutions that will continue to evolve as the industry matures. Evoques parent company Brookfield has a substantial portfolio of renewable energy assets (including within the TVAs jurisdiction). The partnership has a staunch commitment to sustainability.

The campus is well-connected across the local Nashville metropolitan area and nationally through robust on and near-net access to multiple enterprise-grade fiber providers including Lumen, Zayo, Windstream, AT&T, Comcast and CEMC. Lumen, in particular, is on-net and capable of offering dark fiber solutions to the site with up to 100G in bandwidth capacity.

We are pleased to have realized another milestone in our vision for Nashville. Thanks to local partners including GDE, Gallatin Economic Development Agency and TVA, we are now in a position to help deliver the premier scalable, sustainable, and fastest-to-market data center campus in the Nashville metropolitan area. We look forward to a long-term partnership with Evoque as we continue to focus on renewable energy and sustainability-driven opportunities in other strategic, underserved markets around the country, said Jordan Milman, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman at Archer Datacenters.

Evoque is thrilled to build upon Archers vision and continue developing a regional data center hub for enterprise and hyperscale to connect and scale, said Andy Stewart, Chief Executive Officer at Evoque. Our team is committed to making Evoque Nashvilles data center campus a best-in-breed, customer centric solution that delivers the security, performance, and sustainability that data center customers demand.

"TVA and Gallatin Department of Electricity congratulate Archer Datacenters and Evoque on their decision to collaborate in Gallatin, Tennessee. Helping to attract jobs and investment to the region by providing low-cost, clean, reliable energy is fundamental to TVAs mission of service. We are proud to partner with the City of Gallatin and Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development to further that mission by supporting companies like Archer and Evoque, and we celebrate this announcement together, said John Bradley, TVA Senior Vice President of Economic Development.

We are proud to have advised Archer Datacenters on this marquee strategic partnership that we believe will benefit all parties involved and bring critical infrastructure to the broader Nashville region in a sustainable manner, said Irtiaz Ahmad, Managing Director at Solomon Partners Securities LLC.

Solomon Partners Securities, LLC served as exclusive financial advisor and placement agent to Archer Datacenters on the transaction, while Goodwin Procter LLP and Carter Shelton, PLC served as legal counsel. Seyfarth Shaw LLP and Mayer Brown LLP served as legal counsel for Evoque.

About Archer Datacenters

Founded in 2018, Archer Datacenters is a data center platform established to address the growing demand to process, store, and transmit digital information. Archer is focused on identifying, acquiring and developing greenfield data center opportunities with access to cost-efficient renewable energy in strategic, emerging markets across the U.S. that are currently underserved by the wholesale market. Archer provides flexible and customizable solutions for our customers with a focus on secure, scalable, flexible wholesale colocation data centers that facilitate hybrid IT strategies. Archers inaugural project is a greenfield Hyperscale development campus outside Nashville, which features a strategic joint venture partnership with Evoque Digital Infrastructure Evolved, a portfolio company of Brookfield Infrastructure Partners. Archer was founded by Jordan Milman, who currently serves as its Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and David Bartholomai currently serves as its Chief Operating Officer.

About Evoque

Evoque Digital Infrastructure Evolved, based in Dallas, offers local and global businesses an unparalleled range of services and solutions across highly connected markets. Evoque provides companies with a unified offering of colocation, connectivity, and cloud engineering. Evoques market-first Multi-Generational Infrastructure (MGI) strategy enables its clients worldwide to develop and utilize both reliable colocation and hybrid cloud offerings for all businesses taking an application-first approach. Evoque delivers a combination of connectivity, security, and redundancy that leaders increasingly require in their digital transformation initiatives. The company supports a diversified base of mid- to large-size enterprise and hyperscale customers across multiple segments, helping them comply with regulations like HIPAA, NIST, ISO and more. Evoque is a portfolio company of Brookfield Infrastructure Partners, a leading global infrastructure asset manager that owns and operates high-quality, long-life assets in the utilities, transport, midstream and data sectors across North and South America, Asia Pacific and Europe. Visit https://www.evoquedcs.com/ for more information.

CONTACT Jordan Milman  Founder & Chairman of Archer Datacenters, LLC[email protected]

Source: Archer Datacenters
REGULATED INFORMATION





Mont-Saint-Guibert, Belgium, 12 May 2022, 7am CEST  BONE THERAPEUTICS (Euronext Brussels and Paris: BOTHE), the cell therapy company addressing unmet medical needs in orthopedics and other diseases, today announces it has entered into a non-binding term sheet and exclusive discussions for a period of three months with the shareholders of Medsenic, a privately held, clinical stage biopharmaceutical company incorporated in France and specialized in the development of optimized formulations of arsenic salts and their application in inflammatory conditions and other potential new indications.

The objective of the discussions is to explore the benefits of a potential reverse merger or a similar transaction whereby all shareholders of Medsenic would individually contribute fifty-one percent (51%) of the total outstanding share capital of Medsenic into the capital of Bone Therapeutics in exchange for a certain number of shares issued by Bone Therapeutics (the "Business Combination"). The objective of the parties is that, as a result of the Business Combination, Bone Therapeutics would remain a Belgian listed company and own fifty-one percent (51%) of the share capital of Medsenic.

Based on the current information available and subject to due diligence, the parties expect that immediately after closing of the Business Combination, approximately 80% of the total outstanding share capital of Bone Therapeutics shall be held by the shareholders of Medsenic. Parties however agreed that subscription rights of Bone Therapeutics shall be offered to all its existing shareholders but not to the Medsenic shareholders. The terms and conditions of such subscription rights still need to be agreed by the Parties. The final valuation of both companies and exchange ratio shall be further discussed between Medsenic and Bone Therapeutics and confirmed by its auditor, on the basis of mutually accepted external valuations.

If this Business Combination were to materialize, which is not certain at the moment, the combined company would create a fully integrated biopharmaceutical company with a diverse therapeutic portfolio targeting a broad array of inflammatory and orthopedic indications. The Business Combination would offer economic and financial benefits and synergies especially in clinical development as both companies shall together have several mid to advanced stage clinical trials ongoing in lupus, chronic graft-versus-host disease, tibial fractures and other indications. In addition to the Bone Therapeutics ongoing controlled phase IIb study in difficult fractures, Medsenic just completed a successful phase II study and plans to soon submit for a phase III pivotal study in Graft versus Host Disease.

Bone Therapeutics and Medsenic aim to reach an agreement in the course of Q2/Q3 2022, subject to regulatory control clearance, the outcome of due diligence, shareholders' approval and other customary conditions precedent. Further announcements on the final structure and terms of the Business Combination will be made in due course, if and when the final documentation regarding the potential Business Combination is approved or if circumstances so allow or require.

This public announcement does not constitute an offer, or any solicitation of any offer, to buy or subscribe for any securities in Bone Therapeutics.





About Medsenic SAS

Medsenic innovates and exploits the new possibilities offered by the therapeutic use of arsenic trioxide in several autoimmune diseases and is currently in clinical trials in Europe. The company was founded in 2010 by Francois Rieger, former Director of Research at the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research) and author of more than 170 international scientific publications, and Veronique Pomi-Schneiter, former founder and manager of a consulting company specializing in human resources, communication and development strategy. Under the aegis of a high-level scientific board, chaired by the 2011 Nobel Prize in Medicine Jules Hoffman, a specialist in innate immunology, and supported by numerous private investors, Medsenic accelerated its development in 2016 with the arrival of professional investors. Further information is available at www.medsenic.com.





About Bone Therapeutics

Bone Therapeutics is a leading biotech company focused on the development of innovative products to address high unmet needs in orthopedics and other diseases. Currently Bone Therapeutics is concentrating specifically on the development of its most advanced clinical asset, the allogeneic cell therapy platform, ALLOB.

Bone Therapeutics core technology is based on its cutting-edge allogeneic cell and gene therapy platform with differentiated bone marrow sourced Mesenchymal Stromal Cells (MSCs) which can be stored at the point of use in the hospital. Its leading investigational medicinal product, ALLOB, represents a unique, proprietary approach to bone regeneration, which turns undifferentiated stromal cells from healthy donors into bone-forming cells. These cells are produced via the Bone Therapeutics scalable manufacturing process. Following the CTA approval by regulatory authorities in Europe, the Company has initiated patient recruitment for the Phase IIb clinical trial with ALLOB in patients with difficult tibial fractures, using its optimized production process. ALLOB continues to be evaluated for other orthopedic indications including spinal fusion, osteotomy, maxillofacial and dental.

Bone Therapeutics cell therapy products are manufactured to the highest GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices) standards and are protected by a broad IP (Intellectual Property) portfolio covering ten patent families as well as knowhow. The Company is based in the Louvain-la-Neuve Science Park in Mont-Saint-Guibert, Belgium. Further information is available at www.bonetherapeutics.com.





For further information, please contact:

Bone Therapeutics SA

Miguel Forte, MD, PhD, Chief Executive Officer

Tel: +32 (0)493 09 73 66

[email protected]

For Belgian Media and Investor Enquiries:

Bepublic

Bert Bouserie

Tel: +32 (0)488 40 44 77

[email protected]

International Media Enquiries:

Image Box Communications

Neil Hunter / Michelle Boxall

Tel: +44 (0)20 8943 4685

[email protected] / [email protected]

For French Media and Investor Enquiries:

NewCap Investor Relations & Financial Communications

Pierre Laurent, Louis-Victor Delouvrier and Arthur Rouille

Tel: +33 (0)1 44 71 94 94

[email protected]





Certain statements, beliefs and opinions in this press release are forward-looking, which reflect the Company or, as appropriate, the Company directors current expectations and projections about future events. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. These risks, uncertainties and assumptions could adversely affect the outcome and financial effects of the plans and events described herein. A multitude of factors including, but not limited to, changes in demand, competition and technology, can cause actual events, performance or results to differ significantly from any anticipated development. Forward looking statements contained in this press release regarding past trends or activities should not be taken as a representation that such trends or activities will continue in the future. As a result, the Company expressly disclaims any obligation or undertaking to release any update or revisions to any forward-looking statements in this press release as a result of any change in expectations or any change in events, conditions, assumptions or circumstances on which these forward-looking statements are based. Neither the Company nor its advisers or representatives nor any of its subsidiary undertakings or any such persons officers or employees guarantees that the assumptions underlying such forward-looking statements are free from errors nor does either accept any responsibility for the future accuracy of the forward-looking statements contained in this press release or the actual occurrence of the forecasted developments. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this press release.
NEW YORK, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Boxed (NYSE: BOXD) (Boxed or the Company), an e-commerce grocery platform that sells bulk consumables and licenses its e-commerce software to enterprise retailers, today announced a new multi-year collaboration with FedEx Corp (NYSE: FDX), in which the carrier will now deliver most of Boxeds customer shipments.

The mutually agreed upon increase in shipment volume will allow Boxed to reduce the amount it spends on transportation across all its fulfillment centers. The company will reinvest the capital saved in better pricing for customers and more promotions on the products they love. In addition, more Boxed customers will have access to seven day a week service.

In this challenging supply chain environment, e-commerce companies are seeking new avenues to counter escalating costs, and provide the best possible service to their customers, said Boxed CEO Chieh Huang. This enhanced alliance with FedEx provides us with the opportunity to address both.

Boxed and FedEx have enjoyed a strong relationship since the company first started shipping orders in 2013., Boxed will increase its shipping capabilities by fully leveraging the FedEx network, and provide even better service to customers.

The commitment from FedEx will help Boxed grow its retail business and provide a consistent delivery experience throughout the country.

The collaboration between FedEx and Boxed demonstrates how e-Commerce providers and shipping companies can craft new solutions to collectively meet our customers new demands and needs today and tomorrow, said Ryan Kelly, vice president E-Commerce, SAM & Retail Marketing, FedEx. Were proud of this alliance and look forward to enabling Boxed and its retailers access to supply chain flexibility and capability that is unrivaled in the marketplace. It is whats next for businesses of all sizes.

About Boxed

Boxed is an e-commerce retailer and an e-commerce enabler. The Company operates an e-commerce retail service that provides bulk pantry consumables to businesses and household customers, without the requirement of a big-box store membership. This service is powered by the Companys own purpose-built storefront, marketplace, analytics, fulfillment, advertising, and robotics technologies. Boxed further enables e-commerce through its Software & Services business, which offers customers in need of an enterprise-level e-commerce platform access to its end-to-end technology. The Company has developed a powerful, unique brand, known for doing right by its customers, employees and society. For more information visit www.boxed.com.

Media Contact

Dave Taft[email protected](732) 895-8238

Source: Boxed, Inc.
CALGARY, Alberta, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Canacol Energy Ltd. (Canacol or the Corporation) (TSX:CNE; OTCQX:CNNEF; BVC: CNEC) is pleased to report its financial and operating results for the three months ended March 31, 2022. Dollar amounts are expressed in United States dollars, with the exception of Canadian dollar unit prices (C$) where indicated and otherwise noted.

Highlights for the three months ended March 31, 2022

Realized contractual natural gas sales volumes increased 2% to 181.8 MMscfpd for the three months ended March 31, 2022, compared to 177.6 MMscfpd for the same period in 2021. Average natural gas production volumes increased 2% to 183.1 MMscfpd for the three months ended March 31, 2022, compared to 179.5 MMscfpd for the same period in 2021. The increase is mainly due to an increase of natural gas sales volumes contracted under firm contracts in 2022.

Total natural gas revenues, net of royalties and transportation expenses increased 10% to $64.3 million for the three months ended March 31, 2022, compared to $58.2 million for the same period in 2021, mainly due to an increase in natural gas production and an increase the average sales prices, net of transportation expenses.

The Corporation realized a net income of $24.4 million for the three months ended March 31, 2022, compared to a net loss of $3.1 million for the same period in 2021. The non-cash deferred tax expense recognized of $11.3 million resulted in a net loss during the three months ended March 31, 2021, compared to a deferred tax recovery of $12.2 million recognized during the three months ended March 31, 2022. The fluctuation of deferred taxes was primarily due to the effect of the Colombian Peso (COP) foreign exchange rate on the value of unused tax losses and cost pools.

EBITDAX increased 6% to $49.6 million for the three months ended March 31, 2022, compared to $46.7 million for the same period in 2021.

Adjusted funds from operations decreased 12% to $33.8 million for the three months ended March 31, 2022, compared to $38.3 million for the same period in 2021. The decrease is mainly due to higher current tax expense for the three months ended March 31, 2022, offset by higher revenues, net of royalties and transportation expenses.

The Corporations natural gas operating netback increased 7% to $3.58 per Mcf in the three months ended March 31, 2022, compared to $3.36 per Mcf for the same period in 2021. The increase is mainly due to an increase in average sales prices, net of transportation expenses. The increase in operating netback was offset by higher operating expenses per Mcf of $0.36 per Mcf during the three months ended March 31, 2022, compared to $0.28 per Mcf for the same period in 2021, mainly due to higher maintenance costs.

Net capital expenditures for the three months ended March 31, 2022 were $26.6 million. Net capital expenditures included non-cash adjustments related mainly to decommissioning obligations and right-of-use leased assets of $2.5 million for the three months ended March 31, 2022.

As at March 31, 2022, the Corporation had $126.1 million in cash and cash equivalents and $130.3 million in working capital surplus.

Sustainability

Canacol continues to be committed to strengthening its environmental, social and governance (ESG) strategy. Canacol enthusiastically supports global goals to meet the Paris Agreement targets as well as Colombias commitment to a 51% reduction in emissions by 2030, of which natural gas will play a crucial role in a fair and equitable energy transition. The Corporations objective on ESG matters is to improve the quality of life of millions of people through the exploration, production and supply of conventional natural gas in Colombia. Alongside this, the Corporation is focused on generating value for its stakeholders in a sustainable, collaborative, co-responsible, respectful and transparent way. With the Corporations transition to natural gas, it now has an environmentally friendly value proposition that contributes to the reduction of CO2 emissions in Colombia and provides for a more efficient use of resources.

The Corporation continues to support its communities in essential social projects such as access to water and utilities, productive projects, construction and improvement of public and community infrastructure, technical and university scholarships amongst others.

The Corporation has strong corporate governance standards and procedures, which are aligned with best global practices and trends, and uses control mechanisms that protect shareholders interests, respect and promote human rights, guarantee ethical behavior and integrity and ensure regulatory compliance.

For 2022 and beyond, the Corporation is committed to continue developing and maintaining a robust ESG strategy and, as such, is implementing a six-year plan with the following four priorities:

A cleaner energy future - deliver natural gas under the highest environmental and operational efficiency standards. A safe and committed team - maintain best-in-class health and safety practices and promote a diverse and inclusive culture. Transparent and ethical business - adopt the best practices, encourage respect for human rights and ensure ethics and integrity in practices Canacol does. Sustainable development - promote and maintain close and transparent relationships that guarantee communities growth and quality of life.

The Corporation plans to announce its short- and medium-term carbon emission reduction targets prior to the end of 2022, together with a projected timeline for achieving net-zero emissions. In the meantime, the Corporation strives to achieve scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions intensities that are at least 40% lower on average than gas focused peers (and 90% lower on average than oil focused peers) in North and South America.

Outlook

For the remainder of 2022, the Corporation is focused on the following objectives: 1) drilling of up to a total of twelve exploration and development wells in a continuous program, of which four wells were drilled in Q1 2022, targeting a 2P reserves replacement ratio of more than 200% and a 2P RLI of 9.3 years; 2) acquisition of 470 square kilometers of 3D seismic on the Corporations VIM-5 block to expand its exploration prospect inventory; 3) purchase of rental facilities equipment and the installation of gas compression to lower operating expenses and increase recovery factors, respectively; 4) selection of a contractor for the new gas pipeline from Jobo to Medellin, which will add 100 MMscfpd (with expansion potential up to 200 MMscfpd) of new gas sales to the interior in late 2024, resulting in Canacol being responsible for 30% (up to 40%) of Colombias domestic gas supply; 5) continuing the return of capital to shareholders in the form of dividends and common share buybacks; and 6) continue with the Corporations commitment to its ESG strategy and achievement of scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions intensities that are at least 40% lower on average than its gas focused peers (and 90% lower on average than oil focused peers) in North and South America.

FINANCIAL & OPERATING HIGHLIGHTS

(in United States dollars (tabular amounts in thousands) except as otherwise noted)

Financial Three months ended March 31, 2022 2021 Change Total natural gas, LNG and crude oil revenues, net of royalties and transportation expense 73,667 65,818 12% Net income (loss) and comprehensive income (loss) 24,415 (3,062 ) n/a Per share  basic ($) 0.14 (0.02 ) n/a Per share  diluted ($) 0.14 (0.02 ) n/a Adjusted EBITDAX(1) 49,624 46,716 6% Cash flow provided by operating activities 38,063 37,900  Per share  basic ($) 0.22 0.21 5% Per share  diluted ($) 0.22 0.21 5% Adjusted Funds from operations(1) 33,816 38,286 (12%) Per share  basic ($)(1) 0.20 0.21 (5%) Per share  diluted ($)(1) 0.20 0.21 (5%) Weighted average shares outstanding  basic 172,451 179,515 (4%) Capital expenditures, net of dispositions 26,643 27,844 (4%) Mar 31, 2022 Dec 31, 2021 Change Cash and cash equivalents 126,083 138,523 (9%) Working capital surplus 130,325 148,124 (12%) Total debt 559,295 557,709  Total assets 854,711 843,760 1% Common shares, end of period (000s) 170,859 176,167 (3%) Operating Three months ended March 31, 2022 2021 Change Production(1) Natural gas and LNG (MMscfpd) 183,130 179,474 2% Colombia oil (bopd) 428 256 67% Total (boepd) 32,556 31,743 3% Realized contractual sales(1) Natural gas and LNG (MMscfpd) 181,813 177,633 2% Colombia oil (bopd) 412 307 34% Total (boepd) 32,309 31,471 3% Operating netbacks(1) Natural gas and LNG ($/Mcf) 3.58 3.36 7% Colombia oil ($/bopd) 14.23 34.06 (58%) Corporate ($/boe) 20.33 19.33 5%

(1) Non-IFRS measures  see Non-IFRS Measures section within the MD&A.

This press release should be read in conjunction with the Corporations interim condensed consolidated financial statements and related Managements Discussion and Analysis (MD&A). The Corporations has filed its interim condensed consolidated financial statements and related MD&A as at and for the three months ended March 31, 2022 with Canadian securities regulatory authorities. These filings are available for review on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

About Canacol

Canacol is a natural gas exploration and production company with operations focused in Colombia. The Corporations shares are traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol CNE, the OTCQX in the United States of America under the symbol CNNEF and the Bolsa de Valores de Colombia under the symbol CNEC.

Forward-Looking Information and Statements

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities law. Forward-looking statements are frequently characterized by words such as plan, expect, project, target, intend, believe, anticipate, estimate and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions may or will occur, including without limitation statements relating to estimated production rates from the Corporations properties and intended work programs and associated timelines. Forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management at the date the statements are made and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. The Corporation cannot assure that actual results will be consistent with these forward looking statements. They are made as of the date hereof and are subject to change and the Corporation assumes no obligation to revise or update them to reflect new circumstances, except as required by law. Information and guidance provided herein supersedes and replaces any forward looking information provided in prior disclosures. Prospective investors should not place undue reliance on forward looking statements. These factors include the inherent risks involved in the exploration for and development of crude oil and natural gas properties, the uncertainties involved in interpreting drilling results and other geological and geophysical data, fluctuating energy prices, the possibility of cost overruns or unanticipated costs or delays and other uncertainties associated with the oil and gas industry. Other risk factors could include risks associated with negotiating with foreign governments as well as country risk associated with conducting international activities, and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of the Corporation. Other risks are more fully described in the Corporations most recent Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) and Annual Information Form, which are incorporated herein by reference and are filed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Average production figures for a given period are derived using arithmetic averaging of fluctuating historical production data for the entire period indicated and, accordingly, do not represent a constant rate of production for such period and are not an indicator of future production performance. Detailed information in respect of monthly production in the fields operated by the Corporation in Colombia is provided by the Corporation to the Ministry of Mines and Energy of Colombia and is published by the Ministry on its website; a direct link to this information is provided on the Corporations website. References to net production refer to the Corporations working-interest production before royalties.

Use of Non-IFRS Financial Measures - Such supplemental measures should not be considered as an alternative to, or more meaningful than, the measures as determined in accordance with IFRS as an indicator of the Corporations performance, and such measures may not be comparable to that reported by other companies. This press release also provides information on adjusted funds from operations. Adjusted funds from operations is a measure not defined in IFRS. It represents cash provided by operating activities before changes in non-cash working capital, settlement of a litigation settlement liability and decommissioning obligation expenditures. The Corporation considers funds from operations a key measure as it demonstrates the ability of the business to generate the cash flow necessary to fund future growth through capital investment and to repay debt. Adjusted funds from operations should not be considered as an alternative to, or more meaningful than, cash provided by operating activities as determined in accordance with IFRS as an indicator of the Corporations performance. The Corporations determination of adjusted funds from operations may not be comparable to that reported by other companies. For more details on how the Corporation reconciles its cash provided by operating activities to adjusted funds from operations, please refer to the Non-IFRS Measures section of the Corporations MD&A. Additionally, this press release references Adjusted EBITDAX and operating netback measures. Adjusted EBITDAX is defined as consolidated net income adjusted for interest, income taxes, depreciation, depletion, amortization, exploration expenses and other similar non-recurring or non-cash charges. Operating netback is a benchmark common in the oil and gas industry and is calculated as total natural gas, LNG and petroleum sales, net transportation expenses, less royalties and operating expenses, calculated on a per barrel of oil equivalent basis of sales volumes using a conversion. Operating netback is an important measure in evaluating operational performance as it demonstrates field level profitability relative to current commodity prices. Adjusted EBITDAX and operating netback as presented do not have any standardized meaning prescribed by IFRS and therefore may not be comparable with the calculation of similar measures for other entities.

Operating netback is defined as revenues, net transportation expenses less royalties and operating expenses.

Realized contractual sales is defined as natural gas and LNG produced and sold plus income received from nominated take-or-pay contracts without the actual delivery of natural gas or LNG and the expiry of the customers rights to take the deliveries.

The Corporations LNG sales account for less than one percent of the Corporations total realized contractual natural gas and LNG sales.

Boe Conversion - The term boe is used in this news release. Boe may be misleading, particularly if used in isolation. A boe conversion ratio of cubic feet of natural gas to barrels oil equivalent is based on an energy equivalency conversion method primarily applicable at the burner tip and does not represent a value equivalency at the wellhead. In this news release, we have expressed boe using the Colombian conversion standard of 5.7 Mcf: 1 bbl required by the Ministry of Mines and Energy of Colombia. As the value ratio between natural gas and crude oil based on the current prices of natural gas and crude oil is significantly different from the energy equivalency of 5.7 Mcf:1, utilizing a conversion on a 5.7 Mcf:1 basis may be misleading as an indication of value.

For further information please contact: Investor Relations South America: +571.621.1747 [email protected] Global: +1.403.561.1648 [email protected] http://www.canacolenergy.com

Source: Canacol Energy Ltd.
DALLAS, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Leading data center provider Evoque, a portfolio company of Brookfield Infrastructure Partners has entered a joint venture with Archer Datacenters to bring to market over 100MW of power capacity and over 500,000 square feet of data center space to meet the growing data center demands of the United States Central Southeast region. Evoque has earmarked $200mm to accelerate the expansion of the site, which includes a commitment to building a 100% renewable energy solution.

Located approximately 35 miles from Downtown Nashville in Gallatin, Tennessee, the area has become one of the fastest growing economies in the country. The original 28.5 acre campus is anchored by an 82,000 square foot data center shell, with over 40MW of available power today from Gallatin Department of Electricitys (GDE) adjacent substation. The initial project anticipates a 4-phased development, scalable on the existing site as well as an adjacent 32.8 acre parcel. The long-term expandability of 100+MW is possible in concert with the continuously updated transmission capacity of GDE and Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).

The opportunity to expand into the Nashville market and to serve hyperscalers, cloud service providers, and large enterprises is exciting, shares Evoque Chief Executive Officer Andy Stewart. Archer, and their Founder Jordan Milman had great vision that has since been validated by Metas new data center, which is adjacent to our location. Evoque looks forward to maximizing the potential of this opportunity and to deliver more best-in-breed digital infrastructure solutions to more enterprises.

This venture with Evoque aligns Archer with a world-class operator. Given the existing data center shell, the partnership can offer the fastest time to market of any scaled capacity option in the broader region. Evoque has the expertise and resources to deliver a green power solution to meet the growing demand for renewable energy in the data center industry.

With their commitment to operational excellence, sustainable energy capabilities, and forward-thinking leadership, we view Evoque as the ideal partner to help to realize our vision for the premier data center campus in the greater Nashville region, says Jordan Milman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at Archer Datacenters. We look forward to continuing to champion this location alongside Evoque to create an attractive solution for both hyperscale and enterprise customers looking to scale in one of the most dynamic markets in the country.

Solomon Partners Securities, LLC served as exclusive financial advisor and placement agent to Archer Datacenters on the transaction, while Goodwin Procter LLP and Carter Shelton, PLC served as legal counsel. Seyfarth Shaw LLP and Mayer Brown LLP served as legal counsel for Evoque.

About Evoque Evoque, Digital Infrastructure Evolved, based in Dallas, offers local and global businesses an unparalleled range of services and solutions across highly connected markets. Evoque provides companies with a unified offering of colocation, connectivity, and cloud engineering. Evoques market-first Multi-Generational Infrastructure (MGI) strategy enables its clients worldwide to develop and utilize both reliable colocation and hybrid cloud offerings for all businesses taking an application-first approach. Evoque delivers a combination of connectivity, security, and redundancy that leaders increasingly require in their digital transformation initiatives. The company supports a diversified base of mid- to large-size enterprise and hyperscale customers across multiple segments, helping them comply with regulations like HIPAA, NIST, ISO and more. Evoque is a portfolio company of Brookfield Infrastructure Partners, a leading global infrastructure asset manager that owns and operates high-quality, long-life assets in the utilities, transport, midstream and data sectors across North and South America, Asia Pacific and Europe. Visit https://www.evoquedcs.com/ for more information.

About Archer DatacentersFounded in 2018, Archer Datacenters is a data center platform established to address the growing demand to process, store, and transmit digital information. Archer is focused on identifying, acquiring and developing greenfield data center opportunities with access to cost-efficient renewable energy in strategic, emerging markets across the U.S. that are currently underserved by the wholesale market. Archer provides flexible and customizable solutions for our customers with a focus on secure, scalable, flexible wholesale colocation data centers that facilitate hybrid IT strategies. Archers inaugural project is a greenfield Hyperscale development campus outside Nashville, which features a strategic joint venture partnership with Evoque Digital Infrastructure Evolved, a portfolio company of Brookfield Infrastructure Partners. Archer was founded by Jordan Milman, who currently serves as its Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and David Bartholomai currently serves as its Chief Operating Officer.

CONTACT Kevin FlemingSr. Director Communications @ Evoque[email protected]

Source: Evoque
Company Is Committed to Innovation for Patients Living With Heart Failure

MARLTON, N.J., May 10, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Impulse Dynamics, a global medical device company dedicated to improving the lives of people with heart failure (HF), is announcing today the first implants of its newly launched Optimizer Smart Mini, which delivers the companys proprietary CCM therapy. The company announced the launch of its new technology on April 29, and the first procedures with the new commercially-available system were subsequently completed simultaneously by physicians at two different U.S. centers.

I was able to attend the Heart Rhythm Societys annual scientific sessions in San Francisco last week and moderated a rhythm theater panel presentation on Impulse Dynamics CCM technology, said Kenneth Ellenbogen, MD, Martha M., and Harold W. Kimmerling, Professor of Cardiology, Chair, Division of Cardiology, and Director of Clinical Cardiac Electrophysiology at the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center in Richmond, VA. I was involved in some of the early research on CCM, and now its clear that this therapy has the potential to fill a significant unmet medical need for patients with heart failure.

Were excited to be one of the first institutions to implant this latest generation CCM therapy device, said Dr. Ameer Kabour, an interventional cardiologist and Director of Cardiology at Mercy Health St.Vincent Medical Center in Toledo, OH. The Optimizer Smart Mini provides convenience to both providers and many of their patients who suffer from heart failure. These patients may be suffering in spite of being on medications. This device can help relieve many of these patients symptoms in the short term, and the diagnostics it provides can help us manage their disease over the long term.

In the ambulatory surgical center setting, we strive to make our patients experiences as simple, safe, and effective as possible, said Andrew Kaplan, MD, a clinical cardiac electrophysiologist with Southwest Cardiovascular Associates in Mesa, Arizona. The reduced size, physiologic shape, and simplified programming that this new generation of device offers can help us meet all of those requirements. Dr. Kaplan completed his first commercial implant of the Optimizer Smart Mini on May 2, 2022.

The Optimizer Smart Mini incorporates a rechargeable battery with 20-year battery life, offering HF diagnostic monitoring that provides important clinical insights to providers to assist in managing their patients with heart failure. This latest generation also offers new internal technology with improved programming and a smaller size designed to make the implant procedure faster and easier for patients and physicians.

We are committed to continued innovation by not only including a 20-year battery but by also making this new device 25% smaller and 33% lighter than its predecessor. We announced late last month that over 7,000 patients have now benefitted from our CCM therapy, said Jason Spees, President and Chief Commercial Officer at Impulse Dynamics. It is great to know that the millions of patients that could benefit from our CCM therapy worldwide will now get an even better device.

The Optimizer Smart Mini delivers CCM therapy to the heart. CCM therapy delivers precisely timed electrical pulses to the heart that are intended to improve the hearts ability to contract, allowing more oxygen-rich blood to be pushed out through the body.[1] CCM therapy is indicated to improve 6-minute hall walk, quality of life, and functional status of NYHA (New York Heart Association) Class III heart failure patients who remain symptomatic despite guideline-directed medical therapy, are not indicated for CRT(cardiac resynchronization therapy), and have a left ventricular ejection fraction ranging from 25 to 45 percent.



About Impulse Dynamics

Impulse Dynamics, based in Marlton, NJ, is dedicated to helping healthcare providers enhance the lives of people with heart failure by transforming how the condition is treated. The company has pioneered CCM therapy, which is delivered by the companys Optimizer Smart Mini, an FDA-approved treatment verified to improve the quality of life for certain heart failure patients. CCM therapy is a safe, effective, and minimally invasive treatment option for many heart failure patients who otherwise have few effective options available to them. To learn more, visit www.impulsedynamics.com, or follow the company on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

Forward-looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements. All statements other than statements of historical facts contained in this press release are forward-looking statements. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terms such as may, will, should, expect, plan, anticipate, could, intend, target, project, contemplate, believe, estimate, predict, potential or continue or the negative of these terms or other similar expressions, although not all forward-looking statements contain these words. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements concerning: the potential benefits of our CCM therapy and the ability for CCM therapy and our products to fill a significant unmet medical need for patients with heart failure; and the short-term and long-term benefits of the Optimizer Smart Mini and our CCM therapy in patients with heart failure, as well as to the physicians treating those patients. These forward-looking statements are based on managements current expectations and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause our actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Other important factors that could cause actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from those contemplated in this press release include, without limitation: our future research and development costs, capital requirements and our needs for additional financing; commercial success and market acceptance of our proprietary CCM therapy; our ability to achieve and maintain adequate levels of coverage or reimbursement for our Optimizer Smart and Optimizer Smart Mini systems or any future products we may seek to commercialize; competitive companies and technologies in our industry; our ability to expand our indications and develop and commercialize additional products and enhancements to our current products; our business model and strategic plans for our products, technologies and business, including our implementation thereof; our ability to expand, manage and maintain our direct sales and marketing organization; our ability to commercialize or obtain regulatory approvals for our CCM therapy and our products, or the effect of delays in commercializing or obtaining regulatory approvals; FDA or other U.S. or foreign regulatory actions affecting us or the healthcare industry generally, including healthcare reform measures in the United States and international markets; the timing or likelihood of regulatory filings and approvals; and our ability to establish and maintain intellectual property protection for our CCM therapy and products or avoid claims of infringement. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent our views as of the date hereof. We anticipate that subsequent events and developments will cause our views to change. However, while we may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, we specifically disclaim any obligation to do so except as required by law. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing our views as of any date subsequent to the date hereof.

###

[1] European Journal of Heart Failure (2021) doi:10.1002/ejhf.2202

Attachments
MONTREAL, May 11, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Knight Therapeutics Inc. (TSX: GUD) ("Knight" or the "Corporation") a leading pan-American (ex-US) specialty pharmaceutical company, announced today the voting results from the Annual Meeting of the Shareholders held virtually in Montreal, Quebec ("Meeting").

Election of Directors

Each director nominee listed in the Management Information Circular dated April 11, 2022 ("Circular") was elected as Director of the Corporation at the Meeting. Shareholders present in person or represented by proxy at the Meeting voted as follows:

DIRECTOR NOMINEE OUTCOME VOTES FOR % FOR VOTES WITHELD % WITHELD Jonathan Ross Goodman Elected 60,902,832 95.75% 2,701,678 4.25% James C. Gale Elected 63,265,174 99.47% 339,336 0.53% Samira Sakhia Elected 63,472,472 99.79% 132,038 0.21% Robert N. Lande Elected 60,537,287 95.18% 3,067,223 4.82% Michael J. Tremblay Elected 57,178,604 89.90% 6,425,906 10.10% Nicolas Sujoy Elected 60,678,074 95.40% 2,926,436 4.60% Janice Murray Elected 63,124,888 99.25% 479,622 0.75%

Appointment of external Auditors

Ernst & Young LLP were appointed as external auditors of the Corporation for the next year by a majority of the votes cast by the shareholders present or represented by proxy, and the directors were authorized to determine their remuneration. Shareholders present in person or represented by proxy at the Meeting voted as follows:

OUTCOME VOTES FOR % FOR VOTES WITHHELD % WITHHELD Appointed 63,633,816 99.78% 141,491 0.22%

Approval of unallocated rights under the Corporations employee share purchase plan (ESPP)

The resolution to approve unallocated rights under the Corporations employee share purchase plan for the ensuing three years, as described in the Circular, was approved by a majority of the votes cast by the shareholders present or represented by proxy. Shareholders present in person or represented by proxy at the Meeting voted as follows:

OUTCOME VOTES FOR % FOR VOTES AGAINST % AGAINST Approved 50,507,892 79.41% 13,096,618 20.59%

The results of the final votes regarding all matters subject to a vote during the Meeting will also be made available on SEDAR (www.sedar.com).

About Knight Therapeutics Inc.

Knight Therapeutics Inc., headquartered in Montreal, Canada, is a specialty pharmaceutical company focused on acquiring or in-licensing and commercializing pharmaceutical products for Canada and Latin America. Knight owns Biotoscana Investments S.A., a pan-Latin American specialty pharmaceutical company. Knights Latin American subsidiaries operate under United Medical, Biotoscana Farma and Laboratorio LKM. Knight Therapeutics Inc.'s shares trade on TSX under the symbol GUD. For more information about Knight Therapeutics Inc., please visit the company's web site at www.gud-knight.com or www.sedar.com.

Forward-Looking Statement

This document contains forward-looking statements for Knight Therapeutics Inc. and its subsidiaries. These forward-looking statements, by their nature, necessarily involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated by the forward-looking statements. Knight Therapeutics Inc. considers the assumptions on which these forward-looking statements are based to be reasonable at the time they were prepared but cautions the reader that these assumptions regarding future events, many of which are beyond the control of Knight Therapeutics Inc. and its subsidiaries, may ultimately prove to be incorrect. Factors and risks, which could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations are discussed in Knight Therapeutics Inc.'s Annual Report and in Knight Therapeutics Inc.'s Annual Information Form for the year ended December 31, 2021 as filed on www.sedar.com. Knight Therapeutics Inc. disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information or future events, except as required by law.

Investor Contact: Knight Therapeutics Inc. Samira Sakhia Arvind Utchanah President & Chief Executive Officer Chief Financial Officer T: 514.484.4483 T. +598.2626.2344 F: 514.481.4116 Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected] Website: www.gud-knight.com Website: www.gud-knight.com

Source: Knight Therapeutics
THE INFORMATION CONTAINED HEREIN IS NOT FOR RELEASE, PUBLICATION OR DISTRIBUTION IN OR INTO AUSTRALIA, CANADA, ITALY, DENMARK, JAPAN, THE UNITED STATES, OR TO ANY NATIONAL OF SUCH JURISDICTIONS

NBPE Monthly NAV Update

12 May 2022

NB Private Equity (NBPE), the $1.4bn listed private equity investment company managed by Neuberger Berman, today releases its 30 April 2022 monthly NAV estimate.

Highlights (at 30 April 2022)

NAV per share of $29.00 (23.10)

In aggregate, NBPEs listed portfolio companies have been the driver of a 7.0% NAV TR decline year to date

4.1% decline during the month of April, driven by movements in the listed holdings and FX rates

Total announced portfolio realisations year to date of $80 million

Well positioned to take advantage of investment opportunities - $364 million of cash and undrawn credit line available

17% of private company valuations based on 31 March 2022 valuation information; these private valuations received to date in total increased approximately 1% vs 31 December 2021

At 30 April 2022* YTD 1 year 3 years 5 years 10 years NAV TR (USD) (7.0%) 20.6% 70.8% 111.5% 247.3% MSCI World TR (USD) (12.9%) (3.1%) 36.6% 66.5% 175.1% Share price TR (GBP) (13.2%) 17.8% 62.2% 87.2% 431.7% FTSE All-Share TR (GBP) 0.8% 8.7% 14.1% 26.6% 100.8%

*Reflects cumulative returns over the time periods shown and are not annualised.

Business review ( at 30 April 202 2 )

NAV decrease of 4.1% during April 2022, driven by changes in public valuations and FX rates

Monthly valuation changes were driven by declines of listed company share prices, most notably from Autostore, and FX

65% of the portfolio remains valued based on 31 December 2021 private company valuation information

Additional 31 March 2022 private company valuations are expected in the coming weeks and will be incorporated into future monthly NAV updates as received





Realisations from the portfolio in 2022

2022 year to date announced realisations of $80 milllion Four full or partial sales announced in 2022 include: the remaining assets of Telxius, and the announced full sales of Leaseplan and Omega Environmental Technologies, and the partial realisation of MHS Global 1 These four announced full or partial sales are expected to generate a 2.8x gross multiple of capital and a 6% uplift from 31 December 2021 valuations







Strong investment dealflow and continued focus on investing in our two key themes, long-term secular growth and / or low cyclicality

NBPE is well placed to take advantage of new opportunities





Robust liquidity

$364 million of available liquidity ($64 million cash, $300 million of undrawn credit line)





Portfolio Valuation

The fair value of NBPEs portfolio as of 30 April 2022 was based on the following information:

18% of the portfolio was valued as of 30 April 2022 15% in public securities 3% in private direct investments

14% of the portfolio was valued as of 31 March 2022 14% in private direct investments

3% of the portfolio was valued as of 31 January 2022 3% in private direct investments

66% of the portfolio was valued as of 31 December 2021 65% in private direct investments 1% in fund investments



Pending realisations are subject to customary closing conditions. No assurances can be given the transactions ultimately close.

For further information, please contact:

NBPE Investor Relations +1 214 647 9593

Kaso Legg Communications +44 (0)20 3995 6673

Charles Gorman [email protected]

Will Sanderson

Supplementary Information

Company Name Vintage Lead Sponsor Sector Fair Value % of FV Constellation Automotive 2019 TDR Capital Business Services 81.0 5.6% AutoStore (OB.AUTO) 2019 THL Industrials / Industrial Technology 56.7 3.9% Agiliti (NYSE: AGTI) 2019 THL Healthcare 49.3 3.4% Material Handling Systems 2017 THL Industrials / Industrial

Technology 47.8 3.3% Action 2020 3i Consumer / E-commerce 47.1 3.3% USI 2017 KKR Financial Services 42.0 2.9% Kroll 2020 Further Global / Stone Point Financial Services 41.0 2.8% GFL (NYSE: GFL) 2018 BC Partners Business Services 34.4 2.4% Cotiviti 2018 Veritas Capital Healthcare 32.9 2.3% Excelitas 2017 AEA Investors Technology / IT 32.7 2.3% Marquee Brands 2014 Neuberger Berman Consumer / E-commerce 32.7 2.3% BeyondTrust 2018 Francisco Partners Technology / IT 32.5 2.2% Business Services Company* 2017 Not Disclosed Business Services 31.6 2.2% Advisor Group 2019 Reverence Capital Financial Services 31.4 2.2% Auctane 2021 Thoma Bravo Technology / IT 30.0 2.1% Branded Toy Company* 2017 Not Disclosed Consumer / E-commerce 26.5 1.8% Stubhub 2020 Neuberger Berman Consumer / E-commerce 26.4 1.8% True Potential 2022 Cinven Financial Services 24.2 1.7% Staples 2017 Sycamore Partners Business Services 21.8 1.5% Chemical Guys 2021 AEA Investors Consumer / E-commerce 21.1 1.5% Engineering 2016 NB Renaissance / Bain Capital Technology / IT 20.9 1.4% Bylight 2017 Sagewind Partners Technology / IT 20.5 1.4% Petsmart / Chewy (NYSE: CHWY) 2015 BC Partners Consumer / E-commerce 19.7 1.4% Solenis 2021 Platinum Equity Industrials 19.5 1.3% Branded Cities Network 2017 Shamrock Capital Communications / Media 18.3 1.3% Addison Group 2021 Trilantic Capital Partners Business Services 18.1 1.3% Telxius 2017 KKR Communications / Media 17.9 1.2% Renaissance Learning 2018 Francisco Partners Technology / IT 16.8 1.2% Holley (NYSE: HLLY) 2018 Sentinel Capital Industrials / Industrial Technology 16.3 1.1% FV Hospital 2017 Quadria Capital Healthcare 15.7 1.1% Total Top 30 Investments $926.9 64.0%

*Undisclosed company due to confidentiality provisions.

Geography % of Portfolio North America 73% Europe 23% Asia / Rest of World 4% Total Portfolio 100% Industry % of Portfolio Tech, Media & Telecom 21% Consumer / E-commerce 19% Industrials / Industrial Technology 16% Business Services 14% Financial Services 12% Healthcare 10% Other 7% Energy 1% Total Portfolio 100% Vintage Year % of Portfolio 2014 & Earlier 5% 2015 3% 2016 8% 2017 24% 2018 20% 2019 18% 2020 10% 2021 11% 2022 1% Total Portfolio 100%

About NB Private Equity Partners Limited

NBPE invests in direct private equity investments alongside market leading private equity firms globally. NB Alternatives Advisers LLC (the Investment Manager), an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of Neuberger Berman Group LLC, is responsible for sourcing, execution and management of NBPE. The vast majority of direct investments are made with no management fee / no carried interest payable to third-party GPs, offering greater fee efficiency than other listed private equity companies. NBPE seeks capital appreciation through growth in net asset value over time while paying a bi-annual dividend.

LEI number: 213800UJH93NH8IOFQ77

About Neuberger Berman

Neuberger Berman, founded in 1939, is a private, independent, employee-owned investment manager. The firm manages a range of strategiesincluding equity, fixed income, quantitative and multi-asset class, private equity, real estate and hedge fundson behalf of institutions, advisors and individual investors globally. With offices in 25 countries, Neuberger Bermans diverse team has over 2,500 professionals. For eight consecutive years, the company has been named first or second in Pensions & Investments Best Places to Work in Money Management survey (among those with 1,000 employees or more). In 2020, the PRI named Neuberger Berman a Leader, a designation awarded to fewer than 1% of investment firms for excellence in Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) practices. The PRI also awarded Neuberger Berman an A+ in every eligible category for our approach to ESG integration across asset classes. The firm manages $447 billion in client assets as of March 31, 2022. For more information, please visit our website at www.nb.com.

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Safe Orthopaedics announces the installation of a second SORA unit in France and will accelerate the SORA program in the second quarter of 2022







Several dozen surgeries validate the SORA model,

Installation of a second unit at the Saint Charles Clinic (Lyon),

Scheduled acceleration of the program starting in the second quarter of 2022.













Eragny-sur-Oise, France, May 12nd, 2022 08h45 CET  Safe (FR0013467123  ALSAF), a company specializing in the design, manufacturing and marketing of single-use technologies for spinal surgeries, delivering the safest treatment for spinal fractures urgently treated, announces the installation of a second SORA unit in France and wishes to accelerate the SORA program.

Safe Orthopaedics reminds the value of SORA:

- Assisted selection of implants and instruments in the operating room: SORA eliminates the risk of error in product selection, tracks lot numbers and informs all relevant hospital departments of what has been implanted.

- Automated replenishment and inventory management support: Through the automated ordering process, SORA reduces delivery times after each operation, improves operational planning, and reduces hospital lead times, resources and logistics costs.

- Virtual assistant for surgeons and medical staff: SORA's surgical documentation of implants and instruments is accessible via the software and online surgical assistance. SORA offers virtual assistance via the interactive touch screen. Safe Orthopaedics experts can also be invited virtually to answer questions before, during and after surgery.

As announced on November 9, 2021, a first SORA unit had been installed at the Convert Clinic in Bourg-en-Bresse and evaluated by Dr. Vallese and Dr. Afathi and their medical team.

Dr. Pierre Vallese, orthopedic surgeon, explains, "Sora was a bit of a challenge for our OR team, but within a few weeks it had found its place. It is easy to use with an ergonomic and intuitive digital application. We quickly became aware of the benefits of this solution on several levels:

- The management of implants is facilitated with an immediate control of the stock and a restocking ensured directly from the user to the manufacturer. SORA guarantees the availability of the implants and informs the team before the start of the operation.

- The collection of data concerning implant placements allows the stock in place to be personalized over time. SORA ensures implant traceability that could easily be integrated into digital clinical monitoring solutions.

- Team training is ensured by technical data sheets accessible at any time on the application, as well as by remote video assistance if needed. SORA is a window from the OR to the industry."

Dr. Mehdi Afathi, Neurosurgeon in Bourg-en-Bresse, confirms "After a few months of using SORA at the Convert clinic, we can see the interest of this platform for us, the surgeons, for the operating room team, and for the clinic's pharmacy. The operating room nurses, who are in direct contact with SORA, were able to "get the hang of it" quite quickly and now master its use without any problem. We note that thanks to SORA, the stocks necessary for the activity of regulated and urgent spinal surgery are always present, thanks to the automatic replenishment. This improves the safety of the patient who can benefit from the optimal procedure at any time, and relieves the entire team, especially in the pharmacy, whose workload is to some extent reduced."

Safe Orthopaedics announces the installation of a second unit at the Saint-Charles clinic and plans to install the third unit in a French university hospital in the coming weeks to finalize its French evaluation and prove its value in centers of different size and organization.

In the second half of the year, Safe Orthopaedics aims at a faster deployment in France, evaluations in Germany and the USA (centers already identified) and new functionalities.

"First of all, I would like to thank Dr. Vallese, Dr. Afathi and their teams for their involvement in this project. In a few months of use, we have tested, improved and imagined the future functionalities of SORA. In addition to the advantages explained by Drs. Vallese and Afathi, we have noted an increase in the number of surgeries performed at the convert clinic, a reduction in delivery times and in inventories, all of which serve both the clinic's medico-economic and Safe's financial interests," commented Pierre Dumouchel, Chairman and CEO of Safe Group. "New digital functionalities are planned for May and the international deployment of SORA is still planned for the second half of the year, in line with our 2022 strategic plan. In the medium term, we are aiming to have SORA installed in all our major accounts.





About Safe Group

Safe Group is a French medical technology group that brings together Safe Orthopaedics, a pioneer in ready-to-use technologies for spine pathologies, and Safe Medical (formerly LCI Medical), a medical device subcontractor for orthopedic surgery. The group employs approximately 150 people.

Safe Orthopaedics develops and manufactures kits combining sterile implants and single-use instruments, available at any time to the surgeon. These technologies are part of a minimally invasive approach aimed at reducing the risks of contamination and infection, in the interest of the patient and with a positive impact on hospitalization times and costs. Protected by 18 patent families, SteriSpineTM kits are CE marked and FDA approved. Safe Orthopaedics is headquartered in the Paris region (95610 Eragny-sur-Oise) and has subsidiaries in the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States and the Lyon region (Fleurieux-sur-l'Arbresle).

For more information: www.safeorthopaedics.com

Safe Medical produces implantable medical devices and ready-to-use instruments. It has an innovation center and two production sites in France (Fleurieux-sur-l'Arbresle, 69210) and in Tunisia, offering numerous industrial services: design, industrialization, machining, finishing and sterile packaging. Supported by the French stimulus plan in 2020, the company invests in additive printing and will be operational in 2022 on this new technology.

For more information: www.safemedical.fr

Contacts

Safe Group

Francois-Henri Reynaud

Chief Financial and Administrative Officer

Tel. : +33 (0)1 34 21 50 00

[email protected]

Press Relations

Ulysse Communication

Pierre-Louis Germain / +33 (0)6 64 79 97 51 / [email protected]

Bruno Arabian / +33 (0)6 87 88 47 26 / [email protected]

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Parsippany, New Jersey, USA, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Wireless Telecom Group, Inc. (NYSE American: WTT), today announced its Board of Directors has authorized up to $4 million for a share repurchase program for the Companys outstanding stock. The authorization to repurchase expires on December 31, 2022.

Tim Whelan, CEO of Wireless Telecom Group, Inc. stated, With a strong balance sheet and asset light business model, we can support organic growth initiatives and our R&D roadmap, while returning excess capital to our shareholders. The $4 million share repurchase program represents approximately 11% of our current market capitalization. This reflects the Boards desire to create value for our shareholders, as well as its confidence in the direction we are headed and our ability to generate positive future cash flows and improve profitability.

Under the repurchase program, Wireless Telecom Group, Inc. may purchase shares of its common stock through open market transactions, privately negotiated transactions, block purchases or otherwise in accordance with applicable federal securities laws, including Rule 10b-18 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended and pursuant to any trading plan that may be adopted in accordance with Rule 10b5-1 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. The timing and amount of any repurchases under this program will be determined by the Companys management at its discretion based on a variety of factors, including the market price of our common stock, corporate considerations, general market and economic conditions, and legal requirements. The program does not obligate the Company to acquire any particular amount of stock, and the program may be discontinued or suspended at any time at the Companys discretion. The Company anticipates funding for this program to come from available corporate funds, including cash on hand and future cash flow.

About Wireless Telecom Group, Inc.

Wireless Telecom Group, Inc., comprised of Boonton, CommAgility, Holzworth, and Noisecom, is a global designer and manufacturer of advanced RF and microwave components, modules, systems, and instruments. Serving the wireless, telecommunication, satellite, military, aerospace, and semiconductor industries, Wireless Telecom Group products enable innovation across existing and emerging wireless technologies. With a product portfolio including peak power meters, signal generators, phase noise analyzers, signal processing modules, LTE PHY/stack software, noise sources, and programmable noise generators, Wireless Telecom Group supports the development, testing, and deployment of wireless technologies around the globe. Wireless Telecom Group, Inc.s website address is wirelesstelecomgroup.com.

Investor ContactAndrew M. BergerManaging DirectorSM Berger& Company(216) 464-6400[email protected]

Marketing ContactMaria Droge: +1 (973) 386-9696Wireless Telecom Group Inc.25 Eastmans RoadParsippany, NJ 07054Tel: (973) 386-9696Fax: (973) 386-9191www.wtcom.com

Source: Wireless Telecom Group, Inc.
Thunder Bay, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - May 12, 2022) - Benton Resources Inc. (TSXV: BEX) ('Benton' or 'the Company') would like to cordially invite you to visit us at Booth #823 at the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference (VRIC) to be held at the Vancouver Convention Centre West (1055 Canada Place, Vancouver) on Tuesday May 17 - Wednesday May 18, 2022.

Former Prime Minister of Canada Stephen Harper and Former President of Mexico Felipe Calderon are two of the marquee speakers at the 2022 Resource Investment Conference. VRIC will host more than 100 international keynote speakers covering the hottest topics in finance, economics and geopolitics on May 17th and 18th, 2022.

Also presenting are best-selling finance author Robert "Rich Dad" Kiyosaki, dozens of globally respected economists, legendary money managers, and investors. The conversations on stage will cover the most important investment opportunities and key issues in macro-finance.

The VRIC will include a marketplace of 225 investment opportunities in the mining industry, spanning early-stage exploration to advanced-stage producing mines.

For more information and/or to register for the conference please visit: https://cambridgehouse.com/vancouver-resource-investment-conference.

We look forward to seeing you there.

About Benton Resources Inc.

Benton Resources Inc. is a well-funded mineral exploration company listed on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol BEX. Following a project generation business model, Benton has a diversified, highly prospective property portfolio in Lithium, Gold, Silver, Nickel, Copper, and Platinum Group Elements and currently holds large equity positions in other mining companies that are advancing high-quality assets. Whenever possible, BEX retains Net Smelter Return (NSR) royalties for potential long-term cash flow. Benton has also recently entered into a 50/50 strategic alliance with Sokoman Minerals Corp. through three large-scale joint-venture properties including Grey River Gold, Golden Hope and Kepenkeck in Newfoundland that are now being explored. Most advanced projects have an up-to-date NI 43-101 Report available.

For further information, please contact:

Benton Resources Inc.

Stephen Stares, President & CEO

Phone: 807-475-7474

Email: [email protected]

CHF Capital Markets

Thomas Do, IR Manager

Phone: 416-868-1079 x 232

Email: [email protected]

Website: www.bentonresources.ca

Twitter: @BentonResources

Facebook: @BentonResourcesBEX

LinkedIn: @BentonResources

THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE HAS NOT REVIEWED AND DOES NOT ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE.

The information contained herein contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. Forward-looking statements relate to information that is based on assumptions of management, forecasts of future results, and estimates of amounts not yet determinable. Any statements that express predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance are not statements of historical fact and may be "forward-looking statements."

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/123794
Burlington, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - May 12, 2022) - Murchison Minerals Ltd.(TSXV: MUR) (OTCQB: MURMF)("Murchison" or the "Company")would like to cordially invite you to visit us at Booth #819 at the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference (VRIC) to be held at the Vancouver Convention Centre West (1055 Canada Place, Vancouver) on Tuesday May 17 - Wednesday May 18, 2022.

Former Prime Minister of Canada Stephen Harper and Former President of Mexico Felipe Calderon are two of the marquee speakers at the 2022 Resource Investment Conference. VRIC will host more than 100 international keynote speakers covering the hottest topics in finance, economics and geopolitics on May 17th and 18th, 2022.

Also presenting are best-selling finance author Robert "Rich Dad" Kiyosaki, dozens of globally respected economists, legendary money managers, and investors. The conversations on stage will cover the most important investment opportunities and key issues in macro-finance.

The VRIC will include a marketplace of 225 investment opportunities in the mining industry, spanning early-stage exploration to advanced-stage producing mines.

For more information and/or to register for the conference please visit: https://cambridgehouse.com/vancouver-resource-investment-conference.

We look forward to seeing you there.

About Murchison Minerals Ltd. (TSXV: MUR) (OTCQB: MURMF)

Murchison is a Canadianbased exploration company focused on nickel-copper-cobalt exploration at the 100% - owned HPM Project in Quebec and the exploration and development of the 100% - owned Brabant Lake zinccoppersilver project in northcentral Saskatchewan. The Company also holds an option to earn 100% interest in the Barraute VMS exploration project also located in Quebec, north of Val d'Or. Murchison currently has 170.5 million shares issued.

Additional information about Murchison and its exploration projects can be found on the Company's website at www.murchisonminerals.ca . For further information, please contact:

Troy Boisjoli, President and CEO or

Erik H Martin, CFO

Tel: (416) 3503776

[email protected]

CHF Capital Markets

Thomas Do, IR Manager

Tel: (416) 868-1079 x 232

[email protected]

ForwardLooking Information

Certain information set forth in this news release may contain forwardlooking information that involves substantial known and unknown risks and uncertainties. This forwardlooking information is subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, certain of which are beyond the control of the Company, including, but not limited to, the impact of general economic conditions, industry conditions, and dependence upon regulatory approvals.

FLI herein includes, but is not limited to: future drill results; stakeholder engagement and relationships; parameters and methods used with respect to the assay results; the prospects, if any, of the deposits; future prospects at the deposits; and the significance of exploration activities and results. FLI is designed to help you understand management's current views of its near- and longer-term prospects, and it may not be appropriate for other purposes. FLI by their nature are based on assumptions and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such FLI. Although the FLI contained in this press release is based upon what management believes, or believed at the time, to be reasonable assumptions, the Company cannot assure shareholders and prospective purchasers of securities of the Company that actual results will be consistent with such FLI, as there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended, and neither the Company nor any other person assumes responsibility for the accuracy and completeness of any such FLI. Except as required by law, the Company does not undertake, and assumes no obligation, to update or revise any such FLI contained herein to reflect new events or circumstances, except as may be required by law. Unless otherwise noted, this press release has been prepared based on information available as of the date of this press release. Accordingly, you should not place undue reliance on the FLI or information contained herein. Furthermore, should one or more of the risks, uncertainties or other factors materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in FLI. Assumptions upon which FLI is based, without limitation, include: the ability of exploration activities to accurately predict mineralization; the accuracy of geological modelling; the ability of the Company to complete further exploration activities; the legitimacy of title and property interests in the deposits; the accuracy of key assumptions, parameters or methods used to obtain the assay results; the ability of the Company to obtain required approvals; the results of exploration activities; the evolution of the global economic climate; metal prices; environmental expectations; community and nongovernmental actions; and any impacts of COVID-19 on the deposits, the Company's financial position, the Company's ability to secure required funding, or operations. Risks and uncertainties about the Company's business are more fully discussed in the disclosure materials filed with the securities regulatory authorities in Canada, which are available at www.sedar.com.

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/123792
St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador--(Newsfile Corp. - May 12, 2022) - Sokoman Minerals Corp. (TSXV: SIC) (OTCQB: SICNF) ("Sokoman" or the "Company") would like to cordially invite you to visit us at Booth #825 at the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference (VRIC) to be held at the Vancouver Convention Centre West (1055 Canada Place, Vancouver) on Tuesday May 17 - Wednesday May 18, 2022.

Former Prime Minister of Canada Stephen Harper and Former President of Mexico Felipe Calderon are two of the marquee speakers at the 2022 Resource Investment Conference. VRIC will host more than 100 international keynote speakers covering the hottest topics in finance, economics and geopolitics on May 17th and 18th, 2022.

Also presenting are best-selling finance author Robert "Rich Dad" Kiyosaki, dozens of globally respected economists, legendary money managers, and investors. The conversations on stage will cover the most important investment opportunities and key issues in macro-finance.

The VRIC will include a marketplace of 225 investment opportunities in the mining industry, spanning early-stage exploration to advanced-stage producing mines.

For more information and/or to register for the conference please visit: https://cambridgehouse.com/vancouver-resource-investment-conference.

We look forward to seeing you there.

About Sokoman Minerals Corp.

Sokoman Minerals Corp. is a discovery-oriented company with projects in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. The Company's primary focus is its portfolio of gold projects; flagship, advanced-stage Moosehead, Crippleback Lake (optioned to Trans Canada Gold Corp.) and East Alder (optioned to Canterra Minerals Corporation) along the Central Newfoundland Gold Belt, and the district-scale Fleur de Lys project in north-central Newfoundland, that is targeting Dalradian-type orogenic gold mineralization similar to the Curraghinalt and Cavanacaw deposits in Northern Ireland. The Company also recently entered into a strategic alliance with Benton Resources Inc. through three, large-scale, joint-venture properties including Grey River, Golden Hope and Kepenkeck in Newfoundland. The Golden Hope project hosts a recently discovered zone of lithium-bearing pegmatite dikes that has returned significant grades of Li 2 O from surface sampling and diamond drilling including 8.4 m grading 0.95% Li 2 O from GH-22-01. The Grey River project was recently tested with five recon drill holes all of which returned gold values highlighted by 10.58 g/t Au over 1.80 m including 50.13 g/t Au over 0.35 m from GR-21-01.

Sokoman now controls, independently and through the Benton alliance, over 150,000 hectares (>6,000 claims - 1500 sq. km), making it one of the largest landholders in Newfoundland, in Canada's newest and rapidly-emerging gold districts. The Company also retains an interest in an early-stage antimony/gold project (Startrek) in Newfoundland, optioned to White Metal Resources Inc., and in Labrador, the Company has a 100% interest in the Iron Horse (Fe) project which has Direct Shipping Ore (DSO) potential.

Mineralization hosted on adjacent and/or nearby properties is not necessarily indicative of mineralization hosted on the Company's property.

The Company would like to thank the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador for financial support of the Fleur de Lys project through the Junior Exploration Assistance Program.

To learn more, please contact:

Timothy Froude, P.Geo., President & CEO

709-765-1726

[email protected]

Cathy Hume, VP Corporate Development, Director

416-868-1079 x 251

[email protected]

Thomas Do, IR Manager, CHF Capital Markets

416-868-1079 x 232

[email protected]

Website:www.sokomanmineralscorp.com

Twitter: @SokomanMinerals

Facebook: @SokomanMinerals

LinkedIn:@SokomanMineralsCorp

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.

Investors are cautioned that trading in the securities of the Corporation should be considered highly speculative. Except for historical information contained herein, this news release contains forward- looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially. Sokoman Minerals Corp. will not update these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof. More detailed information about potential factors that could affect financial results is included in the documents filed from time to time with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities by Sokoman Minerals Corp.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/123793
NEW YORK, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- BizVibe, a business intelligence platform providing detailed company data for both buyers and suppliers, has recently added new insights for the animal food manufacturing industry. This platform contains 30M public and private company profiles spanning across 300+ industries and 200+ countries, and features more than 1,700 animal food companies. These company profiles range from global market leaders to specialized animal food manufacturers, with each profile containing 50+ unique insights.

View all animal food company profiles. Try for Free!

Company profiles provide the following insights:

Company summary

Product and service offerings

Risk level report

Financial reports and management team contacts

Similar companies and competitors (by region)

Industry trends and challenges

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Animal Food Industry Insights: Trends and Challenges

The rise of direct-to-consumer (DTC) strategies for the pet food industry was one of the biggest trends within the animal food industry for 2021. As more people worked from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, DTC pet food brands and subscription services witnessed online sales of pet food in the U.S. increase by 51% last year.

Despite rising consumer demand for pet food, COVID-19 created numerous challenges for the industry such as a shortage of labor and resources, and disruptions in the global supply chain. Shipping lanes have been affected by the pandemic, leading to shortages in the availability of pet food.

Animal Food Company Insights on BizVibe: Top Players and Specialized Manufacturers

Some of the public and private animal food companies on BizVibe include:

Market Leaders:

Mars Petcare, Inc.

General Mills

Nestle Purina PetCare

The J.M. Smucker Company

Hill's Pet Nutrition

Specialized Manufacturers:

Kent Nutrition Group

Key Products: bird food, sheep food, swine food, horse food

Lake Area Corn Processors LLC

Key Products: livestock feed

Dinh Son Co. Ltd

Key Products: swine food, poultry feed

Godrej Agrovet Limited

Key Products: cubed hay, swine feed

Kanne Brottrunk

Key Products: bird feed

View 50+ insights for all animal food companies

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About BizVibe

BizVibe is transforming the way buyers and sellers do business online. Our supplier intelligence and sales intelligence tools provide best-in-class company insights to help businesses discover, track, monitor, and evaluate companies of interest. BizVibe's platform contains more than 30 million company profiles, each packed with 50+ unique insights. For more information, please visit www.bizvibe.com or start your free trial today.

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SOURCE BizVibe
WASHINGTON, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- NASA will provide coverage of the upcoming prelaunch, launch, and docking activities for the agency's Boeing Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) to the International Space Station. Scheduled to launch at 6:54 p.m. EDT on Thursday, May 19, OFT-2 is the second uncrewed flight for Boeing's CST-100 Starliner spacecraft as part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program.

The Starliner spacecraft will launch on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. About 31 minutes after launch, the Starliner will reach its preliminary orbit. It is scheduled to dock to the space station at 7:10 p.m. on Friday, May 20. Prelaunch activities, launch, and docking will air live on NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency's website.

The spacecraft will carry more than 500 pounds of NASA cargo and crew supplies to the space station and return to Earth with nearly 600 pounds of cargo, including reusable Nitrogen Oxygen Recharge System (NORS) tanks that provide breathable air to station crew members.

OFT-2 will demonstrate the end-to-end capabilities of the Starliner spacecraft and Atlas V rocket, from launch to docking to a return to Earth in the desert of the western United States. The uncrewed flight test will provide valuable data toward NASA certifying Boeing's crew transportation system for regular flights with astronauts to and from the space station.

The deadline has passed for media accreditation for in person coverage of this launch. More information about media accreditation is available by emailing: [email protected]. A copy of NASA's media accreditation policy is online.

NASA's Boeing OFT-2 coverage is as follows and all times are subject to change based on mission operations (all times Eastern):

Tuesday, May 17

Noon  Prelaunch news conference on the NASA TV public channel (or no earlier than one hour after completion of the Launch Readiness Review):

Steve Stich, manager, NASA's Commercial Crew Program

Joel Montalbano, manager, NASA's International Space Station Program

Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager, Boeing Commercial Crew Program

Gary Wentz, vice president, Government and Commercial Programs, ULA

Will Ulrich, launch weather officer, U.S. Space Force, 45th Weather Squadron, Space Launch Delta 45

Media may ask questions in-person and via phone. Limited auditorium space will be available for in-person participation. For the dial-in number and passcode, please contact the newsroom at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida no later than noon on Tuesday, May 17, at: [email protected].

Wednesday, May 18

1 p.m.  NASA leadership media briefing on NASA TV, with the following participants:

Bob Cabana, NASA associate administrator

Janet Petro, director, NASA's Kennedy Space Center

Kathryn Lueders, associate administrator, Space Operations Mission Directorate

NASA astronaut Suni Williams

NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore

NASA astronaut Mike Fincke

Media may ask questions in-person and via phone. Limited auditorium space will be available for in-person participation. For the dial-in number and passcode, please contact the Kennedy newsroom no later than noon Wednesday, May 18, at: [email protected].

Thursday, May 19

6 p.m.  NASA TV launch coverage begins. NASA TV will have continuous coverage through Starliner orbital insertion.

9 p.m. (approximately)  Postlaunch news conference on NASA TV, with the following participants:

Kathryn Lueders, associate administrator, NASA Space Operations Mission Directorate

Steve Stich, manager, NASA's Commercial Crew Program

Joel Montalbano, manager, NASA's International Space Station Program

Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager, Boeing Commercial Crew Program

John Elbon, chief operating officer, United Launch Alliance

Media may ask questions in-person and via phone. Limited auditorium space will be available for in-person participation. For the dial-in number and passcode, please contact the Kennedy newsroom no later than 8 p.m. Thursday, May 19, at: [email protected].

Friday, May 20

3:30 p.m.  NASA TV rendezvous and docking coverage begins

7:10 p.m. (approximately)  Docking

Saturday, May 21

11:30 a.m.  NASA TV hatch opening and welcoming remarks coverage begins

11:45 a.m. (approximately)  Hatch opening and welcoming remarks

NASA TV Launch Coverage

NASA TV live coverage will begin at 6 p.m. For NASA TV downlink information, schedules, and links to streaming video, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv

Audio only of the news conferences and launch coverage will be carried on the NASA "V" circuits, which may be accessed by dialing 321-867-1220, -1240, -1260 or -7135. On launch day, "mission audio," countdown activities without NASA TV launch commentary, will be carried on 321-867-7135.

On launch day, a "clean feed" of the launch without NASA TV commentary will be carried on the NASA TV media channel. Launch also will be available on local amateur VHF radio frequency 146.940 MHz (K4GCC, Launch Information Service And Amateur Television System) and UHF radio frequency 444.925 MHz (N1KSC, Kennedy Space Center Amateur Radio Club), heard within Brevard County on the Space Coast.

NASA Website Launch Coverage

Launch day coverage of NASA's Boeing OFT-2 will be available on the agency's website. Coverage will include livestreaming and blog updates beginning no earlier than 6 p.m. Thursday, May 19, as the countdown milestones occur. On-demand streaming video and photos of the launch will be available shortly after liftoff. For questions about countdown coverage, contact the Kennedy newsroom at: 321-867-2468. Follow countdown coverage on our launch blog at:

http://blogs.nasa.gov/commercialcrew

Public Participation

Members of the public can register to attend this launch virtually. NASA's virtual guest program for this mission also includes curated launch resources, notifications about related opportunities or changes, and a stamp for the NASA virtual guest passport following a successful launch.

Engage kids and students in virtual and hands-on activities that are both family-friendly and educational through Next Gen STEM Commercial Crew.

Watch and Engage on Social Media

Stay connected with the mission on social media via Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram using the hashtag #Starliner. Follow and tag these accounts:

Twitter: @NASA, @Commercial_Crew, @Space_Station, @NASAKennedy

Facebook: NASA, NASACommercialCrew, ISS Facebook, Kennedy Space Center

Instagram: NASA, ISS Instagram, NASAKennedy

NASA will provide a live video feed of Space Launch Complex-41 approximately 6 hours prior to the planned liftoff of the OFT-2 mission. Pending unlikely technical issues, the feed will be uninterrupted until the prelaunch broadcast begins on NASA TV, approximately one hour prior to launch.

Once the feed is live, it will be available at:

http://youtube.com/kscnewsroom

Make sure to check out NASA en espanol on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube for more Spanish-language coverage on OFT-2.

Para obtener informacion sobre cobertura en espanol en el Centro Espacial Kennedy o si desea solicitar entrevistas en espanol, comuniquese con Antonia Jaramillo, 321-501-8425, [email protected].

NASA's Commercial Crew Program is delivering on its goal of safe, reliable, and cost-effective transportation to and from the International Space Station from the United States through a partnership with American private industry. This partnership is changing the arc of human spaceflight history by opening access to low-Earth orbit and the International Space Station to more people, more science, and more commercial opportunities. The space station remains the springboard to NASA's next great leap in space exploration, including future missions to the Moon and, eventually, to Mars.

For NASA's launch blog and more information about the mission, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/commercialcrew

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SOURCE NASA
BIRMINGHAM, Ala., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Encompass Health Corp. (NYSE: EHC) today announced it will present at the UBS Global Healthcare Conference being held May 23-25, 2022 in New York City.

Encompass Health's President and Chief Executive Officer Mark Tarr and Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Doug Coltharp will participate in a fireside chat from 9:15-9:55 a.m. ET on Tuesday, May 24, 2022.

The presentation will be webcast live and available at http://investor.encompasshealth.com.

About Encompass Health As a national leader in integrated healthcare services, Encompass Health (NYSE: EHC) offers both facilitybased and homebased patient care through its network of inpatient rehabilitation hospitals, home health agencies and hospice agencies. With a national footprint that includes 148 hospitals, 252 home health locations, and 99 hospice locations in 42 states and Puerto Rico, the Company provides highquality, cost-effective integrated healthcare. Encompass Health is ranked as one of Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For. For more information, visit encompasshealth.com, or follow us on our newsroom, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Media ContactErin Wendel-Ritter | 205 970-5912[email protected]

Investor Relations ContactMark Miller | 205 970-5860[email protected]

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/encompass-health-to-present-at-ubs-global-healthcare-conference-301546366.html

SOURCE Encompass Health Corp.
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- ChronWell, Inc., a digital health and therapeutics company that partners with medical practices to provide exceptional care beyond the walls of a clinic, recently announced the appointment of Donna Cryer, JD, Paul Haddad and Gary Leibowitz to the company's Board of Advisors.

Donna Cryer, Paul Haddad and Gary Leibowitz were recently appointed to Chronwell, Inc.'s Board of Advisors.

Mrs. Cryer is the founder, president and CEO of Global Liver Institute, a premier patient-driven nonprofit that aims to improve the lives of individuals and families impacted by liver disease around the world. Moved by her own experience as a liver transplant recipient, Cryer has become a powerful force in liver health, health policy, and patient advocacy. She currently serves on the Boards of Directors for the Council of Medical Specialty Societies, Sibley Memorial Hospital, part of Johns Hopkins Medicine and the Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative.

Mr. Haddad is the chairman and CEO of Fourthwall, a leading media and advertising data analytics technology company and founder of Polmondi Ventures. Previously, he was president of a4, Altice USA's advanced advertising and data solutions business, and senior vice president and general manager of Advanced Data Analytics for Cablevision.

Mr. Leibowitz is the founder and CEO of go-ESI, a software go-to-market company, and a recognized cybersecurity expert with board advisor and director positions at SecurityGate.io, eatNgage, ThreatGen , AuthMind and HOU.SEC.CON, a Houston-area information security conference. Leibowitz has extensive and diverse international experience in high-tech marketing, sales, business development, and general management.

Dr. Joe Rubinsztain, CEO of ChronWell, said that he is proud to welcome Cryer, Haddad and Leibowitz to the team. "Patient advocacy, data science and security are critical areas in digital therapeutics, and this world-class team of advisors is exactly what we need to support our rapid expansion," he said.

Chronwell recently announced its groundbreaking strategic partnership with ModifyHealth, a nationwide provider of gut-friendly, fully prepared meals, and Echosens North America, a high-tech medical equipment company offering the FibroScan family of products. This collaboration created LIVErHEALTHY, a newly-integrated digital therapeutic program that provides better outcomes and best-in-class service for patients with Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease.

About ChronWell

ChronWell is a digital health and therapeutics company targeting Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease and other associated metabolic conditions in partnership with healthcare providers. ChronWell pairs advanced digital therapeutics with highly skilled care teams to improve patients' lives beyond the walls of the physician's office and minimize the impact of chronic conditions on patients, providers, employers and insurers. For more information, follow us on LinkedIn or visit chronwell.com.

Contact: Mary GuidenEmail: [email protected]Phone: 206-854-3786

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/healthcare-technology-data-analytics-liver-health-leaders-join-chronwell-incs-advisory-board-301546373.html

SOURCE ChronWell, Inc.
NEW YORK and TORONTO, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ - iAnthus Capital Holdings, Inc. ("iAnthus" or the "Company") (CSE: IAN) (OTCPK: ITHUF), which owns, operates, and partners with regulated cannabis operations across the United States, today reported its financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2022. The Company's Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, which includes its unaudited condensed consolidated financial statements for the three months ended March 31, 2022 and the related management's discussion and analysis of financial condition and results of operations, can be accessed on the Securities and Exchange Commission's ("SEC's") website at www.sec.gov, the Company's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com, and on the Company's website at www.iAnthus.com. As a result of the Company becoming a U.S. reporting company in February 2021, the Company's financial statements are reported in accordance with U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles ("GAAP"). All currency is expressed in U.S. dollars.

First Quarter 2022 Financial Highlights

Revenue of $42.8 million, a sequential decrease of 10% from Q4 2021 and a decrease of 17% from the same period in the prior year.

Gross profit of $22.5 million, relatively flat when compared to Q4 2021 and a decrease of 24% from the same period in the prior year.

Gross margin of 52.6%, reflecting a sequential increase of 560bps from Q4 2021 and a decrease of 480bps from the same period in the prior year.

Net loss of $10.1 million, or a loss of $0.06 per share, compared to a loss of $26.9 million or a loss of $0.16 per share in Q4 2021, and compared to a loss of $19.5 million, or a loss of $0.11 per share, in the same period in the prior year.

Adjusted EBITDA(5) of $3.4 million, a sequential decrease from $8.2 million in Q4 2021 and decrease from $13.0 million from the same period in the prior year. EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA are non-GAAP measures. Reconciliation tables of EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA as used in this news release to GAAP are included below.

Due to liquidity constraints experienced by the Company, the Company did not make applicable interest payments due on its 13% senior secured convertible debentures ("Secured Notes") and its 8% convertible unsecured debentures ("Unsecured Debentures") due during 2020. As previously disclosed by the Company, the non-payment of interest in March 2020 triggered an event of default with respect to these components of the Company's long-term debt, which, as of March 31, 2022, consisted of principal amounts of $97.5 million and $60.0 million, and accrued interest of $34.8 million and $10.8 million, on the Secured Notes and Unsecured Debentures, respectively. In addition, as a result of the default, as of March 31, 2022, the Company has accrued additional fees and interest of $15.8 million ("Exit Fees") in excess of the aforementioned amounts that are further detailed in the Company's financial statements.

As disclosed in the Company's filings with the applicable Canadian securities regulators and the SEC, the Company entered into a restructuring support agreement dated July 10, 2020, as amended on June 15, 2021 (as amended, the "Restructuring Support Agreement") with the holders of its Secured Notes (the "Secured Lenders") and a majority of the holders of its Unsecured Debentures to effectuate a proposed recapitalization transaction (the "Recapitalization Transaction") to be implemented by way of a court-approved plan of arrangement under the Business Corporations Act (British Columbia). Pursuant to the terms of the Recapitalization Transaction and subject to the closing thereof, the Company is required to issue an aggregate of 6,072,579,699 common shares upon the extinguishment of (i) $22.5 million of Secured Notes (including the Exit Fees) plus interest accrued thereon, (ii) $40.0 million of Unsecured Debentures plus interest accrued thereon, and (iii) interest accrued above the principal amount of $14.7 million of the interim financing provided by the Secured Lenders. The Recapitalization Transaction remains subject to the receipt of all necessary regulatory approvals and approval by the Canadian Securities Exchange. The financial highlights herein do not give effect to the consummation of the Recapitalization Transaction.

Table 1: Financial Results in thousands of US$, except share and per share amounts (unaudited) Q1 2022 Q4 2021 Q1 2021 Revenue $ 42,790 $47,722 $ 51,805 Gross profit 22,492 22,419 29,721 Gross margin 52.60% 47.00% 57.40% Net loss (10,102) (26,947) (19,452) Net loss per share (0.06) (0.16) (0.11)

Table 2: Reconciliation of Net Income to Adjusted EBITDA in thousands of US$ Q1 2022 Q4 2021 Q1 2021 Net income (loss) $ (10,102) $ (26,947) $ (19,452) Depreciation and amortization 9,029 7,774 7,374 Interest expense, net 5,834 5,953 5,554 Income tax expense 4,875 2,471 7,291 EBITDA (Non-GAAP) $ 9,635 $ (10,749) $767 Adjustments Impairment loss  5,544  Write-downs and other charges (4) 292 1,616 259 Inventory reserve (41) 1,902  Accretion expense 766 774 4,852 Share-based compensation 1,464 1,613 1,634 Non-monetary gain from MPX NJ acquisition (10,460)   Loss/(Gain) from change in fair value of financial instruments 102 (275) 17 Debt obligation fees (1) 414 422 414 Non-recurring charges (2) 1,243 7,347 2,133 Change in accounting estimate - costs applicable to revenue (3)   2,903 Total Adjustments $ (6,220) $ 18,943 $ 12,212 Adjusted EBITDA (Non-GAAP) $ 3,416 $8,194 $ 12,979

(1) Reflects accrued interest on the Exit Fees. (2) Includes one-time, non-recurring costs related to the Company's Recapitalization Transaction, strategic review process, ongoing legal disputes, and other non-recurring costs associated with having become a U.S. reporting company. (3) In January 2021, the Company completed an assessment of the yield per gram that is used as an input to value the Company's inventory. The timing of this review was based on a combination of factors accumulating over time that provided the Company with updated information to make a better estimate on the yield of its products. These factors included enhanced data gathering of crop production and yields into inventory. The assessment resulted in a revision of the Company's production yield estimates that are used to value ending inventory. This change in accounting estimate was effective on January 1, 2021. (4) Reflects a $235,000 write-down of CBD inventory, and $57,000 of losses on NJ asset disposals. (5) See "Non-GAAP Financial Information" below for more information regarding the Company's use of non-GAAP financial measures.

Other Updates

Recapitalization Transaction

On April 1, 2022, the Maryland Medical Cannabis Commission (the "MMCC") approved the proposed change of ownership control of the Company's wholly-owned subsidiary, S8 Management, LLC ("S8"), contemplated by the Recapitalization Transaction. S8 currently controls four licensed entities in Maryland through management service agreements.

On November 4, 2021, the Company announced that the Florida Department of Health, Office of Medical Marijuana Use (the "OMMU"), by notice dated October 29, 2021, approved the variance request (the "Variance Request") filed by the Company's subsidiary, McCrory's Sunny Hill Nursery, LLC ("McCrory's"), to approve the proposed change of beneficial ownership of McCrory's contemplated by the Recapitalization Transaction. Subsequently, on December 9, 2021, iAnthus announced that, on November 19, 2021, Michael Weisser, Benjamin Pollara and Florida for Care, Inc., a not-for-profit corporation representing members including qualified Florida medical marijuana patients, filed a Petition for Formal Administrative Hearing (as amended, the "Petition") with the OMMU, challenging the OMMU's approval of the Variance Request and requesting a formal administrative hearing before an administrative law judge ("ALJ") at the Florida Division of Administrative Hearings. The OMMU informed the Company that, as a result of the filing of the Petition challenging the agency's decision within the permissible challenge period, the OMMU's prior approval is not an enforceable final agency order until there is a final resolution of the Petition and a final agency order is rendered. On May 4, 2022, the OMMU issued a final agency order, accepting the recommendation of the ALJ and dismissing the Petition.

The Company continues to seek the remaining state regulatory approvals in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York.

Resignation of Randy Maslow and Appointment of Robert Galvin as Interim CEO and Director

On May 4, 2022, the Company announced the resignation of Co-Founder and Interim Chief Executive Officer, Randy Maslow from his executive positions with the Company, including all positions with the Company's subsidiaries and its affiliates, and from the Company's Board of Directors (the "Board") and committees, effective as of May 6, 2022 (the "Resignation Date"). Mr. Maslow will continue to serve the Company in a consulting role for a period of six months following the Resignation Date.1

_______________ 1 The Company's financial statements for the quarter ended March 31, 2022, and associated Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations include additional information on the separation agreement the Company entered into with Mr. Maslow.

On May 6, 2022, the Company announced the appointment of Robert Galvin as Interim Chief Executive Officer and member of the Board, effective as of May 6, 2022.

Opening of Atlantic City, New Jersey Dispensary

On May 5, 2022, the Company opened its first dispensary in the state of New Jersey. The dispensary, which operates under the MPX NJ brand, is located in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Non-GAAP Financial Information

This release includes certain non-GAAP financial measures as defined by the SEC. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable financial measures calculated and presented in accordance with GAAP are included in the tables above. This information should be considered as supplemental in nature and not as a substitute for, or superior to, any measure of performance prepared in accordance with GAAP.

In evaluating our business, we consider and use EBITDA as a supplemental measure of operating performance. We define EBITDA as earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. We present EBITDA because we believe it is frequently used by securities analysts, investors and other interested parties as a measure of financial performance. We define Adjusted EBITDA as EBITDA before stock-based compensation, accretion expense, write-downs and impairments, gains and losses from changes in fair values of financial instruments, income or losses from equity-accounted investments, changes in accounting policy, non-recurring costs related to the Company's Recapitalization Transaction, and litigation costs related to ongoing legal proceedings.

The terms EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA are not defined under GAAP, and are not a measure of operating income, operating performance or liquidity presented in accordance with GAAP. EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA have limitations as an analytical tool, and when assessing the Company's operating performance, investors should not consider EBITDA or Adjusted EBITDA in isolation, or as a substitute for net income (loss) or other consolidated income statement data prepared in accordance with GAAP. Among other things, EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA do not reflect the Company's actual cash expenditures. Other companies may calculate similar measures differently than us, limiting their usefulness as comparative tools. We compensate for these limitations by relying on GAAP results and using EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA only as supplemental information.

About iAnthus

iAnthus owns and operates licensed cannabis cultivation, processing and dispensary facilities throughout the United States. For more information, visit www.iAnthus.com

The Company may be impacted by business interruptions resulting from pandemics and public health emergencies, including those related to the ongoing novel coronavirus disease ("COVID-19"). An outbreak of infectious disease, a pandemic, or a similar public health threat, such as the ongoing outbreak of COVID-19, or a fear of any of the foregoing could adversely impact the Company by causing operating, manufacturing, supply chain, and project development delays and disruptions, labor shortages, travel, and shipping disruption and shutdowns (including as a result of government regulation and prevention measures). It is unknown whether and how the Company may be affected if such a pandemic persists for an extended period of time, including as a result of the waiver of regulatory requirements or the implementation of emergency regulations to which the Company is subject. Although the Company has been deemed essential and/or has been permitted to continue operating its facilities in the states in which it cultivates, processes, manufactures, and sells cannabis during the pendency of the COVID-19 pandemic, subject to the implementation of certain restrictions on adult-use cannabis sales in both Massachusetts and Nevada, which have since been lifted, there is no assurance that the Company's operations will continue to be deemed essential and/or will continue to be permitted to operate. The Company may incur expenses or delays relating to such events outside of its control, which could have a material adverse impact on its business, operating results, financial condition, and the trading price of its common shares.

Forward Looking Statements

Statements in this news release contain forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are made on the basis of the current beliefs, expectations and assumptions of management, are not guarantees of performance and are subject to significant risks and uncertainty. These forward- looking statements should, therefore, be considered in light of various important factors, including those set forth in Company's reports that it files from time to time with the SEC and the Canadian securities regulators which you should review including, but not limited to, the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021 filed with the SEC. When used in this news release, words such as "will," "could," "plan," "estimate", "expect", "intend", "may", "potential", "believe", "should" and similar expressions, are forward-looking statements.

Forward-looking statements may include, without limitation, statements relating to the Company's financial performance, business development and results of operations, and the timing and outcome of the closing of the Recapitalization Transaction.

These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as predictions of future events, and the Company cannot assure you that the events or circumstances discussed or reflected in these statements will be achieved or will occur. If such forward-looking statements prove to be inaccurate, the inaccuracy may be material. You should not regard these statements as a representation or warranty by the Company or any other person that it will achieve its objectives and plans in any specified timeframe, or at all. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this news release. The Company disclaims any obligation to publicly update or release any revisions to these forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, after the date of this news release or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law.

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission have reviewed, approved or disapproved the content of this news release.

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SOURCE iAnthus Capital Holdings, Inc.
New OpenBlue Innovation Center at Cork HQ to further research and development into cutting-edge sustainability solutions

Johnson Controls OpenBlue technology helps customers deliver decarbonization and renewable energy goals while optimizing building performance

Irish Government through IDA Ireland to support Johnson Controls to work on next generation OpenBlue technology and solutions

CORK, Ireland, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Johnson Controls (NYSE: JCI), the global leader for smart, healthy and sustainable buildings today announced that it will open an OpenBlue Innovation Center in its global HQ at One Albert Quay, Cork, Ireland.

The center will be focused on identifying solutions for customers to hit decarbonization and renewable energy goals

The OpenBlue Innovation Center in Cork aims to create a future-ready built environment for both local and global customers and is part of an international network of OpenBlue Innovation Centers working to pioneer new ways to provide smart, healthy and sustainable spaces for customers.

"We are very pleased to be launching our OpenBlue Innovation Center in Cork. This center will be focused on working with our customers to identify solutions for them to hit decarbonization and renewable energy goals while optimizing building performance," said Tomas Brannemo, vice president and president, Building Solutions EMEALA at Johnson Controls. "This center will serve as our regional center of excellence to bring clients to see Johnson Controls' latest cutting-edge innovations on how to solve for net zero".

Fitted with the most advanced Johnson Controls building technology solutions, the OpenBlue Innovation Center will be a showcase of the latest and most innovative solutions from the company in a live environment. The research and development grant Johnson Controls received from the Irish government will support engineering activities at the center, including developing a professional services hub for the Europe, Middle East, Africa and Latin America region over a two-year period. Johnson Controls' research and development presence has grown substantially in recent years and it is expected that 18 new research and development roles will be created as a result of the OpenBlue Innovation Center, in addition to 40 roles already in place working on the next generation solutions for Johnson Controls and its customers.

Research and development at the OpenBlue Innovation Center will focus on the global priority to reduce carbon emissions in the building sector. The building sector accounts for nearly 40 percent of global annual CO2 emissions, making it a key focus area in the pursuit of a net zero world.

"Our partnership with the Irish government through IDA Ireland shows how governments and industry can drive real change. The financial support will allow us to increase our headcount, which will contribute not only to the local economy, but also to the development of our OpenBlue net zero solutions globally to have a positive impact on climate change," said Eamonn Hughes, vice president and general manager, Digital Solutions EMEALA at Johnson Controls.

Welcoming the investment, IDA Ireland's Head of Engineering and Green Economy, Eileen Sharpe added: "IDA Ireland is committed to supporting the work of world class companies such as Johnson Controls to utilize the latest developments in AI, Data Analytics and Cloud Architecture to build new technologies to enable a more sustainable world. This is a most welcome investment for Cork and for Ireland and is in line with our strategy aim to develop Ireland as a leading location for Sustainability Engineering solutions."

OpenBlue, Johnson Controls' suite of connected solutions, is a key enabler changing the face of sustainability for customers today, through smart buildings technologies designed for operational energy efficiency, occupant comfort and sustainability. Cutting-edge solutions such as OpenBlue Net Zero Buildings can help drive significant improvements in energy efficiency and corresponding carbon emissions.

The OpenBlue Innovation Center in Cork will launch on May 12, 2022.

About Johnson Controls:

At Johnson Controls (NYSE: JCI), we transform the environments where people live, work, learn and play. As the global leader in smart, healthy and sustainable buildings, our mission is to reimagine the performance of buildings to serve people, places and the planet.

Building on a proud history of more than 135 years of innovation, we deliver the blueprint of the future for industries such as healthcare, schools, data centers, airports, stadiums, manufacturing and beyond through OpenBlue, our comprehensive digital offering. Today, with a global team of 100,000 experts in more than 150 countries, Johnson Controls offers the world's largest portfolio of building technology and software as well as service solutions from some of the most trusted names in the industry. Visit www.johnsoncontrols.com for more information and follow @Johnson Controls on social platforms.

About Johnson Controls OpenBlue Innovation Centers

Johnson Controls was founded on innovation. It is in our DNA. Today, our OpenBlue Innovation Centers write the next chapters of this proud history, emphasizing seamless collaboration between expert teams to find new ways of providing smart, healthy and sustainable spaces. Powering the blueprint of the future.

www.johnsoncontrols.com/openblue/openblue-innovation-centers

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SOURCE Johnson Controls International plc
Qoala raised US$ 65 million in Series B funding led by Eurazeo with participation from several existing investors including Flourish Ventures, KB Investment, MassMutual Ventures, MDI Ventures, SeedPlus and Sequoia Capital India. In addition, BRI Ventures, Daiwa PI Partners, Indogen Capital, Mandiri Capital Indonesia and Salt Ventures also joined the investment round as new investors.

Qoala becomes Southeast Asia's fastest growing and first insurtech company with licenses and presence in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand.

JAKARTA, Indonesia, May 11, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Entering 2022, Indonesian insurtech startup Qoala, has successfully raised Series B funding of US$ 65 million. The company distributes retail insurance products to consumers for car, bike, home, and health through its omnichannel platform. Based in Indonesia, the platform has successfully expanded to Thailand and Malaysia in 2021, strengthening Qoala's commitment to make makes insurance accessible, easy to understand, and help consumers better with their claims.

Having grown 30 times since the Series A round in April 2020, Qoala is the fastest growing insurtech in SEA. Qoala has acquired over 50,000 insurance marketers and provides a platform supported by over 50 insurers for them to sell insurance from multiple insurers, while managing pre-sale and post-sale services. It also provides several innovative micro-insurance products through its partnerships with Traveloka, Redbus, DANA, JD.ID, Shopee, Kredivo and Investree among others.

Qoala focuses on "retail insurance" which involves insurance for cars, bikes, homes, and health. "Qoala is the only insurtech with licenses in three markets in SEA and with this new round we are optimistic in sustaining our growth momentum. Our business in Thailand has also already grown by three times since we joined forces with FairDee in February 2021, which gives us confidence in our expansion capability," added Tommy Martin, Co-founder and COO of Qoala.

"Qoala's business model of expanding the use of insurance among underserved consumers in Southeast Asia resonates with our thesis of backing innovation to improve financial health of households," said Smita Aggarwal, Global Investments Advisor at Flourish Ventures. "We are excited about the momentum that Qoala has generated since we last invested in Series A. We at Flourish Ventures are pleased to continue our commitment to Qoala."

Tara Reeves of Eurazeo, a European investment firm who led this round and previously funded WeFox, the largest insurtech in the world also added, "Qoala stands out amongst the insurtech companies due to its diverse team which has been able to deliver rapid growth with promising unit economics despite the pandemic. With regional presence and fast growth forecasted for the region, we are excited to lead this round and join Qoala in its journey."

Qoala sets itself apart through a superior tech stack. This enables them to offer industry-leading speed in policy issuance, instant pricing as well as an industry first - instant commissions to insurance marketers. These innovations not only solve very key issues for insurance marketers and consumers but also allow Qoala to acquire and service consumers at a lower cost, leading to superior unit economics. Global insurers like Sompo, AXA, and Chubb have also joined Qoala's platform due to their focus on retail customers so they can fasten insurance adoption while maintaining healthy loss ratios.

The funding also demonstrates appreciation and trust from both Qoala's existing and new investors to continue its growth in the insurtech sector. "We will continue to invest towards scaling up Qoala's reach in our core markets and focus on enhancing our technology and product experience to greatly reduce the hurdles to accessing insurance that are today still very significant," said Harshet Lunani, Founder and CEO of Qoala.

Furthermore, Qoala aims to add over 250 employees this year focus on building out an engineering and product management hub in Gurugram, India. In parallel, Qoala also plans to grant employees with equity compensation and give them the right to acquire shares in the company to strengthen employee ownership in the company.

"Insurance penetration in Indonesia is currently only 2%, far behind the global average of 6%, with most consumers just beginning to understand the value of insurance and hence there is plenty of room for growth. Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia are amongst the top 10 fastest growing global markets for insurance in the next decade," added Harshet.

About Qoala

Qoala is a startup in the field of insurance technology with a mission to socialize insurance through a combination of new product development supported by machine learning-based claim processes. Qoala operates in three countries; Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand offering various insurance protections, ranging from health, motor vehicle, property, personal accident, and other needs that can be accessed quickly, easily, and transparently through the Qoala application or website.

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SOURCE Qoala
Lee Curtis, David Gougis, Wendell Yacur and Rick Keyes to lead technology-focused Advisory practice

CHICAGO, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- SDI Presence LLC (SDI), an IT consultancy and managed services provider (MSP), announces the update of its technology-focused delivery model to best meet the changing needs of its government technology clients.

SDI Presence announces the update of its delivery model to best meet the needs of government technology clients.

"These new positions  along with a new team structure and expanded delivery methodologies  will allow SDI to better share our depth of knowledge in government enterprise technologies by leveraging our broad experience working with municipalities, special districts, counties, and state government agencies," said Jonathan Gair, Vice President of Operations at SDI Presence.

SDI's shift toward a horizontally focused practice model is designed to best position the firm's subject matter expertise to directly impact customer value. Issues with designing, configuring, and testing systems tend to re-occur across technology partners, leading to frustration, inefficiencies, and sometimes flawed deployments. With its new model, SDI is positioning its expert Practice Leads to deliver industry-specific and well-honed methodologies, content, test cases, and design planning services, supported by the SDI consultant team.

"SDI is growing," Jonathan Gair added. "We did not want to lose sight of what makes us unique: our local presence. Now, our directors will be more available to help clients improve services, while our practice leads maintain ownership of the day-to-day project oversight role."

To lead this enhanced Advisory practice, SDI has promoted four experienced SDI personnel to the newly created positions of Practice Leads, with each serving as the leader of a specific technology area:

IT Strategic Planning: Project Manager Lee Curtis will build on his over 40 years of experience leading over 50 IT Strategic Plans and Assessments, and previous experience as a public sector IT Director and CIO.

Land Management Systems (LMS): Project Manager Rick Keyes, a 30-year veteran who specializes in IT and vendor management with state governments and holds PMP and Prosci OCM certifications, will lead the Land Management System (LMS) practice.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP): Project Managers David Gougis and Wendell Yacur will co-lead SDI's ERP practice, building on their combined half century of experience working as advisors to the public sector space. Wendell Yacur is a 30-year IT professional with a focus on management consulting for state governments, while David Gougis has more than 30 years of experience in both technology and finance consulting and as held Lead roles for public sector agencies.

Supporting each Lead will be a regionally focused Director of Operations that is dedicated to client success.

"I truly believe that Rick, Lee, David and Wendell represent one of the strongest, most experienced teams available to organizations," said Hardik Bhatt, President and Chief Growth Office of SDI Presence. "Their backgrounds in procurements, implementations and strategic planning make them subject matter experts in systems that often touch all departments within an organization, meaning they can help facilitate even the toughest, most challenging projects."

These promotions occur as SDI Presence is seeing substantial growth in its government and utilities practices. Seasoned cloud and IT managed services industry leaders Hardik Bhatt, Prasad Alavilli, and Sunil Thomas recently joined SDI, as the firm aggressively builds out legacy IT modernization solutions. In 2021, SDI announced that the firm secured an infusion of private equity capital with Abry Partners, a Boston, Massachusetts-based private equity firm, to fund its growth.

About SDI Presence LLC (www.sdipresence.com)

SDI Presence LLC is an IT consultancy and managed services provider (MSP) that leverages its strong team presence to advance our clients to a secure digital enterprise. With a 25-year corporate resume, SDI delivers strategic managed services, IT consulting, and hybrid infrastructure solutions to optimize our clients' technology environments. SDI is a certified Minority Business Enterprise (MBE), with a portfolio of clients that includes some of the nation's largest airports, utilities, commercial real estate portfolios, and government agencies. Connect with us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.

For media inquiries, please contact:

Dawn Nash PfeifferSDI Presence LLCChief Markets Officer312.580.7516[email protected]

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SOURCE SDI Presence LLC
SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

WASHINGTON, D.C. 20549

REPORT OF FOREIGN PRIVATE ISSUER

PURSUANT TO RULE 13a-16 OR 15d-16 OF

THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934

For the month of May 2022

________________

SILICOM LTD.

(Translation of Registrant's name into English)

________________

14 Atir Yeda St., P.O.Box 2164, Kfar-Sava 4464323, Israel

(Address of principal executive offices)

________________

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant files or will file annual reports under cover of Form 20-F or Form 40-F:

Form 20-F  Form 40-F 

Indicate by check mark if the registrant is submitting the Form 6-K in paper as permitted by Regulation S-T Rule 101(b)(1): ______

Indicate by check mark if the registrant is submitting the Form 6-K in paper as permitted by Regulation S-T Rule 101(b)(7): ______

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant by furnishing the information contained in this form is also thereby furnishing the information to the Commission pursuant to Rule 12g3-2(b) under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934:

Yes  No 

If Yes is marked, indicate below the file number assigned to the registrant in connection with Rule 12g3-2(b): 82-______

On May 2, 2022, Silicom Ltd. (the Registrant) filed a Current Report on Form 6-K announcing that it will hold an annual general meeting of shareholders on June 7, 2022 at 14:00 (Israel time) at the Registrants offices at 14 Atir Yeda Street, Kfar Sava 4464323, Israel and attached a Notice and Proxy Statement and Proxy Card.

This Amendment No. 1 on Form 6-K/A is furnishing an amended Notice and Proxy Statement and Proxy Card solely to add Annexes A and B which were inadvertently omitted from the Notice and Proxy Statement and Proxy Card. Attached is the Notice and Proxy Statement and Proxy Card that will be sent to the shareholders reflecting this change. No other changes have been made to the Notice and Proxy Statement and Proxy Card.

Exhibit Index :

This report on Form 6-K is incorporated by reference into all effective registration statements filed by the Registrant under the Securities Act of 1933.

Signature

Pursuant to the requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the Registrant has duly caused this Report to be signed on its behalf by the undersigned, thereunto duly authorized.

Dated: May 12, 2022

Shareholders of record at the close of business on May 9, 2022 will be entitled to vote at the Meeting or any postponements or adjournments thereof. Shareholders who do not expect to attend the Meeting in person are requested to mark, date, sign and mail the enclosed proxy as promptly as possible.

13. To review the Company's Financial Statements and Annual Report for the year ended December 31, 2021, and to transact such other business as may properly come before the Meeting.

12. To consider and act upon a proposal to approve the appointment of Kesselman & Kesselman Certified Public Accountants (Isr.), PwC Israel, as the independent public accountants of the Company for year ending December 31, 2022, and until the next annual general meeting of the shareholders of the Company, and to authorize the Audit Committee of the Board of Directors to fix the compensation of such auditors in accordance with the amount and nature of their services.

11. To consider and act upon a proposal to approve the Amended Executive Compensation Policy in the form attached hereto as Annex B (the  Amended Compensation Policy ).

10. To consider and act upon a proposal to approve the grant of 50,000 options to purchase Ordinary Shares of the Company pursuant to the Plan and in compliance with the Compensation Policy, the Amended Executive Compensation Policy and the Compensation Policy Cap to Mr. Liron Eizenman, upon the commencement of his term as the Companys new President and Chief Executive Officer, on July 1, 2022.

9. To consider and act upon the proposal to approve the Compensation Package for Mr. Liron Eizenman, who will be appointed as the Companys new President and Chief Executive Officer, commencing July 1, 2022.

8. To consider and act upon a proposal to approve an increase in the monthly base salary of Mr. Yeshayahu (Shaike) Orbach, the Companys current President and Chief Executive Officer, in compliance with the Compensation Policy and the Amended Executive Compensation Policy.

7. To consider and act upon a proposal to approve an increase in the monthly base salary of Mr. Avi Eizenman, the Companys Active Chairman of the Board of Directors, in compliance with the Compensation Policy and the Amended Executive Compensation Policy.

6. To consider and act upon a proposal to approve the grant of 13,333 options to purchase Ordinary Shares of the Company pursuant to the Plan and in compliance with the Compensation Policy, the Compensation Policy Cap and the Amended Executive Compensation Policy to Mr. Yeshayahu (Shaike) Orbach, the Companys current President and Chief Executive Officer.

5. To consider and act upon a proposal to approve the grant of 13,333 options to purchase Ordinary Shares of the Company pursuant to the Companys Global Share Incentive Plan (2013) (the  Plan ) and in compliance with the Companys Compensation Policy, which was re-approved by the Companys shareholders on June 5, 2019 (the  Compensation Policy ), the Compensation Policy Cap (as such term is defined in the Proxy Statement attached hereto) and the Amended Executive Compensation Policy to Mr. Avi Eizenman, the Companys Active Chairman of the Board of Directors.

4. To consider and act upon a proposal to elect Ms. Ayelet Aya Hayak, to the Companys Board of Directors, to hold office as director for a three-year term commencing on the date of the Meeting until the Annual General Meeting of Shareholders to be held in the year 2025, and until her successor has been duly elected.

3. To consider and act upon a proposal to elect Mr. Ilan Erez, to the Companys Board of Directors, to hold office as director for a three-year term commencing on the date of the Meeting until the Annual General Meeting of Shareholders to be held in the year 2025, and until his successor has been duly elected.

2. To consider and act upon a proposal to re-elect Mr. Avi Eizenman, the Companys Active Chairman of the Board of Directors, to the Companys Board of Directors, and, subject to the approval of the Amended Articles, to hold office as director for a two-year term, commencing on the date of the Meeting until the Annual General Meeting of Shareholders to be held in the year 2024, and until his successor has been duly elected.

1. To consider and act upon a proposal to approve the Amendment of the Company's Articles of Association in the form attached hereto as Annex A (the  Amended Articles ).

The Company is an Overseas Company, as such term is defined in the Israeli Companies Regulations (Concessions for Public Companies Traded on Stock Markets Outside of Israel)  2000.

Notice is hereby given that an Annual General Meeting (the  Meeting ) of Shareholders of Silicom Ltd. (the  Company ) will be held, at the offices of the Company at 14 Atir Yeda Street, Kfar Sava 4464323, Israel, on June 7, 2022, at 14:00 Israel time.

Exhibit 2



PROXY STATEMENT

________________

SILICOM LTD.

14 Atir Yeda St.

Kfar Sava

Israel

ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING OF SHAREHOLDERS

June 7, 2022

The enclosed proxy is being solicited by the board of directors (the  Board of Directors ) of Silicom Ltd. (the  Company ) for use at the Company's Annual General Meeting of Shareholders (the  Meeting ) to be held on June 7, 2022, at 14:00 Israel time, or at any adjournment or postponement thereof. Upon the receipt of a properly executed proxy in the form enclosed, the persons named as proxies therein will vote the ordinary shares, par value New Israeli Shekels ( NIS ) 0.01 each, of the Company (the  Ordinary Shares ) covered thereby in accordance with the directions of the shareholders executing the proxy. In the absence of such directions, and except as mentioned otherwise in this proxy statement, the Ordinary Shares represented thereby will be voted in favor of each of the proposals described in this proxy statement.

The proxy solicited hereby may be revoked at any time prior to its exercise, by means of a written notice delivered to the Company, by substitution of a new proxy bearing a later date or by a request for the return of the proxy at the Meeting. The Company expects to solicit proxies by mail and to mail this proxy statement and the accompanying proxy card to shareholders on or about May 9, 2022. Directors, officers and employees of the Company may also solicit proxies by telephone, facsimile and personal interview.

The Company will bear the cost of the preparation and mailing of its proxy materials and the solicitation of proxies. Copies of solicitation materials will be furnished to brokerage firms, nominees, fiduciaries and other custodians for forwarding to their principals, and the reasonable fees and expenses of such forwarding agents will be borne by the Company. Only holders of record of Ordinary Shares at the close of business in New York, NY, USA on May 9, 2022 are entitled to vote at the Meeting. On April 29, 2022, 6,650,824 Ordinary Shares were outstanding and entitled to vote. Each Ordinary Share is entitled to one vote on each matter to be voted at the Meeting.

Two or more shareholders present, personally or by proxy, holding not less than thirty three and a third percent (33 1/3%) of the Company's outstanding Ordinary Shares, shall constitute a quorum for the Meeting. If within half an hour from the time the Meeting is convened a quorum is not present, the Meeting shall stand adjourned until June 14, 2022 at 14:00 Israel time. If a quorum is not present at the adjourned Meeting within half an hour from the time appointed for such meeting, two or more shareholders present personally or by proxy shall be deemed a quorum, and shall be entitled to deliberate and to resolve in respect of the matters for which the Meeting was convened. Abstentions and broker non-votes are counted as Ordinary Shares present for the purpose of determining a quorum.

Pursuant to the Israeli Companies Law, 1999-5759 (the  Companies Law ), each of Proposals 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, and 12 requires the affirmative vote of shareholders present at the Meeting, in person or by proxy, and holding Ordinary Shares of the Company amounting in the aggregate to at least a majority of the votes actually cast by shareholders with respect to such proposals (hereinafter an  Ordinary Majority ).

Pursuant to the Companies Law, each of Proposals 6, 8, 9, 10 and 11 requires the affirmative vote of a simple majority of shares present at the Meeting, in person or by proxy, and voting thereon, as long as either:



 the majority of shares that voted for the approval of the proposal includes at least majority of the shares held by non-controlling and non-interested shareholders voted at the Meeting, (excluding abstaining votes); or



 the total number of shares of non-controlling and non-interested shareholders that voted against the approval of the proposal does not exceed two percent of the aggregate voting rights in the Company.

Shareholders are requested to notify us whether or not they have a "Personal Interest" in connection with each of Proposals 6, 8, 9, 10 and 11 (please see the definition of the term "Personal Interest" with respect to such proposal below under the description of the proposal). If any shareholder casting a vote in connection thereto does not notify us as to whether or not they have a Personal Interest with respect to each of Proposals 6, 8, 9 10 and 11 they will be deemed as having a Personal Interest with respect to such proposal and their vote will not be counted for the special disinterested majority required for the approval of such proposal.

PRINCIPAL SHAREHOLDERS

The following table sets forth, as of April 15, 2022, the number of Ordinary Shares, including options and warrants to purchase Ordinary Shares exercisable within 60 days, owned by (i) all shareholders known to the Company to own more than five percent (5%) of the Company's Ordinary Shares and (ii) all directors and officers as a group (based on 6,650,824 Ordinary Shares outstanding on that date). Each of our shareholders has identical voting rights with respect to its shares. All of the information with respect to beneficial ownership of the Ordinary Shares is given to the best of our knowledge. Except where otherwise indicated, and subject to applicable community property laws, we believe, based on information furnished to us by such owners or otherwise disclosed in any public filings, that the beneficial owners of the Ordinary Shares listed below have sole dispositive and voting power with respect to such Ordinary Shares.

Name of Shareholder Number of Shares and Options Owned (1) Percentage of Outstanding Shares Wellington Management Group LLP(2) 677,200 10.2% Systemic Financial Management, LP(3) 528,838 8.0% First Wilshire Securities Management, Inc. (4) 488,428 7.3%



(1) The table above includes the number of shares and options that are exercisable within 60 days of April 15, 2022. Ordinary shares subject to these options are deemed beneficially owned for the purpose of computing the ownership percentage of the person or group holding these options, but are not deemed outstanding for purposes of computing the ownership percentage of any other person. All the information detailed in this table is as set forth in major shareholders' public filings, unless stated otherwise.



(2) As reported on Schedule 13G/A filed by Wellington Management Group LLP, Wellington Group Holdings LLP, Wellington Investment Advisors Holdings LLP and Wellington Management Company LLP with the SEC on April 11, 2022. The securities as to which the Schedule was filed are owned of record by clients of one or more investment advisers, which are directly or indirectly owned by Wellington Management Group LLP.

Those clients have the right to receive, or the power to direct the receipt of, dividends from, or the proceeds from the sale of, such securities. No such client is known to have such right or power with respect to more than 5% of this class of securities, except for: Wellington Trust Company, NA (Wellington).

As reported on Schedule 13G filed by Wellington with the SEC on February 4, 2022, those securities as to which the Schedule was filed by Wellington, in its capacity as investment adviser, are owned of record by its clients. Those clients have the right to receive, or the power to direct the receipt of, dividends from, or the proceeds from the sale of, such securities. No such client is known to have such right or power with respect to more than five percent of this class of securities.

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The securities as to which the Schedule was filed by Wellington Management Group LLP, as parent holding company of certain holding companies and the Wellington Investment Advisers, are owned of record by clients of the Wellington Investment Advisers. Wellington Investment Advisors Holdings LLP controls directly, or indirectly through Wellington Management Global Holdings, Ltd., the Wellington Investment Advisers. Wellington Investment Advisors Holdings LLP is owned by Wellington Group Holdings LLP. Wellington Group Holdings LLP is owned by Wellington Management Group LLP.



(3) As reported on Schedule 13G/A filed by Systemic Financial Management, LP with the SEC on February 10, 2022.



(4) As reported on Schedules 13G filed by First Wilshire Securities Management, Inc. with the SEC on February 14, 2022.

COMPENSATION OF OFFICERS

For details concerning the compensation granted to the Company's five most highly compensated office holders (as defined in the Companies Law) during or with respect to the year ended December 31, 2021, see the Company's annual report on Form 20-F filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 27, 2022.

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* * * * *

PROPOSAL 1

TO CONSIDER AND ACT UPON A PROPOSAL TO APPROVE THE AMENDMENT OF

THE COMPANYS ARTICLES OF ASSOCIATION

Under the Companys Articles of Association (the  Articles ), directors are elected into three groups ( Groups ). For as long as the Company was required to elect external directors, however, such directors were not elected to the Groups, and were elected separately in accordance with the Companies Law. In light of the July 2020 decision of our Board of Directors to take advantage of exception under Regulation 5D of the Companies Law Regulations (Regulations for Companies the Shares of Which are Registered for Trading Outside of Israel), 2000, whereby it is not required to elect external directors, we no longer have serving external directors and Mr. Ilan Erez and Ms. Ayelet Aya Hayak have continued to serve the remainder of their three-year term as independent directors under NASDAQ rules.

Consequently, our Board of Directors resolved, subject to shareholder approval to amend Article 39(b) of the Articles to remove reference to external directors (the  First Amendment ).

Additionally, management of the Company has selected Mr. Ilan Erez and Ms. Ayelet Aya Hayak to be elected to the Board of Directors, subject to the approval of the Meeting. However, under the current Articles, each Group is required to be as nearly equal in number as possible, and consequently, our Board resolved to revise the structure of the Groups, so that Mr. Ilan Erez and Ms. Ayelet Aya Hayak can be elected to the Board of Directors, together with Mr. Avi Eizenman, the Active Chairman of the Board of Directors, whose current term concludes at this Meeting. To that effect our Board of Directors resolved to introduce a new Sub-Article 39(v) such that one of the members of the Group elected to our Board of Directors at this Meeting, will only serve for a two-year term (the  Second Amendment  and with the First Amendment, the  Amendments ).

As resolved by the Board of Directors, the Board of Directors deems it advisable and in the best interest of the Company to adopt the Amendments and to adopt a corresponding amendment to the Articles, a marked-up version of which is attached hereto as Annex A . The proposed Amendments are designed to support continuity of the leadership of the Board of Directors and Company stability, thus contributing to the success of the Company and to the effort to maximize its operations and results.

The shareholders of the Company will be requested to adopt the following resolution at the Meeting:

RESOLVED, to approve the adoption of the Amendments and to adopt Amended Articles in the form attached hereto as Annex A (the Amended Articles) to the Proxy Statement.

The adoption of the Amendment and the corresponding amendment of the Articles requires the affirmative vote of an Ordinary Majority.

The Board of Directors recommends that the shareholders vote FOR approval of the proposed resolution.

PROPOSAL 2

TO RE-ELECT MR. AVI EIZENMAN

The management of the Company has selected Mr. Avi Eizenman, the Company's Active Chairman of the Board, for re-election as director and as Active Chairman of the Board of Directors.

As noted in Proposal 1, in light of the desire of the Companys management to elect Mr. Ilan Erez and Ms. Ayelet Aya Hayak to the Board of Directors in this Meeting, and the need to have the Groups as nearly equal in number as possible, subject to the approval of the adoption of the Amended Articles, Mr. Eizenmans term in office will be a two-year term and will commence on the date of the Meeting until the Annual General Meeting of the shareholders to be held in 2024 and until his successor has been duly elected.

In the absence of instructions to the contrary, the persons named in the enclosed proxy will vote the Ordinary Shares represented thereby FOR the election of Mr. Avi Eizenman. If Mr. Avi Eizenman is unable to serve, the persons named in the proxy shall vote the Ordinary Shares for the election of such other nominee as management may propose. Mr. Avi Eizenman, who is currently serving as a director of the Company and as the Company's Active Chairman of the Board, has advised the Company that he will continue to serve as director and as Active Chairman of the Board if re-elected.

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Mr. Avi Eizenman has attested to the Board of Directors and the Company that he meets all the requirements in connection with the election of directors of publicly traded companies under the Companies Law and the regulations promulgated thereunder.

The following table provides certain relevant information concerning Mr. Avi Eizenman.

Nominee Age Principal Occupation Avi Eizenman 64 Mr. Eizenman co-founded the Company in 1987 and has served as a Director since its inception. Mr. Eizenman also served as our President and Chief Executive Officer from the Company's inception until April 1, 2001, and on such date, he resigned from his positions as President and Chief Executive Officer and was appointed Active Chairman of the Board of Directors. Before the incorporation of Silicom, Mr. Eizenman held various engineering and management positions at Scitex Ltd. and at the Electronic Research & Development Department of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Mr. Eizenman holds a B.Sc. degree, with honors, in Electrical Engineering from the Technion, and an M.B.A. from Tel Aviv University.

In accordance with our Amended Executive Compensation Policy, which has been submitted to the shareholders for their approval at this Meeting (the  Amended Compensation Policy ), Mr. Avi Eizenman will continue to be a party to an indemnification agreement with the Company in the form of an indemnification letter previously approved by the shareholders on April 11, 2012 to be entered into by the Company with directors serving from time to time in such capacity, and shall continue to be insured under the Company's directors and officers insurance coverage which provides coverage for all directors of the Company. Under our Amended Compensation Policy, any change to the indemnification agreement or the insurance policy, including the cost and/or any changes, which materially depart from the key terms of the current agreement and/or insurance policy (provided that such changes apply equally to all executives of the Company, including directors), will be submitted to the Company's Compensation Committee and the Board of Directors for their approval but shall not, unless required by law or the Company's Articles of Association, be presented at a General Meeting of the shareholders.

The shareholders of the Company will be requested to adopt the following resolution at the Meeting:

RESOLVED, to re-elect Mr. Avi Eizenman, the Companys Active Chairman of the Board of Directors, to the Companys Board of Directors, and, subject to the approval of the Amended Articles, to hold office as director for a two-year term, commencing on the date of the Meeting until the Annual General Meeting of Shareholders to be held in the year 2024, and until his successor has been duly elected.

The re-election of Mr. Eli Eizenman as director and Active Chairman of the Board requires the affirmative vote of an Ordinary Majority.

The Board of Directors, with the exception of Mr. Avi Eizenman who expresses no recommendation as to the vote on the above proposal recommends a vote FOR approval of the re-election of Mr. Avi Eizenman as a director of the Company and Active Chairman of the Board as set forth above.

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PROPOSAL 3

SUBJECT TO APPROVAL OF THE AMENDED ARTICLES, TO ELECT MR. ILAN EREZ TO

THE COMPANYS BOARD OF DIRECTORS, TO HOLD OFFICE AS DIRECTOR FOR

A THREE-YEAR TERM COMMENCING ON THE DATE OF THE MEETING

As noted in Proposal 1, given that Mr. Ilan Erez is no longer considered an external director, and considering that his term is terminating in June 2022, the management of the Company has selected Mr. Ilan Erez for election as director to serve for an additional three-year term commencing on the date of the Meeting until the end of his term and until his successor is duly elected. In the absence of instructions to the contrary, the persons named in the enclosed proxy will vote the Ordinary Shares represented thereby "FOR" the election of Mr. Ilan Erez. If Mr. Ilan Erez is unable to serve, the persons named in the proxy shall vote the Ordinary Shares for the election of such other nominee as management may propose. Ilan Erez, who is currently serving as an independent director of the Company, has advised the Company that he will continue to serve as director if elected.

Mr. Ilan Erez has attested to the Board of Directors and the Company that he meets all the requirements in connection with the election of directors of publicly traded companies under the Companies Law and the regulations promulgated thereunder.

The following table provides certain relevant information concerning Mr.Ilan Erez.

Nominee Age Principal Occupation Ilan Erez 54 Mr. Erez served as a director since July 2010. Mr. Erez has been CFO and General Manager of AlgoSec Inc. since October 2019. AlgoSec is a leading provider of business-driven security management software. Prior to that, Mr. Erez had been General Manager of 3D Systems Corporation's (NYSE: DDD) Software Business Unit from September 2016 to March 2019 and co-managed that business unit from May 2015 to September 2016. 3D Systems provides comprehensive 3D products and services, including 3D printers, print materials, on-demand manufacturing services and digital design and manufacturing tools. From 2005 to 2015, Mr. Erez served as Chief Financial Officer of Cimatron Ltd. (NASDAQ: CIMT) engaged in the design and sale of CAD/CAM software for the tool-making and discrete manufacturing industries. From 1998 to 2005 Mr. Erez served as the Chief Financial Officer of the Company. He also served as VP Operations of the Company from May 2001 to 2005. From 1996 to 1998 Mr. Erez served as Controller and Assistant to the Chief Executive Officer of Bio-Dar Ltd. From 1994 to 1996 Mr. Erez served as an auditor at Kesselman & Kesselman, a PWC member firm. Mr. Erez is a Certified Public Accountant in Israel and holds a B.A in Accounting and Economics from the Hebrew University and an LL.M. in Business Law from Bar-Ilan University.

In accordance with our Amended Compensation Policy which has been submitted to the shareholders for their approval at this Meeting, Mr. Ilan Erez will continue to be a party to an indemnification agreement with the Company in the form of indemnification letter previously approved by the shareholders on April 11, 2012 to be entered into by the Company with directors serving from time to time in such capacity, and shall continue to be insured under the Companys directors and officers insurance coverage which provides coverage for all directors of the Company. Under our Amended Compensation Policy, any change to the indemnification agreement or the insurance policy, including the cost and/or any changes which materially depart from the key terms of the current agreement and/or insurance policy (provided that such changes apply equally to all executives of the Company, including directors) will be submitted to the Company's Compensation Committee and the Board of Directors for their approval but shall not, unless required by law or the Company's Articles of Association, be presented at a General Meeting of the shareholders.





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The shareholders of the Company will be requested to adopt the following resolution at the Meeting:





 RESOLVED, to elect Mr. Ilan Erez as a director of the Company for a three-year term commencing on the date of the Meeting and until his successor has been duly elected. 

The election of Mr. Ilan Erez as director requires the affirmative vote of an Ordinary Majority.

The Board of Directors, with the exception of Mr. Ilan Erez who expresses no recommendation as to the vote on the above proposal recommends a vote FOR approval of the election of Mr. Ilan Erez as a director of the Company as set forth above.

PROPOSAL 4

SUBJECT TO APPROVAL OF THE AMENDED ARTICLES, TO ELECT MS. AYELET

AYA HAYAK TO THE COMPANYS BOARD OF DIRECTORS, TO HOLD OFFICE AS

DIRECTOR FOR A THREE-YEAR TERM COMMENCING ON THE DATE OF THE MEETING

As noted in Proposal 1, given that Ms. Ayelet Aya Hayak is no longer considered an external director, and considering that her term is terminating in June 2022, the management of the Company has selected Ms. Ayelet Aya Hayak for election as director to serve for an additional three-year term commencing on the date of the Meeting until the end of her term and until his successor is duly elected. In the absence of instructions to the contrary, the persons named in the enclosed proxy will vote the Ordinary Shares represented thereby "FOR" the election of Ms. Ayelet Aya Hayak. If Ms. Ayelet Aya Hayak is unable to serve, the persons named in the proxy shall vote the Ordinary Shares for the election of such other nominee as management may propose. Ayelet Aya Hayak, who is currently serving as an independent director of the Company, has advised the Company that she will continue to serve as director if elected.

Ms. Ayelet Aya Hayak has attested to the Board of Directors and the Company that she meets all the requirements in connection with the election of directors of publicly traded companies under the Companies Law and the regulations promulgated thereunder.

The following table provides certain relevant information concerning Ms. Ayelet Aya Hayak.

Nominee Age Principal Occupation Ayelet Aya Hayak 52 Ms. Hayak has served as a director since July 1, 2013. Ms. Hayak provides financial consulting services to corporations. Hayak Ayelet was the CEO of an Automation company, and also serves as a director in several companies. Ms. Hayek holds a BA degree in accounting and business administration from the Tel Aviv College of Management and is also a Certified Public Accountant.





In accordance with our Amended Compensation Policy which has been submitted to the shareholders for their approval at this Meeting, Ms. Ayelet Aya Hayak will continue to be a party to an indemnification agreement with the Company in the form of indemnification letter previously approved by the shareholders on April 11, 2012 to be entered into by the Company with directors serving from time to time in such capacity, and shall continue to be insured under the Companys directors and officers insurance coverage which provides coverage for all directors of the Company. Under our Amended Compensation Policy, any change to the indemnification agreement or the insurance policy, including the cost and/or any changes which materially depart from the key terms of the current agreement and/or insurance policy (provided that such changes apply equally to all executives of the Company, including directors) will be submitted to the Company's Compensation Committee and the Board of Directors for their approval but shall not, unless required by law or the Company's Articles of Association, be presented at a General Meeting of the shareholders.

The shareholders of the Company will be requested to adopt the following resolution at the Meeting:

 RESOLVED, to elect Ms. Ayelet Aya Hayak as a director of the Company for a three-year term commencing on the date of the Meeting and until her successor has been duly elected. 

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The election of Ms. Ayelet Aya Hayak as director requires the affirmative vote of an Ordinary Majority.

The Board of Directors, with the exception of Ms. Ayelet Aya Hayak who expresses no recommendation as to the vote on the above proposal recommends a vote FOR approval of the re-election of Ms. Ayelet Aya Hayak as a director of the Company as set forth above.

PROPOSAL 5

TO APPROVE THE GRANT OF 13,333 OPTIONS TO PURCHASE ORDINARY SHARES

OF THE COMPANY TO MR. AVI EIZENMAN, THE COMPANY'S ACTIVE CHAIRMAN

OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

The Company's Compensation Policy provides that all Executives (other than non-employee directors) are incentivized through cash bonuses and long-term equity-based incentives to provide the Executive with a stake in Silicoms success  thus linking the Executive's long-term financial interests with the interests of Silicoms shareholders. Under the existing Compensation Policy, the maximum value of the variable compensation components shall not exceed eighty percent (80%) of each Executive's total compensation package on an annual basis (the  Compensation Policy Cap ).

The Compensation Committee and the Board of Directors have each recommended and approved on March 14, 2022, a grant of 13,333 options to purchase the Company's Ordinary Shares (hereinafter in this Resolution, the (Options ) to Mr. Avi Eizenman, the Company's Active Chairman of the Board, pursuant to the Company's Global Share Incentive Plan (2013) (the  Plan ). The Compensation Committee and Board of Directors have each also determined that the proposed grant of options to Mr. Avi Eizenman is in compliance with the Compensation Policy, the Amended Compensation Policy and the Compensation Policy Cap. The proposed grant has an exercise price equal to the average closing price of the Company's Ordinary Shares on the 30 trading days preceding the date of the approval of such grant by the Company's shareholders, which date of approval shall be the grant date (in this Proposal 5, the  Exercise Price  and  Grant Date , respectively), where 100% will vest on the second anniversary of the Grant Date, and which options (vested and unvested) shall expire, by their terms, upon the earlier to occur of: (a) the eighth anniversary of the Grant Date; and (b) the first date following the Grant Date on which the closing price per share of the Company's Ordinary Shares falls below fifty percent (50%) of the Exercise Price and remains at such price or at lower price for a period of at least 30 days.

The Compensation Committee and Board of Directors have each concluded that the terms of the proposed grant of options are pursuant to the Plan and are in compliance with the Compensation Policy, the Amended Compensation Policy and the Compensation Policy Cap.

The shareholders of the Company will be requested to adopt the following resolution at the Meeting:

 RESOLVED to approve granting 13,333 options to purchase Ordinary Shares of the Company to Mr. Avi Eizenman, the Active Chairman of the Companys Board of Directors, with the effective grant date and vesting terms as set forth above .

The approval of the grant of 13,333 options to purchase Ordinary Shares of the Company to Mr. Avi Eizenman, the Active Chairman of the Company's Board of Directors, requires the affirmative vote of an Ordinary Majority.

The Board of Directors, with the exception of Mr. Eizenman who expresses no recommendation as to the vote on the above proposal, recommends that the shareholders vote FOR approval of the proposed resolution.

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PROPOSAL 6

TO APPROVE THE GRANT OF 13,333 OPTIONS TO PURCHASE ORDINARY SHARES

OF THE COMPANY TO MR. YESHAYAHU (SHAIKE) ORBACH, A MEMBER OF THE

BOARD OF DIRECTORS, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF THE COMPANY

The Compensation Committee and Board of Directors have each recommended and approved on March 14, 2022, a grant of 13,333 Plan Options to purchase Ordinary Shares of the Company pursuant to the Plan to Mr. Yeshayahu (Shaike) Orbach, a member of the Board of Directors, and President and Chief Executive Officer of the Company. The Compensation Committee and Board of Directors have each also determined that the proposed grant of options to Mr. Yeshayahu (Shaike) Orbach is in compliance with the Compensation Policy, the Amended Compensation Policy and the Compensation Policy Cap. The proposed grant has an exercise price equal to the average closing price of the Company's Ordinary Shares on the 30 trading days preceding the date of the approval of such grant by the Company's shareholders, which date of approval shall be the grant date (in this Proposal 6, the  Exercise Price  and  Grant Date , respectively), where 100% will vest on the second anniversary of the Grant Date, and which options (vested and unvested) shall expire, by their terms, upon the earlier to occur of: (a) the eighth anniversary of the Grant Date; and (b) the first date following the Grant Date on which the closing price per share of the Company's Ordinary Shares falls below fifty percent (50%) of the Exercise Price and remains at such price or at a lower price for a period of at least 30 days.

The Compensation Committee and Board of Directors have each concluded that the terms of the proposed grant of options are pursuant to the Plan and are in compliance with the Compensation Policy, the Amended Compensation Policy and the Compensation Policy Cap.

The shareholders of the Company will be requested to adopt the following resolution at the Meeting:

RESOLVED to approve granting 13,333 options to purchase Ordinary Shares of the Company to Mr. Yeshayahu (Shaike) Orbach, a member of the Board of Directors, and President and Chief Executive Officer of the Company, with the effective grant date and vesting terms as set forth above . 



Pursuant to the Companies Law, approval of Proposal 6 requires the affirmative vote of a simple majority of shares present at the meeting, in person or by proxy, and voting thereon, as long as one of the following conditions is met:



 the majority of shares voted for the proposal includes at least a majority of the shares held by non-controlling and non-interested shareholders voted at the meeting (excluding abstaining votes); or



 the total number of shares of non-controlling and non-interested shareholders voted against the proposal does not exceed two percent of the aggregate voting rights in the company.

Each shareholder voting at the meeting or prior thereto by means of the accompanying proxy card is requested to notify us if he, she or it has a Personal Interest in connection with this Proposal 6 as a condition for his or her vote to be counted with respect to this Proposal 6. If any shareholder casting a vote in connection hereto does not notify us if he, she or it has a Personal Interest with respect to this Proposal 6, he, she or it will be deemed as having a Personal Interest with respect to this Proposal 6 and his, her or its vote will not be counted for the special disinterested majority required.





The Board of Directors, with the exception of Mr. Orbach who expresses no recommendation as to the vote on the above proposal, recommends that the shareholders vote FOR approval of the proposed resolution.

For this purpose, Personal Interest is defined as: (1) a shareholder's personal interest in the approval of an act or a transaction of the Company, including (i) the personal interest of his or her relative (which includes for these purposes any members of his/her (or his/her spouse's) immediate family or the spouses of any such members of his or her (or his/her spouse's) immediate family); and (ii) a personal interest of a body corporate in which a shareholder or any of his/her aforementioned relatives serves as a director or the chief executive officer, owns at least five percent (5%) of its issued share capital or its voting rights or has the right to appoint a director or chief executive officer, but (2) excluding (i) a personal interest arising solely from the fact of holding shares in the Company or in a body corporate; or (ii) a personal interest that is not a result of connections with a controlling shareholder of the Company.

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PROPOSAL 7

TO APPROVE AN INCREASE IN THE MONTHLY BASE SALARY OF MR. AVI

EIZENMAN, THE COMPANY'S ACTIVE CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

The Compensation Committee and Board of Directors reviewed the monthly base salary currently paid to Mr. Avi Eizenman, the Company's Active Chairman of the Board, which is equal to NIS 97,654 per month, and assessed its compatibility, to ensure that Mr. Eizenmans base salary remains suitable and appropriate.

After their evaluation and assessment, each of the Compensation Committee and the Board of Directors approved an increase in Mr. Eizenmans base salary by five percent (5%) to NIS 102,536 from NIS 97,654, per month. The proposed increase, subject to approval by shareholders, will be effective retroactively from January 1, 2022.

The Compensation Committee and Board of Directors have each concluded that the terms of the proposed increased base salary are in compliance with the Compensation Policy and the Amended Compensation Policy.

The shareholders of the Company will be requested to adopt the following resolution at the Meeting:

 RESOLVED to approve the increase in the monthly base salary paid to Mr. Avi Eizenman, the Company's Active Chairman of the Board of Directors, from NIS 97,654 per month to NIS 102,536 per month, effective retroactively as of January 1, 2022 .

The approval of the increase in the monthly base salary paid to Mr. Avi Eizenman, the Active Chairman of the Company's Board of Directors, requires the affirmative vote of an Ordinary Majority.

The Board of Directors, with the exception of Mr. Eizenman who expresses no recommendation as to the vote on the above proposal, recommends that the shareholders vote FOR approval of the proposed resolution.

PROPOSAL 8

TO APPROVE AN INCREASE IN THE MONTHLY BASE SALARY OF MR. YESHAYAHU

(SHAIKE) ORBACH, A MEMBER OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS, PRESIDENT AND

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF THE COMPANY

The Compensation Committee and Board of Directors reviewed the monthly base salary currently paid to Mr. Yeshayahu (Shaike) Orbach, a member of the Board of Directors, and President and Chief Executive Officer of the Company, which is equal to NIS 79,790 per month, and assessed its compatibility, to ensure that Mr. Orbach's base salary remains suitable and appropriate.

After their evaluation and assessment, each of the Compensation Committee and the Board of Directors approved an increase in Mr. Orbach's base salary by five percent (5%) to NIS 83,780 from NIS 79,790, per month. The proposed increase, subject to approval by shareholders, will be effective retroactively from January 1, 2022.

The Compensation Committee and Board of Directors have each concluded that the terms of the proposed increased base salary are in compliance with the Compensation Policy and the Amended Compensation Policy.

The shareholders of the Company will be requested to adopt the following resolution at the Meeting:

 RESOLVED to approve the increase in the monthly base salary paid to Mr. Yeshayahu (Shaike) Orbach, a member of the Board of Directors, and President and Chief Executive Officer of the Company, from NIS 79,790 per month to NIS 83,780 per month, effective retroactively as of January 1, 2022 .

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Pursuant to the Companies Law, approval of Proposal 8 requires the affirmative vote of a simple majority of shares present at the meeting, in person or by proxy, and voting thereon, as long as one of the following conditions is met:



 the majority of shares voted for the proposal includes at least a majority of the shares held by non-controlling and non-interested shareholders voted at the meeting (excluding abstaining votes); or



 the total number of shares of non-controlling and non-interested shareholders voted against the proposal does not exceed two percent of the aggregate voting rights in the company.

Each shareholder voting at the meeting or prior thereto by means of the accompanying proxy card is requested to notify us if he, she or it has a Personal Interest in connection with this Proposal 8 as a condition for his or her vote to be counted with respect to this Proposal 8. If any shareholder casting a vote in connection hereto does not notify us if he, she or it has a Personal Interest with respect to this Proposal 8, he, she or it will be deemed as having a Personal Interest with respect to this Proposal 8 and his, her or its vote will not be counted for the special disinterested majority required.

For this purpose, "Personal Interest" is defined as: (1) a shareholder's personal interest in the approval of an act or a transaction of the Company, including (i) the personal interest of his or her relative (which includes for these purposes any members of his/her (or his/her spouse's) immediate family or the spouses of any such members of his or her (or his/her spouse's) immediate family); and (ii) a personal interest of a body corporate in which a shareholder or any of his/her aforementioned relatives serves as a director or the chief executive officer, owns at least five percent (5%) of its issued share capital or its voting rights or has the right to appoint a director or chief executive officer, but (2) excluding (i) a personal interest arising solely from the fact of holding shares in the Company or in a body corporate; or (ii) a personal interest that is not a result of connections with a controlling shareholder of the Company.

The Board of Directors, with the exception of Mr. Orbach who expresses no recommendation as to the vote on the above proposal, recommends that the shareholders vote FOR approval of the proposed resolution.

PROPOSAL 9

TO CONSIDER AND ACT UPON A PROPOSAL TO APPROVE THE COMPENSATION

PACKAGE OF MR. LIRON EIZENMAN, AS THE COMPANYS NEW PRESIDENT AND

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, COMMENCING JULY 1, 2022

The Companys Board of Directors has approved the appointment of Mr. Liron Eizenman as the Companys new President and Chief Executive Officer, commencing July 1, 2022.

Mr. Liron Eizenman, who is the son of Mr. Avi Eizenman, the Companys Active Chairman of the Board of Directors, has been with the Company for over six years and served in key executive roles with the Company, including as Chief Operations Officer of the Company and as CEO of Silicoms North American subsidiary, Silicom Inc. Mr. Liron Eizenman was the visionary of Silicoms Edge Networking Solutions strategy and was instrumental in driving the company to its leadership position in the SD-WAN/Edge platforms market. According to the Companys planned changes in management, effective July 1st, 2022, Mr. Orbach will cease to serve as the Companys President and Chief Executive Officer and will be appointed as executive vice chairman of the board of directors. The Company and Mr. Orbach have agreed that he will work in his new role on a 40% basis and will be paid a pro rata portion of his approved compensation. Mr. Orbach will remain eligible to receive 50% of any annual bonus due to him as President and Chief Executive Officer, in respect of 2022, and 20% of such bonus for 2023.





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The Companys Compensation Committee and Board of Directors have approved, subject to the approval of the Companys shareholders a compensation package for Mr. Liron Eizenman as the new President and Chief Executive Officer consisting of (i) an amendment to his current employment agreement with the Company to revise his compensation structure and (ii) a severance agreement, , identical to the current CEO severance agreement, as set forth in Annex C ( Severance Agreement  and collectively with the amendment to his current employment agreement, the  Compensation Package ), the principal terms of which are as follows, commencing July 1, 2022:



 Gross monthly base salary of NIS 70,000



 Entitlement to the Chief Executive Officer annual bonus upon the terms and in accordance with the formula approved by the Companys shareholders at the Annual General Meeting held on June 8, 2016 (the  CEO Bonus ), provided only that Mr. Liron Eisenman will only be entitled to 50% of the applicable CEO Bonus for 2022, as and when determined by our Compensation Committee and Board of Directors (with the remaining portion being payable to Mr. Orbach).



 Standard social benefits package applicable to all full-time employees of the Company.



 Severance/Termination provisions (as more fully set forth in the Severance Agreement, attached to this Proxy as Exhibit C)1:



 In the event of Mr. Liron Eizenmans termination for any reason other than Good Reason following a Change in Control , the Company shall pay Mr. Liron Eizenman (A) his last full monthly salary multiplied by the number of years and any additional portion thereof that he was employed by the Company; minus (B) the severance component payable under Mr. Liron Eizenmans Mangers Insurance Policy (the  Severance Component ).



 Should Mr. Liron Eizenmans employment be terminated by the Company for any reason other than Cause or by Mr. Liron Eizenman for Good Reason following a Change in Control, the Company shall pay Mr. Liron Eizenman (A) one and half times his monthly salary multiplied by the number of years and any additional portion thereof that he was employed by the Company; minus (B) the Severance Component.



 Should Mr. Liron Eizenmans employment be terminated by reason of death or Disability, the Company shall pay him a lump sum severance payment, equal to the balance of the full salary on the effective date of termination (excluding bonuses) that would have been payable to him had his employment with the Company continued for a period of 12 months following the date of termination.



 Notice Period for termination (i) for Disability shall be 30 days, (ii) for any reason other than for Cause, no less than 12 months, and (iii) for any reason other than Disability or Cause, following a Change in Control, no less than 18 months.

The Compensation Committee and Board of Directors have each concluded that the Compensation Package is in compliance with the Compensation Policy and the Amended Compensation Policy.

The shareholders of the Company will be requested to adopt the following resolution at the Meeting:

 RESOLVED to approve the Compensation Package for Mr. Liron Eizenman, the Companys new President and Chief Executive Officer, effective as of July 1, 2022 .





Pursuant to the Companies Law, approval of Proposal 9 requires the affirmative vote of a simple majority of shares present at the meeting, in person or by proxy, and voting thereon, as long as one of the following conditions is met:



 the majority of shares voted for the proposal includes at least a majority of the shares held by non-controlling and non-interested shareholders voted at the meeting (excluding abstaining votes); or



 the total number of shares of non-controlling and non-interested shareholders voted against the proposal does not exceed two percent of the aggregate voting rights in the company.





1 Capitalized terms not otherwise defined in the description of the principal terms of the Severance Agreement, can be found in the Exhibit C to the Proxy.





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Each shareholder voting at the meeting or prior thereto by means of the accompanying proxy card is requested to notify us if he, she or it has a Personal Interest in connection with this Proposal 9 as a condition for his or her vote to be counted with respect to this Proposal 9. If any shareholder casting a vote in connection hereto does not notify us if he, she or it has a Personal Interest with respect to this Proposal 9, he, she or it will be deemed as having a Personal Interest with respect to this Proposal 9 and his, her or its vote will not be counted for the special disinterested majority required.

For this purpose, "Personal Interest" is defined as: (1) a shareholder's personal interest in the approval of an act or a transaction of the Company, including (i) the personal interest of his or her relative (which includes for these purposes any members of his/her (or his/her spouse's) immediate family or the spouses of any such members of his or her (or his/her spouse's) immediate family); and (ii) a personal interest of a body corporate in which a shareholder or any of his/her aforementioned relatives serves as a director or the chief executive officer, owns at least five percent (5%) of its issued share capital or its voting rights or has the right to appoint a director or chief executive officer, but (2) excluding (i) a personal interest arising solely from the fact of holding shares in the Company or in a body corporate; or (ii) a personal interest that is not a result of connections with a controlling shareholder of the Company.

The Board of Directors, with the exception of Mr. Avi Eizenman who was not present on the Board of Directors when the above proposal was being considered and voted upon, recommends that the shareholders vote FOR approval of the proposed resolution.

PROPOSAL 10

TO APPROVE THE GRANT OF 50,000 OPTIONS TO PURCHASE ORDINARY SHARES

OF THE COMPANY TO MR. LIRON EIZENMAN, THE COMPANYS NEW PRESIDENT

AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF THE COMPANY

In light of Mr. Liron Eizenmans appointment of the Companys new Chief Executive Officer, commencing July 1, 2022 (the  Commencement Date ), the Compensation Committee and Board of Directors have each recommended and approved, a special long term incentive and retention grant of 50,000 Plan Options to purchase Ordinary Shares of the Company pursuant to the Plan to Mr. Liron Eizenman. The Compensation Committee and Board of Directors have each also determined that the proposed grant of options to Mr. Liron Eizenman is in compliance with the Compensation Policy, the Amended Compensation Policy and the Compensation Policy Cap. The proposed grant shall have an exercise price equal to the average closing price of the Company's Ordinary Shares on the 30 trading days preceding the Commencement Date (in this Proposal 10, the  Exercise Price ), where 50% will vest on the second anniversary of the Commencement Date, 25% on the third anniversary of the Commencement Date and 25% on fourth anniversary of the Commencement Date, and which options (vested and unvested) shall expire, by their terms, upon the earlier to occur of: (a) the eighth anniversary of the Commencement Date; and (b) the first date following the Commencement Date on which the closing price per share of the Company's Ordinary Shares falls below fifty percent (50%) of the Exercise Price and remains at such price or at a lower price for a period of at least 30 days.

The Compensation Committee and Board of Directors have each concluded that the terms of the proposed grant of options are pursuant to the Plan and are in compliance with the Compensation Policy, the Amended Compensation Policy and the Compensation Policy Cap.

The shareholders of the Company will be requested to adopt the following resolution at the Meeting:

RESOLVED to approve granting 50,000 options to purchase Ordinary Shares of the Company to Mr. Liron Eizenman in connection with his appointment as President and Chief Executive Officer of the Company, with the exercise price and vesting terms as set forth above . 

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Pursuant to the Companies Law, approval of Proposal 10 requires the affirmative vote of a simple majority of shares present at the meeting, in person or by proxy, and voting thereon, as long as one of the following conditions is met:



 the majority of shares voted for the proposal includes at least a majority of the shares held by non-controlling and non-interested shareholders voted at the meeting (excluding abstaining votes); or



 the total number of shares of non-controlling and non-interested shareholders voted against the proposal does not exceed two percent of the aggregate voting rights in the company.



Each shareholder voting at the meeting or prior thereto by means of the accompanying proxy card is requested to notify us if he, she or it has a Personal Interest in connection with this Proposal 10 as a condition for his or her vote to be counted with respect to this Proposal 10. If any shareholder casting a vote in connection hereto does not notify us if he, she or it has a Personal Interest with respect to this Proposal 10, he, she or it will be deemed as having a Personal Interest with respect to this Proposal 10 and his, her or its vote will not be counted for the special disinterested majority required.

For this purpose, Personal Interest is defined as: (1) a shareholder's personal interest in the approval of an act or a transaction of the Company, including (i) the personal interest of his or her relative (which includes for these purposes any members of his/her (or his/her spouse's) immediate family or the spouses of any such members of his or her (or his/her spouse's) immediate family); and (ii) a personal interest of a body corporate in which a shareholder or any of his/her aforementioned relatives serves as a director or the chief executive officer, owns at least five percent (5%) of its issued share capital or its voting rights or has the right to appoint a director or chief executive officer, but (2) excluding (i) a personal interest arising solely from the fact of holding shares in the Company or in a body corporate; or (ii) a personal interest that is not a result of connections with a controlling shareholder of the Company.

The Board of Directors, with the exception of Mr. Avi Eizenman who was not present on the Board of Directors when the above proposal was being considered and voted upon, recommends that the shareholders vote FOR approval of the proposed resolution.

PROPOSAL 11

TO CONSIDER AND ACT UPON A PROPOSAL TO APPROVE THE AMENDED

COMPENSATION POLICY

As required by the Companies Law, the Company has adopted an Executive Compensation Policy regarding the terms of office and employment of its directors and executive officers, which was adopted by its shareholders on July 31, 2013.

As per the provisions of the Companies Law, inter alia Sections 267A and B, and Section 118B(1), an executive compensation policy must be approved and re-approved at least once every three years in accordance with the Companies Law.

Following the review of the Executive Compensation Policy, in light of certain changes in the Companies Law, and in light of the rapid changes in the Company's global business activities and its environment since the adoption of the Executive Compensation Policy, the Compensation Committee and Board of Directors recommend to approve the Silicom Ltd. Amended Compensation Policy, attached hereto as Annex B , which is deemed by the Compensation Committee and Board of Directors to be appropriate for the Company and aligns the overall compensation package offered to the Company's office holders with the purposes and goals of the Company.

The Amended Compensation Policy includes the following main amendments to the current Executive Compensation Policy:



 Deletion of certain references to External Directors in the current Compensation Policy, reflecting the fact that the Company no longer has External Directors.



 Increase in the percentage of the annual total compensation package that each Executive (other than non-employee directors) can receive in the form of variable compensation. The maximum value of the variable compensation components shall not exceed 88% of each Executive's total compensation package on an annual basis.

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 The Board of Directors is authorized to exercise its discretion to reduce or not award any Executive's variable compensation, even where performance targets have been met.

In considering the recommendation regarding the Amended Compensation Policy, the Compensation Committee and Board of Directors reviewed the Amended Compensation Policy and its suitability to the Company while considering the following parameters: (a) advancement of the goals of the Company, its working plan and its long term policy; (b) the creation of proper incentives for the office holders while taking into consideration, inter alia, the Company's risk management policies; (c) the Company's size and nature of its operations; and (d) the contributions and expected contributions of the various office holders in achieving the goals of the Company, and profit in the long term in light of their positions.

The Compensation Committee and Board then reviewed and verified that the following considerations are addressed in the Amended Compensation Policy:



(1) the education, skills, expertise and achievements of the relevant office holders in the Company in light of the goals of the Company and the contributions of said officers to the development and success of the Company;



(2) the role and particular position of the office holders, areas of their responsibilities and any previous compensation agreements with them;



(3) the correlation of the proposed compensation terms of office holders included in the Amended Compensation Policy with the compensation of other employees of the Company, and the possible effect of such differences in compensation on the employment relations in the Company;



(4) the possibility of reducing variable compensation at the discretion of the Board and, consideration of a possible maximum value for equity compensation when sold; and



(5) the terms of severance payment included in the Amended Compensation Policy taking into account the performance and roles and responsibilities of the Company's office holders and the performance of the Company during the office holders' tenure.

The Compensation Committee and Board of Directors, in its consideration of recommending the approval of the Amended Compensation Policy by the Company's shareholders, seek to balance the interests of the public shareholders of the Company, with the need to fairly compensate office holders, by considering the value and positioning of the Company on the Israeli and global markets and the role of said office holders in effectuating or maintaining said positioning.

The Amended Compensation Policy was evaluated in light of the advancement of the long term goals of the Company, considerations of how management have handled the risks facing the Company, the size of the Company and the character of its operations in comparison to similar companies in the Israeli market, in addition to the factors discussed above. All of these considerations included, as much as possible, a review of measurable criteria and historical data.

The Compensation Committee and Board of Directors seek to ensure that it maintains the ability to attract and retain superior office holders in key positions, and that the compensation provided to office holders remains competitive relative to the compensation paid to similarly situated office holders in the Company's industry and the broader marketplace from which it recruits and competes for talent.

The Compensation Committee and Board of Directors believe that the most effective compensation program is one designed to reward achievement that aligns office holders' interests with those of the Company and its shareholders by rewarding performance, with the ultimate objective of improving shareholder value and building and maintaining a sustainable company.

In light of the aforementioned considerations, the Compensation Committee and Board of Directors found that the Amended Compensation Policy is fair and beneficial to the Company and its shareholders in light of the factors, considerations, and materials outlined above.

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The Compensation Committee and Board believe that the Amended Compensation Policy properly balances the requirements of the Companies Law and the philosophy and objectives described above.

The shareholders of the Company will be requested to adopt the following resolution at the Meeting:

RESOLVED, to approve the Amended Compensation Policy in the form attached as Annex B to the Proxy Statement.

Pursuant to the Companies Law, approval of Proposal 11 requires the affirmative vote of a simple majority of shares present at the meeting, in person or by proxy, and voting thereon, as long as one of the following conditions is met:



 the majority of shares voted for the proposal includes at least a majority of the shares held by non-controlling and non-interested shareholders voted at the meeting (excluding abstaining votes); or



 the total number of shares of non-controlling and non-interested shareholders voted against the proposal does not exceed two percent of the aggregate voting rights in the company.

Each shareholder voting at the meeting or prior thereto by means of the accompanying proxy card is requested to notify us if he, she or it has a Personal Interest in connection with this Proposal 11 as a condition for his or her vote to be counted with respect to this Proposal 11. If any shareholder casting a vote in connection hereto does not notify us if he, she or it has a Personal Interest with respect to this Proposal 11, he, she or it will be deemed as having a Personal Interest with respect to this Proposal 11 and his, her or its vote will not be counted for the special disinterested majority required.

For this purpose, Personal Interest is defined as: (1) a shareholder's personal interest in the approval of an act or a transaction of the Company, including (i) the personal interest of his or her relative (which includes for these purposes any members of his/her (or his/her spouse's) immediate family or the spouses of any such members of his or her (or his/her spouse's) immediate family); and (ii) a personal interest of a body corporate in which a shareholder or any of his/her aforementioned relatives serves as a director or the chief executive officer, owns at least five percent (5%) of its issued share capital or its voting rights or has the right to appoint a director or chief executive officer, but (2) excluding (i) a personal interest arising solely from the fact of holding shares in the Company or in a body corporate; or (ii) a personal interest that is not a result of connections with a controlling shareholder of the Company.

The Companies Law allows our Board of Directors to approve the Amended Compensation Policy even in the event it was not approved by our shareholders; provided that our Compensation Committee and thereafter the Board of Directors have determined, based on detailed reasoning, and after having re-examined the Amended Compensation Policy, that the approval of the Amended Compensation Policy, in spite of the objection of the Company's shareholders, is for the benefit of the Company.

The Board of Directors recommends a vote FOR approval of the Amended Compensation Policy in the form attached hereto as Annex B.

PROPOSAL 12

APPOINTMENT OF KESSELMAN & KESSELMAN CERTIFIED PUBLIC

ACCOUNTANTS (Isr.), PWC ISRAEL, AS INDEPENDENT PUBLIC ACCOUNTANTS OF

THE COMPANY AND AUTHORIZATION OF AUDIT COMMITTEE TO FIX THE

COMPENSATION OF SUCH AUDITORS

Under the Israeli Companies Law, the appointment of independent public accountants requires the approval of the shareholders of the Company.

Following the recommendation and approval of the Audit Committee, the Board of Directors has authorized and approved the appointment of the accounting firm of Kesselman & kesselman Certified Public Accountants (Isr.), PwC Israel ( PwC Israel ), as the independent certified public accountants of the Company for the year ending December 31, 2022, and until the next annual general meeting of the shareholders of the Company.

- 16 -

The Audit Committee and Board of Directors believe that the selection of PWC as the independent accountants of the Company is appropriate and in the best interest of the Company and its shareholders. Subject to the approval of this Proposal 12, the Audit Committee will be authorized to set the compensation of such auditors in accordance with the volume and nature of their services.

The shareholders of the Company are requested to adopt the following resolution:

RESOLVED, to appoint PwC Israel as the independent public accountants of the Company for the year ending December 31, 2022, and until the next annual general meeting of the Company's shareholders, and to authorize the Audit Committee to set their compensation in accordance with the volume and nature of their services. 

The appointment of PwC Israel as the independent public accountants of the Company for the year ending December 31, 2022, and until the next annual general meeting of the Company's shareholders and authorization of the Audit Committee to set their compensation in accordance with the volume and nature of their services, requires the affirmative vote of an Ordinary Majority.

The Board of Directors recommends that the shareholders vote FOR approval of the proposed resolution.

PROPOSAL 13

REVIEWING THE COMPANY'S FINANCIAL STATEMENTS FOR THE YEAR ENDED

DECEMBER 31, 2021, AND TRANSACTING SUCH OTHER BUSINESS AS MAY

PROPERLY COME BEFORE THE MEETING

At the Meeting, shareholders will have an opportunity to review, ask questions and comment on the Company's Consolidated Balance Sheet as of December 31, 2021 and the Consolidated Statement of Income for the year then ended. The Company published its audited financial statements for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2021 on Form 6-K, which was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the  SEC ) on March 17, 2022 and is available at their website, www.sec.gov , and also published such financial statements together with the Company's Annual Report on Form 20-F, which was filed with the SEC on April 27, 2022 and is available at their website, and you may request that a copy be mailed to you. The Company will hold a discussion with respect to the Annual Report and financial statements at the Meeting. This agenda item will not involve a vote by the shareholders.

Management is not aware of any other matters to be presented at the Meeting. If, however, any other matters should properly come before the Meeting or any adjournment or postponement thereof, the proxy confers discretionary authority with respect to acting thereon, and the persons named in the enclosed proxy will vote on such matters in accordance with their best judgment.

_________________________________

Your vote is important! Shareholders are urged to complete and return their proxies promptly in order to, among other things, ensure action by a quorum and to avoid the expense of additional solicitation. If the accompanying proxy is properly executed and returned in time for voting, and a choice is specified, the shares represented thereby will be voted as indicated thereon. EXCEPT AS MENTIONED OTHERWISE IN THIS PROXY STATEMENT, IF NO SPECIFICATION IS MADE, THE PROXY WILL BE VOTED IN FAVOR OF EACH OF THE PROPOSALS DESCRIBED IN THIS PROXY STATEMENT. Proxies and all other applicable materials should be sent to the offices of the Company at 14 Atir Yeda Street, Kfar Sava 4464323, Israel (telephone number: 972-9-764-4555, facsimile number: 972-9-765-1977) .

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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

We are subject to the informational requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the  Exchange Act ), as applicable to foreign private issuers. Accordingly, we file reports and other information with the SEC. Shareholders may read and copy any document we file at the SEC's public reference rooms at 450 Fifth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20549. Shareholders can call the SEC at 1-800-SEC-0330 for further information on using the public reference room. In addition, similar information concerning us can be inspected and copied at the offices of the National Association of Securities Dealers, Inc., 9513 Key West Avenue, Rockville, Maryland 20850 USA. All documents which we will file on the SEC's EDGAR system will be available for retrieval on the SEC's website at http://www.sec.gov . This proxy statement is also available on our website at http://www.silicom.co.il and on the SEC's website at http://www.sec.gov .

As a foreign private issuer, we are exempt from the rules under the Exchange Act prescribing certain disclosure and procedural requirements for proxy solicitations. In addition, we are not required under the Exchange Act to file periodic reports and financial statements with the SEC as frequently or as promptly as United States companies whose securities are registered under the Exchange Act. The Notice of the Annual General Meeting of Shareholders and the Proxy Statement have been prepared in accordance with applicable disclosure requirements in the State of Israel.

YOU SHOULD RELY ONLY ON THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS PROXY STATEMENT OR THE INFORMATION FURNISHED TO YOU IN CONNECTION WITH THIS PROXY STATEMENT WHEN VOTING ON THE MATTERS SUBMITTED TO SHAREHOLDER APPROVAL HEREUNDER. WE HAVE NOT AUTHORIZED ANYONE TO PROVIDE YOU WITH INFORMATION THAT IS DIFFERENT FROM WHAT IS CONTAINED IN THIS DOCUMENT. THIS PROXY STATEMENT IS DATED MAY 2, 2022. YOU SHOULD NOT ASSUME THAT THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS DOCUMENT IS ACCURATE AS OF ANY DATE OTHER THAN MAY 2, 2022, AND THE MAILING OF THIS DOCUMENT TO SHAREHOLDERS SHOULD NOT CREATE ANY IMPLICATION TO THE CONTRARY.

By Order of the Board of Directors

SILICOM LTD. /s/ Yeshayahu (Shaike) Orbach Yeshayahu (Shaike) Orbach



DIRECTOR, PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Kfar Sava, Israel

Date: May 12, 2022




JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, Alaska  The U.S. Army is poised to revamp its forces in Alaska to better prepare for future cold-weather conflicts, and it is expected to replace the larger, heavily equipped Stryker Brigade in the state with a more mobile, infantry unit better suited for the frigid fight, according to Army leaders.

Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said she expects to make a final decision soon about the Alaska troop change, saying she will likely convert the Stryker unit, which uses heavy, eight-wheeled vehicles, to an infantry brigade.

"I think right now the purpose of Army forces in Alaska is much more about creating an extreme cold weather capable formation" that could be used in Europe or the Indo-Pacific, Wormuth told The Associated Press on a recent trip to Alaska to meet with senior commanders and troops. "We're trying to get to a place where we have Arctic capable forces  forces that can survive and operate in that environment."

The U.S. has long viewed the Arctic as a growing area of competition with Russia and China, particularly as climate change brings warmer temperatures and opens the sea lanes for longer periods of time. But officials have acknowledged that the U.S. lags behind those nations. Russia has taken steps to increase its military presence there, and China views the region as economically valuable for shipping and natural resources.

The changes in the Army were under consideration well before U.S. tensions with Russia soared following its invasion of Ukraine.

Under the new Army plan, the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, now based in Alaska, would be converted to a light infantry brigade. Combined with the division's 4th Infantry Brigade Combat team, the two units will become the 11th Airborne Division, based in Alaska. And the large Stryker vehicles, which are somewhat old, would be replaced by other vehicles that are more suitable for the icy and snowy terrain, Wormuth said.

The greater focus on cold-weather war includes a move to conduct major training exercises for the Alaska-based troops in their home state, under the weather conditions they would face in an Arctic fight. The troops had been scheduled to go to the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana, in March, but Army leaders decided to keep them in Alaska so they could train under the frigid temperatures and frozen terrain that they would encounter in any cold-weather battle.

"I think it really makes sense to have forces trained in the Arctic environments that they would be used for," Wormuth said after spending two days at the still snowy base. "If we're going to have ground forces in Alaska, that's what we need them to be able to do. They can't get that experience going to the Mojave Desert or to Fort Polk."

Last year, in an initial trial event, Pacific-based forces stayed in Hawaii for their scheduled exercises at the National Training Center in California's Mohave Desert. Commanders said they have learned from these first two moves, as they try to recreate conditions and relocate personnel and equipment from well-established training centers to more remote locations.

During her visit to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Wormuth met with commanders who called the training shift a success. Maj. Gen. Brian Eifler, commander of U.S. Army Alaska, said the benefits outweighed any shortfalls created by the need to build the infrastructure for the training exercise in the remote north.

"You're getting the best of both worlds, without losing too much," Eifler said. "We did get a lot more out of it than we thought we would."

Eifler said that while they didn't have as many training observers or civilian role players as they would have at one of the training centers, the trainers that did come were able to learn more about Arctic weather operations.

In addition, Eifler said, the change avoided the costly and time-consuming shipment of vehicles, weapons and other equipment to Louisiana and back. The lengthy packing and shipping process before and after a training exercise in Louisiana or California often forces troops to be without their weapons systems and other equipment for weeks.

During briefings at the Alaska base, commanders said the training included large-scale combat operations under extreme weather conditions in what they called the "most challenging environment on earth." They said that 10,000 troops  including Canadian Army and Air forces  were involved in the exercise.

But they said the exercise also underscored the need for better cold-weather vehicles, including those capable of carrying Arctic infantry forces.

Gen. Joseph Martin, the vice chief of the Army who was in Alaska this year, said the service has been studying what would be the best type of vehicle for the troops. "Is the Stryker the right vehicle for an Arctic warrior? In the winter, you need vehicles that can move across snow," he said.

In addition, he said, the vehicle also needs to be able to operate in the spring or summer thaw, when the ground turns to mud.

As Wormuth wrapped up her visit, she suggested that the decision on the Stryker Brigade is moving forward soon. Any final decision would need approval from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

"If you're going to do big movements of equipment and things like that, the summer is a pretty important window because it's a lot easier to move vehicles around than doing it in the dead of winter," she said.

And in conversations with congressional lawmakers, including during a hearing this week, she made clear that the change would not reduce the number of soldiers in Alaska. Instead, she said that while the infantry brigade will be smaller, the Army would offset that loss by increasing the size and capabilities of the headquarters.

More broadly, she talked with commanders in Alaska about the potential need for more changes as the U.S. military's Arctic strategy evolves.

The U.S., Wormuth said, has resisted moves to militarize the Arctic, even as Russia has expanded its military presence and basing there. But, she said, "will that mindset continue given what the Russians are doing in Ukraine? Or will that get revisited? Will that create a window to think about things differently?"

Commanders said there are questions about whether one of the Pentagon's combatant commands  such as European Command or Northern Command, based in Colorado  should take full ownership of the Arctic and the U.S. military role there. Wormuth said the issue needs further discussion, and any decision may be years away.
The Army has identified the soldier killed by a bear in an Alaska training area on Tuesday.

Staff Sgt. Seth Michael Plant, 30 was taken to the hospital at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, where he was declared dead, the Army said in a news release Thursday.

A second soldier who was injured in the attack was also hospitalized but has been treated and released, the Army said.

Plant, an infantryman from the 3rd Battalion, 509th Parachute Infantry Regiment, was working in a remote area of the joint based called Training Area 412, the Army said.

Army Criminal Investigation Division is investigating the attack, in conjunction with the 673rd Security Forces Squadron, 673rd Civil Engineering Squadron Conservation Law Enforcement Officers, Alaska Wildlife Troopers and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the Army said.

Following the initial attack and U.S. Army personnel extraction, a brown bear approached the area, the Fish and Game Department said in a news release Thursday. Bear spray was deployed by responding personnel and the bear left the immediate area.

Wildlife officials found a den nearby with two brown bear cubs in it, the news release said.

From everything we know so far, based on the scene investigation and information from other responding agencies, this appears to be a defensive attack by a female bear protecting her cubs, Cyndi Wardlow, a regional supervisor with the Fish and Game Department, said in the release.

At this time, the location of the bear involved in Tuesdays attack is unknown, the release said. A bear that is considered a public safety threat or involved in a fatal attack may be killed by the Department.

Plant was a native of Saint Augustine, Fla., and joined the active-duty Army in January 2015 after first serving in the reserves at Fort Benning, Ga., and Fort Bragg, N.C., the Army said.

He arrived at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in July 2021.

Staff Sgt. Plant was an integral part of our organization. Lt. Col. David Nelson, his battalion commander, said in the Armys news release.

He was a positive and dedicated leader who brought joy and energy to the paratroopers who served with him, Nelson said. He always had a smile on his face, he always went above and beyond what was asked of him, and he served as an inspiration to all who had the privilege to know him.

His awards and decorations include the Army Commendation Medal, Afghanistan Campaign Medal, Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, Army Service Ribbon, Overseas Service Ribbon, NATO Service Ribbon, Combat Infantrymans Badge and the Parachutist Badge.
WASHINGTON  Should Russia and China launch competing world conflicts, the Navy is unprepared to fight two wars in separate regions without additional ships, the services top officer told senators on Thursday.

The current fleet of about 298 ships is not sized to handle two simultaneous conflicts, Adm. Mike Gilday, the chief of naval operations, said during a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Its sized to fight one and keep a second adversary in check, but in terms of two all-out conflicts, we are not sized for that.

Though Russias war with Ukraine has garnered much attention in recent months, China is the top pacing threat for the U.S. military due to predatory practices in the South China Sea and simmering tensions over Taiwan, according to a document previewing the 2023 National Defense Strategy, which sets the Pentagons priorities.

With Chinas persistent threat in the western Pacific region and NATO focused on Russia, the Navys ability to battle in simultaneous conflicts is of growing importance, said Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri.

What would the impact be on the Navy's ability to meet its operational requirements in [Europe] if we had to withhold Navy forces from Europe in order to deter Chinese aggression in [the Pacific]? Hawley said at the hearing.

Gilday said the Navy would be challenged to meet both needs.

Youd have to take a look at how you squeeze the most out of the joint force that you have and use it the best possible way, he said.

In 2018, Congress passed a law requiring the Navy to reach a 355-ship fleet as soon as practicable, but the number of ships has only dropped in that time due to budget requirements. For example, the proposed 2023 Navy budget calls for adding nine new ships  but cutting 24.

By comparison, China already has 355 ships in its fleet and plans to add about 65 more within the next four years, according to the Pentagons annual China military report published in November. By 2030, the Chinese fleet is expected to reach 460 ships.

The Navy last month released a 30-year shipbuilding plan that included three options for growing the U.S. fleet  only one of which would allow the Navy to reach the 355-ship goal. The problem, however, is the plans financial requirements, Gilday said.

We would get there with [that option], but it would require real growth in the budget, the admiral said.

Under that plan, the Navy would reach 300 manned ships by 2035 and grow to 367 by 2052. Reaching such a fleet would cost between $25.3 billion and $32.7 billion per year, according to a September 2021 report by the Congressional Budget Office.

Gilday said the plan would do a much better job of meeting the threat in the Pacific but cautioned it would require more of the shipbuilding industry, which doesnt always meet procurement deadlines.

The constraint still facing [that option] is the ability of the industrial base to  actually produce those ships at pace to meet our requirements, he said.

Hawley called it disturbing that only one plan comes close to meeting the operational requirements of the Navy to deal with keeping pace with China and urged fellow senators to take seriously the need for additional ships.

If thats not a wake-up call to the committee, I dont know what it, he said.
WASHINGTON  A bipartisan group of senators are calling for the creation of a Space National Guard, reviving a yearslong effort to place Air National Guard members working for the U.S. Space Force directly under the command of the militarys newest branch.

Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., introduced the Space National Guard Establishment Act on Wednesday to correct a misalignment that has about 1,000 National Guard members working on space missions within the Air Force rather than the Space Force. The Guard troops are in 16 Air National Guard units stationed across eight states and territories.

Without a National Guard component for Space Force, we risk losing many talented individuals who want to keep serving their country and their states after they leave active duty, and that is simply unacceptable, Feinstein said. Creating a Space Force National Guard would also save money and ensure a smoother process in the event we need to activate personnel.

The legislation matches a House bill introduced last year and follows a request by the Space Force to integrate its active duty and Reserve personnel into a single command structure.

This is our No. 1 legislative proposal, Gen. John Raymond, chief of space operations for the Space Force, told the House Armed Services Committee last month.

Raymond said the Space Force explored several options for integration, including setting up a Space National Guard or removing the Air National Guard from the service entirely. When the Space Force was created in 2019, active-duty troops from the Air Force were moved into the new branch but there was no such transfer for the Air National Guard.

Not establishing a Space National Guard was a mistake when Space Force was created, and this bill will remedy that, Feinstein said.

The senator pushed to establish the new force through the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, which allocates funding for the Pentagon, but was unsuccessful. A plan developed by the Air Force, Space Force and National Guard Bureau to create a Space National Guard has yet to come to fruition.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2020 that the Pentagon would spend $100 million to operate a small Space National Guard with about 1,500 personnel, as well as $20 million to construct additional facilities. A larger force of 4,900 to 5,800 personnel would cost at least $385 million annually, according to the agency.

Senators said they are not looking to expand the force. Rubio said he believes the proposed legislation would boost military readiness, increase efficiency and ensure talent retainment.

Additional co-sponsors of the bill include Sens. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, Michael Bennet, D-Colo., Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., Rob Portman, R-Ohio, Rick Scott, R-Fla., Alex Padilla, D-Calif., Mike Braun, R-Ind., and John Cornyn, R-Texas.

If the legislation becomes law, the need to route funding between the Air Force and the Space Force would be eliminated, senators said. The Space Force would also be able to better implement its policies and culture, they added.

The National Guard Association of the United States, a congressional lobbying organization, applauded the introduced bill on Thursday.

A Space National Guard is the only efficient, inexpensive way to enhance our Space Force, said retired Brig. Gen. J. Roy Robison, the groups president. It requires no new personnel, equipment or facilities  just new uniforms and a few new signs.

Brig. Gen. Steven Butow, the commander of Californias Air National Guard, told congressional staffers at a briefing this month that the effort would cost about $250,000.

The Space Force is comprised of nearly 14,000 guardians stationed around the world, according to Raymond. They are charged with maintaining and protecting military satellites, monitoring space surveillance systems and performing other space-related missions.

Air National Guard members working for the Space Force provide 60% of the militarys space electronic warfare capability, according to the National Guard Association. Their units are based in Alaska, California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, New York, Ohio and Guam.
U.S.-led sanctions are forcing Russia to use computer chips from dishwashers and refrigerators in some military equipment, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said Wednesday.

"We have reports from Ukrainians that when they find Russian military equipment on the ground, it's filled with semiconductors that they took out of dishwashers and refrigerators," Raimondo told a Senate hearing, noting that she recently met with Ukraine's prime minister.

U.S. technology exports to Russia have fallen by nearly 70% since sanctions began in late February, according to Raimondo, whose department oversees the export controls that form a big part of the sanctions package. Three dozen other countries have adopted similar export bans, which also apply to Belarus.

"Our approach was to deny Russia technology  technology that would cripple their ability to continue a military operation. And that is exactly what we are doing," she said in a response to a question from Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., about the impact of the export controls.

The semiconductor anecdote came from Ukrainian officials, who told the secretary that when they've opened up captured Russian tanks, they've found parts from refrigerators and commercial and industrial machinery that appear to be making up for other unavailable components, Commerce Department spokeswoman Robyn Patterson said.

The number of U.S. shipments to Russia of items subject to the new rules  semiconductors, telecommunications equipment, lasers, avionics, and maritime technology  has decreased 85% and their value has decreased 97%, compared with the same time period in 2021, Patterson said.

In her Senate remarks, Raimondo also pointed to recent reports that two Russian tank manufacturers have had to idle production due to a lack of components. The White House, too, has previously highlighted those reports, saying that Uralvagonzavod Corporation and Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant have halted production.

Computer chips, also known as semiconductors, are the brains that operate most modern electronics, from appliances to fighter jets. Russia manufacturers few of its own chips, historically relying on imports from Asian and Western companies.

The world's biggest computer chip companies began cutting off deliveries to Russia in late February, after the U.S.-led restrictions kicked in.

The United States and other Western nations already had regulated sales to Russia of chips and other electronic components specifically designed for military use. Those sales required a government license to proceed even before Russia's recent invasion of Ukraine.

The new rules tightened those restrictions and also blocked the sale of most dual-use chips, which have both military and commercial applications, to nonmilitary users in Russia, including those in high-tech industries.

The Biden administration said the ban would cut off more than half of Russia's high-tech imports and kneecap the country's ability to diversify its economy and support its military. The ban was not designed to block deliveries of consumer electronics.

In a novel move that the United States has used only once before  against China's Huawei  it is also requiring companies worldwide to abide by the rules and block such sales to Russia if they use U.S. manufacturing equipment or software to produce chips. Most chip factories around the world use software or equipment designed in the United States, analysts say.

Previous research has shown Russia's military has long relied on western electronics. Russian military drones shot down over Ukraine in recent years have been full of Western electronics and components, according to investigators from the London-based Conflict Armament Research (CAR) group, who dissected the drones.
Meat sourced from Australia isnt particularly unusual to find in an English steakhouse, but its usually beef.

Red Lodge Steakhouse and Bar, a restaurant about 20 minutes south of RAF Mildenhall, serves the steaks and burgers youd expect, but saves room for more adventurous diners interested in exotic meats.

My family and I popped in for dinner and were pleasantly surprised by both the menu and the decor. The bar is like a fuselage, with airplane-seat booths and a wing as a countertop.

The decor around the tables is styled as an African hunting lodge, with maps on the ceiling, antique cameras on windowsills, a big fireplace and a wall of bookshelves filled with antique guns and books.

Lisa Cooper, the manager of the restaurant, said the interior was designed to reflect the fun-loving attitude of the Australian owners.

The Down Under feel isnt limited to the surroundings. Besides the usual pub grub of chicken wings, pizza, steaks, salads and burgers, the menu offers kangaroo steak, an exotic dish of the day and a kangaroo burger called the Skippy.

Having eaten my share of unusual dishes in travels to four continents, I had to give the kangaroo a try.

I ordered the Skippy, my wife ordered the filet mignon and my 4-year-old daughter had the mac and cheese. While we waited for our food, I couldnt help but notice how much chatter was going on in the restaurant.

Some people might be bothered by that, but to me it was a good sign. It was a Wednesday night and the restaurant was almost at capacity.

The food came out in a timely manner, but the steak came out well-done even though my wife ordered it medium-rare. The manager took the situation in stride, apologized and ordered us a new steak.

The steak arrived when I was almost done with my burger, but it was worth the wait, according to my wife. The steak was cooked perfectly. It was delicious, tender and full of flavor.

My first experience with kangaroo meat was quite memorable. The Skippy was jam-packed with a myriad of flavors. It had a lightness to it similar to other lean meats and though Its considered a gamey meat, it wasnt as tough as I expected it to be, compared to other game meats Ive had. It was a juicy burger, and the cheese and the jalapeno mayonnaise sauce went with it extremely well. I didnt feel lethargic at all after eating this unique burger.

My daughter, who has been a picky eater as of late, ate her entire bowl of mac and cheese. As a father who has been struggling to get her to eat all her food, I can say this restaurant did a great job delivering a meal that my kid thoroughly enjoyed.

We finished with a warm brownie with vanilla ice cream, which was a delicious finish to a very tasty meal.

Red Lodge Steakhouse and Bar

Address: 70 Turnpike Road, Red Lodge, United Kingdom

Hours: Monday-Thursday, 3-10 p.m.; Friday, 3-11 p.m.; Saturday, 9 a.m.- 11 p.m.; Sunday, 9 a.m.- 9 p.m.

Prices: Starters range from 5 pounds to 8 pounds; grill menu from 16 pounds to 50 pounds; salads, 10 pounds; burgers, 8 pounds to 13 pounds; pub classics, 7 pounds to 14 pounds.

Information: Phone: 01638 750531; email: redlodgesteakhouse@gmail.com; Online: facebook.com/redlodgesteakhouse
Since reverting to Japan on May 15, 1972, Okinawa Prefecture has become a major tourist destination. However, work remains to improve its economic self-sufficiency and standards of living.

The Irabu Bridge connecting the islands of Miyako and Irabu in Miyakojima, Okinawa Prefecture, opened in 2015. The 2.2-mile-long structure is the largest toll-free bridge in Japan.

"[After the bridge opened] our sales tripled and the area's specialty, Shio Chinsuko cookies, disappeared from the shelves," recalled a women who works in a nearby souvenir shop.

By fiscal 2018, visitors to Miyakojima had doubled in number to more than 1 million a year. But tourism has transformed the tranquil landscape of sugar cane fields, and the lives of the city's residents.

A hotel funded by a mainland Japan-based company is currently being constructed in the Sawada district of Irabu Island. The Miyakojima municipal government's city landscape ordinance restricts beachfront buildings to two stories, but city officials nonetheless green-lighted the four-story hotel, saying the building takes the surrounding scenery into consideration.

"A building of that height will block the view of the sunset," said 64-year-old Mitsunori Kawamitsu, who heads a local neighborhood association. "Even though the area is developing economically, we're losing precious things inherited from our ancestors."

A separate villa-type hotel recently started operating in the district, and most of the land near the beach has been snapped up. Land prices in the city have risen and the average monthly rent for a single-room apartment -- previously around 30,000 yen to 40,000 yen -- soared to as much as 100,000 yen ($765) at one point.

In some cases, apartment landlords and tenants have gotten into disputes because landlords have tried to raise the rent. "Even though tourist numbers have gone up, the prefecture's wage levels haven't changed," said a local resident in his 50s. "If things go on like this, it will become impossible for locals to keep living on this island."

Prior to being returned to Japan in 1972, Okinawa operated under U.S. stewardship. As cheap foreign products were readily available in the prefecture, the region never developed a manufacturing industry. Rather, it was the tourism industry that drove the local economy.

While under U.S. control, the prefecture ran "Battle of Okinawa memorial trips" to attract tourists from mainland Japan. In 1975, three years after Washington relinquished control of the islands, the Okinawa International Ocean Exposition was held: The event triggered land acquisition on the west coast and other parts of Okinawa's main island, as well as the opening of a number of hotels operated by companies on mainland Japan. In fiscal 2018, more than 10 million tourists visited Okinawa Prefecture, putting it on a par with resort islands such as Hawaii in the United States.

However, some say that tourism-focused development has stripped the prefecture of its unique charms. In a survey conducted by the prefectural government in fiscal 2020, tourists flagged the "beautiful ocean," and the "landscapes" as their favorite things about the area.

But the reality is, areas in more than 300 locations have been reclaimed. Shallow waters with coral reefs have been replaced by hotels and commercial facilities. As a result, the prefecture's size has expanded by some 14.5 square miles, roughly equivalent to 800 Tokyo Domes.

Some people have begun to seek ways to balance tourism and the traditional Okinawan way of life.

Each year, about 500,000 tourists visit Taketomi Island, roughly 250 miles southwest of the Okinawa's main island. The island's population of about 350 residents continue to carry out traditional rituals and ceremonies while living in houses with red-tiled roofs. Tourists traverse the island in water buffalo-pulled carriages.

There have been some attempts by outside companies to develop Taketomi Island as well. Now, residents are working toward buying back areas of land. To fund the initiative, locals ask tourists for a 300 yen "entrance fee" at the ferry terminal and other locations. The donation is purely voluntary, and those who opt to pay receive gifts such as island vegetable seeds.

"Tourism is important, but if it goes too far, the island's culture, nature and charms might be lost," said Shosei Uchimori, the 62-year-old director of a local community hall, which is a self-governing body on the island. "We want to keep living here while upholding the spirit of the island."
Mold in privatized military housing remains a topic of media and congressional attention. The issue is significant but not unique to the military community. Mold plagues communities nationwide. From college dorms to single-family homes, mold impacts the health of individuals and displaces families.

A larger issue is becoming evident: If improper mold assessment and remediation continually affect our military, an institution that America places high confidence in, how can we expect policy action to protect the broader public?

Congress held two hearings on substandard privatized military housing in the past few months. On March 31, the House Appropriations subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies held an oversight hearing. The Senate permanent subcommittee on Investigations followed suit last month. Witness testimony in both hearings revealed improper mold assessment and remediation.

The Military Housing Privatization Initiative Tenant Bill of Rights passed by Congress two years ago was the start of a solution, but it does not go far enough. Section nine (9) of the Tenant Bill of Rights states military families are entitled to receive property management services provided by a landlord that meet or exceed industry standards and that are performed by professionally and appropriately trained, responsive, and courteous customer service and maintenance staff.

Congress and the Department of Defense stopped short of naming specific standards in the Tenant Bill of Rights, even though industry standards exist. More importantly, federal law encourages the use of accredited standards. The National Technology Transfer and Advancement Act calls on federal agencies to adopt voluntary consensus-based standards whenever practicable. OMB Circular A-119, established over two decades ago and revised in 2016, spells out the importance of promulgating industry standards.

The Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification is the only organization to publish an accredited industry standard on mold remediation (ANSI/IICRC S520 Standard on Professional Mold Remediation). However, the IICRC has not experienced an uptick in demand for standards from most private military housing companies, nor is it seeing an increase in training within mold-related courses.

Thats troubling. But we can do better.

We know mold is one of the most reported problems in privatized military housing. We owe it to the individuals in uniform and their families to provide clean, healthy homes. It starts with getting accredited mold standards incorporated by reference (IBR) into federal regulations. The American National Standards Institute provides a dedicated portal showing organizations and standards incorporated by reference in the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations.

The blueprint for solving mold in military housing already exists. We need government officials, both elected and appointed, to act.

Michael Dakduk, a Marine Corps veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, is president and CEO of the Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification. The IICRC recently launched Mold Uncovered, a campaign to incorporate accredited mold standards and certifications in law and regulation.
In thinking about the evolution of Russias invasion of Ukraine, Lawrence Freedmans Substack has been invaluable. His latest assessment is blunt about Russias failures on the battlefield: The second phase of the war has been underway for a month now and the Russians have made few gains. ... The Russians have amassed whatever forces they can muster for this latest push, with little left in reserve, and it does not appear to be sufficient. This matches the assessments of other experts on the Russian military. Moscows ability to pursue offensive actions appears to be waning by the day.

Freedman said something else about Putins Victory Day speech that is worth noting, however  that in delivering such a muted set of war aims, Putin offered a definition of victory that might be in reach. So long as the Donbas is spared punitive action, Crimea is defended and Ukraine abandons thoughts of nuclear weapons then Russia will have succeeded. Putin described an imaginary threat for which he therefore might accept an imaginary solution.

Russia has paid an enormous price for its ambitions in Ukraine. It is worth remembering, however, that if the war ended tomorrow with the current battle lines frozen in place, the Russian Federation would control most of Ukraines Black Sea coast. The parallels to Stalins 1939 invasion of Finland come to mind. The Soviet Union suffered horrible losses during the first phase of that winter war, but in the end it still gained control over more than 10% of Finland  territory it controls to this day.

One of the arenas where Ukraine is routing Russia is the information war. A lot of attention has been paid to Russian casualties and very little has been said about Ukrainian casualties. There are lots of videos showing successful attacks on Russian units, but the only ones showing Russian attacks are those that stress the loss of innocent civilians. There are plenty of recordings demonstrating abysmal Russian morale, but we have heard little about Ukrainian weariness.

None of this is to say that the information environment has distorted the state of the conflict beyond all recognition. Relative to prewar expectations, Russia has underperformed and Ukraine has overperformed. The polling in Ukraine strongly supports the narrative of a country united in resisting Russia; on the other hand, I cannot count the number of times Russia has claimed to capture all of Mariupol without, you know, it actually happening.

What I am saying is that because Ukraine has been so effective in the information space, Kyiv has obscured some known unknowns that need to be puzzled out when considering the next phase of this conflict.

For one thing, can Ukraine go on the offensive beyond the north? There is no denying that Ukraine had great success counterattacking to gain territory near Kyiv. They are succeeding around Kharkiv as well. But as Margarita Konaev and Polina Beliakova note in Foreign Affairs, other parts of the country will require a different strategy: To win in Donbas, they will likely have to shift to a more conventional fight on open ground, where they may be more vulnerable. ... In open terrain, especially if the Ukrainians want to move from a defensive posture, regain lost territory, and expel Russian soldiers from the Donbas region, they will need serious reinforcements.

Then there is the south. The Russians continue to control Kherson and are threatening to annex it through a bogus referendum. The humanitarian situation in that region grows more dire by the day.

Finally, what happens to Ukraine after the war ends, or at least after the battle lines stabilize? As Anna Reid notes in Foreign Affairs, Ukraine has demonstrated extraordinary resiliency during this war, but questions remain about its future:

Security will be paramount: even in the most optimistic scenarios, Ukrainians recognize that they will likely face a future of continued conflict in the east, perhaps lasting for years to come. The country will also need to address the loss not only of much of its economy, but also of more than five million of its citizens who have fled the country and will have to be persuaded that there is something to return to. At the same time, it will take exceptional effort for the Ukrainian government not relapse into corruption, even as it pleads for tens of billions of dollars in desperately needed reconstruction money. And it remains unclear just what status the country will have in the West when all is said and done.

Russias decision to invade its sovereign neighbor has proven to be ill-fated. My question is whether, in the end, Russia will still walk away with territorial gains compared to 2014 and Ukraine will be able to recover.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
Hundreds of U.S. Marines and sailors, Australian soldiers and Japanese Self-Defense Force members are conducting a major warfighting exercise in Australia.

Southern Jackaroo 22 at Queenslands Shoalwater Bay Training Area will run until May 27, Australias Department of Defence said in a statement announcing the start of the drills on Tuesday.

Around 200 members of the 2,200-strong Marine Rotational Force  Darwin, who began a six-month rotation to the Northern Territory in March, are involved in the exercise, Capt. Joseph DiPietro, a spokesman for the rotational force, said in an email Tuesday.

Theyll train alongside 400 Australian soldiers and 100 Japanese troops, he said.

Infantry live fire and combined arms drills involving tanks will be part of the training, said Brigadier Michael Say, commander of 7th Brigade, Australian Army.

Exercise Southern Jackaroo is a great example of how our regional partners integrate with Australian forces to conduct realistic combat team training for combat operations, he said in the Australian statement.

Shoalwater Bay, where the training is taking place, is an arena for the biennial Talisman Sabre exercise, which involved 17,000 U.S., Australian, New Zealand, Japanese, South Korean and British troops last summer.

Australian politicians reacted with alarm earlier this month after revelations that the Solomon Islands, 1,200 miles northeast of Shoalwater, was negotiating a security pact with China.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Sunday refused to say how his government might respond if China attempted to establish a military base in the islands, according to a report by The Associated Press that day.

Morrison has said that a Chinese naval base on the impoverished South Pacific island nation would be a "red line" for both Australia and the United States, AP reported.

Meanwhile, the U.S., Australia and Japan have shown a united front opposing Russias war in Ukraine with all three nations helping supply Ukrainian forces and imposing sanctions on Russia.

Considering the current world situation, the trilateral exercise is very significant, and it is very useful for improving the capability of units and all soldiers, Lt. Col. Ryozo Asano, commander of Japanese troops involved in Southern Jackaroo, said in emailed comments provided by DiPietro on Tuesday.

The exercise has taken place each year since 2015. The training builds on past activities and enhances their strengths, the Marine rotational forces commander, Col. Christopher Steele, said in comments provided by DiPietro.

"We are looking forward to enhancing our combined interoperability and developing our relationships," he said.
The Navy has waived the right to contest a revised emergency order issued by the Hawaii Department of Health last week that set a Nov. 1 deadline for submitting a plan for permanently closing the Red Hill underground fuel storage facility.

The health departments May 6 order also requires the Navy to submit by the end of June a plan for emptying the fuel tanks, including an implementation schedule for defueling the roughly 150 million gallons stored there.

The Navys decision means that work to defuel and close the Red Hill facility can begin without further delay, Kathleen Ho, deputy director of environmental health for the Hawaii Health Department, said in a news release Monday.

Leaking jet fuel from the World War II-era facility contaminated the Navys drinking water system that serves thousands of homes on military housing communities on and around Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam.

The petroleum contamination became acute in late November, forcing thousands to relocate to area hotels for most of the winter as the Navy isolated the contaminated well and flushed the system.

Many residents have complained of medical issues ranging from rashes and headaches to fatigue and gastrointestinal problems. More than 100 residents have already filed claims for compensation for illnesses and hardships with the Navys Office of the Judge Advocate.

The Hawaii Department of Health issued its original emergency order in December, which required the facility to be emptied, but no timeline was included. The Navy unsuccessfully contested that order, which took effect in January.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued an order March 7 directing the storage facility be permanently closed, but the timeline for doing so was broad.

The Hawaii Department of Healths revised emergency order requires the Navy by Friday to provide the state an assessment by an independent contractor regarding the facilitys operation.

The Navy contracted Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, a privately held firm based in Waltham, Mass., earlier this year to prepare the Red Hill workplans, conduct assessments and recommend system repairs and improvements for safely defueling the massive tanks.

The emergency order contains a provision that the Health Department has discretion to grant reasonable extensions of time requested by the Navy regarding document submissions if good cause can be established.

Our main focus is ensuring that defueling and closure operations are performed safely and expeditiously, Ho said in the news release.

Among the provisions of the revised emergency order are:

 Continued suspension of operations at Red Hill.

 Maintaining and treating the petroleum-contaminated Red Hill well.

 Submitting a phased plan for the defueling and closure of the facility.

 Meeting with health department officials on or before July 15 regarding planning and scheduling of the closure.

 Providing the state with all documents the Navy supplied to the contractor.

 Submitting versions of all documents and material that can be publicly released.

This work will have consequences for us and for future generations, and on behalf of the people and environment of Hawaii, we will hold the Navy accountable to honor its commitments, Ho said.
TOKYO  Japan should carry out an exhaustive review of its defense strategy, including the role played by U.S. forces, now that the security threat from Russia is approaching that of China and North Korea, a former diplomat said this week.

I am saying that we cant do without comprehensively reviewing the way the [U.S.] bases as well as defense and diplomacy should be, and the assessment of the security environment surrounding Japan, said Hitoshi Tanaka, who served as senior deputy minister for foreign affairs under former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. He spoke to reporters Monday during an online event hosted by the Foreign Press Center in Tokyo.

Keep in mind that there are new threats, added Tanaka, who now serves as the chairman of Institute for International Strategy at The Japan Institute. Russia once again has become a threat.

Tokyo has imposed more than a dozen economic sanctions on Moscow in response to its ongoing invasion of Ukraine. In turn, Russia halted talks over a post-World War II peace treaty with Japan and ended visa-free entry for former residents of four Russian-controlled islands north of Hokkaido.

Japan and Russia never signed a peace treaty after WWII, and the status of four islands captured by the Soviets has been a sticking point for more than seven decades.

Moscow has also increased its military activities around Japan.

Russia tested submarine-launched ballistic missiles in the Sea of Japan, also known as the East Sea, on April 14 and May 6. It also conducted military drills on the disputed islands in March that involved 3,000 troops, The Associated Press reported on April 15.

Russia has also sailed flotillas of warships through narrow Japanese straits, raising alarm in Tokyo.

Tanaka said there may be a need to respond by reallocating Japanese and U.S. forces in the country, including to Hokkaido.

But, he added, this doesnt mean Japan should backtrack on plans to reduce the U.S. military footprint on Okinawa, where about 70 percent of the U.S. facilities in Japan are based.

The security environment surrounding Japan is becoming severe, so there could be discussions to increase military bases on Okinawa as a way to strengthen Japans security structure, but that should not be done, Tanaka said.

Japan should instead build partnerships with other countries in the region, including South Korea, to build a deterrence thats stronger than just the U.S.-Japan alliance.

That said, Japan should not abandon efforts to relocate Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, Tanaka said of a plan long opposed by Okinawa lawmakers who want the airfield totally removed from the island.

The U.S. and Japanese governments agreed in 1996 to build a new airfield at Camp Schwab in the rural Henoko district to facilitate MCAS Futenmas closure. The base is in the heart of Ginowan city.

Local lawmakers have long attempted to block the relocation.

Okinawa Gov. Denny Tamaki met with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Tuesday in Tokyo and urged him to abandon the relocation plan by Sunday, the 50th anniversary of Okinawas reversion to Japanese rule, Kyodo News reported Wednesday. Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno quickly turned down the request, calling the relocation the only solution.

Tanaka, who was involved in the negotiations for MCAS Futenmas relocation, said Japan should highlight the current security environment in an effort to change Okinawans attitudes.

I think the Japanese government needs to convince the Okinawa people, for them to accept the burden of hosting the bases as long as we are a democratic nation, Tanaka said.
CAMP HUMPHREYS, South Korea  North Korea launched three short-range ballistic missiles off its eastern coast on Thursday, according to South Korean military officials.

The weapons were fired around 6:29 p.m., the Souths Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a message to reporters. It said it was coordinating with the United States on the matter.

The missiles were estimated by the Joint Chiefs to have flown about 224 miles at a peak altitude of 56 miles.

The Japanese prime ministers office in a tweet said it also detected a suspected missile being fired from North Korea.

The missiles mark North Koreas 15th round of weapons testing so far this year. The regimes latest launch was conducted on May 7, when it fired a short-range submarine-launched ballistic missile.

The launches come two days after South Korea inaugurated its newest president, Yoon Suk Yeol. A conservative member of the People Power Party, Yoon has vowed to reinforce the countrys alliance with the United States and respond firmly against North Korean provocations.

In his inauguration speech on Tuesday, Yoon said the door to dialogue will remain open for North Korea to resolve its nuclear weapon program.

If North Korea stops developing its nuclear program and turns to substantive denuclearization, I will prepare for an audacious plan to achieve epoch-making improvement in North Koreas economy and North Koreans lives in cooperation with the international community, Yoon said in his speech.

The president also floated the idea of a vast economic package for the North, should it take steps toward denuclearization.

North Korea has a history of conducting weapons tests shortly before and after significant events in South Korea. The regime test-fired around five missiles one month after former South Korean President Moon Jae-in took office in 2017.

U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price in a press briefing on Wednesday said there is no more pressing challenge than that posed by North Koreas weapons program.

We have made very clear that we are willing to engage in good-faith diplomacy with [North Korea], he said. We do so, of course, with no hostile intent.

Multiple U.S. officials in recent weeks have speculated that North Korea has no plans to discontinue missile or nuclear tests.

Defense Intelligence Agency Director Army Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Tuesday briefed lawmakers that the regime will likely continue its testing and justify its actions by using U.S. policy, South Koreas military modernization, and combined U.S.South Korean military exercises as pretext to normalize North Koreas military advancements.

In a press briefing on May 6, State Department principal deputy spokeswoman Jalina Porter said the North may conduct its seventh nuclear test as early as this month.

North Korea last conducted a nuclear test on Sept. 3, 2017. The test, carried out in an underground facility in the northeastern mountains at Punggye-ri, was measured as a 6.3-magnitude earthquake by the U.S. Geological Survey.
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CAMP HUMPHREYS, South Korea  North Korea for the first time has confirmed there are COVID-19 infections within its borders and said it is facing a grave situation due to an outbreak.

The state-run Korean Central News Agency reported Thursday that the North has implemented the largest scale epidemic prevention and control system upon the discovery of the coronavirus respiratory diseases omicron variant.

The news agency did not provide case counts or fatality rates in its report but said North Korean leader Kim Jong Un had ordered a lock down of all cities and their combined population of roughly 25 million people.

Pyongyangs decision to confirm COVID-19 infections in the country comes two years after South Korea reported its first cases. Previously, the North did not report a single infection and released updated case numbers for other nations.

In 2021, North Korea rejected nearly three million doses of the Chinese-produced Sinovac Biotech vaccine from UNICEF, saying they would be needed elsewhere. The North is part of the COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access plan, or COVAX, that provides vaccines to impoverished countries.

Pyongyang also rejected deliveries of the AstraZeneca vaccine through COVAX, citing potential side effects, South Koreas Institute for National Security Strategy said in July 2021.

While North Korea imposes strict limits on access beyond its borders, it allows humanitarian aid groups, such as the World Health Organization, to operate inside the country.

Meanwhile, South Koreas Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency reported 35,906 new COVID-19 cases in its population of 51 million people on Wednesday. Seoul dropped its mask mandate and a host of other social distancing requirements in May. The countrys one-day record is 621,187 cases on March 1.

U.S. Forces Korea, the command responsible for about 28,500 troops in the country, counted 98 cases from the week ending Monday. The U.S. military also dropped much of its social distancing restrictions for its forces across the country as over 98% of its personnel is vaccinated.
CAMP FOSTER, Okinawa  Fifty years after Japan regained dominion over Okinawa, the island prefectures young people are more accustomed than their parents and grandparents to the U.S. military presence on the island.

Yet the mammoth U.S. footprint on Okinawa continues to grate on many locals, particularly those who lived through World War II and the subsequent American rule that ended May 15, 1972.

The older generation experienced the war and that is why they have different opinions from young people, Momoko Tsubaki, 22, of Ginowan city, told Stars and Stripes on March 9 while strolling a shopping mall in Kitanakagusuku. But for us, U.S. military bases were already here when we were born. I have a friend who is a member of a military family.

The U.S. post-war legacy in Japan survives nowhere like it does on Okinawa, where tens of thousands of American troops, their military machines and their culture still command attention. Okinawans have long questioned their share of the cost of Tokyos alliance with Washington.

According to a poll by Japanese sociologists in 2017, young people on Okinawa, ages 18 to 34, agree with the older generation that the prefecture shoulders a disproportionate burden of American bases, just over 65%, versus nearly 74% for ages 65 and up, Wako University sociology associate professor Yukihiro Yoneda told Stars and Stripes during an interview April 15.

Even then, the younger generation tends to choose softer language like somewhat agree, Yoneda said. The poll data was released in April.

Younger people tend to choose moderate answers such as somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or neither agree nor disagree, he said. Compared to the older generation, there is a decrease in strong feelings or views toward U.S. bases.

An April poll of 1,500 Okinawans ages 18 and older by Kyodo News found that locals would prefer a downsized U.S. presence. Most, 84%, believe Okinawa bears a disproportionate share of the U.S. military burden, according to Kyodo on April 24. While 76% expressed affinity for the U.S., 51% said they dont trust the U.S. military, according to the report.

Okinawa, roughly the same area as Tokyo and with a population of 1.4 million, is home to about 30,000 U.S. service members and another 50,000 civilian employees and family members, according to information from the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing and U.S. Forces Japan.

The U.S. has 32 installations, including one it shares with the Japan Self-Defense Forces, that occupy about 18% of the island, according to Okinawa prefecture. They range from Kadena Air Base, a vital Western Pacific airlift and fighter base, to Camp Schwab, home to Marine rapid responders, the 4th Marine Regiment and 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion.

Junsei Yabiku, 19, of Ginowan, a math major at University of the Ryukyus, told Stars and Stripes that he is used to the American presence, but Okinawa bears more than its share.

Japan is still forcing 70% of the U.S. military bases onto Okinawa, he said on campus April 15. It is still questionable if Okinawa is part of the U.S. or Japan.

Seizures, restrictions

Hard fighting during the 1945 Battle of Okinawa, the last major ground battle of World War II, claimed the lives of 14,000 Americans, 110,000 Japanese troops and at least 140,000 Okinawa civilians.

The U.S. under the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty with Japan kept control of Okinawa until the Nixon administration agreed in 1971 to return it. The handover, or reversion, took place May 15, 1972.

Under its administration, the U.S. restricted free speech and union activities on Okinawa and seized property to make way for military bases, Michihiro Akiyama, associate professor of sociology at Okinawa International University, told Stars and Stripes on March 3.

The 1950s was about resistance against the U.S. military forcibly taking the land, he said. This was the beginning of Okinawan peoples resistance against the U.S. military bases.

Meanwhile, crimes perpetrated by U.S. service members often went unpunished, and reminded Okinawans that the military presence presented a threat to their lives, Akiyama said. Crimes and aircraft mishaps colored the older generations attitudes and fed the protest movement that still exists on the island.

Okinawans do not share a monolithic attitude toward the U.S. presence. The Americans promoted democracy, founded banks and schools and fostered a revival of Okinawan, or Ryukyu, culture, said Toshiaki Arashiro, a visiting professor of history and education at Okinawa University.

However, peoples expectations were betrayed, he told Stars and Stripes on Feb. 28. Americans were friendly and nice, but in inconvenient situations, American interests were prioritized. It was an American-first democracy.

Momentum built for a return to Japanese authority that reached its peak in the 1960s, Arashiro said. At the time, Okinawans pressed for complete reversion, meaning the removal of all U.S. bases. Lacking that, the return to Japan for older Okinawans is unfulfilled, he said.

Ordinary Okinawans still see their own wellbeing as secondary to U.S. interests, which contributes to lingering ill-will.

The feeling that the military bases threaten peoples lives and existence and the memories from the war are part of the reason why protest against the bases still continues, Akiyama said.

North to Henoko

In contemporary times, prefectural Gov. Denny Tamaki campaigns to shrink the U.S. presence, focusing the fight on plans to relocate Marine Corps Air Station Futenma from crowded Ginowan to Camp Schwab farther north in the rural Henoko district of Nago.

Tamaki would rather see the air station removed completely and has thrown administrative hurdles in its path, to little avail.

Meanwhile, Japan supports construction of the Schwab airfield, but has agreed to pay $3 billion of the $8.7 billion cost to build a Marine Corps base on Guam to relocate some aviation units from Okinawa.

Most younger Okinawans, 66.3%, prefer the Schwab site over Ginowan or have no opinion, according to Yoneda. Conversely, 66.6% of Okinawans ages 65 and older want the air base off the island altogether, he said.

I never disliked the U.S. military presence, Tomonosuke Bise, 36, of Tomigusuku city, said as he shopped with his wife at the Aeon Mall on March 9.

The locals need more protection from aircraft mishaps and falling parts, but U.S. bases are kind of fun, he said. I think it is a good part of Okinawa.

Younger Okinawans are less concerned with the U.S. bases as a political issue than their parents and grandparents, which has led to reluctant acceptance or moderate agreement, Yoneda said.

As evidence, he pointed to the reelection of Nago Mayor Taketoyo Toguchi, 60, to a second term in January.

Toguchi, backed by Japans ruling Liberal Democratic Party, stayed quiet on the airfield issue, denoting tacit approval, according to a Jan. 23 report in the Asahi newspaper. He overtook the challenger, former city councilman Yohei Kishimoto, who opposed the Henoko project, with 57% of the 33,963 votes cast in a low-turnout election Jan. 23.

Young people want economic issues to be prioritized more than U.S. base issues, Yoneda said.

Nanami Kina, 18, a student of global and regional studies at the Ryukyus university, seemed to agree. The bases are necessary because people make a living doing base-related jobs, she told Stars and Stripes on April 15.

The share of island revenue generated by the U.S. presence fell from about 15% to 5% after the handover, according to data from the prefecture. Tourism filled the gap, growing from a relative handful of visitors annually in the late 1970s to 10 million in 2019, according to the Asahi newspaper in January 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic slashed that number in 2020 to 3.73 million, the report said.

Towa Maeda, 17, of Yonabaru town, said she is comfortable with the U.S. military presence as she strolled around American Village, a popular tourist destination on Okinawa, on March 9.

I think its good. Weve become close with the American people, she said.

Ami Uchihira, 18, of Okinawa city, sees the occupation and the reversion as a positive part of Okinawas history.

Having a connection with the U.S. is the advantage of Okinawa, the University of the Ryukyus education student said April 15 on the Nishihara campus. Having foreigners around has good influence on peoples values and people are more open to study abroad.
Finland on Thursday announced its intent to join NATO, a landmark decision that is expected to win swift approval from allies and could lead to more U.S. military training missions in the Arctic.

"Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay, Prime Minister Sanna Marin and President Sauli Niinisto said in a joint statement.

The move, prompted by Russias war on Ukraine, reverses Finlands quasi-neutral status, which dates to the Cold War. Sweden, citing the same concerns as Finland, also is expected to announce its plan to join NATO in the coming days.

Over the years, Finland has become a close partner with NATO, carrying out joint exercises and taking part in operations in places such as Afghanistan.

U.S. troops also have carried out periodic training events in the country. With full-fledged Finnish membership in NATO, those opportunities to carry out joint missions are expected to expand.

Finlands modernized military also would bring significant assets to NATOs northeastern flank along the 800-mile border Finland shares with Russia.

Finnish leaders said NATO membership would strengthen the countrys security and also the entire defense alliance.

The view from Washington is similar.

Both Finland and Sweden would bring advanced capabilities and abilities into the alliance should they join NATO, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters last week.

Russias foreign ministry on Thursday said in a statement that the country would be forced to take retaliatory steps should Finland follow through on its NATO membership bid.

"Helsinki must be aware of the responsibility and consequences of such a move," the statement said.

The Kremlin did not spell out what types of military moves it could make, but one option could be to add more troops and weaponry to its western border with NATO.

Moscows prior warnings of unspecified consequences should Finland move to join NATO have prompted the U.S. and United Kingdom to offer assurances during a transition period, when Finland would be without the Article 5 security guarantees that come with membership.

Kirby, without offering details, said last week that the U.S. would be able to find ways to address any concerns that either Sweden or Finland might have about the period of time between a NATO membership application and their potential ascension into the alliance.

Typically, it can take about one year for prospective members bid to work its way through the approval process, which requires ratification from member-state parliaments and the U.S. Congress.

However, Finland could be fast-tracked given security concerns over Russia and a recognition within the alliance that the country already meets all NATO military standards.

NATOs summit in Madrid in June, which will be attended by President Joe Biden, is a venue where Finlands membership could be made official.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said he expects both Finland and Sweden to be quickly welcomed should they decide to join.

Public support for joining NATO has soared in Finland since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, with 76% of the population in favor of joining the alliance, according to public broadcaster Yle.
KYIV, Ukraine  Rocket attacks on Ukraine's central Poltava region on Thursday were "perhaps the most intense for the duration of the war," the regional governor said.

"Today's shelling of the Poltava region is perhaps the largest during the course of this full-scale war," Dmitry Lunin wrote in a Telegram post. "12 Russian missiles hit the infrastructure in (the city of) Kremenchuk; most of them hit an oil refinery that was not operational anyway."

"Rescuers are putting out a fire at the refinery. Luckily, no one was hurt," Lunin added.

ROUNDUP OF OTHER DEVELOPMENTS:

KYIV, Ukraine  At least two civilians died Thursday as a result of a shelling attack on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, local authorities said that same day.

"As a result of the shelling, two people were killed, four more were injured, two of whom are doctors. All these people are civilians," Vyacheslav Zadorenko, the mayor of the suburban town of Derhachi, wrote in a Telegram post.

He added that the attack also damaged a building housing a humanitarian aid unit, municipal offices, and hospital facilities.

"None of the sites that came under shelling, not to mention private houses that are destroyed daily, had anything to do with military infrastructure," Zadorenko said.

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KYIV, Ukraine  Ukraine's foreign minister said Thursday that everyone involved in the transportation and sales of grain seized by Russia in occupied areas of the country will face legal consequences.

"Russia is a criminal three times over: it bombed Syria to ruins, occupied part of Ukraine, and is now selling stolen Ukrainian grain to Syria," the ministry's press service cited Dmytro Kuleba as saying.

"I want to remind the participants in this deal: what is stolen has never brought happiness to anyone. Everyone involved in the sale, transportation or purchase of stolen grain is an accomplice to the crime," Kuleba said.

"Your actions will have adequate international legal consequences. We will do everything to make your life as difficult as possible," he continued, commenting on media reports that on Wednesday, a Russian ship carrying Ukrainian grain moored off the Syrian coast.

Kuleba also claimed that thanks to the efforts of Ukrainian diplomats, Egypt and Lebanon had previously refused to buy the "looted" grain shipment.

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MOSCOW  A student of a local construction college died as a result of a shelling attack on the Russian village of Solokhi near the Ukrainian border, a teacher at the college told the Interfax news agency Thursday.

"Russian Nifodyov died as a result of the shelling of the peaceful village of Solokhi by the Armed Forces of Ukraine," Nikolai Ignatenko was cited as saying.

Earlier on Thursday, the governor of Russia's Belgorod region, where Solokhi is located, said that at least one civilian had been killed in the shelling, while six more were injured. While governor Vyacheslav Gladkov likewise blamed the attack on Kyiv's forces, it was not immediately clear whether the slain civilian he referred to was Nifodyov.

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KYIV, Ukraine  Four civilians were reported dead and five more were injured in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region on Thursday, the regional governor said that same day.

"On May 12, the Russians killed four more civilians of the Donbas: two in Novoselivka, one in Avdiivka and one in Lyman. Five more people were injured," Pavlo Kyrylenko wrote in a Telegram post, referring to a village and two cities in the Donetsk region, one of two which make up the Donbas.

His claims could not be immediately verified.

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ROME  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says that he's ready to talk with Russian President Vladimir Putin and that "we must find an agreement,'' but with no ultimatum as a condition.

Zelenskyy also told Italian RAI state TV in an interview scheduled to be broadcast on Thursday night that Ukraine will never recognize Crimea as part of Russia, which annexed that part of southern Ukraine in 2014.

"Crimea has always had its autonomy, it has its parliament, but on the inside of Ukraine," Zelenskyy said, in excerpts of the interview that RAI released earlier on Thursday.

The interviewer asked the Ukrainian leader about a comment by French President Emmanuel Macron cautioning against any humiliation of Putin.

"We want the Russian army to leave our land, we aren't on Russian soil,'' Zelenskyy replied. "We won't save Putin's face by paying with our territory. That would be unjust."

In another comment, Zelenskyy sounded a forward-looking note. "We have to think of the future of Russia. I, as president of Ukraine, say these are our neighbors. There will be other presidents, other presidents and other generations" of Russia, Zelenskyy said.

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KYIV, Ukraine  At least three people died following a Russian airstrike on a city in Ukraine's northern Chernihiv region, while 12 more were injured, Ukrainian military officials said Thursday.

In the early hours of Thursday, Russian troops fired multiple rockets at a school and student accommodation complex in the city of Novhorod-Siversky, the Ukrainian Operational Command "North" said in a Facebook post.

It added that nearby buildings housing local administration offices, college dormitories, and private houses also suffered varying degrees of damage.

The accuracy of these claims could not be immediately verified.

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KYIV, Ukraine  Ukrainian ministry officials said Thursday that Russian troops were trying to block Kyiv's forces from advancing as far as the Ukrainian-Russian border in the northeastern Kharkiv region.

"In the direction of Kharkiv, Russian army units are regrouping and trying to prevent the further advance of our troops in the direction of the state border of Ukraine," defense ministry spokesman Oleksandr Motuzyanyk said in his regular media briefing.

"To this end, the occupiers launch unceasing artillery attacks on our troop units in order to inflict human losses, as well as to damage weapons and military equipment," Motuzyanyk added.

He did not clarify how close Ukrainian forces were to the border.

According to the defense ministry briefing, Moscow's troops were opening fire "along the entire line of confrontation" in Ukraine's east, and attempting to penetrate Ukrainian defenses.

Also on Thursday, the Ukrainian military's General Staff said in its daily operational statement that Russian forces continued their attempts to storm several cities in Ukraine's industrial heartland of Donbas that day, but had no success.



BERLIN  The U.N.'s top human rights body has overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling on its investigators to specifically look into possible rights abuses and violations in northern Ukraine shortly after Russia's invasion.

In a 33-2 vote, with 12 abstentions, the Human Rights Council concluded a special session Thursday on Russia's invasion of Ukraine also by calling on Russia to grant international human rights groups "unhindered, timely, immediate, unrestricted and safe access" to people who have been transferred from Ukraine to Russia or areas controlled by Russian forces or affiliates.

Only China and Eritrea voted against the measure, which also urged the U.N. human rights office to report on events in Mariupol, a besieged southeastern port city where thousands of civilians are believed to have been killed. Access to the city has been virtually nonexistent for international human rights during recent fighting there.

The council called on a team of investigators known as a Commission of Inquiry to look specifically into the "events" in the Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Sumy regions of Ukraine in late February and early March after Russia's invasion "with a view to holding those responsible to account." The commission was already created to investigate rights abuses and violations generally in Ukraine.

Many atrocities in the war came to light last month after Moscow's forces aborted their bid to capture Kyiv and withdrew from around the capital.

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KYIV, Ukraine  Between 8 and 12 Russian missiles hit the oil refinery and other infrastructure in the Ukrainian industrial hub of Kremenchuk Thursday, the acting governor of the central Poltava region said that same day.

In a Telegram post, Dmytro Lunin urged residents to remain in underground shelters, citing the "persistent" threat of airstrikes.

In early April, Lunin had said that the Kremenchuk refinery - Ukraine's only remaining fully functional facility of its kind at the time  was no longer operational following a Russian attack. Moscow claimed to have targeted the refinery again at the end of the month, and to have destroyed further fuel production and storage facilities.

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BERLIN  The U.N. refugee agency is reporting that more than 6 million people have now fled Ukraine in the wake of Russia's invasion.

Geneva-based UNHCR also said Thursday that the number of refugees who have returned back to Ukraine, either partially or fully, has reached more than 1.6 million. It says that number reflects cross-border movements, and doesn't necessarily indicate "sustainable" returns. The agency says it's too early to draw conclusions about "definitive trends" on returns.

Matthew Saltmarsh, an agency spokesman, also said Thursday that a total of 2.4 million people who have left Ukraine have moved beyond Ukraine's immediate border countries which have taken in the lion's share of refugees from the country. Poland alone has registered more than 3.2 million people who fled Ukraine. It and other European Union member countries have open borders, making tracking where people go a complex endeavor.

On Tuesday, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, tweeted that the number of refugees from Ukraine had reached the same 5.7 million figure as the tally from Syria's 11-year war, which previously was the source of the world's biggest refugee crisis.

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UNITED NATIONS -- The U.N. children's agency says the war in Ukraine is a "child rights crisis" where education is under attack and nearly 100 youngsters have been killed in just the last month.

UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Omar Abdi told the U.N. Security Council Thursday that more children have been injured, millions have been displaced and schools continue to be attacked and used for military purposes.

The school year came to a standstill after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, and as of last week at least 15 of 89 UNICEF-supported schools in the country's east have been damaged or destroyed in the fighting, he said.

In mid-March, over 15,000 schools resumed education in Ukraine mostly through remote learning or in-person hybrid options, he said.

"It is estimated that 3.7 million children in Ukraine and abroad are using online and distance learning options," Abdi said.

But he stressed that there are still "enormous obstacles" to education including availability for learning, resources, language barriers and movements of children and their families.

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KYIV, Ukraine  Talks are underway between Kyiv and Moscow on the possible evacuation of 38 "severely wounded" Ukrainian troops from the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, Ukraine's deputy PM said Thursday afternoon.

The steel mill is the only remaining stronghold of Ukrainian resistance in the ruined port city, and is now surrounded by Russian forces.

"We are working step by step," Iryna Vereshchuk wrote in a public post on the Telegram messenger app.

She said that Kyiv hoped to exchange the soldiers for 38 "significant" Russian prisoners of war, before moving on to the next stage of the negotiations. She did not specify what this next stage would concern, but said that there were no negotiations "on the exchange of 500 or 600 people."

Earlier on Thursday, an official at the Ukrainian President's Office said that Kyiv hoped to extract "half a thousand" wounded Ukrainian fighters from Azovstal.

Members of the Azov Regiment holed up inside the plant have repeatedly refused to surrender, citing fears of being killed or tortured. On Tuesday, Ukrainian officials said that "more than a thousand" Ukrainian troops, many of them injured, remained at Azovstal.
Switzerland has frozen a further 2.2 billion Swiss francs ($2.2 billion) of Russian assets in the past five weeks, as its responds to criticism that it should be doing more to block the fortunes of those close to Vladimir Putin.

The current tally of frozen assets now stands at 6.3 billion francs, Swiss official Erwin Bollinger said at a government briefing Thursday in the Swiss capital Bern. The figure is actually down from the 7.5 billion Swiss francs worth of assets frozen as of April 7 because even though an additional 2.2 billion francs were blocked, 3.4 billion francs were released again after being frozen on a precautionary basis.

The number of frozen assets is not an indicator for how effective sanctions are implemented, Bollinger said. The numbers can fluctuate in both directions.

The fresh tally comes a week after outspoken Kremlin critic Bill Browder said at a U.S. government-sponsored briefing on Russian money in Switzerland that the U.S. should reconsider its legal cooperation with the Swiss. Even as Switzerland in February decided to impose sanctions that mirrored those laid down by the European Union, its role as a magnet for Russian riches over the past two decades has come under scrutiny.

Mark Pieth, a law professor at the University of Basel and a corruption expert, said the Swiss authorities had shown a lack of courage to date given the Swiss banking industry estimates Russian assets in the country to be as much as 200 billion Swiss francs.

Seco, the Swiss Secretariat for Economic Affairs, has stressed that the majority of Russian assets in Switzerland are not subject to sanctions and therefore should not be seized. Seco has also consistently said the net number for frozen assets would continue to rise as more assets hidden behind shell companies or in the names of associates are painstakingly uncovered.

Eleven properties across Switzerland have been blocked to date, Seco said. The government agency said its received reports from 72 banks, companies and local authorities to date, without naming any of the banks or entities.
RIGA, Latvia  Russian authorities are forcing Ukrainians who seek safety to submit to strip searches and interrogations, placing some refugees in guarded camps, stripping them of their vital documents and in some cases forcing them to remain in Russia, according to displaced Ukrainians, volunteers helping refugees, and Ukrainian and Western officials.

At least 1 million Ukrainian civilians have fled the fighting into Russia, according to Russian Defense Ministry numbers that the Ukrainian government also accepts as valid. In many cases, especially in the devastated city of Mariupol, many residents were effectively forced into Russia with no option to seek refuge on friendlier soil. In other cases, especially in the breakaway territories of eastern Ukraine, the travel to Russia was voluntary.

Almost everyone has had to pass through filtration camps, a perilous process in which Ukrainians are strip-searched and interrogated. People suspected of having sympathies to the Ukrainian military are being detained and tortured, according to refugees, representatives of volunteer organizations, and Ukrainian and U.S. officials.

They are disappearing people who talk openly about pro-Ukrainian positions, said Lyudmila Denisova, the Ukrainian parliaments human rights ombudsman.

Not every story has ended badly. In some cases, Ukrainians who wanted to pass through Russia and go to another country were able to do so, even if they were staunchly pro-Kyiv. Some spoke appreciatively of help from local Russian humanitarian groups.

But many Ukrainians have been transferred to a constellation of temporary refugee settlements across Russias vast territory, leaving them trapped inside the country that had targeted them with hatred and leveled their homes.

At the camps, the questioning often continues, refugees said.

Who are you for? they asked. For Russia or for Ukraine? said Bohdan, a 26-year-old construction worker from Mariupol, who escaped the city with his wife and 7-year-old daughter in mid-March when buildings in their neighborhood began collapsing because of heavy fighting. He spoke on the condition that his family name not be published because he fears for his security.

He fled into Russian-held territory, the only place he could reach at the time. Eventually, he made his way to a refugee center in Yalta, in Crimea, on the site of an abandoned Soviet health resort that he said had not been renovated since then. He was repeatedly interrogated about his loyalties.

I said, You are interesting people. There was a war happening in my homeland, Russian soldiers attacked, and my house was smashed. And you want me to shout pro-Russian proclamations? he recalled telling them.

Russian officials also questioned him about the location of Ukrainian military positions inside Mariupol, he said.

He and his family went on to leave Russia in mid-April with the help of some foreign volunteer organizations, he said, and are now in Stockholm. The rest of his group of refugees was taken to a run-down health resort somewhere in a remote area of Russia, more than 600 miles inside the border, he said.

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Alexander Shevchuk, 19, who studied information technology at a local college, had lived with his family on the eastern bank of the Kalmius River that bisects Mariupol, close to the headquarters of the pro-Kyiv Azov Regiment that has been a target of Russian firepower.

From the ninth floor of a nearby apartment building, he could witness the citys methodical destruction by Russian artillery. For the first time, I understood what apocalypse looked like, he said. When he was caught in the crossfire inside a shuttered supermarket while hunting for food, a fragment of an artillery shell lodged in his back, he said. Many others around him were killed.

When soldiers from the breakaway Donetsk Peoples Republic captured the area where Shevchuks family was hiding at the end of March, there was little option but to try to make it to Russia. Even before he reached the border, he said, he endured repeated rounds of questioning by separatist soldiers, Russian border guards and agents of Russias FSB, the internal security agency; they all tried to establish whether he had taken part in fighting. He was strip-searched repeatedly and checked for pro-Ukrainian tattoos and the calluses and bruises that can be signs of having handled weaponry.

Shevchuk said he was questioned about his long hair and goatee, which soldiers and border agents believed was a sign of Ukrainian nationalism. Men who had military certificates that suggested they had actively served in the Ukrainian army were taken into custody, he said. One acquaintance of his was taken to another building, then beaten, tortured and robbed before he was released again.

I was terribly afraid, Shevchuk said. I was scared they would say I was from Azov, the pro-Kyiv battalion, he said.

Shevchuk and his family ultimately spent about a week at a filtration camp on the Ukrainian side of the border, awaiting a final round of questioning. The refugees were given questionnaires asking their attitudes about the Ukrainian military, the Ukrainian government and various elements of Ukrainian life. Shevchuk and the others wrote negative, since they figured that was the correct response. We didnt want any problems, he said.

Interrogators also checked phones and tablets, looking at apps and photos to try to find any trace of military combat, and removed SIM cards from some of them because, they said, they could be used for targeting by the Ukrainian military.

If any of the Ukrainians slipped up and referred to what had happened as war, the interrogators would immediately become aggressive, Shevchuk said. Why do you think this is war? War against whom? he said they asked. You know you shouldnt say this word.

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Many refugees are careful about expressing their views openly on Russian soil, unsure about the loyalties of other displaced Ukrainians around them and of the Russians who are helping them.

They will never say anything against Russia, because they dont trust us, said Laila Rogozina, head of the reception office at the Civic Assistance Committee, a Russian volunteer organization that helps refugees and has been harassed by the Kremlin.

The treatment of refugees inside Russia appears to vary widely. Much depends on luck. Some border guards prevent Ukrainians without the proper documents from leaving Russia. Others are laxer, according to Ukrainians who have made the passage.

Its like roulette. They can let you out or send you back at the border, said Kirill Zhivoy, a coordinator at Volunteers in Tbilisi, a group in the capital of Georgia that is helping Ukrainians who manage to cross the border from Russia.

Some refugees are able to find decent short-term housing. Others have access only to guarded camps where refugees cannot come and go as they please.

Ukraines Western backers have expressed alarm.

If women and children and elderly and other individuals are being displaced forcibly, Michael Carpenter, the U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, told reporters last week, that would be a war crime and it would just be appalling as a completely uncivilized endeavor.

The Russian Foreign Ministry has said the reports of forcible displacement are lies.

We are talking about checkpoints for civilians leaving the zone of active hostilities, the Russian Embassy in Washington wrote in a Telegram post. In order to avoid sabotage operations by Ukrainian national battalions, soldiers of the Russian armed forces thoroughly inspect vehicles heading to safe regions. We will detain all bandits and fascists. The Russian military does not create any obstacles for the civilian population, but helps them stay alive and provides them with food and medicines.

Many Ukrainians arrive in Russia with little more than the clothes on their backs, leaving them few choices. Some lack money for bus tickets or understand the countrys labyrinthine bureaucracy. Others are unfamiliar with Russias vast geography, and do not appear to understand that promises of extra support and temporary housing in Russias eastern regions can take them thousands of miles away from Ukraine.

Some people from Mariupol said theyd already decided to go to the Khabarovsk region on Russias far eastern Pacific coast, a six-day train journey from Moscow, said Danil Makhnitsky, the head of a Moscow-based volunteer organization, Society.Future, which is helping refugees with supplies and practical support. Some of the refugees dont understand where they are going when they sign up, he said.

- - -

If Ukrainians want assistance from the Russian government  often a necessity, since Ukrainian cash cant be exchanged into Russian rubles  they often need to give up their passports to get it. Both temporary housing and asylum require turning over documents to the authorities. It can be difficult to get them back.

They are taking Ukrainians hostage, said Denisova, the Ukrainian human rights ombudsman.

Even Ukrainians who say that Russia was their preferred destination say they worry about the challenges of being a refugee there.

The migration service said that if I want my passport back, I will need to write an official letter saying that I am refusing this temporary residence asylum certificate, said Marina Tsymbalova, 33, a refugee from Mariupol who is in Moscow with two of her daughters and has applied for a one-year temporary asylum status in Russia that required her to hand over her Ukrainian documents.

I want to go back at some point, she said. My mom is there, and my older daughter. I worry about them.

Once Shevchuk and his family had reached the Russian side of the border, they spent about a week in temporary housing for refugees before buying bus tickets to neighboring Georgia. He said they had been able to move around freely and had wanted to leave as quickly as possible. It was oppressive to stay in a country where most people support the war and billboards everywhere are plastered with the letter Z, which has become a symbol of the invasion. Inside Russia, it was not possible to express his views openly, he said.

We had a peaceful life. They took it away from me and left me with nothing, he said. All of a sudden they tell you youre being saved. Saved from what? Ive never seen fascists or Nazis.
The destruction of at least eight Russian vessels in recent weeks has provided a morale boost for Ukraine, which managed to take them out despite having little naval capability of its own.

But it also points to an emerging strategic effort to break a Black Sea blockade that is strangling the Ukrainian economy.

Since March 21, Ukrainian missiles and drone attacks have damaged or sunk about four landing ships, three patrol boats and the cruiser Moskva, the Black Sea Fleet flagship, which sank in April, according to Ukrainian defense ministry announcements and data aggregated by the Istanbul-based ship blog Turkishnavy.net.

All told, Russia has lost about 13 vessels since it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry stated Thursday.

The attacks cant be attributed to dumb luck or simple and opportunistic hits, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow and director of the Hudson Institutes Center for Defense Concepts and Technology.

The U.S. provided intelligence helpful in the sinking of the Moskva, the Washington Post reported May 5. However, some analysts say that assistance confirmed information Ukraine already had about the ships location.

The sinking of one landing ship and the damage inflicted on two others in port at Berdyansk on the Sea of Azov in late March heightened Russias concerns about the vulnerability of its ships and pushed them farther out to sea, Clark said.

The loss of the Moskva, which was about 60 miles offshore, reinforced those concerns. And the attacks on patrol boats, which are what is left to enforce the blockade closer to shore, may further loosen the Kremlins grip on Ukraines economy, he said.

They are taking this very stepwise approach to push Russian naval forces further and further back in an attempt to get the blockade to essentially be lifted, Clark said. Because thats the goal, to restart the economy.

On Saturday, Ukrainian attacks on Russian forces at Snake Island destroyed a landing ship, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said.

Those strikes are likely aimed at destabilizing Moscows control of the Black Sea outcropping near the Danube River delta, said Dmitry Gorenburg, a senior research scientist at the Arlington, Va.-based think tank CNA.

In the opening days of the war, Russian forces quickly overwhelmed Ukrainian guards to seize the now-famous island, which is about 70 miles south of Odesa. Russia also established a blockade, shutting down sea lanes to and from Ukraine.

Russia can effectively manage its blockade without Snake Island, Gorenburg said.

But in a postwar environment, the island could further Russian goals to control access to the northwestern Black Sea, protect Crimea and potentially undermine confidence in commercial shipping to and from Romania and Bulgaria, analysts say.

If (the Russians) were to give Snake Island up, the concern would be that Ukraine puts a bunch of Neptune missiles on it and turns it into  this outpost where they can basically deny access to the parts of the Black Sea Russia cares about, Clark said. (Ukraine) could deny access to Crimea almost if you put Neptune missile launchers on Snake Island.

Clark said Ukrainian attacks on the island appear to be an effort to isolate Russian troops and prevent the ability to sustain or resupply them. He characterized the attacks as too small to be a serious effort to reestablish control over the 42-acre island.

On Tuesday, the Russian Defense Ministry said its forces had repelled Ukraines efforts to regain the island, the Russian state news agency Tass reported.

Gorenburg said its important to put Ukrainian strikes on Russian ships in perspective of the Black Sea Fleets overall size and capability.

Even though Russia has lost some vessels, about 20 of its ships and submarines remained in the Black Sea operational zone, the British Defense Ministry tweeted April 28.

Despite the embarrassing losses of the landing ship Saratov and cruiser Moskva, Russias Black Sea Fleet retains the ability to strike Ukrainian and coastal targets, it said.

Russia also has destroyed or seized numerous Ukrainian military vessels, including 10 taken in Berdyansk on March 14, according to Turkishnavy.net.

Those losses combined with fears of Russian submarines lurking in the Black Sea have kept what remains of the Ukrainian navy bottled up in port.

Despite the destruction of Russian ships, the Kremlin is unlikely to change its naval strategy of enforcing its blockade and launching occasional cruise missiles to threaten the parts of Ukraine its land forces cant reach, Gorenburg said.

The main missions that the Russian navy has been performing in the war, they can continue to perform, he said. But they have to be more careful, and there is a higher level of risk than they probably thought a month ago.
The number of declared U.S. military airstrikes around the world last year declined to the lowest total since 2006, a recent report by an international monitoring group said.

The civilian death toll from U.S. airstrikes also fell as a result of the end of combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the report, which was published Tuesday by the London-based nonprofit group Airwars.

The U.S. Air Force launched 500 airstrikes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria in 2021, compared with 915 such missions in 2020, public data from the service says.

But additional airstrikes may be undeclared, said the Airwars report, which accused the U.S. military of not being transparent about collateral damage to civilians.

U.S. assumptions of low civilian harm from its own actions in recent conflicts remain highly problematic, the groups director, Chris Woods, said in a statement in the report.

The number of aerial campaigns over Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria spiked in 2017, the first year of Donald Trumps presidency, before falling over the course of his term.

This trend continued under President Joe Biden, who ordered an undeclared six-month pause on U.S. counterterrorism strikes in Somalia and Yemen, The New York Times reported last year.

Estimates of the number of civilians killed by U.S. drone strikes vary widely between independent monitoring groups and the militarys own assessments.

The Pentagons policies on assessing whether its missions are hurting civilians need reform, according to a January report by Rand Corp., a nonprofit research group that contracts with the Defense Department.

The U.S. does not sufficiently reach out to external sources such as witnesses or reporters, instead depending on its own unreliable technological tools before assessing its culpability, the Rand report said.

The Airwars findings regarding civilian casualties from U.S. airstrikes dovetail with those of a New York Times investigative series last year. The newspaper found that airstrikes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria killed civilians whom the U.S. had declared to be militants, and that the process for determining culpability was flawed.

The Times was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting Monday for its series Airstrikes Gone Wrong.

On Tuesday, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby acknowledged the reporting by the Times and congratulated the newspaper on its award for the series.

Were trying to learn from those mistakes, Kirby said. And we knew that we werent always as transparent about those mistakes as we should be.
Two months after negotiators left Vienna, expectations are fading that Iran nuclear talks will resume, leaving the world with the remains of an agreement no ones willing to pronounce dead.

A media tent erected in anticipation of a grand announcement has been quietly dismantled, showy multilateral pow-wows in the Austrian capital giving way to furtive messages exchanged between the U.S. and Iran via the European coordinator.

European Union envoy Enrique Mora is in Tehran this week for a last-ditch effort to revive the landmark 2015 accord, which curbed Irans nuclear activities in return for sanctions relief, including on oil. The ruler of Qatar, a Gulf Arab state which enjoys unusually good ties with Iran, also arrives Thursday in a bid to lend new momentum to the process.

Hopes are not high.

Four officials, who asked not to be identified so they could speak freely, said Moras visit was unlikely to yield a breakthrough.

President Joe Biden, once optimistic he could revive the multinational accord abandoned by Donald Trump in 2018, now faces the possibility that he wont get it done -- at least not before mid-term elections taking place in six months where Republicans would be sure to portray any deal as a cave-in to Iran.

Negotiators came tantalizingly close to a breakthrough before Russias invasion of Ukraine reshuffled the geopolitical deck and reduced the incentives for compromise on both sides, according to two European diplomats.

Talks have since been stuck over Irans demand that the U.S. remove the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps from its list of terrorist organizations.

A bipartisan majority warned the White House last week that Congress is opposed to lifting sanctions on the IRGC. Its a message Biden can scarcely afford ignore as Democrats face the possibility of losing their congressional majority.

For Iran, $100 oil has mitigated the urgency to secure sanctions relief. Crude prices have almost doubled since talks began a year ago.

Iran also increased exports of oil and refined fuel by almost a third to 870,000 barrels per day in the first quarter, according to commodity data firm Kpler. Most goes to allies such as China and Venezuela who dont need to worry about secondary U.S. sanctions.

In the last month, Irans announced a military-cooperation deal with China and a long-term food-supply contract with Russia -- both parties to the nuclear deal.

Iranian officials said last month theyd only reconvene in Vienna to finalize the accord -- something that looks improbable unless the two sides can agree on the IRGC designation and a handful of other politically-fraught issues that are not part of the text itself.

With talks stuck, diplomats say extending the state of limbo is their best hope to avoid escalation.

For now, European parties to the multilateral accord wont declare it dead because that could force the United Nations to snap back international sanctions, taking more Iranian oil off the market just as soaring energy prices threaten to derail the global economic recovery.

That, in turn, could lead to a resumption of tit-for-tat attacks on Middle East shipping lanes and energy infrastructure -- risking another military conflict while the world is still grappling with the fallout of Russias war on Ukraine.

Oil traders and analysts whod predicted a deal would bring Iranian oil back onto global markets, are no longer factoring in those barrels. JPMorgan Chase & Co. cut its global supply assumption for this year by 400,000 barrels a day and for next year by 1 million barrels a day.

We now expect Iranian crude production and exports to remain at current levels for the foreseeable future, analysts including Natasha Kaneva wrote in a May 4 note.

Its an anticlimactic turn for talks launched with high hopes after Biden took office last year, promising to make good on his campaign pledge to reinstate the agreement.

Failure to revive the deal would add to a list of frustrated goals at home and abroad.

Where Tehrans highly-publicized release of two British detainees in March added to expectations that a breakthrough was near, the arrest of two French nationals this week has soured the mood.

While not directly linked to the nuclear file, Irans arrest of foreign nationals is widely read by diplomats as an effort to boost leverage at the negotiating table.

A U.S. official said it was premature to write off the deal, but acknowledged the process wasnt moving in the right direction.

He said the Biden administration would pursue a diplomatic path with Iran so long as it remains in U.S. interests to restore the agreement. A time would come when thats no longer the case, but Biden has not decided that yet.

With the deal in limbo, Iran has continued enriching uranium beyond agreed limits, gaining knowledge of a suite of technologies to which the pact once prevented access.

That accumulation of know-how has prompted U.S. officials to warn since July that a failure to restore compliance quickly could render the original provisions obsolete.

The international community cannot afford not to close the nuclear deal with Iran, said Emilia Jose Pena Ruiz, a Spanish policy adviser whos written extensively about how Irans energy reserves add weight to its negotiating power. If such an agreement is not reached, we could have another nuclear actor of the North Korea type.

While Iran has always asserted it doesnt want to follow Pyonyangs path to nuclear weapons, the 2015 nuclear agreement was formulated to assuage international doubts.

One of the European diplomats said Tehran may calculate that exercising some voluntary restraint could allow it to continue nuclear work beyond the scope of the agreement while maintaining it on life support.

Iran said in December it wouldnt enrich uranium to levels needed for a bomb. It subsequently rendered part of its inventory of highly-enriched uranium unsuitable for that purpose.

International Atomic Energy Agency monitors continue to check activities and stockpiles at Irans primary enrichment facilities.

But its concern over potential secret activity thats changing the tone.

The UN nuclear watchdog is scheduled to report next month on the results of a two-year probe into the source of uranium particles detected at several undeclared sites. A deal is unlikely until that investigation is settled.

Its hard to be optimistic, said Ali Vaez, Director of the Iran Project at the Washington-based International Crisis Group. The option is not between a deal now or a deal six months from now. Its between a deal now or a deal six years from now.

Bloombergs Ben Bartenstein, Golnar Motevalli and David Wainer contributed to this report.
LOS ANGELES  A U.S. appeals court ruled Wednesday that Californias ban on the sale of semiautomatic weapons to adults under 21 is unconstitutional.

In a 2-1 ruling, a panel of the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Wednesday the law violates the Second Amendment right to bear arms and a San Diego judge should have blocked what it called an almost total ban on semiautomatic centerfire rifles for young adults. America would not exist without the heroism of the young adults who fought and died in our revolutionary army," Judge Ryan Nelson wrote. "Today we reaffirm that our Constitution still protects the right that enabled their sacrifice: the right of young adults to keep and bear arms.

The Firearms Policy Coalition, which brought the case, said the ruling makes it optimistic age-based gun bans will be overturned in other courts.

Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the decision is a clear sign of how courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court which has a major gun case before it, are expanding gun rights.

Federal judges can read the tea leaves, Winkler said. In the coming years, the courts seem certain to strike down numerous gun safety measures in the name of the 2nd Amendment. This 9th Circuit ruling is a harbinger of things to come.

The ruling, however, was not a total victory for gun rights advocates.

They also sought an injunction blocking the state from requiring a hunting license for adults under 21  who are not in the military or law enforcement  to purchase rifles or shotguns.

Handgun sales to those under 21 were already prohibited when the hunting license requirement was passed in 2018 after some of the nations worst mass shootings were committed by young adults using rifles, including the Valentines Day slayings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

The following year, the Legislature acted to address what they saw as a loophole after an April 2019 synagogue shooting in San Diego County.

A 19-year-old armed with a semiautomatic rifle he had just purchased with a hunting license killed a 60-year-old woman and injured three others, including the rabbi and an 8-year-old girl at Chabad of Poway.

The state passed the law banning sales of semiautomatic centerfire rifles to anyone under 21. There were exemptions for police or military troops but not for those with hunting licenses.

Matthew Jones, a 20-year-old at the time from Santee in San Diego County, originally sued saying he wanted a gun to defend himself and other lawful purposes but didn't want to obtain a hunting license.

His lawsuit, which had been filed before the under-age ban on semiautomatic weapons, was amended to also challenge that law.

The suit said the state had whittled down (the) already inapplicable and irrelevant hunting license exemption  the only exemption that is even possible for an ordinary, law abiding young adult who does not wish to enter into a highly dangerous career in law enforcement or the military  by prohibiting an entire class of firearms.

The 9th Circuit ruled the hunting license requirement was reasonable for increasing public safety through sensible firearm control.

But it said an outright ban on semiautomatic rifles for those under 21 went too far.

Its one thing to say that young adults must take a course and purchase a hunting license before obtaining certain firearms, Nelson wrote. "But to say that they must become police officers or join the military? ... It is a blanket ban for everyone except police officers and servicemembers."

Nelson and Judge Kenneth Lee, who ruled in the majority, were part of Republican President Donald Trump's wave of conservative-approved nominees that reshaped the famously liberal court.

Two years ago, Lee authored a 2-1 decision that threw out Californias ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines, saying the law violated the U.S. Constitutions protection of the right to bear firearms. That ruling was later overturned by the court's 7-4 review of the decision.

A dissent was written by U.S. District Court Judge Sidney Stein, who was assigned to the panel from the Southern District of New York. Stein was nominated to that court by Democratic President Bill Clinton.

Stein said he would have upheld the lower court's decision not to block either law.

Stein said the regulation did not place a severe burden on gun ownership rights on young adults and noted they could get semiautomatic rifles from family members or borrow them from others.

He also said the majority failed to consider the the disproportionate amount of violent crime committed by those under 21 who have relatively less mature cognitive development.

Democratic Sen. Anthony Portantino of La Canada Flintridge, who wrote both laws, said he was disappointed the semiautomatic ban was struck down but was pleased the hunting license requirement survived.

I remain committed to keeping deadly weapons out of the wrong hands, Portantino said. "Student safety on our campuses is something we should all rally behind and sensible gun control is part of that solution.

Attorney General Rob Bonta's office said it was reviewing the decision. In a statement, a spokesperson said it was committed to defending Californias commonsense gun laws.
WASHINGTON  President Joe Biden stepped up his administration's response to a nationwide baby formula shortage Thursday that has forced frenzied parents into online groups to swap and sell to each other to keep their babies fed.

The president discussed with executives from Gerber and Reckitt how they could increase production and how his administration could help, and talked with leaders from Walmart and Target about how to restock shelves and address regional disparities in access to formula, the White House said.

The administration plans to monitor possible price gouging and work with trading partners in Mexico, Chile, Ireland and the Netherlands on imports, even though 98% of baby formula is domestically made.

The problem is the result of supply chain disruptions and a safety recall, and has had a cascade of effects: Retailers are limiting what customers can buy, and doctors and health workers are urging parents to contact food banks or physicians' offices, in addition to warning against watering down formula to stretch supplies or using online DIY recipes.

The shortage is weighing particularly on lower-income families after the recall by formula maker Abbott, stemming from contamination concerns. The recall wiped out many brands covered by WIC, a federal program like food stamps that serves women, infants and children, though the program now permits brand substitutes. The Biden administration is working with states to make it easier for WIC recipients to buy different sizes of formula that their benefits might not currently cover.

About half of infant formula nationwide is purchased by participants using WIC benefits, according to the White House.

Clara Hinton, 30, of Hartford, Connecticut, is among that group. She has a 10-month-old daughter, Patiennce, who has an allergy that requires a special formula.

Hinton, who has no car, has been taking the bus to the suburbs, going from town to town, and finally found some of the proper formula at a box store in West Hartford. But she said the store refused to take her WIC card, not the first time that has happened.

Hinton said her baby recently ran out of formula from an already opened can she got from a friend.

She has no formula, she said. I just put her on regular milk. What do I do? Her pediatrician made it clear Im not supposed to be doing that, but what do I do?

In Utah, fellow WIC card holder Elizabeth Amador has been going store-to-store every day after she finishes work at a call center in Salt Lake City in desperate search of one particular formula her 9-month-old daughter needs. She recently was down to only one can, but had four cans on Thursday. She said she wont stop her cumbersome daily routine until she knows the shortage is over.

It sucks, you know because of high gas prices, Amador said. Were having to drive everywhere to find formula. Its stressing.

Some parents are also using social media to bridge supply gaps.

Ashley Maddox, a 31-year-old mother of two from San Diego, started a Facebook group on Wednesday after failing to find formula for her 5-month-old son, Cole, at the commissary on the Navy base.

I connected with a gal in my group and she had seven cans of the formula I need that were just sitting in her house that her baby didnt need anymore, she said. So I drove out, it was about a 20-minute drive and picked it up and paid her. It was a miracle.

She said there was already a stigma attached to being a non-breastfeeding mom and that the group has become supportive. To not be able to have that formula, its scary, she said.

Jennifer Kersey, 36 of Cheshire, Connecticut, said she was down to her last can of formula for her 7-month-old son, Blake Kersey Jr., before someone saw her post on a Facebook group and came by with a few sample cans. She said she and others in the group are helping each other, finding stores that might have the formula in stock and getting it to mothers who need it.

At first I was starting to panic, she said. But, Im a believer in the Lord, so I said, God, I know youre going to provide for me' and I just started reaching out to people, Hey do you have this formula?"

Kimberly Anderson, 34, of Hartford County, Maryland, said her 7 1/2-month-old son takes a prescription formula that has been nearly impossible to find locally. She turned to social media and said people in Utah and Boston found the formula, which she paid to have shipped.

They say it takes a village to raise a baby," she said. Little did I know my village spans the entire U.S. as I ping friends, family for their zip codes so I can check their local Walmarts to have them ship directly to me."

Shortages of basic goods have been a problem since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Access to medical supplies, computer chips, household appliances, cars and other goods has been hurt by closed factories and outbreaks of the virus, as well as storms and other climate-related events.

Parents desperately searching for infant formula on retailer websites such as Amazon and Google are being served up with products intended for toddlers, including powdered toddler goat milk and plant-based milk powders.

One banner ad across Amazon offers organic non GMO formula for babies & toddlers, but a closer inspection of the products image shows that it is only intended for children over 12 months. Other ads for toddler milk appear on Amazons website on pages for out-of-stock infant formula.

Toddler milk cans often closely resemble that of infant formula, but the ingredients are distinct, with toddler milks sometimes boasting more sugar, calories, said Frances Fleming-Milici, UConns Director of Marketing Initiatives at the Rudd Center who has study toddler milk packaging. Toddler milk also does not follow FDA standards for formula.

Its not like youre buying a pair of shoes. This is a little bit more serious, Fleming-Milici said. Its serving up something that you should not be giving to your child.

Dr. Navneet Hundal, a pediatric gastroenterologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said she and other pediatricians have been grappling with the formula shortage for months. Formula companies have stopped giving out samples that she could pass on to parents, she said. She advises new parents to talk to their pediatricians to see if there are other brands of formula that they can safely give their newborns.

This is ruling our clinical practices right now, she said.

A safety recall compounded the challenges.

The Food and Drug Administration warned consumers on Feb. 17 to avoid some powdered baby formula products from a Sturgis, Michigan, facility run by Abbott Nutrition, which then initiated a voluntary recall. According to findings released in March by federal safety inspectors, Abbott failed to maintain sanitary conditions and procedures at the plant.

The FDA launched its investigation after four babies became sick with a rare bacterial infection after consuming formula manufactured at the plant. All four were hospitalized and two died. Chicago-based Abbott said in a statement, there is no evidence to link our formulas to these infant illnesses. Samples of the bacteria collected from the infants did not match those found in the companys factory, Abbott noted.

Abbott said that pending FDA approval, we could restart the site within two weeks. The company would begin by first producing EleCare, Alimentum and metabolic formulas and then start production of Similac and other formulas. Once production began, it would take six to eight weeks for the baby formula to be available on shelves.

On Tuesday, the FDA said it was working with U.S. manufacturers to increase their output and streamline paperwork to allow more imports.

We recognize that this is certainly a challenge for people across the country, something the president is very focused on and were going to do everything we can to cut red tape and take steps to increase supply, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters.

Meanwhile, the shortage got politicized Thursday as Republicans including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott criticized the Biden administration for providing baby formula to babies in detention at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Biden, in a Thursday letter to the Federal Trade Commission, pressed the independent agency to bring all of the Commissions tools to bear to investigate and act in response to reports of fraud or price gouging as a result of the supply disruptions.

It is unacceptable for families to lose time and spend hundreds of dollars more because of price gougers actions, he wrote to FTC Chair Lina Khan.

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Eaton-Robb reported from Columbia, Connecticut. Associated Press writers Mike Catalini in Trenton, New Jersey, Steve LeBlanc in Boston, Brady McCombs in Salt Lake City and Amanda Seitz in Washington contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON  The Supreme Courts nine justices met in private Thursday for the first time since the leak of a draft opinion that would overrule Roe v. Wade and sharply curtail abortion rights in roughly half the states.

The court offered no word on what was discussed in the gathering in the justices' private, wood-paneled conference room, other than to indicate at least one decision will be announced Monday.

By custom, no one aside from the justices attended and the most junior among them, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, was responsible for taking notes.

The abortion case is among 37 unresolved cases that were argued in the fall, winter and spring. The justices typically issue all their decisions by early summer.

Thursdays conference came at an especially fraught moment, with the future of abortion rights at stake and an investigation underway to try to find the source of the leak.

Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the draft opinion, dodged a question about the court's mood during a virtual question-and-answer session Thursday night with students at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University.

The court right now, we had our conference this morning, were doing our work," Alito said, according to The Washington Post. "Were taking new cases, were headed toward the end of the term, which is always a frenetic time as we get our opinions out.

Chief Justice John Roberts last week confirmed the authenticity of the opinion, revealed by Politico, in ordering the court's marshal to undertake an investigation.

Roberts stressed that the draft, written and circulated in February, may not be the court's final word. Supreme Court decisions are not final until they are formally issued and the outcomes in some cases changed between the justices initial votes shortly after arguments and the official announcement of the decisions.

That's true of a major abortion ruling from 1992 that now is threatened, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, when Justice Anthony Kennedy initially indicated he would be part of a majority to reverse Roe but later was among five justices who affirmed the basic right of a woman to choose abortion that the court first laid out in roe in 1973.

Kennedy met privately with Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and David Souter to craft a joint opinion, with no hint to the public or even to other justices about what was going on.

I think its tradition and decorum that everyone corresponds in writing about things that are in circulation, said Megan Wold, a former law clerk to Alito. But at the same time, theres nothing to prevent a justice from picking up the phone to call, from visiting someone else in chambers.

A major shift in the current abortion case seems less likely, at least partly because of the leak, abortion law experts and people on both sides of the issue said.

I think the broad contours are very unlikely to change. To the extent the leak matters, it will make broad changes unlikely, said Mary Ziegler, a scholar of the history of abortion at the Florida State University law school.

Sherif Gergis, a University of Notre Dame law professor who once was a law clerk for Alito, agreed. Ill be surprised if it changes very much, Gergis said.

It's not clear who leaked the opinion, or for what purpose. But Alito's writing means that there were at least five votes in December to overrule Roe and Casey, just after the court heard arguments over a Mississippi law that would ban abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Based on their questions at arguments, Justice Clarence Thomas and former President Donald Trump's three appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Barrett, seemed most likely to join Alito.

Roberts appeared the most inclined among the conservatives to avoid reaching a decision to overrule the landmark abortion rulings, but his questions suggested that he would at the very least vote to uphold the Mississippi law. Even that outcome would dramatically undermine abortion rights and invite states to adopt increasingly stricter limits.

If Roberts, who often prefers incremental steps in an effort to preserve the court's legitimacy, wanted to prevent the court from overruling Roe and Casey, he'd need to pick up the vote of just one other colleague. That would be enough to deprive Alito of a majority.

The liberal justices, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, are expected to dissent from either outcome. But no dissent, separate opinion from Roberts, or even a revised draft majority opinion has been circulated among the justices, Politico reported.

Majority opinions often change in response to friendly suggestions and barbed criticisms. The justices consider the internal back-and-forth a crucial part of their work.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remarked that pointed criticism from her friend and ideological opposite, Justice Antonin Scalia, made her opinions better. Scalia died in 2016; Ginsburg, four years later.

The lack of any other opinions surprised some former law clerks to the justices, though Wold said it's also true that bigger, harder cases traditionally take more time.

While there was no word whether the leak was discussed Thursday, several former clerks said they thought it would be.

I would be shocked if it doesnt come up, Wold said ahead of the meeting, adding that, given what has happened, the court would probably take additional precautions with drafts circulating in the future, including limiting who has access to them.

Kent Greenfield, a Boston College law professor who spent a year as a clerk to Souter, also speculated in advance that the leak would be on the table Thursday. Roberts is in a complete bind. He has to address it, but it doesn't strike me that he has many options, Greenfield said.

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This story has been corrected to show that Kent Greenfield is a professor at Boston College, not Boston University.
RICHMOND, Va.  A settlement has been reached in a lawsuit twelve women brought last summer against Liberty University, accusing the Christian institution of fostering an unsafe environment on its Virginia campus and mishandling cases of sexual assault and harassment, according to court documents filed Wednesday.

A notice of dismissal filed by the plaintiffs' attorney, Jack Larkin, said the case had been settled but provided no details about the terms.

Larkin did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press. But in an email to TV station WDBJ, he said: "The terms of the settlement are confidential in nature and there's really nothing I can say about it beyond that the parties to the suit have resolved their differences, and the matter is settled."

Liberty also did not immediately respond to questions from the AP, though spokesman Ryan Helfenbein acknowledged receiving them.

The development comes as the prominent evangelical school in Lynchburg faces continued scrutiny over its handling of sex assault cases. It is facing other lawsuits that raise similar allegations and recently acknowledged to news outlets that the U.S. Department of Education is reviewing its compliance with the federal Clery Act, which requires colleges and universities to maintain and disclose crime statistics and security information.

In a statement, the department acknowledged the oversight work was ongoing but said no further comment would be provided until "the outcome officially has been communicated to the institution."

The recently settled lawsuit was filed in federal court in New York and made various claims under Title IX, the federal law that protects against sex discrimination in education.

It alleged that Liberty's strict honor code makes it "difficult or impossible" for students to report sexual violence. It said the university had a "tacit policy" of weighting investigations in favor of accused male students, and it said the university retaliated against women who did make such reports.

The women, former students and employees, all filed suit anonymously and were identified as Jane Doe 1-12. Their allegations spanned more than two decades.

Some plaintiffs in the lawsuit described being raped or sexually harassed and having their cases mishandled or effectively ignored. One woman alleged pregnancy discrimination.

The school said at the time the lawsuit was filed that the allegations were "deeply troubling" and pledged to "make things right" if the claims against it were true.

A status report filed in the case in February said that if it was not resolved "amicably" an amended complaint would be filed adding new plaintiffs, including a current student.

Liberty has also been in the spotlight recently for its acrimonious split with former president and chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. in 2020. Litigation between Falwell and the school is ongoing.
John Lee Canley, a Marine Corps gunnery sergeant who was belatedly awarded the Medal of Honor in 2018 for his actions in the Battle of Hue during the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam, died Wednesday. He was 84.

As gunnery sergeant for Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, 1st Marine Division, Canley fought off multiple vicious attacks as it rapidly moved along the highway toward Hue City to relieve friendly forces that were surrounded by enemy, the citation states.

Despite being wounded, Canley repeatedly rushed across fire-swept terrain to carry his wounded Marines to safety, according to the citation.

Canley took command after his commander was wounded and led the company into Hue, where he set up a base of fire and maneuvered with a platoon in a flanking attack that eliminated several enemy positions, the citation states.

During a fierce firefight at a hospital compound on Feb. 6, Canley scaled a wall in full view of the enemy  twice  in order to carry wounded Marines to safety, the citation states.

Canley was born Dec. 20, 1937, in Caledonia, Ark., and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in Little Rock.

In 1953, at age 15, John used his brothers paperwork to enlist in the United States Marines, President Donald Trump said during the Marines Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House on Oct. 17, 2018.

John served in South Korea and Japan, before shipping out to Vietnam for more than five years of intense combat, Trump said.

Trump quoted John Ligato, one of Canleys fellow Marines, as saying, You followed him because he was a true leader. He was totally fearless. He loved his Marines, and we loved him back.

Canley was initially awarded the Navy Cross for his heroism, but a lengthy campaign by Marines in Alpha Company, spearheaded by Ligato, led to the upgrade.

The idea was sparked during a reunion of the 1st Battalion in the early 2000s, Ligato said in a 2018 essay in Leatherneck magazine.

When the Gunny walked into the hospitality suite, heads turned and all conversations ceased, Ligato wrote of the gunnery sergeant. The Marines of Co A gathered around Canley and began reminiscing. All had a Gunny Canley story and the majority included Canley doing something heroic. There were six or seven eyewitnesses to the Gunny carrying wounded Marines to safety, the Gunny confronting enemy automatic weapon positions, and many testimonials of, You saved my ass, Gunny.

Canley is survived by several siblings, three children, a stepson and two grandchildren, the MOH Society release said.
CHICO, Calif. (Tribune News Service)  The sky was the limit Wednesday at Chico Municipal Airport as eight Vietnam veterans got to ride like the wind, courtesy of Dream Flights.

Alicia Rock, chief operating officer and general counsel for Northgate Aviation, the company that sponsors Dream Flights and pays for the plane fuel, has a special place in her heart for the program after her father, who was a veteran, died last year.

"I want to honor my father," Rock said.

Different veterans from different military branches took to the skies Wednesday. One of those who flew Wednesday was Army veteran Ray Flowers, who served for three years. Flowers had flown in a helicopter before but never a small plane.

"I want to buy one of these Sandy!" Flowers shouted at his fiancee, who accompanied Flowers to see him fly, while getting settled into the plane.

Peter Blasingame was another Army veteran who flew in the Boeing Stearman biplane.

"I feel very fortunate to be here," Blasingame said.

The pilot who flew the planes, Andrew Lohman, has been flying for Dream Flights for 5 years and has flown more than 1,000 veterans.

"We want to pay a tribute to Vietnam veterans," Lohmar said prior to lifting off. "We honor your service to our country."

The plane's path was mostly directed toward Lake Oroville.

"I can see the change in emotions during the flight," Lohmar said. "The veterans are a little nervous at first, but as soon as we take off and I see them in the mirror, they are wearing beaming smiles for the rest of the flight."

Dream Flights says on its website that it is dedicated to honoring military veterans and seniors with the adventure of a lifetime. In 2021, during Operation September Freedom, 891 World War II heroes in 47 states were honored during a 61-day national tour, according to a press release.

(c)2022 Chico Enterprise-Record, Calif

Visit Chico Enterprise-Record, Calif at www.chicoer.com

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Sullivan, IN (47882)

Today

Thunderstorms likely. High around 85F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%..

Tonight

Thunderstorms during the evening will give way to partly cloudy skies after midnight. A few storms may be severe. Low near 55F. Winds NW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70%.
Tauranga City Basketball Association has been awarded a grant of $80,000 from the NZCT towards salaries for personnel.

This grant will have a significant impact in the community," says general manager Mark Rogers.

"These roles oversee 4,000 people - mainly youth - involved in weekly competitions (over 100 nights of competition each year), more than 1500 contact hours of coaching delivered to our youth, and over 28 full days of regional or National tournaments and events hosted each year."

Mark says an association in this area was founded back in 1952.

"As the city and the popularity of basketball has grown, so has the number of people playing in our area. Today, more than 4000 players are actively involved and the Association has a total of 12,000 registered in the database. 2010 saw the first full time GM appointed and growth has seen numbers involved double over the past dozen years," says Mark.

The funding support we get from NZCT enables us to deliver many programmes to the community. Support for staffing costs means we do not have to pass these costs on to the participants, who are overwhelmingly youth.

"Basketball is already an expensive sport to play due to the need to hire indoor facilities, so keeping costs as low as possible helps keep participation achievable for our entire community. NZCTs support will allow us to continue running competitions and tournaments, skill development programmes, holiday camps, and coach development opportunities.

Our total membership continues to grow, in spite of Covid and facility limitations, predominantly at our junior levels. The is a direct result of the support the NZCT provides us with staffing costs. We cover Waihi to Opotiki and look forward to expanding our services to the local community during 2022.

For more information, contact Mark Rogers at gm@taurangacitybasketball.co.nz, or call 07 572 0953 or 021 451 433.
It as been almost five years since the Whakatane Homeless Action Group was formed in response to growing numbers of rough sleepers.

The group had some success at the time through its Breakfast Club in Canning Place but went into recess when New Zealand went into Covid-19 lockdown in 2020 and has not been restored.

Whakatane Mayor Judy Turner believes the number of homeless has crept up again recently and Whakatane District Council has recently been looking into more permanent ways to help those in our community whose needs often extend much further than a meal and a roof over their heads.

Three members of an organisation that successfully tackles homelessness in Hamilton and Tauranga were invited to give a presentation to the council recently.

The Peoples Project began in Hamilton in 2014, funded by not-for-profit community organisation The Wise Group and provides a housing-first response to homelessness.

Wise Group chief executive Julie Nelson said in 2014 they knew of 80 people sleeping rough in Hamiltons city centre. It housed those 80 people and hundreds more since. The group has proved the housing-first model  putting people into homes without first requiring them to meet certain criteria such as to stop drinking or taking illegal substances  improved outcomes for people.

Its just about housing people and then dealing with some of those drivers that lend people to some of those other behaviours.

She said that while some people were transitionally homeless and just needed steering towards the right agencies for help, The Peoples Project worked with some of the most difficult cases that other agencies refused to work. The chronically homeless. Often they had been trespassed from the very places from which they required help.

We never give up, Ms Nelson told the council. Weve housed some people 17 times, and thats part of what housing first does. Its not judgmental and it keeps working for people.

One of Whakatanes most high profile homeless was Crazzy Horse, who built himself a hut at The Heads last year before eventually moving on. File photo.

She said as well as helping the people living rough, it improved the safety of the city.

When we first started in 2014, security guards were walking people from their offices, in broad daylight, to their cars.

She said The Peoples Projects success had been largely due to having the most senior people from key organisations at the table.

If youre going to disrupt the system and create some change, youve got to have people at the most senior levels who are comfortable around some of that disruption, because potentially what youre saying is, some of the activity that your agency does needs to change because youre part of the problem.

The Peoples Project has been part of a Government-funded study carried out by University of Otago that looks at some of the social issues facing the long-term chronically-homeless.

Dr Carol McMinn presented findings that showed enormous levels of debt, long histories of poor health and childhood abuse, high levels of disruption throughout their lives, disconnection from family and hundreds of interactions with the health and justice systems where social policies could have made all the difference.

Of those Ms McMinn surveyed, she said 94 out of 98 people had survived a high level of abuse and trauma in childhood.

Homelessness is not just about a lack of housing. The lack of housing is the very last part of their journey, Ms McMinn said.

We need to understand that the majority of people who have come through as single adult homeless have possibly, and probably, had a high trauma background. On top of that, over half had gone on to be wards of the state. Most people [experienced] being bullied and truant at school and leaving school at 15. In those early ages there had been a disruption and decline in their health - anxiety, suicidality, substance abuse at an early age. If someone finds themselves [chronically] homeless, its probably been a very long journey to that point.

Councils role in homelessness

AS local councils are affected by the host of reforms coming from central Government, Whakatane Mayor Judy Turner says the Whakatane District Council needs to look ahead to what its responsibilities may be in the future.

In the Future of Local Government review, housing, poverty, and inequality are all high on the agenda of discussions about local governments role in community wellbeing.

The big problem going forward is, do we, as a council, need to have a policy to take some responsibility. If you look at the reforms of local government that were heading toward, although there is still a lot of detail that we are unclear about, I suspect that some of these things will become mandated as roles that councils will start to play, Mrs Turner said. In the meantime, we do it because we care.

What local government didnt currently have access to, in regard to homelessness, was funding.

It has always been the responsibility of central government agencies, Mrs Turner said.

What were finding now around Whakatane is the needs have changed slightly. Theres lots of people with complex needs where housing isnt the only issue - and sometimes they like living homeless. How do you do the best that you can for people in those circumstances? Yes, I think our numbers are back up again. Im not sure theyre back as high as they were back [in 2017]. I think things have definitely improved, but we just have this huge housing shortage.

What I liked about the presentation [by The Peoples Project] is that its got a longer-term focus. The housing-first project was a very interesting one. I think theres a huge amount of merit there.

I think our next step is to ask, do we need a local application of that, or are the existing agencies able to do it?

Mrs Turner said when she started the Whakatane Homeless Action Group five years ago, 53 people, including children had been identified as living rough or sleeping in cars in or close to the Whakatane CBD.

After a well-attended public meeting in 2017, the action group was formed, and the Breakfast Club started serving free breakfasts. Staffed by volunteers and paid for with donations from church groups and other charities, it helped build relationships between the homeless people and the agencies that could help them.

We put on breakfast every [weekday] morning. It was nothing cleverer than that, Mrs Turner said. We built a relationship, so we could then go with them down to the agencies, sort of that navigator kind of role. Also, it meant that the agencies could come themselves to one of the breakfasts during the week and just get to know people and offer some help. I think it was very successful.

Mrs Turner said she received many complaints about the homeless, from people who dont want them in their backyard.

They want me to move them on or kick them out of town. Actually, I dont have that power. But the point is, in my mind, theyre somebodys brother, theyre somebodys father, theyre somebodys uncle, theyre somebodys cousin. These are people who, for whatever reason, have reached this state. So where can we locate them?

An example of a recent council intervention were two people sleeping rough in a vehicle behind The Strand earlier this year.

I went round a few agencies to see if anybody was working with these people. I didnt strike any gold so I took it to our own community development staff and just said, I know youve got a lot to do but is there anything you could do that might help this situation. They found and housed these two people, and the vehicle, and did an amazing job. I was very proud of how they had resolved that situation. To do the wider job would take a lot more resourcing than we have right now. But should we set that up? Thats a really interesting discussion going forward.

Thats why, though I think were nervous about the reforms, we need to be open to the fact that there are some needs in our community that are not as thoroughly met as they could be and maybe the council would be the best organisation to do that if we could secure funding."
A spectacular, immersive artwork by New Zealand artist Sara Hughes will give new life to the Willow Street bus shelter in central Tauranga.

Midnight Sun*, which has been in development since early 2021, is commissioned by Supercut Projects in collaboration with Tauranga City Council and with support from Creative New Zealand, Tauranga Art Gallery and Techlight.

The expansive, illuminated outdoor painting, captures the final setting of the sun on the eve of the Winter Solstice and, fittingly, will be unveiled during te tau hou Maori, Matariki.

Sara Hughes is a dynamic and highly regarded artist with a well-established career in Australasia.

An artist with a special interest in the development of cities, Hughes has undertaken a number of high-profile public commissions including Magma, 2017, a large 500sqm painting in Auckland, and a series of striking outdoor works for the reopening of Cathedral Square in Otautahi Christchurch from 2014 to 2016.

Her most recent project is being installed on all four sides of the soon-to-open New Zealand International Convention Centre in Auckland.

It will be the largest integrated public artwork in New Zealand.

Her Tauranga installation will be suspended above the Willow Street bus shelter, wrapping around the wall and front of Tauranga Art Gallery to Wharf Street.

It is an active artwork; an endless performance in which everyone participates as they walk along Willow Street.

As clouds pass overhead, shades of pink and golden light will flicker and dance on the pavement, bathing everyone in its glow.

The artwork comprises 96 individual panels of glass, most of which are three metres in length, together creating a total of 260 square metres  epic proportions given the bus stop is 20 metres long and the adjacent canopy around 80 metres.

Come night, Midnight Sun will be lit.

The illumination of the work will replicate, by Kelvins, the luminosity of the setting sun and serve to make the surrounding area more beautiful - and safer - by night.

"I wanted to enable an artwork that would lift the spirits of our weary community. Sara is one of New Zealands most dynamic artists," says Supercut Projects Director Sonya Korohina, who selected and commissioned artist Sara Hughes.

"Her bright and bold installations activate galleries and outdoor sites around the world. Sara understands how colour and light bring forth emotions such as joy and happiness.

"She transforms grey urban spaces, creating expansive artworks that encourage us to see the world in fresh, new ways."

According to Tauranga City Council arts and culture manager James Wilson, the installation signals the citys commitment to its new artistic vision.

"Tauranga has attracted one of the countrys most significant installation artists at a time of great transformation. We want people to know that in this city we take public art seriously, we invest in it, we encourage artists, and we commission for work."

The launch will take place during Matariki, during the last sunset until the winter solstice  when the sun dies at the end of the year and then rises the following day after the longest night.

As a regular bus commuter, Sara Hughes was compelled to create the piece after feeling unsafe in the shelter on a trip to Tauranga years ago.

She spent time there, talking with residents, as part of her research.

"Midnight Sun refers to an extended period of daytime that lasts 24 hours, in which the sun remains visible through the night," says Sara.

"And while it's not sunset the entire day, for much of the time, the sun lingers near and on the horizon, creating the many colours in the artwork. It is also in keeping with my work in the way it will be illuminated for 24 hours - either from natural light or artificial light. While the artwork refers to sunsets, it is also a sun that never sets."

Midnight Sun will be free and accessible by everyone, and welcomes schools, tamariki (children) and rangatahi (youth), when it comes to the study of local art.

"The Willow Street bus shelter is a familiar  and hotly discussed  site in the centre of our city. We hope that this new work will shift how people view the shelter and bring beauty and light into the central city at a time of new beginnings and transformation," says James.

"It is significant and signals our commitment to making public art part of Taurangas transformation strategy.

"We hope Tauranga locals and visitors will take pride in it, and kaitiaki for it, in the way they have with other public art projects, such as Hairy Maclary Park and Tauranga and Mount Maunganuis famous street art.

"The site has been carefully selected as an opportunity to create a welcoming and engaging space for local communities and visitors to Willow Street."

Midnight Sun is a temporary project planned, at this stage, for two years.

Creative New Zealand granted its funds from Nga Toi a Rohe, a 2020 initiative established to incentivise local and regional investment in the development and presentation of new local arts activity outside the main centres of Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.
Relief and excitement are just some of the feelings in the Tauranga community following news that New Zealands border will reopen earlier than expected.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern confirmed the border will fully reopen from the end of July, including for cruise ships and international students.

It comes with a range of other immigration announcements, including sector-specific agreements to support a shift away from low-skilled migrant labour, and a new 'Green list' of 85 hard-to-fill high-skill roles that provides a priority pathway to residency.

Visas for some 20,000 migrants already in the country are also being extended, and there will be new restrictions on students being able to work. Read more here.

Tauranga Business Chamber spokesperson Laura Boucher says with regards to business, the border announcement comes as a relief for a number of industries, but especially primary, construction and tourism-related sectors.

When coupled with the immigration changes, this should alleviate some of the pressure businesses are currently feeling to recruit both skilled and unskilled staff.

While this change wont happen overnight, it is the beginning of a return to some pre-Covid normalcy, and will enable businesses to re-staff and re-group after a challenging few years.

Tauranga Business Chamber spokesperson Laura Boucher. Photo: Salina Galvan Photography.

New that the maritime boarder will open is also being welcomed.

Tapoi Te Moananui a Toi/Tourism Bay of Plenty general manager Oscar Nathan says they are absolutely delighted that the date for the maritime border reopening has finally been set, and that the full reopening of our aviation international border has also been brought forward.

Our whole sector has been pushing for todays announcements, and while the Coastal Bay of Plenty wont start to see the full benefits until next spring and summer, it ensures everyone can start confidently planning towards our next peak visitor and cruise season.

The timing of this announcement is vital for cruise line companies, which need long lead-in times to sort out their schedules and port reservations.

But its also timely for international travellers who want to start planning their holidays and for our onshore tourism operators who will need to restart or rebuild their services before cruise passengers start arriving here.

Tapoi Te Moananui a Toi/Tourism Bay of Plenty general manager Oscar Nathan.

Oscar says they know many residents enjoy seeing these voyages arriving and departing from the harbour and are very much looking forward to seeing them return.

Reopening borders earlier than expected, and clarity around immigration settings will be welcome news to Kiwi businesses, says Buy NZ Made.

Executive director Dane Ambler says the announcement will start to relieve the pressure on SMEs.

International travel to New Zealand is crucial to so many SMEs, be it through tourism, trade or custom.

Bringing the date forward means more customers, more foot traffic, more international skills and talent on-shore sooner.

New Zealand is facing unprecedented skill shortages right now. Businesses have strived to grow their own skills in the workforce, and reopening borders will ensure we can close skills gaps.

The early opening of the borders is necessary and not a moment too soon, says the Restaurant Association.

They have clearly read the room, and realised they need to do something about our dwindling workforce and fast, says CEO Marisa Bidois.

Our industry desperately needs skilled workers and with more tourists set to arrive, our businesses need to be operating at 100 per cent to help our sector recover.

Those coming in on student and working holiday visas make up a critical part of our workforce so we need to start getting those people into the country long before our summer high season.

Marisa says 94 per cent of the associations members have indicated theyve found it extremely difficult to recruit for mid-high level positions.

She says businesses should be able to rely on the immigration lever when talent cannot be found in the country.

Restaurant Association CEO Marisa Bidois.

Data from Student Job Search notes a 52 per cent decrease in applicants for hospitality work in Auckland since October 2021, and a 34 per cent drop nationally.

Without the ability to access a migrant talent pool, hospitality proprietors are making serious sacrifices, by not operating at full capacity at a time when there is so much accumulated debt to pay back.

Whilst the transition arrangement on the immigration rebalance settings for hospitality sounds promising, we look forward to hearing more details on what that looks like.

Marisa says the announcement to extend some essential skills visas is also welcome news for the sector.

After months of advocacy raising awareness of the pressure on our industry caused by staff shortages, this decision will provide relief to many hospitality operators, who have battled 18 months of uncertainty.

We still have a number of ongoing concerns around the rebalance settings and what this will mean for our industry, and we look forward to meeting with Ministers in the coming weeks to further discussions about the future of hospitality in New Zealand.
Showcasing the major growth in development thats expected to take place in Taurangas CBD within the next eight years, the citys new CBD Blueprint represents a pivotal turning point for New Zealands fastest growing city.

Launched today by Priority One, the Western Bay of Plenty region's economic development agency, the Blueprint highlights the 20 catalyst developments that are committed for the city before 2030, underpinning $1.5B in confirmed investment and laying the foundation for further opportunities.

This Blueprint is the first of its kind for Tauranga - never before have we been able to bring together this level of certainty for the community, says Priority One CEO, Nigel Tutt.

The Blueprint has been developed in partnership with developers, investors, central government and Tauranga City Council.

The Blueprint showcases the depth of investment from these groups of people, who are collectively investing billions of dollars into our local economy, building a thriving city that meets the needs of our people today, and tomorrow, says Tutt.

Priority One CEO, Nigel Tutt.

Bayleys Head of Insights, Data and Consulting, Chris Farhi, says the developments shown in the Blueprint demonstrate that Tauranga CBD will be amongst the most transformed city centres in New Zealand over the coming decade.

The existing low-rise development across most of Tauranga CBD creates a widespread canvas that is not available in places like Auckland CBD or Wellington CBD, he says.

Tutt says its expected more developments will be added to the Blueprint in time as demand from investors and developers wanting to be part of the reinvigoration of the CBD heats up.

Purposefully, weve only included developments that have high levels of certainty to give credibility to the plan, however, as interest and excitement builds, we expect well see more, says Tutt.

Key developments in the Blueprint include a range of residential and commercial buildings, the new Tauranga District Court and the proposed projects included in the refreshed masterplan for the civic precinct  Te Manawataki o Te Papa.

Director of Classic Group, Peter Cooney says the launch of the CBD Blueprint has been a long time coming and hes thrilled with the collaborative and coordinated approach.

The increased opportunity for development in Tauranga over the next eight years and the scale of private and council led development makes for a very exciting time in Tauranga, he says.

In the future, Taurangas CBD will be uniquely shaped by eight precincts to help support the growth and investment required to make Taurangas CBD a thriving civic, commercial, and cultural hub.

Tutt says ultimately, as a result of the significant work taking place, many more people will be choosing to live, study, work and play in the CBD over the next decade, creating a more vibrant and exciting city to enjoy.

Priority One will be hosting CBD Blueprint Walking Tours to showcase the developments outlined in the CBD Blueprint.

To register to attend a walking tour, and for additional information around the Tauranga CBD Blueprint, visit: www.priorityone.co.nz/cbd-blueprint

Projects planned for the northern end of the CBD.

Planned prjects for the central CBD.

Projects for the southern CBD.
Chennai, May 12 (IANS) The PMK and VCK have urged the Centre not to give political asylum to former Prime Minister of Sri Lanka Mahinda Rajapakse.



In a statement on Thursday, the youth wing leader of the PMK and former Union Minister Dr. Anbumani Ramadoss said that the Indian government must not consider giving political asylum to Mahinda Rajapakse, who has resigned as the Sri Lankan Prime Minister and is said to be hiding in Trincomalee.



Ramadoss said that Mahinda Rajapakse was facing serious charges of genocide against the Tamil population of the island nation during the civil war in that country in 2009.



He said that there were reports that the former Sri Lankan Prime Minister is likely to come to India along with his family through sea route and called upon the Centre not to give him any consideration. He said that the United Nations Human Rights Commission was taking evidence against Mahinda Rajapakse on the crimes committed by him during the last stages of the Civil war that rocked Lanka.



The PMK leader said that the former Prime Minister of the island nation must be tried for international war crimes with the help of India and other countries.



The VCK has also appealed to the Centre not to consider any asylum to Mahinda Rajapakse as there was a case of genocide against him.



Thol Thirumavalavan, VCK MP said in a statement on Thursday that the Centre must never consider granting asylum to Mahinda Rajapakse, and said that the UNHRC is taking evidence against him for the crimes committed during the civil war against the Tamil population.
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South Africa: NSFAS allocated R49bn budget

The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) will be allocated a R49 billion budget in the 2022/23 financial year.

Delivering his 2022/23 Budget Vote on Thursday, Higher Education, Science and Innovation Minister, Dr Blade Nzimande, said the allocation affirms governments commitment to financially support students from poor and working class backgrounds, whilst also putting a sustainable mechanism in place to support students from the so-called missing middle and postgraduate students.

Nzimande said the National Skills Fund will also provide budget support for scholarships and bursaries for the 2022/23 financial year amounting to R866 million.

The figure is made up of R221 million to the National Research Foundation (NRF)), R527 million to the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS), R80 million to the Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development (DALRRD) and R37.9 million to the DHET Internal Scholarship .

Collectively, the Minister said, Sector Education and Training Authorities (SETAs) spent R701.9 million in support of the missing middle students.

He said various bursaries and loan schemes administered within institutions are another source of funding.

As part of the development of our Comprehensive Student Funding model we are engaging both the public and private components of the financial sector to come up with a funding model to support students in the Missing middle income bracket and post graduate students who cannot secure funding from the National Research Foundation.

Nzimande said the Ministerial Task Team is already engaging the Banking Association of South Africa and significant progress had been made in this regard.

The Ministerial Task Team is expected to present its final report to the Minister by the end of May this year.

Improving the sector

Across the 26 universities, over the 2022/23 and 2023/24 Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF), there is a R7.584 billion budget, with R2.953 billion going towards student housing for the delivery of 16 858 beds across 11 universities.

Of these, 15 898 are new beds and 960 are refurbished beds.

Nzimande acknowledged that more needs to be done.

Clearly R2.953 billion is inadequate for student accommodation, therefore we will seek private sector partnerships, including those already indicating they are investing on their own."

The ministry, Nzimande said, will in the current financial year explore feasibility studies on the new science and innovation universitie,s and a crime detection institution to the value of R6 million.

He said he had revitalised and expanded the Imbali Education and Innovation Precinct project as a pilot to explore and test an alternative modality of education delivery, based on closer multi-educational institutional co-operation and closer articulation, with science and innovation linkages.

This integration, Nzimande said, will ensure that the country produces a well- rounded student, ready to take up positions within the countrys economy and society.

For this project, R90 million will be allocated during the fourth Infrastructure and Efficiency Grant (IEG) cycles.

For the current MTEF, an allocation of R182.11 million has been recommended.

The next precinct to be established will be in Giyani, Limpopo, where a university campus will be set up.

Government has set aside R10 million for the expansion and relocation of the University of Zululand teacher training faculty to the former Zululand Parliamentary Precinct at Ulundi.

We are also building the Sekhukhune Skills Development Centre to the value of R146.9 million, through our Wholesale and Retail SETA, in collaboration with the Sekhukhune TVET [Technical and Vocational Education and Training] College, Nzimande said.

In the current financial year, the department had added a number of campus level projects to the TVET infrastructure initiative, with a R2.9 billion value.

The ministry had a R130.1 billion budget in the 2022/23 financial year.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2022-05-12. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
YAOUNDE, May 11 (Xinhua) -- Cameroon's Minister of Public Health Malachie Manaouda on Wednesday lauded health workers for successfully conducting three kidney transplant operations at the country's main hospital in the capital Yaounde.

"Congratulations to the medical team of the Yaounde General Hospital who have once again successfully performed three kidney transplants. Thank you to the donors for their courage and congratulations to the recipients who can now return to a normal life. We are moving forward," Manaouda said in a tweet without further details.

Officials at the hospital told Xinhua that the operations marked a breakthrough and rekindled confidence in health workers performing more operations in the future.

Cameroon successfully conducted the first-ever kidney transplant operation on a 34-year-old man in November last year. 
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Rumor mill: Apple has doggedly stuck to its Lightning port for the iPhone as USB-C increasingly becomes the standard for other portable devices. However, Apple may finally give it up next year. The move could be spurred on by external pressure.

Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo tweeted Wednesday that Apple will release an iPhone in the second half of 2023  possibly the iPhone 15  that will use a USB-C port instead of its proprietary Lightning port. Kuo based his prediction on a supply chain survey. Kuo said switching to USB-C could lead to better transfer and charging speeds for hardware designs.

Apple has faced pressure from regulators and users to offer iPhones compatible with USB-C cables, which many consumers already own. Everything from competing smartphones to the Nintendo Switch has already made USB-C the standard. Even MacBooks and iPads now use the more common alternative. The iPhone is Apple's last holdout.

(2/2)

It's expected to see existing USB-C-related suppliers of Apple's ecosystem (e.g., IC controller, connector) become the market's focus in the next 1-2 years, thanks to vast orders from iPhones and accessories' adoption of USB-C ports.   (Ming-Chi Kuo) (@mingchikuo) May 11, 2022

Even though it will be Apple's first official iPhone with USB-C, it's not the first ever. Late last year, a Swiss modder built a custom USB-C port into an iPhone, then published instructions for the procedure.

On the regulatory front, the European Union came one step closer to enacting standardized electronic device chargers last month. If approved, it could force iPhones to switch to USB-C. However, if Kuo's analysis pans out, the new regulations would be a mostly moot point, and iPhone users can celebrate having only one cable to charge all of their devices.
United Rentals announced that it is purchasing Ford EVs, which includes hundreds of its all-new electric pickup, the F-150 Lightning, and E-Transit vans.

(Photo : PAUL ELLIS/AFP via Getty Images)

A Ford E-Transit van is seen on display at the Ford Halewood plant in Liverpool, north west England on October 18, 2021.

United Rentals and Ford EVs

The giant equipment rental firm, United Rentals, in its partnership with Ford Pro, is going greener with a massive EV fleet as it tries to meet its sustainability goals in the North American region, as per a news story by Electrek.

The world of automobiles is already shifting to a greener approach with the release of various electric vehicles, expanding to full-sized pickup trucks to transport vans.

During the early days of EVs, most of the electric offerings out there primarily focused on sedans and SUVs, thanks to the Tesla Model 3 and the Model X.

But recently, giant EV makers, such as Tesla and Ford, are now introducing new forms of all-electric cars, such as semi-trucks, pickup trucks, and even vans.

Tesla has already introduced its semi-truck, aptly named the Tesla Semi, and its oddly-shaped Cybertruck pickup.

On the other hand, the electric offering of the iconic American car maker, Ford, now includes the F-150 Lightning pickup and the E-Transit Van.

United Rentals Ford EV Purchase

This time around, United Rentals is following the emerging trend of favoring all-electric vehicles after agreeing to purchase hundreds of new Ford EVs.

(Photo : JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images )

Ford Motor Company unveils their new electric F-150 Lightning outside of their headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan on May 19, 2021.

The equipment retail firm formally announced its partnership with Ford Pro to offer both the E-Transit and F-150 Lightning to its customers.

United Rentals said that it plans to initially purchase around 500 F-150 Lightning pickups as part of its agreement with Ford. That's not all, the firm is also ordering 30 E-Transit vans.

The deliveries of the electric trucks of Ford to United Rentals are beginning sometime at the end of 2022.

The E-Transit vans and F-150 Lightning pickups of United Rentals are both going to be used by its customers, as well as the rental firm itself.

Ford Stocks and United Rentals EV Purchase

According to a recent report by MarketWatch, the massive partnership between the giant automaker and United Rentals was favorable for the stock price of Ford.

Since then, the shares of Ford Motor already saw a 1.5% price increase in the premarket trading shortly after its latest agreement with the rental has been publicly disclosed.

Read Also: Ford's NEW Mustang Reportedly Gets Familiar Fuel Powered Engines! No EV Version at Launch?

United Rental: How Big is it?

It is worth noting that United Rentals is a massive multinational firm. To be more precise about it, Electrek noted the rental company has a fleet across the globe in roughly more than 1,300 locations.

However, North America, including the United States and Canada, is still the main location of United Rentals.

Related Article: Hertz is Offering the Ford Mustang Shelby GT500-H for Rentals, a 900 HP Machine

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Written by Teejay Boris

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
(Photo : Unsplash/Jeremy Bezanger) Satellites

On Mar. 29, Ukrainian forces rolled into the streets of Irpin, which is the northwest of Kyiv, littered with dead bodies and wreckage.

The destruction had knocked all 24 of Irpin's cell towers offline, preventing the survivors from letting their loved ones know that they were safe.

Kostyantyn Naumenko, the head of radio access network planning and development at Vodafone Ukraine, said most base stations had significant destruction.

On Mar. 31, with the help from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Irpin was back online.

Irpin is Back Online

Irpin was reconnected after engineers from Vodafone Ukraine arrived with the satellite antenna called Dishy McFlatface, which is a terminal for the Starlink satellite internet service offered by Musk's SpaceX, according to Wired.

The engineers mounted the receiver and the base to a mobile base station on the edge of the city whose fiber-optic connection and power had been affected. The engineers also attached a generator after.

Also Read: Elon Musk Says SpaceX Will Provide More Terminals in Ukraine to Stabilize its Internet Service Amid Chaos

Within hours, Irpin was back online, and so were its residents. Naumenko said that the first thing that the residents did was to call their relatives to let them know that they were safe and sound.

The speed with which the city was brought back online shows the ingenuity of the engineers that were involved and the nimbleness with which Ukraine's government has used the terminals of Starlink.

Ukraine has received more than 10,000 of the devices since Russia invaded, in part thanks to funding and other help from the US government.

The Starlink terminals have already become central to Ukraine's response to the war, finding both civilian and military uses, according to VerveTimes.

The fast and widespread rollout of Starlink satellites in Ukraine has also been an unplanned experiment in the potential geopolitical power of next-generation satellite internet services.

If SpaceX or other providers are willing, high-speed internet from the sky could be a powerful way to provide internet connectivity to those suffering from war or authoritarian government.

Rose Croshier, a policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, said that in Ukraine, it is immediately obvious that Starlink and other constellations mean that there is an opportunity to have a resilient system protected from traditional ground attacks.

SpaceX's Starlink Satellites

Elon Musk's SpaceX has launched more than 2,000 Starlink satellites since 2019, and it offers internet service to several European countries, parts of Central and South America, New Zealand, and Australia, according to News Update.

Starlink is the most mature of three projects, including one from Amazon, creating a new generation of steady and high-speed internet services using thousands of small satellites in the Earth's orbit.

However, it was not Russia's invasion that brought the space satellites to Ukraine. Instead, it was Starlink's potential to improve the connectivity in the country and its rural regions.

According to departmental adviser Anton Melnyk, the country's Ministry for Digital Transformation first contacted SpaceX several months before the Russian invasion began.

Starlink executives spoke with the country's digital minister Mykhailo Fedorov about activating the service late in February. Just days later, Russia invaded, and Musk's service became attractive for a different reason.

Related Article: SpaceX Starlink Provides Internet for 150,000 Daily Users in Ukraine

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 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Disney Plus continues to gain ground in the streaming world as it records 7.9 million new subscribers during the first three months of 2022, according to the company's Q2 earnings report on Wednesday.

(Photo : MARTIN BUREAU/AFP via Getty Images)

This illustration picture taken on May 27, 2020 in Paris shows the logo of the US video on demand application Disney+ on the screen of a phone.

The streaming service is now holding a formidable 87.6 million subscribers worldwide, while the Disney Plus Hotstar has a promising 50.1 million international subscribers. Compared to last year's overall users at 44 million, the US and Canada alone logged more than 7.1 million new subscribers this year, bringing the number to more than 51 million.

The company also highlighted that Hulu and ESPN Plus have risen to over 205 million, which is a boost from the 196.4 million users that it recorded last January.

March was the main highlight of Disney Plus since it saw increased traffic when it launched several original programs such as the Cheaper by the Dozen, Marvel's Moon Knight, and Pixar's Turning Red. The popular family movie Encanto contributed to the success of the platform as well since it spent twelve weeks in Nielsen's weekly streaming top 10 in the US.

Meanwhile, Disney Plus' rival Netflix continues to lag behind after reporting that it had lost 200,000 subscribers in contrast to the previous quarter, which is also its first decline in more than a decade. But the streaming platform still has around 222 million subscribers.

HBO and HBO Max also reported 3 million new subscribers last quarter, which brings their total number of customers to 77 million. The streaming platform has enjoyed huge success from Season 2 of Euphoria earlier this year, but it still lags behind Disney Plus.

Read Also: Disney+ Beats Netflix in Q1 2022 with 11.8 M New Subscribers, Reveals New Content Coming

More Subscribers to Come

Wall Street analysts' prediction expects more subscribers to come in Disney Plus with 5.2 million. The company also reported that it is earning more subscribers than ever, especially in the US.

Their average monthly revenue per paid subscriber was at $6.10 previously, but now it is at $6.32, all thanks to a huge jump in "retail pricing and a lower mix of wholesale subscribers," according to Disney Plus' report.

However, in spite of this success, the streaming platform is actually losing money due to its higher costs for production, technology, and advertising. This is similar to Netflix's situation, and it is unlikely to decline sooner, and it could possibly cut off its subscriber growth.

Hence, Disney is already eyeing an ad-supported tier to make the subscription plan cheaper. The platform is set to release this plan later this year.

Meanwhile, the confidence of investors in Disney seems to be going down as well since the company's stock dropped more than 30% this year. As of writing, it declined by 2% again to close the trading day at $105.25.

Related Article: Disney+ Likely to Get a CHEAPER Version Than its $7.99 Plan, But There's Ads

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Written by Joaquin Victor Tacla

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Tesla is the current world leader for all things electric vehicles, as it has one of the most widely distributed clean energy cars globally, with many customers from different parts of the globe. However, there are other ventures that Tesla can bring to the public, and that include clean energy cars, batteries, solar power, and soon wind power.

Elon Musk said it might help expand the global economy and power it despite reaching 100x more growth.

Tesla to Help Expand the Global Economy, Power it with Clean Energy

A Tesla fan reported online that Elon Musk's Financial Times interview did not only talk about Donald Trump and Twitter but also about Tesla and its capabilities to help the global economy in the present. The user said that Tesla could "massively expand" the global economy with what it has, alongside its future offers.

The gist of the tweet focus on the many clean energy solutions of Tesla that may help the world, going as far as ten times the economy it has today. The offers of Tesla, including its EVs, solar power, wind power, and batteries, may help the global economy even if it is running higher than expected, featuring its technology for all.

Read Also: Tesla Overheating CPU Issue Leads To Massive EV Recall; Solution, Affected Models, and Other Details

..but most have not done the math.



Also, most do not think Tesla is serious aboutor has a chance atmassively expanding the global economy by massively expanding useful labor via increasingly intelligent humanoid robots.



$TSLA  stevenmarkryan (@stevenmarkryan) May 11, 2022

Elon Musk Said Tesla Can Power the World even 100x its Economy

Here, Musk replied, saying that what the user said is "literally true," focusing on the many efforts Tesla has for the many regions it services now. Musk also said that Tesla can do it even if the economy expands 100 times more than it currently is, with the clean energy offers that the company brings to the public now.

Literally true. Even 100x is possible.  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2022

Tesla's Many Ventures to Clean Energy

Tesla is on its way to becoming a global superpower and a company that runs many industries globally, as it has many ventures towards clean energy that make it usable for many aspects globally. The company is not shy about expanding its many experiences as it focuses on bringing massive Gigafactories for different regions, like in Germany's Giga Berlin.

The clean energy company still focuses on bringing electric vehicles, but there were many disputes between logistics and other partners that contributed to its price increase. Nevertheless, the company aims to have its electric cars as one of the affordable choices in the market available for all, with a list of luxurious features for the vehicle.

Clean energy starts with the company's core value, and Tesla is one to bring this for the world to enjoy in its current releases. From the electric vehicle "Model" lineup down to its Tesla Solar and Powerwall that bring it to home use. Now, Tesla seems like it is aiming far beyond the countries it is present in, as the world economy is one of its targets to help now.

Related Article: Faster Panasonic 4680 EV Battery Development Now Urged by Tesla! Demand to the Tech Company Increases

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Written by Isaiah Richard

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Google finished its I/O presentation on May 11, 2022, with a big surprise-a sneak peek of their latest AR glasses.

(Photo : Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA - APRIL 26: A sign is posted in front of a Google office on April 26, 2022 in San Francisco, California. Google parent company Alphabet will report first quarter earnings today after the closing bell

Unveiling the glasses, Google shows its language-translating and transcription capabilities. Black with a thick rim, the glasses are still a prototype, and the company did not give any details as to when they will be released nor further technical specifications.

Google also took to its social media account to announce the glasses. It reads, "Augmented reality can break down communication barriers-and help us better understand each other by making language visible. Watch what happens when we bring technologies like transcription and translation to your line of sight. #GoogleIO," and attached is a short presentation of the glasses.

The new glasses are unclear if this is the company's Project Iris or if it's something else. Nevertheless, if it does get released, it would be extremely useful.

Read also: Google TensorFlow Lite To Make Android Smarter-Leading To More AI-Reliant Smartphone Features

Keeping It Low-Key

Ten years ago, Sergey Brin debuted eyewear named Google Glass; however, things didn't go so well as it sparked controversy due to privacy concerns over the onboard camera. Moreover, the presentation then was a bit over the top: skydivers over the conference center rappelled down the building to show off the capabilities of the Google Glass.

Since then, Google experimented with other transcription and translation products, such as a pair of earbuds that can do translations in real-time and a recording app downloadable via a smartphone that can do live transcriptions.

This time around, though, the presentation for the glasses is more subdued. It only showed a mother and daughter looking at photos and a deaf person and non-deaf person talking to each other.

Also in one demo, a Google product manager tells someone wearing the glasses, "You should be seeing what I'm saying, just transcribed for you in real-time-kind of like subtitles for the world."

Google didn't provide any more details about the glasses. Nonetheless, the company was able to paint a cool picture of the potential of AR in the future. It also shows that they're on the quest to break down language barriers through new gadgets, such as the glasses.

A Tablet to come in 2023

Also during the conference, Google announced a few products that will be released soon, such as a new tablet that will be launched in 2023. It's been years since the company made a tablet after its poor sales, yet many are excited to see how the tablet will compete in today's market, especially amid the dominance of Apple in the world of tablets.

Following an increase in user interest, the new tablet was announced early to let buyers who are considering alternatives know that they have something under wraps that will be released soon.

Along with the tablet, Google also announced updates to their Pixel product line, such as the smartwatch, which is expected to go on sale late this year, a new mid-range smartphone, and wireless earbuds. They also touched on new software features including, automated summaries for Google Docs and 3D models in Google Maps.

Related Article: Google Chrome Users Urged To Update After Two New Vulnerabilities In The Browser Were Discovered

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 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Russia is reportedly now using appliance parts from the many homes in the country to build its weapons and supply its need to create many of its tools against Ukraine. The report came from Ukrainian officials closely monitoring its neighbor country amidst the conflict that both companies play a role in now.

The move by Russia is a result of the United States' sanctions that prevent it from accessing proper technology to build its weapons and needs for this global issue.

Russia is Using Appliance Parts to Create its Weapon, says Ukraine

(Photo : Steve Buissinne | Pixabay )

According to a report by The Washington Post, Ukraine claims that Russia's latest venture is to create weapons out of salvaged appliance parts that the latter country use for its many needs. These weapons are then used against Ukraine and towards Russia's advancements in this conflict, as they ran out of resources long ago.

The recent meeting by the US with Ukraine detailed what is happening in Russia and its use of alternative technology.

Many prohibitions against Russia were imposed by many industries and even the US government that impeded their gain to get the upper hand in this conflict.

The US Senate and several subcommittee hearings focused on the sanctions by the country against the Eurasian country in this problem with its neighbor.

Read Also: Pentagon Says the US Needs To Learn From SpaceX Starlink's Russian Cyberattack Shut Down

US Sanctions Prohibit Russia from Access Proper Tech

Appliances have many smart tech parts available, and several of these components may be used for different things, even weapons. Russia's engineers are getting more resourceful when resorting to these parts for their weapons and needs for this conflict to continue.

However, the sanctions against them by the US still focus on preventing the country from accessing the proper technology like semiconductors and other parts for Russia. These parts may be used to further their efforts toward conflict with Ukraine.

Russia, Ukraine, and the US

The Russia and Ukraine conflict is a long-running problem for its country now, and it focuses on the many happenings between the two countries that stem from early this year until the present. One of the many important happenings here is Russia's numerous cyberattacks on its neighbor, with one of its targets being hospitals.

Many companies pulled out or stopped their services from running in the transcontinental country, with companies like Google, Apple, Spotify, Meta, and Twitter preventing access. However, it is not the only entity that pulled out its support, as the US government halted Russia's access to technology and parts under its sanction against them.

The conflict is still ongoing, and many people are affected by this, with Ukraine and other Russian citizens being in the midst of it all.

The world also feels the Russia-Ukraine issue due to the many increases in prices for oil and the like. Many cyber attacks have also been launched by the country amongst many corporations and companies in other nations.

The US sanctions are harsh, but the country decided on this to impede Russia from creating more weapons of destruction against Ukraine and the world.

Related Article: DJI is Gatekeeping Its Drones to Avoid Weaponization-Stops Delivery to Russia and Ukraine

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Written by Isaiah Richard

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
A group of three women is braving on wheels across the Mississippi Delta region by offering free reproductive and sexual health care services to help communities who have no access to these basic services.

(Photo : FRANCOIS PICARD/AFP via Getty Images)

A woman stands at the check-in window of the Hope Medical Group for Women in Shreveport, Louisiana, April 19, 2022.

In a report by Good Morning America (GMA), a mobile health clinic called Plan A was featured to give light on the services founded by Dr. Caroline Weinberg to address Mississippi's health crisis.

The clinic is offering free mammograms, contraception, and STD testing, pap smears, and other sexual and reproductive services to patients regardless of their income, location, or insurance status. Plan A has been operating since April of last year.

Weinberg acknowledged in a statement that they could not solve every health care problem, such as having expensive equipment like a mammogram machine and a colonoscopy to be made accessible. But with their clinic, they hope that they can still help and "expand whatever ways" they can to provide for the patient's needs.

Read Also: Mobile Health Clinics Bridge Gap to Underprivileged Communities, Bridging Comms with iPad Translators

"Overturning Roe v. Wade"

Juliet Thomas, Plan A's community health worker, said in an interview with GMA that with their services around reproductive and sexual health care, they might be able to destigmatize the conversation about sex.

She acknowledged that sex and birth control are considered taboo, and she hopes that Plan A will combat these challenges.

It is worth noting that Weinberg also built this clinic in hopes of overturning Roe v. Wade, a legal case that ruled abortion as unconstitutional. The clinic, however, is not offering free abortions, but she said that their clinic is playing a role in "offering preventive measures" on unwanted pregnancies.

"Roe v. Wade being overturned in really any capacity doesn't directly impact our day today, but it has an incredible impact on the community that we serve," she said

Her clinic seeks to empower women by giving them the options to "move forward with their reproductive health," which according to her, is being challenged due to the limitations imposed within the state.

Mississippi's Medicaid

Besides its sexual and reproductive services, Plan A has also included primary care services such as blood pressure screenings and COVID-19 vaccines to address other health issues in the region.

Plan A has also built a brick-and-mortar clinic in Louise, Mississippi, to broaden its services to more communities.

Mississippi happens to be one of the 12 states to not expand Medicaid after the passage of the Affordable Act in 2010. This serves as a vital source of revenue for hospitals and ensures health care services for poor Americans.

The federal government is responsible for covering 90% of Medicaid's costs, while the 10% is covered by the state. Despite the eight expansion bills proposed in this year's legislative session, they are still unprioritized.

Plan A's program coordinator Desiree Norwood hopes that through their initiative, they can at least fill the gaps of the government's health care system.

" I know that there's so much more great work that Plan A is going to do for the area, and I feel hopeful," she added that the Mississippi Delta is often considered one of the unhealthiest places in the U.S.

"But we're determined to change the narrative," she said.

Related Article: Mississippi Hospitals Uses Garage as ICU is Filled With Patients, 200 People Still Waiting for Hospital Beds

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 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Costa Rica is facing a massive problem now, significantly as ransomware attacks widely affected the country's systems and computer networks in the recent happenings. The vicious access to its infrastructure left several government agencies crippled, including its Finance Ministry, with the country already declaring a "State of Emergency."

Costa Rica Declares State of Emergency Due to Ransomware

(Photo : EZEQUIEL BECERRA/AFP via Getty Images)

Costa Rica's new President Rodrigo Chaves gestures after receiving the presidential sash during his inauguration ceremony in San Jose, on May 8, 2022.

NBC News reported that Costa Rica and its recently appointed president, Rodrigo Chaves, have declared a state of emergency in the country following the ransomware attack on its network. The attack was extensive, and the country was severely affected by this, especially as it started the transition to the new government.

Costa Rica's Justice Department also released a report regarding the attack, saying that it was a massive one against the country, effectively crippling its systems and many branches. The attack started last April 12 when the hackers got inside the Finance Ministry, which was not immediately detected by its systems.

Then, the threat actors proceeded to steal data that it would use for its ransom claims against the nation.

Read Also: Fake Windows 10 Updates Installs Ransomware! Some Microsoft Users Already Affected

Ransomware Attack on Costa Rica is Extensive

The ransomware attack on Costa Rica is extensive, and the Latin American country is now looking into the many possible options it can take to counteract this breach. For now, the country is looking into the Conti ransomware group, which recently posted the files that it claims to be from the Costa Rican government, allegedly the legitimate information regarding the country.

Ransomware and its Dangers

Ransomware gangs primarily focus on individual companies and corporations that do not have ties to the government, but what it did to Costa Rica is an extensive one that severely affected the nation. Many groups have already improved their ransomware attacks in the past, with FIN12 being one of the most notorious now.

However, most of them focus on a massive scale of attacks, and names like Conti are some that have tremendous capabilities to launch these breaches to corporations. Conti reportedly has an HR department that runs within its group, and it only means that ransomware gangs are employing massively for their future vendetta.

One of the many suspects in this attack is Conti, and the group published several ties of alleged Costa Rican documents online. The goals of this ransomware are not yet publicly known. Still, the newly appointed president of Costa Rica is working closely with members and experts to pinpoint this attack and hold these people accountable.

Related Article: Lincoln College Set to Close its Doors Following High Profile Ransomware Attack

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 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
On May 11, 2022, a public health alert was issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for select organic ground beef sold at Whole Foods nationwide. The said organic ground beef is said to contain hard plastic.

(Photo : Photo credit should read BARBARA SAX/AFP via Getty Images)

A sales assistant portions mincemeat 01 August 2007 in a butcher's shop in Berlin. After a price explosion of dairy products including milk, the German national farmers' union called for higher prices for meat products. AFP PHOTO BARBARA SAX

The ground beef was produced on April 20, 2022, with a use-by-date of May 18, 2022, with the establishment number "EST. 4027."

16-oz. vacuum-sealed packages containing "ORGANIC RANCHER ORGANIC GROUND BEEF 93% LEAN 7% FAT" with a use-by date of 5-18-2022.

16-oz. Vacuum-sealed packages containing "ORGANIC RANCHER ORGANIC GROUND BEEF 85% LEAN 15% FAT" with a use-by date of 5-18-2022.

There are already consumer reports finding hard, rigid plastic in the ground beef products. On the other hand, there are no reports of illness or adverse reactions during this time.

No Recall?

The reason these products are not being recalled anymore is that they are no longer available for purchase. In the case you have these products, the alert was set in place to let people know not to consume them, but to throw or return them.

Furthermore, consumers can also reach out to the Quality Assurance Manager at NPC Processing Inc., at adamb@npcprocessing.com

Also read: FDA Too Slow To Act on Food Recalls: US Watchdog

Not a First for Whole Foods

This is not the first for Whole Foods to have the USDA announce a health alert on their products. In February 202, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) issued public health alter because of the beef meatballs with marinara sauce that were misbranded and produced with an undeclared allergen.

The products have parmesan cheese made from milk, a known allergen; however, it is not declared on the label.

A Decline in Whole Foods' Product Quality

Over the years, the Austine, Texas-based natural foods pioneer has gotten into controversies regarding the products that they offer to the public. In 2020, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) already sent out a warning to Whole Foods Market for engaging in a pattern of offering misbranded food for sale either by third-party suppliers with misbranded labels or using misbranded labels when repackaging food.

The warning was due to the series of recalls n 2020 that included over 30 food products sold under the brand.

There was also controversy surrounding the quality of Whole Foods ever since Amazon acquired the brand in 2017 for $13.6 billion. This has brought a lot of changes implemented by CEO John Mackey, such as price cuts and operational structuring.

Beef Gone Wrong

Wal-Mart also had to remove popular purchases from its stores due to various recalls and last month, another food item got pulled out-ground beef by Lakeside Refrigerated Services. The recall included 120,800 pounds of ground beef products that may be contaminated with E.coli O103, which was discovered during the routine FSIS testing of imported products.

Also earlier this year, Intertstate Meat Distributors Inc. recalled 28,356 pounds of ground beef that may be contaminated with E.coli O157:H7 that was shipped to Wal-Mart, Kroger, and Albertson's in Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.

Related article: Amazon Buys Whole Foods: Here's How The Deal Will Likely Affect Other Food Players

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(Photo : Sternum)

The Internet of Things is a bustling market, especially after getting a boost from the pandemic that had us move our lives into the digital realm almost entirely for months. As it happens, it's also a market that hackers are increasingly targeting as part of their nefarious plots. An unsecured router or printer can work as a gateway into a protected network, a hijacked conference call camera can capture sensitive discussions, and a vulnerability on the manufacturing line can leave the entire factory disabled.

The reason why this happens is that we use the word "smart" a bit too liberally when we talk about smart devices. Usually, all it takes for us to consider a piece of hardware as such is its capability to connect to networks and operate with some degree of autonomy or interactivity. While being able of executing its core functions, most smart devices are barely capable of protecting their own runtime integrity. This makes retroactive patching the industry's main approach to security, which is hardly ideal.

Enter Sternum, an IoT security and insights company. Its latest offering unveiled at the Barcelona Cybersecurity Congress includes a unique platform that enables companies to test their device fleets for vulnerabilities. The tool can simulate a total of 20 most dangerous known IoT cyberattacks on connected devices in real-time, enabling businesses to check whether their IoT fleets are capable of spotting and withstanding such breach attempts. This helps companies test their existing defenses and their devices' vulnerability to some of the most common and dangerous attack methods out there.

The live attack simulation tool empowers companies to move to a more proactive IoT security doctrine, defusing the attacks before they happen. Sternum's other products take this vision to a whole new level, extending it to connected devices as well.

Proactive Defense Is Best

Sternum's Embedded Integrity VerificationTM platforms amps up the protective capabilities of any smart device you deploy it on. The tool deployed hooks across the code the device runs on, giving it real-time protection. It monitors its everyday operations, proactively blocking and red-flagging any suspicious activities, such as attempts to feed the device malicious data or tamper with its usual workflow.

At the core of the approach is Sternum's patented Exploitation-Fingerprint technology. The idea behind is that patching specific vulnerabilities is ultimately a losing game. Instead, the defending side should look out for general red flags that entire families of cyberattacks share across themselves and halt the actions that hamper the normal functioning of the device.

It's like in fencing or martial arts: No attack can come out of nowhere, as ultimately, you have to put in at least some speed to make an impact, physics-wise. The footwork and motions you put into gaining this speed can telegraph your intention and the attack vector. If you're up against a skilled opponent, they'll likely pick up on that and mitigate your assault.

Sternum effectively turns every smart device into a jiu-jitsu master, always looking out for signs of an impending attack. Once it spots one, it disrupts the attack by striking down the actions that would have allowed the hacker to inject malicious code into the device's memory or otherwise meddle with its regular functioning. This makes for a fundamentally more proactive approach to security, one that does not have to rely on post-mortem patching, as the platform has indeed been proven capable of shutting down attacks targeting unpatched known vulnerabilities without having to download any updates.

Furthermore, the platform gives companies vast monitoring capabilities for their IoT fleets, with real-time updates popping up on a handy dashboard. With the platform, companies can watch over their devices' operation in the field to quickly detect possible attack attempts, as well as malfunctions and other behavior anomalies. They can also collect in-depth insights on the quality and the performance of their devices with the rich data from the Sternum platform and other integrations.

Smart tech is at the forefront of the digital transformation taking place across industries around the world today, but without proper protection, it leaves entire sectors vulnerable to catastrophic hacking events. Preventing those is a matter of shifting gears to a more proactive defense model, and Sternum's solution gives companies just that, turning their smart devices into intelligent ones, capable of defending themselves on their own.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
North Korea's first COVID-19 lockdown is now happening. This is a big deal since this Asian country has never confirmed any cases.

(Photo : Photo by Anthony Kwan/Getty Images)

An impersonator of North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un makes a gesture during a protest at the International Finance Center shopping mall on April 28, 2020 in Hong Kong, China.

Since the global pandemic began, Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un claimed that North Korea has never experienced any novel coronavirus infection.

However, experts doubted this claim. For the first time, the North Korean leader was seen wearing a face mask in public.

First North Korea COVID-19 Lockdown Now Happening

According to NBC News' latest report, North Korea's state media claims that a number of people in Pyongyang were infected with the contagious Omicron COVID-19 strain.

(Photo : Photo by KIM WON JIN/AFP via Getty Images)

Health officials disinfect a corridor amid concerns over the COVID-19 coronavirus at the Pyongchon District People's Hospital in Pyongyang on April 1, 2020. (Photo by KIM Won Jin / AFP)

Also Read: Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine for 6-Month-Old Babies? FDA Authorization Achieved After Successful Trials

These test samples were collected on Sunday, May 8. Because of this, North Korean government officials decided to raise the anti-epidemic efforts to the maximum level.

On the other hand, the Korean Central News Agency described the first COVID-19 cases in the country as the most serious emergency case in the Asian nation.

Now, Kim Jong-Un ordered cities and counties to conduct lockdowns in response to the recorded COVID-19 infection cases.

"It's definitely likely that they've had Covid before, so I guess the main question is why are they saying it now," said Asia Society Policy Institute's associate researcher Dominique Fraser.

Why North Korea's COVID-19 Cases are Alarming

Unlike other nations and countries, the reported COVID-19 cases in North Korea are more alarming.

WUSA 90 reported that since there the Asian country claimed that it hadn't experienced infection cases in the past years, the government did not implement nationwide vaccination.

Experts warned that the majority of the residents being unvaccinated is a major issue for North Korea. They added that serious consequences might happen because of its poor health care system.

As of writing, the North Korean leader said that they would continue their strict COVID-19 protocols while maintaining their economic activities and goals.

If you want to see further details about the first COVID-19 infection cases in NoKor, you can visit this link.

Meanwhile, the new COVID-19 breath tests were previously approved by the FDA.

On the other hand, the updated Moderna COVID-19 Omicron vaccine will soon be distributed in the United States.

For more news updates about COVID-19 and other health topics, always keep your tabs open here at TechTimes.

Related Article: UK COVID: Research Shows Seven Out of 10 People In England Are Infected, Longest Infection Lasted for 16 Months

TechTimes own this article

Written by: Griffin Davis

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
(Photo : Unsplash/Tesla Fans Schweiz) Tesla

On Tuesday, May 10, Tesla CEO Elon Musk praised the Chinese factory workers at the Shanghai gigafactory for pulling extreme hours while taking a shot at American workers who won't do the same.

Elon Musk Praises Chinese Workers

According to The Guardian, the billionaire said that there are " many talented, hardworking people in China" who believe in manufacturing.

He also pointed out that the workers are burning "the 3 a.m. oil," and they won't leave the factory until the work is done, unlike in America, where people are "trying to avoid going to work at all."

Musk's comment comes as Tesla's Shanghai gigafactory pushes its factory workers to the limit in order to meet production targets amid an ongoing pandemic lockdown.

In April. the automaker restricted its Shanghai factory workers from leaving the factory under a closed-loop system that was originally developed by Chinese authorities to contain the participants of the Beijing Olympics.

Also Read: Tesla Gigafactory Shanghai Suspension Worsens; Friday Reopening Uncertain

While locked inside, the factory workers were reportedly made to work 12-hour shifts, six days in a row, and sleep on factory floors since they couldn't go home, according to Business Insider.

The production at the plant was forced to halt because of parts shortages.

Labor rights and safety violations have been reported at Tesla's Shanghai factory since 2018, with some factory workers making as little as $1,500 a month in what is called the "Giga-sweatshop."

Even in the United States, the billionaire is known for disregarding labor norms and work-life balance. Musk infamously said that "nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week."

Musk also has bragged about making the automaker's US employees work 100-hour weeks while claiming to have worked 120-hour weeks himself.

In March, Musk called a meeting for his other company, SpaceX, at 1:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.

China's Extreme Work Culture

These practices are on par with China's extreme work culture nicknamed 996, in which workers are expected to work from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., six days a week, according to New York Post.

The practice has been the source of several protests in the past few years and has been characterized as a form of modern slavery.

Eli Friedman, a labor expert and associate professor of international and comparative labor at Cornell University's ILR School, said that Musk's remark just proves that the American corporations are taking advantage of the low cost of labor in China and its flexibility.

For bosses like Musk, that is a comparative advantage, and the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of workers that they can wake up in the middle of the night and put on the production line is concerning.

Friedman added that the whole thing is tapping into an Orientalist narrative about "robotic" Chinese workers that Musk said is a "good thing."

Officially, the Chinese labor law mandates a 40-hour workweek, with employees allowed up to 36 hours of overtime a month, resulting in just more than a 48-hour workweek.

Employees in China are often asked to sign a striver's pledge, which removes their right to get overtime pay and paid time off.

Related Article: Apple iPhone Assembler Pegatron Halts Production in Shanghai Due to Spiking COVID Cases

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Sophie Webster

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Nikolai Returns

Written by: Michael Tanner

Available In: eBook|Paperback

Author Website: http://www.michaeltannerbooks.com/

In 1920, a glittering Russian Orthodox monastery is dynamited by the Bolsheviks into piles of rubble. Years later, Nikolai RazkazovKolyagrows up in the shadow of the ruins. A veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the deadly Russian arms trade, Kolya learns that he and the old monastery share a special connection and that his life has a purpose, a dangerous purpose.
Organized by Casa de las Americas, the biennial event came back after being suspended in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cuba hosts the 11th Latin American and Caribbean Theater Season, "Mayo Teatral," with mask requirements and coronavirus safety protocols in place.

In the Cuban capital of Havana, where most of the country's playhouses are located, streets and public areas have been adorned with festival-related banners.

Organized by the Cuban cultural center Casa de las Americas, the biennial event came back after being suspended in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Vivian Martinez, curator and director of Mayo Teatral, has called on people to participate in the event.

"It is really inspiring to see people enjoying plays again. This is a way to send a message of unity amid the challenges posed by the pandemic," she said.

#LaColmenita, grupo de teatro cubano, integra a ninos y adolescentes comunes y con necesidades educativas especiales para el disfrute del arte. #SomosCuba #NinosConDerechos @CubaMINREX @JorgeLuisMayoF1 @negfle pic.twitter.com/CAw3n1AunH  Embajada de Cuba en Nicaragua (@embacubanic) May 11, 2022

The tweet reads, "La Colmenita, a Cuban theater group, integrates ordinary children and adolescents and those with special educational needs to enjoy art."

Running through Sunday, the theater season has gathered actors, playwrights, and theater directors from a dozen countries. Among them was Argentinian theater director Mauricio Kartun, who came to attend the Cuban premiere of his latest play.

"I am very happy to be here," he said. "This interaction between the artists and the audience was necessary for the vitality of theater."

The event features seminars, talks, and presentations of plays in Havana as well as in the Cuban provinces of Matanzas, Villa Clara, and Cienfuegos. Theaters in Cuba reopened in the second half of 2021 after the Caribbean nation closed its cultural venues in March 2020.
State Rep. Dodie Horton, R-Haughton, sits at the testimony table next to F. Randy Harper, senior pastor at Bossier City's Bellaire Baptist Church, as she presents to the House Education Committee her HB837, which would ban discussions of sexual orientation or gender identity for kindergarten and other students. The bill was defeated.
The Powerhouse Museum is facing criticism for ousting a public exhibition and throwing staff and resources behind a runway show for Afterpay Australian Fashion Week.

The popular Microcars exhibition has made way for the museums first fashion runway show in its 142-year history, with the NSW Opposition questioning the cost to taxpayers of the museums collaboration with young designer Jordan Gogos.

Powerhouse chief executive Lisa Havilah with designer Jordan Gogos and model Basjia Almaan at the Powerhouse Museum Credit:Flavio Brancaleone

The Microcars exhibition was bumped out on Monday, with the tiny cars placed in storage, coming back on public display by May 19. In their place the museum dedicated in-house production, lighting, design, construction, digital and communications staff to produce the catwalk show for the Iordanes Spyridon Gogos (ISG) label in the museums iconic Boiler Hall.

NSW Arts Minister Ben Franklin has defended the museums involvement as a way help to the creative industries recover after COVID-19.
But still, despite not being what she expected, going sober was the best thing shes done, personally and creatively, she says. Giving up drinking also gave her lyrics a sharpness that was absent from her earlier albums, Lungs (2009), Ceremonial (2011) and How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful (2015). Compare the transformation of her lyrical style from the opening lines of the track Between Two Lungs from the bands debut album: Between two lungs it was released / The breath that carried me / The sigh that blew me forward / Cause it was trapped / Trapped between two lungs To the opening lines of the track Back in Town from Dance Fever: Never really been alive before / Always lived in my head / And sometimes it was easier hungover and half-dead

Im able to be so much more brutal and clear with my lyrics because I have found more honesty in my life, Welch says. Loading Personally, the brutal clarity is what draws me to Welchs later work  but its not for everyone. A friend of mine cant listen to her music, not because she doesnt like it but because her work cuts to the heart so sharply. What happened after sobriety? After facing her compulsion to drink, Welch confronted another compulsion: music. She didnt know why she could never break free of the cycle to make album after album. I have to keep making things to keep up this dance, and to keep up the dance of touring. Which at some point, Im like, is this for a good reason? Or is this almost like a death drive.

Being in control by being out of control, being both freed and restrained are ideas grappled with in Dance Fever. When I ask Welch if the compulsion to make music and tour could be a substitute for the drinking, Welch laughs as she considers it. The drinking would just turn the sound down and allow me to be present ... performance and making music does exactly the same thing. I just dont f--- my life up as much. Im able to be so much more brutal and clear with my lyrics because I have found more honesty in my life, Welch says. Credit:Universal Music Its this tension that forms a major part of Dance Fever, produced by Welch, Jack Antonoff, and Dave Bayley of Glass Animals. Welch describes the 14-track album as a be-careful-what-you-wish-for fable. Why? Because when the pandemic hit, the spell was broken: Welch lost the music  which became the problem she needed to solve on this album.

Loading Welch tells me that the tale begins in March 2020. Even though Id said I quit [music], I just found myself running to New York to start another record, she says. Welch ran to Antonoff, the Grammy Award-winning producer who has collaborated with the likes of Taylor Swift, Clairo, St. Vincent, Lorde, Lana Del Rey and who is the frontman of indie pop band Bleachers. They made King, Free and Choreomania together  the three songs that open the album, all of which are threaded together by the question, Why can I not stop this dance?

King, the lead single, is Welchs favourite song that shes ever made. Motherhood and marriage had started to call her, but shes not sure whether she can answer. Choreomania was inspired by the social phenomenon between the 14th and 17th century known as dancing mania, where adults and children would dance until they collapsed, for reasons still unclear. Welch likes the theory that it was a reaction to stress. I understand why you would want to just run out into the street and dance wildly. Back in New York, Welch knew it was time to face the music of the pandemic when her mum called. Upon returning to London, Welch found it hard to work with Antonoff remotely. It was then, as home-bound life was enforced, that she lost the music.

It really was like the song had abandoned me. I didnt write for a really long time because [with] songwriting you have to tap into a subconscious place and just let it go, and every time I tapped into my subconscious, I just started crying. Its as the careful-what-you-wish-for fable unravels where we can see Welchs ability to find clarity while maintaining the complexity, which she explores in later tracks of the album. My Love describes the grief she felt about her writers block. Cassandra speaks to the character of song, asking for guidance. Eventually, guidance was found: The Welch who is talking to me has come back to music. The album has been released, her global tour has been announced.

Loading It really was a journey back to the stage [after] really kind of going down to hell. In the final moments of our interview it becomes clear how, and why, Welch did come back to music. Ive always been the same since I was a kid. Ive never not been worried or neurotic. But I would put music on and dance in my room alone, and I would feel completely free. Thats what music has always given me.
Based on Rooneys 2017 debut novel , Conversations With Friends (Amazon Prime, from May 16), spans similar territory, albeit with some diversions. Its focus is a Dublin-based foursome. Frances (Alison Oliver) and Bobbi (Sasha Lane) are devoted friends from their school days. Now theyre college students, former lovers and collaborators who present spoken-word poetry. Following a performance, they meet Melissa (Jemima Kirke), an author who admiringly describes their work as very sweet, but ruthless. Subsequent online detection reveals that Melissas married to actor Nick (Joe Alwyn), whom sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued Frances describes in a text message to Bobbi as a trophy husband.

Those who werent seduced by its charms decried it as a slight and unduly protracted tale of adolescent angst, a dull account of a relationship between a couple of irritatingly self-absorbed and whiney navel-gazers.

Irish author Sally Rooneys work polarises people . Reaction to the 2020 hit Normal People (Stan*), adapted from her second novel, was passionate yet divided. Those who loved it (count me in) relished its contemplative, sensual, gently paced tale of a heady teenage romance between affluent Marianne ( Daisy Edgar-Jones ) and working-class Connell (Paul Mescal) as the series followed them from high school in seaside Sligo to university in Dublin.

After the women go swimming together, Melissa invites the students home for a drink at her casually impressive house, where they meet Nick. The attraction between Frances and Nick is evident, despite the palpable discomfort that ensues after theyre left alone at the table as their more outgoing companions repair to the backyard for a smoke. Like Normal People, Conversations is loaded with terse, tense exchanges and awkward silences.

The new adaptation unmistakably comes from the same lineage as the previous production. Its also made up of 12 half-hour episodes and has many of the same producers, as well as director Lenny Abrahamson, writer Alice Birch and costume designer Lorna Marie Mugan.

Nick (Joe Alwyn) and Frances (Alison Oliver) share an intimate moment in Conversations with Friends. Credit:Amazon Prime

Watching the two series, or reading the books, one can detect Rooney honing her craft and her concerns. Again, theres an uncomfortable affair driven by sexual desire and there are evident economic differences between Melissa and Nick and the financially constrained college students. And again theres a European vacation, this time a fourth-episode trip to coastal Croatia (changed from the French countryside in the book). Perhaps anticipating the criticism that its another dive into the petty problems of privileged white folk is the casting of Bobbi as a black expat New Yorker.

Theres also a deliberately unhurried pace, allowing viewers time to absorb the nuances of the relationships, to focus on the characters expressions, gestures and silences. Much of the drama is unspoken. Theres forensic attention to interior worlds, to the roiling thoughts and feelings beneath the surface, the desires, tensions, jealousies and resentments. Theres welcome space for the actors to convey emotion that isnt expressed through dialogue.
National Wildlife Parks Service has launched an investigation into conservation group Aussie Ark after it allegedly collected six broad-toothed rats in the Barrington Tops National Park without the appropriate authority.

The wildlife group uploaded a video to social media in which it said it had worked in partnership with the NSW government to rescue six rats, which are listed as vulnerable in the state. In a statement, NPWS said any suggestion the collection had been done alongside the government was incorrect.

President Tim Faulkner with a broad-toothed rat. Credit:Aussie Ark

The collection of a threatened species from a national park is permitted only in limited circumstances, including where authorised under the Biodiversity and Conservation Act 2016 and the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974, NPWS said in a statement.

The NPWS has directed an investigation into alleged offences under the Biodiversity and Conservation Act 2016 and the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974 following reports of the capture and taking of a threatened species from a World Heritage listed National Park.
Former Australian diplomat accuses PMs security team of man-handling him on campaign trail

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Parts of Brisbane could flood and Laidley Creek has broken its banks, resulting in residents in the area being warned to move to higher ground, with intense rainfall expected to continue across the south-east.

There were also nine swift water rescues and the SES responded to 150 calls for help.

More than 70 schools were closed across Queensland on Friday morning, while roads and highways were cut and ferries cancelled.

But Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has warned the flooding was not expected to be as bad as what Queenslanders experienced in February.
A candidate for Clive Palmers United Australia Party will remain on remand until at least three days before the federal election as he faces 13 charges, including using a carriage service to harass.

Ingram Spencer, the UAP candidate in the Liberal-held seat of Higgins, which covers several suburbs in Melbournes inner south-east, has been in custody since April 27.

Ingram Spencer, the United Australia Partys candidate for the seat of Higgins. Credit:UAP

Spencer was due to appear before the Melbourne Magistrates Court on Thursday, but a prison guard told magistrate David Fanning the 38-year-old had refused to come out of his cell.

I have personally gone in there and told him he has got court, the guard said on a video link from Melbourne Assessment Prison.
Melbourne Airport has issued fresh calls for a loosening of the federal mask mandate for airports and planes following a global move to drop the requirement, but epidemiologists warn that such a change would be too soon.

The European Union will no longer recommend masks be worn at airports and on planes to prevent the spread of COVID-19 starting next week, though member states can still require them.

Passengers wearing masks at Melbourne Airport. Credit:Luis Ascui

A Melbourne Airport spokesperson said they had been asking for an end to the federal mask mandate since March because of the disconnect in COVID rules.

Airports are very similar environments to supermarkets, shopping centres and sports stadiums, where masks are no longer required, the spokesperson said.
The pilot of a helicopter that crashed on Mount Disappointment in March, killing five people on board, may have been confused by the broadcast from another helicopter, which messaged to U-turn as they approached dense cloud.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau released a preliminary report from its ongoing investigation into the crash on Thursday, stating that the pilot was confronted with a wall of cloud before flying into a large, old-growth tree trunk and hitting the ground.

The site of the helicopter crash at Mount Disappointment. Credit:Nine News

The helicopter was one of two aircraft, owned by charter company Microflite, that departed from Melbournes CBD on March 31 for a flight to Ulupna on the NSW-Victorian border.

As they approached Mount Disappointment, the pilot of the first helicopter noted the layer of cloud below was rising and becoming broken, while the base of the cloud above appeared to be lowering, resulting in the clouds appearing to converge ahead of them, ATSB chief commissioner Angus Mitchell said.
Labor expects its proposed national integrity commission will examine alleged misconduct from as far back as 15 years, with both former and current politicians eligible to be investigated under a broad definition of corruption.

Unlike the Coalition, Labor has promised to create an integrity body with retrospective powers, meaning it could examine decisions taken before the commission came into being.

Shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus said there was no time limit on what Labors proposed integrity commission could investigate. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Under attack for failing to establish an integrity commission during the last term of parliament, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has accused the opposition of failing to release enough detail about its plan for an anti-corruption body.

Shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus said in an interview there was every reason to believe Labors integrity commission would investigate alleged misconduct that occurred 10 to 15 years ago  especially if the politicians or public servants in question remain in senior positions.
Labor has gained an edge over the Coalition in a new scorecard of economic and social policies for women that could sway voters at the coming election, highlighting a gulf on key issues ranging from childcare to equal pay and safety from violence.

The assessment concludes that Labor has gone much further towards a universal early learning system that can make it easier for women to stay in the workforce, an economic objective that could lift productivity at a time when employers are warning of labour shortages.

Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese and Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Credit:Rhett Wyman, Alex Ellinghausen

But the scorecard fails both major parties on paid parental leave by finding neither side is committed to a minimum wage for 26 weeks shared between partners and the long-term goal of increasing this to 52 weeks within a decade.

It also fails both Labor and the Coalition on doing enough to help women and children in poverty and marks them down on their work so far in setting targets to promote women across the public sector.
Mr. Stevens was commissioned to form a Cabinet, which will be responsible for carrying through an appeal to the country.

This action was due to Mr. Lang, refusal to withdraw a circular advising State officials to ignore the Enforcement Act.

Sir Philip Game (left) and Jack Lang at the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge on March 19, 1932 Credit:Staff photographer

The Governor (Sir Philip Game) last evening dismissed Mr. Lang, who bad held office as Premier since November 4, 1930.

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald, May 14, 1932

Leader of the United Country party Lieutenant-Colonel Bruxner entering the Treasury Building, Sydney, ca. 1932. Credit:Staff photographer

The new Government may be sworn in on Monday, and the elections are expected to take place in June or early in July.

The news of the Lang Ministrys dismissal was generally received with expressions of relief of and thankfulness.

Mr. Bruxner, leader of the State Country party, said the electors would now have a chance to make the country permanently safe.

Mr. Coates, M.L.C., declared that Mr. Lang had wrecked everything with which be bad ever been associated.
An incensed former Queensland premier says sites for new dams that could protect 10,000 homes in Brisbane and Ipswich from flooding are being ignored by state and Australian governments.

In 2014, government engineers proposed new dams at Linville on the Upper Brisbane River and at Willowbank on the Bremer River, and that the Wivenhoe Dam wall be raised eight metres.

Former Queensland premier Campbell Newman said all governments needed to look at new dam sites in Brisbane Valley. Credit:Fairfax Media

No evaluation has been done because the government of the day, the Campbell Newman-led LNP, lost power the following year.

Newman, now running for the federal Senate as a Liberal Democrats candidate, insists the proposal eight years ago was no thought bubble or political engineering study.
A Christian school in Melbournes east that is under regulatory review over its handling of a former teachers sexual crimes against students is urging parents to vote in defence of its right to vet staff by their religious faith.

The plea, in a letter that St Andrews Christian College principal Catriona Wansbrough sent to parents and carers this week, argues the rights of families who send their children to Christian schools need protection following federal parliaments rejection of the religious discrimination bill.

St Andrews Christian College principal Catriona Wansbrough has urged parents to lobby election candidates about religious discrimination laws.

We know that there are many issues you will consider as you vote, Ms Wansbrough wrote on May 9.

We hope that the protection of fundamental rights which ensure that this college can continue to stand strong as a Christ-centred, God-fearing, Bible-based, Spirit-led Christian school will be one factor you consider.
Matthew Guy would no doubt bristle at the suggestion, but his strategy to win the November 26 state election differs little from the one adopted by Anthony Albanese to win the coming federal election.

The Trump-era approach of lobbing Molotov cocktails from opposition in the hope this will derail an incumbent has probably passed its used by date.

It worked for Tony Abbott in 2013, and to some degree for Daniel Andrews in 2014. But it feels like voters have wised up, and now seek stability, decency and integrity.

Victorian Opposition Leader Matthew Guy. Credit:Paul Jeffers

The new ethos for opposition is, remove as much daylight as possible in most policy areas, campaign hard on a few others including trust and integrity, make yourself a small target, and play the man.
Two men have been charged after allegedly plastering Nazi swastika stickers on a number of fences, light poles, bus stops and a Jewish community centre in Caulfield, just a day after the Andrews government introduced legislation to ban public displays of the hate symbol.

A 29-year-old Elwood man and a 21-year-old Doreen man were arrested at 10.30am in Caulfield, a suburb with a sizeable Jewish population, on Thursday. They have been charged with offensive behaviour and bill posting.

Two men have been charged after allegedly plastering Nazi swastika stickers on buildings in Caulfield. Credit:

On Wednesday, Victoria became the first jurisdiction in the country to criminalise the display of the Nazi symbol, but the law will not come into effect for another 12 months.

Anti-Defamation Commission chairman Dvir Abramovich said the latest incident was a timely wake-up call to monitor the resurgence of the neo-Nazi movement.
Leading Palestinian-American journalist shot dead during Israeli military raid

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Tel Aviv: A day after a Palestinian American journalist was killed during an Israeli raid in a West Bank city, the Israeli military said that it was investigating the possibility that the fatal shot may have been fired by one of its soldiers, according to an Israel Defence Forces official.

The official said the military was investigating three separate shooting incidents involving its soldiers after the death of the reporter, Shireen Abu Akleh, a longtime correspondent for the al- Jazeera news channel, as well as the wounding of her producer in the Jenin Refugee Camp on Wednesday.

Shireen Abu Akleh died after she was shot covering the raid for Al Jazeera. Credit:AP

The acknowledgment that one of Israels soldiers might have been culpable marked a significant backtrack from Israels initial explanation for the shooting - that Abu Akleh was most likely hit by fire from Palestinian militants.

The IDF official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of an ongoing investigation, said that the military was looking into an exchange of gunfire between Israeli soldiers in a vehicle and one or more armed Palestinian men who he said were shooting at the vehicle.
BEIJING, May 12 (Xinhua) -- The security cooperation between China and the Solomon Islands is aboveboard, legitimate, lawful and beyond reproach, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said Thursday, urging Australia to stop distorting facts.

Spokesperson Zhao Lijian made the remarks during a daily press briefing in response to the so-called "concerns" by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison about the security cooperation between China and the Solomon Islands.

The security cooperation is based on mutual respect and equal consultation, and is conducive to promoting social stability and lasting peace in the Solomon Islands and serves the common interests of the South Pacific region, Zhao said.

Zhao also posed some crucial questions to the Australian side.

"Australia referred to the Solomon Islands as its own 'backyard' and tried to draw a 'red line' on China-Solomon Islands security cooperation. What will you call this if not coercion? Australia tried all means to obstruct the exercise of sovereign rights and independent cooperation with other countries by the government of the Solomon Islands. What will you call this if not interference?" Zhao said.

"Australia carried out shady maneuver with countries outside the region to put together a military bloc, which increased nuclear proliferation risks. What will you call these if not moves to hype up regional tensions and seek hegemony in the region?" he added.

"The sovereignty of Solomon Islands matters," Zhao said, urging certain Australian politicians to stop distorting facts. 
15-Year-Old Smuggler Shot While Trying to Run Down Deputy in Texas

KINNEY COUNTY, TexasA 15-year-old was shot and injured during a traffic stop early on May 9 after he allegedly tried to run over a sheriffs deputy, according to Brad Coe, sheriff of Kinney County, a rural border county in south Texas.

The teen was smuggling five illegal aliens in his vehicle when he was stopped by Texas Department of Public Safety troopers and a sheriffs deputy.

The teen is still in the hospital.

Hell be there for a while, Coe told The Epoch Times on May 11.

Were going to go ahead and file the charges for the smuggling and attempted capital murder. That will be our bargaining chip, to use that to say, OK, we can reduce this if you tell us where you picked everybody up at. Let us know who you contacted, and on and on.

Coe said both the deputy and a Texas state trooper discharged their weapons. The Texas Rangers are investigating the incident.

The deputy isnt from Kinney County, but was working part-time in the county as part of Operation Lone Star, Coe said. He declined to say which county the deputy is from. Operation Lone Star is Texas Gov. Greg Abbotts $3 billion border security initiative that has deployed more resources to beleaguered border areas.

Coe said the vehicle belonged to the teen, who lives in San Antonio.

He got into something over his head and didnt know what to do, so he panicked and tried to run somebody over, he said.

It looks like the parents are going to cooperate 110 percent, which is a good thing. They said they did not raise him that way.

Law enforcement officers apprehended three of the five illegal aliens, Coe said.

The Texas Rangers didnt respond by press time to a question regarding the anticipated timeline of their investigation.

Coe, who was a Border Patrol agent in the area for 31 years before becoming sheriff, said hes never experienced such issues with smuggling.

Ive never seen it this bad before, period.

In April 2021, his deputies stopped 15 smuggling loads in the county, and he said we were high-fiving in celebration that they had caught such a large number. This April, they stopped 45 smuggling loads. The numbers dont include what Texas state troopers intercept.

Theres more to catch, Coe said.

Recruiting Juveniles

Law enforcement officers have seen an uptick in juvenile drivers smuggling illegal aliens over the past 15 months.

The juveniles are recruited by transnational criminal organizations (TCO) via social media with the promise of fast cash, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

TCOs convince juvenile drivers that they will not face the same consequences as adults if apprehended or that law enforcement will disengage a pursuit if dangerous conditions are present, according to a February CBP statement.

The result is an increase in erratic driving by inexperienced drivers, often observed exceeding posted speed limits, and driving against oncoming traffic.

In Texass Rio Grande Valley, law enforcement officers have arrested drivers from San Antonio, Houston, and other areas, some as young as 13 years old, CBP stated.

This is an alarming trend, because many of these teenagers underestimate the severity of the crime. Not only can they be prosecuted and sent to jail, but they also endanger lives through their actions, Rio Grande Valley Chief Patrol Agent Brian Hastings said.

Coe said his county is prosecuting all juvenile smugglers.

Dont do it. Its not worth it, Coe warned potential drivers. Yeah, you might get away with it once or twice or three times, but eventually, its going to catch up to you. Sometimes, its the first time.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a rally in Delaware, Ohio, on April 23, 2022. (Gaelen Morse/Reuters)

ACLU Backs Musk Plan to Reverse Trump Twitter Ban

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has come out in support of Elon Musk to end the Twitter ban of former President Donald Trump.

Musk, the SpaceX and Tesla founder, is poised to buy Twitter.

If the purchase goes through, Musk suggested on May 10 that he will lift the ban.

I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump. I think that was a mistake, he said.

Anthony Romero, the ACLUs executive director, said Musks decision is the right call.

When a handful of individuals possess so much power over the most important forums for political speech, they should exercise that power with restraint. If Trump violates the platform rules again, Twitter should first employ lesser penalties like removing the offending postrather than banning a political figure, Romero said in a statement.

Like it or not, President Trump is one of the most important political figures in this country, and the public has a strong interest in hearing his speech. Indeed, some of Trumps most offensive tweets ended up being critical evidence in lawsuits filed against him and his administration. And we should knowwe filed over 400 legal actions against him, he added.

Twitter banned Trump for allegedly inciting violence through posts made during and after the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol. Trump has denied he was inciting violence.

Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, speaks during an event in New York City on June 21, 2018. (Theo Wargo/Getty Images for VH1 Trailblazer Honors)

Trump, who was also removed from Facebook, has been largely communicating since then through press releases, which are often shared by journalists and others on Twitter.

Trump recently started posting on the platform run by his social media company, Truth Social, though users can only gain access to the platform through Apples app store so far.

Trump told news outlets recently that even if he were allowed to return to Twitter, he would not.

I am going to stay on Truth, he told Fox News.

I hope Elon buys Twitter because hell make improvements to it and he is a good man, but I am going to be staying on Truth, he added.

Some other groups have urged Musk to keep the Trump ban in place.

Mr. Musk: free speech is wonderful, hate speech is unacceptable. Disinformation, misinformation and hate speech have NO PLACE on Twitter, Derrick Johnson, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said in a statement.

Do not allow 45 to return to the platform. Do not allow Twitter to become a petri dish for hate speech, or falsehoods that subvert our democracy. Protecting our democracy is of utmost importance, especially as the midterm elections approach. Mr Musk: lives are at risk, and so is American democracy, he added.
Alberta chief medical officer of health, Dr. Deena Hinshaw, provides a COVID-19 update in Edmonton on Sept. 3, 2021. (The Canadian Press/Jason Franson)

Alberta Reporting 2 Probable Cases of Mystery Liver Disease in Patients Under 16

Albertas chief medical officer of health says there are two probable cases of severe acute hepatitis of unknown origin in children in the province.

Dr. Deena Hinshaw says both children are under 16.

She says one of the patients was treated, discharged from hospital and is doing well.

Hinshaw says the other patient remains in hospital.

She says she cannot provide more details due to patient confidentiality.

Torontos Hospital for Sick Children said Tuesday it had identified seven probable cases of the liver disease.

The hospital, also known as SickKids, said the mysterious cases were identified between Oct. 1, 2021, and April 30, 2022, and reported to Public Health Ontario.

SickKids said it remains to be seen whether that number is an increase in cases of unknown origin compared with similar periods in previous years, or if any of the cases will be confirmed to have a new cause.

Manitoba also said a probable case was reported in that province in recent weeks.

Hinshaw said Alberta shared information late last week with clinicians on what to look for and how to report severe acute hepatitis of unknown cause in children.

The province has been working closely with federal, provincial and territorial officials to monitor emerging information, she said.

Weve also been working to align our reporting criteria with the other provinces and territoriesin this case the current World Health Organization and Public Health Agency of Canada definitions, she said at a news conference.

This will allow us to consistently report case information to the federal government and help contribute to the global body of work to understand more about this condition.

The definition for possible cases is broad, Hinshaw said, as any child with severe liver inflammation with unknown cause is being counted.

Id like to make it clear to parents that this reporting does not necessarily mean that there is an elevated risk in the community or that you should take different steps if your children are sick.

The World Health Organization said last week it had reports of almost 300 probable cases in 20 countries. More than 100 possible cases have emerged among children in the United States, including five deaths.

Dr. Theresa Tam, Canadas chief public health officer, said this week that even before the pandemic, about half of all pediatric hepatitis cases that are severe would have no known cause.

Federal health officials are still investigating whether any of these cases are linked in any way, she said.

By Daniela Germano
Australia Needs to Get Smart About China

Commentary

Its 1985, and somewhere in the calm waters of South-East Asia, an Australian submarine slips beneath the surface on a moonless night. Its presence and disappearance go unnoticed as it was business as usual for the world on both sides of the iron curtain.

Upon reflection, it was a time of peace and certainty. The world order was crystal clear. At that time, Australia had not been at war since withdrawing from Vietnam, so the Cold War era post-1973 can be seen as a relatively stable period in Australias military history.

This all changed within a snapshot of time after the Berlin wall was reduced to rubble in 1989. The Cold War was over, but a new threat emerged in the Middle East, and Australia was once again at war on foreign soil.

It can be argued that Australias security interests were no more at risk during the Cold War in the mid-80s than they are now in 2022, despite Chinas imminent presence in the Solomon Islands, 1745 kilometres (1080 miles) from Cairns.

If we look to the left, we find that China has increased its cultural and economic presence in Indonesia. In fact, it is anticipated that Beijing will play a key role in the establishment of Indonesias new capital city, Nusantara, to be located in East Kalimantan on the island of Borneo, 2117 kilometres (1300 miles) from Darwin.

Some government critics have labelled the new capital city New Beijing, noting that China has reportedly built a large cement plant on the site. Yet few Australians would be concerned or even aware of this development.

Perpetuating the idea of a Cold War with Beijing feeds the hunger of realists in the national security space. It justifies their existence and forms the basis of their arguments that fuels the spiralling of increased military spending in Australia and in the region.

The focus should be on smart power, developing a military capability fit for purpose, developing enhanced intelligence capabilities and maintaining good diplomatic relations.

Royal Australian Navy submarine HMAS Rankin is seen during AUSINDEX 21, a biennial maritime exercise between the Royal Australian Navy and the Indian Navy in Darwin, Australia, on Sept. 5, 2021. (POIS Yuri Ramsey/Australian Defence Force via Getty Images)

Our intelligence agencies knew at least a decade ago that the Chinese regime would seek to establish a presence in our region. We watched them build their military presence in the South China Sea, and although we were critical of it, China forged ahead without major disruption. Academics were particularly concerned, evidenced by the multitude of research papers published on the topic.

Now, Beijing has sealed a pact with the Solomon Islands. A deal that the Solomon Islands government felt would improve the nations security and economic interests, one that more than likely outweighed anything Australia could offer. This arrangement is not unlike those that Beijing has made with other nations in our region.

The political rhetoric of this being a failure of foreign policy on Australias part is a distortion of recent history. Note that this has not been labelled an intelligence failure. Why? Because it does not come as a surprise to anyone on both sides of parliament.

Opportunistic rhetoric entrenching notions of a Cold War with China during an election period is an irresistible vote magnet.

Yet alarmist statements do little but compound anxiety experienced by the Australian community as we emerge from the pandemic and helplessly watch horrific scenes of the human tragedy unfold in Ukraine.

It also does nothing to improve relations diplomatic relations with our regional neighbours, which have become increasingly awkward as they continue to prosper from Chinese investment.

There is no strategic advantage to entering a Cold War with China. Instead, we should take the opportunity to rise to the challenge of becoming more economically competitive in our region while maintaining good diplomatic relations with our neighbours. Using smart power and investing in our intelligence capabilities is a much better option than putting ones head in the lions mouth. We need to get smart about China.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
A photo shows a field of wheat on a farm near Inverleigh, some 100 kilometers west of Melbourne, Australia, on Jan. 12, 2021. (William West/AFP via Getty Images)

Australian Scientists Find Way to Make Better Wheat

An Australian led team of international researchers has discovered a gene in wheat that helps produce higher quality crops.

The scientists say the discovery could lead to increased protein in wheat by up to 25 percent with the potential to help improve its nutritional and economic value.

Researchers from the University of Adelaide and the UKs John Innes Centre have identified the genetic driver that improves the yield traits of wheat.

Lead researcher Scott Boden from the University of Adelaide said the significant discovery follows revolutionary progress in wheat science over the past decade.

The scientists say it is the first known example where a forward-genetics screen of a mutant population has been used to identify a gene that controls reproductive development in wheat.

A field of wheat being harvested on a farm near Inverleigh, some 100kms west of Melbourne, Australia, on Jan. 12, 2021. (William West/AFP via Getty Images)

If you identify genes that control flower development and you modify them so that more flowers are produced, then you can increase the productivity or yield of the plant, he told AAP.

He said the research was partly driven by the need to increase food security for the increasing human population.

Probably the most significant discovery is the effect on grain protein content, because if it does translate into modern varieties then it far exceeds anything we can do currently.

The discovery was made after the plants were grown in the field, with the mutation helping to increase the crops protein content.

The increase in protein content occurs without the trade-off of a reduced yield so this discovery has even better potential to provide economic benefit to breeders and growers than just the increased nutritional value by itself.

Boden said the crops are not genetically modified as there is no foreign DNA being introduced into the plant.

The team expects the new wheat varieties to be available to breeders within three years, with farmers to potentially see the benefits within the decade.

The research has been published in the journal Science Advances.
Anthime Joseph Gionet, also known on social media as "Baked Alaska," said Jan. 6 prosecutors threatened him with a felony if he didn't take a plea deal. (GiveSendGo/Screenshot via The Epoch Times)

Baked Alaska Says Prosecutors Threatened Felony Charge If He Didnt Take Jan. 6 Plea Deal

Judge scuttles expected guilty plea, sets trial for March 2023

The social-media personality known as Baked Alaska told a federal judge he was only pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge from being at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, because prosecutors had threatened to charge him with a felony if he didnt take a plea deal.

Defendant Anthime Joseph Gionet, 34, told U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan on May 11, I believe I am innocent, to which Sullivan replied, Well pick a trial date.

Gionet was on the court calendar for a plea-agreement hearing, ostensibly to plead guilty to one count of parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building, a petty misdemeanor.

The virtual online hearing went off script from its opening minute.

Sullivan asked Gionet why he was pleading guilty.

Gionet replied, I wanted to go to trial, but the prosecutors said if I didnt (sic) go to trial, they would put a felony on me, so I think this is probably the better route.

Theyre Going to Hit Me With a Felony

Sullivan then asked Gionet, Are you pleading guilty because youre guilty?

Gionet responded, I believe Im innocent. He then explained, They say if I go to trial, theyre going to hit me with a felony.

Sullivan told Gionet that he cant take a plea of guilty if you tell me youre innocent. So lets pick a trial date.

Gionet then protested.

Your honor, is that a fair thing that they can threaten me with an additional charge a year and a half later?

You have a lawyer to speak for you, sir, the judge cautioned.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Aloi denied Gionets claim.

The government did not say that we would charge Mr. Gionet with a felony if he did not take the plea, she said. We did say the case would continue to be investigated 

Sullivan said he didnt believe Gionets claim.

Your office has proceeded in a very honorable manner, and I didnt believe that when I heard it, he told Aloi. So lets pick a trial date.

Gionets trial was then scheduled for March 7, 2023. Sullivan asked Gionets two attorneys if they would like to confer with their client in a private break-out room.

If he wants to go to trial, he will get a fair trial, he assured defense attorneys.

After the break-out meeting, Aloi told Sullivan the Department of Justice would hold the plea offer open for 60 days. The judge set a status hearing for July 22, but kept the 2023 trial date on the calendar.

Speaking on his livestream program on Cozy.tv several hours after the hearing, Gionet said he wasnt sorry the plea agreement fell apart.

This Is Insane

I didnt know this [expletive] went on. This is insane, he said. This whole holding [expletive] over my head, thats not right. If you were going to charge me with the felony, you should have done it a year and a half ago.

Gionet, who was arrested on Jan. 15, 2021, was charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, and knowingly entering and remaining in a restricted building without authorization. On April 19, 2022, prosecutors added the parading, demonstrating, or picketing charge.

Prosecutors allege that Gionet did a livestream broadcast from the Capitol, in which he said, among other things, Occupy the Capitol, lets go, and We aint leaving this [expletive].

He accused a law enforcement officer of shoving him and called the officer an oath-breaker, along with a sprinkling of profanity, court records allege.

On the night of Jan. 5, 2021, Gionet conducted an interview with Ray Epps, in which Epps said that protesters on Jan. 6 need to go into the Capitol. There has been widespread speculation online about Epps because his photograph was removed from the FBIs Jan. 6 most-wanted page.

Despite encouraging protesters to go inside the Capitol and being present at the first two breaches of police lines on Jan. 6, Epps hasnt been charged for being on restricted ground that day. Epps has denied being an informant for the FBI or any other law enforcement agency.
A picture illustration of U.S. dollar, Swiss Franc, British pound and Euro bank notes, taken in Warsaw on Jan. 26, 2011. (Kacper Pempel/Reuters)

Bank Chiefs Should Face Jail Time for Money Laundering, Say UK MPs

A cross-party group of MPs has urged the government to introduce legislation that would put bank executives behind bars if they allowed or encouraged money laundering.

Parliament rushed through the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act in March in an attempt to deprive Russian oligarchs with ties to President Vladimir Putin of their UK-based wealth, and in the Queens Speech on May 10 the government promised to bring in another bill to tackle money laundering.

But Dame Margaret Hodge, the chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Anti-Corruption and Responsible Tax, said the group feared the governments new bill would not go far enough.

The APPG called on the government to increase its spending on money laundering enforcement to 300 million ($366 million) and said there needed to be much more support for whistleblowers in the City of London.

Hodge said: Our financial services and our defences against dirty money have been overrun. London is now the laundromat for washing dirty money and we cant go on like this.

She said prosecutions for money laundering had fallen by 35 percent in the last five years and claimed, Our agencies are completely outgunned and are simply not fit for purpose.

Conservative MP Kevin Hollinrake said corporate interests were lobbying the government not to bring in tougher measures.

He said: If youre a chief executive of a big bank, are you going to like the prospect of having your collar felt if things go wrong in your bank? Youre not, so you then go to the Treasury therefore and say dont do that.

Hollinkrake likened making bank bosses culpable for money laundering to the Corporate Manslaughter Act, which made construction executives accountable for accidents on building sites caused by negligence or mismanagement.

Suddenly when that happened the deaths and serious injuries dropped like a stone, because that focuses the attention, its not just a cost of doing business, he said.

The government says it will invest 100 million ($122 million) in economic crime enforcement, with another 300 million generated by the economic crime levy.

Transparency International UKs Director of Policy Duncan Hames said, We join these MPs in demanding an end to secrecy in Britains offshore financial sectors, an overhaul of the private sectors dirty money defences, and a significant increase in funding for law enforcement to go after money launderers.

In December last year the international affairs think tank Chatham House published a report that said: The UK is often presented as one of the best regulated countries in the world in regard to money laundering. Yet it is also considered by some as the global capital of money laundering.

PA Media contributed to this report.
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer checks immigration documents as a Honduran asylum seeker arrives at the international bridge from Mexico to the United States next to the border town of Matamoros, Mexico, on Dec. 9, 2019. (John Moore/Getty Images)

Biden Administration, 2 States, Urge SCOTUS to Move Forward With Remain in Mexico Case

Both the Biden administration and two states opposing it in high-stakes litigation told the Supreme Court that it has the power to decide the central legal questions in a case about the Trump-era Remain in Mexico program that requires non-Mexican asylum-seekers arriving at the southern border to wait in Mexico for processing.

Texas and Missouri argue in Biden v. Texas, court file 21-954, that President Joe Biden is breaking the law by ending the program.

Upon taking office, Biden cut off enrollments in the program, part of the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) created by Congress when Bill Clinton was president. The Trump administration had announced in 2018 that it would enforce the dormant program in order to curtail the practice known as catch-and-release, in which individuals would make fraudulent asylum claims knowing they would be let into the United States and be able to stay for years before their court appearance.

But in August last year, at the request of Texas and Missouri, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Texas ordered the government to continue enforcing the MPP policy until lawfully rescinded. The Biden administration had failed to properly justify ending the policy and failed to uphold a 1996 law requiring the detention of certain migrants, the judge held. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit affirmed Kacsmaryks ruling.

The Biden administration told the Supreme Court during oral arguments on April 26 that it shouldnt have to continue the Remain in Mexico program, as The Epoch Times reported.

U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said at the hearing that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas exercised his statutory discretion to make a policy judgment and found that the benefits of MPP were outweighed by its domestic, humanitarian, and foreign policy costs.

Texas Solicitor General Judd E. Stone II told the justices that the law generally requires that the United States detain migrants or send them back to Mexico. If it lacks the resources to detain them, it should return them to Mexico so they can wait there for asylum processing, he said.

But on May 2, the Supreme Court took the unusual step of asking the attorneys involved in the case to provide post-hearing submissions to the court, a move suggesting the justices were uncertain about how much authority they possess under federal immigration laws. The unsigned order (pdf) directed the parties to file supplemental briefs addressing, among other things, whether this Court has jurisdiction to consider the merits of the questions presented in this case.

Biden v. Texas offers a window into how the secretive justices deliberate on cases after oral arguments have been heard. Occasionally, the high court seeks out attorneys for additional briefings when a case is particularly complex, or it believes, in retrospect, that certain issues at the hearing werent as well fleshed out as they could have been.

Public interest in the Supreme Courts opaque deliberative process has grown since May 2, when Politico published a leaked draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, a pending case. The leaked draft suggests that a majority of the Supreme Courts justices are ready to reverse Roe v. Wade, the seminal 1973 precedent that federalized abortion policy, overriding the states and making the procedure lawful throughout the entire United States.

Texas and Missouri filed a supplemental brief (pdf) on May 9, urging the Supreme Court to move forward.

There is no general jurisdictional impediment to this Court answering this question presented, officials from the two states wrote in the document.

Neither 8 U.S.C.  1252(f)(1) nor petitioners litigation choices prevent this Court from affirming the district courts order enjoining the [Bidens administrations] June Termination of the Migrant Protection Protocols.

In the governments supplemental brief (pdf), also filed on May 9, Prelogar wrote that the law does not limit this Courts jurisdiction or pose any obstacle to deciding the questions before it.

Adopting the 5th Circuits interpretation of Section 1252(f)(1) would undermine the carefully designed system [in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996] for limiting and channeling judicial review and authorize judicial micromanagement of immigration enforcement, the federal solicitor general wrote.
President Joe Biden met with manufacturers on May 12 to discuss solutions to the baby formula shortage in the United States. But some Republican lawmakers say the White House isnt doing enough to get formula back on the shelves. An investigation has found that crack pipes are being distributed in safe smoking kits in a number of cities. The findings call into question the White Houses claim that it wont provide funding for crack pipes through its harm reduction program.
Bystander Dies After Road-Rage Shooting Led to Crash: Calgary Police

Police say a woman has died after a road-rage shooting that led to a four-vehicle crash.

The Calgary Police Service said it received reports Tuesday night about two vehicles driving erratically and an exchange of gunfire in the citys northeast. At least two homes were struck by stray bullets, police said.

Supt. Scott Boyd said the two vehiclesa red Silverado truck and a grey Volkswagen Jetta sedancontinued to pursue one another before colliding with two other vehicles at an intersection.

The occupants from both the truck and sedan continued to exchange gunfire as they fled the area on foot, Boyd told a news conference Wednesday.

The driver of a silver van, a 40-year-old woman not involved in the shooting, was declared dead at the scene. Boyd said the cause of her death would be determined by an autopsy.

CTV reported that family and friends of the woman said she was the mother of five children between the ages of nine and 17. Their father died earlier this year and they said its unclear who will care for them now.

A driver in another vehicle involved in the collision was unharmed.

Boyd said the man who was driving the grey sedan was found by officers. He was suffering from gunshot wounds and was taken to hospital, where he remains stable.

The two occupants of the Silveradoa man and a womanfled the area in an unknown direction, he said.

Police said they have not been located.

This reckless behaviour has no room on our city streets, Boyd said. The individuals involved in this behaviour and lifestyle are going to be held accountable for their actions.

Let me be very clear: the actions and behaviour of these individuals led to the death of a woman we believe to be completely innocent in this matter, a woman who will now be mourned by her family and friends, and it breaks our heart.

Boyd asked anyone who knows anything about the crash or the people involved to report to police.

The man and woman who fled the scene last night may have gone home. The man and woman may have gone into a community. They may have met up with friends and family, he said. We believe information could have been shared with them that will be vitally important to our investigation.

Boyd said its too early to say whether what happened was gang-related, but noted its the 58th shooting on Calgarys streets so far this year.

Its absolutely a critical concern for us, he said.

There is no room for any of this gun violence playing out on our streets, regardless if you are a member of organized crime, whether you are in a domestic situation, whether you are having a disagreement with a friend.

There is no space or tolerance for that level of violence on our streets.

By Colette Derworiz
A County of Los Angeles Department of Public Health "Notice of Closure" sign hangs on the door of a restaurant closed due to violations including "failure to comply with health officer order" amid increased Covid-19 restrictions on businesses, in Redondo Beach, Calif., on Jan. 22, 2021. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)

California Restaurant Faces 30-Day Closure for Violating Lockdown Orders

ROSEVILLE, Calif.A restaurant owner that defied COVID-19 lockdown orders amid the pandemic in 2020 is now being told by the state to close his doors for 30 days.

Matthew Oliver, owner of House of Oliver, in Placer County in Northern California, received notice in April from the California Department of Alcohol Beverage Control that a violation filed in December 2020 for keeping his restaurant open would be excused if he agreed to a 30-day license suspension.

We have refused, Oliver told The Epoch Times, while claiming he violated lockdown orders by keeping his restaurant open during the pandemic to provide for his employees.

Meanwhile, a local casino was able to operate freely throughout the pandemic while largely publicizing a New Years party without repercussions, according to Oliver.

Oliver said the state went after him for being loud and vocal in opposition to the governors illegal mandates on social media.

Olivers restaurant is one of 234 businesses throughout the state that received a notice of COVID-19 violations in 2020 and 2021.

However, Assemblyman Kevin Kiley (R-Rocklin), whose jurisdiction covers Placer County, said he speculates Olivers restaurant is politically targeted by the state for openly criticizing the lockdowns and Newsom during the pandemic.

This is an example of the governor using state power to try to punish someone for opposing him politically, it is not the sort of thing that should ever happen in a free and democratic society, Kiley told The Epoch Times.

Kiley further called on Newsom and Alcohol Beverage Control Director Eric Hirata to terminate Olivers penalty for violating the states pandemic health orders in a May 11 letter while citing Placer County had better COVID-19 case outcomes than most of the state.

Lets move on, Kiley said. Businesses suffered enough over the last two years. Theres no point in being vindictive and continuing to hit them with fines, suspensions, and shutdown orders.

It is uncertain whether more businesses will receive a 30-day settlement offer to offset their violations.

The governors office and the Department of Alcohol Beverage Control were not immediately available for comment.
A bill to codify abortion rights has failed in the Senate. But some Democrats are proposing to change the rules to overcome blockage by Republicans. Whats coming next?

The culture wars are heating up before the midterms. Author of childrens book Little Lives Matter Elizabeth Johnston joins us to discuss.

House Republicans took a stab at the Biden administrations border policies, calling them a display of false compassion. They were joined by special guests who have direct experience at the southern border. We spoke to one of those gueststhe president of the National Border Patrol Council.

Food prices hit record highs in April. Biden is announcing actions aiming to boost domestic food production.

The House passed a nearly $40 billion package for Ukraine Tuesday night. The funding is aimed at providing Ukraine with military and economic assistance.

Florida has been making headlines lately over multiple issues surrounding the special protections Disney has been granted in that state and whether it should be granted those privileges due to the companys dramatic shift into the spectrum of woke politics. Florida Congressman Greg Steube joins us to discuss.

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Profile photo of Heston Russell, leader of the Australian Values Party, a veteran affairs advocate and former special forces operative. (Courtesy of Heston Russell)

Career Politicians Putting Self-Interest Ahead of Confronting China: Veteran

Australian soldiers dispatched to the Solomon Islands last year after violent riots razed parts of the capital Honiara to the ground admitted to Heston Russell, a former special force operative, that they were providing security for the Chinese.

They said to me, We didnt know what we were doing there because the people of the Solomon Islands were rioting against a government that had accepted money from the Chinese to recognise Taiwan as Chinese territory, according to Russell, an advocate for veteran affairs and now the Queensland Senate candidate for the Australian Values Party.

We were basically providing security for the Chinese to come in and sign that agreement, he was told, in reference to the contentious Beijing-Solomon Islands security pact that has raised alarm bells across democratic governments.

Russell told The Epoch Times that one of the big problems with Australian foreign affairs policy was how it selected ambassadors and diplomats, saying many were friends of political parties and not actually in tune with the population on the ground.

Profile photo of Heston Russell, leader of the Australian Values Party, a veteran affairs advocate and former special forces operative. (Courtesy of Heston Russell)

He also warned that the rhetoric of a Taiwan invasion was misguided because a potential adversary would find the islands hardened population difficult to subdue. Instead, a Ukraine-like situation would more likely occur around the Solomon Islands.

They [Beijing] can draw us into a red flag situation where theyre able to use their giant PR beast and everything else in betweento say we are trying to impact on the sovereignty of those nations.

The recently inked Beijing-Solomons security agreement opens the door for the Chinese Communist Party to station troops and weapons in the Pacific nationjust 1,700 kilometres from Australias northern city of Cairnsand could lead to tensions akin to the South China Sea.

One South Pacific expert, Cleo Paskal, warned that last years intervention by a combined Australian, New Zealand, Fijian, and Papua New Guinean force in the Solomons actually prolonged the rule of unpopular Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare.

Sogavare was losing his grip on power. His MPs were defecting, the police had gone to him to defuse the [protest] situation and recommended that he should consider stepping aside, she previously told The Epoch Times.

The announcement that Australia was sending troops saved him. He could then turn to MPs that were looking at defecting and say, Look, both China and Australia back me. So, are you really going to go up against me?

Russell, who worked behind the scenes in foreign policy in the capital Honiara during elections in 2014, said Australian politicians had completely misread and mishandled relations with the Pacific.

What has happened in the Solomon Islands should never have occurred, he said. Just because youre engaging with the government and pouring money into it doesnt actually mean the government has control or influence over the population or allows aid to get through.

He said more people-to-people engagement and humanitarian assistance on the ground to win hearts and minds, particularly during disasters like cyclones or tsunamis, was worth more than the millions of aid money being sent to the Pacific. Further, he said a high-level visit from Australian leaders would also have sent a strong message throughout the region.

People clearing debris from the streets in Honiaras Chinatown in the Solomon Islands on Nov. 28, 2021. (Charley Piringi/AFP via Getty Images)

So far, the Australian prime minister and foreign minister have been advised not to visit the Solomon Islands by foreign affairs officials.

Russell pointed out other problems in the defence force, particularly the breaking down of a naval vessel in January when it was meant to provide aid to Tonga during the recent volcanic eruption.

Our defence is in a dangerous position where the government keeps trying to paint these pretty pictures and big box-ticking press statements, Russell said. But the reality on the ground is we are not achieving the best use of taxpayer funds for our foreign affairs.

At the same time, the incursion of Beijing into the South Pacific and the Solomon Islands, a region much more culturally aligned to Australia than China (in terms of religion, sport, and language), demonstrated just how fragile foreign allegiances were.

Additionally, the defence force is also dealing with a high exit rate, with around 10 percent of personnel leaving each year, a problem likely to be compounded by the recommendation to strip 3,000 soldiers of their medals by Chief of Defence Angus Campbell after the release of the Brereton Report into war crimesthe decision was quickly reversed by then-newly appointed Defence Minister Peter Dutton.

Morale issues will be a hurdle for the federal government as it embarks on the biggest expansion of the Australian Defence Force in 40 years.

Australian Army aircrewman prepares to conduct a rescue by winch of a community member from an MRH-90 Taipan, over Lismore, Australia, on Feb. 28, 2022. (Australian Defence Force)

Russell said the problems were a by-product of what was happening in politics these days, with MPs more interested in advancing their careers rather than promoting the most suitable people for each portfolio.

The politicians these days are designed to be good in front of the camera, to be good debaters on the floor of Parliament, talk in segues to avoid blame, and win votes instead of getting the job done correctly, he said.

A similar culture had developed in the upper echelons of the defence force, he claimed, saying a culture of decay had formed and that politics started to influence officers once they reached a certain rank.

Arresting this issue is what spurred Russell, along with former defence personnelincluding medics, engineers, and surveillance specialiststo establish the Australian Values Party.

A key focus of the team, if it gains traction, is to de-politicise the military so it can properly serve the men and women across the chain of command.

The team would also push for programs to send younger Australians overseas into the Pacific to carry out humanitarian work while at the same time building leadership skillsa move that could kill several birds with one stone. At the same time, the countrys large veteran population (around 225,000 supported by the government) could be diverted into the education system to rebuild national spirit and pride.

The biggest issue is that while we have the ANZAC spirit inside of us, its at risk of being suffocated and destroyed even further by those who are leading us, he said, noting that many of his brethren have felt disillusioned at the state of leadership in the country.

Russell is hoping the defence community will get behind the Values Party, as well as younger Australians outside the veteran circle.

He recalled his favourite line from one individual who said there was no one in politics he looked up to, but upon seeing Russells team said, There are some people in there that I would be proud to actually tell my friends in other countries that youre our politicians.
A Chinese paramilitary police officer wears a mask to protect against pollution, a rare occurrance, as they march during smog in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, on Dec. 9, 2015. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

China and Russia Relations Naivete?

News Analysis

Theres no vacuum in geopolitics, so holistic thinking is needed to arrive at reasonable assessments. Iran has survived all these years, even while under more or less strict sanctions, partially because the regimes in Russia and China keep ignoring the sanctions by buying its oil, and selling it weapons and diplomatic protection.

From this viewpoint, if a nation can be assisted in evading strong Western sanctions, not only is the effect on the sanctioned country reduced, but the influence of the one that offered the assistance grows in tandem.

This has been happening with the current sanctions on Russia. After signing agreements of unlimited cooperation between Russia and China, and waiting for the Winter Olympics to conclude, Russia attacked Ukraine. For example, when Visa and Mastercard pulled out of Russia, Chinas UnionPay stepped in to process transactions.

And, of course, China is now buying Russian oil and gas at half price, increasing its competitive advantage.

Since the invasion began, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been doing the usual two steps forward, one step back routine: supporting Russia, then backing away some. So it gives Western governments the illusion that perhaps China can play a constructive role in mediating.

The regime in China, of course, has been working for decades to become a global hegemon, sees the United States as its chief rival, and does anything and everything to injure U.S. interests, alliances, and social cohesion. This obviously includes support for governments and organizations whose actions undermine America, regardless of any ideological similarity to the CCP.

For example, Iran is ruled by an ostensibly Islamic religious regime, while the CCP is anti-religion and persecutes Uyghur Muslims.

So, the Chinese regime engineers for itself the desirable position of being asked to moderate crazy regimes such as Russia, Iran, and North Koreaand happily complies, while extracting a very high price from the West for its services, in the form of Western tolerance of its global campaigns of domination abroad, and horrendous human rights abuses at home. While, in actuality, all these regimes mentioned wouldnt be nearly as brave without the real and continuous economic, diplomatic, and military backing of the CCP.

This also applies in other circumstances.

Take, for example, Israel. Consecutive Israeli governments have explained away its deepening links with the CCP, aside from economic gains, by saying that having good profitable relations with China will make it less supportive of Iran. However, this hasnt worked, since the CCPs campaign is against the United States and Iran is an enemy of the United States.

No amount of friendliness from Israel would change this fundamental equation.

But, if deepening ties with Israel can get the CCP lots of tools or techniques, including dual-use technology such as cyber, and also drive a wedge between Israel and the United Statesthats getting two birds with one stone.

It seems like more governments are starting to listen to their intelligence and security agencies and realize that without dealing with the source of support for Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Iranian regime and North Korea, sanctions will have a reduced effect, and the CCP will step in and take market share from the West.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
China Testing Missiles to Strike Ships in Port, New Images Reveal

Analysis of new satellite images suggests that the Chinese military is testing its ability to target ships in port with long-range ballistic missiles. The discovery may shed light on the Chinese Communist Partys (CCP) efforts to develop a military capable of decapitating U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific.

The new images, taken by a Maxar Technologies satellite and first reported by the U.S. Naval Institute, document a great wall of missile testing facilities, some of which were previously used to test missiles on elaborate replicas of U.S. naval vessels.

Likely constructed in 2018, the newly discovered missile test site is located some 190 miles away from where mock-ups of a U.S. aircraft carrier and destroyer were discovered last year, before being destroyed by missile tests in February.

USNI described the test sites as a string of large-scale target ranges located in western Chinas Takmalakan Desert, and suggested that their usage was the testing of new hypersonic missiles for use in an early military strike.

The nature, location and strikes on these sites all suggest the targets are meant for testing ballistic missiles, USNI reported. These hypersonic anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBMs) are an increasingly significant threat to warships.

Chinas military, the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA), has been developing both its ASBM and nuclear missile capabilities across the triad of its land, sea, and air forces for the last several years. Notably, however, the complexity of the newly revealed test site may suggest that the PLA is developing advanced ASBM capable of making precision strikes by changing their trajectory in flight.

USNI reported that the new site was nearly identical to one destroyed in February, and made of a number of differing materials apparently intended to distinguish target ships from target piers, possibly highlighting the complexity with which China is gathering heat and radar information

Traditional ballistic missiles are often considered ill-suited to attacking harbors, as they can easily stray off target and do not achieve the intended effect if they strike in the water. The PLAs gathering of such targeting information could help them to construct much more accurate weapons systems, worthy of being used in an opening salvo against an enemy port.

ASBMs, if they are able to discern a ship from a pier, could inflict a killer opening blow against an enemy navy, USNI reported. The fear is fleets could be decapitated before they can escape to open water or disperse.

U.S. intelligence leaders have described the risk of China initiating a war over Taiwan before 2030 as acute, and the United States would likely be drawn into such a conflict. To that end, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said earlier in May that the PLA was explicitly researching and developing weapons capable of overcoming the United States military presence in the Indo-Pacific.

They are studying how we fight and designing systems that are intended to defeat us, Kendall said.

Theyre not waiting to see what we do.
Falun Gong practitioners take part in a parade marking the 22nd year of the persecution of Falun Gong in China, in Brooklyn, N.Y., on July 18, 2021. (The Epoch Times/Chung I Ho)

Chinas Killing of Prisoners of Conscience for Their Organs a Tool of Genocide: Rep. Smith

The Chinese communist regimes mass killing of prisoners of conscience for their organs is a tool of genocide, according to Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.).

Beijings forced organ harvesting involves the execution of people declared enemies of the state, as if on order to provide certain organs to meet transplant needs, he said. This is also an apparent form of punishment, and indeed a tool of genocide meant to cull minority populations deemed undesirable by the state.

Smith made the remarks at a May 12 hearing of the Houses Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission to explore evidence of Chinas organ harvesting. The Republican from New Jersey is a co-chair of the commission.

A 2019 independent panel found beyond a reasonable doubt that the Chinese regime has for years been forcibly harvesting the organs from detained prisoners of conscience on a significant scale, with no signs showing that the practice had stopped. The primary victims are detained Falun Gong practitioners, the tribunal found. It also found that the practice amounted to crimes against humanity.

Falun Gong is a spiritual practice consisting of meditative exercises and moral teaching centered on the tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. After it became widely popular in China in the 1990s, the communist regime, perceiving that popularity to be a threat, began a nationwide persecution targeting the practice and its adherents. Millions of practitioners have since been held in detention centers, jails, and labor camps across the country, effectively turning them into a living organ bank for the Chinese regime.

Smith also urged Congress to approve his legislation seeking to punish those involved in Chinas forced organ harvesting trade.

He said the proposal, the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act (H.R. 1592), would impose sanctions against known perpetrators such as Chinese officials, prohibit surgery devices proved to be used for forced organ harvesting from being exported from China, and require the State Department to report on these measures.

Chilling Details

At the hearing, Ethan Gutmann, China studies research fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and author of The Slaughter, recounted his interviews with victims who were jailed in concentration camps in China. The people shared strange and chilling details that he said were signs that they were a living pool of involuntary organ donors.

Following a camp-wide health check, including comprehensive blood tests, certain individuals are cross-matched for organ harvesting, Gutmann said, recounting how Sayragul, a teacher in a camp, told him she had printouts for the blood tests on which a pink checkmark was manually added to certain names.

Other witnesses recalled that certain individuals were forced to wear colored bracelets or vests, sometimes pink, sometimes orange, he said. Either way, approximately a week after the test, the color-coded individuals vanished in the middle of the night.

Gutmann noted that witness testimony from approximately 20 camps is strikingly consistentbetween 2.5 percent to 5 percent annual disappearances from the entire camp.

These disappearances, he said, are predominantly of people in the 28-year-old age group, which is deemed the ideal age for organ ripeness by the Chinese medical establishment.

Adding to the testimony was a regretful recount by Dr. Enver Tohti, a former oncology surgeon who the Chinese regime ordered to carry out the first known case of live organ harvesting, in 1994. Tohti was made to extract the organs of a prisoner who had purportedly just been executed, only to discover on the operating table that the man was still alive.

The whole operation took around 30 to 40 minutes. Chief surgeons happily put those organs into a weird looking box, and said, OK, now you take your team back to hospital; remember nothing happened today, Tohti testified.

The hearing came weeks after researchers published a paper in the American Journal of Transplantation that reviewed more than 2,800 Chinese-language articles from between 1980 and 2015, and concluded that Chinese transplant surgeons forcibly removed organs from people without performing tests required to determine brain death.

In plain language, the papers appear to show that the donors, who were prisoners, were alive at the time of surgery, and were killed by the transplant surgeons in the process of heart extraction, Matthew Robertson, co-author of the transplant paper and a doctoral candidate at the Australian National University, testified at the hearing.

More Action

Others at the hearing called for more action from the international community and medical entities.

The topic for todays hearing, organ harvesting, has far too long been swept under the rug by the international community, said Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.), who is a co-sponsor of the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act.

The United States and our allies must send a strong and unwavering message in defense of basic human rights and protections for all people.

Last week, the European Union approved a resolution voicing serious concerns about the Chinese regimes crime against humanity.

Respect for human rights is not an option, but a requirement in all areas, including in the challenging medical and ethical area of organ donation and transplantation, said the EUs top foreign policy official, Josep Borrell.

The medical community, meanwhile, has been largely silent on this issue because of significant professional and financial opportunities in China, Gutmann said.

This catastrophe was created by Beijing. Yet, for the last 10 years, it has been continuously enabled by a handful of Western doctors who thought they could ride the Chinese dragon and come back home as if everything was normal, he said.

Robert A. Destro, former assistant secretary for democracy, human rights, and labor during the Trump administration, urged the United States to take concrete action.

Congress must use its power of the purse to demand accountability from the bureaucracy and the business community.

From NTD News
Chinese Weaponized Corruption Is a National Security Threat

Commentary

In November 2018, at the direction of then-President Donald Trump, the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI, and other federal security and economic agencies launched the China Initiative to halt the massive transfer of American information and technology to China and counter Chinese spying in American businesses, research institutions, and universities.

In late February of this year the Biden administration terminated the project, alleging the initiative was racially biased and ineffective.

Perhaps. There is evidence the FBI mishandled several cases.

However, the strategic problems posed by Chinas aggressive spying operations and influence operations within the United States have not disappeared.

Why didnt the Biden administration address the China Initiatives problems instead of eliminating the effort?

Thats not just a fair question, its a fundamental national security question that deserves better answers than the administration has provided.

In early January I wrote a column sketching four strategic challenges the United States faces.

Challenge No. 4 is relevant to this column: No. 4The pervasive corruption of influential but venal individuals and venal institutions in democratic nations. The corruption is so internally corrosive to these nations that timely and effective political and military response to Challenges Nos. 1 through 3 is systemically delayed, undermined, or immobilized.

The other challenges were No. 1: Imperialist powers bent on recovering lost empires; No. 2: Failed states seeding regional anarchy; No. 3: Militant extremists attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

They still plague us, and Challenge No. 4 exacerbates all of them.

The Pentagon, State Department and FBI take the national security threat of corruption very seriously. They refer to the corruption strategies, tactics and techniques employed by enemies targeting leaders and institutions as weaponized corruption.

China is unquestionably the most pervasive employer of weaponized corruption in the world.

Consider its activities in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in Congos notorious China Deal. Congo President Felix Tshisekedi ordered the review of the multibillion-dollar China Deal; investigators discovered some $55 million in kickbacks (perhaps more). The bribe plot used shell companies to make the operation look legit.

China has outright cheated Congo. It promised to invest several billion in infrastructure projects, but by the end of 2021 had invested less than half of what the contract stipulated.

Congo is far more vulnerable than the U.S., but it provides an example of China employing economic and financial corruption techniques. State-owned Chinese companies are in thrall to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). That means they are tools of CCP policy. The companies can be coerced financially and their employees physically intimidatedto do things like spy in the United States.

All of Americas enemies prey upon corruptible American leaders and institutions. China, however, has mastered the dark art of targeting corruptible U.S. leaders and influencers using investment ploys, outright bribes, kickback schemes, and blackmail. It certainly appears Beijing set a sex blackmail honey trap for Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.)check out his romance with suspected Chinese spy Christine Fang aka Fang Fang.

China also employs physical threat. Media have reported that FBI agents investigating suspected Chinese spy and influence operations said ethnic Chinese nationals living in the U.S. claimed Chinese intelligence officers told them their families in China faced reprisals if they refused to spy or provide data Beijing sought. That is physical threat.

Ultimately, China uses individual and institutional corruption as a strategic weapon to weaken U.S. defenses, damage the U.S. economy, sap American morale and advance Chinese science and technology.

America needs a focused effort to combat Chinas threat, and that includes punishing corrupt politicians, businesspeople, and academics.

But the Biden administration terminated rather than improved the China Initiative.

Last year the Washington Free Beacon reported that China gave the University of Pennsylvania $72 million after Penn opened the Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement (Biden Center). Is it a cleverly disguised quid pro quo? Then there is Hunter Bidens notorious laptop, which contains details about his multimillion-dollar deal with the CEFC China Energy company.

The sources of our corruption and the individually corrupt must be publicly identified and judicially confronted.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison (R) and leader of the opposition, Anthony Albanese shake hands at the final leaders' debate of the 2022 at Seven Network Studios in Sydney, Australia on May 11, 2022. (Lukas Coch/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

Coalition Pledges To Bolster Advanced Manufacturing Sector in Australia

The incumbent centre-right Coalition government will work with business, industry, and the higher education sector to spur the creation of an advanced manufacturing sector in Australia.

Today, Im launching our plan for modern manufacturing. A plan for modern manufacturing, which sits together with the work were doing in the university sector to ensure that they are playing a key role in seeing our manufacturing sector, particularly here in regional locations like Hunter and the Central Coast and right across the country in regional locations, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in an announcement on May 11.

The prime minister said that a high-valued manufacturing sector would boost the economy.

This is what drives wages to increase, advanced manufacturing applied to technology with some of the smartest minds, our scientific institutions, all working together.

Its investing in the people; its investing in their ideas, its investing in their collaboration and their partnerships, because thats what turns things around. Thats what creates the opportunity, he said.

To kickstart the process, the federal government announced a $69 million (US$47.5 million) investment to create a new Sovereign Manufacturing Automation program for the Composites Cooperative Research Centre at the University of New South Wales.

Manufacturing at a Brisbane factory in Australia, on Jan 25, 2017. (AAP Image/Glenn Hunt)

The initiative comes under the Trailblazer University Program, a $2.3 billion strategy that will provide $362 million to six Australian universities to take their research and try to commercialise it.

Stuart Robert, the minister for workforce and small business, said that each of the Trailblazer projects examined modern manufacturing opportunities to ensure that the commercialisation is aligned and is solid and distinct and connects that research through to industry.

The recent announcement from the federal government comes as the centre-left opposition, the Australian Labor Party (ALP), revealed that if it is elected it would invest $100 million into building renewable solar batteries in Gladstone in collaboration with the Queensland government.

We need a future made in Australia, we need to rebuild manufacturing in Australia. One of the lessons of the COVID pandemic is that we need to be more self-reliant; we need to make more things right here, the leader of the ALP, Anthony Albanese, said.

Australian opposition leader Anthony Albanese debates on live television ahead of the federal election at the Nine studio in Sydney, Australia, on May 8, 2022. (Alex Ellinghausen  Pool/Getty Images)

Now, in Australia, we have the people, we have the skills, and we have the resources to make batteries right here. We have resources like lithium, vanadium, copper, and nickel, but what we do is we send those resources offshore, we see the value-added somewhere else, and then we import it back once the value has been added. It makes far more sense to use those resources and make things here.

The initiative is part of the ALPs plan to invest $15 billion in capital for investment in job-creating projects through loans, equity and guarantees in resources, agriculture, transport, medical science, defence capability, enabling capabilities and renewables and low emissions technologies.
Candidates, left to right, Leslyn Lewis, Roman Baber, Jean Charest, Scott Aitchison, Patrick Brown, and Pierre Poilievre at the Conservative Party of Canada English leadership debate in Edmonton, Alta., on May 11, 2022. (The Canadian Press/Jeff McIntosh)

Conservatives Debate Freedom, Foreign Policy, and Energy in First Official Debate

The candidates running in the Conservative leadership election convened in Edmonton on May 11 for their first official debate in English.

The debate wasnt as contentious as the last weeks unofficial debate hosted by Canada Strong and Free, but still the candidates took the occasional jabs at each other while putting forth arguments on why they are the one to beat the Liberal government in the next election.

The candidates debated pressing issues facing the country such as Canadas energy role, the war in Ukraine, and post-pandemic freedoms, focusing on what each thought an authentic Conservative vision of Canada would look like.

Candidate Scott Atchison, MP for Parry Sound-Muskoka, opened the debate, focusing on the need to unify Canada and alleviate much of the division he says has been worsening in the country.

Accusing Trudeau of deliberately dividing Canadians for political gain, Atchison said that the divisive rhetoric leaves millions of Canadians feeling frustrated and even demonized by their own government.

The answer to todays challenges is not to fan the flames of those frustrations and make Canadians more angry; those politics of division have left you behind, he said, addressing Canadians.

You deserve leaders who care more about your success than our own.

Similarly, Jean Charest, the former premier of Quebec, said that he would focus on national unity, particularly between Eastern and Western Canada.

Other candidates such as Roman Baber, Leslyn Lewis, and Pierre Poilievre focused much of their statements on the need to protect and increase freedoms for Canadians in the aftermath of the pandemic, which at times led to skirmishes among them regarding who was the most sincere in defending freedom in the country.

At one point, Lewis criticized Poilievre for his position on abortion, questioning his ability to defend the conscience rights of those who would vote for pro-life legislation. While others such as Baber and Patrick Brown targeted Poilievres authenticity when it came to defending freedoms during the pandemic.

When the discussion turned toward foreign policy and Canadas role, particularly when it comes to confronting the war in Ukraine, there was broad agreement that Canada should not pursue policies that could result in a direct conflict, but should support Ukraine in other ways.

Charest said the three things Canada should do while working with NATO allies, is to provide lethal weaponry to Ukraine, provide more aid, and open its doors to more Ukrainian refugees.

Poilievre said that he would hesitate to bring in a no-fly zone as it would thrust Canada into a direct conflict with Russia.

Im not standing on the stage today promising to declare that war, he said.

Im [taking] the responsible position that well provide the material support necessary that we can as Canadians, both to the population and to those fighting against Russians, he said.

He added that Canada could play a more strategic role by providing Europe with Canadian energy, so that Europeans no longer have to fund Russias war machine by buying all of its oil and gas.

On the issue of Canadas role as an energy producer, there was also broad agreement that Canada should present itself as a prominent energy supplier going forward.

In his opening statement, Baber said that to unlock Canadas economic potential, Canada should be a natural resources superpower.

In response to a question about the future of pipelines and energy in Canada, Lewis also said that Ottawa needs to rethink its approach to the issue.

It was very short-sighted for us not to invest in pipelines and were seeing the implications of that now, she said.

In Europe, 40 percent of all the oil thats purchased is purchased from Russia. Were actually financing the war between Ukraine and Russia by not getting our products to offset dictatorship oil.
Court Rules Californias Gun Sale Ban for Those Under 21 Is Unconstitutional

A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that Californias ban on the sale of most semiautomatic weapons to adults under age 21 is unconstitutional.

In a 21 decision (pdf), a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the states law violates the Second Amendment rights.

The Second Amendment reads, A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

America would not exist without the heroism of the young adults who fought and died in our revolutionary army, U.S. Circuit Judge Ryan Nelson, an appointee of President Donald Trump, wrote for the San Francisco-based appeals court. Today we reaffirm that our Constitution still protects the right that enabled their sacrifice: the right of young adults to keep and bear arms.

A summary of the court ruling reads, in part: The panel held that Californias ban was a severe burden on the core Second Amendment right of self defense in the home. It also says that historical record showed that the Second Amendment protects the right of young adults to keep and bear arms, which includes the right to purchase them.

The decision by Nelson and U.S. Circuit Judge Kenneth Lee, also a Trump appointee, reverses a ruling by San Diego-based U.S. District Judge M. James Lorenz, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, who in November 2020 (pdf) declined to block the laws enforcement.

[T]he district court erred by holding that the California laws did not burden Second Amendment rights, Nelson wrote in the opinion on Wednesday.

The office of California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, said it is reviewing the courts decision. In a statement, a spokesperson said it was committed to defending Californias commonsense gun laws.

The California law, California Penal Code 27510(a), took effect in July 2021, banning the sale of long guns and semiautomatic centerfire rifles to anyone under the age of 21. Law enforcement officers and active-duty military service members would be exempt from the ban. But those with hunting licenses would not be exempt.

Plaintiffs who brought the case challenging the law had argued the measure infringes on the Second Amendment rights of adults aged 1820.

We are delighted that the Ninth Circuit has vindicated the rights of 18- to 20-year-old adults to keep and bear arms, Haley Proctor, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, told the San Francisco Chronicle on Wednesday after the ruling.

The Firearms Policy Coalition, who were among the plaintiffs, on Twitter called the decision a huge win. The non-profit group said the ruling makes it optimistic age-based gun bans will be overturned in other courts.

U.S. District Court Judge Sidney Stein, an appointee of President Bill Clinton who was temporarily assigned to the panel from the Southern District of New York, dissented. He said the state of California gave substantial and substantiated justifications for its enactment of the semiautomatic rifle regulation.

Stein said the ban did not place a severe burden on gun rights for young adults, pointing out that they can still obtain semiautomatic rifles from family members, or borrow them from others.

He also said that those under 21 are disproportionately more likely to commit violent crimes in general and gun violence specifically than older adults. He wrote, While 18 to 20-year-olds comprise less than 5 [percent] of the U.S. population, they account for more than 15 [percent] of reported homicide and manslaughter arrests.

Nelson had noted in his opinion that plaintiffs pointed out that only 0.25 percent of young adults are arrested for violent crimes.

In other words, Californias law sweeps in 400 times (100 [percent] divided by 0.25 [percent]) more young adults than would be ideal, he wrote. Because it regulates so much more conduct than necessary to achieve its goal, the law is unlikely to be a reasonable fit for Californias objectives.

Hunting License Requirement Reasonable, Court Rules

Matthew Jones, from Santee in San Diego County, is the lead plaintiff in the case. He originally sued in July 2019 when he was 20 years old, saying he wanted a gun to defend himself and for other lawful reasons, but didnt want to obtain a hunting license.

The hunting license requirement was passed in 2018, when handgun sales to those under 21 were already prohibited. The requirement came after a mass shooting where a 19-year-old man opened fire on Valentines day in 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing 17 people.

In 2019, another 19-year-old man in April opened fire at a synagogue in San Diego County, killing one and injuring three others, including an 8-year-old girl. In response, the California legislature moved to ban sales of semiautomatic centerfire rifles to anyone under 21, and the measure was signed into law in October 2019.

Joness lawsuit was filed before the California ban came about. The lawsuit was later amended to also challenge that law.

The 9th Circuit panel said in its majority opinion that an outright ban on semiautomatic centerfire rifle sales to those under 21 went too far. But it said the state can require the underage adults to obtain a hunting license in order to purchase a semiautomatic rifle. It said the license requirement would be reasonable for increasing public safety through sensible firearm control.

Its one thing to say that young adults must take a course and purchase a hunting license before obtaining certain firearms, Nelson wrote in the concurring opinion. But to say that they must become police officers or join the military?  It is a blanket ban for everyone except police officers and servicemembers.

Democratic state Sen. Anthony Portantino of La Canada Flintridge, who wrote both laws, said he was disappointed the semiautomatic ban was struck down but was pleased the hunting license requirement survived.

I remain committed to keeping deadly weapons out of the wrong hands, Portantino said. Student safety on our campuses is something we should all rally behind and sensible gun control is part of that solution.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
De Beers Unable to Raise Supplies While Diamond Prices Keep Rising

As some rough diamond markets see a rise in prices following Russias invasion of Ukraine, De Beers, one of the worlds leading diamond retailers, is finding it difficult to plug the supply gap the way it typically used to do in the past.

The price of a small rough diamond has jumped by around 20 percent since the beginning of March according to Bloomberg. The increase in prices followed the war in Ukraine and subsequent sanctions imposed by Washington on Alrosa, a Russian state-controlled entity that accounts for a third of global diamond production.

Around two decades ago, De Beers safes in London used to hold stocks of diamonds worth up to $5 billion. But this is not the case now. The company now only holds a working inventory of stock.

Moreover, its mines are also running at full speed, and chances of any significant additional supply prior to 2024 are said to be remote. Its very difficult to see us bringing on any new production, Chief Executive Officer Bruce Cleaver said to the media outlet. Thirty percent of supply being removed isnt sustainable.

Last month, Alrosa suspended the publication of its quarterly results and monthly sales data. According to Tom Neys, spokesperson for the Antwerp World Diamond Center, the Russian company is holding off on regular sales. However, he cites informal communications to reveal that there are occasional on demand sales to the city.

Russian goods are still flowing [into Belgium], he told jewelry media outlet JCK. We do know that goods that are bought take a very long time before they arrive. Every import creates a lot of extra checks, making sure that goods get to their destination. That creates a difficult process and that means, of course, extra risk is involved. Because of that, its hard to say if and how much [volume has dropped].

In the United States, big-name jewelers like Signet and Tiffany & Co. have announced ceasing the purchase of diamonds mined in Russia. De Beers is implementing steps to track products from mines to retailers to make sure that Western customers know that the diamonds they buy do not come from Moscow.

Traceability and pipeline integrity are going to be the things that get accelerated out of the Russia-Ukraine war, Cleaver said, according to Reuters. Were in good shape to be able to prove that to our consumers. Weve been working on provenance for 20 years.

The company has also launched a blockchain platform through which rough diamonds can be registered and tracked every time they change hands. In 2021, De Beers registered sales to the tune of $4.82 billion, half of which was from the United States. With Alrosa under sanctions, De Beers sales and market share could rise in the coming months.
DSouzas 2000 Mules Grosses Over $1 Million on Rumble in First 12 Hours

Dinesh DSouzas new documentary hauled in over $1 million on a streaming website in just 12 hours.

Viewers paid to watch 2000 Mules on Rumble and its platform Locals after the movie became available to rent on May 7 at noon, Rumble announced.

The success of 2000 Mules on Rumble is a great sign for creators who do not want to be silenced or censored for their speech, DSouza said in a statement.

Supporting creative independence is core to our values, and we are thrilled to offer creators a new way to distribute and sell movies independently, Assaf Lev, the president of Locals, added.

The film was screened at theaters across the country before it became available to stream online.

Described as an expose of widespread, coordinated voter fraud in the 2020 election, the movie draws on cellphone location data paired with video surveillance that captured people dropping ballots off at drop boxes, boxes situated outdoors where people can drop off ballots.

While some states allow people to gather ballots from certain people and drop them off, the volume of ballots inserted into the boxes and the fact that the peopledescribed as muleswent to multiple boxes to drop ballots off, showed what happened was illegal, filmmakers say.

The mules are instructed to do three votes over here or five votes over there, 10 votes over here, they spread it around so as not to raise eyebrows and not to raise suspicion, DSouza said on EpochTVs Crossroads.

The scale of the operation was enough to tip the 2020 election, he said.

Former President Donald Trump and other Republicans have urged supporters to see the movie.

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) called it revealing and sickening while Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) put it forth after being asked for recommendations for a good war movie.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) was among those watching the documentary at Mar-a-Lago, Trumps resort in Florida, calling it afterward a great work by some serious investigators.

But not everybody has agreed.

Many elections officials say they investigated claims of voter fraud and substantiated few of the cases.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said during a recent debate that his office investigated complaints, including video footage showing a man dropping off ballots into a drop box.

We investigated, and the five ballots that he turned in were all for himself and his family members, he said.

The Michigan Secretary of States office, meanwhile, told The Epoch Times that the movie did not show anything illegal.
Anna Paola de Angelis at Shen Yun Performing Arts at Adelaide's Festival Theatre, on May 11, 2022. (Steve Xu/The Epoch Times)

ADELAIDE, AustraliaAnna Paola de Angelis, a pizza entrepreneur, found Shen Yun Performing Arts absolutely stunning and was amazed to learn that Shen Yun was banned from performing in China.

She connected with the storylines and spirituality in Shen Yun after watching the matinee performance in Adelaides Festival Theatre.

I loved the narratives. It makes you understand a lot about the country that [we] as Westerners  dont see, said Ms. De Angelis.

Through breathtaking dance and music, Shen Yuns artists tell of a time when divine beings walked upon the earth, leaving behind a culture that inspired generations, says Shen Yuns website.

New York-based Shen Yun has a mission to revive Chinas culture as it was before the communist regime in China all but destroyed it.

The scenes of courage touched Ms. De Angelis deeply.

She also felt a spiritual connection with the mini-drama, Salvation During End Times and explained her understanding.

When they said about the coming, the new Earth[The dance] resonated with me because I believe that what I saw there was exactly what theyre preaching  in the Book of Revelation. Its exactly the same thing and so I was amazed. I thoughtthis is incredible, said Ms. De Angelis.

The soprano who sang Dafa Leads Back to Heaven, a story of mans divinity and purpose in life, captivated Ms. De Angelo.

That was beautiful, so moving, so spiritual, she said. I followed the lyrics on the screen, and I definitely had a spiritual connection.

Ms. De Angelis felt that the Chinese authorities will not be able to contain what is happening in the hearts and the spirits of the Chinese people as reflected in this dance.

She called for the Chinese people to be allowed the freedom to practice their beliefs wherever they wish.

Reporting by NTD Television and Diane Cordemans.



The Epoch Times is a proud sponsor of Shen Yun Performing Arts. We have covered audience reactions since Shen Yuns inception in 2006.
A still from the film "Eternal Spring," which tells the story of 18 Falun Gong practitioners who tapped into Changchun Citys state-controlled cable television to broadcast information to counter the Chinese communist regimes propaganda against the spiritual practice. (Courtesy of Lofty Sky Pictures)

Eternal Spring Wins Two Hot Docs Film Awards for Story of 18 Brave Chinese Who Bypassed State Media

A documentary about 18 brave Chinese who hijacked Beijing-controlled media to broadcast uncensored news about the state-backed persecution of Falun Gong practitioners has won two major Canadian film awards.

Eternal Spring, directed by Torontos Jason Loftus, is an animated documentary that looks at the 2002 circumvention of a Chinese state television station. The story and animation by acclaimed Chinese comic-book illustrator Daxiong piece together events that occurred 20 years previously in his homeland, when he and fellow practitioners of the meditative practice Falun Gong became targets of brutal persecution by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the late 1990s.

On May 8, Eternal Spring won both the Rogers Audience Award for Best Canadian Feature and the Hot Docs Audience Award, out of 225 films screened during the 11-day Hot Docs Festival. Hot Docs is the largest documentary film festival in North America, with films from 63 countries participating this year.

Winning first place in the Rogers Audience Award comes with the top prize of $25,000. Second place went to Mark Bones Okay! (The ASD Band Film) with a $15,000 cash prize, while the third place and a $10,000 cash prize was awarded to Barri Cohens Unloved: Huronias Forgotten Children.

Eternal Spring will have its U.S. premiere in New York City at the prestigious Human Rights Watch Film Festival on May 23 when the film will be shown at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Centera multi-screen theatre in the heart of the Lincoln Center compound. It will also be shown at the IFC Center on May 24.

Harrowing True Story

Eternal Spring documents the memories of Daxiong, a Falun Gong practitioner, who fled China after police began cracking down on members of the spiritual group on the order of former CCP leader Jiang Zemin, who perceived Falun Gongs widespread popularity to be a threat to the regimes totalitarian rule. Also called Falun Dafa, the practice is based on meditative exercises and moral teaching grounded in the tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. Within a short span of seven years after it was introduced in China in May 1992, the benefits of Falun Gong to practitioners physical and mental health attracted 70 to 100 million adherents in the country, according to official estimates.

In the early stage of its oppression campaign, the CCPs mouthpiece Xinhua News Agency broadcast video clips of a so-called Tiananmen self-immolation incident in which five individuals were seen setting themselves on fire in Beijings Tiananmen Square. Xinhua claimed the five were Falun Gong practitioners who burned themselves in a religious suicide attempt, despite the fact that suicide is strictly prohibited by the practices teachings.

The incident was used by the CCP to claim that Falun Gong is an evil religion that deserved to be wiped out and its persecution justified. As a result, many Chinese citizens proactively turned in their co-workers, neighbours, and even family members who practiced Falun Gong in the belief that they were brainwashed and dangerous.

Artist Daxiong in a still of the Eternal Spring documentary, which tells the story of a group of Chinese expatriates who brought uncensored news to China and its aftermath. (Courtesy of Lofty Sky Pictures)

To get their side of the story out to Chinese citizens, 18 Falun Gong practitioners in Changchun City hijacked a state cable television network on March 5, 2002, and broadcast the videos Self-immolation or Hoax? and Falun Dafa Spreads Worldwide on eight channels simultaneously to 300,000 cable subscribers in the city.

Within days of the tapping effort in Changchun, more than 5,000 Falun Gong practitioners in the city and nearby area were arrested in a massive sweep by the authorities. At least seven practitioners were beaten to death just days later.

Daxiong was forced to flee in the wake of the police raids. He recalls the event in the animated film resulting from his interviews with the sole survivor who participated in the daring television station hijacking, and depicts the sacrifices of the 18 brave individuals who stood up against threats of violence and death in defense of the rights and freedoms of the people of China.

The CCPs persecution against Falun Gong remains ongoing today, with countless Chinese citizens who practice or support the Buddhist-style cultivation being arbitrarily imprisoned and subjected to forced labour, torture, and abuse.
The landfall facilities of the "Nord Stream 2" gas pipline are pictured in Lubmin, northern Germany, on Feb. 15, 2022. (AP Photo/Michael Sohn)

Excess Gas Drives Down Prices in UK, Even as Prices Across Europe Rise

An unprecedented supply glut of liquefied natural gas (LNG) has driven down wholesale gas prices in the United Kingdom to low levels, while across the English Channel, Europe struggles with high gas prices.

Britains terminals are receiving LNG cargoes intended to be transported to Europe through subsea pipelines. However, the rate of LNG imports has exceeded the ability of the interconnector pipelines to export gas, leading to an imbalance in gas supply and demand in the UK, amplified by the UKs lack of meaningful gas storage capacity compared to other European gas consumers, said analysts at wealth management and investment banking company Stifel, according to The Times.

As a consequence, the UK day-ahead gas prices are at about 40 pence ($0.49) per therm when compared to over 200 pence ($2.47) per therm in continental Europe. Back in March 2022, gas prices in the UK were at over 500 pence ($6.17) per therm.

According to Thomas Rodgers, European gas analyst at the price reporting agency ICIS, the current price differential between the UK and European markets is insane and unprecedented as the two markets usually tend to be correlated.

Prices in the two markets began to diverge in mid-April. While demand for gas in the UK dropped due to the warmer weather, demand in Europe is rising as the region is seeking alternative sources to Russian supplies, and for restocking the continents storage prior to winter.

Following Moscows attack on Ukraine, European Union members decided to pursue energy independence from Russian supplies. In April, Russian energy firm Gazprom cut off natural gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria as the countries failed to make payments in rubles.

Tensions spiked after Kyivs state-owned grid operator Gas TSO of Ukraine (GTSOU) announced on May 10 that it was suspending gas flows through its Sokhranivka entry point station, which is responsible for transporting one third of the gas flowing from Russia to Europe. As a result, European benchmark natural gas contracts rose by over 22 percent on May 12.

Moscow also sanctioned a former Gazprom subsidiary on May 11 that is presently under the control of the German regulator, adding to worries about gas supply.

However, Germanys economy minister dismissed such concerns, stating that the Russian cuts only affect 3 percent of the nations imports, which it can cope with as Berlin secures gas shipments from other sources.

The developments are only the latest in a string of a steady deterioration of security of supply amid the war, Eurasia Group said in a note, according to Bloomberg. The ongoing disruptions will therefore mean EU states will step up preparations for bigger gas supply disruptions from Russia this year.
This Ruili street in Yunnan Province is empty on April 1, 2021. (Provided to The Epoch Times by an interviewee)

Extreme Pandemic Measures Turn Bustling Border Towns Into Ghost Towns

Once China adopted a policy of lockingdown cities as part of its extreme pandemic control and prevention measures in 2020, border cities quickly felt the impact.

In the name of preventing people from outside China bringing COVID-19 into the country, the regime locked down border cities and turned them into ghost towns.

Dongxing, a small town just across the river from Vietnam, has been locked down since Feb. 23more than 77 days. The city does not seem likely to lift the lockdown anytime soon.

Ruili, bordered on three sides by Myanmar, has experienced lockdowns on and off for at least 160 days since Jan, 2020.

Residents of Dongxing and Ruili told the Chinese edition of The Epoch Times that the extreme measure has turned their lives upside down.

Dongxing has Become a Ghost Town

Dongxing resident Mr. Liu said, The population here is down from 200,000 to about 70,000. This once hustling and bustling town has now become a ghost town.

Liu explained that Dongxing was popular with Vietnamese businessmenshops fill the streets. But life has turned miserable since the authorities closed the border. He said, The main business in this city is gone, many aliens [immigrants] had to leave.

Life got even harder when Dongxing was closed during the Chinese New Year. The latest lockdown saw the city closed for at least 77 days, the longest since the outbreak in early 2020, before restrictions were slowly lifted.

Dongxing residents were not allowed to leave the city except under exceptional circumstances. There werent many confirmed cases from the official reports, But the extreme prevention policy has wiped out the entire border trade, Liu said.

The people in Dongxing have been struggling to survive since the city was closed on Feb. 23.

Residents are locked at home all day long, with no job or income, and prices continue rising. Those who have no food stocked or bank savings are suffering. Liu said, The government just does nothing about it.

People are panicked by the Covid virus under the regimes propaganda. In fact, people in the United States or Europe are still living a normal life; but the Chinese are paying such a high price, Liu said.

He referred to the small businesses such as local shops and restaurants that have been left without any income during the endless closure.

Its not zero-Covid, but zero-pocket, Liu said.

Truck drivers gather at a makeshift parking lot where Vietnamese container trucks are waiting to cross into China in Lang Son Province on January 7, 2022. Thousands of trucks carrying fruit remained stuck at the border while China tightened its border policies. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

Ruili Resident Lost Tens of Thousands of Dollars in the Lockdowns

Ruili residents have experienced the citys closure nine times since Jan. 2020, and undergone PCR testing at least 130 times.

Ruili was popular for its jade, import and export, tourism, and catering industries.

These businesses and trades have nearly collapsed because of the lockdown policy.

Ruilis latest round of PCR testing recorded about 190,000 people on April 18, 2022, compared to 380,000 people who took the test on April 13, 2021. At least 200,000 people left the city in a year. Mr. Wang was one of them.

Wang was a merchant in construction materials in Ruili. He invested in Ruili believing the border city would offer better businesses; but, the pandemic changed everything.

He decided to leave the city because every lockdown would cause his business to lag for six months. There was no business before or after each lockdown. The on and off enforcement of the lockdown policy forced him to leave the city.

Wang said he will never return to Ruili. The long lockdown could kill the business. I cant get new orders, the old materials have nowhere to go. Theres shop rent, wages, and my own apartment rent. In two years, I lost more than tens of thousands of dollars in Ruili.

He said many others have also left Ruili because they encountered the same situation.

About 373 million people in 45 cities across China have come under some form of lockdown due to a surge in coronavirus cases, according to estimates by a Nomura International analysts in Hong Kong. The combined annual gross domestic product of those cities amounts to some $7.2 trillion, or 40.3 percent of the countrys economy, Kyodo News reported.

As of May 11, Dongxing remained closed; Ruilis jade market was open, but the border remained closed.

Interviewees were given pseudonyms to prevent reprisal from the regime.

Gao Miao and Hong Ning contributed to this report.
A fire chews through brush in Aliso Wood Canyon between Laguna Niguel and Laguna Beach, Calif., on May 11, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Fast-Moving Brush Fire Races Up OC Hillside, Burns Homes

LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif.A wildfire swept through Aliso Wood Canyon on May 11, burning down multimillion-dollar homes on the hillside overlooking the ocean between Laguna Niguel and Laguna Beach.

The Coastal Fire was reported at 2:44 p.m., Orange County Fire Authority Capt. Sean Doran said. The fire originated near the South Orange County Wastewater Authoritys Coastal Treatment Plant, which handles sewage for the Laguna Beach area, said Orange County sheriffs Sgt. Scott Steinle.

Crews on scene estimated the size at about 200 acres by 6:15 p.m.

The flames spread quickly as they tore through thick brush on the hillside, aided by ocean winds that sparked spot fires ahead of the main blaze. The fire pushed its way uphill, advancing on Aliso Summit Trail and into the neighboring multimillion-dollar estates.

A fire chews through brush in Aliso Wood Canyon between Laguna Niguel and Laguna Beach, Calif., on May 11, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

At least a dozen homes were seen burning as the flames crested a hilltop and advanced into an exclusive neighborhood, swallowing homes along La Vue and Coronado Pointe near the Aliso Summit Trail. Multiple homes were completely destroyed by the blaze.

There were no immediate reports of injuries as of 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday.

The fire advanced even as fixed-wing planes dropped fire retardant on the hillside in hopes of slowing the advance of the flames. Several water-dropping helicopters were also being employed in the firefight.

A fire chews through brush in Aliso Wood Canyon between Laguna Niguel and Laguna Beach, Calif., on May 11, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Evacuations were ordered in the Coronado Pointe and Pacific Island Drive areas, while voluntary evacuation orders were issued in the Balboa Nyes and Moulton Meadows neighborhoods in Laguna Beach. Students taking part in after-school activities at Laguna Beach High School were also evacuated, according to the school district.

Deputies were asking residents on San Simeon, Sierra Vista, Alta Terra, Nucella, Serana, Avante, Tanarron, Terracina, Islands Avenue, Capri Court, Sunrise Lane, Chapala Court, Arelu Court, and Anamonte to evacuate. An evacuation center was established at the Laguna Niguel Community Center at 28751 Crown Valley Parkway, Steinle said.
First Arizona Execution Since 2014

An Arizona man convicted of killing a college student in 1978 was put to death Wednesday after a nearly eight-year hiatus in the states use of the death penalty brought on by an execution that critics say was botchedand the difficulty state officials faced in finding lethal injection drugs.

Clarence Dixon, 66, died by lethal injection at the state prison in Florence for his murder conviction in the killing of 21-year-old Arizona State University student Deana Bowdoin, making him the sixth person to be executed in the U.S. in 2022. Dixons death was announced late Wednesday morning by Frank Strada, a deputy director with Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reentry.

Dixons death appeared to go smoothly, said Troy Hayden, an anchor for the Fox10 TV news program who witnessed the execution.

This one went exactly as I think DOC planned for it to do. Dixon never made eye contact with us. He stared straight up into the ceiling the entire time, Hayden said.

In the final weeks of his life, Dixons lawyers made last-minute arguments to the courts to postpone his execution, but judges rejected his argument that he isnt mentally fit to be executed and didnt have a rational understanding of why the state wanted to execute him. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a last-minute delay of Dixons execution less than an hour before his execution began.

Dixon had declined the option of being killed in the gas chambera method that hasnt been used in the U.S. in more than two decadesafter Arizona refurbished its gas chamber in late 2020. Instead, he was executed with an injection of pentobarbital.

Strada said Dixons last statement was: The Arizona Supreme Court should follow the laws. They denied my appeals and petitions to change the outcome of this trial. I do and will always proclaim innocence. Now, lets do this (expletive).

The last time Arizona executed a prisoner was in July 2014, when Joseph Wood was given 15 doses of a two-drug combination over two hours in an execution that his lawyers said was botched. Wood snorted repeatedly and gasped more than 600 times before he died.

States including Arizona have struggled to buy execution drugs in recent years after U.S. and European pharmaceutical companies began blocking the use of their products in lethal injections.

Authorities have said Bowdoin, who was found dead in her apartment in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe, had been raped, stabbed and strangled with a belt.

Dixon, who was an ASU student at the time and lived across the street from Bowdoin, had been charged with raping Bowdoin, but the rape charge was later dropped on statute-of-limitation grounds. He was convicted of murder in her killing.

In arguing that Dixon was mentally unfit, his lawyers said he erroneously believed he would be executed because police at Northern Arizona University wrongfully arrested him in another casea 1985 attack on a 21-year-old student. His attorneys conceded he was lawfully arrested by Flagstaff police.

Dixon was sentenced to life in prison in that case for sexual assault and other convictions. DNA samples taken while he was in prison later linked him to Bowdoins killing, which had been unsolved.

Prosecutors said there was nothing about Dixons beliefs that prevented him from understanding the reason for the execution and pointed to court filings that Dixon himself made over the years.

Defense lawyers said Dixon was repeatedly diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, regularly experienced hallucinations over the past 30 years and was found not guilty by reason of insanity in a 1977 assault case in which the verdict was delivered by then-Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sandra Day OConnor, nearly four years before her appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Bowdoin was killed two days after that verdict, according to court records.

Another Arizona death-row prisoner, Frank Atwood, is scheduled to be executed on June 8 in the killing of 8-year-old Vicki Lynne Hoskinson in 1984. Authorities have said Atwood kidnapped the girl.

The childs remains was discovered in the desert northwest of Tucson nearly seven months after her disappearance. Experts could not determine the cause of death from the bones that were found, according to court records.

Arizona has 112 prisoners on death row.
Illicit fentanyl-laced pills and other narcotics are displayed by law enforcement during a press conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., on Dec. 16, 2021. (Scottsdale PD)

Florida Bans Nitazene, a New Class of Killer Drugs

Floridas attorney general has issued an emergency order making it a felony for an individual to possess, sell, manufacture, or deliver eight drugs in the class called nitazenes.

The move by the states top law enforcement officer is a response to the increased appearance of these synthetic drugs, including one that is up to 20 times deadlier than fentanyl.

Synthetic opioids, including fentanyl, cause 66 percent of annual overdose deaths nationwide, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

The drug family of opioids includes the prescription painkillers hydrocodone and oxycodone, and the illegal drug heroin.

Theres no approved medicinal use for nitazenes.

The nitazene increasingly seen as a killer of Americans across the country is called isotonitazene, commonly known as ISO. It first appeared in the country in 2019, according to a DEA fact sheet.

The drug is most often encountered by law enforcement officers in powder form. Its so lethal that it puts anyone near it at risk.

While fentanyl can kill an adult if only two milligramsless than the weight of a small mosquitoare consumed, ISO can be fatal if an even smaller amount comes in contact with skin or is inhaled.

Mock sizing of a potentially lethal dose of Fentanyl, on April 1, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Law enforcement agencies have been increasingly worried about potentially deadly encounters with ISO.

In Pasco County, Florida, officers carry an antidote they hope can reverse an overdosetheyre armed with enough for the overdosing person, plus an accidentally exposed responding officer and any K-9 partner, said Britney Morris, a spokeswoman for the Pasco County Sheriffs Office.

When someone shows signs of overdose, deputies can administer Narcan, a reversal treatment designed for fentanyl, Morris said.

The problem is that ISO is such a new threat, authorities arent sure Narcan actually can reverse an overdose, she said.

Within minutes of an ISO overdose, the victim may show symptoms that include blue or purple fingernails or lips, difficulty breathing, unconsciousness, clammy skin, vomiting, drowsiness, and unusually small pupils, according to the sheriffs office.

Helping a person showing signs of a drug overdose can put officers lives on the line.

Its a risk that deputies face every day out in the field, Morris said. Will I have to use Narcan today? And will this be ISO that Narcan may or may not be responsive to?

Fentanyl test strips in a container and Narcan at The Legionnaire bar in Oakland, Calif., on March 3, 2022. (Nathan Frandino/Reuters)

Even if someone does not use recreational drugs, its important to be aware of ISO, its high potency, and the signs of an overdose, Morris said.

Its something that sometimes people dont realize could be in the room with them  lets say somebody has this in their pocket, you know, its something that you could be breathing in.

In Pasco County, two deaths were blamed on ISO in 2021.

Nitazene overdoses have resulted in at least 15 deaths in Florida since 2020.

The drugs methamphetamine, cocaine, and counterfeit pills increasingly have been laced with fentanyl. But now, authorities are finding them laced with deadlier ISO.

Users of illicit drugs often have no idea that a lethal synthetic opioid is mixed in, until its too late, Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody said in a news release.

Further north, there were at least 40 fatal overdoses involving ISO during a six-month period in 2020 in Cook County, Illinois, and Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, according to a 2021 report by the American Society of Addiction Medicine.

Unsafe for Humans

Law enforcement officers have encountered ISO primarily in powder form, according to a DEA fact sheet (PDF).

In April 2019, U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized 1.6 grams of ISO in California.

By August 2020, there had been 98 encounters with ISO in the United States, according to the National Forensic Laboratory Information System database. These encounters involved ISO alone or in combination with other substances.

Florida forensic labs began identifying nitazene cases in 2020, according to Moodys office.

Since then, 268 cases have been identified in the state, with 13 cases in 2020, 171 cases in 2021, and 84 cases as of March 18, 2022.

Nitazenes were developed in the 1950s as a safer alternative to other opioids, such as morphine. After testing, they were declared to be unsafe for human consumption.

In the past few years, they have been rediscovered and popularized due to their decreased detectability in drug-monitoring programs, according to the website for Aegis Sciences Corp., a forensic toxicology and healthcare laboratory based in Nashville, Tennessee.

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody speaks at a press conference at the Florida Capitol in Tallahassee March 29, as Gov. Ron DeSantis looks on. (The Florida Channel)

Moodys emergency order (PDF) filed on April 26 makes eight nitazenes, including ISO, controlled substances in the state, in the hopes of curbing their spread.

The order makes it a felony for an individual to possess, sell, manufacture, or deliver any of the eight drugs.

Moody said she will work with state lawmakers during the 2023 legislative session to codify the nitazenes permanently as Schedule I controlled substances in Florida to prevent future deaths.

Fentanyl Surge Continues

We must make sure they do not become more prevalent in our state, Moody said, or I am afraid we will see overdose deaths skyrocket.

The DEA recently seized 1.8 million fentanyl-laced pills in a two-month nationwide sting.

Since the start of 2021, officials have seized more than 9.5 million counterfeit pillsan increase of almost 430 percent since 2019, Moody said.

Thats a 50-fold increase in just three years, she added.

Fake pills containing fentanyl are being manufactured to look identical to prescription opioid medications like Xanax, Vicodin, Percocet, and Oxycontin, Moody said.

About 4 in 10 fake pills tested by the DEA contain a potentially deadly dose of fentanyl.

U.S. Border Patrol agents confiscated methamphetamine and fentanyl pills near Salton City, Calif., on March 11, 2022. (Courtesy of U.S. Customs and Border Protection)

Fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin.

Florida deaths caused by fentanyl increased by 80 percent last year, Moody said.

About 21 people in Florida die from opioid-related overdoses every day, according to the latest Florida Department of Law Enforcement Medical Examiners Report, Moody said.

Nationwide, opioids were blamed for 93,000 fatal drug overdoses in 2020. Fentanyl overdose now is the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 45, according to the Florida Attorney Generals Office.

The growing opioid crisis in the United States should concern everyone, especially President Biden, who continues to ignore federal immigration lawspaving the way for these dangerous drugs to flood into our country, Moody said May 10 in a prepared statement issued on the first National Fentanyl Awareness Day.

For years, we have been warning about the dangers of fentanyl and how just one pill laced with this synthetic opioid can kill, Moody said.

Most fentanyl comes across the border with Mexico, according to a report from the Commission on Combating Synthetic Opioid Trafficking.

Boxes carrying a total of more than 3,100 pounds of illicit drugs seized at the southwest border in San Diego, Calif., on Oct. 9, 2020. (US Customs and Border Protection)

Since October, fentanyl seizures at the U.S. southwest border have surpassed the amount seized in the previous fiscal year, according to the latest data available from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP),

CBP data also show that since Biden took office, enough fentanyl has been seized at the U.S. southwest border to kill every man, woman, and child in the United States seven times over, Moody says.

Please be especially warned that if you take a pill from anyone other than your doctor, you may be risking your life, Moody said. Just one dose of fentanyl can kill, and with an increasing number of these counterfeit pills circulating throughout the country, the message is more important today than ever before.

For more information on opioid abuse, log on to DoseOfRealityFL.com.
Florida Judge Says DeSantiss Redistricting Map Is Unconstitutional

A Florida judge on Wednesday said he will block a redistricting map drawn by Gov. Ron DeSantis and approved by legislators, ruling it unconstitutional.

Leon County Circuit Court Judge Layne Smith said the map by DeSantis and his staff would have removed Floridas 5th Congressional District, which extends from Jacksonville to Tallahassee, and which is represented by black Democrat Al Lawson.

According to local reports, Lawsons district is about 47 percent black but the DeSantis map would have made it between 12 and 25 percent black.

Smith ordered that a new map drafted by Harvard professor Stephen Ansolabehere be considered instead.

I am finding that the enacted map is unconstitutional under the Fair District Amendment  because it diminishes African Americans ability to elect the representative of their choice, Smith said during a court hearing conducted via Zoom on Wednesday, according to the Florida Phoenix.

He cited the U.S. Constitution, the Voting Rights Act, and Floridas Fair Districts amendments to the state Constitution, which stops lawmakers from making maps to favor certain political parties, and made it clear he would rule in favor of voting rights groups challenging the DeSantis maps.

The League of Women Voters of Florida, Black Voters Matter Capacity Building Institute, Equal Ground Education Fund, Florida Rising Together, and several individual Florida voters filed a lawsuit in state court in Tallahassee last month (pdf), challenging the new congressional map.

The district that has since been enacted and signed into law by the governor does disperse 367,000 African American votes between four different districts, Smith said. The African American population is nowhere near a plurality or a majority.

The judge said he would issue a formal order on Thursday or Friday to prevent the maps from going into effect in Novembers election. This also means the state can immediately appeal it.

Ultimately, the conservative state Supreme Court will likely need to resolve the dispute.

Appeal

Its important that we get this to the next step so that this can be decided as quickly as possible, so that, whatever the answer is finally, ultimately, there is time for the [election] administrators to put into action whatever needs to be done to make it happen, Smith said.

Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections in November, Florida is yet to finalize its redistricting maps after DeSantis in March vetoed the GOP-controlled Legislatures proposed congressional districts. After that, the GOP-dominated House and Senate, instead of drawing new maps, asked DeSantis to do so.

However, the governors maps, too, have also been struck down.

DeSantiss office said it will appeal the decision. As Judge Smith implied, these complex constitutional matters of law were always going to be decided at the appellate level, DeSantis spokeswoman Taryn Fenske said in an emailed statement to Newsweek. We will undoubtedly be appealing his ruling and are confident the constitutional map enacted by the Florida Legislature and signed into law passes legal muster.

Lawson, whose district was set to be impacted by the latest congressional map, said in a statement on Wednesday that he was pleased that the 2nd Judicial Circuit Court Judge struck down the DeSantis congressional map.

The judge recognizes that this map is unlawful and diminishes African Americans ability to elect representatives of their choice, Lawson said. DeSantis is wrong for enacting this Republican-leaning map that is in clear violation of the U.S. and state constitutions.

It is critical to maintain congressional district five so minority voters have a voice at the ballot box in November. I am optimistic that future courts will also do what is right.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Lawmaker Dennis Kwok speaks to journalists outside the High Court as he and some 23 other lawmakers seek an emergency injunction in a bid to overturn a protective face mask ban in Hong Kong on Oct. 6, 2019. (Mohd Rasfan/AFP via Getty Images)

Former Legislator Opens Law Firm in New York, Calls on Hong Kong Expats to Continue Hong Kong Spirit

Dennis Kwok Wing-hang, a former member of the Hong Kong Legislative Council who left Hong Kong in early 2021, recently posted on social media that he had started a law firm in New York. He encouraged expatriate Hong Kongers to continue the spirit of Hong Kong people.

According to some scholars, its estimated that after the Anti-extradition Movement in 2019, about 150,000 people leave Hong Kong each year and move to other countries. Predictions indicate that more will leave in the future. Scholars have launched alliances to help those who left Hong Kong.

In the early morning of May 3, Kwok posted on Facebook that he, like many Hong Kong people around the world now, had to find new directions and goals for himself. He said hes very grateful to have found good partners to open a law firm with in New York and continue his legal work. He will continue to work as a Senior Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School.

At the end of the post, he sent a message to Hong Kong people, I hope everyone can continue the spirit of Hong Kong People no matter where they go, and cheered Hong Kong people, add oil. Some netizens left messages to express their support and blessing for Kwok and said they hope he will be able to speak up for Hong Kong again.

According to the link attached to his post, Kwoks new law firm is called Elliott Kwok Levine & Jaroslaw LLP, located on Fifth Avenue, one of New Yorks prime locations. The firms website says Kwok is one of four partners.

In 2012, Kwok was elected as a member of a Legal functional constituency in the Hong Kong Legislative Council and was the Deputy Chairman of the House Committee of the Legislative Council until ousted in 2020.

During the Anti-extradition Movement in 2019, Kwok presided over the election of the chairman. He was successively criticized for political speculation by the Liaison Office of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office of the CCP State Council, because for allowing too much time for the Pro-democratic lawmakers to raise questions during elections, which prevented the House Committee from electing a chairman within six months. Kwok responded that the criticism was unreasonable attacks and political abuse. He said the two Offices have no right to interfere with the operation of the Legislative Council.

In November 2020, the Standing Committee of the CCP officially announced that four Hong Kong Legislative Council members, including Kwok, were no longer qualified to be members of the legislature. The incident triggered all Pro-democratic Legislative Council members to announce their resignation. Kwok also announced his departure from political life. It was reported that he and his family left Hong Kong for Canada in April 2021.

The main reason Kwok was disqualified was the letter he sent to the United States seeking sanctions on Hong Kong. Regarding being stripped of his membership by the CCP, Kwok said, There is only glory, no regrets. He added: Life is like a chess game, you have no regrets when you make a move. Just figure it out and do what you want to do.

In an interview with The Epoch Times, American current affairs commentator Gida said, from Kwoks experience we can see tht Hong Kong people are not discouraged by the suppression, but after a period of thinking and adjustment, have become more enterprising, we can see the hope of Hong Kong people.

Overseas Scholars Do Their Best

Cheung Kim-wah, the former Deputy Chief Executive of Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute (HKPORI), who left Hong Kong for the UK on April 24, said in an interview with The Epoch Times that although he had finished his work at HKPORI by April, he will support and assist the work of HKPORI as the nominal director for the We Hong Kong People Project and help Hong Kong people.

He mentioned that HKPORI had earlier planned to set up an overseas platform named overseas Hong Kong peoples opinion group, hoping that Hong Kong people living outside China could participate in research on Hong Kong issues to further help Hong Kong.

Cheung bluntly stated that Hong Kong is not the Hong Kong of the CCP, nor of any control groups. Hong Kong belongs to the people of Hong Kong. He said, Wherever Hong Kong people go, they will identify themselves as Hong Kong people, and many will say, we are not immigrants, but [have] emigrated overseas. Therefore, Hong Kong people will continue to express their opinions as stake holders. Cheung said he will be involved in setting up this platform.

Since the Anti-extradition Movement in 2019, many young students have been forced to leave their hometowns, and people are quite concerned about their situations when they leave the country. Some expat scholars from Hong Kong established an active platform on the internet the Hong Kong Collaborative Academic (HKCAN). By using its personal network and experience, it aims to provide Hong Kong students living in the diaspora with information on study and employment in the United States and Canada, and has regular webinars on a variety of subjects.

The founder of this platform, Dr. Yvonne Leung, who is currently woking at Northeastern University in Toronto, told Radio Free Asia that she was deeply saddened to see Hong Kong students being suppressed by the regime after the Anti-extradition Movement. She hoped to help them find a way out, and eventually formed the alliance.

Simon Shen, a Hong Kong international relations scholar, once wrote on Radio Free Asia that he estimated the minimum number of overseas Hong Kong people to be one million before the Anti-extradition Movement in 2019, and the upper limit could be two million. After 2019, thousands of Hong Kong people leave Hong Kong every year and move to countries around the world. Conservatively speaking, in 10 years, the number of expat Hong Kongers will be at least one million more than now.

American current affairs commentator Gida told The Epoch Times that Hong Kong people have created miracles in terms of wealth and built the splendor of the Pearl of the Orient. As an international metropolis, Hong Kong should belong to the world. It is the Hong Kong of the world. People want to preserve Hong Kongs unique culture and freedom, but they have been severely suppressed by the Chinese Communist Partys totalitarian regime.

Its notable that Hong Kong people who have migrated overseas can continue to speak up for Hong Kong.

Epoch Times reporter Sarah Liang contributed to this report.
Garland Directs US Marshals to Help Ensure Safety of Supreme Court Justices

Attorney General Merrick Garland has directed the U.S. Marshals Service to help ensure the safety of Supreme Court justices, after a leaked draft of the courts majority opinion resulted in protests across the country.

The Attorney General directed the U.S. Marshals Service to help ensure the Justices safety by providing additional support to the Marshal of the Supreme Court and Supreme Court Police, reads a statement from Justice Department spokesman Anthony Coley.

He added that Garland continues to be briefed on security matters related to the Supreme Court and Supreme Court Justices.

The U.S. Marshals Service is tasked with protecting courts across the countrys 94 federal district courts. The DOJ statement didnt specify what kind of additional support it would provide.

The leaked draft opinion, published on May 2 by Politico, suggested that the nations high court is ready to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, which has for decades prohibited states from banning abortions prior to when the fetus is considered viable, deemed to be at about 24 weeks of pregnancy. The opinion concerns the case Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, court file 19-1392.

Activists have been protesting at the Supreme Court building as well as outside some justices homes, including at the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in Virginia, named as the author of the leaked draft. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh have also had demonstrations in front of their Maryland homes.

Demonstrators stand outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in Alexandria, Va., on May 9, 2022. (Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

Barricades have been set up around the Supreme Court building amid protests, replacing shorter barriers that people were able to easily scale.

A double layer of barricades surrounds the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on May 10, 2022. (Jackson Elliott/The Epoch Times)

The Senate on Monday passed a bipartisan bill to allow the Supreme Court to provide 24-hour security protection to the immediate family members of Supreme Court justices.

Roberts had on May 3 ordered the Marshal of the Supreme Court to carry out an investigation into the leak, and said that the draft doesnt represent a final decision by the court or the final position of any member in the case.

To the extent this betrayal of the confidences of the Court was intended to undermine the integrity of our operations, it will not succeed, Roberts wrote, adding that the work of the Court will not be affected in any way.

A final opinion in the case is expected in late June or early July. It deals with the constitutionality of a law in Mississippi, the Gestational Age Act, that bans abortion after 15 weeks of gestation, only allowing it for medical emergencies or severe fetal abnormality.

The challenge to the Mississippi law was brought by the only licensed abortion clinic in the state. Lower courts had cited Roe and held the state statute as unconstitutional, before Mississippi asked the Supreme Court to take up the case, which it agreed to in May 2021.

All the Supreme court justices are set to meet on Thursday, for the first time privately since the draft opinions leak.
Pennsylvania U.S. Senate candidate Kathy Barnette is in a tightly contested race with the well-funded Dr. Mehmet Oz and David McCormick. (Courtesy of Kathy Barnette)

Growing Support For Pennsylvania Senate Candidate Kathy Barnette Sparking Twitter Attacks

A Twitter firestorm directed at Kathy Barnette on May 11 suggests that the campaigns of Dr. Mehmet Oz and David McCormick, and their supporters, are in a panic over the black U.S. Army veterans recent surge in the polls.

Oz, a celebrity doctor endorsed by Donald Trump, and McCormick, a hedge fund executive and former U.S. Treasury Dept. official backed by Sen. Ted Cruz, have engaged in an expensive and bitter slugfest in Pennsylvanias GOP U.S. Senate primary.

Barnette, who is also an author and a conservative political commentator, has ascended in the polls and has almost caught Oz with less than a week to go before the May 17 primary.

On May 8, The Trafalgar Group released a poll that showed Barnette at 23.2 percent among 1.080 likely GOP primary voters, just behind Oz (24.5 percent) and ahead of McCormick (21.6 percent).

The polls margin of error is 2.99 percent, which indicates that the race is too close to call.

According to the survey, 15.1 percent remain undecided.

Until Barnettes climb, Oz and McCormickand their respective supportersdirected their attacks on each other. Barnette is now a target.

On May 11, former U.S. National Intelligence acting director and Oz supporter Richard Grenell shared a July 14, 2020, tweet from Barnette where she used BLM and Defund the Police hashtags.

Grenell wrote Good God. Yikes. and gave the impression that Barnette was speaking out against law enforcement in a video that he attached. In the video; however, Barnette delivers an impassioned plea for black people to not support the defund the police movement.

Defunding the police is stupid, people, she said.

Black people, do not fall for these white liberals who are coming into our communities and telling us we need to remove law enforcement, she added.

Also on May 11, conservative podcaster Greg Kelly posted part of an edited video Barnette streamed on Facebook in May 2020 after the George Floyd murder in Minnesota.

The edited excerpt gives the impression that Barnette supported the riots and paints a portrait of a black woman vilifying law enforcement.

Kelly accompanied the video with comments that include Here she is saying how great [the] Black Lives Matter summer was and Kathy needs to do more thinking and less speaking.

KATHY BARNETTE is NOT ready. Here she is saying how GREAT Black Live Matter Summer was. And how she feels COPS just want to SHOOT AND KILL black people. Kathy needs to do more THINKING and less Speaking. TOTALLY SILLY AND UNINFORMED ! pic.twitter.com/WqYG4VCuR6  Greg Kelly (@gregkellyusa) May 11, 2022

Part of the edited video features Barnette saying,

 In broad daylight. Its just absolutely reprehensible. And in that moment, I felt an entire nation come to the aid of what so many of us in the black community feel happens often enough. Some of us feel as though on every street corner theres a police officer. Theyre ready and waiting to shoot a black man.

Jeff Charles, a contributor to Red State and podcast host of A Fresh Perspective, reported about Kellys tweet and posted the entirety of Barnettes comments about Floyd, which include:

What happened to George Floyd. My heart goes out to his family. I cannot imagine. In fact, I couldnt fully listen to the entire video that went viral that Im sure so many of you watched. Its sad. Its sickening to see the indifference, deliberate indifference that was displayed there on that particular day. And in broad daylight. Its just absolutely reprehensible.

And in that moment, I felt an entire nation come to the aid of what so many of us in the black community feel happens often enough. Some of us feel as though on every street corner theres a police officer. Theyre ready and waiting to shoot a black man. I do not believe that that is the case. And well talk about that.

Here are @Kathy4Truth's full comments in context so you can see the part @GregKellyUsa's and @RichardGrenell's tweets left out of the video clip. She clearly says she does NOT believe police officers are waiting on every corner to murder black men. They are lying to you. https://t.co/cx7uyNVkJM pic.twitter.com/ptyNDlaqR2  Jeff Charles (@JeffOnTheRight) May 11, 2022

Grenell also tweeted a video that featured splices of Barnettes comments that make it appear she is a social justice warrior who believes there is systemic racism, specifically among police officers,.

J.D. Rucker of The Liberty Daily wrote that, Ric Grenell doubled-down after being called out by hundreds. Instead of deleting the original tweet, he posted a heavily-edited video again trying to disparage Kathy Barnette.

This time, it takes her out of context multiple times to make it seem in very short clips that shes a BLM racist. Its quite sloppy; theres a part where she says systemic racism and then the video skips to specifically amongst police officers.'

Barnette has run her campaign on a shoestring budget, raising $1.7 million compared to McCormicks $15.9 million and Ozs $15 million cash on hand.

McCormick has spent $11 million of his own money to fund his campaign while Oz has provided $12 million of his own funds.

Barnette climbed in the polls after a May 4 debate where she called out Oz and McCormick for their ties to the World Economic Forum, adding that they are pushing globalism.

Barnette opened by talking about Ozs pro-choice past and she discussed how she was conceived from a rape when her mother was 11 and her father was 21.

Ive seen Oz saying that my life was nothing more than an acorn with electrical currents, Barnette said.

I am the product of rape and I am here to tell people like Dr. Oz that I am not a clump of cells, my life matters, she added.

Pennsylvania Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz joins former president Donald Trump onstage during a rally in support of his campaign at the Westmoreland County Fairgrounds on May 6, 2022, in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. Former President Trump endorsed Dr. Oz in the Pennsylvania Republican primary race for the U.S. Senate over his top opponent David McCormick. (Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

Oz and McCormick are pushing globalism and have ties to the World Economic Forum, which intends to implement a Chinese-style social credit system in the United States, Barnette also said at the forum.

When the debate was held on May 4, Barnette was in third place behind Oz and McCormick. The Trafalgar Group survey released on May 8 told a different story.

The U.S. Supreme Court draft claiming the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling could be overturned that was leaked last week may have played a role in Barnettes rise.

A video she released titled It wasnt a choice. It was a life has gained attention. It tells her story of being a child conceived from rape.

All of the Republicans currently running to replace retiring Republican Sen. Pat Toomey have promised to ban abortion, most making exceptions where the life of the mother is concerned and a few including cases of rape or incest.

Barnette has said she will support exceptions only if the mothers life is at risk.

Steve Bannon, who served as an adviser to Trump, called Barnettes platform Ultra-MAGA.

He has praised Barnette for not stopping discussion about decertifying the 2020 presidential election and for refusing to concede her defeat in a 2020 U.S. House race.

The reason she has struck a chord is she never conceded her House race loss, Bannon told Axios. Pennsylvania is MAGA vs. Ultra MAGA.

With the U.S. Senate in a 50-50 split, and Pennsylvanias track record as an important swing state, the race to fill Toomeys seat is deemed crucial by both parties.

The GOP nominee will likely face Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D) in the general election on Nov. 8.
Hong Kong to Implement Passenger Screening System, Prompting Concerns That CCP Will Obtain the Data

The Hong Kong Legislative Council recently held a meeting to discuss implementation of the Advance Notification of Passenger Information system, planned to be operating in the third quarter of 2024. The system will conduct risk assessments, screen people arriving in Hong Kong, and consider national security and other factors.

The news caused social controversy. Some scholars said the action was obviously excessive and designed to obtain personal information about people. They suspect the authorities will extend the forecast mechanism to Hong Kong outbound passengers. Scholars have also questioned whether the relevant data will be reported to the mainland law enforcement agencies in real time if the intermediaries who set up and manage the relevant systems have a mainland China background. Thus, Hong Kong data will become shared data.

On May 3, the Hong Kong Legislative Council Security Panel met to discuss the Advance Notification of Passenger Information system stipulated in the amended Immigration Ordinance last year. The system requires airlines to provide personal data of passengers and crew on flights heading to Hong Kong before departure, and people can only board the planes to Hong Kong after their data has been reviewed by the authorities. The Hong Kong government emphasized that people with the right of abode in Hong Kong will not be issued with denied boarding instructions, and the system is only applicable to inbound flights.

Sonny Au Chi-kwong, deputy secretary of the Hong Kong Security Bureau, said at the meeting that one of the purposes of the system is to prevent non-refoulement applicants (asylum seekers) from arriving in Hong Kong. In addition, the forecast system will conduct risk assessments and deter persons involved in endangering national security, who are unfavorable to Hong Kong, and potential non-refoulement applicants. However, Sonny Au Chi-kwong did not explain what is considered unfavorable to Hong Kong, and emphasized that the Immigration Department would make the final decision. He said that allowing a passenger to board the plane did not mean the person would enter Hong Kong.

In addition, the Immigration (Amendment) Ordinance empowers the Secretary for Security Bureau to formulate regulations to implement the system.

According to a public document issued by the Hong Kong Legislative Council on May 3, the new forecast system requires airline operators to submit the personal information of passengers and crew to the Hong Kong Immigration Department at least 40 minutes before the flight departs, including: name, date of birth, gender, nationality , and the type, number, expiry date, and issuing country or agency of the valid travel document.

Airline operators can be fined 100,000 yuan (about $12,700) upon conviction of failing to provide complete and accurate information within a specified time or allowing people to board a plane without an authorized boarding order, according to the documents.

The government plans to start bidding in the first quarter of 2023, and to implement the system in 2024. The Security Bureau estimates that the promotion of the forecast system will involve a total of nearly HK$300 million (about $38.26 million) in non-recurrent expenditures in the four financial years from 2022-2023 to 2025-2026, for the purchase of software and hardware, and the establishment of communication networks. The forecast system is expected to cost 71.69 million yuan (about $9.14 million) annually after it is put into operation.

In fact, many activists, scholars, and political figures outside China have been refused entry by the Hong Kong government in the past, such as Taiwanese scholar Wu Ruiren, and former Supreme Court justice of the Philippines, and Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales. Wu Ruiren has been named by pro-CCP newspapers as violating the Hong Kong National Security Law. Morales has charged the CCP government with crimes against humanity in the disputed South China Sea, to the International Criminal Court.

Sonny Au Chi-kwong also revealed that ifrom 2019 to 2021, the Hong Kong authorities have stopped nearly 10,000 people from entering Hong Kong.

In an interview with The Epoch Times, Zhong Jianhua, the deputy chief executive of Hong Kong Minyan Research Institute in the United Kingdom, said that Hong Kong immigration officials have always had the power to deny entry to anyone without giving any reason at all. The Hong Kong governments current move obviously has the mandate of obtaining excessive amounts of personal information, which will inevitably affect Hong Kongs role as a shipping hub. He doubts that the Hong Kong government will extend the forecasting mechanism to Hong Kong outbound passengers in the future.

Yang Yingyu, former manager of the Assessment Development Department of the History Division of the Hong Kong Examination and Assessment Authority, who also resides in the UK, told The Epoch Times that the key point of the policy is that the Hong Kong government intends to employ an intermediary to set up and manage the relevant network. He questioned whether the intermediary people will collect data of overseas visitors and Hong Kong residents, and report it to mainland law enforcement agencies in real time, so that Hong Kong data will become shared data.

Wang Anran, a senior current affairs commentator in Hong Kong, believes that one of the goals of the Hong Kong governments introduction of the Advance Notification of Passenger Information system may be to target mainland senior officials or their children who travel abroad via Hong Kong. He said this system could enable the authorities to obtain the information of the officials and their children when they are about to go to Hong Kong, and then question them about why they are leaving China.
Icon carver Jonathan Pageau and the power of symbolism

Canadian icon carver Jonathan Pageau is bringing symbolism back to life. His brilliant icon carvings hark back to a bygone world that seems relevant only to Christians, yet the icon represents the pinnacle of a symbolic world were all immersed in.

Pageau sees symbolism as an antidote to the nihilism that pervades our world.

St. Michael Killing the Dragon, 2019, by Jonathan Pageau. Soapstone, gold leaf, basma (metalwork), serpentine, onyx, lapis lazuli, and antique pine frame by Andrew Gould; 18 inches by 32 inches. (Andrew Gould)

Just as icons guide Christians in their spiritual life, so secular symbols throughout our traditional cultureas in our songs, stories, and imagescan guide us, giving us hope and purpose each and every day.

Pageau is doing his utmost to spread the word that symbols are alive, well, and all around us. Primarily, he carves icons for liturgical purposes and private devotion.

But hes also created a thriving online community where he teaches iconography, restores the symbolic worldview, and talks with thinkers such as Jordan Peterson who, Pageau says, are trying to restore a sense of meaning and to help heal the deep nihilism that is infusing our culture right now.

St. Michael and the Sword, 2020, by Jonathan Pageau. Soapstone, gold leaf, basma (metalwork), serpentine, onyx, and lapis lazuli; 9 inches by 12 inches. (Jonathan Pageau)

The Traditional Art of the Church

Iconography really is a deep well of wisdom and of insight that Christianity developed in its burgeoning state, he said by telephone. He explained that in the first millennium of Christianity, the church developed a sacred visual language that, although not mandated, spread throughout the Christian world.

Christians visiting churches, from England to Syria, could understand the sacred art they saw even when local styles differed, as there was a clear iconographical language that crossed cultures.

Christ Pulls St. Peter From the Waters, 2022, by Jonathan Pageau. Linden wood with gold leaf; 4 inches by 5 inches. (Jonathan Pageau)

Pageau believes that iconography could be called the traditional art of the Christian church.

During the Renaissance, the Western church slowly moved away from that transcendent medieval visual language and began making realistic art full of gestures and emotions.

Purposeful Art

Pageau nearly stopped making art. Growing up, he became interested in visual art. After graduating from art school, he began creating modern art but found it unfulfilling.

He faced two problems. First, he grew up Protestant and image-making was taboo. Secondly, he found postmodern art to be cynical and ironic. All he wanted to create was something real and tangible but, in the postmodern art world, that was impossible.

One day he took all his art and threw it away, saying to his wife that hed never make art again. She laughed, and told him that was not quite true, for she felt sure he would.

Then he discovered medieval art. I really fell in love with the [visual] language; I thought it was amazing. He could see the Bible stories in the art. And he noticed how the artists created patterns of meaning that he likens to a sacred algebra, where they took elements from one image and then transposed them in another.

Pageau became disappointed that this type of art no longer existed. Then he found that in Eastern Orthodoxy, the tradition had been preserved and developed.

St. Anne and the Virgin, 2014, by Jonathan Pageau. Linden wood; 3 inches by 4 inches. (Jonathan Pageau)

Researching Eastern Orthodoxy, Pageau resonated with its theology and practices, particularly its more mystical approach to Christianityso much so that he eventually converted to Eastern Orthodoxy.

Making art in the Eastern Orthodox tradition solved both his problems. This type of art was completely integrated into the social fabric. It wasnt just arbitrary images, he said. He found that Eastern Orthodoxy had a well-developed theological explanation of why icons existed, and he was now making objects for a sacred purpose: to be used in the church or in private devotion.

Gospel cover, 2017, by Jonathan Pageau. Boxwood, and leather, with basma (metalwork) by Andrew Gould. (Andrew Gould)

Pageau took a university-level course in Eastern Orthodox theology with iconography expert Father Stephen Bigham, who mentored him in the language of iconography.

Transcendent Carving

Pageau first started carving in his spare time because it was something he loved doing. When his bishop saw him carving, he asked Pageau to make him a panagia, the pendant featuring the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child that Eastern Orthodox bishops wear when giving Divine Liturgy.

Hed never made a miniature before, so he contacted a Serbian carver who guided him through the process, which took several days. Pageau laughed when he said, He was ruthless with me. It was wonderful. His mentors feedback helped him improve.

Panagia carving, 2012, by Jonathan Pageau. Soapstone; 2.5 inches by 1.5 inches. (Jonathan Pageau)

Finally, when he felt hed done his best, he gave the pendant to his bishop after the liturgy. Hed become so lost in the process of making the best carving he could, but his bishops reaction woke him up. As his bishop unwrapped the pendant he made a gesture of reverence, crossing himself and bowing slightly. Pageau was taken aback. My bishop wasnt seeing my artwork at that moment.  He was seeing the Virgin. he said.

A bishop wears the panagia that Jonathan Pageau made for him. A panagia is an Eastern Orthodox ceremonial pendant of the Virgin and the Christ Child. (Courtesy of Jonathan Pageau)

It was all Pageau had hoped for. He realized that his bishop would wear the object hed made and that it would follow the bishop through his spiritual life, including his church services.

He also realized the price of such reverence. No one will have a gesture of reverence in front of a Picasso painting, he said. To access that reverence, he had to let go of his pride and his desire to own the language in the image, to let go of any notion that he was the one doing the work rather than its coming from the divine. He welcomed the trade-off.

Carving Icons

Paintings are the main type of church iconography, but carved icons are often used for their durability, especially for objects that need regular handling or for furniture. Christians use small carved icons in the home to help them pray and to remind them of a saint.

St. Michael, 2018, by Jonathan Pageau. Linden wood with gold leaf; 22 inches tall. (Jonathan Pageau)

Pageau makes icons mostly in stone or woodfrom personal pendants and jewelry to Gospel covers, reliquaries, and devotional statues, to furniture and architectural church carvings. For his stonework, he carves into a light-colored soapstone he imports from Kenya.

Crozier for 375th anniversary of Montreal 2019, by Jonathan Pageau. Soapstone, maple wood, and gold leaf. (Jonathan Pageau)

Pageaus work tends to be most influenced by Byzantine art, similar to those works that would have existed in 11th- and 12th-century Constantinople. The Byzantine style is steeped in theological meaning. One only has to look in Byzantine churches to see the golden mosaics full of Christian symbols and stylized figures that look out at worshipers, to inspire and deepen their faith. Byzantine artists often decorated their works with jewels, enamels, metalwork, and carved ivories, to name a few.

St. Gabriel, 2016, by Jonathan Pageau. Soapstone, gold leaf, basma (metalwork), serpentine, onyx, lapis lazuli, blue quartzite, red jasper, jade, with basma stand and frame by Andrew Gould; about 14 inches tall. (Andrew Gould)

But Pageau is not a purist. Hes inspired by the different threads of the Christian tradition, and he makes art that shines with the best of what Christianity has to offer. For example, his work may be influenced by early Gothic art, Romanesque art, or Coptic, Byzantine, Russian, Serbian, or even Armenian images, depending on what combines to create something that is both beautiful and recognizable.

St. Margaret, 2020, by Jonathan Pageau. Soapstone, gold leaf, basma (metalwork), serpentine, onyx, and lapis lazuli; 9 inches by 12 inches. (Jonathan Pageau)

In one icon, for instance, he may use decorative elements such as a basma (a thin sheet of metal, often tin or sometimes silver), which is embossed or engraved with patterns. Russian iconographers nailed the basma directly onto the icon as a frame or as a background for the icon itself. And in another, he may look to the early Gothic style of Christian art, which originated in Ile-de-France (the region around Paris), that is generally characterized by graceful figures with elongated limbs and expressions that were more human than previous styles. Again, each figure or image was made to bring the viewer closer to God.

Pageau is not making carbon copies of the past; theres flexibility in the icon tradition. He likens making icons to writing traditional poetry. You can recognize a sonnet by its form. Its the same with an icon. You can recognize an icon of the Transfiguration of Christ by certain elements, but then theres some play in how that comes together, he explained.

Pageau knows what elements should be used in an image to convey its inner language so he can change the style and harmoniously include some surprising elements. For example, two traditional symbols of the transfiguration of Christrays of divine light that emanate from him and a vertical ellipse called a mandorla, which surrounds Christ much like a haloboth indicate that he is an enlightened being.

Transfiguration, 2015, by Jonathan Pageau. Linden wood and gold leaf; 3 inches by 4 inches. (Jonathan Pageau)

Pageau decides the iconography of each image he makes after understanding his patrons needs. The complexity of the design is directly related to the cost. Pageau draws the icon, and the design is agreed to with the patron. Pageaus assistant then traces the design onto the wood or stone and carves out the background by hand. Pageau hand carves the details and then embellishes the icon with mosaics, metalwork, or collages of semiprecious stones, such as lapis lazuli or serpentine, depending on the carvings complexity.

Sometimes when Pageau works, hell find that all of a sudden certain things start happening in his life that are related to the saint whose image hes carving, as if the saint is somehow reaching out to him. In those moments, he feels that hes being pushed forward, closer to the mystery and a deepening of his faith.

A priest may bless the finished icon, depending on the patrons request.

The Nihilism Cure

Pageau believes that nothing exists for its own sake; everything in the world exists for a reason, and each thing forms a giant web of meaning. Symbolism can be seen as the fabric of reality, and when we see that, it can inform our worldview.

The Creation of the World, 2018, by Jonathan Pageau. Soapstone and gold leaf; 10 inches by 10 inches. (Jonathan Pageau)

Symbolism is the very structure of our experience, Pageau said, and the pattern by which we are able to attend to things. When symbolism is woven into songs, stories, and images, and the more its condensed, were even more able to perceive the pattern.

Pageau explained that when we understand that we have daily rituals (we move with purpose every day, from putting on our socks to having a family meal), then we can see that religion ultimately takes us to our higher purpose by helping us participate in the patterns of reality. And so symbolism is inevitable in your life, he said.

He understands that when we are guided by the purity of religious images, biblical stories, and the morals in myths and fairy taleswhich all contain condensed symbolsthey can help us make sense of the more messy parts of our everyday life and help us discern truth from ornament.

Symbolism is really a way out of the morass of our contemporary world, he said.

To find out more about Jonathan Pageaus art, visit PageauCarvings.com
Independent Police Oversight Firm to Review Santa Ana Police Team

SANTA ANA, Calif.An independent police oversight specialist will review an elite unit within the Santa Ana Police Department after a progressive blog accused some officers of having matching gang-like tattoos and assaulting citizens.

Santa Ana Police Chief David Valentin May 11 disputed the allegations made by KnockLA, calling it misinformation.

This misinformation included baseless attacks on the integrity of some of the most dedicated members of our police department, Valentin said in a YouTube video. I want to assure the community that my command staff and I hold our officers to the highest standards.

Santa Ana Police Chief David Valentin speaks at the police station in Santa Ana, Calif., on March 11, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Last month, the blog accused officers serving with the departments Major Enforcement Team of sharing gang-like skull tattoos and carrying tokens or coins with a slogan on it.

The blog, which was founded by Ground Game LA, a progressive nonprofit group that has called for abolishing the police, also alleges the officers were involved in misconduct but did not face discipline.

In one instance, according to the blog, the enforcement team allegedly verbally harassed two teenage girls and groped one of them at a Culichi Town restaurant in 2020.

Another alleged incident reportedly occurred a year later when officers allegedly groped a woman during an incident in a parking lot at The Copper Door nightclub in Santa Ana.

The police chief has directed the Office of Independent Review Group, an independent police auditing company, to review the case following an internal investigation, he said.

The groups Michael Gennaco told The Epoch Times in an email he was asked to review the complaints and said he hoped to have more information about the investigation in the next 30 to 60 days.

At this point, I am just getting up to speed on the allegations and dont have anything further to share, Gennaco said.

According to the police chief, some of the misinformation stems from a call made to 911 regarding a public disturbance at the Culichi Town restaurant. Patrol officers concluded that no crime had occurred, Valentin said.

The department received two anonymous complaints months later alleging off-duty officers with the enforcement team had verbally harassed two teenagers and groped one of them during the incident. More complaints followed.

The police department conducted an internal affairs investigation and interviewed community members while also reviewing body-worn cameras and other information from the alleged incident, Valentin said.

During the interviews, the alleged victim told police she was not sure if someone had touched her intentionally or by accident.

The alleged touching was described as a brief personal contact in a crowded area, Valentin said. Additionally, the physical description she provided of the man who allegedly touched her did not match or even resemble any of the MET [Major Enforcement Team] officers.

The police department concluded the five-month internal investigation after finding no evidence of wrongdoing, he said.

However, Valentin added the matter was still under investigation and the department plans to hold anyone accountable for any violations of department policy.

The police chief noted that similar tattoos and sharing challenge coins were not illegal activities and can represent a form of camaraderie among members of law enforcement, the military, and other groups who work closely together in dangerous situations or professions.

[Major Enforcement Team] handles some of the most challenging and complex cases in our city and its members are veteran officers and members of our community since its formation in 2020, Valentin said.

The team has made 1,525 arrests, responded to 81 tactical deployments, and has served 54 search warrants, according to the police chief.

The team has also removed 109 guns from Santa Ana streets, he said.
Police and protesters outside the U.S. Capitol's Rotunda in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images)

Jan. 6 Prosecutors Threatened Oath Keepers With Life Sentences, Raised Treason Analogy

Members of the Oath Keepers charged with seditious conspiracy in connection with the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, were told they could face life in prison, according to a letter discussing plea deal negotiations obtained by The Epoch Times.

Nine members charged with conspiracy were told that a lack of recommended sentencing for the charge means the court would apply the sentencing guidelines for the most analogous charge.

The United States takes the position that the most analogous offense to seditious conspiracy is treason,' prosecutors said.

The charge of treason carries a potential death penalty, although prosecutors indicated the defendants would face a life sentence if they didnt plead guilty. Thats despite the seditious conspiracy charge itself only carrying a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.

The threat was contained in a letter that stated the government would stop negotiating plea deals on May 6.

None of the nine Oath Keepers pleaded guilty before the deadline.

The attempted link to treason is absurd, Alan Dershowitz, a professor of law emeritus at Harvard Law School, and who is representing a Jan. 6 defendant who isnt an Oath Keeper, told The Epoch Times in an email.

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorneys Office for the District of Columbia declined to comment.

The government could have trouble with its position, since it noted in a recent filing that the late Sen. Lyman Trumbull, the sponsor of the bill that first made seditious conspiracy a crime in 1861, said the bills purpose was to to punish persons who conspire together to commit offenses against the United States not analogous to treason.

The Conspiracies Act provided a middle option to address serious criminal conduct that did not rise to the level of a capital offense, including conspiracies to commit acts of treason, insurrection, or obstruction of government functions that failed to achieve their purpose, prosecutors added in their brief.

Ben Glassman, a former U.S. attorney in Ohio, told The Wall Street Journalwhich first reported on the letterthat the government has an obligation to set out that kind of worst-case scenario for a defendant because  it is important for a defendant to understand the possible risks of going to trial.

Jonathon Moseley, who has been representing Oath Keeper Kelly Meggs, but is on caretaker status due to his recent disbarment until his client secures new counsel, said that the letter was part of a series of actions by prosecutors that are designed to get defendants to accept plea deals, including quick production of evidence bolstering the cases against the defendants and lagging presentation of evidence that could exonerate them.

It definitely seems like everything about the case here is to try to pressure people into pleading guilty, Moseley told The Epoch Times.

Meggs, facing seditious conspiracy and five other charges, would have considered agreeing to a deal, but only if the government dropped the more serious charges, as is typical in such agreements.

Lawyers for the eight other defendants either declined to comment or didnt respond to queries by press time.

Three other members of the Oath Keepers pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy before the deadline, although it isnt clear if any received the same or similar letters.

Joshua James pleaded guilty on March 2, Brian Ulrich pleaded guilty on April 29, and William Todd Wilson pleaded guilty on May 4.

Overall, almost 800 people have been charged in the breach on the district or federal level. Approximately 248 have pleaded guilty to federal charges. Only a handful of trials have been completed. All defendants who have gone before juries have been convicted on all charges; those who went before judges received split or full acquittals.

Joe Hanneman contributed to this report.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and European Council President Charles Michel announce their joint statement at the prime minister's official residence, in Tokyo on May 12, 2022. (Yoshikazu Tsuno/Pool via Reuters)

Japan and EU Leaders Announce Digital Partnership Amid Chinese Aggression

Leaders from Japan and the EU announced a new digital partnership on May 12 following a summit in which they discussed how to jointly contend with rising authoritarianism amid Russias invasion of Ukraine, nuclear saber rattling from North Korea, and increased aggression from Chinas communist regime.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida met with European Council President Charles Michel and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at the 28th EUJapan summit in Tokyo, where they reaffirmed their commitment to upholding democratic norms, the rules-based international order, and a free and open Indo-Pacific.

Today we discussed the deepening strategic and economic partnership between the European Union and Japan, Michel said. We addressed our bilateral relations and important regional and global challenges, and how best to coordinate our responses.

The EU and Japan are truly like-minded partners. Together we represent a quarter of global GDP. We have a deep and dynamic relationship, united by the fundamental values of democracy and rule of law. Japan is our closest strategic partner in the Indo-Pacific region.

Michel noted Japans elevated relationship with the EU as the two have held an economic partnership since 2019, and Japan is the only Asian nation to date to appear in the EUs strategy for bolstering European security and defense.

To that end, Michel recognized that Japan provided significant humanitarian, financial and military support to Ukraine and its people, following Russias invasion, and underscored the desire by Japan and the EU to build out that shared commitment and to expand dialogues on how to best handle the increasingly aggressive Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Our cooperation in Ukraine is critical in Europe, but its also important in the Indo-Pacific, and we also want to deepen our consultations on a more assertive China, Michel said.

We believe that China must stand up to defend the multilateral system that it has benefited from in developing its country.

Michels comments echoed remarks made by U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman in April, when she noted that, for all its attempts to undermine the rules-based international order, the CCP was one of the biggest beneficiaries of that rules-based international order over the last half-century.

Chinas Shadow Over the Indo-Pacific

The summit comes amid increased international pushback in response to a range of Chinas activities. These include the CCPs attempts to forcibly expand its territory through the creation of artificial islands, its stated commitment to unifying Taiwan with the mainland even by force, its ongoing repression of religious and ethnic minority groups, an extensive campaign of spying and intimidation, and its wide-reaching efforts to modernize and expand its nuclear arsenal.

Given that, von der Leyen referred to the Indo-Pacific as a theater of tensions, and said the EU would need to work more with partners like Japan to protect the peace and stability of the region.

The European Union wants to take a more active role in the Indo-Pacific, von der Leyen said. We want to take more responsibility in a region that is so vital to our prosperity.

Apart from Michels remarks, however, direct references to China were few at the summit.

But veiled discussion was apparent of the CCPs threats against Taiwan as well as of the regimes aggressive behavior and increased military drills in the East China Sea and South China Sea.

We remain seriously concerned about the situation in the East China Sea, including in the waters surrounding the Senkaku islands and South China Sea, and strongly oppose any unilateral attempts to change the status quo and increase tensions that could undermine regional stability and the international rules-based order, the leaders said in a joint statement.

We express serious concern about reports of militarization, coercion, and intimidation in the South China Sea.

We underscore the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, and encourage the peaceful resolution of cross-Strait issues.

We strongly oppose any unilateral attempt to change the status quo by force, regardless of the location, as a serious threat to the entire international order.

To that end, the leaders announced that Japan and the EU would jointly work to expand practical cooperation in several domains, including maritime security, crisis management, cybersecurity, and countering disinformation.

Such efforts, Michel said, were vital to the continuation of a free and open Indo-Pacific, and to support the unity and centrality of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The comments may signal a further alignment with the United States, which on May 12 is hosting eight of the 10 national leaders of ASEAN in Washington as it attempts to sway the region away from increased ties with the CCP.

We will enhance cooperation for a free and open Indo-Pacific, which is inclusive and based on the rule of law and democratic values, as well as unconstrained by coercion, based upon our respective, complementary strategies for the Indo-Pacific region, the leaders said.

Such work, the leaders said, would be grounded in common interests and the shared values of freedom, respect for human rights, democracy, the rule of law, open, free and fair trade, effective multilateralism and the rules-based international order.

A New Digital Partnership

To achieve those ends, the leaders announced the adoption of a new digital partnership (pdf) that would increase JapanEU collaboration on some of the largest security issues of the day.

The new JapanEU Digital Partnership is the first of its kind between the EU and an outside country. It doesnt create legal or fiscal obligations between the two governments but aims to jointly establish structures for collaboration across technological development, implementation, and policy.

Areas of focus include privacy, supply chain resiliency, access to semiconductors, 5G, AI, data flows, and the possibility of alignment regarding the regulation of blockchain technologies.

The partnership will expand upon the extant strategic and economic partnerships maintained by the EU and Japan, which, according to EU documents (pdf), already constitute together the worlds largest area of safe data flows, allowing for the free and trusted flow of personal data.

Its creation was guided by the vision to create a genuine internal market for data, where data flows freely across sectors and countries, according to the leaders.

The announcement follows warnings from several experts that Western-style democracies and authoritarian regimes were increasingly decoupling, breaking the world into distinct technospheres with their own norms, rules, and standards for technology.

The links between Europe and Asia appear to be growing, not receding, in the face of CCP threats, a point Kishida was quick to highlight.

Security in Europe and in the Indo-Pacific are inseparable, he said.
A woman walks past a Skid Row sign pointing out a population of "Too Many" in Los Angeles, on April 26, 2021. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)

LA City Council Approves Settlement of Homelessness Lawsuit

LOS ANGELESThe Los Angeles City Council approved a settlement with the LA Alliance for Human Rights on May 11 in which the city will spend up to $3 billion over the next five years to develop as many as 16,000 beds or housing units for the homeless, enough to accommodate 60 percent of the homeless population in each of the 15 City Council districts.

Today, this council voted to formalize our commitment to building more housing as we approved the settlement for the LA Alliance Case. As a city we will continue breaking down housing barriers for unhoused Angelenos and bringing them indoors at rates weve never seen before, Council President Nury Martinez wrote on Twitter after the vote.

Council members voted 123 to approve the settlement, with Councilwoman Nithya Raman and Councilmen Mike Bonin and Marqueece Harris-Dawson voting no. When the settlement was first announced in April, Bonin said he opposed it, saying it wont really help us solve homelessness.

This settlement is structured to allow the city to do the minimum necessary to step up the failed and expensive enforcement strategies it always uses  it also perpetuates the council district-by-council district approach, which is piecemeal, scattered, inefficient and unsuccessful, he tweeted on April 1.

The settlement of the federal case does not include Los Angeles County, which is also a defendant in the lawsuit, but city officials said the county will be responsible for providing services and housing for homeless individuals with serious mental illness, substance-use issues, or chronic physical illnesses.

City leaders said the county must provide services for that segment of the homeless population, since it has the medical and social-work facilities to do sowhile the city does not.

The actual number of housing units and beds the city will be required to build under the settlement remains uncertain, pending the results of the recently conducted point-in-time countywide homeless count. But city officials estimate that meeting the terms of the settlement will require the addition of 14,000 to 16,000 beds, costing between $2.4 billion and $3 billion.

A large portion of those required units is believed to be already in the planning stages with funding from the 2016 voter-approved Proposition HHH, a $1.2 billion bond measure to fund homelessness solutions.

According to the most recent homeless count, conducted prior to the pandemic in 2020, the countywide homeless population was 66,433, a nearly 13 percent increase from the previous year. The City of Los Angeles homeless population was 36,165, up 14 percent from the prior year.

The county was named as a co-defendant with the city in the March 2020 complaint, but it recently withdrew from closed-door settlement talks in Los Angeles federal court.

In February, U.S. District Judge David Carter ordered a series of mandatory settlement talks to begin after city and county representatives indicated they had no sense of when or if they might strike a deal that would lead to an agreement with the Alliancean association of downtown residents, homeless individuals, and property owners who filed the suit.

The lawsuit brought by the LA Alliance had been on hold almost since it was filed, with the goal of forcing local government to comprehensively deal with the homelessness crisis downtown.

Settlement talks eventually expanded from the original lawsuit focus of downtowns Skid Row area to the thousands of transients living under or next to the regions freeways, then ultimately to the countys entire homeless population.

Skip Miller, outside counsel for the county, has long argued that the county should not be held accountable for Skid Row because the city has primary jurisdiction.

Miller issued a statement in April saying the lawsuit has no merit with regard to the county.

It is between the plaintiffs and the city, and were glad they settled, he said. We intend to litigate and win this case. The county is more than doing its job and doing everything possible to address homelessness without stigmatizing it as a crime. Any assertion that the county has failed on this obligation is utterly baseless. Unlike the lawsuit, which focuses on four miles of downtown L.A., the county is obligated by law to use its resources equitably among all 88 cities and unincorporated areas within the 4,000 square miles of its jurisdiction.

The plaintiffs said that wherever the homeless are located, services have not kept pace with the ever-expanding crisis.
Los Angeles councilman Joe Buscaino speaks at The Warner Grand Theater in San Pedro, Calif., on Feb. 27, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

LA Councilman Buscaino Drops out of Mayoral Race, Supports Caruso

LOS ANGELESLos Angeles City Councilman Joe Buscaino dropped out of the race for mayor on May 12 and announced his support for his former opponent, billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso.

Angelenos have already been sent their ballots from the Los Angeles County Clerk, and voting ends for the election on June 7. The top two candidates will face off on Nov. 8.

Rick and I agree on the playbook to solve the citys pressing issues, Buscaino said. Todays decision did not come easy, but the future of Los Angeles is my priority. Together, we will make Los Angeles cleaner and safer for all.

Buscaino and Caruso have both run tough-on-crime campaigns, including calling for the Los Angeles Police Department to be expanded with 1,500 additional officers.

Buscaino is a former LAPD officer, and Caruso previously led the Los Angeles Police Commission.

The Los Angeles Police Protective League endorsed Caruso over Buscaino in February.

I have tremendous respect for Joe and his deep commitment to the people of Los Angeles, Caruso said. Im honored to have his endorsement and look forward to his counsel on issues like homelessness and criminal justice.

Rick Caruso (2nd R) makes a rebuttal during the mayoral debate with candidates (from L) Joe Buscaino, Kevin de Leon, Karen Bass and Mike Feuer at USCs Bovard Auditorium in Los Angeles on March 22, 2022. (Myung J. Chun/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

Unlike the other front runners in the election, Caruso has ran a largely self-funded campaign, spending nearly $23 million of his own money on the campaign as of April 28, according to the Los Angeles Times. Rep. Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles) has raised more than $1 million since the start of the year and spent almost $800,000, the LA Times reported.

The primary ballotsent out before Buscaino ended his campaignincludes Buscaino, Caruso, Bass, City Attorney Mike Feuer, Councilman Kevin de Leon, activist Gina Viola, real estate agent Mel Wilson, business executive Craig Greiwe, social justice advocate Alex Gruenenfelder Smith, lawyer Andrew Kim, entrepreneur Ramit Varma and business owner John Jsamuel Jackson.

A poll from the Los Angeles Times and the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies on April 11 found Caruso essentially tied with Bass, with Caruso polling at 24 percent and Bass at 23 percent.

Buscaino, however, was polling at 1 percent, down from 4 percent in the same poll conducted in February.

Basss team released the results on May 12 of a poll commissioned by her campaign that had her leading the race with 30 percent of likely voters and Caruso coming in at 28 percent. That poll put Buscaino at 2 percent. More than a quarter of likely voters were undecided.
Latvian Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins takes part in an interview with The Canadian Press at the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa on May 12, 2022. (The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick)

Latvia Seeks Canadian Support for Expanded, Permanent NATO Presence in Baltics

Latvias prime minister is in Ottawa today seeking Canadas support for an expanded, permanent NATO force in his country and fellow Baltic states Lithuania and Estonia.

In an interview, Krisjanis Karins says such an enhanced military presence will send a strong signal to Russia not to consider invading.

Karins is expected to convey his request directly to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau when the two meet later today.

Canada currently has nearly 700 troops leading a NATO battlegroup in Latvia, one of four forces in the Baltics and Poland designed to deter a Russian attack.

Karins says the Canadians are performing admirably alongside counterparts from nine other alliance members, and that his country is grateful for their presence.

But he says Russias invasion on Ukraine has shown the damage that such a conflict can sow on a nation, and the need to prevent Moscow from even considering an attack on the Baltics.

By Lee Berthiaume
The headquarters of German engineering conglomerate Siemens AG stands at twilight on Aug. 23, 2018 in Munich, Germany. (Lennart Preiss/Getty Images)

RussiaUkraine War (May 12): German Industrial Giant Siemens Is Leaving Russia After Nearly 170 Years

The latest on the RussiaUkraine crisis, May 12. Click here for updates from May 11.

German Industrial Giant Siemens Is Leaving Russia After Nearly 170 Years

German industrial giant Siemens AG says it is exiting Russia, where it has operated for almost 170 years.

We condemn the war in Ukraine and have decided to carry out an orderly process to wind down our industrial business activities in Russia, Roland Busch, the Munich-based companys CEO, said Thursday.

Siemens had been one of the first companies to put all new business in Russia, along with international deliveries to the country, on hold following Russias invasion of Ukraine in February.

The company said it had been evaluating the situation with the eye of ensuring the safety of its 3,000 employees in Russia.

The maker of trains and industrial equipment said the Russia sanctions shaved off about 600,000 euros ($623,000) from its fiscal second-quarter results, which were reported Thursday.

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Rand Paul Stalls Quick Senate OK of $40 Billion Ukraine Package

Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul defied leaders of both parties Thursday and single-handedly delayed until next week Senate approval of an additional $40 billion to help Ukraine and its allies withstand Russias three-month-old invasion.

Faced with the prospect of an extended delay for the package that passed the House of Representatives on Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and his Republican counterpart, Mitch McConnell, sought to move forward on the aid package only to be blocked by Paul, a longtime fiscal hawk who objects to the amount of spending proposed.

The stalemate has threatened to delay passage of the measure into next week. Late on Thursday, Schumer moved to limit debate on the bill, which could set up an initial procedural vote on Monday. But it was not clear whether leaders were still trying to negotiate a deal that would further speed the bill along.

If the Senate debate on Ukraine aid spills into next week, it could cause problems for Western nations trying to bolster Ukraine in its fight against Russia. The Biden administration has said that by May 19 it expects to run out of available funds to draw on under an authority that allows the president to authorize the transfer of weapons without congressional approval in response to an emergency.

Paul is demanding that the legislation be altered to require an inspector general to oversee spending on Ukraine. Without his agreement, the Senate must follow a lengthy process stipulated by the chambers arcane rules.

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Rocket Attacks Intensify on Poltava Region

Rocket attacks on Ukraines central Poltava region on Thursday were perhaps the most intense for the duration of the war, the regional governor said that same day.

Todays shelling of the Poltava region is perhaps the largest during the course of this full-scale war, Dmitry Lunin wrote in a Telegram post, and 12 Russian missiles hit the infrastructure in [the city of] Kremenchuk; most of them hit an oil refinery that was not operational anyway.

Rescuers are putting out a fire at the refinery. Luckily, no one was hurt, Lunin added.

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War Forces Ukraine to Divert $8.3 Billion to Military Spending, Tax Revenue Drops: Minister

Ukraine has been forced to spend 245.1 billion hryvnia ($8.3 billion) on its war with Russia instead of development, the finance minister said on Thursday, providing a glimpse into the huge economic cost of Moscows Feb. 24 invasion.

The figure, which has not been disclosed by Ukraines government before, lays bare the economic maelstrom that Ukraine is navigating as its soldiers try to keep Russias renewed offensive at bay in the countrys east.

The spendingdrawn from some funds initially budgeted for developmentwent on everything from buying and repairing weapons to emergency support for internally displaced people (IDP), Finance Minister Serhiy Marchenko said. There are 2.7 million officially registered IDPs, according to data from the social policy ministry, although the real figure is likely many times higher.

The government only collected 60 percent of its planned tax revenue for April, a shortfall that was topped up to the equivalent of 79.5 percent by grants from foreign partners, Marchenko told Reuters in exclusive written comments.

Marchenko said that Kyiv urgently needed foreign support to be ramped up as it is being forced to funnel billions of additional dollars into emergency spending.

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Ukraines Foreign Minister: Everyone Involved in Russias Grain Transportation and Sales Will Face Legal Consequences

Ukraines foreign minister said Thursday that everyone involved in the transportation and sales of grain seized by Russia in occupied areas of the country will face legal consequences.

Russia is a criminal three times over: it bombed Syria to ruins, occupied part of Ukraine, and is now selling stolen Ukrainian grain to Syria, the ministrys press service cited Dmytro Kuleba as saying.

I want to remind the participants in this deal: what is stolen has never brought happiness to anyone. Everyone involved in the sale, transportation, or purchase of stolen grain is an accomplice to the crime, Kuleba said.

Your actions will have adequate international legal consequences. We will do everything to make your life as difficult as possible, he continued, commenting on media reports that on Wednesday, a Russian ship carrying Ukrainian grain moored off the Syrian coast.

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Zelenskyy Says Hes Ready to Talk With Putin

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says that hes ready to talk with Russian President Vladimir Putin and that we must find an agreement, but with no ultimatum as a condition.

Zelenskyy also told Italian RAI state TV in an interview scheduled to be broadcast on Thursday night that Ukraine will never recognize Crimea as part of Russia, which annexed that part of southern Ukraine in 2014.

Crimea has always had its autonomy, it has its parliament, but on the inside of Ukraine, Zelenskyy said, in excerpts of the interview that RAI released earlier on Thursday.

We want the Russian army to leave our land, we arent on Russian soil, Zelenskyy replied. We wont save Putins face by paying with our territory. That would be unjust.

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Ukrainian Ministry Officials: Russia Is Trying to Block Kyivs Forces From Advancing in the Northeastern Kharkiv Region

Ukrainian ministry officials said Thursday that Russian troops were trying to block Kyivs forces from advancing as far as the UkrainianRussian border in the northeastern Kharkiv region.

In the direction of Kharkiv, Russian army units are regrouping and trying to prevent the further advance of our troops in the direction of the state border of Ukraine, defense ministry spokesman Oleksandr Motuzyanyk said in his regular media briefing.

To this end, the occupiers launch unceasing artillery attacks on our troop units in order to inflict human losses, as well as to damage weapons and military equipment, Motuzyanyk added.

He did not clarify how close Ukrainian forces were to the border.

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Russia Withdrawing Troops From Ukraine After Heavy Losses, Intelligence Agency Says

Russia is now withdrawing some of its troops after suffering heavy losses in recent days, claimed the United Kingdoms Ministry of Defense on Thursday.

In an update posted on social media, the ministry alleged that Ukrainian forces are continuing to counterattack to the north of Kharkiv, recapturing several towns and villages towards the Russian border.

Despite Russias success in encircling Kharkiv in the initial stages of the conflict, it has reportedly withdrawn units from the region to reorganize and replenish its forces following heavy losses, the agency said, referring to the second-largest city, located in northeastern Ukraine near the Russian border.

Read the full article here

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Missiles Strike Ukrainian Industrial Hub

Between 8 and 12 Russian missiles hit the oil refinery and other infrastructure in the Ukrainian industrial hub of Kremenchuk Thursday, the acting governor of the central Poltava region said that same day.

In a Telegram post, Dmytro Lunin urged residents to remain in underground shelters, citing the persistent threat of airstrikes.

In early April, Lunin had said that the Kremenchuk refineryUkraines only remaining fully functional facility of its kind at the timewas no longer operational following a Russian attack. Moscow claimed to have targeted the refinery again at the end of the month, and to have destroyed further fuel production and storage facilities.

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Talks Are Underway Between Kyiv and Moscow on the Evacuation of Ukrainian Troops From the Azovstal Steelworks

Talks are underway between Kyiv and Moscow on the possible evacuation of 38 severely wounded Ukrainian troops from the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, Ukraines deputy PM said Thursday afternoon.

The steel mill is the only remaining stronghold of Ukrainian resistance in the ruined port city, and is now surrounded by Russian forces.

We are working step by step, Iryna Vereshchuk wrote in a public post on the Telegram messenger app.

She said that Kyiv hoped to exchange the soldiers for 38 significant Russian prisoners of war, before moving on to the next stage of the negotiations. She did not specify what this next stage would concern, but said that there were no negotiations on the exchange of 500 or 600 people.

Earlier on Thursday, an official at the Ukrainian Presidents Office said that Kyiv hoped to extract half a thousand wounded Ukrainian fighters from Azovstal.

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Ukraines Human Rights Chief: About 3,000 Mariupol Civilians Being Detained in Prisons Controlled by Pro-Russian Separatists

About 3,000 Mariupol civilians are being detained in prisons controlled by pro-Russian separatists in Ukraines industrial east, the countrys human rights chief says.

Lyudmyla Denysova claimed on social media Thursday that Kyiv is aware of at least two prisons set up in the eastern Donetsk region, one in the regional capital of Donetsk and another in Olenivka, a suburb 20 kilometers southwest of the city center.

She claimed that authorities in Kyiv had received reports of people being tortured, interrogated, threatened with execution and forced to cooperate, and others disappearing after interrogations.

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Top US Diplomat Blinken Heads to Europe for NATO, Trade Meetings

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to Germany on Saturday for a meeting of NATO foreign ministers on their response to the war in Ukraine, the State Department said on Thursday.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock last month invited the ministers to an unofficial meeting in Berlin. The meeting comes as Finland, worried by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, moves to join NATO.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said any accession process would be smooth and swift and that Finland would be warmly welcomed.

On Sunday, May 15, Blinken will travel to Paris with U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai and Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo for the second ministers meeting of the U.S.-E.U. Trade and Technology Council.

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Putin Says Large Russian Grain Harvest to Support Higher Exports

Russia, one of the worlds largest wheat exporters, will increase wheat exports this year due to a potentially record harvest, President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday.

Russia competes with the European Union and Ukraine for supplies of wheat to the Middle East and Africa. It continues to export despite difficulties with logistics and payments caused by Western sanctions on Moscow over what Russia terms its special military operation in Ukraine.

Russia currently expects to harvest 130 million tons of grain in 2022, including 87 million tons of wheat, Putin told a meeting of top economic officials in Moscow.

Russia produced a record grain crop of 133.5 million tons in 2020, including 85.9 million tons of wheat. The crop was smaller in 2021.

If this happens, which we are counting on, it could be an all-time record [for the wheat crop] in Russian history, Putin said. He did not provide an export estimate.

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Pentagon Says It Would Not Be Hard to Integrate Finland Into NATO

Finlands entry into the NATO would be historic, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told MSNBC in a television interview on Thursday, adding it would not be difficult to integrate the country into the military alliance.

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Putin: Western Sanctions Will Provoke Global Crisis

Russian President Vladimir Putin says Western sanctions against Russia are provoking a global economic crisis.

Speaking during a Thursday meeting on economic issues, Putin said Western nations were driven by oversized political ambitions and Russophobia to introduce sanctions that hurt their own economies and well-being of their citizens.

Putin charged that the sanctions are provoking a global crisis and will lead to grave consequences for the EU and also some of the poorest countries of the world that are already facing the risks of hunger.

He alleged that the Western elites are ready to sacrifice the rest of the world to preserve their global domination.

The Russian leader insisted the Russian economy has successfully withstood the blow from Western sanctions and that Russian companies will fill the niche left by the withdrawal of Western enterprises.

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Russia Says Finnish Entry to NATO Poses Threat to Which It Will Respond

Russia said on Thursday that Finlands bid to join NATO was a hostile move that definitely posed a threat to its security.

The Kremlin said it would respond but declined to spell out how, saying this would depend on how close NATO moves military assets towards the 1,300 km (800-mile) FinnishRussian frontier.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said Russia would need to take retaliatory steps, both of a military-technical and other nature, in order to stop threats to its national security arising.

Helsinki must be aware of the responsibility and consequences of such a move, it said.

The Finnish move, which Sweden is expected to replicate, confronts President Vladimir Putin with the very outcome he said his war in Ukraine was designed to preventa further expansion of NATO to Russias borders.

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Ukrainian Fighter Trapped in Mariupol Steel Plant Asks Elon Musk for Help

One of the fighters holed up in a steelworks besieged by Russian forces in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol has appealed to SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk to help evacuate them.

Many civilians were rescued from the sprawling Azovstal plant last week under an agreement with Russia, but no deal has been reached with Moscow on allowing out hundreds of fighters, some of whom are wounded, after weeks of bombardment.

@elonmusk people say you come from another planet to teach people to believe in the impossible. Our planets are next to each other, as I live where it is nearly impossible to survive, marine commander Serhiy Volina wrote on Twitter.

Help us get out of Azovstal to a mediating country. If not you, then who? Give me a hint.

Musk, the worlds richest man, owns rocket company SpaceX and electric car maker Tesla, and is planning to buy Twitter. It was not immediately clear whether Musk had seen Volinas tweet.

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UN Considers Investigation Into Possible Russian War Crimes in Ukraine

The U.N. Human Rights Council will decide on Thursday whether to launch an investigation into possible war crimes by Russian troops in the Kyiv area, a move that Russia said would amount to political score-settling.

Members were due to vote on a resolution brought by Ukraine and supported by 59 other countries, to order a Commission of Inquiry to investigate events in the regions around Kyiv that were temporarily held by Russian troops.

The areas  which have been under Russian occupation in late February and March have experienced the most gruesome human rights violations on the European continent in decades, Ukraines First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Emine Dzhaparova, told the Council.

As she spoke by video link, she held up a drawing that she said was made by an 11-year-old boy who was raped in front of his mother. He actually lost the ability to speak after and the only way he communicates is with black lines, she said.

Reuters was unable to verify Dzhaparovas account of what happened to the boy. A spokesperson for Russias diplomatic mission did not immediately respond to a request for comment on her account.

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Dmitry Medvedev: Growing Threat of the Fighting in Ukraine Spilling Into a Direct Conflict Between Russia and NATO

A top Russian official says that there is a growing threat of the fighting in Ukraine spilling into a direct conflict between Russia and NATO.

Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russias Security Council chaired by President Vladimir Putin, said Thursday that growing Western arms supplies to Ukraine and training for its troops have increased the probability that an ongoing proxy war will turn into an open and direct conflict between NATO and Russia.

He added that there is always a risk of such conflict turning into a full-scale nuclear war, a scenario that will be catastrophic for all.

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Putin Reaffirmed Russias Determination to Wrest Separatist-Held Territory From Ukraine

President Vladimir Putin has reaffirmed Russias determination to wrest separatist-held territory from Ukraine in a congratulatory message to the head of the self-proclaimed Luhansk Peoples Republic in eastern Ukraine.

Russia backed the separatists for years and recognized them as independent on the eve of invading Ukraine.

In a statement released by the Kremlin on Thursday, Putin said: I am sure that through our joint efforts we will defend the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Luhansk republic.

Meanwhile, the head of the Luhansk self-proclaimed republic, Leonid Pasechnik, said Thursday that it would never return to Ukrainian control and that most of its residents want it to become part of Russia.

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Ukraines Military: Russian Forces Continue Airstrikes on the Azovstal Steelworks

Ukraines military says Russian forces are continuing airstrikes on the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol and pressing their advance on towns in eastern Ukraine.

In its operational statement for Day 78 of the war, the Ukrainian militarys General Staff says Russian forces have also fired artillery and grenade launchers at Ukrainian troops in the direction of Zaporizhzhia, which has been a refuge for civilians fleeing Mariupol.

It did not elaborate on the latest action around Azovstal.

The military says Russian forces also fired artillery at Ukrainian units north of the city of Kharkiv in the northeast, and reported Russian strikes in the Chernihiv and Sumy regions to the north.

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Ukraine Keeps up Counterattack to North of Kharkiv, Britain Says

Ukrainian forces are keeping up a counterattack to the north of the second largest city of Kharkiv and recapturing several towns and villages toward the Russian border, Britain said on Thursday.

Russia has reportedly withdrawn units from the area and the forces are likely to redeploy after replenishing the losses to the eastern bank of the Siverskyi Donets river, the British defence ministry said in a regular Twitter bulletin.

On Wednesday, Ukraine said it had pushed back Russian forces in the east to recapture Pytomnyk, a village on the main highway north of Kharkiv, about halfway to the Russian border.

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Finland Must Apply for NATO Membership Without Delay, Finnish President and PM Say

Finland should submit an application to join the NATO military alliance, Finnish President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said in a joint statement on Thursday, a major policy shift triggered by Russias invasion of Ukraine.

Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay, Niinisto and Marin said in a joint statement.

Finland, which shares a 1,300 km (810 mile) border and a difficult past with Russia, has previously remained outside the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to maintain friendly relations with its eastern neighbour.

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Russian Forces Have Blocked All Evacuation Routes Out of City: Mariupol Official

An adviser to the Mariupol mayor said on Wednesday that Russian forces have blocked all evacuation routes out of the city.

The adviser, Petro Andriushchenko, said there were few apartment buildings fit to live in after the weeks of bombardment and very little food or drinking water.

Andriushchenko said some residents who have remained in the city are cooperating with the Russian occupying forces in exchange for food.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk says Ukraine has offered to release Russian prisoners of war if Russia will allow the badly injured fighters to be evacuated from the Mariupol steel plant.

Russian forces have surrounded the plant, the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance in the southern port city.

Vereshchuk said no agreement has been reached but negotiations were underway. The fighters trapped in the plant have refused to surrender to the Russians, saying they fear being tortured or killed.

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Ukraine to Hold First War Crimes Trial of Captured Russian

Ukraines top prosecutor disclosed plans Wednesday for the first war crimes trial of a captured Russian soldier, as fighting raged in the east and south and the Kremlin left open the possibility of annexing a corner of the country it seized early in the invasion.

Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said her office charged Sgt. Vadin Shyshimarin, 21, in the killing of an unarmed 62-year-old civilian who was gunned down while riding a bicycle in February, four days into the war.

Shyshimarin, who served with a tank unit, was accused of firing through a car window on the man in the northeastern village of Chupakhivka. Venediktova said the soldier could get up to 15 years in prison. She did not say when the trial would start.

Venediktovas office has said it has been investigating more than 10,700 alleged war crimes committed by Russian forces and has identified over 600 suspects.

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Russia Sanctions Gazprom Germania Group

Russia has imposed blocking sanctions on the entire Gazprom Germania Group taken under control by the German government.

According to a Russian government decision published Wednesday, there are 31 companies on the list, most of which belong to the Gazprom Germania Group.

Germanys Economy Ministry said it was assessing the impact of the announcement and awaiting further details.

The ministry said that German authorities, who took control of Gazprom Germany in April, are making the necessary preparations for various scenarios. It didnt elaborate, but said that the gas supply in Germany is safe and constantly monitored.

Germany has received about 55 percent of its natural gas from Russia before the war, but has since reduced this share to 35 percent. The German government said it aims to wean the country off Russian gas by 2024 at the latest.

Jack Phillips, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
With grit and sensitivity, restaurateur Mie Okuda combines Japanese comfort food with a you are what you eat philosophy

In an industry known for its high risk of failure and low profit margins, Mie Okuda has survived opening a restaurant during an economic slumptwice. In the late 1990s, during Japans Lost Decades recession, she started a restaurant in one of the most restaurant-dense cities in the world, Tokyos Ginza district. Years later in America, Okuda opened a restaurant in New York, just as the effects of the 2008 financial crisis began to be felt.

The latter happened months after Okuda immigrated to the United States in 2007, and the former was a decisive career change after years of working in architecture and design. Despite the odds, she succeeded in winning over diners each time. Okuda herself isnt sure how she manages to do it. I dont know whether to say its good timing or bad timing, she joked. Her Tokyo restaurant did so wellcounting politicians among its patrons and getting frequent television publicitythat within a few short years, a local bank gave her a no-credit loan to expand the eatery to the whole floor. Her New York restaurant Momokawa became popular within two years of opening and has been awarded a Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand title, meaning its an establishment with good food at a good value. It is thriving despite a pandemic that has felled many restaurants in the city.

(Tatsiana Moon for American Essence)

Her entrepreneurial spirit is a testament to her grit: Growing up in a small town in Hokkaido, Japan, she learned about cooking and hospitality from watching her parents run an izakaya (Japanese pub) style restaurant. But when she opened her restaurant in Tokyo, she had no professional culinary background. She had pursued a career in design and had encountered discrimination trying to find work as a single mother raising a biracial son. She eventually found a job at a small firm, but after a few years, she realized that she had to pursue an architecture degree in order to go further with her career. Okuda decided to open a restaurant instead, pouring her life savings into the Tokyo eatery.

But she knew in her heart that she would not stay in Japan; her son, who was half Argentinian, was often bullied in school. She decided to draw up a plan to immigrate to New York. In a city brimming with people of all cultures and backgrounds, she thought her son would no longer feel so alienated. I wanted to show my son, its normal to be different, she said. Here in America, she has forged her own path to success.

That success comes from placing great care into making dishes that are healthy and made with clean ingredients. She sources non-GMO soy sauce, soybeans, and corn as much as possible; insists on using sea salt and unrefined sugar in her restaurant; buys meat products with no antibiotics; and tells her staff to wash vegetables in a specific manner to ensure pesticides are washed out. Okuda studied nutritional science through an online university from 2011 to 2016, juggling schoolwork and managing the restaurant. It was tough, but Okuda said she wanted to learn how to apply the principles of Eastern holistic medicine to cooking with ingredients found in America.

Taro with a sauce made from yuba, or bean curd sheets. (Tatsiana Moon for American Essence)

Okudas restaurant is a serene reprieve from the bustling streets of Manhattan. (Tatsiana Moon for American Essence)

Since she was a teenager, Okuda was interested in nutrition; as she tended to her mother, who was often sick in the hospital, she wanted to learn more about how to cook healthy meals. What you eat becomes your cells and tissues, she explained. Food creates your body. When youre enjoying the food youre eating, positive messages are entering your body, she said. She wants to eventually pursue a masters degree so that she can study more about the relationship between food and health. There are studies that show eating good food produces feel-good hormones; she would like to further investigate whether those hormones could strengthen the immune system.

Okuda said her approach to cooking is that she will only serve something shed feed her own children. Do only the best for the customer, she said. Thats our policy. The name of the restaurant itself captures the desire to offer blessings of good health: mo means 100. Okuda explained that momo means 100 multiplied by 100an auspicious number to wish longevity for every diner.

(Tatsiana Moon for American Essence)

Steak Niku Croquette

Serves 4

2 pounds (1 kilogram) beef steak cut into 1-centimeter cubes

56 medium size potatoes

23 medium size onions

3 tablespoons butter

2 ounces (55 milliliters) red wine

3 tablespoons demi-glace sauce (homemade or store-bought)

3 tablespoons mozzarella cheese

salt and pepper

1 egg

2 tablespoons cold water

2 tablespoons panko breadcrumbs

Saute the square-cut beef steak in butter on high heat. Cook to medium rare. Take the beef out and set aside. Add minced onion to the pan and saute until brown. Add the beef back to the pan; add red wine and demi-glace sauce.

Steam potatoes for 40 minutes using a steamer. Then, mash them roughly while hot. Add the beef with its sauce and cheese to the potatoes. Shape the mixture into croquette balls.

In a separate bowl, lightly beat an egg and add water. Coat the shaped croquettes with panko first and egg second. Then, add another layer of panko and egg. Deep-fry at 325 F (163 C) for 5 to 6 minutes.

Serve and enjoy!

This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.
Democratic Michigan Election Chief Says 2000 Mules Ballot Trafficking Allegations Explained by Standard Election Practices

Officials in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Texas didn't respond to requests for comment on the documentary

The Michigan Secretary of States Office has reviewed portions of the movie 2000 Mules pertaining to Michigan and sees nothing illegal, a spokesperson for the office told The Epoch Times.

The film clips involving Michigan that have been shared with the department are explained by standard election practices well within state and federal law, A.K. Crisp, press secretary for Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said in an email to The Epoch Times.

I find the response quite shocking, as paid ballot trafficking is illegal in all 50 states, the films creator, Dinesh DSouza, said of Bensons assessment of the evidence presented in his documentary.

How can they refuse to even investigate?  Well, I guess the answer has to be that this is cheating that helps their own party.

Crisp went on to say that Michigans 2020 election was found to be secure and accurate by hundreds of audits, numerous courts, and the Republican-led state Senate Oversight Committee.

The 88-minute film highlights a 15-month investigation by public interest group True the Vote into ballot trafficking. The investigation used cell phone signal tracking, geofencing techniques, and video evidence to discover and document the ballot trafficking.

The study found that in Wayne County, Michigan, at least 500 intermediaries called mules engaged in ballot trafficking by collecting thousands of absentee ballots from voters and depositing them in ballot drop boxes for money. Ballot trafficking is a process by which the safeguards of a chain of custody of a voters ballot and official supervision of the handling of that ballot are evaded.

True the Vote cyber expert Gregg Phillips has estimated that at least 4.8 million votes were trafficked nationally in 2020.

The True the Vote figures are based on an examination of election practices in Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Texas, where most absentee ballot drop boxes were placed in neighborhoods recognized as Democratic strongholds.

A segment of 2000 Mules alleges through mathematical analysis of voting results that without the illegally trafficked ballots, Donald Trump would have carried the battleground states of Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania as he did in 2016 and been reelected.

Over the period of May 9 through May 11, The Epoch Times asked the governors, attorneys general, and the highest-ranking election administrators in each of the five battleground states mentioned above what they thought about the evidence of large-scale election fraud presented in the DSouza film.

The officials were also asked what was being done about it in their states.

Only Benson and Michigans Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, and the office of Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, responded by press time.

Nessels office stated, Allegations of fraud should be reported to law enforcement for proper review.

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich speaks at a news conference in Phoenix on Jan. 7, 2020. (Bob Christie/AP Photo)

Brnovich didnt comment directly on the movie or the activities of the 202 mules who, according to the film, operated in Maricopa County during the 2020 election season.

But his offices spokesperson, Katie Conner, told The Epoch Times that there were ongoing investigations underway into aspects of that election.

While we are limited in what we can say, we can confirm that several individuals have been indicted on charges related to ballot harvesting and voter fraud, Conner said.

Last year, Brnovich successfully won a major election integrity lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Conner also said Brnovich had identified and reported on areas of serious vulnerability within our voting system that must be addressed by the legislature.
Missouri Woman Charged With Hospital Death From 2002

CHILLICOTHE, Mo.A former respiratory therapist who worked at a northern Missouri hospital where nine people died under suspicious circumstances 20 years ago has been charged with one of the deaths.

Jennifer Anne Hall, 41, was charged last week with first-degree murder in the 2002 death of Fern Franco, who was one of nine people who died of cardiac collapse between Dec. 16, 2001, and May 18, 2002, at Hedrick Medical Center in Chillicothe, Missouri, KCUR reported.

The Livingston County Sheriffs office said Tuesday authorities continue to search for Hall, who might be using the name Semaboye.

Hall worked as a respiratory therapist at the 49-bed hospital when the patients died. Doctors and nurses at the hospital viewed the numbers of deaths as medically suspicious, according to a law enforcement record supporting the probable cause for her arrest.

The case was revived after an analysis of Francos tissue samples found succinylcholine and morphine, which were not prescribed or ordered for her by her doctors, according to a probable cause statement by Chillicothe Police Officer Brian Schmidt.

Some staff at the hospital believed Hall was responsible because of her proximity to the stricken patients, her access to deadly pharmaceuticals, and because she notified staff of every patients cardiac emergency, according to the probable cause.

She was placed on administrative leave on May 21, 2002, three days after Francos death.

An overdose of succinylcholine causes slow suffocation. At least nine suspicious deaths and 18 suspicious medical emergencies at Hedrick Medical Center during that time period were suspected overdoses of succinylcholine or other drugs.

Hall denied involvement in the deaths during an interview with the Kansas City Star in 2015.

Matthew OConnor, a Kansas City attorney who represented Hall in the past, said the murder charge was based on conjecture and speculation.

This isnt lawyer talkthere arent facts in support of it because Ms. Hall did not commit these acts, he said.

Before she worked at Hedrick Medical Center, Hall was convicted of setting fire to Cass Medical Center in Harrisonville, Missouri, where she was hired as a respiratory therapist. She spent a year in prison before an appeals court vacated her conviction because she received ineffective counsel at trial. A jury acquitted her at a subsequent retrial.

The families of five of the nine patients who died during that period filed wrongful death lawsuits against the hospital in 2010, claiming the hospital covered up possible foul play in their relatives deaths. An appeal filed in 2013 alleged that employees at the hospital believed they would be fired if they raised suspicions about the deaths.

In 2019, the Missouri Supreme Court threw out the lawsuits, ruling that the families had filed their actions after the statute of limitations had run out.
Rafael Nadal of Spain comes in to the net against John Isner of the United States in their 2nd Round Singles match on day three of the Internazionali BNL D'Italia at Foro Italico in Rome on May 11, 2022. (Paolo Bruno/Getty Images)

Nadal Bounces Back From Loss to Alcaraz, Beats Isner in Rome

ROMEOnce is enough when it comes to beating Rafael Nadal on a clay court.

Throughout his career, Nadal has never lost consecutive matches on his favorite surface and the Spaniard extended that perfect record on Wednesday by beating John Isner 63, 61 to reach the third round of the Italian Open.

Nadal was coming off a loss to 19-year-old Carlos Alcaraz in the Madrid Open quarterfinals last week. After a first-round bye, he improved to 440 in matches on clay following a loss on the surface.

Perhaps more importantly, Nadal regained some confidence as he works his way back from a rib stress fracture that kept him out for six weeks before the tournament in Madrid.

While he would clearly love to add to his record total of 10 Italian Open titles, Nadals bigger objective is regaining his top form in time for the French Open, which starts in less than two weeks. Nadal has won 13 of his 21 Grand Slam titles at Roland Garros.

When the match finished, Nadal headed straight to the practice court to hit more balls. He explained that hes a bit in a rush to find his best form as soon as possible.

I need to work as much as I can, Nadal said. The match today was not that demanding physically.

It was essentially decided during one brief stretch.

Nadal struggled on his serve at 33 in the first set, missing a forehand into the net then double-faulting to set up break points for Isner. But the American made unforced errors on both of his break-point opportunities and Nadal eventually held.

Rafael Nadal of Spain serves to John Isner of the United States in their 2nd Round Singles match on day three of the Internazionali BNL DItalia at Foro Italico in Rome, Italy, on May 11, 2022. (Paolo Bruno/Getty Images)

In the following game, Nadal broke Isners serve when the 6-foot-10 American missed a comfortable forehand volley into the net. Nadal then held at love to close out the first set and broke Isners serve in the opening game of the second.

I finished better than I startedwithout a doubt, Nadal said. He had some chances on the returns. I was in his hands in that moment. Lucky that he missed those shots.

Nadal improved to 190 against Americans on clay, having been forced to a deciding set only twiceboth times by Isner, who pushed Nadal to five sets at the 2011 French Open and three sets at the 2015 Monte Carlo Masters.

Up next, Nadal meets Denis Shapovalov, the Canadian he beat at the same stage last year in a grueling three-set comeback victory in which the Spaniard saved two match points.

Super lucky, Nadal said, reflecting back to playing Shapovalov last year. I know how dangerous he is. I need to play better than today.

Second-seeded Alexander Zverev, who was routed by Alcaraz in the Madrid final on Sunday, beat Sebastian Baez 76 (6), 63 to end the Argentine qualifiers eight-match winning streak.

Also, Stefanos Tsitsipas saved two match points before getting past Grigor Dimitrov 63, 57, 76 (4); and Marcos Giron, an American qualifier, picked up his fourth win and five days by beating 2020 finalist Diego Schwartzman 61, 76 (4).

Wearing a ribbon with the colors of Ukraines flag pinned to her hat, defending womens champion Iga Swiatek extended her winning streak to 24 matches with a 63, 60 victory over Romanian qualifier Elena-Gabriela Ruse.

The top-ranked player from Poland will next face former No. 1 Victoria Azarenka, who beat Camila Osorio 62, 64.

Ons Jabeur, coming off her maiden 1000 title in Madrid, defeated Ajla Tomljanovic 75, 62.

Also, 2019 French Open semifinalist Amanda Anisimova eliminated Olympic gold medalist Belinda Bencic 76 (5), 61; and Coco Gauff, who reached the semifinals a year ago, defeated fellow American Madison Brengle 62, 64.

Madrid finalist Jessica Pegula advanced when Anhelina Kalinina withdrew before their match because of an upper back injury. The American will next face third-seeded Aryna Sabalenka.

By Andrew Dampf
A worker walks among pipes at the Dashava natural gas facility in Dashava, Ukraine on Sept. 18, 2014. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Natural Gas Prices in Europe Rise After Ukraine Cuts Russian Pipeline Supply

Natural gas prices in Europe jumped after Ukraines state-owned pipelined operator cut the flow of Russian gas at the Sokhranivka entry point on the border between the Luhansk region of Donbas on May 11.

Ukraines Gas TSO announced the previous day, that due to the lack of physical control of its pipeline in Russian-controlled areas of Eastern Ukraine, it was unable to carry out the fulfillment of its contracts, and would terminate deliveries to its clients in the West.

The Ukrainian gas exporter claimed that it repeatedly told Russian state-owned counterpart, Gazprom about potential threats to flows from interference after losing control of its facilities in the east of the country, but that their appeals were ignored.

It accused Russian occupying forces of interfering with their operations and that they were diverting gas in a way that endangered the stability of the pipeline system.

This was the first time that pipeline operations through Ukraine faced disruption since Russia invaded the country in late February.

The Ukrainian operator has also blocked gas transport through its border compressor station, Novopskov, which supplies about a third of the gas from Russia to Europe.

TTF European natural gas prices rose more than 6.4 percent by the morning of May 11, London time.

The Sokhranivka gas metering station and Novopskov, are both situated in Russian-controlled areas of the country, which up until now had been allowed to operate unimpeded.

GTSOU blamed the actions of the occupiers for the interruption of services and said in an official statement that as a result of the Russian Federations military aggression against Ukraine, several GTS facilities are located in territory temporarily controlled by Russian troops and the occupation administration.

Currently, GTSOU cannot carry out operational and technological control over the CS Novopskov and other assets located in these territories.

Moreover, the interference of the occupying forces in technical processes and changes in the modes of operation of GTS facilities, including unauthorized gas offtakes from the gas transit flows, endangered the stability and safety of the entire Ukrainian gas transportation system.

The pipeline operator said it would still be able to fulfill its transit obligations to Europe by rerouting gas through its Sudzha interconnection point, which is located in Ukrainian-controlled territory.

Gazprom said that Ukraines request would be technologically impossible and it saw no grounds for the decision, but gas flows at Sudzha were able to rise overnight, by about 8 million cubic meters per day.

Germany, which needs gas for its major industries, is currently receiving 25 percent less gas through Ukraine, said the German Energy Ministry to the Associated Press on May 11.

A boost in gas supplies from Norway and the Netherlands is partly compensating for the shortfall, said Annika Einhorn, an energy ministry spokeswoman, who further commented that the majority of Russian gas reaches Germany through the Nordstream 1 pipeline through the Baltic Sea rather than via Ukraine.

However, the share of Russian gas that flowed to Europe through Ukraine had fallen to around 18 percent since the start of the war.

Russia recently halted natural gas to Poland and Bulgaria after the two countries balked at paying for gas in rubles.

The logo of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project is seen on a pipe at the Chelyabinsk pipe rolling plant in Chelyabinsk, Russia, on Feb. 26, 2020. (Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)

Russia accounts for around 40 percent of all European Union natural gas imports.

The EU, which is heavily dependent on Russian energy supplies, is vulnerable to a recession if it faces a total cutoff of both oil and natural gas from Moscow, as it has no serious alternative at this time.

Although Brussels is in the process of banning Russian coal, with further plans to phase out imports of Russian oil, natural gas has not yet been directly targeted, since it is far more difficult to import from other sources.

Even if European nations used their total remaining import capacity to ship gas from non-Russian suppliers, it would only replace just under 29 percent of Russian gas imports.

A cut-off of gas itself would hit European industries such as metals, fertilizer, glass, and ceramics, which have begun to reduce production due to high gas prices.

Private consumers are expected to face even higher electric and heating bills, which will likely hit them harder this winter.

The threat of Russia potentially cutting off natural gas flows to Europe has prompted the EU to pursue alternative suppliers.

The EU leadership believes that they can reduce Russian gas imports by two-thirds by the end of 2022, through the importation of more gas from Norway and Azerbaijan, increased shipments of liquefied natural gas from the United States, further expansion of green energy, and enforced rationing of energy supplies.

The United States has agreed to expand liquefied-natural-gas exports to Europe through to 2030, but Washington has already stretched its existing delivery capacity to the limit.

Energy industry officials are saying that in order to achieve the target, the United States will require investments in new, multibillion-dollar export terminals.

The Associated Press has contributed to this report.
The Intel-24 aircraft at the Hollywood Burbank Airport in Burbank, Calif., on May 10, 2022. (Jill McLaughlin/The Epoch Times)

Officials Tout New Aircraft to Aid California Firefighting Efforts

BURBANK, Calif.Two aircraft equipped with state-of-the-art cameras and sensors may soon be available statewide to help California firefighting efforts.

As part of Wildfire Preparedness Month, fire officials displayed one of the planes, the Intel-24 aircraft, May 10 at the Hollywood Burbank Airport.

The other plane was on duty helping crews fight the destructive wildfires in New Mexico, Mark Ghilarducci, director of the California Governors Office of Emergency Services, told The Epoch Times.

Its super-efficient, super capable, and super helpful. Its a new eye in the sky, Ghilarducci said. I would call it a game-changer with regards to us.

Cameras attached to the outside of the fuselage allow for better visualization of fire activity on the ground, he said.

This is flying at such a high altitude and its taking a picture with this high-resolution camera thats actually watching the fire spread, Ghilarducci said.

The Intel-24 aircraft at the Hollywood Burbank Airport in Burbank, Calif., on May 10, 2022. (Jill McLaughlin/The Epoch Times)

The Intel-24 aircraft at the Hollywood Burbank Airport in Burbank, Calif., on May 10, 2022. (Jill McLaughlin/The Epoch Times)

The data collected by the aircraft is sent to a supercomputer center located at the University of CaliforniaSan Diego. The information allows firefighters and first responders to determine where the fire is headed and how big the blaze it is.

This allows responders to send the right resources to the fire in a strategic fashion, Ghilarducci said.

The aircraft system, called the Fire Integrated Real-Time Intelligence System, or FIRIS, has also been used to help search for missing persons and respond to oil spills and other emergencies.

Gov. Gavin Newsom is expected May 13 to announce a $30 million funding request as part of his revised budget to fund statewide operations for two FIRIS planes this month through the Office of Emergency Services.

Officials display the Intel-24 aircraft at the Hollywood Burbank Airport in Burbank, Calif., on May 10, 2022. (Jill McLaughlin/The Epoch Times)

Southern California agencies have used the aircraft for three years, Orange County Fire Chief Brian Fennessy told The Epoch Times.

The craft has helped Orange County Fire assess fire size and help with other emergencies, such as determining the extent of an oil spill off the coast of Huntington Beach in October caused by a container ship.

Its been a great resource for fire and law enforcement, Fennessy said. Its responded to all of these other things beyond just wildfire.

The specialized cameras can scan the ground using infrared technology, allowing them to read heat signatures from fires, and fuel moisture and other conditions, such as weather.

The Intel-24 aircraft at the Hollywood Burbank Airport in Burbank, Calif., on May 10, 2022. (Jill McLaughlin/The Epoch Times)

The camera can also be used to see infrastructure and send the information to smartphones for fire commands, operations centers, and state operations centers.

Eric Hall, a censor operator with AVEX Aerospace, demonstrated how operators can view fires on the ground using infrared and color technologies. The camera and sensors allow operators to quickly estimate fire size and location, he said.

You can see the big difference in what youre looking at with your naked eye versus what the camera sees, Hall said.
A portrait of New Jersey State Police trooper Werner Foerster, who was killed during a stop on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973, is displayed during an event unveiling a monument in his honor in East Brunswick, N.J., on Nov. 18, 2015. (Julio Cortez/ AP Photo)

New Jersey Supreme Court Draws Backlash Over Granting Parole to Cop Killer

The New Jersey Supreme Court ordered to release on parole the killer of a New Jersey state trooper, thus overturning the decision of the parole board that denied to release the murderer. The court ruling drew backlash from the governor, the states Attorney General, lawmakers, and police.

The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled Tuesday with a 32 vote to grant parole to Sundiata Acoli, a former member of a terrorist group who was convicted of killing New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster in 1973.

Todays Supreme Court opinion examines whether the New Jersey State Parole Board has established by a preponderance of the evidence that there is a substantial likelihood that Sundiata Acoli will commit a crime if placed on parole. #supremeopinionhttps://t.co/IyFEEadArC pic.twitter.com/igmgTga6ku  New Jersey Courts (@njcourts) May 10, 2022

New Jersey Justice Barry Albin wrote in the majority opinion (pdf), the [state Parole] Board has failed to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that there is a substantial likelihood that, if released on parole, Acoli will commit a crime.

Sundiata Acoli, 85, formerly known as Clark Edward Squire, applied for parole several times but his requests were rejected by the New Jersey Parole Board. His attorneys argued hes been a model prisoner for nearly three decades and has counseled other inmates.

New Jersey Parole Board contended Acoli is still a risk to commit future crimes and has not taken full responsibility for trooper Foersters death.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Lee Solomon (pdf) wrote that the parole boards decision was supported by the evidence.

Moreover, the state parole board has the discretion to determine whether the convict qualifies for the release from prison and it should not be overruled by a court, Solomon explained in his dissenting opinion.

Our sole task is to determine whether the Parole Board abused its discretion under a very lenient standard of review. We would find that it did not, Solomon wrote.

In our view, the majority diminishes the role of the Parole Board by making this Court the finder of fact. We consider that decision a disrespect to our fundamental principles of appellate review and a grave injustice to the victim, State Trooper Werner Foerster, and his family, Solomon stated.

Acolis accomplice, Joanne Chesimard, was also convicted and sentenced to a life term but escaped from a New Jersey prison in 1979. Now known as Assata Shakur, she was given asylum in Cuba by then-President Fidel Castro and remains a fugitive. Both Acoli and Chesimard were members of the Black Liberation Army.

The Black Liberation Army (BLA) is an urban guerrilla group with two primary goals of killing police officers and expropriating funds from capitalists and imperialists to finance the revolution, according to the Department of Justice.

Opposing the Verdict

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, expressed his disappointment with granting Acoli parole. I am deeply disappointed that Sundiata Acoli, a man who murdered Trooper Werner Foerster in cold blood in 1973, will be released from prison, Murphy said in a statement.

In 1996, New Jersey enacted a law that denied parole to anyone who receives life in prison for killing an officer on duty. I profoundly wish this law had been in place when Acoli was sentenced in 1974, Murphy said in the statement.

New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin said in a statement, I am grateful to the attorneys in my office who opposed the release of Sundiata Acoli and I am disappointed that he will be released on parole.

New Jersey state Assembly members Victoria Flynn and Gerry Scharfenberger, both Republicans, denounced the state Supreme Court verdict in a joint statement.

There is no legal basis to let this killer go free, especially since he has not expressed remorse after all these years for the death of one of our states police officers, Flynn said in the statement.

Flynn agreed with the dissenting opinion issued by Solomon. It is not the role of the Court to second-guess the Parole Boards decision. There is no justification for this, Flynn said.

Upon hearing that one of the reasons for the parole was because of Acolis verbal renunciation of violence, Scharfenberger commented on the verdict: You shouldnt get a pass for murdering a State Trooper because you suddenly proclaim to be a pacifistits outrageous!

[The Supreme Court] is an institution which is supposed to be the standard-bearer of our justice system but has instead made the choice to dishonor the memory and sacrifice of a fallen officer as well as all who are and have served, Scharfenberger said in the statement.

New Jersey state Senator Jon Bramnick (R) said in a statement, Society needs to hold cop killers totally responsible for their horrific acts.

Todays court decision just reminds us all that is wrong with our courts. We stand with our brothers and sisters in the New Jersey State Police in outrage that during police week the courts release a cop killer. This is a slap in the face to every officer. President Colligan pic.twitter.com/XONt4f0Rxx  New Jersey State PBA (@NJSPBA) May 10, 2022

The President of the New Jersey State Policemens Benevolent Association Patrick Colligan said in a statement posted on Facebook and Twitter, Todays court decision just reminds us all that is wrong with our courts.  This is a slap in the face to every officer.

Killers Accomplice

In 2013, state and federal authorities announced a $2 million reward for information leading to Chesimards capture, and the FBI made her the first woman on its list of most wanted terrorists.

Then-President Donald Trump demanded that Cuba return Chesimard in 2017 when he announced plans to reverse some Obama administration Cuba policies.

In 2005, Castro referred to Shakur as a victim of the fierce repression against the Black movement in the United States and said she had been a true political prisoner.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks at a press conference at the Beehive in Parliament in Wellington, New Zealand, on Jan. 23, 2022. (Mark Mitchell-Pool/Getty Images)

New Zealand to Completely Open International Borders in July

New Zealand (NZ) Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that the countrys international border would be fully reopened to all visitors on July 31, two months earlier than planned.

The move will be the final step of reopening, allowing tourists from countries such as China and India to enter the country. Borders are already opened to Australians and visa-waivered visitors.

New Zealand is in demand and now fully open for business, Ardern said.

Cruise ships will also be able to resume cruising around the pacific nations with the opening of the maritime border on July 31 along with international education.

To address the ongoing skills shortage, a new Green List that covers over 85 hard-to-fill roles will provide migrants with a streamlined and prioritised pathway to residency.

By helping to relieve urgent skills shortages, opening up tourism and putting our immigration settings on a more secure footing, we are building on our proven plan to secure New Zealands economic future, Ardern said.

Eligible high-skilled migrantsincluding construction engineering, trades, health workers, and tech specialistswill be able to go to New Zealand on a work visa from July 4 and begin applying for residence two months later in September.

Education Minister Chris Hipkins said while the full reopening of the international education sector was a significant milestone, they would be shutting the backdoor route to residency.

The future will be different, we wont be going back to Nationals volume over value approach that became a backdoor to residency for lower-skilled and lower-paid migrant workers, who were then at risk of exploitation, he said.

The changes include students in non-degree courses will no longer be granted post-study work rights unless theyre working in specified occupations with skills shortages. Students will also not be able to apply for a second post-study visa.

New Zealand Education Minister Chris Hipkins addresses a press conference at Parliament in Wellington, New Zealand on Oct. 11, 2021. (Robert Kitchin/Pool Photo via AP)

The visas for around 20,000 skilled workers have also been extended to ensure they stay in the country.

Business NZ, a body that represents the voice of New Zealand businesses, welcomed the earlier border reopening.

Its great to see the government is listening, todays announcement sends a clear message that New Zealand is once again open for business, Business NZ CEO Kirk Hope said.

Hope said NZ was facing an unprecedented skills shortage and that reopening immigration was a critical component in ensuring local businesses could survive and succeed.

Simplicity in the policy settings and prompt processing is a positive step to make it as easy as possible for employers to navigate through the new work visa settings that will take effect from July, he said.
Newsom Prepares to Make California Abortion Sanctuary State

SACRAMENTOGov. Gavin Newsom proposed a $125 million reproductive health package May 11, in an effort to declare California an abortion sanctuary for those living outside the state seeking the procedure.

California will not stand idly by as extremists roll back our basic constitutional rights; were going to fight like hell, making sure that all womennot just those in Californiaknow that this state continues to recognize and protect their fundamental rights, Newsom said in a statement.

Newsoms proposal comes after a draft decision was leaked May 2 written by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito of the possible overturning of Roe v. Wadethe 1973 law that legalized abortion nationwide.

According to the news release, the so-called Reproductive Health Package includes the following:

$40 million for grants to reproductive health care providers to offset the cost of providing care to low-income women without health care coverage for abortions

$15 million in grants for reproductive health organizations for outreach and education on reproductive health

$1 million to create a website with information on abortion state law, information about reproductive health providers, and reproductive health service coverage

$1 million for research on the need for reproductive health care access

Funding for the package would come from Newsoms budget proposed 20222023 budget.

Additionally, Newsom plans to assist businesses seeking to relocate to California from other states that are anti-abortion and anti-LGBT, according to the Governors office.

Were expanding access to these critical services, welcoming businesses and their employees fleeing anti-abortion states, and reaffirming our commitment to continuing to work closely with the Legislature and reproductive rights stakeholders to further solidify Californias leadership on abortion rights, Newsom said.

Additional details to the plan will be revealed by Newsom May 13.
In a village north of Jos, capital of Plateau State in Nigeria, a woman wails in grief on Aug. 19, 2021. (Lawrence Zongo/The Epoch Times)

Nigerian Army Standing Down as Terrorists Attack Rural Communities with Impunity

Rampaging terrorists have carried out more than 16 bloody attacks in Nigerias state of Kaduna in recent weeks, often with Nigerian troops standing by and refusing to assist, according to spokesmen for the Christian communities in the region.

Terrorists massacred 25 people in Kauru County on April 25 and burned houses for three hours without intervention by the Nigerian army.

A group of 15 terrorists posing as Nigerian soldiers carried out a massacre of eight defenseless civilians in Cinke, a village of 300, in Plateau state that borders Kaduna state on May 5.

Survivors included Sarah, a 2-year-old recovering in a Jos hospital from a rifle round through her back.

The attack is another attempt to forcefully eject the Rigwe people from their ancestral land as well as to annihilate the entire tribe, Davidson Malison, national publicity director of the Irigwe Development Association, toold The Epoch Times.

Two-year-old Sarah Wei, shot by terrorists attacking her village of Cinke, on May 5, 2022. (Lawrence Zongo)

The tribe of 70,000 Irigwe-speaking people has suffered during scores of attacks by terrorist bandits linked to the Fulani tribe, which has 7 million members in Nigeria including President Muhammadu Buhari.

The terrorists entered the village wearing full military uniforms, including combat boots and began shooting sporadically at 8:45 p.m., Moses Gata, an elementary school teacher in the area, told The Epoch Times about the massacre on May 5.

Malison notified police and military units in several neighborhoods to call for immediate help, he said.

A military convoy including an armored personnel carrier and three pickup trucks carrying more than 30 soldiers entered the village at approximately 11:15 p.m., 25 minutes after the shooting had stopped, according to sources in Cinke.

The convoy and soldiers returned to the village the next day at 6 a.m. but were scorned by local women and chased away, according to Moses.

You were sent to protect us, but you were the ones who killed us! one woman shouted, according to Gata.

Army spokesman Ishaku Sabastine, known by locals as a public affairs officer, answered the call of The Epoch Times but refused to give information without authorization from Brig. Gen. Oyema Nwachukwu, the national press spokesman for the army.

He said he could not give contact information for Nwachukwu, his supervisor.

Aerial view of Cinke Village in Bassa County, Plateau state, which lost eight citizens on May 5, 2022, after an attack by terrorists posing as Nigerian troops. (Lawrence Zongo)

Residents of Agban Kagoro in neighboring Kaduna state are still shaken after a three-hour attack on March 20 that claimed the lives of 35 residents and showed evidence of complicity by the Nigerian army, according to residents who spoke to The Epoch Times.

A local minister who asked for anonymity and who heads up a unit of neighborhood watchmen notified an army unit that a column of pickup trucks loaded with mercenaries was heading toward Kagoro at 6 p.m. on March 20.

At approximately 7 p.m., 150 terrorists, many wearing Nigerian army uniforms, entered in the white pickup trucks or on motorbikes and began shooting at local residents, according to eyewitnesses.

The military responded after an hour of the village burning.

Lt. Clement Ashu, a Christian officer and a native of the Kagoro area, headed up a truck with approximately 10 volunteer soldiers from the Forward Operating Base in Kafanchan, arriving at Agban-Kagoro at 8 p.m.

According to local vigilante witnesses, Ashu and an enlisted man were killed in an ambush some time before 9 p.m.

After finding Ashu and the enlisted man dead, the group returned to the base.

No other group of soldiers arrived on the scene, allowing the terrorists to continue burning four local villages until 10 p.m.

Calls to the commander, Col. Timothy Opurum, were not returned.

In order to get to Agban-Kagoro the column of trucks and motorbikes had to pass through two army checkpoints, according to sources at the Southern Kaduna Peoples Union who asked for anonymity for fear of retribution.

Agban-Kagoro is a mile east of Kafanchan town, the commercial center of Southern Kaduna and approximately 50 miles to the site of the attacks in Plateau state.

Kafanchan has an army base and barracks that accommodate between 60 to 100 soldiers.

The city also hosts a mobile police (mopol) barracks. Mopol is the combat wing of Nigeria police and has an anti-terrorism wing.

To the south and six miles from Agban-Kagoro is Gidan Waya town where a military formation under Operation Safe Haven (OPSH) is stationed.

To the east of the destroyed community and about 12 miles away is Samaru Kataf, which has another military formation that runs two checkpoints under OPSH.

All efforts to reach the Kaduna state police spokesman, Mohammed Jalige, did not pick up his phone when The Epoch Times reached out for comment.

But a soldier stationed in Kafanchan, who spoke to an Epoch Times reporter on condition that his name should not be mentioned, said that no troop can move an inch without orders from Jos, the headquarters of Operation Safe Haven.

We knew that our colleagues were in trouble because many calls came to us and our commander here in Kafanchan, but Jos did not give him permission to move us to the scene, he said.
DHAKA, May 11 (Xinhua) -- Cyclone Asani, which is raging in the Bay of Bengal, on Wednesday brought intermittent light rainfall to parts of Bangladesh including the capital Dhaka.

The city's overcast sky and cool winds, however, brought much relief to people from the blistering summer heat that had continued for weeks.

Kh Hafizur Rahman, a meteorologist with the Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD), told Xinhua that they had recorded 29 mm of rainfall in Dhaka in the last 12 hours till 6:00 p.m. Wednesday (1200 GMT).

The weatherman said rain and low temperature could continue for the next two days, with temporary gusty or squally wind under the influence of Asani, which is likely to weaken into a cyclonic storm by Wednesday night and into a depression by Thursday.

On a hot summer day in Dhaka, the temperature usually remains between 27 and 28 degrees Celsius. However, the BMD recorded Dhaka's temperature on Wednesday at 24.8 degrees Celsius as it has been cloudy in the city.

Many are seen to be caught out in rains while walking on the busiest Dhaka streets.

Some city areas, however, appeared less crowded as people apparently preferred to stay indoors due to the gloomy weather.

All fishing boats and trawlers over the North Bay have been advised to remain close to the coast, proceed with caution till further notice, and not to venture into the deep sea, a bulletin of the BMD warned. 
Dr. Lawrence Tabak, acting director of the National Institutes of Health, left, and fellow NIH official Diana Bianchi testify on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 11, 2022. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

NIH Director Says Error Was Made When Chinese Sequencing Data Was Pulled Offline

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) made an error when it took COVID-19 sequencing data offline, the agencys head said on May 11.

In the way it was originally eliminated from public view, it was withdrawn. And thats the most difficult for people to access. The error that was madeand we found this out after a review of all of our processesis, it should have been suppressed,' Dr. Lawrence Tabak, the acting NIH director, told members of Congress during a hearing in Washington.

Sequences that are withdrawn are kept, but only on a tape drive. In contrast, information that is suppressed can still be accessed by its identifying number, and so researchers are still able to access that information, Tabak said.

The doctor did not share more details about the error and the NIH did not respond to a request for comment.

The sequencing data was submitted to the Sequence Read Archive, a database managed by the NIH, in early 2020. The data showed sequences of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. Also known as SARS-CoV-2, the virus causes COVID-19.

About three months after it was posted, the same researcher who submitted the data asked for it to be retracted, according to emails obtained by a nonprofit called Empower Oversight. The NIH agreed to take the information offline.

The action was first disclosed by Jesse Bloom, an American researcher, in June 2021.

The agency has no plans to change the policy that recognizes submitters rights to their own data and the right to petition that their data be withdrawn, an NIH spokesperson said in a previous statement in response to Blooms paper.

Both Bloom and Dr. Francis Collins, the NIHs director until late 2021, described what happened as the deletion of data. The NIH has since contested that description.

On Wednesday, Tabak was questioned by Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.) as he appeared before the House Appropriations Committee.

Beutler said shed been tracking reports of the deletions since 2021 and asserted there were rational concerns that the Chinese Communist Party had something to do with the sequencing being taken offline and asked what the NIH was doing to secure the archive from such efforts.

Theres no question that the communication that we had about the sequence archive could have been improved. I freely admit that, Tabak said. If I may, the archive never deleted the sequence. It just did not make it available for interrogation. We have the information.

Anybody who submits to the Sequence Read Archive is allowed to ask for it to be removed, and that investigator did do that. But we never erase it, he said.

When the information was withdrawn, it could not be accessed by researchers or other members of the public. When it was changed to a suppressed status at a later time, researchers who knew its identifying number could view it.

Empower Oversight President Jason Foster told The Epoch Times that the way the data was handled effectively deleted it.

NIH documents released with Empower Oversights report demonstrate that the sequencing data was deleted from public view by the NIH at the request of the Wuhan researcher, he said.

In giving out the emails to the nonprofit and other organizations, the NIH redacted the name of the Chinese researcher who submitted and requested the retraction. Internal emails suggest it was Ming Wang, who works at the Hospital of Wuhan University and later included some of the data in a paper published by Small.

Chinese officials said that the retraction was requested because the researchers found it unnecessary to keep their data in the NIH database when it was being published elsewhere.

The emails show Bloom gave top NIH officials, including Collins and Tabak, notice of his forthcoming paper, with Collins calling what Bloom did clever sleuthing that discovered sequences that were deposited (and then deleted) from the archive.

After Bloom sent the version of his paper to a preprint website, a conference call was held on the subject that included Dr. Anthony Fauci, Collins, Tabak, and Bloom, among others. Bloom alleged that Dr. Kristian Anderson, a critic of the theory that the virus came from a Chinese lab, said he was a screener at the website and could delete the submitted paper or revise it, according to notes from the call (pdf). Andersen told Vanity Fair the allegations were false.

The Epoch Times has submitted Freedom of Information Act requests for information pertaining to the call and for the review of the archive processes.

Mark Tapscott contributed to this report.
Demonstrators gather outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in Alexandria, Va., on May 9, 2022. (Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

No Mob Rule, No Criminal Domination

Commentary

Two patterns of destroying civilization are coming together to form a river of violence and intimidation that can destroy the Constitution, the rule of law, and the very basic elements of our free society.

On the political front, there is a self-righteous fanaticism dominating the secular-religious intensity of the Left. This has convinced many on the left that the end justifies the means and therefore, they have the right to break the law for political purposes.

Whether it is burning down neighborhoods, smashing store windows, or throwing Molotov cocktails into pro-life offices, the woke Left has now broken free from the restrictions of the American system of law and constitutional government.

Theodore White warned of this growing extremism in his book, The Making of the President 1972, when he described the militant, uncompromising Left as having moved from a liberal ideology to a liberal theology. Now, 50 years later, the theology of the woke Left has grown more extreme, more hostile, and more willing to use force and intimidation to get what it wants.

I should note that mobs are always wrong, whether it is a summer of riots in cities, people occupying the Capitol on January 6, 2021, or mobs staking out the homes of Supreme Court Justices.

Most recently, the mobs threatening conservative Justices, protesting outside of their homes, and consciously seeking to intimidate them into voting as the Left demands is an example of the political violence that is growing and becoming legitimized on the left.

This political violence is paralleled by the personal violence of hardened criminals that the Left is releasing from jail and putting back on the street. The timidity of the innocent in refusing to put down either mobs or criminals increases the demands and the dangers of both.

The spirit of breaking the law in large groups is mob violence. In small groups, that spirit is criminal. However, when criminals see mobs being tolerated, they are more likely to believe there will be no consequences for committing crimes.

The 1982 Atlantic Monthly essay Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety, by George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, established a framework for a revolution in policing. When Bill Bratton took their theory and turned it into practical policing in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles, the effect was revolutionary.

Their model was simple: clean up the neighborhood and crime will go down. Alternatively, let the neighborhood decay with graffiti, garbage, and broken windows, and the crime rate will go up.

Effective and serious policing, backed up by district attorneys who fought for the rights of innocent victims and were tough on the criminal, led to dramatic declines in crime and amazingly safe cities. The Left hated it. (Recall the Lefts hatred of the police with the Black Panther public commitment to killing policemen in the late 1960s.)

The threat to society from a collapse of cultural values was made explicit in a brilliant 1993 essay for The American Scholar by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was a renowned sociologist before entering public life.

In Defining Deviancy Down Moynihan argued that a society may decide to cope with collapsing discipline and behavior by simply making it less and less unacceptable. Children born without fathers would be made acceptable. Schools that failed to educate children would be made acceptable. Males who grew up with no male role model, no incentive to go to work, and a willingness to engage in predatory behavior would be made acceptable.

We have had several decades of the woke Left and Big Government Socialism promoting and glorifying anti-social behavior, violence, criminals, and hostility toward the police and toward middle-class values.

In many ways, the 1971 movie, A Clockwork Orange, which was based on Anthony Burgesss 1962 novel, was a prophetic forecast of a dystopian future of mindless violence, helpless victims, and brutality. Today, when there is a juvenile gang in Boston led by an 11-year-old, when six people are shot in Atlanta on Mothers Day, when carjackings occur in public in New York City, and when a theater in Chicago cancels a nighttime performance because of a nearby shooting, A Clockwork Orange might be a useful reference for every American.

Americans are at a crossroads. Americans must decide whether to continue to ignore the decay of the Lefts insanely destructive policies, or, whether the time has come to reassert the right of citizens to expect personal safety as the first responsibility of government.

Anyone threatening a Supreme Court Justice is violating the law and should be imprisoned for at least a year. Anyone engaged in violent crime should be locked up until they are too old to be dangerous.

It is time for the innocent and the law-abiding to reimpose civilization on the vicious, the violent, and the predatory.

It really is that simple.

The question is whether the American people are ready to throw out the politicians who have put their lives and their country at risk.

From Gingrich360.com

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attends a plenary meeting of the Workers' Party central committee in Pyongyang, North Korea, in this photo supplied by Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) on Feb. 10, 2021. (KCNA via Reuters)

North Korea Confirms 1st Cases of COVID-19, Enters Severe Emergency Lockdown

North Korea has entered a severe emergency after confirming its first official cases of COVID-19, with leader Kim Jong Un ordering a nationwide lockdown on May 12.

According to the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), a number of people in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, had contracted the Omicron coronavirus variant, also known as BA.2, although no further details were provided as to the exact number of people who have tested positive or possible sources of infection.

The samples of the infected people were collected on May 8, the news agency stated.

North Koreas confirmed infections come more than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic. The country has claimed to have kept the virus at bay, despite it spreading rapidly across the globe.

The nation was one of the first countries to shut down its borders in January 2020 in an effort to prevent the virus from spreading via foreign countries.

However, experts have widely disputed North Koreas claims regarding having zero cases of COVID-19.

There has been the biggest emergency incident in the country, with a hole in our emergency quarantine front, that has been kept safely over the past two years and three months since February 2020, the state-run KCNA news agency said in reference to the new cases.

KCNA stated that Kim ordered the nation to strictly lock down across all regions to prevent the highly-transmissible virus from spreading and vowed to eradicate the outbreak.

He also said emergency reserve medical supplies would be mobilized, according to KCNA.

The state epidemic prevention work shall be switched over to the maximum emergency epidemic prevention system, the news agency reported.

This isnt the first time that Kim has ordered a lockdown in his country, albeit not on such a large scale.

In July 2020, the North Korean leader declared a maximum emergency and ordered Kaesong, which is located near the border with South Korea, to be placed on lockdown for three weeks after a suspected COVID-19 case was reported.

Research and advocacy organization Human Rights Watch warned earlier this year that North Koreas strict pandemic measures, including shutting down its borders to foreign visitors and trade, have further strengthened the governments already strict control over its people while simultaneously creating a humanitarian crisis.

North Korea used COVID-19 restrictions to further oppress the North Korean people while igniting a crisis over access to food, medicine, and other essential goods, said Lina Yoon, senior Korea researcher at Human Rights Watch. Governments and international institutions should press the North Korean government to accept monitored international assistance like food, vaccines, and medicine and to be transparent and non-discriminatory in addressing the pandemic.

According to the latest data from the World Health Organization, 64,207 North Koreans have received COVID-19 testing and all tests had been found negative as of March 31.

However, its unclear if or how many of North Koreas population of 26 million people have been vaccinated, given that the nation rejected shipments of vaccines from the COVAX global COVID-19 vaccine-sharing program and the Sinovac Biotech vaccine from China, which would require international monitoring.

South Koreas government said on May 11 that it had issued renewed offers of humanitarian assistance to North Korea following news of the outbreak, but that Pyongyang has yet to respond.

Reuters contributed to this report.
Firefighters work on extinguishing the Coastal Fire in Laguna Niguel, Calif., on May 11, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Officials Declare Local State of Emergency Over Coastal Fire

LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif.Orange County officials declared a local state of emergency May 12 after a fire scorched over 200 acres in Aliso Canyon, burning through suburbs with multi-million-dollar homes, destroying more than 20 homes and damaging 11, and injuring two firefighters.

Authorities said firefighters had contained 15 percent of the fire as of 5:00 p.m. Thursday.

Both injured firefighters were treated at a nearby hospital and released shortly afterward.

Its been a long night for the people living in Laguna Niguel, and my thoughts and prayers go out to all the people whove been affected by this terrible fire, Orange County Supervisor Lisa Bartlett said during a May 12 press conference. The fire has been devastating for many families  the [Orange County Board of Supervisors] agreed upon an urgency to proclaim a local state of emergency on behalf of the county.

Authorities said approximately 900 homes were placed under mandatory and voluntary evacuation orders.

Firefighters work on extinguishing the Coastal Fire in Laguna Niguel, Calif., on May 11, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

The fire originated near the South Orange County Wastewater Authoritys Coastal Treatment Plant, handling sewage for the Laguna Beach area, according to Orange County Fire Authority officials.

At approximately 3:30 p.m., authorities estimated the fire at about 3 acres. However, the flames spread to at least 200 acres within three hours, ripping through thick brush on the hillside and decimating multimillion-dollar homes overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Although the cause of the fire is still under investigation, authorities said certain factors contributed to its rapid spread, including bad drought conditions, low fuel moistures, westwards winds, and steep terrains.

All of which, authorities said, made for a bad recipe for the fourth fire the county has battled this year.

Earlier this year, authorities extinguished the Emerald Fire in Laguna Beach, the Jim Fire in Cleveland National Forest, and the San Juan Fire alongside Ortega Highway, east of San Juan Capistrano.

Having as much fire behavior as we have had and the acreage that took definitely made us think this is going to be a bad fire season, TJ McGovern, Orange County Fire Authority assistant chief of operations, told reporters.

Firefighters work on extinguishing the Coastal Fire in Laguna Niguel, Calif., on May 11, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

McGovern said the fire started at the bottom of a canyon drain with low fuel moistures until westward winds picked up flames and carried the fire up the canyons slope.

He said they have established projected containment lines around the fires perimeter and are confident the flames wont breach.

However, were not putting it a mop-up stage because we still have to reinforce those containment lines, he said.

In addition to establishing the containment hose lines, authorities scraped the dirt by hand to keep the flames within the projected boundaries.

Theres still a lot of work to be done out there today, he said. Our crews are there still aggressively working at it.

California has secured a fire management assistance grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to ensure the availability of resources to battle the Coastal Fire in Orange County, Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement.

Firefighters work on extinguishing the Coastal Fire in Laguna Niguel, Calif., on May 11, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

The grant is provided through funds from the federal disaster relief fund. It enables local, state, and tribal agencies responding to the fire to apply for 75 percent reimbursement of their eligible fire suppression costs.

Southern California Edison, which has personnel and investigators on the scene, has sent a letter to the state Public Utilities Commission regarding circuit activity occurring close in time to the reported time of the fire.

Firefighters continue to put out hot spots and lingering flames of the Coastal Fire using fixed-wing planes, dropping fire retardant on the hillside, and several water-dropping helicopters to slow the advancement of the fire from causing more damage.

Approximately 550 firefighters have battled the fire, according to authorities.

The priority of the City of Laguna Niguel is the safety and well-being of all of our residents, Mayor Elaine Gennawey told reporters during the press conference.

Residents seeking shelter can call a hotline number to receive information at 714-628-7085 or visit ocsherriff.gov/coastalfire. For animal services information, call 949-470-3045, ext. 0.

Firefighters work on extinguishing the Coastal Fire in Laguna Niguel, Calif., on May 11, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

City News Service contributed to this report.

This article will be updated as events develop.
The Ohio Supreme Court ruled by a 4-3 vote on Jan. 12 to eliminate the congressional redistricting maps. (File photo)

Ohio Redistricting Map, State Primary Election Date Turning Into Puzzle of Unknowns

Ohios legislators have requested that new district boundary maps not be drawn or implemented until after the Nov. 8 General Election.

The move comes as the second phase of Ohios primary electionthat could be held as early as Aug. 2 for the State House and State Senate officesis being planned.

Earlier in the week of May 9, attorneys representing Ohio House Speaker Bob Cupp and Senate President Matt Huffman requested that the Ohio Supreme Court, which has been reviewing and rejecting proposed redistricting maps, hold off on implementing the newly-drawn districts in hopes of eliminating confusion.

Ohio Supreme Court Justice Maureen OConnor has been the lone Republican to vote against Ohios redistricting maps. She has reached the age limit of serving as a judge and will be retiring at the end of 2022.

Such a move would allow the election to go forward without distractions.

If the states high court goes along with the legislators requests, it would mark the sixth time that the Ohio Redistricting Commission would have redrawn and submitted district maps.

The Ohio Supreme Courts judges have been rejecting the maps by a 4-3 vote since September 2021, citing that the maps violate anti-gerrymandering laws and are in favor of Republicans.

Judge Maureen OConnor, a Republican, has been casting the dissenting vote against the maps but will be retiring from the bench at the end of this because of age limits.

A number of the members of the Ohio Redistricting Commission are up for re-election, and the legislators believe it would be more favorable to wait until new members possibly are put in place on the commission.

Depending on what the state decides with the election, the U.S. District Court of Southern Ohio in Columbus still could weigh in to guide the implementation of a district map or setting an election date if the state legislature requests that.

As for the second primary election date, the Ohio Secretary of States Office and the Association of Elections Officials are lobbying to hold the elections for State House, State Senate, and State Central Committee on Aug. 2.

A second election date comes at a cost to Ohio taxpayers of about $30 million.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who serves on the Ohio Redistricting Commission, hopes to have the second half of the primary election some time in August. (Courtesy of Frank LaRoses Office)

There are 15 districts for U.S. House representatives, 33 State Senate districts, and 99 State House districts, according to information from Cupps office.

There had been 16 districts for the U.S. House in Ohio, but one district was eliminated in the 2020 U.S. Census due to the states drop in population.

However, as what Secretary of State Frank LaRose has called a stop-gap measure, the high court is considering using a proposed district map that had been submitted in the third batch for the courts review but was ultimately rejected. That map had previously been rejected in March but could be used for the second portion of the primary election.

However, as of May 11, no concrete date has been set, a worker at the Montgomery County Board of Elections in Dayton told The Epoch Times.

The sentiments of Paul Adams, director of the Lorain County Board of Elections, a politically active and spirited area in northeast Ohio west of Cleveland echoed the elections board.

Not knowing where a districts boundaries are going to be situated not only affects a candidates campaign strategy, but not knowing the date of the election puts a strain on officials who are tasked with finding workers to staff the polling places.

In Lorain County alone, it takes about 1,000 poll workers to adequately staff the precincts, Adams told The Epoch Times.

A second primary election will cost Lorain County alone about $400,000, he said.

Adams has worked for the Lorain County Board of Elections since 2003 and has been its director since 2010.

Theres a lot of things that are making this primary tough. Number 1, we dont know what the boundaries will be in the redistricting map, or when that will be approved.

Second  were still waiting on the final counts from absentee and provisional ballots from the May 3 primary, and having to prepare for the November election.

With an election being held in the summer, were looking at a very low voter turnout, Adams added.

Plus, there will be the challenge of getting enough poll workers to adequately cover the precincts. There have been district boundary disputes and election issues before, but nothing like this, or to the extent that it has caused the primary elections to be split up.

Paul Adams, director of the Lorain County Board of Elections in northeast Ohio, said holding the second portion of the primary presents a lot of challenges. (Courtesy of Paul Adams)

Using an example, Adams said that former State Rep. Dan Ramos (D), filed in February to run for office as a write-in candidate for District 53, covering Lorain and Amherst.

At the time Ramos filed, he was unopposed, or there was no incumbent in the seat.

Incumbent Joe Miller (D), who planned to run for re-election in Lorain and Amhersts District 56, currently has been placed in District 53 under the proposed maps with Ramos.

Dan Ramos originally didnt want to run against an incumbent, Adams said.

Adams went on to say that the last time anything similar has happened with elections was about 30 years ago when the 1992 primary was moved from May to June because of a district boundary dispute, he said.

To the best of my knowledge, that was the only time a primary election got moved, but Ive never known one to be split up.

Were hoping this all gets resolved and that after this primary everything will be on one ballot in November. Well just have to wait and see.
Firefighters work on extinguishing the Coastal Fire in Laguna Niguel, Calif., on May 11, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Ongoing Southern California Fire Rips Through Neighborhoods

LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif.A wildfire scorched over 200 acres in Aliso Wood Canyon May 11, chewing through suburbs with multi-million-dollar homes, destroying at least 20 homes.

This is a mandatory evacuation; all residents must leave, now, an Orange County Sheriffs deputy shouted over an intercom from his cruiser as firefighting vehicles drove past.

Maam, you must leave now!

The middle-aged woman complied with the officers and started up her SUV. Trash cans lay scattered from high winds in front of the homes of her neighborhood of Niguel Summit.

Firefighters work on extinguishing the Coastal Fire in Laguna Niguel, Calif., on May 11, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Just on the street above, large plumes of smoke and flames scattered down the shrubbery of a hillside while Orange County Fire Authority firefighters shot a powerful line of water into a burning home.

A piece of the home, already destroyed, then collapsed onto the driveway creating a sharp tumbling noise and a wave of ash that flew toward the fire engine.

Firefighters work on extinguishing the Coastal Fire in Laguna Niguel, Calif., on May 11, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

The Coastal Fire was reported at 2:45 p.m., originating near the South Orange County Wastewater Authoritys Coastal Treatment Plant, which handles sewage for the Laguna Beach area, said Orange County Sheriffs Department Sgt. Scott Steinle.

The flames spread quickly as they tore through thick brush on the hillside, aided by ocean winds that sparked spot fires ahead of the main blaze.

The fire pushed its way uphill, advancing on Aliso Summit Trail and into the neighboring multimillion-dollar estates.

Orange County Fire Authority Chief Brian Fennessy said at a Wednesday night news conference that an estimated 20-plus homes had been destroyed.

There were no immediate reports of injuries.

Firefighters work on extinguishing the Coastal Fire in Laguna Niguel, Calif., on May 11, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Evacuations were ordered in the Coronado Pointe and Pacific Island Drive areas, while voluntary evacuation orders were issued in the Balboa Nyes and Moulton Meadows neighborhoods in Laguna Beach. Students taking part in after-school activities at Laguna Beach High School were also evacuated, according to the school district.

Residents of the evacuated neighborhood were given access to Crown Valley Community Center, just a few miles from where evacuation orders were announced.

Around 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, approximately 25 residents fled to the emergency operation center provided by the city, where city staff welcomed those seeking shelter and offered donated food and water.

Inside the shelter that can hold up to 200 evacuees, families gathered in small groups, comforting one another, while they watched the fire blaze through nearby neighborhoods on local news channels.

Tim White, a Laguna Niguel resident, said he and his wife were working from home when they heard planes fly overhead in the Monarch Summit neighborhoodan area south of where the flames initially erupted.

We walked down our street and could see the flames coming, White told The Epoch Times. Theres a lot of elderly that live around us, so we talked to a couple of them and told them it was coming.

Firefighters work on extinguishing the Coastal Fire in Laguna Niguel, Calif., on May 11, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

White, along with his wife and daughter, said although they believe their home is safe, they were still nervous and worried.

Were hanging out here until we get an all clear, White said while staring at the inferno from the vantage point of a helicopter camera during a live broadcast. So, fingers crossed.

The flames advanced even as fixed-wing planes dropped fire retardant on the hillside in hopes of slowing the advance of the flames. Several water-dropping helicopters were also being employed in the firefight.

Above the firefighters, a constant flow of firefighting aircraft dropped water over burn areas, coming within feet of the ground crews.

I have not been baptized by a water drop just yet, an Orange County Fire Authority photographer told The Epoch Times as a plane flew past. Its really only a matter of time, though.

As he moved to the higher ground toward the direction of a burning home, additional firefighting units in a row of engines moved towards a wave of smoke, slowly disappearing with the bright lights of the engines lighting up the clouds.

Firefighters work on extinguishing the Coastal Fire in Laguna Niguel, Calif., on May 11, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

This is a developing story.

City News Service contributed to this report.

John Fredricks Follow John Fredricks is a California-based journalist for The Epoch Times. His reportage and photojournalism features have been published in a variety of award-winning publications around the world.
Orange County Power Authority Says Pre-Launch Operating Loss Is Normal

Orange Countys first community choice energy programthe Orange County Power Authoritysaid their recently reported $3 million operating loss is within the normal range for similar energy programs.

The Orange County Power Authority was officially launched in late 2020 in an effort to provide greener power to residents and businesses throughout the county. The agency, as a new purchaser and seller of electricity, is directly taking customers from Southern California Edison though the agency is still transporting the electricity through Edisons power lines.

Four Orange County cities have opted to join the power authority so farIrvine, Huntington Beach, Fullerton, and Buena Parkwith Irvine taxpayers fronting the millions of dollars in startup costs.

The power authoritys end-of-quarter financial report released on May 3 showed an operating loss of $3,020,301 from July 1, 2021, through March 31, 2022, which occurred before the official launch of its electrical services in April for commercial customers.

As some have been questioning the agencys financial feasibility since its inception, the power authority said it is typical for community choice energy agencies to experience a deficit in the beginning as it takes time for revenue to come in later when they start pumping electricity into homes and businesses.

Every Community Choice Aggregator (CCA) has reported net losses for periods prior to the start of their operations, a spokesperson for the Orange County Power Authority told The Epoch Times in an email. It generally takes some period of time after the start of operations to report gains.

According to documents obtained from the Orange County Power Authority, Monterey Bay Community Power had a $305,000 net loss from October 2017 to March 2018, Silicon Valley Clean Energy had a $2,641,900 net loss from October 2016 to April 2017, and San Diego Community Power had a $10,129,580 loss from July 2020 to March 2021.

So far, items of pre-launch operation have included payments that go toward Californias Resource Adequacy program, a policy framework adopted by the state Public Utilities Commission to help ensure the reliability of electric service in the state.

The resource adequacy program pays electricity generators, or power plants, to ensure that they always have adequate capacity in case of a period of peak usage or an emergency shortage. In essence, the power plants are paid to not operate to the fullest extent so that the remaining capacity will be able to serve situations like peak usage in a hot summer, evening peak hours, and broken power grids.

Other major costs came from areas including staffing, administration, professional technical consultancy, power procurement transactional support, legal support, regulatory-related services, and communications and outreachwhich includes required notification mailing, according to the agency.

A monthly revenue projection is not yet available from the agency, which is launching electrical services for residential customers in October.
A resident looks out behind a gate blocking an entrance to a residential area under COVID lockdown in Shanghai on April 13, 2022. (Aly Song/Reuters)

Over 40 Percent of Shanghai Residents Depressed During Lockdown: Survey

Shanghai residents are in their seventh week of lockdown restrictions, causing many of them to suffer mentally. A new survey has found that 40 percent of residents have shown signs of depression.

Chinese news portal NetEase released the survey on May 5 which revealed the psychological well-being of 1,021 Shanghai residents while under the city-wide lockdown.

The survey showed that the Shanghai residents Over-wrought/Discomposing Index reached 3.7 in April, surpassing their average score of 3.42 during the initial stage of the COVID outbreak in early 2020, when the epicenter was in Wuhan. Their current anxiety index is 3.6.

Using Depression Rating Scale, a quantitative method, the survey concluded that since April, more than 40 percent of Shanghai residents have shown symptoms of depression, which is manifested as frequent feelings of lowness, hopelessness, and a lack of interest in anything.

People stand on a rooftop of a building during a COVID-19 lockdown in the Jingan District in Shanghai on May 7, 2022. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

In addition, according to the Baidu Search Index, a big data-sharing platform revealing trends of selected keywords, the number of Shanghai residents searching for keywords such as psychological consultation on the Internet increased. In the past 30 days, the number of searches rose sharply by 2.5 fold compared with the same period last year.

The Epoch Times was able to reach Dr. Li, a Shanghai psychiatrist, who explained that a prolonged state of depression, panic, over-wrought, and uncertainty, will lead to a decline in stress resistance.

For Shanghai residents, these negative emotions are exacerbated because of the city-wide lockdown, Dr. Li said. Moreover, many people are out of work. Lacking a sense of self-recognition and worrying about the future are also major causes of depression, the doctor added.

Residents line up for nucleic acid tests during a lockdown in Shanghai on April 16, 2022. (Aly Song/Reuters)

Zhu Ling (pseudonym), a resident of Shanghais Putuo District, told The Epoch Times that the whole-city lockdown policy was shameless.

Many people have car loans and home loans and need to raise their children. How can they live [if they cant go to work]? Zhu said.

Zhus sister told him that when she was waiting in line to take a COVID-19 test one day, she witnessed a man in his 40s crying loudly. The man said he has a family and he has to repay a car loan and a mortgage.

However, because of the pandemic, he only received half a months payment in nearly three months.

A man with a mask is seen through a window at his home in a residential area in Shanghai, China, on April 13, 2022. (Getty Images/Getty Images)

Zhu noted that many people lost their jobs during the pandemic and could not see hope in life. Some peoples only hope is not to starve to death, and some have even jumped off the building to commit suicide when they couldnt stand it anymore.

They have even reached this point, Zhu said.

The Chinese Communist Party does not have the knowledge to govern a country, yet it is well versed in fooling the people. It never treats citizens as human beings, he said.

Actually, what the party is afraid of is that there are strong-willed people, but there are very few such people in China. For todays Chinese, as long as he is given some food, he will never think of rebellion, and once the lockdown is lifted, he will be grateful [for the Chinese Communist Party] again, he said.

Zhu said he believes that the most crucial issue is that people should have righteous beliefs, know the meaning of life, and not panic in the face of various difficulties.

Many Chinese people now believe in the Marxist-Leninist philosophy of struggle, and between people they can do anything vicious things. Some people stop at no evil, as there is no kindness in their heart, Zhu said.
GOP gubernatorial candidate Lou Barletta speaks at the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania where candidate Jake Corman announced he is dropping out of the race and endorsing Barletta on May, 12, 2022. (Courtesy Barletta campaign)

Pennsylvania Governor Race: Corman Quits, Endorses Barletta

Pennsylvania Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman has announced that he is dropping out of the Republican primary race for governor. Corman made the announcement Thursday, May 12, during a joint press conference with gubernatorial candidate Lou Barletta at the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association in Harrisburg. Corman used that time to endorse Barletta.

Corman said it is time to do what is right for the Republican Party and get behind one candidate who can win in the general election. He urged other candidates to do the same for the good of the party.

Jake Corman (Corman campaign)

In April, Corman prepared papers to withdraw from the race but former President Donald Trump encouraged him to stay in the race, so he did. Trump has not made an endorsement in this race.

Corman has been a member of the Pennsylvania Senate for 24 years, having been elected six times to 4-year terms. But throughout the governors race, Corman has not polled well; his low poll numbers prevented him from being invited to participate in the April 27 statewide debate sponsored by Nextstar Media Group.

The most recent poll by the Trafalgar Group, conducted between May 68, has Barletta, a former U.S. Representative, in second place with 17.6 percent of poll respondents saying they would vote for him if the election were held today.

The same poll puts Corman in fifth place with 5.3 percent support.

Lou Barletta (Barletta campaign)

Frontrunner State Sen. Doug Mastriano leads the poll by 10 percentage points with 27.6 percent support. Also listed are Dave White in third place at 15.1 percent; William McSwain in fourth at 14.4 percent; Melissa Hart ranks sixth at 3.7 percent; Joe Gale is seventh at 3 percent, and Charlie Gerow in eighth place with 2.1 percent support. But the poll also shows 11.3 percent of voters polled are undecided. The poll has a 2.99 percent margin of error.

The primary is only half the battle. The prevailing candidate in the May 17 primary will battle well-funded Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat who is running unopposed in the primary.

Shapiro has begun running television advertisements in opposition of Mastriano, saying Mastriano is like Trump and asking if Pennsylvania really wants another Trump. The ads have been ridiculed in right-leaning social media circles where some respond that yes, another Trump is exactly what they want. However, the same advertisement may have a different ring in the general election when candidates work to earn the votes of members of all parties.

Cormans name will remain on the ballot but he says his vote will go to Barletta, and in a moment of levity, he said he has even told his mother to ignore his name and support Barletta.
Sam Faddis of Unite PA speaks about organization efforts to ensure election integrity in the capital rotunda in Harrisburg, Pa., on May 11, 2022. (Beth Brelje/The Epoch Times)

Pennsylvania Activists Join Forces to Demand Election Integrity

Representatives from more than 70 political activism groups in Pennsylvania are demanding that their legislators repeal no-excuse mail-in voting and secure the commonwealths election processes. Many of them gathered at the capital in Harrisburg on May 11.

Leaders from each group signed an election integrity declaration calling for the legislature to return the law to in-person voting on election day, with the exceptions noted in the election code as it read before the implementation of Act 77 in 2019. It also asks that voters be required to provide photo identification, proof of U.S. citizenship and state residency, and that the state use hardcopy paper ballots.

The group representatives delivered copies of the declaration to the office of every state lawmaker.

In 2019, this Legislature, under Republican control, enacted a law that brought us to mail-in voting in Pennsylvania, said Sam Faddis of Unite PA in a speech at the capital rotunda.

We did not ask for them to do that. They did not consult with us before doing that. They simply imposed that change, despite the fact that mail-in voting has been regarded, forever, as a gift to those who want to engage in electoral fraud and election theft, Faddis said, adding that Act 77 then got worse after the state Supreme Court and then-secretary of state got their hands on it.

Act 77 created a new option to vote by mail without needing an excuse, which had previously been required for voters using absentee ballots. It also allowed for a 50-day mail-in voting period, the longest vote-by-mail period in the country; extended the deadline to register to vote from 30 days before an election to just 15 days; and extended mail-in and absentee submission deadlines from the Friday before an election to 8 p.m. on Election Day.

In 2020, we paid the price for that with an election filled with all sorts of irregularities and allegation of fraud. That election remains in dispute to this day, Faddis said, noting that the implications of a disputed election are felt nationally.

For 18 months, we have asked the Legislature to rectify this mistake and fix the election system, he said. We have asked, we have pleaded, we have requested. For 18 months, we have received platitudes, soothing noises, and rough promises that something, sometime, somehow will be done.

The May 11 gathering in Harrisburg was the result of organization efforts by Faddis to unite the many like-minded political groups operating in Pennsylvania.

In April, people in leadership from 44 separate right-leaning political groups that respect the U.S. Constitution met in Allentown to organize around election integrity laws. The groups included Moms for Liberty, Council of American Patriots, Lehigh Valley Tea Party, Women for Trump East PA, We the People 4 PA, Audit the Vote PA, Grassroots Unite PA, Berks County Patriots, and many others.

During the meeting, they created and unified around the declaration that demands changes to election law. In the weeks that followed, more groups joined the effort. Now, the movement has more than 70 participating organizations.

With just days before the May 17 primary, nothing has been done to address the issues, Faddis said in his rotunda speech, and Pennsylvania will go into the next election with the same broken mechanisms that were used in 2020.

We are done asking. We are done requesting. We are demanding and we are telling you, as the people from whom all power derives, that you will change this.

Tabitha Valleau of Free PA spoke about the significance of more than 70 politically engaged groups acting as one.

Tabitha Valleau of Free PA stands in the Pennsylvania capital rotunda in Harrisburg during an election integrity event on May 11, 2022. (Beth Brelje/The Epoch Times)

Every elected representative in Pennsylvania should be terrified, Valleau said. We the people of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania have united. That has been our biggest deterrent on this journey to getting anything accomplishedso many small and large groups not working together.

But as a united voice, she says, elected officialswho work for the peoplewill now be able to hear the demands to do something to fix Pennsylvanias election system.

The local groups have been in constant contact with their communities more than elected officials, she said.

We take the phone calls. We hear the frustrations of the electoral process in Pennsylvania. They are sitting in their cushy offices here, listening to leadership and doing as they are told by leadership, while we are the ones dealing with the community, Valleau said.

Although the cooperating groups are right-leaning, Republicans should not assume they are safe from the scrutiny of these 70 groups and all their members, which together, cover most of Pennsylvania, group leaders said. They are prepared to actively work to vote people out of office.

This group stands as one and we will do whatever it takes to replace anyone who does not stand with the people, Valleau said. You are either with us, or you are against us. And that will determine how long you are employed by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

After the speeches, representatives from the various groups signed the declaration. Those from the western part of the state who were not present signed electronically. They were not professional politicians, but rather mothers and grandmothers with purses slung over their shoulders and some men in suits, others in jeans and T-shirts.

The Democratic Party is more organized than the Republican Party, Valleau told The Epoch Times after the event. Democrats tend to share the same talking points and stick to them.

Republicans have many groups but typically stay in their own spheres of influence.

Where we have failed is taking all those amazing, constitutionally sound groups and bring them together to have one loud voice, Valleau said.

Working together, they can have more influence and power to elect their preferred representatives, she said.

They can no longer sit by, hold a press conference, say they are going to do something, or put something on a mailer for a campaign, and do nothing about it, because we are actually going to hold them accountable. We have the momentum, and now the reach, as one giant group.

Valleau said they welcome more groups to join the movement, which at this point has no name but does intend to get involved with other issues.

An incomplete list of the participating groups:

Convention of States

Hope for PA

Unite PA

Lehigh Valley Tea Party

Bucks First

Council of American Patriots

Peoples Movement

Women for Trump E. PA

Palisades Republican Club

We the People 4 PA

Audit the Vote PA

Grassroots Unite PA

Delaware County Patriots

Chesco United

Pennridge Area Republican Club

New Hope for Our Nation

Ballot Security Now

We the People

Berks County Patriots

Right for Bucks

Council of American Patriots

Neighbors United

PA Liberty Alliance

Moms for Liberty

Northern PA Patriots

West Chester Tea Party

America Project

SE PA Freedom Fighters

Valley Forge Patriots

Patriots of Pennsylvania (Lancaster, Chester, Dauphin)

Free Delaware County

We the People of Coal Country

Lions for Liberty

We the People USA United of

Columbia County

The Council

FreePA

The Peoples Movement

Pennsylvania Integrity Network

Butler PA Patriots

Freedom Faith & Family Coalition

Coalition for Election Integrity PA

Coalition for Election Integrity

Adorable Deplorables

Philadelphia Tea Party

Shield of Truth Network

Patriot Caucus

Proud American Patriots Network

1776 American Empowered

Community Impact Team of SE PA

Indian Valley Conservative Voice

Freedom Watch Tioga

Parents Coalition Bradford County

PA Coalition for Informed Consent

White Rose Freedom Warriors

Southern Lehigh Grass Roots

Honorare Vita-Honor Life

PA Economic Growth PAC

PA Informed Consent Advocates

Health Freedom Pennsylvania

Freedom for Choice PA Preparedness

Education Group

Pennsylvania Freedom Keeper

Patriots Unite

Tinicum Republican Club (Bucks County)
A photographer and bird lover whos befriended blue jays in her backyard has captured an incredible series of close-ups, showing the little birds in all their colorful glory, and proving that the wonders of nature are never far away.

Jessica Kirste, 43, of Linden, New Jersey, has taken photos of blue jays for years. However, finding herself more at home in the spring of 2021, she became more interested in this particular subject.

It started in my upstairs window, Jessica told The Epoch Times. I would sit on my ottoman and throw unsalted shelled peanuts out the window, and watch them fly in for them while photographing mostly portraits when they would land on the wires. Then I decided I was going to make it a goal to get blue jays in flight.

As her passion in photographing them grew, she began sitting out more with these beautiful birds. She spent months tracking their speed and flight patterns.

Over that time, they have gotten really used to me and look for me in the evening at my upstairs window, said Jessica. I think I will eventually get to the point where they will take the peanut from my hand!

Jessica fell in love with photography as a teen, when she started experimenting with her mothers film camera. Her subjects mostly involved family and friends, with occasional trips to the zoo or aquarium.

However, she claims her efforts were pretty bad until a 2007 trip to the Baltimore Aquarium, where she noticed that her friends digital camera took better quality photos.

She saved up for her own digital camera that same year, a Canon S5 IS super-zoom point and shoot, and believes this is when her photography career began. She transitioned to a DSLR in 2010.

She then learned how to use a digital camera by photographing river birds at Rahway River near her home. Since then, she has made wildlife, bird, and zoo photography her area of focus.

Today, her setup comprises a Canon 7D Mark II with Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM lenses.

In spring 2021, Jessica was visited by four blue jays that eventually became regular guests in her backyard. The same four birds returned in 2022 after a short migration over the winter, with more, totaling 10.

I believe a few are last years offspring, said Jessica.

An acorn tree in Jessicas yard provides one of their favorite foods, but the original four jays have Jessica well-trained by sitting at her window until she raises the blinds in the morning and gives them peanuts.

She asserted, though, that they dont completely rely on her for food. She has also seen them feed on bugs in the grass, acorns, a mulberry tree, and the invasive spotted lanternflies.

Each bird has a unique black headband that goes around from the back of the crown, down the side of the head, and around the front to the other side, said Jessica, making it possible to identify each individual bird.

She has nicknamed her favorite jay Bat Bird, as his stripe resembles the Batman symbol, and claims one of Bat Birds entourage is cheeky enough to fly past her head after collecting a peanut.

Maybe this is his way of saying thank you for the peanuts, she said.

The nature photographer prefers snapping blue jays two to three hours before sunset when the waning sun naturally saturates their blue feathers in the golden light.

Jessica explains that the blue hue of the jays feathers owes to melanin responding to light. Its a stunningly beautiful optical illusion that has to do with light scattering, she said.

The little birds are, in fact, grayish-brown, which can be seen when photographing the birds from underneath.

She emphasizes that blue pigments are rare in nature, if at all they do happen to exist.

Sharing more about how she captures her stunning shots, Jessica said that she will line up her ideal shot against a natural backdrop, then throw peanuts to encourage the blue jays to fly in a certain direction that she wants them to.

The blue jays have grown used to her routine and wait patiently for peanutssome of which they cleverly hidein exchange for posing for Jessicas spectacular shots.

One of her most amazing shots to date depicts a blue jay flying across a rainbow from a passing storm.

Blue jays are not the only visitors to Jessicas yard, but they are her favorites. Among others are a male and female red-bellied woodpeckerMr. and Mrs. Red, as she calls themand they, too, make for amusing photo subjects when they are in a fight with the blue jays over peanuts.

Jessica shares her photos on Instagram, Facebook, and her website. She claims her popular photos have inspired others to start offering their backyard visitors some peanut treats in exchange for posing for photos!

The New Jersey-based photographer believes you dont need to travel far for good photos. Blue jays are common visitors in the backyards of central North America, and she thus encourages others to make friends with the charming little birds.

Always have some unsalted shelled and unshelled peanuts on hand, she suggested. Spend time outdoors instead of in front of screens; the more I sit outside, the more I see hawks, woodpeckers, warblers, egrets, and even bald eagles.

You never know what you will see when youre spending time outdoors.

Share your stories with us at emg.inspired@epochtimes.com, and continue to get your daily dose of inspiration by signing up for the Inspired newsletter at TheEpochTimes.com/newsletter
Political Prisoners: Jan. 6 Defendant Facing Two Years of Pretrial Detention Speaks Out

A man accused of committing crimes on Jan. 6, 2021, is speaking out about the prospect of being held in prison for two years before he goes on trial.

Jake Lang was arrested 10 days after the breach of the U.S. Capitol and has been held since.

His trial is not scheduled to start until 2023.

Theres no right to a speedy trial anymore in America, Lang told NTDs Capitol Report from the Alexandria Detention Center in Virginia, the latest prison in which hes being held.

Theres no right to religious services in prison, you cant your hair cutthe list goes on and on and on. Theyre using COVID as this blinder to just absolutely desecrate the Bill of Rights and we dont really have any rights in prison anymore.

In a memorandum supporting Langs pretrial detention, prosecutors said there were no conditions that would ensure the safety of the community if he were allowed to post bond. They shared screenshots of videos that showed Lang assaulting law enforcement officers outside the Capitol.

Prosecutors said the evidence against Lang is strong and compelling and that he would be a flight risk if released.

Police release tear gas into a crowd of demonstrators during clashes outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)

In a counter-filing, Langs lawyers charged that Langs treatment in the District of Columbia Jail violated his human rights. They also said the government failed to prove Lang is a flight risk, that he was unarmed on Jan. 6 and helped save the lives of multiple protesters, and that he could be let go with conditions assuring the communitys safety.

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, ordered in September 2021 Lang to be kept in prison. A U.S. Court of Appeals panel in January upheld the decision, finding that Lang has not demonstrated that the district court clearly erred in finding that no condition or combination of conditions of release would reasonably assure the safety of any other person and the community.

Im looking at two years until I go to trial. They wont even give me bond. Theyre giving mass murderers and all these robbers and all these people across the country bond, Lang told NTD. But for Jan. 6 political prisoners, over 50 of us are still being held without bond.

While authorities say images captured on Jan. 6 show Lang violently engaging with officers as they tried to prevent rioters from entering the Capitol, Lang says police started the mayhem by unleashing pepper spray and assaulting protesters.

We were just protesting peacefully, Lang said. Then the cops started to reach over the barriers with their batons, whack people in the head  I personally witnessed them drag a woman up over the barrier, drag her back like 20, 30 feet, and then six cops surround her, kicking her in her head, and really riling up the crowd. I mean, if youre a grown man watching that, watching a woman being kicked on the ground by six other grown men, youre going to react a certain way.

Zachary Stieber Reporter Follow Zachary Stieber covers U.S. and world news. He is based in Maryland.
Radical Democrats Race in North Carolinas Most Expensive Primary

Democrats Nida Allam and Valerie Foushee are spending record amounts of money in a battle for North Carolinas Fourth Congressional District primary.

The most expensive Democratic congressional primary in North Carolinas history seems illogical at first. Its a fight between two candidates with an almost-identical platform and similarly high chances of winning the general election.

But at the core, the political battle between Allam and Foushee seems to be about the nationwide conflict between radical Democrats hoping to bring the party further left and party loyalists.

Although Allam and Foushee share a similarly radical platform, Allam has several campaign planks that seriously offset even traditional Democratic Party positions.

Its a misnomer that this is a progressive versus a moderate, said Democratic campaign strategist Morgan Jackson. This is a progressive versus ultraprogressive.

The fourth district is solidly Democratic, so the primary winner will likely go to Congress, influencing at least the next two years of national Democratic politics.

The Squad Surges

In some ways, the Democratic Party conflict in North Carolina began in 2018 with the arrival of The Squad to Congress.

When New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D), Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D), Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar (D), and Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D) arrived as new congresswomen, they had several key political traits in common.

Each was a relatively young woman with an activist background, devoted to bringing radical politics to a national scale.

To me, capitalism is irredeemable, Occasio-Cortez said in 2019.

While the current Democratic Party platform supports a $15 minimum wage, support for the American alliance with Israel, and policies to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, members of The Squad took an extreme approach.

Tlaib called for a $20 minimum wage, Omar accused Israel of terrorism, and Occasio-Cortez backed the Green New Deal which demands 100 percent clean energy by 2030.

As they near four years in Congress, few of their best-known policies have become law. But their stunts have colored the Democratic Partys image nationwide. Supporting their policies also because increasingly popular among mainstream Democrats.

Despite legislative failures, The Squad has continued to grow in number adding two more members, Missouri Rep. Cori Bush (D) and New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D).

Allam, a young Muslim woman and activist who supports many of The Squads policies, would add to their growing political power.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) (L), Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) (2L), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) (2R), and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) speak at a press conference on the Capitol on July 15, 2019. (Holly Kellum/NTD)

Previously, Allam worked as a political director for socialist Bernie Sanders presidential campaign.

Until a few weeks ago, she led the Fourth Districts candidates in fundraising, a likely indicator that the race was hers to win.

Allam has attended rallies that chanted slogans for the elimination of Israel, overturning nearly 60 years of U.S. Middle Eastern diplomacy strategy. She also supported more than tripling the federal minimum wage to $23 an hour.

Then, several major political groups started raising funds for her opponent.

Foushee Fight

Foushees campaign platform strongly resembles Allams, but her political background differs significantly.

Also a minority woman, Foushee has a very different history with the Democratic Party.

Foushee has spent the past 24 years in politics, going from school boards to the North Carolina state Senate. Her long history with the North Carolina Democratic Party has earned her endorsements from nearly 30 North Carolina political leaders.

Even so, her platform shares enough with The Squad to classify her as a radical progressive. Like Allam, she supports the Green New Deal, a higher minimum wage, and the removal of abortion restrictions.

But on several measures, Foushee is less extreme than The Squads goals.

She still supports the U.S. alliance with Israel and her suggested $15 minimum wage is $8 short of Allams preference.

North Carolina Fourth Congressional District candidate Valerie Foushee (R) speaks to voters on March 22, 2022. (Valerie Foushee Campaign)

The rocket fuel for Foushees campaign came from out-of-state political action committees including pro-abortion group Emilys List, the Congressional Black Caucus PAC, and the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Various political groups have given millions to bolster Foushees campaign. The donations to Foushee are so large as to be counterproductive.

North Carolina state representative Marcia Morey (D) withdrew her endorsement of Foushee over concerns that she had taken too many out of state donations.

I thought she would disavow undue outside influence of bundled PAC money. I am very disappointed she did not, said Morey. Then she endorsed Allams campaign.

Whether Allam or Foushee wins the primary, the Fourth District will likely have a relatively equivalent far-left representative.

But Democrat leaders seem acutely aware of the difference between a Democrat-allied radical like Allam and a radical-allied Democrat like Foushee.

Its definitely, We dont want more progressives; we dont want another member of The Squad [expletive] with our establishment politics, said Ryan Jenkins, the leader of the Progressive Caucus of the North Carolina Democratic Party. The Squad really turned D.C. upside down a bit.
A sign is posted in front of new homes for sale at Hamilton Cottages in Novato, Calif., on Sept. 24, 2020. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Remain Cautious on Mortgage Originators: Rocket Companies Analysts React to Mixed Q1 Earnings

Rocket Companies Inc. shares are trading lower by 5.5 percent after the mortgage lender reported a sharp decline in revenue.

On Tuesday afternoon, Rocket reported first-quarter adjusted EPS of 15 cents, missing consensus analyst estimates of 19 cents. Revenue for the quarter was $2.67 billion, beating Wall Streets expectations of $2.17 billion. Revenue was down 41 percent from a year ago.

Rocket reported closed loan origination volume of nearly $54 billion, down from $103.5 billion in the first quarter of 2021. Gain on sale margin of 3.01 percent was also down from 3.74 percent a year ago.

Looking ahead, Rocket guided for second-quarter closed loan volume of between $35 billion and $40 billion and gain on sale margins of between 2.6 percent and 2.9 percent.

Voices From The Street

Credit Suisse analyst Douglas Harter said Rockets weak origination volumes and lackluster guidance were not surprising given recent reports by mortgage peers.

GOS revenue (lower volume) and other income (Amrock) were below expectations and were partially offset by lower expenses and higher servicing income (lower amortization expense) to result in the miss vs. our expectations, Harter wrote in a note. Credit Suisse has a Neutral rating and $11 target.

Bank of America analyst Mihir Bhatia said surprisingly low operating expense guidance was a silver lining in an otherwise disappointing report.

That said, higher rates and robust competition are continuing headwinds that will impact volumes, margins and returns over the near-to-medium term, Bhatia wrote. Bank of America has an Underperform rating and $8 target.

Wells Fargo analyst Donald Fandetti said bearish hedge funds see normalized EPS of only around 70 cents for Rocket.

We believe the risk is on the upside for the US 10-year Treasury yield, therefore we remain cautious on mortgage originators, Fandetti wrote. Wells Fargo has an Equal-Weight rating and $8 target.

By Wayne Duggan

 2022 The Epoch Times. The Epoch Times does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
R | 2h 8min | Drama, Mystery, Thriller | 23 November 2005 (USA)

For the movie Traffic, Oscar-winning screenwriter Stephen Gaghan took what is easily one of the most controversial and divisive of global issues (illegal drugs) and did the near impossible. He wrote a film where no one was innocent, everyone got their hands dirty, and the good guys were just as, if not more, dangerous than the bad guys.

Gaghan never took a moral or ethical stance on his subject, and he created a plethora of diverse characters who presented their own wide range of differing viewpoints and opinions.

George Clooney as Bob Barnes in Syriana. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

In the end he had them asking, whats the real problem: drugs themselves, people who sell them, people who use them, or the assorted governments so ineptly trying to police them? He never got an answer.

Switch Out Drugs With Oil

In his brilliant, incendiary follow-up to Traffic, Gaghan more or less employs the same method of multi-level storytelling and directs his ire at the global oil industry. Unlike illegal drugs, petroleum-based energy products affect every person in the industrialized world, and many who are not.

At this point we have little choice; we have to use them, as most alternatives are cost prohibitive. Like drug users, oil consumers are at the whim of their producers and sellers and, as Gaghan makes so abundantly clear throughout, the governments who regulate the industry.

(LR) Matt Damon, George Clooney, Alexander Siddig, and Mazhir Munir in Syriana. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

If you need further proof, calculate how much money it took to fill your gas tank last week.

Taking his cue from Traffic helmer Steven Soderbergh, first time director Gaghan presents the story in non-linear, quasi-documentary form, but dont get the idea the movie is staid or lacking punch.

There is enough material here to fill five movies and it would appear as if Gaghan had drained his creative juices on this project, as the only two movies hes made since thenGold from 2016 and Doolittle from 2020were both complete creative and critical disasters.

The story is based on the 2002 memoir See No Evil by former C.I.A. agent Robert Baer. While not referenced too directly, there is a character based on Baer (Bob Barnes), played by George Clooney who gives, what is without a doubt, the finest performance of his career.

George Clooney as Bob Barnes (L) and William Hurt as Stan in Syriana. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

When the dust settled at the end of the 2005 awards season, Clooney had won the Oscar, the Golden Globe, and numerous critics association awards in the Best Supporting Actor category.

I named him my top choice in that category in my year-end list and the film itself landed at number one.

An interesting tidbit: Harrison Ford turned down the Barnes role as well as the pivotal part in Traffic eventually played by Michael Douglas, a decision Ford later said he regretted.

Beefy Clooney

Packing on nearly 50 pounds and going Grizzly Adams scruffy, Clooney plays Barnes as a man who always tries to do the right thing, but doesnt quite realize right means different things to different people.

On any given day, he deals with bureaucrats, terrorists, number-crunchers, business tycoons, organized (and disorganized) crime, lobbyists, royalty, and his own slowly disintegrating family. Getting pulled in every direction at once, its a wonder he hasnt already put a gun to his own head.

Matt Damon as Bryan Woodman and Amanda Peet as Julie Woodman in Syriana. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Barnes provides the springboard from which all of the sub-plots launch, but Clooneys is not what you could call a lead role. Time is divided equally between him and four other principals. Poker-faced Jeffrey Wright plays a D.C. lawyer attempting to arrange the merger of two domestic oil companies without selling his own soul in the process.

Matt Damon is a nice fit as a Swedish-based U.S. futures expert whose desire to improve his familys lot has the exact opposite effect. While Clooney, Wright, and Damon provide the us perspective, Mazhir Munir as a burgeoning Muslim fundamentalist and Alexander Siddig as an Arab prince sharing Barness well-intended mind-set give us the them slant.

By bringing to life so many richly-drawn, well-developed and, most importantly, morally ambiguous characters to the screen, Gaghan is able to take them and us into places and situations we could never have imagined, most of which well forever want to avoid.

Selective Editing After the Fact

So volatile was the content of the film (in some peoples eyes, at least), nebulous authorities in some Middle Eastern countries censored parts of the film before allowing it to screen in theaters. It was also somewhat odd that the only Oscar nominations for the film were only for Clooney and Gaghan for Best Screenplay.

Not only was the movie not nominated for an Oscar for Best Director or Picture, it also received the same cold shoulder from the British Academy (BAFTA) and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association: the folks who hand out the Golden Globes. This happened in the same year when Crash, one of the most overrated movies of all-time, went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Stay Mum

A bunch of people in high places apparently didnt want this movie to receive the attention or accolades it so richly deserved, and it smacks of the close-but-not-quite-the-same treatment levied upon Citizen Kane in 1941.

This movie is certainly not for all, or even most tastes. If you prefer something light, breezy, and uncomplicated, dont even waste your time. Seriously, it will give you a headache. The film gets up in your face and under your skin immediately and grows only more confrontational and damning as it progresses.

It wants to pin your ears back, pry your eyes open, and slap your consciousness about in a way no movie has ever attempted and, on that front, it more than succeeded.

Presented in English and multiple subtitled foreign languages.

Syriana

Director: Stephen Gaghan

Stars: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Jeffrey Wright, Amanda Peet, William Hurt

Running Time: 2 hours, 8 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Release Date: Nov. 23, 2005

Rating: 5 out of 5
Russian President Vladimir Putin (C) speaks with his press secretary Dmitry Peskov (2nd R) in a file photo. (Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images)

Russia Threatens Retaliation as Finland Prepares Bid to Join NATO

Russian officials on May 12 threatened to take action if Finland is successful in its bid to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Finland joining NATO will seriously harm bilateral Russian-Finnish relations and the maintenance of stability and security in the North European region, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement, according to state-run media.

Russia will be forced to take retaliatory steps both of military-technical and of other nature in order to stop the threats to its national security that emerge as a result.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow that Russian leaders are developing ways to strengthen our western flanks in connection with the strengthening of NATOs eastern flank.

NATO is moving in our direction, so, of course, all this will become elements for a special analysis and development of necessary measures, in order to balance the situation and ensure our safety, he said.

Finnish President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin on May 12 said that Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay.

NATO membership would strengthen Finlands security, they said.

Finnish President Sauli Niinisto speaks to reporters in Helsinki, on May 11, 2022. (Frank Augstein/Pool via Reuters)

Finland, one of the few European countries that isnt part of NATO, renewed talks of joining the military alliance after Russia invaded Ukraine in February.

The invasion changed the debate on the issue, Marin said shortly after the war started.

Pekka Haavisto, Finlands foreign minister, told the European Parliament on May 12 that public support for joining NATO has soared in recent months, as shown through extensive polling.

Should Finland decide to apply, the accession of Finland would strengthen the security and stability of the Baltic Sea region and Northern Europe, he said. Finland is a regional security provider and it would further strengthen NATO as a future ally. From NATOs perspective, Finland holds solid democratic credentials that meet NATOs membership criteria and has a strong and credible national defense that is interoperable with NATO.

Finland can field some 280,000 troops and has a reserve of approximately 900,000, with a force that includes a high-end fighter jet fleet, the official said.

Members of NATO pledge that an attack against one member is an attack against all.

Ukraine isnt an alliance member, and no other countries have directly joined the war in support of the country. However, many have sent military aid, including weapons.

Sweden, another country considering applying to join NATO, is expected to reach a decision soon.
Service members of pro-Russian troops are seen atop of a tank during Ukraine-Russia conflict on the outskirts of the besieged southern port city of Mariupol, Ukraine, on March 20, 2022. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)

Russia Withdrawing Troops From Ukraine After Heavy Losses, Intelligence Agency Says

Russia is now withdrawing some of its troops after suffering heavy losses in recent days, claimed the United Kingdoms Ministry of Defense on Thursday.

In an update posted on social media, the ministry alleged that Ukrainian forces are continuing to counterattack to the north of Kharkiv, recapturing several towns and villages towards the Russian border.

Despite Russias success in encircling Kharkiv in the initial stages of the conflict, it has reportedly withdrawn units from the region to reorganize and replenish its forces following heavy losses, the agency said, referring to the second-largest city, located in northeastern Ukraine near the Russian border.

But the withdrawal of Russian forces from the Kharkiv Oblast is a tacit recognition of Russias inability to capture key Ukrainian cities where they expected limited resistance from the population, the ministry continued.

Those withdrawn forces, it added, will likely be sent to the Siverskyi Donets River to form a blockade to protect the western flank of Russias main force concentration and main supply routes for operations in the vicinity of Izyum.

Russian military officials have not made a public comment after the United Kingdoms assessment.

Meanwhile, it comes as Moscow threatened to retaliate against Finland after the Scandinavian country indicated that it wishes to join the NATO security alliance. Finland, which shares a border with Russia and has long remained neutral even during Soviet times, stated on Thursday it would apply to join NATO without delay, and Sweden is expected to follow suit.

The Grande Pettine Hotel in Odessa, Ukraine, was destroyed by a missile. (Max Pshybyshevsky/AP)

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the Finns would be warmly welcomed and promised a smooth and swift accession process. French President Emmanuel Macron said he fully supported Finlands choice to join the alliance.

But through state-run media, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Finlands proclamation will trigger a negative response from Russia.

There is a current instruction from the president to develop a list of measures to strengthen our western flanks in connection with the strengthening of NATOs eastern flanks, he told state media Thursday.

Russias foreign ministry said Moscow would be forced to take retaliatory steps, both of a military-technical and other nature, giving no further details. Russian officials have spoken in the past about potential measures including stationing nuclear-armed missiles on the Baltic Sea.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has long said that NATO is attempting to expand its borders in a bid to place military pressure on Moscow. He cited that assertion as a major reason for invading Ukraine, describing it as a special military operation.

Reuters contributed to this report.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) speaks during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 7, 2021. (Alex Brandon-Pool/Getty Images)

Sen. Markey Calls for Nuclear De-escalation With Russia

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has called for the Biden administration to guarantee that it wont engage in a first-use nuclear strike against Russia amid the escalating war in Ukraine, although officials have indicated that the United States will likely maintain its policy of strategic ambiguity.

Markey called on the administration to announce a no-first-use (NFU) policy on May 12 during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing. His statements come two days after Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin could use nuclear weapons if he feels like hes losing the war.

Were supporting Ukraine, but also we dont want to ultimately end up in World War III, and we dont want to end up in a situation where actors are using nuclear weapons, Haines told the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 10. We perceive that as something that [Putin] is unlikely to do unless there is effectively an existential threat to his regime and to Russia from his perspective.

We do think that that could be the case in the event he perceives that he is losing the war in Ukraine and that NATO is sort of, in effect, either intervening or about to intervene in that context, which would obviously contribute to a perception that he is about to lose the war in Ukraine.

Expressing concern about rising nuclear tensions, Markey said on May 12 that the Biden administration should make a diplomatic gesture by declaring an NFU policy.

Doesnt it make sense for the U.S. to say flat out that we will not be the country that engages in a first use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, so the whole world knows and Russia knows as well? Markey asked Karen Donfried, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs.

While Donfried replied that its U.S. policy to stay out of the armed conflict in Ukraine, that answer didnt satisfy the Democrat from Massachusetts.

I think that, increasingly, people in our country and around the world are worried that this could escalate and that nuclear weapons could become involved, Markey said. So, from my perspective, I think it would be wise for our country to say flat out, We will not use nuclear weapons if nuclear weapons have not been used against Ukraine or the United States.

Donfried nodded but didnt say anything in response to Markeys suggestion.

I would also hope that, at least on the side, conversations could be engaged in with regard to nuclear weapons deployment between U.S. and Russia, Markey said. I know its difficult in this context, but have you thought about that?

I want to be clear that the U.S. is not a party to this conflict, Donfried responded. It was Russia that invaded its neighbor.

Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), the ranking Republican member of the committee, also responded to Markey, speaking against his proposal.

This talk of nuclear weapons is something that needs to be undertaken very cautiously. It is not the policy of the United States at this time to declare a no-first-use of nuclear weapons. We have whats called strategic ambiguity in that regard, he said. Our allies have joined with us in that particular policy.

Risch said that while he shares Markeys concerns about nuclear war, that issue is out of the Senates control.

Unfortunately, its not us that have control over irrational conduct, he said, referencing Putins nuclear threats.

However, intelligence experts have warned that the Biden administration has contributed to rising nuclear tensions through actions such as calling for regime change in Russia and not pushing harder for a ceasefire agreement.

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), a group of former intelligence officials headed by retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern, said in a May 1 open letter that Moscow sees U.S. military involvement in Ukraine as akin to the Soviet Unions attempt to put nuclear missiles in Cuba.

Ukraine is now a must-win for Putin, the memo says. We cannot rule out the possibility that, backed into a corner, he might authorize a limited nuclear strike with modern missiles that fly many times the speed of sound.
Pro-abortion "performative artists" walk in circles near Justice Amy Coney Barrett's house in Falls Church, Virginia on May 11, 2022 (Jackson Elliott/The Epoch Times)

Seven Activists Create Performance Art Outside Justice Barretts House

FALLS CHURCH, VirginiaSeven activists quietly walked in circles while dressed as handmaids near Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barretts house on May 11.

The activists wore red robes, white bonnets, and black face masks, a reference to The Handmaids Tale, a novel about a dystopian America controlled by religious extremists who oppress women.

The activists all appeared to be women, with one exception. They all spoke with a similar clipped, angry tone.

Please dont write and release and overturn Roe v. Wade, the leader of the protesters said. If nothing else, we have a right to express our displeasure at their tromping all over stare decisis.

The leader later gave her name as Cassandra and announced that the event was not a protest.

This is performance art, she said.

She added that she would not give her name because her groups leader, a neighbor of Brett Kavanaughs, had his or her personal information posted online and received death threats.

Several of the activists carried cardboard pro-abortion protest signs. These included Its Time to Ovaryact, We Did Not Elect People of Praise, and Keep Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries.

Settled precedent is settled precedent, and every single one of these justices sat in front of the entire Congress and blathered on about stare decisis, settled law. And here they are, [expletive] on 50 years of settled law, Cassandra said.

Cassandra refused to say whether the performers were from a particular activist group, or whether their performance art was a way around Virginias laws against protesting outside residences.

A pro-abortion performative artist dressed as a handmaid while walking near Justice Amy Coney Barretts house in Falls Church, Virginia on May 11, 2022 (Jackson Elliott/The Epoch Times)

Any person who shall engage in picketing before or about the residence or dwelling place of any individualor who shall assemble with another person or persons in a manner which disrupts or threatens to disrupt any individuals right to tranquility in his homeshall be guilty of a Class-3 misdemeanor, Virginia law reads.

Originally, eight performers planned to appear, Cassandra said, but one got stuck in traffic.

Police did not interfere with the performance art.

On their way into the neighborhood, a few conservative neighbors of Barrett shouted, Lets go Brandon and No more mandates for vaccines at the protesters.

For several minutes, the performers walked in circles around a cul-de-sac.

One performer said the group didnt trust conservative media.

For the most part, the performers refused to answer substantive questions about abortion, although they appeared to have a good grasp of legal issues. Cassandra said that the Supreme Court justices should follow stare decisis, a legal doctrine that cases with similar facts should follow precedent.

She also noted that the protesters were careful to follow the law in all their actions, including their choice of parking spot.

We parked very legally, said Cassandra. We want to stay within the bounds of the law. What would the point be if we wanted her to stay within the bounds of the law only to have us break it?

After circling the cul-de-sac for several minutes, the performers walked away in the same direction from which they came.
Members of the Supreme Court pose for a group photograph at the Supreme Court in Washington on April 23, 2021. (Erin Schaff/Pool/Getty Images)

Supreme Court Justices Meet for 1st Time Since Draft Abortion Ruling Leak

The justices of the Supreme Court were to meet face-to-face on May 12 for a private conference on court business for the first time since the unauthorized publication of a draft majority opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade generated a firestorm of controversy.

The leaked draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, confirmed as authentic, suggests that a majority of the Supreme Courts justices are prepared to undo Roe v. Wade, the seminal 1973 precedent that swept away state laws and made abortion legal across the country.

Its unclear when the final version of the Dobbs opinion will be formally issued by the high court, which heard oral arguments in the case on Dec. 1, 2021.

Protests erupted nationwide, including at the homes of the conservative justices thought to favor overturning Roe, after Politico broke the story and published the Dobbs draft on May 2.

Chief Justice John Roberts ordered the high courts marshal to investigate the leak, which some say has led to a crisis of confidence in the court that is undermining its legitimacy.

An effort by Democrats to codify the Roe decision in federal law failed on May 11, when the Senate voted 49-51 on a procedural motion, falling 11 votes short of what was needed under Senate rules to move the bill forward.

At the private weekly conference held by the high court, only the justices attend. The justice with the least seniority, in this case, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, is supposed to take notes.

As the deliberative process unfolds, justices take preliminary votes on cases they have heard. Along the way, they sometimes change their votes.

For example, Roberts reportedly was prepared to vote to strike down the Obamacare law in 2012 in NFIB v. Sebelius, but a left-wing pressure campaign supposedly got him to change his position; he voted to uphold the statute.

The whirlwind of publicity about Dobbs doesnt appear to have changed any of the justices votes on the case. Citing anonymous sources, The Washington Post reported on May 7 that a majority of the court still supports overturning Roe v. Wade. No dissenting opinions in Dobbs have been circulated among the justices, according to Politico.

Among the petitions for certiorari, or review, to be considered at the May 12 conference were several prisoner and criminal appeals. If four of the courts nine justices vote in favor of hearing a petition, its scheduled for oral argument.

The Supreme Courts public information office didnt reply by press time to requests from The Epoch Times to confirm that the scheduled conference had taken place.
Taiwanese human rights activist Lee Ming-che (L) and his wife Lee Ching-yu attend a press conference in Taipei, Taiwan, on May 10, 2022. (Johnson Lai/AP Photo)

Taiwan Activist Released From China Praises Global Help

A Taiwanese human rights activist who served five years in jail in China said that international pressure and the tireless advocacy by his wife worked to ensure his safe return to Taiwan.

With your help, I know that I was not excessively abused in China and was able to return home successfully after I was released, Lee Ming-che said and thanked those involved in his rescue at a press conference Tuesday in his first public appearance since his release.

Lee was arrested by the Chinese regime in 2017 and charged with subversion of state power.

His arrest was Chinas first criminal prosecution of a nonprofit worker since Beijing passed a law tightening controls over foreign non-governmental organizations in 2016.

It marked a turning point as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) showed that it would not hesitate to prosecute Taiwanese individuals for political activism, regardless of the harm it would bring to cross-Strait relations.

It also raised public awareness in Taiwan of the tangible consequences of the CCPs authoritarian rule on individuals.

The Chinese regime claims the island as its own, despite the fact that Taiwan is a de facto independent country, with its own military, democratically-elected government, and constitution.

Lee had given online lectures on Taiwans democratization and managed a fund for families of political prisoners in China that some friends had set up.

While Lee was able to come home, another prisoner, Lee Meng-chu, remains trapped in China. Lee Meng-chu has been accused of being a spy by Chinese authorities and is now serving the two years as part of his sentence which deprived him of political rights.

Its uncertain how many Taiwanese are being held in Chinese prisons, as many families have chosen to remain quiet in the hopes of getting their loved ones release.

In the last five years, Lees wife, Ching-yu worked with local nonprofit organizations to raise awareness about her husbands case.

She also sought help from foreign democratic governments from the United States to the United Kingdom.

Lee gave interviews in the press about whether she could send letters to her husband while in jail and how his health was.

That continued effort, both said, paid off.

External, international support can truly have a concrete impact on the treatment of a political prisoner in China, said Lee Ching-yu.
Places flowers at a memorial in front of a home on Victory Boulevard in West Hills, Lupeann Campos of Winnetka, Calif., on May 9, 2022. (Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times/TNS)

Teenage Boy Accused of Murder Along With Mother After 3 Children Killed at San Fernando Valley Home

By Richard Winton and Nathan Solis

From Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELESThe killing of three children in a quiet Valley suburb over Mothers Day weekend took a new turn Wednesday when Los Angeles County prosecutors charged a 16-year-old boy with murder.

The teen, who has not been identified, appeared in juvenile court and denied a petition accusing him of murder in one of the three deaths.

Law enforcement sources have told The Times that the boy is the son of Angela Flores, 38, who police say admitted to killing three of her children. Their bodies were found Sunday morning inside a house in the 22500 block of Victory Boulevard on the border of the West Hills and Woodland Hills neighborhoods in the San Fernando Valley.

Flores made an initial appearance Wednesday on the murder charges. She did not enter a plea and postponed her arraignment until Aug. 10.

Flores was arrested Sunday, after LAPD officers discovered the bodies of Natalie Flores, 12; Kevin Yanez, 10; and Nathan Yanez, 8.

Sources told The Times that Flores claimed to have believed the children were possessed by demons and repeatedly jumped on them because she thought she could drive the demons out.

Neighbors said they saw Flores holding a Bible and lighting candles in a yard near the home and called authorities about the strange behavior late Saturday night.

LAPD Deputy Chief Alan Hamilton said Flores was taken to a hospital about midnight, but the bodies of the three children were not found inside the home until Monday morning, seven hours later.

2022 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference held in the Hyatt Regency in Orlando, Fla., on Feb. 27, 2021. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Texas Law Regulating Social Media Platforms Back in Effect After Court Ruling

Texas can bar social media platforms from censoring users based on their political views, a federal appeals court ruled on May 11.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel reversed a district judges decision that blocked Texas from enforcing a law that bars platforms from censoring a user based on their viewpoint or location.

The panel didnt explain its decision.

The panel consisted of Judges Edith Jones, a Reagan appointee; Leslie Southwick, a George W. Bush appointee; and Andrew Oldham, a Trump appointee.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton cheered the development.

My office just secured another BIG WIN against BIG TECH, the Republican said in a statement, adding that the court made the right call here.

The law, House Bill 20, is now back in effect.

Plaintiffs said they would appeal, while decrying the lack of an explanation from the court.

Because HB 20 is constitutionally rotten through and through, we are weighing our options and plan to appeal the order immediately, Carl Szabo, vice president and general counsel of NetChoice, said in a statement.

The group represents a number of large technology companies, including Twitter, Google, and Amazon.

The bill says that each person in Texas has a fundamental interest in the free exchange of ideas and information and the state has a fundamental interest in protecting that free exchange.

It forces social media platforms to disclose how they manage content, including moderating content; to publish a biannual transparency report; and bars platforms from censoring users based on their viewpoint or geographic location.

The law only applies to platforms that have more than 50 million active users in the United States in a month.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed the bill into law in September 2021. U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman, an Obama appointee, blocked it about three months later.

NetChoice had sued, arguing the law unlawfully prevented Big Tech companies from exercising editorial discretion over their privately owned websites.

Pitman agreed, finding that the laws prohibitions on censorship violated the First Amendment.

That prompted an appeal.

Lawyers for the state told the appeals court panel in a recent hearing that social media platforms control the modern-day public square, but they abusively suppress speech in that square.

A similar law in Florida remains partially blocked after U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle, a Clinton appointee, ruled in 2021 that such provisions violated the U.S. Constitution.
Commentary

Before I had kids, I thought that breastfeeding was the most natural thing in the world and that it was something that mothers just instantly knew how to do perfectly once the baby was born. I would sit with my calm, little cherubic pink baby at breast, marveling at myself, at the very thought of feeding my precious little one from my own wonderful breastmilk. What a wonderful natural and serene breastfeeding goddess I would be-of that I was sure.

That was one of the first of many, many things I was completely wrong about when I became a parent. Thinking I would be able to learn how to play the guitar and learn Spanish on my first maternity leave were some of the other things I cannot believe I thought I could do while taking care of a baby.

It somehow completely did not compute that taking care of the newborn was pretty much the only thing I would be doing, or could be possibly doing 24/7. I had no concept of how a precious, tiny little newborn could wipe out two newby parents so easily and for so many weeks and no clue how hard, physically and emotionally draining breastfeeding could be.

Yes it was convenient and free, but nobody told me about engorgement, cracked nipples, and how exhausting a newborns two-hour feeding cycle would be. I breastfed for a number of months and am proud of doing so, but then I started supplementing with formula. Many women cannot breastfeed for myriad reasons, and shaming them is particularly repugnant.

My kids are older now but I have been thrown back into thinking about feeding hungry infants and toddlers because of the acute baby formula shortage that is hitting North America right now, and nobody in any position of leadership in America or Canada is actually talking about this horrifying situation.

The only people I see talking about it are mothers frantically searching pharmacies and online delivery services hours from their homes, placing online order after order only to be told that their orders cannot be filled. This is 2022, why are American babies and toddlers at risk of starving? Where are our leaders?

What is going on?

The Wall Street Journal explains:

There are two reasons for the shortage. Supply chain issues caused by the Covid-19 pandemic have made baby formula harder to find for months. The shortage worsened after Abbott Laboratories, a major formula manufacturer, voluntarily recalled some products and closed a plant where the products were made in Sturgis, Mich. The Food and Drug Administration is investigating consumer complaints related to four infants who were hospitalized, two of whom died. A fifth complaint was also filed, but the FDA said there wasnt enough information available to definitively link the illness to the recalled formula. The agency said cronobacter sakazakii, a germ that can be deadly in infants, was detected in the Sturgis plant, but not in the products. The FDA said in a statement that findings during its inspection raised concerns that powdered formula made at the Sturgis plant carried a risk of contamination.

So there we go: lockdowns again. The actions without precedent broke what we previously believed to be unbreakable. We are still feeling the effects. Nor is it surprising to see the FDAs regulatory hands mixed up in this, regardless of whether the recall was or was not justified.

It is just not enough to blame supply chains, or assure parents that formula-producing factories are working twenty-four hour shifts to try to fill demand. Forty percent of Americas baby formula is out of stock. This is actually an emergency situation.

Its not just an American problem either, its affecting Canadian families as well. This is a real health crisis, and we know why its happened, but why arent more people talking about it and doing something about it? Why isnt any politician or company stepping up for North American babies? Im sorry Biden administration, were working on it just isnt good enough.

American airwaves have been burning up over the past several weeks in the wake of the Supreme Court leak on Roe vs Wade. Politicians on both sides of the aisle are everywhere talking about abortion. And while both sides of the abortion debate churn out articles, demonstrate, put out social media posts like theres no tomorrow, and fundraise for their cause, there are living North American babies that we all need to be worried about right now.

This shouldnt be a left wing or a right wing thing. This shouldnt be a Democrat versus Republican thing. Left wingers and right wingers all have babies and toddlers, and those babies, grandchildren of those of the political left and right, will be starving soon if our leadership doesnt get its act together.

For the past two years, our governments demonstrated their extraordinary powers and their willingness and eagerness to flex their extraordinary muscle under the guise of health policy and fighting Covid. They mobilized national and international bureaucracies and agencies, increased surveillance, encouraged unprecedented censorship, ramped up vaccine development and manufacturing, curbed our free speech, our mobility rights, our right to assemble, our right to practice our religion and our right to dissent.

There is no shortage of political power on this continent. Oddly, for the most righteous cause of infant hunger and starvation, there is no political will. This is the astonishing reality, and its anti-human and terrifying.

You would think that in an allegedly civilized society, that babies and toddlers going hungry right in our own backyards would be a non-partisan issue and a societal priority. Sadly, if you thought that, youd be wrong. Babies dont know how you voted. They just need us. Now.

Woe unto us and pity the children.

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.
The dish is a unique product of Southern culture, and it remains an institution in Nashville

Every few minutes, Kahlil Arnold loudly greets a patron walking into his familys restaurantusually a familiar face he already knows by name. One summer afternoon in 2021, he spotted his sisters high school music teacher, WC, sitting at the counter, chatting with said sister. WC has been coming here since my dad was running the place, he said.

Kahlils father, Jack Arnold, opened Arnolds Country Kitchen in 1982, after buying the place from a local restaurateur. Since then, it has become a Nashville institution, drawing in blue-collar workers, business types, and country music stars alike. In a television segment (that never made it to air), Dolly Parton herself picked Arnolds as her favorite place to eat in Nashville.

Arnolds is a meat-and-three restaurant, once a common presence throughout the South. They have faded away in recent decades, but somehow, they still survive in Nashville, Tennessee. Music City is a place where locals and visitors alike are unabashed in expressing their love, not only for a fully-invented-in-America genre of musiccountry musicbut also for a good meat-and-three platter at places where community still holds strong.

The historic Printers Alley, a nightlife district in Nashville. (Annie Wu for American Essence)

A Community

Ben Swank, co-founder of the independent music label Third Man Records, is one of the many regular customers at Arnolds. He was born and raised in Ohio and said that Arnolds was the first place he ever had a genuine, home-cooked Southern meal. After that, he just kept coming back. I gained 25 pounds in a year, he joked.

Kahlil recognized a group seated at another table. You guys need some more food? he asked merrily. Kahlil hadnt seen them since the onset of the pandemic and began chatting with them about the latest goings-on.

Meat-and-three restaurants emerged during the early 20th century. Farmers were shifting from working in the fields to working in urban centers, like Nashville, on manual labor jobs. They needed a meal that would sustain them throughout the day. Their choice was a protein with three vegetable sidesmade in the way dishes were commonly prepared on Southern farms, with whatever was growing on the land.

Chocolate meringue pie at Arnolds Country Kitchen. (Courtesy of Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp)

As the Southern economy shifted away from manufacturing, these restaurants fell out of favor. But not in Nashville.

Elliston Place Soda Shop is a pharmacy that opened in 1939, serving syrupy concoctions at a soda fountain counter to make the medicine go down easier. Later, it also started offering a diner menu featuring meat-and-three platters.

Elliston Place was about to go out of business in 2019 because the owners could no longer afford the rising rent. When a local developer (who was a regular there) heard this news, he purchased the restaurant and pledged to refurbish it to its original style. It reopened in May 2021 to great excitement.

Country music remains the soul of Nashvilles identity. (Courtesy of Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp)

Back in 1982, a customer had similarly helped Jack Arnold buy his family restaurant. Jack did not have the required $13,000 for the deal to go through. My dad would whistle every morning cooking breakfast for everybody, Kahlil recounted. One day, a regular customer, a local entrepreneur named Lawrence Mashburn, noticed that Jack wasnt whistling. Lawrence said, Hey Jack, something wrong? Kahlils father told him about the dilemma. Lawrence Mashburn came the next day with the check for $13,000 and gave it to my dad, without him even asking.

Meat-and-threes have persisted in this region of the South by the grace of God, said Jim Myers, who handles marketing at Elliston Place and calls himself the restaurants minister of culture. Elliston Place has generations of regulars, including one family whose great-grandfathers first job was working behind the soda fountain, and a couple who had their first date there and recently celebrated their 48th anniversary.

Patients who visit the nearby hospital regularly come to Elliston Place for comfort food before getting their treatment. People convene there, whether to celebrate a good report card or to wallow after a bad breakup. Restaurants are not just about food; they are also places to commiserate, Jim noted.

Elliston Place Soda Shop retains the look of an old-fashioned diner. (Annie Wu for American Essence)

The Food

Many of the meat-and-three recipes served at these restaurants were passed down within families. Kahlil explained that there are no special cooking techniques at Arnolds. Mostly, its meat and vegetables, cooked low and slow. We almost overcook the flavoring into the vegetables, he said.

The food of the South is heavily influenced by its early slave culture. Slaves did much of the cooking during the Souths early days. Because they were often left with just the off-cuts of meat, they had to cook it for long periods of time, until the food had enough flavor or was tender enough to chew, Kahlil explained.

At Elliston Place, recipes have also been passed down from chefsagain, primarily African Americans who worked in the kitchen. Patrons also love the pies, which are family recipes from Linda Melton, who managed the restaurant for 28 years. She still comes in every morning to check on the pies.

Mac-and- cheese is considered a vegetable side at many meat-and- three establishments. (Courtesy of Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp)

Meanwhile, at Arnolds, Kahlil is updating the menu by adding new fun food itemslike a fried brisket taco. He places leftover chopped-up brisket into a crunchy taco shell that shatters with the first bite.

Pucketts Grocery is yet another well-known Nashville eatery that started out as a country store in rural Tennessee but has since expanded to several restaurants around the state. Meat-and-three platters are served there alongside other dishes with a Southern flairsuch as pimento cheese balls laced with honey inside and served with a chili jam. The Nashville location features a stage and regularly hosts live music sessions, popular with families and groups of young diners alike.

Meat-and-threes seem destined to stayat least in Nashville. Swank, the music producer, is already training his 8-year-old daughter to be the next generation of Arnolds connoisseurs, as he put it. He first brought her to the restaurant when she was just a toddler, and the restaurant staff brought her banana pudding. It really feels like family, he said.

This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.
Thousands of people gathers on Parliament Hill in a March for Life anti-abortion rally in Ottawa on May 12, 2022. (The Epoch Times)

Thousands Attend March for Life Anti-Abortion Rally in Ottawa

Thousands of people gathered on Parliament Hill for the annual March for Life anti-abortion rally on May 12, with supporters calling for upholding the right to life for every human being from conception to natural death.

Campaign Life Coalition (CLC), the organizer of the National March for Life rally, said in a news release that the purpose of the event is to fight government-sanctioned abortion-on-demand and euthanasia.

The National March for Life, at its core, is a protest against the greatest human rights injustice of our age. Because of the urgency and importance of life issues like abortion and euthanasia, we have a duty to hold our legislators to account, said Debbie Duval, CLCs national capital organizer.

The law must protect life, not sanction its termination.

This years rally focuses on the theme of I AM, a first-person declaration of a human beings right to exist. The CLC says on its website that I AM is a claim to existencean assertion that says I am her! Notice me! and I AM demands a law to protect the preborn.

Debates about abortion are characterized by phrases like womens rights and My Body, My Choiceas if there wasnt another human involved and whose rights must be taken into account, CLC said.

The preborn are real. They have already entered into this world, even though they may be hidden from us most of the timerevealed only in brief snapshots through ultrasound technology.

Pro-life supporters gather for a March for Life rally in Ottawa on May 12, 2022. (Limin Zhou/The Epoch Times)

Pro-life supporters gather for a March for Life rally in Ottawa on May 12, 2022. (Limin Zhou/The Epoch Times)

At the rally, demonstrators were seen holding signs that read I AM a human being and I AM equally human, equally valuable.

The police told The Epoch Times that over 2,000 people were estimated to have participated in the rally.

Support from Pro-Life Parliamentarians

Led by Conservative MP Arnold Viersen, a group of pro-life parliamentarians also attended the March for Life rally to voice support for the movement, including Cathay Wagantall, Damien Kurek, Garnett Genuis, Glen Motz, John Williamson, and Kelly Block.

Im happy to stand up for human rights. Human rights begin when the human begins. Modern science tells us that human beings begin when the sperm meets the egg, so human rights begin when the human begins. So Im happy to stand up every day  to defend human rights, including the human rights of the unborn, Viersen said in a speech.

Wagantall said she is currently working to deliver a private members bill on the issue of abortion. Last summer, she introduced the Sex-Selective Abortion Act (C-233), a bill that would amend the Criminal Code to make it an offence for a medical practitioner to perform an abortion knowing that it is being sought on the grounds of the childs sex.

Wagantall also read a letter from Conservative leadership race candidate Leslyn Lewis, who was unable to join the rally in person.

I want you to know that I stand with you. I stand with you in your fight to be heard by your government, as you call for action on behalf of the vulnerable and the unborn, Lewis said in her letter.

I know exactly what its like for a woman to be staring at the future you worked so hard towards and to suddenly find yourself pregnant at the beginning of your career. I remember person after person told me I had to choose my baby or my career, she continued.

I wont pretend that it wasnt a challenge to build a successful law career with a family but I am grateful every day that I did. My children have shown me the power of choosing life. I am pro-life. I believe every single life is intrinsic and undeniably valuable. I have never been ashamed to say that.

A demonstrator holds a sign as thousands of pro-life supporters gather for a March for Life rally in Ottawa on May 12, 2022. (Annie Wu/The Epoch Times)

Thousands of pro-life supporters paraded in a March for Life rally throughout downtown Ottawa on May 12, 2022. (Annie Wu/The Epoch Times)

Ontario Party Leader and former Conservative MP Derek Sloan also gave a speech, in which he applauded Lewis for being pro-life and chastised other Tory leadership candidates for backing abortion.

I was disgusted that most candidates were tripping over themselves to brag about how pro-abortion they are. Thats very, very unfortunate, Sloan said.

Its time that we say in this country that, to be a Conservative, you should be pro-life, he said.

We may disagree on how to get there, we may disagree on what policies should be used, we may disagree on whether the answer lies in politics or outside of politics in terms of addressing this culture of death. But the idea that someone could be entirely neutral on the issue, could be entirely hands-off when it comes to unrestricted abortion in this country, that is a shame, and frankly, it comes from cowardice.

A counter-demonstration by a relatively smaller group of pro-abortion advocates also took place near Parliament.

The March for Life protest comes a week after the re-emergence of the landmark Roe v. Wade case in the United States, which has brought renewed attention to the issue of abortion on both sides of the border.

Demonstrators began a parade through downtown Ottawa starting from Parliament Hill at 1:30 p.m., and returned to the Hill for a Silent No More awareness presentation at 2:30 p.m.

In a statement, Ottawa police advised against travelling to downtown Ottawa during that time, saying commuters could expect traffic disruptions due to the pro-life parade. The vehicle-exclusion zoneset up after the three-week Freedom Convoy protest at the national capital earlier this yearremains in effect on Wellington Street between Bank Street and Elgin Street.

The Canadian Press contributed to this article.

Limin Zhou Follow Limin Zhou is a reporter based in Ottawa.
Workers are seen inside the P4 laboratory in Wuhan, China, on Feb. 23, 2017. (Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images)

Top US Scientist Tried to Help Wuhan Lab Counter Virus Leak Concerns

Efforts coincide with push to deepen collaboration with China

As the pandemic engulfed the world in 2020, a top U.S. scientist that had for years worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) actively tried to help Chinese researchers at the lab counter concerns that the virus might have originated from the facility, newly released emails show.

These efforts include alerting Chinese scientists of U.S. investigations into the lab and providing them with a list of questions to answer to help respond to outside concerns.

Meanwhile, the U.S. scientist James LeDuc, the then-director of the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), and his colleagues, engaged in a concerted effort to strengthen their partnership with the Wuhan institute, even as scrutiny over the lab as a potential source of the outbreak mounted as the pandemic progressed, the emails revealed.

On April 16, 2020, as Beijing was facing rising scrutiny over how it had handled the COVID-19 pandemic and whether it had a role in starting the outbreak, an email titled Rubio landed in the LeDucs inbox.

I heard from someone in government this evening that Senator Rubio is starting to push for AN investigation regarding Wuhan lab, the email read. Just found it on the web at Forbes by Kenneth Repoza. Title of article is eight senators call for investigation into coronavirus origins.'

The email was from David Franz, a former commander with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and retired colonel. Both scientists had years of contact with the WIV, the facility at the center of speculation over whether the virus may have been leaked from it. LeDucs Galveston National Laboratory, in particular, had been working with the WIV and other Chinese virology centers for years on training and collaborative projects.

Thanks for the heads up. Clearly the topic of the day. Time to pile on and find a scapegoat, LeDuc wrote back.

In no time, LeDuc forwarded the email to Shi Zhengli, a top scientist at the WIV nicknamed bat woman for her research related to bat coronaviruses, to warn her about the investigation. Shi is the head of the facilitys Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases and deputy director of WIVs Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, the countrys first biosafety-level-4 (P4) laboratory that opened for operation in 2018.

Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli is seen inside the P4 laboratory in Wuhan, capital of Chinas Hubei Province, on Feb. 23, 2017. (Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images)

LeDuc wrote that he hoped that Shi had been surviving all the COVID19 drama and requested a phone call sometime soon.

Shi replied on April 18 rejecting the offer for a call, writing: Due to the complicated situation, I dont think its a right time to communicate by the call. What I can tell you is that this virus is not a leaky [sic] from our lab or any other labs. Its a shame to make this scientific question so complicated.

The message string was part of an email trove recently released under the Texas Public Information Act requests made by U.S. Right to Know, a nonprofit focusing on food and public health issues, as well as Judicial Watch, a nonprofit government watchdog.

Together, the emails paint a picture of how prominent U.S. scientists publicly and privately came to the defense of their colleagues at the WIV and Chinas health agencies during the early stages of the pandemic as Beijing faced growing questions about its handling of the pandemic and the virus origins.

These startling documents show that China had partners here in the United States willing to go to bat for them on the Wuhan lab controversy, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a May 9 statement.

UTMB has disputed this claim. The GNL has never collaborated with WIV on SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 researchand as the documents themselves demonstrate, Chinese scientists were disappointingly unwilling to collaborate in fighting the disease, Chris Smith, a director of media relations for the university, told The Epoch Times in an email.

In response to a query from The Epoch Times, Franz said that he didnt express an opinion regarding that possible move by the senate in his email of April 16, 2020. Even if he had, that would have been an opinion held at that time, but [t]hings have changed a lot since then.

Helping Out a Friend

As reports first emerged questioning the potential role of the WIV in causing the pandemic, LeDuc reached out to Yuan Zhiming, director of the WIVs P4 lab, in early February 2020 offering suggestions to counter misinformation.

LeDuc urged Yuan to conduct a thorough review of the laboratory activities associated with research on coronaviruses so that he would be fully prepared to answer questions dealing with the origin of the virus.

I have the utmost respect and admiration for Dr Shi and I am in no way casting doubt on her or her colleagues. I just think that we need to aggressively address these rumors and presumably false accusations quickly and provide definitive, honest information to counter misinformation. If there are weaknesses in your program, now is the time to admit them and get them corrected, he wrote. I trust that you will take my suggestions in the spirit of one friend trying to help another during a very difficult time.

Yuan Zhiming, director of the National Biosafety Laboratory at the WIV, speaks at a press conference on origin-tracing of COVID-19, at the State Council Information Office in Beijing, China on July 22, 2021. (VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

The email attached a two-page document containing questions about the labs activities from October 2019 for Yuans consideration. Some of the questions read:

Is there any evidence to suggest a mechanical failure in biocontainment during the time in question?

What are the coronaviruses in your possession that are most closely related to nCoV based on genetic sequences and are able to replicate in culture?

Is anyone on your team conducting gain of function studies, recombination studies or any other studies that may have resulted in the creation of the nCoV?

How many people have access to the coronavirus stocks and laboratory?

Have any of individuals working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (main campus or BSL4 campus) been infected with the nCoV? Family members of employees?

Yuan never answered that email. LeDuc later shared this email with Franz in April 2020, writing, Please do not forward.

Good note  and timely on your part, replied Franz. I just hate for our friends to have to deal with all this, as you note  particularly in their world.

LeDuc seemed to understand the evasiveness from the Chinese side, as he would note in an email to Franz a week later.

I think they are under pretty strict orders to keep quite [sic], he wrote.

The UTMB scientists appeared to welcome the news when WIVs Yuan appeared in a Chinese state media interview on April 18, 2020, defending the facility.

Im glad Zhiming is speaking up. I have been encouraging him and Zhengli Shi to speak up. Their direct engagement is essential. Otherwise, all we do is secondary, wrote senior molecular biologist UTMB Shi Pei-yong.

When reached by The Epoch Times about the February 2020 note and subsequent emails, Franz said he would have been surprised if [Yuan] Zhiming answered or responded fully, because of the quite different world in which they live and work.

I did hate [that] the colleagues we had been working with have to deal with media and the bureaucracy above them, he said in an email, noting that we were leaning toward a wet market origin in April 2020.

We had obviously had good working relationships with some of our Chinese colleagues as they were very interested in operating the new WIV BSL-4 lab safely, he told The Epoch Times. These labs are VERY complex; a lab director would, by definition, have some serious concerns not having the experienced and expert staff that I inherited when I was asked to command USAMRIID those many years ago.

USAMRIID refers to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where Franz served as a commander from 1995 to 1998.

A security person moves journalists away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology after a World Health Organization team arrived for a field visit in Wuhan in Chinas Hubei province, China, on Feb. 3, 2021. (Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)

LeDucs support for the WIV and its researchers in early 2020 came at a time when scrutiny over the lab as a culprit in leaking the virus was a taboo topic among discussion among many mainstream scientific, political, and media channels.

While Shi and other scientists at WIV have denied that the virus leaked from the lab, the Chinese regime has not allowed outside investigators to inspect records and data from the facility to properly probe the matter.

It wasnt until mid-2021 when the theory became a focus of public discussion after mounting reports about the labs gain-of-function research activities, its collaboration with the Chinese military, its suppression of information, and that staff were hospitalized with COVID-like symptoms in November 2019. This culminated in President Joe Biden instructing the intelligence community to provide a report on the source of the pandemic, including the lab leak theory, a report that ultimately was inconclusive about how the outbreak emerged.

Two Labs in Partnership

The Galveston National Laboratory is a federally-funded P4)facility that has trained staff from the WIV and conducted joint research projects with them since 2013. LeDuc and other senior UTMB staff also maintained close contact with WIV scientists, including Shi.

The U.S. national lab in 2017 signed a memorandum of understanding with the WIV that would entitle the latter to request the destruction of secret files, which under the documents broad definition applied to potentially all documents and details arising from their collaboration.

In a draft statement made on the Galveston letterhead dated April 20, 2020, LeDuc said Shi had described her studies of bat-associated coronaviruses in a September 2015 meeting, where she concluded that there was significant potential risk of transmission of some of these viruses to humans.

He then noted that Shi was the scientist who discovered the link between bats and the SARS virus that spread across the world from China in 2002 to 2003.

She has participated in each of our dialogues; in every session, she has been fully engaged, very open and transparent about her work, and eager to collaborate, wrote LeDuc.

There is convincing evidence that the new virus was not the result of intentional genetic engineering and that it almost certainly originated from nature given its high similarity to other known bat-associated coronaviruses, he continued.

The P4 laboratory, designated as the highest level of biological safety, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, on April 17, 2020. (AFP via Getty Images/Hector Retamal)

The director added that he had toured the WIV P4 facility in 2017 before it began operations, and considered it to be of comparable quality and safety measures as any currently in operation in the US or Europe.

The statement, which was not publicly released, appeared to have been prepared by LeDuc to address the history of the two labs joint work to be submitted to university leadership and Congressional committees being formed to probe the virus origins, April 2020 emails sent by LeDuc indicate.

In one email from LeDuc to Shi on April 16, 2020, LeDuc appears to have attached the statement, while asking Shi to review its contents. Because the statement appeared later in the tranche of documents released under the freedom of information request, it is unclear if this version was attached to the email.

Please review carefully and make any changes that you would like. I want this to be as accurate as possible and I certainly do not want to misrepresent any of your valuable contributions, LeDuc said. I need to submit this on Monday, 20 April, so your prompt reply would be very much appreciated.

Shi responded by sending some reference materials and provided a document with her revisions to the statement. The document, which was an email attachment, was not included in the email tranche disclosure.

LeDuc told his colleagues two days later that he had more than one hour teleconference with five to six people from the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight & Investigations to discuss the possible lab leak.

Our Friends in China

LeDuc also publicly defended the Chinese regimes initial response to the pandemic, even as he and some colleagues privately expressed some frustration at the lack of response from the Chinese scientists they had been working with when they sought data about the new virus.

In mid-January 2020, about two weeks after the first report of the COVID-19 outbreak in the Chinese city Wuhan, LeDuc penned an op-ed article for local media, the draft of which he shared with several senior Chinese health officials soliciting their opinion. Among the recipients were George Gao, director of Chinas Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and Yuan, director of the WIVs P4 lab.

With the working title Chinese Response to New Virus Shows Promise, the draft article praised how China quickly isolated the patients, and instituted an impressive set of interventions to limit the spread of disease and characterize the new pathogen.

Importantly, they have been transparent in sharing their findings with the world, thus allowing other nations to be on the lookout for the new disease, LeDuc added.

Related Coverage Chinese Social Media Depicts Chaos in Virus-Hit Wuhan

The article appeared to overlook the fact that the Chinese regime took weeks to confirm that the virus could spread among people, despite there being ample evidence on the ground of transmission occurring in hospitals and elsewhere, and its suppression of COVID-19 information and data.

Despite the upbeat tone expressed in the op-ed, LeDuc in an email revealed some reservations to a close acquaintance.

I hope Im not overstating their competence in responding, he wrote to Franz on Jan. 17, 2020, before the articles publication. To another Chinese scientist, LeDuc acknowledged that he didnt have the specific examples to note if asked about Chinas impressive measures referenced in the article, and asked if his colleague could provide any.

Minutes after the articles publication online on Jan. 21, Franz would send a note to LeDuc congratulating him, copying Gao of Chinas CDC and WIVs Yuan.

Well done, Jim  and our friends in China, he wrote.

Yuan later replied and thanked LeDuc for his positive attitu[d]e to Chinese public health response system and the practice.

Franz told The Epoch Times that the contentions in LeDucs op-ed were appropriate given it was written based on events prior to Jan. 21, 2020.

On that date, I still believe the oped was appropriate. And I might say the same thing in response, Franz said in an email. I would not necessarily write the same thing 6 months later  nor would he.

Im sure Chinese scientists and clinicians knew that had a problem on 21 Jan and well before, but probably just not how big a problem, he added.

A laboratory technician working on samples from people to be tested for COVID-19 at Fire Eye laboratory in Wuhan in Chinas central Hubei Province on Feb. 6, 2020. BGI Group, a genome sequencing company based in southern China, said it opened a lab in Wuhan able to test up to 10,000 people per day for COVID on Feb. 5, 2020. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

The op-eds publication occurred at a time when UTMBs repeated efforts to get original viral samples from China were hitting a brick wall.

With cases occurring outside China, others will soon have their own isolates and China will have lost the opportunity for leadership, LeDuc wrote to Yuan on Jan. 22, 2020, urging for more openness on virus data.

And if scientific publications start appearing from Chinese investigators without the world having independent access to a strain, China will likely be heavily criticized.

Yuan replied that he would try [his] best to promote the sharing of viral strains, and LeDuc days later would coordinate a formal letter to push the matter forward.

But the Galveston lab never ended up receiving virus samples from China. Three weeks later, though, it was able to source samples from an infected patient in Washington who traveled to China.

UTMB told The Epoch Times that WIV had denied their request for samples. UTMB scientists were forced to obtain samples for research from U.S. patients who had been infected with COVID-19 and used these in its important work to combat COVID-19. The lack of cooperation and transparency from Chinese institutions remains troubling, Smith, the university spokesperson, said in an email.

Dismissing the Lab Leak Theory

On April 15, 2020, Frederick Murphy, a professor emeritus of UTMB who while working at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) helped discover the Ebola virus, wrote to LeDuc and two other UTMB faculty members asking for advice about what he called the virus conspiracy that the CoV came from the Wuhan lab.

I need some advice / fodder to deal with this, as the stuff spreads around hereseveral retired ambassadors live here (stuffy, arrogant types), he said before asking if the UTMB or the Galveston Lab have put out public statements countering these allegations.

The request brought a prompt reply from LeDuc and Thomas Ksiazek, a UTMB professor specializing in pathology, microbiology, and immunology, who had coordinated U.S. outbreak response to Ebola and SARS as the head of the special pathogens branch at the CDC in Atlanta.

As you know there have been no end to the stories on the origin of the virus, wrote Ksiazek. While a prominently-cited article in the science journal Nature by scientist Kristian Andersen and others pretty much puts an end to the stories that the virus was cooked up in the lab, he said, other theories are emerging that the virus might have been a lab leak and that lab researchers became patient 0 after getting infected in the field.

I dont know, but dont think they were working with live bats, Ksiazek wrote in the email, adding that based on a colleagues discussions with the bat lady, Dr. Shi, I dont believe that they had this virus in the lab before this started.

Declassified emails would later reveal that Andersen had said some of the features of the virus look engineered weeks before publishing the March 2020 study.

Related Coverage Footage of Bats Kept in Wuhan Lab Fuels Scrutiny Over Its Research

Video footage from 2017, featured on the website of the state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences that administers the WIV, as well as in Chinese media reports, also showed live bats being held in cages inside the facility. In one, a researcher feeds a bat held in his hands protected by blue surgical gloves.

A researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in Chinas central Hubei Province feeds a bat with a worm in a 2017 video. (Screenshot)

Im a lot more worried about the US status as a leader in world public health and science than Chinamen hiding behind every tree, Ksiazek wrote. Not that there isnt some level of industrial espionage occurring, but were killing ourselves in terms of how were seen by others.

I agree with Toms assessments (of course!), was LeDucs response before he went on to detail the joint meetings he participated in annually with Chinese researchers at WIV since 2015. LeDuc added he never heard about any safety concerns from the Wuhan lab until coming across an April 14 Washington Post opinion article on leaked State Department cables. That report stated that a 2018 cable expressed concerns about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV, and warned that the labs work on bat coronaviruses posed a pandemic risk.

Push to Deepen Ties

The emails reveal that the U.S. officials and scientists maintained an interest in collaborating with the Chinese as the pandemic raged on and despite growing attention on the possible role of the WIV in spreading the initial outbreak.

On Feb. 3, 2020, as the UTMB was still scrambling for access to Chinese virus data, LeDuc wrote that he got strong encouragement from a Department of Health and Human Services official to try to initiate real collaborative studies between our lab and Wuhan.

Folks are recognizing the value of the engagement we have developedhopefully this will translate into some sustained funding, he wrote to Franz.

In an April 2020 email with the subject China bio grants and project plan, Benjamin Rusek, a senior program officer with the National Academy of Science (NAS) informed the UTMB researchers that NAS was unable to extend the two grants for their bio activities with China that were soon to expire. He then suggested holding bilateral meetings on how they utilize the remaining funds, including on gene editing technology to combat SARS-CoV-2.

Pei-yong, do you think that our Chinese friends would be willing to participate? Rusek wrote, noting that all discussion would be off the record.

The scientists received his proposal with enthusiasm. If you believe the press, it looks like they have been successful in their control efforts and perhaps we could learn from them, wrote LeDuc later that month as they organized the meeting.

The email records suggest that two virtual conferences between Chinese and American health officials and scientists took place in mid-May 2020. Rusek also told a corresponding officer from Chinas CDC not to issue a press release or inform the media for the moment.

Last June, when the lab leak theory gained mainstream attention, LeDuc again floated the idea of engaging with China.

The politics are probably too intense now to really do anything, he said, adding that they could try to kickstart discussions with their Chinese counterparts by drawing upon a 2018 joint editorial published in Science announcing the two labs partnership.

[T]he editorial is tangible evidence of our work together and would perhaps offer China an opportunity to engage in an activity that may have wide global support, LeDuc wrote.

Sincere Thanks

LeDuc and others meanwhile had sought to keep the engagement going at a personal level.

In July 2020, LeDuc forwarded headlines of several recently-published papers on American scientific journals to Shi and Yuan of WIV, writing: You May find the first two papers of special interest.

One of them read: Keep Politics out of Funding Decisions for Medical Research and Public Health.

Thank you for the information, Shi wrote back. I appreciated very much the spirit support from scientis [sic] in USA.

LeDuc received an invitation in January 2021 to join the editorial board for the Journal of Biosafety and Biosecurity co-edited by Yuan. Although theres no sign he replied to it.

A month later, Yuan responded to a Happy New Year note from LeDuc to express his sincere thanks to LeDuc and his colleagues assistance for the safety and secure operation of the lab in Wuhan.

During the last year, we all experienced the hardest time, fighting against the virus, fighting against the rumors. The lab. operated smoothly [and] efficiently, providing a crucial platform for pathogen identifiication, animal modeling, antiviral drug screening and vaccine development, and we are very proud of the role and achievements of the laboratory, he wrote. I really hope you could come back here after the epidemic and we could share our understanding on lab management and infectious disease control.

In response to an inquiry by The Epoch Times about the email exchanges between LeDuc and others, UTMB said that the university and Galveston National Lab firmly believe academic research and the exchange of best practices in biosafety and lab operations must be a global pursuit.

As scientists, we collaborate with colleagues around the world to develop countermeasures to safeguard the public health and national security of the United States, a spokesperson said in an email.

Murphy, Ksiazek, Rusek, Shi of UTMB, and Shi and Yuan of WIV didnt respond to The Epoch Times inquiries by press time.
Conservative MP Michael Chong rises during Question Period in the House of Commons in Ottawa on May 31, 2021. (The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld)

Tories Seek to Revive Special Committee on Canada-China Relations

The House of Commons is debating today a motion put forward by the Conservative Party to revive the special committee on Canada-China relations after the party said at the beginning of the new Parliament it wouldnt pursue it due to resource issues.

Tory MP and foreign affairs critic Michael Chong tabled the motion which says the committee needs to be re-established given the immeasurable contributions made by Canadians of Chinese descent, the importance of Chinas ancient civilization to humanity, the distinction between the Chinese people and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the increasing threat posed by authoritarian states like China.

The committees mandate would be to review all aspects of the Canada-Peoples Republic of China relationship, including but not limited to diplomatic, consular, legal, security and economic relations, says the text of the motion tabled May 10.

In December, Chong had said the China committee would not be immediately pursued in the new Parliament due to the creation of two new House committees that were stretching party resources thin.

Those committees are the Standing Committee on Science and Research and the Special Committee on Afghanistan, which examines Canadas involvement in that country in the lead-up to its capture by the Taliban.

Chongs motion says that an organizational meeting of the proposed China committee would take place one week after the presentation of the final report of the Afghanistan committee.

Tories earlier decision to not immediately call for the resumption of the China committee after the 2021 election was criticized by several Conservative MPs, with some speaking to media publicly about their concerns. Following the media reports in January, Chong said his partys stance on China remained unchanged and they would be bringing the committee back.

Tory interim leader Candice Bergen commented on the prospects of bringing back the China committee in an interview on May 9 with The Epoch Times.

She said there are currently many international issues requiring Canadas attention, including Ukraine and energy security, but this shouldnt prevent the government from looking closer at China.

Conservatives want to see that [Canada-China] relationship talked about and explored and see it be a positive relationship, but at the same time, we want to call out the things that the Communist Party of China is doing that are hurting the people of China, but also could potentially be a threat to Canada, she said, mentioning Huawei, foreign interference, and the Uyghur genocide.

So there are many, many things that could be discussed and explored at a committee.
Then-CSIS head Richard Fadden waits to testify at the Commons public safety committee on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on July 5, 2010. (Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press)

Trudeaus Comments on Unvaccinated and Freedom Convoy Were Not Helpful: Former CSIS Director

Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus approach in recent months of making disparaging comments about individuals who refuse vaccination or who protest against mandatory vaccination could fuel extremism, former Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) director Richard Fadden told a House committee on Thursday.

I dont think that attacking views is helpful by anybodynot by you, not by me, not by the prime minister, said Fadden during a meeting of the Standing Committee on Public Safety examining the phenomena of ideologically motivated violent extremism.

Fadden had been asked by Conservative MP Raquel Dancho if Trudeau saying people have fringe unacceptable views or are misogynistic can fuel extremism.

You can disagree with them, thats a different issue. But I think the prime minister went a little bit beyond that and I dont think it was helpful, and its the sort of thing that reinforces the sense that theyre not being listened to, he said.

During an interview on the French-language program La semaine des 4 Julie last September, Trudeau asked whether people who refuse vaccination against COVID-19 should be tolerated.

They are extremists who dont believe in science. Theyre often misogynists, also often racists. Its a small group that muscles in, and we have to make a choice in terms of leaders, in terms of the country. Do we tolerate these people? he said.

In January, Trudeau called those about to protest vaccine mandates in Ottawa as part of the Freedom Convoy demonstration a small fringe minority with unacceptable views.

Fadden said he disagrees with most of the views expressed, presumably by anti-mandate protesters, but thats neither here nor there. We need to find some means of dialoguing.

He also said the root causes of extremism need to be explored by the committeenot just the means to suppress extremismpointing out that the feeling of alienation from society is an important factor.

I think fundamentally what drives people to this sort of thing is the sense that theyre not being listened to. I mean, fundamentally, they come to the conclusion that the political structures that we have at various level are ignoring them, he said.

When asked by Dancho if exclusionary policies like vaccine mandates could push people to extremism, Fadden said it can but he took position in favour of the mandates, citing the need to respect the rule of law.

I dont think you should be ostracized for [not submitting to the mandate], but if the law says you have to be vaccinated in circumstance X, Y, or Z, and youre not, and the law provides for penalty, then you have to deal with the penalties, he said.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson arrives for a regional cabinet meeting at Middleport Pottery in Stoke on Trent, Staffordshire, England, on May 12, 2022. (Oli Scarff/PA)

UK Government Has Got To Fix Northern Ireland Protocol: Johnson

The UKs Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the Northern Ireland Protocol has got to be fixed as the post-Brexit deadlock continues between the UK and the European Union.

Johnsons comment came after the months-long talks on the protocol resumed on Thursday between British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and European Commission Vice-President Maros Sefcovic.

During a phone call, Truss gave a fresh warning of acting unilaterally unless the EU shows requisite flexibility on the protocol, according to the British Foreign Office.

But Sefcovic said it was simply not acceptable for the UK to threaten to unilaterally suspend parts of the protocol.

British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss meeting European Commission Vice-President Maros Sefcovic for talks on the Northern Ireland Protocol in central London on Feb. 11, 2022. (Rob Pinney/PA)

The Northern Ireland Protocol is part of the UKs Brexit deal that leaves Northern Ireland in the EUs single market and customs union, but also effectively creates a sea border for goods and services between the region and the rest of the UK. The protocol was created to avoid a visible land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which is in the EU. A hard border could risk resurrecting sectarian violence between Irish nationalists and unionists.

The Northern Ireland Executive, the regions government, collapsed in February after the Democratic Unionist Partys (DUPs) first minister resigned in protest over the protocol. Following a new election on May 5, the party has refused to participate in forming a new executive until the UK government acts on altering the post-Brexit trade agreement. It may also refuse to nominate a speaker for the Northern Ireland Assembly, the regions Parliament. The assembly cannot sit without a speaker.

Under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the nationalist Sinn Feinthe biggest winner in the recent electioncannot form a government without the unionist DUP, which came second in the election.

Northern Ireland First Minister Paul Givan speaking to the media at the ICC in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on Dec. 15, 2021. (Brian Lawless/PA)

Asked if he believed the text of the Northern Ireland Protocol needed to be changed, Johnson said Northern Ireland is an incredible place which has a fantastic future, but at the moment, very sadly, the institutions of democracy, the political governance of Northern Ireland, has collapsed.

The prime minister said its a real, real problem, adding the reason for the problem is that theres one community in Northern Ireland that wont accept the way the protocol works at present.

Weve got to fix that, he said.

The UKs Union flag (above) and the EU flag flying from the same mast on March 31, 2017. (Jane Barlow/PA)

Earlier on Thursday, a Foreign Office spokesman said the foreign secretary had made clear the UKs overriding priority is to protect peace and stability in Northern Ireland in her phone call with Sefcovic.

Truss said that the protocol was the greatest obstacle to forming a new Northern Ireland Executive, the spokesman said, adding: The foreign secretary noted this with regret and said the situation in Northern Ireland is a matter of internal peace and security for the United Kingdom, and if the EU would not show the requisite flexibility to help solve those issues, then as a responsible government we would have no choice but to act.

In a statement following the phone call, Sefcovic said, It continues to be of serious concern that the UK government intends to embark on the path of unilateral action.

He said the UK had suggested Truss could suspend parts of the protocol, despite the EU putting forward proposals that would substantially improve the way the protocol is implemented.

I am convinced that only joint solutions will work. Unilateral action, effectively disapplying an international agreement such as the protocol, is simply not acceptable, he said.

This would undermine trust between the EU and UK as well as compromise our ultimate objectiveto protect the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement in all its dimensions, while ensuring legal certainty and predictability for the people and businesses in Northern Ireland.

Such unilateral action will also undermine the conditions which are essential for Northern Ireland to continue to have access to the EU single market for goods, Sefcovic said.

According to The Times of London, Attorney General Suella Braverman has issued legal advice that the UK could act because the EUs implementation of the agreement was disproportionate and unreasonable.

Ministers have said they could trigger Article 16 of the protocolwhich allows either side to suspend some of the arrangementswhile it has also been reported that they could bring in emergency legislation.

Irish Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney speaking to the media outside Grand Central Hotel in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on May 11, 2022. (Rebecca Black/PA)

Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney rejected the suggestion that the EU has refused to compromise, pointing to proposals from Brussels which he said will significantly reduce some checks in the Irish Sea.

He added that the majority of the newly-elected lawmakers in Northern Ireland want to see the protocol work.

There is a way forward, there is a landing ground, he told Irish media.

He said the EU wants to focus on compromise, flexibility, partnership, but warned the bloc cant ignore it if the UK undermines a protocol that is about protecting the integrity of the EU single market.

PA Media contributed to this report.
A group of police officers walk through Downing Street, in London, during a protest outside the gates on April 13, 2022. (Stefan Rousseau/PA)

UK Police Issue 50 More Fines as Probe Continues Into Downing Street Lockdown-Breaching Parties

The Metropolitan Police has issued around 50 additional fines for breaches of COVID-19 rules in Downing Street and other government buildings, as the investigation into the so-called partygate scandal continues.

The force said on April 12 that more than 50 referrals for fines had been made. Among those fined at the time were Prime Minister Boris Johnson, his wife Carrie, and Chancellor Rishi Sunak, who were issued fixed penalty notices for attending a birthday gathering for the prime minister in Number 10 Downing Street in June 2020.

The Met said on May 12 that around 50 more fines have been issued, bring the total number of fines to more than 100. Downing Street later confirmed that Johnson was not among those to be fined this time.

Britains Prime Minister Boris Johnson arrives to attend a Cabinet away day at Middleport Pottery in Stoke on Trent, England, on May 12, 2022. (Oli Scarff  WPA Pool/Getty Images)

In a statement, the Met said: As of Thursday May 12, Operation Hillman, the investigation into breaches of COVID-19 regulations in Whitehall and Downing Street, has made more than 100 referrals for fixed penalty notices (FPNs) to the ACRO Criminal Records Office.

These referrals have continued to be made throughout the period since our last update on Tuesday April 12 and the investigation remains live.

When asked about the extent of law-breaking in Downing Street following the Met announcement, Johnson, who was in Staffordshire for a cabinet meeting, said he was sure well have plenty to say about that when the things finished.

There have been ongoing calls for Johnson to resign over the scandal from opposition MPs, as well as his own backbenches, but he has repeatedly said he is determined to get on with the job.

In addition to the police probe and an investigation by senior civil servant Sue Gray into the partygate claims, the prime minister is facing a third inquiry by the Privileges Committee into whether he misled Parliament with his repeated assurances that CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus rules were followed in Number 10.

Following the Mets announcement of the new fines, Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey said it shows the shocking scale of the law-breaking in Johnsons Downing Street and the extent of his lies.

The country cannot afford a prime minister who breaks the law and lies about it. Conservative MPs must find the guts to do what is right, he wrote on Twitter.

Meanwhile, Sir Keir Starmer, leader of the main opposition Labour Party, has pledged to stand down if he is fined for breaching COVID-19 regulations, after he was filmed last year drinking beer with staff in an office in Durham.

PA Media contributed to this report.
Elon Musk attends the opening ceremony of the new Tesla Gigafactory for electric cars in Gruenheide, Germany, on March 22, 2022. (Patrick Pleul/Pool via Reuters)

US Judge Says Musk Recklessly Tweeted That Funding Secured for Taking Tesla Private

SAN FRANCISCOA U.S. judge has determined that Elon Musks 2018 tweets that funding had been secured to take electric car maker Tesla private was inaccurate and reckless, saying there was nothing concrete about financing from Saudi Arabias sovereign wealth fund at that time.

San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge Edward Chens pre-trial decision represented a major victory for investors in a lawsuit accusing the worlds richest person of inflating stock prices by making false and misleading statements, causing billions of dollars in damages.

Chen granted the shareholders summary judgment on the issue of whether Musk knowingly made false statements but declined to grant them summary judgment on the question of whether these statements actually impacted Teslas share prices.

In 2018, Musk met with representatives of Saudi Arabias Public Investment Fund and had a discussion about taking Tesla private, but evidence showed that there was nothing concrete about funding coming from the PIF, the judge wrote.

Rather, discussions between Tesla and the PIF were clearly at the preliminary stage, Chen said.

No reasonable jury could find that Mr. Musk did not act recklessly given his clear knowledge of the discussions, the judge added.

Chen said details such as the total amount of funding needed to take Tesla private or the price to be paid for Tesla stock were not discussed.

The summary judgment, made on April 1, was sealed for more than a month before it was made publicly available on Tuesday.

It is hugely significant, shareholder attorney Nicholas Porritt, a partner at Levi & Korsinsky LLP told Reuters.

Porritt said it is rare that a judge decides that a defendant knowingly made false statements in summary judgment before a jury trial begins. The remaining issue is what damages the intentionally false statement has caused to shareholders, Porritt said.

Musks lawyer, who has filed motions to undo the court decision, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Musk last month said that funding was actually secured to take Tesla private in 2018.

Chens ruling was in line with a complaint from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The securities regulator in 2018 sued Musk for fraud relating to the tweets. Musk then settled with the SEC, stepping down as Tesla chairman, paying fines and agreeing to have a lawyer approve some of his tweets before posting them.

By Hyunjoo Jin
Victorian Premier Called Out Over His Role in the State Health Emergency

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has been questioned over his role in the states health crisis that led to the death of a 14-year-old girl waiting for an ambulance as well as 15 other Victorians deaths in the recent months.

14-year-old Lydia Anseline died on April 13 from an asthma attack after waiting for over 30 minutes for the ambulance to arrive.

During Question Time on May 11, Victorian Opposition Leader Matthew Guy asked if Andrews would finally take responsibility for the failings in the health system that has led to the death of Lydia and many other Victorians.

The death of any Victorian is a tragedy, Andrews responded, Im responsible as every member of the government.

He also mentioned that coronial processes for the Victorians are also important as learning from every incident is deeply at the centre of our health system.

The questioning comes as the Victorian Ambulance announced code orange on the night of May 10, with up to 70 patients waiting and 39 ambulances ramped outside Melbourne hospitals.

Victoria Ambulances are seen at the St. Vincent Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, on Jan. 11, 2022. (Diego Fedele/Getty Images)

However, Victorian Ambulance Union secretary Danny Hill told 3AW on May 11 that he would bet money the number was far higher than 39.

Hill said Ambulance Victoria has experienced its three busiest months ever in the last three months.

Its not an increase in heart attacks, strokes or car accidents, he said. Its an increased reliance on Triple-0 and on emergency departments as well for quite low acuity cases, he said, mentioning delayed appointments and treatments also contributing to the demand.

Victorias health system has been in a state of crisis since the start of the pandemic, with the Victorian government announcing a funding boost of $12 billion ($US8.33 billion) as part of the Pandemic Repair Plan on May 3. They also promised Victoria would see an extra 5000 more nurses and paramedics.

However, the secretary said paramedics need alternative pathways rather than an increased workforce.

If you put on 1000 more paramedics tomorrow, but if they all ran to the hospital, you havent fixed any of the problems.

He said the ambulance has another model that directs callers to paramedics and nurses on call to give advice and direct them to other pathways in the community, the problem is that there are often not enough alternatives in the community to be directed to.

What we probably need to do is get more engagement with the federal government around primary care around aged care, which is such a huge component of the work that paramedics do.

Health Expert Calls For Nation-Wide Reform

Prof. John Wilson, who specialised in diseases of the respiratory organs at the Alfred Hospital has said the health system in Victoria is in crisis and he fears a mass exodus of staff from the sector if the problems are not urgently addressed.

Wilson, who had worked in the Alfred hospital in Melbourne for 30 years resigned on May 11 in an effort to draw attention to the immediate need for reform in the health care system.

The standard you walk past is a standard you accept, he told the Today Show on May 12.

Giving advice on his steps to change, he said the first measure in changing the situation was asking healthcare workers what they need to do their job better, and the second step is considering resourcing, leadership and policy within the system.

But he noted that the healthcare sector in Australia needed the state governments and the federal governments to work together.

The relationship between the states and the federal government hasnt been a happy one through the last two years, he said. When were creating policies and trying to enact them, it goes backwards and forwards.

However, he did praise the federal governments move toward telehealth, which he said showed that governments could move forward if they wanted to.
Pro life demonstrators outside the Victorian State Parliament in Melbourne, Australia on June 18, 2019. Australia's most populous state New South Wales is looking to follow Victoria in creating laws around voluntary assisted dying (AAP Image/James Ross)

Voluntary Assisted Dying Law Advances in New South Wales

NSW is a step closer to allowing voluntary assisted dying, with state parliament due to hold a final vote on new laws next week.

NSW is the only state in Australia that does not allow assisted dying for terminally ill people.

The states upper house passed legislation at the second reading stage in a 20 to 17 vote on Wednesday night.

Upper house MPs will debate amendments to the bill next Wednesday, with a final vote due after that, Independent MP for Sydney Alex Greenwich said.

The landmark legislation passed the lower house with a majority of 20 last year.

This has been a long journey, a long and overdue journey, Greenwich said.

We know that NSW is the last state to embrace this compassionate reform.

Mr Greenwich said the bill is one of the most conservative models on the issue in the country, with 46 amendments already passed.

Its my call to the upper house to not create any barriers and lets work to seek to achieve voluntary assisted dying in NSW by the end of next week, he said.

The Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill was introduced to the parliament with 28 co-sponsors, more than any other piece of legislation in Australian history.

Supporters of the bill rallied outside NSW parliament on Wednesday.

We have waited a long time, as in 50 years Dying With Dignity has been campaigning for these laws, Shayne Higson, president of the NSW branch told AAP.

We have to keep the pressure up because we know that the legislation is not supported by our premier.

Fortunately, there are enough MPs in NSW parliament who reflect the support in their communities and now that support is also being shown in the upper house.

The Catholic Archbishop of Sydney Anthony Fisher said the kill bill divided society into two classes of people  those whose lives were protected by the state and those whose deaths were facilitated because their lives were deemed to be not worth living.

I fear, that this bill will dehumanise the medical and nursing professions, creating a health industry where it might become more cost-effective, or expedient, to push people towards death, he said in a statement.
Men and women are taken into custody after being caught in an illegal gambling operation in Westminster, Calif., on May 10, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Westminster Slap House Raid Busts 21 Suspects

WESTMINSTER, Calif.Westminster Police May 10 detained 21 people and arrested two in a surprise raid on a so-called slap houseor gambling housethat uncovered illegal gambling drugs, weapons, and stacks of cash.

At 5:30 a.m. over 30 SWAT and police detectives surrounded the small three-bedroom houselocated in the 9300 block of Mirror Circleimmediately shooting down roof security cameras before suspects inside could see them encircling the home.

Come out with your hands up, a speaker blaredrepeatedly on a loopgiving suspects inside a chance to surrender peacefully.

Illegal gambling machines captured by the Westminster Police Department in Westminster, Calif., on May 10, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Several tried to escape. However, they immediately darted back inside once they saw they were surrounded.

Shortly after, the men and women inside slowly streamed outtheir arms raisedand were swiftly handcuffed and ordered to sit in a line on the street curb.

Our biggest win today is giving residents their neighborhood back  our detective bureau is going to crush these [slap houses] whenever they pop up in the neighborhoods, Deputy Chief Cameron Knauerhaze told The Epoch Times.

During the raid, police found a loaded handgun, computer gambling machines, a syringe containing an illegal substance underneath couch cushions, drug pipes, debt sheets suspects used to record money owed by tenants and customers, and much more.

A home hiding an illegal gambling operation before being raided by police officers sits under investigation in Westminster, Calif., on May 10, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Inside there was the overwhelming scent of marijuana, meth, stale cigarettes, and rotting food. Broken glass littered the floor.

What people dont realize is its so much more than just gambling, Detective Cmdr. Cord Vandergrift said.

According to Vandergrift, suspects who frequent slap houses often steal merchandise from stores, which they then bring to the house for cash credits to buy drugs or to gamble.

They also turn over stolen mail to slap house operators who then use the information to steal identities.

Its organized crime, Vandergrift said.

An illegal gambling machine is captured by the Westminster Police Department in Westminster, Calif., on May 10, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

The two arrested were booked on outstanding warrants, police said.

The others were released pending further investigation.

The punishment for gambling in a slap house is only a misdemeanor of a crime against property, and does not warrant arrest under California Penal Code.

Officials said they are seeking additional evidence from the homeincluding who was behind the operationblocking it off from further access.

This [process] costs taxpayers so much money, Knauerhaze, the deputy chief stated.

An illegal gambling machine is captured by the Westminster Police Department in Westminster, Calif., on May 10, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

According to Knauerhaze, an estimated 70 law enforcement personnel will now work on the case around the clock in the following days to gather more evidence, conduct follow-up interviews, and gather intel on other slap houses, in an attempt to prosecute suspects beyond citations.

Officials estimate there are potentially 17 more such houses in the city they intend to raid. Police said suspects often go from one to the next.

In the aftermath of the May 10th raid, a man drove up to view the house and then quickly sped off.

Well catch him, Sgt. Eddie Esqueda said. They always turn up at the next raid.

Police have taken an active role in warning homeowners, particularly in the Vietnamese community, about the risks of unknowingly renting their homes to scammers who then convert them into slap houses.

Police Sergeant Phuong Pham came up with the idea to create newspaper and radio ads for the local Vietnamese community to warn them of the practice.

The office area of an illegal gambling operation displays a debt list for gambling customers after being raided by police officers in Westminster, Calif., on May 10, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Some telltale signs, Pham said, are homes with multiple cameras outside and tenants rushing move-in dates with a false sense of urgency or refusing background checks.

Pham makes these radio ads and writes the Vietnamese newspaper ads to spread awareness.

[Pham] is one of the hardest working guys you will ever meet, one of the most compassionate officers out there, Detective Vandergrift said. Its never the iron fist or the tough guy, hes always trying to help people.
Potential New Powers for Britains Media Regulator Draw Concerns From Freedom of Speech Defenders

Defenders of free speech in the UK expressed concern about new powers the Online Safety Bill would provide to Ofcom the UKs regulator of communications services.

The Bill was given an unopposed second reading by British MPs on April 19. It would force Google, Twitter, Meta (formerly Facebook), and others, to abide by a code of conduct, overseen by Ofcom, and remove legal, but harmful content. It is currently in committee.

Basically Ofcom is being given a very, very free hand indeed, said Professor Andrew Tettenborn, common-law and continental jurisdictions scholar and advisor to the Free Speech Union, to The Epoch Times. The Free Speech Union (FSU) is an organisation that was set up by the British journalist Toby Young in 2020.

The upcoming Bill (pdf) on regulating online spaces is intended to protect children from harmful content such as pornography and limit peoples exposure to illegal content, while protecting freedom of speech.

To help it do so, the government announced that it was granting Ofcom new responsibilities and powers, with a wide range of compliance tools, fines, and sanctions, to become the regulator for online harm. It already has experience in tackling this through its role in overseeing telecommunications and broadcasting (TV, radio programs, and video on demand).

Ofcom already has the power to revoke and fine, as it has done so for Chinese state broadcaster CGTNs broadcast license and more recently the Kremin-backed Russia Today this year.

The Bill was introduced to parliament on March 17, sponsored by Ms. Nadine Dorries the secretary of state for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport.

The government published a draft of the Bill in May 2021, and in a statement said it aims to protect people from harmful content as well as to uphold democratic debate online.

Ofcom

Under the Bill, the biggest social media platforms must carry out risk assessments on the types of harms that could appear on their services and how they plan to address them, setting out how they will do this in their terms of service. When and if the Bill comes into force, Ofcom will have the power to fine companies failing to comply with the laws up to 10 percent of their annual global turnover.

Though the proposed legalisation has come under fire from free speech organisations who say that it will significantly curtail freedom of expression in a way that has profound consequences. Last week, the campaign group Index on Censorship said that it could lead to internet users freedom of expression being violated.

If this legislative regime comes into force, there will be very many more restrictions on Internet use, wrote Index on Censorships top lawyer Gavin Millar QC.

Tettenborn has previously criticised some of the powers of Ofcom. In 2020, he said that Ofcom now has very extensivesome might say dictatorialpower to monitor content and regulate the way broadcasters are run, including for example their employment practices.

Tettenborn said there are a lot of fairly worrying features in the upcoming Bill and in regards to the scope of Ofcoms new role.

There is a proposal for super complaints by so-called concerned bodies in Section 140 in the Bill, he said.

What it means is that they get in a sense privileged access to Ofcom if they want to complain about what appears on a particular site, he said, adding that this leaves the regulator open to pressure groups who can then lobby and get active with complaints.

Tettenborn also criticised the legal but harmful duty that social media platforms will be required to tackle and said that any breach of these duties is liable to be met with a large fine from Ofcom.

Such content includes anything that might infringe section 5 of the Public Order Act, anything abusive which may cause people distress, he said.

Now thats very much a subjective idea, said Tettenborn. He added that if someone theoretically were to criticise Islam, a Muslim pressure group could complain that this caused distress to a number of its members. The site where it was published would then remove the piece to avoid any headaches and/or fine.

You might find very, very restrictive rules coming in on the basis of what is harmful, he said.

Fact-checkers

Another member of the Free Speech Union, Dr. Frederick Attenborough wrote (pdf) a report on the Online Safety Bill and said that Ofcoms door always seems to be open to Full Fact, an organisation funded by digital media companies and online service providers.

Full Fact says it is a team of independent fact checkers that has worked closely with Ofcom, and is a member Ofcoms Making Sense of Media Advisory Panel (alongside Google, Facebook, and the BBC) and a member organisation of the Counter-Disinformation Policy Forum (pdf), which is convened by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport.

They do a fairly good job, I am all for Full Fact, but what I object to is the idea of Full Fact, directly or indirectly, being able to dictate to me what I can see or read online, said Tettenborn.

The watchdog and the government also work with a for-profit company called NewsGuard Technologies, which audits online publishers for accuracy. Anna-Sophie Harling, former managing director for Europe at NewsGuard Technologies is now Ofcoms online safety principal and is on its content board, who is in charge of tackling disinformation and taking on technology giants such as Facebook and Alphabet.

In 2020 Ofcoms content group director Kevin Bakhurst addressed freedom of speech in future regulation of content online saying that he believed those concerns are unfounded but he understood the basis for them, adding that we never censor content.

Open expression is the lifeblood of the internet. Free speech is the beating heart of our democracy, values, and modern society, said Bakhurst adding that Ofcom would act sensibly and proportionately, focusing on the most serious and widespread harm, especially to childrennot hounding small businesses or seeking to curtail the editorial freedom of news sites.

Ofcom cannot comment on the Bill before it is implemented. A spokesperson told The Epoch Times there was no conflict of interest in having Full Fact on its advisory panel.

One of our existing duties, given to us by Parliament, is to promote media literacy. Our advisory panel brings together a diverse range of experts to support and inform our work in this area, but doesnt make any policy decisions. It includes representatives from across industry, academia, and charities providing a range of viewpoints, he said.

At the moment disinformation and misinformation arent in the Bill. Full Fact said in March said that the Bill doesnt go far enough, leaving the public vulnerable and exposed to online harms while lacking a credible plan to tackle the harms from online misinformation and disinformation.

More Harm Than Good

Last year, Victoria Hewson, Head of Regulatory Affairs and Research Associate at the free-market think tank Institute of Economic Affairs explored the subject and the risks of unintended consequences of the Bill in a report called More Harm Than Good.

Hewson told The Epoch Times that if you ever see a politician talking about how the online world is a wild west then you know that person doesnt know what they are talking about.

The online world is not a wild west. The law of the land applies equally online as it does offline, if not more so, she said.

Hewson added that as you can imagine if there is going to be any conflict or doubt, the platforms are going to protect themselves primarily from being liable fined or even having their sites blocked and their business completely disrupted which Ofcom will have the power to do. They are obviously going to err on the side of caution.

She added that it was a very dark time in our history when Ofcom was censoring people for talking about particular aspects of lockdown policy for example.

Tettenborn also shared the sentiment.

You had vaccination and lockdown skepticism and essentially Ofcom came down on them like a tonne of bricks saying its your job to support the WHO and the government view, despite the fact that lockdown skepticism seems to be, at least, partly justified, he said.

In 2021, Ofcom released a statement titled Protecting freedom of expression during the coronavirus where it said that freedom of expression is central to our work in this area.

We advised broadcasters to take care when airing unverified claims about the virusincluding statements that sought to undermine the advice of public health bodies or trust in accurate sources of information, it wrote.

Chris Summers and Lily Zhou contributed to this report.
A New York-based beautician has become a mom of 10 after welcoming her third set of naturally conceived twins in a row. Doctors claim the odds of this happening are as rare as 1 in 200,000.

Kimberly Alarcon, 37, who lives with her husband, John, 43, and their family in Wallkill, New York, admits she was scared when she learned a third set of twins were on their way.

Kimberly Alarcon and her third set of twins, Kenzy and Kenzley. (Courtesy of Kimberly Alarcon)

I was worried about everything people may say, where are we going to fit them, can we afford more kids? Kimberly told The Epoch Times. Everything was running through my mind, but my husband is the level-headed one; the first thing he said was, Lets pray, and he told me that everything would be okay. They are blessings.

John and Kimberly, who originally hail from Mount Vernon, share 10 children: Brittney, 17; Sarah, 13; Hunter, 10; Zoey and Zachary, 6; Olivia and Oliver, 4; and newborns Kenzy and Kenzley. They also have custody of their nephew, 3-year-old King.

Sisters Kenzy and Kenzley came into the world via Caesarean section at Westchester Medical Center on April 25, 2022. Kenzy, weighing 4 pounds 15 ounces (2.2 kg), was born 3 minutes ahead of her sister Kenzley, who weighed 5 pounds 9 ounces (2.5 kg).

Kimberly and her husband, John. (Courtesy of Kimberly Alarcon)

Sharing more about their personality, Kimberly said: Kenzy is more laid-back and chill, while Kenzley is very demanding and nosey. Shes a little over a week old and already up and looking everywhere.

In a birth announcement shared on Instagram, Kimberly revealed that there had originally been three babies, but sadly, a boy, Kent, was lost to miscarriage. God gives us what he knows we can handle, so yes, we will love him and remember him, she wrote.

Kimberly is not new to a big family, as she herself grew up with nine biological and eight adopted brothers and sisters, Today reported. Her husband had only one sibling and always longed for a large family, and thus the Alarcon children are more than a dream come true for their parents.

Westchester Medical Centers chief of maternal-fetal medicine, Dr. Angela Silber, told the outlet that conceiving three sets of twins back to back, without medication or intervention, is pretty incredible.

Kimberly told The Epoch Times that her journey through three consecutive twin pregnancies was hard but the reward at the end is outstanding. Consumed by the chaos of everyday life, she never knew how rare it was until her story made headlines.

Public response to the birth of her and Johns third set of twins has been both positive and negative, she conceded.

The first set of twins, Zachary and Zoey. (Courtesy of Kimberly Alarcon)

A normal day in the life of this hands-on mom is always hectic. Were it to be calm, she explained, it would only mean that something is wrong.

Her 10-year-old, Hunter, rises at 5 a.m. and makes his own breakfast. His siblings wake an hour later and the school rush begins; Kimberly sees her older kids onto the school bus, before spending the bulk of the day with her three little ones.

After cooking, cleaning, doing errands, and overseeing online lessonssuch as speech, singing songs, and craftingKimberly sells crafts through her Instagram page, @kimmies_creations.

Once the eldest children return from school, Kimberly helps with homework.

The second set of twins, Olivia and Oliver. (Courtesy of Kimberly Alarcon)

I always ask them how was their day, and always tell them I love them. We bake and cook together and everyone is fed, bathed, and ready for bed by 8 p.m., said Kimberly, who takes the reins at home since Johnwhos a detective, employed for the past 20 years at the Mount Vernon Police Departmentworks long hours.

Kimberly says having a system in place is great, but sometimes things dont go as theyre planned.

The third set of twins, Kenzy and Kenzley. (Courtesy of Kimberly Alarcon)

As a mom raising and caring for such a big family, Kimberly said the key question she always gets asked is, How do you do it, and the funniest question asked is, Do you guys have cable TV?

There are always challenges, whether big or small, but her motto, she said, is simple: Pray, and give it to God.

Being a mother is not always peaches and cream for the 37-year-old, who suffers from depression and anxiety and gets overwhelmed, but Kimberly and her family choose to ignore the negative and be nourished by the positive, which adds to her strength, she said.

Besides, Kimberly feels blessed.

I feel amazed about being a mother, period, she explained. But  being a mother of three sets of twins is truly a blessing, and Im grateful. Some of the best moments about being a mom are when they hug me and tell me they love me; that is the best reward and feeling, ever.

Kimberly, John, and their kids before having the third set of twins. (Courtesy of Kimberly Alarcon)

Share your stories with us at emg.inspired@epochtimes.com, and continue to get your daily dose of inspiration by signing up for the Inspired newsletter at TheEpochTimes.com/newsletter
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WASHINGTON (AP)  Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee asked the Justice Department on Wednesday to investigate whether a Trump administration interior secretary engaged in possible criminal conduct while helping an Arizona developer get a crucial permit for a housing project.

The criminal referral says David Bernhardt pushed for approval of the project by developer Michael Ingram, a Republican donor and supporter of former President Donald Trump, despite a federal wildlife official's finding that it would threaten habitats for imperiled species.

Bernhardt led Interior from 2019 to 2021. In 2017, he was the No. 2 official at the department when the Fish and Wildlife Service, an Interior Department agency, reversed its opposition to the Villages at Vigneto, the proposed 28,000-home development in southern Arizona, and allowed it to move forward.

Democrat Reps. Raul Grijalva of Arizona, the committee chairman, and Katie Porter of California, who leads a subcommittee on oversight and investigations, made the referral in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland. They said the committee has conducted an extensive investigation into the circumstances surrounding the 2017 decision.

A high-ranking interior official had said issuing a Clean Water Act permit for the project could adversely affect endangered species or critical habitat in the area. The region is home to birds such as as the southwestern willow flycatcher and yellow-billed cuckoo, as well as the northern Mexican garter snake.

In their referral, Democrats say Ingram met with Bernhardt in August 2017, two weeks before a Fish and Wildlife official received the phone call directing him to reverse the decision blocking the project. The meeting was not disclosed in Bernhardts public calendar or travel documents.

Two months later, Ingram made a $10,000 donation to the Trump Victory Fund. The permit was approved later that month. At least nine other donors associated with Ingram also donated to the Trump Victory Fund in the days after Ingram's donation, Democrats said.

Evidence strongly suggests the decision was the result of a quid pro quo between Vignetos developer, Michael Ingram, and senior level officials in the Trump administration,'' including Bernhardt, who was then the deputy Interior secretary, the Democrats wrote.

Ingram "had frequent access to high-ranking officials across the Trump administration,'' including Bernhardt, then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and then-Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt, Democrats said. Zinke, who led Interior from March 2017 to January 2019, met with Ingram in May 2017 and April 2018, the Democrats said in documents submitted with the referral. Zinke and his staff emailed Ingram multiple times, using personal email addresses, Democrats said.

Bernhardt, now a lawyer in private practice, called the Democrats' letter a pathetic attempt by career politicians to fabricate news.

A Justice Department spokesman said the department received the letter and will review it.

The lawmakers asked Garland to investigate and consider bringing criminal charges against Bernhardt or other officials.

"The findings of this investigation show us yet again that the previous administration cast career staff expertise aside while they handed out federal agency decisions to Trumps buddies and big donors on a pay-to-play basis, Grijalva said in a statement.

Porter said that an exchange of money for a specific government action is the clearest form of corruption there is, and Americans  Democrats, Republicans and independents  share an understanding that this kind of quid pro quo erodes our democracy.

Lanny Davis, a lawyer for El Dorado Holdings, a company owned by Ingram, called the referral by Grijalva and Porter false, misleading (and) unfair" and said it used "innuendo as a surrogate for fact.''

El Dorado participated in multiple meetings with the committee, "acted in full transparency and gave full cooperation without a subpoena,'' Davis said in a statement. Even so, the company was denied the opportunity to rebut the allegations in the referral or even a chance to speak to Grijalva, Davis said.

"Unfortunately, the American people have been numbed and accustomed to political attacks that have little to do with the truth, and there needs to be bipartisan outrage when this occurs,'' added Davis, a prominent Democrat who was special counsel to former President Bill Clinton.

Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the left-leaning Center for Western Priorities, called the allegations against Bernhardt extremely serious, adding that the Justice Department should launch a full investigation.

We said all along that David Bernhardt was too compromised and too corrupt to be a cabinet secretary. This is damning evidence of a straight up pay-for-play favor,'' she said.

___

Associated Press writer Michael Balsamo contributed to this report.
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HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif. (AP)  A California coastal panel on Thursday rejected a long-standing proposal to build a $1.4 billion seawater desalination plant to turn Pacific Ocean water into drinking water as the state grapples with persistent drought that is expected to worsen in coming years with climate change.

The states Coastal Commission voted unanimously to deny a permit for Poseidon Water to build a plant to produce 50 million gallons of water a day in Huntington Beach, southeast of Los Angeles.

Poseidon said it was disappointed in the decision.

California continues to face a punishing drought, with no end in sight," a company statement said. Every day, we see new calls for conservation as reservoir levels drop to dangerous lows. We firmly believe that this desalination project would have created a sustainable, drought-tolerant source of water."

The vote came after a heated meeting before the commission attended by dozens of supporters and critics of the plan. It was considered a crucial decision on the future of the plant after years of other hearings and delays.

Poseidons long-running proposal was supported by Gov. Gavin Newsom but faced ardent opposition from environmentalists who said drawing in large amounts of ocean water and releasing salty discharge back into the ocean would kill billions of tiny marine organisms that make up the base of the food chain along a large swath of the coast.

The ocean is under attack from climate change already, Commissioner Dayna Bochco said. I cannot say in good conscience that this amount of damage is OK."

Other critics said the water would be too expensive and wasnt urgently needed in the area where it would be built, which is less dependent on state and federal water due to an ample aquifer and water recycling program.

Commissioners cited those issues in following a staff recommendation and rejecting the proposal. They also cited the energy cost of running the plant and the fact that it would sit in an earthquake fault zone.

Before voting, the 12-member commission heard hours of comments from scores of people packed into a hotel meeting room in the Orange County city of Costa Mesa in addition to those tuning in online.

At the meeting, supporters wore orange and yellow construction vests and toted signs saying support desal!

Opponents carried signs reading No Poseidon and Do not $ell our coast" and included a woman who wore a plankton costume and held a sign reading I am a plankton  please do not kill me!

California has spent most of the last 15 years in drought conditions. Its normal wet season that runs from late fall to the end of winter was especially dry this year and as a result 95% of the state is classified as in severe drought.

Newsom last summer urged residents to cut consumption by 15%, but since then water usage has dropped by only about 3%. Some areas have begun instituting generally mild restrictions such as limiting how many days lawns can be watered. More stringent restrictions are likely later in the year.

Much of California's water comes from melting snow and with a far below normal snowpack, state officials have told water agencies they will receive only 5% of what they've requested from state water supplies beyond what's needed for critical activities like drinking and bathing.

Desalination takes ocean water and removes salt and other elements to make it drinkable. Those elements are discharged back into the sea, while the water can be channeled directly to consumers or used to replenish a groundwater basin. The countrys largest seawater desalination plant is already operating in nearby San Diego County, and there are also coastal plants in Florida.

The idea of desalination has been debated for decades in Huntington Beach, a coastal community southeast of Los Angeles known as Surf City USA that relies on its sands and waves for tourism. Discussion of the project has also recently focused on the impact of climate change on regional water supplies and on sea level rise in the low-lying coastal area where the plant would be built.

More than two decades ago, Poseidon proposed building two desalination plants  the one in San Diego County, and one in Huntington Beach. The San Diego County plant was approved and built, and desalinated water now accounts for 10% of San Diego County Water District 's water supplies.

But the Huntington Beach project has faced numerous delays. In 2013, the Coastal Commission voiced concerns that the proposed use of intake structures to quickly draw in large volumes of water from the ocean would damage marine life. Poseidon, which is owned by Brookfield Infrastructure Partners, conducted additional studies and resubmitted the plan with a proposal to mitigate marine damage through restoration of nearby wetlands.

Last month, staff members for the panel issued a 200-page report opposing the project, arguing it fails to adhere to marine life protection policies and policies aimed at minimizing hazards from tsunamis and rising sea levels.

Some on Thursday also debated the extent of the local demand for the desalinated water. Orange County has an ample groundwater basin and recycles wastewater, making the region less dependent on imported water than San Diego. The Orange County Water District, which has said it intends to buy Poseidons water, manages the basin that helps meet about 75% of the water demand in the northern and central parts of the county.

Poseidon contends the region would still benefit by locking in a drought-proof source of water and so would inland communities and states that could gain increased access to imported water supplies once the county can tap into desalinated water. Steve Sheldon, the Orange County Water Districts president, said desalinated water is more expensive now, but he expects the cost of imported water to also rise over time.
Tiffany Blanchette/AP

WASHINGTON (AP)  President Joe Biden will meet Friday with mayors, police chiefs and local public officials to discuss how cities are using funds from the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package on policing and public safety programs.

A White House official insisted on anonymity to provide details of the meeting. In the afternoon, Biden plans to deliver remarks to ask state and local governments to devote more of their coronavirus relief spending to public safety.
FALLS CHURCH, Va. (AP)  Fairfax County officials have rebuffed a request from Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin to establish a security perimeter around the neighborhoods of U.S. Supreme Court justices living in the county after some have faced protests outside their homes.

Youngkin, a Republican, made the request Wednesday in a letter to the county board of supervisors. I fundamentally believe such demonstrations and picketing should not be allowed at the Justice's (sic) homes as they are meant to intimidate and influence the Justices, he wrote.

Three Supreme Court justices  Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett and Clarence Thomas  live in the county. Justices living in and outside the county have been confronted with protests outside their homes since a draft of Alito's opinion that would overturn the Roe v. Wade abortion-rights decision was leaked.

Fairfax County Board of Supervisors Chairman Jeff McKay said Youngkin's request for a security perimeter is unnecessary and improper. He said establishing a perimeter would amount to creating an unconstitutional neighborhood checkpoint that would infringe on First Amendment protest rights. He also noted that protests that have occurred outside Alito's home in the Fort Hunt neighborhood have been peaceful.

We will enforce laws that serve to protect persons and property, McKay wrote. Our officers are equally committed to protecting the First Amendment guarantees afforded to those who gather to exercise their freedom of speech.

Fairfax County Police, for their part, said through a spokeswoman that theyre providing extra staffing in response to reports of planned protests to maintain the safety and security of the public, while ensuring First Amendment rights are protected.

Youngkin also joined Maryland GOP Gov. Larry Hogan in calling on federal law enforcement entities to take the lead and provide sustained resources to protect the justices and ensure the neighborhoods are secure in the weeks and months ahead.

In a letter addressed to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, the governors called on the Department of Justice to enforce a federal law that prohibits pickets or parades with the intent to influence a judge.

Separately, 25 Republican attorneys general wrote to Garland, citing the same law and urging him to prevent protesters "from attempting to intimidate the justices.

Justice Department spokesman Anthony Coley said in a statement Wednesday that Garland continues to be briefed on security matters related to the Supreme Court and justices. He noted that Garland had directed the U.S. Marshals Service to help support the Marshal of the Supreme Court and Supreme Court Police.
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GUATEMALA CITY (AP)  A Guatemala judge who last week ordered nine former police and military officers to stand trial for alleged crimes during that countrys civil war, said Wednesday that death threats against him had increased since announcing his decision.

They send me messages, they call me on the phone, theres vehicles following; all of that is happening, Magistrate Miguel Angel Galvez said.

Galvez is no stranger to high-profile cases. He once ordered former dictator Efrain Rios Montt to be tried. Before they had threatened me, but now they even come to hearings to photograph me, he said.

Last weeks case stemmed from a document from Guatemalas civil war recovered in 1999 known as the Military Diary. Inside, military officials logged forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings and the torture of 183 people.

The men on trial were high-ranking military and police officers arrested last year and implicated in the cases described in the document by nature of the command positions they held when the crimes occurred between 1983 and 1986.

In addition to the nine ex-police and military officers Galvez ordered to stand trial, he called for prosecutors to find Toribio Acevedo Ramirez, a former head of military intelligence. Panamanian authorities arrested Acevedo Ramirez Tuesday in Panama City's airport.

Galvez said that during a hearing he received at least 20 calls from a number in the United States. When he finally answered, a voice on the other end said if you hang up, youre going to remember me.

Galvez said he suspected the leader of the far-right Foundation Against Terrorism, FCT, Ricardo Rafael Mendez Ruiz, could be behind some of the threats. Mendez Ruiz was sanctioned by the U.S. State Department last year as an undemocratic actor for allegedly obstructing prosecutions against former military officers by harassing and intimidating investigators.

Mendez Ruiz had written on social media that It is Miguel Angel Galvezs turn, the FCT will take care of it. He said Galvez would pay for serious crimes he committed. We are going to see him locked up or exiled, he wrote.

On Wednesday, Mendez said he had filed a complaint against the judge.

Galvez said the Supreme Court should investigate the threats, but it had so far not commented.

Meanwhile, Galvez fears the government is trying to build a case against him, as has been the case with other judges and prosecutors who have worked on sensitive corruption cases, which are also sometimes part of his docket.

They will try to withdraw my immunity as revenge for the decisions, Galvez said.

Juan Pappier, senior investigator for Human Rights Watchs Americas division, said it is on Guatemalan authorities to prevent any attacks on Galvez.

This case follows a pattern of intimidation against independent judges and prosecutors who investigate and criminally prosecute corruption and human rights crimes in the country, Pappier said. These attacks have left Guatemalan democracy hanging by a thread.

The Guatemalan Judges for Integrity Association condemned the threats as a direct attack against judicial independence.

The United States and European governments have expressed concern about the deterioration of Guatemalas justice system. A number of respected judges and prosecutors who worked on corruption cases have fled into exile.
NORWALK  The city should consider tweaking its zoning rules to incentivize commercial and residential development along Water Street, according to draft recommendations from an ongoing study.

The study was launched last year to help Norwalk officials develop a new land use plan for the urban waterfront, a vast portion of the city that is dominated by industrial and commercial businesses.

The studys preliminary findings and suggestions were outlined during a virtual meeting this week by representatives of Utile Design, a Boston-based consulting firm hired to help improve the citys complex zoning rules.

The goal of this planning process is to streamline and modernize industrial zoning to preserve and enhance character, improve quality of life and promote economic development, said Zoe Mueller, a Utile project manager.

Mueller said the firms road map will help inform a larger effort to overhaul the citys zoning regulations. The rewrite is aimed at simplifying the zoning code for property owners and developers.

If implemented as drafted, the waterfront plan would encourage more mixed-use development in the marine commercial districts along Water Street, a harbor-adjacent area that is now home to marinas, shipyards and other water-dependent uses.

Mueller recommended limiting new commercial and residential development to the first 245 feet of the parcel, but allowing water-dependent uses on part of the property that is closest to the harbor.

She said the streamlined mixed-use districts would allow property owners to build retail spaces, offices or apartments on their parcels, giving them a new source of revenue that could help support their original water-dependent business.

This would basically be a tool to drive reinvestment, Mueller said.

Tim Love, Utiles founding principal, said the firm recommended the city create specific requirements for any new Water Street development. Love suggested the list could include requirements to upgrade boat docks and to improve flooding infrastructure.

Investment in those parcels will mean that the marine commercial uses and the life of Norwalk at the waters edge will be preserved and enhanced, hopefully, for future generations to come, he said.

Utile also recommended downgrading certain zones along the water from heavy industrial to mixed-use districts to allow boutique manufacturers, retailers, open space or, in some cases, residential buildings.

Mueller said the recommendations for the waterfront were based on feedback from city residents and taxpayers who said they would like to see more recreational space and new efforts to improve the harbors ecology.

Utiles study is still ongoing and the firm collected additional feedback from dozens of residents who attended Mondays meeting. Mueller said the report is expected to be completed and presented to the city as soon as next month.
NORWALK  Federal authorities have arrested a city man accused of accessing and distributing child sex abuse material through a messaging app.

Jake Scott Flewellyn, 24, surrendered to law enforcement Wednesday afternoon, the U.S. attorneys office said. He was charged on a federal criminal complaint with an offense related to the distribution of child sex abuse material, and another offense of accessing with intent to view child sex abuse material, according to the office.

The office said Flewellyn appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge S. Dave Vatti in Bridgeport. He was released on a $100,000 bond and required to wear an electronic monitoring device.

In December 2021, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received a report from Kik, a messaging app, about one its users distributing videos of child sex abuse, the U.S. attorneys office said.

The messaging service deactivated the account, but in April, while the FBI was trying to determine the users identity, Kik reported another user account distributing child sex abuse material to the NCMEC, the office said.

The investigation revealed that Flewellyn created both Kik accounts and used them to distribute images and videos depicting child sex abuse, the U.S. attorneys office said.

The U.S. attorneys office said the FBI conducted the investigation with the assistance of the Norwalk Police Department.

An affidavit attached to the criminal complaint for Flewellyns arrest said the first NCMEC report identified two images and 84 videos depicting suspected child sex abuse sent by the first account. At least one video in the first NCMEC report was of a prepubescent female being sexually abused, according to the affidavit.

The second NCMEC report identified 21 videos depicting suspected child [sex abuse material] between March 10, 2022 and March 30, 2022, according to the affidavit.

The FBI agent investigating the case was able to identify Flewellyn using a variety of sources, including publicly available information, government records, private databases, and subpoenas, the affidavit states.

On April 12, the FBI interviewed Flewellyn in Norwalk and secretly recorded the conversation on video, according to the affidavit. During the interview, Flewellyn admitted he began viewing child sex abuse material approximately one year prior to the interview, the affidavit stated. He also admitted to distributing the videos to other users through Kik, estimating he sent approximately 10 to 20 videos each day he used the Kik application.

He also admitted to viewing child sex abuse material with victims as young as 1 or 2 years old, according to the affidavit.
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP)  A boat loaded with suspected migrants capsized north of an uninhabited island near Puerto Rico and 11 people had been confirmed dead while 31 others were rescued Thursday, authorities said.

It wasn't immediately clear how many people were aboard the boat when it turned over, said U.S. Coast Guard spokesman Ricardo Castrodad. He said a mass rescue effort was still underway.

We're looking to rescue as many people as we can and find as many survivors as we can, he said.

At least eight Haitians were taken to the hospital, although the nationalities of all those aboard the boat were not immediately known.

The incident was the latest in a string of capsizings across the region as migrants from Haiti and the Dominican Republic flee violence and poverty in their countries.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection helicopter spotted the overturned boat late Thursday morning.

"If not for that, we would not have known about this until someone would have found any sign or received reports from people that their loved ones are missing," Castrodad said. They found them early enough that we were able to coordinate a response.

The boat was spotted more than 11 miles (18 kilometers) north of the uninhabited island of Desecheo, which is off Puerto Rico's west coast. The U.S. Coast Guard said those rescued were 20 men and 11 women.

The capsizing comes less than a week after the U.S. Coast Guard and Dominican navy on Saturday rescued 68 migrants in the Mona Passage, a treacherous area between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. One woman believed to be from Haiti died, Castrodad said.

These voyages are dangerous, Castrodad said. They're unsafe, they are grossly overloaded ... (and) no lifesaving equipment. It wouldn't really take much for any of these vessels to capsize.

From October 2021 to March, 571 Haitians and 252 people from the Dominican Republic were detained in waters around Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The majority of those Haitians, 348 of them, landed in Puerto Ricos uninhabited Mona Island and were rescued.

In fiscal year 2021, 310 Haitians and 354 Dominicans were detained, compared with the 22 Haitians and 313 Dominicans apprehended in fiscal year 2020.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Coast Guard said that in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, it apprehended 1,527 Haitians, 838 Cubans and 742 people from the Dominican Republic in the region, which includes Florida and the Caribbean.

Since then, trips of human smuggling boats have only increased, authorities say.

In January, the Coast Guard searched for at least 38 people missing off Floridas coast after a suspected human smuggling boat that had left the Bahamas capsized in a storm. A sole survivor was reported.

Hundreds of Haitians have arrived in Florida alone in recent months after swimming ashore.

Haiti is struggling with a surge in gang-related violence that has killed dozens of people, including women and children, and caused thousands of families to flee their homes. Kidnappings also have spiked, including those of eight Turkish citizens who on Sunday were forced off a bus they had boarded in the Dominican Republic.

Kidnappings in the country of more than 11 million people have increased 180% and homicides are up 17% in the past year, according to the United Nations, which last week expressed concern over the rapid deterioration of security and human rights in Haiti.

Many have criticized the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden for deporting more than 20,000 Haitians in recent months given the country's deepening turmoil.
The DAISY Award for Extraordinary Nurses has been adopted by healthcare facilities around the world to celebrate nurses for their care and compassion. Anderson Hospital is now offering the DAISY (Diseases Attacking the Immune System) program.

Hospital staff thought it fitting to launch the program on the first day of National Nurses Week  a celebration that recognizes the extraordinary, compassionate care nurses provide patients and families every day.

Patients, families and colleagues may nominate nurses by sharing stories and submitting examples of how they were so special. Awards are presented throughout the year at celebrations attended by the honorees colleagues, patients and visitors.

Each honoree receives a certificate commending her or him as an "Extraordinary Nurse." The certificate reads, "In deep appreciation of all you do, who you are and the incredibly meaningful difference you make in the lives of so many people."



Honorees also receive a DAISY Award pin and a beautiful and meaningful sculpture called A Healers Touch, hand-carved by artists of the Shona Tribe in Zimbabwe, Africa.



The DAISY Foundation is a not-for-profit organization, established in memory of J. Patrick Barnes, by members of his family. Patrick died at age 33 in late 1999 from complications of Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura (ITP), a little known but not uncommon auto-immune disease. The care Patrick and his family received from nurses while he was ill inspired this unique means of thanking nurses for making a profound difference in the lives of their patients and patient families.



"When Patrick was critically ill, our family experienced first-hand the remarkable skill and care nurses provide patients every day and night," said Bonnie Barnes, co-founder of The DAISY Foundation. "Yet these unsung heroes are seldom recognized for the super-human, extraordinary, compassionate work they do. The kind of work the nurses are called on to do every day epitomizes the purpose of The DAISY Award.



We are proud to be among the healthcare organizations participating in The DAISY Award program," said Lisa Spencer, Anderson Hospital Chief Nursing and Chief Operating Officer. "Nurses are heroes every day. It is important that our nurses know their work is highly valued. The DAISY Foundation provides one way for us to recognize them.



In addition to the DAISY Award for Extraordinary Nurses, the foundation expresses gratitude to the nursing profession internationally in more than 5,000 healthcare facilities and schools of nursing with recognition of nurse-led teams, nurse leaders, nurses advancing health equity, nursing faculty, nursing students, lifetime achievement in nursing and through the J. Patrick Barnes Grants for Nursing Research and Evidence-Based Practice Projects, medical mission grants and new health equity grant programs. More information is available at http://DAISYfoundation.org.
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JERUSALEM (AP)  Israel advanced plans for the construction of more than 4,000 settler homes in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, a rights group said, a day after the military demolished homes in an area where hundreds of Palestinians face the threat of expulsion.

It was a jolting illustration of Israel's policies in the territory it has occupied for nearly 55 years. Critics, including three major human rights groups, say those policies amount to apartheid, a charge Israel rejects as an attack on its very legitimacy.

Hagit Ofran, an expert at the anti-settlement watchdog group Peace Now, told The Associated Press that a military planning body approved 4,427 housing units at a meeting on Thursday that she attended. The state of Israel took another stumble toward the abyss and further deepened the occupation, she tweeted.

Spokespeople for the Israeli government and the military body in charge of civilian affairs in the West Bank did not respond to requests for comment.

It's the biggest advancement of settlement projects since the Biden administration took office. The White House opposes settlement construction and views it as an obstacle to any eventual peace agreement with the Palestinians.

There was no immediate comment from the administration on Thursday's decision. But last week, when the first reports emerged of the impending settlement approval, State Department spokeswoman Jalina Porter reiterated that the U.S. strongly opposes settlement expansion.

U.N. Mideast envoy Tor Wennesland condemned the announcement, calling the settlements a major obstacle to peace that undermines hopes for a two-state solution.

Continued settlement expansion further entrenches the occupation, encroaches upon Palestinian land and natural resources, and hampers the free movement of the Palestinian population, he said.

Most of the international community considers the settlements illegal and supports a two-state solution to the conflict. But neither the United States nor other world powers have given Israel  the stronger party  any incentive to accede to such an arrangement. Israel says Palestinian leaders have rejected proposals by previous governments that would have given them a state.

Israel views the West Bank as the biblical and historical heartland of the Jewish people. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who once led the main settler organization, is opposed to Palestinian statehood, but his government has taken steps to improve economic conditions for Palestinians.

Israel approved some 3,000 settler homes in October, brushing aside a rebuke from the U.S., its closest ally. Peace talks with the Palestinians broke down more than a decade ago, in part because of Israel's continuing construction on lands the Palestinians want for a future state.

On Wednesday, Israeli troops demolished at least 18 buildings and structures in the West Bank following a Supreme Court decision that would force at least 1,000 Palestinians out of an area Israel designated as a firing zone in the early 1980s.

BTselem, another Israeli rights group, said 12 residential buildings were among the structures that were demolished, in villages in the arid hills south of the West Bank city of Hebron.

Residents of the Masafer Yatta say they have been living in the region, herding animals and practicing traditional desert agriculture for decades, long before Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 war. The Supreme Court sided with the military, which says there were no permanent structures in the area before it was designated a training zone.

Whats happening now is ethnic cleansing," Sami Huraini, an activist and a resident of the area, told the AP. They are trying to expel the people from this land, saying they never lived here permanently, which is a lie.

He said residents of the area where the demolitions were carried out are determined to remain there. The people are staying on their land and have already started to rebuild," he said.

The military declined to comment on the demolitions.

Neighboring Jordan, which made peace with Israel in 1994, condemned both the settlement expansion and the forced displacement of Palestinians, calling it a a flagrant violation of international law.

Israel has built more than 130 settlements across the West Bank that today are home to nearly 500,000 settlers, who have Israeli citizenship. Nearly 3 million Palestinians live in the territory under open-ended Israeli military rule. The Palestinian Authority exercises limited self-rule over parts of the West Bank and cooperates with Israel on security matters.

The Palestinians want the West Bank to form the main part of a future state, along with east Jerusalem and Gaza, all territories seized by Israel in the 1967 war. Israel annexed east Jerusalem in a move not recognized internationally, and Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade on Gaza after the Palestinian militant group Hamas seized power there in 2007.

The Palestinians view the expansion of settlements in the West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem as a major obstacle to any future peace deal because they reduce and divide up the land on which such a state would be established.

___

Associated Press writer Ilan Ben Zion in Jerusalem contributed.
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Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Wednesday called on Congress to be like Illinois and codify abortion access into federal law.

Its long past time for this nation to codify Roe into federal law, Pritzker said at a Fairview Heights abortion clinic. Basic rights of women to control their own bodies are about to be stripped away.

The Womens Health Protection Act that was before Congress Wednesday would have protected an individuals ability to determine whether to continue or end a pregnancy and prevent states from acting to remove or alter abortion protections in the future.

But the legislation did not pass in the Senate, falling by a vote of 49-51 after Democratic West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin joined Republicans in voting no. Democrats do not have the 60 votes needed to overcome a Republican filibuster.

Pritzker on Wednesday said that, since 2015, the number of out-of-state patients coming to Illinois to make their own decisions about whether, where and how to be a parent has tripled.

"And without action from Congress, its set to soar," Pritzker said. "Let me make this clear: Illinois is a pro-choice state, and as long as Im governor and we retain a pro-choice legislature, we will support every womans right to reproductive freedom. When women come here to this state, you are welcomed. You are supported. You are safe. You wont need to suffer."

Pritzker also urged activists to take to the streets to ensure abortion remains widely accessible even if the Supreme Court rolls back its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion nationwide. Later he emphasized protestors must be peaceful.

Pro-choice advocates at the Wednesday news conference in the Fairview Heights Regional Logistics Center warned that overturning Roe would create further inequities in health care among low-income and minority women that already have difficulties receiving quality care.

Opened in January, the center is operated by Planned Parenthood and the Granite City-based Hope Clinic for Women, making abortion care more accessible.

Rep. LaToya Greenwood, D-East St. Louis, said the past two years have amplified the gender, racial and economic inequities that have long blocked access to quality health care for low-income and minority people. Greenwood said the potential decision to overturn Roe v. Wade will be a matter of life and death for Black and brown women.

We should be ensuring that no one is being forced to be a mother against their will, Greenwood said.

Since the leaked draft opinion in a case challenging Roe v. Wade, Illinois Democrats have warned that the overturning of that precedent threatens the right to other reproductive health measures such as birth control and is an end to the constitutional right to privacy.

Yamelsie Rodriguez, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, said Illinois is on a new frontier of abortion access and she is thankful lawmakers have taken the steps to codify women's reproductive rights into law.

We are a safe place not just for Illinoisians but for anyone who needs abortion in a post-Roe world, Rodriguez said.

In 2019, Pritzker signed the Reproductive Health Act enshrining in state law the fundamental right to an abortion. Illinois is one of 16 states to codify the right to an abortion and the only Midwestern state to do so.

Rodriguez said that since the opening of the Fairview Heights facility, case managers have helped nearly 1,000 patients from seven states travel to Illinois for abortions. She said case managers help out-of-state patients with traveling, lodging and other financial assistance.
Glen Carbon's public works department requested and received approval Tuesday for an outside company to take over maintenance and management of the village's pair of elevated water towers, on Glen Carbon Road, behind the Dairy Queen, and along Old Troy Road, from this year through 2033.

Utility Service Co, aka Suez, returned the low bid of $957,603 versus a $1.2 million bid from Maguire Iron, Inc. The board of trustees voted 5-0 in favor of the plan, subject to final approval of a modified bid. Trustee Victor Smith was absent.

Phil Knight, a water system consultant for Southern Illinois with Suez, gave a presentation. He said Suez will inspect the tanks annually, take care of any repairs and perform routine cleanings at least every other year. He said tower #1, behind one of the village's fire stations, will be up for this work every even-numbered year while the smaller tank on Old Troy Road near Mont Road will be done every odd-numbered year.

Knight said Suez will handle all compliance issues - safety, security, sanitary.

"If OSHA were to come to you tomorrow and say, 'Your ladders aren't wide enough; you need a 30-inch ladder now instead of an 18-inch ladder.' Instead of you having to contract someone out to come make that [change] to make it compliant, under our asset management program, we're going to contact you and tell you we're coming out to widen your ladders because OSHA tells me that you have to."

He said Suez will handle any emergency services, such as in the wake of a storm.

Knight said the most important part of the maintenance program is the coating system for the steel.

"The coating system is what allows the steel to last, essentially in perpetuity," he said. "If the coating system is in good shape, your water tower will be in good shape."

Later this year, Suez will focus first on the village's main tank, which holds 500,000 gallons, this year. Knight said crews will first use a high-pressure power to clean the tower's exterior and use hand tools to prep all exterior surfaces. The village logo will be traced to make sure it looks identical when done, then they will spot prime anywhere there is exposed metal and add a polyurethane overcoat to all steel surfaces and extend that overcoating to all concrete foundations on the legs.

Next, crews will turn their attention to the interior. There, a full media blast will be done, taking all interior surfaces down to bare metal and start the coating system anew. First a full, organic, zinc-based primer coat will be applied, a full stripe coat of all weld seams where steel tends to be weakest and a full, 75 percent solid expoy finish coat.

This tank will need two repairs - one to replace the vent on top of the tower with a 16-inch frost-free unit to allow the tank to breathe, especially during winter. This is crucial since water expands when it freezes and Knight said if the tank cannot breathe, it will pop. He said he has seen examples of this in Snow Belt states like Minnesota and Michigan. Second, they will weld-seal the five cathodic protection rod plates inside before removing them as they are no longer in use.

He showed some images of tank #1 taken during the inspection. He said the current coating system is at the end of its usable life on the outside and inside, there is corrosion and staining starting to show. Knight said the rust and staining is quite normal. Next year, this tank will just undergo a visual inspection.

Turning to the smaller tower on Old Troy Road, Knight said the work is scattered more by comparison because this tank is in better overall condition. Some work phases will be delayed until 2030.

"The most important thing we're going to address in terms of tank #2 is we're going to pressure-wash the outside of it and get all of the mildew and all of that off of the bottom half of the tower this summer, probably at the same time we're working on the other tower."

In the eighth year (2030), Knight said they will handle exterior surface prep of the entire water tower then follow the same steps as tower #1. Tank interiors are split into two areas - dry and wet, depending on the water level. Also in 2030, the company will perform spot repairs and add touch-up paint as needed on the dry section. Two years later, in 2032, they will follow the same steps as tank #1 for the interior wet section of tank #2. In 2023, tank #2 will have a washout or be chemically clean and sanitized.

Mayor Bob Marcus asked Knight asked whether this work would cause any service interruptions to residents and businesses.

"You have the capacity to take the towers out of service to allow them to be renovated and worked on without boil orders or losing water pressure," Knight answered.

Marcus said 12 years is a longer contract than the village normally enters into. In response, Knight said that Public Works Director Scott Slemer requested a 12-year term but Knight said the contract verbiage will not state that it is from 2022 to 2034. Instead, it is an evergreen contract that renews annually until the village says it is no longer needed. Slemer added that OSHA and another water safety agency require paintings every 10 to 12 years, so he set things up to get at least one full cycle.

Trustee Ben Maliszewski wanted to know why the ground tanks the village has were not included in this program. Slemer said neither of the companies that bid on this project employ divers to inspect ground tanks. Village Utility Superintendent John Leezy added that work on the ground tanks, which are concrete, not steel, would take the village's water system out of service while the work occurred. They currently have a separate program in place whereby the ground tanks are inspected every five years. Leezy cited the tanks as in very good condition and he and Slemer do not feel the need to employ this kind of agreement for the ground tanks.

Village Administrator Jamie Bowden noted that the village still owns these two towers and if they are sold, this contract would become null and void. He added that a decision to sell them has not been made.

Village Attorney Jim Schrempf suggested some changes: an indemnification clause and verbiage that the village would not assign this contract to a successor without Suez's written permission, which would not be unreasonably withheld. He also suggested adding something more specific about terminating the contract in the event that the village sells the assets.

Knight summarized the benefits, telling the mayor and trustees that will receive copies of the state of these assets, the work will help maintain water quality, lessen the risk to the village, extend the towers' life spans and keep them approved by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

The next village trustee meeting is May 24 at 7 p.m. in village hall, 151 N. Main St.
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There is no denying the fact that the proverb that says, When two elephants fight the grass suffers is at the moment finding expression in the feud between the federal government and the Academic Staff of Union of Universities (ASUU), particularly as the academic union have for three-month been engrossed with a strike action, and has recently announced the extension of the prolonged strike by an additional three months. Given the situation, it is explanatory enough for any discerning mind to understand that it has become a fight between two elephants, which in this context are the FG and ASUU, and on the other hand the students who are collectively the grass that is suffering when analyzed from this proverbial perspective.

Against the foregoing backdrop, it is not an exaggeration to say that the somewhat abuse of the right to protest as a fundamental human right as presently been exhibited by lecturers affiliated to ASUU obviously lay credence to the fact that tertiary education has truly lost its glory in Nigeria. Worse still, it has left a sour taste in the mouths of many Nigerians who are intellectually inclined.

To understand why the standard and quality of university education is fast falling, it would be expedient to take a retrospective look on the state of university education in the country as it is no more an exaggeration to say that university education has lost its glory in todays Nigeria as a result of the interplay of many factors such incessant lecturers strikes, students involvement in clandestine activities and their seeming lack of research culture coupled with their collective docile disposition to imparting knowledge to the young ones in all its ramifications.

Repetitively put, if there is any sector of the economy where the idiomatic expression that says, When Two Elephant Fight, The Grass Suffers is finding expression, it is unarguably the education sector, particular at its sub-sector domiciled in universities which lecturers and the federal through its agents have turned to war-zones.

A friend of mine simply sees the penchant of lecturers embarking on strike at the slightest provocation as retrogressive, noting that it is making the young ones to, in most cases, add extra years to the duration of completing their degrees. Thus, it is not rare to see graduates that spent either 5 or 6 years to complete a degree that was meant to be completed at the duration of 4 years.

At this juncture, it is expedient to say that there is need to re-evaluate some of the he depressing effects strike actions has in the Nigerian students.

In fact, with the ongoing strike, students across various institutions of higher learning in Nigeria are at the moment suffering just as the proverb says. Unfortunately, the strike action was triggered by resolvable disagreement between the government and the unions of various institutions, arising from non-implementation or partial implementation of former agreements reached. The disagreement or lack of understanding between government and academic community resulted in the ongoing stalemate that has no doubt messed up academic calendars of virtually all the universities.

There is no denying the fact that the prevailing strike has dwindled the academic performances of most students that have been at home since February, 2022 when the strike action commenced. The foregoing view cannot be easily pooh-poohed as learning has been suspended for a long period. Even the knowledge acquired during the learning period might have even been forgotten by some students. Worse still, it cannot be out of place to say that some of the students may be compelled to begin to show more interest in the degrees they seek to obtain than going back to school as those in their final year at the time the strike commenced are already in a state of frustration.

Also, as most protracted strikes, such as this, compel students to idle away at home, it cannot be denied that there is a gripping tendency for undergraduates to go into some social vices like prostitution, full scale Yahoo-yahoo, kidnapping among other trending crimes across the country. After all, it is said that An idle mind is the devils workshop.

Given the foregoing analytical views, there is need for a re-evaluation of education across government-owned universities across Nigeria. Factors that often lead to strike in our institutions should be addressed. There is no doubt that the infrastructures in most of our schools are as old as the years of the schools. This is unacceptable.

A conducive learning atmosphere is a sine-qua-non for quality education. In addition, education should be properly and adequately funded to encourage effective research and to avoid brain drain. Proper funding and equipment of Nigerian universities will go a long way to stop further strike action.

Meanwhile, government should always try to honor whatever agreement reached with the academic communities. There is no denying the fact that this strike action embarked upon by lecturers affiliated to ASUU can be averted if necessary steps are taken to build a good relationship between both parties. It is worth emphasizing that any government with a poor education system is heading towards a black future.

At the same time, it will be auspicious for ASUU to device other means other than strike to resolve aggrieved issues. Strike action should be the last resort. This is because of the negative effect frequent strikes have on students and the entire academic community is counterproductive and damaging.
The Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) has pledged to support Civil Society Organisations(CSOs) in Nigeria in the use of the self-regulation framework.

The Registrar General of CAC, Garba Abubakar, pledged on Thursday, during the validation and launch of 'the model self-regulatory framework for Civil Society Organisation' organised by the British Council National Technical Committee in Abuja.

Abubakar, who was represented by the Special Assistance to the Registrar General CAC, Terver Ayua, said, the organisation is ready to partner with CSOs to reach the highest level of their purpose.

He said, "CSOs perform important activities that cut across different sectors, as regulators that register these entities, we have always partnered with and we are ready to partner with these CSOs to make sure they achieve their optimum objective.

"If they are going to continue to be relevant to rendering services to the society. We can only do that if we self regulate or statutory regulate. We promise to give you maximum cooperation to make sure the objective is achieved," he said.

Chief Executive Officer, Food Basket Foundation International and Co-Chair National Technical Committee, Dr Funmi Akinyele, in her review on the 'model self-regulation for CSOs in Nigeria' explained that self-regulation does not mean doing away with extant laws but, making a tailored law that goes in line with the organisation's vision.

According to Akinyele, "organisation regulated without intervention from external interference, will ensure credibility of Civic societies and public trust of accountability. We know we have bad eggs in this circle but that does not mean all are bad.

"It will help incorporate public interest for basically sustainable peace and progress and contribute to common good while maintaining ethical cooperation and partnership where possible and appropriate for the greater public good.

"Accord credibility in its dealing with donors in respect to the laws in any jurisdiction, that all its stakeholders are aware of its activity and proactively report its financial details for transparency.

Funmi noted that as much as the model has its advantages it also has disadvantages as it could breed unhealthy competition, where people are subjective instead of objective.

She said, "window dressing can not be completely put out as some CSOs if self regulates may not do the right thing but put up a front as they do."

Similarly, Abdulsalam Badamasi, Policy and Governance Reform Advisor USAID-SCALE Nigeria, reiterated the need for CSOs' collaboration to work better and more, this is as self-regulation makes it possible to know their strength and create better working conditions.

"Self-regulation is a matter of survival for the civil society organisation, this is because of the shrinking space for the CSOs and the amount of money flowing to this sector, accountability needs to be done, as an organisation that holds public officials accountable should also show a great level of accountability."
The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has been officially notified by United Kingdom (UK) authorities of a confirmed case of Monkeypox with a connection to Nigeria.

We would like to provide some more details about this case. On 7th May 2022, the NCDC was notified by the UK International Health Regulations (IHR) national focal point of a case of monkeypox detected in a patient with recent travel history to Nigeria. The individual is a UK resident who arrived in Nigeria on 20th April 2022, travelled to Lagos and Delta States during the time spent in Nigeria, departed Lagos on 3rd May 2022 and arrived in the UK on 4th May 2022. While in Nigeria, the case did not report being in contact with anyone with symptoms of monkeypox or other illness with rash. The diagnosis of monkeypox (West African clade) was confirmed by PCR in the UK on 6th May 2022. The patient is currently stable and receiving care in the UK.

The NCDC is investigating the incident in collaboration with the Lagos and Delta State Ministries of Health. In addition, the Monkeypox Technical Working Group comprising the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (FMARD), World Health Organisation (WHO), United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF), US Centers for DiseaseControl (US CDC) and coordinated by the NCDC is collaborating to strengthen in-country capacity to prevent, detect and respond to Monkeypox cases in the country.

Since the re-emergence of monkeypox in Nigeria in September 2017, the country has continued to record sporadic cases of the disease from states across the country. Between September 2017 and 30th April 2022, a total of 558 cases and 8 deaths have been confirmed from 22 states. Of these, 15 cases have been confirmed in 2022 alone - this does NOT constitute an outbreak. The highest number of cases have been reported from states in the South-South region of Nigeria. NCDCs monthly situation report on Monkeypox can be accessed using this link - https://ncdc.gov.ng/diseases/sitreps/?cat=8&name=An%20Update%20of%20Monkeypo x%20Outbreak%20in%20Nigeria

We re-assure Nigerians of the NCDCs capacity to effectively diagnose and respond to cases of Monkeypox. The National Reference Laboratory (NRL) in Abuja has the capacity to test for cases of Monkeypox with a quick turn-around time. We urge anyone who has fluid-filled body rashes (vesicular rash), enlargement of glands and other symptoms of monkeypox stated below to report to any public health facility near them for proper diagnosis and care. Any healthcare worker that suspects a case of Monkeypox, should reach out to their LGA Disease surveillance and Notification Officers or State Ministry of Health (Epidemiology team) for appropriate guidance and action. Guidelines on the management of Monkeypox cases and outbreaks can be found on the NCDCs website https://ncdc.gov.ng/themes/common/docs/protocols/96_1577798337.pdf

About Monkeypox

Monkeypox is a virus that is spread primarily from animals to humans, with symptoms such as fever, headache, body pain, malaise, enlargement of glands (lymphadenopathy), sore throat and fluid-filled body rashes (vesicular rash). This may last for two to four weeks. Transmission is via direct contact with infected animals, human, or contaminated materials. The virus does not spread easily between people and the risk of transmission to the wider public is very low.

Monkeypox is generally self-limiting, which means patients tend to recover in a couple of weeks. However, supportive care and management of the condition is required and mostly successful. Control measures include isolation of suspected or confirmed cases, strict adherence to universal precautions, especially frequent handwashing with soap and water and the use of personal protective equipment.

About NCDC

The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control is the countrys national public health institute, with the mandate to lead the preparedness, detection, and response to public health emergencies. The Bill for an Act to establish NCDC was signed into law in November 2018, by President Muhammadu Buhari. The mission for the NCDC is, To protect the health ofNigerians through evidence-based prevention, integrated disease surveillance and response, using a One-Health approach, guided by research, and led by a skilled workforce.

Contact

NCDC Toll-free Number: 6232 | SMS: 08099555577 | WhatsApp: 07087110839 Twitter: @NCDCGov | Facebook: @NCDCgov | Instagram: @NCDCgov | NCDC Media Releases

Signed:

Dr. Ifedayo Adetifa

Director General

Nigeria Centre for Disease Control


Nairobi, May 12, 2022  Ethiopian authorities must thoroughly investigate the detention of journalist Gobeze Sisay and ensure that members of the press are not held for their work, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Thursday.

At about 10 a.m. on May 1, a group of eight armed men in plainclothes stormed Gobezes residence in the Ayat Babur Sefer neighborhood of Addis Ababa, the capital, and abducted him, according to news reports, a statement by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, a statutory watchdog body, and the journalist, who spoke to CPJ by phone.

Gobeze, editor and founder of the privately owned YouTube-based broadcaster Voice of Amhara, told CPJ that he believed some of the men were members of the Ethiopian National Defense Force, saying that one of them wore an ENDF badge and another mentioned that they were taking him to Tor Hayloch, where the ENDF has a facility.

The men held Gobeze for more than a week, blindfolded him, and repeatedly questioned him about his critical reporting and affiliations with opposition political groups, he said. On the evening of May 9, the men warned Gobeze to stop his critical reporting or they would detain him again, and then released him near his home, the journalist told CPJ.

The more than week-long detention of journalist Gobeze Sisay by suspected Ethiopian security agents is an affront to the rule of law and due process. Authorities must act decisively to stop such illegal conduct, or else become complicit in the abuse and disregard for basic human rights, said Angela Quintal, CPJs Africa program coordinator, in New York. Instead of arresting reporters, the government must act swiftly to expose those within its ranks who seek to silence and harass the press, and should publicly commit to ensuring that all journalists can work safely without fear of arrest or prosecution in Ethiopia.

Gobeze said the men searched his house without a court warrant when they detained him, and confiscated his laptop and phone, which they had not returned as of May 12. Gobeze was never brought to court or formally charged during his detention, he said. Under the Ethiopian constitution, police must release suspects within 48 hours of their detention, or charge them with a crime.

On Voice of Amhara, Gobeze recently covered the killing of ethnic Amharas by rebel groups and the challenges faced by those displaced by Ethiopias civil war. According to Gobeze and CPJs review of his work, he previously worked as a news presenter with the privately owned Ethiopian Satellite Television (ESAT) broadcaster, and as a reporter and documentarian for Yegna TV, a privately owned YouTube channel.

Gobeze is also the president of the Raya Development and Peace Association, a local civic organization, and is engaged in a civil lawsuit against ESAT for wrongful termination, Gobeze told CPJ, adding that he was not questioned about either of those topics during his detention.

Authorities at the Addis Ababa Police Commission and the City Peace and Security Administration Bureau denied knowledge of his detention, according to reports. CPJ emailed Justice Minster Gedion Timothewos Hassebon, Federal Police spokesperson Jeylan Abdi, and Billene Seyoum, a spokesperson for the prime ministers office, for comment, but did not receive any replies.

CPJ also emailed the ENDF for comment, but did not receive any response.
Navy inspects mangrove encroachment at Klong Mudong

PHUKET: Officers form the Royal Thai Navy are leading an investigation into claims of encroachment into a protected mangrove forest area near Klong Mudong in Wichit.

landpropertyeconomicsenvironmentnatural-resourcesmilitary

By Eakkapop Thongtub

Thursday 12 May 2022, 01:03PM

Leading an inspection of the area yesterday (May 11) was Capt Pratchai Thongrak, Director of the Investigation and News Division Administrative Office of the National Marine Interest Center at the Royal Thai Navy (RTN) Third Area Command [3AC], based at Cape Panwa.

Capt Pratchai explained that he had been tasked to conduct the investigation by RTN Third Area Commander Vice Admiral Sompong Nakthong, who had received a formal complaint from local villagers of the Makham Khu (Twin Tamarind) community on April 29.

The complaint alleged that people had invaded the Klong Mudong mangrove area by entering and occupying an area along the canal, Capt Pratchai said.

The encroachment had prevented the villagers from making a living by fishing and catching crabs, he added.

The complaint also said that there had been encroachment into the protected mangrove forest, which had destroyed natural resources and caused ecological and environmental damage, he said.

Winai Samsi, an assistant to the village headman (Phu Yai Baan), said that the Makham Khu community comprised more than 500 people living in 121 households.

The area was originally used for tin mining since 1947, but after tin mining was abandoned in 1985-1988, the villagers were allowed to stay, he said.

Villagers have made a living through fishing, such as using nets, raising shrimp and raising fish in [aquaculture] cages, Mr Winai added.

However, other people had moved into the area and disturbed the natural ecosystem with trash and other waste dumped into the canal, he said.

The inspection yesterday confirmed that new construction had taken place in the area, Capt Pratchai noted.

We saw the condition of the area where construction had been done in areas where houses and mangrove forests are mixed, affecting areas used by villagers for their livelihoods, he said.

It was quite complicated in order to ensure there is balance with people living with nature. If there is no nature, people will be in trouble. There must be zoning. I think that we still cant set clear zones for this area. If the zones were clear and well maintained, there would be no complaints, Capt Pratchai said.

As for the process of resolving this issue, the Third Area Command will be involved only as a mediator and a mentor for the community to help society and the community solve this problem. There should be a suitable way and a good solution, because if a government agency does not like the people on either side, will there be inequality? Intervention is possible, the 3AC will not abandon the community. We will do our best for the Makham Khu community to have a good quality of life. This is a sustainable and fertile mangrove forest," said Capt Pratchai.

Wattanachai Petthitiwat, Policy and Plan Analyst at the Phuket Mangrove Forest Resource Management Center, took a stronger line.

The mangrove forest in the area covered more than 40 rai, Mr Wattanachai said.

The Department of Marine and Coastal Resources has allowed the Phuket Provincial Government to use this area for the benefit of local villagers but must protect the area that has been declared a mangrove forest conservation area. The benefits measures have been discussed with community leaders and all stakeholders in the area, he said.

"This visit has confirmed the complaint that the protected mangrove area is being exploited. We must see if serious damage has been done or if it has affected the traditional way of life of the community. If it has affected mangrove forests, legal action will be taken. Any invasion of the area by any person will be prosecuted according to the law," said Mr Wattanachai.
Police ramp up search for missing German tourist

PHUKET: Police and other officials on Thursday (May 12) ramped up their search for a 76-year-old German woman who was last seen in the Mai Khao area on Monday this week.



By Eakkapop Thongtub

Thursday 12 May 2022, 11:55PM

A recent photo of Ms Lange provided by officers conducting the search. Photo: via TAC Phuket

A recent photo of Ms Lange provided by officers conducting the search. Photo: via TAC Phuket

Ms Lange was recorded on CCTV walking along a small local road in the Mai Khao area at 8:48am on Monday (May 9). Image: Supplied

The search for the woman, Barbara Elisabeth Monika Glag Lange, began on Wednesday after officers at the Tourist Assistance Center at Phuket airport were notified at about 3:30pm.

Ms Lange was last seen at the Maikhao Palm Beach Resort on Monday (May 9). She was wearing a blue jacket and black pants.

Officers including Tourist Police, the Thalang District Chief, Tha Chatchai Police, the local village headman and villagers in the area formed two teams to search for Ms Lange yesterday.

One team searched the area along Nai Yang Beach and scoured the area to the south, including areas inside Sirinath National Park. Local park officers assisted with the search as it included some dense jungle areas.

The officers also searched up the hill in front of Koh Pling, where Ms Lange was found the last time she disappeared, on May 5. She was safely returned to the hotel that same day.

The other search team searched along Mai Khao Beach and areas nearby.

Tourist Police are coordinating with Tha Chatchai Police to check CCTV footage in the area near the hotel and throughout Mai Khao.

Police have already confirmed that one CCTV camera recorded Ms Lange walking along a small local road at 8:48am on Monday (May 9).

However, at last report, officers had yet to find Ms Lange as the sun set on Thursday (May 12).

Officers are in contact with Ms Langes family members and hotel staff, Tourist Police reported.

Any persons who believe they have seen Ms Lange are urged to call the Tourist Assistance Center at 062-8808112 or Khun Wichai at 084-0796279.
Sri Lankas economy on brink of collapse as troops quell unrest

COLOMBO: Sri Lankas economy will collapse unless a new government is urgently appointed, the central bank chief warned yesterday (May 11), as security forces fanned out on the streets to restore order after spasms of mob violence.

politicsviolencemilitaryIndian

By AFP

Thursday 12 May 2022, 08:15AM

Sri Lankan police have been ordered to go on the offensive and use live ammunition to stop rioting, a top official has said. Photo: AFP

Police say nine people have died since Monday, when frustration at a dire economic crisis erupted into clashes between backers and opponents of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, injuring more than 200.

Opposition parties have refused Rajapaksas overtures for a unity government to resolve a political deadlock and instead demanded his resignation.

Central Bank Governor Nandalal Weerasinghe said it was critical that a new administration take charge by tomorrow or the country would suffer a catastrophe.

The economy will completely collapse and no one will be able to save it, he told reporters.

The country was fast going down a slope when I took over just over a month ago. I thought we were able to apply the brakes, but with events of Monday the brakes no longer work.

Shortly after taking over as the banks chief in April, Weerasinghe announced a default on Sri Lankas US$51 billion external debt, saying the country had no money to pay its creditors.

He said political stability was vital to implement the reforms needed to address Sri Lankas snowballing debt crisis and the acute shortage of foreign exchange to import essentials.

Security forces have largely curbed public disorder after they were deployed to enforce a nationwide curfew with orders to shoot on sight anyone engaged in looting or violence.

If the situation is not brought under control, there could be total anarchy, a senior security official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Deserted streets

The capital Colombo was almost deserted yesterday aside from soldiers manning checkpoints, near the charred remains of buses that had been set alight by anti-government crowds.

With armoured personnel carriers and a heavy security presence, Sri Lankas military chief addressed a press conference to deny speculation of a looming coup.

Dont ever think that we are trying to capture power, said Kamal Gunaratne, the secretary of Sri Lankas defence ministry.

The military has no such intentions.

A small crowd continued to defy the curfew near the presidents seafront office, where a protest camp has for the past month maintained a vigil calling on him to step down.

We want the whole Rajapaksa clan out because they are so, so corrupt. They have been eating into Sri Lanka like a caterpillar eating into some fruit, activist Kaushalya Fernando told AFP.

In a tweet, Rajapaksa yesterday called for all Sri Lankans to join hands as one, to overcome the economic, social & political challenges.

But the main opposition SJB party reiterated it will not be a part of any government with Rajapaksa still president, even after his brother Mahindas resignation as prime minister on Monday.

Turning point

Sri Lankans have been suffering shortages of essential goods, fuel and medicines for months in the islands worst economic downturn since independence in 1948.

The crisis moved into a darker phase on Monday when government supporters with sticks and clubs attacked demonstrators who had been protesting peacefully for weeks demanding the presidents resignation.

Mobs then retaliated across the country, torching dozens of homes of ruling-party politicians.

Mahinda Rajapaksa had to be rescued in a pre-dawn military operation on Tuesday and taken to a naval dockyard for safety after protesters tried to storm his official residence.

Echoing the UN rights chief and the European Union, the United States on Tuesday said it was concerned both with the violence and the deployment of the military.

We stress that peaceful protesters should never be subjected to violence or intimidation, whether thats on the part of the military force or civilian units, State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters.

India meanwhile was forced to deny social media rumours - some using old images of Mahinda boarding a helicopter - that it was helping Rajapaksa family members to flee.

The Indian High Commission would like to categorically deny speculative reports in sections of media and social media about India sending her troops to Sri Lanka, said a statement.

With vital tourism revenues torpedoed by the pandemic, Sri Lanka last month defaulted on its foreign debt, some of it stemming from Rajapaksa vanity projects built with Chinese loans.

The International Monetary Fund this week began a virtual mission of staff-level talks on a possible bailout.

IMF mission chief Masahiro Nozaki said the lender aimed to be fully prepared for policy discussions once a new government has been formed.
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GODFREY  Country music superstar Mickey Gilley's passing will be felt in the Riverbend, due to his contribution to the regions greater good, longtime friend and promoter Ron Young said.

I got a text from Mickeys band leaders wife, saying he passed away, said Young about Gilley, 86, who died May 7. I just cant get it in my mind that hes gone. He was a very good entertainer.

Young, of Godfrey, owner and founder of Ron Young Nashville Productions, regularly booked Gilley shows in the Riverbend region, in both Jersey and Madison counties, for which the proceeds always benefited the communities.

Gilley did seven benefit concerts in the Metro East, all booked and arranged by Ron Young Nashville Productions.

Gilley is known as the original Urban Cowboy for his appearance in the 1980 movie, Urban Cowboy, with John Travolta, who played the films main character. The setting also featured the famous former club, Gilleys, in Pasadena, Texas, as its central location. This shot Gilley to super-stardom, as well as intensified Travoltas star power after Saturday Night Fever.

The first time the hot Urban Cowboy eras star and his The Urban Cowboy Band performed at Lewis and Clark Community College in Godfrey was in the 80s, to benefit the Alton Volunteer Emergency Corps, Young recalled.

In the early 1990s, Gilley became one of the first country stars to open a permanent theater, the Mickey Gilley Theater, in Branson, Missouri, where the star then focused his career and a celebration of his life will be held later this month, and Young will attend.

The second time Gilley performed at LCCC in Godfrey was in spring 2014, benefiting the Alton 5s no-kill animal shelter, also located in Godfrey. The show sold out all of the theaters more than 950 seats and the audience loved it. Fans gave Gilley, an avid animal lover, roses during his encore on the Hatheway Cultural Center stage.

Gilley and Young met at the honky tonk-styled artists famous Gilleys Club, Texas, 36 years; Young has been in the music industry promoting and booking for 38 years. They two men clicked.

Ron Young Nashville Productions regularly includes benefit concerts on its roster of shows. Because Gilley suggested an animal shelter for which to fundraise, Young immediately thought of 5As and walked into the nonprofit shelter for the first time in his life to tell them they were the benefactors of Gilleys 2014 concert.

In 2018, Gilley performed a show at Graftons The Loading Dock to benefit the Grafton Police Department, which needed radio equipment and safety apparel.

These are the shows Mickey Gilley likes to do  shows that benefit causes and organizations, said then-Grafton Chamber of Commerce President Jamie Clayton to The Telegraph.

I enjoy performing and singing as much these days as I ever have, Gilley said at the time.

For most of Gilleys early career, the pianist and vocalist lived in the shadow of his cousin, Jerry Lee Lewis (also cousins of Jimmy Swaggart), playing a similar fusion of country, rock, blues, and R and B. By the early 1970s Gilley held his own in country music as a star in his own right.

The star and the promoter met when Young first started working in the music industry in promotion and booking. In the 1980s Gilleys then-promoter introduced Young to the star, who closed his namesake Texas club during the same decade.

I talked to his booking agent and became friends with Mickey, Young said. He told me a lot about how to get involved in the music business.

Gilley had several number one hits, including his first, Room Full of Roses, in 1974, and 39 Top 10 country hits, including Dont The Girls Get Prettier at Closing Time, Bring It On Home to Me, I Overlooked an Orchid, City Lights, Shes Pulling Me Back Again, True Love Ways, Stand by Me, Thats All That Matters and Lonely Nights."

Over the years, Young has worked with Aaron Tippin; Johnny Paycheck; John Conlee; Tommy Cash, the brother of Johnny Cash; Little River Band, who he brought twice to the Riverbend at The Loading Dock; and, Molly Hatchet, who he has brought to Altons Macs Time Out during Altons Fourth of July celebration, and to Ropers Regal Beagle, the first act last year on its new stage.
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TOKYO (AP)  Japanese automaker Nissan returned to profitability in the last fiscal year for the first time in three years, despite challenges such as supply shortages caused by the pandemic and soaring costs.

Nissan Motor Co. reported Thursday a net profit of 215.5 billion yen ($1.7 billion) for the fiscal year through March, a reversal from the 448.7 billion yen loss recorded the previous fiscal year.

Annual sales rose 7% to 8.4 trillion yen ($65 billion).

In the January-March quarter, Nissan posted a profit of 14.2 billion yen ($110 million). It recorded an 81 billion yen loss in the same period the year before.

Nissan Chief Executive Makoto Uchida said semiconductor supply shortages will remain a challenge in coming months.

Higher raw materials prices, the impact of lockdowns in China and the war in Ukraine were also reasons for concern, according to Nissan.

But Uchida said he was confident about being able to ensure Nissan remains a truly healthy and resilient company that in any business environment can be financially stable and profitable.

Nissan, allied with Renault SA of France, is projecting a profit of 150 billion yen ($1.2 billion) for the fiscal year through March 2023.

Nissan plans to sell 4 million vehicles around the world, up 3% from nearly 3.9 million vehicles sold the previous year, with healthier sales in Japan and North America. The company's sales in China would be little changed but they would decline in Europe, since Nissan's operations in Russia and Ukraine have been suspended.

The company's Chief Operating Officer Ashwani Gupta said Nissan has streamlined its product lineup to focus on what he called core models to boost profitability.

We are transforming ourselves, he said.

The Yokohama-based maker of the Leaf electric car, Infiniti luxury models and March subcompact is proceeding to the next level of growth, said Gupta.

Nissans reputation was tarnished by a high-profile scandal of its former star executive Carlos Ghosn, who was arrested on financial misconduct charges in 2018. He jumped bail and fled Japan. He is now in Lebanon, the nation of his ancestry.

Ghosn, who led Nissan for two decades, has insisted on his innocence, arguing he was a victim of an internal corporate coup led by misguided officials.

Nissan is banking on the global shift to electric vehicles to counter climate change, as it was an early leader in EVs, a move launched by Ghosn.

It has the electric Ariya sport utility vehicle this year and a smaller model EV. But it faces intensifying competition since the industry is rushing to rev up on EVs, including powerful players like Tesla.

___

Yuri Kageyama is on Twitter https://twitter.com/yurikageyama
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ZAGREB, Croatia (AP)  Thousands rallied across Croatia Thursday in solidarity with a woman who was denied an abortion despite her fetus having serious health problems, and whose weeks-long ordeal has sparked public outrage.

Protests demanding a better public health system and respect of women's right to choice were held in several cities and towns throughout the predominantly conservative and strongly Catholic nation.

Shouting Enough!," participants carried banners reading Master of my own body" or Woman's toughest decision is not yours," as they vowed to stay angry.

Let's be furious and scream until the system provides the health protection we deserve!" one of the speakers told the noisy crowd in the capital Zagreb. Changes can come only through solidarity.

Mirela Cavajda was 20 weeks pregnant when doctors informed her that her fetus had a brain tumor and no chance of a normal life. She said doctors refused to terminate the pregnancy and advised Cavajda to seek the procedure in neighboring Slovenia instead.

The case has rekindled a years-long debate about abortion in Croatia, a member of the European Union. Under public pressure, a medical commission later approved a termination, which the health authorities said would mean an induced childbirth at this stage.

Abortions are legal and allowed after the 10th week of pregnancy if there are serious health threats to the woman or fetus but doctors often refuse to perform them. Scores of Croatian women have traveled abroad for an abortion over the years.

Cavajda said the ordeal has been very hard for her and her family.

"Why prolong the waiting, why should I keep waking up or going to bed wondering if he had died, whether Ill get blood poisoning or not? she said. The worst is yet to come for me.

The existing law that permits abortions dates back to 1978, when the country was part of the Communist-run former Yugoslavia. Croatia became an independent country in 1991, and since then increasingly influential conservative and religious groups have tried to get abortion banned.
EDWARDSVILLE  The father of one of two Alton teens murdered in 1997 was moved to tears Wednesday as he spoke of the effects of the crime, but an expert testified that defendants age at the time of the crime should be considered in sentencing.

Associate Judge Neil Schroeder has set June 1 as the date he will sentence convicted murderer Terril Williams after lawyers argued for hours over a recent Fifth District Appellate Court decision stating juveniles are an exception to the statute calling for mandatory life when the defendant is found guilty of two murders.

Williams, 41, was convicted in 1997 for fatally shooting two men in Alton's Belle Manor apartment complex. The district court has remanded the case back to Madison County for a third sentencing hearing because Williams was 15 at the time of murders.

According to court testimony, Williams and several other associates traveled to Alton after a heated argument over the phone. His uncle, Byron Williams then 35, allegedly gave his nephew a gun and told him to take care of business. Byron Williams is serving a 50-year sentence

Court documents state that, upon reaching Belle Manor, Terril Williams shot James Patterson, Jr., 17, of Alton, while Pattersons hands were in the air and Darryl Womack, 15, in the back of the head as Womack was running away.

In court Wednesday, James Patterson Sr. said he and his family will have to live with the killings for the rest of their lives. He questioned whether Williams even knew his son.

James Garbarino, who is on the faculty of Loyola University and Cornell University, testified Williams meets all the legal criteria for consideration for avoiding a life sentence. He said Williams scored a rare 10 out of a possible 10 on the test. The test includes questions about whether Williams background is so poor that he is made more susceptible to crime before he has become an adult.

Garbarino testified that juveniles brains have not fully developed, making them less culpable for the crimes they commit.

Family members testified that Williams has been subjected to the abuse and other negative factors that would confirm the results of the test.

The issue of life sentences for juveniles is primarily based on a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Miller v. Alabama, that allows for consideration of the defendants age in imposing life sentences. Illinois courts follow a similar law, but also limit the sentence to no more than 40 years in prison.

Garbarino testified that he gave Williams a test to determine whether he qualifies for an exception to the Miller v. Alabama ruling as irreparably corrupt.

The justices ruled that Madison County courts failed to prove that Miller is irreparable corrupt.

His first sentence was life in prison because Illinois law required it. The second sentencing hearing was held after Miller v. Alabama, and a result of the Fifth District Appellate Court decision that the prosecution failed to prove Williams irreparable corrupt.
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NANCY INTHASIT, Stonington, Girls Track, Senior; Inthasit finished first in the 100 (12.54) and the 200 (27.08) at the Marty Roberts Invitational. Her time in the 100 was a meet record. She was named the top female sprinter at the meet. Inthasit is unbeaten in the 100 this season.

JACK TENUTA, Westerly, Baseball, Sophomore; Tenuta pitched a one-hit shutout in the Bulldogs win over Wheeler School/Rocky Hill. He struck out 10 and walked just three batters. He also hit two home runs and drove in three runs in a victory against West Warwick. Tenuta is 5-0 with an 0.57 ERA and is hitting .349.

KATELYN MELINOSKY, Wheeler, Girls Lacrosse, Senior; Melinosky scored six goals in the Lions 10-5 victory over New London. Wheeler is 3-4 on the season.

MATTHEW TIERNAN, Chariho, Boys Volleyball, Junior; Tiernan had 42 digs in the Chargers win against Cranston East and 44 assists in a loss to league-leading La Salle Academy. Chariho is 8-3 this season.

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City bosses should face jail sentences if they fail to prevent economic crime, a prominent group of MPs has demanded.

Executives at firms from High Street banks to accountants must be held responsible for failings in their checks and balances, if the UK is to tackle the flood of dirty money washing across its borders, the cross-party group warned.

The MPs, headed by Labours Dame Margaret Hodge and Tory Kevin Hollinrake, have published a manifesto on economic crime urging the Government to step up the fight against fraud, money laundering and other insidious practices.

Dirty money: A group of MPs has published a manifesto on economic crime urging the Government to step up the fight against fraud, money laundering and other insidious practices

Hollinrake, who sits on Parliaments Treasury Committee, said: Far from being a white collar issue that doesnt affect our day-to-day lives, it facilitates drugs being sold to our children, violent crime on our streets, supports despots and leads to higher taxes and the impoverishment of nations.

He said the UKs willingness to turn a blind eye when the proceeds of economic crime are used to buy property and other assets  such as oligarchs snapping up central London mansions  also funds and supports [Vladimir] Putins brutal hegemony.

Dame Margaret said: It is tragic that it has taken the war in Ukraine to bring the dirty money crisis to a head. We must act in a determined and effective way.

The group praised the Government for pushing ahead with its Economic Crime Bill, but urged ministers to beef it up in the four key areas of transparency, enforcement, accountability and regulation.

On transparency, the Government must push ahead with a full reform of Companies House, the manifesto urged.

Hollinrake said: People at the top of [financial] organisations need to think that if they dont prevent this stuff [economic crime], or put the checks and balances in place, they could go to jail.

That will be the sea change we need in corporate behaviour.

The manifesto also calls for an Office for Whistleblowers to protect and check the claims of employees who expose malpractice. And regulation should improve the way by which banks flag dodgy transactions.

Dame Margaret said the proposals were supported by backbench MPs from across all political parties.
KPMG has been slapped with its biggest-ever fine after a tribunal found it deliberately misled regulators over to its work for Carillion.

The beleaguered auditor was initially set to pay out 20million, but the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) agreed to reduce the penalty to 14.4million due to KPMGs admissions of wrongdoing.

The fine related to audit work that KPMG completed for failed outsourcers Carillion and Regenersis in 2016 and 2014 respectively.

KPMG was initially set to pay out 20m, but the Financial Reporting Council agreed to reduce the penalty to 14.4m due to KPMGs admissions of wrongdoing

We are deeply sorry that such serious misconduct occurred in our firm, said Jon Holt, chief executive of KPMG UK. It was unjustifiable and wrong. It was a violation of our processes and a betrayal of our values.

Audits are supposed to check a companys financial statements, and flag to investors, customers and suppliers if anything appears awry.

When the FRC tried to inspect those audits, to make sure the accountants were doing their job correctly, KPMG staff invented documents to show the inspectors  and tried to pass them off as though they were made at the time.

During the tribunal hearing in January, KPMG made a rare admission of guilt and apologised for its employees conduct.

But six workers tried to absolve themselves of responsibility.

Yesterday, the London tribunal ruled that five of those staff were guilty of misconduct.

They were Peter Meehan, who led the Carillion audit, senior managers Alistair Wright, Richard Kitchen and Adam Bennett, and junior auditor Pratik Paw.

Wright, Kitchen and Bennett were each recommended a 12-year ban and a 100,000 fine by the FRC  though Wright should receive a 10 per cent discount for admitting to some of the allegations, the regulator said.

Paw should get a 50,000 fine and be banned for four years.

But their lawyers hit out at the penalties. Kitchens barrister Fionn Pilbrow said the tribunals decision had career-crippling consequences.

David Turner, acting for Wright, said the fine should be no more than 50,000.

Stuart Smith, the sixth defendant, accepted a 150,000 fine and a three-year ban as part of a settlement with the FRC earlier this year.

KPMGs penalty is the second-largest ever handed to an accountancy business, following the 15million punishment imposed on Deloitte for its audit work at software group Autonomy.

KPMG is still on the hook for its Carillion failures, in separate investigations being brought by the FRC and a negligence claim from the outsourcers liquidators.

Britains Big Four auditors  which also include EY and PwC  have been involved in a string of corporate failures in recent years, leading to the Government launching a shake-up of the industry outlined in this weeks Queens Speech.
Twitter descended into chaos last night after two top employees were sacked while shareholders were urged to revolt over the chief executives pay.

As Elon Musk closes in on a 35billion takeover of the social media giant, boss Parag Agrawal fired consumer product head Kayvon Beykpour and revenue product head Bruce Falck.

Agrawal also said Twitter will not hire staff for the time being and could even rescind offers handed out to prospective hires.

Twitter boss Parag Agrawal (pictured) fired consumer product head Kayvon Beykpour and revenue product head Bruce Falck

The 37-year-old, who has been at the helm since November, wrote in an internal memo to staff that its critical to have the right leaders at the right time.

Beykpour said Agrawal asked me to leave after letting me know that he wants to take the team in a different direction. Falck took a swipe at Agrawal by changing his Twitter bio to unemployed.

Agrawals future is also in doubt following Musks audacious takeover bid.

The shake-up came as shareholder groups urged investors to revolt over Agrawals 25million pay package at the annual general meeting later this month.

Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis said there was a misalignment between chief executive pay and company performance.
Vodafone is in talks to merge with rival Three in a move to expand its share of the UK mobile market.

The deal, if completed, would combine Britains third and fourth-biggest mobile network operators, although it could also trigger scrutiny from competition regulators.

Vodafone faces pressure from activist investor Cevian Capital, which earlier this year took a stake in the group and is pushing for the business to strike more deals in its markets and simplify its structure.

Deal talks: Vodafone is under pressure from activist investor Cevian Capital, which is pushing for the business to strike more deals in its markets and simplify its structure

The mobile operators chief executive Nick Read has also stated a desire to pursue mergers in markets he deemed to be suffering from excessive competition, including the UK.

Vodafone shares fell back slightly by 0.1 per cent, or 0.14p, to 118.72p following the news.

Combining with Three, which is owned by Hong-Kong conglomerate CK Hutchison, would add nearly 10million customers to Vodafones books, giving it a total of over 28million.

The numbers would put it just ahead of BT-owned EE, the countrys largest mobile network, which is thought to have around 26million customers.

It would also push O2 into third place with 23million subscribers with Tesco Mobile in fourth with around 5million.

The merger talks were first reported by The Financial Times, citing sources with knowledge of the matter.

A tie-up between the two firms was previously discussed last year, although a deal failed to materialise.

Such a merger would be likely to attract the attention of competition authorities.

But it is hoped that increased awareness of the need to invest more in the UKs mobile network infrastructure will encourage regulators to approve combinations between larger firms.

Vodafone and Three declined to comment.
When my son was little, I invested in a Child Trust Fund with NatWest, with money I received from the Government.

He turned 18 in January, but so far we have not been able to get hold of the 3,350 inside.

He started trying to get hold of the money at the start of February. I helped him as has autism, and is also still in school every day.

NatWest told him to use an online portal, but when he tried to register it told him he couldn't, as he was not 18. He is.

Trust fund trials: Our reader and her son have been trying to get hold of money saved with NatWest - but so far they have had little success (stock image, posed by models)

I then tried to call NatWest on his behalf, and was placed on hold for over an hour on three occasions.

When I requested a ringback, I answered only to be told there was no one to take my call and the line went dead. The online chat also proved unhelpful.

I raised a complaint online but it was never acknowledged. I then contacted the Financial Ombudsman. The Ombudsman said as my son is 18, he needs to raise a complaint.

I understand this, but I think it is ridiculous that he should have to go these lengths to access his investment.

I want NatWest to give my son his money. My son wants it to give him his money. How can he get what is rightfully his? D.K, via email

Could my child have a forgotten trust fund? Child Trust Funds were available to all children born between 1 September 2002 and 2 January 2011. The Government sent vouchers of between 250 and 500 to parents to start them off, with children from lower-income backgrounds being given 1,000  though these amounts were later scaled down. Parents could keep topping them up if they wished, and they would also earn interest. The accounts started maturing in 2020 as the first children turned 18. When an account matures, the bank should write to the child to inform them. They can either take the money in cash, invest it as an Isa or split it and do both. If they don't respond, the bank should transfer it to an Isa until they do. But many parents still might not know they even have one. Of the 6.3million child trust funds set up, around 40% were opened by the Government on parents' behalf when vouchers went unused. The easiest way to see if your child has such an account is to visit HMRC's website.

Helen Crane, of This is Money, replies: I'm sorry to hear about the rigmarole you and your son have had to go through to get your hands on your own cash.

You put your trust in NatWest to keep hold of your child's pot of money, but since the fund matured on his turning 18 you have faced a Herculean battle in order to get hold of it.

After you wrote to me initially, you told me you had even resorted to sending the relevant documents to the bank via recorded delivery  not something you'd expect to be doing in 2022.

It's frustrating as your son is still studying and could no doubt use the extra funds.

It is also outrageous that, aged 18 and having been diagnosed with autism which would no doubt make the process stressful, he faced having to complain to the Ombudsman to get his money.

I'm afraid to say many other customers are likely to have an uphill struggle accessing their Child Trust Funds.

When I contacted NatWest, it told me the delay was because of a seven-fold increase in the number of people trying to claim their money.

Why the sudden spike in demand? Because NatWest had sent out an email at the end of last year, prompting customers who had unclaimed Child Trust Funds to redeem them.

Which would have been a helpful reminder  if they actually had the staff to deal with the transfers.

In the midst of a cost of living crisis, they might have predicted that such a reminder would lead to an influx of requests from parents and teenagers trying to claim this forgotten windfall.

After I contacted NatWest and told it about your nest egg nightmare, its team were quick to return your calls and your son should have now received his 3,350.

But thousands of others will still be faced with agonising waits to access their own cash.

Future fund: Child Trust Funds were created in 2002, and used to be a popular way of saving up a pot of money for a child to access once they hit adulthood

A NatWest spokesperson said: 'We are currently experiencing an extremely high volume of customers getting in touch to redeem child trust fund accounts and are sorry for the delays that some customers have experienced with this process.

'The safety and security of our customers' accounts is of paramount importance and these accounts are particularly vulnerable to attempted fraudulent claims, which is why we have a detailed checking procedure when redeeming a child trust fund account.'

It added that it had now increased the 'resource' available to deal with Child Trust Fund claims, and that it expected wait times to return to normal within a few weeks.

Ferry nice: Cruise firm Cunard offered Ken and his wife the option to rebook when their trip clashed with her surgery - despite their usual rules stating only 25% would be refunded

Hit and miss: This week's naughty and nice list

Every week, I look at the companies who have fallen short when it comes to customer service, and those who have gone above and beyond.

Hit: This week, reader Ken dropped anchor in my inbox to share a good review of cruise operator, Cunard.

He and his wife booked their first-ever cruise for September 2021, hoping to travel to Norway's Fjords.

It was cancelled due to Covid, but, still looking forward to their Scandinavian soujourn, they took a voucher and re-booked for May 2022.

But the virus was set to disrupt their holiday plans even further. Ken's wife was booked in for a hip replacement in March 2022, which had to be put back when she herself caught Covid.

The rescheduled date for the operation was just two weeks before their trip in May, which wouldn't allow her enough time to recover.

Under Cunard's rules, the couple would only get back 25 per cent of the cost of their trip if they cancelled  money they couldn't a-fjord to lose.

Ken wrote to the firm to see if there was anything it could do. It offered them a voucher for a later cruise, giving his wife time to get ship-shape after her procedure and properly enjoy the holiday.

Hip, hip hooray - a company going an extra nautical mile is always welcome in this column. I wish your wife a speedy recovery and hope you enjoy your long-awaited trip.

Damage done: Storm Eunice hit the UK in early 2022 and caused damage to thousands of properties, including the home of our reader

Miss: Reader H.G got in touch after he had to make an insurance claim when the roof of his home was damaged in Storm Eunice in February.

Luckily - or so he thought - he had buildings and contents insurance with Policy Expert. He made a claim for the repairs, which a roofer estimated could cost 20,000.

So he was surprised to receive a letter saying that the policy was void.

The letter said he gave incorrect information at the time of purchasing and renewing, but H.G could not see how this was the case.

CRANE ON THE CASE Our weekly column sees This is Money consumer expert Helen Crane tackle reader problems and shine the light on companies doing both good and bad. Want her to investigate a problem, or do you want to praise a firm for going that extra mile? Get in touch: helen.crane@thisismoney.co.uk

When he probed further, it appeared the reason was that his father had a County Court Judgment on his name, which was not declared.

While this is true, it should not be relevant as his father does not live at the property.

H.G says his father has lived and worked in the UAE for more than a decade, and only visits the UK for a week or two each year.

He is worried that he may have mentioned to Policy Expert during a previous call that his father was in the house, as he spoke to them during one of his short visits.

Therefore, he appealed Policy Expert's decision, providing evidence of his father's UAE residency and passport - but the claim once again rejected.

I contacted the insurer to query this, and ask whether it would allow the customer to listen to a recording of the phone call that he believes may have been at the root of the problem.

While it expressed sympathy for the damage, it said it would not reconsider without further evidence.

A spokesperson said: 'It is important that all policyholders take care when completing applications  particularly when providing information on behalf of other occupants  as incorrect or incomplete information can render their policy invalid.

Surprise: H.G was shocked to see that his policy was void, which Policy Expert claimed was down to incorrect information provided

'This is not a decision we take lightly and only after thorough examination of all information available to us, the policy remains void. The policyholder has time to provide further evidence to support their claim and can escalate concerns to the Financial Ombudsman Service, if required.'

It added that it checks out any claims against public data sources. H.G said his father received some post to his address, which may have complicated matters in this regard.

It did, however, say that it would provide H.G with a recording of his calls so he is able to check what was said.

H.G has since told me he is obtaining Border Force documents showing his father's entry and exit from the UK, as well as giving Policy Expert copies of his flight bookings.

While it is of course right for insurers to check out claims thoroughly, they have a responsibility to explain what their decisions are based on  especially when someone's home is at stake.

I am glad that H.G has been given the chance to listen to the calls and provide more evidence, and hope that  providing his claim about his father is indeed genuine  he will be able to see the decision overturned. I'll keep you posted.
Photo taken on May 12, 2022 shows the accident site of an explosion in a chemical factory in Kocevje, southern Slovenia. Six people died in an explosion in a chemical factory in southern Slovenia, national TV channel TV Slovenia reported on Thursday. It said the accident, which occurred in Kocevje, about 63 km southeast of the capital Ljubljana, is the biggest industrial accident in the country since Slovenia's independence in 1991. (Photo by Ales Kocjan/STA/Pool via Xinhua)

LJUBLJANA, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Six people died in an explosion in a chemical factory in southern Slovenia, national TV channel TV Slovenia reported on Thursday.

It said the accident, which occurred in Kocevje, about 63 km southeast of the capital Ljubljana, is the biggest industrial accident in the country since Slovenia's independence in 1991.

The accident was likely caused by a human error as two chemicals were mixed together causing the explosion followed by a large fire, local media reported.

Another twenty people needed medical help with one severely injured being treated in a hospital in Ljubljana.

Some buildings in the vicinity of the factory have also been damaged while citizens of Kocevje were advised to remain indoors for several hours.

The factory, Melamin, which has over 200 employees, produces chemical products that are used in construction, textile, painting, paper, tire, furniture and shoe industries.

Vladimir Prebilic, mayor of Kocevje, told reporters the explosion has not caused environmental damage. 

Photo taken on May 12, 2022 shows columns of black smoke billowing from the chemical factory in Kocevje, southern Slovenia.

Six people died in an explosion in a chemical factory in southern Slovenia, national TV channel TV Slovenia reported on Thursday.

It said the accident, which occurred in Kocevje, about 63 km southeast of the capital Ljubljana, is the biggest industrial accident in the country since Slovenia's independence in 1991. (Photo by Mitja Ofak/STA/Pool via Xinhua)

Photo taken on May 12, 2022 shows columns of black smoke billowing from the chemical factory in Kocevje, southern Slovenia.

Six people died in an explosion in a chemical factory in southern Slovenia, national TV channel TV Slovenia reported on Thursday.

It said the accident, which occurred in Kocevje, about 63 km southeast of the capital Ljubljana, is the biggest industrial accident in the country since Slovenia's independence in 1991. (Photo by Robert Latin/STA/Pool via Xinhua)

Photo taken on May 12, 2022 shows the accident site of an explosion in a chemical factory in Kocevje, southern Slovenia.

Six people died in an explosion in a chemical factory in southern Slovenia, national TV channel TV Slovenia reported on Thursday.

It said the accident, which occurred in Kocevje, about 63 km southeast of the capital Ljubljana, is the biggest industrial accident in the country since Slovenia's independence in 1991. (Photo by Ales Kocjan/STA/Pool via Xinhua)
Kingsport, TN (37660)

Today

Partly cloudy in the morning followed by scattered thunderstorms in the afternoon. High 82F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%..

Tonight

Partly cloudy with late night showers or thunderstorms. Low 59F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 50%.
Kingsport, TN (37660)

Today

Partly cloudy in the morning followed by scattered thunderstorms in the afternoon. High 82F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%..

Tonight

Partly cloudy with late night showers or thunderstorms. Low 59F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%.
ALBANY  The Supreme Court's apparent plan to overturn Roe v. Wade has been met with derision and outrage in much of the media's coverage, reflecting, of course, how millions of Americans feel.

But there's another side, representing the millions of people who have hoped and prayed for the day when the court might finally overturn a 1973 decision they regard as immoral and undemocratic.

Sheila Blasch is among those people.

I profiled Blasch three years ago, when, in those days before COVID-19 shuttered the building, she spent hours each week standing outside the Assembly Chamber in the Capitol, silently surrounded by signs and posters decrying abortion. Her perspective on the issue is shaped by the tragedy that in many respects defined her life.

When Blasch was 18, her family's car was stopped at a red light when a drunk driver slammed into it from the back, causing the station wagon to explode and kill her mother. Blasch spent most of the next two years in a burn recovery center.

Blasch, who is now 64, was opposed to abortion before the crash, but she also believes it gave her a unique perspective on the value of life. When she was suffering in the burn unit, some may have believed that she was better off dead or that her future would be without meaning.

"We have people who want to tell others whose life is worth living, but I can tell you that for all I went through, my life has been worth living," the Albany resident told me then in the Capitol. "We're here for a reason. We're created for a reason."

When I reconnected with Blasch, who protests most days outside a Schenectady abortion clinic, to ask about the Supreme Court's leaked draft decision, she was, of course, pleased by it  even as she worried that the leak might not accurately reflect the final decision expected to be released next month.

But, like many Americans on either side of the debate, Blasch was also bracing herself for what the decision might unleash, including the prospect of more anger and divisiveness in our politics and interactions. We are, in many ways, heading into uncharted territory, and it's difficult to know what to expect.

While Blasch is opposed to abortion in all circumstances, polls show that's a position held by a relatively small percentage of Americans  19 percent, according to the most recent Gallup poll on the issue, which, like other surveys, also found that a majority opposed overturning Roe.

But abortion polling is often confusing and contradictory, reflecting, perhaps, the conflicting and complicated feelings that many Americans hold on the issue. Support for abortion falls sharply after the first trimester, and if there's any sort of consensus to be found, polls suggest the comfortable spot for many Americans would be to keep abortion legal but under laws more restrictive than Roe has allowed.

That compromise position is largely absent from our polarized political debate, however. As David Leonhardt of The New York Times noted, the country immediately after a Roe overturn is likely to "split between blue states with greater access to abortion than most Americans favor and red states with substantially less access than most Americans favor."

New York will be in the former category, of course, and it seems likely that the overturning of Roe, if it indeed happens, will boost the state's Democrats. Put it this way: A vulnerable Kathy Hochul will benefit if she can make the campaign less about crime, the economy and taxes and more about the generally anti-abortion positions held by presumptive Republican nominee Lee Zeldin.

But it's also possible Democrats will overplay their hand, as they are prone to do, with proposals that turn away moderates. An example is the plan by Attorney General Letitia James to pay for women who live where abortion is restricted to travel to New York for the procedure.

Swell idea, right? Just wait until, say, Texas decides to purchase assault weapons for New Yorkers stymied by the state's anti-gun restrictions.

You can perhaps understand why Blasch feels some trepidation over what's to come. But her commitment to her position won't waver, she said, even if the overturning of Roe angers and energizes those who disagree.

"I'm going to live the truth to the best of my ability," Blasch told me. "The child is innocent. It's living and it's growing."

Millions of people see abortion from a different perspective, of course, emphasizing the right of women to control their own bodies and lives without government interference. And even if the court really does toss Roe, laws in New York won't change unless and until those on Blasch's side of the debate sway millions of hearts and minds.

That won't happen anytime soon. But Blasch won't stop trying.

cchurchill@timesunion.com  518-454-5442  @chris_churchill
Whether youre a seasoned backcountry camper or someone looking to brave their first night under a starry sky, countless outdoor adventures await throughout New Yorks vast networks of state parks and preserves.

So how do you get into camping, and backpacking? Rich Gottlieb, an avid outdoor enthusiast and (now retired) longtime owner of Rock & Snow outfitter in New Paltz, encouraged folks to go on day hikes and try car camping first before heading out for an epic, solo adventure.

Before taking off on a multiday backpacking trip, I would say you need to hike a bunch first, Gottleib said. Break in those hiking boots, get used to using maps and navigating. Learn what you need to bring for a long day in the woods. Learn what is unnecessary. Hiking is a big component of backpacking and both have to do with endurance and experience so you want to build those basics first.

Evan Thompson, Manager of the Hudson Highlands, Breakneck Ridge and Fahnestock State Parks near Cold Spring, agrees. Unless you were brought up camping and backpacking, its not necessarily something people know how to do. Car camping is a great way to get started.

After narrowing down an area youre interested in exploring  the Catskills, the Adirondacks, or areas closer to New York City like the Hudson Highlands  plan some day hikes so that you get a sense of the trail system and figure out what you need in that pack.

Beginners gear to test out

Rich Gottlieb

Avoid cotton and focus on wicking fabrics to stay comfortable. Then there is the choice in shoes. There are so many great, light hiking boots now, said Gottlieb. But you want to break them in and not save them for the big hike because that can end in blisters.

Water is key and some sort of portable water filtration system (like LifeStraw), as is food, a map, a compass or GPS device, a headlamp (in case you get lost and the day closes in on you faster than your legs can go), and an extra layer. It gets colder at different elevations or it could rain, so just having that extra, dry layer is key, said Gottlieb, as is having footwear that fits the terrain and the weather.

Now that youve hiked and figured out your backpack and the specific power bars and trail-mix that fuels your body, it may be time to start thinking about camping.

Car camping

Most trail systems have campsites somewhere near them, said Gottlieb, when talking about New York State parks and preserves.

Different sites require different levels of preparation. Backcountry campsites require you to carry everything you need in your backpack to sleep and eat in the wilderness overnight or for a weekend or longer. Pitching a tent while sorting out how to protect yourself from rain, bugs and critters is a lot to bite off if its your first time camping,

Its far easier, Gottlieb said, echoing Thompsons comments, to start with car camping, which is simply finding a campsite where you can pull in with your vehicle and pitch your tent, with the built-in safety net of having a car to duck inside if the weather turns extreme, to store food and extra clothing, or to drive to the nearest town for more supplies.

North Lake and South Lake in the Catskills is one car popular car camping destination.

Camping in which tents or other essentials already provided

Tentrr

If you dont want to invest in a ton of gear before knowing if camping is for you, consider a fully outfitted camping experience at select Tentrr sites in Harriman, Mills Norrie, Taconic and Lake Taghkanic State Parks. Tentrr provides the tents, beds and mattresses, an array of equipment  plus the sites are all set up upon arrival. More details and reservations can be found online.

Another option is campsites with some basic essentials already established. Fahnestock Park near Cold Spring, for example, offers 70 sites for tent camping that include a fire ring, grill and picnic table as well as comfort stations (hot showers and restroom facilities) and some basic camping outdoor essentials like firewood bundles and fire starters sold on premises. These sites are also accessible from public transportation.

Were about an hour and change from New York City, Thompson said. You can literally ride the Metro North train up and bike from the Cold Spring station to here, which many people do. Were only 8 miles from the station.

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Because of the comfort stations and grilling stations, these campsites are a relatively safe bet for beginning campers. And offer endless miles of trails are nearby. All you need is a tent, a sleeping bag, a pad and some food, he said.

How to plan for backcountry camping

If you are ready to take that leap and do some backcountry camping, Gottlieb shared tips for getting started:

Plan around lengthy hiking trails. If theres a loop or an out and back that you really want to tackle but cant do it all in one day, thats a great way to start to plan your first backpacking trip, he said. You have a sense of the terrain, are somewhat familiar with the trail and just keep an eye out for a level site to camp on. The Catskills can be tricky because its hard to find level ground and thats key especially if it rains. Beware of bears and critters. While many backpackers and campers can be concerned about bear coming for their food, Gottlieb said that what really gets you in trouble are rodents. If you leave a chocolate bar in your pack or even toothpaste or deodorant, theyll chew through your tent, chew through your pack, take a few bites and leave. Keep everything out of your tent and pack and tie it up, he cautioned. Gear up around seasonality. You need a basic tent that will keep out rain and bugs, he said. And ask a salesperson at a store about different sleeping bag weights and sleeping pads. There are different pads for different seasons and you want to pay attention to that. A summer pad is not going to keep your body warm in the winter even if you have the top of the line sleeping bag. Additional camping basics checklist. In addition to items mentioned above, You need food. Youll need a basic cooking stove and fuel, or at least something to boil water. Theres plenty of backpacking food out there that only requires water, which is a great way to hike light, said Gottleib Some sort of solar charger for flashlights and electronics are also a worthwhile investment beyond having headlamps. Trekking poles can be used to stabilize yourself on rugged terrain, help get up the hills and save knees on the downhills, and they can double as a stake to prop up a tent or tarp. Toss in a pair of gloves can save your hands if the weather takes a turn. Dont forget a trowel and toilet paper for when nature calls.

Even veteran outdoorspeople still learn from each experience. The important thing is to start. Get a map, pick a campsite, find some trails that look fun, make sure you have the essentials and go for it.

General camping tips

Rich Gottlieb

You can hike portions of the Appalachian Trail, hike a few peaks in the Catskills, navigate a more rugged week in the Adirondacks or do some tent camping with the car and comfort station only a stones throw away.

Whatever you do, make reservations as soon as possible, especially for more well-travelled camping sites. All reservations for State Park campsites are made through the Reserve America website, and Thompson cautioned that they fill up fast, especially on the weekends. And there are 56 campsites managed by the Department of Environmental Conservation  several in the Catskills Forests and Adirondack Preserve region  as well as a bevy of smaller, lesser-known campsites.

Explore options at the DECs camping guide and ReserveAmerica website.

Backpacking becomes its own way of life, its own world, said Gottlieb. Everything becomes quiet and its about finding a good spot to camp and  looking at the stars and listening to the sounds around you.
Was there something in the water on May 14, over the course of multiple years? Three famous and successful directors  Sofia Coppola, George Lucas and Robert Zemeckis  were all born on that date. This Saturday, Coppola turns 51, Lucas will be 78 and Zemeckis hits the big 7-0.

Lets see how much you know about their individual, and often intertwined, movie careers by taking our latest quiz. So, set your thinking caps back to the future, may the force be with you and hopefully nothing gets lost in translation.

1. Most of Sofia Coppolas ill-fated acting career was spent in movies directed by her father, Francis Ford Coppola. But she did appear in a movie from either George Lucas or Robert Zemeckis. Which one directed her and what was the hit 1999 movie?

2. Tom Hanks famously won his second consecutive Oscar for starring in Robert Zemeckis Forrest Gump, but what other collaboration between the two resulted in a later nomination for Hanks?

3. George Lucas only directed six feature-length films, but combined with his skills as a writer, producer, innovator and entrepreneur, he ranks as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. What future Oscar-winning actor starred as the title character in Lucas 1971 sci-fi directorial debut THX 1138?

4. True or false: Coppola, Lucas and Zemeckis have each only won one Academy Award.

5. Which one of the following motion capture animated films was not directed by Robert Zemeckis: Beowolf, A Christmas Carol, Monster House or Polar Express?

6. Sofia Coppolas directorial debut, The Virgin Suicides, based on Jeffrey Eugenides debut novel, features Kathleen Turner as the overprotective mother of five daughters. In Peggy Sue Got Married, directed by Coppolas father, what was the relationship between Turner and Coppolas characters?

7. American Graffiti, George Lucas sophomore effort, received a big addition to its budget and was saved from being turned into a TV movie after what Hollywood heavyweight signed on as a producer?

8. Like American Graffiti, Zemeckis directorial debut takes place over the course of one day in the early 1960s, this one being the historically and culturally significant date of Feb. 9, 1964. Name the movie.

9. Chewbacca in the Star Wars films was reportedly based on George Lucas dog, whose name had a connection to the filmmakers other, later blockbuster franchise. What was the dogs name?

10. Nearly a decade before Fifty Shades of Grey, Jamie Dornan made his film debut as a character whose look was inspired by Adam Ant in a Sofia Coppola movie that included among its cast Molly Shannon, Marianne Faithful, Steve Coogan, Rip Torn, Judy Davis, Rose Byrne, Tom Hardy and French pop band Phoenix, led by Coppolas future husband, Thomas Mars? What is the title of this historical drama?



ANSWERS

1. George Lucas, Star Wars: Episode I  The Phantom Menace

2. Cast Away

3. Robert Duvall

4. True. Zemeckis won best director for Forrest Gump; Coppola, best original screenplay for Lost in Translation. Lucas win was an honorary one  he took home the Irving Thalberg Memorial Award. He had previously lost all four competitive Oscars for which he was nominated.

5. Monster House

6. Coppola played Turners little sister

7. Francis Ford Coppola

8. I Wanna Hold Your Hand It takes place on the day of the Beatles first live appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

9. Indiana

10. Marie Antoinette
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On Wednesday night, Lark Hall in Albany will host one of its biggest shows to date when punk and alt-rock icon Bob Mould brings his solo electric tour to town. A solo show conjures up the thoughts of a laid-back affair but for Mould, playing alone is anything but casual.

The solo show is more work than a band show, he said. With the volume and power of the three-piece band, people think, Wow, thats really physical.

Solo its like, Wow Ive got to cover all the parts,  Mould continued. Im always more tired after solo shows.

The tour that brings him to Albany is built around two aspects of his discography: the Distortion box sets  which chronicle the entirety of his post-Husker Du career  and his brilliant 2020 record Blue Hearts, a loud and fast set of protest songs that channel the potency and musical intensity of his punk rock past. Playing solo is a looser experience for Mould, presenting him with the opportunity to broaden his set list and explore the full depth of his catalog of songs.

When I work with (drummer) Jon (Wurster) and (bassist) Jason (Narducy), we dont have a lot of time to rehearse, so theres a working list ahead of time, Mould explained. By myself Im not bound with those constraints; the song list is much deeper, the songbook opens up wider.

The solo shows feel more flexible, spontaneous, he added. Since theyre more intimate, I can get a feel for what people are enjoying and that flexibility is really different.

Musical flexibility has come to define Moulds career. As a solo artist, hes often taken unexpected sonic detours. His 1989 LP Workbook was a stark change from the aggressive punk rock of Husker Du, rooted in folk and more hushed tones. Living in New York City in the late 1990s, Mould got into the club scene and picked up DJing. Those influences are reflected in the full-on electronica soundscapes on his 2002 album Modulate.

The 18 studio albums, four live releases and two albums worth of rarities on the all-encompassing Distortion showcase Moulds willingness to take sonic chances and defy expectations. In putting his body of work into one compendium, Mould found there were thematic consistencies that run through the entirety of his work, regardless of style.

Theres a through-line: my work is always very personal in nature and even when its more observational, its still very personal because it explores my views of other people, he explained. Theres a methodology to the way I write, and I really try to highlight my geography and place with my writing.

When Husker Du broke up, I was holed up in Minnesota, relearning how to write and play guitar outside of the band, Mould continued. When I lived in Manhattan I was really immersed in gay life and subculture and club music, and the music reflected that. Those are pretty opposite examples of environment  geographically and physically  and how it impacted what I was writing.

In theory, a project like Distortion runs the risk of seeming nostalgic, a way of staying in the past instead of moving forward. But Mould views it differently, as it came about at an interesting time.

The pandemic made it hard in terms of looking ahead and focusing on new projects. Distortion allowed him to process and organize his past material.

That has come in handy on his solo electric shows, as it helps him to reconceive the songs in ways that interest him.

Im not one for looking back and 'nostalgia' is such a strong word, he said. A songbook is part of a living thing that Im constantly updating, its not something thats fixed.

The solo shows allow me to reinterpret songs on the fly, Mould continued. A song like What Do You Want Me To Do was written like 70s power pop. When I play it myself, I play it as a slow blues and it reads differently. Moments like that are the fun part.
ALBANY  As COVID-19 cases rise and government mandates have ended, Capital Region colleges are taking myriad approaches to address student and family safety during upcoming graduation ceremonies.

College commencements are largely scheduled for this weekend and next, coinciding with upstate New York and much of New England having the largest area of high risk of coronavirus spread nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As of Wednesday, the Capital Region had the third-highest level of reported COVID-19 infections in New York (behind Long Island and western New York), and hospitalizations are also continuing to trend upward. The region is seeing 55 people per 100,000 test positive daily for coronavirus on a seven-day average  a number that is no doubt lower than actual infections as many people take at-home tests and do not report the results to county health departments. That number of daily positive cases was last seen in early February when the first omicron surge was waning.

Some Capital Region colleges, as a result, are taking extra precautions for their upcoming commencements. Russell Sage College, for example, is requiring commencement attendees to show either proof of vaccination, proof of a negative PCR test within 72 hours or a picture of a negative at-home test that morning, for their Saturday commencement at the MVP Arena in Albany. Unvaccinated attendees must wear a mask. Sage has had these requirements in place and publicly shared since February.

Similarly, Siena College is requiring graduates and guests to show proof of vaccination or wear a mask indoors for their commencement events this weekend.

Other colleges, however, are not enforcing as strict COVID-19 regulations. The College of Saint Rose, for example, is following the protocols of MVP Arena for its Saturday commencement and, therefore, is not requiring masks, proof of vaccination or negative COVID-19 tests to enter. Skidmore College also is not requiring masks for its outdoor commencement ceremony at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center next Saturday.

The University at Albany is "encouraging" mask-wearing and asking individuals who exhibit COVID-19 symptoms to stay home, but it also is not requiring proof of vaccination or negative COVID-19 tests. However, UAlbany's largest graduation event this weekend will be taking place outdoors on the uptown campus at Entry Plaza Lawn.

The results are in See the winners of each category of the 2022 Best of the Capital Region contest, as determined by popular vote.

"Our student population is overwhelmingly vaccinated and boosted, and the folks who are coming with them are not lingering in one place indoors for any length of time at all," said Jordan Carleo-Evangelist, spokesperson for UAlbany.

The university is also holding "moving graduation" events that were also featured last year, which schedule no more than 20 people during 15-minute time slots for graduates to walk past photos of their time at UAlbany, have their names read and pictures taken before they leave. The moving graduations are taking place in three different locations, and are a good option for COVID-19 safety as well as a more personalized graduation experience, Carleo-Evangelist said.

With high school graduations coming in a month, districts will also have to consider what COVID-19 rates are like when coming up with protocols for their ceremonies.
BOISE, Idaho (AP)  Federal prosecutors say an Idaho woman who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, siege of the U.S. Capitol should be sentenced to two months in jail and ordered to serve community service in part because it was her second time forcing entry into a capitol building.

Pam Hemphill of Boise pleaded guilty earlier this year to one misdemeanor count of parading, demonstrating or picketing in the Capitol Building. In exchange, prosecutors dropped three additional misdemeanor charges.

In a sentencing memo filed in Hemphills case on Wednesday, the federal prosecutors noted that just a few months earlier Hemphill was part of a group of protesters that forced their way into an Idaho Statehouse gallery with limited seating, shattering the window of a door in the process.

Hemphill and other members of the far-right group Peoples Rights were at the Boise Capitol because they were angry over coronavirus-related restrictions, and Hemphill bragged about her actions in Boise while talking to other rioters at the U.S. Capitol last year as they sought to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

In fact, Hemphill may be the only defendant to be sentenced by the court so far who participated in not one, but two capitol building breaches within a year, the federal prosecutors told the court.

Hemphills attorney, Nathan Silver II, declined to comment on the case.

Like many other defendants who have been charged in connection with the siege, Hemphill posted videos to social media sites that showed her in Washington, D.C., in the days surrounding the insurrection and at the Capitol when it was happening.

In one video, she compared breaking windows at the federal building to actions protesters at the Idaho Statehouse had taken. In another, she said she avoided getting into trouble after being found inside the Capitol by telling police that she became lost after being pushed into the building by the crowd. The videos were later removed.

The results are in See the winners of each category of the 2022 Best of the Capital Region contest, as determined by popular vote.

She encouraged others to come to the Capitol for a "WAR on social media, even before she arrived, and further encouraged others out in Washington, D.C. on the evening of January 5 to occupy the Capitol and break the glass like they did in Boise, the prosecutors wrote.

Hemphill also lied to FBI agents when she was arrested, the prosecutors said, claiming she had been pushed into the Capitol by other rioters and saying she helped law enforcement officers keep rioters out of the Capitol.

The prosecutors asked the judge to sentence Hemphill to 60 days incarceration, three years of probation, 60 hours of community service and $500 in restitution. Hemphill is scheduled to be sentenced on May 18.
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BERLIN (AP)  The European Union will no longer recommend medical masks be worn at airports and on planes starting next week amid the easing of coronavirus restrictions across the bloc, though member states can still require them, officials said Wednesday.

The European Union Aviation Safety Agency said it hoped the joint decision, made with the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, would mark a big step forward in the normalization of air travel" for passengers and crews.

The new guideline takes account of the latest developments in the pandemic, in particular the levels of vaccination and naturally acquired immunity, and the accompanying lifting of restrictions in a growing number of European countries, the two agencies said in a joint statement.

Passengers should however behave responsibly and respect the choices of others around them, EASA Executive Director Patrick Ky said. "And a passenger who is coughing and sneezing should strongly consider wearing a face mask, for the reassurance of those seated nearby.

While the new recommendations take effect on May 16, rules for masks may still vary by airline beyond that date if they fly to or from destinations where the rules are different.

Germany's Health Ministry said it will continue to require all passengers over the age of 6 to wear medical masks on flights to, from or within the country, though they can be removed during meals.

Last week, German carrier Lufthansa denied a large group of Jewish travelers board a plane because some had refused to wear masks. The airline has since apologized for the incident.

European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control director Andrea Ammon said washing hands and social distancing should still be practiced, but airport operators are advised not to impose distancing requirements if these are likely to lead to a bottleneck.

The agencies also recommended that airlines keep systems for collecting passenger locator information on standby in case they are needed in future, for example if a new dangerous variant emerges.

Airlines welcomed the change in guidance and called for a consistent approach to mask mandates.

We believe that mask requirements on board aircraft should end when masks are no longer mandated in other parts of daily life, for example theaters, offices or on public transport," said Willie Walsh, director-general of the International Air Transport Association.

The decline in reported COVID-19 cases over the past weeks has prompted countries across Europe to roll back pandemic-related restrictions.

Germany said Wednesday that it was disbanding a crisis task force appointed to lead the official response.

The results are in See the winners of each category of the 2022 Best of the Capital Region contest, as determined by popular vote.

And the French government announced separately Wednesday that people will no longer have to wear facemasks in any forms of public transport starting from Monday.

Health Minister Olivier Veran, speaking after a Cabinet meeting, said that the decision is part of policies to lift most restrictions as the pandemic is slowing down in the country.

French authorities reported this week about 39,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 each day on average, down by 30% compared to last week. The numbers of patients in hospitals have also been steadily decreasing in recent weeks.

Wearing facemasks will no longer be needed in metros, bus, trains and domestic flights. It is still be requested in hospitals and nursing homes, Veran said.

France lifted most coronavirus restrictions in March.

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Sylvie Corbet in Paris contributed to this report.

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Follow all of APs pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic
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TROY  Telling the historic story of how food moves from the farm to the table is the challenge that Samantha Mahoski, the new curator for the Hart Cluett Museum, accepted and transformed into the exhibition Cultivating Community: Agriculture in Rensselaer County.

Cultivating Community shows the dynamics and variety of farming in the county over its history. Diversity is seen in the Hebrew Farmers Association of Rensselaer County and Black Farmers United of New York State.

The contentious fights embodied in the Rent Wars of the 19th century are seen in the display of the Big Thunder costume worn for many years to celebrate the uprising. And there is the equipment produced for many decades by TroyBilt, whose archives form the largest single piece of the Hart Cluett Museum collections.

It was very much a collaborative effort. Both Kathy Sheehan (the historian for the city of Troy and Rensselaer County and museum educator and registrar) talked about what would be good for the exhibit, said Mahoski, 28.

Agriculture is such a very broad topic. There is so much material, said Mahoski, who dove into the museum collections to tell the story of farming and food using archival materials and the collections of objects.

The exhibit, which runs through Dec. 18, is the first main museum exhibit that Mahoski pulled together and designed. Information about the exhibit and the museum is available online at www.hartcluett.org.

Mahoski was promoted from curatorial assistant in January to curator to succeed Stacy Pomeroy Draper who spent 43 years at the museum and designed 171 exhibits.

Starlyn DAngelo, the museum executive director, said Mahoski has taken on a complex topic and devised a compelling exhibit.

Shes done a great job. Shes chosen interesting artifacts, said Starlyn, praising Mahoski for taking a great deal of information and displaying it in an appealing fashion in the small exhibition space available.

Mahoski faced time constraints of just three months as curator in preparing the exhibit, which opened on March 25. Mahoski did the exhibit while interacting with the public, handling the museums social media and dealing with the other demands that come with a nonprofit with a small staff whose mission is to tell the countys history and help people explore it.

The results are in See the winners of each category of the 2022 Best of the Capital Region contest, as determined by popular vote.

Mahoskis trip to "Cultivating Community" began in 2019 when, as curatorial assistant, she put together "Selected T-shirts from the Rensselaer County Historical Society Collection." The T-shirts displayed in a case at the museum drew attention as they echoed something that nearly everyone has at home  a personal collection of T-shirts.

A graduate of Wesley College in Dover, Del., where she majored in history and minored in American studies and the recipient of master's degrees from the University at Albany in history and information sciences, Mahoskis career at the Hart Cluett Museum began in 2015 when it was still known as the Rensselaer County Historical Society.

Working at the Delaware state archives led Mahoski to learn that this is what I wanted to do. Mahoski went from volunteer at the Hart Cluett Muesum to part-time employee and then to full-time employee in 2020.

Mahoski said going forward she would like to stage exhibitions that tell the stories of the countys communities that have been overlooked such as the LGBTQ, the countys indigenous people and the Black community.
CROWN POINT, Ind., (AP)  Indiana's appeals court has overturned the murder conviction of a Gary man sentenced last year to 115 years in prison for a fatal shooting at a gas station.

The 2-1 decision released Wednesday overturned Marquis D. Young's murder conviction and his convictions on two counts of attempted murder, citing a lack of evidence. A Lake County jury convicted Young, 31, in the shooting that killed Dion Clayton, 27, and wounded two other men.
WASHINGTON (AP)  A House panel issued subpoenas Thursday to House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and four other GOP lawmakers in its probe into the violent Jan. 6 insurrection, an extraordinary step that has little precedent and is certain to further inflame partisan tensions over the 2021 attack.

The panel is investigating McCarthys conversations with then-President Donald Trump the day of the attack and meetings the four other lawmakers had with the White House beforehand as Trump and his aides worked to overturn his 2020 election defeat. The former president's supporters violently pushed past police that day, broke through windows and doors of the Capitol and interrupted the certification of President Joe Biden's victory.

The decision to issue subpoenas to McCarthy, R-Calif., and Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Andy Biggs of Arizona and Mo Brooks of Alabama is a dramatic show of force by the panel, which has already interviewed nearly 1,000 witnesses and collected more than 100,000 documents as it investigates the worst attack on the Capitol in two centuries.

The move is not without risk, as Republicans are favored to capture back the House majority in this fall's midterm elections and have promised retribution for Democrats if they take control.

After the announcement, McCarthy, who aspires to be House speaker, told reporters I have not seen a subpoena" and said his view on the Jan. 6 committee has not changed since the nine-lawmaker panel asked for his voluntary cooperation earlier this year.

They're not conducting a legitimate investigation, McCarthy said. "Seems as though they just want to go after their political opponents.

Similarly, Perry told reporters the investigation is a charade and said the subpoena is all about headlines.

Neither man said whether he would comply.

The panel, made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans, had previously asked for voluntary cooperation from the five lawmakers, along with a handful of other GOP members, but all of them refused to speak with the panel, which debated for months whether to issue the subpoenas.

Before we hold our hearings next month, we wished to provide members the opportunity to discuss these matters with the committee voluntarily, said Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Democratic chairman of the panel. Regrettably, the individuals receiving subpoenas today have refused and were forced to take this step to help ensure the committee uncovers facts concerning January 6th.

Rep. Liz Cheney, the panels Republican vice chair, said the step wasnt taken lightly. The unwillingness of the lawmakers to provide relevant information about the attack, she said, is a very serious and grave situation.

Congressional subpoenas for sitting members of Congress, especially for a party leader, have little precedent in recent decades, and it is unclear what the consequences would be if any or all of the five men decline to comply. The House has voted to hold two other noncompliant witnesses, former Trump aides Steve Bannon and Mark Meadows, in contempt, referring their cases to the Justice Department.

In announcing the subpoenas, the Jan. 6 panel said there is historical precedent for the move and noted that the House Ethics Committee has issued a number of subpoenas to Members of Congress for testimony or documents, though such actions are generally done secretly.

We recognize this is fairly unprecedented," said Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, the other GOP member of the panel, after the committee announced the subpoenas. "But the Jan. 6 attack was very unprecedented.

Kinzinger said it is "important for us to get every piece of information we possibly can.

McCarthy has acknowledged he spoke with Trump on Jan. 6 as Trumps supporters were beating police outside the Capitol and forcing their way into the building. But he has not shared many details. The committee requested information about his conversations with Trump before, during and after the riot.

McCarthy took to the House floor after the rioters were cleared and said in a forceful speech that Trump bears responsibility for the attack and that it was the saddest day I have ever had in Congress  even as he went on to join 138 other House Republicans in voting to reject the election results.

Another member of the GOP caucus, Washington Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, said after the attack that McCarthy had recounted that he told Trump to publicly call off the riot and said the violent mob was made up of Trump supporters, not far-left antifa members, as Trump had claimed.

The results are in See the winners of each category of the 2022 Best of the Capital Region contest, as determined by popular vote.

Thats when, according to McCarthy, the president said, Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are, Herrera Beutler said in a statement last year.

The GOP leader soon made up with Trump, though, visiting him in Florida and rallying House Republicans to vote against investigations of the attack.

The other four men were in touch with the White House for several weeks ahead of the insurrection, talking to Trump and his legal advisers about ways to stop the congressional electoral count on Jan. 6 to certify Joe Biden's victory.

These members include those who participated in meetings at the White House, those who had direct conversations with President Trump leading up to and during the attack on the Capitol, and those who were involved in the planning and coordination of certain activities on and before January 6th, the committee said in a release.

Brooks, who has since been critical of Trump, spoke alongside the former president at the massive rally in front of the White House the morning of Jan. 6, telling supporters to start taking down names and kicking ass before hundreds of them broke into the Capitol.

Perry spoke to the White House about replacing acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen with an official who was more sympathetic to Trumps false claims of voter fraud, and Biggs was involved in plans to bring protesters to Washington and pressuring state officials to overturn the legitimate election results, according to the panel. Jordan, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, spoke to Trump on Jan. 6 and was also involved in strategizing how to overturn the election.

Several of their efforts were detailed in texts released to the panel by Meadows, who was Trumps chief of staff at the time.

11 days to 1/6 and 25 days to inauguration, Perry texted Meadows on Dec. 26, 2020. "We gotta get going!

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Associated Press writer Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pa., contributed to this report.
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KYIV, Ukraine Ukrainian officials say their forces took out another Russian ship in the Black Sea.

Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, said late Thursday the Vsevolod Bobrov logistics ship was struck as it was trying to deliver an anti-aircraft system to Snake Island. He said the ship was badly damaged but was not believed to have sunk.

A spokesman for the Odesa regional military administration said the vessel caught fire after the strike. There was no confirmation from Russia and no reports of casualties.

The British Ministry of Defense said this week that Ukraine has been targeting Russian air defenses and supply vessels on Snake Island in an effort to disrupt Moscows efforts to expand its control over the Black Sea coastline.

The Ukrainian military last month sank the Moskva cruiser, the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet. In March, the military destroyed the landing ship Saratov.

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KEY DEVELOPMENTS IN THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR:

 Finlands leaders in favor of applying for NATO membership

 ' This tears my soul apart : A Ukrainian boy and a killing

 Protesters vent fury at French company for staying in Russia

 Ukrainian circus comes to town, and stays in Italy, amid war

Follow all AP stories on Russias war on Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

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OTHER DEVELOPMENTS:

MUNICH  German industrial giant Siemens AG says it is exiting Russia, where it has operated for almost 170 years.

We condemn the war in Ukraine and have decided to carry out an orderly process to wind down our industrial business activities in Russia, Roland Busch, the Munich-based companys CEO, said Thursday.

Siemens had been one of the first companies to put all new business in Russia, along with international deliveries to the country, on hold following Russias invasion of Ukraine in February.

The company said it had been evaluating the situation with the eye of ensuring the safety of its 3,000 employees in Russia.

The maker of trains and industrial equipment said the Russia sanctions shaved off about 600,000 euros ($623,000) from its fiscal second-quarter results, which were reported Thursday.



KYIV, Ukraine -- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian forces on Thursday night struck the Chernihiv region and hit schools.

Of course, the Russian state is in such a state that any education only gets in its way. But what can be achieved by destroying Ukrainian schools? All Russian commanders who give such orders are simply sick, and incurable.

He condemned what he suggested were senseless attacks on the refinery in the central Ukrainian industrial hub of Kremenchuk, on the Zaporizhzhia region and the Donbas.

They are cowards, and they try to hide the truth behind missiles, airstrikes and artillery shelling, he said in his nightly video address to the nation. Therefore our task is to fight until we achieve our goals in this war: to free our land, our people and secure our security.

Noting that Thursday is International Nurses Day, Zelenskyy thanked Ukraines nurses and other medical workers for their part in the fight and urged all Ukrainians to do the same. He said since the invasion began on Feb. 24, the Russian military had damaged 570 medical facilities, fully destroying 101 hospitals.

What is that? Its stupidity. Its barbarity. Its the self-destruction of Russia as a state that anyone in the world could see as a cultured nation.

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KYIV, Ukraine  Rocket attacks on Ukraines central Poltava region on Thursday were perhaps the most intense for the duration of the war, the regional governor said that same day.

Todays shelling of the Poltava region is perhaps the largest during the course of this full-scale war, Dmitry Lunin wrote in a Telegram post. 12 Russian missiles hit the infrastructure in (the city of) Kremenchuk; most of them hit an oil refinery that was not operational anyway.

Rescuers are putting out a fire at the refinery. Luckily, no one was hurt, Lunin added.

Kremenchuk is on the Dnieper River, south of Kyiv and north of Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia. The river, flowing north to south, divides Ukraine in half. In the south, it flows through Kherson before emptying into the Black See.

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KYIV, Ukraine  At least two civilians died Thursday as a result of a shelling attack on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraines second-largest city, local authorities said that same day.

As a result of the shelling, two people were killed, four more were injured, two of whom are doctors. All these people are civilians, Vyacheslav Zadorenko, the mayor of the suburban town of Derhachi, wrote in a Telegram post.

He added that the attack also damaged a building housing a humanitarian aid unit, municipal offices, and hospital facilities.

None of the sites that came under shelling, not to mention private houses that are destroyed daily, had anything to do with military infrastructure, Zadorenko said.

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KYIV, Ukraine  Ukraines foreign minister said Thursday that everyone involved in the transportation and sales of grain seized by Russia in occupied areas of the country will face legal consequences.

Russia is a criminal three times over: it bombed Syria to ruins, occupied part of Ukraine, and is now selling stolen Ukrainian grain to Syria, the ministrys press service cited Dmytro Kuleba as saying.

I want to remind the participants in this deal: what is stolen has never brought happiness to anyone. Everyone involved in the sale, transportation or purchase of stolen grain is an accomplice to the crime, Kuleba said.

Your actions will have adequate international legal consequences. We will do everything to make your life as difficult as possible, he continued, commenting on media reports that on Wednesday, a Russian ship carrying Ukrainian grain moored off the Syrian coast.

Kuleba also claimed that thanks to the efforts of Ukrainian diplomats, Egypt and Lebanon had previously refused to buy the looted grain shipment.

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MOSCOW  A student of a local construction college died as a result of a shelling attack on the Russian village of Solokhi near the Ukrainian border, a teacher at the college told the Interfax news agency Thursday.

Russian Nifodyov died as a result of the shelling of the peaceful village of Solokhi by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Nikolai Ignatenko was cited as saying.

Earlier on Thursday, the governor of Russias Belgorod region, where Solokhi is located, said that at least one civilian had been killed in the shelling, while six more were injured. While governor Vyacheslav Gladkov likewise blamed the attack on Kyivs forces, it was not immediately clear whether the slain civilian he referred to was Nifodyov.

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KYIV, Ukraine  Four civilians were reported dead and five more were injured in Ukraines eastern Donetsk region on Thursday, the regional governor said that same day.

On May 12, the Russians killed four more civilians of the Donbas: two in Novoselivka, one in Avdiivka and one in Lyman. Five more people were injured, Pavlo Kyrylenko wrote in a Telegram post, referring to a village and two cities in the Donetsk region, one of two which make up the Donbas.

His claims could not be immediately verified.

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ROME  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says that hes ready to talk with Russian President Vladimir Putin and that we must find an agreement, but with no ultimatum as a condition.

Zelenskyy also told Italian RAI state TV in an interview scheduled to be broadcast on Thursday night that Ukraine will never recognize Crimea as part of Russia, which annexed that part of southern Ukraine in 2014.

Crimea has always had its autonomy, it has its parliament, but on the inside of Ukraine, Zelenskyy said, in excerpts of the interview that RAI released earlier on Thursday.

The interviewer asked the Ukrainian leader about a comment by French President Emmanuel Macron cautioning against any humiliation of Putin.

We want the Russian army to leave our land, we arent on Russian soil, Zelenskyy replied. We wont save Putins face by paying with our territory. That would be unjust.

In another comment, Zelenskyy sounded a forward-looking note. We have to think of the future of Russia. I, as president of Ukraine, say these are our neighbors. There will be other presidents, other presidents and other generations of Russia, Zelenskyy said.

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KYIV, Ukraine  Ukrainian ministry officials said Thursday that Russian troops were trying to block Kyivs forces from advancing as far as the Ukrainian-Russian border in the northeastern Kharkiv region.

In the direction of Kharkiv, Russian army units are regrouping and trying to prevent the further advance of our troops in the direction of the state border of Ukraine, defense ministry spokesman Oleksandr Motuzyanyk said in his regular media briefing.

To this end, the occupiers launch unceasing artillery attacks on our troop units in order to inflict human losses, as well as to damage weapons and military equipment, Motuzyanyk added.

He did not clarify how close Ukrainian forces were to the border.

According to the defense ministry briefing, Moscows troops were opening fire along the entire line of confrontation in Ukraines east, and attempting to penetrate Ukrainian defenses.

Also on Thursday, the Ukrainian militarys General Staff said in its daily operational statement that Russian forces continued their attempts to storm several cities in Ukraines industrial heartland of Donbas that day, but had no success.

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A senior Russian U.N. envoy said Thursday that Finland and Swedens decision to join NATO would instantly turn them from neutral into hostile countries and potential targets for Russia.

Dmitry Polansky, First Deputy Representative of Russia to the U.N., said in an interview with the British conservative magazine UnHerd, that Helsinki and Stockholm know that the moment they become members of NATO it will imply certain mirror moves on the Russian side.

If there are NATO detachments in those territories, these territories would become a target - or possible target - for a strike, Polansky added. NATO is a very unfriendly bloc to us  it is an enemy and NATO itself admitted that Russia is the enemy. It means that Finland and Sweden all of a sudden, instead of neutral countries, become part of the enemy and they bear all the risks.

Elsewhere in the interview, Polansky downplayed the impact of the possible NATO enlargement on Europes security landscape, saying that Russia is ready to face NATO threats and has made the necessary precautions for this.



BERLIN  The U.N.s top human rights body has overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling on its investigators to specifically look into possible rights abuses and violations in northern Ukraine shortly after Russias invasion.

In a 33-2 vote, with 12 abstentions, the Human Rights Council concluded a special session Thursday on Russias invasion of Ukraine also by calling on Russia to grant international human rights groups unhindered, timely, immediate, unrestricted and safe access to people who have been transferred from Ukraine to Russia or areas controlled by Russian forces or affiliates.

Only China and Eritrea voted against the measure, which also urged the U.N. human rights office to report on events in Mariupol, a besieged southeastern port city where thousands of civilians are believed to have been killed. Access to the city has been virtually nonexistent for international human rights during recent fighting there.

The council called on a team of investigators known as a Commission of Inquiry to look specifically into the events in the Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Sumy regions of Ukraine in late February and early March after Russias invasion with a view to holding those responsible to account. The commission was already created to investigate rights abuses and violations generally in Ukraine.

Many atrocities in the war came to light last month after Moscows forces aborted their bid to capture Kyiv and withdrew from around the capital.

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The results are in See the winners of each category of the 2022 Best of the Capital Region contest, as determined by popular vote.

KYIV, Ukraine  Between 8 and 12 Russian missiles hit the oil refinery and other infrastructure in the Ukrainian industrial hub of Kremenchuk Thursday, the acting governor of the central Poltava region said that same day.

In a Telegram post, Dmytro Lunin urged residents to remain in underground shelters, citing the persistent threat of airstrikes.

In early April, Lunin had said that the Kremenchuk refinery - Ukraines only remaining fully functional facility of its kind at the time  was no longer operational following a Russian attack. Moscow claimed to have targeted the refinery again at the end of the month, and to have destroyed further fuel production and storage facilities.

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BERLIN  The U.N. refugee agency is reporting that more than 6 million people have now fled Ukraine in the wake of Russias invasion.

Geneva-based UNHCR also said Thursday that the number of refugees who have returned back to Ukraine, either partially or fully, has reached more than 1.6 million. It says that number reflects cross-border movements, and doesnt necessarily indicate sustainable returns. The agency says its too early to draw conclusions about definitive trends on returns.

Matthew Saltmarsh, an agency spokesman, also said Thursday that a total of 2.4 million people who have left Ukraine have moved beyond Ukraines immediate border countries which have taken in the lions share of refugees from the country. Poland alone has registered more than 3.2 million people who fled Ukraine. It and other European Union member countries have open borders, making tracking where people go a complex endeavor.

On Tuesday, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, tweeted that the number of refugees from Ukraine had reached the same 5.7 million figure as the tally from Syrias 11-year war, which previously was the source of the worlds biggest refugee crisis.

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UNITED NATIONS -- The U.N. childrens agency says the war in Ukraine is a child rights crisis where education is under attack and nearly 100 youngsters have been killed in just the last month.

UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Omar Abdi told the U.N. Security Council Thursday that more children have been injured, millions have been displaced and schools continue to be attacked and used for military purposes.

The school year came to a standstill after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, and as of last week at least 15 of 89 UNICEF-supported schools in the countrys east have been damaged or destroyed in the fighting, he said.

In mid-March, over 15,000 schools resumed education in Ukraine mostly through remote learning or in-person hybrid options, he said.

It is estimated that 3.7 million children in Ukraine and abroad are using online and distance learning options, Abdi said.

But he stressed that there are still enormous obstacles to education including availability for learning, resources, language barriers and movements of children and their families.

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KYIV, Ukraine  Talks are underway between Kyiv and Moscow on the possible evacuation of 38 severely wounded Ukrainian troops from the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, Ukraines deputy PM said Thursday afternoon.

The steel mill is the only remaining stronghold of Ukrainian resistance in the ruined port city, and is now surrounded by Russian forces.

We are working step by step, Iryna Vereshchuk wrote in a public post on the Telegram messenger app.

She said that Kyiv hoped to exchange the soldiers for 38 significant Russian prisoners of war, before moving on to the next stage of the negotiations. She did not specify what this next stage would concern, but said that there were no negotiations on the exchange of 500 or 600 people.

Earlier on Thursday, an official at the Ukrainian Presidents Office said that Kyiv hoped to extract half a thousand wounded Ukrainian fighters from Azovstal.

Members of the Azov Regiment holed up inside the plant have repeatedly refused to surrender, citing fears of being killed or tortured. On Tuesday, Ukrainian officials said that more than a thousand Ukrainian troops, many of them injured, remained at Azovstal.

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VIENNA  German Chancellor Olaf Scholz spoke with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto Thursday, the same day Finlands leaders announced the country plans to apply for NATO membership, the German chancellery said Thursday afternoon.

Chancellor Scholz welcomed todays statements by the President and Prime Minister of Finland Sanna Marin, in which both advocate their countrys immediate accession to NATO, and assured Finland of the Federal Governments full support on this path, Scholzs office said in a statement.

Finlands announcement paves the way for a historic expansion of the alliance that could deal a serious blow to Russia as its military struggles with its war in Ukraine.

Finland shares a 1,340-kilometer (830-mile) land border with Russia.

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KYIV, Ukraine  About 3,000 Mariupol civilians are being detained in prisons controlled by pro-Russian separatists in Ukraines industrial east, the countrys human rights chief says.

Lyudmyla Denysova claimed on social media Thursday that Kyiv is aware of at least two prisons set up in the eastern Donetsk region, one in the regional capital of Donetsk and another in Olenivka, a suburb 20 kilometers southwest of the city center.

She claimed that authorities in Kyiv had received reports of people being tortured, interrogated, threatened with execution and forced to cooperate, and others disappearing after interrogations.

She also alleged that detainees were being kept in inhuman conditions, with inadequate access to bathrooms and no space to lie down.

She claimed that some captives had been released after 36 days, after signing unspecified documents, but did not provide more details. Ukrainian authorities are calling on the U.N. to intervene.

More than 100,000 civilians remain in the ruined port city of Mariupol, which had a pre-war population of about half a million. Ukrainian authorities have previously claimed that thousands of Ukrainians had been forcibly taken to Russia.

Troops from Ukraines Azov Regiment continue to hold out at the Azovstal steelworks, the last bulwark of Ukrainian resistance in the city.

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MOSCOW  Russia has warned that it will have to take unspecified military-technical steps in response to Finlands decision to join NATO.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said Thursday that Finlands accession to NATO will inflict serious damage on Russian-Finnish relations, as well as stability and security in Northern Europe.

It said in a statement that Russia will be forced to take retaliatory steps of military-technical and other characteristics in order to counter the emerging threats to its national security.

The statement noted that while its up to Finland to decide on ways to ensure its security, Helsinki must be aware of its responsibility and the consequences of such a move. The ministry charged that Finlands move also violated past agreements with Russia.

History will determine why Finland needed to turn its territory into a bulwark of military face-off with Russia while losing independence in making its own decisions, it added.
Photo provided/Albany County District Attorney's Office

ALBANY  A Columbia County man was sentenced to 8 years in state prison on Wednesday for a spurt of criminal activity that saw him target the same Macys twice and ended with him crashing his car near Albany International Airport.

Tyler Meltz, 28, threatened an in-store security guard at Colonie Center Macys at knifepoint in order to steal hundreds of dollars of merchandise on June 13, 2021, according to the Albany County District Attorneys Office.
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GREEN ISLAND  A fire at an apartment complex on Center Island damaged several apartments and sent up a column of smoke seen from miles away.

The Green Island Bridge was closed to traffic, and people were walking on the bridge to watch the fire as it tore through a building at River's Edge Apartments late Thursday morning. Center Island, sometimes called Starbuck Island, is in the Hudson River between Troy and Green Island.

Authorities said it appears no one was injured and all were evacuated safely. Green Island Deputy Mayor Rick Jones said he arrived on the scene about 10 minutes after the call for help came in. He said some walls collapsed and most of the roof was gone.

Families were taken to a community room at the complex. Jones said he didn't believe the residents would be able to live in their units for some time. The American Red Cross provided immediate assistance to at least 22 people, including at least four children, in 10 households.

Green Island Fire Chief Matthew Lansing said its investigation into the fire is still in the early stage as authorities try to figure out how the blaze started and the extent of the damage. It appears to have spread across about eight apartments in adjoining buildings. Authorities are bringing in a structural engineer to assess the destruction, according to Jones.

As the fire started and grew, smoke could be seen from as far away as Albany.

Emergency workers went door to door at the complex, urging people to leave even buildings that weren't burning.

Kelsey Anderson was out on a walk with her children when she spotted the fire at about noon. She lives in a neighboring building.

"I saw a bunch of smoke coming from this direction and I knew that's where my apartment was so I was rushing to get back over here to see what was going on," she said. Anderson said the fire appeared to start near the top of the building and quickly spread.

One building caught fire and it appears the flames spread into several apartments. The roof of the structure burned through but by 1 p.m. most of the flames seemed to be extinguished. National Grid cut power to the village of Green Island to assist firefighters.

Roommates Nick Despart and Aiden O'Brien watched firefighters spraying water from a trio of aerial fire apparatus and from handheld hoses into the burning 2200 Building where they had lived for the last year. They rushed home from their jobs when they were alerted that their apartment was being consumed by the fire.

The results are in See the winners of each category of the 2022 Best of the Capital Region contest, as determined by popular vote.

"It's tough to see everything you own just gone," said O'Brien.

Despart said the two friends were getting ready to renew their lease.

Melissa Lee, a resident of a building near the one that caught fire, was alerted to the blaze by a neighbor who knocked on her door. She ran to grab her mother and they made it out safely. She tried to run back into the building to get her money but heard ominous noises when she approached her apartment and decided to leave it all behind.

It sounded like the windows started popping, she said. My life meant more than a couple hundred dollars.

She said the smoke detector didnt go off and she only knew the fire was approaching because of the cracking and popping sounds she heard. She was later told that the building will be torn down.

She and her mother were at the complexs community room later in the day awaiting American Red Cross assistance. The leasing office told her and other neighbors that the owner would make sure they are taken care of.

Deputy Mayor Jones said everyone did a good job responding to the situation. "This could have been a lot worse," he said.
FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. (AP)  A North Carolina man has been sentenced to 10 months in prison for sexually assaulting a 17-year-old girl during a flight on a commercial airliner last year, a federal prosecutor said Wednesday.

U.S. Attorney Michael Easley said in a news release that Ryan Eugene Larned, 38, of Fayetteville was also sentenced to five years supervised release and was ordered to pay a $2,000 fine for sexual contact without consent. Larned also will have to register as a sex offender, the news release said.
OMAHA, Neb. (AP)  During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the meat processing industry worked closely with political appointees in the Trump administration to stave off health restrictions and keep slaughterhouses open even as the virus spread rapidly among workers, according to a congressional report released Thursday.

The report by the House's Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis said meat companies pushed to keep their plants open even though they knew workers were at high risk of catching the coronavirus. The lobbying led to health and labor officials watering down their recommendations for the industry and culminated in an executive order President Donald Trump issued in spring 2020 designating meat plants as critical infrastructure that needed to remain open.

Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn, who leads the subcommittee, said U.S. Department of Agriculture officials and the industry prioritized production and profits over the health of workers and communities as at least 59,000 workers caught the virus and 269 died.

"The shameful conduct of corporate executives pursuing profit at any cost during a crisis and government officials eager to do their bidding regardless of resulting harm to the public must never be repeated, Clyburn said.

Former Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, who now leads the University System of Georgia, declined to comment Thursday. A spokesman for the university system said Perdue is focused on "serving the students of Georgia.

The report is based on communications among industry executives, lobbyists and USDA officials and other documents the committee received from government agencies, Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, JBS, Cargill, National Beef, Hormel and other companies. Those firms control 85% of the beef market and 70% of pork production nationwide.

The North American Meat Institute trade group said the report distorts the truth and ignores the steps companies took as they spent billions to retool plants and purchase protective gear for workers.

The House Select Committee has done the nation a disservice," the trade group's President and CEO Julie Anna Potts said. "The Committee could have tried to learn what the industry did to stop the spread of COVID among meat and poultry workers, reducing positive cases associated with the industry while cases were surging across the country. Instead, the Committee uses 20/20 hindsight and cherry picks data to support a narrative that is completely unrepresentative of the early days of an unprecedented national emergency.

A major union that represents workers at the processing plants condemned the way the Trump administration helped the industry.

We only wish that the Trump Administration cared as much about the lives of working people as it did about meat, pork and poultry products, when we wanted poultry plants to shut down for deep cleaning and to save workers' lives," said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

The report said meat companies were slow to take measures to protect workers from the virus and pushed to make government recommendations to require masks to be worn, install dividers between work stations and encourage social distancing in their plants optional.

But JBS spokeswoman Nikki Richardson said the company did everything possible to ensure the safety of our people who kept our critical food supply chain running.

Tyson Foods spokesman Gary Mickelson echoed that sentiment and said Tyson has worked closely with both the Trump and Biden administrations, along with state and local officials, to respond to the pandemic's challenges.

Smithfield spokesman Jim Monroe said the industry reacted quickly, and Smithfield has spent more than $900 million so far to protect workers. He said it was appropriate for meat companies to share their concerns with government officials as the pandemic unfolded.

The results are in See the winners of each category of the 2022 Best of the Capital Region contest, as determined by popular vote.

But the report cited a message that a Koch Foods executive sent a lobbyist in the spring of 2020 that said the industry shouldnt do more than screen employees temperatures at the door of plants. The lobbyist agreed and said, Now to get rid of those pesky health departments!

To that end, the report said USDA officials  at the behest of meat companies  tried to use Trump's executive order to stop state and local health officials from ordering plant shutdowns.

Even with those efforts, U.S. meat production fell to about 60% of normal during spring 2020 because a number of major plants were forced to temporarily close for deep cleaning, widespread testing and safety upgrades, or operated at slower speeds because of worker shortages. Companies closed plants in consultation with health officials after outbreaks were confirmed.

Throughout the pandemic weve worked hard to maintain safe and consistent operations. At the same time, we have not hesitated to temporarily idle or reduce capacity at processing plants when we determined it necessary to do so, Cargill spokesman Daniel Sullivan said.

Documents the companies provided to the committee showed that meat companies pushed hard for the executive order partly because they believed it would help shield them from liability if workers got sick or died  something a federal appeals court later rejected in a lawsuit against Tyson over worker deaths at an Iowa plant. Emails show the companies themselves submitted a draft of the executive order to the administration days before it was issued.

Early on in the pandemic, meat companies knew the virus was spreading rapidly among their workers because infection rates were much higher in the plants and their surrounding communities. The report said that in April 2020, a doctor at a hospital near a JBS plant in Cactus, Texas, told the company and government officials in an email that there was clearly a major outbreak at the plant because every COVID-19 patient at the hospital either worked there or was related to a worker. Your employees will get sick and may die if this factory remains open, the doctor warned.

The report also highlighted the way meat companies aggressively pushed back against safety recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. That led to the final guidance including language that effectively made the rules optional because it said the recommendations should be done if feasible or where possible.

___

The story has been updated to correct the spelling of former Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdues last name on the first reference.
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Rich Strike will not run in the Preakness after his major upset to win the Kentucky Derby, keeping horse racing from having a Triple Crown winner for a fourth consecutive year.

Owner Rich Dawson made the stunning announcement Thursday, 10 days before the race in Maryland.

Dawson said he and trainer Eric Reed agreed to stick with the initial plan for Rich Strike and rest him for five weeks. Rich Strike, at 80-1, was the biggest long shot to win the Derby in more than a century. Only Donerail in 1913 paid more to win.

The plan now is to have Rich Strike ready to run in the Belmont Stakes in New York on June 11. Dawson said it was wise for the colt to get extra rest and not face a short, two-week turnaround at Pimlico.

Its very, very tempting to alter our course and run in the Preakness at Pimlico, which would be a great honor for all our group, Dawson said in a news release. However, after much discussion and consideration  we are going to stay with our plan of whats best for Ritchie.

We thank the wonderful Preakness and Pimlico folks that have reached out and very much appreciate the invite.

Reed did not immediately respond to a message from The Associated Press seeking comment.

Rich Strike was not expected to be the morning-line favorite for the Preakness, with Derby runner-up Epicenter and Kentucky Oaks winner Secret Oath set to be part of the field. He could have been the first Derby winner not to go off as the Preakness favorite at post time since 2012 when Ill Have Another won the first two legs of the Triple Crown.

With Rich Strikes surprise withdrawal, the Preakness will go on without the official Derby champion for the second time in four years. Country House and disqualified winner Maximum Security skipped the race in 2019.

Bob Baffert-trained Medina Spirit finished third in the 2021 Preakness after testing positive following the Derby for a substance not allowed on race day. Mandaloun, who was elevated to the 2021 Derby win long after Medina Spirit tested positive, did not run in the Preakness last year.

Rich Strikes incredible charge past the leaders down the stretch at Churchill Downs after being initially left out of the Derby field became one of the biggest upsets in sports. The owners, trainer Reed and jockey Sonny Leon had all never won the race.

The results are in See the winners of each category of the 2022 Best of the Capital Region contest, as determined by popular vote.

Adding to the impressive tale, Rich Strike had won only once before and had been claimed for $30,000  pennies in racing and unlikely for Derby-caliber horses.

Neither Reed nor the Maryland Jockey Club immediately responded to messages from the AP seeking comment.

With Rich Strike pointing to the Belmont, the Preakness appears to be a wide-open race among horses back from the Derby, potentially including Zandon and fourth-place finisher Simplification. Trainer Chad Brown, who saddles Zandon, is also expected to enter Early Voting.

Horse racing has had two recent Triple Crown winners: American Pharoah in 2015 and Justify in 2018. Each was trained by Baffert, who is currently serving a suspension in Kentucky for medication violations that is being observed in Maryland and elsewhere. Baffert transferred Derby horses Taiba and Messier to former assistant Tim Yakteen.

Neither is expected to run in the Preakness.

Longtime Baffert friend D. Wayne Lukas confirmed Wednesday that filly Secret Oath would run in the Preakness and decided to pick a different race next Saturday for Ethereal Road  the horse that was scratched to make room in the Derby for Rich Strike. ___

More AP sports: https://apnews.com/hub/apf-sports and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
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SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  North Korea fired three short-range ballistic missiles toward the sea on Thursday, its neighbors said, the latest in a series of weapons demonstrations this year and one that came just hours after it confirmed its first case of the coronavirus since the pandemic began.

The launches could underscore North Koreas determination to press ahead with its efforts to expand its arsenal despite the virus outbreak to rally support behind the leader, Kim Jong Un, and keep up pressure on its rivals amid long-dormant nuclear diplomacy.

Thursdays launches were the Norths first weapons fired since the inauguration of new conservative South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Tuesday.

North Korea has a history of rattling new governments in Seoul and Washington in an apparent bid to boost its bargaining chips in future negotiations. The North Korean nuclear threat will likely top the agenda when Yoon meets visiting U.S. President Joe Biden in Seoul next week.

South Korea, Japan and the U.S. condemned the test of the weapons, which were launched from the Norths capital region on Thursday afternoon.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan condemned the launch when he spoke by phone with his South Korean counterpart, Kim Sung-han, according to a White House statement. The two also discussed President Joe Bidens visit to South Korea next week, Bidens first to an Asian country during his presidency. Biden is also scheduled to visit Japan during the whirlwind trip.

The missiles plunged into the waters between North Koreas eastern coast and outside of Japans exclusive economic zone, Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi said. There was no report of damage to aircraft or vessels.

South Koreas military said it boosted its readiness and surveillance while maintaining close coordination with the United States. It called on the North to immediately halt its repeated missile firings.

South Korea and Japan released similar flight details, saying the weapons traveled about 350-360 kilometers (217-224 miles) at a maximum altitude of 90-100 kilometers (56-62 miles).

Earlier Thursday, North Korean state media confirmed the countrys first COVID-19 infections as Kim ordered nationwide lockdowns to slow the spread of the virus. Kim also ordered officials to bolster the countrys defense posture to avoid any security vacuum.

In recent months, North Korea has test-launched a spate of missiles in what experts call an attempt to modernize its weapons and pressure the United States and its allies into accepting it as a nuclear state and relax sanctions on the North. Some observers say that despite the elevated anti-virus steps, North Korea would likely continue to build its arsenal with weapons tests to boost public morale and strengthen loyalty for the Kim leadership.

The results are in See the winners of each category of the 2022 Best of the Capital Region contest, as determined by popular vote.

North Koreas latest missile firings appear excessive to what would be needed to test and improve military capabilities, Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, said. These launches look like a show of strength after the Kim regime publicly admitted to a coronavirus outbreak.

A statement issued after a meeting chaired by Yoon's national security adviser Kim Sung-han said South Korea would seek practical and stern measures in cooperation with the international community to respond to the growing North Korean threat.

The North Korean weapons tested recently included a variety of nuclear-capable missiles that could potentially reach South Korea, Japan or the mainland U.S. In March, North Korea ended its self-imposed suspension on huge weapons tests since 2018 with a launch of its biggest missile capable of reaching the entirety of the American homeland.

The U.N. Security Council has typically imposed punishing sanctions on North Korea after it carried out nuclear and long-range missile tests. But that didn't happen in March because veto-wielding members are divided over Russia's war in Ukraine.

Last Saturday, South Korea detected a North Korea ballistic missile launch likely from a submarine, the first such test since last October. There are also signs that the North is preparing to conduct its first nuclear test in nearly five years at a remote testing ground in its northeast.

___

Yamaguchi reported from Tokyo.
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DETROIT (AP)  Shares of Tesla and Twitter have tumbled this week as investors deal with the fallout and potential legal issues surrounding Tesla CEO Elon Musk and his $44 billion bid to buy the social media platform.

Of the two, Musk's electric vehicle company has fared worse, with its stock down almost 16% so far this week to $728. Twitter shares fell 9.5% for the week, closing Thursday at $45.08. Both stocks have taken a bigger hit than the S&P 500, which is down 4.7% for the week.

Along with malaise in the broader markets, investors have had to weigh legal troubles for Musk, as well as the possibility that his acquisition of Twitter could be a distraction from running the world's most valuable automaker.

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that U.S. securities regulators are investigating Musk's tardy disclosure that he had bought more than 5% of Twitter shares. Musk now owns more than 9% of the San Francisco company.

The SEC wouldn't comment, and a message was left for Musk's lawyer.

A lawsuit filed last month by some Twitter shareholders alleges that Musk's stake hit 5% on March 14, so he should have filed forms with the SEC disclosing that by March 24. Instead, Musk didn't make the required disclosure until April 4, hurting less-wealthy investors who sold Twitter stock in the nearly two weeks before he disclosed his stake and drove up the price, the lawsuit alleges.

Also Wednesday, a federal judge in California handed a group of Tesla shareholders a major victory, unsealing his ruling that Musk falsely and recklessly tweeted in 2018 that he had funding secured to take Tesla private when the deal wasn't final. The tweets pushed up Tesla's share price at the time.

The ruling means that jurors in a shareholder lawsuit will start off knowing that the judge has ruled that Musk's tweets were false.

At the time of the Aug. 7, 2018 tweets, Musk was in talks with the Saudi Public Investment Fund about bankrolling the deal. But Judge Edward Chen determined that it wasn't final when Musk tweeted: "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.

Chen wrote that there was nothing concrete about funding from the Public Investment Fund, and that discussions were clearly preliminary.

"There had been no discussion about what the purchase price would be for a share of stock. Nor had there been any discussion about what percentage of the company the PIF would own or the total amount of money the PIF would contribute, Chen wrote in his ruling.

The results are in See the winners of each category of the 2022 Best of the Capital Region contest, as determined by popular vote.

Musk's lawyers have asked Chen to reconsider, contending that they aren't aware of cases in which a court has taken similar issues out of a jury's hands where the statements were at best ambiguous and were issued in the word-constrained and informal context of posts on Twitter.

The August 2018, tweets already have landed Musk in legal trouble. The SEC brought a securities fraud charge, which Musk and Tesla settled in 2018. Each agreed to pay a $20 million fine and that a company lawyer would review any Musk tweets that could affect the stock price. The SEC is investigating whether Musk has violated that requirement.

Musk recently lost a bid to have the settlement thrown out on grounds that it violated his First Amendment free speech rights.

Since Musk made his $54.20 per share offer to buy Twitter public on April 14, the shares are exactly the same price  $45.08. Analysts say that's an indication of investor skepticism that the deal will go through even though Musk has lined up financing. Twitter shares are up 4.3% year to date.

Tesla shares, however, are down 26% since the April 14 offer, partly on fears that Musk will become distracted as Tesla, which is headquartered in Austin, Texas, opens two new factories and deals with supply chain issues. The shares have tumbled more than 30% so far this year.
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KYIV, Ukraine (AP)  Finlands leaders Thursday came out in favor of applying to join NATO, and Sweden could do the same within days, in a historic realignment on the continent 2 1/2 months after Russian President Vladimir Putins invasion of Ukraine sent a shiver of fear through Moscows neighbors.

The Kremlin reacted by warning it will be forced to take retaliatory military-technical steps.

On the ground, meanwhile, Russian forces pounded areas in central, northern and eastern Ukraine, including the last pocket of resistance in Mariupol, as part its offensive to take the industrial Donbas region, while Ukraine recaptured some towns and villages in the northeast.

The first war-crimes trial of a Russian soldier since the start of the conflict is set to open Friday in Kyiv. A 21-year-old captured member of a tank unit is accused of shooting to death a civilian on a bicycle during the opening week of the war.

Finlands president and prime minister announced that the Nordic country should apply right away for membership in NATO, the military defense pact founded in part to counter the Soviet Union.

You (Russia) caused this. Look in the mirror, Finnish President Sauli Niinisto said this week.

While the country's Parliament still has to weigh in, the announcement means Finland is all but certain to apply  and gain admission  though the process could take months to complete. Sweden, likewise, is considering putting itself under NATO's protection.

That would represent a major change in Europe's security landscape: Sweden has avoided military alliances for more than 200 years, while Finland adopted neutrality after its defeat by the Soviets in World War II.

Public opinion in both nations shifted dramatically in favor of NATO membership after the invasion, which stirred fears in countries along Russia's flank that they could be next.

Such an expansion of the alliance would leave Russia surrounded by NATO countries in the Baltic Sea and the Arctic and would amount to a stinging setback for Putin, who had hoped to divide and roll back NATO in Europe but is instead seeing the opposite happen.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said the alliance would welcome Finland and Sweden with open arms.

Russia's Foreign Ministry warned that Moscow "will be forced to take retaliatory steps of military-technical and other characteristics in order to counter the emerging threats to its national security.

NATO's funneling of weapons and other military support to Ukraine already has been critical to Kyiv's surprising success in stymieing the invasion, and the Kremlin warned anew in chilling terms Thursday that the aid could lead to direct conflict between NATO and Russia.

There is always a risk of such conflict turning into a full-scale nuclear war, a scenario that will be catastrophic for all," said Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Russias Security Council.

While Russia's advance in the Donbas has been slow, its forces have gained some ground and taken some villages.

Four civilians were killed Thursday in three communities in the Donetsk region, which is part of the Donbas, the regional governor reported.

Britains Defense Ministry said Russias focus on the Donbas has left its remaining troops around the northeastern city of Kharkiv vulnerable to counterattack from Ukrainian forces, which recaptured several towns and villages around the city.

Russian strikes Thursday killed at least two civilians on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraines second-largest city, local authorities said.

The attacks also damaged a building housing a humanitarian aid unit, municipal offices and hospital facilities, Vyacheslav Zadorenko, the mayor of the suburban town of Derhachi, wrote in a Telegram post.

None of the sites "had anything to do with military infrastructure, Zadorenko said.

Fighting across the east has driven many thousands of Ukrainians from their homes.

The results are in See the winners of each category of the 2022 Best of the Capital Region contest, as determined by popular vote.

It is terrible there now. We were leaving under missiles, said Tatiana Kravstova, who left the town of Siversk with her 8-year-old son Artiom on a bus headed for the central city of Dnipro. I dont know where they were aiming, but they were pointing at civilians.

Ukraine also said Russian forces had fired artillery and grenade launchers at Ukrainian troops around Zaporizhzhia, which has been a refuge for civilians fleeing Mariupol, and attacked in the Chernihiv and Sumy regions to the north.

Overnight airstrikes near Chernihiv, in northern Ukraine, killed at least three people, Ukraine's military said. It said that Russian troops fired rockets at a school and student dormitory in Novhorod-Siversky and that some other buildings, including private homes, were also damaged.

In his evening address to the nation, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the assaults.

Of course, the Russian state is in such a state that any education only gets in its way," he said. "But what can be achieved by destroying Ukrainian schools? All Russian commanders who give such orders are simply sick and incurable.

Noting that Thursday is International Nurses Day, Zelenskyy said the Russian military had damaged 570 medical facilities since the invasion began on Feb. 24 and fully destroyed 101 hospitals.

Twelve Russian missiles struck an oil refinery and other infrastructure in the central Ukrainian industrial hub of Kremenchuk on Thursday, the region's acting governor, Dmytro Lunin, wrote in a Telegram post. In early April, he said, the refinery, which had been the last fully functional one in Ukraine at the time, was knocked offline by an attack.

In the southern port of Mariupol, which has largely been reduced to smoking rubble with little food, water or medicine, or what the mayor called a medieval ghetto, Ukrainian fighters continued to hold out at the Azovstal steel plant, the last stronghold of resistance in the city.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said negotiations were underway with Russia to win the release of 38 severely wounded Ukrainian defenders from the plant. She said Ukraine hoped to exchange them for 38 significant Russian prisoners of war.

___

Yesica Fisch in Bakhmut, David Keyton in Kyiv, Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Mstyslav Chernov in Kharkiv, Jari Tanner in Helsinki, and other AP staffers around the world contributed.

___

Follow APs coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
ALBANY  Legislation that would ban New York's use of an out-of-state behavioral facility that uses a controversial form of treatment known as "aversion therapy" passed a key state Senate committee this week.

The bill, which is poised to be voted on by the full Senate, targets the programming at the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center outside Boston. The center has faced scrutiny for its use of electric stimulation devices (ESDs), which aim to deter injurious behavior by delivering electric shocks to patients. The U.S. food and Drug Administration banned the therapy in 2020 but the Rotenberg center successfully appealed the ban in court.

The bill has sparked a fierce debate among lawmakers and some parents who say their children have benefited from the unique programs at the residential facility in Canton, Mass. Those parents also have said their children are afflicted with neurological disorders that trigger aggressive and self-harming behavior that resulted in New York facilities declining to care for them.

"As chair of the Disabilities Committee, I have a sacred responsibility to stand up for vulnerable and often voiceless New Yorkers and ensure they are getting the care and services they need to live fulfilling and comfortable lives," state Sen. John Mannion said in a statement. "Fifty years after Willowbrook, I believe it is appropriate for New York to join the 40 other states that have banned electro-shock."

Electric shock therapy and other aversive conditioning, which involves using pain or discomfort to alter a persons behavior, was banned in New York in 2005. Mannion was referring to the Willowbrook State School, a state-run institution on Staten Island. Revelations of unsanitary and dangerous conditions there prompted New York to deinstitutionalize its treatment programs for individuals with neurological conditions.

But parents of children treated at the Massachusetts facility visited the Capitol this week to pressure lawmakers against supporting the legislation. Many say their children have not been subjected to electric-shock therapy  and never will be  but could lose access to the programs there because New York is expected to discontinue funding for treatment at the facility if the legislation becomes law.

Last year, the Rotenberg Educational Center had 63 adults in its program who were from New York, including 58 whose treatment was funded by OPWDD. Seven of those individuals had been there for more than 20 years, and 32 had been there for between five and 20 years. The center also was providing services to 82 school-aged students from New York, whose treatment is paid for by their New York school districts or social services.

The bill states that it would ban "aversive conditioning which includes any procedure which causes obvious signs of physical pain, including but not limited to hitting, pinching and electric shock; prohibits the use of any procedure or punishment which denies a vulnerable person reasonable sleep, shelter, bedding, bathroom facilities and any other aspect expected of a humane existence."

The bill's sponsor, state Sen. Jabari Brisport, D-Brooklyn, said he named the legislation  "Andre's Law"  for Andre McCollins, who was hospitalized in 2002 after being restrained on a table and shocked 31 times over a period of roughly seven hours at the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center.

"I fail to see how if a practice is discontinued in New York, why we would continue to fund an institution that continues to do the practice whether that is electro-shock therapy or aversive conditioning or anything else that is no longer a practice allowed by the state of New York," Brisport said, adding that his conversations with Cheryl Collins, the mother of Andre Collins, have been a significant factor in his push for the legislation.

The senator acknowledged that the bill targets New York's dealings with the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center, which he has not visited. "To my knowledge, its the only school in the entire country that does that," he added.

The Massachusetts facility routinely takes in residents who are rejected by treatment facilities and educational programs in other states. Supporters of the center note that it changed its policies and instituted safeguards after the McCollins incident, and that the use of electro-shock therapy at the facility is extremely rare and subject to court authorization and an evaluation of the client by an independent mental health expert.

According to the center, aversive conditioning treatment is used in only the most severe cases when the person is at-risk of harming themselves, according to the center. The facility is regularly inspected by two New York agencies: the Office for People with Developmental Disabilities and the Justice Center for the Protection of People with Special Needs.

A related bill remains stalled in the Legislature that would ensure individuals treated at out-of-state treatment centers like the Judge Rotenberg Education Center be permanently entitled to due-process rights before being ordered to move into a New York facility.

Last year, the state abandoned its efforts to discontinue funding for some New York residents receiving educational and treatment programming in other states. OPWDD had ordered a handful of families to choose between moving their disabled adult children to a remote treatment center in the Adirondacks or face the loss of state funding for their child's care at out-of-state treatment centers. The office reversed course days after a Times Union story was published highlighting the situation.

The relocation issue centers on the due-process rights of families under a 2014 law that gave them more say in their children's treatment options once the child turns 21. State lawmakers had said they believed the relocation effort was being driven by an apparent cost-saving measure implemented by the administration of former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to exploit a loophole that would prevent families from invoking those rights.

Parents of children who are autistic and being treated at the facility in Canton, Mass., had said they received the relocation letters just days or weeks before their due-process rights would have been triggered as their children turned 21.

Joseph Atkinson, who had received a notification from OPWDD a year ago that his 21-year-old son would need to move to the state's Sunmount facility in Tupper Lake or risk losing his funding at JRC, told the Times Union last year that his son Joseph had never been treated with shock therapy "and he never will be."

He and his wife Michelle had said the center's treatment programs helped their son cope with his aggressive outbursts  which have included harming them and himself  and enabled him to regularly complete daily tasks, including making meals or doing chores, that had once been out of reach. He has also been removed from many of the behavioral medications he was once prescribed and lost weight as his lifestyle has become more healthy, they said.

"We'd love for him to be back in New York," Joseph Atkinson said. "We would love to have him (here) on Long Island. ... The point is that no one's accepted him (in New York) because of his aggression. The homes have an option not to accept him because they would incur additional costs."

Cohoes Assemblyman John McDonald and several other lawmakers, including Assemblyman Andrew Hevesi, who chairs the Assembly's Children and Families Committee, and Assemblyman Thomas J. Abinanti, who chairs the Committee on People with Disabilities, have pushed legislation to close the due-process loophole. They contend it would help OPWDD make it viable for New York providers to more widely offer the services for high-needs individuals that many families said they can only access in other states.
ALBANY  The state Senate passed legislation this week that would ban the retail sale of animals in pet stores, drawing an immediate rebuke from industry supporters who said those businesses would likely need to close and put numerous people out of work.

Senate Deputy Leader Michael Gianaris, D-Queens, had been a chief sponsor of the bill that he said is intended to shut down the "puppy mill-to-pet store pipeline."

"With so many good animals in need of rescue, there is no need for puppy mills that abuse animals to supply pet stores. Our four-legged companions should be treated with respect, not like commodities," said Gianaris, who has been pushing the legislation for several years.



Lawmakers who support the legislation said most of the animals sold in pet stores come from animal-producing "mills" that they contend engage in inhumane practices. The offspring of those operations, which breed animals that include cats, dogs and rabbits, often have "congenital issues resulting from poor breeding and can cost families thousands of dollars in veterinary care," according to a statement issued by Gianaris' office.

A group calling itself People United to Protect Pet Integrity issued a statement condemning the legislation.

"It is absolutely unconscionable that the state Senate would take action today on a bill that will put every single retail pet shop in New York State out of business," the statement read. "This bill will not only cause a loss of revenue to the state and put thousands of hardworking New Yorkers out of work, but it will also drive New Yorks retail pet industry into the shadows and usher in a new era of unregulated, unchecked pet sales that will be detrimental to animal welfare across the board."

According to the Senate, the state Department of Agriculture and Markets indicates there are approximately 80 pet stores registered in the state.

The bill is also moving through the state Assembly.

"It's no secret that puppy mills breed cruelty, but many people still do not realize that when you buy an animal from a pet store, you are unwittingly supporting puppy mills," said Assemblywoman Linda B. Rosenthal, D-Manhattan.
Saturday night marks the sixth High School Musical Theatre Awards, and the first since 2019 with an in-person celebration of local theater. Seventeen area high school productions are up for 11 awards, hosted by Proctors Collaborative at Proctors in Schenectady.

Follow Sara Tracey (@imsarahughes) for live tweets, and watch along for a live feed of the awards ceremy on the Times Union's Facebook page. The ceremony starts at 7 p.m.

___

Emma Herron was riding home from Scotia-Glenville High School as she watched the April 29 livestream announcement of nominations for the High School Musical Theatre Awards. The nominations kept coming for her school's show this year, "Rodgers + Hammerstein's Cinderella," in which she, in the last role of her high school career, plays the title princess.

First came Best Technical Execution, then Best Choreography Execution, then Best Ensemble. Toward the end, Herron heard her name among the nominees for Best Actress, followed immediately by her friend and fellow cast member Ashley Manocchi, also for Best Actress.

"It was the best moment ever," said Herron, who has performed in school shows since sixth grade and has sung and acted for audiences since she was 5. She has committed to attending Wagner College in Staten Island to study arts administration.

Better than the nomination, Herron said, is that it gives her a chance to perform parts of "Cinderella" again with the cast five weeks after the show closed its three-performance run in early April. Along with 16 other regional schools, Scotia-Glenville is participating in the 2022 HSMTA ceremony and show, being held live on the MainStage at Proctors on Saturday, May 14, for the first time since 2019. (Virtual events were held during two pandemic years.)

See photos from other participating schools here.

Herron and Manocchi will perform as part of a medley with three other Best Actress nominees and with the "Cinderella" cast in a song because the production was nominated for Best Musical in its tier, as well as part of the evening's opening and closing numbers that showcase representatives from every nominated production.

"It's so exciting to be with everyone else from the other schools," said Herron. Students began rehearsing last weekend at Proctors for the awards show. Said Herron, "Everyone is so excited and so kind to one another."

Now in its sixth year, the High School Musical Theatre Awards was created by Proctors Collaborative as a way to celebrate local musical theater and spotlight some of the students who may one day be in the cast of professional touring musicals that visit Proctors, said Christine Sheehan, longtime education director of the Collaborative School of the Arts at Proctors.

"We consider this a partnership with schools and a conversation we have with them all year long," Sheehan said. Because of the planning and logistics involved, schools needed to commit last fall to participating in the spring event. The pandemic surge in late 2021 made some districts uncertain of whether they would be able to produce a musical, leading to 17 participants this year, down from 30 in 2019. Judges from different areas of the Capital Region theater world saw three to five musicals each and scored them in 11 categories. All but Best Musical have five nominees; Best Musical, divided into three tiers based on the size of the show's budget as submitted by the school, has three nominated productions per tier.

For the awards show, Proctors hires a professional stage director, musical director and choreographer, all of whom have been with the program since its 2017 inception, and a five-piece band provides the live music. Proctors CEO Philip Morris will co-host on Saturday with me, Steve Barnes. The Times Union is the presenting sponsor of HSMTA.

The theater awards are put on in collaboration with the Broadway League. Winners of the HSMTA awards for Best Actor and Best Actress will travel to New York City over the summer to participate in the Jimmy Awards, a national competition for high school performers that is sponsored by the Broadway League and draws from regional programs like the one at Proctors.

"I had reservations about participating for the first time," said Brad Gregg, who is choir director of Shenendehowa High School and adviser to its musical company, which stages one show every spring. This year's production, "Mamma Mia," played for four performances from March 17 to 19, with a cast of 71 and a crew of about 80. An estimated 250 people associated with the show and the school will be attending on Saturday, according to Gregg.

He said, "I wanted the first year back after the pandemic to be about the students performing and the culture of the club, and I didn't want anything to potentially distract from that. It wasn't a problem at all. If anything, it created more excitement."

Another veteran performer closing out her senior year with a nominated musical is Katie Lee, president of Shen's Musical Company, who plays the mother of the bride in "Mamma Mia." Shen's principal, Ron Agostinoni, allowed cast and crew to take time off from class to gather to watch the April 29 nominations announcement live. "Mamma Mia" received nominations for Best Set Construction and Best Musical.

"It was so amazing to be in that room. I can't even describe the level of excitement, the cheers and screams as everyone celebrated," said Lee, a songwriter who plans to attend Syracuse University in the fall for vocal performance.

But, she added, "I'm definitely thinking about minoring in theater."

If you go High School Musical Theatre Awards When: 7 p.m. Saturday, May 14

Where: MainStage at Proctors, 432 State St., Schenectady

Tickets: $15

Info: 518-382-3884 and proctors.org See More Collapse

After the awards announcement ended, when Scotia-Glenville drama club director Michael Camelo realized "Cinderella" had earned the most HSMTA nominations, with nine, "I was so proud of these kids I actually teared up a little," Camelo said.

In addition to Herron's and Manocchi's Best Actress nominations, other nominated cast members include sophomore Makai McClinton for Best Actor. (Two more in the Supporting Actor/Actress categories bring SGHS's acting nominations to five.)

For Herron, Manocchi and McClinton, "None of them are expecting to win," said Camelo. Echoing Herron's sentiment, Camelo said, "For them, the real prize is being able to perform the role one more time  on the Proctors stage."

Directors and students involved is HSMTA said that even more important than the recognition of being nominated and the possible honor of winning is the message sent that an arts giant like Proctors devotes significant resources to the program.

"This says that what they do matters," said Camelo, in his sixth year as director of Scotia-Glenville's drama club. "They're in it because it's a place they can be included and feel safe, and can perform, and to know that they're being seen and recognized by such a prominent organization is huge to them, regardless of whether they take home an award."
Waystone, the leading provider of institutional governance, risk, administration and compliance services to the asset management industry, announced today that it is to substantially increase its Ireland-based workforce by creating up to 100 additional new roles in Cashel, following its recent growth.

The newly created Cashel-based roles will span global operations and support functions with services including KYC & MLRO, Regulatory Reporting, Tax Reporting, Fund Registration, Corporate Secretarial, People & Development, Finance, Operational Risk, Compliance Services, Fund Administration, Relationship Management, Project Management, Client Onboarding and Corporate Solutions.

The Cashel operation is central to the evolution of the Waystone Group and will continue to grow and deliver operational scale while continually attracting and developing talent from across the region.

This announcement reflects Waystones significant growth over the past year and the broadening of its service offering including the launch of Waystone Compliance Solutions and its recent agreements with KB Associates and Centaur Fund Services, both of whom are headquartered in Ireland.

Welcoming Waystones announcement, Minister for Trade Promotion, Digital and Company Regulation, Robert Troy TD, said: I am delighted that Waystone plans to create up to 100 new roles at its Cashel site over the next 18 months. These additional jobs will be a welcome boost to Tipperary and will increase the Cashel headcount to nearly 200 employees. The successful growth that Waystone has experienced in recent years is reflective of the wealth of highly skilled and talented people that the Mid-West region and Ireland more broadly has to offer. I wish the team every continued success in this new chapter.

Minister of State at the Department of Finance Sean Fleming TD said: I am delighted to welcome this expansion by Waystone which is an important endorsement for growing regional international financial services operations, which is a priority of our Ireland for Finance strategy. I wish the firm well in the next stage of their development plans and I hope their success in Cashel will encourage further investment in the regions by international financial services firms.

Waystone recently re-opened its operation in Cashel following an extensive refurbishment and expansion project with the addition of 4,500 sq ft of space, bringing its total floor space to 11,000 sq ft.

The project included a significant upgrade of facilities and branding throughout and is designed to accommodate its growing staff numbers with a view to the job creation announced on Thursday.

Over the next 18 months the new roles will bring Waystones headcount in Cashel to approaching 200.

Nick Wheeler, Global Head of Centralisation at Waystone, comments: Ireland has a strong and globally-recognised international funds and financial services industry with a wealth of highly-skilled professionals and we are delighted to be able to continue our expansion in Tipperary with the announcement of up to 100 new roles covering a wide array of financial services disciplines. Waystones Cashel-based operation is central to the Groups international growth strategy and the quality of people we have employed has made our commitment and growth in Tipperary a very easy decision. Our Cashel operation reopened last month following a 4,500 sq ft expansion and refurbishment providing us with significant room for future growth. The facility now provides our growing workforce with a high-grade, flexible workspace and feedback from staff has been extremely positive.

Earlier this month, Waystone announced that its Dublin headquarters would be moving to a new flagship location in Dublin 4 later this year, where it will occupy four floors and 52,000 sq ft of space in the prestigious 35 Shelbourne Road development. Waystone now has a presence in three locations in Ireland; its headquarters in Dublin, a Centre of Excellence in Cashel and more recently, Maynooth, following its agreement to come together with Centaur Fund Services.

CEO of IDA Ireland Martin Shanahan said: Todays announcement by Waystone for its Cashel expansion  its second site in Ireland - is very welcome news. Cashel is an excellent location to scale a financial services company and Waystones presence strengthens an already well-established IFS cluster Mid-West. I wish to congratulate Waystone on this terrific announcement and wish them every success with this expansion.
A man and woman (both in their forties) have been arrested by Gardai for suspected money laundering offences.

The arrests - which Detective Superintendent Pat Ryan of GNCCB called "significant" - were made in Co Cork today (Thursday May 12) by the Garda National Cyber Crime Bureau as part of an ongoing investigation into transnational cybercrime.

The man (40) and woman (42) are being detained under Section 4 of the Criminal Justice Act, 1984 in separate Garda Stations in Cork.

Local operational units in the Cork City area conducted searches leading to the seizure of property and assets, including crypto assets.

Computers are currently being forensically examined for evidential content.

Detective Superintendent Pat Ryan said, "An Garda Siochana considers these arrests as significant in the context of transnational cybercrime and todays action highlights the continued international law enforcement co-operation and commitment in tackling cybercrime.

In recent months, the Garda National Cyber Crime Bureau has been liaising with the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigations) to target the activities of cybercriminals.

This includes parallel investigations into the sale of illicit items online such as ransomware as a service, personal banking details, credit card details, and false documents such as passports and driving licences.
Fairfax County officials have rebuffed a request from Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin to establish a security perimeter around the neighborhoods of Supreme Court justices living in the county who have faced protests outside their homes
Police in North Carolinas capital city say a dump truck driver who was shot and wounded on Wednesday in a road rage incident has been charged
Two men who participated in an elaborate phone scam that cheated people from across the nation have agreed to repay their victims but avoided time behind bars
A suburban Philadelphia man who fired three shots into a local Democratic Party office on Inauguration Day in 2021 has been sentenced to more than three years in federal prison
Again . . .

This was a substantial win for the Guv despite a great deal of political resistance.

It's surprising that the embattled Democratic Party leader was able to maintain a coalition amid divisive politics worsening at every strata of government.

Accordingly . . .



Here's a look at today's news . . .



(Governor) Kelly had a ceremony Wednesday at a grocery store in Olathe to fulfill a promise to sign the bill even though it is not as aggressive in eliminating the tax as she and fellow Democrats want.



They had hoped to eliminate the entire 6.5% tax as of July 1. Only 13 states charge any sales tax on groceries.



Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com links . . .

"Axe the Food Tax": Kansas governor signs bill phasing out grocery sales tax Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly has signed a plan from Republican lawmakers into law to phase out the state's sales tax on groceries over three years.Kelly had a ceremony Wednesday at a grocery store in Olathe to fulfill a promise to sign the bill even though it is not as aggressive in eliminating the tax as she and fellow Democrats want.

You'll be paying a lower sales tax for groceries in Kansas soon, but it won't go to zero until 2025 OLATHE, Kansas - Kansans will soon be paying a lower sales tax rate at the grocery store after Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly signed a tax cut into law that was approved by state lawmakers. The governor, flanked by mostly Democratic lawmakers, signed the bill at a Hy-Vee grocery store in Olathe Wednesday as dozens of midday shoppers looked on.

Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly signs 'Axe the Food Tax' bill into law KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly signed the "Axe the Food Tax" bill into law Wednesday. The bill will eliminate the state's sales tax on groceries by 2025. Kelly signed the bill into law at an Olathe Hy-Vee. To mark the bill's signing, Kelly brought an axe, so she could "Axe the Food Tax."

Developing . . .
Tonight we share a newsworthy bit of behind the scenes chatter that local media has politely ignored . . .

KANSAS CITY CATHOLIC CHURCHES ARE RAISING CONCERN AMONG THE FAITHFUL OVER SECURITY THREATS AMID DEBATE OVER ABORTION LAW!!!



Ultimatums against Catholics and warning that protesters would interrupt services on Mother's Day weren't realized other than a bit of petty vandalism in JoCo.

However . . .

The main problem for Catholic parishes in KCMO is that they're too broke to afford security guards.

Moreover . . .

To our won detriment, Catholics aren't as wild about CCW in their house of worship as some of our Southern Baptist friends.

Nevertheless . . .

Local parishes are sending out polite notices to the faithful to be vigilant and careful about their surroundings amid the decisive debate over abortion.

As a public service . . . We remind militant pro-choice advocates that parishes across Kansas City are jam packed with "cafeteria Catholics" who don't really pay attention to canonical mandates, the rantings of conservative bishops or the fine print of their faith.



Here's a bit more about the threats from national media . . .



The call to protest at Catholic churches came in reaction to last weeks leaked draft opinion suggesting a conservative majority on the Supreme Court may be poised to overturn the landmark abortion ruling in Roe v. Wade.



Earlier this week, a pro-abortion group, Ruth Sent Us, called on social media for activists to Stand at or in a local Catholic Church

Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com links . . .

Threats to Catholic Masses: What's happening today? Abortion-rights activists gather outside of a Catholic church in downtown Manhattan to voice their support for a woman's right to choose on May 07, 2022 in New York City. The protests at the Basilica of St. Patricks Old Cathedral, which have been occurring weekly and where a small number of ...

Will pro-choice protesters attack Catholic churches? The right seems to think so After the Supreme Court draft opinion leak this past week that suggested the imminent reversal of Roe v. Wade, conservatives responded with a variety of attempts to change the narrative. They insisted that the real issue was about who had leaked the document, claimed that the decision wouldn't really change anything, and derided progressives' worries about which precedent would fall next as hysterical.

Catholic Dems mostly silent on targeting of churches by pro-abortion activists Some of the most high-profile Catholic Democrats have remained silent on protests and threats against Catholic churches amid the Supreme Court's leaked draft opinion that shows the court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

CatholicVote Calls on Biden, Leaders to Condemn Threats to Churches, Justices - CatholicVote org The national Catholic advocacy group CatholicVote called on President Joe Biden and other leaders in Washington to publicly condemn any effort to disrupt Catholic Masses or to doxx Supreme Court justices and their families.

Why Are Catholics Under Fire Over Roe V. Wade? Concerns have been raised about the threats of violence by abortion rights protesters as one group announced it will be targeting Catholic churches and the homes of the "extremist" Supreme Court judges who are believed to support overturning Roe. v Wade.

Developing . . .
Credit where it's due . . . Mary Sanchez files a somewhat worthwhile report on a crisis of conscience that continues around the metro.



Here's a glimpse are recent drama along with underlying issues . . .



"News broke that yet another priest, this time not under Johnstons watch, but from the diocese across the state line in Kansas, had been accused inappropriate sexual behavior with a child.

"Local media carried the story. And for many area Catholics, the news triggered emotions of the priest child abuse scandals that years ago resulted in multiple million-dollar settlements, a well-publicized civil trial and even the resignation of Johnstons predecessor.



"And then, seemingly just as fast, the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas, announced that Father Michael Scully had been cleared of the allegations. Only 72 hours had passed.



"Longtime advocates for clergy sexual abuse survivors were outraged. Word had not spread widely enough, they charged, for other possible other victims to come forward.



'Most victims stay silent for decades, said David Clohessy, an advocate with Survivors Network Of Those Abused By Priests, or SNAP, which made the allegations known to media.



'But those who do speak up often act when they see evidence that their disclosure might make a difference, Clohessy said. So the weeks and months after a suspended or suspected predator is disclosed is a key period.'

Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com link . . .
We share this clip as a historical reference of of how TV news once worked . . .

Meanwhile . . .

We're thankful for the Internets which allows the middle-class and even a few muckety mucks to exploit themselves in return for fleeting attention.

Accordingly . . . Here's a peek at how the media portrayed folks down on their luck not so long ago . . .



"Police dramas have been on television since 1951 when Dragnet first appeared. But in the early 1970s, primetime television began to present real documentaries following police on their beats as they did their duties. Most police departments did not allow what you watching here. But Kansas City Missouri did and documentary filmmakers like me found themselves on the streets with the cops filming scenes like these."



Read more via www.TonysKansasCity.com link . . .

Further worthwhile reading . . .

How poverty became a crime in America | Peter Edelman n the United States, a system of modern peonage - essentially, a government-run loan shark operation - has been going on for years. Beginning in the 1990s, the country adopted a set of criminal justice strategies that punish poor people for their poverty.

You decide . . .
The latest coronavirus news from Canada and around the world Sunday. This file will be updated throughout the day. Web links to longer stories if available.
Meanwhile, U.S. cases are up, leading a smattering of school districts to bring back mask mandates and recommendations for the first time since the Omicron winter surge ended.
In addition to the discover nature royal tour news, Kilimanjaro Tanzanite Safaris DMC have discount green season safari booking special offers



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"We are like a fist, all of us working as a team until the moment the president decides otherwise. We are working every day, and we will do so from the trench that the country chooses," he said outside the Government Palace in Lima.





Likewise, the high-ranking official called on Congress of the Republic to work as a team for the sake of Peru.





"Authorities need to rise to the occasion," Gavidia noted.





"I call on Congress again to work (with us) as a team. The country needs its authorities to solve urgent problems; we are experiencing one of the worst crises in the history of our country and the world," he added.





Zamir Villaverde





Concerning the statements by businessman Zamir Villaverde, the minister pointed out that they are out of place, adding that the National Election Board (JNE) has already issued a communication in this regard.





"He will have to present the proof of what he is saying; otherwise, his situation will get substantially complicated. Yesterday, the JNE chairman stated that they are already requesting the Public Ministry to ask this gentleman for proof of what he is saying," Gavidia warned.





In addition, the minister said the complaint should have been made before a prosecutor instead of the Legislative Branch.





"These are quite strange statements; he is using the Legislative Branch tribune to make this type of complaint; I think he should have done it before a prosecutor or judge. Undoubtedly, these are issues in which justice will have to demand proof of what this gentleman claims," he pointed out.





(END) GSR/VVS/MVB
"El Consejo de Ministros Descentralizado busca impulsar el desarrollo de las regiones del pais", indico el presidente de la Republica, Pedro Castillo, al concluir la decima sesion en Tumbes.#SiempreConElPueblo pic.twitter.com/Sx6krQvo1V
The Communications Workers Union claims that TSTT sees to have an agenda of its own, althoug
By Jeff Murphy, May 12, 2022



Housing a number of offices that include Finance and Administration, the University of Central Missouri's Administration Building is a hub for many activities geared toward the university's financial strength.



WARRENSBURG, MO  The University of Central Missouri has received a long-term rating of A+ by Standard & Poors (S&P) Global Ratings for the fifth consecutive year regarding its Missouri Health & Educational facilities Authoritys series 3013C, 2018A and 2018B educational facilities bonds. In addition, as a result of UCMs dedication to sound financial operations, the rating includes an improved outlook, going from negative to stable.



In its rating action, S&P Global noted, The outlook revision reflects our view of a third consecutive year of positive full-accrual operating performance due, in part, to managements proven ability to make material adjustments to its expense base as needed. Furthermore, the outlook revision reflects our view of the universitys historically strong available resources, which, due to favorable market conditions through fiscal 2021, grew at the university and foundation level and provide ample support to the university. Finally, the revision reflects our view of a slowly improving enrollment picture thanks to what appears to be the return of what was once a healthy international enrollment.



S&P Global Ratings provide a forward-looking opinion about a borrowers credit worthiness and ability to repay debt using a letter-grade system. AAA is the very best rating that can be given for a borrowers ability to replay long-term bonds. A long-term credit issue rating of A means that the organization being rated is more susceptible to adverse effects of changes in circumstances and economic conditions than obligations in higher-rated categories, but the borrowers ability to meet its financial commitments is still strong.



At the end of Fiscal Year 2021, UCMs total debt outstanding equaled approximately $94.6 million, including $55.6 million in revenue bonds for projects that include construction of The Crossing  South at Holden, the universitys first student living-retail complex, and a $13 million energy savings capital lease issued in April 2009 for deferred maintenance to buildings on the main campus.



"To maintain an "A+" rating for a fifth consecutive year, with an improved outlook, says a great deal about the campus-wide commitment to good stewardship of our limited financial resources." said Bill Hawley, vice president for finance and operations at UCM.



Sondra Savage-Moore, associate vice president for finance and administration, added, While we continue to focus on student success and academic excellence, it is vital that the institution remains financially sustainable. This rating reflects this sustainability as well as our ability to secure financing for potential future projects that will benefit our students.
Russian troops continue to conduct offensive operations in the Eastern Operational Zone to establish full control over the territory of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson regions and maintain the land corridor with the temporarily occupied Crimea.

This is stated in the latest report of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine as of 06:00, May 12, released on Facebook.

In Volyn, Polissya, and Siversky directions, certain units of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Belarus continue to guard the Ukrainian-Belarusian border in Brest and Gomel regions. There is still a threat of missile and bomb strikes on Ukrainian objects from the territory of Belarus.

The reinforced units of the FSB border service and the units of the Russian armed forces are on duty at the crossing points and in the border areas of Russias Bryansk and Kursk regions. In addition, Russian troops fired artillery on the settlements in Horodnia district of Chernihiv region and launched an airstrike on a settlement in Shostka district of Sumy region.

In Slobozhansky direction, the enemy regroups its troops to prevent the further advance of the Armed Forces of Ukraine towards the state border of Ukraine. In the areas north of Kharkiv, the enemy fires artillery on Ukrainian troops to inflict losses on manpower, weapons, and military equipment.

In Slovyansk direction, the enemy regroups its troops to resume the offensive on Barvinkove and Slovyansk. To strengthen the advanced units, the enemy redeployed a battalion tactical group.

In order to replenish the units that suffered casualties and provide logistical support to the group, the enemy redeployed about 300 units of weapons and military equipment to the area.

In Donetsk direction, the enemy units try to build on the offensive operations in Lyman, Sievierodonetsk, Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Kurakhove directions. The main task remains to establish full control over Rubizhne, capture Lyman and Sievierodonetsk.

In Lyman direction, the enemy leapt the Siversky Donets River to send in the main forces and conduct an offensive. The invaders assault the direction of Zelena Dolyna and Novoselivka. Fighting is ongoing.

To overcome the water barrier, the aggressor redeployed the pontoon-bridge equipment from the territory of the Russian Federation in the direction of Kreminna.

In Sievierodonetsk direction, the enemy advances towards Kudriashivka, Sievierodonetsk with partial success.

In Bakhmut direction, the enemy assaults Pervomaysk and Komyshuvakha. Fighting is ongoing.

In Avdiivka direction, the enemy assaults Novobakhmutivka and Novokalynove.

In Kurakhove direction, the enemy advances in the directions of Stepne  Novomykhailivka, Slavne  Novomykhailivka, and Oleksandrivka  Marinka. Fighting is ongoing.

In Mariupol, the main efforts of Russian invaders are focused on blocking and trying to eliminate the units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the area of the Azovstal steelworks. The enemy does not stop inflicting airstrikes.

In Zaporizhzhia direction, the enemy fired heavy artillery and MLRS on Ukrainian units.

In the Southern Buh and Tavriysky directions, the enemy tries to improve its tactical position.

In Mykolayiv and Kryvyi Rih directions, the enemy continues artillery shelling of Ukrainian positions. In order to detect changes in the positions of Ukraines Defense Forces, the enemy conducts air reconnaissance, including with the use of UAVs.

In Mykolayiv direction, in the area of Nova Kakhovka, the enemy gets ready to set pontoon-bridge crossings.

In Tavriysky direction, Russian troops replenished their stocks and conducted demonstrational activities to restrain the actions of Ukrainian troops.

The situation in the Bessarabsky direction has not changed significantly.

In the territory of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the Ukrainian defenders repulsed nine enemy attacks, destroyed eight enemy tanks, six armored personnel vehicles, five vehicles, and one anti-aircraft gun.

Ukraines air defense units shot down four Orlan-10 UAVs.

The enemy suffers losses in other directions as well.

On February 24, the Russian Federation launched a new phase of the war against Ukraine  a full-scale invasion. Russian invaders shell and bomb peaceful Ukrainian cities, towns, and villages, destroying infrastructure, torturing and killing civilians.

ol
A person was killed and three sustained injuries in a missile attack on the town of Derhachi, Kharkiv region, Thursday morning.

Kharkiv Regional Military Administration Head Oleh Syniehubov reported on the attack via Telegram, Ukrinform reports.

"It was relatively quiet in Kharkiv over the past day. The enemy didnt bombard the city itself. However, the settlements across the region are suffering from strikes. The occupiers fired at the village of Mala Danylivka using multiple rocket launchers. This morning the enemy hit Derhachi with a missile. Unfortunately, one person died and three were injured," the Regional Military Administration head said.

Read also: Luhansk region suffers 26 enemy attacks

Oleh Syniehubov reiterated that people must not relax or neglect own safety. He urged residents to stay indoors whenever possible.

The official noted that the work to restore the regions critical infrastructure is ongoing. "Gas supply has been restored in seven villages of the Borova community (currently occupied, - ed.). The mission to restore gas supply in Kharkiv districts and villages across the region affected by shelling is underway," the Administration head said.

As reported earlier, Russian troops fired on the Derhachiv community in Kharkiv region, injuring two people, on Tuesday, May 10.
Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine, Minister for Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories Iryna Vereshchuk stressed the need to ensure that the siege of the Azovstal stronghold in Mariupol does not become a military tragedy of the 21st century.

The official spoke on the French TV channel LCI, according to the Government portal, Ukrinform reports.

"I believe we must do absolutely everything so that the tragedy of Azovstal doesnt remain in war history textbooks as the greatest tragedy of the 21st century. We need a humanitarian corridor to start a dialogue. And if it happens, people seeking to be rescued will get that chance. That is what depends on Russia, and that is what is currently being negotiated. Only then can we talk about any steps beyond that," Vereshchuk said.

At the same time, the senior official stated that humanitarian corridors are currently very difficult to set up, as Russia does not want to cooperate in evacuations.

"In fact, Russia doesnt want any evacuations. They plan to destroy everyone and everything. Only you, dear journalists, the international community, the peoples of the civilized world, are not allowing this to happen! Your focus is on Azovstal, and this prevents the aggressor from bombing and destroying everyone there. And this is our common cause  not to allow the killing of people who cant defend themselves," said Vice PM.

As Ukrinform reported earlier, Ukraine has offered Russia to exchange severely wounded Azovstal defenders for Russian POWs, according to standard rules for POW swaps.

According to Iryna Vereshchuk, it is currently impossible to unblock Azovstal by military means. Azovstal's defenders do not intend to surrender, while the Russians do not agree to the "extraction" procedure.

Read also: Ukrainian soldiers blocked at Azovstal ask Elon Musk for help

On May 7, Vereshchuk announced that all women, children, and the elderly had been evacuated from the Azovstal steelworks, and that the civilian evacuation part of the Mariupol humanitarian operation had been completed. After that, the leader of the "DPR" Denis Pushilin said that the Russian forces had their hands untied, which was followed by even more brutal attacks on the stronghold.

The Russians have been constantly shelling the metallurgical plant with all kinds of weapons, including warplanes and naval artillery, also repeatedly trying to storm the premises. The Ukrainian military, including several hundred wounded, is defending the site. There is an acute shortage of medicines, and the wounded are dying in agony.
Likewise, it mentioned the presence of BA.4 and BA.5 lineages, which are prompting a rapid increase in cases in South Africa, but have not yet been detected in Peru.

BA.2.12.1 is a descendant lineage of BA.2 that has shown a rapid increase in the United States, namely in New York, accounting for more than 40% of COVID-19 cases during the first week of May in the North American country.

This lineage is characterized for showing particular mutations in the spike protein. According to calculations, it might have prompted a growth in cases 42% higher if compared to the BA.2.

Said BA.2.12.1 lineage has already been detected in Peru by the INS, in samples obtained over the last three weeks of April 2022.

These are six people between the ages of 22 and 64 (half of them women) from Lima Center (3 cases), Eastern Lima (2 cases), and Huacho in Lima Region (1 case).

The INS detailed that said citizens have not been hospitalized or reported as deceased. Besides, a timely follow-up has been carried out, evaluating the evolution of each patient.

Faced with the appearance of new variants and lineages of SARS-CoV-2, the INS continues to carry out genomic surveillance to inform citizens about public health-related decisions.

Furthermore, it recommended completing the vaccination against COVID-19 according to the age group; wearing KN95 facemask or, failing that, a three-fold surgical mask and a community mask (fabric) on top to circulate on public roads and in closed places.

The INS also called on citizens to comply with physical distancing (not less than one meter) while performing social and commercial activities.

Another characteristic of this variant is the evasion of the immune response generated by previous infections or vaccination, although without increasing the severity of the disease.

??#NotaDePrensa

INS: vacunacion, uso de mascarilla y distanciamiento de un metro ante la deteccion de linaje BA.2.12.1 de la variante omicron en el Peru.

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Russia must be kept from even thinking about using nuclear weapons against Ukraine.

Thats according to a German lawmaker, Roderick Kiesewetter, who spoke with Guildhall, as reported by Ukrinform.

The use of tactical nuclear weapons or the causing of an accident in Ukraine is unlikely, but possible, the legislator warns.

He noted that the use of tactical nuclear weapons would cause a total isolation of Russia from UN for a long time.

Asked about the initiative to have the UN General Assembly adopt a resolution implying that the use of a nuclear weapon by Russia would be seen as a declaration of war against humanity, Keisewetter said: The problem with an initiative is that it counteracts the principle of nuclear deterrence. On the other hand it would show the strength of international rules-based order and could keep Russia from even thinking about the use.

At the same time, the lawmaker sees the prospects of Russia launching a nuclear attack as unrealistic as Russia would know about the consequences.

Putin is afraid of democracy and freedom movements, Keisewetter told Guildhall. As a self-confident, well-fortified democracy, we should therefore be bold and show courage and we should not be deterred by Russias propaganda.

As reported earlier, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during an informal meeting with the CIS diplomats once again suggested that Russia could use nuclear weapons, not ruling out such an option.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine warned that the world should prepare for a nuclear strike by the aggressor power.

On the air of the Russia 1 TV channel, Russian propagandist Olga Skabeeva and MP Alexei Zhuravlev discussed how many seconds it would take for the Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile to reach the capitals of Great Britain, Germany, and France  the nations supplying weapons to Ukraine.

Earlier, the head of the Center for Defense Reforms, coordinator of the interagency platform for countering hybrid threats, which operates within the framework of Ukraine-NATO cooperation, Oleksandr Danyliuk also stated that, in response to confirmation of intentions to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, Russia should be excluded from the UN Security Council, and the UN General Assembly should immediately adopt a resolution that such a step on the part of the Russian Federation would be a declaration of war on humanity.

As reported previously, former Commander of the Estonian Defense Forces, MEP, Lieutenant General Riho Terras believes the UN General Assembly should adopt a resolution that the use of nuclear weapons by Russia against Ukraine will be seen as a declaration of war on all mankind.

Ex-Minister of Defense of Lithuania, MEP Rasa Jukneviciene, shares the idea that Russias use of nuclear weapons would mean theyre at war with the whole world.

Also, the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Latvian Parliament, Atis Lejins, supported the initiative on the need for the said UN resolution to be adopted.

A Member of the House of Lords of the British Parliament, former British Foreign Secretary David Owen, believes the initiative to discuss at the UN General Assembly the recent Russian threats to use nuclear weapons is worth looking into.

German MP Gregor Gysi said: If Russia uses a nuclear weapon against Ukraine, with or without a resolution of the UN General Assembly, all of humanity will be affected and it will lead to WWIII. So I'm assuming and hoping that it won't come to that.
Relatives of Mariupol defenders ask President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan to help rescue fighters from the Azovstal steelworks blocked by Russian troops through the extraction procedure.

They made a joint statement at Ukraine Media CenterUkrinform.

Yevhen Sukharnikov, the father of one of the fighters, said: My son is now there, at Azovstal, in this hell, just now, at the moment, they hold defense there What is happening there now is not a war  it is a massacre, it is a violation of all conventions, it's just the annihilation of besieged people  And we demand extraction. We demand the extraction of our people, garrison fighters, from Azovstal together with the wounded and the bodies of fallen comrades."

According to him, there are precedents in world history and during World War II, there is a modern example  in Syria, "where this procedure also takes place from time to time, by the way, with the involvement of Russia."

Sukharnikov said that a week ago, relatives of those currently blocked at Azovstal had issued a petition calling for extraction, already signed by nearly 1.5 million people. "This means that we have a great support of society, we only lack implementation," said the fighter's father.

He added that "a hero is needed" who could carry out the extraction of Ukrainian troops from Mariupol. According to Sukharnikov, the President of Turkey may become such a hero.

"I address personally President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as a man asking a man, as a father asking a father, to help take my son and his comrades out of there. You have some experience in implementing similar operations. We ask to send a civilian fleet, a civilian ship without weapons, to take our people. There are certain risks, we understand that, but we have very little choice. Either we take a risk and start this procedure, or the whole world watches how they are killed there," Sukharnikov said.

He was supported by other relatives of Mariupol defenders. In particular, Natalka Zarytska, the wife of Azov Regiment fighter, addressed the President of Turkey and spoke a few phrases in Turkish.

"While my husband and his comrades come under fire, I address other strong men in the world, including honorable President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan: please help us save the lives of our soldiers, our fighters in Mariupol. You have authority in the world. We love our husbands as much as Hurrem Sultan loved Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, the woman said.

She noted that hundreds of wounded stayed in inhumane conditions at Azovstal without painkillers. "They are dying from basic injuries, but there are also heavily wounded," Zarytska stressed.

She called for the rescue of the soldiers, who are currently besieged under heavy enemy fire.

"The enemy shells from the sea, from the air, from the ground. Today Mariupol is the biggest wound on the body of the world, it is the biggest tragedy of the 21st century," the woman stressed.

She said that time was running out: The war has shifted the timeframe of our lives. If the world has allowed a monster like the Russian Federation to grow up, the world must fight it collectively My husband is there, at Azovstal. We ask everyone: save our soldiers. We ask all communities, all countries of the world, please help!

As reported, Ukraine proposed to Russia to exchange severely wounded Azovstal fighters for Russian prisoners according to the rules of prisoner exchange.

According to Deputy Prime Minister  Minister for Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories Iryna Vereshchuk, it is currently impossible to unblock Azovstal by military means. Defenders of Azovstal are not going to surrender, and the Russians do not agree to the extraction procedure.

The Ukrainian military defends the territory of the steelworks, which is under constant attacks and assaults of Russians involving all kinds of weapons, including airplanes and naval artillery. Several hundred wounded Ukrainian servicemen stay in the Azovstal steelworks. There is an acute shortage of medicines. People are dying in agony.

According to President Zelensky, the Ukrainian authorities now work on diplomatic options to save the Ukrainian military defending the Azovstal.

Soldiers of the Azov Regiment, the National Guard, marines, and motorized riflemen continue to defend Mariupol.

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Ukraine has called on the UN Security Council and Secretary General Antonio Guterres to make every effort to ensure the evacuation of wounded servicemen from the Azovstal steelworks.

Thats according to Ukraines Permanent Representative to the United Nations Serhiy Kyslytsia, Ukrinforms own correspondent in New York reported from the UN Security Council meeting.

The defenders of Mariupol have already done the impossible. They stopped the overwhelming russian troops for more than 3 months. Their contribution to the disruption of the Russian blitzkrieg plans cant be overestimated, the statement reads.

The ambassador noted that many of the Ukrainian defenders remaining at the Azovstal stronghold have sustained grave injuries and have no access to the required medical assistance.

Therefore, Ukraines Permanent Representative to the UN concluded, the evacuation operation should be continued.

We call on the Security Council and the Secretary General to invest further efforts to ensure the evacuation of the sick and wounded from the Azovstal area in accordance with international humanitarian law, Kyslytsia said.

The ambassador stressed that the wounded must be brought to safe places, where their right to life will be guaranteed: Russian captivity is not such a place for the servicemen from Azovstal.

He recalled that the death toll among the Mariupol residents over the past months  about 20,000  is double that caused during World War 2 by German Nazis, who killed 10,000.

As Ukrinform reported earlier, Ukraine has offered Russia to exchange severely wounded Azovstal defenders for Russian POWs according to standard rules for such swaps.

According to Deputy Prime Minister, Minister for Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories Iryna Vereshchuk, it is currently impossible to unblock Azovstal by military means. Azovstal's defenders do not intend to surrender, while the Russians do not agree to the "extraction" procedure.

Vereshchuk said on May 7 that all women, children, and the elderly had been evacuated from the Azovstal metallurgical plant, and that part of the Mariupol humanitarian operation had been completed.

The Russians are constantly shelling the premises of the steelworks with all kinds of weapons, including warplanes and naval artillery, as well as repeatedly trying to storm the area. The Ukrainian military, including several hundred wounded, is defending the site.
The European Commission is planning to provide a wider access to the EU market of road and railway transport services for Ukraine to establish Solidarity Lanes required for agricultural exports, which were mostly blocked due to the Russian invasion.

The relevant statement was published on the website of the European Commission, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

As part of the EU's solidarity response with Ukraine, the Commission today presented a set of actions to help Ukraine export its agricultural produce. Following Russias invasion of Ukraine and its blockade of Ukrainian ports, Ukrainian grain and other agricultural goods can no longer reach their destinations. The situation is threatening global food security and there is an urgent need to establish alternative logistics routes using all relevant transport modes, the report states.

Solidarity Lanes will be used not only to export grain but also import the goods Ukraine needs, from humanitarian aid to animal feed and fertilizers.

In spite of immediate efforts by the EU and its Member States to ease border crossings between Ukraine and the EU, thousands of wagons and lorries are waiting for clearance on the Ukrainian side. The average current waiting time for wagons is 16 days, while it is up to 30 days at some borders. More grain is still stored and held back in Ukrainian silos ready for export.

Among the challenges are differing rail gauge widths: Ukrainian wagons are not compatible with most of the EU rail network. In this regard, alternative solutions are needed.

To address these obstacles and set up the Solidarity Lanes, the EC, together with Member States and stakeholders, will work on the priority actions.

In particular, the EC calls on EU market players to urgently make additional vehicles available. For this purpose, the EC will set up a matchmaking logistics platform and ask Member States to designate dedicated Solidarity Lanes contact points.

Ukraine and exporters are offered to prioritize agricultural export shipments to use the available infrastructure as efficiently as possible. A road transport agreement will be signed with Ukraine to also remove bottlenecks. To encourage EU transport operators to allow their vehicles to enter Ukraine, the EC will also investigate options for top-up financial guarantees.

In addition, the EC urges national authorities to apply maximum flexibility and to ensure adequate staffing to accelerate procedures at border crossing points.

The EC will also assess available storage capacity in the EU and coordinate with Member States to help secure more capacity for temporary storage of Ukrainian exports.

In the medium to long term, the EC will also work on increasing the infrastructure capacity of new export corridors and on establishing new infrastructure connections in the framework of the reconstruction of Ukraine.

The next round of Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) calls for proposals will allow support for projects improving transport connections to Ukraine, including for railway connections and rail-road terminals.

Against this background, the EC adopted a Decision with a view to signing a high-level agreement with Ukraine, updating the maps for the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T), as part of the ECs policy on extending the TEN-T to neighboring countries.

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Ukraine has stockpiled the necessary food products, but due to the ongoing war and the inability to export Ukrainian agricultural products, issues may arise in a number of countries.

Thats according to a Minister of the Cabinet of Ministers, Oleh Nemchynov, who spoke at a national telethon, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

"We have repeatedly said that Ukraine has stocks of all necessary products. But how the world will live without Ukrainian grain, without Ukrainian corn, without Ukrainian oil is a big question," Nemchynov said.

In this regard, he recalled that President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed to world leaders to help unblock seaports so that grain could be exported to prevent famine in a number of countries, and called on Russia to prevent the sale of stolen grain.

Read also: Ukraine warns other countries against buying Ukrainian grain stolen by Russia

The Minister of the Cabinet of Ministers also noted that the sowing campaign had been completed in almost half of the regions. According to the official, the area under crops is slightly smaller than last year. Farmers have changed the structure of crops, he added. "But in general, the sowing was quite successful, despite the fact that the enemy tried to disrupt it, purposefully striking oil depots, warehouses, silos, destroying equipment, and in the temporarily occupied regions  simply stealing it," said the official.

As Ukrinform reported, earlier the Ministry of Foreign Affairs warned other nations against buying stolen Ukrainian grain.

According to the Ministry of Agrarian Policy, the invaders have already stolen at least 400,000-500,000 tonnes of grain worth more than $100 million.

Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal noted that as of May 9, some 8.6 million hectares were sown with various agricultural crops, which is only 24% less than last year.
President of Poland Andrzej Duda and President of Slovakia Zuzana Caputova will make a joint trip to Western Europe countries to persuade their leaders to support the idea of granting Ukraine the EU country candidate status.

Caputova and Duda announced this intention during a joint press conference in Bratislava on Wednesday, Ukrinform reports.

"I invited the President [Duda] to visit together some Western leaders who have a restrained position on granting Ukraine the status of candidate for EU membership. I believe that this is a very important step to support Ukraine and strengthen peace in Europe," Caputova said.

In turn, Duda noted that he accepted Caputova's offer to carry out such a mission, "especially where there are doubts about whether Ukraine can quickly gain a candidate status."

"We have no doubt that Ukrainians should get this status as soon as possible, and we will convince in various places so that Ukraine receives such support," the Polish leader said.

As reported, on May 9, Ukraine submitted the second part of the questionnaire to obtain the status of a candidate country for accession to the European Union.

On April 18, President Volodymyr Zelensky handed over the first part of the questionnaire to Matti Maasikas, Head of the EU Delegation to Ukraine. The questionnaire was submitted to the Ukrainian side personally by President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen during her visit to Kyiv on April 8.

Zelensky signed the application for Ukraine's membership in the European Union on February 28, 2022.

Photo credit: facebook.com/andrzejduda

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France and Canada will continue to coordinate efforts to support Ukraine.

Thats according to a statement by the Elysee Palace following President Emmanuel Macrons phone call with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Ukrinform reports.

The two leaders exchange mainly focused on Russian aggression in Ukraine, the statement reads.

They stressed their commitment to the close coordination between G7 partners and allies that has prevailed since the start of the conflict, in order to support Ukraine militarily, politically, economically and on a humanitarian level, as well as to increase the cost of the war for Russia via unprecedented sanctions, the two leaders agreed.

France and Canada will continue to intensify their support for Ukraine, reads the statement.

The Prime Minister of Canada also expressed his wish to contribute to the FARM initiative proposed by France, aimed at providing a united and coordinated response to the effects of the war in Ukraine on world food security.
Ukrainians in Crimea are being drafted into the Russian army and are forced to fight against their homeland. Refusal may lead to detention and imprisonment. Crimean Tatar leaders and Ukrainian activists are arrested and imprisoned on espionage, sabotage, and terrorism charges.

"The situation in Crimea is overshadowed by a new wave of active Russian military aggression in Ukraine. Ukrainians in Crimea are drafted into the Russian army and are forced to fight against their homeland. Refusal is punished with detention and imprisonment. They are deprived of the right to own land plots in Crimea, to study in their native language. Religious institutions are closed or arrested by the occupation authorities," First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Emine Dzheppar said at the 34th session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

As the official stressed, the leaders of the Crimean Tatar people and Ukrainian activists are arrested and imprisoned for up to 20 years on charges of espionage, sabotage, and terrorism.

The 34th session of the UN Human Rights Council on the deterioration of the human rights situation in Ukraine due to Russian aggression is held in Geneva today.

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| By Mary Therese Phelan

With graduation just around the corner, one thing University of Maryland School of Nursing (UMSON) Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) student John Vincent Adofina doesnt have to worry about is the chaotic pressure of landing his first nursing job.

The new Practicum to Practice Program provides inroads to careers in nursing.

Thanks to the pilot Practicum to Practice Program, a partnership between UMSON and the University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS), Adofina knows this summer he will be reporting for duty on the Multitrauma Intermediate Care (MTIMC) unit on the fifth floor of the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC).

While his classmates are busily applying for jobs, Adofina said he has been focusing on his May 19 graduation and on preparing for his licensure exam. It is a comfort knowing I already have a job waiting for me, he adds.

The Practicum to Practice Program, also known as P3, provides a roadmap from UMSONs senior practicum experience required for all fourth-semester BSN students, to a registered nurse position at an UMMS hospital. P3 offers UMSON students an opportunity to select their senior practicum placement and first job as a nurse.

To be eligible, students must be an UMSON entry-into-practice student in their final semester of study and maintain a cumulative GPA of 2.75 or greater. Qualified students interested in the program submit an online application that is reviewed by program leaders, complete an interview with the unit manager, and formally accept the nurse graduate position.

Upon accepting a nurse graduate position on a unit at one of the UMMS hospitals, P3 participants complete their senior practicum on that unit. After graduation from UMSON, employment on that unit as a nurse graduate begins. Following successful completion of the NCLEX (National Council Licensure Examination) and licensure, the nurse transfers to a Clinical Nurse I position.

The P3 program launched with UMSON in January and has since expanded to Harford Community College. Program leaders are discussing expanding P3 into other schools of nursing and other hospitals.

Adofina took an interest in the P3 program as soon as he learned of it and excitedly applied last December, filling out a survey indicating the unit on which he wanted to complete his practicum.

I wanted to join P3 because theres a lot of randomization when it comes to the practicum placement process, and I felt like P3 enabled me to have a practicum spot that I knew I was going to work in in the future, Adofina said. Having already worked as a student nurse in an acute care unit at the UMMC R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center, he requested placement on the MTIMC unit.

I felt like the MTIMC would be a good starting point for a new grad nurse to see as many cool things as possible, and then eventually transition to the ICU, said Adofina, who finished his practicum last month.

The program was the brainchild of Lisa Rowen, DNSc, MS 86, RN, CENP, FAAN, chief nurse executive, UMMS, who was thinking of creative ways to address a national and statewide nursing shortage.

We have a lot of open nursing positions, and its not just us, she said. Theres been a bit of an exodus of all health care workers out of hospitals, and nurses, in particular, have such a large number of opportunities outside of working in a hospital.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses across the country, including in Maryland, retired early, left hospitals to work for agencies and travel nurse companies, or decided to work in other types of community settings, Rowen said.

A lot of opportunities have proliferated, not because of COVID, but in addition to what happened with COVID, she said. And so, there is a really big gap between what the state of Maryland needs, what the United States needs, and what is being produced at schools of nursing.

As many as 1 million additional nurses will be needed by 2030, according to the federal Health Resources and Services Administrations National Center for Health Workforce Analysis.

Given these challenges, Rowen said she began to consider how UMMS could encourage nursing students to begin exploring job placement opportunities prior to graduating and what UMMS could do to incentivize graduating students to consider employment at one of its hospitals.

Rowen said she knows that senior BSN students are eager to find a practicum placement, and on-site experience that allows students to practice and refine nursing skills in preparation for joining the nursing workforce post-graduation.

They want a practicum placement that will meet their personal goals of what they want to learn about, and many of them already know what specialties they want to be in, Rowen said. For many of them, being in the right practicum sets them up to be in that specialty. I thought, What could we do that would be a win-win for the student and the hospital, and a win for the school? What if we thought of a way to make the practicum experience the pathway to practice upon graduation? And if the nursing students had the option of selecting the practicum placement, rather than being placed by the faculty, would there be some nursing students who would be ready to commit to a job prior to practicum?

She discussed the idea with UMSON leadership, including Jane M. Kirschling, PhD, RN, FAAN, the Bill and Joanne Conway Dean of the University of Maryland School of Nursing; Maeve Howett, PhD, APRN, CPNP-PC, CNE, professor and associate dean of the baccalaureate program; and others who were immediately excited to get the P3 program up and running.

Its really a hiring strategy for the medical center, but at the same time, its a wonderful way for us to get students in clinical practicum slots that they would like, Howett said. Its nice that P3 has expanded the units that students can do a practicum on and particularly units where they might want to work one day.

Hospitals win by getting commitments from students early. By teaching students during the practicum, the amount of time required for onboarding them as new nurses can be decreased, Rowen added. Some UMSON faculty members have also told her that students can be distracted by their job searches by mid-semester. Getting a job offer upfront, it takes away all that stress and worry, Rowen said.

Administrators at participating hospitals were eager to get the program kicked off, Rowen said. They love the notion of getting early commitments and bringing students into the practicum experience where they can be immersed in the unit and the culture where they will be working as a clinical nurse upon graduation, Rowen explained.

Chrissy McGee, MS, was Adofinas preceptor, or mentor, on the unit. He came in and was so eager to learn, McGee said. He was ready Day One, pedal to the metal. He did great.

I think the P3 program really does put these students in a good position, especially being on the unit and caring for the patient population that they are going to work with, McGee said, noting Adofina offered to help his nursing colleagues at every turn and got along well with everyone. I think its just a huge advantage, instead of walking into somewhere more blindly.

For Adofina, his experience on the fifth floor fueled his confidence and made him even more eager to graduate than he already was.

Everything went really well, Adofina said. I got exactly what I wanted out of it. I felt like I was well prepared to eventually work on that multitrauma unit after graduation. I felt like I got a good flow of the nurses there. They work well with each other. It made me feel at home. It also increased my confidence and made me look forward to graduation, knowing that once I take my NCLEX, theres going to be a good team waiting for me thats always willing to help me out.
Seated in Berns impressive medieval townhall  the seat of power for this region of Switzerland for over 600 years  Slahadin Romodan, a 34-year-old from Eritrea, has just voted for the first time in his life.

It was a good feeling, he says smiling.

He is among over 90 refugees from all over the world, now living in every corner of Switzerland, who have come together for the second Swiss Refugee Parliament. The event is an opportunity for them to discuss issues that are critical to them, and have their voices heard.

"I want to take part in decisions on my future and the future of my kids."

Slahadin has been in Switzerland with his wife and two children since 2016. He is doing a nursing assistant apprenticeship at a local hospital and appreciates the life that he has built here, but for him, true integration comes with feeling like he has a voice in Swiss society.

As long as I am in Switzerland, I want to take part in decisions on my future and the future of my kids, he says.

He and other refugees affiliated with the National Coalition Building Institute (NCBI), a Swiss NGO, came together last year to launch the Refugee Parliament with the support of UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and other organizations.

Organized along similar lines as a regular parliament, the participants are divided into working groups and prepare proposals, which are then presented and voted on in a plenary. During the course of the day, working group representatives take the stand. Each makes an impassioned case for their proposal before the chair calls the participants to vote  a green card for yes, a red card for no.

A lively young woman dressed in a red dress and a bright pink hijab, moves around the hall answering questions, providing instructions and solving issues. She is 25-year-old Nahid Haidari from Afghanistan, a co-organizer of the Refugee Parliament and one of its founders. She has been living in Switzerland with her mother and five siblings since 2011 and sees her future here. I am Swiss, she says proudly, as she talks about the close-knit group of Swiss school friends who helped give her a sense of belonging.

Slahadin Romodan, a 34-year-old Eritrean refugee, outside Bern's townhall where the Refugee Parliament took place.  UNHCR/Ariadne Kypriadi

Nahid Haidari, 25, is one of founders and organizers of the Refugee Parliament.  UNHCR/Ariadne Kypriadi

Representatives of working groups took it in turns to take to the stand and present their proposals.  UNHCR/Ariadne Kypriadi

The university student does not shy away from talking about the difficulties she had to overcome as a Muslim woman and as a refugee. She is determined to help other refugees facing similar obstacles and believes the Refugee Parliament can improve their representation in Swiss politics.

Until now, people have always talked about us, and not with us. Our voices are missing, because political participation, including elections, is bound to legal requirements like naturalization, she explains. I hope that the Refugee Parliament will raise awareness and help make the opinions of refugees known.

After taking the stand on behalf of his working group, which is focused on building coalitions with other organizations, Slahadin talks about an issue close to his heart: the difficulty refugees experience accessing higher education. He studied psychology in Ethiopia and would like to pursue postgraduate studies but has struggled to secure financial support to attend a Swiss university. Integration in Switzerland is not difficult. The difficult part is the limited opportunities that the educational system gives to refugees, he says.

Following a long day of intense deliberations, the participants are called on to choose their 10 main proposals. Those selected include aligning the rights of all refugees in Switzerland, insurance coverage for refugees with disabilities, access to mental health services during the asylum procedure, and equal access to language courses, trainings, tertiary studies and the job market.

Last year, some of the refugees visited the Swiss Parliament to share their proposals. Both years, some Swiss parliamentarians also attended the event in Bern to engage with the participants directly.

They saw us for the first time and understood that behind all these stories are human beings and not just identity papers, says Nahid.

The Swiss medias interest in the event means the proposals are also likely to reach the wider Swiss public.

The organizers have even bigger plans for the future. They want to promote meaningful engagement with parliamentarians across political lines and set up Refugee Parliaments in every Swiss canton  an important step in a federal state where political decision-making is decentralised.

The event was supported through UNHCRs new grants for organizations led by displaced and stateless people.
The meeting started at 11:40 a.m. (local time) at the Executive Branch headquarters, the Government Palace Press Secretary reported.

At 3:00 p.m., the Head of State will welcome to the Palace's Courtyard of Honor more than 200 children from different parts of the country, who suffer from cancer.

Afterwards, the president will meet with Miraflores District Mayor Luis Molina at 4:00 p.m.

Later, at 7:00 p.m., the dignitary will hold a meeting with representatives of the National Assembly of Regional Governments (ANGR).

??? Compartimos la agenda de actividades que cumplira el presidente de la Republica, Pedro Castillo, en Palacio de Gobierno.#SiempreConElPueblo pic.twitter.com/vrF3xHBIsf
May 12 2022

Drum Property Group has opened a consultation for West Town, a 205-acre neighbourhood to the west of Edinburgh.

Located between Ingliston park and ride and the Gogar roundabout the consultation sets out plans by 7N Architects to deliver a 'high-density mixed-use extension to the city, combining employment, commercial and community use within a 20-minute neighbourhood of 7,000 new homes.

Built around the tram line the project is billed as a 'town centre' development mixing flats, colonies and terraced housing for private rent, sale and senior living. A new primary and potential secondary school are also envisaged as is a new public park.

Coordinating the masterplan with neighouring developments at Edinburgh Airport and Crosswinds the net-zero carbon vision will serve nearby employment hubs at the Gyle and Edinburgh Park.

The consultation will be live through to 3 June ahead of a phase one planning application this autumn for the first tranche of 2,500 homes.
(@Abdulla99267510)

Former Prime Minister Khan in his review petition has submitted that Article 248 of the Constitution bared any other institution from interfering in the affairs of the Parliament.

ISLAMABAD: (UrduPoint/Pakiatan Point News-May 12th, 2022) Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan has moved a review petition to the Supreme Court of Pakistan challenging a decision on the ruling of the National Assemblys Speaker on the vote of no-confidence.

Former Prime Minister Khan in his review petition submitted that Article 248 of the Constitution bared any other institution from interfering in the affairs of the Parliament.

Imran Khan said that the deputy speakers ruling was in accordance with Article 5 when he rejected a vote of no-confidence against the prime minister.

The PTI Chairman said that soon after the ruling, he sent advice for dissolution of the National Assembly. The apex courts decision neither had the record of the advice nor termed it unconstitutional, he said.

Khan said, Article 248 does not make the applicant answerable for exercising any constitutional powers before any court,.

A SC five-judge larger bench led by Chief Justice Umar Ata Bandial, passed a unanimous judgement that declared the events of April 3, including the NA deputy speakers ruling and the subsequent dissolution of the assembly, to be contrary to the constitution and of no legal effect.

The SC had ordered the National Assembly (NA) speaker to summon a session of the lower house of Parliament on April 9, Saturday to hold voting on the no-trust motion.

The SC ruling will not impact the effectiveness of Article 63 (A), whereas, the top court directed the government not to stop any lawmaker from taking part in the vote of the no-confidence motion.
(@FahadShabbir)

Pakistan and China have agreed to carry forward traditional friendship and both the countries will never allow any force to sabotage their all-weather strategic cooperative partnership, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson, Zhao Lijian said on Thursday

BEIJING, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 12th May, 2022 ) ::Pakistan and China have agreed to carry forward traditional friendship and both the countries will never allow any force to sabotage their all-weather strategic cooperative partnership, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson, Zhao Lijian said on Thursday.

"State Councillor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi held a virtual meeting with his Pakistani counterpart Bilawal Bhutto Zardari yesterday. The two foreign ministers reached important consensus on deepening our all-whether strategic cooperative partnerships and political cooperation," he said during his regular briefing in response to a question asked by APP.

He informed that the two foreign minister exchanged views on further strengthening the safeguarding of safety for Chinese citizens and institutions in Pakistan during their first meeting since the new government in Pakistan came into office.

"It is also the first official bilateral meeting after Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari was sworn in," he added.

The spokesperson said, the two foreign ministers reached important consensus on deepening our all-whether strategic cooperative partnerships and political cooperation, adding, "Both agreed that China and Pakistan should carry forward our traditional friendship." He said that friendship towards China remained the shared consensus in Pakistan transcending political differences.

Foreign Minister Bilawal reiterated that the China-Pakistan friendship remained the cornerstone for Pakistan's foreign policy, and also was a strategic priority for Pakistan.

"The new government will move forward our bilateral relations with the Pakistani speed,"he added.

State Councillor Wang Yi stressed that longstanding friendship between the two friendly countries would not be changed by individual incident and said, "With the concerted efforts of both sides, our partnership will continue to develop with our long term friendship." Zhao Lijian remarked that China and Pakistan would deepen practical cooperation across the board. "China stands ready to synergize the development strategy with Pakistan to support Pakistan's efforts in upholding economic and financial stability." He said, the two sides hoped to pursue the high quality development of China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) while keeping the good running and operation of the existing important projects.

"We will further deepen cooperation in industrial and other areas to boost the driving force for Pakistan's economic development and its economical resilience," he added.

He said, the Chinese side would also try to improve the livelihood and wellbeing of the people in both countries and pursue highest and sustainable development for the benefits of the people.

The spokesperson said, the two sides would also deepen anti counterterrorism and law enforcement security cooperation, adding, the terrorist attacks targeting Chinese citizens over the past days are deeply followed and closely followed by the Chinese government and people.

Pakistan pledged to bring to justice the criminals and strengthen security for Chinese institutions and the people, he said and added, "They will never allow any forces to sabotage China-Pakistan relations."
Secretary of State Antony Blinken will attend a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Berlin on May 14 and US-EU trade talks in Paris on May 15, State Department spokesman Ned Price said on Thursday

WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 12th May, 2022) Secretary of State Antony Blinken will attend a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Berlin on May 14 and US-EU trade talks in Paris on May 15, State Department spokesman Ned price said on Thursday.

"Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken will travel to Germany and France May 14-16 to attend the informal meeting of NATO Foreign Ministers in Berlin, Germany, and join the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council meeting in Paris-Saclay, France," Price said.

In Berlin on May 14, Blinken will discuss with NATO allies their "unified response" to Russia's military operation in Ukraine and the upcoming leaders' summit in Madrid.

"Allies will also adopt a new NATO Strategic Concept to guide the Alliance's work over the next decade," Price said.

On May 15, Blinken will visit Paris for a US-EU trade meeting. He will be joined by US Trade Representative Katherine Tai and Secretary of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

"They will meet with EU leaders to discuss how democratic approaches to trade, technology, and innovation can serve as a force for greater prosperity. The Secretary, accompanied by Under Secretary for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment Jose Fernandez, will also meet with business and civil society stakeholders to hear their views on the TTC's past and future work," the spokesman added.
India has successfully test-fired the extended range version of the BrahMos missile from the Su-30 MKI aircraft for the first time, thus providing the country's armed forces with the opportunity to carry out long-range high-precision strikes, the Indian Defence Ministry said on Thursday

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 12th May, 2022) India has successfully test-fired the extended range version of the BrahMos missile from the Su-30 MKI aircraft for the first time, thus providing the country's armed forces with the opportunity to carry out long-range high-precision strikes, the Indian Defence Ministry said on Thursday.

"India, today successfully fired the Extended Range Version of BrahMos Air Launched missile from Su-30 MKI fighter aircraft. The launch from the aircraft was as planned and the missile achieved a direct hit on the designated target in the Bay of Bengal region," the ministry said in a statement.

The defense department added that the successful test launch provided the Indian air force with the opportunity to deliver high-precision strikes from the Su-30 MKI aircraft against land and sea targets at long distances.

"The extended range capability of the missile coupled with the high performance of the Su-30 MKI aircraft gives the IAF a strategic reach and allows it to dominate the future battle fields," the statement read.

At the same time, the exact range of the missile was not disclosed.

The launch became the fifth test of the BrahMos missile in India this year.

BrahMos Aerospace is a Russian-Indian enterprise producing supersonic cruise missiles capable of being launched from submarines, ships, planes or land-based platforms. It was established in 1998 and named after the rivers of Brahmaputra and Moscow. The Russian side of the venture is represented by the NPO Mashinostroyenia company.
YEREVAN, MAY 12, ARMENPRESS. Minister of Finance of Armenia Tigran Khachatryan participated in the annual meeting of the Board of Governors of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) from May 9 to 12, the ministry said in a news release.

The actions taken so far within the frames of the EBRD activity and the registered results were summed up during the meeting. The governors were introduced on the details of implementation of the EBRDs 2021-2025 strategic and capital program.

During the official visit in Morocco, minister Khachatryan met with the top officials of the EBRD, discussing the latest developments of the global economy and the existing challenges, touching upon Armenias cooperation with the Bank. The sides attached importance to the ongoing EBRD-funded infrastructure projects in Armenia, as well as outlined the prospects of expanding the future cooperation.

The Armenian minister also met with the representatives of the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group and discussed the opportunities of the banks partnership with Armenia.
Former Sri Lankan Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa and his son, member of parliament Namal Rajapaksa, have been barred from leaving the country by a court decision on Thursday on suspicion of having links to recent attacks on peaceful protesters, media reported

MOSCOW/NEW DELHI (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 12th May, 2022) Former Sri Lankan Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa and his son, member of parliament Namal Rajapaksa, have been barred from leaving the country by a court decision on Thursday on suspicion of having links to recent attacks on peaceful protesters, media reported.

Mahinda and Namal Rajapaksa have been prohibited from traveling abroad in connection with the investigation of attacks on the sites of peaceful protests that took place on Monday, Sri Lankan news website News First reported.

A Sri Lankan court issued a travel ban for another 15 other members of the country's parliament on suspicion of conspiring and planning the attacks, the report said.

Meanwhile, Sri Lankan defense ministry secretary Kamal Gunaratne has denied accusations that he was preparing a military coup in the country, according to the Ada Derana news website.

"None of our officers have the desire to seize power. This has never happened in our country," Gunaratne was quoted as saying.

On Monday, groups of pro- and anti-government activists clashed in Colombo amid the state of emergency, imposed on Friday, and a nationwide strike demanding the resignation of the president.

Sri Lankan Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa stepped down from office in a bid to mitigate the ongoing crisis. The protesters set his and the president's houses on fire.

According to Colombo Gazette, the order was issued due to an increase in the number of arsons and instances of public property destruction by protesters across the country.

Earlier in the day, Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa urged the protesters to stop violence and pledged to make every effort to restore political stability in the country.

Sri Lanka has been suffering from the worst economic crisis in its history since gaining independence in 1948. The dire economic situation was caused by shortages of foreign Currency as tourist flows dried up during the COVID-19 pandemic, preventing the country from purchasing enough fuel. The pandemic has also negatively impacted remittances from Sri Lankans working abroad. There is an acute shortage of food and basic necessities, including fuel and gas, with many parts of the island nation facing lengthy power blackouts.
Renowned DuBard School Celebrates 60 Years of Changing Lives

Thu, 05/12/2022 - 13:36pm | By: Van Arnold

Perhaps, no better description exists of the DuBard School for Language Disorders than the one offered by University of Southern Mississippi (USM) President Emeritus Aubrey K. Lucas. The DuBard School makes miracles! declared Lucas.

Lucas served as USM president from 1975-96 and again as interim president in 2012-13. He saw first-hand how the DuBard School teachers and staff worked tirelessly to make the school a prominent and proven leader in the field of language disorders. He remains an enthusiastic advocate for the renowned school.

We have seen families move to Hattiesburg from out of state so that their children could benefit from the DuBard School, said Lucas. The superb faculty and staff give hope and reassurance. DuBard graduates have finished college and are employed in very significant positions. I have known all of the directors of the school, and they should be thanked for leading the DuBard School so very effectively during these 60 years.

Housed at USMs campus in Hattiesburg, Miss., the DuBard School for Language Disorders has been operating in the miracle business since 1962 when Dr. Etoile DuBard founded the School for Preschool Deaf and Aphasic Children. Dr. DuBard also helped organize the curriculum as a charter faculty member for the original Speech and Hearing Department at USM. The DuBard School was officially renamed in her honor in 1996. As part of its 60th Anniversary celebration, the school will host an open house on Thursday, May 19 between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m.

The DuBard School is a clinical division of USMs School of Speech and Hearing Sciences serving children with severe language/speech disorders, including the written language disorder of dyslexia, and/or hearing impairments and provides guidance and counseling for parents and families of the children.

The school is staffed by nationally certified speech-language pathologists, certified academic language therapists and educators of students with hearing loss. They teach children ages 3-13 through a special phonetic, multisensory program called the DuBard Association Method.

A Beautiful, Broken Record

Austin Shavers works on a classroom assignment at the DuBard School. (Photo by Kelly Dunn)

No need to sell Amber and Zachary Shavers on the extraordinary benefits reaped by parents with children enrolled at the DuBard School.

Their 8-year-old son, Austin, has blossomed more in the past year as a DuBard student than they imagined possible. Struggling with a speech impediment since infancy, Austin experienced a rollercoaster of successes and setbacks while attending public schools.

The Shavers, who live in Wiggins, Miss., were so determined to secure a spot for Austin at DuBard that they placed him on a two-year waiting list for enrollment. The payoff has been exceptional. With the compassionate, comprehensive help from trained professionals, Austin maintains a steady trajectory toward overcoming his disability.

The change it has brought to him, and his speech, and his views of our big world is just incredible, said Amber Shavers.

She has been thoroughly impressed with the programs regimen - particularly the one-on-one time Austin receives from DuBard teachers who strive to identify each childs strengths and weaknesses. Much to her delight, homework has gone from a dreaded chore to a favorite pastime.

He has a notebook that has what they call Home News where at the end of the weekend you sit your child down and ask them what they did that weekend that they would want to tell everyone about, said Amber Shavers. Thats his favorite part of homework on the weekends, and I feel like it gives all of the kids a chance to talk about their home lives.

She continued, I probably sound like a broken record to his teachers and the administrators and everybody else there, but we are forever grateful for DuBard as well as the USM students that come to assist with the teachers and students. If my husband and I go somewhere and see someone we know, we are always told how much of a change in Austin and his speech they see, and how they love how much he has grown.

Elijah Cooper listens to instructions from a DuBard School teacher. (Photo by Kelly Dunn)

The DuBard Schools origins can be traced to the tenure of USM President William D. McCain, who learned that a faculty members child needed special services to address a speech disorder caused by complications from Asian Flu. McCain appointed Etoile DuBard to develop and direct a program designed to help the child and others who might require similar therapy. When the School for Preschool Deaf and Aphasic Children opened its doors in 1962, Dr. DuBard had three students.

Etoile DuBard taught the students using the Association Method - a multisensory, structured approach developed by Mildred McGinnis, who was a teacher at the Central Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis, where Etoile studied. Etoile later earned her doctorate and began working with staff to revise and expand the Association Method. Now known as the DuBard Association Method, this process of teaching language is currently used by professionals around the world.

As the DuBard Schools expertise and reputation continued to grow, so did the need for funding. In the mid-1970s, the school began to receive partial funding from the Mississippi Department of Education. Although the state allocation is crucial, the school relies heavily on contributions from the United Way and private donors to cover the cost of budgetary obligations.

The schools services are provided at no cost to students and their families. However, many students require sophisticated technology and specific services to meet their goals. These include hearing aids, cochlear implants, occupational therapy, FM listening systems, specialized computer software among many others. The cost of serving a single, full-time student each year is approximately $22,500.

The DuBard School out-client therapy program provides fee-based individual and small-group therapy for clients ages birth through adulthood who have a diagnosed language, speech or hearing disorder, or a combination of these disabilities. Included are those whose learning differences are in oral language, speech, reading or a combination of oral and written language deficits, including dyslexia.

The Gift of Language

Landon Montgomery is one of approximately 80 full-time students at the DuBard School. (Photo by Kelly Dunn)

After serving several years as a staff speech pathologist, Missy Schraeder was named the DuBard School Director in April 2019. She became familiar with the school during her undergraduate years at USM.

I remember being in school and seeing other students who were taking the DuBard Association Method class. It looked so unique and fun, so I decided to take the intensive summer training, said Schraeder. The next fall, I signed up to complete practicum hours at the DuBard School. My first placement was under the supervision of Dr. Maureen Martin, our former director, and Ms. Daphne Cornett, our former assistant director. I remember learning so much from them and from the students I had the pleasure of working with. Seeing the progress that those students made was inspiring.

When Schraeder joined the DuBard School staff in 1996 the school was housed in the J.B. George Building with space barely large enough to hold 35 students. Classrooms could accommodate no more than seven students. Since moving to its own 17,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art facility in 2002, the school has seen its enrollment swell to an average of 80 full-time and 40 out-client students.

The DuBard School provides not only expert care to children and their families, but also serves as a practicum site for USM students in speech and hearing sciences, kinesiology, and dyslexia therapy. These practicum students gain valuable experience working with students who have significant communication issues while learning from DuBards highly qualified staff.

When asked to summarize the significant role DuBard plays in the lives of countless families, Schraeder stated: We often talk about giving the gift of language. And I think that is exactly what we do at the DuBard School. Giving children the tools they need to be able to communicate is an invaluable gift to them and to their families. Having communication skills allows a child to achieve academic success, gain meaningful employment and become a productive member of society.

Diagnosing the Problem

Meredith Enger is a testament to the life-changing rewards available to students at the DuBard School. The Hattiesburg native struggled throughout her early school years, especially in the areas of spelling and reading. What her teachers were unable to detect was an underlying condition that inhibited Engers academic abilities.

Enter the professionals at DuBard.

The school I attended did not have the resources to diagnose me as dyslexic. Therefore, for many years I went undiagnosed, said Enger. Thankfully, I have persistent and involved parents who knew there was a more significant problem. They reached out to Mrs. Maureen Martin, a long-time family friend at DuBard, and she was able to accommodate me for testing.

Enger, age 12 at the time, began an after-school tutorial program at the school in 2009. After two years of intense therapy to address her dyslexia, she successfully completed the DuBard program.

She went on to graduate from Sacred Heart Catholic High School in 2015 and earned her undergraduate degree in journalism at the University of Mississippi in 2019. Talk about a success story  Enger finished her college degree program in four years, and with honors.

Today, Enger works at what she labels her dream job as Mississippi Magazines Special Projects Director. Her duties include handling accounts on various social media platforms, the magazines website, and running annual promotions, including Mississippi Magazines Best of Mississippi reader poll. She notes that her favorite task is working with brides to create the magazines annual Wedding Register.

Enger walked into the DuBard School a frustrated, confused youngster. She walked out armed with the tools and confidence necessary to achieve her aspirations. The school tossed Enger and her parents an extraordinary lifeline.

I owe everything to the DuBard School, and I do not know where I would be without DuBard, she said. Specifically, my excellent teacher, Ms. Susie Utz, encouraged me and taught me how to overcome my disability. I truly feel that the DuBard School gave me the skills to conquer any obstacle that has been in my way. After DuBard, I never had to receive any extra assistance for my learning disability.

Setting a Higher Standard

Gavin Costello works on an writing assignment. (Photo by Kelly Dunn)

Dr. Maureen Martin served as the DuBard Schools Director for 28 years, retiring in 2017 after 41 years at the school. She points out that when the school began operation in 1962 there were no services in public schools for children with disabilities.

That didnt come along until the 1970s. At that time, the standard of achievement for deaf children in this country was quite low  a fourth-grade reading level  but those werent Etoile DuBards standards, said Martin. She worked tirelessly to help children achieve at a higher level while she also prepared university students to expect and achieve more than the norm.

Each year, students from approximately 20 school districts access the unique, intensive, and life-changing program DuBard provides. Commitments from USM administrators, the DuBard Advisory Board, generous donors, the Hattiesburg community, the State Legislature, parents, students, and the exceptional staff have nurtured and sustained the school for an impressive six decades.

The DuBard School has put Southern Miss on a national and international arena in the fields of speech-language pathology, education of deaf and hard-of-hearing students, and dyslexia, said Martin. The impact on USM students who learn from highly credentialed and experienced professionals, and then go on to serve elsewhere, affects countless families.

Martin says that she is humbled and thrilled to regularly hear of former students  now adults  who lead independent and productive lives, while making a difference in their families and communities.

What more could we hope for and work toward? That each individual child can be all that he or she is capable of being is what we are called to, and it is such a privilege to be a part of that, said Martin.

Schraeder recounts a personal example of how transformative the DuBard School program can be for young children. Her granddaughter came to the school with severe speech and language issues. After three years of therapy, she returned to her local school district on the proper grade level.

Not only is she able to communicate and complete her academics with good grades, but she lost the frustration she had when trying to talk, said Schraeder. She went from a very shy child who was not willing to talk to someone for fear of not being understood to a very outgoing and friendly young lady who is not afraid to talk to anyone. Giving her the gift of language allowed her personality to shine, and I have great expectations for her future.

And just like that, another miracle takes shape.

To learn more about the DuBard School for Language Disorders, call 601.266.5223 or visit: https://www.usm.edu/dubard/dubard-school-history-mission.php
YEREVAN, MAY 12, ARMENPRESS. The British-Dutch oil and gas company Shell will launch a network of filling stations in Armenia this autumn, the Minister of Economy Vahan Kerobyan told ARMENPRESS.

The Shell filling station network will be launched in Armenia already in autumn, Kerobyan said.

Kerobyan said the filling stations will be of new quality and standards. The plan to open the gas stations existed since last year.
The Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, begins a visit to Croatia on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Holy See's recognition of the independence of the Croatian Republic, and says an escalation of the conflict in Ukraine would have devastating consequences for the world.

By Vatican News



The Holy See's concern over a "possible escalation" of the war in Ukraine was expressed on Wednesday by Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, during a meeting with the press in Zagreb on the occasion of his visit to Croatia.

He was there for the 30th anniversary of the Holy See's recognition of the independence of the Croatian Republic and the 25th anniversary of the ratification of three treaties between the Vatican and the Balkan country. The cardinal arrived in the Croatian capital on Tuesday evening.

"Bearing in mind the destructiveness of the weapons" possessed today, he said, a widening of the conflict would threaten "the destruction of all humanity".

He then recalled Pope Francis' strong words against the folly of war and his willingness to do everything to contribute to peace, offering Vatican mediation and also saying he was ready to go to Moscow, an offer that has so far not been accepted.

"It seems that at the moment there is little hope, that a consensual conclusion to the war can be reached," but the Holy See remains available to help put an end to this war as soon as possible, the Cardinal said.

Mass in Zagreb

In his homily during Mass in Zagreb, Cardinal Parolin said, "the darkness of war obscures even the light of human reason and seems to defeat even common sense. For the past two years, we have been living in the darkness of the pandemic, without knowing what to do. Every attempt at a solution seemed inadequate.

After the pandemic came the conflict in Ukraine, he noted. "In such 'dark' experiences we find ourselves disoriented," he said, "but the light of the Risen Christ is stronger and gives hope and consolation, also through his witnesses.

Among these, he cited Blessed Alojzije Stepinac: "In these times of war in Europe," he concluded, "it is worth having recourse to his intercession. Today, like him then, we are faced with the evil that is born in the hearts of men and tends to occupy minds and souls."

Meeting with the Croatian bishops

The visit to Zagreb began on Wednesday morning with a meeting with the Croatian bishops, to whom he brought the Pope's greetings and closeness.

"Over the centuries," the cardinal said, "the Croatian people have always shown undeniable loyalty to the Apostolic See. For their part, many Popes have cherished the growth of close ties with the Croatian people and have shown countless signs of benevolence towards this Church and this land. After years of the communist dictatorship, during which everything was done, through bloody and systematic persecution, to sever the ties of the Croatian people with the Successors of St. Peter, on 25 June 1991, Croatia, together with Slovenia, proclaimed its independence from the then Yugoslavia.

One of the concrete signs of the Holy See's closeness to the Croatian people, he stressed, was precisely the recognition of Croatia's independence on 13 January 1992. As is well known, the Holy See was among the first to take this step and, less than a month later, on 8 February 1992, the Holy See and Croatia established diplomatic relations, the first in the more than millennial history of the Croatian nation.

In these 30 years, the Secretary of State added, "the country and the local Church have taken very important steps, which the Holy See has followed with keen attention. A few years after independence, the Government recognized the special historical and cultural role of the local Church, as well as its social position, and signed and ratified four bilateral Agreements with the Holy See, between 1996 and 1998. The Military Ordinariate and five other dioceses were established. Religious instruction in schools and the teaching of Theology in State Universities has returned. The Croatian Catholic University in Zagreb was opened, as well as several Catholic schools, and numerous churches were built or renovated, he said, and thus, thanks to their joint efforts, good relations were established between Church and State.
The war in Eastern Europe is one of the leading themes that have emerged in meetings the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, is having in Croatia, where he is on a visit to mark the 30th anniversary of the recognition of the country's independence. In a speech on Thursday to the Croatian parliament, the cardinal reaffirmed the Holy Sees closeness to the country and its people.

By Benedetta Capelli

Thursday marked the last day of the Vatican Secretary of States visit to Croatia and its capital Zagreb to mark the 30th anniversary of the Holy See's recognition of the independence of the Croatian Republic and the 25th anniversary of the ratification of three treaties between the Vatican and the Balkan country.

On Thursday morning, he met with the Speaker of the Croatian Parliament, Gordan Jandrokovic, during which the Cardinal recalled the appeals for peace for Ukraine, reiterated several times by Pope Francis since the beginning of Russia's invasion of its neighbor.

For his part, Jandrokovic expressed concern about the possibility of the crisis spreading from Ukraine to south-eastern Europe, with a particular focus on Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the dialogue, the president spoke about the situation in Croatia, expressing fears for the country's future and survival, and then called on the Holy See to help with a solution that would guarantee the equality of all three peoples.

The parliament president expressed satisfaction with the exceptionally good and friendly relations between Croatia and the Holy See, based on strong and historically long ties.

'Beloved' Croatian people

The good relations between the parties were at the centre of the detailed speech that Cardinal Pietro Parolin gave to the Zagreb Parliament, firmly reaffirming that "the Holy See is faithfully at the side of its beloved Croatian people."

He called it a caring bond born over time which, according to the Cardinal, is well expressed by the presence of a Catholic church in the square in front of the Parliament.

The development of St Mark's Square, Cardinal Parolin explained, reflects the whole reality of the historical relations between the Croatian people and the Catholic Church. A reciprocal closeness that has grown with the special predilection and respect nurtured by St John Paul II.

"Like no other," the Cardinal added, "he understood the burden of history, injustice, and suffering to which the Croatians were exposed as a Slavic people in their centuries-long aspiration to have their own State."

John Paul II and Croatia

It was Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Parolin recalled, who gave great impetus to intense juridical and diplomatic activity both before and during the creation of the contemporary Croatian state, particularly at the moment of independence, formally recognized by the Holy See on 13 January 1992, among the first to do so.

"This act," emphasized the Secretary of State, "remains to this day a sign of strong faith, trust, closeness, dedication, and mutual support", even more so confirmed in the three pastoral visits of John Paul II, in one of which he beatified Cardinal Stepinac, a strenuous opponent of Nazi-fascism and defender of religious freedom during the Tito regime.

Read also 12/05/2022 Cardinal Parolin: Escalation of war in Ukraine would threaten all humanity The Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, begins a visit to Croatia on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Holy See's recognition of the independence of the ...

Agreements to bring harmony

In his speech, the Cardinal recalled the value of the treaties signed, specifying that the agreements between the Holy See and the Republic of Croatia "must not be seen to the detriment of other religious communities", but are to be considered as "a model" to prevent conflicts or disagreements.

They are, in general, "useful for regulating the life of the Church and guaranteeing its independence in the face of the desire to interfere in its organization". They are also useful for "building a human, just, and united society" according to the perspective indicated by the conciliar constitution Gaudium et spes.

In this regard, Cardinal Parolin recalled the agreement on the appointment of bishops between the Holy See and China, signed on 22 September 2018, and quoted a phrase by Cardinal Casaroli: "The important thing is not the concordat but the concord", because the value of agreements lies "in promoting harmony and coexistence in today's societies."

On the subject of religious freedom, the Cardinal stressed that "almost all European countries have chosen the system of confessional agreements" to guarantee it, and the Catholic Church intends "to obtain a statute that is as appropriate as possible to its specific needs."

Recalling that "Christianity and Christian solidarity represent the foundations of Western culture and of Europe", the Secretary of State added that nowadays there remain in Croatia damaging signs of the long decades of totalitarian destruction that must be healed with love and dedication.

"It is right to emphasize," he concluded, "the firm faith of the Croatian people and the bona fides in relations between the Holy See and this people."
YEREVAN, MAY 12, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan received today Russias Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Overchuk and Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko, the PMs Office said, adding that the meeting was also attended by Armenian Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigoryan.

I am happy to see you here, I want to state once again that we highly appreciate the work done so far within the frames of the trilateral working group dealing with the opening of regional communications, vehicle, railway communications. You know how important this topic is for us because when we achieve concrete solutions, it will change the situation in the region not only from economic, but also political, psychological and security terms. You know how much we are interested in having a concrete and positive result over it. We continue working intensively. During my official visit to Moscow, this has been one of the key topics that was discussed with Russian President Vladimir Putin. And I am very glad that we have fixed our common approaches and common positions over this.

As for the further work concerning this topic, this topic also has a technical part, which, I think, is not so difficult. But in order for us to have concrete and effective solutions, we need to solve all the legal issues, the procedural matters which will not only help us to quickly come to concrete solutions, but also these solutions will become more substantiated and stronger, if it can be said so. And the mechanism will work effectively in the long-run. I am sure that we all are inclined to such work. I once again want to thank for the work done. I hope and I am sure that this work will be effective in the future as well, its just necessary to come to concrete solutions as soon as possible, the Armenian PM said in his welcoming remarks.

In his turn the Russian deputy PM Alexei Overchuk thanked PM Pashinyan for the warm welcome and said: Indeed, quite recently we have met with you in Moscow where you were on an official visit, you visited Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod. A whole series of meetings both with Vladimir Putin, Mikhail Mishustin and Valentina Matviyenko have taken place. Our profile ministries received instructions based on the results of those meetings, and we are working on their direction. And I want to mention a very important moment that you drew a focus during your visit, that is to completely lift all the coronavirus-related restrictions. Now the operational staff made such a decision, all restrictions will be lifted from May 16 and it would be possible to travel both by roads and planes. In other words, all these issues, which were delaying the contacts between our countries, are being lifted today. Moreover, we have adopted with you decisions about many issues relating to trade, which are very important in the context of todays topic. We are ready to continue the cooperation and develop it with the same spirit also in the future.

Today, of course, we would like to talk about the activities of the trilateral working group. We fully share your assessments on the establishment of transportation communications between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Truly, when this takes place, it will completely change the entire transportation configuration of the region. And really new opportunities will open so that the economy of Armenia will develop and will receive an additional impetus, and Armenias role will significantly increase connected with it. In this respect, of course, we are making maximum efforts both with Mher Grigoryan and Shahin Mustafayev in order to solve these issues. And as you said, the legal and procedural solutions, of course, are very important.

During the meeting issues relating to the bilateral cooperation agenda between Armenia and Russia, as well as the activity of the Armenia-Russia-Azerbaijan deputy prime ministerial trilateral working group were discussed.

The prospects of restoring transportation communications in the South Caucasus region and the further process of the ongoing works within the frames of the January 11 statement of the Armenian Prime Minister, the Russian President and the President of Azerbaijan were touched upon.
WASHINGTON  U.S. President Joe Biden will have "private time" with each in a group of visiting Southeast Asian leaders during a summit this week in Washington, a senior U.S. administration official said on Wednesday.

The official also told reporters on a call that discussions were underway with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) about the possibility of having an empty chair represent Myanmar at the summit.

ASEAN has barred Myanmar's junta from attending its summits until it sees progress in a five-point "consensus" agreed last year in hopes of ending violence that has erupted since generals seized power and detained the country's democratically elected leaders.
PHNOM PENH  Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen said on Thursday that opposition party leader Kem Sokha, who is on trial accused of treason, should be permitted to travel overseas for medical treatment, in a rare conciliatory move.

Hun Sen said though it was ultimately up to the court to decide, Kem Sokha, whose Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) was banned ahead of a 2018 election, should be given special dispensation to leave.

Such overtures to rivals are rare for the self-styled strongman, who has ruled Cambodia for 37 years and has gained notoriety for his harsh treatment of his opponents, most of which are now in exile.

"Going abroad to seek a medical checkup and visit children, there should be no obstacle," Hun Sen told supporters on the sidelines of a summit in the United States.

"The decision whether to allow him to go or not is the complete power of the court. I don't interfere but if I am the court, a judge, I would allow if requested."

Presiding judge Koy Sao could not be reached for comment on Thursday.

The CNRP's dissolution effectively turned Cambodia into a one-party state, allowing Hun Sen's party to win every seat in parliament and influence independent bodies.

Kem Sokha was freed from house arrest in 2019 but his trial is ongoing. He is banned from political activities.

His treason charges stem from accusations he had conspired with the United States to overthrow Hun Sen. Kem Sokha and Washington have refuted that.

Scores of members of the disbanded CNRP are also trial in what the United Nations and human rights groups say is a sham.

Many CNRP members fled overseas, including most of its leadership, leaving behind a country with no functioning opposition.

Pheng Heng, a lawyer for Kem Sokha, said he was not aware of any plan to go abroad, but his client would go if permission was granted. He urged the government to go a step further.

"If they really have a willingness to compromise, they should ask a prosecutor to withdraw the charges," Pheng Heng told Reuters.
Indonesia and Malaysia, regular fixtures among the worlds annual forest loss leaders, both lost less primary forest than the year prior for the fifth year running in 2021, according to new data.

The U.S.-based World Resources Institute, which released its latest figures on global forest losses last month, called the Southeast Asian countries welcome exceptions in what was otherwise yet another bleak year for forests worldwide. WRI and others warn, though, that a host of mounting forces could start pushing forest losses in both countries up again in coming years.

According to WRI, Indonesia lost about 203,000 hectares of primary forest last year, down from 270,000 hectares the year before, and well below a peak of 929,000 hectares in 2016. Primary forest losses in Malaysia meanwhile fell from roughly 73,000 hectares in 2020 to 72,000 hectares last year.

Their losses pale in comparison to those of forest loss leader Brazil, where 1.55 million hectares vanished last year.

Southeast Asias forests, and Indonesias especially, still matter in the global fight against climate change, though, said Elizabeth Goldman, a WRI senior research manager.

Forests store and sequester carbon, and when these forests are cut down or burned or otherwise degraded then the stored carbon within the forests  the wood, the leaves and all the biomass  can be released into the atmosphere as emissions. And Indonesia still has a lot of humid primary forest. ... It has the third-largest primary forest ... in the tropics, she told VOA.

The tropics primary rainforests, old-growth forests largely untouched by human activity, are some of the most carbon-rich and biodiverse ecosystems in the world.

That is why the falling losses in Indonesia and Malaysia are so encouraging, said Goldman, not only for them, but as an example to others.

When a country sees losses go down for one or two years were always sort of cautiously optimistic, because there can be fluctuations in the data. But a five-year-in-a-row decline I think is reason to celebrate and shows that things are working, in Indonesia especially, she said.

All coming together

WRI credits a mix of government policies and corporate commitments for the gains Indonesia and Malaysia have been making.

Indonesia has had a moratorium on the clearing of primary forests since 2011, made permanent in 2019, and another on issuing new permits for palm oil plantations since 2018. Taking a different tack, Malaysia in 2019 committed to clearing no more than 600,000 new hectares of forest for palm oil up to 2023 to slow down its own forest losses.

Indonesia and Malaysia are the worlds first- and second-largest producers of palm oil, respectively, and together fill 85% of the worlds supply of the popular plant extract, used in everything from instant noodles to cosmetics to biofuel. The countries plantations also account for the bulk of their forest losses. Keen to stay plugged into an increasingly climate-conscious global supply chain, though, more and more of the plantations are adopting so-called NDPE policies  No Deforestation, No Peatland, No Exploitation.

Goldman said the Indonesian government has also stepped up its fire management and response system since 2016, when devastating fires accounted for more than 40% of the countrys tree cover loss.

Its difficult to quantify exactly how much each of these policies or practices are contributing to the decline, but it seems like its all coming together to have a positive impact, she said.

Forest losses have definitely been declining, which is great, agreed Chris Wiggs, Indonesia program director for Aidenvironment, a Netherlands-based group that works on making development sustainable. He said NDPE policies, in particular, have had a massive impact, with 83% of palm oil refining capacity across Indonesia and Malaysia now on board.

He also pointed to important forces at play beyond government or corporate control.

Consecutive years of heavy rains have made much of Indonesias remaining forests too waterlogged to clear, he said, while pandemic restrictions have left many companies planning to develop plantations short-staffed. Fluctuations in global palm oil prices over the past few years have also made it riskier to invest in their development, he added.

Trouble on the horizon

Some of the same forces pushing forest losses down are due to expire soon, or have already done so, raising fears that losses could start to level off or even rise again.

Goldman noted that the recent run of wet years is due to end in 2022 with the return of El Nino, a cyclical weather phenomenon that brings Southeast Asia higher temperatures and, with them, the risk of more severe droughts and forest fires.

Palm oil prices  which tend to drive plantation development up or down, depending on which way they go, after about a year  have been rising sharply since mid-2020. Indonesia chose not to renew its freeze on new palm oil plantation permits in September, while Malaysias cap on new forest clearing for plantations expires next year.

Wiggs said Indonesias push to develop its biofuel industry also poses a risk, with some companies rejected by international palm oil traders for continuing to encroach on forests finding ready local buyers in the fuel business. He said new laws aimed at spurring job growth also strip away some important environmental safeguards, including the rights local communities had to appeal a projects environmental impact assessment.

Arie Rompas, forest campaign team leader for Greenpeace Indonesia, said even the countrys 2021 losses were far too high, and that current policies and practices were likely to keep driving heavy forest losses into the foreseeable future.

Goldman and Wiggs are more encouraged by the direction Indonesia and Malaysia are headed for now. But they, too, worry that some of the forces already in motion and on the way could yet turn them around.

Goldman makes a cautionary tale of Brazil, which saw annual forest losses fall for five years in a row in the 2000s only to have them level off and rise again.

So, its something weve seen happen in other places, where the trend has gone down but is ticking back up, she said. If were not careful about some of these things on the horizon, we could see that happen here as well.
Ukraine's top prosecutor disclosed plans Wednesday for the first war crimes trial of a captured Russian soldier, as fighting raged in the east and south and the Kremlin left open the possibility of annexing a corner of the country it seized early in the invasion.

Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said her office charged Sergeant Vadin Shyshimarin, 21, in the killing of an unarmed 62-year-old civilian who was gunned down while riding a bicycle in February, four days into the war.

Shyshimarin, who served with a tank unit, was accused of firing through a car window on the man in the northeastern village of Chupakhivka. Venediktova said the soldier could get up to 15 years in prison. She did not say when the trial would start.

Venediktova's office has said it has been investigating more than 10,700 alleged war crimes committed by Russian forces and has identified over 600 suspects.

Many of the alleged atrocities came to light last month after Moscow's forces aborted their bid to capture Kyiv and withdrew from around the capital, exposing mass graves and streets and yards strewn with bodies in towns such as Bucha. Residents told of killings, burnings, rape, torture and dismemberment.

Volodymyr Yavorskyy of the Center for Civil Liberties said the Ukrainian human rights group would be closely following Shyshimarin's trial to see if it was fair.

"It's very difficult to observe all the rules, norms and neutrality of the court proceedings in wartime," he said.

On the economic front, Ukraine shut down one of the pipelines that carry Russian gas across the country to homes and industries in Western Europe, marking the first time since the start of the war that Kyiv disrupted the flow westward of one of Moscow's most lucrative exports.

But the immediate effect is likely to be limited, in part because Russia can divert the gas to another pipeline and because Europe relies on a variety of suppliers.

Meanwhile, a Kremlin-installed politician in the southern Kherson region, site of the first major Ukrainian city to fall in the war, said officials there want Russian President Vladimir Putin to make Kherson a "proper region" of Russia  that is, annex it.

"The city of Kherson is Russia," Kirill Stremousov, deputy head of the Kherson regional administration appointed by Moscow, told Russia's RIA Novosti news agency.

That raised the possibility that the Kremlin would seek to break off another piece of Ukraine as it tries to salvage an invasion gone awry. Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula, which borders the Kherson region, after a disputed referendum in 2014, a move denounced as illegal and rejected by most of the international community.

Kherson, a Black Sea port of roughly 300,000, provides Crimea with access to fresh water and is seen as gateway to wider Russian control over southern Ukraine.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it would be "up to the residents of the Kherson region after all to decide whether such an appeal should be made or not." He said any move to annex territory would have to be closely evaluated by legal experts to make sure it is "absolutely legitimate, as it was with Crimea."

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak mocked the notion of Kherson's annexation, tweeting: "The invaders may ask to join even Mars or Jupiter. The Ukrainian army will liberate Kherson, no matter what games with words they play."

Inside Kherson, people have taken to the streets to decry the Russian occupation. But a teacher who gave only her first name, Olga, for fear of Russian retaliation said such protests are impossible now because Moscow's troops "kidnapped activists and citizens simply for wearing Ukrainian colors or ribbons." She said "people are scared of talking openly outside their homes" and "everyone walks on the street quickly."

"All people in Kherson are waiting for our troops to come as soon as possible," she added. "Nobody wants to live in Russia or join Russia."

On the battlefield, Ukrainian officials said a Russian rocket attack targeted an area around Zaporizhzhia, destroying unspecified infrastructure. There were no immediate reports of casualties. The southeastern city has been a refuge for civilians fleeing the Russian siege in the devastated port city of Mariupol.

Russian forces continued to pound the steel plant that is the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance in Mariupol, its defenders said. The Azov Regiment said on social media that Russian forces carried out 38 airstrikes in the previous 24 hours on the grounds of the Azovstal steelworks.

The plant, with its network of tunnels and bunkers, has sheltered hundreds of Ukrainian troops and civilians during a monthslong siege. Scores of civilians were evacuated in recent days, but Ukrainian officials said some may still be trapped there.

In his nightly address Tuesday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggested Ukraine's military was gradually pushing Russian troops away from Kharkiv, the country's second-largest city and a key to Russia's offensive in the Donbas, the eastern industrial region whose capture the Kremlin says is its main objective.

Ukraine is also targeting Russian air defenses and resupply vessels on Snake Island in the Black Sea in an effort to disrupt Moscow's efforts to expand its control over the coastline, according to the British Ministry of Defense.

Separately, Ukraine said it shot down a cruise missile targeting the Black Sea port city of Odesa.

Ukraine's natural gas pipeline operator said it moved to stop the flow of Russian gas through a compressor station in part of eastern Ukraine controlled by Moscow-backed separatists because enemy forces were interfering with the station's operation and siphoning off gas.

The hub handles about one-third of Russian gas passing through Ukraine to Western Europe. But analysts said much of the gas can be redirected through another pipeline from Russia that crosses Ukraine, and there were indications that was happening. In any case, Europe also gets natural gas from other pipelines and other countries.

"We're losing a few percent in overall European gas supply, when you consider imports and domestic production as well," said Tom Marzec-Manser, an analyst at market intelligence firm ICIS. "So this is not a huge cutoff to gas supplies" for Europe.

Nor was it clear whether Russia would take any immediate hit, since it has long-term contracts and other ways of transporting gas.

Still, the cutoff underscored the broader risk to gas supplies from the war.

"Yesterday's decision is a small preview of what might happen if gas installations are hit by live fire and face the risk of extended downtimes," said gas analyst Zongqiang Luo at Rystad Energy.
Finlands legislature next week will debate asking NATO for membership after the countrys prime minister and president endorse join the Western defense pact. President Biden wants American farmers to do more to compensate for the loss of harvests in Ukraine. Russias invasion of Ukraine is a setback for arms control talks between Moscow and Washington.
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The U.S. hosts a summit of Association of Southeast Asian Nation leaders.

Hello and welcome to VOA Asia Weekly. I'm Chris Casquejo in Washington. That story coming up.

But first, making headlines.

Former Hong Kong police chief John Lee was elected the business hubs new leader without contest. He pledged allegiance to Chinas central government.

Cardinal Joseph Zen, the outspoken former Roman Catholic bishop of Hong Kong, was arrested under the national security law for alleged foreign collusion.

South Korea's new president, Yoon Suk-yeol, began his five-year term vowing to enforce sanctions on North Korea and stand up for freedom and democracy.

Worlds largest automaker Toyota warned "unprecedented" hikes in raw material costs could reduce profits by up to a fifth this year.

Buildings shook briefly in Taipei after a 6.1 magnitude earthquake struck off Taiwans east coast.

Ferdinand Marcos Junior, the namesake son of the ousted Philippine dictator, declared victory in this weeks presidential elections.

Vowing to be a leader "for all Filipinos," Marcos Junior garnered more than 31 million votes in an unofficial count. (STOP)

He will take office on June 30th after the results are confirmed by the Philippines Congress.

While the leaders of the Philippines and Myanmar are not attending the U.S-ASEAN summit, it is the first time for Southeast Asian leaders to gather here in Washington. As VOAs Jessica Stone reports, it comes at a critical time for regional security and increasing economic engagement.

Since the first ASEAN Summit was held in the U.S. in 2016 at Sunnylands in California, Southeast Asian leaders have witnessed a military coup, natural disasters, a pandemic and now fuel and food shortages due to the war in Ukraine and Chinas port lockdowns.

In Asia, you know, trade, for example, is often perceived as strategy. And we know historically that while the U.S. has been very, very successful in the security element of strategy, its the trade dimension of strategy that has been more challenging.

While six ASEAN member states are among Washingtons top trading partners, experts say the U.S. will not unveil any major economic engagement initiatives during the summit.

So what can the summit deliver for the region?

Observers say Southeast Asia wants reassurances that American military support for NATO and Ukraine will not come at a cost to continuing its commitments in the Indo-Pacific.

Experts also say Washington needs to send a clear message on the U.S.-China relationship, particularly around freedom of navigation the South China Sea.

You have to see strong condemnation of Chinese behavior at every summit like this or some parties in the region point and say, see the U.S. has gone wobbly.

One area where ASEAN is already stepping in, is providing an alternative to the Chinese manufacturing supply chain. The U.S. ASEAN Business Council says Malaysia is expected to announce increased cooperation with American semiconductor manufacturers.

Jessica Stone, for VOA News, Washington.

Please visit our website voanews.com for the most up-to-date news. This is VOA Asia Weekly.

Tensions are still running high in Sri Lanka following the resignation of Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa.

His brother, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, has so far refused to resign.

A severe foreign currency shortfall has resulted in acute shortages of necessities.

Finally on VOA Asia Weekly, Australian government scientists say the iconic Great Barrier Reef has sustained another mass coral bleaching event.

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Authority said more than 90% of the worlds largest coral reef ecosystem was bleached during a prolonged summer heat wave.

Bleaching occurs when the sea is too warm, for too long. It forces the coral to expel microscopic algae that gives it most of its energy and color.

It was the fourth such mass bleaching event in seven years.

Thats all the time we have here on VOA Asia Weekly.

Thank you so much for joining us. Im Chris Casquejo. Please be sure to tune in again next week.
Congressman Frank Pallone today issued a statement on a proposed US weapons sale to Turkey denouncing their intention.

May 12, 2022, 15:47 Pallone denounces US weapons sale to Turkey

STEPANAKERT, MAY 12, ARTSAKHPRESS: "I strongly condemn the proposed weapons sale to Turkey," he noted.

"The United States must not reward Turkey with new weapons and military equipment given the Erdogan regimes long record of domestic and international human rights abuses, destabilizing actions in the region, and failure to live up to NATO commitments."

"In recent months, President Erdogan has made meager overtures to get back in our good graces. The U.S. cannot falsely assume that this sale will incentivize Erdogan halt his deadly actions and change his diplomacy. On the contrary, we know exactly what will happen. This sale will only embolden him and give him the resources to continue his war mongering initiatives in the Caucasus and beyond."

"I cannot support any Congressional action that would help Turkey increase its military arsenal," he concluded.
They started falling from the ceiling and it took a second for Najeebullah to realize what they were. U.S. dollar bills. Coming from above his head in the baggage claim area of the Seattle, Washington airport. Then he realized his friends were showering him with cash, a traditional Afghan celebration.

The reunion for Najeebullah was a long time coming. It started long before the United States pulled out of Afghanistan, leaving those with Special Immigrant Visas scrambling to flee.

Watch related video:



The GPS man



In 2003, Najeebullah, then 24, started working as an interpreter for U.S. Special Forces during some of the most dangerous fighting in Afghanistans Nangarhar, Kunar, Kabul, Laghman, and Nuristan provinces. Better known to his friends as Najeeb, he was nicknamed The GPS man because he intuitively knew the terrain and how to avoid the enemy.



Najeebs last name has been withheld from this article to protect his family members still living in Afghanistan.



The White House had launched the invasion of Afghanistan as a response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, using airstrikes and troops to try to eliminate al-Qaidas base of operations in Afghanistan.



The U.S. Congress approved the Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program in 2009 for former interpreters who were in danger of retaliation for helping U.S. forces. The process was expected to take less than a year. But securing one of the highly prized visas can take several.

In Najeebs 2010 recommendation papers from commanders, a former officer described his fearlessness and wrote, I have trusted him with my life in combat.

Another complimented his intimate knowledge of the Northern Konar and Nuristan provinces.

A third wrote about his personal courage under fire and said it was his distinct honor to work with Najeeb. His former officer, Colonel Stuart Farris, told VOA, If there was one we would do anything for, hes the guy.

Another former officer, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Jason Coombs, credited Najeeb with saving his life.

He stopped me from going into a compound because there was an [enemy] inside, Coombs wrote.

Despite 10 glowing recommendation letters shared with VOA for Najeebullahs Special Immigrant Visa, urging SIV approval at the earliest possible opportunity, he never applied, assuming the United States and Afghan forces would defeat the Taliban.

Kidnappings and murders

In 2011, the Taliban kidnapped Najeebs 11-year old son, Khalid, and demanded $150,000 ransom from his father, whom they considered a traitor. Najeeb left his interpreter job. The son was returned in a rescue 15 days later. Najeeb thought he should prepare to leave Afghanistan to save the rest of his family, but for years he held out hope that the situation would improve.

That changed by 2017. Najeeb says decided to apply for his Special Immigrant Visa when he realized Afghanistan could not be rebuilt to give him the life he wanted for his family. But the most emotional toll was yet to come. In April 2021, his 25-year-old son, Shaid, was on leave from the Afghan army and was traveling to join his family on vacation. The Taliban killed him.

That was a very hard time for me, Najeeb said, lowering his head, to receive his dead body.

Najeeb then lived in fear for his own life as the Taliban tormented him with cellphone death threats, calling him an infidel for working with the Americans. VOA first reported his story in July 2021. Najeeb asked to use a fake name in the report for protection.

He choose Haji, a common name for those who have made the religious Hajj pilgrimage. VOA also disguised his voice and face. Najeeb had been traveling from city to city to escape the Taliban and their death threats.

They tell me, they know my place, they know where I am staying, they are coming after me, he said at the time.

Watch related video:

Disappointment

In late August, the United States instituted Operation Allies Refuge to evacuate Afghans under threat by the Taliban who had taken over the country. Najeebs former officers networked to help his immediate family escape through the Pineapple Express, a volunteer group of veterans working apart from the U.S. government.

It was a harrowing experience. Najeeb joined the crowd at Abbey Gate leading to the Kabul Airport, waving his SIV application and watching for code words. Suddenly his toddler was knocked to the ground unconscious by the surging crowd. He reached down to protect her and the stampeding mob dislocated his shoulder. The family returned to their house.

The next night, on August 26, another group of Americans was in place to rescue them. Najeeb and his family were minutes away, walking to the Abbey Gate, when they heard an explosion and gunfire. Thirteen U.S. service members and numerous Afghans were killed in the suicide bomb attack. Najeeb would call it one of the worst nights of my life.

Breakthrough

He and his family returned, dejected, to their permanent home in Jalalabad. Col. Farris recognized the low morale and texted him this message, Do not give up hope, keep your faith in God. There will be more opportunities to get out. Farris was right.

In January, Farris worked with the non-profit No One Left Behind and former officer Jason Coombs to get Najeeb and family to the Kabul airport and then onto a flight to Pakistan, where he would await approval of his SIV. They told him to get to Kabul, a difficult task for a wanted man. Najeeb says the journey involved circumventing or hiding inside the car to avoid detection at 12 Taliban checkpoints before safely reaching his flight.

Coombs says the family with five children was delayed in Pakistan by a Biden administration policy requiring COVID vaccinations of children.

His medical costs and accommodations were $2,000, says Coombs. We had to wire the money and prove it was not fraud. It was an ordeal. Next there were issues with flights out of Pakistan and No One Left Behind had to pay for the airline tickets. But finally in March, the visa was issued, the plane lifted off from Islamabad, and Najeeb felt enormous relief.

'They will be free forever'

Najeebs Special Immigrant Visa extends to his family. He is designated as a cq1, meaning his visa allows him to apply for permanent U.S. residency, also known as a green card. After five years with the green card, he can apply for citizenship.



For now, the family of seven is living with a Seattle relative who also has five children. Wherever Najeeb walks in the house, the baby toddler he saved at the Abbey gate is glued to his side. She sleeps in his lap as he talks about his childrens future.

My daughters for the last two years didnt go to the school, Najeeb explains, because the Taliban  stopped the girls from going to the school, so they are very excited.



Back in Afghanistan, he did not have any hope for their future or education. But living in the United States he says, They can do anything they want, go anywhere they want, and be free forever.
Analysts say plans by Guineas transitional military government to prosecute former president Alpha Conde and 26 of his top officials will likely be marred by doubts over the fairness of their trials.

A 2019 Afrobarometer survey revealed that over 90% of Guineans consider the judiciary to be corrupt.

Additionally, Jesper Bjarnesen, a senior researcher at Denmark-based Nordic Africa Institute, told VOA that this trial is arguably a diversion.

''There are legitimate charges against the former president, he said, but added ''I think that a transitional government has the primary task to work towards free and fair elections.''

As for judicial credibility, Bjarnesen said, I am not sure that a temporary transitional government is the best facilitator of a legal process against the former president and his cadre.

''There might be room for reconstitution of the judiciary with the military takeover, but that's still a very slim hope in a system where there's systematic abuse of power, Bjarnesen said. What's more likely, he said, is that you'll have new people in power making use of a dysfunctional system.

Conde was ousted by the military last year and placed under house arrest, which the military regime lifted on April 22. But its clear he is not free to leave the country.

Charges filed against Conde and the others include acts of violence while in office, complicity in murder, and assault to destruction of property. Other charges include detention, torture, rapes, kidnapping, disappearances, other sexual abuse, and looting.

Alix Boucher, at the Washington-based Africa Center for Strategic Studies, told VOA she doubts the interest of the military junta in ''upholding justice', noting that the juntas suspension of the constitution since the September 2021 coup would make such trials highly ironic.''

Guineans are still waiting for those responsible for the massacre and mass rapes committed by the previous junta at the stadium in Conakry in September 2009 to be prosecuted, she added. The lack of confidence that such trials would be free and fair reflects Guineas weak legacy of independent oversight institutions, even under Conde.''

Boucher said that the juntas timeline for prosecuting Conde and the 26 others suggests it is set on hanging onto power. The military recently said it needed 39 months to transition back to civilian rule, refuting demands by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to do it much sooner.

Such pronouncements [by the military regime] lack credibility and obscure the essential takeaway that the junta has no plans to relinquish power on its own, Boucher said.

Guinea has a long legacy of military and authoritarian governments. But 77% of Guineans prefer democracy to any other regime and want two-term limits for the presidency, according to the Afrobarometer survey.

''Therefore, the juntas aim to hold power is a direct effort to undermine Guineans deeply held aspirations for a democratic government, Boucher said.
World leaders pledged more than $3 billion on Thursday for the global fight against the pandemic, as the United States marked a grim point in its own COVID-19 battle  and without the billions of dollars in emergency funding Biden has sought from Congress.

"Today, we mark a tragic milestone here in the United States: 1 million COVID deaths," Biden said in a prerecorded message Thursday morning to attendees of the second U.S.-led virtual COVID summit, co-hosted by Belize, Germany, Indonesia and Senegal.

The U.S. has recorded about 82 million COVID-19 cases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Estimates of the total deaths vary, but as of Thursday, Johns Hopkins University data said about 999,000 deaths had been recorded.

New U.S. cases and hospitalizations have been rising in recent weeks, but the number of deaths has stayed relatively low, about 300 per day, down from more than 3,000 per day in February.

"Around the world, many more millions have died, Biden said. Millions of children have been orphaned, with thousands still dying every day. Now is the time for us to act. All of us together. We all must do more, must honor those we have lost by doing everything we can to prevent as many deaths as possible."

The short answer is money'

Together, the attendees  which included representatives from countries including Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Rwanda and South Korea, and also, philanthropic leaders such as Microsoft founder Bill Gates  committed billions of dollars and in-kind vaccine donations, technology assistance, commitments to vaccination drives and more.

The U.S. came to this gathering without a commitment from Congress for the $5 billion in global funding that Biden has asked for: a fact that Germany's leader seemed to highlight in his introductory comments.

"So what is needed?" Chancellor Olaf Scholz said. "The short answer is money."

Scholz pledged $885 million to global COVID efforts on Thursday. Other wealthy nations announced new commitments, with Italy pledging $208 million to the global Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator and South Korea pledging $300 million to that same initiative. Oil-rich Saudi Arabia pledged to give $2.8 million to the World Health Organization; tiny Lichtenstein provided $300,000 to the global COVAX vaccine distribution scheme. South Africa pledged to donate 5 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine and 10 million doses of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine to other African nations; Australia committed to share 60 million vaccine doses by the end of 2022.

Vice President Kamala Harris appealed to the U.S. Congress to approve the White House funding requests.

"We have called upon the United States Congress for $22.5 billion in additional emergency funding to battle COVID," she said. "Five billion dollars of that would be dedicated to continue our leadership and helping to save lives around the world. We will continue to advocate for these life-saving resources as part of our global commitment."

The remaining $17.5 billion would go toward domestic funding.

The White House says it's realistic about its main constraint.

"I think we don't want to sugarcoat it, that we need more money," said White House press secretary Jen Psaki. "We don't have a Plan B here."

She urged Congress to approve the funding, "because we're going to exhaust our treatment supply, we'll lose out to other countries on promising new treatments, we'll lose our place in line for America to order new COVID vaccines, we'll be unable to maintain our supply of COVID tests, and our effort to get  help lower-income countries get COVID vaccines into arms will stall, which is especially relevant given the international summit we're hosting."

Health advocates: Money isn't everything

Health experts, including Dr. Krishna Udayakumar of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center, welcomed the new commitments but told VOA via email that still more needs to be done.

"New funding commitments, over $3 billion, are important to fill immediate needs, but still doesn't reach the scale necessary for a comprehensive response, with a $15 billion gap just for the ACT Accelerator," he said. "We must have clarity on the most important priorities and targets, not a series of fragmented commitments. More vaccine donations, for example, add little value over the coming months.

Now we need to focus on turning vaccines into vaccinations, ramping up test-and-treat capabilities in low- and middle-income countries, and shifting the global response to a sustainable control program with country-led leadership. There is clear support and momentum for the Financial Intermediary Fund, which could play a critical role for future pandemic preparedness and response with the proper funding and governance."

Advocates for health equity, like the ONE Campaign, said they want more action.

"This summit succeeded in securing desperately needed commitments and bringing new participants to the table. But world leaders have yet to deliver the strategy and volume of resources we need to get across the finish line, said CEO Gayle Smith. "Leaders can still deliver a coordinated plan and the resources still required at the upcoming G-7 summit in June. Congress must get the ball rolling by urgently providing $5 billion for the ongoing global fight against COVID."

And the long answer is  long

A senior Biden administration official told reporters on the eve of the summit that the U.S. came to the summit with three priorities: first, to prevent complacency as new variants continue to emerge; second, to prevent deaths by focusing on the most vulnerable; and third, to lay the groundwork to prevent future pandemics.

World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus delivered his organization's four requests to summit attendees: "First, we call for a policy commitment to boost vaccination, testing and treatment in countries," he said. "Second, we call for investment in local production. Third, we call for financial commitments to fully fund the ACT Accelerator and WHO strategic preparedness readiness and response plan. And fourth, we call for political commitment to support the financial intermediary fund and the new architecture for global health security."

Other countries stressed the importance of equity.

"We are advocating the establishment of a more inclusive new world order for public health, more inclusive for better handling of cross-border health issues," said Senegalese President Macky Sall, one of the co-hosts.

Indonesia's President Joko Widodo also urged global unity.

"We must work together to mitigate the pandemic and with a stronger global head architecture and preparedness," he said.

Absent from the summit, however, were two major vaccine developers  China and Russia.

Russia attended the previous summit, in September; China has yet to attend a summit. VOA asked a senior White House official why those two nations were not included.

"In terms of whether Russia was invited: no, we did not extend a commitment ask to them," he said. "And with other countries, we have extended and asked for a financial policy commitment."

He added, "We're finding amongst the countries, the companies, the philanthropies and the nonprofits that have committed to this effort that we've mobilized $3.1 billion of financing towards the global fight. So it's clear other countries are stepping up to do their part."

In the absence of additional congressional funding, Biden said that the U.S. is continuing to fight the pandemic by sharing U.S government-developed COVID-19 technologies with the World Health Organization's COVID-19 Technology Access Pool. And, he said, the U.S. will start a pilot program with the Global Fund to expand access to rapid testing and antiviral treatments.

Dr. Cameron Webb, an internal medicine doctor and senior policy adviser for equity on the White House COVID Response Team, noted that COVID may not be done with humanity. Research has found that many people infected with the virus continue to suffer symptoms long after they test negative. So, too, he said, the battle against the virus may continue for a long time.

"This was a mass disabling event," he told VOA via Zoom, speaking from his office between consultations with patients. "And you know, we talked about 1 million deaths, which, again, is tragic. And just multiply that many times over the number of people who are affected by COVID, in other ways with long-term sequelae. So it's something that we're watching closely, we're studying closely, both here in the United States and around the world."

Udayakumar agreed.

"The key question for the summit is whether it will be a real inflection point to change the trajectory of the pandemic, or another modestly successful milestone that continues an under-resourced global response that is less effective than needed," he said. "We will need to track real actions after the summit, not just commitments, to know the answer."
U.S. President Joe Biden has congratulated Ferdinand Marcos Jr. for winning the presidential election in the Philippines.

The White House said Wednesday U.S. President Joe Biden called to congratulate Ferdinando Marcos Jr. for winning the presidential election in the Philippines.

Marcos, who is colloquially known as Bongbong, claimed victory Wednesday as a near-complete initial count of votes put him far ahead of his closest challenger.

President Biden underscored that he looks forward to working with the President-elect to continue strengthening the U.S.-Philippine Alliance, while expanding bilateral cooperation on a wide range of issues, including the fight against COVID-19, addressing the climate crisis, promoting broad-based economic growth, and respect for human rights, the White House said in a statement.

Marcos father, Ferdinand, ruled the country from 1965 to 1986, and governed using martial law for nearly a decade. The elder Marcos was forced into exile at the end of his rule in a People Power revolution.
Canadian energy experts see the global spike in oil prices  exacerbated by the war in Ukraine  as a two-edged sword, spurring a rush to develop renewable energy sources while simultaneously encouraging increased production of environmentally damaging fossil fuels.

For Canada, a major energy exporter with the potential to fill part of the gap created by the broadening boycott of Russian energy sources, the balancing act is especially delicate.

The left-leaning government led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has pledged to make major investments in renewable energy. But the country is also home to the Alberta tar sands, described by National Geographic magazine as the world's most destructive oil operation."

Speaking in Vancouver in late March, Trudeau announced a plan to spend $9.1 billion by 2030 to reduce carbon emissions through support for electric vehicles, energy-efficient homes and vehicles, wind and solar projects, support for sustainable farming and other measures.

The leaders I spoke with in Europe over the past few weeks were clear, Trudeau told reporters at the time. They dont just want to end their dependence on Russian oil and gas, they want to accelerate the energy transformation to clean and green power.

The whole world is focusing on clean energy and Canada cannot afford not to do that, he said.

But Trudeaus long-term ambition may be complicated in the short term by the rising demand for oil from Canada  the worlds fourth largest exporter  and a renewed interest in the Alberta tar sands, which have become more profitable than they have been for years.

The environmental group Greenpeace Canada last year called for a halt to development of the heavy and hard-to-extract bitumen, saying, The world cant afford to expand the Alberta tar sands, not if we want to preserve this planet for future generations.

And with world oil prices as low as $50 a barrel in recent years, many producers had in fact shelved plans to expand production, mainly because of high start-up costs that made the effort unprofitable. But with current prices topping $100 a barrel, the heavy sludge is suddenly much more appealing.

It is certainly true that higher oil prices will increase interest in all oil resources, including the Canadian oil sands, said Mark Finley, a former manager and analyst with an energy focus at the CIA. He is currently with Rice Universitys Baker Institute for Public Policy.

Moreover, a growing interest in resilient supply chains and what U.S. Treasury Secretary [Janet] Yellen has called friend-shoring will also work to the advantage of Canadian producers, Finley said in an interview.

Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood, an expert with the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives, said it is too soon to tell what impact the war in Ukraine will have on energy investment in Canada. We're not seeing a lot of investment into new fossil fuel projects at this point, but that could change if the war drags on and prices stay high.

Mertins-Kirkwood said industry announcements show that investment in fossil fuels is up this year. That's mainly due to rising oil prices, which started last year but really picked up after the Russian invasion.

Specifically, oil companies in Canada are intensifying production, which means they're trying to get more oil out of existing projects to take advantage of the current price environment.

On the green energy side, Mertins-Kirkwood suggested the Trudeau governments spending plans fall far short of what its own calculations show will be needed to reach its goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

The most recent federal budget says Canada will need to between $125 billion and $140 billion of investment every year to reach that goal, he said, far beyond the current rate of investment in the climate transition of $15 billion to $25 billion.

But Finley said the Trudeau administrations green ambitions are not necessarily in conflict with the renewed interest in Albertas tar sands.

The outcome of this situation, I think, could be both more investment in oil and gas, and an accelerated interest in pursuing the transition [to renewable energy], he said. In that sense, there should be common ground to be found between the government in Ottawa and government/industry in Alberta.

Finley noted that Canada is a natural partner for other Western countries as it belongs to many of the same key institutions, including the International Energy Agency, NATO and OECD, as well as being a major energy exporter.

As the United States and Europe focus on diversifying supplies away from Russia, what kind of countries are likely to be perceived as reliable partners? he asked. Canada would certainly be high on the list.
The U.S. firearm homicide rate spiked 35% in 2020, the first full year of the coronavirus pandemic, rising to the highest level in almost three decades of record-keeping, according to data released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The agency reported 19,350 firearm homicides in the U.S. in 2020, compared with 18,253 in 1993, the first year for which Bureau of Justice Statistics data are available, although the per capita death toll was higher that year.

Gun homicides increased across every age group and ethnicity, as well as in rural, suburban and metropolitan areas. The increase was disproportionately felt by non-Hispanic Black males between the ages of 10 and 44, however. Rates of firearm homicide were higher at higher poverty levels, where they also showed larger increases.

The CDC also reported 24,245 cases of suicide by gun in 2020, a 1.4% rise over the previous year. The bulk of the increase occurred among non-Hispanic American Indian and Alaska Native populations, where the rate of suicide by firearm increased by 41.8%.

"The tragic and historic increase in firearm homicide and the persistently high rates of firearm suicide underscore the urgent need for action to reduce firearm-related injuries and deaths," CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said in a statement. "By addressing factors contributing to homicide and suicide, and providing support to communities, we can help stop violence now and in the future."

The extreme prevalence of guns in the U.S. makes comparing firearm homicide rates in America with those in other countries difficult. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, however, compared overall homicide rates during the early months of the pandemic in several countries. In most cases, homicides fell sharply during the early stages of the pandemic, when lockdowns were in force across many nations.

In most countries, the homicide rate rebounded later in the year, bringing numbers back toward recent averages. Some countries, such as Spain, South Africa and Kazakhstan, experienced sharp increases in the homicide rate in the latter part of 2020.

Economic link

According to CDC data, 79% of all homicides in the U.S. in 2020 involved firearms, up from between 73% and 75% during the previous five years. Guns were used in 53% of suicides in the same year, up from between 50% and 51% in the previous five years.

The CDC data demonstrated a high level of association between elevated firearms homicide and suicide rates and poor economic conditions, including income inequality, unemployment, and housing and economic instability.

"Firearm homicide rates were lowest and increased least at the lowest poverty level (from 2.0 to 2.4 per 100,000 persons) and were higher and showed larger increases at higher poverty levels (e.g., from 7.7 to 10.8 at the highest level)," the report found. "By race and ethnicity, rates were highest and increased most among Black people at the two highest poverty levels. Associations between poverty and firearm suicide are also evident."

Calls for action

The CDC report called for a "comprehensive" approach in addressing the factors known to contribute to gun violence.

"The increases in firearm homicide rates and persistently high firearm suicide rates in 2020, with increases among populations that were already at high risk, have widened disparities and heightened the urgency of actions that can have immediate and lasting benefits," the report found.

"State and local governments, community partners, and health care and other service providers can use the best available evidence to implement comprehensive approaches to prevent homicide and suicide, including addressing physical, social and structural conditions that contribute to violence and disparities," it said.

Among the various efforts the agency recommended were measures to "enhance economic and household stability"  community-based efforts to reach people at the highest risk of gun violence through conflict resolution, suicide prevention services and other programs. The agency also recommended raising awareness about safe firearms storage options to reduce access to guns by children and others who should not have them.

Causes unclear

In discussing its findings, the CDC said the data do not support any specific claims about why gun homicides rose as sharply as they did in 2020.

"The findings of this study do not support causal inferences, and reasons for increasing rates and widening inequities are unclear and potentially complex," the agency said. Among a number of possible drivers, it said, were increased stress and "disruptions in health, social and emergency services during the COVID-19 pandemic"; damaged relationships between communities and law enforcement agencies; increases in firearm purchases; and the exacerbation of long-standing economic disparities in high-risk communities.

Advocates on both sides of the gun control debate had their own ideas about the reasons behind the increase in gun homicides, however.

"Record increases in gun sales, children homebound like never before, social isolation, and economic struggles due to COVID-19 put many people at increased risk for gun violence," the group Everytown for Gun Safety said in a statement. "The pandemic has also highlighted the danger of having weak gun laws that enable easy access to firearms by people with dangerous histories."

Fred Guttenberg, a gun safety activist, pointed to the sharp increase in firearm sales during the pandemic as the root of the problem. Guttenberg's daughter, Jaime, was murdered in 2018 during the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida,

On Twitter, he wrote, "Nobody should be surprised that gun deaths reached the highest level ever recorded in the United States in 2020. Sadly, this was predictable & preventable. And we did nothing. A gun surge was unleashed during COVID & the results have been deadly."

In fact, while the absolute number of firearm homicides set a record in 2020, Bureau of Justice Statistics data show the rate of gun homicides was higher in 1993, at about 7 per 100,000. The rate was 6.1 per 100,000 in 2020, according to the CDC.

Democrats blamed

"I would point out, first of all, that last year from coast to coast  in other words, from Philadelphia to Portland (Oregon), we saw in Democrat-controlled cities homicide records being set," Erich Pratt, senior vice president of the Gun Owners of America advocacy group, told VOA.

Pratt said numerous public policy decisions made at the local level by "leftist politicians" caused a spike in violent crime, including the abolition of cash bail, early release of certain criminal defendants, and calls to "defund" the police.

"The murder rate, which had been on a downward trend for over 20 years, all of a sudden spiked over the last two years," Pratt said. "And that's not surprising, given what was happening."

In an email exchange with VOA, National Rifle Association spokesman Lars Dalseide said, "As communities across the country chose to defund law enforcement, elect soft-on-crime prosecutors, prematurely release dangerous prisoners and institute no-cash bail, no one should be surprised to see an uptick in violent crime."
Sixteen months after President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, rancor defines the U.S.-Cambodia relationship. Yet Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, along with leaders from other Southeast Asian nations, will be attending the U.S.-ASEAN Summit in the White House this week, his presence amplified because Cambodia is the chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

On Feb. 1, the Lunar New Year, Jonathan Turley, the political/economic chief of the U.S. embassy in Cambodia, said the U.S. sought a "peaceful, prosperous and independent" Cambodia  and then blasted the state of democracy in Cambodia and its ever-closer ties with China.

"As a friend and a partner to Cambodia, we naturally have concerns when we see Cambodia moving away from that, when we see a government at every level is dominated by just one party, when peaceful citizens are arrested and imprisoned just for expressing their views, when corruption is unchecked and the powerful act with impunity, and when the Kingdom's hard-won independence and sovereignty are being eroded," Turley told VOA Khmer.

The prime minister's Cambodian People's Party (CPP) has ruled Cambodia since 1979.

In a thinly veiled reference to China and its suspected involvement at the Ream Naval Base in Sihanoukville province, Turley said the U.S. is "very committed to the kingdom's sovereignty. So we are naturally concerned when we see Cambodian sovereignty being eroded, when we see a growing foreign military presence, and when foreign companies contribute to or are involved in corruption violating lands, laborers and environmental regulations."

While the U.S. criticizes Cambodia's backsliding on human rights and democracy, analysts say China's influence is driving U.S. strategy in the region, prompting the Biden administration to take a frank approach to Phnom Penh, perhaps Beijing's closest ally in the region.

"Because the U.S. continues to rigidly view Cambodia through the lens of its intensifying competition with China, the mood among the U.S. foreign policy community has been consistently negative, leading to a deeply entrenched misunderstanding about the nature of Cambodia's foreign policy and its position vis-a-vis China and the U.S.," said Bong Chansambath, a lecturer in international relations at the Royal University of Phnom Penh.

"The misguided belief that Cambodia is China's proxy is counterproductive and detrimental to the foreign policy interests of Cambodia, the U.S. and their shared ties," Bong Chansambath said.

China's embassies in Washington and Cambodia did not respond to VOA Khmer's requests for comment on Beijing's relationship with Cambodia.

However, in an online meeting Sunday, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told his Cambodian counterpart that "the Chinese side also believes that the world should listen more to Asia's voice, respect its position and draw on its wisdom," according to Xinhua, China's state-affiliated news outlet. " While China welcomes countries outside the region to play a positive and constructive role in promoting peace and development in the region, it does not accept any action undermining regional peace and stability or solidarity and cooperation."

Though Biden has promised to double down on U.S. ties with Southeast Asia, Bong Chansambath noted, U.S. policy on Cambodia is essentially a continuation of Trump administration policy, which spoke out about the decline of democracy and sanctioned key Hun Sen allies.

In November, the Biden administration sanctioned two senior Cambodian military officials over their role in China's development in and around Ream Naval Base, which the U.S. worries is part of a longer-term plan for a Chinese military presence on Cambodia's coast.

In June 2021, when the U.S. sought to clarify Beijing's relationship to the base, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said China and Cambodia enjoyed a "traditional friendship" and were "comprehensive strategic and cooperative partners," according to The Associated Press.

It's not just the U.S. that believes Phnom Penh is increasingly moving into China's corner. In April, the Taipei-based Doublethink Lab ranked Cambodia as the country "most exposed" to Chinese influence, in an index that looked at levels of Chinese influence in 36 countries worldwide, in areas such as military, politics, academia and technology.

Cambodia responds

The Cambodian government's chief spokesperson, Phay Siphan, said neither China nor America is welcome to establish a military presence in the country. "Cambodia has learnt full well in its history about the consequences of both officially or unofficially hosting foreign military presences that sent Cambodia into wars," he told VOA Khmer in February.

Phay Siphan said it would be "unacceptable" to conclude that the volume of Chinese investment and presence in Cambodia meant the Phnom Penh government "sold off its sovereignty" to Beijing. He said the U.S. and Cambodia have struggled to understand each other since the 1950s, when Cambodia won independence from France.

Hun Sen has proven to be an adept diplomat despite his autocratic approach at home. He promises enough reforms to keep Western donors engaged and throttles down repression when foreign or domestic pressure mounts. But there is concern that the latest turn toward China  along with his success in curtailing political opposition over the past decade  means a more sustained period of authoritarianism may be in store.

Phay Siphan said Washington needs Phnom Penh to get anything done with the ASEAN bloc. Apart from being a major trading partner of the U.S., the region has a booming population and is strategically placed on the South China Sea, a key location in the geopolitical struggle between the U.S. and China.

"The U.S. also needs Cambodia because Cambodia has a vote in ASEAN in the spirit of consensus," he said. "Regarding Cambodia as an enemy will make one difficult to deal with ASEAN because Cambodia has a voice to veto any cooperation with external partners like the U.S."

And despite its tough talk about U.S. interference in its affairs, Cambodia has indicated a desire to mend fences. Since 2019, the Cambodian government has hired at least three U.S.-based lobbying firms in an effort to improve ties with Washington and attract American investment.

The U.S. is a crucial export market for Cambodia, particularly its garment sector. The two-way trade in goods rose to about $9 billion in 2021, up from $6.9 billion in 2020, and is on pace to increase again this year. The U.S. has yet to renew preferential trade status for Cambodia since it lapsed last year.

Kosal Path, who chairs the master's program in international affairs and global justice at the City University of New York, disagreed that the China factor was the "defining issue" between Phnom Penh and Washington. The Biden administration's continued push to uphold democracy and human rights was increasingly at odds with Hun Sen's rule, he said.

The CPP has ruled a de facto one-party state since 2017 after dissolving its chief rival, the Cambodia National Rescue Party, and grabbing all 125 parliamentary seats a year later in an election critics called a "sham." Intimidation and legal harassment of politicians and opposition parties is increasing ahead of local elections, to be held on June 5, and the next national parliamentary elections, set for mid-2023.

"Such different political and ideological values will continue to be barriers to a closer relationship between the U.S. and Cambodia under the leadership of Prime Minister Hun Sen and the ruling Cambodian People's Party," Kosal Path told VOA Khmer.

He added that the Cambodian government's recent efforts to woo investments and trade pacts from South Korea, India and Japan indicate Phnom Penh's "concerted efforts" to "diversify economic relations" and "reduce exposure to the Sino-American rivalry."

"The upcoming summit can be an opportunity for Cambodia as the ASEAN chair to reset its relations with the United States by focusing on areas of common interests including reaffirmation of rules-based international order, the centrality of ASEAN in peaceful resolution of conflict in the region, trade and investment, and other low-politics areas, especially education, science and technology, climate change," Kosal Path said.

Look to Vietnam

Derek Grossman, a senior defense analyst with the RAND Corporation, said to challenge China in the region, the U.S. should reconsider its values-based policy toward Cambodia and neighboring Laos by following its own approach to Vietnam, where relations have warmed despite the communist regime.

"I also think the Biden administration has concluded that  perhaps prematurely  that Cambodia and Laos are both firmly within China's strategic orbit and not in any way up for grabs in the U.S.-China competition," Grossman told VOA Khmer, adding that there is a need to "reset" bilateral U.S.-Cambodia relations, although Hun Sen "is not easy to deal with."

"I think we are going to find out a lot more when the ASEAN leaders  visit the White House in terms of how the U.S. views Cambodia's role in ASEAN," Grossman said.

Still, he said, there is little hope of a major reset as long as Hun Sen remains in power. That may change if and when the prime minister's son, Hun Manet, a West Point graduate, takes charge, he added. The CPP endorsed his eventual ascension during an extraordinary party congress late last year.

However the U.S. chooses to deal with Cambodia, the ruling party isn't going to change soon, Bong Chansambath emphasized.

"Whether or not the U.S. is comfortable with the current political status quo in Cambodia, it is up to U.S. policymakers to decide," he said. "What I may say here is that the CPP is currently the most established and predominant political force in Cambodia and will continue to be so in the upcoming years, if not decades."
Finland's President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin expressed their approval Thursday for joining NATO, a move that would complete a major policy shift for the country in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Their announcement drew an immediate rebuke from Moscow.

"NATO membership would strengthen Finland's security. As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defense alliance," the Finnish leaders said in a joint statement. "Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay. We hope that the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days."

The leaders said they came to their decision after allowing time for Finland's parliament and the public to consider the matter, and to consult with NATO and neighboring Sweden. Officials in Sweden are expected to consider their own possible NATO application in the coming days.

The Kremlin reacted to the news by threatening to take retaliatory "military-technical" steps and "other characteristics in order to counter the emerging threats to its national security."

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Russia's Security Council, said, "There is always a risk of such conflict turning into a full-scale nuclear war, a scenario that will be catastrophic for all."

In mid-April, Medvedev there will be "no more talk of a nuclear-free Baltic" if Finland and Sweden decide to join the U.S.-dominated, 30-nation NATO military alliance formed after World War II.

"The balance must be restored," Medvedev said.

Finland's Niinisto told Russian President Vladimir Putin this week, "You caused this. Look in the mirror."

Finland's parliament still has to consider a NATO application, but the announcement by the country's leaders makes it all but certain it will apply although the process could take months before it is completed. The country's border with Russia, stretching more than 1,300 kilometers, would be the longest of any NATO country.

Public opinion in both Finland and Sweden, both neutral countries, shifted markedly after Russia's February 24 invasion of Ukraine, which prompted fears that Russia might also attack them. Putin had hoped to divide NATO countries over their response to his Ukraine invasion, but the West instead has imposed numerous sanctions against Moscow and the oligarchs and Russian officials aligned with him.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in late April that if Finland and Sweden were to apply, "They will be welcomed and I also expect the process to be quick."

For weeks, fighting in Ukraine has been concentrated in the eastern Donbas region, with Ukrainian officials acknowledging that Moscow has achieved "partial success" and has taken some villages. On Thursday, explosions were heard near the town of Bakhmut, an area of the Donbas where heavy fighting has occurred.

Britain's Defense Ministry said Russia's focus on the Donbas has left its remaining troops around the northeastern city of Kharkiv vulnerable to Ukrainian attacks, with Kyiv's forces recapturing several towns and villages around the area.

(Some information for this story came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Press and Reuters.)
In his draft opinion overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion, conservative U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito stressed that his ruling was limited to abortion and would not affect other rights.

Nothing in this opinion, Alito wrote in the leaked document, should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.

The document is an initial draft and could change before a final decision is handed down in the next several weeks. But despite Alito's assurances, the sweeping case it makes for reversing the 1973 decision and a subsequent abortion ruling from 1992 has raised alarm among liberals that the same rationale could be used to roll back other rights.

Among them: the right of adults to use contraception, the freedom to marry outside one's own race, and the right to same-sex marriage  freedoms known collectively as "substantive due process rights."

If the rationale of the decision as released were to be sustained, a whole range of rights are in question, a whole range of rights, President Joe Biden said last week.

Central to Alitos argument is an old conservative objection that Roe v. Wade manufactured a right that has no basis in the Constitution.

In affirming the right of Norma McCorvey  the Jane Roe in the court case  to end her pregnancy, the justices ruled 7-2 that abortion is part of a fundamental right to privacy inherent in the Constitutions 14th Amendment.

Adopted in 1868, the 14th Amendments Due Process Clause has been used by the Supreme Court to affirm a panoply of constitutional rights such as the right to marry and the right to use contraception.

But Alito argued that neither abortion nor privacy can be found in the Constitution.

Echoing another conservative criticism, he wrote that the 1973 ruling was egregiously wrong in part because the right to an abortion is not deeply rooted in the nations history and traditions.

In fact, he noted, abortion was criminalized by many states at the time of the 14th Amendments ratification after the American Civil War.

But just because something was illegal in the 19th century and is not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution doesnt mean it cant be constitutionally protected, said Sonia Suter, a law professor at The George Washington University Law School.

When you look at the way he does the analysis to say how terribly wrongly decided Roe was, you could use that exact same analysis to determine that there are arent other rights that are not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, Suter told VOA in an interview.

Caroline Fredrickson, a law professor at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the left-leaning Brennan Center, said Alitos assurance that his ruling would have no bearing on other precedents is misleading.

It just doesn't work that way, she said in an interview with VOA. Anybody who is familiar with the common law system understands that precedents are based on legal reasoning, and they develop. One precedent follows another. If you strike down a law based on a fundamental disagreement with the legal reasoning that underpins it, the same exact arguments will allow the other decisions to be overturned.

Here is a look at four Supreme Court decisions that a Roe v. Wade reversal could impact.

Griswold v. Connecticut

Widely seen as a precursor to Roe v. Wade, this 1965 ruling struck down a Connecticut law that banned the use of contraception.

In 1961, Estelle Griswold, a Planned Parenthood official, and C. Lee Buxton, a Yale University gynecologist, were arrested and fined for operating a birth control clinic in Connecticut.

The two challenged their conviction, arguing that the Connecticut law violated their rights under the 14th Amendment.

In a 7-2 ruling, the court found Connecticuts law infringed on the constitutional right of marital privacy.

The decision paved the way for Roe v. Wade, according to Suter.

"Roe relied heavily on the line of reasoning (in Griswold) and the sort of substantive due process," she said.

If the Supreme Court overturns Roe, many liberals fear it could use the same reasoning to invalidate Roes precursor.

If Casey (the 1992 opinion that reaffirmed abortion rights) is to fall, if Roe v. Wade is to fall, then Griswold v. Connecticut presumably is to fall, as well, Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin, a constitutional scholar, said last week on MSNBC.

But while many conservatives have raised questions about the legal reasoning behind the contraception ruling, few expect an outright ban on birth control.

Instead, Fredrickson said, overturning Roe could lead to "a chipping away (of the right to contraception) by increasingly describing forms of birth control as abortion or abortion-like and allowing states to regulate access to them."

Loving v. Virginia

Before this 1967 case, more than a dozen U.S. states prohibited white people from marrying African Americans.

This historic case involved Mildred Jeter, a Black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man. Unable to marry in their own state in 1958, they traveled to Washington, D.C.

They were arrested when they returned to Virginia under the states laws banning interracial marriages.

Tried and convicted, they were each given a one-year jail sentence on the condition that they leave the state and not return as a married couple for 25 years.

The Supreme Court found that Virginias so-called anti-miscegenation statute violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides within the individual and cannot be infringed by the state, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the courts unanimous decision.

Going after Loving would be extreme, Fredrickson said.

Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, considered the courts most conservative member, is an African American and married to a white woman.

Lawrence v. Texas

A landmark ruling for gay rights, this 2003 decision struck down a Texas law that criminalized homosexual sex, leading to the repeal of so-called anti-sodomy laws around the country.

In 1998, John Lawrence and a male partner were found having sex when police entered Lawrences apartment in response to a disturbance call.

After being arrested and fined under Texas anti-sodomy law, the men challenged the statute as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.

The Supreme Court agreed. Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, a prominent champion of LGBTQ rights on the court, wrote the majority opinion.

Petitioners right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives them the full right to engage in private conduct without government intervention, he wrote.

For LGBTQ rights activists, the decision, which overturned a 1986 Supreme Court ruling upholding a similar anti-sodomy law in Georgia, was a major victory.

Obergefell v. Hodges

This 2015 decision established gay marriage as a constitutional right.

The case was brought by a group of same-sex couples challenging state laws that did not allow them to legally marry.

In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that states must allow gay couples to marry and recognize such marriages performed in states where they were legal.

Again, Kennedy wrote the majority opinion. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right."

Hailed as a major achievement for the LGBTQ community in America, the narrowly decided case is now in jeopardy, Fredrickson said.

I think there is a very fervent disagreement with the Obergefell decision based on the same idea of tradition in our society, he said.

All six conservatives currently on the bench disagree with the Obergefell ruling, according to legal scholars. But whether theyd join forces to overturn it is another story, Suter said.
Nearly three years after U.S.-backed forces in Syria seized the last remaining territory held by Islamic States self-declared caliphate, members of the global coalition charged with eradicating the terror group warn their task is not getting any easier.

Despite ISs loss of several key leaders and intelligence that suggests a dwindling number of fighters in the core areas of Iraq and Syria, coalition members say the reputation and ideology of the group  also known as ISIS or by the Arabic acronym of Daesh  continues to hold its affiliates together while fostering its growth.

Officials attending Wednesdays ministerial in Marrakesh, Morocco, say nowhere is the threat more worrisome than in Africa, where a joint coalition communique described IS as an evolving threat.

"Our shared assessment of the dangerous rise of terrorist threat in Africa has led to the emergence of a tailored approach of the coalition's support to the African continent, Moroccan Minister of Foreign Affairs Nasser Bourita said following the meeting.

IS in Africa

The United States, which co-hosted the ministerial with Morocco, emphasized the need to strengthen African members of the Defeat ISIS coalition with what U.S. officials have called a civilian-focused approach.

ISIS and other terrorist groups frequently style themselves as alternatives to the state, and so it is critical that we work with our partners to increase state capacity to provide services and security to their people, said U.S. Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland.

The United States is committed to working with our partners in West Africa to confront the challenges that have allowed this group to flourish. Among them, the lack of state legitimacy, persistent rights violations, and food insecurity, she added.

Other U.S. officials have told VOA the threat from IS in Africa has become increasingly dire, with affiliates in West African countries and the Sahel finding ways to increase their numbers, in many cases simply by preying on local grievances.

Intelligence estimates from countries working with the United Nations put the number of IS affiliated fighters in Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, Chad, Mali and Mozambique at more than 7,000, with some U.S. and Western counterterrorism officials warning that the numbers are growing still.

For all the focus on pushing back against IS in Africa, however, the global coalition, and U.S. officials in particular, stressed the need not to lose sight of the threat still posed by IS in Iraq and Syria, and in Afghanistan.

ISIS in Iraq is a clandestine threat and a very serious one to carry out massive attacks, Doug Hoyt, acting U.S. deputy envoy to the coalition, told VOA prior to the ministerial.

Iraq

We're still seeing ISIS elements, really, in the seam between Iraqi Kurdistan and greater Iraq, as well as some of the border territories in Nineveh, Hoyt said. And I think that's going to be a problem for Iraq until we solve Syria.

Intelligence shared by various countries with U.N. counterterrorism officials indicate the terror group has between 6,000 and 8,000 fighters spread across Iraq and Syria, with a U.N. report issued this past February describing IS as "an entrenched rural insurgency."

Earlier U.S. intelligence estimates warned IS numbers in Iraq and Syria could be even greater, in the 8,000-16,000 range.

And information shared by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency for a recent Defense Department inspector general report said the terror group appears to be operating mainly in Syrias central desert, while continuing what the agency called a strategic retreat.

Other measures, though, indicate that the threat from IS in Syria may again be growing.

Syria

U.S. counterterrorism officials have raised concerns about ISs attack on the al-Sinaa prison in Hasakah, Syria, this past January, a bold and complex plot that sought to free as many as 4,000 IS prisoners.

More recently, the Rojava Information Center, a pro-Kurdish research group, said IS sleeper cells carried out 54 attacks across northeastern Syria in April, a 184% increase over the previous month.

There are also ongoing concerns about the approximately 10,000 IS fighters, including about 2,000 foreign fighters, still being held in prisons run by the U.S-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.

For years, the U.S. has urged other nations to repatriate their IS fighters from Syria. And officials told VOA that effort continues.

We're trying to set an example in the U.S. by repatriating individuals that are U.S. citizens, and we're also working to help countries that have questions or have issues to repatriate, said Dexter Ingram, acting director of the State Departments Office of the Special Envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS.

A lot of folks are kind of looking to change their laws so that when these individuals are prosecuted  if they're prosecuted  that they have longer sentences, Ingram added.

In the meantime, the State Department on Wednesday pledged another $350 million to communities in northeastern Syria and another $350 million to Iraq to help stabilize communities that had been ravaged by IS.

For some officials in Syria, that money cannot come soon enough.

This is very important to create jobs for the young people in order to avoid them to be recruited by ISIS, Sinam Mohamad, U.S. representative for the SDFs political wing, the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), told VOA.

Afghanistan

Coalition members Wednesday also acknowledged growing fears about a possible resurgence of IS in Afghanistan, with the communique calling the affiliate, also known as IS-Khorasan Province, a growing threat to the South and Central Asian region.

Everybody's watching that right now, the State Departments Ingram told VOA before the ministerial meeting.

The reality is that we are already starting to engage with our Central Asian partners, even if they're at the observer status, at the highest level, he said.

U.S. defense and counterterrorism officials began warning more than a year ago that IS in Afghanistan had begun laying a foundation for a revival, while observers in the region told VOA the group was looking to gain footholds in neighboring countries, including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and parts of Tajikistan.

Intelligence estimates shared by the U.N. earlier this year said the affiliate had more than doubled in size, to more than 4,000 fighters, since U.S. forces left Afghanistan last August.

On Tuesday, DIA Director Lieutenant General Scott Berrier told lawmakers in Washington that IS-Khorasan could reconstitute its ability to launch attacks on targets outside of Afghanistan in probably a year, (or) slightly longer."

The fact that they have had some successful and catastrophic attacks  does not portend well for the future," Berrier added.

Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
It seems likely that an Indian representation will soon be restored in Kabul, even if this will be small and not at the level of ambassador

Currently, the Taliban government is not helping its own cause of gaining world recognition  which will help it access overseas funds at a time when the country is in dire straits  by imposing severe restrictions on women and girls in serious violation of human rights. (Representational Image/ AP)

Since India evacuated its mission in Afghanistan once the Taliban retook Kabul in August 2021, practically under American aegis, after what came to be called the Talibans Doha negotiations with the United States, New Delhi is evidently doing a rethink. It seems likely that an Indian representation will soon be restored in Kabul, even if this will be small and not at the level of ambassador.

This is reflective of realistic thinking. Of course, there can be no question at present of according recognition to the Taliban regime. That is likely to happen when a broad consensus amongst the leading powers emerges. Currently, the Taliban government is not helping its own cause of gaining world recognition  which will help it access overseas funds at a time when the country is in dire straits  by imposing severe restrictions on women and girls in serious violation of human rights.

More basic is the issue that the Taliban regime is not considered representative at the domestic level within Afghanistan. If it were to accommodate into the government all Afghan factions and ethnic and political interests, as well as women, the world may view the regime in Kabul differently.

Since the Taliban rode to power militarily and not through an election process, the only plausible way to gain domestic legitimacy is through the holding of a Loya Jirga, the traditional Afghan national assembly that embraces the various ethnic and other political interests and operates on the basis of a negotiated consensus. As recently as last week, Moscow  which carries influence in Afghanistan  counselled the Taliban exactly on these lines. Former President Hamid Karzai, who chose not to leave the country after the Taliban takeover and is practically under house arrest, has advocated this course for months in media interviews.

Its an open question if the Taliban will heed this well-intended advice. However, Taliban interlocutors have reportedly hinted to the three high-profile hostages  besides Mr Karzai, Dr Abdullah Abdullah, virtually the Prime Minister in the erstwhile Ashraf Ghani government, and former Loya Jirga speaker Fazl Hadi Muslimyar  that a Loya Jirga is on the cards, and the convention could materialise before the summer is out.

If this is not without basis, it would appear that the strong likelihood of India resurrecting its presence in Afghanistans capital in a matter of weeks  as suggested in New Delhi  may not be wholly without linkage to the timing of the Taliban holding the Afghan grand assembly. Indeed, in recent months New Delhi and the Taliban authorities are believed to have been in touch at the level of senior security officials. Not long ago, an Indian team was in Kabul. Earlier, India had hosted the Taliban.

There could be other signs that might suggest a loosening up in Kabul. Dr Abdullah was permitted by the Taliban government to quietly visit his family in New Delhi recently on the occasion of Id-ul-Fitr. It was strictly a private visit. Earlier, Mr Muslimyar was allowed to meet his family in the UAE at the urging of Mr Karzai, who remains a central figure.

Interestingly, the former President, who stayed on in Kabul with his family when the Taliban took over, is himself yet to reach an agreement with the authorities to travel abroad for conferences or medical reasons.

Observers believe that when any of the republican trio travels out of the country, the other two are his guarantors, effectively speaking. If Mr Karzai too is permitted foreign travel, a message of opening up by the regime is apt to be conveyed. The three Taliban leaders who are said to be interlocutors with the hostages are mines minister Shahabuddin Delawar, intelligence chief Abdul Haq Wasiq, and young Anas Haqqani, brother of the powerful Siraj Haqqani, who heads what is now deemed the most influential Taliban faction. These important Taliban figures evidently bear a huge burden of public relations.

When the nearly 200-strong Indian mission in Kabul was being evacuated in a hurry following the re-capture of Afghanistan by the Taliban on August 15 last year, Indias ambassador, Rudrendra Tandon, was on record as saying that the situation in Afghanistan was complex and quite fluid.

In the event, the Indians pulled out in toto. In light of terrorist attacks on the Indian embassy in Kabul and Indian consulates in Heart, Jalalabad and Mazar-e-Sharif at the behest of our western neighbour, there was legitimate concern that Pakistani death squads in newly liberated Kabul could target Indians and Indian interests. Ambassador Tandon had reportedly adopted a nuanced stance, however, which would have meant retaining a very limited diplomatic presence alive in Kabul.

In conspicuous contrast with Indias stand, the other powers that had a direct bearing on regional geopolitics  China, Russia, Iran, the UAE and of course Pakistan, did not withdraw their presence from Kabul when the Taliban returned. As for the US, it operated through Qatars embassy in Afghanistan. Of course, none of these countries attract visceral Pakistani governmental hostility, as India does.

Evidently, the Indian position is now undergoing a measure of quiet re-calibration. It is likely that India rushing wheat to Afghanistan, where roughly half the population stands on the brink of starvation since the Taliban takeover, made an impression in Kabul even if the food aid was routed via the World Food Programme as Pakistan was dragging its foot on providing road access to Indian aid consignments.

Over the years, before the Taliban reoccupied Kabul, India had been accused by Pakistan of fomenting terrorist trouble against it by using the then Afghan government which was friendly towards New Delhi. Recent events have shown this allegation to be false. Of late, the Pakistan Air Force has been dropping bombs in the eastern Afghanistan provinces of Khost and Kunar to destroy the camps of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, which have sought shelter with the government of the (Afghan) Taliban in Kabul in order to escape Pakistani retribution.

When American influence was all-pervasive in Afghanistan before the return of the Taliban, as a fighting politico-military force the Taliban were given sanctuary by Pakistan. This was a conscious policy aimed at eventually dominating Afghanistan if the Taliban returned to rule Kabul. This has now come to pass but Kabul, as before, continues to remain at odds with Islamabad in the security sphere.

In such a complex situation, and with some probability that domestic politics in Kabul may perforce require the Taliban to accommodate other political and ethnic interests in the country, India cannot remain glued to its position of August 2021.
The Supreme Court's nine justices will gather in private Thursday for their first scheduled meeting since the leak of a draft opinion that would overrule Roe v. Wade and sharply curtail abortion rights in roughly half the states.

The meeting in the justices' private, wood-paneled conference room could be a tense affair in a setting noted for its decorum. No one aside from the justices attends and the most junior among them, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, is responsible for taking notes.

Thursday's conference comes at an especially fraught moment, with the future of abortion rights at stake and an investigation underway to try to find the source of the leak.

Chief Justice John Roberts last week confirmed the authenticity of the opinion, revealed by Politico, in ordering the court's marshal to undertake an investigation.

Roberts stressed that the draft, written by Justice Samuel Alito and circulated in February, may not be the court's final word. Supreme Court decisions are not final until they are formally issued and the outcomes in some cases changed between the justices' initial votes shortly after arguments and the official announcement of the decisions.

That's true of a major abortion ruling from 1992 that now is threatened, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, when Justice Anthony Kennedy initially indicated he would be part of a majority to reverse Roe but later was among five justices who affirmed the basic right of a woman to choose abortion that the court first laid out in roe in 1973.

Kennedy met privately with Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and David Souter to craft a joint opinion, with no hint to the public or even to other justices about what was going on.

"I think it's tradition and decorum that everyone corresponds in writing about things that are in circulation," said Megan Wold, a former law clerk to Alito. "But at the same time, there's nothing to prevent a justice from picking up the phone to call, from visiting someone else in chambers."

A major shift in the current abortion case seems less likely, at least partly because of the leak, abortion law experts and people on both sides of the issue said.

"I think the broad contours are very unlikely to change. To the extent the leak matters, it will make broad changes unlikely," said Mary Ziegler, a scholar of the history of abortion at the Florida State University law school.

Sherif Gergis, a University of Notre Dame law professor who once was a law clerk for Alito, agreed. "I'll be surprised if it changes very much," Gergis said.

At least five votes in December

It's not clear who leaked the opinion, or for what purpose. But Alito's writing means that there were at least five votes in December to overrule Roe and Casey, just after the court heard arguments over a Mississippi law that would ban abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Based on their questions at arguments, Justice Clarence Thomas and former President Donald Trump's three appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Barrett, seemed most likely to join Alito.

Roberts appeared the most inclined among the conservatives to avoid reaching a decision to overrule the landmark abortion rulings, but his questions suggested that he would at the very least vote to uphold the Mississippi law. Even that outcome would dramatically undermine abortion rights and invite states to adopt increasingly stricter limits.

If Roberts, who often prefers incremental steps in an effort to preserve the court's legitimacy, wanted to prevent the court from overruling Roe and Casey, he'd need to pick up the vote of just one other colleague. That would be enough to deprive Alito of a majority.

The liberal justices, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, are expected to dissent from either outcome. But no dissent, separate opinion from Roberts, or even a revised draft majority opinion has been circulated among the justices, Politico reported.

Majority opinions often change in response to friendly suggestions and barbed criticisms. The justices consider the internal back-and-forth a crucial part of their work.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg remarked that pointed criticism from her friend and ideological opposite, Justice Antonin Scalia, made her opinions better. Scalia died in 2016; Ginsburg, four years later.

The lack of any other opinions surprised some former law clerks to the justices, though Wold said it's also true that bigger, harder cases traditionally take more time.

Spring usually 'tense'

Several former clerks also said they expect the leak to be discussed at the weekly meeting on Thursday, at which the justices typically finalize opinions in cases they've heard and choose cases to hear in the coming months. The spring normally is a tense time at the court, with major decisions looming that often reveal stark divisions and sometimes produce sharp words.

"I would be shocked if it doesn't come up," Wold said, adding that, given what has happened, the court would probably take additional precautions with drafts circulating in the future, including limiting who has access to them.

Kent Greenfield, a Boston University law professor who spent a year as a clerk to Souter, also speculated that the leak would be on the table Thursday. "Roberts is in a complete bind. He has to address it, but it doesn't strike me that he has many options," Greenfield said.
A Nigerian military commander said at least 51,000 Boko Haram terrorists and their families have surrendered in the country's northeast in just the first three months of this year.

Major General Chris Musa said Tuesday that the mass surrender of insurgents is a sign that Nigerian security forces are winning the 13-year-conflict against Boko Haram. But some analysts remain skeptical.

Musa, the commander of operation Hadin Kai, made the announcement Tuesday to reporters in Abuja. He said among those who surrendered were 11,000 people who had been enslaved by, conscripted by or born to the insurgents.

Musa said they had surrendered because of successful military operations. He spoke to a Lagos-based television show on Monday.

"We want to assure the public that we're doing the best we can and we're working together because this operation is for Nigeria, it is a Nigerian war, Musa said.

The army commander said the death of Boko Haram sect leader Abubakar Shekau also played a role. Shekau was declared killed in May 2021 during fighting with splinter group Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP).

According to the country's 2016 Safe Corridor plan, which provides recruits with a voluntary exit from Boko Haram, many defectors could have a normal civilian life. But analysts said the program, if not properly managed, could pose risks.

Darlington Abdullahi, a retired air commander, said if reintegration is not carried out properly, problems could emerge.

Theres a possibility that they might go back into the kinds of activities they were engaged in previously, Abdullahi said.

The Safe Corridor program is part of a national strategy to reduce militant activity in the countrys northeast but critics argue it is offering amnesty to terrorists.

Musa said surrendered terrorists were being held in a camp in Maiduguri and would be closely monitored before being allowed back into their communities.

But Abdullahi said it wouldn't be easy to change their ideologies.

"For them to fit into the larger society, they must change their mindsets, Abullahi said. They must begin to behave like normal people. They must begin to feel that they belong to the society."

Last week, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres visited the camp in Borno state during his two-day visit to Nigeria and praised the reintegration program.
A United Nations' pledging conference raised $33 million on Wednesday, far short of funds needed for a salvage operation of a decaying tanker full of oil moored off the coast of Yemen, a ship whose demise could cause an environmental disaster.

The U.N. had originally sought $144 million  including $80 million to transfer the more than 1 million barrels of crude oil onboard the FSO Safer to storage within the next four months. The first phase of the salvage was planned to be completed by the end of September, otherwise the vessel could face turbulent winds that start in October, according to the U.N.

The U.N. said it now has a total of $40 million, including previously committed funds for the operation. The tanker has been moored off the Red Sea port of Ras Issa since the late 1980s. The port, on Yemen's western coast, is controlled by the Iranian-backed rebels.

"We need to work quickly to get the remaining funds to start the four-month operation in the weather window we have ahead of us," said David Gressly, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Yemen.

Wednesday's pledging conference, co-hosed by the U.N. and the Netherlands, came more than two months after the U.N. and the Houthi reached an agreement to transfer the tanker's contents to another vessel. The agreement also includes a U.N. commitment to provide within 18 months a "replacement equivalent to the FSO Safer suitable for export."

The Houthis on Tuesday criticized the U.N. for allegedly "not presenting an operational plan" to maintain the tanker, more than two months since they signed the memorandum of understanding, a statement that could complicate U.N. efforts to raise funds.

U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq, however, said they have been proceeding according to an agreed-upon plan. He said the U.N. was trying to urgently offload the oil "before the FSO Safer tanker breaks up."

The pledges Wednesday all came from European countries and the wealthy Gulf nation of Qatar. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which lead a military coalition fighting the Houthis, did not announce pledges during the event.

Gressly, the humanitarian coordinator, said this week the vessel is slowly rusting and going into significant decay, and could explode, causing massive environmental damage to Red Sea marine life, desalination factories and international shipping routes.

The U.N. estimates that about $20 billion would be needed to just clean up an oil spill, which would likely impact nearby countries, including Saudi Arabia, Djibouti and Eritrea, he said.

"The timing and funding are both critical," said Auke Lootsma, the U.N. Development Program's representative in Yemen, adding that bad weather in the winter could complicate the salvage operation and increases the risk of the ship breaking up.

The Japanese-built tanker was sold to the Yemeni government in the 1980s to store up to 3 million barrels of export oil pumped from fields of Marib province, currently a battlefield. The ship is 360 meters (1,181 feet) long with 34 storage tanks.

Since 2015, annual maintenance on the ship has come to a complete halt. Most crew members, except for 10 people, were pulled off the vessel after the Saudi-led coalition entered Yemen's civil war in 2015 on the side of the internationally recognized government.

Yemen's conflict started in 2014 when the Houthis took control of the capital and much of the country's north, forcing the government to flee to the south, then to Saudi Arabia.

Internal documents obtained by The Associated Press in 2020 show that seawater has entered the engine compartment of the tanker, causing damage to pipes and increasing the risk of sinking. Rust has covered parts of the tanker and the inert gas that prevents the tanks from gathering inflammable gases, has leaked out. Experts say maintenance is no longer possible because the damage to the ship is irreversible, according to an AP report.

The U.N. has repeatedly warned that the tanker could release four times more oil than the notorious Exxon Valdez disaster off Alaska in 1989.
As the United States congratulated President-elect Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. on his election as the Philippines' next leader, the State Department said it would strengthen the enduring alliance between the two countries while continuing to promote respect for human rights and the rule of law

On Wednesday, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Jung Pak spoke to VOA State Department bureau chief Nike Ching to preview the upcoming U.S.-ASEAN Special Summit in Washington

Top leaders from the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations bloc are scheduled to participate, except for outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and the Myanmar junta leader Min Aung Hlaing.

Pak told VOA the U.S. would continue to "explore avenues" for pressuring Myanmar's junta "in various ways" so that the country would "return to a path to democracy." A military coup toppled the civilian government in February of last year.

When asked about reports that Marcos would set aside a 2016 ruling from the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague that negates Beijing's sovereignty claims to the South China Sea, Pak said she would not "prejudge" Marcos' agenda.

The following are excerpts from the interview, which has been edited for brevity and clarity.

VOA: Is South China Sea high on the agenda during the U.S.-ASEAN Special Summit? How does the U.S. prepare to work with this regional bloc to push back on illegal activities in the South China Sea?

Pak: South China Sea is an issue of great concern. And it's certainly going to be one of the issues that we discuss at the special ASEAN-U.S. summit later this week. So we'revery excited, of course, to have all of the leaders come in to meet with President Joe Biden.

On the South China Sea, this has been an issue of great concern, given the PRC's (People's Republic of China's) increasingly aggressive actions there, and of course, this will be a part of the discussions that we will have with the ASEAN leaders. It's an issue that we have with our ASEAN counterparts throughout our government. So we're looking forward to that conversation.

VOA: How do you expect Bongbong Marcos' presidency in the Philippines will complicate the U.S. efforts to curb China's influence in the region?

Pak: We certainly look forward to working with the president-elect of the Philippines and congratulate its people for the election. As what we have been doing with President Duterte's government and his officials, we will continue to work with the president-elect's administration on the same types of issues that we deal with for the past several years.

VOA: Is the U.S. worried that Bongbong Marcos' government will set aside a 2016 international tribunal ruling in The Hague and pursue a bilateral deal with China over the South China Sea?

Pak: I'm not going to prejudge the president-elect's agenda or whatever agenda that he has, but I personally  and we at the State Department  very much welcome working with his administration.

VOA: Does the U.S. see any new worrisome activities in the South China Sea?

Pak: I think you will see some of the trends where we we've seen increasingly aggressive and coercive actions by PRC against claimant countries. And, you know, we continue to work with all of our allies and partners in the region and beyond to make sure that the South China Sea is free and open.

VOA: On Myanmar, also known as Burma, Malaysia is calling on ASEAN to open informal channels with the shadow government NUG (National Unity Government). What is the U.S. position on Malaysia's proposal?

Pak: We continue to look at Burma with deep concern, given the escalating violence there. And we have continued to work with our ASEAN friends to figure out a path for Burma to return to democracy. So we welcome any proposals, and we continue to work with all stakeholders to make sure that we support ASEAN's five-point consensus on Burma, calling for an end to the violence there and for a facilitation of humanitarian aid to the Burmese people, who were the biggest victims of all of this.

VOA: How is the U.S. sending a clear message to the military junta during the summit? Would there be an empty chair?

Pak: We want to make sure that we support the ASEAN's decision to invite nonpolitical representatives to high-level events. We want to make sure that at the same time, we support the Burmese people and continue to call for Burma's return to a path toward democracy.

VOA: But in reality, how does the U.S. ensure all-inclusive dialogues for a political solution in Myanmar?

Pak: We continue to press for an end to the atrocities that are occurring there.  The Burma crisis has been a focus of all of our dialogues, (not only) with our ASEAN friends and allies but also with our European friends and beyond. This is something that comes up all the time in our conversations, encouraging dialogue, encouraging the special envoy from Cambodia to engage with all stakeholders and all partners.

We will continue to encourage the junta to return to a path to democracy. At the same time, we'll continue to explore avenues to press the junta in various ways.
Xinjiang cotton found in German clothing manufacturers' shirts, researchers say

Researchers in western Germany say that an isotope analysis has found that shirts by the German companies Puma, Adidas, Hugo Boss and Jack Wolfskin contain traces of cotton related to Uyghur forced labor in the Xinjiang region, according to The Guardian.

Chinese officials reportedly paid Uyghurs to dance on Eid al-Fitr

Ahead of the U.N. human rights chief's anticipated visit to Xinjiang later this month, Chinese authorities allegedly paid Uyghur residents to dance at a mosque square in Kashgar in southern Xinjiang on Eid al-Fitr, a holiday marking the end of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month, according to Radio Free Asia. State media filmed and released the dance performance on YouTube.

Chinese government razes famous Uyghur bazaar in Xinjiang

Radio Free Asia reported that Chinese authorities recently destroyed the Kashgar Grand Bazaar, a Uyghur traditional market that has been promoted as a travel destination in guidebooks such as Lonely Planet.

New book describes China's repression of Uyghurs

In "No Escape," Nury Turkel, the Uyghur American vice chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, tells his own and other Uyghurs' stories of mistreatment by China, according to a report by NPR.

News in brief

According to The Cornell Daily Sun, a graduate student at Cornell University co-founded a charitable organization to help the Uyghur diaspora in Turkey. Rizwangul NurMuhammad, a Fulbright scholar, co-founded Empower Communities Charitable Trust, which aims to provide funding and training to meet the Uyghur community's employment and educational needs. NurMuhammad has been outspoken about Uyghur rights, including raising awareness of her brother's imprisonment by the Chinese government.

Quote of note

"The stories are simply disturbing. It shocks the conscience. They are forcing Uyghur women that are the source of education for Uyghur kids when it comes to values, religious beliefs, manners, even, to go through this transformation process, which is a code word for human re-engineering."

 Nury Turkel, author of the book "No Escape," on conditions for Uyghur women in Chinese camps
Uzbek cotton farmers are celebrating the lifting of a 13-year-old international boycott of their product following a finding that the cautiously reform-minded government is no longer using organized forced labor to harvest the economically vital crop.

The decision will open the door to long-closed markets for one of the worlds biggest cotton producers, including major American clothing retailers such as Amazon, Gap, J.Crew, Target and Walmart.

The U.S.-based Cotton Campaign, a coalition of more than 300 businesses and organizations, initiated the boycott in 2009. At that time, it said, the Uzbek authorities were "forcing over 1 million children and adults, including medical staff, public sector employees and students, to pick cotton every year during the harvest.

The boycott ended after the Uzbek Forum for Human Rights, a Cotton Campaign partner, reported this spring that it found no systemic or systematic, government-imposed forced labor during the cotton harvest in 2021.

Despite the Uzbek Forums finding of discrete incidents of forced labor in several regions, the Cotton Campaign said, This historic achievement comes after years of persistent engagement by Uzbek activists, international advocates and multinational brands, together with a commitment by the government of Uzbekistan to end its use of forced labor.

The campaign now urges end users to conduct human rights due diligence at all stages of production  at cotton farms, spinners, fabric mills and manufacturing units  and ensure to have credible, independent mechanisms in place for forced labor prevention, monitoring, grievance and remedy."

The Cotton Campaign also fights state-sponsored forced labor in Turkmenistan, which it defines as one of the most closed and repressive countries in the world.

It says the authoritarian government there every year forces tens of thousands of public sector workers to pick cotton in hazardous and unsanitary conditions and extorts money from public employees to pay harvest expenses.

Jonas Astrup, the International Labor Organization technical adviser in Tashkent, told VOA that freeing Uzbek cotton from systemic forced and child labor is a political victory for the country.

They did not get rid of the boycott to please the international community but for Uzbekistan itself. Responsibility and accountability ultimately lie with the Uzbek people for how and whether they trust the system and how and whether the government can deliver for its citizens, he said. But it's time to seize economic benefits of job creation, economic growth, attracting trade and investment to the country.

Astrup said the biggest root cause of forced labor was the state quota system for cotton production and official complicity in it. That has been changed but will take time, of course. But the system of production quotas for provinces, districts and farmers has gone away, and this is really the key.

The ILO has been monitoring child labor in Uzbekistan since 2013 and forced labor since 2015. It has a network of 17 independent civil society activists, including former political prisoners, who will continue to use tested tools and methodology.

We have helped inspections grow from 200 to 400 labor inspectors. They are now issuing an annual report with data that is useful for policy and business decisions. They have the mandate to issue fines, investigate violations and submit cases for criminal prosecution, Astrup said.

Astrup sees the end of the boycott as especially timely as Uzbekistan weathers the impact of sanctions on Russia, a key trading partner.

We can help Uzbekistan credibly develop its textile and garment industry and give assurance to international brands and retailers that they can start placing orders, he said.



Astrup added that the ILO and its partners will establish a Better Work Uzbekistan program, focusing on social dialogue mechanisms at factories and cotton-textile clusters, including collective bargaining and bringing employers and workers to the table with government to promote reforms.

Human rights advocates, meanwhile, are calling on the Uzbek government to accelerate reforms and adhere to its international obligations.

Speaking in Tashkent, Bennett Freeman, a Cotton Campaign co-founder and former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, said Uzbekistans next challenge is to open space for civil society and to create the enabling environment essential for responsible sourcing that will attract global brands and protect labor and human rights.

Hugh Williamson, director of Human Rights Watchs Europe and Central Asia division, said Tashkent must lift restrictions on activists and NGOs to enable them to monitor forced labor and ensure this terrible abuse does not return.

Tanzila Narbayeva, Uzbekistans Senate chair who has led efforts to end forced and child labor, admits the country still faces enormous problems.

Ensuring human rights and freedom, specifically labor rights, is one of the priorities in our development strategy, Narbayeva told VOA.

First, we will strengthen our legal basis, synchronizing our laws with international standards. We will continue reforming agriculture and must also develop our institutions, including a solid monitoring system to base policy on reliable data and research, she said.

Narbayeva said Tashkent hears international calls for an independent civil society. She said the government is processing registration applications and conducting a discourse with nongovernmental groups.

We want a pro-active civil society which closely works with relevant international organizations. There will be grants for NGOs, funding for anti-forced labor advocacy and promoting rights in the workplace, she said.
Colored marker stones placed on either side of a small river  blue and white for Finland, red and green for Russia  are all that separate the two countries in the windswept fields of the South Karelia region. The border stretches 1,340 kilometers from the Baltic Sea to the Arctic, much of it sparsely populated, frozen wilderness.

For decades, the two countries have enjoyed peaceful relations, founded on Finland's post-World War II policy of neutrality and nonalignment. But this simple border could soon become be a frontier between East and West: a geopolitical fault line.

Finland's government said Thursday that the country should immediately apply to join NATO in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, upending a cornerstone of Finnish foreign policy in the space of a few weeks. Finnish lawmakers are set to vote on the issue in the coming days before an expected official application for NATO membership next week, in what is likely to be a joint bid with Sweden.

Finland's admission into the alliance is likely to be a formality. It would create by far the longest land border between NATO and Russia.

Moscow has threatened what it calls a "military technical response" if Finland joins the alliance. There are fears the border could become a flashpoint.

"Could Russia then try to take a playbook of, say, Georgia, and try to create some kind of frozen conflict, invade a small part of Finland with the very few forces it has left? Certainly, it could try, but Finland has prepared for this militarily," Charly Salonius-Pasternak of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs told VOA.

For now, there is no visible military presence on the Finnish side, and little to indicate the emergence of any new Cold War Iron Curtain.

Impact unknown

Finnish border guard Captain Jussi Pekkala oversees operations at the Vaalimaa crossing point. "We don't know what will happen and how the situation will change between our countries. But at this time the situation is calm, and border traffic is flowing smoothly," he told VOA on a recent visit to the frontier.

When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, Pekkala said, there was a brief increase in crossings. "We had a lot of persons fleeing from Russia. Of course, Europeans, Americans. Actually, we had like 52 nationalities coming."

Now cross-border traffic is running at just 10% of normal levels. Russia's Sputnik coronavirus vaccine is not approved in the European Union, so most Russians have not been able to enter the bloc for the past two years.

Europe has not introduced travel restrictions on Russian visitors since the Ukraine invasion  but Finland's bid to join NATO could choke off the remaining trickle of visitors as tensions increase.

The decline has hurt the regional economy. Frontier shopping malls selling luxury European brands to Russian consumers lie eerily empty.

Kimmo Jarva, the mayor of Lappeenranta, the biggest town in the region and a popular destination for visiting Russians, said the impact has been significant.

"We are used to cooperation with Russians. Here, for example, more than 3,000 Russian-speaking inhabitants are living here. Almost 2 million Russians were coming every year to this area. But now very few tourists are coming here. And we have estimated that we are losing 1 million euros ($1.04 million) every day because of this situation," Jarva said.

Much of what happens at the border will depend on Russia and its reaction to Finland's NATO membership bid. The chill of rapidly worsening relations between East and West is keenly felt on this frontier.

Mari-Leena Kuosa contributed to this report.
A settlement has been reached in a lawsuit twelve women brought last summer against Liberty University, accusing the Christian institution of fostering an unsafe environment on its Virginia campus and mishandling cases of sexual assault and harassment, according to court documents filed Wednesday.

A notice of dismissal filed by the plaintiffs' attorney, Jack Larkin, said the case had been settled but provided no details about the terms.

Larkin did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press. But in an email to TV station WDBJ, he said: "The terms of the settlement are confidential in nature and there's really nothing I can say about it beyond that the parties to the suit have resolved their differences, and the matter is settled."

Liberty also did not immediately respond to questions from the AP, though spokesperson Ryan Helfenbein acknowledged receiving them.

The development comes as the prominent evangelical school in Lynchburg faces continued scrutiny over its handling of sex assault cases. It is facing other lawsuits that raise similar allegations and recently acknowledged to news outlets that the U.S. Department of Education is reviewing its compliance with the federal Clery Act, which requires colleges and universities to maintain and disclose crime statistics and security information.

In a statement, the department acknowledged the oversight work was ongoing but said no further comment would be provided until "the outcome officially has been communicated to the institution."

The recently settled lawsuit was filed in federal court in New York and made various claims under Title IX, the federal law that protects against sex discrimination in education.

It alleged that Liberty's strict honor code makes it "difficult or impossible" for students to report sexual violence. It said the university had a "tacit policy" of weighting investigations in favor of accused male students, and it said the university retaliated against women who did make such reports.

The women, former students and employees, all filed suit anonymously and were identified as Jane Doe 1-12. Their allegations spanned more than two decades.

Some plaintiffs in the lawsuit described being raped or sexually harassed and having their cases mishandled or effectively ignored. One woman alleged pregnancy discrimination.

The school said at the time the lawsuit was filed that the allegations were "deeply troubling" and pledged to "make things right" if the claims against it were true.

A status report filed in the case in February said that if it was not resolved "amicably" an amended complaint would be filed adding new plaintiffs, including a current student.

Liberty has also been in the spotlight recently for its acrimonious split with former president and chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. in 2020. Litigation between Falwell and the school is ongoing.
* Project aims to get farmers to swap hunting for sustainable meat

* Cross-breeding produces larger goats that fetch a higher price

* Farmers should be trained on managing wildlife, experts say

By Busani Bafana

CHIVWETU VILLAGE, Zimbabwe (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - With worsening droughts in western Zimbabwe making it difficult to grow enough food, the farmers of the Tonga community have been relying on hunting impala, guinea fowl and other wild animals to eat and sell for income.

The farmers in Binga district know their traditional practice of "hunting for the pot" is decimating local protected wildlife and puts them at risk of being arrested for poaching, but they say they have little choice: hunt or go hungry.

"This year the rain was not good, crops did not survive in the heat, and we know food will be scarce," said Levia Mugande from Chivwetu village.

But now she and dozens of other farmers are looking at a new way to get protein on their plates and money in their pockets: a larger breed of goat that fetches a higher price at market.

Last year, Mugande got her first Boer goat buck from the European Union-funded Sustainable Wildlife Management (SWM) Programme, through her farmers' cooperative.

The plan, she said, is to breed the buck with indigenous female goats - or does - on her farm to produce bigger offspring with higher-quality meat, which can supplement what she makes from selling chickens and rosella, the fruit of the hibiscus plant, in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second-largest city.

"I have indigenous goats that I sell twice a year to buy food and pay school fees and other needs at home," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation at a community meeting near her home.

"But I am looking forward to earning more money from my goats," she added, saying her native goats usually sell for up to $20 each depending on their size.

Their larger offspring, who could grow to weigh up to 150 kg (330 pounds), should fetch four times as much.

The goats are part of a balancing act playing out around the world as drought-hit communities with failing crops try to make sure everyone has enough to eat without wiping out the local wildlife that is essential to a healthy ecosystem.

At the same time, the degradation of habitats due to rising temperatures is driving more wildlife onto human settlements in search of food and water, leading farmers to kill the animals.

"There are complications in balancing food availability and conservation of wildlife ... which poses a threat to the crops and livestock on which (people) depend," said Maxwell Phiri, technical assistant for the SWM project in Zimbabwe.

Launched in 2018, it has given 30 farmers in Binga one buck each of the fast-growing Boer and Kalahari goat species to breed with their indigenous females.

So far, the does who bred with the first batch of bucks have all given birth to at least two kids, Phiri said.

Farmers get the bucks for free and the monthly cost of keeping each animal is about $10 for feed and medicine.

LESS POACHING

The farming sector employs more than 60% of Zimbabwe's population, according to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization.

Binga, near the border with Zambia, has a history of insecure food supplies and incomes, in part due to waves of drought, high temperatures and erratic rainfall.

According to government data, Binga is one of Zimbabwe's least-developed districts, ranking as the third poorest in Matabeleland North Province with a poverty rate of 88%, far above the national rural average of nearly 70%.

Now, with more lucrative goat breeds that could potentially bring in higher incomes for years to come, some farmers in the district have stopped relying on wildlife for their meat, said Tawanda Gonye, the district's veterinary extension supervisor.

"The community is moving away from wildlife corridors and there is a decline in cases of farmers being arrested for poaching," Gonye said.

Members of Natural Resource Monitors, a group of young community conservationists who act as environmental police, say they have recovered ten times fewer snares on their patrols since the project started.

"We think people realise the need to preserve wildlife, even when there is not enough food," said Mathias Mugande, one of the monitors working in Binga's Ward Five.

SWM programme coordinator Patrice Grimaud said the project stumbled early on, as farmers adjusted to raising the new goats, which originate in South Africa, based on training from the Department of Veterinary Services.

"Six out of the (first batch) of goats died, mainly due to a combination of eating poisonous plants they were not familiar with, pests, diseases ... and poor nutrition," he said.

Grimaud cautioned that it was too early to attribute the decline of poaching in the area solely to the goat swap.

He pointed to other strategies the SWM has introduced, such as providing farmers with portable livestock enclosures so they do not feel the need to kill wild animals to protect their goats.

The project is also encouraging farmers to look at alternative protein sources such as honey, mopane worms and tamarind, he said.

CLIMATE ADAPTATION

Annette Hubschle, a research fellow and expert on illegal wildlife economies at the University of Cape Town, said trying new foods was only a small step toward stopping people from hunting to ease hunger linked to climate change.

Conservation projects should also encourage communities to adapt their farming to the changing climate so they do not abandon agriculture entirely, she added.

"You cannot just bring in cattle or livestock - you have to provide the means of production," said Hubschle.

"In the case of cattle farming, it would be kraals (enclosures), sheds and water points, while a crop farmer needs different things - access to water, equipment to soften the soil, seeds and compost."

Mpendulo Mwiinde, a farmer from Binga's Ward Four, said he and his peers have found it hard to give up hunting when they have so little food but are starting to understand why they should poach fewer animals.

"Wildlife is important as a future resource, even though some of the animals have destroyed our crops and threatened our livestock," he added.

(Reporting by Busani Bafana, Editing by Jumana Farouky and Megan Rowling. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers the lives of people around the world who struggle to live freely or fairly. Visit http://news.trust.org)
BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazilian far-right President Jair Bolsonaro is not planning to attend the Summit of the Americas next month in Los Angeles, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters on Tuesday.

They said Bolsonaro has told his aides he won't be going to the U.S.-hosted gathering of heads of state from across the continent, but gave no reason why.

Bolsonaro had admired former U.S. President Donald Trump and was slow to recognize the election victory of President Joe Biden. Relations between Washington and Brasilia chilled last year. Bolsonaro and Biden have never spoken to each other.

A spokesman for Brazil's Foreign Ministry said no decision has been taken yet. "The president's attendance is being studied and is not confirmed," the official said.

A third source said diplomatic talks to arrange a meeting between Biden and Bolsonaro have been dropped since the Brazilian president decided not to go to Los Angeles.

The United States will host the Ninth Summit of the Americas June 6-10 for the first time since the inaugural summit in Miami in 1994.

(Reporting by Lisandra Paraguassu; Editing by Leslie Adler)
* Zimbabwe legalised medicinal marijuana in 2018

* Seeks to expand beyond tobacco for badly-needed export dollars

* But farmers face cost, regulatory hurdles

* Global cannabis trade could be worth $272 billion by 2028 -Barclays

By Nelson Banya

HARARE, May 11 (Reuters) - Zimbabwean farmers looking to cash in on a global boom in medicinal cannabis face a litany of costs and regulatory barriers, but growers like Munyaradzi Nyanungo are betting it will boost their fortunes after decades of economic decline.

The southern African country became one of the first in Africa to legalise the production of medicinal cannabis in 2018, hoping for a fresh income stream of badly needed export dollars, and has issued 57 licences.

With finance coming in from foreign companies like U.S.-based King Kong Organics, black farmers like Nyanungo, 35 -- who have struggled to prosper in a moribund economy -- are looking to branch out from traditional crops like tobacco into cannabis.

"We stand to sell cannabis at $25 per kilogramme, which is five, six times more than what a good tobacco crop can give you. We are actually sitting on a green gold mine," Nyanungo said.

The global cannabis industry could be worth $272 billion by 2028, according to Barclays analysts, and Zimbabwe's Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube has said the country wants at least $1 billion of that -- more than it currently makes from its top agricultural export tobacco.

As Africa's biggest tobacco producer, Zimbabwean officials also recognise the need to diversify away from the addictive narcotic that is proven to be ruinous to the health of smokers and those around them. Cannabis is seen as a less harmful alternative to cigarettes and its cannabidiol (CBD) widely accepted as a natural remedy.

COSTLY BUSINESS

But challenges remain, not least the huge cost of getting set up amid tight regulations, such as the requirement to use a greenhouse to meet the criteria for 'organically grown' cannabis -- necessary to be able to sell it to the medical market.

"A greenhouse is very costly," Nyanungo said, trimming the distinctive fan-shaped leaves on his farm. "This entire greenhouse: you need something around $500,000 just to set up the structure," not including the drip system and seed inputs.

Nyanungo's U.S-based partner, King Kong Organics, which supplies seed and other inputs, purchased the greenhouses under an off-take agreement that will see the company buying the cannabis crop for processing.

That, he said, brings the cost of growing a single hectare of cannabis up to $2.5 million. He and other producers are currently lobbying the government to relax the rules -- and lower the costs.

The Zimbabwe Investment and Development Agency, which licences cannabis producers, did not respond to a request for comment.

"If anyone is going to grow medical grade cannabis, it's going to be at their risk because there are too many variables," said Zorodzai Maroveke, CEO and founder of Zimbabwe Industrial Hemp Trust. "So much can go wrong."

Still, the rewards could be substantial.

Operating since 2003, Nyanungo's Forest Farm has been growing traditional crops of tobacco and maize, and raising cattle, but acquired the cannabis licence in 2020. Of his 80 farm hands, 20 now work on the cannabis plants.

He expects to earn $2.5 million in profit from the first harvest in August, significantly higher than what he earned from his other crops and livestock.

(Editing by Tim Cocks and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
The Randburg Magistrate Court will today hand down its judgement on the bail application filed by seven South Africans accused of killing Zimbabwean, Elvis Nyathi, in Johannesburgs Diepsloot township.

Nyathi was stoned and burnt to death in Diepsloot last month when a vigilante group went door to door looking for undocumented foreign nationals and suspected criminals.

Court records indicate that the seven have spent three weeks behind bars. The investigating officer had sought to bring Elvis's wife, Nomusa Tshuma, to South Africa for an identification parade, but she refused, noting that she may be killed like her husband.

The South African Broadcasting Corporation reported that the accused pleaded not guilty to murder and other charges laid against them.

According to the Associated Press, Amnesty International says migrants in South Africa are living in fear of attacks and even death, after a Zimbabwean man was burned to death amid renewed violence against foreigners in some poor neighborhoods of Johannesburg. The rights group said in a report recently that those most targeted are Zimbabweans, who make up the largest number of migrants in Africas most developed economy. Amnesty International accused South African authorities of inaction and a lack of political will to stem the wave of anti-migrant violence witnessed in recent weeks. The report said that violence is driven by vigilante groups who blame foreigners from poorer African countries for South Africas rampant unemployment.
The Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (PTUZ) says crippling poverty is forcing thousands of children to drop out of school.

In a statement, PTUZ said the recent hike in examination fees is expected to worsen the situation as the majority of Zimbabweans are now living from hand to mouth.

PTUZ said, The figures indicate that the government and the candidates will share the costs, in theory, with the government carrying 55% of the burden. Grade 7 candidates, as per the figures circulating, will pay $4,388 while government pays $5,362 for a total of $9,700. Ordinary and Advanced Level candidates will pay $1,620 and $3,240 respectively while government takes care of the remaining 55%.

While in theory the figures may look miniscule, given the loss in the value of the Zim dollar, it should not make us lose sight of the egregious fact that these figures are still not affordable to the generality of the candidates and their funders. You may be aware of the figures we produced last week, which indicate the unfortunate and shocking statistic that the ZIMSEC O Level candidature has been falling by steep levels since 2017, from a high of 332,473 in November 2017, to a low of 163,179 in 2021, a mind-blowing 51%.

PTUZ said more learners are dropping from school as a result of endemic poverty pervading through the society.

It added that the situation is made worse by the fact that drought and famine are ravaging the country today. That, coupled with the fact that parents have had to pay huge tuition fees and other costs means that most parents may not be able to register for the November examinations.

Most parents and guardians are also still battling from the economic effects of Covid 19. We are therefore likely to witness another huge drop in registration. It is the most perfect example of bottlenecking witnessed in the past two decades. We cannot excuse a system that seeks to increase the pass rate by reducing the number of candidates as we are seeing now.

PTUZ said parents of school-going children are unable to raise money quickly enough like in the past when they were using lending facilities provided by banks and other moneylenders.

Unfortunately, at a crucial juncture we have had the government making the senseless announcement whose effect is to prevent people from borrowing money for registering their children, among other problems. We are also aware that government has not been paying its component of the examination fees, or paying so late that the money would no longer make sense.

The result is that examiners are paid late. We request that government not only increases its share of the examination fees to 75%, but that the money be paid timeously in order to enable ZIMSEC to meet its obligations. The PTUZ cannot accept a situation where the government does not take the issue of examinations seriously as is the case right now. We call upon the government to take our input with the seriousness it deserves.

President Emmerson Mnangagwa recently announced new finance measures to tighten money supply and demand by stopping banks from lending people and companies funds for personal and other purposes.

The Ministry of Education has not yet reacted to the PTUZs concerns as state officials have been unreachable for comment.
Finlands President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin Thursday expressed their approval for joining NATO, a move that would complete a major policy shift for the country in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

NATO membership would strengthen Finlands security. As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defense alliance, they said in a joint statement. Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay. We hope that the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days.

The leaders said they came to their decision after allowing time for Finlands Parliament and the public to consider the matter, and to consult with NATO and neighboring Sweden. Officials in Sweden are expected to consider their own possible NATO application in the coming days.

SEE ALSO:

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday if Finland does apply for membership, they would be warmly welcomed into NATO and the accession process would be smooth and swift.

"Finland is one of NATO's closest partners, a mature democracy, a member of the European Union, and an important contributor to Euro-Atlantic security, Stoltenberg said.

Russia has warned against NATO expansion, and said Finland and Sweden joining would bring serious military and political consequences.

"The expansion of NATO and the approach of the alliance to our borders does not make the world and our continent more stable and secure," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Thursday.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tweeted that he praised Finlands decision in a phone call with Niinisto.

The fight for Ukraine played out beyond the battlefields on Wednesday, with Kyiv cutting off one Russian natural gas pipeline that supplies European homes and industry, while a Moscow-installed official in southern Ukraine said the Kremlin should annex Kherson after Russian troops took control.

Ukraines natural gas pipeline operator said it was stopping Russian shipments through a hub in eastern Ukraine controlled by Moscow-backed separatists because of interference from enemy forces, including the apparent siphoning of gas.

About one-third of Russian gas headed to Western Europe passes through Ukraine, although one analyst said the immediate effect might be limited since much of it can be redirected through another pipeline. Russias giant state-owned Gazprom said gas flowing to Europe through Ukraine was down 25% from the day before.

The European Union, as part of its announced effort to punish Russia for its 11-week invasion of Ukraine, is looking to end its considerable reliance on Russian energy to heat homes and fuel industries.

It has, however, encountered some opposition from within its 27-member bloc of nations, especially from Hungary, which says its economy would sustain a major hit if its supply of Russian energy were cut off.

In Brussels, negotiations with Hungary over a ban on Russian energy purchases ended Wednesday for the moment. If not resolved, it would constitute a major split among NATO allies trying to impose unified Western sanctions against Russia and President Vladimir Putin.

A girl and her grandparents evacuate near Lyman, Ukraine, May 11, 2022.

Meanwhile, Kirill Stremousov, deputy head of the Kherson regional administration installed by Moscow, told Russias RIA Novosti news agency, The city of Kherson is Russia."

He asked that Putin declare Kherson a proper region of Russia, much as Moscow did in 2014 in seizing Ukraines Crimea Peninsula and declaring Luhansk and Donetsk as independent entities shortly before invading Ukraine on Feb. 24.

Peskov said that it would be up to the residents of the Kherson region to make such a request, and to make sure there is an absolutely clear legal basis for the action.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak derided the notion of its annexation, tweeting: The invaders may ask to join even Mars or Jupiter. The Ukrainian army will liberate Kherson, no matter what games with words they play.

Kherson is a Black Sea port with a population of about 300,000 and provides access to fresh water for neighboring Crimea. Russian forces captured it early in the war.

Some information for this story came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Press and Reuters.
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[ST. PAUL, MN]  Governor Tim Walz today announced a plan to fund enhanced summer learning programs in Minnesota to help students recover from the learning challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Governor will allocate $75 million of the states flexible American Rescue Plan funds to provide academic enrichment and mental health support this summer and beyond for Minnesotas students, families, educators, communities, and schools. Governor Walz made the announcement today at Otter Lake Elementary School in White Bear Lake.

Our students have sacrificed so much this past year, and the learning disruptions caused by COVID-19 have impacted every single student across Minnesota. Today, we are announcing a summer learning plan to put our students front and center, said Governor Walz. These summer programs will help make up for missed learning opportunities and will help our students conquer the school year in the fall. Our students deserve this investment.

G-O-P Senate Education Committee Chairman Roger Chamberlain of Lino Lakes says there was always plenty of federal money to meet the state's summer school needs, and the governor saying the state needed to fund it was an "unnecessary threat."

Governor Walz will allocate $75 million of the flexible State Fiscal Stabilization Funds in President Bidens American Rescue Plan toward programming that will provide solutions for academic enrichment and mental health support starting this summer. The funding below will enhance both summer learning opportunities and academic year programs at school districts and charter schools across the state:

Academic and Mental Health Support ($34.614 million)

Public schools and districts will receive a general allocation in order to create partnerships with organizations and provide services in the following areas:

 Expand mental health and well-being support to youth and adolescents attending school district and charter school summer learning programs.

 Partner with community businesses and organizations to develop a summer mentor and/or tutoring model that covers enrichment programming and other costs such as transportation and meals to increase student participation.

 Bring school-based summer programs into the community, providing opportunities for enrichment, social and emotional skill building, mental health support, and tutoring services.

 Provide students with summer field trips for hands-on learning opportunities. Hands-on learning opportunities include activities such as trips to nature centers, state parks, zoos, museums, or theaters.

Preschool for 4- and 5-Year-Olds ($20 million)

This allocation provides preschool or prekindergarten to 4- and 5-year-olds. These funds can be used in a Parent Aware star-rated, public or private, preschool, or prekindergarten in-person learning program. These high-quality early learning programs help children develop their social-emotional skills before they begin kindergarten.

School-Linked Mental Health Grants ($6.011 million)

This investment in School-linked Mental Health Grants, administered by the Department of Human Services, will address an increased need for community mental health services as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Expanded Access to Tutoring ($3.25 million)

The Governor will expand access to tutoring services including academic enrichment, mental health support, and other wrap-around services for K-12 children by providing grants to experienced entities, including community organizations.

Increased Adult Basic Education Program Funding ($10 million)

This investment will strengthen Adult Basic Education (ABE) programming statewide to ensure access to, enhance the quality of, and to increase the ABE programming available. This proposal will fund expanded ABE programming for the summer of 2021 and if funding remains available, it would be used throughout fiscal year 2022 in order to build and help sustain enhanced programming year-round.

Learning Acceleration and College Readiness Initiatives ($1.125 million)

The Governor will allocate funding to the Office of Higher Education (OHE) for two programs for the summer months. Funding for OHEs Summer Academic Enrichment Program will increase by $625,000 and the Intervention for College Attendance Program will increase by $500,000. These programs will work to address educational challenges due to the pandemic, which is disproportionally impacting the most underserved students.
The nicest man in the world, reportedly. Photo: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images

This post originally ran after the release of The Mummy. Because Tom Cruise has continued to be a nice guy (unless COVID-19 protocols are being broken), we have continued to update this post to include more unsettlingly nice stories.

First things first: We get it. Theres an awful lot of unsettling Scientology stuff (a whole lot of stuff ) around Tom Cruise. But pay no attention to that: Cruise has a new movie out, which means its time for the latest round of absolutely gushing stories about Tom Cruise. Theyre kind of like Prince stories  always unique and surprising, often exceedingly delightful, if you can ignore the odd feeling in the back of your spine. On a Hollywood press tour, its a truth universally acknowledged that Tom Cruise is a super-nice dude.



He taught Zac Efron how to ride a motorcycle.

In 2010, a young Zac Efron sat down with the now-defunct Details magazine for a cover shoot. He was in his postHigh School Musical phase, trying to break out of the teen-star shell. Somewhere along the line, Tom Cruise asked him if he knew how to ride a motorcycle. You wanna learn how? Cruise asked, inviting young Efron to his house. According to Details, Cruise taught him how a motorcycle engine works, showed him the hangar with his dozens of pristine bikes  including the Triumphs he rode in the Mission: Impossible movies. When Details asked him why he thought Tom Cruise would do such a nice thing, he had no idea. I dont know. I dont even want to know, he said. Its just so cool that he gave a shit, the fact that he cared at all. No one else did that.

He helped Mummy co-star Jake Johnson get in shape.

Heres a story that is very anti-Hollywood, but very Tom, Johnson told Thrillist recently. He wanted me to work out with him and get in shape for the movie. People have told me in the past, including New Girl, that I need to lose weight and stay in shape. But they dont tell me how. Its like, Hey tubbo, fit into these slacks! Instead Tom Cruise invited Johnson to his gym (the Pain Cave). He said, Youll be training with me and my trainers. If you want Ill put you on a food plan with my chef. The food is great, Johnson recalled. When someone on Mummy set insisted that Johnson wait until after Cruise was done working out so the star could have the gym alone, Cruise was furious. Let me make something crystal clear: I dont care what anybody on the crew says to you, they dont know what Im saying to you, Johnson remembered him saying. And Im saying to you that you are always welcome. I dont care what Im doing in there. Youre not other. Youre my castmate. Come in.

He stayed in touch with the kid who dropped out of Jerry Maguire.

Before Jonathan Lipnicki, there was another kid set to steal the show on the Jerry Maguire set. He spent a few weeks filming, but after a certain point, he ran out of gas, Cameron Crowe told Deadline, and wanted to leave the production. The role was recast  Lipnicki stepped in  but Crowe got a call from the mother of the boy who almost took the role. Weeks later, the mother of the first kid calls the office. I got on the phone and she says, Will you please tell Tom Cruise thank you for the way he has kept in touch with my son, sent him letters and gifts, and just let him know all is well? I thought, wow, I had no idea Tom Cruise was doing that, he said. Crowe continued:

She said, It really helped my son. Hes over it now, hes fine, and Tom did a beautiful job helping him transition back to his life. I went to Tom, later, and said, you quietly helped this kid through what could have been a terrible transition. Thank you, but why did you never tell any of us? Tom said, I just didnt want that first actor to go to the movies, look at the screen and think hed failed. I wanted him to love movies, his entire life. That is the quiet way Tom Cruise conducts his professional life.

He gave Kanye West advice on his fledgling comedy career, but declined a role in Kanyes HBO pilot.

Once upon a time, Kanye made a comedy pilot for HBO. When Vulture saw the pilot, Wyatt Cenac revealed overhearing a conversation between Kanye and Cruise: Kanye had been trying to get Tom Cruise to be in the pilot. And he had asked him because they were friendly. And were shooting a scene [in the Escalade] and at one point Kanyes like, Shut the fuck up, its Tom Cruise, and because he couldnt get out of the car, he had to take the phone call smashed between people, Cenac said. You can hear Tom Cruise laughing [does a Tom Cruise laugh] as Kanye goes, Yeah, man, Ive been working on the improv stuff, you know, all your suggestions were great. [Does another Tom Cruise laugh.] That went on for like 15 minutes. Tom Cruise never did the show and we had to hire a Tom Cruise look-alike that was like five-feet taller than Cruise.

Hes a good sport on set.

I think theres something very right with him in that he cares so much about the audience experience, his Mission: Impossible co-star Simon Pegg told Jimmy Fallon. Its like hes obsessive with giving people an authentic experience. Actor-director Todd Field, who acted with Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut, said something similar of working with Cruise and Stanley Kubrick: Youve never seen [an actor] more completely subservient and prostrate themselves at the feet of a director.

He convinced the Black Eyed Peas to do a song for Knight and Day.

Tom Cruise, a self-described big fan of the Peas, was almost done with filming Knight and Day when he, co-star Cameron Diaz, and ex-wife Katie Holmes saw them play over Super Bowl weekend. He was struck with a brilliant idea: As we were watching, it occurred to me that this is the perfect time, so I called up Will [i.am], and he doesnt have any time, but I asked, Are you interested [in doing a song for the film]? They were, so they did.

He totally did not get mad at Cuba Gooding Jr.s dad when he asked about his sexuality.

During the filming of Jerry Maguire, Cuba Gooding Sr. impolitely inquired about Tom Cruises sexuality. He gave Tom Cruise a hug and said, I love you, man. Now seriously, are you gay or not? Gooding Jr. recalled, years later. I almost fainted. And thought, Please, lord, let me disappear. Cruise was so chill dealing with the prying parent: Tom just laughed and said No, his co-star reported.

He gave Kevin Pollock a $500 pen (and then a second pen).

During rehearsals for A Few Good Men, Kevin Pollock noticed Tom Cruise making notes in his script with a ridiculously huge pen. At first, they joked about it. Then, Cruise convinced Pollock to try writing with it. Its like an angel wing floating on a cloud. It was a magical pen, Pollock recalled to the Chive. Even Demi Moore agreed the pen was a total joy to use. When Pollock learned the pen cost $500, he was crestfallen. Later, Cruises assistant showed up with a gift: the luxury writing utensil itself. When Pollock admitted to his co-star that he hadnt used the pen because he felt it deserved a special spot on his mantle, Cruise bought him a second $500 pen  one for the mantle, and one for Pollocks pocket.

He personally arranged for Bill Hader to leave a set and get home to New York after an attempted bombing in Times Square.

As Bill Hader and Tom Cruise were in Los Angeles filming promos for the 2010 MTV Movie Awards, word reached the set that a car bomb had just gone off in Times Square. Hader was a new dad at the time, concerned about his wife and infant daughter in New York. Cruise noticed Haders concern, and asked when hed get to go home to check on them. Hader wasnt due back to the city for two more days, and so, Tom Cruise took over the set and got Bill Hader home by 8 a.m. the next morning. As Hader recalled:

He thinks for a second. No, he says. Well get you home tonight. And in that moment, Tom Cruise, as Les Grossman, in a karate gi, began to direct all my coverage, Hader recalled. All my footage, all my close-ups. Boom! We do three perfect takes. Boom, boom, boom. Everyones chest-butting each other, some people are chest-butting themselves, people are going insane. Two days worth of work, Hader said, and he got it done in 45 minutes. Then Katie Holmes came up to him and handed him a piece of paper with his new flight information. Youre on the red eye tonight, she told him. Im like, What?! Hader said. Because Cruise got him out of work and on a plane that night, he was able to surprise his wife and daughter by 7:45 the next morning and check in on them in person. So thats what its like to work with Tom Cruise, Hader said.

He rescued a family from their burning sailboat.

While vacationing with then-wife Nicole Kidman and their kids on their luxury yacht in 1997, Tom Cruise spotted a sailboat going up in flames. The actor sent the yachts skiff to rescue the people aboard  French paper tycoon Jacques Lejeune, 68, his wife, Bernadette, 42, daughter Eugenie, 7, and two crew members  according to People.

He helped rescue a victim of a hit-and-run, and paid her medical bills.

The year before the sailboat rescue, Tom Cruise was driving down Wilshire Boulevard on a rainy night when he watched Heloisa Vinhas, a 23-year-old aspiring actress, get hit by a car. Cruise commanded someone to call for help and accompanied her to UCLA Medical Center, according to People. He even picked up the $7,000 medical bill for her broken left leg and bruised ribs when he found out she wasnt insured. If hes not Superman, he can be Batman  Batman doesnt have superpowers, Vinhas told the mag.

He saved a pair of his littlest fans during a crowded red carpet.

At Mission: Impossibles West End premiere, Tom Cruise spotted preteen fans Laurence Sadler, 7, and Christos Chris Tzanetis, 13. As he and Kidman made their way through the crowd, he eyed Sadler being pinned against a steel bar. Cruise rescued both young fans from being crushed, and called for a police officers help. Every night I say good-night to him when I pass his poster in my room, Sadler told People at the time.

He never forgets Dakota Fannings birthday.

He has sent me a birthday gift every year since I was 11 years old, Fanning told Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live. I always think, Oh, when Im 18, hell probably stop. Oh, 21, hell stop. But every year. Its really kind. Fanning says he usually gifts her shoes.

He bought his publicists daughter so many wedding gifts.

Pat Kingsley and Tom Cruise had one of the closest talent-publicist relationships. They met after hed finished work on A Few Good Men, and often talked every day. They parted ways, she later said, over a disagreement over The Last Samauris press tour: He wanted to talk more openly about Scientology; she thought it wasnt a good talking point during the press tour. But before that, she said, We talked constantly, telling The Hollywood Reporter that they shared 11 p.m. calls almost nightly. He was an insomniac. I liked the fact that he was so much fun. And he was so thoughtful. He remembered birthdays, my daughters birthday. He came to her wedding; she was registered somewhere for the china, and he bought out everything. Theyve got things they havent even opened yet, and theyve been together 15 years!

He sends Kirsten Dunst (and Jimmy Kimmel) a cake every year.

Kirsten Dunst acted with Cruise in 1994s Interview With a Vampire. I ran into Tom like five years ago, and now I get this cake every thats one of the best cakes Ive ever had. Its from Dylans Bakery in Thousand Oaks, she explained to Jimmy Kimmel in 2015. We call it the Cruise cake at my familys house. Were like, Cruise cakes here! And its gone within a day. Kimmel agrees that the cake is good, and that he receives one regularly, too.

He gifted his lawyer a rare book of English history.

When Cruises longtime lawyer Bert Fields turned 86, the actor got him an especially thoughtful gift. Fields received a customized Cruise cake and an extremely rare edition of [Raphael] Holinsheds history of England, Fields told THR. He knows I write about English history, and this is a fantastic prize.

Hes maintained a friendship with Billy Wilder in the directors last years.

Cameron Crowe really wanted the legendary director to take the role of Jerrys mentor, Dicky Fox. Crowe was inspired by The Apartment, and set a meeting with Wilder to offer him the role. When he arrived to Wilders office, the director started chatting about his old movies, mistaking him for a messenger. When Crowe offered him the role, he declined, finally saying yes after a long courtship.

When filming began, Wilder apologized and dropped out. Crowe told Cruise. Cruise says, lets go talk him into it. We drive to Billy Wilders office. Billy is there, and he lights up when he sees that its Tom Cruise. He invites us in, Crowe recalled to Deadline. He tells Tom these stories about Cary Grant, and Sunset Boulevard. Hes just magnificent. And I realize he is in full Hollywood director, getting-ready-to-make-another-picture-as-soon-as-possible mode, and hes got Tom Cruise in his office. And Im virtually invisible at this point, as that romance is happening. Eventually, Wilder finally declined and the role was recast. Crowe told Deadline Wilder and Cruise remained friends until the directors death. He loved Billy Wilder and we talked about him, constantly. Tom wrote notes to Billy, and they developed a little bit of a friendship. When Billy passed away, Tom came to the memorial and really let everybody know how much he loved Billy. I think Tom got a big kick out of Wilder. How could you not?

He got Cameron Crowe back into directing.

After the failure of Elizabethtown, Cameron Crowe wasnt sure about directing another movie. Then Tom Cruise took him for a drive, and the two of them ended up on the set of Knocked Up. Mr. Cruise introduced Mr. Crowe to Mr. Apatow, who joked that hed been stealing for years from Say Anything, the sharp-witted teen comedy that first established Mr. Crowe as a director in 1989, the New York Times reported. Cruise sidles up to me and goes: See? Get out of your house, man, its fun, Crowe recalled to the Times. And thats when it felt like, yeah, its time to direct again.

He released Jessica Chastain from her Oblivion contract so she could star in Zero Dark Thirty.

Jessica Chastain was set to co-star with Tom Cruise in the dystopian action movie Oblivion when she got a call from Kathryn Bigelow, who wanted Chastain for Zero Dark Thirty. Before even reading the script, Chastain told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017, she agreed to star. Cruise came to Chastains rescue: I was excited to do [Oblivion]. But when [Zero Dark Thirty] came my way, I realized I had to do this. And the person who made it possible for me to do this movie is Tom Cruise. Someone contacted him from my agency and said, Listen, she wants to work with you. And she would love to, but there is this other film, and its so important. And he said, OK, were going to let you out of your contract. Olga Kurylenko eventually signed on to Oblivion in Chastains place.

He always takes his kids calls, even in the middle of a scene.

There were times that I was about ready to say Action; and the phone rang, Steven Spielberg told People in 2002 about working with Tom Cruise in Minority Report. If it was Toms kids, everything stopped for that. Just when he was preparing for probably the hardest scene he has in the whole movie, the phone rang. Anybody else would have looked up with anger in their eyes, but he immediately broke character and walked off and took the call. Spielberg was impressed by his stars attention to his kids even when it came to minor emergencies: Connor or Isabella had stuck an eraser in their eye or something like that. It was not serious, but Dad came to the rescue. I thought it was amazing. I have been known to say, Ill call them back after the shot.

He bought W. Earl Brown Elton JohnBilly Joel tickets after a rehearsal ran late.

While shooting Vanilla Sky, a rehearsal ran late and Cruises scene partner W. Earl Brown (Deadwood, Preacher) missed an Elton JohnBilly Joel concert he had tickets to in L.A. Once Tom Cruise found out, according to People, he made it up to Brown: You didnt give your tickets away? Why didnt somebody tell me? he reportedly asked. When Elton John and Billy Joel played in L.A. a few nights later, Cruise got Brown two tickets to the show, fourth-row center.

He danced to Yung Joc on BET.

Technically, this isnt a nice thing Tom Cruise did for any one person in particular, but rather one very nice thing he did for the internet as a whole. For a short period of time, the Yung Joc motorcycle dance was the most important dance you could do. And Cruise, in an appearance on BET, did the dance. He sold it, committed completely. So here you have it: Tom Cruise dancing on 106 & Park during Mission: Impossible IIIs press tour.

He helped Jennifer Connelly face her fear of flying.

Turns out Tom Cruise can help someone without even knowing hes doing it. Jennifer Connelly told Graham Norton that she suffered from a really crippling fear of flying for years before she filmed Top Gun: Maverick. She didnt realize her character had a scene in the air. But even though he was unaware of her phobia, Cruise gave her a reassuring heads-up from the cockpit: Hes like, Its going to be very graceful, very elegant, just some very elegant rolls, you know. Its going to be nice and easy.
Photo: Thierry Le Fouille/SIPA/Shutterstock

Christopher Walken already rocks the Futurama Mom look, so the actor is perfectly fit to play the most powerful ruler in the galaxy. Variety reports that Walken has been cast as Shaddam IV of House Corrino, Emperor of the Known Universe, in Dune: Part Two. While the character did not appear in Denis Villeneuves first Dune film, he was the catalyst that set off all of its ensuing action and carnage by handing over control of Arrakis to House Atreides. What this really means is that he will be playing Florence Pughs dad, so thats something for Film Twitter to talk about until October 2023.

In other 2une (please let this be a thing) casting news, Feyd-Rautha will appear in Villeneuves Dune: Part Two, and Deadline reports that Austin Butler is in negotiations to play him. The thing about Stings performance as spiky-headed Harkonnen baddie Feyd-Rautha in 1984s Dune is its kind of impossible to follow Stings performance as Feyd-Rautha in 1984s Dune. Its just so weirdly sexy (okay, Bowies Goblin King in Labyrinth was able to follow it, but thats it). I personally assumed that the character wasnt in Denis Villeneuves Dune because Sting was busy and hes 70. It turns out the next rival whom Timothee Chalamet has to face will be played by an Elvis impersonator, which is technically Butlers job description now.

But heres where things get spice-y. New York Times reporter Kyle Buchanan tweeted a link to the Deadline article and added that they also looked at Harry Styles and Tye Sheridan for this role  That ellipsis has us going hmm  in a big way. Did Villeneuve see Styless performance in Eternals and go Scrap it? Did he watch The Card Counter and say, Thats quite enough family vengeance from Tye Sheridan, thanks?

Elsewhere in the Duneiverse, Florence Pugh is also in negotiations to play Princess Irulan Corrino, eldest daughter of the Emperor and possible romantic rival to Zendaya. If Pugh is cast, they will contractually have to change the spelling of the movie to Dughne: Part Twugh.

This post has been updated.
Photo: Carole Bethuel/Netflix

Despite recent setbacks, Netflix is still in the business of TV. Recently, Insider published a report of what kinds of shows Netflix is currently looking for, with intel gathered from talent agencies across Hollywood. Apparently the streamers current lodestar is Emily in Paris. One agent told Insider that the show could not be referenced more in meetings. But thats not all they want. Netflix is looking for a female Jack Ryan, a contained underwater thriller series, and a modern-day retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo that doesnt already exist and star Emily VanCamp. They also emphasized a need for economy. Auteur-driven work (done cheaply)! Sci-fi (that isnt too complicated)! So take heed, potential showrunners, these shows are going to be surefire hits with Netflix. Theyre all guaranteed for two seasons, and only two seasons.

Ace in Space

What Netflix Wants: a sci-fi series thats not too complicated

Logline: A girl from 21st-century Chicago named Alice, a.k.a. Ace (Victoria Pedretti), is transported to the other side of the galaxy (which looks an awful lot like Vancouver), where she discovers an intergalactic conspiracy to control Earths future. Lucien Laviscount stars as the head of the alien-led conspiracy. Lets get him in prosthetics, stat!

How its like Emily in Paris: The quirky hat budget will be out of this world.

Dogme 3000

What Netflix Wants: a competition show for the TikTok generation, low-budget auteur stuff

Logline: This reality-show competition, judged by Lars von Trier, Doja Cat, and that guy who peels raw eggs, will put TikTokers to the test by making them adhere to the Dogme 95 rules of filmmaking in their videos. Theater of Cruelty meets Ratatouille the Musical! Like Project Greenlight, the show will seek to generate a new crop of talent. But unlike Project Greenlight, it will work.

How its like Emily in Paris: Everyone will also have a fundamental misunderstanding of how social media (especially a hashtag) works.

Les Roommates

What Netflix Wants: a new New Girl

Logline: An adorkable American woman (Jenna Ortega) moves into a chalet with three roommates in somewhere that looks like Vancouver. Ones fussy, ones kooky, and ones a potential love interest. Theyre all hot and French. How will they ever get along???

How its like Emily in Paris: Will never disclose the protagonists age.

Whitney in Tuscany

What Netflix Wants: a female Jack Ryan

Logline: Lily Collins plays Whitney Cooper, an undercover CIA operative based in Tuscany. By day, shes the lone American in an Italian marketing firm. By night, shes applying enhanced interrogation techniques on the crumb-bums of central Europe. Will she be the one to take down Putin? Si.

How its like Emily in Paris: Self-explanatory.
(Bloomberg) -- Germany said Russia is using energy as a weapon after Moscow reduced natural gas supplies in retaliation for Europes penalties over the war in Ukraine.

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A unit of Gazprom PJSC that was seized by Germany has had its deliveries reduced by about 10 million cubic meters a day, according to German Economy Minister Robert Habeck.

While the move appears to be largely symbolic -- amounting to about 3% of Germanys Russian gas imports, according to Habeck, the Kremlin is showing it wont shy away from squeezing its largest customer. Benchmark gas prices in Europe surged more than 20%.

The situation is escalating to the point that the use of energy as a weapon is becoming a reality, Habeck told reporters on Thursday in response to Russias move.

On top of the German standoff, shipments to Europe via Ukraine were curtailed on Thursday after a key cross-border entry point was put out of action because of troop activity on the ground, according to Kyiv. Moscows counter-sanctions also targeted a pipeline that crosses Poland, removing a potential backup route for European customers to receive Russian gas.

The tension comes just as a solution appeared to be emerging for what has been the main headache for weeks -- Moscows demand for ruble payments for its gas. Companies including German giant Uniper SE were increasingly confident they could keep buying Russian supplies without breaching sanctions.

Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi on Wednesday seemed to back such a move, and more European buyers are opening ruble accounts.

Read: Draghi Says European Companies Can Pay for Gas in Rubles

Germany has been seeking to wean itself off Russian gas, but it still accounts for about 35% of the countrys supplies, down from more than half before the invasion of Ukraine in late February. It will take another step later this year when the its first floating liquefied natural gas terminal goes on line.

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Habeck said Germany can cope with the latest disruption in part by securing alternative supplies, adding that theres no need to elevate Germanys alert level in response to Moscows sanctions against Gazprom Germania GmbH. The countrys three-stage emergency plan, which is currently at its first level, could see its network regulator eventually ration gas if supplies get tight.

The fuel is a crucial part of the energy mix of Europes largest economy. Some 15% of Germanys electricity is generated from gas -- compared with less than 9% in 2000, as the country winds down nuclear and coal. The fuel is also critical for heating homes and industrial processes in the chemicals and pharmaceuticals sectors.

Moscow prohibited dealings with Gazprom Germania and its various subsidiaries now under the control of Germanys energy regulator. That includes energy supplier Wingas GmbH, a European gas storage business, the London-based trading arm of Gazprom and EuRoPol Gaz, owner of the Polish section of the Yamal-Europe pipeline connecting Russia to Germany.

Germany last month temporarily took control of Gazprom Germania. Most of the groups companies had come under pressure after clients and business partners refused to do business with them after Russias invasion of Ukraine. That raised the prospect that owners of key European energy infrastructure wouldnt survive.

We are monitoring the situation closely, he told lawmakers earlier Thursday. Energy can be used powerfully in an economic conflict.

(Updates with details on Poland)

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Last Tuesday, the VFW Post 5297 raised a new flag at the Cathlamet Fire Hall after presenting it to the Cathlamet Fire Chief Vernon Barton. The flag previously hung on the catwalk of a C-17 that evacuated a Marine to Germany after he was injured by an IED (improvised explosive device) in Iraq. The local post's quartermaster, Justin Tawater, was a staff sergeant in the Air Force at the time and the flying crew chief responsible for all the maintenance of that C-17. Tawater is now a reserve in the Air Force, holding the rank of tech sergeant. "It makes me feel proud," Tawater said."A flag that flew over in a C-17 to save a life is flying in our town." Photo by Diana Zimmerman.
It likely will take an act of Congress to get the US Army Corps of Engineers to dredge sediment in Gray's Bay.

Residents of the Grays River and Deep River valleys have been pressing the Corps for years to clear sediment from the rivers' channels across the bay. They contend that Corps activities to manage the Columbia River shipping channel have plugged the tributary channels' outlets, and this has resulted in increasingly adverse flooding in the valleys.

In discussion Tuesday sponsored by the county board of commissioners, Corps officials reviewed the programs they could offer to address the situation and emphasized that their authority to do projects is directed by the US Congress.

"Our hope is to get dredging so these waters can flow out and ease the back up," said commission Chair Gene Strong, who has lived in the Grays River Valley for over 40 years.

In that time, Strong said, he has seen flooding increase in depth and duration. A volunteer fire fighter, he said that the Grays River Fire Department had to move its Grays River station because flood depth had increased from inches to as much as four feet. The flooding also impacts transportation; it blocks roads and isolates people for days, and the siltation inhibits access to water based business.

The Corps, Strong said, changed Gray's Bay drainage by moving the shipping channel closer to the Oregon shore and depositing spoils on a man made island that blocked the tributaries' outlets.

Speakers from the Corps's Portland division indicated that they have limits on what they can do. While there may be authorities to dredge channels in the Gray's and Deep rivers, projects are prioritized based on cost/benefit analysis.

Also, there needs to be a local partner to share costs, 50 percent of a feasibility study and 35 percent of actual work, commented Valerie Ringold, Portland district planning chief.

After considerable discussion, commissioners decided to seek help from members of Congress who could meet with the Corps and work on appropriations and authorizations for the agency.

"Congressional folks, you know where the funding will be," Commissioner Dan Cothren commented to the regional representatives of Senator Patty Murray and Congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler who attended the meeting (held on Zoom).
AUBURN  An Auburn man was sentenced to prison after admitting to a robbery on the Fourth of July and to selling drugs.

Enrique Torres, 26, was in front of Judge Thomas Leone for sentencing involving two different cases in Cayuga County Court Thursday. Torres was one of four people charged in the robbery on July 4 last year on Janet Street. He pleaded guilty in March to first-degree robbery, a class B felony, Torres also pleaded in March to an unrelated charge of criminal sale of a controlled substance, a class B felony.

In court Thursday, Leone gave Torres a previously-agreed upon sentence of 13 years in prison and five years of post-release supervision for the robbery count. For the sale charge, he received a previously-agreed upon sentence of 10 years and three years of post-release supervision. Those charges will run concurrently.

Torres had an additional criminal sale count for the sale case and another first-degree robbery count and charges of second-degree robbery and second-degree criminal possession of a weapon, both class C felonies, in the robbery case, but those charges were satisfied by the plea.

Leone also ordered Torres to pay $500 in restitution to the Finger Lakes Drug Task Force for the marked money an agent with the task force used when buying drugs from Torres that the task force never got back. He must also pay $1,200 in restitution for a watch and cell phone of the robbery victim that Torres smashed.

Torres was initially charged in the robbery with Anthony Torres and Deja Brown, while Julian Byer was charged later that month.

The district attorney's office said in March that the indictment alleged that both Byer and Enrique Torres admitted they and their co-defendants stole money, jewelry and more from a victim who was struck multiple times and threatened with a loaded 9-mm handgun.

Acting Cayuga County District Attorney Brittany Grome Antonacci said after court that sentencing for Anthony Torres, Brown and Byer will be at a later date.

Also in court

 Judge Leone also gave some prison time to an Auburn man.

James J. Geer III, 36, was in court with charges of second-degree attempted assault, second-degree assault, and third-degree criminal possession of a weapon. Leone sentenced Geer to 1.5 to 3 years in prison for the attempted assault charge, in satisfaction of his other charges. Leone also ordered for $591 to be paid in restitution.

 Robert A. Hawkey, 19, was facing Leone on charges of third-degree burglary, petit larceny and fifth-degree criminal possession of stolen property for when he was arrested on Nov. 2 and a first-degree criminal contempt charge from Nov. 1. Hawkey received a previously-agreed upon sentence of six months in Cayuga County Jail and five years of felony probation for both the burglary and criminal contempt charges, running concurrently.

Staff writer Kelly Rocheleau can be reached at (315) 282-2243 or kelly.rocheleau@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @KellyRocheleau.

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Rome university project to breathe new life into ex-Mattatoio.

The city of Rome has approved a plan to grant the free concession of a large part of the ex-Mattatoio in Testaccio to Rome Tre University which already uses some spaces at the sprawling site.

The plan will see the Roman university given the use around 15,000 sqm of space in the long-neglected complex which served the city as a massive slaughterhouse from 1888 until 1975.

The proposal was put forward by Tobia Zevi, the capital's councillor for heritage and housing policies, who said it "perfectly expresses our idea of Rome: young and modern, always attentive to the creation of cultural spaces, respecting the historical characteristics of its heritage."

Oggi in Giunta abbiamo dato il via libera ad un provvedimento che autorizza la concessione a @UnivRoma3 di alcuni padiglioni dell'ex Mattatoio. Vogliamo contribuire alla creazione di nuove strutture per gli studenti ed i ricercatori della nostra citta.

 https://t.co/I9YA0q2Bve pic.twitter.com/ShymZSvY7y Roberto Gualtieri (@gualtierieurope) May 10, 2022

Under the concession, valid for 20 years with the option of renewing for another 20, the university will be granted six pavillion areas to redevelop for teaching and research purposes, establishing a library, laboratory and offices.

Roma Tre would finance the project, availing of Italy's PNNR funds, and would commit to ensuring the conservation and modernisation of the landmark site.

Mayor Roberto Gualtieri hailed the project as pointing to the "Rome of the future: a factory of culture and knowledge, but also a young, modern and accessible city for everyone."
Several steps damaged in incident at Rome landmark.

Rome police have launched an investigation after a motorist drove a Maserati down the Spanish Steps on Tuesday night, damaging the famed staircase before fleeing the scene.

Police have issued a photograph of one of several steps broken in the incident and are using surveillance footage in an attempt to track down the driver of the sportscar.

Italian media report that in addition to facing charges of aggravated damage to a site of historical interest, the driver will be handed the repair bill.

The 18th-century monument underwent a 1.5 million restoration by luxury fashion house Bulgari between 2015 and 2016.

In 2018 a drunk motorist was arrested for driving his Peugot 206 down the Baroque staircase while on his way home from a night out.

In recent days the site, known in Italian as the Scalinata di Trinita dei Monti, was sealed off to the public for the filming of Fast & Furious 10.
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From India to Indonesia, Elon Musk is scouting out sites to make more Teslas for global roads. With the world mired in supply chain chaos, access to materials matters most. Hes got it right.After lobbying against Indias tight policies around manufacturing and prohibitive import duties, Musk is headed to meet Indonesias President Joko Widodo and visit several areas across the country, which is also the top producer of nickel, a key metal for batteries. Thats an astute bet  for Tesla and Indonesia. And a missed opportunity for New Delhi.

To meet ambitious electric vehicle targets, Indonesia has drawn in several battery and car manufacturers in recent months with a variety of incentives. Government ministers say they hope to have investment across the supply chain.

With a friendly policy bolstering the countrys EV goals, manufacturers have started committing billions of dollars. LG Energy Solution, along with other companies, is investing about $9 billion to set up a supply chain  from mining to manufacturing  in the country. Together with Hyundai Motor Co., the firm is developing a battery plant, too. Meanwhile, the worlds largest powerpack maker Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. is investing almost $6 billion in a battery project with state-backed PT Aneka Tambang Tbk and PT Industri Baterai Indonesia. Further up the value chain, Chinas Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt Co. and PT Vale Indonesia Tbk announced last month they would work together on the formers fifth nickel project in the country.

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The move by companies across the EV supply chain into the Southeast Asias largest economy shows how important it is to be close to the source of raw materials that feed into manufacturing. If theres one thing the past year of logistical screw-ups and delays has shown the industry, its that proximity is key. Even if global supply and demand is balanced on paper, moving industrial goods around has become expensive, slow and cumbersome.

Tesla knows this well. It has created large manufacturing hubs in China and now Germany  countries known for their prowess in industrial production and policies that will help sell its cars. After having trouble making EVs in the US, its market share has grown globally. Now the company is looking to secure materials and make its own batteries, while stopping short of buying mines and getting into a new business. Wherever Musk sees problems in the production process, he looks for a solution. Tesla is essentially creating discrete supply chains across the globe.

Automakers wouldnt have necessarily made their way to Indonesia. The country churns out around 1 million cars in a good year, and is dominated by Japanese producers smaller vehicles. The auto market pales in comparison to the likes of China and the US, and EVs make up a small portion. In addition, its geography doesnt make it an ideal place for electric vehicle charging stations and infrastructure connectivity, although the government aims to make the capital, Jakarta, and the tourist hub of Bali model centers for greener transport.

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Potential sales generated in Indonesia wouldnt really move the needle for Tesla. Yet, the country is leveraging existing resources, an EV business-friendly policy and the right story to make it fertile ground for large-scale investment. The moment that happens, Indonesia will be able to boast about its battery manufacturing supply chain on the global scale  a much vaunted accolade these days that even the US is vying for. Private investment into manufacturing batteries will only draw more attention.

Meanwhile, India continues to hem and haw around whether it will lift duties. Government officials there have made big, bold statements about their ambitions, talking up their desire to draw in Tesla. Earlier this month, Road Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari went as far as to say that Tesla would benefit from manufacturing in India. Yet customers who placed orders are still waiting and its unclear how Musks firm would get a leg up. Now, there are questions around whether Tesla will make its way into India at all, given all the roadblocks.

That probably is a good bet, too. Setting up manufacturing now, especially as companies struggle to procure parts for their products and deal with logistical issues and high shipping costs, is the one thing firms dont want to face. Progress toward EVs has been scattered and commitment isnt clear. Toyota Motor Corp., one of the worlds biggest automakers but a laggard in EVs globally, has pledged to invest $624 million to making EV-related components through its existing units in India, however its unclear who they will buy them. Even Indias dominant automakers Maruti Suzuki India Ltd isnt planning on EVs until 2025. Add in policy hoops and punitive taxes, and India has all but ruled itself out by making the cost of investing in its market so high.

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Indias vaccine king, Adar Poonawalla, also decided to weigh in earlier this month. He tweeted that putting capital into making cars in India would be the best investment Musk would ever make. Thats perhaps too optimistic.

EV and battery manufacturers are in high demand across the globe and it will take far more than bold words and political ambition  that includes making existing resources available and coming up with a coherent policy that manufacturers can work with. Its bizzare, then, Prime Minister Narendra Modis government continues to hold back. Yes, there are a few domestic EV models however, the Indian auto market remains an aspirational one. That means wide-scale adoption will pick up pace where there are models that people want to buy  like Teslas Model 3  or enough charging facilities that make it easy, as the evolution of the two-wheeler market showed.

Much like China made Tesla a global company, Indonesia could do the same for its battery supply chain. All while making manufacturing more affordable and eventually, electric vehicles, too. Its a means to an end  and a smart one at that.

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More From Bloomberg Opinion:

 Making EV Batteries Is Expensive. So Now What?: Anjani Trivedi

 Indias Battery Race is Led by a Scooter Maker: Andy Mukherjee

 Nickel Market Will Be Broken Even if LMEs Fixed: David Fickling

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Anjani Trivedi is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies in Asia. Previously, she was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion

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Record-high prices for synthetic fertilizers are making manure a hot commodity. With global food supplies under extreme pressure, fertilizer of any kind is critical to boosting yields and averting food scarcity. Animal manure is part of the solution, and its value has soared in recent weeks. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight But as farmers seek additional ways to secure nutrients for crops, its time to consider an even more plentiful option outside of the pigsty: human waste.

For millennia, farmers utilized its potential. Now theres so much more to be had. According to one recent study, human urine could meet 13.4% of the global demand for key agricultural nutrients. Extracting that nutrition will require changes in attitudes, infrastructure and even toilets. As synthetic fertilizer prices surge beyond the means of many farmers, its time to invest in the shift.

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Humans realized that manure could boost crop yields at least 8,000 years ago. As human settlements evolved into villages and cities, sewage systems emerged to transport those nutrients back to fields. Diseases such as cholera were often transported with the untreated sludge.

Flush toilets and modern treatment systems eliminated most of the risk, but also deprived farmers of the nutrients they valued. Synthetic fertilizers filled the gap. By 2012, commercially produced synthetic fertilizers were responsible for between 40% and 60% of global food production, and were a key means of alleviating global hunger.

But nitrogen-based synthetic fertilizers are also responsible for 2.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to one recent study. Those emissions are, in part, a consequence of the natural gas used in their production. When natural gas prices spike, as they have in the wake of the war in Ukraine, nitrogen fertilizer prices spike, too. Thats a problem for farmers; but for entrepreneurs and wastewater treatment specialists, its an historic investing opportunity.

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Animal manure is the obvious substitute. But there are only so many pigs, chickens and cows available to supply it. Human waste presents a bigger opportunity. According to a 2020 study in a United Nations-sponsored journal, humanity produces five times more wastewater than the total volume of water flowing over Niagara Falls. Of that, perhaps 48% remains untreated as its released into the environment. In poorer countries, its still often used as fertilizer.

For the developed world, modern sewage treatment plants are one alternative. In New York City, expensive wastewater treatment systems produce over 1,000 tons of biosolids  the solids remaining after water is drained from waste  from 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater daily. Most is sent to landfills (some via an infamous poop train), while some is further treated so that it can be used safely as fertilizer.

Its not just New York. Affluent local governments around the world are producing similar, human excrement-based products that, thanks to surging demand for alternatives to synthetic fertilizers, are in increasingly short supply. By one accounting, this global biosolids market could be worth around $2 billion by 2025.

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Unfortunately, few cities are in a position to pay for New York-style wastewater treatment. In 2011, the Gates Foundation recognized the problem and initiated what it called the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge to develop low-cost sanitation independent of water and sewer systems. Field testing is underway for a Gates-sponsored toilet that accomplishes these goals and produces a compostable cake from dried urine and excrement. Similar projects are underway elsewhere. In Sweden, for example, researchers are pressing nutrient-containing cakes from urine recovered from specially designed toilets.

Nonetheless, as investment flows into the excrement recovery niche, doubts linger as to how owners and users will feel about extracting their wastes instead of flushing them away. The better bet is probably wastewater plant technology that recovers valuable nutrients from the traditional stream.

The municipal waste facility is potentially the new mine, Jason Trembly, a professor of mechanical engineering at Ohio University, said in a phone interview. Instead of extracting ore from the ground, we can do that more successfully through wastewater.

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In 2021, Trembly and a colleague, Damilola Daramola, were awarded a $2.1 million grant by the US Department of Energy to research the use of electrochemical methods to convert wastewater into fertilizer. The goal is to produce a low-cost and renewable energy technology that can be incorporated into new and existing systems in developed and emerging markets. A successful system would provide a low-emission competitor to synthetic fertilizers, potentially contributing to lower costs globally. The next step, Trembly told me, is to secure funding for a pilot scale demonstration.

As fertilizer and food costs continue to spiral upward, the cost of additional grants shouldnt stand in the way of expanding and furthering experiments into new toilets and waste-management systems. The energy and agriculture departments should seek to expand targeted grants to this overlooked niche. Likewise, private investors seeking new twists on old technology could do worse than taking a look at toilets and sewers.

Human waste wont replace synthetic fertilizers on a large scale this planting season. But with a little help, theyll soon be an affordable, clean alternative for farmers worldwide.

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More From Bloomberg Opinion:

 Fertilizer Shortages Finally Give Dung a Chance: Amanda Little

 Higher Food Prices Arent Making Farmers Richer: Adam Minter

 The Worlds Food System Is Too Dependent on Wheat: Jessica Fanzo

(Corrects first name of Professor Jason Trembly in 13th paragraph.)

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Adam Minter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asia, technology and the environment. He is author, most recently, of Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale.

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion

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Theres a reason why OPEC has endured for more than 60 years. Despite all the clamor in Capitol Hill about dragging OPEC in front of a federal judge, the truth is that US politicians must secretly love the cartel. When oil prices are high, as they are now, they can hide behind OPEC, deflecting any responsibility. When oil prices are low, as they were in 2020, they can ask it for help to bail out Americas high-cost petroleum industry.Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the NOPEC legislation, paving the way for full Senate consideration. The House Judiciary Committee approved its own version of the bill last year. Both NOPEC bills are bad  and wont lower pump prices, while they will antagonize oil allies Washington needs to work with.The NOPEC bill faces an arduous journey before it can become law. Previous attempts have cleared the Judiciary Committee four times, and despite a veto threat by then-President George W. Bush, the bill even got approved by the House of Representatives in 2007 in a 345-72 vote, and the Senate by 70-23, only to die afterward. President Barack Obama threatened to veto a subsequent proposal. NOPEC didnt fly during the Trump administration, even though President Trump himself supported the bill as a private citizen.The American Petroleum Institute, the lobby group, is strongly against NOPEC. Why? Because theres only one thing the US energy industry hates more than taxes  a free oil market. It got a taste of what that looks like three times during the past four decades: in 1986, 1998 and again in 2020, when OPEC stopped acting as a cartel and each of its members, chiefly Saudi Arabia, pumped at will. It wasnt pretty. Oil prices plunged, the industry went into a huge recession, and petroleum executives lobbied the White House to get OPEC back working again as, well, a cartel.OPEC is so central to the oil market that the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the states petroleum industry, went so far as attending the cartels meetings in Vienna in the late 1980s as an observer.In some ways, I would like to see NOPEC approved, triggering a trial in federal court. Imagine the formal setting, and the cross-examination of witnesses. You can almost hear OPECs defense attorney asking the cartels secretary-general: And, sir, how did you agree to set your production limits in April 2020 to manipulate the oil market? And the OPEC bosss response: Well, we did so during a conference call that was organized by the White House involving US President Donald Trump, King Salman bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia and, ahem, Russian President Vladimir Putin. Thats how we did it. Guilty as charged, both OPEC and the US government, obviously. Perhaps for that reason, the White House has no position on the latest NOPEC push, although Press Secretary Jen Psaki did her best last week to pour cold water on the proposal. The potential implications and unintended consequences of this legislation require further study and deliberation, she said.Washington is worried that, if the law gets approved, OPEC may retaliate. Saudi Arabia and other Arab petro-monarchies may sell US assets, including sizable holdings of Treasuries. And, of course, OPEC may refuse to cut production in the future to prop up prices if the market collapses, something that will hurt US oil states such as Texas, New Mexico, North Dakota and Alaska.President Joe Biden  along with many other American politicians, both Republican and Democrat  have played both sides of the NOPEC debate. In 2000, when oil prices were rising, then Senator Biden co-wrote a letter to then-President Bill Clinton urging the White House to sue OPEC either in US federal court or, wait for it, at the International Court of Justice in the Hague. In 2007, Senator Biden was the co-sponsor of a version of the NOPEC bill. Despite initially co-sponsoring the legislation, he abstained during the vote. Thats secret love. OPEC itself is very much like the world that the fictional Colonel Jessup described in his famous closing speech: Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Whos gonna do it? You? Replace walls with oil market and men with guns with OPEC and you get the picture. OPEC may be unpleasant, but, at times, its necessary. Rather than NOPEC bills, Washington should try diplomacy, starting with improving its relationships in the Middle East with oil-producing countries. But OPEC itself should pay attention to the noises coming from inside the Beltway. The longer oil trades above $100 a barrel, the higher the risk of unintended consequences.
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Despite their orientation toward the US and western Europe, Finland and Sweden since the Cold War have bet that their national security was best protected by staying out of NATO. They had aimed to avoid disturbing the military balance in the Baltic Sea region and provoking Russia. However, Russias invasion of Ukraine and its demands to stop NATO expansion have sparked a rethinking in both countries. Now their entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization looks like a done deal.

1. Why arent Finland and Sweden NATO members?

Both countries conduct military exercises with NATO and increasingly share intelligence with it. They are part of the alliances Partnership for Peace program, which fosters cooperation with non-members, and, along with Ukraine, are among six so-called Enhanced Opportunity Partners that make particularly significant contributions to NATO operations. But they didnt join the group for historic reasons.

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 Finland has spent the 104 years since its independence tiptoeing around Russia, the giant to its east, with which it has a 1,300 kilometer (800-mile) border. Two wars against the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1944 were followed by a policy of deference and self-censorship toward the Soviets that came to be known as Finlandization. After the Cold War ended, Finland began turning more toward the democracies of western Europe, joining the European Union and adopting the euro. But the ghost of Finlandization lingered and Finns held onto the cornerstone of their foreign policy: maintaining good relations with Russia. The countrys leaders didnt consider NATO a viable option, and popular opinion, until now, was firmly against joining.

 Sweden stayed out of both world wars, and as the two superpowers vied for influence during the Cold War, neutrality was seen as the best way of ensuring the countrys independence. Still, Swedens defense during the Cold War was designed to deter a Soviet invasion, and the country covertly cooperated with NATO. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Swedens policy was officially rebranded as military non-alignment, and its defense was significantly scaled down. But since Russias 2014 annexation of Ukraines Crimea peninsula, Sweden has gradually ramped up military spending and sought ever closer cooperation with NATO.

2. What would their joining do for NATO?

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Having Finland and Sweden in the alliance would arguably make it easier to stabilize the security of the area around the Baltic Sea and to defend NATO members Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Those countries are often seen as a potential target for Russian aggression because they have substantial ethnic Russian minorities, and Russian President Vladimir Putin has used protecting such people as a pretext for interventions in Ukraine. Including Finland and Sweden would add to NATO two sophisticated, well-equipped militaries whose gear is already compatible with that used by the alliance. It would lengthen NATOs border with Russia, which now comprises just 6% of Russias land perimeter, and enable the alliance to improve its surveillance of the countrys western flank.

3. Whats required to join NATO?

NATOs 30 participating countries have to be unanimous in welcoming a new member. Sweden and Finland, which are among the worlds most developed nations with stable democracies and highly trusted political institutions, expect no resistance. The criteria for aspirant nations include a functioning democracy based on a market economy, fair treatment of minority populations, a commitment to resolve conflicts peacefully, and a willingness and ability to make a military contribution to NATO operations. Its not a requirement that citizens bless a move to join, but favorable public opinion lends legitimacy to a countrys bid for membership.

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4. How quickly could it happen?

Finnish leaders came out with a statement May 12 saying Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay, and Swedens government was expected to do the same shortly. While the dozen countries that have joined the alliance since 2004 have followed a gradual process under NATOs Membership Action Plan, many analysts think that entry could be fast-tracked for Sweden and Finland. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has repeatedly said that the two nations meet NATO standards in most areas and that the process can go very quickly if they decide to apply.

5. How has Russia responded to the idea?

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said May 12 that Finland joining NATO would definitely be a threat to Russia. Russia has previously warned of serious military and political consequences from Finnish and Swedish accession, requiring Russia to respond. In April, Russia said it would deploy nuclear weapons in and around the Baltic Sea region if the two joined. Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda dismissed the threat as empty, accusing Russia of already placing tactical nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad, its exclave on the Baltic. Russia had warned the Baltic states of serious consequences before they joined NATO in 2004, but that turned out to be a bluff. On the other hand, Montenegro in 2016 said it had foiled a Russia-backed plan to assassinate then-premier Milo Djukanovic over the countrys plans to enter NATO, which materialized a year later. A court in 2019 sentenced 14 people, including opposition leaders and Russian and Serbian nationals, to as many as 15 years in jail for staging the failed plot, though an appeals court last year annulled the verdicts. Finns expect to face more spying, cyberattacks, airspace breaches and influence operations by Russia should they pursue NATO membership.

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6. What are Finland and Sweden doing apart from rethinking NATO membership?

They are increasing military cooperation between themselves and with other nations, work that began to accelerate in the run-up to the war in Ukraine. In early March, Finnish President Sauli Niinisto visited US President Joe Biden, who promised, in a joint phone call with Swedens Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, to deepen cooperation between the three nations, and later the US made security assurances to both. Theyve also signed security cooperation agreements with the UK. NATOs pledge of collective defense only applies to members, and an extended period on the doorstep of the alliance without a security guarantee would risk a backlash from Russia that the applicant would face on its own. They both intend to continue ramping up defense spending, with Swedens long-term plan increasing funding for the armed forces by almost 30% from 2021 to 2024.

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From the moment I came here seven years ago, I have been aware of Bloombergs huge potential for British consumers who are interested in serious, impartial journalism. We have one of the biggest newsrooms in London  with around 500 journalists  and we have long served our Terminal customers in the Square Mile with the best coverage of markets, finance and investing. We follow 400 listed UK companies from the largest sustainable office building in the world. Our website, television, radio and other platforms already reach 100 million people, including millions of people in the UK  and in just four years we have accumulated nearly 400,000 paid digital subscribers.

But weve never packaged and promoted our journalism here to target a British audience.

Now we are launching Bloomberg UK.

You can read Mike Bloombergs explanation of why he is backing both Britain and independent journalism here. Our goal is to become the main destination for business and financial news in Britain. As you would expect, we will have plenty of coverage of the financial world  but we are also widening our lens beyond the City to chart the future of British business in all its forms, telling the story of the new industries and startups that are reshaping post-Brexit Britain as well as the big beasts of the FTSE100. With our award-winning Westminster and economics teams, well provide clear-eyed, unbiased news on politics and policy  and, beyond that, culture, technology and, of course, climate, through Bloomberg Green.

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Subscribers to Bloomberg UK will naturally enjoy access to all our global digital output. (We have journalists in 120 countries). But I thought I would quickly tell you about the new things youre getting from Bloomberg UK.

* Website: A new UK digital home page, edited by Victoria Wakely, features the best of Bloombergs data-driven journalism. John Authers will help you invest; Stephanie Flanders and Philip Aldrick will decipher the economy; Javier Blas will explain commodities; Andrea Felsted will guide you through the High Street, while Alex Wickham unveils Westminsters secrets; Alberto Nardelli will break some of the biggest political scoops from across Europe; and Adrian Wooldridge will put management under the microscope. Parmy Olson will help you decode the tech and cyber space; Aisha Gani will uncover the UKs fintech unicorns for readers; Tanzeel Akhtar and Emily Nicolle will demystify crypto; Akshat Rathi will introduce you to Bloomberg Green; Paul Davies will lift the lid on banking; and if you want breaking news across global M&A our Deals team will have it first. For opinion, analysis and commentary, you will find Niall Ferguson, Martin Ivens, Clive Crook, Therese Raphael, Pankaj Mishra, Ben Schott, and Max Hastings, as well as a host of others.

* Newsletters. The Bloomberg Open will start your day and then, from June, you will wrap up your day with The Readout with expert analysis of the days biggest stories.

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*Television & Video: In addition to our market-leading coverage through BTV, hosted by Francine Lacqua, Anna Edwards and Guy Johnson, we are launching a new weekly video series  The Bloomberg Breakfast, profiling British CEOs, entrepreneurs and policy leaders. We have fresh episodes of Emma Barnett Meets, airing weekly. You can also watch our deep-dive analysis on Boris Johnsons attempt to level up Britain here. You will see a host of new short and long-form video about Britain.

*Podcasts & Radio: The flagship European breakfast show Bloomberg Daybreak Europe airs each business day from London; a live daily political show Bloomberg Westminster is also available as a podcast. The Cable, a markets wrap-up program, provides insights and in-depth analysis of the most pressing business and financial issues of the day. Next week we will launch our first dedicated UK podcast on the City of London, hosted by Francine and David Merritt.

*Live Events: Britain is already home to leading global summits such as Bloomberg Invest, Sustainable Business, the Bloomberg Tech summit and the Bloomberg Equality summit. We will add another annual flagship event focused on the future of UK business later this year.

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*Data-driven, interactive analysis: Today, Bloomberg UK published the most comprehensive analysis of the governments levelling up agenda to reduce regional inequalities. Next week we will look at the future of the City of London as it forges a new path post-Brexit.

I have only mentioned a handful of our colleagues here, risking the fury of our 2,700 journalists and analysts around the world. We will be announcing more prominent arrivals in the next few weeks. But I hope you get a sense of what we are trying to do  and that you take a look at Bloomberg UK and tell us what you think.

John Micklethwait

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

John Micklethwait is editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News.

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Without much fanfare, some of the biggest names in tech have been pulling back on once-enthusiastic efforts to disrupt healthcare. Within the past nine months, Alphabet Inc. has dismantled its healthcare division Google Health while IBM sold its Watson Health data and analytics business to a private equity firm, having struggled to turn a profit. It turns out healthcare is a highly complex industry and much of the hype around the transformative promise of artificial intelligence may have been overblown.

That reality has hit hard in the U.K, whose influx of investment into health tech comes thanks to the internationally respected, centralized National Health Service that has tested new technology through a special department called NHSX.

Health tech refers to a market in which companies use technology to solve healthcare problems. These range from chatbots to help patients triage symptoms of an illness to fitness trackers to monitor a patients vital signs with a fitness tracker to machine-learning algorithms to make hospital waiting rooms more efficient. A growing cohort of mental health apps for consumers offers to help people manage stress or sleep better. Many of these systems say they use artificial intelligence, which can give them a funding boost in private markets.

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In fact, funding for health-tech startups has soared in the UK from $420 million in 2016 to approximately $3.8 billion in 2021 according to data from database management firm Dealroom and London promotional agency London & Partners. That put Britain in third place behind the U.S. and China for health-tech investment last year.(1)

That funding is driven by the Golden Triangle of academic expertise between London, Oxford and Cambridge, which covers five of the worlds top 25 universities for life sciences and medicines.

But some of the countrys more mature health-tech firms, which got into this game early, are going through something of a midlife crisis, exacerbated by the wider loss of momentum in the pandemic health-tech boom in the U.S.

Part of the problem, according to staff and entrepreneurs from multiple health-tech firms, has been a clash of cultures between the ambitious and iterative world of engineering  where problems can be solved with the right algorithm  and the world of medicine, which calls for a more cautious approach. Medical researchers at health-tech firms have complained of being steamrolled by the move-fast-and-break-things approach of highly paid software engineers. The techies, for their part, complain of being unable to experiment freely in a world obsessed with patient safety and regulation.

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The resulting stumbles from this culture clash not only hurts company profits, it also threatens to corrode patient trust in the NHS and other healthcare systems.

Among the more affected British players is Sensyne Health Plc, which uses artificial intelligence to analyze patient records to help pharmaceutical companies develop new medicines. To get that data, Sensyne has signed agreements with a handful of NHS trusts, such as Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and Exeter NHS Trust; together they own a 16.2% stake in the firm in return for sharing patient data that the company says is anonymized.

But Sensyne found itself on the brink of collapse last month, after the company said it was on the verge of running out of cash and cutting the majority of its staff, according to Sky News. The company had been fined 400,000 ($495,000) by the London Stock Exchange in November for failing to disclose bonus payments to its chief executive officer, a former British science minister who stepped down last month. Publicly, the company said that it suffered contract delays due to the Covid-19 pandemic. But its shift away from developing algorithms to selling access to an analytics platform, as described on its website, also speaks to the challenge of applying cutting edge AI to complex challenges in medicine.

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Another high flying health-tech startup, Babylon Health, has seen its shares fall by nearly 87% since it went public last October through a blank-check company merger that valued it at $4.2 billion. Its now worth about $528 million. The company has heavily marketed its use of artificial intelligence to give diagnostic advice to patients through a symptom-checker on its app, but doctors have warned that it has given unsafe information through the checker. Babylon, in response, publicly criticized an oncologist who criticized its symptom checker as a troll who tweeted defamatory content about us.

Signs are pointing to artificial intelligence falling short of its promise more generally in medicine. Multiple clinical studies published last year showed that nearly all artificial intelligence tools used to try and predict a diagnosis of Covid 19 made no real difference or were potentially harmful. A separate study published in the British Medical Journal last year also found that 94% of AI systems that scanned for signs of breast cancer were less accurate than the analysis of a single radiologist.

More disturbing than any failed experiments is that some patients risk their privacy when AI in healthcare goes wrong. Despite saying they anonymize patient data to train their algorithms, some health-tech firms dont keep that information 100% confidential, according to Phil Booth, coordinator of British data-privacy campaign organization medConfidential. His organization sent a letter in April warning several NHS trusts that that the patient data they were providing to one health-tech company was actually identifiable because it could be linked back to certain markers.

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This is not an AI problem, said Booth. Its technology coming into healthcare thinking it can outperform expert human beings at treating other human beings.

It seems that when technology fails in that regard, humans pay the price.

More From This Writer and Others at Bloomberg Opinion:



Tech Stocks Are Entering an Age of Uncertainty: Parmy Olson



The Davos Set Is Reborn in the Crypto Metaverse: Lionel Laurent



Chinas Tech Companies Get a Reprieve, Not a Pardon: Tim Culpan

(1) U.S. health tech startups attracted approximately $32 billion in VC investment for most of 2021, along with $4.1 billion in China and $3.8 billion in the U.K. as of November 2021, according to Dealroom and London & Partners.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of We Are Anonymous.

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion

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You wouldnt think a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee would turn into a debate over abortion rights. But overturning Roe vs. Wade would have real costs for the US economy, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was entirely correct to note them in a tense and revealing exchange on Tuesday with Senator Tim Scott.

Limiting or eliminating access abortion would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades, Yellen said. Scott replied that framing abortion rights around womens labor force participation and economic stability seems harsh and callous.

This is not harsh. This is the truth, responded Yellen, the former chair of the Federal Reserve. Denying women access to abortion increases their odds of living in poverty or need for public assistance.

Ill just say that as a guy raised by a Black woman in abject poverty, I am thankful to be here as a United States senator, Scott said.

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Scott misses the point. Yellen isnt saying he shouldnt be alive. Shes not saying that poor women dont deserve to have children. Shes pointing out that limiting access to abortion will primarily affect poor and vulnerable women and women of color, who will no longer have the autonomy to make reproductive choices based on whether they can afford it.

And thats in no small part because conservative lawmakers have tended to oppose policies that would support women when they do have children, such as subsidies for child care or universal paid family and medical leave. They also voted against the Build Back Better bill, which included family and medical leave as well as a permanent expansion of the child tax credit.

If you ban abortions, says Caitlin Knowles Myers, an economics professor at Middlebury College, you will see more affluent women travel to obtain and the poorest of poor women unable to attain them. As a result, she says, there could be upwards of 75,000 unplanned births in the year following a reversal of Roe.

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Myerss calculation is based in part on where abortion providers are located and which states are likely to ban or limit abortion. She says about half of US women of reproductive age live in counties where average travel distances to a provider will increase from 33 miles to 282 miles. Of the 25% of women who wont be able to travel, about 75% will give birth as a result.

She asks a question: Once we determine that limiting abortion access is going to cause a subset of women  primarily poor and vulnerable ones  to become mothers when they did not feel prepared to do so, then what happens next?

When someone has a baby, they arent paid to take time off to care for it. The US is only rich country in the world without any form of national paid leave, leaving it up to employers and states. Of the 26 states that the Guttmacher Institute says are certain or likely to ban abortion, none offers paid family leave. According to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 8% of low-wage workers have access to some form of paid leave.

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The result is that one in four women in the US returns to works within two weeks after childbirth  despite the recommendation of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists that they take off at least six weeks.

The expense of raising children is a strain on low-income families. As former Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Jacob Lew point out, 35 million families were receiving up to $300 under a pandemic-era expanded child tax credit, keeping roughly 3.7 million children out of poverty. But that assistance expired in December, causing child poverty to rise 41%.

And what about child care, which allows parents to work so they can support their families? The desperate need for it  and its exorbitant cost  have only become more apparent during the pandemic. Again, the US is an outlier among the developed world, spending just 0.2% of its GDP on child care for children 2 and under. This amounts to a paltry $200 a year for most families. In the US, the average cost is $1,100 per month.

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According to one report, in 2020 average child-care costs for kids younger than 5 in the US were between 17% and 20% of an average workers earnings. In Scotts South Carolina, a state that Guttmacher lists as certain to ban abortion if Roe is overturned, infant child-care costs increased 23% from 2018 to 2020.

Its clear why Scott didnt want to draw attention to the economics of overturning Roe: As Yellen noted, they would be devastating, and meanwhile he and his Republican colleagues oppose many policies that would improve womens lives. Women would not only be denied the choice of whether to have a child, they would also lack access to services that could help them, their children or their future children.

That seems harsh and callous.

More From Bloomberg Opinion:

 After the Supreme Court Breaks Roe, Who Picks Up the Pieces?: Therese Raphael

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 No Abortion Means Poor States Will Get Poorer: Allison Schrager

 How Geography Will Control Womens Health After Roe v. Wade: Bloomberg Opinion

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Julianna Goldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist who was formerly a Washington-based correspondent for CBS News and White House correspondent for Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Television.

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion

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Good government groups and elected officials, including New York Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, are urging the state Legislature to pass a ban on all-in-one voting machines.

All-in-one voting machines are equipped with a printer and scanner or tabulator. The touch-screen machines allow voters to cast their ballots electronically instead of filling out a paper ballot.

But there are numerous concerns about the all-in-one machines. Common Cause New York issued a report in 2020 about ExpressVote XL, one type of all-in-one voting machine available for election administrators. The report detailed problems with the ExpressVote XL machine, from cybersecurity vulnerabilities  the machines "do not leave a secure paper trail," according to Common Cause  to price. The ExpressVote XL costs almost $10,000 per unit, the report says.

Other issues include long lines on Election Day because there will be fewer all-in-one voting machines than privacy booths for voters and the machines are prone to undercounting votes. In one race in Pennsylvania, a candidate had 164 votes on election night. But a manual recount was conducted and the candidate wound up with more than 26,000 votes  enough to win the election.

Legislation introduced by state Sen. Zellnor Myrie, who chairs the Senate Elections Committee, and Assemblywoman Amy Paulin would ban the use of all-in-one voting machines. The state Senate passed the bill in 2021 and is expected to approve it again this year. It has not advanced to the Assembly floor for a vote.

Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, asked lawmakers to act fast and pass the ban on all-in-one voting machines.

"They are wasteful, insecure and deeply flawed machines," Lerner said. "Our current system is already the current gold standard: Voter-marked paper ballots and optical scanners. Any one-in-all voting machine would be a serious  and expensive  needless step backward."

Williams, who is seeking the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, called for New York City and the state to ban the machines.

"These hybrid voting machines are expensive, inaccessible, and risky, and we cannot allow them to be used in New York elections," he said.

The state Board of Elections has already weighed in on all-in-one voting machines, specifically the ExpressVote XL model. Last year, the board declined to certify the machine for use in New York elections.

Politics reporter Robert Harding can be reached at (315) 282-2220 or robert.harding@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @robertharding.

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Anthonia Nwaorie headed to a Houston airport with more than $41,000 in her bags in 2017, planning to use the cash to build a free medical clinic for women and girls in her native Nigeria, according to a lawsuit. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight But the registered nurse was stopped on the boarding bridge by agents from Customs and Border Protection, who claimed she failed to report taking more than $10,000 out of the country as required by federal law.

Nwaories currency was seized and though she was never charged with a crime, it took months and a legal battle before CBP returned the money without conditions. Such seizures are hardly unique.

More than $2 billion was taken from travelers at the nations airports by the CBP and other agencies now associated with the Department of Homeland Security between 2000 and 2016, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis of a government database of every seizure.

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Federal law allows CBP and other agencies to take cash from travelers as a way to combat drug trafficking and other criminal enterprises, but the new report by the Institute for Justice found nearly 70 percent of such cases are like Nwaories  no arrest accompanies a seizure.

Critics argue federal agencies are abusing civil forfeiture to fatten budgets, since the cash flows into government coffers and is redistributed. The report found DHS airport seizures have exploded over the decade-and-a-half studied, climbing 178 percent. In all, DHS agencies made more than 30,500 cash seizures during the period.

Dulles International Airport led the nation in DHS seizures during 2016, the latest year for which data was available. About $41 million was taken from travelers, or nearly a quarter of the amount seized nationwide, according to the report. Dulles only accounts for 2 percent of the nations air travelers.

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Other major hub airports also saw large numbers of seizures in recent years, including Chicagos OHare International Airport, New York Citys John F. Kennedy International Airport, Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport and Atlantas Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. The report says the findings suggest DHS agents at certain airports may be particularly aggressive.

When you consider that these agencies have the ability to seize different types of property wherever they operate, the scope of the entire program is just so large, said Jennifer McDonald, senior research analyst at IJ and the author of the report. The reason we focused on cash seizures at airports is because weve heard they are some of the most abusive.

Nwaorie recalled how she was searched and at one point, handcuffed.

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That was a very big nightmare, Nwaorie said. You think you would wake up and it would go away, but it didnt go away.

DHS officials referred questions to the CBP. A CBP spokesman defended civil forfeiture in a statement after reviewing the IJ report, saying the requirements to declare currency are clearly displayed in CBP facilities and on the agencys website.

The most common reason for currency seizures is a failure to comply with reporting requirements, which is a violation of federal law, the statement read. However, currency seized by CBP at ports of entry has also been connected with bulk cash smuggling, counterfeiting, narcotics trafficking, and other criminal offenses. An individual may petition for the return of seized currency, but the petitioner must prove that the source and intended use of the currency was legitimate.

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The report found half of the DHS airport seizures were from travelers who allegedly failed to report they were traveling internationally with more than $10,000 in cash. Other common claims for seizing cash was that it was involved in drug trafficking, smuggling goods or there was some violation of local or state law, according to the report.

IJ became one of the first nongovernment entities to obtain the forfeiture database maintained by the Treasury Department after roughly four years of legal action and negotiations following a freedom of information request in 2015. IJ is a libertarian public interest law firm based in Virginia. The Washington Post is the first to report on the findings.

Nwaories ordeal began in October 2017. Nwaorie, 62, said she was unaware of the law requiring her to declare her cash, before she arrived at Houstons George Bush Intercontinental Airport.

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She said she had spent years saving the money to open the clinic and had tucked it into envelopes in her purse and carry-on bag. But on the boarding bridge, CBP agents asked her how many people she was carrying money for and another question that stung: How long have you been in the United States?

Nwaorie had been a U.S. citizen since 1994. She said she was led to a room where she was questioned, before the agents seized all $41,377. She was then let go, but didnt have money to continue her trip immediately.

In the months that followed, CBP sent her a forfeiture letter and Nwaorie requested the case be transferred to a U.S. attorneys office for judicial forfeiture proceedings, according to court documents.

In April 2018, the CBP sent another letter saying the U.S. attorneys office declined to pursue forfeiture proceedings and it was returning Nwaories money, court documents show.

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But there was a catch: CBP wanted Nwaorie to sign an agreement saying she would not sue. If Nwaorie did not respond in 30 days, CBP would initiate its own forfeiture proceedings, according to court documents.

Nwaorie refused to sign and decided to sue CBP in federal court in Texas. The same day the agency relented and started the process of refunding her money, according to court documents. She was sent a check in May 2018.

Critics argue the system is stacked against people such as Nwaorie. Subjects must affirmatively challenge the seizure within a window of time if they hope to get their money back, and most cases are decided by an attorney with the seizing agency, rather than a judge.

Civil forfeiture is not limited to DHS agencies. Other local, state and federal agencies engage in it as well, and the practice has come under increasing scrutiny.

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A 2017 Department of Justice Inspector General report found the Drug Enforcement Administration had seized over $28 billion worth of assets over a 10-year period, but found only 44 of 100 seizures it studied were related to an ongoing investigation or resulted in a new investigation, arrest or prosecution.

Earlier in the year, a Pennsylvania man and his daughter sued the DEA and the Transportation Security Administration in a federal class-action lawsuit after DEA agents seized the mans life savings at an airport. The money was eventually returned, but the lawsuit is ongoing.

The Supreme Court limited the power of state and local agencies to seize property in an important ruling in 2019. At the end of June, a group of senators introduced legislation known as the Fair Act that would increase the burden of proof before assets could be seized among other changes to strengthen protections.

For her part, Nwaorie was able to resume her work. The medical clinic is under construction, although it was delayed by over a year.

Its been something that I prayed and thought about for many years, Nwaorie said. I grew up in the town where Im doing the clinic. Women die in childbirth. Its a situation that shouldnt happen.

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COPENHAGEN, Denmark  Denmarks top prosecuting authority said Thursday that it would seek to have a former defense ministers parliamentary immunity lifted so he could be charged with illegally disclosing highly classified information. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight The office of the director of public prosecutions said it would contact Denmarks parliament, the Folketing, regarding the immunity of Claus Hjort Frederiksen. He served as the countrys defense minister from November 2016 to June 2019.

Details of the accusations against Hjort Frederiksen could not be given because of the special nature of the case that involves sensitive information, the Danish Ministry of Justice said in a statement.

Hjort Frederiksen, who has been a lawmaker in parliament since 2005 and is a senior member of Denmarks opposition Liberals, faces up to 12 years in prison if convicted of the unauthorized disclosure of highly classified information.

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Danish media have speculated the case might be linked to allegations that Denmarks foreign secret service helped the United States spy on European leaders, including former German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

In a December television interview, Hjort Frederiksen spoke about a secret eavesdropping deal the United States and Denmark made in the late 1990s.

I must risk a prison sentence. ... I have informed (Danish officials) that this agreement existed, he said.

The deal gave the Danish intelligence community a lot of useful information and the status of a trusted partner of the U.S., Hjort Frederiksen said.

Danish broadcaster DR has reported that the Danish Defense Intelligence Service, known in Denmark by its acronym FE, conducted an internal investigation in 2014 into whether the U.S. National Security Agency had used its cooperation with the Danes to spy on Denmark and neighboring countries.

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The probe, codenamed Operation Dunhammer, concluded that the NSA eavesdropped on political leaders and officials in Germany, France, Sweden and Norway.

Hjort Frederiksen responded to prosecutors moves Thursday by lashing out at the Social Democratic government.

I sincerely hope that the public and all members of the Folketing can now gain insight into what it is that the government believes that I have done that is considered treason, he told Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet.

Hjort Frederiksen told broadcaster TV2 that according to my understanding I have not revealed any secrets. This whole case started in 2013 when (former NSA contractor Edward) Snowden leaked papers he got hold of from the NSA. These documents revealed details of secret U.S. eavesdropping programs.

It has been widely discussed, he told TV2 on Thursday.

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Hjort Frederiksen, 74, was defense minister from November 2016 to June 2019. He also was the chairman of the Danish parliaments Intelligence Services Committee from 2019 to 2020, and a former minister for finance (2009-2016) and for employment (20012009).

Danish media also have speculated that the case could be connected to the December arrest of Denmarks former foreign intelligence chief. Lars Findsen was held in pre-trial custody on a preliminary charge of disclosing highly classified information before an appeals court ordered his release in February.

In Denmark, preliminary charges are one step short of formal charges but allow authorities to keep criminal suspects in custody during an investigation.

Details of the allegations against Findsen, who was suspended in August 2020, also are unknown, and the case has been shrouded in secrecy.

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HELSINKI  Finlands leaders said Thursday theyre in favor of rapidly applying for NATO membership, paving the way for a historic expansion of the alliance that could deal a serious blow to Russia as its military struggles with its war in Ukraine. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight The annoucement by President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin means that Finland is all but certain to join the Western military alliance, though a few steps remain before the application process can begin. Neighboring Sweden is expected to decide on seeking NATO membership in coming days.

NATO membership would strengthen Finlands security. As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defence alliance, Niinisto and Marin said in a joint statement.

Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay, they said. We hope that the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days.

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Russia reacted to the development with a warning. The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Finland joining NATO would inflict serious damage to Russian-Finnish relations as well as stability and security in Northern Europe.

Russia will be forced to take retaliatory steps of military-technical and other characteristics in order to counter the emerging threats to its national security, the ministry said.

History will determine why Finland needed to turn its territory into a bulwark of military face-off with Russia while losing independence in making its own decisions, it added.

Before the ministry issued its statement, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Finlands decision wouldnt help stability and security in Europe. Peskov said Russias response would depend on NATOs moves to expand its infrastructure closer to Russian borders.

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Finland has the longest border with Russia out of all the European Unions 27 members.

Previously, the Kremlin had warned of military and political repercussions if Sweden and Finland decided to become a NATO member. Should they seek to join the alliance, there would be an interim period lasting from when the applications are submitted until ratification by lawmakers in all 30 existing member nations.

In NATO member Estonia, which also borders Russia, Prime Minister Kaja Kallas tweeted that history being made by our northern neighbors. She pledged to support a rapid accession process for Finland into NATO.

Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde tweeted that Finlands announcement gave an important message.

Finlands announcement came a day after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited both Finland and Sweden to sign a military cooperation agreement.

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The U.K. pledged Wednesday to come to the aid of Sweden and Finland if the two Nordic nations came under attack.

During a joint news conference with Johnson in Helsinki this week, Niinisto said Moscow could only blame itself should his nation of 5.5 million people become a NATO member.

You (Russia) caused this. Look in the mirror, the Finnish head of state said Wednesday.

On Thursday, Niinisto tweeted that he spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about Finlands firm support for Ukraine and the countrys intention to join NATO. Niinisto said Zelenskyy expressed his full support for it.

In 2017, Sweden and Finland joined the British-led Joint Expeditionary Force, which is designed to be more flexible and respond more quickly than the larger NATO alliance. The force uses NATO standards and doctrine so it can operate in conjunction with the alliance, the United Nations or other multinational coalitions.

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Fully operational since 2018, the force has held a number of exercises both independently and in cooperation with NATO.

Russias aggression in Ukraine prompted Finland and Sweden to reconsider their traditions of military nonalignment and to contemplate joining NATO itself. Public opinion in the two countries quickly started to shift toward favoring membership, first in Finland and a bit later in Sweden, after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24.

The latest opinion poll conducted by Finnish public broadcaster YLE showed earlier this week that 76% of Finns are in favor of joining NATO, a big change from earlier years when only 20-30% of respondents favored such military alignment.

Speaking to European Union lawmakers Thursday as Niinisto and Marin made their announcement, Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said that Russias unpredictable behavior was a serious concern for Finland. He cited Moscows readiness to wage high-risk operations that could lead to many casualties, including among Russians.

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Should Finland become a NATO member, it would represent the biggest change in the Nordic countrys defense and security policy since World War II, when it fought against the Soviet Union.

During the Cold War, Finland stayed away from NATO to avoid provoking the Soviet Union, instead opting to remain a neutral buffer between the East and the West while maintaining good relations with Moscow and also with the United States.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said the military alliance would welcome Finland and Sweden  both of which have strong, modern militaries  with open arms and that he expects the accession process to be speedy and smooth.

NATO officials say the Nordic duos accession process could be done in a couple of weeks. The most time consuming part of the procedure  ratification of the countrys protocol by the existing NATO members  could be completed in less time than the four or so months it took West Germany, Turkey and Greece to join in the 1950s, when there were only 12 members to ratify their applications.

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These are not normal times, one NATO official said this week, discussing the possible applications of Finland and Sweden. The official was briefing reporters about the accession process on condition that he not be named as no application has been made by the two countries.

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Lorne Cook in Brussels, and Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, contributed to this report.

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Follow the APs coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

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Rescuers on Friday searched a second day for survivors after a makeshift boat overloaded with migrants capsized near Puerto Rico, leaving at least 11 people dead and underscoring the dangers of a recent uptick in migration by boat to the United States. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Federal authorities in Puerto Rico on Friday charged a Dominican man with smuggling in connection with the deadly incident and he is expected to be indicted next week. No other details were immediately known.

Officials said 38 migrants  36 Haitians and two Dominicans  were rescued and eight were hospitalized. U.S. Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection officials estimated that up to 60 people could have been on board the crude vessel. All of the known dead were women and Haitian nationals.

Were hoping to find additional survivors, Ricardo Castrodad, a spokesman for the U.S. Coast Guards San Juan sector, said Thursday night. But it could go both ways. Crews did not see any life jackets, he added.

A Customs and Border Protection aircrew spotted people in the water around noon Thursday, officials said. They said the boat was found about 10 nautical miles north of Desecheo Island  a patch of land in the Mona Passage, the strait between Puerto Rico and the Caribbean island that includes the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

The survivors were taken to Crash Boat Beach in Aguadilla, a town in northwestern Puerto Rico, said Jeffrey Quinones, a regional spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. He said the boat departed from the Dominican Republic.

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Betsy Rivera, spokeswoman for Puerto Ricos Institute of Forensic Sciences, said it did not yet have identities for the deceased.

At least one of the victims had written a phone number on a piece of paper she carried with her, Rivera said. Officials are working closely with the Haitian and Dominican governments to locate family members and repatriate the deceased to their homeland.

Haitian authorities said they were awaiting more information from U.S. officials about the disaster. Prime Minister Ariel Henry tweeted Friday that the news of the death of 11 of his compatriots deeply upset him.

I extend my condolences to the families of the victims of this new tragedy which has plunged us into mourning and plunged us into the greatest desolation, Henry wrote.

Illegal crossings in poorly-constructed wooden boats known as yolas are common.

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The size of the group harks back to the 1980s and 1990s, when yolas would carry anywhere from 70 to 100 migrants, Quinones said: Our general worry is this could replicate over the summer and this could become a trend.

For decades, smugglers have attempted to navigate the tempestuous Mona Passage between Puerto Ricos west coast and the Dominican Republic. They load scores of migrants onto fragile ferries that use rudimentary motors to steer past authorities and try to avoid detection. Countless lives have been lost, officials said.

We say that the largest cemetery we have in the Dominican Republic is the Mona Passage, said Jose Rodriguez, spokesman for the Dominican Committee on Human Rights based in Puerto Rico.

The boats, typically between 20 and 40 feet long, can be hard to detect, U.S. officials said, and it was fortunate CBP spotted the emergency off Puerto Ricos western shore.

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Smugglers build these hastily-constructed vessels with poor quality wood and nails to construct what is essentially a floating cardboard box, Castrodad said. Throughout the entire 80-mile journey, passengers are often forced to use buckets to bail out water and stay afloat in rapidly changing maritime conditions.

The Mona Passage may appear calm at the outset but is known to turn violent in a matter of minutes, Castrodad said.

Videos circulated on social media capture migrants arriving on popular beaches, where locals sometimes welcome and cheer them on as they run from authorities. U.S. Border Patrol agents often return any migrants they intercept immediately back to their home countries. Historically, migrants have largely been Dominican nationals but U.S. officials said theyve seen a sharp rise in attempted crossings by Haitians since August.

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In the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2021, the Coast Guard intercepted 463 Dominicans and 15 Haitians. Passengers on 53 such voyages have been intercepted by the Coast Guard and its partner agencies since then  including 940 Dominicans and 298 Haitian, the Coast Guard said.

The Coast Guard is now on track to intercept 15 times as many Haitian migrants this year as it did in fiscal year 2020, The Washington Post has reported.

This is a constant occurrence, said Castrodad, who recounted at least four similar rescues since Saturday. In one such incident involving 68 migrants, one Haitian woman died. Theres lots of human smuggling activity and we are patrolling and intercepting these boats trying to get to Puerto Rico daily.

In Haiti, deepening turmoil, including a deadly 7.2-magnitude earthquake and the assassination of President Jovenel Moise last year, has sent thousands fleeing to the United States  by land and by sea.

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Jose Rodriguez, spokesman for the Dominican Committee on Human Rights based in Puerto Rico, said migrants in recent months have been drawn to the U.S. territory by the promise of jobs. Puerto Rico is experiencing a labor shortage, particularly in manual labor, as millions in federal funds are being disbursed for reconstruction on the island archipelago five years after Hurricane Maria.

This is a disgrace. These people are trying to improve their living circumstances, Rodriguez said. And unfortunately, many of them are women who have children they cant feed and so they take these kinds of risks.

A spokeswoman for Pedro Pierluisi, governor of Puerto Rico, said Friday that the government laments the loss of life that occurred.

The governor has been working collaboratively with the Dominican Republic to disincentivize these trips and supports federal immigration reform that would more justly regulate the legal entry of migrants to the U.S., press secretary Sheila Anglero Mojica said Friday.

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Some reconstruction jobs in Puerto Rico pay as much as $15 an hour, which is more than some construction workers make in an entire day in the Dominican Republic, said Josue Gastelbondo, head of the mission for the International Organization for Migration in the Dominican Republic.

Gastelbondo estimated that 20,000 Dominicans have migrated illegally to Puerto Rico in the past three years and that about three trips leave per day to Puerto Rico. That is in part due to strong links between the Dominican Republic and the U.S.; more than half of households in the country, he estimated, receive money transfers from the U.S. dollar.

All Dominicans have a family member in the U.S., he said.

Joseph Mike Lysias, of the Support Group to Repatriates and Refugees in Haiti, said the social, political and economic situation in the country has disproportionately impacted women.

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There are no opportunities for women here in Haiti, he said. They fear being kidnapped in the streets.

In addition to the dead, the majority of the survivors were women, CBP officials said.

What we are witnessing is the feminization of migration, said Romelinda Grullon of the Puerto Rico-based Center for the Dominican Woman, adding they have seen increasing numbers of women making the perilous journey alone. The poor are getting poorer and they are desperate to liberate themselves from their situations.

Many of them do not qualify for visas, are sexually assaulted by their smugglers and have experienced some level violence at home or in their communities, she said.

Human rights officials said the Dominican Republican is a transit point for many Haitians who either stay to save money for the trip or stop there before heading for the United States.

Rodriguez, the community leader, estimated there are nearly 300,000 Dominicans of different immigration statuses living in Puerto Rico, representing a potent political and economic force on the archipelago. About 10 percent of them are undocumented and supply cheap labor to various economic sectors on the island but often face abuse and low wages, he said.

Rodriguez blamed government officials in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic for the conditions that can lead to such deaths.

I am making a call to those people who are thinking about making that trip, please dont do it this way, Rodriguez said. Because this is what happens.

Hannah Knowles and Maria Luisa Paul contributed to this report.

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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates  Vida Mehrannia is trying to save her husbands life. Iran is scheduled to put him to death within nine days  by May 21. To Iran, the 50-year-old Ahmad Reza Jalali is a spy for Israel. To his colleagues, he is a respected physician specialized in disaster medicine, a most demanding field. To Mehrannia, he is a beloved husband.

Its a nightmare, she told The Associated Press from Stockholm, where she lives with her 10-year-old son and 19-year-old daughter who have not seen their father in the six years since his arrest. They want to sacrifice my husband.

Mehrannia pins her fading hopes on Jalalis Swedish citizenship and Stockholms attempts to push for his release. The extent of those efforts is unclear, though the Swedish foreign minister called her Iranian counterpart last week and, along with the European Union, expressed categorial opposition to the death penalty and demanded Jalali be released.

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But it appears that Jalalis very ties to Sweden are what landed him in an Iranian prison.

In Iran, some foreigners are pawns, both in Tehrans internal political rivalries and in tensions between Tehran and Western capitals, analysts say. A pattern of Westerners being picked up has grown increasingly visible since the collapse of Irans nuclear deal with world powers.

On Wednesday, Iran said it detained two unidentified Europeans just hours after the European Union envoy touched down in the capital in a last-ditch effort to save the tattered atomic accord.

Iran has imprisoned at least a dozen dual nationals in recent years. Most of them are held on widely disputed spying charges.

Heres a look at the forces at play in Jalalis case.

HOW DID IT START?

Jalali was born in Irans northwestern town of Tabriz. He built a successful career in Italy and Sweden, publishing over 40 articles in medical journals and teaching across the continent. When an Iranian university invited him to a workshop in April 2016, he didnt think twice about attending.

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He never saw his family again.

Security services scooped him up, accused him of leaking details about Iranian nuclear scientists believed to have been killed by the Mossad and whisked him to Irans notorious Evin Prison where he was sentenced to death.

Meanwhile, a landmark quest in Sweden to hold accountable a former Iranian official accused of committing atrocities has kindled outrage back in Tehran.

The two cases have coincided uneasily. Hamid Nouri is standing trial in Stockholm for war crimes and murder committed during the Iran-Iraq war  a conflict that ended more than a quarter century ago and haunts Tehran to this day.

WHAT IS HAPPENING BETWEEN IRAN AND SWEDEN?

For the first time, several Iranians who survived mass executions at the end of the Iran-Iraq war have taken the stand in a Swedish court.

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Iran denies any link between the contentious trial and Jalalis death sentence  declared to be imminent last week as the Swedish court proceedings grabbed international headlines. Irans judiciary spokesman on Tuesday declared Jalalis verdict final. His family believes the cases are linked.

The allegations in Sweden date back to 1988, after Irans then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini accepted a U.N.-brokered cease-fire. Members of the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, heavily armed by Saddam Hussein, stormed across the Iranian border from Iraq in a surprise attack. Iran blunted their assault.

The sham trials of political prisoners began around that time, with defendants asked to identify themselves. Those who responded mujahedeen were sent to their deaths, according to a 1990 Amnesty International report. International rights groups estimate that as many as 5,000 people were executed.

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Iran has sought to bury this dark chapter of history. But now the sensitive memories are being dragged to light. Former prisoners have told the Swedish court that Nouri, a former Iranian judiciary official, handed down death sentences, guided convicts to chambers where they were executed and helped prosecutors gather the names of those sympathetic to the mujahedeen. Nouri denies involvement.

The verdict is expected in July and, if found guilty, the 61-year-old Nouri could face a life sentence. The case reverberates in Tehran, where the hard-line former judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi served on the commissions that issued execution orders.

Iran is outraged, condemning the proceedings as an unjust and illegal show trial.

Iranian authorities have since detained another Swedish citizen, a tourist traveling in the country, Swedens Foreign Ministry confirmed last week.

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WHY DOES IRAN DETAIN FOREIGNERS?

Four decades ago, young Iranian revolutionaries stormed the U.S. Embassy and took 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. They were released in 1981, but Irans policy of hostage-taking never ended, analysts say.

It ebbs and flows, but this has been a notorious page in the Islamic Republics playbook since 1979, said Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. Iran usually detains foreign nationals as a means of getting leverage or something else from that other country.

The tactic has burst into public view as prisoner swaps gain traction. When Tehrans nuclear accord with world powers took effect in 2016, four American captives flew home from Iran. That same day, the Obama administration airlifted Iran $400 million in cash.

More recently this spring, two British citizens who had been jailed in Iran for more than five years were returned home after the U.K. settled a decades-old debt to Iran.

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Today there are at least four Americans, two Germans, two Austrians and two French citizens known to be detained in Iran.

A United Nations panel describes their incarceration as part of an emerging pattern involving the arbitrary deprivation of liberty of dual nationals.

WHAT IS IRANS HISTORY OF EXECUTING PRISONERS?

Iran is one of the worlds leading executioners. In March, the U.N. special rapporteur for Iran told the Human Rights Council that Irans execution count had surged to 280 last year, including at least three minors.

The execution of foreigners, however, remains extremely rare. Iran is not publicly known to have executed a foreigner in the last two decades.

Dual nationals facing the death penalty in recent years, such as Iranian-Canadian Hamid Ghasemi or Iranian-American Amir Hekmati, have had their sentences commuted.

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Last year, U.N. rights experts warned that Jalali faced harsh conditions and was nearing death as his health rapidly deteriorated in solitary confinement. His conviction, the U.N. says, stems from a confession extracted under torture after an unfair trial.

Deprived of sleep under bright lights, he waits for the day he will be taken away to be killed.

Its a terror his family says they share, even 3,000 miles away.

Its torture. ... It has completely taken over our lives, Mehrannia said. For the politics of other countries, we are suffering.

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GUATEMALA CITY  A Guatemala judge who last week ordered nine former police and military officers to stand trial for alleged crimes during that countrys civil war, said Wednesday that death threats against him had increased since announcing his decision. Are you on Telegram? Subscribe to our channel for the latest updates on Russia's war in Ukraine. ArrowRight They send me messages, they call me on the phone, theres vehicles following; all of that is happening, Magistrate Miguel Angel Galvez said.

Galvez is no stranger to high-profile cases. He once ordered former dictator Efrain Rios Montt to be tried. Before they had threatened me, but now they even come to hearings to photograph me, he said.

Last weeks case stemmed from a document from Guatemalas civil war recovered in 1999 known as the Military Diary. Inside, military officials logged forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings and the torture of 183 people.

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The men on trial were high-ranking military and police officers arrested last year and implicated in the cases described in the document by nature of the command positions they held when the crimes occurred between 1983 and 1986.

In addition to the nine ex-police and military officers Galvez ordered to stand trial, he called for prosecutors to find Toribio Acevedo Ramirez, a former head of military intelligence. Panamanian authorities arrested Acevedo Ramirez Tuesday in Panama Citys airport.

Galvez said that during a hearing he received at least 20 calls from a number in the United States. When he finally answered, a voice on the other end said if you hang up, youre going to remember me.

Galvez said he suspected the leader of the far-right Foundation Against Terrorism, FCT, Ricardo Rafael Mendez Ruiz, could be behind some of the threats. Mendez Ruiz was sanctioned by the U.S. State Department last year as an undemocratic actor for allegedly obstructing prosecutions against former military officers by harassing and intimidating investigators.

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Mendez Ruiz had written on social media that It is Miguel Angel Galvezs turn, the FCT will take care of it. He said Galvez would pay for serious crimes he committed. We are going to see him locked up or exiled, he wrote.

On Wednesday, Mendez said he had filed a complaint against the judge.

Galvez said the Supreme Court should investigate the threats, but it had so far not commented.

Meanwhile, Galvez fears the government is trying to build a case against him, as has been the case with other judges and prosecutors who have worked on sensitive corruption cases, which are also sometimes part of his docket.

They will try to withdraw my immunity as revenge for the decisions, Galvez said.

Juan Pappier, senior investigator for Human Rights Watchs Americas division, said it is on Guatemalan authorities to prevent any attacks on Galvez.

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This case follows a pattern of intimidation against independent judges and prosecutors who investigate and criminally prosecute corruption and human rights crimes in the country, Pappier said. These attacks have left Guatemalan democracy hanging by a thread.

The Guatemalan Judges for Integrity Association condemned the threats as a direct attack against judicial independence.

The United States and European governments have expressed concern about the deterioration of Guatemalas justice system. A number of respected judges and prosecutors who worked on corruption cases have fled into exile.

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Lafontant said evidence and documents linked to cases including the July 7 presidential slaying of Jovenel Moise and the August 2020 killing of Monferrier Dorval, head of the bar association of Port-au-Prince, were not taken because theyre in a secure location elsewhere.

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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti  Unidentified suspects broke into one of Haitis main courthouses, ransacked judges offices and stole items including cell phones, Government Commissioner Jacques Lafontant told The Associated Press on Thursday.

The break-in occurred earlier this week at the Court of First Instance in Haitis capital and is one of several reported in recent years, with authorities struggling to protect key evidence and documents in high-profile cases that remain unresolved.
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Tuesdays announcement by Prime Minister Timothy Harris came as he was facing a no-confidence motion from a coalition that includes his own party.

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SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico  The prime minister of the eastern Caribbean island of St. Kitts and Nevis has had the royal governor-general dissolve its Parliament and has fired several top officials including the deputy prime minister.

Harris said he expects to soon announce a date for new elections. The island normally holds general elections every five years, with the last one held in June 2020.
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LOME, Togo  At least eight soldiers have been killed and 13 other security forces members wounded in an ambush by extremists in northern Togo near the border with Burkina Faso, the government said. The incident was a worrying sign that jihadis who are staging increasing attacks in neighboring countries are expanding their activity into Togo.

Early Wednesday, a group of heavily armed men ambushed an outpost in the Kpinkankandi locality in the Kpendjal prefecture, the Togolese government said in a statement. An armored vehicle was damaged and a jeep burned in the deadly attack.

By Thursday, no group had claimed responsibility. Togos government blamed terrorists for what it called a cowardly and barbaric attack.

The government said it wanted to reassure (Togos) entire population of the determination of the defense and security forces to protect our country and to seek out and disable armed terrorist groups. It appealed for the assistance of the civilian population.

It was the second such attack in Togo in the past year. An attack in November 2021 in the same area was repelled by military and security forces and caused no casualties.

Groups linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State Group have been carrying out increasing attacks in the Sahel region, especially in neighboring Burkina Faso.

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Officials in New York are working to help families amid a nationwide shortage of baby formula and are warning consumers to avoid getting scammed while trying to purchase products.

Gov. Kathy Hochul's office on Thursday said that the state Department of Health continues to support the distribution of diapers, formula and other infant supplies through its home visiting program and partnership networks and that through the state WIC program is monitoring supply chain disruptions that may be impacting its participants.

According to a news release, the WIC program has been able to help participants obtain the formulas needed through alternate stores with the formulas in stock and coordinate with manufacturers to get formula to participants when they cannot find it locally. New York WIC participants should contact their local agency for assistance locating products when needed.

Families with WIC should check the New York State Women, Infants and Children vendor site to find a list of WIC approved vendors who may have formula in stock, and families not in the program should go online to see if their infant is eligible for WIC benefits.

Families are advised to call their OBGYN or the infant's medical provider to see if they have in office samples or can suggest a similar formula that may be more readily available in stores that is nutritionally similar to meet the infant's needs.

Following the FDA's recommendation, the state said that families should not try to make formulas at home and caregivers should work with their child's health care provider for recommendations on changing feeding practices, if needed.

Along with those efforts, the state Division of Consumer Protection this week advised consumers to be aware of unscrupulous practices from individuals using the baby formula shortages to scam desperate parents. These scams are typically rooted in online sales, and private sellers who are marketing cans for double the price knowing that big retailers have empty shelves and little information about when they may receive the next shipment.

Parents, feeling the pressures of the shortage, may find themselves scrambling to find alternative solutions but in the end could end up being scammed by unscrupulous bad actors online, Secretary of State Robert J. Rodriguez said in a news release. At a time when there is a national shortage of baby formula, it is imperative that parents and guardians be aware of scams and know how to spot illegitimate online sales.

EXPLAINER: What's behind the baby formula shortage? WASHINGTON (AP)  Many parents are hunting for infant formula after a combination of short- and long-term problems hit most of the biggest U.S

The state is highlighting the following tips:

Safety check the product: Make sure the formula you are buying is not subject to a recall. Information on recent formula recalls can be found on the FDA website. Confirm the formula is new and still sealed in a tamper proof container. Check the expiration date.

Beware of social media: According to the Federal Trade Commission, more than one in four people who reported losing money to fraud in 2021 said it started on social media with an ad, a post, or a message. If you receive a direct message with an offer to sell you formula or if you see formula for sale on an online marketplace, be especially cautious. Try to arrange for an in-person meeting, so you can be sure you receive the products youre buying.

Use caution when shopping online: Shop on trusted sites with retailers known to you. Read the comments within any social media advertisements. This will help you assess what to expect if something goes wrong, and if the comments are turned off, thats a big red flag.

Beware of fake websites: Fraudsters continue to advance in sophistication to perpetuate scams, fake websites resemble legitimate sites, with very credible-looking logos, pictures, and payment options. If the website is advertising unusually low prices, consumers should be wary and diligently verify the legitimacy of the seller.

Beware of third-party vendors: If redirected from a trusted site to a third-party site. Read the sellers policies, review ratings, and consumer comments, and most importantly, do a broad internet search before making your purchase.

Read the product specifications: Online marketing is geared to get you to buy so it is important to understand the product you are purchasing and the terms of the sale to ensure you are getting what you want. Is the brand and type of formula being sold what you are looking for? Is the size of the product you are buying the same as what you are expecting?

Use a credit card: For online purchases, be sure to use a credit card rather than a debit card. If the item that arrives is different than what you ordered or you dont receive the item at all, dispute the charge with your credit card provider.

Know your rights: The Federal Mail, Internet, or Telephone Order Merchandise states that your order must be delivered within 30 days unless otherwise stated. If there is a delay, you must be notified. If the company cannot reach you to obtain your consent to the delay, they must, without being asked, promptly refund all the money you paid for the unshipped merchandise.

The Consumer Assistance Helpline (800) 697-1220 is available Monday to Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and consumer complaints can be filed at any time at dos.ny.gov/consumerprotection.

The state said that the formula shortage is connected to a product recall. On Feb. 17, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned consumers not to use certain powdered infant formula products from Abbott Nutrition's Sturgis, Michigan facility, and Abbott initiated a voluntary recall of certain products. Since that time, the Food and Drug Administration has been working with Abbott and other manufacturers to bring safe products to the U.S. market and to increase the availability of infant and specialty formula products.

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Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size I dont change my mind often  thats actually far from true depending on how you define change my mind. It could be said, in fact, that my mind is so often in flux, my beliefs are so flexible I often have no firm sense of changing from one opinion to another. I think of it as learning. My mind changes itself constantly, as I learn, thoughts arising and old thoughts and prejudices falling to the wayside as easy as breathing. I can give an example, a simple one, someone once pointed out that a phrase is ableist, and I nodded internally and resolved to never use it (when I am pretty sure I never had), it was simple. When I am wrong about something I am delighted to be corrected, even thankful. My mind is always changing. Claire G. Coleman: I was someone else and I could no longer even understand the person before. My dreams, my aspirations, my personality, and even my identity had changed. Credit:Nhung Le There was a time, however, when my internal world changed so profoundly I could never be the same person again. I did not change my mind, for I am one with my thoughts. Instead what happened is my mind changed, and that was the end of it because I am nothing but my thoughts. I am writing this in the days around my 48th birthday, seven long years from when my life changed so profoundly that I cant really remember the person I was before. In the days around my 41st birthday, I was on my ancestral Country, with my partner and my parents, visiting family graves and the unfamiliar places that were once a part of my family. Country was a taboo place, dad told me, the Country around where his father was born had seen so much death it was dangerous to even breathe the air, to get the death stuff on you. The time I changed my mind... Read author Maxine Beneba Clarke on the time she changed her mind about having her books on school reading lists.

Read Booker Prize winner Damon Galgut on the time he changed his mind about writing this piece.

Read bestselling author Johann Haris piece on how our culture of screaming at each other is making us dumber, crueller and more depressed. Two weeks after my first visit I returned, down the winding forest roads, from the country where giant trees roam back to the low-lying Banksias and white sand of my family homeland. I was there for the opening ceremony for a memorial to the massacre in that place, a massacre that my family knew about but had depersonalised. Even the Wadjelas in the town and region knew, but history and the government would not admit to it.

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There were two oral histories regarding that massacre, that of the Wadjelas (who did the killing), and that of my Noongar people; both were recited and spoken of at the memorial opening. The Wadjela story was short on details: Noongar mob killed John Dunn and his family killed the people who did it. The paucity of details should have been a clue there was more to the story. Noongar people also told our story, including an elder who claims my family. Those stories carried all the missing details, the name of the girl who was raped by John Dunn, the name of the Noongar man who had speared Dunn to death, the names of the many Noongar the colonisers slaughtered. That day built a wall on my personal timeline  before that day I was one person, living one life, after that day I was someone else and I could no longer even understand the person before. My dreams, my aspirations, my personality, and even my identity had changed. Novelist Claire G. Coleman. Credit:Joe Armao There were two seeds planted in my mind and soul that day that grew into who I am now, that tore me down and rebuilt me, that changed my mind, my personality, my identity, my aspirations forever. The first was: Aboriginal history and stories are not just stories, they are not a distant story that has nothing to do with me or my life, they are mine, they are my history, they are my family. The massacres were not something that happened to some distant people, distant in space and time, they happened to my family. Loading The other thing I learned was: story is the most powerful tool and the most dangerous weapon in the world. Stories build culture and culture is all we are, not we as individuals, rather every culture  gangs, governments, organisations, institutions  has a culture and a story. Change the story and you can change the world. Terra Nullius, my debut novel, was born from what I learned that day. I have spent most of the time since that mind-altering moment looking for the right story, the one that can change the culture of the nation that envelops my sacred land, the story that will change people so they will want to change the world - to save the world. I believe the story is out there, or stories, that will change people so profoundly there will be no reason to change the world because it will have already changed.

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I have had my moment, when a story changed me, when I didnt have to change my mind because it had already changed in a flash of insight, incubated in a story, back in 2015 in my ancestral Country. There must be a way to give those insights to others, there must be a story that can hit other people like lightning, so they dont have to change their mind, because it had already been changed. Loading That is my lifes work, to find the story that will change your minds, so you will change the world. I have found that story in some cases, for some people, people have told me of the moments when my work has changed their life, changed their world, changed their mind so profoundly they can barely remember who they were or how they thought. The work continues, it always will. When I think back I cant even imagine the person I was before that sunny day in the trees on the south coast of what is now called Western Australia. There is, however, something I understand profoundly. On that day my mind changed, so who I am changed, you could say my world changed because our world is how we see it. My mind changed, my mind is me. Claire G. Coleman is a Noongar woman and author of novels Terra Nullius and The Old Lie and the nonfiction collection Lies, Damned Lies. She is a guest of the Sydney Writers Festival, whose theme this year is Change My Mind. The event runs from May 16 to 22. A cultural guide to going out and loving your city. Sign up to our Culture Fix newsletter here.
A Queensland superyacht tour operator has been arrested during an alleged attempt to flee Australia, after a failed cocaine drug drop left a diver dead in Newcastle this week.

James Blake Blee, 62, will appear in Cairns Magistrates Court after he was taken into custody at Cairns Airport on Wednesday while trying to board a flight to Singapore, police will allege.

Queensland superyacht tour operator James Blake Blee (inset) has been arrested during an alleged attempt to flee the country, after an allegedly failed cocaine drug drop left a diver dead in Newcastle earlier this week. Credit:NSW Police Media, Supplied

Blee is listed as a professional mariner, co-founder and operator of North Queensland Marine & Tours, which markets itself as a must contact for any Superyacht Owners planning to visit Australian or Asian waters.

NSW Police will seek Blees extradition as investigations continue into a large shipment of cocaine attached to the hull of a ship that arrived in the Port of Newcastle from Argentina on Sunday afternoon.
WEISSENHAUS, Germany (AP)  Top diplomats from the Group of Seven wealthy nations gathered Thursday in northern Germany for a three-day meeting centered on Russia's war against Ukraine and the wider impact it is having around the world, particularly on food and energy prices.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, the meeting's host, said the conflict already had become a global crisis" because shipments of staple crops are stuck in Ukraine, a major agricultural exporter.

Twenty-five million tons (27.5 million U.S. tons) of grain are currently blocked in Ukrainian ports, particularly Odesa, Baerbock said. Grain that's food for millions of people around the world, and which is needed particularly urgently in African countries and the Middle East.

That's why we are discussing how the grain blockade exerted by Russia can be unblocked, how we can get the grain out to the world, she added.

Baerbock warned that climate change also is a factor in the brewing global food emergency, and it's another topic the ministers plan to discuss during their meeting in Weissenhaus, a resort on Germany's Baltic Sea coast northeast of Hamburg.

About 3,500 police officers were deployed at the event site to provide security.

The foreign ministers of Ukraine and neighboring Moldova, which fears it could become the next target of Russia's aggression, have been invited to attend the meeting as guests. Indonesias foreign minister, whose country chairs the Group of 20 major economies this year, is expected to join remotely for part of the meeting Friday, when relations with China are on the agenda.

Speaking earlier Thursday in Berlin, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba welcomed the German government's recent decisions to step up military support for his country.

We see a positive, positive dynamic, Kuleba told reporters after a meeting with German lawmakers. We have to make sure that this positive dynamic is maintained.

Kuleba said he considered it a signal of strength that Chancellor Olaf Scholzs center-left Social Democratic Party had dropped its opposition to providing Ukraine with heavy weapons.

He also expressed hope that the European Union would soon approve Ukraine's application to start the process of joining the bloc. French President Emmanuel Macron has suggested it could be decades before Ukraine is ready to become a full EU member.

Baerbock, who recently became the first top representative of Germany to travel to Ukraine since the start of the war, offered support for Ukraines EU application. Asked about Ukraines request for fighter jets, Baerbock was less encouraging, citing the risk of NATO being drawn into a conflict with Russia.

When it comes to no-fly zones and aviation support weve already taken a clear position, she told reporters.

Also attending the meeting in Weissenhaus were the foreign ministers of Britain, Canada, France, Italy and Japan. Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland is representing the United States; U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is recovering from COVID-19 but is scheduled to travel to Berlin for a weekend meeting of NATO foreign ministers.

The NATO gathering will also hear from the foreign ministers of Sweden and Finland as the two countries are poised to join the Western military alliance amid concerns over the military threat from Russia.

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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WASHINGTON  The circus that is New York State politics grew another ring  where a special election will be fought  with the sudden and unexpected resignation Tuesday of Rep. Tom Reed, a Corning Republican.

Within an hour of Reed's announcement, Steuben County Republican Chairman Joe Sempolinski of Canisteo declared his candidacy for the special election in New York's 23rd District, which Reed represented for 12 years and which won't exist in its current form in January. Shortly thereafter, State Sen. George M. Borrello, a Sunset Bay Republican, contacted The Buffalo News to say that he, too, is interested in running in the special election.

And all this is happening after Rep. Claudia Tenney, a Utica-area Republican, announced plans to run in the Southern Tier district in November under a district map that later was invalidated by the New York courts. Tenney and her aides stayed silent Tuesday about whether she would want to run in the special election in the 23rd District.

Any of those candidates' plans could change when a court-appointed expert next week releases a new congressional map that reduces the number of House seats in the state from 27 to 26, as called for due to population shifts in the 2020 census. While some proposed district maps include a Southern Tier seat not unlike the one Reed resigned from, other proposals eliminate Reed's seat, dividing up its territory among other districts and potentially giving the district now served by Rep. Chris Jacobs, an Orchard Park Republican, the counties in the western part of the Southern Tier.

So the bottom line is that voters in Reed's district will cast votes for Congress twice between July and November, with different district lines in the two elections.

Federal judge refuses to block August congressional primary A federal judge in New York on Wednesday refused to stand in the way of a proposal to move New York's congressional primaries to Aug. 23, rejecting the Democrats' plea that the primaries should be held as originally planned on June 28 along district lines that the state courts have ruled to be unconstitutional.

That's because the State Legislature recently passed legislation mandating a special election when a member of Congress resigns. Under that law, Gov. Kathy Hochul has 10 days to call a special election, which must occur between 70 and 80 days after she does so. That would mean the special election is likely to take place in late July or early August.

The current 23rd District leans Republican, but both parties would field candidates in the special election. A weighted vote of the 11 county Republican chairs who have territory in the 23rd District will determine the nominee, with chairs from counties with more population getting more sway in the weighted vote.

Sempolinski said he's the logical person to step in for Reed, whom he long served as a staffer.

"I spent years as the district director for that district," he said. "If anybody can step in at a time when the incumbent's leaving and have the least amount of learning curve, the least amount of disruption to make sure that the people of this district are still served, I would be the logical person to do that."

But Borrello, whose Senate district includes about half the territory in the 23rd District, said he's "definitely interested" in filling Reed's seat, too. He said he will decide on whether to run for the seat after consulting with his family and political advisers.

"I think the people of the 23rd Congressional District need a strong representative who has, you know, lived here and owned a business here and currently owns a business here," Borrello said. "If there's ever a time when we needed someone who understands the trials and tribulations of small business, now is the time."

Republican sources said other potential candidates could surface before the county chairs meet to pick their candidate.

Max Della Pia, an Air Force veteran from Tioga County who previously declared his candidacy for the Southern Tier seat in November, will be the likely choice of Democratic Party chairs to run in the special election.

All of this results from the surprise announcement that Reed made on the House floor on Tuesday.

"After almost 12 years in Congress, today is my last day," he said. "It has been an honor to serve with you all from both parties. I love this institution as it still exemplifies what is best about our government: We are the peoples house. While I am proud that we put people before politics, there is much more to do. I am leaving to continue that work and hope to have a greater impact on our country."

Reed is the former GOP co-chair of the House Problem Solvers Caucus. A genial lawmaker well-liked by colleagues, Reed was seen as a potential candidate for governor this year until a former lobbyist told the Washington Post that he had touched her inappropriately in a Minneapolis bar in 2017.

Shortly after that story broke in March 2021, Reed announced he would not run for re-election. Long known for his plentiful town halls across his district, Reed recently appeared to hint at his coming departure with a "farewell tour" of such meetings.

In an interview, Reed said he resigned to take a job with Prime Policy Group, a bipartisan public policy group founded by longtime Republican lobbyist Charlie Black. He said he decided to resign now because that's when the opportunity presented itself, and because it's clear that Congress won't accomplish much in the coming months as attention turns to the November election.

"I'm going to be working on general political strategy, but I also made sure that this relationship allows me to be involved in political opportunities to support good men and women who are problem-solver-type members of Congress," Reed said.

In his farewell speech on the House floor, Reed made it clear he is concerned that too many members of Congress are too extreme to get things done.

"I believe the current focus on extremism demands us to heed the words of Abraham Lincoln uttered years ago as we face a similar threat to our existence today: 'A house divided cannot stand!' " Reed said. "But I add: 'A house united will not fail.' It is time for petty political posturing to end. Leadership must emerge and in God I trust. His divine protection will extend again if only we acknowledge and accept his love and the divine spark that exists in each of us as citizens of our great nation."

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Beijing (Gasgoo)- Baidu's intelligent speech arm, Xiaodu Technology, recently struck a deal with NIO to optimize NIO vehicles' onboard human-machine interactive experience.

Photo credit: NIO



Building on Xiaodus DuerOS technologies, the two companies will create an integrated onboard AI assistant connecting drivers, cars, and the internet that satisfy users needs.

DuerOS is one of the largest dialogue mode speech operating systems, currently on its 7.0 iterated version. The system offers a natural, realistic, and humanized experience that learns the habit and preferences of its users. Combining the technology with its parent Baidus abundant resources, the cooperation will help NIO to get powerful support in automotive operating system development.

In addition, Xiaodu and NIOs cooperation signifies another development direction in the onboard OS territory for domestic companies. Leaders in their respective fields can further co-explore the potential of customized car + intelligence technology and functions by leveraging eachs resources. The companies can co-construct a comprehensive ecosystem for automotive OS, accelerating the innovation transformation within the auto industry.

Furthermore, the cross-industry integration will help China realize the complete localization of auto operating systems.
Allentown, PA (18103)

Today

Areas of fog and clouds early giving way to partly sunny skies; a late day shower or thunderstorm, but mainly dry. Warm and continued rather humid. .

Tonight

Partly to mostly cloudy with an evening t-storm possible. There might be some breaks in the clouds for the total lunar eclipse around midnight.
Shanghai (Gasgoo)- By the end of Apr. 2022, there had been 3.324 million charging piles deployed across China, up 81.9% from the same period of last year, according to the China Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Promotion Alliance (EVCIPA).

For the first four months of 2022, around 707,000 charging piles (+383.6% YoY) were newly built in the country, including 185,000 public piles (+204.6% YoY) and 522,000 private ones (+511.1% YoY).

Photo credit: Star Charge



As of April 2022, the number of public charging piles in China had added up to 1.332 million, including 577,000 DC piles, 755,000 AC piles, and 485 DC-AC integrated charging piles, the EVCIPA reported after summarizing the data provided by members of the alliance.

In April, around 100,000 public charging piles were newly deployed in China, representing a 53.4% year-on-year jump.

There were around 39,000 public charging piles built per month on average within the year ended April 2022.

In terms of the volume of charging stations by April 2022, the top two provinces were still Guangdong and Jiangsu. Compared to the rankings for the previous month, Zhejiang surpassed Beijing to the second runner-up place, while Hubei entered the top 10 list as the replacement of Henan province.

Regarding the amount of charging stations by April 2022, the top six operators were still TELD, State Grid, Star Charge, EV Power, YKC, and China Southern Power Grid. Notably, DiDis charging service brand, Xiaoju Charging, moved up to the seventh place.

As of April 2022, China had owned a total of 1,480 battery swap stations, 29 of which were newly built last month. By the volume of battery swap stations as of April, the top five provinces or direct-administered municipalities in China were Beijing, Guangdong, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Shanghai. Compared to the previous month, Fujian dropped two spots to the tenth.
Allentown, PA (18103)

Today

Mostly cloudy, seasonably warm, and rather humid; some morning fog, then some showers or a thunderstorm, especially in the afternoon..

Tonight

Mostly cloudy and mild with a spotty shower, especially early.
Police have released additional details about the death of a 9-day-old baby in Page reported earlier this week.

The infant's mother, 33-year-old Jessica Seiser, and caretaker, 40-year-old Nancy Bell, were arrested on suspicion of child abuse Monday.

Bell brought the baby to the Page hospital shortly after 10 a.m. Friday, according to a probable cause statement filed in the Page Justice Court. Officials described the infant, who was pronounced dead at the hospital, as "severely neglected" and malnourished in the statement.

Initially, Bell allegedly told officers in she found the baby near a restroom at Lone Rock, Utah. However, she later confessed that she was taking care of the baby for its mother, Seiser, according to police.

Bell told investigators Seiser had the baby in her car on April 27 as "it would become known she was using drugs while pregnant" if she had the baby in the hospital, the report detailed. She asked Bell to take care of the baby for her as Bell was already breastfeeding her own baby and had "clean milk." Bell agreed and was taking care of both babies while living in her car.

Bell, however, told police that Seiser's baby was difficult to feed as the child wouldn't latch on while breastfeeding and showed signs of being addicted to drugs.

Bell was staying in a parking lot with the two babies when she noticed Seiser's baby's condition became "dire," prompting her to take the child to the hospital.

Seiser later admitted to being the baby's mother to police, according to the probable cause statement, and that she gave the baby to Bell as she "did not want to have any attachment" with the child. She added that she didn't seek medical attention before or after the birth as she didn't want any connection with her baby, court records say.

Both women were booked into the Page holding facility Monday and have yet to be formally charged in Coconino County Superior Court.

Reporter Bree Burkitt can be reached at 928-556-2250 or bburkitt@azdailysun.com.

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[May 12, 2022] Softchoice Announces First Quarter 2022 Results Softchoice Corporation ("Softchoice" or the "Company") (TSX: SFTC) today announced its financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2022 ("Q1 2022"). The Company also maintained its 2022 Outlook, declared its Q2 dividend, and provided a progress update on its normal course issuer bid (share buyback). Softchoice will hold a conference call/webcast to discuss its results today, May 12, 2022, at 8:30 a.m. ET. Unless otherwise noted, all dollar ($) amounts are in U.S. dollars. Selected Q1 2022 Financial Highlights Gross Sales increased by 7.3% to $466.6 million from $434.9 million in Q1 2021, driven by a 10.4% increase in Software & Cloud solutions. Net sales decreased by 4.4% to $222.9 million from $233.2 million in Q1 2021. Gross Sales grew as net sales declined due to an increase in the mix of Software & Cloud solutions within total Gross Sales, which are primarily recorded on a net basis for accounting purposes.

Gross profit increased by 6.4% to $67.1 million, from $63.0 million in Q1 2021, driven by 10.9% growth in Software & Cloud solutions. The increase in Software & Cloud was driven by high growth in our public cloud and security solutions.

Income from operations increased by $2.3 million to $3.8 million, from $1.5 million in Q1 2021.

Adjusted EBITDA decreased by 4.9% to $10.0 million, from $10.5 million in Q1 2021, as Adjusted Cash Operating Expenses increased by $4.6 million, which was partially offset by the increase in gross profit of $4.1 million. This was driven by the decrease in Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy ("CEWS") ($0.5 million in Q1 2021 versus $nil in Q1 2022), accelerated growth investments made by the Company in Q1 2022, and increases in certain variable compensation costs which are tied to gross profit performance.

Increased the quarterly dividend to C$0.09 per common share, which was paid in April 2022.

Initiated share buyback program. Selected Q1 2022 Business Highlights Made significant growth investments in our technical resources, salesforce, and cloud strategies.

Achieved the elite Managed Services Provider designation in the Google Cloud Partner Advantage program, demonstrating the Company's continued success in enabling cloud transformation at scale with technical expertise in Google Cloud Platform.

Subsequent to Q1 2022, Softchoice was named as the 2022 VMware Partner of the Year, which is a global distinction awarded to a single partner each year as part of VMware's annual Partner Achievement Awards. VMware recognized Softchoice for delivering the most customer value and impact to their organizations, creating on-prem to cloud migration opportunities.

Also subsequent to Q1 2022, Softchoice was named a Best Workplace in Canada by the Great Place to Work Institute for the 17th straight year. This followed the Company's recognition as a "Best Place to Work for LGBTQ Equality" in the Human Rights Campaign's 2022 Corporate Equality Index, receiving a perfect score. Commenting on Q1 2022 and the Company's 2022 outlook, Vince De Palma, Softchoice's President & Chief Executive Officer, said: "We experienced a solid first quarter of organic growth including double digit growth in our Software & Cloud solutions, led by our public cloud and security offerings. We generated record gross profit per customer and an exceptional Revenue Retention Rate of 112%, reflecting execution of our strategy to deliver advanced IT solutions to our customers and drive deeper engagements with them. We also accelerated our organic growth investments including an increase of more than 130 team members over the past year, half of whom were added in the first quarter of 2022. Despite a competitive labor market, our recognized brand and culture combined with our strategic focus on advanced IT solutions has resulted in faster than anticipated recruiting. With these personnel in revenue generating sales and technical sales roles, combined with double digit growth in our billings in Q1, we are reaffirming our 2022 outlook as well as restating our expectation that our growth rates will progress through the year as we realize the benefit of these investments." Commenting on Softchoice's financial performance and capital allocation plans, Bryan Rocco, Softchoice's Chief Financial Officer, said: "Gross profit growth of more than 6% in Q1 was driven by approximately 11% growth in Software & Cloud. This was partially offset by lower growth in Hardware due to continued global supply chain constraints as well a decline in Services gross margin due to our increase in team members, who are recorded in Cost of Sales, as part of our strategy to increase our capabilities to deliver more advanced services. This decline in Services is not anticipated to continue as we recorded double digit growth in Services billings in the quarter. Excluding the impact of CEWS, Adjusted EBITDA was flat year over year as our gross profit growth was used to fund accelerated investments in our technical resources, salesforce, and cloud strategies, as reflected by a 7% growth in our headcount. Additionally, we incurred accelerated commission costs in Q1, driven by elevated billing activity in strategic focus areas yielding higher commission rates. We continue to generate strong free cash flow, which we have used to fund our growth investments, pay our dividend and initiate our active and ongoing share buyback program." Financial Summary1



US$ M except per share amounts and percentages Q1 2022 Q1 2021 Growth % Gross Sales 466.6 434.9 7.3% Net sales 222.9 233.2 (4.4%) Gross profit 67.1 63.0 6.4% Adjusted EBITDA 10.0 10.5 (4.9%) as a Percentage of Gross Profit 14.8% 16.6% Income from operations 3.8 1.5 151.9% Net income (loss) 3.7 (2.0) NMF Net income (loss) per Diluted Share (attributable to the Owners of the Company) $0.06 $(0.04) NMF Adjusted Net Income 4.6 2.6 79.1% Adjusted EPS (Diluted) $0.07 $0.05 40.0% US$ M except percentages Q1 2022 Q1 2021 Growth % Gross Sales Mix by IT Solution Type*: Software & Cloud 299.0 270.7 10.4% Services 24.7 24.2 2.0% Hardware 142.9 139.9 2.1% Gross Profit Mix by IT Solution Type*: Software & Cloud 40.3 36.4 10.9% as a percentage of Gross Sales 13.5% 13.4% Services 6.5 7.1 (8.8%) as a percentage of Gross Sales 26.2% 29.3% Hardware 20.2 19.5 3.7% as a percentage of Gross Sales 14.2% 14.0% * Amounts may not add to total due to rounding Financial Position The Company ended Q1 2022 in strong financial condition, with approximately $189 million in available funds from cash on hand and through its $275 million revolving credit facility. Including internally generated cash flows, the Company anticipates having significant resources with which to pursue growth opportunities and enhance shareholder returns. The Company had approximately $98.3 million in loans and borrowings outstanding at the end of Q1 2022. Net debt, equating to loans and borrowings plus lease liabilities less cash-on-hand, was $108.4 million at March 31, 2022, a decline from $185.0 million at March 31, 2021. Net debt increased from $85.9 million at December 31, 2021 due primarily to $18.8 million in non-cash working capital outflows in Q1 2022 driven by typical seasonality of our business. The quarter end ratio of net debt to Adjusted EBITDA for the trailing twelve-months ended March 31, 2022 was 1.6x compared with 2.7x at March 31, 2021, and 1.2x at December 31, 2021. Dividend The Board of Directors (the "Board") of the Company has declared a quarterly cash dividend of C$0.09 per common share of the Company (each, a "Common Share") for the period from April 1, 2022 to June 30, 2022, to be paid as of July 15, 2022 to shareholders of record at the close of business on June 30, 2022. The Dividend to which this notice relates is an eligible dividend for tax purposes. NCIB On March 3, 2022, the Board approved the commencement of a normal course issuer bid ("NCIB") through the facilities of the TSX and/or alternative Canadian trading systems to purchase and cancel up to 3,018,528 of the Company's Common Shares, representing approximately 10% of the public float of 30,185,282, during the twelve-month period commencing March 8, 2022 and ending March 7, 2023. During Q1 2022, the Company repurchased and cancelled 128,986 Common Shares at an average price of Cdn. $24.42 per share. Subsequent to quarter end in April, the Company repurchased and cancelled an additional 174,367 Common Shares at an average price of Cdn. $24.03 per share. In connection with the NCIB, the Company entered into an automatic purchase plan effective as of March 8, 2022 with a designated broker which allows for the purchase for cancellation of Common Shares, subject to certain trading parameters, by the Company's designated broker during times when Softchoice would ordinarily not be active in the market due to applicable regulatory restrictions or self-imposed blackout periods. Outside of these periods, the Common Shares will be repurchased by the Company at our discretion under the NCIB. Our Outlook 2 Softchoice is reiterating its 2022 financial outlook that was originally provided on March 4, 2022: Fiscal 2022 Outlook Gross Profit >$320 million

(>11.5% growth over Fiscal 2021) Adjusted EBITDA as a Percentage of Gross Profit ~30% margin

(Inclusive of ~$25 million of Project Monarch Uplift) Adjusted Free Cash Flow Conversion Approximately 90% Our outlook is based on certain assumptions and factors (including those relating to our view of the drivers of, and expectations related to, our anticipated growth), including the key assumptions and factors set out in the AIF (as defined below) under 'Our Outlook'. Assumes an average U.S.$ / C$ exchange rate of 0.79 in Fiscal 2022. For important information on risk factors, refer to "Forward Looking Information Disclaimer" later in this news release. Quarterly Conference Call Softchoice's management team will hold a conference call to discuss our first quarter 2022 results today at 8:30 a.m. (ET). DATE: Thursday, May 12, 2022 TIME: 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time DIAL-IN: 416-764-8659 or 1-888-664-6392, Confirmation # 47729546 WEBCAST: https://produceredition.webcasts.com/starthere.jsp?ei=1542926&tp_key=f24eae15b0 TAPED REPLAY: 416-764-8677 or 1-888-390-0541, Replay Code 729546 # (Available until May 19, 2022) A link to the webcast will also be available on the Events page of the Investors section of Softchoice's website at http://investors.softchoice.com. Please connect at least 15 minutes prior to the conference call to ensure adequate time for any software download that may be required to join the webcast. An archived replay of the webcast will be available for 90 days. Capitalized Terms Capitalized terms used in this release, including Project Monarch, and terms we use to describe our IT solution types including Software & Cloud, Services, and Hardware and sales channels including SMB, Commercial, and Enterprise are described in the Company's Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations for the three months ended March 31, 2022 (the "Q1 2022 MD&A"), and/or defined in our AIF (as defined below) filed on SEDAR and available on the Company's investor relations website http://investors.softchoice.com. 1 Non-IFRS Measures This news release makes reference to certain non-IFRS measures and other measures. These measures are not recognized measures under International Financial Reporting Standards ("IFRS") as issued by the International Accounting Standards Board ("IASB") and do not have a standardized meaning prescribed by IFRS and are therefore unlikely to be comparable to similar measures presented by other companies. Rather, these measures are provided as additional information to complement those IFRS measures by providing further understanding of our results of operations from management's perspective. Accordingly, these measures should not be considered in isolation nor as a substitute for analysis of our financial information reported under IFRS. We use non-IFRS measures, including "Adjusted EBITDA", "Adjusted EBITDA as a Percentage of Gross Profit", "Adjusted Cash Operating Expenses", "Adjusted Net Income (Loss)", "Adjusted EPS", "Adjusted Free Cash Flow Conversion", and "Gross Sales". These non-IFRS measures and other measures are used to provide investors with supplemental measures of our operating performance and thus highlight trends in our core business that may not otherwise be apparent when relying solely on IFRS measures. Our management uses these non-IFRS measures and other measures in order to facilitate operating performance comparisons from period to period, to prepare annual operating budgets and forecasts and to determine components of management compensation. We also believe that securities analysts, investors and other interested parties frequently use certain of these non-IFRS measures and other measures in the evaluation of issuers. As required by Canadian securities laws, we reconcile the non-IFRS measures to the most comparable IFRS measures. For more information on non-IFRS measures and other measures, see the Q1 2022 MD&A filed on SEDAR and available on the Company's investor relations website http://investors.softchoice.com Reconciliations of Non-IFRS Financial Measures (Information in thousands of U.S. dollars, unless otherwise stated) Three Months Ended March 31, Reconciliation of Net Sales to Gross Sales 2022 2021 Net sales 222,922 233,230 Net adjustment for sales transacted as agent 243,687 201,648 Gross Sales 466,609 434,878 Reconciliation of Operating Expenses to Adjusted Cash Operating Expenses Operating expenses 63,226 61,488 Depreciation and amortization (4,873) (5,322) Equity-settled share-based compensation and other costs (1) (572) (2,810) Non-recurring compensation and other costs (2) (20) (282) Business transformation non-recurring costs (3) (561) (273) IPO related costs (4) - (253) Non-recurring legal provision (5) (87) - Adjusted Cash Operating Expenses 57,113 52,548 Reconciliation of Income from operations to Adjusted EBITDA Income from operations 3,839 1,524 Depreciation and amortization 4,873 5,322 Equity-settled share-based compensation and other costs (1) 572 2,810 Non-recurring compensation and other costs (2) 20 282 Business transformation non-recurring costs (3) 561 273 IPO related costs (4) - 253 Non-recurring legal provision (5) 87 - Adjusted EBITDA 9,952 10,464 Adjusted EBITDA as a Percentage of Gross Profit (6) 14.8% 16.6% Reconciliation of Net Income (Loss) to Adjusted Net Income Net income (loss) 3,729 (1,996) Amortization of intangible assets 3,208 3,219 Equity-settled share-based compensation and other costs (1) 572 2,810 Non-recurring compensation and other costs (2) 20 282 Business transformation non-recurring costs (3) 561 273 IPO related costs (4) - 253 Non-recurring legal provision (5) 87 - Related party debt interest (7) - 1,015 Subordinated debt interest (7) - 263 Interest expense on accretion of non-interest bearing notes (8) - 120 Gain on lease modification (9) (209) - Foreign exchange gain (10) (2,654) (1,883) Related tax effects (11) (675) (1,766) Adjusted Net Income 4,639 2,590 Weighted Average Number of Shares (Basic) 59,512,239 45,240,406 Weighted Average Number of Shares (Diluted) 63,392,680 56,309,860 Adjusted EPS (Basic) (12) 0.08 0.06 Adjusted EPS (Diluted) (12) 0.07 0.05 Reconciliation of Net Cash (used in) Provided by Operating Activities to Adjusted Free Cash Flow Trailing Twelve-Months Ended March 31, 2022 2021 Net cash provided by (used in) operating activities (13) 32,611 12,839 Adjusted for: Share-based compensation and other costs (14) 33,361 3,156 Non-recurring compensation and other costs (2) 426 2,752 Business transformation non-recurring costs (3) 1,861 11,019 IPO related costs (4) 2,818 253 Follow-On Offering costs (15) 287 - Non-recurring legal provision (5) 1,801 - Realized foreign exchange gain (5,908) (1,094) Finance and other expense (income) (16) 806 (62) Cash taxes paid 8,378 5,198 Cash interest paid 4,990 8,781 Change in non-cash operating working capital (13) (12,862) 24,548 Adjusted EBITDA 68,569 67,390 Maintenance Capex (1,895) (810) IFRS 16 lease payments (17) (7,123) (6,829) Adjusted Free Cash Flow 59,551 59,751 Adjusted Free Cash Flow Conversion 87% 89% Notes (Refer to the Q1 2022 MD&A for description of the sections with parentheses within these Notes) (1) These expenses represent costs recognized in connection with the Company's legacy option plan and omnibus long-term equity incentive plan, pursuant to which options granted are fair valued at the time of grant using the Black-Scholes option pricing model and adjusted for any plan modifications, and expenses related to RSUs and DSUs (as defined below). Other costs relate to the employee investment plan and the long-term profit-sharing plan, which were dissolved upon the completion of the IPO, and fair value adjustments in relation to existing equity-based arrangements. See "Share Information Prior to the Completion of the Offering". (2) These expenses include compensation costs relating to severance and other costs comprised of professional, legal, consulting, accounting and management fees that are non-recurring and are sporadic in nature as they primarily relate to costs incurred in connection with shareholder distributions. (3) These costs in Fiscal 2021 relate to the implementation of Project Monarch, which were largely comprised of one-time third-party consulting expenses, personnel costs for dedicated internal resources and software related costs. All costs relating to Project Monarch were segregated for tracking purposes and are monitored on a regular basis. The costs in Q1 2022 relate to system enhancements after the implementation of Project Monarch. As at March 31, 2022, $49.8 million has been invested in operating and capital expenditures for Project Monarch and related system enhancements. See "Summary of Factors Affecting Performance - Business Transformation (Project Monarch)". (4) In connection with the IPO, the Company incurred expenses related to professional fees, legal, consulting, accounting and compensation that would otherwise not have been incurred and therefore are non-recurring. These costs have been separately identified and adjusted for clarity. There were $253 of IPO related costs which were incurred in Q1 2021 that were previously classified under non-recurring compensation and other costs; these costs have been reclassified into IPO related costs in Q1 2021 amount shown. (5) The Company has settled certain legal claims, without admission of liability or wrongdoing, in respect of U.S. wage and hour disputes and has provisioned $1.8 million for such settlements, which are non-recurring in nature. (6) Adjusted EBITDA as a Percentage of Gross Profit is calculated as Adjusted EBITDA divided by gross profit. See "Non-IFRS Measures and Other Measures - Non-IFRS Measures - Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA as a Percentage of Gross Profit". (7) Related party and subordinated debt interest was settled at the time of Offering. For additional details see "Related Party Transactions", "Subordinated Debt Information" and "Share Information Prior to the Completion of the Offering". (8) This represents the expense relating to the accretion of the present value of the non-interest bearing notes recognized over the term of the notes. These notes were settled at the time of Offering. See also "Related Party Transactions", "Subordinated Debt Information" and "Share Information Prior to the Completion of the Offering". (9) Gain on lease modification recognized in Q1 2022 as a result the derecognition of the lease liabilities related to rental parking as the associated office space has been subleased. (10) Foreign exchange gain includes both realized and unrealized amounts. (11) This relates to the tax effects of the adjusting items, which was calculated by applying the statutory tax rate of 26.5% and adjusting for any permanent differences and capital losses. The comparative period has been reclassified due to a change in tax impact on adjusted items. (12) Basic Adjusted EPS is calculated using the weighted average number of shares outstanding during the period. Diluted Adjusted EPS includes the dilutive impact of the stock options in addition to the weighted average number of shares outstanding during the period. See "Non-IFRS Measures and Other Measures - Non-IFRS Measures - Adjusted Net Income (Loss) and Adjusted EPS". (13) The Q1 2022 TTM figure includes adjusted figures for reclassification of costs between net cash provided by operating activities and change in non-cash operating working capital. (14) Share-based compensation represents costs recognized in connection with repurchases of stock options from terminated employees. Included in the trailing twelve months ended Q1 2022, there was $16.9 million relating to Cash-Out Agreements in conjunction with the IPO and $7.7 million relating to Cash-Out Agreements in conjunction with the Follow-On Offering. Other costs are comprised of the employee investment plan and the long-term profit-sharing plan, which were dissolved in connection with the IPO; and fair value adjustments in relation to existing equity-based arrangements. As a result of the IPO, a $6.1 million fair value adjustment was triggered on an existing equity-based arrangement which was dissolved thereafter. See "Share Information Prior to the Completion of the Offering". (15) In connection with the Follow-On Offering, the Company incurred expenses related to professional fees, legal, and accounting fees that would otherwise not have been incurred and therefore are non-recurring. These costs have been separately identified and adjusted above. (16) Finance and other expense (income) refers to interest income on cash, and payments received from employees for parking, net of non-controlling interest portion of unrecoverable withholding taxes on royalties. (17) Lease payments in the TTM Q1 2022 included a one-time early lease termination payment of $0.5 million, which occurred in Q3 2021. 2 Forward-Looking Statements This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws in Canada. Forward-looking information may relate to our future business, financial outlook and anticipated events or results and may include information regarding our financial position, business strategy, growth strategies, addressable markets, budgets, operations, financial results, taxes, dividend policy, NCIB, business plans and objectives. Particularly, information regarding our expectations of future results, performance, achievements, prospects or opportunities or the markets in which we operate is forward-looking information. In some cases, forward-looking information can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "plans", "targets", "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "an opportunity exists", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "outlook", "financial outlook", "forecasts", "projection", "prospects", "strategy", "intends", "anticipates", "does not anticipate", "believes", or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might", "will", "will be taken", "occur" or "be achieved". In addition, any statements that refer to expectations, intentions, projections or other characterizations of future events or circumstances contain forward-looking information. Statements containing forward-looking information are not historical facts but instead represent management's expectations, estimates and projections regarding possible future events or circumstances. Forward-looking information may include, among other things: (i) the Company's expectations regarding its financial performance and outlook, including among others, net sales, gross profit, gross profit growth rates, expenses, Adjusted EBITDA, Adjusted EBITDA to Gross Profit margin, Adjusted Free Cash Flow Conversion, operations, the number of account executives and employees, organic growth and Adjusted EBITDA margin expansion; (ii) the Company's expectations regarding industry and market trends, growth rates and growth strategies; (iii) the Company's business plans and strategies; (iv) the Company's ability to retain customers and increase margin per customer; (v) the Company's relationship and status with technology partners; (vi) the Company's growth strategies, future organic growth, and competitive position in the IT industry; (vii) the Company's dividend program and dividend rates; (viii) the Company's NCIB program and the purchase of Common Shares in connection with such programs; and (ix) the long-term impact of COVID-19 on our business, financial position, results of operations and/or cash flows; (x) M&A opportunities; and (xi) the materialization of the expected benefits of Project Monarch. Forward-looking information is necessarily based on a number of opinions, estimates and assumptions that we considered appropriate and reasonable as at the date such statements are made, and are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information, including but not limited to the risk factors described in our Q1 2022 MD&A and under "Risk Factors" within the Company's annual information form dated March 29, 2022 (the "AIF"). A copy of the AIF can be accessed under our profile on the System for Electronic Document Analysis and Retrieval ("SEDAR") at www.sedar.com and on our website at investors.softchoice.com. There can be no assurance that such forward-looking information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such information. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information, which speaks only as at the date made. In addition to the Forward-looking information cautions described above, the outlook set forth herein includes Gross Profit, Gross Profit growth, Adjusted EBITDA, Adjusted EBITDA to Gross Profit margin and Adjusted Free Cash Flow Conversion, for Fiscal 2022. Key underlying drivers for our forecast, particularly related to Gross Profit and Gross Profit growth, include: (i) the expected growth of our addressable market; (ii) the expected growth of our salesforce and improvements of our salesforce productivity; and (iii) the expected growth in our customer base and wallet share amongst existing customers. A significant portion of the increase in Gross Profit and Adjusted EBITDA for Fiscal 2022 is attributable to the procurement savings, pricing margin improvements, and business growth and reduced revenue leakage and expected net workforce efficiencies anticipated to result from Project Monarch. To the extent that these underlying drivers and benefits are not realized as expected, our Gross Profit, Adjusted EBITDA, Adjusted EBITDA to Gross Profit margin and, as a result, our Adjusted Free Cash Flow Conversion, during the relevant period will be adversely affected. The underlying assumptions relating to future results are inherently uncertain and are subject to significant business, economic, financial, regulatory, market and competitive risks, including risks that our initiatives or projects (including Project Monarch) do not result in the growth and increase in efficiencies anticipated, and could cause actual results to differ materially. If we do not achieve the anticipated results, we may modify or discontinue certain of our other planned business initiatives. In light of the foregoing, investors are urged to put these statements in context and not to place undue reliance on them. About Softchoice Softchoice (TSX: SFTC) is a software-focused IT solutions provider that equips organizations to be agile and innovative, and for their people to be engaged, connected and creative at work. That means moving them to the cloud, helping them build the workplace of tomorrow, and enabling them to make smarter decisions about their technology portfolio. For more information, please visit www.softchoice.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220512005380/en/

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BTO-Binh Thuan a roi nhom 15 tinh, thanh pho at iem thap nhat, roi vi tri xep thu 53/63 tinh thanh cua nam 2020, vuot 41 bac e buoc vao nhom 15 tinh, thanh pho at iem cao nhat nuoc, thuoc nhom cao nhat nuoc. ay la ket qua cua toan he thong chinh tri tu su no luc thao go iem nghen con nguoi. Trong o noi bat len vai tro lanh chi ao va trien khai cac giai phap cua chinh quyen cap tinh.
Exclusive: Tony Award nominee Jeremy Jordan is heading back to the West End this summer!

The Broadway star is set to perform a solo show at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, where he reprised his role as Clyde Barrow in two sold-out, semi-staged concert productions of Bonnie and Clyde back in January.

Presented by Fourth Wall Live and featuring music direction by Benjamin Rauhala, the evening will include "some of the music Jordan is most loved for performing as well as personal favourites both old and new".

His additional Broadway credits include Newsies, Waitress, American Son, Rock of Ages and West Side Story. He has also starred in the current Off-Broadway revival of Little Shop of Horrors and in Finding Neverland at the American Repertory Theater. His most notable screen credits include the 2014 film adaptation of The Last Five Years, Supergirl and Smash.

The event will be held on Monday 29 August 2022.




Williamson, WV (25661)

Today

Intervals of clouds and sunshine. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 83F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies early. Thunderstorms likely late. Low near 65F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 70%.
WASHINGTON (AP)  President Joe Biden stepped up his administration's response to a nationwide baby formula shortage Thursday that has forced frenzied parents into online groups to swap and sell to each other to keep their babies fed.

Shelves typically stocked with baby formula sit mostly empty at a store in San Antonio, Tuesday, May 10, 2022. Parents across the U.S. are scrambling to find baby formula because supply disruptions and a massive safety recall have swept many leading brands off store shelves. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

WASHINGTON (AP)  President Joe Biden stepped up his administration's response to a nationwide baby formula shortage Thursday that has forced frenzied parents into online groups to swap and sell to each other to keep their babies fed.

The president discussed with executives from Gerber and Reckitt how they could increase production and how his administration could help, and talked with leaders from Walmart and Target about how to restock shelves and address regional disparities in access to formula, the White House said.

The administration plans to monitor possible price gouging and work with trading partners in Mexico, Chile, Ireland and the Netherlands on imports, even though 98% of baby formula is domestically made.

The problem is the result of supply chain disruptions and a safety recall, and has had a cascade of effects: Retailers are limiting what customers can buy, and doctors and health workers are urging parents to contact food banks or physicians' offices, in addition to warning against watering down formula to stretch supplies or using online DIY recipes.

Baby formula is displayed on the shelves of a grocery store in Carmel, Ind., Tuesday, May 10, 2022. Parents across the U.S. are scrambling to find baby formula because supply disruptions and a massive safety recall have swept many leading brands off store shelves. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)

The shortage is weighing particularly on lower-income families after the recall by formula maker Abbott, stemming from contamination concerns. The recall wiped out many brands covered by WIC, a federal program like food stamps that serves women, infants and children, though the program now permits brand substitutes. The Biden administration is working with states to make it easier for WIC recipients to buy different sizes of formula that their benefits might not currently cover.

About half of infant formula nationwide is purchased by participants using WIC benefits, according to the White House.

Clara Hinton, 30, of Hartford, Connecticut, is among that group. She has a 10-month-old daughter, Patiennce, who has an allergy that requires a special formula.

Hinton, who has no car, has been taking the bus to the suburbs, going from town to town, and finally found some of the proper formula at a box store in West Hartford. But she said the store refused to take her WIC card, not the first time that has happened.

Hinton said her baby recently ran out of formula from an already opened can she got from a friend.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki speaks during the daily briefing at the White House in Washington, Thursday, May 12, 2022. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

She has no formula, she said. I just put her on regular milk. What do I do? Her pediatrician made it clear Im not supposed to be doing that, but what do I do?

In Utah, fellow WIC card holder Elizabeth Amador has been going store-to-store every day after she finishes work at a call center in Salt Lake City in desperate search of one particular formula her 9-month-old daughter needs. She recently was down to only one can, but had four cans on Thursday. She said she wont stop her cumbersome daily routine until she knows the shortage is over.

It sucks, you know because of high gas prices, Amador said. Were having to drive everywhere to find formula. Its stressing.

Some parents are also using social media to bridge supply gaps.

Ashley Maddox, a 31-year-old mother of two from San Diego, started a Facebook group on Wednesday after failing to find formula for her 5-month-old son, Cole, at the commissary on the Navy base.

Ashley Maddox feeds her 5-month-old son, Cole, with formula she bought through a Facebook group of mothers in need Thursday, May 12, 2022, in Imperial Beach, Calif. "I connected with a gal in my group and she had seven cans of the formula I need that were just sitting in her house that her baby didn't need anymore," she said. "So I drove out, it was about a 20-minute drive and picked it up and paid her. It was a miracle." (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

I connected with a gal in my group and she had seven cans of the formula I need that were just sitting in her house that her baby didnt need anymore, she said. So I drove out, it was about a 20-minute drive and picked it up and paid her. It was a miracle.

She said there was already a stigma attached to being a non-breastfeeding mom and that the group has become supportive. To not be able to have that formula, its scary, she said.

Jennifer Kersey, 36 of Cheshire, Connecticut, said she was down to her last can of formula for her 7-month-old son, Blake Kersey Jr., before someone saw her post on a Facebook group and came by with a few sample cans. She said she and others in the group are helping each other, finding stores that might have the formula in stock and getting it to mothers who need it.

At first I was starting to panic, she said. But, Im a believer in the Lord, so I said, God, I know youre going to provide for me' and I just started reaching out to people, Hey do you have this formula?"

Kimberly Anderson, 34, of Hartford County, Maryland, said her 7 1/2-month-old son takes a prescription formula that has been nearly impossible to find locally. She turned to social media and said people in Utah and Boston found the formula, which she paid to have shipped.

Ashley Maddox feeds her 5-month-old son, Cole, with formula she bought through a Facebook group of mothers in need Thursday, May 12, 2022, in Imperial Beach, Calif. "I connected with a gal in my group and she had seven cans of the formula I need that were just sitting in her house that her baby didn't need anymore," she said. "So I drove out, it was about a 20-minute drive and picked it up and paid her. It was a miracle." (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

They say it takes a village to raise a baby," she said. Little did I know my village spans the entire U.S. as I ping friends, family for their zip codes so I can check their local Walmarts to have them ship directly to me."

Shortages of basic goods have been a problem since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Access to medical supplies, computer chips, household appliances, cars and other goods has been hurt by closed factories and outbreaks of the virus, as well as storms and other climate-related events.

Parents desperately searching for infant formula on retailer websites such as Amazon and Google are being served up with products intended for toddlers, including powdered toddler goat milk and plant-based milk powders.

One banner ad across Amazon offers organic non GMO formula for babies & toddlers, but a closer inspection of the products image shows that it is only intended for children over 12 months. Other ads for toddler milk appear on Amazons website on pages for out-of-stock infant formula.

Toddler milk cans often closely resemble that of infant formula, but the ingredients are distinct, with toddler milks sometimes boasting more sugar, calories, said Frances Fleming-Milici, UConns Director of Marketing Initiatives at the Rudd Center who has study toddler milk packaging. Toddler milk also does not follow FDA standards for formula.

Elizabeth Amador bottle feeds her daughter Destinee, 9 months, at the Ellis R. Shipp Public Health Center Thursday, May 12, 2022, in West Valley City, Utah. President Joe Biden stepped up his administration's response to a nationwide baby formula shortage Thursday, May 12, 2022, that has forced frenzied parents into online groups to swap and sell to each other to keep their babies fed. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

Its not like youre buying a pair of shoes. This is a little bit more serious, Fleming-Milici said. Its serving up something that you should not be giving to your child.

Dr. Navneet Hundal, a pediatric gastroenterologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said she and other pediatricians have been grappling with the formula shortage for months. Formula companies have stopped giving out samples that she could pass on to parents, she said. She advises new parents to talk to their pediatricians to see if there are other brands of formula that they can safely give their newborns.

This is ruling our clinical practices right now, she said.

A safety recall compounded the challenges.

The Food and Drug Administration warned consumers on Feb. 17 to avoid some powdered baby formula products from a Sturgis, Michigan, facility run by Abbott Nutrition, which then initiated a voluntary recall. According to findings released in March by federal safety inspectors, Abbott failed to maintain sanitary conditions and procedures at the plant.

The FDA launched its investigation after four babies became sick with a rare bacterial infection after consuming formula manufactured at the plant. All four were hospitalized and two died. Chicago-based Abbott said in a statement, there is no evidence to link our formulas to these infant illnesses. Samples of the bacteria collected from the infants did not match those found in the companys factory, Abbott noted.

Abbott said that pending FDA approval, we could restart the site within two weeks. The company would begin by first producing EleCare, Alimentum and metabolic formulas and then start production of Similac and other formulas. Once production began, it would take six to eight weeks for the baby formula to be available on shelves.

On Tuesday, the FDA said it was working with U.S. manufacturers to increase their output and streamline paperwork to allow more imports.

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We recognize that this is certainly a challenge for people across the country, something the president is very focused on and were going to do everything we can to cut red tape and take steps to increase supply, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters.

Meanwhile, the shortage got politicized Thursday as Republicans including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott criticized the Biden administration for providing baby formula to babies in detention at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Biden, in a Thursday letter to the Federal Trade Commission, pressed the independent agency to bring all of the Commissions tools to bear to investigate and act in response to reports of fraud or price gouging as a result of the supply disruptions.

It is unacceptable for families to lose time and spend hundreds of dollars more because of price gougers actions, he wrote to FTC Chair Lina Khan.

___

Eaton-Robb reported from Columbia, Connecticut. Associated Press writers Mike Catalini in Trenton, New Jersey, Steve LeBlanc in Boston, Brady McCombs in Salt Lake City and Amanda Seitz in Washington contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON (AP)  The Biden administration is canceling three oil and gas lease sales scheduled in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Alaska, removing millions of acres from possible drilling as U.S. gas prices reach record highs.

President Joe Biden speaks during a visit to Jeff O'Connor's farm in Kankakee, Ill., Wednesday, May 11, 2022. (Tiffany Blanchette/The Daily Journal via AP)

WASHINGTON (AP)  The Biden administration is canceling three oil and gas lease sales scheduled in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Alaska, removing millions of acres from possible drilling as U.S. gas prices reach record highs.

The Interior Department announced the decision Wednesday night, citing a lack of industry interest in drilling off the Alaska coast and conflicting court rulings that have complicated drilling efforts in the Gulf of Mexico, where the bulk of U.S. offshore drilling takes place,

The decision likely means the Biden administration will not hold a lease sale for offshore drilling this year and comes as Interior appears set to let a mandatory five-year plan for offshore drilling expire next month.

Unfortunately, this is becoming a pattern  the administration talks about the need for more supply and acts to restrict it,'' said Frank Macchiarola, senior vice president of the American Petroleum Institute, the top lobbying group for the oil and gas industry.

FILE - Interior Secretary Deb Haaland speaks during a Tribal Nations Summit during Native American Heritage Month, in the South Court Auditorium on the White House campus, on Nov. 15, 2021, in Washington. Haaland on Thursday, May 5, 2022, announced the members of a commission that will craft recommendations on how the federal government can better tackle unsolved cases in which Native Americans and Alaska Natives have gone missing or have been killed. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

"As geopolitical volatility and global energy prices continue to rise, we again urge the administration to end the uncertainty and immediately act on a new five-year program for federal offshore leasing,'' he said.

The lease cancellations come as gas prices have surged to a record $4.40 a gallon amid the war in Ukraine and other disruptions that have pushed prices $1.40 a gallon higher than a year ago. Consumer prices jumped 8.3% last month from a year ago, the government said Wednesday.

A federal appeals court in New Orleans, meanwhile, is considering a challenge to a moratorium on new federal leasing that Biden imposed soon after taking office in January 2021. Biden said the administration needed to consider the effect of new drilling on climate change and conduct proper environmental reviews.

Louisiana and 12 other states challenged Bidens order, saying laws passed in response to the 1970s oil crisis require lease sales on federal lands and waters.

The Biden administration failed to grapple with prior analyses of the planned sales to give a valid reason for postponing or canceling them, Louisiana Deputy Solicitor General Joseph Scott St. John told a 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel this week.

FILE - An oil drilling rig is pictured at sunset, Monday, March 7, 2022, in El Reno, Okla. A federal appeals court in New Orleans hears arguments Tuesday, May 10, 2022, about whether President Joe Biden legally suspended new oil and gas lease sales because of climate change worries. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki, File)

The three-judge panel did not indicate when they will rule.

Environmental groups hailed the latest lease cancellation, saying the administration needs to do more to curb greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels that are driving climate change.

To save imperiled marine life and protect coastal communities and our climate from pollution, we need to end new leasing and phase out existing drilling, said Kristen Monsell, oceans legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group.

Republicans denounced the decision as harmful to consumers and U.S. national security.

The Interior Department's decision approaches levels of irresponsibility and reckless stupidity never seen before,'' said Rep. Garret Graves, R-La. We are paying record prices for gasoline and to heat and cool our homes. Rather than using American energy sources to help solve the problem and lower prices, the Biden administration continues to carry out policies that benefit'' Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and other countries, Graves said.

FILE - Gas prices are displayed at a BP gas station in Elgin, Ill., on March 19, 2022. Just as Americans gear up for summer road trips, the price of oil remains stubbornly high, pushing prices at the gas pump to painful heights. AAA said Tuesday, May 10, 2022, drivers are paying $4.37 for a gallon of regular gasoline. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh, File)

New leasing will not lower current gas prices,'' countered Dustin Renaud, a spokesman for the environmental coalition Healthy Gulf. It takes several years for new leases to begin producing oil, he noted, adding that the industry "is already sitting on over 8 million acres of unused offshore leases.''

The state challenge to Bidens leasing order has not yet gone to trial, but a federal judge blocked the order in a preliminary injunction last year, writing that since federal law does not state the president can suspend oil lease sales, only Congress can do so.

After U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty ruled for the states, the Interior Department held an offshore lease sale last fall, which a federal judge in Washington, D.C. later blocked.

The administration has appealed Doughty's ruling, but has scheduled onshore lease sales next month in eight mostly Western states. However, the administration scaled back the amount of land offered for drilling and raised royalty rates by 50%.

Biden has come under pressure to increase U.S. crude production as fuel prices spike because of the coronavirus pandemic and the war in Ukraine. The United States and other nations have banned imports of Russian oil, driving up prices worldwide.

Biden also faces pressure from Democrats and environmental groups urging him to do more to combat climate change, even as his legislative proposals on climate and clean energy remain stalled in a sharply divided Congress.

Interior cannot conduct new offshore oil and gas lease sales until it has completed a required five-year plan. The current plan expires June 30, and administration officials have not said when or if a replacement will be released.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said last month that the oil and gas industry is set with the amount of drilling permits at its disposal. She defended Biden administration actions to scale down federal leasing, saying that industry has about 9,000 permits that have been approved but are not being used.

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"The industry is free to use these permits in a way they see fit. They just havent acted on those, Haaland told a House committee last week.

Oil companies say they have increased production as the economy recovers from the coronavirus pandemic, but they have been reluctant to ramp up production further, citing a shortage of workers and restraints from investors wary that todays high prices wont last. Decisions by the OPEC+ oil cartel, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, to only modestly increase supplies to the world market have also kept prices high.

Major oil companies reported surging profits in the first quarter and are sending tens of billions of dollars in dividends to shareholders, along with stock buybacks that have sharply increased the value of investor holdings.

Democrats accuse the industry of price gouging and have vowed to bring legislation cracking down on price manipulation to votes in the House and Senate. A bid to impose a windfall profits tax on oil producers has generated little support in Congress.

___

Associated Press writer Janet McConnaughey in New Orleans contributed to this report.
Freeman High Schools seniors will gather to commemorate their graduation at a ceremony on Saturday, May 14.

The 4 p.m. event, to be held in the North Gym, will feature speeches from the class valedictorian Grace VanEngen and salutatorian Brian Connelly, a special senior video and a presentation of diplomas.

High School Principal Jeremy Schroeder said the 22-person class grew together over their time in high school, especially during the challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Theyre a small group, and theyre tightly knit, Schroeder said. Just a good, positive group of kids.

Senior Talisa Buhr, who is unsure of what she wants to study when she goes to Concordia University, said shell cherish the relationships she built at Freeman for the rest of her life.

I went to kindergarten with a lot of my classmates, she said. We grew up together.

Senior Kailey Otto said, coming from a Lincoln context, she enjoyed Freemans smaller class size.

I came here as a freshman from a Lincoln school, Otto said. It was hard to get use to the smaller size, but I really learned to like it. I know everyone in the class, and were all pretty close. In bigger schools, you just have your group of friends.

Otto is going to the University of South Dakota to major in medical biology. She said she wants to become a physicians assistant.

Ive wanted to be a doctor, she said, but the physicians assistant role seemed more personal, one-on-one with patients, and thats more of what I wanted.

Senior Curtis Krause will head to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to study mechanical engineering. He said hes grateful for always feeling pushed onward by his classmates.

We challenged each other and made each other better, Krause said.

Connelly said he learned a lot interpersonally from his time at Freeman. He was home-schooled for most of his early life and said Freeman taught him about working and being present with others.

Connelly, eager to be done with school, is heading straight into the workforce.

Im going down to Kentucky to work river barges, Connelly said. Its good hard work.

The graduating class includes Ian Alberts, Nathan Archer, Talisa Buhr, Tandon Buhr, Brian Connelly, Preston Huls, Nathan Hundley, Jenna Husband, Noah Jurgens, Curtis Krause, Grace Ketelsen, Haden Otto, Kailey Otto, Cole Parde, Alexander Podtburg, Zachary Robeson, Meredith Ruyle, Macy Schiebur, Jace Schroeder, Jaret Schroeder, Grace Vandegrind and Grace VanEngen.

The class motto is One step at a time, but always forward. Class colors are white and carolina blue, and the class flower is the white carnation.

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JUNEAU, Alaska (AP)  ConocoPhillips Alaska has attributed the release of natural gas at one of its North Slope drill sites earlier this year to a broken barrier during construction of a waste disposal well, when pressure limits were exceeded during freeze protection operations.

JUNEAU, Alaska (AP)  ConocoPhillips Alaska has attributed the release of natural gas at one of its North Slope drill sites earlier this year to a broken barrier during construction of a waste disposal well, when pressure limits were exceeded during freeze protection operations.

The company describes what occurred as a unique event, with nothing similar ever occurring at a ConocoPhillips Alaska site.

An investigation into the matter by the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which oversees oil and gas drilling in the state, continues, said Samantha Carlisle, a special assistant with the agency.

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Because the investigation will be thorough and comprehensive," the commission does not have a projected timeline for when the probe will be completed, she said by email.

ConocoPhillips Alaska last month said a shallow gas reservoir that the disposal well had come in contact with was the source of the gas release. The disposal well was intended to be used for the regulated disposal of oil field waste, according to a video released by the company, which noted the company had started drilling operations on the well in late January.

The gas release was first detected on March 4. The company, in a statement this week, said that by March 8, it had secured the location, determined the most probable gas source, and established a controlled flow path for the gas into its central facility at the Alpine development. The flow of gas from the source was stopped as of March 29, it said.

The waste disposal well has been cemented to the surface, the company said.

ConocoPhillips Alaska said no gas had been detected beyond the CD1 pad, no recordable injuries were reported, no damage to the tundra was observed and no wildlife impacts were reported.

The company says it will incorporate findings from its investigation into future projects.
BRUSSELS (AP)  The European Commission proposed helping Ukraine export its wheat and other grains by rail, road and river to get around a Russian blockade of Black Sea ports, which is preventing those critical supplies from reaching parts of the world at risk of food insecurity.

A train driver looks out of his locomotive at the arriving of a Ukrainian freight train with fodder maize, in Vienna, Austria, Friday, May 6, 2022. (AP Photo/Theresa Wey)

BRUSSELS (AP)  The European Commission proposed helping Ukraine export its wheat and other grains by rail, road and river to get around a Russian blockade of Black Sea ports, which is preventing those critical supplies from reaching parts of the world at risk of food insecurity.

The European Unions executive arm said the plan aims to establish alternative routes and ease congestion between borders that also should facilitate getting humanitarian aid and other goods into the war-torn country.

Russias invasion of Ukraine has provoked disruptions of global food supplies, with both countries two of the worlds biggest exporters of wheat, barley and sunflower oil. The blockade of Ukrainian ports has been particularly harmful, having accounted for 90% of grain and oilseed exports before the war, the commission said.

Twenty million tons of grains have to leave Ukraine in less than three months using the EU infrastructure, said Adina Valean, EU commissioner for transport. This is a gigantesque challenge, so it is essential to coordinate and optimize the logistic chains, put in place new routes, and avoid, as much as possible, the bottlenecks.

FILE - Servicemen of Donetsk People's Republic Emergency Ministry work to defuse a Ukrainian mine in an area of the Mariupol Sea Port in Mariupol, in territory under the government of the Donetsk People's Republic, eastern Ukraine, on April 29, 2022. This photo was taken during a trip organized by the Russian Ministry of Defense. The European Commission is proposing to help Ukraine move its critical grain supplies to parts of the world at risk of food insecurity. The plan released Thursday, May 12, 2022, by the European Unions executive arm urges rail, road and river routes to get around a Russian blockade of Black Sea ports. (AP Photo)

The potential loss of affordable grain supplies that Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia rely on has raised the risk of global food shortages and political instability in countries where many people already were not getting enough to eat. The disruptions from the war have further raised food prices, with the high cost of fertilizers  of which Russia is a top exporter  and cooking oils further squeezing the global food chain.

The head of the European Investment Bank said this week that Ukraine is sitting on 8 billion euros worth of wheat it cant export.

In addition to the port blockade, Ukraines Foreign Ministry has accused Russia of stealing grain and trying to sell some on global markets. It cited official estimates indicating that Russia already may have stolen 400,000 to 500,000 metric tons of grain that cost over $100 million. It asserted that practically all ships leaving Sevastopol with a load of grain are carrying the grain stolen from Ukraine, referring to a major port on the Black Sea.

To get Ukraine's food supplies to the world, Europe is looking to increase shipments by railroads and trucks. Trains have started carrying loads of grain to Austria and Germany via other EU countries but amount to only a fraction of the Black Sea port capacity.

A key challenge is the diverging rail gauge widths between Ukraine and EU countries. Since Ukrainian railroad cars dont fit with most of the EU network, goods need to be transferred to trucks or other rail cars adapted to the system.

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The EU says the average wait time for the thousands of rail cars at Ukraines border with the 27-nation bloc is 16 days, reaching up to 30 days in some places.

To address this congestion, the commission said the most urgent priority is to ensure additional transport vehicles are available to get the grain to EU ports. It said grain-hopper trailers, cargo containers, and barges and vessels are urgently needed.

With nonmilitary flights grounded in Ukraine, the commission said the new supply routes should be organized mainly via land and river transport, using for instance Ukraine's ports on the Danube River.

The commission urged member nations to accelerate procedures at border crossing points and increase capacity on EU soil for the temporary storage of Ukrainian exports.

In the medium to long term, the commission will also work on increasing the infrastructure capacity of new export corridors and on establishing new infrastructure connections," it said.

The commissions proposals are nonbinding and mostly intend to facilitate coordination between EU countries, transport operators and equipment suppliers.
Exchange Income Corp. is in the business of buying companies with great management, at good prices that generate enough cash to allow EIC it to continue to pay dividends to its shareholders.

Exchange Income Corp. is in the business of buying companies with great management, at good prices that generate enough cash to allow EIC it to continue to pay dividends to its shareholders.

The company just completed its highest revenue quarter ever and this week closed its largest acquisition, paying $325 million for a Calgary company called Northern Mat & Bridge.

With travellers getting back on planes  EIC owns a half dozen regional airlines and helicopter companies including Perimeter Aviation, Calm Air and search and rescue specialists Provincial Aerospace Ltd. out of Newfoundland  and other of its larger businesses ramping up as well, the company increased its dividend for the 15th time since EIC was founded in 2004.

"EIC is raising its dividend again," said CEO Mike Pyle. "That means the pandemic is officially over."

As if timed to celebrate that success  emphasized by a 10 per cent jump in its share price to $42.76 after the release of first quarter results on Wednesday  it also announced it is tripling the size of Perimeter Aviations passenger terminal located at the end of Ellice Avenue.

The $7 million expansion, which will provide more comfortable waiting areas including special space for elders and a play area for children will be called the Gary Filmon Indigenous Terminal, in honour of EICs chairman who retired at the close of Wednesdays annual meeting, his 18th as the companys original and only chairman.

Filmon, a former premier of Manitoba who turns 80 later this year, said he was very honoured the terminal will be named after him.

"I am overwhelmed," he said. "I had no idea that was in the plans."

Pyle credits Filmon for instilling into EICs DNA the will "to do the right thing" not because it is politically correct, but "because it is the right thing to do".

The company is currently in the process of launching an all-expense paid pilot training program for Northern Indigenous people to provide opportunities that may not have been available in the past and to further enhance its relationship with First Nations communities that its airlines service.

Pyle said the $1 million per year investment in that initiative is a way to illustrate reconciliation, rather than just talking about it.

Filmon said he is proud of the manner in which the corporation conducts itself relative to its relationship with First Nation communities.

"We have invested in building the relationship," Filmon said. "They are a huge customer base for us, but they are much more than that to us. It is an important relationship we must have."

In addition to the new terminal building for Perimeter, EIC is finishing construction on a $13 million maintenance hangar on the site of the old Western Canada Aviation Museum. Calm Air will move its maintenance operations into that building and Provincial Aerospace Ltd., which won a 20-year contract to provide all the maintenance on the Government of Canadas new fleet of Airbus C295W fixed wing search and rescue aircraft, will move into Calm Airs current hangar.

While environment, social and governance values are clearly important to the company, it is its discipline at uncovering sustainable business with strong management in unique niches at a good price that has built its success.

"They dont have to be sexy," Pyle said referring to the collection of 18 companies it now owns across Canada and the U.S. "Flying to Shamattawa is not sexy. A wood mat road is not sexy. Most of the things we do  not sexy. We want sustainable real business with exceptional management teams."

Northern Mat & Bridge has more than 300 employees and two manufacturing facilities in British Columbia near forestry operations. It builds temporary roads and bridges for resource industries like power transmission, pipeline, oil & gas, renewable energy and general construction industries.

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The company is now the leader in the country and has recently significantly broaden its customer base from the oil and gas industry across the country including a big contract with Hydro One in Ontario.

Pyle said an institutional investor told him that those who do not understand the Northern Mat & Bridge acquisition, do not like the EIC model.

Cameron Doerksen, an analyst with National Bank of Canada Financial Markets, is not one of those.

In a note to National Bank customers on Wednesday where he increased his target price on EIC shares from $51.00 to $59.00, Doerksen said he likes the acquisition for several reasons including the fact it will be accretive to earnings.

"It also boosts EICs sustainability credentials," Doerksen said. "The use of temporary timber mats helps minimize the impact to the environment from construction avoiding the building of gravel roads and culverts that are difficult to remediate once construction is completed. As customers and governments increasingly require a lower environmental impact for remote construction, sustainability should act as a growth tailwind for the business in the coming years."

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca
HELSINKI (AP)  Finlands leaders said Thursday theyre in favor of rapidly applying for NATO membership, paving the way for a historic expansion of the alliance that could deal a serious blow to Russia as its military struggles with its war in Ukraine.

Finland's President Sauli Niinisto makes a point during a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki, Finland, Wednesday, May 11, 2022. Britain has signed a security assurance with Sweden which like its neighbor Finland is pondering whether to join NATO following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, pledging to "bolster military ties" in the event of a crisis and support both countries should they come under attack. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, Pool)

HELSINKI (AP)  Finlands leaders said Thursday theyre in favor of rapidly applying for NATO membership, paving the way for a historic expansion of the alliance that could deal a serious blow to Russia as its military struggles with its war in Ukraine.

The dramatic move by Finland was announced by President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin. It means that Finland is all but certain to join NATO, though a few steps remain before the application process can begin. Neighboring Sweden is expected to decide on joining NATO in coming days.

NATO membership would strengthen Finlands security. As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defence alliance, Niinisto and Marin said in a joint statement. Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay. We hope that the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days.

The Kremlin reacted to the development a few hours later, saying that Finlands move to join NATO wont help stability and security in Europe. Finland shares a 1,340-kilometer (830-mile) land border with Russia.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia's response to the move would depend on what specific steps NATO will take to bring its infrastructure close to Russian borders. He noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin already had ordered to work out steps to strengthen the countrys defenses in the west in response to NATOs expansion closer to Russian territory.

Previously, the Kremlin had warned of military and political repercussions if Sweden and Finland decide to join NATO. Should they apply, there will be an interim period lasting from when an application has been handed in until all 30 NATO members parliaments have ratified it.

In NATO member Estonia, which also borders Russia, Prime Minister Kaja Kallas tweeted that history being made by our northern neighbors. She pledged to support a rapid accession process for Finland into NATO.

Finland's announcement came a day after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited both Finland and Sweden to sign a military cooperation agreement.

Finland's Prime Minister Sanna Marin attends a signing ceremony at Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida official residence in Tokyo, Wednesday, May 11, 2022. (Franck Robichon/Pool Photo via AP)

The U.K. pledged on Wednesday to come to the aid of Sweden and Finland if the two Nordic nations came under attack.

During a joint news conference with Johnson and Niinisto in Helsinki, the Finnish head of state said Moscow could only blame itself should his nation of 5.5 million people become a NATO member.

You (Russia) caused this. Look at the mirror, Niinisto said pointedly Wednesday.

On Thursday, Niinisto tweeted that he spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about Finland's firm support for Ukraine and the country's intention to join NATO. Niinisto said that Zelenskyy expressed his full support for it."

In 2017, Sweden and Finland joined the British-led Joint Expeditionary Force, which is designed to be more flexible and respond more quickly than the larger NATO alliance. It uses NATO standards and doctrine, so it can operate in conjunction with NATO, the United Nations or other multinational coalitions. Fully operational since 2018, the force has held a number of exercises both independently and in cooperation with NATO.

Since Russias invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, Finland and Sweden have been pondering whether to abandon their historic, decades-old neutrality and join the 30-member NATO. After Moscow launched its attack on Ukraine, public support in the two countries started to quickly shift toward membership in NATO, first in Finland and a bit later in Sweden.

The latest opinion poll conducted by Finnish public broadcaster YLE showed earlier this week that 76% of Finns are in favor of joining NATO, a big change from earlier years when only 20-30% of respondents favored such military alignment.

Speaking to European Union lawmakers Thursday as Niinisto's and Marin's announcement was made, Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said that the war started by Russia jeopardizes the security and stability of the whole of Europe.

Haavisto said that Russias unpredictable behavior is a serious concern for Finland, notably Moscows readiness to wage high-risk operations that could lead to many casualties, including among Russians themselves.

Should Finland become a NATO member, it would mean the biggest change in the Nordic countrys defense and security policy since World War II when it fought two lost wars against the Soviet Union. Along with Sweden, Finland joined the European Union in 1995 and has the longest border with Russia out of all the bloc's 27 members.

Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde tweeted that Finlands announcement gave an important message and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said that there were strong messages" from Finland's president and prime minister.

During the Cold War, Finland stayed away from NATO to avoid provoking the Soviet Union, instead opting to remain a neutral buffer between the East and the West while maintaining good relations with Moscow and also with the United States.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said the military alliance would welcome Finland and Sweden  both of which have strong, modern militaries  with open arms and expects the accession process to be speedy and smooth.

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NATO officials say the Nordic duo's accession process could be done in a couple of weeks. The most time consuming part of the procedure  ratification of the countrys protocol by the 30 NATO member countries  could even be completed in less time than the four months or so that it took West Germany, Turkey and Greece to join in the 1950s, when there were only 12 members to ratify their applications.

These are not normal times, one NATO official said this week, discussing the possible applications of Finland and Sweden. The official was briefing reporters about the accession process on condition that he not be named as no application has been made by the two countries.

___

Lorne Cook in Brussels, and Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, contributed to this report.

___

Follow the APs coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
FORT WORTH, Texas (AP)  Jurors in a civil lawsuit decided Wednesday that American Airlines did not bear responsibility for an alleged sexual assault against a flight attendant by a celebrity chef who was hired by the airline as an independent contractor.

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP)  Jurors in a civil lawsuit decided Wednesday that American Airlines did not bear responsibility for an alleged sexual assault against a flight attendant by a celebrity chef who was hired by the airline as an independent contractor.

The jury in state court in Fort Worth deliberated for parts of three days before concluding that a sexual assault occurred during a company trip to Germany in 2018, but that American was not involved.

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The chef, Mark Sargeant, has never been charged with a crime. He reached a confidential settlement with the flight attendant, Kimberly Goesling, according to Robert Miller, one of her lawyers.

The Associated Press does not typically name victims of sexual assault but is doing so in this case because Goesling has spoken openly to the news media about her case and issues of sexual harassment at American.

Goesling, who later retired after 30 years with Fort Worth, Texas-based American, sought $25.6 million in damages from the airline during the trial, which lasted more than two weeks.

American Airlines spokeswoman Lindsey Martin said, The jurys decision confirms that American does not tolerate inappropriate sexual conduct of any kind.

Miller said he will appeal the verdict. He said the judge excluded evidence about unwanted advances by Sargeant toward other female American Airlines employees before the alleged assault against Goesling.

Sargeant did not appear at the trial, although jurors saw a video deposition. Last year he told a news organization in the United Kingdom that while intoxicated he went to Goesling's hotel room in the mistaken belief that she was interested in him, but he denied sexually assaulting her.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  North Korea imposed a nationwide lockdown Thursday to control its first acknowledged COVID-19 outbreak after holding for more than two years to a widely doubted claim of a perfect record keeping out the virus that has spread to nearly every place in the world.

FILE- An official of the Hygienic and Anti-epidemic Center in Phyongchon District disinfect the corridor of a building in Pyongyang, North Korea, on Feb. 5, 2021. The Korean Central News Agency said Thursday, May 12, 2022, tests from an unspecified number of people in the capital Pyongyang confirmed that they were infected with the omicron variant. (AP Photo/Jon Chol Jin, File)

SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  North Korea imposed a nationwide lockdown Thursday to control its first acknowledged COVID-19 outbreak after holding for more than two years to a widely doubted claim of a perfect record keeping out the virus that has spread to nearly every place in the world.

The outbreak forced leader Kim Jong Un to wear a mask in public, likely for the first time since the start of the pandemic, but the scale of transmissions inside North Korea wasn't immediately known.

A failure to slow infections could have serious consequences because the country has a poor health care system and its 26 million people are believed to be mostly unvaccinated. Some experts say North Korea, by its rare admission of an outbreak, may be seeking outside aid.

However, hours after North Korea confirmed the outbreak, South Koreas military said it detected the North had fired three suspected ballistic missiles toward the sea. It was its 16th round of missile launches this year  brinkmanship aimed at forcing the United States to accept North Korea as a nuclear power and negotiate sanctions relief and other concessions from a position of strength.

The official Korean Central News Agency said tests of virus samples collected Sunday from an unspecified number of people with fevers in the capital, Pyongyang, confirmed they were infected with the omicron variant.

FILE - This undated photo provided on April 17, 2022, by the North Korean government shows Kim Jong Un at an undisclosed location in North Korea. The Korean Central News Agency said Thursday, May 12, 2022, tests from an unspecified number of people in the capital Pyongyang confirmed that they were infected with the omicron variant. Independent journalists were not given access to cover the event depicted in this image distributed by the North Korean government. The content of this image is as provided and cannot be independently verified. Korean language watermark on image as provided by source reads: "KCNA" which is the abbreviation for Korean Central News Agency. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP, File)

In response, Kim called at a ruling party Politburo meeting for a thorough lockdown of cities and counties and said workplaces should be isolated by units to block the virus from spreading. He urged health workers to step up disinfection efforts at workplaces and homes and mobilize reserve medical supplies.

Kim said it was crucial to control transmissions and eliminate the infection source as fast as possible, while also easing inconveniences to the public caused by the virus controls. He insisted the country will overcome the outbreak because its government and people are united as one.

Despite the elevated virus response, Kim ordered officials to push ahead with scheduled construction, agricultural development and other state projects while bolstering the countrys defense posture to avoid any security vacuum.

In this photo provided by the North Korean government, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, center, attends a meeting of the Central Committee of the ruling Workers' Party in Pyongyang, North Korea Thursday, May 12, 2022. Independent journalists were not given access to cover the event depicted in this image distributed by the North Korean government. The content of this image is as provided and cannot be independently verified. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP)

North Koreas state TV showed Kim and other senior officials wearing masks as they entered a meeting room, although Kim removed his mask to speak into a set of microphones. Still photos distributed by KNCA showed Kim unmasked and sitting at the head of a table where all other officials remained masked.

South Koreas Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korean affairs, couldn't immediately confirm whether it was the first time state media showed Kim wearing a mask since the start of the pandemic. Kim has previously spoken to huge crowds without a mask as he praised the country's earlier pandemic response, and his decision to be seen with a mask could be aimed at raising public vigilance.

North Korea, which has maintained strict anti-virus controls at its borders for more than two years, didnt provide further details about its new lockdown. But an Associated Press photographer on the South Korean side of the border saw dozens of people working in fields or walking on footpaths at a North Korean border town  an indication the lockdown doesn't require people to stay home, or it exempts farm work.

FILE - A schoolgirl wearing face mask, disinfects her hands before entering the Kumsong Secondary School No. 2 in the morning in Pyongyang, North Korea, on Nov. 3, 2021. North Korea announced its first coronavirus infection more than two years into the pandemic Thursday, May 12, 2022 as leader Kim Jong Un called for raising COVID-19 preventive measures to maximum levels. (AP Photo/Cha Song Ho, File)

The measures described in state media and Kims declaration that economic goals should still be met could indicate that North Korea is focusing more on restricting travel and supplies between regions, analyst Cheong Seong-Chang at South Koreas Sejong Institute said.

North Koreas government has shunned vaccines offered by the U.N.-backed COVAX distribution program, possibly because they have international monitoring requirements.

Seoul's Unification Ministry said South Korea is willing to provide medical assistance and other help to North Korea based on humanitarian considerations. Relations between the Koreas have deteriorated since 2019 amid a stalemate in nuclear negotiations and the North's increasingly provocative weapons tests.

Visitors use binoculars to see the North Korean side from the unification observatory in Paju, South Korea, Thursday, May 12, 2022. North Korea imposed a nationwide lockdown Thursday to control its first acknowledged COVID-19 outbreak after holding for more than two years to a widely doubted claim of a perfect record keeping out the virus that has spread to nearly every place in the world. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)

In Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Beijing is offering North Korea help in dealing with the outbreak. North Korea has reportedly rejected previous Chinese offers of domestically developed vaccines.

Kim Sin-gon, a professor at Seouls Korea University College of Medicine, said North Korea is likely signaling its willingness to receive outside vaccines, but wants many more doses than offered by COVAX to inoculate its entire population multiple times. He said North Korea would also want COVID-19 medicines and medical equipment shipments that are banned by U.N. sanctions.

Omicron spreads much more easily than earlier variants of the coronavirus, and its fatality and hospitalization rates are high among unvaccinated older people or those with existing health problems. That means the outbreak could cause a serious situation because North Korea lacks medical equipment and medicine to treat virus patients and many of its people are not well-nourished, Kim Sin-gon said.

A bottle of hand sanitizer is placed as visitors use binoculars to see the North Korean side from the unification observatory in Paju, South Korea, Thursday, May 12, 2022. North Korea imposed a nationwide lockdown Thursday to control its first acknowledged COVID-19 outbreak after holding for more than two years to a widely doubted claim of a perfect record keeping out the virus that has spread to nearly every place in the world. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)

Ahn Kyung-su, head of DPRKHEALTH.ORG, a website focusing on health issues in North Korea, said North Koreas admission of the outbreak is likely designed to press its people harder to guard against the virus as China, which shares a long, porous border with the North, has placed many of its cities under lockdown over virus concerns.

North Korea will also likely stress lockdowns, although the experience of Chinas zero-COVID policy suggests that approach doesnt work against the fast-moving omicron variant, said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor of international studies at Seouls Ewha Womans University.

For Pyongyang to publicly admit omicron cases, the public health situation must be serious, Easley said.

In this photo provided by the North Korean government, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, center, attends a meeting of the Central Committee of the ruling Workers' Party in Pyongyang, North Korea Thursday, May 12, 2022. Independent journalists were not given access to cover the event depicted in this image distributed by the North Korean government. The content of this image is as provided and cannot be independently verified. Korean language watermark on image as provided by source reads: "KCNA" which is the abbreviation for Korean Central News Agency. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP)

North Koreas previous coronavirus-free claim had been disputed by many foreign experts. But South Korean officials have said North Korea had likely avoided a huge outbreak, in part because it instituted strict virus controls almost from the start of the pandemic.

Early in 2020  before the coronavirus spread around the world  North Korea took severe steps to keep out the virus and described them as a matter of national existence." It all but halted cross-border traffic and trade for two years, and is believed to have ordered troops to shoot on sight any trespassers who crossed its borders.

The extreme border closures further shocked an economy already damaged by decades of mismanagement and U.S.-led sanctions over its nuclear weapons and missile program, pushing Kim to perhaps the toughest moment of his rule since he took power in 2011.

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In this photo provided by the North Korean government, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, center, attends a meeting of the Central Committee of the ruling Workers' Party in Pyongyang, North Korea Thursday, May 12, 2022. Independent journalists were not given access to cover the event depicted in this image distributed by the North Korean government. The content of this image is as provided and cannot be independently verified. Korean language watermark on image as provided by source reads: "KCNA" which is the abbreviation for Korean Central News Agency. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP)

North Korea had been one of the last places in the world without an acknowledged COVID-19 case after the virus first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019 spread to every continent including Antarctica. Turkmenistan, a similarly secretive and authoritarian nation in Central Asia, has reported no cases to the World Health Organization, though its claim also is widely doubted by outside experts.

In recent months, some Pacific island nations that kept the virus out by their geographic isolation have recorded outbreaks. Only tiny Tuvalu, with a population around 12,000, has escaped the virus so far, while a few other nations  Nauru, Micronesia and Marshall Islands  have stopped cases at their borders and avoided community outbreaks.

North Korea's outbreak comes as China  its close ally and trading partner  battles its biggest outbreak of the pandemic.

In January, North Korea tentatively reopened railroad freight traffic between its border town of Sinuiju and Chinas Dandong for the first time in two years, but China halted the trade last month due to an outbreak in Liaoning province, which borders North Korea.

___

Associated Press journalists Lee Jin-man in Paju, South Korea, Ken Moritsugu in Beijing and Nick Perry in Wellington, New Zealand, contributed to this report.
MONTREAL - Quebecor Inc. is mulling a move into the wireless market outside Quebec, with CEO Pierre Karl Peladeau saying Shaw Communications Inc.'s wireless business offers one potential avenue.

Quebecor president and CEO Pierre Karl Peladeau addresses the media company's annual meeting in Montreal on Thursday, May 9, 2019. Quebecor Inc. reported its first-quarter profit edged higher compared with a year ago. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson

MONTREAL - Quebecor Inc. is mulling a move into the wireless market outside Quebec, with CEO Pierre Karl Peladeau saying Shaw Communications Inc.'s wireless business offers one potential avenue.

In a release Thursday, he said the ground is ripe for growth beyond the telecom's traditional stomping grounds. The Competition Bureau's opposition to Rogers Communication's Inc.'s $26-billion bid to acquire Shaw and remarks from the federal Industry Department, "allow us to look with increasing favour on the expansion of our wireless business," Peladeau stated.

He cited the prospect of either acquiring Shaws Freedom Mobile if Rogers is compelled to divest it, or launching a telecom offering in provinces where Quebecor has built up the spectrum licences needed to transmit wireless signals.

"We believe that these alternatives position us very favourably, as governmental and administrative authorities, including the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, pursue the public policy of establishing the conditions for true competition in wireless services in Canada," Peladeau said in comments accompanying the Montreal-based firm's first-quarter results.

Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne has said a full takeover of Shaw by Rogers would be "fundamentally incompatible" with the policies of the Trudeau government.

The CRTC has also issued a decision that allows regional operators to lease access to the networks of major Canadian telecommunications companies, provided they have local frequency spectrum themselves. The regulatory conditions surrounding this decision are still pending.

The opportunities are many and the alternatives promising," Peladeau said.

Several times in recent years, Peladeau has said Quebecor was considering an incursion into other provinces. The company says it views the Quebec market as quite mature and that the rest of Canada, where competition is weaker, would offer lucrative opportunities.

Questioned on the subject Thursday, the CEO confirmed that his statements indicate greater determination to extend Quebecor's scope. But he reiterated Quebecor could do so with or without Freedom Mobile under its roof.

The answer is simple: yes, Quebecor is able to start its wireless activity outside of Quebec due to the acquisition of licenses during the auctions that took place last year," he told analysts on a conference call.

In 2021, the company acquired 294 blocks of spectrum in the 3500 MHz band for $830 million. More than half of the investment is concentrated in four Canadian provinces: Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta and British Columbia.

Telus Corp. and BCE Inc., however, asked the Federal Court last summer to block Quebecor's purchase of 5G spectrum in Western Canada, stating the company didn't meet the requirements to bid on airwaves there.

The market frowned following Peladeau's statements, with Quebecor shares falling more than six per cent or $1.69 to $26.42 in midafternoon trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

However, Jerome Dubreuil of Desjardins Capital Markets said investors have no reason to fear the breakout gambit. We continue to believe that the stock is attractively priced as the market is overestimating the risk related to a potential out-of-Quebec expansion," he said in a note.

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On Thursday Quebecor reported its first-quarter profit edged higher compared with a year ago.

The company said its net income attributable to shareholders totalled $121.4 million or 51 cents per share for the quarter ended March 31 compared with a profit of $121.3 million or 49 cents per share a year earlier.

Revenue for the quarter totalled $1.09 billion, down from $1.09 billion in the first three months of 2021.

Quebecor said its adjusted income from continuing operations amounted to 54 cents per share, up from 52 cents per share in the same quarter last year.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 12, 2022.

Companies in this story: (TSX:QBR.B, TSX:RCI.B, TSX:SJR.B, TSX:T, TSX:BCE)
JOHANNESBURG (AP)  The first factory to produce COVID-19 vaccines in Africa says it has not received enough orders and may stop production within weeks, in what a senior World Health Organization official described Thursday as a failure in efforts to achieve vaccine equity.

FILE - Vials of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine move along a conveyor belt at ASPEN Pharmaceuticals in Port Elizabeth, South Africa March 29, 2021. The first factory to produce COVID-19 vaccines in Africa has announced on Thursday, May 12, 2022 that it has not received adequate orders and is planning to stop production within a few weeks, in what a senior World Health Organization official described as a "failure" in efforts to achieve vaccine equity. (AP Photo/File)

JOHANNESBURG (AP)  The first factory to produce COVID-19 vaccines in Africa says it has not received enough orders and may stop production within weeks, in what a senior World Health Organization official described Thursday as a failure in efforts to achieve vaccine equity.

South Africa's Aspen Pharmacare said that it cannot let its large-scale sterile manufacturing facilities sit idle, and will return instead to making anesthetics. At the outset of the COVID pandemic, the company shifted its production and achieved capacity to produce more than 200 million doses annually of the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

"It was widely hailed as a great achievement for Africa, a game-changer for the continent. But it has not been followed up with orders. We have not received any orders from the big multilateral agencies," Stavros Nicolaou, senior executive for strategic trade development at Aspen Pharmacare, told The Associated Press Thursday.

"COVAX has placed orders for 2.1 billion doses of COVID vaccines and not a single one has been placed with Aspen or any other African manufacturers, said Nicolaou, referring to the U.N.-backed effort to distribute coronavirus vaccines to poorer countries.

It's a cardinal sin to have valuable sterile manufacturing capacity and not put it to use," said Nicolaou. "We cannot leave this production capacity idle. We will have to repivot from vaccine manufacturing and return to producing anesthetics unless in the short term we get firm orders for our COVID-19 vaccine.

Nicolaou said the lack of orders is not great for Africa's ambition to reduce its dependence on imported vaccines from 99% to 40%. If we fail at this first step, this is bad not just for Aspen but for all others aspiring to make vaccines in Africa.

At a press briefing on Thursday, Dr. Abdou Salam Gueye, the WHO's emergencies chief in Africa said: it may be a failure but we will learn from it. He added that if orders were to ramp up, the factory could likely be restarted relatively quickly.

It is unfortunate that this plant did not receive enough orders, he said, saying that Africa got two-thirds of its vaccines via COVAX and that those vaccines were ordered by vaccines alliance Gavi.

In a statement, Gavi said Aspen was an active part of J&Js manufacturing network and that the vaccines alliance was extremely enthusiastic about buying COVID shots made in Africa.

But it said when J&J fulfilled its COVAX order, those shots came from outside the continent.

COVAX is still under contract with J&J and we would be very happy for any doses that we are still expecting to be supplied by Aspen, Gavi said. We have communicated this to J&J. However, again this is solely a decision that rests with J&J.

J&J did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Health officials have repeatedly decried the concentration of vaccine production in rich countries, saying the lack of manufacturing capacity in poorer countries was among several factors that put them at the back of the line when COVID-19 vaccines were initially made last year.

Some experts said Aspen's imminent closure should change the world's approach to health security.

The global community spends billions of dollars to shore up military defenses that might never get used, but refuses to spend a fraction of that to support global health defense, said Zain Rizvi, research director at the advocacy group, Public Citizen.

He said global purchasers like COVAX should support manufacturers in poorer countries and described globally distributed vaccine manufacturing as our protection against this virus.

Francois Venter of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg said the cheap rhetoric from politicians and drugmakers about helping Africa make its own vaccines had clearly not translated into orders.

Africans have been totally failed by the global community, their governments, and agencies, he lamented, noting that as rich countries roll out their fourth doses, most Africans havent even had one.

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The production of locally-made shots at Aspen's factory was heralded as a first step toward Africa's efforts to meet its own vaccine needs  but there was significant criticism after reports emerged last year that the majority of its shots were being exported to Europe, according to its deal with J&J.

While nearly 70% of people in rich countries have been immunized against the coronavirus, just 17% of Africa's 1.3 billion people have been vaccinated, according to statistics issued by the Africa CDC on Thursday. In South Africa, 45% of adults are fully vaccinated, although about 85% of the population is thought to have some immunity based on past exposure to the virus.

____

Cheng reported from London.

___

Follow APs coverage of the pandemic at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic
PORTLAND, Maine (AP)  America's commercial fishing industry fell 10% in catch volume and 15% in value during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, federal regulators said Thursday.

FILE  Scott Beede returns an undersized lobster while checking traps off Mount Desert, Maine, May 21, 2012. America's commercial fishing industry fell 10% in catch volume and 15% in value during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, federal regulators said Thursday, May 12, 2022. Some of the largest value seafood species were once again New England staples, such as lobster, and sea scallops. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File)

PORTLAND, Maine (AP)  America's commercial fishing industry fell 10% in catch volume and 15% in value during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, federal regulators said Thursday.

The 2020 haul of fish was 8.4 billion pounds, while the value of that catch was $4.8 billion, officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. The early months of the pandemic posed numerous challenges for the U.S. fishing industry, which has remained economically viable despite the difficult year, NOAA officials said.

It was fishery closures, boats not going out due to COVID, border closings due to COVID, lots of disruption in the flow of goods and services, said Michael Liddel, NOAA's commercial fishery statistics branch chief.

FILE  Marine Patrol officers, left, arrive for a routine inspection aboard scallop fisherman Donald Ricker's boat off Harpswell, Maine, Saturday, Dec. 17, 2011. America's commercial fishing industry fell 10% in catch volume and 15% in value during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, federal regulators said Thursday, May 12, 2022. Some of the largest value seafood species were once again New England staples, such as lobster, and sea scallops. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, files)

NOAA made the announcement as it unveiled its Status of the Stocks report, which provides details about the health of the nation's commercial fishing industry.

The report said there were 51 fish stocks on the federal government's overfished list in 2021. That list includes stocks that have been depleted by excessive fishing and the number was an increase of two from the previous year.

Bering Sea snow crabs were among the stocks added to the overfished list. The snow crab fishery, based in Alaska, is one of the most valuable in the country, and was worth more than $100 million at the docks in 2020. Climate factors appear to be playing a role in the decline of Bering Sea snow crabs.

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The stock could be falling victim to disease, predation and movement in search of colder waters, said Kelly Denit, director of NOAA Fisheries' Office of Sustainable Fisheries.

That abundance has dropped by more than 50% in the last two years, and that stock is now overfished, Denit said.

NOAA also removed a few fish stocks from its overfishing and overfished lists. They included the south Atlantic Coast tilefish and the eastern Pacific Ocean yellowfin tuna.

Some of the largest value seafood species were once again New England staples, such as lobster, a fishery anchored in Maine, and sea scallops, many of which come to the docks in Massachusetts. Other high value seafoods included species of crab, salmon and shrimp.

NOAA said 8% of stocks with known statuses are subject to overfishing. That means nearly 300 fish stocks are not.

The high number of sustainable fish stocks illustrates that regulators and industry were able to "answer the challenge of COVID-19 while ensuring the sustainability and economic stability of our nations fisheries, said NOAAs acting assistant secretary for oceans and atmosphere, Janet Coit.
WASHINGTON - White House officials, Capitol Hill lawmakers and the U.S. secretary of energy have all expressed "significant sympathy" for the plight of Canada's Line 5 pipeline, Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said Thursday after a day of meetings in the U.S. capital.

Minister of Natural Resources Jonathan Wilkinson rises during question period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Friday, April 8, 2022. Canadas natural resources minister says he is hearing significant sympathy from U.S. officials for the plight of the Line 5 pipeline. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

WASHINGTON - White House officials, Capitol Hill lawmakers and the U.S. secretary of energy have all expressed "significant sympathy" for the plight of Canada's Line 5 pipeline, Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said Thursday after a day of meetings in the U.S. capital.

President Joe Biden's administration understands the cross-border pipeline's ongoing role in securing North American energy security, even with both countries building a carbon-free future, Wilkinson said during a phone-in news conference from the Canadian Embassy in D.C.

But the 65-year-old pipeline, a vital energy artery for border states in the U.S. Midwest as well as Ontario and Quebec, is facing a pair of existential legal challenges  one from the government of Michigan, the other from an Indigenous group in neighbouring Wisconsin.

"I certainly did raise  that this is part of enhancing North American energy security, that it's ensuring that we are not taking steps that are going to take us backwards," Wilkinson said after a panel discussion with Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.

"In the meetings with Secretary Granholm, in the meetings with the White House and certainly in the meetings that I had with a number of senators, I think there was a significant sympathy for the Canadian position."

That position  first expressed by Wilkinson's predecessor Seamus O'Regan, and reiterated by Wilkinson himself last week  is that the continued operation of the pipeline is "non-negotiable."

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, long a political ally of Biden, has been trying to shut down Line 5 since November 2020, fearing a catastrophic rupture in the ecologically sensitive Straits of Mackinac, where the twin lines cross the Great Lakes.

And a fresh threat has emerged in Wisconsin, where the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa is urging a federal judge to close the pipeline amid a dispute over easements on Indigenous territory that the band argues expired in 2013.

While Canada remains "very focused" on avoiding such a decision, Wilkinson allowed Thursday that Ottawa has been giving some thought to what it would do otherwise, though he did not elaborate on what strategies are in play.

"In the remote eventuality that there is an issue that we need to address, of course it's prudent for us to be thinking about what might be done," he said. "But our primary focus continues to be on ensuring that this pipeline remains open."

The Michigan case eventually prompted Canada's federal government to file a so-called amicus brief  an argument from a "friend of the court" in favour of Calgary-based Enbridge Inc., the defendant in both cases and Line 5's owner and operator.

Ottawa has also invoked a 1977 pipelines treaty, originally sought by the U.S. government in an effort to avoid interruptions to the cross-border flow of energy, and those talks between the two countries have been ongoing.

Canada won't be filing an amicus brief in the Wisconsin case on the advice of lawyers who warned it could be "counterproductive" to efforts to resolve the dispute in Michigan, Wilkinson said. And he expressed hope that the treaty talks could encompass the issues in play in both cases.

"It's certainly possible that it can be part of the same process," he said.

"Ultimately, what we are looking for is a resolution to all of these issues, so the discussions that will be going on will relate to Line 5 more generally. My hope is that it could be resolved through the same process."

In their panel discussion, hosted by the D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, Wilkinson and Granholm agreed that the crisis in Ukraine and pressure on supply chains have helped to bring the two countries closer together on the issue of energy security.

That discussion was more focused on the future than the present, but the Vancouver-born Granholm sounded bullish on the idea of working closely with Canada to develop a green energy future.

"To me, the opportunity is just so powerful to have a North American powerhouse of an alignment on clean energy deployment and technology development," she said, suggesting former prime minister Lester Pearson's dream of "peace in the world" could be realized by ending dependence on fossil fuels.

And she acknowledged the potential Canada offers as a partner to the U.S. on the extraction and production of critical minerals and rare earth metals, a linchpin component of the global push toward electric vehicles and away from the internal combustion engine.

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"Canada has got some best practices that we should be looking at; we shouldn't be afraid of extraction, if it's done in a responsible way," she said. "There's lessons, but there's also real partnerships that we can be doing on areas where we really need help."

Granholm also indicated that the Biden administration is taking steps to "bust through" regional and state-level opposition to projects designed to allow the U.S. to import clean hydroelectricity generated in Quebec and elsewhere north of the border.

In 2020, voters in Maine pointedly rejected a fully approved proposal to run transmission lines through their state that would have linked a billion-dollar Hydro-Quebec energy generation project with markets in Massachusetts, as well as Vermont and New York.

"If Hydro-Quebec wants to make sure that they are able to deliver hydropower and a state votes against it, and that state is a critical state to be able to make that connection to the northeast, It's extremely frustrating," she said.

"We should take local interests into account, but sometimes those local interests are funded by bigger interests that don't have necessarily the big goal of getting to 100 per cent clean electricity in mind."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 12, 2022.
After two years of transitioning between a viral clinic for patients with Covid-19 and a walk-in clinic, Glendive Medical Center (GMC) Urgent Care is back to full-time regular patient care services. No appointments are necessary, and walk-ins are welcome.

GMC is excited to announce that Amanda Torgerson, NP and Ryann Smelser, DNP, join April Price, APRN and Jan Strang, LPN in urgent care to complete their full team of providers. Torgerson is a native to Eastern Montana and is happy to be back serving the community she grew up in. Smelser has provided nursing care at Gabert Clinic and most recently was the provider at EMVH. She is enjoying helping patients in the urgent care setting.

Urgent care is a place to go when you need immediate, non-life-threatening medical care and features a full spectrum of services with set prices. Care is provided for illnesses and minor injuries such as allergies and asthma, simple fractures and sprains, earaches, and more. A full list of services and prices is available on the website at https://www.gmc.org/services/urgent-care/.

Urgent care hours remain the same as before, Monday through Friday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. and Saturday, 10 a.m.-2 p.m.

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A West End couple had settled in for a quiet evening, but their malfunctioning telephone landline had other plans  it phoned 911 to alert Winnipeg police to come to their door.

A West End couple had settled in for a quiet evening, but their malfunctioning telephone landline had other plans  it phoned 911 to alert Winnipeg police to come to their door.

Karen Kirk said for more than a week her phone wouldnt let her call out, but people could call in.

On Friday, something bizarre happened.

"My line started calling 911 without my knowledge," she said on Wednesday. "This happened three times, resulting in police officers attending my residence in person and dealing with the other calls via 911 phone operators."

This week, numerous Winnipeggers have come forward to report their landlines have been out of service for days, weeks and even months. Bell MTS is accused of poor customer service and failing to respond to outages in a timely manner, including in the case of a senior who uses Lifeline.

Daniel Crump / Winnipeg Free Press. Karen Kirk and husband Peter Ogrodnik in their west end home. Their landline telephone service was malfunctioning for more than a week and even dialled 911 several times, unbeknownst to them, leading to a late night visit from police Friday night.

In Kirks case, she said that late Friday she was already in bed, and her husband, Peter Ogrodnik, was watching television, when two police officers suddenly knocked on their door.

"They told my husband he had to get me out of bed to prove I wasnt in trouble. And then, the next day, the 911 operator called, asking if I was in trouble or if it was my phone again.

"This is clearly a waste of police resources," she said, adding a Bell MTS crew fixed the phone on Tuesday. "I sure hope the lines are truly fixed this time."

A Bell MTS spokeswoman said this week the wet weather this spring is to blame for landline telephones, internet and TV services being disrupted for some customers.

"Our crews have been and continue to work as quickly as possible to restore all services," Morgan Shipley said on Tuesday, adding customers can call 204-225-5687 for assistance.

JESSICA LEE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Gary and Alexandra Moulders telephone pole in West St. Paul.

In fact, the residents in one Crescentwood neighbourhood  including a 90-year-old woman who uses the Lifeline emergency system  whose landline phone plight was detailed in Tuesdays Free Press, got their service back later that afternoon when a Bell MTS crew arrived.

"The landline is working, the TV is good, and her Lifeline is working," said the womans daughter.

"I can feel a little relaxed now that the Lifeline is working."

But West St. Paul residents Gary Moulder, and his wife Alexandra, said their telephone landline has been completely out for two weeks and Gary said he has called Bell MTS many times.

The couple said they need the service because he is housebound due to mobility issues and he needs it for emergencies.

"MTS isnt doing anything about it," he said.

"They said the cable has deteriorated. One repair guy said it was too expensive so they dont want to do it."

JESSICA LEE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Gary and Alexandra Moulder at their West St. Paul home. Gary is housebound and uses a walker. His wife, Alexandra, worries he will not be able to call for help without a landline during an emergency.

Alexandra said she worries every time she leaves the house, including when she gets groceries.

"He is disabled," she said. "If something happened to him, he would have no way of getting hold of me  they know that. We never had a problem when it was just MTS. It is only when Bell took over weve had problems.

"What do they care about Winnipeg?"

A resident in the Sanford area, whose phone line had so much static on it for a year that "the phone (was) basically useless," said that after a year of fighting with Bell MTS to replace a worn-out cable, she took a different approach.

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"I finally filed a complaint with the CRTC to get them to agree to lay a new cable last fall," she said.

"It is not just city dwellers who have trouble with MTS. People in rural Manitoba are even more dependent on MTS as there are very few options for phone or internet."

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission is the federal regulator for telephone companies.

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca
Despite the very unfortunate situation unfolding at Maples Personal Care Home  as COVID-19 spreads in the Winnipeg facility home and others across Manitoba  families and residents should not expect a return of robust information sharing by provincial government.

Despite the "very unfortunate situation" unfolding at Maples Personal Care Home  as COVID-19 spreads in the Winnipeg facility home and others across Manitoba  families and residents should not expect a return of robust information sharing by provincial government.

On Wednesday, Seniors and Long-Term Care Minister Scott Johnston dismissed calls by the Manitoba NDP to publish detailed and transparent information regarding the scale of COVID-19 outbreaks at care homes in Manitoba.

"Every effort is made when there is an outbreak of COVID, or there is infections existing in personal care homes, that individual family members are notified," Johnston said in response to NDP health critic Uzoma Asagwara during question period.

Asagwara raised the story of seniors Gail and Mike Dobbin  first published Tuesday in the Free Press  in the chamber. The couple was reinfected with COVID-19 while living at Beacon Hill Lodge in Winnipeg; Mike died in July 2021 and Gail died in April.

Their son, John Dobbin, called on the province to resume regular, detailed updates on outbreaks at personal care homes.

Without that information Manitobans "dont know how other care homes are being affected" and "dont know if theres an incident," Dobbin told the Free Press.

"Theres absolutely no reason why this province cant provide that information," Asagwara said Wednesday during question period. "People want to know that their loved ones and their friends are safe."

Beacon Hill Lodge was still listed in outbreak by the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority as of Wednesday, along with 15 other personal care homes in the city. Neither the health region nor provincial public health reports the number of infections in residents and staff.

Johnston offered condolences to the Dobbin family Wednesday.

However, the minister for seniors and long-term care  a new position created by Premier Heather Stefanson shortly after she took office  said personal care homes will continue provide COVID-19 outbreak information directly to family members.

Meantime, the public can look at the provinces weekly epidemiology report to see a high-level summary of all outbreaks in the province, Johnston said. "There is information that is related to families, as well as made public."

Johnston was peppered with questions from the Opposition and Liberals on the provinces response to COVID-19 in care homes.

A recent outbreak at Maples, which involves at least 17 residents and 10 staff, required a site visit from the WRHA to monitor the situation and ensure protocols were in place to "secure the safety of the residents," Johnston said.

On Wednesday, the Free Press asked the WRHA to provide an update on the number of cases at Maples. The health authority said questions should be directed to care home operator, Ontario-based Revera Inc., over concern its numbers would not be current.

Revera did not return a request from the Free Press by deadline.

Johnston assured legislators nursing levels at the home in northwest Winnipeg were meeting provincial requirements.

"This is a very unfortunate situation, but were the essentials in place to address these issues? Yes, they were," Johnston said.

During the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, Maples was hit with a massive outbreak, driven in part by a lack of infection and prevention control oversight, a later external review found.

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The outbreak infected 157 residents and decimated staffing levels to the point emergency responders had to be called in to provide care. Fifty-six residents died.

A report by external investigator Lynn Stevenson ordered by the provincial government contained 17 recommendations to improve long-term care.

Johnston said the government is proceeding with discussions to increase funding for care homes and nurse-to-resident ratios, as recommended by the Stevenson report.

"This government has adopted all 17 recommendations of the Stevenson report staffing is part of that, bedside service is part of that. However, there is going to be a process of negotiation to be able to accomplish that," the minister said.

Johnstons press secretary said he was unavailable to speak to reporters following question period.

danielle.dasilva@freepress.mb.ca
OTTAWA  Kildonan residents say Canada Post needs to do a better job managing mail disruptions, after nearly two weeks of having to drive five kilometres to pick up cheques and bills.

OTTAWA  Kildonan residents say Canada Post needs to do a better job managing mail disruptions, after nearly two weeks of having to drive five kilometres to pick up cheques and bills.

I dont know what kind of people they have working there; its infuriating, said Myron Krywyj, who lives on Kilbride Avenue.

His Winnipeg street has been partially closed for construction, meaning some of the community mailboxes stopped receiving mail in late April.

Anxious to get a cheque to supplement his disability payments, Krywyj says he had to call multiple Canada Post offices to learn what was causing the disruption, and how he could pick up his mail.

The Crown corporation told him to get to a Church Avenue warehouse in the Inkster industrial park, a 30-minute bus ride away.

Krywyj was baffled Canada Post didnt notify anyone about the disruption, given the City of Winnipeg posted a notice about upcoming construction dates.

They put junk mail in our boxes all the time. How come they couldnt just put a letter in each one, saying, Your service will be temporarily interrupted; you can pick your mail up at this location? he said.

Just give us a notification; one piece of paper in each mailbox, or just put a sign up.

His friend, Fred De Villa, had the same confusion.

I think every resident in this area didnt get anything during these two weeks, he said. Everyones been worried about what happened.

De Villa said it only makes sense for mail to not arrive when the snow is knee-high on the sidewalk. But the weather now is really different, he said with a laugh.

He made a trip to Church Avenue last week, and ended up having just one piece of mail.

Its too far from here, he said.

I worry about my bills coming and not being able to pay. Seniors I spoke to said theyre also concerned, because theyre expecting some money from the government.

De Villa had asked whether certain neighbours had mail waiting, but the Canada Post clerk wouldnt tell him, citing privacy issues.

Krywyj argued the local pharmacy that holds parcels could have distributed letter mail so people who dont have direct deposit could get cheques.

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Canada Post said it resumed mail delivery Wednesday, after the construction foreman confirmed the sidewalk was safely accessible.

Our operations team has been closely monitoring the progress of construction as it moves up Kilbride Avenue, wrote spokesman Phil Legault.

Mail delivery to the community mailboxes was attempted but wasnt always available on a daily basis, because of safety concerns for our delivery agents and customers.

Krywyj argued the postal service could have at least told its customers about the issue. The Crown corporation did not explain its protocols for mail disruption.

We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience and thank them for their patience and understanding, wrote Legault.

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca
A call to limit the number of days City of Winnipeg staff can work from home and scrutinize the impact remote work has on civic services is up for debate at city hall.

A call to limit the number of days City of Winnipeg staff can work from home and scrutinize the impact remote work has on civic services is up for debate at city hall.

While approximately 1,800 of 10,400 staff have worked from home at least part-time during COVID-19, the city revealed details of a new formal flexible workplace plan to employees and elected officials this week.

Coun. Janice Lukes fears the plan rushes to make a major permanent change.

Shes calling for the executive policy committee to order an 18-month pilot project that allows employees to work remotely for a maximum of two days per week on a regular basis. The motion was unanimously supported by councils innovation and economic development committee Wednesday.

It also calls for a review of the impact of the flexible workplace program on productivity and service delivery.

"This is a very big change for the City of Winnipeg workforce and I think we should take baby steps to it before we jump in completely offering five days per week work flex. I just feel I need a level of accountability," said Lukes.

The motion, which still requires EPC approval, also calls for the public service to set a goal for the changes to have "no negative impact on the downtown economy."

Small downtown businesses have suffered, many shutting down, after foot traffic dwindled to a fraction of previous levels during the pandemic. Many downtown workers are still working remotely more than two years later.

The city needs to set an example by bringing back as many of its downtown staff as possible, Lukes said.

"I think we should be looking at as many avenues as possible to get people downtown. Sometimes we have to make a bit of a sacrifice to help out downtown until we get (more) people living there," she said.

The city must be careful to retain skilled workers, so some work-from-home options are likely needed, Coun. Markus Chambers told the media. He agreed with Lukes that the impact on services must be carefully monitored.

To retain skilled workers, some work-from-home options are likely needed, Coun. Markus Chambers says. (Mikaela MacKenzie / Winnipeg Free Press files)

"We want to make sure there is some rigour behind any program that sets to have people work remotely (to) still hold them accountable for the work that they need to do on behalf of the citizens of Winnipeg," said Chambers.

The recovery of the city centre does depend on the return of workers, at least part-time, said Kate Fenske, chief executive officer of Downtown Winnipeg Business Improvement Zone.

"It is important not to rush into any permanent change or shift to how we operate as a city immediately without figuring out what all the risks and the benefits are. I think going five days a week (remote work) goes too far. The downtown is a critical component and a piece of our citys success," said Fenske.

Michael Jack, city chief administrative officer, said the current plan doesnt prescribe a minimum number of days staff must work at the office, though he expects few would be eligible to work remotely full-time.

"From my discussions with our senior management team, I do think five days remote every week would be extremely rare."

Jack will seek more detail about the calls to impose add an 18-month pilot project and a two-day-per-week maximum for remote hours before he weighs in on those ideas. He called it "somewhat unusual" for a political motion to dictate a human resources decision.

The citys current remote work plan offers a reasonable path forward that balances the need to attract and retain staff without sacrificing service levels, Jack said.

"Most of the city employees that residents interact with, they see when theyre having their services delivered  whether youre at the library, whether youre at the pool, whether its a paramedic or a firefighter  these people arent working remotely, these people are working on the front line," he said.

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"I dont think residents will see any discernible difference in their services or their level of service based on some employees working remotely."

The city also has no plans to terminate leases or sell off properties it occupies in the downtown, should the new formal program free up office space, Jack said.

"We dont see this program as being a significant challenge to downtown economic recovery," he said.

Councils executive policy committee is expected to consider the motion May 18.

joyanne.pursaga@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @joyanne_pursaga
In the flooded Red River Valley, island life  and having to hop in a boat to complete even the simplest of everyday tasks  isnt for everyone.

In the flooded Red River Valley, island life  and having to hop in a boat to complete even the simplest of everyday tasks  isnt for everyone.

Gillian Potvin decided to heed a voluntary evacuation notice and leave with her son, Luc, a week ago as water lapped over roads and surrounded their home just south of St. Adolphe.

"With a two-year-old, it wasnt practical to think we could boat in and out every day with him to go to daycare," said Potvin, who runs a communications and marketing firm. "We had safety in mind. Were going to hunker down (with in-laws in Ste. Agathe) until its safe to go back."

Gillian Potvin photo Flooding just south of St. Adolphe, east side of Red River. Gillian Potvin, with son Luc, sandbagging at her parents property.

Her husband, Daniel, stayed behind to "man the moat" amid the first major flood since they moved to the rural property, located on the east side of the Red, five years ago.

Their house is on a hill and is safe from the projected peak of this springs flood, which will be similar to those of 2009 and 2011.

About 200 households in the RM of Ritchot have received voluntary evacuation notices due to flooded access roads.

"In these experiences, as scary as they can be, weve seen our community come together to sandbag, to bring food and to be there to help their neighbours," Potvin said Wednesday. "Thats just heartwarming."

Gillian Potvin photo About 50 volunteers helped fill sandbags and set up a structural dike which protects Barbara Biggar and Reg Giesbrechts home south of St. Adolphe.

Potvin witnessed that kind of support when about 50 volunteers helped set up a structural dike around her parents home, which is also south of St. Adolphe and now boat access only, about three weeks ago.

Barbara Biggar and Reg Giesbrecht are staying put to monitor seepage and water pumps within the dike that protects their home from 1997 levels plus two feet.

"We are surrounded by water. We are basically on an island," said Biggar, who runs a communications consulting firm and is a Progressive Conservative strategist. "Its very stressful. Any level of flood is stressful."

Last week  before local roads became submerged  she called 911 after a vehicle went into a water-filled ditch. Witnesses helped the woman escape through a window.

We are surrounded by water. We are basically on an island... Its very stressful. Any level of flood is stressful.  Barbara Biggar

"The water was up to her waist and rising," said Biggar.

Like many who live in flood zones, Potvin and Biggar are concerned about a Colorado low thats set to dump more rain Thursday and Friday.

The system, coupled with one last Monday, could cause rivers to rise again, Transportation and Infrastructure Minister Doyle Piwniuk said in a statement to the legislature.

High water levels could continue into June, he said, as the Red neared its crest in Morris and Ste. Agathe.

The province issued an overland flood warning for parts of southwest and southeast Manitoba ahead of the rainstorm. A flood warning was issued for Dauphin Lake.

As of Wednesday, 28 rural municipalities and four First Nations had declared local states of emergency.

Gail Adair photo Flooding in the High Rock Road area in the community of West Hawk Lake, about 140 kilometres east of Winnipeg. Danny Adair pulls in part of a dock that broke loose and was floating in McKenzie Bay.

Environment Canada meteorologist Terri Lang said the heaviest rain is expected in communities close to the Manitoba-Saskatchewan boundary.

Between 30 and 50 mm will fall in the west, with more than 60 mm possible in places hit by embedded showers or thunderstorms, according to a special weather statement.

Amounts of 20 to 40 mm are possible elsewhere before the system tapers off by Friday night.

"Its another Colorado low in procession with all the other Colorado lows (this spring)," said Lang. "Any amount of rain isnt welcome at this point."

Wind gusts of up to 90 km/h will also cause problems.

Wet snow and freezing rain are possible as the system moves into northern areas Saturday.

Flood-hit areas of the Interlake are preparing for rivers to peak again. Dikes are being raised in the First Nation communities of Peguis and Fisher River. About 2,000 residents have left their homes since late last month.

Its another Colorado low in procession with all the other Colorado lows (this spring)... Any amount of rain isnt welcome at this point.  Terri Lang, Environment Canada meteorologist

The Rural Municipality of West Interlake is looking for more workers to fill sandbags, operate water pumps and monitor a dike on Provincial Road 325, about six kilometres east of Ashern.

As floodwater finally began to recede at the dike, officials were concerned about the storm and water yet to flow through the RM before draining into Lake Manitoba.

"If that (dike) washes out, it could overpower the drains and endanger Ashern," said Reeve Arnthor Jonasson.

Home to about 700 people, Ashern is 170 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg.

West Interlake is operating a diversion and trying to source more tractor pumps. It ordered 25,000 sandbags from the province, filling about 2,000 by Wednesday afternoon.

The RMs public works staff "have been going full out" to protect properties, said Jonasson.

People in cottage country in eastern Manitoba are also dealing with significant flooding. Docks, watercraft and other objects have floated away on some bloated lakes, and many roads are closed.

Gail and Danny Adair, who live year-round on McKenzie Bay at West Hawk Lake, said their road was under about half a foot of water.

People in the Rural Municipality of Morris are using boats as floodwater submerges an increasing number of gravel roads and driveways. (Harley Siemens / File)

Theyre worried they will become cut off if the water rises further.

"Were trying to decide right now, do we go into (Winnipeg) or do we stay here?" said Gail Adair. "Im scared for the weekend, with three days of rain."

To the north, Donna Hastings has never seen water levels this high on Long Lake in Nopiming Provincial Park, where she and her husband own Windsock Lodge. Their boathouse is partially submerged.

"The water has nowhere to go but overland. Everything is completely full," said Hastings.

Provincial Road 314 is washed out near the Manigotagan River and Cat Lake, and Hastings is worried PR 304 will close, leaving the lodge without road access.

The water has nowhere to go but overland. Everything is completely full.  Donna Hastings

If that happens, Hastings guests from Toronto and Jamaica will have to leave on a float plane.

The lodge, which is in spring bear hunt season, began welcoming customers after the COVID-19 pandemic slashed business for about two years.

"We were really excited about getting back to normal, but then we got this," said Hastings. "Well survive. There are people who are doing worse than this."

 with files from Danielle Da Silva

chris.kitching@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @chriskitching
Winnipeg Mayor Brian Bowman is renewing his call for a public inquiry into controversial capital projects and real estate deals during the Katz-Sheegl era at city hall after the existence of a second, parallel RCMP probe has come to light.

Winnipeg Mayor Brian Bowman is renewing his call for a public inquiry into controversial capital projects and real estate deals during the Katz-Sheegl era at city hall after the existence of a second, parallel RCMP probe has come to light.

On Tuesday, the Free Press revealed the existence of RCMP Project Dioxide  a previously undisclosed investigation into a string of real estate deals and an over-budget capital project during the administration  2004-2014  of former mayor Sam Katz.

Project Dioxide ran parallel to RCMP Project Dalton, the multi-year, multimillion-dollar fraud investigation into the construction of the Winnipeg Police Service headquarters.

On Wednesday, Jeremy Davis, a spokesman for Bowman, said the mayor had not been aware of the existence of RCMP Project Dioxide prior to the Free Press report.

"While this investigation was not known to the mayor until now, the fact remains that there are many unanswered questions and a public inquiry is still the best way to ensure accountability for taxpayers," Davis said in a written statement.

RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES On Wednesday, Jeremy Davis, a spokesman for Winnipeg Mayor Brian Bowman, said the mayor had not been aware of the existence of RCMP Project Dioxide prior to the Free Press report.

"The standing ask of our provincial government is the Public Inquiry motion that was supported by all but one member of City Council on February 22, 2017."

Coun. Janice Lukes (Waverley West) was the lone vote against the motion, which called on the provincial government to open a broad inquiry into city hall operations during the Katz era.

Davis noted that Bowmans motion was intentionally broad, so any inquiry could look into "matters outside just the (WPS) HQ." He also pointed to another motion from Bowman that waived solicitor-client privilege for city lawyers the RCMP asked to interview.

RCMP Project Dalton was formally closed in 2019 without charges.

On Monday, the RCMP confirmed the existence of Project Dioxide in a written statement sent to the Free Press, noting it did not result in criminal charges. But the Mounties offered no information on when and why the probe was closed.

NDP MLA Nahanni Fontaine said she was both surprised  and not  after learning of the existence of Project Dioxide.

"At the end of the day, Im not entirely surprised. There are a lot of unanswered questions about all of that. That is what the RCMP is supposed to be doing. They should be looking into the allegations that have been made for the last many years," Fontaine said.

"They should be investigating this."

JOE BRYKSA / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Pictured Phil Sheegl with former mayor Sam Katz. Last month, Manitobas top civil court ruled that former City of Winnipeg chief administrative officer Phil Sheegl accepted a bribe in connection with the WPS HQ project.

Fontaine noted the NDP has repeatedly called on the Progressive Conservative provincial government to launch an inquiry.

"The province has a responsibility to be concerned about what happened and to put that concern into action by calling a public inquiry. There is a significant amount of information and allegations coming forward that I believe warrant a public inquiry," she said.

"Citizens deserve to know what went wrong and what really happened. Were talking about, potentially, criminal actions. So everybody is just supposed to let those involved off the hook?"

Citizens deserve to know what went wrong and what really happened. Were talking about, potentially, criminal actions. So everybody is just supposed to let those involved off the hook?  NDP MLA Nahanni Fontaine

The provincial government, first led by former premier Brian Pallister, and now under the leadership of Premier Heather Stefanson, have repeatedly shot down calls for such an inquiry.

Last month, Manitobas top civil court ruled that former City of Winnipeg chief administrative officer Phil Sheegl accepted a bribe in connection with the WPS HQ project.

On Tuesday, Sheegls lawyer, Robert Tapper, told the Free Press his client intends to appeal the ruling.

ryan.thorpe@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @rk_thorpe

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NORWAY House Cree Nation is transferring care home residents and staff to Winnipeg, after failed attempts to fix the centres hot water system and problems with sewage backup.

NORWAY House Cree Nation is transferring care home residents and staff to Winnipeg, after failed attempts to fix the centres hot water system and problems with sewage backup.

"Its terrible," said one staff member, reached Wednesday. "Were doing the best we can."

The care home has been without hot water since March 17. Staff had been reduced to using baby wipes for residents personal hygiene while hoping the problem would soon been fixed. Sewer backup has also been a problem at the aging facility, said the staff member, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

They said all 21 residents and 20 staff caregivers will board a medevac plane and three regular Perimeter Airlines flights and travel 452 kilometres south to Winnipeg on Friday.

The residents will stay at Norway House Cree Nations medical boarding home at 333 Maryland St. for the next two to four months, said the staff member, who wasnt certain where the employees accompanying them will be housed.

The First Nation has been forced to take the lead on organizing charter flights, medical transport and accommodations for the elderly residents and staff, as neither the provincial government nor Indigenous Services Canada has provided a commitment, council member Deon Clarke said.

"We cant risk the health of our elders We cant risk losing any of them because these are our knowledge keepers they are very precious," Clarke said. "Weve got to make them our priority."

The province has signed off on the residents being temporarily relocated to the building on Maryland Street with appropriate emergency plans in place, said Clarke. The government also agreed to provide medical beds for the seniors, but thats where support stopped, he said.

"We cannot wait for Manitoba any longer to come up with plans. They havent stepped up to the plate."

On Wednesday, Health Minister Audrey Gordon was not made available for comment. Her press secretary directed inquiries to the federal First Nations and Inuit Health Branch or Norway House Cree Nation.

In the meantime, Clarke said his community is looking at hotels and rentals to house the staff and their families heading south with the residents. The band councillor said he hopes the province can bolster their ranks with temporary additional staff.

The goal is to have the elders back in the renovated home for Treaty and York Boat Days in August, he said.

Norway House is trying to create a home away from home for the elders by bringing familiar staff and keeping residents together, rather than sending them to individual homes across the province, Clarke said.

"We dont want to cause any more emotional trauma to these elders. These are the people who have survived residential school and day school. Theyve been through too much and we dont to cause them to go through any more."

The provincial government should cover the cost of the flights, said Liberal Leader Dougald Lamont, who raised the issue during question period Wednesday.

"Will the premier commit to cover the cost to get elders from Norway House to a place of comfort and safety?" he asked.

The health minister said a request for proposals has been issued "and we will continue to do what is necessary to ensure Manitobans receive the services they need," Gordon told the house.

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Lamont said a Manitoba Hydro power surge "fried the circuits" of the hot water tanks at the personal care home.

Hydro says it was notified of an outage to a nursing home in Norway House on March 21, and it was repaired in an hour.

However, everything needs to be replaced and the hot water parts are 10 weeks on back order, Clarke said. The home had sewer backups and, in the process of repairing the problem, aging sewer lines failed in other spots.

Part of the sewer line has to be excavated to correct the problem. However, that work cant be completed until ground-penetrating radar is conducted on the adjacent former residential school site this summer, Clarke said.

carol.sanders@freepress,mb.ca

danielle.dasilva@freepress.mb.ca

Danielle Da Silva

Reporter Danielle Da Silva is a general assignment reporter. Read full biography
FOR Patricia Maruschak, providing aid for embattled Ukraine is both professional and personal.

FOR Patricia Maruschak, providing aid for embattled Ukraine is both professional and personal.

As the director of partnerships and programs for Primates World Relief and Development Fund, an organization headquartered in Toronto operated by the Anglican Church of Canada, its her job to help direct relief to residents of the war-torn eastern European country.

But its also personal for the Winnipeg-based Maruschak, a 53-year-old mother of two teenage boys whose ancestors came to Canada from Ukraine.

"The first weeks of the war were so upsetting," said Maruschak, who started her job with the fund four days after the war started Feb. 24.

"It was hard to focus. I felt guilty feeling happy here in Canada when people were dying in Ukraine. How could I celebrate anything in life when that was happening?"

What helps Maruschak deal with her anger about the war is being actively involved in programming aid.

To date, the fund has received more than $650,000 in donations from Anglicans across Canada. It is using the money to support two European aid groups assisting Ukrainian refugees with food, shelter, water and other needed items, along with supporting two organizations in Ukraine.

One of the Ukrainian groups the fund supports assists disabled people who are fleeing the fighting, while the other provides specialized medical supplies to first responders.

"PWRDFs goal is to support local organizations as much as possible," she said, adding it is exploring support for other Ukrainian groups that assist children impacted by the war.

"Ukraine has a vibrant civil society, with lots of organizations doing a great job of serving their country any way possible."

The fund also wants to create long-term partnerships with Ukrainian groups for when the war is over and the country is being rebuilt.

"When rebuilding happens, it will need to be done by Ukrainians, not international groups. We want to support that," she said.

Maruschak has spent more than 20 years in international relief and development work, including with Canadian Lutheran World Relief and the Manitoba Council for International Co-operation. She also lived and worked in Ukraine from 2006 to 2010.

"I still have friends and former colleagues in that country, and some relatives," Maruschak said, noting she knows some of the places and neighbourhoods she sees bombed and destroyed on the news.

"Its heartbreaking to hear how their lives have been shattered."

In addition to assisting people in Ukraine through the fund, Maruschak  who speaks Ukrainian  is involved through her church, Holy Trinity Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral on Main Street in Winnipeg, where she is working with others to help resettle refugees from Ukraine.

The crisis has brought new people to the church who are looking for ways to help.

"If they end up becoming more involved in the church, thats great," she said. "If they dont, thats fine. As long as we can work together to do what we can, thats all that matters."

She also helped bring a cousin and her son to Winnipeg in April.

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"They have adjusted well, although they miss their husband and father who stayed behind," Maruschak said.

At the same time, Maruschak is also focused on needs in other countries experiencing conflict  such as South Sudan, Ethiopia, Iraq and Bangladesh.

"Its easy for the needs in those places to be forgotten due to the war in Ukraine," she said, adding the fund is matching the amount donated for Ukraine to help other places in the developing world where fighting is impacting people.

"The needs are great, and I get a chance to do something to make a difference every day," Maruschak said, adding the important thing is for everyone "to show up and do what they can to help."

Those who wish can donate to the funds work in Ukraine at pwrdf.org.

faith@freepress.mb.ca
Hy-Vee, Inc. has extended its support to veteran and active duty military member employees by joining the Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve (ESGR) Statement of Support Program.

In a ceremony held at the Ron Pearson Center in West Des Moines, Iowa, representatives from the ESGR, United States Army and Navy Reserves, and Iowa National Guard attended the signing of the Statement of Support, which was signed by Georgia Van Gundy, executive vice president, chief administrative officer, and chief customer officer for Hy-Vee.

The mission of the Statement of Support Program is to increase employer support of the nations Guard and Reserve units by encouraging employers to act as advocates for employee participation in the military.

By signing the Statement of Support, Hy-Vee pledges that:

It fully recognizes, honors, and complies with the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act.

It will provide managers and supervisors with the tools they need to effectively manage employees who serve in the Guard and Reserve.

It appreciates the values, leadership, and unique skills Service members bring to the workforce and will encourage opportunities to hire Guardsmen, Reservists and Veterans.

It will continually recognize and support our countrys Service members and their families, in peace, in crises, and in war.

Hy-Vee has long supported our nations active-duty and veteran military members through our Hy-Vee Homefront program, Van Gundy said. We are honored to extend that support by joining the ESGR Statement of Support Program to let our employees who are also members of the nations Guard and Reserve units know that we are here for them and will support them as they continue to serve our country.

For more information about ESGR, visit https://www.esgr.mil/About-ESGR/Who-is-ESGR.

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WINONA  Its about what is best for students.

That is what the top administrators at Winona Area Public Schools said was the main reason to make several changes to the locations of special education programs throughout the district. The changes were presented to the school board last Thursday.

We needed to make sure that we were balancing what our students need, Superintendent Dr. Annette K. Freiheit said. That was the biggest push on this, was to really get that continuum of services for our students and balance that with adult preferences.  The ultimate end is: How does it help the students?

Some of the changes have been in consideration since Dr. Sarah Knudsen joined the district as the director of special education in 2018 but have been delayed for several reasons, including disruptions from COVID-19. However, with increasing student need and a realization during the WAPS Community Task Force meetings that the most accessible elementary building was not being utilized for special education services, the numbers, data and facts all pointed to now being the right time for a shift.

Most of the changes involve students who are in need of the most intensive supports offered through what are called Setting III programs. Students in these programs typically spend about 80% of their day in a special education setting and are integrated into a general education classroom the remaining 20%.

The changes include:

Moving the Setting III Emotional Behavior Disorder LEO program from the Winona Area Learning Center to Winona Senior High School (to the agriculture building).

Creating a center-based Setting III Emotional Behavior Disorder program at Jefferson Elementary.

Moving two Setting III Developmental Cognitive Disabilities classrooms at Jefferson to Goodview and W-K.

Creating a center-based Autism Spectrum Disorder program at W-K.

There are pros and cons to any decision that relocates students and staff, but in this case, WAPS administrators said, the pros outweigh the cons for the students  both now and in the future.

The dominos at the elementary level started with the need to house the Setting III EBD program at one location. Jefferson was identified as the ideal location for the program. That meant, however, that the two DCD classrooms at Jefferson needed to go elsewhere, which necessitated the move of one classroom to W-K and one classroom to Goodview.

When we move a program like this into two buildings, we give more opportunities for students to be in their neighborhood school, Knudsen said. We increase the number of buildings in our district that have a greater continuum of services. We utilize our Goodview space that has fewer barriers to accessibility and air conditioning. We have several students who require air conditioned spaces due to their health needs. And this would also more evenly distribute programs across the buildings.

Knudsen said that utilizing Goodview became apparent during the WAPS Community Task Force discussions, which often bemoaned the lack of accessibility at Jefferson and W-K. Freiheit added that including students of all abilities is beneficial to the entire school community, not just those students in special education programming. Spreading out the special education programs throughout the district will also allow building principals to more easily integrate students in these programs into general education classrooms, which is required by federal law.

Theres more opportunities to be exposed to the states curricular standards in a general education setting, board member Jim Schul said. So therefore, this is a 14th amendment civil right that we are privileging on our students, which is what we should have been doing a long time ago.

Knudsen said there was a comprehensive analysis done to determine the changes that needed to occur, and staff input will be critical when these changes are implemented. Staff input will also be critical when evaluating these changes.

Board member Steve Schild acknowledged the complexity of providing special education services by admitting he didnt fully understand all the complicating factors that went into it. But he did support the decisions made by administrators because of what they identified as their top priority.

What the superintendent said about the administrative decision emphasized primarily the needs of the students  that is a real trump card put down on something like that, he said. I was very glad to hear that. That should be at the heart of everything we do. That helps me understand.

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Students and staff at Morin School south of Billings celebrated with representatives from RiverStone Health Public Health Services on Tuesday afternoon under a new sun shade at the school.

The RiverStone Health Cancer Control Team partnered with the school to construct a sun shade for the playground. The structure will provide shade for children during school hours. The area can be used at recess or for outside classroom space. The sunshade is a permanent structure, with a cover that is removable during inclement weather.

During the event, students gathered at tables under the shade for an interactive sun safety presentation which was followed by water, cookies, and an activity pack.

Funding for the Morin School sun shade was made available by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services.

The RiverStone Health Cancer Control Team works year round on preventive cancer screenings and education about preventing cancers, including skin cancers related to sun exposure.

This is the third sun shade provided through the program. Shades have already been placed at Independent and Pioneer Schools.

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Nine high school seniors were honored and received college scholarships Wednesday night through the Winona Daily News Above & Beyond program.

The reception at Winona State University attracted nearly 70 people.

Students will receive their awards  at least $1,000  through the Winona Community Foundation, which partnered with Above & Beyond this year, or directly from Winona State, Saint Marys University or Minnesota State College Southeast.

WNB Financial recently supported the Above & Beyond program with a $10,000 challenge grant, and individual donors have been contributing in the first year back for the program after two years sidelined during the pandemic.

Were thrilled to honor the Class of 22 Above & Beyond students, said Bob Heisse, executive editor of the Daily News and the River Valley Media Group. Our sincere thanks to every donor who is boosting the program through the foundation.

Rusty Cunningham, former Daily News and River Valley Media Group executive editor who established the program 15 years ago, served as master of ceremonies Wednesday night and told the students: Its an honor to celebrate your strength and courage to overcome obstacles and serve others. Your stories have inspired tens of thousands of readers in our area and beyond.

Cunningham recognized two groups that dont enough recognition or thanks  parents, family members and friends of the students, and educators throughout our region.

Each student received a framed copy of their story in the Daily News with a scholarship.

Nancy Brown, executive director of the Winona Community Foundation, thanked WNB Financial and all donors and praised the students.

The following students received Above & Beyond scholarships:

Ellen Olson, Winona High

Alex and James Arneson, Mabel-Canton

Zoey Slaby, C-FC

Sajida Mirzada, Cotter

Inkya Johnson, Rushford-Peterson

Abigail Kanz, Lewiston

Althea Kappauf, Houston

Brandon Ross, Caledonia

Presenting scholarships on Wednesday night were David Vaselaar, president and CEO of WNB Financial, and representatives of Winona colleges.

All three colleges gave certificates of scholarships to their school to every student.

Minnesota State College President Marsha Danielson and Josiah Litant, vice president of strategic initiatives, presented for MSC. Tim Albers, vice provost for enrollment management, and Nicole Peterson, dean of students, presented for Saint Marys, and Denise McDowell, vice president for enrollment management and student life, presented for Winona State.

To support the Above & Beyond program visit www.winonacf.org/donate. Checks can be written to the the Winona Community Foundation and reference Above & Beyond; this can be in the memo line or in the payable to line. Mail to Winona Community Foundation, 111 Riverfront Suite 2E, Winona, MN 55987.

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The Tomah Health board of directors has selected its new hospital CEO, Derek Daly will succeed hospital CEO Phil Stuart who is retiring after 50 years in health care, including 27 years at Tomah Memorial Hospital and Tomah Health.

Daly has served the last five and a half years as CEO of Blue Mountain Hospital District including its 25-bed critical access hospital in John Day, Oregon, a rural health clinic, long-term care facility, home health and hospice agency, and ambulance service.

Prior to his position in Oregon, Daly served two and a half years as CEO for a Sanford Health managed facility, Liberty Medical Center in Chester, Montana, where he had executive oversight for a 25-bed critical access hospital with on-site long-term care, a rural health clinic, and an assisted living facility.

Daly was born in Madison, before later growing up in eastern South Dakota. He attended Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he received an undergraduate degree in business administration before obtaining his masters degree in health administration from the University of Iowa.

Like Stuart, Daly is an employee of HealthTechS3  a health care consulting and hospital management firm based in Brentwood, Tennessee, with clients across the United States, including Tomah Health.

I am looking forward to officially starting in my role at Tomah Health sometime this summer and getting a chance to meet all of our internal caregivers, team members and community partners, Daly said. My wife, Nicole, and I are looking forward to relocating our young family to Tomah, getting involved in the community, and forming personal and professional relationships in the area. The Dalys have a 7-month-old son.

Stuart originally said that he would step down in June, adding that if the transition to a new CEO takes longer, he would be available to ensure a solid handoff.
More housing may be coming to the city of Baraboo.

Baraboo City Council members voted Tuesday to allow City Administrator Casey Bradley to execute a development agreement with developers looking to add to the Spruce Haven subdivision south of Pierce Park.

We hit an impasse with the developer, Bradley said. Ultimately, this is their final offer and our final offer and its up to the council to make that decision.

The land to be potentially developed is already platted. It would be a mix of 52 duplexes, senior housing, multi-family housing and 57 individual residential lots for entry level housing east of Evergreen Drive and west of County Highway DL on the south side of the city.

As part of the agreement, the city would commit to ask the Joint Review Board to amend the boundaries of Tax Increment Finance District 8, though the housing structures would not be included in TID 8, meaning it would be on the tax rolls once it is built. The developer would be required to create $7 million in new assessed value. If it met its goals, the city would provide payments incrementally up to $2 million for infrastructure costs.

The developer agreed to dedicate 0.9 acres of land back to the city for a park and an easement along the property line to install a sidewalk or path to create a walking path in the area.

One point of contention Bradley said staff members and the developers had during negotiations was the desire to see some type of business that would sell food items, such as a grocery store.

Typically, we see access to transportation as an issue, so we want to make sure weve got some sort of business thats offering food staples in that area, Bradley said. Our concern is if were going to incentivize this, we need to make sure its set up to succeed.

He said the developers agree a store like that should be built nearby, but Bradley said they did not want it to be a requirement in the contract. That way, if they fail to secure a commercial business for the land zoned to allow for that type of business, they would not be in breach of a contract.

Council member Bryant Hazard said such a store would likely thrive in the space.

The area is getting so developed, a business such as that would probably do pretty well, Hazard said.

Council members Scott Sloan and Jason Kent discussed the caveat during the Finance and Personnel Committee meeting immediately preceding the council meeting. Sloan said they deliberated how to best ensure the space is used to develop a food provider without allowing for another type of business that would not serve the intended purpose.

We were talking about how to set this up and I guess one of the concerns we had is that a liquor store would go in there with just the bare, bare essentials of food, Sloan said.

Sloan said the main goal shared among council members is to prevent another type of business opening before a store which mainly sells food.

Council members decided to allow Bradley to execute the contract for the development with the limitation that the first property developed on the commercial land be a store which sells food items. It would require their approval as a council before being built. Then any other type of business could be built in the commercial zone once that type of store is established.

There are three parcels as part of the project zoned for commercial development. The change to the proposed agreement does not penalize the developer if it is unable to ensure a commercial food store would be built there. If the developer could not, the city would likely pursue a developer to provide that type of store on the property.

Follow Bridget on Twitter @cookebridget or contact her at 608-745-3513.

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WISCONSIN DELLS  Wisconsin Dells representatives from the State Senate and Assembly covered a range of topics in a listening session in the city Wednesday.

Sen. Joan Ballweg, R-Markesan and Rep. Alex Dallman, R-Green Lake, held the meeting at Kilbourn Public Library. Three attendees showed up to discuss topics including election integrity, the Wisconsin River corridor in the Dells, bipartisanship, the state budget, gerrymandering and the leaked U.S. Supreme Court opinion to overturn the landmark abortion ruling in Roe v. Wade.

City resident John Montgomery brought up the issue of election integrity, which Ballweg said has become an increasingly pressing issue since the COVID-19 pandemic but has subsided with the availability of vaccines.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court is dealing with a lawsuit relating to voting drop boxes, which were allowed for the spring 2022 election, Ballweg said. The court has not decided whether to allow them in the fall elections.

She also discussed the ongoing review into the election by former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman and guidance in 2020 exempting clerks from the need to send special election workers into nursing homes during the pandemic.

Every time there is an election, there are two election deputies, said Ballweg. One representing Republican, one representing Democrat so that there isnt anybody trying to sway the vote one way or the other. That didnt happen in many of these locations.

Kay James, the former long-time editor of the Wisconsin Dells Events, expressed concern with the investigations, saying that the issues were not as pressing as they appear. She added that people with disabilities need assistance with taking absentee ballots to the polls and that under your laws, it is not allowed and disenfranchises them.

Under the laws that we proposed in the Legislature this year, it was allowed, said Ballweg. It currently is allowed that you can designate someone to be the person to drop off your ballot.

Another local resident, Debbie Kinder, asked Ballweg about the Wisconsin River corridor in the area, which she cited as a state natural area for the most part. Kinder was the president of the Stewards of the Dells of the Wisconsin River, an organization dedicated to preservation of the corridor containing the Upper and Lower Dells on the river, until May 10.

There are places where that state natural area is very thin and there are also private properties along the corridor, said Kinder. We are trying to make sure those properties are protected and the main piece that we have to help us with that is the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund.

The fund was created in 1989 to preserve natural communities, protect fisheries and water quality and expand outdoor recreation opportunities.

Kinder added that the fund was used for Newport Park in Lake Delton. Ballweg said she advocates for the fund and that the fund was reauthorized for the next four years in the most recent state budget at $3.25 million per year.

Part of my role on joint finance (the Legislatures budget committee) this year was digging into the DNR part of the state budget, said Ballweg. We were authorizing funding that was never asked for. What we tried to do in this is to right-size a little bit of the money that was going to be available for stewardship.

Ballweg said there are a couple stewardship requests to finance per month. To improve relations between municipalities and the DNR, she said, the Legislature increased the value of return per acre of land that the DNR pays to the municipalities.

Kinder asked Ballweg and Dallman about the division within state government between the Republican-controlled legislature and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers. Ballweg responded by stating that 90 percent of everything passed through state government has bipartisan support.

She cited the state budget that Evers proposed and that the Legislature and the budget committee remade and which he ultimately signed. An increase in meat processing, dairy export funding and legislation making it easier for family farms to transfer farm equipment following a death in the family were written and supported by Ballweg.

Rep. Tony Kurtz, R-Wonewoc, introduced the idea for meat processing, which Evers supported.

We did change the governors bill a little bit, said Ballweg. We put in some enhancements for reporting and metrics. We said that we wanted DATCP (Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection) to work with Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC). The governor only had in milk and dairy and row crops, but he didnt have ginseng and wood products.

Ballweg acknowledged differences with the governor over how elections are conducted. Evers also vetoed several Republican bills that would have limited abortion rights. She also mentioned conflicts with the governor regarding allocation of federal COVID relief funds.

Gerrymandering and district maps were another concern of Kinders. She said that despite the popular vote electing a Democratic governor and attorney general, the maps all but guarantee a Republican-controlled state Legislature.

We had a lot of seats flip last election, said Dallman in response to Kinders claims. The hard part of the maps is, and the governor said this himself, is the way the geography is of our state, its hard to not have a Republican Legislature, noting the concentration of Democratic voters in Milwaukee and Madison.

Kinder and James were critical of the possible loss of abortion rights. Ballweg responded by expressing her belief that life begins at conception but that the state will continue negotiations regarding the abortion issue and that Planned Parenthood would remain in existence, but would likely no longer perform abortions if Wisconsins 1849 abortion ban is allowed to resume once Roe is overturned.
COLUMBUS  Jacob Flood will serve as the next superintendent of the Columbus School District.

The Columbus School District Board of Education approved a two-year contract for Flood during a special board meeting on Tuesday. Flood will be taking over for Annette Deuman who will be retiring on July 1 following seven years in the role.

Flood is currently the Director of Curriculum and Instruction for the Kewaskum School District. Prior to this position, he served as an elementary school principal in Kewaskum and before that, as an intermediate school principal in Waupun. His teaching experience was at the middle school level in Lomira and Beloit. He is currently in a doctoral program at Cardinal Stritch University.

Twenty-eight candidates applied for the position. After video interviews and on-site interviews with semifinalists, the board narrowed it down to three finalists. Each of the finalists spent a day in the district touring the community and visiting the schools. That evening they met with a stakeholder group and the board for a final interview.

The Columbus School District Board of Education is thrilled to introduce Mr. Jacob Flood to the community as our next Superintendent, Columbus School Board President Julie Hajewski said in a press release. We are extremely appreciative of the student, staff, parent, and community stakeholders that participated in the reliable and proven process of the superintendent search firm utilized by the district, McPherson and Jacobson. This process helped the board to identify the priorities of our stakeholders and match those priorities with the best qualified candidate. We cant wait to begin our work with Mr. Flood on July 1 to continue to ensure that our students are community, career, and college ready.

Follow Terri Pederson on Twitter @tlp53916 or contact her at 920-356-6760.

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WAUPUN  A freeze on state educational funding could have dire consequences for the Waupun Area School District, officials warned, prompting the district to possibly consider going to referendum in the fall.

Superintendent Steve Hill and Director of Business Services Carrie Hintze reported that news to the Waupun City Council on Tuesday night  part of ongoing cooperation between the city and the district that has historically been a hallmark of local municipal leadership.

We are pleased to hear you have a healthy fund balance, so just saying, joked Hill about the city's earlier audit report.

So we know where to look, Hintze said.

On the serious side, Hintze said, It has been hard ever since I started working in this business environment, but funding has always been a challenge for schools, and its getting more and more so as the years progress.

In planning for the current school year the district had been counting on a $200 to $250 increase per student. That translates into $400,000 to $500,000 in revenue to cover increased operating expenses, raises for staff, benefit increases and more.

Unfortunately, Hintze said, the state Legislature decided that with increased COVID-19 recovery funds, an increase in regular aid was not needed. Federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds may not be used to cover general operating costs, however, leaving a shortfall that could only be filled using fund balance. While the fund balance  often called reserve funds  is still healthy, it cannot be used continuously without adversely affecting the districts financial stability, bond rating and more.

Their take on the situation was we were getting all of these ESSER dollars  three issuances of federal aid  and we should have plenty of money and therefore have no need for an increase in revenue limit," said Hintze.

The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund (ESSER) is a $122 billion pot of money included in ARPA to help schools safely reopen. The funding allows for expenses that reduce the pandemics impacts on students through the purchase of health screening tools, funds for learning loss and additional resources to address the mental well-being of students impacted by the isolation of the lockdown.

The formula for revenue limits is simple, according to Hintze.

They take a look at our three-year rolling average of students, we have a base amount per member, then there are adjustments for unusual expenses (students with special needs), Hintze said. They take that student dollar total, the state tells us how much theyre going to provide, and the rest comes from our taxpayers.

That accounts for 90% of district revenue, with the rest coming from a variety of other sources. Revenue will be the same for the next academic year as well, with no increases.

According to Hill, private school vouchers represent the loss of about $10,000 per student  not enough to warrant staff cuts but possibly resulting in the loss of curriculum offerings for non-essential classes. That includes Advanced Placement classes where students can get college credits for classes attended in high school.

The state's allowance per student varies from district to district, with some receiving as much as $14,000 per student. According to Hintze, due to Wisconsins Act 10, conservative districts are penalized for spending less and/or being more fiscally responsible.

The district levies approximately $1 million annually for school vouchers, which are funds that allow income-eligible families to enroll their children in private schools. This is another drain on district funds, according to Hill.

The positive impact this year was that the school tax rate dropped significantly this year, said Hintze. The Fund 10 (general) levy was down approximately $500,000. Most taxpayers did see a significant drop in their taxes, at least as far as the school portion went.

The district is doing what it can to adjust for the challenges ahead.

We dont have extra money through ESSER funds, Hill said. We have exactly the same amount as we did last year, but of course costs have risen and we need to use 20% of it for COVID learning loss. That creates a fiscal problem for us. I will be recommending to the School Board that we ask for an operational referendum. Referendums do allow districts to exceed the state-imposed revenue caps  obviously only with voter approval."

He added that seven in every 10 school districts in the state have gone or plan to go to such a referendum to meet their financial needs.

"The funding formula is broken," he said. "Its not flawed. It's straight-up broken."

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A group of students was able to get hands-on knowledge of how a local farm operates on Wednesday.

The Portage FFA held Food for America at Gumz Farms to show fourth and fifth graders what goes on at farms. Students from the Portage Area School District spent the day on the farm and got to learn about agriculture to see where there food comes from.

Gumz Farms is a fourth-generation, family-owned farm off of County Road O in Endeavor. The farm produces red potatoes, onions, peppermint, spearmint, carrots, field corn and soybeans.

Brenna Babcock is an Ag teacher for the Portage Community school district. She teaches at Bartels Middle School and is also a Portage FFA advisor.

Food for America is an opportunity for students to get first-hand experience at a local farm and learn more about agriculture, Babcock said. The material they will learn today is all from the students.

Babcock explained that the Portage Middle and High School students who are Portage FFA members came up with the curriculum for the students on Wednesday.

The students came up with the lessons and will be leading the younger students today, Babcock said.

There were eight stations, including onions, potatoes and petting zoo, throughout the farm that students would go for 10-15 minute lesson about an aspect of the farm.

Babcock said that in the past, the event had been just for fourth grade students in the Portage Area School District, but due to COVID-19 there were fifth graders also at Gumz Farms.

There were so many students that the day was broken into two sections. One group of three buses arrived at Gumz Farm in the morning and a second group arrived in the afternoon.

Linda Gumz was stationed at the onion station where fourth graders learned about the equipment used for harvesting and packaging the onions.

Of course it smells like onions, its an onion farm, Gumz told the group of students as they walked into a garage full of harvesting equipment where she explained the process of harvesting onions.

Student then took a short walk inside to see how the onions were packaged. They got a front row seat at seeing the equipment packaging 50-lb bags of onions.

It is really important for these students get a look at how their food is made, Josh Capodarco said. This is a way they get to see their neighbors and others in the community doing the work to feed our area, state and country.

Capodarco is an Ag teacher at Portage High School and is a Portage FFA advisor. He said Gumz Farms is great for the day because it allows students to see everything that makes a farm work, from the buildings to the people and the food products.

Theres a lot of space here and a lot for the kids to check out, Capodarco said. This really is a great place for this because the kids get to see every single step in the food process but pulling the plant from the ground.

Capocardco said one of the interesting things about the farm is that they distill mint into mint oil.

There was a student station devoted to mint distilling, turning the mint plant into mint oil, at Gumz Farm led by Brock Ashley. Ashley explained to the fourth graders how the harvested mint comes to the farm in a truck and is processed.

Ashley said Gumz Farms processes spearmint and peppermint to make their mint oil.

Gumz Farms in owned by brothers Richard and Roderick Gumz. Richard Gumz said the students would be learning a lot on the farm and a lot about safety on a farm.

Its really good seeing all the kids out here today and its great weather, Richard Gumz said. Theres less farmers than there used to be so for these kids to get this hands-on knowledge is great.

This was the first year Gumz Farms was chosen by the Portage FFA. Babcock said in the past the event was held at an area dairy farm. Richard Gumz said if everything went well on Wednesday he would consider holding the event again in the future.

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FOND DU LAC  The prosecution continued its case against Gregory Spittel, 33, Waupun, on Wednesday. First responding officers took the stand to describe what they experienced the morning of Aug. 24, 2019, when Carol Foremans body was found in Spittels basement.

Waupun Police Officer Alexandra Tipton, who was the first to respond to the home the morning following the 911 call, was the first to take the stand.

Foreman died a few days after being found near death in Spittels basement. Spittel, who is accused of causing her death, entered the third day of his trial on Wednesday.

Spittel faces felony charges of first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless endangering safety, two counts of aggravated battery, false imprisonment, intimidating witnesses and battery or threat to a judge, prosecutor or law enforcement officer.

He faces misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct, resisting or obstructing an officer, possession of cocaine and possession drug paraphernalia. If found guilty of first-degree homicide, he faces a mandatory life sentence.

Spittel is being tried in the courtroom of Fond du Lac Circuit Court Judge Paul Czisny.

Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney asked Tipton if she believed Spittel was intoxicated that morning.

He had a strong order of intoxicants, appeared unsteady, and his speech was choppy and not fluent, Tipton replied.

Spittel was difficult to calm down, Tipton said.

At times he would begin to talk to me, but then he would spike back up to screaming and yelling, Tipton said.

Spittel began acting as if he wanted to attack by staring directly at her, clenching his fist and advancing toward her, Tipton testified.

He was screaming, shes dead. It doesnt matter. My life is over  kill me, Tipton said.

Tipton said she continued to try to calm him down, but he became more upset and threw a couch cushion and plastic alcohol bottle at her.

Tipton commanded him to stop several times before striking him with an electronic control device. Spittel continued to resist, but she and another officer were able to get Spittel handcuffed behind his back.

Spittel was also complaining after recently being notified that he was mailed paperwork for possession of cocaine and paraphernalia charges after being told by an officer that he would not be charged.

Tipton said she was not able to help care for Foreman at the time.

I was not able to offer assistance and address her medical needs due to his behaviors, Tipton said.

Another officer, who had paramedic experience, was in the basement assisting Foreman but had to return upstairs to assist Tipton. Tipton said the officer returned downstairs after Spittel was brought back under control.

Tipton did ask for additional help and a Fond du Lac Sheriffs patrol deputy responded.

Spittel was saying, Shes my everything. I do not care, Tipton said.

Miranda Rights were read to Spittel while Spittel was at Waupun Memorial Hospital; however, he was not being charged with homicide at that time, Tipton said.

Defense attorney Timothy Drewa asked where Tipton passed by Spittel when she first tried to go down in the basement, and Tipton said she passed by at the top of the stairs.

Drewa also asked about possible injuries Spittel might have gotten while being arrested and with walking around the home without shoes, since there was broken glass left on the floor.

Drewa also asked if Tipton wore any protective gear in the home, and she responded that she wore gloves to protect herself.

Fond du Lac County Sheriffs Office Patrol Officer Andrew Jagdfeld also testified on Wednesday. Jagdfeld said he responded in about 13 minutes after the call for assistance. He never went into the basement.

He did help transfer Spittel to the hospital and offered a recorder to be used in the hospital.

He said that about seven days prior that they made arrangements for Foreman to spend the night, Jagdfeld said. Theyd have a cookout and around 7 a.m. they would pick up Spittels boys for the day.

Spittel told the officers that his house was spotless, and he had cleaned the house before Foreman arrived that day.

Jagdfeld said Spittel also told them that what he was wearing the night before and that he had slept in the boxer shorts that he was wearing the morning when officers arrived.

He also said he had drank before Foreman arrived at his home the night before.

Spittels other attorney Jaclyn Shelton cross-examined Jagdfeld. Shelton brought up how many people were in the home that day.

You were the third officer in the home, Shelton said, adding that there were also EMS and firefighters who were in the house.

Everyone was able to walk through the house, Shelton said.

I was not filled in what was going on in the basement, Jagdfeld said. Basically it was an EMS situation at that time.

The case is ongoing this week and is currently scheduled to end on Friday.

Follow Terri Pederson on Twitter @tlp53916 or contact her at 920-356-6760.

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The agency that administers elections in Wisconsin would be completely overhauled or outright abolished under plans proposed by all four top Republicans running to unseat Democratic Gov. Tony Evers this fall.

Construction business owner Tim Michels, the most recent entrant in the crowded field of Republicans running for governor in the Aug. 9 primary, unveiled his election plan on Thursday, which would, among other measures, repeal all previous election guidance issued by the Wisconsin Elections Commission to clerks across the state and terminate the six members of the bipartisan commission  three Republicans and three Democrats  and replace them with new appointments.

Michels' plan would drastically alter the state Elections Commission but also stops short of calls by other top GOP contenders to completely abolish the agency, which has come under fire from Republicans for how the 2020 election was administered due to unfounded claims of widespread fraud and mounting pressure from former President Donald Trump.

My plan is a fresh start, and allows us to bring in or bring back people who are ready to get to work to fix our elections, not make the problem worse," Michels said in a statement.

Former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, the frontrunner in the race based on recent polling, issued a statement shortly after Michels' announced his plan blasting the proposal for not going far enough.

Anyone who has been paying attention knows that the Wisconsin Elections Commission cannot be reformed, Kleefisch said. It must be abolished.

Like Kleefisch, fellow GOP gubernatorial candidates Kevin Nicholson, a business owner and former Marine, and Rep. Timothy Ramthun, R-Campbellsport, have called for a complete dismantling of the state Elections Commission. Both Ramthun and Nicholson have said they want to see the Elections Commission eliminated and oversight of elections moved to the Secretary of State's Office. Kleefisch's proposal entails creating a new office within the state Department of Justice to oversee elections.

Earlier this year, former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who was hired by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, to lead the one-party review of the 2020 election at a cost of $676,000 to taxpayers, listed the "elimination and dismantling" of the Elections Commission as one of his top recommendations to the Legislature.

Vos, who has repeatedly extended Gableman's contract with the state despite no evidence of widespread fraud in the now 18-month-old election, has been adamantly opposed to eliminating the commission. Vos has also rejected Gableman's recommendation that the Legislature consider decertifying the results of the 2020 election, something experts and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have described as a constitutional impossibility.

Calls to dismantle the Elections Commission come just six years after the agency was formed in 2016 by former Gov. Scott Walker and Republican lawmakers to replace the nonpartisan Government Accountability Board, which itself was created in 2008 in the wake of the 2001 legislative caucus scandal that saw lawmakers from both parties convicted of using taxpayer resources to campaign.

The GAB came under fire from Republicans for its role in an investigation into coordination between Walker's 2012 recall campaign and supposedly independent political groups.

Plan details

Michels' plan to reform the Elections Commission includes calling the Legislature into a special session on his first day as governor to vote to remove the agency's six commissioners within a month. It would also terminate all senior staff at the agency and require them to reapply under the newly appointed commission.

Any staff member who participated in issuing guidance that did not comply with state law would be prohibited from rejoining the agency. Republicans have taken aim at agency guidance provided in 2020 to not send poll workers to nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic.

His plan would also ban private grant funding for administering elections and the use of unstaffed absentee ballot drop boxes. He also calls for a twice annual purge of dead and inactive voters from the polls. Currently, the commission performs a daily check on voters who are dead or have become ineligible. Voters who have not cast ballots in four years are purged from voter rolls.

Vos and Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg, who have said they oppose abolishing the state Elections Commission, did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday.

Ann Jacobs, the Democratic chair of the Elections Commission, described Michels' plan as "craziness" in a tweet Thursday.

"It demonstrates a total lack of understanding how elections work," Jacobs said. "There would be no guidance for elections at all? And no staff? Just an empty office? Who will administer registrations?"

The winner of the Aug. 9 primary will go on to face Evers in the Nov. 8 general election.

Evers, who has vetoed multiple bills passed by the GOP-led Legislature aimed at putting restrictions on elections, has said he opposes any effort to make voting harder in Wisconsin.

"All eligible voters should be able to vote," Evers tweeted Thursday. "I will continue to veto any radical legislation that makes it harder to access the ballot box."
RACINE  A father of five was killed and two others were shot on Racine's north side Tuesday night, a night that included multiple reports of shots being fired, the Racine Police Department confirmed Wednesday morning.

The man who died has been identified by his fiancee as Kvonte Kidd-Ellis Sr., 30. He had two daughters and three sons, the oldest of them being 13 years old. His youngest child, KiArah, was born three months ago.

No arrests or suspects have been reported. Those who were shot have not yet been publicly identified by authorities.

Kidd-Ellis was found by first responders in front of a home on the 1400 block of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive just after 9 p.m. Tuesday.

He was taken to a hospital and died there, police said.

In messages to The Journal Times, Kidd-Ellis' fiancee, Nisha Bostick, said she was out of state at the time of his death; as of Wednesday afternoon, she was still trying to make it home to Wisconsin from Texas.

Gunfire

The 1400 block of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive is south of Kewaunee Street, north of Albert Street and about three blocks west of Douglas Avenue (Highway 32).

There was a strong police presence in that area Tuesday night after the shootings, with dozens of evidence markers being placed on the street and on sidewalks, bullets seen in the street, and officers taking statements from witnesses.

Later in the night, two other men arrived at Ascension All Saints Hospital suffering from gunshot wounds, the RPD reported; one had been shot in the abdomen and leg, the other in the shoulder and back.

The man shot in the shoulder and back was treated at the hospital and released by morning, the RPD reported. The other's wounds were more serious, and he was taken via Flight for Life to a Milwaukee area hospital and was reported to be in stable condition as of Wednesday morning.

Other shots fired reports that did not yield any reported injuries included near the intersection of Marquette and Albert streets and on the 1500 block of MLK Drive, just north of where the deadly shooting was.

Both of those men were also shot on the 1400 block of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, Sgt. Kristi Wilcox of the RPD confirmed.

The Tuesday shootings came as summer temperatures arrive in southeastern Wisconsin. Wednesday saw the highest temperatures recorded in the area so far in 2022, surpassing 80 degrees Fahrenheit for the first time this year.

Police are asking witnesses to call the RPD Investigations Unit at 262-635-7756, or to contact Crime Stoppers at 262-636-9330 or via the p3 app. The investigation remains ongoing.
Starting May 23, the Empire Builder passenger train that rolls through northern Montana will return to daily service, Amtrak officials said.

Amtrak's summer schedule is rolling back reductions made in January due to what the company described as COVID-19-driven workforce shortages.

Daily service will be restored not only for the Empire Builder, but for the California Zephyr, Lake Shore Limited and Southwest Chief as well.

Amtrak officials said the expanded frequencies and service restoration were made possible by the company's existing workforce and recruitment efforts, which have resulted in more than 1,500 new employees this year. Officials said Wednesday the train had been running five days a week.

Thanks to our dedicated existing employees and newly-hired staff, we are thrilled to expand our scheduled service just in time to meet customers rising demand for travel this summer, Stephen Gardner, CEO at Amtrak, said in a May 9 news release. We are recruiting and training additional employees nationwide to accelerate our recovery from the pandemic and to support service growth. Theres never been a better time to come work at Amtrak.

U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., praised the return of service and noted his bill reinstating furloughed Amtrak employees and rolling back previous service reductions to the Empire Builder was part of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).

This announcement is long overdue, and its great news for folks living on the Hi-Line who depend on daily Amtrak service to support our states rural economies and to stay connected to family and friends, Tester said in a news release, which noted he was the only member of Montanas congressional delegation to vote for the ARPA.

Amtrak officials in June 2020 decreased service from seven days to three for several routes, including the Empire Builder, which runs along the Hi-Line with stations from Wolf Point to Libby. Company officials noted ridership fell 97% in a matter of weeks when the coronavirus hit.

Ridership on the route dropped 40% from Fiscal Year 2019 to FY 2020. In FY 2019, 420,855 people rode the Empire Builder. In FY 2020, that was 253,486. In 2018, 428,854 customers rode the Amtrak Empire Builder, according to figures provided by Amtrak.

In February, Amtrak announced new cleaner, faster and more fuel-efficient locomotives on the Empire Route. Engines 301 and 302 were among the first of 75 locomotives being delivered that Amtrak and Siemens Mobility developed. The ALC-42 locomotive series are made in the United States and part of the Siemens Charger group of locomotives.

The Empire Builder travels about 2,200 miles between Chicago and the Pacific Northwest, with a choice of Seattle or Portland as a start or end point, Amtrak says. The trip takes about 45 hours to complete with stops in Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon.

The Empire Builder was inaugurated by the Great Northern Railway and departed Chicago June 10, 1929, but it was christened the next day in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the GNR had its headquarters and where its mainline to Seattle began.

It was named for James J. Hill  the Empire Builder, who in the late 19th century founded what became Great Northern, Amtrak said in a June 11, 2019, news release marking the lines 90th anniversary.

Assistant editor Phil Drake can be reached at 406-231-9021.

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Seeing the invisible: W&M physicists designing optical device to spot hidden objects

A senior physics major at William & Mary, Alex Toyryla is working with a team of William & Mary physicists on a project funded by the U.S. Department of Defenses Army Research Office with the goal of developing a device to see invisible threats, such as unexploded ordnance. Photo by Adrienne Berard Photo - of - Hide Caption

Alex Toyryla was 12 years old when he first learned that something hidden could kill him. In 2013, his family moved to Laos, a nation upon which 2.5 million tons of U.S. munitions were dropped during the Vietnam War  and about a third of those bombs failed to detonate. They are scattered throughout Laos, buried under farmland or lodged in gullies, ready to explode.

Now a senior physics major at William & Mary, Toyryla is working with a team of William & Mary physicists on a project funded by the U.S. Department of Defenses Army Research Office with the goal of developing a device to see invisible threats, such as unexploded ordnance.

We dropped a lot of bombs over there, and theyre still causing so many problems, Toyryla said. Progress on getting rid of them has been extremely slow over the last 50 years, so one potential application for what were developing could be to help pinpoint the location of all these munitions.

Toyryla is careful to speak in hypothetical terms because what the team of researchers is developing has extremely broad application potential  everything from assisting in cardiac surgeries to spotting oil reserves, submarines and WMDs. They are designing a device with the capacity to see what is invisible to the naked eye.

For the most part, when people think about visibility, they think about the light they can see, explained W&M Professor of Physics Irina Novikova, who is a principal investigator on the project. For quantum physicists like Novikova, visibility represents the shorter waves within a much larger ocean of electromagnetic radiation.

Both magnetic and electric fields interact with matter, but the interaction of an electric field is usually about 100 times stronger than that of the magnetic field, which is why most modern detectors are focused on the electro side of optics. Novikova, her students and collaborators at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory are developing a detector tuned to the magnetic side.

Our project is to build an atomic magnetometer, which means a device which measures magnetic field based on atoms, Novikova said. What we are doing is very different from a lot of research going on in this area, because we want to measure not only the magnitude of the magnetic field with good precision, but also its direction. That provides very valuable information about whatever object you're studying.

Magnitude and direction

Existing atomic magnetometers only measure the magnitude of a magnetic field, but not its direction, Novikova explained. This gives an incomplete picture of how an object interacts with a magnetic field, especially when it interacts with a large magnetic field over a long period of time.

Every magnetic field is a vector, explained Mario Gonzalez Maldonado, a lead on the project and a postdoc researcher in W&Ms Department of Physics. That means you need to know both its strength and its direction. You cannot say you really know whats going on if you are only measuring change in one of those variables.

Gonzalez Maldonado is running experiments and analyzing data through artificial intelligence to drill down and visualize the smallest possible magnetic variation  roughly the size of the magnetic field created by a beating human heart. The smaller the change he can detect, the larger the range of hidden objects he can spot, which is essential to the project, Novikova explained, because everything on the planet interacts with Earths magnetic field in some way.

Right now, existing atomic magnetometers and some superconducting magnetometers are designed for measuring very small magnetic fields, which means that when it comes to measuring changes in Earth's magnetic field, there is a problem, Novikova said. Our method is intrinsically compatible in operating in Earth's magnetic field and looking at the small changes compared to the Earth's magnetic field.

Novikova is quick to add that she and her fellow physicists are still in the exploratory stage of the project, which is in the first year of an expected four-year timeframe. She likens the work to designing a tuning fork, which requires constant discovery and reinterpretation as the team learns more about the frequencies it can transmit and receive.

In a way, this is a kind of resonance tuning, but for matter not sound, she explained. Small signals at the right frequency give a large optical response. Hearing is a good analogy, though, because we triangulate to make sense of noise. We listen for changes in frequency or pitch and we also listen for changes in amplitude or magnitude, if its getting louder. We cant have a clear picture of what we are hearing unless we account for multiple variables at once.

Detection and navigation

For the Department of Defense, the detection of magnetic anomalies to help locate hidden objects like submarines or centrifuges is clearly one promising potential application for the device, Novikova said, but the device could also work in reverse. For example, if a variable such as the local magnitude of the Earths magnetic field is known, then the device could be programmed to solve for direction.

This would mean the device could be a powerful navigation tool, Novikova explained. It would use the Earths field instead of GPS, which is also obviously something that also appeals to the DoD  GPS-less navigation.

The precise measurement of magnetic fields requires the use of a variety of instruments, all taking advantage of a broad range of physical phenomena, Novikova explained. The team fires infrared lasers, set to specific frequencies, through a series of lenses into a crockpot-sized magnetic shielding chamber containing rubidium atomic vapor. The vapor interacts with the laser light in such a way that, based on how it is absorbed, it can be used to determine magnetic field strength and direction.

When we change the angle of the magnetic field, or the direction of it, then the transmission through the chamber changes at specific frequencies, so that gives us the basis for the angle and strength of the field compared to our system at any given time, said Toyryla, who will be joining the optics group at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory after he graduates this month.

The ultimate goal of the magnetometer device is to combine accuracy, long-term stability and vector measurement capability into one single sensing unit roughly the size of a computer chip, Toyryla explained. The device will be electromagnetically silent and produce no fields whatsoever outside the sensor reading. At such a small scale, it will both be commercially viable and have a small enough system to limit interference.

We use atomic physics to build sensors because atoms are really reliable, Novikova said. An atom is an absolute tuning fork, which doesnt change its tone and we know quite well which frequencies it can ring. They are very stable and isolated from the environment, so temperature and pressure dont affect them. If you want to measure something with extreme accuracy, you link to atomic frequencies. What were developing is going to be a very precise device.
Activists across North Dakota are joining others around the country in holding rallies for reproductive rights on Saturday.

The events in Bismarck, Fargo, Grand Forks, Minot and many other U.S. cities are in response to a leaked U.S. Supreme Court draft opinion that portends to strike down abortion rights rendered in the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling.

Groups involved in the North Dakota rallies include ACLU North Dakota, ERA Now, North Dakota WIN Fund, North Dakota Womens Network, Planned Parenthood North Central States, Prairie Action ND and the Red River Womens Clinic in Fargo, North Dakotas only abortion provider.

"We do know data shows time after time, the majority of Americans don't want abortion to be totally banned," North Dakota Womens Network Executive Director Kristie Wolff told Prairie Public. "They don't want Roe to go away. In fact, we can even see it in the personhood initiative that was in front of North Dakota voters several years ago. That was voted down by North Dakota voters. It's not something people want."

The 2014 "personhood" measure would have defined life as beginning at conception; 64% of voters opposed it.

The Bismarck rally is from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday at the state Capitol. It will include speakers, sign-making and a march around the Capitol mall, Wolff said.

The rallies will come three days after the U.S. Senate fell short in an effort toward enshrining Roe v. Wade abortion access as federal law, blocked by a Republican filibuster, according to The Associated Press. The vote was almost along party lines -- 51-49 against proceeding, with 60 votes needed to move ahead.

North Dakotas two senators, both Republicans, opposed the legislation.

Sen. John Hoeven said it would remove nearly all protections for the unborn, effectively allowing abortion up until birth across the country. At the same time, the bill would block state pro-life laws, including those in North Dakota, and prevent states from enacting their own pro-life legislation in the future.

Sen. Kevin Cramer said, This extreme measure destroys protections for the most vulnerable by usurping states rights to protect life. The sanctity of life is not a political fight, but a fight for humanity itself. It is unconscionable for Democrats to not only attempt to legislate the legalization of abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, but also override the will of states and their citizens.

North Dakota is one of about a dozen states that have laws that would come into force if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. The 2007 North Dakota law makes it a felony to perform an abortion unless necessary to prevent the womans death, or in cases of rape or incest. Violations would be punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Red River Womens Clinic Director Tammi Kromenaker has told AP that if abortion becomes illegal in North Dakota, she plans to open a clinic in Minnesota, where theres more protection for abortions.

North Dakota recorded 1,171 abortions in 2020, according to the latest figures available from the state Health Department. The total includes 833 North Dakota residents and 338 women from other states, particularly Minnesota and South Dakota, who came to North Dakota for the procedure.

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Shen Yueyue (C), Vice-Chairperson of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress and President of the All-China Women's Federation, conducts an investigation tour of Beijing from April 20 to 22. [China Women's News/Yang Rui]

Shen Yueyue, Vice-Chairperson of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress and President of the All-China Women's Federation (ACWF), conducted an investigation tour of Beijing's Haidian, Tongzhou and Dongcheng districts from April 20 to 22.

When visiting residential communities, schools and families, Shen talked with local women, teachers, parents, women volunteers and staff members from women's federations at the grassroots level. Shen learned about their sense of fulfillment, happiness and security brought by the improvement of their daily lives and their access to healthcare, education and other public services.

Noting the importance of carrying out publicity and education activities for women to greet the convening of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, Shen stressed organizing women role models from all walks of life to share their stories and hard work at their posts, encouraging ordinary women to talk about their happy lives, and rallying women closely around the Party.

Shen urged giving full play to women's unique role in protecting their families and themselves from the epidemic and in epidemic containment in their communities, contributing their strength to coordinating epidemic prevention and control with economic and social development.

Efforts should be made to strengthen the building of family, family education and family traditions, advance the implementation of core socialist values, help millions of families cultivate positive family values in the new era, promote the healthy growth and all-around development of children, as well as pay attention to and care for ordinary women, especially women and children in need.

Shen Yueyue (C), Vice-Chairperson of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress and President of the All-China Women's Federation, visits a residential community during an investigation tour of Beijing from April 20 to 22. [China Women's News/Yang Rui]

In family education guidance service stations, school-family-community cooperative education consulting rooms and parent's schools and children's homes in communities, Shen studied together with local residents the important discourses made by General Secretary Xi Jinping on family, family education and family traditions, and she learned in detail about the progress in the implementation of the law on family education promotion and the school-family-community cooperative education.

Shen Yueyue (C), Vice-Chairperson of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress and President of the All-China Women's Federation, conducts an investigation tour of Beijing from April 20 to 22. [China Women's News/Yang Rui]

Shen Yueyue, Vice-Chairperson of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress and President of the All-China Women's Federation, attends a symposium during her investigation tour. [China Women's News/Yang Rui]

Shen learned about the latest achievements on and further plan of family and women's work and the implementation of the school-family-community cooperative education of Beijing at a symposium. She hailed the city's experience and practices in family and women's work, and she called for more efforts on fulfilling the fundamental task of fostering virtue through education and ensuring the implementation of all tasks of family education.

When visiting the family of Yang Xin, a medical worker who went to Northeast China's Jilin Province to support the epidemic containment, Shen learned about the family members' needs in daily life and family education, expressed thanks for the family's contributions to the anti-epidemic fight, and encouraged them to motivate more families to contribute to the battle against the epidemic.

During a visit to the home of Li Fanglin, a 97-year-old retired woman cadre, Shen expressed appreciation for Li's contributions to the women's cause, wished her a long and happy life, and pledged to carry forward the good traditions of former cadres of the women's federation and strive for more achievements in the work of the women's federation.

Cai Shumin, Vice-President and Member of the Secretariat of the ACWF, also attended the investigation tour.

(Source: China Women's News/Translated and edited by Women of China)
Glasgow is a place with an ancient history and unique culture. Glaswegians, as its citizens are called, are known for their distinctive accent and dialect. The name Glasgow comes from Brittonic or Brythonic, an ancient Celtic language, and means green hollow or glen, believed to refer to a ravine near the Glasgow Cathedral. Others believe it has been derived from the old Gaelic words Glas Caomh, meaning a dear green place  a moniker that some still use to refer to the city. In modern Celtic, the citys name is Glaschu. Historically an industrial city, arts and culture lovers have much to explore in Glasgow, home to the Scottish Opera, Scottish Ballet, and National Theatre of Scotland. Glasgow lies in the vicinity of stories Loch Lomond and The Trossachs National Park, making it a popular hub for nature lovers.

Geography And Climate Of Glasgow

A wide view looking down on a street, buildings, and rooftops in Glasgow city center, Scotland, United Kingdom.

Glasgow is a port on the River Clyde about 32 km from its mouth in the North Atlantic, in the region known as the western Lowlands. It lies about 45-72 km west of Edinburgh. The citys neighborhoods sprawl along most of the lower Clyde valley, and most government and business sectors can be found on the northern side of the river. Before 1975, Glasgow was part of old Lanarkshire County. From 1975 to 1996, it became part of the Strathclyde Region. Since 1997, Glasgow has been named a Council Area, one of 32 in Scotland.

Due to its proximity to the North Atlantic, Glasgow experiences an oceanic climate as per the Koppen Climate Classification. Winters are generally cool, with cloudy skies and average daytime temperatures of about 7.2 C from December through February. Extreme cold and heavy snowfall are rare. The summers are relatively cool, with conditions that can be pretty variable. Daytime highs range from 18.3 C to just under 19.4C from June through August. Humidity and rain are frequent, but heat spells are rare. Spring is mild, and the volatile weather of the summer often settles into more stable autumn. Rain is frequent all year round, with an average of 170 rainy days per year.

History Of Glasgow

The Necropolis in Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom. Editorial credit: Ion Mes / Shutterstock.com

Glasgow has been a natural location for settlement. Excavations have uncovered some evidence of a prehistoric village on the present-day site of the city. The Romans reached the area in the 2nd century AD, building what is known as the Antonine Wall in 154 AD. Today, parts of it, along with other Roman artifacts, are available to view at the Hunterian Museum. It is believed that Glasgow became a religious center after Saint Mungo, also known as St. Kentigern, founded a cathedral in 540. Archaeological digs in the area have confirmed some aspects of the presence of a religious community in the 6th century. The Glasgow Cathedral, which opened in 1197 on the same site, is dedicated to St. Mungo. Glasgow became a royal burgh in 1450. The University of Glasgow was established in 1451 and became a driver of the citys academic and intellectual life. The diocese was elevated to the status of the Archdiocese of Glasgow in 1492. When the Scottish and English royalty became unified in 1603, it launched centuries of growth as Glasgow became a major port in Britains transatlantic trade with the West Indies and North America in rum, sugar, and tobacco. Glasgow was ripe for the onset of the Industrial Revolution, drawing in people from the surrounding areas and beyond. From the 20th into the 21st century, Glasgow transitioned into a modern city with a diversified population and economy.

The Population Of Glasgow

A view of the University of Glasgow on a beautiful summer day.

Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland and the fourth-largest in the United Kingdom. In 1801, the population was estimated at 77,000, which jumped to 147,000 by 1821 and 762,000 by 1901. The population peaked in 1925 at about 1,089,000 and remained relatively stable until the 1950s. At that time, Glasgow was one of Europe's most densely populated cities. In the ensuing decades, a government effort to spread the urban population to the suburbs resulted in the creation of new communities such as East Kibride and Cumbernauld in the 1960s. The move was intended to reduce pressure on the city's overcrowded inner-city neighborhoods. From the 1960s, the population began to drop by about 1% per year until the early 21st century, when it began a slow rise. The population of Glasgow (council area) is 593,245, according to 2011 census data, with the metropolitan area (Greater Glasgow) at 957,620. The wider Glasgow City Region, incorporating the outlying areas, has a population of 1.84 million, or about a third of all of Scotland.

Economy Of Glasgow

Buchanan Street in the city center, Glasgow, Scotland. Editorial credit: Ion Mes / Shutterstock.com

Located between the Scottish Highlands and Lowlands at the mouth of the Clyde, Glasgow transformed into a natural hub for commerce. The settlements early industries included agriculture, breweries, and fishing. Cured salmon was an early export commodity, with records of it being shipped to continental Europe in the 1490s. The Acts of Union in 1707 gave Scotland commercial access to the broader British Empire. At one time, it was home to more than half the total British trade in tobacco, importing up to 47 million pounds annually at its peak. Glasgow grew to become the largest seaport in Scotland and the tenth-largest (measured by tonnage) in Britain. The shipbuilding sector took advantage of its location, alongside the strong presence of the textiles, precision marine engineering, and chemical industries. The Scott family set up the first shipbuilding yard in 1711, and the industry quickly grew to become clustered along the Clyde. As a global shipbuilding center, the city was known for producing innovative vessels, some of which became famous, including the iconic Cutty Sark, launched in 1869, and the RMS Queen Mary, launched in 1934. With the largest economy in Scotland, heavy engineering and manufacturing continue to play a role in the citys economy in the 21st century, albeit a much-reduced one. Aerospace tech is a relatively new addition to the industry mix, along with communications and information technology and a significant push into biomedical technology and pharmaceuticals. Tourism has become more critical to the citys fortunes with a concerted effort at the government level.

Attractions In Glasgow

Glasgow Cathedral in Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom.

History buffs will enjoy simply walking through the old city, exploring buildings like the University of Glasgow Cloisters and uniquely atmospheric areas like the Glasgow Necropolis, a Victorian cemetery. The Glasgow Cathedral is even older, opened in 1197, and the citys oldest house, known as Provands Lordship built in 1471.

Main Hall of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom. Editorial credit: SunPanupong / Shutterstock.com

Streetscapes dating from the 17th and 18th centuries are preserved in the Glasgow Cross district, with many others displaying Victorian and art nouveau styles. Glasgow is a city of fascinating galleries and museums to explore, such as Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, the Gallery of Modern Art, and the Riverside Museum. The Hunterian Museum, established in 1807, is housed on the University of Glasgow campus. Along with its major cultural institutions, Glasgow has become famous for its street art scene and a lively independent music community to be experienced at many of the citys pubs and other venues.

From its ancient beginnings and industrial past, modern Glasgow has emerged as a city of culture, education, and diversified businesses, with a more and more diverse population. Because of its rich and varied past, it is a city with a unique local culture that has endured and flourished into the 21st century. Today it can be experienced as a vibrant and multi-layered city where a six-and-a-half-century old university is on the cutting edge of biotech, and respect for history blends with a trendy nightlife and restaurant scene.
Authorities have recovered the remains of two people who were reported missing in the region in separate cases, with no foul play suspected in either death.

The remains of Valene Little Bird, 41, of Fort Yates, who also went by Valene Addison, were found along the Missouri River shoreline late Tuesday, according to Bismarck police. The body of Tyler Schaeffer, 18, of Beulah, was recovered from the Knife River on Wednesday night, according to police in that city.

Authorities continue searching for two others in the region: Chase Hurdle, 18, of Bismarck; and Charles Bearstail, 64, of New Town.

Tyler Schaeffer

Schaeffer went missing in early May. His body was found Wednesday in the part of the Knife River that winds through Riverside Park in Beulah, Police Chief Frank Senn said. The state medical examiner will conduct an autopsy.

Everything leads toward it being an accidental death, Senn said.

Schaeffer was last seen on video from a local bank about 3 a.m. on May 1, according to Senn. Schaeffer seemed OK but had some impairment, the chief said, adding that there is some indication hed been drinking earlier.

All indications are that he was going out for a walk, Senn said.

The state wing of the Civil Air Patrol and crews from several area jurisdictions assisted in the search, the chief said.

Little Bird

An angler on Tuesday night found human remains along the Missouri River shoreline by Bismarck's water intake, and police responded, according to Lt. Luke Gardiner. An autopsy was conducted; results were not immediately released. Dental records were used to identify the remains as being those of Little Bird.

Family reported her missing to Bismarck police in January. Family had not seen her since June 2021. She was reported to be homeless and staying with friends when she went missing. An organized weekend search for her in late February turned up no traces.

It's unclear why family didn't report Little Bird missing for seven months, Gardiner said.

Police on Thursday said their initial investigation does not lead them to suspect foul play. The case remains under investigation.

Chase Hurdle

Hurdle, 18, walked away from Bismarck High School about 9 a.m. on Nov. 2. Police for several reasons now believe he might have jumped off the Memorial Bridge.

Hurdle was tracked by cellphone tower data as far as the Bank of North Dakota, which is near the bridge. Witnesses said he was seen on Memorial Bridge before reports came in about a man jumping off the bridge. A North Dakota Highway Patrol K-9 tracked a scent to the bridge and lost it where the man was seen jumping.

Police are asking anyone who walks along or boats on the Missouri River to watch for signs. Gardner said earlier this month that "The parents of Chase want closure, and if the individual that jumped off the bridge is him, the more awareness we have the better."

Charles Bearstail

Bearstail last contacted family or friends and last used his cellphone on April 24, and he was reported missing by his family three days later. Land, air and water searches have turned up no trace of him, according to the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation Emergency Operations Center.

Bearstail regularly took part in outdoors activities including hiking, camping and kayaking. His pickup truck was found at the Four Bears Park Point the day he was reported missing. Investigators believe he might have gone out on Lake Sakakawea.

Boaters, anglers, hikers and campers in the area are asked to watch for signs.

Four boat teams are being deployed on rotation on a daily basis, and ground teams are doing daily visual scans of the lake surface and shorelines. Drones are supporting the teams, according to Emergency Operations Center Director Emily Sitting Bear. Dozens of area agencies have helped with the response.

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Over 50m given to Welsh households to help with cost of living crisis

More than 50m has been provided to Welsh households to help tackle the cost of living crisis through a 150 cost of living payment.

The payments started in April and more people will be receiving their money in the coming weeks.

So far the payment has reached 332,710 homes across Wales.

Earlier this month we asked Wrexham Council when eligible residents in the county borough can expect to receive the payment, however we have yet to receive the information.

The 152m scheme is being delivered by local authorities on behalf of the Welsh Government. Support is being provided to all households in properties in council tax bands A to D, and all households which receive support from the Council Tax Reduction Scheme regardless of their council tax band.

Payments will be made as a single payment directly into peoples bank accounts if the local authority holds that information.

Where this information is not held, eligible households will need to complete a simple registration form. Local authorities will contact all eligible households to ask for the necessary details.

Separately, the Welsh Government is also providing a 25m discretionary fund to local authorities. This will allow councils to help people they consider to be in need of assistance, providing discretionary support as deemed appropriate to address local needs.

Rebecca Evans, Minister for Finance and Local Government, said: This payment is providing much needed relief to Welsh households, helping people cope with increasingly challenging circumstances.

Rising bills and rising prices will stretch budgets and force people into difficult decisions. This 150 payment is one of the ways in which we are alleviating some of that pressure.

Welsh councils have responded quickly to this crisis and I want to thank them for their efforts in getting this scheme up and running.

Well continue to do everything we can to provide support, but many of the key levers for change  most importantly welfare support  lie in Westminster. The UK Government needs to join us in providing a full crisis response, providing urgent support to people.

The 150 cost of living payment is part of a wider support package worth 380m, which is also providing help including winter fuel payments and emergency support through the Discretionary Assistance Fund.

Jane Hutt, Minister for Social Justice, added: Weve been working closely with partner organisations to provide targeted support to help people deal with the cost of living crisis.

I know people will be worried and its important for everyone to know that support is available.

The Claim whats yours campaign helps people know what help is out there, and would be a great first port of call for anyone unsure about what theyre entitled to.
Wrexham residents urged to hand in unwanted firearms as part of two week amnesty

Wrexham residents are being urged to hand in unwanted guns as part of two-week campaign to stop firearms falling into the wrong hands.

Known as Operation Aztec, police forces are appealing for people to hand in firearms and ammunition during the amnesty which starts today, 12 May 2022.

Many firearms are held in innocence and ignorance of their illegality or are overlooked and forgotten in peoples homes. Some are held legally and are no longer required.

However others are acquired and distributed by criminal networks to harm, threaten and intimidate their local communities.

Police say the two week surrender gives people the chance to dispose of firearms or ammunition by simply taking them to a local police station and handing them over.

Surrendering unwanted, unlicensed, and illegal weapons avoids the risk of them becoming involved in criminality and means that members of the community can dispose of firearms in a safe place.

During the 14 day period, those surrendering firearms will not face prosecution for the illegal possession at the point of surrender and can remain anonymous.

Legislative changes also mean it is no longer legal in some cases to own specific firearms without a license, if at all.

It is the responsibility of the owner to ensure that they meet the relevant ownership requirements.

Detective Superintendent Mark Pierce, Head of the Force Major Incident Team and Serious & Organised Crime Unit said In line with our vision to make North Wales the safest place in UK, we are keen to provide the general public with a quick and easy way to surrender firearms in their possession  for whatever the reason, such inheritance, or no longer required.

You can hand in firearms at identified police stations, or should you require assistance at your address, please call 101 to arrange a necessary appointment

During the surrender members of the public are encouraged to take firearms into police stations and hand them over the front counter. The weapons will then be forensically examined, and information sent for forensic examination where appropriate.

In Wrexham firearms and ammunition can be surrendered at the Wrexham Town Police Station on Rhosddu Road between 8:30am and 7pm Monday to Saturday and 9am to 6pm on Sundays

If you know of people involved in illegal firearms call police on 101 or Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.
A North Dakota state senator who is resigning following a report about text messages he exchanged with an inmate ran up travel expenses the past decade that are more than 14 times what lawmakers bill state taxpayers on average. Travel records reviewed by The Associated Press show Republican Ray Holmberg has made taxpayer-funded trips to four dozen U.S. cities, China, Canada and several countries in Europe. He was reimbursed about $126,000 for nearly 70 trips  all out of state  over the past decade. Holmberg, who became one of the states most powerful lawmakers in a career that spanned 46 years, announced this month that he would resign June 1 following a report that he had traded scores of text messages with a man jailed on child pornography charges.
The Cross-Canada Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee was established by education workers in March 2021 to oppose the mass infection of staff and students in schools due to the criminal policies pursued by governments at all levels. CERSC members are gathering testimony for the Global Workers Inquest into the COVID-19 Pandemic from supporters and contacts across Canada about the impact of the ruling elites homicidal prioritization of corporate profits over the safeguarding of human life on their working conditions and well-being.

Malcolm Fiedler, a leading CERSC member from British Columbia (BC), recently spoke with Tadhg, a former education worker, about his experiences during the pandemic. To tell your story to the Global Workers Inquest, contact us at CERSC.csppb@gmail.com.

***

Malcolm Fiedler: Could you please describe where you live and what you do for a living?

Tadhg: I live in Vancouver where, until contracting COVID in September 2020, I worked for the Vancouver School Board (VSB) with students designated as having special needs.

MF: Can you tell us about your experience during the first wave in the spring of 2020? How did your employer react? Did you feel that adequate precautions were taken to keep staff safe?

T: When COVID-19 arrived in the spring of 2020, I was initially pleased about the steps taken by health authoritiesthe lockdown and closure of schoolsto mitigate transmission. This state of affairs did not, however, last more than eight weeks before the BC New Democratic Party (NDP) government began a slow yet steady erasure of protective measures in worksites and social environments.

Returning to school in June 2020, it was immediately apparent that the VSB had failed to take adequate steps to protect staff or students, and instead were maintaining a propaganda campaign of half-truths and outright falsehoods. Beyond placing hand sanitizers here and there, there were no concrete measures taken to ensure a safe working or learning environment: no mask mandate, no enforcement of safety protocols, in short, only a lip-service response. My appeals to the unions, both the British Columbia Teachers Federation (BCTF) and Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Local 15, were met with the parroting of government positions and declarations made by BCs public health officer that were in direct contradiction of World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations.

Disturbed and disheartened by the disinterest and failure of both the employer and unions to ensure safe working conditions and concerned about my personal risk due to age and medical history, I sought an opinion from my physician, who recommended in writing that I should not be in close physical proximity to students or staff as I was at elevated risk of developing complications if exposed to COVID. In August 2020, I submitted this medical documentation to my employer, requesting an accommodation to work remotely until such time as a vaccine became available or whenever the VSB could ensure safe working conditions. My requestwith a physicians written recommendationwas denied within hours with an explanation that no remote learning was going to be offered. I submitted a second request several days later, repeating the health risk I was at, which was again quickly denied.

When I requested support from my union, CUPE Local 15, they responded with a reiteration of the employers position rather than a defence of my right to safe working conditions. The VSB communicated that, if I was unfit to work, then I should seek medical care!

I thus, reluctantly, returned to work September 8, 2020. On the first day, I spoke to no less than 5 teaching staff who were not wearing masks in common areas, such as hallways, as was required. I communicated my concerns to the school principal.

Three days later, I tested positive for COVID. I informed my colleagues I had been in contact with and was subsequently reprimanded and threatened by the principal over the telephone for warning my co-workers of the possibility they could be infected! I reported the principals conduct to CUPE Local 15, and was told they would talk to the principal. No grievance and no proof of such a call was ever given to me.

Over the following weeks, as my physician had warned, I developed serious complications from COVID that left me unable to work. The VSB, which just weeks earlier had declined my request for accommodation, cut off my medical benefits when my sick days were exhausted! So, I was denied a medically justified request for accommodation. Then, when incapacitated by the very malaise I had asked to be spared exposure to, I was left too sick to work and without medical benefits. Again I sought assistance from CUPE Local 15, even contacting the president, Warren Williams, directly, all to no avail. Their responses were indistinguishable from the employer, virtual word-for-word parroting. Not only did CUPE Local 15 fail their stated mandate of ensuring safe working conditions for members, they then failed to represent me or pay for my medical benefits, suggesting only that I should see about CERB. [Canada Emergency Response Benefit: a $2,000 per month payment made by the federal government to workers unable to work during the early stages of the pandemic.]

That was 20 months ago. I have never returned to work, being left with permanent lung damage that leaves me breathless going up stairs or walking in the street. Undoubtedly this is leading to an abbreviated life expectancy.

MF: What impact did the BC governments denial of the airborne transmission of COVID-19 have on your workplace? Were you and your colleagues made aware of the need to wear high-quality masks to prevent infection by aerosols, which are small particles that can linger in the air like smoke?

T: The BC NDPs coordinated denial of airborne transmission had a profoundly negative impact on both working conditions and worker morale in my school. As educators, we strive to foster critical thinking, encouraging students to question rather than blindly accept authoritarian statements at face value. Even students as young as 13 were cognizant that the position of John Horgans government on aerosol transmission was contradicting WHO guidelines, leaving students and staff struggling with cognitive dissonance in attempts to reconcile BCs outlier status. This was especially true for those international students who had exposure to other, more scientifically consistent approaches.

John Horgan (Wikimedia Commons)

For staff, morale sunk to an all-time low. They were betrayed by the government, media and their own politically compromised unions, isolated and forgotten, exposed to viral infection on a daily, hourly basis, and threatened by administrators merely for requesting enforcement of the few mandated health protocols. School Board communications consistently downplayed the functional value of masks, preferring instead to insist upon farcical and theatrical sanitization exercises and obsessive repetition on the eradication of droplets.

MF: Whats your opinion of the political response to the pandemic, both at a provincial level, with the BC NDP, and at the federal level, with Trudeaus Liberals?

T: The measures taken by federal and provincial health authorities have been insufficient, failing to meet WHO criteria. Rather than adopt significant protocols to mitigate transmission, Premier Horgan, Health Minister Adrian Dix, Education Minister Jennifer Whiteside and the entire BC NDP Caucus have hidden and manipulated data, downplaying the risk to people, and engaged in messaging outright lies via the BC Centre for Disease Control and public health officer Bonnie Henry. Their actionscriminal negligence in both word and deedhave been, and remain, tailored to ensure economic health over the personal health and well-being of citizens. This includes the sacrifice of childrens health, with many children being too young for any possible respite offered by vaccination.

It is not enough for Horgan, Dix and Henry to be removed from the offices they hold, their actions and communications must be investigated. But this is difficult to do when the BC NDP has erected a wall of silence surrounding public access via freedom of information requests. Charges of criminal negligence causing death should, in all likelihood, be laid. The spectacle of a laughing premier, health minister or public health officer in the midst of a lethal pandemic that has killed more than 3,000 BC citizens as they continue to allow transmission via lax measures and inadequate protocols is that of an indifferent, sociopathic regime equal to any despotic cabal in any era. If Horgan, Dix and Henry are not moved by 3,000 plus deaths, they will not suddenly be moved by 100,000 dead souls.

I have filed a complaint with the BC Human Rights Tribunal against my employer, the VSB, for failing to take steps to ensure my health and safety in response to a written request for accommodation. The complaint is pending.
According to federal court documents filed last week as part of an ongoing investigation into an alleged ammunition theft ring centered at Fairchild Air Force Base in Washington state, federal agents recovered over 14,000 rounds stolen from the base by at least six US Air Force members.



The indictment claims that the ammunition ring was uncovered after one of the airmen became the subject of an FBI investigation after posting on social media his belief that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent, that the US Capitol had to be stormed and that people have to die.



The six airmen are facing multiple charges, including conspiracy to steal government property, possession of stolen ammunition and possession of an unregistered firearm. So far, Staff Sergeants John Sanger, 30, Eric Eagelton, 29, and Nathaniel Richards, 25, along with three other airmenAustin Limacher, 28, Shawn Robson, 40, and Jonah Pierce, 25have been charged in relation to the conspiracy.

Fairchild Air Force Base

The indictment is written in such a way that it leaves open the possibility of more charges being filed against still unnamed co-conspirators.



In addition to finding thousands of 5.56 mm rounds, the standard round used by the US and NATO-aligned militaries, the government claims to have recovered other stolen military equipment from the soldiers homes.



Equipment allegedly recovered by the government includes M68CCO red dot sights and PEQ-15 target illuminators, both of which are typically mounted on rail systems found on M-4/AR-15 military-style rifles. The PEQ-15 includes a visible laser and an infrared laser. The latter is used with night vision goggles to allow operators to paint targets in dimly lit areas and illuminate a bullets likely trajectory.



The indictment claims that searches executed on the basis of warrants found stolen ammunition at all six military members residences. In its searches, the government claims to have also found two unmarked suppressors belonging to Limacher and a gold and bronze in color firearm suppressor belonging to Eagleton. The latter, despite facing multiple serious charges, was released from state custody at the end of April over the objection of federal prosecutors.



In the indictment, the government asserts that the six men, all part of the 92nd Security Forces Squadron Combat Arms Training Management section at Fairchild, were part of the conspiracy that the Defendants, and their known and unknown conspirators, would steal military ammunition, property of the Untied States to which the Defendants had access by means of their military service, and provide the stolen ammunition to the known and unknown conspirators for their personal use and possession.



The government claims that Sanger became the subject of an FBI investigation after he posted online his support for former President Donald Trumps fascistic conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen and that the Joe Biden presidency was illegitimate.



According to federal prosecutors, in a December 2, 2020 online exchange, barely a month before the US Capitol was overrun by fascist militia members in furtherance of Trumps coup attempt, Sanger was asked what taking our government back looked like. Sanger is alleged to have responded, I think the capital [sic] need to be seized... No trial or chance to escape.



In another post cited by the government, on December 9, 2020, Sanger, allegedly writing under the social media handle problematicpatriot, wrote, They defrauded our election system and are still getting away with it.

He continued, That means this system has run its [sic] course. People have to die.



The government does not offer a precise explanation as to why Sanger and his accomplices were stealing thousands of rounds of ammunition and high-end military equipment commonly used by soldiers performing close quarters combat operations and night-time assassination raids. But there is no question that current and former military members and police officers played an outsized role in the failed coup of January 6, 2021.

Six of the 11 members of the Oath Keepers militia group who have been charged with seditious conspiracy for their actions on January 6, including the leader of the group, Stewart Rhodes, have prior military experience.

A USA Today analysis from earlier this month found that at least 70 of the nearly 800 people charged in connection with the January 6 coup have military backgrounds. The same report found that at least 19 current or former police officers have also been charged in the attack.



Despite Sanger having access to high-end military equipment while making multiple comments expressing his desire to violently overthrow the government, an investigation into Sanger was not opened up by the government until August 2021. In a criminal complaint filed in April 2022 and reviewed by The Spokesman-Review, an undercover Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent who was assigned to investigate Sanger claimed to have worn a wire during multiple interactions with Sanger and Eagleton beginning in September 2021.



The agent claims that he ingratiated himself with Sanger by discussing Sangers dislike of minorities and his vehement opposition to vaccines.



In one of his meetings with Sanger and Eagleton, the agent allegedly recorded Eagleton discussing his anti-Semitic views and dislike for Jews. At the same meeting, held on March 12, 2022, Sanger said he enjoyed meeting like-minded individuals who hated the government and the military.

The court documents allege that the undercover agent, Sanger and Eagleton that same day went to the shooting range at Fishtrap Lake and shot ammunition that had been stolen from the base. The agent claims that after the shooting practice, Sanger gave him dozens of rounds of ammunition in a zip lock bag.



A couple of weeks later, according to the indictment, Sanger texted the undercover officer saying that more ammo was available. He wrote that Eagle can hook us up with some rounds. Dudes awesome.

The agent allegedly replied, Really? How much does he want for them?



Nothing, replied Sanger. Its stolen.



After another trip to the firing range, according to the undercover agent, Sanger provided him green-tip rounds, which can penetrate ballistic armor.



The indictment reads: After providing the (undercover agent) with the stolen munitions, Sanger stated if the ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] knocked on his door, he knew which rounds to load up first since they were armor-piercing.



The fact that Sanger and his accomplices were able to steal thousands of rounds of ammunition and expensive combat optics, apparently undetected for months or even years, speaks to the freedom with which far-right elements are allowed to operate within the US military.



The emergence of fascistic groups and neo-Nazis within the military and police apparatuses is an international phenomenon, expressing the ongoing and global breakdown of bourgeois democracy.



The World Socialist Web Site, has written extensively on fascist terror networks that have been cultivated by the German state, including the neo-Nazi terrorist group National Socialist Underground and networks within Germanys Special Forces Command.



The proliferation of these networks is a sign of the immense crisis of bourgeois class rule. Terrified by a massive growth of working class opposition, frightened ruling classes the world over are cultivating fascistic layers and sects within the military and police forces to be used as shock-troops against the threat of revolution.




Sri Lankan President Gotabhaya Rajapakse addressed the nation yesterday evening after mobilising the military throughout the country with orders to strictly enforce the law against rioters and to shoot on sight.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa [Credit: AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena]

Referring to the thug attack on anti-government protesters in Colombo on Monday, Rajapakse hypocritically condemned the unfortunate situation and said police has been instructed to initiate a full investigation.

The attack was orchestrated by the ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna as the pretext for the imposition of police-state measures. After being addressed by Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse, hundreds of SLPP goons, armed with clubs and sticks, were unleashed against anti-government demonstrators outside his official residence and then on protesters who had occupied Galle Face Green in central Colombo for about a month.

The extensive nationwide protests demanding President Rajapakse and his government resign have been fuelled by a social disaster created by huge price increases, acute shortages of essential food, medicines, fuel and lengthy daily power cuts.

In his national address, Rajapakse focused on the violent clashes that erupted outside the houses of SLPP ministers and parliamentarians across the country after that attack on Galle Face Green protesters. Houses were set on fire and several people died in the clashes.

As the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) warned in a statement on May 10, these clashes have played directly into the hands of Rajapakse and the state apparatus. The president declared that soldiers from the three branches of the armed forces and the police have been ordered to strictly enforce the law against the rioters.

Rajapakse had already declared a state of emergency last Friday after a massive one-day general strike and business closures shut down the countrys economy and sent a shudder of fear through the ruling class. The state of emergency gives the president extensive powers to deploy armed forces with powers, arrest people without warrant, ban strikes, protests and meetings, impose curfews and media censorship, and proscribe political parties.

The island-wide deployment of the military yesterday is reminiscent of the reactionary 26-year communal war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. In Colombo, armoured vehicles and soldiers on motorcycles are patrolling the streets. Heavily-armed soldiers are manning checkpoints complete with barricades to stop and search vehicles and people.

Heavily-armed soldiers and military vehicle in Colombo enforcing curfew. [Image: Facebook]

In every part of the country, military personnel have set up checkpoints at the entrances to all major towns and at strategic points along highways.

The presidential media division has announced that the round-the-clock curfew imposed on Monday will be lifted at 7 am today, but only for seven hours and will remain in place until Friday morning.

Following the thug attack on anti-government protesters on Monday, thousands of people poured into Galle Face Green defying the curfew and security forces to show their solidarity. Yesterday evening, however, the police declared that the regrouped protesters were in breach of curfew regulations, indicating preparations for their forcible removal.

Hundreds of health workers in Kandy march in protest against thug attack on Galle Face Green demonstrators.

A crackdown on social media is also on the cards. Yesterday the police said they had identified 59 social media platforms with investigations commenced against them under repressive Computer Crimes Act and other criminal laws.

The extensive military deployment and resort to police-state measures is a sharp warning that Rajapakse is systematically preparing for a showdown with the working class that has already demonstrated its determination to defend its social and democratic rights.

Millions of workers participated in the April 28 and May 6 general strikes, shocking the entire political establishment, including the trade unions which they thought there would be limited protests.

All of the capitalist political partiesgovernment and opposition alikeare committed to reaching a deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for an emergency bailout and to implementing the draconian emergency measures that will accompany it. All of them support the IMFs demand for stabilityin other words, the suppression of working-class opposition.

Twelve business lobby groups, including the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce, Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry of Sri Lanka, and the Joint Apparel Association Forum, wrote to the president this week calling on him to appoint a prime minister and cabinet acceptable to all leading parliamentary political parties.

The big-business groups declared that these steps must be done with immediate effect in order to take urgent action to restore law and order and economic activity in the country and not to jeopardise talks with the IMF.

Despite the deployment of the military, President Rajapakse remains in a weakened position. Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse resigned on Monday, along with this cabinet, after it became clear that working people were outraged at the attack by pro-government thugs and sections of the working class stopped work. The president, using his far-reaching executive powers, currently holds all cabinet posts.

In his national address, Rajapakse said he would appoint a new prime minister and cabinet within a week that commands a majority in the parliament and secures the confidence of the people. Steps would then be taken to revert to the 19th constitutional amendment to empower the parliament. Currently the president can sack ministers or the whole government at his own discretion.

Currently, however, no party commands a parliamentary majority and all of them are deeply discredited. The opposition Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB), which has 65 members in the 225-seat parliament, offered to form a government yesterday but declared that the president must step down.

Similarly, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)-led National Peoples Power (NPP) proposed that it be allowed to appoint an interim government, but also demands that Rajapakse resigns. It has only three MPs but has urged other parties to support it. It has also declared that it would back an interim regime from outside.

While President Rajapakse has repeatedly insisted that he will not resign, there are clearly frantic behind the scenes discussions taking place to put some form of interim government in place and to buy time for the implementation of the IMFs agenda.

A politically criminal role is being played by the trade unions. In response to the attack on anti-government protesters on Monday and the outrage of broader sections of workers, the trade unions called an indefinite general strike on Monday evening.

Given that a 24-hour curfew was in place, however, many workers were de facto on strikethat is, they were not permitted to go to work. Key sections of workersin the plantations and free trade zonesdid go to work, with the permission of the police and the unions.

Now that Rajapakse has eased the curfew, the Trade Union Coordinating Committee (TUCC) yesterday called off their general strike, telling the media it was necessary to normalise public services to prevent the country falling into anarchy. They declared that they would contribute to the peoples struggle in a new form.

All along the trade unions have acted not to fight for the democratic and social rights of the working class, but to confine, divert and suppress the groundswell of opposition in the working class to the government and to prop up bourgeois rule. Their demands are virtually identical to the opposition partiesthe resignation of the government and the formation of a new capitalist interim government.

The working class should place no faith in any of the establishment parties which all have a track record of implementing the pro-market agenda of the IMF and international finance capital, or their trade union lackeys who have sabotaged and betrayed every struggle by workers over the past two years.

The Socialist Equality Party stresses the urgent need of the working class to take matters into its own hands. We have begun forming action committees independent of the trade unions and all of the capitalist parties and urge workers to rapidly establish a network of actions committees throughout the island to fight for their democratic and social rights.

In its May 10 statement, the SEP also calls on workers to form defence committees and defence guards, in conjunction with the action committees, to protect the working class and rural masses from the attacks of pro-government thugs.

The SEP has elaborated a series of policies to address the pressing social needs of working people, including the repudiation of all foreign debt, a rejection of IMF austerity, and for working-class control over the means of production and distribution, including the nationalisation of the banks, major corporations and plantations.

There is no solution to the social disaster facing the working class outside the fight for a socialist program. A network of workers actions committees can rally the urban and rural poor to its side and lay the basis for a workers and peasants government to refashion society on a socialist basis.
The World Socialist Web Site received this letter from Sheri, a nurse in Kentucky, describing the transformations in the hospitals, the exploitation of nurses and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

On the day I graduated from kindergarten, I made it clear that I intended to become a nurse. I worked as a nurses aide from 1988 to 1996. In the fall of 1996, I finally started nursing school. My mother passed away in 1985. My father attended my graduation, and you wouldve thought from the pride I saw in his face that I had just gotten a Ph.D. in neurosurgery.

When I began my career, we still wore white uniforms. And people respected those uniforms. We took our jobs seriously because its a serious job. We gave comfort to the grieving, held the hands of people afraid and dying alone, offered relief to those in pain, and, most rewarding, we saved lives.

I felt good about what I did. Now all I feel is tired  and angry, and used, and overworked, and pressured, fearful, and threatened. But most of all I feel betrayed.

East Alabama Medical Center nurse Abby Smith works on a COVID-19 patient in the intensive care unit Thursday, Dec. 10, 2020, in Opelika, Ala. (AP Photo/Julie Bennett)

Over the weekend, my most recent incident, I disarmed a patient and took away his duffle bag full of guns. You wont find this story in any newspaper or television news. Not even in a hospital report. It isnt a story my employer would not want repeated because it would be bad for business.

And that brings me to my point.

The biggest and most detrimental change Ive seen in the medical field is that its no longer about medicine. Its just business. Hospitals have always been a business, but the medicine used to come first. That emphasis has shifted.

I remember that in 2004 hospitals nationwide brought in public relations firms to teach nurses customer service, to better serve families. We were actually told to concentrate on visitor needs. Then in 2006, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) implemented the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) surveys to make certain nurses understand their customer services assignments.

As a result of this shift in priority, I now have to contend with situations like (and this is true) having a family member enter a room during a code and demand coffee! Which would you guess takes priority under these new guidelines: the saving of a life or getting this visitor their coffee?

This does nothing to help the patient. All it means is more time playing waitress or maid to visitors and less time for patient care. Hospital administrators know that the surveys usually filled by family members determine how they do on national surveys, which means more customers and profits.

In 2011, CMS established the Electronic Health Records (EHR) Incentive Program for Medicare/Medicaid. Hospitals had to implement the program by January 2014 in order to be eligible for reimbursement of recipient costs. The onerous nature of these records meant more time spent charting on computers and less time for patient care.

And to save on costs, they expect nurses to clean up rooms, collect the trash, bring food, and feed the patients while asking us to take on more patients. What does this mean?

Nurses are now running back and forth fetching soft drinks and snacks, catering to every whim of visiting family members and friends, dashing to the computers to chart hourly and check boxes every two hours (even if there is no change in the patients condition), running for scheduled medications, emptying bed pans, giving a patient a bath or shower, cleaning up feces from a patients hair, the walls and ceilings as well as tackling the unexpected that happens every day.

It is not unusual for patients to use their call lights not for emergencies, which is what they were intended for but to change the channel on the TV or pull my blanket up a little or fluff my pillow or hand me my purse or give me a Sprite. But all that patient care still must be done!

But above all we must chart! Management knows nurses will stay and finish charting even if it means staying two hours over your shift.

Ever hear of Warning Fatigue? [Alarm fatigue describes how busy workers, especially in health care, become desensitized to safety alerts, and as a result they ignore or fail to respond appropriately to such warnings.] I dont know of another occupation outside of nursing that suffers from it more. I honestly dont know. Alarms, sirens, whistles, bells, screeches, flashing pulsating lights that are constantly beckoning the nurses attention.

WARNING for meds being one minute late. WARNING for trying to give scheduled potassium when the patients lab value is within normal limits. WARNING for PRN [Pro re nata, or simply as needed] medication being scanned five minutes before the four-hour mark has passed. WARNING to document location of the IV site prior to giving medication even though there is a separate flowsheet that describes where the IV is located.

WARNING fatigue is REAL!

Recent events concerning RaDonda Vaught have brought attention to this next situation and heaped on additional pressures. If the pharmacy, for whatever reason, is unable to enter newly ordered medications, we have to override the PYXIS (automated medication dispensing systems). We have the order to give the medication but no direct access to the medication. (Keep in mind, it cant be one minute late, or WARNING!) After overriding, we then have to type out an explanation for every single medication we remove.

I recently had a patient with a dangerously low blood sugar level. The attending physician ordered a solution of D50 (concentrated dextrose) to be given immediately. But the medication wasnt available in the PYXIS. It took the pharmacy 45 minutes to deliver it. The patient couldnt eat. I mixed sugar in some lubrication and administered it rectally. Though it wasnt policy, it saved her life.

What if I hadnt? What if I had just waited on pharmacy? In 45 minutes, this patient could have slipped into a coma and died. Could I have been charged with murder? Every person on diabetes medication should have D50 ordered as a PRN order, and it should have been available at the PYXIS.

Things need to change.

Hospital policies should be committed to patient care and not stockholders portfolios or management raises or CEO year-end bonuses.

Nurses worked COVID units for more than two years without proper personal protective equipment. Disposable N95 respirators intended for one use per every isolation patient were suddenly good enough for ten 12-hour shifts.

Holding true to form, on March 1, 2020, laws went into place to protect the money over the health and well-being of essential workers (and by extension the families of these workers), stating that employers could not be held responsible if employees contracted COVID.

How many nurses lost their lives while hospitals went right on making money hand over fist?

Nurses dont intentionally harm patients. We have been screaming for more than 20 years that health care is in trouble. But those screams always fell on deaf ears. We are dealing with numerous distractions, hurdles, roadblocks, and increasing abuse and legal pitfalls that could be eliminated  if doing so didnt cut into the CEOs salary.

The United States is seeing the beginning of a mass exodus from the nursing field. Folks had best start preparing to take care of their emergencies themselves. If changes arent made soon, you will all be on your own!
The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan hosted a mass gathering on May 7 that served as a propaganda event in the campaign of the Democratic Party to declare the COVID-19 pandemic to be over. Dubbed the Comeback Commencement Ceremony, the event was held for those students who graduated in 2020 and 2021, when social distancing measures prevented large commencement ceremonies.

As indicated by the title, the theme of the event, held at Michigan Stadium, was the lie that society had emerged from the pandemic and that measures to fight the spread of COVID-19, such as lockdowns and masks, were things of the past.

Provost Susan M. Collins apologized to the graduates for not being able to celebrate their graduation at a mass event during the two prior years. Interim President Mary Sue Coleman lamented the disruption in education as an unusual experience for all of us.

No mention was made of the over 1 million confirmed COVID-19 deaths in the United States to date, or the estimated 20 million excess deaths worldwide since the outbreak of the global pandemic.

Nor was there any mention of the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO) strike in the autumn of 2020, when graduate student instructors walked out to demand the right to remote learning, improved COVID-19 tracing measures, economic support, and the demilitarization of the campus. This disruption was brought to an end after the administration sought a court injunction and Michigan Federation of Teachers President David Hecker intervened in the negotiations. The union sold out the strike and the student instructors failed to win the basic demand to work remotely. In the fall of 2021, the university ended its infection tracking system.

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), who was a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force under Trump and is currently the chief medical adviser to President Biden, delivered the main address to the graduates. Its purpose was twofold: to whitewash the role of the Democratic Party in the disastrous response to the pandemic and to promote the deadly lie that the pandemic is over.

Expressing either an astonishing lack of self awareness or unbridled hypocrisy, or a combination of both, Fauci urged the graduates to combat the cacophony of falsehoods and lies, without specifying the falsehoods and lies to which he was alluding. There are examples aplenty he could have cited, one of which is the infamous declaration by Biden on July 4, 2021 that the United States was declaring our independence from a deadly virus.

The previous month he said, Take your mask off. Youve earned the right.

These completely reckless, unscientific and treacherous statements were made to justify the lifting of mitigation measures and, above all, the forcing of students and educators back into unsafe classrooms so that parents could be driven back into virus-infected factories and workplaces.

In the 10 months since Biden declared independence from the virus, 400,504 more Americans have died from the disease, according to the Worldometer COVID tracker.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths, said Fauci.

In truth, his appearance at the ceremony signified his acceptance of the normalization of the distortion of science.

Anthony Fauci came into conflict with Trumps open promotion of the anti-scientific herd immunity program of mass infection. Without naming the former president and would-be dictator, Fauci urged the graduates to give leadership  through example, in contrast to certain elected officials.

As he spoke, there were intermittent sounds of blaring horns from a small group of Trump train protesters who circled the stadium before and during the ceremony.

Faucis indirect allusion to Trump and the Republicans was meant to contrast the current administration to its predecessor. But the event itself served to highlight the basic continuity between the two.

Biden and the Democrats have embraced the fiction that COVID has become endemic, along with the murderous corollary that the population must live with the virus.

The superficial differences in style and presentation do not alter the fact that in both cases genuine science, public health and human life are subordinated to the dictates of the corporate oligarchy, which vetoes the measuressuch as mask mandates and the temporary closure of schools and non-essential workplacesthat could contain and ultimately eliminate the virus and save countless lives.

Or, to put it more bluntly, the struggle against the pandemic is inseparable from the struggle against the capitalist profit system.

What did Fauci mean by leadership through example? Was he offering his own handling of the White House Correspondents Association dinner one week prior to his speech in Ann Arbor as an example?

The 81-year-old Fauci declined to attend the superspreader event, citing [his] individual assessment of personal risk, but making no additional comments on the safety of the event for its 2,500 participants, including the 79-year-old president. Dozens of participants at the dinner have since tested positive for COVID-19, according to press reports.

That the pandemic is over is a foregone conclusion in the corporate media, where COVID-19 and the meager mitigation measures taken by governments are placed in the past tense. Noting the presence outside Michigan Stadium of a small number of right-wing protesters, the Bridge Michigan website looked back on the pandemic:

Faucis presence was yet another reminder of the conflicting experiences and sentiments among Michigan residents during the pandemic. While most embraced masks and vaccines, others viewed the mandates and emergency orders as an effort by government officialswith Fauci and Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as chief villainsto weaken personal freedoms.

It was a full-out party atmosphere, the Detroit Free Press effused, with graduates running up to each other all over the field, offering huge hugs and many exclaiming loudly: You made it! I didnt know if you were coming.

The Free Press went on to quote a speech by Anne Curzan, dean of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. Two years later and how beautiful to be here with you, she gushed.

Recalling the online graduation day in 2020, when the campus was empty, Curzan told the audience, It was bone sad.  We were all discombobulated.

With over a million Americans unnecessarily dead from COVID-19 and as many as 15-20 million dead worldwide, Curzans remarks indicate both the irresponsible insularity of the commencement and the disorientation of the upper-middle class layers who were behind it.

The event itself will most certainly cause many COVID-19 infections. More than 4,000 graduates were in attendance, the overwhelming majority without masks. Before the ceremony, these graduates were corralled into a chaotic queue to enter the stadium. One graduate reported a crowd crush, with excited graduates pushing to get to the front of the line. There were no serious measures to ensure social distancing.

Several more thousand people entered Michigan stadium to watch the ceremony, bringing together unmasked individuals of all ages.

The UM Comeback commencement and other mass events taking place across the country contrast starkly with the realities of the pandemic. Ann Arbor is situated in Washtenaw County, where the rolling 7-day average of COVID-19 cases is currently 215.6, according to the Mayo Clinic tracker. In Michigan, as elsewhere in the country, cases have been increasing sharply since late March, attributable to the introduction of the Omicron B variants into a population that has been encouraged to take off their masks and resume life as normal.

As the WSWS reported Monday, the White Houses own estimates project that over the coming fall and winter, the US will see another 100 million infections from the Omicron variants. This staggering number of cases can be expected to result in an additional 500,000 deaths. This information, first reported in the Washington Post on Friday, was certainly known to Fauci as he stood on the stage looking out over a sea of faces at Michigan Stadium and validated the ongoing normalization of untruths.
Today's guest blog is jointly written by Jaimee Comstock-Skipp (Leiden University PhD candidate) and Asim Saeed (Independent Researcher)



Siyavush Beg Gurji (c.15361616), a brilliant but elusive maestro from the Safavid era, has intrigued scholars for half a decade. Initiated by Anthony Welch in findings published nearly 50 years ago, some pages from a dispersed manuscript located in private German and Danish collections help widen our understanding of this individual, and the state of the arts in Iran at the turn of the sixteenth to the seventeenth century.



Fig. 1. Garshasp seated before Zahhak while the div, Minharas, is held prisoner (Or.12985, f. 74v). Public Domain

Fig. 2. Ardavan before Ardashir (IO Islamic 966, f. 360v). Public Domain

Born in Georgia, Siyavush Beg was brought to the first Safavid capital Tabriz where he trained to become a page. Upon the relocation of the Safavid court to Qazvin in 1548, Siyavush transferred there and continued his studies of calligraphy, illustration, painting, and poetry. He worked in the royal workshops to produce manuscripts for the shah and other courtiers and enjoyed royal support from subsequent Safavid monarchs up until 1590. He contributed three paintings to a copy of the Garshaspnamah of Asadi, which was an expansion of and complement to Firdawsis Shahnamah (dated 1573, fig. 1). Following these, Siyavush painted sumptuous illustrations for Shah Ismail II's (r. 15761577) royal copy of the same work (dated 157677; dispersed), and afterward fulfilled non-courtly commissions.

During the lull in royal patronage of manuscript production in the late-1570s through the 1580s, Siyavush and his colleagues produced manuscripts for connoisseurs not related to the rulers. As a case in point, they worked on a copy of Khvandamirs Habib al-Siyar (Friend of Biographies) that was produced in 1579 for Mirza Abu Talib ibn Mirza Ala al-Dawlat, a Tajik high official at the court in Qazvin (former Homberg collection, since dispersed). Elsewhere, a Khamsah of Nizami copied in 1549 for the Safavid financial secretary Ali Khan Beg Turkman (Morgan Library ms. M.836) has illustrations attributable to Siyavush c. 1579. Although not definitively associated with his hand, loose folios in his style are elsewhere scattered in collections (Pierpont Morgan Library ms. M.386.7r) and have appeared at auction (Christies, 10 October 2013, lot 29). It is believed that Siyavush Beg formally retired in the 1590s and headed to Shiraz where he is believed to have added to some projects prior to his death in around 1616.

In sum, up until now Siyavush Gurjis official output has totalled fewer than thirty illustrations over a period of seven decades. However, it is hard to believe a richly gifted artist, passionately engaged with painting under four different Safavid monarchs (Tahmasp I, Ismail II, Muhammad Khudabanda, and Abbas I), and spending almost his entire life under royal aegis could produce work for only three manuscripts. To him we might also now credit illustrations in a second Khamsah of Nizami (Topkapi Palace Library ms. R.881, circa 15901610); and illustrations in two copies of Qazi Ahmads Gulistan-i Hunar, a treatise on calligraphers and painters (one in the Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow, and the other formerly in the collection of Clara C. Edwards). Furthermore, a group of Shahnamah manuscripts also reflect his artistic practices and stylistic details. Although they are unsigned, their illustrations repeating compositions and figures fit comfortably in his corpus, and suggest either his own participation or perhaps that of a colleague working closely alongside him.

These Shahnamah copies sharing common circumstances of production include the following:

British Library IO Islamic 966, with colophon dated 1604, page size 370 x 235 mm, figs. 2, 5, 9, 11

Kuwaits al-Sabah Collection, Inv. No. LNS 233, no colophon, page size 350 x 235 mm

Yahuda Collection of the Israel Museum (ms. 120) dated 1617

Newly discovered illustrations, held in private collections, from a single dispersed Shahnamah manuscript (here labelled MS Exhibit 369 B) whose illustrations, compositions, and dimensions (averaging 355 x 240 mm) closely relate to the other Shahnamah works, as well as the above-mentioned Garshaspnamah (Fig. 1, Or. 12985, page size 348 x 235 mm)

All these works have been attributed by scholars to be of Safavid origin and contain specific elements from the workshops of Qazvin on the cusp of artistic innovations originating in Isfahan. Although lacking an artists signature, they are apparently prepared in the late sixteenth century, and several folios across them have identical figures and compositional layouts.



The fire ordeal of Siyavush.

Fig. 3. Exhibit 369 B, f. 114v  the owner

Fig. 4. LNS 233, f. 42r  The al- Sabah Collection, Dar al- Athar al-Islamiyyah, Kuwait

Fig. 5. IO Islamic 966, f. 97r, Public Domain

Figs. 35 depict the famous fire ordeal of the character Siyavush, where he is asked to ride through the blazing fire in order to prove his innocence against accusations levied by his step mother. Siyavush rides through the flames with his head turned back in all three images. The galloping black horse with a yak tail hanging from the neck, the decorated saddle and the whip in rider's hand, the astonished solider with his raised hands are obvious similarities. One wonders if some pouncing or stencilling techniques were applied. The common painter of these is posited to be one individual who follows a composition from Shah Tahmasp's famous Shahnamah as a model (now held in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran). However, they are simpler versions, and could have been carried out by Siyavush Beg or his colleague.



Tus and Giv and the maiden lady.

Fig. 6. Exhibit 369 B, f. 109r  the owner

Fig. 7. LNS 233 MS, f. 97r  The al-Sabah Collection, Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah, Kuwait.

Other illustrations from ms. Exhibit 369 B, the British Library, and Kuwait collection have much in common. They share similar compositions, colour tones, heavily outlined backgrounds in which purple and pink towering masses of rocks at times overflow into the margins. Tadpole clouds populate golden and blue skies, dark green grounds are spotted with radiant flowers, above which short flame-like trees emerge (figs. 6-7). Old maple trees with bulky trunks brim with autumnal leaves (figs. 8-9).



The death of Rustam.

Fig. 8. Exhibit 369 B, f. 386v  the owner

Fig. 9. IO Islamic 966, f. 323v, Public Domain

In another famous episode of the Shahnamah, Tahmina is seen visiting Rustam's chamber in figs. 10 and 11 which again bear striking similarities. Upon close observation, the version in the private collection reveals some extraordinary features. A superbly sketched simurgh (the mythical bird of the Shahnamah) on Rustam's blanket (fig. 12) displays the artists genius and outstanding drawing skills (perhaps Siyavushs), as he effectively connects the past with the present through a simple yet powerful image. In this folio as in the British Librarys copy, two towering cypress trees breach the upper margins above the richly decorated interiors with pink and lavender wall paintings. They both have elaborately detailed grounds covered in animal and foliate motifs. Cypress trees play an effective role in the images both visually and symbolically, for they are associated with the stature of heroes in classical poetry. The tree is also a symbol of immortality, eternity, grandeur, strength, and manliness. Tahmina's tryst with Rustam following her depicted arrival leads to the birth of their son Suhrab, one of the most known characters of the Shahnamah.



Tahmina visits Rustam.

Fig. 10. Exhibit 369 B, f. 93v  the owner

Fig. 11. IO Islamic 966, f. 79v, Public Domain



Fig. 11. Close up of Rustam's covering

There are many other parallels across these Shahnamah manuscripts that have been noted elsewhere, but it is worth exploring how their common illustrations came about. Regarding the style of Siyavush-like paintings in the British Library IO Islamic 966, Basil Robinson credits the unnamed artist as a young Isfahani. Isfahan became the site of the new Safavid capital in 1598 and an innovative artistic style popularized by Siyavushs younger colleague, the artist Reza Abbasi, emerged there early on after the power shifted from Qazvin. The scholar Barbara Schmitz has since modified Robinsons young Isfahani attribution to an old Qazvini artist working alone in a style that had by the early 1600s gone out of fashion. Whether or not it was Siyavush, this same individual executed the majority of the miniatures in this copy dated 1604. Robinson has also attributed three miniatures of the British Librarys Garshaspnamah to this same young Isfahani which Norah M. Titley has contested to be the work of Siyavush Beg. Aditionally, the scholars Adel T. Adamova and Manijeh Bayani have convincingly proposed Siyavush Beg as the possible illustrator of the Shahnamah copies in the British Library and Kuwait (see Ademova and Bayani, cat. 32, 459 - 486). They suggest that Siyavush set to work to illustrate the Kuwait version sometime prior to 1600, almost twenty years after he contributed to Shah Ismail IIs Shahnamah. He would have next begun working on the British Library manuscript dated 1604. They stylistically justify their argument by noting how the artist followed conventions originating in the Qazvin school of painting. The hitherto never-before referenced paintings of MS Exhibit 369 B carry striking similarities to both the London and Kuwait manuscripts, and we can insert this new Shahnamah material and others into the trajectory delineated above.

Sometime between 1579 and 1604, the young Isfahani/ old Qazvini Siyavush Beg may have busied himself with yet another magnificent Shahnamah, that of MS Exhibit 369 B. Perhaps up until his final days, he might have contributed to the Shahnamah copy in the Israel Museum that was completed a year after his death. Though not much can be said with absolute certainty about the production of manuscript Exhibit 369 B, on stylistic grounds the illustrations appear to have been produced by Siyavush Beg or a painter working alongside him during the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Their sumptuousness vouches for an expensive production affordable to a prince or an aristocrat who could employ elite artists and cover the expenses of their studio.

Our conclusions are based on stylistic comparisons and the upsurge of sub-royal patrons who were commissioning richly illustrated manuscripts in parallel or in competition with princely ateliers during the second half of the sixteenth century. Economics impact arts, and one reason for the increase in such sub-royal productions was the lack of reliable royal patronage during the reign of the feeble and almost blind Safavid Shah Muhammad Khudabanda (r.15781587). Another possible owner of the manuscript in question could be that of the artist producing it himself; having made other copies to sell, perhaps he enjoyed his own compositions so much that he directly duplicated them.

Within these four manuscripts, the same figures frequent compositions, clad in rich garments with delicately sketched hands and rendered movements, bulky turbans and fur collars. Animals populate compositions, especially the meticulously drawn horses and foxes with fluffy tails. There are soldiers in helmets, kings in crowns, archers, and musicians. Stylistically, the most decisive element that links all of the paintings is the near perfect sense of weight and balance by the painter. Also common is the unbroken brush movement and the use of colour that is thoroughly typical of the Qazvin palette, and the painters penchant for transgressing the text frame and extending images into the margins. Although he did not physically sign these works with letters comprising his name, Siyavushs hand and influence can be identified in these illustrations and bear his hallmarks.

With special thanks to Katja Preuss for her generous contributions & guidance, the Cambridge Shahnama Project and some wonderful friends.

Asim Saeed (Independent Researcher) and Jaimee K. Comstock-Skipp (Leiden University PhD candidate)





Contact Asim: artmusekhi@gmail.com

Contact Jaimee: Academia.edu

Further reading:

Adamova, Adel T., and Manijeh Bayani, Persian Painting: the Arts of the Book and Portraiture. Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah: The Al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2015.

Babaie, Sussan, et al., Slaves of the Shah: New Elites of Safavid Iran. London: I.B. Tauris, 2004.

Qazi Ahmad, Golestan-e honar, tr. Vladimir Minorsky as Calligraphers and Painters: A Treatise by Qadi Ahmad, Son of Mir-Munshi, Washington, D.C., 1959.

Robinson, B.W. Shah Ismail II's Copy of the Shahnama. Iran 14 (1976): 1-8.

 Shah Ismail II's Copy of the Shahnama: Additional Material. Iran 43 (2005): 291-299.

Schmitz, Barbara. Islamic and Indian Manuscripts and paintings in The Pierpont Morgan Library. New York: The Pierpont Morgan Library, 1997.

Titley, Norah. A Manuscript of the Garshaspnameh. The British Museum Quarterly 31:1/2 (Autumn 1966): 27-32

Persian Miniature Painting and its Influence on the Arts of Turkey and India. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984.

Welch, Anthony. Artists for the Shah: Late Sixteenth Century Painting at the Imperial Court of Iran. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.
On May 6, Kent County Medical Examiner Dr. Stephen Cohle released the results of the official autopsy of Patrick Lyoya, who was killed execution-style by Grand Rapids, Michigan, police Officer Christopher Schurr during a traffic stop on April 4.

A still from the Grand Rapids Police video recording of an officer struggling with and shooting Patrick Lyoya, shown at Grand Rapids City Hall on Wednesday, April 13, 2022. (Grand Rapids Police Department)

The autopsy confirms that the 26-year-old Congolese refugee was shot in the back of the head, and the cause of his death was ruled a homicide. Dr. Cohle told CNN that the autopsy was conducted on the same day that Lyoya was killed, but the report was released to the media only after it was given to the prosecutors office.

The medical examiner also qualified his homicide determination, telling CNN, What it implies is that in this case ... the officer meant to shoot him, adding that it is up to the prosecutor to decide whether it is justifiable.

As seen on the dashcam, bodycam and smartphone videos, Patrick Lyoya was pulled over by Schurr in a residential neighborhood of Grand Rapids at 8:00 a.m. on April 4 because his license plate registration did not match the vehicle he was driving. After a scuffle in which Schurrs taser was wrestled away from him by Lyoya, the officer pinned Lyoyas head to the ground, pulled his police handgun, press it against the drivers head and pulled the trigger.

The Kent County autopsy was held back because the medical examiner was awaiting the results of the toxicology examination and other tests to complete the report. The findings of Dr. Cohles examinationwhich have been known for five weekscorrespond entirely with those of the independent autopsy conducted by Dr. Werner Spitz on behalf of the Lyoya family on April 19. Dr. Spitz found that the young man was killed instantly by a gunshot wound of the head.

As the legal team for the Lyoya family has maintained, the autopsy findings, plus the video evidence released by the Grand Rapids Police Department (GRPD) on April 13, are enough for the Kent County prosecutor to bring criminal charges against Schurr. In a statement on Saturday, Lyoya family attorneys Ven Johnson and Ben Crump called for the immediate release of the Michigan State Police report on the shooting and the prosecution of Schurr for an unjust killing.

However, local news media has instead focused attention on the secondary finding of the medical examiners report: Lyoya had a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of .29, which is more than three times the legal driving limit at the time he was killed.

For example, the Detroit News published an article on Monday under the headline, Lyoya super drunk under law when pulled over in fatal traffic stop, exam finds. The article, written by crime reporter George Hunter, is exploiting a Michigan law passed in 2010 that designates someone as super drunk if their BAC is .17 or above while operating a motor vehicle.

Hunter, who describes himself as having spent a long time covering crime and that three of my siblings were police officers in Detroit, wrote in the article that it is unclear whether Schurr also suspected Lyoya was intoxicated, because every line of the officers three-page use of force report was redacted in records obtained by the News. The reporter paints a picture of Lyoya as a dangerous criminal who disobeyed commands from Schurr and builds up the image of an officer who received 14 commendations and was cleared by an international investigation after a citizen claimed the officer stole his grandmothers ashes during an arrest.

A similar article was published by the Detroit Free Press on May 6 with the headline, Patrick Lyoyas autopsy report released by Kent County, blood-alcohol levels over limit.

The purpose of the emphasis on Lyoyas BAC being above the legal driving limit is very clear. Along with previous reports that detailed Lyoyas record of run-ins with law enforcement, details about his driving record and alleged domestic violence, the corporate media is preparing public opinion to accept either the complete exoneration or a slap on the wrist for Schurr.

As quoted in the Detroit News article, attorney Ven Johnson denounced the repeated attacks on Lyoya and said, Lets talk about the real story, that the autopsy 100 percent confirms what we told everyone from Day One. Johnson added, The gunshot wound was to the back to the head and the manner of death was homicide.  Alcohol to us is irrelevant as it relates to the cause and manner of death. Assuming the results are correct, and Ill litigate at the time of trial, it is what it is. If this is accurate, then, yes, he was highly intoxicated. But the last time I checked, the penalty for drinking and driving is not execution.

What the media campaign in support of Schurr and against Lyoya is seeking to conceal is the reality of life facing young workers and the class basis of the police violence that is meted out against them in neighborhoods and communities across the US every day.

Originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Patrick Lyoya arrived in the US when he was 18 years old in 2014 along with the rest of his family. Before winning asylum to enter the US due to violence in the DRC, the Lyoya family lived in a refugee camp for 11 years in the east African country of Malawi.

Patrick attended high school in Lansing, Michigan, while his parents worked odd jobs. His mother, Dorcas, worked in a laundromat, and his father, Peter, worked in a nursing home. Patrick also worked while he attended high school. A report by National Public Radio (NPR) noted that he worked in a small manufacturing plant making auto parts and was also employed at a turkey farm and at a vacuum cleaner and appliance store.

Patrick was described to NPR by his coworker Ramazani Malisawa as just focused on the work. He was a good worker and worked hard. Malisawa said that it was important for Patrick to be able to send his two young daughters to school. He said Lyoya once told him, My kids, they will know we had a father, and our fatherhe worked hard.

Meanwhile, Schurr is currently on administrative leave awaiting the decision of Kent County Prosecutor Chris Becker, who says he has not received a complete investigative report from the Michigan State Police.

Protesters demanding justice for the Lyoya family demonstrated on Tuesday and forced the early shutdown of a monthly Grand Rapids City Commission meeting for a second time. A protester was later arrested outside of City Hall by the GRPD.
At the behest of Ukraines Security Service (SBU), the countrys equivalent of the FBI, Spanish police detained the popular blogger Anatoly Shariy in Spain last Wednesday on suspicion of committing treason. The police were forced to release Shariy just one day later because a Spanish judge ordered his release.

Despite his brief detainment and release, Shariy was still forced to surrender his passport and has to present himself to a court twice a month. He is also barred from leaving the country pending an extradition hearing requested by the Ukrainian government.

In addition to treason, the SBU accuses Shariy of carrying out illegal activities to the detriment of Ukraines national security in the information sphere. According to the SBU, there is reason to believe that Shariy acted on behalf of foreign entities.

Reports indicated that Shariys arrest was coordinated between Ukrainian authorities and the Spanish police. The involvement of the government of a NATO member suggests that Shariys pending extradition hearing may well be a mere formality that will result in his forced return to Ukraine and immediate imprisonment.

The arrest, which did not even take place on Ukrainian territory, marks a significant escalation in the Ukrainian governments targeting of political opponents.

Since the beginning of the war, Shariy has been subject to protests and harassment by right-wing thugs outside his home in Spain. Despite living abroad since 2012, Shariys address and personal details have been published on Ukraines Myrotvorets (Peacemaker) online database of supposed enemies of the state, indicating that the campaign against him was being led by the SBU.

The SBU has well-known ties to the countrys far-right and proudly places itself in the tradition of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which collaborated with the Nazis in World War II and was involved in the massacres of tens of thousands of Jews and Poles.

Just prior to his arrest, Shariy reported to Mint Press News that he believed the SBU was looking to assassinate him after receiving an obviously staged email from a friend who was looking to pin down Shariys daily whereabouts.

Fascist elements in Ukraine immediately celebrated news of Shariys arrest on social media. Serhii Sternenko, a leader of the fascist Right Sector and prominent social media figure, quickly uploaded a YouTube video gloating over Shariys detention abroad. He stated, Shariy has been detained, and now all the other participants in the information war will be detained as well. As in all of Sternenkos video blogs, a portrait of the Ukrainian nationalist hero and World War II Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera was strategically placed in the background.

Shariy initially fled Ukraine for Lithuania in 2012 because his investigations of government corruption during the presidency of the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych had led to his prosecution in Ukraine. After the February 2014 US-backed coup that ousted the Yanukovych government, he became a target of Ukraines far-right. Opposing the civil war in eastern Ukraine, which was initiated by the right-wing Petro Poroshenko government, Shariy quickly gained popularity among Ukrainians who were skeptical of the war and the supposedly democratic pro-NATO government.

While Shariy himself has displayed a serious degree of political disorientation over the years  including homophobic and chauvinistic remarks  he has never the less made a number of important reports on corruption, and the promotion of antisemitism, and far-right violent Ukrainian nationalism by the Ukrainian government.

Most notably, Shariy exposed the fact that the killers in the horrific acid attack and murder of anti-corruption activist Kateryna Handziuk in 2018 were members of the Right Sector battalion and that one of the attackers proudly sported neo-Nazi tattoos.

All of the attackers received light sentences of just 3-6 years for the political assassination. Following the beginning of full-scale war with Russia in February, Kiev despicably released the leader of Handziuks murder, Sergey Torbin, and allowed him to pick other far-right inmates with military experience like himself to join in the NATO-provoked war against Russia.

Such revelations made Shariy both highly popular on social media and a target of the Poroshenko government which saw its own political support plummet to around 20 percent due to widespread disillusionment with corruption, poverty, and the never-ending civil war in Donbass that had claimed the lives of over 13,000 Ukrainians at the time.

In June 2019, Shariy announced the creation of his own center-right libertarian political party, which favored a negotiated settlement to end the ongoing civil war between Kiev and pro-Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine.

The Party of Shariy initially supported the candidacy of the former comedian Volodymyr Zelensky who presented himself as a candidate of peace in opposition to the incumbent war monger Poroshenko. Shariy recently told MintPress News, I thought he [Zelensky] was determined to follow up on his election promises. I helped him to become the president. Its true me and my team did anything for him to get the post.

However, Zelensky quickly exposed himself as a fraud. Basing himself just like Poroshenko on sections of the Ukrainian oligarchy and an alliance with imperialism, he doubled-down on the war in Eastern Ukraine by refusing to implement the Minsk peace accords and announcing a highly provocative Crimea Platform strategy to retake the Black Sea peninsula from Russia by any means.

The pro-war, NATO-friendly policies of Zelensky, like those of Poroshenko, required the support of Ukraines far-right militias. As a result, members of Shariys party suffered a number of targeted political attacks following Zelenskys election.

In February of 2021, with Zelensky himself now facing the same rapidly declining popularity ratings as his predecessor Poroshenko, Shariy was first charged with treason and spreading Russian propaganda.

At the time, Zelensky had also shut down three popular television stations associated with the pro-Russian Opposition Platform  For Life party and likewise began prosecution of party leader Viktor Medvedchuk for treason.

While Zelensky is now hailed in the Western capitalist press as a modern-day Ukrainian George Washington, in January 2022 his popularity ratings stood at just 23 percent and there was widespread skepticism whether he would finish out his full presidency before forced early elections or another far-right orchestrated coup.

Now, the war is providing the basis for the Ukrainian government to completely eradicate political opposition and engage in an unprecedented promotion of the far-right. Making a mockery of the Western propaganda about the alleged defense of democracy in Ukraine, since the beginning of the war, the Zelensky government has arrested both Medvedchuk and Shariy, has outlawed 11 political opposition parties including Shariys, and has provided de facto state-support for a widespread campaign of political arrests, lynchingsand murders.

An Instagram post by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on celebrating the end of World War II on May 9. The image shows a soldier proudly wearing the Nazi Totenkopf insignia. Zelensky has since deleted the post.

On Monday, May 9, the day of the anniversary of the end of World War II, President Zelensky shared a photo on Instagram and Telegram of a Ukrainian soldier sporting the Nazi Totenkopf (skull) insignia. This insignia was used during World War II by the 3rd SS Panzer Division, a unit of elite Nazi soldiers infamous for committing numerous war crimes. It is now a favorite symbol of neo-Nazis worldwide. The Ukrainian President has since deleted the image from his post.
Deaths from drug overdoses in 2021, the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, rose to record-setting levels. Overdose deaths neared 108,000, fueled by an ever-worsening fentanyl crisis, according to preliminary data published Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Hydrocodone pills, also known as Vicodin, are arranged for a photo at a pharmacy in Montpelier, Vt. on Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2013. [AP Photo/Toby Talbot]

Overdose deaths in the US have now surpassed a staggering 1 million since the CDC began collecting data about two decades ago. The surge over the past two years is a result not only of the proliferation of fentanyl, but has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has served to isolate growing numbers of people and restricted access to treatment programs.

The number of deadly overdoses in 2021 was similar to those caused by diabetes and Alzheimers disease and approximately a quarter of the official number of deaths from COVID-19 that year, according to the CDC.

Prior to the pandemic, the US was already coping with a groundswell of deaths of despair from suicides, overdoses and alcohol poisoning, as well as deaths from gun violence.

The 15 percent rise in overdose deaths in 2021 followed a rise of almost 30 percent in 2020. A growing share of these deaths were driven by fentanyl, a class of potent synthetic opioids that is as much as 100 times more powerful than morphine. Fentanyl and methamphetamines, synthetic stimulants, are often mixed with other drugs. Users are most often not aware of fentanyls presence in the drugs they are using.

According to state health officials, many overdose deaths appear to be the result of mixing fentanyl and methamphetamines. Deaths involving synthetic opioids rose to 71,000 in 2021, up from 58,000 the year before, while deaths from stimulants like methamphetamines increased to 33,000 from 25,000.

Alaska saw the largest percentage increase of any state in 2021. Dr. Anne Zink, Alaskas chief health official, told the New York Times that of the 140 fentanyl overdose deaths recorded in 2021, over 60 percent also involved methamphetamines and nearly 30 percent involved heroin.

Fentanyl, introduced in the 1960s as an intravenous anesthetic, is a white powder that is now often combined with other drugs such as heroin and cocaine to be sold on the illegal market. It can be produced in a lab and can be cheaper and easier to distribute than heroin, making it more lucrative for drug dealers and traffickers. It is often unwittingly used by those who have moved on to heroin after becoming addicted to opioids that have been pushed by Purdue and other pharmaceutical companies.

A substantial share of illicit pills believed by users to be the opioid OxyContin, the benzodiazepine Xanax or the attention deficit hyperactivity disorder drug Adderall now contain fentanyl, oftentimes in deadly doses. Individuals seeking prescription opioids, relief from anxiety, or a stimulant to stay awake for exams or work, become the unwitting victims of deadly doses of fentanyl.

Black Americas now have the highest fatality rates from drug overdoses, followed by American Indian and Alaska Native males, with significant increases seen among these groups in recent years.

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), at the National Institutes of Health, overdose deaths among teens have doubled in the past three years, even though drug use is decreasing overall among teens. Teens are more likely to take pills they think are Adderall, Xanax or Percocet, seeking help to study, calm anxiety or treat pain, according to Dr. Nora Volkow, director of NIDA.

Theyve been doing this for decades, the Guardian quotes Volkow saying. What is now different is these prescription drugs that are illicitly manufactured containing fentanyl have increased 50-fold, she said.

The proliferation of fentanyl is undoubtedly a significant contributing factor to the surge in overdose deaths. However, this epidemic of deaths cannot be separated from either the pandemic or the social crisis that it has exacerbated. The criminal government policy pursued by both the Trump and Biden administrations in relation to COVID-19 has led to an official death toll of 1 million Americans in just two years.

The governments refusal to adopt a Zero-COVID public health strategy has created conditions in which the country is now in the third year of the pandemic with no end in sight.

The White House announced earlier this month that it expects the US to record 100 million new cases of COVID-19 during the coming fall and winter months, along with a significant wave of deaths. Using the accepted infection fatality rate from the virus of 0.5 percent, this translates into 500,000 additional deaths.

Last month, President Biden sent his administrations inaugural National Drug Control Strategy to Congress which, according to the White House web site, focuses on two critical drivers of the epidemic: untreated addiction and drug trafficking. The Office of National Drug Control Policy has requested just over $450 million for fiscal year 2023 to fund this effort.

This summuch of which will end up going to federal and local policecompares to the record $39.8 billion in military aid to Ukraine just authorized by the US House to fund the US-NATO proxy war. This goes beyond the $33 billion requested by the Biden administration and is being pushed through by a bipartisan effort, including from the left wing of the Democratic Party.

The geyser of money for war comes as $10 billion for COVID-19 relief was dropped by the Democrats, despite the Biden administrations predictions of an approaching fall and winter of surging deaths from the coronavirus. Can it seriously be believed that this same Democratic Party will lead a war against overdose deaths that are almost certain to rise in 20222023?

The crisis of overdose deaths in the US is above all a social crisis that must be confronted by workers and youth in a struggle against a wealthy elite that is prepared to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives annually to overdoses and other deaths of despair at the same time as it forces the population into unsafe workplaces and schools and drives millions into poverty as prices soar and real wages plunge.

Only the working class has the power and position in society to fight for socialist policies in opposition to a ruling class that prosecutes war abroad while condemning the population at home to death and disease.
On Tuesday, Elon Musk said he would restore the Twitter account of Donald Trump if his planned purchase of the social media and microblogging platform is successful.

During an online event hosted by the Financial Times, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX said that it was not correct to ban Trump and called it a mistake. Musk claimed that banning Trump from Twitter ended up amplifying the former President, It alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice.

Musk, who has referred to himself as a free speech absolutist, added, He is now going to be on Truth Social as will a large part of the right in the United States and so I think this could end up being frankly worse than having a single forum where everyone can debate.

Furthermore, Musk said that permanently banning Trump from Twitter, was a morally bad decision, to be clear, and foolish in the extreme.

Elon Musk (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

That Musk refers to the banning of Donald Trump from social media platforms in January 2021 as a matter of free speech or protecting the publics right to political debate is patently false. Trumps Twitter account was terminatedas well as his accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTubebecause, as president of the United States, he was engaged in an ongoing conspiracy to remain office despite losing the 2020 presidential election by more than 7 million votes.

The high point of this conspiracy to overthrow the US Constitution took place on January 6, 2021, when a right-wing mobincluding fascist, neo-Nazi and paramilitary groupswas mobilized by Trump and other elected Republican officials to assault the US Capitol and stop the congressional certification of Joe Biden as president.

On January 6 itself, Trump tweeted 25 times, pushing the stolen election conspiracy theory and, among other things, claiming falsely that Vice President Mike Pence had the authority to stop the certification of Biden as president by sending the votes, back to the states.

Meanwhile, Trump has since continued with his fascistic plotting against the public by maintaining the lie that Biden is not a legitimate president, and that the election was stolen by the Democrats.

During his online appearance Tuesday, Musk said that Twitter should not permanently ban any accounts unless they are bots or spam/scam accounts, where theres just no legitimacy to the account at all. He said that Twitter founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey shares his opinion that permanent bans, undermine trust in Twitter as a town square where everyone can voice their opinion.

Dorsey tweeted in response, I do agree. There are exceptions (CSE, illegal behaviour, spam or network manipulation, etc.), but generally permanent bans are a failure of ours and dont work, which I wrote about here after the event (and called for a resilient social media protocol). CSE stands for Child Sexual Exploitation.

But in the days after the January 6 insurrection in Washington D.C., Dorsey said the ban was the right decision for Twitter which was in an extraordinary and untenable circumstance that forced the company to focus on reducing the real threat of offline harm.

Musk also said at the FT forum that, if he takes control of the company, Twitter will continue to use tools against those who are tweeting things that are wrong and bad by either deleting them or making them invisible.

Although he did not specify exactly what he meant, he said tweets deemed illegal or otherwise just destructive to the world would be made to have very limited traction. These are the same techniques of shadow-banning that Twitter currently takes against left-wing and socialist opposition to the US-NATO war drive in Ukraine against Russia.

Twitters board of directors accepted an offer from Musk on April 25 to purchase the platform for $44 billionor $54.20 per shareand remove it from the stock market, making it his privately owned company.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal on May 5, Musk added 19 more investors and another $7.14 billion to the financing of his offer including $1.9 billion from Prince al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia and $1 billion from Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle Corporation.

Musk, the worlds wealthiest individual, worth approximately $240 billion, claimed at one point that he does not care if he makes any money on the Twitter deal. However, even with the additional financing from other wealthy individuals, Musk still has to pledge Tesla shares worth $31.5 billion to cover a $6.25 billion margin loan needed to complete the purchase.

Musk was asked by the FT moderator on Tuesday, if Trump were to be let back on to Twitter and he did something similar to what he had done on January 6, would he be back in the sin bin? Musk refused to answer the question directly saying only that Trump had stated he was not planning to come back to Twitter. He concluded his comments by saying the Trump ban was morally wrong and flat out stupid.
There are no lines Jeremy Corbyn will not cross in his campaign to return to the Parliamentary Labour Party.

His most grotesque act of obeisance yet was his interview by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty on the war in Ukraine, in which he aligned himself totally with the NATO war drive against Russia.

Jeremy Corbyn (right) the then leader of the Labour Party embraces Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell at Labour's Conference at the Brighton Centre in Brighton, England, Monday, Sept. 23, 2019. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

Since the war broke out, Corbyn and his allies in the rump left of the Labour Party have come under renewed attack by leader Sir Keir Starmer. His assault initially centred on a February 16 Stop the War Coalition statement signed by members of Labours Socialist Campaign Group (SCG) opposing NATOs eastward expansion and accusing the UK of pouring oil on the fire in Ukraine.

Starmer demanded that all Labour signatories, including 11 MPs, retract their names or have the party whip removed. Only Corbyn and Claudia Webbe, who have both already had the Labour whip withdrawn, did not retract their signatures. Corbyn went on to speak at a Stop the War rally in London as both of his two longest-standing allies, John McDonnell and Dianne Abbott, bailed.

Finding himself abandoned by his few remaining supporters, and doubtless under pressure from the SCG MPs, Corbyn gave an interview to Times Radio on April 20 to plead his case. A Corbyn-led Labour Party, he assured the ruling class, would still be supporting Ukraines right to defend itself. He did not blame NATO for the fact Russia has invaded Ukraine. All that his anti-war opposition amounted to was an appeal for the freedom to dream of a world where we start to ultimately disband all military alliances.

Four days later Starmer replied with a kick in the teeth, telling BBCs Sunday Morning that it was very difficult to see how Corbyn could be readmitted to the Labour Party after his remarks. Earlier this month Starmer told the Times he would expel any Labour MP who did not declare unshakeable support for Nato.

Corbyn responded with a further capitulation. Going one better than the Murdoch-owned Times, he clarified his position on the war in Ukraine in an interview with the CIAs own Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL)

Founded in 1949, Radio Free Europe was established by the National Committee for a Free Europe, an anti-communist CIA front organisation under the direction of Allen Dulles, who in his time as head of the CIA oversaw the 1953 Iranian and 1954 Guatemalan coup detats and the MKUltra torture experimentation programme. Radio Liberty was established in 1951 by another CIA front organisation, the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia. The now joint stations continue to serve as a lever of American imperialism under the United States Agency for Global Media.

Corbyn, who once had a column in the Stalinist Morning Star, knows this history and that the interview may as well have been held in the Pentagon. But he calculated that his choice of platform would underscore his willingness to do whatever is asked of him.

Asked by Vazha Tavberidze, a Vaclav Havel Journalism Fellow working with RFE/RLs Georgian Service,where he attributed blame for the war, Corbyn replied, Russian, particularly President Putins, aggression against Ukraine. He insisted that while those in Russia that advise Putin might have thought Ukraines integration into US and European security structures was some kind of threat to Russia, I dont agree with that.

NATOs key propaganda claims in the war are that the alliance is defending freedom and democracy in innocent Ukraine against unprovoked and inexplicable Russia aggression, and that it has never had any designs on Russia. Corbyn endorsed this myth, abandoning the position he put forward just months ago.

The February 16 Stop the War statement, which still lists the former Labour leader first as a signatory, demanded a halt to NATOs eastward expansion and refuted the idea that NATO is a defensive alliance. It called for a settlement which addresses Russias security concerns, in recognition of the fact that the US was preparing Ukraine as a staging ground for a NATO war with Russia in all but name. It argued that British arms shipments and troop deployments to Eastern Europe were inflaming tensions and indicating disdain for Russian concerns.

The Stop the War Coalition February 16 statement now only lists the names of two MPs in support, both of whom sit as Independents in Parliament. These are former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who was booted out of the Parliamentary Labour Party over a year ago by Sir Keir Starmer, and Claudia Webbe, another former Labour MP.

Neither Stop the War nor Corbyn could provide a political perspective to combat this predatory war drive, but they could, at this point, acknowledge political realities. Two months later, fully aware of NATOs warmongering, Corbyn flatly denies any hostile intentions by NATO against Russia. He went on in Saturdays interview to shrug his shoulders at the further rapid extension of the military alliance. Asked by Tavberidze about Sweden and Finlands planned membership of NATO, he replied, Thats a matter for them.

Again, Corbyn knows better, but spouts the required propaganda. NATO has relentlessly escalated tensions on Russias borders, forcing countries to pick a side, and coupled this with ongoing diplomatic pressure and the deeper integration of the Baltic and Eastern European countries into the military structures of the US and its European allies. Sweden and Finland have been presented with an ultimatum and are in turn working to present their populations with a fait accompli on NATO membership. This process was graphically underscored by Johnsons announcement Wednesday of UK military alliances with both, pre-empting their official participation in the alliance and making clear that British imperialism, unlike Corbyn, makes no pretence of neutrality on the issue.

Corbyn would not even oppose NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. Asked if he would welcome such a move, he replied, it seems very unlikely. Squirming to the point of incoherence he continued, according to the transcript, Although I do obviously support the decisions that have been made [inaudible] in the case of Georgia, for example, as with Ukraine, before returning to theme to say, what I dont understand is why Russia has chosen to go down the route of invasion and war.

The former Labour leaders inability to give a straight answer is due to his desperate triangulating between two audiences: Starmer and his party of warmongers and the ruling class they serve, and the following Corbyn has built up with his criticisms of the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and other imperialist interventions. He wants to prove his loyalty to the British bourgeoisie without totally alienating his traditional supporters and ending any political use value he has in channelling anti-war sentiment into harmless semi-pacifist phrase-mongering.

Corbyn went as far as possible in neutering his already craven comments to Times Radio without openly abandoning the pretence of an anti-war position, suggesting the growth [but not maintenance?] of military alliances in the long term [but not now?] is not necessarily [but not definitely?] the way forward. NATOs global role, he added as a limp caveat, has not always been a good thing.

The headline of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty interview with Corbyn reading "Former U.K. Labour Leader Corbyn: Ukraine War Is 'Disgraceful' And Russia's 'Wrong At Every Level'" (Credit: screenshot/www.rferl.org)

This was in stark contrast to his repeated denunciations of the illegal, wrong, disgraceful, wrong at every level and conclusively Russian invasion. The clear message is that whatever his qualms about British militarism, he can join in the demonisation of Russia with the best of them.

Corbyn explained his preferred policy would be to force Russia to agree a ceasefire and negotiated solution through a combination of political pressure and what he euphemistically described as whats happening on the ground. What is happening on the ground is a NATO proxy war against Russia. Pressure is being applied through sanctions, destroying the living standards of the world working class.

In plain English, a Corbyn-led Labour Party or Britain would participate in the NATO war. Asked if the UK was doing enough to help Ukraine, he replied uncritically, Were giving a lot of aid, yes.

Again, the aid referred to is close to 3 billion in military assistance, including tens of thousands of weapons, missiles, and heavy artillery pieces as well as training for Ukrainian soldiers delivered by the UKs professional killers in the special forces. With customary sleight of hand, Corbyn doffs his cap to these efforts before adding that humanitarian aid is also important.

Tanks uploaded on military truck platforms as a part of additional British troops and military equipment arrive at Estonia's NATO Battle Group base in Tapa, Estonia, Friday, Feb. 25, 2022. (AP Photo/Sergei Stepanov)

Corbyn is all but declaring, I may personally dream of a world without war, but I will not fight to oppose it and I will peacefully coexist in a party of warmongers. All he asks in return is the freedom to wring his hands from time to time and call for peace, dialogue and diplomacy, largely in order to bring onboard a section of the middle class generally supportive of the war but repelled by Starmers unhinged sabre-rattling.

More than any other issue, it was Corbyns record of parliamentary opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars of Tony Blair that won him two overwhelming Labour leadership elections. Hundreds of thousands voted for him to wage a fight against the Blairite war criminals. Instead, as leader, Corbyn dropped his opposition to NATO and allowed the party a free vote on bombing Syria and renewing the Trident nuclear weapons system, which they duly backed. He made no moves whatsoever against Blair or his disciples.

Corbyns record since handing leadership of the party of NATO to Starmer has confirmed that party unity with the right-wing MPs and apparatus running the Labour Party remains the alpha and omega of his politics, based on an unshakeable hostility to any movement of the working class outside of the safe channels of parliament and the Labour and trade union bureaucracy. Not even the threat of a war with Russia risking a Third World War can break his commitment. On the contrary, it has strengthened it, for fear that the consequences of the war drive will push the working class into revolutionary struggles.

Corbyns actions discredit not only him, but the Stop the War Coalition. Since its foundation, the STWC has insisted that opposition to war must be based on an orientation to lefts in the Labour Party and the trade unions. This bankrupt perspective demobilised the mass movement built up over the war in Iraq. Over time, Stop the War developed a semi-official status as an advisor to British imperialism, advocating a less warmongering, less US-aligned foreign policy.

With the further rightward march of Labour and the unions, dragging the SCG in their wake, the STWC has all but collapsed, struggling even to fill a platform in the UK as its patrons abandon their past association. Corbyn, the last holdout and Chair of Stop the War for four years, has now given a NATO-friendly interview denouncing Russia to Radio CIA.

The development of the war crisis to the current far advanced stage is inseparable from the betrayals and false perspective of Corbyn and Stop the War. The bloody US campaign for global hegemony since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, with Britain as its leading ally, has produced a well of opposition in the working class, as has the explosive growth of social inequality. But this opposition has been denied any means of intervening against the war-austerity drive and its architects.

Building an anti-war movement requires a political reckoning with Corbynism and the STWC. These forces must be broken with, and a turn made to the socialist perspective put forward by the Socialist Equality Party and its sister parties internationally: to oppose the imperialist war drive of the NATO powers and the reactionary, nationalist response of the Russian government through the prosecution of the global class struggle and its elevation into a political fight against capitalismthe source of all war, inequality and oppression.
Aligning the interests and priorities of 164 governments to reach agreement at the World Trade Organization (WTO) is no easy feat. The challenge is even greater when the topic is as contentious as the role of intellectual property rights protection in the extraordinary circumstances of COVID-19. But this is exactly what WTO members are trying to do, building on the outcome document that recently emerged from an informal process conducted by the WTO Director-General Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala with the European Union, India, South Africa and the United States (the Quad). This document would reinforce and streamline the scope for governments to limit patent rights to support the geographic diversification of production capacity of vaccines to fight COVID-19. Many WTO members are keen to integrate this intellectual property dimension into a trade and health package to provide for a holistic response to the pandemic, which in turn would be part of a set of results planned for the WTO 12th Ministerial Conference in mid-June. If successful, the deal could support greater vaccine equity. It would also confirm that the multilateral trading system can deliver on pressing global challenges.

The discussion process, while difficult and protracted, focused on designing a concrete, problem-solving response to address specific obstacles that governments had identified since India and South Africa tabled their proposal for a broad waiver of treaty obligations in October 2020. In adopting this pragmatic approach, the conversations also moved away from the European Unions initial, more technical emphasis. No single point of view dominated the conversations. Members worked in good faith to come together towards what could be a meaningful proposal, without prejudice to their respective positions, that could be built upon by the rest of the WTO membership.

At its core, the outcome document would confirm the right of developing country governments to issue executive decrees, emergency orders and other legal instruments, in addition to conventional compulsory licenses, to authorize a company to use the patents underlying the COVID-19 vaccines without the consent of the patent right holder, subject to a delicate balance of flexibilities and clarifications crafted within the general equitable principles set out in the framework of the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Vaccines produced under these conditions may be exported, not only used to service domestic markets, and adequate remuneration to the patent right holder may take into consideration the humanitarian and not-for-profit purposes of these programs to support manufacturers to produce and supply vaccines at affordable prices. WHO guidelines also provide a helpful reference, given the lack of domestic experience in many countries. In addition, protection of clinical trial data would not prevent a government from effectively implementing these flexibilities. These provisions are to be applied for a period to be determined of between 3 to 5 years, and any measure taken in conformity with them would not be subject to the WTOs dispute settlement mechanism. Six months from now, WTO members would decide whether to extend this treatment to COVID-19-related therapeutics and diagnostics.

Generally, the outcome document has been welcomed as an accepted basis for negotiation among the broader WTO membership. This is an important step forward, particularly in light of the lack of progress that hampered discussions for the past 18 months. But a deal is not yet done. While delegations consult with their capitals, initial reactions have focused on certain issues, mostly already reflected in brackets in the document. First, China, a major vaccine manufacturer, has said it would not make use of the flexibilities that are finally agreed upon. The point under discussion now is how to properly reflect this major announcement in the text. Second, as there is no intention to inadvertently establish requirements beyond those of the TRIPS agreement for members using the flexibilities of the outcome, further deliberation is needed to keep or delete paragraph 3.a) of the outcome text, on single authorization and listing of patents. Third, some members would like to have the scope of the document cover therapeutics and diagnostics to fight COVID-19, in addition to vaccines. These issues, and any other which may arise, would need to be sorted out to reach a deal in time for MC12. The next days and weeks will need focused and intensive negotiations among members, under the able stewardship of the TRIPS Council Chair, ambassador Lansana Gberie of Sierra Leone.

Stakeholders on both sides of the discussion are unhappy with the outcome as it does not fully reflect any one of their respective positions. For many civil society organizations and public health advocates, nothing but a full waiver of TRIPS provisions works; for many pharmaceutical companies, no flexibility beyond those included in the TRIPS agreement is acceptable or needed. As they now gear up their domestic consultations within such a polarized environment, WTO members have nevertheless the opportunity to leverage this exceptional effort to reach a compromise outcome that could help build up and diversify vaccine manufacturing capacity to fight the pandemic, foster regional supply chains and strengthen health systems. In Africa, for example, new facilities used to produce COVID-19 vaccines could be leveraged to produce vaccines against other endemic infectious diseases and boost resilience for the future, improving the regions capacity to provide for itself. Robust and reliable vaccine production capacity in Africa is a global public good.

In addition to the potential impact on fostering vaccine equity, a deal on intellectual property would signal that a problem-solving pragmatic approach is useful to sort out complex issues in a multilateral setting. It could also help unlock a package on response to the pandemic, which could pave the way for other negotiations at MC12. This would be a first welcome step in putting WTO members on the track of finding ways to cooperate even in challenging topics and at difficult times.
Our company is offering wood pellets, which are imported from Lithuania. The minimum purchase is 48 tons. Two TIR trucks. The price in Bialystok is 191 euros net for 1 ton, without transport costs. The price of transport in the Polish, we set individually. The form of payment is 100% prepayment based on a proforma invoice.
Scientists have succeeded in bringing dead eyes back to life, proving that "photosensitive neuron cells in the retina can still respond to light and communicate with each other up to five hours after death, sending signals 'resembling those recorded from living subjects,'" reports The Telegraph. While it sounds like something out of an Edgar Allen Poe tale, the finding suggests that brain death might be reversible, which also sounds like a Poe tale.

Lead author Dr Fatima Abbas, of the Moran Eye Centre at the University of Utah, said: "We were able to wake up photoreceptor cells in the human macula, which is the part of the retina responsible for our central vision and our ability to see fine detail and colour. "In eyes obtained up to five hours after an organ donor's death, these cells responded to bright light, coloured lights and even very dim flashes of light."

Another scientist at the Universtity of Utah, Dr. Frans Vinberg, said, "Retina is part of our central nervous system so we think similar things might be seen also in the other parts of the brain.""
A Georgia Sheriff appears to have had bad information about the roadside search of a women's lacrosse team bus. Members of the team from a historically black college describe the search as "terrifying" and were afraid it would escalate. The Sheriff claims personal items were not searched, and that this was purely a routine event. Body camera footage and reports from the victims show otherwise.

Delaware Online:

Body camera footage from Georgia deputies who stopped a Delaware State University women's lacrosse team bus late last month directly contradicts Tuesday statements by the sheriff who defended the stop.

In a public address, Liberty County Sheriff William Bowman said "no personal items on the bus or person(s) were searched" during the April 20 stop. But the bodycam footage, which Delaware Online/The News Journal has obtained and made publicly available without editing, shows deputies rifling through players' backpacks and bags  something those on the bus have said for days.
Last month, we learned that researchers excavating North Dakota's Tanis fossil site found an incredibly well-preserved leg of a dinosaur. The creatureand others at the sitewere likely killed by the impact of the 12 kilometer-wide Chicxulub asteroid that crashed into the Gulf of Mexico 66 million years ago and eradicated 80% of Earth's animals. Turns out, the scientists may also have found a minuscule fragment of that asteroid encased in a bit of amber. The story of the discovery is told in Dinosaur Apocalpyse, a new BBC Earth documentary also airing on PBS's Nova. From CNN:



It's "like getting a sample vial, running back in time and getting a sample from the impact site and then saving it for science," [University of Manchester paleontologist Robert] DePalma said.

DePalma said they hope to be able to confirm what the asteroid was made from and where it might be from  efforts that have caught the attention of NASA; DePalma presented his findings last month at the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

"This example of what might be a little tiny fragment, maybe micrograms, of the colliding asteroid  the fact that a record of that is preserved, would be mind-blowing," said Goddard Chief Scientist Jim Garvin, who has studied impact cratering on Earth and Mars.
Despite ongoing challenges facing the automotive industry resulting in skyrocketing vehicle prices and inventory shortages, Buffalo's ACV Auctions has continued to find ways to innovate and grow.

It now offers services to ship vehicles from sellers to auction winners. Dealers now can finance vehicles through services ACV offers. And ACV has added new offerings to help dealers appraise and inspect vehicles.

As a result, the online vehicle auction company  Western New York's first $1 billion unicorn  reported a 49% increase in revenues during the first quarter of 2022. Though the company is still losing money, it's not uncommon for tech startups to take a while to become profitable as they scale up. ACV CFO Bill Zerella expects the company will break even by the end of 2023.

For the year, the company predicts revenue between $452 million to $460 million, up around 27% from 2021.

These are some of the ways ACV plans to reach its targets:

More than just auctions

ACV's transportation and capital offerings have helped the company weather the challenges facing the automotive industry.

"We continue to invest in the technology and resources to scale ACV Transportation and ACV Capital," ACV CEO George Chamoun said. "These investments are driving strong top-line growth by delivering highly differentiated services to the market, while also creating efficiency for both our partners and for ACV."

ACV will transport vehicles sold on its platform from the seller to the buyer. During the first quarter of 2022, the company saw a 45% increase in the number of transports and expanded to more than 3,000 carrier partners. Efficiency also increased, as more than half of the transports were automatically dispatched.

The company also launched a transportation app for carriers to manage their pickups and deliveries.

Through ACV Capital, dealers can finance their purchases made at the company's online auctions. Compared to the first quarter of 2021, loan volume grew 140% and revenue per loan was up 50%.

The company's new online capital portal offers dealers a "seamless post-auction financing solution," Chamoun said.

Continued tech innovation

Chamoun expects ACV's new technology offerings will create sustainable, long-term growth by driving customers to the company's platforms and creating efficiency.

Through several recent acquisitions, ACV has expanded its live appraisal capabilities:

Monk, an artificial intelligence-powered platform that can detect damage on vehicles.

Drivably, an online platform that lets dealers purchase vehicles directly from consumers.

MAX Digital, which is used by dealers to determine how to price vehicles for sale.

"Our ability to deliver trusted vehicle valuations because of our expansive, proprietary data enables dealers to provide attractive offers to their consumers, which means sourcing from more customers for the dealership, which in turn drives more wholesale supply," Chamoun said.

ACV's technology tools will now be offered under the brand SAM  smart acquisition manager.

SAM makes buying at ACV even easier, Chamoun said. It offers tailored buyer recommendations, relevant and engaging notifications and auto-bidding capabilities. SAM contributed over 5% of ACV's quarterly unit volume and Chamoun believes it will be a big growth driver as it continues to expand.

"Simply put, every dealer needs SAM," he said.

Strong vehicle mix

ACV doesn't just sell mass-market vehicles on their auction platform. High-end, luxury vehicles like BMWs, Porsches and Lamborghinis make their way onto the platform, too.

Despite "softening wholesale prices," ACV sold vehicles worth a total of $2.4 billion, an 83% increase from the first quarter of 2021. But the number of vehicles sold, 140,125, was up just 9%.

The revenue increase is a result of a broader mix of vehicles on ACV's marketplace, Chamoun said.

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Davis Shafer, a senior at Washington High School, was nominated a 2022 Presidential Scholar.

A student from Sioux Falls and a student from Aberdeen have been named two of 161 high school students across the nation selected by the U.S. Secretary of Education as 2022 Presidential Scholars.

Washington High School senior Davis Q. Shafer and Aberdeen Central High School senior Jordan Phillips were honored as the scholars for South Dakota.

The White House Commission on Presidential Scholars selects students annually based on their academic success, artistic and technical excellence, essays, school evaluations and transcripts, as well as evidence of community service, leadership and demonstrated commitment to high ideals.

Shafer and Phillips demonstrated outstanding academic achievement, artistic excellence, technical expertise, leadership, citizenship, service and contribution to their school and community, according to a news release.

To qualify for the scholar program, Shafer said he had to take the ACT and SAT. After that, he learned he was one of the top scorers in the state for the tests, and from there, he came to school an hour early each day to write essays for the application process for the program.

He wrote essays about his participation in school, different challenges he's faced in life, and took a photo of and wrote an essay about his baby grand piano, telling the judges about his love for playing piano.

Of the 3.7 million students expected to graduate from high school nationwide this year, more than 5,000 qualified for the 2022 awards.

Presidential scholars include one young man and one young woman from each state, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and U.S. families living abroad. Another 15 students are chosen at-large, as well as 20 scholars from the arts and 20 in career and technical education.

Each scholar can name their most-influential teacher, who is honored with a personal letter from the secretary of education. Shafer nominated Meghan Wounded-Head from Sioux Falls Washington High School and Phillips nominated Kent Hansen from Aberdeen Central High School.

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Wounded-Head has been Shafer's teacher for English II and AP Literature and Composition, and Shafer said he appreciates her down-to-earth, practical teaching.

"She's one of the most kind teachers in the world and makes a positive impact on her students every day," Shafer said of Wounded-Head. "She's never afraid to tell you exactly what she thinks about our writing or our work."

Student winners don't get scholarships, but receive an expenses-paid trip to Washington, D.C., and are presented with a medallion at a special ceremony sponsored by the White House.

Shafer plans to attend the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to major in biomedical engineering, and hopes to become a family doctor after his schooling.

Phillips to attend Duke

Kent Hansen was Phillips' social studies teacher when she moved to Aberdeen from Ohio as a high school sophomore. Hansen always went out of his way to ensure that Phillips was adjusting to the change, she said.

Jordan Phillips, a senior at Aberdeen Central High School, was named one of the 2022 Presidential Scholars.

Phillips said she's extremely grateful for the support she's received from the Aberdeen community and school district since she found out that was named one of the 2022 presidential scholars.

She's also grateful for the community's support for her Cozys for the Cure initiative. She initially created the organization when she was living in Ohio as a way to raise money for breast cancer awareness after her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Phillips was previously named a 2021 Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes winner for her Cozys for the Cure initiative. She had donated more than $120,000 to the Susan G. Komen Foundation, which supports mammogram units in southeastern Ohio.

More: Aberdeen teen Jordan Phillips earns Gloria Barron Prize for Young Heroes

In the fall, Phillips will attend Duke University through the Robertson Scholars Leadership Program, which will also allow her to spend some of her sophomore year at the University of North Carolina. Although she isn't entirely certain yet what she'll major in, she plans to go into public policy and work in nonprofits.

This article originally appeared on Sioux Falls Argus Leader: Sioux Falls, Aberdeen students named 2022 Presidential Scholars
A federal appeals court will let Texas enforce its new social media law  which targets Twitter, Facebook and other large platforms that Republicans accuse of censoring conservatives  even though the court has yet to rule on the law's constitutionality.

The one-sentence order by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, issued Wednesday evening, came with no explanation and was split 2-1, though the order did not indicate how the panel's three judges voted.

The law known as House Bill 20, approved largely along party lines by the Legislature last year, was blocked from taking effect in December by U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman of Austin.

Siding with two tech industry groups that challenged the law, Pitman said HB 20 was an unconstitutional violation of social media companies' free speech rights  interfering with the platforms' editorial discretion and their First Amendment right to moderate the third-party content they disseminate.

A federal appeals court will let Texas enforce its new social media law  which targets Twitter, Facebook and other large platforms that Republicans accuse of censoring conservatives  even though the court has yet to rule on the law's constitutionality.

"HB 20 prohibits virtually all content moderation, the very tool that social media platforms employ to make their platforms safe, useful, and enjoyable for users," Pitman wrote.

Wednesday's order came only two days after the appeals court heard oral arguments in which Texas lawyers defended HB 20 as a legitimate effort to ban platforms from censoring certain viewpoints.

Texas argues that the large platforms are "common carrier" public forums, subjecting them to state regulation to ensure free and unobstructed access without fear of viewpoint discrimination.

'Big win against Big Tech'

Ken Paxton, the state's Republican attorney general, called the ruling a "big win against Big Tech."

"Texas's HB 20 is back in effect," Paxton wrote on Twitter. "The 5th Circuit made the right call here, and I look forward to continuing to defend the constitutionality of HB 20."

The Texas law lets users sue if they are blocked from posting on a large platform or if their posts are removed.

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Tech industry groups argued that HB 20 would open social media platforms to countless lawsuits, upending their ability to enforce content moderation policies and protect users from abusive posts, scams or falsehoods.

Carl Szabo, vice president and general counsel of NetChoice, which challenged the Texas law, said the industry group plans to immediately appeal the order, which he called "an unusual and unfortunate move" because it was issued without explanation or addressing the law's merits.

'Assault on the First Amendment'

HB 20 is an assault on the First Amendment, and we remain confident the courts will strike it down as unconstitutional, Szabo said. "In the meantime, unfortunately, Americans  especially Texans  will be negatively impacted.

In blocking the state law last year, Pitman said social media companies were improperly burdened by provisions that require platforms to create a system that lets users track complaints and receive an assessment of the legality of removed content within two days, excluding weekends. HB 20 also creates burdens by requiring large platforms to notify users every time a post is removed and provide an opportunity to appeal  with 14 days to give users a written explanation about the decision, the judge said.

The requirements, Pitman said, "are inordinately burdensome given the unfathomably large numbers of posts on these sites and apps."

Pitman also noted that the law applies only to social media companies with at least 50 million users a month, allowing HB 20 to target platforms that Republicans accuse of bias while exempting Parler, Gab and other sites popular with conservatives.

Trump's social media accounts

Abbott spokeswoman Renae Eze said the governor made HB 20 a priority during special sessions of the Legislature last year "because allowing biased social media companies to cancel conservative speakers erodes America's free speech foundations."

"We fully expect social media companies to comply with this Texas law, and if they refuse and attempt to cancel conservative speech, the attorney generals office will hold them accountable to Texans and the Lone Star State," Eze said.

HB 20 was fueled by conservative anger that coalesced after Twitter banned former President Donald Trump's account, citing the risk of further violence after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, while Facebook and Instagram suspended Trump accounts for similar reasons.

"The Big Tech oligarchs will never forgive themselves for not more tightly controlling political speech online, which they blame for the defeat of Hillary Clinton at the hands of Donald Trump," said Jim Lakely, vice president of the conservative Heartland Institute.

"We now live in a world in which a handful of powerful people who control the digital town square allow one side of the political spectrum  the left side  to speak as they wish, and suppress the speech of conservatives," he said.

But social media companies say their content moderation policies offer essential protections for users, and Scott Wilkens, senior staff attorney for the Knight First Amendment Institute, said the ruling will have dire consequences for online speech.

"Texass law violates the First Amendment because it compels social media companies to publish speech they dont want to publish," Wilkens said, adding that the legal theories pushed by lawyers for Texas would "give government broad power to censor and distort public discourse."

The three members of the 5th Circuit panel that lifted Pitman's injunction against HB 20 were all appointed by Republican presidents  Judges Edith Jones by Ronald Reagan, Leslie Southwick by George W. Bush, and Andrew Oldham by Trump. Wednesday's order indicated, in a footnote, that the panel was split on its ruling but included no other information.

A court order blocking a somewhat similar law in Florida is on appeal in a different circuit court but remains in effect.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: 5th Circuit Court lets Texas enforce, for now, social media law
Jerry Johnson flew from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Phoenix with $39,500 cash to buy a new semitruck for his small business. Phoenix police took the money without criminal charges.

The Arizona Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday that a man from whom Phoenix police seized $39,500 in cash despite never submitting criminal charges against him may continue contesting the forfeiture.

The decision comes six months after Jerry Johnsons attorneys and a representative from the Maricopa County Attorneys Office gave oral arguments before the higher court as to whether the Maricopa County Superior Courts finding that Johnson failed to prove the money was his was correct.

Johnson had flown into Phoenix from Charlotte, North Carolina, in August 2020 to purchase a third semi-truck for his small shipping company. Johnson had found a posting for a truck he wanted at a Phoenix-based auction and flew to Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport with $39,500 in cash  $7,500 in his carry-on backpack and $32,000 in boxes he had packed in his checked luggage.

Johnson previously told The Arizona Republic he chose to travel with cash to avoid incurring fees from withdrawing it outside his usual bank and had found articles that said traveling with large amounts of cash was perfectly legal.

But Johnson's money was seized by Phoenix police when officers confronted him at Sky Harbor International Airport and questioned its origin before accusing him of being involved in a money-laundering operation. Johnson said the officer coerced him into signing a waiver form indicating the money wasnt his, or go to jail.

Jerry Johnson flew from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Phoenix with $39,500 cash to buy a new semitruck for his small business. Phoenix police took the money without criminal charges.

Such waivers later became illegal after Gov. Doug Ducey signed a bill that enacted sweeping reforms to the states civil forfeiture laws such as requiring a criminal conviction for the state to forfeit ones property in civil court under most circumstances.

During the oral argument before the Arizona Court of Appeals held on Nov. 9, 2021, the three judges repeatedly questioned and criticized a Maricopa County attorney's argument against Johnson, one of them at one point referring to the process of civil forfeiture, or RICO, as "distasteful."

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Im sorry if it seems harsh that the state should actually have to come forward with evidence before it takes peoples money away at the airport, Presiding Judge Peter Swann said at the time.

Dallen Gardner, an attorney representing the Maricopa County Attorneys Office, argued at the time that the money didnt belong to Johnson, that it didnt appear to come from Johnsons business bank account and that he didnt know exactly how much cash he was carrying when police confronted him.

Want to know all the latest development news? Download the free azcentral.com app.

I dont know how much I have in my wallet, Swann replied. Do you need to check it? Should I be worried that the police are going to come check it? Am I going to have to explain where I got it?

Swann, who penned the courts decision dated Tuesday, said the lower court erred in its ruling that Johnson had failed to prove the money was his.

The state argues that Johnson failed to prove ownership, but if it is not Johnsons money, then whose money is it? Swann wrote on Tuesday. The state failed to introduce any evidence of who owned the money.

Institute for Justice, a libertarian non-profit law firm thats representing Johnsons appeal, celebrated the higher courts decision to reverse the lower courts initial ruling.

Todays decision points out the obvious: Jerry Johnson properly proved ownership of his money and has the right to defend it in court, Alexa Gervasi, one of the attorneys representing Johnson, said in a written statement. The scales are already tipped in the governments favor in civil forfeiture, but the lower court went outside the bounds of Arizona law when it forced Jerry to prove his own innocence. We are glad that Jerry will have his day in court to defend against the unjust forfeiture of his life savings.

Andrew Wimer, a spokesperson for Institute for Justice, said the State has 30 days to appeal the Court of Appeals ruling to the Arizona Supreme Court. Otherwise, the case will return to Maricopa County Superior Court where the Maricopa County Attorneys Office will have to prove Johnsons money was connected to criminal activity or return it.

It was not immediately clear whether MCAO planned to appeal the decision.

Reach the reporter Perry Vandell at 602-444-2474 or perry.vandell@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @PerryVandell.

Support local journalism. Subscribe to azcentral.com today.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Arizona Court of Appeals reverses $39,500 civil forfeiture decision
Experts say overturning Roe v. Wade would likely have a disproportionate impact on lower-income households and people of color, warning the most vulnerable Americans stand to bear outsized costs from added barriers to abortion access.

Policymakers in Washington are also sounding the alarm.

I believe that eliminating the right of women to make decisions about when and whether to have children would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in testimony before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday.

A leaked draft of a majority opinion last week showed the Supreme Court poised to overturn the right to an abortion almost 50 years after recognizing it. Doing so would leave decisions on whether to limit or ban abortions up to states, which experts warn will hit poor people, with fewer resources to travel for access to the procedure, the hardest.

A Roe reversal is going to create a situation that dramatically increases inequality and abortion access, said Caitlin Myers, an economics professor at Middlebury College who specializes in research on the effects of reproductive policies.

The abortion advocacy group Guttmacher Institute counts nearly two dozen states with legislation that could be used to curtail access, more than half of which have so-called trigger laws that would take effect swiftly in the event Roe is repealed.

About half of U.S. women of reproductive age live in those states, said Myers, who has consulted with the Center for Reproductive Rights and Planned Parenthood on abortion lawsuits in the past.

What I predict is likely to happen is that about three-quarters of the women who want abortions are still going to find a way to get out and reach a provider, and about a quarter of the women who want abortions wont, Myers said. So, well be talking about a situation where the primary population that is going to be affected by this is a population of low-income women, many of whom are already mothers.

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A study released by the Brookings Institution in 2015 found that low-income people were more than five times as likely to have an unintended birth as affluent people, and data gathered in the Guttmacher Institutes 2014 Abortion Patient Survey found the percentage of abortion patients living below the federal poverty line had increased from 42 to 47 percent since 2008.

Some economists additionally pointed to years of research documenting the effects childbirth can have on a persons labor force participation, income and education.

The more resources you have at your disposal, the more second chances you have.  But the fewer resources you have available, the more this could make a huge difference, David Slusky, an economics professor at the University of Kansas, said.

A study conducted across five years at the University of California involving interviews with nearly 1,000 women who sought abortions between 2008 and 2010 found that those denied abortions were more likely to experience economic hardship and insecurity.

And, said Jason Lindo, an economics professor at Texas A&M University, limiting abortion access can have effects that last for generations within a family.

There are likely to be effects on these womens families, including their partners, and also including their children, Lindo said.

Growing up in a lower-income family, Lindo said, can lead to long-term implications for children, including ramifications for their education and their adult earnings and many other things that we might think of as being measures of economic or social success.

And that tells us, I think, that whatever government programs that we have, and of course we do have many, they are not large enough in magnitude to close that gap, Lindo added. So despite the social safety net that we do have, these children still suffer effects of growing up in more disadvantaged households.

A 1997 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper estimated the marginal child who was not born due to legalization would have been 70 percent more likely to live in a single parent family, 40 percent more likely to live in poverty, 50 percent more likely to receive welfare, and 35 percent more likely to die as an infant.

These selection effects imply that the legalization of abortion saved the government over $14 billion in welfare expenditures through 1994, the paper also read.

Research from the Columbia Universitys Center on Poverty and Social Policy found earlier this year that the monthly child poverty rate reached 17 percent in January, up 4.9 percent from the previous month, following the lapse of the expanded child tax credit. The largest rises were seen among Latino and Black children, the study found.

While some experts say rolling back abortion rights could knock people out of the labor force, Rachel Greszler, a senior research fellow on budget and entitlements at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation, pushed back in an interview on arguments that a Roe reversal would cost the economy.

We have already a declining fertility rate in the U.S., especially in the last couple of years, Greszler, whose work focuses on retirement and labor policy, said, and thats led to people saying, Hey, this is really bad for the economy, and its especially bad for the future. 

When we look at the fact that we have a huge labor shortage today, you cant help but point out the fact that, well, 63 million babies have been aborted since the Roe decision was made, and those are individuals who would potentially be in the labor force today contributing to economic output and also would be taxpayers, Greszler said.

However, others have countered similar arguments pointing to areas like immigration policy.

Remember, there are millions of people around the world already educated at someone elses expense who want to move toward the United States, Slusky, of the University of Kansas, said. So I think that if we wanted more workers, we could start with people who already exist in other parts of the world who want to work in the United States.

And, Texas A&Ms Lindo argued, a bigger economy itself is also not always desirable, noting more people does typically mean higher GDPs, but it does not necessarily mean higher GDP per capita, which I think most people would say is a better measure of the overall health of an economy.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
On Feb. 23, Ukrainian musicians were doing what theyve always done: getting together with their bands, recording in studios, writing new songs, planning concerts and tours. The next day, Russia invaded their country, and everything changed. Some took solace in songwriting, performed secret concerts for soldiers or took in refugees at theater shelters. Others, plagued by bomb-induced migraines, were unable to contemplate a single note. Some music artists joined the military; some used their bands vans to transport supplies. Obviously, youre not thinking about touring, says Sasha Maslov, the Kharkiv-born photographer who returned to Ukraine from New York. In these images he shot for Billboard in late March, Maslov captures regional pop stars, folk groups, rappers and bandura players. A lot of people cant concentrate. Youre going about your business and the Russians are everywhere. War is always present.

More from Billboard

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Good morning, and hope you're having a great Thursday so far! Lets check out todays top stories.

An image from the day that Notre Dame de Lourdes Church burned down, in Fall River, on May 11, 1982.

Forty years ago, Fall Rivers Flint neighborhood saw unimaginable devastation  the Notre Dame de Lourdes Church caught fire and burned to the ground, taking along with it most of a city block. The city didn't just lose some buildings that day. The Flint was never the same after that. Read more about the history of the church, and how people who were there felt on that horrible day.

Several Patriots players, along with team owner Robert Kraft and Massachusetts First Lady Lauren Baker, were in Fall River on Wednesday celebrating the reopening of a renovated Department of Children and Families' home for young adults. Check out more from this amazing event right here.

And everyone needs a good friend, even if youre a library. The Friends of the Fall River Public Library are celebrating 50 years of friendship with the Fall River Public Library. Find out more about the group, its beginnings in 1972, and where its headed in the future.

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This article originally appeared on The Herald News: Do you remember the Notre Dame Church fire?
Richard Wagner, whose three-decade career as a correspondent for CBS News included covering the war in Vietnam and numerous other conflicts around the world, has died. He was 85.

His wife, Donna Lewis-Wagner, said that he died at his home in Charlottesville, VA. No cause of death was given.

More from Deadline

During the 1960s, 70s and 80s, Wagner appeared frequently on CBS Evening News when Walter Cronkite and then Dan Rather were in the anchor chair.

Starting at CBS News in 1964, Wagner was based for a time in Saigon, as he was among the correspondents who covered the war in Vietnam, at a time when the military had yet to establish the parameters of access to operations. Vietnam was dubbed the living room war, as it was a new concept for television for evening news correspondents to deliver regular first hand-accounts and images from the battlefield.

On a podcast in 2018 with other correspondents who covered the war, Wagner recalled the challenges and fears of reporting from the combat zone. I recall a situation once where we were pinned down, couldnt move, and then the barrage lifted almost as quickly as it had begun, and I wanted to swiftly stand up now that it was safe and do a stand upI found that my hand was shaking so much that I really couldnt do it. It affected me so much that I couldnt do what I had to do until I collected myself.

He also was based in London, Hong Kong and Johannesburg, as he covered the troubles in Northern Ireland and the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. He also reported extensively on events in Central America in the 1970s and 80s. In 1984, he was near El Suchitoto, El Salvador with Newsweek photographer John Hoagland when Hoagland was killed in a crossfire. Wagner won the Sigma Delta Chi award for his radio reporting on that day.

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Wagner also won the Overseas Press Club Ben Grauer Award in 1987 for radio spot news reporting from abroad, as he covered the events in Baghdad that led to Saddam Husseins invasion of Kuwait and then the response of the U.S. and allies, Operation Desert Storm. He also covered Ayatollah Khomeini return from exile to Iran in 1979, the aftermath of the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981, and the ouster of Ferdinand Marcos as leader of the Philippines in 1986.

Wagner also was based in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle, as he covered national politics and other events, including the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island and the Challenger explosion. He also became CBS News first health and science correspondent, and won an Ohio State University Radio-Television award for a CBS Radio documentary on DNA. He left CBS News in 1993.

Wagner was a native of Boston, who received a bachelors degree from Georgetown University and attended its School of Medicine in 1958. He served with the U.S. Army at its Biological Warfare Research Center at Fort Detrick, MD, from 1959 to 1962.

In addition to his wife, Wagner is survived by his daughter, Kerry Wagner.

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Startup Spotlight: CaHill Tech caters to next generation of construction workers with app

Growing up, Carley Hill spent her summers working for her family's construction company in Western New York.

Now, she has taken the knowledge gained from her family's business and created a business of her own, CaHill Tech. Through its award-winning aQuiRe app, CaHill Tech is focused on training the next generation of construction workers in a way they're already familiar with  through watching videos on their phones.

Training for frontline workers

After studying fine art in college and a career making public art and working in the film industry, Hill returned to Buffalo 10 years ago and went back to working at her family's construction company.

During that time, she served on some national construction boards and saw the same issue pop up over and over: Construction companies were struggling to attract and train the next generation of workers as baby boomers were retiring.

The aQuiRe app contains thousands of safety and training videos, everything from how to read a tape measure correctly to how to pour concrete. The videos are shot on job sites and feature workers with years of experience sharing their knowledge with the next generation.

"This is designed for the front-line worker," Hill said. "It's designed for somebody in the field, greasy gloves, hard hat, muddy boots.

The app has 400 modules with thousands of resources to go along with the modules, Hill said, and new modules are added regularly. The CaHill Tech team is working on adding training about solar panel installation and can create custom content for companies.

Around 4,000 employees from 40 companies across the Northeast are using the app, Hill said, including Harrison and Burrowes, a family-owned bridge construction company near Albany.

"It's easy to use. It's user-friendly," Harrison and Burrowes COO Chris DiStefano said. "It's a great refresher for some of the older guys that kind of think they know everything and get a little bit complacent. It's great for the new guys that haven't really learned what we do yet."

Sign up for the Buffalo Next free newsletter The News' Buffalo Next team covers the changing Buffalo Niagara economy. Get the news in your inbox 5 days a week.

Making the construction trade accessible

Hill plans to grow her company from seven employees, especially on the sales and client success sides, she said. The Clarence-based company is also in the process of raising $800,000 from investors.

To continue growing CaHill Tech, Hill wants to make the aQuiRe app as accessible as possible.

She's working on a potential partnership with BOCES to get the app in the hands of students. She also wants to target and empower military veterans and people who were formerly incarcerated.

"We're really trying to democratize access to these trades-based skills by putting it in a format that anybody who has the drive and the motivation to be a part of this can access, Hill said.

The CaHill Tech team is also working on translating the aQuiRe app's content into Spanish, which Hill believes will unlock a global opportunity for the company to expand beyond the United States.

 Natalie Brophy

Want to know more? Two stories to catch you up:

Welcome to Buffalo Next. This newsletter from The Buffalo News will bring you the latest coverage on the changing Buffalo Niagara economy  from real estate to health care to startups. Read more at BuffaloNext.com.

THE LATEST, IN CONTEXT

What: Tactical camera company Bounce Imaging recently raised $4.2 million in funding from investors.

Tell me more: Bounce Imaging is a 43North company based in Buffalo that makes stabilized, 360-degree cameras for the military, police and other first responders. Bounce Imaging's customers include the U.S. Department of Defense, the FBI, U.S. Marshals and more than 400 state and local law enforcement agencies and fire departments across the U.S., Canada and Europe.

Local investor Jack Greco, who is one of the cofounders of ACV Auctions, is an investor in Bounce Imaging, according to the company.

Why it matters: Bounce Imaging plans to use the $4.2 million investment to "expand our reach within the U.S. military and first responder community," including in Ukraine, CEO and founder Francisco Aguilar said. The company previously donated its throwable camera balls to forces fighting Russia in Ukraine.

Since winning 43North in 2017, Bounce Imaging has grown to more than 20 employees and has raised more than $10 million. It also won a $15 million contract with U.S. Customs and Border Protection to support port inspection.

THE LATEST

Catch up on news tied to Buffalo Niagara's economy

After going public on the stock exchange in March 2021, ACV Auctions' stock price shot up to more than $33, but the shares have steadily declined since. ACV shares fell nearly 8% Wednesday to close at an all-time low of $8.20.

A pair of residential complexes on North Forest and Maple roads that would bring 300 apartments to the middle of Amherst, the region's largest suburb, is being proposed by Bliss Construction and PB Investors.

Five solar-power projects in Chautauqua County have been given final or preliminary backing for tax-break requests. The projects, valued at more than $23 million, will generate more than 20 megawatts of electricity in all.

Erie County Clerk Mickey Kearns says there's a serious problem with more than 10,000 properties across Erie County that are facing hundreds or thousands of dollars each in late property taxes.

Douglas Jemal continues to buy downtown Buffalo properties, paying $1.14 million for the three-story building housing JJ's Casa di Pizza Restaurant on E. Mohawk St., as well as the adjacent Washington Street alleyway parking lot.

After slashing costs in the first quarter, Buffalo biopharmaceutical company Athenex Inc. is pivoting its focus, trimming its expenses and strengthening its balance sheet while focusing on developing cell therapy programs.

The confrontation that led to a felony charge against Christopher H. Koch, CEO of New Era Cap Co., began Saturday night when his girlfriend's ex-husband pulled up and abruptly confronted Koch by Olivers Restaurant.

A federal complaint filed against Starbucks accuses the company of engaging in illegal workplace behavior toward employees of its Buffalo-area stores.

Mickey Rats Beach Club is planning to open for business again by Memorial Day, for what may be its final summer, as plans for its redevelopment are proceeding but have been delayed, while neighboring Captain Kidd's has already been demolished.

Dr. Todd E. Shatkin's $7.85 million project to create a dentistry college alongside his existing Amherst businesses is drawing criticism over the unusual structure of the relationship with Daemen College, and his bid for nearly $400,000 in sales tax breaks.

Dr. Jill Owens was named interim president of Upper Allegheny Health System, which includes Olean General Hospital and Bradford Regional Medical Center.

A $1.5 million donation to the John R. Oishei Children's Hospital from KeyBank and the First Niagara Foundation will further develop and sustain a program to address maternal health and racial equality in health care.

Amid a contract dispute with National Fuel Gas, IBEW Local 2154 representing the utility's workers in Southwest New York state and Northwest Pennsylvania is holding out the possibility of going on strike.

Katherine Conway-Turner, president of SUNY Buffalo State, discussed with The News the future of the school, the challenges ahead, and the needs of new students and how the school is addressing them.

The Super Flea is back, and it is coming to the Buffalo Outer Harbor for a four-month span on select weekend dates starting June 4, with at least 350 vendors selling their wares.

Roswell Park is planning to rehab a historic 1,300-square-foot house at 907 Michigan Ave. while constructing a significant modern addition to the south that will more than double its size.

In the largest deal in the firms nine-year history, Buffalo-based private equity firm Lorraine Capital acquired ICM Controls, a North Syracuse manufacturer of electronic controls.

Jericho Road Community Health Center has purchased a former assisted-living facility in Buffalo for $2.05 million, with plans to renovate the structure and use it to assist asylum seekers.

Niagara University received its largest gift in the universitys 166-year history as Jeff and Mary Helen Holzschuh gave their alma mater $10 million, earning their name on its business school.

Buffalo Next reporters Jonathan D. Epstein, Jon Harris, Natalie Brophy, Janet Gramza and Mike Petro contributed to this roundup.

ICYMI

Five reads from Buffalo Next:

1. Survey provides initial price ranges for PSLs: Buffalo Bills season ticket holders got one of the first glances at what a PSL may cost in the new $1.4 billion stadium when the team emailed them a survey last week on the potential design, amenities and seating options.

2. Tops Friendly Markets is making upgrades to many of its local stores: Tops is not only improving its look and product offerings, but also updating its technology and reducing electricity costs by using solar farms to provide renewable energy.

3. Costco will open its first Western New York store: It will be coming to what is considered one of the busiest shopping districts in the Buffalo Niagara region  the Niagara Falls Boulevard retail corridor. So, how will it fit?

4. Buffalo's angel investors: They all hope to hit it big, but that is not their primary motivation. They see investing in startups as their way of contributing to the region's economic resurgence.

5. A road increasingly traveled. Fed-up nurses turn to lucrative travel work: Perhaps no issue looms larger for Western New York's hospitals, paying huge costs to travel agencies amid a staffing pinch and desperately searching for permanent employees to lessen their reliance on high-priced temporary workers.

The Buffalo Next team gives you the big picture on the regions economic revitalization. Email tips to buffalonext@buffnews.com or reach technology and startups reporter Natalie Brophy at nbrophy@buffnews.com.

Email tips to buffalonext@buffnews.com.

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Story at a glance

Spain is set to approve a reform plan that would guarantee three days of menstrual leave a month for women with extreme period pain.

If approved, the reform plan would make Spain the first Western country to officially recognize menstrual leave.

A small number of countries already offer menstrual leave for women including Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

Women in Spain will get three days of menstrual leave a month under a reform plan.

If approved, the move will make Spain the first Western country to offer time off from work for women suffering from extreme period pain.

The reform plan is set to be approved by the Spanish government next Tuesday, the Telegraph reported, under which schools would also be required to offer period products for students.

America is changing faster than ever! Add Changing America to your Facebook or Twitter feed to stay on top of the news.

If someone has an illness with such symptoms a temporary disability is granted, so the same should happen with menstruation  allowing a woman with a very painful period to stay at home, Spains Secretary of State Equality and Gender Violence Angela Rodriguez told El Periodico newspaper, according to Telegraph.

Menstrual leave is offered in a small number of other countries including Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, Zambia and South Korea.

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The Langham's newest property on the Gold Coast

Courtesy Langham Hospitality Group

There will soon be a new touch of class to Australia's Gold Coast. As part of the Jewel Towers, the first development in three decades with beachfront access, The Langham, Gold Coast will open on June 23  and Travel + Leisure has the exclusive first look.

"The Langham, Gold Coast is unlike any other property on the Gold Coast," John O'Shea, the hotel's managing director, said in a statement released to T+L. "From its absolute beachfront location to its stunning iconic structure that has changed the coastline of the city."

The Langham's newest property on the Gold Coast

Courtesy Langham Hospitality Group

The 339-room property consists of 169 rooms and suites on the third to 20th floors and 170 residences from the 22nd to 49th floors, which are part of the Jewel Residences by The Langham.

Situated between Surfers Paradise and Broadbeach, the hotel offers the best of the brand's trademark luxury traditions, like afternoon tea in Palm Court, a tradition that started at The Langham, London in 1865. Guests will also find Cantonese cuisine in the 90-seat T'ang Court, the sister venue to The Langham's Michelin-starred Asian restaurants  and the first T'ang Court location in Australia.

On the outside, the five-star hotel is eye-catching with a design that mimics quartz crystals and can be seen from the Nerang River to the hinterlands. Inside, a "modern coastal palette" will permeate through the resort, and its 17 different room and suite types  all with 180-degree waterfront views  are decorated with art from Australian sculptor and artist Camie Lyons.

"Everywhere you turn there are design features that delight the eye to continually discover," O'Shea added. "I'm a big fan of the resort pool that has a sand lagoon-style entrance and then flows out to an infinity edge overlooking the Pacific Ocean and of course a swim-up pool bar  a must on the Gold Coast!"

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The Langham's newest property on the Gold Coast

Courtesy Langham Hospitality Group

Also on the property is a grab-and-go cafe, a lobby lounge, podium sky terrace, and 5,300-square-foot holistic wellness destination, Chuan Spa with treatments inspired by traditional Chinese medicine philosophies, and both indoor and outdoor pools. The Langham will also have a 7,000-square-foot ballroom and four meeting rooms and spaces for events.

Rooms will be available to book in mid-May with an opening offer that includes a complimentary breakfast buffet for two, welcome cocktails, and a guaranteed ocean-view room.

The Langham's newest property on the Gold Coast

Courtesy Langham Hospitality Group

"The team [has] been working hard behind closed doors to add the final sparkling touches to the hotel and now, we can't wait to welcome our very first guests into what will be a new era of luxury for the Gold Coast and beyond," O'Shea said.
A view of Trump International Hotel in Washington D.C, USA on October 18, 2021.

Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu Agency via Getty

Donald Trump's family business completed the sale of a long-term lease on the Trump International Hotel in Washington on Wednesday to a Miami-based investor group for a reported $375 million.

A crew was seen at the property after dark Wednesday, removing the Trump-branded signs a letter at a time, starting with the gold-plated family name above the hotel's main entrance.

The buyers, CGI Merchant Group, reportedly plan to reopen as a Waldorf Astoria run by Hilton.

The building, located on Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the Capitol, is a D.C. landmark that was completed in 1899 to hold the city's post office and the U.S. Post Office Department headquarters.

The sales price covers rights to operate the 263-room hotel within the Old Post Office building which is leased from the federal government.

RELATED: Donald Trump Actually Lost $70M on His D.C. Hotel While in Office, Congressional Investigators Say

Washington real estate players are reportedly surprised at the high price tag of a hotel that lost more than $70 million during the four years of the Trump presidency.

In 2020, the average price of a hotel in D.C. was $354,000 per room, The New York Times reports, while the Trumps sold theirs for what adds up to be well over $1 million per room.

The family could make as much as $100 million in profit from the sale, sources close to the private deal told the AP.

After completing a $200 million renovation, the hotel opened before the 2016 election that sent Trump to the White House, according to the Times.

Donald Trump, 2016 Republican presidential nominee, center, cuts a ribbon with his sons Donald Trump Jr., from left, Eric Trump, his wife Melania Trump and his daughters Tiffany Trump and Ivanka Trump during the grand opening ceremony of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2016. The Trump Organization has eight hotels in the U.S. and seven in other countries. The Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C. is housed in the 1899 Romanesque Revival-style Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue

Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

"We took a dilapidated and underutilized building and transformed it into one of the most iconic hotels in the world," Eric Trump, the former president's son and an executive vice president at the Trump Organization, said in a statement announcing the deal.

During the Trump's four-year term, the hotel became a hub for the president's supporters, administration officials, lobbyists, Republican lawmakers, campaign staffers and visiting foreign dignitaries who would have paid for rooms, drinks, food and other services.

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Critics said this created perpetual ethics issues.

RELATED: Trump Org Asked Federal Government to Change D.C. Hotel Lease amid Coronavirus Shutdown: Reports

House Democrats in Oct. 2021 revealed findings of an investigation into Trump's personal business dealings during his time in the White House, citing the Constitution's emoluments clause, forbidding a president from personally benefiting from foreign powers.

The investigators said their analysis showed Trump's hotel had "received an estimated $3.7 million in payments from foreign governments" from 2017 through 2020.

Trump, for his part, has long insisted maintaining his businesses while president was a burden, not a blessing. He claimed in 2019 his political turn had cost him at least $2 billion.
USA Covid

Kent Nishimura / Getty In September 2021, 650,000 small plastic flags, some with personal messages to those who have died, went up around the Washington Monument to recognize the Americans lost to COVID-19

May 12, 2022 marked a grim, but anticipated milestone  just over two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 1 million Americans have died from the virus.

The number is one that felt unimaginable at the start of the pandemic in March 2020, when COVID-19 was just beginning to spread around the country. But as cases started to soar, deaths did too.

By April 2020, the U.S. began seeing around 1,000 deaths a day as hospitals filled up with patients, and doctors and nurses were unsure how best to treat the tricky virus, which attacks everything from the respiratory system to the brain and heart.

Mitigation efforts like masks helped, and new infections and deaths dipped down in the spring before people eager to socialize again led to another rise that summer.

RELATED: Celebrities We Lost During the COVID-19 Pandemic

And over the holiday season, with people heading back indoors amid the cold weather and celebrating holidays with family, cases soared upwards and deaths hit their highest levels ever. On Jan. 12, 2021, the U.S. recorded the most-ever deaths in a day with 4,406, a level that has not been seen since.

refrigeration trucks

Noam Galai/Getty Refrigerated trucks holding the bodies of COVID-19 victims sit in New York City

USA Covid

Kent Nishimura / Getty An aerial view of the 650,000 flags placed on the National Mall to recognize the Americans lost to COVID-19

With the nation recording an average of 2,500 to 3,500 deaths a day through January and February 2021, the death toll soon surpassed 500,000, half a million.

That period, though, was also the start of the U.S.'s effort to vaccinate the country with the three newly approved COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson. By April, every adult was eligible for a vaccine, and the highly effective formulas led deaths to drop significantly, from the highs of 4,000 a day to around 200 a day by July.

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RELATED VIDEO: Unvaccinated TikToker Who Died of COVID Spent Last Days Urging Followers to Get the Vaccine

But despite having these vaccines on hand, millions of Americans refused to get vaccinated, and a new, severe COVID-19 variant  delta  ravaged the unvaccinated, leading to thousands of deaths. By December 2021, the death toll hit 800,000.

RELATED: COVID Vaccinations Could Have Saved Around 234,000 American Lives in 2021

That winter brought a new variant, omicron, that was highly contagious but mild, leading to less severe illnesses, especially for vaccinated people. Cases soared to the highest levels yet, but deaths stayed lower than the peaks from the year before. Still, by Feb. 2022, deaths had surpassed 900,000.

Covid USA

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Activists gather during a vigil in Lafayette Park for nurses who died during the COVID-19 pandemic in Jan. 2022

As of May 12, the U.S. is still averaging around 330 deaths a day. The number of deaths is by far the most of any country in the world, and astronomically high for one of the richest countries in the world. The next closest country in number of deaths is Brazil, with 664,750.

The first U.S. death likely occurred on Feb. 7, 2020, in a woman who died at home in Santa Clara County, Calif., based on autopsy samples performed by the Centers for Disease Control. Now 27 months later, an unimaginably quick rate, the country has lost 999,999 more lives.

In a statement commemorating the "tragic" milestone, President Joe Biden gave his prayers to the families who have lost loved ones, and called on Congress to pass the COVID spending bill, which provides resources for testing, vaccinations and hospital bills; the bill has been held up for months.

"As a nation, we must not grow numb to such sorrow," Biden said. "To heal, we must remember. We must remain vigilant against this pandemic and do everything we can to save as many lives as possible, as we have with more testing, vaccines, and treatments than ever before. It's critical that Congress sustain these resources in the coming months."

"To those who are grieving, and asking yourself how will you go on without him or what will you do without her, I understand. I know the pain of that black hole in your heart. It is unrelenting. But I also know the ones you love are never truly gone. They will always be with you."
The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (U.N.) slammed China and Russia on Wednesday for opposing further sanctions against North Korea, which has conducted a spate of missile tests this year that have alarmed the West and neighboring South Korea.

Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said at a U.N. Security Council meeting that the U.S. wished to tighten sanctions against the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK), which she said has test-fired 17 ballistic missiles this year.

Thomas-Greenfield said the effort to ratchet up sanctions was blocked by two veto-holding nations  China and Russia  which have instead proposed a counter-resolution that would relieve sanctions on North Korea over humanitarian concerns. North Korea has long teetered on the brink of a famine.

Thomas-Greenfield said the DPRK was preparing for its seventh nuclear test and the nation poses threats to regional and international security.

This council should not stand for it,  the U.S. ambassador said. But this security council has stayed silent because two council members have argued that council restraint will somehow encourage the DPRK to stop escalating and instead come to the negotiating table.

The U.N. has passed numerous resolutions sanctioning North Korea since 2006, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, targeting nuclear programs, weapons and equipment. Despite the measures, leader Kim Jong-un has continued to develop its nuclear and missile programs.

The 17 launches this year include three intercontinental ballistic missiles potentially capable of reaching the U.S. mainland and a missile fired from a submarine last week.

The U.S. is pushing for the U.N.s first tightening of restrictions on the DPRK since 2017.

Russian Deputy Ambassador Anna Evstigneeva said it was completely pointless to expect unconditional disarmament from Pyongyang by upping sanctions.

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Sanctions and pressure will not achieve this, Evstigneeva said.

Chinas ambassador to the U.N., Zhang Jun, said countries were calling for the denuclearization of the DPRK while they themselves are promoting nuclear development.

Zhang Jun said the U.S. proposal was not an appropriate way to address the current situation.

Regrettably, the U.S. has turned a blind eye to reasonable proposals of China and other relevant council members, and remains enamored superstitiously of the magical power of sanctions, he told the council.

The five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council  China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States  all hold veto powers on any substantive resolution.

South Korean Ambassador to the U.N. Oh Joon warned on Wednesday that the missile tests demonstrate North Koreas prioritization of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs at the expense of its own people.

The DPRKs position is becoming increasingly aggressive, edging toward the actual use of nuclear capabilities, Joon said. This councils silence  only further emboldens Pyongyang.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
Biden moves to strike US arms deal with Turkey, report says, as Erdogan uses Ukraine peacemaker role to restore reputation in DC

A composite image of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and US President Joe Biden. Mustafa Kamaci/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images; Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Biden asked Congress to approve an arms deal with Turkey last month, the WSJ reported.

Separately, Turkey asked the US to approve the sale of 40 US-made F-16 fighter jets to it.

The US and Turkey fell out in 2017 but Ankara's reputation has improved since chairing Ukraine-Russia peace talks.

President Joe Biden's administration asked congressional leaders last month to approve a new weapons deal with Turkey, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The deal would see the US provide Turkey with missiles, radar, and electronics for its existing fleet of F-16 fighter jets, The Journal said.

As well as the deal for missiles and parts, Turkey is separately hoping to sign a much larger deal with the US, worth roughly $6 billion, for 40 new F-16 jets.

Turkey made that request in October, but it is unclear whether Biden has asked Congress to approve that deal.

The Biden administration said recently that an F-16 deal with Turkey, which is a NATO member, serves the bloc's interests. However, the proposed deals will likely face opposition from several US lawmakers who have objected to Turkey's human-rights record.

Nonetheless, progress on the deals is significant given the US and Turkey fell out dramatically in 2017 after Turkey bought Russian-made S-400 surface-to-air missile systems. As a result, the US sanctioned Turkey and removed it from the Pentagon's F-35 fighter jet program at great expense.

News of the F-16 parts deal reported by The Journal comes as Turkey hopes to restore its reputation in Washington, DC, by making the most of its self-declared role as peacemaker between Ukraine and Russia.

Top officials from Ukraine and Russia have met several times for peace talks in Turkey since Russia's invasion began on February 24. However, Ukraine and Russia have not been able to agree on conditions for a cease-fire.

Russia said this week that talks were continuing, but were now being held remotely, Reuters reported.

In a sign that the US has warmed to Turkey's efforts to support peace negotiations, Biden on a March 10 call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan "expressed appreciation" for Erdogan's efforts to "support a diplomatic resolution to the conflict."

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In another move that will likely have pleased the US, Turkey supplied Ukraine with armed drones after Russia invaded, which have since been used on Russian troops.

As a result of the Ukraine crisis, the US and Turkey have resumed their dormant "strategic dialogue," The Journal reported.

In October, the US warned Turkey against purchasing Russian weapons ever again after Erdogan met with President Vladimir Putin.

"We continue to make that clear to Turkey and what the consequences will be if they move in that direction," deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman told reporters at the time.

Read the original article on Business Insider
It was hard to miss the Balmain party in Manhattan Wednesday evening. Turning off Madison Avenue and onto 59th Street, the sidewalk in front of the boutique was painted highlighter yellow, which not only illuminated the partys entrance from blocks away but also gave attendees a buttercup-like effect on their faces once they arrived. It was anything but subtle, which felt perfectly on brand for the celebration.

People in club-ready looks  Balmain, of course  strutted down the street as they approached the store. Lea Michele, Tommy Dorfman, Nina Agdal and Victor Glemaud were some of the guests who turned out, welcoming Olivier Rousteing back to New York. While the Madison Avenue store opened in September 2020, Rousteing hadnt been back to Manhattan to see the store since before the pandemic.

More from WWD

New York has always been such a dream for me, because its the city of the dream, its the city of dynamism and energy, the designer said in front of the store, after being pulled away from the many adoring fans and shoppers eager to greet him. I know that Balmain is such a French brand from 1945 but what Ive tried to do in the 10 years of my career at Balmain was always to push the global; Balmain was not only Parisian but international in my mind.

I have to say that I would never be who I am without American support, from the many people here, he continued. Im not only talking about celebrities, Im talking about the press, the journalists, retailers and wholesalers. Tonight is about thanking America for the love and support that they gave me.

It was his first time seeing the store, which he described as having a chic French touch with an American modern vibe. While in town, he planned to have a nice dinner out with his team before speaking at Parsons and meeting with Netflix.

The night also marked the announcement of the Balmain NFT, a long-term, global partnership with MintNFT.

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Before Rousteing headed back into the store and to the throngs waiting to greet him, he disclosed his favorite look from last weeks Met Gala.

My favorite look from the Met Ball last week, I had a couple that I really loved but to be completely honest I would saythe Kim K look, he said. It was not only about the dress, it was about the concept and saying how iconic she is today, and how iconic was Marilyn [Monroe], and bringing them together on this red carpet showed that all the fights she went through to be the woman she is today and being respected by the fashion industry. Now she has access to the most iconic woman of the world. Its a good revolution.

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Click here to read the full article.
Bringing his Ukraine relief campaign to Hartford, former Polish President Lech Walesa on Tuesday called on a crowd at Infinity Hall in Hartford to help the millions of refugees flooding into Poland.

At the same time, Walesa said the worlds nations now face an opportunity to curb Russias long tradition of political corruption and imperialism.

At this point, it is not enough for Ukraine to defeat Russia militarily. Unless we really put the right order in Russia, Russia will rise again within five to 10 years and will constitute a threat to the rest of the world again, Walesa said.

Speaking to more than 200 people at a gathering sponsored by the World Affairs Council of Connecticut, Walesa also said it is urgent that citizens around the globe defend democracies from a wave of power-hungry demagogues.

Participate in elections, because in Poland we underestimated this right to vote and we allowed populists and demagogues to get the power. Looking at the example of Poland, the brave Polish people cannot really get rid of those demagogues and populists right now, he said.

Walesa, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is touring the United States this spring to champion the cause of Ukrainian refugees who have flooded into Poland because of the Russian attacks on their homeland. Its currently estimated that up to 3.2 million displaced Ukrainians are in Poland, with more than another million in Hungary, Moldova, Romania and elsewhere.

The Red Cross, Americares, Project Hope, Caritas and dozens of other organizations are running humanitarian aid operations in some of those countries, and Walesas Lech Walesa Institute is channeling money to help. The World Affairs Council announced that all proceeds from Tuesday evenings speech and invitation-only reception would go into that fund.

On stage at the Infinity, the 78-year-old founder of Polands once-powerful Solidarity movement said helping Ukraine and its people is a pressing task. But he also believes free nations  particularly the United States and Germany  must lead the world in changing the course of Russia.

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Most of the globe is ready for a period of safety, security and peaceful resolution to conflicts, he told Megan Clark Torrey, chief executive officer of the World Affairs Council of Connecticut and the evenings moderator.

Throughout all our history we have had troubles with Russia, and today Russia constitutes trouble again, he said. The political system that rules there is terrible. A single individual  Lenin, Stalin before, Brezhnev and now Putin  can cause this terrible threat to the world, he said.

This time Putin has made a mistake. Somehow he has inspired the whole world to unite and oppose Russia. Its a great opportunity for the world to give the final blow to Russia. The United Nations and the world must force Russia to introduce changes to its political system, he said, calling for term limits, an independent judiciary, a constitutionally guaranteed free press and other elements of Western democracies.

Two tasks still remain: The first to deal with Russia, who represents the remnant of the old world. The second, to help China to adjust to the track along which we have been moving, Walesa said through his interpreter, Magdalena Iwinska.

These are tasks that Poland alone cannot address. I believe in Europe it should be Germany who should be leading, and in the world it should be the United States, he said. Here is my appeal to you, United States: Take advantage of the opportunity that has been given to us.
Star wide receiver transfer Jordan Addison will be heading out west to check out USC this weekend.

The Trojans have been believed to be the favorite since Addisons entry into the transfer portal. Rumors of massive NIL opportunities offered by USC began to surface right before he announced his transfer.

The 2021 Bilitnikoff winner has wrapped up an official visit to Austin this week. Texas is right in the thick of things in Addisons recruitment after making a strong impression on the visit.

Addison would instantly be one of the top weapons on Texas offense in 2022. A trio of Bijan Robinson, Xavier Worthy and Addison could rival anyone in the country.

No official timetable for a decision has been set by Addison. It remains to be seen how many more visits he will take.

Hearing that Jordan Addison will be taking an official visit to USC this weekend. Horns were hopeful they could close the deal while he was in Austin, but the process continues.  Geoff Ketchum (@gkketch) May 12, 2022

Contact/Follow us @LonghornsWire on Twitter, and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Texas news, notes and opinions.
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Republican leaders throughout New York's sprawling 23rd Congressional District are today dealing with a major case of political confusion stemming from former Rep. Tom Reed's Tuesday resignation from the House seat he held for almost 12 years.

And none are happy about it.

Rep. Tom Reed's resignation opens Southern Tier political free-for-all Reed said he resigned to take a job with Prime Policy Group, a bipartisan public policy group founded by longtime Republican lobbyist Charlie Black.

County GOP officials and state Chairman Nicholas A. Langworthy question why the Corning-based Reed would suddenly leave Congress for a lobbying post amid the state's redistricting effort in legal limbo and subject voters to even more uncertainty through a special election to fill the post for the rest of 2022.

"I'm very unhappy with the current circumstances. There was absolutely no communication beforehand," Langworthy said Wednesday. "We are now faced with the cost of running a special election and an inordinate amount of political confusion thrust upon the voters.

"This is a lot of burden on ordinary people in the summer months," Langworthy said. "It is totally unnecessary."

Cathy Young mentioned as possible congressional candidate as Reed exits Young was previously mentioned as a candidate for the Reed seat until preliminary reapportionment lines thrust Rep. Claudia Tenney of Oneida County and her brimming campaign fund into the Southern Tier district's GOP field.

Allegany County Chairman Mike Healy also did not hold back.

"It really is unfortunate we have to go through all this," he said. "I don't know why Mr. Reed just couldn't wait."

Cattaraugus County Chairman Robert Keis said Reed seems to have forgotten the local support following his resignation stemming from reports of a woman receiving his unwanted sexual attention. Keis thinks that support saved Reed from being "drummed out of Congress."

"He could have had the common decency to notify us," the chairman said. "But there has basically been nothing."

Indeed, Reed's departure leaves Republicans reeling as they grapple with a host of uncertainties hinging on congressional districts that have yet to be finalized. They have no shortage of candidates, but they remain frozen until a special master appointed by a state judge unveils new lines drawn as a result of legal challenges reaching all the way to the Court of Appeals.

Reapportionment hearing casts Bath as NY's political epicenter for a day The center of New York's political universe shifted to this Southern Tier village Friday as a court appointed elections expert weighed proposals from politicos and ordinary citizens alike for new  and fair  districts in this year's congressional and State Senate elections.

"It's just a multi-level mess," Keis said. "There's no other way to put it."

Issues facing the GOP include:

 Finding a candidate for a summer special election to replace Reed until his term expires on Jan. 1. Few are committing to anything until new lines are released Monday by the special master, Jonathan Cervas, in the Bath courtroom of State Supreme Court Justice Patrick F. McAllister. Nobody yet knows whether the traditional Southern Tier congressional district will be preserved or divided.

 Choosing from among a bevy of Republican candidates, which sources say includes former State Sen. Cathy Young of Olean, Steuben County Republican Chairman Joe Sempolinski and State Sen. George M. Borrello of Sunset Bay. Young had been considered a top prospect when Reed announced last year he would not seek a seventh term, but retreated when Rep. Claudia Tenney of Oneida County said she and her $1.15 million campaign account would move to the Reed district and run.

 Deciding whether to run a Republican for this summer's special election to fill the Reed term, and nominating that candidate for the November general election, or naming a placeholder for the special. But the placeholder idea appears to be gaining few backers.

 Presenting to voters a special election, possibly on Aug. 2, for the rest of Reed's term, followed by a possible primary on Aug. 28, followed by still another contest in the Nov. 8 general election. The races include the possibility of circulating new designating petitions.

 And what to do about Tenney? The congresswoman has spent much of her recent time moving about what appeared to be a new Southern Tier district reaching up into southern Erie County. She has even benefited from Buffalo fundraisers. But all that stems from redistricting that appeared to largely preserve the Reed district  before the state courts ruled the new districts gerrymandered and unconstitutional. Now Tenney, and everyone else, wonders whether she will still move to the Southern Tier or return to her home turf in New Hartford.

Rep. Tom Reed, returning from Ukraine border, offers bleak picture of the war ahead Back from a congressional trip to Poland's border with Ukraine, Rep. Tom Reed painted a bleak portrait of a war that he expects to drag on, with potentially devastating impacts on Europe's supply of food and fuel later this year.

Tenney now presents a problem to some.

"There is not a lot of support for putting Claudia in there, because she does not live in Tom's district," Keis said. "I have responsibilities to someone who lives here."

Now, new attention is focused on Young and her impressive record of attracting votes while previously serving in the Assembly and Senate. After failing to win the Senate minority leader post in 2019, she left Albany for an executive position with the Geneva campus of Cornell University. She was considered a top candidate to succeed Reed.

But when the State Legislature drew new district lines earlier this year, after a new Independent Redistricting Commission remained hopelessly deadlocked, Tenney appeared on the Southern Tier scene.

Healy said he likes all the possible candidates, though he noted Young's name recognition, especially in Chautauqua, Cattaraugus and Allegany counties. Keis said he has always supported Young throughout her career, but is waiting for more clarity about the district lines.

"We have three excellent candidates besides Claudia," he added.

Democratic leaders appear to have settled on Max Della Pia, an Air Force veteran from Tioga County who declared back in November. Cattaraugus County Democratic Chairman Frank Puglisi has also been mentioned.

Reed announced his resignation on the House floor Tuesday, and he later told The Buffalo News he will work for Prime Policy Group, a bipartisan public policy organization founded by longtime Republican lobbyist Charlie Black. He said he decided to resign now because of the immediate opportunity and his view that Congress will accomplish little as the November election approaches.

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An Iowa Park daycare worker accused of leaving a child on a bus pleads guilty to Abandon Endanger Child Criminal Negligence.

According to court documentation:

Jessie Granjeno

Jessie Granjeno pleaded guilty to Abandon Endanger Child Criminal Negligence Thursday in the 89th District Court. She received 5 years community supervision and will pay $1,000 in fines plus court cost, according to the agreement.

According to a previous Times Record News report, Granjeno was arrested in November 2020, after Child Protective Service notified Iowa Park Police that Granjeno, an employee at Itty Bitty Childcare facility in Iowa Park, had left a 3-year-old unattended in a vehicle for several hours.

Granjeno had taken about seven children to the daycare facility on the morning of Aug. 24, 2020. During an interview conducted by the Texas Department of Family Protective Service, Granjeno said, I did not do what I normally do and walk through the bus to turn the key before I got the kids out. She said, I did not count my kids that morning as I got them off the bus.

More: Iowa Park daycare worker charged in child abandonment

The report indicated the victim was inside the vehicle for approximately three hours with the windows closed and estimated the temperature inside the vehicle at 127 degrees. During an interview with Iowa Park police, Granjeno admitted she did not follow protocol when she took the children out of the vehicle, and she did not notify her supervisor of the incident until about noon that day. When asked why she did not call EMTs to check the child she said she did not know why.

Granjenos supervisor told investigators she was not notified of the incident until 12:45 p.m. that day. The victims mother was not notified until later that day via a text message.

This article originally appeared on Wichita Falls Times Record News: Daycare worker pleads guilty to leaving child on bus
Jim Urquhart/Reuters

The three adult children of Oath Keepers boss Stewart Rhodes have detailed what it was like growing up with the libertarian-turned-violent militiaman, from being home-schooled on nothing but the American Revolution to having no food on the table while he was jet-setting around the country.

Rhodes, a Yale-educated lawyer and former paratrooper, has been charged with seditious conspiracy after the feds said he spearheaded the most coordinated and serious effort to overthrow the U.S. government on Jan. 6. He and 10 other members of the far-right militia group worked together to recruit, train, and prepare for an attack, and Rhodes continued to call for the overthrow of the government even after the failed insurrection, prosecutors allege.

Rhodes didnt storm the Capitol himself and instead remained in a D.C. hotel room communicating with other members and even getting on the phone to a Trump intermediary in an effort to speak to the president, one member said.

The day after his arrest this year, Rhodes ex-wife Tasha Adams called him a complete sociopath who terrorized and physically abused her and their six children for years until she finally got a divorce.

Oath Keepers Founder Secretly Backed Lawsuit for Government Based on Lord of the Rings

Speaking for the first time to the Southern Poverty Law Centers Hatewatch, his three adult children (the other three kids are still minors) said that, on the day Adams filed for divorce in 2018, they packed their bags and tried to sneak out of the house at 4 a.m. by telling their dad, who was already up and in a mania, that they were going to buy food.

We thought that if he is here and we are here when [the divorce papers] are delivered, he would kill all of us. We felt that we were running for our lives, Sequoia Adams, 19, said.

The couples children grew up being home-schooled but the only history Rhodes taught them was the American Revolution, they said. He brainwashed them into thinking the world was ending, and constantly moved the family around the country as he burned everyone around him, Sequoia said.

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You could tell that he wanted to be George Washington, said daughter Sedona Adams, 23.

Who Was the Trump Intermediary on the Phone to Oath Keepers Boss on Jan. 6?

All the kids were born at home and Sequoia said she never got a birth certificate so therefore couldnt get a passport or social security number later in life. Rhodes used the possibility of getting her birth certificate to psychologically abuse her and force her to maintain contact with him, she said.

Rhodes was initially involved with Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who ran three failed presidential campaigns as both a libertarian and Republican candidate. Rhodes threatened to leave the country if Paul lost in 2004, Sequoia said, and then said hed do the same if Obama won in 2008.

But when Obama did win, Rhodes instead realized he could bring together other terrified, angry libertarians into some sort of movement, they said. At first it was a supposedly bipartisan group to educate people about their constitutional rights. But when people started donating, the Oath Keepers quickly turned into something darkerand shoddier.

What he wanted was collapse, so he could be the king of the collapse, with his own little army, so it was always going to go the way it did, Sequoia said.

As money flooded in, he started jet-setting around the country to give talks, eating at fancy restaurants, and buying top-of-the-line survivalist gear. Meanwhile, his wife and kids had no food on the table and resorted to selling silver to pay the bills, they said.

Rhodes realized disaster relief or emergency appeals were the most lucrative, so hed always be on the phone saying, We need to create an emergency, Sedona recalled.

Anything that they could put up a GoFundMe foranything that gets a GoFundMe link in front of the mailing list, his 24-year-old son Dakota Adams said.

The children didnt mention specific fundraisers Rhodes ran; one of the groups earlier efforts involved recruiting members and resources to guard rooftops in Ferguson, Missouri, during the 2014 riots sparked by Michael Browns death.

When Trump was elected, Rhodes was initially critical and wanted to release an open letter to school Trump on the Constitution, the kids said. But he grew paranoid that a Democratic president would give the FBI the green light to charge him over his participation in anti-government militant Ammon Bundys infamous standoff with federal authorities on a Nevada ranch in 2014.

By the time Trump lost in 2020, Rhodes was all in on the deluded belief that the election had been stolen and people like him needed to take part in a bloody fight to save the republic.

He is still behind bars awaiting trial after a federal judge shot down claims by his lawyers in February that he should be bailed as hes no longer a danger with Trump out of office.

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MSNBC pundit and former GOP Rep. Joe Scarborough (Fla.) said on Wednesday the result of a primary election in Nebraska the night before is an indication that Republicans who oppose former President Trump can defeat candidates he is backing.

They humiliated Donald Trump in Nebraska, Scarborough said. It sends a message to a lot of other Republicans that you can take this guy on, and you can beat him.

University of Nebraska Regent Jim Pillen defeated businessman Charles Herbster, who had been endorsed by Trump, in Nebraskas Republican gubernatorial primary. Herbster is facing sexual misconduct allegations from eight women, including a state senator.

Trump has picked up wins from candidates he has backed in several of the early primaries this year, including key wins in the presidential battleground of Ohio.

Scarborough, a frequent Trump critic, said Pillens win is an indication that Republican voters may be souring on Trump and the party has the ability to move on from the former president and his policies.

The one thing that is constant  is Republicans say one thing about Donald Trump on the air and off the air even people who have worked with him trash him, they cant stand him, the Morning Joe co-host said.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.
Rafael Kapelinskis drama Budapest Diaries wrapped shooting in Budapest this week. The Polish-Hungarian coproduction is set in 1981, when the political and economical crisis worsened in Poland, and many people travelled to Hungary where the repression was less severe, according to Film New Europe.

Kapelinski is a London-based writer-director, a graduate of the U.K.s National Film and Television School and the London Film School. In 2017 he was awarded the Crystal Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for his debut feature Butterfly Kisses, a British production.

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Budapest Diaries, written by Kapelinski, tells a touching story about the relationship between 11-years-old Irek and his mother, Hanna. She claims they are travelling so that Irek can see a more beautiful and colorful world. He eventually discovers that the motive for their journey and the adult world are far more complex than he might have ever imagined.

Budapest Diaries - Credit: Courtesy of Lukasz Bak

Courtesy of Lukasz Bak

After several appearances in Polish television series, this is Agnieszka Judyckas first lead role in a feature film, as the mother. The cast includes mainly Polish actors, including Piotr Rogucki, Mykyta Liashchenko, Oleksandr Liashchenko, Sambor Czarnota, Pawe Janyst, Bartomiej Firlet, Arkadiusz Smolenski and Klara Bielawka. Among the Hungarian actors, Dorka Gryllus has the biggest part.

Production started in Katowice in March and moved to Budapest later that month. The filming will finish in Wroclaw on May 19. There are 36 shooting days.

Kapelinski developed the screenplay, which is loosely based on a true story from his childhood, at the Cinefondation Residence, the EKRAN program and the Ateliers dAngers workshop, and he was a finalist at the Script Pro screenwriting competition.

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- Credit: Courtesy of FNE

Courtesy of FNE

Budapest Diaries is produced by Magorzata Domin and Dominika Mandla through Domino Film in coproduction with Gabor Osvath and Balazs Zachar through Filmfabriq.

The film is financed by the Polish Film Institute (PISF), the Lower Silesian Film Center (DCF), Silesia Film, the Audiovisual Technology Center (CeTA) and the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. The National Film Institute  Hungary also supported the production with Euros 517,000. The total budget is approximately Euros 2.5 million.

This article is published in partnership with online news service Film New Europe, which covers film and TV industry news from across Central and Eastern Europe.

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The languages, cultures and history of Native American tribes were "targeted for destruction" by federal Indian boarding schools, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said Wednesday, and some of the children who attended those schools never made it home.

Haaland, whose grandparents were taken to boarding schools at the age of 8, said her agency had begun the work of chronicling the worst of the abuses and trying to find out what happened to the students who were lost in the system, an attempt to "honor our trust obligations to Indigenous communities."

The secretary made her remarks as the Interior Department released its first report on Indian boarding schools and their impacts on Native peoples throughout the United States.

Chemawa Indian School in Salem is one of the four off-reservation boarding schools the federal government currently runs. At more than 140 years old, it is the oldest continuously operated and federally run Indian boarding school in the United States.

Seeking healing:Families of former Chemawa students seek answers, healing

Today, Chemawa has more than 300 students enrolled but at least 30,000 children attended the school in Chemawa's first 96 years alone.

The report is the first step in the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, a series of examinations into the generational impact of 408 federal boarding schools and more than 1,000 religious and privately run schools upon Native peoples, and how to address those impacts.

Deborah Parker, the CEO of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, spoke during an often-tearful news conference outlining the report's release and next steps.

"Our children had names," Parker said. "Our children had homes. They had families. They had their languages, their regalia, their prayers and religions."

But as Parker, a member of the Tulalip Tribes, pointed out, a system of federal, private and religious-run boarding schools over more than 150 years did its best to wipe out thousands of years of Native languages, cultures and family ties. The damage done to these children, and to the generations that followed, was immense, she said.

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The report was commissioned by Haaland in 2021 following the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves of children in Canadian residential schools. Like the U.S. schools, the Canadian residential school system sought to wipe out Native cultures, languages and traditions, and assimilate Indigenous children.

Just as the U.S. government's failure to consult with and respect the practices of Indigenous peoples' land stewardship may have led to the environmental tragedies of the 20th and 21st centuries, Haaland said, federal policies moved to exterminate, eradicate and assimilate Native Americans, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians.

"The languages, cultures, religions, traditional practices and even the history of Native communities was targeted for destruction," Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo, said. "Nowhere is that clearer than in the legacy of federal Indian boarding schools."

Haaland said her own grandparents were taken from their parents and placed in boarding school at age 8. They joined tens of thousands of other Indigenous children as young as 4 who were forced into boarding schools run by the Interior Department and religious institutions.

Ongoing quest for answers

Oregon Gov. Kate Bown called the report a "somber reminder" of the "nation's legacy of colonialism, violence and intergenerational trauma against Indigenous and tribal students and their families" in a tweet.

"We must recommit ourselves to building a just and equitable country, to ensure that our Indigenous communities are able to grow & heal from these terrible acts," Brown added.

Chemawa Indian School was one of the 408 federal schools across 37 states that operated between 1819 to 1969 identified in the Department of Interior's investigation. The official list of Federal Indian boarding schools lists nine schools in Oregon in addition to Chemawa:

Forest Grove Indian Training School in Forest Grove.

Grand Ronde Boarding School in Grand Ronde.

Kate Drexel Industrial Boarding School in Pendleton.

Klamath Agency Boarding School in Chiloquin.

Siletz Boarding Schoolin in Sletz.

Simnasho Boarding and Day School in Simnasho.

Umatilla Boarding and Day School in Pendleton.

Warm Springs Boarding and Day School in Warm Springs.

Yainax Indian Boarding School in Beatty.

Oregon's U.S Sen. Jeff Merkley, chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the Department of Interior, released a statement following the release of the report calling it an important acknowledgment of injustices in the state and the country. He also said he looks forward to taking further steps to right historic wrongs as chair of the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee.

"Oregon played a role in this painful history, with 10 different federal Indian boarding schools since statehood. By compiling the first official count of these schools and initial list of burial grounds, the federal government is finally taking a significant step to address the devastating consequences of its actions and help create a path forward for Indigenous people to recover from the pain and betrayal," Merkley said in the release.

Families of former Chemawa Indian School students have long called for answers.

They spoke to the Statesman Journal last year about their desire to discover precisely what happened to their ancestors and their hope for a public apology for the trauma endured.

An emotional great-niece of Tillie Franklin recounted her experience discovering Franklin's burial sitenear the entrance of Chemawa's cemetery. Franklin's siblings were put into different off-reservation boarding schools after their family home burned down in 1916.

"I can still hear my grandmother say to me that she never saw Tillie again," Lillian Medina said.

It took decades for her to find out Franklin had been sent to Chemawa. School records identified Franklin's family as unknown.

Advocates organized a run last year to raise awareness for unidentified children buried at Chemawa. The school's cemetery was established in 1886, a year after the school was moved from Forest Grove to its current location.

SuAnn Reddick, a former volunteer historian for Chemawa, conducted research for 25 years to compile a list of names of those buried at the cemetery. Her research was published last year in partnership with Eva Guggemos, an archivist and associate professor at Pacific University.

According to the website:

At least 270 students died in the custody of the schools at Forest Grove and Chemawa between 1880 and 1945.

175 of those children were buried in the school cemetery.

The remains of approximately 40 students were returned home near the time of their deaths.

The locations of approximately 50 student remains are unaccounted for. Maps indicate there could be up to 40 plots in the cemetery that contain remains of unidentified students or staff.

Reddick said she had reached out to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Department of Interior to offer her research but neither she nor Guggemos received any inquiries from the DOI about their work in publishing the new website with deaths at Chemawa.

Effort to locate graves, acknowledge trauma

The federal report stipulates that due to missing records, the exact numbers may never be known, but Haaland said one goal of the new initiative is to enumerate them as fully as possible.

Many of these children never made it home. The report seeks to locate those children and bring them home.

To date, the Interior Department and its partner, the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, has identified 53 burial sites, both marked and unmarked, and hopes to locate all of them. The department will not make public the specific locations of the identified burial sites to protect them against grave-robbing, vandalism and other disturbances, Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland said during the news conference.

Raising awareness:Dozens run to raise awareness of unidentified remains at Chemawa

Another legacy of these schools was the intergenerational trauma inflicted on children, families and communities. Newland said the impacts of the boarding schools have left lasting scars on Indigenous peoples.

"That impact continues to influence the lives of countless families from the break up of families and tribal nations to the loss of languages and cultural practices and relatives," Newland, an Ojibwe and a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community, said.

"There's not a single American Indian, Alaska Native or Native Hawaiian in this country whose life hasn't been affected by these schools. We haven't begun to explain the scope of this policy era until now."

Haaland and Parker referenced a recent study by researcher Ursula Running Bear that found adults who attended boarding schools now suffer from poor physical health. They also said Native people have the highest rates of suicides, children in foster homes and in the criminal health system.

Jim LaBelle Sr., an Inupiaq from Alaska and vice-chair of the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, said Alaska Natives are 18% of the state's total population, yet represent 40% of people in the state's criminal justice system.

Report sets out next steps

Newland and Haaland said an all-of-government approach will be necessary to rebuild the bonds within Native communities that the boarding school system set out to break. Haaland added that President Joe Biden supports the initiative.

"We have begun working through the White House Council of Native American Affairs on the path ahead to preserve tribal languages, invest in survivor-focused services, and honor our trust obligations to Indigenous communities," Haaland said.

The report identifies the next steps that will be taken in a second volume, aided by a new $7 million investment from Congress through fiscal year 2022.

In addition to locating the remaining burial sites, the agency will determine an approximate amount of federal funding directed to support boarding schools, produce a list of students brought to the schools over the years, including tribal affiliations, from existing records and a deeper investigation into the impacts of the schools on Indigenous communities today.

On Thursday, the Indigenous Peoples Subcommittee of the House Natural Resources Committee will hold the first hearing on a bill to establish a truth and healing commission on Indian boarding schools.

The bill, the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act, would further the Interior Department's work to investigate the boarding schools and the policies that created them. It would also develop recommendations to protect students' graves, support repatriation of the children interred in graveyards and discontinue the removal of Indigenous children by state social services, foster care agencies and adoption agencies.

"We will not stop advocating until the United States fully accounts for the genocide committed against Native children," Parker said.

Debra Krol reports on Indigenous communities at the confluence of climate, culture and commerce in Arizona and the Intermountain West. Reach Krol at debra.krol@azcentral.com. Follow her on Twitter at @debkrol.

Coverage of Indigenous issues at the intersection of climate, culture and commerce is supported by the Catena Foundation.

Dianne Lugo is a reporter at the Statesman Journal covering equity and social justice. You can reach her at dlugo@statesmanjournal.com or on Twitter @DianneLugo.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Indian boarding schools left painful legacy, new report says
Chris Christie, Donald Trump

Heidi Gutman/Walt Disney Television/Getty; SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Chris Christie and Donald Trump

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie came up with a clever comeback for one of Donald Trump's favorite insults.

After Christie and two more Republican governors, Doug Ducey of Arizona and Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, showed their support for Gov. Brian Kemp's reelection campaign, the former president fired off a statement to express his disdain for the GOP surrogates.

"Today, the worst 'election integrity' Governor in the country, Brian Kemp, loaded the great state of Georgia up with RINOs," Trump said, using the acronym for "Republican in name only."

"That's right, he had them all," Trump continued, naming Kemp's trio of high-profile supporters. "That tells you all you need to know about what you are getting in Georgia  just a continuation of bad elections and a real RINO if you vote for Brian Kemp."

NEW!



President Donald J. Trump:



Today, the worst "election integrity" Governor in the country, Brian Kemp, loaded the great state of Georgia up with RINOs. That's right, he had them all. Chris Christie, Doug Ducey from Arizona, and Pete Ricketts from Nebraska. That tells pic.twitter.com/honZ35cH2u  Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) May 11, 2022

Christie tweeted a response on Wednesday. "Insightful commentary about three Republican Governors who were overwhelmingly re-elected by their people from a former President who lost to Joe Biden. Maybe the 'R' in RINO really stands for re-elected," Christie wrote, adding that he was "proud to stand with" Ducey and Ricketts in support of Gov. Kemp.

Insightful commentary about three Republican Governors who were overwhelmingly re-elected by their people from a former President who lost to Joe Biden. Maybe the R in RINO really stands for re-elected. Proud to stand with @DougDucey @GovRicketts supporting @BrianKempGA  Governor Christie (@GovChristie) May 11, 2022

Christie is a former ally who led the Trump transition team as he entered the White House in 2017 and later helped him prep for debates with his 2020 opponent, Democrat Joe Biden. Christie broke away from Team Trump when he refused to concede the election to the winner, now President Biden, calling his legal challenges over the results and his conspiratorial claims about the loss a "national embarrassment."

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RELATED: Chris Christie Says 'Not a Whole Lot of Question' Donald Trump Should Be Impeached After Riots

Trump continues to repeat false claims of 2020 election fraud, despite a lack of evidence and the fact that Biden is nearly 500 days into his presidency.

U.S. President Donald Trump (L) and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie attend a panel discussion on an opioid and drug abuse in the Roosevelt Room of the White House March 29, 2017 in Washington

Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty From left: Jared Kushner, Chris Christie and Donald Trump in 2017

Gov. Kemp is a favorite target of Trump's grumbling due to his decision to certify Georgia's 2020 election results, which added the state's 16 electoral votes to Biden's count.

Trump has endorsed Kemp's primary opponent, former Sen. David Perdue, who's made the so-called "rigged and stolen" election a theme in his campaign. (Perdue also lost in the same election cycle when Democrat Jon Ossoff defeated him in a January 2021 run-off vote to represent Georgia in the Senate.)

RELATED: Donald Trump Endorses Dr. Oz in Pa. Senate Primary: 'He Has Lived with Us Through the Screen'

Across the country, political players are keeping a close eye on Trump-endorsed candidates to see how they fare  and to gauge the former president's influence on the GOP  as November's midterms approach.

Voters head to the polls for Georgia's Republican primary May 24. The winner will face Democrat Stacey Abrams, who's running unopposed in her party's primary.

Christie is reportedly "seriously considering" running for the Republican nomination in 2024.
Eleven years after starting her Fashion Icons in New York  and 61 interviews later  Fern Mallis celebrated the release of her second book Wednesday night at Nordstroms 57th Street store in Manhattan.

A steady stream of well-wishers cycled through the cocktail party including designers like Proenza Schoulers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, Nicole Miller, Dion Lee, Stan Herman, Jeffrey Banks, Yeohlee Teng and Frederick Anderson. En route to the third-floor event at Nordstroms NYC Broadway Bar, copies of Mallis Fashion Icons 2 book were showcased in different areas.

More from WWD

Six years ago, Rizzoli published the first installment of highlights from Mallis 92Y interviews, Fashion Lives: Fashion Icons With Fern Mallis.

Before establishing her series of talks, Mallis served as executive director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America from 1991 through 2001. In 1993, with then CFDA president Herman, Mallis centralized fashion week in New Yorks Bryant Park by creating 7th on Sixth. She also had a senior role at IMG Fashion from 2001 to 2010 and ushered in fashion weeks in Mumbai, Berlin and other locales.

Stylist Ty Hunter, Rickie De Sole, Real Housewives of New Jersey alum Dorinda Medley, Martha Stewart, Amy Fine Collins, Arthur Elgort, Tim Gunn, Peter Som, Hillary Taymour, Bob Morris, Mark Bozek, Bethann Hardison, David Rabin, Sam Shahid, Nicole Fischelis, Patrick McMullan, George Wayne and Susan Magrino were among the others who made an appearance. While Mallis greeted friends and gamely posed for selfies, a few attendees tried on handheld masks illustrated with the likenesses of Tom Ford, Diane von Furstenberg, Betsey Johnson and other designers who Mallis has interviewed through the years at 92Y.

The guest of honor described the occasion as overwhelming, taking a minute to compose herself and dab a few tears. Im going to get emotional. Its such a sense of accomplishment and love and affection from the industry. Between everybody who is here and what Nordstrom has done has just blown me away. Their support of this and what they have done with this party is mind-boggling, she said.

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More than anything, it validates the Fashion Icons conversations, according to Mallis, who described them as a master class and an archive for the industry of all the most creative leaders.

The idea that their personal stories will live on through the books is essential, Mallis said. As I keep saying, all of these people are more than a name on a label. They are real people. Who is their grandmother and why were they so influential? What was the bedroom like that they grew up in? What informed these people? How did they succeed and reinvent their lives many times? So many of them went bankrupt, are still in there and went on to huge success. Im fascinated by it, Mallis said. We all read about collections and profit stories, but who are they.

Creating the Fashion Icons series was Mallis reinvention after 20 years of running New York Fashion Week and recognizing that it was going in a direction that was not where she was. This is almost more important than the tents were, because this is real. This lives on. The tents [in Bryant Park] for me were Brigadoon. They were there and now theyre gone. Now people talk about the tents like they do about Studio 54  Oh, you had to be there. If you werent there, you cant even imagine how great it was.

New York Fashion Weeks longtime lead security consultant Ty Yorio certainly was. At Wednesdays book party, he recalled seeing Mallis in action through the years. In the police department, we call it somebody who can think on their feet. And she can  instantly, he said. My favorite memory was when she put everything together in 1993 with the tents in Bryant Park. It was against all odds and [people asked], Is this thing really going to work?

Hunter, who works closely with Beyonce, said he always wanted to connect with Mallis when he was starting out 15 or 16 years ago. By chance, the opportunity presented itself at a Stuart Weitzman store, where they both happened to be shopping during the holiday season. She is fashion week. She is the start of all of this to me. If that event never happened, where would be today fashion-wise? It helped to get to see fashion from around the world here, he said. I always admired her. For her to be so iconic and still approachable, I love her for that.

Like Morris and Herman, Hunter has a book in the works that Knowles wrote the foreword for and Bill Porter penned its afterword. Entitled, Makeover From Within: Lessons in Hardship, Acceptance and Self-Discovery, the book is due out in October and is now available for preorder. Everybody wanted me to do a fashion book and style book, but I wanted to tell my story first so they can get to know me. There are many more things to come, Hunter explained.

Herman said of Mallis, The biggest contribution she has made is what everyone has deified her for, which was putting together the fashion shows in Bryant Park  with me, definitely with me. On her epitaph, that will be her moment of greatness.

But lest anyone forget her current gig, Notdstrom sent guests home with copies of Fashion Icons 2.

Launch Gallery: Designers, Friends Help Fern Mallis Celebrate Fashion Icons 2

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EXCLUSIVE: Director Jacques Audiard will helm Emilia Perez, a comedy that will star Spanish actress Karla Sofia Gascon , with talks underway with Selena Gomez and Zoe Saldana.

Will provide more details when I get them, but this is creating buzz in the Cannes market. Its a musical comedy about an El Chapo-type fugitive who cant get away from the law so has a sex change. Ten years later she misses her children immensely and returns as their aunt. Library Pictures International is financing, and The Veterans will be selling international along with CAA Media Finance, which is also selling North American territories. Gascon is an up and coming Spanish trans actress who has emerged as one to watch and should pop in this musical comedy along the lines of Mrs. Doubtfire.

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Tell you more when I know it.

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May 12A former Harford County priest was sentenced Wednesday to 22 years in federal prison followed by a lifetime of supervised release for illegal sexual activity with minors, the Maryland's U.S. Attorney's Office reported.

Fernando Cristancho, 65, of Bel Air, pleaded guilty in October to coercing and enticing a minor he met through his work as a priest to engage in sexual activity. Cristancho also admitted to producing nude images of four other minors, according to the Maryland U.S. Attorney's Office.

U.S. District Judge Ellen L. Hollander ordered Cristancho to register as a sex offender in the places where he resides, where he is an employee, and where he is a student, under the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act.

"Cristancho is finally being held accountable for his horrific crimes," said Erek L. Barron, U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland. "Let this sentence serve as a deterrent to anyone that seeks to sexually abuse children, especially those in trusted positions intended to be a safe place and haven for children. The United States Attorney's Office for the District of Maryland will relentlessly pursue and prosecute predators that exploit the trust of children and families."

According to the U.S. attorney's office, Cristancho was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in Colombia, South America, in 1985 and moved to Alexandria, Virginia, where he was an assistant priest from 1994 to 1997.

Around 1999, Cristancho was granted priesthood in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, first in Baltimore County and then at St. Ignatius Catholic Church in Harford County. After arriving at St. Ignatius in 1999, Cristancho became close with a woman and her then-8-year-old grandson, according to the plea agreement.

The woman was a regular parishioner at St. Ignatius and would often bring her grandson with her, according to an agreed statement of facts. Cristancho began to grow close to the family, spending time with them outside church.

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When the boy turned 11, the U.S. attorney's office said, Cristancho began sexually abusing the child. Cristancho would complain of a bad back and ask the boy for back rubs, the U.S. attorney's office stated. He would also offer the boy alcohol, kiss him and act as if they were in a romantic relationship, including telling the boy that he loved him. Cristancho also showed the boy pornography and suggested they perform the sexual activities depicted, authorities said.

When Cristancho left St. Ignatius, the U.S. attorney's office stated, he would hold religious ceremonies at a parishioner's house where the boy would act as a lector, a role he performed while at St. Ignatius with Cristancho. In the summer of 2002, Cristancho became more involved with the family, inviting himself on a camping trip, arranging for the boy to help him around the house and spending weekends with him.

It was during those weekend stays that Cristancho sexually abused the boy, according to the U.S. attorney's office. The abuse continued from 2002 through fall 2003, prosecutors said. The Archdiocese of Baltimore revoked Cristancho's authority to work as a priest in 2002.

Cristancho's crimes were discovered by authorities after he went to a pharmacy to use its printing equipment in September 2017, prosecutors stated. An employee at the pharmacy saw what appeared to be photos of naked children on Cristancho's phone while assisting him and made a report to the police.

Police served a search warrant on Cristancho's home on Sept. 19, 2017. During the search, investigators seized various digital devices including a smartphone. A forensic examination of the phone resulted in the discovery of nude photos and videos of four other minor victims, with most of the images being recorded when the victims were less than 5 years old, authorities said.

This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative by the Department of Justice to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse. Led by the U.S.Attorney's Offices and the Criminal Division's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state and local resources to locate, apprehend and prosecute individuals who sexually exploit children, and to identify and rescue victims.
Europe Google Publishers (Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

Google said Wednesday that it struck licensing deals with 300 news publishers in Europe in its latest effort to comply with a recently introduced European Union copyright law.

The tech giant signed the agreements with national, local and specialist news publications in Germany, Hungary, France, Austria, the Netherlands and Ireland and said discussions with many others are ongoing.

It didn't disclose how much it's paying or give names of the news outlets.

European Union countries have been adopting into local law a 2019 EU directive granting publishers additional rights over their content.

The new law allows search engines like Google to link to and use snippets of news content, while giving publishers new rights when extended previews are used online.

It doesnt, however, specify where the line between the two lies. The agreements are aimed at avoiding costly and lengthy lawsuits over that distinction.

Google last year announced copyright deals with several large German publications and a group of French news publishers.

The company also said it's rolling out a new tool to offer licensing agreements to thousands of other European publishers, starting in Germany and Hungary.

The tool's licensing offers are based on consistent criteria which respect the law and existing copyright guidance, including how often a news website is displayed and how much ad revenue is generated on pages that also display previews of news content," Sulina Connal, Google's director of news and publishing partnerships, said in a blog post.
Local Jewish organizations say it was wildly inappropriate for a Williamsville official to link a state health emergency rule to the Nazis' relocation, imprisonment and slaughter of Jews.

Leaders from the groups said Deputy Mayor Dave Sherman's description of the regulation at Monday's Village Board meeting minimized the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany during World War II.

Williamsville officials compare state Covid-19 rule to Nazi, communist abuses Williamsville Mayor Deb Rogers, Deputy Mayor Dave Sherman and Trustee Matt Carson tied the regulation to some of the worst human-rights violations of the 20th century during Monday's contentious Village Board meeting.

"These comparisons are extremely disrespectful and demeaning to those who survived the Holocaust, their family members and to the 11 million people who were murdered," the Holocaust Resource Center of Buffalo and the Buffalo Jewish Community Relations Council said in a joint statement.

Sherman on Thursday told The Buffalo News he clearly recognizes the horrors inflicted on Jews during World War II and he did not mean to suggest the state will order people to their deaths.

But he said he stands by his contention that the powers granted to the state health commissioner under this isolation and quarantine order are reminiscent of the Nazis' unlawful separation of families.

Williamsville election comes into focus as trustees decide whether to run Mayor Deb Rogers appointed Dave Sherman and Matt Carson to their board seats and both have served during a period when Village Board meetings grew contentious as the mayor and other attendees defied the state mask mandate.

"I'm not saying that the health commissioner is going to send anybody to the gas chamber," said Sherman, a former Amherst town historian. "But it's the concept. It's the concept that a family's going to be broken up at a moment's notice and displaced."

Rogers, Sherman and Trustee Matt Carson voted to formally object to a state Health Department rule concerning who needs to isolate or quarantine, and for how long, if they have contracted or been exposed to a highly communicable disease such as Covid-19.

"These regulations have been in place since the beginning of the pandemic," department spokeswoman Erin Silk said in an email.

The rule states that any such order must be imposed "consistent with due process of law" and is subject to judicial review. This didn't satisfy Rogers, who compared the order to the quarantine camps opened under communist rule in China, or Carson, who compared it to the U.S. government's internment of Japanese Americans in camps during World War II.

After mask fight, what comes next for Williamsville Mayor Deb Rogers? Elected officials past and present say it appears Rogers is trying to position herself for a run for higher office.

Sherman quoted a passage describing what happened to Jewish residents of the Netherlands following the Nazi invasion in 1940.

"That, folks, is from the diary of Anne Frank," Sherman said, referring to the teenager who died in a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust.

He went on to say, in part, "Maybe this is extreme  but I can't imagine those poor people in the early 1940s who had their door broken down and their kids taken away from them."

Trustee Christine Hunt pushed back against the three board members' comments, saying the state put in place a reasonable, temporary order as part of its efforts to manage the Covid-19 outbreak.

Following the meeting, Sherman's remarks have drawn the most criticism after The News wrote about the board discussion.

Ex-mayors declare for seats on Williamsville Village Board roiled by mask debate Two former village mayors, Mary Lowther and Dan DeLano, have announced theyre running for a pair of board seats held by allies of Mayor Deb Rogers, who has drawn regional notice as a critic of virus-related restrictions.

"We must remember and respect our history and be mindful of harmful and inaccurate comparisons  rejecting them loudly and without pause," Jewish Family Services of Western New York said in its own statement that noted this area is home to nearly 50 survivors of the Holocaust.

Rogers on Thursday emphasized that she did not link the state rule to the Holocaust, but she did not say whether she rejects that comparison.

"My comparison was that of present day communist China," she said in an email. "What I said was alarmingly misrepresented and unfortunately now I, along with my family, have become targets of anger, hatred and hostility in the community."

Williamsville's community development director, Keaton DePriest, later issued a separate statement attempting to further clarify village officials' remarks on the resolution.

Sherman, for his part, said he was "surprised" at the pushback his remarks have generated.

Williamsville Village Board decides to pay $300 fine for violating mask rule The board voted 3-2, with Trustees Eileen Torre and Christine L. Hunt and Deputy Mayor David F. Sherman giving approval to the resolution to pay the fine. Mayor Deb Rogers was joined by newly-appointed Trustee Matt Carson in voting no.

He said he didn't intend to minimize the suffering inflicted on Jews in Europe during World War II. But he said his research into the state emergency order led him to conclude it grants New York the power to separate families.

"Those poor people in Europe 75, 80 years ago, they had no legal recourse, either. That's the comparison," Sherman said. "It's not the end result. Not the ultimate solution. It's just the concept that, through no fault of your own, you could be removed from your family."

Informed that the order includes a provision for judicial review, with the right to legal counsel to assist anyone challenging an order, Sherman said the adjudication process would move slowly.

"Meanwhile, you're locked up, literally, in some, I don't know, a hotel or gymnasium somewhere," he said. "And all that legal assistance would come after the fact, not when they're coming to your house and saying, 'You have to come with me.' "

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Ireland will kick-off their autumn campaign by hosting world champions South Africa, the Irish Rugby Football Union has announced.

The Springboks, who are in the same group as the Irish for next years World Cup, will visit Dublin for the first time in five years on Saturday, November 5.

Andy Farrells side will then welcome Fiji to Aviva Stadium a week later before rounding off the series against Australia on November 19.

 Coming soon: three huge    matches this November! We welcome the @Springboks, @FijiRugby and @Wallabies to Dublin in Autumn #TeamOfUs | #IrishRugby  Irish Rugby (@IrishRugby) May 12, 2022

Irelands last encounter with South Africa came in November 2017 and ended in a record 38-3 victory.

But the Boks have since gone on claim a third World Cup title, in addition to a series win over the British and Irish Lions last summer.

The fixture will be the only meeting between the two sides before next Septembers World Cup Pool B clash at Stade de France in Paris.

Fiji were also last in Dublin in 2017, when Ireland secured a hard-fought 23-20 victory, while the Irish will take on the Wallabies for first time since clinching a 2-1 series success in Australia in June 2018.

Ireland have not faced South Africa since a 38-3 victory in 2017 (Brian Lawless/PA)

Ireland head coach Farrell is currently preparing for a summer tour of New Zealand.

His Six Nations Triple Crown winners will face the All Blacks in Auckland, Dunedin and Wellington on successive Saturdays in early July.

The Irish, who have won 12 of their last 13 matches, are poised to tour for the first time since Farrell succeeded Joe Schmidt after the coronavirus pandemic forced the cancellation of a 2020 trip to Australia and last years scheduled visit to Fiji.

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Autumn fixtures:

Ireland v South Africa; Saturday, November, 5, 5.30pm; Aviva Stadium, Dublin

Ireland v Fiji; Saturday, November 12, 1pm; Aviva Stadium, Dublin

Ireland v Australia; Saturday, November 18, 8pm; Aviva Stadium, Dublin
Former Gov. Pat McCrory served on the frontline of the culture wars in 2016 when he signed North Carolinas controversial bathroom bill, which curbed protections for transgender people. When he was defeated for reelection later that year by a razor-thin margin, he raised questions about the voting process and didnt concede until nearly a month after the election.

Those experiences would seem to make McCrory an ideal nominee in a post-Trump GOP animated by claims of election fraud and the politics of transgender rights. Instead, in the run-up to North Carolinas Tuesday primary, hes dropping in polls and being dismissed by MAGA faithful as a liberal RINO.

His fall from the governors mansion to Senate long shot is the latest case study of the GOPs transformation during the Trump era.

It is kind of a unique situation at this point in time, McCrory said in an interview. But to have it be said Im liberal is ironic, because four years ago I was being branded the exact opposite.

He laughed. Im the same person.

McCrory points out that he was heckled in public, called a bigot, subjected to death threats and shunned with his wife from Charlotte social events as part of the fallout from the bill known as HB2 in 2016, which banned transgender people from using public bathrooms that aligned with their gender identity.

His first year in the governors office gave rise to the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina, a series of protests at the Capitol against him and the GOP-controlled legislature that resulted in hundreds of arrests in 2013 and 2014.

Far-left demonstrators were a regular presence outside the governors mansion and at the Capitol as McCrory signed legislation that ticked off top conservative priorities: banning sanctuary cities and stopping food stamp benefits for undocumented immigrants; cutting unemployment benefits; increasing the waiting period to three days to have an abortion; and, most notably, what became known as the bathroom bill.

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Anybody who really knows Pat and pays attention, whether theyre liberal or conservative, theyre not going to call him liberal, said former Republican Gov. Jim Martin, who is supporting McCrory in the primary.

As a former governor and former mayor of the states biggest city, Charlotte, McCrory was well-positioned to win the GOP nomination when Republican Sen. Richard Burr announced his retirement. And for much of the primary campaign, McCrorys near-universal name recognition powered him to a commanding lead  even after former President Donald Trump unexpectedly endorsed Rep. Ted Budd in June 2021.

Then the conservative Club for Growth announced it was spending $5 million to support Budd. Then $10 million. Then $15 million. The organizations super PAC bought up ad time portraying McCrory as a liberal faker, a line of attack the group has sustained for months as it sought to boost support for Budd. Other outside groups piled on with several more millions in spending against McCrory.



I was probably the original person who was canceled, and now Im the one being called a liberal, McCrory said in an interview. Someone came up to me the other day and said, McCrory, you were DeSantis before DeSantis. I said, Thats a unique perspective. I stood up to some things that were contrary not just to liberals, but to the power elite of my party.

The bombardment has taken a heavy toll on McCrory, who lost his first bid for governor in 2008, won the office in 2012 and was defeated for reelection in 2016 by just two-tenths of a percentage point. Budds lead has grown exponentially in the past month, a period that included a Trump rally in the state. In the last two months, McCrory has fallen 9 percentage points to 20 percent, while Budd has surged 30 points to 48 percent, according to new polling released Monday.

Burr noted the power of the Club for Growths assault on McCrory, without mentioning the organization by name.

"It's amazing what having an unlimited checkbook can do to public opinion, Burr told POLITICO, adding that McCrory has always been a conservative.

McCrorys cool relationship with Trump, and his occasional criticisms of the former president, have made it easier for the attacks on his conservative bona fides to stick. And there are those who contend that, while state policies shifted rightward during his tenure as governor, McCrory was often a behind-the-scenes impediment to their agenda.



Former Republican state Sen. Bob Rucho specifically noted McCrorys private resistance to cutting state unemployment benefits and enacting tax reform legislation  policies McCrory now takes credit for on the campaign trail.

Hes already lost two statewide elections, said Rucho, who, like McCrory, is from the Charlotte area. In the past, it used to be if you lose one statewide election, your political career is probably over. Having lost two, that is very rare that hes even back again, to be honest.

With significantly fewer financial resources, McCrory has tried to fight back against the not-conservative-enough characterization by reminding voters of the days when he was lauded by conservative groups. Hes pleaded with reporters for coverage and appealed directly to voters on social media, in addition to running a television ad on the topic.

Yall know I was the most conservative governor in North Carolina history, McCrory says in the ad. Im the guy who outlawed sanctuary cities. You remember.

Last month, he took to his Facebook and Twitter channels, desperate to push back against a narrative with millions of dollars behind it. On April 14, he merely tweeted a link and the headline of a 2015 news story: McCrory signs bill outlawing sanctuary cities in NC.

Prior to that, Conservative Outsiders PAC, a super PAC associated with the Club for Growth, had been airing a television ad hitting McCrory on immigration.

McCrory also posted a video on Facebook trying to set the record straight about a different negative ad, posted by another group that is working with the Club  the School Freedom Foundation.

Listen, you know me, McCrory said, explaining he was unquestionably against the teaching of critical race theory in schools. Lets cut the crap.

Martin, the former governor and McCrory supporter, mentioned a recent Club for Growth ad featuring Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who threw his support behind Budd last month at Trumps rally. In the ad, Robinson said McCrory was a nice guy, but no conservative.



Saying hes not a conservative  the lieutenant governor doesnt know what hes talking about. He just said what they told him to say, Martin said. Its a weird thing. But, you know, politics is like that.

John Lassiter, a close friend and informal adviser of McCrory who began working with him in Charlotte government in the mid-1980s, remains hopeful about McCrorys chances Tuesday. He said he expected voters would wake up at the end of the campaign, and decide to vote for the person they supported previously.

Its really unfair, Lassiter said. He is very conservative, particularly on fiscal matters and the role of government. At his core, his politics are pretty tried and true, and he has stuck to those despite the trade winds that come every cycle.

Lassiter, whom McCrory tapped to oversee and privatize the states economic development efforts, said McCrory is pretty aligned with people like Thom Tillis, the U.S. senator who was speaker of the North Carolina House when McCrory was governor.

Tillis, for his part, called McCrory a business conservative. Having ones Republican credentials called into question is par for the course, he added.

"Primaries do that, Tillis said. They portray me as a liberal. The two things they do is cast you as a RINO or too liberal, and corrupt. Neither of those are true for him.

Burgess Everett contributed to this report.
Curated by the IndieWire Crafts team, Craft Considerations is a platform for filmmakers to talk about recent work we believe is worthy of awards consideration. In partnership with Amazon, for this edition we look at how composers Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans, supervising sound editor Andrea Bella, and sound designer Kevin Peters created a unique soundscape to give voice to the Western and sci-fi flavors of Outer Range.

When the Amazon series Outer Range introduces viewers to Royal Abbott, a rugged Wyoming rancher played by Josh Brolin in his most iconic cowboy mode, it seems to be setting the audience up for a classic Western transposed to the modern era. Yet as the series progresses and Royal becomes enmeshed in mysteries that are both grounded in reality (murders and disappearances in which his adult sons are involved) and the supernatural (a mysterious void that opens up on his property), Outer Range moves into the areas of science fiction and the police procedural.

More from IndieWire

One way that Outer Range maintains a consistent tone while taking advantage of all the possibilities its broad array of genre traditions introduces is through the sonic textures provided by composers Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans and the sound team led by supervising sound editor Andrea Bella and sound designer Kevin Peters. As the videos below will show, these artists found a soundscape to match the shows visual style  one both epic and intimate, and one which honors the shows Western and sci-fi influences without being beholden to either. The sound design and music also add an entirely new dimension to the awe and dread that permeate Outer Range, not just enhancing the tension in the imagery but also introducing new mysteries.

The Score of Outer Range

Ironically  given the unusual and audacious premise of Outer Range  Bensi and Jurriaans felt that their task was clear from the outset. There wasnt a lot of pre-conversation about what to do, Jurriaans told IndieWire. The vibe was already so in our world that we knew exactly what to do. Indeed, on series like Ozark, The Outsider, and The OA the composers have earned reputations as musicians whose work stands outside of traditional genres and often expresses the undefinable; OA co-creator Brit Marling once referred to them as spellcasters. Their particular form of sonic magic was integral to the success of Outer Range, given that the shows unconventional story lacked some of the traditional genre signposts to guide the audience.

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Bensi and Jurriaans had been fantasizing about working in sci-fi for a while, and Outer Range provided both the perfect opportunity to play in that sandbox and to bring a lot of musical ideas the duo had been working on to fruition. We felt a kinship with the project, Bensi said, adding that he and Jurriaans have always been attracted to epic qualities in their music. Even when we were playing heavy metal together, we were always trying to get at ideas about man versus nature and something ethereal. This sensibility makes itself felt in the first episode of Outer Range, when Royal stands at the edge of the hole and the music evokes dread, power, mystery, and beauty all at once.

In order to build to a sense of epic grandeur in Outer Range, Bensi and Jurriaans had to start from a more minimalist perspective in order to build the music alongside the drama. As they discuss in the video above, the composers took their cues from the story and the filmmaking, finding inspiration in not only the shows blend of genres but its quirky sense of humor. This was a wonderful recipe of taking whats on the screen and marrying it to experimental, non-traditional music, Bensi said. We bow to the baroque period, the classical period, avant garde modernism it really does culminate a lot of the things weve done over the last 10 years, both orchestrally and electronically. Jurriaans added that the whole process was so natural and fluid that often it was hard to tell where sound design ended and music began. A lot of the sound design became a kind of backdrop to the score and helped tie it all together, he said. There were a lot of disparate things going on, but it works as long as you have pillars gluing it together.

The Sound Design of Outer Range

The task of providing the aural glue that Jurriaans described fell to supervising sound editor Andrea Bella, who, working with sound designer Kevin Peters, found sounds that would be faithful to both the more natural elements of Outer Range and those that lacked real world reference points. For Bella, that unusual juxtaposition was both the challenge and appeal of working on the show. There are many different levels and many different worlds, she said. It has a lot to do with nature, but then theres the paranormal world of the hole  but the natural world communicates with that, so these worlds must link. They must coexist on the same level. As the video above demonstrates, when characters enter the hole they might be surrounded by sounds were familiar with, but as visions overtake them and the hole exerts its power, otherworldly effects begin to intrude.

Peters noted that Outer Range was a dream to work on because of the sense of detail that needed to characterize both worlds; even when the show was sticking to its more realistic storylines, it ranged from beautiful, quiet, ambient scenes to super busy rodeo scenes and car chases and shootouts, he said. Its such a wide spectrum. As the video above demonstrates, Peters often took the characters as his guide when creating sound effects, assigning specific gun noises or cars to specific people. We spent a lot of time in the beginning developing those sounds, Bella said, adding that scenes like the car chase were especially challenging due to the need to coexist with the score. Theres a lot of trial and error. You build something, you mix it against the music, and you pick and choose your moments and make sure that everything pops when you get on the mix stage.

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WEST HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA - MAY 10: Rebel Wilson attends the Netflix Senior Year Special Screening at The London West Hollywood at Beverly Hills on May 10, 2022 in West Hollywood, California. (Photo by Vivien Killilea/Getty Images for Netflix)

Vivien Killilea/Getty

Rebel Wilson is off the market!

While appearing on an episode of the U Up? podcast hosted by Jordana Abraham and Jared Freid, the Isn't It Romantic star revealed she's taken, saying, "I am now happily in a relationship."

When asked about how she met her new partner, Wilson, 42, told the podcast hosts that a mutual friend had connected them.

"I was on and off on the Raya app, but this was a friend set up," she explained. "He'd known both of us for at least five years each, and was like, 'Yeah, I think you two would hit it off,' and then we did."

RELATED: Rebel Wilson Says Winning an Oscar Is 'Definitely a Big Goal of Mine'

Rebel Wilson arrives at the world premiere of "The Deb" at Rebel Theatre, Australian Theatre for Young People on April 22, 2022 in Sydney, Australia.

Brendon Thorne/Getty Rebel Wilson

"I think that escalates things quicker, [meeting someone] from a trusted source," she added of her newfound romance. "So then you're like, okay, I can trust this person, that they are legit, they are who they say they are  which is something on the [dating] apps you don't really know."

In February 2021, a friend of the actress told PEOPLE Wilson parted ways with her ex-boyfriend, Jacob Busch, four months after making their relationship Instagram official.

"Jacob was an amazing guy but just not the one for her long-term," Wilson's friend told PEOPLE at the time.

On the same day, the actress also shared a new photo of herself on Instagram in which she referred to herself as a "single girl" while showing off her slim figure in a denim dress and cropped yellow cardigan.

"Lots on my mind...aghhhhhh...#single-girl-heading-to-Super-Bowl!" she wrote in the caption of her post.

Never miss a story  sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

Wilson went public with her relationship with Busch in September 2020 by sharing a sweet photo of the two boarding a helicopter alongside Helen Mirren and Kate Beckinsale.

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The former couple made their red carpet debut shortly after when they attended the Monte-Carlo Gala For Planetary Health in Monaco.

"This is the first guy she's met who is a match for her humor and personality. Someone who has his own life and success and isn't intimidated by her," a source told PEOPLE at the time. "He's entrepreneurial and they're both very business-minded."

RELATED VIDEO: Rebel Wilson Says She's 'Proud of Myself for Improving My Life for the Better' After 77-Lb. Weight Loss

The former couple frequently shared updates of their romance on social media, enjoying vacations in Mexico and Aspen.

In November 2020, Wilson told PEOPLE she spent all of 2019 going out on as many dates as possible before meeting Busch.

"Last year was the year of love, that's why maybe I'm still so obsessed with dating and stuff because I deliberately went out and I dated a lot of different people," Wilson said. "And I wasn't very experienced in love and relationships, my movie Isn't It Romantic was pretty similar to my real life in that respect. And so I went out and just gave it my all, tried really hard to find love and stuff."
Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland at the press conference Wednesday, May 11, 2022. (Screenshot)

United States Department of the Interior (DOI) Secretary Deb Haaland and Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland got emotional this afternoon in a press conference announcing the findings of the Federal Indian Boarding School investigation.

The 106-page reportpenned by Newland and released to the public at noon on Wednesday, May 11details for the first time that the federal government operated or supported 408 boarding schools across 37 states between the years 1819 and 1969. Additionally, the investigation identified 53 marked and unmarked burial sites connected to the schools, though the Department expects to find the number of children buried at boarding schools across the nation to be in the thousands or tens of thousands, as the investigation continues.

Each of those children is a missing family member, a person who was not able to live out their purpose on this earth because they lost their lives as part of this terrible system, Haaland said during the press conference. This is not news to us. As Indigenous people, we have lived with the intergenerational trauma of federal Indian boarding school policies for many years. But what is new is the determination in the Biden-Harris administration to make a lasting difference in the impact of this trauma for future generations.

As a result of the reportwhich will lead to a continued investigation to uncover burial sites associated with each boarding school, as well as the names and identities of the children buried thereHaaland announced a yearlong cross-country tour called The Road to Healing to connect with and listen to boarding school survivors stories.

Recognizing the impacts of the federal Indian boarding school system cannot just be a historical reckoning, Haaland said. We must also chart a path forward to deal with these legacy issues.

Each speaker at the press conference stressed the living, present-day impacts that boarding schools continue to have on Native communities.

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Newland, who paused several times to choke back emotions, spoke about the need for an independent research group to assess the lasting impacts federal Indian boarding schools have had on Native health, education, and economic status.

There's not a single American Indian, Alaskan Native, or Native Hawaiian in this country whose life hasn't been affected by these schools, Newland said. That impact continues to influence the lives of countless families, from the breakup of families and tribal nations, to the loss of languages and cultural practices and relatives. We haven't begun to explain the scope of this policy aea until now.

Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) Director Deborah Parker said that the reports publication signifies a historic moment in American history, as it reaffirms the stories we all grew up with, the truth of our people, and the often immense torture our elders and ancestors went through as children at the hands of the federal government and the religious institutions.

Parker said that investigation is needed beyond the DOIs work to know the magnitude of loss and human life. She petitioned for the passage of the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act that would build on the work of the Interior Department.

Importantly, the bill would task a Truth and Reconciliation Commission with locating and analyzing all records on Indian boarding schools, including church and government records beyond the Department of Interior's reach.

The bill will have a live hearing with the House Natural Resource Subcommittee for Indigenous Peoples tomorrow at 1pm. Tribal leaders and survivors, including Parker, are expected to give testimony in support of the legislation.

Jim LaBelle Sr., an Alaska Native survivor of boarding schools from ages eight to 18 years old, also addressed the press on Wednesday afternoon.

I learned everything about European American cultureits history, language, civilizations, math, sciencebut I didn't know anything about who I was as a Native person, LaBelle said. I came out not knowing who I was.

LaBelle credited the boarding school era for the vast over-representations of Alaska Natives who have been incarcerated or lived in foster care in the state.

In response to a question about whether reparations are owed to boarding school survivors, LaBelle said that it's going to require some sort of resources to help put our languages back together, rescind federal (initiatives) that restrict us from traditional hunting, fishing and gathering, and (take) another look at our criminal justice system.

Currently, the federal Bureau of Indian Education funds or operates 186 schools across the United States, including four off-reservation boarding schools.

Another reporter asked what the transformation between the schools that exist right now and those run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the past.

The most important thing to understand right now is that it is not the express purpose of the United States federal government to operate the schools to forcibly assimilate kids, Newland said, adding that most of the schools funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs are operated directly by tribes. So the difference is at the core of the school's mission, which is to empower Indian kids in their communities and not to forcibly assimilate kids and not to take them from their families without their consent.

In response to whether or not the federal investigation will include any religious schools Native American children attended that predated 1819, Newland said that DOI is really focusing on [its] role as the United States federal government.

I think its really important because of our sacred trust relationship with tribes and with Indian people that we account for our actions, Newland said.

Haaland and Newland both stressed that the report published today is merely the first step of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative.

There's a lot more work that has to be done to simply tell the truth and lay out the scope of the federal Indian boarding school system, Newland said. There are survivors and families and communities that want to come forward to tell their story. So in short, there's a lot of work left to do to simply get to this point where we can explain for ourselves on behalf of the United States federal government, what we did with these boarding schools.

The next step of the investigation will be to focus on numbering how many kids were placed in federal Indian boarding schools across the country, how many kids didn't make it home, where they're buried, and counting how many federal dollars were spent operating the boarding school system.









About the Author: "Jenna Kunze is a reporter for Native News Online and Tribal Business News. Her bylines have appeared in The Arctic Sounder, High Country News, Indian Country Today, Smithsonian Magazine and Anchorage Daily News. In 2020, she was one of 16 U.S. journalists selected by the Pulitzer Center to report on the effects of climate change in the Alaskan Arctic region. Prior to that, she served as lead reporter at the Chilkat Valley News in Haines, Alaska. Kunze is based in New York."

Contact: jkunze@indiancountrymedia.com
A dark blue Chevy Impala was stolen from a Kum & Go on April 30. Anyone with information on the whereabouts of the vehicle or the driver should contact SPD.

Update: Springfield police announced on Wednesday afternoon the suspect had been taken into custody in Iowa.

The Springfield Police Department is asking for the public's help identifying a carjacking suspect who they say stole a car on April 30.

According to a news release from the police department, the incident happened outside of the Kum & Go at 2161 E. Republic Road. A white man with blonde hair and a beard stole a dark blue 2011 Chevy Impala from the parking lot.

The vehicle had the Missouri license plate GE2D3G, but police think it could have been removed at this point. However, stickers on the rear window are believed to be there still. Police also note that there is a large dent on the rear door on the driver's side.

Anyone with information on the whereabouts of this vehicle or the suspect is encouraged to contact the Springfield Police Department at 417-864-1810 or make an anonymous call to 417-869-TIPS (8477).

Springfield police are searching for this man in connection with a carjacking on April 30.

Jordan Meier covers public safety for the Springfield News-Leader. Contact her at jmeier@news-leader.com, or on Twitter @Jordan_Meier644.

This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Update: Springfield police say carjacking suspect arrested in Iowa
May 11SELLERSBURG  The Ogle Hall auditorium at Ivy Tech's Sellersburg campus was packed Tuesday to honor the new graduates of Veterans Court of Southern Indiana.

The court is a specialized system that helps veterans who've become involved with the court system get treatment for addiction or mental illness.

Indiana Supreme Court Chief Justice Loretta Rush was in attendance at the event.

The gathering honored Indiana National Guard member Garel Blanchard; U.S. Air Force veteran Patience Rosen; U.S. Army Veteran Myron Conley; U.S. Navy veteran Steven Smith; U.S. Army veteran Dereck Hamblin, U.S. Air Force veteran Ronald Tolbert and U.S. Marine Corps veteran Ruben O'Neal.

Graduates from Washington County also were honored. They are Army veterans Dalton Moore and Christopher Adamson, Army Reserves veteran Raymond Pavey and Marine Corps veteran Israel Lozano.

"There are tears of happiness, there are tears of pride, there are tears of joy," said Clark Circuit Court 4 Judge Vicki Carmichael. "I am so proud of all the graduates and the work they've done."

The court also celebrated its 10th anniversary on Tuesday.

Established in 2011 and then certified in the Office of Court Services in January 2012 the court helps veterans.

Participants are required to have regular court appearances in front of the Hon. Maria D. Granger, supervising Judge of the Floyd County Veterans Court, or the Hon. Andrew Adams, supervising Judge of the Clark County Veterans Court.

All members are required to complete a treatment plan that starts when veterans first appear in court.

Veterans were joined on stage with their mentors as they received diplomas.

Rosen spoke to the crowd about her time in Veterans Court, saying although she's never been involved with the justice system, nor has she dealt with addiction, the other graduates helped her fit in, leading her to success.

"When they helped me fit in, that's when I changed," she said. "I saw the commonalities in all of us, we were all so eager to do better."

While being involved in the program Rosen was able to meet with doctors and was diagnosed with severe obsessive compulsive disorder. She said that changed her life.

"Today a group of veterans will end a long-read chapter in their personal books, while simultaneously beginning their rebranding chapter," she said. "Today you see a healthier, happier, more productive group of individuals who found their sense of purpose again."
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Buffalo attorney Wayne C. Felle said the jury found that a former Buffalo Police Department detective had manufactured a confession in the case against his client, Josue Ortiz, and used the false evidence to maliciously prosecute Ortiz, who was arrested, charged and ultimately convicted in the fatal shooting of brothers Nelson and Miguel Camacho in their West Side Buffalo apartment on Nov. 11, 2004.
There's dark comedy and then there's really dark comedy, and On the Count of Three is perhaps darker still
Cecile Hansen, chairwoman of the Duwamish tribal council, shown in their longhouse with a portrait of Princess Angeline, the eldest daughter of Chief Seattle. The Duwamish have gone to court again, seeking federal recognition.
First Purple Heart State signs to be installed on Washington highways within the next month
While Democrats were spending their political energies enforcing gender-neutral vocabulary to please their progressive base, Republicans were executing a methodical and, frankly, brilliant strategy to solidify their base with the singular objective of overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Now the left is rising up in outraged protest at the unfairness of it all.

Republican leaders recognized long ago that they are under no obligation to holster their brass knuckles and play nice. Even though Americas demographics suggest the GOP grip on power should be waning steadily, the party is instead fighting well above its weight. Democrats are helping them every step of the way.

What will it take to shake Democrats into action? The 2000 presidential election, won by Democrats but handed to Republican George W. Bush by a narrow Supreme Court ruling, had no lasting impact on Democratic Party mobilization. The rise of racist, obstructionist right-wing politics after President Barack Obama took office still did little to advance the Democrats bigger agenda. Yes, Obamacare became the law of the land, but other platform issues  immigration reform, equal rights for women and minorities, and criminal justice reform  made scant headway.

Not even the election of Donald Trump in 2016  with nearly 3 million fewer votes than Democrat Hillary Clinton  was enough to wake up the left. Democrats weak control of Congress after the 2020 election has yielded only stalemate, rendering Joe Bidens presidential victory moot. Even the Capitol insurrection seems not to have moved the political needle in Democrats favor.

While Republicans savor their likely Roe v. Wade victory, the progressive left is doubling down on the small stuff, and therein lies the problem. They have muddled the English language with endless debate over which politically correct words to use  homeless or unhoused?  to the point that people now feel obligated to list pronoun preferences on their email signatures.

Never mind the confusion of referring to a single individual as they, the relentless focus on Orwellian properspeak is alienating moderates and providing fuel for Republicans to mock the left mercilessly.

Hispanic voters  once a reliable voting bloc for Democrats  are being repelled by progressive insistence on the gender-neutral term Latinx. According to a 2021 Gallup poll, only 4% of Hispanic Americans preferred usage of Latinx. About 40% find the term downright offensive, Politico found.

Democrats need to ask themselves whats really important for voters. Do Americans really want to be told how to speak, or do they want to protect abortion rights? Do moderates want to be badgered on social and political correctness, or do they want to make sure Trump stays out of the White House and that his insurrectionist followers are booted from Congress?

We suspect its the latter. But Republicans are banking on Democratic activists sticking with the former.
WASHINGTON (AP)  President Joe Biden on Thursday kicked off the first-ever Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit to be held in Washington as his administration makes an extended effort to demonstrate that the United States has not lost focus on the Pacific even while dealing with Russias invasion of Ukraine.

As Biden welcomed leaders from eight ASEAN nations for a dinner to start the two-day special summit, the White House announced the United States would commit to more than $150 million in new projects to bolster Southeast Asia's climate, maritime and public health infrastructure.

A senior administration official, who previewed the announcement on the condition of anonymity, said the effort was meant to signal that the U.S. is looking to step up our game in Southeast Asia.

The gathering marked the group's first meeting at the White House in its 45-year history. Leaders will take part in more formal talks at the State Department on Friday.

The ASEAN nations include Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. The top leaders from ASEAN member Myanmar were barred from attending, while outgoing Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte dispatched Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. to represent his government.

The summit comes before Biden's trip next week to South Korea and Japan  his first visit to Asia as president  for talks with those two countries' leaders. He also will meet during that trip with leaders from the Indo-Pacific strategic alliance with the U.S. known as the Quad: Australia, India and Japan.

Biden has tried to put greater focus on that alliance and improving relations with Pacific nations in the early going of his presidency as he sees a rising China as the most threatening economic and national security adversary to the United States.

Biden, who pledged to make the Pacific a greater focal point of U.S. policy, has seen his attempt at an Asia pivot complicated by the most serious fighting in Europe since World War II.

A White House Asia policy adviser said the administration remains committed to stepping up relations with Southeast Asian nations to address climate, economic and education initiatives.

There has been a sense that in previous administrations that we had set off with a determined pace to focus on East Asia or in the Indo-Pacific and then find ourselves with other pressing challenges that perhaps draws (us) away a little bit, Kurt Campbell, coordinator for Indo-Pacific Affairs on the White House National Security Council, said Wednesday. I think there is a deep sense that that cant happen again.

The new U.S. investment in ASEAN nations includes $40 million for clean energy infrastructure, $60 million for a new regional maritime initiative and $6 million to accelerate digital development in the region.

The White House also announced that Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies will launch a privately funded institute for rising leaders from ASEAN nations that will bring mid-career public sector officials to the United States for leadership training.

Duterte, the Philippines president, is skipping the summit because his country is in a political transition. ASEAN has barred Myanmar  in crisis since the army ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021  from sending all but nongovernmental leaders for ASEAN meetings.

The Biden administration condemned the military coup that led to the ouster of Suu Kyi. She was convicted by a military court last month of corruption and sentenced to five years in prison in the first of several corruption cases against her. Suu Kyi has denied the charges.

Biden is also expected to address the situation in Myanmar with ASEAN leaders, as well as discuss China and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Campbell said the administration expects the private talks will be direct, polite, but maybe a little bit uncomfortable at times as the U.S. and ASEAN members are not on the same page on all issues. He said the administration wants to see the group play a more deeply engaged role in the critical diplomacy about next steps in Myanmar.

Biden has called for Russia to be disinvited from Novembers scheduled Group of 20 summit because of its invasion of Ukraine. ASEAN member Indonesia, which holds the presidency of the G-20 this year, has resisted the calls to pull Moscows invitation.

Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the presumptive winner of this weeks Philippines presidential election, could test U.S. sway in the region. The son and namesake of the countrys former dictator has said he wants to pursue closer ties with China.

He has received congratulatory calls from both Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping. His campaign said that Marcos Jr. also met on on Thursday with Chinese ambassador, Huang Xilian, who conveyed that Beijing wants to bring cooperation between the two country to new heights.

Campbell acknowledged that historical considerations could present challenges to the relationship with Marcos Jr., a seeming reference to long-standing litigation in the United States against the estate of his father, Ferdinand Marcos.

A U.S. appeals court in 1996 upheld damages of about $2 billion against the elder Marcos estate for the torture and killings of thousands of Filipinos. The court upheld a 1994 verdict of a jury in Hawaii, where he had fled after being forced from power in 1986. He died there in 1989.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Thursday said she was not aware if the litigation or China came up in Bidens call with Marcos Jr.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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YORK  The driver of a van who rolled his vehicle in the middle of the night on Interstate 80, in York County, has pleaded no contest to felony DUI.

Albert Woods, Jr., 45, of Omaha, appeared in York County District Court this past week. He pleaded no contest to third offense driving under the influence with a blood alcohol level of more than .15, a Class 3A felony. In return for his change of plea, the prosecution dismissed charges of driving under suspension, a Class 3 misdemeanor, and willful reckless driving, first offense, a Class 3 misdemeanor.

According to court documents, deputies with the York County Sheriffs Department were dispatched on April 1, at 2:23 a.m., on the report of a dark-colored minivan and its driver who was speeding and driving all over the roadway near the Goehner exit. Then a second reporting party reported the same vehicle, saying the driver was unable to maintain a lane. And moments later, York County Communications received three different calls from drivers who said the driver of the dark colored SUV tried to get between two semi trucks, lost control and rolled into a nearby field near mile marker 345, which is between the Henderson and Bradshaw exits.

YSO deputies and a sergeant with the Nebraska State Patrol responded to the calls and came upon the incident scene. The deputy says in his court affidavit that upon arrival, he saw a vehicle parked on the shoulder of the westbound lanes with its hazard lights on, and a second vehicle  a black GMC Envoy  was sitting upright in a bean field south of the eastbound lanes of travel.

The driver on the shoulder was a witness who had called 911 earlier. That driver told law enforcement he went over to check on the driver of the other vehicle and he thought the driver appeared to be drunk.

The deputy says in the affidavit that Woods was seated in the drivers seat of the running vehicle. The deputy said he could smell the odors of alcohol and marijuana. He said Woods appeared to be impaired and Woods admitted to also using Percocet.

A check of his records showed Woods drivers license was suspended with a license pickup order due to an insurance cancellation.

During a search of the vehicle, NSP officers found a bag of marijuana and a digital scale with marijuana residue scatted around the top of it.

The deputy said a preliminary breath test indicated a breath alcohol content of over .08. He was arrested. Later, he submitted to a chemical test which indicated his alcohol content was .158.

It was indicated in court documents that Woods has an extensive criminal history to include being a convicted felon and a multi-state offender. He has criminal histories in the states of Arkansas, Iowa and Nebraska. He has prior convictions for assault on a peace officer, possession with the intent to deliver, use of a weapon to commit a felony, domestic violence, distribution of crack cocaine and distribution of marijuana. He also has two convictions for DUI  the first out of Douglas County with a conviction date of April 25, 2019, and the second out of Pottawattamie County, Iowa, with a conviction date of May 6, 2021. He served prison time from May of 2002 to October of 2012, along with 60 months in federal prison, starting in 2012. He is currently on federal parole for distribution of narcotics.

After his arrest, the York County Sheriffs Department was in contact with Woods federal parole officer regarding the placement of a federal hold on Woods.

Sentencing in the York County District Court, regarding this particular case, has been set for June 23.
Air India, a Tata Sons owned airline and former national air carrier of India has announced the appointment of Campbell Wilson as the CEO and Managing Director. The Air India board approved the appointment of Wilson subject to requisite regulatory approvals, the company said in a statement.

Tata Sons and Air India Chairman N Chandrasekaran said, "I am delighted to welcome Campbell to Air India. He is an industry veteran having worked in key global markets cutting across multiple functions. Further, Air India would benefit from his added experience of having built an airline brand in Asia. I look forward to working with him in building a world-class airline."

Also read: Tata Sons appoints Campbell Wilson as CEO and MD of Air India

Here's all you need to know about Campbell Wilson:

Campbell Wilson Work Profile

Campbell Wilson has 26 years experience in the aviation industry and started as a Management Trainee with Singapore Airlines in 1996 in New Zealand. He then worked for SIA in Hong Kong, Canada, Japan, before returning back to Singapore as the founding CEO of Scoot, which he led till 2016.

Wilson then worked as the Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing at SIA, before returning back as the CEO of Scoot in 2020.

Campbell Wilson Education

Campbell Wilson, 50, did is Master of Commerce (1st Class Honours) in Business Administration from the University of Canerbury in New Zealand.

Air India CEO Controversy

Earlier in February this year, Tata Sons had announced the appointment of former chairman of Turkish Airlines Ilker Ayci as the CEO and MD of Air India. However, he declined to take up the position amid controversies over his views related to India.

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Tata Sons has appointed Campbell Wilson as the CEO and Managing Director of Air India. Wilson is the CEO of Scoot, wholly-owned low cost subsidiary of Singapore Airlines (SIA). The Air India board approved the appointment of Wilson subject to requisite regulatory approvals, the company said in a statement.

Earlier in February this year, Tata Sons had announced the appointment of former chairman of Turkish Airlines Ilker Ayci as the CEO and MD of Air India. However, he declined to take up the position amid controversies over his views related to India.

Also read: Woman suffers panic attack after Air India denies boarding, 'came late' says airline

Campbell Wilson has 26 years experience in the aviation industry and started as a Management Trainee with Singapore Airlines in 1996 in New Zealand. He then worked for SIA in Hong Kong, Canada, Japan, before returning back to Singapore as the founding CEO of Scoot, which he led till 2016.

Wilson then worked as the Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing at SIA, before returning back as the CEO of Scoot in 2020. Vistara, the Indian full-service airline is a joint venture between Tata Sons and Singapore Airlines.

Tata Sons and Air India Chairman N Chandrasekaran said, "I am delighted to welcome Campbell to Air India. He is an industry veteran having worked in key global markets cutting across multiple functions. Further, Air India would benefit from his added experience of having built an airline brand in Asia. I look forward to working with him in building a world-class airline."

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CANBERRA, Australia (AP)  A Chinese ambassador says Chinas engagement with South Pacific island countries poses no threat to Australia, responding to fears that Beijing will establish a military foothold in the Solomon Islands.

Chinas envoy to Australia, Xiao Qian, attempted to reassure his host nation in a newspaper opinion piece published Thursday as reports emerged of a planned trip by a high-level Chinese delegation to the Solomons following the completion of a bilateral security pact.

The cooperation between China and the South Pacific island countries is conducive to peoples well-being on both sides, and regional prosperity and stability, and will by no means threaten Australias security, Xiao wrote in The Australian Financial Review.

Chinas rise should not be seen as a threat to Australia, Xiao wrote. He made no specific mention of the Solomon Islands or the security pact.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, whose conservative government is seeking a fourth three-year term in elections next week, said he disagreed with the ambassador that Chinese government interference in the Pacific is of no consequence.

I think its of great consequence, Morrison told reporters.

I support the Australian national interests, not the Chinese governments view of what national interests are, whether they be in Australia or across the Pacific, and thats why Ive always taken a very strong stance upon this, Morrison added.

Australia and its allies including the United States fear the China-Solomons pact will result in a Chinese naval base being established less than 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) off the northeast Australian coast.

Solomons Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare has maintained that there will be no Chinese military base in his country and China has denied seeking a military foothold in the islands.

Asked if Chinas rise should be seen as a threat to Australia, opposition leader Anthony Albanese told reporters: China has changed its posture. They are more aggressive in the region.

We need to, in the words of the (President Joe) Biden administration, have competition without catastrophe, Albanese said.

Solomons opposition lawmaker and chair of the parliamentary foreign relations committee, Peter Kenilorea, told The Associated Press he had heard Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi would visit the capital, Honiara, on the weekend that Australians vote on Saturday, May 21.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry said it had no information to release about the trip, and Sogavares office did not immediately respond on Thursday to a request for comment on Wangs visit.

Some senior Australian government lawmakers have suggested Beijing had timed the announcement of the Solomons pact during an election campaign to undermine the ruling coalitions chances of retaining power in the poll.

Its obviously provocative, particularly during the course of an election campaign, that China has made that decision and I think we again need to be eyes wide open about what is happening in our region, Defense Minister Peter Dutton said Wednesday.

The center-left Labor Party opposition has described the China-Solomons pact as Australias worst foreign policy blunder in the Pacific since World War II.

Government lawmakers argue Beijing wants a change of government because Labor lawmakers would be less likely to stand up to Chinese coercion.

In a speech on Wednesday, Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce accused China of following the same strategic course as Japan had done when it began building an airfield on the Solomons during World War II.

The airfield would have enabled Japanese bombers to threaten shipping between the Unites States and Australia. The airfield was the target of the Battle of Guadalcanal, the first major U.S. land offensive against Japanese forces.

It is quite obvious through their desire to have military bases that they are starting a process of encircling Australia and that there is a wish, at the very least, to intimidate, or worse, to supplicate Australia, Joyce said.

Australia has a security pact with the Solomon Islands and sent a peacekeeping police force to Honiara in November after civil unrest.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia has reacted strictly towards the recent incidents of Indigo airline's behaviour with the specially-abled child and the SpiceJet Durgapur incident. In his recent statement, he made his zero-tolerance stand clear on any such incidents towards the airlines.

As he reiterated to IANS, "I have zero tolerance for such behaviour, and no human being should go through such a harrowing experience." Similarly, on the turbulent Durgapur flight recently, he said that the matter is being dealt with with utmost seriousness and deftness.

He was quick to add, "Please understand that while I am all for growth imperatives, there is a Laxman Rekha that airlines cannot cross. I have set up many advisory groups, and I personally hold these meetings, but we cannot have such instances. I am willing to meet and discuss all such issues in a transparent manner, and the rule of law is the same for one and all. Remember that I am a facilitator and am readily available as a problem solver."

Also read: Air India appoints new CEO and MD: All you need to know about Campbell Wilson

Scindia wants the country to become a global aviation hub and prefers that India flies out passengers directly on non-stop flights to different destinations. He wants Indian carriers to come forward with plans to fly directly to destinations in Europe and North America. At the same time, he would like India to become a launchpad for Southeast Asian and Anzac airlines so that they can use Delhi and Mumbai as layovers for flying out to Europe and North America.

He said, "We are rapidly building our infrastructure, increasing capacity both on the ground and in the air, so why shouldn't we push the envelope on this front. Airport leasing, upgradation, more aircraft... we are expanding on all fronts."

Further, Scindia said that the existing fare caps act as a protector for air travellers as well as airlines and indicated that doing away with the curbs could be looked at once the environment stabilises in terms of passenger traffic and jet fuel prices.

He added, "The underlying credo is growth, and those imperatives are available for everyone in this space, but equally there is a level playing field, and passenger growth and protection of his rights as a consumer are vital. Domestic air passenger traffic has almost recovered to pre-Covid levels and has crossed the 4 lakh mark on some days in recent times. However, jet fuel prices are elevated, and many states have reduced the taxes levied on the fuel."

As such, Scindia stated that fare capping, which is done on a rolling basis, protects passengers from being charged excessive fares.

With crude prices ramping up and ATF prices going into the stratosphere, fare capping is applicable on a rolling basis for a 15-day cycle, and the Civil Aviation Ministry monitors the situation.

Emphasising that the civil aviation space is on the path of finding its feet after being brutally impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, the Minister said it can be considered fine once passenger traffic is stable for a quarter, and also the ATF (aviation turbine fuel) price should come down so that the airlines are healthy.

"Fare cap is a protector on both sides, on the upper side and the lower side... as soon as that (stable) period comes into place... I have the least desire to interfere, and I need to create a nice feel so that you guys (industry) can play," Scindia averred.

Very aggressive on cargo traffic, Scindia said that the government will establish 33 new domestic cargo terminals by 2024-2025, which will allow India`s cargo sector to flourish and boom. Pushing reforms in the cargo sector, the Minister said that industry players need to focus on transportation of smaller cargo loads from Tier II and III cities to Metros to achieve the target of 10 million metric tonnes in cargo.

He said this can be achieved by the acquisition of smaller size aircraft. To facilitate this, he said 33 new domestic cargo terminals will be established by 2024-2025. He also stressed the need to work on ease of doing business in the cargo sector by making processes paperless, adapting automation and digitalisation, and making cargo processing rapid.

During the last two years, in the midst of the Covid pandemic, the cargo sector has emerged as a promising area not just for Indian aviation but for global aviation. The Indian cargo sector has witnessed a growth rate of 9 to 10 per cent since 2013-14. During the last two years, the airlines have witnessed a 520 per cent increase in cargo revenue.

With inputs from IANS
IndiGo, which is under fire over its refusal to allow a specially-abled child to board its flight in Ranchi, has clarified that the decision was taken in view of passenger safety as the kid was in a state of panic. However, this has done little to calm frayed tempers, with Union civil aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia warning that he is investigating the matter himself.

Incidents of misbehaviour by airline or security staff against flyers have always grabbed headlines in India. Only in March, Air India was accused of stopping a disabled passenger from boarding a Bengaluru-Kolkata flight. Kaushik Majumdar, who works at the Indian Statistical Institute in Bengaluru, was reportedly asked by the pilot to disconnect the batteries of his electric wheelchair, which he said was impossible.

Majumdar alleged this was the second occasion Air India staff misbehaved with him  the first time being in December 2017 when the airlines ground staff barred him from boarding a flight to Kolkata.

Also read: Delhi Airport: Woman faints after boarding denied, Air India says 'came late'

In October 2021, actor and dancer Sudha Chandran was reportedly asked by CISF personnel to remove her prosthetic limb during security check. Taking to social media, Chandran narrated her ordeal and also tagged Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The CISF issued an apology to her after the video went viral.

Entrepreneur Antara Telang in 2016 and media professional Suranjana Ghosh in 2013 faced similar experiences at Mumbai airport when CISF personnel asked them to remove their prosthetic limbs.

In 2019, a woman had alleged that her 13-year-old son, who suffers from autism and has Down Syndrome, was forced to lie on the floor after he fell sick and was denied a wheelchair by the Air India staff at Delhis Indira Gandhi International Airport. The woman took to social media and posted pictures of her son lying on the floor.

Again, in July 2016, a couple had alleged that their 14-year-old autistic daughter was denied priority boarding by SpiceJet at Mumbai airport.

In 2006, Tamil actor Prithvirajs autistic son was also prevented from boarding a flight at Bengaluru by CISF personnel who allegedly said he could harm other passengers. Video footage of the incident, filmed by Prithviraj, showed the security men telling him that his son Ahed could not board the flight to Chennai as he was mentally unstable.

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New Delhi: Ujjivan Small Finance Bank (SFB) on Thursday reported a 7 per cent decline in its net profit to Rs 126.5 crore for the last quarter of the fiscal ended in March 2022.

The bank had posted a net profit of Rs 136 crore in the same quarter of the preceding fiscal year 2020-21.

Total income during the quarter under review increased to Rs 920 crore as against Rs 735 crore in the year-ago period, Ujjivan SFB said in a regulatory filing.

Gross Non-Performing Assets (NPA) deteriorated to 7.34 per cent in the January-March quarter from 7.1 per cent in the corresponding period of the previous year. However, net NPA declined to 0.61 per cent from 2.9 per cent last year.

Capital adequacy ratio of the bank stood at 19 per cent with Tier-1 capital at 17.7 per cent, it said.

For the full year 2021-22, the bank posted a loss of Rs 415 crore from a profit of Rs 8 crore in FY 2021.
Chief of Army Staff, General Manoj Pande, is on a three-day visit to Ladakh to review force deployment along the borders with China.

He arrived at Leh on Thursday on his maiden visit to Ladakh region after assuming charge as Army chief.

General Pande was briefed on the security situation along the borders with special focus on Eastern Ladakh. The high-level of operational readiness being maintained by the forces while maintaining a high tempo of capability development was highlighted.

Later, General Pande, accompanied by Lieutenant General Upendra Dwivedi, General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Northern Command, and Lieutenant General A. Sengupta, General Officer Commanding, Fire and Fury Corps, called on R.K. Mathur, the Lieutenant Governer of the Union Territory of Ladakh.

This was followed by a detailed discussion on issues related to civil-military cooperation and the role of Indian Army in developmental activities in the UT of Ladakh.

During his visit to Ladakh, General Pande will also visit the forward areas in Eastern Ladakh and interact with the troops deployed along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in one of the most difficult and inhospitable terrains in the world.

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Mumbai: The Union Home Ministry on Thursday appointed senior IPS officer Atulchandra Kulkarni as the Additional Director General (ADG) of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) on deputation.

The order was issued by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs. The MHA has asked the Maharashtra government to relieve Kulkarni immediately, the order said.

The post of Inspector General of Police of the NIA has been upgraded temporarily to the rank of ADG, and Kulkarni has been appointed for a period of one year or until further orders, it added.

Kulkarni, a 1990-batch IPS officer of Maharashtra cadre, is currently posted as ADG Prisons in Pune.

Earlier he was chief of the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad, state Criminal Investigation Department (CID) as well as joint commissioner of police (crime) in Mumbai.

Before the posting in Mumbai, he was on deputation at the Centre.
NEW DELHI: The Lucknow bench of Allahabad High Court on Thursday rejected a petition seeking its directions to the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) for opening 22 closed doors of the world-famous monument Taj Mahal, which is located in the Agra district of Uttar Pradesh.

Lucknow bench of Allahabad High Court rejects petition seeking to open 22 closed doors in Taj Mahal. pic.twitter.com/rEe3U65xwy  ANI (@ANI) May 12, 2022

A petition has been filed in the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court seeking directives to the Archaeological Survey of India to open 20 rooms inside the Taj Mahal in Agra to find out whether Hindu idols and inscriptions are hidden there.

Amid all this, BJP Lok Sabha MP from Rajsamand and Jaipur Royal scion Diya Kumari had claimed on Wednesday that the land on which Taj Mahal was built was owned by the erstwhile Jaipur Royal family.

She also claimed to have documents to prove that the land was originally owned by the Jaipur Royal family, which was later captured by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan.

"When Shah Jahan took the land of the Jaipur Royal family, the latter could not oppose him because it was under his control at that time," Kumari said. "The Jaipur Raj Parivar Trust possesses the land records. If the court orders, then the Royal family will present the documents," the BJP MP told the media.

She added, "Even today if a government acquires any land, it gives compensation in return for it. Some kind of compensation was given at that time too, but there was no law to appeal against Shah Jahan or take any action against him. Now it is good that someone has raised their voice and filed a petition in the court."

Kumari said, "It is a good thing that someone has appealed to open the doors of the Taj Mahal so that the truth comes out. We are also examining the matter now."

Earlier during the Ayodhya temple dispute, the Jaipur Royal family had claimed that they were descendants of Lord Ram.
West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee writes to PM Modi, stating that Govt of India isn't releasing funds to West Bengal for MGNREGA and PM Awas Yojana. The CM requests PM's immediate intervention and direction to the concerned Ministry to release the funds "without any further delay."

West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee writes to PM Modi, stating that Govt of India isn't releasing funds to West Bengal for MGNREGA and PM Awas Yojana. The CM requests PM's immediate intervention and direction to the concerned Ministry to release the funds "without any further delay." pic.twitter.com/W0lQsel6kb  ANI (@ANI) May 12, 2022

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has written to the Prime Minister seeking wages due to the workers of Bengal. The letter was sent to prime minister Narendra Modi's residence in Delhi's South Block on Thursday. In it, Mamata asked Modi when the pending wages of the 100-day workers of Bengal will be paid. Why is the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana money not being given to Bengal?

Mamata said in the letter that for the last four months, the Centre has kept the dues of Bengal under the MGNREGA scheme. The Chief Minister said that the poor people living in the villages of the state are facing difficulties due to not giving that money to Bengal. Why don't the workers of Bengal get wages for 100 days of work from the mgnrega scheme funds?

Mamata told Modi that in the last four months, the Centre has kept around Rs 6,500 crore due to Bengal due from the fund. As a result of this, the poor people of the villages of Bengal are suffering. Mamata wrote in the letter that the livelihood of many poor people in the villages of Bengal depends on the money given by the Centre. These marginalized people are being deprived due to the arrears of money.

At the same time, Mamata said that the Centre has also kept the money of pradhan mantri awas yojana fund pending. In his letter to Modi, the chief minister wrote that Bengal is first in the country in the construction of houses in rural areas under the PM Awas Yojana. Since the financial year 2016-17, 32 lakh houses have been constructed in West Bengal under this project. However, the centre's money given to Bengal has been withheld. As a result, the rural development of Bengal is being hampered. The Chief Minister of Bengal has requested the Prime Minister to consider the matter seriously.
New Delhi: The Chhattisgarh Board of Secondary Education (CGBSE) will release CGBSE Chhattisgarh Class 10, 12 Results 2022 soon.

Once released, the students who sat for the CGBSE Chhattisgarh Class 10, 12 examination will be able to check their scores on the official site of CGBSE on cgbse.nic.in. Students will also be able to check scores on the other official website results.cg.nic.in.

Earlier, on May 10, State government Principal Secretary, Alok Shukla had said that CGBSE Chhattisgarh Class 10, 12 results for this year will be announced in 3-4 days.

CGBSE Chhattisgarh Class 10, 12 Results 2022: Steps to check result

Step 1. Visit the official site of CGBSE - cgbse.nic.in.

Step 2. Click on CGBSE Chhattisgarh Board 10th, 12th Results 2022 link available on the homepage.

Step 3. Enter the required login details and click on submit

Step 4. Your result will be displayed on the screen

Step 5. Check the result and download it for further need.

It may be noted that the Chhattisgarh Class 10 board examination was conducted from March 3 to March 23, 2022, while Class 12 board examination was conducted from March 2 to March 30, 2022. Additionally, students are advised to keep a check on the official site of CGBSE for more related details.
Mumbai: The Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) has witnessed several ups and downs since it came into existence, but the latest rumblings is being witnessed in the wake of Sharad Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) joining hands with rival BJP in Gondia Zilla Parishad elections to keep Congress away from power.

Irked over this development, Maharashtra Congress president Nana Patole accused ally NCP of being a "backstabber". Speaking to reporters in Mumbai on Wednesday, Patole said that the Congress high-command will be apprised about the "machinations" of NCP of the last two-and-a-half years in the forthcoming Udaipur conclave.

Maharashtra Congress chief said that friendship should be done with all honesty and that "an enemy attacking openly from the front is better", adding that the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), which includes Shiv Sena, NCP and Congress, was formed to keep the BJP out of power.

"Despite being in an alliance, the NCP encroached on Congress in Malegaon, Bhiwandi and several other places. Yesterday, the NCP joined hands with the BJP in the Gondia Zilla Parishad to elect the president. They have stabbed Congress in the back," Patole is quoted by PTI as saying.

Patole said that in the Bhandara Zilla Parishad, the Congress foiled BJP's attempt to hurt the Grand Old Party. Flaying the NCP, he said, the latter had earlier "encroached upon" the Congress in Malegaon and Bhiwandi despite being in an alliance, which proves that NCP considers Congress as its rival.

He further added, "MVA partners Jayant Patil (NCP), Subhash Desai (Shiv Sena) and myself had decided that efforts should be made to ensure that maximum Zilla Parishads stay with the MVA."

Notably, the NCP on Tuesday joined hands with rival BJP to elect the president of the Gondia Zilla Parishad, keeping the Congress away from power with the backing of Independents and a local outfit.

In Bhandara, five rebel members of the BJP-led by former MLA Charan Waghmare joined hands with Congress to elect the party candidate as the president of the ZP. A BJP member was elected as the vice president of the Zilla Parishad in Bhandara.

Responding to Patole's charge, Maharashtra NCP president and minister Jayant Patil said the NCP always wants the three Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) constituents to remain together.

Talking to reporters, he said, "the party will take note if something different has happened in Gondia as alleged by Nana Patole. But there is also a need to think about who gets along well or shares different opinions at the local level. We will take information on that."

"There may be some problem in (local leaders of NCP and Congress) coming together at the local level due to differences in opinions. We will go into details of this," the NCP leader was quoted as saying.

Jayant Patil further said that the NCP never intended to disturb the MVA.
New Delhi: The three-day `Chintan Shivir` of the Congress in Rajasthan`s Udaipur from May 13 is meant to brainstorm on a roadmap for the revival of the party`s fortunes and is likely to witness a clamour for the return of Rahul Gandhi to head the organisation as some sections are likely to raise the demand, according to sources.

The demand was formally raised recently at a CWC meeting but it was said that organizational polls have already been announced, said IANS report citing sources. The most vocal voices in the party for Rahul Gandhi`s return are said to be its two Chief Ministers Ashok Gehlot (Rajasthan) and Bhupesh Baghel (Chhattisgarh), apart from Randeep Surjewala, KC Venugopal and other Rahul loyalists.

In the Chintan Shivir, Rahul Gandhi will speak as a second last speaker just ahead of party chief Sonia Gandhi, and the party hopes to get a new path of revival from there to reverse its electoral losses. The conclave will focus on time-bound party restructuring for strengthening the organisation and making it battle-ready for the 2024 Lok Sabha election.

Rahul Gandhi had quit the post after the party`s second successive massive defeat in the 2019 elections and in his resignation, sought that someone from outside the Gandhi family should be appointed as party chief but the CWC appointed Sonia Gandhi as interim President. Soon a section of leaders, the G-23, wrote a letter for sweeping reforms in the party and election from the block to the CWC level.

When Sonia Gandhi called some of the members of the dissident group for discussions, they said that there was no question on the leadership but fixing responsibility on those responsible for party`s defeat in the recent spell of Assembly elections.

The heads of various departments of Congress, office bearers, former Union ministers and MPs would all participate in the Chintan Shivir. A total of 422 members will be present in the Shivir, of which 30-35 per cent will be youth and 21 per cent women.

Conclave to focus on time-bound Congress revamp

Top Congress leaders are expected to come out with solutions and clear the party's stance on key issues including polarisation, Centre-state ties, forming of alliances and attempts at bringing in ''uniformity", especially in the Northeast, that are confronting the country and the party, Congress sources told PTI.

The 3-day Chintan Shivir at Udaipur, from May 13 to 15, is being organised after a gap of almost nine years. The party is facing "an unprecedented crisis" as it remains in power on its own in just two states and has less than 100 members in both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha.

Unlike in the past, when Chintan Shivirs did not set any set timelines, the Udaipur declaration will state time-bound initiation and accomplishing of structural changes in the organisation at all levels, said the report.

The last such conclave was held in Jaipur in 2013 when the Congress-led UPA was in power. It focussed on the elevation of Rahul Gandhi as vice president of the party. The earlier 'shivirs' were held in Pachmarhi in 1998 and Shimla in 2003.

The Udaipur Shivir will culminate in a Nav Sankalp Resolution which will be the outcome of three days of in-depth deliberations on the political, social, economic, organisational and agricultural issues and the party's response to these challenges.

The Congress will focus on issues of polarisation, centre-state relations, the situation in Jammu and Kashmir, economic downturn, disinvestment of PSUs, MSP, social inequities and problems facing the youth.

The conclave will begin with introductory remarks of Congress President Sonia Gandhi on May 13 and a valedictory address by Rahul Gandhi on May 15. The Shivir will begin at 2 PM following which over 400 delegates will discuss subject-specific issues across six groups.

Chintan Shivir will discuss ways to re-energise Congress: Pilot

The Congress will deliberate on ways to re-energise the party and challenge the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance in the `Nav Sankalp Chintan Shivir` being held in Udaipur, party leader Sachin Pilot said on Wednesday.

Sachin Pilot said the three-day brainstorming conclave will be result-oriented, adding "We will hold discussions on party organization, how to challenge NDA in coalition politics and to re-energize Congress during the `Nav Chintan Shivir`. This conference will be result and outcome-oriented."

Talking to media persons in Jaipur, he said, "The Nav Sankalp Chintan Shivir in Udaipur will prove to be very important in deciding the future strategy."

"There will be polls this year and Lok Sabha polls will be held in 2024. If there`s any party that can defeat NDA and BJP at the national level, it is Congress," Sachin Pilot added.

(With Inputs from Agencies)
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP)  In an early victory for a Donald Trump-endorsed candidate at the start of midterm season, Rep. Alex Mooney on Tuesday beat fellow incumbent Rep. David McKinley in West Virginias 2nd Congressional District Republican primary.

Donald Trump loves West Virginia, and West Virginia loves Donald Trump, Mooney said in his victory speech.

McKinley was sharply criticized by the former president when he broke with his party as one of 13 Republicans to vote with the Democrats to support President Joe Bidens $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. Trump called McKinley a RINO, or Republican in Name Only and endorsed Mooney the day Biden signed the infrastructure law.

The two incumbents, who have taken dramatically different approaches to their time in office, were pitted against each other in the states 2nd Congressional District after population losses cost West Virginia a U.S. House seat.

McKinley, who has represented the state in the House since 2011, said in a statement Tuesday night that serving the people of West Virginia had been the honor of his life  and made a subtle reference to the infrastructure vote.

Im proud that I have always stood up for whats right for West Virginia  even when it hurt me politically, he said. "The groundwork we have laid over the last twelve years has paved the way for a more prosperous and diverse West Virginia economy.

Mooney, who has served in West Virginia's House delegation since 2015, gave his victory speech surrounded by supporters at a hotel watch party in Charles Town in West Virginia's eastern panhandle, where he lives. McKinley was watching the results come in at home with his family.

West Virginias election was the first of five primaries in which two incumbent U.S. House members will compete against each other. It will be followed by similar contests in Georgia and Michigan and in two Illinois districts.

The race was one of the most-watched of the day. In Nebraska, another Trump-backed candidate, Charles Herbster, was in a crowded field of GOP contenders for governor. The contests came on the heels of a victory by Trump-endorsed conservative JD Vance, author of the bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, who defeated six other candidates to win the Ohio Republican primary for U.S. Senate last week.

Earlier Tuesday night, Trump-endorsed incumbent U.S. Rep. Carol Miller breezed to the Republican nomination in West Virginias 1st District, defeating four little-known candidates and setting herself on a clear path to reelection.

Miller will vie for her third term in the House in the fall against Democrat Lacy Watson, who was unopposed in the Democratic primary. Watson, of Bluefield, lost in the 2020 Democratic primary in the former 3rd District.

In Nebraska's 2nd Congressional District, in the Omaha area, three-term Republican Rep. Don Bacon won the primary over long-shot candidate Steve Kuehl, an Omaha consultant who got a shoutout from Trump when the former president visited earlier this month.

Trump blasted Bacon as a bad guy during a recent rally in the state and had criticized him previously for his support of a federal infrastructure bill that most GOP lawmakers opposed. Bacon also has been mildly critical of Trump in the past, saying the former president bore some responsibility for the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Trump stopped far short of officially endorsing Kuehl, however, saying: I think Steve will do well. Good luck, Steve, whoever the hell you are.

Sen. Mike Flood, a former speaker of the Nebraska Legislature, won in the state's 1st Congressional District over five other Republican candidates. Flood wants to fill the seat abandoned by Jeff Fortenberry, a Republican who resigned from office and ended his reelection bid after he was convicted of lying to federal authorities about an illegal campaign contribution. Fortenberrys name still appeared on the ballot for the 1st Congressional District because he withdrew after a deadline to certify the ballot.

In the rural, geographically vast 3rd Congressional District, Republican U.S. Rep. Adrian Smith easily won his partys nomination. Two Democrats were vying for their partys nomination within the district, which is overwhelmingly Republican.

In West Virginias 2nd Congressional District, McKinley's decision to support the infrastructure bill was on voters minds.

Susan Smith, a small-business owner in Valley Grove, voted for Mooney at a local elementary school Tuesday morning. She lives in McKinleys former district and said she always voted for him in the past. But not in this election.

When Mr. McKinley started voting with the Democrats and the current administration, thats when things changed, said Smith, who cited McKinleys vote for Bidens infrastructure bill and the Jan. 6 commission. Im sorry to be losing a congressman, but we cannot have a Republican congressman voting with the Democrats. West Virginia did not need the money from this un-infrastructure bill.

In the general election, Mooney will face openly gay former Morgantown city councilor Barry Wendell, who bested security operations manager Angela Dwyer during Tuesday's Democratic primary.

Mooney enters the general election as a heavy favorite to win. West Virginia hasnt elected a Democrat to the House since 2012.

Associated Press writer Grant Schulte in Omaha, Nebraska, contributed to this report.

Follow AP for full coverage of the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ap_politics.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
NEW DELHI: Projecting himself as an aam aadmi, former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi on Thursday interacted with porters ahead of boarding the train for the partys upcoming Chintan Shivir in Udaipur from May 13-15.

Upon his arrival at the New Delhi Railway Station, the Gandhi scion was welcomed by the porters association. According to sources, Rahul boarded the train at Sarai Rohilla railway station in Delhi and was accompanied by Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel, Delhi Congress chief Anil Chaudhary, Lok Sabha member Manickam Tagore and other leaders.

The porters association members presented a bouquet to Rahul and urged him to end their contractual work arrangement.

#WATCH | Delhi: Railway porters interact with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on board a train to Udaipur, Rajasthan. Congress leaders are heading to Udaipur for the party's Chintan Shivir that begins tomorrow. (Source: AICC) pic.twitter.com/dxAufjQID1  ANI (@ANI) May 12, 2022

Rahul accepted the bouquet and assured the porters to look into their issue. Sources said the party has booked a bogey that will take the Congress leaders to Udaipur, where the Shivir officially opens on Friday.

Ahead of its brainstorming conclave here, the Congress asserted on Thursday that it was the principal opposition party but was conscious of its "shortcomings" and was ready to ''transform'' itself by working on its ideology and organisation.

The party said it would introspect in the next three days to embark on a new direction by confronting various challenges paving the way for the country's bright future.

The three-day 'Nav Sankalp Chintan Shivir' is being held in the backdrop of a string of electoral defeats and dissent in the party which has seen a sharp decline in the last seven years. The Shivir will focus on time-bound party restructuring, finding ways to combat politics of polarisation and getting battle-ready for upcoming electoral challenges.

Underlining the importance of the conclave, Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot said that the Congress is the principal opposition party in the country and people had expectations from it. This Shivir is for the country and through it, the party will send a new message to people all over, he said.

Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said the session is being held at a time when the country is facing the challenge of polarisation. Politics of hatred and division is being played out in the country by the BJP and there is a need to find answers on how to tackle them, he said.

"There is a need to bring about organisational changes. At a time when the country is facing multiple challenges, it is natural that Congress will discharge its responsibilities towards the people and articulate their concerns. That is why we are holding the Nav Sankalp Shivir," he told reporters.

"We know that the country has expectations from the Congress. We know we have limitations, we know we have shortcomings and we know that we need to improve our ideology and organisation further and adapt to the changing circumstances and transform ourselves. With this thought in mind, we have organised this Chintan Shivir," said Surjewala.

"The outcome of this conclave from the brave land of Udaipur, we feel that it will not just give direction to the Congress to tackle the present challenges but will also pave the way for India's golden future," he said.

Sending out a clear message to critics within the organisation, Congress president Sonia Gandhi at a CWC meeting earlier this week cautioned ahead of the session that self-criticism is needed in party forums but it should not be done to erode self-confidence and morale, as she asserted that it is time "to repay our debt to the party".

Gandhi had also warned that the 'Chintan Shivir' should not become a ritual while asserting that she was determined that it should herald a restructured organisation to meet the many ideological, electoral and managerial tasks it confronts.

The issue of leadership in Congress is not likely to be discussed at the Udaipur conclave, party sources said, though several leaders are likely to rake up the demand for Rahul Gandhi to take over the party leadership.

(With PTI Inputs)
New Delhi: The anti-encroachment drive in Delhis Madanpur Khadar area by South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC) on Thursday (May 12) led to protests with some people pelting stones at security personnel, police said.

Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MLA Amanatullah Khan, who was among those agitating against the drive, has been arrested and sent to judicial custody, as per ANI. Earlier today, he was detained by Police at Madanpur Khadar.

The AAP leader had claimed earlier he has been arrested, which was then denied by the Delhi police. "Delhi Police has arrested me. Can imprison me, not my spirits," Khan said in a tweet in Hindi.

            ,      Amanatullah Khan AAP (@KhanAmanatullah) May 12, 2022

Denying the AAP MLAs allegation, a senior police officer had said, "We have detained AAP MLA Amanatullah Khan and others who protested against the drive along with supporters and locals. We have made adequate security arrangements to ensure no untoward incident takes place."

#WATCH AAP MLA Amanatullah Khan detained by Delhi police at Madanpur Khadar, where SDMC is conducting an anti-encroachment drive#Delhi pic.twitter.com/ZyKNeNPOg8  ANI (@ANI) May 12, 2022

During the protest, the security personnel was seen wearing helmets and armed with batons to disperse the crowd. As the SDMC removed illegal and temporary structures in Madanpur Khadar and Dhirsen Marg, the North Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) carried out the demolition drive in Rohini and Karol Bagh.

Amanatullah Khan along with AAP supporters earlier reached Kanchan Kunj in Madanpur Khadar and protested against the demolition drive with some raising anti-BJP slogans.

In the past few days, civic authorities in Delhi have been carrying out anti-encroachment drives in various parts of the national capital, claiming they are removing illegal structures. A recent such drive in Shaheen Bagh by SDMC had met massive resistance by the opposition leaders as well as locals.

On May 9, AAP and Congress workers had staged protests in Shaheen Bagh to obstruct the civic body's ongoing anti-encroachment drive. Following this the SDMC filed a complaint against AAP MLA Amanatullah Khan and his supporters. "After bulldozer action in Shaheen Bagh, Delhi Police has registered FIR under sections 186,353,34 of IPC on a complaint given by SDMC against AAP MLA Amanatullah Khan and his supporter for obstructing government work. An investigation has been started, DCP South East Esha Pandey had said.

(With agency inputs)
Singing of the national anthem has been made compulsory at all madarsas in Uttar Pradesh from Thursday. The Registrar of the Uttar Pradesh Madrassa Education Board, SN Pandey, issued an order to this effect to all the District Minority Welfare Officers on May 9.

In today's DNA, Zee News Editor-in-Chief Sudhir Chaudhary analysed Yogi governments decision to make the national anthem mandatory in all madarsas in the state.

You must have often heard that the national anthem is not sung in any madarsa of the country. But in Uttar Pradesh, the Yogi government has made the national anthem mandatory in all 16 and a half thousand madarsas of the state. This is a very revolutionary change.

You must have seen that in every school of the country, whether it is a Christian missionary school, a Hindu school, a Sikh school or a Buddhist school, the national anthem is sung in all schools. But not in madrasas.

In the order issued by the Madarsa Education Council of Uttar Pradesh, it is written that this decision will be applicable to all the recognized madarsas of the state, whether they get funding from the government or not.

There are three types of madrasas in India. Firstly, those which are recognized by the government and get funding from the central and state governments. Secondly, those which are recognized by the government but they get funding from Islamic institutions and people of the Muslim community. And thirdly, those madrasas which are neither recognized by the government nor do they get funding from the government.

Live TV
GUJCET 2022 Result: Gujarat Secondary and Higher Secondary Education Board is all set to release Gujarat Common Entrance Test (GUJCET) 2022 Result on Thursday (May 12, 2022).

The results are expected to be declared by the Gujarat Board at 10 AM on gseb.org.

According to the announcement made by state education minister Jitu Vaghani on Wednesday, GUJCET Results 2022 are expected to be declared by the GSEB at 10 am today.

 Jitu Vaghani (@jitu_vaghani) May 11, 2022

Once declared, GUJCET 2022 Result will be made available on the official website of Gujarat Board - gsebservice.com and gujcet.gseb.org.

GUJCET 2022 Result  Steps to check scorecard

Step 1. Visit the official GSEB website  gseb.org

Step 2. Click on the click which says GUJCET 2022 Result on the homepage

Step 3. Enter your credentials such as registration number and date of birth in the given fields

Step 4.Click on submit

Step 5. Your GUJCET 2022 Result will be displayed on the screen

Step 6. Download GUJCET result and take a printout for future reference

The GUJCET 2022 final answer key was released on Wednesday, May 11, 2022 on the official website.

Additionally, along with the GUJCET 2022 Results, GSEB is also going to announce GSEB HSC 12th Science stream results for students.

Students are advised to keep a check on the official website gseb.org for latest updates.
Varanasi (UP): A district court will deliver its verdict shortly in the case related to the video survey of the Gyanvapi mosque, which is situated adjacent to the Kashi Vishwanath temple. The court will also decide on a plea by the Gyanvapi mosque management committee (Anjuman Intezamiya Masjid) seeking the removal of Ajay Kumar Mishra as the court commissioner for the survey, lawyers said.

Here are the key updates from the case:

- The controversy erupted when a survey suggested that several deities, including Shringar Gauri, were located in Varanasi's Kashi Vishwanath temple premises and the Gyanvapi Masjid complex. Soon after the report, several religious groups started protesting against the mosque.

- The videography and survey of the mosque was ordered by Civil Judge (Senior Division) Ravi Kumar Diwakar on a plea by Delhi women Rakhi Singh, Laxmi Devi, Sita Sahu and others seeking permission to perform daily worship of deities Shringar Gauri, Lord Ganesha, Lord Hanuman and Nandi whose idols are located on the outer wall of the Gyanvapi mosque.

- The women had moved the court with their plea on April 18, 2021, and also sought a court's order to stop the opponents from causing any damage to the idols.

- The counsel for the mosque management committee had earlier contended that the court had not given any order to do the videography inside the mosque but to do it only till the 'chabutra' (courtyard) outside the barricades enclosing the mosque area.

- The court commissioner had on last Friday conducted an inconclusive survey of some areas outside Gyanvapi Masjid in the Gyanvapi-Shringar Gauri complex amid brief sloganeering by the two sides. The Muslim side had accused the court-appointed advocate commissioner of acting in a biased manner, alleging that he had tried to get videography done inside the Gyanvapi mosque without orders and moved the court to replace him.

- The court of Diwakar, who had earlier heard the arguments of the Hindu and Muslim sides, further heard the matter relating to the opening of the two basements located inside the barricading in the Gyanvapi complex for videography and the replacement of the advocate commissioner. Advocate commissioner Mishra also presented his side, lawyer Shivam Gaur representing the Hindu side told reporters.

- After hearing arguments of both sides, the court reserved its decision for Thursday, government counsel Mahendra Prasad Pandey said. Meanwhile, joint secretary of Anjuman Intezamiya Masjid Syed Mohammad Yasin told PTI that there is barricading all around Gyanvapi Masjid and the Hindu side is talking about videography of the two basements located beneath the mosque by opening them. Gaur claimed that in the order for videography-survey issued by the court on April 26, the matter of videography by going inside the barricading is also included.

(With PTI inputs)
New Delhi: The Rajasthan Police on Thursday conducted a flag march in Hanumangarh following a clash between two groups the other day, reported ANI. The move comes after communal tension erupted in Rajasthan`s Hanumangarh district after Block President of Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) Satveer Saharan and several got injured in a clash over the removal of people of a particular community sitting in front of the temple.

Saharan was referred to the district hospital for treatment. An angry crowd gathered on the spot and blocked the Nohar-Rawtsar road.

Photos released by news agency ANI show a police squad conducting the march with proper security preparations.

Rajasthan | Police conduct flag march in Hanumangarh following a clash between two groups yesterday One person named Satveer was injured in the incident, say police. pic.twitter.com/YNzAn2RBzh  ANI MP/CG/Rajasthan (@ANI_MP_CG_RJ) May 12, 2022

Heavy police forces have been deployed in the area with police and district administration officials maintaining a strict vigil on the people.

Meanwhile, internet services have been restored in Bhilwara as the situation remains peaceful.

Rajasthan remains on the boil as violent incidents, one after another, continue to hit the state.

Earlier, a 22-year-old youth was murdered allegedly by members of another community in Bhilwara. There was outrage among the people after the crime, which took place on Tuesday evening. The BJP, VHP and Hindu Jagran Manch members called for a bandh in the district following the incident.

(With agency inputs)
New Delhi: In a relief to many, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has forecast an early onset of monsoon this year. As per the weather department, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands is likely to receive the first seasonal showers on May 15, almost four days earlier than its usual expected date.

Fairly widespread to widespread light/moderate rainfall is expected over the Andaman and Nicobar Islands during the coming five days, the IMD said.

"Fairly widespread to widespread light/moderate rainfall is very likely over Andaman and Nicobar Islands during the next five days. Isolated heavy rainfall is very likely over the region between May 14-16 even as squally weather with wind speed reaching 40-50 kmph, gusting to 60 kmph, is also likely over south Andaman Sea on May 15 & 16," the IMD said in a statement, as per IANS.

The MeT department has also predicted an early monsoon for Kerala. The southern state is likely to welcome the Southwest Monsoon four days early on May 26, the IMDs extended range forecast said.

According to IANS, the official announcement regarding the monsoon arrival in Kerala would be made around May 15 when the IMD issues its second stage South-West Monsoon forecast. The normal onset of monsoon over Kerala is June 1.

Kerala has been lashed by heavy rainfall for the last two days due to the impact of Cyclone Asani and its remnant system on the east coast.

The early onset of monsoon will bring immense relief as many parts of the country have been witnessing heatwave and searing temperatures over the past fortnight.

ALSO READ: Heatwave onslaught: India's hottest and coolest places last week- In Pics

(With agency inputs)
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(Brand Desk Content)
New Delhi: The Centre on Thursday (May 12) announced to relax the existing guidelines on Covid-19 booster doses for overseas travellers. These foreign-bound travellers will now be able to take a precaution dose before the stipulated nine-month waiting period as required by the guidelines of the destination country, PTI reported.

Union Health Mansukh Mandaviya said in a tweet, Indian citizens and students travelling overseas can now take the precaution dose as required by the guidelines of the destination country. This new facility will be available soon on the CoWIN portal.

Indian citizens & students travelling overseas can now take the precaution dose as required by the guidelines of the destination country. This new facility will be available soon on the CoWIN portal.  Dr Mansukh Mandaviya (@mansukhmandviya) May 12, 2022

The health ministrys decision to ease rules on the precaution dose for overseas travellers comes after the National Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (NTAGI)s recommendations.

According to PTI, last week, the advisory panel suggested that those travelling overseas can take the precautionary jab of the Covid-19 vaccine as per the norms of their destination country before the mandatory nine-month gap. "The issue was discussed in a meeting of NTAGI held last week after which it recommended that those who need to travel overseas can take the booster shot, before the stipulated nine-month waiting period, as per the booster guidelines of the country they are travelling to," a source had told the news agency.

Notably, India has allowed all those above 18 years to take a precaution jab, providing they have completed nine months after the second dose. This third vaccine shot has been made available to the acdult population groups at private vaccination centres.

India had commenced administering precaution doses of Covid-19 vaccines to the healthcare and frontline workers and those aged 60 and above with comorbidities from January 10 this year. Later, the Center had extended the booster dose for all those above 60 and eventually for 18 plus population at private vaccination centres.

Meanwhile, over 190.83 crore vaccine doses have been administered in the country so far since the commencement of the nationwide vaccination drive.

(With agency inputs)
New Delhi: India on Thursday successfully test-fired an extended-range version of the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile from a Sukhoi fighter jet in the Bay of Bengal, in a boost to the country's strategic strike capability.

It was the first launch of the extended range version of the BrahMos missile from a Su-30MKI aircraft, the defence ministry said. The range of the advanced version of the missile is learnt to have been extended to around 350 km from the original 290 km.

"The launch from the aircraft was as planned and the missile achieved a direct hit on the designated target in the Bay of Bengal region," the ministry said in a statement.

It said the extended-range capability of the missile coupled with the high performance of the Su-30MKI aircraft gives the Indian Air Force a strategic reach and allows it to dominate future battlefields.

"With this (test-firing), the IAF has achieved the capability to carry out precision strikes from Su-30MKI aircraft against a land/ sea target over very long ranges," the ministry said.

Besides the IAF, the Navy, the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) and the BrahMos Aerospace Private Limited (BAPL) were involved in the test firing.

"The dedicated and synergetic efforts of the IAF, Indian Navy, DRDO, BAPL and HAL have proven the capability of the nation to achieve this feat," the ministry said.

BrahMos Aerospace Pvt Ltd, an India-Russian joint venture, produces supersonic cruise missiles that can be launched from submarines, ships, aircraft, or land platforms.

BrahMos missile flies at a speed of 2.8 Mach or almost three times the speed of sound. In April too, the Indian Air Force successfully test-fired a BrahMos supersonic cruise missile from a Sukhoi fighter jet on the eastern seaboard.
If the evidence wasnt already persuasive, a new report makes it abundantly clear: SUNY Erie Community College in on a ruinous path. Changes are inevitable, including at the South Campus. Fortunately for the Orchard Park location  and the rest of the system  it has creative new leadership to manage the transformation and fashion a sturdier and sustainable model.

The latest evidence of ECCs poor condition comes in a draft report by education consultant RPK Group. Its conclusions echo and underscore many observations that county residents have already heard. Among them, it says, the college needs to:

 Operate as a single institution, not three separate colleges  in Amherst, Buffalo and Orchard Park  each with its own administrations and staffs. Its a startlingly wasteful and inefficient structure.

 Cut poorly attended programs, defined as those with fewer than 30 students enrolled on a three-year average, with declining or single-digit growth and with degree production below 10 per year. Some classes have only a handful students, not surprising, given that the colleges enrollment has cratered over the past 11 years, plunging to 7,737 students today from 14,000 in 2011. And with the student population in free fall, so are revenues.

The college already announced a plan to close those programs, while first allowing current students to complete their studies.

 Move all program homes to either the City Campus or North Campus while reducing or reallocating South Campus staff. At the same time, the report says, the college should establish partnerships with industry and community resources to continue a presence in the Southtowns. That work is already underway.

With funding from area foundations, ECC hired RPK Group last year to study its operations. The firm specializes in sustainable business practices for higher education. It found that of more than 50 colleges it has studied, SUNY ECC has the greatest number of redundancies in faculty and administration. Thats a recipe for failure.

All community colleges are under pressure but, even then, the threat to ECC is high. While community colleges generally saw a recent year-to-year enrollment drop of 9.5%, enrollment at ECC declined by 29% over a recent four-year period. Were it not for federal pandemic relief funds and county aid, the college would have been precariously close to falling off a fiscal cliff last summer, said then-interim President William Reuter.

Fortunately, ECCs new president, David Balkin, is already implementing creative solutions to the colleges problems. Having turned around another struggling institution, the underperforming South Bend-Elkhart Campus of Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana, Balkin is well-equipped to address ECCs weaknesses.

For example, Balkin wants to do more to pair the colleges programs with the communitys employment needs. Already, the college has conferred associate degrees in automotive technology as part of a partnership with two of the regions biggest car dealers, West Herr Automotive Group and Northtown Automotive Cos., which need trained professionals.

Balkin also plans to work closely with high schools to create a pipeline of students seeking certificate programs and two-year degrees; and pursue collaborations with local four-year colleges to identify and help students who have stopped out.

In a lower-tech response to ECCs troubles, the county has offered retirement incentives, hoping to reduce costs enough that layoffs will be unnecessary. But they loom as a possibility.

If this report does anything, it should foreclose on any lingering thoughts that ECC isnt in the midst of a crisis. It is. Fixing it will hurt, but ignoring it will hurt more.

  

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New Delhi: India will be hosting the meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization or SCO's anti-terror body--Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS) next week here from 16 to 19th of May. The summit will see the participation of all members of the grouping, including Pakistan. The SCO's RATS, based out of Uzbek capital Tashkent, is a permanent body of the grouping and aims to counter terrorism, extremism and separatism in the region.

A three-member Pakistani delegation will take part in the meeting. While SCO as a grouping came into existence in 2001, India and Pakistan became its members in 2017. Important to note that the Pakistani delegation, which will participate in a multilateral event, is among the first govt delegation visiting India since the new government took charge in Islamabad after the unceremonious departure of Imran Khan govt.

India had also participated, along with Pakistan in various SCO initiatives, including anti-terror drill in Russia's Chebarkul in 2018.

The meeting comes even as India is the current chairman of the executive council of SCO Rats. Earlier this year, Director of SCO RATS Mirzaev Ruslan Erkinovich visited India and held talks with Indian leadership including NSA Ajit Doval, minister of state in the ministry of external affairs Meenakshi Lekhi, BSF Chief.

India will be holding the SCO RATS council meeting on October 14th this year in Delhi. New Delhi has also proposed to hold a joint SCO anti-terrorist exercise (JATE) in Manesar this year, something that has been supported by all member countries.

The last such anti-terror exercises took place in Pakistan's Pabbi. On March 25th this year, the 37th meeting of the council of the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO RATS) took place in Tashkent under the chairmanship of India.

The SCO grouping is one of the largest groupings, covering around 40% of the global population and 30% of global GDP. The grouping is dominated by Russia and China and includes four central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

This year, Uzbekistan is the chair of the grouping and will hold the summit in September. It hands over the chairmanship to India, which will hold the summit next year. If an in-person summit happens next year, then the leaders of China and Pakistan could visit India.
New Delhi: The Karnataka Secondary School Leaving Certificate (SSLC) Class 10 result 2022 is likely to be announced this month. The Karnataka SSLC result 2022 will be released on the official website- sslc.karnataka.gov.in and karresults.nic.in.

Karnataka SSLC result 2022 is likely to be announced in May, said Karnataka Secondary Education Examination Board (KSEEB) official.

"The SSLC, 10th exam result 2022 is likely to be announced by May-end. The 10th exam result will be available on the official website- sslc.karnataka.gov.in," the official told Careers360.

The students need to note that KSEEB earlier released the SSLC answer key on April 12.

Karnataka SSLC 10th Result 2022: Steps to check

Step 1. Go to the official website KSEEB - sslc.karnataka.gov.in

Step 2. Click on the SSLC 10th exam result 2022 link on the homepage

Step 3. Enter the login credentials- registration number/ roll number

Step 4. Ypur SSLC 10th result 2022 will appear on the screen

Step 5. Download 10th result 2022 and take a print out for further reference

It may be noted that around 8.73 lakh students appeared for the SSLC, Class 10 exam which was concluded on April 11.

In order to access Karnataka SSLC score card 2022, students will be required to enter their registration number.

The KSEEB Karnataka Board Class 10 supplementary exams 2022 will be conducted in the last week of June.
Srinagar: A government employee, belonging to the Kashmir Pandit community, was shot dead at his office in Chadoora area of Budgam district in central Kashmir on Thursday (May 12).

The employee, Rahul Bhatt, worked with the revenue department at the Tehsildar office in the Chadoora area.

Official sources told Zee News that Bhatt was fired upon by terrorists on the office premises when he was performing his duties.

J&K | An employee of Chadoora Tehsil office, Rahul Bhat who was shot at by terrorists at Tehsil office in Budgam district succumbs at SMHS hospital. (Visuals deferred by unspecified time) pic.twitter.com/01apRspzC1  ANI (@ANI) May 12, 2022

The government employee, who sustained grievous injuries, was rushed to Srinagar hospital for treatment, where he succumbed to his injuries.

Kashmir zone police said in a tweet, The #injured was immediately brought to SMHS Hospital, Srinagar for treatment where he #succumbed to his injuries. Preliminary investigation reveals that 02 #terrorists are #involved in this #heinous crime & have used pistol for committing this crime.

The #injured was immediately brought to SMHS Hospital, Srinagar for treatment where he #succumbed to his injuries. Preliminary investigation reveals that 02 #terrorists are #involved in this #heinous crime & have used pistol for committing this crime.@JmuKmrPolice https://t.co/4gnHF9r9cv  Kashmir Zone Police (@KashmirPolice) May 12, 2022

Meanwhile, security forces have launched a search operation in the area to nab the attackers.
West Bengal government is heading for bifurcation of several existing districts in the state, hinted Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee here on Thursday. The state at present has 23 districts.

"Look at our neighbouring state of Bihar, which has 38 districts. In West Bengal, we have so many big districts which need bifurcation to expedite administrative efficiency. So, in future, the current number of 23 districts might be increased to 46," the chief minister said. She was addressing the annual general meeting of the West Bengal Civil Service (Executive) Officers` Association at the newly inaugurated Kolkata`s iconic town hall here.

According to her, the bifurcation and increase in the number of districts is extremely necessary to improve the promotion avenues of the West Bengal Civil Service (WBCS) officers, which in her words are the "state`s own officers".

"The WBCS officers are the state`s own officers. So, it is the duty of the state government to give priority to them. If more districts are created, we can give important postings to WBCS officers and their avenues for promotion to the ranks of additional district magistrates, district magistrates, deputy secretaries and additional secretaries should increase, the chief minister said.

Speaking on the occasion, the chief minister also targeted the Union government for not allocating enough Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers to the state. "In 2011, when we came to power, the total number of IAS officers in the state was just 314. The situation has improved now with the number rising to 378. Still there is a huge shortfall which is often a hurdle for running the administration more smoothly," the chief minister said.

She once again attacked the Centre for releasing the dues of the state government on account of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). "Because of these dues, often payments of wages under MGNREGA are getting stuck or delayed. As it is, the people are suffering due to massive increase in the prices of essential commodities. Lives of people become further miserable if they do not get payment for the work done," the chief minister said.

Live TV
New Delhi: 'Modi @20: Dreams Meet Delivery', a book written on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was launched at a grand event organized at Vigyan Bhawan in Delhi on Wednesday (May 11, 2022).

Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu on Wednesday (May 11, 2022), while releasing the book 'Modi @20: Dreams Meeting Delivery', said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a leader who demonstrated to the world that dreams can indeed be realized.

VP Naidu complimented the authors of the book for their "incisive analysis and cogent presentation".

"The authors have masterfully traced the contours of an iconic leader's fascinating journey of 20 years," VP Naidu said.

VP Naidu calls PM Modi a phenomenon

The Vice President at the launch event called PM Modi a phenomenon at the national level.

"The book is a rare compilation that gives the readers a ringside view of the evolution of one of the most popular and iconic leaders of modern India," Vice President Naidu said.

"The Prime Minister is a phenomenon at the national level. The book presents different facets of the distinct thought process, the pioneering, pro-active approach and the quintessential, transformational leadership style that Narendra Modi has come to be so closely identified with," added the Vice President.

The Vice President also added PM Modi is the first Prime Minister born after independence, has over the last 20 years carved out a unique place in the history of post-independent India while being the Chief Minister of Gujarat for about 13 years and over the last eight years as the Prime Minister.

"The journey, the words and deeds and the dreams of Modi ji and their realization in scale needs to be presented and understood. This publication certainly helps in decoding Modi and helps understand how he has the courage to dream big for the people of his country and the grit to translate these dreams into tangible reality positively impacting the lives of crores of Indians," Vice President Naidu said.

Book on PM Modi to become Gita for people in politics, says Amit Shah

Union Home Minister Amit Shah, during the launch of the book, Modi@20: Dreams Meeting Delivery, said to understand Prime Minister Narendra Modis 20 years of political leadership, it is crucial to study three decades of his early struggle.

This book will rise up to become equivalent to Gita for those who believe in the path of building a complete persona and those who are in the field of social work and politics, Amit Shah said.

Mukhtar Naqvi calls PM Modi an institution of good governance

Senior BJP leader and Union minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi also lauded PM Narendra Modi as an "institution" of good governance and as someone on a "mission of inclusive development".

After the release of the book "Modi@20: Dreams Meet Delivery", Naqvi said Modi has defeated "political intolerance and phobia" of the "Modi bashing brigade" through his diligence and determination for empowerment without appeasement.

(With agency inputs)
New Delhi: Union minister Ramdas Athawale on Tuesday said that Amravati MP Navneet Rana, who was booked for sedition along with her MLA husband after she triggered the Hanuman Chalisa row in Maharashtra, is a Dalit leader and injustice was meted out to her by the MVA government out of "vendetta politics", reported PTI.

Athawale, who went to meet the Rana couple in Delhi days after their release on bail from Mumbai jail in the sedition case, while speaking to the media demanded a probe into the entire episode.

Ranas have faced injustice. Navneet Rana is an elected MP. The action taken against her with revenge is very serious. Navneet Rana belongs to our Dalit community. Injustice was meted out to her. I condemn the injustice on behalf of the RPI. Action should be taken against the police for committing the injustice, Athawale said.

Ranas only wanted to recite 'Hanuman Chalisa' outside Thackeray's private residence 'Matoshree' with the intention that various issues plaguing the state will be resolved through the divine invocation. There was no need to register a sedition case against them as they did not stage a protest, but had only announced in that regard (Ranas later withdrew their plan to chant Hanuman Chalisa), Athawale told PTI.

To put them in jail under the sedition charge is a blot on democracy, he alleged.

The leader further alleged that residences of the Ranas in Amravati and suburban Khar in Mumbai were pelted with stones.

He also questioned the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation's (BMC) move to issue a notice to the Khar housing society, where the Ranas own a flat for alleged illegal alterations and accused the civic body of acting with vengeance.

About the sedition case, protests had erupted after the Ranas announced to recite Hanuman Chalisa outside Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray's private residence in Mumbai last month. They were subsequently arrested amid angry protests by Shiv Sainiks on the charge of promoting enmity. Later the sedition charge was also added.

The couple walked out of jail on May 5, a day after a Mumbai court granted them bail.

(With PTI inputs)
Shimla: Former Union telecom minister Pandit Sukh Ram was cremated on Thursday with full state honours in Himachal Pradesh's Mandi as hundreds of people joined Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur and other state ministers to pay their last respects.

Before the cremation at Hanuman Ghat, his mortal remains were kept for Seti Manch for Antim Darshan. His son and BJP MLA Anil Sharma lit the unreal pyre.

The chief minister said that Pandit Sukh Ram, who served as the union minister of state for communications (independent charge) between 1993 and 1996, would always be remembered for bringing a telecom revolution in the country.

He contributed immensely to the development of Himachal Pradesh and for the welfare of its people during his long political career spanning over sixty years, Thakur added.

Sukh Ram had breathed his last at AIIMS New Delhi on Wednesday after suffering a brain stroke. Besides the chief minister, Jal Shakti Minister Mahender Singh Thakur, Urban Development Minister Suresh Bhardwaj, Tribal Development and IT Minister Dr Ram Lal Markanda, MP and state BJP president Suresh Kashyap also attended the cremation.

MLAs Rakesh Jamwal, Inder Singh Gandhi and Jawahar Thakur; political advisor to the chief minister Trilok Jamwal; Zila Parishad Chairman Pal Verma; mayor, deputy mayor, Mandi Municipal Corporation councilors and thousands of people from different walks of life paid rich tributes to the departed soul.
New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday (May 12, 2022) addressed the "Utkarsh Samaroh" in Gujarat's Bharuch via video conferencing. According to the Prime Ministers Office (PMO), the event was organised to mark the 100 per cent saturation of four key state government schemes in the district which will help provide timely financial assistance to those in need.

PM Modi interacted with the beneficiaries of 'Utkarsh Initiative', before addressing the event today, and spoke about how the schemes by the state governments and how is it shaping their lives.

While talking to one of the beneficiaries, PM Modi was seen getting emotional. The man who was interacting with the prime minister is visually challenged and was attending the event with his daughter.

While talking to Ayub Patel, one of the beneficiaries of government schemes in Gujarat, PM Modi gets emotional after hearing about his daughter's dream of becoming a doctor and said, Let me know if you need any help to fulfill the dream of your daughters, read a tweet by the states directorate of information.

Watch the video here:

#WATCH | While talking to Ayub Patel, one of the beneficiaries of govt schemes in Gujarat during an event, PM Modi gets emotional after hearing about his daughter's dream of becoming a doctor & said, "Let me know if you need any help to fulfill the dream of your daughters" pic.twitter.com/YuuVpcXPiy  ANI (@ANI) May 12, 2022

In the video, Patel can be seen sharing his story with the prime minister. He told PM Modi how his eyesight got affected when he was in Saudi Arabia.

I had gone to Saudi Arabia when I used some eye drop, he said. The prime minister asked him what the doctors suggested, to which he replied that there is no solution now Its glaucoma.

After this PM Modi aksed him about his daughters, and he said, My daughters are studying - one in class 8 and the other in class 12, and the third one is class 1. The government will take care of the youngest ones education till class 8. The other two also get a scholarship.

PM Modi also interacted with the Patels daughter, who teared up while saying: "I want to become a doctor because of the problem that my father is suffering from.

At this moment, even PM Modi got emotional and said, Your compassion is your strength.

After the interaction, PM Modi also extended his support to the family and asked the man to inform him if he need any help to fulfil the dream of your daughters.

About Utkarsh Samaroh

According to PMO, the district administration had carried out a special drive  Utkarsh Initiative  from January 1 to March 31 this year, with the aim to ensure the complete coverage of schemes providing assistance to widows, elderly and destitute citizens.

A total of 12,854 beneficiaries were identified across the four schemes, PMO said. Taluka-wise WhatsApp helpline numbers were announced to collect information about those who were not receiving benefits of the scheme for the drive.

PMO also stated that Utkarsh camps were organised in all villages and wards of municipality areas of the district for applicants to provide necessary documents for on spot approval. Incentives were also given to Utkarsh assistants to further facilitate the drive.
New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address the Utkarsh Samaroh in Gujarats Bharuch on Thursday (May 12, 2022) via video conferencing to mark the 100 per cent saturation of four key state government schemes in the district which will help provide timely financial assistance to those in need, said the Prime Ministers Office (PMO).

PM Modi will also participate in the second global virtual summit on Covid-19 today, being hosted by US President Joe Biden, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said.

PM Modi to address Utkarsh Samaroh

According to PMO, the district administration had carried out a special drive  Utkarsh Initiative  from January 1 to March 31 this year, with the aim to ensure the complete coverage of schemes providing assistance to widows, elderly and destitute citizens.

A total of 12,854 beneficiaries were identified across the four schemes, PMO said. Taluka-wise WhatsApp helpline numbers were announced to collect information about those who were not receiving benefits of the scheme for the drive.

PMO also stated that Utkarsh camps were organised in all villages and wards of municipality areas of the district for applicants to provide necessary documents for on spot approval. Incentives were also given to Utkarsh assistants to further facilitate the drive.

PM Modi to participate in 2nd global summit on Covid

The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) informed that PM Modi will take part in the second global virtual summit on Covid-19 today. As per MEA, the summit intends to galvanise new actions to address the challenges of the pandemic and build a stronger global health security architecture.

"Prime Minister Narendra Modi will participate in the Second Global COVID Virtual Summit on May 12 at the invitation of the President of the USA, Joseph R Biden Jr," the MEA said in a statement on Wednesday.

"The Summit intends to galvanize new actions to address the continued challenges of the Covid pandemic and build a stronger global health security architecture," it said.

The MEA said leaders of a number of countries are expected to participate in the summit. The summit will also be attended by heads of state/government of Belize in its capacity as Chair of CARICOM, Senegal as Chair of African Union, Indonesia as President of G20 and Germany as President of G7 respectively.

Additionally, Secretary-General of the United Nations, Director General of World Health Organization and other dignitaries would also participate.

Earlier, last year, PM Modi participated in the first global virtual summit on Covid hosted by Biden on September 22.

(With agency inputs)
Bengaluru: In the wake of Kerala reporting over 80 cases of Tomato Flu, the Karnataka Health Minister K Sudhakar has said there is no need to panic. Saying that the flu is endemic to that state, Sudhakar instructed authorities in the border district to remain vigilant aimed at controlling its spread.

What has Tomato Flu got to do with Covid-19?

Tomato flu is a rare viral disease, which causes red-coloured rashes, skin irritation and dehydration, and the disease gets its name from the blisters it causes, which look like tomatoes. The tomato fever is affecting children below the age of five in Kerala. "Though some symptoms are similar to Covid-19, the tomato flu has nothing to do with Covid-19. These symptoms are usually seen in other types of viral infections also. There is no need to panic as the authorities have been asked to remain alert. Moreover, the tomato flu is endemic to Kerala," Sudhakar said.

The main symptom of the tomato flu is large blisters the size of tomatoes which are red in colour. Other symptoms include high fever, body ache, joint swelling and fatigue - much like chikungunya, the Minister's office said in a statement. Cases of tomato flu have currently been reported from Aryankavu, Anchal and Neduvathur in Kerala State.

Kerala's neighbouring states on alert

In connection to the fairly large number of cases in Kerala, the border districts of Karnataka - Mangaluru (Dakshina Kannada), Udupi, Kodagu, Chamrajnagara and Mysuru - have been directed to keep a vigil on daily travellers from Kerala and also monitor children for any of the aforementioned signs and symptoms in OPDs of Health Institutions, the statement said.

Further directions have been given to inform the State IDSP (Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme) section immediately if any cases with such symptoms are detected, it said, adding that DHOs of districts concerned and other districts too are directed by the Commissioner of Health to ensure surveillance.

Even Tamil Nadu has taken precautions. As a step against the spread of the tomato flu in one of the districts of neighbouring Kerala, a medical team is carrying out tests on those entering Coimbatore for fever, rashes and other illnesses - symptoms of such flu - at Walayar on the Tamil Nadu-Kerala border.

(With PTI inputs)
(Bloomberg) -- Germany could weather a ban on Russian gas in the upcoming winter so long as it fills storages, progresses on LNG terminals and cuts consumption, Economy Minister Robert Habeck said in an interview with WirtschaftsWoche.

Most Read from Bloomberg

The ability of Europes largest economy to endure a halt is subject to several preconditions but was doable, he told the magazine. The comments come as Germany is planning four new floating liquefied natural gas projects and fast tracking approvals to slash its dependence on Russian gas.

But replacing all of the Russian volumes will be a difficult undertaking, with the country receiving more than half its supply from Russia last year. Executives of companies including EON SE have said its unlikely the German government will support any European Union embargo on Russian gas because the impact on the economy would be massive.

If German gas storages are full by the end of this year, and two of the four floating LNG terminals its planning are connected to the grid by then, we can get through the winter to some extent in the event that Russian gas supplies are cut off, Habeck said.

The prognosis also hinges on industry and households reducing energy consumption by 10% to avoid getting into an emergency situation, Habeck said.

He added that he supported the European Unions efforts to intensively seek dialogue with Hungary, where Prime Minister Victor Orban has hardened its public stance against a ban on Russian oil purchases, saying it would withdraw its veto threat only if its imports via pipelines are excluded.

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Mumbai: Mumbai Police on Wednesday (May 11) registered a case against an unidentified person for clicking photographs of Amravati MP Navneet Rana when she was undergoing MRI scan at a private hospital here. Security officials of the Lilavati hospital in suburban Bandra had filed a complaint in this regard, police said.

As per the complaint, an unidentified person clicked photographs of Rana by entering the MRI section where electronic devices like mobile phones are strictly banned, said a police official.

A First Information Report (FIR) was registered under section 448 (trespass) of the Indian Penal Code, he added. Rana was hospitalized after she and her husband, MLA Ravi Rana got bail in a sedition case earlier this month. The Independent legislator couple had been arrested after they announced that they would recite the Hanuman Chalisa outside Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray's private residence 'Matoshri' here.

After the release, Navneet Rana was admitted to Lilavati hospital on May 5; she underwent an MRI scan on May 6. Her photos while undergoing the scan circulated on social media. Local Shiv Sena leaders had visited the hospital and objected to the clicking of photographs inside an MRI room. A Sena delegation had also visited the Bandra Police Station to seek a probe in the matter. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation had also issued a notice to the hospital over the incident.
New Delhi: A massive fire broke out at platform number 5 of the Moradabad Railway Station during the early hours on Thursday (May 12, 2022).

According to the police, the fire broke out at 2.30 AM at a canteen on platform 5, due to which people started running in all directions. Meanwhile, a train headed for Bareilly also reached the station and stopped after seeing the fire, creating panic among the train passengers as well, after which the fire department was informed.

Upon receiving the information about the fire, a wickets car arrived and doused it off.

According to Mukesh Kumar, the Chief Fire Officer (CFO) of the Fire department, as soon as the information was recieved at 2.30 AM, an immediate wicket of fire brigades was sent to the railway station to douse it off. After a few hours, the fire was doused off, he said.

However, no casualties have been reported, and certain loose wires were suspected to have caused the fire.

More details are awaited.
Ranchi: The Jharkhand government led by Chief Minister Hemant Soren on Thursday suspended mining secretary Pooja Singhal, a day after she was arrested in connection with a money laundering case by the Enforcement Directorate (ED).

News agency ANI confirmed that Jharkhand Govt has suspended mining secretary Pooja Singhal after her arrest in the money laundering case.

Jharkhand govt suspended State Mining Secretary Pooja Singhal in connection with an alleged money laundering case  ANI (@ANI) May 12, 2022

A special PMLA court in Ranchi had on Wednesday sent Jharkhand mining secretary Pooja Singhal to five-day remand of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in connection with a money-laundering probe linked to the alleged embezzlement of MGNREGA funds and other charges.

Singhal was earlier arrested by ED. Before that, Singhal was summoned for questioning. Notably, she was questioned for around nine hours on Monday also.

Following the arrest of Singhal, Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren said, "All possible legal actions will be taken by the state government on this issue."

This is the second arrest in this case as Chartered Accountant Suman Kumar is already arrested by ED on May 7.

ED recovered Rs 17.51 crore from the premises of Kumar and Rs 1.8 crore from pulse Hospital. Singhal was arrested after ED got credible evidence of her connection with CA Suman Kumar.

Earlier this month, ED conducted raids at Pulse Hospital, Ranchi. The hospital is owned by Abhishek Jha, husband of Pooja Singhal, Secretary, Mines and Geology, in Jharkhand.

Senior advocate of Jharkhand High Court, Rajeev Kumar, submitted a complaint against her to the ED in February 2022. Earlier on Sunday, the ED interrogated Abhishek Jha, husband of Pooja Singhal, IAS, in connection with searches at Pulse Hospital.

Pooja Singhal is the secretary of the Department of Mines and Geology and the Managing Director of Jharkhand State Mineral Development Corporation Limited (JSMDC).
NEW DELHI: Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who is an ace versatile actor has always added credibility to his account. Be it by slipping into difficult roles or by bringing pride to the country by earning a global fan following, Nawazuddin has always managed to amaze us with his authenticity.

Recently, the Indian government revealed several names who will be receiving awards on the behalf of the nation. Not to be surprised, Nawazuddin is one of them. Siddiqui has walked the red carpets of Cannes, about 8 times and this will be a staggering 9th time when the star will do us proud. As the actor goes on adding more to his legacy, the star is chosen as one of the delegates to receive an award on the behalf of India.

The opening ceremony of the 2022 edition of the prestigious film festival will take place in the month of May. Cannes is among the most prestigious film festivals in the world. It is held yearly in May in Cannes, France. The 10-day festivity sees the worlds biggest stars come down as some of the massive and most critically-acclaimed films in the world are screened there.

Meanwhile, on the work front, Nawaz has an interesting lineup of films which includes 'No Land's Man' , 'Tiku Weds Sheru', 'Noorani Chehra', and 'Adbhut' among others.

Live TV
New Delhi: Actress Kangana Ranaut says that rumours about her being combative and a fight picker has created a negative perception about her. She jokes that due to this reason she is unable to get married. Actor Arjun Rampal, who was also part of that interview, comes to her defence and listed out the good qualities of Kangana and said she is actually a very normal person. Both Kangana and Arjun are currently promoting their upcoming spy-thriller Dhaakad, which is helmed by Kangana. She plays the main role of Agent Agni in the film.

In an interview with RJ Sidharth Kanan, Kangana was asked by him if she is just as dhaakad (fearless/strong) in real life as her character. Claiming that she is different from her character in real life,the actress laughed and said, Thats not how it is, come on. Who will I beat up in real life? I am unable to get married because of people like you spreading these rumours.

When Sidharth asked if her perception as a tough person is becoming an obstacle for her in finding a partner, Kangana half-jokingly replied, Yes, because rumours are spread about me that I beat up boys.

Kangana Ranaut is famous for making controversial statements. The actress has called filmmaker Karan Johar a flag bearer of nepotism. She has also often slammed actors Alia Bhatt and Ranbir Kapoor. The former for being a product of nepotism and the latter for not speaking up on political issues. The actress has also coined terms like Bollywood mafia to refer to a coterie of powerful people in Bollywood.

Arjun Rampal, who was also part of the interaction was asked to list Kanganas good qualities to quash rumours about her, to which he praised the Queen actress and said, All I can say is that Kangana is a fabulous actor. Whatever she does is for a role but she is not like that in real life. In real life, she is very sweet, very loving, and very God-fearing. She does puja-paath and a lot of yoga. She is actually a very normal person.

Dhaakad is directed by Razneesh Ghai and will be released on May 20. The movie is being touted as the first female led Indian spy-thriller.
New Delhi: South superstar Mahesh Babu and wife Namrata Shirodkars nine year old daughter Sitara is super excited as her fathers film Sarkaru Vaari Paata releases today. Sitara made her music video debut in the promotional video song Penny from the movie. The star kid wants to follow her fathers footsteps and become an actor. She is already friends with female leading ladies Samantha Ruth Prabhu and Rashmika Mandanna. She calls the former her best friend and the latter very pretty. In an interview with TV9, Sitara revealed that she was initially nervous when shooting for Penny started but after the first two takes, she became comfortable.

As the conversation flowed, Sitara shared that she even tried to coax Mahesh Babu to add her in the actual Penny song but he refused. I asked him to add me in the actual Penny song but he said it is already shot. I tried my best, said Sitara. She also shared that after her elder brother Gautham made his silver screen debut in fathers film 1: Nenokkadine, that she knew she also wanted to act.

Furthermore, Sitara opened up on Mahesh Babus co-stars. Talking about Samantha Ruth Prabhu, she said Sam aunty has been like my best friend. Every time I would go on sets, she would play with me. It was so fun. She is awesome. Sitara had spent time withSamantha on the sets of Dookudu.

The star kid is also a big fan of Pushpa actress Rashmika Mandanna. The latter had worked with Mahesh Babu in Sarileru Neekkevaru, on whose film sets Sitara had spent some time with her. She called Rashmika very pretty and such a kind person.

Earlier, sharing the poster of Penny, Mahesh Babu had congratulated Sitara and wrote on Instagram, #Penny... a very special one for me!! Couldn't be prouder, my rockstar! @sitaraghattamaneni.
New Delhi: The Narendra Modi government has announced a 13 percent hike in the dearness relief for beneficiaries of the Contributory Provident fund (CPF).

In an Office Memorandum, issued by the Department of Pension & Pensioners Welfare dated 11 May 2022, it has been announced that the Dearness Relief admissible to the CPF beneficiaries in receipt of basic ex-gratia payment in the 5th CPC series is being enhanced with effect from 1 January, 2022.

The OM further states that surviving CPF Beneficiaries who have retired from service between the period 18.11.1960 and 31.12.1985 and are entitled to ex-gratia of Rs 3,000, Rs 1,000, Rs 750 and Rs 650 for Group A, B, C and D respectively with effect from 4 June, 2013 shall now be entitled to enhanced Dearness Relief from 368 percent to 381 percent of the basic ex-gratia with effect from 1 January 2022.

The following categories of CPF beneficiaries shall be entitled to Dearness Relief from 360 percent of the basic ex-gratia to 373 percent of ex-gratia with effect from 1 January 2022.

A. The widows and eligible children of the deceased CPF beneficiary who had retired from service prior to 1 January 1986 or who had died in service prior to 1 January 1986 and are entitled to revised ex-gratia of Rs 645 per month with effect from 04 June 2013 vide OM dated June 27,2013

B. Central Government employees who had retired on CPF benefits before 18 November 1969 and are in reciept of ex-gratia payment of Rs 654, Rs 659, Rs 703 and Rs 965.
New Delhi: The Central government is expected to release the funds as part of the 11th instalment of the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN) Yojana in the coming days. Last year, the government released the funds on May 15, 2022. According to media reports, the government could release the funds under the scheme around May 15 this year too.

However, ahead of the release of the 11th PM Kisan installment, a fraud related to the scheme has come to the fore in Uttar Pradesh. According to reports, the UP state government has found that there were more than 3.15 lakh farmers that were ineligible to receive the funds under the PM Kisan Yojana.

The government is now planning to recover the transferred funds from such fraud accounts. The officials have reportedly started laying down the groundwork on how to retrieve the funds from the ineligible farmers.

To date, there are more than 2.55 crore farmers who have received monetary assistance under the PM Kisan Yojana at least once in Uttar Pradesh. However, the Aadhaar card details of 6.18 lakh beneficiaries were reportedly found incorrect in the database.

While the officials have corrected the data of several farmers so that they dont miss out on the financial benefits under the scheme, farmers should also complete the e-KYC verification to get Rs 2000 in their accounts.

According to the latest update from the Central government, the last date to complete the PM Kisan e-KYC proess is May 31. As of now, only 53% of the beneficiaries have e-KYC compliant accounts. Also Read: Bloodbath in crypto market! Bitcoin down at 2020 level

Farmers who wont be completing the e-KYC process by the due date could face trouble in receiving the monetary benefits under PM Kisan Yojana. Read how to complete PM Kisan e-KYC here
New Delhi: Apple iPhone 13 is one of the best selling smartphones in the Indian markets. However, many customers, who wish to buy the flagship smartphone, usually delay their purchase on the premise of buying it at cheaper prices. For such interested customers, theres good news!

Apple iPhone 13 (128 GB variant) is currently selling with a discount of Rs 10,000. The smartphone, which was launched at a price of Rs 79,900, is currently available at Rs 69,990 on the e-commerce platform. But thats not all, as customers can additional discounts on the purchase of the iPhone 13 on Amazon.

Card Discount on iPhone 13

Customers can get additional Rs 10% instant discount up to Rs 1500 on Bank of Baroda Credit Card (Non-EMI) transactions. Buyers can also get a 10% instant discount of up to Rs 2000 on Bank of Baroda Credit Card (EMI) transactions.

Also, Prime members can get 5% back with Amazon Pay ICICI Bank credit card on iPhone 13 purchase. On the other hand, non-prime members can get 3% back on the purchase of the smartphone via Amazon Pay ICICI Bank credit card.

Exchange Offer on iPhone 13

Amazon is offering a discount worth up to Rs 11,600 on buying iPhone 13 with the exchange offer. The amount of discount depends on the smartphone model and its current condition. The newer and more expensive the smartphone, the more will be the discount.

iPhone 13 Specs

Apple iPhone 13 packs a 6.1-inch Super Retina XDR display. The smartphone comes with several features including an advanced 5G experience, longer battery life, and a beautiful flat-edge design. Also Read: Taken loan from PNB? You may have to pay higher EMIs from next month, check details

The smartphone is powered by the A15 Bionic processor that offers super-fast performance and power efficiency. The device packs a longer battery life, and a beautiful flat-edge design with incredible durability with the Ceramic Shield front cover, tougher than any smartphone glass. Also Read: 3 free LPG cylinders for Antyodaya card-holders! Uttarakhand govt takes big step ahead of crucial by-poll
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Lahore: A Pakistani anti-terrorism court (ATC) on Wednesday (May 11, 2022) sentenced 22 people to five years in jail each for attacking a Hindu temple in Punjab province last year.

In July 2021, hundreds of people attacked the Ganesh Mandir temple at Bhong city, district Rahim Yar Khan, some 590 kms from Lahore, in reaction to alleged desecration of a Muslim seminary by an eight-year-old Hindu boy.

The angry mob, carrying weapons, sticks and bamboos, assaulted policemen deployed at the temple and vandalised and burned down a part of the temple. The attackers had also damaged the idols, walls, doors and electric fittings while desecrating the temple.

The trial of 84 arrested suspects began last September which concluded last week.

"On Wednesday, ATC Judge (Bahwalpur) Nasir Hussain announced the verdict. The judge handed down imprisonment of a five-year each to 22 suspects while acquitting the remaining 62 people, giving them a benefit of doubt," a court official told PTI.

All the suspects were brought to the court amid tight security from the New Central Jail, Bahawalpur before the judge announced the verdict.

The official said the court handed out the punishment to 22 accused persons after the prosecution presented the relevant evidence in the form of footages and witnesses testified against them.

On the order of the apex court, the government had earlier recovered more than PKR 1 million (USD 5,300) compensation from the suspects.

The temple was later restored on the order of the Supreme Court.

Then chief justice of Pakistan Gulzar Ahmed regretted that vandalism at the Ganesh Mandir had brought shame to the country as police acted like silent spectators.

"Imagine what mental agony the desecration incident had brought to the members of the Hindu community," the chief justice had observed.

Pakistan's parliament had also condemned the temple attack by adopting a resolution.
Seoul: North Korea officially confirmed its first COVID-19 outbreak on Thursday and ordered a national lockdown, with state media reporting a sub-variant of the highly transmissible Omicron virus had been detected in the city of Pyongyang.

"There has been the biggest emergency incident in the country, with a hole in our emergency quarantine front, that has been kept safe over the past two years and three months since February 2020," the official KCNA news agency said.

The report said people in Pyongyang had contracted the Omicron variant, without providing details on case numbers or possible sources of infection. The samples of the infected people were collected on May 8, it said.

The report was published as the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un chaired a Workers` Party meeting to discuss responses to the first outbreak of the coronavirus.

Kim ordered all cities and counties of the country to "strictly lock down" their regions to prevent the spread of the coronavirus and said emergency reserve medical supplies would be mobilised, according to KCNA.

Although the North has never confirmed a single coronavirus infection in the country, officials in South Korea and the united States have cast doubts, especially as cases of the Omicron variant were widely reported in neighbouring South Korea and China.

North Korea has declined shipments of vaccines from the COVAX global COVID-19 vaccine-sharing programme and the Sinovac Biotech vaccine from China.

Kim told the Workers` Party meeting the latest emergency quarantine system`s purpose is to stably control and manage the spread of the coronavirus and quickly heal infected people to eliminate the source of transmission in the shortest period, KCNA said.

A South Korea-based website that monitors activities in Pyongyang said this week that residents have been told to return home and remain indoors because of a "national problem" without offering details.

Earlier on Thursday, Chinese state television reported North Korea has required its people to stay at home since May 11 as many of them have "suspected flu symptoms", without referring to COVID-19.
Colombo: Opposition leader Ranil Wickremesinghe was on Thursday sworn in as the new Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, days after his predecessor Mahinda Rajapaksa resigned following violent protests over the worst economic crisis in the debt-ridden island nation.

The 73-year-old United National Party (UNP) was appointed as the Prime Minister by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa after they held closed-door discussions on Wednesday.

Wickremesinghe, who has served as the country's prime minister four times, was in October 2018 fired from the post of prime minister by then-President Maithripala Sirisena. However, he was reinstalled as the prime minister by Sirisena after two months.

Members of the ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), a section of the main Opposition Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) and several other parties have expressed their support to show majority for Wickremesinghe in Parliament, sources said.

The UNP, the oldest party in the country, had failed to win a single seat from districts, including Wickremesinghe who contested from the UNP stronghold Colombo in 2020 parliamentary polls.

He later found his way to Parliament through the sole national list allocated to the UNP on the basis of the cumulative national vote. His deputy Sajith Premadasa had led the breakaway SJB and became the main Opposition.

Wickremesinghe is widely accepted as a man who could manage the economy with far-sighted policies and is perceived as the Sri Lankan politician who could command international cooperation.

Sri Lanka is facing its worst economic crisis since gaining independence from Britain in 1948. The crisis is caused in part by a lack of foreign currency, which has meant that the country cannot afford to pay for imports of staple foods and fuel, leading to acute shortages and very high prices.
Colombo: Opposition leader Ranil Wickremesinghe was sworn in as Sri Lanka's 26th Prime Minister on Thursday, days after his predecessor Mahinda Rajapaksa was forced to resign following violent protests over the worst economic crisis in the debt-ridden island nation.

The 73-year-old United National Party (UNP) leader took the oath before President Gotabaya Rajapaksa at a ceremony in the president's office after they held closed-door discussions over formation of a new government to address the economic crisis.

"My best wishes to the newly appointed PM of #LKA, @RW_UNP, who stepped up to take on the challenging task of steering our country through a very turbulent time. I look forward to working together with him to make Sri Lanka strong again," President Gotabaya tweeted along with a picture of him and Wickremesinghe.

Soon after his appointment, Wickremesinghe promised to end the national crisis and revive the island nations economy.

I have taken on the challenge of uplifting the economy and I must fulfill it: Sri Lanka's new PM Ranil Wickremesinghe, in Colombo pic.twitter.com/73arzUeb9a  ANI (@ANI) May 12, 2022

Sri Lanka was without a government since Monday when Gotabaya's elder brother and prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa resigned after violence erupted following an attack on the anti-government protesters by his supporters. The attack triggered widespread violence against Rajapaksa loyalists, leaving 9 people dead.

Mahinda quickly congratulated Wickremesinghe, saying that he wishes him all the best as he navigates "these troubled times." "Congratulations to the newly appointed Prime Minister of #lka, @RW_UNP. I wish you all the best as you navigate these troubled times," tweeted Mahinda, who is under protection at a naval base following violent attacks on his aides.

The High Commission of India in Colombo said it looks forward to working with new Government of Sri Lanka formed in accordance with democratic processes.

"High Commission of India hopes for political stability and looks forward to working with the Government of Sri Lanka formed in accordance with democratic processes pursuant to the swearing in of Hon'ble @RW_UNP as the Prime Minister of #SriLanka," it tweeted.

It said that India's commitment to the people of Sri Lanka will continue. Members of the ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), a section of the main Opposition Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) and several other parties have expressed their support to show majority for Wickremesinghe in Parliament, sources said.

However, several factions oppose the move to appoint Wickremesinghe as the new Prime Minister.

Wickremesinghe, a lawyer-turned politician who has been in Parliament for 45 years, has served as the prime minister on four previous occasions. He was fired from the post of prime minister by then-President Maithripala Sirisena in October 2018. However, he was reinstalled as the prime minister by Sirisena after two months.

He is widely accepted as a man who could manage the economy with far-sighted policies and is perceived as the Sri Lankan politician who could command international cooperation.

The UNP, the oldest party in the country, had failed to win a single seat from districts, including Wickremesinghe who contested from the UNP stronghold Colombo in 2020 parliamentary polls.

He later found his way to Parliament through the sole national list allocated to the UNP on the basis of cumulative national vote. His deputy Sajith Premadasa had led the breakaway SJB and became the main Opposition.

Premadasa, a former deputy to Wickremesinghe, had rejected the President's original invitation to be prime minister. He had insisted that the President must resign as a pre-condition. Premadasa later softened his stance and demanded the President to give a time frame for stepping down. However, the President replied that he would appoint Wickremesinghe as the new premier.

Sri Lanka is facing its worst economic crisis since gaining independence from Britain in 1948. The crisis is caused in part by a lack of foreign currency, which has meant that the country cannot afford to pay for imports of staple foods and fuel, leading to acute shortages and very high prices.
Amid the brutal war with Moscow, Ukraine has offered to release Russian prisoners of war in exchange for the safe evacuation of the badly injured fighters trapped inside a steel mill in the ruined city of Mariupol, news agency Associated Press reported. This comes as Kyiv began preparing for its first war crimes trial of a captured Russian soldier.

According to AP, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk on Wednesday said that negotiations were underway to release the injured fighters who are holed up in the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance in Mariupol.

In retaliation to Russian aggression on its territory, Ukraine has also shut down a pipeline that takes Moscows gas to Western Europe, which contributes greatly to the Russian economy.

Ukraine has also closed a Kremlin-installed politician in the southern Kherson region said officials there want Russian President Vladimir Putin to annex it.

Meanwhile, amid talks of an exchange, a former Russian fighter said that Russias troops were not prepared for a direct war with Ukraine

The Russian military`s failure to seize the Ukrainian capital was inevitable because in the preceding years they had never directly faced a powerful enemy, according to a former mercenary with the Kremlin-linked Wagner Group who fought alongside the Russian army, reported Reuters.

Marat Gabidullin took part in Wagner Group missions on the Kremlin`s behalf in Syria and in a previous conflict in Ukraine, before deciding to go public about his experience inside the secretive private military company.

He quit the Wagner group in 2019, but several months before Russia launched the invasion on Feb. 24 Gabidullin, 55, said he received a call from a recruiter who invited him to go back to fighting as a mercenary in Ukraine.

He rejected the offer, because, he said, he did not agree on principle with the Kremlin`s invasion of Ukraine.

(With inputs from agencies)
New Delhi: Ever since Tesla CEO Elon Musk took over the microblogging site Twitter, not a day goes by when he is not in news. Recently, the tycoon announced a much-anticipated decision of willing to revoke the Twitter ban on former US President Donald Trump. The announcement wasn't received well by the social media community and netizens are divided about whether Trumps re-entry on Twitter should be given a nod.

However, Dogecoin creator Billy Markus, who goes by the name Shibetoshi Nakamoto on Twitter, has helped Musk in justifying his move and the SpaceX founder agrees.

Taking to Twitter Shibetoshi Nakamoto lined down three possible scenarios of Donald Trumps Twitter comeback and Elon Muk shares his view on the subject. Take a look at what Musk and the crypto expert have to say.

if donald trump gets back on twitter this is all that will happen 1) he won't use it

or

2) he will make a single tweet that is like "this site is bad come to truth social" or whatever it's called it doesn't matter, adults don't need to have yet another meltdown, ffs  Shibetoshi Nakamoto (@BillyM2k) May 11, 2022

What are these 3 scenarios?

1. Donald Trump will not use Twitter.

2. Donald Trump will make a single tweet like, "This site is bad. Come to Truth Social'.

3. In case, the first two scenarios do not play out, one will always have the option to block him or to get Donald Trump to block an individual.

"Literally who cares," the dogecoin creator wrote.

Soon after the tweet went viral, the new owner Elon Musk wrote agreed to all the possible scenarios and said Exactly.

Donald Trumps Twitter comeback

Elon Musk on Tuesday said the decision to permanently ban Donald Trump from the platform was morally wrong and also it did not stop him from voicing his opinion as he came up with his own social media platform named Truth Social.

Trump was banned by the microblogging site after the Capitol riots for inciting violence and violating the site policies.

The ban was supported by a large chunk of Twitter users as well as US politicians.

However, Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey later agreed that banning Donald Trump from Twitter permanently was a business decision and called the ban on individuals wrong.
New Delhi: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who visited Sweden this week to discuss security, was trolled heavily online after a picture of him wearing full suit while rowing a boat went viral on the internet.

The picture of Johnson rowing Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson in a boat was captured sparking memes on social media.

You may have seen the photo of Boris Johnson out for a row with Swedish PM Magdalena Andersson. The boat is called Harpsundsekan and there's a long-running tradition of visiting leaders going out on the water with the Swedish prime minister. pic.twitter.com/3aQ9fpS5JP  TLDR News UK (@TLDRNewsUK) May 11, 2022

Many netizens made jokes about Anderssons slightly fearful look as Johnson begins rowing.

The picture was taken in a Harpsundsekan boat on a lake. According to reports, its a tradition amongst the Swedish Prime Minister that visiting leaders go for a short boat ride.

While reacting to the picture, a netizen wrote, "Boris Johnson is like 'I've rowed in suits all my life and I'm gonna be alright'."

Check out the memes here:

I love how @SwedishPM wears a floatation device when @BorisJohnson is like "I've rowed in suits all my life and I'm gonna be aiight". https://t.co/UbdxBTYbrT  Sebastian Bruns (@naval_gazing) May 11, 2022

Push him over. Push. Him. Over. https://t.co/wS6CLwcpRT  Andrea Let Tangle & Whisper Kiss (@FeoUltima) May 11, 2022
Ranil Wickremesinghe arrives at a Buddhist temple after his latest appointment as prime minister

News that Ranil Wickremesinghe is the new prime minister has been largely met with dismay and disbelief in Sri Lanka.

His appointment is being viewed as yet another arrogant response by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to weeks of protests over rising prices and shortages.

Mr Wickremesinghe is seen as being close to the Rajapaksa family, and many think he has been chosen because he will be likely to guarantee their security.

Protests flared up in early April in the capital, Colombo, and have grown in size and spread across the country. People are furious because the cost of living has become unaffordable, and nine people have lost their lives in the unrest.

However some say his experience and links with India and the West could help overcome the economic crisis that led to the protests.

"We are facing a crisis, we have to get out of it," he told Reuters news agency shortly after his swearing-in. Asked whether there was a possible solution, he replied, "Absolutely."

It is the sixth time the senior opposition MP has held the post. He's never seen out a full term.

A lawyer by profession, he comes from an affluent family of politicians and businessmen.

He was first elected to parliament in 1977 and quickly moved up the party ladder after Ranasinghe Pramadasa was elected president in 1989. He first served as prime minister from 1993 to 1994.

In 1994, he became leader of the United National Party (UNP) when Gamini Dissanayake was killed by suspected rebels of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

He himself narrowly escaped an assassination attempt when a bomb went off at a meeting he was addressing in the town of Eppawala.

Mr Wickramesinghe improved his party's image by appointing a disciplinary commission to get rid of corrupt party members.

He also tried to change his personal image with various different haircuts to give himself a more appealing look and he tried to broaden the UNP's public support by touring villages.

Story continues

Around the turn of the century he was a genuine contender for president but his star has since waned.

He was prime minister during the deadly Easter Sunday bombings in 2019, which killed at least 250 people.

He told the BBC he had been "out of the loop" when it came to intelligence warnings ahead of the attacks.

In the last election, his once ruling UNP managed to scrape together just one parliamentary seat, leaving him its sole representative in parliament.

One major reason people are angry over Mr Wickremesinghe's return has been his perceived closeness to the Rajapaksa family despite being in opposition. Many people believe he helped shield them when they lost power in 2015 - his appointment now is seen as a way for the president to defy protesters' demands that he quit.

Sri Lankan journalist R Sivaraja has told BBC Tamil he believes Mr Wickremesinghe's strengths, including maintaining good relations with diplomats and not making rash decisions, could hold him in good stead in the current climate.

But many remain unconvinced, including Archbishop of Colombo Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith. "People want a person with integrity, not someone who has been defeated in politics," he told local media.
Two favorite Chippewa Falls businesses are now under new ownership.

Connells Supper Club in Chippewa Falls and Connells Club 12 in Fall Creek have been purchased after being put up for sale in November by owner Lynn McDonough. The identity and the immediate plans for the businesses is being kept confidential out of respect for McDonough, who is currently experiencing severe health problems.

It has been an absolute pleasure to serve you over the years, Connells Supper Club management said in a recent social media post. We have been blessed by your support and have truly cherished getting to know so many great people in the community. We are excited to announce that Connells Restaurants will soon be transitioning to new owners. We are very happy to have found passionate owners that are excited to serve you and the community by continuing on the Connells Supper Club legacy.

McDonough has owned the Chippewa Falls location for the past 33 years and the Fall Creek club for 15 years. McDonough said he is retiring from the restaurant business because of his deteriorating health and inability to keep up with the day-to-day physical demands of owning Connells.

Im getting to be really immobile, McDonough said. Ive been having bad back problems for a while. It is making it hard to walk around and stay hands on in the business. Owning Connells has been great and fantastic, but its time for someone else to come in.

Connells is a classic style sit-down supper club, featuring a variety of steak meals, burgers, salads and other offerings. McDonoughs ownership of Connells has largely been met with praise, as in 2015 McDonough was named Wisconsin Restaurateur of the Year, receiving recognition for his dedication to the restaurant industry in Wisconsin as well as recognition of the Connells brand.

He said he would like to see both businesses be sold together, and have all current staff retain their positions, but that is ultimately that is up to the new ownership.

These are turnkey businesses, McDonough said. Everything will stay exactly the same, if thats what the new owner wants to do. Since the businesses go well together, Id rather not split them up. However, if someone has an interesting idea, and needs to split them up then we can talk and see if it is possible.

While the plan is to keep the businesses largely the same under the new ownership, Connells Supper Clubs social media post did urge all individuals with gift certificates to use them as soon as possible, as they wont be valid when the new business plan is enacted soon.

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When Camryn Billen was younger, she wanted to be a ballerina or a teacher.

It always fluctuated, she said.

When she graduates from Chippewa Valley Technical College on Friday, May 20, her associate degree will be in agronomy management  the science of agriculture by using technology  a far cry from being a teacher.

Its not something she ever thought would appeal to her. After graduating from Chippewa Falls High School in 2017, she went to college for English education.

A love of reading has always been a part of who I am, she said. My mom has photos of my brother and me reading encyclopedias.

But the more she thought about teaching, the more she realized a different calling. At the same time, as a Wisconsin Farmers Union intern, she volunteered to be a representative at the Capitol during the states lobby day. As an intern, she also worked at Kamp Kenwood in rural Chippewa Falls.

Billen, who now lives in Eau Claire, set her sights on agronomy as she began to appreciate the idea of community.

I realized I wanted to go into teaching to change the system from within. I wondered how I could do that in a more inclusive way, she said. At Kamp Kenwood we did a lot of work around sustainability. How can we make sure the people producing our food make the money to keep producing our food?

Billen said that job opened her eyes to food deserts, urban farming, fair wages for farmers, depressed milk wages, country of origin labeling and general education surrounding how our food is grown, processed and distributed.

This degree in agronomy stemmed from my personal belief: I should not be able to advocate for policy that I know nothing about, she said as a matter of fact. There is so much misinformation out there. I didnt want to be a contributing factor to that.

Those words coming from Billen dont surprise Brent Christianson at all.

Christianson, Billens agronomy management instructor, said she is the type of person who is needed working in farm policy.

She is a great advocate for everything we do, and she is so well-spoken, he said. She took the right approach to this. She knew she needed to first learn about, experience, and literally live and breathe agriculture by working at Right Choice Acres (CVTCs own farmland) before she could write policy.

Christianson said Billen had an idea of what farmers and farm businesses did, but she wanted to be immersed in the process to understand how it really worked.

We were simply a stop on her awesome path to success, he said.

And though she had a huge learning curve, Billen didnt let that stop her from gaining a needed education for her career.

Shes like many students in that she is driven, passionate and a great student, but she set herself apart in that she has a vision and an end goal unlike any other student, Christianson said. She had to work harder than most other students because she didnt have the background. In the end, she was able to see how it all tied together and it will really help her in the future.

Billens dream is to work closely with farmers in some capacity. She would like to work with an organization in Madison to help farmers. Shes even considering going back to school to get educated more in-depth on policy knowledge.

But its quite possible she has already managed the most difficult part of her journey  gaining the trust of farmers.

At a CVTC Advisory Committee meeting recently, Billen was a student representative and gave a short update on her plans after graduation. She talked about her route to ag policy and two farmer members on the board stopped her mid-sentence and told her, We need more people like you in agriculture. You are who we want writing policy and standing up for us, Christianson remembered.

It was pretty cool to see that kind of buy-in for her plan from a very well-respected local farmer, he said.

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Workforce shortages, training and cybersecurity. These are some of the issues CED Profit Center Manager Camden Van Brocklin has been facing.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Van Brocklin said he heard from the Nebraska Chamber that similar problems arose from statewide manufacturers.

People were having a hard time finding the solutions that were local to Nebraska, said Van Brocklin, who is based in Columbus.

With CED being a technology manufacturing company, the business works through a huge ecosystem of partners that could help provide such assistance to organizations, he noted.

That has led to the NE Chamber and CED | Industrial Solutions Network-hosted Manufacturing Nebraskas Future event held May 11 at Central Community College-Columbus, 4500 63rd St.

The day-long event had manufacturing executives, business owners, higher education officials, plant managers, engineers, technicians, Women in Manufacturing  Nebraska Chapter members and operational leaders in logistics, processing and supplier sectors visit the campus.

We wanted a manufacturing event focused around the problems that manufacturing is seeing in Nebraska and focus on getting them the solutions that are needed to them, Van Brocklin said.

CED Division Marketing Lead Madison Brooks said the events goal was to focus on manufacturers.

We want them to become bigger and better and lean into the manufacturing technologies and get them to that next step, she said. Thats because were here to help those manufacturers build strong communities and were here for that. Were here to support, build and help.

Attendees got an eyeful on state-of-the-art technology that statewide businesses are using for their operations. A virtual reality handset was on display at one station while another showcased robotics by having a machine that can unload and load packages.

The event also saw discussions about modernization threats and opportunities, financial options and challenges and best practices. Later, there were technology demonstrations showcasing the aforementioned new types of tech.

Van Brocklin said he believes Nebraska Chamber President Bryan Slone summed up the states manufacturing at the moment. Nebraska is ranked 36th in research and development spending, around $16,000 per person behind productivity annually and around a 60% automation potential yet realized, he added.

Nebraska isnt behind because we lack hardworking people  anyone will tell you we have hardworking people in Nebraska  but were behind because they dont have the tools to succeed, Van Brocklin said. There are other communities and states that have done a lot to adapt to technology early on and theyre seeing the benefits. Nebraska  being kind of isolated  has missed out on some of that growth. So now its go time. We want to stay relevant and a strong manufacturing state.

Earlier in the day, about 100 Columbus area high school students toured the manufacturing technology expo. They also had the chance to tour the colleges advanced manufacturing classrooms and facilities.

Van Brocklin said the event was also geared for teens as a way for them to garner interest in the trades. He added its a very well-known secret that the field is struggling at the moment.

Were having a hard time getting people to community colleges to learn about manufacturing, he said. We thought, While we have all this cool technology in the same room and all these great companies, why dont we bring in high schools from around the area to be curious and enjoy some of the cool conversations. Hopefully, it inspires them to pursue careers within manufacturing.

Andrew Kiser is a reporter for The Columbus Telegram. Reach him via email at andrew.kiser@lee.net.

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The quick thinking of an off-duty Omaha police officer helped save the life of an Omaha man after the man suffered a heart attack inside a local Walmart.

Michael Freeman, 78, was at a Subway inside the Walmart at 50th Street and Ames Avenue shortly before 1 p.m. Friday. After ordering a club sandwich, he suddenly fell backward and hit his head on the floor.

From what the doctors are telling us, he was in ventricular fibrillation, v-fib, said Marlon Freeman, Freemans son. He was clinically dead.

Keith Lampert, a longtime Omaha police officer working a shift as an off-duty officer at Walmart, was standing near the Subway when he heard a thud.

When I turned around, I saw this gentleman lying flat on his back, Lampert said. He didnt seem to be responsive or aware of the fact that he had just fallen. He was fading in and out of consciousness, and I called for a medic while keeping an eye on him.

Lampert had to perform CPR on Freeman as he went from breathing shallowly on his own to not breathing at all.

Freeman had had a heart attack. According to Marlon Freeman, his father had no history of heart problems or any significant medical issues.

When medics arrived, they were able to stabilize Michael Freeman and take him to the hospital.

Marlon Freeman said he was contacted about his fathers condition and immediately began the nearly eight-hour drive from his home in Denver to Omahas Immanuel Medical Center.

When Marlon Freeman arrived at the hospital, his father was sedated and intubated in the ICU, and the path to recovery was unclear.

Its not a look you ever want to see your dad have, Marlon Freeman said. I was just sitting with my mom and son in the ICU, watching him breathe on the ventilator, timing our breaths with his. I was trying to prepare for the worst.

But by Saturday morning, Michael Freeman had been taken off the ventilator and was no longer sedated. He was up and talking  and asking about the officer who had saved his life.

My dad just wants to give this guy a giant hug, Marlon Freeman said.

Michael Freeman and Lampert have since talked and are working to make that hug happen. Marlon Freeman said that, considering tensions between police and the Black community in some places, Lamperts quick thinking and compassion were meaningful to the family.

Its been such a blessing, he said. In light of things that go on all over  not just in Omaha  between Black men and White cops, I think this is a really heartwarming and loving story.

Marlon Freeman noted that his father experienced an occasional byproduct of CPR from Lamperts chest compressions.

Granted, he did break my dads ribs, he said, laughing. But it was a good break.

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Many parents are hunting for infant formula after a combination of short- and long-term problems hit most of the biggest U.S. brands.

Millions of babies in the U.S. rely on formula, which is the only source of nutrition recommended for infants who aren't exclusively breastfed.

Here's a look at what's behind the problem and what parents can do:

Why is there a shortage?

Ongoing supply disruptions have combined with a recent safety recall to squeeze supplies.

The problems began last year as the COVID-19 pandemic led to disruptions in labor, transportation and raw materials  economy-wide issues that didn't spare the formula industry. Inventory was further squeezed by parents stockpiling during COVID-19 lockdowns.

Then in February, Abbott Nutrition recalled several major brands of powdered formula and shut down its Sturgis, Michigan, factory when federal officials began investigating four babies who suffered bacterial infections after consuming formula from the facility.

Abbott is one of only a handful of companies that produce the vast majority of the U.S. formula supply, so their recall wiped out a large segment of the market.

What is in baby formula?

Most formulas are made from protein from cow's milk that's been altered to be easier to digest and enhanced with extra nutrients babies need for growth and development. The Food and Drug Administration sets specific nutritional requirements, including minimum amounts of protein, fat, calcium and a number of vitamins. Formula makers achieve these levels by adding various sugars, oils and minerals.

The formulas are designed to mimic breast milk, though studies have repeatedly shown better health for babies who are breastfed.

Why can't all mothers rely on breast milk?

Health professionals recommend exclusively breastfeeding babies until they are 6 months old. But federal figures show that only 1 in 4 are relying solely on breast milk at that age.

Mothers face a number of challenges to long-term breastfeeding, including returning to work and finding the time and equipment needed to pump breast milk. About 60% of mothers stop breastfeeding sooner than they had planned, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

State and federal laws have been enacted to encourage breastfeeding by requiring break time and accommodations for mothers of infants.

Rates of breastfeeding have consistently been lower among Black babies than other groups. About three quarters of Black babies ever are breast fed, below the national average of 84%, according to the CDC.

What should parents do if they are having trouble finding formula?

Talk with your pediatrician or call a local food bank to see if they can help locate some options. Experts also recommend checking with smaller stores and pharmacies, which may still have supplies when larger stores run out.

Most regular baby formulas contain the same basic ingredients and nutrients, so parents shouldn't hesitate to buy a different brand if they're having trouble finding their regular one.

Some infants require specialty formulas due to allergies, digestive problems and other medical conditions. Parents should talk to their doctor if they can't find those products, which manufacturers usually distribute through pharmacies and clinics.

Low-income families that qualify for WIC  a federal program similar to food stamps that serves mothers and children  can also contact their local agency.

Health officials also warn against buying formula via social media websites or outside of conventional retailers because they could be counterfeit.

Why are parents told not to use make-your-own formula recipes online?

Many do-it-yourself formula recipes are made from cow's milk and granular sugar that may be difficult for young babies to digest. They also lack the specific vitamins and proteins found in breastmilk and FDA-approved formulas that are needed for basic nutrition.

"Particularly for small babies, many of these formulas and mixtures that are found online don't contain even the most basic nutrient mixes that babies need to survive," said Dr. Steven Abrams, a pediatricians at the University of Texas, Austin.

Abrams also stressed that parents should never dilute infant formula.

When are supplies likely to improve?

Health regulators recently announced several steps designed to boost supply, including allowing faster importation of certain foreign brands.

The FDA is working with Abbott to try and fix the violations that triggered the shutdown of its Michigan plant, which produces Similac, EleCare and several other leading brands.

The Chicago-based company said this week that, pending FDA approval, it could restart manufacturing at its plant within two weeks. After that it would take another six to eight weeks before new products hit store shelves.

But even then, experts caution that many of the industrywide issues will continue to restrain supplies.

"This is going to be a problem and it's not going away for at least a period of several months," Abrams said.

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WASHINGTON  A House panel issued subpoenas Thursday to House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and four other GOP lawmakers in its probe into the violent Jan. 6 insurrection, an extraordinary step that has little precedent and is certain to further inflame partisan tensions over the 2021 attack.

Among those receiving subpoenas is U.S. Rep. Scott Perry who represents Pennsylvanias 10th Congressional District. The district includes Carlisle and part of Cumberland County.

The panel is investigating McCarthys conversations with then-President Donald Trump the day of the attack and meetings the four other lawmakers had with the White House beforehand as Trump and his aides worked to overturn his 2020 election defeat. The former presidents supporters violently pushed past police that day, broke through windows and doors of the Capitol and interrupted the certification of President Joe Bidens victory.

The decision to issue subpoenas to McCarthy, R-Calif., Perry and Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Andy Biggs of Arizona and Mo Brooks of Alabama is a show of force by the panel, which has already interviewed nearly 1,000 witnesses and collected more than 100,000 documents as it investigates the worst attack on the Capitol in two centuries.

The move is not without risk, as Republicans are favored to capture back the House majority in this falls midterm elections and have promised retribution for Democrats if they take control.

After the announcement, McCarthy, who aspires to be House speaker, told reporters I have not seen a subpoena and said his view on the Jan. 6 committee has not changed since the nine-lawmaker panel asked for his voluntary cooperation earlier this year.

Theyre not conducting a legitimate investigation, McCarthy said. Seems as though they just want to go after their political opponents.

Similarly, Perry told reporters the investigation is a charade and said the subpoena is all about headlines.

Neither man said whether he would comply.

The panel, made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans, had asked for voluntary cooperation from the five lawmakers, along with a handful of other GOP members, but all of them refused to speak with the panel, which debated for months whether to issue the subpoenas.

Before we hold our hearings next month, we wished to provide members the opportunity to discuss these matters with the committee voluntarily, said Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Democratic chairman of the panel. Regrettably, the individuals receiving subpoenas today have refused and were forced to take this step to help ensure the committee uncovers facts concerning January 6th.

Rep. Liz Cheney, the panels Republican vice chair, said the step wasnt taken lightly. The unwillingness of the lawmakers to provide relevant information about the attack, she said, is a very serious and grave situation.

Congressional subpoenas for sitting members of Congress, especially for a party leader, have little precedent in recent decades, and it is unclear what the consequences would be if any or all of the five men decline to comply. The House has voted to hold two other noncompliant witnesses, former Trump aides Steve Bannon and Mark Meadows, in contempt, referring their cases to the Justice Department.

In announcing the subpoenas, the Jan. 6 panel said there is historical precedent for the move and that the House Ethics Committee has issued a number of subpoenas to Members of Congress for testimony or documents, though such actions are generally done secretly.

We recognize this is fairly unprecedented, said Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, the other GOP member of the panel, after the committee announced the subpoenas. But the Jan. 6 attack was very unprecedented.

Kinzinger said it is important for us to get every piece of information we possibly can.

McCarthy has acknowledged he spoke with Trump on Jan. 6 as Trumps supporters were beating police outside the Capitol and forcing their way into the building. But he has not shared many details. The committee requested information about his conversations with Trump before, during and after the riot.

McCarthy took to the House floor after the rioters were cleared and said in a forceful speech that Trump bears responsibility for the attack and that it was the saddest day I have ever had in Congress  even as he went on to join 138 other House Republicans in voting to reject the election results.

Another member of the GOP caucus, Washington Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, said after the attack that McCarthy had recounted that he told Trump to publicly call off the riot and said the violent mob was made up of Trump supporters, not far-left antifa members, as Trump had claimed.

Thats when, according to McCarthy, the president said, Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are, Herrera Beutler said in a statement last year.

The GOP leader soon made up with Trump, though, visiting him in Florida and rallying House Republicans to vote against investigations of the attack.

The other four men were in touch with the White House for several weeks ahead of the insurrection, talking to Trump and his legal advisers about ways to stop the congressional electoral count on Jan. 6 to certify Joe Bidens victory.

These members include those who participated in meetings at the White House, those who had direct conversations with President Trump leading up to and during the attack on the Capitol, and those who were involved in the planning and coordination of certain activities on and before January 6th, the committee said in a release.

Brooks, who has since been critical of Trump, spoke alongside the former president at the rally in front of the White House the morning of Jan. 6, telling supporters to start taking down names and kicking ass before hundreds of them broke into the Capitol.

Perry spoke to the White House about replacing acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen with an official who was more sympathetic to Trumps false claims of voter fraud, and Biggs was involved in plans to bring protesters to Washington and pressuring state officials to overturn the legitimate election results, according to the panel. Jordan, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, spoke to Trump on Jan. 6 and was also involved in strategizing how to overturn the election.

Several of their efforts were detailed in texts released to the panel by Meadows, who was Trumps chief of staff at the time.

11 days to 1/6 and 25 days to inauguration, Perry texted Meadows on Dec. 26, 2020. We gotta get going!

In the texts released by the committee, Perry encouraged Meadows to talk to Jeffrey Clark, an assistant attorney general who was sympathetic to Trumps bogus claims of election fraud. A week later, on Jan. 3, Clark attended a meeting at the White House with Trump, where the prospect of elevating Clark to the role of acting attorney general was discussed  but adamantly resisted by Justice Department officials, who threatened to resign, and White House lawyers. Trump ultimately backed down.

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Family love. Prince Harry is missed by Prince Williams kids. An insider revealed to Us Weekly on May 12, 2022 that the Duke of Cambridges children with wife Kate MiddletonPrince George, 8, Princess Charlotte, 7, and Prince Louis, 4love their uncle and the rest of their family in the most adorable way.

Princess Charlotte celebrated her 7th birthday on May 2, 2022, and has a yearly tradition to call the royal family members. She adores [Queen Elizabeth II] and her grandpa [Prince] Charles dotes on her in a big way. Theyre very proud of the person shes developing into, just as they are with George and Louis, Us Weeklys source said. When Prince Harry was mentioned, the insider confirmed that Prince William are extremely fond of him also, adding that the Duke of Sussex loves his nieces and nephews very much. The source continued, Charlotte will send everyone in the family thoughtful gifts and cards, and at the very least theyll call as a family to sing happy birthdays and so on.

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The insider also noted that Williams childrens relationship with other royals is a positive sign for the future of the crown. Its extremely comforting for the senior royals to see that the future of the royal family is safe with this next generation at the helm, the insider explained. Obviously, this is a big testament to the manner in which theyre being raised by William and Kate, and the fact theyve had decent values and morals instilled at them from the very beginning of their life journey.

Click here to read the full article.

Prince Harry hasnt properly visited Williams family since he and his wife, Meghan Markle, moved to California in 2020. The pair moved with their child Archie, 3, and welcomed daughter Lilibet in the coastal state in June 2021. Prince Harry briefly came back to the United Kingdom for his grandfather, Prince Philips, funeral in 2021, and again in April 2022 to briefly reunite with his grandmother Queen Elizabeth before the Invictus Games in the Netherlands.

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Harry and Meghan are set to appear at Queen Elizabeths Platinum Jubilee. A statement from the couples representatives said, Prince Harry and Meghan, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are excited and honored to attend The Queens Platinum Jubilee celebrations this June with their children, a spokesperson of the couple announced. This will mark their daughter, Lilibet Dianas, first trip to the UK. However, the couple and their children will not be attending the traditional balcony appearance during the trooping of colour, per the Queens request.

Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.

Buy: Battle of Brothers by Robert Lacey $14.94

For more about Prince Harry and Prince Williams feud, check out historian Robert Laceys 2020 book, Battle of Brothers. In this New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, Lacey takes a close look at Harry and Williams relationship throughout the years and considers each moment that led to their eventual estrangement. From the impact of their mother Princess Dianas tragic death and the pressures of their roles in the royal family (William, the future king vs. Harry, the spare), to the influence their wives Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle have had on their differing paths, Battle of Brothers reveals all the highs, lows, and discretions of these brothers lives in a way never offered before.

Our mission at STYLECASTER is to bring style to the people, and we only feature products we think youll love as much as we do. Please note that if you purchase something by clicking on a link within this story, we may receive a small commission of the sale.

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Meghan Markle is advocating for working moms  and families all over  in a new initiative aiming to increase child care assistance.

The Duchess of Sussex was featured in a release announcing that the Marshall Plan for Moms, an initiative that aims to help change labor conditions for women and working moms in particular, is organizing a National Business Coalition for Child Care.

The business coalition already includes Athletes Unlimited, Care.com, Fast Retailing, Gibson Dunn, Patagonia, Synchrony and Meghan and Harrys Archewell. To join, a company must help provide child care  or a child care benefit  to its employees, according to The New York Times.

Families everywhere, and especially working moms, are asked to shoulder so much, Meghan said in a release shared with HuffPost on Wednesday. This has only been heightened by the pandemic, with increased caregiving responsibilities, rising prices, and economic uncertainty.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex attend the sitting volleyball event during the Invictus Games at Zuiderpark on April 17 in The Hague, Netherlands. (Photo: Karwai Tang via Getty Images)

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex attend the sitting volleyball event during the Invictus Games at Zuiderpark on April 17 in The Hague, Netherlands. (Photo: Karwai Tang via Getty Images)

As its been said many times, it takes a village to raise a child, the duchess added. Today, were sending a message that childcare isnt just a community imperativeits a business imperative. Creating a stronger workforce starts with meeting the needs of families.

In a separate statement, Reshma Saujani, the founder and CEO of the Marshall Plan for Moms, wrote: The input from working parents is clear: employer child care supports can improve the recruitment, retention, productivity, and happiness of employees.

This is not only crucial for the health and wellbeing of individual American families, Saujani said, but also central to American economic competitiveness.

The Duchess of Sussex spoke about the need to assist families, and primarily mothers, when she previously advocated for paid leave for all in a letter addressed to Congress in October.

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In that letter, she spoke of her own upbringing and what it was like for her and her husband, Prince Harry, to welcome their second child, Lilibet, last year. The two are also parents to son Archie, who is 3.

Like any parents, we were overjoyed. Like many parents, we were overwhelmed, Meghan said, in the note published on Paid Leave for All. Like fewer parents, we werent confronted with the harsh reality of either spending those first few critical months with our baby or going back to work.

No family should be faced with these decisions, the duchess said, adding that No family should have to choose between earning a living and having the freedom to take care of their child (or a loved one, or themselves, as we would see with a comprehensive paid leave plan).

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex pictured with their son, Archie Mountbatten-Windsor, at a meeting with Archbishop Desmond Tutu during their royal tour of South Africa on Sept. 25, 2019, in Cape Town, South Africa. (Photo: Pool via Getty Images)

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex pictured with their son, Archie Mountbatten-Windsor, at a meeting with Archbishop Desmond Tutu during their royal tour of South Africa on Sept. 25, 2019, in Cape Town, South Africa. (Photo: Pool via Getty Images)

A national paid leave program was initially part of Democrats comprehensive Build Back Better bill, but opposition from more moderate members of the party led to it being cut.

Paid leave should be a national right, rather than a patchwork option limited to those whose employers have policies in place, or those who live in one of the few states where a leave program exists, Meghan wrote in her October letter. If were going to create a new era of family first policies, lets make sure that includes a strong paid leave program for every American thats guaranteed, accessible, and encouraged without stigma or penalty.

The duchess explained that the issue isnt about Right or Left, its about right or wrong, before invoking her family in her signoff.

So, on behalf of my family, Archie and Lili and Harry, I thank you for considering this letter, and on behalf of all families, I ask you to ensure this consequential moment is not lost.

Subscribe to HuffPosts Watching the Royals newsletter for all things Windsor (and beyond).

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

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SANTA FE  New Mexico officials have released a draft plan to address an ongoing education lawsuit brought by underserved K-12 students, and education advocates and tribal leaders are expected to comb through the document in the coming days.

The New Mexico Public Education Department says its looking for feedback on the plan, which is intended to address a 2018 state court ruling that has dominated education policy and funding discussions among state lawmakers ever since.

In 2018, the court concluded the state has fallen short of its constitutional duty to provide an adequate education, at least to some 70% of K-12 students, including Native Americans, English learners, and those who come from low-income families or have disabilities. The court said students had unequal access to qualified teachers, quality school buildings, and other lessons that engage them tailored to their cultural background and needs.

The 55-page Martinez/Yazzie Discussion Draft Action Plan is named for the mothers of students who sued the state separately, and combined in a lawsuit in 2015. The draft plan outlines targets for improving the diversity of teachers by 20%, increasing graduation rates by 15%, and increasing reading and math proficiency by 50% for groups identified in the lawsuit by 2025, compared to 2019 levels.

More: An ethnic studies expert explains why schoolbooks need replacing  and why cultural relevance matters

It also catalogs changes the administration has made so far, including major salary raises for teachers, and improved social studies standards.

The Martinez/Yazzie Discussion Draft Action Plan is not just a plan for the future; it also reflects all the work thats taken place since the beginning of this administration, and it challenges all of us with strong performance targets to move the needle on key student outcomes, said Secretary of Education Kurt Steinhaus.

In 2020, a state judge denied a request by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham to dismiss the lawsuit. The same judge ruled in 2021 that many of the vulnerable students werent being provided computers and internet sufficient for them to participate in remote learning, despite efforts by education officials to deploy Wi-Fi hot spots and secure laptops for many students.

The education department had promised to release the draft in December, before the state Legislatures annual meeting that determines education funding, but didnt do so, to the chagrin of tribal leaders. The budgets passed earlier this year.

This article originally appeared on Las Cruces Sun-News: New Mexico releases draft plan to address education lawsuit
The former Landmark Hotel will likely wear yet another new name.

A federal judge has approved a nearly $43 million judgment against the owner of the former Landmark Hotel on Charlottesvilles Downtown Mall for trademark infringement and breaching a confidential settlement agreement, permanently preventing the group from using the name Dewberry.

Dewberry Engineers Inc., part of Dewberry, a nationwide architectural, construction and engineering firm, filed the lawsuit against The Dewberry Group, the Atlanta-based real estate group that owns the former Landmark, in May 2020 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria.

The lawsuit was the latest in two decades of legal trouble and stalled development of the barren downtown tower. It was filed after a Daily Progress article in Jan 2020 described a new name for the building, now planned as apartments.

The unfinished skeletal structure remains on Charlottesvilles Downtown Mall, appearing to some as an eyesore and to others as a reminder of the citys towering economic divide.

It was recently wrapped in a $45,000 mural called Music Box on Main by recently minted Friends of Cville Downtown organization. The Dewberry Foundation, associated with the Dewberry Group, donated $10,000 to downtown organization and was listed as a co-sponsor of the mural.

The buildings name was changed from The Landmark to The Dewberry Hotel and then to The Laramore, after Joseph C. Jack Laramore, who designed the street-level portion of the building. Then the buildings name was changed again, to Dewberry Living. The moniker is used for the companys luxury apartment buildings.

However, the new moniker violated a 2007 confidential settlement agreement between the two Dewberry companies, stirring up tensions, according to the lawsuit.

The engineering firm said its longstanding trademarks have once again come under attack, while The Dewberry Group accused the company of committing fraud and called for its trademarks to be canceled.

U.S. District Court Judge Liam OGrady was not swayed by the Dewberry Groups arguments and granted a summary judgment motion in favor of Dewberry Engineers.

A three-day bench trial in October was held to determine damages, during which OGrady wrote that it became apparent that the Dewberry Groups infringement was intentional and ignored numerous red flags alerting it to the illegality of its conduct.

The trial produced further evidence of [the defendants] willfulness and bad faith, OGrady wrote. It showed that Dewberry Group encountered, but ignored, a succession of multiple red flag facts and circumstances alerting it to the illegality of its conduct, and had ample financial motivation for doing so.

The scathing 30-page order includes OGradys determination that Dewberry Group namesake John Dewberry and general counsel David Groce did not deliver credible testimony.

OGrady wrote that it strains credulity to believe that Groce could clearly remember minor details, but have no recollection of the Patent and Trademark Offices far more significant denial of the Dewberry Groups attempts to trademark names that included Dewberry.

Similarly, the court finds that John Dewberrys testimony throughout trial was not credible, OGrady wrote. John Dewberry testified that he wasnt being kept abreast of the [Patent and Trademark Office] application or rejection, claiming that Ive never seen any of this stuff until you showed it to me today.

This professed ignorance is not credible, OGrady wrote. At best, his ignorance amounts to willful blindness.

Much of OGradys order centers on the confidential settlement agreement from 2007 litigation between the companies, which prevented the Dewberry Group from using the name Dewberry, among other things.

Consistent with John Dewberrys pattern of claiming ignorance, when asked at trial whether he had read the [confidential settlement agreement] that he signed, his answer was, probably not, OGrady wrote. Even if true, however, Dewberry Group remains bound by the [agreement].

Dewberry testified that he was not happy to learn that the agreement did not give both parties equal rights to use Dewberry for real estate development services because thats what [he] wanted it to say.

That admission reveals his awareness and dislike of the very [agreement] provisions that [John Dewberry] breached repeatedly, thus providing further evidence of willful and intentional infringement, OGrady wrote.

OGrady wrote that Dewberry tried to blame Groce, claiming his general counsel may have, you know, been hiding [the letter] from me because he was afraid or something. OGrady did not find that credible, either.

Describing the case as exceptional, OGrady awarded Dewberry Engineers nearly $43 million in damages as well as attorneys fees, which have yet to be calculated. A final judgment and permanent injunction were entered earlier this month.

The injunction largely prevents the Dewberry Group from using the word Dewberry in connection with any real estate-related products or services.

The Group is, however, allowed to use the name Dewberry Capital in connection with its promotion, offering and performance of real estate development services as a real estate developer, including purchasing real property, arranging for the construction of commercial and residential buildings and mixed use properties, and leasing and managing properties.

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Bodos Bagels employees, supporters and a few local officials gathered outside of the restaurants Corner location on University Avenue to show support for the union efforts of employees at that location who want to join the United Food and Commercial Workers.

Employees on the organizing committee said they wanted to form a union in order to address several concerns including understaffing, wages that they say dont keep with the areas cost of living and inadequate paid sick leave.

The union effort includes about 14 employees at the Corner Bodos location, one of three in the Charlottesville area.

The crowd included community supporters and union members. Some in the group held signs, including Union Bagels Taste Best and Unionize for Everything, Everywhere All at Once.

Malcolm Augat, a baker at Bodos and member of the union organizing committee, said they like Bodos but want to improve it.

Bodos has long been iconic for Charlottesville. If its going to stay iconic for Charlottesville, it needs to make sure that it has workers from the city who can afford to live in the city, he said.

Not all who showed were in favor. Matt Cantarano, who said hes worked at all three Bodos locations and currently works at the Preston Avenue location, said he was against unionization.

If you want chips, you can work, he said. The problem is people are too lazy. They dont want to work. They just want to get paid for nothing. And Im opposed to that.

In a statement yesterday, Scott Smith, of Bodos, said management supports the right of our employees to choose whether or not they want to bring in a third-party representative.

Virginia is a right-to-work state, where employees are not required to join a union or pay dues.

Private-sector employees can unionize if they are voluntarily recognized by management or through a National Labor Relations Board election.

Previously, the state code prohibited local governing bodies from recognizing any labor union or other employee association as a bargaining agent or to collectively bargain with them but that changed last May.

Now teachers and other public-sector employees can negotiate a contract that would cover wages, hours and other work conditions, but first the local government or school board must approve an ordinance to allow collective bargaining.

Since the law changed, Charlottesville firefighters, transit employees and schools employees have proposed collective bargaining ordinances. Albemarle County schools employees have also submitted a collective bargaining resolution.

Charlottesville City Councilors Michael Payne and Sena Magill and Del. Sally Hudson, D-Charlottesville, spoke out in support of the unionization.

Payne said the city has to get our act together when it comes to city employees who want to collective bargain.

Charlottesville is currently interviewing consultants who will help create a collective bargaining ordinance. Interim City Manager Michael Rogers told councilors recently that he expects to bring an ordinance that would permit collective bargaining for city employees to council in early summer.

There is also a union representing University of Virginia employees, but they are considered state employees, and there is no state law that requires the university to negotiate with their union.

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South Africa: Joint Response Tactical Team leads search and rescue operations in KZN

Deputy President David Mabuza says government has activated a Joint Response Tactical Team to spearhead search and rescue operations in KwaZulu-Natal in the aftermath of the devastating floods in the province.

The Deputy President said this when he responded to oral questions before a hybrid sitting of National Council of Provinces on Thursday.

The organs of State, across all spheres of government, have also activated contingency arrangements in line with their respective mandates, and integrated institutional arrangements to deal with the disaster.

As part of an integrated response to this disaster, government has developed a National Integrated Flood Response and Recovery Plan that outlines the multi-sectoral response and recovery efforts to be implemented by all stakeholders in affected communities, he said.

The Deputy President said through this plan, government has adopted a three-pronged approach to the disaster response and recovery. This includes:

 Phase 1: Immediate humanitarian relief, to ensure that all affected persons are safe and that their basic needs are met;

 Phase 2: Stabilisation and recovery, which includes rehousing people who have lost homes and restoring provision of services; and

 Phase 3: Reconstruction and rehabilitation, with a focus on Building Back Better.

In line with this approach, government activated a Joint Response Tactical Team comprising search and rescue specialists from all first responders across public, private and volunteer organisations, in order to spearhead the search and rescue operations, as well as provide humanitarian relief to communities affected by this disaster in KwaZulu-Natal province, he said.

Mabuza said the team is based at the Virginia Airport, which is located 10 kilometres north east of Durban, and is supported by the South African Police Service Air Wing, and the South African National Defence Force with a variety of resources including aircraft, engineers, as well as water bunkers and tankers to support the provision of basic services to the affected areas.

As part of the rapid response interventions, the National Disaster Management Centre reported that, as of 30 April, 8 096 people in KwaZulu-Natal were being accommodated in 98 shelters, he said.

Government implementing rapid response interventions

The Deputy President said the recent floods and heavy rains in the provinces of KwaZulu-Natal and some parts of the Eastern Cape, as well as parts of the North West, have brought untold misery and suffering.

We have witnessed severe damage and destruction of houses, property, infrastructure, loss of homes, personal possessions, as well as unprecedented loss of lives and livelihoods, with the devastation felt most acutely in KwaZulu-Natal.

Once again, we would like to express our deepest condolences to all the families and relatives of the people who have lost their lives due to this natural disaster and tragic calamity.

Our thoughts and prayers are also with all the families whose members are still not accounted for. We remain hopeful that continued recovery and rescue efforts will help us find closure in this regard.

The Deputy President said in responding to the damage that has been brought about by the devastating floods, on 18 April, the President declared a National State of Disaster as an effective response by all spheres of government to this disaster.

In the main, this is to enable government to urgently coordinate and deploy all necessary resources to affected areas as part of its rapid response interventions.

In terms of the National State of Disaster, the primary responsibility to coordinate and manage the disaster is assigned to the national sphere of government, working closely with provincial governments and municipalities of the affected areas.

This enables the mobilisation of resources, capabilities and technical expertise in providing relief, recovery and rehabilitation to affected communities.

The Deputy President said in this regard, the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, through the National Disaster Management Centre, is coordinating the response and recovery measures by the relevant organs of State and stakeholders.

Continuous assessments to determine cost of damage

Mabuza said, meanwhile, that government is conducting continuous technical assessments of costs to determine the extent of damage in affected areas that will determine medium- to long-term interventions.

Furthermore, to fast track the implementation of response and recovery interventions, National Treasury has issued guidelines to the affected provinces and municipalities on budget reprioritisation and reallocation of existing conditional grants, in line with the Public Finance Management Act.

This will enable National Treasury and the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs to finance shortfalls that are currently being experienced by organs of State, given the extent and magnitude of the impact of the damage, in order to bring back normality, and restore the delivery of services to the affected communities.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2022-05-12. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Amnesty International

May 11, 2022

PRESS RELEASE

Authorities in Sri Lanka must immediately rescind the emergency regulations and shooting orders that provide excessive powers to the police and military, and take immediate steps to respect, protect and fulfil the human rights of peaceful protestors, Amnesty International said today.

The authorities must also refrain from using the state of emergency as a pretext to curb the rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression, including at the protest sites such as Gotagogama in the country.

Following the Presidents proclamation of a State of Emergency on 6 May along with a country-wide curfew from 9-12 May, backdated emergency regulations were published overnight on 9 May. They give sweeping powers to the police and the armed forces to search and make arrests of suspects without due process safeguards. On 9 May, protesters peacefully demonstrating in front of the Presidential Secretariat since over a month were violently attacked by pro-government supporters after being allegedly incited to violence by top party leaders at Temple Trees, the Prime Ministers official residence in Colombo. The police stood largely as bystanders to the violence, doing little to effectively protect the peaceful protesters and their protest site, despite having used tear gas and water cannon to disperse the protestors just days before on 6 May.

Authorities in Sri Lanka should carry out a prompt, thorough, impartial, independent, effective and transparent investigation into the reports of violent attacks on peaceful protesters. Authorities should bring to justice those suspected to be responsible and ensure access to justice and effective remedies for victims, said Yamini Mishra, South Asia Regional Director at Amnesty International.

The attacks look like a deliberate decision by the Police to allow pro-government groups to physically assault peaceful protesters, destroy structures and wreak havoc at the Gotagogama protest site. The authorities have an obligation to provide an enabling environment for the protesters to peacefully exercise their human rights, and to end the violent attacks on protesters, added Yamini Mishra.

Elements of anti-government groups retaliated to the attack on 9 May by beating up pro-government supporters and destroying buses believed to have transported them. This escalated into targeting of parliamentarians with damage to their vehicles and arson against their homes, businesses, and party offices. According to authorities, nine people have died and over 220 people have been injured in the violence that erupted. Additionally, 41 vehicles had been set on fire, 61 vehicles were damaged, and 136 incidents of property damage were recorded.

Justice and accountability from the Sri Lankan authorities is the need of the hour.

Yamini Mishra, South Asia Regional Director at Amnesty International

Justice and accountability from the Sri Lankan authorities is the need of the hour. An effective and transparent inquiry is necessary to bring those responsible for the violence to justice. The country is headed towards a deepening crisis while accountability and solutions for the economic crisis  key calls by the protesters  go completely unaddressed. Right now, Sri Lanka is a tinderbox, and any move to impermissibly restrict human rights through sweeping emergency powers granted to law enforcement agencies, including the armed forces,  will lead to further repression, said Yamini Mishra.

The Emergency Regulations lack due process safeguards, such as the right to be informed of the reason for arrest, and the issuance of an arrest receipt at the time of arrest informing family where they would be detained. Access to legal counsel is subject to conditions. The offences are broad and can be used to bar trade union strike actions, give powers to the President to shut down public processions, restrict access to public spaces, restrict the right to freedom of expression including the right to information, freedom of movement and peaceful assembly.

Further, the Regulations provide powers to use armed force against anyone who does not comply with orders. The Regulations come with hefty penalties including life imprisonment for ordinary penal offences. There is also no access to bail for offences under the Regulations, except under exceptional circumstances. Persons authorised by the commanders of the armed forces are empowered by the Regulations to remove suspects from detention for a period of seven days at a time. Sri Lankan authorities are accused of multiple instances of custodial torture in the past, making these provisions dangerous and raising the possibility of misuse of these powers.

On 10 May, the Defence Ministry issued a notice saying the Armed forces have been ordered to open fire at anyone looting public property or causing harm to others- a move that has been called illegal by some parliamentarians. The cabinet remains dissolved following the PMs resignation on 9 May.

The shooting orders provide a license to kill. Violent mobs should be contained, however lethal force must not be the first resort. Any restrictions on human rights during times of emergency must be necessary and proportionate to the exigencies of the situation and must not be used as a tool against freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, right to personal security, liberty and freedom from arbitrary detention. Further, any derogations from human rights guarantees under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Sri Lanka is a state party, should be formally communicated with a clear explanation of the reasons for them to other State parties, said Yamini Mishra.

Sri Lanka has a history of human rights violations implicating the Military, including custodial torture under consecutive emergency situations in the past. This pattern of violations of human rights must end.
Charlottesville City Schools new safety model that was rolled out this year is going well, division officials recently told the school board.

I would say it has been successful, and it will improve, said Jason Lee, the divisions supervisor of facilities, safety and operations. I think with all the data were collecting, the people we are bringing to the table, and the conversations we are having, it can only get better and better.

The school board decided in summer 2020 to remove school resource officers from buildings. After months of discussions, the board signed off a new model in May 2021 that included hiring eight care and safety assistants who would monitor hallways and build relationships with students along with additional social-emotional support counselors and social workers.

Were a year into this, Lee said. Were analyzing it, and were aware of some of the deficits. There are some glows but there are some grows as well.  Were one of four schools in the state of Virginia that were brave enough to do what we did. I think it was a success.

Charlottesville schools had 77 incidents this school year through April 28 that required a response from either Charlottesville Fire, EMS or the police department. About 70% of those were handled by the Charlottesville Police Department, which included responses from multiple agencies.

Charlottesville High and Buford Middle schools accounted for the most calls. About a one-third were for medical attention, 28% were for verbal or social media threats, 14.7% were theft, vandalism or trespassing, and 13.7% were for drug-related offenses, according to the presentation.

This is the first year the school division has collected this type of information. This year will serve as the baseline for future comparisons, officials said.

Lee said that the response time from agencies is a significant challenge, and hes working with area agencies to improve it. When the school system had SROs on site, the officer could call directly for a response. Now, school officials go through 911.

It hasnt been a lot of an issue, but again, theres that gap of time, Lee said.

The core part of the new model is the care and safety assistants. Lee said they have completed several different trainings this year and are certified as school safety officers through the state.

We picked the right people for the job, Lee said. We have people that are really invested in the community and the students and the students.

Many of the assistants hired at the beginning of the school year had existing relationships with the schools where they worked.

About a third of students at Buford Middle and Charlottesville High schools who participated in a division survey said the assistants have helped maintain safety or been helpful to them or others, according to the presentation. About 46% of the respondents said they didnt have an opinion or were neutral on the topic.

A majority of staff members who responded to the survey agreed that the CSAs have been helpful.

Lee said the students who were neutral might have not sought the support of the CSAs.

But it could be students who dont know the services that CSAs actually provide, so we could do a better job of pushing in and allowing them to understand the services that CSAs could bring, Lee said. Thats just me speculating as I analyze it and break it down.

This was the first year that the school division crafted and administered its own school safety survey. About 1,020 students responded along with 112 teachers.

About half of the students said they felt safe at school, though 17.2% said they didnt, according to the results shared last week. About 60% of staff said they felt safe at school.

For a majority of students, having friends at school makes them feel safe. Staff members said on the survey that they thought staff helps students feel the safest.

Students and staff said on the survey that they felt unsafe in the bathrooms and during hallway transitions. Board members requested more information about that and for suggestions on how they could address that concern.

These are all areas where most building-level individuals understand that theres a little bit more free rein, free space, Lee said.

About 40% of students agreed that mental health professionals in their schools have been helpful along with nearly 85% of staff members.

About 30.7% of students said they didnt think teachers or staff knew how to handle student behavior or disruptions, though 31.5% of students said the opposite.

Meanwhile, about 57% of staff members said they felt equipped to handle student behavior or disruptions,

Students largely agreed that teachers and staff cared about them, and a majority said they have an adult in the building they can trust.

Most of the staff who responded said they felt equipped to build good relationships with students and had at least one colleague they could trust if they needed help.

Thats very important as you build that culture of care within your buildings, Lee said.

Moving forward, Lee said the school system is continuing to work on improving building security systems and providing de-escalation training for all staff.

The more people we have that are on board to have de-escalation skills, the safer and safer our schools are, Lee said.

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Two Charlottesville-area candidates for the 5th Congressional District of Virginia may have very different views, but they both want the same thing.

They want to unseat and replace incumbent U.S. Rep. Bob Good, a Republican.

Dan Moy, a Republican challenging Good for the partys nomination, and Josh Throneburg, the Democratic Partys nominee for the November election, held simultaneous campaign events in the city Tuesday night.

Moy held a meet and greet at the 3twenty3 building in downtown Charlottesville, gathering with a small group of constituents for coffee and desserts. While Moy holds some similar views to Good, he said he sees Good as a missing politician, which is part of why he decided to run.

[Good] has been missing-in-action when it comes to working on the issues that would address the problems in our local economy: opioid addiction, drug addiction, Moy said. Broadband access is still a problem in our area. Getting manufacturing and jobs back so our young people dont leave the 5th District to go elsewhere. These are all highly relevant issues that are actually not partisan in nature.

Moy, a retired Air Force colonel, said the most important issue to his campaign is the economy.

People have lost faith in government leaders to do anything productive in their daily lives. This is why Ive placed such a great emphasis on doing something to renew our local economy, the bread and butter issues that every day Virginians care about, Moy said.

Other issues Moy is focused on are Second Amendment rights, defunding Planned Parenthood and supporting law enforcement. He also says he wants to work in line with Gov. Glenn Youngkin and prevent a radical left agenda in the state.

It was just a short walk away to go further left. At the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, Throneburg held a community forum where a couple dozen constituents gathered to ask questions of the Democratic nominee.

Throneburg said he knows itll be a tough district to win, given its tendency to swing red.

The district leans to the right, but there are lots of great spaces that are kind of new to the district, he said. We have Lynchburg, which is this incredibly diverse and lively community, and I think theres a lot of opportunity for us to connect with folks there. We have a lot of these new counties that are coming out of the 7th District.

The district boundaries across the state were redrawn in 2020 and are redrawn every decade following the census. The federal government requires districts have nearly equal populations and not discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity.

In the past, some of the district lines made little geographic sense and were instead designed to give one party a better chance of winning the Congressional seat.

In Virginia, legislative district boundaries are now set by a 16-member commission comprising state legislators and non-legislator citizens. The General Assembly must vote to approve the maps without amending them.

If the General Assembly rejects the first set of draft maps, the commission must submit another. If the General Assembly rejects this second set of draft maps, the Virginia Supreme Court is tasked with enacting new maps.

The court approved the new districts at the end of last year.

Although the districts have changed, it didnt necessarily make it easier, Throneburg said.

Its a challenging district, for sure, for Democrats to win in, but I think we have an opportunity here, Throneburg said.

Throneburg said hes running for the future of his children. A big focus of his campaign is mitigating the effects of climate change.

When youre a father, the thing you want most in this world is to create a space where your kids can be healthy and safe and thrive. And right now this planet and this country arent providing that, so I want to be a part of solving those problems, he said.

Throneburg said part of his commitment to the future of children is his commitment to education. This includes investing more resources in schools with better pay for teachers, upgrading facilities and improving safety.

Throneburgs campaign is focused on improved healthcare access and affordability, racial justice and protecting abortion rights. He said he believes in gun violence prevention but said he does not support taking guns away from gun owners.

Moy also voiced a focus on education, but said his concern is that parents should be able to have a say in what is being taught in the classroom. He said he believes in keeping political agendas out of schools.

I think that there has been a concern that children are being challenged to question what theyre being taught in their homes and churches, to question whether those values are relevant or not in the school system. I think that we, as parents, should be completely aware of what our curriculum in schools is addressing, and we should have a voice in it, Moy said.

Both Moy and Throneburg said they want to address issues affecting rural communities and fix broadband internet access issues across the state.

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Construction of the often-delayed and increasingly expensive Mountain Valley Pipeline has left its mark on the balance sheet of the corporate parent of Roanoke Gas Co.

In a conference call Wednesday to discuss second-quarter earnings, RGC Resources reported an impairment charge of about $29.6 million related to the investment by one of the companys subsidiaries, RGC Midstream, in the natural gas pipeline.

RGC Midstream is a 1% partner in the $6.6 billion joint venture, which will expand the supply of two existing natural gas pipelines to the customers of Roanoke Gas, another subsidiary of RGC Resources.

The $29.6 million impairment is essentially a write-down of the value of the companys role in Mountain Valley, which has been hampered by legal challenges from environmental groups. Since work on the pipeline began in 2018, the cost has nearly doubled and completion has been delayed by four years.

RGC Resources President and CEO Paul Nester said the after-tax impairment loss reduces the pipelines $66 million value to the company by about 60%.

Other partners in the project have recorded larger impairments  commensurate with their more expansive stakes in the 303-mile interstate pipeline  with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, following a series of setbacks that include a federal appeals courts rejection of two key Mountain Valley permits earlier this year.

Neither RGCs original investment nor the impairment will impact the rates paid by Roanoke Gass 63,000-some customers in the Roanoke and New River valleys, Nester said.

Generally, an impairment loss occurs when the fair market value of a company-owned asset falls below its recorded value, decreasing net income, according to Dana Garner, an assistant professor in Virginia Techs Pamplin College of Business.

In its SEC filing, RGC Resources listed a net loss of about $24 million for the quarter that ended March 31, reflecting the first Mountain Valley-related impairment that it has reported.

Pipeline opponents  who cite the environmental damage caused by construction as well as the finished projects contribution to climate change  say its investors should abandon a failing venture.

But Nester said Wednesday that RGC continues to support a pipeline that is nearly completed. He said that an additional source of fuel is needed for the Roanoke region and that Mountain Valley would relieve a shortage caused by geopolitical events and help bring prices down.

The Roanoke Valley, the commonwealth of Virginia and the United States need the Mountain Valley Pipeline more than ever, he said.

We are really troubled by the fact that area businesses and residential customers have been and will continue to be forced to absorb elevated natural gas costs, he said in the conference call.

Through March 31, RGC Midstream has invested $55.3 million in the pipeline. Another $10 million is needed for completion, Nester said.

Excluding the impairment, underlying net income grew by 6.5% in the second quarter for RGC Resources, which the company attributed to its investment in infrastructure replacement programs, steady customer growth and a significant increase in natural gas use by an industry it serves.

The most recent setback for Mountain Valley, which would transport 2 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas through the Roanoke and New River valleys, came earlier with year at the hands of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Citing environmental concerns, the Fourth Circuit rejected two government approvals, one that allowed the pipeline to pass through the Jefferson National Forest in Giles and Montgomery counties and the other a finding that endangered species would not be jeopardized along the lines route from northern West Virginia to Southside Virginia, where it will connect with an existing pipeline.

Last week, Mountain Valley said it would seek new permits, which will increase the cost from $6.2 billion to $6.6 billion and extend a projected completion date from this summer to the second half of next year.

It is not unusual for a publicly traded company to record impairments, according to Michelle Hagadorn, a professor and associate chair of the Business Administration and Economics Department at Roanoke College.

Impairment losses can occur for a variety of reasons: physical damage to the asset, a permanent reduction in market value, legal issues against the asset, and early asset disposal, she wrote in an email.

But success is far from guaranteed, as evidenced by the pipelines eight-year history of regulatory and legal obstacles.

There are ongoing, and potential future legal and regulatory matters related to MVP, any of which could affect the ability to complete or operate the project, RGC said in its SEC filing.
The lady at the Madison County School Board meeting Tuesday night made an important point. In so many words, she raised the question of what schools should teach children.

Sadly, her answer did not include Virginias history of racism. She was all for math and science. But she seemed to consider it political to talk about subjects like the treatment of Black people in Virginia and the U.S. Those discussions would likely include the institution of slavery, lynching of Blacks, laws denying Blacks access to public facilities because of the color of their skin, and legally forbidding interracial marriage.

If race relations is not a proper subject to teach school children, it is hard to know what is. School boards like Madisons, which seems likely to restrict teaching about race relations, and Orange County, which voted to impose those restrictions Tuesday night, could join dozens of counties across the Commonwealth that now lie by omission to their students.

That undercuts the fundamental idea of education.

We learn from our mistakes. Acting like America did nothing wrong in its treatment of Blacks is not just passive prevarication, it is delusion. It does not help us all get along. The U.S. grows more diverse by the day. We should celebrate our system of freedom and inclusion. But we cannot escape the fact that it never would have developed if leaders had not intervened to end slavery with the Civil War and then battled for civil rights. As the current battle over the removal and disposal of Confederate statues in Charlottesville and other places proves, work remains to be done.

Mandates like the one Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued as his first executive order ensured that this work will not take place. In a Republican political strategy now being applied across the country, Youngkin banned discussion of institutional racism from classrooms. He also banned discussion of all divisive subject matter, which has now been interpreted to include matters of sexual orientation and gender identity. Meanwhile, the governor welcomes a Supreme Court decision overturning womens control of their bodies. Hes happy the Virginia General Assembly may soon get to dictate whether women can be forced to remain pregnant against their will. Sex education in schools could soon be on the chopping block.

The removal of race and sex from school curricula portends a kind of legally enforced ignorance among young people that cedes those topics to parents. Many of those parents will simply not talk about them. Others might distort facts if they do. Students need to know history to move the country forward, not backward. But the governors proclamation that divisive topics are verboten scares school boards into compliance. It makes teachers constantly second-guess themselves. A teacher speaking at the Madison School Board meeting spoke for hundreds of teachers across the state when she told the board that she loved the county but no longer loved teaching because she felt that parents were being pitted against teachers.

Youngkin seems to welcome the divide as it wins him support from White conservatives. As school boards do what the governor requires, White parents no longer need worry about their children being asked to understand what it meant to be owned by another human being. Students of all races and religions will not get to debate topics such as why it took from 1900 until 2022 for the United States Congress to pass a law making lynching a federal hate crime

(Heres a hint: Southern states blocked the legislation.)

At least Madison County has pledged to discuss a proposed ban on race discussions and limits on instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity with parents and teachers before deciding.

We wonder if counties which so eagerly answered the governors call for lies of omission after it was issued were the same counties which were already unconcerned and/or uncomfortable tackling the ugly legacies of racism.

Parents will always be the primary source of information that shapes the character and beliefs of their children. Teaching those same children history and current cultural trends is why we have schools.
The wordsmithing has begun as Benton County officials prepare for a bond measure campaign needed to build a long-desired, $100 million-plus justice system campus. In their crosshairs: what to call the site.

And the word "public."

What the county previously referred to as the north site  an undeveloped lot near HP Inc.  is now dubbed the "Community Safety and Justice Campus." The new name recommendation was favored over the "Justice and Community Safety Campus," per a 7-3 vote of the Justice System Improvement Program Executive Committee.

Part of the debate was whether to use the word "public" or "community" in the name.

According to Chris Edmonds of Lake Oswego-based Coastline Public Relations, a consultant hired by the county, the group found "public" to be more sterile, less accessible and less inclusive than community.

They felt the word "community" best reflects the countys values, he said.

'Community' is really sort of a welcoming term, Edmonds said at the county Board of Commissioners meeting Tuesday, May 10.

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The executive committee is composed of county officials, including Commissioner Xan Augerot, Presiding Judge Locke Williams, Sheriff Jef Van Arsdall, District Attorney John Haroldson and County Administrator Joe Kerby among others.

The campus naming is intended to reinforce the countys site pick as final, putting an end to any discussions of other possible locations. There was no official vote on Tuesday, but commissioners agreed with the new title.

A process for specifically naming the individual facilities as well as the campus itself is expected in the future.

When we refer to it as the north site, it only makes sense in context with other directional options, Edmonds said. Now that a decision has been made on that, its time to give this campus a name.

The first in a pair of surveys to gauge the communitys feelings about a bond measure is expected to roll out from May 23 to May 27. It will include hypothetical questions regarding both a $95 million bond and also a $75 million option that would not include not include the sheriffs office.

The idea of paying for a new courthouse or a crisis resource center has not gone to the ballot before, but voters have rejected three jail bonds since 2000, all at much lower price points. The last one, in 2015, sought $25 million and failed by four percentage points.

Cody Mann covers Benton County and the cities of Corvallis and Philomath. He can be contacted at 541-812-6113 or Cody.Mann@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter via @News_Mann_.

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People Who Paper, 5:30 p.m. Thursday, May 12, Maxtivity Art and Craft Creative Space, 1604 Main St., Philomath. Bring a project, use the center's space and tools. No registration necessary. Cost: $10.

Live music by DRTR, 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday, May 12, Common Fields, 545 SW Third St., Corvallis. Information: 541-757-1544.

Live music by Wild Hog Jam, 7 to 10 p.m. Thursday, May 12, Old World Center, 341 SW Second St., Corvallis. Admission: free. Information: 541-231-4701.

South Albany High School presents "And Then They Came for Me: Remembering the World of Anne Frank" by James Still, 7 p.m. Thursday, May 12 through Saturday, May 14, and 2 p.m. Sunday, May 15; livestream of May 13 and 14 performances; Ellizabeth Bentley Theater, SAHS, 3705 SE Columbus St. Due to the subject matter, the play is not suitable for young children. Tickets: $10 for adults, $5 for students; available at https://www.showtix4u.com/event-details/64107.

University Theatre presents "On the Razzle" by Tom Stoppard, 7:30 p.m. Thursday, May 12, Withycombe Hall, 2901 SW Campus Way, Corvallis. The show follows two silly assistants on an adventure in the city of Vienna, which leads to a wild chase, mistaken identity and a little romance. "On the Razzle" is adapted from the 19th-century Viennese farce "Einen Jux will er sich machen" by Johann Nestroy, which became the basis of Thorton Wilders "Matchmaker" and later "Hello, Dolly!" Tickets: https://oregonstatecla.universitytickets.com/w/event2.aspx?SeriesID=4.

Live Celtic music by the Loose Flagstone, 7 to 10 p.m. Friday, May 13, Old World Center, 341 SW Second St., Corvallis. Musicians include Leslie Glassmire (flute), Jennifer Parke (fiddle), Tracy Daugherty (bodhran) and Marjorie Sandor (guitar). Benefit for the Corvallis Sister Cities Association Uzhhorod Refugee Fund. Suggested donation: $5 to $20. Information: 541-231-4701.

Chamber Music Corvallis concert, 7:30 p.m., Friday, May 13, First Presbyterian Church, 114 SW Eighth St. The Cuarteto Lationamericano will play string quartet works of Villa-Lobos, Ponce and other Latin-American composers. The quartet will give an informational talk at 6:45 p.m.

"Eminent Oregonians: Three Who Matter," 2 p.m. Sunday, May 15, Lakeside Center, Mennonite Village, 2180 54th Ave. SE, Albany. Journalist R. Gregory Nokes will speak on the abolitionist Jesse Applegate; Jane Kirkpatrick will describe suffragist Abigail Scott Duniway; and publisher Steve Forrester will discuss Richard Neuberger, whose election to the U.S. Senate changed Oregon and national politics. Free; sponsored by the Linn County Historical Society.

Tours, 11 a.m. and 1 and 3 p.m. Monday, May 16, S.E. Young Building; meet at the Broadalbin Street entrance to the Natty Dresser, 124 Broadalbin St. SW, Albany, five minutes before the tour. RSVP: 541-248-3561.

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Fundraiser for the Corvallis Sister Cities Association's Uzhhorod (Ukraine) Refugee Fund. Earl Newman, an artist and screen printer who lives in Summit, has created and donated a screen-printed poster illustrating support for Ukraine. Two hundred numbered posters will be printed; several framed posters will be available. The prints will sell for $100 each to be donated to the refugee fund; framed prints will cost extra. Information: 541-760-8081 or caroltrueba@gmail.com.

Rally to support Ukraine, noon to 2 p.m. Saturdays, Benton County Courthouse, 120 NW Fourth St., Corvallis. All are invited to come show solidarity with Ukraine in an event that is not antiwar or anti-Russia but pro-Ukraine. Those attending can bring Ukrainian flags, sunflowers and signs showing support. Updates on the humanitarian aspect of the war will be given. Information: 7442117@gmail.com.

Fundraiser to support refugee fund: Four-notecard packs and 8 x 10 prints featuring paintings by Corvallis sisters Allessandra Bakker, 16, and Isabella Bakker, 13, are available for purchase at Visit Corvallis and Benton County Historical Societys Corvallis and Philomath museums for $25 and $30, respectively. Proceeds go toward the Corvallis Sister Cities Associations Uzhhorod Refugee Fund.

Benefit for refugee fund: Celtic music by Corvallis band Loose Flagstone, 7 to 10 p.m. Friday, May 13, Old World Deli, 341 SW Second St. Proceeds will go to the Corvallis Sister Cities Association Uzhhorod Refugee Fund. Suggested donation: $5 to $20. Musicians include Leslie Glassmire (flute), Jennifer Parke (fiddle), Tracy Daugherty (bodhran) and Marjorie Sandor (guitar).

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Associated Press of Pakistan: Yesterday State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi had a virtual meeting with Pakistani Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari. We noted that it is the first meeting between Chinese and Pakistani foreign ministers since the new Pakistani government came into power. Can you share more information?

Zhao Lijian: State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi had a virtual meeting with Pakistani Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari yesterday. It is not only the first meeting between Chinese and Pakistani foreign ministers since the new Pakistani government came into office, but also the first official bilateral activity of Foreign Minister Bilawal Zardari since he was inaugurated. The two foreign ministers reached important consensus on deepening the all-weather strategic cooperative partnership and practical cooperation between the two countries, and exchanged views on better protecting the security of Chinese citizens and institutions in Pakistan. The two foreign ministers shared the following.

First, the two countries should carry forward their traditional friendship. Developing amicable relations with China has always been a common perception in Pakistan that transcends all political differences and enjoys a high degree of agreement throughout Pakistan. Foreign Minister Bilawal Zardari said Pakistan-China friendship is a cornerstone of Pakistans foreign policy and a strategic priority. The new Pakistani government will promote Pakistan-China relations at Pakistan speed. State Councilor Wang Yi also stressed that the friendship between the two sides will be passed on from generation to generation and will not be shaken or changed by any single event. It is believed that, with joint efforts, China-Pakistan all-weather strategic cooperative partnership will be further developed and traditional friendship will be further carried forward.

Second, the two countries should deepen practical cooperation in various areas. China is ready to seek greater synergy between the two countries development strategies, support Pakistan in maintaining economic and financial stability, and build a high-quality China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) together. The two sides should not only properly operate and develop existing important projects, but also further their cooperation in industrial and other sectors to boost the vitality and resilience of Pakistans economic development. The two countries should carry out more livelihood projects, so that CPEC can better benefit the people along the route and achieve the goal of high standard, sustainable and people-centered development.

Lastly, the two countries should strengthen counter-terrorism and law enforcement and security cooperation. For some time, Pakistan has seen a series of terrorist attacks on Chinese nationals. The Chinese government and Chinese leaders attach great importance to this, and the Chinese society and people pay close attention to it. The Pakistani side has committed to make thorough investigation and bring all criminals to justice, enhance security protection of Chinese programs and personnel in Pakistan, and resolutely prevent any malicious provocation and sabotage targeting CPEC. Any forces' attempt to undermine China-Pakistan relations will never succeed.

CCTV: According to reports, by May 11, 98% of the votes in the presidential election of the Philippines have been counted. Presidential candidate Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos and his running mate Sara Zimmerman Duterte-Carpio were elected as President and Vice President respectively in a landslide victory with 60% of the votes. Does China have any comment? Whats your expectation for future relations between China and the Philippines?

Zhao Lijian: On May 11, President Xi Jinping sent a congratulatory message to Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos on his election as President of the Philippines. On the same day, Vice President Wang Qishan sent a congratulatory message to Sara Zimmerman Duterte-Carpio on her election as Vice President of the Philippines.

As President Xi Jinping stressed in the congratulatory message, China and the Philippines are neighbors facing each other across the waters and partners through thick and thin. In recent years, with the joint efforts of both sides, China-Philippines relations have been consolidated and enhanced, bringing benefits to the people of both countries and contributing to regional peace and stability. At present, both China and the Philippines are at a critical stage of development, and bilateral relations face important opportunities and broad prospects. China attaches great importance to China-Philippines relations and stands ready to work together with the Philippines to adhere to good-neighborly friendship and common development, and push forward our comprehensive strategic cooperative relationship for the benefit of both countries and peoples.

Beijing Daily: The US Interior Department released a report on May 11 that at least 500 American Indians, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children died while in boarding schools operated or supported by the US government. What is your comment?

Zhao Lijian: I have noted the report you mentioned. It confirmed that Indigenous children of the US endured a tragic past of torture in Indian boarding schools. The report expects that continued investigation will reveal the approximate number of Indigenous children who died at Federal Indian boarding schools to be in the thousands or tens of thousands.

Such a report is long overdue. Prior to that, the US government had never kept official statistics on the real conditions of these schools, or verified the number of Indigenous children who went to the institutions, died there or were missing. In fact, the US was reluctant to admit the existence of the history at first, and even tried to cover it up. But the great pressure from the Indigenous communities, the whole country and the wider world eventually compelled the US to look into the past and unearth facts that shock the world. The report shows from 1819 to 1969, Indigenous children went through unfair treatment including whipping, sexual abuse, forced labor and severe malnourishment in more than 400 federal Indian boarding schools, and more than 500 children died as a result.

The US is founded on the atrocious massacre and persecution of the Indigenous population. The maltreatment of Indigenous people is the US original sin convicted by the Indian boarding schools. American Indians used to be the dominant population in North America, which has shrunk to represent only 2% of the current US population after massacre and eviction. The US achieved cultural assimilation and territorial dispossession with forced separation and resettlement of Indigenous children. But the trauma generations have gone through persists even till today. American Indians are still under discrimination with worrying health conditions and destitution. Among all the ethnic communities of the US, American Indians have the lowest life expectancy, the highest poverty rate, the highest rate of youth alcohol abuse, and the lowest community doctor-to-patient ratio. In 2019, about 25% of American Indians lived in poverty, which is 2.5 times that of the national average.

The dark history of Indian boarding schools is only a tip of the iceberg of the US systemic racial discrimination and human rights problems. Racial minorities including Americans of Asian, African, Latin American descent and Muslims still cannot breathe or gain security. Statistics from US research institutions revealed that anti-Asian hate crimes surged by 339% in 2021. From the Tulsa Massacre to George Floyd, and to Patrick Lyoya of Michigan who died of police violence not long ago, the list of African American deaths only goes on and on amid racial discrimination. People of Latin American descent, accounting for 19% of the US population, only possess 2% of the countrys wealth. Up to 93.7% of Muslims in the US are living in the shadows of Islamophobia.

The US should fulfill its commitment of all men are created equal with concrete actions, and adopt serious measures to truly help ethnic minorities get over their trauma. More importantly, the US should learn from history, treat the social endemic of racism, and avoid repeating the human rights tragedies time and again.

Yonhap News Agency: First, it is reported that the US may launch the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework as early as May, and both the ROK and Japan are expected to join it. What is Chinas comment on that? Second, there are media reports that the DPRK has identified a COVID-19 case. Will China have anti-epidemic and vaccine cooperation with the DPRK?

Zhao Lijian: On your first question, China believes that any regional cooperation framework in the Asia-Pacific should meet the trend of the times for peace and development, promote mutual trust and cooperation among regional countries, embody the philosophy of openness, transparency, inclusiveness, equality, mutual respect, mutual trust and mutual benefit, and follow the principle of respecting others sovereignty and non-interference in others internal affairs. The Asia-Pacific is a promising land for cooperation and development, not a chessboard for geopolitical contest. China is ready to work with all parties to foster a platform for Asia-Pacific cooperation in the spirit of openness and win-win cooperation and reject small circles smack of the Cold War mentality.

On your second question, China and the DPRK are friendly neighbors linked by mountains and rivers. The two sides enjoy the fine tradition of mutual assistance. Since the onset of COVID-19, the DPRK side has been firmly supporting China in the fight against the coronavirus. China very much appreciates that. We feel deeply for anti-COVID situation in the DPRK. As the DPRKs comrade, neighbor and friend, China is ready to go all out to provide support and assistance to the DPRK in fighting the virus.

Al Jazeera: My question is still related to the shooting of an Al Jazeera journalist by Israeli forces. The international community has called for an open, transparent and independent investigation into this incident. Israel says its prepared to cooperate with the Palestinians on the investigation, which is rejected by the Palestinians. The Palestinians expect a fair international investigation into this issue. What is Chinas view on this? Is China ready to play a role in this incident? Besides, Id like to ask again what is Chinas position on Israels killing of the Al Jazeera journalist yesterday?

Zhao Lijian: On your second question, I stated Chinas position yesterday. I know she was your colleague. We are shocked by the incident and express deep condolences to you.

China consistently rejects and strongly condemns violence against journalists doing their job. We hope the incident will be handled in a just manner according to law. As to the international investigation you mentioned, China supports it in principle. We think the incident should be handled in a just manner.

Hubei Media Group: Kurt Campbell, Coordinator for Indo-Pacific Affairs in the US National Security Council, said at the United States Institute of Peace on May 11 that issues including China will be discussed at the upcoming US-ASEAN Summit. He also said that there is a deep sense in the US that other challenges cannot distract it from the Indo-Pacific region and that the US will increase investment in and engagement with ASEAN nations. I think what we want to underscore more than anything else is that the United States wants to take steps to maintain peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, said Campbell. The US continues to follow its one-China policy and does not support the independence of Taiwan. It has no intention to take provocative actions, but wants clarity about the desire to deter steps that would be provocative. Does China have any comment?

Zhao Lijian: I have taken note of relevant reports. On the Taiwan question, I would like to stress again that the one-China principle is a universal consensus of the international community and an established basic norm governing international relations. The US should abide by the one-China principle and the three China-US joint communiques, honor its political commitment to China on the Taiwan question, earnestly act on President Bidens statement that the US does not support Taiwan independence, and stop exploiting Taiwan-related issues to engage in political manipulation in an attempt to contain China.

As to the US-ASEAN Summit, it is Chinas view that the US, as a non-regional country, should play a positive and constructive role in promoting peace and development in the region. It should not undermine regional peace, stability, solidarity and cooperation, still less use cooperation as a cover to force others to pick sides, or play with fire on issues concerning Chinas core interests.

Phoenix TV: The Hong Kong Police Force recently arrested several people who are suspected of endangering national security in collusion with external forces. Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, retired cardinal of the Hong Kong diocese, is among those arrested. The Vatican and the White House have both expressed concern. Does the Chinese side have any comment?

Zhao Lijian: We have noticed relevant reports. I want to stress that Hong Kong is a society with rule of law where no organization or individual is above the law and all offenses shall be prosecuted and punished in accordance with law. We firmly oppose any act that denigrates rule of law in Hong Kong and interferes in its affairs.

Global Times: It is reported that Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said during a recent campaign activity that the Chinese government is seeking to put pressures on countries across the Pacific. He is very concerned, as many other Pacific leaders are, about the interference and intrusionof the Chinese government into such arrangements as the security cooperation between China and Solomon Islands. He said he is concerned over what that can mean for the peace, stability and security of the South Pacific region. Does China have any comment?

Zhao Lijian: The security cooperation between China and Solomon Islands is based on mutual respect and equal-footed consultation. It is conducive to promoting social stability and lasting peace in Solomon Islands and serves the common interests of the South Pacific region. The security cooperation is aboveboard, legitimate, lawful and beyond reproach.

The Australian side may answer the following questions. Australia referred to Solomon Islands as its own backyard and tried to draw a red line on China-Solomon Islands security cooperation. What will you call this if not coercion? Australia tried all means to obstruct the exercise of sovereign rights and independent cooperation with other countries by the government of Solomon Islands. What will you call this if not interference? Australia carried out shady maneuver with countries outside the region to put together a military bloc, which increased nuclear proliferation risks. What will you call these if not moves to hype up regional tensions and seek hegemony in the region. The sovereignty of Solomon Islands matters. Certain Australian politicians should stop distorting facts and playing the thief calling stop the thief.

Associated Press: I would like to ask if there might be any updates on Foreign Minister Wang Yis visit to Solomon Islands?

Zhao Lijian: Im not aware of relevant information.

Reuters: Reuters reported that the Biden administration has drafted an executive order that would give the Department of Justice powers to stop foreign countries like China from accessing Americans personal data. Does the foreign ministry have any comment?

Zhao Lijian: I have noted relevant reports. On the issue of data security, China has been aboveboard, open and cooperative. Chinas laws clearly stipulate that data security, personal information and other legitimate rights and interests of all citizens and organizations should be protected. The Chinese government strictly abides by the principles of the protection of data security, and prohibits and cracks down on illegal activities in accordance with law. China has also put forward the Global Initiative on Data Security, which calls on all countries not to directly access overseas data via companies or individuals.

All countries have the right to take measures to protect the personal data and privacy of their citizens. But the relevant measures should be reasonable and well-grounded. They should not be reduced to tools to suppress certain countries and companies by overstretching national security concepts and abusing state power.
Holly Lawson, clinical coordinator at St. Francis Hospital, stands next to a new camera monitor system inside a room at St. Francis Hospital in Colorado Springs on Friday, March 25, 2022. Penrose- St. Francis is expanding the use of cameras that can monitor up to 10 patients at a time who might otherwise need a staff member in the room constantly. Hospitals, nursing homes and the broader health system face a long road to recovery from the staffing shortages. (Chancey Bush/ The Gazette)
Peach cobbler recipe

Layer 1 melt 1 stick of margarine in a 9 by 13 glass cake pan

Layer 2 drop the mixture (should be fairly thick) into the margarine

Layer 3 2-3 cups of peaches

Layer 4 Sprinkle 1 or more cups of sugar on top

Bake 30-40 minutes

Serve warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream but will keep for up to three days.

From Diane Schwenke, CEO of the Grand Junction Chamber of Commerce
In this image from Senate TV, the tally of a 49-51 Senate procedural vote that did not pass on the Senate floor is shown on Wednesday, May 11, 2022 at the Capitol in Washington. The afternoon roll call promised to be the first of several efforts in Congress to preserve the nearly 50-year-old court ruling.
Many foreign tourists are hoping the Vietnamese government will remove the current pre-departure Covid test requirement because it serves no purpose and adds to travel costs.

Ben Teh from Singapore, who visited HCMC last month after Vietnam reopened its borders, hoped Vietnam would follow neighboring countries like Laos and Thailand in scrapping the Covid test requirement for foreign entrants.

"The pre-departure negative Covid test makes no sense to me and it's really a hassle for travelers to get tested in their home country," Teh told VnExpress International.

He said the test was costly, with a PCR test in Singapore costing about $100.

"It's time to do away with the pre-departure test. Since Vietnam has decided to open its doors to the world, scrapping the test will encourage more tourists to visit," he added.

"Scrapping the health declaration form was a great move, why not the Covid test?"

Vietnam removed the medical declaration requirement for all foreign entrants from April 27, but under the current regulation, anyone entering Vietnam must test negative for the new coronavirus within 72 hours of departure for a PCR test and 24 hours for a rapid test.

Michael Burger from the U.S. who arrived at the Noi Bai Airport in Hanoi Monday, said he had experienced a smooth arrival with swift immigration and customs procedures, except for the PCR test requirement.

He said he would visit HCMC and tourist hotspots like Da Nang and Hoi An during this trip and was satisfied with Vietnams tourism reopening policies that seem to be back to the way they were.

He expected the government would soon scrap the pre-departure test requirement for foreign tourists so that everyone can feel free to visit Vietnam.

"The test is a waste of time and money," Burger said.

"I think Vietnam should consider removing the negative Covid test requirement for anyone who has been fully vaccinated and had at least one booster shot. This would not only give more credibility to the vaccines but might also be an incentive for more people to get vaccinated."

Getting tests adds costs and getting the results back in time can sometimes be problematic, Michael added.

Ivana Katrinka Palacios from the Philippines, who plans to fly to Vietnam this summer, said she was not comfortable with the pre-departure test requirement because it was "really useless" and no longer meaningful at this time.

"We're not really sure those people will not get infected by Covid after they take the tests. We don't know the whereabouts of those people and whom they will interact with in the span of 72 hours or 24 hours," she said.

In a proposal submitted to Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh last week, experts from the government-run Private Economic Development Research Board wanted the government to lift coronavirus test requirements for foreign entrants because it would be a "barrier" to reopening international tourism.

Pham Ha, CEO of Lux Group, which specializes in luxury cruises, said it was time for the government to completely lift tourism barriers for foreign tourists to compete with other regional countries.

Starting March 15, Vietnam allowed quarantine-free travel and resumed its pre-pandemic visa exemption policy for citizens from 24 countries, including Japan, South Korea and European economies. The country is providing one-month visa to other countries, and has not resumed the three-month visa.

However, the number of foreign tourists visiting the country remains relatively low. Travel firms which specialize in inbound tourism say that the Covid test requirement and "unfriendly" visa policies are among barriers preventing foreign tourists from returning to the country.
ELKO  Jurors learned about how video surveillance and social media played a part in the search for Gabrielle Britney Ujlaky during the second day of the Bryce Dickey murder trial.

Witnesses, including law enforcement and a friend of Dickeys and Ujlakys, testified about the day the 16-year-old girl went missing and the efforts to locate a green Ford F150 pickup truck that Dickey said drove away with the girl and a tall man with a cowboy hat behind the wheel.

Video surveillance taken from the Sage West Village Apartments and the Spring Creek Maverik gas station and store were entered into evidence on Wednesday.

One video showed a person walking across West Sage Street to the Angel Park parking lot on March 8, 2020. Minutes later, a blue Chevrolet truck identified as belonging to Dickey arrived and the individual got into the vehicle, timestamped at 3:22 p.m. The truck then turned around and made a left turn onto West Sage headed toward Mountain City Highway.

Another video showed the pickup truck driving east on Boyd-Kennedy Road at 3:45 p.m. that same afternoon, heading toward Sage Elementary School.

Law enforcement testified that a team composed of four officers reviewed 12 hours of footage searching for the green pickup that Dickey told law enforcement drove away with Ujlaky from Spring Creek High School parking lot.

An officer testified that a vehicle matching Dickeys description did not appear during the teams search.

Ujlaky was reported missing on March 8, 2020, after she did not show up at home or respond to calls or messages from family and friends.

Dickey, who was the last person to see her alive, told law enforcement they drove around Elko and Spring Creek before he dropped her off at the SCHS parking lot to meet a new friend.

The next day, a search was launched starting at Boyd-Kennedy Road, the last location Ujlakys phone was pinged.

Friends, including Selena Winkler, joined the search. Winkler testified she knew both Dickey and Ujlaky because they were part of the same close group of friends.

She said she knew Dickey through classmates at Spring Creek High School, but she was really good friends with Ujlaky. Winkler added she knew they were close and that Ujlaky looked to Dickey as a big brother, but didnt look to him for protection.

Winkler remembered Ujlaky as a tough girl who could hold her ground in a physical fight or argument, even taking down two girls at once. She said she also believed she could have defended herself if Dickey attacked her.

At the time, Winkler believed Dickey and Ujlaky had a strong sibling-type relationship when the group hung out together, and she couldnt see him causing her harm.

I honestly cant see any of my friends hurting any of my other friends, Winkler said in court on Wednesday.

At the time, Winkler said she and her boyfriend considered Dickey friends. However, after his arrest and up to her testimony in court, she said she was angry at Dickey.

On Wednesday, Winkler testified she and her boyfriend participated in searches for Ujlaky. They began in the late afternoon until dark, driving down roads behind Spring Creek High School on March 9 and 10, and engaged in at least one phone call and several Snapchat text messages with the defendant.

Screenshots of the Snapchat conversations between her and Dickey March 9 and 10, 2020, were turned over to police five months later by Winkler.

Elko County District Attorney Tyler Ingram asked Winkler to explain to the court how Snapchat pinpoints locations and sends them to friends with each message, which is then updated to a new location.

Pertaining to the case, Winkler said that locations of where they were searching were sent to everyone in their group, including Dickey.

At one point, Winklers boyfriend received a call from Dickey that she overheard on speaker phone while they were driving around the Burner Basin area on March 10. He told them police were chasing a green pickup through Osino at that moment.

Winkler said they left the area and drove to Osino out of curiosity. They did not see any signs of a police chase, she told the court.

Several Snapchat messages submitted as evidence were read aloud by Winkler, including one corroborating the phone conversation from Dickey about the Osino chase.

Another message exchange started with Dickey telling Winkler he had been brought in for questioning by law enforcement, calling it an interrogation and that investigators wanted to know every inch of the day he last saw Ujlaky.

During their conversations, Winkler asked Dickey about what could have happened to Ujlaky.

Me: Do you think she would run away? Bryce: Honestly no, but IDK [I dont know]. Winkler read. Bryce: I am lost right now. Me: We all kind of are. Nothing seems to make sense at all.

Winkler messaged her hopes to Dickey on Snapchat that Ujlaky would be found alive and safe. He messaged back, I sure hope so.

Dickey sent another message to Winkler and her boyfriend on March 10.

Im so sorry this happened, he wrote in his Snapchat message. I have a lot of regrets that I cant take back and thats on me, but I hope you guys dont blame me. If so, then you have the right to, but thank you for being here for me, it means the world.

Dickey has been charged with felony open murder, including first degree murder and all lesser included offenses, sexual assault with the use of a deadly weapon, and an alternate charge of sexual assault.

The trial resumes Thursday in Elko District Court with Judge Mason Simons presiding.

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ELKO  A Ryndon man was arrested this week on charges of robbing and injuring a relative last summer.

Robert R. McEneny, 32, was jailed Tuesday with bail set at $30,000.

An Elko County Sheriffs deputy was called to Northeastern Nevada Regional Hospital on Aug. 17 by a man who said he suffered a broken hip during an encounter with his brother, McEneny, on June 14.

The victim told the deputy he was repeatedly struck in the face during an argument over money that belonged to their mother, and fell on his hip in a gravel driveway. McEneny allegedly grabbed the $800 and left the scene.

The brother was transported to a Reno hospital for surgery on his hip.

A criminal complaint was filed May 5 charging McEneny with robbery or coercion, and battery resulting in substantial bodily harm.

According to Elko County Jail records, McEneny was arrested in June 2020 for buying, possessing or receiving stolen property. He pleaded guilty to attempted possession of a stolen motor vehicle and was given a suspended sentence of 16-40 months in prison by District Judge Mason Simons.

McEneny was placed on probation for two years. Jail records indicate he has been arrested three times since then for violating probation, in addition to this weeks arrest.

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Thursday, May 12, 2022 at 1:47PM

by Matt St Clair

I've never been to Montana, being more of a metro/suburb-type person, but the luscious scenery always captured onscreen makes it compelling enough to want to explore. The deserted roads, the wide open spaces, the mountains accompanied by clear blue skies can make any Montana-set movie compelling even if the story isnt. Such is nearly the case with the aptly-titled Montana Story, from the filmmaking duo Scott McGehee and David Siegel (The Deep End, What Maisie Knew, Bee Season).

The story itself is pretty simple. Two distant half-siblings Erin (Haley Lu Richardson) and Cal (Owen Teague) attempt to reconnect and heal their troubled past as they say goodbye to their dying father...

Between Cal dealing with Erins sudden arrival after being away for so long, a rift involving a sickly pet horse, and both of them coming to terms with their fathers neglect, the two siblings go on an immense emotional ride over the course of a few days. Erin and Cal continuously falling apart and piecing themselves back together doesn't break much new ground in familial movie territory but the family horse, Mr. T, is a distinctive script element thanks to its symbolic significance. Despite Mr. Ts ailing health, Erin yearns to take him back home since he offers some semblance of happiness from her otherwise dark childhood.

The two central actors do a capable job at making their tumultuous bond captivating. That's especially true of Haley Lu Richardson (After Yang, Support the Girls, Unpregnant) who once again shows shes quietly become one of her generations very best. Even in Richardsons very first scene, shes able to fill us in on Erins struggle to return home with just her stuttering line delivery and stressed-out face. Watch the way Erin first stares at her bedridden father. That's a lot for her to bear both seeing him in that state and once again being in the presence of a loved one who inflicted serious emotional pain. Prickly yet empathetic, Richardson creates an effective, distressingly real portrait of someone battling past trauma.

On the flip side, Owen Teague is a more stoic presence as Cal. Erin's frustrations are continuously visible but Cal aims to shield his own; his turmoil only occasionally reaches his surface. A moment when he's recalling a traumatic childhood moment to his fathers nurse Ace (Gilbert Owuor) lingers thanks to Teagues acting and the cinematography from DP Giles Nuttgens. As Cal tells his story, the camera slow zooms in on his face without cutting away to Aces reaction or to a flashback of that event. The details and the actors eyes pack an emotional punch.

Moments like those help Montana Story avoid becoming weighed down by its sluggish pacing and sequences of our main characters trekking across the Montana landscape that, while visually captivating, only make the picture longer than it needed to be. The scripts straightforward depiction of siblinghood doesn't do enough to elevate it. Yet, those who have firsthand experience with sibling/parent troubles might feel affected by its simple story and also, the compelling central performances. B-

Montana Story opens in theaters tomorrow.
As a father, a law enforcement professional, and your next Sheriff, I believe many changes must be implemented in the way we address public safety in order for our community to reduce crime and provide a safe environment to raise our families.

Sir Robert Peel said it best:

The Police are the Public; the Public are the Police. The Police are paid to give full time attention to duties that are incumbent upon every citizen in the interest of community welfare and existence.

As your Sheriff, I believe numerous positive changes are needed within the agency to ensure your agency provides the most professional and ethical service possible. Our agency is currently plagued with extremely low morale and a turnover rate at 40%. I believe we can improve morale and reduce the turnover rate by changing your agency's leadership philosophy from a good ol boy to a leadership philosophy that places value in every Deputy and views every employee as an intricate part of the overall mission of the agency.

We have all worked for leaders who recognize their buddies, rather than recognizing those individuals who work hard and do a great job.

I would accomplish a change in inner department culture, by offering long-term investments in employees such as education, training, career pathing and professional development, as well as investing in their well-being and personal growth. This will not only lower the turnover rate but allow all employees of the Elko County Sheriff's Office to better serve our community.

I also have numerous changes I would implement to ensure our agency is focused on proactive community oriented policing. I believe this starts with the Sheriff being present and available for our communities, municipal governments, civil organizations, housing associations, religious organizations, unincorporated advisory boards, just to list a few. The Sheriff is the community's public safety leader and should be present and available to help address any public safety concerns these organizations may have.

Proactive Community Policing -- these practices would be implemented in an effort to prevent crime. I would implement a more user-friendly house watch system where homeowners could list their home with the Sheriffs Office, for instance when they went on vacation, to be checked routinely with more accountability to ensure those house watches are completed on a regular basis.

These are only a small portion of the ideas/plans. Visit @GaylorforSheriff on Facebook for more.

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Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday addressed a ceremony to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Youth League of China.

The younger generation, according to Xi, should do their best to help realize national rejuvenation -- the greatest dream of the Chinese people since the Opium War of 1840.

Overseas Chinese youth said that they will carry forward their dreams and missions, and forge ahead on the new journey to realize the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation.

Lan Tianzhang, deputy captain of the political work of the 20th Chinese peacekeeping engineering detachment to Lebanon, said the young peacekeepers in Lebanon have been taking concrete actions to fulfill their missions and safeguard world peace, adding that they will work hard to make more contributions to realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

Wang Xiaowei, manager of the fifth site office of the Phnom Penh-Sihanoukville Expressway invested by the China Road and Bridge Corporation, said they, as young workers serving the Belt and Road Initiative, feel proud of their mission and are more aware of the responsibilities of the young generation, adding that they will take roots in the frontline to ensure that the project becomes a high-quality one.

Wang Yuqing, a Chinese teacher at the Confucius Institute at the University of Karachi in Pakistan, said that Xi's words greatly encouraged young teachers working at overseas Confucius Institutes and gave them the confidence to do a better job of telling China's stories.

Miao Danying, a lecturer at the United Nations Visitors Service at Nairobi, said that an increasing number of Chinese people are serving in the United Nations and young faces are constantly emerging, showcasing Chinese culture and contributing Chinese talent in different positions.

Miao believed that with the continuous development of China, the prospects for Chinese youth to realize their dreams will be even broader.

Xia Yang, president of the Association of Chinese Students and Scholars in Japan, said that they must study hard and return home as soon as possible to contribute to China's development and prosperity as well as the rejuvenation of the nation.

Li Feng, who is about to finish his studies at the University of Zagreb in Croatia soon and return to China, pledged to be a young person with lofty ideals and firm convictions, and contribute to the development and prosperity of the country.




President Nguyen Xuan Phuc speaks at the meeting with voters of Cu Chi district,

HCM City, on May 11. (Photo: VNA)

At the meetings, held both in person and via videoconference, local residents pointed out many pressing issues related to education, infrastructure, housing for low-income earners, and the Thu Thiem new urban area.

They proposed central agencies soon work out special mechanisms and policies for Thu Duc city so that it can develop on par with its potential and expectations. They also expressed their attention to the outcomes of the freshly-finished fifth session of the 13th-tenure Party Central Committee, including those on land and the corruption combat.

President Phuc appreciated voters opinions about the issues relevant to the development of HCM City and Vietnam as a whole, asking leaders of localities in the city to directly reply to peoples opinions and devise working plans to deal with outstanding problems.

He also requested the Peoples Council, Peoples Committee, and NA deputies delegation of HCM City, especially the secretaries of its districts and Thu Duc citys Party committees, to frequently listen to and hold dialogue with people while resolving the issues of public concern in an appropriate manner and in line with law so as to protect peoples legitimate interests.

The State leader highly valued efforts by local people and authorities in the COVID-19 fight and social security ensuring, which has helped the city obtain fast recovery and return to normal after the pandemic.

Apart from achievements, HCM City is still facing numerous difficulties, so it needs to work harder to develop dynamically, comprehensively, and sustainably and care for the life of the 10 million residents, he added.

At the coming NA session, the parliament will consider some important projects such as Belt Road No. 3 in HCM City and Belt Road No. 4 in Hanoi. Lawmakers will also discuss some special mechanisms and policies for the southern economic hub, according to the President.

Meetings with voters are regular activities of NA deputies before and after each session of the legislature./.
A booth at the Vietnam Medipharm Expo 2022 (Photo: VNA)

The four-day event is being held by the Vietnam Medical Import-Export JSC in coordination with the Vietnam Advertisement and Fair Exhibition JSC.

It offers pharmaceutical and medical enterprises from Vietnam and overseas opportunities to showcase their latest achievements and products in the two areas including medical equipment for hospitals, clinics and healthcare," said Nguyen Trong Quy from the event's management board.

It also helped to connect the State management agencies with scientists and businesses while enhancing links among businesses, hospitals and customers.

Two forums discussing the domestic medical equipment market and preventive healthcare services will be held on the sidelines of the expo. Another conference on applying traditional medicine in caring for and improving people's health will be also included./.
Photo for illustration (Source: tienphong.vn)

Three routes to the RoK will be resumed from June 1.

According to the Vietnam News Agency, routes connecting Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City with Japans Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya each will see up to two new flights per week.

Flights from/to Da Nang and Tokyo will take to the skies again from July 1.

As the result, the carrier will operate 25-30 weekly flights from Hanoi and HCM City to major cities of Japan.

Vietnam Airlines will add 3-4 flights per week into routes linking Hanoi and HCM City with Seoul capital city of the RoK from May 15.

It is to resume the Hanoi-Busan and Da Nang-Seoul routes from June 1, and the HCM City-Busan a month later.

Wide-body Boeing 787 aircraft will be used on the routes.

On the occasion, the airline will roll out promotional tickets in routes from/to Hanoi-Busan, Da Nang-Seoul for flights departing from June 1 to the end of this year.

TH Group founder in Asias Top Sustainability Superwomen list

Thai Huong, chairwoman of TH Group, is the first and only Vietnamese representative to be listed among the top 10 of Asias Top Sustainability Superwomen.

Asias Top Sustainability Superwomen is a non-profit project launched by CSRWorks International, Singapores most trusted name in sustainability consulting, training, and thought leadership.

Chairwoman of TH Group Thai Huong (Photo: tuoitre.vn)

The purpose of the scheme is to recognise and honour the contribution of exceptional women leaders who are driving change with the goal of making the world a better place, reported by the Voice of Vietnam.

Under Huongs leadership, TH Group has been implementing a range of ventures, and a US$1.2 billion project in Nghe An province is the groups biggest in Vietnam. The site features a state-of-the-art dairy cow farm and fresh milk production plant that is capable of churning out 500,000 tonnes of fresh milk annually.

The project has been recognised as "The most concentrated large-scale, high-tech dairy cow production project in the world by the Asian Book of Records. It has received the Enterprise with High-tech Application Certificate from the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.

After deploying the Nghe An project, TH Group is now carrying out similar projects on a small scale in many localities nationwide, such as Cao Bang, Ha Giang, Thanh Hoa, Phu Yen, Kon Tum, and Soc Trang. All of its dairy farms supply fresh and clean milk for domestic consumption and for export to markets such as China and Cambodia.

Furthermore, TH Group is also developing a concentrated high-tech dairy cow production project in Russia, with total investment capital reaching US$2.7 billion.

Executive Huong has been presented with a number of domestic and international prizes, including the Hero of Labour in the Renovation period, the Gulfood Outstanding Achievement Award, and the "ASEAN empowering woman" by World Knowledge Forum 2019.

She has also been given other awards and titles such as the Global Trade Ambassador Award, the Asia Responsible Enterprise Award, Forbes 50 Over 50: Asia 2022, Entrepreneur of the Year at the 2018 Stevie Awards, Asia-Pacific Entrepreneurs APEAs Enterprise 2018, and the most inspirational leader of the year by IFM International Finance 2018.

International passengers increase by over 500% in Q1

Vietnamese airports welcomed a total of 232,000 international passengers during the first quarter of the year, marking an increase of 502% against the same period from last year, according to statistics released by the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam.

Photo for illustration (Source: VOV)

According to the Voice of Vietnam, April alone saw airlines operate a total of 30,000 flights, representing a decline of 2.4% compared to last years corresponding period.

Furthermore, airports across the country welcomed 6.6 million passengers, including 232,000 international arrivals, representing an annual drop of 14.3%.

Compared to the same period from last year, the number of international passengers using local airlines also picked up 214.7%, while domestic passengers dropped slightly by 18.2%.

With regard to freight transport in April, the volume of goods through Vietnamese airports surged by 18.4% to reach 140,700 tonnes. Of the figure, international cargo volume also soared by 45.3% to 117,700 tonnes, while the volume of domestic goods hit 23,000 tonnes, down 39.1%.

Following the rise in the number of international passengers, Vietnamese airlines have recently increased the number of flights on offer and have also moved to restore international air routes.

Photo for illustration (Source: VGP)

Most recently, national flag carrier Vietnam Airlines unveiled that it will seek to increase the frequency of flights on eight routes to Japan and the Republic of Korea from May 15, while simultaneously restoring three routes to the Republic of Korea from June 1.

EU adopts equivalence decisions for COVID-19 certificates issued by Vietnam

The European Commission (EC) has recognised the digital COVID-19 certificates of Vietnam, Indonesia and Seychelles as equivalent to the EU COVID Certificates issued by authorities in the EU countries.

These three countries will therefore be connected to the EU system and the EU will accept their COVID-19 certificates under the same conditions as its own Digital COVID Certificate. This means that passengers from the three countries will be permitted to enter the bloc under the same rules as those who hold EU Digital COVID-19 certificates, according to the Vietnam News Agency.

Photo for illustration (Source: VNA)

At the same time, all the three countries have decided to accept the EU Digital COVID-19 certificates.

With the accession of Vietnam, Indonesia and Seychelles, the number of countries and territories connected to the EU system has increased to 67, said European Commissioner for Justice Didier Reynders.

He also expressed his delight that the pandemic situation is improving and the certificate remains a useful tool for many destinations, for example, in case of testing requirements.

According to the announcement published by the EC, the decision will take effect starting from May 11./.
Ms. Tredene Dobion (centre) presents the support package

to Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Nguyen Minh Vu

The project will include 1 million NZD for medical equipment, provided through UNICEF Vietnam, and 1 million NZD for community level economic recovery support through CARE International and Oxfam in Vietnam.

Ambassador Tredene Dobson said that: This project acknowledges that there is a two-fold approach to COVID recovery. On the one hand there is an on-going health response and this is why Aoteara New Zealand is working with UNICEF to deliver medical equipment to areas where it is needed for the ongoing safe and effective response to COVID-19.

However, there is also a significant economic impact from the pandemic so following consultation with the Government of Vietnam, we wanted to ensure that this project also supported economic recovery amongst some of Vietnams most vulnerable communities, both in the major urban centers but also in hard hit rural areas, she added.

In his speech at the event, Deputy Minister Nguyen Minh Vu said that after two years of the outbreak, the COVID-19 pandemic in Vietnam has been basically controlled, but economic consequences are still very heavy.

Therefore, the New Zealands support package is very significant as it focuses on improving livelihood conditions, creating jobs, and improving the lives of people, especially the poor.

The partnership with UNICEF Vietnam will focus on providing medical equipment to support vaccination and treatment of children in Vietnam.

Ms Rana Flowers, UNICEF Representative in Vietnam said: Health systems have experienced terrible disruptions in essential health and other social services worldwide, including health services not related to COVID. This has had a significant impact on the well-being of children and women beyond that of the COVID-19 disease itself. While it is necessary to focus on the response to the pandemic, it is essential to also strengthen the preparedness of the health system to future outbreaks.

The medical equipment provided thanks to New Zealand will contribute to the preparedness of the health system for future outbreaks, she emphasized.

The projects with CARE International in Vietnam and Oxfam in Vietnam will support a total of 5,400 persons who have been negatively impacted by the pandemic. Most assistance will be directed to women, people with disabilities and members of ethnic minority communities in Ho Chi Minh City, Binh Duong, Quang Tri, and Ha Giang provinces.

Speaking of the collaboration with the New Zealand, Ms Le Kim Dung, Country Director of CARE International in Vietnam said: CARE believes that this grant will support over 3,100 people from vulnerable households in ethnic minority communities in Quang Tri and Ha Giang recover quickly from the shock after Covid-19 pandemic.

Ms. Vu Thi Quynh Hoa, National Director of Oxfam in Vietnam also shared: In this project, Oxfam and partners will support job skill trainings and financial assistance for at least 2,300 informal workers such as street vendors, small family business shops, and lottery ticket sellers in Ho Chi Minh City and Binh Duong to build their livelihood resilience.

Over the past two years, the New Zealand Embassy has successfully delivered several COVID-19 response projects totalling 270,000 NZD through its partners, assisting more than 3,300 female workers in various sectors and 130 children with disabilities as well as members of the hearing-impaired community in Vietnam by Oxfam in Vietnam, ActionAid in Vietnam, East Meets West, CARE International in Vietnam, Vietnam General Confederation of Labour, Tan Binh Centre, and SCDeaf./.




Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh (L) meets with his Cambodian counterpart Hun Sen

(Photo: VNA)

During the meeting, the Vietnamese Government leader highly valued Cambodia's role and contributions as ASEAN Chair, including promoting the implementation of the ASEAN Five-Point Consensus on the situation in Myanmar.

PM Chinh also congratulated Cambodia on positive results it achieved in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic and fully reopening the economy, expressing his belief that Cambodia will successfully organise the commune/ward elections in early June as well as the National Assembly elections in 2023.

For his part, Cambodian PM Hun Sen spoke highly of Vietnams achievements in COVID-19 response, and socio-economic recovery and development, saying that he believes the Vietnamese Government and people will continue to achieve even greater achievements in its doi moi (renewal) process and international integration.

The Cambodian leader also thanked Vietnam for supporting Cambodia in the role as ASEAN Chair 2022.

The two leaders expressed their satisfaction with the positive developments in the bilateral cooperation in recent times, especially the maintenance of meetings and high level delegation exchanges, as well as cooperation mechanisms in all channels.

Two-way trade kept a positive growth momentum, hitting 3.37 billion USD in the first quarter of 2022, up 24.9 percent year-on-year.

In order to continue promoting the "good neighbourliness, traditional friendship, and comprehensive, sustainable and long-term cooperation" between the two countries in the coming time, the two PMs agreed to promote the exchange of high-level delegations during the Vietnam - Cambodia, Cambodia - Vietnam Friendship Year 2022 and jointly organise meaningful activities to celebrate the 55th anniversary of bilateral diplomatic relations (June 24, 1967-2022).

The two sides will make efforts to maintain trade-investment development; promote tourism; effectively use the border gate system to facilitate trade and people-to-people exchanges; uphold the achievement of demarcation and marker planting on about 84 percent of the land border and continue the work on the remaining 16 percent; and jointly build a border of peace and friendship between the two countries.

Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh also expressed his thanks and wished that the Cambodian Government would continue to pay attention to and create conditions for the community of Vietnamese-origin Cambodians to strengthen their legal status and stabilise their lives in Cambodia.

On this occasion, the Vietnamese Government leader respectfully conveyed the regards of Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, State President Nguyen Xuan Phuc and National Assembly Chairman Vuong Dinh Hue to Prime Minister Hun Sen and other senior leaders of Cambodia. PM Hun Sen expressed his sincere thanks and invited Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh to pay an official visit to Cambodia./.




Prime Minister Pham Minh delivers a presentation at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington D.C on May 11 (Photo: baochinhphu.vn)

The Vietnamese Government leaders speech was broadcast live on technology platforms by CSIS.

In his welcome speech, Dr. John Hamre, President and CEO of CSIS, said that PM's arrival and presentation at the centre was a privilege for CSIS. This is also the third time CSIS has welcomed Vietnamese leaders.

In his presentation, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh recalled that 77 years ago, President Ho Chi Minh opened the Declaration of Independence with the immortal truth: All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." This is also the spirit of the Declaration of Independence of the US in 1776, he noted.

Nearly three decades of normalising relations, the relationship between Vietnam and the US has borne fruit with sincerity, trust and responsibility as well as sympathy, sharing and mutual respect to achieve the goals of the two countries and their people. The two sides have overcome their differences and achieved fundamental principles for bilateral relations, as affirmed in the Vietnam-US Joint Vision Statement when General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam Nguyen Phu Trong visited the US in 2015, which emphasises respect for each other's political institutions, independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.

Vietnam appreciates the USs continuous support for a strong and independent Vietnam over the past years. In 27 years since the two countries normalised relations, four consecutive US Presidents have visited Vietnam and left good impressions among the people of the two countries.

According to Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh, in the context of profound, rapid and unpredictable changes in the international situation, both the Governments and academics need to strengthen coordination, exchange and sharing of ideas to build a better world together.

Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh emphasised that as an active and responsible member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the international community, Vietnam always strives to contribute to dialogue and cooperation, and is willing to play a proactive and active role in accordance with their potential and position.

Vietnam strives to be a modernity-oriented industrialised developing country and graduate from the lower-middle group by 2025. It aims to become a developing country with modern industry and upper-middle income by 2030, and a developed and high-income country by 2045.

The PM said that Vietnam's development aspiration is associated with the aspiration for peace, stability, cooperation and development in the region and the world.

He expressed his hope that the US and its partners will cooperate and support Vietnam in realising that strategic vision, saying that this will open up great opportunities for more comprehensive and deeper cooperation between Vietnam and the US and other countries.

Chinh affirmed that Vietnam consistently pursues the foreign policy of independence, self-reliance, peace, friendship, cooperation and development, diversification and multilateralisation of relations; being a good friend and a reliable partner with countries around the world, and a responsible member of the international community.

Vietnam has always shown sincerity, consistency and transparency in building and implementing this policy, he stressed.

The PM affirmed that, between independence and dependence, Vietnam always chooses independence with the spirit of "nothing is more valuable than independence and freedom" set by President Ho Chi Minh; between negotiation and confrontation, Vietnam chooses negotiation; between dialogue and conflict, Vietnam chooses dialogue; between peace and war, Vietnam chooses peace; between cooperation and competition, Vietnam chooses cooperation, and a healthy and equal competition that respects each other's legitimate rights and interests.

Vietnam is ready for dialogue and cooperation to handle differences and disagreements, contributing to peace, stability and development in the world; and ensure the harmonisation of interests and satisfactorily address the concerns of partners, countries and the international community, he stated.

For that reason, in the process of resolving disputes and conflicts in the region and the world, including the East Sea - an important sea for countries inside and outside the region, Vietnam has always advocated maintaining peace and stability; ensuring security, safety, and freedom of navigation and aviation; protecting legitimate rights and interests; settling disputes by peaceful measures and through dialogue on the basis of respect for international law, especially the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS); effectively and fully implementing the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the East Sea (DOC), and working actively towards the early conclusion of an effective and substantive Code of Conduct in the East Sea (COC), PM Chinh said.

To contribute responsibly to common international and regional issues, Vietnam has actively participated in and promoted its role in multilateral mechanisms, especially ASEAN, the UN and regional and inter-regional, and Mekong sub-region cooperation mechanisms in accordance with specific requirements, capabilities and conditions.

PM Chinh stated that Vietnam has been proactive, active and responsible in promoting its role as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council for the 2008-2009 and 2020-2021 tenures. It has directly participated in and contributed military personnel to the United Nations peacekeeping force since June 2014. The country was also the venue for the 2nd US-DPRK Summit in 2019.

Regarding the Ukraine issue, Vietnam supports and is willing to join efforts and initiatives of the international community to facilitate the parties dialogues to find long-term and sustainable solutions, Chinh said, adding the country has provided humanitarian aid of 500,000 USD for Ukraine.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, despite many difficulties, Vietnam has donated masks and medical supplies to 51 countries, including the US; and made financial contributions to the COVAX Programme.

Although it is a developing country with numerous difficulties in socio-economic conditions, Vietnam has showed its great responsibility and determination in efforts to respond to climate change and fulfill its commitments under the Paris Agreement and at the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP 26) in the UK to bringing net emissions to zero by 2050.

Vietnam has been strongly promoting economic, trade and investment cooperation with almost all countries in the world. In particular, it has negotiated and signed 15 free trade agreements (FTAs), opening up a large free trade market with more than 60 countries and partners, including all major economies in the world, thus demonstrating its responsibility in the realisation of equality and free trade.

For the US, the Government leader said that Vietnam always wishes to strengthen cooperation with the US on a basis of sincerity, continue to reinforce trust and enhance the responsibilities of both sides, for the common interests of the two countries people as well as for peace, cooperation and development in the region and the world.

Vietnam and the US have come a long way in showing sincerity and building mutual trust. First of all, the two sides have focused on and showed their determination in overcoming the war consequences. Since the normalisation of relations in 1995, the bilateral relations have continuously developed in many aspects.

On the basis of their nearly three-decade relationship, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh stressed the need for sincerity, trust, respect and continued responsibility in overcoming the war consequences, in order to heal the wounds of both peoples and foster the cooperation between the two countries to meet the aspirations and interests of their people, and contribute to peace and stability, cooperation and development in the region and the world, as confirmed by the two sides during the visit to the US by General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam Central Committee Nguyen Phu Trong in 2015.

The head of the Vietnamese Government affirmed that as the US and many countries are looking to the Indo-Pacific region, while Vietnam is promoting the implementation of aspirational development goals, the two countries is facing new opportunities to develop their comprehensive partnership in a stable, long-term, substantive, effective and intensive manner, especially in terms of economy, trade, investment, science and technology, digital transformation, high-quality human resources training and climate change adaptation as well as in solving international and regional issues.

Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh held that along with traditional cooperation areas, the two sides need to look forward to collaboration areas in the future, especially green growth, technological innovation, digital transformation and supply chain diversification.

He reiterated that sincerity, trust and responsibility are the keys for countries to resolve disagreements and differences in a changing world like today. Sincerity, trust and responsibility have also made important contributions to the strong development of Vietnam - US relations over the past 30 years.

He expressed his belief that these will also be key factors in guiding, promoting, and bringing the comprehensive partnership between Vietnam and the US to a new height in the coming years.

After the presentation, the PM answered many questions raised by CSIS scholars regarding Vietnam - US relations, the implementation of commitments at COP 26, and the Indo-Pacific initiative.

The presentation and answers of Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh at the CSIS were warmly welcomed by participating scholars and experts./.
Delegates at the meeting (Photo: baoquocte.vn)

According to Professor Bartesaghi, according to an agreement signed between UCU and Foreign Trade University of Vietnam in December 2021, a MERCOSUR-ASEAN Research Center will be established at Foreign Trade University to enhance research exchange and teaching on topics of mutual interest, such as economic industrialization and modernization strategies, issues to overcome the middle-income trap, as well as measures to promote import and export between MERCOSUR and ASEAN in general and with Vietnam in particular.

The Professor also announced that Uruguay will restart short-term student exchange activities with Vietnam and wishes to welcome Vietnamese students on field trips in Uruguay.

The Vietnamese Ambassador expressed his delight at the progress in the cooperation between the two universities, considering this a necessary step to contribute to the enhancement of in-depth knowledge between Vietnam and MERCOSUR in order to better exploit the cooperation potential of the two sides.

He welcomed the initiative of UCU to organize Vietnam Week at its campus in the first quarter of 2023 to introduce the culture, country and people of Vietnam to students of Uruguayan universities within the framework of activities celebrating the 30th anniversary of the diplomatic relations between Vietnam and Uruguay (1993-2023).

The Catholic University of Uruguay, founded in 1985, ranks top in Uruguay and is a prestigious university in the world./.
Biopharma covers demand of the domestic market for blood products by 100%, it can resume their export, Oksana Muliarchuk, director of the company's plasma center network, has said.

"The need for blood products is now 100% closed, we are closing the need for all hospitals, including military ones," she told Interfax-Ukraine.

Muliarchuk explained that the need for such drugs has decreased since the beginning of the war, in particular due to the fact that a significant part of cancer patients who need such drugs have gone abroad.

At the same time, she noted that the Ministry of Health constantly monitors the availability of stocks of blood products in warehouses.

In addition, according to Maliarchuk, Biopharma began to restore the work of its plasma centers. So, for two months since the beginning of the war, plasma centers in Cherkasy and Sumy had been operating, which prepared only blood components, and in early May, the company resumed the work of plasma collection centers in Cherkasy and Kamianske, and is launching the center in Sumy.

"Unfortunately, we have centers where we cannot resume work yet. For example, in Kharkiv we cannot resume work due to hostilities. In Kyiv, the work of a plasma center has not been resumed for technical reasons  we are waiting for the opportunity to equip a bomb shelter in the building where it is located," she said.

As reported, the Cabinet of Ministers provided for the possibility of lifting a ban on the export of blood products until martial law is lifted on the basis of a reasonable submission from the Ministry of Health, subject to meeting the needs of the healthcare system in such drugs.

Earlier, the biopharmaceutical company Biopharma (Kyiv) announced plans to invest $20-23 million in the development of a network of plasma centers by 2025, build plasma centers and blood centers in every regional center of Ukraine.
By Azernews





Azerbaijan's Economy Minister Mikayil Jabbarov and Turkmen President Serdar Berdymukhamedov have discussed transport and energy cooperation between the two countries.

During the meeting, the parties stressed the need to intensify the established fruitful relations in the trade, economic, transport, and energy sectors.

They emphasized the importance of using the favorable geographical locations of the two countries, creating favorable prerequisites for the formation of transcontinental transit-transport corridors, providing the most favorable land and sea routes for the transportation of goods, and their integration into the international transport infrastructure.

Turkmen president noted that the successful implementation of projects to form new transport corridors will serve to strengthen inter-regional and bilateral relations.

"It is also important to increase cooperation in the energy sector, which is strategic for the national economies of Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan. The development of this sector is a priority for both states with the largest oil and gas deposits," he said.

The sides also noted the need to strengthen the role of the bilateral Intergovernmental Turkmen-Azerbaijani Commission on Economic Cooperation as a coordinating body for the development of relations in various sectors. In addition, they stressed the importance of holding bilateral forums, which will contribute to the development of relations between the entrepreneurs of the two countries.

Mikayil Jabbarov arrived in Turkmenistan on an official visit on May 10. The purpose of the visit was to discuss the development of cooperation between the two countries in the political, trade and economic, cultural and humanitarian spheres, fuel and energy, transport and communications.

On January 21, 2021, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan signed a memorandum of understanding over the joint exploration of the Dostlug gas field. According to experts' estimates, the Dostlug gas field contains natural gas and 60-70 million tons of oil.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said that the signed agreement opens a new page in the development of the Caspian Sea's hydrocarbon resources.

"This project will contribute to the strengthening of the energy security of our countries, as well as our neighbors. This project opens up great export opportunities, thereby contributing to the growth of the well-being of our peoples," the president said.

In his turn, the Turkmen president noted that the signing of the memorandum marks a new stage in the energy cooperation between the two countries in the Caspian Sea.

The deal will enable future transport of Turkmen hydrocarbons to Europe via Azerbaijan, thereby bolstering Azerbaijans position as a regional energy hub and Europes energy provider.
The National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine (NSDC) decided to forcibly seize such property rights of the Russian Federation and its residents in Ukraine as 99.772644% of the shares of Prominvestbank (PIB, Kyiv) owned by the state development corporation VEB.RF, and 100% of the shares of the International Reserve Bank (IR Bank, formerly Sberbank, Kyiv), owned by Sberbank of Russia.

According to its decision of May 11, approved on the same day by Presidential Decree No. 326, financial assets are also seized in the form of rights to claim debt of VEB.RF to PIB for UAH 0.93 billion and Sberbank of Russia to IR Bank for UAH 14.9 billion .

In addition, other financial assets of these subsidiaries of Russian banks are seized, with the exception of UAH 3 billion of IR Bank, which are directed to satisfy the requirements of its creditors.

The corresponding decision of the National Security and Defense Council and the presidential decree were published on the website of the Verkhovna Rada on Thursday.

As reported, on April 9, the government of Ukraine decided to seize corporate rights and financial assets withdrawn from the market at the beginning of the war by IR Bank and Prominvestbank. As the Cabinet of Ministers clarified, this decision, in fact, is the practical implementation of the law on the basic principles for the forced seizure of objects of property rights of the Russian Federation and its residents in Ukraine.
On Thursday, the Verkhovna Rada approved by 334 votes a decree of President Volodymyr Zelensky dated May 11 on the forced seizure of assets of Russia's Sberbank and VEB.RF in Ukraine, MPs report from a meeting room.

According to MP Oleksiy Honcharenko, we are talking about the financial assets of the Ukrainian subsidiary of Sberbank  the International Reserve Bank (IR Bank, formerly Sberbank, Kyiv) worth UAH 5.826 billion (hereinafter  at the end of March this year) and subsidiary of VEB.RF, Prominvestbank (PIB, Kyiv),  UAH 4.483 billion.

Honcharenko added that the rights to claim the debt of Sberbank of Russia and VEB.RF to their subsidiaries for UAH 14.890 billion and UAH 934.87 million are also seized.

According to the decree, the document puts into effect the decision of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, adopted on the same day, May 11. According to an explanatory note in the Verkhovna Rada, these actions were carried out in accordance with the law on the main principles for the forced seizure of objects of property rights of the Russian Federation and its residents in Ukraine (No. 2116-I), adopted by the Parliament on March 3 this year.

"Objects of property rights of the Russian Federation and its residents, registration of ownership of which is not required in accordance with the law, become the property of the state from the day the decision of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine is put into effect by the decree of the President of Ukraine," the law says.

The law requires the approval of such presidential decree in the Verkhovna Rada no later than six months after the lifting of martial law in the country, but the head of state and the parliament decided to immediately carry out this procedure.

According to the decree published on the website of the Verkhovna Rada, 99.772644% of PIB shares owned by VEB.RF and 100% of IR Bank shares owned by Sberbank of Russia are also forcibly seized.

With regard to the seizure of other financial assets of these subsidiaries of Russian banks, an exception is made for assets worth UAH 3 billion of IR Bank, which are directed to satisfy the claims of its creditors and the necessary costs of the Deposit Guarantee Fund (DGF).

The second exception is also the rights under loans from IR Bank to Ukrzaliznytsia with a debt of approximately $166 million, to Electrotyazhmash for UAH 516.9 million, State Joint-Stock Holding Company Artem for UAH 205.1 million and Zorya-Mashproekt for UAH 2.325 billion, as well as the rights under a loan from PIB to Ukrzaliznytsia for $231.6 million, which are subject to transfer (probably to the National Investment Fund, appointed for this role by the Cabinet of Ministers on May 10).

According to the decision of the National Security and Defense Council, the Cabinet of Ministers and the DGF, together with the National Bank, must ensure the forcible seizure of these objects of property rights of the Russian Federation and its residents within ten days from the date of publication of the decree.
PrJSC Ukrhydroenergo has started exporting electricity to Moldova in accordance with a contract signed on May 10 with the Moldovan state-owned Energocom, the company said on its website on Thursday.

"The company sells electricity in accordance with an uneven daily schedule, providing coverage for peak consumption and the necessary volumes for the energy system of Moldova," the company said.

According to Ukrhydroenergo, the company's generating capacities are sufficient both to supply the energy system of Ukraine and for export.

"It should be noted that due to exports, Ukrhydroenergo ensures the flow of funds to Ukrenergo for the provision of electric power transmission services, as well as the sale of part of the excess electricity during the spring flood," Director General of Ukrhydroenergo Ihor Syrota said.

Currently, the company is carrying out a kind of test deliveries to work out interaction with Moldovan partners.

Ukrhydroenergo daily purchases transmission capacity to Moldova at daily auctions for access to interstate networks in accordance with the daily schedule for the sale of electricity, which is agreed with Energocom and SOE Moldelectrica (Moldova's system operator).
Some 20 million tonnes of grains must leave Ukraine in less than three months, using the EU infrastructure, European Commissioner for Transport Adina Valean has said.

On Thursday in Brussels, Valean presented an action plan prepared by the European Commission aimed at helping Ukraine export its agrocultural products. This is about the use of optimal supply chains, the so-called "Solidarity Lanes."

According to the European Commission, the operation of Ukrainian ports is currently blocked, in this regard, grain and other agricultural products can no longer be transported to their destination. "The situation is threatening global food security and there is an urgent need to establish alternative logistics routes using all relevant transport modes," the European Commission said.

According to the European Commissioner, the export of 20 million tonnes of Ukrainian grain through the EU infrastructure is a huge task.

"This is a gigantesque challenge, so it is essential to coordinate and optimize the logistic chains, put in place new routes, and avoid, as much as possible, the bottlenecks. Our communication addresses the emergency solutions but also medium and long time measures to better connect and integrate Ukraine's infrastructure with the EU one. For both short-term and long-term solutions, we will work with the Ukrainian authorities and in close collaboration, especially with the neighbouring Member States, who spared no effort in helping during this crisis," Valean said.

In addition to using the European infrastructure, in some EU countries the idea of creating a humanitarian corridor for the export of goods from Ukraine through Belarus to the ports of the Baltic countries was also discussed.

However, European Commissioner for the Environment Virginijus Sinkevicius told BNS on Thursday that the possibility of transporting Ukrainian grain through Belarus to Brussels is not being considered.

Sinkevicius said this means that priority should be given to trains coming from transshipment stations to EU seaports, logistics corridors should be created, and the largest possible capacities should be provided in seaports to transport Ukrainian crops to markets.

Commenting on the plan presented by the Commission, he said the measures proposed by the commission are primarily addressed to the Baltic countries, Poland and Romania, since they are closest to Ukraine.

According to the European Commissioner, before the start of the military operation, some 90% of all Ukrainian grain was transported through ports, and grain exports accounted for about 20% of the country's total export earnings. Now in Ukraine there are more than 40 million tonnes of grain, some 50% of which should be exported in the coming months.
As result of shelling of Dnipropetrovsk region, one person killed, one injured, infrastructure facility destroyed

As a result of enemy shelling of Zelenodolsk community of Dnipropetrovsk region, one person was killed, one was injured, and an infrastructure facility was destroyed, head of the regional military administration Valentyn Riznychenko said.

"The next morning, the occupiers again fired at Zelenodolsk community - from Uragans. They hit Velyka Kostromka and Zelenodolsk... They attacked just when people left for work. One dead, one wounded... An energy infrastructure facility was destroyed," Riznychenko wrote in his telegram channel on Thursday.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine (MFA) strongly condemns the Russian Federation's actions in disposing of grain that was illegally seized from Ukrainian farmers.

"The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine strongly condemns the Russian Federation's actions in disposing of grain that was illegally seized from Ukrainian farmers. Russian occupants are stealing Ukrainian grain and either consuming it themselves or attempting to sell it on international markets. The plunder of food supplies from the territory of an independent sovereign state is one of the aspects of looting," the MFA said in a comment posted on the website on Wednesday.

"The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine warned consumer countries that grain consignments exported by Russia could contain stolen grain obtained as a result of Russian occupation authorities' plundering. Any country that knowingly purchases stolen grain is considered to be complicit in the crime."

According to existing information, the occupants have already seized at least 400-500 thousand tons of grain worth more than $100 million, according to the Ukrainian government. It is known that "almost all grain-laden ships departing from Sevastopol transport stolen Ukrainian commodities."

"The criminal seizure, export and consumption of Ukrainian is another example of Russia's destructive acts, which, in particular, contravene the fundamental principles of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)  achieving food security for all and overcoming hunger," the ministry emphasizes.

In addition, "the aggressor state's policy puts into doubt the relevance of its participation in FAO and other international organizations."

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine demands that Russia stop illicit grain stealing, unblock Ukrainian ports, restore freedom of navigation, and allow trade ships to pass.

"We urge the international community to strengthen economic sanctions against Russia in order to stop its military aggression against Ukraine, to avert a humanitarian disaster and the world's food security crisis," the ministry said.
The total amount of direct documented damage to Ukraine's infrastructure from Russia's armed aggression is more than $94 billion, or almost UAH 2.8 trillion, an increase of almost $2.4 billion over the week, according to an updated analysis within the framework of the Russia will Pay project of the KSE Institute team.

According to a press release on Wednesday, in the new calculations, the largest increase in damage is due to an increase in the number of damaged and destroyed residential buildings as a result of hostilities: according to the latest estimates of project analysts, 35.2 million square meters of housing stock worth $31 billion were destroyed or damaged due to the war.

Compared to previous estimates, this figure increased by almost $1.3 billion. Cities such as Mariupol, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Sumy and Rubizhne suffered the most from the destruction of the housing stock.

The current calculations take into account the KSE estimate of damage from destruction and damage to tank farms: as of May 10, losses from destruction of 27 tank farms amount to $227 million.

In addition, according to the latest calculations within the framework of the Russia will Pay project, the total number of destroyed or damaged educational institutions is already almost 1,000, and the damage reaches $1.3 billion.

In total, since the beginning of the Russian war against Ukraine, at least 208 enterprises, 508 medical institutions, 562 kindergartens, 295 bridges, 156 warehouses, 102 religious buildings, 83 administrative buildings, 27 oil depots and 12 civilian airports have been damaged, destroyed or captured.

The total losses of the Ukrainian economy due to the war, according to the estimates of the Ministry of Economy and KSE, taking into account both direct losses calculated in this project and indirect losses (decrease in GDP, cessation of investment, outflow of labor, additional spending on defense and social support, etc.) range from $564 billion to $600 billion.

The study is supported by the President's Office, the Ministry of Economy, the Ministry of Reintegration and the Ministry of Infrastructure.

Within the framework of the project, volunteers from the Centre for Economic Strategy, Dragon Capital, the Anti-Corruption Headquarters, the Institute of Analysis and Advocacy, Transparency International Ukraine, ProZorro.Sale, ProZorro and the Ukrainian Council of Shopping Centers work together with the KSE Institute team.
The European Union and Japan demanded that Russia immediately stop its military aggression in the territory of Ukraine, and reaffirmed their intention to provide coordinated support to Kyiv.

This is stated in a joint statement adopted at the end of the EU-Japan Summit, which took place on Thursday in Tokyo. "The EU and Japan demand that Russia immediately stop its military aggression in the territory of Ukraine, immediately and unconditionally withdraw all forces and military equipment from the entire territory of Ukraine and fully respect Ukraine's territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence within its internationally recognised borders. We support Ukraine in cooperation with the G7 and other like-minded countries, including by further expanding sanctions against Putin's Russia," the parties said.

In this regard, Brussels and Tokyo assured that they intend to continue to provide coordinated political, financial, material and humanitarian support to Ukraine.

They stated that Russia's unjustified and unprovoked military aggression against independent and sovereign Ukraine grossly violates international law and the principles of the UN Charter and undermines European and global security and stability. "It makes our cooperation more necessary than ever in our determination to restore peace and stability and uphold the UN Charter and international law. We strongly condemn Russia's aggression that causes massive loss of life and suffering to civilians," they said in the statement. The parties also expressed their confidence that those responsible for the war crimes and the atrocities perpetrated by Russia will be held accountable and brought to justice.

"We recognise that Russia's illegal aggression against Ukraine shakes the rules-based international order and generates economic disruption globally, affecting partners around the world. We will work, together with the international community, in global and multilateral fora, to address and mitigate these negative global impacts caused by the aggression," they said.

In addition, the parties equally condemned the role of the Lukashenko regime in Belarus in facilitating Russia's military aggression against Ukraine.

They also said that The Russian aggression against Ukraine reverberates strongly in international energy markets, leading to further significant price increases of fossil fuels and electricity globally. "The European Union expresses appreciation to Japan for the solidarity shown earlier this year in ensuring sufficient and affordable liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies to EU markets. In the light of sanctions on Russia, we will cooperate to keep global energy markets stable and help ensure each other's security of supply, in particular for the supply of LNG," the parties said.

In addition, the statement refers to "immediate action to accelerate the energy transition based on energy efficiency and the large-scale deployment of clean, safe and sustainable energies." "We will cooperate to reduce Europe's dependency on energy supplies from Russia and to ensure diversification of energy supply sources, and acknowledge the need for investments to achieve this," the parties said.
The Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, the Ministry of Economic Development and Technology of Poland, the Polish Agency for Investment and Trade, and MasterCard will open a business support center "Diia.Business" in Warsaw, which will work temporarily, during the war.

As the Ministry of Digital Transformation reported on its Telegram channel on Thursday, this decision was made due to numerous requests.

In this center, Ukrainians will be able to: consult on obtaining refugee status or other legal grounds for staying on the territory of Poland; receive information about living and employment in Poland; learn how to open a business in Poland.

The official opening ceremony is scheduled for May 17, 2022, and Diia.Business in Warsaw will begin to receive visitors from May 18 by prior registration.
Lithuania has resided more than 50,000 Ukrainians who were forced to leave the country due to Russia's war against Ukraine, a third of them have already been employed, Ukrainian Ambassador to Lithuania Petro Beshta has said.

"Lithuania received Ukrainian citizens, now temporarily displaced persons, in an amount that corresponds to 1.8% of the total population. This is a very large figure for a state like Lithuania, but they continue to accept Ukrainians and provide everything necessary. More than 50,000" Beshta said at a briefing at the Ukraine Media Center on Thursday.

He specified that the total population of Lithuania is 2.7 million people.

According to Beshta, a third of Ukrainians who arrived in Lithuania have already been employed.

"As of now, one third of the adult population of Ukrainians who can work has already been employed. They receive an average salary of about EUR 900. Another third are looking for this job. And the other third, probably, has not yet decided, because there is also a psychological barrier for Ukrainians, and everyone is talking about it  Lithuanians and Ukrainians: that our people are not always ready to look at their stay in Lithuania so long-term, to look for work, because each of us, we all believe that the war will end quickly and they will return home soon," he said.

The ambassador also noted that 500 Ukrainians in Lithuania have already told the authorities about their plans to return to Ukraine.

"We cannot accurately verify whether they returned and in what condition, but this trend is already emerging," Beshta stressed.
Azerbaijan has exported 3.5 billion cubic meters of gas to Europe during the period of January-April 2022, Energy Minister Parviz Shahbazov wrote on his official Twitter page.

During the reported period, Azerbaijan exported a total of 7.6 billion cubic meters of gas. Out of these, 46 percent were exported to Europe, 2.9 billion cubic meters of gas or 38 percent were exported to Turkey, and 1.2 billion cubic meters of gas or 16 percent to Georgia.

The minister noted that the gas exports increased by 17.4 percent compared to the same period of last year. He added that a total of 15.7 billion cubic meters of gas were produced in the country in January-April.

Moreover, Shahbazov stated that 11.1 million tons of oil were produced and 9 million tons of oil exported in Azerbaijan during the reported period.

To recall, with the completion of the TAP (Trans-Adriatic Pipeline) construction on December 31, 2020, Azerbaijan began commercial gas supplies to Europe via the Southern Gas Corridor. The European Commission's Southern Gas Corridor initiative aims to build a natural gas supply route from the Caspian and Middle Eastern regions to Europe. The route from Azerbaijan to Europe consists of the South Caucasus Pipeline, the Trans-Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP), and TAP.

Last year, TAP transported 8.1 billion cubic meters of gas to Europe. By late 2022, Azerbaijan plans to increase gas supplies to Europe to 9.1 billion cubic meters, and in 2023 the volume of gas supplies is expected to reach 11 billion cubic meters.

According to the forecast of the Azerbaijani government for oil and gas production in the country until 2026, about 48 billion cubic meters of gas will be produced in 2023, 49 billion cubic meters in 2024 and about 50 billion cubic meters in 2025.
Ukrainians who have not been "filtered" in filtration camps near Mariupol are being taken to the premises of the former correctional colony No. 52 in the village of Olenivka, Donetsk region, or to the Izolyatsia prison in Donetsk, Commissioner for Human Rights of the Verkhovna Rada Liudmyla Denisova said.

"Ukrainians are kept in inhuman conditions. With the planned limit of the colony of 850 people, today at least 3,000 people are kept there, mainly from Mariupol and the Mariupol district. The minimum term of detention there is 36 days. Captured Ukrainians are tortured, given one bottle water for dozens of people, they are fed not every day and taken to the toilet once a day. In addition, the prisoners do not have the opportunity to lie down, because the room is overcrowded," she wrote on Facebook.

According to the Ombudsman, some prisoners are released after 36 days, after being forced to sign some papers. There are also reports of mass disappearances of people after interrogations.

Denisova said that the invaders of the Russian Federation violate the norms of international humanitarian law, in particular Article 34 of the Geneva Convention for the Protection of Civilian Population in Time of War of 1949, according to which the unjustified detention of civilian hostages is strictly prohibited.

"I appeal to the UN Commission to investigate human rights violations during Russia's military Invasion of Ukraine to take into account these facts of war crimes and human rights violations in Ukraine by the occupying state," she said.
Families of servicemen of the Azov regiment appealed to the world community, first of all to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with an appeal to facilitate the procedure for the extraction of Ukrainian fighters from Mariupol.

"My son is also in Azovstal in hell. They're holding the line right now. It's not just a war, it's a massacre. We demand the extraction of our fighters together with the wounded and fallen brothers. There is a world practice. Fighters are withdrawn to a third country, neutral. We insist on such a decision. We have launched a petition with the launch of the extraction procedure. So far, it has gained one and a half million votes," Yevhen Sukharnikov, the father of one of the Azov fighters, said at a briefing at the Ukraine Media Center.

"The society supports this decision, only the organization is missing. We understand that Turkey may be such a country. I appeal to President Erdogan as a lord, as a father  save our fighters. You have practice. Direct the civilian fleet. We understand all the risks, but this is our only chance. Either we take a risk, or we watch the whole world as they are being killed there," he added.

Natalia Zarytska, the wife of a fighter of the Azov regiment, called on all countries of the world to help rescue Ukrainian fighters blocked on the territory of the Azovstal plant in Maruipol.

"Russia attaches the label of neo-Nazis to our fighters and under this pretext is trying to destroy our relatives. There is no time. If the world has allowed such a monster as Putin to grow, then it must take responsibility for his destruction," she insists.

"I received a message from my husband that the Red Cross and the UN were only interested in civilians. And my husband asks: "Are we, the fighters, waste material? We were helping and supporting civilians, rescued them, shared products. Are we really nobody," she said.

As reported, Deputy Prime Minister for the Reintegration of Temporarily Occupied Territories of Ukraine Iryna Vereschuk said that the Ukrainian side is negotiating on the issue of rescuing fighters from Azovstal, the government is working out various options. First of all, we are talking about the exchange of Ukrainian seriously wounded soldiers from Azovstal for Russian prisoners of war.
The enemy is trying to build up its military presence on Zmiyiny Island in order to block Ukraine's sea lanes, Ukrainian Defense Ministry Spokesperson Oleksandr Motuzianyk has said.

"Ships of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in the Black and Azov Seas continue to carry out tasks to isolate the area of warfare, conduct reconnaissance and try to provide fire support to their troops in the coastal direction. The enemy is also trying to build up a military presence on Zmiyiny Island. The goal is to block Ukraine's sea communications," Motuzianyk said at a briefing at the Ukraine media center in Kyiv on Thursday.

The spokesperson said "there are certain successes of the Ukrainian army, including the destruction of the Russian sailors."

"The enemy is reinforcing air defense systems on the western coast of the Crimean peninsula, in particular, in the area of the village of Chornomorske, Cape Tarkhankut, an S-300 anti-aircraft missile battery has been deployed as part of three command posts," Motuzianyk said.
The Russian occupiers again carried out a rocket attack on an oil refinery in the town of Kremenchuk, Poltava region, as well as the territory of Poltava district, head of Poltava Regional Military Administration Dmytro Lunin said.

"Four hits again at Kremenchuk refinery. Also, the sounds of explosions were heard in Poltava district. Details later. We are not leaving shelter!" Lunin wrote on Telegram on Thursday.

As reported, on April 24 in the evening, nine Russian missiles struck the Kremenchuk thermal power plant and the Kremenchuk refinery. As a result, one person was killed, seven more were injured, the fire at the refinery was eliminated only by the middle of the next day.

Earlier, on April 2, the Russian occupiers destroyed the infrastructure of the Kremenchuk oil refinery with their shelling, it stopped working,
Coordinator of actions on humanitarian corridors from the Presidents Office, Tetiana Lomakina, said that negotiations on the evacuation of medics and wounded from the territory of the Azovstal metallurgical plant in the temporarily besieged Mariupol (Donetsk region) are continuing.

"Negotiations are underway on an important second stage of the humanitarian operation to rescue medical workers and the wounded. This is about 500 people. And also about the opening of humanitarian corridors that Mariupol residents need. And there are still about 100,000 people in the city. They are mostly elderly people, women and children," Lomakina said during a briefing at the media center Ukraine on Thursday.

She recalled that earlier, with the support of the UN and the Red Cross, about 300 people were evacuated from Azovstal.

In turn, Deputy Prime Minister for the Reintegration of Temporarily Occupied Territories of Ukraine Iryna Vereschuk later clarified that at the moment there are negotiations on the evacuation of only 38 seriously wounded servicemen from the territory of the plant.

"Now we are negotiating only about 38 seriously wounded (bedridden) fighters. We work step by step. We will exchange 38 heavy ones, then we will move on. Now there are no negotiations on the exchange of 500 or 600 people, as reported by some media," Vereschuk wrote on Telegram on Thursday.

The Minister called on politicians, journalists and public figures to refrain from commenting on the content of the negotiations, as they not only misinform and disorient society, but also harm the negotiation process.

"I'm really asking. It's about people's lives. Refrain from making public comments about what you don't know. If everything works out and we get people out, then do what you want. And now I ask you to be responsible and not to interfere," Vereschuk summed up.
Russias attacks on schools and hospitals in Ukraine should not go unpunished - French Ambassador to UN

Russia's attacks on schools and hospitals in Ukraine should not go unpunished, France's permanent representative to the UN Nicolas De Riviere said.

"Attacks on schools and hospitals, as well as the killing and maiming of children are serious violations of international humanitarian law and children's rights in wartime. We call on the Secretary-General to use all the mechanisms of the Security Council to verify the facts and establish responsibility... These crimes must not go unpunished," De Riviere said at a meeting of the UN Security Council in New York on Thursday.

He assured that France would continue to support investigations in order to fight impunity, providing full support to Ukrainian justice and international courts, including the International Criminal Court.
Having lost a significant part of their military-technical potential during the war in Ukraine, the Russians have already been forced to supply units that suffered irreparable losses with equipment and weapons 50-60 years old, according to the Main Intelligence Agency of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry.

"However, this situation does not embarrass the Kremlin leadership, it does not care how much and with what to send cannon fodder to fight for the future of the Russian world. There will always be something that has been rusting in warehouses for decades and that even Third World countries did not want to buy at the time," reads a statement posted on the Agencys website reads.
The occupiers on Thursday once again fired prohibited cluster munitions at the village of Velyka Kostromka, Dnipropetrovsk region, one person was killed, there are wounded, and the neighborhood of the village of Ukrayinka, Kryvyi Rih district, was also shelled, the Prosecutor Generals Office reports.

"On May 12, 2022, the occupiers once again fired prohibited cluster munitions at the village of Velyka Kostromka, Dnipropetrovsk region. As a result of the shelling, an energy infrastructure facility was destroyed. According to preliminary data, one person was killed, there are wounded," the prosecutor's office said on the Telegram channel on Thursday.

Also, according to the prosecutor's office, on May 12, the occupiers carried out shelling of the vicinity of the village of Ukrayinka in Kryvyi Rih district. "Unexploded rockets with ammunition were found at the scene, an explosive service is working," the prosecutor's office informs.

The report of the Prosecutor General's Office notes that there are no military facilities on this territory.

The Dnipropetrovsk Regional Prosecutor's Office provides procedural guidance in criminal proceedings on violations of the laws and customs of war (Part 1, Part 2 of Article 438 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine).
Ukraine calls on the UN Security Council and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to ensure the evacuation of the wounded from the Azovstal plant in Mariupol, Ukraine's Permanent representative to the UN Serhiy Kyslytsia has said.

"Many people at Azovstal were seriously injured and do not have access to medical treatment, which they urgently need. Therefore, we believe that the evacuation operation should be continued. We call on the Security Council and the Secretary General to make further efforts to ensure the evacuation of the sick and wounded from the territory of Azovstal in accordance with international humanitarian law," Kyslytsia said at a meeting of the UN Security Council in New York on Thursday.

He stressed that these people should be taken to safe places where their right to life will be guaranteed.

Kyslytsia added that Ukraine is also concerned that the repressive Russian practice of using filtration camps for Ukrainians fleeing dangerous territories has been strengthened.

"Inhumane conditions and cruel treatment. The word filtration can only be considered as a euphemism for concentration," he pointed out.

The Permanent Representative said that Ukraine demands that Russia immediately and unconditionally release from the filtration camp the mother of 4-year-old Alice, from whom she was separated during the evacuation from the occupied territories.

"We call on UNICEF to use all possible means to protect the rights of this child and other children who have been separated from their parents by Russians," Kyslytsia said.
Western consumers should be aware of Ukrainian products to buy them not only for quality, but also in solidarity with Ukraine  owner of TM Voda UA

An exclusive interview with Dmytro Nikiforov, the owner of AT Market (Kyiv), which bottles Carpathian high-mountain water under the Voda UA brand, about the situation in the industry and the business environment that has developed after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

- Let's first speak about the indicators, pre-war and post-war market shares, sales volumes.

- Our market share in percentage is insignificant. Today, I will estimate it at up to 1.5%. But at the same time, with such a market share, we are the 11th or 12th producer in the country in terms of quantities consumed out of more than 150 legal water producers. This place in the market indicates how this market is monopolized, that it is not a market-based one, and that there is no such imbalance in any country in the world.

 This is not caused by administrative difficulties in obtaining license to develop water sources, right?

- No, only with the difficulties of marketing. There is one gigantic company in Ukraine that has "concreted" its place in the market by market-based and non-market methods, which makes it very difficult to gain a market share. With only 1.5% of the market, we are barely in the top 10 manufacturers, so you can see how the situation is with the 140 other manufacturers that are not in the top 10. However, everyone survives somehow. At the same time, we occupy the second place in the HoReCa market. That is, there is a huge distance between the first and second place, but we managed to gain a foothold within the country in second place in this segment. This is, as it were, a great success. Unfortunately, we are unlikely to replace the leader, but we intend to expand. The second place among almost 160 manufacturers is a good indicator that the product is in demand, and it is a matter of technique to develop it and we are pretty much working for this.

- Do you expect the nationalization of companies from the industry with Russian owners after the military invasion of Ukraine by Russia?

- It's hard for me to predict, because there are actually a huge number of them, and as far as I know, nothing has been nationalized. It is unknown how these processes are going to take place, since companies with Russian capital, owning assets in Russia and operating in Ukraine, this is not normal in today's conditions. It is clear that this situation will somehow change, but I do not know how it will change.

- What kind of contacts with the Russian Federation did you have before the war?

- If you google "drinking water Voda UA buy Moscow," then there are many links where it was sold or its shelf stocks are being sold. Russia was not a priority market for us, because they did not have a very loyal attitude towards Ukrainian manufacturers and Ukrainian brands. There were shipments there, but I would not call them large. For us, the loss of this market means absolutely nothing, so we painlessly said goodbye to them.

- And from the point of view of Russian water imports, how will the market be freed up if its trademarks are removed?

- I do not know of any Russian water that would be sold here, except for water for healing Essentuki, which has not been seen here for a long time.

- Do you deal with data on the dynamics of sales after the start of the war?

- I must state the decline in sales during the war period, despite the fact that our brand exposure at points of sale has increased significantly, since we were one of the first to manage the logistics of water from western Ukraine to regions of the country that were unsafe at that time. But, in the domestic market itself, we have a decline in sales, even in the case with the same period last year.

- How are you going to compensate for this decline?

- The central area of focus we are currently working on is export supplies to the EU, since our major production facilities are located 150 km from the nearest border. We believe that the Western consumer should be aware of the existence of Ukrainian products and will have an incentive to buy them not only because of their quality, but also in solidarity with Ukraine and to help Ukrainian businesses.

On this occasion, we launched the "Support Ukraine, buy Ukrainian" project, and we are trying to reach out, first of all, to Eastern European large distributors in retail chains.

- How successful is everything going on?

- We have just started, the project is only two weeks old and so far we have only two responses. Well, that's already encouraging.

- It is clear that you mainly have Eastern Europe in the export geography. What other regions do you work with?

- We had Kuwait for the export deliveries, but due to the ongoing events, this business was suspended, because it is not yet possible to develop logistics by sea. We primarily consider border countries with cheap logistics, as well as the UK, where, in our opinion, pro-Ukrainian sentiment is the strongest in Europe.

- How do you assess the current situation on the border, what kind of "bottleneck" has formed there?

- The biggest challenge is always to sell the product and find a market. We can handle the rest of the problems.

- How does the large share of bottled water impact logistics at its relatively low cost?

- The cost of water always has about 50% of transport costs. This is the specifics of the industry, since the product itself is inexpensive, but from the point of view of transportation, nothing can be worse than water in glass: you have volume and weight at the same time. For example, the cost factor of logistics in vodka will be about 10%, but in water it can be more than 50%. But the fact is that all water manufacturers in the world are in such conditions.

Yes, by supplying products to Poland, for example, we will still be more competitive than Vittel or Evian, or some other well-known European brands. It will take longer for them to reach Poland, and their cost factor of logistics will be even higher. Of course, they take by brand awareness, but the market conditions are the same for everyone  everyone transport water by trucks. Therefore, from this point of view, all manufacturers are on an equal footing, and we do not pay any increased premiums for logistics from Ukraine to Europe. There are no problems here, there are a lot of trucks, the market price and we do not pay inflated tariffs compared to other manufacturers.

- Many companies complained that after the start of the war, truck drivers of draft age were not allowed to go abroad, which forced them to stop exporting. Have you experienced this?

- No, we didn't, because we don't have exports to Europe today.

- How do you think the state could improve the situation with import-export?

- There are three key points here. We all understand that money today means much less than before the war: if you do not sow wheat, then you will not bake bread either. Now, thank God, access to money in Ukraine is quite simple. Now, the main thing is to preserve, restore and develop own production facilities.

The first is that not a single bank will give you a loan to restore destroyed factories and enterprises, because there is no collateral, it is destroyed. Therefore, the state needs to give targeted bank loans for the restoration of destroyed facilities and enterprises.

Secondly, the state is obliged to support business with money, namely working capital, because with the introduction of martial law, all debt obligations within the business were frozen, and therefore there is a huge problem with payments. That is, trading enterprises did not pay all their suppliers on absolutely legal grounds, thus the enterprises were left without profit, and many of them are shutting down. They are completely self-sufficient and have not suffered from shelling, but due to a lack of working capital, they simply halt. Therefore, the state should immediately open programs to finance working capital and secure bank loans.

Yes, some non-returns are possible, but these are all really trifles, these steps should be taken immediately.

And the third is the encouragement of exports. It is clear that products such as chicken or wheat do not need government support, the state must support the export of products, the share of which in deliveries abroad was nil or insignificant before the war. We need to introduce a new SKU to our export portfolio.

This support can be as compensation of 10% of the value shown in the export declaration. Then we can somehow compete with the Europeans and expand the range of export products. This is important because the domestic market has shrunk and for many, exports are their only salvation today. The state should think very hard about how to support the export of those products, the share of which was insignificant or it was absent abroad.

- Since the beginning of the war, most of the Ukrainian business supports the Armed Forces and the population. Will the additional "humanitarian" burden on it greatly affect its economic activity?

- Of course, the Ukrainian business itself will not be able to cope with this task. That is, it provides assistance in some issues, but it cannot globally settle this problem, because there is no such a resource. Business itself needs support, so it helps to the best of its ability. I do not think that today the share of business support of the general needs of the Armed Forces and those who are in need is high. Of course, business is doing what it can, but its efforts, even roughly, are not enough to solve the problems of supporting the Armed Forces and vulnerable groups of society.

- Who have you already helped, what has been done since the beginning of the war?

- Since the beginning of the war, we were among the first to arrange logistics and delivery of water to Vinnytsia and Kyiv regions, when Russian invaders were still standing near Kyiv. We have opened our warehouses for all those in need. We were given applications, according to which we shipped water for the Armed Forces of Ukraine, volunteer organizations, hospitals, bomb shelters and, in general, for everyone in need. That is, we gave away products worth about UAH 4.5 million. We shipped water from warehouses in Vinnytsia and Kyiv. We shipped not only water, but also tea, also our own brand.

- How else can your company provide assistance, as in the case of a broken water supply in Mykolaiv, for example?

- In this case, specifically our company cannot render the help, because it is unrealistic to compensate the water supply system interrupted in the city of Mykolaiv with bottles. Tap water cannot be compensated by the manufacturer of bottled water. The problem is solved by filling tanks in a nearby city and sending them there. We can compensate for the lack of drinking water in shelters, hospitals, cities and villages, but we cannot compensate for broken water pipes.

- Do you expect that the well-being of the population will decline and everyone will switch to cheaper alternatives, even to consumption of tap water?

- Yes, we are expecting this, especially because we work in the medium plus segment. Our water, a priori, cannot be cheap. This is Carpathian water. Ipso facto it will be more expensive than all the others, due to the logistics and the difficulty of obtaining it. We work in the medium plus segment, and it will take a large tumble. I predict that some of our fans and consumers will switch to cheaper bottled water, and consumers of cheap bottled water will most likely switch to filtered water in large part. It's unavoidable. The contraction and reduction of the market will happen, because, as we understand without overstating the obvious, the well-being and purchasing power of people is declining, and the consumer will save as much as possible on all consumer goods.

- What is your "planning horizon", for what period do you make calculations in the work: weeks, months or a season?

- We do not live according to the principle "the day has passed and thank God." We are actively preparing to meet the summer season, we are trying to expand as much as possible in retail outlets within the country. We are negotiating cooperation with the largest distributors and are trying to use the tool and the possibility of exporting as much as possible, so we focus on such a medium-term perspective until the end of the year. We believe that the situation will not worsen, and perhaps it will improve. Therefore, we feel quite sovereign: we are engaged in planning and expanding as much as possible.

- Can you share the details of the biggest recent deals?

- In principle, we do not have such large transactions. We are present in almost all national retail chains. We are simply expanding our presence in these chains. That is, if there are 350 stores, and before the war we were present only in 50, then our task now is to expand at least two or three times. We are engaged in a purely routine, I cannot give any transaction as an example.

- What has changed at your plant since the beginning of the war?

- The plant is located in the Carpathian "nowheresville," therefore, almost nothing has changed there. Yes, some workers were drafted into the Armed Forces of Ukraine to join territorial defense units, but, in principle, the plant has been working absolutely stably all this time, and martial law did not impose any special difficulties on its operation.

- Voda UA attended major government events last year. How did you manage to take this place, and will the current popularity of Ukrainian politicians abroad help support the export of your brand?

- We did not make any efforts to get on the tables of government bodies. There is no administrative resource for a water manufacturer to somehow enter there, it somehow happened by itself. That is, the Verkhovna Rada was the first client from government agencies, for which we made a special label with the symbols of the parliament. After that, all major government agencies began to purchase our water. Moreover, not only directly from us, but also from distributors. I think that this is largely due to naming, when you understand 100% which country's water you are drinking.

All of these bodies have conducted independent water testing, according to which our water meets the highest quality standards, and in many ways it is significantly ahead of well-known world brands. As far as I know, we are the only ones in the country who produce mountain spring water. Water is extracted mainly from underground wells, while we extract from high-altitude water intakes at an altitude of 1,400 meters above sea level. Therefore, thanks to branding and unprecedented water quality, we are present at many official events and economic forums in government structures.

We consider it incorrect to use the popularity of our politicians abroad for advertising purposes. Therefore, we never post photos of the president, prime minister or MPs with our water or against the background of our water even in social networks. We consider this wrong and do not consider this way of brand development.

- The Cabinet of Ministers has recently simplified the import of products with a label not in Ukrainian. Do you allow for the possibility of simplifying the label, changing containers from glass to plastic, or other forced changes in the appearance of your products?

- In addition to Voda UA, we have brands that are simpler, which we bottle in standard containers. As for Voda UA, 90% of the success lies in the design and packaging. Our glass bottle is even more like a vase that foreigners take with them as a souvenir from our country. That is, this is a business card, and it is thanks to it that we became the second in HoReCa. By simplifying the bottle, we will lose this sense of exclusivity and something completely distinct in the national identity. Therefore, for us, any simplification of the brand will inevitably be associated with a decrease in sales, and if there is a shortage of containers, labels or packaging, we will be forced to suspend the bottling of Voda UA until the situation is resolved and focus on the Karpatska Dzherelna Vysokohirna brand, which we bottle in standard containers. In principle, it is no different from Voda UA, but it costs less from the point of view of the brand, since its bottling is much simpler. Therefore, Voda UA will be bottled exclusively in its intended containers or will not be bottled at all.

- What is the situation with glass and plastic containers in the industry?

- To date, we do not experience problems with components. Yes, we had to change suppliers, because not everyone remained in service. We have new suppliers of labels, molds, and so on, but in fact, we have all of this, or all of this can be ordered in neighboring countries. The problem may be exclusively in glass bottles, because we can only make them at a factory where we have molds. It is impossible to transfer activities to another factory. Ordering new ones is very expensive and takes a long time, so we are tied to the Vetropack plant in Hostomel as for glass. Thank God, it did not suffer much from the Russian occupiers. Production there will be launched after mine clearance. Also, as far as I know, the stock of bottles they produced for us was not affected. I think that within a month we will be able to receive the shipment, so in our particular case there are no problems with the container.

- Now there is an opportunity for businesses to switch to the general taxation system at 2%. Have you taken advantage of this opportunity?

- My financial consultants and accounting department said that we remain on the same positions: 2% of turnover in today's realities is not profitable for us.

- What initiatives would you recommend to the state in the field of taxation in your industry and for business in general?

- Apart from loans, business does not need to be supported, as well as there is no need to lower taxes. It is necessary to immediately beat this "hydra," which is called the registration of tax invoices. This is the tool, thanks to which the thievish tax officials and MPs covering them wash out the turnover in the amount of VAT from the business. The state must immediately stop the practice of registering tax invoices, which does not exist anywhere in the world. This is the main problem of our entire tax system today.

Business suffers from this registration of tax invoices, all these criteria for classifying enterprises as risky should be removed immediately. They are simply killing business by washing away the working capital and this should be stopped immediately.

There is no need to lower taxes, they are feasible. In the net, VAT should be abolished in principle, and introduce understandable and clear turnover tax and sales tax, non-refundable. Because any refundable tax like VAT is a so-called square tax and creates corruption risks, but such people are getting benefits from this money flow that it is impossible to get this issue rolling.

Therefore, the abolition of VAT and income tax with their replacement for an exit capital tax is what the state should do for business. Without this, the business will not be cured, no matter how it is stuffed with loans. All funding is broken down into something that simply cannot work in the existing paradigm.






By Azernews





Azerbaijan is one of the key energy partners of the European Union, Ambassador Peter Michalko has said in remarks about Europe Day at ADA University.

Michalko added that Azerbaijan is one of the EU's closest partners, both in the Eastern Partnership format and in various sectors of the economy.

"Today Azerbaijan and the EU have become closer to each other more than ever," Mikhalko said.

The ambassador stated that the priorities of bilateral cooperation are also the transition to digital technologies, the development of rural areas, and people-to-people contacts.

Michalko pointed out that the new comprehensive agreement between Azerbaijan and the EU will further strengthen productive cooperation.

"We hope that the new legal framework will give us an opportunity for even wider development," he said.

Visa-free regime

Speaking at a seminar, Lithuanian Ambassador Egidijus Navikas said that the introduction of a visa-free regime between the EU and Azerbaijan can be an important step for productive cooperation.

"I intend to raise this issue," he said.

He added that the relations between Azerbaijan and the EU intensified after the end of the 2020 second Karabakh war.

Noting that the EU companies are actively involved in reconstruction work in Azerbaijans Karabakh, Navikas mentioned that the EU is also a mediator in establishing peaceful relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

New agreement

Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry Ambassador-at-Large Rashad Novruz said that the new comprehensive agreement between Azerbaijan and the EU will soon be signed and will yield good results.

"Azerbaijan and the EU are predictable and mutually understanding partners. That is why our cooperation is developing," he said.

He stressed that the EU is not only Azerbaijan's largest trading partner but also ranks first in terms of investments in the country.

"Azerbaijan looks to the future in terms of bilateral relations just like the EU," he said.

Bolstering co-op

Moreover, French Ambassador Zacharie Gross noted that the EU hopes for productive cooperation with Azerbaijan.

"The EU really seeks to enhance cooperation with Azerbaijan. We see Azerbaijan as our partner," he said.

The ambassador also expressed confidence in the further development of productive relations.
At the beginning of April, a national network of metal centers called Vartis resumed full operation of its bases in most regions of Ukraine. All metal bases of the company in the liberated territories also work in a regular mode.

To date, direct damage to Ukraine's infrastructure due to enemy shelling is estimated by experts at $88 billion. These are destroyed houses, kindergartens and schools, roads, hospitals, ports, airports, railway infrastructure, shopping malls, warehouses and logistics centers.

We believe in our victory and understand the need for rapid and high-quality reconstruction of housing, socio-economic and critical infrastructure in many human settlements. Our company is ready to take an active part in the reconstruction of Ukraine, providing metal products for construction of any scale - said Vartis Commercial Director Serhiy Kovalenko.

Since the beginning of the large-scale Russian invasion, 15 metal depots of the company in Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kherson and Odesa oblasts had temporarily stopped working. The full-fledged work of the company is gradually being restored in all territories liberated from the occupiers. To date, the company's 13 metal depots located in Kyiv and Kyiv region have been completely restored.

Vartis has all the resources to be a reliable partner for Ukrainians in rebuilding the country. Pricing policy, product range and developed logistics give us the opportunity to make profitable offers in the domestic market of rolled metal, both for wholesale and retail customers, - Serhiy Kovalenko emphasized.

Also in May, the company plans to open a new metal base in the Transcarpathian region to ensure uninterrupted logistics in the western part of Ukraine.

Reference

Vartis is a national network of metal centers. It is one of the 5 largest domestic players in the market of rolled metal. It has its own car fleet. The company's main products: fittings, beams, steel sheets, welded and profile pipes. The company works for wholesale and retail customers, providing quality certified products for construction work.
President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi congratulated Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan on his election as President of the UAE on Saturday, a statement by the Egyptian presidency said.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with the family of slain Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh after criticizing Israel's use of force at her funeral, an official said Sunday.
Finland will apply for NATO membership, the Nordic country's president and the prime minister announced Sunday, as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and a delegation of GOP senators met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv during an unannounced visit Saturday, delivering the latest show of American solidarity with the country at war with Russia.
Before Russia's invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, many observers looked at Russia's overwhelming combat power and thought Russia would achieve a quick victory.

Because Russia has a US$62 billion defence budget and holds numerical advantages in weapon systems such as tanks, artillery, attack helicopters and planes, many analysts asked not whether Russia would win but rather how quickly it would do so.

What these observers and less experienced analysts are not taking into account is that wartime performance is influenced by more than how weapon systems function.

Success in battle is also a function of strategy, operational employment, doctrine, training, leadership, culture and the will to fight.

Russia held and continues to hold an overwhelming numerical advantage in manpower and weapon systems, but Ukraine holds the advantage in every other factor.

Ukraine's military competence goes a long way to explain why Russia failed to seize Kyiv and Kharkiv and why Russia's attempts to seize the entirety of the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces in its latest offensive in the east will likely fail.

Ukraine's military reforms

Following its miserable performance in 2014 against Russia, when demonstrations by pro-Russian groups in the Donbas region of Ukraine escalated into a war between the Ukrainian military and Russian-backed separatists, Ukraine conducted a comprehensive review of its security and defence establishment.

The ensuing report led former president Petro Poroshenko to enact the Strategic Defense Bulletin of Ukraine in May 2016.

The bulletin mandated broad and sweeping reform across the defence establishment, with the goal of producing a force capable of performing up to NATO standards by 2020.

Over the next six years, Ukraine reformed its military with the help of Western advisers, trainers and equipment. From 2016 to 2018, I served as the executive officer of the U.S. senior defence adviser to Ukraine and was able to witness some of these reforms.

In that position, I met with dozens of members of Ukraine's security establishment, including then-President Poroshenko and then-Defense Minister Stepan Poltorak.

It was clear that Ukrainian leaders feared a large-scale Russian invasion, and they knew they had little time to make difficult reforms in five categories: command and control, planning, operations, medical and logistics, and professional development of the force.

Battlefield experience

By the time Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, Ukraine had built a well-led, professional force with a culture that encouraged junior leader initiative on the battlefield.

These initiatives occur when original battlefield orders are no longer relevant or fit the changing situation.

Before reforms were enacted, the lieutenants and captains who were conducting the fighting on the ground were unable to make decisions and were required to seek permission before they could act.

Benefiting from eight years of fighting in the Donbas and six years of Western trainers and advisers, Ukraine's military in 2022 wasn't the same as it had been in 2014, much to Russia's surprise.

In fact, it was far superior to Russia's military in nearly every measure but size.

As a result, Russia's latest invasion pitted a large but poorly trained force against a much smaller but well-trained, well-led and motivated force.

As the war moves east, Ukrainian levels of proficiency, training, leadership, culture and motivation remain constant.

Russian levels of troops and equipment also remain constant - and their poorly led forces cannot be fixed in weeks or months.

It took Ukraine six years to reform its military.

Deploying combat troops

Many media reports have focused on the fact that Russian forces' moving from the north of Ukraine to support operations in the east will increase Russia's likelihood of success in occupying Ukraine's eastern region.

Yet, what is often ignored is that Ukraine is also able to move forces east. Sure, a small element of Ukrainian forces will remain to defend Kyiv.

But others will move east, meaning the overall ratio between Russian and Ukrainian forces is unlikely to change much unless Russia decides to ship in even more troops.

Likewise, Russia does not seem capable of changing how it employs its troops when they meet stiff Ukrainian resistance.

Although much was made of the appointment of Gen. Alexander Dvornikov to command Russian operations in Ukraine, his promotion seems to have changed little on the ground.

Operations over the past few weeks have demonstrated that Russia is still incapable of executing large-scale attacks that result in Russian control over Ukrainian territory.

The only real change that gives hope to Russia is the geographic terrain.

The land in the north of Ukraine consists largely of wetlands, which forced Russia to stick to the roads and thus limited the number of routes it could use to advance on Kyiv.

The terrain in the east contains more open space and would enable Russia to move its troops and tanks along multiple routes instead of one.

Critical military aid

A key to Ukraine's holding off this much larger force is the ability to rapidly replace military equipment that gets depleted or destroyed.

Western aid since the start of the war in February 2022 has been absolutely critical to Ukraine's continued success.

Ukraine's needs have not changed since then.

As Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba explained during a meeting with NATO officials in April 2022, his wish list "only has three items on it. It's weapons, weapons, and weapons."

Ukraine can likely hold out, provided it can get more of everything. But given questions about the continued U.S. supply of Javelin anti-tank missiles, getting more weapons is not a guarantee.

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Egypts Presidency of the 27th session of the Conference of the Parties to UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27) has revealed the conferences official logo, which represents the cultural identity of Egypt and Africa, the Egyptian foreign ministry announced.

The logo of COP27, which is set to be held in Sharm El-Sheikh in November, highlights the unique cultural identity of Egypt and the African elements of the ancient Egyptian civilisation, the ministry added.

The design displays the African sun embracing the sun of the ancient Egyptian deity Aten as it rises over a new horizon.

The sun, a source of life and a sign of hope, is a deeply rooted symbol in the African civilisation, the Egyptian foreign ministry said, adding that the rising and setting sun refers to the cycle of life and renewed hope for a better world, as its rays provide the energy needed for the continuation of life.

The sun of Aten, with its rays ending in hands, refers to the generosity of nature as it provides the means for life, welfare and prosperity, the statement said, adding that in the middle of the logo there is a new horizon representing hope for a better future.

Aten was an ancient Egyptian deity represented by the sun disk, and was at the centre of a religious belief system established by 18th dynasty Pharaoh Akhenaten. Atenism is considered one of the earliest, if not short-lived, monotheistic religions in recorded history.

The Ministry of Foreign affairs said the logo aims to send a message on the importance of preserving our planet.

It is high time for the international community to show solidarity in the face of climate change, which threatens humanity now more than ever, the statement said.

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A veteran Al Jazeera correspondent who was shot dead on Wednesday during an Israeli raid in the West Bank was a highly respected journalist in the Middle East whose unflinching coverage was known to millions of viewers.





News of Shireen Abu Akleh's death reverberated across the region. The 51-year-old journalist became a household name synonymous with Al Jazeera's coverage of life under occupation during her more than two decades reporting in the Palestinian territories, including during the second intifada, or uprising, that killed thousands of Palestinians.

Abu Akleh's name trended across Twitter in Arabic on Wednesday, setting social media alight with support for the Palestinians.

Her image was projected over the main square in the West Bank city of Ramallah as mourners flooded the Al Jazeera offices there and her family home in east Jerusalem.

Abu Akleh's coverage of the harsh realities of Israel's military occupation was inextricably linked with her own experiences as a Palestinian journalist on the front lines.

Her death underscores the heavy price the conflict continues to exact on Palestinians, regardless of their role as journalists.

Although she was also a US citizen who often visited America in the summers, she lived and worked in her homeland Palestine in east Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Abu Akleh, a Palestinian Christian whose family was originally from Bethlehem, was born and raised in Jerusalem. She leaves behind a brother and her parents.

In an Al Jazeera video released last year, Abu Akleh recalled the scale of destruction and "the feeling that death was at times just around the corner'' during her coverage of the second intifada, from 2000-to 2005.

"Despite the dangers, we were determined to do the job," she said.

"I chose journalism so I could be close to the people,'' she added.

"It might not be easy to change the reality, but at least I was able to communicate their voice to the world.''

Abu Akleh joined Al Jazeera in 1997, just a year after the groundbreaking Arabic news network launched.

Among her many assignments were covering five wars in Gaza and Israel's war with Lebanon in 2006. She reported on forced home evictions, the killings of Palestinian youth, the hundreds of Palestinians held without charge in Israeli prisons, and the continuous expansion of Jewish settlements.

Her longtime producer, Wessam Hammad, said Abu Akleh possessed an incredible ability to remain calm under pressure.

"Shireen worked all these years with a commitment to the values and ethics of our profession,'' he said of Abu Akleh, who the network called "the face of Al Jazeera in Palestine.''

He and Abu Akleh were often caught in Israeli cross-fire during the many stories they covered together, he said. On one assignment, their car was filled with tear gas and they struggled to breathe, When they would think back on these moments, he said Abu Akleh would laugh and marvel at how they managed to survive.

Images of the moments after Abu Akleh was shot in the head in the West Bank town of Jenin circulated online and were broadcast on Al Jazeera and other Arabic news channels.

Wearing a helmet and a vest clearly marked "PRESS," Abu Akleh's body was shown lying face down in a patch of sand. A Palestinian man jumped over a wall to reach her as gunshots rang out, dragging her motionless body to a car.

In a video from the West Bank hospital where Abu Akleh was pronounced dead, a male colleague was seen weeping at her hospital bed as others choked back tears.

A female correspondent for Al Jazeera in the Gaza Strip wept on air as she reported from a vigil for the journalist.

Later Wednesday, Abu Akleh's body, draped in a Palestinian flag and covered by a wreath of flowers, was carried through downtown Ramallah on a red stretcher. Hundreds chanted, "With our spirit, with our blood, we will redeem you, Shireen.''

An outpouring of condemnation came from governments around the world. The US State Department called her death "an affront to media freedom.''

Al Jazeera and witnesses, including her producer who was shot in the back Wednesday, said Israeli forces killed her.

Israel said it was unclear who was responsible, calling it "premature and irresponsible to cast blame at this stage.''

It had started as another routine assignment for Abu Akleh. She'd emailed colleagues that she was heading to the Jenin refugee camp to check on reports of an Israeli military raid.

"I will bring you the news as soon as the picture becomes clear,'' she wrote.

"Generations grew up seeing her work,'' producer Hammad, said.

"People listened to Shireen's voice and were influenced by her to study journalism so they could be like her.''

Abu Akleh's niece, Lina Abu Akleh, described her as a "best friend'' and "second mom''.

"She is someone that I was looking up to since I was a kid, watching all of her reports," she told journalists from the family's home. "I never thought this day would come where the news would be about her."

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Egypt is going to hold an international press conference early next week to explain the state's vision on handling the current international economic crisis, Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly announced on Wednesday.

PM Madbouly said during the weekly cabinet meeting on Wednesday that the press conference will cover the plans and efforts by the Egyptian state to attract foreign and local investments in accordance with directive from President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi.

President El-Sisi instructed the government to hold an international press conference on the states plan to face the international economic crisis in late April during the annual Egyptian Family Iftar Banquet.

The PM also announced that a new unit in the cabinet has been established under his direct supervision to swiftly solve problems faced by investors.

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Ukraine's leaders must start shaping their terms for an acceptable peace deal, especially in light of Russia's surprising failure to win its war outright, Italy's premier said Wednesday.

When Russia first launched its invasion of Ukraine, "we thought there was a Goliath and a David,'' Mario Draghi told reporters at a news conference in Washington.

But "what seemed like an invincible power has proved'' not to be, Draghi said, referring to Russian forces' inability to overcome the defense mounted by Ukraine's military, with heavy Western backing.

Draghi spoke after meeting with President Joe Biden on Tuesday. Draghi says he urged Biden to push to get all key players, including the United States and Russia, into talks to end the war.

But any rush to close a peace deal that leaves Ukrainians angry and resentful risks a return to fighting, the Italian leader said Wednesday.

"We have to remove any thought that we can reach an imposed peace,'' Draghi said. "That is a recipe for disaster.''

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By Trend

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has allocated a loan in the amount of 10 million euros for the introduction of smart waste collection and route optimization systems in Azerbaijans Ganja city, the Bank told Trend.

The relevant agreements were signed today between the EBRDs First Vice President Jurgen Rigterink, Azerbaijans Minister of Finance Samir Sharifov and Head of Ganja City Executive Power Niyazi Bayramov.

According to EBRD, new types of containers, expansion of the existing fleet and the introduction of more environmentally friendly vehicles will be provided under the agreement, which will significantly reduce the carbon footprint of municipal services of the city.

More than 300,000 people living in Ganja will benefit from improvements in their urban environment. Todays agreement will also pave the way for a follow-on project that will complete the solid waste management improvements by way of a new modern regional sanitary landfill, the Bank said.

Meanwhile, the present project is part of Ganjas engagement in the EBRD Green Cities program and will contribute to the development of a Green City Action Plan (GCAP). Ganja joined the program in 2020.

The EBRD is an important institutional investor in Azerbaijan. To date the EBRD has invested over 3.5 billion euros through 181 projects there. The Banks strategy in the country focuses on helping Azerbaijan to diversify its economy and develop the private sector in non-oil sectors.
The Group of Seven industrialised nations on Thursday condemned the growing restrictions placed on women and girls by the Taliban in Afghanistan, accusing the hardline Islamist group of isolating the country.

"We call on the Taliban to urgently take steps to lift restrictions on women and girls," the foreign ministers of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain and the United States said in a statement.

"We condemn the imposition of increasingly restrictive measures that severely limit half the population's ability to fully, equally and meaningfully participate in society," they said.

By restricting the rights of women ans girls, the Taliban are "further isolating themselves from the international community", the ministers said.

When the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan last year, they promised a softer rule than during their first stint in power from 1996 to 2001, which was marked by human rights abuses.

But they have increasingly restricted the rights of Afghans, particularly girls and women, who have been prevented from returning to secondary schools and many government jobs.

Women across the country have been banned from travelling alone, and last week the authorities ordered them to cover up completely in public, ideally with a burqa.

The G7 foreign ministers gathered on Thursday for a three-day meeting in Germany, which holds the presidency of the group.

The ministers plan to discuss the war in Ukraine but also other pressing global issues.

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The rulings are not final and can be appealed.



The defendants were charged with several crimes that took place in August 2013, including the premeditated murder of civilians as well as policemen who were tasked with dispersing a sit-in in Cairos Rabaa square, which has been renamed Hisham Barakat Square.

The defendants were also charged with attempted murder, blocking roads, destroying public property, and possessing firearms and Molotov cocktails.

The case, which involves more than 700 defendants including fugitives, dates back to the dispersal of the Rabaa sit-in that was held by supporters of ousted Islamist President Mohamed Morsi in August 2013.

The dispersal left hundreds dead and thousands arrested on a variety of charges. It also unleashed days of nationwide street clashes and attacks on security installations.

In June last year, Egypts Court of Cassation upheld the death penalty for 12 people in the case, Mohamed El-Beltagy, Safwat Hegazy, and Abdel-Rahman El-Bar, three key leading members of the terrorist-designated Muslim Brotherhood.

The country's top appeals court also commuted in June the death penalty for 31 others in the same case to life imprisonment, but upheld prison sentences ranging from five to 25 years for 277 others.

The cassation court also upheld a 10-year prison sentence against Osama, the son of ousted President Morsi.

Criminal proceedings against another key Brotherhood figure, Essam El-Erian, were abated after his death in custody in August 2020. El-Erian had received a final death penalty in the case.

In 2018, a Cairo Criminal Court issued preliminary death sentences for 75 members of the Brotherhood in a mass trial in the case. Several defendants, including Mohamed Badie, the Brotherhoods Supreme Guide, were handed life imprisonment sentences in the case.

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Two police major generals and two conscripts have been killed in a road accident during a mission to arrest a suspect in a major swindling case in Aswan governorate on Thursday, the Ministry of Interior announced.

All four were in a police car that overturned during the manhunt in the city of Edfu, the ministry stated.

The ministry added that the suspect was arrested and all necessary legal measures have been taken

According to news reports, the suspect, who is commonly known as Mostafa El-Bank, is a tuktuk driver with a criminal record. He allegedly swindled victims in Aswan and other governorates in Upper Egypt out of nearly EGP 200 million (about $10.9 million) over the past few months by claiming that he was able to sell their cattle for higher prices than their true value.

When the suspect then disappeared without paying, the victims reported him to the authorities and public prosecution for swindling their money and cattle.

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Egyptian foreign minister and president-designate of the 27th session of the Conference of Parties on Climate Change (COP27) Sameh Shoukry headed on Wednesday to Copenhagen to participate in the ministerial meeting on the implementation of climate pledges, which will be held on 12-13 May, the Egyptian foreign ministry announced

The meeting is co-chaired by Egypt, as the country hosting the upcoming COP27, and the United Kingdom, as the current president, with the participation of various ministers and officials of member states of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Executive Secretary of the Convention, and representatives of civil society.

The Egyptian foreign ministry said the meeting is being held in conjunction with the 30th anniversary of the UNFCCC, and represents an opportunity to discuss the necessary executive steps to push forward implementing pledges to combat climate change.

The Danish prime minister will receive Minister Shoukry to discuss advancing bilateral relations between the two countries.

The Egyptian FM will also meet with his Danish counterpart to discuss all areas of bilateral cooperation between the two countries and ways to promote them.

Minister of the Environment Yasmin Fouad is part of the delegation accompanying Shoukry.

A statement issued by the Ministry of Environment said that 50 ministers concerned with environmental affairs will attend the event.

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Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry has affirmed that Egypts presidency of the 2022 UN Climate Change Conference (COP27) prioritises fulfilling climate pledges and turning them into a tangible reality on the ground.

Shoukry made the remarks on Thursday during the opening session of the ministerial meeting on the implementation of climate pledges in Copenhagen, Egypts foreign ministry said in a statement.

The meeting, co-chaired by Egypt, being the country hosting the upcoming COP27, and the UK, the current president, runs on 12-13 May.

In a speech, Shoukry said the ministerial meeting in the Danish capital is an opportunity for the exchange of visions and expertise on the implementation of international climate action.

This comes through activating the terms of the Paris Agreement on climate change and fulfilling the national pledges regarding reducing emissions, Shoukry noted. This is in addition to the other pledges announced at COP26 last year in Glasgow, he added.

The meeting was attended by Britain's Minister of State at the Cabinet Office and COP26 President Alok Sharma, Danish Minister of Climate, Energy and Utilities Dan Jrgensen, and Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Patricia Espinosa.

Several ministers and officials at member states of the convention, and representatives of civil society attended the meeting.

Egypt is scheduled to host COP27 in the Red Sea resort city of Sharm El-Sheikh in November with ambitions to build on the outcomes of COP26 in Glasgow and support global efforts in mitigating and adapting to climate change.

Egypt has also pledged to speak up for aspirations of Africa and developing countries to cope with climate change, including through securing the required finance in this regard.

During the meeting, Shoukry stressed Egypts keenness that COP27 represent an important step on the way towards implementing climate pledges and turning them into a reality on the ground.

Shoukry highlighted the importance of maintaining the current momentum in climate action in a way that raises ambitions and makes the goal of keeping the rise in global temperatures under 1.5 degrees Celsius within reach.

The top Egyptian diplomat underscored the need for the current geopolitical situation to not affect climate pledges.

Shoukry reviewed with Sharma and Jrgensen Egypts preparations to host COP27, affirming the country's keenness to consult with all relevant parties and learn about their visions regarding various climate issues.

This shall contribute to ensuring that the conference yield balanced outcomes that take into consideration the priorities and concerns of all parties, Shoukry added.

The Egyptian FM also highlighted the importance of the engagement of all parties concerned with international climate action in the conference.

The meeting discussed issues of climate change adaptation, the harms and losses due to climate change, and the importance of securing climate finance in developing countries.

Meeting also with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen on Thursday, Shoukry welcomed cooperation with Denmark along with other international partners to make COP27 a success.

The Egyptian FM conveyed President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisis invitation to Frederiksen to attend the summit of heads of state and governments that will be held during the conference in November.

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Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry and his Danish counterpart Jeppe Kofod signed in Copenhagen on Thursday a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to boost consultation on bilateral ties as well as regional and international issues, amid a ministerial climate meeting.

According to the Egyptian foreign ministry, Shoukry and Kofod held talks on cementing bilateral political, economic and cultural relations between the two countries as well as the green transition in Egypt.

They discussed cooperation in light of Egypts hosting of the 2022 UN Climate Change Conference (COP27), which is set to be held in the Red Sea resort city of Sharm El-Sheikh in November.

The two officials also discussed Egypt-EU relations and cooperation, which Denmark expressed a desire to support.

Shoukry and Kofod also exchanged views on the impacts of the Ukraine crisis, developments in Palestine, and the situation in Libya and Syria.

The Egyptian FM spoke about the latest developments in the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), upholding Egypts stance demanding Ethiopia sign a legally binding agreement with the downstream countries on the filling and operation policies of the dam.

The two also discussed the counter-terrorism file, with the Danish FM presented his condolences for the victims of the recent terrorist attacks that took place in Sinai this week.

Shoukry is currently in Copenhagen to attend and co-chair the ministerial meeting on the implementation of climate pledges.

He is attending the event in his role as president-designate of COP27.

The meeting, which is co-chaired by Egypt and the UK, the current president, runs on 12-13 May.

During COP27, Egypt hopes to build on the outcomes of COP26 in Glasgow and support global efforts in mitigating and adapting to climate change.

On the sideline of the meeting, Sameh Shoukry reviewed Egypts vision for COP27 with Britain's Minister of State at the Cabinet Office Alok Sharma and Danish Minister of Climate, Energy and Utilities Dan Jrgensen.

Sameh Shoukry also met earlier on Thursday with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, where he welcomed cooperation with Denmark along with other international partners to make COP27 a success.

The Egyptian FM conveyed President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisis invitation to Frederiksen to attend the summit of heads of state and governments that will be held during the conference in November.

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Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly headed on Thursday to Tunisia to participate in the 17th session of the Egyptian-Tunisian higher committee, which aims to promote bilateral economic relations.ions.

The meetings will be held on Thursday and Friday and will be presided over by Madbouly and his Tunisian counterpart Najla Bouden, a statement by the Egyptian cabinet said on Thursday.

Madbouly is accompanied by a delegation of several ministers, including Education Minister Tarek Shawki, Higher Education Khaled Abdel-Ghaffar, International Cooperation Rania Al-Mashat, Housing Minister Assem El-Gazzar, Communications and Information Technology Minister Amr Talaat, and Agriculture Minister El-Sayed El-Quseir.

The meetings are expected to include the signing of a handful of agreements to strengthen bilateral cooperation between Egypt and Tunisia.

Additionally, the Egyptian-Tunisian economic forum will be held on the sidelines of the higher committee meetings, and will focus on exchanging visions on investment prospects between Cairo and Tunis.

Egypt's exports to Tunisia reached $223.3 million in 2021, down from $263.9 million and $613.8 million in 2020 and 2019 respectively. Egypt mainly exports clothing, food, and cleaning products.

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An initial probe by the Israeli Army showed that the Israeli forces have fired dozens of bullets during the raid in the West Bank that led to the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh (51) on Wednesday, Israeli newspaper HAARETZ reported.

While the initial probe says that most of the Israeli fire was directed southwards, and Abu Akleh and a Reuters photographer who was wounded were positioned to the north of the Israeli forces, it admitted that it appears that some Israeli fire was directed northwards as well, according to HAARETZ.

The probe is inconclusive if Abu Akleh was killed by Israeli fire or Palestinian gunmen while she was covering a military raid in Jenin on Wednesday.

According to sources, who spoke to the Hebrew newspaper, the probe showed that Abu Akleh was about 150 meters away from Israeli military forces when she was shot and killed.

M-16 Rifle

Israeli soldiers from the elite Duvdevan Unit fired a few dozen bullets during the raid in Jenin, the investigation shows, but whether it was Israeli or Palestinian gunfire that killed the Al Jazeera reporter is unknown.

The bullet, which struck her in the head, is 5.56 millimeters in diameter and was shot from an M16 rifle, but Haaretz said that since such rifles are used by both the Israeli forces and Palestinian cells in the West Bank, the information is insufficient to determine which side fired the bullet.

Sources told the newspaper that in the course of an arrest outside the Jenin refugee camp, 'hundreds of bullets were shot at Israeli troops, who responded by firing dozens of bullets at specific targets'.

The sources claimed that some of the rounds fired at them came from a gunman who they spotted on the roof of a house, an armed man peering from a window and others.

Most of the Israeli fire was directed southwards, while Abu Akleh and a Reuters photographer who was wounded were positioned to the north of the Israeli forces. Nevertheless, it appears that some Israeli fire was directed northwards as well, the proble claimed.

The paper said that officials believe that a ballistics examination of the Israeli troops' weapons could either confirm or refute the claim that the bullet that hit Abu Akleh was fired by an Israeli soldier.

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China said Thursday it was ready to "fully support" North Korea in its pandemic prevention efforts after Pyongyang reported its first official Covid-19 case and declared a national emergency.

North Korea, which imposed a rigid blockade of its borders at the start of the pandemic in 2020, had not previously reported any Covid-19 cases.

But samples taken from patients with fevers in Pyongyang "coincided with Omicron BA.2 variant", the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported Thursday, as leader Kim Jong Un and top officials announced they would implement the "maximum emergency epidemic prevention system".

China is North Korea's biggest trade partner and close ally.

"We sympathise with the current (coronavirus) outbreak situation in North Korea," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Thursday at a regular presser.

"As comrades, neighbours and friends, China is ready to provide full support and assistance to North Korea in its fight against the epidemic," Zhao said, without offering details on whether China will send vaccines, medical equipment or aid.

North Korea has so far rejected any kind of vaccine programme -- even when offered supplies by the World Health Organization, China and Russia -- and has tried to prevent an outbreak by sealing its borders.

Experts say the nation's 25 million people are vulnerable due to the lack of Covid-19 vaccines, and that the country's crumbling health infrastructure would struggle to deal with a major outbreak.

China is one of the biggest donors of Covid-19 vaccines to developing countries, but exports have dropped sharply in recent months as it battles major virus outbreaks in several provinces.

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Israel advanced plans for the construction of more than 4,000 settler homes in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, a rights group said, a day after the military demolished homes in an area where hundreds of Palestinians face the threat of expulsion.

It was a jolting illustration of Israel's policies in the territory it has occupied for nearly 55 years. Critics, including three major human rights groups, say those policies amount to apartheid, a charge Israel rejects as an attack on its very legitimacy.

Hagit Ofran, an expert at the anti-settlement watchdog group Peace Now, told The Associated Press that a military planning body approved 4,427 housing units at a meeting on Thursday that she attended. ``The state of Israel took another stumble toward the abyss and further deepened the occupation,'' she tweeted.

Spokespeople for the Israeli government and the military body in charge of civilian affairs in the West Bank did not respond to requests for comment.

It's the biggest advancement of settlement projects since the Biden administration took office. The White House opposes settlement construction and views it as an obstacle to any eventual peace agreement with the Palestinians.

There was no immediate comment from the administration on Thursday's decision. But last week, when the first reports emerged of the impending settlement approval, State Department spokeswoman Jalina Porter reiterated that the U.S. ``strongly'' opposes settlement expansion.

Most of the international community considers the settlements illegal and supports a two-state solution to the conflict. But neither the United States nor other world powers have given Israel _ the stronger party _ any incentive to accede to such an arrangement. Israel says Palestinian leaders have rejected proposals by previous governments that would have given them a state.

Israel approved some 3,000 settler homes in October, brushing aside a rebuke from the U.S., its closest ally. Peace talks with the Palestinians broke down more than a decade ago, in part because of Israel's continuing construction on lands the Palestinians want for a future state.

On Wednesday, Israeli troops demolished at least 18 buildings and structures in the West Bank following a Supreme Court decision that would force at least 1,000 Palestinians out of an area Israel designated as a firing zone in the early 1980s.

B'Tselem, another Israeli rights group, said 12 residential buildings were among the structures that were demolished, in villages in the arid hills south of the West Bank city of Hebron.

Residents of the Masafer Yatta say they have been living in the region, herding animals and practicing traditional desert agriculture for decades, long before Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 war. The Supreme Court sided with the military, which says there were no permanent structures in the area before it was designated a training zone.

``What's happening now is ethnic cleansing,`` Sami Huraini, an activist and a resident of the area, told the AP. ``They are trying to expel the people from this land, saying they never lived here permanently, which is a lie.''

He said residents of the area where the demolitions were carried out are determined to remain there. ``The people are staying on their land and have already started to rebuild,`` he said.

Israeli occupation army declined to comment on the demolitions.

Neighboring Jordan, which made peace with Israel in 1994, condemned both the settlement expansion and the forced displacement of Palestinians, calling it a ``a flagrant violation of international law.''

Israel has built more than 130 settlements across the West Bank that today are home to nearly 500,000 settlers, who have Israeli citizenship. Nearly 3 million Palestinians live in the territory under open-ended Israeli military rule. The Palestinian Authority exercises limited self-rule over parts of the West Bank and cooperates with Israel on security matters.

The Palestinians want the West Bank to form the main part of a future state, along with east Jerusalem and Gaza, all territories seized by Israel in the 1967 war. Israel annexed east Jerusalem in a move not recognized internationally, and Israel imposed a blockade on Gaza after the Palestinian militant group Hamas seized power there in 2007.

The Palestinians view the expansion of settlements in the West Bank and annexed east Jerusalem as a major obstacle to any future peace deal because they reduce and divide up the land on which such a state would be established.

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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a phone call to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev on May 11 discussed how the United States can continue to support recent positive momentum on peace talks between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

In a tweet, Antony Blinken said that I spoke with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev today about how the United States can continue to support recent positive momentum on peace talks between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

On the phone call, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken extended his congratulations on the 99th birthday anniversary of great leader Heydar Aliyev, and noted that U.S. State Department and U.S. ambassadors to the three South Caucasus nations had recently visited Azerbaijan and held fruitful discussions in Baku.

Antony Blinken expressed his support for the talks between Azerbaijan and Armenia and the potential conclusion of a peace agreement, voicing his hope that this would contribute to lasting peace in the region. He also stressed that the United States is ready to support the process of delimitation and demarcation of borders between Azerbaijan and Armenia, as well as the opening of transport communications.

For his turn, President Ilham Aliyev said that Armenia had accepted the five principles presented by Azerbaijan for the normalization of the relations with Armenia and that Azerbaijan is ready to start negotiations on a peace agreement based on these principles.

Further, the president also noted that Azerbaijan has determined the composition of the national commission to begin the process of delimitation and demarcation as soon as possible, stressing the importance of opening transport and communication links.

The two men also touched upon issues related to the humanitarian agenda between Armenia and Azerbaijan as well as the energy security.

During the phone talk, the sides exchanged views on the opportunities for increasing dialogue between the two countries and the process of democratization in Azerbaijan, stressing the role of the intergovernmental commission in the development of bilateral relations.




The emir of Qatar on Thursday accused Israel over the death of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh during an Israeli army raid in the occupied West Bank.

Abu Akleh was "killed by the Israeli occupation forces", Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani said at a joint news conference in Tehran with Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi.

"We must hold the perpetrators of this heinous crime accountable," the Qatari leader added.

Abu Akleh, a 51-year-old Palestinian-American, was shot dead on Wednesday as she covered the Israeli military operation in the Jenin refugee camp.

The Qatar-based pan-Arab television channel charged that the Israeli forces had killed her deliberately "in cold blood".

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett had said Wednesday it was "likely" Abu Akleh was killed by stray Palestinian gunfire, but Defence Minister Benny Gantz later conceded it could have been "the Palestinians who shot her" or fire from "our side".

Calls have mounted around the world for an independent investigation into the shooting.

But the Palestinians have turned down an Israeli offer to carry out a joint probe, saying they would investigate alone and share their findings.

Israeli newspaper HAARETZ on Wednesday reported that an initial probe by the Israeli Army showed that the Israeli forces have fired dozens of bullets during the raid in the West Bank that led to the killing of Abu Akleh.

The Iranian president also implicated Israel, the sworn enemy of the Islamic republic.

"We are certain that these crimes cannot bring security to the Zionist regime. To the contrary, they will only increase popular anger" towards Israel, Raisi said.

*This story was edited by Ahram Online

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It's likely to be the quickest NATO enlargement ever and one that would redraw Europe's security map. Finnish leaders announced Thursday their belief that Finland should join the world's biggest military organization because of Russia's war in Ukraine. Sweden could soon follow suit.

Should they apply for membership, the move would have far-reaching ramifications for Northern Europe and trans-Atlantic security.

No doubt, it will also anger their large neighbor Russia, which blames, at least in part, its war in Ukraine on NATO's continued expansion closer to its borders. It's unclear how Russian President Vladimir Putin might retaliate. The Kremlin said Thursday that it certainly won't improve European security.

The following is a brief look at what Finland and Sweden's membership in the 30-country NATO alliance could mean, with the Nordic partners expected to announce their intention to join within days.

FINLAND AND SWEDEN

Not neutral like Switzerland, Finland, and Sweden traditionally think of themselves as militarily ``nonaligned.''

But Russia's war in Ukraine and Putin's apparent desire to establish a Moscow-centered ``sphere of influence'' have shaken their security notions to the core. Just days after he ordered the Feb. 24 invasion, public opinion shifted dramatically.

Support in Finland for NATO membership has hovered around 20-30% for years. It now stands at over 70%. The two are NATO's closest partners but maintaining good ties with Russia has been an important part of their foreign policy, particularly for Finland.

Now they hope for security support from NATO states, primarily the United States, in case Moscow retaliates. Britain pledged on Wednesday to come to their aid.

THE NORDIC REGION

NATO membership for the two, joining regional neighbors Denmark, Norway, and Iceland, would formalize their joint security and defense work in ways that their Nordic Defense Cooperation pact hasn't.

NORDEFCO, as it's known, focuses on cooperation. Working within NATO means putting forces under joint command.

Accession would tighten the strategic Nordic grip on the Baltic Sea _ Russia's maritime point of access to the city of St. Petersburg and its Kaliningrad exclave.

Finland and Sweden also join them, along with Iceland, at the heart of the triangle formed with the North Atlantic and maritime areas in the Arctic, to where Russia projects its military might from the northern Kola Peninsula. Integrated NATO military planning will become a lot simpler, making the region easier to defend.

NATO

Finland and Sweden are NATO's closest partners. They contribute to the alliance's operations and air policing.

Most importantly, they already meet NATO's membership criteria, on functioning democracies, good neighborly relations, clear borders and armed forces that are in lock-step with the allies. After the invasion, they formally boosted information exchanges with NATO and sit in on every meeting on war issues.

Both are modernizing their armed forces and investing in new equipment. Finland is purchasing dozens of high-end F-35 warplanes. Sweden has top quality fighter jets, the Gripen.

Finland says it's already hit NATO's defense spending guideline of 2% of gross domestic product. Sweden too is ramping up its military budget and expects to reach the target by 2028. The NATO average was estimated at 1.6% last year.

RUSSIA

Putin has demanded that NATO stop expanding and in his May 9 speech blamed the West for the war.

But public opinion in Finland and Sweden suggests that he has driven them into NATO's arms.

If Finland joins, it would double the length of the alliance's border with Russia, adding a further 1,300 kilometers (830 miles) for Moscow to defend.

Putin has promised a ``military, technical'' response if they join. But many troops from Russia's western district near Finland were sent to Ukraine, and those units suffered heavy casualties, Western military officers say.

So far, Moscow is doing nothing obvious to dissuade the two _ apart perhaps from a couple of incidents where Russian planes entered their airspace. The Kremlin said Thursday that its response could depend on how close NATO infrastructure moves toward Russia's borders.

Some at NATO worry that the Russians might deploy nuclear weapons or more hypersonic missiles to the Kaliningrad exclave, across the Baltic Sea wedged between allies Poland and Lithuania.

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Here are the latest developments in the war in Ukraine:

Finland seeks NATO membership

Finland's president and prime minister say they want their country to join NATO in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

"NATO membership would strengthen Finland's security," President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin say.

NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg promises that membership process -- which the US senate, Germany and France also say they back -- will be "smooth and swift".

Russian warning to Finland

Russia, which has been infuriated by NATO's expansion into eastern Europe, says it will be forced to take "military-technical" steps if Helsinki presses ahead with its NATO bid.

"Helsinki should be aware of its responsibility and the consequences of such a move," the foreign ministry says.

UN probing into alleged Russian atrocities

The UN Human Rights Council has voted overwhelmingly to launch an inquiry into alleged serious violations committed by Russian troops in Ukraine, heaping further diplomatic pressure on Moscow.

The council voted 33-2 in favour of a draft resolution brought by Ukraine to create an investigation into alleged violations in the Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Sumy regions in late February and in March.

Ukraine to hold first war crimes trial

Ukraine says it will put a 21-year-old Russian soldier, accused of gunning down an unarmed civilian while he was riding his bike, on trial for war crimes, the first such case to go to court since the war began.

Vadim Shishimarin is accused of killing the 62-year-old man on February 28 near the central village of Chupakhiva, Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova's office says.

Gas row escalates

Russian energy giant Gazprom says it will stop shipping gas to western Europe through Poland in line with Russian sanctions on more than 30 EU, US and Singaporean energy companies, imposed in retaliation for Western penalties over Ukraine.

The row has raised fears for the future of Europe's gas supplies and prompted German Economy Minister Robert Habeck to accuse Russia of using energy as a "weapon".

Europe must cut Russia's 'energy oxygen': Kyiv

Europe must end its reliance on Russian gas and cut off Moscow's "energy oxygen", says Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba.

"This energy oxygen for Russia must be turned off and that is especially important for Europe," Kuleba said during a visit to Berlin.

Sanctions worse for Europe: Putin

Russian President Vladimir Putin says sanctions imposed on Moscow over Ukraine have hit Western countries worse than Russia, which he insists is resisting "external challenges".

Western countries have slapped Russia with unprecedented sanctions over the invasion. But Putin says Western governments "guided by short-sighted, inflated political ambitions and by Russophobia deal a much harder blow to their own national interests, their own economies and the well-being of their own citizens."

'Three killed' in strike on north Ukraine

Ukraine says three people were killed and 12 others wounded in a Russian strike in Ukraine's northern Chernigiv region overnight.

The attack comes nearly two months after Russian forces withdrew from the north to focus on the east and south.

It took place in the town of Novgorod-Siversky, according to the emergency services. Chernigiv governor Vyacheslav Chaus says "critical infrastructure", including a school, were hit.

Keep us a spot in EU: Ukraine

Ukraine asks Brussels to keep it a spot in the European Union, even if obtaining full membership takes time.

"It is not about the fastest possible membership for Ukraine in the EU. But what is very important for us is for this spot to be reserved for Ukraine," Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tells German broadcaster ARD.

Ukraine asked Brussels in February to fast-track its EU membership bid amid French warnings the process will likely take "decades."

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Top diplomats from the Group of Seven wealthy nations gathered Thursday in northern Germany for a three-day meeting centered on Russia's war against Ukraine and the wider impact it is having around the world, particularly on food and energy prices.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, the meeting's host, said the conflict already had become a ``global crisis`` because shipments of staple crops are stuck in Ukraine, a major agricultural exporter.

``Twenty-five million tons of grain are currently blocked in Ukrainian ports, particularly Odesa,'' Baerbock said. ``Grain that's food for millions of people around the world and which is needed particularly urgently in African countries and the Middle East.''

``That's why we are discussing how the grain blockade exerted by Russia can be unblocked, how we can get the grain out to the world,'' she added.

Baerbock warned that climate change also is a factor in the brewing global food emergency, and it's another topic the ministers plan to discuss during their meeting in Weissenhaus, a resort on Germany's Baltic Sea coast northeast of Hamburg.

About 3,500 police officers were deployed at the event site to provide security.

The foreign ministers of Ukraine and neighboring Moldova, which fears becoming the next target of Russia's aggression, have been invited to attend the meeting as guests. Indonesia's foreign minister, whose country chairs the Group of 20 major economies this year, is expected to join remotely for part of the meeting Friday, when relations with China are on the agenda.

Speaking earlier Thursday in Berlin, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba welcomed the German government's recent decisions to step up military support for his country.

``We see a positive, positive dynamic,'' Kuleba told reporters after a meeting with German lawmakers. ``We have to make sure that this positive dynamic is maintained.''

Kuleba said he considered it a ``signal of strength'' that Chancellor Olaf Scholz's center-left Social Democratic Party had dropped its opposition to providing Ukraine with heavy weapons.

He also expressed hope that the European Union would soon approve Ukraine's application to start the process of joining the bloc. French President Emmanuel Macron has suggested it could be decades before Ukraine is ready to become a full EU member.

Baerbock recently visited Kyiv, the first top representative of Germany to travel to Ukraine's capital since the start of the war, and offered support for Ukraine's EU application.

Also attending the meeting in Weissenhaus were the foreign ministers of Britain, Canada, France, Italy and Japan. Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland is representing the United States; U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is recovering from COVID-19 but is scheduled to travel to Berlin for a weekend meeting of NATO foreign ministers.

The NATO gathering will also hear from the foreign ministers of Sweden and Finland as the two countries are poised to join the Western military alliance amid concerns over the military threat from Russia.

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The conference, titled International Cooperation on Trafficking and Restitution of Cultural Heritage, was held at the Italian Cultural Institute (IIC) in Cairo on 10 May.

Illicit trafficking in cultural property constitutes a serious transnational crime affecting countries of origin, transit, and destination. Mexico, Egypt, and Italy, among others, have suffered theft of archaeological objects, hence the importance of promoting cooperation between countries with ancient civilisations.



Conference attendees had the opportunity to listen to prominent Mexican cultural figure and Cultural Secretary of the International Italian-Latin American Organisation (IILA) Jaime Nualart, Lieutenant Colonel Giuseppe Marseglia of the Carabineros Command for the Protection of the Cultural Heritage of Italy (TPC) in Rome, and General Supervisor of the Repatriation Department of the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt Shaaban Abdel-Gawad.

Ambassador of Mexico in Egypt Jose Octavio Tripp, Italian Ambassador in Egypt Michele Quaroni, Ambassador of Argentina to Egypt Eduardo Varela, and their Venezuelan counterpart Wilmer Barrientos, also participated.



Academics, members of the diplomatic corps, students, and the public interested in the subject were also present, as well as international experts who discussed the measures that countries can take in three areas: prevention, restitution, and international cooperation.



Speakers discussed actions to fight the criminal phenomenon that is nowadays organised in a vast global network and the initiatives that countries can take to collaborate on an international level for the recovery of assets and their return to their legitimate owners.

Nualart said the fight against the illicit trade in cultural goods is an ongoing task and requires the commitment of all society and the international community as a whole. Education at schools and universities and raising awareness of the cultural heritage is very crucial; society has to be well informed that heritage is part of its identity, Nualart added.

Abdel-Gawad recapitulated not only on the efforts Egypt has made to prevent the theft of its cultural heritage, but also those it deploys internationally to recover artefacts that have been stolen.

Marseglia presented, from an operational approach of the police forces, the investigative work to safeguard and protect national cultural heritage through the prevention and repression of criminal activities, as well as the work of restitution of cultural property that Italy is carrying out.

He explained that the Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, a specialised department of Carabinieri, has won important awards in the world thanks to the effectiveness of its actions to safeguard cultural heritage. The actions implemented by Italy to prevent and fight against violations are today the main reference model in the sector, he pointed.

Another topic of discussion was the database of illegally removed cultural artefacts, the largest database in the world for this specific sector, a fundamental tool that allows obtaining information on the assets of artefacts of Italian or foreign provenance.



While Ambassador Tripp reaffirmed Mexico's commitment to collaborate at the international level to achieve the restitution of cultural property, as well as to combat the sale and trafficking of Mexican cultural heritage abroad, he highlighted that the processes of restitution and return of Mexican archaeological objects have been significantly intensified.

International agreements relating to the fight against illicit trafficking and the restitution of illegally stolen cultural heritage were also presented at the conference.

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Russia's invasion of Ukraine has added to supply concerns, which have increased with Europe's announced moves on a potential Russian oil embargo.

But in short back-to-back meetings on Thursday, OPEC+ members reconfirmed "the decision to adjust upward the monthly overall production by 0.432 mb/d for the month of June," the group said in a statement.

Prices had soared on Wednesday, with Brent North Sea crude closing above $110 a barrel, its highest level in two-and-a-half weeks.

At around 0945 GMT on Thursday, Brent stood at $110.47 a barrel and American WTI at $107.83 a barrel.

But analysts had widely expected the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), led by Riyadh, and their 10 partners led by Moscow to stay the course.

"It is likely that OPEC will stick with its plan despite ongoing instability relating to the Russia-Ukraine conflict," XTB analyst Walid Kudmani told AFP ahead of the meeting, citing "prospects of falling demand due to widespread lockdowns seen in China as a result of rising Covid cases".

As in previous months, the cartel continued to open the taps slightly, a strategy begun in the spring of 2021 when the economy began recovering after the drastic cuts imposed amid the shock of the pandemic.

Thursday's talks via video conference began with technical discussions at the ministerial committee meeting around 1100 GMT and lasted less than an hour.

China, grounds for 'caution'

Largely spared for two years, China in recent weeks has been battling its worst coronavirus outbreak since the spring of 2020 which has strained its zero-Covid strategy.

Beijing on Wednesday closed dozens of metro stations and residents fear their city will be locked down, as is already the case in Shanghai, the country's largest city with 25 million people.

"The slowing activity in China is certainly a factor that will justify their decision to stay put, faced with the mounting international pressure to increase production to address the worsening global energy crisis," Ipek Ozkardeskaya, an analyst at Swissquote bank, told AFP ahead of the meeting.

This is "a reason to remain cautious," said Fawad Razaqzada, analyst at City Index and Forex.com.

As for the new economic sanctions planned against Russia, they were also not expected to move the needle for the moment.

In its sixth package of sanctions, the European Commission is seeking a ban on all Russian oil, crude and refined, transported by sea and pipeline by the end of 2022, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told the European Parliament.

'Huge impact'

That prospect threatens supply in an already tense European market.

While unanimity among the 27 EU member states is required for the sanctions to go forward, Hungary, which is highly dependent on Russian deliveries, rejected the project in its current form.

"If it (the EU) manages to convince its members to ratify the plan... then this will have a huge impact on Russian oil exports," Razaqzada said.

But once again the OPEC+ alliance, anxious to remain united and avoid upsetting Moscow, will "certainly not save the day," Ozkardeskaya said ahead of the meeting.

"The cartel made clear that the Ukraine war -- that impacts the Russian exports -- is not cause for concern," she said.

Stephen Innes, an analyst at SPI Asset Management, said OPEC+'s wait-and-see approach was "increasingly untenable" and "contrary to its mission statement".

"(It's) why they have fallen under constant criticism for being slow and technically unprepared to react to recent developments in global markets," he said.

But does OPEC+ really hold the key to price stabilisation? Between a lack of investment in oil infrastructure in some member countries and operational problems, the cartel regularly fails to meet its production quotas.
With hopes for countering global warming pinned on progress at the upcoming COP27 UN Climate Change Conference in Egypt, a new report from the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC), Africa's leading infrastructure solutions provider, sets out the continent's stance by balancing the need for emissions reduction with critical development imperatives.

The report, Roadmap to Africa's COP: A Pragmatic Path to Net Zero, is set within a context where Africa has borne the brunt of the most devastating impacts of climate change while contributing little to global emissions. This low carbon output reflects Africa's crippling energy deficit, which has stymied industrialisation and economic development. Africa, therefore, needs a realistic agenda for addressing climate change which allows the region to also continue advancing its industrial base.

"Africa is unlike any other continent when it comes to global net-zero - and we need a blueprint for a common negotiating stance that reflects this," said Samaila Zubairu, President and CEO of AFC. "We are advocating for consideration of Africa's energy deficit and the need for quantum leaps in industrialization for job creation and reducing poverty, as well as climate-proofing built infrastructure and protecting our powerful carbon sinks."

The report argues that, while cutting emissions is vital for the more developed and highest polluting wealthier nations, there is a more limited universal impact to be gained from reducing the far lower emissions of sub-Saharan Africa. The report concludes that African nations will drive a far greater effect in combatting global warming by focusing instead on three significant areas of change.

1. Localise

According to the report, Africa must focus on developing local industries by putting processing and manufacturing at the centre of sustainable circular economies. Doing so will eliminate emission-spewing shipments of Africa's minerals and other commodities to Asia for manufacturing and processing, only to be shipped again as finished goods to consumer markets.

Achieving this objective requires closing Africa's energy deficit. While renewable sources are the ultimate goal, in the near-term Africa must exploit its abundant reserves of natural gas. Since much of Africa is already at net zero, such development can be achieved without contributing substantially to global carbon emissions, while channeling harmful gas flares from oil fields and reducing the use of more polluting fuels such as coal, diesel and firewood. Resultant job creation and economic growth will enable African nations to invest further in renewable sources.

Especially important is creating local manufacturing of the components of renewable energy technology. It is critical for these metals to be mined in such a way that minimises further pollution and for resource-efficient sustainable mining techniques to be combined with ecosystems fostering local production centres.

2. Re-build

Africa is the most exposed region to the ravages of global warming largely because its infrastructure is ill equipped to withstand climate shocks. Without intervention, the cost of structural damage caused by natural disasters in Africa will increase to US$415 billion a year by 2030 from between US$250 billion to US$300 billion now, according to the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. The continent needs strong and resilient building - to re-build ocean and river defenses, and infrastructure in transport, construction, electricity grids and off-grid energy, which will in turn help the development of sustainable mining and the circular economies that drive growth and job creation, according to the report.

3. Finnovate

Key to effecting change is ensuring that Africa-based institutions such as the AFC get access to essential climate funds through financial innovation to support resilient building and investment in localised mass-scale manufacturing and processing. Financing is also needed to help preserve Africa's vast carbon sinks, which absorb more carbon dioxide annually than any other region's rainforests but are being depleted by local populations for firewood for cooking and heating.

Working with development finance institutions, governments and institutional investors, AFC's many projects over the course of 15 years demonstrate that it is possible to mobilise financing at scale through crowding in private sector investment. Through leveraging financial input from governments and NGOs, we have the tools to de-risk climate investments and offer strong returns to incentivise funding from institutional investors. These efforts can help ensure that capital flows to the frontlines of the fight against climate change-Africa.

About Africa Finance Corporation

AFC was established in 2007 to catalyse private sector-led infrastructure investment across Africa. It is the second highest investment grade rated multilateral financial institution in Africa. AFC's approach combines specialist industry expertise with a focus on financial and technical advisory, project structuring, project development and risk capital to address Africa's infrastructure development needs and drive sustainable economic growth. AFC invests in high-quality infrastructure assets that provide essential services in the core infrastructure sectors of power, natural resources, heavy industry, transport, and telecommunications. Since its inception, AFC has invested over US$10 billion in projects across 35 African countries.

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About half of Koreans support drafting women into the military, a poll suggests. Equal conscription for men and women has become a talking point amid deteriorating gender relations in Korea, and remarkably more women than men now support it.

In the Gallup Korea poll of 1,003 adults released on Sunday, 47 percent supported drafting only men into the military and 46 percent the drafting of both men and women.

Among male respondents, 51 percent called for drafting men only and 44 percent both men and women. But among female respondents, the percentages were 43 percent and 47 percent.

More than half or 51 percent of those aged 18-29, the current eligible age for military service, called for drafting both men and women compared to 37 percent who supported the conscription of men only.

Among female respondents of the age group, the proportions were 48 percent for equal conscription and 35 percent for men only, compared to 54 percent and 40 percent among their male counterparts.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said Tuesday he has tested positive for COVID-19 and is experiencing mild symptoms.

Via Twitter, the billionaire philanthropist said he will isolate until he is again healthy. "I'm fortunate to be vaccinated and boosted and have access to testing and great medical care," Gates wrote.

The Seattle-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the most influential private foundation in the world, with an endowment of about $65 billion.


Korea's trade deficit swelled to US$3.7 billion in the first 10 days of this month, the Korea Customs Service said Wednesday. The country already suffered from the second consecutive month of trade deficits in April for the first time in 14 years.

That means the cumulative trade deficit so far this year has reached $9.86 billion. Over the same period last year Korea enjoyed a healthy $7.92 billion trade surplus.


By Azernews





By Sabina Mammadli

Today, relations between Belarus and Azerbaijan, without exaggeration, can be described as exemplary in the modern system of inter-state relations, SB Belarus Today newspaper writes.

Hailing the relations between the two countries, the article noted that bilateral cooperation is developing in all spheres of mutual interest.

The paper adds that at a meeting with representatives of the public and expert community, Belarus and foreign media in 2019, President Alexander Lukashenko stressed that relations between Belarus and Azerbaijan are an example of relations between the two Christian and Muslim states.

In addition, the Belarus leader has repeatedly said in his speeches that he values ??friendship, trust, support, and personal attention to the interests of his country by the Azerbaijani leadership.

Published on May 10 to commemorate the 99th birthday of national leader Heydar Aliyev, the article emphasized that the start of the relations between the two countries became possible thanks to him.

The life of Heydar Aliyev is a vivid example of the invincibility of human will, the article added.

Noting the absence of problems between the two states throughout history, the paper pointed out that this is evidenced by the fact that problems were always resolved on telephone calls between the presidents of the two states.

The paper further adds that the Belarus president had good, friendly relations with Azerbaijan's national leader Heydar Aliyev and his support during the times of sanctions pressure on the country was indicative.

The common history of Belarus and Azerbaijan, which has passed a long and thorny path, the state independence, the consonance of destinies, and long-term friendship between the people of the two countries have become the determining factors in enhancing contact in the field of culture and art, the paper added. Its legal basis is the agreement on cooperation in culture and art between the Azerbaijani and Belarus ministries of culture, dated March 6, 1996.

Over these years, bilateral cooperation in the field of culture has covered not only all segments of culture but also all age categories. The most active interaction was established between the theater groups of the two countries. The Azerbaijan State Academic Opera and Ballet Theater and the National Academic Bolshoi Opera and Ballet Theater of Belarus signed a Memorandum of Cooperation in 2011. Every year, dozens of stage masters, conductors, and leading ballet dancers of the two countries successfully tour the theater stages of Belarus and Azerbaijan.

The article stressed that the Azerbaijani-Belarusian relations are still built on a high level of trust between the two countries' presidents. A direct indicator is the trade turnover between the countries.

The trade turnover between Azerbaijan and Belarus amounted to $320.3 million, with the export accounting for $229.8 million and imports for $90.4 million in the first nine months of 2021. In 2020, it was $447 million.
Ryu Hyun-jin of the Toronto Blue Jays will return to the mound in a game against the Tampa Bay Rays this weekend, after being sidelined for a few weeks due to an injury.

Ryu was placed on the 10-day injured list on April 17 after being diagnosed with an inflamed elbow.

During his recovery, Ryu made an appearance in a Triple-A game last Sunday, throwing 74 pitches over four innings.

But it remains to be seen whether he will be back in peak form for the away game, which is scheduled for this Saturday at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida.


Some young women say the experience can be put on a resume. "I have a master's degree, but male graduates are being paid higher salaries than me at entry level because of their military service," a 26-year-old staffer with a midsize company said. "Whenever I see male managers build consensus better with my male coworkers, it occurs to me that military service isn't necessarily a waste of time."

In a poll of 1,786 people over 16 by Kstat Research last month, 42.2 percent of supporters cited the need for women to be able to defend themselves in a war, and 25 percent said women should share duties equally with men. Next came because women are capable (14.9 percent), and because military service can be helpful in building a career (12.3 percent).

Some 42 percent of women in their 20s support equal conscription instead of compelling only young men to shoulder the burden of defending the country.

One 26-year-old office worker said, "In the past, I vaguely thought that women too could join the military whenever I heard my male coworkers talk about their military experience. But the war in Ukraine has made me think that women too should be given basic military training like rifle shooting and gas mask drills."

The number of female soldiers stood at 13,449 in 2020 or a mere 2.4 percent of all 555,000 active-duty soldiers in the country. "Today's young women think they can do anything as well as men," said Kim Elly, a visiting professor at Sungkonghoe University. "They feel they too can join the military, not because they believe they should defend the country, but because they don't think of themselves as weak and want to be stronger."

But there are many obstacles to conscripting women. It would cost a lot of money to convert training facilities and barracks so that both male and female soldiers can use them. The Constitutional Court pointed this out in 2010, when it ruled that the male-only draft is constitutional.

There are also lots of worries about the male-centered culture and the danger of sex crimes in the military. In the poll, 24.6 percent of opponents of female conscription said women contribute to the country through childbirth and childrearing, and some 20.3 percent cited the risk of sexual harassment.

Most victims of sexual assault in the military are female soldiers, according to a survey of 2,730 military officers across the country by the National Human Rights Commission last October. Some 32.1 percent of female soldiers experienced sexual harassment, compared to eight percent of male soldiers. And 42.9 percent of female soldiers fell victim to sexual assault, compared to 22.3 percent of male soldiers.

A 26-year-old former Army officer said, "We need to increase gender-sensitivity awareness in the military before talking about female conscription."

"I support conscripting women. But there's a need to create an environment where female soldiers do not need to worry about sexual assault," a 26-year-old former officer pointed out. "In a situation where even senior female officers fall victim to sex crimes, there'll be a lot of sexual harassment in barracks if women are drafted."
KYODO NEWS - May 13, 2022 - 00:59 | All, Japan, Coronavirus

Japan will assist developing nations with their anti-coronavirus steps with cumulative assistance worth $5 billion, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Thursday during a global summit aimed at galvanizing efforts to tackle the coronavirus pandemic.

In a video message, Kishida said Japan will continue to promote vaccinations so the world can see an end to the pandemic. At the same time, he pledged Japan will do its part to strengthen the global health system to prepare for future pandemics.

The summit, the second of its kind, garnered fresh financial commitments totaling more than $3 billion, according to the U.S. government, which co-hosted the event with Belize, Germany, Indonesia and Senegal.

Japan's $5 billion assistance includes financial contributions to the U.N. -led COVAX vaccine-sharing scheme. Japan will provide up to $200 million via the Japan International Cooperation Agency to help boost the local manufacturing capacity of vaccines and medicine in Africa, Kishida said.

The summit was held to ensure vulnerable people have access to vaccines, testing and treatment and to prevent future health crises.

"Japan is determined to continue to lead international efforts to achieve universal health coverage" via Japan-hosted events in the coming months, Kishida said.

Leaders from the "Quad" group, comprised of Australia, India, Japan and the United States, are expected to hold a meeting later this month, while Japan is set to take over the presidency of the Group of Seven nations from Germany next year.

During the summit, the United States vowed to increase its initial contribution toward establishing a new pandemic preparedness and global health security fund at the World Bank by an additional $200 million, bringing its total commitment to $450 million.

The White House also announced the same day that the United States has marked a grim milestone of 1 million lives lost to COVID-19, far more than any other country.
KYODO NEWS - May 12, 2022 - 13:04 | All, Japan

Japan's current account surplus in fiscal 2021 shrank 22.3 percent to 12.64 trillion yen ($97.6 billion) as surging energy prices caused the trade balance of the resource-poor country to deteriorate, the Finance Ministry said Thursday.

The current account balance, one of the widest gauges of international trade, declined for the fourth consecutive year to its lowest level since fiscal 2014, as Russia's aggression against Ukraine pushed up oil and gas prices, according to a preliminary report released by the ministry.

The pace of the contraction was the quickest since fiscal 2013, when the current account surplus decreased 43.7 percent on year as fossil fuel imports climbed due to a suspension of nuclear power plants following the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi complex in 2011.

Japan's current account surplus, which indicates the nation's international competitiveness, has nearly halved since peaking at 24.34 trillion yen in fiscal 2007.

Imports jumped 35.0 percent in value terms to a record 87.15 trillion yen as purchases of crude oil and coal doubled while those of liquefied natural gas expanded 58.8 percent, the data showed. The global economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic fallout also contributed to the spike in energy prices.

Japan's import costs were further inflated by the recent rapid depreciation of the yen against the U.S. dollar, a ministry official said. The U.S. dollar averaged 112.38 yen in fiscal 2021, up 5.9 percent from the previous year.

Exports grew 25.1 percent to a record 85.50 trillion yen, lifted by a 33.9 percent increase in semiconductor-manufacturing equipment shipments that reflected booming global chip demand.

The nation's trade balance posted a 1.65 trillion yen deficit in the year that ended March, following a 3.78 trillion yen surplus in fiscal 2020.

Service trade, which includes cargo shipping and passenger transportation, registered a 4.80 trillion yen deficit.

The red ink grew from a 3.54 trillion yen deficit a year earlier as Japanese companies paid more to purchase software and cloud services from foreign companies to promote teleworking amid the pandemic, the official said.

The travel balance, which reflects money spent by foreign visitors in the country on services and goods against the amount Japanese spent abroad, posted a 191.4 billion yen surplus, following a 255.9 billion yen surplus the previous year. In the pre-pandemic fiscal 2019, Japan saw a surplus of 2.46 trillion yen.

In March alone, Japan logged a current account surplus of 2.55 trillion yen, marking the second consecutive month of black ink, helped by an expansion in primary income, which reflects returns on overseas investments.

Primary income in the month increased 1.40 trillion yen from a year earlier to register a surplus of 3.26 trillion yen, lifted partly by the weaker yen boosting dividends from overseas companies.

The country saw a goods trade deficit of 166.1 billion yen in March, down 1.16 trillion yen from a year earlier and marking the fifth straight month of red ink, due to the energy price rises.

Services trade fell 103.0 billion yen to post a 127.7 billion yen deficit as Japanese companies including drugmakers paid more to overseas companies.
KYODO NEWS - May 12, 2022 - 16:44 | All, World, Japan

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and his EU counterparts agreed Thursday to cooperate in realizing a "free and open" Indo-Pacific as Russia's continued war in Ukraine and an increasingly assertive China have increased uncertainty in the region.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, European Council President Charles Michel and Kishida also agreed in the in-person meeting in Tokyo to coordinate between them in imposing tough sanctions against Russia and helping Ukraine.

In a joint press appearance, von der Leyen said the 27-member bloc "wants to take a more active role" in the region that is thriving but is also "a theater of tensions," referring to the East and South China seas, where China is increasing its activities, as well as North Korea's threat.

Kishida said Russia's invasion is "absolutely impermissible" as it shakes the "foundation of international order not just covering Europe but also Asia."

Michel said Japan and the European Union have a "deep and dynamic relationship united by the fundamental values of democracy and rule of law," and called for strengthening the partnership.

"Russia's war against Ukraine has shown that deeper cooperation is not a luxury, it's a vital necessity," he added.

Von der Leyen called Russia "the most direct threat to the world order," citing Moscow's "worrying pact" with China and their calls for "new and very much arbitrary international relations."

Already, both Japan and the European Union have strongly condemned Russia for its invasion and its alleged war crimes, and imposed financial and trade sanctions on the Russian government and individuals to isolate Moscow. They also recently unveiled plans to phase out Russian oil imports.

Kishida has also warned of the implications of the Ukrainian crisis for regions beyond Europe and stressed the need to never allow the use of force to alter the status quo, at a time when the rise of an assertive China is heightening regional concerns.

Kishida and the EU leaders also confirmed their cooperation in energy and food security as well as economic security.

In a joint statement released after the meeting, Japan and the European Union said, "We strongly oppose any unilateral attempt to change the status quo by force, regardless of the location, as a serious threat to the entire international order."

The statement also referred to the situation in the East and South China seas as well as the Taiwan Strait, where China has been stepping up its military pressure against the democratic island.

"We remain seriously concerned about the situation in the East China Sea, including in the waters surrounding the Senkaku islands, and South China Sea," it said.

The Senkakus have been a source of friction between Japan and China as China claims the Japan-administered islands and has repeatedly sent vessels near them.

"We underscore the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, and encourage the peaceful resolution of cross-Strait issues," the statement also said.

In their latest meeting, the Japanese and EU leaders also agreed on launching a framework of comprehensive cooperation in the digital area, with the two sides recognizing the importance of a free and secure flow of data.

They also affirmed diversifying and strengthening the supply chain of materials such as semiconductors and cooperating on infrastructure.

The European Union has been stepping up its engagement with the Indo-Pacific and aligned with Japan, the United States and other nations in a bid to make the region a free, open and rules-based one. It has identified key areas of cooperation such as security, digital connectivity and climate change.

During Thursday's talks, Kishida also called for removal of EU import restrictions on some food items from parts of Japan imposed in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear crisis.

Japan and the European Union hold a regular summit at least once a year, and the previous one took place in May 2021 in a virtual format due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
KYODO NEWS - May 12, 2022 - 00:14 | World, All

Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son and namesake of the late Philippine dictator, on Wednesday declared victory in this week's presidential election, expressing his resolve to promote economic growth and improve education.

Marcos, popularly known as "Bongbong," said in his press conference that 31 million Filipinos had "voted for unity." He also said in a televised speech he will tap Sara Duterte-Carpio, his vice presidential running mate and daughter of the country's incumbent leader Rodrigo Duterte, as education minister.

"Bongbong looks forward to working across the Philippines, and with international partners and organizations, to address critical issues facing the country, and to begin delivering for the Filipino people," his spokesman, Vic Rodriguez, said earlier in a statement.

The spokesman quoted the 64-year-old as saying he wants to tell the world, "Judge me not by my ancestors, but by my actions."

While the Marcos-Duterte alliance has led them to their electoral triumph, victims of the atrocities committed while the late Marcos was in power have voiced concerns. Other countries are also closely watching whether respect for human rights and the rule of law will be ensured under the incoming administration.

His father's 21-year rule was marked by rampant rights abuses, torture, killings and embezzlement of public funds. The 1986 pro-democracy "people power" revolution toppled his dictatorship and sent the Marcos family into exile.

On Tuesday, Marcos visited the late dictator's grave and voiced his appreciation to the Filipino people for giving him the landslide victory and to his father, who has been "his inspiration throughout his life and taught him the value and meaning of true leadership," according to a statement released by his team.
KYODO NEWS - May 12, 2022 - 20:38 | All, World

Finland's President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said Thursday that the Nordic country will apply to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization "without delay" amid the deepening crisis following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

In a joint statement, the Finnish leaders said that steps to join the 30-member military alliance would be taken "rapidly within the next few days," in a move that will almost certainly be opposed by Russia, with which Finland shares a land border and has long held neutral relations.

The move comes as Swedish media reported Thursday that Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson indicated that her country would also apply for NATO membership as early as Monday and begin application procedures immediately, with the developments certain to heighten tensions in northern Europe.

The Finnish leaders' statement, saying NATO membership would strengthen the country's security, suggested there was no major opposition to the move in Finland's parliament.

Finland is expected to apply for membership before a NATO summit in Spain in late June. If approved, it will come under the alliance's collective defense framework, meaning Finland will be an ally and can be assisted and defended by other allies if it comes under attack.

Public opinion in Finland has also swayed in favor of joining NATO following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in late February.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Thursday that Finland joining NATO would pose a threat to Russia "without a doubt," according to the Tass news agency.

"Another expansion of NATO does not make our continent more stable and safe," Peskov was quoted as saying. But he also said, "All will depend on what this process of expansion will imply. To what extent the military infrastructure will get closer to our borders."

All 30 NATO members must ratify the application for a new country to join the alliance, with some expecting the process could take up to a year, spurring concern that Russia could take military action against Finland during that time.

Moscow has previously warned both Finland and Sweden that there would be military repercussions if they joined NATO, including the use of nuclear weapons.

Finland shares a 1,300-kilometer border with Russia and was previously invaded by the country's predecessor state, the Soviet Union, during World War II and has since maintained neutrality.

Although not NATO members, both Finland and Sweden joined the European Union in 1995.

Related coverage:

Japan, Finland condemn Russian aggression, agree on resolute action

Finland more open to NATO entry in wake of Russia's actions: minister
KYODO NEWS - May 12, 2022 - 16:34 | All, Japan

The National Police Agency issued an advisory to all prefectural police forces in December to avoid questioning people in a way that could be perceived as racially motivated, according to agency officials.

The advisory came after the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo tweeted on Dec. 6 that it had received reports of "suspected racial profiling incidents" with several foreigners "detained, questioned and searched" by police.

Racial profiling refers to law enforcement officers deciding based on ethnicity that a person is likely to be involved in criminal activity.

The written advisory read that when choosing who to stop and question, police officers "should not base their decisions solely on how they look, such as appearance and clothing."

When asked at a press conference about the U.S. Embassy's tweet on the day it was posted, top government spokesman Hirokazu Matsuno said police questioning is not carried out based on race or nationality, and officers approach suspicious people in accordance with the law.

Conversely, the preliminary results of a Tokyo Bar Association survey of police treatment of people with foreign roots, released earlier this year, showed that 62.9 percent of the 2,094 respondents reported being questioned by police in the preceding five years.

Complaints regarding discriminatory treatment of people with foreign roots living in Japan are increasingly visible on social media.

Moe Miyashita, a lawyer and expert in human rights issues related to foreigners, said, "People do come forward about the racial profiling they have endured in Japan, but the government does not clearly recognize its existence, and debate on the issue is at cross-purposes."

The NPA advisory, issued during a push for greater crime detection over the year-end and New Year's holiday period, was aimed at preventing questioning being misconstrued as motivated by discrimination or prejudice.

It cites race, religion and nationality among the factors that could be taken as subject to prejudice or discrimination. It also calls for consideration of LGBT people and other sexual minorities, reading, "We want comprehensive training to ensure inappropriate and inconsiderate words and actions are strictly refrained from."

In January 2021, an English teacher with a Japanese mother and Bahamian father was left stunned after police in Tokyo explained they had questioned him because "in our experience many people with dreadlocks carry drugs." An inspection of his belongings confirmed he had no drugs.

The experience stayed with him. "Even though I've done nothing wrong, now whenever a police officer passes me I tense up. I think police work hard to keep the peace, but I feel like if you're not 'pure Japanese' then you'll always be seen with suspicion," he said.

Lawrence Yoshitaka Shimoji, a sociology researcher at Ritsumeikan University and author of books including on Japanese people with mixed parentage, said discriminatory treatment of people whose heritage is linked to other Asian nations or Africa is particularly marked.

He also said there are countless cases of police confirming addresses or searching bags when people cannot produce identification such as residency cards.

Shimoji called the NPA advisory "an important first step" but added the problem would not be solved until it is "understood at the level of local police boxes."

The government does appear to be moving toward treating the issue with greater seriousness. In March, an opposition lawmaker asked during an upper house committee meeting for the government's opinion on a racial profiling case in which police stopped a man's car and asked to see his license because it was "strange to see a foreigner driving."

National Public Safety Commission Chairman Satoshi Ninoyu, a ruling Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker, condemned racial profiling in his response, saying, "It is unacceptable for police questioning to be done for reasons such as race or nationality."

He also cited the large numbers of people with foreign heritage living across Japan in stressing the need for a nationwide fact-finding survey on racial profiling.

Miyashita called for the government to gather data on suspected racial profiling cases and look into them, but she also stressed robust prevention mechanisms are needed.

"What is ultimately required are legal provisions to forbid racist treatment, and the establishment of an independent, third-party body to review what is appropriate in specific cases," she said.
KYODO NEWS - May 12, 2022 - 12:00 | All, World

The U.S. policy of not supporting the independence of Taiwan remains unchanged, government officials said Wednesday, after the removal of such a reference from the State Department's "fact sheet" on relations with the island angered China.

"We do not support Taiwan independence and we have repeatedly made this clear both in public and in private," State Department spokesman Ned Price told a press briefing.

White House Indo-Pacific coordinator Kurt Campbell separately said during a think-tank event the same day, "I can be very direct. Our policy has not changed and remains consistent."

Since switching diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, Washington has committed to a one-China policy under which it recognizes Beijing as the "sole legal government of China." But the policy allows unofficial ties with Taiwan and provision of assistance to help the island maintain a sufficient self-defense capability.

Washington maintains an ambiguous position regarding the use of military force in response to any Chinese attack on Taiwan, a policy aimed at both deterring China from invading and dissuading Taipei from seeking independence.

The State Department's fact sheet on Taiwan relations had previously stated that the United States does not support Taiwan independence.

But the language was removed, along with a phrase that Taiwan is part of China, following an update posted online on May 5. Price said such updates are made "regularly."

"The fact sheet had not been updated in several years...I think we care most about ensuring that our relationships around the world are reflected accurately in our fact sheets," Price said Tuesday.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian emphasized Tuesday that Taiwan is "an inalienable part of the Chinese territory" and criticized the fact sheet change as "political manipulation of the Taiwan question."

"The attempt to change the status quo across the Taiwan Strait will hurt the United States itself," he warned.

Tensions have been growing over Taiwan as China steps up its military pressure on the island while the United States forges closer ties with Taipei. Beijing considers Taiwan a renegade province to be reunified with the mainland, by force if necessary,

The new fact sheet said the United States "continues to encourage the peaceful resolution of cross-strait differences consistent with the wishes and best interests of the people on Taiwan."
KYODO NEWS - May 12, 2022 - 22:13 | All, World

North Korea fired three short-range ballistic missiles Thursday, the South Korean military said, days after the inauguration of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, who has indicated he will take a hard-line stance with Pyongyang.

South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said North Korea launched the missiles from Pyongyang's Sunan area at around 6:29 p.m. toward the Sea of Japan.

Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi told reporters North Korea fired three missiles, and if on their usual trajectories, they likely flew about 350 kilometers with a maximum altitude of around 100 km.

The missiles are believed to have fallen into the sea off North Korea's eastern coast and outside Japan's exclusive economic zone, and the Japanese government has received no reports of damage, Kishi said. Japan, which has no diplomatic relations with North Korea, lodged a protest with Pyongyang via its embassy in Beijing, he added.

North Korea has been conducting a series of missile tests since the start of the year. The latest launches mark the third round this month, following a suspected firing of a submarine-launched ballistic missile Saturday.

"A series of actions by North Korea threatens the peace and stability of our country and the international community, so it is absolutely unacceptable," the defense minister said.

Yoon has emphasized the importance of his country's trilateral security cooperation with Japan and the United States in addressing Pyongyang's missile and nuclear threats.

Prior to taking the helm, the new leader said a preemptive attack remains an option in dealing with the threats. His predecessor Moon Jae In had sought reconciliation with the North.

Amid growing speculation that the reclusive country may carry out a nuclear test soon, U.S. President Joe Biden is scheduled to visit South Korea and Japan from May 20 to 24, making it his first trip to Asia since taking office in January 2021.

Last week, Washington said the North could be ready as early as this month to conduct its seventh nuclear test, the first since 2017, at its Punggye-ri test site. Japan and South Korea have also said they share that view.

Related coverage:

No comment from North Korea about suspected missile launch of May 7

North Korea fires apparent submarine-launched ballistic missile

North Korea could be ready to conduct nuclear test this month: U.S.
The Armenian armed forces have shelled Azerbaijani army positions in liberated Kalbajar, the Defense Ministry reported.

In a statement, posted on its website, the ministry said that on May 11, in the evening, units of the Armenian armed forces, using various caliber weapons periodically subjected to fire Azerbaijan Army positions in the direction of Yukhari Ayrim and Zaylik settlements of the Kalbajar region, from positions in the direction of Azizli and Yukhari Shorzha settlements of the Basarkechar region on the state border.

The Azerbaijani army units took appropriate retaliatory measures to suppress the opposite side.

Armenia periodically shells Azerbaijani military positions located on its liberated territories. The previous truce violation took place on May 9 in the same direction.

To recap, on April 6, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, European Council President Charles Michel, and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan met in Brussels. After the meeting, Michel said that Azerbaijan and Armenia agreed to instruct the foreign ministries of the two countries to work on a future peace treaty.

Earlier, Ilham Aliyev stated that peace will return to the Caucasus based on the five principles Baku recently proposed for normalizing relations with Armenia. He made the remarks during a meeting with Polish Foreign Minister, OSCE Chairman-in-Office, Zbigniew Rau, on March 31.

The five principles we have initiated reflect the norms of international law and good international conduct... Reciprocal recognition of territorial integrity and inviolability of international borders, and then the delimitation of borders  I think that peace will come to the Caucasus on this basis. We want it, he said.

The president emphasized that these principles are fundamental to any interstate relations.

We are seeing the potential for active cooperation amongst the three countries of the South Caucasus, and I think that this will be important not only for these countries but also for the wider region, he added.

The trilateral ceasefire deal, signed by the Azerbaijani and Armenian leaders with the mediation of the Russian president on November 10, 2020, ended the three-decade conflict over Azerbaijans Karabakh region, which along with the seven adjacent regions came under the occupation of Armenian armed forces in the war in the early 1990s.

The deal also stipulated the return of Azerbaijan's Kalbajar, Aghdam and Lachin regions. Before the signing of the peace deal, Azerbaijan liberated 300 villages, settlements, city centers, and historical Shusha city that had been under Armenian occupation for about 30 years.

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 was set to implement clause 9 of the November 2020 statement related to the unblocking of all economic and transport communications in the region.

On November 26, 2021, the Azerbaijani, Russian and Armenian leaders signed a statement and agreed on a number of issues, including the demarcation and delimitation of the Azerbaijani-Armenian border by late 2021, some points related to humanitarian issues and the issue of unblocking of transport corridors which applies to the railway and to automobile communications.

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. 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.
KYODO NEWS - May 13, 2022 - 00:02 | All, Japan

Japan's top uniformed officer of the Defense Ministry said Thursday that recent activities by China's navy, including fighter jets taking off and landing on an aircraft carrier near the southern prefecture of Okinawa, are "a security concern."

Gen. Koji Yamazaki, chief of the ministry's Joint Staff, aired a strong sense of caution against the activities "held in waters close to Japan" with the aim of "bolstering navigating capabilities of the aircraft carrier in the Pacific region" when speaking at a press conference in Tokyo.

The remarks came as Self-Defense Forces vessels and aircraft have kept a vigilant watch for the Chinese navy's flotilla, including the aircraft carrier Liaoning, missile destroyers and a supply ship. In early May, they sailed from the East China Sea to the Pacific Ocean through waters between Okinawa's main island and Miyako Island.

The Liaoning was deployed about 150 kilometers south of Ishigaki Island in the prefecture at one point, according to the ministry, adding that fighter jets took off and landed on the vessel for a ninth straight day on Wednesday.

The Liaoning remained in the area as of Thursday, according to Yamazaki, saying he "took seriously" that the Chinese navy operates "near Taiwan and the southwestern region" of Japan.

Earlier this week, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno told a press briefing that Japan would "closely monitor" the moves by the Chinese military.

China has been exhibiting increasing assertiveness in the East China Sea, including in Japanese territorial waters around the uninhabited Tokyo-controlled Senkaku Islands, which Beijing claims and calls Diaoyu.




Beijing, May 11 (Xinhua) --Beijing has taken swift measures to battle a resurgence of COVID-19.

Local authorities said 56 new locally transmitted COVID-19 infections had been reported between 3 p.m. Tuesday and 3 p.m. Wednesday.

The new cases were all detected among personnel under closed-off management.

Meanwhile, mass nucleic acid testings were organized in Beijing Tuesday, with over 14.5 million residents sampled.

Staff members have also stepped up efforts for epidemiological investigation and source tracing.

Health authorities say hidden transmission sources in communities still exist and Beijing will use antigen testing as a supplementary measure to screen key risk groups and staff in key industries.





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A ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Youth League of China (CYLC) is held at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, May 10, 2022. (Xinhua/Zhai Jianlan)

BEIJING, May 11 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday addressed a ceremony to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Youth League of China.

The younger generation, according to Xi, should do their best to help realize national rejuvenation -- the greatest dream of the Chinese people since the Opium War of 1840.

Overseas Chinese youth said that they will carry forward their dreams and missions, and forge ahead on the new journey to realize the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation.

Lan Tianzhang, deputy captain of the political work of the 20th Chinese peacekeeping engineering detachment to Lebanon, said the young peacekeepers in Lebanon have been taking concrete actions to fulfill their missions and safeguard world peace, adding that they will work hard to make more contributions to realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

Wang Xiaowei, manager of the fifth site office of the Phnom Penh-Sihanoukville Expressway invested by the China Road and Bridge Corporation, said they, as young workers serving the Belt and Road Initiative, feel proud of their mission and are more aware of the responsibilities of the young generation, adding that they will take roots in the frontline to ensure that the project becomes a high-quality one.

Yuan Wanfu checks the flatness of road basement layer at a construction site in Nairobi, Kenya, April 23, 2022. (Xinhua/Long Lei)

Wang Yuqing, a Chinese teacher at the Confucius Institute at the University of Karachi in Pakistan, said that Xi's words greatly encouraged young teachers working at overseas Confucius Institutes and gave them the confidence to do a better job of telling China's stories.

Miao Danying, a lecturer at the United Nations Visitors Service at Nairobi, said that an increasing number of Chinese people are serving in the United Nations and young faces are constantly emerging, showcasing Chinese culture and contributing Chinese talent in different positions.

Miao believed that with the continuous development of China, the prospects for Chinese youth to realize their dreams will be even broader.

Xia Yang, president of the Association of Chinese Students and Scholars in Japan, said that they must study hard and return home as soon as possible to contribute to China's development and prosperity as well as the rejuvenation of the nation.

Li Feng, who is about to finish his studies at the University of Zagreb in Croatia soon and return to China, pledged to be a young person with lofty ideals and firm convictions, and contribute to the development and prosperity of the country.
The crisis in Ukraine has cast a long shadow over Greek fruit and vegetable exports. #GLOBALink





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ADEN, Yemen, May 11 (Xinhua) -- An officer of Yemen's security forces was killed by unknown shooters in the country's southern port city of Aden on Wednesday, a government official told Xinhua.

"Salim Saif Radfani, an officer of the security forces in charge of guarding the Aden International Airport, was killed in an area close to the airport," the local official said on condition of anonymity.

Radfani was stopped by a vehicle carrying masked shooters while driving his own car near the Aden airport compound, according to the source.

"The gunmen rained a barrage of gunshots on the officer's car and killed him instantly inside his car," he said.

The official confirmed that terrorists' fingerprints were found in preliminary investigation with more going on into the drive-by shooting attack.

Since 2015, the Saudi-backed Yemeni government has been based in Aden.

Local authorities are trying to maintain security and stability in the strategic Yemeni port city which suffers from sporadic bombing incidents and drive-by shooting attacks.

Yemen has been mired in a civil war since late 2014, when the Iran-backed Houthi rebels seized control of several northern provinces and forced the internationally-recognized government out of the capital Sanaa. 
Students line up to enter the teaching building of No. 60 Middle School in Harbin, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, May 12, 2022.

Schools in Harbin started resuming in-person classes in phases on Thursday. (Xinhua/Zhang Tao)

Students attend a class at No. 60 Middle School in Harbin, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, May 12, 2022.

Schools in Harbin started resuming in-person classes in phases on Thursday. (Xinhua/Zhang Tao)

Students attend a class at No. 60 Middle School in Harbin, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, May 12, 2022.

Schools in Harbin started resuming in-person classes in phases on Thursday. (Xinhua/Zhang Tao)

Students attend a class at No. 60 Middle School in Harbin, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, May 12, 2022.

Schools in Harbin started resuming in-person classes in phases on Thursday. (Xinhua/Zhang Tao)

A student attends a class at No. 60 Middle School in Harbin, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, May 12, 2022.

Schools in Harbin started resuming in-person classes in phases on Thursday. (Xinhua/Zhang Tao)

A medical worker takes a swab sample from a student for nucleic acid test at No. 60 Middle School in Harbin, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, May 12, 2022.

Schools in Harbin started resuming in-person classes in phases on Thursday. (Xinhua/Zhang Tao)
BEIJING, May 12 (Xinhua) -- A ceremony marking the centenary of the Communist Youth League of China (the League) was held at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Tuesday morning. President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and chairman of the Central Military Commission, delivered an important speech.

He stressed that youth gives rise to infinite hope and young people are the creators of a bright future. For the younger generations in the new era, the time could not be better for them to complete weighty tasks since they have an incomparably broad stage to display their talents and brighter prospects than ever before to realize their dreams. Realizing the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation is a relay race of history in which today's young people should strive to deliver their best performance.

President Xi called on the League to focus on the fundamental task of preparing the youth to contribute to and carry forward the socialist cause. The League should nourish the youth for the Party, take on its responsibilities, bear in mind the interests of the youth, and have the courage to reform itself.

He hopes that the League will unite and help its members and young people grow into new-era exemplary youths who have ideals, dare to assume responsibility, and are hardworking and able to endure hardship, so that they will build up the momentum for national rejuvenation with their youthful energy and creativity and build a better China with their youthful ingenuity and effort.

Other members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee also attended the event. They are Li Keqiang, Li Zhanshu, Wang Yang, Wang Huning, Zhao Leji and Han Zheng.

The atmosphere was solemn and warm in the banquet hall of the Great Hall of the People. A streamer bearing the words "Ceremony Marking the Centenary of the Communist Youth League of China" hung above the podium. In the middle of the curtain behind was the emblem of the Communist Youth League of China, with a sign reading "1922-2022" below and five red flags on each side.

The ceremony began at 10:00 a.m. All rose and sang the national anthem.

After enthusiastic applause, Xi Jinping delivered a speech.

He started by extending warm congratulations and sincere greetings to all League members as well as Communist Youth League organizations and staff at all levels on behalf of the CPC Central Committee.

Since the day of its founding, the Party has paid particular attention to the youth and placed the hopes of China's revolution on them, Xi noted.

Over the past century, under the Party's strong leadership, the League has stayed true to its original aspiration and founding mission, organized and guided generation after generation of young people to stay firm in their convictions and loyal to the Party, fight for national independence and the people's liberation, and contribute to the country's strength and prosperity and the happiness of the people. Through these efforts, a stirring chapter of youth was written on China's path toward national rejuvenation.

Over the past century, the Communist Youth League has been of one heart and mind with the Party and followed in its footsteps, he said. It has united and led League members and young people in dedicating themselves to the cause of the Party and the people, devoting their youth to the journey toward national rejuvenation, and thus engraving their glory in the annals of history. Both history and reality tell us that the Communist Youth League of China is worthy of being regarded as the vanguard of the Chinese youth movement, a loyal aide to the Party, and a reliable reserve force.

Over the past century, with firm ideals and strong will, the Communist Youth League has amassed valuable experience, Xi stressed. The 100-year history of the League has defined that upholding Party leadership is crucial to its success, and instilled its political essence of having firm ideals and convictions. The century-long history has also helped build up the League's strength for contributing to national rejuvenation, and identified taking root among young people as its source of vitality. Such important experience should be drawn upon to make new achievements in the future.

Xi pointed out that on the new journey ahead, how to better unite, organize, and mobilize young people in China's efforts to achieve the Second Centenary Goal and realize the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation is a major topic that needs to be addressed in the Chinese youth movement and work related to youths in the new era.

He shared his hopes for the League in four aspects.

First, he hopes that the League would nourish the youth for the Party and remain a political school that leads the political advancement of the Chinese youth. The League should be politically-minded, start with ways of thinking, and take into consideration the characteristics of the youth in helping them set lofty goals at an early age, and in fostering their trust for the Party, confidence in socialism with Chinese characteristics and belief in Marxism from the bottom of their heart. The League should be guided by the vitally important goal of making sure that the cause of the Party is carried forward by future generations, and focus on the fundamental task of preparing the youth to contribute to and carry forward the socialist cause. It should help the youth become more proud, confident, and assured in their identity as Chinese people through tempering both in thinking and practice.

Second, he hopes the League would take up its responsibilities and remain a vanguard in organizing the Chinese youth to keep going forward. The League should unite and lead its members and young people in heeding the call of the Party and the people, bearing in mind the country's most fundamental interests, shouldering their missions, and realizing their aspirations and making achievements in new fronts in the new era. The League should encourage its members and young people to pursue the great ideal and drive forward the great cause.

Third, he hopes the League would bear in mind the interests of the youth and remain the strongest bond between the Party and the youth. The League should uphold the lifeline of serving the youth, carry out its political duty of consolidating and expanding the support from the youth for the Party's governance, and make every effort to benefit the youth, solve their difficulties, think from their perspective, respond to their concerns, and offer the youth tangible support.

Fourth, he hopes the League should have the courage to reform itself and remain an advanced organization that closely follows the Party and stays at the forefront of the times. The League should ensure the overall leadership of the Party throughout the whole process of its work in all areas, follow the Chinese socialist development path of people's organizations, and deepen its reform. The League should develop a keen understanding of the youth and, in light of the new changes and features of young people's work and life styles, explore new approaches and models for its primary-level organizations, lead youth and student federations in promoting patriotism and socialism and constantly consolidate and expand the patriotic united front among the youth. The League should also use the Party's experience and effective practices in strict Party self-governance to improve itself with the spirit of reform and innovation and in a strict and practical manner, and at the same time exercise rigorous self-governance. Through comprehensive and high-standard self-improvement, the Communist Youth League will take on a positive image that reflects the spirit of the times.

Striving for progress is the most precious character of youths, and it is also what is most expected of them by the Party and the people, Xi stressed.

League members in the new era should be role models of upholding lofty ideals and firm beliefs, take the lead in studying Marxist theory, build the ideal of communism and a shared ideal of socialism with Chinese characteristics, conscientiously practice core socialist values, and fully promote patriotism, he said.

They are expected to play an exemplary role by studying hard and boldly engaging in innovation, take the requirements of their jobs as the starting point to improve their capabilities and strive for excellence, and try their best to become backbone personnel and advanced youths.

They should be both brave and adept in carrying out our struggle, lead the way in rising to challenges and tackling tough problems, and refuse to be taken in by fallacies or to tremble in the face of danger.

They should be models of hard work and dedication, take the lead in remaining committed to standing on the side of the people, be realistic, pragmatic, and down-to-earth, be the first to suffer hardship and the last to enjoy comfort, and be willing to play a minor but forever effective role in their posts.

They should set an example in acting in a good and virtuous manner and in observing a strict code of discipline, uphold public and personal morals, abide by disciplinary regulations and the law, and strictly fulfill their obligations as League members.

All League members should receive political training, intensify political tempering, and strive for political advancement. On this basis, they should actively draw closer to the Party, set it as their goal to become a qualified Party member, and take pride in achieving it.

League staff must refine their political character of being loyal to the Party and champion the spirit of pursuing noble ideals, Xi said.

They must consciously practice the mass line and firmly establish a correct mass viewpoint, maintain close ties with youths, be friends instead of "bureaucrats" to youths, and work to better benefit youths rather than themselves.

They must develop a work style of being responsible and practical, refrain from empty talk to do more pragmatic work, have the courage to bear hardships, take on difficult tasks, shoulder heavy responsibilities, and face risks under harsh environments and at the community level, and conduct themselves properly and do solid work.

They must improve moral cultivation to remain honest and self-disciplined, hold regulations and the law in awe and speak and act prudently, constantly build up their willpower, perseverance, and self-control, and be persons who always bear the public good in mind, have a strong sense of righteousness, and remain untainted by malpractices.

On the quest to realize national rejuvenation, the Communist Party of China is the vanguard, the Communist Youth League is the spearhead, and the Young Pioneers is the reserve force, Xi said, adding that joining the Pioneers, the League, and then the Party makes up the "trilogy of life" for youths seeking political advancement.

The League should perform its political duty of guiding the Young Pioneers, standardize and strengthen mechanisms for the Young Pioneers recommending outstanding members to the Youth League and from the Youth League to the Party, and work hard to improve the interconnection and coordination between personnel cultivation in the Young Pioneers, the Youth League, and the Party.

Party organizations at all levels must attach great importance to the training and recruitment of outstanding young people and should, particularly, focus on cultivating and admitting outstanding Youth League members into the Party, so as to ensure our socialist country never changes its nature.

Party committees and Party leadership groups at all levels must study the laws governing youths' growth and their contemporary features with great enthusiasm, devote great energy to the work related to youths, and serve wholeheartedly as their confidant and their guide, Xi noted.

Party organizations at all levels must implement the systems and mechanisms for using Party building to lead League building, study and resolve major issues regarding League work on a regular basis, care about and expect more of League staff, and support the League in creatively carrying out their initiatives in accordance with the features of and the laws governing the work on people's organizations.

For the Party and the country, young people deserve the best protection and bear our highest expectations, Xi stressed.

"They are like the young trees thriving on earth that will eventually grow into towering trees to provide shelter for those in need. They are like the rising sun whose energy keeps on increasing as it climbs up the sky until the moment when it lights and warms up the earth," he said. "The Party and the country place their hopes on the youth."

Presiding over the ceremony, Wang Huning said the important speech delivered by President Xi comprehensively reviewed the 100-year history of the League's unswerving adherence to the instructions and guidance of the Party, and fully recognized that the League, under the Party's leadership, has united and led generations of League members and young people in making significant contributions to realizing the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation.

The speech has elucidated the historical experience of the League and youth work, while setting clear requirements for the League's work in the new era, Wang said.

The speech holds significant political, theoretical, and strategic value and is a sound source of guidance, and we should conscientiously study and understand it, and thoroughly implement it, he said.

He Junke, first secretary of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League of China, and Chen Gang, first secretary of the Secretariat of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, spoke at the ceremony.

Members of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee, as well as leading members of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, the State Council, the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, and the Central Military Commission attended the ceremony.

The event was also attended by about 1,000 people, including leading officials from various departments of the CPC Central Committee, the government, the military and mass organizations, representatives of League members and young people from all walks of life in Beijing and diplomatic envoys from some countries to China. 
BEIJING, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday sent a congratulatory message to Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos on his election as president of the Republic of the Philippines.

China and the Philippines are neighbors facing each other across the sea and partners through thick and thin, Xi said.

In recent years, with the joint efforts of both sides, the bilateral relations have been consolidated and enhanced, bringing benefits to the people of both countries and contributing to regional peace and stability, Xi added.

Xi stressed that both China and the Philippines are at a critical stage of development and their relations face important opportunities and enjoy broad prospects.

Noting that he attaches great importance to the development of the bilateral ties, Xi said he is ready to establish a good working relationship with Marcos to uphold good-neighborliness and joint development, and further advance the bilateral comprehensive strategic cooperative relationship to benefit the two countries and their people.

On the same day, Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan also sent a message to Sara Zimmerman Duterte-Carpio to congratulate her on her election as vice president of the Philippines. 
BEIJING, May 12 (Xinhua) -- The following is the full text of a speech delivered by Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, at a ceremony marking the centenary of the Communist Youth League of China on Tuesday.

Speech at a Ceremony Marking the Centenary of the Communist Youth League of China

May 10, 2022

Xi Jinping

Members of the Communist Youth League of China (League), young friends, and comrades,

Youth gives rise to infinite hope, and young people are the creators of a bright future. A nation can thrive and prosper only when it places hopes on its youth and maintains its youthful vigor.

Today, we are gathered here at the ceremony marking the centenary of the Communist Youth League of China to encourage League members and young people to forge ahead on the new journey toward realizing the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation.

First of all, on behalf of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, I would like to extend warm congratulations and sincere greetings to all League members as well as Communist Youth League organizations and staff at all levels.

League members, young friends, and comrades,

The Chinese nation is an ancient nation with a long, enduring history and has experienced many years of vicissitudes. More importantly, it is also a youthful nation that continuously pursues self-improvement and remains vibrant. With a civilization of over 5,000 years, our nation has long cherished the traditional belief that heroes are cultivated from young age and embraces the idea that the waves behind drive on those ahead. We believe a nation will be strong only when its young people are strong and a nation will make progress only when its younger generations make progress. We have always believed that the future of our nation rest on youths. For hundreds of years, the strength, vitality, and creativity of the youth have always been a mighty force that drives our nation forward against all challenges and enables it to stand tall among the nations of the world.

The destiny of the youth is always closely connected with the times. After the Opium War of 1840, China was gradually reduced to a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society and suffered greater ravages than ever before. The country endured intense humiliation, the people were subjected to great pain, and the Chinese civilization was plunged into darkness. Many noble-minded patriots sought to pull the nation together. Many progressive young people were enlightened at this "Awakening Age." The great May Fourth Movement promoted the spread of Marxism in China, ushered in the new-democratic revolution, and marked the beginning of the youth's role as the pioneers advancing social changes in China.

With the youth awakened and advanced ideas disseminated, the dynamic revolution quickly swept across the vast land of China. As Marxism-Leninism was becoming closely integrated with the Chinese workers' movement, the Communist Party of China was born. Since the day of its founding, the Party has paid particular attention to the youth and placed the hopes of revolution on them. At its First National Congress, the Party carried out specific studies into the establishment and development of a youth league as the prep school for the Party. On May 5, 1922, the Communist Youth League of China was founded under the direct care and leadership of the CPC, marking a milestone in the history of China's revolution and youth movement.

Faithfully following the Party and working for the Party and the people constitute the Communist Youth League's original aspiration and founding mission, to which the League has stayed true over the past century. Under the Party's strong leadership, it has organized and guided generation after generation of young people to stay firm in their convictions and loyal to the Party, fight for national independence and the people's liberation, and contribute to the country's strength and prosperity and the happiness of the people. Through these efforts, a stirring chapter of youth was written on our path toward China's national rejuvenation.

In the period of the new-democratic revolution, the Communist Youth League actively engaged in promoting Marxism in China, enlightening young people with advanced ideas and rallying their force. Under the League's leadership, its members and young people devoted themselves to anti-imperialist and anti-feudal movements of workers, peasants, and students, actively served in revolutionary armies led by the Party, and fought in the battles to bring down warlords, resist Japanese invaders, and overthrow the rule of the Kuomintang. They manifested a spirit of fighting bravely without fear of sacrifice. Charging forward through hailstorms of bullets, League members and young people showed their firm faith and passed the test of life and death, dedicating their youth to the victory of China's revolution and making outstanding contributions.

In the period of socialist revolution and construction, the Communist Youth League took an active part in the most extensive and profound social reform in the Chinese history. Its members acted as the spearhead in various campaigns and they were organized to reclaim uncultivated land, educate the illiterate, and learn from the model soldier Lei Feng. Under the League's leadership, its members and young people were empowered by the spirit of "daring to make the sun and the moon shine in the new sky" and shouted out the slogan of "devoting our youth to the motherland." They rose to all sorts of challenges, no matter in scientific researches or the harsh natural environment. They manifested a spirit of daring to struggle and working hard. Pulling through hardships and dangers, League members and young people took the initiative to shoulder responsibilities and braved themselves in the most challenging and demanding missions, dedicating their youth to the country's construction and making outstanding contributions.

In the new period of reform and opening up and socialist modernization, the Communist Youth League adjusted itself to the strategic shift in the focus of the Party and the country's work, freed the mind, and forged ahead with resolve. It launched a large number of creative initiatives, encouraging young people to be "pacesetters of the New Long March," to uphold "five things to stress," "four things to beautify," and "three things to love," to join the Project Hope for children's education in rural areas, to serve as volunteers, to perfect their professional performances, and to work for the environmental project "Mother River Protection." Under the League's leadership, a call of the time that "let us unite for national rejuvenation" resonated, and League members and young people rode the waves on all fronts of modernization. They manifested a spirit of daring to explore and setting the trend. Engaging themselves in the modernization drive by destroying the old and establishing the new, League members and young people acted as trailblazers of reform and led the way ahead, dedicating their youth to the country's reform and opening up and socialist modernization and making outstanding contributions.

In the new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics, the Communist Youth League has pursued a great struggle, a great project, a great cause, and a great dream, made innovation on the basis of what has worked in the past, advanced its work with full strength, and reformed itself comprehensively. Under the League's leadership, its members and young people did their best in the fight against poverty, in cutting-edge scientific researches, in disaster rescue and relief missions, on the epidemic response frontline, in the Olympic arena, and at posts of defending the motherland, stepping up and responding to the calls of the Party and the people when they were most needed. They have manifested a spirit of self-confidence, self-reliance, vigor, and action. "My pure love is only for China," a phrase written by a young soldier and martyr, has become the most powerful expression of young people in contemporary China. Bearing a great dream and a great mission, League members and young people have willingly carried the ball on the frontline and demonstrated their brilliance in the course of realizing national rejuvenation, dedicating their youth to historic achievements and changes in the cause of the Party and the country and making outstanding contributions.

Although the times keep changing, young people in China have been committed to the same mission. Over the past century, the Communist Youth League has been of one heart and mind with the Party and followed in its footsteps. It has united and led League members and young people in dedicating themselves to the cause of the Party and the people, devoting their youth to the journey toward national rejuvenation, and thus engraving their glory in the annals of history.

Both history and reality tell us that the Communist Youth League of China is worthy of being regarded as the vanguard of the Chinese youth movement, a loyal aide to the Party, and a reliable reserve force.

League members, young friends, and comrades,

The further we advance and the higher we climb, the better we should be at absorbing wisdom from our past experience, boosting our confidence, and improving our strength. Over the past century, with firm ideals and strong will, the Communist Youth League has amassed valuable experience which should be drawn upon to make new achievements in the future.

The 100-year history of the Communist Youth League has defined that upholding Party leadership is crucial to the League's success.

The Communist Youth League would not have taken shape without the Communist Party of China. Since the very first day it was founded, the League has shared the same banner, will, and mission with the Party, integrated upholding the leadership of the Party into its lifeblood, and developed its particular character and distinct advantage which differentiate it from other youth organizations. Following the instructions and guidance of the Party remains the political career of the League, and that the League will act upon the Party's call is the political belief of League members from generation to generation. History has proved that only if it upholds Party leadership can the Communist Youth League unite the youth and lead them in moving forward and ensure that the Chinese youth movement is advancing in the right political direction.

The 100-year history of the Communist Youth League has instilled its political essence of having firm ideals and convictions.

Inspired by ideals and convictions, the Communist Youth League has organized and united young people with firm belief and scientific thinking. The first national congress of the League defined building a communist society as its ultimate ideal and made clear its banner of socialism, which has lighted the beacon of ideals and convictions among generations of young people. This is the most fundamental and enduring cohesion of the League. History tells us that only by holding high the banner of communism and socialism, can the Communist Youth League form the most solid unity, forge the most effective organization, and ensure that the youth are united under the banner of the Party's ideals and convictions.

The 100-year history of the Communist Youth League has helped build up its strength for contributing to national rejuvenation.

The Party's goal determines the orientation of the Communist Youth League's action. Focusing on the Party's key tasks in different stages of history, the League has united and led its members and youths in joining the people in practice. It has served as pioneers in efforts toward national rejuvenation and played their role as a fresh driving force and the spearhead, ensuring that the goal of achieving national rejuvenation become the main theme throughout the Chinese youth movement. History has fully demonstrated that only by centering on endeavoring for the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, can the Communist Youth League unite as many young people as possible to write an epic chapter of youth.

The 100-year history of the Communist Youth League has identified taking root among young people as its source of vitality.

The Communist Youth League is glowing with youth and vigor after a hundred years of vicissitudes because it has consistently taken root among young people, put its focus of work on the overwhelming majority of young workers and peasants and ordinary youths, and stood with the youth while building a bridge to bring young people closer to the Party. History has shown that only by drawing nourishment and strength from the fertile soil of the vast number of young people, can the Communist Youth League be a close friend to youths that is trustworthy, reliable, and inseparable.

League members, young friends, and comrades,

Under the strong leadership of the Party, people of all ethnic groups in China have united as one with a shared purpose, have fulfilled the First Centenary Goal of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects, and are moving on toward the Second Centenary Goal of building China into a great modern socialist country in all respects.

Realizing the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation is a relay race of history in which today's young people should strive for excellent performance. The times have always endowed young people with historical responsibilities. For generations of youths in the new era, the time could not be better for them to complete weighty tasks since they have an incomparably broad stage to display their talents and brighter prospects than ever before to realize their dreams. At the ceremony marking the centenary of the Communist Party of China, representatives from the Communist Youth League and the Young Pioneers declared the commitment of making due contribution to building a strong country. This is what Chinese youths are supposed to do in the new era and what the Party's youth organizations must be committed to.

On the new journey ahead, how to better unite, organize, and mobilize young people in China's efforts to achieve the Second Centenary Goal and realize the Chinese Dream is a major topic that needs to be addressed in the Chinese youth movement and work related to youths in the new era. The Communist Youth League must enhance its leadership, organization, and services, unite and help its members and young people grow into new-era exemplary youths who have ideals, dare to assume responsibility, and are hardworking and able to endure hardship. In this way, they will build up the momentum for national rejuvenation with their youthful energy and creativity and build a better China with their youthful ingenuity and effort.

Here I would like to share a few of my hopes with the League.

First, I hope the League would nourish the youth for the Party and remain a political school that leads the political advancement of the Chinese youth. Only those aim high would scale the heights and look afar, and only those with a global vision would achieve great success. The passion of youth should be accompanied by firm ideals and convictions. By including the word "communist" into the League's name, the Party hopes that this youth organization would always stand on the high ground of ideals and convictions, equip the youth with the Party's theories, inspire them with the Party's original aspiration and founding mission, guide them with the Party's glorious banner, and shape them with the Party's fine conduct. The youth of China in the new era are more confident and capable of self-improvement, and they think more critically. At the same time, they are facing the influence of various trends of thought and would inevitably get confused about matters such as ideals and reality, doctrines and issues, egoism and altruism, individual and collective identities, and the nation and the world. More meticulous education and guidance is needed to help them make social observations with a sharp eye, think about life with a sober mind, and create the future with wisdom.

As a school for the young people to study socialism with Chinese characteristics and communism through practice, the Communist Youth League should be politically-minded, start with ways of thinking, and take into consideration the characteristics of the youth in helping them set lofty goals at an early age, and in fostering their trust for the Party, confidence in socialism with Chinese characteristics and belief in Marxism from the bottom of their hearts. The League should be guided by the vitally important goal of making sure that the cause of the Party is carried forward by future generations, and focus on the fundamental task of preparing the youth to contribute to and carry forward the socialist cause. It should help the youth become more proud, confident, and assured in their identity as Chinese people through tempering both in thinking and practice, so that the cause of the Party will be carried on from generation to generation.

Second, I hope the League would take up its responsibilities and remain a vanguard in organizing the Chinese youth to keep going forward. Working hard is the brightest color of youth, and taking actions is the best trial for young people. Responsibilities and commitment are what make the youthful years shine. The youth are always pioneers who are most passionate about innovation and most motivated to innovate. The cause of the Party and the people would not be advanced without the endeavor and dedication of generations of young aspirants. Only when youth fully aligns with the cause of the Party and the people, can its spectrum be broadened and energy fully stimulated. Young people are the most vigorous, enterprising, and least conservative group in society, who possess infinite power to improve the objective world and promote social progress. The Communist Youth League should unite and lead its members and young people in catching the contemporary waves, heeding the call of the Party and the people, bearing in mind the country's most fundamental interests, shouldering their missions, and realizing their aspirations and making achievements in new fronts in the new era. The League should encourage its members and young people to pursue the great ideal, drive forward the great cause, and let their youth blossom in fields where the Party and the people need them most.

Thirdly, I hope the League would bear in mind the interests of the youth and remain the strongest bond between the Party and the youth. The Communist Youth League is a people's organization under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, as well as the youth's own organization. The greatest strength of the League lies in its network at the primary level that allows the League to stay close to the youth. The League should uphold the lifeline of serving the youth and carry out its political duty of consolidating and expanding the support from the youth for the Party's governance. While letting the Party know about the wellbeing of the youth, the League should also fully pass on the Party's care to the youth. The League should make every effort to benefit the youth, solve their difficulties, think from their perspective, respond to their concerns, and make full use of the resources and channels provided by the Party to offer the youth tangible support. In this way, young people would genuinely feel that the Party is always close by and ready to attend to their needs.

Fourthly, the League should have the courage to reform itself and remain an advanced organization that closely follows the Party and stays at the forefront of the times. For the Communist Youth League, what kind of youth organization it should develop itself into and how to build it are major questions of fundamental importance. "A fixed system is not capable of responding to infinite changes, one road would not lead to myriad destinations, and a lost sword would hardly be located in a river by leaving a mark on the boat." Only through bold self-reform can the League keep pace with the times, the youth's development, and the trend of practice and innovation.

The Communist Youth League should ensure the overall leadership of the Party throughout the whole process of its work in all areas, follow the Chinese socialist development path of people's organizations, focus on the goal and direction of maintaining and strengthening its political character, pioneering nature, and connection with the people, and deepen its reform. The League should develop a keen understanding of the youth and, in light of the new changes and features of young people's work and life styles, explore new approaches and models for its primary-level organizations. It should lead youth and student federations in promoting patriotism and socialism and constantly consolidate and expand the patriotic united front among the youth. The League should also use the Party's experience and effective practices in strict Party self-governance to improve itself with the spirit of reform and innovation and in a strict and practical manner, and at the same time exercise rigorous self-governance. Through comprehensive and high-standard self-improvement, the Communist Youth League will take on a positive image that reflects the spirit of the times.

As a line in an old Chinese poem goes, "Everything in life must be experienced by oneself; it is the minor steps that take one to a wider world." Striving for progress is the most precious character of the youth, and it is also what is most expected of them by our Party and people. League members in the new era should be role models of upholding lofty ideals and firm beliefs, take the lead in studying Marxist theory, build the ideal of communism and a shared ideal of socialism with Chinese characteristics, conscientiously practice core socialist values, and fully promote patriotism. They should play an exemplary role by studying hard and boldly engaging in innovation, take the requirements of their jobs as the starting point to improve their capabilities and strive for excellence, and try their best to become backbone personnel and advanced youths. They should be both brave and adept in carrying out our struggle, lead the way in rising to challenges and tackling tough problems, and refuse to be taken in by fallacies or to tremble in the face of danger. They should be models of hard work and dedication, take the lead in remaining committed to standing on the side of the people, be realistic, pragmatic, and down-to-earth, be the first to suffer hardship and the last to enjoy comfort, and be willing to play a minor but forever effective role in their posts. They should set an example in acting in a good and virtuous manner and in observing a strict code of discipline, uphold public and personal morals, abide by disciplinary regulations and the law, and strictly fulfill their obligations as members of the Communist Youth League. All League members should receive political training, intensify political tempering, and strive for political advancement. On this basis, they should actively draw closer to the Party, set it as their goal to become a qualified Party member, and take pride in achieving it.

For many years, the staff of the Communist Youth League have carried forward their fine traditions, diligently performed their duties, and thus made significant contributions to the Party's work related to youths. League staff must refine their political character of being loyal to the Party, champion the spirit of pursuing noble ideals, and remain clear-minded and strong-hearted so that they make people feel the lucidness and pureness of young officials at first sight. They must consciously practice the mass line and firmly establish a correct mass viewpoint, maintain close ties with youths, be friends instead of "bureaucrats" to youths, and work to better benefit youths rather than themselves. They must develop a work style of being responsible and practical, refrain from empty talk to do more pragmatic work, have the courage to bear hardships, take on difficult tasks, shoulder heavy responsibilities, and face risks under harsh environments and at the community level, and conduct themselves properly and do solid work. They must improve moral cultivation to remain honest and self-disciplined, hold regulations and the law in awe and speak and act prudently, constantly build up their willpower, perseverance, and self-control, and be persons who always bear the public good in mind, have a strong sense of righteousness, and remain untainted by malpractices.

League members, young friends, and comrades,

Revolutionaries are always young. Today, a hundred years on from its founding, the Communist Party of China is still in its prime, and remains as determined as ever to achieve lasting greatness for the Chinese nation. Quoting from Engels, Lenin once said, "We are the party of the future, and the future belongs to the youth. We are a party of innovators, and it is always the youth that most eagerly follows the innovators. We are a party that is waging a self-sacrificing struggle against the old rottenness, and youth is always the first to undertake a self-sacrificing struggle." Both history and reality have shown that the Communist Party of China is a party that always preserves its youthful features and a party that is worthy of the young people's trust and worth following.

On the quest to realize national rejuvenation, the Communist Party of China is the vanguard, the Communist Youth League is the spearhead, and the Young Pioneers is the reserve force. Joining the Pioneers, the League, and then the Party makes up the "trilogy of life" for youths seeking political advancement. The Party has kept its gate open to all young people and will continue to welcome more youths who will add new blood to the Party. The Communist Youth League must perform its political duty of guiding the Young Pioneers, standardize and strengthen mechanisms for the Young Pioneers recommending outstanding members to the Youth League and from the League to the Party, and work hard to improve the interconnection and coordination between personnel cultivation in the Young Pioneers, the League, and the Party. Party organizations at all levels must attach great importance to the training and recruitment of outstanding young people and should, particularly, focus on cultivating and admitting outstanding League members into the Party, so as to ensure our socialist country never changes its nature.

Li Dazhao, a Chinese communist, once said, "The youth are the soul of a country." The Party's work related to young people was, is, and will be of strategic importance. Party committees and Party leadership groups at all levels must study the laws governing youths' growth and their contemporary features with great enthusiasm, devote great energy to the work related to youths, and serve wholeheartedly as their confidant and their guide. Party organizations at all levels must implement the systems and mechanisms for using Party building to lead League building, study and resolve major issues regarding League work on a regular basis, care about and expect more of League staff, and support the League in creatively carrying out their initiatives in accordance with the features of and the laws governing the work on people's organizations.

League members, young friends, and comrades,

More than 2,000 years ago, Confucius said, "A youth is to be regarded with respect. How do you know that his future will not be equal to our present?" For the Party and the country, young people deserve the best protection and bear our highest expectations. They are like the young trees thriving on earth that will eventually grow into towering trees to provide shelter for those in need. They are like the rising sun whose energy keeps on increasing as it climbs up the sky until the moment when it lights and warms up the earth. The Party and the country place their hopes on the youth.

As the Northern Shaanxi College was set up in 1937, Comrade Mao Zedong wrote the inscription "We need to cultivate a large number of personnel who will become the vanguard of China's revolution. They are politically far-sighted and full of the spirit of struggle and self-sacrifice. They have largeness of mind and are loyal, active, and upright. They do not pursue any personal gain, but work for the sole purpose of national and social liberation. They always meet difficulty head-on with resolve and brave persistence. They are neither swaggerers nor people who seek the limelight, but rather practical people who keep their feet firmly on the ground. Once our country has a large number of such vanguard, the task of China's revolution will be carried out successfully." In present-day China, the Party and the people still need a large number of such vanguard, and the Party Central Committee earnestly hopes the Communist Youth League can deliver results in this regard. This is the ardent expectation of the Party as well as our motherland and people. 
BEIJING, May 12 (Xinhua) -- The United States, as a non-regional country, should play a positive and constructive role in promoting regional peace and development, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Thursday, in response to reports that the upcoming U.S.-ASEAN summit will discuss issues related to China.

"The United States should not use cooperation as a cover to force others to pick sides, or play with fire on issues concerning China's core interests," said Zhao Lijian, the spokesperson.

It was reported that Kurt Campbell, the White House's Indo-Pacific policy coordinator, said that the United States hopes to take measures to maintain peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.

The United States continues to follow the one-China policy, does not support "Taiwan independence," and has no intention of taking provocative actions. But it "wants clarity about the desire to deter steps that would be provocative," according to Campbell.

In response, Zhao said the one-China principle is a universal consensus of the international community and an established basic norm governing international relations.

The United States should abide by the one-China principle and the three China-U.S. joint communiques, the political commitments made to China on the Taiwan question, and U.S. President Joe Biden's statement that the United States does not support "Taiwan independence," Zhao said.

The United States should stop exploiting Taiwan-related issues to engage in political manipulation in an attempt to contain China, he added. 
South Africa: Global Fund Grant must be used efficiently  Dr Phaahla

Health Minister, Dr Joe Phaahla, has committed to checking on the Global Fund Grant to ensure that it is implemented in a quality manner and that the country utilises the funding received efficiently.

Phaahla said this on Thursday in Pretoria while officiating the signing of the new Global Fund grant valued over R8.8 billion for the next three-year cycle for the countrys response to HIV and tuberculosis (TB).

I urge our implementers to make South Africa proud and utilise the money accountably and effectively ensure that services are reaching the communities in need.

I am excited for the new funding and promise to check in on the grant to ensure [that] we are implementing in a quality manner and absorbing funds effectively, the Minister said.

He said that the country is grateful for the partnership it has forged with Global Fund since 2003.

To date this partnership has seen South Africa receiving around US$1.3 billion to fight HIV, TB and Malaria. This, he said, is strengthening the countrys efforts towards meeting the 2030 Sustainable Goals.

I would like to thank the Global Fund for increasing the funding allocation for South Africa from US$ 369 million in 2019-2022 to US$ 546 million for the period 2022-2025. South Africa appreciates this continuous support.

The allocated funds include the matching funds of US$10 million and will support activities to be implemented through the AIDS Foundation of South Africa, Beyond Zero, NACOSA and the National Department of Health as principal recipients.

Responding to the recent findings of South Africas first TB prevalence survey which showed a TB burden about twice as high as was previously estimated, the Minister said that a surge investment has been prioritised for TB interventions. He extended his gratitude to Global Fund for responding vividly to the COVID pandemic, through grant flexibilities.

He said that this is also through dedicated COVID funds that the Global Fund allocated from 2020 including the recently approved fast-track -all amounting to a total of US$ 238 million.

The COVID-19 Response funding is contributing significantly to limit interruptions in delivery of TB and HIV services, he said.

Country Coordinating Mechanism (CCM)

Speaking about SAs Country Coordinating Mechanism (CCM), Phaahla said that it ensured a robust consultation process which ensured, every province; key population; beneficiaries; constituency; sector had a say in what goes in the funding proposal.

The CCM consulted more than 35 entities and over 2000 individuals to inform the funding proposal.

This was indeed a proposal for the country.

Our CCM has been made lean and effective through the evolution process. Our current CCM has managed to prioritise the transformation agenda, about 400 community-based organisations will be empowered and trained to be able to implement our programmes, and 200 of them will be trusted with a small grant, he said.

The CCM particularly developed the Sub-Recipient Selection Manual, which promotes implementation through community-based organisations and balances with performance of implementers to ensure the grant is successful.

The approval of this proposal ushers in innovation for the country. We will explore inclusion of Key Populations One Stop Shop in Mangaung, West Rand and Francis Baard, to include intersectionality of Key Populations and tailor made clinical and psychosocial services.

Phaahla also noted an inclusion of a new program that supports the establishment of community-led networks for former inmates; cervical cancer to prevent and treat cervical cancer among high-risk women and girls. He also noted a telemedicine (e.g. virtual consults) and an e-pharmacy service which will be implemented especially for clandestine men who have sex with men but also open to all key and vulnerable populations.

He expressed commitment to ensure that the country makes the best use of these optimised resources.

We will increase our efforts to quickly implement our programmes in HIV and TB to recover some gains which were reversed due to COVID-19. We will continue to maximise the use of our resources through efficiency measures and further streamline implementation processes and ensure we utilise the funding received efficiently. We want to ensure we make an impact on HIV and TB by finding the missing patients and putting them on treatment.

In the last few weeks, South Africa has been interacting with the Global Fund in preparation processes for the next Global Fund Replenish.

He said that at least US$18 billion is needed to replenish the Global Fund and South Africa aims to honour its commitment towards the replenishment. He urged all other countries to honour their commitments.

Speaking during the signing ceremony, Co-Chair of the South African National AIDS Council (SANAC), Steve Letsike, said that during the COVID-19 pandemic, South Africa drew lessons from the HIV and TB programmes to adapt using community-based and community-led systems.

Letsike said that the Global Fund was also generous enough to disperse additional financial resources to aid the country in ensuring that it does not further compromise gains made against HIV and TB.

Today we are here to celebrate yet more resources that will ensure that such responses continue and fight to reclaim the gains made despite the continued threat now posed by a myriad of factors, such as climate change for example.

The world is changing as we need to adapt. The pandemic also continues to test our health and social emergency readiness and responsiveness, said Letsike adding that it is at times like these, that the resilience of South Africa as a nation shines through.

South Africa has been a contributor to the Global Fund since 2001 and has contributed over US$22.65 million to the Global Fund to date.

Letsike said that the Global Funds unique partnership approach leverages the expertise of other organisations and agencies, its comprehensive engagement of communities most affected by HIV and TB, and its country-led funding model is what sets the fund apart, making it responsive, adaptable, and highly effective.

We have seen this result in strong partnerships with communities, civil society, governments, the private sector, and donors, making it a global health leader alongside the country.

We hope to continue on this trajectory as we embark on this new chapter where we shall continue to fight, laugh, smile, cry and hold each other accountable as we achieve the best results towards an HIV, TB, Stigma, GBV free South Africa, she said. SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2022-05-12. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
By Azernews





By Orkhan Amashov

As Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan struggles to probe and penetrate the most peace-resistant stratum of Armenian society to gain its support, his detractors are continuing to foment resistance against what they believe is nothing but "inglorious peace".

The present phase of the confrontation between the government and opposition is not the height of the nationwide schism, and the incumbent PM is not in the throes of the most violent despair of his tenure  he faced a greater threat in the past, yet managed to ride supreme in the face of the slings and arrows of his detractors.

Prior to the 2021 June snap election, the prospects for Pashinyan's government were far more lamentable and the danger of the loss of power was potentially imminent. Back then, the question sullying the minds of Armenians was whether Pashinyan would be able to maintain electoral support after the disastrous 2020 war, and the answer to that critical question was given affirmatively. The result was perceived as a vote of confidence and the offering of a fresh mandate to pursue a peace agenda.

However, there is no guarantee he will survive unscathed on this occasion, for nothing is unthinkable and the resilience of the disgruntled opposition, coupled with the deep-entrenched and seemingly intractable paranoia within Armenian society, form a continuous source of implacable vexation.

The ongoing ferment should not be underestimated. Although a sufficiently potent critical mass has not been established to enable the opposition to overthrow Pashinyan and his government, it is possible that such a mass could transmogrify into an irresistible force within a short space of time.

Revenge is a strong poison, and Armenian society has not come anywhere near overcoming the inextinguishable allure of the fatally toxic ambition that once governed it to the fullest extent. The political spectrum in Yerevan is not monolithic, of course. Those who call for the removal of the incumbent government do not currently have an upper hand yet the eventual growth of the present discontent to something disproportionately massive cannot be excluded.

It is in this context that the emergence of Armenia's six-point counter-proposal to Azerbaijan's original peace offer should be evaluated. The exact content of the former is not known, but one is given to understand that it entails the provision on the rights and security of Karabakh Armenians and makes references to certain terms and constructs that Baku finds inadmissible  specifically "the final status of the former Nagorno-Karabakh Oblast" and "the OSCE Minsk Group" that has long been viewed "de facto dead" by Azerbaijan.

The counter-proposal may, at first glance, appear to be a meagre attempt to consolidate Yerevans negotiating position by placing emphasis on what is important to Armenia. However, on closer inspection, once the timing and circumambient circumstances are taken into account, it seems to have been designed to placate the disaffected and pander to the oppositions prejudices.

The Armenian opposition has become more image-conscious. In some quarters, the term "revenge" seems to be, if not detested, certainly undesirable. Its regressive connotations are fathomed by some Pashinyan opponents to the extent that they offer a different lexicon.

For instance, Armen Gevorkyan from the Republican Party claims that what should drive the opposition today is not revanchism, but a desire to protect the nation's dignity within the clearly delineated red lines. Yet the gist is the same - bemoan the loss of national self-confidence and hopelessly stick to the idea of reversing the consequences of the Second Karabakh War by refusing Baku's peace agenda.

Pashinyan is far from being forced to resign. The present state of affairs does not necessitate such a compulsion. Avetik Chalabyan of the National Agenda Party believes that in order for Pashinyan to be constitutionally removed, around 20 members of his party in the Parliament should denounce him so as to create the basis for "no-confidence".

Once it is clear that Pashinyan, as PM, does not command the confidence of the National Assembly, there will be a new election. This, of course, entails a great deal of wishful thinking, yet it is noteworthy to acknowledge that the opposition is considering all sorts of routes.

Pashinyan now is vacillating and undertaking a great deal of prevarication so as to appease his disparagers. Renouncing the peace agenda may provide for him some momentary respite which would be detrimental to his course in the long run.

One aspect that should be borne in mind with unmistakable clarity is that the revanchist opposition is unlikely to be won over or convinced of the futility of the pro-war venture. It is improbable that the inflexible obduracy will be eschewed. However, it is possible is that the revenge-driven segment could be overpowered.

In the meantime, Baku must brace itself for all sorts of eventualities. The prospects for a peace deal will not be bolstered by the demise of Pashinyan and rise of the former elites, yet such a political change will primarily be negatively consequential for Yerevan, not Baku.

To recapitulate, the ghastly return of the Karabakh clan to the top of Armenian politics is not perceived as a likely possibility, as the circumstances on the ground are not sufficiently conducive for such an after-the-bell comeback.

Yet, the current opposition is able to exert sufficient pressure on the government to derail the peace process. The present ambiguity over the terms of the peace negotiations between Baku and Yerevan seems to have been engendered by Pashinyan's attempts to fend off the attacks of his denigrators.
LANZHOU, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Ahead of International Nurses Day, which fell on Thursday, nearly 400 nurses in Qingyang, northwest China's Gansu Province, set up the city's first Nightingale volunteer service team, which aims to provide immediate care during disasters and emergencies.

The team was led by 47-year-old Tuo Yali, head nurse of the Department of Intensive Care Unit (ICU) Center at Qingyang People's Hospital and one of three Chinese awardees of the Florence Nightingale Medal, the highest international honor for nurses, in 2021.

During her 28-year career, Tuo worked in various departments of the hospital, including pediatrics, neurosurgery, urology, and neonatology before coming to the ICU center, where nurses face tougher tasks compared to the general wards.

Many of the head nurse's colleagues wonder why she chose to work in the most challenging department when she had other options, but Tuo always wants to be where she is needed most.

When the devastating earthquake jolted Wenchuan, Sichuan Province on May 12, 2008, people in Qingyang also felt its shock. Tuo, then working in the neonatology department, was one of the last people to run out of the hospital building, as she stayed to make sure no babies were left behind in the neonatal ICU.

In the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, Tuo was the first in her hospital to volunteer to go to Wuhan. "Her action prompted a lot of our staff to follow suit," said Wang Hongwei, Party secretary of Qingyang People's Hospital. "The number of applicants far exceeded the demand."

After arriving in Wuhan, Tuo applied to care for severe and critical patients, meaning she was faced with a high risk of infection. Despite that, she was the one who was "always in the ward," according to her colleagues from the same medical team.

Tuo regarded the patients as family. She remembered each patient's favorite food and spoon-fed the elderly every meal. When some patients felt frustrated and rejected her care, she sent them postcards with encouraging words: "Please be strong and trust us. We can do this together!"

During her 53 days in Wuhan, Tuo participated in the treatment of 278 COVID-19 patients.

For her outstanding contribution to healthcare, last year, Tuo became one of 83 Chinese nurses who have won the Florence Nightingale Medal. Soon after winning the medal, Tuo registered to donate her body to science.

"I want to devote my whole self to my beloved medical career, without reservation," she said.

On Thursday, Tuo and her colleagues held an oath-taking ceremony for the newly recruited nurses in her hospital.

"... With loyalty will I endeavor to aid the physician in his work, and devote myself to the welfare of those committed to my care." With the recitation of the Florence Nightingale Pledge, another group of young nurses embarked on their career.

"Times are changing, but the spirit of Florence Nightingale remains the same," said Tuo. "From the moment we chose nursing as our career, we will always be caring, patient and enterprising in fulfilling the mission of healing the wounded and rescuing the dying." 
Photo taken on May 12, 2022 shows the accident site where a plane veered off the runway during take-off and caught fire at the Chongqing Jiangbei International Airport in Chongqing, southwest China. (Xinhua/Liu Chan)

CHONGQING, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Twenty-five people were injured after a passenger plane veered off the runway during take-off and caught fire at an airport in southwest China's Chongqing at around 8 a.m. on Thursday, airport sources said.

The passenger plane operated by Tibet Airlines was carrying 113 passengers and nine crew members on board, said the sources.

All people aboard the plane were evacuated and the injured were rushed to hospital for treatment.

Photo taken on May 12, 2022 shows the accident site where a plane veered off the runway during take-off and caught fire at the Chongqing Jiangbei International Airport in Chongqing, southwest China. (Xinhua/Liu Chan)
Finnish President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin on Thursday publicly supported the idea of Finland applying to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

"Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay. We hope that the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days," the two leaders said in a joint statement, arguing that NATO membership would strengthen Finland's security.

Foreign and security policies in Finland are jointly managed by the president and the cabinet, according to the Finnish constitution. A formal decision would have to be made by the president and the cabinet ministerial committee for foreign and security policy in a joint meeting.

Meanwhile, Speaker of the House Matti Vanhanen said on national radio Yle on Thursday that the president and the cabinet are expected to "make their decisions" this coming Sunday.

Finland is expected to submit an application soon, possibly in collaboration with neighboring Sweden, according to local media reports.

Finnish public support for NATO membership began to rise in February. Various polls show that it has risen from around 20 percent to more than 70 percent. According to local analysts, 10-15 MPs are expected to oppose the application and membership.





Produced by Xinhua Global Service




A technician collects information of relics in Cave 17 of the Yungang Grottoes in Datong, north China's Shanxi Province, May 11, 2022.

A group of technicians of the Yungang Research Institute are striving to create digital versions of Cave 17 of the Yungang Grottoes in Datong, north China's Shanxi Province.

The institute is dedicated to protection, research and management of the Yungang Grottoes. In recent years, working staff of the institute have been engaged in collecting and digitalizing information of the grottoes relics for the purpose of facilitating digital archives of them.

The digitalization of the information is meant to explore new feasible methods of researching on the relics and to keep them in reliable and lasting protection.

The Yungang Grottoes, with 45 major caves and more than 59,000 statues, were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2001.

To date, one-third of the overall information collection and digitalization work has been completed. (Xinhua/Yang Chenguang)

Technicians collect information of relics in Cave 17 of the Yungang Grottoes in Datong, north China's Shanxi Province, May 11, 2022.

A group of technicians of the Yungang Research Institute are striving to create digital versions of Cave 17 of the Yungang Grottoes in Datong, north China's Shanxi Province.

The institute is dedicated to protection, research and management of the Yungang Grottoes. In recent years, working staff of the institute have been engaged in collecting and digitalizing information of the grottoes relics for the purpose of facilitating digital archives of them.

The digitalization of the information is meant to explore new feasible methods of researching on the relics and to keep them in reliable and lasting protection.

The Yungang Grottoes, with 45 major caves and more than 59,000 statues, were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2001.

To date, one-third of the overall information collection and digitalization work has been completed. (Xinhua/Yang Chenguang)

A technician collects information of relics in Cave 17 of the Yungang Grottoes in Datong, north China's Shanxi Province, May 11, 2022.

A group of technicians of the Yungang Research Institute are striving to create digital versions of Cave 17 of the Yungang Grottoes in Datong, north China's Shanxi Province.

The institute is dedicated to protection, research and management of the Yungang Grottoes. In recent years, working staff of the institute have been engaged in collecting and digitalizing information of the grottoes relics for the purpose of facilitating digital archives of them.

The digitalization of the information is meant to explore new feasible methods of researching on the relics and to keep them in reliable and lasting protection.

The Yungang Grottoes, with 45 major caves and more than 59,000 statues, were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2001.

To date, one-third of the overall information collection and digitalization work has been completed. (Xinhua/Yang Chenguang)

A staff member restores the wall of Cave 1 of the Yungang Grottoes in Datong, north China's Shanxi Province, May 11, 2022.

A group of technicians of the Yungang Research Institute are striving to create digital versions of Cave 17 of the Yungang Grottoes in Datong, north China's Shanxi Province.

The institute is dedicated to protection, research and management of the Yungang Grottoes. In recent years, working staff of the institute have been engaged in collecting and digitalizing information of the grottoes relics for the purpose of facilitating digital archives of them.

The digitalization of the information is meant to explore new feasible methods of researching on the relics and to keep them in reliable and lasting protection.

The Yungang Grottoes, with 45 major caves and more than 59,000 statues, were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2001.

To date, one-third of the overall information collection and digitalization work has been completed. (Xinhua/Yang Chenguang)

A staff member restores the wall of Cave 1 of the Yungang Grottoes in Datong, north China's Shanxi Province, May 11, 2022.

A group of technicians of the Yungang Research Institute are striving to create digital versions of Cave 17 of the Yungang Grottoes in Datong, north China's Shanxi Province.

The institute is dedicated to protection, research and management of the Yungang Grottoes. In recent years, working staff of the institute have been engaged in collecting and digitalizing information of the grottoes relics for the purpose of facilitating digital archives of them.

The digitalization of the information is meant to explore new feasible methods of researching on the relics and to keep them in reliable and lasting protection.

The Yungang Grottoes, with 45 major caves and more than 59,000 statues, were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2001.

To date, one-third of the overall information collection and digitalization work has been completed. (Xinhua/Yang Chenguang)

Technicians collect information of relics in Cave 17 of the Yungang Grottoes in Datong, north China's Shanxi Province, May 11, 2022.

A group of technicians of the Yungang Research Institute are striving to create digital versions of Cave 17 of the Yungang Grottoes in Datong, north China's Shanxi Province.

The institute is dedicated to protection, research and management of the Yungang Grottoes. In recent years, working staff of the institute have been engaged in collecting and digitalizing information of the grottoes relics for the purpose of facilitating digital archives of them.

The digitalization of the information is meant to explore new feasible methods of researching on the relics and to keep them in reliable and lasting protection.

The Yungang Grottoes, with 45 major caves and more than 59,000 statues, were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2001.

To date, one-third of the overall information collection and digitalization work has been completed. (Xinhua/Yang Chenguang)

A three-dimensional image of a Buddha statue in Cave 17 of the Yungang Grottoes is seen on a screen in Datong, north China's Shanxi Province, May 11, 2022.

A group of technicians of the Yungang Research Institute are striving to create digital versions of Cave 17 of the Yungang Grottoes in Datong, north China's Shanxi Province.

The institute is dedicated to protection, research and management of the Yungang Grottoes. In recent years, working staff of the institute have been engaged in collecting and digitalizing information of the grottoes relics for the purpose of facilitating digital archives of them.

The digitalization of the information is meant to explore new feasible methods of researching on the relics and to keep them in reliable and lasting protection.

The Yungang Grottoes, with 45 major caves and more than 59,000 statues, were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2001.

To date, one-third of the overall information collection and digitalization work has been completed. (Xinhua/Yang Chenguang)

Technicians collect information of relics in Cave 17 of the Yungang Grottoes in Datong, north China's Shanxi Province, May 11, 2022.

A group of technicians of the Yungang Research Institute are striving to collect digital data of Cave 17 of the Yungang Grottoes in Datong.

The institute is dedicated to protection, research and management of the Yungang Grottoes. In recent years, staff of the institute have been engaged in collecting and digitalizing information of the grottoes relics for the purpose of facilitating digital archives of them.

The digitalization of the information is meant to explore new feasible methods of researching on the relics and to keep them in reliable and lasting protection.

The Yungang Grottoes, with 45 major caves and more than 59,000 statues, were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2001.

To date, one-third of the overall information collection and digitalization work has been completed. (Xinhua/Yang Chenguang)

People visit the Yungang Grottoes in Datong, north China's Shanxi Province, May 11, 2022.

A group of technicians of the Yungang Research Institute are striving to create digital versions of Cave 17 of the Yungang Grottoes in Datong, north China's Shanxi Province.

The institute is dedicated to protection, research and management of the Yungang Grottoes. In recent years, working staff of the institute have been engaged in collecting and digitalizing information of the grottoes relics for the purpose of facilitating digital archives of them.

The digitalization of the information is meant to explore new feasible methods of researching on the relics and to keep them in reliable and lasting protection.

The Yungang Grottoes, with 45 major caves and more than 59,000 statues, were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2001.

To date, one-third of the overall information collection and digitalization work has been completed. (Xinhua/Yang Chenguang)

A technician collects information of relics in Cave 17 of the Yungang Grottoes in Datong, north China's Shanxi Province, May 11, 2022.

A group of technicians of the Yungang Research Institute are striving to create digital versions of Cave 17 of the Yungang Grottoes in Datong, north China's Shanxi Province.

The institute is dedicated to protection, research and management of the Yungang Grottoes. In recent years, working staff of the institute have been engaged in collecting and digitalizing information of the grottoes relics for the purpose of facilitating digital archives of them.

The digitalization of the information is meant to explore new feasible methods of researching on the relics and to keep them in reliable and lasting protection.

The Yungang Grottoes, with 45 major caves and more than 59,000 statues, were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2001.

To date, one-third of the overall information collection and digitalization work has been completed. (Xinhua/Yang Chenguang)
Staff members work at an inflatable COVID-19 testing lab in Shunyi District of Beijing, capital of China, May 12, 2022. An inflatable COVID-19 testing laboratory was put into use recently in Shunyi District. The newly installed lab, with a designed daily testing capacity of 100,000 tubes, covers the testing demand of various towns from Shunyi, as well as regions in other districts such as Miyun and Tongzhou. (Xinhua/Ren Chao)

BEIJING, May 12 (Xinhua) -- In the face of mounting uncertainties due to COVID-19, one thing remains certain -- China will stick to its dynamic zero-COVID policy that has proven pragmatic and effective.

That steadfast commitment, reaffirmed by the Communist Party of China leadership at a high-level meeting last week, came as the COVID-hit city of Shanghai has seen infections fall over the past 10-plus days and many manufacturers, including Tesla, gradually resume operations.

Shanghai's response is a continuation of China's dynamic anti-COVID measures, which the world's most populous country has constantly fine-tuned and optimized according to the fluid reality.

Beijing's attempts to juggle the COVID response and the economic and social development, which the Chinese leaders have stressed since the pandemic began, have proven efficacious.

The country of a 1.4 billion population always upholds the philosophy that protecting health and wealth during a pandemic is by no means a zero-sum game.

All anti-epidemic measures naturally come at a price, and there has been short-term downward pressure on the Chinese economy. However, claiming that this will stifle the expansion of the world's second-largest economy is as shortsighted as it is irresponsible.

Over the longer term, China will benefit economically from the dynamic zero-COVID approach. It has, so far, prevented many deaths at home and seen the country's industries come through the pandemic largely unscathed.

Mass quarantine, large-scale testing, and closed-off management all take a toll on the economy. But once the outbreak is under control, the economy is expected to maintain its resilience and extend its track record of growth with policy support.

That has been demonstrated as Chinese cities once plagued by the pandemic, such as Shenzhen, still registered stable growth in the first quarter after waves of flare-ups died down thanks to China's zero-COVID strategy. In a report on Shenzhen this week, South China Morning Post focused on the factories in the Chinese technology hub running at near or full capacity while adhering to China's dynamic zero-COVID policy. The report said: "it has so far helped the government walk a fine line."

By only sealing off cities or areas that have seen spikes in infections, launching swift screening and massive inoculation encouragement, and pledging ramped-up efforts to stabilize the economy, China has managed the economic side effects of its COVID-fighting measures and made its zero-COVID policy sustainable.

China's war against COVID-19 is by no means an ideological campaign that "sacrifices its economic growth," as some Western media portrayed it. It's essentially a war to protect people's lives -- the foundation for all economic development.

China's scientifically-based and precise reaction to the virus and an array of pro-growth policies explain why the Chinese economy is off to a steady start this year, with its GDP up 4.8 percent year on year in the first three months.

The taming of the virus, a universal challenge facing the world, necessitates customized and responsive solutions that guarantee the best outcomes. The one that China has been adhering to is such a solution that suits itself. 
Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi meets with Pakistani Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari via video link in Beijing, capital of China, May 11, 2022. (Xinhua/Yue Yuewei)

BEIJING, May 11 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Wednesday met with Pakistani Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari via video link, calling on the two sides to thwart any attempt to undermine bilateral ties.

Wang said that China and Pakistan are unique and time-tested all-weather strategic cooperative partners. The friendship between two sides will be passed on from generation to generation and will not be shaken or changed by a single incident.

"China will, as always, firmly support Pakistan in safeguarding national sovereignty, security and dignity and in its commitment to national development and rejuvenation," Wang said, adding that China believes that Pakistan will also firmly stand with China on all issues concerning China's core interests.

Bilawal said he was glad to have his first official bilateral activity since taking office as meeting with Chinese foreign minister.

Bilawal said that both the ruling and opposition parties in Pakistan firmly support the bilateral friendship, which is the consensus shared by Pakistani people. Pakistan firmly upholds the one-China policy and supports China's positions on issues related to Taiwan, Xinjiang, Tibet and the South China Sea. And Pakistan fully supports the Belt and Road Initiative, especially the construction of the Pakistan-China Economic Corridor.

The two sides also exchanged views on the safety of Chinese citizens and institutions in Pakistan.

In regard to a series of terrorist attacks targeting Chinese nationals in Pakistan over a period of time, Wang said China and Pakistan should take immediate action and take firm and effective measures to deal with it.

"The pressing task is to speed up the investigation of the perpetrators and punish them as soon as possible. We should take targeted measures to improve security protection for Chinese personnel, institutions and projects in Pakistan, give timely security warnings, and plug security loopholes so as to prevent similar incidents from happening again," said Wang.

China will continue to support Pakistan in enhancing its counter-terrorism capability and is ready to join hands with Pakistan to thwart any attempt of undermining China-Pakistan relations, Wang added.

Bilawal said that Pakistan condemns in the strongest terms the terrorist attack on the Confucius Institute at the University of Karachi. Pakistan firmly opposes all terrorist acts and will bring all criminals to justice.

Pakistan is ready to strengthen cooperation with China to enhance its counter-terrorism capability and ensure the safety of all Chinese citizens in Pakistan, added Bilawal. 

Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi meets with Pakistani Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari via video link in Beijing, capital of China, May 11, 2022. (Xinhua/Yue Yuewei)
Undated image shows the Egyptian army's air strike on terrorists in North Sinai, Egypt. The Egyptian army on Wednesday killed 14 terrorists during armed clashes and military operations in North Sinai Governorate. (Egyptian Armed Forces/Handout via Xinhua)

CAIRO, May 11 (Xinhua) -- The Egyptian army on Wednesday killed 14 terrorists during armed clashes and military operations in North Sinai Governorate.

The Egyptian armed forces confirmed in a statement that seven terrorists were killed in clashes with law enforcement forces when they attempted to attack a security outpost in North Sinai.

The terrorists' automatic rifles, hand grenades and wireless communication devices were seized, according to the statement.

Another seven terrorists were killed in an air raid in North Sinai on the same day, according to the statement.

The anti-terror operations came after 11 Egyptian troops were killed and five others wounded on May 7 in clashes with terrorists in western Sinai.

Through a decade of fighting terrorism in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt has managed to minimize terrorist activities in the peninsula.

The terrorists in Sinai are mostly loyal to the Islamic State group. 

Undated image shows the arms seized by the Egyptian army during armed clashes with terrorists in North Sinai, Egypt. The Egyptian army on Wednesday killed 14 terrorists during armed clashes and military operations in North Sinai Governorate. (Egyptian Armed Forces/Handout via Xinhua)

Undated image shows the Egyptian army's air strike on terrorists in North Sinai, Egypt. The Egyptian army on Wednesday killed 14 terrorists during armed clashes and military operations in North Sinai Governorate. (Egyptian Armed Forces/Handout via Xinhua)
A war-left U.S. bomb is recovered from a riverbed in Kandal province, Cambodia, May 21, 2015. (Photo by Phearum/Xinhua)

BEIJING, May 11 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian on Wednesday slammed the United States for leaving tens of thousands of tonnes of unexploded bombs in Southeast Asian countries.

"During the Vietnam War, the United States used cluster bombs and bio-chemical weapons and committed heinous crimes in Southeast Asian countries including Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia," Zhao told a regular press briefing.

According to Cambodian media reports, a U.S.-made explosive device weighing almost one tonne and containing more than 500 kg of explosives was recently uncovered opposite the Royal Palace in the capital Phnom Penh. In April this year alone, at least five unexploded U.S. aerial bombs were discovered in Cambodia, each weighing more than 200 kilograms.

In response to a question on the topic, Zhao said that the United States released more than 15 million tonnes of bombs, landmines and shells in Vietnam, of which about 80,000 tonnes are unexploded and remain scattered over nearly 20 percent of the country's territory, which has killed more than 40,000 people and wounded more than 60,000 since the end of the Vietnam War.

"In Laos, the U.S. troops dropped 270 million bombs, weighing 2 million tonnes in total, meaning one tonne or 135 bombs for each person in the country," Zhao said.

According to incomplete data from Yale University, from October 1965 to August 1973, the United States dropped 2.7 million tonnes of ordnance on Cambodia, said the spokesperson. Statistics from the Cambodian government show that from 1979 to 2021, nearly 20,000 people were killed and more than 45,000 people were crippled by unexploded ordnance including landmines.

"History has proven that the United States is a destroyer of rules and order, a maker of violence and conflict, and a perpetrator of coercive diplomacy," Zhao said.

He said it is a typical U.S.-style double standard for the United States to pin the labels of "coercion" and "militarization" on others while forming small cliques and instigating confrontation in the name of democracy, human rights and rules.

"What the United States defends is its own hegemony and the 'rules of the gang' at the expense of the fundamental interests of small and medium-sized countries," the spokesperson said.

It is the common aspiration of regional countries and the shared hope of the international community to seek peace, solidarity and cooperation rather than turmoil, division and confrontation, Zhao said.

Noting that attempts to provoke bloc confrontation and create turbulence and tension will gain no support, Zhao said Asian countries will never allow the region to be used as a chessboard for major power rivalry or a chess piece for major power confrontation. 

A war-left U.S. bomb is recovered from a riverbed in Kandal province, Cambodia, May 21, 2015. (Photo by Phearum/Xinhua)

The shells of war-left U.S. bombs and other munitions are displayed at an event in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, July 20, 2018. (Photo by Phearum/Xinhua)
NANCHANG, May 12 (Xinhua) -- A total of 4,264 Siberian white cranes, a critically endangered bird species, have been spotted over the winter and spring at Poyang Lake, China's largest freshwater lake, in east China's Jiangxi Province.

The migratory birds began to travel north in late February. However, some wild cranes of the species were still at the lake in May, a relatively rare sight in previous years, said the Jiangxi Poyang Lake National Nature Reserve Administration at a video conference on Thursday.

Researchers will keep an eye on the lingering cranes, said Luo Hao from the administration's scientific research department.

Poyang Lake has an intact ecosystem and is an important wintering spot for waterfowl in Asia. The peak migration period for birds heading to the lake begins in mid-December and continues into early January.

Rated as critically endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, the Siberian white crane, also known as the snow crane, has a global population of around 4,000.

The other end of the migration route, Russia's Kytalyk National Park, has signed a memorandum of understanding on strategic cooperation with Jiangxi Poyang Lake National Nature Reserve Administration to jointly protect the wild birds.

"The white cranes will visit Kytalyk National Park in batches all the way from China's Poyang Lake," said Sargylana Mikhailova with the Kytalyk National Park. "We will pass on the baton of protecting the wildlife, study their breeding conditions and share our research results with China." 
Staff members transfer boxes containing registered samples for nucleic acid test at an inflatable COVID-19 testing lab in Shunyi District of Beijing, capital of China, May 12, 2022. An inflatable COVID-19 testing laboratory was put into use recently in Shunyi District.

The newly installed lab, with a designed daily testing capacity of 100,000 tubes, covers the testing demand of various towns from Shunyi, as well as regions in other districts such as Miyun and Tongzhou. (Xinhua/Ren Chao)

Staff members work at an inflatable COVID-19 testing lab in Shunyi District of Beijing, capital of China, May 12, 2022. An inflatable COVID-19 testing laboratory was put into use recently in Shunyi District.

The newly installed lab, with a designed daily testing capacity of 100,000 tubes, covers the testing demand of various towns from Shunyi, as well as regions in other districts such as Miyun and Tongzhou. (Xinhua/Ren Chao)

A staff member works at an inflatable COVID-19 testing lab in Shunyi District of Beijing, capital of China, May 12, 2022. An inflatable COVID-19 testing laboratory was put into use recently in Shunyi District.

The newly installed lab, with a designed daily testing capacity of 100,000 tubes, covers the testing demand of various towns from Shunyi, as well as regions in other districts such as Miyun and Tongzhou. (Xinhua/Ren Chao)

Staff members work at an inflatable COVID-19 testing lab in Shunyi District of Beijing, capital of China, May 12, 2022. An inflatable COVID-19 testing laboratory was put into use recently in Shunyi District.

The newly installed lab, with a designed daily testing capacity of 100,000 tubes, covers the testing demand of various towns from Shunyi, as well as regions in other districts such as Miyun and Tongzhou. (Xinhua/Ren Chao)

A staff member transfers a box containing registered samples for nucleic acid test at an inflatable COVID-19 testing lab in Shunyi District of Beijing, capital of China, May 12, 2022. An inflatable COVID-19 testing laboratory was put into use recently in Shunyi District.

The newly installed lab, with a designed daily testing capacity of 100,000 tubes, covers the testing demand of various towns from Shunyi, as well as regions in other districts such as Miyun and Tongzhou. (Xinhua/Ren Chao)

A staff member works at an inflatable COVID-19 testing lab in Shunyi District of Beijing, capital of China, May 12, 2022. An inflatable COVID-19 testing laboratory was put into use recently in Shunyi District.

The newly installed lab, with a designed daily testing capacity of 100,000 tubes, covers the testing demand of various towns from Shunyi, as well as regions in other districts such as Miyun and Tongzhou. (Xinhua/Ren Chao)

Staff members work at an inflatable COVID-19 testing lab in Shunyi District of Beijing, capital of China, May 12, 2022. An inflatable COVID-19 testing laboratory was put into use recently in Shunyi District.

The newly installed lab, with a designed daily testing capacity of 100,000 tubes, covers the testing demand of various towns from Shunyi, as well as regions in other districts such as Miyun and Tongzhou. (Xinhua/Ren Chao)

Photo taken on May 12, 2022 shows an inflatable COVID-19 testing lab in Shunyi District of Beijing, capital of China. An inflatable COVID-19 testing laboratory was put into use recently in Shunyi District.

The newly installed lab, with a designed daily testing capacity of 100,000 tubes, covers the testing demand of various towns from Shunyi, as well as regions in other districts such as Miyun and Tongzhou. (Xinhua/Ren Chao)

A staff member transfers samples for nucleic acid test at an inflatable COVID-19 testing lab in Shunyi District of Beijing, capital of China, May 12, 2022. An inflatable COVID-19 testing laboratory was put into use recently in Shunyi District.

The newly installed lab, with a designed daily testing capacity of 100,000 tubes, covers the testing demand of various towns from Shunyi, as well as regions in other districts such as Miyun and Tongzhou. (Xinhua/Ren Chao)
By Trend

Azerbaijani citizens, according to preliminary data, werent on the Turkish Aqua cargo ship where the fire accident took place on May 10 in the Sea of Azov, near Russian Temryuk port, the press service of Azerbaijans Foreign Ministry told Trend.

The press service made the remark commenting on the information in the media, according to which there were 13 people - citizens of Azerbaijan, Turkey and India on the ship which flew the flag of Vanuatu and carried grain.

The media said that one person died as a result of the incident and the fire was extinguished.
URUMQI, May 11 (Xinhua) -- Muslim residents and religious figures in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region shared their personal experiences in a video during the recently concluded Islamic holy month of Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr.

From April 3 to May 2, Muslims of various ethnic groups in the region observed Ramadan. They celebrated Eid al-Fitr, which fell on May 3, while enjoying a one-day holiday, said Xu Guixiang, spokesperson for the regional government, during a video conference on Tuesday.

Memet Juma, hatip of the Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar Prefecture, said that prayers visited the 550-year-old mosque every day, and thousands of people of different ethnic groups performed their traditional dances on the square in front of the mosque.

Noting that Xinjiang is home to various ethnic groups and religious beliefs, Zumrat Obul, head of the regional united front work department, said that all normal religious activities are protected by law.

In recent years, there has been great misunderstanding about the religious situation in Xinjiang, and the United States in particular has groundlessly claimed that religious freedoms are restricted in Xinjiang.

"These ridiculous lies run completely counter to the facts," Xu said.

"We would like to go on telling Xinjiang's true stories to the international community," Xu said. "We are also looking forward to welcoming more visitors to Xinjiang who can witness the prosperous and comfortable life here." 
A nurse takes care of a newborn baby at a hospital in Lijiang, southwest China's Yunnan Province, May 12, 2022. The number of registered nurses in China has grown with an average annual rate of 8 percent over the past 10 years, reaching 5.02 million at the end of 2021, the National Health Commission said Wednesday, ahead of International Nurses Day, which falls on May 12. (Photo by Zhao Qingzu/Xinhua)

A nurse checks the dripping speed for a patient at a hospital in Qianxi City, southwest China's Guizhou Province, May 12, 2022. The number of registered nurses in China has grown with an average annual rate of 8 percent over the past 10 years, reaching 5.02 million at the end of 2021, the National Health Commission said Wednesday, ahead of International Nurses Day, which falls on May 12. (Photo by Fan Hui/Xinhua)

A nurse bandages the wound for a patient at a hospital in Beibei District of southwest China's Chongqing, May 12, 2022. The number of registered nurses in China has grown with an average annual rate of 8 percent over the past 10 years, reaching 5.02 million at the end of 2021, the National Health Commission said Wednesday, ahead of International Nurses Day, which falls on May 12. (Photo by Qin Tingfu/Xinhua)

Nurses take care of newborn babies at a hospital in Yongzhou, central China's Hunan Province, May 12, 2022. The number of registered nurses in China has grown with an average annual rate of 8 percent over the past 10 years, reaching 5.02 million at the end of 2021, the National Health Commission said Wednesday, ahead of International Nurses Day, which falls on May 12. (Photo by Jiang Keqing/Xinhua)

A medical worker takes a swab sample from a child for nucleic acid test at a school in Huaihua, central China's Hunan Province, May 12, 2022. The number of registered nurses in China has grown with an average annual rate of 8 percent over the past 10 years, reaching 5.02 million at the end of 2021, the National Health Commission said Wednesday, ahead of International Nurses Day, which falls on May 12. (Photo by Su Yongzhu/Xinhua)

A medical worker takes a swab sample from a resident for nucleic acid test at a community in Suzhou, east China's Jiangsu Province, May 12, 2022. The number of registered nurses in China has grown with an average annual rate of 8 percent over the past 10 years, reaching 5.02 million at the end of 2021, the National Health Commission said Wednesday, ahead of International Nurses Day, which falls on May 12. (Photo by Hang Xingwei/Xinhua)

A nurse prepares medicine at a hospital in Ji'an, east China's Jiangxi Province, May 12, 2022. The number of registered nurses in China has grown with an average annual rate of 8 percent over the past 10 years, reaching 5.02 million at the end of 2021, the National Health Commission said Wednesday, ahead of International Nurses Day, which falls on May 12. (Photo by Li Jun/Xinhua)

A nurse takes care of a patient at a hospital in Nanjing, east China's Jiangsu Province, May 12, 2022. The number of registered nurses in China has grown with an average annual rate of 8 percent over the past 10 years, reaching 5.02 million at the end of 2021, the National Health Commission said Wednesday, ahead of International Nurses Day, which falls on May 12. (Photo by Su Yang/Xinhua)

A nurse works at the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) in a hospital in Taizhou, east China's Jiangsu Province, May 12, 2022. The number of registered nurses in China has grown with an average annual rate of 8 percent over the past 10 years, reaching 5.02 million at the end of 2021, the National Health Commission said Wednesday, ahead of International Nurses Day, which falls on May 12. (Photo by Tang Dehong/Xinhua)

A nurse takes care of a newborn baby at a hospital in Nanjing, east China's Jiangsu Province, May 12, 2022. The number of registered nurses in China has grown with an average annual rate of 8 percent over the past 10 years, reaching 5.02 million at the end of 2021, the National Health Commission said Wednesday, ahead of International Nurses Day, which falls on May 12. (Photo by Fang Dongxu/Xinhua)

Nurses prepare medicine at a hospital in Hengyang, central China's Hunan Province, May 12, 2022. The number of registered nurses in China has grown with an average annual rate of 8 percent over the past 10 years, reaching 5.02 million at the end of 2021, the National Health Commission said Wednesday, ahead of International Nurses Day, which falls on May 12. (Photo by Xiao Yahui/Xinhua)

A nurse cleans medical equipment at a hospital in Huai'an City, east China's Jiangsu Province, May 12, 2022. The number of registered nurses in China has grown with an average annual rate of 8 percent over the past 10 years, reaching 5.02 million at the end of 2021, the National Health Commission said Wednesday, ahead of International Nurses Day, which falls on May 12. (Photo by Zhao Qirui/Xinhua)

Medical workers rush to an ambulance at a hospital in Handan, north China's Hebei Province, May 12, 2022. The number of registered nurses in China has grown with an average annual rate of 8 percent over the past 10 years, reaching 5.02 million at the end of 2021, the National Health Commission said Wednesday, ahead of International Nurses Day, which falls on May 12. (Photo by Hao Qunying/Xinhua)

A nurse takes a swab sample from a child for nucleic acid test at a community in Yangzhou, east China's Jiangsu Province, May 12, 2022. The number of registered nurses in China has grown with an average annual rate of 8 percent over the past 10 years, reaching 5.02 million at the end of 2021, the National Health Commission said Wednesday, ahead of International Nurses Day, which falls on May 12. (Photo by Meng Delong/Xinhua)

A nurse prepares to distribute medicine at a hospital in Tongren, southwest China's Guizhou Province, May 12, 2022. The number of registered nurses in China has grown with an average annual rate of 8 percent over the past 10 years, reaching 5.02 million at the end of 2021, the National Health Commission said Wednesday, ahead of International Nurses Day, which falls on May 12. (Photo by Li He/Xinhua)

A nurse takes care of a newborn baby at a hospital in Chishui, southwest China's Guizhou Province, May 12, 2022. The number of registered nurses in China has grown with an average annual rate of 8 percent over the past 10 years, reaching 5.02 million at the end of 2021, the National Health Commission said Wednesday, ahead of International Nurses Day, which falls on May 12. (Photo by Cao Liang/Xinhua)

A nurse prepares for a surgery at a hospital in Tangshan, north China's Hebei Province, May 12, 2022. The number of registered nurses in China has grown with an average annual rate of 8 percent over the past 10 years, reaching 5.02 million at the end of 2021, the National Health Commission said Wednesday, ahead of International Nurses Day, which falls on May 12. (Photo by Liu Mancang/Xinhua)

Nurses work at a hospital in Guiyang, southwest China's Guizhou Province, May 12, 2022. The number of registered nurses in China has grown with an average annual rate of 8 percent over the past 10 years, reaching 5.02 million at the end of 2021, the National Health Commission said Wednesday, ahead of International Nurses Day, which falls on May 12. (Photo by Deng Gang/Xinhua)

A nurse sterilizes medical equipment at a hospital in Tongren, southwest China's Guizhou Province, May 12, 2022. The number of registered nurses in China has grown with an average annual rate of 8 percent over the past 10 years, reaching 5.02 million at the end of 2021, the National Health Commission said Wednesday, ahead of International Nurses Day, which falls on May 12. (Photo by Ye Shunqiang/Xinhua)

A nurse prepares medicine at a hospital in Tangshan, north China's Hebei Province, May 12, 2022. The number of registered nurses in China has grown with an average annual rate of 8 percent over the past 10 years, reaching 5.02 million at the end of 2021, the National Health Commission said Wednesday, ahead of International Nurses Day, which falls on May 12. (Photo by Li Lei/Xinhua)

A nurse takes care of a newborn baby at the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) in a hospital in Dingxi, northwest China's Gansu Province, May 12, 2022. The number of registered nurses in China has grown with an average annual rate of 8 percent over the past 10 years, reaching 5.02 million at the end of 2021, the National Health Commission said Wednesday, ahead of International Nurses Day, which falls on May 12. (Photo by Wang Kexian/Xinhua)
UNITED NATIONS, May 11 (Xinhua) -- A Chinese envoy on Wednesday warned against attempts to impose more sanctions on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).

Dialogue and consultation is the only correct way to resolve the Korean Peninsula issue. The United States is a direct party to the issue and holds the key to breaking the deadlock. As such, it should take concrete actions to respond positively to the reasonable concerns of the DPRK and create conditions for an early resumption of dialogue, said Zhang Jun, China's permanent representative to the United Nations.

Although the U.S. side claims to be willing to engage in unconditional dialogue, when it comes to actions, it is continuing to tighten sanctions and exert pressure. This is clearly not constructive, he told the Security Council. "The new draft resolution proposed by the United States, evoking Chapter VII of the UN Charter, is centered on furthering sanctions, which is not an appropriate way to address the current situation on the peninsula."

The Security Council, over the years, has adopted numerous resolutions on the issue, which, while authorizing sanctions, have also stressed the need for a peaceful, political, and diplomatic solution to the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula. All these deserve equal attention, said Zhang.

"Sanctions are but a means to an end, and should always serve the overall goal of political settlement. Equating sanctions to or replacing diplomatic efforts is completely putting the cart before the horse, and will not achieve the desired result," he said. "Despite the fact that sanctions have already had a negative humanitarian impact and collateral damage to other countries, the countries concerned are still in total denial, which is inconsistent with the conclusions of various international humanitarian agencies and the 1718 (DPRK Sanctions) Committee's panel of experts."

In response to the latest situation, China and a number of Security Council members have all put forward reasonable proposals to explore ways to take strong actions and promote the political solution to the Korean Peninsula issue, in a way that best garners the consensus of council members. The draft resolution tabled by China and Russia is for this very purpose. Regrettably, the United States, which is the penholder of the DPRK non-proliferation issue, has turned a blind eye to the reasonable proposals of China and other relevant council members, and remains enamored superstitiously with the magic power of sanctions, said Zhang.

"We believe that if the United States changes its negative attitude, it is possible for council members to reach a consensus. We hope that the council members will give serious consideration to the joint China-Russia draft resolution," he said. 
BEIJING, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Beijing will conduct three additional rounds of mass nucleic acid testing in 12 districts from Friday to Sunday, as the Chinese capital races against time to contain the latest resurgence of COVID-19 infections.

The 12 districts include all the urban and major suburban districts, namely, Dongcheng, Xicheng, Chaoyang, Haidian, Fengtai, Shijingshan, Fangshan, Tongzhou, Shunyi, Changping, Daxing and Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, Xu Hejian, a spokesperson for the Beijing municipal government, told a press briefing on Thursday.

Xu called on locals to reduce personnel flows to cut off the transmission chain of the virus, assuring that the city's routine operation and the supply of daily necessities will not be affected.

Beijing reported 36 new locally transmitted COVID-19 infections between 3 p.m. Wednesday and 3 p.m. Thursday, Pang Xinghuo, deputy head of the Beijing municipal disease prevention and control center, told reporters.

Thirty-two cases were detected among people under closed-off management and four were found in mass screening in communities, Pang said, adding that among the new infections, 32 are moderate or mild cases and four are asymptomatic carriers.

Beijing has reported 928 locally transmitted infections since April 22. Currently, it has 17 high-risk areas and 37 medium-risk areas for COVID-19. 
SAO PAULO, May 11 (Xinhua) -- At least two people died and 14 were injured on Wednesday after a light aircraft crashed in Brazilian city of Boituva, authorities reported.

The plane carrying recreational skydivers plunged to the ground in a forced landing after taking off from the National Skydiving Center in Boituva, known as the "national skydive capital" of Brazil.

The plane, with a pilot and 15 skydivers aboard, belongs to the Skydive4Fun tourism company, according to a statement released by the Boituva mayor's office.

"In Boituva's 50 years of skydiving history, it's the first aircraft accident at the National Skydiving Center. It's a very sad day," Boituva Mayor Edson Marcusso said.

A fire department spokesperson said that the injured were taken to nearby hospitals, while the Brazilian Air Force said in a press release that experts were conducting an investigation at the crash site. 
Photo taken on Oct. 28, 2021 shows the White House in Washington, D.C., the United States. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

*NED exported various kinds of anti-government ideas, incited color revolutions, and plunged the Arab world into war, social unrest and economic recession.

*The NED has been colluding with local political groups to meddle in other countries' internal affairs.

*NED has been spreading provocative rhetoric to arouse anti-government sentiments among the public.

BEIJING, May 12 (Xinhua) -- The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which takes orders directly from the U.S. government and manipulates NGOs through the provision of funding to conduct subversion, infiltration and sabotage to serve U.S. strategic interests, is actually the "second CIA" of the United States, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Monday.

"We believe the international community will see its true face more and more clearly, and more countries will expose its heinous deeds in various forms," Zhao Lijian said at a regular press briefing.





INSTIGATING "COLOR REVOLUTIONS" TO SUBVERT LAWFUL GOVERNMENT

After World War II, the United States opened a covert front against the Soviet Union through the CIA and other intelligence apparatus. By the 1960s, the United States had realized gradually that it was far from enough to "promote democracy" through secret means only. There was an urgent need to establish a "public-private mechanism" to openly provide funding. In 1983 and with the efforts of the then U.S. president and some other people, NED was founded as a bipartisan and non-profit institution.

NED is nominally an NGO that provides support for democracy abroad, but in fact, it relies on continuous financial support from the White House and the U.S. Congress, and takes orders from the U.S. government.

As early as in 1991, the founder of NED Alan Weinstein put it bluntly in an interview with the Washington Post that a lot of what they were doing was what the CIA had done 25 years ago. NED was therefore known globally as the "second CIA."

NED has a long history of instigating color revolutions against "hostile" countries. Early NED documents revealed activities by NED mainly in Eastern Europe to subvert state power as early as the late 1980s.

On Aug. 27, 1989, the Washington Post published a report titled "How we helped Solidarity win," pointing out that NED provided financial support for the Polish Solidarity to help them overthrow the then Polish government, heralding drastic changes in Eastern Europe.

It was also an important enabler behind the Arab Spring. In Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Algeria, Syria, Libya and other countries, NED provided financial support to pro-America individuals and groups by supporting professed feminism, freedom of the press, and human rights activities.

A destroyed building is seen at the Al-Qatirji industrial city in Syria's northern city of Aleppo on March 7, 2022. (Photo by Ammar Safarjalani/Xinhua)

It exported various kinds of anti-government ideas, incited color revolutions, and plunged the Arab world into war, social unrest and economic recession.

In Bolivia, the organization instigated the "color revolution," forcing President Evo Morales to resign and go into exile. During the nearly 14-year rule of the leftist government under Morales, Bolivia enjoyed political stability and the fastest growth rate in South America. Its poverty rate continued to drop, people's livelihoods improved markedly, and tensions between the white and the indigenous eased significantly.

The Morales government won the general election, but was forced to step down by "street movements" and the military and police. NED played a part in more ways than one.





CULTIVATING ANTI-GOV'T FORCES & FUNDING SEPARATIST FORCES

The NED has been colluding with local political groups to meddle in other countries' internal affairs. Its efforts include infiltrating target countries, cultivating local anti-government forces and stoking social tensions

To interfere in China's internal affairs, the NED worked hard to meddle in Hong Kong's elections.

It contacted opposition parties, groups and organizations in Hong Kong through its affiliated National Democratic Institute for International Affairs or the National Democratic Institute (NDI). Since 1997, the NDI has published 18 assessment reports aimed at influencing Hong Kong's "democratic development."

According to the NED website, 2 million U.S. dollars were spent on 11 Hong Kong-related projects in 2020, with a particular focus on disrupting LegCo (Legislative Council of Hong Kong) elections.

It also interfered in Russia's elections, threatened Russia's constitutional, defense and national security, interfered in Mongolia's parliamentary elections, and "monitored" the elections and constitutional referendum in Kyrgyzstan.

In Belarus, the NED has kept creating political instability. The United States masterminded three "color revolutions" against the Belarusian government in 2006, 2010 and 2020 respectively, during which NED played an important role.

It also funded many "independent media." According to the NED website, between 2016 and 2020, the NED funded 119 projects in Belarus under the category of "Freedom of Information," spending an average of 50,000 dollars on each project. This particular category received more funding than any other category for five consecutive years.

Besides, it stirred up protests and demonstrations in Thailand, incited the opposition parties in Nicaragua to seize power by force, and funded anti-Cuba forces to manipulate public opinion against the government.

While the United States has long-standing interference in Venezuela's internal affairs, it also orchestrated violent coup to realize regime change in Haiti and interfered in Uganda's presidential election by supporting the opposition leader.

China has long been a key target of its infiltration and subversive activities. NED invests heavily in anti-China programs every year and attempts to incite independence in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Tibet.

According to data released on its website in 2020, NED provided over 10 million dollars of grants for 69 China-related programs within one year, aiming to deliver various activities undermining China's political and social stability.

It is the main source of funding for various "Xinjiang independence" organizations. NED claims to have provided grants of 8.7583 million dollars for various "Uyghur organizations" between 2004 and 2020.

NED also maintains close ties with "Tibet independence" forces. They have been in contact since 2010 when then Chairman of NED Gershman presented the "Democracy Service Medal" to Dalai Lama.

Its Tibet-related programs focus on strengthening the local separatist forces and hyping up the Tibet issue internationally. In 2019, NED provided 600,000 dollars for Tibet-related programs.

Most notably, NED gives full support for "Hong Kong independence." It has long carried out projects on so-called "labor rights," "political reform" and "human rights monitoring" in Hong Kong, and was behind almost all street demonstrations there.

People protest against the United States' intervention in Hong Kong affairs in front of the U.S. Consulate General, south China's Hong Kong, Dec. 3, 2019. (Xinhua/Wang Shen)

Since 2003, NED has covertly organized, planned, directed and funded many large-scale street movements in Hong Kong, including the illegal "Occupy Central" movement and the violent demonstrations over proposed legislative amendments.

In September 2019, NED recruited anti-China elements in Hong Kong to join the board of directors of the Washington-based "Hong Kong Democracy Council."

In 2019, it invested about 640,000 dollars in projects in Hong Kong, mainly to slander China by flaring up human rights issues.





SPREADING DISINFORMATION & IDEOLOGICAL INFILTRATION

NED has been spreading provocative rhetoric to arouse anti-government sentiments among the public.

In 2021, Cuba experienced its worst economic crisis in 30 years due to the COVID-19 pandemic and tightened sanctions by the United States. On July 11 last year, large-scale anti-government demonstrations broke out in many cities, including the capital Havana.

Later investigations by the Cuban government found close ties between U.S. government agencies and the demonstrations, in which NED played an important role.

The organization has also been fabricating Xinjiang-related lies to fuel the momentum for containing China.

The NED-funded "World Uyghur Congress" and "Human Rights Watch" started and spread such rumors as "genocide" in China's Xinjiang and "the detention of one million Uyghurs in education and training centers."

After interviewing only eight people, the NED-backed Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, based on such an absurd small-sample research, applied the estimated ratio to the whole of Xinjiang and concluded that 1 million people were detained in the "re-education detention camps" and 2 million "forced to attend day/evening re-education sessions," thus disseminating rumors about Xinjiang.

NED has also been spreading the "political virus" and politicizing COVID-19 origins-tracing, as well as fueling tensions and hyping up the concept of "sharp power," so as to stoke up anti-China and anti-Asian sentiments in the United States and other Western countries.

Since the start of the pandemic, the NED-funded "Uyghur American Association" and its affiliates continuously peddled right-wing conspiracy theories, blaming China for the pandemic and all related deaths, and circulating rumors that China is waging a "virus war" on the world and "purposefully, intentionally exporting the virus to cause the pandemic."

In order to achieve ideological infiltration, NED has created various "democracy awards" to encourage dissidents in other countries to help the United States to "export" democracy.

Since 1991, NED has been granting the Democracy Award annually to political activists and dissidents in countries including Russia, China, the DPRK, Myanmar, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and Ukraine in recognition of "defending human rights and democracy."

People riding a motorbike pass an Iranian bank in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 28, 2021. (Photo by Ahmad Halabisaz/Xinhua)

NED also uses the global assemblies of the World Movement for Democracy to grant the Democracy Courage Tributes.

Since the Eighth Global Assembly in 2015, names related to China has begun to appear on the list of recipients. Anti-China organizations and individuals seeking independence for Tibet or Hong Kong or related to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement have successively received the Tributes.

NED made grants to the Egyptian Democratic Academy, an NGO, for ideological infiltration in Egypt. In June 2011, the then U.S. ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson acknowledged that Washington had spent no less than 40 million dollars to "promote democracy" in Egypt since February 2011.

In October 2013, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), one of NED's core grantees, received over 300,000 dollars from NED to "improve the communication skills of political activists in Venezuela."

Before Venezuela's local elections in December 2013, the NDI hosted seminar outside Venezuela to provide "expert advice" on the use of technology and social media for citizen outreach and engagement.
BEIJING, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday sent a congratulatory message to Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos on his election as president of the Republic of the Philippines.

China and the Philippines are neighbors facing each other across the sea and partners through thick and thin, Xi said.

In recent years, with the joint efforts of both sides, the bilateral relations have been consolidated and enhanced, bringing benefits to the people of both countries and contributing to regional peace and stability, Xi added. 
UNITED NATIONS, May 11 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was appalled by the killing of Al-Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the West Bank, said his deputy spokesman on Wednesday.

"The secretary-general is appalled by the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American reporter for Al-Jazeera TV, who was shot dead earlier today while covering an operation by Israeli security forces in Jenin in the occupied West Bank," said Farhan Haq, the deputy spokesman, in a statement.

Guterres sent his heartfelt condolences to the family of Abu Akleh and wished a quick recovery to fellow journalist Ali Samoudi, who was wounded in the same incident, said the statement.

Guterres called on relevant authorities to carry out an independent and transparent investigation into this incident and ensure that those responsible are held accountable, it said.

"The secretary-general condemns all attacks and killings of journalists and stresses that journalists must never be the target of violence. Media workers should be able to carry out their work freely and without harassment, intimidation or the fear of being targeted. The secretary-general reiterates his firm conviction that a free press is essential for peace, justice, sustainable development and human rights," said the statement. 
Photo taken on May 12, 2022 shows the accident site where a passenger plane veered off the runway during take-off and caught fire at the Chongqing Jiangbei International Airport in southwest China's Chongqing.(Xinhua/Liu Chan)

CHONGQING, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Twenty-five people were injured after a passenger plane veered off the runway during take-off and caught fire at an airport in southwest China's Chongqing at around 8 a.m. on Thursday, airport sources said.

The passenger plane operated by Tibet Airlines was carrying 113 passengers and nine crew members on board, said the sources.

All people aboard the plane were evacuated and the injured were rushed to hospital for treatment. 

Photo taken on May 12, 2022 shows the accident site where a passenger plane veered off the runway during take-off and caught fire at the Chongqing Jiangbei International Airport in southwest China's Chongqing.(Xinhua/Liu Chan)
By Trend

As part of the political dialogue processes, Head of the Presidents Administrations Department for Liaison with Parties and the Legislative Authority Adalat Valiyev has been holding regular meetings with the chairmen of political parties for two years, the department told Trend.

On May 11, Valiyev held a meeting with the Chairman of the Azerbaijan National Independence Party Arzukhan Alizade.

At the meeting, Valiyev emphasized that global geopolitical processes contribute to the maintenance of political solidarity in the country.

Cooperation with political parties on issues complying with national interests is one of the priorities in the country's political dialogue, he said, noting that the potential of political parties should be mobilized in the fight against media provocations against Azerbaijan.

Stressing international cooperation between the Azerbaijan National Independence Party, established in 1992, and the European People's Party (EPP), the head of the department stated that existing ties should be effectively used to convey Azerbaijani realities to the world community.

Arzukhan Alizade highly appreciated the establishment of a new political configuration in the country and outlined the special role of this process in strengthening democratic values ??and promoting political culture. He said that all Azerbaijani political forces should act single in the matters of national issues.

The sides also discussed the new realities in the region. It was noted that it's necessary to intensify mutual efforts to develop relations between the government and opposition in the format of constructive cooperation. Such cooperation will protect the gains achieved and will help prevent various provocations.

The official representative of the Administration praised the active participation of the National Independence Party in the dialogue between the government and opposition, its accession to joint statements on national issues, as well as commended its attendance of joint meetings of political parties and joint trips to Azerbaijan's liberated territories. He also appreciated the party's proposals on the improvement of the political party regulation, as well as the submission of financial reports to the Central Election Commission.

Valiyev added that these factors are important for the good image of the party.

During the meeting, Alizade noted the upcoming events on the occasion of the party's 30th anniversary.
Travelers walk through terminals at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Virginia, the United States, April 14, 2022. (Photo by Ting Shen/Xinhua)

"In the very strict lockdowns there was a point where if you only had an American passport, you could not enter Europe," says Dominic Volek. "I think that made a lot of particularly ultra high net worth individuals realize that they're potentially a little bit more fragile than they thought."

NEW YORK, May 12 (Xinhua) -- The number of wealthy Americans applying for citizenship or residency in foreign countries has skyrocketed over the past three years as U.S. billionaires, tech entrepreneurs and celebrities look to create a "plan B" for their families, reported major news portal Insider last week, based on interviews with multiple investment migration firms.

Latitude Residency & Citizenship, a company which guides high-net-worth investors around the world through the application process, was quoted as saying that U.S. inquiries have increased 300 percent between 2019 and 2021.

Henley & Partners, one of the world's largest citizenship brokers, said sales to American nationals increased by 327 percent between 2019 and 2020 and an additional 10 percent in 2021.

According to Dominic Volek, head of private clients at Henley & Partners, there are "four C's" currently driving the investor citizenship industry: COVID-19, climate change, cryptocurrency, and conflict. The recent uptick in American applicants started during the Trump administration and escalated during pandemic lockdowns, he said.

"In the very strict lockdowns there was a point where if you only had an American passport, you could not enter Europe," said Volek. "I think that made a lot of particularly ultra high net worth individuals realize that they're potentially a little bit more fragile than they thought."

More than a dozen countries offer so-called "golden passports" and visas that allow affluent foreigners to receive citizenship or residency in exchange for investing in the country. The most expensive programs range from 1.1 million U.S. dollars in Malta to 9.5 million dollars in Austria, the Insider report said, citing Forbes. 
Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi attends his first press conference after winning the election in Tehran, Iran, on June 21, 2021. (Photo by Ahmad Halabisaz/Xinhua)

TEHRAN, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi on Thursday warned of the danger any foreign interference poses to regional security when it comes to settlement of regional issues, official news agency IRNA reported.

Raisi gave the warning at a joint press conference with visiting Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani in the capital Tehran, stressing that the regional differences should be resolved by regional countries.

Referring to the Yemeni crisis, the Iranian president called for lifting the siege of the Arab state "as soon as possible" to allow the Yemenis to decide the fate of their own country.

Iran and Qatar agree that Afghanistan's problems should be resolved through the formation of an inclusive government, he said.

For his part, the Qatari emir said "resolving disputes in the region is possible only through dialogue."

"Today, we discussed various issues ... The main topic was about Palestine. We also talked about Syria, Iraq and Yemen. We believe that the problems existing in these countries must be resolved through fair and comprehensive solutions," he explained.

He also expressed Qatar's optimism for the Vienna talks aimed to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

The Qatari emir arrived in Tehran on Thursday, and is scheduled to meet with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. 
U.S. President Joe Biden is seen at the White House in Washington, D.C., the United States on Nov. 8, 2021. (Photo by Ting Shen/Xinhua)

COVID-19 deaths continue to rise despite the Biden administration's plan to send more safe smoking kits and clean needles to drug users as part of a "harm-reduction" approach.

NEW YORK, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Drug overdose deaths rose 15 percent in U.S. President Joe Biden's first year in office, according to new data published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

More than 107,000 people in the United States died in 2021 from drug overdoses, of which more than 80,000 died from opioids, according to the statistics.

"Deaths from fentanyl continued to rise as Biden pursued open border policies that allowed more drug traffickers into the United States," The Associated Press report Wednesday, citing CDC data.

Also, deaths continue to rise despite the Biden administration's plan to send more safe smoking kits and clean needles to drug users as part of a "harm-reduction" approach, according to the report.

"The time has come for us to treat addiction like any other disease," Biden once said in a statement. "And at the same time, we are disrupting drug traffickers' financial networks, supply chains and distribution routes, including the Internet." 
DAR ES SALAAM, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Tanzania on Thursday marked International Nurses' Day by pledging to improve the welfare of nurses across the East African nation.

Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan said Tanzania will keep investing in the health sector to further improve service delivery and the nurses' working environment.

"Happy International Nurses' Day to all nurses in our country. Your selfless service to our nation is exemplary and of paramount importance to our development," said President Hassan in her official tweet.

"I commend all nurses in the country that are working hard to save the lives of patients," the Minister of Health, Seniors and Children Ummy Mwalimu told the parliament.

Mwalimu said the government will continue improving the welfare of nurses who make up 80 percent of the health personnel in the country.

"The government also intends to employ more nurses," she told the House in Dodoma, the capital of Tanzania.

International Nurses' Day is celebrated annually on May 12 in memory of the birth of Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing, but also to honor nurses as an invaluable resource, and raise awareness of the challenges they face.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said in a statement issued in the commercial capital of Dar es Salaam that International Nurses' Day is marked in the context of the global COVID-19 health emergency, which has highlighted the depth of the nursing shortage in Africa, and globally.

Throughout the pandemic, nurses have made great sacrifices, acted courageously and recommitted daily to tackle a global health threat that is unprecedented in modern times, serving as an indispensable pillar supporting African healthcare systems through some very challenging times, said the statement. 
CAPE TOWN, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Zandile Christmas Mafe, the suspect who allegedly burnt down the main parliament building of South Africa this January will be indicted, a state advocate of South Africa told Cape Town Magistrate's Court Thursday.

Mafe, 49, is charged with housebreaking with intent to commit terrorism and arson, arson, terrorism and theft. He could face life imprisonment if convicted.

A final damage report of the parliament will be ready on May 20, while a crime scene and arson report will also be finalized soon, said Senior State Advocate Mervyn Menigo.

Menigo's request to postpone the case to June 9 was accepted by the court.

Mafe was detained on Jan. 2 after the fire broke out early in the day, on suspicion of stealing property after he gained entry to the parliamentary precinct without authorization.

The fire lasted more than 70 hours, severely damaging the building of the National Assembly (NA), the lower house, and completely burning down the NA chamber. It also caused extensive damage to the century-old Old Assembly building that houses the National Council of Provinces, the upper house.

The National Assembly and the parliament's plenary meetings have been moved to a much smaller chamber, Good Hope, within the parliament precincts in a hybrid way, with many members participating online. 
BUJUMBURA, May 12 (Xinhua) -- The hybrid rice that Chinese farming experts are promoting in Burundi is contributing to the east African country's food security, a Chinese expert told Xinhua on Tuesday.

Yang Huade, who received an award from the Burundian President earlier this month for doing "great things for Burundi" in rice farming, said the rice production more than tripled since he arrived in Burundi in 2015.

Yang said the hybrid rice yield currently ranges between 9 and 10 tonnes per hectare, more than tripled that of 2015.

Before, farmers could reap about 800,000 Burundi francs (389 U.S. dollars) per hectare, now the net profit is about 4.8 million francs, said Yang.

"I felt great pleasure when I received the award from the Burundian president. This was due, of course, to the excellent work I am doing in Burundi's agriculture sector", said Yang, the chief of the Chinese team of farming experts at the Gihanga research center.

The team is made up of 13 experts including 11 Chinese experts. Two others are Burundian nationals who are language translators.

"We imported hybrid rice from China to Burundi and we immediately had a high production to improve food security in Burundi", he said.

He added that the center also introduced a rice variety practiced in mountains which is more resistant to diseases.

According to him, the center provides supervision to 22 villages set up in 14 out of 18 Burundian provinces where rice is being cultivated.

"The center provides inputs, technology and guidelines to rice farmers," he said.

According to him, some 49 students trained by the center are supervising over 1,500 farmers who also received training in rice growing in those villages located throughout the country.

The center also trained agronomists for the Burundian environment, agriculture and livestock ministry, he said.

To increase the rice production in Burundi, he advised farmers to speed up the development of hybrid rice in low lands, not only in the Imbo region (west Burundi), but also in the Moso region (east Burundi).

He added that there is a need to grow new rice varieties with high resistance to diseases in high-altitude regions where mountain rice is grown.

He also suggested the promotion and the use of organic fertilizers to increase production.

"Working in cooperatives is also important to put strengths together. Farmers face the problem of lacking information, technology and supplies. But through cooperatives, they can address all those problems", said Yang.

He seized his opportunity to encourage rich people to take part in the farming sector.

"If you want to cultivate hybrid rice, for instance, some people have land, others have labor, others have money. Why can't you combine all those resources to increase the yield and then participants will share the benefit", said Yang.

He underlined that seeds of hybrid rice can now be produced at the research center thanks to the team of experts.

"It is possible to set up a seed center and produce qualified seeds and even export them to other countries in the near future", said Yang.

On May 2, at the celebration of the International Workers' Day in the province of Muyinga, northeast Burundi, Burundian President Evariste Ndayishimiye gave awards to outstanding workers and associations including Yang, for doing "great things for Burundi" in rice farming. 
WINDHOEK, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Namibia on Thursday launched a sovereign wealth fund that will promote intergenerational prosperity for all Namibians by ensuring that the distribution of benefits flowing from exploiting the country's natural resource endowments is shared across generations.

Speaking at the launch, President Hage Geingob said the country is taking concrete actions to herald a new era for Namibians.

"We would like to put aside a portion of the revenue we collect from the present exploitation of mineral resources for future generations of Namibians to also enjoy the fruits of the resource endowment of their country, "he said.

The fund will be split into two, the Intergenerational and Stabilization accounts which will be financed with proceeds from the renewable energy industry, mining royalties, fishing quotas and the sale of state-owned assets.

"The second objective of the Fund, which will be served by the Stabilisation Account, is fiscal and official reserve stabilization," he said.

He said Namibia is also establishing the Welwitschia Fund which will serve as an automatic shock absorber and enable the country to maintain stable expenditure patterns over time. 
NEW DELHI, May 12 (Xinhua) -- The Indian government on Thursday announced reduction of the gap for COVID-19 booster dose for its citizens travelling abroad.

Under this new directive, Indian citizens and students travelling abroad can soon take the third precautionary dose of the vaccine against the pandemic as per the travel guidelines of the destination country.

"Indian citizens and students travelling overseas can now take the precaution dose as required by the guidelines of the destination country. This new facility will be available soon on the CoWIN portal," federal health minister Mansukh Mandaviya said in a brief statement.

CoWIN portal is the Indian government's COVID Vaccine Intelligence Network.

Last month India's federal health ministry announced that those above the age of 18 years who had completed nine months after the administration of the second vaccine dose would be eligible for the precaution or booster dose.

However, it said the facility would be paid and shall be available at private vaccination centers.

The first two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine were provided free of charge to the eligible population across India at government hospitals.

The National Capital Territory of Delhi and the states of Bihar and Haryana have made booster doses available free of charge for the eligible population at government-run hospitals. 
SEOUL, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Seven foreign carmakers in South Korea will voluntarily recall almost 12,000 vehicles on defects in software and other parts, the transport ministry said Thursday.

Mercedes-Benz Korea will recall 7,598 vehicles from eight models, including the S580 4MATIC, as indicators, hazard lights and reversing lights can malfunction because of a software error in the rear signal acquisition and actuation module, according to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport.

Toyota Motor Korea will recall 1,789 vehicles of two models due to a software error in the brake control devices.

The ministry planned to fine the Japanese automaker after reviewing the voluntary recall and correction measures.

Tesla Korea will recall 1,254 vehicles of its Model 3 due to a software error in the touch screen control devices, while Stellantis Korea will recall 814 units of the Jeep Grand Cherokee for a software flaw in the engine control devices.

BMW Korea will recall 328 units from four models, including iX xDrive40, for the defected software in air bag control.

Volkswagen Group Korea will recall 151 cars of the Bentley Bentayga V8, while Bike Korea will recall 24 units of two types of motorcycles over safety concerns.

The companies will contact vehicle owners through mail or mobile phone messages, offering repair services free of charge, the ministry said. 
DHAKA, May 12 (Xinhua) -- Denim products were seen from a distance even before one was entering the exhibition hall in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, the world's second-largest RMG (ready-made garments) exporter.

The love of RMG sector insiders was palpable at the 12th edition of Bangladesh Denim Expo which closed on Wednesday after attracting some 6,000 people to visit the stands of denim items.

Many visitors from abroad also came, looking to buy or sell denim products.

The expo, themed Beyond Business, kicked off on Tuesday and attracted a total of 79 participants from about 10 countries, offering international fashion buyers a one-stop sourcing platform for all aspects of jeans wear.

Md Fazlul Karim is an assistant manager (Marketing & Sales) of Bangladesh's Uni Asia Associates Ltd.

"We're very happy to be here and to know how much our country is developing in terms of textiles and garments," said the assistant manager.

He said the exhibition, which had been absent for the last two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, also paved the way for closer interaction with foreign businesses and products.

"I have basically understood the difference between the two fabrics, one made in China and the other made in our country."

"The difference I noticed is that the quality of the Chinese one is much better. We're also moving forward a lot."

David Chen is a country manager of China's SAB Weixing Co., Ltd. He was also very happy to attend the exhibition and showcase manufacturing ability of his company to the world.

"We, SAB, is one of the biggest government accessory manufacturing companies of the world. So we come here," he said.

Bangladesh is a big market, and there are many business chances in the country as it returns to normalcy gradually, the manager said.

Rudy Muntasser, sales manager of Italy's SoKo Chimica SRL, said Bangladesh is a booming country in textile and denim specially. "We are very very much happy to be here again."

The exhibition also served as an important platform for players in the international denim trade to mingle with other people of the fraternity, make new contacts and broker deals.

"We were expecting an increased number of exhibitors and visitors from home and abroad this time," said Mostafiz Uddin, founder and chief executive officer of the Bangladesh Denim Expo.

He said Denim supply chains have experienced major turbulence and disruption in the past two years, and have been forced to innovate and adapt in order to survive and remain relevant.

Against the backdrop, this year's Bangladesh Denim Expo addresses new opportunities for successful and sustainable business in a world that now demands the industry leaders go "Beyond Business."

Bangladesh has become one of the most significant hub for denim apparel production around the world. To meet the ever-growing demand from the RMG sector, local textile entrepreneurs have made substantial investment in the past so as to produce good quality denim items.

Bangladesh's export earnings increased by 35.14 percent year-on-year to 43.34 billion U.S. dollars in the first 10 months of the current 2021-22 fiscal year (July 2021-June 2022), with about 80 percent of the export earnings coming from the RMG sector, according to the data released by Bangladesh's Export Promotion Bureau (EPB) recently. 
By Azernews





The Armenian prime ministers ungrounded accusations against Azerbaijan cast serious doubts on the country's desire for peace, Spokesperson for Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry Leyla Abdullayeva said.

During his speech at the Clingendael Institute of International Relations in the Netherlands, Pashinyan accused Azerbaijan of not taking humanitarian steps to return people of Armenian origin in detention in Azerbaijan.

Commenting on the issue, the spokesperson reminded that Azerbaijan has liberated its territories from occupation and that Armenia has purposefully planted mines in the occupied lands during nearly 30-year-long occupation, as well as after the signing of the tripartite statement.

Later, Abdullayeva noted that Armenia initially denied the existence of minefield maps in general, and only after facing international pressure, they presented minefield maps with only 25% accuracy.

The spokesperson added that it would be wrong to describe Armenia's submission of mine maps as a humanitarian gesture, as it was Armenia's obligation under international humanitarian law after the signing of the tripartite statement.

Abdullayeva stressed that since the signing of the statement, some 219 people, mostly civilians, have been killed by landmines. Furthermore, she added that 10 people were injured in nine mine blasts in April.

Unfortunately, our citizens regularly fall victim to landmines, even after Armenia submitted minefield maps, she added.

In the statement, the spokesperson added that Azerbaijan is currently rebuilding and restoring the liberated territories that had been destroyed by Armenia. For decades, the work has been done day and night to ensure the return of the IDPs to their homes, she added.

However, a huge mine problem in these areas poses a serious threat to the early return of IDPs. The only reason for this is Armenias 30-year-long aggressive policy and its destructive results.

The spokesperson stated that considering all these, the accusations of the Armenian prime minister are inappropriate and unfounded. She stressed that the Armenian leader should first recognize the reasoning behind the detention in Azerbaijan of Armenian saboteurs, who illegally entered the country.

Moreover, Abdullayeva stated that humanitarian issues are an important part of the peace agenda, which is why, Azerbaijan is always guided by the principles of humanism in its activities, even during the 44-day war and after, it took unilateral humanitarian steps. However, she noted that Armenia must finally understand that for peace, it is necessary not only to talk but to act.

To recap, about 1,500 mines and unexploded ordnance were found and defused on Azerbaijan's liberated territories on April 1-30, the Mine Action Agency said.

ANAMA, along with the partner countries, carries out demining activities on the liberated territories. Moreover, the State Border Service and the Defense Ministry are also demining liberated lands.

Armenia submitted to Azerbaijan all mine maps of liberated territories as a result of talks held through the mediation of the Russian Defense Ministry on December 4, 2021.

On December 12, 2021, Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov told reporters that mine maps, provided by Armenia, are not so far fully accurate.

In an address to the 6th Eastern Partnership Summit of the European Union in Brussels on December 15, 2021, President Ilham Aliyev said that about 200 people had been killed or injured in mine explosions to that date. In this regard, he stressed the importance of the EU and member states providing technical and financial assistance to Azerbaijan to eliminate the mine problem.

Armenia deliberately and constantly planted mines on Azerbaijani territories, in violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention, thereby being a major threat to regional peace, security, and cooperation.

On June 12, 2021, Azerbaijan handed over 15 Armenian prisoners in exchange for a map detailing the location of 97,000 mines in Aghdam.

On July 3, 2021, Armenia submitted to Azerbaijan maps of about 92,000 anti-tank and anti-personnel mines planted during the occupation of Fuzuli and Zangilan regions.

Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a Russia-brokered peace agreement on November 10, 2020, to end 44 days of fighting and work toward a comprehensive peace deal.
LONDON, May 12 (Xinhua) -- The United Kingdom (UK) and the European Union (EU) disagreed on Thursday over how to fix Brexit's Northern Ireland Protocol problem. London said it "will have no choice but to act" if the EU does not show the "requisite flexibility" over the protocol.

In a telephone call with European Commission Vice President Maros Sefcovic, UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said her country's overriding priority was to protect peace and stability in Northern Ireland and that the protocol had become the greatest obstacle to forming a Northern Ireland Executive, according to a UK government press release.

Truss also "outlined why EU proposals would take us backwards, by creating more checks and paperwork," the press release said.

In a statement on Thursday, Sefcovic said it continues to be "of serious concern that the UK government intends to embark on the path of unilateral action."

"This is despite a series of wide-ranging and impactful solutions proposed by the EU, based on our intensive engagement with all representatives in Northern Ireland. These proposals would substantially improve the way the protocol is implemented," he said.

According to Sefcovic, "only joint solutions will work" and unilateral action is "simply not acceptable."

The UK-EU rift has recently deepened as rows continued over the protocol, under which Northern Ireland is part of the UK's customs territory but is subject to the EU's customs code, value-added tax (VAT) rules and single market rules for goods.

Despite the two sides' agreement in October 2019, the protocol has caused divisions over how some of the rules should be implemented, particularly for goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, according to an official report.

While British leaders have argued the protocol needs to be amended, the EU has said a renegotiation is off the table.

The need to find a solution has been made even more urgent after Sinn Fein, the Irish nationalist party, was on Saturday declared winner in elections for the devolved assembly in Northern Ireland and a system of power-sharing was introduced.

Coming second in the elections, the pro-British Democratic Unionist Party has indicated it would not sit in the assembly, citing its opposition to the protocol with a trade border down the Irish Sea. 
BEIJING, May 12 (Xinhua) -- The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which takes orders directly from the U.S. government and manipulates NGOs through the provision of funding to conduct subversion, infiltration and sabotage to serve U.S. strategic interests, is actually the "second CIA" of the United States, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Monday.

"We believe the international community will see its true face more and more clearly, and more countries will expose its heinous deeds in various forms," Zhao Lijian said at a regular press briefing.

INSTIGATING "COLOR REVOLUTIONS" TO SUBVERT LAWFUL GOVERNMENT

After World War II, the United States opened a covert front against the Soviet Union through the CIA and other intelligence apparatus. By the 1960s, the United States had realized gradually that it was far from enough to "promote democracy" through secret means only. There was an urgent need to establish a "public-private mechanism" to openly provide funding. In 1983 and with the efforts of the then U.S. president and some other people, NED was founded as a bipartisan and non-profit institution.

NED is nominally an NGO that provides support for democracy abroad, but in fact, it relies on continuous financial support from the White House and the U.S. Congress, and takes orders from the U.S. government.

As early as in 1991, the founder of NED Alan Weinstein put it bluntly in an interview with the Washington Post that a lot of what they were doing was what the CIA had done 25 years ago. NED was therefore known globally as the "second CIA."

NED has a long history of instigating color revolutions against "hostile" countries. Early NED documents revealed activities by NED mainly in Eastern Europe to subvert state power as early as the late 1980s.

On Aug. 27, 1989, the Washington Post published a report titled "How we helped Solidarity win," pointing out that NED provided financial support for the Polish Solidarity to help them overthrow the then Polish government, heralding drastic changes in Eastern Europe.

It was also an important enabler behind the Arab Spring. In Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Algeria, Syria, Libya and other countries, NED provided financial support to pro-America individuals and groups by supporting professed feminism, freedom of the press, and human rights activities.

It exported various kinds of anti-government ideas, incited color revolutions, and plunged the Arab world into war, social unrest and economic recession.

In Bolivia, the organization instigated the "color revolution," forcing President Evo Morales to resign and go into exile. During the nearly 14-year rule of the leftist government under Morales, Bolivia enjoyed political stability and the fastest growth rate in South America. Its poverty rate continued to drop, people's livelihoods improved markedly, and tensions between the white and the indigenous eased significantly.

The Morales government won the general election, but was forced to step down by "street movements" and the military and police. NED played a part in more ways than one.

CULTIVATING ANTI-GOV'T FORCES & FUNDING SEPARATIST FORCES

The NED has been colluding with local political groups to meddle in other countries' internal affairs. Its efforts include infiltrating target countries, cultivating local anti-government forces and stoking social tensions

To interfere in China's internal affairs, the NED worked hard to meddle in Hong Kong's elections.

It contacted opposition parties, groups and organizations in Hong Kong through its affiliated National Democratic Institute for International Affairs or the National Democratic Institute (NDI). Since 1997, the NDI has published 18 assessment reports aimed at influencing Hong Kong's "democratic development."

According to the NED website, 2 million U.S. dollars were spent on 11 Hong Kong-related projects in 2020, with a particular focus on disrupting LegCo (Legislative Council of Hong Kong) elections.

It also interfered in Russia's elections, threatened Russia's constitutional, defense and national security, interfered in Mongolia's parliamentary elections, and "monitored" the elections and constitutional referendum in Kyrgyzstan.

In Belarus, the NED has kept creating political instability. The United States masterminded three "color revolutions" against the Belarusian government in 2006, 2010 and 2020 respectively, during which NED played an important role.

It also funded many "independent media." According to the NED website, between 2016 and 2020, the NED funded 119 projects in Belarus under the category of "Freedom of Information," spending an average of 50,000 dollars on each project. This particular category received more funding than any other category for five consecutive years.

Besides, it stirred up protests and demonstrations in Thailand, incited the opposition parties in Nicaragua to seize power by force, and funded anti-Cuba forces to manipulate public opinion against the government.

While the United States has long-standing interference in Venezuela's internal affairs, it also orchestrated violent coup to realize regime change in Haiti and interfered in Uganda's presidential election by supporting the opposition leader.

China has long been a key target of its infiltration and subversive activities. NED invests heavily in anti-China programs every year and attempts to incite independence in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Tibet.

According to data released on its website in 2020, NED provided over 10 million dollars of grants for 69 China-related programs within one year, aiming to deliver various activities undermining China's political and social stability.

It is the main source of funding for various "Xinjiang independence" organizations. NED claims to have provided grants of 8.7583 million dollars for various "Uyghur organizations" between 2004 and 2020.

NED also maintains close ties with "Tibet independence" forces. They have been in contact since 2010 when then Chairman of NED Gershman presented the "Democracy Service Medal" to Dalai Lama.

Its Tibet-related programs focus on strengthening the local separatist forces and hyping up the Tibet issue internationally. In 2019, NED provided 600,000 dollars for Tibet-related programs.

Most notably, NED gives full support for "Hong Kong independence." It has long carried out projects on so-called "labor rights," "political reform" and "human rights monitoring" in Hong Kong, and was behind almost all street demonstrations there.

Since 2003, NED has covertly organized, planned, directed and funded many large-scale street movements in Hong Kong, including the illegal "Occupy Central" movement and the violent demonstrations over proposed legislative amendments.

In September 2019, NED recruited anti-China elements in Hong Kong to join the board of directors of the Washington-based "Hong Kong Democracy Council."

In 2019, it invested about 640,000 dollars in projects in Hong Kong, mainly to slander China by flaring up human rights issues.

SPREADING DISINFORMATION & IDEOLOGICAL INFILTRATION

NED has been spreading provocative rhetoric to arouse anti-government sentiments among the public.

In 2021, Cuba experienced its worst economic crisis in 30 years due to the COVID-19 pandemic and tightened sanctions by the United States. On July 11 last year, large-scale anti-government demonstrations broke out in many cities, including the capital Havana.

Later investigations by the Cuban government found close ties between U.S. government agencies and the demonstrations, in which NED played an important role.

The organization has also been fabricating Xinjiang-related lies to fuel the momentum for containing China.

The NED-funded "World Uyghur Congress" and "Human Rights Watch" started and spread such rumors as "genocide" in China's Xinjiang and "the detention of one million Uyghurs in education and training centers."

After interviewing only eight people, the NED-backed Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, based on such an absurd small-sample research, applied the estimated ratio to the whole of Xinjiang and concluded that 1 million people were detained in the "re-education detention camps" and 2 million "forced to attend day/evening re-education sessions," thus disseminating rumors about Xinjiang.

NED has also been spreading the "political virus" and politicizing COVID-19 origins-tracing, as well as fueling tensions and hyping up the concept of "sharp power," so as to stoke up anti-China and anti-Asian sentiments in the United States and other Western countries.

Since the start of the pandemic, the NED-funded "Uyghur American Association" and its affiliates continuously peddled right-wing conspiracy theories, blaming China for the pandemic and all related deaths, and circulating rumors that China is waging a "virus war" on the world and "purposefully, intentionally exporting the virus to cause the pandemic."

In order to achieve ideological infiltration, NED has created various "democracy awards" to encourage dissidents in other countries to help the United States to "export" democracy.

Since 1991, NED has been granting the Democracy Award annually to political activists and dissidents in countries including Russia, China, the DPRK, Myanmar, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and Ukraine in recognition of "defending human rights and democracy."

NED also uses the global assemblies of the World Movement for Democracy to grant the Democracy Courage Tributes.

Since the Eighth Global Assembly in 2015, names related to China has begun to appear on the list of recipients. Anti-China organizations and individuals seeking independence for Tibet or Hong Kong or related to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement have successively received the Tributes.

NED made grants to the Egyptian Democratic Academy, an NGO, for ideological infiltration in Egypt. In June 2011, the then U.S. ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson acknowledged that Washington had spent no less than 40 million dollars to "promote democracy" in Egypt since February 2011.

In October 2013, the National Democratic Institute (NDI), one of NED's core grantees, received over 300,000 dollars from NED to "improve the communication skills of political activists in Venezuela."

Before Venezuela's local elections in December 2013, the NDI hosted seminar outside Venezuela to provide "expert advice" on the use of technology and social media for citizen outreach and engagement. 
PHNOM PENH, May 12 (Xinhua) -- American nationals living in Cambodia said Wednesday that impunity and belligerence have destroyed the reputation of the United States and the U.S. is broken beyond repair.

Leaving Ohio in 1971 for Europe before moving to Cambodia nearly 10 years ago, an American man, who asked to be identified by his nickname Bob, said in the 1970s, America was regarded as a progressive and prosperous country, but its ramifications of the Vietnam War and other wars have caused people to see the U.S. in a harsher light.

"The impunity and belligerence of the USA have hurt its reputation severely," Bob told Xinhua.

Another American national Mariam Arthur, 55, who left California for Cambodia in 2007, said she had grown discontent with life in the U.S., saying that America is broken and beyond repair, specifically in legal system, medical system, food supply, environment and political system.

She said Cambodia is very cosmopolitan with people from so many different countries living here, so she heard a lot of opinions about America.

"Most foreigners in Cambodia don't trust the U.S. and feel that there is a hidden agenda behind its actions and policies," Mariam said.

"I think most of the world sees the U.S. as a bully. They see it interfering with other countries using terms like democracy and human rights," she added.

She said the U.S. is a "hypocrite" and fails to uphold these values itself.

U.S. SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ISSUES

Bob said the gravest problems the U.S. has are its reactionism, xenophobia or racism, and environment, among others.

"I see there are so many divisors in the USA as are fleas on a dog," he said. "The most prevalent one is 'WASPs' (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) against all others," and entitlement and arrogance are the prime motors for social discord."

Bob added that political parties should try to unify the nation for the good of all instead of only seeking power -- divide and conquer.

Mariam said the main social and political problem in the U.S. is division -- the division between Republicans and Democrats, right and left, white and black, rich and poor.

"Everyone is divided about something and won't listen to opposing views," she said. "There is no free speech in America currently, if someone disagrees with an opinion, they 'cancel' the person by blocking them, removing their content, or sometimes even threatening them."

She said Americans don't feel secure. They live in fear of a medical emergency or losing their job, even if they hate that job.

"Most Americans are living "paycheck-to-paycheck" and mired in debt, so they don't have time to really think about politics or investigate what their politicians are doing, so they depend on news channels which are highly unreliable and biased," Mariam said.

U.S. PARTIES AND ELECTORAL SYSTEM

Bob said both major U.S. parties are damned to follow the money -- they must finance their campaigns -- and kowtow to those that have money.

"Healthcare, women's rights, fair wages, ecology, and many other topics are only given lip service because the ill, women, workers, or the planet do not fill campaign coffers," he said.

For the existing U.S. electoral system, he said the Electoral College is an outdated institution, and electors possess the legal prerogative to vote as they wish -- without regard to the popular election results.

"It should be abolished and like most civilized countries that elect their presidents by direct popular vote," he said.

Mariam said the problem is with voter fraud on many levels and there are real absentee ballots sent to dead people or non-citizens that get sent in fraudulently.

"There is tampering at polling stations. There is tampering with counting. Even if demands are heard, the government will only offer a token resolution and keep doing what it wants behind-the-scenes," she said.

For the existing U.S. electoral system, Mariam does not think reform will solve the voting problem, saying that first, votes need to be secure and the count needs to be secure.

"Any reform is useless if the votes are still fraudulent and the counting is tampered with," she said.

"Second, even if the votes are correct, the U.S. has become a nation of whiners who get angry when they don't get their way. It used to be that if your political party lost, you tried harder in the next election. Now everyone just feels angry and victimized," she added.

"MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN" PHILOSOPHY

Mariam said for America to be great, it would have to be completely rebuilt, saying that there are too many institutions that are enslaving the citizens.

She said the "military-industrial complex," the "medical-industrial complex," global corporations only concerned with profit, food and water being poisoned, natural resources being depleted, gangs and government agencies running illegal drugs and human trafficking rings together, the list goes on.

She added that there are some politicians trying to address these issues, but they are silenced by the majority of corrupt politicians who have been running the country for decades.

"Making America great again would mean tearing down these institutions and structuring society in a way that is more focused on communities," Mariam said.

She said people's mindsets need to be changed from being so narcissistic and greedy to more compassionate.

"Maybe, it isn't the 'political system' that is destroying the U.S., but the people who are currently in politics," she said. "I suggest cleaning out all current politicians and voting for fresh candidates who are not bought and paid for by lobbyists working for corporations. It might not be a perfect idea, but it would be a start."

"The present U.S. political system is plutocratic or oligarchic, xenophobic, unjust, and impunitive," he said.

QUALITY OF LIFE IMPROVED AFTER LEAVING THE U.S.

Mariam said even if her standard of living has not changed after leaving the U.S., her quality of life has definitely improved.

"I can live comfortably on 1,500 U.S. dollars per month in Cambodia, but in the U.S., most people pay more than that just for rent each month.

She said crime is much lower in Cambodia and that there are occasional bag snatchers, but more serious crimes are much less frequent than in the U.S.

"I have access to quality medical care that I can afford in Cambodia. A few years ago, I had a knee injury and I went to a high standard hospital where the doctor's consultation and MRI scan cost around 200 dollars," she said.

"I can't even imagine the thousands of dollars it would have cost in the U.S.," Mariam added. 
Colombo: Amid the ongoing severe economic crisis in Sri Lanka, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa on Wednesday addressed the nation and said that our country is facing a political and economic crisis. Most people and political parties are suggesting that an alliance be formed with members of various political parties to form the government.

"I have tried to form a coalition government for the past few days and I agree with the suggestion of the coalition government. "I'm making this decision at this difficult time. He said the new Prime Minister of Sri Lanka will be appointed within a week. He said the old cabinet has recently been removed and a new cabinet is set to be formed without any Rajapaksa along with young MPs. The PM and the old cabinet had resigned at the request of all parties. As we all know, on May 9, we saw an unfortunate situation. In a very short span of time, violence was seen to spread throughout the country.

PM Mahinda Rajapaksa fled the violence-hit country:-

At the same time, pm Mahinda Rajapaksa ran away with the entire family after throwing the country into the fire of violence. On Monday, violent mobs surrounded Rajapaksa's official residence in Colombo. He had to resign as prime minister to ease the anger of the public. But, even after the resignation, the public anger did not subside. In such a situation, he resigned and there an army helicopter landed in his official residence. The entire Rajapaksa family boarded the helicopter and fled to Colombo, saving their lives from the angry protesters.

Mamata Banerjee awarded with Special Bangla Academy Award

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Humans are prone to take things or people for granted. Only after they lose them do they regret their attitude towards them. However, artist Samjhana Rajbhandari has been able to get respite from the regret of not helping her father exhibit his collection of postage stamps.

Her woodcut print exhibition, Prints: A Tribute to the Past, which began on May 8 at Nepal Art Council, Babermahal, is primarily dedicated to her father, late Bidyadhis Rajbhandari. Yet, on a higher scale, it reminisces about Nepals overall postage stamp history.

Rajbhandari, whose father passed away five years ago, revisited his stamp collection during the time of the Covid pandemic. I have seen my father collecting his stamps since I was a child. Many times I had this thought about why he indulged himself in such a painstaking hobby, which I used to care less about. During my adulthood, my father frequently asked me to help him exhibit his collection of stamps as I am an artist. However, I could not fulfil his desire when he was alive, the artist shares.

Postage stamps and Nepali art

Artist Samjhana Rajbhandari explains her artworks at her woodcut print exhibition, Prints: A Tribute to the Past, about Nepals postage stamp history, in May 2022. Photo: Bikash Shrestha

Late Bidyadhis Rajbhandari was a philatelist and had a collection of postage stamps printed in Nepal since 1886, the sixth year of the postage stamp history in Nepal. Pranab Man Singh, a founder member of Quixotes Cove and Satori Center for the Arts, states, Jung Bahadur Rana printed them on paper imported from Britain using a printing machine from the same country. These stamps were only used in Nepal. It was only in the 1950s after Nepal joined the world and became a member of the Universal Postal Union that its stamps were recognised internationally.

The uses of stamps are gradually on the decline due to the advent of digital media. Yet, stamp collection still is a passionate hobby. In many countries, it is a valuable business and investment strategy.

In 1967, a postage stamp enthusiast went to his local post office in the North England town of Rochdale to buy a pair of Great Britain stamps. He paid one shilling and nine pence (less than 10 US cents) for a pair that celebrated the invention of the television and featured a silhouette of Queen Elizabeth II.

What he did not realise until later was that one of the stamps was missing the queens head. It was a lucky purchase. In 2014, he sold the stamp, known as SG 755b, at auction for 23,600 ($36,260). Moreover, stamps issued between 1840 and 1875 are now among the worlds most valuable ones because of their rarity and historical significance.

Moreover, postage stamps are a part of visual culture which strongly holds the valuable knowledge of an issuing country which eventually leads to understanding the socio-political, economical and cultural aspects of that country. Samjhana Rajbhandari, realising the same, was inspired to work on this series. Previously, she used to work with the themes of nature and life.

The exhibition

Samjhana Rajbhandaris woodcut print exhibition, Prints: A Tribute to the Past, about Nepals postage stamp history, in May 2022. Photo: Bikash Shrestha

The artist has carefully selected the exhibitions title as she revisited the past through her artworks using the woodcut medium and presented them now using her creative skills in the form of prints.

She adds, In the initial phase in the development of postage stamps, stamp making process included printmaking techniques like engraving and lithography. The woodcut method is the oldest form of printmaking. I choose to work monochrome because, in the early days, stamps were found in only one colour.

She has used colours like red, brown, yellow, orange, and green among others for her prints. In the exhibition, the prints that dominate architectural heritage such as temples, monuments and religious motifs signify the inclination of the country towards its rich heritage. Other than that, prints of commemorative postage stamps are also displayed. Then, there is a series of prints which are imaginative stamps using the motif of Astamangal.

The exhibition has 33 prints that have an emotional yet historical connection. About this connection, Roshan Mishra, the director/curator of Taragaon Museum, states in the catalogue, Samjhana has done several solo exhibitions in her career, but this series of work really stands out as it helps to immortalise and contextualise the forgotten history that would have been either neglected or discarded. To a great extent, personal histories are undocumented in Nepal, (but) such an exhibition will encourage the audience to explore their own collection and the family history.

According to artist Rajbhandari, the older technique of stamp making process is similar to the process of printmaking and being a printmaker herself, she was intrigued to work on her fathers collection of stamps. Woodcut uses a relief process in which the tools like knives are used to carve the wooden surface to form a printing block which is used to press onto the paper and make a print. She has chosen Nepali lokta paper to print her designs and to give her viewers a taste of how philately works in her collection. Original stamps that she chooses from her fathers collection are also on display.

Samjhana Rajbhandaris woodcut print exhibition, Prints: A Tribute to the Past, about Nepals postage stamp history, in May 2022. Photo: Bikash Shrestha

The exhibition that continues till May 17 is quite interesting where one gets to see the detailed works of stamps on the larger-size prints although postage stamps are most frequently 0.87* 0.98 inches only.

It was painstaking work to enlarge the size of the stamps and create prints out of them. However, I feel that the positive feedback from the visitors is like the fruit of my hard work and tribute to my father. Moreover, I am concerned about how can this source of knowledge be preserved and what should I do, adds Rajbhandari.
Habi, a Bogota-based proptech, has closed on $200 million in a Series C funding round co-led by Homebrew and SoftBank Latin America Fund.

The startup did not reveal its exact valuation, saying only it had reached unicorn status -- meaning that it is now valued at more than $1 billion.

The raise follows a year of strong growth, according to the company, which saw its revenue increase by well over 20x in 2021. With this latest raise, Habi says it has become the second unicorn in Colombia and the only LatAm unicorn with a female founder and CEO, according to Crunchbase. It also claims that it is now the first proptech unicorn in Spanish-speaking LatAm. Brazil -- where the population speaks Portuguese -- is home to more than one proptech unicorn, including QuintoAndar and Loft.

Habi says its mission is to empower low- and middle-income consumers in the housing sector by providing access to liquidity and information in a market where data is limited and the majority of homes are not listed online. The startup currently operates in more than 15 cities in Mexico and Colombia.

The company last raised in June of 2021 -- a $100 million Series B led by SoftBank Latin America Fund. Since its 2019 inception, Habi has brought in over $315 million in equity funding. Banco Mercantil del Norte SA, Institucion de Banca Multiple, Grupo Financiero Banorte, Tiger Global, Inspired Capital, Clocktower Ventures, Endeavor Catalyst and Henry Kravis participated in the latest financing, among others.

Over the past year, Habi says it has worked on building out its services and proprietary database, so that it can offer customers a full stack of services, including iBuyer, brokerage, financial services and a marketplace.

With strong partnerships and an expanded market presence, we are at the very early stages of building out the infrastructure to provide much-needed information, trust and liquidity to a housing market that desperately needs it, said Brynne McNulty Rojas, Habis co-founder and CEO, in a statement.

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In January 2022, Habi announced its acquisition of online marketplace Propiedades.com and iBuyer Tu Canton as part of its effort to grow its presence across Mexico.

The company plans to use the new capital to expand geographically across Spanish-speaking LatAm and double down on its push into embedded financial services.
The 100% stake acquisition allows BlueWave to expand its leadership in innovative solar and energy storage development and pursue long-term asset ownership of its development projects

BOSTON, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- BlueWave, a leading Boston-based solar and energy storage developer and certified B Corp, and Axium Infrastructure, an infrastructure investment management firm with a deep North American renewables portfolio, announced today that an Axium managed fund (Axium) has acquired BlueWave. Under the terms of the acquisition, BlueWave will keep its name and entire team in place as the company focuses on the growth of its solar energy and storage development portfolio.

BlueWave Solar

With an intent to integrate Environmental Social Governance (ESG) at the heart of its project development and management process, Axium's values align with BlueWave's mission to transform access to renewable energy through a responsible development philosophy. Axium is proud to support BlueWave's industry-leading work in community solar development and the practice of agrivoltaics and floatovoltaics which promise to generate clean energy while being mindful of land conservation and preserving neighboring ecosystems. While Axium has several other asset-based investments in the renewable energy sector, this will be Axium's first renewable development company acquisition.

The acquisition marks an opportunity for BlueWave to evolve its business model to not only develop, but also build, own and manage the projects within its development portfolio, driven by the company's belief in the long-term value of community-scale solar. With this, BlueWave will focus on hiring to support the transition to long-term asset ownership and build a team to support ongoing company growth. The acquisition also gives BlueWave the financial security to weather the development market and continue the pursuit of innovative development avenues.

"This acquisition marks a pivotal new period in BlueWave's history. It was crucial for us to find a like-minded owner who shares in our mission to revolutionize renewable energy and to help us scale, and that partner is unequivocally Axium" said Trevor Hardy, CEO of BlueWave. "Axium's ownership will enable tremendous growth opportunities as we look to own and operate our development assets and continue pioneering in dual-use solar development, storage development and accessibility of renewable energy for low- to middle income communities."

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"BlueWave is thrilled to join forces with such a deeply committed, mission-driven, ESG investor. Axium and BlueWave share common values and purpose and are united in a vision for achieving significant growth, innovation, and impact in the climate battle. It's a wonderful match, and with the talent and resources Axium adds to the equation, I have every confidence we will achieve that vision," said John DeVillars, Co-Founder and Chairman of BlueWave.

"Our acquisition of BlueWave is a reflection of their solar and energy development innovation and a desire for us to significantly grow our renewable energy portfolio. We're proud to support a company that not only shows growth and financial promise, but also aligns with our values and strong focus on ESG," said Thierry Vandal, President, Axium Infrastructure U.S. Inc. "We look forward to a bright and more sustainable future working alongside BlueWave's tenured and talented team to push the limits on solar innovation."

To learn more about BlueWave, visit https://bluewave.energy/.

About BlueWave

BlueWave's vision is to protect our planet by transforming access to renewable energy. As a pioneering solar developer, BlueWave has developed and built more than 150 MW of solar projects to date. As built, these projects collectively generate enough solar energy to avoid more than 144,000 metric tons of carbon emissions annually. A certified B Corp, BlueWave has received national recognition for its work to protect the planet, including being named the Clean Energy Company of the Year in 2018 by the Northeast Clean Energy Council, one of the top 100 Impact Companies in the United States for each of the last four years as rated by Real Leaders Magazine, and a leading growth company by Inc. Magazine and the Boston Business Journal.

About Axium Infrastructure

Axium Infrastructure (comprised of Axium Infrastructure Inc. and its affiliated entities) is an independent portfolio management firm dedicated to generating long-term investment returns through investing in core infrastructure assets. Axium Infrastructure had US$6.6 billion in assets under management as of December 31, 2021, as well as approximately US$1.4 billion in co-investments. The firm benefits from the capabilities of a group of specialists with decades of experience acquiring, developing, financing, operating and managing infrastructure assets. Focus is placed on assets that are supported by robust market demand and under long-term contract with creditworthy counterparties. Since 2010, the firm has invested in a diversified portfolio of over 200 North American infrastructure assets. For further information, including information about other infrastructure assets the firm has invested in, please visit www.axiuminfra.com. This release is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer or solicitation to buy securities of any entity.

Axium Infrastructure

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SOURCE BlueWave Solar
(Bloomberg) -- Boeing Co. would consider selling stock to repair its balance sheet if its battered shares recover and the company hits milestones like finally restarting 787 Dreamliner deliveries, Chief Financial Officer Brian West said.

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All options are on the table, West told a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. conference on Wednesday.

While a prominent customer has publicly questioned the companys strategic vision after its dismal first quarter results, West pointed to a potential comeback that could start with the 787 program. US regulators are reviewing a certification plan for repairing structural defects in about 115 undelivered Dreamliners, a step toward resuming deliveries that have been largely halted since late 2020.

Boeing gained as much as 4.5% during Wests upbeat presentation before plunging to a 2.7% loss at the close of a turbulent trading session in New York. The stock is down about 36% so far this year.

West was optimistic the company could one day return to being a prodigious cash-generator, after burning through more than $30 billion since 2019. But formidable challenges remain -- from Covid-related lockdowns in China to parts shortages that have hamstrung Boeings 737 Max production. He blamed a dip in April deliveries of the cash-cow Max on a lack of wiring connectors.

Were on the verge of turning the corner, West said.

(Adds details of potential equity raise in first two paragraphs.)

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

2022 Bloomberg L.P.
NEW YORK, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Business Operations Consulting Services Market Overview:

Business Operations Consulting Services Market

The Business Operations Consulting Services procurement market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 5.39%. SpendEdge's market experts predicts that this market is expected to have an incremental spend of USD 25.57 billion. Download a sample PDF of this sourcing and procurement report

Business Operations Consulting Services Market: Supplier Intelligence

Our sourcing and procurement report provides detailed insights and analysis of the major cost drivers, volume drivers, and innovations of the Business Operations Consulting Services procurement and sourcing market, which the global suppliers have been leveraging to gain a competitive edge across regions.

Some of the leading Business Operations Consulting Services suppliers profiled extensively in this report include:

Kearney Holdings Ltd.

Accenture Plc

Bain & Co. Inc

This sourcing and procurement report provides detailed analysis on:

Strategies deployed by major category end-users

The most adopted and high potential pricing models

Managing commodity price volatility

Negotiate on pricing and contractual terms

Business Operations Consulting Services Market: Price Strategies and Pricing Models

To optimize the value of the purchase it is crucial to keep a track of current and future price trends. Price forecasts are beneficial in purchase planning, especially when supplemented by the constant monitoring of price influencing factors. During the forecast period, the market expects a change of 5%-8%.

Identify favourable opportunities in oil and gas pipeline safety TCO (total cost of ownership)

Expected changes in price forecast and factors driving the current and future price changes

Identify pricing models that offer the most rewarding opportunities

SpendEdge's Smart Procurement for Business Operations Consulting Services Market

SpendEdge's procurement intelligence platform is the go-to tool for companies looking to access latest procurement research insights and supplier data on an easy to use platform.

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Subscribe to our FREE starter plan if you are looking to explore our capabilities:

View 6 full reports

View 800+ report samples

Pre-order upcoming reports

Dedicated account manager

Invite colleagues to try platform

Our web-based procurement platform has helped procurement professionals and sourcing teams manage multiple spend areas and achieve more than $2 billion in savings - Sign up for free today!

Table of Content

Executive Summary

Market Insights

Category Pricing Insights

Cost-saving Opportunities

Best Practices

Category Ecosystem

Category Management Strategy

Category Management Enablers

Suppliers Selection

Suppliers under Coverage

US Market Insights

Category scope

Appendix

About SpendEdge:

SpendEdge shares your passion for driving sourcing and procurement excellence. We are the preferred procurement market intelligence partner for 120+ Fortune 500 firms and other leading companies across numerous industries. Our strength lies in delivering robust, real-time procurement market intelligence reports and solutions.

Contacts

SpendEdge

Anirban Choudhury

Marketing Manager

Ph No: +1 (872) 206-9340

https://www.spendedge.com/contact-us

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SOURCE SpendEdge
(Bloomberg) -- California Governor Gavin Newsom is proposing a $125 million package to bolster access to reproductive health services and prepare for an influx of people seeking abortions should Roe v. Wade be overturned.

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The Democratic leader also said hell offer incentives to employers in areas with laws perceived as anti-abortion or anti-LGBTQ to relocate to California -- an indirect shot at states such as Texas and Florida that have passed controversial conservative measures.

Newsom is accelerating efforts to make the most-populous state an abortion sanctuary after the leak of a draft opinion by the US Supreme Court indicating that Roe v. Wade would be reversed. The governor, up for re-election this year, has blasted the expected ruling and said hell seek voter approval to enshrine the right to an abortion in Californias constitution.

He plans an additional $57 million in spending on top of a January budget proposal for $68 million in abortion-related funds, according to a statement from his office Wednesday. The money would go to providing care for uninsured people, improving infrastructure for reproductive health facilities and giving grants for outreach and education.

Were making sure that all women -- not just those in California -- know that this state continues to recognize their fundamental rights, Newsom said in the statement. He is due to release his full revised budget proposal on Friday.

The governor said hell update existing incentives for businesses to move to California, or expand their footprint, from states that have enacted abortion restrictions and laws seen as attacking gay rights, without providing more detail.

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Newsom has been vocal criticizing a Texas law that severely curtails abortions and a Florida law that limits school instruction about gender identity and sexual orientation -- a measure that has led to clashes between Republican Governor Ron DeSantis and California-based Walt Disney Co. Both states have sought to lure California companies and have been popular destinations for departing residents.

New Laws

California has already sought to shore up abortion access, enacting a law in March to prevent insurers from charging out-of-pocket costs for the procedure. The legislature also is considering a package of 13 bills tied to reproductive rights, some of which would provide funding for abortion-seekers both in and out of state, as well as legal protection for providers.

The state, flush with cash from a record budget surplus, joins other liberal-leaning areas in pledging more funding for abortion services.

This week, New York Governor Kathy Hochul said the state would invest $35 million to help clinics prepare for a flood of abortion-seekers, both by expanding their capacity and providing extra security to protect patients and providers. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced that the city would provide $500,000 to providers and local abortion funds that assist both Illinois residents and women across state lines.

Of Californias new proposed spending, $40 million of it will go directly to clinics that cover uninsured patients.

Having a right only means anything if you can get to the abortion clinic and pay for your abortion, Elizabeth Nash, the interim associate director of state issues for the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice research group, said during a webinar on abortion access after Roe.

Newsoms proposal includes $1 million for a website that will provide centralized reproductive health information, including services available to abortion-seekers. Another $20 million will go toward physical security for clinics, which have faced violence and harassment from anti-abortion activists, and toward information security to protect the personal data of people seeking and providing care.

The plan also includes $20 million for scholarships and loan repayment to reproductive health providers, which could increase clinic capacity by incentivizing more workers to pursue the high-risk, high-stigma jobs amid a staffing shortage.

California would be home to an estimated 30% of abortion clinics in America should Roe be overturned, data analyzed by the San Francisco Chronicle show. Already, it provides the closest abortion access for an estimated 46,000 women of reproductive age in neighboring states, according to the Guttmacher Institute. If Roe was reversed and states moved to ban abortions entirely, the research group estimates that as many as 1.4 million women from elsewhere would rely on California clinics.

To ensure state funds make their way quickly to clinics on the ground, coordination efforts between local governments and reproductive health providers need to be strengthened, said Heidi Gerbracht, the founder of the advocacy group Equity Agenda.

I am really deeply concerned that I dont think the relationships exist, necessarily, in these states where we know reproductive rights will be protected, she said.

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2022 Bloomberg L.P.
By Azernews





Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan discussed the current state of cooperation in the military, military education and military intelligence sectors on May 12.

The meeting was held in Baku between Azerbaijani Defence Minister Zakir Hasanov and a delegation led by Chief of the General Intelligence Department of the Kazakh Defence Ministry Serik Iztleuov.

Welcoming the guests, Zakir Hasanov noted that relations between the two countries are based on a solid historical basis and close fraternal relations.

Further, he gave detailed information about the work carried out in the liberated territories after the victory in the Patriotic War under the command of President Ilham Aliyev.

The minister also spoke about reforms carried out in the Azerbaijan Army, taking into account the combat experience of the Karabakh war, and the model of the Turkish Armed Forces.

For his part, Iztleuov stressed the importance of mutual visits in terms of expanding military cooperation.

During the meeting, the sides stressed the importance of conducting joint exercises to raise the professional level of servicemen of the two countries and discussed other issues of mutual interest.
The Canadian Business Hall of Fame Presented by BMO In Support of JA Canada (CNW Group/Canadian Business Hall of Fame)

Maureen Kempston Darkes, Hassan Khosrowshahi, Paul Guy Desmarais (posthumous), Paul Desmarais, Jr., and Andre Desmarais recognized with the highest honour in Canadian Business

TORONTO, May 12, 2022 /CNW/ - This evening, The Canadian Business Hall of Fame (CBHF) returns to an in-person celebration, for the first time since 2019, at the Metro Toronto Convention Center. 600 of Canada's most esteemed business leaders will gather to recognize five exceptional and visionary individuals to be inducted as the 43rd Class of Companions, the highest honour of its kind in Canadian business.

The Canadian Business Hall of Fame welcomes 600 Guests for the 43rd Induction Ceremony & Celebration supporting JA Canada

The celebration is the signature national fundraising event in support of JA Canada, and the proceeds of the evening will fuel the non-profit's mission to equip students with skills for lifelong success. JA's work empowering youth to build resilient economies and communities has been recognized as a path to peace with JA Worldwide's recent Nobel Peace Prize nomination. The Companions of the Canadian Business Hall of Fame who are awarded because of their vision and leadership, contributions to economic prosperity and civic engagement serve as role models for the next generation of youth leaders.

Each year, business leaders are nominated by their peers and chosen by an independent selection committee comprised of Korn Ferry and representatives of Canada's foremost business and academic institutions. Nominations for the Order of Business Hall of Fame are received on a rolling basis.

The inductees being recognized this year include:

Maureen Kempston Darkes O.C., O.Ont., D.Comm., LL.D, General Motors Group Vice President, President GM Latin America, Africa & Middle East (Retired)

Hassan Khosrowshahi O.C., O.B.C., Chairman, Persis Holdings

Paul Guy Desmarais (posthumous 1927-2013) P.C., C.C., O.Q., Former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Power Corporation of Canada

Paul Desmarais Jr. O.C., O.Q., MBA, Chairman, Power Corporation of Canada

Andre Desmarais O.C., O.Q., Deputy Chairman, Power Corporation of Canada

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Past Companions, business partners and friends from across the country will not only attend the event, but have donated gifts in honour of the Inductees sharing personal messages of dedication:

"Canada is defined by the people that help build this great nation. Inductees to the Order of the Business Hall of Fame have each made outstanding contributions to the economic well-being of communities throughout the country. To all the Inductees, the Canadian Business Hall of Fame, and to Junior Achievement Canada, congratulations and thank you." -Kathleen Taylor, C.M., Chair of the Board, RBC

"The greatest legacy we can have is to serve as role models for the next generation of leaders, enabling them to achieve more than we could imagine. The Desmarais Family is an exceptional source of inspiration for all of us. To all the Inductees, thank you for your remarkable contribution to Canada. " -Monique F Leroux and Jean-Guy Desjardins

"Congratulations to all of these remarkable business leaders for a lifetime of achievement in business, and for their recognition as members of the CBHF 2022 Class of Companions. A huge shout out to Maureen Kempston Darkes for blazing a trail for all women in business to follow, and doing so with courage, humility and compassion." -Linda Hohol

"Hassan Khosrowshahi is a classical scholar, a global citizen, a consummate gentleman, and a uniquely modern entrepreneur who has created many highly successful new enterprises in his adopted country, Canada. His is a totally inspiring story on many levels." -Honourable David Peterson

To recognize the CBHF 2022 Class of Companions with a Gift in Honour, please visit www.cbhf.ca for more information or email us at info@cbhf.ca.

Interviews with the outstanding business leaders, stories of impact, transformation and the future of work are also featured today in the Globe and Mail's Report on Business section.

A video of the Induction Ceremony, acceptance speeches, and personal videos showcasing the life and careers of Maureen Kempston Darkes, Hassan Khosrowshahi, Paul Guy, Paul Jr., and Andre Desmarais will be available on www.cbhf.ca next week.

About The Canadian Business Hall of Fame (CBHF)

The Canadian Business Hall of Fame celebrates outstanding lifetime achievements of Canada's most distinguished business leaders. Since 1979, more than 200 business leaders have been inducted into the Canadian Business Hall of Fame. Celebrating the leaders of today and inspiring the leaders of tomorrow, the CBHF Gala Dinner is the signature national fundraising event in support of JA Canada. For more information, please visit www.cbhf.ca.

About JA Canada

JA Canada prepares youth to succeed by delivering programs with experiential learning opportunities to more than 220,000 students each year across Canada. This is done in partnership with educators, volunteers, and businesses to educate students about financial literacy, work readiness and entrepreneurship. For more information, please visit www.jacanada.org.

SOURCE Canadian Business Hall of Fame

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Walmart Canada will give $1 million to support Children's Miracle Network hospitals across the country

MISSISSAUGA, ON, May 12, 2022 /CNW/ - Children's Miracle Network is launching its annual spring fundraising campaign today with Walmart Canada in support of Canada's kids, families, and their local children's hospitals. This year's campaign runs from May 12th to June 5th. Canadians are invited to participate by donating in-store or online at Walmart.ca.

Canada's Children's Hospital Foundations & Walmart Logo (CNW Group/Canada's Children's Hospital Foundations)

Walmart Canada will give $1 million to support Children's Miracle Network hospitals across the country

Each spring, with the generous support of its associates and customers, Walmart Canada supports children's hospitals' areas of greatest need including revolutionizing treatment and care through research and providing lifesaving equipment and healing environments. To kick-start this year's campaign, Walmart is donating $1 million.

Walmart Canada has partnered with Children's Miracle Network for 28 years. Donations made by Walmart associates and customers stay local to support the children's hospital in their community. To date, Walmart Canada has raised and donated more than $185 million to Children's Miracle Network.

"Walmart Canada is an incredible partner," said Mark Hierlihy, President and CEO of Canada's Children's Hospital Foundations. "For close to three decades, they have supported Children's Miracle Network for a very important reason. Walmart Canada knows that their associates and customers care about the health and well-being of Canada's kids and their families who live in their local communities and who are served by children's hospitals across Canada."

"Walmart Canada is on a journey to become a regenerative company  one that does good, not harm. That's why we support local communities and organizations like Children's Miracle Network and their network of premier children's hospitals to provide extraordinary care to children and their families across Canada," said Horacio Barbeito, President and CEO at Walmart Canada. "Children's Miracle Network has a very special place in the hearts of our associates and customers and we hope Canadians will give generously and make this campaign one of our best ever."

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Last year, kids like Evelyn made more than 2.6 million in-person or virtual children's hospital visits. Thanks to support from corporate partners like Walmart, Evelyn received the right care at the right time and is thriving.

Learn more about Walmart Canada's support of Children's Miracle Network here.

About Walmart Canada

Walmart Canada operates a chain of more than 400 stores nationwide serving 1.5 million customers each day. Walmart Canada's flagship online store, Walmart.ca is visited by more than 1.5 million customers daily. With more than 100,000 associates, Walmart Canada is one of Canada's largest employers and is ranked one of the country's top 10 most influential brands. Walmart Canada was recently recognized as a LinkedIn Top Company of 2021 and was also named one of Canada's most popular brands (based on Google searches). Walmart Canada's extensive philanthropy program is focused on supporting Canadian families in need, and since 1994 Walmart Canada has raised and donated more than $500 million to Canadian charities. Additional information can be found at walmartcanada.ca and on Walmart Canada's social media pages  Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

About Children's Miracle Network

Children's Miracle Network raises funds and awareness for 170 member hospitals, 13 of which are in Canada. Donations stay local to fund critical treatments and healthcare services, purchase pediatric medical equipment, and support research. Its various fundraising partners and programs support its mission to save and improve the lives of as many children as possible. Visit the Children's Miracle Network website to learn more about its cause. In Canada, Children's Miracle Network is managed and operated by Canada's Children's Hospital Foundations.

SOURCE Canada's Children's Hospital Foundations

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Agreement confirms companys compliance with privacy law while allowing continued growth of Clearview AIs industry leading facial recognition technology (FRT) platform

NEW YORK, May 12, 2022--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Clearview AI, the leading facial recognition technology company that provides powerful and reliable photo identification technology to law enforcement agencies across the country, has reached a settlement agreement in Illinois state court that confirms the companys compliance with the states privacy law. The settlement does not change Clearviews current business of providing access to its search engine to government agencies for the purpose of investigating crimes and enhancing national security.

The settlement agreement, filed in Illinois Circuit Court of Cook County, disposes of a lawsuit brought by plaintiff American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), which makes exemptions for government and government contractors, banking and bank affiliates as well as consent-based usage.

Hoan Ton-That, Clearview AIs CEO said, "The courts endorsement of the BIPA settlement is an achievement for Clearview AIs customers and our mission of providing justice to victims of crime across the country. Clearview AI intends to serve private sector clients with product offerings that are not affected by this agreement, focused on our core mission of enhancing security."

KEY ELEMENTS OF THE SETTLEMENT

Clearview AI will continue to serve its law enforcement and government customers by providing them with the companys facial recognition search engine tool that searches a growing database of 20+ billion publicly available images, the largest database of its kind anywhere in the world.

Clearview AI will be able to provide its powerful FRT algorithm to private commercial entities for security purposes.

Clearview AI did not admit any liability. The company agreed to pay only $250,000 in plaintiffs attorneys fees and will pay no damages to anyone.

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"Today, facial recognition is used to unlock your phone, verify your identity, board an airplane, access a building and even for payments. This settlement does not preclude Clearview AI selling its bias-free algorithm, without its database, to commercial entities, which is fully compliant with BIPA," Ton-That added.

Lee Wolosky, partner at Jenner & Block on behalf of Clearview AI, stated, "This settlement is a huge win for Clearview AI. Clearview will make no changes to its current business model, it will continue to expand its business offerings in compliance with applicable law and it will pay a small amount of money to cover advertising and fees, far less than continued litigation would cost." Mr. Wolosky is a former U.S. ambassador and national security official under Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama.

Floyd Abrams, Senior Counsel Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP, also representing Clearview AI, said, "Clearview AI is pleased to put this litigation behind it. The settlement does not require any material change in the companys business model or bar it from any conduct in which it engages at the present time. Clearview AI currently does not provide its services to law enforcement agencies in Illinois, even though it may lawfully do so. To avoid a protracted, costly and distracting legal dispute with the ACLU and others, Clearview AI has agreed to continue to not provide its services to law enforcement agencies in Illinois for a period of time." Mr. Abrams is an expert on constitutional and First Amendment law and has argued 13 cases before the Supreme Court of the United States.

Clearview AI's FRT platform is used by law enforcement agencies to help solve crimes after-the-fact by quickly and accurately matching photos of suspects, persons of interest and potential victims against a database of more than 20 billion publicly available facial images. It affords law enforcement the unparalleled ability to match photos from the widest possible field comprising a multitude of ages, ethnicities and physical characteristics  a dataset that is much more representative of the population than mug shot or DMV image libraries, helping to eliminate bias in the image matching process. Clearview AI is not a real time surveillance tool.

Clearview AIs FRT platform has been instrumental in helping investigators solve thousands of cases including crimes against children, homicides, financial frauds, drug trafficking, sex offenders as well as victim and missing person identifications.

In January, Clearview AI was awarded a U.S. patent for its unique facial recognition algorithm, which performed nearly flawlessly in the recent National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) Facial Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT), ranking No. 1 in the U.S. and top 10 worldwide across all categories.

Clearview AI

Clearview AI provides law enforcement agencies with a revolutionary facial recognition search engine that helps investigators solve crimes after the fact. Its platform of more than 20 billion facial images, the largest known database of its kind, is sourced from public-only web sources, including news media, mugshot websites, public social media, and many other open sources. Law enforcement agencies that use Clearview AI receive high-quality leads with fewer resources expended. When supported by other evidence, these leads help law officials accurately and rapidly identify suspects, protect victims, and keep communities safe. TIME recently named Clearview AI one of the world's "100 Most Influential Companies." https://www.clearview.ai/

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220512005422/en/

Contacts

Media contact: Lisa Linden, The LAKPR Group, llinden@lakpr.com
IndexBox, Inc.

Companies Mentioned in the Report: Smurfit Kappa, DS Smith, Saica, Mondi, Prinzhorn Holding, Ehrhardt Kartonagen, Saica Pack Turkey, Medio Ambiente Pack S.A., Transpack S.A., Packmann Gesellschaft Fur Verpackungen Und Dienstleistung Mbh, Industrie-Kartonagen Maier, Japackaging, Paul Lindner Gmbhmb-Karton Ernst Behrend, Pack Shop Linz, Eylul Oluklu Mukavva Ve Ambalaj San.Tic.Ltd., Weedon Direct, Creative Boxes, Igepa Packaging, Ozguc Packaging Industry, Siauliu Antrines Zaliavos Uab, Ds Smith Speciality Packaging, Omka Cardboard Company

NEW YORK, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- IndexBox has just published a new report: ' EU  Corrugated Paper and Paperboard - Market Analysis, Forecast, Size, Trends and Insights' . Here is a summary of the report's key findings.



EU Corrugated Paper and Paperboard Market Statistics

Imports $942.4 Million USD Exports $911.2 Million USD Top Importers Poland, Netherlands, Belgium Top Exporters Germany, France, Czechia

The size of the corrugated paper market in the European Union was estimated at approx. $7.1B in 2021. This figure reflects the total revenues of producers and importers (excluding logistics costs and intermediaries' margins, which will be included in the final consumer price). The market value increased at an average annual rate of +1.3% from 2007 to 2021. REQUEST FREE DATA

EU Corrugated Paper and Paperboard Production

In 2021, approx. 9.5M tonnes of corrugated paper and paperboard were produced in the European Union; surging by 13% on the previous year's figure. The total output volume increased at an average annual rate of +2.3% from 2007 to 2021. REQUEST FREE DATA

The country with the largest volume of corrugated paper production was Italy (3.4M tonnes), comprising approx. 35% of total volume. Moreover, corrugated paper production in Italy exceeded the figures recorded by the second-largest producer, Germany (1.6M tonnes), twofold. Poland (1.1M tonnes) ranked third in terms of total production with an 11% share. REQUEST FREE DATA

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In Italy, corrugated paper production expanded at an average annual rate of +3.6% over the period from 2007-2021. The remaining producing countries recorded the following average annual rates of production growth: Germany (-1.7% per year) and Poland (+5.7% per year).

EU Corrugated Paper and Paperboard Exports

Corrugated paper exports expanded remarkably to 938K tonnes in 2021, with an increase of 12% on 2020. The total export volume increased at an average annual rate of +3.0% from 2007 to 2021.

In value terms, corrugated paper exports surged to $911M in 2021. Total exports indicated a noticeable increase from 2007 to 2021.

Exports by Country

Germany represented the largest exporter of corrugated paper and paperboard in the European Union, with the volume of exports recording 385K tonnes, which was approx. 41% of total supplies in 2021. It was distantly followed by France (97K tonnes), the Czech Republic (83K tonnes), Poland (76K tonnes) and Denmark (46K tonnes), together mixing up a 32% share of total exports. The following exporters - Belgium (42K tonnes), Spain (38K tonnes), Austria (27K tonnes), Croatia (25K tonnes), the Netherlands (16K tonnes), Latvia (16K tonnes) and Ireland (16K tonnes) - together made up 19% of total supplies.

In value terms, Germany ($393M) remains the largest corrugated paper supplier in the European Union, comprising 43% of total exports. The second position in the ranking was occupied by France ($107M), with a 12% share of total supplies. It was followed by the Czech Republic, with an 8.4% share.

In Germany, corrugated paper exports expanded at an average annual rate of +5.9% from 2007-2021. In the other countries, the average annual rates were as follows: France (+2.2% per year) and the Czech Republic (+1.3% per year).

Export Prices by Country

In 2021, the corrugated paper export price in the European Union amounted to $972 per tonne, increasing by 16% against the previous year. Prices varied noticeably by the country of origin: the country with the highest price was the Netherlands ($2,493 per tonne), while Ireland ($241 per tonne) was amongst the lowest. From 2007 to 2021, the most notable rate of growth in terms of prices was attained by the Netherlands (+3.4%), while the other leaders experienced more modest paces of growth.

EU Corrugated Paper and Paperboard Imports

In 2021, approx. 860K tonnes of corrugated paper and paperboard were imported in the European Union; surging by 15% on 2020. Total imports indicated notable growth from 2007 to 2021: its volume increased at an average annual rate of +4.3% over the last fourteen years.

In value terms, corrugated paper imports soared to $942M in 2021. Total imports indicated a noticeable increase from 2007 to 2021: its value increased at an average annual rate of +4.3% over the last fourteen years.

Imports by Country

In 2021, Poland (158K tonnes), followed by the Netherlands (99K tonnes), Belgium (89K tonnes), Austria (85K tonnes), Hungary (66K tonnes), Slovakia (65K tonnes), Germany (57K tonnes), the Czech Republic (53K tonnes) and France (49K tonnes) represented the major importers of corrugated paper and paperboard, together generating 84% of total volume.

In value terms, Poland ($132M), the Netherlands ($118M) and Belgium ($88M) constituted the countries with the highest levels of imports in 2021, together comprising 36% of total supplies.

Poland, with a CAGR of +15.9%, saw the highest rates of growth with regard to the value of imports from 2007-2021, while purchases for the other leaders experienced more modest paces of growth.

Import Prices by Country

In 2021, the corrugated paper import price in the European Union amounted to $1,096 per tonne, increasing by 23% against the previous year. There were significant differences in the average prices amongst the major importing countries. In 2021, the country with the highest price was Germany ($1,409 per tonne), while Poland ($834 per tonne) was amongst the lowest. From 2007 to 2021, the most notable rate of growth in terms of prices was attained by the Czech Republic (+2.8%), while the other leaders experienced more modest paces of growth.

About IndexBox

IndexBox is a market research firm developing an AI-driven market intelligence platform that helps business analysts find actionable insights and make data-driven decisions. The platform provides data on consumption, production, trade, and prices for more than 10K+ different products across 200 countries.

For more information, please visit

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Product Coverage

Corrugated paper and paperboard.

Related Links

Corrugated Paper and Paperboard Market

Paper and Paperboard Market

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Carton Boxes Market

Printing and Writing Paper Market

CONTACT: Contact Information Mekhrona Dzhuraeva Editor media@indexbox.io




Cover Genius

Experienced HR exec. to support rapid growth as the company more than doubles employee headcount

Daniel Chavenson also joins as VP of Strategy and Corporate Development to accelerate strategic business opportunities

NEW YORK, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cover Genius , the insurtech for embedded insurance, is pleased to announce the addition of Gloria Basem as Chief People Officer (CPO). Gloria will lead the companys global people strategy during its rapid growth, overseeing talent acquisition, employee experience, growth, learning, DEI, career development and compensation. She will work closely with the executive team to ensure People strategies enable company goals.

Were thrilled to welcome Gloria to the company as we continue to expand our teams, which more than doubled this past year, around the globe to meet our mission to protect all the customers of the worlds largest digital companies, said Angus McDonald, Co-Founder and CEO of Cover Genius. Following a year of unprecedented growth where we saw a 667% increase in sales for XCover, our global distribution platform, Glorias experience helping to create engaged and aligned teams at tech companies and startups will play a critical role in helping us meet our goals.

Basem joins Cover Genius with a deep experience in successfully building and growing the HR function for various organizations and brings expertise in organizational effectiveness and leadership to the team. Most recently, she served as Chief People Officer for Stash, a fintech company. She has also served as Chief People Officer at MediaMath, a global adtech firm, New Avon, Planned Parenthood of New York City and the CDM Group. Gloria received her Masters of Business Administration (M.B.A.), Marketing at Temple University and her Bachelors Degree in Human Resources and Organizational Studies at The University of Michigan.

Im delighted to join Cover Genius team of bold, authentic and purposeful individuals and look forward to continuing to foster the company culture that has led to its position as the leading global insurtech for embedded insurance, said Basem. Im very impressed with how Cover Genius adapted and was able to refocus during the past couple of years. There are a number of programs here that differentiate us as an amazing place to work, and I look forward to building on these.

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Cover Genius has also hired Daniel Chavenson, VP of Strategy & Corporate Development. With more than 15 years of experience in the insurance industry, Chavenson will be responsible for the evaluation and execution of growth opportunities for Cover Genius globally. He will work with partners and strategic targets to identify unique opportunities to scale and grow the business globally. Chavenson joins Cover Genius from Embroker where he spent four years overseeing external strategic relationships and leading insurance strategy and operations. Prior to that, he spent several years in leadership positions at AXIS Capital and Zurich Insurance. Daniel holds a Masters of Business Administration (M.B.A.) from the University of California, Berkeley and a Bachelors of Economics from Vanderbilt University.

About Cover Genius

Cover Genius is the insurtech for embedded insurance that protects the global customers of the worlds largest digital companies including Booking Holdings, owner of Priceline, Kayak and Booking.com, Intuit, Hopper , Skyscanner , Ryanair and Descartes ShipRush . Were also available at Amazon , Flipkart , eBay , Wayfair and SE Asias largest company, Shopee . Cover Genius vision is to protect all the customers of the worlds largest online companies through XCover , an award-winning global distribution platform for any line of insurance or warranty, and XClaim , an API for instant payment of approved claims that delivers an NPS of +65, a result that has been independently recognized as the highest for any insurance company globally.

Cover Genius and partners co-create solutions that embed protection thats licensed or authorized in over 60 countries & all 50 US States.

CONTACT: Media Contact Shelley Petri Senior B2B Marketing Communications Manager https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelley-petri/




NEW YORK, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- As per Zion Market Research study, The global aquaponics market was worth around USD 872.7 million in 2021 and is estimated to grow to about USD 1807.29 million by 2028, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 12.9 percent over the forecast period. The report analyzes the digital remittance market's drivers, restraints/challenges, and the effect they have on the demands during the projection period. In addition, the report explores emerging opportunities in the digital remittance market.

Zion Market Research Logo

Key Industry Insights & Finding of the Aquaponics Market Reports:

As per the analysis shared by our research analyst, the Aquaponics Market is expected to grow annually at a CAGR of around 12.9 % (2022-2028).

Through the primary research, it was established that the Aquaponics Market was valued approximately USD 872.7 Billion in 2021 and is projected to reach to roughly USD 1807.29 Billion by 2028.

North American area has the largest market share in the worldwide aquaponics industry.

Asia-Pacific region has the second-largest market share in the aquaponics industry, thanks to ongoing technological advancements.

European region has the third-largest market share in the aquaponics market due to the presence of a well-established infrastructure.

Due to rising demand for low operating costs combined with high yields, the aquaponics industry is expanding in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa.

Zion Market Research published the latest report titled as "Aquaponics Market By Type (Media Filled Growbeds (MFG), Nutrient Film Technique (NFT), Deep Water Culture (DWC), and Others), By Component (Bio Filter, Settling Basins, Fish tanks, Soil-free plant beds, Rearing Tanks, Aquaponic Produce, and Others), By Equipment (Pumps and Valves, Water Heaters, Fish Purge Systems, Aeration Systems, Water Quality Testing, and Others), By Application (Fish, Herbs, Fruits, and Vegetables), By End-User (Commercial, Home Production, and Research) and By Region  Global and Regional Industry Overview, Market Intelligence, Comprehensive Analysis, Historical Data, and Forecasts 2022  2028" into their research database.

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Aquaponics Market: Overview

Aquaponics is a food-production method that combines aquaculture (the breeding of aquatic animals in tanks) and hydroponics (the growing of plants in water), in which nutrient-rich aquaculture water is delivered to hydroponically grown plants, where nitrifying bacteria convert ammonia to nitrates. Because all aquaponic systems are based on contemporary hydroponic and aquaculture farming techniques, the size, complexity, and types of foods grown in an aquaponic system can differ just as much as any other system found in a different agricultural field.

Because aquaponics is free of artificial fertilizers and crop protection chemicals, and fish waste serves as the principal nutrition for plants, the demand for organically grown crops has huge potential and an unexplored market for emerging aquaponic farms and aquaponic system vendors.

Get a Free Sample Report with All Related Graphs & Charts (with COVID 19 Impact Analysis): https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/sample/aquaponics-market

Our Free Sample Report Includes:

2022 Updated Report Introduction, Overview, and In-depth industry analysis

COVID-19 Pandemic Outbreak Impact Analysis Included

157 + Pages Research Report (Inclusion of Updated Research)

Provide Chapter-wise guidance on Request

2022 Updated Regional Analysis with Graphical Representation of Size, Share & Trends

Includes Updated List of tables & figures

Updated Report Includes Top Market Players with their Business Strategy, Sales Volume, and Revenue Analysis

Zion Market Research methodology

Industry Dynamics:

Aquaponics Market: Growth Dynamics

Drivers: Free from any interference of harmful fertilizers or pesticides.

There are no toxic fertilizers or pesticides present in the aquaponics culture's produce. The World Bank's Fertilizer Price Index is forecasting an upward trend. The fish waster, which grows in water solvents, is a wonderful natural fertilizer for these veggies. This also helps to cut down on the costs of using fertilizers in large-scale production. Furthermore, no expensive equipment is used, implying that the market is profitable in the long run.

Restraints: Competition from hydroponics and vertical farming.

Agricultural techniques such as hydroponics and vertical farming are causing a surge in the use of sustainable agricultural methods. This is offering a significant hurdle to the market's expected growth over the forecast period, which ends in 2028.

Directly Purchase a Copy of the Report @ https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/buynow/su/aquaponics-market

Global Aquaponics Market: Segmentation

The global aquaponics market is segregated based on type, component, equipment, application, and end-user.

By Application, the global market is classified into Fish, Herbs, Fruits, and Vegetables. Fish has the largest market share and is expected to grow at the fastest rate over the projected period. The need for this segment is being driven by reasons such as rising global population, changing lifestyles, and increasing seafood demand for human consumption.

By Equipment, the global market is classified into Pumps and Valves, Water Heaters, Fish Purge Systems, Aeration Systems, Water Quality Testing, and Others. During the projected period, the others (grow lights for plants) category will have the biggest market share. The demand for this category is being accelerated by factors such as growing indoor farming and increasing utilization of grow lights in indoor farming.

Get More Insight before Buying@ : https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/inquiry/aquaponics-market

List of Key Players of Aquaponics Market:

Aquaponic Lynx LLC

GreenLife Aquaponics

Nelson & Pade Aquaponics

The Aquaponic Source

ECF Farm systems GmbH

MyAquaponics

Backyard Aquaponics

NutraPonics Canada Corporation

Symbiotic Aquaponic

Endless Food Systems.

Key questions answered in this report:

What are the growth rate forecast and market size for Aquaponics Market?

What are the key driving factors propelling the Aquaponics Market forward?

What are the most important companies in the Aquaponics Market Industry?

What segments does the Aquaponics Market cover?

How can I receive a free copy of the Aquaponics Market sample report and company profiles?

Report Scope:

Report Attribute Details Market size value in 2021 USD 872.7 Million Revenue forecast in 2028 USD 1807.29 Million Growth Rate CAGR of almost 12.9 % 2022-2028 Base Year 2020 Historic Years 2016 - 2021 Forecast Years 2022 - 2028 Segments Covered By Product Type, By Application, and By End Use Forecast Units Value (USD Million), and Volume (Units) Quantitative Units Revenue in USD million/billion and CAGR from 2022 to 2028 Regions Covered North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa, and Rest of World Countries Covered U.S., Canada, Mexico, U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Argentina, GCC Countries, and South Africa, among others Companies Covered Aquaponic Lynx LLC, GreenLife Aquaponics, Nelson & Pade Aquaponics, The Aquaponic Source, ECF Farm systems GmbH, MyAquaponics, Backyard Aquaponics, NutraPonics Canada Corporation, Symbiotic Aquaponic, and Endless Food Systems. Report Coverage Market growth drivers, restraints, opportunities, Porter's five forces analysis, PEST analysis, value chain analysis, regulatory landscape, market attractiveness analysis by segments and region, company market share analysis, and COVID-19 impact analysis. Customization Scope Avail customized purchase options to meet your exact research needs. https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/custom/2240

Free Brochure: https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/requestbrochure/aquaponics-market

Recent Developments

April 2021- France-based indoor farming company Les Nouvelles Fermes raised EUR 2 million (approximately USD 2.4 million) in its first round of funding by the investors from IRDI, the Banque des Territoires, Credit Agricole Aquitaine and the CIC. The company has plans to build the largest aquaponic farm in Europe, with this funding.

2019- Superior Fresh, the Midwest's premier aquaponic produce provider, has increased the size of its greenhouses from 6 to 13 acres and the size of its aquaculture facility from 40,000 to 100,000 square feet.

Regional Dominance:

Asia-Pacific region has the second-largest market share.

Because of the increasing use of modern farming techniques and the growing demand for organic food, the North American area has the largest market share in the worldwide aquaponics industry. The Asia-Pacific region has the second-largest market share in the aquaponics industry, thanks to ongoing technological advancements. Furthermore, increased demand for improved agricultural productivity in countries such as China and India drives the business. The European region has the third-largest market share in the aquaponics market due to the presence of a well-established infrastructure. Furthermore, easy technical process adoption was followed by an increase in per capita income. Due to rising demand for low operating costs combined with high yields, the aquaponics industry is expanding in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa.

Global Aquaponics Market is segmented as follows:

Aquaponics Market: By Type Outlook (2022-2028)

Media Filled Growbeds (MFG)

Nutrient Film Technique (NFT)

Deep Water Culture (DWC)

Others

Aquaponics Market: By Component Outlook (2022-2028)

Bio Filter

Settling Basins

Fish tanks

Soil-free plant bed

Rearing Tanks

Aquaponic Produce

Others

Aquaponics Market: By Equipment Outlook (2022-2028)

Pumps and Valves

Water Heaters

Fish Purge Systems

Aeration Systems

Water Quality Testing

Others

Aquaponics Market: By Applications Outlook (2022-2028)

Fish

Herbs

Fruits

Vegetables

Aquaponics Market: By End-User Outlook (2022-2028)

Commercial

Home Production

Aquaponics Market: By Region Outlook (2022-2028)

North America

The U.S.

Canada

Europe

France

The UK

Spain

Germany

Italy

Rest of Europe

Asia Pacific

China

Japan

India

South Korea

Southeast Asia

Rest of Asia Pacific

Latin America

Brazil

Mexico

Rest of Latin America

Middle East & Africa

GCC

South Africa

Rest of Middle East & Africa

Press Release For Aquaponics Market: https://www.zionmarketresearch.com/news/global-aquaponics-market

Browse Other Related Research Reports from Zion Market Research

Food Supplements Industry Market - Global Industry Analysis : The global Food Supplements Industry accrued earnings worth approximately 161.2 (USD Billion) in 2021 and is predicted to gain revenue of about 321.2(USD Billion) by 2028, is set to record a CAGR of nearly 8.8% over the period from 2022 to 2028.Fin Fish Market - Global Industry Analysis.

Fin Fish Market - Global Industry Analysis : The size of the global fin fish market is expected to become around USD 29.85 billion in 2028 from USD 20.48 billion in 2021 growing at the rate (CAGR) of 4.81%. This report discusses market research on the fin fish market, its market growth factors, and its challenges.

Confectionery Market - Global Industry Analysis: The global confectionery market was worth around USD 187.9 billion in 2021 and is estimated to grow to about USD 240.4 billion by 2028, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 3.5 percent over the forecast period.

Browse through Zion Market Research's coverage of the Global Food & Beverage Industry

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SOURCE Zion Market Research
THEBARTON, Australia, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Agilex Biolabs Pty Ltd has unveiled its new building with a ribbon cutting ceremony by The Honourable Stephen Patterson MP Minister for Trade and Investment at 12:30pm on Thursday 17 February 2022 at 31 Dalgleish street Thebarton South Australia 5031.



Agilex Biolabs launched its new laboratory for the analysis of large molecule therapeutics, more than doubling the geographic area of its Adelaide campus. The addition of this 2,520 m2 facility expands the service capabilities of Australia's most technologically advanced bioanalytical partner and brings a new point of pride to South Australia.

State-of-the-art instrument platforms and increased capacity empower drug sponsors from all over the world to succeed as they expand into the novel, promising world of large molecule therapeutics. Areas of medicine such as oncology are seeing new ways of approaching treatment due to innovative modalities like antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) and allogeneic cell therapies. Gene therapies and vaccines created using genetic platforms such as RNA, miRNA, and siRNA need specialised tools and technology to measure critical safety and efficacy endpoints in human clinical trials. The new Agilex large molecule facility features cutting-edge bioanalytical techniques and equipment specifically designed for these fast-growing therapeutic areas, such as digital droplet quantitative RT-PCR analysis and an EliSPOT/FluoroSPOT multi-spot reader for high-sensitivity molecule detection.

Before the new Agilex large molecule facility was built, many drug sponsors conducting clinical trials in Australia would have to ship their clinical samples to labs in other countries to get important patient safety data. The expansion into this kind of support represents South Australia's ability and willingness to accommodate the huge influx of biopharmaceutical companies from all over the world bringing their toxicology studies and clinical programs to Australia.

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Adelaide's scientific community can blossom as Agilex Biolab continues to grow. Already staffed with over 150 scientists and support personnel, the comprehensive bioanalytical service headquarters will soon reach 200 welcoming experts from all over the world to its ranks.

"The world's most talented, driven scientists are drawn to research facilities that foster scientific advancement and cutting-edge technologymany of those people will now be coming to Adelaide," said Agilex Biolabs CEO, Jason Valentine. "Committed investment and our local community's support for this new center of scientific excellence will elevate South Australia's reputation for spurring innovation and harboring success."

The community offered their enthusiastic applause at the new facility's official opening on Thursday afternoon. The ribbon cutting ceremony was conducted by the Minister for Trade and Investment, The Honourable Stephen Patterson MP.

Minister for Trade and Investment Stephen Patterson said the State Government had an ambitious plan to grow SA's Health and Medical Industries sector's contribution to the state's economy.

"As a government, we're working collaboratively with industry to more than double the HMI economic contribution to SA from $2.3 billion to $5 billion by 2030.

"South Australia is open for business and at the forefront of world-leading capabilities, bio-tech precincts and an academic research ecosystem that makes it the ideal place to invest and do business."

The traditional 'welcome to country' and cleansing ceremony was led by local indigenous leader Jack Buckskin.

About Agilex Biolabs

Agilex Biolabs is Australia's leading provider of bioanalytical services and toxicology studies supporting preclinical and clinical drug development. With over 25 years of specialized experience and a rapidly growing suite of full-service offerings, Agilex equips biopharma companies from United States, Asia-Pacific, and European regions with reliable, defendable data as they advance novel therapeutics through the development pipeline. By combining specialized expertise, technological innovation, and a 25-year track record, the Agilex team has successfully supported hundreds of preclinical and clinical trials from around the world. Agilex Biolabs is headquartered in Adelaide, South Australia, with additional laboratory sites in Queensland. For more information, visit https://www.agilexbiolabs.com/

Social Links

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgilexBiolabs

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/agilex-biolabs

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK8yK3JxXni6QhiorMUIyLA

Media Contact

Brand: Agilex Biolabs

Contact: Janki Patel, Marketing Associate

E-Mail: janki.patel@agilexbiolabs.com

Website: https://www.agilexbiolabs.com/

SOURCE: Agilex Biolabs




Erdene Resource Development Corporation

HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Erdene Resource Development Corp. (TSX:ERD; MSE:ERDN) ("Erdene" or the "Company") is pleased to announce operating and financial results for the three months ended March 31, 2022 and to provide an update on its Khundii Gold District, including its Bayan Khundii Gold Project (Bayan Khundii or BK). This release should be read in conjunction with the Companys Q1-2022 Financial Statements and MD&A, available on the Companys website and SEDAR.



Quotes from the Company:

During the first quarter of 2022, we made further progress on our objectives of expanding the Khundii Gold District, while progressing the Bayan Khundii Gold Project towards development, said Peter Akerley, Erdenes President and CEO. Weve recently launched the first phase of our 2022 drill program, that will follow up on our 2021 discoveries at the Dark Horse Mane and Ulaan Southeast prospects. These discoveries support Erdenes thesis that our Khundii District trend has the potential to host a multimillion-ounce gold deposit, which could significantly increase gold production from the Bayan Khundii Gold Project.

We also made solid progress advancing Bayan Khundii towards a construction decision, despite the continued impact of COVID-19, continued Mr. Akerley. Engineering and design work is largely complete and procurement is well advanced in advance of a construction decision. Weve also begun conceptual design work to determine the potential impact of a scale up in production in advance of the commencement of full construction.

Q1-2022 Highlights and Significant Subsequent Events:

Bayan Khundii Gold Project  100% Erdene

Progressed construction readiness activities for the Bayan Khundii Gold Project: Early works completed including camp expansion, communications infrastructure installation and project controls software implementation Re-pricing and tender for all major mechanical and construction works well advanced, with anticipated completion in Q2 2022 Preferred vendors selected for Engineering, Procurement and Construction Management (EPCM) and non-process infrastructure, including camp, warehouse and workshop Key personnel onboarded and project execution plans and manuals prepared in advance of a construction decision Initiated confirmatory studies for mine water supply, with results expected in Q2 2022

Obtained key permits and advanced regulatory approvals required for mine development: Regulatory review of detailed drawings well advanced, with nine facilities fully approved, including those planned during the site establishment and initial construction  received construction permits for eight of these facilities in February 2022 Process plant regulatory review ongoing with approvals anticipated in Q3 2022

Continued local community programs in advance of full construction: Undertook several community-led programs to support public health and basic education in the sub-province, within the framework of Local Cooperation Agreement Increased employment ahead of expected early works decision in Q2 2022, with nearly 30 local residents recruited Ramped up vegetation program on-site at 2 ha area for future reclamation and environmental protection





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Exploration

Launched first phase of the 2022 exploration program, targeting 10,000 metres of diamond and 3,000 metres of rotary air blast (RAB) drilling Focused on expanding high-grade gold mineralization discovered in 2021 at the Ulaan and Dark Horse discoveries, confirming continuity at the Altan Nar Gold Project, and testing near-surface, high-grade oxide gold targets across the District First results from the program are expected to be announced in late May 2022





Corporate

Progressed due diligence for the Bayan Khundii Project Finance with EDC and Mongolian financiers EDC mandate letter contemplates a senior secured debt facility of up to US$55 million EDC term sheet agreed and detail and drafting underway in advance of anticipated mid-2022 financial close Due diligence is proceeding in parallel with Mongolian financial institutions on subordinated debt

Recorded a net loss of $1,231,156 for the three months ended March 31, 2022, compared to a net loss of $617,084 for the three months ended March 31, 2021 Exploration and evaluation expenditures totaled $2,904,572, including capitalized expenditures of $2,122,948, for the three months ended March 31, 2022, compared to $2,523,968, including capitalized expenditures of $2,289,725, for the comparative prior year period, as expenditures on the BK Gold Project Detailed Engineering & Design work and Construction Readiness activities (including deposits on long-lead items), exceeded the prior year period due to a ramp up in activity. Additionally, Stakeholder relations costs exceeded those in Q1 2021, due to payments under the Local Co-operation Agreement (LCA), executed in mid-2021 Corporate and administrative expenses totaled $445,446 for the three months ended March 31, 2022, compared to $394,604 for the three months ended March 31, 2021, with the year on year variance primarily due to higher administrative salaries in support of pre-development and financing work for the Bayan Khundii Gold Project and increased regulatory fees driven by growth in the Companys market capitalization





Qualified Person

Peter Dalton, P.Geo. (Nova Scotia), Senior Geologist for Erdene, is the Qualified Person as that term is defined in National Instrument 43-101 and has reviewed and approved the technical information contained in this news release.

About Erdene

Erdene Resource Development Corp. is a Canada-based resource company focused on the acquisition, exploration, and development of precious and base metals in underexplored and highly prospective Mongolia. The Company has interests in three mining licenses and an exploration license in Southwest Mongolia, where exploration success has led to the discovery and definition of the Khundii Gold District. Erdene Resource Development Corp. is listed on the Toronto and the Mongolian stock exchanges. Further information is available at www.erdene.com. Important information may be disseminated exclusively via the website; investors should consult the site to access this information.

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain information regarding Erdene contained herein may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Forward-looking statements may include estimates, plans, expectations, opinions, forecasts, projections, guidance, or other statements that are not statements of fact. Although Erdene believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to have been correct. Erdene cautions that actual performance will be affected by a number of factors, most of which are beyond its control, and that future events and results may vary substantially from what Erdene currently foresees. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include the ability to obtain required third party approvals, market prices, exploitation, and exploration results, continued availability of capital and financing and general economic, market or business conditions. The forward-looking statements are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. The information contained herein is stated as of the current date and is subject to change after that date. The Company does not assume the obligation to revise or update these forward-looking statements, except as may be required under applicable securities laws.

NO REGULATORY AUTHORITY HAS APPROVED OR DISAPPROVED THE CONTENTS OF THIS RELEASE

Erdene Contact Information

Peter C. Akerley, President and CEO, or

Robert Jenkins, CFO

Phone: (902) 423-6419

Email: info@erdene.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ErdeneRes

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ErdeneResource

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/erdene-resource-development-corp-/




CINCINNATI, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- In celebration of International Nurses Day and the Year of the Nurse Educator, Health Carousel, LLC, the 17th largest healthcare staffing agency in the US, today announced a three-year commitment of $200,000 to fund a variety of nurse training and education programs in the US and abroad. This substantial, multi-year investment represents a small portion of the work underway through the company's Light the Way initiative, which focuses on ethical recruitment and the sustainability of the nursing profession.

Health Carousel's Light the Way initiative takes its namesake from Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing and known as the "The Lady With the Lamp" for the nightly rounds she made caring for wounded soldiers, guided only by a dim oil lamp. Since their inception in 2004, Health Carousel has maintained its Light the Way program, through which all of their programs and activities promoting ethical recruitment practices and global nursing sustainability have been funneled. Light the Way is proud on this International Nurses Day 2022, to announce additional efforts in the US and abroad.

Providing Support in the US and Abroad

In the United States, funding is earmarked to establish Light the Way Scholarships. These awards will primarily be given to nurses wishing to pursue a graduate or post-graduate nursing degree. Discussions are currently underway with several professional and nationality-specific US-based nursing organizations to administer the awards. Additionally, Chamberlain University was named a preferred nursing education partner for Health Carousel earlier this week.

Around the globe, Light the Way funds are earmarked for a variety of nursing sustainability endeavors. In the Philippines, funds will be used for Ph.D. nurse educator scholarships to improve both the student capacity of nursing schools and the quality of education they provide. In Uganda, funds are being used to establish a nurse training lab in coordination with the Uganda Nurse and Midwives Union. Additional programs are under development.

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A Focus on Nurse Education and Educators

Health Carousel's decision that the funds are to be used to build nurse educational capacity is entirely purposeful, as it can lessen the US and global nursing shortage. According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing , in 2019, US nursing schools turned away more than 80,000 qualified nursing applicants because of an insufficient number of faculty to teach them. In the Philippines, the majority of nursing faculty lack advanced education and training and this reflects in the low pass rates of their students taking the country's nurse licensure exam. Similar difficulties persist worldwide.

"We're making a substantial financial and administrative commitment, but it's much needed to support the nursing profession and its many challenges that grew during the pandemic," said Bill DeVille, Founder and Board Chair of Health Carousel. "Investing in nursing's future is a tradition at Health Carousel that we have quietly celebrated. Most don't realize that we have helped hundreds of nurses earn their Master's of Nursing degrees since our founding in 2004. Today, many recipients of these awards serve as nursing leaders and educators in the US and internationally."

Earl Dalton, Health Carousel Chief Nursing Officer explains that these investments have a direct impact on patient care.

"Health Carousel's investment battles against industry trends that threaten patient care," said Dalton. "Namely, the experienced nurses in the US are rapidly leaving the nursing workforce and our patient population is becoming older, with much more complex care needs. The result is a widening experience-complexity gap. Put simply, there aren't enough veteran nurses to mentor younger ones. Health Carousel's investment in nursing training and advanced degrees is an effective way to address this situation."

About Health Carousel

Health Carousel is a total talent management company with a leading portfolio of workforce solutions and healthcare staffing solutions including travel nursing, locum tenens, and international healthcare providers.

Health Carousel is listed as the 17th largest healthcare staffing company in the US by Staffing Industry Analysts. Health Carousel aims to deliver the finest healthcare talent and workforce management solutions, so every patient has access to a qualified healthcare professional when and where they need them. Health Carousel has a steadfast dedication to the highest industry standards, which are without equal in the industry. This is evident by the codes of professional practice that they follow and in the Light the Way program, through which our ethical and sustainable recruitment initiatives are delivered.

CONTACT:

pr@healthcarousel.com

Cision

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SOURCE Health Carousel
iBio, Inc.

BRYAN, Texas, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- iBio, Inc. (NYSEA:IBIO) (iBio or the Company), a developer of next-generation biopharmaceuticals and pioneer of the sustainable FastPharming Manufacturing System, today announces its financial results for the fiscal quarter ended March 31, 2022 and provides a corporate update.



In this quarter, we took multiple steps forward towards becoming a clinical-stage company  a potentially major value inflection point, said Tom Isett, Chairman & CEO of iBio. We anticipate there may be a notable medical and business opportunity for our nucleocapsid-based COVID-19 vaccine candidate, as the durability and efficacy of the existing spike-based vaccines are called into question at the same time as new waves of variants are forecasted to arrive. Concurrently, we are rapidly advancing our lead immuno-oncology asset, the IL-2-sparing anti-CD25 antibody IBIO-101, with plans to be in the clinic in calendar 2023. In addition, our early-stage drug discovery programs are all advancing well, and we also continue to demonstrate the quality of our FastPharming System and potency-enhancing capability of our GlycaneeringSM Technology. Altogether, we believe that we are well-positioned to continue executing our growth strategy.

Third Quarter and Recent Business Developments:

BIOPHARMACEUTICALS

Vaccines

Investigational New Drug (IND)-Enabling challenge studies of IBIO-202, the Companys second-generation vaccine candidate for multi-variant COVID-19 disease, are underway and proceeding as planned. Assuming favorable study outcomes, iBio plans to file an IND application with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) before the end of calendar 2022.

Separately, iBio continues to evaluate the feasibility of intradermal delivery of its vaccine candidates, including its SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid antigen, through its work with a leading innovator of microarray patch systems.

Data analysis from the immunogenicity study of IBIO-400 has confirmed intramuscular injection is the preferred route of administration for the Companys vaccine candidate for Classical Swine Fever. Updated efficacy protocols, manufacturing processes, and validation plans were submitted to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) during the quarter to enable manufacturing clearance of pre-license lots for studies material to licensure. Given that regulatory review can be extended for first time applicants, iBio is estimating a response from the USDA on the submission within approximately 12 months.



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Therapeutics

iBio continues to develop its IL-2 sparing anti-CD25 antibody, IBIO-101, on the FastPharming Platform. Comparability studies have demonstrated that by applying the Companys Glycaneering Technology, the FastPharming System produces a potent, high-quality, afucosylated molecule that is equivalent to the same version of the antibody produced with traditional mammalian cell culture manufacturing methods.

The Company announced today that it has completed the Lead Optimization stage in the development of IBIO-101 and has entered the IND-Enabling stage. An IND for IBIO-101 is expected before the end of Q2 of calendar 2023.

RubrYc Therapeutics (RubrYc) achieved a technology validation milestone with a third party during the quarter. As a result, iBio acquired approximately 1.0 million additional shares of RubrYc for $2.5 million per the existing Stock Purchase Agreement.

Initial data from the evaluation of the potential anti-cancer effects of the Companys endostatin E4 molecule in combination with other cancer treatments upon fibrotic tumors is expected in the second half of calendar year 2022.

BIOPROCESS

Pursuant to a second Statement of Work (SOW) under an existing Master Joint Development Agreement between iBio and Safi Biosolutions, Inc., iBio will assist Safi in its efforts related to the USU 4D Bio3 On-Demand Blood program, funded by the Defense Health Program (DHP), by utilizing the FastPharming system to make one of the most critical reagents used in the production of Safis manufactured Red Blood Cells (mRBCs).

iBio recognized $1.8 million in royalty revenue from the license of its plant-based drug manufacturing intellectual property to Fraunhofer USA, Inc. (Fraunhofer USA). It also received the first of two $5.1 million payments from Fraunhofer USA related to the settlement of the intellectual property dispute.

Third Quarter and Recent Corporate Developments:

On January 31, 2022, the Company reconvened its 2021 Annual Meeting to allow more of its stockholders to consider and vote on Proposal 4 (Reverse Stock Split) and Proposal 5 (Change in Authorized Shares). Although approximately 65% and 68% of the votes received were in favor of Proposal 4 and Proposal 5, respectively, the total number of shares voting in favor were insufficient for them to pass.

Today, the Company filed its preliminary proxy materials with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in connection with a Special Meeting of Stockholders (the Special Meeting) to approve two similar proposals (Reverse Stock Split and Change in Authorized Shares) (the Proposals).

The Company has entered into a securities purchase agreement with a certain accredited investor for the issuance and sale of 1,000 shares of Series 2022 Convertible Preferred Stock, $0.001 par value per share (the Preferred Stock), at a price of $0.27 per share. The Preferred Stock permits the holder to vote at the Special Meeting, on the Reverse Stock Split proposal, with the holders of the common stock as a single class, with each share of Preferred Stock being entitled to 5,000,000 votes per share, provided that any votes cast by the Preferred Stock with respect to the Proposal must be voted in the same proportion as the aggregate shares of common stock are voted on the Proposal. At its sole discretion, the Companys Board of Directors may convert the Preferred Stock to common stock at a conversion ratio of 1:1.



The increasing prevalence of brokerage firms opting to forego discretionary or proportionate voting of the shares held by them in street name has made it significantly more difficult for companies like iBio with a large retail stockholder base, to secure affirmative votes from a majority of the outstanding shares entitled to vote, said Mr. Isett. Over the past few weeks, we have been exploring ways to overcome that structural impediment to implementing the will of our voting stockholders and believe that the Preferred Stock placement provides an elegant and validated solution; serving to amplify, but not fundamentally alter, the underlying vote.

Financial Results:

Revenues for the third quarter ended March 31, 2022, were approximately $1.9 million, an increase of approximately $1.1 million, or 154%, compared to $0.8 million in the fiscal quarter ended March 31, 2021. As is commonplace for early-stage Pharma Services companies, the Company experiences significant quarter-to-quarter revenue variability, driven by factors such as the number and size of customer contracts, as well as the timing of revenue recognition.

R&D and G&A expenses for the third quarter of fiscal 2022 increased 157% and 60%, respectively, over the comparable period in fiscal 2021. This reflects the Companys growing investments in its pipeline, platform technologies, employees, and related infrastructure. iBio anticipates this trend continuing, however, the rate of growth is expected to moderate over time.

The Companys consolidated net loss for the third quarter ended March 31, 2022, was approximately $12.4 million, or $0.06 per share, compared to a net loss of approximately $7.7 million, or $0.04 per share, in the same period of 2021.

As of March 31, 2022, the Company had cash and cash equivalents plus debt securities of approximately $48.6 million, excluding $5.9 million of restricted cash. Based on management assumptions, including assumptions regarding the sale-leaseback of the facility in Bryan, we continue to believe that we have adequate cash to support our activities through September 30, 2023.

Webcast and Conference Call

iBio management will host a webcast and conference call at 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time today, May 12, 2022, to discuss these results and provide a corporate update.

The live and archived webcast may be accessed on the Companys website at www.ibioinc.com under News and Events in the Investors section. The live call can be accessed by dialing (833) 672-0651 (domestic) or (929) 517-0227 (international) and referencing conference code: 2392536.

About iBio, Inc.

iBio is a developer of next-generation biopharmaceuticals and a pioneer in sustainable, plant-based biologics manufacturing. Its FastPharming System combines vertical farming, automated hydroponics, and novel glycosylation technologies to rapidly deliver high-quality monoclonal antibodies, vaccines, bioinks and other proteins. iBio is developing proprietary biopharmaceuticals for the treatment of cancers, as well as fibrotic and infectious diseases. The Companys wholly-owned subsidiary, iBio CDMO LLC, provides FastPharming Contract Development and Manufacturing Services along with GlycaneeringSM Development Services for advanced recombinant protein design. For more information, visit www.ibioinc.com.

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

Certain statements in this press release constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the federal securities laws. Words such as "may," "might," "will," "should," "believe," "expect," "anticipate," "estimate," "continue," "predict," "forecast," "project," "plan," "intend" or similar expressions, or statements regarding intent, belief, or current expectations, are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based upon current estimates and assumptions and include statements regarding there being a notable medical and business opportunity for our nucleocapsid-based COVID-19 vaccine candidate, as the durability and efficacy of the existing spike-based vaccines are called into question at the same time as new waves of variants are forecasted to arrive; plans to file an IND for IBIO-101 by the end of Q2 of calendar 2023 and be in the clinic with IBIO-101 in calendar 2023; continuing to demonstrate the quality of our FastPharming System and potency-enhancing capability of our Glycaneering Technology; the Company being well-positioned to continue executing its growth strategy; filing an IND application with FDA before the end of calendar 2022 for IBIO-202; a response from the USDA on the submission for BIO-400 within approximately 12 months; having initial data from the evaluation of the potential anti-cancer effects of the Companys endostatin E4 molecule in combination with other cancer treatments upon fibrotic tumors in the second half of calendar year 2022; the preferred stock placement providing an elegant solution to implement the will of the Companys voting stockholders; R&D and G&A expenses continuing to increase with the rate of growth moderating over time; and the Company having adequate cash to support its activities through September 30, 2023. While the Company believes these forward-looking statements are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on any such forward-looking statements, which are based on information available to us on the date of this release. These forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties, many of which are difficult to predict that could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations and assumptions from those set forth or implied by any forward-looking statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations include, among others, the Companys ability to continue to execute its growth strategy; its ability to file an IND for IBIO-101 by the end of Q2 2023 and to be in the clinic with IBIO-101 in calendar 2023: file an IND application with FDA before the end of calendar 2022 for IBIO-202; receive a response from the USDA on the submission for BIO-400 within approximately 12 months; receiving initial data from the evaluation of the potential anti-cancer effects of the Companys endostatin E4 molecule in combination with other cancer treatments upon fibrotic tumors in the second half of calendar year 2022; its ability to provide a solution to implement the will of the stockholders; its ability to obtain regulatory approvals for commercialization of its product candidates, or to comply with ongoing regulatory requirements; regulatory limitations relating to its ability to promote or commercialize its product candidates for specific indications; acceptance of its product candidates in the marketplace and the successful development, marketing or sale of products; its ability to maintain its license agreements; the continued maintenance and growth of its patent estate; its ability to establish and maintain collaborations and attract and increase partnership opportunities for its bioprocess business; its ability to obtain or maintain the capital or grants necessary to fund its research and development activities and whether the Company will incur unforeseen expenses or liabilities or other market factors; successful compliance with governmental regulations applicable to its manufacturing facility; competition; its ability to increase its authorized shares; its ability to retain its key employees or maintain its NYSE American listing; and the other factors discussed in the Companys filings with the SEC including the Companys Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended June 30, 2021 and the Companys subsequent filings with the SEC on Forms 10-Q and 8-K. The information in this release is provided only as of the date of this release, and the Company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained in this release on account of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by law.

Contact:

Stephen Kilmer

iBio, Inc.

Investor Relations

(646) 274-3580

skilmer@ibioinc.com

iBio, Inc. and Subsidiaries

Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheets

(In Thousands, except share and per share amounts)

March 31, June 30, 2022 2021 (Unaudited) Assets Current assets: Cash and cash equivalents $ 33,767 $ 77,404 Accounts receivable - trade 1,004 426 Settlement receivable - current portion 5,100 5,100 Investments in debt securities 14,813 19,570 Inventory 3,283 27 Prepaid expenses and other current assets 2,349 2,070 Total Current Assets 60,316 104,597 Restricted cash 5,941  Convertible promissory note receivable and accrued interest 1,612 1,556 Settlement receivable - noncurrent portion  5,100 Finance lease right-of-use assets, net of accumulated amortization 86 26,111 Operating lease right-of-use asset 5,151  Fixed assets, net of accumulated depreciation 34,581 8,628 Intangible assets, net of accumulated amortization 4,919 952 Investment in equity security - at cost 1,760  Prepaid expenses - noncurrent 975  Security deposits 29 24 Total Assets $ 115,370 $ 146,968 Liabilities and Equity Current liabilities: Accounts payable $ 5,279 $ 2,254 Accrued expenses (related party of $0 and $701 as of March 31, 2022 and June 30, 2021, respectively) 2,939 3,001 Finance lease obligations - current portion 45 367 Operating lease obligation - current portion 10  Note payable - PPP loan - current portion  600 Contract liabilities 8 423 Total Current Liabilities 8,281 6,645 Finance lease obligations - net of current portion 41 31,755 Operating lease obligation - net of current portion 5,548  Term note payable - net of deferred financing costs 22,120  Total Liabilities 35,990 38,400 Equity iBio, Inc. Stockholders Equity: Common stock - $0.001 par value; 275,000,000 shares authorized at March 31, 2022 and June 30, 2021; 218,165,624 and 217,873,094 shares issued and outstanding as of March 31, 2022 and June 30, 2021, respectively 218 217 Additional paid-in capital 286,232 282,058 Accumulated other comprehensive loss (194 ) (63 ) Accumulated deficit (206,876 ) (173,627 ) Total iBio, Inc. Stockholders Equity 79,380 108,585 Noncontrolling interest  (17 ) Total Equity 79,380 108,568 Total Liabilities and Equity $ 115,370 $ 146,968

iBio, Inc. and Subsidiaries

Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations and Comprehensive Loss

(Unaudited; in Thousands, except per share amounts)

Three Months Ended Nine Months Ended March 31, March 31, 2022 2021 2022 2021 Revenues $ 1,943 $ 765 $ 2,322 $ 1,880 Cost of goods sold 48 493 201 1,275 Gross profit 1,895 272 2,121 605 Operating expenses: Research and development 5,551 2,162 11,393 6,892 General and administrative (related party of $0, $491, $250 and $1,394) 8,526 5,313 23,522 15,385 Total operating expenses 14,077 7,475 34,915 22,277 Operating loss (12,182 ) (7,203 ) (32,794 ) (21,672 ) Other income (expense): Interest expense (related party of $0, $610, $810 and $1,836) (250 ) (612 ) (1,187 ) (1,841 ) Interest income 40 152 111 183 Royalty income 2 1 7 3 Forgiveness of note payable and accrued interest - SBA loan   607  Other   6  Total other (expense) (208 ) (459 ) (456 ) (1,655 ) Consolidated net loss (12,390 ) (7,662 ) (33,250 ) (23,327 ) Net loss attributable to noncontrolling interest  1 1 4 Net loss attributable to iBio, Inc. (12,390 ) (7,661 ) (33,249 ) (23,323 ) Preferred stock dividends  (64 ) (88 ) (195 ) Net loss attributable to iBio, Inc. stockholders $ (12,390 ) $ (7,725 ) $ (33,337 ) $ (23,518 ) Comprehensive loss: Consolidated net loss $ (12,390 ) $ (7,662 ) $ (33,250 ) $ (23,327 ) Other comprehensive loss - unrealized loss on debt securities (103 ) (16 ) (131 ) (36 ) Comprehensive loss $ (12,493 ) $ (7,678 ) $ (33,381 ) $ (23,363 ) Loss per common share attributable to iBio, Inc. stockholders - basic and diluted $ (0.06 ) $ (0.04 ) $ (0.15 ) $ (0.12 ) Weighted-average common shares outstanding - basic and diluted 218,096 215,539 217,986 188,493








By Azernews





Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov will meet Armenian and Russian Foreign Ministers Ararat Mirzoyan and Sergey Lavrov respectively in Dushanbe, Tajikistan.

"A meeting of the foreign ministers of Armenia, Russia, and Azerbaijan is planned in Dushanbe on May 12-13," Armenian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Vahan Hunanyan said.

As reported earlier, the Azerbaijani minister left for Dushanbe to attend a meeting of the CIS Council of Foreign Ministers on May 12.

Bayramov is planned to hold a number of meetings during the visit, the ministry said.

The direct phone conversation between the Azerbaijani and Armenian ministers, the first in about 30 years, occurred on April 11, 2022. Following that, the ministers held another phone conversation on April 25.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, and European Council President Charles Michel met in a trilateral format in Brussels on April 6.

The meeting was held as a follow-up to the discussions on the situation in the South Caucasus region and the development of EU relations with both nations.

The leaders took stock of developments since their last meeting in Brussels in December 2021 and their videoconference meeting, together with French President Emmanuel Macron, in February 2022. They reviewed progress on the implementation of undertaken commitments. The leaders discussed the recently reported tensions and reiterated the need for adhering fully to the provisions of the November 10, 2020, trilateral statement.

Both Aliyev and Pashinyan have expressed willingness to work quickly toward a peace agreement between their countries. To that end, it was decided to instruct foreign ministers to begin work on drafting a future peace treaty that would address all of the issues.

At the same time, it was also agreed to convene a Joint Border Commission by the end of April, of which the mandate will be to delimit the bilateral border between Armenia and Azerbaijan and ensure a stable security situation along and in the vicinity of the border.
(Bloomberg) -- Mining investors are stampeding back into a region many had seemed determined to leave.

Most Read from Bloomberg

Straddling the border of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, a vast forested area roughly the size of Portugal contains one of the worlds richest caches of minerals: copper for wires and cables, and cobalt for rechargeable batteries. At the intersection of the two African nations, trucks queue for about 53 kilometers (33 miles) along a cratered road snaking past giant mounds of mining residue and villagers selling stacks of watermelons  most of them carrying metals vital to the global energy transition.

But despite the lucrative resources, western mining companies have for years put more effort into trying to get out of, than into, the central African copperbelt, increasingly frustrated by a litany of policy u-turns and cash grabs.

Suddenly thats no longer the case.

Existing investors are doubling down, and others  like giant BHP Group  are sniffing around the region for the first time in years. First Quantum Minerals Ltd. finally approved a billion-dollar expansion in Zambia, while Barrick Gold Corp., which considered selling its Zambian mine and is an outspoken critic of the Congolese government, is hunting for new projects in both countries. Anglo American Plc announced a new joint venture in Zambia on Thursday.

Whats changed? In Zambia, new President Hakainde Hichilema is going out of his way to woo investors and repair relations damaged by his predecessor. He says he wants to triple copper output in the next decade, an ambitious target that would require $30 billion of investments, according to analysts at BMO Capital Markets.

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More broadly, theres a growing awareness that copper and cobalt are central to the worlds shift toward renewable energy, and security of supply will become crucial in the coming decades. The global copper market is already tight and new mines are difficult to find. In cobalt, Congo is so dominant that its impossible to ignore.

At the same time, other copper-rich countries like Peru and especially Chile  long viewed by the industry as a safe place to build  are looking less friendly.

You cant ask people to invest in your country without giving them comfort, Barrick Chief Executive Officer Mark Bristow said in an interview. Money is a very panicky commodity and it runs away quickly from stress.

While most US, European and Australian mining companies backed away from the copperbelt over the last decade  Glencore Plc is the one major exception that has invested heavily in two giant Congolese copper and cobalt mines  Chinas resource giants have dug in.

Thats nowhere more apparent than the Congolese city of Kolwezi, which owes its very existence to mining  founded in the 1930s to exploit the giant mineral deposits.

On a drive through its main street today, the cultural influence is everywhere: billboards for Zijin cement sit on nearly every corner, while Chinese karaoke bars and casinos flank the road.

Now, other mining companies are again increasing their presence and activity. In Congo, a new mine spearheaded by billionaire Robert Friedland is rapidly ramping up production under a plan that would make it the worlds third-largest producer by 2024. BHP, the worlds biggest mining company, has held talks about buying into another of Friedlands Congo copper projects that neighbors the new Kamoa-Kakula mine, Bloomberg reported last year.

The African copperbelt and its role in supplying critical minerals is also getting increased attention at a government level. US Under Secretary for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment Jose W. Fernandez traveled this week to speak at the annual gathering of the continents mining industry in Cape Town, where critical mineral supply chains formed a central theme of his remarks. His next stop: two days in the Zambian capital to meet with Hichilema.

We think the mining sector in Africa has huge potential, Fernandez said on a call with reporters. We also know that in the clean energy future, critical minerals will be an important part of the solution and that African nations have a lot of the critical minerals, be it cobalt, manganese, lithium, and others, a lot of the  a lot of the critical minerals that will be needed to power turbines, to power electric batteries.

Zambia will need to attract as much as $180 million yearly in searching for and proving new reserves alone if it is to reach the government's ambitious production targets, Sokwani Chilembo, chief executive at the countrys mines lobby group, said in an interview last week.

The increase in copper prices over the past few years is "the major tailwind," he said. "It really has given everyones ambitions a boost.

The country is making a concerted effort across agencies and departments to provide an attractive environment for investors, Finance Minister Situmbeko Musokotwane said in an interview in his Lusaka office on May 5.

The government sees copper as the new oil and wants to benefit from the growing demand for electrification in the way that oil-rich countries capitalized on energy booms, he said. That means growing production levels.

The oil of Zambia  namely copper  is going to bring the benefits that weve seen elsewhere, Musokotwane said. Of course, its our responsibility that when this money comes through, it must be used properly.

(Updates with additional comments from Chamber of Mines.)

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek

2022 Bloomberg L.P.
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey (left) said he won't be Twitter's CEO after Elon Musk completes his buyout of the company. Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue/Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Twitter's founder Jack Dorsey quashed speculation that he would be back to lead the company.

"Nah, I'll never be CEO again," Dorsey tweeted on Wednesday.

Dorsey has been vocal about running Twitter as a public good and not as a company.

"Nah."

That's how Jack Dorsey, Twitter's founder, responded to speculation that he would return to helm the social-media platform after Elon Musk acquired the company.

On Wednesday, the YouTuber Charles Wieand tweeted that he predicted Musk would "just ask @Jack to be CEO of Twitter."

Dorsey replied, "Nah, I'll never be CEO again."

Some Twitter users urged him to reconsider, but Dorsey responded with a second "nah," adding that the company should "roll the dice again" and start fresh.

Users were also keen on hearing who the founder thought would make a good leader, to which Dorsey replied, "No one ultimately."

Dorsey has said on multiple occasions that he sees Twitter as a public good and is against running it as a corporation.

"In principle, I don't believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company," Dorsey tweeted last month.

Musk, who also runs Tesla and SpaceX, is in the midst of completing his acquisition of Twitter. The deal is expected to close in October.

In April, Dorsey tweeted that he believed Musk's buyout was the "right first step" in righting Twitter. He added that Musk was the "singular solution" he trusted to lead the platform.

Dorsey cofounded Twitter in 2006. He was fired from his role as CEO two years later but returned to helm the company again in 2015.

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Dorsey then stepped down in November and handed over the company's reins to the software engineer Parag Agrawal. Musk and Agrawal have often clashed, with the Tesla CEO regularly ridiculing Agrawal on Twitter. In a securities filing on April 13, Musk said he did not "have confidence in management."

Musk was considering becoming Twitter's interim CEO, CNBC reported last week.

Read the original article on Business Insider
First Lady of the United States Dr. Jill Biden

John Angelillo/UPI/Shutterstock Jill Biden

First Lady Jill Biden has written a heartfelt essay about her trip to Eastern Europe over the weekend, describing the grief, sorrow and fear she saw in the mothers she met in Slovakia, Romania and Ukraine who've been affected by Russia's war.

"They wear brave faces, but their emotion is portrayed in the slope of their shoulders, the nervousness in their bodies," Biden, 70, wrote in an op-ed for CNN. "Something is missing  laughter, a common language among women."

Dr. Biden also addressed Russian President Vladimir Putin directly in the essay, calling on him to "end this senseless and brutal war."

The first lady's trip included a surprise stop inside Ukraine on Mother's Day to meet Olena Zelenska, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's wife.

Zelenska "came out of hiding, leaving her own children, to visit with me and ask for help for the people of her country," Biden, 70, wrote in the CNN op-ed. "She didn't ask me for food or clothing or weapons. She asked me to help her get mental health care for all those suffering from the effects of Putin's senseless and brutal war."

Ukraine's first lady  who hadn't been seen in public since the war began in late February  spoke of the women and children who've been raped, shot and killed and of the countless Ukrainians who've lost their homes in the war with Russia, according to Dr. Biden's essay.

RELATED: Jill Biden Received Letter from Ukrainian First Lady with Country's Needs: 'We're Working on It'

"We wished each other Happy Mother's Day. I told her I was in Ukraine to show Ukrainian mothers that we were standing with them, and I was carrying the hearts of the American people with me," Biden wrote, adding that Zelenska responded by saying, "the Ukrainians are so grateful for the support of the American people."

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US First lady Jill Biden (L) offers flowers to Ukraine President wife Olena Zelenska, outside of School 6, a public school that has taken in displaced students in Uzhhorod on May 8, 2022, during an unannounced visit of Jill Biden to Ukraine on the sidelines of an official trip in nearby Slovakia. (Photo by Susan Walsh / POOL / AFP) (Photo by SUSAN WALSH/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

SUSAN WALSH/POOL/AFP via Getty

The pair met in Uzhhorod, a small city in western Ukraine near the Slovakian border, at a school that is currently housing individuals affected by the war.

While there, Dr. Biden spoke with a mother who shared stories of alleged Russian brutality. "When she and her family ventured out in search of food, Russian soldiers would shoot into the lines of people waiting for a piece of bread," she wrote.

Russia has denied intentionally targeting civilians  but thousands have been reported dead.

RELATED: Ukraine's First Lady Speaks Out in Rare Interview amid Invasion, Praising Courage of Her Country's Women

The first lady also stopped in Romania and Slovakia over the weekend in support of U.S. military personnel and embassy workers stationed in those countries, as well as Ukrainian mothers and children who have been forced to flee their homes because of violence that's affected their home.

"The Ukrainian mothers at the Romanian and Slovak schools I visited told me about the horrors of the bombs that fell night after night as they sought to find refuge during their journey westward," Dr. Biden wrote. "Many had to live days without food and sunlight, harbored in basements underground."

US First Lady Jill Biden meets with Slovak and Ukrainian mothers and their children as the families participate in a Mother's Day activity in Kosice, Slovakia, on May 8, 2022. (Photo by Susan Walsh / POOL / AFP) (Photo by SUSAN WALSH/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

SUSAN WALSH/POOL/AFP via Getty

Dr. Biden wrote in her essay that she also heard from women who are grateful to the people of Romania and Slovakia, countries that combined have received more than a million refugees, according to United Nations figures.

More than 6 million Ukrainians have fled their country in Europe's refugee crisis that began when Putin ordered his troops to invade on Feb. 24.

RELATED: Nancy Pelosi Visits Ukraine, Receives Medal from President Zelenskyy: 'There for You Until the Fight Is Done'

"The border guards told me stories of thousands of people with few belongings who crossed into Slovakia  a desperate sea of humanity, whose lives were forever changed on February 24, the date of Russia's further invasion of an unjust war that began years ago," Biden wrote.

"In the cold of February, many came without shoes, walking for miles upon miles. They were fleeing in fear, carrying one wish of being able to return home," she continued. "One 11-year-old came by himself with a phone number to contact his family written on his hand."

To end her essay, Dr. Biden, who teaches English at Northern Virginia Community College, quoted the poet Kahlil Gibran: "The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain."

"My hope is that this is true for the mothers I met. But that can only happen when this war ends," Dr. Biden wrote. "Mr. Putin, please end this senseless and brutal war."
Kalera

ORLANDO, Fla., May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kalera AS (Euronext Growth Oslo: KAL, Bloomberg: KSLLF), one of the preeminent leafy green vertical farming companies and a leader in plant science for producing high-quality produce in controlled environments, announced today that it has named James Leighton as President and Chief Executive Officer. Leighton is an accomplished executive with a strong reputation within the consumer-packaged goods and food industries.



Jim is a true Level 5 leader with a deep and varied background in leading companies in the food and CPG sectors. His focus on people and his disciplined approach to operations and execution will serve Kalera and its shareholders well in the years to come, said Curtis McWilliams, the current Interim CEO and the incoming Chairman of Kaleras Board of Directors following its announced merger with Agrico Acquisition Corp.

As a veteran executive with well over 20 years of leadership roles in CPG and food industries, Leighton will provide Kalera with strong leadership as the Company continues to pursue its strategic growth vision. Leighton most recently served as Chief Executive Officer for Inghams Enterprise. Founded in 1918 and listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, Inghams is the largest poultry producer in Australia with sales of $1.9 billion. Previously, Leighton served as President and Founder for 40North Foods, a subsidiary of JBS S.A. established to create protein-centric brands. He served as Chief Operating Officer, Interim CEO and Director at Boulder Brands, Inc. where he played a key role scaling the business and ultimately selling it to Pinnacle Foods. In addition, Leighton spent seven years at Perdue Farms, including serving as President of the companys global Food Group. Leighton holds an MBA from the Keller Graduate School of Management, and a BA in Business Administration and Industrial Relations from the University of Iowa.

Jim Leighton noted, I could not be more excited to join Kalera at this momentous time. It is an incredible opportunity to work with a highly-capable team to create the worlds leading company in clean, fresh, locally-grown produce with the support of the board and the companys various stakeholders. I have quickly gained an appreciation for the Kalera teams efforts to position the company for a great future, and I look forward to working with the management team to further leverage all of our complimentary capabilities.

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About Kalera:

Kalera is a vertical farming company headquartered in Orlando, Florida. Kalera uses proprietary technology and plant and seed science to sustainably grow year-round, local, non-GMO leafy greens that are nutrient-rich and free of harmful chemicals or pesticides. It has spent several years optimizing plant nutrient formulas and developing an advanced automation and data acquisition system with Internet of Things, cloud, big data analytics and artificial intelligence capabilities. Kalera currently operates farms in the US (Orlando, Atlanta, Houston and Denver) as well as in Munich and Kuwait. Additional farms are in development. More information is available at www.kalera.com.

Media Contact:

Kathleen Komarzec

kkomarzec@lambert.com

(616) 916-4092

Investor Relations Contact:

Eric Birge

ir@kalera.com

313-309-9500




May 14th Food Drive Will Help Feed Needy Families in All 50 States

WASHINGTON, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) will conduct its annual national food drive this Saturday, May 14. NALC's food drive, first held in 1993, helps feed millions of Americans.

National Association of Letter Carriers. (PRNewsFoto/National Association of Letter Carriers)

The Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive, the country's largest one-day food drive, provides residents with an easy way to donate food to those in need.

Customers simply leave their donation of non-perishable food items next to their mailbox on Saturday, May 14. Letter carriers will collect these food donations on that day as they deliver mail along their postal routes, and distribute them to local food banks, pantries, shelters and churches.

"Letter carriers are a part of every neighborhood in the nation," NALC President Fredric Rolando said, "and we see the growing need for food assistance in our communities. On Saturday, May 14, NALC invites everyone to participate in the annual Stamp Out Hunger Food Drive. Together, we can help stamp out hunger in America."

The timing is important, with food banks, pantries and shelters running low on donations from the winter holidays and with summer approaching, when most school meal programs are suspended.

On May 14, as they deliver mail, the nation's 200,000 letter carriers will collect the donations that residents have left near their mailboxes. People are encouraged to leave a sturdy bag (or bags) containing non-perishable foods, such as canned soup, canned vegetables, canned meats and fish, pasta, rice or cereal before the regular mail delivery on Saturday. The food donations stay in each community, going to help local residents.

National partners assisting NALC in the food drive are: the U.S. Postal Service, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, the National Rural Letter Carriers' Association, Vericast, United Way Worldwide, the AFL-CIO, Valpak, the Kellogg Co. and CVS Health.

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People who have questions about the drive in their area should ask their letter carrier, contact their local post office, or go to nalc.org/food-drive, facebook.com/StampOutHunger or twitter.com/StampOutHunger .

********

The 294,000-member National Association of Letter Carriers represents letter carriers across the country employed by the U.S. Postal Service, along with retired letter carriers. Founded by Civil War veterans in 1889, the NALC is among the country's oldest labor unions.

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SOURCE National Association of Letter Carriers
Matinas BioPharma Holdings, Inc.

 Announced an exclusive research collaboration with BioNTech focused on the combination of mRNA and Matinas proprietary LNC platform technology 



 50% of Patients Enrolled to Date in Cohort 4 of EnACT (MAT2203 in Cryptococcal Meningitis); Topline Data Expected Q3 2022 

 Feedback from Clinical Type C Meeting with the FDA Provides Potential Pathway to NDA Submission for MAT2203 with a Single Confirmatory Trial for Both Induction and Consolidation Indications 



 Successful Second In Vivo Efficacy Study of Oral LNC-Remdesivir 

$43.9 million at March 31, 2022, Sufficient to Fund Planned Operations Through 2023 

 Management to Host Conference Call Today, Thursday, May 12th, at 8:30 a.m. ET 

BEDMINSTER, N.J., May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Matinas BioPharma Holdings, Inc. (NYSE AMER: MTNB), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on improving the intracellular delivery of nucleic acids and small molecules with its lipid nanocrystal (LNC) platform technology, today reported financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2022, along with a corporate update.

We have made substantial progress in continuing to validate our LNC platform delivery technology by delivering consistent and compelling clinical and preclinical data through advancing our internal pipeline over the past few months, commented Jerome D. Jabbour, Chief Executive Officer of Matinas. Our recently announced collaboration with BioNTech provides clear external validation for our LNC platform from a global pharmaceutical leader and creates the opportunity for oral administration of mRNA vaccines and other cutting-edge therapeutics, which could potentially benefit hundreds of millions of patients. Our own internal discovery programs built around preclinical data validating the LNC delivery of nucleic acids and antisense oligonucleotides, combined with our ongoing projects with Genentech and Gilead, provide momentum as we seek to capitalize upon the significant potential for our proprietary, next generation delivery technology. We could not be more pleased with our progress in 2022, and believe that we are well-positioned, with numerous value-creating milestones on the horizon.

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First Quarter 2022 Highlights and Recent Events

External Collaborations

In April 2022, Matinas and BioNTech entered an exclusive research collaboration to evaluate the combination of mRNA formats and Matinas proprietary LNC platform technology. The Companies have initiated collaborative formulation, development, and optimization work toward planned preclinical efficacy testing. BioNTech and Matinas have also commenced formal license agreement discussions for Matinas LNC delivery platform technology.

Data from a second in vivo study of oral LNC-remdesivir in mice infected with SARS-CoV-2 demonstrated that oral LNC remdesivir reduced viral lung titers (as early as Day 2), improved lung congestion scores, and reduced COVID-associated weight loss. The study was performed in collaboration with the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the Department of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC).

The Company expanded its collaboration with Genentech, a member of the Roche Group, to include a third compound, which is a type of antibody fragment. Matinas will be focusing on creating an optimized oral formulation applying the LNC platform for preclinical testing, with potential results anticipated later in 2022.



Internal Pipeline Progress

MAT2203

Enrollment continues in Cohort 4 of the ongoing EnACT study (Encochleated Oral Amphotericin for Cryptococcal Meningitis Trial) of MAT2203 (oral amphotericin B) for the treatment of cryptococcal meningitis, with 28 patients (out of a total of 56) enrolled to date in Uganda. Cohort 4 is testing an all-oral regimen of MAT2203 during the 14-day induction period, followed by four additional weeks of oral consolidation therapy with MAT2203. The Company continues to anticipate reporting topline data from Cohort 4 in the third quarter of 2022.

Matinas recently held a productive follow-up clinical Type C meeting with the FDA and has received written feedback concerning the confirmatory data required to support the submission of a New Drug Application (NDA) for MAT2203. As reflected in the official minutes of the meeting, FDA is now considering the potential registration of MAT2203 for both a step-down induction indication as well as a consolidation treatment indication based upon a single Phase 3 confirmatory trial. This pivotal registration trial will feature a non-inferiority trial design comparing MAT2203 (administered with 5FC) with a control arm of IV amphotericin (also administered with 5-FC), randomized 2:1 in favor of MAT2203, as induction and then consolidation therapy in HIV patients with cryptococcal meningitis. Critical elements of the pivotal registration trial will likely include: Primary endpoint of 2-week all-cause mortality for induction indication Non-inferiority margin of 10%, translating into a total trial size of approximately 250 patients (with 80% power) A key secondary endpoint may include meningitis culture-positive relapse free survival time through 18 weeks to evaluate consolidation treatment in support of a single NDA filing for both induction and consolidation treatment with MAT2203 in patients with cryptococcal meningitis







This streamlined development pathway represents a meaningful improvement from customary requirements for an NDA submission, which traditionally requires two adequate and well-controlled Phase 3 trials for registration. The Company plans to meet with FDA in the third quarter of 2022 to finalize the trial design and anticipates that the pivotal Phase 3 registration trial will commence later in 2022, with the anticipated financial support of the National Institutes of Health.

The Company has recently submitted a formal Request for Scientific Advice to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to facilitate a development and registration program in support of expanding the regulatory footprint for MAT2203 globally. Concurrent with the EMA process, the Company remains in discussions with key third parties interested in obtaining rights to MAT2203 on a global and regional basis.

Preclinical studies of MAT2203 in Candida auris and mucormycosis have been initiated to support potential label expansion for MAT2203 into the treatment of other invasive fungal infections. Preliminary data generated to date demonstrate that MAT2203 is as effective as liposomal amphotericin B in protecting against mucormycosis, a deadly invasive fungal infection. Additional confirmatory studies in different strains of mucormycosis are ongoing. Preclinical evaluation of MAT2203 against Candida auris was initiated in April 2022 and preliminary data is expected in the third quarter of 2022.

In the first quarter of 2022, the Company selected and reached agreement with Thermo Fisher Scientific to support scale-up and manufacturing for MAT2203 in anticipation of a potential NDA submission. Thermo Fisher Scientific, with more than 65 locations around the world, provides integrated, end-to-end capabilities across all phases of development, including APIs, biologics, viral vectors, cGMP plasmids, formulation, clinical trials solutions, logistics services and commercial manufacturing and packaging.





MAT2501

Results from a single ascending dose (SAD) study of MAT2501 (oral amikacin) in healthy volunteers demonstrated rapid absorption of MAT2501 following oral administration with a time to maximal concentration of approximately 2 hours. Circulating plasma levels of LNC-delivered amikacin were significantly lower than IV-administered amikacin, which is expected to translate into a significantly improved safety profile for MAT2501. There were no serious adverse events and no evidence of any renal or ototoxicity observed, two of the most common toxicities seen with IV-administered amikacin.





First Quarter 2022 Financial Results

Cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities at March 31, 2022, were approximately $43.9 million, compared to $49.6 million at December 31, 2021. Based on current projections, the Company believes that cash on hand is sufficient to fund planned operations through 2023.

For the first quarter of 2022, net loss attributable to common shareholders was $6.0 million, or a net loss of $0.03 per share (basic and diluted), compared to a net loss attributable to common shareholders of $5.2 million, or a net loss of $0.03 per share (basic and diluted), for the same period in 2021. The increase was due primarily to an increase in research and development expenses.



Conference Call and Webcast Details



The Company will host a live conference call and webcast to discuss these results today, Thursday, May 12, 2022, at 8:30 a.m. ET.



To participate in the call, please dial (877) 407-5976 (Toll-Free) or (412) 902-0031 (Toll) and reference conference ID 13727955. The live webcast will be accessible on the Investors section of Matinas website, www.matinasbiopharma.com, and archived for 90 days

About Matinas BioPharma

Matinas BioPharma is a biopharmaceutical company focused on improving the intracellular delivery of nucleic acids and small molecules with its lipid nanocrystal (LNC) platform technology. The Company is developing its own internal portfolio of products as well as partnering with leading pharmaceutical companies to develop novel formulations that capitalize on the unique characteristics of the LNC platform.

Preclinical and clinical data have demonstrated that this novel technology can provide solutions to many of the challenges in achieving safe and effective intracellular delivery, for both small molecules and larger, more complex molecules, such as mRNA, DNA plasmids, antisense oligonucleotides, and vaccines. The combination of a unique mechanism of action and flexibility with formulation and route of administration (including oral), positions Matinas LNC technology to potentially become the preferred next-generation intracellular drug delivery vehicle with distinct advantages over both lipid nanoparticles and viral vectors.

The Company is focused on developing an internal and external pipeline of drugs candidates based on the LNC platform. Internally, the Company has two clinical stage assets. MAT2203 is an oral, LNC formulation of the highly potent antifungal medicine amphotericin B, currently in Phase 2 clinical trials; MAT2501 is an oral, LNC formulation of the broad-spectrum aminoglycoside, amikacin, primarily used to treat chronic and acute bacterial infections, and currently in Phase 1. Externally, the Company has established a broad set of relationships with multiple global pharmaceutical collaborators, including BioNTech (mRNA), the National Institutes of Health and Gilead Sciences (antivirals), and Genentech, a member of the Roche Group (small molecules, antisense oligonucleotides, and antibody fragments).

Forward Looking Statements

This release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including those relating to our business activities, our strategy and plans, our collaboration with BioNTech, the potential of our LNC platform delivery technology, and the future development of its product candidates, including MAT2203, MAT2501, the anticipated timing of regulatory submissions, the anticipated timing of clinical studies, the anticipated timing of regulatory interactions, the Companys ability to identify and pursue development and partnership opportunities for its products or platform delivery technology on favorable terms, if at all, and the ability to obtain required regulatory approval and other statements that are predictive in nature, that depend upon or refer to future events or conditions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements include words such as "expects," "anticipates," "intends," "plans," "could," "believes," "estimates" and similar expressions. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause actual results to be materially different from any future results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to, our ability to obtain additional capital to meet our liquidity needs on acceptable terms, or at all, including the additional capital which will be necessary to complete the clinical trials of our product candidates; our ability to successfully complete research and further development and commercialization of our product candidates; the uncertainties inherent in clinical testing; the timing, cost and uncertainty of obtaining regulatory approvals; our ability to protect the Companys intellectual property; the loss of any executive officers or key personnel or consultants; competition; changes in the regulatory landscape or the imposition of regulations that affect the Companys products; and the other factors listed under "Risk Factors" in our filings with the SEC, including Forms 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K. Investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this release. Except as may be required by law, the Company does not undertake any obligation to release publicly any revisions to such forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. Matinas BioPharmas product candidates are all in a development stage and are not available for sale or use.





Matinas BioPharma Holdings Inc. Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheets March 31, 2022 December 31, 2021 (Unaudited) (Audited) ASSETS: Current assets: Cash and cash equivalents $ 19,328,135 $ 21,029,806 Marketable securities 24,541,834 28,592,049 Restricted cash - security deposit 50,000 50,000 Prepaid expenses and other current assets 1,199,111 1,321,466 Total current assets 45,119,080 50,993,321 Non-current assets: Leasehold improvements and equipment - net 2,013,322 1,537,728 Operating lease right-of-use assets - net 4,082,763 4,218,890 Finance lease right-of-use assets - net 15,835 22,270 In-process research and development 3,017,377 3,017,377 Goodwill 1,336,488 1,336,488 Restricted cash - security deposit 200,000 200,000 Total non-current assets 10,665,785 10,332,753 Total assets $ 55,784,865 $ 61,326,074 LIABILITIES AND STOCKHOLDERS' EQUITY: Current liabilities: Accounts payable $ 1,351,905 $ 938,270 Accrued expenses 1,840,748 2,850,888 Operating lease liabilities - current 558,702 538,546 Financing lease liabilities - current 17,134 21,039 Total current liabilities 3,768,489 4,348,743 Non-current liabilities: Deferred tax liability 341,265 341,265 Operating lease liabilities - net of current portion 3,993,396 4,140,387 Financing lease liabilities - net of current portion - 2,621 Total non-current liabilities 4,334,661 4,484,273 Total liabilities 8,103,150 8,833,016 Stockholders' equity: Common stock 21,685 21,627 Additional paid-in capital 185,901,685 184,251,138 Accumulated deficit (137,612,481 ) (131,634,208 ) Accumulated other comprehensive loss (629,174 ) (145,499 ) Total stockholders' equity 47,681,715 52,493,058 Total liabilities and stockholders' equity $ 55,784,865 $ 61,326,074





Matinas BioPharma Holdings, Inc. Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations and Comprehensive Loss (Unaudited) Three Months Ended March 31, 2022

2021

Revenue: Contract research revenue $ - $ 33,333 Costs and expenses: Research and development 4,978,105 3,241,432 General and administrative 2,744,195 3,145,010 Total costs and expenses 7,722,300 6,386,442 Loss from operations (7,722,300 ) (6,353,109 ) Sale of New Jersey net operating loss & tax credits 1,734,133 1,328,470 Other income, net 9,894 68,319 Net loss $ (5,978,273 ) $ (4,956,320 ) Preferred stock series B accumulated dividends - (210,900 ) Net loss attributable to common shareholders $ (5,978,273 ) $ (5,167,220 ) Net loss available for common shareholders per share - basic and diluted $ (0.03 ) $ (0.03 ) Weighted average common shares outstanding - basic and diluted 216,644,783 203,871,820 Other comprehensive loss, net of tax Unrealized loss on securities available-for-sale (483,675 ) (91,766 ) Other comprehensive loss, net of tax (483,675 ) (91,766 ) Comprehensive loss attributable to shareholders $ (6,461,948 ) $ (5,048,086 )



Investor and Media Contacts



Peter Vozzo

ICR Westwicke

443-213-0505

peter.vozzo@westwicke.com

Source: Matinas BioPharma Holdings, Inc.




OTTAWA, ON, May 12, 2022 /CNW/ - The Honourable Francois-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, will hold a media availability by teleconference on May 13 to provide an update on his meetings with his international counterparts and business leaders during his trip in Germany and Belgium, including the discussions that took place at the G7 Digital Ministers meeting in Dusseldorf, Germany, on May 10 and 11.

Date: Friday, May 13

Time: 9 am (ET) / 3 pm (CET [Brussels time])

Media outlets wishing to take part in the teleconference are asked to contact ISED Media Relations to receive the dial-in information.

Stay connected

Find more services and information at Canada.ca/ISED.

Follow Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada on social media.

Twitter: @ISED_CA, Facebook: CanadianInnovation, Instagram: @cdninnovation and LinkedIn

SOURCE Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada

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NANO Nuclear Energy Inc.

SMR & Advanced Reactor 2022

SMR & Advanced Reactor 2022

Reset Connect London 2022

Reset Connect London 2022

NEW YORK, May 05, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NANO Nuclear Energy Inc. (NANO Nuclear), a company emerging from the shared micro Small Modular Reactor (SMR) ambitions of a world class nuclear technical team working alongside business and industry professionals, possessing strong relationships with both government as well as the private and public nuclear industries, is pleased to announce that it will an exhibitor at the upcoming SMR & Advanced Reactor 2022 conference, organized by Reuters Events is part of Reuters News & Media Ltd, which will take place on May 24th & 25th in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

Additionally, NANO Nuclear will be a sponsor, exhibitor and also present at the Reset Connect London 2022, the UKs largest and leading sustainability ecosystem and net-zero event for business, investors and innovators. The green investment gathering will be taking place during London Climate Action Week at ExCeL London, United Kingdom on June 28th & 29th, featuring speaking engagements for Founder & Chairman Jay Jiang Yu as well as Chief Executive Officer James Walker.

Bringing together market-leading changemakers from the nuclear industry to discuss the short and long-term future of nuclear energy, SMR & Advanced Reactor 2022 will share the latest technological, regulatory and investment moves, discussing SMRs and advanced reactors as the answer to nuclear energy replacing fossil fuels in baseload power generation. Featuring innovative thought leaders such as NuScale Power Chief Technology Officer Dr. Jose Reyes, Roll Royce SMR Chief Executive Officer Tom Samson and GE Hitachi Executive Vice President Jon Ball, SMR & Advanced Reactor 2022 will examine the future of energy distribution and maintaining talent in the marketplace. Additionally, speakers such as U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Christopher T. Hanson and International Atomic Energy Agency Deputy Director General Lydie Evrard will facilitate discussions regarding regulatory adjustments needed to secure a future for nuclear energy.

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SMR & Advanced Reactor 2022

Reset Connect London 2022 is the flagship event (expo & conference) of London Climate Action Week 2022, drilling into the sustainability and climate tech space with a focus on existing, new & innovative technologies/solutions and the green/ESG investment community. The event will take place at ExCeL London on June 28th & 29th and will act to continue the momentum built up by the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26). Featuring speakers such as Head of Sustainability, Rolls-Royce Rachael Everard and Labour Member of the House of Lords and Chair of the Centre, Accelerating Social Technology Lord Jim Knight of Weymouth, Reset Connect London 2022 will bring together business (SMEs through to corporate), industry and government with solution providers, policy makers, innovators and the finance community that can enable & fund change.



Reset Connect London 2022

As a sponsor and exhibitor of the event, NANO Nuclear will also be an active participant in the free exchange of ideas, with Founder and Chairman Jay Jiang Yu to contribute to panel discussions around fund/investment raising and scaling up start up and CEO James Walker to contribute to the Art of the Possible-Cutting Edge Technology with the Potential to Drive Change Now.

I am incredibly excited to have received an opportunity to share my perspective on launching a purpose-led startup in the ESG and green energy sector and why I believe there is a nuclear tech revolution starting. I look forward to meeting with fellow attendees at the RESET CONNECT gathering, said Jay Jiang Yu, Founder, Chairman and President of NANO Nuclear Energy Inc. The discussion will put NANO Nuclear in good stead, helping to introduce international green energy innovators and investors to our Company. Furthermore, I believe James contribution to the discussion about the Art of the Possible-Cutting Edge Technology with the Potential to Drive Change Now, will be very informative for those in attendance.

About NANO Nuclear Energy Inc.

The Path to Zero starts here. Nano Nuclear Energy Inc. is a company emerging from the shared micro Small Modular Reactor (SMR) ambitions of a world class nuclear technical team, working alongside business and industry professionals, possessing strong relationships with both government, and the private and public nuclear industries. Our Company is looking to disrupt the SMR space, principally in underdeveloped nuclear areas, and advance micro SMRs towards development and deployment in residential, commercial, and industrial settings. Nano Nuclear Energy is committed to building smaller, cheaper, and safer nuclear energy, while incorporating the latest technology into its own proprietary mobile and on-demand capable nano nuclear reactors, novel reactor designs, intellectual properties, and research methods. For more corporate information please visit: https://NanoNuclearEnergy.com/

For further information, please contact:

Email: Info@NanoNuclearEnergy.com

Business Tel: (212) 634-9206

PLEASE FOLLOW OUR SOCIAL MEDIA PAGES HERE:

NANO Nuclear Energy LINKEDIN

NANO Nuclear Energy YOUTUBE

NANO Nuclear Energy TWITTER

NANO Nuclear Energy INSTAGRAM

Photos accompanying this announcement are available at:

https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/d4d26174-788f-408e-945e-b51a0cf62efe

https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/95443428-35bf-460a-9c7c-58d9b03cc680




Paris Hilton's solitary confinement booth on Capitol Hill, Washington DC, USA - 11 May 2022

Shutterstock Paris Hilton's solitary confinement booth on Capitol Hill, Washington DC, USA - 11 May 2022

Paris Hilton was back in Washington, D.C. this week, paying a visit to the White House as part of her continued advocacy against child abuse.

"So honored to be back in DC to continue my advocacy work," the 41-year-old socialite wrote on Twitter. "I had such an inspiring time meeting with policy staff & walking the halls of the West Wing with advocates. I am so glad to see that the most powerful office in the world is dedicated to fighting for the rights of all."

So honored to be back in DC to continue my advocacy work. I had such an inspiring time meeting with policy staff & walking the halls of the West Wing with advocates. I am so glad to see that the most powerful office in the world is dedicated to fighting for the rights of all. pic.twitter.com/glhLgIyARu  ParisHilton.eth (@ParisHilton) May 10, 2022

In the photographs shared to her social media accounts, Hilton could be seen outside the White House, where she was joined by her husband, venture capitalist Carter Reum.

A White House official told CNN that Hilton joined policy staff, fellow survivors and other state and national advocates "as part of her advocacy efforts to improve protections of youth in residential programs and facilities."

While in the capital, the heiress met with lawmakers including South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, who shared a photo of the two talking in his office.

"Met with @ParisHilton this week to talk about how we can better serve America's youth," the Republican captioned the photo, which he shared on his official Twitter account.

Met with @ParisHilton this week to talk about how we can better serve Americas youth. pic.twitter.com/Mxh9AKesuy  Tim Scott (@SenatorTimScott) May 10, 2022

The reality television star has spent recent years urging for schools such as Provo Canyon the Utah boarding school whose staff members she has accused of inflicting emotional, physical and psychological abuse on her during her stay as a teenager  to be monitored more closely.

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RELATED: Paris Hilton Opens Up About the Secret Terrifying Abuse She Suffered as a Teen

In 2021, Hilton testified against Provo Canyon School, where she was sent for 11 months in an attempt to tame her rebellious partying as a teenager. During her testimony in a Utah court room, Hilton said she had been "verbally, mentally and physically abused on a daily basis. I was cut off from the outside world and stripped of all my human rights."

"My name is Paris Hilton, I am an institutional abuse survivor and I speak today on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of children currently in residential care facilities across the United States," she said in her testimony to the Utah Senate Judiciary, Law Enforcement, and Criminal Justice Committee. "For the past 20 years, I have had a recurring nightmare where I'm kidnapped in the middle of the night by two strangers, strip-searched, and locked in a facility. I wish I could tell you that this haunting nightmare was just a dream, but it is not."

Paris Hilton's solitary confinement booth on Capitol Hill, Washington DC, USA - 11 May 2022

Shutterstock Paris Hilton's solitary confinement booth on Capitol Hill, Washington DC, USA - 11 May 2022

Following her emotional testimony, a measure that regulates treatment centers for troubled teens became law in Utah.

Hilton said she believes the alleged abuse at the school continued for years after she left, saying changes only started to be made after she publicly spoke out in the YouTube Originals documentary This Is Paris that premiered in 2020. The school is now under different ownership.

"I buried my truth for so long," Hilton told PEOPLE exclusively in August 2020 of why she came forward 20 years after her stay at the institution. "But I'm proud of the strong woman I've become. People might assume everything in my life came easy to me, but I want to show the world who I truly am."

In a firsthand account published in USA Today Wednesday, Hilton further detailed the abuse and explained her trip to D.C., writing, "Institutional abuse survivors are on Capitol Hill this week to continue educating lawmakers about how badly children placed in the troubled teen industry are treated. We will continue to make our voices heard to rally national support in this important election year to urge Congress to finally stop institutional child abuse."
OTTAWA, ON, May 12, 2022 /CNW/ - A united global response to COVID19 must ensure that vaccines get to people who need them most. Working together is key to developing a global solution to a global problem.

The Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, today announced $732 million for the Access to COVID-19 Tools-Accelerator (ACT-A). The announcement was made as part of the second virtual Global COVID-19 Summit, convened by the United States of America and co-hosted by the Governments of Belize, Germany, Indonesia, and Senegal. This funding includes the allocation of $220 million previously announced on April 8, 2022 at the Gavi COVAX Advance Market Commitment Summit. Including prior announcements, these funds will ensure Canada meets its burden share for the 2021-2022 ACT-A budget cycle.

The emergence and spread of new variants of COVID-19, like Omicron, has reinforced the need for a strategy that works to control COVID-19 worldwide, including for high-risk populations. ACT-A is helping to overcome global inequities by providing low- and middle-income countries access to COVID-19 tests, treatments, vaccines, and personal protective equipment. It remains the world's best solution to end the acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the Summit, Prime Minister Trudeau underlined how vaccine supply is no longer the key constraint to combating COVID-19 around the world. However, many countries continue to encounter difficulties getting vaccines from tarmacs into arms, particularly in remote communities and among vulnerable populations. He also stressed the role of misinformation in undermining confidence in COVID-19 vaccines, recognizing that Canada and its global partners must work together to reinforce the continued importance of testing and treatments, both to identify dangerous variants and to contain future outbreaks.

Canada will continue working with its international partners to bolster global health security, and help ensure the world is better equipped to respond to and recover from pandemics and other health crises in the future.

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Quote

"We must continue to work together and support the international response to end this pandemic everywhere and for everyone. Today, I am announcing new and meaningful funding for the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A), bringing Canada's total contribution to more than $2 billion since the start of the pandemic. Canada is contributing to the international pandemic response and will continue to work with partners to ensure that that we strengthen our collective ability to prevent, prepare and respond to disease outbreaks going forward."

 The Rt. Hon. Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada

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Associated Links

This document is also available at https://pm.gc.ca

SOURCE Prime Minister's Office

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By Azernews





Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov have discussed Azerbaijani-Armenia normalization and bilateral relations, the ministry said on May 12.

The ministers came together on the sidelines of the CIS Council of Foreign Ministers' meeting in Dushanbe to address the development of relations between the two countries in various directions.

The parties discussed the present situation in the region and emphasized the significance of fully implementing the trilateral statements between Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Russia to guarantee regional peace and security.

They emphasized the need to take efforts to restore the Azerbaijani-Armenia ties.

The sides also discussed problems related to regional and international security agendas.
Continual Focus on Process Expertise Strengthens Impact on Steel Industry

CONSHOHOCKEN, Pa., May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- In the steel manufacturing industry, companies face complex issues ranging from technology adaptation, regulatory pressures, and cost efficiencies, to maintaining consistent quality. Quaker Houghton (NYSE: KWR), the global leader in industrial process fluids and long term partner to the steel industry, recognizes these challenges and works to develop customized solutions based on their innovative R&D approach and comprehensive range of products and services. This will be highlighted at the 2022 AISTech Conference and Exposition (https://home.quakerhoughton.com/aistech) at Booth 1007.

Quaker Houghton experts will also present technical papers during the cold rolling and lubrication and hydraulics sessions featuring:

"Aspects of Boundary Lubrication in Advanced High-Strength Steel Rolling" by Bas Smeulders, PhD, Research Scientist, on Monday, May 16 th at 4:30 pm

"Improvement of Work Safety and Reduction of Environmental Issues with Fire-Resistant Lubricants in Steel Plants" by Ronald Knecht, Global Strategic Product Line Manager  Hydraulics & Lubricants, on Tuesday, May 17th at 3:00 pm

Quaker Houghton will exhibit some of its portfolio of differentiated offerings for the steel industry including:

Long Steel Manufacturing : A selection of hydraulic fluids, lubricants, greases, gear oils, coolants, and cleaners to help run processes under demanding conditions

Industrial Greases: A wide range of lubricants for mill applications aimed to provide greater efficiency, improved working conditions, and reduced total cost of ownership

QH FLUID INTELLIGENCE: Our ultimate, value-based engineered solution combining our comprehensive process fluid portfolio, QH Equipment and sensor technology, QH FLUIDTREND software, and expert engineering services

In addition, the company has a full line of steel fluid solutions that include cleaners, rolling oils, corrosion preventives, temper fluids, pickle oils, surface treatment, industrial lubricants, equipment, and services. These will be featured at AISTech 2022 from May 16-18 at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. will be

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For Quaker Houghton's full product line, visit: https://home.quakerhoughton.com/product-lines/

For steel operations: https://home.quakerhoughton.com/steel

For fire-resistant hydraulic fluids: https://fireresistantfluids.com/

For QH FLUID INTELLIGENCE & QH FLUIDTREND: https://home.quakerhoughton.com/qhfluid-intelligence/

About Quaker Houghton:

Quaker Houghton is the global leader in industrial process fluids. With a presence around the world, including operations in over 25 countries, our customers include thousands of the world's most advanced and specialized steel, aluminum, automotive, aerospace, offshore, can, mining, and metalworking companies. Our high-performing, innovative and sustainable solutions are backed by best-in-class technology, deep process knowledge and customized services. With approximately 4,700 employees, including chemists, engineers and industry experts, we partner with our customers to improve their operations so they can run even more efficiently, even more effectively, whatever comes next. Quaker Houghton is headquartered in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, located near Philadelphia in the United States. Visit quakerhoughton.com to learn more.

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/quakerhoughton

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/sifcoasc

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/EPMARCorp

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/quakerhoughton/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sifco-applied-surface-concepts/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/epmar-corporation/

Cision

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SOURCE Quaker Houghton
Recharge Resources Ltd.

Vancouver, BC, Canada, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Recharge Resources Ltd. (RR : CSE) (SLLTF : OTC) (SL5 : Frankfurt) (Recharge or the Company) announces that, further to the news release dated March 21, 2022, it has closed the acquisition of a 100% interest in the Brussels Creek Project gold-copper-palladium property, located in the Kamloops Mining District, British Columbia (the Property). Prior to this amendment, Recharge had earned in to a 60% interest in the Property.



Recharge acquired the remaining 40% right, title and interest in the Property in consideration of Recharge paying the sum of $75,000 and issuing 2,500,000 common shares in the capital of the Company. The interest earned is subject to a 2-percent net smelter royalty payable to the optionor. One percent of the royalty may be purchased for $1-million, exercisable any time on or before the expiration of one year from the commencement of commercial production on the Property. No further work commitment is required pursuant to the original agreement.

About the Brussels Creek Project

The Property is an early-stage exploration property, located approximately 24 kilometres west of Kamloops, B.C., and is immediately adjacent to New Gold's New Afton mine. The Property comprises 17 claims (66 cells) covering 1,350.43 hectares. The geological setting of the property is very similar to New Afton, a silica-saturated copper-gold alkalic porphyry-style deposit, as well as the Highland Valley, Mount Polly, Kemess and Galore Creek deposits. Recent field observations noted the presence of a substantial mineralized quartz-feldspar porphyry body intruding the overlying Nicola group volcanics. Historic sampling and mapping on the property, in 1983 and 1984, located a broad anomalous zone (200 metres by 400 metres) with gold values up to 3.5 grams per tonne. Grab samples taken from the property in 2019 include values of 10.1 g/t Au (with 0.7 g/t palladium) and 11.5 g/t Au.

In 2020, Syber commenced exploration work on the Property and has completed an airborne magnetometer survey over the entire property, a lidar and orthophotography survey, and also one week of prospecting and mapping. Interpretation of the geophysical survey identified six areas of interest, showing potential for the structural complexities and potassic alteration that are common features of this style of porphyry copper-gold deposit. Le Mare (renamed Recharge Resources subsequently) commissioned Healex Consulting of Nanaimo, B.C., to complete a National Instrument 43-101 technical report on the property. This report is made available at SEDAR.

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The shares issued pursuant to the agreement are subject to a four-month hold period upon issuance.

About Recharge Resources

Recharge Resources is a Canadian mineral exploration company focused on exploring and developing the production of high-value battery metals to create green, renewable energy to meet the demands of the advancing electric vehicle and fuel cell vehicle market.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors,

 David Greenway 

David Greenway, CEO

For further information, please contact:

Recharge Resources Ltd.

Mr. Joel Warawa

Phone: 778-588-5473

E-Mail: info@recharge-resources.com

Website: recharge-resources.com

Disclaimer for Forward-Looking Information

Certain statements in this release are forward-looking statements, which reflect the expectations of management regarding Recharges intention to continue to identify potential transactions and make certain corporate changes and applications. Forward looking statements consist of statements that are not purely historical, including any statements regarding beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions regarding the future. Such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results, performance or developments to differ materially from those contained in the statements. No assurance can be given that any of the events anticipated by the forward-looking statements will occur or, if they do occur, what benefits Recharge will obtain from them. These forward-looking statements reflect managements current views and are based on certain expectations, estimates and assumptions which may prove to be incorrect. A number of risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements, including Recharges inability to identify transactions having satisfactory terms or at all and the results of exploration or review of properties that Recharge does acquire. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this news release and Recharge assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements, or to update the reasons why actual results differed from those projected in the forward-looking statements, except in accordance with applicable securities laws.




Just blaming the Mexican border for Americas fentanyl problem isnt enough to keep an alarming number of people from dying of a drug overdose.

Federal data once again showed that a record number of Americans are overdosing, primarily with fentanyl. To be exact, some 107,000 people lost their lives last year.

That indeed is heartbreaking, as Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey correctly characterized the fentanyl mortality rate announced this week.

Its heartbreaking to see the death & destruction caused by lethal drugs like fentanyl, the Republican governor said on Twitter.

But Ducey quickly turned his apparent compassion for drug addicts into a political football, meant more to anger voters than to seriously look at ways to save lives.

Theres no question that the increase in opioid overdoses is tied to criminal activity at our border, he said. By neglecting the border crisis, the Biden administration is fueling an opioid epidemic.

The border doesn't fully explain overdoses

Fentanyl bags that were taken by the Yavapai sheriff's office.

Is it fair to use the pain and suffering of families who lost loved ones to fentanyl and other drugs to attack political rivals during a consequential election year?

Fentanyl is indeed a border problem, since Mexican cartels are huge suppliers of drugs to American consumers, and Joe Biden is currently the president of the United States.

So, as the saying goes, alls fair in love and war.

But what about the people overdosing themselves? Sadly, nothing can be done for those weve already lost, but perhaps their families would find solace in knowing that those in power are sincerely interested in preventing others from falling into the same deadly trap.

Make no mistake: The staggering surge of fentanyl deaths will only get worse if politicians merely paint it as a border problem and point their fingers at each other to win votes.

Why do so many Americans turn to fentanyl?

Fentanyl can easily and cheaply be produced anywhere, experts say. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the synthetic opioid is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine.

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This epidemic is serious, and obviously deadly. Blaming the border for it may be politically expedient, but it ignores the root of the problem  American consumers.

Yes, go after the drug cartels. But government officials must also find out why so many Americans are in such despair to turn to deadly drugs.

Perhaps then we can engage in meaningful discussions over how to prevent so many drug overdoses.

Elvia Diaz is an editorial columnist for The Republic and azcentral. Reach her at 602-444-8606 or elvia.diaz@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Twitter, @elviadiaz1.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Why did a record 107,000 Americans die of a drug overdose?
Youngest Managing Director in Chicago Real Estate Instrumental in $8.5 Billion Bronzeville Lakefront Megadevelopment

CHICAGO, May 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Everyone is familiar with that classic saying, "age is just a number." At 28 years old, Morgan Malone perfectly embodies the idiom. Recently named Farpoint Development's managing director of strategic initiatives and operations, Malone has become one of the youngest managing directors in Chicago real estate. The promotion further expands her thought leadership at the company, where Malone was previously director of development and external affairs.

Rising Farpoint Executive Morgan Malone Continues to Elevate Equitable Developments and Impact Ecosystems in New Role as Managing Director of Strategic Initiatives

Malone Continues to Elevate Equitable Developments in New Role as Managing Director of Strategic Initiatives

In her new role, Malone will continue to steward the $8.5 billion Bronzeville Lakefront megadevelopment, on the former Michael Reese Hospital site, while also contributing to Farpoint's social impact, strategic partnerships and operations at large.

"Morgan is an economic development maven, with a deep understanding of social impact and how to skillfully navigate complex systems and processes," said Regina Stilp, a founding principal of Farpoint Development, one of the six firms that comprise GRIT, the joint venture behind Bronzeville Lakefront. "At 100 acres and worth billions of dollars, Bronzeville Lakefront is massive, and the stakes are high. As developers, we are responsible for building a community that honors and elevates the experience of current and future residents. This project is a behemoth, and in a sense, Morgan is the glue that holds it all together."

The chance to help grow opportunities and build generational wealth in the Bronzeville neighborhood specificallyand on Chicago's South Side broadlydrives Malone's work. Bronzeville Lakefront is expected to create 75,000 jobs and $8.2 billion in direct and indirect economic impact.

"I am committed to equitable and inclusive development and holistic thinking," Malone said. "That's what drew me to Farpoint and Bronzeville Lakefrontthe opportunity to build impact ecosystems and infrastructure at scale. Some people distrust developers, but I see development as a pathway to build with purpose and create deep, transformational and generational change that positively affects those most impacted."

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A Lifetime of Civic Engagement Drives Success

Civic duty and mission-driven work are a part of Malone's DNA. Her parents are both career Marines. She began working on political campaigns as early as age 12, and frequently engaged in community service. After college, Malone's journey took her from organizing work with labor unions to managing the Englewood Quality of Life Plan, which involved hundreds of residents, five task forces and intricate public-private partnerships.

Professional accolades came early and often. In 2020, Malone was named one of Crain's Chicago Business's "20 in Their 20s" for her work with the Chicago Department of Aviation, where she led administrative operations for the $8.5 billion terminal expansion at O'Hare International Airport.

Since 2015, Malone has been a member of the Cook County Commission on Social Innovation, which focuses on job creation, community revitalization and entrepreneurship, among other aims. She is also on the board of the Greater Englewood Chamber of Commerce Foundation and the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. Additionally, she serves on the advisory board for Chicago Cityscape, which makes property, neighborhood and construction development data accessible to all.

"It's never too early to make an impact. You don't have to wait your turn. You can be a doer, add value and have agency while unapologetically adhering to the principles you are passionate about," Malone said. "I have always been people-centered, service-oriented and civic-minded. For years, I worked inside the community advocating for equity and economic development. Now, I'm in private industry, but my objective is and always will be the same: positive social impact. I'm here to strengthen communities, to advocate for and voice the concerns of people who are typically underrepresented."

Building a Pipeline for Black Women

It's no secret that the commercial real estate industry has a long way to go when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion. A 2021 global real estate survey found that nearly 85 percent of senior-level real estate executives in North America are white. Malone's commitment to equity translates to a desire to open doors for more people of color.

Every quarter, Malone co-hosts a happy hour for Black women in architecture, engineering, construction, design and development. Her goal is to foster connection and promote pipeline development for marginalized people in commercial real estate and related industries. The other co-host is Michelle McClendon, a senior project executive at Gilbane Building Company, a construction firm.

"We launched these happy hours last year and they have been immensely popular," Malone said. "There aren't many Black women in the industry, which is precisely why we need spaces like thisto help establish and strengthen pipelines and accelerate diversity. I always say we're eliminating a culture of 'can't' and amplifying a culture of 'do.' If you want to change the landscape, you must take steps to spark a shift."

About GRIT

GRIT is a joint venture comprising Farpoint Development, Bronzeville Community Development Partnership, Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives, Draper & Kramer, Loop Capital and McLaurin Development to redevelop the former Michael Reese Hospital site in Chicago's Bronzeville community. The 100-acre, multibillion-dollar development is master planned as a vibrant, mixed-use, walkable, live-work-learn-play community with more than nine acres of sustainability-oriented green space. It will be anchored by the Bronzeville Innovation Center, which will encompass innovative life sciences, medical and bioscience offices, wet lab space and university partnership sites and be powered by the Chicago ARC, a life sciences accelerator developed in partnership with Israel's Sheba Medical Center and Kaleidoscope Health Ventures. Bronzeville Lakefront's offerings will include affordable, senior and workforce homes, retail options, restaurants and office space that will be home to major companies and organizations.

Media Contact:

Beshanda Owusu

bowusu@purposebrand.com

773-398-9194

Bronzeville Lakefront (PRNewsfoto/GRIT)

Cision

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SOURCE GRIT
ArcelorMittal plant is seen in Vanderbijlpark, an industrial city south of Johannesburg

(Reuters) - ArcelorMittal South Africa Ltd's share price was down 5.97% at 1500 GMT on Thursday on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange on the second day of a strike over wages, as workers picketed outside its factories.

The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) began a strike at Africa's biggest steel company on Wednesday, after wage negotiations broke down last week.

South Africa's labour court on Wednesday ordered that workers at the company's steel plants, blast furnaces and coke batteries be excluded from an ongoing job boycott, after ArcelorMittal argued these are essential services barred from striking by law, NUMSA said.

"Justice Mahosi of the labour court interdicted the strike temporarily but only for workers in the blast furnaces, coke batteries and the steel plant, until a final judgment has been made," NUMSA said in a statement.

The union wants a 10% pay increase, a housing allowance and payment of 80% of medical insurance costs, against the company's final offer of a 7% wage increase.

ArcelorMittal was not available to comment.

A NUMSA spokesperson said she could not immediately establish how many of union members worked in the departments affected by the court order but said NUMSA was the biggest union at ArcelorMittal, with about half of the company's permanent employees affiliated to it.

The company, majority owned by Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal SA, had 7,133 permanent workers at the end of 2021, its latest annual report showed.

On Thursday, scores of striking workers picketed outside ArcelorMittal's Vereeniging plant about 100 kilometres south of Johannesburg, chanting protest songs, burning tyres and blocking roads with cement blocks and debris as police kept a close watch.

"We want a 10% salary increase, that's why we are standing outside," Marake Mokoena, a crane driver, told Reuters.

"This is because (the price of) everything is increasing, petrol, food and everything, but the company doesn't want to give us that percentage, so we will fight until we get that 10% increase."

(Reporting by Nelson Banya; editing by Jason Neely and David Evans)
Starfleet Innotech, Inc.

We recognize the crucial role that North America plays as fertile grounds to stage our global expansion. There are incredibly exciting projects being launched across the SFIO ecosystem. Our job here in the US is to find partners interested in joining us on that journey.

NEW YORK, May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Starfleet Innotech , Inc. (OTC Pink: SFIO) (" SFIO " or The "Company") caps off the first leg of its US roadshow with a successful showing at the Planet MicroCap conference in Las Vegas, strategic meetings with Silicon Valley partners in Palo Alto. Towards the end of the month, executives from the global conglomerate will be congregating in New York to cement the agreements necessary to establish a more concrete presence in the United States.



While we already have a presence in the United States through our office, key personnel, and strategic partners, our showcase in Las Vegas formally kicks off the next phase of our growth as a conglomerate, said Santiago Arnaiz, General Manager of Communications at SFIO. We recognize the crucial role that North America plays as fertile grounds to stage our global expansion. There are incredibly exciting projects being launched across the SFIO ecosystemin the Philippines, Dubai, Malaysia, and beyondall vital parts of our growth journey. Our job here in the US is to find partners interested in joining us on that journey. The reception so far has been promising.

As a global investment holding company, SFIO is focused on innovation through disruptive collaborations across its three key industries: Food and Beverage (F&B), Real Estate, and Technology. This translates to making strategic investments in high-growth businesses and building synergies across its diverse portfolio in order to provide maximum shareholder value.

SFIO currently maintains offices across New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, the Philippines, and the United States. Over the next few months, the SFIO team will be mobilizing across North America , building on its momentum in Las Vegas and San Francisco, towards establishing a more concrete presence in the region.

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Last week, both Arnaiz and Chief Investor Officer Richard De Lima presented SFIO at the Planet MicroCap showcase to an audience of investors, fund managers, and family offices. In Toronto, CEO Jeths Lacson has mobilized a signed partnership with the companys Canadian distributor for Gorgeous Coffee and Epiphany Manuka Honey products . Under this agreement, the companys F&B products will be made available for purchase online through Amazon, and eventually through major retail outlets across North America.

Meanwhile, Chief Technology Officer Richard Prodigalidad met with technology partners in San Francisco and Palo Alto, including biotech wearable developer NeuroSky . Wearables developed by NeuroSky are set to be integrated into SFIOs real estate projects under the Moraya brand of wellness-oriented, tech-enabled townships. Deployed through Project Fort, a community health dashboard service and subsidiary of SFIO, these wearables will gather the data necessary to pioneer entirely new approaches to proactive community care .

In addition to ecosystem partners, Prodigalidad secured commitments to connect the increasing demand for tech talent across Silicon Valley with highly-skilled developers and designers based in the Philippinespositioning SFIO as the central hub in a global innovation ecosystem. More details on this new initiative will be shared in the months to come.

The work continues in connecting with investors and other growth enablers to take SFIO to the next level. We have a full lineup of meetings over the next few weeks, ranging from exploratory chats, follow-up sessions stemming from our recent participation at Planet MicroCap, and deep-dives into partnership agreements, said Arnaiz. It was exciting to get to sit down with our partners in Silicon Valley to kick off our co-creation efforts in technology. Im looking forward to doing the same in New York, representing our businesses like Epiphany Cafe with potential F&B partners.

Among these potential partners are major distributors, retail stores, manufacturers, and cafe franchiseswith whom SFIO hopes to bring its F&B businesses like Epiphany Cafe and Gorgeous Coffee into the country. To support these growth efforts, the company will be engaging with a US-focused IR firm to bolster its traction in this crucial market.

Our goal at SFIO is to bridge promising businesses from emerging economies with crucial growth enablers, many of which are based in the United States, said Arnaiz. Over the last year or so, weve been hard at work championing those promising businesses. Now were shifting our focus to the US, to build the other side of that global infrastructure. While here, well be looking to accomplish three things: strike strategic partnerships with institutional players, increase visibility on our global businesses, and gather the resources we need to get Starfleet soaring.

For media enquiries, please contact:

Craymond Yeong, PR & Marketing Specialist

Starfleet Innotech, Inc.

Phone: (+64) 21 0833 2966

Email: info@sfio.co.nz

Twitter: @SFIO_Inc

Facebook: @starfleetinnotech

YouTube: SFIO

About Starfleet Innotech, Inc.

Starfleet Innotech , Inc. (OTC: SFIO) is a global investment holding company focused on innovation through disruptive collaborations across its three key industries: Food and Beverage (F&B), Real Estate, and Technology. With a strong presence across New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, and the Philippines, SFIO makes strategic investments in high-growth businesses, building synergies across its diverse portfolio to provide maximum shareholder value. Guided by tradition, driven by innovation, and enabled by collaborationSFIO is on a hyper-growth path to build a thriving global business ecosystem, shaping the futures of its core industries.

FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS

The statements contained herein may contain certain forward-looking statements relating to Starfleet Innotech, Inc. Starfleet that are based on the beliefs of Starfleet as well as assumptions made by and information currently available to Starfleets management. These forward-looking statements are, by their nature, subject to significant risks and uncertainties. These forward-looking statements include, without limitation, statements relating to Starfleets business prospects, future developments, trends and conditions in the industry and geographical markets in which Starfleet operates, its strategies, plans, objectives and goals, its ability to control costs, statements relating to prices, volumes, operations, margins, capital expenditures, overall market trends, risk management and exchange rates.

When used herein, the words anticipate, believe, could, estimate, expect, going forward, intend, may, ought to, plan, project, seek, should, will, would and similar expressions, as they relate to Starfleet or Starfleets management, are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements reflect the Starfleets views at the time such statements were made with respect to future events and are not a guarantee of future performance or developments. You are strongly cautioned that reliance on any forward-looking statements involves known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Actual results and events may differ materially from information contained in the forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors, including any changes in the laws, rules and regulations relating to any aspects of Starfleets business operations, general economic, market and business conditions, including capital market developments, changes or volatility in interest rates, foreign exchange rates, equity prices or other rates or prices, the actions and developments of the Starfleets competitors and the effects of competition in the food manufacturer and service sector, technology applications and components, and real estate development. Sales and property management on the demand for, and price of, Starfleets products and services, various business opportunities that Starfleet may or may not pursue, changes in population growth and other demographic trends, including mortality, pandemics, morbidity and longevity rates, persistency levels, Starfleets ability to identify, measure, monitor and control risks in Starfleets business, including its ability to manage and adapt its overall risk profile and risk management practices, its ability to properly price its products and services, including property development capital expenditures and establish reserves for future policy benefits and claims, seasonal fluctuations and factors beyond the Starfleets control. Subject to the requirements of the Listing Rules, Starfleet does not intend to update or otherwise revise such forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. As a result of these and other risks, uncertainties and assumptions, forward-looking events and circumstances discussed herein might not occur in the way Starfleet expects, or at all. Accordingly, you should not place reliance on any forward-looking information or statements. All forward-looking statements herein are qualified by reference to the cautionary statements set forth in this section.




Stockton Mayor Kevin Lincoln and members of the City Council flew to Washington, D.C., this week to advocate for Stocktons legislative priorities.

Some 50 San Joaquin County delegates are in the nations capital for the San Joaquin Council of Governments One Voice trip. The purpose of the program is to advocate for increased funding and legislation for projects to the San Joaquin region.

Councilmember Kim Warmsley said the city is looking for $70 million to revitalize the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Airport Way corridor to create walkability and increase safety. The underpass was completed in 1937 for $310,000 with the help federal dollars from President Franklin D. Roosevelts New Deal during the Great Depression.

Warmsley said she and councilmember Christina Fugazi, who is not in Washington, have been championing the revitalization project for some time.

Stockton Mayor Kevin Lincoln was at the White House Monday, May 9, for President Joe Biden's announcement about reducing the cost of high-speed internet for millions of Americans.

Theres blight, theres a need to revitalize this underpass because its so decomposed. Its old, Warmsley said. Ive been talking to staffers here about why its important to invest in this redesign, it's going to give our residents and young people the ability to walk this corridor and be safe.

Warmsley said the underpass is not ADA-compliant and does not properly serve residents as a route to get to the grocery store, pharmacy or laundromat. Councilmembers Sol Jobrack, Dan Wright and Paul Canepa are also representing Stockton in the Capitol this week.

In addition to the One Voice trip, Lincoln was also invited to the White House to attend an announcement from President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on reducing the cost of high-speed internet for millions of Americans.

Internet is no longer a luxury, it is a necessity and far too many Stocktonians lack internet access, Lincoln said in a statement. I was invited to the White House today to represent the internet connectivity and infrastructure needs of Stockton.

More news: Major internet providers to slash cost of broadband service for low-income Americans

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The Bipartisan Infrastructure Laws Affordable Connectivity program provides eligible families high speed internet at reduced or no cost. The Stockton council members in Washington have a meeting scheduled with Congressman Josh Harder this week, who also advocated for San Joaquin County residents to take advantage of the new program he helped write.

Im encouraging every family to go online and apply to save $30 a month on their internet bill because I know every dollar counts right now, Harder said in a statement. I want every family in our community to get the savings they deserve."

Those interested in the Affordable Connectivity Program can apply at getinternet.gov. The City of Stockton also has its own plans to eventually provide free internet access throughout all of downtown.

Warmsley said the Stockton council members are advocating for a number of other legislative priorities in Washington, D.C.:

$35 million for a right-of-way improvement for the widening of Lower Sacramento Road

$1 million to complete a technical sustainability plan to enhance broadband access and renewable energy in the region

$11 million to enhance environmental infrastructure use, design and upgrades to the Port of Stockton

$30 million to revitalize and redesign the Stockton Airport

For the full list of the San Joaquin Council of Governments One Voice projects, visit https://www.sjcog.org/134/San-Joaquin-One-Voice.

Record reporter Ben Irwin covers Stockton and San Joaquin County government. He can be reached at birwin@recordnet.com or on Twitter @B1rwin. Support local news, subscribe to The Stockton Record at https://www.recordnet.com/subscribenow.

This article originally appeared on The Record: Stockton Mayor Kevin Lincoln advocates for region in Washington, DC
TigerGraph, Inc.

Independent Research Details Business Benefits and Cost Savings for TigerGraph Customers; Study Finds TigerGraph Increased Profits, Reduced Fraud, and Increased Productivity

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., May 12, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- TigerGraph , provider of a leading graph analytics platform, today released the results of a study commissioned by TigerGraph and conducted by Forrester Consulting that outlines the Total Economic Impact (TEI) of deploying TigerGraph . The study involved extensive interviews with six TigerGraph customers  each reporting between $20 - $250 billion in annual revenue  to examine their return on investment (ROI) and overall business benefits after adopting TigerGraph. Results indicate that for a composite organization, TigerGraph delivers 600% ROI and a net present value (NPV) of $20.81 million over three years, with one interviewed SVP and data scientist at a financial services organization describing TigerGraph as a force multiplier for improving existing processes in graph.



Weve seen the phenomenal impact TigerGraphs advanced graph analytics has had on global customers in nearly every industry  from automotive and healthcare to financial services and manufacturing. Yet, to have Forrester Consulting evaluate, research, and quantify what weve always known about graphs business value  and to then hear how TigerGraph was able to help organizations ask and answer critical business questions  is extremely rewarding, says Yu Xu, founder and CEO of TigerGraph. These impactful results  from increases in profitability to productivity gains  bolster TigerGraphs position as the industrys graph authority. As more of todays leading organizations tap the power of graph to accelerate their digital transformation efforts, TigerGraph continues to deliver a world-class, customer-proven product.

In addition to reporting 600% ROI and an NPV of $20.81 million over three years, Forrester Consulting also outlined benefits that a composite organization experienced with TigerGraph. These include:

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Increased profits from new products and services valued at $9.6 million over three years. A greater understanding of customers and organizational data through fast and powerful analysis opened a wide variety of avenues for organizations to provide new products and services, attract new customers, and generate new revenue resulting in increased profits.

Data team productivity increase of 70%. The data team saved time spent performing analysis and managing data and engineering databases, representing a three-year PV of $2.5 million for the composite organization.

Ease of use. Interviewees identified several features that contributed to ease and flexibility of experience including GSQL, the proprietary, Turing-complete programming language used by TigerGraph.



Another interviewed customer, an SVP of data fabric management at a financial services firm who participated in the Forrester TEI study shared their TigerGraph experience: It is really the scalability of the software that attracted us. [A] billion nodes within three months is just not manageable by a lot of relational database[s] and even some of the graph databases on [the] market. For us, without this graph database, there is really no way for us to figure out the relationship[s] among all these different applications.

Another interviewee from the study, an SVP and data scientist from a financial services organization, shared, We needed a graph technology that would help us in a real-time, enterprise-scalable manner to tick and tie what we call non-obvious relationships together. [With] TigerGraph that can happen in a matter of seconds or minutes.

Also, an SVP and data scientist in financial services commented on the ability to reduce fraud losses, improve customer experience, and make better decisions with TigerGraph. The same interviewee also stated that for their organization, data is really the new oil in terms of businesses. Its [a] competitive advantage for a lot of companies and creating a robust picture of our customers.

TigerGraph continues to advance the graph market while working to make graph accessible and understandable to more businesses worldwide. Last week, TigerGraph announced the finalists in the  Graph for All Million Dollar Challenge , a global search for innovative ways to harness the power of graph technology and machine learning to solve real- world problems. Winners and recipients of the $1 million in prizes will be announced and showcased at Graph + AI Summit , the industrys only open conference focused on accelerating analytics, AI, and machine learning with graph algorithms. The virtual event, taking place May 24-26, will include speakers from the worlds most innovative organizations and feature keynotes from industry visionaries as well as breakout sessions, use cases, and panels led by data, analytics, and AI professionals.

The complete findings of the Forrester Consulting TEI study of TigerGraph can be accessed here .

For more information on Graph + AI Summit or to register, please visit: https://www.tigergraph.com/graphaisummit/ .

Upcoming Webinar

Stay tuned for an upcoming TigerGraph webinar with guest speakers from Forrester to discuss the studys methodology, key findings, and quantified results. For updates on this webinar and to view other TigerGraph webinars, please visit https://www.tigergraph.com/webinar/ .

Helpful Links

About TigerGraph

TigerGraph is a platform for advanced analytics and machine learning on connected data. Based on the industrys first and only distributed native graph database, TigerGraphs proven technology supports advanced analytics and machine learning applications such as fraud detection, anti-money laundering (AML), entity resolution, customer 360, recommendations, knowledge graph, cybersecurity, supply chain, IoT, and network analysis. The company is headquartered in Redwood City, California, USA. Start free with tigergraph.com/cloud .

Media Contact

Tanya Carlsson

Offleash PR for TigerGraph

tigergraph@offleashpr.com

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Palestinians hold pictures of Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed by Israeli army gunfire during an Israeli raid, according to the Qatar-based news channel, in the West Bank (Reuters)

She covered the most persistently important story of the Arab world for the most widely watched channel in the Middle East.

On Wednesday morning, Shireen Abu Akleh fell victim to the very same conflict between Israelis and Palestinians that she had been chronicling for Al Jazeera, shot dead under still-murky circumstances as Israeli soldiers conducted a raid on the West Bank town of Jenin.

The death of the 51-year-old, Jerusalem-born Palestinian American is already sending shockwaves in Israel, the Middle East and across the world, and will likely draw more attention to the unsettled and lingering conflict at a time when it has receded from view.

Over the past quarter-century, Abu Akleh became a regular presence in homes, cafes and offices across the Arab world, as well as more broadly through Al Jazeeras English-language channel, the globe.

She was definitely the voice of Palestine in every Arab home, one international journalist said in an interview.

Her death by a gunshot to the head Jenin is already complicating an ongoing political crisis in Israel, and has prompted calls for answers by the United Kingdom and the United States.

I encourage a thorough investigation into the circumstances of her death and the injury of at least one other journalist today in Jenin, Tom Nides, the US ambassador to Israel, wrote in a tweet.

The news of the killing prompted Israels United Arab List to delay an announcement on whether it would remain part of Israels governing coalition or allow it to lose its slim majority. Palestinian leaders, Al Jazeera, Qatar, where the broadcaster is headquartered and NGOs, have all blamed Israel for the killing, though Israel insists that Palestinian gunmen likely shot Abu Akleh.

The veteran journalist, known for her cool demeanour and professionalism, and her team were setting up to cover live, ongoing Israeli raids on Jenin when one of her colleagues, Ali al-Samudi, was suddenly shot in the shoulder, according to accounts collected by Palestinian journalists.

Story continues

There were no clashes at the moment, said Mohammed Daraghmeh,

Palestine-based bureau chief for Asharq, a United Arab Emirates news outlet, said: Ali fell and he was shot again in the back. At this moment Shireen was screaming, Ali was shot! Ali was shot!

Heavier shooting then erupted. Video posted to social media showed panicked journalists screaming for help as automatic weapon fire sounded in the distance. Another journalist who was next to her told me that lots of gunfire had come to the scene, and Shireen fell, Mr Daraghmeh recounted. He tried to reach for her but she wasnt moving.

Video showed what was said to be Abu Aklehs lifeless body lying on the ground. Journalists covering the raid began screaming for ambulances. The Palestinian Health Ministry confirmed Shireen Abu Akleh was hit in the head by gunfire. Mr Samudi remains in stable condition.

Israeli forces said they were met by massive gunfire and explosives during the raid and responded by opening fire. "It appears likely that armed Palestinians, who were firing indiscriminately at the time, were responsible for the unfortunate death of the journalist, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said.

But both Palestinian officials and Al Jazeera have blamed Israel for shooting the journalists, who wore blue helmets and body armour denoting them as members of the press.

Its clear they were shot from the Israeli soldiers side, said Mr Daraghme. There was no threat of any kind to soldiers. There was no crossfire, and they were away from the soldiers.

Al Jazeera called the killing blatant murder, violating international laws and norms and accused Israeli forces of having assassinated Abu Akleh in cold blood. It called on the international community to hold Israel accountable for the death

Al Jazeera holds the Israeli government and the occupation forces responsible for the killing of Shireen, it said in a statement.

Israels foreign ministry released video footage showing what it described as Palestinian gunmen in Jenin announcing they had shot an Israeli soldier, but noted that no Israeli soldiers had been shot during Wednesdays encounter in Jenin. Israel has called for a joint investigation into the death, welcoming a joint autopsy to identify the round that killed her.

Palestinian journalists mourn near the body of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh (EPA)

There are indications that Ms Abu Akleh was killed by Palestinian terrorist fire, the foreign ministry statement said. Israel will be conducting a thorough investigation. We call on the Palestinian Authority to cooperate with said investigation to get to the truth.

Mr Daraghmeh, who was a close friend and colleague of Abu Akleh, described her as zealously committed to her work. A Palestinian Christian, Abu Akleh never married and leaves behind no children. After earning a degree in journalism from Jordan, she moved back to Jerusalem and got to work.

I used to call her a nun who devoted her life to journalism and high values, he said.

Her years-long coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for the most widely watched pan-Arab satellite channel, and its English-language affiliate, made her a brand name across the region.

During a trip to Sudan once, Mr Daraghmeh showed a picture of himself with Abu Akleh, and was told by young journalists and journalism teachers that she would be mobbed in the streets as a celebrity if she ever made it to Khartoum.

Everyone in the Arab world who followed the Palestinian conflict would see her coverage, he said.
The Phillips Collections presentation of Picasso: Painting the Blue Period unfolds like a detective story.

Walking through the galleries, we view Picassos early works displayed alongside selections of what the ambitious young artist saw, studied and sketched in the vibrant art scene of Paris and Barcelona during 19011904.

Edgar Degas Nude Woman (189193), Henri de ToulouseLautrecs Woman at the Tub (1896) and Auguste Rodins sculpture Eve (1883)all give clues of what Picasso would look for ideas to create his own art like The Blue Room (Paris, 1901).

Picassos references to art history and religion, as well as his autobiography, are continuing elements in his works. Evocation (The Burial of Casagemas) (1901) is his record of a personal moment, a deathbed portrait of his close friend Carlos Casagemas, which he has recast in the manner of El Greco.

Like a poet employs metaphor, Picasso would use the color blue both for its human emotions of sadness, grief and despair and for its religious symbolism.

He also knew the grim statistics of victims suffering because of their sex, class, poverty and despairall of which he saw in the faces of women at SaintLazare, a womens prisonhospital. Unlike his famous wives and lovers who served as models for his later works, these women are unknown. Melancholy Woman (1902) was a lonely woman who captured his attention during his visit to SaintLazare as she sat apart in isolation and depression. With the her hands hidden within layers of shawls and her eyes closed, Crouching Beggarwoman (Barcelona, 1902) could be one of the many blind and beggars he saw on the street. She has been described as the personification of poverty.

Works on paper like The Soup (c. 18621865) by Honore Daumier and paintings like Saint Genevieve Provisioning Paris [Sainte Genevieve ravitaillant Paris] (c. 18971898) by French symbolist painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes would influence Picasso in his interpretation of charity. In The Soup (Barcelona, 1903), rather than the beggar holding out a hand for alms, Picasso poses a woman slightly bent forward in a gesture of offering the gift of nourishment, a bowl of soup to a child.

Choices of images and themes, postures and positions of limbs, and color to portray mood would converge in the creation of some of Picassos most compelling works in what would later be called the Blue Period.

How did he do it? His sketches show what he saw, but this exhibit goes beneath the surface of the paintings to see what our eyes cannot, in trying to understand the techniques and materials he used to create his own style.

The latest technological methods in art conservation along with historical studies have been employed to research Picassos early works at this pivotal point in his career. Like the processes of blood-type analysis and fingerprinting in the field of forensics, these studies have revealed information that create a unique record of his methods, as well as pose new questions.

Videos in the exhibit provide details of the scientific findings of the underlying compositions and motifs beneath three works.

The original infrared reflectance image of The Blue Room uncovered a portrait of a man in a white shirt. Further imagery reveals he is holding a red and yellow flower below his bow tie in his left hand. Who the man is remains a mystery, perhaps someone Picasso saw who frequented the Montmartre district for vice and pleasure and who would appear in his other works.

X-ray images of Crouching Beggarwoman reveals an earlier depiction of a woman with her hand out to receive alms. Rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise, the work further shows that underneath is a painting of the landscape of the Labyrinth of Horta in Barcelona. While the artist of the landscape is unknown, what the radiograph established is the date that Picasso would have begun to use the canvas to paint Crouching Beggarwoman.

The study of the paint samples of The Soup indicates final reworking by the artist in many areas, such as changing the position of the woman from her back to the viewer to the woman and child posed sideways. Like Crouching Beggarwoman, The Soup is evidence of Picassos preoccupation with gesture with the repositioning of an arm, a hand or a foot to emphasize a sentiment, thus presenting emotion through evocative imagery.

Like any great mystery series, which hints at the end of the story to lead to another adventure, the final two galleries track how Picasso revisited and repurposed themes in his transition from the late Blue Period into what would come next in his early Rose Period (190506).

So much more was to come in Picassos work over the next 70 years of artistic creations, which would include a variety of themes in works from paintings and sculptures, poems and plays. How it all started is now on view to explore in Picasso: Painting the Blue Period at the Phillips Collection through June 12.
By Azernews





Azerbaijani Deputy Foreign Minister Elnur Mammadov and Paraguayan Foreign Minister Julio Arriola discussed regional and international security issues of mutual interest on May 10.

As part of the Azerbaijani deputy foreign ministers visit to Latin America, the sides expressed appreciation of the level of relations between the two countries, stressing the importance of the political dialogue.

Further, the sides exchanged views on the partnership between Azerbaijan and Paraguay within international organizations, as well as opportunities for expanding cooperation in energy, agriculture, and humanitarian spheres.

Mammadov thanked Paraguay for its consistent and sustainable support for the territorial integrity and sovereignty of our country.

Earlier, the diplomats held political consultations for the first time in Asuncion, Paraguay.

The parties discussed the current state of bilateral relations, as well as issues of expanding mutual partnership in political, economic, energy, agricultural and humanitarian spheres.

Moreover, they exchanged views on the development of prospects for cooperation within regional and international organizations.
The folks at the Science Museum of Virginia are celebrating something that is all around us and is often taken for grantedbut without which we would literally go to piecesin Skin: Living Armor, Evolving Identity. The new touring exhibit explores the science of human and other animals skin, as well as the societal constructs associated with skin color.

The skins ability to sense, adapt and regrow is phenomenal, but this exhibition covers far more than biology, said Virginia C. Ellett Director of Education Timshel Purdum. It weaves culture, evolution, economics, genetics and power into the narrative that highlights the diversity in an organ that is so important and distinct to each species.

Many people have never considered skin as an organ, but guests will learn that it is, in fact, the largest organ in our bodies and serves to protect us from microbes and the elements, helps regulate body temperature, and permits the sensations of touch, heat and cold. In addition, the cells in its outer layer, the epidermis, manufacture features such as our fingernails and hair that are made from the same protein.

Guests who wonder just how much skin it takes to cover our bodies will find their answer in a memorable display that shows that the amount of skin on an average person is equal to the covering of one twin-size mattress, or 22 square feet. In contrast, the skin covering an elephant would be equal to the covering on four and a half king-size mattresses.

There are so many things most people dont know about skin explained in this exhibit. Every corner has some wow factor! said Purdum.

One unforgettable element is the discussion and depiction of face mites.

This exhibition shows that we are never alone! Nearly every person has these microscopic mites that make their home on your face and eyebrows and eyelids. Guests can view microscopic slides of the mites, which are arachnidsrelated to ticks and, more distantly, to spidersand they can watch an amazing video of a living face mite crawling around, said Purdum. The most common remark we hear when guests see this display is that it makes them want to go wash their face!

The beginning of Skin features tactile circles of replicated scales, quills and feathers. Later on in the exhibit, guests have the opportunity to test their skills at identifying different animal skin by flipping large circlesone side has the animal and the other a close-up view of the animals skin. The circles can be flipped to identify the various animals featured.

A fascinating display presents examples of how some animalsincluding octopuses, squids and other cephalopodscan change their color and shapes as a survival technique. In addition, guests will see the difference in the size of a porcupine when its quills rise, as well as the size of a puffer fish when it inhales a large amount of water and its spikes erect.

That phenomenon of birds and mammals erecting their feathers or fur is about helping them keep warm and making them look bigger to predators, said Purdum. Often, when you see your cat or dog get puffy, its because theyre trying to look bigger!

The exhibit delves into color changes that different creatures can initiate. When guests pass a panel with an image of an animal in one direction, it is recognizable, but when they turn to pass in the opposite direction, it seems to disappear. Another display shows that color can be used to deter would-be predators.

In a display called Sepia Rainbow the exhibition does a wonderful job exploring why there is a such a spectrum of skin color among humans, said Purdum. Panels and an interactive computer graphic present a map of the world showing regions where the suns ultraviolet rays are the strongest. In those areas, our early ancestors would have more melanin as protection. As our ancestors moved throughout the globe, populations who moved to areas where UV rays are weaker, would have adapted to have less melanin, allowing people to make more vitamin D.

In addition, one section talks about the how differences in color and race have been perceived culturally and historically. The exhibit culminates with a wall of faces of different hues and shades that continually morph. A bench in front of this display invites guests to sit a while and ponder the impact of this display of the spectrum of members in our human family.

Our goal is to ensure that the conversations that are sparked at the Science Museum continue when families return home, said Jennifer Guild, manager of Communications and Curiosity. In all we do, we hope to spark curiosity and continued exploration of the world around us.

Throughout the exhibits run at the Science Museum of Virginia, a variety of programs and activities will complement its exploration of its topic. The forthcoming Planet Shark: Predator or Prey will include displays of their fascinating skin, and The Dome theaters film about spirit bears provides a glimpse of rare black bears that are, in fact, white and inhabit a specific region of Canada. Also, a drop-in challenge in the Science Museums makerspace, The Forge, offers an opportunity for guests to use cardboard and their design skills to create armor inspired by the amazing array of animal armor from armadillos to porcupines.

We hope that families will take the opportunity to experience this exhibition and to get a sampling of the amazing things about the creatures that inhabit our world, which they can continue to explore at their own pace.
I TRY NOT to be too hard on the police, but then things like the case of 77-year-old Ralph Ennis occur.

In case you missed it on the TV news, Ennis, who lives in Pennsylvania, was in the Front Royal area when a deputy reportedly saw him driving erratically.

The Warren County deputy reportedly tried to pull Ennis over but the elderly man, who his wife said suffered from dementia, drove about four miles before finally coming to a stop in a business parking lot.

The elderly man, probably lost and confused, got out of his vehicle holding his keys, which the deputy ordered him to drop like those keys were a dangerous weapon. When the man didnt comply, two deputies grabbed him and slammed the old man face-first into the back of his truck, all three men falling to the ground at one point.

Ennis was taken to the hospital when he was reportedly found suffering from a brain bleed. He died a few days later.

This scenario is not speculation. A Front Royal town policeman caught it all on his cars dash camera and can be heard saying, in a very angry and frustrated voice, that this treatment of Ennis was completely unnecessary. The video has been aired on D.C. television news segments multiple times.

Perhaps the deputies in question have been spared the heartbreak of having a relative with dementia but, as I have been told many times by many different law enforcement officers, ignorance is no excuse under the law.

Dementia is a sad disease, as those of us who have family members with any of its forms all too readily know. As the disease progresses, those suffering from it can get lost in their own neighborhoods or even their own homes.

I had a relative who, having been perfectly fine when she left home, got lost on the way to her hairdressers house, a two-mile trip she had made hundreds of times. She wound up at an airport 20 miles away.

Another friend, sitting in his chair in his living room, got up and said that it was time to go home. When his son tried to explain that he was home, the elderly man would not believe him. Finally, the son put his father in the car and drove him down familiar roads for a few miles. When the son returned to his fathers driveway, the elderly man got out and was perfectly happy.

As for Ennis dropping his keys, a vehicle is often an elderly persons last remaining instrument of independence. It is hard enough for an old person in complete control of his or her faculties to give up his or her mode of transportation.

For someone like Ennis, who was several hours from home and likely confused about where he was, dropping his keys would likely have been unthinkable. That vehicle, at least in the confused mind of a dementia patient, was his only means of reaching home and safety.

According to his wife, who spoke to the media in a telephone interview, Ennis had disappeared back in March and there was a missing persons flyer to prove it. It is easy to say that he should not have been allowed to drive after that, but the fact was that he had somehow made his way into Warren County.

Ill leave it to the lawyers and the doctors to determine whether the harsh treatment by the deputies caused the brain bleed that reportedly led to Enniss death. But to bully an elderly man with dementia whose only weapon was the vehicle key in his hand is inexcusable. The elderly man, now out of his vehicle and off the highway, posed no threat.

A man driving erratically might be under the influence of some drug, but he also might be sick or wandering aimlessly in the frightened world of dementia. Under the law he is innocent until proven guilty and does not deserve to be manhandled.

The deputies involved can only hope they do not one day suffer from dementia. Then again, maybe thats what they deserve.

Id be willing to bet that the deputies will contend that they were only following their police training. If they were trained to manhandle an old man with dementia, then training is as much of a problem as the deputies.

As for the Front Royal town policeman, he and his department deserve credit for releasing the dashcam video.

That video is worth more than 1,000 words.
Fredericksburg City Council gave final approval for the fiscal year 2023 budget at a meeting Tuesday night.

Vice Mayor Chuck Frye Jr. and Councilman Matt Kelly voted against a 3-cent real estate tax increase and the citys Capital Improvement Plan, respectively.

Both of those issues passed 61, but Frye and Kelly said their votes were statements to encourage more dialogue about a rising cost of living in the city that is showing no signs of slowing down.

Its been alluded to this evening that we are looking at some very significant costs moving forward on big projects, Kelly said. We really havent gotten into the operational component of future budgets.  Were going to have to pay police officers, sheriffs, teachers and everybody else a lot more. We know thats all coming down the pike. We do need to sit down and have a conversation about what our priorities are and explain that to the public.

The City Council approved a $114.9 million general fund budget with a $30.5 million transfer to Fredericksburg City Public Schools.

The budget includes a 4% raise for city staff. In addition to the real estate tax rate going from 83 cents per $100 of assessed value to 86 cents, there is also an 8% hike in water rates and a 10% increase in sewer rates.

There are several major projects included in the Capital Improvement Plan, including $101 million for wastewater treatment plant upgrades, $57 million for a new middle school and $14 million for a new fire station.

City Manager Tim Baroody reiterated Tuesday that water and sewer fees will continue to rise for the next several years to complete the wastewater upgrades.

We believe well continue to need to raise rates for several years for a period of five to six years to accomplish what is a historic project for the city of Fredericksburg to meet federal and state mandates by 2026, Baroody said.

Former Gov. Ralph Northams outgoing budget in December included $27 million to Fredericksburg for the wastewater treatment plant upgrades. Baroodys staff also noted that there are other funding sources that could bring the debt service for the expenditure down to $43 million.

Kelly said in addition to the initial costs of the major projects, hes concerned about the operational funds thatll be required.

While some on City Council, including Mayor Mary Katherine Greenlaw, have claimed the public should be aware of whats coming, Kelly said the conversations havent been robust enough. He said its not the job of citizens to dig through and research the budget, but that city officials should do a better of job of explaining it.

Our priorities have to change and we cant get everything, Kelly said. Now is the time to tell the public what they can and cannot expect  A lot of the projects were talking about now coming to fruition, a lot them have been frankly deferred. Now were facing them along with everything else were doing. We cant keep operating this way.

Frye also has concerns.

He voted against the real estate tax rate increase on April 26 on first read. He stuck with his vote Tuesday because of a fear from longtime residents that theyre being priced out of the city. He also said young individuals and families are unable to own a home in Fredericksburg.

I absolutely understand what we have to do in the city so [my vote] is not a knock on what we have to do in the city, Frye said. I want to use my platform as a statement vote so folks can pay attention that things are changing and to know there are going to be a lot of increases coming up over the next few years to handle what we need to handle in the city.

Greenlaw said the rising costs are so obvious it doesnt take a Philadelphia lawyer to figure that one out.

Still, Councilman Jon Gerlach said city officials must find creative ways to ease the burden on those who can least afford the increases.

Councilwoman Kerry Devine said the higher taxes and rates arent enjoyable to see but theyre necessary.

We are an old city with new needs, Devine said. Were growing, which is a good thing.  But along with that growth and vibrancy comes the need to upgrade and expand our basic needs.

Taft Coghill Jr: 540/374-5526 tcoghill@freelancestar.com

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A lawsuit filed in July by a dozen anonymous women who claimed Liberty University not only failed to help them after they reported sexual assaults or sexual misconduct but made the college more dangerous through its responses has been settled, according to court documents filed Wednesday.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York on behalf of the Jane Doe plaintiffs, accused the school of enabling on-campus rapes and specifically referenced the weaponization of the Liberty Way, LUs honor code. It described claims of sexual assaults and violence against multiple students, as well as discrimination against a pregnant and breastfeeding student, spanning more than two decades.

Among the lawsuits claims were those from one plaintiff who said she was attacked when she was 15 while at a 2000 summer camp offered by LU but was warned by LU campus police she would be criminally charged with filing a false report if she did not withdraw her claim about the assault. According to the suit, she later learned the attacker was Jesse Matthew Jr., who pleaded guilty in 2016 to the abduction and killing of two Virginia college students.

A notice seeking the suits dismissal due to settlement was filed Wednesday by the plaintiffs attorney, Jack Larkin. Details of the settlement were not available in court documents. Larkin did not return a message seeking comment Wednesday.

In a statement Wednesday, Liberty University confirmed the settlement with all of the plaintiffs as well as all but two additional women Larkin represented.

An update to the lawsuit, filed by Larkin in February, had noted additional victims have come forward and the suit potentially could grow from 12 to 22 plaintiffs, but progress toward a settlement was being made at that time.

LUs statement Wednesday said its president, Jerry Prevo, made it clear when the Jane Does filed their lawsuit that, despite certain claims being potentially outside of the statute of limitations, the university was committed to doing what it could to make things right with the plaintiffs represented by attorney Jack Larkin.

The statement also highlighted recent initiatives undertaken by the university, including $8.5 million in security cameras, blue light boxes and other upgrades; a review of policies and procedures, including better communicating that students who are sexually harassed or assaulted while engaging in behaviors that otherwise would violate the schools honor code will not be disciplined; and its intent to add lactation rooms to better support mothers who are members of the LU community.

Again, the University hopes that the many measures that it undertook prior to the settlement also convey the sincerity and seriousness by which Liberty University is approaching these concerns under the direction of President Prevo and the universitys Board of Trustees, the statement said.

After the suit was initially filed, Liberty officials said the allegations were deeply troubling, if they turn out to be true, and said the school had invested in staff and programs to help victims of sexual assault.

The Jane Does lawsuit, together with similar claims made public, became a major catalyst for students, alumni and others seeking systemic change at LU. Multiple people came forward through social media, their own lawsuits or other channels, claiming their reports of sexual assault led to their own punishment, were minimized by someone in authority or that they were too afraid of potential consequences to speak up.

In November, a rally on campus that drew hundreds of attendees and supporters prompted a direct response from the schools board of directors, promising change to institutional policies and independent and comprehensive review of its Title IX policies and processes, which entail how school campuses handle reports of sexual assault.

That same month, Virginias two U.S. senators, Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, said they were urging the federal Department of Education to investigate how Liberty University responds to sexual assault cases.

The Washington Post reported this month the education department is conducting such an investigation, and LU told the newspaper it welcomes the review and has pledged its full cooperation.

Group says Department of Education investigating LU over LGBTQ-related concerns An advocacy group says the U.S. Department of Educations Office for Civil Rights is investigating Liberty University following a Title IX complaint filed by the organization.

'It ought to be better:' Outcry over sex assaults culminates in Liberty University campus rally Demands that Liberty University open a truly independent investigation into accusations of systemic mishandling of sexual assault complaints hit a peak Thursday.
KIRK TWIGG is not an easy man to reach.

The chair of the Spotsylvania County School Board has developed a reputation for failing to respond to constituents, refusing to talk with the media, and ignoring requests from fellow board members for basic information.

Thats ironic, given that in October 2019, when running for reelection, Twigg had this to say to The Free LanceStar:

I believe the voter, taxpayer, parent and student deserve to know what is going on ... and in a timely fashion.  I will ... encourage more communication between the superintendent, School Board and parents.

What has changed? Power.

Whereas Twigg was consistently in the minority on many votes from the time he first joined the School Board, he is now the chair who appears to be leading a revolution without a cause.

We say without a cause because four months into his tenure, there is still no answer to one basic question: What is Twiggs core vision?

Twiggs failure to state his plans suggests that he either doesnt want to divulge what he intends to do, or he is playing a game he simply hasnt figured out yet.

Either way, its a violation of the uncodified guardrails, generally accepted by democratically minded people, that school board leaders will be transparent in their activities.

The Free LanceStar has twice reached Twigg by phone to ask about his plans for the school system.

The first time, we invited him to write an opinion piece laying out his vision. He said he would consider doing so, but not until late June or early July, when all will be revealed, with no explanation about what that cryptic phrase means.

The second time was a follow-up call before publishing this editorial to ask why he has not been transparent about his plans. Again he demurred, saying only that wed talk next month.

It seems the media arent the only ones he is being coy with. Constituents and school parents have shared emails and screenshots of personal social media posts in which Twigg has responded in similar fashion. Openly bragging about his leadership, and telling them to watch for whats to come.

Perhaps because of growing outcries, at the May 9 School Board meeting, Twigg finally spoke about what he means by all will be revealed. Referencing his conversations with The Free LanceStar, he said he wanted to talk in July, hoping by then the drama will have died down and he can talk about the boards accomplishments. He then listed several.

However, he continued to evade the core question we asked: What is your vision for the school system?

Some of those who worked to put Twigg and his supporting cast into power are as flummoxed by Twiggs obfuscation as anyone.

Longtime Spotsylvania resident Alfred M. King invited members of the school board to his house prior to the swearing in on Jan. 1 to provide some guidance on how to prepare for the responsibilities before them.

They have largely failed to show any interest in learning to handle their tasks.

We [the conservative leaders who helped put them into office] are truly paralyzed, King told The Free LanceStar.

If Twiggs not listening to those who helped put him into office, and hes uninterested in sharing his plans with the media or his constituents, who is he listening to?

On at least two occasions, Twigg has spoken in ways that would suggest he is carrying the flag for the local Tea Party.

On April 23, at a gathering hosted by the Fredericksburg Virginia Patriots, Twigg was introduced by Nick Ignacio.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Twigg said. The Spotsylvania School Board continues to work for you.

Like the vague allusions to all being revealed, this subservient language is both curious and disturbingly suggestive.

Then, at the May 9 School Board meeting, he referenced a teacher who watched Tea Party meetings online, saying he was happy about this and calling it educational TV.

Privileging any one political party, especially from the dais, is concerning. School Board members in Virginia are supposed to be nonpartisan.

For now, there are no clear answers to the question of what Twigg is planning, or who he is listening to. The devastating impact of Twiggs failure to be transparent, however, is coming into focus.

On Friday, we will outline the concerns facing the Spotsylvania County School system, and the potential costs of a secretive approach to leadership.
For as many Marvel films as there have been in the past several years, itd be fair to say weve seen about everything the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) has to offer. Then here comes Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which is easily the most unusual and horror-inspired film in the marvel wheel.

The film starts out grotesque in one of the first scenes. With Doctor Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) reluctantly attending the wedding of his ex-girlfriend Christine (Rachel McAdams), the celebration is interrupted by a Cyclops monster taking over New York City.

After taking care of the monster with relative ease, and with help from friend and ally in Wong (Benedict Wong), Strange runs into a mysterious teenage girl named America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez). Confessing to America that he saw her in his dream last night, America pleads to Strange that it was not a dream  that was the multiverse.

America soon shows him proof. It turns out, America has the ability to travel between different dimensions. The only problem is, she cant control it and can only open these universes when she gets scared.

Never having the best bedside manner, Strange seeks help from a friend who can help America control her powers, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen). Little does Strange know, Maximoff, also known as Scarlet Witch, isnt fit to be the best mentor right now. Not only did she lose the love of her life in Vision, she has dreams every night of being a mother to her two young sons  non-existent, of course, but they feel very real to her.

When the Scarlet Witch learns that America can travel to different universes, she goes from friend to enemy. Somewhere in the universe, Wanda is convinced she can be a mother to her two children.

Things get complicated further when America, naturally scared for her life, travels across dimensions with Strange. Its in these universes where Strange meets various versions of himself, and some familiar faces, in his quest to protect America and keep her powers as far away from the delusional Scarlet Witch as possible.

Much like the first Doctor Strange film, its sequel is not lacking in visuals. Of course, when a film is so visually stunning, its generally all style and no substance. This is the biggest problem in Multiverse of Madness. For a film that looks so large, it doesnt feel large, as visuals and jump-scares replace the humor and heart weve come to love from the MCU.

Olsen is the real stunner of the film, though, showing hell hath no fury like a witch scorned. Olsens character is so broken, but shes determined to watch the world burn if thats what it takes to gain an ounce of happiness.

In spite of the convoluted plot and odd sequences, there are several fanservice moments that are too juicy to spoil. While most blockbusters tend to the general population, Multiverse of Madness is undoubtedly made for the die-hards, as viewers who havent seen recent Marvel films or shows will be confused within minutes of the opening credits.

Multiverse of Madness is worth seeing for the visuals and the films mighty ambition; just dont be surprised if you feel shortchanged by a spell or two at the films end.

Grade: B

Blake Kavan works for a technology company in Fremont, NE. In his spare time, he loves to watch and write about movies, primarily of the action and thriller genres. He will contribute reviews for movie enthusiasts to read and enjoy for major motion pictures released. Blake can be reached at blakekavan11@gmail.com.

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Erica Hilbers, RN BSN, was 16 years old when she decided to pursue a career in nursing.

My sister is a nurse at Bryan in Lincoln, and she urged me to take a CNA course, Hilbers said.

Born in Fremont, Hilbers earned her bachelor's of science in nursing at Midland Lutheran College. Hilbers has been working as a registered nurse for over 15 years. Prior to that, she worked as a CNA for seven years at the Hooper Care Center.

After she obtained her, she worked at the Oakland Mercy Hospital (small critical access hospital in Oakland) where Hilbers said she gained experience in all different areas - inpatient, emergency room, outpatient, and surgical nursing. After working there for over 12 years, she then started working as a circulating Nurse in surgery at Methodist Fremont Health. Where she has been for the past tree days. For the past 10 years she has been volunteering for the Uhling Rescue Squad.

Upon learning of her nomination for this publication, Hilbers was surprised.

I was told by a coworker, and I said, Oh, how sweet! I feel honored and appreciated. There are so many who deserve this as much as I do.

Hilbers is grateful for the team she gets to work with.

I learned what I know from my team," she said. "I couldnt do the job I do without their help. Knowing I have their support is so important to me.

When asked if she has any special philosophy that has guided her in her career, Hilbers said that always trying to go above and beyond, making a difference is key.

Theres always work to be done, always changes in the medical field," she said. "We have students come in who are interested in learning what we do, and that also keeps me motivated.

The Tribune had Hilbers answer the following questions about her experience as a nurse.

Q. Tell us about your immediate family.

My husband, Brent, and I live on a farm south of Uehling. We have four daughters: Kaylee, 17 (who is also a CNA); Marissa, 12; Riley, 9; and Paris, 6, who all attend Logan View High School.

Q. When, why did you decide to become a nurse?

I have many relatives that are nurses and my sister encouraged me to become a CNA for a good job in high school. At the age of 16, I started working as a certified nursing assistant at the Hooper Care Center. During my time there I found that I loved to help take care of others and building relationships with residents and their families. I also found that I really enjoyed the nursing field and that I wanted to become a nurse.

Q. What do you like best about nursing and find most rewarding about it?

What I enjoy the most is taking care of others. As a nurse you get to take care of people during some of their most vulnerable and hurting times. I believe that through a simple smile, kind gestures to try to go above and beyond for someone, and through simple acts of kindness, you can really make a difference. If you can help a patient through a difficult time, make them more comfortable and be there for them when they need it the most - that is what is the most rewarding about being in the field of nursing.

Q. Funniest, saddest, most unusual experience in nursing?

The saddest experience in nursing for me has been with my past experience when working in the emergency room. I was taking care of a pediatric trauma patient and experiencing the emotions of the parent right next to their hurt child. In other times, being there for families in time of grief when you do everything you can to try and save their loved one but it just isnt enough.

On the other side, one of the funniest experiences Ive had is as a surgical nurse, you get to see other sides of patients as well. I had a good friend come in for a colonoscopy procedure. Knowing that I was going to be the nurse for her colonoscopy procedure, she took the time to write a comical personal message where the sun doesn't shine and no one else could see the message until we were ready for her procedure. Needless to say, that was a first at that time but even funnier that now it has happened more times than one.

Q. If you hadnt become a nurse, what profession might you have entered? And why?

If I had not become a nurse, the other profession I would have entered would have been a teacher. In high school I knew I either wanted to be a teacher or a nurse. I love to teach but learned that as a nurse, I get the best of both worlds  I get to be a teacher when doing education for patients and their families. In my years of nursing I also really enjoy teaching students and being a preceptor for new employees.

Q. Why are you glad you chose nursing?

I am glad I chose the nursing field because of all that I get to do and experience. The nursing field is always changing with advancements so there is never a dull moment and plus you get to meet and care for so many different people on a daily basis. I believe it is truly a miracle of the things that we can now do patients in the field of medicine. In addition to this there is such a variety of jobs and experiences available  something for everyone. Plus - the job security is definitely there.

Q. Future plans?

My future plans are to continue working as a registered nurse at Methodist Fremont Health in the operating room. I am currently taking a course to gain more knowledge about the perioperative field of nursing. My goal is to get my CNOR  the certification of a nurse specific for the operating room.

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When Kyle Brichacek goes to treat his patients, he keeps in mind how he would want caregivers to treat his family members.

It's a thought he has kept with him for 10 years as a registered nurse.

A Fremont native, Brichacek attended Fremont Public Schools. After high school, he attended Central Community College for his associates degree and to become an RN. Brichacek finished his schooling at Midland University for his bachelors degree.

At the time Brichacek was going through school, he took advantage of a program offered by Methodist Fremont Health that pays for the student to attend school. Midland partnered with MFH to offer this option to students. In return, the student works for MFH for a set amount of time after graduation.

Along with MFH, Brichacek has worked in a nursing home in Omaha. He enjoys his current post.

Its close to home and I enjoy everybody I work with, Brichacek said of working at MFH and being in Fremont. Its a little bit smaller. Its a really good team (at MFH). Its nice taking care of people and having an impact on peoples lives that live around you. A little bit closer knit population.

There are times when Brichacek can connect with his patients who are also from Fremont and know about certain places and whats going on there. Brichacek added that it seems like his patients like that he is from Fremont, too. He also tries to get to know his patients to make them feel more comfortable.

COVID  something no one knew much about  has had a big impact and was difficult to navigate through, Brichacek said.

He lost patients during this time which was hard.

It was rare  not being able to turn something around for somebody  but it became frequent and we felt almost helpless the times we couldnt save people, he said.

The Tribune had Brichacek answer the following questions about his experience as a nurse.

Question. Tell us about your immediate family.

Answer: I have an amazing and beautiful wife named, Meghan, who is an awesome nurse. We have two rowdy boys aged 1 and 2, Ben and Oliver.

Q. When, why did you decide to become a nurse?

A. I started in nursing as a CNA and medication aide in a nursing home. I really enjoyed taking care of my patients and quickly decided nursing was the career path I would pursue.

Q. What do you like best about nursing and find most rewarding about it?

A. What I find the most rewarding are the days that I am able to take care of a patient in the hospital that may be experiencing one of their worst days and turn things around for them, make them feel better, and get them on the right track to improving their health and getting them closer to discharging home.

Q. Funniest, saddest, most unusual experience in nursing?

A. The saddest and most unusual experience has definitely been going through the COVID pandemic working as a nurse in the hospital.

Q. If you hadnt become a nurse, what profession might you have entered? And why?

A. I would be a stay-at-home dad, because that's really my favorite job, nursing is a close second.

Q. Why are you glad you chose nursing?

A. Many reasons. Of course, I enjoy having a positive impact on the lives of the patients I take care of. Nursing can also be challenging mentally, physically, and emotionally, which can be both good and bad at times. You are always learning as a nurse. I enjoy working with the team at MFH and helping other nurses.

Q. Future plans?

A. No real changes planned in the near future.

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From social worker to nurse, Sarah Gillett said she has many experiences during the 30 years she has been a nurse.

I love what I do and a part of that, too, is that I have been so fortunate to always have these amazing coworkers around me. That makes the tough days bearable and the good days even more fun when youre surrounded by really good people, Gillett said of her second career as a nurse.

Gillett is originally from Hooper, and attended Logan View Public Schools. After high school, she attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she earned a degree in public health education.

For several years, she worked as a social worker. Gillett then attended Midland University for her bachelors degree in nursing.

For 25 years, Gillett was a labor and delivery nurse. Looking for a different schedule, Gillett switched over to outpatient procedures about five years ago.

Patients that Gillett sees are outpatient only. Some of these procedures could include those who need a blood transfusion, IV fluids, on IV antibiotics for long term, and more. Although very different from labor and delivery, Gillett said she very much enjoys being in this department and finds it interesting

Some of our patients we see daily for weeks at a time so thats really great that we get to know them. Thats what makes nursing enjoyable, she said. Those relationships that you develop with people.

Seeing the patients frequently helps to pick up on subtle changes in a patients health, Gillett said. Her patients do become like family or very important guests, she added. In the outpatient department they might also be able to point patients in the right direction for resources they need.

During COVID, they did monoclonal antibodies in their clinic. Although her patients were not the sickest, some were very ill, she said. The hope was that they would get their fusion in time to keep them from getting worse.

It was very challenging, but we also felt very happy to be able to do that here because we felt that it was something important and it was something that was very helpful to the community, she said. And not just the Fremont community, but we had many patients that came from Omaha and out of state even just to get a spot at an infusion center.

While it was kind of stressful we all felt really good about it because we felt that we were doing something that was actually helping to make a difference and keep people out of the hospital.

Gillett sat down with the Tribune to reflect on her time as a nurse.

Question. Tell us about your immediate family

Answer. My favorite role has always been mom to my three sons. The oldest, Grant Wallace, is a physician specializing in cardiology/cardiac electrophysiology. He and his wife, Stephanie, live in Columbus, Ohio. My middle son, Ben, is an attorney and serves as legal counsel for our state Legislature. He and his wife, Alexandra, live in Lincoln, Nebraska. They are expecting their first child this fall! My youngest son, Adam, lives in Oakland, Nebraska, and works as an agronomy analyst for Kaup Seed. My husband, Mike, is a commercial sales rep for Nova Fitness Equipment.

Q. When, why did you decide to become a nurse?

A. Nursing is my second career. I also have a bachelor's degree in public health education. I spent several years working as a social worker, but desired a different type of challenge. My four brothers were all physicians and medicine always interested me. Nursing seemed like a good fit. I returned to school and earned my nursing degree, summa cum laude, in 1992. It was the right choice.

Q. What do you like best about nursing and find most rewarding about it?

A. There are so many ways to practice nursing and that's what makes it such a great career. You are always in demand and the opportunities are endless. The relationships you develop with patients and coworkers are, by far, the most rewarding aspect. Having had such a long tenure in labor and delivery, I sometimes had the chance to tell an expectant patent that I was there when they were born. That's pretty special.

Q. Funniest, saddest, most unusual experience in nursing?

A. There are far too many funny experiences to share just one. While caring and compassionate, nurses also need thick skin, strong stomachs and a great sense of humor. I could write a book! Thankfully, the good times far outnumber the bad. Death and loss are always hard. When that loss involved a baby, it was especially heartbreaking. Fortunately, those instances were rare.

Q. If you hadnt become a nurse, what profession might you have entered? And why?

A. Many things have interested me over the years. I've always liked real estate, but wouldn't be suited to sales. Maybe appraisal or title research?

Q. Why are you glad you chose nursing?

A. Nursing has been good to me. My employer has been good to me. For almost 30 years, I have had a job that offers the tangibles of stability, variety, good income, and good benefits. The other things that aren't as easily measured are even more important. We are there for it all: the highest highs, the lowest lows, and everything in between. We see it all. Our patients share things with us that they don't share with anyone else. We hear it all. Nurses understand that this is an enormous privilege and an enormous responsibility. Few other professions can compare. I am so proud to be a nurse.

Q. Future plans?

A. Retirement is on the horizon in the coming years. In the meantime, I will keep learning, growing, and striving to provide exceptional care to my patients.

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It has returned.

After a COVID-caused hiatus, the Fremont Area Chamber of Commerce is bringing back its Topics at 12 series.

The public is invited to the event from 11:45 a.m. to 1 p.m. Tuesday, May 17, in the First State Bank and Trust Education Center, 1005 E. 23rd St., in Fremont.

Topics at 12 is a monthly meeting, which covers a variety of subjects. The event is free and lunch is provided.

This months lunch and learn event is focused on the results of a recent childcare survey in Dodge County  and the importance of businesses working with childcare providers.

Child care is so important in our community right now so were thankful for our friends at the United Way who did a child care survey to see where Dodge County is at in the number of openings we have in our daycare facilities compared to what we need, said Tara Lea, executive director of the Fremont Area Chamber.

Lea said she hopes to see business owners and human resources representatives attend. These are people that may daily deal with employees who cant come to work, because they cant find child care.

We want business professionals to see the statistics and then begin to help solve the problem, she said.

Lea said more childcare providers are needed. Child care also is needed at different hours.

Currently, childcare is often offered between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. However, there are people who work in the evenings or overnight.

And we dont have any childcare options for those folks, she said.

Lea said Topics at 12 covers a host of topics such as human resources or social media.

It was stopped during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Were ready to continue having these once a month now, Lea said.

Attendees are encouraged to RSVP on the chamber website at fremontne.org.

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By Azernews





By News Center

Baykar Technology CEO Selcuk Bayraktar has said that the Turkish Bayraktar TB3 will be the worlds first unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) to use short runways, Yeni Shafak reports.

Bayraktar made the remarks at an event dedicated to the National Technology Move organized at Istanbul Technical University, the report adds.

During his presentation, Bayraktar touched upon the newly-developed Bayraktar TB3, planned to be the worlds first UCAV, capable of landing and taking off on short-runway naval platforms.

Although yesterday, an American company announced that it will do it [to produce UCAVs] first for ships with short runways, but lets see who will do it first, Bayraktar stressed.

Speaking about Baykars activities, the CEO emphasized that contracts had been signed with over 20 countries for the export of Baykar-manufactured unmanned platforms, adding that these unmanned platforms have been actively used in 13 countries.

He said that like other Turkish defense industry products, the Bayraktar TB3 and Kizilelma combat aircraft will change the history of warfare once they are operational.

Stating that over 95 percent of Baykars revenues come from exports, the CEO added that Bayraktar TB2 is the most exported UCAV in the world, which has the highest price and performance level.

Recently, the US General Atomics Company introduced its MQ-9B STOL UCAV for the first time.

In the meantime, Turkey continues to work on its domestic National Combat Aircraft project. Turkish defense industry companies began to transfer their experience and knowledge to the Turkish Aerospace Industries' National Combat Aircraft (TAI). The aircraft, which is expected to be released from the hangar in 2023, has been ordered.

Baykar is a private Turkish defense company specializing in UAVs and artificial intelligence, which was founded with 100 percent domestic capital in 1984 under Baykar Makina by Ozdemir Bayraktar.

The companys primary goals were the production of automotive parts such as engines, pumps, and spare parts to ensure the localization of the automotive industry in Turkey.

In the 2000s, the company took steps toward producing unmanned aerial vehicles in line with the developments and progress in the aviation sector.
United States Attorney Jan Sharp on Thursday announced that Estuardo Hernando Ruiz-Orozco, 51, of Guatemala was sentenced Thursday in federal court in Omaha, for conspiracy to produce and transfer fraudulent documents.

Chief United States District Judge Robert F. Rossiter, Jr. sentenced Ruiz-Orozco to 24 months imprisonment.

Before sentencing, Ruiz-Orozco had forfeited $17,561 as proceeds or property facilitating the fraudulent document scheme. There is no parole in the federal system.

After his release from prison, he will begin a three-year term of supervised release. Ruiz-Orozco will be deported by U.S. immigration authorities after completing his sentence to imprisonment.

In the spring of 2020, law enforcement officers investigating an identity theft matter involving the use of a deceased persons Social Security number learned that fraudulent identity documents could be obtained from a co-conspirator residing in Fremont.

During the course of the year, investigators made several purchases of fraudulent documents (Social Security cards, state drivers licenses, and lawful permanent resident cards (I-551s) from the co-conspirator, who was receiving dozens of packages originating in California through the U.S. Mail.

Investigators determined that another co-conspirator residing in Pomona, California, was the source of the fraudulent documents mailed to Nebraska. Investigators determined that Ruiz-Orozco, living in Wakefield, Nebraska, was also selling fraudulent documents obtained from the California supplier.

On Oct. 7, 2020, an undercover officer ordered fraudulent identity documents from Ruiz-Orozco. On Oct. 15, 2020, the defendant produced a drivers license, an I-551, and a Social Security card to the undercover officer.

Investigators planned and executed coordinated arrests of the defendants on April 14, 2021. Investigators obtained warrants to search the Nebraska defendants residences and cars, yielding dozens of counterfeit federal and state identity cards, blank card stock for use in producing fraudulent documents, and nine notebooks containing customer names and biographical information.

The trial for the remaining defendants is scheduled for June 21.

This case was investigated by Homeland Security Investigations, the Social Security Administrations Office of Inspector General, and the Nebraska Department of Motor Vehicles.

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Foreign ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) have expressed their "strongest opposition" and "deplored" the Taliban-led government in Kabul's recent decree telling women to wear the head-to-toe burqa in public and other "increasing restrictions," saying the hard-line group in control of Afghanistan since August is "further isolating" itself internationally.



The ministers from the seven leading industrialized countries called on the Taliban "to urgently take steps to lift restrictions on women and girls, respect their human rights, and meet the expectations of Afghans and the world" with respect to their participation in public life and free speech.



Such freedoms, they said in a statement, are "crucial for long-term peace, stability and development of the country."



"We condemn the imposition of increasingly restrictive measures that severely limit half the populations ability to fully, equally and meaningfully participate in society, including the recent announcement on womens appearance in public along with new punishments for family members to enforce compliance with these restrictions," the G7 statement said.



No country has recognized the Taliban-led government.



At least four countries -- China, Pakistan, Russia, and Turkmenistan -- have established formal diplomatic ties with Kabul under the Taliban.



A May 7 decree from officials of the Taliban-led government calls for women to only show their eyes and recommends that they wear the head-to-toe burqa. Head scarves are common for most Afghan women, but in urban areas such as Kabul, many do not cover their faces.

Failure to comply will result in a woman's father or closest male relative being reprimanded, imprisoned, or fired from employment.



"We stand with the Afghan people in their demand for equal rights in line with the Talibans commitments to all Afghans and Afghanistans obligations under international law," the G7 ministers said.



Two months ago, Taliban officials ordered that all secondary girls' schools be closed just hours after reopening them for the first time since the Sunni fundamentalist militants swept to power last year as U.S.-led international troops withdrew and the UN-backed Afghan government dissolved.



Earlier on May 12, the European Union's special envoy to Afghanistan, Tomas Niklasson, told the AFP news agency that a recent Taliban veto on girls' schools "has put some doubts in our heads regarding how reliable their promises are, how reliable they may be as a partner."

With reporting by AFP
Pakistan has handed over two top commanders of the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) to the Afghan Taliban, which has been mediating peace talks between the sides, as part of efforts to revive negotiations with the militant group, sources told RFE/RLs Radio Mashaal.



Muslim Khan and Mehmood Khan were recently transferred from a military detention facility to the custody of the Afghan Taliban in Pakistans northwestern tribal belt, said sources with knowledge of the matter.



The move came as a delegation of senior Pakistani military officials arrived in the Afghan capital, Kabul, on May 9 for talks with the TTP leadership, said sources with knowledge of the negotiations.



As a confidence-building measure, the TTP agreed a temporary cease-fire from May 10 to 15, according to a decree issued by the TTP leadership and seen by RFE/RL. The militant group had announced a unilateral truce from April 29 to May 9 to mark the end of the holy month of Ramadan and the start of the Eid al-Fitr holiday.



The talks between the Pakistani delegation and the TTP are being mediated by the Afghan Taliban, which has close ideological and organizational ties with the TTP. The Afghan militant group is also a longtime ally of Islamabad, its main foreign sponsor.



The negotiations came as the TTP, also known as the Pakistani Taliban, has intensified its attacks in Pakistan since a monthlong cease-fire expired and peace talks collapsed in December.



Since then, Islamabad has sent secret delegations to Afghanistan to hold talks with the TTP on reviving the expired truce and resuming talks over a negotiated end to the TTPs 14-year insurgency in Pakistan, where thousands of people have been killed in militant attacks and clashes between the TTP and the military.



The TTP has demanded the release of 102 commanders and fighters in Pakistani prisons. Pakistan had released most of the TTP prisoners but had been reluctant to free Muslim Khan and Mehmood Khan.



The TTP has also demanded the implementation of Islamic Sharia law in Pakistans tribal belt, a demand that observers said the government would likely reject.



The two commanders will be released from the custody of the Afghan Taliban once the TTP agrees a permanent cease-fire with Islamabad, said a source with knowledge of the negotiations.



Muslim Khan was a top Pakistani TTP leader from the Swat Valley in northwestern Pakistan. In 2016, a Pakistani military court sentenced him to death. A former spokesman for the militants, he was convicted of killing 31 people, including civilians and security personnel.

In the same year, Mehmood Khan, also a TTP leader from Swat, was convicted of kidnapping two Chinese engineers for ransom and sentenced to 20 years in prison.



The pair are likely to be officially pardoned by Pakistani President Arif Alvi before they are handed over to the TTP, sources said.



The Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), the military's media wing, did not respond to an e-mail from Radio Mashaal seeking comment. Pakistans Foreign Office could also not be reached.



In January, Pakistan sent a secret delegation to Afghanistan to hold talks with the TTP leadership. The delegation held several days of talks with TTP chief Noor Wali Mehsud and members of the extremist groups leadership council in Afghanistans southeastern province of Paktika, said sources with knowledge of the discussions.

Made up of mostly Pashtun tribal elders, the Pakistani delegation also visited Kabul, where they met senior members of the Haqqani network, a key Afghan Taliban faction. The network is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.



The Talibans interior minister, Sirajuddin Haqqani, the head of the Haqqani network, has been the key facilitator for the talks between Islamabad and the TTP.



Intensifying Attacks



Efforts to revive the peace talks came as the TTP has intensified its attacks against Pakistani security forces.



Riven internally, debilitated by the death of successive leaders, and forced from its strongholds, the TTP was seen for years as a largely spent force. But the group has reemerged over the past two years, unifying squabbling factions and unleashing a wave of deadly attacks.



Pakistan recorded at least 294 militant attacks in 2021, a 56 percent increase compared to the previous year, according to the Islamabad-based Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies (PICSS). Most of the attacks were attributed to the TTP.



Pakistan has not witnessed a respite in TTP attacks since the new year.



On April 14, the TTP claimed that it had killed seven Pakistani soldiers in an attack in the countrys restive North Waziristan tribal region. On March 30, at least three Pakistani soldiers and as many attackers were killed in a firefight in northwestern Pakistan, in an attack claimed by the TTP.

A massive Pakistani Army offensive in 2014 drove out many TTP militants from Pakistan and across the border to Afghanistan, where their leadership resides.



Islamabad has accused the Afghan Taliban of failing to expel the TTP or prevent it from using Afghan territory for carrying out attacks in Pakistan.



On April 16, Pakistan carried out unprecedented air strikes in eastern Afghanistan, killing dozens of people. Pakistan said it was targeting the TTP. The air strikes provoked unusually harsh exchanges, with the Taliban issuing threats against Islamabad, its longtime ally.

Observers said the Talibans takeover of Afghanistan in August has further galvanized and strengthened the TTP.



The withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan in August has also significantly reduced U.S. air strikes in the region, allowing the TTP to operate more freely, experts said.



TTP fighters have also obtained sophisticated weaponry, including U.S.-made firearms, which their Afghan allies seized from Afghanistan's former armed forces.
FILE - In this May 7, 2020 file photo, workers leave the Tyson Foods pork processing plant in Logansport, Ind. At the height of the pandemic, the meat processing industry worked closely with political appointees in the Trump administration to stave off health restrictions and keep processing plants open even as COVID-19 spread rapidly among workers, according to a new Congressional report released Thursday, May 12, 2022.
Colorado Springs is responsible for identifying a site for a passenger rail station that would serve Amtrak and intercity commuter trains, and the staff has narrowed the options down to four sites in the downtown area.

You voted:
Alexandre Renoir grew up hearing the stories his family told about his great-grandfather.

He appreciated them, sure, but he was a little kid. It wasnt until his early teens that he realized the enormity of his relatives contribution: Pierre-Auguste Renoir was one of the founding fathers of impressionism, the 19th-century art movement that also starred Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet.

I was raised strangely. Artists and poets and other important artistic figures would come to our house for dinner, Renoir said from home in Sacramento, Calif. Wed have long conversations on art. I was well-versed. We had a huge library on my great-grandfather at home, and I grew up with a 7-foot tall nude sculpture of my great-grandmother in the living room.

While he was surrounded by art, and grew up drawing, sketching and sculpting, Alexandre didnt fully embrace his visual arts talent until his late 20s. In his family, it was almost verboten to pursue anything resembling the work of his great-grandfather. Instead, the Renoirs went into the movie business, inspired by Pierre-Augustes second son, Jean Renoir, who made more than 40 films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s.

If you go What: Works by Alexandre Renoir, Marcus Glenn and Tim Yanke. When: Beginning at 4 p.m. Friday and Saturday Where: The Broadmoor, 1 Lake Ave. Price: Free; broadmoor.com

This is speculation, but my instinct tells me when he (Pierre-Auguste) died in 1919, his three sons, including my grandfather, said what are we going to do? Alexandre said. Dad has died. He was one of the founding fathers of an entire movement of art. (He cast) a huge shadow. It was not their schtick. Thats why they went into the newest art form  cinema.

Alexandre gave it a shot, but it didnt connect: I remember a director saying, Alex, its like you dont care. And its because I didnt care. Id be disappointed and go home and paint something.

In so doing, he realized what he was meant to be all along: an artist, and only the second one in his famous family. Alexandres works, along with contemporary works by Marcus Glenn and abstracts by Tim Yanke, will be exhibited at The Broadmoor at 4 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Over time, Alexandre has created his style, though he still shares a couple of commonalities with his great-grandfather.

The base of impressionism is a wonderful thing. I add to it, a more modernistic bold color scheme, whereas before there were muted colors in my great-grandfathers work, Alexandre said. He influenced me in his philosophy, thats the No. 1 thing I take from him.

He sums up that philosophy with one story: Manet would tell Monet to tell his buddy Renoir to get another job, because hes never going to make it as an artist unless he uses the color black in his paintings.

Renoir would tell his buddy Monet to tell his buddy Manet to shut it, because there are enough dark and ugly things in the world and hes not going to add any more. I try to make my paintings bright and happy.

One thing the two Renoirs differ on is their method. Alexandre uses a palette knife instead of a paintbrush to create his vividly colored and textured paintings, similar to Vincent Van Goghs style, he says, while his great-grandfather once joked a palette knife was only good for cleaning a palette.

(He was) a character and a half, Alexandre said. Very humble, and also not. He knew who and what he was and how serious he was about his craft. At home you were allowed to call him Mr. Renoir or Boss. He never disparaged someone elses craft or skill.

Contact the writer: 636-0270
In this photo provided by Randi Oyan, is the former Rapid City Indian School, in Rapid City, S.D., on Wednesday, May 11, 2022. The school opened in the late 1800s and shut down in 1933. It was later converted into an asylum and a hospital, and now operates as an Indian Health Service clinic. A memorial is planned at a nearby hillside where researchers say dozens of boarding school children are buried in unmarked graves.
By Trend

Minister of Economy and Commerce of Kyrgyzstan Daniyar Amangeldiyev met with Turkish Minister of Treasury and Finance Nureddin Nebati to discuss prospects for bilateral partnership, Trend reports with reference to the Kyrgyz Ministry of Economy.

During the meeting, ministers discussed issues of establishing a Kyrgyz-Turkish Development Fund, which will strengthen relations between the two countries and contribute to the Kyrgyz economy.

Amangeldiyev prioritized the expansion of bilateral cooperation with Turkey in areas such as trade, investment, and entrepreneurship.

The meeting took place as part of the Kyrgyz minister's visit to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development's 31st Annual Meeting of the Board of Governors (EBRD).
Colorado's legislators, who for months disagreed on a strategy to confront the state's spiraling fentanyl crisis, finally settled on a compromise and approved this year's most contentious legislation with barely more than an hour to spare before they're constitutionally required to end the 2022 session.

To escape the gridlock, the House and Senate appointed a conference committee, which came up with compromise language to close the divide between the chambers' competing solutions.

The House and Senate then gave the compromise their final approval, sending the measure to Gov. Jared Polis, who is expected to sign the measure. The vote in the Senate wasn't easy  10 of the 15 Senate Republicans voted against the compromise crafted by the conference committee.

House Bill 1326 ultimately cleared the Senate on a 27-8 vote with seven Republicans and Sen. Julie Gonzales, D-Denver, voting against.

The House debated the compromise for an hour, but finally approved it on a 46 to 18 vote. The bill's final vote in the House was 35 to 30.

Rep. Mike Lynch, R-Wellington, the bill's original co-sponsor, then asked to have his name removed from the bill, which now goes to the governor.

"This is the best we got," said Senate Minority Leader Chris Holbert, R-Douglas County, in calling for support for the compromise. Sen. John Cooke, R-Greeley, said he would support the change, based in part on a recommendation from the Weld County district attorney. The compromise is better than the House version, Cooke said.

But Sen. Bob Gardner, R-Colorado Springs, countered that the language provides an affirmative defense for anyone charged with a felony for 1-4 grams possession.

The compromise eliminates a three-year automatic repeal of the felony charges for simple possession of 1 to 4 grams of fentanyl, one of the many sticking points.

It also states that a person caught with 1 to 4 grams of fentanyl commits a Level 1 drug misdemeanor if the individual "had a reasonable, but mistaken, belief" that the drug "did not contain any quantity of fentanyl, carfentanil, benzimodazole opiate, or an analog thereof."

Supporters, including Rep. Kerry Tipper, D-Lakewood say a person could be charged with felony possession and it would be up to a jury to decide if the person "knowingly" possessed, based on questions and evidence, and then could reduce the charge to a misdemeanor if the person did not know.

The bill was then off to the House for its vote on the compromise and the final version.

The last-minute action avoided the possibility of the fentanyl bill dying and possibly necessitating a special session to hammer out an agreement and pass the legislation.

House Bill 22-1326 is Colorado's sweeping response to fatal overdoses, which surged nationwide over the past several years, as fentanyl, which is stronger than heroin and lethal in small doses, became an increasingly dominant presence in the illicit drug market. In Colorado, more than 800 people died after ingesting fentanyl in 2021, according to state data.

Broadly speaking, the bill tightens penalties for people convicted of distributing fentanyl, particularly when the drug use results in death; emphasizes a key treatment option in jails and support for people recently released from incarceration; and, funds a statewide education program. It would also set aside $20 million to buy more Naloxone and fentanyl test strips, among other provisions.

But

Among the most contentious issues revolved around what's known as intent  whether users knew or should have known that what they possessed contained fentanyl in it.

The bill that came out of the House included language that said if users didn't know, they couldn't be charged with a felony. The Senate struck that language, setting off the dispute that threatened the bill's passage as the session clock winded down.

Rep. Kerry Tipper, D-Lakewood, a member of the conference committee, said the compromise would still allow law enforcement to arrest and charge someone who has 1 to 4 grams of fentanyl with a felony. It would be up to a jury to decide, through processes already in place, whether the defendant knew they possessed fentanyl.

Rep. Leslie Herod, D-Denver, who has been among the bill's strongest advocates for adopting the House version, told Colorado Politics she supports the compromise.

"It's a good standard. It keeps the prosecution having to prove someone knew they had fentanyl. It still allows someone who didn't know they had fentanyl to still have a pathway to justice. They won't have the felony or that [criminal] record. The big parts of the bill remain intact: high level dealers get higher offenses for having fentanyl; the harm reduction and treatment in this bill are unparalleled," she said.

Medically-assisted treatment will be available in jails, and that will save lives, she added.

Much of the debate the last several weeks centered on the criminal penalties leveled at people who are caught possessing fentanyl. For harm reduction advocates, the change is an unacceptable return to what they describe as the failed policies of the "War on Drugs." For law enforcement, setting the felony threshold at 1 gram is not enough: As far as many district attorneys, sheriffs and police chiefs, possessing any amount of fentanyl should be a felony.

"Were in support of more Naloxone," physician Sarah Rowan said in committee. "We need much more treatment, as my colleagues have said. So, we are worried that the harms from more legal problems for our patients will outweigh the benefit of this bill."

Phil Weiser on fentanyl

For law enforcement, fentanyl's high potency makes it too dangerous to allow on the streets in any quantity.

"There is no safe amount of fentanyl to possess, Greg Sader, the deputy chief of the Commerce City Police Department, told lawmakers after he recounted what many suspected was an accidental overdose deaths of five people in February who thought they were ingesting cocaine.

In addition to seeking a felony charge for any amount of fentanyl possession, Sader and other law enforcement officials advocated that the committee remove language saying that individuals must know or should've known the drug they possessed included fentanyl in order for the felony charge to kick in. The language addresses a key nuance: Fentanyl has permeated the drug supply, and many users of other substances, such as meth, cocaine, heroin or pills that look legitimate, don't realize what they have.

But requiring they know or should've known would make prosecution impossible, district attorneys said. Michael Dougherty, the top prosecutor overseeing Boulder County, said that while the language has "good intentions," it would make the law itself "unworkable," short of a full confession.

Brian Mason, the district attorney for Adams and Broomfield counties, said including that language would essentially undo the changes to felony charges the bill would make.

Reporter Seth Klamann contributed to this story
This month, Colorado Springs-area colleges will hold their first unrestricted, in-person spring commencement ceremonies since 2019, allowing graduates to celebrate a major life milestone in the traditional manner  walking across a stage and accepting their degree as family and friends cheer them on.

The University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and Pikes Peak Community College will hold their ceremonies at the Broadmoor World Arena on Friday and Saturday, respectively. Colorado College's ceremony, scheduled May 22, will be its first at the newly-opened Ed Robson Arena.

More than 1,200 UCCS graduates are planning to cross the stage during the school's two Friday ceremonies  a record number, according to school officials. CC will march more than 500 graduates, about 60 of whom officially graduated last winter or will complete their requirements in the summer.

PPCC plans to have 700 graduates at the final commencement under its current name; the school will change its name to Pikes Peak State College in the fall.

The COVID-19 pandemic upended graduation plans nationwide as schools scrambled to find a way to acknowledge their students accomplishments without compromising health and safety. UCCS held virtual ceremonies in 2020 and in the spring of 2021. In December, the college held an in-person event, but all attendees were required to wear face coverings, with graduates allowed to remove their masks only to have pictures taken.

Colorado College held an in-person commencement last year, with graduating students required to show proof of a negative COVID test in advance of attending. Faculty, staff and family members who were not fully vaccinated were "strongly" encouraged to have a negative test result, officials said.

PPCC held a completely virtual ceremony in 2020. The next year, organizers decided to try something creative.

In 2021, we had a drive-in grad walk on one day and a virtual ceremony on another day, said spokeswoman Karen Kovaly. We had an enormous amount of logistics to work through.

For the drive-up ceremony, each student was given a time slot during which they could drive up to a podium that was set up in the parking lot and accept their degree and congratulations from staff and faculty, all of whom wore masks. Family and friends could follow the graduate in up to two cars, forming a mini-procession.

Graduates who werent comfortable with the drive-in format could attend the virtual ceremony.

So we had two ceremonies to plan, Kovaly said. This year, we are back to doing what we know, with far fewer unknowns.

Some schools have given graduates from the past two years the option to walk the stage this month, officials said.

Were really excited to be able to hold the kind of ceremony were used to having, so these graduates can have the experience they deserve after all their hard work, said UCCS representative Jenna Press.
Hong Kong: 3rd COVID-19 jab rate hits 50%

The Government today appealed to eligible people to receive the third dose of a COVID-19 vaccine as soon as possible, as half of the citys population aged 12 or above has received their third COVID-19 jab.

As of today, about 3.38 million people had received their third COVID-19 vaccine dose, accounting for 50% of the population aged 12 or above.

The Government urges citizens to take the third vaccine dose to enhance protection against COVID-19 and prepare for the implementation of stage three of the Vaccine Pass at the end of this month.

Secretary for the Civil Service Patrick Nip said that at present, about one million people who are due to receive their third dose have yet to do so.

As such, the COVID-19 Vaccination Programme has sent more than one million SMS messages over the past two weeks to these people reminding them to act promptly.

Mr Nip pointed out that currently, the COVID-19 vaccination rates of people aged three or above for the first and second doses are 91.5% and 85.6%.

Noting that the protection conferred by the vaccines will diminish over time, he urged members of the public to get vaccinated on time in accordance with expert advice.

We need the proactive response from every member of the public in boosting the vaccination rate together and building a stronger protective barrier to cope with the future risks brought about by the potential emergence of new mutant strains, Mr Nip added.

This story has been published on: 2022-05-12. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
By Trend

Georgia is committed to develop framework, which encourages investments in renewables, said Georgian Finance Minister Lasha Khutsishvili at the Annual Meeting and Business Forum of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), Trend reports with the reference to the EBRD.

During the meeting, Khutsishvili emphasized that the recent developments have shown energy independence and energy security has become a priority worldwide.

"Georgia has a potential of generating green energy through its water, solar and wind resources. EU flagship project on Black Sea connectivity (undersea electricity cable) feasibility of which is ongoing by WB, may play an important part in the integration of the European energy system," Khutsishvili said.

"Further, it is important to continue and even increase our focus on economic and structural reforms. Recent developments in the region have really showed the significance of the path of the structural reforms we had been following: state-owned enterprises (SOE) reform and Capital Market reforms, which are aimed at strengthening the fundamentals of our economies," Khutsishvili added.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is holding its 31st Annual Meeting and Business Forum in both physical and hybrid modes in Marrakech, Morocco this May, after two years in which the event had to take place online because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Grand plans to build almost 1,200 new market-rate apartments in downtown Colorado Springs received a $9.7 million financial lift from El Paso County on Tuesday.

Commissioners agreed 4-1 to earmark, over 25 years, about $7.1 million in future property tax revenues and just under $2.6 million in future sales tax revenues to help finance the $400 million-plus three-phase project, known as Experience at the Epicenter, proposed by suburban Seattle-based apartment developer and owner Weidner Apartment Homes. The company also co-owns and helped build the Weidner Field downtown stadium.

The county's agreement with the company comes ahead of proposed designation of the site, just south of Weidner Field, by the city as an urban renewal area, said Jariah Walker, executive director of the Colorado Springs Urban Renewal Authority.

The designation would allow an increased portion of sales and property tax revenues generated from various taxing entities, such as the county, to be spent on public improvements at the site.

Walker said he expects the request to go before the City Council in the fall or winter.

Last summer, the company began construction on the first phase, a 408-unit building. When completed, the project will have built 1,182 market-rate apartments in three buildings that also will include more than 37,000 total square feet of retail floor space.

Additionally, the project includes construction of more than 2,000 parking spaces, a feature Weidner representatives said was significantly needed in the area; two public plazas; and streetscape, lighting and other public improvements.

"The goal of the (Urban Renewal Authority) with this project has been a private investment and reinvestment, which is restoring targeted areas with strong community benefits and public improvements," Walker told commissioners Tuesday.

Weidner representatives said the project will bring much-needed housing to the rapidly growing city and county, and would generate hundreds of jobs and just above $1 billion that would go back into the regional economy. Proponents of this type of tax financing claim increased tax revenues would only be generated in the first place because of new projects like Experience at the Epicenter.

But commissioners criticized the tax financing proposal as El Paso County paying for public improvements that are Colorado Springs' responsibility.

"This is the city taking our tax dollars from county residents and using it to subsidize city infrastructure," said Commissioner Carrie Geitner, the lone vote against approving the agreement.

Quoting research papers from think-tanks like Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia and Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., Geitner said tax districts such as this build where development would have happened anyway. Residents living outside the district will have to bear the increased cost to subsidize the project, she said.

"I can see why this works for the city. They need probably a lot of that infrastructure updated. This makes sense for them," she said. "But in the case of (El Paso County), theres none of that infrastructure that we would be paying for.  Were not getting something that we would otherwise need to pay for. Were actually going to have to increase our services with less and less money."

Commissioners also questioned the need for so many parking spaces downtown, which Weidner representatives said they were spending $33 million to build.

The county's parking garage at the corner of Sahwatch Street and Vermijo Avenue, Commission Chairman Stan VanderWerf said, is not used as much as it could be when people attend events nearby at Weidner Field. He questioned whether the existing garage could alleviate parking woes in the area.

Commissioner Longinos Gonzalez said he was concerned the county also would be subsidizing new parking when the county is not generating enough funding from its own garage to maintain and operate it. He recalled the county's pulling $1 million in emergency reserve funds in 2019 to help pay for emergency safety improvements to the structure.

"Were being asked to subsidize parking for the city and Weidner apartments, which is absolutely detrimental to the county," Gonzalez said. "Then we compete with ourselves for parking (revenues). So it's not just 25 years of (subsidization). It's ongoing additional subsidizing."

Weidner Property Management spokesman Greg Cerbana said residents and business owners near the project area told the company more parking was sorely needed.

"To help out with the neighborhood and merchants in that area ... we made the commitment to 'over-park,' knowing the city had no plans" to build additional parking spaces, Cerbana said.

The developer originally requested El Paso County earmark more than $10.1 million in future tax revenues over 25 years  100% of both its future property and sales tax revenues  for the project. The county on Tuesday approved a total $9,718,490  100% of future property tax revenues and 75% of revenues generated from the county's 1% sales tax  in a compromise.

The Gazette's Rich Laden contributed to this report.
By Trend

Georgian Foreign Minister Ilia Darchiashvili met with Foreign Minister of Spain Jose Manuel Albarez to outline future prospects for expanding bilateral ties, Trend reports via Georgian Foreign Ministry.

During the meeting, the ministers discussed bilateral relations between Georgia and Spain, including the possibility of expanding cooperation in the trade and economic spheres, as well as prospects for the development of tourism relations.

Albarez praised the efforts made by Georgia on the path to European integration, and noted the support of Spain in this regard, which is of particular importance during the consideration by the European Commission of the second part of the EU questionnaire.

The second part of the European Commission questionnaire, consists of 33 chapters and up to 2300 questions in all sectoral directions, was handed over by Georgian Prime Minister on May 10, 2022.
ENBD REIT, a shari'a-compliant real estate investment trust managed by Emirates NBD Asset Management, said it has completed a major upgrade of its flagship Al Thuraya Tower 1 property within Dubai Media City, thus creating a modern and functional high-end office destination.

The project, which began in June last year, was carried out by interior contractor KPS with Savills acting as project manager and cost consultant.

Since completing the AED22 million ($6 million) comprehensive refurbishment, high levels of interest have already resulted in new tenants securing 18,000 sq ft of office space in the building, reflecting a growing demand from prospective business tenants seeking high quality working spaces with desirable amenities in a prominent area, said the statement from ENBD REIT.

The upgrade included a comprehensive fit-out of the foyer and entrance to the building as well as corridors, staircases, and common bathrooms, including lighting and tiling throughout the tower.

The Emirati group said lifts, fire escapes and the podium were also upgraded as part of this project.

In addition to an improved layout and decor, prayer rooms, yoga/fitness studio facilities and additional access for people of determination were also added.

Anthony Taylor, Head of Real Estate at Emirates NBD Asset Management, said: "The successful completion of this major upgrade of Al Thuraya Tower 1 positions ENBD REIT well to take advantage of a new phase in the evolution of Dubais office rental market, in which many tenants are seeking quality spaces that prioritise the health and comfort of their staff in an aesthetically attractive and contemporary environment."

"The higher occupancy already achieved in the tower, and the increasing interest now being received from prospective occupiers, initially indicates that the strategic decision that we took in 2020 to invest in the future of this flagship asset that has been a cornerstone of our portfolio for over 15 years has been the right one," he added.

Valued at $69 million, Al Thuraya Tower 1 is the one of the largest asset representing 19% of the value of ENBD REITs portfolio, which comprises 11 buildings in Dubai across the office, retail and alternative sectors.-TradeArabia News Service
Area law enforcement agencies had a Mason City house surrounded with officers and tactical vehicles on Wednesday, resulting in an arrest of a shooting suspect.

Shortly before 3 p.m., police attempted to execute a search warrant at the residence at 108 Eighth Street SW. They were told by residents of the home that the subject of an arrest warrant police also had, Kaleb Van Scyoc, was still in the house.

Scanner chatter and witnesses at the scene noted Van Scyoc is also known as Kaleb Trunkhill.

Van Scyoc was wanted after being identified as the shooter in an incident that took place on Tuesday near Eighth Street and North Van Buren Avenue in which one person was injured.

After around two hours of attempting to negotiate Van Scyoc's surrender, officers could be seen armed with rifles and teargas, entering the property.

Van Scyoc was ultimately located at the residence and was arrested, according to a statement issued by Mason City Police Chief Jeff Brinkley around 6 p.m.

Van Scyoc faces charges of intimidation with a dangerous weapon, possession of a firearm by a domestic abuser and reckless use of a firearm causing bodily injury, all felonies, and one misdemeanor charge of discharging a firearm within city limits.

Iowa State Patrol and the Cerro Gordo County Sheriff's Office assisted at the scene.

The incident was the second of its kind in less than a week. On Friday, May 6, 27-year-old Cody Dakin was arrested after a brief car chase ended in a three-plus hour standoff on First Street Northwest in Mason City. After flushing Dakin out of the house with teargas, he was taken into custody without incident and treated on the scene by Mason City EMS.

Lisa Grouette is the Local News Editor and Photo Editor at the Globe Gazette. Reach her at 641-421-0525 or lisa.grouette@globegazette.com. Follow Lisa on Twitter @LisaGrouette

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WEBSTER CITY  Officers who were with Sgt. Jim Smith described trying to save his life after he was shot during a standoff in a Grundy Center home in April 2021.

I thought Jim was gone, but I still knew that I needed to get him to someone who is a professional, and maybe theres a chance he could be saved, Trooper Matthew Lively said as the trial for Michael Thomas Lang, the man accused of killing Smith, continued Wednesday in Hamilton County District Court in Webster City.

Lang, 42, is charged with first-degree murder, attempted murder and assault on a peace officer in the fatal shooting, the struggle during a traffic stop that preceded it and the shootout with officers in an armored vehicle that ended it.

Troopers in an Iowa State Patrol tactical team led by Smith had cleared the attached garage and basement at Langs home after he refused to surrender on the night of April 9, 2021.

Smith and Hardin County K-9 handler Mitchell Kappel were preparing to send police dog Ogon into the kitchen to continue the search for Lang when Lang came out of the dark kitchen and fired a shotgun slug at Smith, striking his collar bone area.

Smith fell back into the garage.

Nearby, Grundy Deputy Zachary Anderson said he couldnt fire his own weapon because other officers where close by. He said his initial instinct was to rush forward.

I stepped forward, and then I stepped back because I knew I couldnt go in front of the door. From my training I know that its a fatal funnel. If you walk in front of that, you are either going to be a problem or create one, Anderson said.

Kappel, who had been right next to Smith, initially thought about sending Ogon after Lang.

I felt if I could get my K9 into the kitchen that we could have another person into the fight.  I was going to try to get close to the door frame and throw my dog into the kitchen and have him help address the situation, Kappel said.

But as he prepared to launch Ogon, he looked up and saw Lang holding a shotgun. They made eye contact. Kappel drew his .40-caliber Glock and fired twice. The handgun shots apparently missed, and Kappel retreated into the basement for cover.

Lively, also stationed nearby in the garage, told jurors he called out to Smith but got no response.

I grab him by the top of the shirt lapels here and drag him back from that location  for at least some cover, just to get him out of the line of sight, get him off the X, Lively said.

Behind cover in a back room off the garage, Lively did a blood sweep looking for Smiths injury and located the wound. He began applying pressure.

Holding his pistol in one hand, he reached behind himself and unlocked a door to the outside and pulled Smith onto a back patio where they were exposed. Another officer came to help, and they brought him to an ambulance team nearby.

Meanwhile, Kappel and Trooper Jordan Barnes became trapped in the basement because the top of the stairs passed that kitchen door.

As the standoff dragged on, they could hear Lang walking around, using the microwave, loading more shells into his shotgun and opening a can.

Lang would also call out taunts, telling them to get out of the house.

He said that he was nice to the first guy by shooting him in the chest, but come sun up, hes going to shoot us in the face with a deer slug, Kappel said.

Barnes said he heard Lang say You can leave. I wont shoot you in the back. Ill be a gentleman.

Later, after brief negotiations over the phone appeared to be fruitless, a tactical team moved on the house, first using a post attached to the front of an armored Bearcat vehicle to break through a window.

Thats when Lang appeared from the kitchen window and fired a slug at the vehicle.

Driver Chass Ossian said he heard the blast and noticed spider webbing on the bullet-resistant windshield.

If it made it through the windshield, I would have been hit, Ossian said.

Other troopers returned fire, and Lang was wounded and detained.

DCI crime scene teams said they found four fired shotgun shells, apparently from Langs weapon in the kitchen. In the house they found two .40-caliber casings from Kappel's pistol, and 24 .223-caliber casings from officers rifles. Another 18 casings were also found outside.

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Following a national search, Jerry Wallace has been selected as the new leader for Danville Community College.

Glenn DuBois, the chancellor of Virginias Community Colleges, announced Wallaces hiring as president Thursday afternoon.

Wallace is currently the campus president of the Hastings Campus of Nebraska Central Community College where he has worked since 2019, a news release stated. Before that job, he was dean of workforce, technical and community education from 2017 to 2019 at New River Community and Technical College in Beckley, West Virginia.

The Danville community is working hard to become a national, if not global, leader in advanced manufacturing, DuBois said in a statement. With Jerry Wallaces leadership, Danville Community College will be a leader and dependable partner in that effort, creating the training opportunities the community needs to attract and retain businesses.

DuBois touted Wallaces experience in workforce development.

Wallace, who will start at DCC in July, was one of three finalists for the position out of a national search that attracted 63 candidates. Muriel Mickles, DCCs interim president, along with Patrick Tompkins, of Onancock, were the other finalists.

And thanks to the terrific work that Dr. Muriel Mickles has done as DCCs interim president, the college is ready to excel in its next chapter, DuBois said.

The position became vacant following the resignation of Jacqueline Gill Powell in May 2021. Powell stepped down after only having the job for less than two years to become special assistant to DuBois.

The finalists and their spouses visited Danville recently to tour the community and participate in forums where attendees were able to ask questions.

Im very excited to join the Danville community and to lead DCC with a focus on student success and economic development-driven workforce development, Wallace, who becomes DCCs seventh president, said in a statement. I look forward to working with the colleges faculty and staff as we find ways to continually improve how we serve our students and broader communities.

His other experience includes serving as associate dean of continuing education, resident life director and enrollment services representative at colleges in Odessa, Texas, Montgomery, West Virginia and Muskegon, Michigan, a news release stated.

Dr. Wallace, I believe, will be an excellent president for our colleges workforce development programs. He offers a wealth of experience in that regard, and we look forward to having him join us, Carlyle Wimbish, chair of the Danville Community College Advisory Board, said in the statement. And our board owes a debt of gratitude for the outstanding job that Dr. Muriel Mickles did in her year as our colleges interim president. She accomplished a lot in her time in that role.

Wallace began his education career in K-12 schools in Michigan. He earned a bachelors degree from Grand Valley State University; a masters degree from Western Michigan University; an MBA from Maryville University; and doctorate from St. Thomas University.
Authorities have increased a reward for information related to a February deadly shooting at Luckys bar just over the state line in Caswell County, North Carolina.

It was on Feb. 6  between 1:45 and 2 a.m.  that Daren Lorenzo Hairston, 21, of Danville, was shot in the parking lot of the bar, Caswell County Sheriffs Office Sgt. Greg Ingram told the Register & Bee in February.

When deputies responded, they found the Danville resident dead from a gunshot wound.

Multiple shots were fired in the incident. A news release described it as a discharge of a firearm that escalated into a homicide investigation at 268 Gatewood Road in Providence.

On Wednesday, Ingram said officials are hopeful someone will come forward with information. In February, officials said they werent sure of a motive.

A cash reward for information in the homicide that leads to an arrest or identification of a suspect has increased to $2,500.

Anyone with information about the incident can contact the Caswell County Sheriffs Office at 336-694-9322 or Crime Stoppers of Caswell County at 336-694-5199. Information provided will remain confidential.

This marks the second homicide at the bar near Danville in two years. In March 2020, Keith Hayes, of Danville, was killed at the establishment.
A lawsuit filed in July by a dozen anonymous women who claimed Liberty University not only failed to help them after they reported sexual assaults or sexual misconduct but made the college more dangerous through its responses has been settled, according to court documents filed Wednesday.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York on behalf of the Jane Doe plaintiffs, accused the school of enabling on-campus rapes and specifically referenced the weaponization of the Liberty Way, LUs honor code. It described claims of sexual assaults and violence against multiple students, as well as discrimination against a pregnant and breastfeeding student, spanning more than two decades.

Among the lawsuits claims were those from one plaintiff who said she was attacked when she was 15 while at a 2000 summer camp offered by LU but was warned by LU campus police she would be criminally charged with filing a false report if she did not withdraw her claim about the assault. According to the suit, she later learned the attacker was Jesse Matthew Jr., who pleaded guilty in 2016 to the abduction and killing of two Virginia college students.

A notice seeking the suits dismissal due to settlement was filed Wednesday by the plaintiffs attorney, Jack Larkin. Details of the settlement were not available in court documents. Larkin did not return a message seeking comment Wednesday.

In a statement Wednesday, Liberty University confirmed the settlement with all of the plaintiffs as well as all but two additional women Larkin represented.

An update to the lawsuit, filed by Larkin in February, had noted additional victims have come forward and the suit could potentially grow from 12 to 22 plaintiffs, but progress toward a settlement was being made at that time.

LUs statement Wednesday said its president, Jerry Prevo, made it clear when the Jane Does filed their lawsuit that, despite certain claims being potentially outside of the statute of limitations, the university was committed to doing what it could to make things right with the plaintiffs represented by attorney Jack Larkin.

The statement also highlighted recent initiatives undertaken by the university, including $8.5 million in security cameras, blue light boxes and other upgrades; a review of policies and procedures, including better communicating that students who are sexually harassed or assaulted while engaging in behaviors that otherwise would violate the schools honor code will not be disciplined; and its intent to add lactation rooms to better support mothers who are members of the LU community.

Again, the University hopes that the many measures that it undertook prior to the settlement also convey the sincerity and seriousness by which Liberty University is approaching these concerns under the direction of President Prevo and the universitys Board of Trustees, the statement said.

After the suit was initially filed, Liberty officials said the allegations were deeply troubling, if they turn out to be true, and said the school had invested in staff and programs to help victims of sexual assault.

The Jane Does lawsuit, together with similar claims made public, became a major catalyst for students, alumni and others seeking systemic change at LU. Multiple people came forward through social media, their own lawsuits or other channels, claiming their reports of sexual assault led to their own punishment, were minimized by someone in authority or that they were too afraid of potential consequences to speak up.

In November, a rally on campus that drew hundreds of attendees and supporters prompted a direct response from the schools board of directors, promising change to institutional policies and independent and comprehensive review of its Title IX policies and processes, which entail how school campuses handle reports of sexual assault.

That some month, Virginias two U.S. senators, Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, said they were urging the federal Department of Education to investigate how Liberty University responds to sexual assault cases.

The Washington Post reported this month the education department is conducting such an investigation, and LU told the newspaper it welcomes the review and has pledged its full cooperation.
FALLS CHURCH, Va. (AP)  Fairfax County officials have rebuffed a request from Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin to establish a security perimeter around the neighborhoods of U.S. Supreme Court justices living in the county after some have faced protests outside their homes.

Youngkin, a Republican, made the request Wednesday in a letter to the county board of supervisors. I fundamentally believe such demonstrations and picketing should not be allowed at the Justice's (sic) homes as they are meant to intimidate and influence the Justices, he wrote.

Three Supreme Court justices  Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett and Clarence Thomas  live in the county. Justices living in and outside the county have been confronted with protests outside their homes since a draft of Alito's opinion that would overturn the Roe v. Wade abortion-rights decision was leaked.

Fairfax County Board of Supervisors Chairman Jeff McKay said Youngkin's request for a security perimeter is unnecessary and improper. He said establishing a perimeter would amount to creating an unconstitutional neighborhood checkpoint that would infringe on First Amendment protest rights. He also noted that protests that have occurred outside Alito's home in the Fort Hunt neighborhood have been peaceful.

We will enforce laws that serve to protect persons and property, McKay wrote. Our officers are equally committed to protecting the First Amendment guarantees afforded to those who gather to exercise their freedom of speech.

Fairfax County Police, for their part, said through a spokeswoman that theyre providing extra staffing in response to reports of planned protests to maintain the safety and security of the public, while ensuring First Amendment rights are protected.

Youngkin also joined Maryland GOP Gov. Larry Hogan in calling on federal law enforcement entities to take the lead and provide sustained resources to protect the justices and ensure the neighborhoods are secure in the weeks and months ahead.

In a letter addressed to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, the governors called on the Department of Justice to enforce a federal law that prohibits pickets or parades with the intent to influence a judge.

Justice Department spokesman Anthony Coley said in a statement Wednesday that Garland continues to be briefed on security matters related to the Supreme Court and justices. He noted that Garland had directed the U.S. Marshals Service to help support the Marshal of the Supreme Court and Supreme Court Police.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) has awarded its 'Sustainable Transport Contractor' prize to a joint venture led by Spanish infrastructure major Acciona for the Dubai Metro extension project.

One of the main reasons leading to the prize was the award of Leed (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) V4 Gold certification for the seven stations that Acciona and its partners built as part of the project.

It is the highest sustainability grading at world level and recognizes good practices carried out to implement resilient and energy-efficient infrastructures. These certifications have made the extension of the Dubai Metro the worlds biggest transport project with Leed Gold certification.

These RTA awards recognize road and transport projects and initiatives carried out in Dubai that make a positive contribution to caring for the environment through the application of sustainable construction principles.

The award ceremony took place in the World Trade Center of Dubai and the prize was received on behalf of Acciona by its Project Director Jose Luis Olivan.

The Dubai Metro Route 2020 project involved the construction of a 15-km-long section, including 11.8 km of raised viaduct and a 3.2-km-long tunnel that starts from Nakheel Harbour & Tower station on the Red Line.

In total, there are seven stations, including an interchange at Nakheel Harbour & Tower and an emblematic Metro station to welcome visitors to the site of the Universal Expo, said the statement from RTA.

Extension Route 2020 was officially inaugurated in October last year, coinciding with the start of the big event.

To increase energy efficiency and reduce the environmental impact of the Metro station, Acciona optimized the cooling systems and installed solar panels to generate energy, as well as using low-emission and insulating materials on the outer walls and roof cladding, among other elements.

These measures have achieved a 24% reduction in energy consumption, as well as a 55% saving in water consumption. Furthermore, 95% of the construction material waste has been saved and the start-up process for the stations has been improved, it added.
To hear the Biden administration talk, the war in Ukraine is nearly won  and the United States wants some of the credit for winning it.

Russia is failing. Ukraine is succeeding, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said last month.

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III went a step further. The United States isnt merely helping Ukraine win, he said; its using the war to undermine Russias status as a world power.

We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it cant do the kind of things that it has done in invading Ukraine, Austin said.

Last week, U.S. officials disclosed that American intelligence helped Ukrainian forces kill as many as 12 Russian generals and sink the flagship of Russias Black Sea fleet  humiliating setbacks for Moscows once-proud armed forces.

Its good news, of course, that Ukraine is holding its own against Russias invasion. And yes, the United States and its allies deserve credit for helping the Kyiv government survive.

But several things are wrong with this picture.

For one thing, Ukraine hasnt quite won yet. The chest-thumping is premature.

Russian forces are close to taking full control of the port city of Mariupol; that will give it a prize it has long sought: a land bridge between the Crimean peninsula and Russia. The Russians could also expand the territory they hold in eastern Ukraine, where fierce fighting is underway. If that happens, Kyivs victory could soon look less impressive.

For another, its unusual for U.S. officials to claim credit, even anonymously, for successful intelligence sharing. The problem isnt that theyre revealing state secrets; Russia already knew the U.S. was helping the Ukrainians with targeting.

The problem is that President Vladimir Putin has tried to rally support  among both his own people and those of other countries  by portraying Russia as the victim of a U.S. plot. We just helped him make his case.

The war in Ukraine does not have anything to do with Ukraine, a commentary shown on Russian state television claimed last week. The war in Ukraine was designed to cause regime change in Moscow.

The commentator was Tucker Carlson of Fox News.

More important, the United States has quietly escalated its goals in the war but without much clarity about exactly what they are.

Thats a phenomenon known as mission creep, and its a recipe for trouble. Just ask former President George W. Bush, who led the United States into overambitious wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

You dont want to create pressure on yourself to do more than is wise to do, Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations, a top State Department official in the Bush administration, told me.

One reason the U.S.-led alliance in support of Ukraine has held together so impressively is that its initial goal was clear and broadly shared: helping the Kyiv government defend itself.

Now the goals are getting blurry, and thats beginning to create division among U.S. allies.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu complained recently that some members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization want the war to continue.  They want Russia to become weaker, an apparent reference to Austins announced aims.

Meanwhile, Britains combative foreign secretary, Liz Truss, said her country is committed to push Russia out of the whole of Ukraine, a more ambitious goal than even the Biden administration has embraced.

I dont think we have shared definitions of success, Haass said. Thats a problem.

Expanding the goals of the war could stiffen Putins determination to keep fighting or push him toward escalating, perhaps by resorting to chemical or nuclear weapons.

Austins statement reinforces Putins belief that this is an existential threat, Haass warned. You dont want to push him into a corner any smaller than the one hes already painted himself into.

Some day, Russia and Ukraine will decide to stop fighting. At that point, there will need to be cease-fire talks and, perhaps, negotiations toward a peace settlement. U.S. diplomats may even want to dust off the concept of offramps  offers to make it easier for Russia to compromise.

And once the war is over, the United States and Russia will still need to deal with each other on a broad range of issues.

Escalating goals and premature claims of victory wont help us get there any faster.

In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt described his foreign policy as Speak softly and carry a big stick.

Last month, President Joe Biden said he wanted to use the same approach in Ukraine. We will speak softly and carry a large Javelin, he said.

This would be a good time for him to take his own advice.
Forty years ago, Ricky Skaggs stepped on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry for the first time.

Twenty-seven at the time, Skaggs already had plenty of star power. He had played mandolin onstage with Bill Monroe at the age of 6 and been on TV with Flatt and Scruggs at the age of 7. He tried to join up with the Opry then, but he was told to grow up and wait a while.

In the meantime, he joined up with Ralph Stanleys band in 1979 at the age of 15, but he burned out early from the rigors of being a road dawg, working for the Virginia Electric Power Company in Washington, D.C., for the next year.

Word of his instrumental prowess had gotten around, however, and the Country Gentlemen snapped him up as a fiddler for the next two years. J.D. Crowe and The New South grabbed him next but could only hold him for a year before he left to form his own group, Boone Creek with Jerry Douglas and Vince Gill. Emmylou Harris recruited him for her Hot Band after Rodney Crowells departure in 77, featuring Skaggs on mandolin, fiddle and harmony vocals. Skaggs launched his solo career in 1980 and has piled up a long list of accolades since, including 12 No. 1 hits and becoming a member of the Opry in 1982.

I sure feel at home there, the 67-year-old Skaggs said by phone last week from his Tennessee home. I feel like its where Im supposed to be. God opened that door for me a long time ago.

Skaggs says hes always revered the Opry and promotes it every chance he gets. But Opry veteran and country legend Roy Acuff wasnt so sure that Skaggs would remain committed to the Opry if he got famous.

Mr. Acuff told me that if they make me a member, then Ill get to be a big star, and Ill leave and never come back, Skaggs recalls. And I said, Thats not who I am. And he said, Well, thats what a lot of em say. And I said, One of these days youre gonna eat those words! And he did. He had to eat em. Every time I came back Id always go to his dressing room and knock on the door and tell him I was here again and hed go, Yeah, yeah, I see you. But its still special. It never has lost its glow for me, and Im still honored to be a member.

Skaggs has glowed pretty brightly in his own right as well. Before he remade himself as a bluegrass icon, he was a huge country music star, with a bus, a tractor-trailer and a 27 member entourage and a contract that forbade him doing any style of music but commercial country. Skaggs dumped all that in 96 for a bluegrass career and has taken home seven Grammys with his band Kentucky Thunder. A devoted Monroe disciple, he sets a blistering pace in his live shows, his Monroe mandolin chop a blur as he tears through material by the father of bluegrass as well as a little Scruggs, Stanley and even a taste of Djangos guitar licks re-created on mandolin.

He recorded with wife, Sharon, of the Whites for his last release, 2014s Hearts Like Ours, and did a 2015 tour with Ry Cooder and the Whites that displayed a glorious mix of Delmore Brothers, Flatt and Scruggs, the Louvin Brothers, Kitty Wells, Bill Monroe, Hank Williams, Merle Travis, and Hank Snow. Skaggs says they recorded the shows, and he hopes to put out a record of those shows and perhaps another chapter of 2010s all-gospel album, Mosaic, on his own label  Skaggs Family Records. His label was shut down by COVID-19, but it has been renovated and is back in business.

But bluegrass is his home base. Its real, Skaggs says. Its music that makes people feel good. He cites Doc Watsons playing as a prime example. He had a sound, he had a lick, it just had so much life in it. And it was so joyous. People gravitate towards joy whether they set out to call it that or not. Theres something in the heart, in the spirit that cries out for peace and joy and happiness, and bluegrass just seems to have that.

Skaggs intends to pass that on.

We really try to focus on joy, Skaggs says. The music we play and the show that we do with Kentucky Thunder, its just a lot of fun, a lot of happiness and joy thats gonna come off that stage.

Contact Grant Britt at gbritt1@triad.rr.com.
RALEIGH  Gov. Roy Coopers proposed state budget released Wednesday includes $10.5 million for the International Civil Rights Center and Museum to buy property next door so the site can be expanded.

The museum would provide $4.5 million in matching funds.

And $16 million would go to renovating the dormitories at the Charlotte Hawkins Brown State Historic Site in Sedalia, which was just named one of the 11 most endangered historic sites by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

The budget also would allocate $5 million to demolish the existing aviary at the N.C. Zoo and to plan for its replacement.

Other line items in Coopers budget within the state Department of Natural and Cultural Resources include $4 million to plan and build the African American Monument at the State Capitol; $600,000 to move and repair the Oregon Inlet Lifesaving Station; and $10 million to renovate and expand the Fort Fisher Aquarium.

Museum expansion

In March, Sit-In Movement Inc., a nonprofit which owns the museum, officially bought 2.2 acres next to the museum, including the former First Citizens Bank at South Elm and Market streets.

The property and five-story brick building sold for $10.25 million. The city of Greensboro and Guilford County each agreed to kick in $2 million toward the purchase, along with a $500,000 grant from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, museum officials said.

The expansion is necessary to meet requirements allowing it to potentially become a UNESCO World Heritage Site. UNESCO stands for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and there are only 24 sites with this designation in the United States. Among them are the Statue of Liberty and the Grand Canyon.

To qualify, the museum must control the immediate environment of the building so it can maintain the character and feel of the historic site at the time that the historic event took place, Will Harris, a principal scholar for the museum, previously told the News & Record.

The museum site sits on what was the old F.W. Woolworth store, where four N.C. A&T students refused to leave a whites-only lunch counter until they were served. The months-long protest, which eventually succeeded, sparked similar sit-ins throughout the South.

Dormitories in disrepair

Palmer Memorial Institute, a boarding school founded in 1902 by Charlotte Hawkins Brown, transformed the lives of more than 2,000 African American students before it closed in 1971. The school, which reopened in 1987 as the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum, is the first State Historic Site to honor an African American woman.

Today, three former dormitories for the schools students  Galen Stone Hall, Charles W. Eliot Hall and Reynolds Hall  are unsafe to enter following severe storm damage and years of disuse, officials said on the state historical sites Facebook page.

Restoring these neglected buildings to usefulness will help to further position the museum as an anchor in the historically Black community of Sedalia, Andre D. Vann, president of the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Historical Foundation, said in a prepared statement. This national recognition is an opportunity to revitalize Palmer Memorial Institute and reinvigorate support for this unique, special place.

Zoo aviary

The aviary, built in 1982, had been closed since Jan. 24 due to concerns about the highly contagious avian flu, although the zoo said none of its birds has tested positive for the virus. Then in April, the zoo announced it was closing the building permanently due to safety concerns and relocating the nearly 100 birds and more than 2,000 plants.

Inspections of the building revealed weaknesses in the roof and erosion under the building that have made the structure unsafe for workers and visitors, the (Raleigh) News & Observer reported previously. The report from the inspection indicated the building would not be worth repairing and that a new building, if constructed, should be placed on a more stable site within the park.

The $5 million Cooper requested is the estimated cost of demolishing the existing building and designing a new one. Its not clear when a new aviary could be built.

State lawmakers in the N.C. General Assembly will come up with their own spending plans, but can consider Coopers budget proposal, during their spring session scheduled to convene next week on Wednesday.
GREENSBORO  A requested budget increase that would mostly go toward higher pay for staff of many Guilford County schools has cleared its first hurdle.

The Board of Education voted Tuesday to request a net increase of $25.7 million more per year in annual funding from the Guilford County Board of Commissioners. The vote was 7-2, with board members Anita Sharpe and Linda Welborn dissenting.

Superintendent Sharon Contreras has recommended that if the district receives the money, most of it  about $18.8 million  be slotted for increased compensation for teachers, principals, assistant principals and many classified staff.

Specifically, she recommended a $10 million increase for teachers, nearly $3.3 million more for principals and assistant principals and $5.5 million more in compensation for classified staff such as custodians, cafeteria workers and teacher assistants.

School administrators expect another $8.5 million would be needed to match state-mandated pay and benefit-cost increases and pay for increased insurance and utility costs and rising charter school enrollment. Money for charter schools is funneled through the district.

Slightly offsetting those costs is nearly $1.6 million in identified savings, according to Angie Henry, the districts chief financial officer.

The school districts total annual funding request to the commissioners comes to about $252 million.

The school board on Tuesday also approved asking the commissioners for $10 million in capital outlay funds for next fiscal year to pay for HVAC upgrades, roof repairs and outdoor lighting among other things. The county gave the district $4 million in capital outlay funds for the current fiscal year.

That does not include bond money borrowed by the county on behalf of the schools to pay for major construction projects.

School administrators expect that the county manager will present his own budget proposal to commissioners later this month, hold a public hearing on June 2 and adopt a budget on June 16. Once the district knows how much the county is wiling to give, the budget will come back to the school board for a vote on June 23.

If the state hasnt adopted a final budget at that time, that vote would actually be for a interim budget resolution, with finalization to occur sometime later in the year.

In other business:

 School board members voted to approve a student transition plan related to construction of the new Foust Gaming and Robotics School. The district needs to house students elsewhere while the new elementary school is built at the old Foust Elementary site.

According to the plan, Foust students in grades 1 through 5 will attend school in a separate building on the campus of Jackson Middle School during construction. The school is about two miles from Foust.

Students in pre-K and kindergarten will attend Murphey Traditional Academy, which is located next to Jackson Middle.

Contreras said that the district chose to have the students start attending Murphey because it is transitioning Foust to become a magnet-only school, rather than a school that students are assigned to because of their neighborhood. Students who live in the Smith High School attendance zone, which includes Foust, will get first preference if they want to attend the new Foust once it is completed and reopened in a couple years.

Students are expected to begin the transition during the next school year.

 School board members also voted to approve using up to almost $705,000 in federal COVID-19 relief dollars for a new math teacher recruitment program.

The program is a partnership with UNCG and is tailored to the colleges students who are studying to be math teachers.

Students in the program would receive content area support, residency experiences, mentoring in a cohort model, professional development and paid tuition and fees, according to a news release from the district.

In return, the students commit to teach in Guilford County Schools.

Contreras said that administrators already have 42 UNCG students in mind as possible beneficiaries.

Contact Jessie Pounds at 336-373-7002 and follow @JessiePounds on Twitter.
DURHAM  Four North Carolina law enforcement leaders, including Guilford County Sheriff Danny Rogers, on Wednesday unveiled a strike team strategy to address rising violence across the Interstate 85 and 40 corridors that affect four counties.

In addition to Rogers, sheriffs from Alamance, Durham and Orange counties held a joint news conference to talk about the new crackdown. It was the first formal announcement of the collaboration between the counties sheriffs, though the strike team was formed over a year ago.

Crime knows no boundaries, and the Strike Team is a multi-faceted approach to address the proliferation of firearms, illegal drugs and human trafficking in our region along the I-85/I-40 corridor, Durham County Sheriff Birkhead said in a written statement.

The press conference was held six days before North Carolinas primary election. All four sheriffs involved are seeking reelection next Tuesday: Birkhead in Durham, Charles Blackwood in Orange, Terry Johnson in Alamance and Rogers in Guilford where no less than seven candidates oppose him.

The effort, the sheriffs said, is meant to apprehend suspects wanted across county boundaries and tackle the flow of firearms transported along the highways.

Blackwood declined to go into particulars of how we operate because that puts us at a disadvantage but said that collective efforts allow the respective sheriffs offices to help each other track down problematic suspects with arrest warrants.

Violent crimes and gun violence are currently poised to break previous records in Durham, according to data.

Citing a shortage of deputies in Durham, Birkhead said the collaboration to confront crime makes sense because of finite resources.

We think its time to let people know what were doing now, Birkhead said. Were continuing to see the gun violence and everyones wondering whats going on.
RALEIGH  Gov. Roy Cooper proposed Wednesday that North Carolina government spend or earmark much of a projected $6.2 billion surplus to address further a host of needs like building construction, education inequities, affordable housing and worker retention.

The Democratic governor unveiled his recommended adjustments to the second year of a two-year budget lawmakers approved and he signed last fall. They also include higher pay for state employees and teachers beyond what the enacted budget already directs.

Despite a difficult few years, North Carolina families and communities are marching ahead with the resilience that has always defined us, Cooper told reporters. The budget that Im presenting today will build on our success and strengthen those areas that need reinforcement.

The budget proposal came two days after the General Assembly and Coopers administration announced the state would exceed previous revenue projections for the current fiscal year by $4.2 billion, or 15%.

Cooper handles the overcollections by increasing second-year spending by $2.3 billion  or 8.5%  to $29.3 billion. But theres also another $2.4 billion going to a host of itemized investments he places in reserves for things like infrastructure, economic development and workforce training that does not count in the $29.3 billion.

The remaining $1.5 billion is unspent, but appropriating the rest is likely to breed skepticism among Republican legislators who will review his ideas before passing their own adjustments. The legislative session begins next Wednesday.

While the governors budget proposal includes several shared priorities, we are wary of excessively increasing spending in the face of potential economic downturns, House Speaker Tim Moore said in a written statement.

Coopers proposal contains neither additional tax cuts nor more money for the states rainy day fund. He pointed out that the fund is already on track to reach $4.2 billion once the new fiscal year begins July 1 and that income tax cuts are already contained in the current budget.

While calling his proposal a smart, fiscally sound budget. Cooper also added: I think that its clear that (Republicans) want to invest more than they do.

Senate leader Phil Bergers office declined comment Wednesday on Coopers proposal.

Moore said Wednesday he was hopeful a bipartisan agreement could be reached with the governor. Compared to last year, when lawmakers worked for months crafting a two-year plan because no comprehensive budget was in place, Republicans have sounded less willing to stay in Raleigh this summer since the current budget would continue if no agreement is reached with Cooper.

His proposal includes $687 million more for K-12 and UNC System construction projects and repairs; $102 million to purchase and improve potential sites to lure large companies to the state; and $165 million for affordable housing.

The governor also wants to spend an additional $526 million to cover the next year of a public education spending remedial plan approved by a judge to meet standards cited in the long-standing Leandro litigation.

On pay raises, a 2.5% increase for most state employees set to begin in July would grow in Coopers plan to 5%, while state law enforcement and health care workers would get a 7.5% increase. Teacher pay schedules would be adjusted to ensure instructors see a combined average 7.5% raise this year and next, instead of the current 5%.

State Budget Director Charlie Perusse said these and other compensation proposals are needed to address a state government job vacancy rate approaching 20%. The turnover rate last year among first-year state employees reached 36%, he added.

Cooper once again proposed expanding Medicaid to hundreds of thousands of additional low-income adults through the 2010 federal Affordable Care Act. While Republicans have opposed the idea for years, Berger said last year hes now open to expansion. A special House-Senate study committee began meeting in the winter to consider expansion and other health care access improvements.

I believe that were getting closer than ever to an agreement, Cooper said. I do appreciate that Republican leaders are taking this seriously.
Carroll College will hold its class of 2022 commencement ceremony on Saturday in Nelson Stadium with 228 students graduating, including baccalaureate and master's degree recipients, as well as Carrolls first cohort of Accelerated Nursing students.

Alumni from the classes of 1952, 1960-62 and 1970-72 will also be honored.

Providing a special address to graduates will be Ray Kuntz, alumnus from the Carroll College class of 1977. Kuntz has provided transformational support to the college and its students over the years, college officials said. He served on the Carroll board of trustees from 2010-18 and was the recipient of Carrolls highest honor, the 2018 Insignis Award.

Carroll President John Cech said Kuntz honed some amazing business and entrepreneurial skills while at Carroll as a student and went on to become "one of Montanas most successful businessmen."

Cech said Kuntz has given to Carroll for 41 years and paid for the construction of two apartment buildings on campus with the goal that the rent collected goes directly to student scholarships. Cech called it the single-largest donation to Carroll in its history. He said Kuntz has established or supported other scholarship funds which have benefited 613 students over the years through total awards of $1,343,751.

Kuntz on Tuesday called the opportunity to speak "a nice honor," adding that Carroll has "been a real important part of my life."

Kuntz was owner of Watkins & Shepard Trucking, which had 1,300 employees and 20 terminals. He had also served as chair of the American Trucking Association. He said he now lives half the year in Florida and the other half in Helena. He has been a developer of several projects in Helena, including the Vanilla Bean Coffee Shop and the new Seeley Building on Last Chance Gulch, and still does development in town.

"As long as the city treats me decent I will continue to develop something in Helena," he said in a telephone interview.

This ceremony will include the first group of Accelerated Nursing students. In early 2020, the Montana Board of Nursing approved expanding Carrolls nursing program to include an Accelerated Nursing option. The program is for students who have earned a bachelors degree in any field and want to complete more coursework to become a licensed Registered Nurse. These students graduated in 15 months with a bachelor of science degree in nursing.

Anthrozoology instructor and recipient of the 2021 Outstanding Teaching Award, Molly Sumridge will provide the faculty address during the ceremony. In addition, Cech will provide the presidents address to the graduates.

The class of 2022 senior speaker will be Megan Michelotti of Butte, who is graduating with a double major in communications and public relations. She was elected by her fellow classmates to speak on their behalf.

Additionally, the college will be honoring the achievements of exceptional faculty, staff and students with the Outstanding Teaching Award, Distinguished Scholar Award, Excellence in Service Award, Bishop Gilmore Memorial Award for Outstanding Scholarship for the student(s) with the highest GPA, the Michael Murphy Award for Outstanding Collegiate Citizenship, and the Raymond G. Hunthausen Outstanding Service Award.

A schedule of commencement activities is as follows:

Saturday

9:30 a.m., Baccalaureate Mass, Cathedral of St. Helena. Due to limited seating in the Cathedral, admission to Baccalaureate is by ticket only. Doors to the Cathedral open at 8:15 a.m.

1 p.m., Commencement, Nelson Stadium. Commencement will be held in Nelson Stadium, rain or shine. No tickets are required for entrance as unlimited guests are allowed per graduate for the outdoor ceremony. Stadium gates will open for seating at noon. The general public is welcome to attend.

Commencement details as well as a link to the livestream are available at www.carroll.edu/commencement.

Staff Writer Phil Drake can be reached at philip.drake@helenair.com and 406-231-9021.

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When the wood speaks  Tim Carney listens.

Over the years  its spoken really beautiful things to him.

A few of them are on display now at 1+1=1 Gallery that he co-owns with his wife, Maureen Shaughnessy:

A gracefully inviting Days End rocking chair made from walnut and quilted-birch;

a captivating Caldera, bistro table made from a maple burl; and

several curved wood floor lamps with dancing-shape flow  Snowdrop and Snowdrop Drift.

The works are part of an exhibit, Contemporary Wood, thats on display for the Spring Art Walk, 4 to 8 p.m. Friday, May 13, and runs through May 21.

Carney will give a casual demo and hold a Q&A on how he designs chairs Friday night. And there will be light food and beverages.

Contemporary Wood also features unique turned-wood vessels by Boyd Carson and Tom Robinson.

Carney said this will likely be the last show of his work, since hes planning to step back from his woodworking business and hopes to sell it.

Over 45-50 years, a lot of beautiful wood has whispered hundreds of ideas to guide Carneys designs and hands.

He knew from a very early age he liked working with wood.

He thinks he was 9 when he just about gave his mom a heart attack  he was working up on a roof, helping his older brother add a porch to their house.

Although wood fascinated him, he didnt pursue working with it until years later.

He spent nine years in the seminary and also earned a fine arts degree, but then took a job as a carpenter with the railroad in Pocatello, Idaho.

It was after he was laid off from that job in 1982, that he opened his own business  Timothys Fine Woodworking.

In 1996, he and his business relocated to Helena, and its been a good move.

(Helena) seems much more receptive to artwork and fine furniture, he said.

His rockers -- one of which graces the window of the gallery -- have beautiful sweeping and sculptural lines, designed for beauty and comfort.

Part of the key is the joinery, which comes together in an interlocking or double-rabbet joint designed by master woodworker, Sam Maloof.

Carney went to one of Maloofs workshops in 1997 or 1998, and it took my work in a whole new direction. He was very inspiring to me.

The Maloof joint allows for the graceful play of hard and soft lines, that give Carneys rockers their unique and graceful curves.

It also contrasts with the more angular joinery thats often used on furniture.

Carneys joinery process and the prototypes he uses to build his rockers will be the focus of his demo talk Friday night.

And while the chairs are arresting in their beauty, theres more than just looks that matter.

Theyre all made to be comfortable.

I can visualize in three dimensions, he said, which has been particularly helpful in designing furniture.

But the drawings and design often need some minor tweaking once hes built his prototypes.

When he tested his rocker prototype, he found the seat was too low and the rocker didnt rock the way he thought it should.

So, he tweaked the design to get it perfect.

Once he has the prototype exact, he takes the pieces apart and builds a jig or template of each part.

He can then cut the pieces he needs to make several chairs with the same design.

The pieces are all hand-carved and shaped to give his chairs their graceful curves.

From his last rocker design, he made a batch of six.

Carney is also known for his live-edge tables, which show the bark-edge of the tree, minus the bark.

His Caldera II table, inspired by the Yellowstone caldera, is a beautiful example.

The highly burnished table top is made from a slice of a giant burl from a maple tree, with intricately interlocking wood grains.

His tables and rockers all get their own unique names.

When I get a piece of wood, I let it be until I get to know it. I have to let my intuition work and try to understand what it can be. It takes a while to be with it.

If Im doing something special, I have to be with it for a while to make it beautiful.

Hes worked with all kinds of wood over the years, from cocobolo, to ebony, to zebra wood, but some of his favorites are walnut, cherry and maple.

People are vying over his tables, said Shaughnessy. Thats particularly true as word is getting out that hed like to retire.

And so would Shaughnessy. Theyve put out the word they would like to sell their gallery.

They want to find someone who not only loves contemporary art, but also loves community.

Were looking for the right person to continue our vision of community.

I cant stand the idea of not having a place to see contemporary art, said Shaughnessy.

For more information: 1+1=1 Gallery is located at 434 N. Last Chance Gulch, https://1plus1is1.com/, 406-431-9931.

If you go What: Art Walk: Contemporary Wood  featuring master woodworker Tim Carney. A Casual Q&A and demo of how he designs chairs. When: 4 to 8 p.m. Friday, May 13 Where: 1+1=1 Gallery, 434 N. Last Chance Gulch Contact: https://1plus1is1.com/, 406-431-9931

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MISSOULA  Two of the Democrats running in the primary for the newly created western Montana U.S. House district had a sharp exchange during a forum here Wednesday night over an ad paid for by a political action committee and running on TV stations in the district.

The race is between Cora Neumann, a Bozeman nonprofit executive who has focused on public health issues; Monica Tranel, a Missoula lawyer who has experience in the energy and natural resources sectors; and Tom Winter, a former state lawmaker from Missoula who works to expand access to broadband.

The ad says two of the candidates running for the seat "are from California" and cites a home owned by Republican candidate Ryan Zinke's wife in Santa Barbara and a California house Neumann sold in 2020.

Just because youre wealthy does not mean you should have undue influence on our elections, Neumann said during the forum in response to a question about voting access. Unfortunately, my opponent Monica Tranel has a super PAC thats running lies and ads against me.

A political action committee, or PAC, called Montanans for a Better Congress is running the TV spot that started May 6 and airs through the primary in support of Tranel. The PAC reported spending $109,000 to run the ad.

By law PACs and candidates cannot coordinate to support a campaign.

Tranel quickly countered Neumann during the forum hosted by Missoula County Democrats.

By definition, a super-PAC isnt mine, Tranel said. And anything thats not true you could surely correct. If there is something thats not true, Cora, then point out what it is. But its not mine.

Neumann told Tranel she could also object to the ad, though Neumann did not say during the forum specifically what was incorrect.

While she claims to also stand against money in politics, she has not spoken up and condemned these lies on TV, Neumann said.

Neumanns campaign has said her family moved to Bozeman when she was an infant and lived there until the financial recession in the 1980s forced the family to move elsewhere. She returned in 2019 and said a large amount of her extended family also lives in the area. The PAC ad shows a screenshot of Neumanns financial disclosure form when she was a Senate candidate in the 2020 primary showing she sold a house in California in early 2020.

Tranel ended the exchange by saying "We can move on because I think the people here want to hear about the issues and not the ad hominem attacks."

Tranel has drawn contrasts to Neumann in her campaign, with Tranel highlighting her childhood growing up in eastern Montana, family ties around the state and majority of career spent in Montana.

While so far in the primary Democrats have mostly focused on attacking the expected winner of the Republican primary, former congressman and past Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, the forum Wednesday marked a change in tone.

We do not as Democrats need to be taking each other down at a time so delicate in our history, Neumann said. We need to be talking about issues that matter to Montanans.

In her rebuttal, Tranel said Neumann was the one waging a personal attack we said we werent going to be doing.

Montanans for a Better Congress is registered as a type of tax-exempt organization often called a "super PAC," which can raise and spend unlimited money.

While super PACs must disclose donors, they often raise money from other types of nonprofits or corporations that are allowed to obscure the source of funding.

Montanans for a Better Congress formed the day after the most recent federal reporting deadline, meaning it won't have to file a comprehensive disclosure report with the Federal Election Commission for at least two more weeks. PACs are required to report communications within 48 hours of broadcast if they spent at least $10,000 on them.

The dispute between Neumann and Tranel came during responses to a question about how to increase access to voting, and in their answers all candidates said they supported the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.

Winter pointed to a bill he tried to pass in the state Legislature that would have allowed for online voter registration and said his understanding of the GOP opposition that killed it would make him equipped to push back against efforts to limit access to the polls in Congress. He also said his campaign would not accept money from PACS or companies and groups associated with fossil fuels.

As part of her answer, Neumann also said she wanted to see the U.S. Supreme Courts Citizens United decision reversed because money played too large a role in campaigns.

Neumann is the frontrunner when it comes to fundraising for the race, having pulled in more than $1,172,000 over the race. That compares to Tranels $675,150 and Winters nearly $85,000.

Tranel said she also wanted to see campaign finance reform, adding that 80% of contributions to her campaign have come from Montana residents.

Nobody else can come close to that in this race, Tranel said.

Neumann said while she was also opposed to the role money plays in elections, the Democrat who emerges from the primary needs to be able to take on Zinke, who has raised more than $2.4 million over the campaign.

"I'm building a really strong campaign," Neumann said. " ... We're keeping pace with Ryan Zinke. ... We are building an operation that can absolutely win."

Winter emphasized that he's the only candidate who has won an election in Montana, and told the crowd he did it in a district that favored Trump in his presidential elections.

"I won a district that voted for Trump plus 11 points, held by a Republican, the (state) speaker of the House's son. I did that in our backyard, just over there. I don't have to reinvent the wheel," Winter said.

Wednesday was the second time the candidates all appeared together at a public forum. They are set to again share a virtual stage Thursday evening in a forum hosted by Western Native Voice. Another is set for May 20 in Bozeman and hosted by Gallatin County Democrats.

Absentee ballots hit the mail Friday for the June 7 primary.

 Reporter Sam Wilson contributed to this story.

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Dubais Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) has added a package of services to its Chatbot branded Mahboub, including the right-of-way inquiries, temporary road service requests, and the status of vendors' prequalification applications.



RTA has launched three services directed to the business community The first service is for inquiries about the violations of right-of-way rules and regulations, said Mira Ahmed Al-Sheikh, Director of Smart Services, Corporate Technology Support Services Sector, RTA.



The second service relates to the provision of a temporary road to land plots within the right-of-way in areas that have no asphalt roads. The third service is for inquiring about the status of prequalification of suppliers applications to inquire about the status of applications for prequalification of suppliers enabling them to be approved RTA suppliers.



The objective of providing these services is to offer them to the business community through RTAs Chatbot (Mahboub) instead of the business app. The Chatbot is capable of serving customer needs related to RTAs informational, procedural and interactive inquiries and thus reducing the pressure on the Call Centre. The Chatbot technology has a feature of learning from previous conversations, which helps to understand the nature of inquiries and respond to them accurately, she concluded.



Bilingual Service



The Chatbot is bilingual (Arabic and English) and works on various platforms, thus serving a wide range of both language speakers inside and outside the UAE. Work is underway to expand the scope of the Chatbot to include various colloquial Arabic dialects, including the GCC dialect.



The Smart Services Department, in collaboration with several RTA departments, has introduced the most frequently used services (293 services) and added them to the system. Such services are highlighted by inquiries about the renewal of vehicle registration, introduction about nol and Abra services in addition to an array of transactional services that can be directly processed by users. It is worth mentioning that RTAs Chatbot had been ranked as the biggest and best artificial intelligence-powered chatbot system in the region.  TradeArabia News Service
Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte last week said he would support a special legislative session should a landmark federal ruling on abortion rights be reversed, raising the possibility that Republican lawmakers will move quickly to further restrict or outlaw the practice in the state.

The governors comments, first reported by Montana Public Radio, were made on local talk radio show "Talk Back" on May 5 in answer to a callers question about the U.S. Supreme Courts forthcoming ruling expected to reverse the Roe v. Wade ruling. A draft opinion leaked earlier this month indicated the court is poised to overturn the 50-year-old decision that guarantees the federal right to abortion.

We have to proceed in a way that protects life and I would be happy to call a special session if we have a path that is defensible in the courts here in Montana and we have a consensus in the legislature, Gianforte said. Every life has to be protected.

Gianforte didnt elaborate on what kind of legislation Republicans might pursue in an abortion-focused special session, or what he means by "a path that is defensible in the courts." Montana's Legislature meets once every two years, but either the governor or a majority of lawmakers can call a special session to address issues in the interim.

The U.S. Supreme Court's ruling is expected in June and the next regular session of the Legislature is January 2023.

Beyond Roe, abortion access in Montana is currently governed by a precedent set by the states high court in 1999, known as the Armstrong ruling, which ensures access to pre-viability abortions. As part of an appeal to a preliminary injunction that's put three new laws altering access to abortion in the state on hold, Republican Attorney General Austin Knudsen has asked the state Supreme Court to also overturn Armstrong.

Brooke Stroyke, a spokesperson for Gianforte, did not elaborate on what conditions would need to be met for a special session. "The governor is working with legislative leaders to ensure we are prepared to act deliberately when the Supreme Court issues its decision," she wrote Thursday in a response to emailed questions.

As of Thursday afternoon, no state lawmakers had submitted requests for bill drafts related to the issue, according to the Legislative Services Division.

Legislative Republicans are committed to proceeding strategically to protect preborn Montana children, Senate President Mark Blasdel and House Majority Leader Sue Vinton said in a joint statement.

House Minority Leader Kim Abbott on Thursday called the prospect of an abortion-focused special session "a stunt at taxpayers' expense."

"The avenue that he would need to pursue is to change the explicit right of privacy in the Constitution. The governor would find no support from the Democratic caucus for that," Abbott said. " ... We value the right to privacy, we value the Constitution, and that's what we're talking about here."

Several months ago, efforts to call a special session to address outdated political districts for the Public Service Commission eventually fell apart after a group of Republican lawmakers insisted on adding "election integrity" issues into the mix. Once called, a special session can be expanded to other topics by simple majority votes, and some GOP legislators worried it could quickly balloon out of control. Others balked at the cost of a special session, estimated at $108,000 for the first day, plus $56,000 for each subsequent day.

The GOP leaders' joint statement also took aim at the judiciary, an area where Republicans have increasingly trained their focus since the 2020 election gave them control of the state's executive and legislative branches. All eyes right now should be on the Montana court system to watch if our judges rule according to the text of our constitution or rule in favor of extreme liberal anti-life activists, Blasdel and Vinton stated.

Republican lawmakers last session attempted to allow judicial candidates for Montanas nonpartisan Supreme Court to declare party affiliations, and endorsements from the state's top Republicans have shone a partisan spotlight on those normally low-profile races during this election cycle.

Several challenges to legislation covering hot-button issues are pending before the state Supreme Court, including on abortion access, elections and gun rights.

Republicans hold vast majorities in the House and Senate, so they likely wont need any Democratic support to pass a bill that would set the stage for the state Supreme Court to reconsider its Armstrong decision if it does not overturn it when deciding the current abortion case before the chamber. While GOP lawmakers have split on many issues, they were largely united on abortion-related bills during the 2021 session.

The Legislature could also attempt to pass a constitutional referendum to ask the voters to alter the Montana Constitution to specify that citizens dont have a right to abortions. But that requires a two-thirds vote of the Legislature, meaning even if all 98 Republicans supported the measure, theyd need to pick up yes votes from at least two Democrats as well.

Like their colleagues across the aisle, Democrats also presented a united front on most abortion-related bills last session. One exception was a bill to prohibit health insurance plans sold in the federal exchange in Montana from covering abortion care. It picked up support from four House Democrats on its way to being signed into law by the governor.

That bill, along with three others that restricted abortion access in Montana, were signed into law by Gianforte last year. The other three are all temporarily on hold while a lawsuit filed by Planned Parenthood of Montana works through the courts.

Those three laws sought to ban abortions after 20 weeks gestational age; require a woman to be informed of the option to view an ultrasound before an abortion; and require informed consent before a drug-induced abortion while blocking the medication from being provided through the mail.

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The state health department is urging people and families covered by Montana Medicaid, which includes Medicaid expansion, and Healthy Montana Kids to make sure their contact information with the state is up to date.

That's because when the federal public health emergency is expected to end later this summer, the eligibility process for those programs will change and the Department of Public Health and Human Services will need to get in touch with people to verify their qualification status.

If their contact information is not correct, some could lose coverage they're qualified to receive.

Its imperative that Montanans update their contact information with DPHHS to ensure they will receive upcoming notices related to their health care coverage, department director Adam Meier said in a press release sent Thursday. We encourage people to utilize one of the numerous options available to complete this crucial task.

People can update their information by:

Completing the new change of address form online at apply.mt.gov or through this direct link. Individuals can also create an online account at apply.mt.gov. Through an online account, members can update their contact information and renew their coverage when it is time, as well as receive correspondence.

Calling the Public Assistance Helpline at 1-888-706-1535.

Mailing a letter to DPHHS, PO Box 202925, Helena, MT 59620-2925.

Faxing a letter to 1-877-418-4533.

Going to a local Office of Public Assistance.

The department will also launch a new website soon where people can update their information.

The termination of the emergency will start a major shift in how the state of Montana reviews who is qualified for health insurance coverage through most adult Medicaid programs. That process, called redetermination, has been on hold in states across the country during COVID-19 in an effort by the federal government to make sure people could access health care during the pandemic.

The health department said in Thursday's press release that once the end of the public health emergency is announced, it will finalize the date when it will start processing annual renewals and changes to Montana Medicaid and Health Montana Kids clients' circumstances and making changes to coverage if appropriate.

The department expects to finish the redetermination process by May 31, 2023. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services allow states a year to complete the process, however. CMS has also provided guidance to states about the best way to complete redeterminations with minimal errors.

CMS is concerned that if states attempt to initiate more than 1/9 of their total caseload in a given month, there will be an increased risk that state processes will not meet federal renewal requirements, and eligible individuals will be erroneously determined ineligible or lose coverage for avoidable procedural reasons, the guidance reads.

The department said that people no longer qualified for either Medicaid program will get a notice informing them of the end of their coverage and connecting them with information on how to get insurance through the federal marketplace. Before the pandemic, about 80% of Montanans who bought their coverage on the exchange qualified for subsidies to lower the cost. During the public health emergency, those subsidies and the number of people who qualified for them were expanded, but that too will end when the emergency status terminates.

The number of people covered by Medicaid in Montana rose dramatically during the pandemic. In March of 2020, there were 86,788 adults accessing insurance through the expansion program. That rose to 113,850 at the start of this year, a nearly 32% increase. In traditional Medicaid, enrollment went from 42,454 to 58,847 over the same period, a 38% jump.

While some people's Medicaid coverage will be automatically renewed, others will get a packet in the mail to complete the renewal process. The department urged people to do their renewal online at apply.mt.gov or by calling the Public Assistance Helpline at 1-888-706-1535.

Individuals and families have at least 30 days to return their renewal packet, and the department will follow up with notices and text messages to reach as many people as possible.

It is important that individuals respond and complete their renewal, Meier said in the release. If a member does not complete their renewal, their healthcare coverage will end.

The department is also working with Cover Montana, which is operated by the Montana Primary Care Association, to help people determine how to enroll in the coverage that best fits their needs.

Cover Montana will be working on a broad public education effort throughout 2022, said Olivia Riutta, director of Cover Montana, in the release. We will have navigators in communities talking to people. Soon, we will launch a new website and social media effort to help people get easy access to accurate information. And we will work with health care providers, nonprofit organizations, schools, and other partners to reach as many Montanans as possible.

Montanans covered by Medicaid who need help navigating the renewal process or finding other health coverage can call Cover Montanas toll-free help line at 844-682-6837 or find in-person help in their area at www.covermt.org.

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BURLINGTON  The owners of Gooseberries Fresh Food Market announced Wednesday that they are selling the store to out-of-state buyers, changing the face of a popular shopping destination.

The ownership family of David, Kathy and Michael Spiegelhoff cited changes in the grocery business in announcing the sale of Gooseberries, 690 W. State St., which the family has owned and operated since 2006.

"Grocery has become a challenging industry," the family announced on Facebook. "We have made the decision to sell based on what is best for our family, our staff and the Burlington community."

The store is being purchased by Berkot's Super Foods, a chain of 16 stores based in Illinois. All of Berkot's stores are located in Illinois except a former Richter's Marketplace in Twin Lakes in Kenosha County, which the company acquired two years ago.

Twin Lakes Chamber of Commerce President Tim Hodgman said since Berkot's took over, the grocery store has been cleaned up and remodeled. The inventory of products seems to be bigger, too, including a better variety of fresh meats, he said.

Although losing Richter's Marketplace was a disappointment, Hodgman said, people have embraced Berkot's, and the company supports local groups like churches and scout troops.

"They are still doing all that Richter's did," he said. "They still support the local stuff."

Founded in 1990 in Mokena, Illinois, just south of Chicago, Berkot's describes itself as "your neighborhood, family-owned and operated, full-service grocery store."

Company officials could not be reached for comment.

The Spiegelhoffs said the Burlington store would continue, and that the new owners would attempt to maintain all of the store's current employees.

"Berkots is focused on serving their customers, serving the community, and taking care of their employees," the Spiegelhoff family said. "We trust that they will be a great caretaker of the grocery business and community in Burlington."

Other details have not yet been announced, including when the new owners will take over.

Gooseberries opened in July 2006 at the site of a former Piggly Wiggly grocery store that had been operated by Bob Schmaling.

The sale comes a few months after a Spiegelhoff company called Gooseberries Burlington LLC purchased the store property for $2.4 million from previous owners Schmaling Real Estate LP. The Spiegelhoffs had previously been leasing the property.

At the time of the real estate sale, David Spiegelhoff downplayed the significance and offered assurances that the store would not be closing.

"We purchased the Gooseberries building in January 2022, and this opportunity arose soon after," the Spiegelhoffs said in Wednesday's announcement. "The timing is right for all involved."

The closure announcement stunned Gooseberries customers.

"So sad," customer Sarah Mitchell posted on Facebook. "Will miss them and their quality products."

Burlington Mayor Jeannie Hefty extended best wishes to the Spiegelhoff family and expressed gratitude for their past commitment to serving Burlington customers, both at Gooseberries and at other stores they have operated.

Hefty noted that the Gooseberries market drew customers from as far away as some Illinois cities.

"We were fortunate to experience an honest and caring business, that customers came first through the years," she said in a written statement.

Of the new store owners, the mayor said, "We welcome Berkot's to our community and the very best joining a vibrant city."

After its initial store in Mokena, Illinois, Berkot's has grown to include 15 others, mostly in small to mid-sized communities throughout the Chicago suburbs and elsewhere in northern Illinois.

Melissa Fedora, executive director of the Mokena Chamber of Commerce, said although Berkot's technically is a chain, the local ownership conducts itself more like a mom-and-pop operation.

The company supports the chamber and other nonprofits in its hometown, Fedora said. The store employees work to remain connected with local customers, she added.

"They're very involved in the community," she said. "They're one of the businesses you can count on."

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DECATUR  Darion L. Evans, the teenage triggerman in a Decatur dice game robbery who shot one woman to death and came close to killing another, failed in a bid Thursday to have his 45 year sentence reconsidered.

Brought from prison to Macon County Circuit Court shackled hand and foot, the 23-year-old defendant tried to argue that he didnt deserve to spend that much time behind bars.

Presiding Judge Thomas Griffith, who had sentenced him in November of 2017, told Evans he would have had a fair chance of having some of his sentence cut following changes in case law that had followed his sentencing.

But more recent Illinois Supreme Court decisions had said that such reconsideration was now not open to defendants who had taken fully negotiated plea deals as Evans, 16-years-old at the time of the crime, had done when he pleaded to murder.

His defense attorney, Daniel Fultz, had been called to give evidence Thursday. He said he faced a determined prosecutor who wanted a 25 year enhancement for using a firearm added to any sentence. Fultz said negotiating sessions between himself, the prosecutor and Griffith saw the judge also agree the firearm enhancement would not be waived.

... I didnt want to plead a 16-year-old kid to a 45-year-sentence, recalled Fultz. ...But the evidence against him was so overwhelming that I did not think it would be a good idea to say we should go to trial.

Fultz said without the plea agreement and, if convicted by a jury, Evans was looking at a minimum sentence of 76 years.

Chief Public Defender Michelle Sanders, representing Evans Thursday, said she realized the weight of case law was now against her. But she argued a young man who thought he was taking the best deal offer didnt deserve the sentence he received.

Assistant States Attorney Christina Mullison replied that, whatever the merits or otherwise of Evanss arguments, Supreme Court decisions made this an open and shut case. The fully negotiated plea should be upheld, she said.

After Griffith said he had no choice but to agree and made his decision not to resentence Evans, Sanders gave the court notice her client would be appealing.

The victim in the case, 21-year-old Cesley Taylor, had been shot to death in a hail of bullets in her apartment on Sept. 7, 2015. A second victim, Britney Wilson, was gunned down and badly wounded but survived.

Evans, the gunman, had been part of a gang of four robbers. Of those, Shaitan L. Cook Jr. had been sentenced to 20 years in prison, Daiquan D. Cline had also been sentenced to 20 years while Ryan H.J. ONeal had received a 24 year sentence.

Contact Tony Reid at (217) 421-7977. Follow him on Twitter: @TonyJReid

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One of the best articles Ive read about abortion was by Eric Sapp who wrote at ChristianPost.com (Oct. 3, 2016) Hillary Clinton should be the candidate for those whose concern for the unborn determines their vote. Heres an excerpt:

Want to guess which political party is more effective at reducing poverty and unwanted pregnancies? Ill give you a hint. Its not the pro-life party that in this last congressional session alone fought to cut medical care for poor mothers and children, food programs for kids, and contraception coverage and access for women.

He added, Lets assume the impossible happened and Roe [the 1973 Supreme Court decision that a woman has a right to choose abortion] is overturned  leaving each state to decide if theyll allow abortions. Only about 10% of abortions take place in states with legislatures that have seriously tried to limit abortion. So if abortion was outlawed in all those states, and no woman crossed state lines to get one, the most overturning Roe would achieve is a 10% reduction in abortions. Compare that to nearly 40 years of data showing that we would save more than three times as many unborn children by cutting the number of poor women in half. Increase contraception access, family leave and improve pre- and post- natal healthcare, and wed cut abortions by 50% or more.

The Catholic church has been at the forefront of the fight against abortion rights. They also ignored, refused to believe, and hid reports for decades, if not centuries, of children being sexually abused by priest. If you havent seen the movie Spotlight, you should do so.

They also oppose birth control. They made Mother Teresia a saint. If youd like to hear her rant against birth control, watch Hells Angel available on youtube.com.

Ron Adams, Decatur

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Sarah Hammond, executive director of the Humane Society of the New Braunfels Area (HSNBA) walks through the dog kennels Tuesday, April 26, 2022 at HSNBA.
Scotty McCreery

Deeper than the holler, Scotty McCreery owns a voice suited for country music.

In line with such famed country baritones as Randy Travis and Josh Turner, McCreery returns to the area on Sunday, May 15. Hell stand tall and sing wide from the hallowed stage of the Paramount in Bristol, Tennessee. Season 10 winner of American Idol, McCreery has since carved an indelible career in country.

At the time, McCreery attended North Carolina State University. The day after he won American Idol, he had to fly back home to take an English test. Since then, hes recorded five hit albums, including his latest, last years Same Truck.

I am a regular dude who sings country music, said McCreery.

If You Go  Who: Scotty McCreery  When: Sunday, May 15, at 8 p.m.  Where: Paramount Center for the Arts, 518 State St., Bristol, Tenn.  Admission: $33-$114  Info: 423-274-8920  Web, audio and video: www.scottymccreery.com

Webb Wilder

Hank Williams honky-tonk gels with Little Richard jive and Beatles melodicism to compose the music of Webb Wilder.

Gobs of guitar opening wide his path, Wilders way returns to the historic Down Home in Johnson City on Saturday, May 14. With Buddy Holly-like spectacles on his face and a rock n roll guitar in hand, Wilder entertains with music that rocks and a show that dazzles.

Wilder punctured Americas national music consciousness with 1986s time bomb It Came from Nashville. An independent streak, briefly interrupted by a major label deal, spreads wide the world of Webb Wilder music. No one looks like, sounds like or performs like Wilder. A thinking mans rocker, he makes music draped in integrity.

If You Go  Who: Webb Wilder  When: Saturday, May 14, at 8 p.m.  Where: Down Home, 300 W. Main St., Johnson City  Admission: $30  Info: 423-929-9822  Web, audio and video: www.webbwilder.com

Annabelles Curse

Part the curtains for the return of Annabelles Curse.

A longtime local and regional favorite, the indie folk-rock band reemerges on Thursday, May 19, at Abingdon Vineyards in Abingdon. Miss them now, catch them in September during Bristol Rhythm & Roots Reunion.

Formed in 2010, Annabelles Curse, led by Zack and Carly Booher Edwards, is a band like no other. Elegy crisscrosses eloquence throughout such albums as 2011s Monsters and 2017s Beyond the Station. They play music that burrows to the bones and lyrics that wriggle to the brain to make one think. Unforgettable nuggets, their music rings as golden.

If You Go  Who: Annabelles Curse  When: Thursday, May 19, at 7 p.m.  Where: Abingdon Vineyards, 20530 Alvarado Road, Abingdon  Admission: $15  Info: 276-623-1255  Web, audio and video: www.facebook.com/annabellescurse/

Music Notes

Tickets go on sale tomorrow at 10 a.m. for countrys Craig Morgan at The Cameo Theater in Bristol, Virginia, on Saturday, Oct. 29. Morgan, whose hits include Almost Home and Redneck Yacht Club, will bring his God, Family, Country Tour to Bristol. The tour coincides with the release of his forthcoming memoir, God, Family, Country.

Tickets retail from $65 to $75.50. Prices increase by $5 on the day of the show. For more information, visit https://thecameotheater.com or call 276-296-1234.

New albums from local artists keep coming. East Tennessees Circus No. 9, signed to Bonfire Music Group, issues its latest album on Friday, July 1. The progressive bluegrass bands self-titled album, which yields the first single, Steampipe Coffee, can apparently be bought at their shows, including on Friday, May 20, at the Down Home in Johnson City. Or you can preorder a signed copy for $20 via https://circusnumbernine.com.

Kingsports Travis White gets into the new music act with his latest EP, Sirens. Released tomorrow, the contemporary Christian musician with a distinctly rock n roll style included such new songs as Walking Dead in the new EP.

Furthermore, 49 Winchesters new album, Fortune Favors the Bold, releases tomorrow. Copies will be available on CD and vinyl during their free show at The Sessions Hotel tomorrow night in downtown Bristol. For those who cannot make it to the show, LPs and CDs can be ordered via https://49winchester.com for $25 for an LP and $15 for a CD.

Billy Corgans Smashing Pumpkins helm this weeks free MP3 downloads. Snag a full concert at https://archive.org/details/tsp2007-06-27.aud5. Recorded at Ashevilles Orange Peel in 2007, the full show includes such smashes as Bullet with Butterfly Wings and 1979.

Tom Netherland is a freelance writer. He may be reached at features@bristolnews.com.
Its rarely a good practice to second guess personnel decisions of organizations. Its impossible for those outside the walls to know all the facts that go into those decisions, but the case of Bristol, Virginia police officer Johnathan Brown is one that may be an exception.

Browns case has played out in the public square since that early March morning of 2021 when Brown fired six shots, killing a meth-influenced driver of a red Ford Mustang aiming the car straight for him in a motel parking lot.

A jury of his peers found Brown not guilty of murder after a weeklong court case that finished May 4, but apparently the verdict wasnt enough to get Brown back in uniform and on the streets for the Bristol, Virginia Police Department. Apparently an internal investigation by the police department has not been completed, more than a year after the incident occurred.

While it is somewhat heartening, but also not entirely surprising, that the American court system is faster than the city of Bristol Virginia, the question of, What is taking so long? seems fair at this point.

Is this just another episode in the municipal soap opera that is the city of Bristol, Virginia, or are there legitimate reasons for such a lengthy inquiry that goes beyond a week of intense court testimony?

It would seem the city would want to complete its internal investigation before indicting Brown with a murder charge and sending the case to court.

During her closing argument, Browns attorney said the commonwealth rushed to indict Brown before the investigation was complete. The defense called Browns fellow officers on the scene of the shooting to the stand. They testified Brown did nothing inappropriate that morning and that his actions were in self-defense to save his own life.

Now, acquitted of any wrongdoing by a jury of his peers, why is Brown still sitting on the sidelines suspended without a paycheck since the March 2021 shooting?

From the outside looking in, the situation is puzzling. For Brown, it has to be frustrating to win a court victory and be seemingly minutes from getting your career back, only to be held up by a year-old investigation.

Johnathan Brown deserves answers. City residents deserve answers.

The city needs to wrap up this investigation and resolve this issue quickly for the good of all.
Abu Dhabi Chemicals Derivatives Company (Taziz) has announced that Shaheen Chem Holdings Investment (Shaheen) has signed up a strategic partner in the Taziz EDC & PVC, a joint venture between Taziz and Indian multinational conglomerate Reliance Industries Limited, that will construct and operate a world-scale chlor-alkali, ethylene dichloride (EDC) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) facility in Ruwais region of the emirate.

The project is set to come up at the Taziz Industrial Chemicals Zone, which had been jointly set up by ADNOC and ADQ.

On completion, the project which is being set up at an investment of more than $2 billion, will supply local manufacturers, replacing chemicals currently imported, while also exporting to meet growing demand for these chemicals globally.

Taziz will provide new opportunities for local manufacturers, supporting growth of their knowledge and capabilities, catalysing local industrial development.

Through this tie-up, Shaheen brings extensive knowledge of the local market and joins the project with a focus on utilizing production for use in local supply chains.

The agreement marks the first direct investment by a privately-owned UAE company in the Taziz Industrial Chemicals Zone.

It also follows the investment agreements between Taziz and eight UAE-based investors in December 2021, which marked the first domestic Public Private Partnership (PPP) in Abu Dhabis downstream and petrochemicals sector.

Taziz Acting CEO Khaleefa Yousef Al Mheiri said: "We are delighted to welcome Shaheen as a strategic partner in the company. This strategic agreement further consolidates Tazizs position as the sought-after partner for local and international investment in the UAEs chemicals industry."

"The partnership supports our national strategy to drive the growth and diversification of the countrys industrial base, strengthen domestic supply chains and enable the private sector to "Make it in the Emirates", in line with the leaderships wise directives," he added.

The chemicals to be produced by the Taziz EDC and PVC project have a wide range of industrial applications and will create opportunities for export, as well as providing local industry with a source of critical raw materials manufactured in the UAE for the first time.

Taziz comprises three zones, the first of which is an Industrial Chemicals Zone that will host chemicals production, with seven world-scale projects already in the design phase.

The second is a Light Industrial Zone, which will be home to downstream conversion industries that will convert the outputs of the Chemicals Zone into consumable products. The third is an Industrial Services Zone that will house a variety of companies providing the services required by the TAZIZ industrial zones and the wider Ruwais Industrial Complex.

Investment in the production of chemicals is a priority for the UAEs industrial growth strategy, championed by the Ministry of Industry and Advanced Technology, which aims to raise the UAEs industrial sectors contribution of national GDP to AED300 billion by 2031. Chemicals are an attractive sector given projected demand growth globally and the opportunity local production creates to grow the UAEs industrial base.

Chlor-Alkali enables the production of caustic soda, crucial to the production of aluminum, and EDC is used in the production of PVC for a wide range of industrial and consumer products including pipes, windows, cables, films and flooring.

Shaheen Managing Director Walid Azhari said: "We are honored to partner with Taziz and Reliance in this world class industrial plant which will include the largest Chlor Alkali plant in the world. We are looking forward to working with our partners during the development, construction and operation stages of the project."

"This project will be the cornerstone for many exciting downstream opportunities which will create a whole new industrial cluster in the UAE, in line with the Abu Dhabi Economic Vision 2030," he stated.

All projects in the Taziz Industrial Chemicals Zone are subject to customary regulatory approvals.-TradeArabia News Service
HICKORY  Anyone visiting Catawba Valley Community College will notice two new members have arrived and taken flight on the main campus.

Two giant bronze Red Hawk sculptures were installed recently on CVCCs main campus, residing on the columns in the center of the colleges roundabouts.

We take pride in what our Red Hawk brand means in our community, said Catawba Valley Community College President Garrett Hinshaw. Thanks to the vision of Mr. David Sain and Mr. Dave Zagaroli and our great partnership with the city of Hickory, their vision is now a reality on our campus. Everyone will now know that they are entering a special place called Red Hawk Nation at Catawba Valley Community College.

The two sculptures were provided through a partnership with the city of Hickory.

Zagaroli, a city of Hickory councilman who was instrumental in the sculptures being installed, paid a visit to them after they were installed. He was more than pleased with the final product after this project was started three years ago in partnership with sculptor Jon Hair.

We were trying to find (Hair) a home here in Hickory and do a foundry and art studio. That fell through, but while he was here I thought wouldnt it be nice to have some bronze statutes on either our highway and at our schools, Zagaroli said. I did some sketches and came to Garrett with this idea. The city was on board. We were going to do a larger one, but we werent able to pull that off. After three years, Im so pleased to see this. I was just blown away. Ive been working with Jon on photographs and other stuff, but I didnt realize how dramatic these sculptures were going to be. Its just great. I think the students, campus and community are going to love it.

The Red Hawk sculptures were installed by Hickory Construction Company, and it took approximately four hours for them to be raised and mounted with two steel rods and secured with an epoxy adhesive.

I am totally proud and honored to be a part of the dedication and background work that it took to make this momentous work of art a part of the CVCC campus, Sain said.

These two giant Red Hawks were designed by Hair  an Iowa native who now lives in Cornelius.

According to Hair, the sculptures took approximately nine to 12 months to make. They are made of silicon bronze and stand 9 feet wide with the Red Hawk having a 14-foot wing span. They weight 800 pounds and are hollow with a quarter-inch thickness on the inside.

The Red Hawks are two of 70 pieces that Hair has made across North Carolina, and Catawba Valley Community College is the 46th college for which he has made sculptures.

Hair said that the two Red Hawks, which Hinshaw has donned Big Red and Big Hawk, are two of his favorite pieces that hes made.

Its just another piece of you that youre leaving behind for other people to be inspired by, Hair said. Thats the only reason I do this.
NASCAR driver Ryan Newman has rescued an elk that caused safety concerns during rutting season at Grandfather Mountain, the nonprofit nature park in the North Carolina mountains.

Doc was the dominant of three elks at the park run by the Grandfather Mountain Stewardship Foundation, park officials said Wednesday.

The elk in the habitat were causing extensive damage to their environment and creating some safety issues when rutting, or gearing up for the breeding season, according to a news release by the Linville-based foundation.

In revved Newman, who agreed to relocate Doc to his personal farm.

Doc is named after legendary folk and bluegrass guitarist Doc Watson, who was born in Deep Gap and died in 2012 at age 89.

Foundation officials searched for a new domicile for Doc for over a year, after concluding that it would ultimately be beneficial to the elk if one was located to a new home, according to the news release.

Newmans ranch houses at least 80 animals and hosts educational programs, according to its website.

Jesse Pope, foundation president and executive director, said the ranch was the perfect fit for Doc. He said the foundation was very fortunate to partner with Newman, who has a wonderful facility and a passion for wildlife and conservation.

The 18-time NASCAR Cup Series winner picked up Doc in early April, officials said.

Grandfather Mountains work to educate kids about animals is similar to what we do back at Rescue Ranch, Newman said in the release, referring to his 87-acre Statesville ranch. And whenever we have an opportunity to move an animal like Doc from one place to another, it makes sense to do it.

Christie Tipton, animal habitats curator for the foundation, said officials hope the habitat will replenish itself with just two of the 800-pound elks left. Theyre named Merle and Watson, Merle for Doc Watsons son. Doc Watson and his son performed and recorded together starting when Merle was 15. Merle Watson died 21 years later, in a tractor wreck in 1985.

Elk are quite different than deer, Tipton said. Their hooves are designed for aerating the soil, which is great for the environment when theyre out in the wild but can be tough for the soil in a smaller area.

They also like to chew on all the trees, and the elk like to till up the ground when they are in rut, Tipton said in the release. It has been rough on the habitat.

Doc, Tipton said, is at a great place, but we do miss him.

Supporting the elk

For details about the Grandfather Mountain elk and supporting their habitats by symbolically adopting Merle and Watson, visit grandfather.com/adopt.

To learn more about Rescue Ranch in Statesville, visit www.rescueranch.com.
Dairy farmers are under growing pressure about the environmental impacts of their dairy operations as well as the economic implications of running a business. However, assessing the trade-offs between environmental and economic performance through field experimentation is not practical or feasible due to being time-consuming and costly.

A faster and reliable alternative is the use of mathematical modeling. Mathematical models allow us to perform such a task through input-output accounting analysis, incorporating most of the complex interactions among the main components of the dairy production system.

Although highly elaborate models and tools capable of simulating dairy farm environmental and economic outcomes (like the Ruminant Farm Systems model) already exist, there are no support tools to reach decision makers in a user friendly manner. Most of the existing tools require large amounts of data and great efforts to set up and calibrate, and their results are not straightforward to understand and interpret. They are research oriented and simply overwhelming for the decision maker to use without the guidance of specialists. Thus, they are not conducive to practical farm use.

Another approach

As such, with support from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Dairy Innovation Hub, we are developing a farmer oriented, simple-to-use, highly intuitive tool we call EZ Dairy Enviro-Money. It will provide a high-level assessment of whole-farm nutrient balance, greenhouse gas emissions, and economic performance. Input data will rely on the farmer's mental recollection.

The tool would be set up and run in a few minutes, and it would be able to generate reports from scenario analyses almost instantaneously. Results will include key performance indicators and related improvement opportunity indicators assessed by comparison with benchmarks collected from the literature or other reliable sources.

Providing this next-generation, intuitive tool will create an engaged and captive target audience ready and willing to continue the journey for deeper understanding and consequential changes for better with regard to both environmental and economic aspects. Stay tuned for EZ Dairy Enviro-Money, which will be available through the University of Wisconsin-Dairy Management website by early next year.





To comment, email your remarks to intel@hoards.com.

(c) Hoard's Dairyman Intel 2022

May 9, 2022
Australia may have been relatively late to the space exploration game, but a NASA expert believes proven and promised local innovation will ensure that local industry benefits from the golden age of space exploration  if we can quickly build a big enough skills pipeline.

Australia plays a significant role in our exploration, said Dr Charles Elachi, who for 15 years served as director of NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)  the NASA centre currently managing 40 active missions around Earth, Mars, and elsewhere  and, among other things, has an asteroid named after him.

JPL currently employs a number of scientists who have been trained in Australia or are collaborating with us, Elachi said during a recent Stone & Chalk webinar, in which he referenced the work of Australian scientists such as QUT alumnus Dr David Flannery and Dr Abigail Allwood, who developed the $1.3b PIXL X-ray instrument that scans rock samples for the organic signatures of ancient life.

Other Mars-related missions, such as the team tasked with collecting rock core samples and eventually returning them to Earth for close analysis, are also poised to tap Australian talent, said Elachi, who said he wouldnt be surprised to see Australian scientists involved to do detailed analysis.

Although Australian facilities such as Canberras Deep Space Network have supported global space exploration for decades, the increasing involvement of Australian scientists reflects an expanding pipeline of possible space-related careers.

For Australian scientists like astronaut Andy Thomas  after whom the University of Adelaides new Andy Thomas Centre for Space Resources (CSR) has been named  working at JPL has become a gateway to space careers.

Elachi  who has taken up a role as adjunct professor at the University of Adelaide and has joined the CSR to help develop the local space sector  foresees many more following in Thomass footsteps as Australias fledgling spacetech sector bootstraps itself into what it hopes will become a $12b industry, with 20,000 new jobs, by 2030.

Potholes in the road to space

While it took years for Australias government to organise a formal space technology sector, recent successes confirm that local innovators are being welcomed by a global space community enervated by the recent surge in private space activity.

Yet with its rising popularity comes the challenges of building an industry  specifically, the problematic shortage of spacetech skills, which was called last year out in a detailed analysis that identified pervasive current shortages and future requirements across the 319 skills relevant to the space industry.

Although there were just two areas where Australia currently does not have skills available, the taxonomy included 86 high intensity skills areas  including 48 at risk of critical shortages due to high demand, low availability, or insufficient capacity at training providers.

Thats problematic given that the space industry is undergoing a global lift-off that will create a flood of new career opportunities for Australians with the right skills.

A growing roster of space missions this year will, for example, see the likes of SpaceX sending private astronauts to the International Space Station, a moon landing to place numerous scientific instruments, and crewed flights by Boeings Starliner spacecraft.

Work to put humans in space is already engaging Australian scientists in NASAs Artemis program  which will establish a long-term lunar presence as a precursor to Mars exploration  with the Australian Space Agency (ASA) already securing a NASA deal to build a lunar rover.

That will be a major role that Australia is playing in our exploration of the moon, Elachi said, noting that human-focused space missions require expertise from across the spectrum of science  including non-STEM fields such as cognitive science and psychiatry, crucial to helping humans adapt to space travels isolation.

You need people from every discipline to actually be involved to make a successful space application, Elachi said. For young people who are interested in being in space, Australia is playing a significant role to make that happen.

Expanding engagement with the sector, both here and abroad, will see Australians playing a larger and larger role in space exploration, Elachi said, and there are lots of opportunities for students to work in the space program in the United States.

Ultimately, he said, building a career in spacetech will require many of the same traits  persistence, flexibility, and more  that have sent humans to space, over and over again, despite often momentous setbacks.

There is a lot of testing and a lot of smart people working on these things, he explained. I cant remember any day when I didnt look forward to going and working at JPL, because I knew that every day we were going to learn something.
You have questions. I have some answers.

Q: Do you know when the end of Picard is going to appear?

A: The second season of Star Trek: Picard has been completed on Paramount+, and a third and final season is expected in 2023. While the series has seen some players from Star Trek: The Next Generation show up here and there on Picard, Variety says the third season will be the first time the main TNG cast has performed on screen together since the 2002 feature film Star Trek: Nemesis. And Picard showrunner Terry Matalas has promised on Twitter that these arent just cameos. This is a proper send off to the TNG crew.

Q: I remember the song Bring the Boys Home by Freda Payne that came out around the end of the war in Vietnam. I thought I would hear it during Desert Storm, or on Memorial Day and Veterans Day. Do you know if the song would offend anybody for political reasons?

A: The song by Payne, best known for the classic Band of Gold, was a hit in 1971, spending 10 weeks in the Billboard Top 40, rising as high as No. 12. But it was a controversial work, as most protest songs were during that time, with its references to a senseless war and facing death in vain, as well as a chorus pleading to turn the (troop) ships around. Still, the song has hardly disappeared. A quick check of music streamers Pandora and Spotify found it easily enough, and it has been on various collections of Paynes songs.

Q: Can you help with the name of an old movie set in South America on a plantation? It had intrigue, love interest and so on, but the main event was stopping an invasion of ants that was heading to the plantation to destroy the crop.

A: That would be The Naked Jungle, a 1954 film starring Eleanor Parker and Charlton Heston.

Q: I seem to recall Jerry Seinfeld getting paid $1,000,000 per episode at one point. Is this accurate, and to the best of your knowledge, have any other TV personalities received this kind of pay since then?

A: Many reports indicate Seinfeld was in the million-dollar club in the later years of his series, but hes far from the only performer to hit that mark. Other comedy stars to make that much or more have included the six cast members of Friends, the five core stars of The Big Bang Theory, Charlie Sheen in his Two and a Half Men years, Kelsey Grammar on Frasier and Tim Allen on Home Improvement.

Q: I watched a theater movie, five or more years ago, which I think took place in ancient Central or South America about indigenous peoples whose heads were lopped off by their king as a sacrifice to the gods. One black-haired tribesman decided he wanted no part of this, and the rest of the movie was about his escape. Does this sound at all familiar?

A: I suggested, and you confirmed, the movie is Apocalypto, a 2006 film co-written and directed by Mel Gibson (and sometimes branded Mel Gibsons Apocalypto).

Q: Probably 50-plus years ago I saw a show where I think William Bendix played a psychiatrist who saw a patient who was having a recurring dream about being in Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7. The doctor awoke in his office later and a while after in a bar saw a picture of his patient. When he asked the bartender about the man the reply was he died at Pearl Harbor. I have tried and tried to locate this show with no success. Any ideas?

A: You can find the drama, called The Time Element, on YouTube. It originally aired in 1958 on the drama anthology Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse, and was written by Rod Serling (later famous for The Twilight Zone). The production indeed starred Bendix  but as the patient. Martin Balsam was the doctor.
Kannapolis City Manager Mike Legg has been honored with the James D. Prosser Excellence in Government Leadership Award from the Centralina Regional Council, which is comprised of government officials from the nine counties in the Charlotte region.

Legg has served as city manager of Kannapolis since 2004. He began working for Kannapolis in 1995, first as the citys planning director and then as deputy city manager. He has been involved in the dramatic change in Kannapolis over the past decade, with the transformation of the community from a textile-based economy to a regional economy with expanding roots in biotechnology and tourism.

With direction from the Kannapolis City Council, he has managed the successful Downtown Revitalization Project, which includes new infrastructure, a mixed-use development, the Atrium Health Ballpark and construction of the West Avenue Streetscape.

He serves on numerous boards and initiative groups such as the Cabarrus Economic Development Corporation, and the Cabarrus Chamber of Commerce.

He is also a member of the following organizations and boards:

 International City and County Managers Association (ICMA)

 NC City and County Managers Association (NCCCMA)

 Vice chair, Water and Sewer Authority of Cabarrus County (WSACC)

 Kannapolis Rotary Club (past president)

 Board of directors, Kannapolis Education Foundation

 Board of directors, N.C. Music Hall of Fame

 Board of directors, Foundation for the Carolinas  Cabarrus (past)

A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, his professional career has included positions with the city of Charlotte, the city of Cape Coral, Florida, the Western Piedmont Council of Governments, and vice president of Benchmark, Inc.

He and his wife, Kelly, have two children.
Microsoft, the company that produces Windows which is the target of practically every ransomware attack, is now offering paid products to fight those very ransomware attacks.

I kid you not. No other operating system suffers ransomware attacks, though helpful security experts try to spread the burden a bit, and suck up to the big M, by claiming they have seen similar malware for Linux and the Mac.

But no attack in which a ransom has been demanded and a company put out of operation for a while has involved anything other than Windows.

This kind of money making is in keeping with Microsoft's culture; the one thing the company possesses in spades is chutzpah. It is absolutely brazen in its bid to make money off something which its own products allow to happen.

That was the culture propagated by its co-founder Bill Gates and it has never gone away. Not that any serious effort has been made to change it over the company's 47 years of operation.

The American television network CNBC filed a report about this new method of raising money on Monday. You can see the details here, dear reader; I do not intend to give this company any more mileage on this score than it has already received.

Microsoft launches [paid] cybersecurity services to help clients fight off ransomware and other attacks https://t.co/A6hL67SRVY pic.twitter.com/ESUlzKbvW6  Ken Westin (@kwestin) May 9, 2022

For some time now, the Redmond-based company has been trying to divert attention from its abysmal security record by putting out so-called "studies" to claim that it has security credentials.

No online or print publication dares to point out the fact that Microsoft is now providing cures for diseases that it itself incubates and facilitates.

Microsoft is far too powerful for that kind of confrontation and most journalists in the US are more into stenography than actual reporting.

I never hesitate to hold Microsoft's feet to the fire, but then it does get a bit repetitive; the company has no shame and its bigwigs keep repeating the same shibboleths over and over again.

Occasionally, I drag myself out and point out the more egregious claims, as when the company issued a long write-up about flaws that allowed escalation of privilege on Linux systems without mentioning that none of these flaws could be exploited remotely.

But then this business of Microsoft providing a product to fight its own disease is not entirely new. Many years ago, the company announced that it would be supplying a program, now known as Windows Defender, to guard against malware.

At that time, there was talk of a lawsuit to prevent this as it was argued, correctly, that Windows was the reason why most malware was able to infect systems.

But nobody had the cojones to carry through on that threat. What has happened now is a repeat, with the only difference being that people will actually have to pay to get help with something which they could well avoid if they stopped using Windows.

That, however, would require a measure of common sense, something which has become really uncommon these days. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for anyone to take that route.
CHICAGO - Chicago is lagging other cities in its recovery from the pandemic, the CEOs of a major airline and hotel chain said Wednesday.

One measure in which its lagging is how much airlines are flying. Capacity remains lower in Chicago than average, said Robert Isom, CEO of American Airlines, which has a major hub at OHare International Airport.

Chicago is also behind in the return of white-collar workers to offices, much like cities with large tech industries such as Seattle and San Francisco, said Mark Hoplamazian, CEO of Chicago-based Hyatt Hotels.

Hoplamazian said the recovery of tourism and travel in Chicago might be particularly hurt by slower international travel and the citys historic dependence on large conventions, which have returned but arent yet back in full swing.

Weve seen other cities come back more strongly, he said. A short time later, in comments directed at the new leader of Choose Chicago, the citys official tourism arm, he said: Youve got your work cut out for you.

Hoplamazian and Isom made the comments at a downtown lunch hosted by the Executives Club of Chicago. The airline and hospitality industries, battered by the pandemic, have faced the task of ramping up staff and operations after pandemic cuts, but the two CEOs said demand for travel is returning.

Tourists and leisure travelers have been driving demand, but Hoplamazian said Hyatt is seeing more corporations and associations booking hotels for gatherings. He expects group travel will reach pre-pandemic levels by the end of the year.

Also growing is blended work and leisure trips. Travelers are extending work trips into long weekends, Hoplamazian said.

Bleisure is real, Isom said, referring to a blend of business and leisure.

Still, both industries have faced hiring challenges. For airlines, a pilot shortage that was looming before the pandemic was exacerbated by retirements and limited hiring and training of new pilots during the pandemic, Isom said. About 150 American Airlines planes are grounded because the carrier doesnt have the pilots to fly them.

Corporate tech and digital workers have also been in short supply, Hoplamazian said. He pinned it on increasing competition as more companies relied on digital tools during the pandemic, and as tech companies such as Amazon and Salesforce grew.

Another hurdle for American this summer will be orders of new Boeing planes that havent yet been delivered. American would add several international destinations if it had the planes, Isom said.

Despite the pandemic challenges, Isom said American is heavily invested in Chicago and OHare. A massive overhaul is underway at OHare partially funded by airline fees.

We have to have a supply of passengers who will actually work that cost out over time, Isom said.

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Florida communities are rallying to protest the Parental Rights in Education Act  or, as its better known, the Dont Say Gay bill  which will go into effect on July 1.

The American Civil Liberties Union and Families for Safe Schools were among a long list of supporters standing with LGBTQ+ students and families. And, while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis goal is to silence their messages, the families, communities and organizations protesting the new law appear to be growing bolder.

The family of the late Walt Disney, founder and creator of the Disney empire, are considered conservative and private, but they recently expressed disappointment over Floridas new bill. Charlee Corra, a Disney heir, is transgender. Her father, Roy P. Disney, and his wife are supporters of the LGBTQ+ community and resolute to not let this happen elsewhere.

The new law and national outrage may affect attendance at Disney World, which receives 58 million visitors annually. But the controversy over Floridas Dont Say Gay bill may not be the only detour to vacationing at the most magical place on Earth.

Costs to visit are prohibitive for some families and may soon increase as DeSantis revoked Disneys decades-long status as an independent special district, which had exempted the company from certain taxes. These costs may need to be absorbed by Florida taxpayers and consumers to make up for the $1 billion debt.

As poverty increases across the country, Disney is hiking its prices. In 2022, ticket prices increased between 2% and 6% with a four-day pass for one person, rising to $12 more than last year. For a park-hopper pass allowing visits to multiple parks, visitors will pay an additional $25.

In March, Disney unveiled the new Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser Hotel, which costs a family of four a staggering $6,000 for two nights. While the cost includes food and entrance to Hollywood Studios, the price tag is out of reach for most visitors.

In 2022, average weekly earnings for full-time workers is $1,037. Based on this, one parent would have to work almost six weeks to pay for the bespoke experience of a real-life roleplaying game offered by the Star Wars-themed hotel.

Both Disney and Florida seem to be out of touch with the public, whether through high prices that are out of reach for most Americans or a law that discriminates against the LGTBQ+ community.

Katie Greenan is an assistant professor of communication at the University of Indianapolis and a Public Voices Fellow through The OpEd Project. Hallie Gallinat is a student at the University of Indianapolis, and writes for The Reflector, the universitys student-run newspaper.

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To hear the Biden administration talk, the war in Ukraine is nearly won  and the United States wants some of the credit for winning it.

"Russia is failing. Ukraine is succeeding," Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said last month.

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III went a step further. The United States isn't merely helping Ukraine win, he said; it's using the war to undermine Russia's status as a world power.

"We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can't do the kind of things that it has done in invading Ukraine," Austin said.

Last week, U.S. officials disclosed that American intelligence helped Ukrainian forces kill as many as 12 Russian generals and sink the flagship of Russia's Black Sea fleet  humiliating setbacks for Moscow's once-proud armed forces.

It's good news, of course, that Ukraine is holding its own against Russia's invasion. And yes, the United States and its allies deserve credit for helping the Kyiv government survive.

But several things are wrong with this picture.

For one thing, Ukraine hasn't quite won yet. The chest-thumping is premature.

Russian forces are close to taking full control of the port city of Mariupol; that will give it a prize it has long sought: a "land bridge" between the Crimean peninsula and Russia. The Russians could also expand the territory they hold in eastern Ukraine, where fierce fighting is underway. If that happens, Kyiv's "victory" could soon look less impressive.

For another, it's unusual for U.S. officials to claim credit, even anonymously, for successful intelligence sharing. The problem isn't that they're revealing state secrets; Russia already knew the U.S. was helping the Ukrainians with targeting.

The problem is that President Vladimir Putin has tried to rally support  among both his own people and those of other countries  by portraying Russia as the victim of a U.S. plot. We just helped him make his case.

More important, the United States has quietly escalated its goals in the war but without much clarity about exactly what they are.

That's a phenomenon known as "mission creep," and it's a recipe for trouble. Just ask former President George W. Bush, who led the United States into overambitious wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"You don't want to create pressure on yourself to do more than is wise to do," Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations, a top State Department official in the Bush administration, told me.

One reason the U.S.-led alliance in support of Ukraine has held together so impressively is that its initial goal was clear and broadly shared: helping the Kyiv government defend itself.

Now the goals are getting blurry, and that's beginning to create division among U.S. allies.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu complained recently that some members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization "want the war to continue.  They want Russia to become weaker," an apparent reference to Austin's announced aims.

Meanwhile, Britain's combative foreign secretary, Liz Truss, said her country is committed "to push Russia out of the whole of Ukraine," a more ambitious goal than even the Biden administration has embraced.

"I don't think we have shared definitions of success," Haass said. "That's a problem."

Expanding the goals of the war could stiffen Putin's determination to keep fighting or push him toward escalating, perhaps by resorting to chemical or nuclear weapons.

Some day, Russia and Ukraine will decide to stop fighting. At that point, there will need to be cease-fire talks and, perhaps, negotiations toward a peace settlement. U.S. diplomats may even want to dust off the concept of "offramps"  offers to make it easier for Russia to compromise.

And once the war is over, the United States and Russia will still need to deal with each other on a broad range of issues. Escalating goals and premature claims of victory won't help us get there any faster.

Doyle McManus is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com

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The inaugural edition of the World Utilities Congress ended on a successful note in Abu Dhabi with global leaders and industry experts shedding light on several key topics, according to the event organisers.

The three-day exhibition and conference, hosted by Taqa and organised by dmg events, gathered over 10,000 trade professionals and 120 exhibiting companies who sought to promote proactive measures to digitalise power and water systems, control emissions, and attract long-term capital investments.

It brought together over 200 industry expert speakers, over 1000 conference delegates, and hosted more than 50 strategic and technical conference sessions, including a Nuclear Energy Leadership Forum.

Over the course of three days, leaders and industry experts from the region, and around the world, tackled critical issues and explored solutions during the conference sessions, enabling the continued pursuit of a greener present and future, said the organisers dmg events.

The sessions also shed light on the importance of embedding future-focused digital transformation strategies as a response to evolving market and customer needs, they stated.

On day three, topics such as Efficient integration of renewable energy into power grids, Entering the golden age of utility reinvention  how is digitalisation redefining utility business models?, Integrated power and water strategies for smart cities development and more were also discussed, they added.

Taqa's Group CEO and Managing Director Jasim Husain Thabet said: "The inaugural edition of the World Utilities Congress was a huge success, which speaks not only to the critical importance our sector plays in delivering a more sustainable future, but also to the unique position of Abu Dhabi to enable this change."

"In partnership with dmg events, we hosted more than 10,000 visitors, two ministerial sessions and strategic and technical discussions that are helping shape the future of the utilities industry at the event," he added.

Christopher Hudson, President from dmg events, the organisers of the World Utility Congress said: "The success of the first World Utilities Congress in Abu Dhabi has been incredible to see. In organising this event, we have helped our peers from around the world to learn from each other and to work together for a sustainable future."

"The World Utilities Congress has been the perfect opportunity for the sector to showcase ideas, solutions and best practice in front of an audience that matters," noted Hudson.

The days panellists included Dr. Afif Al Yafei, CEO of Transco; Reji Kumar Pillai, Chairman of Global Smart Energy Federation; Frederic Godemel, Executive Vice President for Power Systems and Services at Schneider Electric; Mothana Bahjeat Qteishat, Senior Managing Director at Jinkopower; Mahmoud Sulaimani, Managing Director of Siemens Energy Saudi Arabia; Mohit Shrimal, Assistant Vice President at Huawei; Danilo Moresco, Vice President and Global Industry Manager, Power and Water, Energy Industries at ABB; Marco Janssen, Vice President of Operational Excellence at Taqa; Dina Tsiambaou, Partner at Deloitte; Saqib Mahmood, Director, Digital Transformation at the National Water Company; Martin Piesker, Head of Digitalisation at Siemens Energy for the Middle East and North Africa; and Michael Naber, Founder & CEO of Simerse.

During his participation, Dr. Afif Saif Al Yafei, CEO of Transco, Chairman of the World Utilities Congress Technical Committee and member of the Executive Committee said: "Each renewable source comes with its own characteristics, making planning incredibly important."

Comprehensive studies, modelling, and multi-stakeholder engagement must be well executed in order to allow for the seamless integration as well as to ensure the reliability and integrity of the grid. We are also witnessing how peak renewable power generation is coinciding with peak energy use in the UAE. This enables the utilisation of renewables for various purposes including electricity generation, and cooling  which is essential for the region.

During his session, Danilo Moresco, Vice President and Global Industry Manager, Power and Water, Energy Industries at ABB, said: Our purpose at ABB is driven by our willingness to achieve a more productive, sustainable future, and we absolutely believe that sustainability and efficiency should be planned into all operations.

"The role of digitalisation in this sector is instrumental to achieving our sustainability goals, and lowering carbon emissions and enabling decarbonisation requires smarter handling of the energy produced and supplied. With the most up-to-date digital technologies, utility companies can collect, contextualise and analyse data for full transparency and measurability," stated Moresco.

"This capacity to take action will help them to optimise energy efficacy, accurately track greenhouse gas emissions and reporting across supply chains, as well as enable more effective monitoring of carbon offsets," he added.
What if Russia used a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine? There has been plenty of speculation as to whether this might happen, or how we should limit the chance that it does. But less has been said about how to react should Vladimir Putin decide to launch a nuclear strike.

Im not talking about major nuclear war, when those questions might be moot. Instead consider that the Russians deploy a tactical nuke, the Western coalition splinters due to fear of further strikes, and Russia keeps part of Ukraine as Putin claims a daring victory. The battle lines ossify. Putins likely rhetoric notwithstanding, it would fall somewhere between a Russian win and a Russian loss.

What does that world look like, and how should we prepare for it?

Until recently, my view was that any actual use of a nuclear weapon, no matter the scale, would dramatically change everything. Nuclear use would no longer be considered taboo, and the world would enter a state of collective shock and trauma. Other countries around the world would start frantically preparing for war, or the possibility of war.

But recent events have nudged me away from that viewpoint. For instance, I have seen a pandemic that arguably has caused about 15 million deaths worldwide, yet many countries, including the U.S., havent made major changes in their pandemic preparation policies. That tells me we are more able to respond to a major catastrophe with collective numbness than I would have thought possible.

I also have seen Trumpian politics operate through the social media cycle. Former President Donald Trump did and said outrageous things on a regular basis (even if you agree with some of them, the relevant point is that his opponents sincerely found them outrageous). Yet the rapidity of the social media news cycle meant that most of those actions failed to stick as major failings. Each outrage would be followed by another that would blot out the memory of the preceding one. The notion of Trump as villain became increasingly salient, but the details of Trumpian provocations mattered less and less.

Might the detonation of a tactical nuclear weapon follow a similar pattern? Everyone would opine on it on Twitter for a few weeks before moving on to the next terrible event. Putin as villain would become all the more entrenched, but dropping a tactical nuclear weapon probably wouldnt be the last bad thing he would do.

To cite the terminology of venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, the tactical nuclear weapon might stay the Current Thing for a relatively short period of time.

Maybe the potency of the nuclear concept, and its instantiation in the actual slaughter of innocents, would create more long-lasting trauma than this, but I am no longer sure.

We dont know how many people such a weapon would exterminate, but its quite possible that it would kill only a small fraction of the number that have died in the war overall. Russia could either use a small nuke or avoid aiming it at a densely populated area. And it already is the case that Roe v. Wade debates are pushing the Ukraine war out of the forefront of our consciousness, at least in the U.S.

The nuclear strike probably would have foreign policy consequences across the broader world. For instance, more countries might seek to acquire nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction. Those events could become the new outrages, subsuming Putins tactical nuke deployment in a broader wave of condemnation. In other words, worries about nuclear war might replace opprobrium directed at Putins individual act.

The administration of President Joe Biden faces options, including in the realm of communications. One is to let this process operate and allow the world not to freak out so much about the tactical nuclear deployment, which might end up being seen as just another event in a long and bloody war. Many people will feel, perhaps correctly, that the same simply cannot happen to them. Even if you think we ought to instead punish Putin severely, this may not be possible if the NATO coalition has fractured out of fear.

The downside is that we would be normalizing nuclear weapons use while also encouraging Putin to continue in his depredations.

The alternative is to speak repeatedly about Russias nuclear outrage and to keep the attention of the world focused on it as a special and uniquely evil event. The risk in doing so is that we would elevate Putins rebellion against Western norms and raise his supposedly heroic profile among those who support him. If you talk about a tyrant but dont punish him, he may end up all the stronger. Furthermore, it isnt obvious whether trending on Twitter would support such a Biden strategy in the longer run.

What if they gave a nuclear war and no one came? Or at least no one squawked too loudly? We should start to give this matter some thought.

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist.

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South American retailer Cencosud said Wednesday it has offered to spend $676 million, including $265 million in cash, to buy a 67% ownership stake in Greensboro-based The Fresh Market Holdings Inc.

Fresh Market said existing company shareholders, including the Apollo Funds, the Berry family and corporate management, would have a combined 33% stake.

The supermarket chain was founded in 1982. It has 160 stores across 22 states, including two in Greensboro, one in Winston-Salem and 21 overall in North Carolina.

The chain reported $1.93 billion in fiscal 2021 revenues.

Cencosud said the proposed deal would provide 12% of its global revenue from the United States, as well as greater access to U.S. capital markets options.

If the deal is approved by federal regulators, Fresh Market management would remain in charge of the chain.

Cencosud has demonstrated that it is a world-class retailer with exceptional margins, Jason Potter, Fresh Markets chief executive, said in a statement.

The Fresh Market has experienced strong financial momentum over the last few years, and this partnership with Cencosud will allow the company to further capture market share as we expand our footprint in our core Southeast market and beyond.

Cencosud said a major incentive for the deal is being able to leverage best practices across its Latin American businesses to The Fresh Market, and accordingly incorporate best practices from The Fresh Market to its existing portfolio, helping to drive increased performance and efficiencies.

Matias Videla, Cencosuds chief executive, said in a statement that The Fresh Market is one of the best supermarkets in the USA. It is widely recognized by market specialists and customers alike for its customer-centric culture, excellence in fresh produce and memorable shopping experience in its stores.

We are very pleased to make our first investment in the American market through a partnership of the prestige of Apollo Global Management with extensive experience in the retail market.

Apollo partner Andrew Jhawar said that Fresh Market has a tremendous new store growth opportunity that Cencosuds investment can accelerate.

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Philip Morris International Inc. confirmed Wednesday that an affiliate has made a $16 billion all-cash offer for Swedish Match AB in a potential industry-changing deal.

The PMI affiliate, Philip Morris Holland Holdings B.V.1, is offering a 39.4% premium compared with Swedish Matchs closing share price of $7.56 in U.S. dollars on Monday.

The manufacturers said that an offer document is expected to be made public by June 22, while the acceptance period in the offer is expected to start June 23 and expire Sept. 30.

PMI said it would preserve and develop Swedish Matchs operational presence in Sweden, where much of the companys workforce is located, as well as its U.S. headquarters in Richmond, Va.

Swedish Match Inc. made industry history in October 2019 when eight General Snus styles made it through the Food and Drug Administrations lengthy gauntlet for gaining authorization as a modified-risk product. Its Zyn oral nicotine product holds a 64% U.S. market share.

A modified-risk tobacco product application seeks FDA approval to advertise those products as reduced-harm or reduced-risk compared with cigarettes.

Underpinned by compelling strategic and financial rationale, this combination would create a global smoke-free champion  strengthened by complementary geographic footprints, commercial capabilities and product portfolios  and open up significant platforms for growth in the U.S. and internationally, PMI chief executive Jacek Olczak said in a statement.

Swedish Matchs dedicated employees and management have steadfastly pursued the companys vision of a world without cigarettes, while delivering very strong results.

PMI said in the news release that it values how Swedish Match has: relentlessly pursued tobacco harm reduction through its range of smoke-free products; received authorizations for its products via strict regulatory pathways in the U.S.; and reshaped the public health environment in countries such as Sweden and Norway.

PMI said another incentive for the megadeal is leveraging Swedish Matchs substantial operational platform in the U.S. to unlock commercial opportunities across other smoke-free categories in the coming years.

Follows pattern

The proposed megadeal follows the pattern of PMI and Altria Group Inc. of buying their way into a tobacco category when it has struggled to develop its own products.

PMI said that since 2008, it has invested more than $9 billion in researching, developing, and commercializing its smoke-free products.

PMI said in 2021 that 30% of its revenue comes from smoke-free products. It has stated plans to be mostly smoke-free by the end of 2025.

For example, Altria paid $12.8 billion in December 2018 for a 35% stake in Juul Labs Inc., maker of the top-selling electronic cigarette Juul until recently passed by R.J. Reynolds Vapor Co.s Vuse.

As part of the Juul investment, Altria discontinued production of its electronic cigarette NuMark, which had struggled to gain traction among vapers. It agreed to not develop and market its own e-cigs products for up to six years as long as Altria is providing services to Juul Labs.

However, by January 2020, Altria had written down for a second time the value of the investment to $4.2 billion as of Dec. 31, 2019.

In November, the U.S. Trade Representative affirmed a pivotal legal victory by British American Tobacco Plc involving its patent-infringement lawsuit against rival PMI.

On Sept. 29, the U.S. International Trade Commission issued a final determination of a violation of the Tariff Act of 1930 by Philip Morris USA Inc. and Altria Client Services LLC as it related to two BAT product patents.

PM USA is barred from importing PMIs IQOS 2.4, IQOS 3, IQOS 3 Duo heat-not-burn cigarette products. It also was ordered to halt future sales of those products  marketed as Marlboro HeatSticks  already in the U.S.

Analyst reactions

The megadeal drew mixed responses from industry analysts and anti-tobacco analysts for potential impact on the manufacturers and their rivals.

While we take no view on the likelihood of a deal materializing, we believe an acquisition of Swedish Match has strategic merit for PMI given the U.S. market is the most lucrative nicotine market in the world with strong and highly predictable/stable cash flows, said Goldman Sachs analyst Bonnie Herzog.

It would provide PMI access to the fast-growing and high margin oral nicotine pouch category with Zyn.

Herzog said PMI could access to the U.S. market for its Veev electronic cigarette product if approved by the FDA. Philip Morris USA cant distribute Veev because of its Juul ownership stake.

Owning Swedish Match also could open the door to resuming distribution of Marlboro HeatSticks in the U.S. if PMI and Philip Morris USA chose to end their exclusive license/distribution rights for iQOS by April 2024, Herzog said.

We view this potential acquisition as a strategic neutral  and possibly negative  for Altria as PMI could become a formidable competitor on Altrias home turf.

Barclays analyst Gaurav Jain also cited the potential ending of the iQOS collaboration between PMI and Altria as a potential ripple effect from the megadeal.

He said it also could serve to preclude any prospects for reuniting PMI and Altria.

If PMI were to acquire Swedish Match, then Altria would face a significant competitive threat from PMI in the U.S. with its On! oral-nicotine product and on its core cigarette business should PMI commercialize iQOS through Swedish Match, Jain said.

Altria now has no incentive to come to an agreement with PMI on iQOS. We now expect a prolonged litigation between PMI and Altria on the iQOS distribution agreement.

Cowen & Co. analyst Vivian Azer said that while the companies did not quantify potential revenue synergies, the strategic rationale of the transaction make sense to us.

This compliments PMIs smokefree exposure (30% of revenues), and would further PMIs aspiration to generate over 50% of sales from smoke-free products in 2025.

Whats more, SWMA offers a scalable platform in the U.S.

Azer said that we believe that Altria was aware of this risk in announcing organic innovation in both the modern oral tobacco and heat-not-burn categories at CAGNY.

It remains to be seen whether these will be sufficient offsets, as the company has a somewhat challenged track record of organic novel innovation.

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The owner of Thruway Shopping Center confirmed Thursday the securing of a second anchor tenant with beauty retailer Sephora opening a 7,000-square-foot store in the fall.

The store, part of an international chain founded in France, sells thousands of makeup, bath and body products from more than 200 brands.

Sephora will be adjacent to the Trader Joes grocery store, with BohoBlu moving into a smaller space, said Diana Shipley, a real-estate official with Thruway owner and operator Saul Centers.

Hanes Mall officials said Sephora currently has a standalone 4,994-square-foot store, as well as a limited presence within J.C. Penney.

Sephora also has a presence within Kohls at 1010 Hanes Mall Blvd.

In December 2020, Sephora said it would open 850 permanent Sephora shops inside Kohls stores by 2023 as part of exiting its partnership with J.C. Penney. The Sephora spaces at Kohls are typically about 2,500 square feet.

On Tuesday, O2 Fitness Clubs said it has committed to taking a 30,000-square-foot space in the former SteinMart department store site in Thruway. The fitness club chain, based in Raleigh, plans to open the site in early 2023.

O2 Fitness officials said they have been negotiating with Saul Center, operator of Thruway, for more than a year on the anchor space at 400 S. Stratford Road.

Shipley said the plan for the remaining 10,000 square feet in the former SteinMart site is to divide it into small spaces of 1,500 to 3,500 square feet.

There are plans to attract boutique or national tenants not already in the area, Shipley said. She added those tenants dont necessarily have to be complementary to O2 Fitness.

With the Thruway location, O2 Fitness would have a center in all four Triad urban cities when including Greensboros Friendly Center, High Points Palladium Shopping Center and Burlingtons New Market Square, which is set to open by the end of May.

In March, the Plow & Hearth retail store at Thruway closed after nearly 11 years. According to the retailers website, the Winston-Salem store was its only location in North Carolina.

Thruway gained another anchor tenant in 2019 when Athleta opened a retail store near Trader Joes. Athleta is a unit of The Gap that focuses on womens workout, travel and yoga wear.

The retailer has a store in Friendly Center in Greensboro, as well as stores at Southpark Mall in Charlotte, Streets at Southpoint in Durham, and Crabtree Mall I Raleigh.

Thruway landed Athleta competitor Lululemon in November 2018. The Lululemon fronts Stratford Road.

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When the great COVID-19 lockdown slammed the brakes on the entire live music industry, like every other touring act, the members of Chicago were forced to head back to their individual homes and wait out the pandemic storm.

For founding member Robert Lamm, this meant beelining to Southern California with Joy Kopko, his wife of 30 years, where the couple sequestered for months. It was both a shock to the system and a welcome respite for Lamm, who has been recording and touring with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame group ever since he launched it back in 1967 along with Peter Cetera, Terry Kath, Lee Loughnane, James Pankow, Walter Parazaider and Danny Seraphine. For the self-described loner, this metaphysical pause button allowed him to delve deeper into his creative side.

For me, I knew it was going to be a long time  I just didnt know how long, Lamm recalled. Lately in my life, I havent really had time to plan anything, so I just sat down in my little studio at the piano and started playing. I started pulling out ideas that I had stockpiled over the years and exploring that music. I began thinking about how I always wanted to write with this guy or that guy. I just started calling old friends and, in some cases, new friends. I began collaborating, using file sharing.

That kind of really became my everyday thing. It was so much fun and such an old process of sitting down and finding out what is there  what is it that I have to say? Lyrically, especially, I found out I was getting deeper and deeper in terms of things I wanted to say and do things I wanted to express, but I just hadnt had time to explore that before. It was really a wonderful thing for me.

One of the collaborations Lamm struck was with Jim Peterik, a founding member of fellow horn-driven band The Ides of March and later of Survivor. Despite only having met Peterik at a show a couple of years ago, Lamm quickly bonded with his new writing partner. (His work method and my work method really blended together.) Before long, the Lamm/Peterik partnership caught the ear of BMG producer Joe Thomas (Brian Wilson/Dave Matthews Band), who insisted Lamms new songs could be the basis for a new label deal for the band, a notion that surprised the septuagenarian musician.

(Joe) asked me if I thought Chicago might want to record some of these songs, and I said I could only ask as it wasnt really my plan. It turned out to be the plan, Lamm said, noting the album will likely be released this year on BMG. We thought we were done and that there wasnt any record company interested in late-career Chicago. But they (BMG) were very interested after they heard the songs.

As an act known for its relentless road schedule, not having missed one year of touring since the beginning, Lamm said the band had work to do to get back up to speed to resume the busy tour schedule that had always typified life in the band. There was also the challenge of incorporating newer material in with Chicago classics.

We just kind of talked briefly, and were going to start with where we left off, Lamm said. There are probably a few little adjustments we intended to make anyway in terms of the song lineup, who sings what and where theyre going to stand when they sing it. (Playing new songs) is always a tricky thing. Were a legacy band, so we have to really take care of our fans when we do this. I know when I go to a show, I want to hear the songs that Im familiar with of the artist whose concert Im attending. I dont particularly want to hear a lot of stuff Im not familiar with.

One of the biggest changes in the band is Parazaiders absence because of an Alzheimers disease diagnosis he received in April of last year. Parazaiders health issues had prevented him from touring with the group before the pandemic. Lamm found out about the Alzheimers diagnosis shortly after Parazaider and his wife found out.

Walts wife texted us, and I had an exchange with him, Lamm said. It was not too long after it was discovered and he was already under treatment and therapy. Were hoping for the best. Were sort of at the age when were really noticing that certain people are not around anymore. Its the passage of time and life.

In terms of Chicagos longevity via a career that found the band selling more than 100 million records worldwide while amassing 47 gold and platinum records and 70 charting songs, Lamm feels some of it can be traced to a delicate balance of pleasing both the players and the fans.

The context of having a long career and a large repertoire is actually a constant discussion of What can we get away with leaving out where we can bring something in thats really fun to play? he said. (2019) was where we went and did a full, top-to-bottom version of Chicago II live. Were skilled enough to do that and interested enough in asking ourselves, What the hell were we doing with the second album? Why were we writing like that and why did people like it? But I guess they did, so lets do it again.

This latest juncture in Lamms career extends beyond his work with Chicago. During his downtime, the Brooklyn native did songwriting woodshedding by taking deep dives into the catalogs of composers ranging from Neil Young to Burt Bacharach and exploring myriad soundtracks from Hollywoods Golden Age. These efforts have yielded fruit in the shape of a potential solo effort on BMG that may get released this year.

As I was inundating Joe Thomas with these songs, he said after this (Chicago) album comes out hed produce my solo album for BMG, Lamm said. I asked him if he was sure that BMG would want it and he said, Believe me, theyre going to want it.
Police car hit by another vehicle in Winston-Salem

A Winston-Salem police car was involved in a traffic crash Wednesday on Peters Creek Parkway, authorities said.

The wreck happened at 11:46 a.m. A vehicle trying to avoid hitting another vehicle hit the police car, said Kira Boyd, a spokeswoman for the Winston-Salem Police Department.

The officer wasnt injured, Boyd said. At least one person involved in the crash suffered minor injuries, Boyd said.

The crash happened on Peters Creek Parkway at Hutton Street, just north of Silas Creek Parkway and Interstate 40, according to WGHP/FOX8, the news-gathering partner of the Winston-Salem Journal.

No further details were immediately available.

 John Hinton

Gunfire at church, police station injures two

Police say someone opened fire at a church in Winston-Salem on Tuesday night, followed by a related shooting in which someone fired on a vehicle at a police station.

Two people were shot.

Shortly after 7 p.m., police were called to Piney Grove Baptist Church at 4715 Indiana Ave., where they said a large gathering had occurred when one or more people fired a gun multiple times. It was not immediately clear from a police statement whether the gunfire occurred inside or outside the church.

A 19-year-old who left and drove to the District One Police Substation at 7836 North Point Blvd. was pursued by another vehicle. Someone in the pursuing vehicle shot into the 19-year-olds car  while at the police station  before fleeing, investigators said.

The teenager was taken to a hospital with injuries that police said were not considered life-threatening.

Around the same time, another male shooting victim arrived at a hospital. Investigators say he also was shot at the church and had non-life-threatening injuries.

Authorities ask anyone with information about the shootings to call the Winston-Salem Police Department at 336-773-7700, Crime Stoppers at 336-727-2800, or on the Spanish language line at 336-728-3904.

 Staff Report

Man convicted of rape, other sexual offenses

A Kernersville man was convicted Tuesday on charges that he raped and sexually abused a girl, according to court documents.

Charles William Abbott, 54, of Dewey Street in Kernersville, pleaded guilty to second-degree rape, two counts of second-degree sexual offense, felonious restraint and indecent liberties with a child.

Judge David Hall of Forsyth Superior Court sentenced Abbott to a minimum of four years, two months and a maximum of 10 years in prison. After he gets out of prison, he will have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life and he will be on satellite-based monitoring for 10 years, court documents said.

The alleged incidents happened on May 25, 2021.

Michael Hewlett</&h6>

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Its Friday the 13th, traditionally a day when superstitious folks get even more worried than normal.

Friday the 13th is a confluence of two superstitions, the fear of Fridays and the fear of the number 13.

Though Fridays are often looked on well, since thats the end of the work week for many people, Fridays have also been associated with bad fortune since at least as early as the 14th century, when, in The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote, And on a Friday fell all this mischance.

References to Friday being an ominous day became even more popular in the 17th century. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Superstitions, you shouldnt marry, leave for a trip, move into a new house or begin a new project on a Friday.

The number 13, meanwhile, has also been associated with trouble for centuries. The theories why that number is so bad include that there were 13 people at the Last Supper; that, in numerology, 12 is considered a number of completeness and 13 is therefore one past it; and that in Norse mythology, the god Loki caused mayhem as an uninvited 13th guest at a gathering. Some buildings even skip from the 12th to the 14th floors in the official naming.

So you combine those two superstitions and youve got a double-whammy. Theres even a name for the fear of Friday the 13th, paraskevidekatriaphobia. It was coined in the 1980s by Donald Dossey, a behavioral scientist from Asheville. The more straightforward fear of the number 13 by itself is called triskaidekaphobia.

Dossey, who died in 2016, told SAM back in 2009 that the symptoms of paraskevidekatriaphobia range from a nagging sense of doom all the way to not getting out of bed that day, and joked that once people learn how to pronounce the word they are cured of it.

He also joked that a Friday the 13th falling on a full moon in a month with a blue moon (two full moons in the same month) is super-duper unlucky. So we in the Eastern Time Zone dodged that by three days. Monday is the flower full moon.

Today is the only Friday the 13th in 2022.

The next one is Jan. 13, 2023.

The next full moon that falls on a Friday the 13th will be Aug. 13, 2049.

History.com offers one reason Friday the 13th may be unlucky: On Oct. 13, 1307, King Philip IV of France ordered hundreds of the Knights Templar arrested. The knights were a powerful and wealthy religious and military order that was formed in the 12th century to defend the Holy Land. The knights were jailed on various charges and some were executed. Many believe that the real reason that King Philip had the knights arrested was to confiscate their money.

Also on Friday the 13th:

*On Sept. 13, 1940, Buckingham Palace was damaged by Nazi bombing during the Blitzkrieg.

*On Sept. 13, 1996, rapper Tupac Shakur died after being shot six days earlier.

Some Friday the 13th trivia from timeanddate.com: If Jan. 1 of a non-leap year is on Thursday, then there will be three Friday the 13ths that year, in February, March and November. The next time that will happen is 2026. If Jan. 1 of a leap year falls on Sunday, there will be three Friday the 13ths that year, January, April, and July.

So happy Friday the 13th and please, stay away from ladders, dont break any mirrorsand if you see a penny, pick it up.

Email: AskSAM@wsjournal.com Write: Ask SAM, 418 N. Marshall St., Winston-Salem, NC 27101

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Duke Energy and a Texas-based subsidiary of an international energy company were the top bidders Wednesday for wind energy rights in a pair of areas totaling 110,000 acres off the coast of North Carolina.

Combined, the two bids are worth $315 million, the U.S. Department of the Interior announced Wednesday evening after an all-day auction. Sixteen potential bidders were approved to take part in the sale.

The opening bids at 9 a.m. were less than $3 million. The top offers came in the 17th round of bidding at 3:20 p.m., according to a summary from the interior departments Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

The two projects are part of President Joe Bidens goal for the U.S. to generate 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind power by 2030.

The Biden-Harris administration is moving forward at the pace and scale required to help achieve the presidents goals to make offshore wind energy a reality for the United States, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland said in a statement accompanying Wednesdays announcement. Together with an all-of-government approach, we can combat the effects of climate change while creating good-paying union jobs that can benefit underserved communities. Todays lease sale is further proof that there is strong industry interest and that Americas clean energy transition is here.

BOEM estimates that the new lease sites, in an area known as Carolina Long Bay about 20 miles from Bald Head Island, would have the capacity to generate at least 1,300 megawatts of power  enough to provide electricity to nearly a half-million homes at a time.

Duke Energy Renewables Wind, a subsidiary of Duke Energy, submitted a top bid of $155 million to lease a 55,000-acre site, while TotalEnergies Renewables USA made a top offer of $160 million for a similarly sized area.

Securing this lease creates optionality for future offshore wind if the North Carolina Utilities Commission determines its part of the least cost path to achieve 70% carbon reduction by 2030 and net-zero by 2050, Stephen De May, Duke Energys North Carolina president said in a statement, referring to the states climate goals. As we continue to assess the area and project potential, we look forward to listening and learning from diverse stakeholders and community members.

Offshore uncertaintyWednesdays prospective top bids fell far short of those offered by the winners of February auctions involving wind leasing rights for a half-dozen sites off the coasts of New York and New Jersey.

Those bids  for areas totaling nearly 500,000 acres  ranged from $285 million to $1.1 billion, and totaled $4.37 billion.

Experts werent surprised that the top Carolina Long Bay bids came in considerably lower than those offered in February.

One reason for the difference is the wind itself, said Steve Kalland, executive director of the N.C. Clean Technology Center at N.C. State University.

While the wind resource off the North Carolina coast is vast, its not as strong as areas in the north, he explained.

Still, a $300 million commitment for the Carolina Long Bay sites is a testament to the offshore energy potential there, he insisted.

Let me reiterate, the wind resource off North Carolina is substantial, Kalland said. I dont want the governor calling me 15 minutes after he reads this.

Potential bidders also likely factored North Carolinas murky commitment to offshore wind energy into their deliberations about potential offers Wednesday, he added.

While Gov. Roy Cooper set goals of 2,800 megawatts of offshore capacity by the end of this decade and 8,000 megawatts by 2040 in an executive order last year, they are targets, not mandates, because they havent been backed by legislation.

New York, meanwhile, is legally bound to pursuing at least 9,000 megawatts of offshore wind energy by 2035, and New Jersey has committed to 3,500 megawatts.

North Carolina climate legislation that did pass in the legislature last year offered no real direction on wind energy. In fact, the 11-page House Bill 951 used the word wind just once.

The law directs the N.C. Utilities Commission to take all reasonable steps to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from energy production in the state by 70% compared to 2005 levels by 2030, and reach carbon-neutral levels by the middle of the century.

North Carolina ... has carbon reduction mandates within HB 951 that dont necessarily specify the technology to reach those carbon reduction goals, noted Matt Abele, spokesman for the N.C. Sustainable Energy Association.

Carbon dioxide is the leading manmade contributor to climate change.

The state also has yet to establish policies for how the power is handled when it reaches shore, Abele and Kalland pointed out. While Duke, as a winning bidder, likely will control its offshore energy, its unclear how the process will work for TotalEnergies Renewables and other future producers.

HB 951 is confusing about how Duke Energy has to be involved  or even if it has to be involved in the transfer of offshore power, Kalland said. Theres not a lot of consensus about how that will play out.

That uncertainty likely played into the bidding strategy Wednesday, he added.

Duke has a Monday deadline to submit a plan to the utilities commission detailing the steps the company will take to meet the states emissions-reduction goals.

Wind energy is one of a number of carbon-free technologies Duke Energy is evaluating to reduce carbon emissions on its system, the company said Wednesday.

Before the leases are finalized, the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission will conduct an anti-competitiveness review of the auction, BOEM said Wednesday.

Duke said its targeting a 2030-2032 timeframe to begin operations at the offshore wind farm.

John Deem covers climate change and the environment in the Triad and Northwest North Carolina. His work is funded by a grant from the 1Earth Fund and the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation. 336-727-7204

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A Winston-Salem woman won $1 million in the North Carolina Education Lottery, a spokesman for the state lottery said Thursday.

Loretta Mitchell bought her $10 Jumbo Bucks ticket from Three Corner Food Mart on East 30th Street in Winston-Salem, the spokesman said.

Mitchell went to the lottery headquarters in Raleigh to collect her prize. She opted to receive her winnings as a lump sum of $600,000 rather than as an annuity of $50,000 over 20 years.

After the required state and federal tax withholdings, Mitchell collected $426,063.

State residents buying tickets for scratch-off games generate more than $900 million per year for education, the state lottery says.

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Abu Dhabi National Energy Company (Taqa), a leading integrated utilities in the region, has posted a net income (Taqa-share) of AED2 billion ($544 million) for the first quarter (Q1) of 2022, 37% higher than the prior-year period.



Taqa delivered strong performance underpinned by its stable regulated and contracted utilities businesses and boosted by higher commodity prices. Highlights for the period include:



Group revenues of AED12.4 billion, 20% higher than the prior-year period, primarily due to higher commodity prices within the Oil & Gas segment, while adjusted EBITDA was AED5.6 billion, up 20%, mainly reflecting higher revenues as well as improved income from associates, partially offset by higher expenses.



Capital expenditure was AED868 million, 31% lower than the prior-year period, mainly driven by lower expenditure in the Transmission & Distribution segment.



Free cash flows recorded AED3.3 billion, 5% lower than the same period last year, maintaining significant liquidity (AED19.3 billion in cash and cash equivalents and undrawn corporate credit facilities).



Gross debt was AED63.9 billion, down from AED65.0 billion at the end of 2021, further improving the Groups credit metrics.



Operational highlights:

 Transmission network availability for power and water of 98.0%, flat to the prior-year period.

 Generation global technical availability of 84.0%, lower compared to 88.7% from the prior-year period, mainly due to planned and unplanned maintenance within the UAE fleet.

 Oil & Gas average production volumes increased to 126.9 thousand barrels of oil equivalent per day (boepd), an increase of 5%, driven by higher production in Europe.



Upon approval of the financial results, Taqas Board of Directors also declared a first interim cash dividend for the year of AED675 million (0.60 fils per share), in line with the Companys dividend policy.



Jasim Husain Thabet, Taqas Group Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, commented: Taqas solid financial results for the first quarter of 2022 demonstrate the value of our agile and robust business model, and more importantly, provide an excellent foundation for our strategic growth plans.



We started the year by issuing a green bond linked to our first solar PV plant, which was oversubscribed by international investors. The bond is listed on the London Stock Exchange with a secondary listing on the ADX. In the UAE, we announced a partnership with Etisalat Digital to enhance digital capabilities and customer experience for our power and water customers across Abu Dhabi, as well as expressing an interest to acquire EGAs power generation assets to boost Taqas UAE capacity.



The current market conditions further advance our positioning to actively pursue organic and inorganic growth opportunities in the UAE and abroad and make the Taqa a competitive investor that is agile and able to swiftly execute, Jasim Husain Thabet added.  TradeArabia News Service
A nearly $1 billion tentative settlement has been reached in a class-action lawsuit brought by families of victims and survivors of last June's condominium collapse in Surfside, Florida, an attorney said Wednesday.

Harley S. Tropin announced the $997 million settlement during a hearing before Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Michael Hanzman. Still pending final approval, the settlement involves insurance companies, developers of an adjacent building and other defendants.

Earlier this year, Hanzman had approved an $83 million settlement to compensate people who suffered economic losses such as condominium units and personal property. A key question from the beginning has been how to allocate money from the propertys sale, insurance proceeds and damages from lawsuits among wrongful death cases and property claims.

The 12-story Champlain Towers South condiminium collapsed abruptly in the early-morning hours of June 24, almost instantly destroying dozens of individual condo units and burying victims under tons of rubble. Rescuers spent weeks carefully digging through mountains of concrete, first to find survivors and later to recover the remains of those who died. A total of 98 people were killed.
The driver of a Durham school bus swerved off the road to avoid the bus  and the students on board  getting hit in the crossfire, police said Monday. No students were reported injured, Durham Police said, due to the quick action of the bus driver. Police said a shooting call was reported after 4:30 p.m. in the 1400 block of East Club Boulevard, at the intersection of Dearborn Drive, in the ...
Nebraska hospitals contributed nearly $1.4 billion in community benefits in 2020, according to a report released Thursday.

The report, from the Nebraska Hospital Association, included responses from 70 of the organization's 92 member hospitals, including all of the largest ones.

It showed that those hospitals collectively shouldered about $737 million in charity care and unreimbursed care provided to Medicare and Medicaid recipients, which accounted for the more than half of the community benefit amount. They also had to write off $186 million in bad debt.

Those amounts, however, were smaller than in previous years.

For example, the bad debt total was at its lowest level since at least 2014, while the last time hospitals had a higher amount of unreimbursed care was in 2016.

Brian Noonan, a spokesman for the hospital association, said those numbers were lower primarily due to federal dollars made available to pay for uninsured patients, reduced non-COVID-19 patient volumes and Medicaid not booting anyone off of its coverage rolls during the pandemic.

The federal aid has helped many of the state's hospitals keep their finances in the black in the face of rising costs and more and more people unable to pay their hospital bills.

Kelly Nielsen, a division vice president for CHI Health, said the health system had 320,000 patients last year who were uninsured or underinsured, the most in its history.

"That financial relief was a lifeline for so many," she said.

However, that money is starting to dry up, and hospitals are starting to feel the effects, especially with costs rising much faster than increases in insurance reimbursement.

Ivan Mitchell, CEO of Great Plains Health in North Platte, said the hospital had a "very good last year," but so far this year has had negative margins.

"Unless these costs are somehow reined in, it's going to be very difficult for hospitals and health systems in the future," he said.

Reach the writer at 402-473-2647 or molberding@journalstar.com. On Twitter @LincolnBizBuzz.

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Country star Luke Bryan will bring his Farm Tour back to Nebraska in September, when he puts on a show on a farm near Murdock.

The Stock and Hay Grain Farm, near 298th Street and Waverly Road in Cass County about a half-hour east of Lincoln, will be the site of the Sept. 22 concert, which will begin at 5 p.m. on that Thursday afternoon.

Since 2009, the annual Farm Tour has taken Bryan to about 70 farms across the country, including a 2017 concert on the Benes Farm east of Lincoln, as the son of a Georgia peanut farmer gives back to the farming community in which he grew up.

"I look forward to these shows every year mainly because of the meaning behind them and why it was important to me to start the Farm Tour 13 years ago, Bryan said in a news release. It has allowed communities who dont normally get a concert in their areas to experience a fun night in their backyard, all while lifting up the American farmer.

"Small town and farming pretty much sum up my childhood. It is my way of life and I know it is a way of life for so many. It is truly the highlight of my year for me and my whole team.

The Farm Tour, which is sponsored by Bayer, also gives back to the community with some proceeds from the tour going to scholarships for students from farming families who are attending colleges and universities near tour stops and through a summer-long social media campaign in which Bayer will donate one meal to Feeding America for each use of the hashtag #HeresToTheFarmer.

One of the most successful country artists of the 2010s, Bryan has been named Entertainer of the Year by both the Country Music Association and the Academy of Country Music, sold more than 75 million albums, had 27 No. 1 country hits and, since 2018, has been a judge on American Idol.

The six-stop 2022 Farm Tour shows will come during a two-week break in Bryans Raised Up Right Tour that will play more than 30 amphitheaters and arenas from June to October.

DJ Rock, who is slated to play the Raised Up Right dates, will join Bryan on the Murdock show, along with Jameson Rodgers and the Peach Pickers.

Tickets for the Murdock show are $65. Parking is available for $5. Those tickets can be obtained at lukebryan.com. Prices increase to $80 for tickets and $30 for parking on the day of the show.

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A federal judge dismissed much of a lawsuit against the University of Nebraska alleging officials acted with "deliberate indifference" in responding to reports of rape or sexual harassment by Husker athletes.

In a 35-page order entered Wednesday, Chief U.S. District Judge Robert F. Rossiter Jr. said while UNL had not violated the students' civil rights or subjected them to harassment and retaliation, it did make some missteps in investigating their claims.

Filed in July 2020, the lawsuit alleged university officials failed to act in a timely manner or handled reports of sexual misconduct with indifference because the accused were male student-athletes on Husker teams.

Of the nine women who joined in the lawsuit, four were named, including a former Husker volleyball player. The lawsuit described instances of rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment and stalking by other UNL students, as well as retaliation and continued harassment after the misconduct was reported.

It also drew rare involvement from the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, which in a filing last summer chastised UNL for misapplying Title IX case law.

Rossiter, however, said seven of the nine women  including all four who were named in the lawsuit  failed to make a claim that met the standard required of Title IX lawsuits, and dismissed their complaints.

Two women's complaints, both by unidentified former students, were allowed to continue.

A woman identified in the lawsuit as Jane Doe 1 was stalked and harassed by an ex-boyfriend who was aided by a university employee who relayed a message to her despite the university issuing a "no-contact directive" to that student, Rossiter wrote.

"These allegations are sufficient to allege (UNL) had 'prior notice of a substantial risk of peer harassment  based on evidence [of] previous similar incidents of' harassment," Rossiter wrote.

Another woman, identified in the lawsuit as Jane Doe 2, reported a sexual assault to a professor and later filed a formal complaint and initiated a Title IX investigation in November 2017.

Although UNL offered the woman accommodations as required by federal law, Rossiter said the student who assaulted Jane Doe 2 and was in her doctoral program continued to harass her after she had filed a complaint against him, leading her to drop out the university.

"Such allegations are sufficient to show the discrimination was 'so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive' such that it 'deprived [her] of access to the educational opportunities  provided by the school,'" Rossiter wrote.

The judge said other women's claims failed to meet the standard set forth in federal law, however.

Rossiter dismissed a complaint by Capri Davis, a former Husker volleyball player who filed a complaint after she and an unnamed woman were groped at an off-campus party, saying that while "completely inappropriate and indecent," the act could not be considered "severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive" to deprive her of educational opportunities.

The court also dismissed complaints from three women who reported instances of rape and sexual assault to the Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance, which is the office charged with investigating Title IX complaints at UNL, only to have investigators conclude there was no wrongdoing.

Rossiter said while Title IX investigators could have done a more thorough investigation into a complaint filed by Sheridan Thomas, who reported being raped by a football player in 2015 and said investigators did not interview potential witnesses she provided, but said she failed to state a claim that the university had acted unreasonably.

Similar claims made by Miranda Melson and Sydney Brun-Ozuna were also dismissed. Melson and Brun-Ozuna alleged the university had acted indifferently after they had reported being sexually assaulted. Rossiter said they had failed to provide claims that the university's actions  or lack thereof  had deprived them of educational opportunities.

Rossiter also threw out allegations that several women had faced retaliation after reporting being sexual assaulted, saying the retaliation they faced was from their alleged abuser and not from the university or university officials, as well as claims that they had been denied equal-protection rights afforded by the Fourteenth Amendment.

In a statement, the university said it was pleased with the judge's dismissals.

"The opinion provides substantial affirmation for the university's confidence in its overall Title IX process," spokeswoman Leslie Reed said.

UNL "cannot comment on the specifics of any Title IX case," Reed added, and disagreed with the factual assertions made in the remaining claims.

Reach the writer at 402-473-7120 or cdunker@journalstar.com. On Twitter @ChrisDunkerLJS

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Johnson County Central's proposed $43 million bond issue to build a consolidated pre-K-12 school in Tecumseh narrowly failed Tuesday, despite voters in Johnson County signaling their support.

More than 54% of the 1,235 of votes cast by district patrons in Johnson, Nemaha, Otoe and Pawnee counties opposed the bond issue, according to unofficial results from the Johnson County Clerk's Office.

In Johnson County, however  where 80% of the vote came from  voters supported the bond issue 506 to 473.

But in neighboring Otoe County, 179 out of 227 voters said no to constructing the new school, which would have consolidated the district's elementary school and high school in Tecumseh and a middle school in Cook into one building.

A majority of the handful of votes from Nemaha and Pawnee counties also opposed the bond.

Superintendent Jon Rother said the 125,700-square-foot facility would have replaced aging facilities and cut down on costs of bussing students to and from Cook, located 15 miles from Tecumseh.

"Obviously, that was a very big bond for a small community," Rother said. "I'd say we narrowly missed the mark."

The district's school board was set to meet Wednesday to discuss how to move forward. District officials could come back with a new proposal in as little as six months, Rother said.

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A Russian soldier has gone on trial in Ukraine for the killing of an unarmed civilian.

The case that opened in Kyiv marked the first time a member of the Russian military has been prosecuted for a war crime since Russia invaded Ukraine 11 weeks ago.

A 21-year-old captured member of a tank unit is accused of shooting a 62-year-old Ukrainian man in the head through an open car window in a northeastern village.

Finlands leaders have come out in favor of applying to join NATO, and Sweden could do the same within days.

That would amount to a historic realignment on the continent 2 1/2 months after Russian President Vladimir Putins invasion of Ukraine sent a shiver of fear through Moscows neighbors.

The Kremlin has reacted to the move by Finland by warning it will be forced to take retaliatory military-technical steps.

President Joe Biden is stepping up his administrations response to a nationwide baby formula shortage that has forced frenzied parents into online groups to swap and sell to each other to keep their babies fed.

The shortage stems from supply chain disruptions and a safety recall. Retailers are limiting what customers can buy, and doctors are urging parents to contact food banks, physicians' offices as well as warning against watered-down formula or making DIY recipes.

Mayors, police chiefs and other local officials are going to the White House to share with President Biden how they are spending money from the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package on policing and public safety programs.

White House officials say Biden will highlight some of these efforts during an event in the Rose Garden on Friday and urge cities to spend even more of their coronavirus relief money on public safety before the summer months, which typically bring a spike in violent crime.

The 2021 relief package included $350 billion for state, local and tribal governments. That relief money could go to police departments.

Elon Musk says his planned $44 billion purchase of Twitter is temporarily on hold pending details on spam and fake accounts on the social media platform.

The Tesla billionaire's tweet Friday is another twist amid signs of internal turmoil over the proposed acquisition.

The Senate on Thursday confirmed Jerome Powell for a second four-year term as Federal Reserve chair, giving bipartisan backing to Powells high-stakes efforts to curb the highest inflation in four decades.

The 80-19 vote reflected broad support in Congress for the Feds drive to combat surging prices through a series of sharp interest rate hikes that could extend well into next year.

The Feds goal is to slow borrowing and spending enough to ease the inflation pressures.

In sports, the Heat advance to the NBA's Eastern Conference finals, the Blues are in the second round of the NHL playoffs, and the Mets win another series. Correspondent Tom Mariam reports.

House investigators say they have issued subpoenas to House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and four other GOP lawmakers as part of their probe into the violent Jan. 6 insurrection.

It's an extraordinary step that has little precedent and is certain to further inflame partisan tensions over the 2021 attack.

The Jan. 6 panels subpoenas for McCarthy of California and Republican Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Andy Biggs of Arizona and Mo Brooks of Alabama come as the investigation is winding down and as the panel prepares for a series of public hearings this summer.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said President Joe Biden did all that he could to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic since taking office.

Biden appealed to world leaders for a renewed international commitment to attacking COVID-19 as he leads the U.S. in marking the tragic milestone of 1 million deaths in America.

North Korea has ordered a lockdown after confirming its first coronavirus case.

Kentucky Derby winner Rich Strike will not run in the Preakness. Owner Rich Dawson made the stunning announcement 10 days before the race in Maryland. It means there will not be a Triple Crown winner for a fourth consecutive year.

Twitter fired two of its top managers Friday, the latest sign of internal turmoil amid Tesla billionaire Elon Musk's planned buyout of the company.

Twitter confirmed the departures and said the company is pausing most hiring and except for business critical roles.

Astronomers have unveiled the first wild but fuzzy image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Nearly all galaxies, including our own, are believed to have these giant black holes at their center, where light and matter cannot escape. That makes it extremely hard to get pictures of them.

A new congressional report says that in the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, the meat processing industry worked closely with political appointees in the Trump administration to stave off health restrictions and keep slaughterhouses open even as COVID-19 spread rapidly among workers.

The report issued Thursday says meat companies pushed to keep their plants open even though they knew workers were at high risk.

The North American Meat Institute trade group says the report distorts the truth and ignores steps companies took to protect workers.

Mercedes-Benz is telling the owners of more than 292,000 vehicles in the U.S. to stop driving them because the brakes could fail.

The automaker is recalling the vehicles and says it will offer free towing so owners can get them to a dealership for service. The recall covers certain ML, GL and R-Class vehicles from the 2006 through 2012 model years.

The company says it has no reports of crashes or injuries. Dealers will inspect the booster and replace parts as needed. Owners will be notified by letter starting May 27.

Ashley Judd encouraged people to seek help for their mental health after the loss of her mother, country star Naomi Judd. In an interview on Good Morning America, the movie star said she wanted to address her mother's struggle with depression and talked about resources such as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

Naomi Judd died at the age of 76, a day before she was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame with her duo partner and daughter Wynonna Judd. Ashley Judd said her mother shot herself.

Nurses that worked through the pandemic are being honored during National Nurses Week.

The Associated Press

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Gov. Pete Ricketts said Thursday that he would expect to fill the legislative seat vacated by the death of Sen. Rich Pahls of Omaha before a potential special legislative session that may be called to deal with anti-abortion legislation following a pending decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The court appears poised to overrule its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide before it completes its current term late next month or in early July, leaving a decision on abortion rights to individual states.

An anti-abortion majority in the Legislature is poised to consider imposing a ban on abortions in Nebraska, but that decision would require at least 33 votes to free such a proposal from a filibuster waged by its opponents.

Speaker of the Legislature Mike Hilgers of Lincoln has said he will work with Ricketts to schedule a special session.

A bill to prohibit abortions in Nebraska, with an exception for any that might be required to prevent the death of the mother, was trapped by a filibuster during the closing days of the 2022 regular legislative session, which adjourned last month.

A motion to free the bill fell two votes short of the 33 required to invoke cloture and failed on a 31-15 vote. Pahls, who was ill, was one of three senators recorded as excused and not voting.

Ricketts said he would go through his regular process of appointing a senator by seeking applications and conducting interviews and would anticipate that the legislative seat would be filled prior to a potential special session.

The governor answered a question about the abortion issue during a news conference called to proclaim "Foster Care Month" in Nebraska and spotlight the need for more foster parents in Nebraska.

"A strong family is the start of how we have a great childhood," Ricketts said. "Parents are incredibly important."

But some children will need foster parents to provide "a caring home," the governor said, "and we don't have enough foster parents now."

Stephanie Beasley, director of the division of children and family services in the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services, said foster parents can have "a huge impact on the social growth" of children and provide stability in their lives.

Foster parents receive monthly reimbursements to help provide for a child's need and must meet basic income guidelines, provide adequate bedroom space with a separate bed for each child, complete 30 hours of free training, undergo background checks and agree to use non-physical discipline for children.

"Foster parents truly are heroes," Ricketts said.

Most foster parents are relatives.

First Lady Susanne Shore participated in the event.

Reach the writer at 402-473-7248 or dwalton@journalstar.com. On Twitter @LJSdon

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OMAHA  From one angle, the Republican primary for Nebraska governor was a test of Donald Trumps power in a red state, and the defeat of Charles Herbster, Trumps chosen candidate, was a rebuke from Nebraskas GOP electorate.

True, Trump did endorse Herbster. He even visited the state ahead of the election and joined for a second, call-in tele-rally after that. But there was more than the former presidents endorsement at play in Jim Pillens victory Tuesday.

I think that Trump is still pretty popular, said Philip Young, a political consultant and former executive director of the state GOP. I think this race had some local-specific things regarding the candidates that came into play, and it wasnt just about a Trump endorsement.

Herbster faced late-breaking groping allegations from eight women. Negative advertising saturated the airwaves and mailboxes  some of it funded by the current governor. Two of the top three candidates had far deeper pockets than the third. Thousands of voters changed their registrations to vote in the heated race.

Pillen, who is backed by outgoing Gov. Pete Ricketts and other powerful state Republicans, won with 34% of the vote. Herbster got 30% and state Sen. Brett Lindstrom, who presented himself as a fresh-faced (but still conservative) alternative with experience, came away with 26%.

Pillens vote margins were about 9,500 more than Herbster and 21,000 more than Lindstrom. A fourth candidate, former Sen. Theresa Thibodeau, claimed 15,861 votes  just more than 6%  a meaningful sum in the overall results.

County-level results put numbers to a narrative that already felt true in the race: Lindstrom performed strongly around the states big population centers, Pillen claimed a broad swath of the state and Herbster did best in the states most rural areas.

If you put Republican voters into three buckets and looked at that distribution across the state, I think what youd see is something that looks very much like the geographical patterns of voting strength for those three candidates, said Kevin Smith, chair of University of Nebraska-Lincolns political science department.

Pillen, a hog producer and University of Nebraska regent, carried 58 counties, the most important of which was Lancaster. He won the home of Nebraskas capital by 2,900 votes over Herbster. He also won big in his home county of Platte, where he carried a whopping 67% of the total vote and topped Herbster by more than 2,400 votes.

Together, just Lancaster and Platte counties account for more than half of Pillens winning margin.

But Pillen generally fared well across the state.

The candidate, who was endorsed by the Nebraska Farm Bureau, ran strongly in farm country, winning nearly two-thirds of rural counties outside the big three of Douglas, Lancaster and Sarpy. His total advantage over Herbster in those counties was more than 8,000 votes.

And while Lindstrom ran up the most votes in the big three, Pillen critically held his own there against Herbster.

Pillen actually came in third in both Douglas and Sarpy counties, but combined, he trailed Herbster there by only about 1,500 votes. Along with his big margin in Lancaster County, he topped Herbster in the big three by roughly 1,400 votes.

Even in some of the counties where Trump has proved the strongest, Pillen had a good showing against his Trump-endorsed rival.

Of the 30 counties where Trump ran up his highest percentage of votes against Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, Pillen carried half of them. That included Pillen winning three of the five counties where Trumps 2020 vote percentage topped 90%.

Herbster carried 31 counties in all, all of them rural. He ran up his biggest vote advantages over Pillen in Sarpy County (about 1,000 votes) and his home county of Richardson (just less than 600 votes). Most of the counties Herbster carried were sparsely populated counties in the Panhandle and Sandhills, too small to make much difference in the race.

Lindstrom won four counties total. He carried his home county of Douglas, neighboring Sarpy and also the two counties just to the north  Washington and Burt. Lindstrom has relatives in Burt County, where he received his strongest vote percentage in the state at 49%.

Smith speculated that Pillen attracted the traditional establishment Republicans, while Herbster picked up most of the MAGA crowd of staunch Trump supporters. He said its reasonable to infer that Lindstroms strength partly reflects party crossovers and frustrated, moderate Republicans in the suburbs.

In states like Nebraska, where there are viable, conservative candidates that can connect with people who would otherwise support Trump candidates on values and issues that are meaningful to them, those candidates can run and win, Smith said. Jim Pillen showed that.

But calling the results a rebuke of Trump may be too strong a statement, said Dona-Gene Barton, a UNL political science professor who has researched the lifespan of political scandals. For one, Herbster still did pretty well in a tight three-way race. And scandal landed heavily on his campaign last month.

April 14, the Nebraska Examiner published allegations from eight women that Herbster had touched them inappropriately. And, in the closing days of the campaign, attack ads ran that targeted his track record of paying property taxes late and insinuations about his time judging beauty pageants.

The constant bombardment and release of new allegations didnt give Herbster time to rebound, at least for a significant portion of voters, Barton said.

When you have late-breaking scandal information and you continue to have new details that voters can then digest  thats when it can have some of the biggest impact on vote tallies, she said. So this was the perfect storm, at least when it comes to the Herbster campaign.

The race left observers guessing for more than two hours Tuesday night.

Initial returns that were heavy on mail-in ballots from urban counties showed Lindstrom ahead. But his opponents closed the gap and ultimately overtook him as more results rolled in.

It looks to me like Brett Lindstrom was very strong in the mail ballots in the urban areas, but the election day votes were more even, said Ryan Horn, president of Bullhorn Communications and a Republican media strategist. Thats a reflection of the Ricketts family money.

All three candidates were the target of negative advertising, which observers frequently identify as a significant factor in this race. Herbster and Pillen aimed ads at each other, and other ads came from third-party groups, including one that received nearly $1.3 million from Ricketts in March and April and targeted both Herbster and Lindstrom.

Negative campaigning works, Young said  and it worked for Pillen this time. Young said it didnt seem that negative ads aimed at the nominee stuck as well as attacks against the other two top candidates.

When a political consultants candidate doesnt have enough positives, he said, he or she looks to raise the opponents negatives.

Unfortunately, I think there were more people voting against candidates than voting for candidates, Young said.

In the races waning weeks, Lindstrom attracted a barrage of attacks casting him as liberal and targeting votes he has taken in the Nebraska Legislature. Lindstroms campaign estimated that outside groups spent about $1.8 million total on mail, TV and text messages against him  more than the Lindstrom campaign had spent, total, as of late April.

No one has spent more money attacking Republicans in the state of Nebraska than Pete Ricketts, Horn said. His late attacks against Brett Lindstrom, mostly overwrought and out of context, did just enough damage to a campaign that didnt have the funds to match and respond.

Lindstrom stuck with a positive message throughout the campaign, and many of his supporters Tuesday night cited that as a reason they voted for him. But his war chest was also far smaller than Herbsters or Pillens. He was outspent several times over.

Lindstrom brought in about $2.8 million cash, including late contributions as of Tuesday afternoon, and had spent about $1.6 million as of April 25.

Pillen saw significant success in fundraising and brought in about $8.8 million cash, counting late contributions as of Tuesday afternoon.

Among the contributions Pillen has reported since the most recent filings were due: $250,000 he gave to his own campaign May 4, his first time shelling out since a $1 million contribution in 2021.

Herbster poured $11.3 million cash from his own pocket into his campaign out of a total of roughly $11.6 million cash raised since the start of 2021, counting late contributions filed as of Tuesday afternoon.

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The Emirates Tourism Council has reviewed the national plans to develop a tourism data system in accordance with the best global practices to promote tourism in foreign markets to increase the footfall of visitors in the UAE.



The first Council meeting in 2022, which met under the chairmanship of Dr. Ahmad Belhoul Al Falasi, Minister of State for Entrepreneurship and SMEs, and attended by the membership of heads, directors of all local tourism departments and entities in the UAE, also reviewed the performance of the tourism sector and hotel establishments in the country in 2021 and the growth rates achieved in several tourism indicators, reported Emirates News Agency WAM.



According to the data, hotel establishments in the country hosted 19 million visitors in 2021, with a growth of over 29 percent compared to the number of visitors in 2020. Domestic tourism accounted for 58 percent of the total visitors number last year in the UAE. Hotel establishments last year generated revenues of AED28 billion, witnessing a growth of up to 70 percent compared to 2020.



Over the past year, more than 75 million hotel stays have been booked, up 42 percent compared to 2020, while the hotel occupancy rate reached 67 percent, which is the highest rate ever achieved in leading tourist destinations worldwide. The number of hotel establishments in the UAE increased by 5 percent in 2021 to 1,144 establishments compared to 2020. During the same period, the number of hotel rooms increased by 8 percent, up to 194,000 rooms across the UAE.



Al Falasi asserted that the UAE's tourism sector continues to achieve outstanding results due to the vision and directives of the wise leadership and the concerted national efforts to develop the country's tourism environment by providing integrated tourism products and services that enhance the UAEs position as a preferred and sustainable tourist destination for tourists from within the country and around the world.



Al Falasi stated that these positive results demonstrate the efficiency of the policies adopted by the UAE to support and develop the national tourism sector, and that many of these indicators are approaching pre-pandemic growth rates.



"This shows a full recovery of the national tourism sector and confirms the positive direction it is increasingly achieving," he said, adding that these results are the product of the concerted government efforts and the efficiency of the private tourism sector to provide an attractive and secure national tourist environment, leading and integrated tourism services, diverse and unique destinations, and advanced tourism infrastructure.



Al Falasi also noted the importance of major events and initiatives organised by the UAE during the past phase in achieving these results and providing national tourism with great developmental potential.



"Expo 2020 Dubai attracted more than 24 million visitors in 6 months, and the second edition of the 'most beautiful winter in the world' campaign, which generated revenues of AED 1.5 billion, attracted over 1.3 million domestic tourists in just one and a half months," he said.



In addition, the Council showcased the efforts of the stakeholders in the Tourism Satellite Account (TSA), with Al Falasi reiterating the importance of all relevant stakeholders working in synergy to support the TSA project and provide the technical infrastructure and human resources necessary for its development.



The UAE has also signed a partnership and coordination agreement with the United Nations World Tourism Organisation to support the development of this statistics system. Moreover, the TSA will contribute to increasing the efficiency of the country's tourism statistics system by measuring the economic indicators of the tourism sector and its contribution to the national economy and the labour market.


Tribal officials removed St. Stephens Indian School Superintendent Frank No Runner as well as other administrators and the entire board governing the school following an investigation that found widespread wrongdoing of school leadership.

The council voted to fire the administrators and school board members after the Bureau of Indian Education found they had engaged in the use of drugs and alcohol on school property and at school functions, sexual misconduct and harassment, bullying, nepotism and financial exploitation, according to a statement. School officials also failed to ensure that employees maintained valid state teaching certification, according to the investigators report.

St. Stephens Indian School is a K-12 school on the Wind River reservation. Part of its funding comes from the Bureau of Indian Education, which conducted the independent federal investigation.

The Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone business councils requested the bureau open an investigation following various allegations against No Runner, including that he had engaged in sexual harassment, bullying, consumption of alcohol on school property, and creating a toxic environment, the report states. The bureau conducted the investigation in March and April.

In addition to the former superintendent No Runner, the council also fired K-8 principal Greg Juneau, high school principal Matthew Mortimer, food services supervisor Pattee Bement and school board members William CHair, John Goggles, Ronnie Oldman and Eugene Ridge Bear. Former school board member Dominic Littleshield was not a member at the time of the investigation itself, but was part of the board during the period covered by the investigation.

No Runner had been the schools superintendent since July 2015 and lived with his family, including his wife and St. Stephens employee Bement, on property leased by the St. Stephens Indian School, the report states.

Multiple witnesses said that No Runner had sexually harassed or bullied them and others and created a toxic work environment where employees were threatened with termination, according to the report. The report states that some of the harassment and bullying took place over social media. One former employee said she left the school because of this behavior from No Runner and Juneau, the schools former K-8 principal. Witnesses who testified for the investigation said No Runner asked current and former students for sexual favors, sometimes in exchange for money.

The investigators found that No Runner used his position as superintendent to influence his subordinates and to give his wife, Bement, a salary and position that was inappropriate. Bement also had frequent absences, the report found. One witness said that when he complained of this, No Runner told him, You are not going to fire my wife.

The investigation also concludes that No Runner had consumed alcohol and used marijuana on school premises or at school-related events, sometimes with other St. Stephens employees. The report states that Juneau and Bement also used marijuana on school property.

School board members signed off on inappropriate pay increases for employees, and both board members and employees used school funds for personal expenses, the report states. The investigators also found that the board had failed to dismiss employees with expired state certifications.

The Inter-Tribal Council handed its authority over the school to the Bureau of Indian Education after the investigation and firing of the administrators and board members.

Eastern Shoshone Business Council Chairman John St. Clair said in a statement that this action was a precautionary effort aimed at protecting our children and community.

Our children deserve the best possible education, but that hardly seems possible with the kind of misconduct discussed in this report by the Bureau of Indian Education, Northern Arapaho Business Council Chairman Jordan Dresser said in the statement.

St. Clair emphasized that the report is only an administrative investigation. It doesnt address criminal misconduct.

Its not clear how the school plans to move forward or how the Bureau of Indian Education will take over the responsibilities of these former employees and board members.

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RACINE  A woman is facing charges for her alleged involvement in a May 5 drive-by shooting on Mead Street.

Hendria M. Jackson, 40, from Hampton, Georgia, was charged with seven felony counts of first degree recklessly endangering safety and a felony count of discharge firearm from vehicle.

According to a criminal complaint:

On May 5, officers were sent to the 1600 block of Mead Street for a home being shot.

Upon arrival, officers found six casings in total with three being in the driveway and three in the roadway near the residence. Three bullet holes were in the front of the home and three on the south side of the home. Two projectiles were also found inside the residence.

The owner said that, in addition to himself, there were six children sitting in the living room when the house was struck by gunfire. One of the children said that they saw a car going north on Mead Street and a man in the passenger seat was firing a gun.

A home owner in the block said the suspects originally knocked on their door, but they did not recognize them so they did not answer. A woman then redirected the other two men with her to the residence that they eventually ended up shooting at.

Officers collected surveillance from the area, cellphone footage and doorbell camera footage. Officers were able to identify the vehicle as a Kia sedan with Florida license plates. Video showed the car pull into the driveway of the home and three people got out.

The woman was identified as Jackson, and she was seen coming back toward the car while holding something in her right hand. She then got into the drivers seat and the car goes north on Mead Street. Then, the passenger extended his arm out of the window and fired three shots.

On May 6, officers conducted a stop of the car involved in the shooting.

Jackson was interviewed and she identified herself and the two men in images shown from the shooting. She said they were in the area and heard gunshots, but denied the gunshots came from her car.

Jackson was given a $20,000 cash bond in Racine County Circuit Court on Tuesday. A preliminary hearing is on May 18 at the Racine County Law Enforcement Center, 717 Wisconsin Ave., online court records show.

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RACINE  One of two brothers charged with a homicide that occurred during an alleged robbery of a Racine drug dealer was in Racine County Circuit Court on Wednesday for arraignment.

Jonathan Martinez, 25, of Gurnee, Illinois, pleaded not guilty to first-degree intentional homicide, as party to a crime, in the Oct. 4, 2021 shooting death of James Hamilton, 31.

Christopher Martinez, 23, of Waukegan, Illinois, who also faces a charge of first-degree intentional homicide, as party to a crime, has not yet been extradited from Lake County, Illinois.

A third brother, Moises Gonzalez, 28, is charged with attempted armed robbery, as party to a crime, and possession of marijuana with the intent to distribute as a second and subsequent offense.

Gonzalez did not participate in the robbery itself but allegedly knew about it ahead of time. He was not charged with the homicide.

Martinez is being held at the Racine County Jail where bail was set at $1 million cash.

Case history

The Racine Police Department was dispatched to the 1000 block of Monroe Avenue on the report of suspicious circumstances after a male called to report a possible home invasion at Hamiltons home on Oct. 4, 2021.

Inside the residence, officers said they found Hamilton dead from multiple gunshot wounds.

According to the criminal complaint, there were multiple weapons inside the residence, including a Smith & Wesson .357 revolver with three rounds fired and blood on the handgrip. Additionally, there was an AR-15-style rifle, 9mm casings near the victim, a .22 caliber casing in the living room, and bullet holes in the doors and furniture.

Evidence at the scene led investigators to theorize the victim and suspects exchanged gunfire.

Officers located $125,041 in cash during the investigation, with approximately $107,530 of the cash found in a Louis Vuitton bag.

More than $6,400 in blood-soaked bills was found on the floor and approximately 7.5 pounds of drugs  marijuana, psychedelic mushrooms, heroin and LSD  were also found.

According to the criminal complaint, surveillance video from the neighborhood placed a red pickup truck driven by Jonathan Martinez in the neighborhood the evening of the homicide.

Further, cellphone traces place Christopher and Jonathan Martinezs cellphones in the immediate area the night of the homicide.

Warning

According to the criminal complaint, Gonzalez reportedly warned Hamilton earlier in the day about a potential home invasion/robbery.

Gonzalez told Hamilton, to be alert and watch out for himself, and arm himself, because he (Gonzalez) had a bad feeling, according to investigators.

The defendant may have had more than a bad feeling. According to the criminal complaint, Gonzalez knew his younger brothers intended to rob Hamilton.

Shootout

Gonzalez reportedly told investigators he sold marijuana on the side to help make ends meet and to support his family.

It was through this side gig that he said he knew Hamilton. Later, he introduced Hamilton and his younger brother Christopher Martinez.

Gonzalez reportedly told investigators that Christopher Martinez was aware of the large amounts of cash that Hamilton had and had purportedly spoken repeatedly about the possibility of robbing him.

On the day of the homicide, Gonzalez allegedly picked up Hamiltons roommate so he would be out of the house for the day. It was at that time that he warned Hamilton.

Allegedly, Gonzalez received a text message from Christopher Martinez stating the robbery had gone bad and he had shot Hamilton. Christopher Martinez also allegedly said he was going to go back for the money but Gonzalez texted him that it would be stupid to go back and instead he should get out of there, according to the criminal complaint.

Gonzalez said Hamilton was alive after the shooting and made a call to his roommate, who was still with Gonzalez, telling him that either he had been shot or that his dog had been shot.

Later, Christopher Martinez allegedly blamed Gonzalez for what transpired at Hamiltons house because when they entered, he was armed and on the lookout.

According to Gonzalez, Christopher Martinez said Hamilton shot first and he allegedly returned fire, killing him.

Gonzalez described Christopher Martinez as wild and crazy, according to the criminal complaint. Gonzalez also said his brother had badgered him about assisting in the robbery and had further offered $10,000 cash for the assistance. Gonzalez allegedly told investigators he didnt want to upset Christopher because he was scared for his safety and the safety of his family.

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Founded in 1994 by Frank Crivello, Milwaukee-based Phoenix Investors and its affiliates (collectively Phoenix) are a leader in the acquisition, development, renovation, and repositioning of industrial facilities throughout the United States. Utilizing a disciplined investment approach and successful partnerships with institutional capital sources, corporations, and public stakeholders, Phoenix has developed a proven track record of generating superior risk-adjusted returns while providing cost-efficient lease rates for its growing portfolio of national tenants.

Perhaps Phoenixs greatest focus and legacy lay in the revitalization of distressed communities suffering from the aftermath of urban blight. Phoenix Investors core focus shifted to the renovation of large former industrial plants about a decade ago as I witnessed entire communities making significant strides in the areas surrounding our redevelopments, said Frank Crivello, Chairman & Founder of Phoenix Investors. Most often when we complete a major industrial renovation, nearby businesses and neighborhoods begin to improve. Weve found that our renovations are often inspiration for other investments and increased economic activity.

Milwaukee is both home to Phoenix Investors and the recipient of Phoenixs various philanthropic efforts. Beyond donations to local nonprofits and community organizations, Phoenix Investors undertook a project in Northern Milwaukee that resulted in evidenced reduction of crime in the area surrounding the redevelopment. Phoenix worked in conjunction with the Milwaukee Police Department to analyze four years of crime data from the blocks directly surrounding the facility. By 2017, one year after the building had been demolished, overall crime within the surrounding neighborhoods decreased by 19 percent. Between 2015 and 2019, total property crimes were reduced by 36 percent, while more serious crimes decreased 32 percent.

A plant closure is devastating to the soul of any community, said Anthony Crivello, Phoenix Investors Executive Vice President. Generations of family members in these communities have a deep connection to a plant through past or present employment.

A plant closure has profound and negative implications for the former company and its brand, said David Marks, Phoenix Investors President and CEO. Therefore, most corporate sellers care less about the price we pay for their closed plants and much more about what we will do with it and how we will repopulate it with quality companies and jobs. Our projects, with the help of our corporate and public partners, help reverse the fortunes of distressed communities and stoke their economic engines.

As a nationally recognized commercial real estate firm, Phoenix Investors facilities are hosted by communities across the United States, many of which have experienced marked improvements in crime reduction, increases in economic activity, significant reductions in unemployment rates, and a renewal of neighborhood safety and culture.

Please visit https://phoenixinvestors.com to learn more about Phoenix Investors, their national reach, and their commitment to revitalizing communities through public-private partnerships.

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ROCHESTER  A longstanding policy of keeping politics out of the Rochester Memorial Day Parade is being put to the test.

A candidate planning to challenge Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos for reelection to his legislative seat says he is being excluded from the parade while Vos is getting VIP treatment as emcee of a post-parade ceremony.

Adam Steen, a Republican who intends to run against Vos in a GOP primary in August, said parade organizers are playing favorites by denying him a spot in the May 30 parade.

"It seems a little one-sided," Steen said.

Contacted by The Journal Times, parade organizers confirmed that they asked Steen to stay out of the parade. They said it was only to avoid politicizing the event  not to show favoritism.

Sara Damaschke, a member of the organizing committee, said the group does not exclude anyone. If Steen shows up, he will be allowed to join the parade, she said.

"If you're dead set on it and you're going to come, we're not going to say no," Damaschke said.

Damaschke and a former longtime parade organizer both said they were contacted by a mysterious lawyer-like person threatening a lawsuit if Steen is kept out of the parade.

Steen said he had no knowledge of anyone threatening a lawsuit.

Steen is a Donald Trump supporter who denies that Democrat Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. Steen alleges that Vos has not taken the 2020 election issue seriously, even though the Assembly speaker ordered an investigation into the election that remains ongoing, months after it was expected to end.

Rochester voted for Trump over Biden by more than a 2-to-1 margin  1,821 votes to 743.

The Memorial Day parade in Rochester is an opportunity for both Vos and Steen to gain public exposure before an Aug. 9 primary in which Republican voters will select one of them to appear on the ballot in November in the 63rd Assembly District.

The holiday event is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. May 30, followed by a remembrance at Pioneer Park. Vos, who lives in Rochester and represents the 63rd District, has walked in the parade and been master of ceremonies at the park ceremony for several years.

Vos said it is common for parade organizers in Rochester and elsewhere to invite current elected leaders while excluding political challengers. Having government officials in attendance is part of the parade tradition, he said.

The incumbent state legislator said he plans to participate again in the Rochester event  and to leave politics aside.

"It's something that's really special," he said. "I don't want to tarnish it."

This will be the 156th year of the Rochester parade, dating back to the 1860s.

2016 incident

An earlier incident of politicking at the parade turned ugly for another political challenger.

In 2016, Paul Nehlen, a Republican denounced by some in his own party, turned out for the parade at a time when he was running against U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Janesville, who was then speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Nehlen, a self-described "pro-white" candidate whose history is rife with allegations of racism and anti-Semitism, showed up with a dump truck emblazoned with a message, "Dump Paul Ryan."

Ryan walked in the parade, but organizers told Nehlen that his dump truck was not permitted.

While parked at the Rochester Post Office, the truck was apparently vandalized by someone who flattened a tire, threw trash into the truck bed, ripped letters off the vehicle and used duct tape to cover other letters.

Janine Johnson, who led the parade organizing committee for 15 years until this year, remembers the dump truck incident.

"Somebody made it political," she said of the parade, "and I think that ticked off some people."

Strange phone calls

Steen said he approached this year's parade organizers and then attended a committee meeting last week. When told he was not welcome at the parade, Steen said he regarded it as petty politics, but he did not raise strong objections.

"I was really polite," he said. "I just think they're  what do you want to say  misinformed."

Johnson and Damaschke both said they later got telephone calls from someone identifying himself as "Alex" and threatening a lawsuit against the parade organizers if Steen is excluded.

Damaschke said the caller claimed to be a lawyer from Tennessee; Johnson said her caller said he would contact a lawyer in Chicago.

Damaschke said she felt it was inappropriate for a lawyer to be calling local volunteer parade organizers and making threats. Referring to Steen, she said: "If this is the kind of campaign that this guy is going to run, I'm not going to vote for him."

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The father whose 12-year-old daughter was reportedly injured when an off-duty Kenosha Police officer knelt on the back of her neck while trying to subdue her during an in-school incident has filed a claim in a first step toward a lawsuit.

The notice was filed Tuesday, according to documents submitted by Drew DeVinney, attorney for Jerrel Perez, the girls father.

The claim names Police Officer Shawn Guetschow, Interim Police Chief Eric Larsen, the City of Kenosha and the Kenosha Unified School District. Should the lawsuit proceed, Perez intends to ask for damages, including punitive damages, for the violation of his daughters constitutional rights.

The claim states Guetschow violated state criminal and civil laws when he held his knee against the back of the neck of the girl. The claim also alleges that Guetschow lost his temper and choked the child until she suffered a traumatic brain injury.

"The allegations within the Notice of Claim are unfounded. The Kenosha Unified School District will vigorously defend itself and its employees in the event that litigation is initiated in this matter," Sam Hall Jr. of Crivello Carlson, S.C., Kenosha Unified's attorney, said Wednesday night. Lt. Joseph Nosalik, spokesperson for the police department, said he had yet to see the claim and, therefore, could not comment.

Guetschow was working as a security officer for the district at Lincoln Middle School at the time of the March 4 incident. Police officials have said the officer remains employed with the department and is on desk duty while an internal investigation into the matter continues. In late April, Larsen requested an escalated investigation by the FBI, which is currently looking into whether possible civil rights violations occurred in the case.

According to DeVinney, no criminal charges have been filed against Guetschow.

The Kenosha District Attorneys office has not commented about the matter and has not announced any investigation of Officer Guetschow, he said.

Girl charged with misdemeanor

The office has criminally charged the girl with a misdemeanor, according to DeVinney. The girl who is identified as Jane Doe in the claim is not in custody, he said. No additional information on the criminal charges against her were immediately released, however, the claim notes while the juvenile delinquency petition has been filed, the proceedings are confidential. According to the claim, DeVinney challenges the inequity in law enforcement that is beset against children of color.

The difference between how an adult with a badge and a child with black skin are being treated should offend everyones sense of morality, ethics, and justice. By pursuing charges against Jane Doe, the Kenosha Police Department is attempting to criminalize an innocent child to justify the unjustifiable.

Jane Doe is an innocent victim and will defend herself against these baseless charges, DeVinney said in the claim. They know that change cannot be accomplished in silence. Jerrel Perez will not sit silently as the Kenosha Police Department vilifies his innocent daughter for their own political gain.

A little more than week after the incident, Guetschow resigned his position with the district citing the districts lack of support of him and the toll it had taken on his family.

Meanwhile, Perez and his family have been joined by several anti-violence and anti-racism groups in calling for Guetschow to be criminally charged in the incident and for his termination as a police officer.

As a result of the incident, the Kenosha Unified School Board later this month is also expected to discuss the matter of sworn police officers working as resource officers and security personnel on public school campuses.

This incident never should have occurred. No man who has the capability to beat and choke a 12-year-old with his knee is fit for law enforcement or to roam school hallways, DeVinney said. The Kenosha Police Department have shown how far they are willing to go to avoid accountability, even in this case, when their victim is an innocent kid.

DeVinney in the claim states that in addition to the brain injury the girl is a victim of police brutality.

The absence of accountability for a grown man that choked this child is striking, he said. It is for this reason, and on behalf of all who seek meaningful change, that the claimants are taking this first step to hold these defendants responsible.

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Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson said he doesnt expect abortion to be an issue in his campaign and said if Roe v. Wade is overturned its not going to be that big a change in Wisconsin despite a law on the books that would ban abortion in almost every instance.

It might be a little messy for some people, but abortion is not going away, he told the Wall Street Journal, adding that people would be able to still drive to Illinois for an abortion if Roe is overturned.

Johnson told the newspaper hes not sure that the Wisconsin law banning abortions in every instance except to save the mothers life would actually go into effect. That stance is consistent with legal experts on both sides who expect a bevy of legal challenges to Wisconsins abortion bans if Roe is overturned.

But in any case, Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin said it would stop providing abortions in the state unless courts determine Wisconsins abortion ban cant be enforced. An abortion provider told the Wisconsin State Journal that he and other abortion providers already discussed starting a clinic in northern Illinois that could cater to Wisconsinites.

Johnsons statement that people can still seek abortions, just across the state line, contrasts with the views of Wisconsins Republican gubernatorial candidates who oppose abortion in almost all cases.

But unlike the gubernatorial candidates, Johnson, of Oshkosh, doesnt have to compete in a party primary and is instead eyeing a general election in the closely divided state.

Primary voters are always folks more intensely interested in politics (and) more intensely partisan, Marquette Law School Director Charles Franklin said in an interview last week. But they also are usually also more ideologically in the camp of their party.

Johnsons suggestion that abortion isnt going to be the big political issue everybody thinks it is because its not going to be that big a change drew pushback from Democrats.

U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., said Johnsons assurance that Wisconsinites can obtain abortions in Illinois is really an irresponsible statement for a senator to make.

The vast majority of people who are seeking abortion are folks who may not have the resources to travel to Illinois for an abortion, she told the Wall Street Journal.

Black and Latino Wisconsinites have higher rates of living in poverty than white residents, according to UW-Madison researchers who found the Black poverty rate was 2.5 times higher than the overall poverty rate in the state. Additionally, the CDC reports Black and Hispanic women are far more likely to obtain abortions than white women.

Democrats respond

Johnsons comments came as the U.S. Senate was scheduled to vote on the Womens Health Protection Act, an effort to codify nationwide abortion protections.

People will lose their lives under Wisconsins abortion ban and all Ron Johnson has to say is that it might be a little messy? Lauren Chou, spokesperson for Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes U.S. Senate campaign, said in a statement.

Sarah Abel, spokesperson for state Treasurer Sarah Godlewskis U.S. Senate campaign, said abortion is already an issue for Johnson and referred to an ad Godlewski ran blasting Johnson in the wake of the leaked draft showing the U.S. Supreme Court poised to overturn Roe.

I would give Ron Johnson credit for admitting that the reproductive freedom of women is not an issue for him, except thats a lie. Abortion has always been a big part of his record, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Tom Nelson said. This was evident when he said that the leaked abominable Alito opinion was well-written.

Messy is when you spill a glass (of) milk, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Alex Lasry said. Stripping away womens freedom and constitutional right to make their own personal decisions about their body, their health care, and their family is not messy.

Past support

Johnson has supported federal abortion bans in the past and praised the leaked Roe draft opinion but said the matter is best handled by each state. Still, Johnsons spokesperson, Alexa Henning, would not say whether Johnson still supports a federal ban.

The reality is there is no consensus on passing federal legislation, nor will there be without the process first playing out in the states, she said in a statement. The Senator has always felt that this issue is best decided by the people on a state-by-state basis.

Last week, Johnson told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he expects Wisconsins abortion ban, which hasnt been enforced since 1973, wouldnt last long if Roe is overturned, saying the democratic process in Wisconsin will have something other than the 1849 law. Thats unlikely with a Republican-majority Legislature and would be less likely if a Republican gubernatorial candidate, all of whom are in favor of complete or near-complete abortion bans, gets elected in November.

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An investigation into the 2020 election in battleground Wisconsin will be paused while five lawsuits play out, and the salary for the former state Supreme Court justice leading it will be cut in half, the Assembly speaker said Wednesday.

However, the investigation could be revived if courts rule that elections officials and others must comply with the subpoenas issued by Michael Gableman, said Robin Vos, Wisconsin's top state Republican lawmaker, who hired Gableman using taxpayer money.

Gableman's review was originally supposed to end in October, but Vos has granted extensions the latest of which was through April 30. Last month, under pressure from Donald Trump, Vos allowed the contract to go forward indefinitely.

Vos said Wednesday that was to deal with five ongoing lawsuits, three of which relate to open records and two are about his powers as special counsel. Gableman's taxpayer-funded salary will be cut from $11,000 to $5,500 a month, but the overall $676,000 budget for the work will not grow, Vos said.

Two of the lawsuits challenge Gableman's power to subpoena those involved with running elections in Wisconsin. Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul, who represents the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, sued Gableman, arguing that any interviews with state officials must be conducted in public, not behind closed doors as Gableman wants.

Gableman filed a separate lawsuit seeking to jail the mayors of Madison and Green Bay along with any others who he says don't comply with his subpoenas. Those officials have said they have complied. A judge has scheduled a July 11 hearing in that case.

"We have now been investigating for almost a year and we will potentially restart the investigation if we have the subpoenas served," Vos said.

Ann Jacobs, the Democratic chair of the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, said the lawsuits could be resolved if Gableman agreed to conduct the interviews in public. She said it was "unfortunate that taxpayers are going to continue to pay a very high salary" to Gableman to fight lawsuits that could be easily ended.

Vos said he hoped those cases would wrap up quickly, but the appeals could last well into next year.

The overall budget for Gableman's taxpayer-funded investigation remains unchanged at $676,000, Vos said. About $500,000 of that budget has been spent to date on the investigation and legal fees. Gableman has turned in two interim reports that did not include any evidence to show there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election won by President Joe Biden.

His latest report included easily disproven claims about voter turnout in nursing homes. A Wisconsin State Journal review found turnout was not unusual in nursing homes.

Jacobs said Gableman is not running an investigation but a "political endeavor meant to drum up false claims of voter fraud."

Biden carried Wisconsin by nearly 21,000 votes, an outcome that has survived recounts, partisan and nonpartisan reviews and numerous lawsuits. Vos ordered the Gableman investigation under pressure from Trump and other Republicans who allege the election was stolen. The probe has faced bipartisan criticism.

Gableman continues to work out of his suburban Milwaukee office with one aide, and that has been the extent of his staff for months, Vos said.

Gableman and Vos have suffered a series of defeats in court in open records lawsuits filed by the liberal watchdog group American Oversight. Two different judges in the past month have ordered that Gableman not delete records related to the investigation and that Vos be sure that doesn't happen. Vos has been found in contempt for not producing records and there is a June 10 hearing to determine whether Gableman should be found in contempt.

Wisconsin's review is one of only a handful of GOP efforts to look back at the 2020 election that remain alive.

A much-ridiculed investigation wrapped up in September in Arizona without offering proof to support Trump's claims of a stolen election. Similar efforts are being pursued by Republicans in the presidential battleground states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, also won by Biden.

And in Utah, a panel of majority-GOP lawmakers in December approved an audit of the state's election system. Unlike Arizona, the Utah effort will be conducted by nonpartisan legislative auditors and is not focused solely on 2020.

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WAUKEGAN  A jury convicted a suburban Chicago woman of involuntary manslaughter Tuesday for failing to give her son the medical care he required after a heart transplant.

Jennifer Stroud, 41, of Park City, also was found guilty of endangering the life of a child. She faces up to 14 years in prison at her July 21 sentencing, the Daily Herald of Arlington Heights reported.

Jason Stroud, 11, was a sixth-grader at Woodland Middle School in Gurnee when he died on Sept. 11, 2016, four years after undergoing his transplant.

"Both parents knew that Jason's transplant required lifetime care, and they knew the risks of failing him," said Eric Kalata, assistant Lake County state's attorney. "They were reckless with his life."

Stroud's attorney, Elliot A. Pinsel, said he was disappointed with the verdict.

Stroud, her then-husband David Stroud and Jason moved from Milwaukee to Park City in 2015. The couple were expected to take Jason to Lurie Children's Hospital in Chicago for regular visits and provide him daily medication to prevent his body from rejecting the heart, authorities said.

When Jason missed several hospital appointments from December 2015 to August 2016, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services investigated, authorities said.

David and Jennifer Stroud were co-defendants at one point, but the case was severed after the couple filed for divorce in July 2017.

David Stroud pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in May 2019 and was sentenced to five years in prison.

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1. Yes. Its vitally important to nominate or put into office the best candidate in each race.

2. Yes. Major state offices are at stake; voters shouldnt leave the work unfinished.

3. No. Its hard to get excited about a runoff, especially with few races on the ballot.

4.No. There is on ly one week of early voting, so it will be hard to squeeze in a trip to the polls.

5. Unsure. Im undecided about whether I will vote in the runoff.

Vote

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Swiss-Belhotel International, a leading hospitality group which currently manages 125 properties in 19 countries, has announced ambitious expansion plans with a strategic focus on Central and Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa.



As part of the move the group recently signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Odyssey Group to support its expansion in Japan.



Swiss-Belhotel International is looking at other asset management alliances globally to support its expansion and is presently negotiating on more opportunities. This is a real pivot and change in the expansion approach by working with third party asset managers and investment bankers.



Making the announcement at the Arabian Travel Market (ATM) in Dubai, Gavin M Faull, Chairman and President of Swiss-Belhotel International, stated: We are well placed to take advantage of the growing confidence in travel and very excited to continue our global expansion with a strong focus on Central and Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa. These regions hold enormous potential for our brands and are important growth markets for us.



Today we are at 125 hotels and are aiming towards a healthy growth of 250 hotels by 2030. Working closely with our owners we have been successfully navigating the unprecedented challenges posed by the pandemic and look forward to driving value to our owners, associates, employees, and guests through our diverse brands.



As part of its robust expansion in Southeast Asia, Swiss-Belhotel International has recently set up a regional office in Thailand. The company is looking to capitalize on new opportunities in priority markets like Thailand and Vietnam where it has multiple hotel projects in advanced negotiations.



Faull added: While we are particularly pleased with our progress in Thailand and Vietnam, Southeast Asia as a whole offers tremendous opportunity to expand our footprint further. Our collaboration with the Odyssey Group, which is one of Asias leading mid-market private market asset managers providing differentiated and bespoke investment solutions across multiple asset classes, is aimed at bolstering our expansion in Japan.



As the travel market continues to recover, Swiss-Belhotel International is also looking to increase its presence in Africa with several deals under negotiation.



African countries are still underserved by branded hotel supply despite solid domestic demand. We are witnessing strong owner interest in our brands across Africa with many promising opportunities in the pipeline that we expect to finalise soon, Faull said.  TradeArabia News Service
1. Yes. If inflation remains high and interest rates rise, the economy will be a major factor.

2. Yes. If the nation goes into a recession, it will be the issue on the minds of most voters.

3. No. Inflation will likely moderate by then; if so, the economy wont be a major issue.

4.No. All the turmoil involving Russia and Roe v. Wade will probably take center stage.

5. Unsure. Its hard to say how the economy will play with voters at this point.

Vote

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All youth organizations that wish to show their projects at the Vernon County Fair must fill out the Vernon County Fair 2022 Youth Organization Application Form. A youth organization is: An organization under adult leadership that has educational programing." The application form can be found on the vernoncountyfair.com website under the premium book tab. Deadline is June 1 to have your application form in and approved. New this year.

All entries (Jr. Fair and Open Class) for the Vernon County Fair will be done online. There will be no written application form. Instructions are online on how to enter your exhibits; please read instruction before entering. Entry deadline is Aug. 3. The fair office will be open Thursday, from noon to 4 p.m., starting July 7. There will be computers available for doing your Jr. Fair and Open Class entries, along with help if you need it. All Jr. Fair entry payments will be done through your organizational leader. Open Class entry payment are due once you submit your entries. Payments can be made at the fair office (not the UW Extension office) Thursday or by check mailed to Vernon County Fair, Bill Marohl, S3784 Bakkom Rd., Viroqua, WI 54665. All entry materials and passes can be picked up at the fair office (not the UW Extension Office) after Sept. 1. New this year.

Exhibit buildings will be open to receive exhibits on Tuesday evening week of the fair (Sept. 14-18), from 5 to 7 p.m. in all classes except livestock, poultry and rabbits.

Fair premium books will be available at the fair office, Thursday starting July 7 for $5/book, or free at the fair's website, vernoncountyfair.com under the premium book tab listed by department for both Jr. Fair and Open Class.

The fair office hours are noon to 4 p.m., on Thursday starting July 7 and every Thursday through July. The fair office will be open Aug. 1 and 2 from noon to 4 p.m. and from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Aug. 3. For other times, make an appointment by calling 608-634-4064 and leaving your name and phone number. The fair office hours during fair week are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Monday, 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday and 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday. The fair office phone number is 608-637-3165 and there is a message system, so we will get back with you if you leave a message

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A national group is putting an original UW-La Crosse play center stage.

The National Committee of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival has honored the universitys Department of Theatre Arts with several awards for the original documentary drama, Severe Clear: September 11 from Memory to History. Written by UWL faculty and students, the production premiered on campus in Toland Theatre in October 2020.

This type of national recognition not only speaks to the incredible work our faculty and students are producing but also sheds positive national light on the university as a whole, says Joe Anderson, chair of the Theatre Arts Department.

The Kennedy Center committee celebrates institutions, productions and individuals for their determination, adaptability, innovation, and experimentation on home campuses nationwide.

The UWL production received numerous Citizen Artist Awards. The awards recognize programs in higher education using theatrical production to promote long-term societal impact through an artistic lens, to encourage empathetic exploration of the complex cultural and physical world, and to advocate for justice on campus and throughout the world.

Among the UWL citations:

 Special Achievement in the Production of a New Work

 Special Achievement in the Production of a Devised or Company-Generated Work

 Special Achievement in Direction by Faculty Artists, citing Assistant Professor Greg Parmeter

 Special Achievement in Ensemble Performance

Find out more about the creation of the award-winning production in the documentary Severe Clear: The Story Behind the Story at: https://youtu.be/9SpGgw6shwg

This isnt the only recent recognition for the Theatre Arts Department. In spring 2021, the national theatre blog OnStage named it the best theatre program in Wisconsin while listing top programs in all 50 states.

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Minor Hotels, a leading hotel owner, operator and investor, will add four further new-build properties within the Middle East during 2022, including debuting two new brands to the region  NH Collection and NH Hotels.



Having already launched two new properties in the region to date this year  an Anantara in the UAE and an Avani in Oman, the group will also soon share exciting news about expanding its footprint within the region into Saudi Arabia.



Amir Golbarg, SVP Operations Minor Hotels, Middle East & Africa, commented: Having closed 2021 with a really strong consolidated performance over what was a challenging year, 2022 has started on an equally strong footing as all the countries we are present in get back to normal operations.



At the same time we continue to expand our footprint, having already launched two new hotels to date this year and will debut two new brands in the region in the coming months  NH Collection and NH Hotels, in addition to soon announcing upcoming hotels in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a country weve been looking to expand into.



Anantara Hotels, Resorts & Spas



Launched at the start of 2022 and just named on Conde Nast Travelers annual Hot List, Anantara World Islands Dubai Resort is the first luxury resort on Dubais World Islands archipelago. Located approximately 4km off the coast, the new island resort offers guests a new luxury destination in Dubai and a unique perspective on the city.



Anantara will launch its second property in the Qatar capital later this year with the opening of 222-key The Plaza Doha Anantara Hotel & Suites. The hotel is in the final stages of development in the Um Ghuwelina area of the city, approximately 15 minutes drive from Hamad International Airport.



The 174-key Anantara Mina Al Arab Ras Al Khaimah Resort is scheduled to open in Q1 2023 and will be the groups first property in the emirate of Ras Al Khaimah in the UAE. Overlooking a private beach and an eco-reserve with mangroves, the resort will offer a range of luxury accommodation options including pool villas and the first Maldivian-style overwater villas in Ras Al Khaimah.



Scheduled to open in late 2024, the 233-key Anantara Sharjah Resort will be located on a prime beachfront location in Sharjah, approximately 30 minutes drive from Dubai International Airport and 15 minutes drive from Sharjah International Airport.



Avani Hotels & Resorts



Opened in January, the new-build Avani Muscat Hotel is strategically located in Seeb, a prime residential area at the heart of the Omani capitals westward growth. The hotel is just 15 minutes from Muscat International Airport, adjacent to the Al Araimi Boulevard Mall and just a five-minute drive from the Mall of Muscat.



When it opens in 2024, Avani Bilaj Al Jazayer Bahrain Resort will be part of Bilaj Al Jazayer, a new waterfront leisure mixed-use masterplan. The new 110-key hotel will be located along the main boulevard of Bilaj Al Jazayer on the waterfront and will offer a selection of guest rooms and suites. The hotel will share a beach club with the adjacent Tivoli hotel within the Bilaj Al Jazayer development.



Bilaj Al Jazayer is located on the south-west coast of Bahrain and encompasses 1.3 million sq m of land with a three-kilometre beachfront. Manama, the capital and main city of Bahrain, is a 25-minute drive and Bahrain International F1 Circuit and Dilmun Waterpark are in close proximity.



Tivoli Hotels & Resorts



The 110-key Tivoli Bilaj Al Jazayer Bahrain Resort will be part of Bilaj Al Jazayer. Scheduled for a 2024 opening, the hotels facilities will include guest rooms and suites, two restaurants, two bars and a cafe, an outdoor swimming pool, a gym, plus spa and wellness facilities. The Tivoli hotel will share a beach club with Avani within the Bilaj Al Jazayer development.



Oaks Hotels, Resorts & Suites



Scheduled to open in 2025, Oaks Egypt New Capital Apartments & Suites will be located in the heart of the Egyptian New Administrative Capital bringing a total of approximately 400 apartments and suites to the market in this fast-developing new administrative and financial capital. The new-build hotel will be housed across two wings, connected centrally at the rooftop and on the ground floor with a spacious retail area.



NH Collection



Opening in October 2022, NH Collection Doha Oasis Hotel & Beach Club is in the later stages of development and will be both the first NH Collection property in the Middle East region and the first of the brand globally with a beach club. The 300-key hotel is located in the Ras Abu Abboud area along Dohas eastern coast, midway between the city centre and Hamad International Airport, and has a rich history.



The previous Oasis Hotel, from where the new property takes its name, was in the same location and was Dohas first ever hotel when it opened in the 1950s. Accommodation options will include a mix of guest rooms and over 50 suites, the largest being the 332-sq-m Royal Duplex Suite.



This will be the first NH Collection to launch in the Middle East and the first outside of the brands traditional areas of operation in Europe and South America. NH Collection hotels are conceived for discerning travellers, whether for business or pleasure, who are looking for strategic locations in core international destinations. The brand blends thoughtful attention to detail, outstanding services, premium innovative products, state-of-the-art technology and genuine local gastronomy.



The Vyra Suites NH Collection Doha is a 228-key serviced apartment property located in West Bay, Dohas prominent business district hosting much of the citys most modern infrastructure. Situated amongst a plethora of commercial skyscrapers, large scale mixed-use developments and government entities, the new-build 44-storey property is comprised of 72 one-bedroom, 144 two-bedroom, and 12 three-bedroom apartments as well as a restaurant, coffee shop, fully equipped gym, indoor swimming pool, kids club, teens room, and a number of meeting rooms.



NH Hotels



Currently in the final stages of development, NH Dubai The Palm will open its doors in Q4 this year with 227 guest rooms and suites, in addition to 306 serviced apartments. Located on Dubais Palm Jumeirah and within easy reach of the citys key tourist attractions, facilities at the new-build hotel will include multiple restaurants and bars, three spa treatment rooms, a fully-equipped gym, a kids club and four meeting rooms.



The new 14-storey hotel will introduce new hot spots to The Palm, including a lively sports bar and a stylish rooftop bar and lounge alongside the infinity pool, all west facing and perfect for enjoying the citys famous sunsets. NH Dubai The Palm will be the first of the brand to launch in the Middle East and will join an existing portfolio of over 240 NH Hotels properties.  TradeArabia News Service
Some members of the first graduating class of Viterbo University engineering majors are jumping right into good engineering jobs, some on familiar territory because of their internship experiences. Thats what Brygida Boryczka thought shed be doing when she started at Viterbo four years ago, but her education at Viterbo inspired her to become an educator herself.

A graduate of Appleton West High School, Boryczka chose to study engineering at Viterbo even though the program was brand new at the time, in part because the campus felt comfortable and the small class sizes would make it easier to ask questions and get to know faculty and fellow students.

It seemed like they had a really good plan for the engineering program, and they were really prepared for it, she said. And when I visited the campus, it seemed less intimidating than other schools.

Besides, La Crosse is a special place for the Boryczka family. Her mother, Barbara, and father, Bolek, met at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse in 1995, both coming from Poland to study here. They came to La Crosse separately, and after returning to Poland, they married. In 1997, they came back to Wisconsin and started a family.

Growing up, Boryczkas parents would only allow her and her older brother, Bartek, to speak Polish at home. If I said something in English, theyd pretend they didnt understand or say it back to me in Polish, Boryczka said.

Being bilingual from an early age gave Boryczka an advantage in learning other languages. By the time she came to Viterbo she had studied enough Spanish to set her sights on double-majoring in engineering and Spanish.

When she started at Viterbo, Boryczka was intent on a career as a civil or environmental engineer. As a sophomore, she was encouraged by math Professor Sheldon Lee to make Spanish a minor and go for a major in mathematics, a field deeply embedded in engineering.

Brygida is one of the strongest students I have had in my classes. She has a combination of raw talent and exceptional work ethic. Early on, I realized that I should grade her work first in order to catch any mistakes I might have made in my answer key, Lee said. She has a rare ability to retain everything learned from previous classes and is able to consolidate concepts in creative ways to solve new problems.

She also was recruited to tutor in the universitys Academic Resource Center. She helped other students with their classwork in everything from computer modeling and calculus to theology and thermodynamics, and it rekindled an interest in teaching that she had harbored growing up.

She was always my top recommendation as a tutor, Lee said. We are grateful for all of the work she has done at the tutor center on campus, as it can be difficult to find students comfortable with tutoring mathematics, especially upper-level courses.

Graduating May 14 with a 3.98 GPA and two bachelors degrees (engineering and applied math and analytics), Boryczka is headed for the University of Minnesota-Duluth to pursue a masters degree in mathematics and get some classroom experience as a teaching assistant.

Though shes not starting a career as an engineer right out of college like almost all her classmates (seven of nine in this first graduating class), she said her engineering studies will always be a great asset. My engineering education has given me many valuable skills, such as critical thinking and problem solving, as well as teamwork, she said.

Boryczka and her fellow engineering students had their teamwork, problem solving, and critical thinking skills put to the test collaborating on capstone projects for Viterbos HAWK WORKS program. Viterbos engineering program has emphasized that engineering is a collaborative process that doesnt take place in a vacuum, so HAWK WORKS pairs engineering students with faculty and students from other disciplines to work together to search for solutions to real-world problems.

Two of this springs HAWK WORKS projects involved trishaws, three-wheeled, pedal-powered rickshaws. One project had a team designing and creating improvements in a trishaw owned by Bethany St. Joseph Corp. Another team worked on creating a smartphone app to make it easier for volunteer trishaw pilots to book their nursing home time slots in the hopes of better pilot retention rates.

Boryczkas team, meanwhile, worked on a major environmental problem: PFAS contamination. French Island has drinking water issues because of well contamination by the so-called forever chemicals, and the team was inspired to do research after hearing about a Princeton University study that found a microbe that could break down PFAS.

The team set up a research project to determine whether the microbe, called A6 for short, existed in the soil of the Black River bottoms owned by the Mississippi Valley Conservancy on the north end of French Island. The study results showed preliminary indications that A6, which thrives in an acidic, iron-rich soil, could be present in the project area. More research is planned for next year.

I think its exciting that our work might be able to help with a problem that is really prevalent in the community, Boryczka said.

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The agency that administers elections in Wisconsin would be completely overhauled or outright abolished under plans proposed by all four top Republicans running to unseat Democratic Gov. Tony Evers this fall.

Construction business owner Tim Michels, the most recent entrant in the crowded field of Republicans running for governor in the Aug. 9 primary, unveiled his election plan on Thursday, which would, among other measures, repeal all previous election guidance issued by the Wisconsin Elections Commission to clerks across the state and terminate the six members of the bipartisan commission  three Republicans and three Democrats  and replace them with new appointments.

Michels' plan would drastically alter the state Elections Commission but also stops short of calls by other top GOP contenders to completely abolish the agency, which has come under fire from Republicans for how the 2020 election was administered due to unfounded claims of widespread fraud and mounting pressure from former President Donald Trump.

My plan is a fresh start, and allows us to bring in or bring back people who are ready to get to work to fix our elections, not make the problem worse," Michels said in a statement.

Former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, the frontrunner in the race based on recent polling, issued a statement shortly after Michels' announced his plan blasting the proposal for not going far enough.

Anyone who has been paying attention knows that the Wisconsin Elections Commission cannot be reformed, Kleefisch said. It must be abolished.

Like Kleefisch, fellow GOP gubernatorial candidates Kevin Nicholson, a business owner and former Marine, and Rep. Timothy Ramthun, R-Campbellsport, have called for a complete dismantling of the state Elections Commission. Both Ramthun and Nicholson have said they want to see the Elections Commission eliminated and oversight of elections moved to the Secretary of State's Office. Kleefisch's proposal entails creating a new office within the state Department of Justice to oversee elections.

Earlier this year, former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who was hired by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, to lead the one-party review of the 2020 election at a cost of $676,000 to taxpayers, listed the "elimination and dismantling" of the Elections Commission as one of his top recommendations to the Legislature.

Vos, who has repeatedly extended Gableman's contract with the state despite no evidence of widespread fraud in the now 18-month-old election, has been adamantly opposed to eliminating the commission. Vos has also rejected Gableman's recommendation that the Legislature consider decertifying the results of the 2020 election, something experts and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have described as a constitutional impossibility.

Calls to dismantle the Elections Commission come just six years after the agency was formed in 2016 by former Gov. Scott Walker and Republican lawmakers to replace the nonpartisan Government Accountability Board, which itself was created in 2008 in the wake of the 2001 legislative caucus scandal that saw lawmakers from both parties convicted of using taxpayer resources to campaign.

The GAB came under fire from Republicans for its role in an investigation into coordination between Walker's 2012 recall campaign and supposedly independent political groups.

Plan details

Michels' plan to reform the Elections Commission includes calling the Legislature into a special session on his first day as governor to vote to remove the agency's six commissioners within a month. It would also terminate all senior staff at the agency and require them to reapply under the newly appointed commission.

Any staff member who participated in issuing guidance that did not comply with state law would be prohibited from rejoining the agency. Republicans have taken aim at agency guidance provided in 2020 to not send poll workers to nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic.

His plan would also ban private grant funding for administering elections and the use of unstaffed absentee ballot drop boxes. He also calls for a twice annual purge of dead and inactive voters from the polls. Currently, the commission performs a daily check on voters who are dead or have become ineligible. Voters who have not cast ballots in four years are purged from voter rolls.

Vos and Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg, who have said they oppose abolishing the state Elections Commission, did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday.

Ann Jacobs, the Democratic chair of the Elections Commission, described Michels' plan as "craziness" in a tweet Thursday.

"It demonstrates a total lack of understanding how elections work," Jacobs said. "There would be no guidance for elections at all? And no staff? Just an empty office? Who will administer registrations?"

The winner of the Aug. 9 primary will go on to face Evers in the Nov. 8 general election.

Evers, who has vetoed multiple bills passed by the GOP-led Legislature aimed at putting restrictions on elections, has said he opposes any effort to make voting harder in Wisconsin.

"All eligible voters should be able to vote," Evers tweeted Thursday. "I will continue to veto any radical legislation that makes it harder to access the ballot box."

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Emirates and the Department of Culture and Tourism  Abu Dhabi (DCT Abu Dhabi), have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to boost tourist numbers across the airlines global network.



The new partnership is part of the airlines commitment to promote tourism to the UAE by aligning activities with other tourism partners and capitalising on opportunities to encourage visitors to experience more than one destination in the UAE during their stay.



The MoU was signed at the ongoing Arabian Travel Market in Dubai by Adnan Kazim, Emirates Chief Commercial Officer and Saleh Mohamed Al Geziry, Director General for Tourism, at DCT Abu Dhabi.



Under the MoU, Emirates and DCT Abu Dhabi will work closely to explore and implement promotional activities as well as bespoke packages for tour operators and the wider travel trade in key markets across the airlines network to encourage visits to Abu Dhabi as part of their overall UAE holiday. The two partners will also collaborate on advertising and cross promotional marketing campaigns, familiarisation programmes for travel trade and media, as well as promotional competitions.



Saleh Mohamed Saleh Al Geziry said: As we announce this strategic partnership with Emirates, we look forward to working together to cement Abu Dhabis position as a must-visit destination. From thrills and adventures that can be found at our captivating experiences and theme parks such as Warner Brothers Abu Dhabi, to leading museums such as Louvre Abu Dhabi, there is something for everyone to enjoy. We cant wait to share our Abu Dhabi story with the world."



Adnan Kazim said: "We are delighted to be working closely with DCT Abu Dhabi to help boost visitation. We are well-positioned to support the development of tourism to Abu Dhabi and the wider UAE through our network of nearly 130 global destinations. We are committed to promoting our home base, the UAE, as a travel and tourism hub, with its rich array of attractions and line-up of experiences and events that showcase the best of what all seven emirates have to offer.



Our partnership with DCT Abu Dhabi will promote sustainable growth of inbound visitors and ensures they are able to experience the capitals unique cultural landmarks, modern family attractions and beautiful natural landscapes."



In 2021, the Emirates Tourism Council was formed to strengthen the UAEs tourism portfolio, through collaboration across all local tourism authorities and departments in the emirates with the aim to enhance the UAEs position as a preferred global destination. The UAEs tourism sector is expected to contribute to 5.4% of the nations total GDP, or AED116.1 billion ($31.6 billion) and is forecasted to support over one million jobs by 2027.  TradeArabia News Service
Alabama law awarding honorary degree to civil rights lawyer

A civil rights lawyer who once fought to desegregate the University of Alabama is now receiving an honorary degree from the school.

Attorney Fred Gray of Tuskegee will be awarded an honorary doctor of laws degree during the law schools graduation ceremony on Sunday afternoon, the university said in a statement.

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The commencement marks the 50th anniversary since three students became the first Black people to graduate from the law school.

Gray, 91, once helped represent Vivian Malone Jones and James Hood in their attempt to desegregate the university, where they enrolled as the first Black students in 1963 after then-Gov. George C. Wallace staged his stand in the schoolhouse door against integration.

Gray also represented Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Black seamstress Rosa Parks, whose arrest for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man prompted the Montgomery bus boycott. Later, he represented Black men who filed suit after the government let their illness go untreated in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study.

Currently, Gray is involved in a lawsuit seeking to remove a Confederate monument from a square at the center of mostly black Tuskegee.
Becton Speaks Up About Allegations Involving Husbands Church

Less than a month before Californias June 7 Primary Election, Contra Costa District Attorney Diana Becton claims reports concerning a civil case filed against her husbands church are being misrepresented by her opponents.

An unnamed alleged victim has filed a lawsuit in Contra Costa County against the Rev. Alvin C. Bernstine, pastor of Bethlehem Missionary Baptist Church in Richmond and a former church employee. The men are accused of sexual abuse of a 14-year-old. The lawyers for the victim say the crime took place about 10 years ago.

Becton, who is the countys first Black district attorney has been married to Bernstine since 2020.

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The safety of Contra Costa residents, including women and girls, is my highest priority, Becton said in a statement to California Black Media. The church where my husband is a pastor has been the subject of misleading news articles that are distorting the facts. The civil case is going to work its way through the courts, and I am confident the truth will come to light.

Becton, a former Contra Costa County Superior Court judge, was appointed the countys 25th District Attorney by the countys supervisors in 2017. The following year, she ran and was elected to the position.

She is currently running for reelection in the June 7 election against prosecutor Mary Knox.

The allegations of sex abuse center around Jesse Armstrong, a former youth choir director at the church, hired by Bernstine.

The victims lawyers allege that Armstrong is a registered sex offender in the state of California and is serving a two-year and eight-month prison sentence for the abuse that allegedly took place over a four-month period.

The lawsuit also claims that Armstrong was twice convicted of sexually abusing at least five minor girls before working at Bethlehem Missionary Baptist Church.

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(Armstrong) used his position as choir youth director to meet, groom and reportedly sexually assault Jane SD Doe, the victims attorneys say. The sexual abuse mentioned in the lawsuit occurred at various locations, including but not limited to, between classes at the plaintiffs school, and at hotels, oftentimes immediately following choir practice or other church events.

The victims attorney questioned Bethlehem Missionary Baptist Churchs hiring process, arguing that a minimal background check would have revealed that Armstrong was a sexual predator.

Either they hired him with no background check, which is the height of negligence, or they knew of his criminal background and hired him anyway which could expose them to criminal liability, the attorneys stated.

Bectons spokesperson Ted Asregadoo said, the events listed in this civil suit occurred in 2012 and these civil claims substantially predate Bectons and Bernstines marriage.

Becton recently told CBM that her priority is keeping the 1.1 million residents of Contra Costa County safe from dangerous and violent criminals.

The reports of the civil lawsuit involving a teenage girl surfaced after Becton, 70, received key endorsements for her reelection campaign and her office was recognized for its involvement in closing a decades-old cold case.

On April 23, Becton, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, and Richmond Acting Police Chief Louie Tirona announced that they identified a man who killed a 28-year-old woman in 1999. The culprit, who died 11 days after the crime, was identified through DNA left at the scene.

Becton has also received backlash from some members of law enforcement for her stance in another case. In April 2021, she announced charges for felony voluntary manslaughter, felony assault with a semi-automatic firearm and unreasonable force against Andrew Hall, a White Danville police officer and deputy. In October 2021, Hall was convicted for assault with a firearm in the 2018 shooting of Laudemer Arboleda, a 33-year-old Filipino American man.

In March, a Contra Costa Superior Court judge sentenced Hall to six years in prison.

Knox, a registered Democrat who has served as a Contra Costa County prosecutor for 37 years, is running against Becton.

Becton blames the timing of the current reports on her opponent.

It is outrageous that my opponent is using this case to try to score political points and for political gain days before ballots get into the hands of voters. I wont be doing the same, Becton stated.
California 22 Primary Election: Black Candidates Running for US House of Representatives

Election offices have begun sending out vote-by-mail ballots for the June 7, 2022, California Primary. Statewide, voters will discover that Black candidates for United States House of Representative seats are over-represented on their ballots.

California Black Media (CBM) is reporting that 18 Black candidates are running for 14 US House seats. Eleven are registered as Democrats and seven are running as Republicans. Nine are women and nine are men.

Although African Americans are 5.8% of California residents, Black candidates are on ballots for 26.9% of the US House seats.

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Californias delegation to the US House of Representative will have 52 members in the next Congress. While it is the still the largest delegation, one seat was lost due to a decline in population count from the 2020 US census. Congressional district population following the 2020 census is about 761,169 people.

A consequence of losing a US House seat is that district boundaries have been redrawn by the independent California Citizens Redistricting Commission (CCRC) and many district numbers have been reassigned. For example, Rep. Barbara Lee, one of the three Black members of the California delegation, currently represents House District 13 and is running to represent District 12. However, the district numbers for the other Black representatives, Maxine Waters (District 43), who is running for re-election, and Karen Bass (District 37), who has decided to run for mayor of Los Angeles have not changed.

The Black candidates running for Congress are:

Democrat Kermit Jones is a Navy veteran and an internal medicine doctor who has a law degree. He is running to represent District 3 (Yuba). He is running against three opponents. This district leans Republican. No current member of Congress is on the ballot for this race.

Republican Jimih L. Jones is a parts advisor for a car dealership. He is running to represent District 4 (Napa). He has five opponents. This is a solid Democratic district. Rep. Mike Thompson (D) is running in this race.

Republican Tamika Hamilton, a former Air Force Sergeant, is running to represent District 6 (Fair Oaks). She has six opponents. This is a solid Democratic district. Rep. Ami Bera (D) is running in this race.

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Two Black candidates are in the competition to represent District 12 (Oakland). Democrat Barbara Lee is a current member of Congress representing District 13 (Oakland). Democrat Eric Wilson is a Nonprofit Organization Employee. Five candidates are on the ballot. This is a solid Democratic district.

Republican Brian E. Hawkins is a Councilmember and Pastor. He is running to represent District 25 (Riverside). He has four opponents. This is a solid Democratic district. Rep. Raul Ruiz (D) is running in this race.

Democrat Quaye Quartey is a US Naval Academy graduate, veteran, and entrepreneur. He is running to represent District 27 (Santa Clarita). He has five opponents. This district is predicted to be a toss-up for Democrats and Republicans. Rep. Mike Garcia (R) is running in this race.

Republican Ronda Kennedy is a Civil Rights Attorney. She is running to represent District 30 (Burbank). She has eight opponents. This is a solid Democratic district. Rep. Adam Schiff (D) is running in this race.

Democrat Aarika Samone Rhodes is a teacher. She is running to represent District 32 (Sherman Oaks). She has six opponents. This is a solid Democratic district. Rep. Brad Sherman (D) is running in this race.

Republican Joe E. Collins III is a Retired Navy Sailor. He is running to represent District 36 (Torrance). He has seven opponents. This is a solid Democratic district. Rep. Ted W. Lieu (D) is running in this race.

Three Black candidates are running to represent District 37 (Los Angeles). Democrat Jan C. Perry is a Community Investment Executive and former LA City Councilmember. Democrat Sydney Kamlager is a California State Senator. Democrat Daniel W. Lee is Mayor of Culver City. Seven candidates are on the ballot. This is a solid Democratic district. Rep. Karen Bass (D) currently represents this district.

Republican Aja Smith is a small business owner. She is running to represent District 39 (Moreno Valley). She has six opponents. This is a solid Democratic district. Rep. Mark Takano (D) is running in this race.

Democrat William Moses Summerville is a Pastor and hospice chaplain. He is running to represent District 42 (Long Beach). He has seven opponents. This is a solid Democratic district. No current member of Congress is on the ballot for this race.

Two Black candidates are on the ballot to represent District 43 (Los Angeles). Democrat Maxine Waters is a member of Congress representing this district. Republican Allison Pratt is a youth advocate and mother. Four candidates are running for the seat. This is a solid Democratic district.

Democrat Morris Falls Griffin is a maintenance technician. He is running to represent District 44 (San Pedro). He has two opponents. This is a solid Democratic district. Nanette Diaz Barragan (D), a current Member of Congress, is running in this race.

In the June 7 primary election, the two candidates receiving the most votes  regardless of party preference  move on to the November 8 general election. If a candidate receives a majority of the vote (at least 50% plus 1) a general election still must be held.

The Black candidates winning the general election will serve in the 118th Congress and be sworn in next January.
Can Federal Lynching Law Help Heal America?

For three centuries lynching was a standard practice in the cruel treatment of Black men, women, and children in America. Even after slavery, Blacks from 1882  1959 were lynched on average every six days, totaling at least 4,733 brutal deaths, according to researchers at the Tuskegee Institute.

Now, after more than a century of advocacy, legislation declaring lynching a federal crime was recently signed into law. Despite decades of senseless delays, this new law pushes America to finally acknowledge that racism often correlates to a level of violence and terror woven into the very fabric of this country.

Centuries of lynching, brutality and unspeakable violence against Black people in U.S. history was considered normal, even Christian, according to author Terry Anne Scott in her new book, Lynching and Leisure.

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Church socials were organized around lynching of Black people. White families and children posed for photos with the hanging corpses and even sent these grotesque images through the mail as postcards. This sociopathic behavior manifests as a total absence of conscience as violence and harm are inflicted upon others. It is recognized today as a severe personality disorder and/ or mental derangement.

Those vile and unlawful acts traumatized more than just the victims, family, and friends. Lynching sent a chilling message through entire communities: this is for you, too, if you dare to upend the racial hierarchy that puts Whites ahead of Blacks in every aspect of society.

Though it can be disturbing to acknowledge, this country sanctioned these hideous acts before this law was enacted; that remains one of Americas hidden truths. With no federal law deeming lynching illegal, America could turn a blind eye to these atrocities.

Sponsored by U.S. Rep. Bobby L. Rush in the House (D-Ill) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) in the Senate, the Senate unanimously passed the Emmet Till Anti-Lynching Legislation, and House approved it 422 to 3. With this law finally in place, the dawning of a racial reckoning in the United States seems more believable than ever before.

In 2020, George Floyds brutal murder sparked global outrage, protests, and demands for racial equity  sentiments expressed with deepened intensity and purpose. COVID-19 has killed more than six million people and devastated families around the world. Today, scenes of suffering and destruction in Ukraine grip us all. The collective outpouring of grief may be creating a special moment.

We are saturated with pain and loss, contributing to a higher, increased capacity for empathy and compassion. Is it possible these heart-wrenching narratives merged into our collective consciousness and produced an environment where 100 years of failure to produce a federal lynching law was transformed, paving the way for a milestone accomplishment?

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All people of color can now celebrate this victory as Black people were not the only race to suffer from lynching. The inspiration and name behind this legislation stems from Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black youth from Chicago lynched in 1955 near Money, Mississippi after Whites believed he offended a White woman in a grocery store.

In other parts of the nation, the pain and suffering from lynching was also felt throughout history. In the 1800s, across the frontier, 137 Native Americans were lynched. During the Los Angeles Chinese Massacre of 1871, a mob killed 19 Chinese immigrants, 15 of whom were hanged, some after they were shot.

The homegrown terrorism that allowed the lynching of colored people draws similar parallels to the current 24/7 war coverage in Ukraine that the rest of the world continues to watch. The world has a front-row seat to witness the pure terror brought on by Russias invasion of Ukraine.

This cruel and maniacal destruction of a country, community, and people is devastating to watch, yet it follows patterns of terrorists perpetuating lies to justify their violence, denying that said violence ever happened, and showing no compassion, empathy, or concern for their victims. But this is not a new concept.

This pattern of terrorism has happened repeatedly throughout history. Americas institutionalized and structured racism inspired the Nazi horror that precipitated World War II. In his book, Hitlers American Model, author James Q. Whitman writes that the Nuremberg Laws, the legislative formation of the Nazis anti-Jewish push, evolved as the regime studied race policies in America.

The world is currently witnessing an extreme manifestation of that same terror and entitlement to brutalize Ukraine through Russias occupancy. Similarly, White people feeling empowered to wield cruelty and violence during slavery resulted in immense suffering, broken promises, and violence post Reconstruction and during the Jim Crow era.

Those patterns symbolize an outgrowth of racism and racial hierarchy built into the structure of our government. It threatens our humanity and very survival as a community at large.

Passing this anti-lynching legislation and fully supporting Ukraine in its time of crisis indicates that America is ready to unite and dismiss the idea of devaluing human life and humanity based on a fallacy of ultimate power and authoritarianism. Even in todays polarized times, progress continues; a reminder that our hearts must open before mindsets can change.

The unique aspect of Russias War on Ukraine gives way for more open-mindedness on the topic because White people are terrorizing other White people, in a bedeviling war where combatants are bound by similar skin color, culture, and even language in some cases. Meanwhile, ongoing atrocities perpetrated in Syria, Yemen, Africa, and other places around the globe have not received the same exposure and media coverage that generates massive outpouring of emotional denunciation and condemnation of these actions.

Now, the world begins to open its heart at a time when the broader public can draw a mutual connection and relationship with those people represented in the images coming from Ukraine. The Emmet Till Anti-Lynching Law provides proof that America can push forward and evolve, even finding bi-partisan consensus to bridge entrenched division at a critical moment. Perhaps an environment is emerging where Congress will continue to act on proposals addressing centuries of slavery and racism in America.

Showing compassion for those opposing your beliefs is a key component of racial healing. A democracy cannot survive without a critical mass of the population having empathy and care for those perceived as different and holding alternative views. The war in Ukraine illustrates what can happen when false narratives enable violence. This monumental moment could be propelling America on a journey towards healing and transformation.

Dr. Gail C. Christopher, executive director of the National Collaborative for Health Equity, is the former Senior Advisor and Vice President of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and architect of the Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation framework. Her newly released book, Rx Racial Healing, is a narrative of her understanding of the power of racism and the need for healing.
Enslaved people finally honored in South Carolina beach town

When Gerry Thompson recently purchased his new home in Surfside Beach, he was missing a critical piece of information.

The home had been built on a cemetery where enslaved people from a nearby plantation and their descendants had been buried.

Im kind of gobsmacked that this was part of that cemetery, he said. I feel bad about it. I wish there had never been houses built on here, personally.

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The cemetery that Thompsons and his neighbors homes sit on top of was part of the former Ark Plantation, a nearly 3,200 acre slave plantation where owner John Tillman grew indigo _ a purplish-blue colored plant used to make dyes _ that he shipped to Europe.

Several dozen enslaved Africans _ 63 as of an 1860 survey _ worked and lived on the Ark Plantation and historians believe scores of people could be buried in the cemetery. Official death records exist for around 60 people.

Now, Surfside Beach is honoring that part of the towns history.

On May 3, town officials, local historians and members of the Surfside Beach Historical Society unveiled a series of historical markers and informational plaques detailing the lands history.

This is something weve been working on for a long time and its a good feeling to see that its here and its presented in such a way that its going to be remembered, said Cad Holmes, an Horry County resident who works as an amateur historian. Holmes is also a newly-elected member of the historical society.

Its our legacy, Holmes added. History is something that shouldnt be swept under the rug.

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BURIALS AT THE ARK CEMETERY

Enslaved people working and living at the Ark Plantation, for generations, were buried near the plantation house. Its not known how many people are buried there, but Holmes said hes found death certificates for more than 60 people. Forty-nine of those people are named on a plaque at the site, including Sabe Rutledge, who Holmes is descended from.

Rutledge lived at least part of his early life on the plantation, Holmes said.

Holmes explained that identifying the people buried was difficult because few of the graves were marked, and death certificates he was able to find only date back to the mid-1800s.

Holmes, on one of the historical markers, described Rutledges funeral in 1952, in which family members followed a mule driven wagon carrying Rutledges casket. Holmes attended the funeral as a child.

(Rutledges) desire to be buried there was also prompted by earlier generations local Gullah belief, `If you were buried by water flowing into the ocean your soul could find its way back to Africa, the marker reads. We still remember the crying and the singing of the people.

The historical markers note that traditions of the Gullah Geechee people, who were formerly enslaved along the coasts of the Carolinas and Georgia, would have people buried with personal belongings and marked graves with broken glass or other light-reflecting materials.

The traditions, Holmes explained, called for buried people to face East and be near water so that their souls could return to Africa.

Some of the burials, according to Joyce Suliman, are as shallow as 12 inches. Suliman helped coordinate the historical markers and herself owns a home that was built on top of the cemetery.

The cemetery was used for burials up through the 1950s and was very active, she said. After discovering that her home was built atop the cemetery, Suliman said she worked with Horry County officials to run a ground-penetrating radar over her backyard and other areas to locate the burials.

Its not clear when the homes were originally built on the cemetery as Horry County land records for the area only date back to the late 1980s.

Robert Blomquist, a spokesperson for Surfside Beach, said the town couldnt immediately comment on when the homes were first built, and couldnt comment on why they were built on the site.

The Town cannot speak to the decisions of the past, we can only look to the future, Blomquist said. Were proud and thankful for all the Surfside Beach Historical Society has done to identify areas of historical significance in our Town.

Suliman said that as she advocated for Surfside Beach to officially recognize the cemetery she butted heads with locals and builders.

I think this is truly what the general public needed to see because we had a lot of conflict with people believing this was a burial ground, she said. In fact, if looks could kill, I would have been dead ten times over.

Suliman said her next goal is for Surfside Beach to dedicate the two historical sites as a park so that the historical society can apply for grants and build a gazebo.

WHAT HAPPENED AT THE ARK PLANTATION?

Sitting behind a large sand dune meant to protect it from storms, the Ark Plantation house was a large wooden building erected sometime before the mid-1700s.

After Elisha Tillman died in 1824, his son, John Tillman, took over the plantation and ran it until his death in 1865.

The plantation originally grew indigo which Holmes said was often shipped to Europe for use in clothes and uniforms.

After emancipation, Holmes said, freed slaves made their way to the Freewoods, Burgess and Holmestown Road area of Horry County. Some of the former slaves traveled up the Waccamaw River to Darlington, Holmes said, and some returned to Horry County after the Civil War ended.

Those formerly enslaved people, Holmes said, set about making the water-logged land they managed to purchase into farmable land. For generations, Holmes said, Black families farmed in the Burgess area, acquiring more land as they could. That legacy today is carried on by a handful of Black farmers who still grow crops on inherited and acquired land in the area.

Holmes ancestors worked and lived on the Ark Plantation, including Rutledge, who he referred to as an uncle.

Rutledge and his father, Holmes said, worked as overseers on the plantation. He said he suspects that Tillman may have been Rutledges father, though he doesnt have concrete proof.

After emancipation, Holmes said Black people werent welcome in the Surfside Beach area. He recalled that Black residents could only fish in the area after dark.

The only time we could come down here was to fish, we couldnt go on the beach, he said.

The Ark Plantation house was later used as an inn for travelers.

Suliman said the markers were necessary to inform residents of the history of their town. She wishes she could have intervened sooner.

It was a shame we could not preserve it, she said.

For residents like Thompson, the history is sobering.

Im a Christian, I pray they Rest In Peace and have peace because I think thats terrible, he said. Its terrible to put houses over graves.
First AME  L.A. Hosts Rock the Vacx Clinic

Free vaccinations are available at the Rock the Vacx Clinic hosted by First AME Church of Los Angeles. Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson and Johnson vaccines are open to children ages 5 and up as well as adults. Also, guests can obtain free COVID testing and enjoy free food trucks and free hair cuts.

No appointment or insurance are required, visitors are only asked to bring proof of vaccination and valid identification, said Pastor J. Edgar Boyd.

The next Rock the Vacx Clinic will be held on Saturday, May 14, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., at the YMCA, 3820 Santa Roslia Drive in Los Angeles. On Saturday, May 21 and Saturday, May 28, FAME will host the clinic on its campus located at 2270 S. Harvard Blvd., in Los Angeles.

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To learn more, call (323) 735-1251.
Govt Invests $145 Million in Re-Entry Programs for Formerly Incarcerated People

After serving a 22-year sentence in a California prison, James Morgan, 51, found himself facing a world of opportunities that he did not imagine he would have as an ex-convict once sentenced to life for attempted murder.

Morgan, a Carson native, says he is grateful for a second chance at life, and he has taken full advantage of opportunities presented him through California state reentry and rehabilitation programs.

After completing mental health care for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Morgan was released from prison and granted parole in 2018.

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I did not expect what I found when I got out, Morgan told California Black Media (CBM), explaining that he was fortunate to participate in a program for the formerly incarcerated in San Francisco.

I was mandated by the courts to spend a year in transitional housing, said Morgan. Those guys walked us through everything. They made it really easy. It was all people I could relate to, and they knew how to talk to me because they used to be in the prison population  and they were from where we were from.

Morgan says he also took lessons on anger management and time management.

Now, he is currently an apprentice in Local 300 Laborers Union, specializing in construction, after he participated in a pre-apprenticeship program through ARC (the Anti-Recidivism Coalition).

Right now, Im supporting my family, Morgan said. Id say Im doing pretty good because I hooked up with the right people.

Supporters of criminal justice reform say Morgans success story in California is particularly encouraging.

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Black men in the Golden State are imprisoned nearly 10 times the rate of their White counterparts, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. And just a little over a decade ago in 2011, the Supreme Court of the United States ordered California to reduce the number of inmates in its overcrowded prison system by 33,000. Of that population, nearly 30% were Black men even though they account for about 5 % of the states population.

To help more formerly incarcerated people like Morgan get back on their feet after paying their debt to society, last month, the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Labor announced that the federal government is investing $145 million over the course of the next fiscal year to support reentry programs across the country.

The Biden-Harris Administration also announced plans to expand federal job opportunities and loan programs, expand access to health care and housing, and develop and amplify educational opportunities for the formerly and currently incarcerated.

Its not enough to just send someone home, its not enough to only help them with a job. Theres got to be a holistic approach, said Chiraag Bains, deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council on Racial Justice and Equity.

Bains told CBM that that reentry programs help establish an incarceration-to-employment pipeline.

The White House announced the programs late last month as President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of 75 people and granted pardons to another three, including Abraham Bolden, the first Black Secret Service agent on White House detail.

Bolden was sentenced to 39 months in prison in 1964 for allegedly attempting to sell classified Secret Service documents. He has always maintained his innocence.

Today, I granted pardons to three people and commuted the sentences of 75 people. America is a nation of laws, but we are also a nation of second chances, redemption, and rehabilitation, Biden tweeted April 26.

According to Bains, about half of the people the President pardoned are Black or Brown.

The president has spoken repeatedly about the fact that we have too many people serving time in prison for nonviolent drug offenses and too many of those people are Black and Brown, said Bains. This is a racial equity issue.

Both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have faced sharp criticisms in the past for supporting tough-on-crime policies as U.S. Senator and California Attorney General, respectively, that have had disproportionately targeted Blacks and other minorities.

According to a 2021 Stanford University Study, reentry programs in California have contributed to a 37 % decrease in the average re-arrest rate over the period of a year and a 92 % decrease during the same time.

Over the last decade, California has funded a number of initiatives supporting reentry and rehabilitation. In 2015, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation launched the Male Community Re-Entry Program (MCRP) that provides community-based rehabilitative services in Butte, Kern, Los Angeles and San Diego Counties. The Butte program services Tehama, Nevada, Colusa, Glenn, Sutter, Placer and Yuba counties.

A year later, Gov. Newsoms office introduced the California Community Reinvestment Grant Program. The initiative funds community groups providing services like job placement, mental health treatment, housing and more to people, including the formerly incarcerated, who were impacted by the War on the Drugs.

Morgan spoke highly of programs that helped him reintegrate into society  both in prison and after he was released.

In hindsight, I look back at it and Im blown away by all of the ways that theyve helped me, Morgan said.
Harris urges grads to tackle problems in unsettled world

Vice President Kamala Harris urged graduates of Tennessee State University on May 7, to apply their leadership skills to help tackle the multitude of challenges posed by an unsettled world.

In her undergraduate commencement speech at the historically Black university in Nashville, Harris said the Class of 2022 stands on the brink of a new frontier, pointing to the prospects of more breakthroughs in technology and medical research.

But with war raging in Ukraine, the risks from climate change and basic freedoms under threat in the United States, graduates are stepping off into an uncertain future, she said.

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The vice president also stressed her connection to the Tennessee State graduates as a fellow graduate of another historically Black university. She recalled seeing Howard University, her alma mater, the first time she flew on the vice presidential helicopter. While reminiscing about her time as a student, she said it reinforced the realization that I could be anything, do anything, even if it had never been done before _ like you.

Harris _ the first female U.S. vice president, and the first Black woman and person of South Asian descent in the role _ received a rousing welcome from the commencement crowd.

While the graduates are entering a world full of possibility, the vice president also pointed to a series of challenges threatening fundamental principles across the globe and in the United States.

Russias invasion of Ukraine threatens international rules and norms, Harris said. In the U.S., she pointed to the need to protect voting rights and womens rights.

You graduate into an unsettled world both abroad and here at home, Harris said. In the United States, we are once again forced to defend fundamental principles that we hoped were long settled, she said. Principles like the freedom to vote, the rights of women to make decisions about their own bodies. Even what constitutes the truth, especially in an era when anyone can post anything online and claim it is a fact.

Harris pointed to roiling issues like climate change that have accelerated and other problems that have long persisted  disparities in wealth, access to health care and in the criminal justice system.

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And graduates, I look at this unsettled world and yes, I then see the challenges, she said. But Im here to tell you, I also see the opportunities. The opportunities for your leadership.

In stressing their potential, she told the graduates that they survived a global pandemic and have the advantage of growing up in the digital age.

There is no limit to your capacity for greatness and there is no obstacle you cannot overcome, she said. And there is no barrier you cannot break.
More than 23,000 visitors attended the 29th edition of Arabian Travel Market (ATM) 2022, as industry leaders gathered at Dubai World Trade Centre (DWTC) to share insights into the future of international travel and tourism.

In addition to doubling our visitor numbers year-on-year, ATM 2022 hosted 1,500 exhibitors and attendees from 150 countries, commented Danielle Curtis, Exhibition Director ME for Arabian Travel Market.

These figures are especially impressive given that lockdowns are still taking place in China and other destinations. Whats more, the development of the travel and tourism sector throughout the Middle East region shows no signs of abating, with GCC hotel construction contract awards set to rise by 16 percent this year alone.

The value of UAE and Saudi Arabian projects accounted for 90 percent of all regional hospitality contracts awarded in 2021, according to research from BNC Network. With analysis from Colliers International forecasting that $4.5 billion worth of hotel construction contracts will be awarded in the GCC during 2022, industry experts took to the ATM Global Stage for a panel discussion about the future of the regions hospitality industry.

Moderated by Paul Clifford, Group Editor  Hospitality at ITP Media Group, the panel discussion featured insights from Christopher Lund, Director  Head of Hotels MENA at Colliers International; Mark Kirby, Head of Hospitality at Emaar Hospitality Group; Tim Cordon, Area Senior Vice President  Middle East and Africa at Radisson Hotel Group; and Judit Toth, Founder and CEO of Vivere Hospitality.

Commenting on the need to attract and retain talent within the Middle Easts hospitality sector, Cordon said: The organisations that get this right are going to benefit because, of course, we know how expensive it is to bring new people into our business and its even more expensive if you lose them. I dont think you can talk about the future of hospitality without talking about the future of talent.

Toth pointed out that it was equally important to educate industry professionals on the priorities and mindset of younger employees and guests alike. The younger generation think completely differently. They live in a world of crypto and NFTs. How are they going to be able to bring their ideas and talents into the [hotel] business? And remember, on the other side, your new and future customers are also coming from the same background, with the same motivations and understanding. So, its a matter of bringing in new talent that shares common ground with new customers.

Speaking on the continued importance of nationalisation efforts, Emaar Hospitality Groups Kirby said: Emiratisation coexists with how we develop our leadership teams to operate hotels. We focus on leadership at this level to come from within, [drawing on] internal talent. The fact that were growing and opening new hotels helps us, because it provides opportunities for our existing team members to move up.

As part of the conference agenda for the fourth and final day of ATM 2022, representatives from Atlas, Wego Middle East and Alibaba Cloud MEA took to the ATM Travel Tech Stage to explore how data is changing airline retailing. Panellists shared insights into how to build data-led organisations, and why companies that successfully harness travel data today will be most likely to succeed in the longer term.

The morning sessions included a session hosted by WTM Responsible Tourism, on the ATM Global Stage, focusing on how the latest innovations can be used to promote responsible technology for travel and tourism. Concluding this years edition of ATM, afternoon sessions included a discussion about the return and rise of city tourism.

The final day of the live event also included the announcement of ATM 2022s Best Stand Design and Peoples Choice Award, which were presented to Saudia for its futuristic and striking concept. Other stands awarded for their creativity included the Department of Culture and Tourism  Abu Dhabi, Jumeirah International, Ishraq International and TBS/Vbooking.

ATM 2022 has provided a timely opportunity for the global travel and tourism sector to gather in Dubai and explore the future of our industry. Innovation, sustainability, technology and talent acquisition and retention will be crucial to its long-term success, concluded Curtis.

Meanwhile, video-sharing platform Welcome to the World secured up to $500,000 of investment after winning the inaugural ATM Draper-Aladdin Startup Competition on the ATM Travel Tech Stage.

Following the success of the hybrid approach adopted for last years edition, the live ATM 2022 will be followed by ATM Virtual, which will take place on May 17 and 18.  TradeArabia News Service
In Rightful Remembrance of Min. Malcolm:Valuing our Lives, Work and Struggle

This is again a sankofa offering for rightful remembrance and reflection on our honored ancestor and beloved teacher, El Hajj Malik El Shabazz.

If we are to rightfully remember Min. Malcolm, we must seriously grasp and practice what he so meticulously taught us about valuing our lives, our work and our struggle. Here I use grasp to mean take in hand and heart his legacy, study and understand it, and hold it firmly as a valuable heritage and framework for continuing forward.

Whether it is on his day of birth or his day of sacrifice and martyrdom, or any other day of the year, remembering and honoring him must offer some meaningful expression and evidence that his life and teachings help shape how we live our lives, do our work and wage our struggles to be ourselves, free ourselves, develop ourselves and come into the fullness of ourselves.

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So, our ceremonies and rituals of remembrance, of raising and praising his name and drawing lessons from his life, work and struggle are all good. But in the final analysis, Min. Malcolm would ask how does it translate into a meaningful and transformative practice? That is to say, how does it help inspire, anchor, orient and expand what we think, feel, say and do?

In other words, how does our honoring him reflect and reaffirm that we use his life lessons to bring out the best of who we are and must become and continue to be as persons and a people?

In his famous eulogy for Min. Malcolm, the esteemed activist actor, Ossie Davis, tells us that in honoring him, we honor the best in ourselves. And this honoring of him, must be through emulating him in the way he lived his life, did his work and waged his struggles of life and liberation.

It is what we see as best in him that we must raise up, praise and pursue. For that which is the best in him is the best in us in capacity and potential, perhaps in lesser measure, but in no less value or meaning.

For we all have inherent, transcendent, equal and inalienable worthiness, and we bring to the world our own unique gifts, talents, capacities and potentials. And we must, Minister Malcolm teaches us, strive mightily to fully realize them and use them to bring good in the world as both persons and a people.

This is the meaning of his teaching that a race of people is like an individual . . .; until it uses its own talent, takes pride in its own history, expresses its own culture, (and) affirms its own selfhood, it can never fulfill itself.

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Indeed, this means that we must think in new, liberated and liberating ways about how we live our lives, do our work and wage our struggle. For as Min. Malcolm taught, the logic of the oppressed cannot be the logic of the oppressor, if they want liberation.

And if we want to live good, meaningful and expansive lives, liberation and the liberation struggle as well as the practice of freedom on every level must be at the center of what we consider important and urgent. Here he teaches us that it is in the knowledge, embrace and practice of the best of our culture and history that we affirm our selfhood and fully realize the best of ourselves.

Min. Malcolm wants us to see our lives as sacred, endowed by the Creator with a nature that leads toward righteousness, but which must be fully realized and reaffirmed in our daily striving and struggle to practice the good and to be caring, just, truthful and upright in our relations with each other. He wants us to recognize (and respect) each other as brothers and sisters, and to self-consciously stop and avoid injury and injustice to ourselves and each other.

For we, like other humans, intentionally and unintentionally, sometimes and too often in the context of our oppression, injure and act unjustly toward each other through physical violence and the psychological violence of disrespect and degradation. But here again we must resist, resist emulating our oppressor and struggle to prefigure in our daily lives the good world we want, work and struggle for.

Also, Haji Malcolm taught, we injure ourselves and each other by bad habits that harm or destroy our health and by negative practices which make us unworthy in relationships of love, work and struggle. And again, given the shared nature of our lives, work and struggle, even if it seems persons are only injuring themselves, in a larger sense, they are injuring us also, causing suffering in the community, and weakening its capacity for the life it must live, the work it must do and the struggle it must wage.

Seba Malcolm, as a communitarian moral teacher, i.e., one who always places what we do in the context of community and its affect on the community, in addition argues that we are also greatly unjust and injurious to ourselves when we are unjust and injurious to each other. For we are linked in community and shared humanity with each other.

It is worth noting that Nana Malcolm argues that failing to work and contribute to the best of our ability is an injustice and injury to oneself and also to the community. He calls such half-stepping and being trifling sinning against oneself, against our personal and collective self. Thus, he says, idleness and laziness (are) among the Black mans greatest sins against himself.

Indeed, he says, Heaven requires hard work. Here he speaks not only of heaven related to the promise of the good in the afterlife, but of that also which promises a good life in the here-and-now, free from the hell of oppression in its various evil and earthly forms.

Seba Malcolm, then, is not offering any narrow notion of personal purging and self-strengthening, but wants us to link all we do to a more expansive concept of our identity, purpose and direction as a world historical people, self-consciously and actively committed to freedom, justice, physical, psychological and material well-being, peace, reciprocal respect and caring and other shared goods in the world.

Thus, our beloved teacher Seba Malcolm wants us to struggle to end human suffering and oppression and to honor our history and culture of struggle and of being a moral and social vanguard in the world. And he wants us to free ourselves from any of the varied vices, values and practices which diminish or undermine our capacity to develop our full potential, exercise our capacities in the work and struggle for liberation, human flourishing and ultimately the well-being of the world.

Finally, Seba Malcolm, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, wants us to live, work and struggle for liberation and the good in unity and harmony, born of knowledge, understanding, love and patience. He says we must constantly study and learn each other, even when we think we already know each other as persons and a people. Often, he says, we injure ourselves and each other and are unable to unite and act for common good out of lack of knowledge or light as he calls it.

We need enlightenment concerning the whole world he teaches. But especially, We need more light about each other. For Light creates understanding; understanding creates love; love creates patience; and patience creates unity. And through this unity a united front can be brought about with which we can confront our oppressor, end our oppression and contribute definitively to ending oppression in the world.

Min. Malcolm X, our honored ancestor and beloved teacher, then, wants us to take our lives, work and struggle seriously. He sees us in world-encompassing ways and wants us to do likewise. Indeed, Seba Malcolm assures us we are a key part of the global struggle for freedom and justice in the world.

And thus, he tells and teaches us that What we do here in regaining our self-respect, our manhood (and womanhood), our dignity and freedom helps all people everywhere who are fighting against oppression and also contributes significantly to opening up a new history and horizon of possibilities for humankind.

Dr. Maulana Karenga, Professor and Chair of Africana Studies, California State University-Long Beach; Executive Director, African American Cultural Center (Us); Creator of Kwanzaa; and author of Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community and Culture and Introduction to Black Studies, 4th Edition, www.OfficialKwanzaaWebsite.org; www.MaulanaKarenga.org.
L.A. Faith Leaders Stand Together for Karen Bass, Demand Apology from Police Protective League for Defamatory Ad

Major pillars in the faith community gathered at the Los Angeles Sentinel to denounce the alleged claims against Congresswoman Karen Bass on Wednesday, May 11.

The presidents of the Baptist Ministers Conference of Los Angeles, Western Baptist State Convention, AME Ministerial Alliance, California Missionary Baptist State Convention and other faith leaders from across Los Angeles are calling for a retraction from the unionized group, Los Angeles Police Protective League, along with an apology, to improve community-police relations.

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The unions ad painted a picture that tied Bass to the USC allegations against former Councilmember Mark Ridley-Thomas. The ad illustrated their claim by alleging that she accepted $95,000 in free tuition for an online Masters degree program at the USC School of Social Work while serving in Congress almost 10 years ago. However, Bass request to receive the tuition grant was approved by the House Committee on Ethics, according to Los Angeles Times.

The unionized ad is 30-seconds long and valued at approximately $2 million to run across five major television networks. Los Angeles Times stated that Bass has moved forward with sending cease-and-desist letters to those media outlets on Tuesday, May 10.

Faith leaders in attendance included the Rev. Dr. Benjamin J. Hardwick, pastor of Praises of Zion Baptist Church and president of the Western Baptist State Convention; the Rev. K.W. Tulloss, pastor of Weller Street Missionary Baptist Church and president of the Baptist Ministers Conference of Los Angeles and Southern California; the Rev. John E. Cager III, pastor of Ward AME Church and president of the AME Ministerial Alliance; the Rev. E. Wayne Gaddis, president of the California Missionary Baptist State Convention; and other ministers from across Los Angeles.

Looking at the actions made by the L.A. police union, the faith-based leaders shared the extent of the damage that this incident has done to the relationship between police and people of color within the collective community.

The leaders emphasized the following points about the ad:

Bad for the city  As crime ticks up in our city and all around the country, the Los Angeles Police Union should be focused on fighting crime, not fighting Karen Bass.

Bad for community relations  Spending $2 million to attack a community leader like Karen Bass  someone who has spent her entire life fighting for us  will only hurt community-police relations.

Bad timing  We are at a sensitive time for our city. How are police leaders responding? By attacking a public servant with deep ties in the community she has served for decades on the heels of a nationwide racial reckoning and the 30th anniversary of the Civil Unrest. LAPPL should be helping us move forward, not backward.

The faith leaders also questioned what benefit the union has to gain from mudslinging Bass, seeing how a key component of her campaign is dedicated to increasing and evolving the Los Angeles Police Department. Beyond running for mayor, Bass has been an advocate for building better relationships between law enforcement and citizens across the nation.

According to Spectrum News 1, she called for more LAPD patrols in light of speculation that Angelenos do not feel safe. Also, Bass public safety strategy calls for citizens to be hired to replace officers assigned to desk tasks, which allows more police to patrol the streets.

According to a recent report by LAPD Chief Michel Moore, the agency now has 9,521 sworn members, which is 185 fewer than the 9,706 sworn members allocated for the fiscal year.

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Tulloss opened the press conference by stating, We are here gathered together with faith community leaders across our city, denominational leaders in response to the $2 million ad by the L.A. police union and their attack against Congresswoman Karen Bass.

He continued, We are here to voice our concern and our displeasure of the police union, what they did in this ad was very bad for the city. With crime at a whole time high, this is an opportunity for the police to focus on the crime problem in our city and not attacking one of our local and elected Black officials, Karen Bass.

Cager shared similar concerns by stating, Its an old playbook. Karen Bass is the author of the George Floyd Justice and Policing Act  the police union commits millions of dollars to get rid of her.

The Ward AME Church pastor noted, Weve seen it in Los Angeles before when the police union sided with Sam Yorty against Tom Bradley over 50 years ago.

Los Angeles has moved on from the politics of race baiting from the time when victory was determined by dividing the White westside [residents] and the White valley [residents] from people of color, he said.

This is a time for Los Angeles to come together, and we call on all of the candidates in this race and every race to rebuke and resist the cheap politics of race baiting and to draw Los Angeles together, concluded Cager.

We further condemn the police union for continuing fan the flames of racial politics.
Lets Really Talk About Homelessness

Homelessness is at an all-time high in Los Angeles, right now, with over 40,000 citizens living on the street. With this becoming a city-wide crisis, it may lead one to ask  are we (city officials, citizens, and individual communities) genuinely doing enough to help fellow Angelenos in need?

While there are multiple platforms that work to fight for and help homeless people, members of these homeless communities feel as though they still do not have the proper resources and support.

This is what led Teri Rogers, Skid Row survivor, to start her own non-profit organization, Breaking Stigmas Treatment Operation.

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Breaking Stigmas Treatment Operation works to advocate for those who are currently suffering from homelessness, mental health and issues regarding substance abuse and womens health.

After graduating from a recovery center back in 2019, I felt the need to be in service and help others through my lived experience, Rogers told the LAS in an interview.

Along with graduating from the recovery center, 2019 also came the release of Game Girls, a Breaking Glass Pictures documentary that followers Rogers and her girlfriend, Tiahna Vince, as they navigate life and their relationship through the chaotic world of Los Angeles Skid Row.

Through her organization, Rogers also works to support homeless individuals who suffer from the disease of addiction.

It doesnt discriminate, she said passionately. [Addiction] is just as disabling as someone dealing with cancer or an amputated arm or leg. However, those instances are met with sympathy and compassion from both the community and the health industry. We dont get that kind of support.

Rogers took the time to share that life in homelessness is often about the hustle. A typical day on Skid Row all depends on what side youre on.

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Especially in downtown L.A.  theres a lot of hustle and bustle. Drug dealers and drug users are normally up very early with a great work ethic, selling drugs or collecting cans. Everyones on the grind, she said.

But, if youre in the middle, like me, youre normally up packing to relocate for the city workers to clean the streets. Its always very noisy and dirty.

This is why Rogers feels though she has to fight and fight and fight to find a way to bring awareness to the struggles of the homeless community. Her organization works to provide tools such as case management, support and resources, gas cards, community service opportunities and a variety of services that assist people with getting back on their feet. Rogers also provides the homeless population, along with seniors living alone, with food through her catering service.

Are city officials doing the right work? Teri Rogers believes that they dont do enough. While services look good on paper, she noted that those in need often have to jump through fiery loops that frustrate and discourage people from properly taking the steps to pursue help.

I had to advocate for myself very, very, very hard. I almost lost my housing while in treatment, which would have another roadblock [for me]. So, I think we need more homeless prevention options, she said.

Their [city officials and servants] role to me is no depart from all different folks from all different walks of life. You dont have to be uneducated to become a part of Skid Row. Theres a lot of strong people of all different intellects. I just that without stability, its hard to manage everyday life. People are scared already living second-to-second, minute-to-minute.

Rogers shared that the goal is for homeless people to become productive members of society.

Teri believes that the best way that the community could better support homelessness is by not looking down on or judging [homeless people]. [We should know] that any of us could be one paycheck away, decision away, or even trauma-related experience away from losing everything.

She also wanted to make it known that each person suffering from homelessness has their own set of trials and tribulations. Each individual requires a different level of care, some more severe than others, but the judicial systems screw us.

During times of COVID-19, Roger observed that a necessity genuinely needed for unhoused individuals is continued care. Some are able to get services from specific areas that they are living in, however, once it is time to move, the care may no longer be available.

Continued care is very essential in maintaining stability, shared Rogers.

As the year continues, Breaking Stigmas Treatment Operation is looking forward to providing recovery-bred housing (RBH) to those released from custody and rehabilitation centers. The organization hopes that, with this, more people will be able to have easier transitions back into society with a purpose.

Eventually, Id also like to build tiny homes for temporary housing that provide basic living skills to get people back on their feet, Rogers said.

For Rogers personally, as the year continues, she hopes to get herself and others out of poverty. Id also like to provide weekly therapy sessions ran by licensed therapists and financial literacy classes. I want to break the stigmas so that all people can receive whats not being given due to financial qualifications.

To support Teri Rogers and her non-profit Breaking Stigmas Treatment Operation, you can donate to their Cashapp ($BreakingStigmas). You can also follow their Instagram @beyond_stigmas, or visit their website: https://stigmas.info. The documentary Game Girls is available to watch on Amazon Prime.
Stentorians Hope to Increase Diversity in County Fire Department

The fire service is changing, and its an amazing career, said the L.A. Stentorians Captain Kenneth Lee during a recent interview with the Sentinel. Lee heads up the Recruit Prep Program (RPP) for the Stentorians, an association of African Americans within L.A. Countys fire service.

He and other members of the organization are on a mission to encourage young people of color to pursue careers in the fire department and other emergency medical service departments in L.A. County.

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Historically, Lee said, the department had been resistant to hire people of color, so the Stentorians were formed in 1954 as a support system for men and women who wanted to join. Members provided a space for the underrepresented to socialize and to talk about the issues they faced as fire department employees. Almost 70 years later, the organization has become part of the citys unevenly stitched fabric.

Lee and the Stentorians hope to fix some of those stitches with the RPP by helping young people of color to develop success skills and overcome some of the deterrents they may face when trying to become a firefighter or other EMS personnel.

The fire department to even work for them you have to have an [Emergency Medical Tech] certification, Lee explained.

Every person who is a badged personnel in the state of California is also an EMT. The cost of that class is about $1,200. And its offered in various institutions [like] colleges, and usually you need that class now, just to apply, along with getting whats called a CPAT, which is another $350.

Its not often that youre going to find people who are willing to apply for a job thats going to cost them about $1,500 thats just the application. And you still have to go through the background process and you still have to go through the medical

The RPP, said Lee, helps to ensure that young potential recruits are successful in taking the qualifying exams and they are also physically fit. They have mentoring programs and they are currently in the process of getting their own EMT school accredited.

Young people of color typically have more of an engagement with police officers than the average person, he said.

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If you have a record, youre automatically excluded. So, what we do the goal is to not only introduce people to the field but to get to them young enough before they come into these situations where they are ultimately ineligible to even pursue a career in firefighting and we want to make sure they are academically prepared to be successful on those exams, physically fit and in shape so they can perform.

Lee also talked about the explorer program for ages 14 through 18. That program is currently being revamped. But currently, for youth 18 and up, the Stentorians have partnered with the Academy of Emergency Services facilitated by financial help from State Senator, Holly J. Mitchell.

Graduates of the program have the opportunity to gain experience under the academy.

Were here to help and to serve, Lee said.

And if youre someone who cares about the community and has the courage to challenge yourself mentally and physically, [again,] its an amazing career.
Wednesday, May 11, 2022

The U.S. Department of Labor has renewed partnerships with the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to strengthen collaboration with their U.S. embassies and consulates, and to provide information about laws governing workplace safety and health, wages and work hours, and other employment issues individuals from these countries face while working in the United States.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of Labor Julie Su joined El Salvadorean Ambassador Milena Mayorga, Guatemalan Ambassador Alfonso Quinonez and Honduran Charge dAffaires Javier Bu at a signing ceremony at the Frances Perkins Building in Washington, the departments headquarters. They signed letters of arrangement with the departments Occupational Safety and Health Administration and Wage and Hour Division. They also signed partnerships with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Labor Relations Board.

Our joint commitments with the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras ensure that people from these countries working here in the U.S. are aware of the protections our nations labor laws provide, including the right to a safe and healthy workplace, and the right to be paid for all their hard-earned wages, said U.S. Deputy Secretary Labor Julie Su. They should also know that they have the ability to exercise their labor rights freely and participate in our countrys strong economy.

Partnerships like these help the department enforce U.S. labor laws more effectively, especially in high-risk and low-wage industries where violations are more likely to occur. They also help the departments enforcement agencies identify problems workers face to improve and target their outreach efforts.

Hispanic communities contribute to the economies of both America and their countries of origin, said the El Salvadorean Ambassador Milena Mayorga. That is why it is important to use a variety of resources to educate workers and employers about enforceable labor rights.

The government of Guatemala looks forward to its partnership with the Department of Labor on ensuring that Guatemalan migrants in the U.S. work in a safe and healthy environment, are aware of their rights and those are respected while in the U.S., said Guatemalan Ambassador Alfonso Quinonez. We hope that through these partnerships we can work together to foster positive and meaningful relationships between workers and employers, and continue building bridges between our peoples to create more prosperity for our countries.

The partnership we are renewing [this week] is a clear example of goodwill, joint commitment, and efficiency in design of protection mechanisms in favor of the working sector of the migrant population in the United States, said Honduran Charge dAffaires Javier Bu. The agreements that we sign today make this association operational and have a clear focus on articulating efforts and aligning resources to promote respect for the rights of Honduran workers in this great country; it is the right and just thing to do, and it means a well-deserved recognition of the effort and sacrifice of our fellow migrants.

Adapted from U.S. Department of Labor Press Release 22-812-NAT

(mew)

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/international_law/2022/05/workplace-rights-in-central-america.html
Cambodian fishermen were surprised to discover a rare giant stingray they caught by accident in the Mekong River.

The fishermen caught the endangered fish last week in a deep part of the Mekong in Cambodias northeastern Stung Treng province. It measured four meters long and weighed about 180 kilograms.

The giant freshwater stingray is one of Southeast Asias largest and rarest species of fish.

The stingray was caught when it swallowed a smaller fish that had taken a fishermans hook. An international team of experts worked with the fishermen to unhook the fish. The team then examined the stingray before returning it unharmed to the river.

The experts were from Wonders of the Mekong, a U.S. government-financed organization. The group carries out research activities on the Mekong and shares its results with governments and communities along the river.

The Mekong River is Southeast Asias longest, passing through China, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia and Vietnam. About 60 million people depend on the river for food and survival.

The Mekong is an important environment for numerous species, both large and small. But the leader of Wonders of the Mekong, Zeb Hogan, says the rivers underwater ecosystem is poorly understood.

These are unseen worlds, underappreciated and out of sight, Hogan said in a statement from his employer, the University of Nevada.

Speaking to Reuters, Hogan said the catch was significant because it confirms the existence of these big fish in this stretch of river. However, Hogan added that the faraway area is not well studied and is considered under threat.

The area could suffer "devastating ecological effects" if proposed hydropower dam projects move forward, the scientific team said in a statement. Other threats include illegal fishing and large collections of plastic waste.

Hogan has been studying biodiversity in the Mekong for more than 20 years. He told Reuters the reduction in population of some freshwater fish in the river was very concerning.

"Historically, this (part) of river produced 200 billion young fish, Hogan said. Then, during the flooding season, the fish were spread throughout all of Cambodia and even into Vietnam," he added.

Im Bryan Lynn.

Reuters and Agence France-Presse reported on this story. Bryan Lynn adapted the reports for VOA Learning English.

We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page.

____________________________________________________

Words in This Story

species  n. a group of animals or plants that are similar and can produce young animals or plants

hook  n. a curved piece of metal used for hanging things or catching fish

ecosystem  n. everything that exists in a particular environment

underappreciate  v. to not fully appreciate something; appreciate: to understand how good something or someone is

significant  adj. important or noticeable

devastating  adj. making someone very shocked and upset

biodiversity  n. the number and kinds of plants and animals that exist in a particular area or in the world generally
Finland said on Thursday it would apply for NATO membership "without delay. Another Nordic country, Sweden, is also expected to seek membership.

The decision angered Russia, whose military is struggling with its war in Ukraine. Russia invaded Ukraine in part to prevent an expansion of the NATO military alliance.

Finnish President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said in a joint statement, Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay. We hope that the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days.

The announcement signaled that the Nordic country has dropped its position of neutrality that it held throughout the Cold War.

The two leaders added, NATO membership would strengthen Finlands security. As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defense alliance.

Finlands inclusion in NATO would bring the military alliances expansion right up to the Russian border. Finland has the longest border with Russia out of all the European Unions 27 members.

Russian officials had warned of military and political repercussions if Sweden and Finland decided to join NATO. Russian officials had also spoken about the possibility of stationing nuclear-armed missiles on the Baltic Sea.

Finlands announcement came a day after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited both Finland and Sweden to sign a military cooperation agreement. Britain said on Wednesday that it would help the two Nordic nations if they came under attack.

Niinisto wrote on Twitter that he spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about Finlands firm support for Ukraine and the countrys plan to join NATO. Niinisto said Zelenskyy expressed his full support for it.

The announcement came as Russia suffered another setback in its invasion of Ukraine. Ukrainian forces this week drove Russian troops out of the area around its second-largest city Kharkiv. Russia already withdrew its forces from the area surrounding the capital, Kyiv.

Finland-Russia relations

Finland has centuries of uneasy relations with Russia. The country was ruled by the Russian empire from 1809 to 1917. It fought off Soviet invasions before the start of World War Two and gave up some territory.

From 1956 to 1982, Finland kept friendly and close relations with Russia to keep its independence by avoiding conflict. The country stayed neutral during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies. Finland joined the European Union in 1995 but stayed out of the NATO alliance.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, public support in Finland started to grow for membership in NATO.

The latest opinion study by Finnish public broadcaster YLE shows that 76 percent of Finns are in favor of joining NATO. That marks a major increase from earlier years, when only 20 to 30 percent of Finns favored joining the military alliance.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Finland and Sweden would be "warmly welcomed." He said the process for the countries to join the alliance would be "smooth and swift".

I'm Dan Novak.

Hai Do adapted this story for Learning English based on reporting from Reuters and The Associated Press.

___________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

apply - v. to ask formally for something

repercussion - n. something usually bad or unpleasant that happens as a result of an action

setback - n. a problem that makes success less likely

swift - adj. happening or done quickly or immediately
The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) says Chinas zero-tolerance policy toward COVID-19 is not sustainable  or unable to last for very long.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Tuesday, When we talk about the zero-COVID, we dont think that its sustainable, considering the behavior of the virus now and what we anticipate in the future.

His remarks came shortly after the country announced additional restrictions in Shanghai and Beijing to prevent the spread of the virus.

China quickly defended its policy, calling the remarks from Tedros irresponsible.

On Wednesday, Chinas Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said, The Chinese governments policy of epidemic prevention and control can stand the test of history, and our prevention and control measures are scientific and effective.

Officials in Shanghai tightened restrictions further on its 26 million residents, even though the city is seeing a decrease in new COVID-19 infections.

Residents in some Shanghai neighborhoods have been informed in writing that they are not permitted to leave their homes as part of a quiet period that would last for at least three days. The new restrictions come after a brief period in which residents were able to move about their neighborhoods.

There have also been reports on Chinese social media of residents being forcibly removed from their homes and placed in hotels or quarantine centers if their neighbors tested positive for the coronavirus.

Nearly all of Shanghais residents have been under severe restrictions for the past six weeks. City officials are struggling to control a large outbreak of new cases largely driven by the omicron version of the virus. The lockdown measures have led to angry complaints of a lack of fresh food and medicine in Chinas biggest city.

Beijing officials also tightened COVID-19 restrictions on residents this week, with more mass testing and road closures. The Chinese capital is dealing with its worst outbreak since 2020.

Im Ashley Thompson.

VOA News reported this story. Ashley Thompson adapted it for Learning English, with additional materials from The Associated Press.

____________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

tolerance - n. the ability to accept, experience, or survive something harmful or unpleasant

anticipate - v. to think of (something that will or might happen in the future)

epidemic - n. an occurrence in which a disease spreads very quickly and affects a large number of people

resident - n. someone who lives in a particular place

outbreak - n. a sudden start or increase of fighting or disease


Accusing the Khargone police of harassment, protesting women said that they have been forced to hit the streets because of the persistent persecution of the community and warned that they will continue to protest till the polices high-handedness is stopped.

Muhammad Raafi | TwoCircles.net

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KHARGONE, MADHYA PRADESH  Scores of Muslims in Madhya Pradeshs Khargone Tuesday marched the streets in protest against the police-highhandedness and accused the police force of arresting innocent Muslim youth during nocturnal raids. Those who participated in the protest included women and children.

The protesting women alleged that the police were inhumanely treating their kith and kin in the name of the rule of law. They said that police were acting arbitrarily by raiding the homes of Muslims. Instead of opening the doors, they crash the doors and ruthlessly beat the male members, they said.

Muslim women in Khargone allege targeted police harrassment against Muslim community  calling it Gundagardi. Over a hundred Muslim youths, along with several minors, have been arrested so far. Community faces double attack, first from the rioters and again from the admin. pic.twitter.com/DnnbSaSBb0  Sharjeel Usmani (@SharjeelUsmani) May 10, 2022

Accusing the police of harassment, the women said that they have been forced to hit the streets because of the persistent persecution of the community and warned that they will continue to protest till the polices high-handedness is stopped.

The Madhya Pradesh Police detained three main accused men, all Muslims, on Monday after last months communal violence in Khargone.

On Sunday, Special Armed Force Commandant Ankit Jaiswal said that 182 people had been detained in 72 instances related to the violence. The hunt for the other accused suspects, according to Jaiswal, is still on.

On April 10, several individuals allegedly threw stones at a Ram Navami parade in Khargones Talab Chowk neighbourhood, while protesting loud and offensive music being played on loudspeakers. As a result, clashes erupted at the Gaushala Marg, Tabadi Chowk, Sanjay Nagar, and Motipura sectors. The violence left at least 24 individuals wounded.

During the riots, ten homes, largely belonging to Muslims, were set ablaze. On April 18, the local government named a 28-year-old man who had gone missing during the communal tensions as the first victim of the violence.

Iqbal Bani, who reportedly incited the violence in Anand Nagar, was detained in Ratlam district on Sunday, according to Jaiswal. Afzal, the second accused, was arrested in Indore and is suspected of being responsible for the rioting in the Bhatwadi region. Arsh, the cases third primary suspect, was apprehended near Khargones Kasrawad town.

On April 11, the Madhya Pradesh government demolished homes and

shops belonging to Muslims in Khargone. Deputy Inspector General of Police Khargone Range, Tilak Singh, claimed that the homes that were demolished belonged to those who had thrown stones during the procession.

On April 12, the state government set up a two-member claims tribunal to assess the damage caused by the communal violence.

The protesters said that the police were deliberately targeting Muslims while those who incited the violence were roaming free. This is injustice. Mosques were burnt down and looted. The police didnt act against those involved.

They alleged that the media was also showing just one side of the story.

On Wednesday, tensions escalated in Khargone after Muslims visited the SP office with a memorandum on police action in light of the recent violence in the district. While the members alleged that police were arresting innocent Muslim children in connection with the Ram Navami violence, Police claimed that the people reached the office to pressurize the cops against the arrests made so far.

Some people have come here to pressurize us against arrests we made regarding the violence. They have been told, that upon analyzing the video footage those found innocent will be released while those found involved wont be spared, Neeraj Chourasia, ASP, Khargone was quoted by media.

Visuals from the police station showed people of the Muslim community reaching the police station. The group alleged that the police were arresting innocent Muslim children and the elderly without substantial evidence. We had a word with SP and demanded that our people must be released, they said in a memorandum.

Muhammad Raafi is a journalist based in New Delhi. He tweets at @MohammadRaafi
THURSDAY, May 12, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Persistent use of steroids and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) like ibuprofen to treat acute lower back pain may actually turn it into a chronic condition, a new study warns.

However, some experts who expressed concerns about the study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine pointed out that it was not a clinical trial, which is the gold standard for medical research, The New York Times reported.

The findings by the team at McGill University in Montreal are based on observations of patients, an analysis of a large patient database and an animal study.

The study results suggest we "need to think further about how to treat our patients, lead investigator Dr. Luda Diatchenko, a professor who specializes in human pain genetics, told the Times.

Back pain is the most common type of pain, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The research is intriguing, but requires further study, Dr. Steven Atlas, director of primary care practice-based research and quality improvement at Massachusetts General Hospital, told the Times.

That opinion was echoed by Dr. Bruce Vrooman, a pain specialist at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire. But Vrooman also told the Times that the study was impressive in its scope and added that if the findings hold up in a clinical trial, it could force reconsideration of how we treat acute pain."

The study represents a "paradigm shift," Dr. Thomas Buchheit, director of the regenerative pain therapies program at Duke University, told the Times.

There is this unspoken rule: If it hurts, take an anti-inflammatory, and if it still hurts, put a steroid on it, he said. But this study shows that we have to think of healing, and not suppression of inflammation.

Current guidelines advise people with back pain to begin with exercise, physical therapy, heat or massage, which can be as effective as pain medications but don't cause the same side effects.

If those approaches don't work, patients can try NSAIDs like ibuprofen, the guidelines advise. Acetaminophen (best known as Tylenol) is not an anti-inflammatory.

More information

Visit the National Library of Medicine for more on back pain.

SOURCE: The New York Times

Originally published on consumer.healthday.com, part of the TownNews Content Exchange.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP)  Finlands leaders Thursday came out in favor of applying to join NATO, and Sweden could do the same within days, in a historic realignment on the continent 2 1/2 months after Russian President Vladimir Putins invasion of Ukraine sent a shiver of fear through Moscows neighbors.

The Kremlin reacted by warning it will be forced to take retaliatory military-technical steps.

On the ground, meanwhile, Russian forces pounded areas in central, northern and eastern Ukraine, including the last pocket of resistance in Mariupol, as part its offensive to take the industrial Donbas region, while Ukraine recaptured some towns and villages in the northeast.

The first war-crimes trial of a Russian soldier since the start of the conflict is set to open Friday in Kyiv. A 21-year-old captured member of a tank unit is accused of shooting to death a civilian on a bicycle during the opening week of the war.

Finlands president and prime minister announced that the Nordic country should apply right away for membership in NATO, the military defense pact founded in part to counter the Soviet Union.

You (Russia) caused this. Look in the mirror, Finnish President Sauli Niinisto said this week.

While the country's Parliament still has to weigh in, the announcement means Finland is all but certain to apply  and gain admission  though the process could take months to complete. Sweden, likewise, is considering putting itself under NATO's protection.

That would represent a major change in Europe's security landscape: Sweden has avoided military alliances for more than 200 years, while Finland adopted neutrality after its defeat by the Soviets in World War II.

Public opinion in both nations shifted dramatically in favor of NATO membership after the invasion, which stirred fears in countries along Russia's flank that they could be next.

Such an expansion of the alliance would leave Russia surrounded by NATO countries in the Baltic Sea and the Arctic and would amount to a stinging setback for Putin, who had hoped to divide and roll back NATO in Europe but is instead seeing the opposite happen.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said the alliance would welcome Finland and Sweden with open arms.

Russia's Foreign Ministry warned that Moscow "will be forced to take retaliatory steps of military-technical and other characteristics in order to counter the emerging threats to its national security.

NATO's funneling of weapons and other military support to Ukraine already has been critical to Kyiv's surprising success in stymieing the invasion, and the Kremlin warned anew in chilling terms Thursday that the aid could lead to direct conflict between NATO and Russia.

There is always a risk of such conflict turning into a full-scale nuclear war, a scenario that will be catastrophic for all," said Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Russias Security Council.

While Russia's advance in the Donbas has been slow, its forces have gained some ground and taken some villages.

Four civilians were killed Thursday in three communities in the Donetsk region, which is part of the Donbas, the regional governor reported.

Britains Defense Ministry said Russias focus on the Donbas has left its remaining troops around the northeastern city of Kharkiv vulnerable to counterattack from Ukrainian forces, which recaptured several towns and villages around the city.

Russian strikes Thursday killed at least two civilians on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraines second-largest city, local authorities said.

The attacks also damaged a building housing a humanitarian aid unit, municipal offices and hospital facilities, Vyacheslav Zadorenko, the mayor of the suburban town of Derhachi, wrote in a Telegram post.

None of the sites "had anything to do with military infrastructure, Zadorenko said.

Fighting across the east has driven many thousands of Ukrainians from their homes.

It is terrible there now. We were leaving under missiles, said Tatiana Kravstova, who left the town of Siversk with her 8-year-old son Artiom on a bus headed for the central city of Dnipro. I dont know where they were aiming, but they were pointing at civilians.

Ukraine also said Russian forces had fired artillery and grenade launchers at Ukrainian troops around Zaporizhzhia, which has been a refuge for civilians fleeing Mariupol, and attacked in the Chernihiv and Sumy regions to the north.

Overnight airstrikes near Chernihiv, in northern Ukraine, killed at least three people, Ukraine's military said. It said that Russian troops fired rockets at a school and student dormitory in Novhorod-Siversky and that some other buildings, including private homes, were also damaged.

In his evening address to the nation, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the assaults.

Of course, the Russian state is in such a state that any education only gets in its way," he said. "But what can be achieved by destroying Ukrainian schools? All Russian commanders who give such orders are simply sick and incurable.

Noting that Thursday is International Nurses Day, Zelenskyy said the Russian military had damaged 570 medical facilities since the invasion began on Feb. 24 and fully destroyed 101 hospitals.

Twelve Russian missiles struck an oil refinery and other infrastructure in the central Ukrainian industrial hub of Kremenchuk on Thursday, the region's acting governor, Dmytro Lunin, wrote in a Telegram post. In early April, he said, the refinery, which had been the last fully functional one in Ukraine at the time, was knocked offline by an attack.

In the southern port of Mariupol, which has largely been reduced to smoking rubble with little food, water or medicine, or what the mayor called a medieval ghetto, Ukrainian fighters continued to hold out at the Azovstal steel plant, the last stronghold of resistance in the city.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said negotiations were underway with Russia to win the release of 38 severely wounded Ukrainian defenders from the plant. She said Ukraine hoped to exchange them for 38 significant Russian prisoners of war.

Yesica Fisch in Bakhmut, David Keyton in Kyiv, Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Mstyslav Chernov in Kharkiv, Jari Tanner in Helsinki, and other AP staffers around the world contributed.

Follow APs coverage of the war in Ukraine: 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.
It was a more-than-chilly day last month when the crew of Well Want for Nothing set up their film gear and lighting equipment in a Reedsburg barn.

But after peeling off winter coats and knit caps to reveal their chore-worn costumes, well-known stage actors Kelsey Brennan, as Addie, and Colleen Madden, as Charlotte, filmed a crucial scene as the cameras rolled.

The 10-minute film Well Want for Nothing, now in post-production, is the latest project from an artist collective that grew out of connections from Spring Green and the highly regarded classical theater company American Players Theatre. Key to the group are actors Brennan and Marcus Truschinski, writer and actor Eric Schabla, cinematographer and director Jack Whaley and director Jake Penner.

Once Well Want for Nothing gets on the film-festival circuit, our next steps will be to create a film production company  one that is grounded in the Midwest, Truschinski said. While we dont have a name yet, we have a cohesive vision and a group of people who are very committed and very experienced.

Well Want for Nothing is the brief, mid-20th century story of Addie, a hardened rancher, struggling to conceal a devastating loss from her older sister Charlotte, who is visually impaired.

The team previously created the 25-minute original film One Foot In, a tale of two graverobbers in the 1800s starring Truschinski and APT veteran actor James DeVita. One Foot In was made outdoors during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown, at a time that live theater performances had ground to a halt, including the summer 2020 season for APT.

The pandemic was really the biggest launching point for all of this, said Truschinski, a member of APTs core company. All of sudden, we had a free summer. We had all been really, really interested in film (and said) Lets try to produce something.

Schabla, an APT actor who had started moving into script-writing, presented them with the script he wrote for One Foot In. Soon, the group was filming.

Creative exchange

A lot of us come from the theater, said Schabla. And I think were all realizing at this moment, particularly during the pandemic, how these major storytelling media  theater, film, TV  are kind of on a collision course.

Theres more creative exchange than ever, said Schabla, who in the fall will take part in an American Film Institute screenwriting program. I think people are waking up to the fact that this intersection of media is kind of the rising tide that lifts all ships.

The long acting history between Madden and Brennan as APT actors enriched their performances in the groups newest film, Truschinski said.

APT actors in particular have so much experience with this kind of language, and were dealing with an ensemble all the time. You build this family, he said.

Colleen and Kelsey, playing sisters, and knowing each other so well, I felt that a lot of the sub-textual work (in Well Want for Nothing) could be done with a shorthand, because they know each other so well. Their relationship is so believable.

APT actors and tech artists traditionally work intensely through the spring into early fall on productions at APTs outdoor theater or its newer indoor Touchstone Theatre in Spring Green. During the winter, they sometimes find work with other area theater companies. But film offers yet another outlet for their talents.

We have these great artists who have been working for years and years and years  in this kind of isolation, to be honest, Schabla said. These APT artists are at the height of their craft, but in the winters it felt like there was this vacuum that could be filled by something that could keep people active creatively, but also get them to use a different set of muscles.

The film collective is its own entity and entirely separate from APT, although APT has offered support such as costumes for Well Want for Nothing, Schabla said.

Midwestern sensibility

Both Well Want for Nothing and One Foot In were shot outdoors kind of out of necessity because of the pandemic, but both have a rich, rural, Midwestern aesthetic.

I think were interested, as a collective, in telling stories that are grounded in this rural, Midwestern sensibility, Schabla said. That doesnt necessarily mean we always have to shoot out in the middle of the woods. There are all kind of vibrant cities and places to film in. But theres something about the humility of the Midwest, how understated it is, that lends itself to film and lends itself to contextual screenwriting thats less sexy and less snappy, and hopefully goes to a deeper place.

This area of the country is often depicted as  its something thats been made fun of a lot, Truschinski said.

I feel like a lot of (film) stories are based on what people are doing on the coasts. We want to shine a light on how beautiful this part of the country is, but also how varied it is. The Midwest is not just one thing.

Theres a natural resiliency to the people who choose to make this place their home, he said. And both of our first films are about that.

Well Want for Nothing and One Foot In are the groups first efforts to build a portfolio of films, in hopes that will lead to bigger things.

Weve partnered with Arts Wisconsin, a registered nonprofit that is serving as a fiscal receiver for donations, Truschinksi said.

It was a huge boon for us, and gave us a lot of confidence. Arts Wisconsin immediately responded to us and said, yes, there really is not something like this, a not-for-profit film production company, in the state.

Direct donors, crowdsourcing and the partnership with Arts Wisconsin have helped cover the more than $50,000 cost to produce One Foot In and some $20,000 for Well Want for Nothing.

We have a bank of full ideas in a Google drive for future projects too, Schabla said. We have other things in the works  always.

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Get AfricaFocus Bulletin by e-mail! Format for print or mobile Africa/Global: Debt, IFFs, and Inequality in Africa AfricaFocus Bulletin

May 11, 2022 (2022-05-11)

(Reposted from sources cited below) Editor's Note 43 African governments are facing expenditure cuts totalling $183 billion (equivalent to 5.4 percent of GDP) over the next five years, reveals new analysis from Oxfam and Development Finance International (DFI) today. If these cuts are implemented, their chances of achieving the UNs Sustainable Development Goals will likely disappear. - Oxfam International and Development Finance International This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains key excerpts from this new briefing paper published on April 19, 2022. The full paper, available at https://panafrica.oxfam.org/latest/policy-paper/africas-extreme-inequality-crisis-building-back-fairer-after-covid-19, provides an analysis linking internal inequality between rich and poor within Africa with the global economic and political structures which helped create such a system and continue to help keep it in place. The paper also includes, as most other such international reports, a set of recommendations which can be seen as only an utopian wishlist. Alternatively, they may be taken as long-rang goals on which action is both urgently required and becoming more feasible as more information is pried from offshore secrecy by investigators and momentum for action grows as the tax justice movement in Africa and around the world increases its capacity for coordination and political influence. The report continues by noting that Africas debt burden is stifling post- COVID economic recovery and stagnating the public services necessary to reduce poverty and inequality. Africas debt burden has been climbing steadily, averaging 67 percent of GDP in 2021. Debt repayments are equivalent to 51 percent of African countries budget revenue and 22 times more than their spending on social protection. Debt servicing exceeds spending on healthcare in all but six African countries, rising to 77 times more in South Sudan. The G20 countries have so far offered little relief: debt cancellation or suspension amounts to just $9.3 billion. It also cites the responsibility of both African and global governments and international agencies to take action to stem the system of illicit financial flows and tax evasion/avoidance that perpetuates the debt. Also included are links selected by the editor to other related material available online immediately below this paragraph. That is followed by a section highlighting recommended books, drawn from the AfricaFocus affiliate page on bookshop.org (https://bookshop.org/shop/africafocus). Bookshop.org is a registered B Corporation (https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/)which shares its surplus above costs and reinvestment in the site with independent bookstores. Affiliates include authors, organizations, and online publications such as AfricaFocus as well as independent bookstores who may set up their own pages on the site. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Editor's Picks https://africanarguments.org/2022/04/austerity-is-not-the-answer-to-africas-colliding-challenges/

A useful short article summarizing the Oxfam/DFI report. https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articles/30516/by-hiking-interest-rates-fed-dooms-the-developing-world

Its a widely acknowledged truth that when the United States economy sneezes, many countries catch a cold. And so it is with this weeks interest rate hike by the Federal Reserve in Washington, whose efforts to contain inflation in the U.S. are sure to create new problems for already battered economies and families in less affluent countries. https://fpif.org/the-united-states-of-tax-havens/

My article from November 3, 2021

There are many ways in which the United States is not one country.

Im not referring to the electoral reality of red states versus blue states, or to the split between a radicalized Republican Party and those of us who hope that an inclusive democratic vision of the nation might eventually prevail. Nor am I speaking here of racial or ethnic divisions, however defined.

Rather, what I mean is that the United States, where countless corrupt billionaires and dictators have stashed their loot, is not a single tax haven, but many separate tax havens. https://www.henleyglobal.com/publications/africa-wealth-report-2022

Fascinating 40-page report from an investment-advice company.

The Africa Wealth Report is published by Henley & Partners, the global leader in residence and citizenship by investment, in partnership with South African wealth intelligence firm New World Wealth. https://www.pewresearch.org/race-ethnicity/2022/04/14/race-is-central-to-identity-for-black-americans-and-affects-how-they-connect-with-each-other/

Pew Survey Report on Black American Opinions

Very detailed 90-page report on survey, including immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa and both Hispanic and non-Hispanic respondents. Also includes links to methodology.

The online survey of 3,912 Black U.S. adults was conducted Oct. 4-17, 2021. The survey includes 1,025 Black adults on Pew Research Centers American Trends Panel (ATP) and 2,887 Black adults on Ipsos KnowledgePanel. Respondents on both panels are recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. . . .

No matter where they are from, who they are, their economic circumstances or educational backgrounds, significant majorities of Black Americans say being Black is extremely or very important to how they think about themselves, with about three-quarters (76%) overall saying so. . . .

Finally, Black Americans were asked about how connected they felt to Black people around the world. About four-in-ten (41%) say everything or most things that happen to these Black people impact their own lives. Immigrant (41%) and U.S.-born (41%) Black adults are about as likely to hold this view. So are non-Hispanic (41%), multiracial (35%) and Hispanic (38%) Black adults. However, Black adults who say that being Black is very or extremely important to them (48%) are more than twice as likely as those for whom being Black is less important (18%) to say what happens to Black people around the world affects what happens in their own lives. https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780198852728.001.0001/oso-9780198852728-chapter-7

Open-access. Concluding chapter from the new book by Leonce Ndikumana and James K. Boyce: On the Trail of Capital Flight from Africa: The Takers and the Enablers.

This book investigates the dynamics of capital flight from Angola, Cote dIvoire, and South Africa, countries that have witnessed large-scale illicit financial outflows in recent decades. Quantitative, qualitative, and institutional analysis for each country is used to examine the modus operandi of capital flight; that is, the who, how, and where dimensions of the phenomenon. Who refers to major domestic and foreign players; how refers to mechanisms of capital acquisition, transfer, and concealment; and where refers to the destinations of capital flight and the transactions involved. The evidence reveals a complex network of actors and enablers involved in orchestrating and facilitating capital flight and the accumulation of private wealth in offshore secrecy jurisdictions. This underscores the reality that capital flight is a global phenomenon, and that measures to curtail it are a shared responsibility for Africa and the global community. Addressing the problem of capital flight and related issues such as trade misinvoicing, money laundering, tax evasion and theft of public assets by political and economic elites will require national and global efforts with a high level of coordination. ++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note+++++++++++++++++ Books Recommended by AfricaFocus Bulletin https://bookshop.org/lists/stop-the-bleeding-illicit-financial-flows-and-tax-justice/ The AfricaFocus Bookshop on bookshop.org contains multiple lists of books read and/or recommended by the editor on a variety of subjects, including books on African and global issues, mystery novels, and books of possible interest picked up at the numerous Little Free Library boxes in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood. Purchasing your books here is the best way to support the ongoing work of AfricaFocus, as AfricaFocus is no longer actively seeking voluntary subscription payments as contributions paid by check or Paypal. The links in the AfricaFocus shop can only be used for books to be sent to mailing addresses in the United States. But many of the same books can be bought on https://uk.bookshop.org/ to be sent to mailing addresses in the United Kingdom. For AfricaFocus subscribers in other countries, please check with the publisher or with bookstores or distributors in your country. And, of course, you may also check with friend, colleague, or comrade to see if they can get the book for you. The four highlighted below are, in my opinion, most useful as first books to read for the non-specialist for their clear writing and analysis, even though the first two were written approximately a decade ago. https://bookshop.org/a/709/9780857490421

Published in 2011. Still the best introductory overview putting the global context and African realities in context. https://bookshop.org/a/709/9780230341722

Published in 2013. The best single book to read on IFFs worldwide. https://bookshop.org/a/709/9781610397117

Published in 2016. The best single book to read on IFFs in Africa. https://bookshop.org/a/709/9781509543496

The best single book to read on IFFs in the United States. Tax Us If You Can is also available in PDF format at https://www.taxjustice.net/cms/upload/pdf/tuiyc_africa_final.pdf and at https://taxjusticeafrica.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Tax-Us-If-You-Can-Why-Africa-should-Stand-up-for-Tax-Justice.pdf. Demands for austerity and spiralling debt are sabotaging Africas COVID-19 recovery April 19, 2022 https://panafrica.oxfam.org/latest/policy-paper/africas-extreme-inequality-crisis-building-back-fairer-after-covid-19 43 African governments are facing expenditure cuts totalling $183 billion (equivalent to 5.4 percent of GDP) over the next five years, reveals new analysis from Oxfam and Development Finance International (DFI) today. If these cuts are implemented, their chances of achieving the UNs Sustainable Development Goals will likely disappear. The Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index: Africa Briefing Paper shows that Africas debt burden is stifling post-COVID economic recovery and stagnating the public services necessary to reduce poverty and inequality. Africas debt burden has been climbing steadily, averaging 67 percent of GDP in 2021. Debt repayments are equivalent to 51 percent of African countries budget revenue and 22 times more than their spending on social protection. Debt servicing exceeds spending on healthcare in all but six African countries, rising to 77 times more in South Sudan. The G20 countries have so far offered little relief: debt cancellation or suspension amounts to just $9.3 billion. Majority of African governments know and want to lift their citizens from poverty but their coffers are empty, so they need support instead of more pressure, said Peter Kamalingin, Oxfams Pan Africa Program director. At a time when poor countries are faced with increasing costs of living and with poor people unable to afford food, it cannot be the time to suffocate them with more austerity. That is the surest way to undermine recovery, widen inequality and destroy livelihoods. The index ranks 47 African countries on their policies on public services, tax and workers rights. South Africa ranks first, followed by Seychelles, Tunisia, Namibia and Lesotho. At the bottom are South Sudan, Nigeria, Chad, Liberia and the Central African Republic. North Africa outperforms Africas other subregions, with Central Africa ranking last. The analysis shows that African governments failure to tackle inequality -- through support for public healthcare and education, workers rights and a fair tax system -- left them woefully ill-equipped to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. The IMF has contributed to these failures by consistently pushing a policy agenda that seeks to balance national budgets through cuts to public services, increases in taxes paid by the poorest, and moves to undermine labour rights and protections. As a result, when COVID-19 struck, 52 percent of Africans lacked access to healthcare and 83 percent had no safety nets to fall back on if they lost their job or became sick. Quality public services are proven to reduce inequality. For example, they have reduced inequality by 34 percent in Namibia, 22 percent in South Africa and 19 percent in Benin. However, Africas unfair tax system is increasing inequality by 1 percent. In Tanzania and Tunisia, fair tax policies have slashed inequality by 10 percent. Oxfam and DFI are urging the G20 to reallocate and waive off unnecessary conditionalities so that lower-income countries can access most of the $100 billions worth of IMF Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) with ease. They are calling for increased aid flows to Africa to increase access to inequality- busting public services and COVID-19 vaccines. The vaccination rate in Africa needs to increase significantly if the continent is to meet the 70 percent vaccine coverage target set for June 2022. That some governments have fared better than others at tackling inequality confirms we can end inequality if we make the right policy decisions. This must include taxing the wealthiest, curbing illicit financial flows, restructuring debt held by poor countries and ending the pandemic through equitable access to COVID-19 Vaccines and therapeutics. - Peter Kamalingin. ENDS Notes to editors Download Oxfams Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index: Africa. Our analysis of the IMFs COVID-19 loans during the first year of the pandemic is also available for download. Contact information: Victor Oluoch in Kenya victor.oluoch@oxfam.org Africas Extreme Inequality Crisis: Building Back Fairer after Covid-19 https://panafrica.oxfam.org/latest/policy-paper/africas-extreme-inequality-crisis-building-back-fairer-after-covid-19 Introduction Africa is facing a crisis of extreme inequality which is undermining growth, preventing poverty eradication and contributing to insecurity. The six richest African billionaires are now wealthier than the poorest 50% of Africans combined. This briefing paper shows that COVID-19 has deepened this crisis, and that the responses of African governments and international financial institutions are making little difference as debt burdens grow and austerity kicks in. While some African governments were doing a lot to fight inequality before COVID-19, through equitable public services, progressive taxation and enhanced labour rights, especially for women, most were not. The paper lays out a comprehensive plan of measures which could be taken by African governments, the AU and the international community, including the EU, to significantly reduce inequality,eradicate poverty, accelerate growth, and reduce insecurity throughout Africa. Executive summary Africas Crisis of Inequality, Debt and Adjustment Africa is facing a crisis of extreme inequality: seven of the ten most unequal countries in the world are in the region; inequality is undermining growth in every African Union member state; and the top 1% of Africans hold 33% of Africas wealth. Such inequality is a major cause of political instability and insecurity. The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically increased poverty and inequality, such that the six richest Africans now own more wealth than the poorest 50% combined. As a result, without accelerated efforts to reduce inequality, it will be impossible to end extreme poverty in Africa by 2030. Africa was poorly prepared to face a pandemic, with 52% of its citizens lacking access to healthcare, 83% lacking access to social protection and 52% of workers having no formal labour rights. Unequal access to vaccines (11% of Africans have been vaccinated by early February, compared with 71% of Europeans) means that Africans are more likely to die from COVID-19. African governments made valiant attempts to respond to COVID-19, but most lacked affordable finance so as to increase spending sharply  low-income countries spent only 3.1% of GDP and emerging markets 5.3% of GDP, compared with 19.1% for OECD economies. Much of this went towards healthcare and social protection, but most African governments are now phasing out these measures, leaving no long-term increases in healthcare or social protection spending to fight future pandemics. Africas debt burden has risen sharply before and during COVID-19: debt servicing is almost three times as much as education spending, six times health spending, 22 times social spending and 236 times more than climate adaptation spending. To repay debts and reduce budget deficits, the IMF is encouraging most countries to implement austerity: 43 AU member states will cut their spending by a cumulative 5.4% of GDP in 202126, totalling $183bn. This confirms earlier Oxfam findings, which showed that in 2020-21 the Fund had encouraged 33 African countries to pursue austerity policies.1 What Can Be Done about This Crisis? The key government policies which reduce inequality are: universal free education and health services and social protection; equitable taxation; and enhanced labour rights, especially for women. Development Finance International and Oxfam International have designed a Commitment to Reducing Inequality (CRI) Index to track progress on these policies and their impact across 158 countries, including 47 in Africa.2 The latest CRI Index report finds that North Africa outperforms other regions in Africa, with Central Africa lagging behind. The African countries that fare better are South Africa and the Seychelles, but they score only 0.75, meaning that they could do one-third more to match the best global performers. Lesotho comes in the top five, showing that lower-income countries can perform well. The poorest performers are South Sudan, Nigeria, Chad, Liberia and the Central African Republic. On public services, many African countries allocate high proportions of their budgets to education, but most fall way below AU or global targets for education, health, social protection and agriculture spending. Because amounts spent per capita are low, education, health and social protection do not reach the poorest people. Across Africa, social spending reduces inequality by only 7.8%, compared with 8.5% in Asia and 10% in Latin America: however, Namibia (34%), South Africa (22%) and Benin (19%) stand out for using social spending to cut inequality. Africa does better on equitable taxation, because its tax systems are progressive on paper, with many countries having high top personal and corporate income tax rates, and VAT exemptions for food. However, Africa collects only 29% of the taxes implied by its tax rates, 10% behind other developing regions, because of high levels of tax exemptions and tax dodging. Taxes on wealth, capital gains, inheritances and property are also weak. As a result, tax in Africa is actually increasing inequality by 1%  though Tanzania and Tunisia have used tax to cut inequality by 10%. The worst African performance is on labour rights. Though many aspects of policy look good on paper, some countries repeatedly violate labour rights, lack laws or enforcement of womens labour rights, and have very low minimum wages. Above all, 67% of Africas workers are unemployed, underemployed or in jobs without formal contracts, leading Africa to have the highest wage inequality of any developing region. This briefing paper presents a set of key recommendations to African governments, the AU Commission and the international community on the urgent measures they can take to cut inequality in Africa, thereby eradicating poverty, accelerating growth and reducing insecurity and migratory pressures. Conclusion and Recommendations There is nothing inevitable about the crisis of extreme inequality in Africa, nor its worsening during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, without concerted efforts by governments and support from the international community, the crisis will deepen, and stop the region from meeting the SDGs. The pandemic must serve as a wakeup call to national, regional and global leaders for an inclusive recovery that tackles inequality aggressively. In spite of strong anti-inequality efforts by some governments in the region, market-produced inequality due to poor labour rights and unequal access to land and credit have kept inequality far too high. The efforts of many other African governments to tackle inequality are far short of what is needed, and in fact are increasing inequality in many cases. Only immediate measures to reverse pandemic-related rises in inequality, strongly reinforced national commitment to anti-inequality policies, and regional and international support, can allow African countries to emerge from the pandemic without a major increase in inequality and poverty  and resume their progress to meeting the SDGs. 1. The Most Urgent Recommendations  Ensuring COVID-19 vaccines for all African countries, to reach 70% vaccine coverage by June 2022, in line with the global WHO goal.  Immediately reversing the planned fiscal austerity, with a particular emphasis on increasing spending for health, education and social protection to achieve the SDGs.  These enhanced spending efforts should be funded by:

- increasing rates and collection of progressive income and wealth taxes in each country.

- cancelling debt service due to all creditors between 2022 and 2025.

- reallocating $100bn of SDRs to low-income developing countries (LIDCs) as grants. If additional loans are to be offered, they should be highly concessional loans with minimal or no conditionality; and

- increasing aid flows to Africa targeted at enhancing anti-inequality social spending.  Mandating the IMF and World Bank to ensure that all country programmes and policy advice focus on reducing inequality, and contain specific urgent measures to make tax, public services and labour policies achieve this more effectively. 2. Key Recommendations for African Governments Across the continent, it is vital for national governments to build post-COVID recovery plans, including: A. Spend much more on universal high-quality public services that reduce the gap between rich and poor people  Allocate 20% of government budgets to free universal pre-primary, primary and secondary education.  Allocate 15% of government budgets to fund free public universal healthcare without patient fees of any kind.  Provide universal social protection programmes including, for example, for the working poor, children, people living with disabilities, unemployed people and other vulnerable groups, including pensioners.  Allocate 10% of budgets to enhanced investment in smallholder food-producing agriculture.  Increase investment in water, sanitation and hygiene so as to ensure universal access and coverage. B. Redistribute income and wealth through progressive taxation  Make corporate and personal income taxes more progressive  Introduce or strengthen taxes on wealth, capital gains, property, and financial transactions and income.  Ensure all value added and general sales taxes exempt basic food products.  Ensure multinational corporations pay their fair share of taxes by strengthening anti-tax avoidance policies.  Scrap unnecessary tax exemptions for corporations and richer individuals, and review tax treaties to ensure that they support revenue generation and do not give away taxing rights unnecessarily.  Strengthen the capacity of national revenue authorities to curb illicit financial flows, through corporate country-by-country reporting and exchanging data on profits and wealth holdings.  Invest in strengthened tax administrations compliance efforts that are targeted at high-income earners and corporations. C. Strengthen labour policies and rights, especially for informal, vulnerable and unemployed workers  Ensure workers have rights to unionize, strike and bargain collectively, in line with ILO conventions.  Legislate in all countries against gender discrimination, rape and sexual harassment, and for equal pay.  Increase parental leave and expand paternity leave significantly to reduce the burden of unpaid care on women.  Increase minimum wages to match per capita GDP.  Invest far more in national structures enforcing labour legislation, including encouraging the informal sector to progressively comply with laws and provide social protection to their workers.  Invest in public sector jobs and public works to cut unemployment, and increase unemployment benefits. 3. Recommendations for AU Leaders and the AU Commission The mandate of the African Union in Vision 2063 includes poverty eradication, which cannot be achieved without reducing inequality sharply. In addition, the AU theme for 2022 is Food Security to Strengthen Agriculture, and Accelerate Human Capital, Social and Economic Development. In this context, the AU should put reducing inequality at the heart of its work from 2022 onwards, by: A. Recognizing and planning to remedy AU member states extreme inequality crisis  Prioritize tackling inequality in the agendas of summits, ministerial meetings and the Secretariat.  Develop a joint continental action plan to set clear targets and accelerate measures to reduce inequality and poverty.  Establish a robust mechanism to support and monitor the achievement of SDG 10 on reducing inequality. B. Encouraging a race to the top in policies to reduce inequality  Enhance the roles of regional commissions (EAC, ECOWAS, SADC, WAEMU) in advising members on coordinating tax policies, by building regional tax harmonization frameworks, involving more progressive income taxes and VAT, and strengthened taxes on capital gains, property, financial income and wealth.  Seek regional harmonization of investment and tax codes to curb harmful tax competition in the region, particularly by sharply limiting tax incentives.  Develop common regional frameworks on measures to combat tax dodging and illicit financial flows, including corporate country-by-country tax reporting and information exchange on bank accounts.  Enhance monitoring of compliance with AU norms on spending on education, health, social protection and agriculture, and extend this to assess coverage of public services for people living in poverty.  Develop and monitor compliance with regional norms on labour policies designed to reduce inequality, such as union rights, womens rights, minimum wages and policies to encourage job formalization. 4. Recommendations For The EU And The International Community The international community should support national and regional efforts by:  Mandating the IMF and World Bank to ensure that all AU country strategies, programmes and policy advice focus on reducing inequality, and contain specific measures to achieve this more effectively.  Immediately reverse opposition to the TRIPS waiver on all COVID-19 vaccines, treatments and technologies, and support the mandatory sharing of vaccine recipes by pharmaceutical corporations, including sharing MRNA technologies with the WHO MRNA hub in South Africa.  Supporting the rapid scaling up of publicly controlled vaccine production facilities across the continent.  Providing comprehensive debt cancellation to AU countries where needed, to reduce their debt servicing to low levels and ensure that they have enough financing to achieve the SDGs.  Establishing a global fund for social protection that supports lower-middle- and low-income countries to provide social protection for all by 2030.  Introducing solidarity taxes in their own countries on wealth, income, carbon emissions and financial transactions, with part of the revenue going to lower-income countries.  Assisting developing countries to collect more taxes by reversing the global race to the bottom on corporate tax rates, sharing corporate country-by- country tax reporting information and information on global bank accounts, and ending tax treaties which reduce tax collection.  Ensuring that all global tax reforms provide a fair share of their benefits to developing countries, by making all profits taxed where they have been created, through a process where developing countries are equally represented.  Ensuring that climate policies do not harm low-income countries. Specifically, the EU should consider an exclusion of least developed countries (LDCs) from the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and use the revenues from the CBAM to increase support for climate action in low- income countries.  The EU should not pressure African countries to implement the recent OECD tax deal (BEPS 2), nor penalise countries that did not endorse it, by blacklisting them in the EU tax havens list. The EU should allow countries to carefully consider the trade-offs in the deal and the best course of action for them, including the use of unilateral measures such as digital service taxes or alternative minimum taxes. If African countries agree to the OECD tax deal, the EU should support them to implement it in a way that is more convenient for them, and EU countries should renegotiate bilateral tax treaties with low taxation levels, as provided for in the deal.  The EU must live up to its rhetoric of a partnership of equals with the AU and support national and regional efforts by prioritising reducing inequality in all its national-level policy dialogue with African countries, and in its collective and member state interventions in IMF and World Bank governing bodies. It could also, where requested by African governments, provide capacity building assistance to help countries design and implement equitable spending and progressive tax policies, and to enhance labour rights in order to reduce inequality sharply  which would help them eradicate poverty, and dramatically accelerate GDP growth between now and 2030. AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus Bulletin is edited by William Minter. For an archive of previous Bulletins, see http://www.africafocus.org, Current links to books on AfricaFocus go to the non-profit bookshop.org, which supports independent bookshores and also provides commissions to affiliates such as AfricaFocus. AfricaFocus Bulletin can be reached at africafocus@igc.org. Please write to this address to suggest material for inclusion. 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Slices Bar & Grill, on Pennsylvania Avenue, near the old Oscar Mayer factory site, has a reputation for making one of the best bar burgers in town.

Its well deserved, and the North Side bar has a sign on the wall showing that its meat is from Jenifer Street Market. Thats critical for customers who care about where their food comes from.

Slices cheeseburger is available in -pound and -pound versions, and at a time when prices are going up in many places, the menu shows burger prices crossed out and reduced: from $8.25 to $7.25 for the -pounder and from $7 to $6 for the -pounder.

When I came in for lunch on a recent Friday, owner James Slice Krause was grilling burgers behind the bar, calmly handling a steady stream of dine-in and takeout orders.

Krause later told me that early in the pandemic meat prices went up dramatically and he reprinted his menus to reflect that. Prices settled down, but didnt come all the way back, he said. When they became more manageable, he lowered his burger prices.

Slices prices may go up again soon, Krause said. Some of our stuff is going through the roof. Chicken is going nuts right now.

The burger was quite good, but wasnt my favorite. The meat was high quality, as advertised, and the toasted bun didnt dominate, which I appreciated. I chose pepper jack cheese and it was applied thick enough so it didnt disappear into the meat like it does on some cheeseburgers.

It came with leaf lettuce, a slice of red tomato and grilled onions. Customers can also order onions raw. A pickle spear came on the side and I cut it up and put it inside the bun along with ketchup and mustard.

The burger didnt include a side, so I ordered the potato salad ($3), which Krause said is made by his girlfriend, Terra OBrien. Its good, but doesnt taste homemade.

The chicken salad croissant ($5.75) was better, although I later learned the salad itself comes from a distributor. Its a tad sweet, maybe from chopped sweet pickles. It had the right amount of mayo and the croissant was perfectly grilled.

As a side, I got a half order of french fries ($2.50), which were medium thick and unsalted. They come from a supplier and looked ordinary, but tasted fantastic.

The burrito pizza puff ($3) was the perfect snack. The menu accurately describes it as a giant pillow of happiness. Its golden, deep-fried flaky shell yielded to cheese, tomato sauce and ground sausage. Its unclear why burrito is in the name and Krause said thats just what it says on the box.

The chili ($3.75/$4.25) is referred to on the menu as Slices secret recipe, and the cup looked more like a bowl. Could it win a chili cook-off? No, but the flavor was fine. There were just too many beans for my taste.

A few weeks earlier, I showed up at Slices for its Friday fish fry, which also has some renown. Every seat was taken by 6 p.m., and my group didnt want to wait, so we went elsewhere.

During my recent lunch I asked whether the fish fry was served then. The capable bartender who handled the lunch rush solo, said while the evening fish is beer battered (theres also baked cod), whats available by day is a four-piece order that comes to them battered. Krause said for the fish fry dinner he makes the batter himself.

Instead, for lunch, I tried to order the walleye fingers from the appetizer menu, but the bartender said theyre having trouble getting them. Im pretty sure well never get them back, Krause said. Theyve been out for two years.

Slices is also known for its goulash, which Krause makes every Thursday for his lunch special.

Krause has owned the place for 26 years, initially with Robert Bellamy when it was called Slice-N-Bullits.

Bellamy left in 2007, and Krause shortened the name to Slices. Before they owned their own place, Krause and Bellamy worked at the Caribou Tavern on East Johnson Street, where Bellamy was known as Bullit.

Krause, 53, was putting a knife back into its sheath, missed the sheath and the knife went through his hand, cutting some nerves. He was 22 then and didnt go to the hospital, he said. He just taped it up.

But every time somebody came in, it was, What happened to your hand? What happened to your hand? What happened to your hand? he said. One guy started calling me (Slice) and everybody else did.

He said his hand healed in about two weeks, but he still cant feel the side of one finger.

Krause works lunch Monday through Friday and cooks Sunday breakfast, but is training someone else for that shift, he said. His bartenders cook at dinner, except for on Fridays when he handles the fish fry.

While getting certain products during the pandemic has been hit and miss every week, Krause said business stayed steady. Bartenders lost hours when there was no drinking inside, but Slices did a lot of takeout.

We had a lot of support, he said. We have a lot of loyal, old-time customers, so they took care of us.

Diner's scorecard Restaurant: Slice's Bar & Grill Location: 2417 Pennsylvania Ave. Phone: 608-243-6925 Website: slices-bar-grill.business.site Hours: Monday through Thursday 11 a.m. until midnight, Friday and Saturday 11 a.m. until 2 a.m., Sunday 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Prices: Appetizers $2.50 to $9.50, sandwiches $3.50 to $7.25, soup $3.50 to $4.25, salad $7.50, Friday fish $12 to $16.50, shrimp and steak $13.50 and $18.25. Noise level: Medium Credit cards: Accepted Accessibility: Yes Outdoor dining: Yes, some tables outside Delivery: No Drinks: Full bar Gluten-free: No Vegetarian offerings: A few, with a veggie burger coming soon Kids menu: No, but lots of items children like Parking: Lot Service: Excellent Bottom line: One of Madison's favorite neighborhood bars has a lot to offer in terms of food.

Read restaurant news at go.madison.com/restaurantnews.

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GENEVA (AP)  The number of new coronavirus cases reported worldwide has continued to fall except in the Americas and Africa, the World Health Organization said in its latest assessment of the pandemic.

The decline comes as Europe marked a COVID-19 death milestone: 2 million on the continent.

In its weekly pandemic report released late Tuesday, the U.N. health agency said about 3.5 million new cases and more than 25,000 deaths were reported globally, which respectively represent decreases of 12% and 25%.

The downward trend in reported infections began in March, although many countries have dismantled their widespread testing and surveillance programs, making an accurate count of cases extremely difficult.

WHO said there were only two regions where reported COVID-19 infections increased: the Americas, by 14%, and Africa, by 12%. Cases remained stable in the Western Pacific and fell everywhere else, the agency said.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned during a press briefing this week that the rising cases in more than 50 countries highlights the volatility of this virus.

Tedros said COVID-19 variants, including mutated versions of the highly infectious omicron, are driving a resurgence of COVID-19 in several countries, including South Africa, which was the first to identify omicron in November.

He said relatively high rates of population immunity are preventing a spike in hospitalizations and deaths but cautioned that this is not guaranteed for places where vaccination levels are low. Only about 16% of people in poorer countries have been immunized against COVID-19.

WHO's report noted that some of the biggest jumps in COVID-19 cases were seen in China, which saw a 145% rise in the last week.

Earlier this week, Chinese authorities doubled down on pandemic restrictions in Shanghai after a brief period of loosening up. The move frustrated residents who were hoping a more than monthlong lockdown was finally easing after complaints of food shortages and quarantines where some people were forced to surrender their house keys.

WHO's Tedros said Tuesday he didn't think China's zero-COVID strategy was sustainable, considering the behaviour of the virus now and what we anticipate in the future.

On Thursday, North Korea announced its first coronavirus outbreak and imposed a nationwide lockdown. The size of the outbreak wasnt immediately known, but it could have serious consequences because the country has a poor health care system and its 26 million people are believed to be mostly unvaccinated.

Follow APs coverage of the pandemic at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
A former Sun Prairie High School youth advocate will spend 30 days in jail as part of a sentence of probation he received Thursday for two misdemeanors, closing a case in which he was initially charged with three felonies, for his interactions with a teenage student in 2018 and 2019.

Michael A. Johnson, 45, of Madison, who pleaded guilty in March to disorderly conduct and failure to report child abuse or neglect, will be barred from working in another job involving children following the disposition of the case.

A criminal complaint filed in 2019 detailed allegations in which a girl who was 15 years old when she met Johnson told police that her relationship with Johnson went from mentor to sexual objectification, supported by a series of photos and text messages.

But the case fell apart, Johnsons lawyer, Chris Van Wagner, said in court Thursday, when the photos and messages could not be found by prosecutors, who instead agreed that Johnson could plead guilty to the misdemeanor charges.

Johnson was originally charged with sexual exploitation of a child, using a computer to facilitate a child sex crime and causing a child to view or listen to sexual activity.

The reduction in charges, however, hasnt lessened the impact of what Johnson was alleged to have done with the girl. Speaking to Circuit Judge Josann Reynolds, the girl, now 19 years old, told how she went to Johnson for help getting back on track at school, but came away losing trust in anyone who said they could help her.

My life will never be the same after what you did to me, she told Johnson.

As part of the plea agreement, Van Wagner and Assistant District Attorney Carl Lazarus asked for two years of probation. Reynolds agreed to that sentence, but added 30 days in jail as a condition of Johnsons probation. She said she was deeply concerned about the impact the case has had on the victim.

Its visceral, Reynolds said.

Johnson apologized.

Im truly sorry for anyone I may have offended, he said. I want the court to know Im not a bad person at the end of the day. Im just sorry for everything thats gone on.

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Two high school students from Dane County have been named Presidential Scholars by U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona.

Four students from Wisconsin were among the 58th class of 161 presidential scholars who were recognized for their accomplishments in academics, the arts, and career and technical education fields. In addition to the two from Dane County, one student is from Milwaukee, and one is from Waupun.

Wisconsins 2022 U.S. Presidential Scholars are: Daphne Joyce Wu, from Middleton High School, who was named a U.S. Presidential Scholar in Career and Technical Education; Ananya Krishna, from Madison Memorial High School; David E. Arthur, from Marquette University High School; and Cameron David Pokorny, from Waupun Senior High School, also named a U.S. Presidential Scholar in Career and Technical Education.

I join President Biden to celebrate a class of scholars whose pursuit of knowledge, generosity of spirit, and exceptional talents bring our nation tremendous pride, Cardona said in a statement Thursday. Throughout one of the most trying periods in our nations history and amid our recovery from the pandemic, our students have once again demonstrated their strength and that they have so much to contribute to our country. Thanks to them, I know Americas future is bright.

The scholars are selected by a White House commission, which considers the students academic success, artistic and technical excellence, essays, school evaluations and transcripts, as well as a demonstrated commitment to community service and leadership.

The 2022 U.S. Presidential Scholars include one young man and one young woman from each state, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, and U.S. families living abroad, as well as 15 chosen at large, 20 scholars in the arts and 20 scholars in career and technical education, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

More than 5,000 students who qualified for the 2022 awards demonstrated outstanding performance on the College Board SAT or ACT exams or were nominated by chief state school officers, other partner recognition organizations and YoungArts, the National Foundation for the Advancement of Artists.

The class of 161 scholars will be recognized with an online program this summer.

The U.S. Presidential Scholars Program has honored more than 7,900 of the nations top-performing students since the start of the program in 1964.

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The agency that administers elections in Wisconsin would be completely overhauled or outright abolished under plans proposed by all four top Republicans running to unseat Democratic Gov. Tony Evers this fall.

Construction business owner Tim Michels, the most recent entrant in the crowded field of Republicans running for governor in the Aug. 9 primary, unveiled his election plan on Thursday, which would, among other measures, repeal all previous election guidance issued by the Wisconsin Elections Commission to clerks across the state and terminate the six members of the bipartisan commission  three Republicans and three Democrats  and replace them with new appointments.

Michels' plan would drastically alter the state Elections Commission but also stops short of calls by other top GOP contenders to completely abolish the agency, which has come under fire from Republicans for how the 2020 election was administered due to unfounded claims of widespread fraud and mounting pressure from former President Donald Trump.

My plan is a fresh start, and allows us to bring in or bring back people who are ready to get to work to fix our elections, not make the problem worse," Michels said in a statement.

Former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, the frontrunner in the race based on recent polling, issued a statement shortly after Michels' announced his plan blasting the proposal for not going far enough.

Anyone who has been paying attention knows that the Wisconsin Elections Commission cannot be reformed, Kleefisch said. It must be abolished.

Like Kleefisch, fellow GOP gubernatorial candidates Kevin Nicholson, a business owner and former Marine, and Rep. Timothy Ramthun, R-Campbellsport, have called for a complete dismantling of the state Elections Commission. Both Ramthun and Nicholson have said they want to see the Elections Commission eliminated and oversight of elections moved to the Secretary of State's Office. Kleefisch's proposal entails creating a new office within the state Department of Justice to oversee elections.

Earlier this year, former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who was hired by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, to lead the one-party review of the 2020 election at a cost of $676,000 to taxpayers, listed the "elimination and dismantling" of the Elections Commission as one of his top recommendations to the Legislature.

Vos, who has repeatedly extended Gableman's contract with the state despite no evidence of widespread fraud in the now 18-month-old election, has been adamantly opposed to eliminating the commission. Vos has also rejected Gableman's recommendation that the Legislature consider decertifying the results of the 2020 election, something experts and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have described as a constitutional impossibility.

Calls to dismantle the Elections Commission come just six years after the agency was formed in 2016 by former Gov. Scott Walker and Republican lawmakers to replace the nonpartisan Government Accountability Board, which itself was created in 2008 in the wake of the 2001 legislative caucus scandal that saw lawmakers from both parties convicted of using taxpayer resources to campaign.

The GAB came under fire from Republicans for its role in an investigation into coordination between Walker's 2012 recall campaign and supposedly independent political groups.

Plan details

Michels' plan to reform the Elections Commission includes calling the Legislature into a special session on his first day as governor to vote to remove the agency's six commissioners within a month. It would also terminate all senior staff at the agency and require them to reapply under the newly appointed commission.

Any staff member who participated in issuing guidance that did not comply with state law would be prohibited from rejoining the agency. Republicans have taken aim at agency guidance provided in 2020 to not send poll workers to nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic.

His plan would also ban private grant funding for administering elections and the use of unstaffed absentee ballot drop boxes. He also calls for a twice annual purge of dead and inactive voters from the polls. Currently, the commission performs a daily check on voters who are dead or have become ineligible. Voters who have not cast ballots in four years are purged from voter rolls.

Vos and Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg, who have said they oppose abolishing the state Elections Commission, did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday.

Ann Jacobs, the Democratic chair of the Elections Commission, described Michels' plan as "craziness" in a tweet Thursday.

"It demonstrates a total lack of understanding how elections work," Jacobs said. "There would be no guidance for elections at all? And no staff? Just an empty office? Who will administer registrations?"

The winner of the Aug. 9 primary will go on to face Evers in the Nov. 8 general election.

Evers, who has vetoed multiple bills passed by the GOP-led Legislature aimed at putting restrictions on elections, has said he opposes any effort to make voting harder in Wisconsin.

"All eligible voters should be able to vote," Evers tweeted Thursday. "I will continue to veto any radical legislation that makes it harder to access the ballot box."

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Wisconsins Democratic U.S. Senate candidates have each slammed recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions, but they dont see eye-to-eye on how to resolve conservatives hold on the nations highest court.

After a leaked memo showed the federal high courts preliminary decision to end nationwide abortion protections, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Tom Nelson said he would work to expand the Supreme Court.

Nelson added in an interview Thursday that he would consider anything to shake up the current court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, and said he favors imposing term limits.

Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, who holds a slight edge in the Marquette Law School Poll, wouldnt clarify whether he supported expanding the court or imposing term limits.

Given the GOPs attempt to pack the court with judges intent on overturning basic rights, we need to take a long hard look at reform, he said in a statement, calling for a code of ethics for justices.

Asked again whether he was in favor of expanding the court or imposing term limits, Barnes spokesperson Lauren Chou said, he recognizes the need for reforms in the court but is prioritizing codifying Roe v. Wade.

Milwaukee Bucks executive-on-leave Alex Lasry, polling second in the Marquette poll, said he doesnt support packing the court but would consider term limits for justices.

We need to take the politics out of the Supreme Court, Lasry said in a statement. I dont want to expand the court, but I do believe there needs to be Court reform. The potential of term limits should be part of that discussion.

State Treasurer and Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Sarah Godlewski isnt in favor of expanding the court, spokesperson Sarah Abel said.

In a statement, Godlewski said, I would be open to exploring term limits for Justices so that neither side can abuse the system by appointing inexperienced judges to lifetime positions.

The best way to counteract the packed conservative majority on the Supreme Court that Ron Johnson, Mitch McConnell, and the GOP created by stealing two seats, is to elect more Democrats, send extremists like Ron Johnson packing, end the filibuster, and pass laws that protect womens health and freedom, voting rights, LGBTQ rights, civil rights, and so much more, she said.

The idea of increasing the courts size  which has been floating around Democratic camps and has led to an unsuccessful proposal in 2021 to increase the number of justices from nine to 13  has split Democrats for years.

Some propose expansion as a way to undo the courts conservative majority. Others consider it a careless way to politicize the court and set a precedent for Democrats and Republicans each to expand the court when theyre in power. The maximum number of justices has changed over the years but has held steady at nine since 1869, according to the U.S. Supreme Court.

President Joe Biden has said he is not a fan of increasing the high courts size. He set forth a commission partially to study its viability, but the commissions final report stated it takes no position on the wisdom of expansion. And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she wouldnt hold a floor vote on the Democratic effort to expand the Supreme Court to 13 justices.

Still, the stakes have become higher for Democrats as the court appears poised to overturn abortion protections guaranteed under Roe v. Wade, leaving Democrats in fear of what right might be struck down next. The court dealt Wisconsin Democrats another blow when it rejected Wisconsins 10-year legislative maps drawn by Gov. Tony Evers, sending the matter back to the state high court, which then chose the GOP-majority Legislatures maps.

The real issue here is politicians like Ron Johnson who will stop at nothing short of a full abortion ban, Barnes said. The priority must be throwing out the filibuster and making Roe v. Wade the law of the land.

Tom favors expanding the court due to the Republicans stealing a few seats from us when they unjustly blocked Obamas nominee, Nelson spokesperson Irene Lin said, referencing Senate Republicans unwillingness to confirm now-Attorney General Merrick Garland after former President Barack Obama nominated him for the court in 2016.

Former President Donald Trump nominated three justices during his term, each of whom were confirmed under a Republican-majority Senate. His last nominee, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, was appointed in violation of (Republicans) own rules about no confirmations in an election year, Lin said, referencing the logic Republicans used to block Garland.

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Gov. Tony Evers veto of a bill that would have allowed some advanced practice nurses to work independently of doctors has prompted the state Board of Nursing chair to resign and bill supporters to plan to speak up at the state Capitol Thursday.

The bill, which would have created a separate license for nurse practitioners and other nurses with advanced training, was opposed by numerous doctor groups. They said the measure would be removing better-trained doctors from the patient care equation. Nursing groups said it would have increased patient access to quality, safe and economical care for Wisconsins rural, tribal, and urban populations.

Evers, in his April 15 veto message, said he opposed allowing advanced nurse practices functionally equivalent to those of physicians or potentially omitting physicians from a patients care altogether.

Peter Kallio, the nursing board chair, resigned May 3, saying in a letter to Evers that you and your administration know very little about the day-to-day work of advanced practices nurses in Wisconsin.

I can no longer continue, when I know that the support of the state government leadership is not supportive of its 90,000 nurses, he wrote.

Kallio, whose term was set to expire July 1, said an emergency rule has allowed advanced practice nurses to work more independently during the COVID-19 pandemic, with no negative changes in patient outcomes. More than 25 states have already reduced practice barriers, he said.

About 8,000 of Wisconsins 94,000 registered nurses have advanced degrees, working as nurse practitioners, certified registered nurse anesthetists, certified nurse midwives and clinical nurse specialists, according to the Wisconsin Nurses Association.

Nursing groups have scheduled a press conference Thursday morning at the Capitol, with speakers to include bill authors state Sen. Patrick Testin, R-Stevens Point, and state Rep. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, R-Appleton, who is a nurse practitioner.

The bill would have allowed advanced practice nurses who have worked with a doctor or dentist for 3,840 clinical hours to practice independently.

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WASHINGTON  The U.S. House emphatically approved a fresh $40 billion Ukraine aid package Tuesday as lawmakers beefed up President Joe Bidens initial request, signaling a magnified, bipartisan commitment to thwart Russian President Vladimir Putins bloody three-month-old invasion.

The measure sailed to passage by a lopsided 368-57 margin, providing $7 billion more than Bidens request from April and dividing the increase evenly between defense and humanitarian programs.

The bill would give Ukraine military and economic assistance, help regional allies, replenish weapons the Pentagon has shipped overseas and provide $5 billion to address global food shortages caused by the wars crippling of Ukraines normally robust production of many crops.

The new legislation would bring American support for the effort to nearly $54 billion, including the $13.6 billion in support Congress enacted in March.

Thats about $6 billion more than the U.S. spent on all its foreign and military aid in 2019, according to a January report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, which studies issues for lawmakers.

KEY DEVELOPMENTS IN THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR:

 Russia pounds Odesa as civilian bodies uncovered elsewhere

 Crucial NATO decisions expected in Finland, Sweden this week

 Biden signs Ukraine bill, seeks $40B aid, in Putin rejoinder

 German minister: Civilian killings demand accountability

Follow all AP stories on Russias war on Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

OTHER DEVELOPMENTS:

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy cited some good news Tuesday from the front, where he said the Ukrainian military was gradually pushing the Russian troops away from Kharkiv.

The Ukrainian General Staff said its forces drove the Russians out of four villages to the northeast of Kharkiv as it tries to push them back toward the Russian border.

Meanwhile Tuesday, Ukrainian officials say Russian missiles pummeled the vital port of Odesa, apparently as part of efforts to disrupt supply lines and weapons shipments critical to Kyivs defense.

Ukraines ability to stymie a larger, better-armed Russian military has surprised many who had anticipated a much quicker conflict.

With the war now in its 11th week and Kyiv bogging down Russian forces in many places and even staging a counteroffensive in others, Ukraines foreign minister appeared to voice confidence that the country could expand its aims beyond merely pushing Russia back to areas it or its allies held on the day of Feb. 24 invasion.

WASHINGTON  Senators meeting Tuesday with Ukraines ambassador to the U.S. says her message was one of thanks and making clear more help will be needed in the future.

Senators from both parties met with Oksana Markarova to discuss the war in Ukraine. Congress is preparing to provide $40 billion in military and humanitarian aid to help Ukraine defend against Russias military invasion.

Sen. Robert Menendez, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says of the meeting: It was a message of thanks, a call to support us to the end.

Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware says Markarova told lawmakers that Ukraine had already depleted its stockpiles of Soviet-era weapons and equipment and material, and that it was vital for the U.S. and others to resupply Ukraine.

Thank you, do more. We have a hard fight ahead, Coons said of Markarovas message to lawmakers. With your support, we can win.

Republican Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri says members of his party were satisfied with the ambassadors explanation for how a previous bout of aid has been spent and describes the latest $40 billion initiative as a survival package.

BUCHAREST, Romania  U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres met with refugees from war-torn Ukraine in Moldova on Tuesday, saying after that it is impossible to meet refugees and not be deeply moved by their stories.

One couple was telling me of a bomb that fell in their yard. People that have abandoned everything, including parts of their families, Guterres told reporters outside the refugee center in Moldovas capital, Chisinau.

Guterres previously served as U.N. high commissioner for refugees. He noted during his two-day visit to Moldova, where he met with Moldovas leaders, that the small nation has absorbed the most refugees proportionate to its own population of about 2.6 million people.

The U.N. chief told Moldovan President Maia Sandu in a meeting Tuesday that the U.N. would bolster its support for her country to help it deal with the refugee crisis. More than 450,000 refugees from Ukraine have fled into Moldova, one of Europes poorest countries.

Before leaving Moldova, Guterres also visited the home of a local family hosting Ukrainian refugees, whom he thanked for their generosity in opening up their homes to those fleeing the war.

WARSAW, Poland  Polands prime minister said Tuesday that Russias ambassador to Poland could have avoided being doused in red paint at a Soviet military ceremony if he followed the Foreign Ministrys advice to steer clear of the event.

Ambassador Sergey Andreev was splattered Monday with red paint thrown at him by protesters opposed to the war in Ukraine at a Warsaw cemetery holding the remains of Red Army soldiers who died during World War II. He had hoped to pay his respects on the Russian patriotic Victory Day holiday marking the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Russian crimes in Ukraine are such a terrible experience for so many people that the ambassadors presence at the memorial to Soviet soldiers was provocative, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said, according to the Polish news agency PAP.

Andreev had to abandon the ceremony after the paint was thrown at him and he returned to his car under a police escort.

MILAN  The Italian Foreign Ministry says 63 Ukrainian orphans will be flown on Wednesday from Krakow, Poland to Trapani, Sicily.

The transport was organized by the Pope John XXIII Community, along with Italian diplomats in Ukraine and Poland.

This humanitarian evacuation confirms Italys commitment to assisting civilians hit by the conflict in Ukraine, the Italian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Some 37,000 minors, many accompanied by family members, have arrived in Italy since Russia launched its invasion.

VALLETTA, Malta  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Maltese lawmakers that despite pleas, Ukraine has not received the amount of weapons it would need to unblock the siege of Mariupol and free the city.

Zelenskyy said defenders still continue their resistance in the plant of Azovstal. We are using all possible diplomatic instruments to rescue them, but Russia doesnt allow for any of the proposed options. We have asked our partners to provide weapons in order to unblock Mariupol and rescue both civilians and military personnel.

But he said the amount of weapons needed has not been provided. Zelenskyy said Ukrainian cities and towns have been hit by 2,250 missiles over the 2 1/2-month invasion. The bombardment doesnt stop, neither during the day, nor the night, he said.

The president also said Russias blockade of ports on the Black Sea and Sea of Azov means Ukraine cannot export grains and sunflower, which will provoke a crisis in the global food market.

If we cannot export wheat, barley, sunflower, sunflower seed oil, then it means that people in North Africa and Asia will be lacking food and the prices will go up, Zelenskyy said. Later, there could be new chaos and a new migration crisis, and I think you can feel this crisis in the neighboring regions to Malta.

ANNAPOLIS, Md.  Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan announced the shipment of a multimillion dollar aid package to Odesa, Ukraine, on Tuesday, including medical supplies and body armor.

The Maryland Department of Health is donating more than 485,000 bandages and wound care supplies, 95 Eternity mechanical ventilators for intensive care units and 50 Astral portable ventilators, the governors office said.

The package also includes nearly 200 pieces of body armor, including tactical vests and shields, which have been donated by the Maryland State Police.

Odesa is a sister city of Baltimore. Russian troops pounded the vital Ukrainian port on Tuesday, Ukrainian officials said, in an apparent effort to disrupt the supply lines and Western weapons shipments critical to Kyivs defense.

The governor was joined for the announcement at a warehouse in Hanover, Maryland, by Yaroslav Brisiuck, deputy chief of mission for the Embassy of Ukraine.

Additional medical supplies have been donated to the Paul Chester Childrens Hope Foundation, a Dickerson-based grassroots medical organization, to support the treatment of children and adults wounded during Russias invasion of Ukraine.

KYIV, Ukraine  German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock says her Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, has accepted an invitation to join top diplomats from the Group of Seven nations later this week.

Baerbock spoke during a visit Tuesday to Kyiv, where she met Kuleba and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

The G-7 foreign ministers will meet at Schloss Weissenhaus, a luxury resort on Germanys Baltic Sea coast, from May 12-14. Russias attack on Ukraine is expected to be a major topic at the meeting.

BOSTON  The United States, Britain, the European Union and other allies are collectively blaming Russia for a cyberattack that disrupted satellite communications used by Ukraines military just as Moscow invaded its neighbor on Feb. 24.

In addition to knocking out vital Ukrainian broadband service, the attack disabled tens of thousands of satellite uplinks from France to Poland, cutting service to private citizens and remote management of wind farms in central Europe.

In a statement, Britain noted that the attack began about an hour before Russia invaded. We will continue to call out Russias malign behavior and unprovoked aggression across land, sea and cyberspace, and ensure it faces severe consequences, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said in a statement.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken noted in a statement Tuesday that the attack on the satellite network of U.S.-owned Viasat was just one in a series of disruptive Russian digital assaults on Ukraine that began in mid-January. They have deleted and stolen data, disrupted telecommunications and attempted to knock out power to hundreds of thousands.

Tuesdays announcement came as allied cyber security leaders met in Newport, South Wales, for a conference sponsored by Britains National Cyber Security Center. Ukraine had previously blamed Russia for the Viasat attack.

KYIV, Ukraine  Ukraines gas transmission operator says it will shut off almost a third of Russian gas that passes through the country onward to Europe over Moscows war on the country.

The Ukrainian GTS made the announcement Tuesday in a statement posted to its website. It said that the war made it impossible to reach areas of its system to ensure its safety, particularly in Russian-held areas of the Luhansk region.

The company said it would halt some 32.6 million cubic meters of gas per day with the decision. It described the situation as force majeure, a legal term used for so-called acts of God that prevent contracts from being carried out.

It said the shutoff would begin at 7 a.m. Wednesday and that it would offer Russia the chance to try to reroute gas through another crossing held by the Ukrainian government.

The operator said: The company repeatedly informed Gazprom about gas transit threats due to the actions of the Russian-controlled occupation forces and stressed stopping interference in the operation of the facilities, but these appeals were ignored.

Sergei Kupriyanov, a spokesman for Russias state-controlled natural gas giant Gazprom, said Ukraines request to route shipments through another hub would be technologically impossible and that the company sees no grounds for the decision.

UNITED NATIONS  The U.N. General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly for the Czech Republic to replace Russia on the world organizations leading human rights body following its suspension over allegations of horrific rights violations by Russian soldiers in Ukraine.

The Czech Republic was the only candidate for the seat on the 47-member Human Rights Council. Seats on the Geneva-based council are divided among regional groups and a replacement for Russia had to come from an East European country.

In Tuesdays secret ballot vote, 180 of the General Assemblys 193 members deposited ballots. The result was 157 countries in favor of the Czech Republic and 23 abstentions.

The assembly approved a U.S.-initiated resolution on April 7 to suspend Russia from the Human Rights Council by a vote of 93-24 with 58 abstentions. The vote was significantly lower than on two resolutions the assembly adopted in March demanding an immediate cease-fire in Ukraine, withdrawal of all Russian troops and protection for civilians. Both of those resolutions were approved by at least 140 nations.

After the General Assembly suspended Russia, its deputy ambassador Gennady Kuzmin told U.N. members that Russia withdrew from the Human Rights Council before the vote. Council spokesman Rolando Gomez said that by withdrawing, Russia avoided being deprived of observer status at the rights body.

Since its Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, Russia has lost its spot on multiple U.N. bodies, including the executive boards of UN Women and the U.N. childrens agency UNICEF, the Committee on Non-governmental Organizations and the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. It was also suspended from the World Tourism Organization.

WASHINGTON  A top U.S. intelligence official says eight to 10 Russian generals have been killed during the war in Ukraine.

Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, who leads the Defense Intelligence Agency, disclosed the estimate Tuesday while testifying before a Senate committee.

Berrier told senators that because Russia lacks a non-commissioned officer corps, its generals have to go forward into combat zones and end up in dangerous positions.

HELSINKI  The Finnish Parliaments defense committee is supporting the Nordic country seeking membership in NATO, saying it would be the best solution to guarantee the countrys security and would be a way to raise the bar on being the target of aggression by neighboring Russia.

The committee chairman Petteri Orpo, leader of the main opposition National Coalition Party, said in a statement that Finlands security situation has drastically changed as a result of Russias attack on Ukraine.

Orpo stressed possible NATO membership would be purely a defense-related solution for Finland, a nation of 5.5 million that shares the longest border with Russia out of all European Union members.

Finland would join NATO to maximize its own security and defend the country. This would not be directed against anyone, Orpo told reporters on Tuesday.

Finland is expected to announce later this month whether it will seek to join the military alliance.

Recent polls show a support of over 70% among Finns for membership in NATO, a dramatic shift in support of 20-30% regularly recorded in the past few decades until Feb. 24 when Russias invasion of Ukraine started.

KYIV, Ukraine  Germanys foreign minister has reopened her countrys embassy in Kyiv that was closed more than two months ago following the Russian invasion.

Annalena Baerbock said Tuesday that the diplomatic mission would work with a skeleton staff, headed by Ambassador Anka Feldhusen.

Baerbock, the first German Cabinet member to visit Ukraine since the start of the war, pledged further support to Kyiv, including when it comes to investigating and prosecuting war crimes.

Speaking after visiting the towns of Bucha and Irpin, where Russian soldiers are believed to have killed numerous civilians, Baerbock said there can never again be impunity for the war crimes committed by Russia.

She said Germany will provide funds to pay for two additional Ukrainian prosecutors who will investigate sexual violence committed during the conflict.

Baerbock also stressed that Germany will reduce its dependence on Russian energy supplies to zero, forever. The German government has said it will end imports of Russian oil and coal this year and of natural gas from Russia by 2024 at the latest.

GENEVA  The U.N.s top human rights body will hold a special session this week following a request from Ukraine to discuss the worsening human rights situation in the country stemming from the Russian aggression.

The 47-member Human Rights Council said more than one-third of member states, the required minimum, backed the call that will pave the way for Thursdays session at the U.N.s European headquarters in Geneva.

Supporters included many Western countries, as well as Gambia, Marshall Islands and Mexico. A total of 55 countries, including observer states, backed the call, but the list could grow.

The council also held an urgent dialogue during its last session to discuss Ukraine just days after the Feb. 24 invasion by Russian forces.

KYIV, Ukraine  The governor of the eastern Luhansk region on Tuesday rejected Russias claims its forces have breached Ukrainian defenses near the city of Popasna and moved the regions administrative borders.

In a Telegram post, Serhiy Haidai described the claim as fantasies. He insists that the defense is strong. There are no breakthroughs.

Moscow considers the eastern Ukrainian region a sovereign state.

LVIV, Ukraine  Ukraines foreign minister is suggesting that Kyivs goals in fighting the Russian invasion have expanded.

In an interview with The Financial Times published Tuesday, Dmytro Kuleba said the picture of victory is an evolving concept.

In the first months of the war, the victory for us looked like withdrawal of Russian forces to the positions they occupied before Feb. 24 and payment for inflicted damage, Kuleba said.

Now, if we are strong enough on the military front and we win the battle for Donbas, which will be crucial for the following dynamics of the war, of course the victory for us in this war will be the liberation of the rest of our territories, the minister said.

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy welcomed the latest package of European Union sanctions against Russia, particularly highlighting a proposed ban on imports of Russian oil.

Zelenskyy told lawmakers in Slovakias Parliament on Tuesday that he understands Slovakia is not able to immediately replace Russian oil but stressed it is important to do so, calling it a price to be paid for freedom.

Slovakia, which is fully dependent of Russian oil, supports the sanctions but has asked for a three-year exemption from the ban until its key refinery Slovnaft makes technological changes needed to process other than Russias heavy oil.

Speaking through a translator, Zelenskyy also thanked Slovakia for its help in supplying his countrys military with the arms it needs. Acting at his request, Slovakia gave Ukraine its Soviet-era S-300 air defense system.

LVIV, Ukraine  Ukrainian officials say around 100 civilians still remain trapped at the Azovstal steel mill in Mariupol despite earlier reports that all have been evacuated.

Donetsk regional governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said in televised remarks on Tuesday those left behind are the civilians that the Russians have not selected.

How and based on what criteria they take people out (of the plant) is something only the occupiers know, Kyrylenko said. He explained that everyone in Mariupol de-facto is held hostage by the Russians, and the occupiers take advantage of it, constantly changing the conditions of the evacuation.

Earlier on Tuesday, Petro Andryushchenko, an advisor to the Mariupol mayor, also said civilians are still trapped at the Azovstal mill that is the last pocket of resistance in the embattled port city.

It wasnt immediately clear how the two officials knew about the remaining civilians at the Azovstal plant and the fighters still there were yet to confirm this.

Hundreds of civilians had sheltered at the plant. Scores of them have been evacuated in recent days in a joint effort by Ukrainian authorities, the Russian military, the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

On Saturday, Ukraines Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said that all women, children and elderly have been evacuated from Azovstal.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
The State Journal has done a commendable job covering the anti-democratic actions of the new Republican Party. But the newspaper missed the mark in its article about Gov. Tony Evers Board of Regents appointments. The real story is not those appointments. It's that they are unlikely to be voted on and confirmed by the Wisconsin Senate.

As noted late in the article, they will likely join the many Evers appointees who have not been confirmed and will be replaced if a Republican governor is elected in 2022, or if they displease the Legislature.

This is consistent with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., not allowing a vote on President Barack Obamas Supreme Court nominee, and the same Republicans' attempt to overturn President Joe Bidens election. These actions (and others) say clearly that Democrats will not be allowed to govern when they win elections -- when Republican lose, they will retain power by any means necessary.

It is not hard to see where this leads for our democracy and country. But it is hard to see what will stop that movement, other than honorable Republicans saying "enough" and demanding their party leaders stop and respect democracy.

I implore them to do so before its too late.

Keith Heimforth, Madison
Record breaking heat again Thursday, but a cold front will begin to push into Wisconsin tonight. Showers and storms then look likely through Friday and some could be severe. Full details in our latest forecast video.
Nomination: It is my pleasure to recommend Dr. Kalise Price as an outstanding Magic Valley registered nurse. Kalise was born and raised in Twin Falls, ID. Kalise doesnt often talk about her humble beginnings and she never once has used them as an excuse to not be the best human and nurse she could be. If you did wrangle it out of her, she will tell you she grew up poor, in high school working part time at Maxies pizza to have food to eat and part time at Shopko to have money to buy tampons. After barely getting herself though high school, she went to cosmetology school and added cutting hair at the JCPenny Salon to her work list. She started volunteering at the Twin Falls Long Term Care Center, cutting and perming the little old ladies hair. She was sad and upset that they would come to her with dirty clothes and unkempt appearance. She kept thinking to herself that this was such a disservice, to be at this vulnerable stage and place in life and not even have basic cares like getting teeth brushed, hair combed, and a clean shirt. She started thinking that she could take good care of these humans, that she could help ease their suffering and make their lives a little better and thats when she started classes as CSI for her licensed practical nurse (LPN) degree. After graduation, Kalise was able to quit her job at Maxies and Shopko and started her nursing career at the old downtown clinic on Shoshone providing care on the adult medical- surgical floor, still continuing to cut hair at JCPennys and volunteer at the care center. Kalise worked hard to care for her patients in her LPN role but she found herself wondering about the care regimens and would question the RNs about labs and treatments, only to be met with answers like those are RN things and dont worry about it, thats not your role. Kalise accepted that as a challenge and returned to CSI to start her Registered Nursing (RN) degree. She had married a local boy who ran Bills automotive downtown and about 3 years later she walked across the graduation stage with a 1-year-old and a newborn on her hip, having just buried her mother a week before.

With her new RN degree, Kalise applied for a job at Magic Valley Regional on the Labor & Delivery Unit. After her interview they asked her what she thought about instead working in the Newborn Intensive Care Unit (NICU). She accepted the challenge and if you ask any mommy, daddy, or newborn who had a stint in the NICU, they would tell you Kalise was the nurse you wanted. This is where I bumped into Kalise in 2003. I was a baby nurse that had just accepted a job in the NICU and Kalise, a charge nurse, swooped me right up and took me under her wing. I remember watching her work and being amazed.she never sat down, she never stopped. She did cares on the babies, and would then go to deliveries, and then fold the laundry and take out the garbage, and then starting wiping down the counters. I remember telling myself, Ill be damned if I let this woman outwork me! Kalise was an example for me and other nurses in her work ethic, but also in her nursing. I was young and did not have children and I would listen to her talk to families and teach them about caring for their babies. She taught hundreds of scared moms and dads to confidently take home sick or premature babies, and she didnt even know I was learning right along with them. I realized quickly that I only wanted to work the days she was in charge because I found working with her brought out the best version of me. And when I delivered my own premature, sick twins, I felt so much confidence knowing she was there to provide care for them. When I met Kalise in the NICU, she was working on her bachelors degree onlineadd that to the list of things this woman was doing in addition to being on the unit best practices committee and also being on call 48+ hours a week working on the hospitals Neonatal Transport Team, picking up sick and early babies from outlying facilities.

I remember the day CSI called me and told me she had put me as a reference for a teaching position she was applying for in the RN program. I cried. I didnt want her to leave our unit; I needed her and the babies needed her and basically everyone needed herbut I told CSI that if anyone knows the struggle of humans in our community who are good, but trying to be better, it was Kalise. If anyone had done things the hard way with everything working against them, it was her.

She knew what it was like to have a family and a job and no money, but also a desire to be more. I did not have to cry too hard because even though she accepted the job of teaching in the RN department at CSI, she continued to work a few shifts a month in the NICU, in addition to her starting her Masters degree in nursing. It wasnt long before a job opened at CSI teaching in the RN program and I couldnt help but jump at the opportunity to work again with the best nurse I know. I started teaching in the Fall of 2012 and once again Kalise took me right under her wing. She helped me make to extremely difficult transition from bedside nurse to nurse educator, all the while finishing her doctorate degree in nursing, raising her family, and still working in the NICU on nights and weekends. It was with Kalises encouragement that I started the long educational journey to my doctorate degree in nursing. When it was hard and I wanted to quit, I would think of her work ethic and her drive for success, despite obstacles, and when I voiced that I wanted to quit she told me to stop making excuses, remember my goals, and get to work.

About four years ago, the CSI RN program went through big changes and we were in need of a new chair for the program. Kalise was the first person that came to my mind. Not only was she the most senior RN we had, she was also the most qualified as she had spent her time and money becoming an RN program accreditation visitor. With national accreditation standards being a requirement for nurse graduates to work at most nursing facilities, including St. Lukes Magic Valley, her knowledge in this area was vital and no other faculty member had her experience and expertise. She continues to be a vital asset to the CSI RN program as she leads courageously, always thinking differently, and also working tirelessly side by side with faculty. She is one of the biggest reasons that CSI is able to educate around 100 future nurses a year to provide care in our community.

I have worked with Kalise as a nurse for almost 20 years now and I really cant think of a better nurse to honor for her sacrifice and dedication to our profession. She has served in several capacities but has always shown hard work, dedication, and compassion for whomever her patient happens to belittle old ladies at the care center, sick adult medical patients, preterm babies, fellow nurses, nursing students, and our community.

Current Employer:

College of Southern Idaho & St. Lukes Magic Valley

Career History: Idaho Home Health & Hospice, Medical/Surgical & Intensive Care Unit Twin Falls Clinic & Hospital; Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center; Medical/Surgical, Cath Lab, Pediatrics, Mother/Baby, Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), and Clinical Education St. Lukes Magic Valley; and Nurse Educator/Administrator College of Southern Idaho.

Achievements: LPN, RN, BSN, MSN-Leadership/Management, DNP-Evidence-Based Practice. Ive presented at conferences, published, and an Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing (ACEN) Site Visitor.

Why did you decide to become a nurse? I wanted to make difference.

How many years have you been in nursing? 28 years

What makes you unique from other nurses? Not sure, we all have our uniqueness. Perhaps the odds were against me in obtaining an education.

What is the most rewarding part of being a nurse? Emotional reward from caring for patients and student success.

Why did you go into your field of nursing? I wanted to be a labor and delivery nurse. When I interviewed at Magic Valley Regional Medical Center, I was told my personality would fit better in NICU; didnt really know what that meant at the time, but I was hooked the first time I went to a high-risk delivery. I worked 18 years in NICU nursing until I assumed the nurse administrator role for the RN program at CSI October 2018. I chose nursing education because I wanted to be a part of peoples educational journey to success.

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TWIN FALLS  Chobani, which employs more than 1,000 people in the Magic Valley, has pledged to cover expenses incurred by employees who need to travel out of state, or more than 100 miles, to receive an abortion, cancer treatment, transplant surgery, bariatric surgery, gender reassignment care and other specialized procedures.

Businesses have an obligation to prioritize their employees health, safety & well-being, CEO and Founder of Chobani Hamdi Ulukaya posted on Twitter. Thats why Chobani amended its health plans to support our employees ability to access specialized healthcare not available locally  including womens reproductive health services.

This announcement comes days after a leaked draft opinion suggests the U.S. Supreme Court plans to overturn Roe V. Wade, the case that guarantees federal constitutional protections of abortion rights.

Idaho has a trigger law that would ban abortions in the state, with limited exceptions, if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade.

Chobani President Kevin Burns sent an email to employees Thursday morning describing the new policy adjustment and acknowledging the U.S. is seeing changes that may impact a womans ability to choose and control her reproductive health safely.

We know that some of these issues are not without controversy, emotion, or political and religious implications. We recognize that we have employees with strongly-held views on both sides of this issue and we respect the deeply-held beliefs on both sides, Burns wrote to employees. For Chobani, this is not a political stance or posturing  its a reaffirmation of our core belief that we will strive to do whats best for the safety, health and well-being of our employees and their families.

For employees or dependents who must travel, the food company will now cover transportation, such as plane fare or gas, lodging expenses for the person receiving the care and the caregiver, and reimbursement for childcare costs.

Burns also wrote the company hopes other employers will consider taking similar actions.

Following the announcement, Planned Parenthoods affiliate in Idaho praised the companys announcement and called on other Idaho employers to follow Chobanis lead.

Thank you, Hamdi Ulukaya, for recognizing the importance of abortion care and Idahoans access to critical health care, said Rebecca Gibron, CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawaii, Indiana, Kentucky. This is a major step to defend the health and safety of Idahoans.

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TWIN FALLS  Idaho Gov. Brad Littles Operation Esto Perpetua is aimed at reducing the flow of fentanyl into the state. To help develop a strategy for reducing fentanyl distribution, a Citizens Action Panel gathered input from the public at four community roundtables around Idaho.

The fourth and final roundtable for the Citizens Action Group was held Wednesday at the College of Southern Idaho in Twin Falls.

The governor opened the roundtable with an overview of the resources the Legislature has committed in recent sessions to treatment, legal issues, and facilities to help with addiction and recovery.

The goal of Esto Perpetua, he said, was to reduce the flow of the drug into Idaho.

I want to emphasize with Operation Esto Perpetua, were trying to focus on the supply of meth and fentanyl, Little said, and what we do for interdiction.

The Citizens Action Group is made up by two legislative members, Speaker Scott Bedke and Senator Abby Lee; Coeur dAlene Mayor Jim Hammond; Shoshone-Paiute Tribe Chairman Brian Thomas; former Ammon Mayor Dana Kirkham; and Idaho State Police Col. Kedrick Wills. The group is chaired by former Rep. Luke Malek.

Malek said the observations from the four roundtables will be delivered to the Law Enforcement Panel, which will develop a strategy to combat fentanyl, and recommend items to improve the states response to the growing threat.

Esto Perpetua is the motto of the state of Idaho; its the heart of who we are, Malek said. And this problem is threatening the heart of who we are.

Law enforcement officers, county prosecutors, and other public servants gave testimony to the Citizens Action Group over a two-hour period.

Twin Falls County Prosecutor Grant Loebs told the panel that shortly after he began his job in 1997, the methamphetamine surge began, which quickly overwhelmed his office with cases.

We are now in the grip of another surge, which is much more deadly, Loebs said. We dont have the manpower to deal with this any more than we had the manpower to deal with the meth surge back in the late 90s.

Loebs told the panel that people on court-restricted probation undergo drug testing as part of their terms of release, but that standard drug testing doesnt catch fentanyl, and people on probation know this and exploit it.

They know that if they test positive for meth that theyre going to be in trouble. They know that if they smoke marijuana, they know theyll get caught with heroin in their system, Loebs said. They know another thing: They know that they will not be tested by the Department of Probation for use of fentanyl. The test doesnt catch that drug, Loebs said.

Loebs also said that fentanyl should be added to the list of drugs for which there are mandatory minimums for dealing a large quantity. Current mandatory minimum sentences for marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamines and heroin had been shown to deter trafficking of those substances across Idahos borders, Loebs said.

Minidoka County Prosecutor Lance Stevenson echoed Loebs request for mandatory minimum sentencing and upped the ante by asking for a life-sentence option for high-volume dealers.

I want to be able to take that guy away from everywhere else in our community and to stop him, Stevenson said. Thats what the mandatory minimum code gives you. Life in prison, you can argue that, and thats a big deterrent. Thats a big hammer. And I like that hammer.

Stevenson also said he sees a need for treatment options for first-time offenders. He described a recent case in Minidoka where an individual ended up in jail after an overdose and was released on bail only to overdose and end up back in jail. After his second release on bail, the individual had a fatal overdose.

I think we did a pretty good job with the resources we had, Stevenson said. We had him on pretrial release, he was testing, we were doing everything we could. There was a component there that we were missing and I think that component was treatment.

Fentanyl is increasingly found in the jails, Twin Falls Sheriffs Capt. Scott Bishop said, smuggled in by individuals familiar with the strip search procedures.

When we bring people into our jail there is a system in place on how we search them, Bishop said. The places that they put the items are not places that we are locating the drugs during a normal strip search. And without a search warrant, we are not going to go past where we are doing our searching now.

Bishop said that there are a small number of jails and prisons in Idaho that have begun using body scanners similar to what are used in airports, and that should be expanded statewide. Though very expensive, he said, body scanners offer an effective, minimally intrusive way to determine if contraband is concealed within a cavity.

Tamara Ashley is a member of the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes and is a social worker for the Duck Valley Indian Reservation. She posed several questions to the panel about how to protect and promote social workers as frontline responders to substance use.

What are we doing to help our frontline workers? Ashley asked. There is not a tool to detect fentanyl. How are we keeping a vulnerable population safe if we cannot detect the substance?

Ashley said her department is understaffed and that has resulted in huge workloads for caseworkers.

We have high turnover rates, Ashley said. Theres not very many people that are wanting to be in this position and be in these fields, and yet we are responsible for keeping people safe, keeping the community safe.

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As the U.S. Supreme Court appears poised to turn back the clock on abortion as a fundamental right protected by the U.S. Constitution, the courts conservative justices could do the same thing with gay marriage.

Based on the same legal argument revealed in a leaked draft opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, the justices could overrule the courts 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, which declared same-sex marriage a fundamental right protected by the U.S. Constitution.

The analysis of Alitos draft opinion would be remarkably similar to what it would be in Obergefell, McKay Cunningham, a constitutional law professor and director of experiential learning at The College of Idaho, said in a phone interview.

While some rights are pretty clearly protected in the Constitution (speech, press, religion, for example), you wont find the words abortion or gay marriage.

In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court relied on the right to privacy under the due process clause in the 14th Amendment as a justification for interpreting abortion as a fundamental right protected by the Constitution.

The same privacy right was used in Obergefell, when the court ruled gay marriage to be a fundamental right, long after many states had legalized same-sex marriage.

In his draft opinion in the abortion case, Alito argues that the court should not create new fundamental rights that could apply under due process. Further, even if the court could create new rights wholesale, any right, Alito argues, should be deeply rooted in the nations history and traditions.

The right to an abortion, Alito argues, is not. And as a result, states are pretty much given free rein, Cunningham said. All states have to do is show that their law is rational. All theyve got to show is theyve got a legitimate reason for the law, and morality is considered to be a legitimate reason in most instances.

Again, the same could be said for gay marriage.

The prospect of Obergefell being overturned is a frustrating prospect for Deborah Ferguson and Craig Durham, of the Boise law firm Ferguson Durham, the two attorneys who won the Latta v. Otter case in 2014 that legalized gay marriage in Idaho, months before the Obergefell ruling.

Its a pretty, pretty radical draft document by Alito, and it is profoundly disturbing, Ferguson said in a phone interview. I would love to be able to say, well, you know, Obergefell could be distinguished (from Roe v Wade), but really, what I find so disturbing, there is no limiting principle there in that (draft) decision.

In other words, Ferguson said, Alitos draft opinion could extend to a whole range of other rights for U.S. citizens that are not enumerated in the Constitution, such as gay marriage, interracial marriage and contraception, and turned back over to the states to regulate as legislatures see fit.

It seems like the logic of Alitos draft would apply to undermine the right to privacy in the Constitution and to all those rights in the substantive due process clause, Durham said.

Gay marriage in Idaho

Idaho voters in 2006 approved, with 63% of the vote, a constitutional amendment that declared, A marriage between a man and a woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this state.

In 2013, the National Center for Lesbian Rights brought a lawsuit, Latta v Otter, against the state of Idaho on behalf of four lesbian couples challenging the state ban.

In 2014, U.S. District Court Judge Candy Dale ruled in favor of the couples in the case.

The state appealed to the 9th District Court of Appeals, which upheld Dales ruling.

The state of Idaho asked the U.S. Supreme Court to issue an emergency stay, which the Supreme Court granted but then vacated shortly thereafter, and gay couples began receiving marriage licenses in Idaho in October 2014.

At the same time, the Obergefell case was making its way through the courts and ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015, eventually becoming the landmark case that legalized gay marriage in the United States.

Its not entirely clear what the law would be in Idaho if Obergefell is overturned. Thats because Idahos constitutional amendment was ruled unconstitutional by two lower courts without ever making it to the Supreme Court. Idahos 2006 constitutional amendment is still on the books. Idaho never repealed it, like other states did.

Idaho also has on the books Idaho Code 32-209, which states that Idaho would not recognize a same-sex marriage from another state.

Just this year, the Idaho Legislature had a debate about a simple tax conformity bill because some Republican lawmakers argued it went against the Idaho Constitution, because that amendment is still on the books.

The bill, House bill 472, simply aligned Idaho with tax policy changes in federal law, but some right-wing legislators, such as Rep. Ron Nate, R-Rexburg, objected, arguing that voting for the bill would be violating the Idaho Constitution, according to The Associated Press.

In all, 22 Republican legislators voted against the bill.

Going backward on rights

Some have pointed out that Alitos draft opinion states that its dealing with abortion only and not all those other rights that fall under the right to privacy under the due process clause.

We emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right, Alito wrote. Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.

Just because Alito wrote that doesnt mean we should believe him, though, as Alito and justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett had indicated that Roe v Wade was settled precedent, but here they are tearing down this precedent.

A lot of these justices have not made it a secret, Cunningham said. Theyve spoken in public events about how they would like to revisit some of these cases and turn them around. So if I was a betting man, and there was an Obergefell-type case that came up again, I dont know what Id say, but it would definitely not be comfortable.

Durham and Ferguson pointed out the Supreme Court has made several bad decisions in its history for not extending rights, particularly to minorities, such as the Dred Scott decision and allowing Japanese internment camps, but I think this is the first time that well have taken away something that was deemed a fundamental right for 50 years, Durham said.

If the Supreme Court overturns the decision that the right to marry is a fundamental right, you can probably bet on the Idaho Legislature making a run at banning same-sex marriage again.

One man, one woman

A few weeks ago, when I was looking over state legislative candidates, I came across the campaign website for Jaron Crane, who is running in District 12.

Hes the son of former Idaho Treasurer Ron Crane and brother of Idaho Rep. Brent Crane, R-Nampa, the House State Affairs Committee chairman who said over the weekend that he would hold hearings on legislation banning emergency contraception and abortion pills once the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade.

One of Jaron Cranes planks in his campaign platform is pro-family  but apparently only certain families.

I believe that marriage is between one man and one woman and it is the responsibility of our government to protect that union, Jaron Crane writes, even though same-sex marriages have been legal everywhere in this country for almost seven years now, and marriage between one woman and one man is still protected.

A few weeks ago, his platform struck me as odd, like it was something out of ancient history.

Today, though, we can actually see where thats headed.

Lets say a case goes up to the U.S. Supreme Court on this issue, Durham said. And they say were overruling Obergefell because thats not implicit in the concept of ordered liberty in our nations history, then absolutely, I think the Idaho constitutional amendment would be back in force, and same-sex marriage would then be unlawful in Idaho.

Scott McIntosh is the opinion editor of the Idaho Statesman. You can email him at smcintosh@idahostatesman.com or call him at 208-377-6202. Follow him on Twitter @ScottMcIntosh12.

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This feature ran Dec. 12, 2019, in the Times-News and at Magicvalley.com.

Its a longstanding tradition for a military unit to adopt a mascot. Over the centuries, ponies, dogs, goats, rams, baboons, tigers, camels, elephants  even ferrets  served as pets, not working animals.

So in 1931 when 116th Cavalry of the Idaho National Guards Company D arrived for training in Boise, the Buhl unit brought the company mascot.

But the live goat with its horns painted red, its face tinted and its whickers dyed, disappeared within a few days, according to the June 13, 1931, edition of the Twin Falls Daily News.

Then a cook from Boises 148th Field Artillery confessed to getting Company Ds goat. The mess sergeant had butchered and cooked the goat and served the meat to the troops.

No sign of the goat was ever found, the News said. Boise troopers said they buried the bones.

Mychel Matthews is the managing editor for the Times-News. The Hidden History feature runs every Thursday in the Times-News and at Magicvalley.com. If you have a question about something that may have historical significance, email Matthews at mmatthews@magicvalley.com.

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KYIV, Ukraine  An adviser to the Mariupol mayor said Wednesday that Russian forces have blocked all evacuation routes out of the city.

The adviser, Petro Andriushchenko, said there were few apartment buildings fit to live in after the weeks of bombardment and very little food or drinking water.

Andriushchenko said some residents who have remained in the city are cooperating with the Russian occupying forces in exchange for food.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk says Ukraine has offered to release Russian prisoners of war if Russia will allow the badly injured fighters to be evacuated from the Mariupol steel plant.

Russian forces have surrounded the plant, the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance in the southern port city.

Vereshchuk said no agreement has been reached but negotiations were underway. The fighters trapped in the plant have refused to surrender to the Russians, saying they fear being tortured or killed.

KEY DEVELOPMENTS IN THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR:

 Ukrainians make gains in east, stop Russian gas at one hub

 Wartime birth amid the air raid sirens in Ukraine hospital

 US, Western Europe fret over uncertain Ukraine war endgame

 Fighters appeal for evacuation of wounded from Mariupol mill

 House approves $40B in Ukraine aid, beefing up Biden request

 Leonid Kravchuk, independent Ukraines 1st president, dies

 Ambassador nominee for Ukraine seeks quick embassy reopening

 Follow all AP stories on Russias war on Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

OTHER DEVELOPMENTS:

WASHINGTON  U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said a ban on sales of semiconductors and other technology to Russia by the U.S. and its allies is having a serious impact on Russias ability to manufacture military equipment.

We have reports from Ukrainians that when they find Russian equipment, military equipment, on the ground, its filled with semiconductors that they took out of dishwashers and refrigerators, Raimondo said Wednesday during a Senate hearing, adding that she met a few weeks ago with Ukraines prime minister.

Raimondo said two of Russias tank manufacturing plants have shut and many of its auto makers have furloughed workers and closed down.

And so the point is, we are having a very serious effect, she said. What we need to do in order to continue this is enforcement, enforcement, enforcement.

Raimondo said U.S. exports of technology to Russia are down nearly 70% since late February when the Biden administration, in coordination with European and Asian allies, imposed sanctions and export controls on Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine.

WASHINGTON  Final congressional approval of a $40 billion Ukraine aid bill seems certain within days, according to some lawmakers.

The Senates top Republicans said Wednesday they expect strong GOP backing for the House-passed measure. That will signal a bipartisan, heightened commitment to helping thwart the bloody Russian invasion.

In his nightly video address Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said funds from the aid bill will allow Ukraine to get more weapons and equipment plus help investigate war crimes by Russia.

The bill also would help regional allies, replenish weapons the Pentagon has shipped overseas and provide $5 billion to address global food shortages caused by the wars crippling of Ukraines normally robust production of many crops.

The new measure includes $6 billion to arm and train Ukrainian forces, $8.7 billion to restore American stores of weapons shipped to Ukraine and $3.9 billion for U.S. forces deployed to the area.

Theres also $8.8 billion in economic support for Ukraine, $4 billion to help Ukraine and allies finance arms and equipment purchases and $900 million for housing, education and other help for Ukrainian refugees in the U.S.

BERLIN  The U.N. nuclear agency says it is again receiving remote data from the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine following an interruption caused by the Russian occupation of the site.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said late Wednesday that data transmission was re-established following a visit by its inspectors and technicians in April, after Russian forces withdrew.

The agency said it was the first time in two months that it has received remote data from all nuclear power plants and spent fuel storage facilities in Ukraine where monitoring systems are in place.

Its head, Rafael Mariano Grossi, said this was a very important step for the IAEA to continue to implement safeguards in Ukraine.

Grossi cautioned, though, that on-site verification at the Zaporizhzhya nuclear plant continues to be challenging owing to the presence of Russian forces and Rosatom personnel at the site, calling the situation unsustainable.

Grossi said he has proposed leading an expert visit to Zaporizhzhya after the necessary consultations and at the earliest possible opportunity.

MOSCOW  The governor of a Russian region near Ukraine says that at least one civilian has been killed and another six have been wounded in the Ukrainian shelling of a village close to the border.

Belgorod Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov said that the village of Solokhi came under shelling from the Ukrainian side late Wednesday. He said that the village residents will be evacuated.

Gladkovs account couldnt be independently verified. Russian authorities in the regions near Ukraine have repeatedly reported incidents when border areas came under Ukrainian shelling.

KYIV, Ukraine  Ukraines Foreign Ministry has accused Russia of stealing the countrys grain and trying to sell some of it at global markets.

The ministry said in Wednesdays commentary that the stealing of Ukrainian grain amounts to looting.

It warned countries that purchase Russian grain that some of its shipments could contain the grain stolen from Ukraine, making its buyers possible accomplices.

The ministry cited official estimates indicating that Russia already may have stolen 400,000-500,000 metric tons of grain that cost over $100 million. It charged that practically all ships leaving Sevastopol with a load of grain are carrying the grain stolen from Ukraine.

It urged the global community to toughen the sanctions against Russia.

TURIN, Italy  A Ukrainian band thats competing in this years Eurovision Song Contest turned out in a Turin park for a rally with a few dozen of their compatriots to express solidarity for their war-ravaged homeland.

Ahead of Wednesday nights competition, the Kalush Orchestra posed for photos with some 50 Ukrainians who live in Italy.

Each of the rallys participants put a hand to the heart in a sign of devotion to Ukraine.

Kalush Orchestra this week was one of the entrants advancing to the finals of the wildly popular European annual songfest, whose winner will be decided on Saturday.

The Ukrainians rallied behind a stage where free concerts by some of the musical groups from among the 35 nations sending entries are held nightly on the sidelines of the actual competition.

The upbeat entry by Kalush Orchestra for the competition is a song that was composed by the bands front-man as a tribute to his mother.

But the song, Stefania, has been transformed to a kind of anthem to Ukraine, which was invaded by its powerful neighbor Russia on Feb. 24.

The song quickly became a sentimental favorite for many of Eurovisions fans.

SOFIA, Bulgaria  A pro-Russian nationalist party staged a protest rally in front of the parliament building in Bulgarias capital, Sofia, on Wednesday, calling for the government to resign and accusing it of failing to tackle the economic crisis.

Several hundreds supporters of the Vazrazhdane party demanded that the centrist coalition of Prime Minister Kiril Petkov step down because it draws Bulgaria into the war of the United States against Russia in Ukraine.

Waving Bulgarian and some Russian flags, participants shouted antigovernmental slogans accusing the Cabinet of being more concerned about Ukraine instead of taking care of their own people.

Organizers insisted that Bulgaria should act as a conciliator, rather than arming one side and thus fueling the conflict. They urged the government to resign and clear the way for new elections which would allow their party to rule Bulgaria in line with national interests.

Later, the protesters marched to the nearby Sofia municipality, where they clashed with police as they tried to remove an Ukrainian flag from the building.

Bulgaria, which was among Moscows closest allies during Soviet times, is now a NATO and EU member state. Traditional bonds with Russia, based on common religion and cultural heritage are being harmed as many are horrified by the bloodshed caused by Russias aggression.

Still, many Bulgarians share strong pro-Russian sentiments that play in favor of populist leaders. Vazrazhdane has currently 13 legislators in the 240-seat National Assembly, who have been strong supporters of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

KYIV, Ukraine  A Ukrainian general says that Russia hasnt abandoned hopes to capture the Ukrainian capital.

Brig. Gen. Oleksiy Hromov said at Wednesdays briefing that the Russians harbor plans to take control over the southern Mykolaiv and Odessa regions to build a land corridor to the Transnistria separatist region of Moldova and also try to storm Kyiv.

Hromov said that Russia still hopes to capture more Ukrainian territories and call a sham vote to make them part of Russia. He added that such Russian plans will be foiled by the Ukrainian resistance.

The Russian forces tried to capture the Ukrainian capital in the first weeks of the invasion, but have pulled back after facing staunch Ukrainian defenses and shifted their focus on the countrys east, where Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian forces since 2014.

WASHINGTON  Ukraines leaders must start shaping their terms for an acceptable peace deal, especially in light of Russias surprising failure to win its war outright, Italys premier said Wednesday.

When Russia first launched its invasion of Ukraine, we thought there was a Goliath and a David, Mario Draghi told reporters at a news conference in Washington. But what seemed like an invincible power has proved not to be, Draghi said, referring to Russian forces inability to overcome the defense mounted by Ukraines military, with heavy Western backing.

Draghi spoke after meeting with President Joe Biden on Tuesday. Draghi says he urged Biden to push to get all key players, including the United States and Russia, into talks to end the war.

But any rush to close a peace deal that leaves Ukrainians angry and resentful risks a return to fighting, the Italian leader said Wednesday.

We have to remove any thought that we can reach an imposed peace, Draghi said. That is a recipe for disaster.

BERLIN  The German army says it has begun training Ukrainian soldiers to use a powerful artillery system that Germany and the Netherlands plan to supply to Ukraine.

The Defense Ministry said 18 crews are being trained to use the Panzerhaubitze 2000, an advanced, self-propelled howitzer.

This is a clear sign of our solidarity, the ministry said. But Germany wont become a party to the conflict because of the training or delivery of the howitzers.

DONETSK  Separatists in Donetsk on Wednesday celebrated the eighth anniversary of self-proclaimed independence from Ukraine.

Constitution square in the city center was renamed after a Russian officer who was among the first Russian servicemen killed in the special military operation.

The head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk Peoples Republic, Denis Pushilin, and Engels Gadzhimagomedov, the father of the killed officer, installed a new street sign. Local residents who support the pro-Russian separatists came to lay flowers.

The Day of Donetsk Peoples Republic was celebrated without the usual mass events this year due to security reasons.

BUCHAREST, Romania  Romanias foreign ministry says that two Romanian journalists were detained Tuesday in the Russia-backed breakaway region of Transnistria in neighboring Moldova.

The two journalists were detained by security forces in Transnistrias de facto capital of Tiraspol and released hours later after diplomatic efforts from both Romania and Moldova, the ministry said Wednesday in a statement.

(The) Romanian diplomatic mission in Chisinau was not informed in advance about the intention of the two journalists, it said, adding that the so-called Transnistrian authorities recently banned foreign journalists from entering the region.

The incident follows a series of mysterious attacks in the Russia-backed region in recent weeks that have alarmed officials in Moldovas capital, Chisinau.

In late April, grenades were launched at the regions state security office, and a day later two large broadcast antennas were downed. Last week, police in Transnistria said explosive devices were dropped from a drone near a village. No one was injured in the incidents.

Transnistria, a thin strip of land that borders Ukraine and has a population of around 470,000, broke away after a short civil war in the early 1990s. An estimated 1,500 Russian soldiers are stationed there.

WARSAW, Poland  Former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt says that the U.N. Security Council should adopt a resolution protecting grain shipments from the Ukraine amid the Russian invasion.

Bildt was speaking to Polands TVN24 during the Impact22 congress about energy and technology prospects, in Poznan, western Poland.

Will Russia dare to stop shipments of grain under U.N. protection?, Bildt asked, stressing the escort initiative is worth discussing.

The Security Council is to be briefed Thursday on humanitarian issues in Ukraine as it is fighting Russian invasion, and that may open an opportunity for discussing protection of the grain exports.

Separately, the European Union is to announce a plan this week to help Ukraine get around Russias blockade of its ports by shipping food supplies by rail and truck.

Ukraine is one of the worlds top producers of corn and wheat, and is called Europes bread basket. The lack of millions of tons of its grain on world markets is already leading to hikes in the prices of grain products.

PRAGUE  Czech President Milos Zeman has approved a request of 103 Czechs to join Ukraines armed forces to help them fight Russian aggression.

Czech citizens are banned from service in foreign armies which is a crime punishable by a prison term of up to five years.

Those 103 belong to a total of some 400 Czechs who have applied for an exemption from the ban, according to the Defense Ministry. The authorities still have to process most of the requests.

Its not clear how many Czech have already been fighting on the Ukrainian side against invading Russian troops.

The presidents approval has to be co-signed by Prime Minister Petr Fiala who said through his spokesman he would sign all requests that have been approved by the Czech authorities.

BERLIN  The German government has dismissed suggestions that it might activate the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany to compensate for reduced flows via Ukraine.

A spokeswoman for the Energy Ministry said Wednesday that Germany is currently receiving a quarter less gas through Ukraine after Ukrainian authorities shut down a pipeline saying it no longer controls a key compressor station thats in Russian hands.

Annika Einhorn, the ministry spokeswoman, said the shortfall is being partly compensated for through increased supplies from Norway and the Netherlands.

Nord Stream 2 has really died after Russian attacked Ukraine and nobody is thinking about switching to that, she said.

She also noted that the majority of Russian gas reaches Germany through a sister pipeline, Nord Stream 1, rather than via Ukraine.

Germany has pledged to end imports of Russian natural gas by 2024 at the latest.

MOSCOW  A senior Russian official has denounced the U.S. aid for Ukraine as part of Washingtons proxy war against Russia.

Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russias Security Council who served as president in 2008-2012 when Vladimir Putin shifted to prime ministers position due to term limits, said Wednesday on a messaging app that the $40 billion aid package for Ukraine approved by the U.S. Congress was driven by a desire to inflict a heavy defeat on our country, restrict its economic development and political influence in the world.

He described the aid package as part of the U.S. proxy war against Russia and predicted that the United States will fail while the goals of Russias special operation in Ukraine will be fulfilled.

In another statement Wednesday, Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the lower house of Russian parliament, accused the United States of using the aid package to drive Ukraine deeper into debt and try to take control of the countrys grain reserves.

PARIS  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Russias war in Ukraine is pushing a number of countries toward NATO membership.

With Finland and Sweden moving toward joining the alliance, he said, These countries want to be protected from Russia because their people see whats happening in Ukraine and want to live in security, in their own house, and spend time calmly with their family.

Russia has cited NATOs expansion toward its borders as a reason for invading Ukraine.

Speaking Wednesday to French university students via video link, Zelenskyy also proposed preventive sanctions against Russia and any countries that threaten to use nuclear weapons. He also called for international debate about nuclear disarmament.

He said Russias suggestions that it could use nuclear force in the war in Ukraine should not go unpunished, but didnt elaborate.

He urged more unity in European policy, as the EUs 27 members haggle over a sixth round of sanctions that include an oil embargo.

Asked how the war could end, he said, The war will end when we restore our unity and territory...when we get back what belongs to us.

LVIV, Ukraine  Satellite photos analyzed by The Associated Press show that a Russian ship believed to be carrying stolen Ukrainian grain has docked in Syria.

The photo taken Tuesday by Planet Labs PBC showed the Russian-flagged Matros Pozynich at dockside in Latakia, Syria.

The ship seen in the photo matched known characteristics of the bulk carrier, as well as its dimensions.

The ship turned off its transponders nearly a week ago off the island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea.

Samir Madani, the co-founder of the online research firm TankerTrackers.com, also told the AP that he believed the ship docked in Latakia was the Matros Pozynich, based on its dimensions and last-known position.

Ukraine has alleged that the ship had 27,000 tons of grains Russia stole from the country. It alleged Russia initially tried to ship the grains to Egypt, which refused to take the cargo. Ukrainian diplomats had been asking nations not to accept the grain.

The ships registered owners, Crane Marine Contractor LLC of Astrakhan, Russia, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A Russian bombing campaign and support from Iran beat back insurgents who nearly toppled Syrian President Bashar Assad after the 2011 Arab Spring. Russia still maintains a navy and air base in Syria, though it has reportedly rotated forces out of the country to aid its war on 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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Last week, someone leaked a draft opinion by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in which the High Court is, apparently, prepared to overturn Roe v. Wade a half-century after it granted American women the right to have provenance over their own bodies. The draft opinion, should it stand, will ignore the feelings of the vast majority of Americans  right and left  who believe Roe v. Wade and related cases should remain the law of the land. It will chase women and young people out of Idaho, and  potentiallyput your jobs and your security in jeopardy. Right-wing states like Idaho will no doubt become weaker and poorer because of this decision.

Yet, the thing that disappointed me the most was that it was leaked in the first place.

The speculation as to who leaked the draft opinion is running rampant. From what I can tell, the majority of speculators lay the blame on a law clerk. I tend to agree with that supposition. Having clerked for a federal judge here in Idaho, I understand the access they have to judges and their opinions.

Thats why I am supremely disappointed in whoever leaked the draft opinion.

As a law clerk for a federal judge, you are accountable to various ethical and judicial codes and statutes that govern your life during and beyond your clerkship. Essentially, your judge is your client. You are strictly prohibited from discussing interactions you have with your judge about a judicial opinion during the time of your employment. This goes not only for clerks, but also assistants and secretaries. Violations can result in your termination or disbarment or both. These obligations even extend beyond your clerkship. To this day, I am prohibited from disclosing discussions Ive had with my judge about opinions that were issued years ago.

Thats how it should be.

The reason behind these prohibitions should be evident. Leaking a draft decision can substantially increase or decrease the bargaining power one party to the suit has over the other to negotiate a settlement. Furthermore, in big cases like the one at hand, it can incite undue public and private pressure on the judge making the decision. Furthermore, if a judge cant trust the people in their chambers, that stifles the free-flow of ideas, debate and analysis a judge counts on from his or her clerks and assistants. How an opinion gets crafted can be complex at times. A judge may decide to make an opinion more or less detailed depending on its import. Paragraphs worth of reasoning and analysis can be added or deleted based on discussions held within chambers. Finally, judges sometimes change their minds as a result of those debates within chambers. By law, none of that process is made public and thats how it should be. Judges hire clerks and staff for their talent, but above all, they hire people they feel they can trust. Without trust, the entire process breaks down.

Just like it did last week at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Overturning Roe v. Wade is a monumental decision that will, no doubt, negatively affect Idaho and our country. But, to whoever leaked this (potentially) ground-breaking opinion, shame on you.

You have violated your oath to this country and your profession. Perhaps you thought the leak would change national opinion, or more to the point, the opinion of a decisive U.S. Supreme Court Justice. I doubt youre right about that. Having clerked for a federal judge, I know they dont sway from their decisions easily no matter what the public pressure is. Indeed, they are duty-bound to reach judicial opinions fairly and honestly without consideration of public opinion.

Breaking your oath to this country is not noble. Its cowardly. I would say that Im proud that I fulfilled my ethical duties to my judge in that regard, but its not something youre supposed to feel pride over. Its just what you do. Thats how oaths work.

Youre not brave. Youre un-American. Shame on you.

Jeremy J. Gugino is a Democratic communications volunteer.

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A European consortium which includes the alliance of Eurojet Germany, Conchepe Italy and Habag Lloyd for International Shipping Lines agreed with Egyptian authorities to inject $500 million in the development of Tahya Misr 1; the second terminal at Damietta Port.

Per the agreement, the project includes the construction, development of the superstructure, use, management, operation, exploitation, maintenance and re-delivery of the second Long live Egypt container station at the port located 10 km west of the Nile river of Damietta branch westward Ras El-Bar.

A statement issued by the Egyptian government also revealed that the project is the first phase of the project to build the integrated logistics hub of Damietta for containers, the second phase of which will include the creation of a logistics hub from the station to the manufacturing centers in the Republic by railways.

Damietta Alliance Container Station Company, Eurojet Germany, Conchepe Italy, and Habag Lloyd International Shipping Lines who make up the investors, will implement docks for the station, length of 1970 m, depth up to 18 m. The backyard of the station reaches 910 thousand m2, and its absorption capacity is 4.5 million equivalent containers.

The project, according to the statement, is a major Egyptian step in the world trade arena and creates more than 1000 direct and indirect job opportunities.

The project is the first phase of the project to build the integrated logistics hub of Damietta for containers, the second phase of which will include the creation of a logistics hub from the station (Long live Egypt) to the manufacturing centers in the Republic by railways, the statement added.
Hungary-headquartered and low cost airline Wizz Air has revealed plans for expansion opportunities in Saudi Arabia, Zawya reports.

The airline, the media notes, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Future Aviation Forum to explore airline market development opportunities in the kingdom.

The company in a press release, indicated that it will work towards enabling potential investment and operating models to benefit and add to the Saudi Arabian aviation ecosystem, boosting its tourism industry and significantly increasing its connectivity.

The Gulf country plans to triple passenger traffic through its ambitious 2030. Listed on the London stock market, Wizz Air has a UAE-based subsidiary Wizz Air Abu Dhabi, which is 51-percent owned by state holding company ADQ.
The Ministerial Meeting of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, which convened in Marrakech on Wednesday, issued a strong-worded final statement expressing concern over the proliferation of separatist movements in Africa, such as the Algeria-backed Polisario, and sounding the alarm bell on the connivance between these separatist movements and terrorist groups in the continent (AQIM, Boko Haram, Al Shabab etc.)

These groups both take advantage of state vulnerabilities in Africa, the statement pointed out, reaffirming the member countries shared determination to continue the fight against ISIS.

The participants noted with concern the proliferation of non-state actors, including separatist movements that generate destabilization and further vulnerability of African states and that ultimately favor Daesh/ISIS and other terrorist and violent extremist organizations, said the final statement

Under the auspices of the Global Coalition to Defeat Daesh/ISIS, the Africa Focus Group will bolster the civilian-led counterterrorism capabilities of African members of the Coalition, they said, stressing the need for the Africa Focus Group to foster synergies with other existing international, sub-regional and regional counterterrorism efforts and initiatives on the African continent.

The participants from over 80 countries and international organizations recalled that the Coalition to Defeat Daesh/ISIS will continue to be a civilian-driven effort by, with, and through the African members, in line with the principles of national ownership, and in accord with the specific needs of African member states.

They also noted the nexus between separatist and terrorist movements acting in collusion, exploiting existing vulnerabilities in a way that multiplies their destabilizing impact.

In this sense, the participants emphasized the need to address the evolving threat of Daesh, especially in Africa, by strengthening the counter-terrorism capabilities of African members and taking into account the challenges and threats posed by the proliferation of non-state actors, including separatist groups, as a destabilizing factor and vulnerability in the region.

They also stressed the importance of addressing underlying causes to insecurity in Africa, while reiterating that any lasting solution to halting the spread of Daesh/ISIS on the continent will rely primarily on national authorities, as well as sub-regional and regional efforts and initiatives that acknowledge and address the political and economic drivers of conflict.

The Ministers emphasized the need to address the global Daesh/ISIS threat through holistic and comprehensive coordination of efforts, which are a hallmark of the oalition. Such efforts include the initiatives forwarded by the Coalition Working Groups, including Communications, Counter ISIS Finance, Foreign Terrorist Fighters, and Stabilization, the statement said.

They also welcomed the first Global Coalition to Defeat Daesh/ISIS meeting to be convened in Africa

The Ministerial Meeting of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS was co-hosted by the Moroccan Minister of Foreign Affairs Nasser Bourita and the U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken.

The event is a turning point in the commitment and international coordination in the fight against ISIS, with a particular focus on the African continent and the evolving terrorist threat in the Middle East and other regions.
At least eight Togolese soldiers were killed and thirteen wounded on Tuesday night in a terrorist attack in northern Togo, a first in the country previously spared from violence, the government announced.

During the night of Tuesday to Wednesday at around 3:00 am, an advanced post of the Operation Kondjouare device, located in the locality of Kpinkankandi was the object of a violent terrorist attack carried out by a group of heavily armed individuals not yet identified.

This attack unfortunately left eight people dead and 13 wounded on the side of the defense and security forces, the government said in a statement broadcast on state television.

This was the first deadly terrorist attack in Togo, where the army is deployed in the north to deal with the threat of spillover violence from jihadist groups in neighboring Burkina Faso. Togo had recorded only one attack in November 2021.

The government said it strongly condemns this cowardly and barbaric attack, saying it was doing everything possible to seek out and disable these armed terrorist groups.

According to a senior military official who requested anonymity, the soldiers were attacked by about 60 men on motorcycles.

The exchange of fire lasted more than two hours. And it was one of the reinforcement teams that jumped on an improvised explosive device, he said.

In November 2021, armed men launched an attack on security forces in the far northern village of Sanloaga, with no casualties.

A recent series of border raids in countries south of the Sahel has confirmed fears that jihadist groups in the region are seeking to advance toward the coast.

Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have been plagued by jihadist insurgencies, and neighboring states such as Ghana, Togo, and Cote dIvoire are concerned about spillover to their borders.
As Nigerias February 2023 presidential election approaches, the number of candidates to succeed Muhammadu Buhari is increasing. Tunde Bakare, a popular Pentecostal minister, and Godwin Emefiele, the governor of the Central Bank, are entering the race.

Tunde Bakare is considered one of Nigerias most influential pastors for his sermons and criticism of successive regimes over the years. In the 2011 presidential election, won by Goodluck Jonathan, Tunde Bakare was running mate to Muhammadu Buhari, the current president.

For the 2023 presidential election, he is running in the primary of the All Progressives Congress (APC), President Buharis party. My administration will commit to working on four projects, including peace, progress, prosperity and opportunity, he said.

The idea of a man of the cloth taking an interest in politics is seen as problematic by some. His candidacy is therefore causing heated controversy among Nigerians.

Politics is for you and me, the ordinary Nigerian. It is for everyone. Democracy is a government of the people and for the people. So there is nothing wrong with everyone running, said Sani Yabagi, the unsuccessful candidate for the 2019 presidential election.

Controversy has also caught up with the candidacy of Godwin Emefiele, the current governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), a declared candidate in the APC primaries. Mr. Emefiele, 55, has been at the helm of the CBN since 2014, when he was appointed by President Goodluck Jonathan.

Since he declared his candidacy, calls for his resignation have continued to be heard. Resign. Stop embarrassing the country, read a tweet from Obiageli Ezekwesili, former minister of education and former vice president of the World Bank for Africa.

The case was brought before the courts, but in the end it was the outgoing president who decided: on Wednesday, at the end of a cabinet meeting, the Nigerian head of state called for the immediate resignation of the senior officials who are seeking to replace him.
The legislative body set up by the junta in Guinea on Wednesday set the duration of the transition before the return of civilians to power at three years, in contrast to West African states and the international community, which are calling for a shorter period.

In September, after the putsch against President Alpha Conde who had been in power for more than ten years, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) had insisted that the transition be very short and that elections be held within no more than six months.

ECOWAS suspended Guinea after the September 5 putsch and imposed sanctions following the juntas repeated refusal to comply with its demands.

The 36-month deadline adopted Wednesday in plenary session by the National Transitional Council (NTC), which serves as parliament, is revised downward slightly from the April 30 announcement by the head of the military junta, Colonel Mamady Doumbouya, who had opted for a 39-month transition.

The countdown to the return of civilians to power begins from the promulgation of the law passed Wednesday, said government spokesman Ousmane Gaoual Diallo, without indicating the date of validation of the new text by transitional president Doumbouya.

Out of 81 members of the CNT, 73 voted on the text on Wednesday. One CNT member was absent, three abstained and four left the room in protest.

The timetable presented by the National Council of the Rally for Development (CNRD)  the juntas governing body  was debated and voted on by a majority of CNT members, said the rapporteur of the legislative bodys law commission, Jean Paul Kotembedouno.

The 36 months are sufficient to prepare the country for a return to constitutional order, he added.
A plane belonging to a private company that maintains hydrocarbon pipelines crashed on Wednesday in a forest in central Cameroon with 11 people on board, and rescue workers are trying to find the occupants, the Ministry of Transport said.

The air traffic services lost radio contact with the aircraft and then the aircraft was located in the forest near Nanga Eboko, some 150 km northeast of Yaounde, the ministry said in a statement, without further details on the fate of the passengers.

It crashed on the ground and our teams are seeing if it is possible to save people, confirmed a ministry official who requested anonymity.

The aircraft was chartered by the Cameroon Oil Transportation Company S.A. (COTCO), said this source and another senior aviation official, also on condition of anonymity. COTCO is responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of a pipeline between Cameroon and neighboring Chad.

The aircraft, whose type and make were not made public, was flying from Yaounde-Nsimalen airport to Belabo in the east of the country, the ministry statement said. Ground means are currently en route to the site of the aircraft crash to assist its occupants, the statement concluded.

The last air disaster in Cameroon was on the night of May 4-5, 2007. A Boeing 737-800 belonging to Kenya Airways, flying from Douala to Abidjan, crashed into the sea shortly after taking off from the airport of the Cameroonian economic capital during a violent storm. Its 114 occupants were killed, including 34 Cameroonians.

Three years later, an investigation by the Cameroonian civil aviation authority concluded that the accident was due to pilot error, as the captain did not detect a dangerous inclination of the aircraft and did not correct its trajectory in time.

Since then, Cameroon has seen only minor air accidents involving small passenger planes or helicopters.
Participants in the Ministerial Meeting of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, which convened in Marrakech on Wednesday, expressed concern over the proliferation of separatist movements in Africa, like the Algeria-backed polisario, and their collusion with terrorist groups, such as AQIM, al Shabab, Boko Haram

The participants noted with concern the proliferation of non-state actors, including separatist movements that generate destabilization and further vulnerability of African states and that ultimately favor ISIS and other terrorist and violent extremist organizations, said a final communique issued at the end of the meeting that was attended by the representatives of over 80 countries and international organizations.

In a closing statement, the Coalition members said they are concerned at the proliferation of separatist movements in Africa which causes destabilization and state fragility which in turn is favorable for ISIS and other terrorist organizations.

They insisted on the nexus between separatist and terrorist movements acting in collusion, exploiting existing vulnerabilities in a way that multiplies their destabilizing impact. In this sense, the participants emphasized the need to address the evolving threat of Daesh, especially in Africa, by strengthening the counter-terrorism capabilities of African members and taking into account the challenges and threats posed by the proliferation of non-state actors, including separatist groups, as a destabilizing and vulnerability-generating factor in the region.

Under the auspices of the Global Coalition to Defeat Daesh/ISIS, the Africa Focus Group will bolster the civilian-led counterterrorism capabilities of the Coalitions African members, they said, stressing the need for the Africa Focus Group to foster synergies with other existing international, sub-regional and regional counterterrorism efforts and initiatives on the African continent.

The Ministers also recalled that the Coalition will continue to be a civilian-driven effort by, with, and through its African members, in line with the principles of national ownership, and in accord with the specific needs of African member states.

They also stressed the importance of addressing underlying causes to insecurity in Africa, while reiterating that any lasting solution to halting the spread of Daesh/ISIS on the continent will rely primarily on national authorities, as well as sub-regional and regional efforts and initiatives that acknowledge and address the political and economic drivers of conflict.

The participants emphasized the need to address the global Daesh/ISIS threat through holistic and comprehensive coordination of efforts, which are a hallmark of the Coalition.

Such efforts include the initiatives forwarded by the Coalition Working Groups, including Communications, Counter ISIS Finance, Foreign Terrorist Fighters, and Stabilization, the statement said.

They also welcomed the first Global Coalition to Defeat Daesh/ISIS meeting to be convened in Africa.

The Ministerial Meeting of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS was held at the joint invitation of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nasser Bourita, and the U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken.

The event is a turning point in the commitment and international coordination in the fight against Daesh, with a particular focus on the African continent and the evolving terrorist threat in the Middle East and other regions.
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Ongoing worldwide research of diverse populations by an international team of scientists, including a University of Massachusetts Amherst genetic epidemiologist, has shed important new light on how genes contribute to type 2 diabetes.

The study was published Thursday, May 12, in Nature Genetics. "Our findings matter because we're moving toward using genetic scores to weigh up a person's risk of diabetes," says co-author Cassandra Spracklen, assistant professor of biostatistics and epidemiology in the UMass Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences.

The meta-analysis by the DIAMANTE (DIabetes Meta-ANalysis of Trans-Ethnic association studies) Consortium of 122 different genome-wide association studies (GWAS) was co-led by Andrew Morris, professor of statistical genetics at The University of Manchester, and University of Oxford professors Mark McCarthy and Anubha Mahajan.

"The global prevalence of type 2 diabetes, a life-changing disease, has quadrupled over the last 30 years, affecting approximately 392 million people in 2015," Morris says.

The research is a major step toward the ultimate goal of identifying novel genes and understanding the biology of the disease, which has the potential to help scientists develop new treatments.

It is also an important milestone in the development of "genetic risk scores" to identify individuals who are more predisposed to develop type 2 diabetes, regardless of their population background.

The meta-analysis compared the DNA of almost 181,000 people with type 2 diabetes against 1.16 million people who didn't have the disease. Searching across the entire human genome for sets of genetic markers called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, genome-wide association studies look for genetic differences between people with and without a disease.

The technique allows scientists to zero in on parts of the genome involved in disease risk, which helps pinpoint the genes that cause the disease.

However, the largest genome-wide association studies of type 2 diabetes historically have involved the DNA of people of European descent, which has limited progress in understanding the disease in other population groups.

To address this bias, scientists from the DIAMANTE Consortium assembled the world's most diverse collection of genetic information on the disease, with almost 50% of individuals from East Asian, African, South Asian and Hispanic population groups.

"Up to now, over 80% of genomic research of this type has been conducted in white European-ancestry populations, but we know that scores developed exclusively in individuals of one ancestry don't work well in people of a different ancestry," says Spracklen, who helped analyze and coordinate the data sharing from the East Asian ancestry populations.

The new paper builds off Spracklen's previous research identifying genetic associations with type 2 diabetes in East Asian-ancestry populations and identifying genetic associations with diabetes-related traits (fasting glucose, fasting insulin, HbA1c) in multi-ancestry populations.

"Because our research has included people from many different parts of the world, we now have a much more complete picture of the ways in which patterns of genetic risk for type 2 diabetes vary across populations," McCarthy says.

Mahajan adds, "We have now identified 117 genes that are likely to cause Type 2 diabetes, 40 of which have not been reported before. That is why we feel this constitutes a major step forward in understanding the biology of this disease."

Explore further New genetic markers of type 2 diabetes identified in East Asians

More information: Anubha Mahajan, Multi-ancestry genetic study of type 2 diabetes highlights the power of diverse populations for discovery and translation, Nature Genetics (2022). www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01058-3 Journal information: Nature Genetics Anubha Mahajan, Multi-ancestry genetic study of type 2 diabetes highlights the power of diverse populations for discovery and translation,(2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41588-022-01058-3
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After years of trying to have a baby without success, Brenna Kaminski and her husband, Joshua Pritt, decided to try in vitro fertilization.

Only 15 states require insurance to cover fertility treatments, and Florida, where Kaminski and Pritt live, isn't one of them. Still, the couple's insurance, from Pritt's job at an energy company, didputting them among the fortunate minority of Americans whose insurance plan covers the pricey fertility procedure. Kaminski and Pritt gamed out what their share of the cost would be for one round of IVF: $2,700, the out-of-pocket maximum under their policy.

Instead, after many twists and turns with two specialty practices, they paid more than $15,000 for two rounds of IVF, including all medicines. And, as is true for the majority of the procedures nationally (success rates vary from 12% to 49% depending on a patient's age), neither round resulted in a viable pregnancy. "This whole thing has been a nightmare," said Kaminski, 37, who does freelance marketing and writing. "The stress has been unbelievable."

About 1 in 5 women have trouble getting pregnant, and IVF has become a common path to parenthood for many. But even as demand grows, insurance coverage remains limited. About 27% of companies with 500 or more employees covered IVF in 2020, up from about 24% in 2015, according to Mercer, a consulting firm.

"Infertility is a disease and should be treated as such, and insurance coverage should reflect that," said Dr. Kara Goldman, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University. "Coverage is often incomplete because people too often don't see infertility as equal to other diseases."

Kaminski's insurer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, offered a list of in-network IVF providers near the couple's home in Melbourne, Florida. For in-network care, the couple would be responsible for 20% of the costs. For out-of-network care, they would have to pay 40%.

The first in-network specialists they tried, in spring 2020, had an office nearby, in Viera, Florida. But after seeing a doctor, they learned they had to travel 3 hours to Miami, where the physician performed the IVF procedures over three separate visits.

The couple paid about $2,700 out-of-pocket for the medicines alone. They also paid an additional $500 because the fertility clinic required them to use an out-of-network lab for blood tests.

In November 2020, the couple decided to try again, with another fertility medical group listed in their Blue Cross provider network. It was in Winter Park, Florida, about an hour's drive from their home.

Kaminski visited with doctors at the Center for Reproductive Medicine, and they scheduled her to begin the procedure at their facility in the same building. But that facility, the Orlando Avenue Surgery Center, was not in the Blue Cross network.

Kaminski said the surgery center told her that it was likely to be added to the Blue Cross network soon, and she appealed to the insurer for a waiver to have the center's care considered in-network. She was told by customer service agents for the insurer that she'd get the waiver, but she didn't get that confirmed in writing. Still, she went through with the procedure.

It took place in 2021, and Kaminski again expected to pay about $2,700 out-of-pocket for the care from the IVF specialist in Winter Park. She knew she would face separate out-of-pocket costs for the medications used in IVF.

But because her care was deemed out-of-network by Blue Cross, Kaminski said, she was billed more than $6,000 by the clinic and its surgery center. That was in addition to nearly $4,000 in out-of-pocket drug costs.

Kaminski has spent nearly a year trying to get Blue Cross to treat her second round of IVF as in-network. She said it's unfair for Blue Cross to have listed the Winter Park fertility clinic in its provider network if its doctors performed the actual IVF procedure in an out-of-network surgery center. The surgery center is owned by some of the clinic's doctors.

In a statement to KHN, the Center for Reproductive Medicine's executive director, Stephen Brown, wouldn't address Kaminski's case specifically even though she had given permission for him to discuss it. In an email, Brown wrote that the clinic was transparent with all its patients that its surgery center was not in Blue Cross' network.

Brown said low reimbursement rates aren't what has kept the surgery center out of the Blue Cross network. Instead, he said, the insurer didn't act quickly, taking more than four years to add the surgery center to its provider network. "The reason for not initially being in-network with BCBS was based solely on the lack of response from BCBS," Brown said.

Before any treatment is done, Brown said, the clinic gives its patients estimates of the costs of their procedures based on their insurance. Kaminski received an estimate that said she could expect to pay $3,000 to $4,000 just for the transfer of the embryos grown in the lab into her uterus.

In March 2021about a month after Kaminski completed her treatmentthe Winter Park surgery center was added to Blue Cross' provider network.

In February 2022, KHN reached out to the provider and insurer. Within two weeks, Blue Cross told the couple it would consider all the services they received at the surgery center in-network, and it paid all its bills in full. Kaminski and Pritt no longer owed anything to the center. Blue Cross had initially said it would pay a nominal portion of disputed bills that totaled $21,450 for care in 2020 and 2021 because the surgery center was out of its network.

Blue Cross also confirmed to the couple that in January 2021 it had granted them a waiver so all the surgery center's bills could be considered in-network. Mistakenly, the waiver hadn't been applied, so they faced the high out-of-network charges.

"It's finally making logical sense," Pritt said after learning that their billing dispute was resolved. "It's good to know we won't be getting any more bills."

After Blue Cross decided to cover the IVF in Winter Park, the couple received $1,600 back from Orlando Avenue Surgery Center.

John Simley, a spokesperson for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, said: "With non-routine waivers, mistakes can happen. The good news is they generally get fixed quickly."

In this case, though, it took nearly a year.

Experts say Kaminski's case shows that even when people have coverage for IVF, they can be left with huge bills. Also, insurers' lists of in-network providers are not always accurate. "It feels like a bait-and-switch," said Sabrina Corlette, a research professor and co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University.

A new federal insurance law, the No Surprises Act, went into effect in January 2022. It says patients don't have to pay more than the in-network cost-sharing amount if the insurer's provider directory gave inaccurate information.

Whether the law would apply in cases such as Kaminski and Pritt's is unclear. Even if it did, the law took effect too late for them.

Betsy Campbell, chief engagement officer at Resolve: The National Infertility Association, a patient advocacy organization, said Kaminski's case shows that insurance coverage isn't always designed around the patient. "Infertility treatment is a series of very complex procedures involving lab work, surgery, anesthesia, and it needs to be provided in a way that the insurance system has not always respected," she said.

Too often, insurance makes a couple jump through hoops to get the care they need, Campbell said. "Everyone should have the right to build a family, and it should not matter what employer you work for, or what state you live in, or how big a check you can write," Campbell said.

Kaminski and Pritt aren't giving up on having children. For now, they're pursuing other fertility treatments that aren't IVF.

2022 Kaiser Health News.

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Setting its sights on national growth, Charlotte-based health care giant Atrium Health announced major plans on Wednesday to double its size through a deal with a Midwestern hospital system.

This is Atrium Health's largest business deal to datea strategic combination with Illinois and Wisconsin-based hospital system Advocate Aurora Health.

The move will result in the fifth largest health system in the country, Atrium CEO Gene Woods told The Charlotte Observer in an interview Tuesday ahead of the announcement.

The system will be headquartered in Charlotte, with combined revenue of more than $27 billion. It will operate under the Advocate Health name, with the Advocate, Aurora and Atrium Health brands used locally.

The goal isn't size, Woods said, but what that size enables: more investments in employees and communities, and in solving inequities. "Size will enable us to serve our communities," he said. "We're just looking to do that more, better, faster."

Still it's a huge leap for a hospital system that once focused explicitly on the Carolinas.

The new system will serve more than 5.5 million patients, with 67 hospitals and more than 1,000 sites of care across Illinois, Wisconsin, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama.

Woods and Advocate Aurora Health CEO Jim Skogsbergh will serve as co-CEOs of the combined organization for the first 18 months. After that, Skogsbergh will retire and Woods will become the lone CEO.

'Looking to create a national system'

Atrium's series of combination deals follow a trend toward hospital consolidation across the country. But critics of consolidation have warned it could mean patients will face higher prices.

The deal is staggering in its size and reach, said hospital consolidation critic and Duke Law School professor Barak Richman.

"This does not point to a new frontier of competition," Richman told the Observer Wednesday. "It points to a new scale of lack of competition. A new scale of monopoly power."

A consolidation deal of this size could mean higher prices, suppressed wages for nurses and physicians and more expensive national insurance plans, Richman said, calling the combination "very, very alarming."

"I don't understand how you can say owning a bunch of hospitals (across the country), how you can serve people in North Carolina better," he said.

But Atrium said the new combination will create more jobs and opportunities for innovation.

Together, the combined system has nearly 150,000 employees, according to Atrium. The organizations pledged to create more than 20,000 jobs across the communities served, but they did not detail specifics on how to achieve that.

In response to hospital consolidation concerns, Woods said he believes Atrium and Advocate Aurora have track records of driving savings based on making the systems more efficient. And he wants to work to enhance partnerships with insurance companies to better serve patients.

"An argument out there that some folks make about size is: 'big is bad,' " Skogsbergh said in a Tuesday interview with the Observer. "We frankly don't believe that. We think bad is bad. We think inefficient is bad. We think ineffective is bad. But we think if we do this right, we're going to get stronger and patients are going to benefit from it."

The strategic combination with Advocate Aurora Health is Atrium Health's first foray into the Midwest.

"One of the things we have learned through COVID, is that the digital world and telehealth has no state boundaries," Woods said Tuesday. "We're looking to create a national system so we can serve communities better."

The combined system also announced a $2-billion pledge to tackle health inequities as well as a commitment to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030.

A long way from Carolinas HealthCare

The Advocate Aurora Health combination is the latestand biggestin moves that Atrium Health has taken toward nationwide expansion since changing its name from "Carolinas HealthCare System" in 2018.

That change was seen by experts as a sign of the hospital system's ambitions to grow beyond the Carolinas, the Observer reported at the time.

And one day after announcing that name change, the hospital system announced a plan to combine with Georgia-based health care organization Navicent Health.

Since then, Atrium has combined with two other hospital systems: North Carolina's Wake Forest Baptist Health and Georgia-based Floyd health system.

The partnership with Wake Forest Baptist Health, including the Wake Forest School of Medicine, was announced in early 2019. That combination paved the way for Atrium to bring a medical school to Charlotte, which is the largest city in the U.S. without a four-year medical school, according to Atrium.

The Advocate Aurora Health combination will not affect the timeline for the Charlotte medical school, Woods said.

The school, a second campus for the Wake Forest School of Medicine, will be built on a 20-acre parcel at the intersection of Baxter Street and South McDowell Street, Atrium announced last year. The school will host its first class of students in 2024.

What's next for Atrium deal

The latest deal for Atrium will still need regulatory approval from the Federal Trade Commission.

Richman said he would expect some concerns about the consolidation to be raised at the regulatory levels, though Atrium spokesman Dan Fogleman said the organization is hopeful regulatory approval will come this year.

"This will certainly not fall through the regulatory cracks," Richman said.

And NC Attorney General Josh Stein has previously voiced concern about the trend toward hospital consolidation.

"Too often, when one hospital swallows up another, patients end up paying more and getting worse care," Stein said in a February statement.

But in early 2021, Stein told Atrium Health and Wake Forest Baptist Health he would not oppose the combination.

"This deal marks an important step forward in helping to train and prepare the next generation of physicians, many of whom will stay and practice in our state," Stein said at the time. "If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it is that way we need smart, dedicated and well-trained medical professionals to provide health care."

North Carolina State Treasurer Dale Folwell opposed the combination in a statement Wednesday, calling the proposed new system a "six-state medical behemoth."

He called for a "vigorous examination" of the combination from the state Attorney General's Office, the FTC and the U.S. Department of Justice. "More mega-mergers are the wrong prescription for the health care industry," Fowell said in the statement.

Explore further Critical care surgery team develops blueprint for essential operations during COVID-19

2022 The Charlotte Observer.

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The Human Cell Atlas goal of mapping every cell type in the human body to transform our knowledge of biology, infection and disease is a milestone step closer with four studies published in Science today.

Researchers with the international Human Cell Atlas (HCA) consortium have created highly detailed maps of more than a million individual cells across 33 organs and systems across the human body, giving new biological insights into human health and disease, including the immune system.

These complementary multi-tissue cell atlases will contribute towards a single Human Cell Atlas and have many therapeutic implications including informing our understanding of common and rare diseases, vaccine development, anti-tumor immunology and regenerative medicine.

Until now, the HCA has mostly focused on gaining a deep cellular understanding of individual organs, tissues or small subsets of tissues. Now, four major collaborative studies by researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, UK; the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, U.S.; The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, U.S.; and their international collaborators, have developed methods and created the most comprehensive, cross-tissue atlases to date.

Openly available, the atlases allow researchers to compare specific cell types across the body in fine detail, revealing novel cell functions and shedding light on health and disease.

Deep dive into the immune system across tissues

Historically our understanding of the human immune system has been mainly limited to the role of cells circulating in blood, however immune cells within tissues play a key role in maintaining health and combating infection. In one of the Science papers, researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the University of Cambridge and their collaborators sequenced RNA from 330,000 single immune cells from across the adult body to understand the function of immune cells in different tissues.

After creating a curated catalogue of immune cells within the human body, the team developed a machine-learning toolCellTypistto automate cell type identification. Using this tool, they identified about a hundred distinct types of immune cells, including specific macrophages, T cells and B cells and their distribution across different tissues.

Dr. Sarah Teichmann, Co-Chair of the Human Cell Atlas Organizing Committee, Head of Cellular Genetics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and a senior author on the paper, said: "A detailed understanding of cells through the Human Cell Atlas will help explain many aspects of human health and disease. By comparing particular immune cells in multiple tissues from the same donors we identified different flavors of memory T cells in different areas of the body, which could have great implications in managing infections. Our openly available data will contribute to the Human Cell Atlas and could serve as a framework for designing vaccines, or to improve the design of immune therapies to attack cancers."

A second study from the Sanger Institute, the University of Cambridge and their collaborators appears online in Science today, which created a comprehensive atlas of the developing human immune system across organs, revealing tissues involved in the formation of blood and immune cells and enhancing our understanding of immune disorders. It also reveals cell types that are lost as we grow up, to inform in-vitro cell engineering and regenerative medicine research.

An atlas from frozen tissues sheds light on rare and common disease genes

One of the promises of single cell atlases is to help map the specific cell types in which disease genesfrom those causing rare diseases like muscular dystrophy or contributing to the risk of common diseases like heart diseaseact across the human body. It needs all cell types to be profiled, including cells from skeletal muscle, fat cells and neurons which are hard to capture. Cells from larger numbers of individuals are also vital, requiring scientists to collect and freeze tissues before analysis.

In one of the new papers in Science, researchers from the Broad Institute and their collaborators reveal how they optimized single-nucleus RNA sequencing to overcome the challenge of using frozen cells, and then created a cross-tissue atlas to analyze 200,000 cells from multiple banked frozen tissues focusing on rare and common disease genes. Using novel machine learning algorithms, the team then systematically associated the cells in the atlas with 6,000 single-gene diseases and 2,000 complex genetic diseases and traits to identify cell types and gene programs that could be involved in disease, revealing multiple novel starting points for new studies into health and disease.

Dr. Aviv Regev, Co-Chair of the Human Cell Atlas and Faculty on Leave from the Broad Institute and MIT, who is now Head of Genentech Research and Early Development, and a senior author on the paper, said: "Our single-nucleus Human Cell Atlas study demonstrates a powerful large-scale way to analyze cells from frozen tissue samples across the body with deep-learning computational advances, and opens the way to studies of tissues from entire patient cohorts at the single cell level. We were able to create a new roadmap for multiple diseases, by directly relating cells to human disease biology and disease-risk genes across tissues. We anticipate this work will lead to many new studies and enable the ongoing efforts of the human cell atlas to build a reference map of all human cells."

The Tabula Sapiens: broad cross-tissue cell atlas

The final paper in this set describes a very large cross-tissue study by researchers from the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub and their collaborators. The team used single cell RNA sequencing of live cells to analyze many organs from the same donor, which enabled cross-tissue comparisons controlled for genetic background, age and environmental effects. The collection of nearly half a million cells provides a uniquely broad cross-tissue atlas from live cells, and has created a data set the researchers call 'The Tabula Sapiens'.

The Tabula Sapiens data allowed detailed characterization of more than 400 specific cell types, their distribution and variation in gene expression across the tissues. In addition, by analyzing live cells, their data also enabled the first large-scale analysis of alternative gene splicing in a single cell atlas. The study provides researchers with a huge research resource of human expert annotated cell types which will give major new insights into fundamental biology and disease.

Professor Stephen Quake, President of the CZ Biohub Network, and Lee Otterson Professor of Bioengineering and Professor of Applied Physics at Stanford University, and a senior author on the paper, said: "The Tabula Sapiens is a reference atlas that provides a molecular definition of hundreds of cell types across 24 organs in the human body. It represents the efforts of more than 150 authors across several institutions; the scientific community will be discovering new insights into human biology from this resource for many years to come."

HCA cross-tissue data and tools are openly available

The HCA is an international collaborative consortium that charts the cell types in the healthy body, providing an unprecedented resource for studying health and disease. An open, cutting-edge, scientist-led consortium, HCA is a collaborative effort of researchers, institutes, and funders worldwide, with more than 2,300 members from 83 countries across the globe.

With commitments to open access, ethics and global equity, HCA data is openly available to benefit people everywhere. The data from these and other studies are freely available on the HCA Data Portals, which researchers worldwide can access through the HCA Data Coordination Platform as well as through the Cambridge Cell Atlas, the Broad Single Cell Portal, and the UCSC Cell Browser.

Professor Sten Linnarsson, from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, and a member of the HCA Organizing Committee, said: "The Human Cell Atlas is transforming our understanding of biology and disease. These cross-tissue studies represent a milestone for the HCA and single cell biology by enabling systematic, in-depth comparison of the same cell types across development and adulthood. They are a great step forwards to generating a Human Cell Atlas of all cell types in the human body, laying a foundation for a new era of diagnosis, healthcare and precision medicine."

Explore further International team creates first complete fruit fly cell atlas
Janos Zempleni, professor of nutrition and Health sciences, and colleagues are pursuing a way to use milk to deliver cancer-fighters to the brain. The project recently received $630,00 in support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Credit: University Communication, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

In health care, perhaps no word sends a more chilling message than "cancer." Brain tumors, for example, prove especially resistant to current treatments. Only 5% of patients with that condition survive more than three years and the median survival time is 10 to 14 months.

But an innovative research project by University of NebraskaLincoln scientists offers the potential for a breakthrough. In a federally funded project, Janos Zempleni, a professor with the Department of Nutrition and Health Sciences, and Husker colleagues are pursuing a surprising way to use milk as the vehicle delivering cancer-fighting therapeutics to the brain.

The concept isn't as fanciful as it might soundit's building on recent science. Preliminary findings in recent years show that it's possible to manipulate the body's genetic function to reduce the growth of tissues, including cancerous tumors. Scientists achieve that result by directing a type of gene regulator known as siRNAs to the targeted tissue. Genetic signaling carried by the siRNAs shuts down genetic function that enables new tissue growth.

But converting that preliminary finding into effective medical treatment has run into obstacles. So far, scientists have not been able to find an efficient way to deliver the genes consistently to the targeted area and in sufficient quantity.

Milk, it turns out, offers a good chance to solve the problem. Humans absorb siRNAs through food, recent research shows. And milk, Zempleni has found, stands out for its robust ability, once ingested, to help the genes accumulate naturally in the brain.

In their project, the Husker researchers will hone milk-focused techniques for effective gene delivery. Specifically, the project will use milk-transported siRNA genes to shut down the growth function of a gene known as IDH1, whose mutations result in brain tumors. The research also offers hope in addressing rare brain-centered genetic abnormalities affecting young children, said Zempleni, Willa Cather Professor of molecular nutrition and director of the Nebraska Center for the Prevention of Obesity Diseases.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has provided a $630,000 grant to support the project. Zempleni will lead the research, in collaboration with Forrest Kievit, assistant professor of biological systems engineering, and Jiantao Guo, associate professor of chemistry. USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture awarded the grant.

The long-term potential of this science is "enormous. It has not been realized yet at all," said Zempleni, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences and winner of the Institute of Agricultural and Natural Resources' 2015 Omtvedt Innovation Award.

Zempleni and his colleagues will use genetic science and chemistry to load exosomes, a natural nanoparticle in milk, with therapeutic material including siRNAs. Loading the material on cow's milk exosomes would first require genetically modifying the cow, an enormously tricky task. So, the researchers instead will culture MAC-T cells (similar in genetic composition to cow's milk cells) in the laboratory to produce exosomes, then direct them to brain tumors in mice.

The researchers aim to develop techniques that achieve two goals: Have the siRNAs effectively and consistently reach the tumors and have the siRNAs accumulate in sufficient quantity to reduce the tumor growth.

If this technology proves viable, large-scale production of exosomes will be needed to meet real-world patient demand. Laboratory cultures can supply only a small volume of exosomes. A cow, in contrast, can provide an ample number through its milk.

So, the Husker researchers aim, long term, to take a big step if their current research reaches its gene-delivery goals: They will seek to develop a genetically modified cow.

Such a cow, Zempleni wrote, would secrete "milk exosomes conducive to maximal delivery of RNA therapeutics to brain tumors in human cancer patients."

The pharmaceutical industry is already using this general concept. It's known as biopharming, meaning the use of animals in producing medical treatments. The drug Atryn, used to prevent blood clots in patients with a rare disease, is derived from the milk of genetically engineered goats.

"With our technology, you could actually use these milk exosomes, attach the appropriate feature and deliver a therapeutic to folks suffering from these rare diseases," Zempleni said. "I think this could be a huge game changer if we get a funding agency to take the risk of developing these animals. That is a difficult task. With the MAC-T cells, it's relatively easy, but taking this to livestock, a goat or a cow, it's way, way complicated."

Husker research has been pioneering in identifying the importance of milk as a potential gene delivery mechanism. In 2014, Scott Baiera doctoral candidate in Zempleni's labproposed an initial research project on the subject, culminating in a Journal of Nutrition paper that he, Zempleni and other Husker colleagues co-authored. The article since has been cited academically almost 300 times. Baier received his doctoral degree in nutrition science from Nebraska in 2015 and now is senior director of medical strategy at Vaniam Group, a company focusing on transformative cancer therapies in Dallas.

Zempleni's path to the scientific exploration of genetics and food science began in his teenage years in his home country of Germany.

"I loved biology but at that age, I loved to go fishingI was very much into all these native species of fish from Germany," he said.

In succeeding years, his interests broadened, gradually shifting "from fish to biology to science."

"I was torn between biochemistry or nutrition science," he said. "I think in hindsight I made the right choice going with nutrition science. It's a very comprehensive approach, and it allowed me to delve deeply into biochemistry and molecular biology. So, I think I've got the best of both worlds."
Credit: Iryna Inshyna/Shutterstock

A few hours after Tom (not his real name) was born, he became restless and did not want to be breastfed. His mother noticed that his left arm and leg were shaking rhythmicallysomething was not right.

Tom was immediately transferred to the neonatal intensive care unit. An MRI scan revealed that he had suffered a severe stroke. Doctors told Tom's parents that there was no treatment they could give the child. He would probably be disabled.

Most people think of stroke as something that mainly affects the elderly, but it can also occur in newborn babies. These "perinatal strokes" happen when one of the major arteries to the brain becomes blocked, leading to a lack of blood supplyand hence oxygento certain brain areas. About one in 5,000 newborns have a stroke. It usually happens in the first few days after they are born.

Most of the babies will have problems later in life, with the severity of the problems depending on which brain areas were injured. These problems can include muscle tightness in the arms and legs (cerebral palsy), behavior problems, learning difficulties and epilepsy.

No therapy exists for newborns with stroke. Researchers, including our own team at University Medical Center Utrecht, have been working on new treatments, one of which involves stem cells.

Stem cells have the ability to turn into many different cells in the body, and they are little factories of several growth factors (proteins that stimulate the growth of specific tissues). The theory is that if we can get stem cells into the damaged part of a baby's brain, the stem cells' growth factors will stimulate the brain to repair itself.

Effective in animals

Earlier studies in animals showed that injecting stem cells into the brains of newborn mice with stroke dramatically reduced the amount of brain damage and disability they suffered. The experiments showed that the treatment was safe and had no side-effects in the mice. These animal studies gave us hope that the treatment would work in newborn babies, too, preventing a lifetime of disability.

But how do you deliver stem cells to a baby's brain without having to use needles or surgery? We decided to try an intranasal route (through the nose), which was tested in mice. After we delivered the stem cells intranasally, the cells traveled rapidly and specifically to the injured brain areas. The injured brain area sends out "alarm signals" that guide the stem cells to the right spot in the brain.

Once the stem cells arrived at the damaged area, they secreted growth factors that boosted the repair systems of the mice's brains. Within a few days, the stem cells were broken down and not traceable in the brain any longer. After several experiments with this method, we concluded that dripping stem cells in the nose is the safest and most efficient way to deliver them to the brain.

Ten babies

After many years of laboratory research, we have finally tested the treatment in babies. The results have been published in The Lancet Neurology.

Baby Tom, mentioned earlier, was the first baby to participate in the study and received stem cells within a week of being born. To ask parents to enroll in an experimental therapy in the first week of their newborn child's life is a very delicate process.

After we had a long conversation with his parents, they decided to let their son take part in the study. He received stem cells via nose droplets, a procedure that took only several minutes. Afterwards, Tom was monitored closely for a few days before he went home.

We treated ten newborns who were transferred from hospitals across the Netherlands to the University Medical Center Utrecht after suffering from a stroke. In all ten newborns, the stem cell droplets were administered without any complications. There was one baby who had a mild fever after the treatment, which quickly cleared up on its own.

A follow-up MRI scan of the brain made three months after the stroke showed less injury than expected, possibly because of the stem cells. At four months, the treated babies, including Tom, performed well when the quality of their movements was tested. When the children are two years old, we will check their development again.

We are now looking for opportunities to proceed with a randomized controlled trial (the gold standard for medical studies) to prove that stem cell therapy can effectively repair brain injury after perinatal stroke.

The discovery of a new and safe therapy with stem cells also opens up opportunities for other babies with brain injury, such as babies who are born too early, or babies that suffer from a lack of oxygen during birth (perinatal asphyxia). Stem cell therapy gives hope to the most vulnerable patient group, with possible lifelong benefits.

Explore further Neural stem cells may hold key to combatting newborn brain injury

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Cortical representation learning through perturbed and adversarial dreaming. Credit: Deperrois et al

A new study by researchers from the University of Bern, Switzerland suggests that dreamsespecially those that simultaneously appear realistic, but, upon a closer look, bizarrehelp our brain learn and extract generic concepts from previous experiences. The study, carried out within the Human Brain Project and published in eLife, offers a new theory on the significance of dreams using machine learning inspired methodology and brain simulation.

The importance of sleep and dreams for learning and memory has long been recognizedthe impact that a single restless night can have on our cognition is well known. "What we lack is a theory that ties this together with consolidation of experiences, generalization of concepts and creativity," explains Nicolas Deperrois, lead author of the study.

During sleep, we commonly experience two types of sleep phases, alternating one after the other: non-REM sleep, when the brain "replays" the sensory stimulus experienced while awake, and REM sleep, when spontaneous bursts of intense brain activity produce vivid dreams.

The researchers used simulations of the brain cortex to model how different sleep phases affect learning. To introduce an element of unusualness in the artificial dreams, they took inspiration from a machine learning technique called Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). In GANs, two neural networks compete with each other to generate new data from the same dataset, in this case a series of simple pictures of objects and animals. This operation produces new artificial images which can look superficially realistic to a human observer.

The researchers then simulated the cortex during three distinct states: wakefulness, non-REM sleep, and REM sleep. During wakefulness, the model is exposed to pictures of boats, cars, dogs and other objects. In non-REM sleep, the model replays the sensory inputs with some occlusions. REM sleep creates new sensory inputs through the GANs, generating twisted but realistic versions and combinations of boats, cars, dogs etc. To test the performance of the model, a simple classifier evaluates how easily the identity of the object (boat, dog, car etc.) can be read from the cortical representations.

"Non-REM and REM dreams become more realistic as our model learns," explains Jakob Jordan, senior author and leader of the research team. "While non-REM dreams resemble waking experiences quite closely, REM dreams tend to creatively combine these experiences." Interestingly, it was when the REM sleep phase was suppressed in the model, or when these dreams were made less creative, that the accuracy of the classifier decreased. When the NREM sleep phase was removed, these representations tended to be more sensitive to sensory perturbations (here, occlusions).

According to this study, wakefulness, non-REM and REM sleep appear to have complementary functions for learning: experiencing the stimulus, solidifying that experience, and discovering semantic concepts. "We think these findings suggest a simple evolutionary role for dreams, without interpreting their exact meaning," says Deperrois. "It shouldn't be surprising that dreams are bizarre: this bizarreness serves a purpose. The next time you're having crazy dreams, maybe don't try to find a deeper meaningyour brain may be simply organizing your experiences."

More information: Nicolas Deperrois et al, Learning cortical representations through perturbed and adversarial dreaming, eLife (2022). Journal information: eLife Nicolas Deperrois et al, Learning cortical representations through perturbed and adversarial dreaming,(2022). DOI: 10.7554/eLife.76384

Provided by Human Brain Project
Caregivers of stroke survivors are facing some challenges accessing support for themselves, according to a new study. Credit: Vlada Karpovich/Pexels

When planning ongoing care for a stroke patient, the focus tends to rest on the patient with sometimes little consideration for the family member or friend who will be their caregiver.

Now, a new study is shining a spotlight on the challenges faced by stroke survivor caregivers when accessing health and social services for themselves.

Led by Arthur Labatt Family School of Nursing professor Anna Garnett and published in BMC Health Services Research, the study highlighted some significant barriers caregivers face when accessing support. These barriers include financial factors, lack of transportation, and lack of awareness about available services.

The study emphasized the need for Canadian policymakers to acknowledge and understand the challenges caregivers face to develop programs that support stroke survivor caregivers in a more meaningful way.

"There is a need to consider caregiver access to services," said Garnett. "And it's not just about providing the service but also ensuring they are able to use it."

Caregivers in the study were not only subjected to reduced income or termination of their employment so they could provide care; they are also facing the loss of the stroke patient's income if the patient was a primary earner in their family, the study said.

Even when there were financial subsidies and support programs intended to assist them, caregivers are often unaware or uninformed about what is available and whom to contact for more information.

The study suggests greater connectivity and communication between health-care providers, community programs and social services would increase ease of access and usage. Developing roles, such as stroke navigators, who can assist caregivers in managing their options for assistance, would also help address accessibility concerns.

Caregivers in the study also described being left behind or forgotten by their friend groups and social networks.

"In some cases, they felt invisible," said Garnett. "While they received inquiries about the wellness of their charge, their own needs did not garner similar attention and concern. Reduced social support meant that caregivers had even less assistance with basic tasks and needed respite services to manage their household."

Accessing respite services sometimes proved to be fraught with additional challenges for caregivers, the study found. They noted difficulty developing trust with health service providers who care for the stroke survivor, due to issues with changing personnel and unreliable service.

When unsure of who would be caring for their charge, caregivers were less likely to leave home to address their own needs. Similarly, when faced with the potential of leaving the stroke survivor alone, caregivers were less likely to leave, feeling anxious about the possibility of another stroke while they are away.

The findings from the study highlight the need for readily available, affordable and accessible health and social services, Garnett said.

"Including caregivers within the circle of care for stroke survivorsalong with health providers, social workers, and program providerswould likely increase service accessibility," she said. "Fostering trust between caregivers and health providers through increased, ongoing engagement would enable opportunities for better responding to caregiver health and social service needs."

Explore further Engaging family caregivers key to coordinated home health care

More information: Anna Garnett et al, Factors impacting the access and use of formal health and social services by caregivers of stroke survivors: an interpretive description study, BMC Health Services Research (2022). Anna Garnett et al, Factors impacting the access and use of formal health and social services by caregivers of stroke survivors: an interpretive description study,(2022). DOI: 10.1186/s12913-022-07804-x
The first underwear meant to protect against sexually transmitted infections during oral sex was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Thursday.

Loralswhich are available as bikinis or shortiesare made of vanilla-flavored latex about as thin as condom material and form a seal on the inside of the thigh to keep fluids in, developer Melanie Cristol told the New York Times. They are to be used only once, like a condom.

On Thursday, Cristol's company will begin selling the underwear explicitly for infection protection.

Infections such as herpes, gonorrhea and syphilis can be transmitted through oral sex, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Until now, the only FDA-authorized product for protection during oral sex was a dental dam, a thin sheet of latex polyurethane typically held in place with hands to form a barrier between the mouth and genitals, according to the Times.

"The FDA's authorization of this product gives people another option to protect against STIs during oral sex," Courtney Lias, director of the FDA office that led the review of the underwear, told the Times.

"Oral sex is not totally risk-free," Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, director of the division of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told the Times.

There's growing need for such protection because more "teenagers are initiating their first sexual activity with oral sex," she said.

Offering protection that's enjoyable to use could "reduce anxiety and increase pleasure around that particular behavior," for people of all ages, Marrazzo added.

Human clinical trials of Lorals were not needed for the FDA's approval, but the agency did require documentation about thickness, elasticity, strength and other measures, as it does with condoms, the Times reported.

In the past year, the FDA has also given approval to two new dental dam companies, which may suggest increased consumer interest, according to the newspaper.

Explore further Survey says youth need more education on adequate protection and enhanced safety when engaging in oral sex

More information: Visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for more on Visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for more on sexually transmitted infections.

Copyright  2022 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
Inclusive project will involve all social enterprise stakeholders.

Minister for Rural and Community Development, Heather Humphreys, TD, today, 12th May 2022 announced a new initiative designed to gather key information about social enterprise in Ireland.

The National Social Enterprise Census will gather important data about social enterprises in Ireland.

The initiative will help inform policy and the rollout of future supports in a move aimed at benefitting the Social Enterprise Sector.

Following a competitive tender process, the project is being delivered on behalf of the Department of Rural and Community Development by Amarach Research, in partnership with Social Enterprise Republic of Ireland (SERI) and the Irish Local Development Network (ILDN).

Making the announcement today, Minister Humphreys said:

Our social enterprises play such a vital role in communities across the country, as we saw during the recent Pandemic.

As the Department overseeing National Social Enterprise Policy, it is vital that we have as much reliable data as possible about social enterprises in Ireland.

This initiative will be key to informing future policy decisions as well as the type of supports our social enterprises need. And it will also help us to deliver on our commitments under Our Rural Future  of which our social enterprises form a key part.

The Minister added:

Historically, the lack of concrete data has impeded efforts regarding the provision of supports for, and raising awareness of, social enterprise. This is an opportunity to establish a reliable evidence base necessary for future policy development and delivery, which will benefit the sector.

I am delighted to see the Consortium led by Amarach Research, in collaboration with SERI and the ILDN, has already started work on this landmark project.

I am pleased too that all social enterprise networks and support organisations are involved in the process to ensure maximum inclusivity.

Social Enterprises are businesses for social good, creating jobs and generating impact in sectors such as the circular economy, social care, hospitality and retail.

This exercise will identify key data in aggregate form such as the total number of social enterprises in Ireland, their regional spread, the primary sectors they are active in, their staffing levels and traded income.

This will ensure the Department is in a much better position to support the sector and develop social enterprise policy, with a strong and robust evidence base.

ENDS

Contact:

The Department of Rural and Community Development Press Office

01-7736843 / 087-1734633

Press.office@drcd.gov.ie

Notes to editors:

Social Enterprises

Social enterprises are businesses that work primarily to improve the lives of people. Their core objective is to achieve a social, societal, or environmental impact. Like other businesses, social enterprises pursue their objectives by trading in goods and services on an ongoing basis. However, surpluses generated by social enterprises are re-invested into achieving their core social objectives, rather than maximising profit for their owners.

They frequently work to support disadvantaged groups such as the long-term unemployed, people with disabilities, the Travelling Community, etc., or to address issues such as food poverty, social housing, or environmental matters.

National Social Enterprise Policy

Irelands first National Social Enterprise Policy for Ireland 2019-2022 was launched by the Department of Rural and Community Development on 18th July 2019, with the objective of creating an enabling environment for social enterprise to grow and contribute more fully to Irelands social and economic progress.

The Policy is focused on three main objectives:

Building Awareness of Social Enterprise Growing and Strengthening Social Enterprise Achieving Better Policy Alignment

The Policy includes a specific measure which states that to improve data on social enterprises, the Government, in collaboration with stakeholders, will improve data collection relating to the extent of social enterprise in Ireland and the areas in which social enterprises operate.

Social Enterprise Republic of Ireland (SERI)

SERI is a support organisation formed in July 2020 for social enterprise in Ireland. Their aims are:

To grow the social enterprise sector to benefit all people and communities,

To work with local and national government and, to connect private and social enterprise in a way never done before.

Their strategy focuses on four pillars main pillars of representation, awareness, support and relationships.

Irish Local Development Network (ILDN)

The ILDN is the representative body for the 49 Local Development Companies throughout Ireland. LDCs are volunteer-led multi-sectoral partnerships, which deliver community and rural development from a bottom-up perspective.

The ILDN supports the LDCs in the delivery of numerous programmes such as LEADER and the Social Inclusion Community Activation Programme (SICAP), with each LDC operating an average of more than 20 distinct programmes. The integrated approach taken by LDCs provides a comprehensive and accessible way for people and community groups to take advantage of employment supports, enterprise grants, social inclusion, training, as well as environmental and well-being supports.
AFTER THE controversial flyover issue, now the rice purchase made by the local government for Zamboanguenos at the height of the Covid-19 pa...
ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine (AP)  Ukraines top prosecutor disclosed plans Wednesday for the first war crimes trial of a captured Russian soldier, as fighting raged in the east and south and the Kremlin left open the possibility of annexing a corner of the country it seized early in the invasion.

Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said her office charged Sgt. Vadin Shyshimarin, 21, in the killing of an unarmed 62-year-old civilian who was gunned down while riding a bicycle in February, four days into the war.

Shyshimarin, who served with a tank unit, was accused of firing through a car window on the man in the northeastern village of Chupakhivka. Venediktova said the soldier could get up to 15 years in prison. She did not say when the trial would start.

Venediktovas office has said it has been investigating more than 10,700 alleged war crimes committed by Russian forces and has identified over 600 suspects.

Many of the alleged atrocities came to light last month after Moscow's forces aborted their bid to capture Kyiv and withdrew from around the capital, exposing mass graves and streets and yards strewn with bodies in towns such as Bucha. Residents told of killings, burnings, rape, torture and dismemberment.

Volodymyr Yavorskyy of the Center for Civil Liberties said the Ukrainian human rights group will be closely following Shyshimarin's trial to see if it is fair. Its very difficult to observe all the rules, norms and neutrality of the court proceedings in wartime, he said.

On the economic front, Ukraine shut down a pipeline that carries Russian gas across the country to homes and industries in Western Europe, marking the first time since the start of the war that Kyiv disrupted the flow westward of one of Moscows most lucrative exports.

But the immediate effect is likely to be limited, in part because Russia can divert the gas to another pipeline and because Europe relies on a variety of suppliers.

Meanwhile, a Kremlin-installed politician in the southern Kherson region, site of the first major Ukrainian city to fall in the war, said officials there want Russian President Vladimir Putin to make Kherson a proper region of Russia  that is, annex it.

The city of Kherson is Russia, Kirill Stremousov, deputy head of the Kherson regional administration appointed by Moscow, told Russias RIA Novosti news agency.

That raised the possibility that the Kremlin would seek to break off another piece of Ukraine as it tries to salvage an invasion gone awry. Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula, which borders the Kherson region, after a disputed referendum in 2014, a move denounced as illegal and rejected by most of the international community.

Kherson, a Black Sea port of roughly 300,000, provides Crimea with access to fresh water and is seen as gateway to wider Russian control over southern Ukraine.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it would be up to the residents of the Kherson region after all to decide whether such an appeal should be made or not. He said any move to annex territory would have to be closely evaluated by legal experts to make sure it is absolutely legitimate, as it was with Crimea.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak mocked the notion of Kherson's annexation, tweeting: The invaders may ask to join even Mars or Jupiter. The Ukrainian army will liberate Kherson, no matter what games with words they play.

Inside Kherson, people have taken to the streets to decry the Russian occupation. But a teacher who gave only her first name, Olga, for fear of Russian retaliation said such protests are impossible now because Moscow's troops kidnapped activists and citizens simply for wearing Ukrainian colors or ribbons. She said people are scared of talking openly outside their homes and everyone walks on the street quickly.

All people in Kherson are waiting for our troops to come as soon as possible," she added. Nobody wants to live in Russia or join Russia."

On the battlefield, Ukrainian officials said a Russian rocket attack targeted an area around Zaporizhzhia, destroying unspecified infrastructure. There were no immediate reports of casualties. The southeastern city has been a refuge for civilians fleeing the devastated port city of Mariupol.

Russian forces continued to pound the steel plant that is the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance in Mariupol, its defenders said. The Azov Regiment said on social media that Russian forces carried out 38 airstrikes in the previous 24 hours on the grounds of the Azovstal steelworks.

The plant, with its network of tunnels and bunkers, has sheltered hundreds of Ukrainian troops and civilians during a months-long siege. Scores of civilians were evacuated in recent days, but Ukrainian officials said some may still be trapped there.

An adviser to the Mariupol mayor said Russian forces have blocked all evacuation routes out of the city. Petro Andriushchenko said there are few apartment buildings fit to live in and little food or drinking water. He said some remaining residents are cooperating with occupying Russian forces in exchange for food.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggested Tuesday that Ukraines military is gradually pushing Russian troops away from Kharkiv, the countrys second-largest city and a key to Russias offensive in the Donbas, the eastern industrial region whose capture the Kremlin says is its main objective.

Ukraine is also targeting Russian air defenses and resupply vessels on Snake Island in the Black Sea in an effort to disrupt Moscows efforts to expand its control over the coastline, according to the British Ministry of Defense.

Separately, Ukraine said it shot down a cruise missile targeting the Black Sea port city of Odesa.

Elsewhere, the governor of a Russian region near Ukraine said at least one civilian was killed and six wounded by Ukrainian shelling in the village of Solokhi, near the border. Belgorod Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov's account couldn't be independently verified, but he said the village will be evacuated.

Ukraines natural gas pipeline operator said it moved to stop the flow of Russian gas through a compressor station in part of eastern Ukraine controlled by Moscow-backed separatists because enemy forces were interfering with the station's operation and siphoning off gas.

The hub handles about one-third of Russian gas passing through Ukraine to Western Europe. But analysts said much of the gas can be redirected through another pipeline from Russia that crosses Ukraine, and there were indications that was happening. In any case, Europe also gets natural gas from other pipelines and other countries.

Were losing a few percent in overall European gas supply, when you consider imports and domestic production as well, said Tom Marzec-Manser, an analyst at market intelligence firm ICIS. So this is not a huge cutoff to gas supplies" for Europe.

Nor was it clear whether Russia would take any immediate hit, since it has long-term contracts and other ways of transporting gas.

Still, the cutoff underscored the broader risk to gas supplies from the war.

Yesterdays decision is a small preview of what might happen if gas installations are hit by live fire and face the risk of extended downtimes, said gas analyst Zongqiang Luo at Rystad Energy.

In other developments, Ukraines Foreign Ministry urged the global community to toughen sanctions on Russia, saying Russia is stealing Ukrainian grain and trying to sell some of it on global markets. The ministry estimates Russia may have already stolen up to 500,000 metric tons of grain valued at more than $100 million.

And U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said a ban on sales of semiconductors and other technology to Russia by the West is limiting Russias ability to manufacture military equipment. Ukrainians who have found Russian equipment reported that it was "filled with semiconductors that they took out of dishwashers and refrigerators, Raimondo said.

Gambrell reported from Lviv, Ukraine. Yesica Fisch in Bakhmut, David Keyton in Kyiv, Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Mstyslav Chernov in Kharkiv, Lolita C. Baldor in Washington, Kelvin Chan in London and AP's worldwide staff contributed.

Follow APs coverage of the war in Ukraine: 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.
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP)  Arkansas on Wednesday sued several drug manufacturers and pharmacy benefit managers over the cost of insulin for diabetes, accusing the companies of conspiring to inflate the price of the medication.

The lawsuit filed in state court accuses manufacturers Novo Nordisk, Sanofi and Eli Lilly of conspiring with pharmacy benefit managers Express Scripts, Caremark and Optum and violating Arkansas' deceptive trade practices law with the high insulin prices.

For these Arkansas residents with diabetes, the physical, emotional, and financial tolls of paying such excessive prices for diabetes medications is devastating," the lawsuit, filed by Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, said. Unable to afford the drugs their doctors prescribe, many diabetics in Arkansas ration or under-dose their insulin, inject expired insulin, reuse needles, and starve themselves to control their blood sugars."

A spokesman for Optum did not have an immediate comment on the lawsuit, and the other companies did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday.

The lawsuit accuses the companies of engaging in a scheme in which the drug makers rose their insulin prices and paid an undisclosed portion of that price back to the pharmacy benefit managers. Pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, run prescription drug coverage for employers, insurers, unions and other clients.

About 37 million Americans have diabetes, and an estimated 6 million to 7 million use insulin to keep their blood sugars under control. Its an old drug, refined and improved over the years, that has seen relentless price increases. About 400,000 Arkansans have diabetes and another 800,000 in the state have prediabetes  higher than normal blood sugar levels that can lead to full-blown diabetes, according to the lawsuit.

Concerns about high insulin prices prompted a similar lawsuit filed by Mississippi last year and class action suits in other states. It also has sparked efforts in Congress and state legislatures to cap the prices of insulin and other diabetes treatments.

Arkansas' lawsuit seeks up to a $10,000 fine for each violation of the state's deceptive trade practices act, in addition to punitive damages and restitution.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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WEDNESDAY, May 11, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- The European Union mask mandate for airliners and airports will be dropped as of May 16, officials said Wednesday.

The new guideline "takes account of the latest developments in the pandemic, in particular the levels of vaccination and naturally acquired immunity, and the accompanying lifting of restrictions in a growing number of European countries," the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said in a joint statement Wednesday. The groups said they hoped the decision would be "a big step forward in the normalization of air travel" for passengers and crews.

"Passengers should however behave responsibly and respect the choices of others around them," EASA Executive Director Patrick Ky said in the statement. "And a passenger who is coughing and sneezing should strongly consider wearing a face mask, for the reassurance of those seated nearby."

Despite the move by the EU, masking rules may still vary by airline if regulations are different in the locations they fly to or from. Washing hands and social distancing should still be practiced, but airports should not impose distancing requirements if they are likely to cause bottlenecks, according to ECDC Director Andrea Ammon. "While risks do remain, we have seen that nonpharmaceutical interventions and vaccines have allowed our lives to begin to return to normal," Ammon said in the statement.

Officials also said that airlines should keep systems for collecting passenger locator information on standby in case of future need, such as if a new dangerous coronavirus variant appears.

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WEDNESDAY, May 11, 2022 (HealthDay News)  The U.S. Food & Drug Administration announced Tuesday that it is continuing its efforts to boost the country's supply of infant formula.

Amid shortages due to high demand and recall and supply issues, stores have limited the number of products consumers can purchase. Mothers across the United States have been desperately searching for more formula: Some are driving several hours, only to find more empty shelves, while others have looked up homemade infant formula recipes online. But the FDA has advised parents not to try to make formula at home.

"Ensuring the availability of safe, sole-source nutrition products like infant formula is of the utmost importance to the FDA," FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, M.D., said Tuesday in an agency news release. "Our teams have been working tirelessly to address and alleviate supply issues and will continue doing everything within our authority to ensure the production of safe infant formula products."

The latest FDA moves might help ease the dire situation many mothers face. Among the steps the agency has taken includes using a food supply chain continuity system, developed during the pandemic, to monitor the status of infant formula supply. Agency officials are also meeting regularly with major infant formula manufacturers to understand their production capacity, including their ability to ramp up production. Some manufacturers are meeting or exceeding capacity levels, the FDA said.

Several infant formula manufacturers are working to increase output by prioritizing the products that are most needed, as well as optimizing production schedules, the agency added. The FDA is also helping manufacturers bring safe products to the market by quickly reviewing manufacturing changes that will help speed production, especially for specialized formulas for medical needs. Another FDA effort is watching trends for in-stock rates regionally and nationally to know where formula is most needed and working with retailers to ask their members to place purchase limits on some products.

The FDA said it is helping ease foreign shipments by employing more flexibility for allowing products from abroad that are already permitted into the United States, including a streamlined import entry review for certain products from foreign facilities that have good inspection records.

The shortage first began in February, when the Abbott Nutrition Sturgis, Michigan, plant issued a voluntary recall of some of its powdered infant formula products. On a case-by-case basis, the FDA is allowing formula from that facility to be released to people who need urgent, life-sustaining supplies of certain specialty and metabolic formulas. The benefits of allowing caregivers in consultation with their medical providers to access these products may outweigh the potential risk for bacterial infection, the FDA said. The agency said it is also working with other major infant formula manufacturers to increase supply and help ensure that production of infant formula products can safely resume at the Abbott Michigan plant.

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THURSDAY, May 12, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- An international research effort has unveiled the most extensive reference map yet of individual cells within the human body, knowledge that could revolutionize the study of health and disease.

The massive Human Cell Atlas contains detailed maps of more than one million individual cells across 33 organs and systems, researchers announced this week.

"You can think of it as a Google Maps of the human body," said Sarah Teichmann, head of cellular genetics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the United Kingdom and co-chair of the Human Cell Atlas Organizing Committee. "It's really that street maps' view of individual cells and where they sit in tissues that we are aiming towards."

The most recent addition to the Atlas includes the mapping of nearly 500,000 cells from 24 human tissues and organs, including the lungs, skin, heart and blood, according to a set of papers published May 13 in the journal Science.

"These four papers are a milestone point towards creating a full-draft Human Cell Atlas," said Meagan Phelan, spokeswoman for the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The Human Cell Atlas project is an open, scientist-led consortium with more than 2,300 members from 83 countries across the globe.

The effort stands alongside the Human Genome Project, which has been working to map the entire human genetic structure, said Stephen Quake, president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Network and a professor of bioengineering and applied physics at Stanford University.

"People often think about the genome as the blueprint of the organism, but that's not really correct," Quake said. "The genome is more of a parts list. Every cell type uses a different set of parts. And what we've been able to do collectively here is help understand and interpret how different parts of the genome are used to define different cell types."

Guiding new treatments

The Atlas is intended to aid future medical research by helping scientists understand the precise cells that are being affected by diseases, as well as the medications used to treat them, the researchers said.

For example, investigators have learned that different cell types  such as immune cells or epithelial cells  serve distinct roles in diverse parts of the body, with subtle organ-specific differences across cell types.

In one surprise, researchers found that "housekeeping genes" previously thought to handle basic functions in much the same way in every cell likely have many more roles across the body than previously thought.

Additionally, an immune protein called CD47 appears to differ widely in form from cell to cell, the researchers said. Since CD47 has been implicated both in cancer and in the buildup of dangerous plaques on artery walls, this finding could guide the development of drugs that are more effective and with fewer side effects.

"We hope by using maps like these, we would be better able to understand how disease arises in the body and identify the precise place where disease arises," said Aviv Regev, co-chair of the Human Cell Atlas Organizing Committee and head of research and early development at Genentech. "That would allow us to develop more precise diagnostics for patients and new treatments."

Two of the new papers also provide a new understanding of the human immune system.

Until now, the immune system has largely been observed through the role of immune cells circulating in blood. But immune cells within tissues and organs also are critical to maintaining health, researchers found.

The researchers analyzed immune cells across 16 tissues from 12 individual adult organ donors, creating a cross-tissue immune cell atlas that revealed the relationships between immune cells in one tissue and their counterparts in others.

Immune cell surprises uncovered

"We found that some families of immune cells, such as macrophages, have common signatures across tissues, whereas others, such as memory T-cells, have different flavors depending on which tissue they reside in," Teichmann said. "Knowing the code of which molecules direct and maintain T-cells in specific tissues is important for targeting cells  for instance, for cancer therapies. So overall, the insights have implications for therapies that enhance or suppress immune response to fight disease and for designing vaccines."

Another paper used machine-learning algorithms to associate specific cells identified in the Atlas with 6,000 single-gene diseases and 2,000 complex genetic diseases and traits, Regev said.

The effort found non-muscle cell types that have been implicated in muscular dystrophy, Regev said, as well as atrial fibrillation genes that are also used by cells in skeletal muscle, the esophagus and the prostate.

"Now we can try and devise ways to target more specifically the cells where we want to have an impact, but not other cells that are also using these genes in the body," Regev said.

The Human Cell Atlas project has been made possible by improvements in genetic analysis that have made it easier and more affordable to tackle such large-scale efforts, the researchers said.

"If you go back about 10 years, there's been really a revolution in the ability to measure individual cells," Regev said.

Quake said, "I'm reminded of the old vaudeville joke that it takes 20 years to become an overnight success. That's sort of where we are with this. People have had this vision of looking at gene expression in single cells for upwards of three decades, and the technology has been maturing gradually. It got to the point where we could apply it to a project of this scale."

More information

The Human Cell Atlas has more about its work and discoveries.

SOURCES: Sarah Teichmann, PhD, head, cellular genetics, Wellcome Sanger Institute, United Kingdom; Stephen Quake, PhD, president, Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Network and professor, bioengineering and applied physics, Stanford University, Calif.; Aviv Regev, PhD, head, research and early development, Genentech, South San Francisco, Calif.; Meagan Phelan, spokeswoman, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C.; Science, May 12, 2022, online

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Originally published on consumer.healthday.com, part of the TownNews Content Exchange.
WEDNESDAY, May 11, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Uncontrolled asthma is more likely among adults with asthma who have higher anxiety due to COVID-19, while most parents of children with food allergy (FA) reported unchanged or decreased FA-specific anxiety (FAA) due to COVID-19, according to two studies published online April 22 in the Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology.

Kamal M. Eldeirawi, Ph.D., R.N., from the University of Illinois Chicago, and colleagues conducted a cross-sectional study among U.S. adults with a self-reported physician diagnosis of asthma to examine the association between COVID-19-related anxiety and asthma control. Complete data were available from 873 surveys. The researchers found that a high anxiety score was reported for almost 48 percent of participants. Compared with their counterparts reporting low levels of anxiety, those with high anxiety were twice as likely to have uncontrolled asthma (odds ratio, 2.00). After adjustment for all covariates, including having confirmed/suspected COVID-19, the odds of uncontrolled asthma were 1.64, 1.78, and 3.83 for those in the second, third, and fourth versus first anxiety quartiles, respectively.

Clara Westwell-Roper, M.D., Ph.D., from the British Columbia Children's Hospital Research Institute in Vancouver, Canada, and colleagues surveyed Canadian parents of children and youth with FA in May to June 2020 to examine the association between general anxiety symptoms and FAA during the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, 293 participants completed the FAA questionnaire. The researchers found that 67 percent of respondents reported an increase in overall stress and anxiety that they attributed to COVID-19, whereas only 28 percent reported increased FAA due to COVID-19. Most respondents, including those with increased overall anxiety, reported unchanged or decreased FAA attributable to COVID-19 (30 and 42 percent, respectively).

"The pandemic may have unique impacts on emotional distress in families of children with chronic conditions, particularly when anxiety is alleviated by public health restrictions," Westwell-Roper and colleagues write.

One author from the Westwell-Roper study disclosed financial ties to the biopharmaceutical industry.

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TRENTON, N.J. (AP)  New Jersey would expand abortion access and require insurance companies to pay for the procedure under legislation proposed by Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy on Wednesday.

Murphy vowed state agencies also won't cooperate with other states that might try to prosecute New Jersey abortion providers or women who seek abortions here.

Murphys announcement came four months after he signed into law a bill guaranteeing abortion rights, and in anticipation of the U.S. Supreme Court possibly overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide.

While offering few specifics at this stage, the governor said he wants to let a wider range of medical providers perform the most common type of abortion. A fund would be established so that advanced practice registered nurses, physicians assistants and certified nurse midwives can provide abortion services. The source and amount of the fund wasn't laid out.

We remain steadfast to our commitment that all New Jerseyans have access to reproductive health care, including abortion," Murphy said at a press conference.

The legislation also would mandate that insurance providers cover abortions without cost-sharing or out-of-pocket expenses.

A persons ability to access abortion care should not depend on how much money they make, he said.

The Supreme Court isn't expected to rule on the Mississippi case that challenges Roe v. Wade until this summer. But after the court's draft opinion was leaked last week, some governors indicated they would consider prosecuting women who sought abortions in other states.

Murphy said government agencies in New Jersey will not cooperate with states that seek to do that.

We will not be cooperating with any out-of-state investigations into our health care providers that seeks to punish anyone  patient, provider, counselor, friend, Uber driver, you name it  for providing abortion care, he said.

Republican state Sen. Steven Oroho reacted to Murphy's announcement by accusing the governor of forcing struggling New Jersey families to pay for abortions for everyone through even higher taxes and health care premiums, and called Murphy's plan to expand the spectrum of health care professionals who can provide abortions "reckless and unsafe for women."

Murphy said he hoped the state legislature would have a bill ready by next week or soon after.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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Many parents are hunting for infant formula after a combination of short- and long-term problems hit the biggest U.S. brands. So what should you do if you can't find formula? Talk with your pediatrician or call a local food bank to see if they can help locate some options. Experts also recommend checking with smaller stores and pharmacies, which may still have supplies when larger stores run out. Most regular baby formulas contain the same basic ingredients and nutrients, so parents using those products shouldnt hesitate to buy a different brand if theyre having trouble finding their regular one. Parents of infants requiring specialty formulas should talk to their doctor if they cant find those products.
The Missoula County Elections Office mailed 58,755 ballots today ahead of the June 7 federal primary election.

Polling places also will be open on Election Day for voters who do not choose to receive their ballots in the mail. Voters can look up their polling place online at MyVoterPageMT.com.

Ballots are due back to the Elections Office by 8 p.m. on Tuesday, June 7; postmarks are not sufficient.

Return postage is paid by Missoula County, and the U.S. Postal Service recommends mailing ballots at least seven days ahead of time to ensure delivery by Election Day. Voters can also drop off their ballots at the Elections Center at 140 N. Russell St. leading up to the election.

For this election, voters can drop their ballot off any time in the secure, ADA-accessible ballot drop box located on the north side of the Elections Center.

In 2020, we surveyed voters in Missoula County, and the No. 1 requested item was an afterhours ballot drop box, Elections Administrator Bradley Seaman said. State law prohibits unattended ballot drop boxes during all-mail elections, like the recent school/special district election. But because the primary will be a polling place election, we are excited to offer an afterhours ballot drop box for voters who wish to use this service.

Approximately 85% of Missoula County voters opt to receive their ballots in the mail.

Voters can learn how the Elections Office ensures all ballots are counted by watching the informational videos posted online at missoula.co/electionvideos.

Voters can always confirm their ballot has been received and accepted by visiting MyVoterPageMT.com.

Because the election is less than 30 days away, Missoula County residents who need to register to vote or make changes to their registration, such as updating their address, must now do so in person at the Missoula County Elections Office. Voter services will be provided in the green warehouse on the east side of the Elections Center.

The Elections Office also will provide voter services at several satellite events in the following communities:

Seeley Lake: Thursday, May 19, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Location: Missoula County Seeley Lake Satellite Office, 3360 Hwy. 83 N.

Frenchtown: Friday, May 20, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Location: Frenchtown Fire Station, 16875 Marion St.

Evaro: Thursday, May 26, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday, June 4, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Monday, June 6; 8 a.m. to noon; Tuesday, June 7, 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Location: Gray Wolf Peak Casino, 20750 U.S. Hwy. 93

Missoula County residents can register to vote, update their registration, request a replacement ballot or drop off their mail ballot at these events.

Election Day voter registration is under legal review. While available, the best way for residents to ensure theyre able to vote in this election is to register or make changes by noon on Monday, June 6, in person at a satellite event or at the Elections Center.

Voters are encouraged to check that their address is correct and confirm other details of their registration online at MyVoterPageMT.com. Contact the Elections Office at electioninfo@missoulacounty.us or 406-258-4751 to ask questions or for more information.

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The Missoula County Sheriffs Office canceled two upcoming training sessions for detention facility staff that had featured a self-described Oath Keeper and "constitutional sheriff" as the trainer.

In an email on Monday to the Missoulian, Missoula County Sheriffs Office spokeswoman Jeannette Smith said Missoula will no longer hold two sessions scheduled for May 31 and September 19 with Richard Rick Whitehead. The decision came after Reuters published a story on May 6 focused on U.S. police trainers with far-right ties instructing hundreds of law enforcement officers in the country. The story highlighted Whitehead, an Idaho-based police training consultant.

In February, the Missoula Police Department terminated its relationship with a training group that advocates for police violence. Killology Research Group, led by former Army Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, held two police training sessions for Missoula officers.

During a failed 2020 campaign for the sheriffs office in Kootenai County, Idaho, Whitehead handed out cards where he self-identified as an Oath Keeper, Reuters reported. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, members of the Oath Keepers hold anti-government beliefs and laud themselves as defenders of the Constitution. Whitehead also told Reuters he was an Oath Keeper in 2016 and 2017.

Whiteheads website touts his long career in law enforcement. He developed his training and consulting firm in 1995, and said in an interview that he spends 20 to 25 weeks per year traveling across the country, training law enforcement personnel.

In an October 2019 interview posted on YouTube, an interviewer asks Whitehead how important the Constitution is and how to hold law enforcement to the Constitution. Whitehead responds saying the sheriff's office is a constitutional office. If elected, he adds he and a sheriff in a nearby county "are like-minded and would be two constitutional sheriffs on this end of the state.

In a separate March 2020 interview on a YouTube channel titled Church and State: Christian Political Talk Show, Whitehead says he views himself as a 10th Amendment constitutionalist," explaining this means he thinks states should be taking power back from the federal government.

I think it starts at the local level to start exerting that control and to take that back, that it belongs to the states, Whitehead says in the interview.

When asked if Whiteheads values reflect that of the Missoula sheriffs office, Smith did not answer.

Missoula County Detention Facility personnel have attended trainings offered by Richard Whitehead & Associates LLC following a program change in July 2021, Smith said in an email. In light of the recent article, Missoula County Detention Facility will no longer attend training presented by Richard Whitehead & Associates LLC.

Whitehead posted twice in September 2021 on his Facebook page about visits and trainings in Missoula. He also posted in April and May of 2021 welcoming the Missoula Detention Facility to his Officer in Training model, which he also refers to as the common sense model.

Smith confirmed the trainings were only for jail staff  no sheriff's deputies attended.

Detention facility staff attended and reviewed the sessions to ensure they met curriculum standards, she added. Whitehead's firm was approved by the Montana Public Safety Officer Standards & Training (POST) and qualified for the council's credits.

The total amount the county paid to Whitehead's firm to date is $16,005.63.

Multiple trainings

Social media posts by Whitehead also mention doing trainings in Kalispell and Flathead County.

According to emails obtained by Reuters, a medic in Bonner County, David Ramsey, reported Whitehead following an April 2020 training for paramedics. In the trainings, Ramsey said Whitehead dismissed the pandemic as a joke and labeled COVID-19 controls as unconstitutional. He also made fun of women and showed a photo of a police car with an LGBTQ+ flag printed on it, and then, according to Ramseys email, asked the class Whats next? We have to have a Muslim flag to satisfy the goat fers?

Whitehead said he didnt make a comment about a Muslim flag, but stood by his opinion that having pride flags on law enforcement vehicles creates a slippery slope that drags law enforcement officers away from their mission of fighting crime, the Reuters story states.

In a statement response to the article posted on his website, Whitehead says the article refuses to give context to his platform and attempts to paint law enforcement as extremist in need of federal intervention.

He also defends taking an oath.

Yes, I believe in our country's founding documents, and on three occasions throughout my career, I have taken an oath to defend our Constitution, Whitehead says. I have never rescinded that oath. What does it say about the state of our nation when believing in (its) Constitution has you deemed an extremist?

Multiple constitutional sheriff organizations have been actively recruiting law enforcement officers over the past two years. Protect America Now, run by Arizona sheriff Mark Lamb, and the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, headed by former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack, are the two most prominent organizations in the movement.

Those groups have extended their reach into Montana. Cascade County Sheriff Jesse Slaughter is listed as a member on the Protect America Now website. He has appeared on a podcast with Mack where the two discussed methods for spreading constitutional messaging in schools and Mack invited Slaughter to a CSPOA event.

Current Lake County Sheriff candidate Corey White has also publicly acknowledged his membership in Macks CSPOA.

Long history

Travis McAdam with the Montana Human Rights Action Network has a different take on the influence of constitutional sheriff ideology, a movement he has been researching for the past two years.

It really centers around this idea that county sheriffs are the highest legitimate law officers in the county, McAdam said during a webinar Tuesday.

Constitutional sheriffs, McAdam explained, believe they have the authority to determine which laws are and are not enforced in their counties. McAdam said the Constitution actually bestows that authority upon the Supreme Court, not county sheriffs.

McAdam traced the underpinnings of constitutional sheriff ideology back to white supremacist extremism of the 1970s.

Constitutional sheriffs rest their arguments on theories like county supremacy and sheriff supremacy, which originated from a movement known as Posse Comitatus in the 1970s. The white nationalist Posse Comitatus movement  Latin for the power of the county  was known for combining racism, antisemitism and paramilitary organizing, according to the Montana Human Rights Action Network.

McAdam said the movement advocated for the use of force to combat an overarching one-world government and considered sheriffs the key to their resistance.

The danger of constitutional sheriffs, according to McAdam, comes from using the positive connotation of the Constitution to justify an overreach of power on the part of local law enforcement.

Having a sitting sheriff promoting these ideas is really a way that helps normalize these ideas that are rooted in hardcore white nationalism and anti-government ideology, McAdam said.

Since 2020, McAdam said, the number of constitutional sheriffs has been on the rise. COVID-19 health rules spurred buy-in to the constitutional sheriff cause.

The pandemic created these opportunities for anti-government activists to go into and try to persuade local sheriffs that they have these superpowers, said McAdam, "that they didnt have to follow these health directives and these health protocols that were coming out."

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HELSINKI (AP)  Finlands leaders said Thursday theyre in favor of rapidly applying for NATO membership, paving the way for a historic expansion of the alliance that could deal a serious blow to Russia as its military struggles with its war in Ukraine.

The annoucement by President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin means that Finland is all but certain to join the Western military alliance, though a few steps remain before the application process can begin. Neighboring Sweden is expected to decide on seeking NATO membership in coming days.

NATO membership would strengthen Finlands security. As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defence alliance, Niinisto and Marin said in a joint statement.

Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay," they said. "We hope that the national steps still needed to make this decision will be taken rapidly within the next few days.

Russia reacted to the development with a warning. The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Finland joining NATO would inflict serious damage to Russian-Finnish relations as well as stability and security in Northern Europe."

Russia will be forced to take retaliatory steps of military-technical and other characteristics in order to counter the emerging threats to its national security," the ministry said.

History will determine why Finland needed to turn its territory into a bulwark of military face-off with Russia while losing independence in making its own decisions, it added.

Before the ministry issued its statement, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Finlands decision wouldnt help stability and security in Europe. Peskov said Russias response would depend on NATOs moves to expand its infrastructure closer to Russian borders.

Finland has the longest border with Russia out of all the European Unions 27 members.

Previously, the Kremlin had warned of military and political repercussions if Sweden and Finland decided to become a NATO member. Should they seek to join the alliance, there would be an interim period lasting from when the applications are submitted until ratification by lawmakers in all 30 existing member nations.

In NATO member Estonia, which also borders Russia, Prime Minister Kaja Kallas tweeted that history being made by our northern neighbors. She pledged to support a rapid accession process for Finland into NATO.

Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde tweeted that Finlands announcement gave an important message.

Finland's announcement came a day after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited both Finland and Sweden to sign a military cooperation agreement.

The U.K. pledged Wednesday to come to the aid of Sweden and Finland if the two Nordic nations came under attack.

During a joint news conference with Johnson in Helsinki this week, Niinisto said Moscow could only blame itself should his nation of 5.5 million people become a NATO member.

You (Russia) caused this. Look in the mirror, the Finnish head of state said Wednesday.

On Thursday, Niinisto tweeted that he spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about Finland's firm support for Ukraine and the country's intention to join NATO. Niinisto said Zelenskyy expressed his full support for it."

In 2017, Sweden and Finland joined the British-led Joint Expeditionary Force, which is designed to be more flexible and respond more quickly than the larger NATO alliance. The force uses NATO standards and doctrine so it can operate in conjunction with the alliance, the United Nations or other multinational coalitions.

Fully operational since 2018, the force has held a number of exercises both independently and in cooperation with NATO.

Russias aggression in Ukraine prompted Finland and Sweden to reconsider their traditions of military nonalignment and to contemplate joining NATO itself. Public opinion in the two countries quickly started to shift toward favoring membership, first in Finland and a bit later in Sweden, after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24.

The latest opinion poll conducted by Finnish public broadcaster YLE showed earlier this week that 76% of Finns are in favor of joining NATO, a big change from earlier years when only 20-30% of respondents favored such military alignment.

Speaking to European Union lawmakers Thursday as Niinisto and Marin made their announcement, Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said that Russias unpredictable behavior was a serious concern for Finland. He cited Moscows readiness to wage high-risk operations that could lead to many casualties, including among Russians.

Should Finland become a NATO member, it would represent the biggest change in the Nordic country's defense and security policy since World War II, when it fought against the Soviet Union.

During the Cold War, Finland stayed away from NATO to avoid provoking the Soviet Union, instead opting to remain a neutral buffer between the East and the West while maintaining good relations with Moscow and also with the United States.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said the military alliance would welcome Finland and Sweden  both of which have strong, modern militaries  with open arms and that he expects the accession process to be speedy and smooth.

NATO officials say the Nordic duo's accession process could be done in a couple of weeks. The most time consuming part of the procedure  ratification of the countrys protocol by the existing NATO members  could be completed in less time than the four or so months it took West Germany, Turkey and Greece to join in the 1950s, when there were only 12 members to ratify their applications.

These are not normal times, one NATO official said this week, discussing the possible applications of Finland and Sweden. The official was briefing reporters about the accession process on condition that he not be named as no application has been made by the two countries.

Lorne Cook in Brussels, and Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, 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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PORTLAND, Ore. (AP)  Prospective homebuyers in Oregon can continue to send love letters to people selling homes.

U.S. District Judge Marco Hernandez on Wednesday permanently blocked a ban on the personal messages some buyers write in an effort to sweeten their offers on homes, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported.

The Oregon Legislature approved the ban last year, saying such letters could aid sellers in illegally choosing buyers based on factors such as race, color, religion, sex or sexual orientation, which would violate federal fair housing laws.

Conservative public interest law firm, the Pacific Legal Foundation, sued the state to block the laws implementation.

Hernandez ruled that the ban, which would require a home seller to reject any communication other than customary documents in a real estate transaction, including photographs, provided by a buyer, was a violation of buyers First Amendment rights.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Total Real Estate Group, a Bend firm with about 20 agents.

Daniel Ortner, a lawyer with the Pacific Legal Foundation, said the judges decision sent a clear message that states couldnt infringe upon home buyers and sellers rights to communicate.

The State of Oregon clearly recognized that it could not justify its ban on sharing information that helps sellers find the best buyer for their home, Ortner said in a news release.

In his March preliminary injunction, Hernandez said Oregons reasons for the ban had merit, given its long and abhorrent history of racial discrimination in property ownership and housing, which blocked people of color from owning houses for decades.

But he said House Bill 2550 was an overreach, banning innocuous messages and infringing on free speech.

It wasn't immediately clear if the state could appeal the decision.

Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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Who gets to be the the decider on what should happen to a woman who needs an abortion?

In Texas a law already bans abortion as early as six weeks and allows anyone to sue clinics, doctors, nurses and people who drive a woman to get an abortion, and a GOP lawmaker is attempting to make abortion punishable by the death penalty.

In Tennessee a law introduced in March would permit a rapists family member to sue an abortion provider to stop a woman from terminating her pregnancy.

And in Missouri, a bill allows private citizens to sue anyone who helps a person leave the state in order to get an abortion and would deny victims of rape, incest or human trafficking abortions. Another proposal, makes it illegal to access medications used in abortion, in the process preventing use in treating ectopic pregnancies, where the fertilized egg is implanted outside the uterus. Untreated ectopic pregnancies often put the woman at high risk of death.

An early draft of Justice Alitos opinion on the cases now before the Supreme Court is adamant that Roe vs. Wade was wrongly decided and has continued to be wrong over the ensuing years. His theory of constitutional law leads to his conclusion that the right to a womans privacy is not supported by the 14th Amendment, as are other rights, and that the right to abortion in particular must be regulated by legislation.

The problem is that the sole explanation for the disparate anger and disdain directed at Roe is that that right to abortion has been used by key factions within the Republican Party for years as a political strategy to achieve minority rule by the Right. On this issue, the arguments professed as law have nakedly partisan objectives.

If Roe is overturned, more people may see abortion in the wider context of poverty and inequality in health care. One can be pro-life but also highlight the way these beliefs are very clearly anti-woman. The effects could go far beyond the hot issue of abortion to even include the outlawing of birth control. Even now, as earlier stated, state laws currently in effect do not consider the possibility of a pregnancy dangerous, even life-threatening, to the woman. This lack of understanding of the reality of pregnancies is extremely troubling.

It is clear that opponents of Roe do not care about womans health as they rescind her rights to make important healthcare decisions. As we can see, the Republican legislatures are already limiting abortion in states across the country, including Montana. Twenty-four states, also including Montana, are poised to enact even more draconian measures limiting access to abortion.

When Alito refers the issue to state legislatures to resolve this issue, it must be an open challenge to ensure those whom we elect support our beliefs. It therefore remains the duty of state legislators, governors and Congress to pass legislation that affirms this right. If you care about this, your participation is needed; help elect state and national politicians who will support the right to abortion and pressure them to rid us of anti-abortion legislation and enact laws to fully realize your concerns.

Carolyn Snively is a former teacher and Missoula writer. She has published two books including "The Smiling Photo" about the perils of war.

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In Montana, we take pride in our locally owned businesses, our universities (though we may disagree on which one), and other local schools. We trust in and rely on Montanas world-class health care, and most of us have at least one favorite local charity doing invaluable work in our community. All of these fundamental institutions depend on one common thing for success  great employees.

The current cost and availability of housing and child care are making it harder than ever to keep or even find employees, which in turn makes it harder than ever for our businesses and other institutions to succeed. Unless we expand our work toward solutions, these problems will not just burden our employers, but negatively impact our economy and ultimately our sense of community as people may be forced to leave and businesses may be forced to shut.

Next week, at the University of Montana, entrepreneurs, economists, for-profit and nonprofit business leaders, legal experts, and policy makers are meeting to better define these challenges and hear how people across the state and country are exploring, developing, and refining solutions. The event, the second annual Big Sky Business Insight Summit, is presented by Missoula Economic Partnership and First Security Bank and is open to the public.

Housing and child care might seem like perennial problems with no quick solutions, but both are under acute strain that demands and will benefit from immediate action. The summit will include panelists and speakers from across Montana and the U.S. who are working to solve chronic and immediate problems in the areas of housing and child care.

The cost of housing has increased at record pace in the past two years while we have seen record lows in the number of houses available to new homeowners. Missoula County has a housing stock deficit that closely matches the reduction in home production that immediately followed the housing market collapse of 2007 and 2008. Overcoming that inventory deficit is an urgent and attainable goal that will establish a healthy baseline of housing inventory.

The summit will showcase panelists like Foothold, a Montana business that is pioneering a model for affordable offsite home construction using environmentally friendly materials. Their business model combats the acute challenges of a shrinking skilled labor market, increased material costs, and the chronic challenge of a short Montana building season.

Two thirds of kids 5 or younger have parents in the workforce who need child care to get to work. Currently, we have the capacity to serve less than half of those children with care. The pandemic exacerbated the existing child care shortages in our communities with the closure of some child care businesses and many child care providers seeking new careers. Addressing this shortage and finding accessible solutions is necessary not only for employees with children, but for the businesses who employ them.

The summit will include leaders from Zoot, a large Montana technology employer that established a model partnership for child care, improving the efficiency and predictability for providers and families while providing a competitive hiring and employee retention advantage for participating employers.

Regardless of size or sector, the businesses and institutions we value and depend on every day in Montana struggle to realize their full potential when they cant attract or retain great employees due to the cost and availability of housing or child care. You have a chance to learn more about these challenges and what you can do about them at the 2022 Big Sky Business Insight Summit, taking place May 18-20 in Missoula. For details about the program and to register, visit missoulapartnership.com/big-sky-business-insight-summit-2022.

Grant Kier is CEO of Missoula Economic Partnership

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How to stay motivated to workout (Stock)

With thousands of excuses to choose from, coming up with a reason not to workout is often easier than going to the gym.

Fortunately, lack of motivation is a universal struggle when it comes to exercising - even for the people most dedicated to the gym - personal trainers.

For suggestions on how to remain dedicated to your fitness goals and get moving, we asked personal trainers how they stay motivated - and how they keep clients motivated as well.

Chris Matsui, a performance training specialist at Fusion Performance Training, told The Independent: Personally, I know that if I dont workout my body starts to fall apart and get worse.

Despite being fatigued from [insert excuse] I make it a point to go to the gym a minimum of three times a week.

He also always remembers that any exercise is good - even if it isnt your best workout.

This doesnt mean that each workout is a home run but its enough to build a sweat and make my body feel better, he said.

As for his clients, he told us that he reminds them even a short 20-30 minute workout can be impactful for your long-term goal.

The exercise it takes to burn off high-calorie foods

Not everyone will have the time to workout 90 minutes each time, so make the best of it and do what you can until you have more free time, he advises.

Even two minutes of exercise can make a difference - as researchers from Victoria University in Australia found a two-minute high-intensity workout can be as effective as half an hour of moderate exercise.

Benji Tiger, a personal trainer at OrangeTheory in Florida, uses her physical appearance as her main motivator.

I remain motivated because I like to look a certain way, she told us. I always saw these people with incredible bodies on social media and I wanted to have a similar body.

And although she has achieved her goals, she still uses social media as a motivator to be better.

Social media is typically given a bad reputation for promoting harmful or unachievable body ideals but a 2015 study found that the social influence of online peers can actually motivate people to exercise more.

Story continues

To keep clients motivated, Tiger reminds them of how far theyve come and of their increasing strength.

If they dont feel like working out or they feel like theyve hit a plateau, I have them do a workout that they used to find difficult when they first started exercising, she said. It usually works as motivation because it is proof of their progress.

She also recommends clients find someone equally motivated who they can workout with on days they arent working with her.

It can make exercising more fun, she said.

Six workout gadgets to help you train



If youve resolved to spend more time in the gym or train in the great outdoors, here are some great bits of kit to improve and track your workout. (Getty)" />



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Equinox trainer Rob Arreaga told us that he stays motivated by reminding himself to be better than I was yesterday.

Even that little push is enough to get him to the gym, he told us.

And with clients, he encourages them to be their own competition.

I remind them they are fighting to be the best that they can be - and they are the only ones who can do it, he said.

When even that fails, Arreaga tells his clients to take the day off - as the occasional skipped workout is okay too.

This article was originally published in 2018
A 25-year-old woman accused of fatally stabbing a man inside a Butte house more than two years ago pleaded guilty to deliberate homicide Thursday.

Susan Marie Criss faces a maximum of life in prison but its also possible her mental health could affect the ultimate sentence District Judge Kurt Krueger imposes in the case.

Criss has spent months at the Montana State Hospital in Warm Springs and at one point, Virginia Hill, a forensic psychiatrist there, deemed her unfit to proceed.

That has since been changed and she appeared in court Thursday, and answered a series of questions about understanding her rights and the consequences of pleading guilty.

Upon questioning from her public defender, Jamie Upham, she admitted purposefully and knowingly killing Mark William Woodger at a house on Trinity Loop in the early morning hours of Jan. 20, 2020. But she also said she was suffering from mental illness at the time.

Krueger told her he could sentence her from 10 years to life and also said he would determine placement, which could include custody of the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services. Among other things, it oversees the state hospital.

Criss told police that Woodger was looking really black and weird, was trying to hurt her baby and then stabbed her in the arm. She said she grabbed the knife, stabbed him and he began to run around the house with the knife stuck in his neck. Her mother was also in the house at the time.

Police and paramedics arrived and Woodger, 49, was taken to the hospital but was pronounced dead shortly after 6 a.m.

According to a birth notice, Criss had given birth to a boy five days prior. Criss mother told police her daughter had just had a baby and had a difficult labor and was having trouble, prosecutors said.

The mother said she was staying with her daughter to help out and took the baby during the night because he was crying. She said she changed his diaper, laid him on the bed with her and the baby fell right to sleep. Then she heard thumping in the house.

When police arrived, they found Criss unclothed and seated next to Woodgers head. She said her baby was in the other room and she tended to him as an officer tried to get Woodger breathing on his own.

At one point, Criss also told the officer she did not remember grabbing the knife and when asked if Woodger was standing up standing up or lying down during the incident, she said both.

Krueger will set a sentencing date after a presentence investigation is complete.

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Spain records third highest number of child hepatitis cases in Europe



Spain has confirmed 22 cases, behind only the United Kingdom and Italy

As the number of confirmed cases of severe hepatitis in children rack up around the globe, data from the European Centre for Disease Control (ECDC) has revealed that Spain now has the third highest incidence in Europe. After registering 22 cases, Spain is now only surpassed by the United Kingdom, with 163 and Italy, with 35.

At that point, the Minister of Health attempted to quell the rising panic by insisting that the number was no higher than in other years, and the WHO agreed, adding that more investigation was needed to determine if there has been a global rise, or if more cases are simply being diagnosed.

It is being assessed whether the cases detected in Spain represent an unusual increase in unknown cases of hepatitis with respect to those detected in previous years or whether they present differential characteristics with the cases that are usually identified, the Ministry said in a statement.

Within the EU, a total of 106 cases have been diagnosed, with Sweden (9), Portugal (8) and the Netherlands and Denmark (both with 6) coming in behind Spain and Italy. Outside of the European Union, the UK leads the number of cases with 163, followed by the US (at least 109), Brazil (16), Indonesia (15) and Israel (12), according to the ECDC report.

To date, the cases of this rare childhood hepatitis around the world amount to 450 and sadly, 11 children have already lost their lives.

Image: Pixabay
SEOUL, South Korea (AP)  North Korea imposed a nationwide lockdown Thursday to control its first acknowledged COVID-19 outbreak after holding for more than two years to a widely doubted claim of a perfect record keeping out the virus that has spread to nearly every place in the world.

The outbreak forced leader Kim Jong Un to wear a mask in public, likely for the first time since the start of the pandemic, but the scale of transmissions inside North Korea wasn't immediately known.

A failure to slow infections could have serious consequences because the country has a poor health care system and its 26 million people are believed to be mostly unvaccinated. Some experts say North Korea, by its rare admission of an outbreak, may be seeking outside aid.

However, hours after North Korea confirmed the outbreak, South Koreas military said it detected the North had fired three suspected ballistic missiles toward the sea. It was its 16th round of missile launches this year  brinkmanship aimed at forcing the United States to accept North Korea as a nuclear power and negotiate sanctions relief and other concessions from a position of strength.

The official Korean Central News Agency said tests of virus samples collected Sunday from an unspecified number of people with fevers in the capital, Pyongyang, confirmed they were infected with the omicron variant.

In response, Kim called at a ruling party Politburo meeting for a thorough lockdown of cities and counties and said workplaces should be isolated by units to block the virus from spreading. He urged health workers to step up disinfection efforts at workplaces and homes and mobilize reserve medical supplies.

Kim said it was crucial to control transmissions and eliminate the infection source as fast as possible, while also easing inconveniences to the public caused by the virus controls. He insisted the country will overcome the outbreak because its government and people are united as one.

Despite the elevated virus response, Kim ordered officials to push ahead with scheduled construction, agricultural development and other state projects while bolstering the countrys defense posture to avoid any security vacuum.

North Koreas state TV showed Kim and other senior officials wearing masks as they entered a meeting room, although Kim removed his mask to speak into a set of microphones. Still photos distributed by KNCA showed Kim unmasked and sitting at the head of a table where all other officials remained masked.

South Koreas Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korean affairs, couldn't immediately confirm whether it was the first time state media showed Kim wearing a mask since the start of the pandemic. Kim has previously spoken to huge crowds without a mask as he praised the country's earlier pandemic response, and his decision to be seen with a mask could be aimed at raising public vigilance.

North Korea, which has maintained strict anti-virus controls at its borders for more than two years, didnt provide further details about its new lockdown. But an Associated Press photographer on the South Korean side of the border saw dozens of people working in fields or walking on footpaths at a North Korean border town  an indication the lockdown doesn't require people to stay home, or it exempts farm work.

The measures described in state media and Kims declaration that economic goals should still be met could indicate that North Korea is focusing more on restricting travel and supplies between regions, analyst Cheong Seong-Chang at South Koreas Sejong Institute said.

North Koreas government has shunned vaccines offered by the U.N.-backed COVAX distribution program, possibly because they have international monitoring requirements.

Seoul's Unification Ministry said South Korea is willing to provide medical assistance and other help to North Korea based on humanitarian considerations. Relations between the Koreas have deteriorated since 2019 amid a stalemate in nuclear negotiations and the North's increasingly provocative weapons tests.

In Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Beijing is offering North Korea help in dealing with the outbreak. North Korea has reportedly rejected previous Chinese offers of domestically developed vaccines.

Kim Sin-gon, a professor at Seouls Korea University College of Medicine, said North Korea is likely signaling its willingness to receive outside vaccines, but wants many more doses than offered by COVAX to inoculate its entire population multiple times. He said North Korea would also want COVID-19 medicines and medical equipment shipments that are banned by U.N. sanctions.

Omicron spreads much more easily than earlier variants of the coronavirus, and its fatality and hospitalization rates are high among unvaccinated older people or those with existing health problems. That means the outbreak could cause a serious situation because North Korea lacks medical equipment and medicine to treat virus patients and many of its people are not well-nourished, Kim Sin-gon said.

Ahn Kyung-su, head of DPRKHEALTH.ORG, a website focusing on health issues in North Korea, said North Koreas admission of the outbreak is likely designed to press its people harder to guard against the virus as China, which shares a long, porous border with the North, has placed many of its cities under lockdown over virus concerns.

North Korea will also likely stress lockdowns, although the experience of Chinas zero-COVID policy suggests that approach doesnt work against the fast-moving omicron variant, said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor of international studies at Seouls Ewha Womans University.

For Pyongyang to publicly admit omicron cases, the public health situation must be serious, Easley said.

North Koreas previous coronavirus-free claim had been disputed by many foreign experts. But South Korean officials have said North Korea had likely avoided a huge outbreak, in part because it instituted strict virus controls almost from the start of the pandemic.

Early in 2020  before the coronavirus spread around the world  North Korea took severe steps to keep out the virus and described them as a matter of national existence." It all but halted cross-border traffic and trade for two years, and is believed to have ordered troops to shoot on sight any trespassers who crossed its borders.

The extreme border closures further shocked an economy already damaged by decades of mismanagement and U.S.-led sanctions over its nuclear weapons and missile program, pushing Kim to perhaps the toughest moment of his rule since he took power in 2011.

North Korea had been one of the last places in the world without an acknowledged COVID-19 case after the virus first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019 spread to every continent including Antarctica. Turkmenistan, a similarly secretive and authoritarian nation in Central Asia, has reported no cases to the World Health Organization, though its claim also is widely doubted by outside experts.

In recent months, some Pacific island nations that kept the virus out by their geographic isolation have recorded outbreaks. Only tiny Tuvalu, with a population around 12,000, has escaped the virus so far, while a few other nations  Nauru, Micronesia and Marshall Islands  have stopped cases at their borders and avoided community outbreaks.

North Korea's outbreak comes as China  its close ally and trading partner  battles its biggest outbreak of the pandemic.

In January, North Korea tentatively reopened railroad freight traffic between its border town of Sinuiju and Chinas Dandong for the first time in two years, but China halted the trade last month due to an outbreak in Liaoning province, which borders North Korea.

Associated Press journalists Lee Jin-man in Paju, South Korea, Ken Moritsugu in Beijing and Nick Perry in Wellington, New Zealand, 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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